OT: Another take on how the Muslim world got to where it is, from The Times:
thetimes.co.uk
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 22 2001
The world is paying for the failure of a dream
MICHAEL BINYON
Today's Islamic extremists are turning back to the old certainties of the desert
Unity, legitimacy and revelation: these were the revolutionary concepts firing the early Muslims with a zeal that swept all before them. Within a few decades they had burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and overwhelmed the enfeebled and schismatic Eastern Christians, squabbling over theology. They conquered North Africa, raced through Spain and in 732 were at the gates of Poitiers, finally checked by Charles Martel.
But the very strengths that had sustained them were to prove, in the long run, the obstacles that have held Islam back and undermined its temporal authority. They simply could not be adapted to the changing world. And it is this that over the past century has so frustrated Muslims, who see their achievements belittled, their values questioned and their attempts to reconcile themselves to a Western-dominated world rebuffed.
From this frustration, this clash between the religious vision and the secular reality, the modern Islamist movement has been born. Islamic “fundamentalist” extremism is a violent reaction to the failed secular dreams of the Arab world and beyond, a simplistic turning back to old certainties.
Only now, with the culmination of such extremism in the terrible toll in Manhattan, have Muslims begun, publicly, to question where such “fundamentalism” has led, and at what cost. Ahmad Bishara, the secretary-general of Kuwait’s liberal National Democratic Movement, said last week that Arabs and Muslims “should engage in deep soul-searching to answer far-reaching questions about our institutions and prevailing culture; a culture that glorifies violence; and institutions that feed the cycle of terror.”
In an editorial in the English-language Arab Times, he added: “Regardless of where the eventual blame finally lands, our society has a problem on its hands already. For terrorist acts are nothing but a violent manifestation of a greater Arab-Islamic culture that is laden with intolerance and embraces violence as a means of changes and edifies terrorists.”
None of this lies in Islam’s roots. The unity of early Islam saw no division between tribes, languages or regions: all peoples who “submitted” to Islam were part of the umma, an equal community that acknowledged a single God and the divine mission of his Prophet. But such unity, with the same simple structure of government that the “Commander of the Believers” had exercised in Arabia, broke down across thousands of miles. Local rivalries broke out; personal jealousies fuelled ambitions; taxes, armies and the economy became increasingly hard to co-ordinate; and old identities began to reassert themselves.
Two dynasties of caliphs, the spiritual leaders of Islam who were also the empire’s rulers, succeeded, by devolution and good appointments, in holding the community together. Learning, science and trade flourished. The notion of the umma survived, even if its lands and provinces became more distinct. But legitimacy proved far trickier. The issue came up early on, when many Muslims, including the Prophet’s wife, refused to accept Ali as the third Caliph on the murder of his predecessor in 656. The Ommayyad clan mounted a challenge, Ali was murdered and his party — the Shiat Ali or Shia — marked the first schism in Islam. No one subsequently was able to lay down criteria for how leaders of the Community of Believers were to be selected.
The sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 marked a turning point. Leadership of Islam passed, eventually, to outsiders — Ottoman Turks, from Central Asia, whose hereditary sultans assumed the role of Caliph with little pretence of spiritual legitimacy. The Ottoman Empire proved remarkably durable, largely because of its loose structure, political adaptability and religious tolerance.
The fatal challenge came from the West. It was not only the superior technology of Europe — the Turks learnt to absorb and adapt that; it was the notions of nationhood and nationalism that began to gnaw at the long enduring notion of Muslim and Ottoman unity. And by the First World War nationalism and secularism had combined to hasten the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
The collapse undermined centuries of Islamic unity. The new ruler of Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, saw Islam as a reactionary force and ruthlessly purged its influence from his new secular state. Emergent Arab states also were set up on Western, national, secular models. Ancient notions of Islamic government and law were all but ignored.
The new ideologies influencing the Muslim world were nationalism, especially in the struggle against Western empires and Zionism, socialism and communism. They crystalised in the revolutionary regimes of Nasser’s Egypt and the Baath socialist governments in Iraq and Syria.
But secular nationalism proved little more successful. The Middle East continued to fester; Muslim governments still could not match the technology of the West; and, most importantly, there was little reconciliation between modern life and Islamic teaching.
The last scholar who had attempted a philosophical and religious synthesis was Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian thinker of the 19th century, who tried to open up areas of Koranic revelation, not for questioning, but for its relevance to the modern world.
Since then, that area has been closed. Saudi puritanical literalism, backed by money, has taken hold; “fundamentalism” has banned all discussion of Islam and modernity; and the dysfunction between Muslim societies and Muslim thought has grown. This is what has fuelled the extremists’ anger at the West. And this lies at the heart of Ahmad Bishara’s worries about where Islamic culture is going.
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