4] ISLAM TRIUMPHANT
IMPERIA L ISLAM (1500.1700 )
The discovery and exploitation of gunpowder led to the de- velopment of a military technology that gave rulers more power over their subjects than before. They could control greater areas more effectively, provided that they also devel- oped an efficient, rationalized administration. The military state, which had been a feature of Islamic politics since the decline of Abbasid power, could now come into its own. In Europe also, monarchs were beginning to build large central- ized states and absolute monarchies, with a more streamlined government machinery. Three major Islamic empires were created in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the Safavid Empire in Iran, the Moghul Empire in India and the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia, Syria, North Africa and Arabia. Other impressive polities also appeared. A large Muslim state was formed in Uzbekhistan in the Syr-Oxus basin; another state with Shii tendencies was established in Morocco, and even though Muslims were at this time in competition with Chinese, Japanese, Hindu and Buddhist traders for the con- trol of the Malayan archipelago, the Muslims came out on top in the sixteenth century.
It was, therefore, a period of triumph. The three major em- pires all seemed to turn their backs on the egalitarian tradi- tions of Islam, and set up absolute monarchies, however. Almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision and the empires developed a sophisti- cated administration. They were all influenced by the Mon- gol idea of the army state, but involved civilians in their imperial policies, so that the dynasties won more grass-roots support. But these empires were very different from the old
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Abbasid state in one important respect. The Abbasid
Ottomans, and his capital at Isfahan enjoyed a cultural renaissance, which, like the recent Italian renaissance in Europe, drew inspiration from the pagan past of the region; in the case of Iran, this meant the old pre-Islamic Persian culture. This was the period of such great Safavid painters as Bihzad (d. 1535) and Riza-i Abbari (d. 1635), who produced luminous and dreamlike miniatures. Isfahan became a mag- nificent city of parks, palaces and huge open squares, with imposing mosques and madrasahs.
The new ulama immigrants were in a strange position, however. As a private group, they had never had their own Shii madrasahs before but had met for study and discussion in one another's homes. They had always, on principle, held aloof from government, but now they were required to take over the educational and legal system of Iran, as well as the more religious tasks of the government. The shah gave them generous gifts and grants that eventually made them finan- cially independent. They felt that they could not refuse this unique opportunity of propagating their faith, but were still wary of the state, refusing official government posts and pre- ferring to be ranked as subjects. Their position was potentially very powerful. According to Twelver orthodoxy, the ulama and not the shahs were the only legitimate representatives of the Hidden Imam. But as yet, the Safavids were able to keep the ulama in line; they would not be able to exploit their posi- tion fully until the Iranian people as a whole had converted to the Shiah. But their new power meant that some of the more attractive traits of Twelver Shiism became submerged. In- stead of pursuing their profound mystical exegesis, some of them became rather literal-minded. Muhammad Baqir Maj- lisi (d. 1700) became one of the most influential ulama of all time, but he displayed a new Shii bigotry. He tried to suppress the teaching of Falsafah and mysticism {irfan) in Isfahan, and mercilessly persecuted the remaining Sufis. Henceforth, he
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was able to insist, the ulama should concentrate on fiqh. Majlisi introduced into Iranian Shiism a distrust of mysticism and philosophy that is still prevalent today.
To replace the old Sufi devotions, such as the communal dhikr and the cult of Sufi saints, Majlisi promoted the mourn- ing rituals in honour of Husain, the martyr of Kerbala, to teach the populace the values and piety of the Shiah. There were elaborate processions, and highly emotional dirges were sung, while the people wailed and cried aloud. These rites became a major Iranian institution. During the eighteenth century the taziyeh, a passion play depicting the Kerbala tragedy, was developed, in which the people were not passive spectators, but provided the emotional response, weeping and beating their breasts, and joining their own sorrows to the suf- fering of Imam Husain. The rituals provided an important safety valve. As they moaned, slapped their foreheads and wept uncontrollably, the audience aroused in themselves that yearning for justice which is at the heart of Shii piety, asking themselves why the good always seemed to suffer and evil nearly always prevailed. But Majlisi and the shahs were careful to suppress the revolutionary potential of these rites. Instead of protesting against tyranny at home, the people were taught to inveigh against Sunni Islam. Instead of vowing to follow Husain in the struggle against injustice, the people were told to see him as a patron, who could secure their ad- mission to paradise. The rite was thus neutralized and made to serve the status quo, and urged the populace to curry favour with the powerful and look only to their own inter- ests. It was not until the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 that the cult would once again become a means for the oppressed to articulate their grievances against corrupt government.
But some of the ulama remained true to the older Shii tra- ditions, and their ideas would inspire reformers and revolu- tionaries right up to the present day, not just in Iran but
throughout the Muslim world. Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) founded a school of mystical phi- losophy at Isfahan, which Majlisi did his best to suppress. They continued the tradition of Suhrawardi, linking philoso- phy and spirituality, and training their disciples in mystical disciplines which enabled them to acquire a sense of the alam al-mithal and the spiritual world. Both insisted that a philoso- pher must be as rational and scientific as Aristotle, but that he must also cultivate the imaginative, intuitive approach to truth. Both were utterly opposed to the new intolerance of some of the ulama, which they regarded as a perversion of re- ligion. Truth could not be imposed by force and intellectual conformism was incompatible with true faith. Mulla Sadra also saw political reform as inseparable from spirituality. In his masterpiece Al-Afsan al-Arbaah (The Fourfold Journey), he described the mystical training that a leader must undergo before he could start to transform the mundane world. He must first divest himself of ego, and receive divine illumina- tion and mystical apprehension of God. It was a path that could bring him to the same kind of spiritual insight as the Shii imams, though not, of course, on the same level as they. Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89) was profoundly influenced by the teachings of Mulla Sadra, and in his last address to the Ira- nian people before his death he begged them to continue the study and practice of irfan, since there could be no truly Is- lamic revolution unless there was also a spiritual reformation. Mulla Sadra was deeply disturbed by a wholly new idea that was gradually gaining ground among the ulama of Iran, and which would also have fateful political consequences in our own day. A group who called themselves Usulis believed that ordinary Muslims were incapable of interpreting the basic principles {usul) of the faith for themselves. They should, therefore, seek out one of the learned ulama and fol- low his legal rulings, since they alone had the authority of the
Hidden Imam. The Shii ulama had never agreed to close "the gates of ijtihad" like the Sunnis. Indeed, they called a leading jurist a mujtahid, one who had earned the right to exercise "in- dependent reasoning" when formulating Islamic legislation. The Usulis taught that even the shah should obey the fatwah of the mujtahid whom he had chosen for his mentor, since he needed his legal expertise. During the seventeenth century the Usulis did not win widespread support, but by the end of the century, when it was clear that the Safavid Empire was in decline, their position became popular. It had become crucial to establish a strong legal authority that could compensate for the weakness of the state.
By this time, the empire had succumbed to the fate of any agrarian economy, and could no longer keep pace with its re- sponsibilities. Trade had deteriorated, there was economic insecurity and the later shahs were incompetent. When Afghan tribes attacked Isfahan in 1722, the city surrendered ignominiously. One of the Safavid princes escaped the mas- sacre, and with the help of the brilliant but ruthless comman- der Nadir Khan, managed to drive out the invaders. For over twenty years Nadir Khan, who got rid of his Safavid col- league and made himself shah, pulled Iran together and achieved notable military victories. But he was a cruel, brutal man and was assassinated in 1748. During this period, two crucial developments gave the ulama of Iran a power unparal- leled anywhere else in the Muslim world. First, when Nadir Khan had tried, unsuccessfully, to re-establish Sunni Islam in Iran, the leading ulama had left the empire and taken up resi- dence in the holy Shii cities of Najaf and Kerbala (dedicated respectively to Ali and Husain). This seemed a disaster at first, but in Najaf and Kerbala, which were in Ottoman Iraq, they had a base from which they could instruct the people which was out of reach of the temporal rulers of Iran. Second, during the dark interregnum that followed Nadir Khan's
death, when there was no central authority in Iran until Aqa Muhammad of the Turcoman Qajar tribe managed to seize control in 1779 and founded the Qajar dynasty, the ulama stepped into the power vacuum. The Usuli position became mandatory, and events would show that the ulama could com- mand the devotion and obedience of the Iranian people far more effectively than any shah.
THE M O G H U L EMPIR E
The turmoil occasioned by Shah Ismail's Shii jihad against Sunni Islam was, in part, responsible for the establishment of the new Muslim Empire in India. Its founder, Babur (d. 1530), had been an ally of Ismail, and had fled as a refugee to Kabul in the Afghan mountains during the war between the Safavids and the Uzbeks, where he had seized control of the remnants of the state established there by Timur Lenk. Thence he managed briefly to establish a power base in north India, which he intended to run on the Mongol lines favoured by Timur. His state did not last, and there was factional strife among the Afghan amirs until 1555, when Humayun, the ablest of Babur's descendants, secured the throne and, though he died almost immediately, a dependable regent held the "Mongol" (or "Moghul") power intact until Humayun's son Akbar (1542-1605) attained his majority in 1560. Akbar was able to establish an integrated state in north India, where he was acknowledged as the undisputed ruler. He retained the old Mongol habit of running the central government as an army under the direct command of the sultan. He set up an efficient bureaucracy and, with the aid of his firearms, the Moghul Empire began to expand at the expense of the other Muslim rulers, until he controlled Hindustan, the Punjab, Malva and the Deccan.
Unlike Ismail, however, Akbar did not oppress or perse- cute his subjects, nor did he attempt to convert them to his
own faith. Had he done so, his empire would not have sur- vived. The Muslims were a small ruling minority in a coun- try that had never attempted to impose religious conformity. Each Hindu caste had its own religious practices, and Bud- dhists, Jacobites, Jews, Jains, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sunni Muslims and Ismailis had all been allowed to worship with- out hindrance. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Hindus of all castes and even a few Muslims had joined forces in establishing a spiritualized, contemplative form of monotheism, which forswore sectarian intolerance. The Sikh religion, founded by Guru Nanak (d. 1469), had grown from these circles, insisting on the unity and compatibility of Hin- duism and Islam. There was, however, always a possibility of aggressive confrontation. Universalism was firmly estab- lished in India, and an intolerant polity would run against the grain of Indic culture. Muslim rulers had long been aware of this and had employed Hindus in their armies and administration. Akbar accentuated this tradition. He abol- ished the jizyah tax that the Shariah prescribed for dhimmis, became a vegetarian, so as not to offend Hindu sensibilities, and gave up hunting (a sport he greatly enjoyed). Akbar was respectful of all faiths. He built temples for Hindus, and in 1575 set up a "house of worship" where scholars of all reli- gions could meet for discussion. He also founded his own Sufi order, dedicated to "divine monotheism" (tawhid-e ilaht), based on the Quranic belief that the one God could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion.
Even though it was certainly true to the spirit of the Quran, Akbar's pluralism was very different from the hardline communalism that had been developing in some Shariah cir- cles, and it was light years from the bigotry of the recent Sunni/Shii conflict. But any other policy would have been politically disastrous in India. Akbar had courted the ulama at the beginning of his reign, but he was never very interested in the Shariah. His own bent was towards Sufism and Falsafah,
both of which inclined towards a universalist vision. Akbar wanted to build the model society that the Faylasufs had de- scribed. His biographer, the Sufi historian Abdulfazl Allami (1551-1602), saw Akbar as the ideal philosopher-king. He also believed that he was the Perfect Man, whom Sufis thought to exist in each generation to give divine guidance to the ummah. Akbar was establishing a civilization, which, Al- lami argued, would help people to cultivate a spirit of such generosity that conflict would become impossible. It was a polity that expressed the Sufi ideal of sulh-e kull ("universal peace"), which was merely a prelude to mahahhat-e hull, the "universal love" which would positively seek the material and spiritual welfare of all human beings. From this perspective, bigotry was non-sense; the ideal Faylasuf king, such as Akbar, was above the parochial prejudice of narrow sectarianism.
Some Muslims, however, were offended by Akbar's reli- gious pluralism. Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1625), who was also a Sufi, felt that this universalism (which he laid at the door of Ibn al-Arabi) was dangerous. Sirhindi proclaimed that he himself rather than Akbar was the Perfect Man of the age. Unity with God could only be achieved when Muslims pi- ously observed the laws of the Shariah, which by this time was becoming more sectarian in its outlook. In the early part of the seventeenth century, however, few Muslims in India sub- scribed to Sirhindi's views. Shah Jihan, Akbar's grandson, who reigned from 1627 to 1658, kept in the main to Akbar's poli- cies. His Taj Mahal continued his grandfather's tradition of blending Muslim with Hindu styles of architecture. At his court, he patronized Hindu poets and Muslim scientific works were translated into Sanskrit. But Shah Jihan tended to be hostile to Sufism and his piety was based more strictly on the Shariah than Akbar's had been.
He proved to be a transitional figure. By the end of the century, it was clear that the Moghul Empire had begun its
decline. The army and the court had both become too ex- pensive, the emperors still invested in cultural activities, but neglected agriculture, on which their wealth depended. The economic crisis came to a head during the reign of Au- rengzebe (1658-1707), who believed that the answer lay in greater discipline in Muslim society. His insecurity was ex- pressed in murderous hatred of Muslim "heretics" as well as adherents of other faiths. He was supported in his sectarian policies by those Muslims who, like Sirhindi, had been un- happy with the old pluralism. Shii celebrations in honour of Husain were suppressed in India, wine was prohibited by law (which made socializing with Hindus difficult) and the number of Hindu festivals attended by the emperor was drastically reduced. The jizyab was reimposed, and the taxes of Hindu merchants were doubled. Worst of all, Hindu tem- ples were destroyed all over the empire. The response showed how wise the previous tolerance had been. There were serious revolts, led by Hindu chieftains and Sikhs, who started to campaign for a state of their own in the Punjab. When Aurengzebe died, the empire was in a parlous state and never fully recovered. His successors abandoned his communalist policies, but the damage was done. Even Mus- lims were disaffected: there had been nothing authentically Islamic about Aurengzebe's zeal for the Shariah, which preaches justice for all, including the dhimmis. The empire began to disintegrate, and local Muslim officials tended to control their regions as autonomous units.
The Moghuls managed to remain in power, however, until 1739, and there was a rapprochement during the eighteenth century between Hindus and Muslims in the court; they learned to speak one another's languages and to read and translate books from Europe together. But Sikhs and the Hindu chieftains from the mountainous regions still fought the regime, and in the north-west the Afghan tribes which
had brought down the Safavid Empire in Iran made an un- successful bid to establish a new Muslim empire in India. In- dian Muslims began to feel uneasy about their position, and their problems foreshadowed many of the difficulties and de- bates that would continue to exercise Muslims during the modern period. They now felt that they were a beleaguered minority in an area which was not, like the Anatolian heart- lands of the Ottoman Empire, a peripheral region, but one of the core cultures of the civilized world. Not only were they contending with Hindus and Sikhs, but the British were also establishing a strong trading presence which was becoming increasingly political, in the subcontinent. For the first time, Muslims faced the prospect of being governed by infidels, and, given the importance of the ummah in Islamic piety, this was profoundly disturbing. It was not simply a matter of pol- itics, but touched the deepest recesses of their beings. A new insecurity would continue to characterize Muslim life in India. Was Islam to become simply another Hindu caste? Would Muslims lose their cultural and religious identity, and be swamped by foreign traditions that were different from those of the Middle East, in which Islam had come to birth? Had they lost touch with their roots?
The Sufi thinker Shah Valli-Ullah (1 703-62) believed that the answer lay in Sirhindi's position, and his views would con- tinue to influence the Muslims of India well into the twenti- eth century. He expressed the new embattled vision, and as Muslims felt their power slipping away in other parts of the world and experienced similar fears about the survival of Islam, other philosophers and reformers would reach similar conclusions. First, Muslims must unite, bury their sectarian differences with one another and present a united front against their enemies. The Shariah must be adapted to meet the special conditions of the subcontinent, and become a means of resisting Hinduization. It was essential that Mus-
lims retain the upper hand militarily and politically. So con- cerned was he, that Shah Valli-Ullah even supported the dis- astrous Afghan attempt to revive Muslim power. A defensive strain had entered Muslim thinking, and this would continue to characterize Islamic piety in the modern period.
THE OTTOMA N EMPIR E
When the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople (which now became known as Istanbul) in 1453, they were in a posi- tion to establish an empire, which, because it had been able to evolve so gradually, was more firmly grounded than the other empires, and would become the most successful and endur- ing. The early Ottoman chiefiains had been typical ghazi rulers, but in Istanbul the sultans established an absolute monarchy, on the Byzantine model, with an elaborate court ritual. The state was chiefly based on the old Mongol idea, however, seeing the central power as a huge army at the per- sonal disposal of the sultan. Mehmed the Conqueror's power was based on the support of the Balkan nobility, many of whom were now converting to Islam, and the infantry-the "new troop" [yeni-chert)—which had become more important since the advent of gunpowder. The Janissaries, who, as con- verted slaves, were outsiders with no landed interests, became an independent force, solidly behind the sultans. The Ot- tomans also retained the ethos of their old ideal, seeing them- selves as manning a frontier state, dedicated to a jihad against the enemies of Islam. To the west they faced Christendom, and to the east were the Shii Safavids. The Ottomans became as murderously sectarian as the Safavids, and there were mas- sacres of Shiis living in Ottoman domains.
The jihad was phenomenally successful. The campaign of Selim I (1467-1520) against the Safavids, which had stopped the Iranian advance, developed into a victorious war of con-
quest which brought the whole of Syria and Egypt under Ot- toman rule. North Africa and Arabia were also incorporated into the empire. To the west, the Ottoman armies continued their conquest of Europe and reached the gates of Vienna in the 1530s. The sultans now ruled a massive empire, with su- perb bureaucratic efficiency, unrivalled by any other state at this time. The sultan did not impose uniformity on his sub- jects nor did he try to force the disparate elements of his em- pire into one huge party. The government merely provided a framework which enabled the different groups - Christians, Jews, Arabs, Turks, Berbers, merchants, ulama, tariqahs and trade guilds -t o live together peacefully, each making its own contribution, and following its own beliefs and customs. The empire was thus a collection of communities, each of which claimed the immediate loyalty of its members. The empire was divided into provinces, ruled by a governor (pasha) who was directly responsible to Istanbul.
The empire reached its apogee under Suleiman al-Qanuni ("the Lawgiver") (1520-66), who was known as Suleiman the Magnificent in the West. Under his rule, the empire reached the limits of its expansion, and Istanbul enjoyed a cultural re- naissance, which was chiefly characterized by superb archi- tecture, notably that of the court architect Sinan Pasha (d. 1578). The Ottoman mosques that appeared all over the em- pire shared a distinctive style: they were spacious, filled with light, had low domes and high minarets. The court also pa- tronized painting, history and medicine to a high level, built an observatory in 1579 and was intrigued by the new Euro- pean discoveries in navigation and geography. There was an eager interchange of information with the West during these expansive years when, despite Europe's achievements, the Ottoman state was the most powerful in the world.
Like the other two empires, the Ottomans also gave their state a special Islamic orientation. Under Suleiman, the
Shariah received a more exalted status than in any previous Muslim state. It became the official law of the land for all Mus- lims, and the Ottomans were the first to give regular form to the Shariah courts. Legal expert-the qadis, who dispensed justice in the courts, their consultants (muftis), who interpreted the law, and the teachers in the madrasahs—became an official government corps, creating a moral and religious link between the sultan and his subjects. This was especially valuable in the Arab provinces, where the partnership between the state and the ulama helped people to accept Turkish rule. Not only did the ulama have the backing of the sacred law and so gave legit- imacy to the regime, but it was often the case that the ulama, who were native to a particular province, acted as essential in- termediaries between the indigenous population and the Turk- ish governor.
Ottoman subjects were, in the main, proud of belonging to the Shariah state. The Quran had taught that an ummah which lived according to God's law would prosper, because it was in harmony with the fundamental principles of exis- tence. The spectacular successes of the early Ottomans, whose legitimacy was largely based on their devotion to God's revealed law, seemed to endorse this belief. The ulama could also feel that the empire was their state and that the Ottomans had achieved a rare integration of public policy and Muslim conscience. But this partnership - fruitful as it was-had a negative side, since instead of empowering the ulama, it would eventually muzzle and even discredit them. The Shariah had begun as a protest movement, and much of its dynamism derived from its oppositional stance. Under the Ottoman system, this was inevitably lost. The ulama be- came dependent upon the state. As government officials, the sultan and his pashas could-and did-control them by threatening to withdraw their subsidies. Abu al-Sund Khola Chelebi (1490-1574), who worked out the principles of the
Ottoman-ulama alliance, made it clear that the qadis derived their authority from the sultan, the guardian of the Shariah, and were therefore bound to apply the law according to his directives. Thus the Shariah was made to endorse the system of absolute monarchy (now more powerful than ever before) which it had been originally designed to oppose.
The Shii ulama of Iran had broken free of the state, and had won the support of the people. Many of the Iranian ulama would become committed reformers and were able to provide the people with effective leadership against despotic shahs. A significant number would be open to the democratic and liberal ideas of the modern period. But in the Ottoman Empire the ulama would become emasculated; deprived of their political edge, they became conservative and opposed any change. After Suleiman's reign, the curriculum of the madrasahs became narrower: the study of Falsafah was dropped in favour of a greater concentration on fiqh. The Is- lamic stance of the Ottoman Empire, a huge ghazi state, was communalist and sectarian. Muslims felt that they were the champions of orthodoxy against infidels who pressed on all sides. The ulama and even the Sufis imbibed this ethos, and when the empire began to show the first signs of weakness, this tendency became even more marked. Where the court was still open to the new ideas coming from Europe, the madrasahs became centres of opposition to any experimenta- tion that derived from the European infidels. The ulama op- posed the use of printing for Islamic books, for example. They turned away from the Christian communities in the empire, many of whom were looking eagerly towards the new West. The ulama's influence with the people coloured major sectors of Ottoman society, making them resistant to the idea of change at a time when change was inevitable. Left behind in the old ethos, the ulama would become unable to help the people when Western modernity hit the Muslim world, and they would have to look elsewhere for guidance.
Even the mighty Ottoman Empire was not proof against the limitations of agrarian society, which could not keep pace with its expansion. Military discipline weakened, so that the sultans found that they could no longer wield absolute power. The foundering of the economy led to corruption and tax abuse. The upper classes lived in opulence, while revenues decreased; trade declined as a result of more effective Euro- pean competition, and local governors tended to line their own pockets. Nevertheless, the empire did not collapse, but retained a vigorous cultural life throughout the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, however, the decline was evident, especially in the peripheral regions. There local re- formers tried to restore order by means of religious reform.
In the Arabian peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1 703-92) managed to break away from Istanbul and establish a state in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf. He was a typi- cal reformer, in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyyah. He believed that the current crisis was best met by a fundamentalist return to the Quran and sunnah, and by a militant rejection of all later accretions, which included medieval fiqh mysticism and Falsafah, which most Muslims now regarded as normative. Because the Ottoman sultans did not conform to his vision of true Islam, Abd al-Wahhab declared that they were apostates and worthy of death. Instead, he tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on his view of the first ummah of the seventh century. His aggressive techniques would be used by some fundamentalists in the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest. Wahhabism is the form of Islam that is still practised today in Saudi Arabia, a puritan religion based on a strictly literal interpretation of scripture and early Islamic tradition.
In Morocco, the Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1 780-1836) approached the problem differently. His solution was to edu- cate the people and make them better Muslims. He travelled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, instructing the or-
dinary people in their own dialect, and teaching them how to perform such basic rituals as the salat prayer correctly. In his view, the ulama had failed in their duty, had locked themselves away in their madrasahs, interested only in the minutiae of fiqh, and had left the people to their own devices. Other Neo-Sufis, as these reformers are called, performed similar missions in Al- geria and Medina. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) founded the Sanusiayyah movement, which is still the predom- inant form of Islam in Libya. The Neo-Sufis had no interest in and no knowledge of the new West, but they evolved ideas sim- ilar to those espoused by the European Enlightenment by means of their own mystical traditions. They insisted that the people rely on their own insights, instead of relying on the ulama. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim thinker, except the Prophet. He thus encour- aged Muslims to cast off habits of deference and to value what was new, instead of clinging to past tradition. His mysticism was based on the figure of the Prophet, and taught the people to model themselves on an ideal human being rather than yearn for a distant God, in a sort of devotional humanism.
There was, therefore, no intrinsic reason why Muslims should reject the ethos of the new Europe. Over the centuries they had cultivated virtues that would also be crucial to the modern West: a passion for social justice, an egalitarian polity, freedom of speech and, despite the ideal of tanshid, a de facto or (in the case of Shiism) a principled separation of religion and politics. But by the end of the eighteenth century the most alert Muslims had been forced to recognize that Europe had overtaken them. The Ottomans had inflicted stunning defeats on the European powers in the early days, but by the eighteenth century they could no longer hold their own against them, nor deal with them as equals. In the sixteenth century Suleiman had granted European traders diplomatic immunity. The treaties known as the Capitulations (because
they were formulated under capita: headings) meant that Eu- ropean traders living in Ottoman territory were not required to observe the law of the land; their offences were tried ac- cording to their own laws in their own courts, which were presided over by their own consul. Suleiman had negotiated these treaties with the nations of Europe as an equal. But by the eighteenth century it was clear that these Capitulations were weakening Ottoman sovereignty, especially when they were extended in 1740 to the Christian millets in the empire, who were now "protected" like the European expatriates, and no longer subject to government control.
By the late eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire was in a critical state. Trade had declined still further; the Bedouin tribes were out of control in the Arab provinces, and the local pashas were no longer adequately managed by Istanbul, were often corrupt, and exploited the population. The West, how- ever, was going from one triumph to another. But the Ot- tomans were not unduly worried. Sultan Selim III tried to take a leaf out of Europe's book, assuming that an army re- form along Western lines would restore the balance of power. In 1789 he opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students learned European languages and studied the new Western sciences alongside modern martial arts. But this would not be sufficient to contain the Western threat. Muslims had not yet realized that Europe had evolved a wholly different type of society since the Ottoman Empire had been established, that they had now pulled irrevocably ahead of Islamdom and would shortly achieve world power.
The three great empires were all in decline by the end of the eighteenth century. This was not due to the essential in- competence or fatalism of Islam, as Europeans often arro- gantly assumed. Any agrarian polity had a limited lifespan, and these Muslim states, which represented the last flowering of the agrarian ideal, had simply come to a natural and in-
evitable end. In the pre-modern period, Western and Chris- tian empires had also experienced decline and fall. Islamic states had collapsed before; on each occasion, Muslims had been able to rise phoenix-like from the ruins and had gone on to still greater achievements. But this time, it was different. The Muslim weakness at the end of the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of an entirely different type of civi- lization in the West, and this time the Muslim world would find it far more difficult to meet the challenge.
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