"Islamic evolutions"

By Dan Juma

CAVEAT: I'm not a Muslim myself, so don't expect me to necessarily defend it. I'm just trying explain it

Islam and its divisions

It is important to remember that Islam has not usually converted people by force but by persuasion. Although there has been forced conversion in the history of Islam, it is the exception rather than the rule, and has been condemned by most Islamic lawyers. However, it is not only the philosophical arguments and Sufic experiences of Islam that have converted people to the religion. The extra tax on non-Muslims, the jizya, has been an economic incentive for followers of other religions to convert to Islam. But the philosophic and experiential aspects of Islam have been important attractions of the religion and are therefore important in attracting people to it. In sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia in particular, Islamic rule spread more by peaceful persuasion and conversion of existing dynasties than by conquest.

Most people are by now familiar with the fact that early Islam split into Sunni and Shi'ite branches according whether Muslims thought succession to Muhammad as leader of the 'Ummah (Islamic community and state) should be by consensus (the Sunni position) or by heredity (the Shi'ite position). The historical details of the struggle over succession, and the fact that there was a third group (the Khawarij or Kharijites) who have almost died out, are arguably irrelevant today.

Issues of law (e.g. temporary marriage - see the last installment) and traditional communal identity are probably more important today in distinguishing Sunnis from Shi'ites. Ironically today the leading Shi'te power, Iran, is a republic, while their leading Sunni opponent, Saudi Arabia, is a monarchy. So much for the ideological influence of a 7th century struggle for succession on Islam today!

It is also useful to know that new religions splitting off of Islam, including the Baha'i, and the Druze, have split off from Shi'ite Islam, which often has a Messianic or Apocalyptic character to it. The concept of the Mahdi, an Islamic ruler who would restore righteousness, also originated in Shi'ite Islam, but spread very quickly and became popular among Sunnis. The famous Sudanese Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad was a Sunni.

The subdivisions within Sunnism, the 4 "madhahib" or "schools of law" or "rites" or whatever term is used to translate them, are interesting, but not terribly relevant to divisions within Islam today. Many movements within Sunni Islam, including the Wahhabi movement of Saudi Arabia, as well as Sufi movements opposed to Wahhabism, have sought to reconcile these madhahib and bring them together. The philosophical divisions within Islam, which cut across even the Sunni/Shi'ite split, are certainly more relevant. Even of those we can give no more than an oversimplified introduction here.

Islamic philosophy

Especially during the Caliphate of the Abbasid dynasty (750-1258), but even under the Ummayyads (661-750 in the Middle East, to 1031 in Spain) as well as under the Fatimids (910-1171), Greek philosophy began to influence Islamic thought. The Mu'tazilite philosophers in particular, were heavily influenced by Aristotelian rationalism, and elevated reason to an equality with revelation in their religious thought. Through such Islamic philosophers as Averroes

(ibn Rushd) Aristotelian thought re-entered Western Europe, and some of Aristotle's works survive only in Arabic translation, no longer in the original Greek. Ironically, some of Averroes' works survive only in Latin or Hebrew translation, not in the original Arabic.

There was a Sufi reaction against the extreme rationalism of the philosophers. Just as Christian (and Jewish) philosophies became more heavily influenced by Aristotelianism in the High Middle Ages, so Islamic thought became more influenced by the other worldly doctrines of neo-Platonic mysticism, especially in the way that al-Ghazzali (1058-1111) reconciled Sufism with orthodoxy. Thus ironically, as Western Europe became more Aristotelian and rational, Islamic civilization became more mystical and Sufic. Buddhist and Hindu practices from Central and South Asia also began to spread within Islam as part of Sufism. Eventually Sufism became so diverse that it is hard to define. Every time I thought I had it pinned down it turned out to be somewhere else until I have given up trying to understand it in a rational, academic fashion.

Medieval Islam was also much more tolerant than medieval Christianity, not only in the sense that Muslim states were more tolerant of Christians (whom they saw as followers of a previous revelation) than Christian states were of Muslims (whom they saw as heretics), but also in the sense that differences of opinion within the faith were more tolerated. Both religions were theoretically tolerant of Jews, but their record toward Jews left much to be desired in practice, although it varied from time to time and from place to place.

The challenge of the West

Whatever its achievements, the medieval period presented the unedifying spectacle of two new civilizations fighting across the Mediterranean Sea over the bones of the older, classical Greco-Roman civilization. As Christian kingdoms pushed Muslim ones out of Iberia, Muslim armies moved into the territories of the old Byzantine Empire, finally conquering it in 1453, and moving into the Balkans.

The rise of science and modern technology, especially the nautical technology that enabled Christian western Europe to move around this water planet against the winds as no civilization had done before, along with firearms (which allowed western civilization and those who cooperated with it to force its will on others) led to the rise of Christian western Europe over the rest of the world. So-called "gunpowder empires," which traded something for firearms – slaves in the case of Africa, other items in other continents - and used the firearms to expand, came to dominate the world outside Europe. Eventually Europe came to control the world directly, beginning with the Americas (which eventually broke away), but spreading to the rest of the world thereafter.

This affected the Muslim world intensely, and not only in the Middle East. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798-1801) was a wakeup call in the Middle East, leading to intellectual and political upheavals. The British conquest of the Mughal dynasty in India was known to Muhammad Bello, Sultan of Sokoto in West Africa. The scramble for colonies overran almost the entire Muslim world, from Indonesia to Senegal, and from Central Asia to Tanzania.

The only Muslim countries never conquered were probably Turkey (a remnant of the Ottoman Empire that survived the First World War), Afghanistan (which did suffer invasion if not outright colonization) and Saudi Arabia. Iran was nominally independent, but invaded by the Allies in World War II, and subject to outside manipulation, most famously in the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953. It seemed that Muslims had no independence that Western powers felt bound to respect, outside of Saudi Arabia. Those who take seriously Ann Coulter's call to invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity simply do not know the history of Muslim relations with European powers.

The vulnerability of Islam has shown itself most clearly in the possibility of a threat to Islamic control of Mecca and Medina. This became a very real possibility when the last Muslim great power, the Ottoman Empire, collapsed in World War I. Britain and France proceeded to divide Ottoman territories among themselves as League of Nations Mandates. The Saudi State, which had adopted Wahhabism as its particular form of Islam, stepped into the breach and held the imperial powers at bay, or so it maintained.

In point of fact the British and French were hardly concerned with two remote towns in the middle of the Arabian Desert, and they were not yet aware of the vast stores of oil under the Saudi desert. This did not, of course, prevent the Saudi rulers from taking for themselves the title "Defender of the two holy places" and it gave the Wahhabi ideology much prestige in the Islamic world. The coming of oil money to Saudi Arabia additionally enabled the Saudis to spread Wahhabism far and wide among Muslims.

Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia

Wahhabism is a particular form of Islamic fanaticism, which reacted not only against Sufism but against rationalism as well. It denounced not only Sufis as non-Muslims, but the Ottomans and most other Muslims as well. When the Wahhabi Saudis had wrested control of Mecca and Medina from the Ottomans in an earlier era they had even refused to allow pilgrim caravans from Syria and Egypt to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Needless to say this alienated the rest of the Muslim world, which rallied to help the Ottomans take back Mecca, and induced the Wahhabis to begin moderating their beliefs. However, this process is far from complete. While the Wahhabis are the only school of Muslims allowed to preach in Saudi Arabia, they do not pray behind other Imams outside of Saudi Arabia, a fact which still causes much hostility between themselves and other Muslims. The idea that many non-Muslims hold, that the Saudi form of Islam is the purest or most correct, is a strange one to my mind, and certainly not shared by most Muslims. Turn it around and ask if you want Muslims deciding whether Methodists, Baptists or Catholics are the correct sect of Christianity. Indeed Muslims would say that they are the correct followers of Jesus. I will only say that I hold no position on which, if any, are the true practitioners of Islam, and ask only that Muslims refrain from deciding which are the true practitioners of Christianity.

As I mentioned, the ability of the alliance between the Saudi ruling family and the Wahhabi scholars to defend Mecca and Medina gave them much prestige after World War I, but that prestige has recently been lost. The Saudis were unable to defend themselves against a threat from a secular Arab nationalist regime, the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and they were forced to call in United Nations forces, led by the United States, to defend themselves. The joke went around that U.S. President George H. W. Bush had taken the title "Defender of the two holy places" for himself. Of course President Bush was not interested in defending or threatening Mecca and Medina at all, but in protecting the world’s access to Saudi petroleum. However, the continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, and the fact that the Saudi regime needed those troops to maintain its independence, was an unacceptable irritant in the Islamic world. Usama bin Ladin's fatwa, or Islamic legal opinion, to "slay the Americans where you find them" was generated not because of the Palestinian problem or even less on the grounds that the younger President George Bush claimed, that "they hate us because we are free" but because American troops were based in Saudi Arabia, where they could pose a direct threat to the holiest shrines of the Islamic world. Despite all the bogus claims that were advanced about weapons of mass destruction, the real reason American troops had to get out of Saudi Arabia was to remove this irritant by removing the Iraqi regime that threatened Saudi control of both Persian Gulf oil (important to Americans, Europeans and Japanese) and the two holy cities of Islam (important to Muslims). Unfortunately, doing so has served only to convince many Muslims that the second president Bush intended to attack Islamic civilization as a whole. What the ultimate result will be remains to be seen.

[parenthetical note: Notice how far the oil fields are from Mecca and Medina. Maybe Bush should have split Saudi Arabia into three parts instead of invading Iraq to watch it fall into three parts.]

Other responses

Fanaticism is not the only response of Muslims to the dominance of the west. Many Muslims have decided that the time has come for Muslims to learn from the West, just as western European Christians (including the future Pope Silvester II) learned from Islam during the Middle Ages. Such responses as the modernization program of Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and the many students coming from Muslim countries to European and American universities are examples of this. It is such a widespread response that Muslim students are so common that the 9/11 conspirators had no trouble passing as common exchange students, and were barely suspected of having nefarious intentions.

Another response is secularism, and the gradual abandonment of traditional Islam for some modern alternative. This may mean rethinking the nature of Islam itself and trying to come up with new Islamic customs and laws for modern circumstances but it may also involve non-Islamic ideologies. Among the latter are various forms of third world nationalism, including African nationalism, Arab nationalism (including Ba'athism) which originated with Arab Christians. Ba'athism still controls Syria, despite President Bush's warning after the fall of Saddam Hussein that Syria not let any "Bathists" [sic] in, as if his father had warned the Chinese not to let any Communists in after the fall of the Soviet Union. That's how little George W. Bush knows about the Middle East.

Communism was also popular in many Muslim societies during the Cold War, most spectacularly in Indonesia before the "year of living dangerously" but also in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians and among western educated Arabs in the Sudan.

Secular Islamic nationalism has also become popular. The Turkish secular Islamic nationalism of Ataturk is probably the best known example. Pakistan was intended by its founder Ali Jinnah to be a similarly secular Muslim country. The creation of Pakistan was actually opposed by the organized Islamic scholars of India, partly because they feared it would be a secular country, although also because they felt a divided India would result in more danger to the many Muslims who would inevitably be left behind in India, a prediction that has sadly come to pass. There are now today more Muslims in India than in Pakistan, and even if Pakistan takes Kashmir this will be true. Muslim scholars in 19th century India had even been opposed to Jihad against the British.

Bosnian Muslim nationalism is (or was) another secular Islamic nationalism based on the Turkish model, additionally influenced by the "nationalities policy" of Marxist-Leninist Communism. "Nationalities policy" is perhaps the only popular, surviving aspect of Communism, and while I wouldn't recommend it for the United States I have to admit that it is popular among people in Eastern Europe. In any event, the secularly educated Bosnian president Izetbegović was much more nationalist and separatist than the Islamic scholar Haris Silajdžić.

The rise of the Islamic scholars to positions of prominence of government deserves special mention, for it is very recent. Islamic law is highly theoretical, and more and more Muslim countries had relegated it to personal and family law until recently. These ulama (as Islamic scholars are called in Arabic) had become so marginalized by the early 20th century that Nikki Keddie, one of the most prominent experts on the Iranian ulama in the United States, predicted in one of her first books that they would soon be completely irrelevant. Its roots, causes and development are controversial, and perhaps best left for another article.

Extremism

Ironically, most of the fanatics, outside of Saudi Arabia itself, are western educated. In the Sudan, seats set aside for those with western college degrees were monopolized by Communists and Muslim brothers during the democratic periods of Sudanese history. The Muslim Brothers in particular are composed largely of western educated persons. In Iran the extremist president Ahmedinejad is a western educated engineer and not a traditional Islamic scholar. Traditional Islamic scholars are among his fiercest opponents.

I have heard two reasons advanced for the fact that extremists seem more likely to be western educated. One is that they need to get publicity for their opinions, since they are not traditionally looked to for Islamic advice. As they say in Hollywood, there is no such thing as bad press, and anything that puts them in the newspapers is good as far as they are concerned. The other is that Western scholarship of Islam has created an Islamic extremism in its own image. Whichever explanation is correct, perhaps neither, it is commonly noted that a disproportionate percentage of extremists are western educated, although most western educated Muslims, like most Muslims in general, are not fanatics. The life of the influential but controversial Sayid Qutb is not atypical in this respect.

A further caveat about extremism, and especially terrorism, is probably in order. Suicide bombing has become associated with Islam in the minds of many, but in fact it was invented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Sri Lankan secular movement which attracts support only from Hindu Tamils. Muslims on Sri Lanka have nothing to do with the civil war, which pits Hindu insurgents against a Buddhist government. Christian terrorists bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A Japanese new religion with roots in Buddhism put sarin gas on the Tokyo subway. There is nothing necessarily Islamic about terrorism, nor is there anything innately terrorist about Islam. What should concern us about Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qa'ida is not just that they are better at it than the other terrorists, or even that they are anti-American, but that they have been given a great boost by the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, which allowed them to argue that the "Crusader-Zionist alliance" was intent on destroying Muslim societies in general. We are not just observers in the ongoing struggle for the future of Islam, but we are involved in the struggle whether we know it or not, and whether we want to be or not. Our actions can help convince Muslims that their future lies in moderation, modernization and cooperation with others, or it can help convince them that the future will be a world-ending conflict that ends in the Day of Resurrection and the fire set aside for unbelievers, as the Qur'an (22:9) puts it.