by Ed Husain
In 1679, Princess Jahanara confronted her brother in public, and argued – in court – that he should apply ‘the same law for all, as the same God rules over all’. One hundred and fifteen years previously, their great-grandfather Akbar the Great had decided that Hindus and Muslims were equal in India, and no special tax would be levied on the country’s Hindus, despite the Quran’s calling for a jizya poll tax on protected non-Muslims who lived in a Muslim-controlled state. Akbar had argued that although jizya had been useful in the Arabian context of the Prophet’s day, it was not relevant to the India of his time, and few Indian Muslims, even Muslim clerics, disagreed with him. His great-grandson Aurangzeb, however, took a more literalist approach, and enforced the jizya tax on India’s Hindus and Sikhs. Like all literalists, he justified his stance by quoting verbatim from the Quran.
How can reason ever win in the face of brute force combined with claims of godly validation? And must everything that is mentioned in the Quran be ‘established’ in society? If so, since the Quran mentions slavery repeatedly, should Muslims reintroduce that practice, too?
Aurangzeb’s sister pleaded with him to abandon his rigid approach and undermining of their family traditions. In public, the Venetian chronicler Niccolao Manucci records, Aurangzeb ‘bade her goodbye and turned his back on her, a movement that cut the princess to the very quick’. For the First Lady of the Mughals – daughter of the creator of the Taj Mahal, granddaughter of Jahangir, great-granddaughter of Akbar the Great – this abandonment by her own brother was a deep humiliation. Eighteen months later, in 1681, aged sixty-seven, Jahanara died.
If she had wanted, Jahanara could have been buried beside her beloved parents inside the Taj Mahal. Instead, she opted for a simple tomb close to the grave of a Sufi master in Delhi. Having helped her father build the Taj Mahal in all its glory, in the end she abandoned worldly pomp and power and was buried in a simple mausoleum among poets and spiritual seekers, under a tomb inscription that I read when I visited her graveside in Delhi:
Let no rich canopy cover my grave: this grass is the best covering for the tomb of the faqeera [poor in spirit], the humble, transitory Jahanara, disciple of the holy men of Chisht, daughter of the emperor Shah Jahan (AD 1681)
The public battle of Jahanara’s time between opposing strands of Islam saw the victory of literalism over mysticism. That battle rages today. Most people in Pakistan have heard of Aurangzeb and venerate him deeply, but very few know of his elder brother Dara Shikoh. Aurangzeb ruled with power and might, but by working to erase Sufism, the compassionate soul of Islam, from his court and circle of influence, he gave birth to a fanaticism that led to Mughal decline and Muslim losses in India.
Jalaluddin Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Dara Shikoh and Jahanara, the legendary Sufi figures we have met in this chapter, were all children of proud, confident Muslim civilisations in Turkey, Persia and India. But their poetic, mystical and pluralistic vision came under growing attack both from within Islam and, before long, and still more ominously, from further afield.
PART TWO
The Rise of Anger
Why did the loss of Muslim empires lead to the rise of political Islam?
Why did Salafis or Wahhabis emerge as a force of hatred against mainstream Muslims?
Why do jihadis persist in their violence despite global retribution?
Can radical Muslims kill and maim in the name of Islam and remain within the fold of the faith?
7
A Hundred Years of Humiliation
There was once a civilisation that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental superstate that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins.
One of its languages became the universal language of a large part of the world, and the bridge between the peoples of a hundred lands. Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known. The reach of this civilisation’s commerce extended from Latin America to China, and everywhere in between.
And this civilisation was driven, more than anything, by invention. Its architects designed buildings that defied gravity, and its mathematicians created algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers and creation of encryption. Its physicians examined the human body and found new cures for disease, whilst its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration. Its writers created thousands of stories – stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things.
When other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilisation thrived on them and kept them alive. When the censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilisations, this civilisation kept it alive and passed it on to others.
While modern Western civilisation shares many of these traits, the civilisation I’m talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600, which included the Ottoman Empire, the courts of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and such enlightened rulers as Suleiman the Magnificent.
Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilisation, its gifts are very much part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians. Sufi poet–philosophers like Rumi challenged our notions of self and truth, and leaders like Suleiman contributed to our notions of tolerance and civil leadership.
Perhaps we can learn lessons from this example: it was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population, which included Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.
Not the words of a Muslim leader, but of the successful US businesswoman Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard, ending her speech ‘Technology, Business and Our Way of Life: What’s Next?’ in Minnesota in September 2001.
Fiorina was right to highlight the theme of leadership. The Quran confirms that Muslims are expected to take a lead in the stewardship of God’s creation, and for centuries the Muslim psyche expected them to assume this higher position of responsibility. But no more.
Islam first spread across the Arab world through trade, spiritual perseverance and military success. For the first hundred years after the passing of the Prophet Mohamed, to be a Muslim was to be part of the ruling class, the victorious and powerful force that was Islam. In the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslims were the new ruling order in the Middle East. The Syrian Christian writer John of Damascus, observing the entry of the Muslims into the Levant in the eighth century, wrote of their zeal, but also their efficiency in collecting taxes. When Christians and others wanted to convert, the Umayyad caliphs of that period refused, preferring the higher taxes collected from non-Muslims in return for their dhimmi (protected) status. Yet over time, the Syrians, Egyptians and others came to believe in the elite Muslim creed, and adopted the conquerors’ lifestyle, faith, and even Arabic language.
To be Muslim was to be powerful and expansionist, as the empire kept on conquering new territories. In the ancient world, if a people were not advancing and conquering, they were liable to be conquered. ‘Kill or be killed’ was the mantra of antiquity. Islam, in its simplicity of belief in the one God and the message of the Prophet, overturned the rule of Christianity in the East – the Copts of Egypt, the Najranis of Arabia, the Orthodox in Jerusalem – and soon the eyes of the Muslim armies were set on Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire. Although Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099, Saladin retook it for the Muslims in 1187, and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet seized Constantinople in 1453. The Ottomans even laid siege to Vienna, in the heart of Europe, in 1529, and then again in 1683. In the West, an offshoot Umayyad dynasty brought Muslim rule all the way to North Africa and Spain. It was not until the fifteenth century that the Spanish expelled Jew
s and Muslims, and Catholicism reigned supreme.
In these great battles of ideas and peoples, Islam and Muslims were for a millennium largely unbeatable, and their inner core of faith, ideas, trade and territory was secure. Even the great scourge of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East, in the mid-thirteenth century, appeared to be reversed when the Mongol warriors from the central Asian steppes, having destroyed Muslim armies and cities, within a century embraced Islam. Their descendants created the Mughal Muslim dynasty in India and Afghanistan, while their Ottoman cousins ruled Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa and much of the Middle East. Such was the power and confidence of Islam. No set of ideas or army could defeat Muslim superiority.
And then everything changed.
In 1789, the French Revolution was proclaimed against the monarchy in the name of liberty, fraternity and equality. France witnessed the overthrow of a repressive royalty, attacks on the clergy, the ransacking of churches, discarding of tradition, and veneration of godless thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. It was Voltaire who had entertained audiences by writing plays for French theatre mocking Muslims and their Prophet ‘Mahomet’ (rather than Mohamed) as the founder of a barbarian sect, an imposter, a scoundrel and a fanatic. A brash, new, modern, civilisation grew from the corpse of European Catholicism – and within a decade sent its emissary to the Muslim world.
The French moved into Alexandria with battalions of scholars, who built a library of modern European literature and a printing press with Arabic type (the first encroachment on the sacred art of Quranic calligraphy). As Muslims looked on bewildered, 29-year-old General Napoleon Bonaparte, a true child of the French Revolution, marched into Cairo. Where was the European intellectual response that defended faith, tradition, monarchy and family? When the French arrived in Alexandria in Egypt on 1 July 1798, the Islamic world would not have been aware of the British philosopher Edmund Burke’s faith-based and principled repudiation of the French revolutionaries’ iconoclastic zeal.
When Muslim armies had conquered cities in the past, Sufi dervishes would spread spirituality among the populace. The Mughals and Ottomans went to battle with spiritual men at their helm. Bonaparte, however, shook the Muslim world to its core with his new approach. As master of Egypt, he introduced the virtues of Western civilisation. He established the Institut d’Egypte for French scholars, a library, a chemistry laboratory, a health service, a botanical garden, an observatory, an antiquities museum and a zoo. Napoleon had come to challenge British naval supremacy, he claimed; Egypt was merely collateral damage. But his ‘civilising mission’ was more than just a matter of routing the British. The scientific and newly secular culture of the West was set to change the Muslim world for ever.
The deficits in their own knowledge, and the enthusiasm for secular enlightenment among the French, shocked the Muslims into tacitly accepting that a new, superior civilisation had emerged in the West. Worse, when Napoleon was ejected from Egypt, in 1801, this was not effected by Ottomans or Arabs but by a British fleet under Lord Nelson. In just three years Napoleon had delivered an intellectual challenge to Egypt and the Muslim world that still reverberates today. The medieval crusades had failed to have an impact on the core of Islam or trigger its worldly decline, but Napoleon’s modern French ideas planted the seeds of doubt within it.
Thus began a hundred years of humiliation. By 1901, the glory days of the Muslims were over, and Russia’s Tsar Nicolas I referred to the Ottoman caliphate as ‘the sick man of Europe’. During the century following Napoleon’s expulsion from Egypt in 1801, much was going wrong in the two greatest contemporary empires of Islam: the Ottoman and the Mughal. Failures there led to the birth of that Islamism in the 1920s that has come to haunt Muslim countries and communities around the world today.
French ideas began to spread in some of the Ottoman lands closest to the French. In February 1804 a Christian rebellion started against the Ottomans in Serbia. The Ottoman Empire had a system of ‘millets’, autonomous religious minority communities, giving rise to multiculturalism, religious pluralism and tolerance. Yet even this accommodation, the refuge of Europe’s persecuted minorities, did not withstand French rallying cries. The Ottomans suppressed the 1804 Serbian uprising, but in 1815 a second upheaval won the Serbs autonomy within the empire. The Greeks followed, with European support, and won an independent sovereign Greek kingdom. The Christian peoples of the Balkans successively rebelled and won for themselves liberty, fraternity and equality.
The French Revolution not only sent Napoleon to become master of Egypt, but even shook the Ottomans in Istanbul, the great capital of Islam. Between 1789 and 1807, to modernise their system of government, the Ottomans responded to the French Revolution by creating a nizami cedit, or ‘new order’, by bringing in European advisers to reform the Janissaries, the sultan’s military elite. The military responded by dethroning the sultan and installing their preferred monarch. This was a humiliation for the executive authority of the old caliph, Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), while his short-lived successor Mustafa IV (r. 1807–8) was a mere stooge of the Janissaries. The ‘new order’ was killed at birth.
Sultan Selim III put the threat from the West down to European military prowess. In response, he opened a number of military schools with French instructors to teach students French, mathematics and navigation. The problem was that the Europeans could not be beaten, or even rivalled, unless the Muslims changed their intellectual approach, yet the Muslims could not go as far as the French in adopting a wholly individualistic, rational culture, and severing links with their past. This dichotomy haunted the Ottomans to their very end.
Very quickly, a new Ottoman sultan, Mahmut II (r. 1808–39), took the throne. He was more attuned to the grumblings of the population and their resentment of the machinations at the top of the empire. To seem more European, and in line with the sentiments of the time, he created a ‘Charter of Alliance’ (Senet-i Ittifak in Turkish) in 1808. This was the first agreement between ruler and ruled in Ottoman history, with local rulers demanding their rights in exchange for pledging allegiance to the sultan. It has sometimes been likened to a Turkish Magna Carta. But autocracies do not change so easily. The agreement did not last, but a precedent for change was set.
The greatest hope for change, and with it the greatest humiliation, came in the form of the Ottoman Tanzimat (‘reorganisation’) reforms. They were designed to be wholesale reforms of Muslim societies driven from the centre, and influenced fully by the secularism now in the ascendant in both France and Britain. It was no accident that the man who drove the Tanzimat changes, their chief architect, was the Ottoman ambassador to France in 1834 and Great Britain in 1836. Mustafa Reshid Pasha returned to Istanbul as foreign minister, and later grand vizier (prime minister). From 1839 on, he introduced a series of reforms to make the Ottoman monarchy more constitutional, more secular and more liberal – altogether more European.
While these developments earned applause from London, Paris and Vienna, they were held in deep suspicion by the Muslim populace at large. To most Muslims, particularly the leading ulama religious scholars, the reforms smacked of kowtowing to Europe. When, in the 1450s, the printing press was first introduced into Ottoman territories, the hard-line ulama successfully lobbied the Sultan and had it banned as a tool of the devil. In Europe the printing press played a role in the reformation of Christianity, as the new ideas of Martin Luther quickly spread. The availability of mass-produced bibles, translated by Luther and others into languages that people actually spoke (instead of Latin), had the direct result of creating mass interest in reading. Muslims, by contrast, kept the press at bay. Consequently, there came about a 200-year lag in the development of intellectual thought, and a Muslim stagnation in worldly matters. It was only with Napoleon that printers arrived in Cairo.
Muslims were in awe of the new and apparently superior Europeans and the Ottomans continued reforming as many aspects of government as possible in a bid to catch up. The Tanzimat reforms
sought to Westernise fully: Napoleonic trade laws were introduced in 1850; homosexuality was decriminalised in 1858, more than a century ahead of Britain’s legalisation of gay rights; sharia punishments for apostasy and adultery ended; and non-Muslims were made full citizens of the Ottoman state, ending their special taxation and dhimmi status. Radical changes were needed to bring the empire up to date with the modern world, and Sultan Abdul Majid (1839–61), son of Mahmut II, forged ahead.
By 1859, the hatred of Westernisation was so strong, and the humiliation of Islam felt so deeply, that unlike any other time in Ottoman history, a public assassination of the sultan was attempted, in what was called the Kuleli incident. There had been family intrigues in the past, but never before had forty-one members of the public plotted to kill an Ottoman sultan, for what they saw as his wholesale Westernisation and abandonment of Islam.
The Tanzimat reforms did not save the struggling Ottoman Empire, alas. By 1900, the Europeans were even further ahead, while ideas such as nationalism, Darwinism and racial superiority were finding a home among the sultan’s Arab subjects. The Balkan Christians had already broken away and shown the way for others.
The humiliation from within and without was afflicting not only the heartlands of the Ottoman caliphate. Further east, in India, home of the mighty Mughals, Muslim rule was also dealt a blow from which the Mughals never recovered. Since the string of victories scored by the British East India Company, from the battle of Plassey in 1757 to the defeat of the Muslim hero Tipu Sultan in 1792, the Mughals had survived in name only. But it was survival nevertheless, and where there was life, there was hope of renewal and revival. The British destroyed that hope with a further, decisive, humiliation.
