The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong

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СКАЧАТЬ In true conservative style, Muslims were conforming their behavior to a past perfection.

      The practice of Muslim law made the historical figure of Muhammad into a myth, releasing him from the period in which he had lived and bringing him to life in the person of every devout Muslim. Similarly, this cultic repetition made Muslim society truly islamic, in its approximation to the person of Muhammad, who in his perfect surrender to God was the prime exemplar of what a human being should be. By the time of the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, this Shariah spirituality had taken root throughout the Muslim world, Sunni and Shii, not because it was forced on the people by caliphs and ulema, but because it did give men and women an experience of the numinous and imbue their lives with meaning. This cultic reference to the past did not, however, imprison Muslims in an archaic devotion to a seventh-century way of life. The Ottoman state was arguably the most up-to-date in the world during the early sixteenth century. It was, for its time, superbly efficient, had developed a new-style bureaucracy, and encouraged a vibrant intellectual life. The Ottomans were open to other cultures. They were genuinely excited by Western navigational science, stirred by the discoveries of the explorers, and eager to adopt such Western military inventions as gunpowder and firearms.¹⁰ It was the job of the ulema to see how these innovations could be accommodated to the Muhammadan paradigm in Muslim law. The study of jurisprudence (fiqh) did not simply consist in poring over old texts, but also had a challenging dimension. And, at this date, there was no real incompatibility between Islam and the West. Europe was also imbued with the conservative spirit. The Renaissance humanists had tried to renew their culture by a return ad fontes, to the sources. We have seen that it was virtually impossible for ordinary mortals to break with religion entirely. Despite their new inventions, Europeans were still ruled by the conservative ethos until the eighteenth century. It was only when Western modernity replaced the backward-looking mythical way of life with a future-oriented rationalism that some Muslims would begin to find Europe alien.

      Further, it would be a mistake to imagine that conservative society was entirely static. Throughout Muslim history, there were movements of islah (“reform”) and tajdid (“renewal”), which were often quite revolutionary.¹¹ A reformer such as Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus (1263–1328), for example, refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” He lived during and after the Mongol invasions, when Muslims were desperately trying to recover from the trauma and to rebuild their society. Reform movements usually occur at a period of cultural change or in the wake of a great political disaster. At such times, the old answers no longer suffice and reformers, therefore, use the rational powers of ijtihad to challenge the status quo. Ibn Taymiyyah wanted to bring the Shariah up to date so that it could meet the real needs of Muslims in these drastically altered circumstances. He was revolutionary, but his program took an essentially conservative form. Ibn Taymiyyah believed that to survive the crisis, Muslims must return to the sources, to the Koran and Sunnah of the Prophet. He wanted to remove later theological accretions and get back to basics. This meant that he overturned much of the medieval jurisprudence (fiqh) and philosophy that had come to be considered sacred, in a desire to return to the original Muslim archetype. This iconoclasm enraged the establishment, and Ibn Taymiyyah ended his days in prison. It is said that he died of a broken heart, because his jailers would not allow him pen and paper. But the ordinary people loved him; his legal reforms had been liberal and radical, and they could see that he had their interests at heart.¹² His funeral became a demonstration of popular acclaim. There have been many such reformers in Islamic history. We shall see that some of the Muslim fundamentalists of our own day are working in this tradition of islah and tajdid.

      Other Muslims were able to explore fresh religious ideas and practices in the esoteric movements, which were kept secret from the masses because their practitioners believed that they could be misunderstood. They saw no incompatibility, however, between their version of the faith and that of the majority. They believed that their movements were complementary to the teaching of the Koran and gave them new relevance. The three main forms of esoteric Islam were the mystical discipline of Sufism, the rationalism of Falsafah, and the political piety of the Shiah, which we will explore in detail later in this chapter. But however innovative these esoteric forms of Islam seemed and however radically they appeared to diverge from the Shariah piety of the mainstream, the esoterics believed that they were returning ad fontes. The exponents of Falsafah, who tried to apply the principles of Greek philosophy to Koranic religion, wanted to go back to a primordial, universal faith of timeless truths, which, they were convinced, had preceded the various historical religions. Sufis believed that their mystical ecstasy reproduced the spiritual experiences of the Prophet when he had received the Koran; they too were conforming to the Muhammadan archetype. Shiis claimed that they alone cultivated the passion for social justice that informed the Koran, but which had been betrayed by corrupt Muslim rulers. None of the esoterics wanted to be “original” in our sense; all were original in the conservative way of returning to fundamentals, which alone, it was thought, could lead to human perfection and fulfillment.¹³

      One of the two Muslim countries we shall be examining in detail in this book is Egypt, which became part of the Ottoman empire in 1517, when Selim I conquered the country in the course of a campaign in Syria. Shariah piety would, therefore, predominate in Egypt. The great university of al-Azhar in Cairo became the most important center for the study of fiqh in the Sunni world, but during these centuries of Ottoman rule Egypt fell behind Istanbul and lapsed into relative obscurity. We know very little about the country during the early modern period. Since 1250, the region had been governed by the Mamluks, a crack military corps composed of Circassian slaves who had been captured as boys and converted to Islam. The Janissaries, a similar slave corps, were the military backbone of the Ottoman empire. In their prime, the Mamluks led a vibrant society in Egypt and Syria, and Egypt was one of the most advanced countries in the Muslim world. But eventually the Mamluk empire succumbed to the inherent limitations of agrarian civilization and by the late fifteenth century had fallen into decline. However, the Mamluks were not entirely vanquished in Egypt. The Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the country by making an alliance with Khair Bey, the Mamluk governor of Aleppo. As a result of this deal, Khair Bey was appointed viceroy when the Ottoman troops left.

      At first, the Ottomans were able to keep the Mamluks in check, quashing two Mamluk uprisings.¹⁴ By the late sixteenth century, however, the Ottomans were just beginning to outrun their own resources. Severe inflation led to a decline in the administration and, gradually, after several revolts, the Mamluk commanders (beys) reemerged as the real rulers of Egypt, even though they remained officially subservient to Istanbul. The beys formed a high-ranking military cadre which was able to lead a rebellion of Mamluk troops in the Ottoman army against the Turkish governor and install one of their own number in his place. The sultan confirmed this appointment and the Mamluks were able to retain control of the country, apart from a brief period toward the end of the seventeenth century when one of the Janissaries seized power. Mamluk rule was unstable, however. The beylicate was divided between two factions and there was constant unrest and internecine strife.¹⁵ Throughout this turbulent period, the chief victims were the Egyptian people. During the revolts and factional violence, they had their property confiscated, their homes plundered, and endured crippling taxation. They felt no affinity with their rulers, Turkish or Circassian, who were foreigners and had no real interest in their welfare. Increasingly, the people turned to the ulema, who were Egyptians, represented the sacred order of the Shariah, and became the true leaders of the Egyptian masses. As the conflict between the beys became more acute during the eighteenth century, Mamluk leaders found it necessary to appeal to the ulema to ensure that their rule was accepted by the people.¹⁶

      The ulema were the teachers, scholars, СКАЧАТЬ