Download Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam Part 4: Islamic

Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Part 4: The Origins of Islamic Fundamentalism
Three Islamic Empires in 1600’s
The Authority of the Ulema in Islam
• A gulf separates modernism from Muslim fundamentalism. For a
Muslim, the idea of a Shariah state was deeply satisfying. This was the
achievement of the Ottoman Empire, which drew legitimacy from its
fidelity to Islamic law.
• The Sultan’s authority was mediated through the ulema, the religious
scholars who had the sacred authority of Islamic law behind them.
• The ulema was an important link between the Sultan and his subjects.
• The ulema felt that the Ottoman state was their state and the sultans
accepted the constraints put upon them by the clergy because the
partnership enhanced their authority
The Five Pillars of Islam
• For a devout Muslim, politics is what Christians would call a sacrament. It is an
activity that must be sacralized so that it becomes a channel for the divine.
• The Islamic community (ummah) is central to Mohammad’s vision of the Five
Pillars of the Islamic faith.
• Where Christians identify orthodoxy
with correct belief, Muslims, like Jews,
require “orthopraxy” - a uniformity of
religious practice -, and see belief as
a secondary issue.
• Muslims in the early modern period
did not experience divine law as a curb
on their freedom; it was a ritual and
cultic realization of a mythical archetype,
which they believed, put them in touch
with the sacred.
Esoteric Movements
• Muslims were able to explore fresh religious ideas and practices
through esoteric forms of Islam, which were hidden from the masses
because their practitioners believed they could not be understood.
• The three main forms of esoteric Islam were: Sufism, the rationalism
of Falsafah, and the political piety of the Shiah.
• The esoteric forms of Islam were a
conservative way of
returning to fundamentals,
which alone, it was thought,
could lead to human
perfection and fulfillment.
Sufi Prayer
Shiis flaggelating themselves during Ashura
Mamluks in Egypt
• Egypt became part of the Ottoman empire in 1517. The great university
of al-Azhar in Cairo became the most important center for the study of
fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) in the Sunni world.
• But Egypt fell behind Istanbul and lapsed into obscurity. Since 1250 the
region had been governed by the Mamluks, a crack military corps
composed of Circassian slaves (from the north Caucasis) who had been
captured as boys and converted to Islam.
• The Mamluks had once ruled
a vibrant society, but the Mamluk
empire succumbed to the limitations
of an agrarian civilization and by the
15th century fell into decay.
Mamluk Cavalry
Power of the Ulema in Egypt
• By the late 16th cent. Mamluk rule was unstable with constant conflict
between different warring factions.
• The Egyptian people felt no affinity with their rulers and turned to the
ulema, who represented the sacred order of Shariah, and became the
true leaders of the Egyptian masses.
• The ulema were the teachers, scholars and
intellectuals of Egyptian society. Each town
had between one and seven madrashahs
(colleges for the study of Islamic law and
theology).
• The ulema also held important political
positions. Egyptian society took on a distinctly
religious character.
Disarray of the Ottoman Empire
• By the late 18th cent. the Ottoman empire was in serious disarray.
• The efficiency of its government in the 16th cent. had given way to
incompetence, especially in the outlying areas of the empire, such as
Egypt.
• The West began its startling rise to power and the Ottomans found
that they could no longer fight as equals with the powers of Europe.
• Ottoman attempts at modernization were relegated to improvement
in military strategy and technology. In other words, it was superficial.
• In the Arabian peninsula, Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab created a breakaway state and tried to create an enclave of pure Islamic faith by
returning to the Koran and by rejecting medieval jurisprudence,
mysticism and philosophy.
The Rise of Shiism in
th
16
Cent. Iran
• The Sufis taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan
paradigm in their own lives and insisted that the way to God lay
through the creative and mystical imagination. Later, they taught that
the common people should rely entirely on their own insights, and
should not have to depend on the scholars and learned clerics.
• The Safavids conquered Iran in the early 16 cent and made Shiism the
official religion of the state. Up to that
point, the Shiah had been an intellectual
and mystical esoteric movement, and Shiis
had refrained from political involvement.
The Safavids
Who Are the Shiis?
• When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, he had made no arrangement
for the succession and his friend Abu Bakr was elected by to the caliphate by
a majority of the ummah in Mecca.
• Some believed, however, that Muhammad would have wished to be
succeeded by his closest male relative,
Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was his ward, cousin
and son-in-law.
• But Ali was continually passed over in
Ali ibn Abi Talib
subsequent elections until he finally became
the 4th caliph in 656. The Shiis, however, do
not recognize the first three caliphs and call
Ali the Firsts Imam (“leader”).
• Ali was assassinated by Muslim extremists in 661. His rival, Muawiyyah,
seized the caliphate and established the more worldly Umayyad dynasty,
based in Damascus.
The Kerbala Tragedy and Shiiah Protest
• When Muawiyyah died, there were huge demonstrations in favor of Ali’s
second son, Husain (Husain’s older brother had died).
• The new Umayyad caliph tried to assassinate Husain. Husain decided that
he must take a stand and set out with a band of 50 followers (including
women and children) for Kufa, believing that such a heroic stand against
tyranny would convince the ummah to back him.
• But Ummayad troops met Husain and his entourage, and slaughtered them
near the plain of Kerbala.
• This tragedy would becoming the
defining myth of the Shiis. Shiis mourn
the death of Husain on the first day of
Ashura each year by weeping, beating
their bodies and declaring their undying
opposition to the corruption of Muslim
political life. Shiis developed a piety of
protest.
Shiis Become a Sect Within Islam
• After the tragic death of Hussain, Shiites became convinced that only
descendants of his father, Ali (who was not killed at Kerbala), should lead
the ummah, and they became a distinctive sect within Islam.
• Shiites came to believe that only members of Muhammad’s family
through the house of Ali had true knowledge of God.
• In some Shii circles, Ali was revered as an incarnation of the divine.
• Only descendants of Ali could provide the ummah with divine guidance.
• The Shiites were drawing on the ancient Persian tradition of a chosen,
god-begotten family which transmitted the divine glory from one
generation to another through a descendant of Ali, called the “true
Iman” (leader).
• This emphasis on the “incarnation” of divine authority was considered
dangerous by most Sunnis because it was an attempt to make a
transcendent, ineffable God too “personal.”
The Myth of Husain
• The mythology of Shiism could not be applied practically in the real
world. The Abbasids, the successors of the Umayyads, once in power,
soon dropped their Shii radicalism and became ordinary Sunnis.
• The myth of Husain seemed to suggest that any attempt to oppose a
tyrannical ruler was doomed to failure, no matter how pious it might
be.
• In 874, the eleventh Shii Imam died, probably
poisoned at the behest of the Caliph. He had
been kept in strict seclusion so that Shiis
knew
very little about him. People came to
believe that the Imam indeed had a son and
that he had gone into hiding to save his life.
Street-seller with pictures of Husain
The Myth of the “Occultation”
• In 934, the current agent brought the Shiah a message from the Hidden
Imam that he had not died but had been miraculously concealed by God,
and that he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to
inaugurate a new reign of justice.
• He was still the infallible guide of the Shiah and the only legitimate ruler of
the ummah, but he would no longer be able to have any direct contact with
them.
• This defining myth of Shiism became known
as the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam.
• The spirituality of Shiism became a symbolic
quest for the Unseen. Shiis worshipped an
invisible, inscrutable God, searched for a concealed
meaning in the Koran, took part in a ceaseless but
invisible battle for justice, yearned for a hidden Imam,
and cultivated an esoteric version of Islam.
The Hidden Imam
Shiism Becomes Established Religion in Iran
• Shiis condoned a total secularization of politics that seemed to violate the
crucial Islamic principle of tawid, which forbade any such separation of state
and religion.
• The paradox is that this allowed the Shii ulema more freedom to exercise
their rational powers. Because the Hidden Imam was not available, they had
to rely on their rational powers.
• By the end of the 15th cent. most Shiis were Arabs and the Shiah were
especially strong in Iraq. Most Iranians were Sunni, but this changed with the
arrival of Shah Ismail, head of a Sufavid order of Sufis. He conquered Iran and
made Shiism the official religion of the new Safavid
empire. This was a break with Shii tradition.
Muhammad
Baqir Majliisi
• Shiah scholars became the establishment. The Shii ulema
took over the legal and educational system in Iran as well as
the religious duties of government.
• Muhammad Baqir Majliisi later changed Shiism by banning
mystical practices and philosophic exploration.
The Challenge of Modernizing
• By the end of the 18th cent. Muslims had fallen behind the West intellectually and,
because the Islamic empires were also politically weak at this time, they would be
vulnerable to European states, which were about to make a bid for world hegemony.
• In 1798, Napolean Bonaparte invaded Egypt and promised
to liberate Egyptians from their Ottoman overlords. The
ulema were not impressed. Bewildered, they were hesitant
to take political power, even though Napolean encouraged this.
• Muhammad Ali seized control and tried to create a modern
state that was independent of Istanbul. He massacred Mamluk
officers in 1805.
• But in the absence of stable, democratic institutions, violence
was the only way to establish order. Law and order were reestablished, but Egypt was slow to modernize and most efforts
to modernize the country failed.
• There was a lack of innovation and the only way for Egyptians to modernize was to
imitate western models. Muhammad brought in technocrats from Europe but, without
a modern educational system, the military continued to dominate.
• In Egypt, two societies emerged – a military society imitating western models of
military rule and an unmodernized society.
For Egyptians, Secularization is Alien
• Muhammad marginalized the power of the Egyptian ulema and
undermined the madrasha schools.
• The ulema turned their backs on change. Modernity was not seen as
an intellectual challenge, but as destructive regulations imposed by a
despotic leader. There were no clergy guides in entering the modern
world in a society that had only known a partnership between the
ulema and the ruling elite. Secularization remained completely foreign
to Egyptian society despite Muhammad’s efforts to drag Egypt into the
modern world.
• This was in stark contrast to the Ottoman empire.
The Failure of Imitating Western Models
• The Ottoman Pasha understood that the Ottoman empire could not survive
in the modern world unless it became a centralized state, with a modern
army, and a new legal and administrative system.
• In Egypt, Muhammad Said Pasha, Muhammad Ali’s son, adopted a western
lifestyle and welcomed the building of the Suez Canal by the French. The
Canal helped to ruin the Egyptian economy and helped to create a crippling
dependency on European powers. Egypt had a new strategic power, but it
was financially bankrupt.
• Similarly, the rebuilding of Cairo under
Muhammad Ali and his sons was done on
a totally western model and this alienated
the mass of Egyptians. Modernization created
deprivation and dependence.
• In 1882, in order to stabilize the country and
secure the Canal, Britain occupies Egypt.
Russian and British Concessions
• Modernization was even harder to achieve in Iran due to vast distances,
difficult terrain and the autonomous power of nomadic tribes.
• During the first half of the 19th cent. both Russian and British merchants
received special concessions from the Shahs which exempted them from
taxes. Low-priced western goods displaced Iranian crafts. The silk industry
was destroyed; the price of silver fell dramatically.
• Unlike Muhammad Ali in Egypt, the Qajar shahs had no modern army and no
central bureaucracy capable of enforcing their will on the ulema. Traditionally,
the Shii ulema had kept out of politics, but, in the face of increasing European
commercial power, this changed. Iranian merchants and artisans began to
turn to the ulema for advice.
• The Iranian shahs tried to counter the growing power of the ulema by
appealing to the masses through their support for the mourning ceremonies
for Husain, the martyr of Kerbala.
• The popular faith was very different from legalistic Shiism, but it had obvious
revolutionary potential.
Messianic Movements Oppose Western Interference
• Karim Khan, the leader of the Shaykhi school, created a rebellion against the
mujtahids, the Shia scholars. Whereas the orthodox ulema simply opposed the
commercial encroachments of the British and the Russians, Karim Khan saw
that new solutions had to be found to address the western threat.
• A second messianic movement occurred when Sayyid Ali
Muhammad declared that he was the “gate” (bab) to the divine
which the ulema declared to have been closed at the time of the
Occultation of the Hidden Imam. He called for a new and more just
social order and endorsed the bourgeois values of modernity.
The “Bab” was brought to trial but his followers, the Babis
created a revolutionary movement that unified many dissatisfied
Iranian groups who yearned for social justice. The movement was
quashed and the Bab was executed in 1850. This was the origin of
the Bahai faith,
• As with Shebetai Zevi, the Jewish messianic figure, a messianic movement
provided a bridge to a secularist ideology. Religion could help people
appropriate the ideals and enthusiasm of modernity.
Is Islamic Society Anti-western ?
• Today, western people have become accustomed to hearing Muslim
fundamentalists inveighing against their culture, denouncing their
policies as satanic and pouring scorn on values such as secularism,
democracy and human rights. There is an assumption that “Islam” is a
odds with everything that the West stands for.
• But it is fair to say that, under the influence of their own spirituality,
Muslims arrived at many ideas and values that are similar to our own
modern notions.
• They had evolved an appreciation of the wisdom of separating religion
and politics, had a vision of intellectual freedom and cultivated rational
thought. They also had a Koranic passion for social justice and equality.
Modernization Takes Time
• In Iran during the second half of the 19th cent. a circle of intellectual thinkers,
politicians and writers were passionate in their admiration of European
culture.
• One of the tasks of conservative, pre-modern faith had been to help people
accept the inherent limitations of their society. How would Islam change in
order to allow Iranians to take full part in modern world? Many progressive
Iranian leaders blamed religion for the disorders of the nation, but it was
almost impossible for an agrarian society to support the freedoms allowed in
modern society.
• Most of these leaders were elitists and didn’t represent the ordinary Iranian,
who was tied to the past. They could point to change, but couldn’t bring it
about in an orderly fashion. Their view of the west was naïve and inadequate.
Western models could not just be imposed. It had taken centuries for western
people to evolve their democratic ideals. Why couldn’t Islamic reformers see
this?
Temporary Harmony Between East and West and
Then a Fearful Reaction
• During the 1870’s a new group of writers from what is now Lebanon and
Syria came and settled in Cairo. Most of them were Christians who had
been educated in the French and American missionary schools. Their
influence was enormous.
• Unfortunately, soon afterwards, Egypt came under the leadership of
Jamal al-Din, an Iranian, who came to be known as “al-Afghani.” He was
passionate, eloquent, wild and quick-tempered, and tried to
Jamal al-Din:
“al Afghani”
get Muslims in the entire region to unite under the
banner of Islam and to use religion to counter the
threat of Western imperialism. His religious vision
was fueled by the fear of annihilation – something
we have found to be a common response to the
difficulties of modernity. He is later expelled.
Corrosive Sense of Inferiority in Egypt
• The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 created new rifts within Egyptian society.
The ulema were replaced by those who had received a western education. The
Shariah courts were replaced by European civil courts. Most damaging of all was the
tendency of Egyptians to internalize the colonialists’ negative views of the Egyptian
people.
• In 1899, Muhammad Abdu, a disciple of al-Afghani, became the mufti of Egypt, the
country’s chief consultant in Islamic law. He tried to reform the Egyptian educational
system, but faced strong resistance.
• One example of this is how the veiling of women
became a symbol of Islamic authenticity and a
symbol of resistance to colonialism.
• By the end of the 19th century, there were Jews,
Christians and Muslims who believed that their
faith was in danger of being obliterated.
• There was growing conviction that, in contrast to
centuries of tradition, religion had to become as
rational as modern science.
Contrast Between Egyptian and Iranian Ulema
• Starting in 1925, with the influence of the scholars, Ali Abd al-Raziq and
Rashid Rida, Egyptian leaders tried to establish a fully modernized
Islamic state based on Shariah. They were trying to absorb the learning
and values of the modern West by placing them within an Islamic
context. Rida was not a fundamentalist, but his ideas would influence
the fundamentalists of the future. Egyptian scholars were appalled by
how, under Attaturk, Turkey had been secularized.
• Unlike the Egyptian ulema, who had retreated defensively into
the world of the madrassahs, the Iranian ulema were often in the
vanguard of change and would continue to play a decisive role in
Iranian politics.
• But when a new parliament was created, one of the leading
clerics of Tehran, Shaykh Fadlullah Nuri argued that since all
government was illegitimate during the absence of the Hidden
Imam, the new parliament was un-Islamic.
Nuri
The Fall of Iran and the “Miracle” of Khomeini’s
Return
• The First World War was very disruptive for Iran and left many Iranians
longing for strong government. This opened the door for a small group to
overthrow the government in 1921. The British acquiesced because the new
prime minister was seen as pro-British.
• The new war minister, Reza Khan, was the stronger leader and he took over
power and tried to modernize the country. Reza had no interest in social
reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize
the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy. Any opposition was
ruthlessly suppressed. Khan was the founder
of the Pahlavi dynasty that was overthrown
in the Iranian revolution of 1979, leading to
the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
• For some Iranians, Khomeini’s return seemed
a miracle and resembled the mythical return
of the Hidden Imam.
Other Developments
• Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
the founder of Sunni fundamentalism. He believed that religious people and
secularists could not live at peace in the same society.
• The discrediting of Abdul Nasser’s vision of a secular Egyptian society as a
result of Egypt’s catastrophic defeat in the Six Day War with Israel in June
1967.
• Developments in Iran under Khomeini and Iran’s ant-American rhetoric
(“The Great Satan”)
• The assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981
and Hosni Mubaraks’ regime.
• The evolution of the concept of jihad, from
Islamic faith as “struggle” to violent
opposition to western values and modern,
western culture.
• The emergence of organized, wellfunded and heavily armed radical
Islamist groups.
Assassination of Anwar Sadat
Summary: Key Points
• Fundamentalist theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to
define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful
in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from a
terror of extinction.
• These movements are not an archaic throwback to the past. They are
modern, innovative and modernizing. Fundamentalists learn to manipulate
the political system in a way that brings more power to religious groups.
• Religion often helps people to adjust to modernity. Fundamentalism is an
attempt to relocate modernity within the realm of the sacred by bringing
back God into the political realm in new and innovative ways.
• Fundamentalism is an attempt to fill the void at the heart of a society based
on scientific rationalism. Because it was constantly embattled,
fundamentalist campaigns to re-sacralize society became aggressive and
distorted.