Islam's (various) visions of the world
By Antonella Caruso
The events of recent months have led us to reflect on Islam and its traditions, not only because it was the religious faith of the terrorists of September 11, but also because of the frequent references to the Koran and the prophetic sayings of Osama bin Laden and one of his key aides, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Consequently, both militant Islam and Islam are now on trial and no attempt is made to distinguish between the politicization of faith and the faith itself. Similarly, there have been numerous debates on Islam between its supporters and opponents, between experts of the traditions of the faith and the not so expert. The differing reactions to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the ensuing war against the International Islamic Front and the Afghan Taliban have also given a new lease of life to Samuel Huntington's theory on the clash of civilizations, especially between the Islamic and Jewish-Christian civilizations.
This calls for a re-examination of Islamic traditions and a reconstruction of the International Islamic Front's geopolitical vision of the world through analogous visions formulated in the distant past. This article thus concentrates on the Islam territory where the political objectives of both al-Qaeda and its revolutionary predecessors meet. It also attempts to map the various ideological phases of these particular Islamic cartography.
"Islam is dogma and faith, it is country and nationality, it is religion and state, it is spirituality and activism, it is the Holy Book and the sword. The noble Koran says all this." This is how the imam, Hassan al-Banna, ideologist and founder of the Association of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, expressed himself in his long speech delivered during the organization's fifth conference in 1938. A visionary reformer at the beginning of the last century, al-Banna made his explosive entry into the widest reaching movement of Muslim resurgence (late 19th-first half 20th century) that set out to restore the glory of Islam and the Arab peoples following their humiliation and fall into decadence under the European protectorate. Although Hassan al-Banna was killed in 1948, his political and cultural program has never ceased to act as a reverential reference point for the various radical and moderate currents within modern Islamic thought, and it still survives to our times thanks in part to the incessant propaganda activity of his followers.
Islam is based on the single dogma of divine unity. It transpires from the unity of the cosmos, and it is the duty of mankind to affirm it on earth. Islam's date of birth coincides with the foundation of the first Muslim community (umma), founded by the prophet Muhammad in Medina in AD 622 - the first year of the Muslim calendar or hejira. It is cemented by the universal value of faith which transcends all bonds of blood and race of its followers. The utopia of modern and contemporary political Islam is the reestablishment of the original Medina umma, considered the model for political, social and religious organization; in other words, the reunification of Arab and Islamic countries through the implementation of the only Divine Law, or sharia. The consolidation of nation-states and the profound cleavages within the Arab and Islamic world clash with the utopia, now as well as in the past.
The notion of a return to the past has historically demonstrated a remarkable capacity to gather massive popular support. It is widely interpreted as the restoration of the values of purity and fraternity between all Muslims, which have been eroded by the corruption of traditional customs (Westernization) and the non-observance of religious rules in favor of codes of conduct alien to Muslim legislative tradition. The fraternity between all Muslims, citizens enjoying equal rights in the Islamic umma, is sanctified by the religious, political and juridical bonds set out in the Koran which is dogma but also a model of the perfect society. Religion thus determines citizenship and until the beginning of the last century every Muslim was by right a citizen of the reign or empire of the ruling caliph. "Islam does not recognize geographic borders nor does it consider divisions of blood and race. All Muslims are intended as one nation [umma] and the Islamic nation is also one, however distant its countries might be and however much its frontiers may be challenged."
In this ideologically compact space, the direction of the "Muslim nation" is taken by one state or by one empire which acts as its champion. But the geopolitical unity of this direction, represented by the caliphate, first Arab and then Turk, has never withstood the impact of the tribal peculiarities and individual national interests that have characterized the history of the "Muslim nation" as early as the first decades of the Islamic caliphate. In the course of its history, the political center of the caliphate moved first from Medina to Damascus and then to Baghdad before ending in Istanbul. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 sanctified the birth of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal, but left the wider Muslim community deprived of its most visible manifestation of unity, "The Muslim Brothers consider the caliphate as the symbol of Islamic unity, the most visible expression of the bond linking the nations of Islam."
Despite the dissolution of the caliphate, the notion of a single political center was not altogether lost. At the height of pan-Arab nationalism (1930-60), it materialized in the consolidation of a nation-leader of the Arab and Muslim unity. Nasser's Egypt thereby became the focus of those aspirations to unity. But it did not last long. In 1967, the Arabs' military defeat in the war against Israel inflicted a heavy blow on such dreams. Ten years later, Egypt's detachment from the anti-Israeli camp with the signing of the Camp David Agreement crushed attempts to create a unified compact block of Arab and Muslim nations to realize the more far-reaching aspirations of Islamic unification. But despite this, the idea of a leader did not fade with Nasser's death and several attempts have been made since then to revitalize it: Qaddafi in Libya, the Ba'athist movement in Syria with its geopolitical project of a "Greater Syria" and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, militarily engaged first against revolutionary Iran and then against the US.
So many attempts to reaffirm Arab pre-eminence within the wider Muslim community can be explained by both Islamism and Arab nationalism. In his revolutionary pan-Arab philosophy, the Egyptian president, Jamal Abd el-Nasser (1918-70) brilliantly described his theory of circles to outline the areas within which Egyptian political action should move. Nasser's circles were Arab, African and Islamic, and he did not hesitate to define their order of importance. He said, "There is no doubt that the Arab circle is the most important of these circles. ... we are bound to it through our common religion and the centers of religious diffusion have changed as their capitals have moved from Mecca to Kufa and Cairo. Furthermore, our proximity has united us into a homogenous group integrated by spiritual, historical and material factors."
Before Nasser, the Islamist Hassan al-Banna - whose association later became the Nasser regime's most bitter opponent - spoke in similar terms, "In truth, this pure Islam came into being in Arabia and spread to the other nations through the Arab peoples. Its noble book [the Koran] is written in the pure form of the Arab language and the Muslim nations are united under its name and through its language. ... Later, when the Arabs were humiliated, Islam too was humiliated. This occurred when the effective political power swung from the hands of the Arabs to the command of the non-Arabs and the Dailamitis. The Arabs are the troops and the guardians of Islam. ... Arab unity is essential to the restoration of the glory of Islam, to the formation of its state and to the consolidation of its power. It is therefore the duty of every Muslim to act in order to revive and consolidate Arab unification."
The medieval conception of the universe placed the earth at the center of the planetary system. Likewise in the pan-Arab and Islamic ideological cartography, the Muslim lands revolved around a center presented by the Arab nations. More precisely, the medieval universe was all enveloping, like the layers of an onion, and the outer sky - where the immobile stars rested - tied together the concentric circles of the planets rotating harmoniously around the earth. Being an image of celestial harmony, the earth portrayed by medieval Islam presented similar subdivisions to the "climates" of ancient Greek geography or the keshvar of ancient Mesopotamian and Iranian traditions.
In these ancient conceptions of the universe the idea of a "climate" or keshvar that was better than all others, presupposed the existence of a "center of all centers". Similarly, in medieval Islamic cartography the best "climate" was in the middle, comprising the Arab countries, while the "center of all centers" - the pulsating heart of the entire system - was represented by the mosque in Mecca.
Islamic faith, thanks to its universal and unifying strength, represented ideologically what was, in cartography, the center of the known universe, and it first symbol, the Ka'ba - the black stone on the grounds of the mosque in Mecca - became the point of communication between heaven and earth, between God and man.
The Egyptian president Nasser thus synthesized popular Islamic sentiment, "The third circle that comprises the continents and the oceans is the circle of the religious community whose center is Mecca. ... when I think of the hundreds of millions of souls united by the bond of the same faith, my conviction in the possibility of a solidarity that unites all these Muslims grows ever stronger."
The two mosques in Mecca and Medina, where the prophet of Islam first preached and from where Islam spread, still play today the same role in the collective conscience of the Muslim peoples. Despite the differences of language and customs, the fact that all Muslims turn to the Ka'ba for their five daily prayers and make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime indicates that these holy places also play a precious role in consolidating the bonds of solidarity and fraternity among the faithful.
The mosque at al-Aqsa in Jerusalem represents Islam's third holy place. The sacred city of Jerusalem, celebrated as the point of convergence of the three great monotheistic religions, becomes, after the crusades of the Middle Ages, its occupation in 1967 and its annexation to the state of Israel in 1981, the center of Palestine and the future capital of its state. The Islamic movement Hamas goes even further and defines it as the heart of the waqf - an inalienable religious endowment - belonging to all Muslims, and it is therefore the duty of each individual Muslim to return the city to Islam. The grounds of the mosques in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the most holy of holy places, are deemed inaccessible and prohibited to all non-Muslims.
The moving force behind these symbols and holy places is not limited to the medieval boundaries of time and space. It re-emerges last century's pan-Arab and Islamic ideologies and reasserts itself again with considerable force today in the rather less sophisticated declarations of Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.
If the history and traditions of Islam have provided the symbols, it is also true that the political tradition of the Arab nations has never ceased to exploit them in order to mobilize public opinion and legitimize the existing political, monarchical or republican power. But the ruling elite does not possess the sole rights to manipulate such symbols and they are therefore challenged by opposing ideologies and movements on the same ground.
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri represent neither states nor kingdoms, nor armies nor religious spheres. Yet they continue to preach the same notes that have reverberated in the Muslim consciousness since times long past from the microphones and images of al-Jazira, the private television channel based in Qatar. Once again, the states within the region are forced to face further subversive attacks from within. Contrary to the past, and more dangerously than before, the new opposition forces do not recognize national borders and their actions aim towards far and diverse objectives.
Curiously, however, the leaders who were stationed in Afghanistan speak Arabic, not Pashtu. Their propaganda is first directed to the Arab countries from which they originate (Saudi Arabia and Egypt) and to Iraq and to the occupied Palestinian territories, and only then to Afghanistan. Their military backbone is Arab. The "Afghan Arabs", as the Arab soldiers within the troops of the Taliban were commonly referred to, were considered loyal, incorruptible and militarily superior to their fighting Afghan companions.
Their ideological and organizational brain, al-Zawahiri, is also Arab. The offspring of their leaders will continue to perpetuate the noble lineage of the Prophet Mohammed. After denying any relation with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar - the emir of the self-proclaimed Emirate of Afghanistan, disbanded by the forces of the Northern Alliance - Osama bin Laden asserted, "All my wives are Arab and my relationship with the Mullah Omar is purely spiritual".
So once again, in the endlessly tragic destiny of its tormented history, Afghanistan found itself fighting yet another war that was not its own.
((c) Heartland. This version has been edited by Asia Times Online.) To subscribe to Heartland, please e-mail cassanpress@sina.com
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