Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  In fact, some Sufi brotherhoods evolved into bands of mystical knights, espousing an ethos called futuwwah, which resembled the European code of knightly valor, courtly love, and chivalric honor. Whether the influence ran from west to east, or vice versa, or both ways is a dispute I won’t get into.

  In any case, Sufis illustrated futuwwah ideals through mytho-poetic anecdotes about Muslim heroes of the first community. One such story, for example, told of a young traveler arrested for killing an old man. The victim’s sons brought this young man before Khalifa Omar. The traveler admitted his deed. Extenuating circumstances existed, but he refused to plead them; he had taken a life and so must forfeit his own. He did make one request, however: could the execution be delayed for three days while he went home and took care of a bit of business? He had an orphan in his care back there, he had buried this child’s inheritance in a spot no one knew about, and if he didn’t dig it up before he died, the child would be left penniless. It wasn’t fair that the child suffer for his guardian’s crime. “If you let me go today,” the murderer said, “I promise I’ll come back three days from now and submit to execution.”

  The khalifa said, “Well, okay, but only if you name someone to act as your proxy, someone who will agree to suffer the penalty in your stead if you don’t come back.”

  Well, that stumped the young traveler. He had no friends or relatives in these parts. What stranger would trust him enough to risk execution in his place?

  At that moment, Abu Dharr, one of the Prophet’s companions, declared that he would be the young man’s proxy. And so the murderer departed.

  Three days later he had not returned. No one was surprised but they did weep for poor Abu Dharr who faithfully set his head on the chopping block. The executioner was just oiling his ax and getting ready to chop when the young man came galloping up on a dusty horse, all covered with sweat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was delayed,” he said, “but here I am now. Let’s proceed with the execution.”

  The spectators were amazed. “You were free; you had totally escaped. No one could have found you and brought you back. Why did you return?”

  “Because I said I would, and I am a Muslim,” the young man replied. “How could I give the world cause to say that Muslims no longer keep their promises?”

  The crowd turned to Abu Dharr. “Did you know this young man? Did you know of his noble character? Is this why you agreed to be his proxy?”

  “No,” said Abu Dharr, “I never met him before in my life, but how could I be the one to let the world say Muslims are no longer compassionate?”

  The victim’s relatives now dropped to their knees. “Don’t execute him,” they pleaded. “How can we be the ones to make the world say there is no forgiveness in Islam?”

  Many proponents of Sufi chivalry traced their lineage back to Ali, not necessarily because they were Shi’i but because Ali enjoyed legendary renown as the perfect knight, the ideal combination of strength, courage, piety, and honor. It was said, for example, that in one of those iconic battles of early Islam, a young man came toward Ali, swinging a sword. Ali said, “Don’t you know who I am, you foolhardy youngster? I’m Ali! You can’t beat me. I’ll kill you. Why are you attacking me?”

  “Because I am in love,” said the young fellow, “and my sweetheart says that if I kill you, she’ll be mine.”

  “But if we fight, I am more likely to kill you,” Ali pointed out.

  “What’s better than dying for love?” the young man said.

  Upon hearing those words, Ali took off his helmet and stretched out his neck. “Strike right here.”

  Seeing Ali’s willingness to die for love, however, set that young man’s heart ablaze and turned his love for a woman into something higher—love of Allah. In a single moment, Ali transformed an ordinary young man into an enlightened Sufi.3 Such were the legends that inspired these Muslim knights.

  THE OTTOMANS (ABOUT 700 TO 1341 AH)

  Although Sufi orders proliferated through the Muslim world, they had the most profound consequences in Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia, the territory that constitutes modern Turkey. It was here that the post-Mongol recovery of Islam began.

  In Asia Minor, Sufi orders linked up with merchants’ and artisans’ guilds called akhi (the Turkish word for futuwwah). These outfits cushioned ordinary folks against the uncertainties of the time. Certainly, people needed some cushioning. Asia Minor had long been the frontier between Turkish Muslims and European Christians. The Seljuks and Byzantines had torn the land up, fighting over it. One Seljuk prince had forged a fairly stable sovereign state here called the Sultanate of Rum (Rum being the Arabization of Rome) but then armies of Crusaders crisscrossing the land had disrupted order, and Seljuks fighting among themselves had eroded stability further.

  By the time the Crusades were winding down, various Turkish princes more or less controlled eastern Asia Minor, but only more or less; the Byzantine more or less controlled the western parts, but only more or less; and no claim went undisputed by the other. Asia Minor had become a lawless no-man’s land, inhabited by both Christians and Turks and ruled by no one.

  The Mongol eruptions drove fresh hordes of Turkish pastoral nomads out of Central Asia. They drifted until they reached Asia Minor, but here finally they felt at home. Why here? Because pastoral nomads tended to like this sort of lawless environment. As autonomous self-ruling clans, they had their own leaders and laws and just felt crimped by the sort of law and order governments imposed. In a disputed frontier zone they could roam where they wanted, graze their herds where they wished, and supplement their needs by raiding settled folks according to the time-tested traditions of the steppes they had once called home.

  Christians still lived in this anarchic zone, small towns and villages endured, but no government guaranteed the safety of the roads, no police came to the aid of anyone whose store got robbed, and no agency rushed to help in cases of fire, flood, or other catastrophe. The public sphere had eroded, so one had nobody to turn to in times of trouble except one’s clan, one’s friends and—one’s Sufi brothers.

  As the new Sufism proliferated through this region, itinerant mystics began to roam the land. Some came from Persia and further east; some emerged locally. Many were dervishes, men who embraced voluntary poverty as a spiritual exercise. They didn’t work but lived on alms in order that they might free up all their time to contemplate God.

  Many of these mystic vagabonds were also eccentrics; if you were living on alms, there was probably some advantage to standing out from the crowd. Kalendar, one of the earliest of these mystic vagabonds, wandered from town to town with bands of followers, all beating drums, chanting, singing, shouting, ranting, wildly exhorting people to come to Allah and urging them also to fight the infidels, fight them, fight! He and his followers had unkempt hair, they dressed in rags, and they disturbed the peace, but they excited fervid passions and strange ideas, and wherever Kalendar went, Kalendari brotherhoods sprouted in his wake.

  Almost as a defense against wild men like Kalendar, more respectable people embraced another mystic named Bektash, an austere ascetic. For all his clerical sobriety, Bektash had a disturbing intensity about him, but at least he didn’t shout. He became the favorite Sufi of the ulama.

  Then there were the Mevlevi dervishes, darlings of the intellectuals and cognoscenti. They sprang up around a poet named Jalaludin, who was born in Balkh, for which reason, in Afghanistan, he is known as Jalaludin-i Balkhi. He was a boy when Mongol power began to coalesce around Genghis Khan. His father smelled trouble coming and moved the family west to what was left of the sultanate of Rum, for which reason most of the world knows this poet as Jalaludin-i Rumi (“Jalaludin the Roman.”)

  Rumi’s learned father founded a school, and Rumi began teaching there once he came of age, for he acquired his own reputation for learning. He wrote conventional religious treatises that gained him great respect and attracted numerous students, who crowded into his lectures and hung on his eve
ry word.

  The key moment in Rumi’s legendary biography occurred one day when a ragged stranger came into his classroom. The stranger sat in the back but he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. He kept bursting into song, disrupting the lecture—he seemed crazy. The stories about this stranger remind one of the young Jack Kerouac ceaselessly shouting “Go!” from the back of the room when Alan Ginsberg was reading Howl for the first time in public. Rumi’s students grabbed hold of the beggar and tried to throw him out of the room, but their professor made them stop and asked the man who he was and what he wanted.

  “I am Shams-i Tabrez,” the stranger said, “and I have come for you.”

  To the astonishment of his students, Rumi closed his book, cast off his scholar’s cloak, and said, “My teaching days are over. This is my master.” He walked out of the classroom with Shams, never to return.

  Jalaludin and the beggar became inseparable. These two bonded passionately but on a purely spiritual level, bonded so utterly that Rumi began to sign his poetry with his master’s name: his lyrics from this period have been collected as The Works of Shams-i Tabrez. Before Rumi met Shams, he was a respected writer whose work might have been read for a hundred years. After he met Shams, he became one of the greatest mystic poets in the history of literature.

  After a number of years, Shams mysteriously disappeared, and Rumi went on to compose a single thousand-page poem called Mathnawi Ma’nawi (The Spiritual Manuscript). In the famous opening passage, Rumi poses a question: why is the melody of the flute so piercingly sad? Then he answers his own question: because the flute started out as a reed, growing by the river bank, rooted in soil. When it was made into a flute, it was severed from its roots. The sorrow keening in its song is the reed’s wistful memory of its lost connection to the source. In the next thirty thousand couplets, Rumi delivers hundreds of stories in a language thrumming with eroticized religiosity, illustrating how we human flutes can recover our connection to the source. Rumi remains influential, even in the English-speaking world, where translations of his work outsell those of every other poet.4

  In short, Sufism had something for every taste and class. Sufis converted the pastoral nomads to Islam, so these tribes imbibed the passions of Islam before absorbing its doctrines. Sufi orders intertwined with artisans’ guilds, with merchants associations, with the peasantry, with aristocratic military groups—like a web, Sufism connected all the disparate groups in this atomized world.

  Some Sufi brotherhoods devoted to futuwwah ideals developed into ghazi corporations. The word ghazi meant something like “warrior saint.” Ghazis were reminiscent of the Knights Templar and other Christian military orders spawned during the Crusades, except that no one ordained them, Islam having no pope-like figure to do the ordaining. Instead, ghazis ordained themselves, forming around some masterful knight and taking inspiration from some charismatic sheikh. They adopted special headgear and cloaks and other accessories as badges of membership in their group. They had initiation rituals involving vows, pledges, iconic artifacts and arcane relics, much the same sorts of things boys cook up when they form “secret clubs.”

  Members of ghazi orders centered their lives around campaigns into Christian territory to perform great deeds of valor for the advancement of the one true faith. They were very much like an Islamic version of the knights of Arthurian legend.

  Hundreds of these ghazi group sprang up, big ones and little ones. In search of fame and fortune, these knights sallied into the frontier “marches,” that ever-growing belt of territory that the Byzantines still officially claimed but where their authority had grown dubious. Once in a while some ghazi chieftain secured enough territory to claim a little state of his own, whereupon he promptly declared himself an amir (also emir) and his little state an emirate. “Amir” was an Islamic title that had once meant “commander” but now meant something more like “prince.”

  With eastern Anatolia crystallizing into numerous little ghazi emirates, Byzantine power shrank and the lawless frontier zone receded westward—which posed an ironic contradiction: the frontier marches were mother’s milk to the ghazi states. As the disputed zone moved, so did the ghazi knights; they leaked away from the established emirates and off into the wild west, where a man could still prove himself in battle and incidentally score some plunder.

  At a certain point, however, the wild west stopped receding because the frontier was close enough to Constantinople that the Byzantines could make a stand. Ghazi knights draining from the east began to accumulate in these frontline states situated nose to nose with Byzantine power. Knights could find employment here for at least fifty years after fighting had faded out in the rest of Anatolia. The frontline states accordingly grew ever stronger while the eastern emirates grew ever weaker. It was here on this militarized frontier, therefore, that a new world empire was born.5

  In 1258 CE, the very year Hulagu destroyed Baghdad, a boy named Othman was born to a leading ghazi family in Anatolia. Othman’s descendants were called the Othmanlis, or Ottomans, as people in the West pronounced it, and they ended up building a mighty empire.

  Not that Othman himself built an empire; he only managed to construct the toughest little ghazi emirate in Anatolia. His recent ancestors had been pastoral nomads out of Central Asia, a clan of about four hundred fleeing the Mongols, and he had not moved far from his roots. His palace was his horse, his throne his saddle, and his office his saddlebag. His capital was wherever he camped for the night. All he really bequeathed to his successors was a process. In the fighting season, he would lead his men into the frontier provinces and accumulate booty by fighting Christians. In the “off-season,” he collected taxes from any productive settled folks he found in areas he controlled.

  As the Ottomans grew stronger, they began to absorb other ghazi states, sometimes by conquering them, sometimes by out-and-out buying them. Ghazi chieftains who had been sovereign emirs became feudal aristocrats, still powerful in their own right but subservient to an even greater power, the head of the Ottoman dynasty.

  The Ottomans profited from the single most crucial bit of luck that makes the difference between success and failure for a family dynasty: it had a series of long-lived rulers, all of them pretty capable. One of them, Murat I, sailed across the Black Sea and began adding bits of Europe to his conquests. By his era (1350-1389 CE) the Ottoman dynasty no longer ruled from horseback but had an urban capital, a palace, a government bureaucracy, a tax policy, a treasury. Ottoman rulers adopted a veneer of high Islamic civilization, not to mention some of the rituals, pomp, and ceremonials of the Byzantine court.

  Another Ottoman ruler, Bayazid I (1389-1402) launched a program called the devshirme, which consisted of bringing captured boys from Christian Europe back to his palace, raising them as Muslims, and developing them into crack soldiers. These were really just the familiar mamluks of Islamic history by another name; mamluks were Turkish boys growing up in Arab or Persian courts, these were Christian boys growing up in a Turkish court. The soldiers developed by the devshirme were called janissaries, a corruption of the Turkish phrase Yeni Ceri, which means “new troops.”

  Bayazid’s janissaries liberated him from his own feudal lieges, those recently sovereign aristocratic ghazis who traced their descent back to Central Asia. Their troops still provided Bayazid with foot soldiers, but the janissaries gave him a professional corps of officers to lead them.

  Bayazid’s raids reached ever deeper into Europe. The kings of France and Hungary got together and organized a force to check him, but Bayazid demolished their joint army in 1396, at Nicopolis, a town in present-day Bulgaria. Now the amir of the Ottomans truly ruled an empire. In fact, Bayazid had outgrown the title of amir. He called himself the sultan, thereby declaring himself the chief executive of Dar al-Islam, a secular version of the khalifa. His military adventures became full-blown campaigns, and every year he launched a new one, striking west one year, heading east the next year to absorb more ghazi emirates and extend his rule
into the old Muslim heartland. Back and forth he scuttled, moving at such speed that people began to call him the Thunderbolt. Bayazid acquired the swagger of a Caesar.

  Then it all came crashing down. On one of his forays east, Bayazid ran into a warrior tougher than himself—the dreaded Timur-i-lang. Bayazid’s own feudal lieges had called Timur into Anatolia. They resented having lost sovereignty to the Ottomans, and so they sent a message to Timur, complaining that Bayazid was spending so much time in Europe, he was turning into a Christian. Well, Timur-i-lang would have none of that, for along with being a ruthless savage of unparalleled cruelty, Timur was also a Muslim who fancied himself a patron of the high arts, a scholar in his own right, and a devout defender of Islam.

  In 1402, near the city of Ankara, these two civilized patrons of the arts set niceties aside and went at each other blade to axe, and may the worst man win. Timur-i-lang proved himself the more brutal of the two. He crushed the Ottoman army, took Emperor Bayazid himself prisoner, clapped him in a cage like some zoo animal, and hauled him back to his jewel-encrusted lair in Central Asia, the city of Samarqand. Despair and humiliation so overwhelmed Bayazid that he committed suicide. Out west, Bayazid’s sons began to war with each other over the truncated remains of his one-time empire.

  It looked like the end of the Ottomans. It looked like they would end up having been just another of the many meteoric Turkish kingdoms that flashed and fizzled. But in fact, this kingdom was different. From Othman to Bayazid, the Ottomans had not just conquered; they had woven a new social order (which I will describe a few pages further on). For now, suffice to say that in the aftermath of Timur’s depredations, they had deep social resources to draw upon. Timur died within decades, his empire tattered quickly down to a small (but culturally brilliant) kingdom in western Afghanistan. The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, not only recovered, it began to rise.