Religion and secular power in the Almoravid dynasty

I just came across a set of notes I made back in 2007 that I thought I would turn into a blog post. They have to do with the Almoravid ascendancy in what is now Spain.

The Umayyad dynasty endured in the Islamic Caliphate from 657 to 750. In Islamic Spain, however, the Umayyads ruled for another two and half centuries until 1031, more or less factually independent of the Caliphate, which they nevertheless formally recognized. They were eventually succeeded by the Almoravid dynasty.

12th century Almoravid gold coin

The Almoravids were a reform movement that originated among the Berber tribes of North Africa, in the Sahara. It advocated a return to the basics of Islam, interpreted as always with its own particular emphasis. Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn (died 1106) founded the dynasty based on the Sanhaja group of Berber tribes. Ibn Tāshufīn established Marrakesh as his capital, around 1062. At that time, the Almoravids controlled the Berber parts of Morocco and western Algeria.

By this time, Islamic Spain was ruled by local kings in several different small states, making them vulnerable to the Christian Reconquista. King Alfonso VI of Castille and Leon (1040—1109) took Toledo and pressed for further conquests of Muslim-held areas.

Carlos Fuentes writes in El Espejo Enterrado (1992), "But if the Reconquista was indeed a war against Islam, it was also a war of the Christian kings among themselves." Yet "this combat was also an embrace" because of the complex and shifting alliances involved. In Alfonso VI's drive on the southern Muslim kingdom of Grenada, his most famous warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043-1099), better known to history as El Cid, allied with the Muslim king of Zaragoza. El Cid had earned his reputation as a great Christian warrior against the Muslims ("Moors"); ironically, his name comes from Arabic, meaning "my lord." But his main subordinate commander made a competing alliance with the king of Grenada. In feudal times, loyalty could be a complex and shifting quality, founded on a much different basis than that to which we are now accustomed.

El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar; 1043-1099)

But the Muslim kings didn't have to pick only from Christian allies. Several of the remaining Spanish Muslim petty monarchs called on Ibn Tāshufīn for assistance. After defeating Alonso VI i the Battle of Zallāqah in 1086, the Christian advance was halted. Ibn Tāshufīn and his Almoravids were eventually left in control of the remaining Muslim areas of Spain.

The Berber reformer Ibn Tūmart was born around 1080, in the era when Ibn Tāshufīn had become the most powerful leader in western Islam. After study in the great centers of Islamic earning, Córdoba, Alexandria, Baghdad and Mecca, Ibn Tūmart became the founder of yet another back-to-basics Berber reform movement, the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn) movement, their name meaning "those who recognize the unity of God." styled himself as the mahdī, an eschatological savior in Islamic thought. The mahdī is more often associated with Shi'a Islam but has also been part of the Sunni tradition.

By 1147, Ibn Tūmart and his successor ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (1145-63), who was also a close disciple of Ibn Tūmart Islamic renewal beliefs, had taken Marrakesh and were in control of the former Almoravid kingdom in northern Africa.

Once again, Islamic Spain splintered politically, and it was Alfonso VII (c. 1104—1157) this time who attempted to exploit their military weakness. And, again the Spanish Muslim kings invited the rulers in Marrakesh, this time ʿAbd al-Muʾmin and the Almohads, to help. ʿAbd al-Muʾmin reversed the territorial gains of Alfonso VII and expanded Almohad rule into the whole Maghreb. Eventually the Almohads rule Islamic Spain and what is now Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

But the Almohads' impressive moment of historical prominence lasted only a century or so. As Fred Donner writes in "Muhammad and the Caliphate" (The Oxford History of Islam [1999]):

During the last decades of the twelfth century the Almohads had to overcome the stubborn resistance mounted by the last Almoravid holdouts from the Balearic Islands (near the eastern coast of Spain), who had seized much of Ifriqiya. In Spain the Almohads were engaged in a continuing struggle against the Christian kingdoms, particularly those of Castile and Portugal. Despite promising offensives into Castilian territory in the 1190s, the Almohads were crushingly defeated in 1 212 by a Christian coalition at Las Navas de Tolosa (in southern Spain), the battle that really sealed the fate of Islamic Spain. Almoravid control in Spain unraveled over the next two decades, and Christian forces seized in rapid succession the major cities of Andalusia: Merida (1231), Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), Murcia (1261), and Cádiz (1262). Virtually all that remained of Muslim Spain thereafter was the small, brilliant kingdom of Granada, which hung on until 1492, partly because of the skill of its rulers, the Nasrids, and partly because in r 244 one of the rulers had signed a treaty recognizing the vague overlordship of the kingdom of Castile.

W. Montgomery Watt, the great Western scholar of Islam, took up the question of "The Decline of the Almohads" in the Summer 1964 issue of History of Religions. His article focuses on ways in which the religious reform movement aspect of the leadership of Ibn Tūmart and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin may have facilitated their political and military success. And, conversely, how the decline of the worldly power of the Almohads was related to changes in their religious orientation. But 1230, the Almohads embraced a more Orthodox Sunni Islam and the Mālikite variety of sharia (Islamic law).

Watt looks at why the back-to-basics Almohad religious movement faded so quickly. He uses the Prophet Muhammad's original founding of Islam as a reference point.

Watt suggests that part of the answer lies in the following areas. Ibn Tūmart emphasized peripheral ritual issues such as forbidding the use of musical instruments, which Watt sees as in large part a protest by rural tribesmen "against the soft life of the city-dwellers, not an attempt to reform themselves." The Prophet's original movement was an urban-based one, addressing issue which made broader demands for reform necessary and which called for real self-examination. "For one thing," Watt writes, "Muhammad is more concerned with basic social injustice, as, for example, in the perversion of traditional custom for the advantage of individuals."

Ibn Tūmart asserted doctrinal points against his Almohovid opponents. He argued for an abstract, non-anthropomorphic concept of God, stressed the role of reason and criticized the Almorovids' approach to the Mālikite school of sharia. But, Watt writes:

If Ibn-Tūmart's moral and social preaching was peripheral and sectional, his doctrinal emphases are a hotchpotch; that is to say, they consist of a number of unrelated and apparently incompatible points, which have been adopted because of some immediate practical relevance. The root of the difficulty is that Ibn-Tūmart has no radically new conception of the state or a way of life. Basically he accepts the Sunnite conception of the Islamic polity and way of life.

Ibn Tūmart was a charismatic leader, a role which had a strong tradition among the Berbers. But Watt suggests that their religious doctrines lacked a corresponding appeal. Watt credits the emphasis on reason in Almohadism as being what "made possible the flourishing of philosophy in Spain in Ibn-Ţufayl and Averroes (Ibn-Rushd). Yet the section of the population which experienced the need for a rational religion must have been small; and the problem of how a rational theology was to be related to the religion of the masses was never adequately solved in Spain."

Watt's comments on the Prophet's original movement by way of contrast to Ibn Tūmart's are intriguing:

There will always be something of a mystery about the growth and development of Islam, as indeed there is about all the great religions. When one reflects on the facts, it is truly astounding that the message of the Qur'an, originally addressed to the relatively uncultured citizens of Mecca, should have been capable of becoming the basis of a great civilization whose leading exponents stood for centuries in the highest ranks of human culture. It might be suggested that military success contributed to the development, together with the existence of a situation in which military success on the scale of the Arab conquests was possible. Yet the military success itself owed something to the religion and, at the same time, was never more than one facet of the whole. ...

The conclusion that the failure of Almohadism was essentially a failure to make converts from all sections of the community and converts of sufficiently high quality is supported when we turn back to look at the prophet Muhammad. As already noticed, in the moral and social field he was constantly aiming at the reform of his own community; though he accepted current morality in certain respects (e.g., the blood-feud or corporate responsibility for crime), most of the points he emphasized were central and concerned with basic social injustice. From a doctrinal and general point of view he was putting forward a radically new conception of the community and way of life. ... Thus the Islamic community came to be regarded as a community actually constituted by its possession of a divinely revealed way of life-the way or sunna of Muhammad, given to him by God and practiced by him. It was above all this conception of the charismatic or divinely founded and guided community that inspired countless men to labor at the solution of the practical and intellectual problems confronting the Islamic body politic in its early centuries. They were not merely converted but made to respond from the depths of their being.

Cenk Uygur on militant atheism and Islamophobia

There has been some attention lately in the progressive media to the Islamophobia promoted by outspoken atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has a half-hour interview here with Muslim religious scholar Reza Aslan on the topic, Reza Aslan - Bigotry, Fundamentalism and Neo-Atheism in the Media 10/13/2014:

Digby in QOTD: Reza Aslan Hullabaloo 10/14/2014 links to an interview by Jesse Singal with Aslan, Reza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong About Islam New York Magazine 10/14/2014. Aslan says there:

This is going to sound odd to say, but probably nothing, because when you are dealing with that kind of level of certainty, whether you are talking about a religious fundamentalist, or an atheist fundamentalist, which is precisely what someone like Sam Harris is, it’s really a waste of time to try to argue either data points or logical reasoning, because they have already made up their mind and it becomes kind of useless to have that kind of conversation.

Digby is somewhat surprised by the Islamophobia coming from atheists.

I'm tempted to attribute the Harris/Maher kind of Islamophobia to the kind of testosterone poisoning that women have sometimes encountered in the "skeptical" movement that debunks pseudo-science and attracts science-minded atheists. Skeptic star Michael Sherman, the Founding Director of Skeptic magazine and a longtime monthly columnist for Scientific American, has been accused of being a nasty twit (and worse!) in his behavior toward women. He also has a fondness for Friedrich Hayek/Ayn Rand type "Utopian-free-market economics (which isn't exactly reality-based).

Rand herself was also very much an atheist, to the embarrassment of her fans like Paul Ryan. But that didn't stop her from being on the bandwagon of Cold War opposition to Communism, which was routinely and prominently condemned for its "godlessness" - which Rand presumably shared.

I can't help but think that some of the atheist Islamophobia is based on ideological affinity. If you're an atheist who loves the Republicans for being free-market, damning Islam is a way to identify with them on something religious without claiming to be Christian. There's also some ideological piggy-backing on the politics: Christians are likely to dismiss atheist arguments directed against the *Christian* God. But if you show religion is evil by criticizing the barbarian Moon God Allah and his fanatical brainwashed polygamous beheading followers, you might get a hearing among conservative Christians.

Juan Cole writes about Maher and Harris in Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Muslim Problem Informed Comment 10/07/2014:

Maher’s and Harris’s charges against Muslims in general are ridiculous. Neither one has ever lived in a Muslim-majority society or knows the languages or cultures. They just retail invidious calumnies second-hand. Almost anything polemicists like Sam Harris say of Muslims can be said of others; i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is. In the 1990s an ABC poll showed that 10% of Americans sympathized with far right wing white supremacist groups like the Michigan Militia. My recollection is that polling showed that a significant proportion of Chinese sympathized with the 9/11 attacks and to this day only a third think al-Qaeda committed them (i.e. it wasn’t viewed as a fundamentalist act but as an anti-imperialist one [this point of view is execrable; I'm just reporting it]). Note that in this last instance, the attitudes have nothing to do with religion but rather with nationalism/ imperialism, a binary pair that explains the world much better than religion/atheism. The same statistics, if glibly given by Maher or Harris for Muslims, would damn the latter and their tradition; but what about the Chinese? Is Communist-Capitalism or the Confucianist heritage to blame here?

Atheists and Islamophobia

Religion needs the challenge of atheism. At least if we're going to have a democratic, pluralistic society where religious institutions continue to play a meaningful part.

Some atheists, I'm guessing most of those who think of themselves as atheists, have either rejected religion for some more-or-less rationalist, philosophically materialist worldview. Or they just feel no particular emotional attachment to religion. Sigmund Freud comes to mind as someone who consciously took a materialist worldview and was highly critical of religion but also took it seriously and treated it with more respect than many religious people do.

But some atheists are also creeps. And some of them are conservative creeps. That's the point that Frederick Clarkson makes in We Have A Better Story To Tell Talk to Action 03/31/2013, in which he discusses an article by Nathan Lean:

Lean's article for me, underscores the problem of a false narrative that continues to pervade our national discourse: The notion that being non-religious or secular is inherently progressive. This narrative continues in large part because the religious and political Right has been so heavily invested in it.

The narrative has been so powerful and pervasive that it can be hard to remember that the Left is not now, nor has it ever been entirely non-religious and the Right has certainly never been entirely religious. Never. There has always been a Religious Left, although like any other sector it has had its ups and downs. And there have always been non-religious conservatives. Always.

The Nathan Lean article to which he refers is Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia Salon 03/30/2013. Conservative polemical claims about the religion of Islam offer an obvious temptation to American atheists. They allow them to make arguments against Islam that resonate with many Americans and extend the criticisms of Islam to religion in general.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Lean writes, "The New Atheists had found their calling. The occasion was, for them, a vindication — proof that modernity, progress and reason were the winners in the post–Cold War era and that religion was simply man's play toy, used to excuse the wicked and assuage fears of a fiery, heavenless afterlife as the punishment for such profane deeds."

For [Sam] Harris, the ankle-biter version of the Rottweiler [Richard] Dawkins, suicide bombers and terrorists are not aberrations. They are the norm. They have not distorted their faith by interpreting it wrongly. They have lived out their faith by understanding it rightly. "The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge," he writes in "Letter to a Christian Nation."

That may sound like the psychobabble of Pamela Geller. But Harris’s crude departure from scholarly decorum is at least peppered with references to the Quran, a book he cites time and again, before suggesting it be "flushed down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal."

Dawkins, in a recent rant on Twitter, admitted that he had not ever read the Quran, but was sufficiently expert in the topic to denounce Islam as the main culprit of all the world’s evil: "Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter and verse like I can for Bible. But [I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." How's that for a scientific dose of proof that God does not exist?

This is an ecumenical ground on which the village atheist can ally with the backwoods bigot. Or, as Lean puts it:

Where exactly Dawkins gets his information about Islam is unclear (perhaps Fox News?). What is clear, though, is that his unique brand of secular fundamentalism cozies up next to that screeched out by bloggers on the pages of some of the Web’s most vicious anti-Muslim hate sites. In a recent comment he posted on his own Web site, Dawkins references a site called Islam Watch, placing him in eerily close proximity to the likes of one of the page’s founders, Ali Sina, an activist who describes himself as "probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive." Sina is a board member for the hate group, Stop the Islamization of Nations, which was founded by anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and which has designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Tags: atheism, islam

Egyptian officialdom and Coptic Christians: a mixed record

The anti-Muslim hate-mongering that rightwingers in America and Europe are currently promoting is largely fact-free. But that shouldn't stop the rest of us from looking realistically at the variety of relationships between Christians and Muslims in Muslim-majority countries.

In the face of a bomb attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria on January 1, the Egyptian government has prominently defended the Christian and condemned the attack, as Juan Cole explains in Mubarak: We will Cut off the Head of the Snake; Al-Azhar: This was an Attack on all Egyptian Informed Comment 01/02/2010:

The foremost seat of Islamic learning in Egypt, Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, issued a plea for Egyptians to maintain their national unity the face of this bombing. In a statement, al-Azhar urged all Egyptians to rise above their anguish and perceive that the criminal hand that attacked the church in Alexandria is not an Egyptian hand. It added that "The brotherhood that has united them across centuries cannot be affected by a cowardly, criminal act perpetrated by enemies of the nation and of the [Muslim] community."

The invocation of both watan (the secular nation-state) and umma (the Muslim community or nation) refers to the two major political identities of Egypt. It is the secular nation-state or watan to which the Coptic Christians belong, and which was sinned against by the bombing of the church, but the al-Azhar is going further, and saying that the Muslim community was also harmed by this attack.

His Excellency the Rector of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyib, expressed his utmost regret and pain at the criminal incident and sent his condolences to the families of the victims. Al-Tayyib said in his official statement that the criminal action is prohibited in Islamic law, since Islam obliges Muslims to protect churches the same way they protect mosques. He said, "The targets of this attack are not the Christians alone, but rather all Egyptians." He said that the bombers were seeking to destabilize Egypt by dividing it.

The Rector of al-Azhar is among the most respected Sunni Muslim leaders in the world, and many Egyptian believers take his rulings or fatwas very seriously.

This is a 24-minute video on the attack and the aftermath from Al Jazeera English 01/02/2011. Note that the Al Jazerra interviewer makes it a point to report on instances of official discrimination against Christians by the Egyptian government. He also does something that may seem exotic to American TV news viewers: he actually corrects a mention of an event by one guest to make sure viewers understand that it's an unsubstantiaed rumor.



As this Al Jazeera report makes clear, Egypt is scarcely an ecumenical paradise for Christians. But it's important to note the real nature of incidents like this.

Al-Ahram, which Cole describes as a "semi-official Egyptian newspaper", has numerous articles and features on the attack at its English-language site:

Ekram Ibrahim, Citizen initiatives against anti-Coptic attacks 01/03/2011: "One of the main initiatives is a call for Muslims to attend the Orthodox Christmas Eve mass on January 6 as a sign of solidarity."

Ekram Ibrahim, More Egypt pro-Coptic protests today 01/03/2011: "Yesterday, thousands of outraged Copts conducted at least five protests throughout Cairo. Fifty seven were reported injured and Cairo traffic was jammed as a result of the protests."

Gamal Essam El-Din, Egypt MPs urge Coptic restraint after church attack 01/03/2011: "Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People's Assembly, said 'the attack against the Alexandria church of Al-Qiddisin is a cowardly act, and is by no means aimed to strike at Copts only, but all Egyptians, Copts and Muslims, in order to spark a civil war.'"

Ekram Ibrahim, Cairo boils as Copts protest 01/02/2011: "Friday night's explosion outside Saints Church in Alexandria during New Year's midnight mass killed 21 and left more than 96 injured and stirred Copts out of their docile 'pigeon attitude.'"

Hani Shukralla, J’accuse 01/01/2011. He argues that general social intolerance against Christians in Egypt has been increasing. This is an important point: "I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government."

Abdel Moneim Said, Our national unity 01/02/2011: "What appears obvious is that a malicious campaign is afoot to stir sectarian strife in the country using terrorism, hate-mongering and other expressions of fanaticism, and generally trying to reproduce conditions that prevail in certain other nearby countries."

Sadly, this diversity of response reflected in the above reports finds little echo in this Los Angeles Times story on the event: Amro Hassan and Borzou Daragahi, Egypt calls for calm as church bombing toll rises to 25 01/03/2011. The second-to-last paragraph mentions, for the readers who get that far into the story: "The bombing drew widespread condemnation across the Middle East, including from Islamist political groups such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon." But then the story concludes with a clash-of-civilizations spin: "It was the latest in a series of violent attacks in the Muslim world targeting Christian communities, already shrinking because of emigration."

Tags: egypt, islam, islamic fundamentalism, terrorism

Tennessean series on anti-Muslim demagoguery

Bob Smietana of the Tennessean has done a multi-article report on what Juan Cole calls "the Muslim-Hating Industrial Complex", including Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear 10/24/2010. This page provides links to other articles in the series: The Price of Fear.

Yes, there is a business market for hate. If you get into the right niche, you can make money promoting hatred and encouraging violence.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism,, islam

Progressives and Islamophia

When rightwing Republicans created a controversy over the Park 51 community center in New York - the Ground Zero Mosque as the FOXists preferred to call it - it was clear that Islamophia had worked its way higher in the Republicans' arsenal of ways to induce mass fear and hatred. So I've been paying more attention to it since then.

As several news organizations have been reporting lately, such controversies are occurring in Europe, as well. On a recent visit to Austria, my wife and I were both struck by the number of people we heard repeating the most dubious claims about Muslims in Austria. We were especially disturbed at speaking to an attorney that we've known for years, who insisted on telling us about the impending takeover of Austria by Muslims and the imposition of sharia law (Islamic religious law).

The essential argument was no different from that we hear from American Islamophobes. He claimed that German courts were making rulings based on sharia. He pretended not to notice when I told him that I found that impossible to believe because German like (as in all EU countries) is secular. When I asked him for an example of a case in which this occurred, he couldn't cite anything, not a name, not a place, not a date. (And this guy is an attorney!) Nor did he seem to know anything at all about sharia other than that it was Muslim and scary and evil.

He claimed that second and generation Turks in Austria (Turks are the largest Islamic minority in Austria) harbored secret plans to overthrow the existing constitution and impose sharia. But he couldn't name any actual Turks or Turkish groups in Austria advocating such a thing. Nor could he name a single member of Parliament proposing replacing the Austrian secular law with sharia. If not one single member of Parliament is favoring such an idea, it's pretty obvious a threat so distant as to be downright delusional. If they had an Austrian version of FOX News, I'm sure it would find some Muslim kook living in Austria who advocates all sorts of hair-raising things.

He didn't seem to know that Turkey itself doesn't operate under sharia, in fact has been under strict secular law since Attaturk's rule in the 1920s. I can tell the difference in a conversation like this between someone who's prejudiced, someone who's well-meaning but poorly informed, and outright fanatics. This guy was clearly operating on fanaticism. And when you try to engage a fanatic on what he's actually saying, you get some strange conversation. He told a story about some lawyer he knows who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution who told him about how the Muslim theocrats imposed their rule, something that's hardly a secret one needs to learn by whispers from an Iranian acquaintance. And he said, "They want to do the same thing here." I asked him, "Are you saying that Persians are trying to take over Austria?" "No!" he said, "The Muslims!"

One of the things that's somewhat problematic for liberals/progressives to deal with when faced with Islamophobia. On the one hand, it's bigotry that rightwingers are using to promote fear and hatred, and to validate notions like waging an illegal, aggressive war against Iran. It's pretty clear in the actual American political context, where many Republicans are now convinced - speaking of fanaticism - that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim revolutionary, in that context anti-Muslim hate-mongering is also a surrogate for good old all-American white racism, too. So it's not something that Democrats (of the capital-D or small-d variety) can ignore.

But, of course, there are real criticisms that Westerners have about some social practices in Muslim countries and communities that come in conflict with Western moral assumption and sometimes the law. Many of those have to do with women's rights and women's status. In public appearance, conservative Republican Christianists, many of whom also hold some troubling ideas and attitudes on women's rights, like to forefront the alleged evils of the "sharia" bogeyman in their anti-Muslim hate propaganda. That was a prominent feature of the impressive report Christiane Amanpour made this past weekend on ABC's This Week, 10/03/2010, in which the anti-Muslim polemicists made just that charge.

But there are legitimate criticisms to be made of real existing Islamic practices on that score, all of which are being made by Muslims themselves.

Michelle Goldberg, whose excellent Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) is one of the best journalistic treatments of the Christian Right in recent years, addresses this dilemma of American progressives confronting Islamophobia in The Un-Reluctant Fundamentalist Democracy Journal Fall 2010. It is a review of the book Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,former member of the Dutch Parliament who now lives in the United States and works for the conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Insitute (AEI), which is also known as Neocon Central.

For the right-wing think tank, landing such a brilliant, cosmopolitan heroine was a coup. The American right often alleges that liberals, full of mushy-headed cultural relativism, can’t even bestir themselves to defend their own values against reactionary Islam. The liberal intellectual establishment’s rejection of Hirsi Ali appeared, at least on the surface, to bear this out.

That’s certainly what Paul Berman argues in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist," he writes of Hirsi Ali, asserting that the left’s failure to rally around her is evidence of deep intellectual corruption. Pointing to her liberal critics, particularly the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, he says, "The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press."

Here's how Michelle addresses that charge:

But there is a problem with this perspective. Hirsi Ali is, in many ways, immensely admirable. But she can also be reactionary, glib, and sloppy, and judging by Nomad–a painfully disappointing book–these tendencies have gotten worse since she joined AEI. Nomad brims with attacks on unrecognizable straw feminists, bizarre statements about the United States, and, strangest of all, a tendency to romanticize religions outside of Islam. Hirsi Ali remains, she says, an atheist, but she’s developed an odd admiration for the Catholic Church, which, she suggests, should try to civilize Muslims through conversion. There is in Nomad a new concern for private property and a shout-out to gun rights. She ladles praise on her AEI colleague Charles Murray, author, most famously, of The Bell Curve, which purported to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Hirsi Ali attacks Islam in the name of liberalism, but she’s more than willing to jettison her liberalism for the sake of her anti-Islamism. Perhaps if she had found a home on the left, Hirsi Ali’s thinking would have developed in a different direction. One could blame liberals or feminists or mainstream intellectuals for letting her down, for driving her into the arms of the neoconservatives. But to do so is to condescend to a woman who has always taken responsibility for forging her own path. [my emphasis]

No one is constrained to think in simple-minded terms. Progressives can sympathize with the situation of a woman like Hersi Ali who fled her country after death threats from Islamic extremists but recognize it if she, as Michelle puts it, is "reactionary, glib, and sloppy" or "shows contempt for fundamental American values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion". Her claims have to be judged on their merits. She may reject Islam. But it sounds as though her attitudes about the so-called traditional family and her hostility to feminism are very similar to those of the Christian Right.

On Hirsi Ali's criticisms of Western feminism, Michelle writes:

To be blunt, Hirsi Ali has no idea what she’s talking about. Western feminists have consistently stood up for women’s rights in developing countries–including Muslim countries–inspiring endless polemics by both Christian and Muslim conservatives blasting “feminist colonialism.” Long before September 11, the Feminist Majority Foundation was a lonely American voice against the Taliban’s sexual apartheid, and today, the New York-based feminist group Women for Afghan Women runs domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan. The American feminist movement lobbies, fiercely and consistently, for family planning programs in poor countries, including Muslim countries. American feminists–including Muslim feminists–have set up domestic violence shelters that serve women trapped in violent homes in insular religious communities. American feminists have also played a crucial role in the global campaign against female genital mutilation, both by getting the U.S. government to exert its influence on countries reliant on American aid, and by supporting women working in Africa to end the practice.

In other words, liberals and anyone else concerned to counter crass hate-mongering against Muslims can reject falsehoods and demagoguery without becoming apologists for every aspect of every Muslim culture. Nor does it means soft-pedaling legitimate criticism of Muslim practices or Islamic religious beliefs. Nobody is compelled to be willfully stupid about the issues involved, in other words. And no one should be under any illusion that Republican Islamophobia is anything but poisonous to democracy.

As far as the Christian religion, promoting mindless hate is also inconsistent with honest Christian values. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham shouldn't be surprised or whine about feeling rejected if the value of their Christian teachings are judged in part by their deliberate and dishonest promotion of hatred.

Michelle reminds of something else that we should keep in mind when we hear Republican Christianists criticising real or imagined discrimination against women by Muslims:

American conservatives, meanwhile, have consistently attacked programs that help to liberate women in the developing world. They’ve slashed funding for reproductive health clinics abroad, and have put pressure on foreign governments to maintain restrictive anti-abortion laws. They’ve fought efforts to expand women’s rights in international law, helping to ensure that the United States remains one of the few countries that have refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women–putting it in the company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. In 2007, the evangelical activist Janice Crouse, a Bush delegate to a 2002 United Nations summit on children, attacked the Convention in explicitly relativist terms: "It is like the old colonialism. . . . [H]ere you have the UN taking up the same kinds of principles and saying to countries you have to do things my way. You have to do things in the way of Western nations."

Indeed, when it comes to women’s rights, American conservatives often ally themselves with the very governments Hirsi Ali decries. As Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post in 2002, "Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences." He quoted a U.S. official saying, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

Tags: islam, islamic law, islamophobia

Varieties of Islāmic law

The Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570/571-632) in a depiction from ca. 1315

With all the hate-mongering going on over the "Ground Zero Mosque" - which isn't on Ground Zero nor a mosque - one of the things we're hearing a lot from people like Sean Hannity is about the danger of "sharia" (Islāmic law) being imposed on us good Christian Real Americans. This sharia bogeyman is also used by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremists in Europe. So, for anyone who actually cares to know a tiny bit more about the historical context of Islāmic law (sharia), I'm posting this brief description I originally did in March 2006, with only minor changes except for the addition of material about Afghanistan. It's based largely on the scholarly account by the Christian ecumenical theologian Hans Küng.

But I'm adding these introductory paragraphs. In one sense, the US discussion on this is just plain silly. American law is secular. It's not based on religion. On the contrary, for the national or state governments to adopt or enforce purely religious laws would be unconstitutional.

The conservative fear-mongering over "sharia" can't easily acknowledge this for several reasons, some of them obvious and others not so obvious. Pointing out that it would require a change in the entire Constitutional order to impose sharia law in the US wouldn't make it sound like an immediate threat to freak out over. Also, many conservative Christian Republicans want Christian religious ideas to be enacted and imposed by law, however much they might comma-dance around admitting it. (See Julie Ingersoll, Washington Post Story Gets Christian Reconstructionism Wrong Religion Dispatches 08/16/2010.)

The pseudohistory promoted by the scamster David Barton that is popular among Christian fundamentalists in the US - and forms the basis of history lessons at Glenn Beck University (there really is something called that!) - argue that US Constitutional law actually is founded on Christianity. (See J. Brent Walker, A Critique of David Barton's Views on Church and State 04/01/2005 on the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty website and Steve Foster, Beck U. – Leave Those Kids Alone The Donkey Edge 07/08/2010.)

It's also worth remembering that other religious groups have their own laws that are considered binding on their members, e.g., Catholic canon law. As a general rule, American law doesn't enforce those religious laws and doesn't interfere with their enforcement within religious institutions. Ask any Catholic who has had to have a marriage annulled. There are lots of "gray areas", of course, which sometimes produce much rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth among Christian political conservatives. Civil and criminal responsibility of church officials in case of sexual abuse of minors may be affected by the types of internal rules and oversight a church has exercised. But the basic rule is if religious law contradicts civil law, civil law overrides it. That applies to Islāmic religious law just as it does to Christian canon law or other kinds of religious regulations churches adopt.

Finally, Islām is a religion of law. Much of the development of Islāmic tradition has been in the context of the development of religious law, sharia, as compared to Christianity or Judaism, where theological disputes as such have had a greater role. (As always, this kind of broad historical generalization should be understood as just that.) That is due in no small part to the fact that in the traditional Islāmic lands, separation of church and state didn't develop as it did in Christian Europe. Islām has never been organized around a central religious hierarchy comparable to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches. As referenced below, there are certainly problems within the Islāmic world around issues of law and what we call "separation of church and state." But there's a difference in understanding them realistically and making a scary bogeyman out of sharia.

Following is the text from March 2006; it references what at the time were current events and I've left those comments because they also provide context:

Up until not long ago, the President's [Bush's] most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan. Yes, the dominant Islāmic law tradition in Afghanistan historically is not the gruesome fundamentalism of the Taliban government ousted in 2001. To what extent the Hanafi school in Afghanistan has been corrupted by three decades of more-or-less continuous war with no end in sight, I don't know. In an undated article at GlobalSecurity.org (Hanafi Islam accessed 08/24/2010), they write:

Broad-minded without being lax, this school appeals to reason (personal judgment) and a quest for the better. It is generally tolerant and the largest movement within Islam. The Hanafi school is known for its liberal religious orientation that elevates belief over practice and is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities. ...

An estimated 84% of Afghanistan's population is Sunni, following the Hanafi school of jurisprudence; the remainder is predominantly Shi'a, mainly Hazara. In March 2003 Ayatollah Mohammad Asef Mohseni, leader of the predominantly Shia Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan, proposed that, along with the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence, the Shia Ja'fari school of jurisprudence be included in the new constitution as an official sect.

Taliban legal practices were particularly influenced by the Deobandi tradtion in Sunni Islām.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna (religious tradition), development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

The global war against Islam (or a fantasized version of it)

Department of Defense analyst Thomas McCabe's The Strategic Failures of al Qaeda Parameters (Spring 2010) seems at first like a pragmatic assessment of Al Qa'ida's effective demise as a significant force in world politics.

But the article is mainly an ideological justification for permanent war against the Muslim Menace. There's American triumphalism:

Immediately following 9/11, America showed an unprecedented ability to move quickly and with overwhelming force. Since then, the United States continues to display an impressive capacity to rapidly adapt strategically and tactically, while demonstrating impressive staying power in Iraq and Afghanistan, although many might say in Iraq it was a close call. While al Qaeda is undoubtedly hoping that the current turmoil in the world economy presages the collapse of the United States, a far likelier outcome is that once the initial panic passes the world will look pretty much like it did before, with America in fundamentally the same position — at the center.

As a statement of the obvious, that the United States will be the world's predominant military power for the foreseeable future, the deeply flawed response of the Cheney-Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks, followed now by Obama administration spectacularly ill-advised escalation of the Afghanistan War, have drastically weakened the credibility of the US as a world leader.

We also see in this paragraph the basic trick that underlies the entire article. It's the discussion of "Al Qaeda" as a massive, deadly, long term menace on a level with a hostile major power. Al Qa'ida, and here I'm referring to the remains of the group headed by Osama bin Laden, probably is "hoping that the current turmoil in the world economy presages the collapse of the United States". But so what? Lots of tiny sects, some of them with violent intent and capabilities, have all sorts of malign hopes for the fate of the United States. But McCabe uses the grandiose framework of evaluating the flaws of "Al Qaeda's" strategic assumptions to advocate for the need for the US to indefinitely fight a vaguely-defined Islamic threat.

His framework also shows in this claim: "After attacking the United States (and before), al Qaeda repeatedly expanded its theater of operations to embrace a greater portion of the world." But the biggest expansion of actual war has been the completely unnecessary American invasion of Iraq and the other decisions that leave us fighting militarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan nearly nine years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, with lower-level sporadic acts of war in Yemen and Somalia, and some unknown number of covert operations in places like Iran.

The active foreign terrorist threats currently confronting the United States may draw some inspiration from Al Qa'ida's actions and doctrines. But it's unlikely that Bin Laden's organization, to the extent that it exists at all, has much direct role in instigating them, much less exerting meaningful command-and-control authority over them. Groups like "Al Qa'ida in Iraq" were Salafi extremists groups, but their actual connection to Bin Laden was very tenuous. McCabe's underlying assumption of Al Qaeda as some kind of world power challenging American vital interests all over the world is a bad joke.

This is a good example of the problem with his argument:

Believing in a very narrow Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam—an especially rigid, austere, and intolerant fundamentalist interpretation—al Qaeda and other jihadis have repeatedly tried to encourage, or force, local Muslims to follow their practices and beliefs whether this was acceptable to the local populace or not. In Algeria, the jihadi insurgents were often extreme even by al Qaeda standards and routinely murdered those whom they defined as un-Islamic for such petty crimes as speaking French or not wearing proper Islamic dress. Over time, most of the population came to support the government, however reluctantly. Al Qaeda’s recent attempt to revive the Algerian civil war has not met with much popular support.

The argument that the Wahhabi variety of Islam, the one sponsored by Saudi Arabia, is the basis of Bin Laden-style jihadism is a favorite of the neoconservatives. But, as actual scholars of Islam like Juan Cole have explained, Bin Laden's jihadist ideas derived from the Egyptian extremist Sayyim Qutb are a violent extremist brand of Salafism, which is not Wahhabism. After all, Bin Laden's most important target has been the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy which is the chief international sponsor of Wahhabi Islam.

And the notion that the Algerian fundamentalists and the conflicts involving them are somehow "Al Qaeda" or like it, as well as the idea that what still exists of the actual Al Qa'ida could reignite the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, strike me as really pretty silly.

McCabe does make some interesting and probably valid points about how jihadist type groups (not just Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida) has alienated other Muslims. But that whole line of argument about the strategic failures of his mythic version of "Al Qaeda" leads up his own strategic proposal for a protracted US campaign against Islam. He suggest that a PR effort be part of it, though it's not at all clear how what he pictures would be different from the lame versions we've been using for years now. But in proposing this, he gives a key of his image of Islam:

Those in charge of this communication campaign should emphasize that the jihadis have sought to redefine Islam as a religion of intolerance at best and aggression and genocide at worst. Jihadists want to militarize the faith, so that Islam would literally become a terrorist religion rather than the religion of some terrorists, a redefinition that ideally will be widely opposed throughout the Muslim and Arab worlds. Unfortunately, in terms of Islamic theology and law, the jihadis may have a good case, as has been argued by a number of critics, or they may have a position that is at least as strong as their opponents’ arguments. Even if the jihadis do not dominate the debate, we have to be ready to deal with the fact that large segments of Muslim society choose to accept the jihadi arguments and ally with them. It is immaterial as to why they may follow these extremists, whether it is because they do not disagree or do not dare to disagree, out of religious solidarity, or because of hostility directed at the United States and the non-Muslim world. If large segments of Muslim society believe that extremist Islam truly reflects the basic tenets of Islam, the campaign will at least have removed any ambiguity. If the response is an embarrassed silence, we should make clear that, under the circumstances, such silence will be considered a “yes” in support of the extremists. [my emphasis]

It doesn't give a great deal of confidence in McCabe's general knowledge of Islam or his overall ability to assess sources that his one footnote reference to those "number of critics" who take that position is to a 2003 book (Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers) from the highly far-right Regnery Press, which specializes in, well, cranking out rightwing books. In Balancing the Prophet Financial Times 04/27/2010, Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar who actually knows a lot about the religion, describes Robert Spencer's perspective:

People often seem eager to believe the worst about Muhammad, are reluctant to put his life in its historical perspective and assume the Jewish and Christian traditions lack the flaws they attribute to Islam. This entrenched hostility informs Robert Spencer’s misnamed biography The Truth about Muhammad, subtitled Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.

Spencer has studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it is an evil, inherently violent religion. He is a hero of the American right and author of the US bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.

In the spirit of Spencer and his fellow Islamophobes, McCabe goes on to basically argue that "Al Qaeda" actually represents a huge number of the Muslims of the world, ending in a favorite Islamophobe argument:

First we need to understand that al Qaeda is not really an isolated phenomenon. In many ways, it is the tip of a large iceberg. It is not the lunatic fringe of Sunni Islam; it is the fanatic core of Sunni Islam, which is a profoundly
different phenomenon. Al Qaeda is an integral part of a broad and rather diverse spectrum of politicized Sunni Islam, and for that matter, of Sunni Islam as a whole. Unfortunately, the theological and ideological roots from which it grew still exist. Even if we are capable of destroying al Qaeda, we can expect it will have successors as long as those roots remain intact, especially those roots found in the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, the Deobandi school in South Asia, and the Qutbist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only Muslims can destroy those roots, and so far they have failed to demonstrate a willingness to do so. [my emphasis]

He then repeats the factually-challenged neocon/Islamophobe contention that huge numbers of Muslims supported the 9/11 attacks:

The second thing we need to understand is that when al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11, it had significant and fairly widespread support throughout the Arab world. Much of this support is the result of a belief that al Qaeda was standing up to the United States and punishing it for policies that harmed or demeaned Muslims. To the degree that al Qaeda has lost that popular support, it was a direct result of the strategic and tactical errors highlighted earlier in this article. Unfortunately, that potential base of support still exists and may be tapped by more sophisticated or more selectively bloodthirsty extremists.

Actually, there was a remarkable degree of condemnation from Muslim countries, including those in the Arab world, of the attacks. McCabe is conjuring bogeymen here. If there was any distinct region of the world from which the expressions of sympathy for the US seemed to be comparatively muted, it was Latin America.

And McCabe invokes another neocon standard, the argument based heavily of Bernard Lewis' faulty generalizations, that Arabs are generally kind of screwed up and hostile and envious and resentful:

Unfortunately, the problem goes far beyond these negative perceptions
and is rooted not just in America’s foreign policy but also in the political culture, psychology, and pathologies of the region. Much of the support al Qaeda received was rooted in the frustration, rage, and malignance with which much of the Muslim Middle East views the world and its position in it. These attitudes long predated either the existence of Israel or the US invasion of Iraq, and, in fact, preceded the United States having a major presence in the region. Middle East Muslims look at the world, especially the United States, with a primordial sense of grievance and a profound sense of resentment, which al Qaeda has been able to turn into a global threat. Once a leading civilization, the Muslim Middle East has been surpassed and is now dominated by peoples it historically regarded as inferior. The Muslim Middle East has been increasingly marginalized due to the globalization of the world economy by the capitalist economic powers and is constantly threatened by a wide range of attractions related to western popular culture. Governments in Muslim territories are often regarded as corrupt, incompetent, and in the view of Islamic radicals, defeatist in the face of Islam’s enemies, and often depicted as servants of the opponents of Islam who have been put in power and kept in power by its enemies. [my emphasis]

The few constructive observations in McCabe's article don't detract from the fact that he is essentially enunciating an already-too-familiar framework for permanent war against Muslims in general and Arab Muslims in particular.

On Islamaophia, see also this recent piece by Bruce Lawrence, The Polite Islamophobia of the Intellectual Religion Dispatches 06/01/2010.

Tags: islam,
islamic fundamentalism, us foreign policy

Saudia Arabia, Yemen and Shi'a-Sunni tensions

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly Online reports in Sectarian rifts appear by Omayma Abdel-Latif (11/19-25/09 edition) that Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Shi'a rebels in Yemen is really ticking off Iran and Saudi Shiites, the latter composing 1/3 or so of the Saudi population. It also says Al Qa'ida implicitly supported the Saudi attacks by issuing a statement condemning the Shi'a Al-Houthi group the Saudis are targeting.

Gee, hyper-Sunni cult Al Qa'ida hates Iranian-backed Shi'a group? Who could have guessed? (Yes, that's meant to be sarcastic.)

The Al-Houthis "are Zaidis, a branch of Shiism closest to Sunni doctrine". Like the other Shi'a, the Zaidis (also Zaidiya, Zaydīyah, Zaidīs, Zaydis) recognize the primacy of the fourth caliph ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib to follow the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community. But unlike most Shi'a, the Zaidis do not regard the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān, as usurpers.

The name of the sect comes from Zayd ibn ʿAlī (d. 740), the grandson of Shi'a martyr Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (626-680), the son of the fourth caliph. The Zaidis are commonly known as the Fiver Shi'a because they recognize Zayd as the fifth Imam, which other Shi'a do not. Their interpretations of Islāmic law have often been close to those of Sunni jurists.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online gives this discription of Zaidi distinctiveness:

Although they have their own school of law based on the legal interpretations of Zayd and his successors, the Yemeni Zaydīs are otherwise the closest of all Shīʿī factions to the Sunnīs (and most particularly to the Ḥanafī school of Sunnī jurisprudence); this has often been interpreted by Western scholars to mean that they are “moderate” or practical. The Zaydīs differ from other Shīʿī denominations in that they accept the legitimacy of the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and, at least partially, ʿUthmān. Moreover, in contrast to certain other Shīʿī groups, the Zaydīs do not view the imam as infallible, nor as a quasi-divine, inspired, or supernaturally endowed person representing God on earth, and, again unlike other factions, they do not require that he be divinely designated in any way. In Zaydī belief, the qualifications for the imamate include: descent from ʿAlī and Fāṭimah (though they do not require that it pass from father to son), absence of physical imperfections, and personal piety. The imam must be able to take up the sword, either offensively or in defense, which rules out infants as well as “hidden imams” of the type acknowledged by the Ismāʿīlīyah and the Twelvers. [my emphasis]

That latter point indicates that they also lack the messianic/apocalyptic element that characterizes Twelver Shiism. The Zaidis generally reject mystical approaches to the faith.

The article quotes the head of the Lebanese Hizbullah party on the sectarian implications:

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nasrallah said there is a tendency today to put a gloss of sectarianism on every conflict in the region, and that this was meant to break up Muslim nations into small entities. This, he said serves Israel.

"Every conflict in our region is being interpreted only from the perspective of the Sunni-Shia divide," he said in his latest speeches commemorating the Day of the Martyr. "It is being said that Turkey, the Sunni state, is engaging in the Middle East to take the role of Iran, the Shia state." Nasrallah called on Iran to make a rapprochement towards Saudi Arabia and vice versa. "There should be an initiative from any Arab or Muslim nation to bring those two big and important nations together to dialogue in order to put out the sectarian fire."

The fighting has spilled over into Saudi Arabia, as reported in Saudi villages evacuated due to violence in Yemen, UNICEF says Today's Zaman (Turkey) 11/14/09.

Tags: iran,
islam, saudi arabia

Islāmic reformist views of Western culture

‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889–1940)

Following up on my post yesterday on a translation of a speech credited to the first caliph Abu Bakr used by the Algerian Islāmic reformer ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889–1940) as a response to what he saw as failings of the Ottoman caliphate, an article by Ibrahim Kalin of Georgetown University, Islam and the West: Deciphering a Contested History (available publicly as of this writing), from Oxford Islamic Studies Online describes four main modern response in the Islamic world to Western culture. The approach he calls "critical engagement" is reflected by the Islāmic reformist tradition of which Ibn Badis was part:

From the Ottoman intellectuals Namik Kemal and Mehmed Âkif Ersoy to their colleagues the Iranian Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and the Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAbduh, the reformists sought to unlink the Western value system from the material achievements of Western civilization, that is, science, technology, democracy, and constitutionalism. Their assumption was based on a clear distinction between an objective material civilization, which was represented by the modern West, and spiritual values, which the Muslim world did not need to borrow from the West. While this view is still widely held in the Muslim world, extreme modernization and globalization have made such distinctions impossible. [my emphasis]

The other three positions he calls total adaptation, "outright rejection and denouncement of Western culture as cultural imperialism" (Wahhābīs and Salafīs) and the kind of traditional Islām holding "that a more elevated ethical and spiritual dialogue with the West (and the rest of the world) is possible while maintaining one's [non-Western] cultural tradition."

The jihadist groups like Osama bin Laden's original al-Qa'ida, which scarcely exists any more in the form it did in 2001, are generally extreme manifestations of the Sunni Salafī tradition. Shi'a groups like Hamas, of course, reject the majority Sunni brand of Islām including its Salafī variety.

Kalin also makes this important observation:

The legacy of colonialism continues to make a profound impact on Islam-West relations today. Many Muslim countries fought wars of liberation against European powers but after independence found themselves dependent upon their former colonizers. The current distribution of global power, once wielded by Europe and now by the United States, fuels a sense of alienation, frustration, and mistrust in the Muslim world. In addition to pressing policy issues, Samuel Huntington's implicit claim in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) that there is a collision between the fundamental values of Islamic and Western worlds and that "Islam has bloody borders" was viewed as epitomizing a point of view that justifies the current global power imbalance to the detriment of non-Western cultures and societies. The events of September 11th and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have further increased tensions between various Muslim and Western groups. Many in Europe and the U.S. see extremist groups in the Muslim world as a threat to the existence of international security and to the future of Western civilization. Many in the Muslim world see the "war on terror" as a war on Islam and Muslims. As [John] Esposito and [Dalia] Mogahed show in Who Speaks for Islam (2008), the overwhelming majority of Muslims subscribe to the universal principles of human rights, rule of law, and democracy, which are also Western values. But they also want the West to respect Islamic culture, religion, and tradition. This entails a more reasoned and balanced discussion of Islam-West relations than equating Islam and Muslims stereotypically with terrorism, violence, irrationalism, oppression, or cultural backwardness. In this regard, Islamophobia, the unfounded fear of Islam and Muslims, and the hatred arising from that fear are a major source of tension. [my emphasis]

Tags: albelhamid ben badis, islam

Abū Bakr, ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis and Muslim political theory

‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889-1940)

I've written before about the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the first four caliphs following the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community (umma). They were, with the time of their caliphates: Abū Bakr (632-634 CE); ‛Umar ibn al-Khaţţāb (634-644); ‛Uthmān ibn Άffān (644-656); and, ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib (656-661).

These four caliphs are assumed especially in the Sunni tradition to have established important precedents for Islāmic conduct. All four of them had known the Prophet and had worked closely with him, and were thus known as being among the "Companions of the Prophet". Naturally, their association with the Prophet added to the authority of their precedents as rulers.

The Shi'a, the "partisans of ‛Alī", recognized only ‛Alī among the four as a legitimate caliph. The Shi'a tendency emerged from the first Muslim civil war (Fitnah), which began during ‛Alī. Today about 10% of the world's Muslims being Shia. For centuries, the Shia would be intermixed in the same communities as the majority Sunni. The present-day geographical concentrations of Shia in Iran and certain areas of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon was a later development.

The following speech attributed to Abū Bakr from 632, "The Principles of Governing in Islam" appears in Oxford Islamic Studies Online. It is an English translation taken from al-Hihab (The Meteor) of January 1938, a newspaper of an Algerian Islamic reformer, ‛Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis (1889-1940). The translation from the Arabic is by Emad Eldin Shahin. Shahin says in his introduction that the article, which apparently consisted almost completely of Abū Bakr's speech, "reflects Ibn Badis's nonconventional response to the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate [as a consequence of the First World War], which he held responsible for the repression and injustice of Muslim societies."

I've bolded passages that refer to requirements of rulers to act justly and to the need for the people to provide legitimacy and consent to the rulers based on the justice of their actions. The italicized passages are in the Oxford Islamic Studies Online original:

O People. I was entrusted as your ruler, although I am not better than any one of you.

Support me as long as you see me following the right path, and correct me when you see me going astray.

Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs. If I disobey Him, you owe me no obedience.

The weak among you are powerful [in my eyes] until I get them their due. The powerful among you are weak [in my eyes] until I take away from them what is due to others.

I say that and seek God's forgiveness for myself and for you.

The First Principle

No one has the right to assume any of the affairs of the umma [Muslim community] without their consent. It is the people that have the right to delegate authority to the leaders and depose them. No one can rule without the consent of the people. Rule cannot be bequeathed nor be based on personal considerations. This principle is derived from [Abu Bakr's] statement, “I was entrusted as your ruler.” In other words, I was entrusted by others; and that is “you.”

The Second Principle

He who manages an affair of the Muslim community should be the most qualified in this matter and not the best in behavior. If two persons share good behavior and qualifications, but one is better in good behavior and the other is more qualified for this matter, the one who is better qualified should be entrusted with this matter. Undoubtedly, qualification varies with the circumstance and the position. Someone might be qualified in a specific matter and position for possessing the characteristics suitable for that position. In this case, he should be entrusted with that post. On this basis, the Prophet appointed ‘Amr ibn al-‘Asi [died 663] to lead the army of Dhat al-Salasil and supported him with Abu Bakr, ‘Umar [ibn al-Khattab, died 644], and Abu ‘Ubayda ibn al-Jarra [circa 581–639], who were all under his command, though they were better than him. He also appointed Usama ibn Zayd [died circa 673] as a commander of an army that included Abu Bakr and ‘Umar. This principle is based on the statement, “although I am not better than any one of you.”

The Third Principle

Assuming the affairs of the people does not make the ruler better than anyone else. Preference is achieved through merit and deeds. If Abu Bakr was better, this was not due to his rule over them but because of his deeds and stances. This principle is also derived from the statement, “although I am not better than any one of you.”

The Fourth Principle

The people have the right to monitor those in charge because they are the source of their authority and preserve the right to appoint or depose them.

The Fifth Principle

The responsibility of the people toward the ruler lies in offering assistance to him as long as they see him following the righteous path. They must support him, as they share with him the responsibility. This principle, as the previous one, is derived from the statement, “Support me as long as you see me following the right path.”

The Sixth Principle

The responsibility of the people also lies in advising and guiding the ruler and pointing the righteous path to him when he deviates. The people must correct him if he misbehaves. This principle is based on the statement, “correct me when you see me going astray.”

The Seventh Principle

The people have the right to question the rulers, hold them accountable for their actions, and make them follow the choice of the nation, not their own. The people have the final word, not the rulers. This is a result of the people's right to hold the rulers accountable and correct them when they are convinced that the rulers are not following the right path, and cannot convince the people otherwise. This is derived form the statement, “correct me when you see me going astray.”

The Eighth Principle

Any one who assumes an affair of the people should declare the plan he is going to follow, so that the people become aware of and agree to it. He is not allowed to lead the people as he pleases, but as they please. This principle is based on the statement, “Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs.” His plan is the obedience of God. The people knew what the obedience of God in Islam entailed.

The Ninth Principle

The people will not be governed except by the law they voluntarily adopt, the law that realizes their interest. The rulers only implement the will of the people, who obey the law because it emanates from them, not because it is imposed on them by any other authority, be it of an individual or of a group. This makes the people feel free to manage their affairs on their own. Everyone in society will share this feeling. Freedom and sovereignty are a natural and legitimate right of every individual in society. This principle is derived from the statement, “Obey me as long as I observe God in your affairs. If I disobey Him, you owe me no obedience.” Thus, they do not obey the ruler per se, but they obey God by following the law that He has revealed and that they have accepted for themselves. The ruler is delegated by them to apply this law to everyone, including himself. Therefore, if he deviates, he forsakes their obedience.

The Tenth Principle

All are equal before the law, regardless of their strength or weakness. The law should apply to the strong without any fear of their strength and to the weak without leniency for their weakness.

The Eleventh Principle

[The state] should protect the rights of the individuals and groups in society. The rights of the weak should not be forsaken because of their weakness, and the strong should not usurp the right of anyone because of their strength.

The Twelfth Principle

[The state] should maintain a balance in society when protecting the rights of its members. The dues should be fairly taken from the strong without transgression or weakening them. The rights of the weak should be granted to them without favor due to their weakness, so that they do not transgress against others. This principle and the two previous ones are derived from the statement, “The weak among you are powerful [in my eyes] until I get them their due. The powerful among you are weak [in my eyes] until I take away from them what is due to others.”

The Thirteenth Principle

There should be a realization of a mutual responsibility of the ruler and the ruled in reforming society. They should always feel the need to continue working strenuously and seriously, and seek forgiveness from God, who oversees them. This is based on the statement, “I say that and seek God's forgiveness for myself and for you.”

Tags: abu bakr, albelhamid ben badis, islam

Now this is different

Following up on the previous post about Mexico and the merging of cultures, here's a TV clip from Aljazeera English about Mayans in southern Mexico converting to Islām.



Tags: islam, mexico

Brother Al and the Muslims

Here is a story that gives us some insight into the prevailing American fundamentalist Christian view of Islam.

Evangelical Leaders Pledge Common Cause with Islam by Stephen Adams, CitizenLink (from James Dobson's Focus on the Family Web site) 01/03/08. the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an umbrella group of conservative Protestants, recently wrote a conciliatory public letter to Muslims. The petition was a response to a statement by a number of prominent Muslims, that was called A Common Word Between Us and You. The Christian petition originated with a group of Yale Divinity School scholars and is titled A Christian Response to "A Common Word Between Us and You".

This kind of exchange seems to be very much in the spirit of ecumenical dialogue to promote world peace that Hans Küng's Global Ethic Foundation promotes.

Evangelicals in the American sense means conservative Protestants who adhere to a "born-again" theology. Fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Former President Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham are non-fundamentalist, evangelical Christians. (Billy's son Franklin may be another question.)

Conservatives regularly complain that "moderate" Muslims aren't doing enough to counter violent jihadism. But you don't have to listen that closely to see that in many cases, what the conservatives are really saying is that the real enemy is Islam and that the "moderates" are either useless against the jihadists or actually support them.

This exchange of public statements gives an example in practice of how this works out. If the conservatives were serious about wanting "moderate" Muslim to step up to promote peace, one would think they would embrace such a moment. NAE President Leith Anderson gives an example of this in the statement he about his support for the Christian public letter at Signing the Letter to Islam NAE.net 11/2/07:

What are my hopes from this dialogue [between Christians and Muslims]? First, mutual respect between the two largest religions on the globe. This includes a freedom to state what we each believe without pretending that there is comprehensive mutual agreement. Second, peace in places and between peoples who are hostile toward one another. Third, religious liberty where every nation allows its citizen to freely believe and worship even if that means changing what is believed and how worship is rendered. Fourth, an opening for future dialogue with the conviction that it is not good to live in either ignorance nor isolation.

The CitizenLink news report notes that prominent Baptist theologian Albert Mohler has attacked the Christian statement:

Their response [the Christian petition] — initiated by Yale Divinity School and endorsed by other liberal Christian leaders — apologized for the sins of Christians during the Crusades and for "excesses" of the global war on terror, without mentioning Muslim atrocities. It appeared to leave the fundamentals of Christianity — especially the deity of Christ — open for discussion.

It even seemed to acknowledge Allah as the God of the Bible. "Before we 'shake your hand’ in responding to your letter,” it stated, "we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world."

The very name of the Muslim communiqué — A Common Word between Us and You — is from a verse in the Quran that condemns “people of the Scripture” (Christians) for alleged polytheism (the doctrine of the Trinity).

Mohler said the agreement “sends the wrong signal” and contains basic theological problems, especially in "marginalizing" Jesus Christ. He also condemned the apology for the Crusades. (my emphasis)

While the theological buzzwords may not be immediately obvious to all readers, this position essentially rules out all ecumenical dialogue between Chritianity and Islam (and Judaism) that isn't a sales pitch of Christians proselytizing believers of the other faith.

There are different motivations for people to learn about someone else's religion. The kind of dialogue sought by Hans Küng and the Global Ethic Foundation is one that would help believers understand what the other religion believes and to seek common ground in the interest of world peace. A genuine ecumenical dialogue, that is.

Learning about another religion for the purpose of proselytizing means that one is seeking to understand the other religion from a sales standpoint, i.e., how can I convince the other side to give up their own religion and adopt mine?

The former means understanding the other religion on its own terms. Not accepting it or converting to it, but understanding it in its own terms, not just from the standpoint of one's own religion. Christianity and Islam are both religions that historically emphasized winning converts. So such an approach can be challenging for both.

The latter means understanding the other religion in order to discredit it, at least in the eyes of those targeted for conversion.

This is where the fundamentalist view converges with the desire of those who wish to demonize Islam for more earthly reasons than saving the souls of Muslims. The quote above on criticism of the Christian petition provides some good examples of how that works.

First of all, saying that Christians should never make a statement that would have the effect of "marginalizing" Jesus Christ is pretty much the same as saying that Christians should never talk to Muslims about religion except to convert them. Or maybe to anger and humiliate them during torture sessions in the Bush Gulag. The reality is that Christians have never won a lot of voluntary conversions from Islam or Judaism, in part because the doctrine of the Trinity doesn't make any sense to them.

For that matter, it doesn't make sense to Christians either. Any minister who is remotely respectful of the religious complexities of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is going to wind up explaning it by some version of saying, "it's a Mystery", and that believing it is a matter of faith. My own pastor, who takes his theology pretty seriously, explains it as a type of dialogue of God with Himself. Then he reminds people that they're never going to really understand the doctrine and that you shouldn't beat yourself up over it. (Kind of like a native English speaker attempting to master German, for instance.)

Muslims and Jews believe that there is one God. Not "one God in three Persons" as the Trinity doctrine describes it. But one God in one Person. Historically and theologically, that one God is God worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Maybe someday She'll explain to us how many Persons She really is in a more understandable way. Meanwhile, we can't understand the doctrine. But we can do the math. The belief in one God is a common belief among Christians and Muslims. The belief in Jesus as a prophet is also common to both faiths. The belief that Jesus is God is common only to Chrisitians. And, for that matter, the Western and Eastern Christian Churches split nearly a thousand years ago (theoretically and at least in part really) over how to define the doctrine of the Trinity and have never reconciled over it. But let's not even go there.

So, saying, "I'm not going to talk about your religion on any kind of equal, respectful basis until you acknowledge that Jesus is God", is pretty much eliminating the possibility of Christians talking to Muslims about their faith on any kind of equal, respectful basis. It's very similar to Cheney and Bush telling Iran, "Do everything we tell you to do with nothing in return, and after you've done it then we'll hold negotiations with you."

It's a particularly brainless fundamentalist habit to talk about Allah as though the word designates a particular deity different from the one worshipped by Christians. "Allah" is the Arabic word for "god". Arabic-speaking Christians also pray to "Allah".

The defense of the Crusades is particularly ironic coming from hardline Protestants. The Crusades were for a long time a standard item in Protestant polemics against the Catholics, wars of conquest in the name of God that Protestants claimed with the doing of the vile papists, not some common and dubious legacy of the religion of Christianity. Brother Al, though, is more than happy to embrace the Crusades.

If you can stomach a half hour of this, Brother Al did a radio program on this. He spends the first ten minutes on anti-abortion. The segment on the evangelical letter to Muslims begins around 11:15 in the excerpt.

There's a telling moment near the end that gives the listeners a brief exposure to the limited nature of fundamentalists' alleged fondness for Jews. A caller to the show asks a reasonable question: if fundis can recognize that Jews worship the same God as Christians, why is that not the case with Muslim. Brother Al responds, with a minimum of mealy-mouthing, that Jews do not worship the same God as Christians.

Tags: albert mohler, christian fundamentalism, christianism, christianity, hans küng, islam