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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the Twelfth Imam, who had gone into hiding to save his life. It was an attractive solution, because it suggested that nothing had changed. The last two Imams had been virtually inaccessible. Now the Hidden Imam would continue to make contact with the people through his wakil, Uthman al-Amri, who would dispense spiritual advice, collect the zakat alms, interpret the scriptures, and deliver legal judgments. But this solution had a limited life span. As time passed beyond the point where the Twelfth Imam seemed likely to be still alive, Shiis became anxious once again, until, in 934, the current agent, Ali ibn Muhammad as-Samarri, brought the Shiah a message from the Hidden Imam. He had not died, but had been miraculously concealed by God; he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to inaugurate a 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 commune with the faithful through agents, or have any direct contact with them. Shiis should not expect his speedy return. They would only see him again “after a long time has passed and the earth has become filled with tyranny.”³¹

      The myth of the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam cannot be explained rationally. It makes sense only in a context of mysticism and ritual practice. If we understand the story as a logos, one that should be interpreted literally as a plain statement of fact, all kinds of questions arise. Where in the world had the Imam gone? Was he on earth or in some kind of intermediate realm? What kind of life could he possibly have? Was he getting older and older? How could he guide the faithful, if they could neither see nor hear him? These questions would seem obtuse to a Shii who was involved in a disciplined cultivation of the batin, or secret sense of scripture, which bypassed reason and drew on the more intuitive powers of the mind. Shiis did not interpret their scriptures and doctrines literally. Their entire spirituality was now a symbolic quest for the Unseen (al-ghayb) that lies beneath the flux of outward (zahir) events. 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 that had to be secreted from the world.³² This intense contemplative life was the setting that alone made sense of the Occultation. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time and, paradoxically, he became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he and the other Imams had lived a normal life in Medina or Samarra. The Occultation is a myth that expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalizingly absent. It is present in the world but not of it; divine wisdom is inseparable from humanity (for we can only perceive anything, God included, from a human perspective) but takes us beyond the insights of ordinary men and women. Like any myth, the Occultation could not be understood by discursive reason, as though it were a fact that was either self-evident or capable of logical demonstration. But it did express a truth in the religious experience of humanity.

      Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation. But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century.³³ This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope.

      The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society. From this new perspective, any government had to be viewed as illegitimate, because it usurped the prerogatives of the Hidden Imam, the true Lord of the Age. Nothing could be expected of earthly rulers, therefore, though in order to survive, the Shiis must cooperate with the powers-that-be. They would live a spiritual life, yearning for a justice that could only return to earth in the Last Days “after a long time has passed.” The sole authority they would accept was that of the Shii ulema, who had taken the place of the former “agents” of the Imams. Because of their learning, their spirituality, and their mastery of the divine law, the ulema had become the deputies of the Hidden Imam and spoke in his name. But because all governments were illegitimate, ulema must not hold political office.³⁴

      Shiis thus tacitly condoned a total secularization of politics that could seem to violate the crucial Islamic principle of tawhid, which forbade any such separation of state and religion. But the mythology of this secularization sprang from a religious insight. The legend of the Imams, who had nearly all been assassinated, poisoned, imprisoned, exiled, and, finally, eliminated by the caliphs, represented the basic incompatibility of religion and politics. Political life belongs to the realm of logos; it must be forward-looking, pragmatic, able to compromise, plan, and organize society on a rational basis. It has to balance the absolute demands of religion with the grim reality of life on the ground. Premodern, agrarian society was based on a fundamental inequality; it depended upon the labor of peasants who could not share the fruits of civilization. The great confessional religions of the Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE) had all been preoccupied with this dilemma and tried to grapple with it. Where there were insufficient resources, and where lack of technology and communications made it harder to impose authority, politics became more brutal and aggressively practical. It was, therefore, extremely difficult for any government to live up to the Islamic ideal or to tolerate the existence of an Imam, an embodiment of divine wisdom, who made its shortcomings so sadly evident. Religious leaders could admonish, criticize, and protest against flagrant abuses, but in some tragic sense the sacred had to be either marginalized or kept within bounds, as the caliphs had interned the Imams in the Askari fortress in Samarra. But there was nobility in the Shii devotion to an ideal which must be kept alive, even though, like the Hidden Imam, it was concealed and currently unable to operate in a tyrannical and corrupt world.

      Even though the Shiah had become a mythological faith, that did not mean that it was irrational. In fact, Shiism became a more rational and intellectual version of Islam than the Sunnah. Shiis found that they were in agreement with the Sunni theologians known as the Mutazilites, who tried to rationalize the doctrines of the Koran. In their turn, СКАЧАТЬ