Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  He was hauled into the imperial court and made to debate a leading theologian on the question of whether the Qur’an was created or uncreated, an issue that contained the whole question of the role of reason in moral inquiry. The philosopher hit Ibn Hanbal with logic, the scholar struck back with scripture. The philosopher tied him up in knots of argument, Ibn Hanbal burst free with invocations to Allah on high. Obviously, no one could really “win” a debate of this sort because the debaters did not agree on terms. When Ibn Hanbal refused to disavow his views, he was physically beaten, but it didn’t change his mind. He was clapped into prison. Still he clung to his principles: never would he let reason trump revelation, never!

  So the authorities ratcheted up the pressure. They beat Ibn Hanbal until his joints popped out of their sockets, bound him in heavy chains, and tossed him into prison for several years. Ibn Hanbal refused to renounce his views. As you might guess, the well-publicized abuse failed to discredit his ideas but instead gave them a certain prestige. Common folks, who already resented the Abbasids for their wealth and pomp, grew restive now; and when the masses grew restive, even the mighty Abbasids had to pay attention because almost every time a khalifa died, a scuffle broke out to determine his successor, a scuffle in which either side might use the passions of the crowd as artillery. When the aging, aching Ibn Hanbal was released from prison, reverent crowds greeted him and cheered him and carried him home. Seeing this, the imperial court developed some reservations about Islamic philosophy and the Greek ideas from which it derived. The next khalifa demoted the Mu’tazilites and heaped honors upon Ibn Hanbal, which signaled the waning prestige of the Mu’tazilites, and with them the philosophers. And it signaled the rising status of the scholars who maintained the edifice of orthodox doctrine, an edifice that eventually choked off the ability of Muslim intellectuals to pursue inquiries without any reference to revelation.

  THE SUFIS

  Almost from the start, however, as the scholars were codifying the law, 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. In reaction, perhaps, to the luxurious lifestyles of Muslim elite, 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 new 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. The Sufis differed from the others only in saying, “How do you purify your heart? Whatever the exactly correct gestures and litanies may be, how do you actually get immersed in Allah to the exclusion of all else?”

  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. (The lesser jihad they identified as the struggle against external enemies of the community.)

  Gradually a buzz got started about these eccentrics—that some of them had broken through the barriers of the material world to a direct experience of Allah.

  In Basra, for example, lived the poet Rabia al-Basri, whose life is now laced with legend. Born in the last years of Umayyad rule, she was a young woman when the Abbasids took over. As a little girl, she had been traveling somewhere with her family when bandits hit the caravan. They killed her parents and sold Rabia into slavery. That’s how she ended up in Basra as a slave in some rich man’s household. Her master, the stories say, kept noticing a luminous spirituality about her that made him wonder. . . . One night, when she was lost in prayer, he observed a halo surrounding her body. It struck him suddenly that he had a saint living in his house, and awe took hold of him. He set Rabia free and pledged to arrange a good marriage for her. He would get her connected to one of the best families in the city, he vowed. She had only to name the man she wanted to marry, and he would open up negotiations at once.

  But Rabia said she could not marry any man, for she was already in love.

  “In love?” gasped her recent master. “With whom?”

  “With Allah!” And she began to pour forth poetry of such rapturous passion that her former owner became her first and lifelong disciple. Rabia entered upon a life of ascetic contemplation, mystic musings that frequently erupted into a love poetry so intensely emotional it sounded almost carnal, except that the “lover” she addressed was Allah:O my own Lord, the stars glitter

  and the eyes of men are closed.

  Kings have locked their doors.

  Lovers are alone with their beloved ones . . .

  And here I am alone with You.1

  How much poetry she poured forth, I don’t know. The canon that survives is slight, but in her day, her fame was great: many journeyed to Basra just to see Rabia for themselves. Many came away convinced that she had found the key to union with Allah. To her, the key was not fear but love, utterly abandoned, reckless, and unlimited love.

  Easy enough to say but how could one actually fall into such love? Hungry seekers hung around with the charismatic mystic herself, hoping to catch her passion like a fever. Some did catch it, they said, which of course brought more seekers to her gates. I don’t call them students, because no books were involved, no scholarship, no study. Rabia of Basra did not teach. She simply radiated, and people in her vicinity changed. This became the pattern in Sufism: direct transmission of techniques leading to enlightenment from master to mureed, as would-be Sufis were called.

  Until this time, most Muslim mystics were “sober” Sufis, rigorously devoted to rituals and recitation. Their devotions focused on fear (of God). Rabia Basri put love at the center and helped spawn a long tradition of “God-intoxicated Sufis.” Let’s be clear, though: all of these people were Muslims first and Sufis next. I state this caveat simply because today lots of people call themselves Sufis when they’re really just singing and dancing themselves into a state of euphoria. The Sufis were not after a mere emotion. They weren’t trying to get high. Their spiritual practices began with the known devotions of Islam and then added more on top.

  People flocked to Sufis with a definite goal in mind. They hoped to “get somewhere.” Working with a Sufi master smacked of learning a methodology. Indeed, what Sufis did came to be labeled the tariqa, the “method.” Those who entered upon the method expected to move through distinct stages to annihilation of their egos and immersion in God.

  The jurists and the orthodox scholars did not look kindly on the Sufis, especially the God-intoxicated variety. The language employed by these saints began to sound a bit heretical. Their claims grew ever more extravagant. Common folks began to ascribe magical powers to the most famous Sufis. The hostilities came to a head in the late tenth century CE with a Persian Sufi named al-Hallaj.

  Hallaj means “cotton carder.” This was his father’s profession, and he too started out in the family trade; but the longing for union with God sank talons into his heart, and he abandoned his home to search for a master who would initiate him into Sufi secrets. At one point, he spent an entire year standing motionless in front of the Ka’ba, never uttering a sound. One year! Imagine the attention this m
ight have drawn to him. Later, he went traveling to India and to Central Asia, and everywhere he went he spouted poetry and gave strange speeches, and he attracted countless followers.

  But the sober Sufis began to back away from him, because Hallaj was saying things like, “My turban is wrapped around nothing but God.” And again, “Inside my clothes you’ll find nothing but God.” And finally, in case someone didn’t get his point, “I am God.” Well, actually, he said, “I am Truth,” but “Truth” was famously one of the ninety-nine names of God and given Hallaj’s recent history, no one could miss what he was getting at.

  This was too much. The orthodox scholars demanded action. The Abbasid khalifa wanted to appease the scholars so they would get off his back about the philosophers. He therefore had Hallaj clapped in prison for eleven years, but Hallaj was so lost to the world by this time, he didn’t care. Even in his cell he kept spouting his God-intoxicated utterances, sometimes associating himself with Jesus Christ, and often mentioning martyrdom. One thing was for sure: he recanted nothing. Finally, the orthodox establishment decided they had run out of options. They would have to pressure the state to apply the time-tested, never-fail method of discrediting a message: kill the messenger.

  The authorities did not just execute Hallaj. They hung him, cut off his limbs, decapitated him, and finally burned his corpse. Oddly enough, it didn’t work. Hallaj was gone, but Sufism continued to proliferate. Charismatic individuals kept emerging, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all across the civilized world. Some were “sober” Sufis like Junayd and some were the God-intoxicated variety, like Rabia Basri and Hallaj.

  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 in full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a technique for achieving 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. At this juncture, one of the intellectual giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the province of Khorasan. His name was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.

  By his early twenties, Ghazali had already earned acclaim as one of the foremost ulama of his age. No matter how many hadith you knew, he knew more. In his day, some ulama had elaborated a theology to compete with that of the Mu’tazilites. The Asharite school, as it was called, insisted that faith could never be based on reason, only on revelation. Reason’s function was only to support revelation. Asharite theologians were constantly squaring off against prominent Mu’tazilites in public debates, but the Mu’tazilites knew fancy Greek tricks for winning arguments, such as logic and rhetoric, so they were constantly making the Asharites look confused.

  Ghazali came to their rescue. The way to beat the philosophers, he decided, was to join them enough to use their tricks against them. He plunged into a study of the ancients, mastered logic, and inhaled the treatises of the Greek. Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called The Aims of the Philosophers. It was chiefly about Aristotle. In the preface, he said the Greeks were wrong and he would prove it, but first—in this book—he would explain what Greek philosophy was all about so that readers would know what he was refuting when they read his next book.

  One has to admire Ghazali’s fair-mindedness. He didn’t set up a straw man for himself to knock down. His account of Aristotle was so lucid, so erudite, that even hard-core Aristotelians read the book and said, “Aha! Now at last I understand Aristotle!”

  Ghazali’s book made its way to Andalusia and from there into Christian Europe, where it dazzled those few who could read. Western Europeans had pretty much forgotten classical Greek thought since the fall of Rome. For most, this was their first exposure to Aristotle. Somewhere along the way, however, Ghazali’s preface had dropped out, so Europeans didn’t know Ghazali was against Aristotle. Some, indeed, thought he was Aristotle, writing under a pen name. In any case, The Aims of the Philosophers so impressed Europeans that Aristotle acquired for them an aura of imposing authority, and later Christian philosophers devoted much energy to reconciling church doctrines with Aristotelian thought.

  Meanwhile, back in Persia, Ghazali had written his follow-up to The Aims of the Philosophers, a second seminal volume called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Here, Ghazali identified twenty premises on which Greek and Greco-Islamic philosophy depended, then used syllogistic logic to dismantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my mind, was his attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among material phenomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think fire causes cotton to burn, because fire is always there when cotton burns. We mistake contiguity for causality. Actually, says Ghazali, it’s God who causes cotton to burn, since He is the first and only cause of all things. The fire just happens to be there.

  If I’m making Ghazali sound ridiculous here, it’s only because I’m not as fair-minded as he was with Aristotle. I disagree with him. Not everyone does. Ghazali’s case against causality was resurrected in the West, by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume; and in the 1970s, I read essentially the same argument made again by the American Zen Buddhist Alan Watts, who likened cause and effect to a cat walking back and forth past a narrow slit in a fence. If we’re looking through the slit from the other side, Watts said, we keep seeing first the head of the cat and then the tail, which doesn’t mean the head causes the tail. (Actually, I think it does, in a sense, but I won’t get into that here.)

  Take it however you will, the argument against causality undermines the whole scientific enterprise. If nothing actually causes anything else, why bother to observe the natural world in search of meaningful patterns? If God is the only cause, the only way to make sense of the world is to know God’s will, which means that the only thing worth studying is the revelation, which means that the only people worth listening to are the ulama.

  Ghazali allowed that mathematics, logic, and even the natural sciences could lead to true conclusions, but wherever they conflicted with the revelations, they were wrong. But if science is right only when it reaches the same conclusions as revelation, we don’t need science. All the truth we need we can get from the revelations.

  Some of the philosophers struck back. Ibn Rushd (known to Europeans as Averroes) wrote a riposte to Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence , but it did little good: when the smoke cleared, Ghazali had won the day. From his time forward, Greek-based Muslim philosophy lost steam and Muslim interest in natural science foundered.

  Ghazali won tremendous accolades for his work. He was appointed head of the prestigious Nizamiya University in Baghdad, the Yale of the medieval Islamic world. The orthodox establishment acknowledged him as the leading religious authority of the age. Ghazali had a problem, however: he was an authentically religious man, and somehow, amid all the status and applause, he knew he didn’t have the real treasure. He believed in the revelations, he revered the Prophet and the Book, he was devoted to the shari’a, but he wasn’t feeling the palpable presence of God—the very same dissatisfaction that had given rise to Sufism. Ghazali had a sudden spiritual crisis, resigned all his posts, gave away all his possessions, abandoned all his friends, and went into seclusion.

  When he came out of it many months later, he declared that the scholars had it right, but the Sufis had it righter: The Law was the Law and you had to follow it, but you couldn’t reach Allah through book learning and good behavior alone. You needed to open your heart, and only the Sufis knew how to get the heart opened up.

  Ghazali now wrote two more seminal books, The Alchemy of Happiness and The Revival of the Religious Sciences. In these, he forged a synthesis between orthodox theology and Sufism by explaining how the shari’a fit in with the tariqa, the Sufi method for becoming one with God. He created a place
for mysticism within the framework of orthodox Islam and thus made Sufism respectable.

  Before Ghazali came along, three intellectual movements were competing for adherents in the Islamic world. After Ghazali, two of those currents had come to an accommodation and the third had been eliminated.

  I don’t say the philosophers acknowledged that Ghazali had proved them wrong and as a result shriveled up and died. Nor do I even say that public opinion turned against the philosophers because Ghazali had proved them wrong. Public opinion rarely believes or disbelieves anything based on proof. Besides, hardly anything in philosophy is ever definitively proven right or wrong.

  I say, rather, that some people wanted to turn away from philosophy and natural science in this era. Some already regarded reason as dangerous trickery leading only to chaos, and Ghazali gave such people the ammunition they needed to look respectable, and even smart while they were denouncing philosophy and reason.

  In the years that followed, more and more people turned in this direction. The assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral matters allows people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no two people having exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doctrines that assert unambiguous rules promote social solidarity because they enable people to cohere around shared beliefs, and when no one knows what tomorrow may bring, people prefer to clump together.