|
February
6, 2002
David
Vest
The
Enron Creature
February
5, 2002
Norman
Madarasz
Dispatch
from Pôrto Alegre
Tom Malinowski
What
to do with
Our "Detainees"?
Dita Sari
Why
I Rejected the
Reebok Human Rights Award
February
4, 2002
Eric Miller/Beth
Daley
Five
Weapons Systems
That Bilk the Taxpayers
Kenneth
Roth
Dear
Condoleezza,
You've Misstated the
Geneva Convention
Robert
Jensen
The
Occupation Must End
Shahid
Alam
How
Different Are
Islamic Societies?
David
Vest
Everybody
Says I Loathe You
John Chuckman
American
Politics of Grief
February
3, 2002
Zoltan
Grossman
War
and New Military Bases
February
2, 2002
Francis
Schor
Carlucci's
Strange Career
February
1, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
The
Great Ashcroft Cover Up
Jeremy
Voas
Why
We're Suing Ashcroft
David
Vest
10
Things I Know About Him
January
31, 2002
Rahul
Mahajan
The
State of the Union:
A New Cold War
Dave Marsh
Miles
Copeland, War
and the Future of Music
John Pilger
The
Colder War
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Killer Dog, Weird Couple
Dr. Susan
Block
Blowback
and Daniel Pearl
January
30, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Linda
Lay, Hill and Knowlton and the Tears of a Clown
Jack McCarthy
Free
Noelle Bush!
Michael
Ratner
Memo
to Bush: Adhere to
the Geneva Convention
Jay Moore
Proud
to be an American?
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
January
27, 2002
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Enron's
Drip, Drip, Drip
Tom Turnipseed
MLK
Jr.'s Dream Perverted
January
26, 2002
Norman
Madarsz
Adieu,
Bourdieu
January
25, 2002
National
Lawyers Guild
Know
Your Rights
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
February 6,
2002
Mullahs and Heretics
By Tariq Ali
I never believed in God, not even between the
ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was
instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there but
space. It could have been my lack of imagination. In the jasmine--scented
summer nights, long before mosques were allowed to use loudspeakers,
it was enough to savour the silence, look up at the exquisitely
lit sky, count the shooting stars and fall asleep. The early
morning call of the muezzin was a pleasant alarm--clock.
There were many advantages in being an
unbeliever. Threatened with divine sanctions by family retainers,
cousins or elderly relatives -- 'If you do that Allah will be
angry' or 'If you don't do this Allah will punish you' -- I
was unmoved. Let him do his worst, I used to tell myself, but
he never did, and that reinforced my belief in his non--existence.
My parents, too, were non--believers.
So were most of their close friends. Religion played a tiny
part in our Lahore household. In the second half of the last
century, a large proportion of educated Muslims had embraced
modernity. Old habits persisted, nonetheless: the would--be
virtuous made their ablutions and sloped
off to Friday prayers. Some fasted for a few days each year,
usually just before the new moon marking the end of Ramadan.
I doubt whether more than a quarter of the population in the
cities fasted for a whole month. Cafe life continued unabated.
Many claimed that they had fasted so as to take advantage of
the free food doled out at the end of each fasting day by the
mosques or the kitchens of the wealthy. In the countryside fewer
still fasted, since outdoor work was difficult without sustenance,
and especially without water when Ramadan fell during the summer
months. Eid, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, was celebrated
by everyone.
One day, I think in the autumn of 1956
when I was 12, I was eavesdropping on an after--dinner conversation
at home. My sister, assorted cousins and I had been asked nicely
to occupy ourselves elsewhere. Obediently, we moved to an adjoining
room, but then listened, giggling, to a particularly raucous,
wooden--headed aunt and a bony uncle berating my parents in
loud whispers: 'We know what you're like . . . we know you're
unbelievers, but these children should be given a chance . .
. They must be taught their religion.'
The giggles were premature. A few months
later a tutor was hired to teach me the Koran and Islamic history.
'You live here,' my father said. 'You should study the texts.
You should know our history. Later you may do as you wish. Even
if you reject everything, it's always better to know what it
is that one is rejecting.' Sensible enough advice, but regarded
by me at the time as hypocritical and a betrayal. How often
had I heard talk of superstitious idiots, often relatives, who
worshipped a God they didn't have the brains to doubt? Now I
was being forced to study religion. I was determined to sabotage
the process.
It didn't occur to me at the time that
my father's decision may have had something to do with an episode
from his own life. In 1928, aged 12, he had accompanied his
mother and his old wet--nurse (my grandmother's most trusted
maid) on the pilgrimage to perform the hajj ceremony. Women,
then as now, could visit Mecca only if they were accompanied
by a male more than 12 years old. The older men flatly refused
to go. My father, as the youngest male in the family, wasn't
given a choice. His older brother, the most religious member
of the family, never let him forget the pilgrimage: his letters
to my father always arrived with the prefix 'al--Haj' ('pilgrim')
attached to the name, a cause for much merriment at teatime.
Decades later, when the pores of the
Saudi elite were sweating petro--dollars, my father would remember
the poverty he had seen in the Hijaz and recall the tales of
non--Arab pilgrims who had been robbed on the road to Mecca.
In the pre--oil period, the annual pilgrimage had been a major
source of income for the locals, who would often augment their
meagre earnings with well--organised raids on pilgrims' lodgings.
The ceremony itself requires that the pilgrim come clothed in
a simple white sheet and nothing else. All valuables have to
be left behind and local gangs became especially adept at stealing
watches and gold. Soon, the more experienced pilgrims realised
that the 'pure souls' of Mecca weren't above thieving. They
began to take precautions, and a war of wits ensued.
Several years after the trip to the Holy
Land my father became an orthodox Communist and remained one
for the rest of his life. Moscow was now his Mecca. Perhaps
he thought that immersing me in religion at a young age might
result in a similar transformation. I like to think that this
was his real motive, and that he wasn't pandering to the more
dim--witted members of our family. I came to admire my father
for breaking away from what he described as 'the emptiness
of the feudal world'.
Since I did not read Arabic, I could
learn the Koran only by rote. My tutor, Nizam Din, arrived on
the appointed day and thanks to his heroic efforts, I can at
least recite the lines from the opening of the Koran -- 'Alif,
lam, mim . . .' -- followed by the crucial: 'This book is not
to be doubted.' Nizam Din, to my great delight, was not deeply
religious. From his late teens to his late twenties, he had
worn a beard. But by 1940 he'd shaved it off, deserted religion
for the anti--imperialist cause and dedicated himself to left--wing
politics. Like many others he had served a spell in a colonial
prison and been further radicalised. Truth, he would say, was
a very powerful concept in the Koran, but it had never been
translated into practical life because the mullahs had destroyed
Islam.
Nizam Din soon realised that I was bored
by learning Koranic verses and we started to spend the allotted
hour discussing history: the nationalist struggle against British
imperialism, the origins of terrorism in Bengal and the Punjab,
and the story of the Sikh terrorist Bhagat Singh, who had thrown
a bomb in the Punjab Legislative Assembly to protest against
repressive legislation and the 1919 massacre of Jallianwallah
Bagh. Once imprisoned, he had refused to plead for mercy, but
renounced terrorism as a tactic and moved closer to traditional
Marxism. He was tried in secret and executed by the British
in the Central Jail in Lahore, a 15--minute walk from where
Nizam Din was telling me the story. 'If he had lived,' Nizam
Din used to say, 'he would have become a leader the British
really feared. And look at us now. Just because he was a Sikh,
we haven't even marked his martyrdom with a monument.'
Nizam Din remembered the good times when
all the villages in what was now Pakistan had Hindu and Sikh
inhabitants; many of his non--Muslim friends had now left for
India. 'They are pygmies,' he would say of Pakistan's politicians.
'Do you understand what I'm saying, Tariqji? Pygmies! Look at
India. Observe the difference. Gandhi was a giant. Jawaharlal
Nehru is a giant.' Over the years I learned far more about
history, p0litics and everyday life from Nizam Din than I ever
learned at school. But his failure to interest me in religion
had been noted.
A young maternal uncle, who had grown
a beard at an early age, volunteered to take on the task. His
weekly visits to our house, which coincided with my return from
school, irritated me greatly. We would pace the garden while,
in unctuous tones, he related a version of Islamic history
which, like him, was unconvincing and dull. There were endless
tales of heroism, with the Prophet raised to the stature of
a divinity, and a punitive Allah. As he droned on, I would watch
the kites flying and tangling with each other in the afternoon
sky, mentally replay a lost game of marbles, or look forward
to the Test match between Pakistan and the West Indies. Anything
but religion. After a few weeks he, too, gave up, announcing
that my unbeliever's inheritance was too strong.
During the summer months, when the heat
in the plains became unbearable, we would flee to the Himalayan
foothills, to Nathiagali, then a tiny, isolated hill resort
perched on a ridge in a thick pine forest and overlooked by
the peaks. Here, in a relaxed atmosphere with almost no social
restrictions, I met Pashtun boys and girls from the frontier
towns of Peshawar and Mardan, and children from Lahore whom
I rarely saw during the winter became summer friends. I acquired
a taste for freedom. We had favourite hiding places: mysterious
cemeteries where the tombstones had English names on them (many
had died young) and a deserted Gothic church that had been charred
by lightning.
We also explored the many burned houses.
How were they burned? I would ask the locals. Back would come
the casual reply. 'They belonged to Hindus and Sikhs. Our fathers
and uncles burned them.' Why? 'So they could never come back,
of course.' Why? 'Because we are now Pakistan. Their home is
India.' Why, I persisted, when they had lived here for centuries,
just like your families, and spoke the same language, even if
they worshipped different gods? The only reply was a shrug.
It was strange to think that Hindus and Sikhs had been here,
had been killed in the villages in the valleys below. In the
tribal areas -- the no--man's--land between Afghanistan and
Pakistan -- quite a few Hindus stayed on, protected by tribal
codes. The same was true in Afghanistan itself (till the mujahedin
and the Taliban arrived).
One of my favourite spots in Nathiagali
lay between two giant oaks. From here one could watch the sun
set on Nanga Parbat. The snow covering the peak would turn orange,
then crimson, bathing the entire valley in its light. Here we
would breathe the air from China, gaze in the direction of
Kashmir and marvel at the moon. Given all this, why would one
need a multi--layered heaven, let alone the seventh layer that
belonged to us alone -- the Islamic paradise?
One day, to my horror, my mother informed
me that a mullah from a neighbouring mountain village had been
hired to make sure I completed my study of the Koran. She had
pre--empted all my objections. He would explain what each verse
meant. My summer was about to be wrecked. I moaned, groaned,
protested, pleaded and tantrumed. To no avail. My friends were
sympathetic, but powerless: most of them had undergone the same
ritual.
Mullahs, especially the rural variety,
were objects of ridicule, widely regarded as dishonest, hypocritical
and lazy. It was generally believed that they had grown beards
and chosen this path not out of spiritual fervour, but in order
to earn a crust. Unless attached to a mosque, they depended
on voluntary contributions, tuition fees and free meals. The
jokes about them mostly concerned their sexual appetites; in
particular, a penchant for boys below a certain age. The fictional
mullah of the storytellers and puppet--shows who travelled from
village to village was a greedy and lustful arch--villain; he
used religion to pursue his desires and ambitions. He humiliated
and cheated the poor peasants, while toadying to landlords and
potentates.
On the dreaded day, the mullah arrived
and, after eating a hearty lunch, was introduced to me by our
family retainer, Khuda Baksh ('God Bless'), who had served in
my grandfather's household and because of his status and age
enjoyed a familiarity denied to other servants. God Bless was
bearded, a staunch believer in the primacy of Islam, and said
his prayers and fasted regularly. He was, however, deeply hostile
to the mullahs, whom he regarded as pilferers, perverts and
parasites. He smiled as the mullah, a man of medium height in
his late fifties, exchanged greetings with me. We took our seats
round a garden table placed to catch the warming sun. The afternoon
chorus was in full flow. The air smelled of sun--roasted pine
needles and wild strawberries.
When the mullah began to speak I noticed
he was nearly toothless. The rhymed verse at once lost its magic.
The few false teeth he had wobbled. I began to wonder if it
would happen, and then it did: he became so excited with fake
emotion that the false teeth dropped out onto the table. He
smiled, picked them up and put them back in his mouth. At first,
I managed to restrain myself, but then I heard a suppressed
giggle from the veranda and made the mistake of turning round.
God Bless, who had stationed himself behind a large rhododendron
to eavesdrop on the lesson, was choking with silent laughter.
I excused myself and rushed indoors.
The following week, God Bless dared me
to ask the mullah a question before the lesson began. 'Were
your false teeth supplied by the local butcher?' I enquired
with an innocent expression, in an ultra--polite voice. The
mullah asked me to leave: he wished to see my mother alone.
A few minutes later he, too, left, never to return. Later that
day he was sent an envelope full of money to compensate him
for my insolence. God Bless and I celebrated his departure in
the bazaar cafe with mountain tea and home--made biscuits. My
religious studies ended there. My only duty was to substitute
for my father once a year and accompany the male servants to
Eid prayers at the mosque, a painless enough task.
Some years later, when I came to Britain
to study, the first group of people I met were hard--core rationalists.
I might have missed the Humanist Group's stall at the Fresher's
Fair had it not been for a spotty Irishman, dressed in a faded
maroon corduroy jacket, with a mop of untidy dark brown hair,
standing on a table and in a melodious, slightly breathless
voice shouting: 'Down with God!' When he saw me staring, he
smiled and added 'and Allah' to the refrain. I joined on the
spot and was immediately roped into becoming the Humanist rep
at my college. Some time afterwards when I asked how he had
known I was of Muslim origin rather than a Hindu or a Zoroastrian,
he replied that his chant only affected Muslims and Catholics.
Hindus, Sikhs and Protestants ignored him completely.
My knowledge of Islamic history remained
slender and, as the years progressed, Pakistan regressed. Islamic
studies were made compulsory in the 1970s, but children were
given only a tiny sprinkling of history on a foundation of fairytales
and mythology. My interest in Islam lay dormant till the Third
Oil War in 1990.[2] The Second Oil War in 1967 had seen Israel,
backed by the West, inflict a severe defeat on Arab nationalism,
one from which it never really recovered. The 1990 war was accompanied
in the West by a wave of crude anti--Arab propaganda. The level
of ignorance displayed by most pundits and politicians distressed
me, and I began to ask myself questions which, until then, had
seemed barely relevant. Why had Islam not undergone a Reformation?
Why had the Ottoman Empire not been touched by the Enlightenment?
I began to study Islamic history, and later travelled to the
regions where it had been made, especially those in which its
clashes with Christendom had taken place.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all began
as versions of what we would today describe as political movements.
They were credible belief--systems which aimed to make it easier
to resist imperial oppression, to unite a disparate people,
or both. If we look at early Islam in this light, it becomes
apparent that its Prophet was a visionary political leader
and its triumphs a vindication of his action programme. Bertrand
Russell once compared early Islam to Bolshevism, arguing that
both were 'practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win
the empire of this world'. By contrast, he saw Christianity
as 'personal' and 'contemplative'. Whether or not the comparison
is apt, Russell had grasped that the first two decades of Islam
had a distinctly Jacobin feel. Sections of the Koran have the
vigour of a political manifesto, and at times the tone in which
it addresses its Jewish and Christian rivals is as factional
as that of any left--wing organisation. The speed with which
it took off was phenomenal. Academic discussion as to whether
the new religion was born in the Hijaz or Jerusalem or elsewhere
is essentially of archaeological interest. Whatever its precise
origins, Islam replaced two great empires and soon reached
the Atlantic coast. At its height three Muslim empires dominated
large parts of the globe: the Ottomans with Istanbul as their
capital, the Safavids in Persia and the Mughal dynasty in India.
A good place for a historian of Islam
to start would be 629 ad, or Year 8 of the new Muslim calendar,
though that had yet to come into being. In that year, 20 armed
horsemen, led by Sa'd ibn Zayd, were sent by Muhammad to destroy
the statue of Manat, the pagan goddess of fate, at Qudayd, on
the road between Mecca and Medina. For eight years Muhammad
had tolerated the uneasy coexistence of the pagan male god
Allah and his three daughters: al--Lat, al--Uzza and Manat.
Al--Uzza (the morning star, Venus) was the favourite goddess
of the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad belonged, but Manat
was the most popular in the region as a whole, and was idolised
by three key Meccan tribes that Muhammad had been desperately
trying to win over to his new monotheistic religion. By Year
8, however, three important military victories had been won
against rival pagan and Jewish forces. The Battle of Badr had
seen Muhammad triumph against the Meccan tribes despite the
smallness of his army. The tribes had been impressed by the
muscularity of the new religion, and Muhammad must have deemed
further ideological compromise unnecessary. Sa'd ibn Zayd and
his 20 horsemen had arrived to enforce the new monotheism.
The keeper of Manat's sanctuary saw the
horsemen approach, but remained silent as they dismounted. No
greetings were exchanged. Their demeanour indicated that they
had not come to honour Manat or to leave a token offering. The
keeper didn't stand in their way. According to Islamic tradition,
as Sa'd ibn Zayd approached the beautifully carved statue of
Manat, a naked black woman seemed to emerge from nowhere. The
keeper called out: 'Come, O Manat, show the anger of which you
are capable!' Manat began to pull out her hair and beat her
breasts in despair, while cursing her tormentors. Sa'd beat
her to death. Only then did his 20 companions join him. Together
they hacked away until they had destroyed the statue. The sanctuaries
of al--Lat and al--Uzza were dealt with in similar fashion,
probably on the same day.
A seventh--century prophet could not
become the true spiritual leader of a tribal community without
exercising political leadership and, in the Peninsula, mastering
the basics of horsemanship, sword--play and military strategy.
Muhammad had understood the need to delay the final breach
with polytheism until he and his companions were less isolated.
However, once the decision to declare a strict monotheism was
taken, no concessions were granted. The Christian Church had
been forced into a permanent compromise with its pagan forebears,
allowing its new followers to worship a woman who had conceived
a child by God. Muhammad, too, could have picked one of Allah's
daughters to form part of a new constellation -- this might
even have made it easier to attract recruits -- but factional
considerations acted as a restraint: a new religious party had
to distinguish itself forcefully from Christianity, its main
monotheistic rival, while simultaneously marginalising the appeal
of contemporary paganism. The oneness of a patriarchal Allah
appeared the most attractive option, essential not only to
demonstrate the weakness of Christianity, but also to break
definitively with the dominant cultural practices of the Peninsula
Arabs, with their polyandry and their matrilinear past. Muhammad
himself had been the third and youngest husband of his first
wife, Khadija, who died three years before the birth of the
Islamic calendar.
Historians of Islam, following Muhammad's
lead, would come to refer to the pre--Islamic period as the
jahiliyya ('the time of ignorance'), but the influence of its
traditions should not be underestimated. For the pre--Islamic
tribes, the past was the preserve of poets, who also served
as historians, blending myth and fact in odes designed to heighten
tribal feeling. The future was considered irrelevant, the present
all--important. One reason for the tribes' inability to unite
was that the profusion of their gods and goddesses helped to
perpetuate divisions and disputes whose real origins often lay
in commercial rivalries.
Muhammad fully understood this world.
He belonged to the Quraysh, a tribe that prided itself on its
genealogy and claimed descent from Ishmael. Before his marriage,
he had worked as one of Khadija's employees on a merchant caravan.
He travelled a great deal in the region, coming into contact
with Christians, Jews, Magians and pagans of every stripe.
He would have had dealings with two important neighbours: Byzantine
Christians and the fire--worshipping Zoroastrians of Persia.
Muhammad's spiritual drive was fuelled
by socio--economic ambitions: by the need to strengthen the
commercial standing of the Arabs, and to impose a set of common
rules. He envisioned a tribal confederation united by common
goals and loyal to a single faith which, of necessity, had to
be new and universal. Islam was the cement he used to unite
the Arab tribes; commerce was to be the only noble occupation.
This meant that the new religion was both nomadic and urban.
Peasants who worked the land were regarded as servile and inferior.
A hadith (a reported saying of Muhammad's) quotes the Prophet's
words on sighting a ploughshare: 'That never enters the house
of the faithful without degradation entering at the same time.'
Certainly the new rules made religious observance in the countryside
virtually impossible. The injunction to pray five times a day,
for example, played an important part in inculcating military
discipline, but was difficult to manage outside the towns.
What was wanted was a community of believers in urban areas,
who would meet after prayers and exchange information. Unsurprisingly,
peasants found it impossible to do their work and fulfil the
strict conditions demanded by the new faith. They were the last
social group to accept Islam, and some of the earliest deviations
from orthodoxy matured in the Muslim countryside.
The military successes of the first Muslim
armies were remarkable. The speed of their advance startled
the Mediterranean world, and the contrast with early Christianity
could not have been more pronounced. Within twenty years of
Muhammad's death in 632, his followers had laid the foundations
of the first Islamic empire in the Fertile Crescent. Impressed
by these successes, whole tribes embraced the new religion.
Mosques began to appear in the desert, and the army expanded.
Its swift triumphs were seen as a sign that Allah was both omnipotent
and on the side of the Believers.
These victories were no doubt possible
only because the Persian and Byzantine Empires had been engaged
for almost a hundred years in a war that had enfeebled both
sides, alienated their populations and created an opening for
the new conquerors. Syria and Egypt were part of the Byzantine
Empire; Iraq was ruled by Sassanid Persia. All three now fell
to the might and fervour of a unified tribal force.
Force of numbers didn't come into it
-- nor did military strategy, although the ability of the Muslim
generals to manoeuvre their camel cavalry and combine it with
an effective guerrilla--style infantry confused an enemy used
to small--scale nomadic raids. Much more important was the
active sympathy which a sizeable minority of the local people
demonstrated for the invaders. A majority remained passive,
waiting to see which side would prevail, but they were no longer
prepared to fight for or help the old empires.
The fervour of the unified tribes, on
the other hand, cannot be explained simply by the appeal of
the new religion or promises of untold pleasures in Paradise.
The tens of thousands who flocked to fight under Khalid ibn
al--Walid wanted the comforts of this world
In 638, soon after the Muslim armies
took Jerusalem, Caliph Umar visited the city to enforce peace
terms. Like other Muslim leaders of the period, he was modestly
dressed; he was also dusty from the journey, and his beard was
untrimmed. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who greeted
him, was taken aback by Umar's appearance and the absence of
any attendant pomp. The chronicles record that he turned to
a servant and said in Greek: 'Truly this is the abomination
of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet as standing in
the holy place.'
The 'abomination of desolation' did not
remain for long in Jerusalem. The strategic victories against
the Byzantines and the Persians had been so easily achieved
that the Believers were now filled with a sense of their own
destiny. After all, they were, in their own eyes, the people
whose leader was the final Prophet, the last ever to receive
the message of God. Muhammad's vision of a universal religion
as precursor to a universal state had captured the imagination,
and furthered the material interests, of the tribes. When German
tribes took Rome in the fifth century, they insisted on certain
social privileges but they succumbed to a superior culture and,
with time, accepted Christianity. The Arabs who conquered Persia
preserved their monopoly of power by excluding non--Arabs from
military service and temporarily restricting intermarriage,
but although willing to learn from the civilisations they had
overpowered, they were never tempted to abandon their language,
their identity or their new faith.
The development of medicine, a discipline
in which Muslims later excelled, provides an interesting example
of the way knowledge travelled, was adapted and matured in the
course of the first millennium. Two centuries before Islam,
the city of Gondeshapur in south--western Persia became a refuge
for dissident intellectuals and freethinkers facing repression
in their own cities. The Nestorians of Edessa fled here in 489
after their school was closed. When, forty years later, the
Emperor Justinian decreed that the school of Neoplatonic philosophers
in Athens be closed, its students and teachers, too, made the
long trek to Gondeshapur. News of this city of learning spread
to neighbouring civilisations. Scholars from India and, according
to some, even China arrived to take part in discussions with
Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Christians and Syrians. The discussions
ranged over a wide variety of subjects, but it was the philosophy
of medicine that attracted the largest numbers.
Theoretical instruction in medicine was
supplemented by practice in a bimaristan (hospital), making
the citizens of Gondeshapur the most cared for in the world.
The first Arab who earned the title of physician, Harith bin
Kalada, was later admitted to the Court of the Persian ruler
Chosroes Anushirwan and a conversation between the two men was
recorded by scribes. According to this the physician advised
the ruler to avoid over--eating and undiluted wine, to drink
plenty of water every day, to avoid sex while drunk and to
have baths after meals. He is reputed to have pioneered enemas
to deal with constipation.
Medical dynasties were well established
in the city by the time of the Muslim conquest in 638. Arabs
began to train in Gondeshapur's medical schools and the knowledge
they acquired began to spread throughout the Muslim Empire.
Treatises and documents began to flow. Ibn Sina and al--Razi,
the two great Muslim philosopher--physicians of Islam, were
well aware that the basis of their medical knowledge derived
from a small town in Persia.
A new Islamic civilisation emerged, in
which the arts, literature and philosophy of Persia became part
of a common heritage. This was an important element in the defeat
by the Abbasids, the cosmopolitan Persian faction within Islam,
of the narrow nationalism of the Arab Umayyads in 750. Their
victory reflected the transcending of Arabism by Islam, though
the last remaining prince of the Umayyads, Abdel Rahman, managed
to escape to al--Andalus, where he founded a caliphate in Cordoba.
Rahman had to deal with the Jewish and Christian cultures he
found there, and his city came to rival Baghdad as a cosmopolitan
centre.
Caliph Umar's successors fanned out from
Egypt to North Africa. A base was established and consolidated
in the Tunisian city of al--Qayrawan, and Carthage became a
Muslim city. Musa bin Nusayr, the Arab governor of Ifriqiya
(present--day Libya, Tunisia and most of Algeria), established
the first contact with continental Europe. He received promises
of support and much encouragement from Count Julian, the Exarch
of Septem (Ceuta in Morocco). In April 711, Musa's leading lieutenant,
Tarik bin Ziyad, assembled an army of 7000 men, and crossed
over to Europe near the rock which still bears his name, Jabal
Tarik (or Gibraltar). Once again, the Muslim armies profited
from the unpopul--arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik
defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to
join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the
autumn, Cordoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear
that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious
Musa bin Nusayr left Morocco with 10,000 men to join his victorious
subordinate in Toledo. Together, the two armies marched north
and took Zaragoza. Most of Spain was now under their control,
largely thanks to the population's refusal to defend the ancien
regime. The two Muslim leaders planned to cross the Pyrenees
and march to Paris.
Rather than obtain permission from the
Caliph in Damascus, however, they had merely informed him of
their progress. Angered by their cavalier attitude to authority,
the Commander of the Faithful dispatched messengers to summon
the conquerors of Spain to the capital; they never saw Europe
again. Others carried on the struggle, but the impetus was lost.
At the Battle of Poitiers in October 732, Charles Martel's forces
marked the end of the first Muslim century by inflicting a sobering
defeat on the soldiers of the Prophet: naval bases remained
in the South of France -- at Nice and Marseille, for example
-- but, for now, Islam was largely confined to the Iberian peninsula.
A century later, the Arabs took Sicily, but could only threaten
the mainland. Palermo became a city of a hundred mosques; Rome
remained sacrosanct. Xenophobic northern Italians still refer
to Sicilians as 'Arabs'.
In 958, Sancho the Fat left his cold
and windy castle in the Kingdom of Navarre in search of a cure
for obesity, and went south to Cordoba, the capital of the western
caliphate and, thanks to Caliph Abderrahman III, Europe's main
cultural centre. Its closest rival lay in distant Mesopotamia,
where a caliph from another dynasty presided over Baghdad. Both
cities were renowned for their schools and libraries, musicians
and poets, physicians and astronomers, mullahs and heretics,
and also for their taverns and dancing girls. Cordoba had the
edge in dissent. There, Islamic hegemony was not forcibly imposed;
there had been genuine debates between the three religions,
producing a synthesis from which native Islam benefited greatly.
The Great Mosque in Cordoba could only
have been created by men who had participated in the city's
intellectual ferment. The architects who built it in the eighth
century understood that it was to represent a culture opposed
to the Christian one which chose to occupy space with graven
images. A mosque is intended as a void: all paths lead to emptiness,
reality is affirmed through its negation. In the void, only
the Word exists, but in Cordoba (and not only there) the Mosque
was also intended as a political space, one in which the Koran
might be discussed and analysed. The philosopher--poet Ibn
Hazm would sit amid the sacred columns and chastise those Believers
who refused to demonstrate the truth of ideas through argument.
They would shout back that the use of the dialectic was forbidden.
'Who has forbidden it?' Ibn Hazm would demand, implying that
they were the ones who were the enemies of true faith. In Baghdad
they spoke half in admiration, half in fear, of the 'Andalusian
heresy'.
It would be hundreds of years before
this culture was obliterated. The fall of Granada, the last
Muslim kingdom in al--Andalus, in 1492 marked the completion
of that process: the first of Europe's attempted final solutions
was the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian
peninsula. When he visited Cordoba in 1526, Charles I of Spain
rebuked his priests: 'You have built what can be seen anywhere
and destroyed what is unique.' The remark was generous enough,
but Charles had not realised that the mosque had been preserved
at all only because of the church that now lay inside it.
At the beginning of the 11th century,
the Islamic world stretched from Central Asia to the Atlantic
coast, though its political unity had been disrupted soon after
the victory of the Abbasids. Three centres of power emerged:
Baghdad, Cordoba and Cairo, each with its own caliph. Soon
after the death of the Prophet, Islam had divided into two major
factions, the Sunni majority and a Shia minority. The Sunnis
ruled in al--Andalus, Algeria and Morocco in the Maghreb, Iran,
Iraq and the regions beyond the Oxus. The Fatimid caliphs belonged
to the Shia tradition, which claimed descent from the fourth
Caliph, Ali, and his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet.
The Fatimid caliphs had ruled parts of North Africa and lived
in Tunisia till a Fatimid expeditionary force under the command
of the legendary Slav General Jawhar captured Egypt, and Jahwar
established a dynasty complete with caliph and built a new
city -- Cairo.
Each of these regions had different traditions,
and each had its own material interests and needs, which determined
its policy of alliances and coexistence with the non--Islamic
world. Religion had played a major part in building the new
empire, but its rapid growth had created the conditions for
its own dismemberment. Baghdad, the most powerful of the three
caliphates, lacked the military strength and the bureaucracy
needed to administer such a large empire. Sectarian schisms,
notably a thirty--year war between the Sunni and Shia factions,
had also played their part. Key rulers, politicians and military
leaders in both camps had died in the years immediately preceding
the First Crusade. 'This year,' the historian Ibn Taghribirdi
wrote in 1094, 'is called the year of the death of caliphs and
commanders.' The deaths sparked off wars of succession in both
Sunni and Shia camps, further weakening the Arab world. The
notion of a monolithic and all--powerful Islamic civilisation
had ceased to have any purchase by the beginning of the 11th
century, and probably earlier.
In 1099, after a forty--day siege, the
Crusaders took Jerusalem. The killing lasted two whole days,
at the end of which most of the Muslim population -- men, women
and children -- had been killed. Jews had fought with Muslims
to defend the city, but the entry of the Crusaders created
panic. In remembrance of tradition, the Elders instructed the
Jewish population to gather in the synagogue and to offer up
a collective prayer. The Crusaders surrounded the building,
set fire to it and made sure that every single Jew burned to
death.
News of the massacres spread slowly through
the Muslim world. The Caliph al--Mustazhir was relaxing in his
palace in Baghdad when the venerable qadi[4] Abu Sa'ad al--Harawi,
his head clean--shaven in mourning, burst into the royal quarters.
He had left Damascus three weeks earlier, and the scene he encountered
in the palace did not please him:
How dare you slumber in the shade of
complacent safety, leading lives as frivolous as garden flowers,
while your brothers in Syria have no dwelling place save the
saddles of camels and the bellies of vultures? Blood has been
spilled! Beautiful young girls have been shamed . . . Shall
the valorous Arabs resign themselves to insult and the valiant
Persians accept dishonour . . . Never have the Muslims been
so humiliated. Never have their lands been so savagely devastated.
The Crusaders settled in the region in
the course of the 12th century, and many Muslim potentates,
imagining that they were there to stay, began to collaborate
with them commercially and militarily. A few of the Crusaders
broke with Christian fundamentalism and made peace with their
neighbours, but a majority continued to terrorise their Muslim
and Jewish subjects, and reports of their violence circulated.
In 1171, a Kurdish warrior, Salah al--Din (Saladin), defeated
the Fatimid regime in Cairo and was acclaimed Sultan of Egypt.
A few months later, on the death of his patron Nur al--Din,
he marched to Damascus with his army and was made its Sultan.
City after city accepted his suzerainty. The Caliph was afraid
that Baghdad, too, would fall under the spell of the young conqueror.
Though there was never any question of his assuming the Caliphate
itself -- caliphs had to be from the Quraysh, and Saladin was
a Kurd -- there may have been some concern that he would take
the Caliphate under his aegis, as previous sultans had done.
Saladin knew this, but he also knew that the Syrian aristocracy
resented his Kurdish origins and 'low upbringing'. It was best
not to provoke them, and others like them, at a time when maximum
unity was necessary. Saladin stayed away from Baghdad.
The union of Egypt and Syria, symbolised
by prayers offered in the name of the one Caliph in the mosques
of Cairo and Damascus, formed the basis for a concerted assault
against the Crusaders. Patiently, Saladin embarked on an undertaking
that had until then proved impossible: the creation of a unified
Muslim army to liberate Jerusalem. The barbarousness of the
First Crusade was of enormous assistance to him in uniting his
soldiers: 'Regard the Franj,' he exhorted them. 'Behold with
what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the
Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war.'
Saladin's long march ended in victory:
Jerusalem was taken in 1187 and once again made an open city.
The Jews were provided with subsidies to rebuild their synagogues;
the churches were left untouched. No revenge killings were
permitted. Like Caliph Umar five hundred years before him, Saladin
proclaimed the freedom of the city for worshippers of all faiths.
But his failure to take Tyre was to prove costly. Pope Urban
despatched the Third Crusade to take back the Holy City, and
Tyre became the base of its operations. Its leader, Richard
Plantagenet, reoccupied Acre, executing prisoners and slaughtering
its inhabitants. Jerusalem, however, could not be retaken. For
the next seven hundred years, with the exception of one short--lived
and inconsequential Crusader occupation, the city remained under
Muslim rule, and no blood was spilled.
The Crusades had disrupted a world already
in slow decline. Saladin's victories had temporarily halted
the process, but the internal structures of the Caliphate were
damaged beyond repair, and new invaders were on the way. A Mongol
army from Central Asia led by Timur (Marlowe's Tamburlaine)
laid siege to Baghdad in 1401, calling on the Caliph to surrender
and promising that if he did so, the city would be spared.
Foolish and vain till the last, the Caliph refused, and the
Mongol armies sacked the city. A whole culture perished as libraries
were put to the torch, and Baghdad never recovered its pre--eminence
as the capital of Islamic civilisation.
Despite its presence in India, which
its armies had first entered in the eighth century, and, later,
in north--western China, and despite its merchant fleets trading
in the Indonesian archipelago, in southern China, and off the
east and west coasts of Africa, Islam's centre of gravity was
by the 14th century moving in the direction of the Bosphorus.
On four occasions Muslim armies had laid siege to Constantinople,
the capital of Eastern Christianity. Each time the city had
survived. But from 1300, the frontier emirate of Anatolia began
slowly to eat into Byzantine territory, and in 1453 old dreams
were realised and the ancient city of Byzantium acquired its
present name: Istanbul. Its new ruler was Mehmet II, whose forebear,
Uthman, had founded the dynasty bearing his name over a hundred
years earlier.
The Ottoman dynasty inaugurated its reign
by opening a new Islamic front in South--East Europe, just as
Islamic civilisation was about to collapse in the Iberian peninsula.
In the course of the 14th century, the Ottomans took Hungary,
swallowed the Balkans, nibbled away at the Ukraine and Poland,
and threatened Vienna. Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries,
a majority of Muslims lived under the rule of the Ottoman, the
Safavid (Persian) or the Mughal (Indian) empires. The Sultan
in Istanbul was recognised as Caliph by the majority and became
the caretaker of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Arabic
remained the religious language but Turkish became the Court
vernacular, used by the ruling family and administrative and
military elites throughout the Empire, though most of the religious,
scientific, literary and legal vocabulary was lifted from Persian
and Arabic. The Ottoman state, which was to last five hundred
years, recognised and protected the rights of Christians and
Jews. Many of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal after
the Reconquest were granted refuge in Ottoman lands and a large
number returned to the Arab world, settling not just in Istanbul,
but in Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus.
Jews were not the only privileged refugees.
During the wars of the Reformation German, French and Czech
Protestants fleeing Catholic revenge--squads were also given
protection by the Ottoman sultans. Here, there was an additional
political motive. The Ottoman state closely followed developments
in the rest of Europe, and vigorously defended its interests
by means of diplomatic, trade and cultural alliances with major
powers. The Pope, however, was viewed with suspicion, and revolts
against Catholicism were welcomed in Istanbul.
Ottoman sultans began to feature in Eur--opean
folklore, often demonised and vulgarised, but the sultans themselves
were always conscious of their place in geography and history,
as evidenced in this modest letter of introduction sent by Suleiman
the Magnificent, who reigned from 1520 to
1566, to the French King:
I who am the Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign
of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs on the
face of the earth, the shadow of God on Earth, the Sultan and
sovereign lord of the White Sea and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia
and of Anatolia, of Karamania, of the land of Rum, of Zulkadria,
of Diyarbekir, of Kurdistan, of Aizerbaijan, of Persia, of
Damascus, of Aleppo, of Cairo, of Mecca, of Medina, of Jerusalem,
of all Arabia, of Yemen and of many other lands which my noble
fore--fathers and my glorious ancestors (may Allah light up
their tombs!) conquered by the force of their arms and which
my August Majesty has made subject to my flaming sword and my
victorious blade, I, Sultan Suleiman Khan, son of Sultan Selim,
son of Sultan Bayezid: To thee, who art Francis, King of the
land of France.
The tolerance shown to Jews and Protestants
was rarely, if ever, extended to heretics within Islam, however.
The mullahs ensured that punishment was brutal and swift. To
deter heresies they jealously safeguarded their monopoly of
information and power, opposing all moves to import a printing
press to Istanbul. 'Remember Martin Luther,' the qadi warned
the Sultan. The Reformation could be supported because it served
to divide Christianity, but the very idea of a Muslim Luther
was unacceptable. The clerics knew the early history of Islam
and were determined not to repeat it.
Unlike Christianity, Islam had not spent
its first hundred years in the wilderness. Instead, its early
leaders had rapidly found themselves at the head of large empires,
and a great deal of improvisation had been required. According
to some scholars, the first authorised version of the Koran
was published some thirty years after the death of Muhammad,
its accuracy guaranteed by the third Caliph, Uthman. Others
argued that it appeared much later, but Koranic prescriptions,
while quite detailed on certain subjects, could not provide
the complete code of social and political conduct needed to
assert an Islamic hegemony. The hadith filled the gap: it consisted
of what the Prophet had said at a particular time to X or Y,
who had then passed it on to Z, who had informed the author,
who in turn recorded the 'tradition'. Christianity had done
something similar, but confined it to four gospels, editing
out or smoothing over contradictions along the way. Scholars
and scribes began collating the hadith in the seventh and eighth
centuries, and there have been ferocious arguments regarding
the authenticity of particular traditions ever since. It is
likely that more than 90 per cent of them were invented.
The point is not their authenticity,
however, but the political role they have played in Islamic
societies. The origins of Shi'ism, for example, lie in a disputed
succession. After Muhammad's death, his Companions elected
Abu--Bakr as his successor and, after his death, Umar. If Ali,
Muhammad's son--in--law, resented this, he did not protest.
His anger was provoked, however, by the election of the third
Caliph, Uthman. Uthman, from the Umayya clan, represented the
tribal aristocracy of Mecca, and his victory annoyed a loyalist
old guard. Had the new Caliph been younger and more vigorous
he might have managed to effect a reconciliation, but Uthman
was in his seventies, an old man in a hurry, and he appointed
close relatives and clan members to key positions in the newly
conquered provinces. In 656 he was murdered by Ali's supporters,
whereupon Ali was anointed as the new Caliph.
Islam's first civil war followed. Two
old Companions, Talha and al--Zubair, called on troops who had
been loyal to Uthman to rebel against Ali. They were joined
by Aisha, the Prophet's young widow. Aisha, mounted on a camel,
exhorted her troops to defeat the usurper at Basra, in what
has come to be known as the Battle of the Camel, but it was
Ali's army that triumphed. Talha and al--Zubair died in the
battle; Aisha was taken prisoner and returned to Medina, where
she was placed under virtual house--arrest. Another battle took
place, in which Ali was outmanoeuvred by the Umayyads. His
decision to accept arbitration and defeat annoyed hardliners
in his own faction, and in 661 he was assassinated outside a
mosque in Kufa. His opponent, the brilliant Umayyad General
Muawiya, was recognised as Caliph, but Ali's sons refused to
accept his authority and were defeated and killed in the Battle
of Kerbala by Muawiya's son Yazid. That defeat led to a permanent
schism within Islam. Henceforth, Ali's faction -- or shiat --
were to create their own traditions, dynasties and states, of
which modern Iran is the most prominent example.
It would have been surprising if these
military and intellectual civil wars -- tradition v. counter--tradition,
differing schools of interpretation, disputes about the authenticity
of the Koran itself -- had not yielded a fine harvest of sceptics
and heretics. What is remarkable is that so many of them were
tolerated for so long. Those who challenged the Koran were usually
executed, but many poets, philosophers and heretics expanded
the frontiers of debate and dissent. Andalusian philosophers,
for example, usually debated within the codes of Islam, but
the 12th--century Cordoban, Ibn Rushd, occasionally transgressed
them. Known in the Latin world as Averroes, he was the son and
grandson of qadis, and his other grandfather had served as the
Imam of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Ibn Rushd himself had been
the qadi in both Seville and Cordoba, though he had to flee
the latter when the mullahs banned him from entering the Great
Mosque and ordered his books to be burned. These clashes with
orthodoxy sharpened his mind, but also put him on his guard.
When the enlightened Sultan Abu Yusuf questioned him about the
nature of the sky, the astronomer--philosopher did not initially
reply. Abu Yusuf persisted: 'Is it a substance which has existed
for all eternity or did it have a beginning?' Only when the
ruler indicated his awareness of ancient philosophy did Ibn
Rushd respond by explaining why rationalist methods were superior
to religious dogma. When the Sultan indicated that he found
some of Aristotle's work obscure and wished it to be explained,
Ibn Rushd obliged with his Commentaries, which attracted the
attention of Christian and Jewish theologians. The Commentaries
served a dual function. They were an attempt to systematise
Aristotle's vast body of work and to introduce rationalism and
anti--mysticism to a new audience, but also to move beyond it
and promote rational thought as a virtue in itself.
Two centuries earlier, Ibn Sina (980--1037),
a Persian scholar known in the Latin world as Avicenna, had
laid the basis for a study of logic, science, philosophy, politics
and medicine. His skills as a physician led his employers,
the native rulers of Khurasan and Isfahan, to seek his advice
on political matters. Often, he gave advice that annoyed his
patrons, and had to leave town in a hurry. His Kanun fi'l--tibb
('Medical Canon') became the major textbook in medical schools
throughout the Islamic world -- sections of it are still used
in contemporary Iran. His Kitab al--Insaf ('Book of Impartial
Judgment'), dealing with 28,000 different philosophical questions,
was lost when Isfahan was sacked during his lifetime by a rival
potentate: he had lodged his only copy at the local library.
The stories of Ibn Hazm, Ibn Sina and
Ibn Rushd demonstrate the potential for semi--official thought
during Islam's first five hundred years. The last two, in particular,
chafed at the restrictions of religious orthodoxy, but like
Galileo after them, chose to live and continue their researches
in preference to martyrdom. Others, however, were more outspoken.
The ninth--century Baghdad heretic, Ibn al--Rawandi, wrote several
books that questioned the basic principles of monotheism. The
Mu'tazilite sect, to which he had once belonged, believed that
it was possible to combine rationalism and belief in one God.
They questioned the Revelation, rejected predestination, insisted
that the Koran was a created and not a revealed book, and criticised
the quality of its composition, its lack of eloquence and the
impurity of its language. Only Reason dictated obligation to
God.[7] Ibn al--Rawandi went further still, arguing that religious
dogma was always inferior to reason, because only through reason
could one attain integrity and moral stature. The ferocity of
his assault first surprised, then united Islamic and Jewish
theologians, who denounced him mercilessly. None of his original
work has survived, and we know of him and his writings mainly
through Muslim and Jewish critics' attempts to refute his heresies.
However, he also makes a remarkable appearance in the work of
the poet--philosopher Abu al--Ala al--Ma'ari (973--1058), whose
epic poem Risalat al--Ghufran ('Treatise on Forgiveness'), set
in Paradise and Hell, has Ibn al--Rawandi berating God: 'Thou
didst apportion the means of livelihood to Thy creatures like
a drunk revealing his churlishness. Had a man made such a division,
we would have said to him: "You swindler! Let this teach
you a lesson."'
The guardians of Islam during the Ottoman
period knew this history well and were determined to prevent
any challenge to Muslim orthodoxy. This may have preserved the
dynasty, but it sank the Empire. By keeping Western European
inventions, ideologies and scientific advances at bay, the clerics
sealed the fate of the caliphate. But in the view of the majority
of Muslims, the Ottomans had preserved the Islamic heritage,
extended the frontiers of their religion, and, in the Arab East,
created a new synthesis: an Ottoman Arab culture that united
the entire region by means of a state bureaucracy presiding
over a common administration and financial system. The Ottoman
state, like other Muslim empires of the period, was characterised
by three basic features: the absence of private property in
the countryside, where the cultivator did not own and the owner
(the state) did not cultivate; the existence of a powerful,
non--hereditary bureaucratic elite in the administrative centres;
and a professional, trained army with a slave component.
By abolishing the traditional tribal
aristocracy and forbidding the ownership of landed estates,
the Ottomans had preserved their position as the only dynasty
in the Empire, and the only repository of a quasi--divine power.
To combat dynastic threats, they created a civil service recruited
from every part of the Empire. The devshirme system forced
Christian families in the Balkans and elsewhere to part with
a son, who became the property of the state. He was sheltered,
fed and educated until he was old enough to train in the academy
as a soldier or bureaucrat. Thus Circassians, Albanians, Slavs,
Greeks, Armenians and even Italians rose to occupy the highest
offices of the Empire.
Traditional hostility to the ploughshare
determined the urban bias of the dynasties that ruled large
tracts of the Islamic world, but to what extent was this attitude
also responsible for the absence of landed property? This was
not a local phenomenon: not one of the caliphates favoured the
creation of a landed gentry or peasant--ownership or the existence
of communal lands. Any combination of these would have aided
capital--formation, which might have led to industrialisation,
as it later did in Western Europe. The sophisticated agricultural
techniques employed by the Arabs in Spain can be adduced to
prove that working on the land was not taboo, but these techniques
were generally confined to land surrounding towns, where cultivation
was intense and carried out by the townsfolk. Rural land was
rented from the state by middlemen, who in turn hired peasants
to work on it. Some of the middlemen did become wealthy, but
they lived and spent their money in the towns.
In Western Europe, the peculiarities
of the feudal system -- the relative autonomy enjoyed by village
communities organised round communal lands, combined with the
limited but real sovereignties of vassals, lords and liege lords
-- encouraged the growth of small towns in the Middle Ages.
The countryside still dominated, but political power was feudal
power -- that is, it wasn't centralised. In the towns, trade
and manufacturing was controlled by the guilds. In this arrangement
lay the origins of modern capitalism. The subordination of the
countryside in the Islamic world, with its a rigidly dynastic
political structure dependent on a turbulent military caste,
meant that the caliphates could not withstand the political
and economic challenge posed by Western Europe. Radical nationalist
impulses began to develop in the Ottoman lands as early as the
late 18th century, when Turkish officers, influenced by the
French Revolution and, much later, by Comte, began to plot against
the regime in Istanbul. The main reason that the Ottomans staggered
on till the First World War is that the three vultures eyeing
the prey -- the British Empire, tsarist Russia and the Habsburgs
-- could not agree on a division of the spoils. The only solution
appeared to be to keep the Empire on its knees.
The First World War ended with the defeat
of the Ottomans, who had aligned themselves with the Kaiser.
As the triumphant powers were discussing how to divide their
booty, a Turkish nationalist force led by Kemal Pasha (later
Ataturk) staked its claim to what is now Turkey, preventing
the British from handing over Istanbul to the Greeks. For the
first time in its history, thanks to Ataturk, Islam was without
a caliph or even a pretender. Britain would have preferred to
defeat and dump Ataturk, while hanging on to the Caliph, who
could have become a pensioner of imperialism, kept for ceremonial
occasions, like the last Mughal in Delhi before the 1857 Mutiny.
It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert
that provided the old religion with the means and wherewithal
to revive its culture while Britain created new sultans and
emirs to safeguard their newest and most precious commodity.
Throughout the 20th century, the West, to safeguard its own
economic interests, supported the most backward, despotic and
reactionary survivals from the past, helping to defeat all forms
of secularism. As we know, the story is unfinished.
Tariq Ali
is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. He is the author of
The
Stone Woman. His new book The
Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
will be published in April by Verso.
|