recent reading: destiny disrupted

I guess this is maybe the rhythm this blog will take - inactivity punctuated by a few blog posts at once. Some more recent reading, specifically Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, a broad history of the Islamic world, framed as a corrective to "world histories" that are really histories of Europe and the United States, in which the rest of the world is assigned roles in the form as "encounters" with Asia, with Africa, with Islam, etc.

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When the ideal future envisioned by postindustrialized, Western democratic society is taken as the endpoint of history, the shape of the narrative leading to the here-and-now features something like the following stages:

1: Birth of civilization (Egypt and Mesopotamia)
2: Classical age (Greece and Rome)
3: The Dark Ages (rise of Christianity)
4: The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation
5: The Enlightenment
6: The Revolutions
7: Rise of the Nation-States
8: World Wars I and II
9: The Cold War
10: The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism

But what if we look at the world through Islamic eyes?

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1: Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia
2: Birth of Islam
3: The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity
4: Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates
5: Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols
6: Rebirth: The Three-Empires Era
7: Permeation of East by West
8: The Reform Movements
9: Triumph of the Secular Modernists
10: The Islamist Reaction

Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West has constructed an Orientalist fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a sinister sense of "otherness" is mingled with envious images of decadent opulance. Well, yes, to the extent that Islam has entered the Western imagination [at all], that has more or less been the depiction.

But more intriguing to me is the relative absence of any depictions at all. In Shakespeare's day, for example, preeminent world power was centered in three Islamic empires. Where are all the Muslims in his canon? Missing. If you didn't know Moors were Muslims, you wouldn't learn it from Othello.

Going to college when I did -- I imagine this is true for all humani... humanitists? humanities majors, whatever, of a certain age range -- Said's Orientalism was one of the core texts pretty much everybody read, along with something by Foucault and something on gender. It's interesting that because of that I sort of stopped thinking about Said at all for a number of years -- sort of abandoning him as undergraduate fodder. He's certainly not faultless -- in many ways he's like Elaine Pagels, in that he became associated with a specific niche of valuable scholarship, so that any time you have a conversation that is too near that topic, you have to bring him up, which preserves his relevance and sometimes acts to prevent his replacement.

Anyway, the larger point here is precisely what Ansary says: how much did you hear about Islam (especially outside of the Crusades and the 20th century) in your history classes before college? I would bet very little; like Ansary, I've worked on history textbooks, though I've never been part of the planning process or (as he talks about in the introduction) had my plans to include Islam continually shot down. But it does give me a somewhat wider view of what's commonly covered than I would have if I were only relying on my own idiosyncratic high school experience. (That said, I took all the history electives I could and still don't remember learning much about Islam. I dropped out of the honors program almost immediately in disgust over other matters, but I think the only history class that would have impacted was an American history class.)

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On the Shi'ites and Sunni, their different usages of the word "imam," and their different perceptions of Mohammed's specialness:

Originally, imam was simply the term for a person who led communal prayer. To most Muslims, that's still what the word means today. ... but when Shi'i say "imam," they mean something considerably more elevated. To Shi'i there is always one imam in the world, and there is never more than one. They proceed from the premise that Mohammed had some palpable mystical substance vested in him by Allah, some energy, some light, which they call the baraka of Mohammed. When the Prophet died, that light passed into Ali, at which moment Ali became the first imam...

The mainstream doctrine, as articulated by Abu Bakr and Omar, said that Mohammed was strictly a messenger delivering a set of instructions about how to live. The message was the great and only thing. Beyond delivering the Qur'an, Mohammed's religious significance was only his sunna, the example he set by his way of life, an example others could follow if they wanted to life in God's favor. People who accepted this doctrine eventually came to be known as Sunnis, and they comprise nine-tenths of the Muslim community today.

The Shi'i, by contrast, felt that they couldn't make themselves worthy of heaven simply by their own efforts ... they wanted to believe that direct guidance from God was still coming into the world, through some chosen person who could bathe other believers in a soul-saving grace, some living figure who would keep the world warm and pure. They adopted the term imam for this reassuring figure.

Put aside the Islamic specifics of this dispute for a moment and consider the generalities. These are conflicts we see again and again in the early development of religions. Christianity argued fiercely over the nature of Christ. The shape of those arguments, how they were resolved and why, differ from the early Muslim arguments because of some key social differences -- specifically, Mohammed was a political and military leader who needed an immediate successor one way or the other, while Jesus was a religious leader in a time and place where the normal response to the death of a religious leader was for his disciples to go their separate ways. The Christ arguments take place long, long after the death of Jesus, when those disciples had founded movements of their own in Jesus's name, not all of which agreed on cultural, legal, or theological points, whereas the Mohammed arguments -- though they continue to transpire for generations -- begin immediately.

But in any event, in both cases there are arguments not just about the correct way to continue but, in time, arguments about the nature of the leader: was he important principally as a vessel for his message (which becomes the dominant Muslim view of Mohammed) or is his message inseparable from his own divine character (which becomes the dominant Christian view of Jesus)? These are not uniquely Abrahamic dilemmas. Similar questions are raised about the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (and for that matter invoked by disagreements over which other figures are buddhas), for instance, and not just within Buddhism. Because Gautama's work began in India, there are Hindu schools of thought that consider him an avatar of Vishnu, even though this is (many Buddhists would say) incompatible with the Buddha's own teachings.

Notice, too, how a disagreement over the nature of Mohammed results in two branches of Islam that are very different in ways that, at first glance, don't seem so easily explained. That is, if you began with descriptions of Shi'ite and Sunni Islam, the explanation "one of them believes Mohammed was given a mystical energy that has been passed on to others, and the other doesn't" would not be immediately obvious.

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On the background to why Iran is Shi'ite today:


The Shi'ite threat metastasized because of an ominous synchronicity that developed in Umayyad times:

The Shi'i were the suppressed religious underdogs of Islam.

The Persians were the suppressed ethnic underdogs of Islam. 

The Shi'i chafed against the orthodox religious establishment.

The Persians chafed against the Arab political establishment...

One day, a mysterious man blew into the city of Merv. This distant outpost of the empire lay almost fifteen hundred miles east of Damascus. Here in the wild, wild east, this stranger began to agitate against the Umayyads by promulgating a millennial religious narrative that spoke of an impending apocalyptic showdown between good and evil.

No one knew much about this fellow, not even his real name. He went by the handle Abu Muslim, but that was obviously a pseudonym ... he was a professional revolutionary, dispatched by a secretive group called that Hashimites ... a cross between a cult and a political party, whose core membership probably never exceeded thirty. Its name referred to the Prophet's clan, the Banu Hashim, and its purpose, supposedly, was to put a member of the Prophet's family at the head of the Muslim world.

This was just one of many angry little hard-core bands of antigovernment conspirators active at this time, all preaching some version of the same message: the community had fallen off the track, history had gone off course, the Messenger's mission had been subverted, and toppling the Umayyads and empowering a member of the Prophet's family in their stead would set everything right again. Let me note that this narrative has been reinvented again and again in the Muslim world over the course of history, and some version of it is being recited even today, by revolutionaries who have substituted "the West" for "the Umayyads."

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"If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he a bad Muslim?"

The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Muslim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world between the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbelievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in the community or outside it. 

Some philosophers who took up this question said Muslims who were grave sinners might belong to a third zone, situated between belief and unbelief. The more rigid, mainstream scholars didn't like the idea of a third zone, because it suggested the moral universe wasn't black and white but might have shades of gray.

There is a lot of food for thought in these three paragraphs.

First, while I'm not going to claim that non-Muslims are uniformly treated wonderfully in Muslim theocracies -- or that there are no Islamists who misinterpret their religion as woefully as our crazies misinterpret Christianity -- it is always worth noting how little sense it makes for these Tea Party Zapf dingbats to rail on about "sharia law" being adopted in the United States when the whole premise of Islamic law is that the bulk of it is only applicable to Muslims.

Second, one of the things that the Christian-centric view of history and religion (which, like I keep saying, has been absorbed even by westerners and Americans who aren't practicing Christians) tends to occlude is the idea of religions that can pose questions like this: "if you commit action X, do you cease being a member of the religion?" Mainstream Christianity understands questions like that only with reference to heresy, and even heresy doesn't work the way most people think it does. That is, a Christian is understood to remain a Christian unless they are specifically excommunicated. There is no mainstream Christian framework in which it makes sense to ask if someone ceases to be a Christian because of a thing they've done, unless of course that thing is converting to another religion.

But this is because of Christianity's unique features, not Islam's.

This reminds me that one of the things I've been thinking lately is that one of the worst things that happened to Christianity is when it stopped being a religion of adult conversion -- which is one reason it's flourishing in Africa and Asia now, where it's returned to being one. There are religions that I think are well-suited to being the religion you're raised in, because they provide paths for you to then choose from as an adult -- that's a discussion for another time. But Christianity was not just founded by and for adult converts, it continued to be a religion of adult conversion (not missionaries forcing the religion on natives, but genuine adult conversion) for centuries, and there is a marked difference in the way believers talk about it.

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On the Sufis --

Almost from the start .. some people were asking, "Is this all the revelation comes to in the end -- a set of rules? Because I'm not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?" Instructions from God on high were all very well, but some people longed to experience God as a palpable living presence right now, right down here. What they wanted from the revelations was transformation and transcendence. 

A few of these people began to experiment with spiritual exercises that went way beyond the requirements of duty. They read the Qur'an incessantly or spent hours reciting the names of Allah. In Baghdad, for example, there was a man named al-Junayd who habitually performed four hundred units of the Muslim prayer ritual after work every day. ... some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called suf in Arabic, for which reason people began to call these people Sufis.

They professed no creed, these Sufis. They were not out to launch another sect. Sure, they opposed worldly ambition and corruption and greed, but so did every Muslim, in theory. 

They began to work out techniques for eliminating distractions and cravings not just from prayer but from life. Some spoke of engaging in spiritual warfare against their own meanest tendencies. Harking back to a hadith in which Mohammed distinguished between a "greater" and a "lesser" jihad, they declared that the internal struggle to expunge the ego was the real jihad, the greater jihad.

Although I always want to stress that truth I have brought up in earlier posts -- all religions are not the same -- by the same token it is not a coincidence that any time (within the limits of my knowledge) there is a religion that fits certain criteria (it has to be sufficiently large and broad, such that there is a pressure to adapt the religion to fit the practitioner rather than, in the modern manner, to just fuck off down the street to some other church), people will force it into certain shapes. Specifically, they will always squeeze it until they can get some mysticism out of it. The legalist and mystical practitioners of Catholicism can seem to be members of two entirely different religions, and yet.

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In sum, by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on three great cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians, philosopher-scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and law n full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a technique for achieving a personal union with God. Yes, the three groups overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing directions, and their intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes bloody political and financial stakes. 

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More development in Shi'ism:

[In Shi'ism], whenever an imam had more than one son, his death opened up the possibility of disagreement about which of his progeny was truly the next imam. Just such a disagreement over the fifth imam gave birth to a minority sect called the Zaidis (or Fivers). Another disagreement over the seventh imam had spawned the Isma'ilis (or Seveners). 

The remaining Shi'i agreed on the imam all the way to the twelfth generation down from Ali, but the twelfth imam disappeared when he was a little boy. Non-Shi'i assume he was murdered. Shi'i, however, believe he never died but went into "occultation," a concept peculiar to Shi'ism: occultation meant he could (can) no longer be seen by ordinary people.

Mainstream Shi'i (or Twelvers) call this twelfth imam the "hidden imam." Shi'ite doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam is and always will be alive, that he is still in direct communication with God and is still guiding the world in some unseen way. The doctrine doesn't say exactly how the Hidden Imam remains hidden. It doesn't say whether he has become invisible, donned a disguise, changed form, gone to ground in some cave, or what... Shi'ite doctrine declares that the twelfth imam will reveal himself at the end of history, sparking the perfection of Allah's community and inaugurating the final Age of Justice, the endpoint sought by all good Muslims. Upon reaching its endpoint, history will end, the dead will be resurrected, and Allah's judgment will sort all who have ever lived into heaven or hell according to their just desserts. Because of this expectation that the Hidden Imam will appear again at the end of days, Shi'i sometimes refer to him as the Mahdi, "the expected one" (a concept that exists in Sunni Islam too, but less vividly).

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Back to Iran:

When the Safavids first came to power they had created a distinctly Persian Islam by making Shi'ism the state religion. This was useful to the state at first, because it promoted a national coherence that made Persia strong for its size. But it alienated Sunnis within the borders, and as the throne weakened, these Sunnis turned rebellious and began to pull away.

Making Shi'ism the official state religion had another downside ... it gave the Shi'i religious scholars a dangerous sense of self-importance, especially the mutjahids, a title that meant "scholars so learned they have a right to make original judgments" (later these worthies were called ayatollahs). These Shi'i ulama began to claim if Persia was really a Shi'i state, kings could rule only with their approval, because only they spoke for the Hidden Imam...

Safavid kings therefore found themselves facing a Hobson's choice. If they sought the approval of the ulama they would be conceding ultimate authority to the ayatollahs; if they asserted their own authority as supreme, they would have to forego the ulama's approval and in that case rule without popular legitimacy ... kings who lack legitimacy need some other source of power to give them authority ... they had nothing to turn to but their armies ... trained and "advised" by European military experts.

In short, Persia ended up with European Christians helping Safavid kings clamp down on Muslim religious scholars who were closely tied to the masses: obviously a formula for trouble.

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By 1700 or so, religious institutions had bureaucratized spirituality in much the same way that the Catholic Church had bureaucratized Christianity in late medieval Europe. The whole system of Muslim law had been worked out so fully that there was no creative work left for any new enthusiast to do. The application of sharia to every dot and detail of personal and social life was a done deal. ... the Sufi orders had been institutionalized, and authorities at every level agreed that "the gates of ijtihad were closed."

"Ijtihad," remember, means "free and independent thinking based on reason." It can't depart from scripture, but it consists of thinking through the implications of scripture creatively. Muslim scholars had once allowed that ijtihad might be exercised on issues not explicitly settled by Qur'an; then by Qur'an and hadith; then by Qur'an, hadith, and the work of previous authoritative scholars ... and so by the eighteenth century, important scholars generally agreed that no unsettled issues existed. Everything had been covered, everything worked out; ordinary people no longer needed to exercise free and independent thought. There was nothing left to do but follow the rules.

Following the rules, however, does not provide the spiritual fulfillment people seek from religion. The bureaucratization of Islam created much the same stultifications and discontents that in Christendom had provoked the Protestant Reformation. And, indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, reform movements were beginning to sprout throughout the Muslim worled.

But there was never a Muslim version of Europe's Protestant Reformation ... no doctrine of individualism emerged here, no coupling of religion to nationalism (except in a sense in Iran), no separation of church and state, no conceptual division of the world into secular and religious realms, no sudden development of enlightenment-style liberalism ...

Why not?

Well, for one thing, some of the issues that fueled the Reformation could not arise in Islam. Protestant reformers rebelled against the Church; Islam had no church. ... Protestants said priests could not mediate between man and God; Islam never had a priesthood ... the Protestant reformers insisted on a direct, personal interaction between the individual worshipper and God. The Muslim prayer ritual had always been just that.

European religious reform took shape in a purely European context ... Muslims were in a different boat. Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations ... then came the Mongol holocaust ... by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims looked around and saw with dawning horror that they had been conquered: from Bengal to Istanbul, they were subservient to foreigners in every aspect of their lives, in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods and in their very homes.

... One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam but Muslims. Innovations, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form.

Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities.

A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. 

That first paragraph is especially interesting, although it's also interesting thinking about the Protestant Reformation and its aftermaths in terms of their specifically European historical contexts. But this idea that bureaucratization -- or especially, of the establishment deciding that the work of formulating a religion has been completed -- leads to reform movements, that's very interesting.

It goes to some basic questions about religion and human nature: what do people look for in religion?

Amateurs do badly with this question when they try to answer for other people, for a very simple reason: not everyone has the same answer. But the same answers tend to come up, over and over again, and that's very important. Paul of Tarsus and Thomas Aquinas were very different figures and undoubtedly were attracted to different things in the religious life. The impulse that leads Sufis and nuns to introduce mystical practices to Islam and Catholicism comes from a different answer than the impulses that lead to legalism or end of the world prophecies.

A sufficient number of them, though, especially among religious professionals of some stripe -- clergy, scholars, what have you -- are going to want to be active and to contribute, and a static religion in which everything has been figured out and all the questions are answered is not as satisfying as it might sound like it should be.

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You can look long and hard through the actual writings of Abdul Wahhab and not find Wahhabism as it is defined today, largely because he didn't write political tracts; he wrote Qur'anic commentary and wrote it strictly in the vocabulary of his doctrine. His single-minded focus on details of Muslim doctrine, law, and practice might strike outsiders as obsessive. His major work, Kitab-al-Tahwid (the Book of Unity), has sixty-six chapters, each of which presents one or more quotes from the Qur'an, unpacks each quote, lists lessons to be learned from the quote, and then explains how this quote relates to Wahhab's core creed.

Wahhab is the founder of what is sometimes misleadingly called "Islamic fundamentalism" -- a "back to basics" movement (which, like the Christian fundamentalists later, was strongly informed by Wahhab's interpretation of the Qur'an rather than just rewinding to the practices and interpretations of an earlier time) in response to his disgust with the wealthy modern westernized Arabs he saw as going through the motions of Muslim devotion. Wahhab's alliance with the House of Saud in the 18th century led to the creation of Saudi Arabia. I didn't highlight much in this section because it was already familiar to me, I guess.

Some Islamic fundamentalists disapprove of the term "Wahhabist," because Wahhab's own claim was that he wasn't proposing an "ism," but only encouraging people to abandon innovations and modern "isms" and to go back to the Qur'an -- that is, Wahhab would claim that there is nothing in "Wahhabism" that is his own thought, it's only about following what the Qur'an says. At the same time, "Islamic fundamentalism" is a problematic term for a number of reasons:

1: It is a back formation introduced later by way of comparison to Christian fundamentalism, which was also formed in response to modernism but which takes its name from "The Fundamentals."

2: Christian fundamentalism insists on several ultra-conservative approaches to Christian scripture which were novel and strange when fundamentalism was introduced, but Wahhab's insistence of Qur'anic literalism is neither novel nor unusual. That is, traditional Islam is already "fundamentalist" for the most part -- it is more explicit than Christian fundamentalism in allowing for interpretation, and it has specific systems and strategies for interpretation and the evaluation of interpretation instead of the hodge-podge that Christian fundamentalism has wound up with, but traditional mainstream Islam has always insisted on the truth of the Qur'an, and so labeling an ultraconservative movement as "Islamic fundamentalism" does not underscore the correct areas of contrast.

This is basically unresolvable, because Islamic fundamentalism is the term the public knows, and for the last few decades and the century to come, the terminology will be dictated more by journalists and speechwriters than by academics.

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And on to the opposite of Wahhabism, so to speak, the beginnings of the modernist reform movements:

Sayyid Ahmad, or Sir Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh ... began exploring ways to rethink Islam as an ethical system that would stay true to its own traditions and spirit but make it compatible with a secular world dominated by Europeans. 

... Ahmad came from a modernist, Western-oriented family, and he knew something about British life. His mother, however, was a devout Muslim of legendary piety, respected for her scholarship. She made the boy go to madrassa, and she equaled his grandfather as an influence on this life, so Sayyid Ahmad grew to manhood with these two dueling currents in his personality: a heartfelt allegiance to his own Muslim community and a high regard for British culture and a longing for the respect of those colonials.

... England had impressed him deeply ... What could he do to elevate his community? ... he decided that the problem lay partly in the way Muslims were interpreting Islam. They were mired in magical thinking, they were clinging to superstition and calling it Islam. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan began elaborating a doctrine that offended his contemporaries among the Indian ulama. Religion, he suggested, was a natural field of human inquiry and achievement. It was integral to human life. It evolved with the human community in the natural course of things -- just like art, agriculture, and technology -- growing ever more sophisticated as a man grew more civilized.

Early humans had a limited capacity to explore moral and ethical issues intellectually, Sayyid Ahman speculated. They needed revealed religion to help them overcome their passions and guide them to moral judgments and conduct: rulings from a higher power, delivered by prophets with the charismatic authority to persuade without explanation. But the moral and ethical injunctions of all great, true religions are not fundamentally irrational. They are reasonable, and reason can discover them, once people have developed the intellectual capacity to do so.

That's why Mohammed announced that he was the last of the prophets -- he didn't mean that his rulings about issues in the Mecca and Medina of his day were to be the final word on human conduct throughout the ages. He meant that he had brought the last tools people needed to proceed on the quest for a moral community of their own, without unexplained rulings from God. Islam was the last of the revealed religions because it was the beginning of the age of reason-based religions.

... Ahmad was suggesting implicitly that Muslims disconnect from obsessing about heaven and hell and miraculous interventions by God in history and rethink their faith as an ethical system.

... Ahmad's specific ideas failed to create any widespread movement associated with his name, but modernist intellectuals in other Muslim lands were exploring similar ideas and coming up with similar conclusions. In Iran, a prime minister working for the Qajar Shahs established a school called Dar al-Funun, which offered instruction in all the sciences and in the arts, literature, and philosophies of the West ... similar modernists were active at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.

These, of course, are the strains of Islam that western political discourse would have you believe do not exist.