by Tamim Ansary
From the other side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like the long-familiar program to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems, and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self-interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman, and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.
What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves as familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.
The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations,” if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on.
Unraveling the vectors of those two crowds is the minimum precondition for sorting out the doctrinal bases of today’s disputes. The unraveling will not itself produce sweetness and light, because there are actual incompatibilities here, not just “misunderstandings.” When I started working on this book, I read my proposal to a group of fellow writers, two of whom declared that the conflict between the Muslim world and the West was promoted by hidden powers because “people are really the same and we all want the same things”; the conflict would fade away if only people in the West understood that Islam was actually just like Christianity. “They believe in Abraham, too,” one of them offered.
This sort of well-meant simplification won’t get us very far.
On the other side, I often hear liberal Muslims in the United States say that “jihad just means ‘trying to be a good person,’” suggesting that only anti-Muslim bigots think the term has something to do with violence. But they ignore what jihad has meant to Muslims in the course of history dating back to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed himself. Anyone who claims that jihad has nothing to do with violence must account for the warfare that the earliest Muslims called “jihad.” Anyone who wants to say that early Muslims felt a certain way but we modern Muslims can create whole new definitions for jihad (and other aspects of Islam) must wrestle with the doctrine Muslims have fleshed out over time: that the Qur’an, Mohammed’s prophetic career, and the lives, deeds, and words of his companions in the first Muslim community were the will of God revealed on Earth and no mortal human can improve on the laws and customs of that time and place. This doctrine has forced all Muslim reformers to declare that they are proposing nothing new, only restoring what was originally meant. They must deny that they are forging forward, must insist that they are going back to the pristine original. That’s a trap Muslim thinkers must break out of.
The modernist Egyptian theologian Sheikh Mohammed Abduh wrote famous books showing that the Qur’an actually prescribed science and certain (but not other) modern social values. He cites scriptural declarations to show that in marriage the Qur’an actually favors monogamy over polygamy. His case is convincing but he clearly came to his task intending to find support for monogamy in the Qur’an. It was a conclusion he had already reached. The question is, from what other source did he derive this conclusion? Was it not rational thought applied to the deepest principles of shared human life?
The role of women in society is no doubt the starkest instance of the incompatibility between the Islamic world and the West, an issue much in need of intellectual unraveling and deconstruction. Every society in every era has understood the powerful potential of sexuality to disrupt social harmony and every society has developed social forms to check that power. On this point, the disagreement between Islamic and Western culture is not about whether women should be oppressed, as is often represented in the West. Well-meaning folk on both sides believe that no human beings should be oppressed. This is not to deny that women suffer grievously from oppressive laws in many Muslim countries. It is only to say that the principle on which Muslims stand is not the “right” to oppress women. Rather, what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community.
And I must say, I don’t see how a single society can be constructed in which some citizens think the whole world should be divided into a women’s realm and a men’s realm, and others think the genders should be blended into a single social realm wherein men and women walk the same streets, shop the same shops, eat at the same restaurants, sit together in the same classrooms, and do the same jobs. It can only be one or the other. It can’t be both. From where I stand, I don’t see how Muslims can live in the West, under the laws and customs of Western societies, if they embrace that divided-world view, nor how Westerners can live in the Muslim world as anything but visitors, if they embrace that genders-shuffled-together view.
I don’t offer one answer or another to the questions I am posing. I only say that Muslim intellectuals have to grapple with them. And they have been. Some of the most daring departures from orthodox Islamic doctrines emerged in Iran, during the two decades after that country expelled the United States and claimed its cultural sovereignty. There, anonymous writers proposed that every generation had the right to interpret the Shari’ah anew without reference to the accumulated code of the religious scholars. This idea and others like it were suppressed. The suppression made news in the West—it was more evidence that Iran was not a democracy. What struck me, however, was that such ideas were voiced at all in the Muslim world. I wondered if it could only happen in a place where Muslims were struggling with themselves and each other, not with the West.
After 9/11 the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure on Iran, and in the face of this external threat, ideas with a Western aroma lost credibility because they smelled of collaboration: they no longer needed to be suppressed; they could gain no purchase with a public that had turned conservative, a public that chose the ultranationalist Ahmadinejad to head up their nation.
Many points for discussion, even argument, simmer between the Islamic world and the West. There can be no sensible argument, however, until both sides are using the same terms and mean the same things by those terms—until, that is, both sides share the same framework or at least understand what framework the other is assuming. Following multiple narratives of world history can contribute at least to developing such a perspective.
Everybody likes democracy, especially as it applies to themselves personally; but Islam is not the opposite of democracy; it’s a whole other framework. Within that framework there can be democracy, there can tyranny, there can be many states in between.
For that matter, Islam is not the opposite of Christianity, nor of Judaism. Taken strictly as a system of religious beliefs, it has more areas of agreement than argument with Christianity and even more so with Judaism—take a look sometime at the laws of diet, hygiene, and sexuality prescribed by orthodox religious Judaism, and you’ll see almost exactly the same list as you find in orthodox, religious Islam. Indeed, as Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad once noted, until recent centuries, it made more sense to speak of Judeo-Muslim than of Judeo-Christian culture.
It is, however, problematically misleading to think of Islam as one item in a class whose other items are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Not inaccurate, of course: Islam is a religion, like those others, a distinct set of bel
iefs and practices related to ethics, morals, God, the cosmos, and mortality. But Islam might just as validly be considered as one item in a class whose other items include communism, parliamentary democracy, fascism, and the like, because Islam is a social project like those others, an idea for how politics and the economy ought to be managed, a complete system of civil and criminal law.
Then again, Islam can quite validly be seen as one item in a class whose other items include Chinese civilization, Indian civilization, Western civilization, and so on, because there is a universe of cultural artifacts from art to philosophy to architecture to handicrafts to virtually every other realm of human cultural endeavor that could properly be called Islamic.
Or, as I have tried to demonstrate, Islam can be seen as one world history among many that are unfolding simultaneously, each in some way incorporating all the others. Considered in this light, Islam is a vast narrative moving through time, anchored by the birth of that community in Mecca and Medina fourteen centuries ago. The story includes many characters who are not Muslim and many events that are not religious. Jews and Christians and Hindus are part of this story. Industrialization is an element of the plot, and so is the steam engine and the discovery of oil. When you look at it this way, Islam is a vast complex of communal purposes moving through time, driven by its own internally coherent assumptions.
And so is the West.
So which is the real history of the world? The philosopher Leibniz once posited the idea that the universe consists of “monads,” each monad being the whole universe understood from a particular point of view, and each monad containing all the others. World history is like that: the whole story of humankind from a particular point of view, each history containing all the others, with all actual events situated somewhere with respect to a central narrative, even if that “somewhere” is in the background as part of the white noise against which the meaningful line stands out. They’re all the real history of the world. The work lies in the never-ending task of compiling them in the quest to build a universal human community situated within a single shared history.
APPENDIX
The Structure of Islamic Doctrine
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 With footnotes.
CHAPTER 1
1 See Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 148.
2 Conan Doyle, for example, uses “Parthian shot” to mean “parting shot” in his 1886 novel A Study in Scarlet.
3 The eleventh-century Persian poet Firdausi drew on this vast body of Persian legends to write the Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic poem in which Kay Khosrow the Just figures largely.
CHAPTER 2
1 From a passage by Tabari, excerpted in The Inner Journey: Views from the Islamic Tradition, edited by William Chittick, (Sandpoint, Idaho: Morning Light Press, 2007), p. xi.
2 Akbar Ahmed’s Islam Today (New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 21, for excerpts from Mohammed’s last sermon.
CHAPTER 3
1 Reza Aslan, No god but God (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 113.
2 This is Tabari’s description; an excerpt appears on page 12 of Islam: From the Prophet Mohammed to the Capture of Constantinople, a collection of documents edited and translated by Bernard Lewis. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
3 The core of a document purporting to be Omar’s original declaration to Jerusalem appears in Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007), pp. 91-92.
CHAPTER 5
1 From Ibn Qutayba’s ninth-century history Uyun al-Akhbar, excerpted in Islam: From the Prophet Muhammed to the Capture of Constantinople (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 273.
2Nafasul Mahmum (chapter 14), Sheikh Abbas Qummi quoting from thirteenth-century historian Sayyid Ibn Tawoos’s book Lahoof (Qom, Iran: Ansariyan Publications, 2005).
3 G. E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970), p. 70.
CHAPTER 6
1 Wiet, Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate, pp. 12-24.
2 From Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census by Tertius Chandler. (Lewiston, New York: St. David’s University Press, 1987).
CHAPTER 7
1 My rendering of a poem that appears in Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, edited by A. Harvey and E. Hanut, (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1999).
2 From Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, “Women Scholars of Hadith,” at http://www.jannah.org/sisters/womenhadith.html.
3 Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Early Caliphate (1932; Lahore, Pakistan: The Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam, 1983), p. 119.
4 Ghazali, “On the Etiquettes of Marriage,” The Revival of the Religious Sciences book 12 at http://www.ghazali.org/works/marriage.htm.
CHAPTER 8
1 Chaim Potok, History of the Jews (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 346-347.
2 Mohammed Ali, A Cultural History of Afghanistan, 120-123 (Kabul: Punjab Educational Press, 1964).
3 My cousin Farid Ansary quoted this line from a contemporary of Firdausi’s; he couldn’t recall the poet’s name. However, similar (but more extensive) anti-Arab vituperations can be found at the end of Firdausi’s Shahnama.
CHAPTER 9
1 Philip Daileader discusses the fragmentation process in medieval Europe in lectures 17-20 of his audio series The Early Middle Ages (Chantilly, Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2004). See also the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition, entry for “knight.”
2 Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), pp. 38-40.
3 Ibid., p. 46.
4 Quoted by Karen Armstrong in Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), pp. 178-179.
5 Ibid., p. 73.
6 Ibid., p. 39.
7 David Morgan, The Mongols (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2007), p. 17.
8 Ibid., pp. 64-71.
9 Sabbah’s sect resurrected itself as the Nizari Isma’ilis, gained new converts, and rose again, but it morphed into a peaceful movement that is now one of the most progressive sects of Islam, devoted to science and education. Its leader is called the Agha Khan, and the Isma’ilis run the Agha Khan University in Pakistan, one of the brightest centers of learning in today’s Islamic world: everything changes.
10 An account of the sack of Baghdad by Muslim historian Rashid al-Din Fazlullah (1247-1318) appears in The Middle East and Islamic World Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 49.
11 The mamluk army was much bigger than Hulagu’s, but the Mongol’s terrible success made them the Goliath in every confrontation.
12 Morgan, 146.
CHAPTER 10
1 Morgan, pp. 16-18.
2 See Akbar Ahmed’s interesting discussion of these differences between the two religions in Islam Today, pp. 21-22.
3 Muhammed ibn-al-Husayn al-Sulami, The Book of Sufi Chivalry: Lessons to a Son of the Moment (New York: Inner Traditions International, 1983). These stories appear in the forward, pp. 9-14. The ghazis apparently borrowed the story about Omar from a traditional older story about a pre-Islamic king named Nu’man ibn Mundhir.
4 Alexandra Marks, writing for the Christian Science Monitor on November 25, 1997, said the Coleman Barks’s translation of Rumi, The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), had sold at that point, a quarter of a million copies worldwide.
5 See Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1965) pp. 33-51.
6 Details of Ottoman society come largely from Stanford Shaw’s History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially pp. 55-65, 113-138, and 150-161.
7 Zahirud-din Muhammad Babur, Babur-nama, translated by Annette S. Beveridge, (1922; Lahor: Sang-e-Meel Publications, reprinted 1987), p. 121.
8 Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne, The Drama of Mogu
l India (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972) pp. 113-114, 493-494.
9 Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 97.
CHAPTER 11
1 See C. M. Woolger, “Food and Taste in Europe in the Middle Ages,” pp. 175-177 in Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
2 Peter Russel, Prince Henry the Navigator (London: Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, 1960).
3 Daileader, Lecture 15, Early Middle Ages (Chantilly, Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2004).
CHAPTER 12
1 Great Britain was born after King James VI of Scotland inherited the crown of England. He and his successors held both crowns separately until the Act of Union in 1707. Only after that date is it correct to speak of “the British.”
2 For a detailed inside picture of life in the Ottoman harem, see Alev Croutier’s Harem: The World Behind the Veil (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), especially pp. 35-38, 103-105, 139-140.
3 James Gelvin points out these global interconnections in The Modern Middle East. See pp. 55-60.
4 Nick Robbins, “Loot: In Search of the East India Company,” an article written for openDemocracy.net in 2003. Find it at http://www.opendemocracy.net/theme_7-corporations/article_904.jsp.
5 Gelvin, pp. 84-86.
6 As reported by Frederick Cooper, deputy commissioner of Amritsar, in a dispatch excerpted by Reza Aslan, No god but God (New York, Random House, 2006), pp. 220-222.
