ISLAM A Short History text [2] [3] -- Sufism parts (highighted) Audio ch8-10

ISLAM A Short History text - Sufism parts (highighted) Audio ch8-10 

[2] The esoteric movements 

[3] Culmination - A New Order - Sufism parts (highighted) Audio ch8-10 

2] ===

The Eabbasids:The high Caliphal period (750-935 )

The Abbasids had won support by carefully presenting them- selves in a Shii light, but once in power they shed this reli- gious camouflage and showed that they were determined to make the caliphate an absolute monarchy in the traditional agrarian way. Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah (750-54), the first Ab- basid caliph, massacred all the Umayyads he could lay his hands upon. Hitherto the indiscriminate slaughter of a noble Arab family would have been unthinkable. Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur (754-75) murdered all the Shii leaders whom he considered a danger to his rule. These caliphs gave them- selves titles expressive of the divine right of kings. Al-Mansur indicated that God would give him "special help" to achieve victory; his son styled himself al-Mahdi (the Guided One), the term used by Shiis to describe a leader who would estab- lish the age of justice and peace.

Caliph al-Mahdi (775-85), in choosing this title, might have been trying to woo the Shiis after the bloodshed commit- ted by his father. The Abbasids were acutely aware of the dis- content that had helped to bring down the Umayyads and realized that they must make concessions to the disaffected groups. Even though they were Arabs themselves, their vic- tory ended the old practice of giving Arabs privileged status in the empire. They moved their capital from Damascus to Iraq, settling first in Kufah and then in Baghdad. They promised to treat all the provinces equally and not to allow any ethnic group special status, which satisfied the mawalis. Their empire was egalitarian in that it was possible for any man of ability to make his way in the court and administration. But the move from Kufah to Baghdad was significant. The caliphs had left behind the ambience of the garrison towns, which had been built on the old tribal model and made each quarter equal and independent. The centre of Baghdad was the famous "round city," which housed the administration, the court and the royal family. The bazaars and homes of the artisans and servants were relegated to the periphery. Baghdad was built in a conve- nient location, beside the Tigris and close to the Sawad, the agricultural base of Iraq. But it was also close to Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian Sassanids, and the new caliphate was modelled on the old pre-Islamic autocracy.

By the time of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the transformation was complete. Al-Rashid ruled like an old-style absolute monarch, not like the rashidun. He was isolated from his subjects; the old informality that had characterized life under the first caliphs was replaced by elaborate pomp. Courtiers kissed the ground when they came into his pres- ence, in a way that would have been unimaginable in the days when Arabs prostrated themselves only before God. Where the Prophet had always been addressed informally by his given name, like any other mortal, the caliph was styled the "Shadow of God on earth." The executioner stood behind him, to show that the caliph had the power of life and death. The caliph no longer supervised the affairs of the ummah himself, but left government to his vizier. His role was to be a court of ultimate appeal, beyond the reach of factions and politicking. He led the prayers on Friday afternoons and led his army into major battles. The army itself had changed, however. It was no longer a people's army, open to any Muslim, but a corps of Persians, who had helped the Abbasids into power and were seen as the caliph's personal troops.

This was, of course, abhorrent to the religious movement, whose members had had high hopes of the Abbasids when they first came to power. But however un-Islamic it was, the new caliphate was a political and economic success in these early days. The caliph's role was to provide his subjects with security, and under Harun al-Rashid, when the caliphate was at its peak, the empire enjoyed an unprecedented peace. Up- risings had been ruthlessly quashed, and the populace could see that opposition to this regime was pointless, but the upside was that people were able to live more normal, undisturbed lives. Harun al-Rashid was a patron of the arts and scholarship, and inspired a great cultural renaissance. Literary criticism, philosophy, poetry, medicine, mathematics and astronomy flourished not only in Baghdad but in Kufah, Basrah, Jun- dayvebar and Harran. Dhimmis participated in the florescence by translating the philosophical and medical texts of classical Hellenism from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. Building on the learning of the past, which had thus become available to them, Muslim scholars made more scientific discoveries during this time than in the whole of previously recorded history. Indus- try and commerce also flourished, and the elite lived in refine- ment and luxury. But it was difficult to see how this regime was in any way Islamic. The caliph and his entourage lived in splendid isolation, which could not have been in more marked contrast to the asceticism of the Prophet and the rashidun. Far from confining themselves to the four wives prescribed in the Quran, they had vast harems like Sassanian monarchs. Never- theless, the religious reformers had no choice but to accept the Abbasids. Islam is a realistic and practical faith, which does not normally encourage the spirit of martyrdom or the taking of pointless risks.

This realism was especially evident among the Shiis. Afier the tragic death of Husain in Kerbala, his immediate descen- dants had lived secluded and devout lives in Medina, even though many regarded them as the rightful imams of the u m m a h . Husain's oldest son, Ali Zayn al-Abidin (d. 714), who was known by Shiis as the Fourth Imam, since he had followed Ali, Hasan and Husain, was a mystic and left behind a beauti- ful collection of prayers.3 Muhammad al-Baqir, the Fifih Imam (d. 735 had developed an esoteric method of reading the Quran: each word, each verse had a hidden (batin) mean- ing, which could only be discerned by means of mystical tech- niques of concentration, similar to those developed in all the world faiths to give the contemplative access to the inner re- gions of their being. This batin meaning probably expounded al-Baqir's new doctrine of the Imamate. His brother Zayd ibn Ali was a political activist and was eventually killed in an up- rising against the Umayyads in 740. To counter Zayd's claim to be the i m a m of his time, al-Baqir argued that the unique i l m of the Prophet was passed down the line of Ali's immediate descendants. Each one of the imams chose his successor and passed on the esoteric lore that enabled him to discover the sa- cred meaning of scripture. Only the i m a m who had received this special designation (nass) from his predecessor was the le- gitimate leader of the Muslims. He - al-Baqir- had received this nass from his father; Zayd had not. In 740, however, al- Baqir had few followers; most Shiis preferred Zayd's revolu- tionary politics to al-Baqir's mystical quietism, but after the Abbasids' ruthless suppression of all Shii dissent, they were ready to listen to Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765), the Sixth Imam, who had himself been imprisoned by Caliph al-Mansur. Al-Sadiq reaffirmed and developed the doctrine of nass, declaring that even though he, as the designated imam, was the true leader of the u m m a h , he would not press his claim to the caliphate. Henceforth the i m a m would be a spiritual teacher; he would impart the divine i l m to his generation and guide them in the batin reading of the Quran, but Shiis must keep their doctrines and political beliefs to themselves in this dangerous political climate.

But this appealed only to a mystically inclined elite. Most Muslims needed a more accessible piety, and they found it in a new type of devotion, which had first emerged at the end of the Umayyad period but only achieved prominence during the reign of Harun al-Rashid. It was similar to the Christian devo- tion to Jesus, since it saw the Quran as God's uncreated Word, which had existed with him from all eternity, and which had, as it were, taken flesh and human form in the scripture revealed to Muhammad. Muslims could not see God, but they could hear him each time they listened to a recitation of the Quran, and felt that they had entered the divine presence. When they ut- tered the inspired words, God's speech was on their tongues and in their mouths; they held him in their hands when they carried the sacred book. This appalled the Mutazilites, since it offended their rational piety and their strict sense of the unity and utter simplicity of God. This doctrine seemed to make the Quran a second divine being. But, like the esoteric Shiah, the Mutazilah was only for an intellectual minority, and this devo- tion to the Quran became extremely popular. Its adherents were known as the ahl al-hadith, the Hadith People, because they insisted that Muslim law must be based on the eyewitness "reports" of the maxims and customary practice (sunnah) of the Prophet. They disagreed with the followers of Abu Hanifah, who had deemed it essential for jurists to use their powers of "independent reasoning" (ijtihad), arguing that they must have the freedom to make new laws, even if they could not be based on a hadith or a Quranic utterance.

The ahl al-hadith were, therefore, conservatives; they were in love with an idealized past; they venerated all the rashidun, and even Muawiyyah, who had been one of the Prophet's companions. Unlike the Mutazilites, who had often been po- litical activists, they insisted that the duty of "commanding the right and forbidding the wrong" was for only the very few; the rank and file must obey the caliph, whatever his religious cre- dentials. This was attractive to Harun al-Rashid, who was to conciliate the more pious movements and approved of the anti-revolutionary tendency of the ahl al-hadith. The Mu- tazilites fell from favour in Baghdad, and the Hadith People felt encouraged to ostracize them socially. On occasion, at their request, the government even imprisoned leading Mu- tazilites.

The Abbasids were aware of the strength of the religious movement and, once they had established their dynasty, they had tried to give their regime Islamic legitimacy. They there- fore encouraged the development of figh to regulate the life of the population. A split developed in the empire. The lives of the ordinary people would indeed be governed by the Shariah, as the body of Islamic law was called, but Muslim principles did not prevail in court circles nor among the higher officials of the government, who adhered to the more autocratic norms of the pre-Islamic period in order to make the Abbasid state a going concern.

Under the Umayyads, each town had developed its own fiqh, but the Abbasids pressed the jurists to evolve a more uni- fied system of law. The nature of Muslim life had changed drastically since the time of the Quran. Since conversion to Islam had been encouraged, the dhimmis were becoming a mi- nority. Muslims were no longer a small elite group, isolated from the non-Muslim majority in the garrison towns. They were now the majority. Some of the Muslims had come to the faith recently, and were still imbued with their old beliefs and practices. A more streamlined system and recognized reli- gious institution was required to regulate Islamic life for the masses. A distinct class of ulama (religious scholars; singular: alim) began to emerge. Judges (qadis) received a more rigorous training, and both al-Mahdi and al-Rashid encouraged the study of law by becoming patrons of fiqh. Two outstanding scholars made a lasting contribution. In Medina, Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) compiled a compendium which he called al- Mutawattah (The Beaten Path). It was a comprehensive account of the customal law and religious practice of Medina, which, Malik believed, still preserved the original sunnah of the Prophet's community. Malik's disciples developed his theo- ries into the Maliki School (madhhab), which became preva- lent in Medina, Egypt and North Africa.

But others were not convinced that present-day Medina was really a reliable guide to pristine Islam. Muhammad Idris ibn al-Shafii (d. 820), who had been born in poverty in Gaza and had studied with Malik in Medina, argued that it was not safe to rely on any one Islamic city, however august its pedi- gree. Instead all jurisprudence should be based on ahadith about the Prophet, who should be seen as the inspired inter- preter and not simply as the transmitter of the Quran. The 

commands and laws of scripture could be understood in the light of Muhammad's words and actions. But, Shafii insisted, each hadith had to be reliably supported by a chain (isnad) of devout Muslims leading directly back to the Prophet himself. The isnad must be stringently examined, and if the chain was broken or if any one of its "links" could be shown to be a bad Muslim, the hadith must be rejected. Al-Shafii tried to medi- ate between the ahl al-hadith and those jurists, such as Abu Hanifah, who had insisted upon the necessity of ijtihad. Shafii agreed that some degree of ijtihad was necessary, but believed that it should be confined to a strict analogy (qiyas) between one of the Prophet's customs and contemporary practice. There were, al-Shafii taught, four "roots" of sacred law (usul al-fiqh): the Quran, the sunnah of the Prophet, qiyas (analogy) and ijmah, the "consensus" of the community. God would not allow the entire u m m a h to be in error, so if a custom was ac- cepted by all Muslims, it must be recognized as authentic, even if no Quranic reference or hadith could be found in its support. Al-Shafii's method was not capable of ensuring the strict historicity of the Prophet's sunnah, according to modern standards of accuracy, but it did provide a blueprint for the creation of a way of life that certainly gave Muslims a pro- found and satisfying religious experience.

Al-Shafii's groundbreaking work led other scholars to the study of ahadith, according to his criteria. Two sound and au- thoritative anthologies were completed by al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 878), which stimulated interest in fiqh and led eventually to the creation of a homogeneous religious life, based on the sacred law of the Shariah, throughout the vast Islamic Empire. The inspiration of the law was the person of the Prophet, the Perfect Man. By imitating the smallest de- tails of his external life and by reproducing the way he ate, washed, loved, spoke and prayed, Muslims hoped to be able to acquire his interior attitude of perfect surrender to God. Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are pro- moted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence. To this day, Muslims remain deeply attached to the Shariah, which has made them internalize the arche- typal figure of Muhammad at a very deep level and, liberat- ing him from the seventh century, has made him a living presence in their lives and a part of themselves.

But like all Islamic piety, the Shariah was also political. It constituted a protest against a society that was deemed by the religious to be corrupt. Both Malik ibn Anas and al-Shafii had taken part in Shii uprisings against the early Abbasids; both had been imprisoned for their politics, though they were re- leased and patronized by al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid, who wanted to exploit their expertise and create a uniform legal system throughout the empire. The Shariah totally rejected the aristocratic, sophisticated ethos of the court. It restricted the power of the caliph, stressed that he did not have the same role as the Prophet or the rashidun, but that he was only per- mitted to administer the sacred law. Courtly culture was thus tacitly condemned as un-Islamic. The ethos of the Shariah, like that of the Quran, was egalitarian. There were special provisions to protect the weak, and no institution, such as the caliphate or the court, had any power to interfere with the personal decisions and beliefs of the individual. Each Muslim had a unique responsibility to obey God's commands, and no religious authority, no institution (such as "the Church") and no specialized group of "clergy" could come between God and the individual Muslim. All Muslims were on the same footing; there was to be no clerical elite or priesthood acting as an intermediary. The Shariah was thus an attempt to re- build society on criteria that were entirely different from those of the court. It aimed to build a counter-culture and a protest movement that would, before long, bring it into con- flict with the caliphate.

By the end of the reign of Harun al-Rashid, it was clear that the caliphate had passed its peak. No single government could control such vast territory indefinitely, before the ad- vent of modern communications and modern means of coer- cion. Some of the peripheral provinces, such as Spain (where an escaping Umayyad had set up a rival dynasty in 756),were beginning to break away. The economy was in decline. Harun al-Rashid had tried to solve the problem by dividing the em- pire between his two sons, but this only resulted in a civil war (809-1 3) between the brothers after his death. It was a mark of the secular spirit of the court at this date that unlike the fitnah wars of the past, there was no ideological or religious motiva- tion in this struggle, which was simply a clash of personal am- bition. When al-Mamun emerged as the victor and began his reign (813-33), it was clear that there were two main power blocs in the empire. One was the aristocratic circle of the court; the other, egalitarian and "constitutionalist," bloc was based on the Shariah.

Al-Mamun was aware of the fragility of his rule. His reign had started with a civil war, with a Shii rebellion in Kufah and Basrah (814- 15) and a Kharajite revolt in Khurasan. He tried to woo these disparate groups and reduce the religious tension, but his policies only made matters worse. An intellectual him- self, he felt naturally drawn to the rationalism of the Mu- tazilites and brought them back into favour. He could also see that the populist movement of the ahl al-hadith, which insisted that the divine law was directly accessible to every single Mus- lim, was not compatible with absolute monarchy. Once back in power, however, the Mutazilites turned upon the ahl al-hadith, who had persecuted them for so long. An "inquisition" (mihnah) ensued, in which leading Hadith People, notably the popular Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 833), were imprisoned. Ibn Hanbal became a folk hero. Championing the Mutazilites had done al- Mamun no good; it had simply alienated the masses. At one point, the caliph tried to reach out towards the Shiis by naming Ali al-Rida, the Eighth Imam, as his heir, but the Shiis were, like the Mutazilites, simply another spiritual and intellectual elite and could not command the support of the ordinary peo- ple. A few months later, al-Rida conveniently died- possibly by foul play.

Later caliphs also tried to woo the Shiis and oscillated be- tween one religious faction and another, to no avail. Caliph al-Mutasim (83342) attempted to strengthen the monarchy by making the army into his own personal corps. These troops were Turkish slaves, who had been captured from be- yond the River Oxus and converted to Islam. But this merely separated him still further from the populace, and there was tension between the Turkish soldiers and the people of Bagh- dad. To alleviate this, the caliph moved his capital to Samarra, some sixty miles to the south, but this simply isolated him still more, while the Turks, who had no natural links with the people, grew more powerful with every decade, until they would eventually be able to wrest effective control of the em- pire away from the caliphs. Increasingly, during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, there were armed revolts by those militant Shiis who were still committed to political activism and had not retreated into mystical quietism, and the eco- nomic crisis went from bad to worse.

But these years of political disintegration also saw the con- solidation of what would become known as Sunni Islam. Gradually, the various legists, the Mutazilites and the ahl al- hadith pooled their differences and drew closer together. An important figure in this process was Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari (d. 935), who attempted to reconcile the theology of the Mu- tazilites with that of the Hadith People. The Mutazilites had been so fearful of anthropomorphic notions of God that they denied that the divine had any "human" attributes at all. How could we say that God "spoke" or "sat on a throne," as the Quran averred? How could we talk of God's "knowledge" or "power"? The ahl al-hadith retorted that this wariness drained the experience of God of all content, and reduced the divine to a philosophical abstraction with no religious significance. Al-Ashari agreed, but appeased the Mutazilites by saying that God's attributes were not like human qualities. The Quran was God's uncreated speech, but the human words which ex- pressed it and the ink and paper of the book itself were cre- ated. There was no point in searching for a mysterious essence underlying reality. All we could know for certain were the concrete facts of history. There were, in al-Ashari's view, no natural laws. The world was ordered at every mo- ment by a direct intervention of God. There was no free will: men and women could not think unless the divine was think- ing in and through them; fire burned not because it was its na- ture to do so, but because God willed it.

The Mutazilah had always been too abstruse for the vast majority of Muslims. Asharism became the predominant phi- losophy of Sunni Islam. It was obviously not a rationalist creed, but more of a mystical and contemplative discipline. It encouraged Muslims to see the divine presence everywhere, to look through external reality to the transcendent reality im- manent within it, in the way that the Quran instructed. It sat- isfied the hunger, that was so evident in the ideas of the Hadith People, for an immediate experience of God in con- crete reality. It was also a philosophy that was congenial to the spirit of the Shariah. By observing the sunnah of the Prophet in the smallest details of their lives, Muslims identified them- selves with the Prophet, whose life had been saturated with the divine. To imitate the Prophet, the Beloved (habib) of God - by being kind to orphans, to the poor or to animals, or by behaving at meals with courtesy and refinement-was to be loved by God himself. By weaving the divine imperative into the interstices of their lives, Muslims were cultivating that constant remembrance (dhikr) of God enjoined by the Qura n By. 4the middle of the tenth century this Shariah piety had been established throughout the empire. There were four recognized law schools, each regarded with Muslim egalitar- ianism as equally valid: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali schools, the latter preserving the ideals of Ibn Hanbal and the Hadith People. In practice, these four madhhabs did not differ markedly from one another. Each Muslim could choose the one he or she would follow, though most tended towards the one that was prevalent locally.

But as one might expect, the chief factor that drew all Sunni Muslims together was political. The divine was experi- enced in the form taken by the community, and this affected a Muslim's personal piety. Sunni Muslims all revered Muham- mad and all four rashidun. Despite the failures of Uthman or Ali, these rulers had been devout men who far surpassed con- temporary rulers in the quality of their surrender to God. Sunnis refused to demote the first three rashidun, as the Shiis did, believing that Ali alone had been the legitimate imam of the ummah. Sunni piety was more optimistic than the tragic vision of the Shiis. It asserted that God could be with the ummah even in times of failure and conflict. The unity of the community was a sacred value, since it expressed the oneness of God. This was far more important than any sectarian divi- sion. It was crucial, therefore, for the sake of peace, to recog- nize the present caliphs, despite their obvious shortcomings. If Muslims lived according to the Shariah, they could create a counter-culture that would transform the corrupt political order of their day, and make it submit to God's will.

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The esoteric movements [AudioCh 8]

This piety did not satisfy all Muslims, however, though it be- came the faith of the majority. Those who were more intellectual or mystically inclined needed to interpret the religion differently. During the Abbasid period, four more complex forms of Islamic philosophy and spirituality emerged that ap- pealed to an elite. These ideas were kept secret from the masses, because the adepts believed that they could easily be misunderstood by those of meaner intelligence, and that they made sense only in a context of prayer and contemplation. The secrecy was also a self-protective device. Jafar as-Sadiq, the Sixth Imam of the Shiah, told his disciples to practise taqiyyah (dissimulation) for their own safety. These were per- ilous times for Shiis, who were in danger from the political es- tablishment. The ulama, the religious scholars, also doubted the orthodoxy of these esoteric groups. Taqiyyah kept conflict to a minimum. In Christendom, people who held beliefs that were different from the establishment were often persecuted as heretics. In Islam, these potential dissidents kept quiet about their ideas, and usually died in their beds. But the pol- icy of secrecy also had a deeper significance. The myths and theological insights of the esoterics were part of a total way of life. Mystical doctrines in particular could be experienced as imaginatively and intuitively valid, but were not necessarily comprehensible to the ordinary rational understanding of an outsider. They were like a poem or a piece of music, whose effect cannot be explained rationally, and which often re- quires a degree of aesthetic training and expertise if it is to be appreciated fully.

The esoterics did not think that their ideas were heretical. They believed that they could see a more profound meaning in the revelation than the ordinary ulama. It must also be re- called that beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to ac- cept certain credal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. All the Muslims who were attracted to the 

esoteric disciplines observed the five "Pillars" (rukn) or essen- tial practices of Islam. They were all in full agreement with the shahadah, the brief Muslim confession of faith: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet." They per- formed the salat prayer five times daily, paid the zakat alms, fasted during Ramadan, and, if their circumstances permit- ted, made the hajjto Mecca at least once in their lives. Any- body who remained faithful to the Pillars was a true Muslim, whatever his or her beliefs.

We have already discussed the quietist form of Shiism, ex- pounded by Jafar as-Saddiq soon after the Abbasids came to power. Even though Shiis were as committed to Shariah piety as Sunnis and had their own madhhab (the Jafari School, named after as-Saddiq himself), they looked chiefly for guid- ance to the current imam, the repository of divine ilm for his generation. The imam was an infallible spiritual director and a perfect qadi. Like Sunnis, Shiis wanted to experience God as directly as the Muslims in the first community, who had wit- nessed the unfolding revelation of the Quran to the Prophet. The symbol of the divinely inspired imam reflected the Shii sense of sacred presence, discernible only to the true con- templative, but nevertheless immanent in a turbulent, dan- gerous world. The doctrine of the imamate also demonstrated the extreme difficulty of incarnating a divine imperative in the tragic conditions of ordinary political life. Shiis held that every single one of the imams had been murdered by the caliph of his day. The martyrdom of Husain, the Third Imam, at Kerbala was a particularly eloquent example of the perils that could accrue from the attempt to do God's will in this world. By the tenth century Shiis publicly mourned Husain on the fast day of Ashura (10 Muharram), the anniversary of his death. They would process through the streets, weeping and beating their breasts, declaring their undying opposition to the corruption of Muslim political life, which continued to privilege the rich and oppress the weak, despite the clear commands of the Quran. Shiis who followed Jafar as-Saddiq may have abjured politics, but the passion for social justice was at the heart of their piety of protest.

During the ninth century the hostility between the Ab- basid establishment and the Shiis came to the fore again as the caliphate declined. Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-61) sum- moned the Tenth Imam, Ali al-Hadi, from Medina to Samarra and placed him under house arrest. He felt that he could not risk allowing this direct descendant of the Prophet to remain at large. Henceforth, the imams were virtually inac- cessible to the Shiis, and could communicate with the faithful only through "agents." When the Eleventh Imam died in 874, it was said that he left behind a young son, who had gone into hiding to save his life. Certainly there was no obvious trace of the Twelfth Imam, who may already have been dead. But still, the agents ruled the Shiis on his behalf, guiding their esoteric study of the Quran, collecting zakat and issuing legal judge- ments. In 934, when the Hidden Imam would have reached the term of his natural life, the "agent" brought the Shiis a special message from him. He had gone into "occultation," and had been miraculously concealed by God; he could have no further contact with the Shiis. He would return one day to inaugurate an era of justice, but only after a long time had passed. The myth of the Occultation of the Hidden Imam was not intended to be taken literally, as a statement of mundane fact. It was a mystical doctrine, which expressed our sense of the divine as elusive, absent or just out of reach, present in the world but not of it. It also symbolized the impossibility of im- plementing a truly religious policy in this world, since the caliphs had destroyed Ali's line and driven ilm from the earth. Henceforth the Shii ulama became the representatives of the Hidden Imam, and used their own mystical and rational in- sights to apprehend his will. Twelver Shiis (who believed in the twelve imams) would take no further part in political life, since in the absence of the Hidden Imam, the true leader of the ummah, no government could be legitimate. Their mes- sianic piety, which yearned for the imam's return, was expres- sive of a divine discontent with the state of the community.

Not all Shiis were Twelvers, and not all abjured politics. Some (called Seveners or Ismailis) held that Ali's line had ended with Ismail, the son of Jafar as-Sadiq, who had been designated i m a m but had died before his father. They did not, therefore, recognize the legitimacy of Jafar's second son, Musa al-Kazim, whom Twelvers revered as the Seventh Imam.' They also developed an esoteric spirituality that looked for a hidden (batin) meaning in scripture, but instead of retiring from public life, they tried to devise a wholly dif- ferent political system and were often activists. In 909 an Is- maili leader managed to seize control of the province of Tunisia, giving himself the messianic title of al-Mahdi (the Guided One). In 983 the Ismailis wrested Egypt from the Abbasids, and set up their own rival caliphate in Cairo, which lasted nearly two hundred years. There were also secret Is- maili cells in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen. Members were ini- tiated gradually into the sect by the local dai (agent). The religion practised in the lower grades was not unlike Sunnism, but as the initiate progressed he was introduced to a more ab- struse philosophy and spirituality, which made use of mathe- matics and science as a means of awakening a sense of transcendent wonder. Ismailis' meditations on the Quran gave them a cyclical view of history, which they believed to have been in decline ever since Satan had rebelled against God. There had been six great prophets (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad) who had each reversed this downward trend. Each prophet had an "executor" who taught the secret meaning of his message to those who were capable of understanding it. Aaron, for example, had been Moses' executor, and Ali had been Muhammad's. As the faithful strug- gled to put their teachings into practice, they would prepare the world for the final reign of justice, which would be inau- gurated by the seventh prophet, the Mahdi.

It was an attractive movement. Where the Sunni protest against court had made Sunnis suspicious of the arts and sci- ences, Ismailism offered the more intellectual Muslims a chance to study the new philosophy in a religious way. Their spiritual exegesis was a process of tawil (carrying back), which directed the attention of the worshipper beyond the literal meaning of scripture to the hidden, divine reality that was its original source. The Quran insists that God communicates with the faithful by means of "symbols" (ayat), since the di- vine can never be expressed in wholly rational or logical dis- course. Ismailis always alluded to God in the phrase, "He Whom the boldness of thought cannot contain." They also believed that no one revelation or theological system could ever be definitive, since God was always greater than human thought. Ismailis agreed that Muhammad had been the last and most important of the six major prophets, but also in- sisted that the full significance of the revelation that he had brought to the Arabs would become clear only when the Mahdi arrived. They were, therefore, open to the possibility of new truth, which was alarming to the more conservative of the ulama. But the Ismailis were not simply a contemplative sect. Like all true Muslims, they were concerned about the fate of the ummah, and believed that faith was worthless unless it was combined with political activism. By working for a just and decent society, they would pave the way for the arrival of the Mahdi. The Ismailis' success in establishing an enduring caliphate showed that their ideal had political potential, but it could never appeal to the majority. The Ismaili vision was too hierarchical and elitist to appeal to more than a small number of intellectual Muslims.

 

The Ismailis derived a good deal of their cosmic symbol- ism from Falsafah, the third of the esoteric movements that emerged at this time. It sprang from the cultural renaissance inaugurated by the Abbasids, in particular the discovery of Greek philosophy, science and medicine that were now avail- able to Muslims in Arabic. The Faylasufs were enthralled by the Hellenistic cult of reason; they believed that rationalism was the highest form of religion, and wanted to relate its more elevated insights to the revelation of the Quran. They had a difficult task. The Supreme Deity of Aristotle and Plotinus was very different from Allah. It did not concern itself with earthly events, had not created the world and would not judge it at the end of time. Where monotheists had experienced God in the historical events of this world, the Faylasufs agreed with the Greeks that history was an illusion; it had no beginning, middle or end, since the universe emanated eter- nally from its First Cause. The Faylasufs wanted to get be- yond the transient flux of history, and learn to see the changeless, ideal world of the divine that lay beneath it. They regarded human reason as a reflection of the Absolute Reason which is God. By purifying our intellects of all that was not rational and learning to live in a wholly reasonable way, human beings could reverse the process of eternal emanation away from the divine, ascend from the multiplicity and com- plexity of life here below to the simplicity and singularity of the One. This process of catharsis, the Faylasufs believed, was the primordial religion of all humankind. All other cults were simply inadequate versions of the true faith of reason.

Yet the Faylasufs were usually devout men, who believed that they were good Muslims. Their rationalism was itself a kind of faith, because it takes courage and great trust to be- lieve that the world is rationally ordered. A Faylasuf dedi- cated himself to living the whole of his life in a reasonable manner; he wanted to bring all his experiences and values together so that they formed a consistent, total and logical world-view. It was, perhaps, a philosophical version of tawhid. Faylasufs were good Muslims too in their social concern; they despised the luxurious society of the court and the despotism of the caliphs. Some of them wanted to transform society ac- cording to their ideal. They worked as astrologers and physi- cians in the court and other great households, and this had a marked though marginal effect on the culture. None of the Faylasufs attempted such a comprehensive reformation as the ulama, however, and produced nothing with the popular ap- peal of the Shariah.

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. 870) was the first major Fayla- suf or "Philosopher" of the Muslim world. Born in Kufah and educated in Basrah, he settled finally in Baghdad, where he enjoyed the patronage of al-Mamun. In the capital he worked closely with the Mutazilites in their attempt to rid theology (kalam) of anthropomorphism, but he did not confine himself, as they did, to Muslim sources, but sought wisdom also from the Greek sages. Thus he applied Aristotle's proof for the ex- istence of the First Cause to the God of the Quran. Like all the later Faylasufs, he believed that Muslims should seek truth wherever it was found, even from foreign peoples whose religion was different from their own. The revealed teachings in the Quran about God and the soul were parables of ab- stract philosophical truths, which made them accessible to the masses, who were incapable of rational thought. Revealed religion, therefore, was a "poor man's Falsafah," as it were. A Faylasuf such as al-Kindi was not trying to subordinate reve- lation to reason, but to see the inner soul of scripture, in rather the same way as the Shiis sought the batin truth of the Quran.

It was, however, a musician of Turkish origin who fully es- tablished the Islamic tradition of rationalistic philosophy. Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 950) went further than al-Kindi in seeing philosophy as higher than revealed religion, which be- came, in his view, a mere expedient and a natural social ne- cessity. Where al-Farabi differed from both the Greek rationalists and from Christian philosophers, however, was in the importance he gave to politics. He seems to have believed that the triumph of Islam had at last made it possible to build the rational society that Plato and Aristotle had only been able to dream about. Islam was a more reasonable religion than its predecessors. It had no illogical doctrines, such as the Trinity, and stressed the importance of law. Al-Farabi be- lieved that Shii Islam, with its cult of the imam as the guide of the community, could prepare ordinary Muslims to live in a society ruled by a philosopher-king on rational principles. Plato had argued that a well-ordered society needed doc- trines which the masses believed to be divinely inspired. Muhammad had brought a law, backed by such divine sanc- tions as hell, which would persuade the ignorant in a way that more logical arguments could not. Religion was thus a branch of political science, and should be studied and observed by a good Faylasuf, even though he would see further to the kernel of the faith than the average Muslim.

It is significant, however, that al-Farabi was a practising Sufi. The different esoteric groups tended to overlap and to have more in common with one another than with the more conservative ulama. Mystically inclined Shiis and Faylasufs tended to gravitate together, as did Shiis and Sufis, who may have had different political views but shared a similar spiri- tual outlook. Sufism, the mysticism of Sunni Islam, is differ- ent from the other schools that we have considered, since it did not develop an overtly political philosophy. Instead, it seemed to have turned its back on history, and Sufis sought God in the depths of their being rather than in current events. But nearly all religious movements in Islam take off, at least, from a political perspective, and Sufism was no exception. It had its roots in the asceticism (zuhd) that developed during the Umayyad period as a reaction against the growing world- liness and luxury of Muslim society. It was an attempt to get back to the primitive simplicity of the ummah when all Mus- lims had lived as equals. The ascetics often wore the kind of coarse woollen garment (tasawwuf) that was standard among the poor, as the Prophet had done. By the early ninth century the term tasawwuf (which gives us our "Sufi") had become synonymous with the mystical movement that was slowly de- veloping in Abbasid society.

Sufism was also probably a reaction against the growth of jurisprudence, which seemed to some Muslims to be reduc- ing Islam to a set of purely exterior rules. Sufis wanted to re- produce within themselves that state of mind that made it possible for Muhammad to receive the revelations of the Quran. It was his interior islam that was the true foundation of the law, rather than the usul al-fiqh of the jurists. Where estab- lishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad's religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their appreciation of other religious traditions. Some, for ex- ample, were especially devoted to Jesus, whom they saw as the ideal Sufi since he had preached a gospel of love. Others maintained that even a pagan who prostrated himself before a stone was worshipping the Truth (al-haqq) that existed at the heart of all things. Where the ulama and the jurists were in- creasingly coming to regard revelation as finished and com- plete, the Sufis, like the Shiis, were constantly open to the possibility of new truths, which could be found anywhere, even in other religious traditions. Where the Quran described a God of strict justice, Sufis, such as the great woman ascetic Rabiah (d. 801), spoke of a God of love.

All over the world and in every major faith tradition, men and women who have a talent for this type of interior journey have developed certain techniques that enable them to enter deeply into the unconscious mind and experience what seems like a presence in the depths of their being. Sufis learned to concentrate their mental powers while breathing deeply and rhythmically; they fasted, kept night vigils and chanted as a mantra the Divine Names attributed to God in the Quran. Sometimes this induced a wild, unrestrained ecstasy, and such mystics became known as "drunken Sufis." One of the earliest of these was Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 874), who wooed Allah like a lover. But he also learned the discipline of fanah (annihilation): by gradually peeling away the layers of egotism (which, all spiritual writers agree, holds us back from the experience of the divine), Al-Bistami found an enhanced self in the ground of his own being that was nothing other than Allah himself, who told al-Bistami: "I am through Thee; there is no god but Thou." This potentially shocking reword- ing of the shahadah expresses a profound truth, which has been discovered by mystics in many different faith traditions. The shahadah proclaimed that there was no God, no reality but Allah, so it must be true that once self is finally cancelled out in a perfect act of islam, all human beings are potentially divine. Husain al-Mansur (d. 922), also known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder, is said to have made a similar claim, crying: "Ana al-Haqq!"("I am the Truth!" or "I am the Real!"), though some scholars have suggested that this should read: "I see the Truth!"

Hallaj was executed by the ulama for claiming that it was possible to make a valid hajj in spirit, while staying at home. His death shows the hostility that was developing between the Sufis and the ulama. Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), the first of the so-called "sober Sufis," withdrew from this type of ex- tremism. He thought that the intoxication experienced by al- Bistami was merely a phase which the mystic must transcend in order to achieve an enhanced sense of self and a more complete self-possession. When a Sufi first heard the divine call, he or she became aware of their painful separation from the source of all being. The mystical journey was simply a re- turn to what is truly natural to humanity, a doctrine very sim- ilar to that held by Buddhists. Sufism remained a fringe movement during the first Abbasid period, but later Sufi mas- ters would build on Junayd's system and create an esoteric movement which, unlike the others we have considered, would captivate the majority of Muslims.

Even though they all claimed to be devout, committed Muslims, the esoterics had all changed the religion of the Prophet. Muhammad would have been startled by the doc- trines of the Faylasufs, and Ali would almost certainly not have recognized the ideas and myths of the Shiis, who de- clared themselves to be his partisans. But, despite the convic- tions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs and practices are identical with those of the founders of their faith, religion must change in order to survive. Muslim re- formers would find the esoteric forms of Islam inauthentic, and would try to get back to the purity of the first ummah, be- fore it was corrupted by these later accretions. But it is never possible to go back in time. Any "reformation," however con- servative its intention, is always a new departure, and an adap- tation of the faith to the particular challenges of the reformer's own time. Unless a tradition has within it the flexibility to de- velop and grow, it will die. Islam proved that it had this cre- ative capacity. It could appeal at a profound level to men and women who lived in conditions that were quite different from the desperate, brutal era of the Prophet. They could see meaning in the Quran that went far beyond the literal sense of the words, and which transcended the circumstances of the original revelations. The Quran became a force in their lives that gave them intimations of the sacred, and which enabled them to build fresh spiritualities of great power and insight.

The Muslims of the ninth and tenth centuries had moved far from the first little beleaguered ummah in Medina. Their philosophy, fiqh and mystical disciplines were rooted in the Quran and in the beloved figure of the Prophet, but because scripture was God's word, it was thought to be infinite and ca- pable of multiple interpretation. They were thus able to make the revelation speak to Muslims who lived in a world that the Prophet and the rashidun could not have imagined. But one thing remained constant. Like the religion of the very first ummah, the philosophy, law and spirituality of Islam were pro- foundly political. Muslims were acutely aware-in a way that was admirable-that for all its glittering cultural attainments, the empire they had created did not live up to the standards of the Quran. The caliph was the leader of the ummah, but he lived and ruled in a way that would have horrified the Prophet. Whenever there was a marked discrepancy between the Quranic ideal and the current polity, Muslims would feel that their most sacred values had been violated; the political health of the ummah could touch the deepest core of their being. In the tenth century, the more perceptive Muslims could see that the caliphate was in trouble, but so alien was it to the spirit of Islam that Muslims would experience its de- cline as a liberation.

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3] CULMINATION

 

A NEW  ORDER  (935-1258 ) [AudioCh 9]

By the tenth century it was clear that Islamdom could no longer function effectively as a single political unit. The caliph would remain the nominal head of the ummah and re- tain a symbolic, religious function, but in practice the differ- ent regions of the empire were governed independently. From Egypt, the breakaway caliphate of the Ismaili Fatimids' ruled North Africa, Syria, much of Arabia, and Palestine; in Iraq, Iran and Central Asia, Turkish army officers (amirs) seized power and established what were really independent states, competing with one another militarily. The tenth cen- tury has been called the Shii century, because many of these dynasties had vague Shii leanings. But all the amirs continued to acknowledge the Abbasid caliph as the supreme leader of the ummah, so entrenched was the ideal of absolute monarchy. These dynasties achieved some political success. One even managed to found a permanent Muslim base in north-west India in the early eleventh century. But none managed to sur- vive for very long, until the Seljuk Turks, from the lower Syr basin, seized power in Baghdad in 1055 and came to a special arrangement with the caliph, who recognized them as his lieutenants throughout the Dar al-Islam. During the years be- fore the Seljuk victory, it had seemed as though the empire was doomed to perpetual disintegration. As one dynasty suc- ceeded another and as frontiers shifted, an outside observer might have been justified in assuming that, after an initial pe- riod of success, Islamdom was in decline.

But he would have been wrong. In fact, almost by accident, a new order was emerging that would be much more conge- nial to the Muslim spirit. Despite the political turbulence, Islamic religion was going from strength to strength. Each re- gion had its own capital, so that instead of one cultural centre in Baghdad, there were now several. Cairo became a vital city of art and learning under the Fatimids. Philosophy flourished there and in the tenth century the caliphs founded the college of al-Azhar, destined to become the most important Islamic university in the world. Samarkand also saw a Persian literary renaissance. One of its luminaries was the Faylasuf Abu Ali ibn Sina (980-1037), who is known as Avicenna in the West. Ibn Sina had been a disciple of al-Farabi, but took religion far more seriously. In his view a prophet was the ideal philoso- pher, not merely a purveyor of abstract rational truth for the masses, because he had access to insights that did not depend upon discursive thought. Ibn Sina was interested in Sufism, and recognized that mystics attained an experience of the di- vine that could not be reached by logical processes, but which did cohere with Faylasuf notions. Both Falsafah and the faith of the mystics and the conventionally pious were therefore in harmony.

Cordova also experienced a cultural florescence, even though the Umayyad caliphate in Spain had eventually col- lapsed in 1010 and disintegrated into a number of rival, inde- pendent courts. The Spanish renaissance was particularly famous for its poetry, which resembled that of the French troubadour courtly tradition. The Muslim poet Ibn Hazam (994—1064) developed a simpler piety, which relied solely on ahadith, and jettisoned complex fiqh and metaphysical philoso- phy. Nevertheless, one of Spain's later intellectual stars was the Faylasuf Abu al-Walid Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126-98), who was less important in the Muslim world than the more mysti- cally inclined Ibn Sina, but whose rationalistic thought influ- enced such Jewish and Christian philosophers as Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. In the nineteenth cen- tury the philologist Ernest Renan hailed Ibn Rushd (who is  known in the West as Averroes) as a free spirit, an early cham- pion of rationalism against blind faith. But in fact, Ibn Rushd was a devout Muslim and a qadi judge of Shariah law. Like Ibn Sina, he believed that there was no contradiction between re- ligion and Falsafah, but that while religion was for everybody, only an intellectual elite should attempt philosophy.

It seems that once the caliphate had been-for all practical purposes - abandoned, Islam got a new lease of life. There had always been tension between the ideals of absolute monarchy and the Quran. The new polities that were emerg- ing in the Islamic world by a process of trial and error were closer to the Islamic vision. Not that all the new rulers were pious Muslims-far from it-but the system of independent courts and rulers, all on a par with one another but contained within a loose notional unity, approximated more truly the egalitarian spirit of the Quran. It was also in harmony with the art that was emerging in the Muslim world at this period. The arabesque does not give more emphasis to one letter than to another; each character has its place and makes its unique contribution to the whole. Muslim historians, such as Ibn Ishaq and Abu Jafar al-Tabari (d. 923), made little attempt to synchronize the sometimes conflicting traditions about the Prophet's life, but simply juxtaposed rival versions, giving each equal value. Muslims had accepted the caliphate be- cause it guaranteed the unity of the ummah, but once the caliphs showed that they could not integrate the empire any longer, they were content to relegate them to symbolic status. There was a change in Islamic piety. Hitherto, theology and spirituality had nearly always been rooted in a political re- sponse to the historical circumstances of the Muslim commu- nity. But now that Muslims had more congenial political arrangements, Muslim thought and devotion were less driven by current events. Significantly, Islam became more political again during the modern period, when Muslims faced new  perils which, they felt, put the moral, cultural and religious well-being of the ummah in jeopardy, and even threatened its very survival.

It was the Seljuk Turks who, more by accident than de- sign, gave fullest expression to the new order in the Fertile Crescent, where this decentralization was more advanced. The Seljuks were Sunnis, with a strong tendency towards Sufism. Their empire was ruled from 1063 to 1092 by the brilliant Persian vizier Nizamulmulk, who wanted to use the Turks to restore unity to the empire and rebuild the old Abbasid bureaucracy. But it was too late to revive Baghdad, since the agricultural region of the Sawad, the basis of its economy, was in irreversible decline. Nor was Nizamulmulk able to control the Seljuk army, a cavalry force of nomadic tribesmen who were still a law unto themselves and moved with their herds wherever they wished. But, with the aid of a new slave corps, Nizamulmulk did build an empire which reached as far as Yemen in the south, to the Syr-Oxus basin in the east and into Syria in the west. This new Seljuk Em- pire had very few formal political institutions, and order was imposed at the local level by the amirs and the ulama, who set up an ad hoc partnership. The amirs who commanded the various districts pre-empted Nizamulmulk's centralizing plans by becoming virtually independent, administering their own regions and taking the land revenues directly from the inhabitants instead of from Baghdad. This was not a feudal system, since, whatever the vizier may have in- tended, the amirs were not the vassals of the caliph nor of the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah. The amirs were nomads who had no interest in farming their territory, so they did not form a feudal aristocracy, tied to the land. They were sol- diers, and not much interested in the civil life of their sub- jects, which became in effect the province of the ulama.

The ulama held these scattered military regimes together.

 

During the tenth century they had become dissatisfied with the standard of their education, and had established the first madrasahs, colleges for the study of Islamic sciences. This made their training more systematic, their learning more uniform, and enhanced the status of the clergy. Nizalmul- mulk encouraged the building of madrasahs throughout the Seljuk Empire, adding subjects to the curriculum that would enable the ulama to work in local government. In Baghdad, he founded the prestigious Nizamiyyah madrasah in 1067. Now that they had their own institutions, the ulama had a power base, which became distinct from but equivalent to the mili- tary courts of the amirs. The standardized madrasahs also pro- moted the homogeneous Muslim lifestyle fostered by the Shariah throughout the Seljuk domains. The ulama also mo- nopolized the legal system in their Shariah courts. A de facto split had thus occurred between political power and the civil life of the community. None of the mini-states run by the amirs lasted long; they had no political ideology. The amirs were very temporary functionaries, and all the idealism of the empire was provided by the ulama and the Sufi masters (pirs), who had their own separate sphere. Learned ulama would travel from one madrasah to another; the Sufi pirs were notoriously mobile, journeying from one town and one cen- tre to another. The religious personnel began to provide the glue that held the disparate society together.

Thus after the demise of the effective caliphate the em- pire became more Islamic. Instead of feeling that they be- longed to one of the ephemeral states of the amirs, Muslims began to see themselves as members of a more international society, represented by the ulama, which was coextensive with the whole Dar al-Islam. The ulama adapted the Shariah to these new circumstances. Instead of using Muslim law to build a counterculture, the Shariah now saw the caliph as the symbolic guardian of the sacred law. As the amirs came and  went, the ulama, with the backing of the Shariah, became the only stable authority, and as Sufism became more popular, the piety of the people deepened and acquired an interior dimension.

Sunni Islam now seemed in the ascendant almost every- where. Some of the more radical Ismailis, who had become disillusioned with the Fatimid Empire, which had so signally failed to impose the true faith on the ummah, set up an underground network of guerrillas, dedicated to the overthrow of the Seljuks and the destruction of the Sunnis. From 1090 they conducted raids from their mountain fortress in Alamut, north of Qazvin, seizing Seljuk strongholds and murdering leading amirs. By 1092 this had become a full-scale revolt. The rebels became known by their enemies as the hashishin (which gives us our word "as- sassin"), because they were said to use hashish to give them the courage to take part in attacks that often resulted in their own death. The Ismailis believed that they were the cham- pions of the ordinary people, who were themselves often harassed by the amirs, but this campaign of terror turned most Muslims against the Ismailis. The ulama spread wild and inaccurate stories about them (the hashish legend being one of these myths), people who were suspected of being Is- mailis were rounded up and killed and these massacres led to fresh Ismaili attacks. But despite this opposition, the Is- mailis managed to build a state around Alamut, which lasted 150 years and which only the Mongol invaders were able to destroy. The immediate effect of their jihad, however, was not, as they had hoped, the advent of the Mahdi, but the dis- crediting of the whole of the Shiah. The Twelvers, who had taken no part in the Ismaili revolt, were careful to appease the Sunni authorities and to abstain from any political in- volvement. For their part, Sunnis were ready to respond to a theologian who was able to give magisterial definition of  their faith and who has been called the most important Mus- lim since the Prophet Muhammad.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), a protege of vizier Nizamulmulk, a lecturer at the Nizamiyyah madrasah in Baghdad and an expert in Islamic law, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1095. The Ismaili revolution was at this time at its height, but al-Ghazzali was chiefly distressed by the possi- bility that he was losing his faith. He found that he was para- lyzed and could not speak; his doctors diagnosed a deep-seated emotional conflict, and later Ghazzali explained that he was concerned that though he knew a great deal about God, he did not know God himself. He therefore went off to Jerusalem, practised Sufi exercises and returned to Iraq ten years later to write his masterpiece lyah alum al-Din (The Revival of the Reli- gious Sciences). It became the most-quoted Muslim text after the Quran and the ahadith. It was based on the important insight that only ritual and prayer could give human beings a direct knowledge of God; the arguments of theology {kalam) and Fal- safah, however, could give us no certainty about the divine. The lyah provides Muslims with a daily spiritual and practical regi- men, designed to prepare them for this religious experience. All the Shariah rules about eating, sleeping, washing, hygiene and prayer were given a devotional and ethical interpretation, so that they were no longer simply external directives, but en- abled Muslims to cultivate that perpetual consciousness of the divine that is advocated by the Quran. The Shariah had thus become more than a means of social conformity and a slavish exterior imitation of the Prophet and his sunnah it became a way of achieving interior islam. Al-Ghazzali was not writing for the religious experts, but for devout individuals. There were, he believed, three sorts of people: those who accept the truths of religion without questioning them; those who try to find jus- tification for their beliefs in the rational discipline of kalam; and the Sufis, who have a direct experience of religious truth.

fior›stárninopIe

 

Seljuk Empiie and apanàge I and under Sńn central

 

Al-Ghazzali was aware that in their new political circum- stances people needed different religious solutions. He dis- liked the Ismaili devotion to an infallible imam: where was this imam?How could ordinary people find him? This dependence upon an authority figure seemed to violate the egalitarianism of the Quran. Falsafah, he acknowledged, was indispensable for such disciplines as mathematics or medicine, but it could give no reliable guide to spiritual matters that lie beyond the use of reason. In al-Ghazzali's view, Sufism was the answer, because its disciplines could lead to a direct apprehension of the divine. In the early days, the ulama had been alarmed by Sufism, and regarded it as a dangerous fringe movement. Now al-Ghazzali urged the religious scholars to practise the con- templative rituals that the Sufi mystics had developed and to promote this interior spirituality at the same time as they propagated the external rules of the Shariah. Both were cru- cial to Islam. Al-Ghazzali had thus given mysticism a ringing endorsement, using his authority and prestige to assure its in- corporation into mainstream Muslim life.

Al-Ghazzali was recognized as a supreme religious au- thority in his own time. During this period Sufism became a popular movement, and was no longer confined to an elite. Now that the people's piety was not preoccupied, as in the early days, with the politics of the ummah, they were ready for the ahistorical, mythical inward journey of the mystic. Instead of being a solitary practice for esoteric Muslims, dhikr (the chanting of the Divine Names) became a group activity that propelled Muslims into an alternative state of consciousness, under the guidance of their pir. Sufis listened to music to heighten their awareness of transcendence. They clustered around their pirs, as Shiis had once gathered around their imams, seeing them as their guide to God. When apir died, he became, in effect, a "saint," a focus of sacredness, and the peo- ple would pray and hold dhikrs at his tomb. Each town now

 

Islam • 91

had its khanqah (convent), as well as a mosque or a madrasah, where the local pir instructed his disciples. New Sufi orders (tariqahs) were formed, which were not bound to a particular region but which were international, with branches all over the Dar al-Islam. These tariqahs thus became another source of unity in the decentralized empire. So were the new broth- erhoods and guilds {futuwwabs) for artisans and merchants in the towns, which were greatly influenced by Sufi ideals. In- creasingly, it was the Islamic institutions that were pulling the empire together and, at the same time, the faith of even the most uneducated Muslims was acquiring an inner resonance that had once been the preserve of a sophisticated and eso- teric elite.

Henceforth there would be no theological or philosophical discourse in Islam that was not deeply fused with spirituality. New "theosophers" began to expound this new Muslim syn- thesis. In Aleppo, Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191) founded a school of illumination (al-ishraq) based on ancient pre- Islamic Iranian mysticism. He saw true philosophy as the re- sult of a marriage between the disciplined training of the intellect through Falsafah and the interior transformation of the heart effected by Sufism. Reason and mysticism must go hand in hand; both were essential to human beings, and both were needed in the pursuit of truth. The visions of the mys- tics and the symbols of the Quran (such as heaven, hell and the Last Judgement) could not be proved empirically, but could only be glimpsed by the trained intuitive faculty of the contemplative. Outside this mystical dimension, the myths of religion made no sense, because they were not "real" in the same way as earthly phenomena which we experience with our normal waking consciousness. A mystic trained him- or herself to see the interior dimension of earthly existence by means of the Sufi disciplines. Muslims had to cultivate a sense of the alam al-mithal, "the world of pure images," which

exists between our ordinary world and God's. Even those who were not trained mystics became aware of this world in dreams or in the hypnogogic imagery that can surface as we fall asleep or into a trance state. When a prophet or a mystic had a vision, Suhrawardi believed, he had become aware of this interior realm, which could correspond to what we call the unconscious mind today.

This type of Islam would have been unrecognizable to Hasan al-Basri or Shafii. Suhrawardi may have been executed for his views but he was a devout Muslim, who quoted the Quran more extensively than any previous Faylasuf His works are still read as mystical classics. So are the books of the prolific and highly influential Spanish theosopher Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240), who also urged Muslims to dis- cover the alam al-mithal within them, and taught that the way to God lay through the creative imagination. Ibn al-Arabi's books were not easy and appealed to the more intellectual Muslims, but he believed that anybody could be a Sufi, and that everybody should look for the symbolic, hidden meaning of scripture. Muslims had a duty to create their own theopha- nies, by training their imaginations to see below the surface to the sacred presence that resides in everything and everyone. Every single human being was a unique and unrepeatable revelation of one of God's hidden attributes, and the only God we will ever know is the Divine Name inscribed in our inmost self. This vision of a personal Lord was conditioned by the faith tradition into which a person was born. Thus the mystic must see all faiths as equally valid, and is at home in a synagogue, mosque, temple or church, for, as God says in the Quran: "Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah."'

Thus there had been a religious revolution after the demise of the caliphate. It affected the humble artisan as well as the sophisticated intellectual. A truly Muslim people had come into being, who had learned to endorse the faith at a

 

profound level. Muslims had responded to what might have been a political disaster with a vast spiritual renewal, which reinterpreted the faith to meet the new conditions. Islam was now thriving without government support. Indeed, it was the only constant in a world of political flux.

THE CRUSADES  [AudioCh 10]

The new order of politically autonomous amirs, which had come into being under the Seljuk Turks, continued after their empire had begun to fall apart at the end of the eleventh cen- tury. The system had obvious drawbacks. The amirs con- stantly fought one another, and found it very difficult to band together against an external foe. This became tragically ap- parent in July 1099, when the Christian Crusaders from west- ern Europe attacked Jerusalem, the third holiest city in the Islamic world after Mecca and Medina, massacred its inhabi- tants and established states in Palestine, the Lebanon and Anatolia. The amirs of the region, who were fighting each other as the Seljuk Empire declined, could make no united ri- poste, and seemed powerless against this aggressive Western intrusion. It was fifty years before Imad ad-Din Zangi, amir of Mosul and Aleppo, was able to drive the Crusaders from Ar- menia in 1144, and almost another half-century before Yusuf ibn Ayyub Salah ad-Din, the Kurdish general who is known as Saladin in the West, was able in 1187 to take Jerusalem from the Crusaders, who managed, however, to retain a foothold in the Near East along the coast until the end of the thirteenth century. Because of this external threat, the Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin lasted far longer than the more ephemeral states of the amirs in the Fertile Crescent. At an early stage of his campaign, Saladin had defeated the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, incorporated its territory into his growing empire and returned its inhabitants to Sunni Islam.

SEUUKS OF RU M

CALIPHATE

DANISH-IMANDIDS

ELD1GUZID5

The Crusader States in Palestine, Syria and Anatolia, c. 1130

 

The Crusades were disgraceful but formative events in Western history; they were devastating for the Muslims of the Near East, but for the vast majority of Muslims in Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, Malaya, Afghanistan and India, they were re- mote border incidents. It was only in the twentieth century, when the West had become more powerful and threatening, that Muslim historians would become preoccupied by the medieval Crusades, looking back with nostalgia to the victo- rious Saladin, and longing for a leader who would be able to contain the neo-Crusade of Western imperialism.

EXPANSION

The immediate cause of the Crusades had been the Seljuks' conquest of Syria from the Fatimids in 1070. During their campaign, they had also come into conflict with the now ail- ing Byzantine Empire, whose borders were poorly defended. When the Seljuk cavalry crossed the lines and entered Anato- lia, they inflicted a devastating defeat on the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikurt in 1071. Within a decade Turkish no- mads had taken to roaming freely throughout Anatolia with their flocks, and amirs founded small states there, manned by Muslims who saw Anatolia as the new frontier and a land of opportunity. Powerless to stop this Turkish advance, the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus I asked the Pope for aid in 1091, and in response Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade. The Crusaders' occupation of parts of Anato- lia did not long stem the Turkish conquest of the region. By the end of the thirteenth century the Turks had reached the Mediterranean; during the fourteenth century they crossed the Aegean, settled in the Balkans, and reached the Danube. Never before had any Muslim ruler been able to inflict such a defeat upon Byzantium, which had behind it the prestige of the ancient Roman Empire. It was with pride, therefore, that

 

the Turks called their new state in Anatolia "Rum" or Rome. Despite the decline of the caliphate, Muslims had now ex- panded into two areas that had never before been part of the Dar al-Islam - eastern Europe and a portion of north-west India-and which would become highly creative regions in the near future.

Caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) tried to restore the caliphate in Baghdad and its environs. Seeing the power of the religious re- vival, he tried to draw upon Islam. Originally, the Shariah had been developed in protest against caliphal rule, but now al- Nasir studied to become an alim in all four of the Sunni law schools. He was also initiated into one of the futuwwab clubs, with the aim of making himself the Grand Master of all the futuwwabs in Baghdad. Afier al-Nasir's death, his successors continued these policies. But it was too late. The Islamic world was shortly engulfed in a catastrophe which would finally bring the Abbasid caliphate to a violent and tragic end.

THE MONGOL S  (1220-1500 )

In the Far East, the Mongol chiefiain Genghis Khan was building a world empire, and a clash with Islamdom was in- evitable. Unlike the Seljuks, he was able to control and disci- pline his nomadic hordes, and made them into a fighting machine with a destructive power that the world had never seen before. Any ruler who failed to submit immediately to the Mongol chiefiains could expect to see his major cities en- tirely laid waste and their populations massacred. The Mon- gols' ferocity was a deliberate technique but it also expressed the nomads' pent-up resentment of urban culture. When Muhammad, shah of the Khwarazmian Turks (1200-1220), attempted to build a Muslim caliphate of his own in Iran and the Oxus region, the Mongol general Hulegu regarded it as an act of insolent hubris. From 1219 to 1229 the Mongol armies pursued Muhammad and his son Jalal al-Din across Iran, through Azerbaijan and into Syria, leaving a trail of death and devastation behind them. In 1231, a new series of raids began. One great Muslim city after another was demol- ished. Bukhara was reduced to rubble, Baghdad fell after a single battle, and took the moribund caliphate with it: corpses filled the streets, and refugees fled to Syria, Egypt or India. The Ismailis of Alamut were massacred, and though the new Seljuk dynasty of Rum submitted to the Mongols at once, it never fully recovered. The first Muslim ruler who was able to stop the Mongols in their tracks was Baibars, the sultan of the new Egyptian state ruled by a Turkish slave corps. The Mam- luks (slaves) had dominated the army of the Ayyubid Empire founded by Saladin; in 1250 the Mamluk amirs had led a suc- cessful coup against the Ayyubid state, and founded their own empire in the Near East. In 1260 Baibars inflicted a defeat on the Mongol army at Ain Jalut in northern Palestine. Afier their sortie into India had been deflected by the new sultanate based in Delhi, the Mongols settled down to enjoy the fruits of victory, creating empires in the heartlands of Islamdom that owed allegiance to Kublai, the Mongol Khan in China.

The Mongols created four large states. The descendants of Hulegu, who were known as 11-Khans (representatives of the Supreme Khan), at first refused to accept that their defeat was final, and destroyed Damascus before they eventually acqui- esced and retired to their empire in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and the mountainous regions of Iran. The Chaghatay Mongols established a state in the Syr-Oxus basin, while the White Horde was established in the Irtysh region, and the Golden Horde around the River Volga. It was the greatest political upheaval in the Middle East since the Arab invasions of the seventh century, but unlike the Arab Muslims the Mon- gols brought no spirituality with them. They were, however, tolerant of all religions, though they tended towards Buddhism.

 

Their law code, the Yasa, which was attributed to Genghis Khan himself, was a narrowly military system, which did not affect civilians. It was Mongol policy to build on local traditions once they had subjugated an area, and so by the end of the thir- teenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries all four of the Mongol empires had converted to Islam.

The Mongols therefore became the chief Muslim power in the central Islamic heartlands. But whatever their official allegiance to Islam, the main ideology of their states was "Mongolism," which glorified the imperial and military might of the Mongols and dreamed of world conquest. The whole state was run on military lines. The monarch was the commander-in-chief, and was expected to lead his men him- self and not leave campaigns to his deputies. Hence there was, in the early days, no capital city. The capital was wherever the khan and his army happened to be encamped. The whole ap- paratus of the state was conducted like an army, and the ad- ministration accompanied the soldiers on the march. The whole intricate camp-culture was conducted with remarkable efficiency. There were two chief political objectives: world hegemony and the perpetuation of the ruling dynasty, which justified any cruelty. It was an ideology similar to the old ab- solutist polity, which had believed that the greater the ruler's power, the better the peace and security of the state. The de- crees of all the monarchs of a dynasty remained in force as long as the family was in power, marginalizing all other legal systems. All the top jobs in government were given to mem- bers of the family and their local clients and proteges, who were all drawn into the entourage of the great nomadic army at the core of the state.100 • Karen Armstrong

There could hardly be a greater contrast with the egalitar- ianism of Islam, but it was, in a sense, a continuation of the militarization of society that had occurred in the final years of the Abbasid caliphate, where the amirshad ruled from the   garrisons, leaving the civilians and the ulama to their own Is- lamic devices. There had always been the possibility that the military might interfere more in civil affairs, if an amir had achieved anything resembling stability. To a degree, this hap- pened under the Mongol rulers, who were powerful enough to put new constraints on the ulama. The Shariah was no longer permitted to be a potentially subversive code. By the fifteenth century it was agreed that the ulama could no longer use their own independent judgement {ijtihad) in creative legislation; it was said that "the gates of ijtihad'' were closed. Muslims were obliged to conform to the rulings of past au- thorities. The Shariah had in principle become a system of established rules, which could not jeopardize the more dy- namic dynastic law of the ruling house.

The Mongol irruption into Muslim life had been trau- matic. Mongols had left a swathe of ruined cities and libraries behind them, as well as economic recession. But once they had achieved victory, the Mongols rebuilt on a magnificent scale the cities they had devastated. They also established brilliant courts, which promoted science, art, history and mysticism. Appalling as the Mongol scourge had been, the Mongol rulers were fascinating to their Muslim subjects. Their political structures remained subtly enduring and, as we shall see, influenced later Muslim empires. The Mongols' power had suggested new horizons. They had seemed about to conquer the world, and had been a portent of a new kind of imperialism, which linked the possibility of universal rule with mass destruction. The splendour of their states dazzled, at the same time as they undermined Muslim preconceptions. Muslims were not stunned into passivity by the horrors they had lived through, nor by the political defeat that these Mon- gol states represented. Islam is a resilient faith. Frequently in their history Muslims had responded positively to disaster, and used it constructively to gain fresh religious insights. So too after the Mongol invasions, when people clearly felt that the world as they had known it was coming to an end, but also that an entirely new global order was possible.

This was clearly evident in the vision of the Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), who was himself a victim of the Mongols but whose teachings expressed the sense of bound- less possibility that they had brought with them. Rumi had been born in Khurasan; his father was an alim and a Sufi mas- ter, and Rumi himself was learned in figh, theology and Ara- bic and Persian literature. But to escape the approaching Mongol hordes, the family was forced to flee. They came as refugees to Konya, the capital of the sultanate of Rum, in Anatolia. Rumi's spirituality is suffused by a sense of cosmic homelessness and separation from God, the divine source. The greatest misfortune that could befall any human being, Rumi insisted, was not to feel the pain of severance, which goads a man or woman to the religious quest. We must realize our inadequacy and that our sense of selfhood is illusory. Our ego veils the reality from us, and by divesting ourselves of egotism and selfishness we will find that God is all that re- mains.

Rumi was a "drunken Sufi." His spiritual and personal life veered from one emotional extreme to another; he sought ec- stasy in dancing, singing, poetry and music, and the members of the order that he founded are often called the Whirling Dervishes because of their stately, spinning dance, which in- duces a trance state of transcendence. Despite his obvious in- stability, Rumi was known in his lifetime as Mawlanah (our Lord) by his disciples, and his Mawlanah Order has had great influence in Turkey right up to the present day. The Math- nawi, his magnum opus, is known as the Sufi scripture. Where Ibn al-Arabi had written for the intellectual, Rumi was sum- moning all human beings to live beyond themselves, and to transcend the routines of daily life. The Mathnawi celebrated the Sufi lifestyle which can make everyone an indomitable hero of a battle waged perpetually in the cosmos and within the soul. The Mongol invasions had led to a mystical move- ment, which helped people come to terms with the catastro- phe they had experienced at the deeper levels of the psyche, and Rumi was its greatest luminary and exemplar. The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited po- tential of human life. Sufis could experience on the spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics.

Others responded to the upheavals of the period very dif- ferently. The destruction of the invasions, when so much had been lost, led to an intensification of the conservatism that al- ways characterized agrarian society. When resources were limited, it was impossible to encourage inventiveness and originality in the way that we do today in the modern West, where we expect to know more than our parents' generation and that our children will experience still greater advance. No society before our own could afford the constant retrain- ing of personnel and replacement of the infrastructure that innovation on this scale demands. Consequently, in all pre- modern societies, including that of agrarian Europe, educa- tion was designed to preserve what had already been achieved and to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the indi- vidual, which could undermine the stability of a community that had no means of integrating or exploiting fresh insights. In the madrasahs, for example, pupils learned old texts and commentaries by heart, and the teaching consisted of a word- by-word explication of a standard textbook. Public disputa- tions between scholars took for granted that one of the debaters was right and the other wrong. There was no idea, in the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing the clash of two opposing positions to build a new synthesis. Thus the madrasahs promoted an acceptance of those notions that

 

Islam •  103

could unite Muslims throughout the world, and stamped down on heterodox ideas that would cause dissension and tempt people to leave the straight path and go their own way. By the fourteenth century, the study and observance of the Shariah was the only type of piety to be accepted by all Mus- lims, Sunni and Shii, Sufi and Faylasuf alike. By this time, the ulama liked to believe that these laws had been in place from the very beginning of Islamic history. Thus while some Sufis, such as Rumi, were beginning to glimpse new horizons, many of the ulama believed that nothing ever changed. Hence they were content that the "gates of ijtihad" were closed. After the loss of so much of the learning of the past, the destruction of manuscripts and the slaughter of scholars, it was more impor- tant to recover what had been lost than to inaugurate more change. Because the Mongol military code made no provision for civil society, the ulama continued to govern the lives of the faithful, and their influence tended to be conservative. Where Sufis such as Rumi believed that all religions were valid, by the fourteenth century the ulama had transformed the plural- ism of the Quran into a hard communalism, which saw other traditions as irrelevant relics of the past. Non-Muslims were forbidden now to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and it became a capital offence to make insulting remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The trauma of the invasions had, not surprisingly, made Muslims feel insecure. Foreigners were not only suspect; they could be as lethal as the Mongols. But there were ulama who refused to accept the closing of the "gates of ijtihad".Throughout Islamic history, at times of great political crisis-especially during a period of foreign encroachment-a reformer (mujdadid) would often renew the faith so that it could meet the new conditions. These reforms usually followed a similar pattern. They were conservative, since they attempted to go back to basics rather than create an entirely new solution. But in this desire to return to the pristine Islam of the Quran and sunnah, the reformers were often iconoclastic in sweeping away later medieval developments that had come to be considered sacred. They were also suspi- cious of foreign influence, and alien accretions, which had corrupted what they saw as the purity of the faith. This type of reformer would become a feature of Muslim society. Many of the people who are called "Muslim fundamentalists " in our own day correspond exactly to the old pattern set by the muj- dadids.

In the post-Mongol world, the great reformer of the day was Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), an alim of Damas- cus, which had suffered so terribly at the hands of the Mon- gols. Ibn Taymiyyah came from an old family of ulama who belonged to the Hanbali madhhab, and wanted to reinforce the values of the Shariah. He declared that even though the Mongols had converted to Islam, they were in fact infidels and apostates, because they had promulgated the Yasa instead of the Shariah. Like a true reformer, he attacked Islamic de- velopments that had occurred after the Prophet and the rashidun as inauthentic: Shiism, Sufism and Falsafah. But he also had a positive programme. In these changed times, the Shariah had to be brought up to date to fit the actual circum- stances of Muslims, even if this meant getting rid of much of the fiqh that had developed over the centuries. It was essential, therefore, that jurists use ijtihad to find a legal solution that was true to the spirit of the Shariah, even if it infringed the letter of the law as this had been understood in recent times. Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolution- ary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he un-derstood it. 

 

Islam . 105

Ibn Taymiyyah was imprisoned, and was said to have died of sorrow, since his gaolers would not permit him to write. But the ordinary people of Damascus loved him, be- cause they could see that his Shariah reforms had been lib- eral, and that he had had their interests at heart. His funeral became a massive demonstration of popular acclaim.

Change could be exciting but it was also disturbing. In Tunis, Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun (1 332-1406) watched one dynasty after another fail in the Maghrib, the western region of the Islamic world. Plague destroyed whole communities. Nomadic tribes had migrated from Egypt into North Africa, causing massive devastation and a corresponding decline in traditional Berber society. Ibn Khaldun had himself emigrated to Tunisia from Spain, where the Christians had conducted a successful reconquista of Muslim territory, taking Cordova in 1236 and Seville in 1248. All that was left of the thriving Mus- lim kingdom of al-Andalus was the city-state of Granada, which would be defeated by the Christians in 1492, but not be- fore building the magnificent Alhambra palace there in the mid fourteenth century. Islam was clearly in crisis. "When there is an entire alteration of conditions," Ibn Khaldun re- flected, "it is as if the whole creation had changed and all the world had been transformed, as if there were a new creation, a rebirth, a world brought into existence anew."3

Ibn Khaldun wanted to discover the underlying causes of this change. He was probably the last great Spanish Faylasuf; his great innovation was to apply the principles of philo- sophic rationalism to the study of history, hitherto considered to be beneath the notice of a philosopher, because it dealt only with transient, fleeting events instead of eternal truths. But Ibn Khaldun believed that, beneath the flux of historical incidents, universal laws governed the fortunes of society. He decided that it was a strong sense of group solidarity {asi- biyyah) that enabled a people to survive and, if conditions were right, to subjugate others. This conquest meant that the dominant group could absorb the resources of the subject peoples, develop a culture and a complex urban life. But as the ruling class became accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle, complacency set in and they began to lose their vigour. They no longer took sufficient heed of their subjects, there was jeal- ousy and infighting and the economy would begin to decline. Thus the state became vulnerable to a new tribal or nomadic group, which was in the first flush of its own asibiyyah, and the whole cycle began again. Ibn Khaldun's masterpiece Al- Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History applied this theory to the history of Islam, and would be read closely by Muslim empire builders in coming years, as well as by Western histo- rians in the nineteenth century, who saw Ibn Khaldun as a pi- oneer of their scientific study of history.

Ibn Khaldun was able to watch the decline of the Mongol states during the second half of the fourteenth century, which clearly confirmed his theory. Their original asibiyyah had peaked, complacency had set in, and the stage was now set for other dominant groups to take control. It seemed likely that the new leaders would come not from the Islamic heartlands, but from the fringes of the Muslim world, which had not been subject to Mongol rule. By this time, the Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria had also started its decline. At its height, the Mamluks had created a vibrant society, with a strong esprit de corps, and a flourishing culture. But by the fifteenth century the empire had outrun its resources, and, like any agrarian state, had begun to fall apart.

The ruler who most fully expressed the spirit of the age was a Turk from the Syr Valley, who had grown up in the Mongol Chaghaytay state in Samarkand, and was passionate about the Mongol ideal. Timur (1336-1405), known as Timur Lenk (Timur the Lame) because of a pronounced limp, and Tamburlaine in the West, seized power in the declining Chaghaytay Empire, claimed Mongol descent, and began to reconquer the old Mongol territory with the sav- agery that had characterized the original invasions. Timur combined his thirst for achievement and love of destruction with a passion for Islam, and because he so perfectly en- shrined the enthusiasms of his day, he became a folk hero. He erected magnificent buildings in Samarkand, where he presided over a splendid court. His version of Islam-big- oted, cruel and violent-bore little relation to the conserva- tive piety of the ulama or the Sufi doctrine of love. He saw himself as the scourge of Allah, sent to punish the Muslim amirs for their unjust practices. His chief concern was to es- tablish order and punish corruption, and even though his sub- jects feared Timur's brutality, they appreciated his strong government after the disintegration of recent years. Like the Mongols before him, Timur seemed unstoppable, and for a time it looked as though he would achieve world conquest. By 1387 he had subjugated all the Iranian highlands and the plains of Mesopotamia. In 1395 he conquered the old Golden Horde in Russia, and in 1398 he descended upon India, where he massacred thousands of Hindu prisoners and devastated Delhi. Two years later he had conquered Anatolia, sacked Damascus and perpetrated a massacre in Baghdad. Finally, in 1404, he set off for China, where he was killed the following year.

No one was able to keep Timur's empire intact. World conquest was clearly still an impossible dream, but the dis- covery of gunpowder weapons during the fifteenth century would enable new Muslim rulers to establish substantial but more manageable empires in the late fifteenth and early six- teenth centuries, which also attempted to wed the Mongol idea with Islam. These new empires would take root in India, Azerbaijan and Anatolia.

The Sultanate of Delhi had been established during the thirteenth century, and by the early fourteenth century Islam was soundly established in the Ganges basin as far as Bengal. In the mountainous regions, a few Hindu Rajputs, the Indian ruling class, held aloof, but most Hindus accepted Muslim supremacy. This was not as surprising as it might appear. The caste system confined the exercise of political authority to a limited number of families, and when these had been ex- hausted, Hindus were willing to accept anybody in their place, provided that they did not infringe the caste regula- tions. As outsiders, Muslims were not bound by these stric- tures, and they had the strength of a powerful international society behind them. Muslims remained a minority in India. Some lower castes and trades, including some of the "un- touchables," converted to Islam, often as a result of the preaching of Sufi pirs. But the majority retained their Hindu, Buddhist or Jain allegiance. It is not true, as often averred, that Muslims destroyed Buddhism in India. There is evidence for only one attack on one monastery, and no concrete data to support widespread slaughter. By 1330 the greater part of the subcontinent acknowledged the authority of the Sultanate of Delhi, but unwise government on the part of the sultans led to rebellions among the Muslim amirs, and it became evident that the sultanate was too big for one person to govern. In the usual way, the central power disintegrated and the amirs ruled their own states, with the help of the ulama. Until the advent of gunpowder, the Delhi sultanate remained one power among many in Muslim India.

On the fringes of the Mongol states, the ghazi warriors had been left to run their own amirates, acknowledging the Mon- gol rulers as their overlords. These ghazi states were usually religious with a strong tendency towards Sufism. In Azerbai- jan and Anatolia, tariqahs were formed which adapted some of the wilder forms of Sufism to the revolutionary ethos of the old Shiah. They revived the ghulwww "extremist" theology that had inspired the very early Shiis, revering Ali as an in- carnation of the divine, believing that their dead amirs had gone into "occultation," and often revering their leader as the Mahdi, who had returned to inaugurate a new age of justice. The Bekhtashi dervishes in Anatolia had a broad popular fol- lowing, and preached the imminent advent of a new order that would sweep away the old religious norms. Similarly iconoclastic was the Safaviyyah order in Azerbaijan, which began as a Sunni tariqah but which by the fifteenth century had been attracted by the gbuluww ideas, and who called themselves Twelver Shiis. They believed that their leader was a descendant of the Seventh Imam, and was thus the only le- gitimate leader of the Muslim ummah. By the early sixteenth century, Ismail, the pir of the Order, who may also have be- lieved himself to be a reincarnation of the Hidden Imam, would found a Shii empire in Iran.

When the Mongol states collapsed, the whole of Anatolia was divided into small independent ghazi states, which, since the late thirteenth century, had started to wrest towns and vil- lages from the declining Byzantine Empire. One of the small- est of these states was ruled by the Osmanli family, which became increasingly powerful during the early years of the fourteenth century. In 1326 the Osmanlis or Ottomans had conquered Bursa, which became their capital; in 1329 they had seized Iznik, and by 1372 they had seized the greater part of the territory of Byzantium. They established a new capital at Edirne (Adrianople), and reduced the Byzantine emperor to a dependent ally. The secret of Ottoman success was the discipline of its trained infantry, known as the "new troop" (yeni-ciim or Janissary), a slave corps. Murad I (1 360-89) had become the most powerful of the western Muslim rulers, and by 1372 was ready to advance into the Balkans, attacking the independent kingdoms of Bulgar and Serbia, the most impor- tant power in the Balkan peninsula. In 1389 the Ottomans defeated the Serbian army at Kosovo Field in central Serbia. Murad was killed, but the Serbian Prince Hrelbeljanovic Lazar was captured and executed. It marked the end of Ser- bian independence and, to this day, Serbians revere Prince Lazar as a martyr and national hero, and have nurtured a pro- found hatred of Islam. But the Ottoman advance continued, and was by no means unpopular with the majority of Byzan- tine subjects. The old empire had been in disarray; the Ot- tomans brought order and a revived economy, and many of the populace were attracted to Islam. The Ottomans suffered a major setback in 1402, when Timur defeated their army at Angora, but they were able to reconsolidate their power after Timur's death, and in 1453 Mehmed II (1451-81) was able to conquer Constantinople itself, using the new gunpowder weapons.

For centuries, the Byzantine Empire, which the Muslims had called "Rum" (Rome), had held Islam at bay. One caliph after another had been forced to concede defeat. Now Mehmed "the Conqueror" had fulfilled the old dream. The Muslims were on the brink of a new age. They had survived the Mongol trauma and found a new strength. By the end of the fifteenth century Islamdom was the greatest power bloc in the world. It had advanced into eastern Europe, into the Eurasian steppes, and into sub-Saharan Africa in the wake of Muslim traders. In the thirteenth century Muslim merchants had also established themselves along the coast of the south- ern seas in East Africa, southern Arabia, and the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. Muslim merchants, every one a missionary for the faith, had settled in Malaya at a time when Buddhist trade had collapsed there, and soon enjoyed immense prestige. Sufi preachers followed the businessmen, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Malaya was predominantly Muslim. The whole world seemed to be be- coming Islamic: even those who did not live under Muslim rule discovered that the Muslims controlled the high seas, and that when they left their own lands they had to confront Islamdom. Even when the European navigators made their astonishing discoveries in the late fifteenth and early six- teenth centuries, they could not dislodge the Muslims from the seaways. Islam seemed invincible, and now Muslims were ready to establish new empires, which would become the most powerful and up-to-date in the world.

 

 

4

ISLAM A Short History text [1] Beginnings

 KAREN ARMSTRONG ISLAM A Short History

CONTENTS

1 BEGINNINGS 

• The Prophet (570-632)
• The Rashidun (632-661) 
• The First Fitnah

2 DEVELOPMENT 

• The Umayyads and the Second Fitnah
• The Religious Movement 
• The Last Years of the Umayyads (705-750)
• The Abbasids: The High Caliphal Period (750-935) 
• The Esoteric Movements     65 

3 CULMINATION 

• A New Order (935-1258)     81
• The Crusades Expansion
• The Mongols                 96-115

4 ISLAM TRIUMPHANT 

• Imperial Islam (1500-1 700)
• The Safavid Empire 220-1 500) 3 3
• The Moghul Empire
• The Ottoman Empire

5 ISLAM AGONISTES 

• The Arrival of the West (1 750-2000)
• What is a Modern Muslim State? 
• Fundamentalism
• Muslims in a Minority 
• The Way Forward
• Key Figures in the History of Islam 

Glossary of Arabic Terms 

Pronunciation Guide 

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading Index

Discussion Questions

===

1] BEGINNINGS

 

T H E  PROPHE T (570.632 )

During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E.,an Arab business- man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to re- tire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he per- ceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the Quraysh, had become rich by trading in the sur- rounding countries. Mecca had become a thriving mercantile city, but in the aggressive stampede for wealth some of the old tribal values had been lost. Instead of looking after the weaker members of the tribe, as the nomadic code prescribed, the Quraysh were now intent on making money at the expense of some of the tribe's poorer family groupings, or clans. There was also spiritual restlessness in Mecca and throughout the peninsula. Arabs knew that Judaism and Christianity, which were practised in the Byzantine and Persian empires, were more sophisticated than their own pagan traditions. Some had come to believe that the High God of their pantheon, al-Lah (whose name simply meant "the God"), was the deity wor- shipped by the Jews and the Christians, but he had sent the Arabs no prophet and no scripture in their own language. In- deed, the Jews and Christians whom they met often taunted the Arabs for being left out of the divine plan. Throughout Arabia one tribe fought another, in a murderous cycle of vendetta and counter-vendetta. It seemed to many of the more thoughtful people in Arabia that the Arabs were a lost people, exiled forever from the civilized world and ignored by God himself. But that changed on the night of 17 Ram-

 

adan, when Muhammad woke to find himself overpowered by a devastating presence, which squeezed him tightly until he heard the first words of a new Arab's scripture pouring from his lips.

For the first two years, Muhammad kept quiet about his experience. He had new revelations, but confided only in his wife Khadija and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian. Both were convinced that these revelations came from God, but it was only in 612 that Muhammad felt empowered to preach, and gradually gained converts: his young cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, his friend Abu Bakr, and the young merchant Uthman ibn Affan from the powerful Umayyad family. Many of the converts, including a significant number of women, were from the poorer clans; others were unhappy about the new inequity in Mecca, which they felt was alien to the Arab spirit. Muhammad's message was simple. He taught the Arabs no new doctrines about God: most of the Quraysh were al- ready convinced that Allah had created the world and would judge humanity in the Last Days, as Jews and Christians be- lieved. Muhammad did not think that he was founding a new religion, but that he was merely bringing the old faith in the One God to the Arabs, who had never had a prophet before. It was wrong, he insisted, to build a private fortune, but good to share wealth and create a society where the weak and vulner- able were treated with respect. If the Quraysh did not mend their ways, their society would collapse (as had other unjust societies in the past) because they were violating the funda- mental laws of existence.

This was the core teaching of the new scripture, called the guran (recitation) because believers, most of whom, including Muhammad himself, were illiterate, imbibed its teachings by listening to public readings of its chapters (surahs). The Quran was revealed to Muhammad verse by verse, surah by surah during the next twenty-one years, often in response to a

 

crisis or a question that had arisen in the little community of the faithful. The revelations were painful to Muhammad, who used to say: "Never once did I receive a revelation, without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me."' In the early days, the impact was so frightening that his whole body was convulsed; he would often sweat profusely, even on a cool day, experience a great heaviness, or hear strange sounds and voices. In purely secular terms, we could say that Muhammad had perceived the great problems confronting his people at a deeper level than most of his contemporaries, and that as he "listened" to events, he had to delve deeply and painfully into his inner being to find a solution that was not only politically viable but spiritually illuminating. He was also creating a new literary form and a masterpiece of Arab prose and poetry. Many of the first believers were converted by the sheer beauty of the Quran, which resonated with their deepest as- pirations, cutting through their intellectual preconceptions in the manner of great art, and inspiring them, at a level more profound than the cerebral, to alter their whole way of life. One of the most dramatic of these conversions was that of Umar ibn al-Khattab, who was devoted to the old paganism, passionately opposed to Muhammad's message, and was de- termined to wipe out the new sect. But he was also an expert in Arabian poetry, and the first time he heard the words of the Quran he was overcome by their extraordinary eloquence. As he said, the language broke through all his reservations about its message: "When I heard the Quran my heart was softened and I wept, and Islam entered into me."2

The new sect would eventually be called islam (surrender); a muslim was a man or a woman who had made this submission of their entire being to Allah and his demand that human be- ings behave to one another with justice, equity and compas- sion. It was an attitude expressed in the prostrations of the ritual prayer (salat) which Muslims were required to make

 

three times a day. (Later this prayer would be increased to five times daily.) The old tribal ethic had been egalitarian; Arabs did not approve of the idea of monarchy, and it was abhorrent to them to grovel on the ground like slaves. But the prostra- tions were designed to counter the hard arrogance and self- sufficiency that was growing apace in Mecca. The postures of their bodies would re-educate the Muslims, teaching them to lay aside their pride and selfishness, and recall that before God they were nothing. In order to comply with the stern teaching of the Quran, Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor in alms (zakat). They would also fast during Ramadan to remind themselves of the privations of the poor, who could not eat or drink whenever they chose.

Social justice was, therefore, the crucial virtue of Islam. Muslims were commanded as their first duty to build a com- munity (ummah) characterized by practical compassion, in which there was a fair distribution of wealth. This was far more important than any doctrinal teaching about God. In fact the Quran has a negative view of theological speculation, which it calls zannah, self-indulgent whimsy about ineffable matters that nobody can ascertain one way or the other. It seemed pointless to argue about such abstruse dogmas; far more crucial was the effort (jihad) to live in the way that God had intended for human beings. The political and social welfare of the ummah would have sacramental value for Muslims. If the u m m a h prospered, it was a sign that Muslims were living ac- cording to Gods will, and the experience of living in a truly is- lamic community, which made this existential surrender to the divine, would give Muslims intimations of sacred transcen- dence. Consequently, they would be affected as profoundly by

any misfortune or humiliation suffered b y the u m m a h a s Chris- tians by the spectacle of somebody blasphemously trampling on the Bible or ripping the Eucharistic host apart.

 

This social concern had always been an essential part of the visions of the great world religions, which had developed during what historians have called the Axial Age (c. 700 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E.), when civilization, as we know it, developed, to- gether with the confessional faiths which have continued to nourish humanity: Taoism and Confucianism in China; Hin- duism and Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent; monothe- ism in the Middle East; and rationalism in Europe. These faiths all reformed the old paganism, which was no longer ad- equate in the larger and more complex societies that evolved once people had created a mercantile economy capable of supporting this cultural effort. In the larger states, people ac- quired broader horizons, and the old local cults ceased to be appropriate; increasingly, the Axial Age faiths focused on a single deity or supreme symbol of transcendence. Each was concerned about the fundamental injustice of their society. All pre-modern civilizations were based economically upon a surplus of agricultural produce; they therefore depended upon the labour of peasants who could not enjoy their high culture, which was only for an elite. To counter this, the new faiths stressed the importance of compassion. Arabia had re- mained outside the civilized world. Its intractable climate meant that the Arabs lived on the brink of starvation; there seemed no way that they could acquire an agrarian surplus that would put them on a footing with Sassanid Persia or Byzantium. But when the Quraysh began to develop a market economy their perspective began to change. Many were still happy with the old paganism, but there was a growing ten- dency to worship only one God; and there was, as we have seen, a growing unease about the inequity of the new civiliza- tion that was developing in Mecca. The Arabs were now ready for an Axial Age faith of their own.

But that did not mean a wholesale rejection of tradition. The Axial Age prophets and reformers all built on the old

 

pagan rites of their region, and Muhammad would do the same. He did demand that they ignore the cult of such popu- lar Arabian goddesses as Manat, al-Lat and al-Uzzah, how- ever, and worship Allah alone. The pagan deities are said in the Quran to be like weak tribal chiefs, who were a liability for their people, because they could not give them adequate protection. The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply not working3 There was spiritual malaise, chronic and destructive warfare, and an injustice that violated the best Arab traditions and tribal codes. The way forward lay in a single God and a unified ummah, which was governed by justice and equity.

Radical as this sounded, the Quran insisted that its mes- sage was simply a "reminder" of truths that everybody knew? This was the primordial faith that had been preached to the whole of humanity by the prophets of the past. God had not left human beings in ignorance about the way they should live: he had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth. Islamic tradition would later assert that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinity. All had brought their people a divinely inspired scripture; they might express the truths of God's religion differently, but essentially the message was always the same. Now at last God had sent the Quraysh a prophet and a scripture. Con- stantly the Quran points out that Muhammad had not come to cancel the older religions, to contradict their prophets or to start a new faith. His message is the same as that of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Jesus.' The Quran mentions only those prophets who were known to the Arabs, but today Mus- lim scholars argue that had Muhammad known about the Buddhists or the Hindus, the Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans, the Quran would have endorsed their

 

ABYSSINIA

 

sages too, because all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to accept Islam, unless they particularly wished to do so, be- cause they had received perfectly valid revelations of their own. The Quran insists strongly that "there shall be no coer- cion in matters of faith,"6 and commands Muslims to respect the beliefs of Jews and Christians, whom the Quran calls ahl al-kitab, a phrase usually translated "People of the Book" but which is more accurately rendered "people of an earlier rev- elation:"

Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner-unless it be such of them as are bent on evil-doing-and say: "We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you; for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto Him that we [all] surrender ourselves." 7

It is only our more modern culture that can afford to prize originality and jettison tradition wholesale. In pre-modern society, continuity was crucial. Muhammad did not envisage a violent rupture with the past or with other faith communi- ties. He wanted to root the new scripture in the spiritual land- scape of Arabia.

Hence Muslims continued to perform the customary ritu- als at the Kabah, the cube-shaped shrine in the heart of Mecca, the most important centre of worship in Arabia. It was extremely ancient even in Muhammad's time, and the origi- nal meaning of the cult associated with it had been forgotten, but it was still loved by the Arabs, who assembled each year for the hajj' pilgrimage from all over the peninsula. They would circle the shrine seven times, following the direction of the sun around the earth; kiss the Black Stone embedded in

 

Islam . I I

the wall of the Kabah, which was probably a meteorite that had once hurtled to the ground, linking the site to the heav- enly world. These rites (known as the umrah) could be per- formed at any time, but during the hajj pilgrims would also run from the steps of al-Safa beside the Kabah across the val- ley to al-Marwah, where they prayed. They then moved to the environs of Mecca: on the plain of Arafat, they stood all night in vigil; they rushed in a body to the hollow of Muzdalifah; hurled pebbles at a rock in Mina, shaved their heads, and on the Id al-Adha, the final day of the pilgrimage, they per- formed an animal sacrifice.

The ideal of community was central to the cult of the Kabah. All violence was forbidden in Mecca and the sur- rounding countryside at all times. This had been a key fac- tor in the commercial success of the Quraysh, since it enabled Arabs to trade there without fearing the reprisals of vendetta warfare. During the hajj pilgrims were forbidden to carry arms, to argue, to kill game or even to kill an insect or speak a cross word. All this was clearly congenial to Muhammad's ideal for the ummah, and he was himself de- voted to the shrine, often made the umrah and liked to recite the Quran beside the Kabah. Officially, the shrine was dedi- cated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and there were 360 idols arranged around the Kabah, probably representing the days of the year. But by Muhammad's day, it seems that the Kabah was venerated as the shrine of Allah, the High God, and it is a mark of the widespread conviction that Allah was the same as the deity worshipped by monotheists that those Arabs in the northern tribes on the borders of the Byzantine Empire who had converted to Christianity used to make the hajj alongside the pagans. Yet for all this, in the early days of his mission, Muhammad still made the Muslims perform the salat prayer facing Jerusalem, the holy city of the ahlal- kitab, turning their backs on the pagan associations of the

 

Kabah. This expressed his longing to bring the Arabs into the monotheistic family.

Muhammad acquired a small following and eventually some seventy families had converted to Islam. At first, the most powerful men in Mecca ignored the Muslims, but by 616 they had become extremely angry with Muhammad who, they said, reviled the faith of their fathers, and was obviously a charlatan, who only pretended to be a prophet. They were particularly incensed by the Quran's description of the Last Judgement, which they dismissed as primitive and irrational. Arabs did not believe in the after life and should give no cre- dence to such "fairy tales."' But they were especially con- cerned that in the Quran this Judaeo-Christian belief struck at the heart of their cut-throat capitalism. On the Last Day, Arabs were warned that the wealth and power of their tribe would not help them; each individual would be tried on his or her own merits: why had they not taken care of the poor? Why had they accumulated fortunes instead of sharing their money? Those Quraysh who were doing very well in the new Mecca were not likely to look kindly on this kind of talk, and the opposition grew, led by Abu al-Hakam (who is called Abu Jahl, "Father of Lies," in the Quran), Abu Sufyan, an ex- tremely intelligent man, who had once been a personal friend of Muhammad, and Suhayl ibn Amr, a devout pagan. They were all disturbed by the idea of abandoning the faith of their ancestors; all had relatives who had converted to Islam; and all feared that Muhammad was plotting to take over the lead- ership of Mecca. The Quran insisted that Muhammad had no

political function but that he was simply a nadhir, a "warner,"9 but how long would a man who claimed to receive instruc- tions from Allah accept the rulings of more ordinary mortals like themselves?

Relations deteriorated sharply. Abu Jahl imposed a boycott on Muhammad's clan, forbidding the Quraysh to marry or

 

Islam • 13

trade with the Muslims. This meant that nobody could sell them any food. The ban lasted for two years, and the food shortages may well have been responsible for the death of Muhammad's beloved wife Khadija, and it certainly ruined some of the Muslims financially. Slaves who had converted to Islam were particularly badly treated, tied up, and left to burn in the blazing sun. Most seriously, in 619, after the ban had been lifted, Muhammad's uncle and protector (wali) Abu Talib died. Muhammad was an orphan; his parents had died in his infancy. Without a protector who would avenge his death, according to the harsh vendetta lore of Arabia, a man could be killed with impunity, and Muhammad had great dif- ficulty finding a Meccan chieftain who would become his pa- tron. The position of the ummah was becoming untenable in Mecca, and a new solution clearly had to be found.

Muhammad was, therefore, ready to listen to a delegation of chiefs from Yathrib, an agricultural settlement some 250 miles north of Mecca. A number of tribes had abandoned the nomadic way of life and settled there, but after centuries of warfare on the steppes found it impossible to live together peacefully. The whole settlement was caught up in one deadly feud after another. Some of these tribes had either converted to Judaism or were of Jewish descent, and so the people of Yathrib were accustomed to monotheistic ideas, were not in thrall to the old paganism and were desperate to find a new so- lution that would enable their people to live together in a sin- gle community. The envoys from Yathrib, who approached Muhammad during the hajj in 620, converted to Islam and made a pledge with the Muslims: each vowed that they would not fight each other, and would defend each other from com- mon enemies. Eventually, in 622, the Muslim families slipped away, one by one, and made the migration (hijrah)to Yathrib. Muhammad, whose new protector had recently died, was al- most assassinated before he and Abu Bakr were able to escape.

 

The hijrah marks the start of the Muslim era, because it was at this point that Muhammad was able to implement the Quranic ideal fully and that Islam became a factor in history. It was a revolutionary step. The hijrah was no mere change of address. In pre-Islamic Arabia the tribe was a sacred value. To turn your back on your blood-group and join another was un- heard of; it was essentially blasphemous, and the Quraysh could not condone this defection. They vowed to exterminate the ummah in Yathrib. Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give one another protection. News of this extraordinary new "su¬ pertribe" spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

Yathrib would become known as al-Medinah (the City), because it became the pattern of the perfect Muslim society. When Muhammad arrived in Medina one of his first actions was to build a simple mosque ( masjid : literally, place of pros- tration). It was a rough building, which expressed the auster- ity of the early Islamic ideal. Tree trunks supported the roof, a stone marked the qiblah (the direction of prayer) and the Prophet stood on a tree trunk to preach. All future mosques would, as far as possible, be built according to this model. There was also a courtyard, where Muslims met to discuss all the concerns of the ummah — social, political and military as well as religious. Muhammad and his wives lived in small huts around the edge of the courtyard. Unlike a Christian church, which is separated from mundane activities and devoted only to worship, no activity was excluded from the mosque. In the

 

Quranic vision there is no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the political, sexuality and wor- ship. The whole of life was potentially holy and had to be brought into the ambit of the divine. The aim was tawhid (making one), the integration of the whole of life in a unified community, which would give Muslims intimations of the Unity which is God.

Muhammad's numerous wives have occasioned a good deal of prurient interest in the West, but it would be a mistake to imagine the Prophet basking decadently in sensual delight, like some of the later Islamic rulers. In Mecca, Muhammad had remained monogamous, married only to Khadija, even though polygamy was common in Arabia. Khadija was a good deal older than he, but bore him at least six children, of whom only four daughters survived. In Medina, Muhammad became a great sayyid (chief), and was expected to have a large harem, but most of these marriages were politically motivated. As he formed his new supertribe, he was eager to forge marriage ties with some of his closest companions, to bind them closer to- gether. His favourite new wife was Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, and he also married Hafsah, the daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab. He married two of his daughters to Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Many of his other wives were older women, who were without protectors or were related to the chiefs of those tribes who became the allies of the ummah. None of them bore the Prophet any children.'' His wives were sometimes more of a hindrance than a pleasure. On one occasion, when they were squabbling about the division of booty after a raid, the Prophet threatened to divorce them all unless they lived more strictly in accordance with Islamic val- ues." But it is still true that Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company of women. Some of his male companions were astonished by his leniency towards his wives and the way they stood up to him and answered him

 

back. Muhammad scrupulously helped with the chores, mended his own clothes and sought out the companionship of his wives. He often liked to take one of them on an expedi- tion, and would consult them and take their advice seriously. On one occasion his most intelligent wife, Umm Salamah, helped to prevent a mutiny.

The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet's heart. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segrega- tion and veiling for the Prophet's wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house. These customs were adopted some three or four generations after the Prophet's death. Muslims at that time were copying the Greek Chris- tians of Byzantium, who had long veiled and segregated their women in this manner; they also appropriated some of their Christian misogyny. The Quran makes men and women part- ners before God, with identical duties and responsibilities.12 The Quran also came to permit polygamy; at a time when Muslims were being killed in the wars against Mecca, and women were left without protectors, men were permitted to have up to four wives provided that they treat them all with absolute equality and show no signs of favouring one rather than the others.13 The women of the first ummah in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle. They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion, though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it into line with the prevailing patriarchy.

In the early years at Medina there were two important de- velopments. Muhammad had been greatly excited by the prospect of working closely with the Jewish tribes, and had even, shortly before the hijrah, introduced some practices

 

(such as communal prayer on Friday afternoons, when Jews would be preparing for the Sabbath, and a fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement) to align Islam more closely with Judaism. His disappointment, when the Jews of Medina refused to ac- cept him as an authentic prophet, was one of the greatest of his life. For Jews, the era of prophecy was over, so it was not surprising that they could not accept Muhammad, but the polemic with the Jews of Medina occupies a significant pro- portion of the Quran and shows that it troubled Muhammad. Some of the Quranic stories about such prophets as Noah or Moses were different from those of the Bible. Many of the Jews used to scoff when these were recited in the mosque. The three main Jewish tribes also resented Muhammad's as- cendancy; they had formed a powerful bloc before his arrival in the settlement, and now felt demoted and determined to get rid of him.

But some of the Jews in the smaller clans were friendly and enhanced Muhammad's knowledge of Jewish scripture. He was especially delighted to hear that in the Book of Genesis Abraham had two sons: Isaac and Ishmael (who became Ismail in Arabic), the child of his concubine Hagar. Abraham had been forced to cast Hagar and Ismail out into the wilderness, but God had saved them and promised that Ismail too would be the father of a great nation, the Arabs.14Local tradition had it that Hagar and Ismail had settled in Mecca, that Abraham had visited them there and that together Abraham and Ismail had rebuilt the Kabah (which had originally been erected by Adam but had fallen into disrepair).15 This was music to Muhammad's ears. It seemed that the Arabs had not been left out of the divine plan after all, and that the Kabah had vener- able monotheistic credentials.

By 624 it was clear that most of the Jews of Medina would never be reconciled with the Prophet. Muhammad had also been shocked to learn that the Jews and Christians (whom he

 

had assumed to belong to a single faith) actually had serious theological differences, even though he appears to have thought that not all the ahl al-kitab condoned this disgraceful sectarianism. In January 624 he made what must have been one of his most creative gestures. During the salat prayer, he told the congregation to turn around, so that they prayed in the direction of Mecca rather than Jerusalem. This change of qiblah was a declaration of independence. By turning away from Jerusalem towards the Kabah, which had no connection with Judaism or Christianity, Muslims tacitly demonstrated that they were reverting to the original pure monotheism of Abraham, who had lived before the revelation of either the Torah or the Gospel and, therefore, before the religion of the one God had been split into warring sects.16Muslims would direct themselves to God alone: it was idolatrous to bow be- fore a human system or an established religion rather than before God himself:

Verily, as for those who have broken the unity of their faith and become sects-thou has nothing to do with them.. . Say: "Be- hold, my Sustainer has guided me to a straight way through an ever-true faith- in the way of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false, and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him." Say: "Behold, my prayer, and [all] my acts of wor- ship, and my living and dying are for God alone.""

The change of qiblah appealed to all Arab Muslims, especially to the emigrants who had made the hijrah from Mecca. Mus- lims would no longer tag lamely behind those Jews and Chris- tians who ridiculed their aspirations, but would take their own direct route to God.

The second major development occurred shortly after the change of the qiblah. Muhammad and the emigrants from Mecca had no means of earning a living in Medina; there was not enough land for them to farm, and, in any case, they were

 

Islam • 19

merchants and businessmen not agriculturalists. The Medi- nese, who were known as the ansar (the helpers), could not af- ford to keep them gratis, so the emigrants resorted to the ghazu, the "raid," which was a sort of national sport in Arabia, as well as being a rough-and-ready means of redistributing resources in a land where there was simply not enough to go round. Raiding parties would attack a caravan or contingent from a rival tribe and carry off booty and livestock, taking care to avoid killing people since this would mean a vendetta. It was forbidden to conduct a raid against a tribe that had be- come an ally or "client" (a weaker tribal group who had sought protection from one of the more powerful tribes). The emigrants, who had been persecuted by the Quraysh and forced to leave their homes, began to conduct ghazu against the rich Meccan caravans, which brought them an income, but to conduct a ghazu against one's own tribe was a serious breach in precedent. The raiding parties enjoyed some initial success, but in March 624 Muhammad led a large band of mi- grants to the coast to intercept the largest Meccan caravan of the year. When they heard of this outrage, the Quraysh dis- patched an army to defend the caravan, but, against the odds, the Muslims inflicted a stunning defeat on the Meccans at the well of Badr. Even though the Meccans were superior in terms of numbers, they fought in the old Arab style with care- less bravado, each chief leading his own men. Muhammad's troops, however, were carefully drilled and fought under his unified command. It was a rout that impressed the Bedouin tribes, some of whom enjoyed the spectacle of seeing the mighty Quraysh brought low.

There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muham- mad had to contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who resented the power of the Muslim newcom- ers and were determined to expel them from the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where Abu Sufyan now di-

 

rected the campaign against him, and had launched two major offensives against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not simply to defeat the ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the Muslims. The harsh ethic of the desert meant that there were no half-measures in warfare: if possible, a victorious chief was expected to exterminate the enemy, so the ummah faced the threat of total extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a severe de- feat on the ummah at the Battle of Uhud, but two years later the Muslims trounced the Meccans at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad protected the settle- ment by digging a ditch around Medina, which threw the Quraysh, who still regarded war rather as a chivalric game and had never heard of such an unsporting trick, into confu- sion, and rendered their cavalry useless. Muhammad's second victory over the numerically superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand Meccans to three thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the nomadic tribes that Muham- mad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh look decid- edly passe' The gods in whose name they fought were clearly not working on their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to be- come the allies of the ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal confederacy, whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight each other's enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made the hijrah to Med- ina; at last, after five years of deadly peril, Muhammad could be confident that the ummah would survive.

In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When the Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebel- lion against Muhammad in 625, they were expelled from

 

Islam . 21

Medina, in accordance with Arab custom. Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assas- sinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up sup- port for Abu Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no mercy. The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their women and children sold as slaves.

The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a very primitive society: the Muslims them- selves had just narrowly escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the Qurayzah they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought an- other war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah. The executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did not indicate any hostil- ity towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. SmallerJew¬ ish groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic em- pires. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into

 

22 • Karen Armstrong

Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts a s the P r o t o c o l s o f t h e E l d e r s o f Zion, because they had no such traditions of their

own. Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt no such ha- tred of Judaism.

Muhammad's intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to bring hostilities to an end as soon as possi- ble. The Quran teaches that war is such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in their power to restore peace and normality in the shortest possible time.18 Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed. But after the Battle of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca and quashed the opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to abandon the jihad and begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in train a daring and imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to a close. He announced that he was going to make the hajj to Mecca, and asked for volunteers to accom- pany him. Since pilgrims were forbidden to carry arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into the lions' den and putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and resentful Quraysh. Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to join the Prophet and set out for Mecca, dressed in the tradi- tional white robes of the hajji. If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the Kabah or attacked bona fide pilgrims they would betray their sacred duty as the guardians of the shrine. The Quraysh did, however, dispatch troops to attack the pil- grims before they reached the area outside the city where vi- olence was forbidden, but the Prophet evaded them and, with

 

the help of some of his Bedouin allies, managed to reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at Hudaybiyyah and awaited developments. Eventually the Quraysh were pressured by this peaceful demonstration to sign a treaty with the u m m a h . It was an unpopular move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager for action, and felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was determined to achieve victory by peace- ful means.

Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by attacking one of the Prophet's tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca without shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the Kabah, rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan rites of the hajj'an Islamic significance by linking them to the story of Abraham, Hagar and Ismail. None of the Quraysh was forced to become Muslim, but Muhammad's victory convinced some of his most principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan, that the old religion had failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms of his beloved wife Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah as Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the ummah could not, of course, attack one an- other, the ghastly cycle of tribal warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended. Single-handedly, Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia.

T H E R A S H I D U N (632-661 )

The life and achievements of Muhammad would affect the spiritual, political and ethical vision of Muslims forever.

 

They expressed the Islamic experience of "salvation," which does not consist in the redemption of an "original sin" com- mitted by Adam and the admittance to eternal life, but in the achievement of a society which puts into practice God's de- sires for the human race. This not only redeemed Muslims from the sort of political and social hell that existed in pre- Islamic Arabia, but also provided them with a context within which they could more easily make that wholehearted sur- render to God which alone can fulfil them. Muhammad be- came the archetypal example of that perfect submission to the divine, and Muslims, as we shall see, would attempt to conform to this standard in their spiritual and social lives. Muhammad was never venerated as a divine figure, but he was held to be the Perfect Man. His surrender to God had been so complete that he had transformed society and en- abled the Arabs to live together in harmony. The word islam is etymologically related to salam (peace), and in these early years Islam did promote cohesion and concord.

But Muhammad had achieved this success by being the re- cipient of a divine revelation. Throughout his career, God had sent down the oracles that formed the Quran. When faced with a crisis or dilemma, Muhammad had entered deeply into himself and heard a divinely inspired solution. His life had thus represented a constant dialogue between transcendent reality and the violent, puzzling and disturbing happenings of the mundane world. The Quran had, there- fore, followed public and current events, bringing divine guidance and illumination to politics. Muhammad's succes- sors, however, were not prophets, but would have to rely on their own human insights. How would they ensure that Mus- lims continued to respond creatively and directly to this sa- cred imperative? The ummah that they ruled would be much larger and increasingly more complex than the little commu- nity of Medina, where everybody knew everybody else and

 

there had been no need for officialdom and a bureaucracy. How would the new deputy (khalifah) of Muhammad pre- serve the essence of the first u m m a h in very different circum- stances?

The first four caliphs to succeed Muhammad grappled with these difficult questions. They were all men who had been among the Prophet's closest companions, and had played a leading role in Mecca and Medina. They are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided" caliphs, and their period of rule would be just as formative as that of the Prophet him- self. Muslims would define themselves and their theology ac- cording to the way they assessed the turbulent, glorious and tragic events of these years.

After the Prophet's death, the leading Muslims had to de- cide what form the ummah should take. Some may not have believed that there ought to be a "state," a polity which had no precedent in Arabia. Some seemed to think that each tribal group should elect its own i m a m (leader). But the Prophet's companions Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab argued that the ummah must be a united community, and should have a single ruler, as it had under the Prophet. Some believed that Muhammad would have wanted to be succeeded by Ali ibn Abi Talib, his closest male relative. In Arabia, where the blood-tie was sacred, it was thought that a chief's special qualities were passed down the line of his descendants, and some Muslims believed that Ali had inherited something of Muhammad's special charisma. But although Ali's piety was beyond question, he was still young and inexperienced, and therefore Abu Bakr was elected the first khalifah of the Prophet by a majority of votes.

Abu Bakr's reign (632-34) was short but crucial. He was chiefly preoccupied by the so-called wars of riddah (apostasy) when various tribes tried to break away from the ummah and reassert their former independence. It would, however, be a

 

mistake to regard this as a widespread religious defection. The revolts were entirely political and economic. Most of the Bedouin tribes who had entered the Islamic Confederacy had little interest in the details of Muhammad's religion. The Prophet, a realist, had recognized that many of the alliances he had formed were purely political, a matter of one chief joining forces with another, as was customary in the Arabian steppes. Some chiefs may have believed that their pact had been only with Muhammad and not with his successor, and that after his death they were free to raid tribes in the ummah, thus calling upon themselves a Muslim riposte.

It was, however, significant that many of the rebels felt im- pelled to give their revolts a religious justification; the leaders after claimed to be prophets, and produced Quranic-style "revelations." The Arabs had been through a profound experi- ence. It was not "religious" in our modern sense of the word, since for many it was not a private faith, following an interior conversion. The Prophet had broken the old mould, and suddenly-if momentarily-the Arabs had found themselves for the first time members of a united community, free from the burden of constant, debilitating warfare. For the brief years of Muhammad's career they had glimpsed the possibil- ity of an entirely different way of life, bound up with a reli- gious change. What had happened had been so astounding that even those who wanted to break away from the ummah could only think in prophetic terms. It was probably during the riddah wars that Muslims began to assert that Muhammad had been the last and greatest of the prophets, a claim that is not made explicitly in the Quran, as Muslims countered the challenge of these riddah prophets.

Abu Bakr quelled the uprisings with wisdom and clemency, and thus completed the unification of Arabia. He dealt cre- atively with the complaints of the rebels, and there were no reprisals taken against those who returned to the fold. Some

 

were enticed back by the prospect of taking part in the lucra- tive ghazu raids in the neighbouring lands, which gained dra- matic momentum under the rule of the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-44). These raids were a response to a problem that had arisen from the new Islamic peace in the peninsula. For centuries, the Arabs had eked out their inade- quate resources by means of the ghazu, but Islam had put a stop to this because the tribes of the u m m a h were not permit- ted to attack one another. What would replace the ghazu, which had enabled Muslims to scratch out a meagre liveli- hood? Umar realized that the u m m a h needed order. Lawless el- ements had to be brought under control, and energies which had previously been expended in raiding and feuding now had to be channelled into a common activity. The obvious answer was a series of ghazu raids against the non-Muslim communi- ties in the neighbouring countries. T h e unity of the u m m a h would be preserved by an outwardly directed offensive. This would also enhance the caliph's authority. The Arabs tradi- tionally disliked kingship and would be leery of any ruler who assumed the style of a monarch. But they would accept the authority of a chief during a military campaign or while they were journeying to new pastures. Umar therefore called him- self amir al-muminim (the commander of the faithful), and Muslims accepted his rulings in matters that concerned the

u m m a h a s a whole, but not on matters that individuals could decide for themselves.

Under Umar's leadership, therefore, the Arabs burst into Iraq, Syria and Egypt, achieving a series of astonishing victo- ries. They overcame the Persian army at the Battle of Qa- disiyyah (637), which led to the fall of the capital of the Persian Sassanids at Ctesiphon. As soon as they had the man- power, Muslims would thus be able to occupy the whole of the Persian Empire. They encountered stiffer resistance in the Byzantine Empire, and conquered no territory in the

 

 

Byzantine heartlands in Anatolia. Nevertheless, the Muslims were victorious at the Battle of Yarmuk (636) in northern Palestine, conquered Jerusalem in 638, and controlled the whole of Syria, Palestine and Egypt by 641. The Muslim armies went on to seize the North African coast as far as Cyrenaica. Just twenty years after the Battle of Badr, the Arabs found themselves in possession of a sizeable empire. This expansion continued. A century after the Prophet's death, the Islamic Empire extended from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. It seemed yet another miracle and sign of God's favour. Before the coming of Islam, the Arabs had been a de- spised outgroup; but in a remarkably short space of time they had inflicted major defeats upon two world empires. The ex- perience of conquest enhanced their sense that something tremendous had happened to them. Membership of the ummah was thus a transcendent experience, because it went beyond anything they had known or could have imagined in the old tribal days. Their success also endorsed the message of the Quran, which had asserted that a correctly guided so- ciety must prosper because it was in tune with God's laws. Look what had happened once they had surrendered to God's will! Where Christians discerned God's hand in apparent fail- ure and defeat, when Jesus died on the cross, Muslims experi- enced political success as sacramental and as a revelation of the divine presence in their lives.

It is important, however, to be clear that when the Arabs burst out of Arabia they were not impelled by the ferocious power of "Islam." Western people often assume that Islam is a violent, militaristic faith which imposed itself on its subject peoples at sword-point. This is an inaccurate interpretation of the Muslim wars of expansion. There was nothing religious about these campaigns, and Umar did not believe that he had a divine mandate to conquer the world. The objective of Umar and his warriors was entirely pragmatic: they wanted

 

plunder and a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah. For centuries the Arabs had tried to raid the richer settled lands beyond the peninsula; the difference was that this time they had encountered a power vacuum. Persia and Byzantium had both been engaged for decades in a long and debilitating series of wars with one another. Both were exhausted. In Persia, there was factional strife, and flooding had destroyed the country's agriculture. Most of the Sassa- nian troops were of Arab origin and went over to the in- vaders during the campaign. In the Syrian and North African provinces of Byzantium, the local population had been alien- ated by the religious intolerance of the Greek Orthodox es- tablishment, and were not disposed to come to their aid when the Arabs attacked, though Muslims could make no headway in the Byzantine heartlands of Anatolia.

Later, when the Muslims had established their great em- pire, Islamic law would give a religious interpretation of this conquest, dividing the world into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam), which was in perpetual conflict with the Dar al- Harb (the House of War). But in practice the Muslims ac- cepted that they had reached the limits of their expansion by this date, and coexisted amicably with the non-Muslim world. The Quran does not sanctify warfare. It develops the notion of a just war of self-defence to protect decent values, but con- demns killing and aggression.19 Furthermore, once the Arabs had left the peninsula, they found that nearly everybody be- longed to the ahl al-kitab, the People of the Book, who had received authentic scriptures from God. They were not, therefore, forced to convert to Islam; indeed, until the middle of the eighth century, conversion was not encouraged. The Muslims assumed that Islam was a religion for the descen- dants of Ismail, as Judaism was the faith of the sons of Isaac. Arab tribesmen had always extended protection to weaker clients (mawali). Once the Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians

 

in their new empire had become dhimmis (protected subjects), they could not be raided or attacked in any way. It had always been a point of honour among Arabs to treat their clients well, to come to their aid, or to avenge an injury done to them. Dhimmis paid a poll tax in return for military protection, and were permitted to practise their own faith, as the Quran en- joined. Indeed some of the Roman Christians, who had been persecuted by the Greek Orthodox for their heretical opin- ions, greatly preferred Muslim to Byzantine rule.

Umar was determined to maintain good discipline. The Arab soldiers were not to enjoy the fruits of victory; the con- quered lands were not to be divided among the generals, but left to the existing cultivators, who paid rent to the Muslim state. Muslims were not allowed to settle in the cities. Instead, new "garrison towns" (amsar) were built for them at strategic locations: Kufah in Iraq, Basrah in Iraq, Qum in Iran, and Fustat at the head of the Nile. Damascus was the only old city to become a Muslim centre. A mosque was built in each of the amsar where the Muslim troops attended Friday prayers. In these garrison towns, the soldiers were taught to live an Is- lamic life. Umar stressed the importance of family values, was hard on drunkenness, and promoted the ascetic virtues of the Prophet, who, like the caliph himself, had always lived frugally. But the garrison towns were also Arab enclaves, where those traditions that could be accommodated with the Quranic world-view were continued on foreign soil. At this point, Islam was an essentially Arab religion. Any dhimmi who did convert had to become a "client" of one of the tribes and be absorbed into the Arab system.

But this period of triumph came to an abrupt end in November 644, when Umar was stabbed in the mosque of Medina by a Persian prisoner-of-war who had a personal grievance against him. The last years of the rashidun were characterized by violence. Uthman ibn Affan was elected as

 

the third caliph by six of the Prophet's companions. He was a weaker character than his predecessors, but for the first six years of his reign the umma h continued to prosper. Uthman governed well and the Muslims conquered new territory. They seized Cyprus from the Byzantines, thus finally ejecting them from the eastern Mediterranean, and in North Africa the armies reached Tripoli in what is now Libya. In the East, the Muslim troops took much of Armenia, penetrated the Caucasus and established Muslim rule as far as the River Oxus in Iran, Herat in Afghanistan, and Sind in the Indian subcontinent.

But, despite these victories, the soldiers were becoming dis- contented. They had undergone a massive change. In just over a decade they had exchanged a harsh nomadic existence for the very different lifestyle of the professional army. They spent the summer fighting and winter far from home in the garrison towns. The distances were now so vast that the campaigns were more exhausting, and they were taking less plunder than be- fore. Uthman still refused to allow the commanders and the richest Meccan families to establish private estates in such countries as what is now Iraq, and this made him unpopular, es- pecially in Kufah and Fustat. Uthman also alienated the Mus- lims of Medina by giving the most prestigious posts to members of his own Umayyad family. They accused him of nepotism, even though many of the Umayyad officials were men of great ability. Uthman had, for example, appointed Muawiyyah, the son of Muhammad's old enemy Abu Sufyan, governor of Syria. He was a good Muslim, and a skilled admin- istrator, known for his steadiness of character and his measured assessment of circumstances. But it seemed wrong to the Mus- lims of Medina, who still boasted of being the ansar(helpers) of the Prophet, that they should be passed over in favour of Abu Sufyan's offspring. The Quran-reciters, who knew the scripture by heart and had become the chief religious authorities, were

 

Islam . 33

also incensed when Uthman insisted that only one version of the sacred text be used in the garrison towns, and suppressed variants, which many of them preferred, but which differed in minor details. Increasingly, the malcontents looked to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin, who, it seems, had opposed the policies of both Umar and Uthman, standing for "soldiers' rights" against the power of the central authority.

In 656 the discontent culminated in outright mutiny. A group of Arab soldiers from Fustat returned to Medina to claim their due, and when fobbed off they besieged Uthman's simple house, broke in, and assassinated him. The mutineers acclaimed Ali as the new caliph.

T H E FIRST FITNAH

Ali seemed an obvious choice. He had grown up in the Prophet's household and was imbued with the ideals pro- moted by Muhammad. He was a good soldier and wrote in- spiring letters to his officers, which are still classic Muslim texts, preaching the necessity of justice and the importance of dealing compassionately with the subject peoples. But despite his intimacy with the Prophet, his rule was not universally ac- cepted. Ali was supported by the ansar of Medina and those Meccans who resented the rise of the Umayyads. He also en- joyed the support of Muslims who still lived the traditional nomadic life, especially in Iraq, whose garrison town Kufah was an Alid stronghold. But the assassination of Uthman, who, like Ali himself, had been Muhammad's son-in-law, and had been one of the earliest converts to Islam, was a shocking event which inspired a five-year civil war within the ummah, which is known as the fitnah, the time of temptation.

After a brief delay, Muhammad's favourite wife Aisha, to- gether with her kinsman Talhah and Zubayr, one of the Prophet's Meccan companions, attacked Ali for not punishing

 

Uthman's murderers. Since the army was in the provinces, the rebels marched from Medina to Basrah. Ali was in a difficult position. He must himself have been shocked by Uthman's

murder, which, as a devout man, he could not condone.0B0uTt c (y) Tj 2.65 his supporters insisted thatposition. He must himself have been shocked

 

to conquer Constantinople, which had not only failed but led to heavy loss of manpower and equipment. Umar was the first caliph to encourage the dhimmis to convert to Islam, and they were eager to join this dynamic new faith, but since they no longer had to pay the poll tax (jizyah), the new policy resulted in a drastic loss of revenue. Umar was a devout man, who had been brought up in Medina and had been influenced by the religious movement there. He tried to model his behaviour on that of the rashidun, stressed the ideal of Islamic unity, treated all the provinces on an equal basis (instead of favour- ing Syria) and was humane towards the dhimmis. He was very popular, but his Islamic policies, which endeared him to the pious, were not good for the economy of the ailing empire. The reigns of his successors were punctuated with revolts and rumbling discontent. It made little difference whether the caliphs were dissolute, like Yazid II (720-24), or devout, like Hisham I (724-43). Hisham was a strong and effective caliph, who was able to put the empire back on a more sound economic basis, but he achieved this by making the state more rigidly centralized and his own rule more autocratic. He was becoming more like a conventional absolute monarch, and the empire benefited from this politically. The problem was that this type of autocracy was abhorrent to the devout, and fundamentally un-Islamic. Was it not possible to run a state on principles after all? Shiis became increasingly active. Their leaders claimed descent from Ali, believing that the i l m that would enable Muslims to inaugurate a just society had been preserved most fully in Muhammad's family and that they alone should rule. The more radical Shiis blamed all the pre- sent problems of the u m m a h on the first three rashidun (Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman), who should have allowed Ali to take the leadership in the first place. Many of the more ex- treme Shiis (known as the ghulat. exaggerators) were converts and brought some of their old beliefs into Islam with them.

 

They saw Ali as an incarnation of the divine (like Jesus), be- lieved that Shii leaders who had been killed in an insurrection were in temporary "occultation" and would return to inaugu- rate a utopian realm of justice and peace in the Last Days.

But the religious were not the only people who felt alien- ated from Umayyad rule. The converts to Islam (mawalis: clients) objected to their second-class status. There were tribal divisions among the Arab Muslims, some of whom wanted to settle down and integrate with the subject peoples and others who wanted to continue the old expansionist wars. But the Islamic sentiment had become so widespread that the various revolts and uprisings nearly all adopted a religious ideology. This was certainly true of the revolt that finally top- pled the Umayyad dynasty. The Abbasid faction capitalized on the widespread desire to see a member of Muhammad's family on the throne, and emphasized the descent of their leader from the Prophet's uncle Abbas and his son Abdallah, one of the most eminent of the early Quran reciters. They began to muster support in the Iranian provinces in 743, oc- cupied Kufah in August 749, and defeated the last Umayyad caliph, Mansur II, in Iraq the following year. When they had finally subdued the empire, the Abbasid caliphs would inau- gurate a very different kind of society.

Karen Armstrong books in Scribd Documents Audiobooks

 Books

• The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah by Karen Armstrong
• The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
• A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong
• The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Text Only) by Karen Armstrong
• If We Could Fly by Karen Armstrong
• St Paul: The Misunderstood Apostle by Karen Armstrong
• Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time by Karen Armstrong
• Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story by Karen Armstrong
• Angel Eyes: Releasing Fears and Following Your Soul Path by Karen Armstrong

==

Documents

• KAREN-ARMSTRONG__Buddha.pdf
• [Karen Armstrong] a History of God the 4000-Year
• Islam - Karen Armstrong
• Metaphysical mistake | Karen Armstrong | Comment is free | The Guardian
• Muhammad - A Prophet for our times - Karen Armstrong.pdf

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Audiobooks

• Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong
• A History of Jerusalem by Karen Armstrong
• The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong
• The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong
• Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong
• Summary and Analysis of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Based on the Book by Karen Armstrong
• For My Good: Rejecting the Null by Karen A. Armstrong
• KAREN-ARMSTRONG__Buddha.pdf
• [Karen Armstrong] a History of God the 4000-Year
• Islam - Karen Armstrong
• Metaphysical mistake | Karen Armstrong | The Guardian
• Muhammad - A Prophet for our times - Karen Armstrong.pdf
• ==

[홍혜걸의 인사이트 인터뷰] #9 죽음학 (전 서울대병원 내과 정현채 & 의학전문기자 홍혜걸)