SOME NOTES ON
THE HISTORY OF MODERN ISLAM

During the Crimean War in the mid 19th century the British supported the Ottoman Turks against the Russian threat. At this time the British saw the Ottoman Empire as a friend against Russian Czardom. It was felt that the Turks were benign, civil - indeed noble - and that they maintained peace and good governance in the East. Consequently a considerable foundation of cross-cultural relations and good will was established with Turkish civilization. Ottoman high culture inspired a European vision of "Romantic Islam", the Islam of the so-called "Orientalists" and of such groups as the Anglo-Ottoman Friendship Society. Ottoman styles influenced European decoration and design. Fashionable ladies read translations of the Rubuyat of Omar Khyam. And it was during this period that some Europeans, including aristocrats and people of prominence (such as Pickthall), began to convert to the moderate Hanafi Islam of the Turks.

At the same time, the Ottomans were looking to closer relations with European powers. This was mainly because the once-great Ottoman Empire had, in fact, grown complacent and corrupt, had been out-stripped technologically and militarily and so was weakened and increasingly vulnerable to external aggression. Its hold over its territories and over the ethnic groups under its administration was slipping. The Ottoman empire had gone into terminal decline.

The policy of the British Empire was then reversed under the puritanical Prime Minister Gladstone. He spared no opportunity to demonize the Turkish Muslims and to create antagonism between the British and Ottoman Empires. During the era of Gladtone's prime ministerships British policy hardened against the Ottomans and to "turn Turk" became synonymous with treason and treachery. At the same time, (the real agenda behind Gladstone's anti-Turk indignation) the British Empire and its commercial interests sought to extend its influence in the East at the expense of the Ottomans.

Significantly, the main means of doing this was for the British to lend support to Arab nationalist sentiment. The British stirred the Arabs against the Turks. This necessarily entailed supporting the Arab's style of Islam. The Arabs had long been under Turkish domination. Turkish Islam was moderate with strong mystical, Sufi elements. The Mevlevi Sufi Order, the famed Whirling Dervishes, founded by the poet Jalal al-din Rumi, was interwoven with the Ottoman administration and Bektashi Sufism - which entailed a synthesis of Sunni and Shia Islam - flourished. The Hanafi School of Law, which of all the four classical Schools (or Madhabs) gave the greatest latitude to reason and analogy, framed Ottoman legal codes and the administration of the Ottoman Empire. In the 18th century, however, a reactionary reform movement - later called Wahabism - had begun among the Arabs. It was a reaction to Turkish and European colonial domination of trhe Arab world. It purported to return Islam to its pristine roots in response to the supposed pollution of the faith by foreign elements.

Based in strict Hanbalite law - the most literal of the four madhabs and the school that gave the least latiutide to reason and analogy - and viciously anti-Sufi and anti-Shia, Wahabism sought to rid Islam of all its medieval "innovations". This meant stripping the religion of all its Persian, Indian and Turkish appropriations and going back to a strictly Arab Islam. The Wahabis believed that these elements had tainted pure Islam and led to the decline of the Arab heartland of Islam. They called themselves Salafis because they sought to by-pass the whole edifice of medieval Islam and return to the Islam of the first three generations of Muslims (the Salaf), which is to say to an Islam from before the time it spread among the Persians, Indians and Turks. This Arab religious reform movement was inextricably bound up in the Arab struggle against Turkish imperialism. The Wahabis, and the British, supported the warlord chieftain Ibn Saud and legitimized the Saudi dynasty and its struggle against the Ottomans. In the periods when Wahabis took control of the Holy Places in Arabia from the Turks (with British support) they proceeded to destroy 1500 years of Muslim heritage, including the desecration of the tombs of the wives and companions of the Holy Prophet, in the iconoclastic imposition of neo-Arabist purism. The cult of saints was seen as a Persian innovation. Sufism in general was seen as an Indian innovation. Prayer beads were a Christian pollutant via the Christian-loving Turks. All such innovations and heresies had to go and pure, Arab Islam restored.

By the time of the Great War - the war to end all wars (WW1) - the Turks - still vulnerable to invasion from Russia and still seeking allies in Europe - had no choice but to side with Germany against Britain. Now the roles of the Crimean conflict were reversed. The British Empire sided with the Russians against the Turks and Germans. The Turks faced a dire juncture in their history. As defeat loomed there was the possibility that the 500 year old Muslim control of Asia Minor and of ancient Byzantium could come to an end. And since the Ottomans had control of the Caliphate - the symbolic leadership of all Muslims - it seemed that Islam would be dealt a telling blow. There were some Europeans in this period who confidently predicted the demise of the Islamic faith. Attendance at the annual pilgrimage, the Hajj, had declined to a mere trickle. British terrorists thwarted every effort to construct rail-links from Turkey to the Hijaz. In a famous battle at Gallipoli the British and their allies attempted an invasion of Turkey. The Turks, unassisted and using inferior weaponry, managed to defend themselves under the leadership of Kamal Attaturk, but they did so at an enormous expense.

In the recriminations after the war Attaturk and his followers took control of the Turkish state and began a vigorous program of modernisation, Westernization and secularisation. The Ottoman Empire - and the Caliphate - was dismantled. The Sufi brotherhoods - who had resisted the modernization of weapons because they were unchivalrous - were outlawed and the traditional Islam of the Turks was suppressed and brought under tight state supervision. The continuity of Turkish Islam, unbroken since the Middle Ages, was ruptured. This was arguably essential for the survival of Turkey itself but at the same time it was a blow for the moderate schools of Islam and - significantly - it empowered the "fundamentalist" advocates of purist Arab Islam, which is how Islam has taken shape throughout the following decades of the 20th century. It was the collapse of Turkish Islam that brought Wahabism - neo-Arabist purism - to the fore. Once free of Turkish imperial control, the Arab world began to erupt into nationalist fervour and the Wahabi purists began to assert themselves.

In fact, Wahabism had little influence over the broader body of Muslims, the Muslim Ummah, until the 1930s. When it began to exert a wide influence it was in the context of a resurgent Arabism filling the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Wahabi-backed House of Saud took full control of the Hijaz, Mecca and Medina, in 1924 and established the modern state of Saudi Arabia, with Wahabism (or Salafism) as its official religion. Thereafter, until the present day, the Saudi regime has promoted Wahabism (Arab purism) - an 18th C. Hanbalite heresy - as normative Islam throughout the Muslim world. The Saudi regime was consolidated on massive oil wealth. From the 1930s until the present day the Saudis have spent vast sums of money building Wahabi mosques, printing Wahabi literature and funding Wahabi institutions world-wide. By the end of the 20th century, with Wahabi control of the Holy Places intact, virtually every aspect and corner of modern Islam has been penetrated by Wahabi influence through the agency of the Saudi regime.

This, again, is in contrast to the 19th century situation where it was the Ottoman caliphate that extended a global influence among Muslims. But whereas Ottoman Islam was relatively moderate and accomodating (befitting a quite broad multi-ethnic empire - the excesses and crimes of the Ottomans were not an outcome of their religion but of their own ethnic chauvanism) Saudi Wahabism is puritanical, externalist, narrow and regressive, based as it is upon the idea of purging the faith of foreign (non-Arab) contaminants. Wahabi Islam is a fossilized superstition that replaces the spirit of a living religious tradition with the dead hand of literalism motivated, at core, by Arab chauvanism, the deep belief that only Arabs are "true" Muslims and that only Arabs can dictate the norms of religion to the Muslim world. Other related forms of fundamentalism such as that inspired by the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb are extensions of the same ideology. Salafism is built upon various hadith (traditions) that nominate the early generations of Muslims - the early Meccan establishment - as a paradigmatic extension of the era of prophecy. In Salafist thinking all Muslims need do is emulate the Salaf, just as Christian fundamentalists might emulate the early apostolic period. In Salafist thinking the Salaf were a charmed people under Divine Guidance; Islam went astray when it turned away from the model of the Salaf. It is important to note that this ideology is the Sunni answer to Shiism in which the family of the Prophet (rather than the Meccan establishment) is viewed as under Divine Guidance. But whereas Shiism retreated from the Arab world and was grafted into Persia, Salafi Sunnism was inseperable from Arab revivalism.

The British, needless to say, soon betrayed the Arabs and supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine after World War 2. Remincent of the strategic role played by the Crusader states in the Middle Ages, this venture restored the opportunities of enmity for the British to exploit. Having removed the Ottomans from the equation the British needed leverage against the newly empowered Arabs. It is entirely true to form that the British continue to support both the Israelis and the Saudis and to juggle their interests between them. British petroleum interests have a huge stake in the Middle East. The Gladstonian policy of divide-and-exploit prevails in British policy to this day. In the post-WW2 environment, with the decline of the British Empire and the rise of American global dominance, the Americans have adopted and continued the same policy. It is no accident that the Israeli and Saudi lobbies - ostensibly two opposed camps - are the largest and most influential lobby groups in Washington. Today an Anglo-American alliance - along with Zionism - and guided by British and Texan oil interests, continues the long British tradition of exploitative interference in and manipulation of the politics of the Middle East.

But again, significantly, this has involved and continues to involve the promotion of fundamentalist, Arab-purist forms of Islam. Towards the end of the Cold War we witnessed the spectacle of the Americans supporting Wahabi warriors against the Russians in Afghanistan. The Americans had at first sponsored nationalist Iran as its main proxy in the Middle East, but the Shah - in truly fateful miscalculations - sought to de-Islamify Iran and restore an image of ancient (pre-Islamic) Persia. The Shi'ite Iranian revolution - in which Shiism was accomodated to a new concept, namely the modern Islamic State - was the largest mass revoluition of the 20th C and upset balance of power in the entire region. Both the Cold War super-powers were caught by surprise. The Russians had to move to head off any extension of the Shi'ite revolution into their Central Asian proxies and so invaded Afghanistan. The Americans, like the British before them, bolsted the Arab nationalists in Iraq to counter Iran, but also had to counter the Russians. This involved the introduction of Arabist Wahabism into the ancient Central Asian heartland of Islam. The Americans gave theoretical and practical support to the Saudis to relocate large numbers of young Arabs to Afghanistan and conduct "Holy War" against the Soviet occupation. In due course, Saudi groups trained upwards of 70,000 soldiers. They defeated the Soviets, often unaware that they had substantial clandestine American backing - ironically, they interpreted their disproportionate successes as the blessings of Allah.

Once the Soviets had been defeated, the Arab Aghanis set about creating an extremist Wahabi state in Afghanistan (after the pattern of the revered salaf) under the so-called "Taliban", i.e. students of the Wahabi schools that had been created with Saudi (and Anglo-American) support. Traditional Islam in Afghanistan had been as austere as the country itself, but diverse, multi-layered and mystical, with Persian, Indian, Turkoman and other influences, and wasc by any measure more moderate than Wahabism. The Taliban fanatics set about "cleansing" Afghani Islam. It is indicative of what happened in modern Afghanistan that the Taliban commenced a program of blowing up the nation's many Buddhist statues, denouncing them as idols. These same statues had survived without threat for over a thousand years under traditional Afghani Islam.

So, to recap: it was the British who directly and indirectly aided in the establishment of the Wahabi state in Saudi Arabia and it was the Anglo-Americans who directly and indirectly aided in the establishment of the Wahabi state in Afghanistan. In both cases it has been the self-interested, short-sighted policies of the West that has stimulated, spread and consolidated fundamentalist Islam at the expense of other expressions of Islamic religion. Support for the oil-rich Saudis has also facilitated the continued infiltration of Wahabi doctrine into the new Western Muslim communities. Islam in the West has been characterized by prolonged "turf wars" to see who controls and speaks for the Western Muslim communities. In most cases, Muslims in the West have been dislocated from the traditional madhabs and have little or no clerical supervision in their new homes. In these circumstances, Salafism - aided by Saudi money - finds fertile soil.

These short-sighted policies came home to roost on September 11 2001, when teams of Wahabis - Saudis, not Afghans - hijacked passenger jets in the USA and used them as missiles aimed at various iconic American targets. In many ways this was the climax of a pattern of folly that extends back into the 19th century. Western policies, first pursued by the British and then continued by the Americans, have been creating a Muslim monster, a monster that was finally exposed on September 11. The West recklessly undermined and destroyed the Ottoman Empire which left a hornet's nest of Arab nationalism, and puritanist Islam, in its wake, a situation that remains to this day. Then the West recklessly and short-sightedly transplanted Arab purist Islam into heartland of Central Asia, flushed with money and weapons. The West, moreover, continues to support the Saudi regime in Arabia while the Saudis propagate regressive fundamentalism among Muslims everywhere. This is the broader context of the 911 attacks and of the subsequent "war on terror".

The Arabs-in-Aghanistan group known as "al-Qaeda" was identified as the organisation responsible for the 911 attacks. Having vanquished the mighty Soviet empire, the deluded young jihadists in Afghanistan set their sights upon the mighty USA. This turn of events is also inseperable from Arab purism and Arab nationalism. The central complaint of the likes of Usama bin Laden and "al Qaeda" is that the American allies of the Saudi regime have been permitted to have bases and troops in Arabia. Their grievance with the Americans, first and foremost, is territorial and nationalistic, yet inextricably religious also in so far as Arabia is the Muslim Holy Land. Bin Laden and "al Qaeda" had no initial interest in wider Muslim causes (not even Palestine). Their cause was to cleanse the Arabian peninsula of foreigners just as Wahabism cleanses Islam of foreign influences.

It is important to realise, though, that the militant point of view of Bin Laden reflects a splintering within Wahabism itself. The relation between Wahabism and the House of Saud has become strained. When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait Saudi Arabia was under direct threat and turned to the Americans for military help. The Americans took the opportunity to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia. This angered a section of the Wahabi clergy. The House of Saud's close relationship with the Americans is seen by one faction of Wahabis (largely the young and zealous) as having gone too far, even to the extent that the House of Saud is considered so corrupted that it must be opposed by violent means. This is a case of the Saudis reaping what they have sown. They have promoted and nurtured a puritanism that, at length, has turned against them and their opulent hypocrisy and compromised wealth.

It is our argument that, at least in part, Islam has not matured into modernity because of the messy collapse of the Ottoman domains, the retardation of traditional religious forms and the corresponding rise of Arab purism as the dominant paradigm in the Muslim world. The pernicious influence of Wahabism has been pervasive throughout modern Islam and other more moderate Islamic perspectives - by which I mean the maturing perspectives of a living post-Caliphate tradition - have not been permitted to prosper. The policies of the West are as much to blame for this as any other factors. It is also our argument that the "war" on Islamic terrorism is meaningless so long as the noxious doctrines of Wahabism prevail in and radiate out from the centre of the Muslim world, backed by Saudi oil money. Moreover, the greatest danger posed by terrorism is not through an organised network of al-Qaeda "operatives" as Western propaganda and fear-mongering suggests but through independent or semi-independent cells of jihadis inspired by the pervasive influence of Saudi Wahabism in Muslim communities in the West. It is Wahabism that provides the soil for Muslim jihadism world-wide.

This brings us to the lamentable state of Islam today. Most contemporary Muslims are infected with Wahabism to some degree. Through the control of the Hajj - the beating heart of Islam - and through their vigorous publication and propaganda efforts, wahabism is everywhere. The decline of the Madhabs has left a vacuum being filled by fundamentalism, just as the decline of traditional, episcopal forms of Christianity have left a vacuum being filled by forms of evangelical fundamentalism. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire Muslims have, perforce, entered a post-Caliphate, post-Madhab era in which the simplistic formula of the Salafists seems a solution. Other Muslims have become so alienated from Islam that they no longer practise the religion or attend mosque - they are disgusted and disengaged. Wahabism has turned Islam into an empty externalism. Piety has been reduced to the mindless beating of foreheads on the floor. The national life of the Arabs has been poisoned as has the whole religious life of the broader Muslim Ummah. Much of the beautiful heritage of Islam has been destroyed or lost through neglect. The iconoclastic Saudis have turned the site of the apartments of the Prophet's wives into a car park. Turkish Islam has been reduced to an emasculated servant of the secular Turkish state. Shi'ite fundamentalism - transformed by nationalist statism - has taken hold of Iran. The mystical, Sufi heritage of Islam has been decimated and marginalised and in some cases only survives in tawdry New Age circles in the West, sentimentalized beyond recognition. This is the context in which sincere, intelligent Muslims who care for and love Islam must work and struggle today. This is the background to the world-shaping events of our time. It is a story of folly compounded by folly.

Despite the tragic drift of events described above, there are other tendencies in modern Islam that offer cause for hope. Foremost among these is the true globalisation of Islam and the arrival of significant communities of Muslims in the West - Britain, Europe, Australia, North America - breaking the old distinctions of Abode of Peace/ Abode of War upon which the "clash of civilizations" is predicated. There are over twenty million Muslims in northern Europe now. This is a reflux to European colonialism. The post-Caliphate age of Islam is the post-colonial age. It is one of the inevitable ironies of history that colonial powers are eventually colonized and empires are eventually consumed by the very people they oppressed.

God willing, the impetus for a new Islam will come from Muslims in the West, including the growing numbers of Western converts.

 

The Rose at Dusk - A Manifesto of Muslim Reform

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