by Ed Husain
Sati al-Husri (1879–1967)
Sati al-Husri was originally a supporter of the Young Turks, but – like so many of his peers – eventually abandoned Ottomanism for Arab nationalism. He stressed the importance of language and history for Arabs to embrace unity. Husri held a variety of positions in the Syrian government after 1908, where he worked to reform the education system.16
Husain bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca (early twentieth century)
Sharif Husain bin Ali was the head of the Hashemite dynasty in the early twentieth century. With the support of Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner of Egypt, Sharif Husain intended to overthrow Ottoman rule in Arab lands and restore Mecca and Medina to their former glory; this plan is outlined in the McMahon–Husain Correspondence. Sharif Husain envisioned himself as Caliph following the Arab victory, in a territory spanning from Aleppo to Aden. Though this was an Arab national movement in a sense, it was based more on political aims than social or humanitarian ones. Ultimately, the Arab Revolt was a failure; though Sharif Husain declared himself Caliph of all Muslims after the Kemalist revolt in 1924, he was driven out of Mecca by Wahhabis shortly thereafter.17
George Antonius (1891–1942)
George Antonius, a Lebanese–Egyptian scholar who lived in Palestine, is considered the first historian of Arab nationalism. In his book The Arab Awakening, he argued that the Arab nation – which consisted of racial and cultural-linguistic elements – had been ‘dormant’ for centuries.
BA’ATH PARTY AND UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC
Michel Aflaq, Syria (1910–89)
Michel Aflaq, a Christian, co-founded the Arab Ba’ath Party18 in 1940 with Salah al-Din al-Bitar. ‘Ba’ath’ means ‘renaissance’ or ‘rebirth’. Through the party, which combined elements of nationalism and socialism, Aflaq worked with Gamal Abdul Nasser to create the United Arab Republic (UAR). Although he was Christian, Aflaq believed that there was a special relationship between Islam and Arab nationalism that Arabs of any religion could and should respect.19
Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Syria (1912–80)
Salah al-Din al-Bitar co-founded the Arab Ba’ath Party with Michel Aflaq in 1940. Bitar served as prime minister in several early Ba’athist governments in Syria, and he expected to be appointed the vice president of the UAR. Instead, he was appointed the minister of state for Arab affairs, and later minister of culture and national guidance. He was dismayed over the dominant role Nasser gave the Egyptians in administrating the UAR. In 1966 he fled the country, after which he lived mostly in Europe and remained politically active until he was assassinated in 1980, most likely by an agent of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.
Zaki al-Arsuzi, Syria (1899–1968)
Zaki al-Arsuzi founded a separate Arab Ba’ath party in 1940, which eventually merged with Aflaq and Bitar’s party in 1947. Arsuzi aimed to establish the identity of the Arab nation through his philosophy of the Arabic language; he believed the foundation of Arab nationalism was brotherhood – fraternity by nature and proximity of their descent. He conceded in 1966 that the creation of a single Arab nation was untenable at that time, and he instead suggested a federated order through which borders might eventually disappear.20
Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt (1918–70)
Gamal Abdul Nasser was president of Egypt from 1956 until his death. His socialist and nationalist ideas were broadcast throughout the Arab world on the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs radio station. Despite his popular appeal, by mid-1957 his only governmental ally in the region was Syria. In January 1958, Nasser acquiesced to repeated calls from Syria to unify, creating the United Arab Republic.21
Taha Hussein, Egypt (1889–1973)
Although the author Taha Hussein was originally a pharonist, meaning he did not want Egypt involved in Arab nationalism, he eventually came to support the Arab nationalist project, publishing the article ‘al-Udaba hum bunat al-qaumiyaa al-arabiyya’ in the late 1950s.
Constantin Zureiq, Syria (1909–2000)
Constantin Zureiq was a Christian academic and supporter of Arab nationalism. He sought to transform Arab society by emphasising rational thought. Like Michel Aflaq, he saw an important relationship between Islam and Arab nationalism.22
Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, Iraq (1913–73)
Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz became a proponent of Arab nationalism while studying law in Baghdad and London in the 1930s. He later supported the 1941 failed Iraqi rebellion against the British, and eventually served as prime minister of Iraq. While in government, Bazzaz aimed to reduce military salaries and privilege – an unpopular goal. He was charged by the Ba’athist government with participation in activities against the government. Bazzaz argued that Arab nationalism and Islam were compatible in every respect.23
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1.North Korea calls itself the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, but we know that it is not a democracy, so our media is confident in referring to it as undemocratic. Our lack of knowledge about Islam renders our press unable to refute ISIS’s claim to being Islamic.
2.John Gray, Black Mass (Allen Lane 2007).
3.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin 2004), p. 195.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid., p. 172.
6.Esposito, J. & Mogahed, M., Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (Gallup 2007), pp. 6, 7.
7.Burke, op. cit., p. 11.
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS ISLAM?
1.Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Penguin Random House 2014), pp. 2–3.
2.Inhabitants of two towns on the outskirts of Damascus in Syria, Ma’lula and Sednaya, still speak Aramaic. I have visited both.
3.I have mostly used my own translations of the Quran from the Arabic original.
CHAPTER 3 WHO IS A MUSLIM TODAY?
1.John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (Allen Lane 2007).
2.While Turks, Persians and Muslim civilisations in India did not use the Arabic language orally, they did use the Arabic script for their own languages. Today, Urdu and Persian still use Arabic script. In Turkey, the secular Muslim reformer Kemal Atatürk abolished Arabic use in writing, and Turks now use Latin script.
3.Muslims follow a lunar year with a different calendar. The calendar commenced from the day that the Prophet settled in Medina. By that measure, the year 2017 in the Gregorian calendar will be 1438. Known as the Hijri calculation, derived from the Hijrah (often anglicised as Hegira) or migration of the Prophet from Mecca, this dating is still important to Muslims, but not widely used. Only in Saudi Arabia, Iran and among Islamic organisations is the Hijri dating cited.
4.Genesis 22:17.
5.Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury 2015), pp. 85–6.
CHAPTER 4 THE SUNNI–SHI‘A SCHISM
1.The Umayyads gave birth to the first dynastic monarchy within Islam. After the first four caliphs, they ruled for almost a century from their headquarters in Damascus, Syria. They were known for their luxuries, conquests, grand palaces, political intrigue, corruption, murders, and attempts at mass control. They were widely seen by Muslims to be the old order, representing the pre-Islamic Meccan elite. The original Umayyads (with the exception of the caliph Omar bin Abdul Aziz) were mostly perceived as the offspring of those who had persecuted the Prophet, and had converted to Islam only after making the calculation that becoming Muslim could yield new power.
2.Steve Coll, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, documents that the CIA were encouraging Sunni mujahideen in Afghanistan to launch suicide bombings against the Soviets, but that the Sunni fighters refused on religious grounds, as committing suicide is forbidden in the Quran. That God alone gives and takes life is the mainstream Sunni Muslim position. Thirty years later, Hezbollah’s invention has become a weapon of choice among both Sunni and Shi‘a terrorists. See Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin 2004)
.
3.Cited in Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (Profile 2010), p. 24.
4.Sayyida Zeinab, a granddaughter of the Prophet, is buried on the outskirts of Damascus. The site is a regular target of ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks. Hezbollah and Iranian pressure has ensured its protection. When I lived in Damascus, I used to visit this shrine regularly for its ethos of spiritual splendour and serenity.
5.Tweet by the popular English-speaking Shi‘a scholar Sayed M. Modarresi on 10 December 2015.
6.Every year, Shi‘a Muslims celebrate this occasion as Eid e Ghadir, named after the well beside which the Prophet stopped while travelling back to Medina after the last pilgrimage. There, he pointed to Imam Ali as a protector of those the Prophet had protected in life. Shi‘a Muslims claim that this was an indication of Ali becoming the successor of the Prophet. Sunni Muslims dispute that conclusion.
7.The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur conducted an inquisition of beliefs to eliminate Shi‘a attitudes during the years 754 to 775. Taqiyya was developed to maintain secretly Shi‘a identity and avoid persecution.
CHAPTER 5 WHAT IS THE SHARIA?
1.The World’s Muslims, Religion, Politics and Society (Pew Research Centre 2013).
2.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11414646/To-defeat-our-foe-we-must-first-define-him.html; To Defeat Our Foe, We Must First Define Him, Telegraph.
3.A sanad is a chain of narrators that transmitted a hadith from the Prophet. Famously, Imam Bukhari collected over 100,000 hadith but recorded only 7,000. His criterion was the soundness of the sanad or chain. If a narrator was of doubtful character, then he rejected the hadith. But if the chain of narrators included men of good repute, then no matter how questionable the actual text of the hadith, Imam Bukhari would include it in his authoritative collection.
4.Most prominent among these scholars were Imam Abu Bakr al-Jassas and Abu Ja’far al-Tahawi.
5.It is a mistake committed in many Muslim societies today to seek to judge the liberalism of a Muslim by testing to see if they drink alcohol or not. Muslims who avoid alcohol are not extremists, and those who drink are not liberals – such crass differences betray ignorance. The 9/11 murderers drank alcohol, for example.
CHAPTER 7 A HUNDRED YEARS OF HUMILIATION
1.William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (Bloomsbury 2006), p. 21.
2.Henry Kissinger, World Order (Penguin 2014), p. 3.
3.Ibid. p. 4.
4.Ibid. p. 27.
CHAPTER 8 WHO IS AN ISLAMIST?
1.Z. Sardar, ‘Great thinkers of our time – Maulana Sayyid Abul-Ala Maududi’, New Statesman, 14 July 2003.
2.Quoted in Gudrun Kramer, Makers of the Muslim World: Hasan al-Banna (Oxford, One World, 2010), p. 21.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid., p. 51.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid., p. 102.
7.Sheikh Ramadan Al-Bouti (d. 2013) and Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro (d. 2005).
8.20 May 2016, Ennahda summit in Tunis.
CHAPTER 9 WHO IS A SALAFI? OR A WAHHABI?
1.The Muslim 500 published in 2010 by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan, defined Salafis as Islamic fundamentalists and estimated their population to be 3 per cent of Muslims.
CHAPTER 10 WHO IS A JIHADI?
1.As analysed and cited by Shaikh Hamza Yusuf at the annual conference of Muslim scholars gathered at the Global Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in 2015.
CHAPTER 11 WHO IS A KHARIJITE, OR TAKFIRI?
1.Taken from hadith sources cited on Salafi websites including www.answering-extremism.com (accessed on 26 December 2017).
CHAPTER 12 DIGNITY
1.Quoted in Foreign Policy, 14 May 2015.
2.See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Avon, 1992).
CHAPTER 13 THE JEWS
1.King Abu Abdullah Muhammad XI was known as Boabdil, the twenty-third Muslim king of Granada.
2.B. Hughes, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), p. 426.
3.Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 303.
4.Matthew 23:33.
5.The banality is redoubled by the suggestion that a specific tree, the gharqad (boxwood), will protect Jewish people and not call out to Muslims. These claims of hadith are popular among those who oppose Jewish people being in Israel.
6.http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iran-News/Iran-continues-to-call-for-Israels-destruction-despite-nuclear-deal-481659; Iran Continues to Call for Israel’s Destruction Despite Nuclear Deal, Jerusalem Post, 16 February 2017.
7.Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (New York 2009), p. 209.
8.Ibid., p. 11.
CHAPTER 14 EDUCATION
1.See Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London 1991), p. 76.
2.UNDP, Arab Human Development Report, Building a Knowledge Society (NY 2003), p. 53.
3.Arab Thought Foundation, Fourth annual cultural development report, 2012.
4.UNESCO report, 2012.
5.In ‘Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 1984, Wael Hallaq illustrates how, among the highest echelons of the Sunni ulama, both in theory and in practice, the gate of ijtihad was not closed, but the prevailing perception was that it was from roughly the twelfth century onwards.
6.A study of 4,000 political radicals operating across the Muslim world and the West found that among Islamist radicals, 44.9 per cent had studied engineering, compared with only 11.6 per cent of the general populations in their countries. They did not all contribute bomb-making expertise: only 15 per cent of the engineers worked as terrorist bomb-makers, while 26 per cent had communication roles. Steffen Hertog and Diego Gambetta, ‘The Surprising Link Between Education and Jihad’, Foreign Affairs, March 2016.
7.Gambetta and Hertog, cited in Martin Rose, Immunising the Mind (British Council 2015).
8.A popular hadith claims that the Prophet said: ‘Disagreement among my community is a mercy.’ Hadith scholars disagree on its authenticity, but the prevalence of it reflects Muslim communal attitudes.
9.The Economist, 2–8 April 2016.
CHAPTER 15 WOMEN
1.Gallup poll, Mogahed, Esposito, 2007.
2.Samir Kassir, Being Arab (Verso 2006).
3.There is a historical debate on how old she was at the time of her marriage to the Prophet. Some suggest nine, others twelve, and some seventeen.
4.See M. A. Nadwi, Al-muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam (2013), a summary of the Arabic forty volumes.
5.Sheikh Ghannouchi in conversation with the author at a round-table meeting organised by the author in 2013 at the US Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC.
6.A. J. Arberry (Trans.), The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love (Luzac, London 1951), p.16.
7.Ibid., p. 21.
CHAPTER 16 SEX
1.C. Barks (Trans.), Rumi: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1996), p. 178.
2.Washington Post, 10 June 2015.
3.D. Ladinsky (Trans.), The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (Penguin, 1999), p. 253.
4.Ibid., p. 282.
5.Ibid., p. 40.
6.Ibid., p. 191.
7.Ibid., p. 107.
CHAPTER 17 GOD IS ALIVE
1.Ibn Arabi, The Voyage of No Return (Cambridge, Islamic Texts Society, 2000), p. 16.
2.C. Addas (Trans.), Ibn Arabi: The Voyage of No Return (Islamic Texts Society, 2000), p. 100.
CHAPTER 19 THE FAMILY TABLE
1.Radwa S. Elsaman and Mohamed A. Arafa, ‘The Rights of the Elderly in the Arab Middle East: Islamic Theory Versus Arabic Practice’, in Marquette Elder’s Advisor, Vol. 14, Issue 1.
2.Boston Review, 6 November 2014.
CHAPTER 20 THE NEXT LIFE
1.Quran, 21:35.
CONCLUSION: THE WAY FORWARD
2.See Moisés Naím, The End of Power (New York, Basic, 2013), p. 5,
3.UK Ministry of Defence, Strategic Trends Programme: Global Strategic Trends – out to 2040 (London 2010).
4.Economist, 14–20 May, 2016.
5.See Appendix.
6.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35999557; BBC, 8 April, 2016, Saudi Arabia and Egypt announce Red Sea bridge.
7.See John Gray, Straw Dogs (London, Granta, 2002).
8.Source: senior European diplomat present at the declaration.
9.Jean-Pierre Chauffour, From Political to Economic Awakening in the Arab World: The Path of Economic Integration (Washington, DC, World Bank, 2013).
10.Economic integration is defined as elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to the flow of goods, services and factors of production within a group of countries.
11.Poll commissioned by Geert Wilders’s PVV party and undertaken by Maurice de Hond’s research organisation in June 2013. Cited by Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 236.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid., p. 237.
14.Great Muslim scholars and imams of the past, including Abu Bakr Ibn al-’Arabi and Imam al-Qurtubi, ruled that the khawarij were not Muslims. In the modern era, even Saudi Arabia’s most prominent religious authority, the late Shaykh Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, declared the khawarij disbelievers. In Pakistan, Shaikh Tahir al-Qadri has been vocal in declaring the khawarij and modern-day imitators such as al-Qaeda and ISIS to stand altogether outside the fold of Islam.
