This article from today's WSJ, asks the question, what would the Taliban have done with Rumi?
September 7, 2001
Taliban vs. Poet
By Melik Kaylan. Mr. Kaylan, a writer in New York, is completing a book on the history of Constantinople. He has visited Afghanistan several times.
Just when it seems that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has run out of ways to offend world opinion, violate common sense and further immiserate its populace, it comes up with a new angle.
Recently, the Kabul theocrats arrested 24 aid workers, eight of whom are Western (including two Americans), for allegedly trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. On Tuesday, Taliban spokesmen abruptly announced the start of the foreigners' trial, offering no assurances of impartiality, no access for outside monitors or family members, and no timetable. The foreigners, if found guilty, are apparently punishable by imprisonment or expulsion, while the remaining 16 Afghans are subject to capital punishment. Finally, according to the prevailing Afghan version of Sharia law, the ultimate arbiter of their sentences will not be the court, but Mullah Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader.
There must be few disinterested observers of Taliban conduct left on the globe who can expect fairness in the administration of justice, or competence in governance, from Mullah Omar's regime. After all, these are the same people who some months ago attacked the giant Buddha sculptures of Bamiyan with heavy weapons for being a threat to the Muslim faith. This kind of acutely misjudged political theater goes beyond the worst antics of that old charlatan Idi Amin and more nearly resembles the lunacy of the Emperor Caligula, with his massed javelin assault against the ocean waves for disobedience to the gods.
According to United Nations sources, two million Afghan refugees have fled to Pakistan, 1.5 million to Iran, and those left behind face famine conditions at home. Can anyone doubt that the regime is merely resorting to diversionary psychodramas to keep its citizens loyal? Unable to put food in their mouths, it hopes to distract them with myths of ever more imminent conspiracies against their religion. In so doing the Taliban are driving off the only remaining source of sustenance available to many of their citizens: humanitarian aid from outside.
According to the chief justice in Kabul, the alleged proselytizing of the aid workers now on trial "is a matter of concern for the whole Islamic world, not just the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan." Apparently, the only people who still imagine that anyone believes their propaganda are the Taliban themselves. What really should concern Muslims everywhere is that Mullah Omar claims common cause with them, and presumes to represent them, especially in the eyes of non-Muslims. The Taliban have far more in common with likeminded non-Muslim tyrants down the ages, even with such notorious enemies of Islam as Stalin and Milosevic, than they do with other Muslims.
It was Stalin who justified the wholesale oppression and starvation of his subjects, many of them Muslim, in order to save them from the wiles of capitalism. And the Serbs under Milosevic slaughtered their Bosnian neighbors so as to preserve the Slavo-Christian heritage of Europe from "the Turk." They no more represent Christians around the world than the Taliban do Muslims. In fact, the Taliban have almost succeeded in furnishing a retroactive propaganda victory to the butchers of Bosnia and Chechnya. It is now that much easier to use the horrors of Afghanistan under Taliban rule as an example of any society allowed fully to pursue its Islamic identity. Why indeed would Muslims wish to live under Muslim rule if women are not allowed to work, if they cannot attend school after age eight, and if they cannot travel alone without a male relative? If a continual state of paranoid vigilance against internal lapses and external enemies is the sine qua non of a perfected Islamic society, why should Muslims wish it and why would the rest of the world tolerate it?
The answer is that this is one interpretation of Islam, and an anomalous one in the context of Muslim states through the centuries. Historically, the tolerance of other religions has been a common characteristic of Islam. In the Moorish kingdom of Spain, Jews and Muslims flourished together. Expelled by the Inquisition, the majority of Spanish Jews found a welcome home in the Ottoman Empire. To this day, in Turkey and Syria, Muslims are often found praying for miracles at ancient Christian holy sites. Indeed, in Syria, a substantial population of Armenians abides and flourishes unmolested.
The Islamic world has never been a monolith, despite efforts exerted by Afghan, Iranian, Algerian, Pakistani and Saudi fundamentalists to make it so. They seem to have alighted on the planet entirely oblivious to the cultural striations of their Muslim heritage. How could the Taliban hew to their tenets if they had the slightest knowledge of Sheherezade or Harun-al-Rashid's Baghdad? What would they make of Omar Khayyam's love of rhyming quatrains, the flute and the forbidden grape? And the sublime illuminated depictions of the "Shahname," indeed the entire history of miniature painting from the Persians to the Ottomans to the Moguls -- how do they square it with their ban on human representation?
Rumi
No doubt they would mete it the same treatment as the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Yet long after the Taliban have joined the dust of the ages, the other Islam will abide. The Islam of Jelaluddin Rumi for example -- astonishingly, the most widely read poet in the U.S. nearly eight centuries after he lived under the enlightened and tolerant Seljuk sultan of eastern Turkey.
There is a chronicle of the death of Rumi, which illustrates the tolerance of Islam at its apogee. Rumi himself, in his great work, the "Shams-I-Tabriz," goes so far as to dismiss the terminology of Jew, Christian and Muslim as "false distinctions." He was so universally revered that women, children, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Turks and Greeks all flooded the streets at his funeral procession.
The noise became so great that even the sultan, insulated in his palace, heard its echoes. He summoned the chief of the rabbis and priests and demanded to know why they should be so concerned with the death of this Muslim imam. They are said to have answered by saying that, "In Rumi we have comprehended the true nature of Jesus and Moses. In him we have we have found the same guidance that is offered by the perfect prophets whose words we have read in our books."
At this riposte, the story goes, the sultan fell silent, and all his ministers with him. What, one wonders, would the Taliban have done with Rumi? |
