5] ISLAM AGONISTES
THE ARRIVAL OF THE WEST (1750.2000 )
The rise of the West is unparalleled in world history. The countries north of the Alps had for centuries been regarded as a backward region, which had attached itself to the Greco-Roman culture of the south and had, gradually, de- veloped its own distinctive version of Christianity and its own form of agrarian culture. Western Europe lagged far behind the Christian empire of Byzantium, where the Roman Empire had not collapsed as it had in Europe. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these western European countries had just about caught up with the other core cul- tures, and by the sixteenth century had begun a process of major transformation that would enable the West to domi- nate the rest of the world. The achievement of such ascen- dancy by an outgroup is unique. It is similar to the emergence of the Arab Muslims as a major world power in the seventh and eighth centuries, but the Muslims had not achieved world hegemony, and had not developed a new kind of civ- ilization, as Europe had begun to do in the sixteenth cen- tury. When the Ottomans had tried to reorganize their army along Western lines in the hope of containing the threat from Europe, their efforts were doomed because they were too superficial. To beat Europe at its own game, a conven- tional agrarian society would have to transform itself from top to bottom, and re-create its entire social, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, political and intellectual structures. And it would have to do this very quickly, an im- possible task, since it had taken the West almost three hun- dred years to achieve this development.
The new society of Europe and its American colonies had a different economic basis. Instead of relying upon a surplus of agricultural produce, it was founded on a technology and an investment of capital that enabled the West to reproduce its resources indefinitely, so that Western society was no longer subject to the same constraints as an agrarian culture. This major revolution in reality constituted a second Axial Age, which demanded a revolution of the established mores on several fronts at the same time: political, social and intel- lectual. It had not been planned or thought out in advance, but had been the result of a complex process which had led to the creation of democratic, secular social structures. By the sixteenth century Europeans had achieved a scientific revo- lution that gave them greater control over the environment than anybody had achieved before. There were new inven- tions in medicine, navigation, agriculture and industry. None of these was in itself decisive, but their cumulative effect was radical. By 1600 innovations were occurring on such a scale that progress seemed irreversible: a discovery in one field would often lead to fresh insights in another. Instead of seeing the world as governed by immutable laws, Europeans had found that they could alter the course of nature. Where the conservative society created by agrarian culture had not been able to afford such change, people in Europe and America were becoming more confident. They were now prepared to invest and reinvest capital in the firm expectation of continu- ing progress and the continuous improvement of trade. By the time this technicalization of society had resulted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Westerners felt such assurance that they no longer looked back to the past for inspiration, as in the agrarian cultures and religions, but looked forward to the future.
The modernization of society involved social and intellec- tual change. The watchword was efficiency: an invention or a
polity had to be seen to work effectively. An increasing num- ber of people were needed to take part in the various scien- tific and industrial projects at quite humble levels- as printers, clerks, factory workers- and in order to acquire a modicum of the new standards, they had to receive some kind of education. More people were needed to buy the mass- produced goods, so that to keep the economy going an in- creasing number of people had to live above subsistence level. As more of the workers became literate, they demanded a greater share in the decisions of government. If a nation wanted to use all its human resources to enhance its produc- tivity, it had to bring groups who had hitherto been segre- gated and marginalized, such as the Jews, into mainstream culture. Religious differences and spiritual ideals must not be allowed to impede the progress of society, and scientists, monarchs and government officials insisted that they be free of ecclesiastical control. Thus the ideals of democracy, plu- ralism, toleration, human rights and secularism were not sim- ply beautiful ideals dreamed up by political scientists, but were, at least in part, dictated by the needs of the modern state. It was found that in order to be efficient and productive, a modern nation had to be organized on a secular, democratic basis. But it was also found that if societies did organize all their institutions according to the new rational and scientific norms, they became indomitable and the conventional agrar- ian states were no match for them.
This had fateful consequences for the Islamic world. The progressive nature of modern society and an industrialized economy meant that it had continuously to expand. New markets were needed, and, once the home countries had been saturated, they had to be sought abroad. The Western states therefore began, in various ways, to colonize the agrarian countries outside modern Europe in order to draw them into their commercial network. This too was a complex process.
The colonized country provided raw materials for export, which were fed into European industry. In return, it received cheap manufactured Western goods, which meant that local industry was usually ruined. The colony also had to be trans- formed and modernized along European lines, its financial and commercial life rationalized and brought into the West- ern system, and at least some of the "natives" had to acquire some familiarity with the modern ideas and ethos.
This colonization was experienced by the agrarian colonies as invasive, disturbing and alien. Modernization was inevitably superficial, since a process that had taken Europe three cen- turies had to be achieved at top speed. Where modern ideas had time to filter down gradually to all classes of society in Europe, in the colonies only a small number of people, who were members of the upper classes and-significantly-the military, could receive a Western education and appreciate the dynamic of modernity. The vast majority of the popula- tion were left perforce to rot in the old agrarian ethos. Society was divided, therefore, and increasingly neither side could understand the other. Those who had been left outside the modernizing process had the disturbing experience of watch- ing their country become utterly strange, like a friend disfig- ured by disease and become unrecognizable. They were ruled by secular foreign law-codes which they could not under- stand. Their cities were transformed, as Western buildings "modernized" the towns, often leaving the "old city" as a mu- seum piece, a tourist trap and a relic of a superseded age. Western tourists have often felt disoriented and lost in the winding alleys and apparent chaos of an oriental city: they do not always appreciate that for many of the indigenous popu- lation, their modernized capitals are equally alien. People felt lost in their own countries. Above all, local people of all classes of society resented the fact that they were no longer in control of their own destiny. They felt that they had severed
all connection with their roots, and experienced a sinking loss of identity.
Where Europeans and Americans had been allowed to modernize at their own pace, and to set their own agendas, the inhabitants of the colonized countries had to modernize far too rapidly and were forced to comply with somebody else's programme. But even Western people had found the transformation of their society painful. They had experi- enced almost four hundred years of political and often bloody revolutions, reigns of terror, genocide, violent wars of reli- gion, the despoliation of the countryside, vast social up- heavals, exploitation in the factories, spiritual malaise and profound anomie in the new megacities. Today we are seeing similar violence, cruelty, revolution and disorientation in the developing countries, which are making an even more diffi- cult rite of passage to modernity. It is also true that the mod- ern spirit that developed in the West is fundamentally different. In Europe and America it had two main character- istics: innovation and autonomy (the modernizing process was punctuated in Europe and America by declarations of inde- pendence on the political, intellectual, religious and social fronts). But in the developing world, modernity has been ac- companied not by autonomy but by a loss of independence and national autonomy. Instead of innovation, the developing countries can only modernize by imitating the West, which is so far advanced that they have no hope of catching up. Since the modernizing process has not been the same, it is unlikely that the end product will conform to what the West regards as the desirable norm. If the correct ingredients of a cake are not available-if rice is used instead of flour, dried eggs instead of fresh, and spices instead of sugar-the result will be differ- ent from the cake described in the cookbook. Very different ingredients have gone into the modern cake of the colonized countries, and democracy, secularism, pluralism and the rest
are not likely to emerge from the process in the way that they did in the West.
The Islamic world has been convulsed by the moderniza- tion process. Instead of being one of the leaders of world civilization, Islamdom was quickly and permanently re- duced to a dependent bloc by the European powers. Mus- lims were exposed to the contempt of the colonialists, who were so thoroughly imbued with the modern ethos that they were often appalled by what they could only see as the back- wardness, inefficiency, fatalism and corruption of Muslim society. They assumed that European culture had always been progressive, and lacked the historical perspective to see that they were simply seeing a pre-modern agrarian society, and that a few centuries earlier Europe had been just as "backward." They often took it for granted that Westerners were inherently and racially superior to "orientals" and ex- pressed their contempt in myriad ways. All this not unnatu- rally had a corrosive effect. Western people are often bewildered by the hostility and rage that Muslims often feel for their culture, which, because of their very different ex- perience, they have found to be liberating and empowering. But the Muslim response is not bizarre and eccentric; be- cause the Islamic world was so widespread and strategically placed, it was the first to be subjected in a concerted, sys- tematic manner to the colonization process in the Middle East, India, Arabia, Malaya and a significant part of Africa. Muslims in all these places very early felt the brunt of this modernizing assault. Their response has not been simply a reaction to the new West, but the paradigmatic reaction. They would not be able to come to modernity as success- fully or as smoothly as, for example, Japan, which had never been colonized, whose economy and institutions had re- mained intact and which had not been forced into a debili- tating dependency on the West.
The European invasion of the Islamic world was not uni- form, but it was thorough and effective. It began in Moghul India. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, British traders had established themselves in Bengal, and at this time, when modernization was still in its infancy, the British lived on a par with the Hindu and Muslim merchants. But this phase of British activity is known as the "plundering of Bengal," because it permanently damaged the local indus- try, and changed its agriculture so that Bengalis no longer grew crops for themselves but produced raw materials for the industrialized Western markets. Bengal had been re- duced to second-class status in the world economy. Gradu- ally as the British became more "modern" and efficient themselves, their attitude became more superior, and they were determined to "civilize" the Indians, backed up by the Protestant missionaries who started to arrive in 1793. But the Bengalis were not encouraged to evolve a fully industrialized society of their own; the British administrators introduced only those aspects of modern technology that would rein- force their supremacy and keep Bengal in a complementary role. The Bengalis did benefit from British efficiency, which kept such disasters as disease, famine and war at bay, and the population increased as a result; but this created new prob- lems of overcrowding and poverty, since there was no option of migration to the towns, as in the West, and the people all had to stay on the land.
The plundering of Bengal economically led to political domination. Between 1798 and 1818, by treaty or by military conquest, British rule was established throughout India, ex- cept in the Indus Valley, which was subdued between 1843 and 1849. In the meantime, the French had tried to set up an empire of their own. In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt, hoping to establish a base in Suez that would cut the British sea routes to India. He brought with him a corps of
scholars, a library of modern European literature, a scientific laboratory and a printing press with Arabic type. From the start, the advanced culture of Europe, coming as it did with a superbly efficient modern army, was experienced in the Mus- lim Middle East as an assault. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt and Syria failed. He had intended to attack British India from the north, with the help of Russia. This gave Iran a wholly new strategic importance, and for the next century Britain es- tablished a base in the south of the country, while the Rus- sians tried to get control of the north. Neither wanted to make Iran a full colony or protectorate (until oil was discov- ered there in the early twentieth century), but both powers dominated the new Qajar dynasty, so that the shahs did not dare to make a move without the support of at least one of them. As in Bengal, both Britain and Russia promoted only the technology that furthered their own interests and blocked such inventions as the railway, which might have benefited the Iranian people, in case it endangered their own strategic positions.
The European powers colonized one Islamic country after another. France occupied Algeria in 1830, and Britain Aden nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, Egypt in 1882, the Sudan in 1889 and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915 the Sykes-Picot agreement divided the territories of the moribund Ottoman Empire (which had sided with Germany during the First World War) between Britain and France in anticipation of victory. After the war, Britain and France duly set up protec- torates and mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. This was experienced as an outrage, since the European powers had promised the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire independence. In the Ottoman heartlands, Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatiirk (1881-1938), was able to keep the Europeans at bay and set up the independent state of Turkey. Muslims in the Balkans, Russia and Central Asia be-
came subject to the new Soviet Union. Even after some of these countries had been allowed to become independent, the West often continued to control the economy, the oil or such re- sources as the Suez Canal. European occupation often left a legacy of bitter conflict. When the British withdrew from India in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which are to this day in a state of deadly hostility, with nuclear weapons aimed at each other's capitals. In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their home- land to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish secular state of Is- rael there, with the support of the United Nations and the international community. The loss of Palestine became a po- tent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Nevertheless, in the very early days, some Muslims were in love with the West. The Iranian intellectuals Mulkum Khan (1833-1908) and Aqa Khan Kirmani (1853-96) urged Iranians to acquire a Western education and replace the Shariah with a modern secular legal code, seeing this as the only route to progress. Secularists from these circles joined the more liberal ulama in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and forced the Qajars to set up a modern constitution, to limit the powers of the monarchy and give Iranians parlia- mentary representation. Most of the leading mujtahids in Najaf supported the constitution. Sheikh Muhammad Husain Naini expressed their view most cogently in his Admonition to the Nation (1909), which argued that limiting tyranny in this way was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah, and that constitu- tional government, Western-style, was the next best thing to the return of the Hidden Imam. The Egyptian writer Rifah al-Tahtawi (1801-73) was enthralled by the ideas of the Eu- ropean Enlightenment, whose vision reminded him of Fal-
safah. He loved the way everything worked properly in Paris, was impressed by the rational precision of French culture, by the literacy of even the common people, and intrigued by the passion for innovation. He longed to help Egypt enter this brave new world. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98) tried to adapt Islam to modern Western liberalism, claiming that the Quran was quite in accordance with the natural laws that were being discovered by modern science. He founded a college at Aligharh where Muslims could study science and English alongside the conventional Islamic subjects. He wanted to help Muslims to live in a modernized society with- out becoming carbon copies of the British, retaining a sense of their own cultural identity.
Before colonization had got under way in their areas, some Muslim rulers had tried to modernize on their own initiative. The Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II had inaugurated the Tanzi- mat (Regulations) in 1826, which abolished the Janissaries, modernized the army and introduced some of the new tech- nology. In 1839 Sultan Abdulhamid issued the Giilhane de- cree, which made his rule dependent upon a contractual relationship with his subjects, and looked forward to major re- form of the empire's institutions. More dramatic, however, was the modernization programme of the Albanian pasha of Egypt Muhammad Ali (1769-1849), who made Egypt virtu- ally independent of Istanbul, and almost single-handedly dragged this backward province into the modern world. But the brutality of his methods showed how difficult it was to modernize at such breakneck speed. He massacred the polit- ical opposition; twenty-three thousand peasants are said to have died in the conscripted labour bands that improved Egypt's irrigation and water communications; other peasants so feared conscription into Muhammad All's modernized army that they frequently resorted to self-mutilation, cutting off their own fingers and even blinding themselves. To secu-
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larize the country, Muhammad Ali simply confiscated much religiously endowed property and systematically marginal- ized the ulama, divesting them of any shred of power. As a re- sult, the ulama, who had experienced modernity as a shocking assault, became even more insular and closed their minds against the new world that was coming into being in their country. Muhammad All's grandson Ismail Pasha (1803-95) was even more successful: he paid for the construction of the Suez Canal, built nine hundred miles of railways, irrigated some 1,373,000 acres of hitherto uncultivable land, set up modern schools for boys and girls and transformed Cairo into a modern city. Unfortunately, the cost of this ambitious pro- gramme made Egypt bankrupt, forced the country into debt and gave Britain a pretext for establishing its military occupa- tion in 1882 to safeguard the interests of the European share- holders. Muhammad Ali and Ismail had wanted to make Egypt a modern independent state; instead, as a result of modernization, it simply became a virtual British colony.
None of these early reformers fully appreciated the ideas behind the transformation of Europe. Their reforms were, therefore, superficial. But later reformers up to and including Saddam Hussein have also simply tried to acquire the mili- tary technology and outer trappings of the modern West, without bothering overmuch about its effects upon the rest of society. From an early date, however, some reformers were acutely aware of these dangers. One of the first to sound the alarm was the Iranian activist Jamal al-Din (1839-97), who styled himself "al-Afghani" ("the Afghan"), probably hoping that he would attract a wider audience in the Muslim world as an Afghan Sunni than as an Iranian Shii. He had been in India at the time of the great mutiny of Hindus and Muslims against British rule in 1857; wherever he travelled in Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia or Europe he was aware of the ubiqui- tous power of the West, and was convinced that it would soon
dominate and crush the Muslim world. He could see the dan- gers of a shallow imitation of Western life, and asked the peo- ple of the Islamic world to join forces against the European threat; they must come to the scientific culture of the new world on their own terms. They must, therefore, cultivate their own cultural traditions, and that meant Islam. But Islam itself must respond to the changed conditions and become more rational and modern. Muslims must rebel against the long closing of the "gates of ijtihad' and use their own unfet- tered reason, as both the Prophet and the Koran had insisted. The Western encroachment had made politics central to the Islamic experience once more. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims had seen current events as theophanies; they had encountered a God who was present in history, and had issued a constant challenge to build a bet- ter world. Muslims had sought a divine meaning in political events, and even their setbacks and tragedies had led to major developments in theology and spirituality. When Muslims had achieved a type of polity that was more in ac- cordance with the spirit of the Quran after the decline of the Abbasid caliphate, they had agonized less about the political health of the ummah, and felt free to develop a more interior piety. But the intrusion of the West into their lives raised major religious questions. The humiliation of the ummah was not merely a political catastrophe, but touched a Muslim's very soul. This new weakness was a sign that something had gone gravely awry in Islamic history. The Quran had promised that a society which surrendered to God's revealed will could not fail. Muslim history had proved this. Time and again, when disaster had struck, the most devout Muslims had turned to religion, made it speak to their new circum- stances, and the ummah had not only revived but had usually gone on to greater achievements. How could Islamdom be falling more and more under the domination of the secular,
Godless West? From this point, a growing number of Mus- lims would wrestle with these questions, and their attempts to put Muslim history back on the straight path would some- times appear desperate and even despairing. The suicide bomber-an almost unparalleled phenomenon in Islamic history-shows that some Muslims are convinced that they are pitted against hopeless odds.
Al-Afghani's political campaigns, which were often either bizarre or downright immoral, smacked of this new despera- tion. In 1896, for example, one of his disciples assassinated the shah of Iran. But his friend and colleague the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905) was a deeper and more measured thinker. He believed that education and not revolution was the answer. Abdu had been devastated by the British occupation of Egypt, but he loved Europe, felt quite at ease with Europeans and was widely read in Western science and philosophy. He greatly respected the political, legal and educational institutions of the modern West, but did not be- lieve that they could be transplanted wholesale in a deeply religious country, such as Egypt, where modernization had been too rapid and had perforce excluded the vast mass of the people. It was essential to graft modern legal and constitu- tional innovations on to traditional Islamic ideas that the peo- ple could understand; a society in which people cannot understand the law becomes in effect a country without law. The Islamic principle of shurah (consultation), for example, could help Muslims to understand the meaning of democ- racy. Education also needed reform. Madrasah students should study modern science, so that they could help Mus- lims to enter the new world in an Islamic context that would make it meaningful to them. But the Shariah would need to be brought up to date, and both Abdu and his younger contem- porary, the journalist Rashid Rida (1865-1935), knew that this would be a long and complex process. Rida was alarmed by
the growing secularism of Arab intellectuals and pundits, who sometimes poured scorn upon Islam in the belief that it was holding their people back. This, Rida believed, could only weaken the ummah and make it even more prey to West- ern imperialism. Rida was one of the first Muslims to advo- cate the establishment of a fully modernized but fully Islamic state, based on the reformed Shariah. He wanted to establish a college where students could be introduced to the study of international law, sociology, world history, the scientific study of religion, and modern science, at the same time as they studied fiqh. This would ensure that Islamic jurisprudence would develop in a truly modern context that would wed the traditions of East and West, and make the Shariah, an agrar- ian law code, compatible with the new type of society that the West had evolved.
The reformers constantly felt that they had to answer the European criticisms of Islam. In religious as in political af- fairs, the West was now setting the Muslim agenda. In India, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) in- sisted that Islam was just as rational as any Western system. Indeed, it was the most rational and advanced of all the con- fessional faiths. Its strict monotheism had liberated humanity from mythology, and the Quran had urged Muslims to ob- serve nature closely, reflect upon their observations and sub- ject their actions to constant scrutiny. Thus the empirical spirit that had given birth to modernity had in fact originated in Islam. This was a partial and inaccurate interpretation of history, but no more biased than the Western tendency at this time to see Christianity as the superior faith and Europe as always having been in the vanguard of progress. Iqbal's em- phasis on the rational spirit of Islam led him to denigrate Su- fism. He represented the new trend away from mysticism that would become increasingly prevalent in the Muslim world, as modern rationalism came to seem the only way forward. Iqbal
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had been deeply influenced by Western thought and had re- ceived a Ph.D. in London. Yet he believed that the West had elevated progress at the expense of continuity; its secular in- dividualism separated the notion of personality from God and made it idolatrous and potentially demonic. As a result, the West would eventually destroy itself, a position that was easy to understand after the First World War, which could be seen as the collective suicide of Europe. Muslims therefore had a vital mission to witness to the divine dimension of life, not by retiring from the world to engage in contemplation, but by an activism that implemented the social ideals of the Shariah.
The reformers we have considered so far were intellectu- als, who spoke chiefly to the educated elite. In Egypt, the young schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna (190649) founded an organization that brought their ideas to the masses. The Soci- ety of Muslim Brothers became a mass movement through- out the Middle East, and was the only ideology at this time that was able to appeal to all sectors of society. Al-Banna knew that Muslims needed Western science and technology, and that they must reform their political and social institu- tions. But he was also convinced, like the reformers, that this must go hand in hand with a spiritual reformation. When al- Banna saw the British living in luxury in the Suez Canal Zone, he was moved to tears by the contrast with the miser- able hovels of the Egyptian workers. He saw this as a religious problem that needed an Islamic solution. Where Christians would often respond to the challenge of modernity by a re- assertion of doctrine, Muslims have responded by making a social or political effort (jihad). Al-Banna insisted that Islam was a total way of life; religion could not be confined to the private sphere, as the West contended. His society tried to in- terpret the Quran to meet the spirit of the new age, but also to unify the Islamic nations, raise the standard of living,
achieve a higher level of social justice, fight against illiteracy and poverty and liberate Muslim lands from foreign domina- tion. Under the colonialists, Muslims had been cut off from their roots. As long as they copied other peoples, they would remain cultural mongrels. Besides training the Brothers and Sisters in the rituals of prayer and Quranic living, al-Banna built schools, founded a modern scout movement, ran night schools for workers and tutorial colleges to prepare for the civil service examinations. The Brothers founded clinics and hospitals in the rural areas, built factories, where Muslims got better pay, health insurance and holidays than in the state sec- tor, and taught Muslims modern labour laws so that they could defend their rights.
The society had its faults. A small minority engaged in ter- rorism and this brought about its dissolution (though it has since revived, under different auspices). But most of the members-who numbered millions of Muslims by 1948— knew nothing about these fringe activities and saw their wel- fare and religious mission as crucial. The instant success of the society, which had become the most powerful political in- stitution in Egypt by the Second World War, showed that the vast mass of the people wanted to be modern and religious, whatever the intellectuals or the secularist government main- tained. This type of social work has continued to characterize many of the modern Islamic movements, notably the Mu- jamah (Islamic Congress), founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yasin in Gaza, which built a similar welfare empire to bring the bene- fits of modernity to Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel after the June War of 1967, but in an Islamic context.
WHAT IS A MODER N MUSLIM STATE?
The colonial experience and the collision with Europe had dis- located Islamic society. The world had irrevocably changed. It
was hard for Muslims to know how to respond to the West, be- cause the challenge was unprecedented. If they were to partic- ipate as full partners in the modern world, Muslims had to incorporate these changes. In particular, the West had found it necessary to separate religion and politics in order to free gov- ernment, science and technology from the constraints of con- servative religion. In Europe, nationalism had replaced the allegiance of faith, which had formerly enabled its societies to cohere. But this nineteenth-century experiment proved prob- lematic. The nation states of Europe embarked on an arms race in 1870, which led ultimately to two world wars. Secular ide- ologies proved to be just as murderous as the old religious big- otry, as became clear in the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag. The Enlightenment philosophes had believed that the more educated people became, the more rational and tolerant they would be. This hope proved to be as utopian as any of the old messianic fantasies. Finally, modern society was committed to democracy, and this had, in general, made life more just and equitable for more people in Europe and America. But the people of the West had had centuries to prepare for the demo- cratic experiment. It would be a very different matter when modern parliamentary systems would be imposed upon soci- eties that were still predominantly agrarian or imperfectly modernized, and where the vast majority of the population found modern political discourse incomprehensible.
Politics had never been central to the Christian religious experience. Jesus had, after all, said that his Kingdom was not of this world. For centuries, the Jews of Europe had refrained from political involvement as a matter of principle. But pol- itics was no secondary issue for Muslims. We have seen that it had been the theatre of their religious quest. Salvation did not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just so- ciety in which the individual could more easily make that ex- istential surrender of his or her whole being that would bring
fulfilment. The polity was therefore a matter of supreme im- portance, and throughout the twentieth century there has been one attempt after another to create a truly Islamic state. This has always been difficult. It was an aspiration that re- quired a jihad, a struggle that could find no simple outcome. The ideal of tawhid would seem to preclude the ideal of secularism, but in the past both Shiis and Sunnis had ac- cepted a separation of religion and politics. Pragmatic poli- tics is messy and often cruel; the ideal Muslim state is not a "given" that is simply applied, but it takes creative ingenuity and discipline to implement the egalitarian ideal of the Quran in the grim realities of political life. It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Mus- lim world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philoso- phers as John Locke (1632-1704) as a new and better way of being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals.
But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a brutal attack upon religion and the religious.
Atatiirk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, sup- pressed the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterpro- ductive. Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went un- derground. Muhammad Ali had also despoiled the Egyptian ulama, appropriated their endowments and deprived them of influence. Later Jamal Abd al-Nasser (1918-70) became for a time quite militantly anti-Islamic, and suppressed the Mus- lim Brotherhood. One of the Brothers, who belonged to the secret terrorist wing of the society, had made an attempt on al-Nasser's life, but the majority of the thousands of Brothers who languished for years in al-Nasser's concentration camps
had done nothing more inflammatory than hand out leaflets or attend a meeting. In Iran, the Pahlavi monarchs were also ruthless in their secularism. Reza Shah Pahlavi (reigned 1921-41) deprived the ulama of their endowments, and re- placed the Shariah with a civil system; he suppressed the Ashura celebrations in honour of Husain, and forbade Irani- ans to go on the hajj: Islamic dress was prohibited, and Reza's soldiers used to tear off women's veils with their bayonets and rip them to pieces in the street. In 1935, when protestors peacefully demonstrated against the Dress Laws in the shrine of the Eighth Imam at Mashhad, the soldiers fired on the un- armed crowd and there were hundreds of casualties. The ulama, who had enjoyed unrivalled power in Iran, had to watch their influence crumble. But Ayatollah Muddaris, the cleric who attacked Reza in the parliamentary Assembly, was mur- dered by the regime in 1937 and the ulama became too fright- ened to make any further protest. Reza's son and successor, Muhammad Reza Shah (reigned 1944—79), proved to be just as hostile to and contemptuous of Islam. Hundreds of madrasah students who dared to protest against the regime were shot in the streets, madrasahs were closed and leading ulama were tor- tured to death, imprisoned and exiled. There was nothing democratic about this secular regime. SAVAK, the shah's se- cret police, imprisoned Iranians without trial, subjected them to torture and intimidation, and there was no possibility of truly representative government.
Nationalism, from which Europeans themselves had begun to retreat in the latter part of the twentieth century, was also problematic. The unity of the ummah had long been a trea- sured ideal; now the Muslim world was split into kingdoms and republics, whose borders were arbitrarily drawn up by the Western powers. It was not easy to build a national spirit, when Muslims had been accustomed to think of themselves as Ot- toman citizens and members of the Dar al-Islam. Sometimes
what passed as nationalism took a purely negative stance and became identified with the desire to get rid of the West. Some of the new nations had been so constructed that there was bound to be tension among their citizens. The southern part of the Sudan, for example, was largely Christian, while the north was Muslim. For a people who were accustomed to defining their identity in religious terms, it would be hard to establish a common "Sudanese" nationalism. The problem was even more acute in Lebanon, where the population was equally di- vided among at least three religious communities - Sunni, Shii and Maronite Christian-which had always been au- tonomous before. Power sharing proved to be an impossibility. The demographic time bomb led to the civil war (1975-90), which tragically tore the country apart. In other countries, such as Syria, Egypt or Iraq, nationalism would be adopted by an elite, but not by the more conservative masses. In Iran, the nationalism of the Pahlavis was directly hostile to Islam, since it tried to sever the country's connection with Shiism and based itself on the ancient Persian culture of the pre-Islamic period.
Democracy also posed problems. The reformers who wanted to graft modernity on to an Islamic substructure pointed out that in itself the ideal of democracy was not in- imical to Islam. Islamic law promoted the principles of shurah (consultation) and ijmah, where a law had to be endorsed by the "consensus" of a representative portion of the ummah. The rashidun had been elected by a majority vote. All this was quite compatible with the democratic ideal. Part of the diffi- culty lay in the way that the West formulated democracy as "government of the people, by the people, and for the peo- ple." In Islam, it is God and not the people who gives a gov- ernment legitimacy. This elevation of humanity could seem like idolatry (shirk), since it was a usurpation of God's sovereignty. But it was not impossible for the Muslim coun-
tries to introduce representative forms of government with- out complying with the Western slogan. But the democratic ideal had often been tainted in practice. When the Iranians set up their Majlis (Assembly) after the Constitutional Revolu- tion of 1906, the Russians helped the shah to close it down. Later, when the British were trying to make Iran a protec- torate during the 1920s, the Americans noted that they often rigged the elections to secure a result favourable to them- selves. Later American support for the unpopular Muham- mad Reza Shah, who not only closed down the Majlis to effect his modernization programme, but systematically denied Ira- nians fundamental human rights that democracy was sup- posed to guarantee, made it seem that there was a double standard. The West proudly proclaimed democracy for its own people, but Muslims were expected to submit to cruel dictatorships. In Egypt there were seventeen general elec- tions between 1923 and 1952, all of which were won by the popular Wafd party, but the Wafd were permitted to rule only five times. They were usually forced to stand down by either the British or by the king of Egypt.
It was, therefore, difficult for Muslims to set up a modern democratic nation-state, in which religion was relegated to the private sphere. Other solutions seemed little better. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, founded in 1932, was based on the Wahhabi ideal. The official view was that a constitution was unnecessary, since the government was based on a literal reading of the Quran. But the Quran contains very little leg- islation and it had always been found necessary in practice to supplement it with more complex jurisprudence. The Saudis proclaimed that they were the heirs of the pristine Islam of the Arabian peninsula, and the ulama granted the state legiti- macy; in return the kings enforced conservative religious val- ues. Women are shrouded from view and secluded (even though this had not been the case in the Prophet's time), gam-
bling and alcohol are forbidden and traditional punishments, such as the mutilation of thieves, are enshrined in the legal system. Most Muslim states and organizations do not con- sider that fidelity to the Quran requires these pre-modern penal practices. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, from a very early date condemned the Saudis' use of Islamic pun- ishments as inappropriate and archaic, especially when the lavish wealth of the ruling elite and the unequal distribution of wealth offended far more crucial Quranic values.
Pakistan was another modern Islamic experiment. Muham- mad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the founder of the state, was im- bued with the modern secular ideal. Ever since the time of Aurengzebe, Muslims had felt unhappy and insecure in India: they had feared for their identity and felt anxious about the power of the Hindu majority. This naturally became more acute after the partition of the subcontinent by the British in 1947, when communal violence exploded on both sides and thousands of people lost their lives. Jinnah had wanted to cre- ate a political arena in which Muslims were not defined or limited by their religious identity. But what did it mean for a Muslim state which made great use of Islamic symbols to be " secular" ?The Jamaat-i Islami, founded by Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), pressed for a more strict application of Shariah norms, and in 1956 the constitution formally defined Pakistan as an Islamic Republic. This represented an aspiration, which now had to be incarnated in the political institutions of the country. The government of General Muhammad Ayub Khan (1958-69) was a typical example of the aggressive secularism that we have already considered. He nationalized the religious endowments (awgaf ), placed restrictions on madrasah educa- tion and promoted a purely secular legal system. His aim was to make Islam a civil religion, amenable to state control, but this led inevitably to tension with the Islamists and eventually to Khan's downfall.
During the 1970s, the Islamist forces became the main focus of opposition to the government, and the leftist, secular- ist Prime Minister Zulfaqir Ali Bhutto (1971-77) tried to mol- lify them by banning alcohol and gambling, but this was not sufficient and in July 1977 the devout Muslim Muhammad Zia al-Haqq led a successful coup, and established an ostensi- bly more Islamic regime. He reinstated traditional Muslim dress, and restored Islamic penal and commercial law. But even President Zia kept Islam at bay in political and economic matters, where his policy was avowedly secularist. Since his death in a plane crash in 1988, Pakistani politics has been dominated by ethnic tension, rivalries and corruption scandals among members of the elite classes, and the Islamists have been less influential. Islam remains important to Pakistan's identity and is ubiquitous in public life, but it still does not af- fect realpolitik. The compromise is reminiscent of the solu- tions of the Abbasids and Mongols, which saw a similar separation of powers. The state seems to have forced the Is- lamic parties into line, but this state of affairs is far from ideal. As in India, disproportionate sums are spent on nuclear weapons, while at least a third of the population languishes in hopeless poverty, a situation which is abhorrent to a truly Muslim sensibility. Muslim activists who feel coerced by the state look towards the fundamentalist government of the Tal- iban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The fact that Muslims have not yet found an ideal polity for the twentieth century does not mean that Islam is incom- patible with modernity. The struggle to enshrine the Islamic ideal in state structures and to find the right leader has pre- occupied Muslims throughout their history. Because, like any religious value, the notion of the true Islamic state is transcendent, it can never be perfectly expressed in human form and always eludes the grasp of frail and flawed human beings. Religious life is difficult, and the secular rationalism
of our modern culture poses special problems for people in all the major traditions. Christians, who are more preoccu- pied by doctrine than by politics, are currently wrestling with dogmatic questions in their effort to make their faith speak to the modern sensibility. They are debating their be- lief in the divinity of Christ, for example, some clinging to the older formulations of the dogma, others finding more radical solutions. Sometimes these discussions become an- guished and even acrimonious, because the issues touch the nub of religiosity that lies at the heart of the Christian vision. The struggle for a modern Islamic state is the Muslim equiv- alent of this dilemma. All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particu- lar modernity, and the quest for an ideal form of Muslim government should not be viewed as aberrant but as an es- sentially and typically religious activity.
FUNDAMENTALIS M
The Western media often give the impression that the embat- tled and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as "fundamentalism" is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is not the case. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of our modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Bud- dhism, fundamentalist Sikhism and even fundamentalist Confucianism. This type of faith surfaced first in the Chris- tian world in the United States at the beginning of the twen- tieth century. This was not accidental. Fundamentalism is not a monolithic movement; each form of fundamentalism, even within the same tradition, develops independently and has its own symbols and enthusiasms, but its different manifestations all bear a family resemblance. It has been noted that a funda-
mentalist movement does not arise immediately, as a knee- jerk response to the advent of Western modernity, but only takes shape when the modernization process is quite far ad- vanced. At first religious people try to reform their traditions and effect a marriage between them and modern culture, as we have seen the Muslim reformers do. But when these mod- erate measures are found to be of no avail, some people resort to more extreme methods, and a fundamentalist movement is born. With hindsight, we can see that it was only to be ex- pected that fundamentalism should first make itself known in the United States, the showcase of modernity, and only ap- pear in other parts of the world at a later date. Of the three monotheistic religions, Islam was in fact the last to develop a fundamentalist strain, when modern culture began to take root in the Muslim world in the late 1960s and 1970s. By this date, fundamentalism was quite well established among Christians and Jews, who had had a longer exposure to the modern experience.
Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain char- acteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disen- chantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. This is not always a paranoid reaction. We have seen that secularism has often been imposed very ag- gressively in the Muslim world. Fundamentalists look back to a "golden age" before the irruption of modernity for inspira- tion, but they are not atavistically returning to the Middle Ages. All are intrinsically modern movements and could have appeared at no time other than our own. All are innovative and often radical in their reinterpretation of religion. As such, fundamentalism is an essential part of the modern scene. Wherever modernity takes root, a fundamentalist movement
is likely to rise up alongside it in conscious reaction. Funda- mentalists will often express their discontent with a modern development by overstressing those elements in their tradi- tion that militate against it. They are all-even in the United States-highly critical of democracy and secularism. Because the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture, fundamentalists tend to emphasise conven- tional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home. The fundamentalist community can thus be seen as the shadow-side of modernity; it can also highlight some of the darker sides of the modern experiment.
Fundamentalism, therefore, exists in a symbiotic rela- tionship with a coercive secularism. Fundamentalists nearly always feel assaulted by the liberal or modernizing estab- lishment, and their views and behaviour become more ex- treme as a result. After the famous Scopes Trial (1925) in Tennessee, when Protestant fundamentalists tried to pre- vent the teaching of evolution in the public schools, they were so ridiculed by the secularist press that their theology became more reactionary and excessively literal, and they turned from the left to the extreme right of the political spectrum. When the secularist attack has been more violent, the fundamentalist reaction is likely to be even greater. Fun- damentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly unable to understand one an- other. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute, with liberalizers or secularists within one's own culture or nation. In the first instance, for example, Muslim fundamen- talists will often oppose their fellow countrymen or fellow Muslims who take a more positive view of modernity, rather than such external foes as the West or Israel. Very often, fun- damentalists begin by withdrawing from mainstream cul-
ture to create an enclave of pure faith (as, for example, within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem or New York). Thence they will sometimes conduct an of- fensive which can take many forms, designed to bring the mainstream back to the right path and resacralize the world. All fundamentalists feel that they are fighting for survival, and because their backs are to the wall, they can believe that they have to fight their way out of the impasse. In this frame of mind, on rare occasions, some resort to terrorism. The vast majority, however, do not commit acts of violence, but simply try to revive their faith in a more conventional, law- ful way.
Fundamentalists have been successful in so far as they have pushed religion from the sidelines and back to centre stage, so that it now plays a major part in international affairs once again, a development that would have seemed incon- ceivable in the mid-twentieth century when secularism seemed in the ascendant. This has certainly been the case in the Islamic world since the 1970s. But fundamentalism is not simply a way of "using" religion for a political end. These are essentially rebellions against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and a frequently desperate attempt to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world. But the desperation and fear that fuel fundamentalists also tend to distort the religious tradition, and accentuate its more aggres- sive aspects at the expense of those that preach toleration and reconciliation.
Muslim fundamentalism corresponds very closely to these general characteristics. It is not correct, therefore, to imagine that Islam has within it a militant, fanatic strain that impels Muslims into a crazed and violent rejection of modernity. Muslims are in tune with fundamentalists in other faiths all over the world, who share their profound misgivings about modern secular culture. It should also be said that Muslims
object to the use of the term "fundamentalism," pointing out quite correctly that it was coined by American Protestants as a badge of pride, and cannot be usefully translated into Ara- bic. Usul, as we have seen, refers to the fundamental principles of Islamic jurisprudence, and as all Muslims agree on these, all Muslims could be said to subscribe to usuliyyah (funda- mentalism). Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, "funda- mentalism" is the only term we have to describe this family of embattled religious movements, and it is difficult to come up with a more satisfactory substitute.
One of the early fundamentalist idealogues was Mawdudi, the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami in Pakistan. He saw the mighty power of the West as gathering its forces to crush Islam. Muslims, he argued, must band together to fight this encroaching secularism, if they wanted their religion and their culture to survive. Muslims had encountered hostile societies before and had experienced disasters but, starting with Afghani, a new note had crept into Islamic discourse. The Western threat had made Muslims defensive for the first time. Mawdudi defied the whole secularist ethos: he was proposing an Islamic liberation theology. Because God alone was sovereign, nobody was obliged to take orders from any other human being. Revolution against the colonial powers was not just a right but a duty. Mawdudi called for a univer- sal jihad.Just as the Prophet had fought the jahiliyyah (the "ig- norance" and barbarism of the pre-Islamic period), Muslims must use all means in their power to resist the modern jahiliyyah of the West. Mawdudi argued that jihad was the central tenet of Islam. This was an innovation. Nobody had ever claimed before that jihad was equivalent to the five Pil- lars of Islam, but Mawdudi felt that the innovation was justi- fied by the present emergency. The stress and fear of cultural and religious annihilation had led to the development of a more extreme and potentially violent distortion of the faith.
But the real founder of Islamic fundamentalism in the Sunni world was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who was greatly in- fluenced by Mawdudi. Yet he had not originally been an ex- tremist but had been filled with enthusiasm for Western culture and secular politics. Even after he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953 he had been a reformer, hoping to give Western democracy an Islamic dimension that would avoid the excesses of a wholly secularist ideology. However, in 1956 he was imprisoned by al-Nasser for membership of the Brotherhood, and in the concentration camp he became con- vinced that religious people and secularists could not live in peace in the same society. As he witnessed the torture and ex- ecution of the Brothers, and reflected upon al-Nasser's avowed determination to cast religion into a marginal role in Egypt, he could see all the characteristics of jahiliyyah, which he defined as the barbarism that was for ever and for all time the enemy of faith, and which Muslims, following the exam- ple of the Prophet Muhammad, were bound to fight to the death. Qutb went further than Mawdudi, who had seen only non-Muslim societies as jahili. Qutb applied the term jahiliyyah, which in conventional Muslim historiography had been used simply to describe the pre-Islamic period in Ara- bia, to contemporary Muslim society. Even though a ruler such as al-Nasser outwardly professed Islam, his words and actions proved him to be an apostate and Muslims were duty- bound to overthrow such a government, just as Muhammad had forced the pagan establishment of Mecca (the jahiliyyah of his day) into submission.
The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to es- pouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet's life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrab from Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But
Muhammad had in fact finally achieved victory by an inge- nious policy of non-violence; the Quran adamantly opposed force and coercion in religious matters, and its vision-far from preaching exclusion and separation-was tolerant and inclusive. Qutb insisted that the Quranic injunction to tolera- tion could occur only after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state. The new intransi- gence sprang from the profound fear that is at the core of fun- damentalist religion. Qutb did not survive. At al-Nasser's personal insistence, he was executed in 1966.
Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influ- enced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. They are determined to return to what they see as the original vision of Islam. The ulama are the leaders of the government; women are veiled and not permitted to take part in professional life. Only reli- gious broadcasting is permitted and the Islamic punishments of stoning and mutilation have been reintroduced. In some circles of the West, the Taliban are seen as quintessential Muslims, but their regime violates crucial Islamic precepts. Most of the Taliban ("students" of the madrasahs) belong to the Pashtun tribe, and they tend to target non-Pashtuns, who fight the regime from the north of the country. Such ethnic chauvinism was forbidden by the Prophet and by the Quran. Their harsh treatment of minority groups is also opposed to clear Quranic requirements. The Taliban's discrimination against women is completely opposed to the practice of the Prophet and the conduct of the first ummah. The Taliban are typically fundamentalist, however, in their highly selective vision of religion (which reflects their narrow education in some of the madrasahs of Pakistan), which perverts the faith
and turns it in the opposite direction of what was intended. Like all the major faiths, Muslim fundamentalists, in their struggle to survive, make religion a tool of oppression and even of violence.
But most Sunni fundamentalists have not resorted to such an extreme. The fundamentalist movements that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s all tried to change the world about them in less drastic but telling ways. After the humil- iating defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War against Israel in 1967, there was a swing towards religion through- out the Middle East. The old secularist policies of such leaders as al-Nasser seemed discredited. People felt that the Muslims had failed because they had not been true to their religion. They could see that while secularism and democ- racy worked very well in the West, they did not benefit or- dinary Muslims but only an elite in the Islamic world. Fundamentalism can be seen as a "post-modern" movement, which rejects some of the tenets and enthusiasms of moder- nity, such as colonialism. Throughout the Islamic world, students and factory workers started to change their imme- diate environment. They created mosques in their universi- ties and factories, where they could make salat, and set up Banna-style welfare societies with an Islamic orientation, demonstrating that Islam worked for the people better than the secularist governments did. When students declared a shady patch of lawn-or even a noticeboard-to be an Is- lamic zone, they felt that they had made a small but signifi- cant attempt to push Islam from the marginal realm to which it had been relegated in secularist society, and re- claimed a part of the world-however tiny-for Islam. They were pushing forward the frontiers of the sacred, in rather the same way as the Jewish fundamentalists in Israel who made settlements in the occupied West Bank, reclaim- ing Arab land and bringing it under the aegis of Judaism.
The same principle underlines the return to Islamic dress. When this is forced upon people against their will (as by the Taliban) it is coercive and as likely to create a back- lash as the aggressive techniques of Reza Shah Pahlavi. But many Muslim women feel that veiling is a symbolic return to the pre-colonial period, before their society was dis- rupted and deflected from its true course. Yet they have not simply turned the clock back. Surveys show that a large pro- portion of veiled women hold progressive views on such matters as gender. For some women, who have come from rural areas to the university and are the first members of their family to advance beyond basic literacy, the assump- tion of Islamic dress provides continuity and makes their rite of passage to modernity less traumatic than it might otherwise have been. They are coming to join the modern world, but on their own terms and in an Islamic context that gives it sacred meaning. Veiling can also be seen as a tacit critique of some of the less positive aspects of modernity. It defies the strange Western compulsion to "reveal all" in sex- ual matters. In the West, people often flaunt their tanned, well-honed bodies as a sign of privilege; they try to counter- act the signs of ageing and hold on to this life. The shrouded Islamic body declares that it is oriented to transcendence, and the uniformity of dress abolishes class difference and stresses the importance of community over Western indi- vidualism.
People have often used religion as a way of making mod- ern ideas and enthusiasms comprehensible. Not all the Amer- ican Calvinists at the time of the 1776 American Revolution shared or even understood the secularist ethos of the Found- ing Fathers, for example. They gave the struggle a Christian colouration so that they were able to fight alongside the sec- ularists in the creation of a new world. Some Sunni and Shii fundamentalists are also using religion to make the alien
tenor of modern culture familiar, giving it a context of mean- ing and spirituality that makes it more accessible. Again, they are tacitly asserting that it is possible to be modern on other cultural terms than those laid down by the West. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 can be seen in this light. During the 1960s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89) brought the people of Iran out onto the streets to protest against the cruel and unconstitutional policies of Muhammad Reza Shah, whom he identified with Yazid, the Umayyad caliph who had been responsible for the death of Husain at Kerbala, the type of the unjust ruler in Shii Islam. Muslims had a duty to fight such tyranny, and the mass of the people, who would have been quite unmoved by a socialist call to revolution, could re- spond to Khomeini's summons, which resonated with their deepest traditions. Khomeini provided a Shii alternative to the secular nationalism of the shah. He came to seem more and more like one of the imams: like all the imams, he had been attacked, imprisoned and almost killed by an unjust ruler; like some of the imams, he was forced into exile and deprived of what was his own; like Ali and Husain, he had bravely op- posed injustice and stood up for true Islamic values; like all the imams, he was known to be a practising mystic; like Hu- sain, whose son was killed at Kerbala, Khomeini's son Mustafa was killed by the shah's agents.
When the revolution broke in 1978, after a slanderous at- tack on Khomeini in the semi-official newspaper Ettelaat, and the shocking massacre of young madrasah students who came out onto the streets in protest, Khomeini seemed to be direct- ing operations from afar (from Najaf, his place of exile), rather like the Hidden Imam. Secularists and intellectuals were willing to join forces with the ulama because they knew that only Khomeini could command the grass-roots support of the people. The Iranian Revolution was the only revolu- tion inspired by a twentieth-century ideology (the Russian
and Chinese revolutions both owed their inspiration to the nineteenth-century vision of Karl Marx). Khomeini had evolved a radically new interpretation of Shiism: in the ab- sence of the Hidden Imam, only the mystically inspired ju- rist, who knew the sacred law, could validly govern the nation. For centuries, Twelver Shiis had prohibited clerics from par- ticipating in government, but the revolutionaries (if not many of the ulama) were willing to subscribe to this theory of Ve- layat-i Faqih (the Mandate of the Jurist).' Throughout the revolution, the symbolism of Kerbala was predominant. Tra- ditional religious ceremonies to mourn the dead and the Ashura celebrations in honour of Husain became demonstra- tions against the regime. The Kerbala myth inspired ordinary Shiis to brave the shah's guns and die in their thousands, some donning the white shroud of martyrdom. Religion was proved to be so powerful a force that it brought down the Pahlavi state, which had seemed the most stable and powerful in the Middle East.
But, like all fundamentalists, Khomeini's vision was also distorting. The taking of the American hostages in Teheran (and, later, by Shii radicals in Lebanon, who were inspired by the Iranian example) violates clear Quranic commands about the treatment of prisoners, who must be handled with dignity and respect, and freed as soon as possible. The captor is even obliged to contribute to the ransom from his own resources. Indeed, the Quran expressly forbids the taking of prisoners except during a conventional war, which obviously rules out hostage-taking when hostilities are not in progress.2 After the revolution, Khomeini insisted on what he called "unity of ex- pression," suppressing any dissentient voice. Not only had the demand for free speech been one of the chief concerns of the revolution, but Islam had never insisted on ideological con- formity, only upon a uniformity of practice. Coercion in reli- gious matters is forbidden in the Quran, and was abhorred by
Mulla Sadra, Khomeini's spiritual mentor. When Khomeini issued his fatwah against novelist Salman Rushdie on Feb- ruary 14, 1989, for his allegedly blasphemous portrait of Muhammad in The Satanic Verses, he also contravened Sadra's impassioned defence of freedom of thought. The fatwah was declared un-Islamic by the ulama of al-Azhar and Saudi Ara- bia, and was condemned by forty-eight out of the forty-nine member states of the Islamic Conference the following month.
But it appears that the Islamic revolution may have helped the Iranian people to come to modernity on their own terms. Shortly before his death, Khomeini tried to pass more power to the parliament, and, with his apparent bless- ing, Hashami Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Majlis, gave a democratic interpretation of Velayat-i Faqih. The needs of the modern state had convinced Shiis of the necessity of democracy, but this time it came in an Islamic package that made it acceptable to the majority of the people. This seemed confirmed on May 23, 1997, when Hojjat 01-Islam Seyyid Khatami was elected to the presidency in a landslide victory. He immediately made it clear that he wanted to build a more positive relationship with the West, and in September 1998 he dissociated his government from the fat- wah against Rushdie, a move which was later endorsed by Ay- atollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Faqih of Iran. Khatami's election signalled the strong desire of a large segment of the population for greater pluralism, a gentler interpretation of Islamic law, more democracy and a more progressive policy for women. The battle is still not won. The conservative cler- ics who opposed Khomeini and for whom he had little time are still able to block many of Khatami's reforms, but the struggle to create a viable Islamic state, true to the spirit of the Quran and yet responsive to current conditions, is still a major preoccupation of the Iranian people.
MUSLIMS IN A MINORIT Y
The spectre of Islamic fundamentalism sends a shiver through Western society, which seems not nearly so threat- ened by the equally prevalent and violent fundamentalism of other faiths. This has certainly affected the attitude of West- ern people towards the Muslims living in their own countries. Five to six million Muslims reside in Europe, and seven to eight million in the United States. There are now about a thousand mosques each in Germany and France, and five hundred in the United Kingdom. About half the Muslims in the West today have been born there to parents who immi- grated in the 1950s and 1960s. They rejected their parents' meeker stance, are better educated and seek greater visibility and acceptance. Sometimes their efforts are ill-advised, as, for example, Dr. Kalim Siddiqui's call for a Muslim parliament in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, a project which re- ceived very little support from most British Muslims but which made people fear that Muslims were not willing to in- tegrate into mainstream society. There was immense hostility towards the Muslim community during the crisis over The Sa- tanic Verses, when Muslims in Bradford publicly burned the book. Most British Muslims may have disapproved of the novel, but had no desire to see Rushdie killed. Europeans seem to find it difficult to relate to their Muslim fellow countrymen in a natural, balanced manner. Turkish migrant workers have been murdered in race riots in Germany, and girls who choose to wear a hijab to school have received ex- tremely hostile coverage in the French press. In Britain, there is often outrage when Muslims request separate schools for their children, even though people do not voice the same ob- jections about special schools for Jews, Roman Catholics or Quakers. It is as though Muslims are viewed as a Fifth Col- umn, plotting to undermine British society.
Muslims have fared better in the United States. The Mus- lim immigrants there are better educated and middle class. They work as doctors, academics and engineers, whereas in Europe the Muslim community is still predominantly work- ing class. American Muslims feel that they are in the United States by choice. They want to become Americans, and in the land of the melting pot integration is more of a possibility than in Europe. Some Muslims, such as Malcolm X (1925-65), the charismatic leader of the black separatist group called the Nation of Islam, gained widespread respect at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and became an emblem of Black and Muslim power. The Nation of Islam, however, was a hetero- dox party. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard, a pedlar of De- troit, and, after the mysterious disappearance of Fard in 1934, led by Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975), it claimed that God had been incarnated in Fard, that white people are inherently evil and that there was no life after death-all views that are heretical from an Islamic perspective. The Nation of Islam de- manded a separate state for African Americans to compensate them for the years of slavery, and is adamantly hostile to the West. Malcolm X became disillusioned with the Nation of Islam, however, when he discovered the moral laxity of Elijah Muhammad, and took his followers into Sunni Islam: two years later, he was assassinated for this apostasy. But the Na- tion of Islam still gains far more media coverage than the much larger American Muslim Mission, founded by Malcolm X, which is now wholly orthodox, sends its members to study at al-Azhar and explores the possibility of working alongside white Americans for a more just society. The bizarre and re- jectionist stance of the Nation may seem closer to the Western stereotype of Islam as an inherently intolerant and fanatical faith.
In India, those Muslims who did not emigrate to Pakistan in 1947 and their descendants now number 115 million. But despite their large numbers, many feel even more belea-
guered and endangered than their brothers and sisters in the West. The Hindus and Muslims of India are all still haunted by the tragic violence of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and though many Hindus stand up for Muslim rights in India, Muslims tend to get a bad press. They are accused of a ghetto mentality, of being loyal at heart to Pakistan or Kash- mir; they are blamed for having too many children, and for being backward. Indian Muslims are being squeezed out of the villages, cannot easily get good jobs and are often refused decent accommodation. The only signs of the glorious Moghul past are the great buildings: the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and the Juneh Mosque, which have also become a rallying point for the Hindu fundamentalist group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which claims that they were really built by Hin- dus, that the Muslims destroyed the temples of India and erected mosques in their place. The BJP's chief target was the Mosque of Babur, the founder of the Moghul dynasty, at Ay- odhya, which the BJP dismantled in ten hours in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. The impact on the Muslims of India has been devastating. They fear that this symbolic destruction was only the beginning of further troubles, and that soon they and their memory will be erased in India. This dread of annihilation lay behind their frantic opposition to The Satanic Verses, which seemed yet an- other threat to the faith. Yet the communalism and intoler- ance is against the most tolerant and civilized traditions of Indian Islam. Yet again, fear and oppression have distorted the faith.
THE WAY FORWAR D
On the eve of the second Christian millennium, the Cru- saders massacred some thirty thousand Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem, turning the thriving Islamic holy city into a stink-
ing charnel house. For at least five months the valleys and ditches around the city were filled with putrefying corpses, which were too numerous for the small number of Crusaders who remained behind after the expedition to clear away, and a stench hung over Jerusalem, where the three religions of Abraham had been able to coexist in relative harmony under Islamic rule for nearly five hundred years. This was the Mus- lims' first experience of the Christian West, as it pulled itself out of the dark age that had descended after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, and fought its way back on to the international scene. The Muslims suffered from the Crusaders, but were not long incommoded by their presence. In 1187 Saladin was able to recapture Jerusalem for Islam and though the Crusaders hung on in the Near East for another century, they seemed an unimportant passing episode in the long Islamic history of the region. Most of the inhabi- tants of Islamdon were entirely unaffected by the Crusades and remained uninterested in western Europe, which, despite its dramatic cultural advance during the crusading period, still lagged behind the Muslim world.
Europeans did not forget the Crusades, however, nor could they ignore the Dar al-Islam, which, as the years went by, seemed to rule the entire globe. Ever since the Crusades, the people of Western Christendom developed a stereotypical and distorted image of Islam, which they regarded as the enemy of decent civilization. The prejudice became en- twined with European fantasies about Jews, the other victims of the Crusaders, and often reflected buried worry about the conduct of Christians. It was, for example, during the Cru- sades, when it was Christians who had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslim world, that Islam was de- scribed by the learned scholar-monks of Europe as an inher- ently violent and intolerant faith, which had only been able to establish itself by the sword. The myth of the supposed fanat-
ical intolerance of Islam has become one of the received ideas of the West.
As the millennium drew to a close, however, some Mus- lims seemed to live up to this Western perception, and, for the first time, have made sacred violence a cardinal Islamic duty. These fundamentalists often call Western colonialism and post-colonial Western imperialism al-Salibiyyah:the Crusade. The colonial crusade has been less violent but its impact has been more devastating than the medieval holy wars. The powerful Muslim world has been reduced to a dependent bloc, and Muslim society has been gravely dislocated in the course of an accelerated modernization programme. All over the world, as we have seen, people in all the major faiths have reeled under the impact of Western modernity, and have pro- duced the embattled and frequently intolerant religiosity that we call fundamentalism. As they struggle to rectify what they see as the damaging effects of modern secular culture, funda- mentalists fight back and, in the process, they depart from the core values of compassion, justice and benevolence that char- acterize all the world faiths, including Islam. Religion, like any other human activity, is often abused, but at its best it helps human beings to cultivate a sense of the sacred inviola- bility of each individual, and thus to mitigate the murderous violence to which our species is tragically prone. Religion has committed atrocities in the past, but in its brief history secu- larism has proved that it can be just as violent. As we have seen, secular aggression and persecution have often led to a heightening of religious intolerance and hatred.
This became tragically clear in Algeria in 1992. During the religious revival of the 1970s, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) challenged the hegemony of the secular nationalist party, the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had led the revolution against French colonial rule in 1954, and had established a socialist government in the country in 1962. The
Algerian revolution against France had been an inspiration to Arabs and Muslims who were also struggling to gain inde- pendence from Europe. The FLN was similar to the other secular and socialist governments in the Middle East at this time, which had relegated Islam to the private sphere, on the Western pattern. By the 1970s, however, people all over the Muslim world were becoming dissatisfied with these secular- ist ideologies which had not delivered what they had promised. Abbas Madani, one of the founding members of FIS, wanted to create an Islamic political ideology for the modern world; Ali ibn Hajj, the imam of a mosque in a poor neighbourhood in Algiers, led a more radical wing of FIS. Slowly, FIS began to build its own mosques, without getting permission from the government; it took root in the Muslim community in France, where workers demanded places of prayer in the factories and offices, incurring the wrath of the right-wing party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
By the 1980s, Algeria was in the grip of an economic crisis. FLN had set the country on the path to democracy and state- hood, but over the years it had become corrupt. The old garde were reluctant to attempt more democratic reforms. There had been a population explosion in Algeria; most of its thirty million inhabitants were under thirty, many were unem- ployed, and there was an acute housing shortage. There were riots. Frustrated with the stagnation and ineptitude of the FLN, the young wanted something new and turned to the Is- lamic parties. In June 1990 the FIS scored major victories in the local elections, especially in the urban areas. FIS activists were mostly young, idealistic and well educated; they were known to be honest and efficient in government, though they were dogmatic and conservative in some areas, such as their insistence upon traditional Islamic dress for women. But the FIS was not anti-Western. Leaders spoke of encouraging links with the European Union and fresh Western investment.
After the electoral victories at the local level, they seemed certain to succeed in the legislative elections that were sched- uled for 1992.
There was to be no Islamic government in Algeria, how- ever. The military staged a coup, ousted the liberal FLN President Benjedid (who had promised democratic reforms), suppressed FIS, and threw its leaders into prison. Had elec- tions been prevented in such a violent and unconstitutional manner in Iran and Pakistan, there would have been an out- cry in the West. Such a coup would have been seen as an ex- ample of Islam's supposedly endemic aversion to democracy, and its basic incompatibility with the modern world. But be- cause it was an Islamic government that had been thwarted by the coup, there was jubilation in the Western press. Algeria had been saved from the Islamic menace; the bars, casinos and discotheques of Algiers had been spared; and in some myste- rious way, this undemocratic action had made Algeria safe for democracy. The French government threw its support behind the new hardHne FLN of President Liamine Zeroual and strengthened his resolve to hold no further dialogue with FIS. Not surprisingly, the Muslim world was shocked by this fresh instance of Western double standards.
The result was tragically predictable. Pushed outside the due processes of law, outraged, and despairing of justice, the more radical members of FIS broke away to form a guerrilla organization, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and began a terror campaign in the mountainous regions south of Al- giers. There were massacres, in which the population of en- tire villages was killed. Journalists and intellectuals, secular and religious, were also targeted. It was generally assumed that the Islamists were wholly responsible for these atroci- ties, but gradually questions were asked which pointed to the fact that some elements in the Algerian military forces not only acquiesced but also participated in the killing to dis-
credit the GIA. There was now a ghastly stalemate. Both FLN and FIS were torn apart by an internal feud between the pragmatists, who wanted a solution, and the hardliners, who refused to negotiate. The violence of the initial coup to stop the elections had led to an outright war between the re- ligious and secularists. In January 1995 the Roman Catholic Church helped to organize a meeting in Rome to bring the two sides together, but Zeroual's government refused to par- ticipate. A golden opportunity had been lost. There was more Islamic terror, and a constitutional referendum banned all religious political parties.
The tragic case of Algeria must not become a paradigm for the future. Suppression and coercion had helped to push a disgruntled Muslim minority into a violence that offends every central tenet of Islam. An aggressive secularism had re- sulted in a religiosity that was a travesty of true faith. The in- cident further tarnished the notion of democracy, which the West is so anxious to promote, but which, it appeared, had limits, if the democratic process might lead to the establish- ment of an elected Islamic government. The people of Eu- rope and the United States were shown to be ignorant about the various parties and groups within the Islamic world. The moderate FIS was equated with the most violent fundamen- talist groups and was associated in the Western mind with the violence, illegality and anti-democratic behaviour that had this time been displayed by the secularists in the FLN.
But whether the West likes it or not, the initial success of the FIS in the local elections showed that the people wanted some form of Islamic government. It passed a clear message to Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, where secularist governments had long been aware of the growing religiosity of their coun- tries. In the middle of the twentieth century, secularism had been dominant, and Islam was thought to be irredeemably passe. Now any secularist government in the Middle East was
uncomfortably aware that if there were truly democratic elec- tions, an Islamic government might well come to power. In Egypt, for example, Islam is as popular as Nasserism was in the 1950s. Islamic dress is ubiquitous and, since Mubarak's gov- ernment is secularist, is clearly voluntarily assumed. Even in secularist Turkey, recent polls showed that some 70 percent of the population claimed to be devout, and that 20 percent prayed five times a day. People are turning to the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, and Palestinians are looking to Mu- jamah, while the PLO, which in the 1960s carried all before it, is now looking cumbersome, corrupt and out of date. In the republics of Central Asia, Muslims are rediscovering their re- ligion after decades of Soviet oppression. People have tried the secularist ideologies, which have worked so successfully in Western countries where they are on home ground. Increas- ingly, Muslims want their governments to conform more closely to the Islamic norm.
The precise form that this will take is not yet clear. In Egypt it seems that a majority of Muslims would like to see the Shariah as the law of the land, whereas in Turkey only 3 percent want this. Even in Egypt, however, some of the ulama are aware that the problems of transforming the Shariah, an agrarian law code, to the very different conditions of moder- nity will be extreme. Rashid Rida had been aware of this as early as the 1930s. But that is not to say that it cannot be done.
It is not true that Muslims are now uniformly filled with hatred of the West. In the early stages of modernization, many leading thinkers were infatuated with European cul- ture, and by the end of the twentieth century some of the most eminent and influential Muslim thinkers were now reaching out to the West again. President Khatami of Iran is only one example of this trend. So is the Iranian intellectual Abdolkarim Sorush, who held important posts in Khomeini's
government, and though he is often harried by the more con- servative mujtahids, he strongly influences those in power. Sorush admires Khomeini, but has moved beyond him. He maintains that Iranians now have three identities: pre- Islamic, Islamic and Western, which they must try to recon- cile. Sorush rejects the secularism of the West and believes that human beings will always need spirituality, but advises Iranians to study the modern sciences, while holding on to Shii tradition. Islam must develop its figh, so as to accommo- date the modern industrial world, and evolve a philosophy of civil rights and an economic theory capable of holding its own in the twenty-first century.
Sunni thinkers have come to similar conclusions. Western hostility towards Islam springs from ignorance, Rashid al- Ghannouchi, the leader of the exiled Renaissance Party in Tunisia, believes. It also springs from a bad experience of Christianity, which did stifle thought and creativity. He de- scribes himself as a "democratic Islamist" and sees no incom- patibility between Islam and democracy, but he rejects the secularism of the West, because the human being cannot be so divided and fragmented. The Muslim ideal of tawhid re- jects the duality of body and spirit, intellect and spirituality, men and women, morality and the economy, East and West. Muslims want modernity, but not one that has been imposed upon them by America, Britain or France. Muslims admire the efficiency and beautiful technology of the West; they are fascinated by the way a regime can be changed in the West without bloodshed. But when Muslims look at Western soci- ety, they see no light, no heart and no spirituality. They want to hold on to their own religious and moral traditions and, at the same time, to try to incorporate some of the best aspects of Western civilization. Yusuf Abdallah al-Qaradawi, a grad- uate of al-Azhar, and a Muslim Brother, who is currently the director of the Centre for Sunnah and Sirah at the University
of Qatar, takes a similar line. He believes in moderation, and is convinced that the bigotry that has recently appeared in the Muslim world will impoverish people by depriving them of the insights and visions of other human beings. The Prophet Muhammad said that he had come to bring a "Middle Way" of religious life that shunned extremes, and Qaradawi thinks that the current extremism in some quarters of the Islamic world is alien to the Muslim spirit and will not last. Islam is a religion of peace, as the Prophet had shown when he made an unpopular treaty with the Quraysh at Hudaybiyyah, a feat which the Quran calls "a great victory."' The West, he insists, must learn to recognize the Muslims' right to live their reli- gion and, if they choose, to incorporate the Islamic ideal in their polity. They have to appreciate that there is more than one way of life. Variety benefits the whole world. God gave human beings the right and ability to choose, and some may opt for a religious way of life-including an Islamic state— while others prefer the secular ideal.
"It is better for the West that Muslims should be reli- gious," Qaradawi argues, "hold to their religion, and try to be moral.'"4 He raises an important point. Many Western people are also becoming uncomfortable about the absence of spiri- tuality in their lives. They do not necessarily want to return to pre-modern religious lifestyles or to conventionally insti- tutional faith. But there is a growing appreciation that, at its best, religion has helped human beings to cultivate decent values. Islam kept the notions of social justice, equality, tol- erance and practical compassion in the forefront of the Mus- lim conscience for centuries. Muslims did not always live up to these ideals and frequently found difficulty in incarnating them in their social and political institutions. But the strug- gle to achieve this was for centuries the mainspring of Is- lamic spirituality. Western people must become aware that it is in their interests too that Islam remains healthy and strong.
The West has not been wholly responsible for the extreme forms of Islam, which have cultivated a violence that violates the most sacred canons of religion. But the West has cer- tainly contributed to this development and, to assuage the fear and despair that lies at the root of all fundamentalist vi- sion, should cultivate a more accurate appreciation of Islam in the third Christian millennium.
KEY FIGURES IN THE HISTORY OF ISLAM
Abbas I, Shah (1588-1629): presided over the zenith of the Safavid Empire in Iran, building a magnificent court at Isfahan and import- ing Shii ulama from abroad to instruct Iranians in Twelver Ortho- doxy.
Abd al-Malik: Umayyad caliph (685-705) who restored Umayyad power after a period of civil war; the Dome of the Rock was com- pleted under his auspices in 691.
Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad ibn (1703-92): a Sunni reformer who tried to effect a radical return to the fundamentals of Islam. Wah- habism is the form of Islam practised today in Saudi Arabia.
Abdu, Muhammad (1849-1905): an Egyptian reformer who sought to modernize Islamic institutions to enable Muslims to make sense of the new Western ideals and reunify the country.
Abdulfazl Allami (1551-1602): Sufi historian and biographer of the Moghul emperor Akbar.
Abdulhamid: Ottoman sultan (1839-61) who issued the Giilhane de- crees which modified absolute rule and made the government de- pendent upon a contractual agreement with Ottoman subjects.
Abu Bakr: one of the first converts to Islam; a close friend of the Prophet Muhammad, he became the first caliph (632-34) after Muhammad's death.
Abu al-Hakam (also known in the Quran as Abu Jahl, Father of Lies): he led the opposition against Muhammad in Mecca.
Abu Hanifah (699-767): a pioneer of ftqh and the founder of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.
Abu al-Qasim Muhammad: also known as the Hidden Imam. He was the Twelfth Imam of the Shiah, who was said to have gone into hid- ing in 874 to save his life; in 934 his "Occultation" was declared: God, it was said, had miraculously concealed the imam and he could make no further direct contact with Shiis. Shortly before the Last Judgement, he would return as the Mahdi to inaugurate a golden age of justice and peace, having destroyed the enemies of God.
Abu Sufyan: led the opposition against the Prophet Muhammad after the death of Abu al-Hakam (q.v.), but eventually, when he realized that Muhammad was invincible, converted to Islam. He belonged to the Umayyad family in Mecca, and his son Muawiyyah (q.v.) became the first Umayyad caliph.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-833): hadith collector, legist and leading figure of the ahl al-hadith. His spirit is enshrined in the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence.
Ahmad ibn Idris (1780-1836): the Neo-Sufi reformer, active in Mo- rocco, North Africa and the Yemen, who bypassed the ulama and tried to bring a more vibrant form of Islam directly to the people.
Ahmad Khan, Sir Sayyid (1817-98): an Indian reformer who tried to adapt Islam to modern Western liberalism, and who urged Indians to collaborate with the Europeans and accept their institutions.
Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1625): Sufi reformer who opposed the pluralism of the Moghul emperor Akbar (q.v.).
Aisha: the favourite wife of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in her arms. She was the daughter of Abu Bakr (q.v.) and led the Medinan opposition to Ali ibn Abi Talib (q.v.) during the first fitnah.
Akbar: Moghul emperor of India (1560-1605). He established a toler- ant policy of cooperation with the Hindu population, and his reign saw the zenith of Moghul power.
Ali ibn Abi Talib: the cousin, ward and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and his closest surviving male relative. He became the fourth caliph in 656, but was murdered by a Kharajite extremist in 661. Shiis believe that he should have succeeded the Prophet Muhammad, and they revere him as the First Imam of the Islamic community. His shrine is at Najaf in Iraq, and is a major place of Shii pilgrimage.
Ali al-Hadi: the Tenth Shii Imam. In 848 he was summoned to Samarra by Caliph al-Mutawakkil and placed under house arrest there. He died in the Askari fortress in 868.
Key Figures in the History of Islam . 195
All al-Rida: the Eighth Shii Imam. Caliph al-Mamun appointed him as his successor in 818 in an attempt to court the malcontent Shiis in his empire, but it was an unpopular move, and al-Rida died— possibly murdered - the following year.
Ali Zayn al-Abidin (d. 714): the Fourth Shii Imam, a mystic, who lived in retirement in Medina and took no active role in politics.
Aqa Muhammad Khan (d. 1797): the founder of the Qajar dynasty in Iran.
Aurengzebe: Moghul emperor (1658-1 707) who reversed the tolerant policies of Akbar, and inspired Hindu and Sikh rebellions.
Baibars, Rukn ad-Din (d. 1277): Mamluk sultan who defeated the Mongol hordes at Ain Jalut in northern Palestine, and eliminated most of the last Crusader strongholds on the Syrian coast.
Banna, Hasan al- (1906-49): an Egyptian reformer and founder of the Society of Muslim Brothers. He was assassinated by the secularist government of Egypt in 1949.
Bhutto, Zulfaqir Ali: prime minister of Pakistan (1971-77) who made concessions to the Islamists but was overthrown by the more devout Zia ul-Haqq.
Bistami, Abu Yazid al- (d. 874): one of the earliest of the "drunken Sufis," who preached the doctrine of fanah (annihilation) in God, and discovered the divine in the deepest recesses of his being after prolonged mystical exercises.
Bukhari, al- (d. 870): the author of an authoritative collection of ahadith.
Chelebi, Abu al-Sund Khola (1490-1574): worked out the legal prin- ciples of the Ottoman Shariah state.
Farabi, Abu Nasr al- (d. 950): the most rationalistic of all the Faylasufs, who was also a practising Sufi and who worked as the court musician in the Hamdanid court in Aleppo.
Ghannouchi, Rashid al- (1941-): Tunisian leader of the exiled Renais- sance Party, who describes himself as a "democratic Islamist."
Ghazzali, Abu Hamid Muhammad (d. 11 11): the Baghdad theologian who gave definitive expression to Sunni Islam, and brought Sufism into the mainstream of piety.
Hagar: in the Bible, she is the wife of Abraham and the mother of Abraham's son Ishmael (in Arabic Ismail, q.v.), who became the fa- ther of the Arab peoples. Hence Hagar is revered as one of the ma- triarchs of Islam and remembered with especial reverence in the ceremonies of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Haqq, Zia ul-: prime minister of Pakistan (1971-77) who pursued a more avowedly Islamic government, which still separated religion from political and economic policy.
Hasan ibn Ali (d. 669): the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib (q.v.) and the grand- son of the Prophet Muhammad. He is revered by Shiis as the Second Shii Imam. After the murder of his father, Shiis acclaimed him as caliph, but Hasan agreed to retire from politics and lived a quiet and somewhat luxurious life in Medina.
Hasan al-Ashari (d. 935): the philosopher who reconciled the Mutazi- lah and the ahl al-hadith; his atomistic philosophy became one of the chief expressions of the spirituality of Sunni Islam.
Hasan al-Askari (d. 874): the Eleventh Shii Imam, who lived and died in the Askari fortress in Samarra, as the prisoner of the Abbasid caliphs. Like most of the imams, he is believed to have been poisoned by the Abbasid authorities.
Hasan al-Basri (d. 728): preacher in Basrah and leader of a religious re- form; he was an outspoken critic of the Umayyad caliphs.
Hidden Imam: see Abu al-Qasim Muhammad.
Husain ibn Ali: the second son of Ali ibn Abi Talib (q.v.) and the grand- son of the Prophet Muhammad. He is revered by Shiis as the Third Imam and his death at the hands of Caliph Yazid (q.v.) is mourned annually during the month of Muharram.
Ibn al-Arabi, Muid ad-Din (d. 1240): a Spanish mystic and philoso- pher, who travelled extensively in the Muslim empire. A prolific and highly influential writer, he preached a unitive and pluralistic theo- logical vision, in which spirituality is fused indissolubly with his phi- losophy.
Ibn Hazam (994-1064): a Spanish poet and religious thinker of the court of Cordova.
Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad (d. 767): author of the first major biography of the Prophet Muhammad, which is based on carefully sifted hadith reports.
Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman (1 332-1406): author of al-Maqaddimah (An Introduction to History). A Faylasuf, he applied the principles of philosophy to the study of history and sought the universal laws op- erating behind the flux of events.
Ibn Rushd, Abu al-Walid Ahmad (1126-98): a Faylasuf and Qadi of Cordova, Spain, known in the West as Averroes, where his rationalis- tic philosophy was more influential than it was in the Muslim world.
Ibn Sina, Abu Ali (980-1037): known in the West as Avicenna, he rep- resents the apogee of Falsafah, which he linked to religious and mys- tical experience.
Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1 328): a reformer who tried to counter the influ- ence of Sufism and to return to the fundamental principles of the Quran and the sunnah. He died in prison in Damascus.
Ibn al-Zubayr, Abdallah (d. 692): one of the chief opponents of the Umayyads during the second fitnah.
Iqbal, Muhammad (1876-1938): Indian poet and philosopher who em- phasized the rationality of Islam to prove that it was quite compati- ble with Western modernity.
Ismail: the prophet who is known as Ishmael in the Bible, the eldest son of Abraham, who was cast out into the wilderness at God's command with his mother, Hagar, but saved by God. Muslim tradition has it that Hagar and Ismail lived in Mecca, that Abraham came to visit them there and that Abraham and Ismail rebuilt the Kabah (which had been originally constructed by Adam, the first prophet and fa- ther of mankind).
Ismail ibn Jafar: he was appointed the Seventh Imam of the Shiah by his father Jafar as-Sadiq (q.v.). Some Shiis (known as Ismailis or Sev- eners) believe that he was the last of the direct descendants of Ali ibn Abi Talib (q.v.) to succeed to the imamate, and do not recognize the imamate of Musa al-Kazim, the younger son of Jafar as-Sadiq, who is revered by Twelver Shiis as the Seventh Imam.
Ismail Pasha: he became the governor of Egypt (1863-79) and was given the title Khedive (great prince). His ambitious modernizing programme bankrupted the country and led ultimately to the British occupation of Egypt.
Ismail, Shah (1487-1524): the first Safavid shah of Iran, who imposed Twelver Shiism on the country.
Jafar as-Sadiq (d. 765): the Sixth Shii Imam, who developed the doc- trine of the imamate and urged his followers to withdraw from pol- itics and concentrate on the mystical contemplation of the Quran.
Jamal al-Din, "al-Afghani" (1839-97): an Iranian reformer who urged Muslims of all persuasions to band together and modernize Islam to avoid the political and cultural hegemony of Europe.
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali (1876-1948): the leader of the Muslim League in India at the time of the partition of the country, who is therefore hailed as the architect of Pakistan.
Junaid of Baghdad (d. 910): the first of the "sober Sufis" who insisted that the experience of God lay in enhanced self-possession and that the wild exuberance of the "drunken Sufis" was merely a stage that the true mystic should transcend.
Khadija: the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad and the mother of all his surviving children. She was also the first convert to Islam and died before the hjrah during the persecution of the Muslims by the Quraysh in Mecca (616—19), possibly as a result of the privations she suffered.
Khan, Muhammad Ayub: prime minister of Pakistan (1958-69), who followed a strongly secularizing policy, which led eventually to his downfall.
Khatami, Hojjat 01-Islam Seyyid: president of Iran (1997-). He wants to see a more liberal interpretation of Islamic law in Iran and to fos- ter relations with the West.
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah (1902-89): the spiritual mentor of the Islamic revolution against the Pahlavi regime, and the Supreme Faqih of Iran (1979-89).
Kindi, Yaqub ibn Ishaq al- (d. 870): the first major Faylasuf, who worked alongside the Mutazilah in Baghdad but also sought wisdom from Greek sages.
Kirmani, Aqa Khan (1853-96): an Iranian secularist reformer.
Mahdi, Caliph al-: Abbasid caliph (775-85) who recognized the piety of the more religious Muslims, encouraged the study of fiqh and helped the religious to come to terms with his regime.
Mahmud II: Ottoman sultan (1808-39) who introduced the moderniz- ing Tanzimat reforms.
Majlisi, Muhammad Baqir (d. 1700): an alim who showed the less at- tractive form of Twelver Shiism after it had become the establish- ment faith in Iran, vigorously suppressing the teaching of Falsafah and persecuting the Sufis.
Malcolm X (1925—65): the charismatic leader of the black separatist group Nation of Islam, who achieved a high profile in the United States during the Civil Rights movement. In 1963 he seceded from the heterodox Nation of Islam and took his followers into main- stream Sunni Islam; as a result, he was assassinated two years later.
Malik ibn Anas (d. 795): the founder of the Maliki school of Islamic ju- risprudence.
Mamun, Caliph al-: Abbasid caliph (81 3-33) whose reign marked the beginning of the Abbasid decline.
Mansur, Caliph al-: Abbasid caliph (754—75). Strongly suppressed Shii dissidents and moved the capital of the empire to the new city of Baghdad.
Mansur, Husain al- (also known as al-Hallaj, the Wool Carder): one of the most famous of the "drunken Sufis," who is said in ecstasy to have cried "Ana al-haqq!" ("I am the Truth!") so convinced was he of his total union with God. He was executed for heresy in 922.
Mawdudi, Abul Ala (1903-79): a Pakistani fundamentalist ideologue, whose ideas have been very influential in the Sunni world.
Mehmed II: Ottoman sultan (1451-61) who is known as "the Con- queror" because he achieved the conquest of Byzantine Con- stantinople in 1453.
Mir Dimad (d. 1631): founder of the school of mystical philosophy at Isfahan and the teacher of Mulla Sadra (q.v.).
Muawiyyah ibn Abi Sufyan: the first of the Umayyad caliphs, who ruled from 661 to 680 and brought strong, effective government to the Muslim community after the turmoil of the first fitnah
Muddaris, Ayatollah Hasan (d. 1937): an Iranian cleric who attacked Reza Shah in the Majlis and was murdered by the regime.
Muhammad ibn Abdallah (c. 570-632): the prophet who brought the Quran to the Muslims and established the monotheistic faith and a single polity in Arabia.
Muhammad Ali, Pasha (1769-1849): an Albanian officer in the Ot- toman army who made Egypt virtually independent of Istanbul and who achieved a major modernization of the country.
Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832): the Neo-Sufi reformer who founded the Sanusiyyah movement, which is still predominant in Libya.
Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 735): the Fifth Shii Imam. He lived in re- tirement in Medina and is said to have developed the esoteric method of reading the Quran which was characteristic of Twelver Shiism.
Muhammad, Khwarazmshah: ruler of a dynasty (1200-20) in Khwar- azm, who tried to establish a strong monarchy in Iran but incurred the wrath of the Mongols and brought about the first Mongol inva- sions.
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah: the second Pahlavi shah of Iran (1944—79), whose aggressively modernizing and secularizing poli- cies led to the Islamic revolution.
Mulkum Khan, Mirza (1833-1908): Iranian secularist reformer.
Mulla Sadra (d. 1640): Shii mystical philosopher whose work was an in- spiration to intellectuals, revolutionaries and modernizers, espe- cially in Iran.
Murad I: Ottoman sultan (1 360-89) who defeated the Serbians at the Battle of Kosovo Field.
Muslim (d. 878): the collector of an authoritative anthology of hadith re- ports.
Mustafa Kemal also known as Atatiirk (1881-1938): the founder of modern, secular Turkey.
Mutawakkil, Caliph al-: Abbasid caliph (847-61) who was respon- sible for imprisoning the Shii imams in the Askari fortress in Samarra.
Nadir Khan (d. 1748): temporarily revived the military power of Shii Iran after the fall of the Safavid dynasty.
Naini, Sheikh Muhammad Husain (1850-1936): an Iranian mujtahid whose treatise Admonition to the Nation gave a strong Shii endorse- ment to the notion of constitutional rule.
Nasir, Caliph al-: one of the last of the Abbasid caliphs, who tried to use Islamic institutions to strengthen his rule in Baghdad.
Nasser, Jamal Abd al-: president of Egypt (1952-70), leading a mili- tantly nationalistic, secularist and socialist government.
Nizalmulmulk: the brilliant Persian vizier who ruled the Seljuk Empire from 1063 to 1092.
Qutb, Sayyid (1906-66): a Muslim Brother, executed by al-Nasser's regime; his ideology is crucial to all Sunni fundamentalism.
Rashid, Caliph Harun al-: Abbasid caliph (786-809) whose reign coin- cided with the zenith of caliphal absolute power, and who presided over a magnificent cultural florescence.
Reza Khan: shah of Iran (1921-41) and the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. His government was aggressively secularist and nation- alist.
Rida, Muhammad Rashid (1865-1935): journalist who founded the Salafiyyah movement in Cairo and was the first to advocate a fully modernized Islamic state.
Rumi,Jalal al-Din (1207-75): a highly influential Sufi leader who had a large popular following and founded the Mawlani Order, often known as the Whirling Dervishes.
Salah ad-Din, Yusuf ibn Ayyub (d. 1193): the Kurdish general who be- came the sultan of an extensive empire in Syria and Egypt, returned
Egypt to Sunni Islam after defeating the Fatimid caliphate, and ejected the Crusaders from Jerusalem. Salah ad-Din (known as Sal- adin in the West) was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty.
Selim I: Ottoman sultan (1512-20) who conquered Syria, Palestine and Egypt from the Mamluks.
Selim III: Ottoman sultan (1 789-1807) who attempted a Westernizing reform of the empire.
Shafii, Muhammad Idris al- (d. 820): revolutionized the study of fiqh by laying down the principles {usul) of Islamic law; founder of the Shafii school of jurisprudence.
Shah Jihan: Moghul emperor (1627-58) whose reign saw the height of Moghul refinement and sophistication; he commissioned the Taj Mahal.
Shah Valli-Ullah (1703-62): a Sufi reformer in India who was one of the first Muslim thinkers to see the threat that Western modernity posed to Islam.
Sinan Pasha (d. 1578): architect of the Suleymaniye mosque in Istanbul and the Selimye mosque in Edirne.
Sorush, Abdolkarim (1945-): leading Iranian intellectual who advo- cates a more liberal interpretation of Shiism, while still rejecting Western secularism.
Suhrawardi, Yahya (d. 1191): Sufi philosopher, founder of the school of illumination (ishraq) based on pre-Islamic Iranian mysticism. He was executed for his allegedly heterodox beliefs by the Ayyubid regime in Aleppo.
Suleiman I: Ottoman sultan (1520-66), known as al-Qanuni, the Law- giver, in the Islamic world, and the Magnificent in the West. He crafted the distinctive institutions of the empire, which reached the fullest extent of its power during his reign.
Tabari, Abu Jafar (d. 923): a scholar of Shariah and historian, who pro- duced a universal history, tracing the success and failure of the vari- ous communities who had been called to the worship of God, concentrating particularly on the Muslim ummah.
Tahtawi, Rifah al- (1801-73): an Egyptian dim who described his pas- sionate appreciation of European society in his published diary, was responsible for the translation of European books into Arabic and promoted the idea of modernization in Egypt.
Umar 11: an Umayyad caliph (717-20) who tried to rule according to the principles of the religious movement. He was the first caliph to
encourage positively the conversion of the subject people of the em- pire to Islam.
Umar ibn al-Khattab: one of the Prophet Muhammad's closest com- panions. He became the second caliph after the Prophet's death (634-44), and masterminded the first Arab wars of conquest and the building of the garrison towns. He was murdered by a Persian pris- oner of war.
Uthman ibn Affan: one of Muhammad's first converts and his son-in- law. He became the third caliph (644—56), but was a less able ruler than his predecessors. His policies opened him to the charge of nepotism and inspired a mutiny during which he was himself assas- sinated in Medina. His murder led to the first fitnah wars.
Walid I, Caliph al-: an Umayyad caliph (705-1 7) who ruled during the peak of Umayyad power and success.
Wasan ibn Ata (d. 748): founder of the Mutazilah school of rational theology.
Yasin, Sheikh Ahmad (1936-): the creator of Mujamah (Islamic Con- gress), a welfare organization, in Israeli-occupied Gaza. The terror- ist group HAMAS was an offshoot from this movement.
Yazid I: Umayyad caliph (680-83) who is chiefly remembered for the murder of Husain ibn Ali (q.v.) at Kerbala.
Zayd ibn Ali (d. 740): the brother of the Fifth Shii Imam; Zayd was a po- litical activist and the Fifth Imam may have developed his quietist philosophy in order to counter his claim to the leadership. There- after Shiis who engaged in political activism and eschewed the Twelvers' withdrawal from politics were sometimes known as Zay- dites.
GLOSSARY OF ARABIC TERMS
Ahadith (singular, hadith): news, reports. Documented traditions of the teachings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, which were not in the Quran but which were recorded for posterity by his close com- panions and the members of his family.
Ahl al-hadith: Hadith People. A school of thought which first appeared during the Umayyad period, which would not permit jurists to use ijtihad (q.v.) but insisted that all legislation be based upon valid aha- dith (q.v.).
Ahl al-kitab: People of the Book. The Quranic term for people, such as Jews or Christians, who adhered to the earlier scriptures. Since the Prophet and most of the early Muslims were illiterate, and had very few-if any-books, it has been suggested that this term should more accurately be translated: "followers of an earlier revelation."
Alam al-mithal: the world of pure images. A realm of the human psy- che which is the source of the visionary experience of Muslim mys- tics and the seat of the creative imagination.
Alim: see ulama. Amir: commander.
Ansar: the Medinese Muslims who became the "helpers" of the Prophet by giving the first Muslims a home when they were forced to leave Mecca in 622, and assisted them in the project of establish- ing the first Muslim community.
Batin: the "hidden" dimension of existence and of scripture, which can- not be perceived by the senses or by rational thought, but which is discerned in the contemplative, intuitive disciplines of mysticism.
Dar al-Islam: the House of Islam. Lands under Muslim rule.
Dhikr: the "remembrance" of God, especially by means of the chanting of the Names of God as a mantra to induce alternative states of con- sciousness. A Sufi devotion.
Dhimmi: a "protected subject" in the Islamic empire, who belonged to the religions tolerated by the Quran, the ahl al-kitab (q.v.). they in- cluded Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs. Dhimmiswere allowed full religious liberty and were able to organize their community according to their own customal law, but were re- quired to recognize Islamic sovereignty.
Faqih: a jurist; an expert in Islamic law.
Fatwah: a formal legal opinion or decision of a religious scholar on a matter of Islamic law.
Fiqh: Islamic jurisprudence. The study and application of the body of sacred Muslim law.
Fitnah: temptation, trial. Specifically, the term is used to describe the civil wars that rent the Muslim community apart during the time of the rashidun (q.v.) and the early Umayyad period.
Futuwwah: a corporate group of young urban men, formed after the twelfth century, with special ceremonies of initiation, rituals and sworn support to a leader that were strongly influenced by Sufi (q.v.) ideals and practices.
Ghazu: originally, the "raids" undertaken by Arabs in the pre-Islamic period for booty. Later a ghazi warrior was a fighter in a holy war for Islam; often the term was applied to organized bands of raiders on the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam (q.v.).
Ghulat (adjective, ghuluww): The extreme speculations. adopted by the early Shii Muslims (q-v.), which overstressed some aspects of doctrine.
Hadith: see ahadith.
Hajj: the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Hijrah: the "migration" of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Mus- lim community from Mecca to Medina in 622.
Ijmah: the "consensus" of the Muslim community that gives legitimacy to a legal decision.
Ijtihad: the "independent reasoning" used by a jurist to apply the Shariah (q.v.) to contemporary circumstances. During the four- teenth century Sunni Muslims (q.v.) declared that the "gates of ijti- had" were closed, and that scholars must rely on the legal decisions of past authorities instead of upon their own reasoned insights.
Glossay of Arabic Terms . 205
Ilm: a knowledge of what is right and how Muslims should behave.
Imam: the leader of the Muslim community; Shii Muslims (q.v.) use the term to denote the descendants of the Prophet, through his daughter Fatimah and her husband, Ali ibn Abi Talib, whom Shiis consider to be the true rulers of the Muslim community.
Irfan: the Muslim mystical tradition.
Islam: "surrender" to the will of God.
Jayiliyyah (adjective, jahili): the Age of Ignorance. Originally the term was used to describe the pre-Islamic period in Arabia. Today Mus- lim fundamentalists often apply it to any society, even a nominally Muslim society, which has, in their view, turned its back upon God and refused to submit to God's sovereignty.
Jihad: struggle, effort. This is the primary meaning of the term as used in the Quran, which refers to an internal effort to reform bad habits in the Islamic community or within the individual Muslim. The term is also used more specifically to denote a war waged in the ser- vice of religion.
Jizyah: the poll tax, which the dhimmis (q.v.) were required to pay in return for military protection.
Kabah: the cube-shaped shrine in the holy city of Mecca, which Muhammad dedicated to God and made the most sacred place in the Islamic world.
Kalam: a discussion, based on Islamic assumptions, of theological ques- tions. The term is often used to describe the tradition of Muslim scholastic theology.
Khanqah: a building where such Sufi (q.v.) activities as dhikr (q.v.) take place; where Sufi masters live and instruct their disciples.
Madhhab ("chosen way"): one of the four legitimate schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Madrasah: a college of Muslim higher education, where ulama (q.v.)
study such disciplines as fiqh (q.v.) or kalam (q.v.).
Mawali (clients): the name given to the early non-Arab converts to Islam, who had to become nominal clients of one of the tribes when they became Muslims.
Mujtahid: a jurist who has earned the right to exercise ijtihad{(q.v), usu- ally in the Shii world.
Pir: a Sufi (q.v.) master, who can guide disciples along the mystical path.
Qadi: a judge who administers the Shariah (q.v.).
Qiblah: the "direction" which Muslims face during prayer. In the very
early days the qiblah was Jerusalem; later Muhammad changed it to Mecca.
Rashidun: the four "rightly guided" caliphs, who were the companions and the immediate successors of the Prophet Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Salat: the ritual prayers which Muslims make five times daily.
Shahadah: the Muslim declaration of faith, "I proclaim that there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad is his Prophet."
Shariah: "the Path to the Watering Hole." The body of Islamic sacred laws derived from the Quran, the sunnah(q.v.) and the ahadith(q.v.). Shii Muslims: they belong to the Shiah i-Ali, the Partisans of Ali; they believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's closest male relative, should have ruled in place of the rashidun (q.v.), and revere a num- ber of imams (q.v.) who are the direct male descendants of Ali and
his wife Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter. Their difference from the Sunni majority is purely political.
Sufi; Sufism: the mystical tradition of Sunni Islam (q.v.).
Sunnah: custom. The habits and religious practice of the Prophet Muhammad, which were recorded for posterity by his companions and family and are regarded as the ideal Islamic norm. They have thus been enshrined in Islamic law, so that Muslims can approximate closely to the archetypal figure of the Prophet, in his perfect surren- der {islam) to God.
Sunni Islam: the term used to describe the Muslim majority, who revere the four rashidun (q.v.) and validate the existing political Islamic order.
Tariqah: one of the brotherhoods or orders who follow the Sufi (q.v.) "way" and have their own special dhikr (q.v.) and revered leaders.
Tawhid: making one. The divine unity, which Muslims seek to imitate in their personal and social lives by integrating their institutions and priorities, and by recognizing the overall sovereignty of God.
Ulama (singular, alim): learned men, the guardians of the legal and re- ligious traditions of Islam.
Ummah: the Muslim community.
Umrah: the ritual circumambulators around the Kabah (q-v.).
Zakat: purity. The term used for a tax of fixed proportion of income and capital (usually 2.5 percent), which must be paid by all Muslims each year to assist the poor.
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Ahadith: ah-ha-deeth
Ahl al-hadith: ah-lalha-deeth
Ahl al-kitab: ah-lal ki-tab
Alam al-mithal: aah-la-mal me-thal
Alim: aah-leem
Amir: ah-meer
Ansar: ahn-sahr
Batin: bah-tin
Dar al-Islam: dah-ral is-lahm
Dhikr: dhikr
Dhimmi: dhim-mee
Faqih: fa-qeeh
Fatwah: fet-ivah
Fiqh: fiq-eh
Fitnah: fit-nah
Futuwwah: fu-too-'wah
Ghazu: gha-zoo
Ghulat: ghoo-lat
Hadith: hah-deeth
Hajj: hadzh
Hijrah: hij-rah
Ijmah: ij-maah
208 . Pronunciation Guide
Ijtihad: ij-ti-had
Ilm: iihlm
Imam: i-mam
Irfan: iihr-fan
Islam: Is-lahm
Jahiliyyah: jah-hi-lee-yah
Jihad: ji-had
Jizyah: jiz-yah
Kabah: kaa-bah
Kalam: ka-lam
Khanqah: khahn-qah
Madhhab: madh-huh
Madrasah: mad-ra-sah
Mawali: ma-wa-lee
Mujtahid: moj-tah-hid
Qadi: qah-dee
Qiblah: qib-lah
Rashidun: rah-she-doon
Salat: sah-lat
Shahadah: shah-ha-dah
Shariah: Shah-reeh-aah
Tariqah: tah-ree-qah
Tawhid: taw -heed
Ulama: ooh-la-ma
Ummah: om-mah
Umrah: oohm-rah
Zakat: za-kat
NOTES
1 BEGINNINGS (pages 3 to 37)
1. Jalal al-Din Suyuti, al-ifqan fi ulum al aqram in Maxime Rodinson,
Mohammed (trans. Anne Carter, London, 1971), 74.
2. Muhammad ibn Ishaq, SimtRasul Allah (trans. and ed. A Guillaume,
The Life of Muhammad, London, 1955), 1 58.
3. Quran 25:3; 29:17; 4447; 69:44. Quotations from the Quran are all taken from Muhammad Asad (trans.), The Message of the Quran, Gibraltar, 1980.
4. Quran 80:11.
5. Quran 2:129—32; 61:6.
6. Quran 2:256.
7. Quran 29:46.
8. Quran I'i'A—l.
9. Quran 741-5, 8-10; 88:21-2.
10. Muhammad's concubine Mariam, who was a Christian and not one of his wives, bore him a son, Ibrahim, who, to the Prophet's immense sorrow, died in infancy.
11. Quran 33:28—9.
12. Quran 33:35.
13. Quran 43.
14. Genesis 16; 18:18—20.
15. D. Sidersky, Les Origines dans les legendes musulmanes dans le Coran et dans les vies desprophetes (Paris, 193 3).
16. Quran 2:129-32; 3:58-62; 2:39.
17. Quran 6:159,161-2.
210 . Notes
18. Quran 8:16-17.
19. Quran 2:194, 252; 5:65; 22:40-42.
2 DEVELOPMENT (pages 41 to 77)
1. Quran 49:12.
2. Quran 9:106-7.
3. Little is known about the early Shiah. We do not know for certain whether Ali's male descendants really were revered by a group of mystically inclined Shiis, or whether this history was projected back on to the early imams after the line had become extinct, and when "Twelver Shiism" received definitive form.
4. Quran 2:234; 8:2; 23:57-61.
5. The origins of "Sevener" or Ismaili Shiism are obscure. The story of the sect's fidelity to Imam Ismail may have developed after the theol- ogy of "Twelver Shiism" was finally formulated, to give justification for the Ismaili position. Seveners, who were usually politically active, may have originally been "Zaydis," i.e., Shiis who followed the exam- ple of Zayd ibn Ali, the brother of the Fifth Imam, and believed that Muslims had a duty to lead armed revolts against an unjust regime.
3 CULMINATION (pages 81 to 111)
1. The Ismaili dynasty in Cairo is often called the "Fatimid" dynasty, because, like the Twelvers, Ismailis venerated imams who were di- rect descendants of Ali and Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter.
2. Quran 2:109.
3. Al-Muqaddimah, quoted in Youssef M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamental- ism (London, 1990), 18.
5 ISLAM AGONISTES (pages 141 to 187)
1. The theory of Velayat-i Faqih had been discussed by jurists before, but was little known and had always been considered eccentric and even heretical. Khomeini made it central to his political thought and later it became the basis of his rule in Iran.
2. Quran 2:178; 8:68; 24:34; 47:5.
3. Quran 48:1.
4. Joyce M. Davis, BetweenJihadand Salaam: Profiles in Islam (New York,
1997), 231.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
The Prophet Muhammad
ANDRAE, Tor, Muhammad The Man and His Faith (trans. Theophil Men- zel, London, 1936)
ARMSTRONG,Karen, Muhammad A Biography of the Prophet (London, 1991) GABRIELI, Francesco, Muhammadandthe Conquests of Islam (trans. Virginia Luling and Rosamund Linell, London, 1968)
GUIALLAUME, A. (trans. and ed.), The Life of Muhammad A Translation of Ishaq's Skat Rasul Allah (London, 1955)
LINGS, Martin, Muhammad His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (London,
1983)
NASR, Sayyid Hossein, Muhammad, the Man of Allah (London, 1982) RODINSON, Maxime, Mohammed (trans. Anne Carter, London, 1971) SARDAR, Ziauddin, and Zafar Abbas Malik, Muhammad for Beginners (Cambridge, 1994)
SCHIMMEL, Annemarie, And Muhammad Is His Messenger The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill and London, 1985)
WATT, W. Montgomery, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford, 195 3)
, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford, 1956)
, Muhammad? Mecca: History in the Quran (Edinburgh, 1988) ZAKARIA, Rafiq, Muhammadand the Quran (London, 1991)
Islamic History
AHMED, Akbar, Living Islam, from Samarkand to Stornoway (London, 1993)
, Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World (London,
1999)
ALGAR, Hamid, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906 (Berkeley, 1969) BAYAT, Margol, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY, 1982)
ESPOSITO, John, Islam, the Straight Path (rev. ed., Oxford and New York, 1998)
(ed.), The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford, 1999)
GABRIELI, Francesco, Arab Historians of the Crusades (trans. E. J. Costello, London, 1984)
HODGSON, Marshall G. S., The Ventureof Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago and London, 1974)
HOURANI, Albert, A History of the Arab Peoples (London, 1991)
HOURANI, Albert, with Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson (eds.), The Modern Middle East (London, 199 3)
KEDDIE, Nikki R (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institu- tions in the Middle East since 1500 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972)
(ed.), Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiismfrom Quietism to Revolution
(New Haven and London, 1983)
LAPIDUS, Ira }A.,A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 1988) LEWIS, Bernard, The Arabs in History (London, 1950)
, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1976)
, Thefews of Islam (New York and London, 1982)
, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York and London, 1982)
, The Middle East 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day (London, 1995)
MAALOUF, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (London, 1984)
MOMEN, Moojan, An Introduction to Shi'i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiism (New Haven and London, 1985)
MOTTAHEDEH, Roy, The Mantle of the Prophet Religion and Politics in Iran
(London, 1985)
NASR, Seyyid Hosain, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London, 1966)
PETERS, F. E., The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places
(Princeton, 1994)
, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (Princeton,
1994)
PETERS, Rudolph, Jihad in Classical and Medieval Islam (Princeton, 1996)
RA HMAN, Fazlur, Islam (Chicago, 1979)
Suggestions for Further Reading . 21 3
RUTHVEN, Malise, Islam in the World (London, 1984)
SAUNDERS, J. J., A History of Medieval Islam (London and Boston, 1965) SMITH, Wilfred Cantwell, Islam in Modern History (Princeton and Lon- don, 1957)
VON GRUNEBAUM, G. E., Classical Islam: A History 600-1258 (trans. Kather- ine Watson, London, 1970)
WALKER, Benjamin, Foundations ofIslam: The Making of a World Faith (Lon- don, 1998)
WA TT, W. Montgomery, Islam and the Integration of Society (London, 1961)
, The Majesty that Was Islam: The Islamic World 660-1100 (London
and New York, 1974)
WENSINCK, A. J., The Muslim Creed. Its Genesis and Historical Development
(Cambridge, 1932)
WHEAT C R OFT, Andrew, The Ottomans (London, 1993)
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOG Y
AL-FARABI, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (trans. Muhsin Mahdi, Glen- coe, Ill., 1962)
CORBIN, Henri, Histoire de laphilosophie islamique (Paris, 1964)
FAKHRY, Majid, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1970)
LEAMAN, Oliver, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge,
1985)
MCCARTHIE, Richard, The Theology of al-Ashari (Beirut, 195 3) MOREWEDGE, P ., The Metaphysics ofAvicenna (London, 1973)
(ed.), Islamic Philosophical Theology (New York, 1979) (ed.), Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism (New York, 1981)
NETTON, I. R., Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Edinburgh, 1991)
ROSENTHAL, E., Knowledge Triumphant The Concept of Knowledge in Me- dieval Islam {Leiden, 1970)
SHARIF, M. M., A History of Muslim Philosophy (Wiesbaden, 1963) VON GRU N EBAU M , G. E., Medieval Islam (Chicago, 1946)
WATT, W. Montgomery, Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam (Lon- don, 1948)
, Muslim Intellectual. The Struggle and Achievement of Al-Ghazzali
(Edinburgh, 1963)
-, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh, 197 3)
ISLAMIC MYSTICISM AND SPIRITUALITY
AFFIFI, A. E., The Mystical Philosophy of Ibnu 'l-Arabi (Cambridge, 1938) ARBERRY, A J., Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam (London, 1950) B A KHT IAR, L., Sufi Expression of the Mystic Quest (London, 1979)
CHITTICK, William C, The Sufi Path of Love. The Spiritual Teachings of
i?«TO (Albany, 1983)
• , The Sufi Path of Knowledge..n al-Arahi's Metaphysics of Imagination
(Abany, 1989)
CORBIN, Henri, AvicennaandtheVisionary Recital (trans.W. Trask, Prince- ton, 1960)
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (trans. W Trask, London, 1970)
, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shiite Iran
(trans. Nancy Pearson, London, 1990)
MASSIGNON, Louis, The Passion of al-Hallaj, 4 vols. (trans. H. Mason, Princeton, 1982)
NASR, Seyyid Hossein (ed.), Islamic Spirituality, 2 vols. (London, 1987) NICHOLSON, Reynold A., The Mystics of Islam (London, 1914)
SCHIMMEL, A M., Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill and London, 1975)
, The Triumphant Sun: A Study of Mawlana Rumi's Life and Work
(London and The Hague, 1978)
SMITH, Margaret, Rabia the Mystic and Her Fellow Saints in Islam (London, 1928)
VALIUDDIN, Mir, Contemplative Disciplines in Sufism (London, 1980)
ISLAMIC RESPONSE TO THE MODER N WORL D
AHMED, Akbar S., Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (Lon- don and New York, 1992)
AKHAVI, Shahrough, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Abany, 1980)
AL-E AHMADjJalal, Occidentosis:A Plague from the Jfef (trans. R. Campbell, ed. Hamid Algar, Berkeley, 1984)
DAVIS, Joyce M., Between Jihad and Salaam: Profiles in Islam (New York, 1997)
DJAIT, Hichem, Europe and Islam: Cultures and Modernity (Berkeley, 1985) ESPOSITO, John (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York and Oxford, 1983)
Suggestions for Further Reading • 215
, The Islamic Threat Myth or Reality? (Oxford and New York, 1995)
, with John L. Donohue (eds.), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspec- tives (New York and Oxford, 1982)
, with Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Muslims on the Americanization Path (Atlanta, 1998)
GELLNER, Ernest, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London and New York, 1992)
GILSENAN, Michael, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East (London, 1990)
HALLIDAY, Fred, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London and New York, 1996)
HANNA, Sami, and George H. Gardner (eds.), Arab Socialism: A Documen- tary Survey {Leiden, 1969)
HOURANI, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Oxford, 1962)
IQBAL, Allama Muhammad, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
(Lahore, 1989)
KEDDIE, Nikki R., Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyidjamal ad-Din "al-Afghani" (Berkeley, 1968)
MATiN-ASGARi, Afshin, "Abdolkarim Sorush and the Secularization of Islamic Thought in Iran," Iranian Studies, 30, 1997
MITCHELL, Richard P, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London, 1969) RAHMAN, Fazlur, Islam and Modernity. Transformation of an Intellectual Tra- dition (Chicago, 1982)
SHARIATI, Ali, The Sociology of Islam (Berkeley, 1979)
, What Is To Be Done The Enlightened Thinkers and an Islamic Re- naissance {n.]}., 1986)
, Hajj {Tehran, 1988)
TIBI, Bassam, The Crisis of Political Islam: A Pre-Industrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age (Salt Lake City, 1988)
VOLL, John, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Boulder, 1982)
ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM
APPLEBY, R. Scott (ed.), Spokesmenfor the Despised Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (Chicago, 1997)
ARMSTRONG, Karen, The Battlefor God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Chris- tianity and Islam (London and New York, 2000)
CHOUEIRI, Youssef M., Islamic Fundamentalism (London, 1990)
216 • Suggestions for Further Reading
FISCHER, Michael J., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1980)
GAFFNEY, Patrick D., The Prophet? Pulpit Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1994)
HAMAS, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Jerusalem, 1988) HEIKAL, Mohamed, Autumn of Fury. The Assassination of Sadat (London, 1984)
HUSSAIN, Asaf, Islamic Iran: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (London, 1985)
JANSEN, Johannes J. G., The Neglected Duty. The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York and London, 1988) KEPEL, Gilles, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt (trans. Jon Rothschild, London, 1985)
KHOMEINI, Sayeed Ruhollah, Islam and Revolution (trans. Hamid Algar, Berkeley, 1981)
LAWRENCE, Bruce B., Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (London and New York, 1990)
MARTY, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed
(Chicago and London, 1991)
, Fundamentalisms and Society (Chicago and London, 1993)
, Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago and London, 199 3)
—, Accounting for Fundamentalisms (Chicago and London, 1994)
, Fundamentalisms Comprehended (Chicago and London, 1995) MAWDUDI, Abud Ala, Islamic Law and Constitution (Lahore, 1967)
, jfihadin Islam (Lahore, 1976)
-, The Economic Problem of Man and Its Islamic Solution (Lahore,
1978)
, Islamic Way of Life (Lahore, 1979)
MILTON-EDWARDS, Beverley, Islamic Politics in Palestine (London and New York, 1996)
NASR, Seyyed Vali Reza, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, the Jama at-i Islami of Pakistan (London and New York, 1994)
QUTB, Sayyid, Islam and Universal Peace (Indianapolis, 1977)
, Milestones (Delhi, 1988)
, This Religion of Islam (Gary, Indiana, n.d.)
RUTHVEN, Malise, A Satanic Affair Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam
(London, 1990)
SICK, Gary, All Fall Down: America? Fateful Encounter with Iran (London, 1985)
Suggestions for Further Reading . 217
SiDHARED, Abdel Salam, and Anonshirivan Ehteshani (eds.), Islamic Fun- damentalism (Boulder, 1996)
ISLAM AND WOME N
AFSHAR, Haleh, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case-Study (London and New York, 1998)
1AHMED, Leila, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern De- bate (New Haven and London, 1992)
—, A Border Passage (New York, 1999)
GOLE, Nilufa, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor, 1996)
HADDAD, Yvonne Yazbeck, and John L. Esposito, (eds.), Islam, Gender and Social Change (Oxford and New York, 1998)
KARAM, Azza M., Women, Islamismsand the State.. ContemporaryFeminisms in Egypt (New York, 1998)
KEDDIE, Nikki R., and Beth Baron (eds.), Women in Middle Eastern History. Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven and London, 1991) MERNISSI, Fatima, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry (trans. Mary Jo Lakehead, Oxford, 1991)
The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood (London, 1994)
Women? Rebellion and Islamic Memory (London, 1996)
WESTER N PERCEPTIONS OF ISLAM
ARMSTRONG, Karen, Holy War The Crusades and Their Impact on Today? World (London, 1988; New York, 1991)
DANIEL, Norman, Islam and the West The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960)
, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London and Beirut, 1975) GIBB, H. A. R., and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West (London, 1957) HOURANI, Albert, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991)
KAB B A N I, Rana, Europe? Myths of Orient (London, 1986)
, Letter to Christendom (London, 1989)
KEDAR, Benjamin, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches towards the Muslims (Princeton, 1984)
RODINSON, Maxime, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London, 1984) SAID, Edward W., Orientalism (New York, 1978)
SOUTHERN, R. W., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
Mass., 1962)
INDEX
Aaron, 69
Abbari, Riza-i, 118
Abbas (uncle of the Prophet), 53 Abbas I, Shah, 118
Abbasid caliphate, 53-57, 58-59, 62,
67, 71, 81, 82, 96, 98, 115
Abd al-Malik, Caliph, 44—45,47, 50 Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad, 135 Abdu, Muhammad, 153
Abdulhamid, Sultan, 150
Abraham, 8,17, 23, 69
Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah, Caliph, 53 Abu Bakr, First Caliph, 4, 15, 25-27, 52 Abu al-Hakam (Abu Jahl), 12
Abu Hanifah, 48-49, 58
Abu Jafar al-Mansur, Caliph, 54, 57
Abu Sufyan, 12, 19, 21, 23, 32,49
Abu Talib, 13
Abu al-Qasim Muhammad see Hid- den Imam
Adam, 24, 69
Aden, 148
Admonition to the Nation (Naini), 149 Afghani, al- (Jamal al-Din), 151-53 Afghanistan, 32, 163, 170
Africa, North, 29, 30, 32
under Umayyads, 50
under Abbasids, 59
under Ismaili Fatimids, 81, 105
under Ottomans, 115,132,135
Afsanal-Arbaah,Al- (Sadra), 122
ahadith, 49, 59-60, 83
ahld-hadith (Hadith People), 58, 60,
62, 63, 65
ahlal-kitab (People of the Book), 10, 11, 18, 21, 30
Ahmad ibn Hanbal, 62-63 Ahmad Khan, Sayyid, 150 Ain Jalut, Battle of, 97
Aisha (wife of the Prophet), 15, 23, 33
Akbar, Emperor, 124—2 7
Alamut, 87, 97 Albert the Great, 83 Aleppo, 91, 93
Alexius Comnenus I, Emperor, 95 Algeria, 136
French occupation, 148 FIS and FLN in, 180-84
Algiers, 181, 182
Alhambra palace, 105
Ali ibn Abi Talib, 4, 15, 25 as Fourth Caliph, 33-36
in opposition to Muawiyyah, 34, 44,46,47,48
and Shiahi-Ali, 36, 43, 52, 76, 108;
65, 70, 117, 173
Ali al-Hadi, Tenth Imam, 68 Ali al-Rida, Eighth Imam, 63
Ali Zayn al-Abidin, Fourth Imam, 56
Aligharh college, 150
Allah, 3,4, 8, 11, 23, 75
AUami, Abdulfazl, 127 American Muslim Mission, 177 American Muslims, 177
Anatolia, Byzantine resistance in, 29, 30
Crusaders in, 93
Seljuks advance into, 95; 101
conquered by Timur, 107; 108
under Ottomans, 109,115, 116,
129
Andalus, al-, 105
Angora, 110
Aquinas, Thomas, 83
Aristotle, 72
Armenia, 32
Asharism, 64
Ashura, 159, 174
Astrakhan, 116
Atariirk (Mustafa Kemal), 148, 158
Aurengzebe, Emperor, 128, 162 Averroes, see Ibn Rushd Avicenna, see Ibn Sina Ayodhya, 178
Ayyubid dynasty, 93, 97
Azerbaijan, 97, 107, 109, 117
Azhar, al-, college, 83, 175, 177, 185
Babur, Emperor, 124 Babur, Mosque of, 178 Badr, Battle of, 19, 29
Baghdad, 54, 55, 58, 63, 72
Seljuks seize power in, 81 in decline, 85; 86, 96
falls to Mongols, 97 sacked by Timur, 107
Baibars, Sultan Rukn ad-Din, 97
Banna, Hasan al-, 155-56, 171
Basrah, 31, 34, 46, 48, 55, 62, 72
Bedouin, 23, 26
Bekhtashi dervishes, 109
Bengal, 108, 147
Benjedid, President, 182
Berbers, 105, 132
Bhutto, Prime Minister Zulfaqir Ali, 163
Bihzad, 120
Bistami, Abu Yazid al-, 75
BJP (Bharatiya Janarta Party), 178 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 147
British:
in Bengal, 147
in Iran, 148
in Aden, 148
in Egypt, 148
in Sudan, 148
Buddhism, x, 76, 97,108, 125
Bukhara, 97
Bukhari, al-, 60
Bulgar, 109
Bursa, 109
Byzantine Empire, 27, 30, 32
decline, 95-96, 109
seized by Ottomans, 110; 141
Cairo, 69, 83
Camel, Battle of the, 34,44 Caucasus, 32, 117 Chaldiran, Battle of, 118
Chelebi, Abu al-Sund Khola, 133 China, 107
Christians in Muslim empire, 10, 30,
125, 132,134; 164
Constantinople, see also Istanbul 42, 110,130
Constitutional Revolution (Iran,
1906), 149, 161
conversion to Islam: discouraged, 30, 41
encouraged by Umar II, 52, 53; 63
Cordova, 83, 105
Crusades, 93-95
influence on Western view of Islam, 179-80
Ctesiphon, 27, 54
Cyrenaica, 29
Cyprus, 32
Damascus, 31, 34, 37,48, 97, 104,
107
Danube, River, 95
Dar al-Harb, 30
Dar al-Islam, 30, 81, 91, 96, 159, 179
David, 8
Deccan, 124
Delhi, 97, 107, 108
Dervishes, Whirling, 101
Dimad, Mir, 122
Edirne, 109
Egypt, 27, 29, 59
under Ismailis, 69; 97, 105, 106,
132
French in, 147-48
British in, 148, 151
under Muhammad Ali, 150-51; 155,160,183-84
Euphrates, River, 34, 97
Farabi, Abu Nasr al-, 72-73, 83
Fard, Wallace, 177
Fatamid dynasty, 81, 83,93
Faylasufs, 71-73, 76, 83, 84, 90, 103,
104,105
dominant under Moghuls, 116; 120
promoted by Akbar, 125
Falsafah study under Ottomans, 134, 135,149-50
FIS (Islamic Salvation Front, Algeria), 180-83
fitnah:
first, 33, 37,41,42,46
second, 44
FLN (National Liberation Front, Algeria), 180-83
French:
in Egypt, 147-48,
in Algeria, 148
in Libya, 148
in Morocco, 148
fundamentalism, 164-75
Fustat, 31, 32, 33
Ganges, River, 108
Gaza, 156
Genesis, 17
Genghis Khan, 96, 98
Georgia, 11 7
Ghannouchi, Rashid al-, 185 Ghazzali, Abu Hamid Muhammad
al-, 88-90
GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria), 182-83
Granada, 105
Giilhane decree, 150
Hafsah (wife of the Prophet), 15 Hagar, 17, 23
baj], 11, 22-23, 67, 75, 159
Hanafi madhhab, 65
Hanbali madhhak65, 104
Harran, 55
Harun al-Rashid, Caliph, 54-56, 57,
59,61
Hasan ibn Ali, Second Imam, 36 Hasan al-Ashari, Abu al-, 63-64 Hasan al-Basri, 46-47, 48, 92
Herat, 32
Hidden Imam (Abu al-Qasim Muhammad), 68, 109, 118,120,
123, 149, 173, 174
Hijaz, 3,43
hijrah, 1 3, 18
Hinduism, ix, 108
encouraged under Akbar, 125 suppressed under Aurengzebe, 128 eighteenth-century rapproche-
ment, 128
post-Partition, 178
Hindustan, 124
Hisham I, 52
Hubal, 11
Hudaybiyyah, 23,186
Hulegu, 96, 97
Humayun, 124
Husain ibn Ali, Third Imam, 43, 56, 67
cult of, 121, 128, 159, 173, 174
Ibn Ali al-Sanusi, Muhammad, 136 Ibn al-Arabi, Muid ad-Din, 92, 101,
127
Ibn Hajj, Ali, 181 Ibn Hanbal, 65
Ibn Hazam, 83
Ibn Idris, Ahmad, 135
Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad, 49, 84
Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman, 105 Ibn Rushd, Abu al-Walid Ahmad
(Averroes), 83-84 Ibn Sina, Abu Ali, 83
Ibn Taymiyyah, Ahmad, 104-5,135 Ibn al-Zubayr, Abdallah, 43
India, 32, 81, 96, 97, 107, 108
under Moghuls, 11 5, 116, 124-29 Muslims as beleaguered minority,
129-30,162
European invasion of Islamic life, 147
Partition, 149
post-Partition Muslims in, 178 Iqbal, Muhammad, 154
Iran, 31, 32, 44
supports Abbasids, 53, 69
under Turks, 81, 97; 97, 109
under Safavids, 11 5, 116
Shiism declared state religion, 117, 118,133
British and Russian intervention, 148
secularised by Pahlavis, 159-60 Revolution (1978-79), 173-75
Iraq, 27, 31, 32
support for Ali, 33, 36,43,44; 48,69
under Turks, 81; 148, 160
Irtysh, 97
Isaac, 17
Isfahan, 120,122
Islamic Conference, 175 Islamic Salvation Front see FIS Ismail (Ishmael), 17, 23, 30
Ismail ibn Jafar, Seventh Imam, 69 Ismail Pasha, 151
Ismail, Shah, 109, 117, 118, 124
Ismailis, 69-70, 87, 90 massacred by Mongols, 97
Israel:
creation of state, 149 expansionism, 156
Istanbul, 130, 132 see also Con- stantinople
lyah alum al-Din (al-Ghazzaii), 88 Iznik, 109
Jafar al-Sadiq, Sixth Imam, 57, 66, 67,
69
Jafari madhhah, 67
Jalal al-Din, 97
Jamal al-Din see al-Afghani Jamaat-i Islami, 162
Janissaries, 130, 150
Jerusalem, 11, 18
taken by Muslims, 29; 35,42 Dome of the Rock built, 44; 88 conquered by Crusaders, 93 taken back by Saladin, 93, 178
Jesus, x, 8, 53, 69, 74, 157
Jews:
early tribes, 10, 16-17, 20-21;
in Muslim empire, 30-31, 125, 132
in Europe, 157
ultra Orthodox, 167, 171
jihad, 6, 36, 87;
Ismail's against Sunnism, 118, 124;
130,158
Mawdudi and Qutb call for, 168-70 Jihan, Shah, 127
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 162 Jordan, 184
Junayd of Baghdad, 75 Jundayvebar, 55
June War (1967), 156
Juneh Mosque, 178
Kabah, 10-12,17, 23
Kabul, 124
Kashan, 11 7
Kashmir, 178
Kazan, 116
Kerbala massacre, 43, 56, 67, 121, 173,
174
Khadija (wife of the Prophet), 4, 13, 15
Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 175 Khan, Prime Minister Muhammad
Ayub, 162
Kharajites, 35, 36,43,44,45,46,47,
48,62
Khatami, President Hojjat 01-Islam Seyyid, 175, 184
Khaybar, 21
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 122, 173-75
Khurasan, 62, 101, 11 7
Khwarazmian Turks, 96 Kirmani, Aqa Kahn, 149 Konya, 101
Kosovo Field, Battle of, 110
Kublai Khan, 97
Kufah, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36,43,48, 54, 55,
62, 72
Lat, al-, 8
Lazar, Prince Hrelbeljanovic, 110 Lebanon, 93,148
civil war, 160
hostages, 174
Libya, 32, 136
occupied by French, 148 Locke, John, 1 58
Madani, Abbas, 181
Maghrib, 105
Mahdi, concept of, 69, 70,109
Mahdi, Caliph al-, 54, 59, 61 Mahmud II, Sultan, 150 Maimonides, 83
Majlisi, Muhammad Baqir, 120, 122
Malaya, 110,115
Malcolm X, 177
Malva, 124
Malik ibn Anas, 59, 61
Maliki madhhab, 59, 65
Malikshah, Sultan, 85
Mamluks, 104, 106
Mamun, Caliph al-, 62-63, 72
Manat, 8
Mansur, Husain al- (al-Hallaj), 75 Manzikurt, Battle of, 95 MaqaJJimah,Al-(Ibn-Khaldun), 106
Martel, Charles, 50
Marwah, al-, 11
Marwan, 44
Mashad, 159
Mathnawi (Rumi), 101-2
Mawdudi, Abul Ala. 162, 168-69 Mawlanah Order (Whirling
Dervishes), 101
Mecca, pre-Islamic, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12
as place of pilgrimage, 10-1 1, 22
Mecca, pre-Islamic (conl): taken by the Prophet, 23 under Uthman, 32
forbidden to non-Muslims, 103 Medina, 14, 20-21, 24-25
under Uthman, 31 -33
under Ali, 33-34
under Umayyads, 37, 43; 48, 59 forbidden to non-Muslims, 103;
136
Mehmed II (the Conqueror), 110, 130
Mesopotamia, 11 7
Mina, 11
Moghul Empire, 115, 116,124-28
Mongols, 96-102
11-Khans, 97
Chaghatay, 96, 106
White Horde, 97
Golden Horde, 97, 107 convert to Islam, 98 influence, 100, 101
decline, 106, 109
monotheism, 8, 13, 18, 75, 125
Morocco, 135, 148, 183
Moses, 8, 17, 69
Mosul, 93
Muawiyyah I, Caliph, 32, 34—36,41,
42-43, 46,47, 48, 58
Muawiyyah II, Caliph, 44 Mubarak, President, 184
Muddaris, Ayatollah, 159 Muhammad ibn Abdallah (the
Prophet):
revelation on Mount Hira, 3-4 reveals Quran, 4-5
and first Muslims, 5, 6, 10, 12,
13-14
Quraysh opposition, 12-14 makes hijrah to Medina, 14 changes qiblah to face Mecca, 18 battles against Mecca, 18-22 takes Mecca, 22-23
death, 23
succession, 49
against coercion, 8, 10
his wives, 15-16
attitude to Jewish tribes, 16-17, 20-22
asceticism, 31, 46, 56, 74
as archetype, 24, 61 Ismaili view of, 69-70
insulting made capital offence, 103
and Middle Way, 186
Muhammad Ali, Pasha, 150-1, 158 Muhammad al-Baqir (Fifth Imam),
56-57
Muhammad, Elijah, 177 Muhammad, Shah of Khwarazmian
Turks, 96
Muhammad Reza Shah, 159, 161,
173
Mujamah (Islamic Congress), 156, 184
mujdadid, 103-4 Mulkum Khan, Mirza, 149 Murad I, 109
Murjites, 48
Musa al-Kazim, 69
Muslim (haditb collector), 60 Muslim Brotherhood, 155, 158-59,
162, 169,184, 185
Muslims in Britain, 176 Muslims in France, 176, 181 Muslims in United States, 177 Mutasim, Caliph al-, 63
Mutazilites, 47-48, 57-58, 62-63, 64,
72
Mutawakkil, Caliph al-, 68 Muttawattah, Al- (Ibn Anas), 59 Muzdalifah, 11
Nadir tribe, 20
Nadir Khan, 123
Naini, Sheikh Muhammad Husain, 149
Najaf, 149, 173
Nanak, Guru, 125 Nasir, Caliph al-, 96
Nasser, Jamal Abd al-, 158-59, 169,
171, 184
Nation of Islam, 177
National Liberation Front see FLN Nile, River, 31
Nizamiyyah madrasah, 86, 88
Nizamulmulk, 85, 88
Noah, 17, 69
Ottoman Empire, 109-10, 11 5, 116,
120,130-35,136-37
Oxus River, 32, 63, 85, 96, 97, 11 5,
118
Pahlavi dynasty, 159-61, 174
Pakistan, 149, 162-63, 178
Palestine, 29, 81,93, 97, 149, 184
PLO, 184
Partition of India, 149, 162, 178
Pahtum tribe, 170
Pen, Jean-Marie le, 181
Persian Empire, 27, 30, 34, 55, 83
Plato, 73
Poitiers, Battle of, 50 Portuguese, 11 7
Protocol of the Elders ofZim, 22 Punjab, 124, 128
Qadarites, 47 Qadisiyyah, Battle of, 27 Qajar dynasty, 148, 149
Qanuni, al- see Suleiman I Qatar, University of, 185-86 Qaynuqah tribe, 20
Qazvin, 87
Qum, 31,117
Quradawi, Yusuf Abdallah al-, 185-86
Quran, xi
as revealed to the Prophet, 4-5, 21
poetic quality, 5; 6
and continuity of faith, 8, 9, 11
no coercion, 10
and the Last Days, 12, 53 and women's rights, 16
and Jews of Medina, 16-17, 20-
22
on war, 22, 30
on society, 29
religious tolerance, 30, 170 Uthman standardizes text, 33 calligraphy, 45
and political debate, 46
iatin meanings, 56, 72, 76
ahl al-hadith, 58
Faylasuf interpretation, 72
Sufi interpretation, 74
as basis for Saudi government, 161
Quraysh tribe, 3,4, 8
oppose the Prophet, 12, 14, 19,
22-23; 49, 186
Qurayzah tribe, 20-22
Qutb, Sayyid, 169-70
Rabiah, 74
Rafsanjani, Hashami, 175
Rajputs, 108
rashidun, 23-33,49, 52, 55, 56, 58, 61,
65, 77, 104, 117, 160
Rayy, 117
Red Fort, 178
Red Sea, 11 7
Renan, Ernest, 83
Reza Shah Pahlavi, 159, 172 Rida, al-, Eighth Imam, 159 Rida, Rashid, 153-54, 184
Rum, Sultanate of, 96, 97, 101
Rumi,Jalal al-Din, 101-2, 103
Rushdie fotwah, 175
Russia, 107, 116
in Iran, 148
Sadat, Anwar al-, 170 Saddam Hussein, 151
Sadra, Mulla, 122, 175
Safavid Empire, 115, 116, 11 7-24,
129, 130
Safaviyyah order, 109
Salah ad-Din, Yusuf ibn Ayyiib (Saladin), 93, 95,179
Samarkand, 83
Timur builds court at, 106 Samarra, 63, 68
Sanusiayyah movement, 136
Sassanids, 27, 30, 54, 56
Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 175, 176,
178
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xi
Saudi Arabia, 161-62, 175
SAVAK, 159
Sawad, 34, 54, 85
Second World War, 156 Selim I, Sultan, 11 8, 130 Selim III, Sultan, 137
Seljuk Empire, 81, 85-87, 95, 96
Serbia, 109-10 Seveners. seelsmailis Seville, 105
Shafii madhhak 65
Shafii, Muhammad Idris al-, 59-60,
61,92
Shariah law, 58-62, 64, 84
under Seljuks, 86, 88,96
under Mongols, 100
closing of gates of ijtihad, 103, 123, 152; 104, 116, 125, 128, 129
exalted under Suleiman, 132-33 call for replacement by secular
code, 149
call for reform, 153
replaced with civil system by Pahlavis, 159
in Pakistan, 162-63; 175, 184
Shii Muslims, 36,43, 45, 46,48,49,
52, 54, 56-57
rebellions, 61, 62, 63; 65, 66
and Imamate, 68, 72, 73; 81, 103,
104, 109
dominant under Safavids, 116,117, 118-23
massacred by Ottomans, 130; 134,
158
suppressed by Pahlavis, 160
and Iranian Revolution, 173-75; see also Ismailis and Twelvers
Siddiqui, Dr.Kalim, 176
Siffin, 34
Sikhs, 125, 128
Sind, 32
Sinan Pasha, 132
Sirhindi, Ahmad, 127-29
Six-Day War (1967), 171
Solomon, 8
Sorush, Abdolkarim, 184-85
Soviet Union, 149
Spain, 50, 62
Umayyad caliphate collapses, 83; 105
Sudan, 148,160
Suez Canal, 147,149,151,155
Sufism, 74—76, 83, 85, 86, 87
popularized, 88-92; 101,102, 103,
104,108,110
dominant under Moghuls, 116, 117
promoted by Akbar, 125 under Ottomans, 134 suppressed by Arariirk, 158 drunken sufis, 75,101
Neo-Sufis, 136
sober sufis, 75 Suhayl ibn Amr, 12
Suhrawardi, Yahya, 91-92
Suleiman I (al-Qanuni also the Mag- nificent), 132, 136-37
Sunni Muslims, 63-65
Seljuks as, 85; 87, 96, 103, 109,
116
persecuted in Iran by Ismail, 117-18
tolerated by Akbar, 125; 158
fundamentalism, 170-71, 172 and Malcom X, 177
today, 184-85
Sykes-Picot agreement, 148
Syr River, 81, 85, 97,106, 115
Syria, 27, 29, 30, 32
refuses to accept AH, 34; 44, 52
Ismailis in, 69
under Ismaili Fatimids, 81
taken by Seljuks, 95; 97, 104, 106
under Ottomans, 11 5,132
Napoleon in, 148, 160
Tabari, Abu Jafar, 84 Tabriz, 117
Tahtawi, Rifah al-, 149-50 Taj Mahal, 127, 178
Talhah, 33
Taliban, 163, 170, 172
Tanzimat, 150
taziyeh, 12 1
Tehran hostages, 174
Tigris, River, 54, 97
Timur Lenk (Tamburlaine), 106, 110,
124
Transjordan, 148
Trench, Battle of the, 20, 21, 2 2
Tripoli, 32
Tunis, 105
Tunisia, 69, 105
occupied by French, 148; 183,
185
Turkish migrant workers, 176
Turkey, 148,158, 184
Twelvers, 68-69, 87, 109
declared religion of Safavids, 117; 174
Uhud, Battle of, 20
Umar ibn al-Khattab, Second Caliph, 5, 15, 25, 29-30, 31, 41, 52
Umar II, 50
Umayyad dynasty, 4, 32, 34, 37
caliphs, 41-42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50
brought down by Abbasids, 53, 54,
59, 74
ummah:
ideal of, 6, 11, 13-14, 24-25, 27, 30,
34,74
under Umayyads, 35, 36, 42, 43,45,
47,48, 50
under Seljuks, 84
decline of, 152, 154
United States, Muslims in, 177 Urban II, Pope, 95
Usulis, 122-2 3
Uthman ibn Affan, Third Caliph, 4, 15, 31-32, 34, 35, 46, 49, 52, 65
Umm Salamah (wife of the Prophet), 16
Uzbekhistan, 115
Uzbeks, 118, 124
Uzzah, al-, 8
Valli-UUah, Shah, 129
Velayat-i-Faqih, 174, 175
Vienna, 132
Volga, River, 97
Wahhabism, 135, 161 Walid I, Caliph al-, 50 Waraqa ibn Nawfal, 4 Wasan ibn Ata, 47 women:
converted by the Prophet, 4
women (conl):
Quranic position, 16 fundamentalist discrimination
against, 166, 170, 172
Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, 72 Yarmuk, Battle of, 29
Yasin, Sheikh Ahmed, 156 Yathrib, 13; see Medina Yazid I, 43, 173
Yazid II, 52
Yemen, 69, 85, 135
Zangi, Imad ad-Din, 93 Zayd ibn Ali, 56
Zeroual, President Liamine, 182-83 Zia al-Haqq, President Muhammad,
163
Zoroastrians, 30, 125
Zubayr, 33
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In Karen Armstrong's view, what is the historical mission of Islam? What is the chief duty of Muslims according to the Quran? What is the Islamic notion of salvation?
2. What are the five pillars of Islam? Does Islam place more emphasis on right living or right belief? The community or the individual? In these ways, is it more similar to Chris- tianity or Judaism?
3. At the time of Muhammad, what was the attitude of Islam toward other prophets and religious traditions? How were non-Muslim subjects, or dhimmi, treated in the Islamic empire? How does that treatment compare to what went on in the premodern West?
4. Is Islam a militaristic faith? What does the Quran have to say about just and unjust wars? Given the context of his times, did Muhammad set a particularly violent or non- violent example?
5. What does the Quran teach about the importance of converting people of other faiths? Does Islam condone coerced conversion? How does its theological stance on conversion compare to the teachings and practices of the other major world religions?
230 . DiscussionQuuestions
6. What does the Quran have to say about the place of women? How forward- or backward-thinking was Muham- mad's treatment of women for his time? What accounts for the persistence of a practice such as female veiling in the modern-day Muslim world?
7. What are the differences between Sunni and Shii Mus- lims? What were the origins of this split within Islam? Did it have theological underpinnings or was it merely po- litically motivated?
8. What is the primary meaning of the word jihad? Explain its significance in Islam. How did Muhammad understand it? How do some modern-day fundamentalists understand it?
9. What are the roots of Islamic fundamentalism? How does Islamic fundamentalism compare to fundamentalist move- ments in other faiths? Are there certain of its precepts that make Islam more prone to religious fanaticism? What his- torical factors have contributed to anti-Western fundamen- talism in Islam?
10. What have been some of the successes and failures of modern-day Islamic nation-building? What particular chal- lenges do postcolonial Islamic states face? What has been a common problem with the way secularism has been im- posed in the Muslim world?
11. What are some of the greatest challenges facing the Islamic faith today?
12. What are the most common misperceptions about Islam and the Muslim world in the West?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAREN ARMSTRONG is one of the world's foremost scholars on religious affairs. She is the author of sev- eral bestselling books, including The Battle for God, Jerusalem, The History of God, and Through the Narrow Gate, a memoir of her seven years as a nun. She lives
in London.
TH E MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou Daniel J. Boorstin
A. S. Byatt Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf Ron Chernow Shelby Foote Charles Frazier Vartan Gregorian Richard Howard Charles Johnson Jon Krakauer Edmund Morris Joyce Carol Oates Elaine Pagels John Richardson Salman Rushdie Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See William Styron Gore Vidal
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The principal text of this Modern Library edition was set in a digitized version of Janson,
a typeface that dates from about 1690 and was cut by Nicholas Kis, a Hungarian working in Amsterdam. The original matrices have survived and are held by the Stempel foundry in Germany.
Hermann Zapf redesigned some of the weights and sizes for Stempel, basing his revisions on the original design.
TEACHER'S GUIDE
A free printed Teacher's Guide for Islam by Karen Armstrong is available to educators to help frame in-class discussions through questions that explore reading themes and compre- hension. Appropriate for high school- and college-level stu- dents, the guide also offers useful suggestions for further study and additional thematic resources. Copies may be ob- tained by writing to Random House High School Academic Marketing, MD 11-1,280 Park Avenue, New York, NY 1001 7. Please allow four to six weeks for delivery.
To download the guide, please visit our websites:
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