[Grem] The History of Islam

[Emoke Greschik]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8387/islam-history
..... The controversy right from the moment of the Prophet's last illness
before his death. The controversy over his succession, and what such
succession meant, tore apart the immediate followers of the Prophet, and
incited tribal warfare, fratricide and schisms that since then have
provided the backdrop to Muslims in respect to their own understanding and
practice of Islam as religion and politics.

*Islam as the Abrahamic vision of man's relation with God **was supplanted
by the theology of political Islam. *The process began in the midst of the
Prophet's last illness and accelerated with his death. The majority Sunni
sect in Islam coalesced around the view that the immediate successors of
the Prophet, elected or chosen, ought to be the closest companions of
Muhammad, and their rulings in the formative stage of Muslim history became
the standard by which subsequent generations of Muslims innovated the
requirements of ruling an empire.

Those Muslims who dissented from the majority view represented by Sunni
Islam were the Shi'a, or the party of Ali. Ali was a cousin of the Prophet,
raised from his childhood in the Prophet's household and, hence, the
closest companion of Muhammad. Ali was also the Prophet's son-in-law by
marriage to Fatima, his only surviving child.* The Shi'a Muslims believed
Ali was the designated successor of the Prophet because of their familial
ties, but he **was forcefully denied the succession by those who usurped it
immediately following the Prophet's demise.** Shi'a Islam evolved as the
main minority sect with its own theopolitics within Islam*.

*The first Muslims were Arabs of the desert, the Bedouins, among whom
Muhammad was born. Their tribalism persisted despite the Prophet's warnings
and it shaped Islam from the first hour of the post-Prophetic history.
Sectarianism within Islam was the unavoidable outcome of clan and tribal
conflicts among the first Muslims,* and the Sunni-Shi'a divide became the
main cleavage as a result, setting the template of further divisions as *sects
proliferated over time in the history of Islam.*

*Less than a century after the Prophet's death in 632 C.E., his followers,
the Bedouin Arabs, became the rulers of an empire that stretched from the
Iberian Peninsula in the West to the Indus River in the East.* There was
nothing in the Qur'an, or in the traditions of the Prophet, to instruct
these Arabs on the mechanics of administrating an empire. *They took to
imitating the rulers of Persia, whom they defeated, and adopted the
administrative manuals of both Byzantine and Persian officialdom* to rule
the lands and peoples they conquered. And in order to provide legitimacy in
the name of Islam to Arab rule *in Damascus and later in Baghdad, the ulema
(religious scholars) worked out the details of law and society, the Sharia,
derived from the Qur'an and the Prophetic traditions.*

The origin of Islamic culture and civilization lies in *the empire *that
Bedouin Arabs, through the force of arms, established in a very short
period. This *was also the origin of political Islam, which came to
represent the dominant face of Islam as theopolitics.*

*The fight that erupted, with the news of the Prophet's demise, among his
closest companions* over succession related to temporal power that the
Prophet had exercised, and not his role as a Messenger of God (*Rasul Allah*).
This fight *culminated in 680 C.E. with the defeat of the Prophet's
grandson, Husayn, killed and decapitated in the field of Kerbala,* close to
the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq, by the army sent out by Yazid I, the
Ummayad Caliph of the rapidly expanding Islamic empire.

*The event in Kerbala* was a watershed in the history of Islam. Ethnic
Arabs, recently converted to Islam, delivered Husayn's cruel end. Ever
since, this crime, as sordid as the crucifixion of Jesus, *has stained
Muslim history with the mark of Cain.*

After Kerbala,t* it could no longer be said *that Islam, as Abrahamic
monotheism, guided politics ethically along the path of justice and mercy.
Instead, the politics that surfaced upon the death of the Prophet hardened
after the killing of Husayn, and politics henceforth came to define Islam
as faith, culture, and society.

In the Battle of Kerbala, depicted in Abbas Al-Musavi's painting, Husayn,
the son of Ali and grandson of Muhammad, was killed along with his family
and all his followers by the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate. It was the
most crucial moment in the split between Shi'a and Sunni Islam. (Image
source: Brooklyn Museum)
*The Ummayads in Damascus, the imperial capital, were the first dynastic
rulers among Arabs in Islamic history. *The founder of the dynasty,
Muawiyyah, seized power following the murder of Ali, the fourth Caliph and
the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet. With the Ummayads the institution
of the Caliphate, which was an innovation to fill the void of leadership
among the Arabs in Medina following Muhammad's death, adopted the pomp and
pageantry of the Persian and Byzantine rulers. *The Caliphate, from that
first century of Islamic history until its abolition in 1924 by Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was the embodiment of Oriental
Despotism. *

*Those Muslims who witnessed **the tribal conflicts erupt* after the
Prophet's demise and recoiled in revulsion from politics turned inward in
seeking union with the divine mystery, as mentioned in the Qur'an. They*
sought solace in the spiritual dimension of Islam and emulated the
Prophetic tradition of withdrawal from the world through prayer and
meditation. They became the founders of the Sufi, or mystical, tradition in
Islam. This was the "other" face of Islam, distinct from* *political Islam*.

The physical expansion of the Islamic empire was carried forth by the
armies of the Caliphs. But* the spread of Islam as a faith tradition was a
slow process, carried forth by Sufi missionaries belonging to various
fraternal orders and independent of political rulers of the world of Islam*.

There is a world of difference in conversion brought about at the point of
sword of conquering armies, and conversion that results from the communion
of hearts and minds among people. The latter is more genuine and
transformative than the former in every religion. The Qur'an itself --
verse 49:13 -- warned the Prophet that the acceptance of Islam by the Arabs
of the desert was one of submission in the face of defeat, and that belief
had not entered their hearts. This verse might be read as forewarning of
crimes Muslims would commit through history in the cause of political
Islam, beginning with the killing of Husayn in Kerbala.

*Political Islam from its outset was an inquisition.* It *began with Abu
Bakr, the first Caliph,* when he subverted the Islamic principle stated in
the Qur'an -- "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256) -- and *
declared war on those Arab tribes who withheld their loyalty from him
following the death of the Prophet. The "Ridda Wars," or the "Wars of
Apostasy," launched by Abu Bakr inaugurated political Islam, and since
then, the precedent he set for Muslim-on-Muslim violence has plagued
Islamic history into our times.*

The role of the *a'lem* (pl. *ulema*; religious scholars) was instrumental
in the making of political Islam. The *ulema* provided legitimacy to the
Ummayad Caliphs in Damascus in the period of intra-tribal conflicts that
had led to the killings of the three Caliphs (Umar, Uthman, and Ali) after
Abu Bakr and then the massacre in the field of Kerbala.

*The consensus of the ulema* -- *accepted by* those who eventually came to
represent the majority *Sunni Muslims* (the word "Sunni" derived from
*Sunna*, meaning following the path or tradition of the Prophet) --* was
that political and social order however provided and maintained was
preferable to* *fitnah (disorder*). *This consensus provided doctrinal
legitimacy to the Caliphs. In return, the Caliphs recognized the special
function of the religious scholars and jurists in the drafting,
codification, and implementation of Sharia, or Islamic laws.*

As a result of this bargain between men wielding swords and men wielding
pens, the foundational arrangement of political Islam was firmly
established. It was an arrangement consistent with the thinking prevalent
in antiquity that religion (*deen* in Arabic) prescribed the totality of
human affairs. This meant, as it was understood by the *ulema* in the
formative period of Islamic history, that *the primary function of state
and government (dawlat in Arabic) was the establishment of the rule of
Sharia.* As Ann K.S. Lambton in her study, *State and Government in
Medieval Islam* (1981), observed:

"The law precedes the state and is immutable at all times and under all
conditions. The state is there to carry out the law. To disobey a law or to
neglect a law is not simply to infringe a rule of the social order: it is
an act of religious disobedience, a sin, and as such involves a religious
penalty."

Once the bricks and mortar of political Islam were set in the making of the
Islamic civilization, *Islam as the official doctrine of the state and
empire clearly demarcated the norm as prescribed in the Sharia and made the
ulema its official guardians. The Islamic state was a nearly perfect
embodiment of a closed totalitarian system designed by men towards the end
of the first millennium of the Common Era, and any suggestion of change or
adoption of new idea in matters of either religion or politics was
condemned as bid'ah (heresy deserving punishment).*

*But Muslim dissidents who viewed* *the doctrine of political Islam,* or
what might also be referred to as "official" Islam,* as* *an aberration*, *went
underground and kept the "other" Islam free from the shackles of politics.*
Beneath the hardened features of political Islam, the "other" Islam of
Sufis provided solace to Muslims by tending to their humanity in the light
of God's most favoured attributes of mercy and compassion.

*The "other" Islam*, unlike political Islam, *is not bound by time and
space. It is directed to man's inner yearnings for that which is eternal.
It plunges in search of the inner meaning of the Qur'an as the Word of God,
and the assuredness that God's mercy is not denied to any of His creations.*
The Qur'an states, "We are nearer to man than his jugular vein" (50:16),
reassuring man that he is not alone and God is not some distant uncaring
deity.

Whereas the defining characteristic of political Islam was religion
inseparable from politics, in "other" Islam politics was the corruption of
religion and the dissolution of belief. Hence, from the perspective of
"other" Islam, the *Sharia* as the corpus of Islamic laws codified by the
*ulema* and sanctioned by the Caliphs was a poor, even corrupt,
representation of the divine *Sharia* (in Arabic, a "path") imprinted in
the hearts of all believers as the path to acquiring God's infinite grace.

*ii.*

*Political Islam and the Islamic civilization it inaugurated was*
time-bound as a theopolitical system constructed in a certain historical
period or context. It *was a construct of late antiquity and the early
medieval era. **Since it was a fixed and closed system, it was invariably
given to decay and dissolution.*

*During the Middle Ages, the Islamic civilization flourished just as other
civilizations had. *As Abdus Salam (1926-1996) -- a physicist of
Indo-Pakistani origin and the first Muslim scientist awarded the Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1979 -- observed in one of his lectures,* the world of
Islam and the world of Christianity (Europe) were more or less at a similar
stage of development around the middle of the seventeenth century.*

The evidence of this relative equality of the two civilizations, Salam
suggested, could be seen in their technological achievements represented by
the two monuments, the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, and St. Paul's Cathedral
in London, England, completed about the same time. Some two decades later,
Salam observed,

"there was also created -- and this time only in the West -- a third
monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity's
future. This was Newton's *Principia*, published in 1687."

Newton's monument had no counterpart in India, or anywhere else in the
Muslim world.

*The Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution,
led by men of astounding intellect from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo and
Newton, propelled Europe out of the medieval age into the making of the
modern world. **But Islamic civilization, held together by political Islam,
descended into a death spiral. A century after Newton published his major
work, the Ottoman Empire was turning irreversibly into a pale shadow of a
civilization that once had threatened the powers of Europe at the gates of
Vienna.*

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington
by the Islamist terrorists of al Qaeda, Bernard Lewis published *What Went
Wrong?* (2002). It was Lewis's effort to answer why, and how, the world of
Islam had failed to accommodate the imperatives of the modern world.

"In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a
pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world," wrote Lewis.

"And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance,
Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized
arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and
bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the
cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them."

The civilizational success of political Islam in late antiquity and the
early medieval era ironically carried within it the seeds of its own
decline and demise. *World War I eventually put an end to the anachronism
that the Ottoman Empire had become, and the abolition of the Caliphate was
a formal effort to bury political Islam for good.*

*Thoughtful Muslims, for nearly a century before the demise of the Ottoman
Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate, had been thinking and writing
about the need for an Islamic reform. Europe's cultural advancement
following the Reformation and Enlightenment held up a mirror for the
Islamic world to follow in similar direction to similar ends.*

In India under British rule, for instance, there were a significant number
of Muslims who painfully recognized the malaise of Islamic societies and
offered remedy for their advancement into the modern world. Among them the
notable were Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), the founder of the Aligarh
University; Syed Ameer Ali (1849-1928), jurist and historian; and Muhammad
Iqbal (1877-1938), poet and philosopher.

One of the most important works was published in 1925 by Ali Abd al-Raziq
(1888-1966), an Egyptian scholar and jurist at Al-Azhar University in
Cairo. In his seminal work, titled *al-Islam wa 'Usul al-Hukm* (Islam and
the Fundamentals of Authority), al-Raziq pointed out that there was no
basis in the Qur'an and the Sunnah (traditions) of the Prophet for the
institution of the Caliphate.

Al-Raziq was not someone from outside the ranks of the *ulema*, or a lay
scholar unfamiliar with the intricacies of Islamic jurisprudence and
theology in the construction of *Sharia*. He was a student of Muhammad
Abduh (1849-1905) at al-Azhar, when Abduh had been appointed* the Grand
Mufti of Egypt.*

*Al-Raziq's main contention was based on the distinction between spiritual
and temporal authority. He indicated that the confusion among Muslims in
the period after the Prophet arose from their inability to distinguish
between the Apostolic role of Muhammad and the authority he derived as the
Messenger of God (Rasul Allah), and the Caliphate as a temporal
institution.* Al Raziq wrote:

"Muhammad was but an apostle, sent on behalf of a religious summons, one
pertaining entirely to religion and unmarred by any taint of monarchy or of
summons to a political state; and he possessed neither kingly rule nor
government, and he was not charged with the task of founding a kingdom in
the political sense, as this word and its synonyms are generally
understood."

*Al-Raziq **was denounced by his peers. He was made to appear before the
Council of the Greatest Ulema of Al-Azhar to hear the judgment against him,
as his license to teach and practice law was revoked. Egypt was then ruled
under Britain's supervision**, which likely saved al-Raziq from **even more
severe punishment.*

*But al-Raziq had stripped away the argument of traditional Islam on the
sanctity of the Caliphate, and with it went the idea of Sharia being
sacred. In the half-century following the abolition of the Caliphate by
Mustafa Kemal, Muslims under European rule gained their independence as new
states emerged in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world of Islam.*

This period in the middle decades of the last century was *a period of
intense expectations on the part of Muslims for progress in their living
conditions. A massive effort was invested to make the transition from the
world of pre-Newtonian knowledge and learning to the modern world of
science, industry and democracy.*

*There was a consensus among the rich and the poor that Islam was not
intrinsically opposed to the modern world. There was a readiness among
Muslims to follow in the footsteps of the West*.

This consensus was reflected in a well-known and widely circulated aphorism
attributed to Muhammad Abduh. On returning to Cairo from a visit to Europe,
Abduh told his students, "I travelled in the West and found Islam, but no
Muslims; I have returned to the East and find Muslims, but not Islam."

*The transition into the modern world, however,* *proved immensely complex
and difficult.* Europe's transition had required several generations and a
couple of centuries to break away from the feudal age into the modern age.
The resistance from those invested in the *ancien* arrangements of society
and culture was immense, and wars that followed were fierce.

Something similar to the European experience was unavoidable for Muslims in
their effort to break from the hold of their traditional culture. And not
unlike the wars in Europe*, wars within the world of Islam since the 1970s
are symptoms of the Muslim struggle to transit into the modern world.*

*iii.*

*The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 was the formal announcement
of* *political
Islam's* *death*. *But it refused to die, even as it was laid to rest. Its
twitching was felt in the deep dark interior of the world of Islam, in
remote and unwelcome places such as Nejd inside Arabia.*

Here in Nejd, the medieval theology of Ibn Taymiyyah had struck roots. It
had impressed *an eighteenth-century itinerant preacher in the region,
Abdul Wahhab (1703-92), who turned Ibn Taymiyyah's extremist thinking into
an even more rigid and austere doctrine, hostile to all things inimical to
the Bedouin tribal culture of his time and environment.*

*Abdul Wahhab's version of political Islam impressed a local tribal chief,
and the marriage of convenience between the preacher and the tribal leader
gave birth to the first Saudi state in the interior of Arabia. But when it
sent tribal warriors to raid towns inside the frontiers of the Ottoman
Empire, it provoked* *the Caliph of Islam in Istanbul, on whose orders this
nascent state of the Wahhabi ruler was destroyed.*

But *the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire* *provided the conditions
for the rebirth of the Saudi state as a kingdom under Abdul Aziz ibn Saud
in the 1920s. Fortune, in the guise of great power politics, smiled upon
him. He seized the support offered by the British, in return for influence
in a region of strategic importance. The discovery of oil made the Saudi
kingdom a prize to be protected by the Western powers, first Britain and
later the United States, with far reaching consequences for the rest of the
world, and even more so for the world of Islam and Muslims.*

Any modernizing revolution is hugely disruptive. The movement from one
stage of social development to another is not linear; it is, instead,
filled with zigzags and reversals at every stage of the process toward an
uncertain future.

When a people, however, pushes back against this process of change in their
midst, or seeks to abort it, this reactionary effort pins its hopes on
longing for an idealized past. The Newtonian revolution and the emergence
of modern Europe made political Islam anachronistic.* Wahhabism, as the
official doctrine of the Saudi kingdom, was much more than a return of the
most extreme version of political Islam in the early decades of the last
century. It was, and remains, a demented effort of the most backward people
within the world of Islam to remain culturally tied to antiquity, or
jahiliyya (the age of ignorance), which* *Islam at its origin derided and
rejected.*

*Political Islam in whatever version -- Wahhabism, Khomeinism, Ikhwanism
(the Muslim Brotherhood) and their derivatives -- has no answer* *for
Muslims on how to make their historic transition into the modern world.* It
can continue to rage against the modern world until its civilized
inhabitants, including Muslims, have had enough of its destructiveness and
obliterate it.

Then that vision of Abrahamic monotheism, which Muhammad was mysteriously
directed to deliver to his people, will be emancipated from political Islam.

*This message Muhammad was given admonished Arabs for their lack of faith,
provided them with ethics for living honorably, told them in no uncertain
term that the God of Abraham made no distinction among nations and people
who believe in Him, and that on the Day of Final Reckoning, they need have
no fear if they strive in doing what is right.*

*This is the "other" Islam. This is submission to truth, whose most
righteous exemplar was Abraham when his faith was tested by his Deity,
according to the Hebrew Bible, to sacrifice his son. And this is the faith
of Sufis who took Muhammad's message to people in places far removed from
the desert confines of Arabia.* It is simply, as the Qur'an reminds
(30:30), *deen al-fitrah*, the natural religion, or inclination, of man to
know his Creator. There is no return of this "other" Islam; it never went
missing.
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