The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (10 page)

Tawhid
is Islam’s chief theological principle. Since Islam’s self-description holds that it is a correction of its two monotheistic precursors,
tawhid
challenges the bases of Jewish and Christian belief. Judaism contends that the covenant God made with his people only applied to the Jews, for better or worse.
Tawhid
undercuts the particularism of Judaism. It holds that the message of the one God cannot be limited to one tribe only, a chosen people, but is universal, applicable to all men at all times.

Christianity, which preaches that God sacrificed his only son to redeem the sins of all men for all time, is universalist like Islam. Both are also exclusivist—either you accept the gospel of Christ, or the message of Muhammad, or you are damned. The similarities between the two faiths end there. For Christians, Jesus was God’s son and the Messiah. For Muslims, Muhammad was a prophet, albeit the final messenger. Islam teaches that Jesus was also a prophet, a Muslim prophet, an important figure in the long line beginning
with Abraham and reaching its conclusion with Muhammad, but he was not the son of God. He was not resurrected, because he did not die on the cross, but is waiting to return on Judgment Day. And thus from an Islamic perspective, Christianity is nonsense flirting with heresy.

Tawhid
holds that the one God is by definition indivisible and eternal, and therefore the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is
shirk
, or associating other entities with the one true God. God is not triune but one, and he does not father children, never mind sons who die. In the words of another
sura, al-ikhlas
, Islam’s most concise statement of
tawhid:
“God is one. God is everlasting. He did not give birth and He was not born. And there is nothing to be likened unto Him.” To be sure, Islam emerges from the Abrahamic tradition, but it represents a sharp rebuke to its two predecessors, and its doctrinal differences with them were at the origins of the long-standing enmity between Islam and Judaism, and Islam and Christianity.

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, for his part, did hold that Christianity and Judaism were infidel creeds. But his baleful eye was focused mostly on other Muslims, and in particular on the two rival Muslim sects on the Arabian Peninsula, Shiism and Sufism. The former he faulted for various heretical beliefs, but most especially for its veneration of the Shia imams, starting with Ali and ending with the twelfth or occluded imam, whose return would, from the Shia perspective, redeem mankind and initiate an era of justice. In imparting a semidivine status to men, the Shia were held to be
mushrikeen
, “idolaters,” or those who commit
shirk.
So were the Sufis, adherents of a syncretic Islam that borrowed from different intellectual and spiritual traditions, including Greek and Hindu philosophy, Neoplatonism, Christian theology, and folklore. For instance, the Sufis took from Christianity the notion that an intercessor, or
wali
(pl.,
auliya)
, with special spiritual access can help a person’s prayers be heard by God, a talent that made the
wali
something like a Muslim saint.

Shrines throughout the Arabian Peninsula, including those of
the Prophet’s companions, were pilgrimage sites for Muslim travelers, and anathema to the
muwahhidun
, who in the early nineteenth century destroyed the shrines and waylaid travelers on the annual hajj and the
‘omra
, a lesser pilgrimage that unlike the hajj can be made at any time during the year. Religious pilgrimages were a major source of income for the Ottomans (as they still are for the Saudis today), and so the Ottomans sent Muhammad Ali Pasha, an officer of Albanian origin who had become ruler of Egypt after Napoleon’s departure, to put down the Wahhabi insurrection. He and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab are the two key precursors of the Muslim reform movement: the latter was the wellspring of religious renovation, while the former blazed the way for cultural and political renewal.

In Egypt, Muhammad Ali witnessed firsthand the scientific and military superiority of the West, and decided to learn as much as he could about this awesome infidel power that had defeated the Muslims so handily. He dispatched military cadets to France and Italy to study the latest in technological advances, while other delegations returned to Cairo with stacks of books from Europe’s leading figures on literature, drama, philosophy, and political theory. Although Muhammad Ali Pasha and his heirs rated these texts less highly than technical and military manuals, they were also translated into Arabic, making Cairo the undisputed cultural center of the Muslim world and attracting intellectuals, ideologues, and intriguers, like Jamal al-Din al-Asadabadi (1838–1897), the controversial and charismatic founder of the Salafi movement.

It is one of the ironies of Middle Eastern intellectual history that the architect of what would become a patently Sunni movement was a Shiite who used an assumed name to conceal that fact: Asadabadi, better known as Afghani, was not from Afghanistan but Persia. However, unlike Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Afghani was little concerned with sectarian differences. He believed that the real threat came from outside: the West, which he saw as a dangerous enemy that the Muslims must learn from or lose to. He taught that rather than just blindly
imitating Europe, the
umma
could find salvation within Islam itself, if it would only abandon its stultifying tradition and draw directly on the example of early Muslim society, the time of the righteous forebears, the
salaf.

There is some speculation that Afghani was an atheist who merely used Islam to market his reform ideas in an idiom familiar to his Muslim audience. For instance, in responding to Ernest Renan’s contention that Islam and science were incompatible, Afghani seems to have conceded the point to his contemporary, only adding that the same is true of Christianity and all religions. “So long as humanity subsists,” Afghani wrote, “the struggle will not cease between dogma and free enquiry, between religion and philosophy, a bitter struggle from which, I fear, free thought will not emerge victorious.”
⁷

Obviously, free thought did win out in the West, or else Afghani would not have been able to publish in French his riposte to Renan, which was not translated into any Oriental language. But by comparing Islam to Christianity, Afghani had harmonized his ideas with the prejudices of his European audience. His conflation of all religions as essentially dogmatic and intolerant was a message the Western secular elite was as predisposed to hear in the nineteenth century as it is today.

No Western intellectual thinks fascism and communism are the same, nor does anyone with a literary sensibility argue that a James Patterson thriller and a Don DeLillo novel are similar just because they are both prose fictions; yet this same intelligentsia is content to believe that all religions are fundamentally the same. To understand why the Muslim reform movement did not follow the same path as the Protestant Reformation, we must recognize the differences between faiths and take them seriously, or else fall prey to the moderate/fundamentalist fallacy. That is, if all religions are essentially the same, and the specific character and quality of religious ideas are irrelevant, then the only way to explain why some people under the influence of religion act one way while others act differently is to
break down each religion into a moderate camp and a fundamentalist camp—that is, there are fundamentalist Muslims just as there are fundamentalist Christians, Hindus, and Jews. However, it is only Western intellectuals who distinguish between moderates and fundamentalists; people of faith distinguish between believers and non-believers, and Muslims are no exception.

The nonbelievers, as Napoleon’s conquest had shown, were more powerful than the faithful. How was that possible when the
umma
, according to the Prophet of Islam, was supposed to be the best of all nations? The point of reform was not to make Islam more “moderate,” or more amenable to the West, but to revive the
umma.

During his time in Cairo, Afghani won many disciples. The most important of them was Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), a native Egyptian, a journalist, educator, and scholar. ‘Abduh, who became the mufti of Egypt, was perhaps the greatest of all Egypt’s Muslim reform intellectuals, and it was under his stewardship that Salafism reached its apogee. Openly acknowledging the backwardness of the lands of Islam and seeking to catch up to and surpass the West, ‘Abduh established the central themes that would inspire generations of Muslim intellectuals and activists, including Al Qaeda.

‘Abduh was raised in a traditional, rural community and came to believe that the practices and beliefs drawn from folklore, as well as Sufism, were part of what had retarded the
umma.
He promoted an activist Islam that engaged the world around it, including politics, and challenged the fatalism, superstition, and resignation that had corroded the
umma
, for he argued that without reform and renovation Muslim societies would never be able to meet the challenges of modernity that the West had made clear. In order to restore the
umma
to its rightful place in human affairs, Afghani and ‘Abduh looked to the ideal model, the first Islamic
umma
, and surmised that the lands of Islam were struggling because Muslims were not practicing the real Islam as set down by the Prophet and his companions. In ‘Abduh’s view, the entire edifice of Islam, its religious endowments,
mosques, universities, and scholarship, had long fallen into a state of decay.

There is no official “church” in Islam, but by the nineteenth century the accumulation of hundreds of years of doctrine and practice based on imitation
(taqlid)
had essentially become an institutional body. What ‘Abduh sought was to shear away all of that accreted dogma and practice, and return the faith to its original essence. In his view, the true Islam was well suited for the modern age since it was infinitely more rational than Christianity. The gospels, after all, were full of fantastic tales of supernatural feats performed by the son of God, whereas Islam had only one obvious miracle, the Quran, an extraordinary event, yet one consistent with the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, all of whom delivered messages from the one true God. There was no reason for Muslims to abandon their faith to join the modern world as the Europeans had because Islam was essentially rational. ‘Abduh admired the West for its material progress, but thought that success had brought with it a spiritual malaise that issued from the gap between science and Christianity. In Islam, he thought, this divide did not exist, since God’s word and his creation, revelation and reason, could not be in contradiction.

‘Abduh’s move in asserting there was no conflict between reason and faith was provident. If it were otherwise, if reason stood on its own and acted independently, then it could accept no authority above itself, neither the sultan nor God. A regime of Arab reason, like the Enlightenment, would therefore have to be a political project that would reject Islam and overthrow the established order. By insisting that Islam and modernity were compatible, ‘Abduh promised the best of both worlds: Muslims could remain true to their faith and enjoy the fruits of science and rationality.

It was a clever attempt at a solution. But ‘Abduh’s strategy for reform did not, in the end, revive the
umma
or liberate Muslims from their backward mental habits; rather, it has sentenced them to cultural and intellectual servitude. ‘Abduh’s error, common not only in
Muslim circles but in Western ones as well, even down to the present day, was in failing to see that it was the cultural values of the West—the very values he rejected—that had led to its success. What ‘Abduh wanted to separate, science from the values of the culture that produced science, cannot be split; and what he sought to unify, revealed religion and empirical science, cannot logically cohere.

Dalia, the Quran teacher, was not convinced of this. She was embarrassed by the notion that some Muslims believed in afreet, but she also thought that the Quran contains nuclear physics, astronomy, and biology, including details of the origins of human life, from insemination through conception and childbirth. She had our class read
al-alaq
, the ninety-sixth
sura
in the Quran, though thought to be the first that came to the Prophet, where the angel Gabriel’s first injunction to the terrified Muhammad is
iqra
, “recite,” the root word for Quran, “the recitation”: “Recite in the name of your Lord, who created—created man from a clot of blood.”

“Blood clot” is the standard translation for
alaq
, but since the verb
alaqa
means “to hang,” some modern writers allege that
alaq
refers to the human egg suspended from the ovary waiting to be fertilized by the sperm. I told Dalia that I didn’t think any scientist would consider the highly figurative and rhyming language of
al-alaq
to be real science.

“There are a lot of people,” she said, “who believe it’s one of the miracles of the Quran.” I asked if she thought so, too. “I think it’s at least remarkable.”

This was simply apologetics. The argument that there is science in the Quran is a long-standing literary genre representing one defensive posture toward the West that evolved out of ‘Abduh’s contention that revealed religion was compatible with science. Since God’s word and his creation must complement each other, ‘Abduh reasoned that there must be signs in the holy book
(aya
also means “sign”) illuminating the natural order. And if the mysteries of God’s creation are included in his revelation, then it was not much of a
stretch for those after ‘Abduh to claim that Islam had described scientific phenomena long before Western scientists presumed to illuminate the natural order. This claim allows Muslim apologetics to assert the superiority of Islam to Western modernity even where the West is most proud of its own achievements.