[More then a year old, keep that in context, please. A passive analysis, all offense is a construct of your mind, really!]
The last time a ‘reformation’ happened, in Europe in the mid sixteenth to mid seventeenth century, it put nearly all the continent in utter turmoil in the form of the Thirty Years’ War. Just in Germany (or the Holy Roman Empire as it was then called), the population loss was close to one-third of its existing 20 million, and it took the country until the early eighteenth century to restore previous demographic and economic levels.
But anyone who has read the history of that period would know the number of variables alongside religion that was involved in that war. However, that same person would also acknowledge that religion acted as a major catalyst for the events and only took a backseat when the major parties had been fully engaged and were, to an extent, war-weary, and only when religious doctrines were abandoned for ‘reasons of state’ was the Peace of Westphalia achieved.
Is the world ripe for another such reformation? A plethora of recent major events seem to bear such signals that the Reformation might be coming to the East, to the other great world religion, Islam. Before going into any debate whether it might actually occur, let us examine these events, and start with a historical perspective.
The Re-rise of Islam
It would not be an exaggeration to say that since its birth and ‘blitzkrieg’ expansion, Islam remained in a dominant position compared to the rest of the world. To a great degree, the infighting between the various Islamic factions prevented the Moors from taking Northern Europe (defeated by Charles Martel at Tours in 732), or the Fatimids from taking over Southern Italy circa 955 (they already held Sicily), or many such conquests thereafter till the Ottoman siege of Vienna. That they only had to stop this outward fighting (or expansion) to fight amongst themselves perhaps shows a major reservoir of military strength, and when the infighting stopped, and peace was made with the Dar-ul-Harb (such as between Charlemagne and Haroun al-Rashid), it gave birth to one of the most ‘enlightened’ societies, compared to Gibbon’s dark age of contemporary Western Christendom.
So it is perhaps not a mistake to comment that, at that stage of history, the Islamic East (and Maghreb, Andalusia and parts of Islamic Africa) perhaps seemed as amazing to Western (and even Eastern) Christendom as today’s Western Civilization is looked upon by the East. In fact, common opinion suggests that Western Christendom only escaped from the clutches of the dark ages via the Crusade experience when, among other benefits, they developed great trade and re-learned their Roman and Greek heritage from Arab scholars.
History, however, has a general dislike for stability before which no previous Empire could make a prolonged stand. After 600 years of general prosperity, the great scourge of the Mongols arrived at Islam’s doorsteps, and with some help (as usual) from the never-ending court intrigues and faction fighting, sacked the flower of Islam, Baghdad, with such thoroughness that the Arab element of the Islamic World took a backseat from which they only recovered recently.
All was, of course, not destroyed. The Islamic empire was vast, and just like the Kurds had relieved the Islamic World from the Crusades in the guise of Salah-al-Deen al-Ayyubi, now the Turks came forward, first in the guise of the Mamelukes, and then in the guise of the Ottomans. A new Golden Age began for the Muslims, and losses in the West (Sicily, Islamic Spain) were offset by great gains in Africa, India and Eastern Asia. For sure, this golden age was perhaps not as comprehensive as the previous age, but then, this age was less restless, alongside being less prosperous, and gave birth to some unparalleled philosophies which still guide most of the Islamic World.
But prosperity begets complacency, and feeds the great cycle of history. The rich and the civilized become soft, the poor, ‘barbarians’ start to look at them like fruits ripe for plucking, and their restless nature generally begets innovation. From the eternal fighting of the medieval and early modern ages emerged a consolidated, hardened, technologically superior Europe who turned outwards, while at the same time the Islamic societies turned inwards, slowly becoming stagnant and weak. For sure, this reversal of roles took generations and centuries, but the end result was that Islam, through its followers, ceased to become a major force in general. What the Europeans couldn’t achieve in two centuries of hard fighting during the Crusades, they achieved nearly effortlessly during the Age of Imperialism.
For the last 250 years, a perusal of the history of the world would show the most minuscule contributions in civilization from the once-great Muslims. Europe’s superiority and often, suppression made sure that the Muslims were considered only an auxiliary, a tangential. But then, history again started to turn a cycle. The Europeans now turned to devastating themselves in the form of the two World Wars, and except for the USA, the Old Europe became stagnant. No longer could the bindings of colonialism be enforced, and the now independent Muslims started to explore themselves.
The Islamic Identity
The primary thought patterns started, quite obviously, nationalistically, especially in mostly-Muslim countries. This nationalism was generally secular, although by its very definition it needed to have religious elements, but rarely do we see this nationalistic concept ‘overwhelmed’ by religion, until the very failure of this concept through the failure of application. Nationalism, in all its forms, nearly overnight, became a vice from a virtue and was considered a weakening factor. Universalism was not an option; there was still too much anger at the failed states, the stealing of resources and the nostalgia of past glory. Rather obviously, Islamism came forth to fill the gap. It is not that the Islamic identity was a totally new thing, but whereas previously it was passive, in this new age, adopted by an angry, ambitious, idealistic, glory-seeking populace, it became active mostly via manifestation. Oversimplistically, but more succinctly, the generally passive religious identity now took an active (even aggressive) politico-religious form, more by the need of the time rather than by the intrinsic virtues, though it must also be said that of the modern monotheisms, Islam remains the most comprehensive, and by definition, more adaptable to the fulfillment of such a need. The seeding of this thought process can be tracked starting from Hasan al-Banna, to Qutb through Khomeini, the Islamic Salvation Front and al-Bashir. Suffice to say that any effort in generalizing such a framework shift is doomed to failure due to the large and varied demographics and societal structures involved.
Whereas the success or failure of this new ‘awakening’ is better left to the judgment of future historians, one aspect requires our immediate attention if we are to understand the subject matter. In all revolutions, an element always exists who want to bring change much faster than the ‘mainstream’, and are generally judged to be the radicals. The methods they use, often unconventional, determine their success, and generally have strong effects on the movement as a whole. Consider Che Guevara and Castro, the Meinhof-Bader gang, and even Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This might happen due to a very high internalization of values or great frustrations with the system where the pace of change is extremely slow.
In the case of the new Islamism[1], both variables had a role. I think that in our times the most violent form of such radicalism is expressed by the most-right wing Wahabis, or the Salafis, who show both symptomatic variables.
Salafism, or the turning back to the acts and decisions of the Prophet and the first two generations of successors as a guide to what Islam should be, was originally a liberal idea propagated by Taqi al-din ibn Tayimiyya, where reaction to the then-recent Mongol Invasion and sack of Baghdad also had a strong role to play mostly in the strong anti-Shi’a conjecture. It tried to cut through the thicket of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence. The role of ibn Tayimiyya, in my mind, is almost like Marx, and that of Abdul Wahab, of Lenin or Stalin, who applied it to a local context.
The extreme fringe of the Salafi movement consists of the likes of al-Qaeda, the radical Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and in a more indirect, almost ‘influential’ capacity, (non-exhaustively) several Pakistani terrorist groups and JMB in Bangladesh. As the nature of such ideologies have been discussed earlier, these organizations wanted to bring in desired social change as fast as possible, and for this they applied violent force, which is often the fastest way to achieve that objective, albeit with a high rate of failure. Of course, sometimes their failures might also create a certain awareness for that ideology which allow the mainstream moderate of that movement to reap rich harvest, as perhaps witnessed by the Naxal failure but socialist success in West Bengal.
It’s not like there are many Salafis in this world, they remain a small minority among the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, and the extreme, violent segment another minority even within them. But the methods they use to accelerate social change in their direction have given them a disproportionate amount of publicity. However, the extreme Salafi drive against the Shi’a, as witnessed currently in Iraq, might backfire terribly to bring about a conflagration not unlike the Thirty Years’ War, but far more devastating in consequence due to the sophistication of modern weaponry. Extending the analogy, Samarra can be taken for Donawuerth, or even Magdeburg, which fast brought the Protestants into the action, though it’s stretching it a bit too far. Recent summits in Makkah, or even the Abdullah-Ahmadenijad meeting can be considered attempts to stem the negative flow of events, but these show every chance of failing, like the Diet of Regensburg.
The greatest internal turmoil in the Islamic world is happening right now, in our times, at least if you consider the number of bodies being felled in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Iran. A few factors can be attributed to this, such as colonial rearrangements of territories, corrupt governments who had to make deals with Islamists to ensure their survival and a shift in the Islamic jurisdictional structure which became deformalized, where people like Zawahiri who are not ‘orthodox clerics’ can have a lot of support and the say of the populace.
I have a notion that this Sunni-Shi’a clash, much like what the Thirty Years’ War did for Christendom to generally moderate Catholic-Protestant tensions, will eventually bring up a universal Islamic identity reconciled with technological advancements. The signs are already there. Witness the recent Ahmadenijad-Abdullah summit between nemeses such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then the other unlikely bedfellows such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanese and Iraqi Sunnis, and on the other hand Iran, Bahrain, Shi’a Iraq etc.
Of course, in such reformations, religion is never the sole variable and has a rather nasty habit of dragging other variables with it. During the Thirty Years’ War it was state politics, and in the modern time we also see a merger and alignment of such forces. Consider Bangladesh, where against JMB, the ‘moderate’ forces unified and aligned, including the archrival political parties and the effect of the external forces. Also consider the Danish Cartoons incident, or more recently and clearly, Benedict’s comment and the European Left’s support for it.
There are monetary dimensions to this issue, for sure, especially related to oil money. Another important issue is the morphing of Islam from a locality-based, diversified creed to an almost planetary universal creed where Muslims shun petty sectarianism. This new Islam is eschewing ‘local innovations’ such as Shab-e-Barat. The new generation of ‘Internet Muslims’ are helping the coordination of this universal class but in the process are becoming alienated from local Muslims, for whose ‘conversion’ religious efforts again become necessary, part of that eternal cycle. Even within these ‘localized’ Muslims there are large numbers of diverging viewpoints and parochial views on their local visions, and the tendency to consider other (especially non-local) variants un-Islamic and deviant.
Before I move further in this article it must be said that sometimes collective analysis is much easier than individual, however in such a case one con is that broad brushes are a must. In the process you do run the risk of generalizing and bias which I would kindly ask the reader to excuse.
Such parochial attitudes are also something which affect the slaughter of the ‘deviants’. Such excuses have been used for ages. In modern times, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said: “Let blood be spilled, and we will speed those who are good to their paradise”; during the medieval times, when Bishop d’Cetaux Arnaud Amaury, who during the Crusade against the Cathars killed 200,000 and when asked how to differentiate Catholics from Cathars, replied: “Kill them all, God will sort his own’, to the classical times when the parishioners of the Archbishop of Alexandria, Cyril, dragged the Mistress of the Great Library of Alexandria, Hypatia, and hacked her to death.
But we must also contemplate, as pointed at previously, that such a conflict can also bring about positive change for the wider body of the World’s Muslims as they understand the horrors and evils of extremism and sectarianism and see the benefits of embracing moderation and toleration. Whether this will lead to better relationship with the West will of course depend on relevant variables and similar understanding from that sector.
Islamic societies are not inherently rigid and stagnant. They come in many flavors and types. Take for example conservative Iran, where democratic forces are working as you look at Ahmadenijad’s loss. Adoption of democracy is not a standard of excellence by any means, but it does indicate, as it is especially vindicated by high-ranking Islamic clerics, the desire for the populace to have a strong say in state and mass theological affairs.
In fact, that is the point of view I am rooting for. I can not accurately predict whether a reformation is happening or will happen. History is a flow, there are no neat lines separating or predicting such periods. But the upheaval is real, as any keen observer of contemporary events will admit. Despite my sadness at the sheer loss of life at these upheavals, my readings on history suggest that such are often followed by great forward strides for the human thought process, a significant reconciliation of our base reptilian brain-stem against the mammalian and advanced cerebral cortex where we learn to value our ‘better natures’. The Islamic Civilization consists of 1/5th of humanity, and the resulting ‘enlightenment’ might be greatly beneficial for the human enterprise, and we might again see another golden age, where the whole of the Islamic World will contribute greatly to world civilization, not unlike, but in a much grander scale than Islamic Spain did to Europe. That is the reformation I talk of, where a great people, firm in their beliefs of doing good, enrich the human enterprise inexorably.
Footnote:
[1] Islamist: This word is used to mean the new politically-motivated Islam. Not meant in any derogatory or religiously offensive sense.
