Understanding Islamic Society

[Cyrano]

They had some 27 versions in Egypt before SA picked one and officilised it and printed millions of copies the faithful can hold dear and cherish but hardly any can read, much less decipher or qayamat! understand.

[ramana]

Understanding Islamic Society? I have given up trying to. It is always been my way or high way. The insult ALL religions but no one may say anything about theirs (even quote a hadith if they do not like it).

You are welcome.
You haven't made the effort but post here. Not everyone needs to be in all threads.

Since 711 AD Islam as been encroaching Bharat yet don't want to know what it is.

First time in modern times Islam's weakness is exposed.
The modern Muslim can't countenance Muhamad's repugnant personal life and morals as documented in their Hadiths.
The uniform outrage shows the weakness.
Yes U SD used them as toolkit to pressure India on Ukraine and failed. The consequence is India reducing energy dependency on West Sia.
This. Is only the beginning.

[Cyrano]

JBP makes an important and subtle point I've seen no one else make wrt Abrahamic religions

[ramana]

Patrica Crone:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140814160 ... /crone.asp

Patricia Crone. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam.
Princeton University Press. 1987. Beginning with pg. 231.
THE RISE OF ISLAM

Having unlearnt most of what we knew about Meccan trade, do we find ourselves deprived of our capacity to explain the rise of Islam? If we take it that trade is the crucial factor behind the appearance of a prophet in Arabia, the spread of his message there, and the Arab conquest of the Middle East, then the answer is evidently yes. But, in fact, Meccan trade cannot be said ever to have provided a convincing explanation for any of these events.
The view that Meccan trade is the ultimate cause of the rise of Islam is Watt's. The reader may begin to feel that there has been enough polemic against Watt in this book, and this is a view that its author shares. But to disagree with the conventional account is of necessity to disagree with the fons and origo of this account: throughout the present work, the reader can treat the name of Watt as a shorthand for "early Islamic historians in general" and take polemical attention as a backhanded compliment to him. It is thanks to the enormous influence exercised by his work that a general appraisal of the theories that dominate the field takes us back to Watt for a final round.

According to Watt, the Qurashi transition to a mercantile economy undermined the traditional order in Mecca, generating a social and moral malaise to which Muhammad's preaching was the response.I This hypothesis is clearly weakened by the discovery that the Meccan traded in humble products rather than luxury goods, but it is not necessarily invalidated thereby. Even so, however, there are other reasons why it should be discarded.

In the first place, it is unlikely that so brief a period of commercial the nineteenth century, for example, the town of Ha'il enjoyed a meteoric rise to commercial importance, comparable to that described for Mecca, without there being any indication of a correspondingly swift breakdown of traditional norms. Why should there have been? It takes considerably more than a century of commercial success to undermine the tribal order of a population that has been neither uprooted nor forced to adopt a different organization in connection with its economic activities. Caravan trade is not capitalist in any real sense of that word, and Watt's vision of the Meccans as financiers dedicated to a ruthless pursuit of profit occasionally suggests that he envisages them as having made a transition to the twentieth century.

In the second place, the evidence for a general malaise in Mecca is inadequate. According to Watt, the Qur'an testifies to an increasing awareness of the difference between rich and poor and a diminishing concern on the part of the rich for the poor and weak even among their own kin, orphans in particular being ill-treated; further, the Qur'anic stress on acts of generosity implies that the old ideal of generosity had broken down to the point that the conduct of the rich would have been looked upon as shameful in the desert, while at the same time the Qur'anic emphasis on man's dependence on God suggests that the Meccans had come to worship a new ideal, "the supereminence of wealth." But the Qur'an does not testify to an increasing awareness of social differentiation or distress: in the absence of pre-Qur'anic evidence on the subject, the book cannot be adduced as evidence of change. And charges of excessive attachment to wealth and neglect of others, especially the poor and the weak, are standard items in the repertoire of monotheist preachers, as is the theme of man's dependence on God: how different would Muhammad's preaching have been, one wonders, if he had begun his career in Medina, or for that matter elsewhere? It is not very likely that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between the objective factors that led to the appearance of a prophet in Arabia and Muhammad's subjective perception of his mission: prophets are heirs to a prophetical tradition, not to a sociological habit of viewing their society from outside.

Leaving aside the Qur'an, then, to what extent does the tradition corroborate Watt's diagnosis? Viewed as pagan enemies of Islam, the Meccans are accused of neglect of kinship ties and other protective relationships, as well as a tendency for the strong to "eat" the weak. But viewed as proto-Muslims, they are praised for their harmonious relations. The conduct of trade in particular is supposed to have been characterized by cooperation between rich and poor; indeed, by the time of the rise of IsIam there no longer were any poor. Both claims, of course, merely illustrate the point that what the tradition offers is religious interpretation rather than historical fact. If we go by the overall picture suggested by this tradition, there is, however, no doubt that Watt's diagnosis is wrong. In social terms, the protection that Muhammad is said to have enjoyed from his own kin, first as an orphan and next as a prophet, would indicate the tribal system to have been intact, as Watt himself concedes, adding that the confederate status of foreigners in Mecca would indicate the same. It was, as Abu Sufyan said, Muhammad who disrupted traditional kinship ties with his preaching. From the point of view of morality, traditional tribal virtues such as generosity were both esteemed and practised: wealthy Meccans such as 'Abdallah b. Jud'an would have been astonished to learn that their conduct would have been looked upon as dishonourable in the desert.

In religious terms, the Meccans are depicted as zealots on behalf of their pagan shrine as well as devotees of a string of other deities by whom they swore, after whom they named their children, and whom they took with them in battle against the Muslims. Watt interprets the violations of the haram during the ars of Fijar as "probably a sign of declining belief." But obviously holy places and months were violated from time to time: Muhammad himelf is supposed to have violated a holy month without having lost belief in it and if the Meccans had come to regard such violations as unobjectionable, they would hardly have referred to the wars in question as huru-b al-ija-r, "the sinful wars. " The fact that the Meccans carried their pagan deities with them into battle does not mean that "the remnants of pagan belief in Arabia were now at the the level of magic'' we are hardly to take it that the remnants of Islam were similarly at the level of magic by the time of the battle of Siffin, in which the soldiers are said to have carried Qur'ans with them; or that Christians who wear crosses are mere fetishists. Watt concedes that "in view of the opposition to Muhammad at Mecca it is conceivable that some small groups there -- perhaps those specially concerned with certain religious ceremonies -- had a slightly higher degree of belief." But a slightly higher degree of belief among small groups with possibly special functions scarcely provides an adequate explanation for the magnitude of this opposition.

The fact is that the tradition knows of no malaise in Mecca, be it religious, social, political, or moral. On the contrary, the Meccans are described as eminently successful; and Watt's impression that their success led to cynicism arises from his otherwise commendable attempt to see Islamic history through Muslim eyes. The reason why the Meccans come across as morally bankrupt in the sources is not that their traditional way of life had broken down, but that it functioned too well: the Meccans preferred their traditional way of life to Islam. It is for this that they are penalized in the sources; and the more committed a man was to this way of life, the more cynical, amoral, or hypocritical he will sound to us: Abu Sufyan cannot swear by a pagan deity without the reader feeling an instinctive aversion to him, because the reader knows with his sources that somebody who swears by a false deity is somebody who believes in nothing at all.

In the third place, the Watt thesis fails to account for the fact that it was in Medina rather than in Mecca that Muhammad's message was accepted. In Mecca, Muhammad was only a would-be prophet, and if he had stayed in Mecca, that is what he would have remained. This makes sense, given the general absence of evidence for a crisis in Mecca: if Muhammad himself had conceived his monotheism as a blueprint for social and moral reform in Mecca, he must soon have changed it into something else. It was outside Mecca, first in Medina and then elsewhere in Arabia, that there was a market for his monotheism: the Meccans had to be conquered before they converted. It follows that the problems to which Muhammad's message offered a solution must have been problems shared by the Medinese and other Arabs to the exclusion of the Meccans. In short, they were problems that had nothing to do with Meccan trade.

Is this surprising? Ultimately, the Watt thesis boils down to the proposition that a city in a remote corner of Arabia had some social problems to which a preacher responded by founding a world religion. It sounds like an overreaction. Why should a blueprint for social reform in Mecca have caused the entire peninsula to explode? Clearly, we must concentrate on such factors as were common to Arabia, not on those that were peculiar to Mecca; the more unusual we consider Mecca to have been, the more irrelevant we make it to the explanation of the rise of Islam.

Watt is not, of course, unaware of the need to explain the success of Muhammad's message outside Mecca. But having linked its genesis with Meccan trade, he is forced to identify a second set of problems to account for its success in Medina; and having opted for problems arising from a transition to a settled life in Medina, he needs a third set of problems to account for its spread in Arabia at large, this time opting for a general spiritual crisis: "there was a growing awareness of the existence of the individual in separateness from the tribe, with the consequent problem of the cessation of his individual existence at death. What was the ultimate destiny of man? Was death the end?''

The changes and transitions in question would, however, seem to be largely of Watt's own making. As regards the feuds with which the Medinese had to cope, they did not arise from a transition to settled life, but simply from settled life in general. It is a mistake to regard tribal organization as peculiar to nomads and sedentarization as necessarily leading to alternative forms of organizations, norms, and beliefs. The settled people of pre-oil Arabia were tribally organized, like the Bedouin, and they subscribed to much the same norms and beliefs; both settled and nomadic life was typically life under conditions of statelessness. Watt is right that sedentarization created a greater need for authority, but the material resources required for the creation and maintenance of stable state structures simply were not available. Accordingly, Arabian settlements were usually plagued by feuds; those characteristic of Medina in the sixth century would appear to have been no different from those characteristic of most Arabian settlements, including Medina, in the nineteenth. The feuds to which Muhammad offered a solution were a constant of Arabian history, not a result of change. It was only the solution that was new. The novelty of the solution lay in the idea of divinely validated state structures; and it was Muhammad's state, not his supposed blueprint for social reform, which had such powerful effect on the rest of Arabia.

As for the spiritual crisis, there does not appear to have been any such thing in sixth-century Arabia, in the sense normally understood. There is no feeling in Muhammad's biography of burning questions and long- debated issues finally resolved. Instead, there is a strong sense of ethnogenesis. The message of this biography is that the Arabs had been in the peninsula for a long time, in fact since Abraham, and that they had finally been united in a state. Muhammad was neither a social reformer nor a resolver of spiritual doubts: he was the creator of a people.

The impulse behind Watt's attempt to identify social changes and spiritual crises in Arabia comes from his conception of religion as a set of ultimate truths concerning the nature and meaning of life: what is the destiny of man? Is death the end? When religion is thus conceived, it usually takes a fundamental change in people's way of life and outlook to make them abandon their beliefs, and the process tends to be accompanied by pangs of conscience and spiritual pain. If we assume that the pre-Islamic Arabs shared this conception of religion, it follows from the rapid spread of Islam in the peninsula that there must have been a fundamental change -- which to most of us conjures up an image of socio- economic change -- with accompanying spiritual crisis. All we need to do then is to identify the nature of this crisis. The immense appeal of Watt's work on the rise of Islam rests on the fact that he thought along these very intelligible lines and came up with a socioeconomic change of the requisite kind: the Meccans were making a transition to a capitalist economy and losing their faith in the process. How very familiar; the Meccans were just like us. But an explanation that credits our own experience to a simple society is unlikely to be right. What sort of socio- economic change and spiritual crisis preceded the Israelite adoption of Yahweh? How much thought about the ultimate destiny of man went into the Icelandic adoption of Christianity by vote of parliament? None, apparently. Similarly in the case of Islam. Islam originated in a tribal society, and any attempt to explain its appearance must take this fact as its starting point.

What, then, was the nature of religion in tribal Arabia? The basic point to note here is that tribal gods were ultimate sources of phenomena observable in this world, not ultimate truths regarding the nature and meaning of life. More precisely, they were ultimate sources of all those phenomena that are of great importance in human society, but beyond direct human control: rain, fertility, disease, the knowledge of soothsayers. the nature of social roups, and so forth. They were worshipped for the practical services they could render in respect of these phenomena. As Wellhausen noted, they differed from more spirits only in that they had names and cults devoted to them; without a name a deity could not be invoked and manipulated, and he very object of the cult was to make the deity exercise its power on behalf of its devotees. "Ilaha, regard the tribe of Rubat (with benevolence)," as a third-century inscription says. This being so, tribal gods neither required nor received emotional commitment, love, or loyalty from their devotees. Thus a famous story informs us that "in the days of paganism Banu Han-lfa had a deity made of dates mixed with clarified butter. They worshipped it for a long time. Then they were hit by a famine, so they ate it.'' In much the same pragmatic spirit a modern Bedouin vowed half of whatever he might shoot to God. Having shot some game, he ate half, left the other half for God and departed; but feeling hungry still, he crept back and successfully stole God's part, and ate it, boasting that "God was unable to keep his share, I have eaten his half as well as mine.'' Now if hunger could make a tribesman eat or cheat his god without remorse, then it is obvious that practical needs could likewise make him renounce or exchange this god for another without compunction. "We came to Sa'd so that he might get us together, but Sa'd dispersed us; so we have nothing to do with Sa'd," as a pre-Islamic tribesman is supposed to have said in disgust when his idol scared his camels away. In much the same fashion a whole tribe abandoned its native gods for Christianity when its chief was cured of childlessness by a Christian monk. And the numerous other Arabs who found the medical facilities of the Christian God sufficiently impressive to adopt Him as their own are unlikely to have found the act of conversion any more difficult. A god was, after all, no more than a powerful being, and the point of serving him was that he could be expected to respond by using his power in favour of his servants. A modern Tiyaha tribesman who was being swept away by a flood screamed in great rage at God, "I am a Tihi! I am a Tihi! God, if you don't believe it, look at the brand on my camels." Obviously, if a deity was so inefficient as to unleash floods against his own followers, or so weak as to be unable to protect them from famine, or to keep his own share of some game, or to work miraculous cures, then there was reason to eat, cheat, abuse, denounce, or abandon him. "What were two little words?" as Doughty was asked on one of the numerous occasions on which attempts were made to convert him, "pronounce them with us and it shall do thee no hurt." The idea that a believer might be personally committed to a deity, having vested the ultimate meaning of his life in it, did not occur to any of these men. Those who tried to convert Doughty were evidently thoroughly committed to Islam, but not to Islam as a saving truth of deep significance to them as individuals. Convert, settle, and we will give you palm trees, as they told Doughty; in other words, be one of ours. Allah was a source communal identity to them, not an answer to questions about the hereafter. And the numerous people who tried to convert him or to penalize him for his Christianity on other occasions were likewise people who neither knew nor cared much about Islam as a saving truth, but who were outraged by his open denial of the God who validated their society. Now, just as tribal gods did not articulate great spiritual truths, so also they were not deeply entrenched in everyday life. Pre-Islamic (or for that matter pre-modern) Arabia was strikingly poor in mythology, ceremonial, ritual, and festivals. Religious life was reduced to periodic visits to holy places, stones, and trees, to sacrifice and consultation of diviners; most Bedouin managed with even less than that; and these practices were not closely associated with belief in specific gods. The great annual pilgrimage was apparently not conducted in the name of any one deity, and the remaining practices could effortlessly be switched from one deity to another; all survived into modern times, among Muslim and Christian tribesmen alike. Renouncing one god for another thus did not require any change in either outlook or behaviour, unless the new deity carried with him a behavioural programme anti- thetical to tribal norms. In principle, the Christian deity did carry with him such a programme, though in practice the holy men active in Arabia were in no position to ensure that ccnversion amounted to more than two little words. But the Muslim deity did not. On the contrary, he endorsed and ennobled such fundamental tribal characteristics as militance and ethnic pride. Despite the Qur'anic suspicion of Bedouin, it was only with the development of classical Islam in the Fertile Crescent that the celebrated antithesis between muruwwa and dm, manliness and religiosity, emerged.

It is thus clear that the mass conversion of Arabia to Islam does not testify to any spiritual crisis, religious decadence, or decline of pagan belief. Indeed, in behavioural terms, the better part of Arabia was still pagan in the nineteenth century. What the mass conversions show is that Muhammad's God had something very attractive to offer here and now. When Sa'd, the pre-Islamic deity, scared away the camels of his devotees, the latter concluded that "Sa'd is just a rock": the power that he was supposed to have exercised had proved unreal. But when Muhammad established himself, they concluded that "Allah is great." The Arabs converted to Islam because Allah was a greater power than any other spirit endowed with a name and a cult so far known in Arabia, and the problem is not the ease with which they could convert, but the inducement. What was it that Allah had to offer?

What he had to offer was a programme of Arab state formation and conquest: the creation of an umma, the initiation of jihad. Muhammad was a prophet with a political mission, not, as is so often asserted, a prophet who merely happened to become involved with politics. His monotheism amounted to a political programme, as is clear not only from non-Muslim accounts of his career, but also from Ibn Ishaq.

Thus Ibn Ishaq informs us that the turning point of Muhammad's career as a prophet came when he began openly to attack the ancestral gods of Quraysh and to denounce his own ancestors. This was a turning point because in so doing, he attacked the very foundations of his own tribe; and it was for this that he would have been outlawed or killed if his own kinsmen had not heroically continued to protect him -- not for the threat that his monotheist preaching allegedly posed to the pagan sanctuary or Meccan trade. He was, after all, no more than a local eccentric at the time, and Quraysh were quite willing to tolerate his oddities, including his minor following, as long as he confined his teaching to abstract truths about this world and the next. But they were not willing to tolerate an attack on their ancestors. By his they were outraged,and quite rightly so: a man who tries to destroy the very foundation of his own community is commonly known as a traitor. But Muhammad would scarcely have turned traitor without some vision of an alternative community. In denouncing his own ancestors, he had demonstrated that his God was incompatible with tribal divisions as they existed; and this incompatibility arose from the fact that his God, unlike that of the Christians, was both a monotheist and an ancestral deity. Allah was the one and only God of Abraham, the ancestor of the Arabs; and it was around ancestral deities that tribal groups were traditionally formed. It follows that it was around Allah, and Allah alone, that the Arabs should be grouped, all the ancestral deities that sanctioned current divisions being false. If we accept the traditional account of Muhammad's life, Muhammad was thus a political agitator already in Mecca, and it was as such that he offered himself to other tribes. "If we give allegiance to you and God gives you victory over your opponents, will we have authority after you?" an 'Amin is supposed to have asked, fully aware that ac- ceptance of Muhammad was acceptance of a ruler with ambitious plans. It was also as such, not merely as an otherworldly arbitrator, that he was accepted in Medina.

Assuming that Medinese society was rent by feuds, as opposed to united by proto-kings, it is not difficult to explain why the Medinese should have been willing to experiment with Muhammad's political programme; but given that Arabia had never been politically united before, and was never to be so again, it is certainly extraordinary that he and his successors should have succeeded in bringing this unification into effect. Why did the Arabs in Muhammad's time find the vision of state structures and unification so attractive?

It is customary to invoke Meccan trade in answer to this question. Quraysh, we are told, had in effect united most of Arabia already, numerous tribes having acquired an interest in the conduct of Meccan trade as well as in the maintenance of the sanctuary; inasmuch as the interests of Mecca and Arabia at large had come to coincide, Muhammad's conquest of Mecca amounted to a conquest of most of Arabia, though the process of unification was only to be completed on the suppression of the ridda. But though it is true that the suppression of the ridda completed the process, this is not an entirely persuasive explanation. If the interests of Mecca and the Arabs at large had come to coincide, why did the Arabs fail to come to Mecca's assistance during its protracted struggle against Muhammad? Had they done so, Muhammad's statelet in Medina could have been nipped in the bud. Conversely, if they were happy to leave Mecca to its own fate, why should they have hastened to convert when it fell? In fact, the idea of Meccan unification of Arabia rests largely on Ibn al-Kalbl's tl-tradition, a storyteller's yarn. No doubt there was a sense of unity in Arabia, and this is an important point; but the unity was ethnic and cultural, not economic, and it owed nothing to Meccan trade.40 Muhammad's success evidently had something to do with the fact that he preached both state formation and conquest: without conquest, first in Arabia and next in the Fertile Crescent, the unification of Arabia would not have been achieved. And there is no shred of evidence that commercial interests contributed to the decision, on the part of the ruling elite, to adopt a policy of conquest; on the contrary, the sources present conquest as an alternative to trade, the reward of conquest being an effortless life as rulers of the earth as opposed to one as plodding merchants. Nor is there any evidence that the collapse of Meccan trade caused an "economic recession" that contributed to the enthusiasm with which the tribesmen at large adopted this policy.44 It is, of course, legitimate to conjecture that trade may have played a role, but there is no need for such conjecture. Tribal states must conquer to survive, and the predatory tribesmen who make up their members are in general more inclined to fight than to abstain. "How many a lord and mighty chief have our horses trampled under foot . . . we march forth to war, the ever renewed, whenso it threatens," one pre-Islamic poet boasts. "We slew in requital for our slain an equal number of them], and [carried away an uncountable number of fettered prisoners . . . the days have thus raised us to be foremost with our battles in warfare after warfare; men find in us nothing at which to point their finger of scorn," another brags. "When I thrust in my sword it bends almost double, I kill my opponent with a sharp Mashrafi sword, and I yearn for death like a camel overfull with milk," a convert to Islam announced. Given that men of this kind constituted Muhammad's following, we do not need to postulate any deterioration in the material environment of Arabia to explain why they found a policy of conquest to their taste. Having begun to conquer in their tribal homeland, both they and their leaders were unlikely to stop on reaching the fertile lands: this was, after all, where they could find the resources which they needed to keep going and of which they had availed themselves before. Muhammad's God endorsed a policy of conquest, instructing his believers to fight against unbelievers wherever they might be found; and if we accept the testimony of non-Muslim sources, he specifically told them to fight the unbelievers in Syria, Syria being the land to which Jews and Arabs had a joint right by virtue of their common Abrahamic descent. In short, Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?

The reason why additional motives are so often adduced is that holy war is assumed to have been a cover for more tangible objectives. It is felt that religious and material interests must have been two quite different things --an eminently Christian notion; and this notion underlies the interminable debate whether the conquerors were motivated more by religious enthusiasm than by material interests, or the other way round. But holy war was not a cover for material interests; on the contrary, it was an open proclamation of them. "God says . . . 'my righteous servants shall inherit the earth'; now this is your inheritance and what your Lord has promised you . . . ," Arab soldiers were told on the eve of the battle of Qadisiyya, with reference to Iraq; "if you hold out . . . then their property, their women, their children, and their country will be yours." God could scarcely have been more explicit. He told the Arabs that they had a right to despoil others of their women, children, and land, or indeed that they had a duty to do so: holy war consisted in obeying. Muhammad's God thus elevated tribal militance and rapaciousness into supreme religious virtues: the material interests were those inherent in tribal society, and we need not compound the problem by conjecting that others were at work. It is precisely because the material interests of Allah and the tribesmen coincided that the latter obeyed him with such enthusiasm.

The fit between Muhammad's message and tribal interests is, in fact, so close that there is a case for the view that his programme might have succeeded at any point in Arabian history. The potential for Arab state formation and conquest had long been there, and once Muhammad had had the idea of putting monotheism to political use, it was exploited time and again, if never on the same pan-Arabian scale. Had earlier adherents of Din Ibrahim seen the political implications of their own beliefs, might they not similarly have united Arabia for conquest? If Muhammad had not done so, can it be argued that a later prophet might well have taken his role? The conquests, it could be argued, turn on the simple fact that somebody had an idea, and it is largely or wholly accidental that somebody did so in the seventh century rather than the fifth, the tenth, or not at all.

But the fact that it was only in the seventh century that the Arabs united for conquest on a pan-Arabian scale suggests that this argument is wrong. If we choose to argue otherwise, we must look for factors which were unique to Arabia at that particular time, not constants such as the feuds of Medina, and which affected the entire peninsula, not just a single city such as Mecca. Given the fit between Muhammad's message and tribal interests, the factors in question should also be such as to accentuate the perennial interests of tribal society rather than to undermine them in the style of Meccan trade as conventionally seen. There is only one development that meets all three specifications, and that is the foreign penetration characteristic of sixth- and early seventh-century Arabia.

As mentioned already, the Persians had colonies throughout eastern Arabia, in Najd, and in the Yemen, as well as a general sphere of influence extending from the Syrian desert to the Hijaz. The Byzantines had no colonists to the south of Tabuk, but their sphere of influence was felt throughout western Arabia from the Syrian desert where they had client kings to the Yemen where their Ethiopian allies ruled until they were ousted by the Persians. Muhammad's Arabia had thus been subjected to foreign rule on a scale unparalleled even in modern times: where the Persians had colonists and fire-temples, the British merely had Philby. The scale on which Muhammad's Arabia exploded is equally unparalleled, the nearest equivalent being that of the Ikhwan. It seems unlikely that the two phenomena were unrelated.

If so, how? One model can be eliminated at once. It is well known that empires tend to generate state structures among their barbarian neighbours thanks to the ideas that they provide, the material sources that they pass on, and the resentment that their dominance engenders; and having generated such state structures, they will usually become targets of conquest, too. This is the pattern known from Central Asia and Europe; but it is not the pattern to which Arabia conforms. There was no incipient growth of state structures at the expense of tribal ties in Arabia, not even in Mecca. Muhammad's state in Medina-was formed by a prophet, not a secular statesman, by recourse to religious authority, not material power, and the conquests were effected by a fusion of tribal society, not by its disintegation. If the imperial powers contributed to the rise of Islam, they must have done so in a different way.

An alternative hypothesis would be that Islam originated as a nativist movement, or in other words as a primitive reaction to alien domination of the same type as those which the Arab conquerors were themselves to provoke in North Africa and Iran, and which European colonists were later to provoke throughout the Third World. If we accept the testimony of the non-Muslim sources on the nature of Muhammad's teaching, this interpretation fits extremely well.

Nativist movements are primitive in the sense that those who engage in them are people without political organization. Either they are members of societies that never had much political organization, as is true of Muhammad's Arabia,.or they are drawn from these strata of society that lack this organization, as is true of the villagers who provided the syncretic prophets of Iran. They invariably take a religious form. The leaders usually claim to be prophets or God Himself, and they usually formulate their message in the same religious language as that of the foreigners against whom it is directed, but in such a way as to reaffirm their native identity and values. The movements are almost always millenarian, frequently messianic, and they always lead to some political organization and action, however embryonic; the initial action is usually militant, the object of the movement being the expulsion of the foreigners in question. The extent to which Muhammad's movement conforms to this description can be illustrated with reference to a Maori prophet of the 1860s who practically invented Islam for himself. He reputedly saw himself as a new Moses (as did Muhammad), pronounced Maoris and Jews to be descended from the same father (as were the Jews and their Ishmaelite brothers), and asserted that Gabriel had taught him a new religion which (like that taught to Muhammad combined belief in the supreme God of the foreigners with native elements (sacred dances as opposed to pilgrimage). He proclaimed or was taken to proclaim, the Day of Judgment to be at hand (as did Muhammad). On that day, he said or was taken by his followers to say, the British would be expelled from New Zealand (as would the Byzantines from Syria), and all the Jews would come to New Zealand to live in peace and harmony with their Maori brothers (as Jews and Arabs expected to do in Syria). This, at least, is how his message was reported by contemporary, if frequently hostile, observers.8 And though he may in fact have been a pacifist, his followers were not. Unlike the followers of Muhammad, however, they fought against impossible odds.

Like the Maori prophet, Muhammad mobilized the Jewish version of monotheism against that of dominant Christianity and used it for the self-assertion, both ideological and military, of his own people. It is odd that what appears to have been the first hostilc reaction to alien domination, and certainly the most successful, should have come in an area subject to Byzantine rather than Persian influence, that of the Persians being more extensive. But Jewish-Arab symbiosis in northwest Arabia could perhaps account for this: according to Sebeos, the Byzantine victimization of Jews played a crucial role in the birth of Muhammad's movement. In any case, Muhammad was not the only prophet in seventh-century Arabia, and two of his competitors, Musaylima and Aswad, were active in areas subject to Persian influence, the Yamama and the Yemen, respectively, while a third, Sajah, was sponsored by tribes known to have participated in the celebrated battle against the Persians at Dhu Qar. The fact that the resistance to Islam in Arabia was led by imitators of Muhammad rather than by representatives of traditional paganism is thus unlikely to mean that traditional beliefs and values had lost force in Arabia; on the contrary, Muhammad would seem to have hit upon a powerful formula for the vindication of those values. And this formula was, of course, likely to be used against Muhammad himself when he began his subjection of Arabia.

A more serious objection would be that the foreign presence is unlikely to have affected the majority of Arabs very deeply! Unlike the Maoris, who were losing their land to the British, they certainly cannot have felt that their entire way of life was under threat; and unlike the Berbers, they were not exposed to forced conversion. Nor are expressions of dissatisfaction with foreign domination very common in the sources. There is, admittedly, no lack of anti-Persian feeling in the poetry triggered by the battle of Dhu Qar, which the Prophet supposedly described as the first occasion on which the Arabs obtained revenge from the Persians, the conquests (by implication) being the second. But in historical fact this battle may not have represented more than a short-term disagreement between the Persians and their Arab subjects. Still, there were some who felt that "the Arabs were confined between the lions of Persia and Byzantium," as Qatada said in a passage contrasting the ignominious state of the Arabs in the jahiliyyah with the grandeur achieved on the coming of Islam. "Other men trampled us beneath their feet while we trampled no one. Then God sent a prophet from among us . . . and one of his promises was that we should conquer and overcome these lands," as Mughlrab. Shu'ba is supposed to have explained to a Persian commander. In general, it is acknowledged that the Arab conquests were nothing if not "an outburst of Arab nationality."

To what extent, if at all, the nativist model can be applied to the rise of Islam is for future research to decide; no doubt there are other ways in which the interaction between Arabs and foreigners could be envisaged. But it is at all events the impact of Byzantium and Persia on Arabia that ought to be at the forefront of research on the rise of the new religion, not the Meccan trade. Meccan trade may well turn out to throw some light on the mechanics behind the spread of the new religion, but it cannot explain why a new religion appeared at all in Arabia or why it had such a massive political effect.

[sanjaykumar]

Cyrano, it is not a subtle point. I posted some time ago on exegesis and eisegesis. I pointed out how, felicitously, the latter is pronounced ‘I see Jesus’.

[ramana]

Patricia Crone: How did Quranic Pagans make a living?

https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files ... lihood.pdf

[ramana]

Patricia Crone On Imperial Trauma

https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files ... Trauma.pdf

It seems but for the Khilafat revival by Mahatma Gandhi, the Turkish Muslims would have assimilated into Indian society and been long gone.

[ramana]

I could not get part I. Please post if you find it.
Please visit the page for the graphics. Quite important.

https://scholars-stage.org/radical-isla ... ext-pt-ii/

RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM IN CONTEXT, PT II
10 October, 2013

How to make sense of radical Islamic terrorism? This violence is barbaric – but it is not senseless. When you understand the society from which savagery has sprung, the cold logic behind these attacks becomes all too apparent. Part II of a series; Part I is here.


How do you save a civilization from implosion?

Modernization has never been pretty. It destroyed Christendom before the growth revolution picked up steam and left the European subcontinent in disorder for two centuries more. The collapse of the Chinese imperial order and the traditional family that supported it was a cataclysmic string of tragedies that left tens of millions dead. Now it is the Ummah‘s turn to walk through the threshing ground of modernity.

Traditional Islamic civilization does not need to fear spectacular cultural or political collapse. These are the after shocks of a more mundane type of destruction. Social anthropologist extraordinaire Emmanuel Todd explains:

SPIEGEL: Monsieur Todd, in the middle of the Cold War, in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, you predicted the collapse of the Soviet system. In 2002, you described the economic and imperial erosion of the United States, a global superpower. And, four years ago, you and your colleague Youssef Courbage predicted the unavoidable revolution in the Arab world. Are you clairvoyant?

Todd: The academic as fortune-teller — a tempting idea. But Courbage and I merely analyzed the reasons for a possible — or let’s say likely — revolution in the Arab world, an inexorable change, which could also have unfolded as a gradual evolution. Our work was like that of geologists who compile the signs of an imminent earthquake or volcanic eruption. But when exactly the eruption takes place, and its form and severity — these things cannot be predicted in an exact way.

SPIEGEL: On what indicators do you base your probability calculation?




Todd: Mainly on three factors: the rapid increase in literacy, particularly among women, a falling birthrate and a significant decline in the widespread custom of endogamy, or marriage between first cousins. This shows that the Arab societies were on a path toward cultural and mental modernization, in the course of which the individual becomes much more important as an autonomous entity.

SPIEGEL: And what is the consequence?

Todd: That this development ends with the transformation of the political system, a spreading wave of democratization and the conversion of subjects into citizens. Although this follows a global trend, it can take some time. (emphasis added). [11]

Monsieur Todd explains the fall of the old order from the heights of the ivory tower. He can collect data dispassionately and pronounce revolutions from afar. Those closer to the upheaval are not granted such liberties. For them the death of civilization is an intensely personal affair. To understand their view–and how it can lead to radical terrorism–we must see the disintegration of their society as they do.

The War Nerd gives us a chance to do just that. Several days before the attack on the Westgate, he suggested that Western malls were a particularly conspicuous assault on the old Arab order:

In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch —literally watch—the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day.

The mall was anchored by a huge market, HyperPanda, complete with its own cheery green and red logo. HyperPanda sold everything from camel meat to iPods…. You go in the mall and the logos of all the high-end retailers of Europe and Asia wink at you, and there are even chairs and benches for the tired grandmother to slump in while the kids try their skate-shoes on the marble floors…

All this, only eight miles from the Yemen border. It’s amazing, actually. Amazing that the regime tolerates it at all, because as jihadis know, or sense, all social change is corrosive, and worse still, unpredictably corrosive, eating away at norms that don’t seem to have any direct connection to the change itself.

HyperPanda’s most direct affront to the culture is that it provides an attractive nuisance, in insurance terms, to the adolescent population. Malls draw teens in Najran just like they do in Minnesota. But the Mutaween have taken a, shall we say, proactive stance toward that fact in Najran.




The Mutaween (“Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice”) has hundreds of men, and even a few women, working in Najran. Some wear the big beards and special headdress, but others are in disguise. And what these undercover morality police do, mostly, is patrol HyperPanda to see if boys are talking to girls, or looking at girls, or throwing girls little folded-up slips of paper with their cell phone numbers. That last one is perhaps the greatest threat to morality in town, and HyperPanda is the scene of most such crimes. The Mutaween mount multi-cop surveillance routines, with some disguised as Malays or Filipinos, to detect any instances of heterosexual contact at the mall.

The culture, the law, are very clear. No pre-marital fooling around, and that includes flirting at HyperPanda. Mall rules are very clear too: It’s an obvious place for boys and girls to check each other out. When mall meets culture, hijinks ensue—and murders sometimes follow, with the male relatives of the girl who’s been compromised at HyperPanda hunting down and killing the boy who accosted her.

Ten years ago, the mall didn’t exist. Cell phones, the other contributor to the delinquency of minors in Najran, have only been around for 20 years, like the internet that gives girls notions of romance, thanks to the South Korean soap operas they all watch.

Everything is tilting toward the mall, away from the old rules, and the resistance is always futile, and worse yet, ridiculous. Every day one piece of this resistance breaks away. Yesterday it was the new head of the Mutaween admitting that there’s no Scriptural basis for forbidding women to drive.

That will infuriate men in Saudi, because as devout as they consider themselves to be, this was never just a religious argument. Orthodoxy never is; it’s always what’s comfortable and familiar. It would be news to these guys, watching the old world crumble, that people in South Dakota are afraid that “creeping Sharia” is about to creep its way into Fargo, presumably on insulated booties.

Kids in Najran already hate the Mutaween. They see kids flirting on TV from the west, and cops chasing grownup criminals, and it strikes them as ridiculous that so many cops devote all their time to the prevention of flirting. Now that the King has ordered the Mutaween to be nice, hate will turn to contempt. Pieces of the old walls will start falling even faster.

It’s hard to see how defensive jihad is, when you come from the homeland of the malls. At first, when you get to a place like Najran, you notice how alien and annoying everything is, how unlike California. Slowly you begin to realize that all the ingredients of California are being added to the mix.

It’s amazing how well most people handle this very volatile, unstable mix. When people are flooded with so much alien culture and technology, you’d expect wilder upheavals than we’re getting, especially in rural patriarchies like the one that used to operate unchallenged in Saudi Arabia. It’s not a surprise—not at all—that a fraction of the young males from there joined up for jihad. The real surprise is that there are so few of them. [12]

HyperPanda delivers a blow to the traditionalists no number of crusades, sieges, Nakbahs or democratic liberations ever could. The traditional Islamic system is well prepared for their type of shock. Defending the honor of the near in-group from the faraway out-group was a fundamental moral value of the Arab tribal system; Islam hijacked this tribal frame of mind, elevating the conflict between in and out to the entire Muslim community. The tribal mindset does not fear division and conflict between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb. Pressure from the outside is business as usual.

But HyperPanda does not come from the outside. The old system is not falling apart because of anything intentional the outside has done at all. Middle Eastern women are choosing to have less children, marry outside their families, and pursue education because they want to. Arab teens are watching dreadful K-dramas and flirting in malls because they want to. The enemies of the traditional order don’t come from the House of War. The threat comes from within.


.

Totalitarian regimes have it easy. They have a ready-made response when people start to lose faith in the system: round the offenders up, force ’em to write self criticisms, and send them to the Gulag — or if that is too complex, simply kill them. Just enough should be done to strike fear in the hearts of everyone else. Fear works when faith fails.

This is not a universal solution. Totalitarian methods prove fantastically impossible in decentralized societies. Arab tribes are a prime example. There are few human cultures so overtly hostile to centralized government as that sired by the Bedouin tradition (though the most zealous citizens of the Anglosphere can get pretty close). Anthropologist Philip Salzman describes the common tribal attitude towards their governments as one of the ‘central tenants of [Arab] deep culture’: “Middle Easterners regard states as criminal organizations to be distrusted, avoided, and, whenever possible, defeated and conquered.” [3]

Using the government to enforce social norms or ideological purity just isn’t in the cards. Governments have tried to do so, but as the Saudi example suggests, this method has a poor track record. If the more radical elements are truly committed to keeping things the way they are, they must find a way to cajole, convince, pressure, or dupe the modernizers away from modernization. They cannot coerce their fellow Arabs back into the stone age.

This point is important. I will repeat it: The Arab world has plenty of people who want modernization. A small minority actively agitate for change. A much larger group cannot be bothered to agitate for anything, but are content to let history take its course. This second group are the people who keep Arabian reactionaries from sleeping properly each night. They know that letting history run its course is to declare defeat. They also know that they alone do not have power to derail history from this chosen path. Defeat seems assured.

Those most agitated by the erosion of the old Islamic order do not accept defeat. They will not accept defeat until they know with a certainty that the game is up and the rest of their society will never rise up to make a more perfect Ummah. But only if the idle majority joins in unity with the committed minority can this dream become a reality. The most committed are willing to go to extreme measures to awaken the apathetic to their senses.

{{Go back to Shiv's Oil Droplet model. What the author is saying is the inner extremist minority controls the moderate majority in order for the faith to survive by fear. This is a new interpretation. However we see this in India Muslims with the hijab protest, the thook movement etc. And the Arfa Kahnums...}

This is the social context that gives birth to radical Islamic terrorism. From the radical’s perspective, compromise is just another step towards defeat; moderation or apathy from inside the system pose greater dangers than pressure from outside it. Thus the central aim of radical groups is to create a political environment where moderation and compromise is not possible.

This chosen end leads easily to extremist means. An example closer to home may help us understand why this is so.


.

The antebellum South could never decide if they loved or loathed Thomas Jefferson. They loved him for the obvious reasons. By 1860 they would justify secession with his fabled words. In those early days of glory and gunpowder, it was gratifying to pronounce that the spirit of the American revolution was the spirit of a Southerner. But not everything Mr. Jefferson wrote was congenial to Southern sensibilities. From his pen came venomous eloquence that undermined everything the Deep South’s faux aristocracy pretended to be:


“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it… The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other…. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. — But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one’s mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” [4]

Thomas Jefferson’s actions never matched the high standard set by his rhetoric. This did not matter much in the eyes of his contemporaries; a plantation master was never to be judged on what he physically accomplished. These parlor patricians took pride in their independence from work. Sweat was for Yankees – and slaves. They strove to live in a world of the mind.

Here the words of Thomas Jefferson tore through their pageantry. His sin was to express with eloquence sentiments shared by many – too many. Whether or not this was his intention, with such words Jefferson forced slavers to step down from their abode in the clouds and see their elect existence for what it really was: a base, reprehensible tyranny that corrupted all it touched, running counter to the courtly system of morals southerners pretended to honor. Yet this was not the most frightening thing about Mr. Jefferson and his words. What most disturbed those committed to the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ was not the realization that it was a system of tyranny. No, what disturbed them most was that other southerners had the gall to admit it.

The historian William W. Freehling once asked how a radical minority of a minority could lead the United States into Civil War. Part of the answer can be found in the paranoia of this class. Condemned by the Europeans, overtaken by the Yankee economy, and in perpetual fear of slave rebellion, the antebellum South was a world besieged. Who did this people under assault, the most radical slavers, hate the most? Freehling’s answer: Other southerners. They loathed and feared Thomas Jefferson’s intellectual descendants — southern gentry who sat rich and fine on their plantations, but all the while discontent in their hearts with the tyrants they were. The fire-brands of the South hated those who were happy to let the demographic and economic trends of their day lead slavery to its eventual demise. If the South was to be the South, then all southerners needed a gut for slavery.

Soon the weak-hearted elements of Southern society forced its most trenchant members to extremes:

“Perptualists [who believed slavery should be saved or extended] early discovered that apologists [like Jefferson] could neither be forced into consolidations of the institution nor forced away from increasing its vulnerabilities. The result was early loss of proslavery opportunities and early emergence of crimped and contained slave power.

The second and third generation of slave holding perpetualists drew the proper conclusion. If the South was ever to be a South, actively warring against anti-slavery, Jeffersonians passive failure to man the barricades had to be contested as aggressively as apologists’ tame attempts to chip away at the institution Thomas Jefferson epitomized why fire-eaters had to rally the irresolute. Such necessity profoundly shaped Southern extremist politics.” [5]


As more and more states started to look (and act) like Maryland the question became more desperate. How do we keep the system alive? More importantly, how do we keep our own slave holders in line? How do we keep the South united against the moral assault from the outside?

The answer is fairly simple: we do everything our power to create a world divided into ‘us’ vs ‘them,’ anything that will force our moderates and the apathetic to pick a side. Even if it means war.

It is a tactic old as time. And it is a tactic we see repeated in the Middle East today. Like the antebellum South, theirs is a society radically different from those around it, subject to cultural incursions from the outside, apparently doomed to the forces of history, and fatally weak to the claim that it is oppressive and immoral. Many people living in the old order are not emotionally invested in it; a radical only needs to see the crowds at a Haifa Wehbe concert to a know that too many of their compatriots are cheering its death. These people will not be moved to action unless something radical is done.

Some people make the mistake of thinking these terrorist attacks are about Westerners or Christians. They are not. They never have been. [6] Jihadism isn’t about destroying the West – it is about creating an Ummah that has no West in it. There is no room for compromise in his vision. If the Ummah is to be what it is supposed to be then the moderates must be forced to pick a side.

This is what barbarity is for. This is why innocent men, women, and children are being gunned down in malls and blown up in market places. It forces everyone to take a side. Barbarity precludes compromise. It takes advantage of the old tribal urge to unite and defend the near us from the far other. And if these savage tactics de-humanize Muslims in eyes of the rest of the world – well, all the better. In the traditional Islamic system pressure from the outside is business as usual.

We can appreciate Modiji's moves much better. Its to strenghten the moderates. But like the powdery mildew the extemeist cna take over at an opputune time.

[Cyrano]

Very good article, thanks for posting it.

Few comments/observations on

"Western malls were a particularly conspicuous assault on the old Arab order"

This is true and its what I call the "chosen people contradiction". If we are the chosen people then why are we made to take birth in a desert and struggle for subsistence, while richly endowed peoples exist in great prosperity to the east and west - which we cant deny because we see them trading with each other passing through our lands ?

The answer to that is the (however illogical it is) "that God put them there for us to plunder for our needs (not all that different from date palms or mountain herds) while keeping us away from the moral degradation that abundance invariably brings" justification. We find variants of this in other abrahamic religions too, so it is not really all that original, but has persisted as a core belief to this day. Thats why Gazwa-e-hind is seen as a right because why else would Hind exist? and a duty because we have to consume what the creator has created for us, cant just ignore it and let kaffirs be thus insulting Him, can we?

But at the same time, there is that worm of doubt, that corrupting temptation to question one's own beliefs facing the realisation that obeying injections to pray 5 times a day doesn’t leave productive time to think and work for one's prosperity, nor does the psychology inducted by constant prayers begging and imploring for the Great One's clemency and favours leave any room for agency and responsibility. Its those people who are wracked by this self-doubt, who dare to question the basic tenets albeit in their own minds, that form the moderates. And its can spread. What ramanaji evocatively called "powdery mildew" and is to be eliminated at all costs.

Anyone asking what about hindu prayers and rituals obviously doesnt understand either. But that thats another topic.

The article says

Defending the honor of the near in-group from the faraway out-group was a fundamental moral value of the Arab tribal system; Islam hijacked this tribal frame of mind, elevating the conflict between in and out to the entire Muslim community.

and then asks

How do you save a ==meaning this Arab islamic== civilization from implosion?

The Ummah is a likeminded gang of bandits, whose code of honour the author somewhat misunderstands. Likemindedness comes from the chosen people contradiction they share. Ummah is a temporary pact not to turn on each other until there are prosperous Kaffirs to turn upon. When that common enemy is not reachable or consumed and gone, the Ummah pact dissolves faster than ice in a desert and they turn on each other. As soon as the larger and juicy other (outside civilisation) acting like a magnet to coalesce believer tribes is gone, the iron filings fall apart. Then the question of who his the chosen one rears its head again, and this is the only context where Malthusian principle applies. Because bacteria in a petri dish dont have agency or take productive responsibility either. Warring factions within Pakiland illustrate this splendidly.

To save such a civilisation from implosion, either resources have to be provided constantly or the fundamental tenets have to be discarded altering it irrevocably. There is no other way. Thats why I dont beleive a reformed Islam is possible. By its own injunctions a reformed Islam will cease to be Islam.

For those who cite islands of prosperous communities in the Arab world, they must realise that such prosperity was achieved to the extent that the core tenets were diluted or abandoned, just like even The One cant fit a square peg into a round hole without cutting corners or changing definitions !

JMT.

[ramana]

The key is Islam was created for a tribal society. As the tribal society modernizes the need for Islam goes away.
And to ensure the tribal inner core does not attack the moderate egg white, they have to be protected and the inner core decimated.
Thats what Halgu Khan did when he finished off the Caliph in Baghdad. However, he did not take out the mullah's power.

[ramana]

Iran and Afghanistan were getting more modern in the cities than in the countryside.
We see how the rural tribal society de-modernized the urban in both Iran and Afghanistan.
In Iran, it was the Khomeini Muttaween and in Afghanistan, it was the Jihadis who later became the Taliban.

In Pakistan, the urban still retained their tribal moorings and hence were spared the de-modernization.
It's more ethnicity that is more prevalent in Pakistan and can rend them asunder.

[NRao]

I could not get part I. Please post if you find it.

RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM IN CONTEXT, PT I

09 October, 2013

How to make sense of radical Islamic terrorism? This violence is barbaric – but it is not senseless. When you understand the society from which savagery has sprung, the cold logic behind these attacks becomes all too apparent.

Brendon O’Niell says "it is time to recognize the sheer barbarity" of 21st century Islamic terror attacks:

“In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.” [1]

I applaud Mr. O’Niell’s frankness. Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab are savage, barbaric, and evil. Period. They should be seen by all and denounced by all as the monstrous brutes that they have become. Civilization has a pale; this lies beyond it.

But stating this is not enough. We cannot simply name a man a monster — we must try to understand why so many men want to be monsters in the first place. O’Niell is less helpful here:

“Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity’s moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic…. consider the attack on Westgate in Kenya, where both the old and the young, black and white, male and female were targeted. With no clear stated aims from the people who carried the attack out, and no logic to their strange and brutal behaviour, Westgate had more in common with those mass mall and school shootings that are occasionally carried out by disturbed people in the West than it did with the political violence of yesteryear.” [2]

There are problems with this line of thought. In his zeal to denounce Islamic terrorism O’Niell makes two errors: 1) He assumes that indiscriminate slaughter of ‘the young and old, black and white, male and female’ is a ‘new and unusual’ development in human history and 2) that the sheer barbarity of these acts ‘defy logic.’

Perhaps the Khwarazmians also thought the slaughter they witnessed was something new under the sun:

“The Mongols now entered the town and drove all the inhabitants, nobles and commoners, out on to the plain. For four days and nights the people continued to come out of the town; the Mongols detained them all, separating the women fiom the men. Alas! How many peri-like ones did they drag from the bosom: of their husbands! How many sisters did they separate from their brothers! How many parents were distraught at the ravishment of their virgin daughters!

The Mongols ordered that, apart from four hundred artisans whom they specified and selected from amongst the men and some children, girls and boys, whom they bore into captivity, the whole population, including the women and children, should be killed, and no one, whether woman or man, be spared. The people of Merv were then distributed among the soldiers and levies, and, in short, to each man was allotted the execution of three or four hundred persons.” [3]

The indiscriminate massacre of 700,000 men and women and children outside the walls of Merv was barbarous. It was savage. It was evil. But it was not illogical. The horror and slaughter of Mongol conquests often seemed senseless – even ludicrous – to the historians who recorded them. But to the Mongols it had a very real and useful purpose. When these massacres are seen in the context of the strategic dilemmas faced by the Mongol forces, the imperial system Chinggis Khan created out of whole cloth, and the basic dynamics that defined the encounters between Eurasian steppe peoples and their sedentary neighbors for centuries, the unrestrained butchering of men and women begins to make more sense. [4]

To understand something is not to justify it. The Mongol hordes wrought inexcusable evils. But these evils were deliberately chosen and should be understood and described as such.


All that remains of Merv

Source: Mark and Delewan. Wikimedia. 7 March 2006. o

The Mongols of the twelfth century are not the the terrorists of the twenty first. No radical Muslim slaughters for the same reason hardened Mongols once did. But neither slaughtered simply for the sake of it. While Islamic terrorists attacks can seem the acts of “lunatics” who have “no logic,” nothing could be further from the truth. There is a cold and frightening logic that defines these terrorist attacks. As with medieval historian bewailing the Mongol advance, latter day observers struggle to understand the use of barbaric terror because they are unfamiliar with the social and political context from which the barbarians come.

There is a temptation to look at radical terrorist attacks across the globe and boil them down to their most obvious common element: Islam. This is a step in the right direction but ultimately an insufficient explanation. This theory can be dismantled with a simple question: what of the Islamic communities who have produced no terrorists?


Kingdom of Champa, c. 1300 AD

Source: Wikimedia user clioherodotus. 26 July 2010.
Consider the Cham. (Pronounced jam, as the type spread on toast). Today the Cham are a minority ethnic group whose communities are scattered across the lower Mekong delta in Vietnam and Cambodia. They were once a more powerful people whose kingdom–Champa—stretched across the southern half of modern Vietnam. Theirs was a maritime polity; when not sacking Angkor or fighting off Viet attacks on the land, the Cham traded far and wide by sea. It is through their contacts with Malay, Indian, and Arabic seafarers that the Cham were introduced to Islam. By the 1600s the Cham ruling class and literati had converted.

The Cham’s subsequent history is not happy. The Vietnamese continued their grand Nam tiến and whittled away at the Cham polities century by century until their last capital fell into Vietnamese hands in 1832. Many of the Cham fled to Cambodia, and there they lived as an exile race on the fringes of Khmer society. In retrospect, their treatment by traditional Khmer society does seems not too bad. In those days they were targets of discrimination; when the Red Khmer came to power they were targets of extermination.

The Cham were everything the Khmer Rouge despised: many of Cambodia’s most successful livestock merchants were Cham, all Cham spoke an alien language, refused to eat or dress in a standardized way, and most damningly of all, were fiercely loyal to their God. They paid a staggering price for their faith:

“the Moslem Cham, were sought out and killed as part of a “centrally organized genocidal campaign.” Whole Cham villages were leveled. For example, in the district of Kompong Xiem five Cham hamlets were demolished and their population of 20,000 reportedly massacred; in the district of Koong Neas only four Cham apparently survived out of a population of 20,000 inhabitants.121 The Chain Grand Mufti was thrown into boiling water and then hit on the head with an iron bar; the First Mufti was beaten to death and thrown into a ditch; the Second Mufti was tortured and disemboweled; and the chairman of the Islamic Association of Kampuchea died of starvation in prison.” [5]

One of every three Cham died during the three years of Khmer Rouge rule. [6]

To this day the Cham live on the margins of Cambodian society. They are poor, have no power, and are often taken advantage of by the powers that be. They are also Muslim. Islam is as the core of their identity. One Cham in Vietnam succinctly summed his people’s common view in an interview with anthropologist Philip Taylor: “To be Muslim is to be Cham.”[7] The Khmer agree. In common speech Cambodians rarely use the word Cham at all– when talking about the Cham they usually just call them “the Muslims” (buak Islaam — ពួកឣិស្លាម) and call spoken Cham “Muslim language” (phiasaa Islaam — ភាសាឣិស្លាម). [8] Their ethnicity and their faith cannot be divorced in the minds of the Cham or the society in which they live.


A Cham women from Vietnam

Source: photo by Adam Jones
adamjones.freeservers.com

This existence of the Cham and peoples like them are stumbling block to those who blame Islam alone for barbaric acts of terror. The Cham’s identity is defined by their adherence to Islam. They are a people stripped of a kingdom, scattered and despised by cultures around them for centuries, and the target of a genocide which aimed to eradicate them and their faith. Within living memory one of every three Cham died because of their religion. Alienated by their customs, language, and beliefs from the community in which they live, the Cham who survived the killing fields have known little but poverty. They have not benefited substantially from Cambodia’s recent economic growth and have no strong voice in the Cambodian political system.


If there was ever a group of Muslims whose history is bitter enough to justify radicalism or whose present condition is desperate enough to encourage terrorism, it would be the Cham.

Yet not one of the Earth’s 400,000 Cham has ever participated in terrorist attack. Never has a barbarian arose from their ranks.


.

If barbarity is not an inherit part of Islam, then from what source does it spring? Lynn Rees offers a perceptive answer to our query:

The problem is less the software architecture of Islam and more the Arab firmware its embedded in. The Arabs reintroduced tribalism to parts of the Near East and Africa where it had been extinct for centuries along with Islam. The pernicious thing about our enabling of the House of Saud through our petrodollars is that the particular Islam they export comes with the most primeval of Arab tribalism. [9]

Lets talk a bit about the social system Mr. Rees names “Arab tribalism.”

The historian Jack Goldstone has suggested that the great civilizations of Eurasia — “Latin and Greek Christendom, the Islamic Caliphate, Hindu India, and Confucian China” – can be understood best when seen as complex systems.”Despite wars and conquests, epidemics and famines, dynastic struggles and heterodox religious movements,” he notes, “they remained basically true to their founding visions” responding to each disturbance with an eventual return to “equilibrium.” [10]

Mr. Goldstone focuses on the imams and the qadis of medieval times, but the traditional Islamic order was much broader than the Caliphate or the Islamic theology that supported it. The chattering classes and the religious ideas they passed between themselves was just the top layer of Islamic civilization. More relevant for our search is its foundations – the basic structures of the Islamic order that shaped the daily lives of every man and child that lived within it. Though dynasties fell and economies collapsed, this bedrock survived the arrival of the Turks, the ravages of the Mongols, and the empires of the Europeans and molded both the dazzling cities of the Levant and the nomads of the Mahgreb.



The tribes of per-Mohaddeian Arabia
Source: The human journey


This foundation was the traditional Arab endogamous community family, usually embedded in larger tribes, and marked by the lack of independence and education afforded to its women and the number of children they bore. The substructure spread with the original Arab conquests but long survived survived the demise of the the Caliphs. The Federal Research Division explains what a society built upon this structure looks like in modern times:

“Syrian life centers on the extended family. The individual’s loyalty to his family is nearly absolute and usually overrides all other obligations. Except in the more sophisticated urban circles, the individual’s social standing depends on his family background. Although status is changing within the emerging middle class, ascribed rather than achieved status still regulates the average Syrian’s life. His honor and dignity are tied to the good repute of his kin group and, especially, to that of its women….

“Because of the cohesiveness of religious and ethnic groups, they universally encourage endogamy, or the marriage of members within the group. Lineages, or groups of families tracing descent to a common ancestor, also strive for endogamy, although this is in fact less common, despite its theoretical desirability. Viewed as a practical bond between families, marriage often has political and economic overtones even among the poor….

Being a good family member includes automatic loyalty to kinsmen as well. Syrians employed in modern bureaucratic positions, such as government officials, therefore find impersonal impartiality difficult because its conflicts with the deeply held value of family solidarity…

Syrians have no similar ingrained feelings of loyalty toward a job, an employer, a coworker, or even a friend.

Women are viewed as weaker than men in mind, body, and spirit and therefore in need of male protection, particularly protection from nonrelated men. The honor of men depends largely on that of their women, and especially on that of their sisters; consequently, the conduct of women is expected to be circumspect, modest, and decorous, with their virtue above reproach. Veiling is rarely practiced in villages or tribes, but in towns and cities keeping one’s women secluded and veiled was traditionally considered a sign of elevated status. In the mid-1980s, the practice of wearing the veil was quite rare among young women in cities; however, the wearing of the hijab (a scarf covering the hair) was much more common. Wearing the hijab was sometimes more a symbol of Islamic affiliation than a token of modesty, and the garment underwent a revival in the 1980s as a subtle protest against the secular Baath regime. For this reason, the government discouraged the wearing of such Islamic apparel.

“The traditional code invests men as members of family groups with a highly valuable but easily damaged honor (ird). The slightest implication of unavenged impropriety on the part of the women in his family or of male infractions of the code of honesty and hospitality could irreparably destroy the honor of a family. In particular, female virginity before marriage and sexual fidelity afterward are essential to the maintenance of honor. In the case of a discovered transgression, the men of a family were traditionally bound to kill the offending woman, although in modern times she is more likely to be banished to a town or city where she is not known.” (emphasis added). [10]

This is the traditional Arab social order. [11] This tribal familialism formed the bedrock of Islamic civilization since its genesis; when combined with Islamic religious authority it created an Ummah that could thrive in cosmopolitan fleshpots and rugged pastoral lands. Its fifteen thousand year history is a testament to how resilient and well structured a system it turned out to be.

But now the whole thing is falling apart. The repercussions of its fall will be heard for years – and they will be barbaric.

[ramana]

https://www.meforum.org/1813/the-middle ... tribal-dna

The Middle East's Tribal DNA
by Philip Carl Salzman
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, pp. 23-33

Conflicts within the Middle East cannot be separated from its peoples' culture. Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents' attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict. While many diplomats and analysts view the Arab-Israeli dispute and conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim communities through the prism of political grievance, the roots of such conflicts lie as much in culture and Arab tribalism.

Tribalism and Predatory Expansion
Every human society must establish order if it is going to survive and prosper. Arab culture addresses security through "balanced opposition" in which everybody is a member of a nested set of kin groups, ranging from very small to very large. These groups are vested with responsibility for the defense of each member and responsible for harm any member does to outsiders. If there is a confrontation, families face families, lineage faces lineage, clan faces clan, tribe faces tribe, confederacy faces confederacy, sect faces sect, and the Islamic community faces the infidels. Deterrence lies in the balance between opponents. Any potential aggressor knows that his target is not solitary or meager but rather, at least in principle, a formidable formation much the same size as his.

Balanced opposition is a "tribal" form of organization, a tribe being a regional organization of defense based on decentralization and self-help. Tribes operate differently from states, which are centralized, have political hierarchies, and have specialized institutions—such as courts, police, tax collectors, and an army—to maintain social control and defense.

Understanding the influence of tribalism upon the development of both Arab culture and, by extension, Islam, requires acknowledging the basic characteristics and dynamics of Middle Eastern tribalism. Part of any tribesman's job description is to maximize both the number of children and of livestock. There are practical reasons for this: First, children aid in labor. Nomadic pastoralism requires heavy physical work. Workers are needed to conduct many tasks simultaneously. Family members are more committed to common interests than individuals recruited for reciprocity or pay. Large families also enhance political stature. Because technology remains constant across tribal societies in any given area, the factor that determines military strength is how many fighters an individual can muster. The man who can call on five or six adult sons and a similar number of sons-in-law to support him is a force with which to reckon. Cultural values underline this emphasis on progeny. A man is not a man if he cannot produce children, and a woman is not really an adult if she does not become a mother.

Maximizing livestock possession is also important. Livestock generate income of offspring, products, and services. They produce milk and meat. Camels offer hair; sheep supply wool, and goats provide underwool, all of which can be spun into yarn or woven into bags and food covers, and goat hair can also be woven into sheets and used as tent roofs. Camels enable distance travel. Sold at market, they supply money to purchase goods not produced locally, such as firearms, brass household goods, tea, and sugar. Their sale also provides funds to buy agricultural land, peasant villages, and urban villas.[1]

There are also important social reasons to maximize livestock possessions. Upon marriage, the husband's family compensates the wife's kin with livestock. Any man with political aspirations should own animals. Slaughter of sheep or goats enables hospitality for guests.[2] Loan or grant of livestock can establish or reinforce alliances with other families and create useful obligations to be repaid in provision of labor or political support.

Tribal success, though, counted in increasing progeny and livestock, strains pasturage, water, and arable land. To accommodate enlarged populations, it becomes necessary to expand tribal resources through geographical expansion, often at the expense of neighboring populations. Alternatively, some tribes may capture herds and seize pastures and water resources through predatory raiding. Such a strategy often appeals to young tribesmen who see it as a quick way to independence and prominence.[3] Either way, tribesmen are ready to fight. Their tribal structure enhances feelings of unity and normalizes antipathy against outsiders. Challenging neighbors over territory and livestock not only feels natural and justified but is also desirable.

Raiding is the modus operandi of predatory expansion with the capture of livestock the first priority. Attacks on the human population tend to vary according to the cultural distance of the outsiders. Those close are treated with some consideration: Men are allowed to escape, and women are not harmed, nor is housing destroyed. Among Bedouin, women from other Bedouin groups are often left some mulch animals to support their children.[4] But resistance is met by force, and injuries or deaths lead to blood feuds. Tribes can respond to blood feuds with large parties bent on vengeance. Conflict can thus escalate to all-out battle. Losers can escape by retreat, taking their household and livestock with them. This leaves the territory open for occupation by the winners.

The concept of "honor" infuses raiding and predatory expansion. First, fulfillment of obligations according to the dictates of lineage solidarity achieves honor. Second, neutral mediators who resolve conflicts and restore peace among tribesmen win honor. Third, victory in conflicts between lineages in opposition brings honor. Violence against outsiders is a well-worn path for those seeking honor. Success brings honor. Winners gain; losers lose. Trying, short of success, counts for nothing. In Middle Eastern tribal culture, victims are despised, not celebrated.

Nothing is more common in the history of tribes in the Middle East and North Africa than battles between tribes, the displacement of one by another, and the pushing of losing tribes out of their territories. Sometimes, losing tribes became dependents of stronger tribes, allowing them to continue to access territory while, at other times, losing tribes retreated to peasant areas from where they were absorbed into the peasantry, and lost their tribal nature.[5]

While tribal organization facilitates the ability of Middle Easterners first to defend life and property and second to make a living through pastoralism, it also facilitates control over other people and their resources. The principle of alliance, with the closer against the more distant, applies both within and outside the tribe. Just as all members of a small lineage are obliged to unify and support the lineage against another lineage, all members of a tribe are expected to unify and support the tribe when it is in conflict with others. This does not mean that all members of the tribe line up in one gigantic regiment but rather that other members of the tribe see themselves as unified against outsiders and will provide material support if and when necessary. Tribal solidarity and balanced opposition remain powerful means of predatory expansion.[6]

Tribal Influence on the Rise of Islam

It is against this backdrop of tribal interaction that Muhammad's actions should be considered. Prior to Muhammad's ascendancy, the tribes of northern Arabia engaged in raiding and feuding, fighting among themselves for livestock, territory, and honor. Muhammad's genius was to unite the fissiparous, feuding Bedouin tribes into a cohesive polity. Just as he had provided a constitution of rules under which the people of Medina could live together, so he provided a constitution for all Arabs, which had the imprimatur not only of Muhammad but also of God. Submission—the root meaning of the Arabic term islam–to God and His rules, spelled out in the Qur'an, bound into solidarity Arabian tribesmen, who collectively became the umma, the community of believers.

Building on the tribal system, Muhammad framed an inclusive structure within which the tribes had a common, God-given identity as Muslims. This imbued the tribes with a common interest and common project. But unification was only possible by extending the basic tribal principle of balanced opposition. This Muhammad did by opposing the Muslim to the infidel, and the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam and peace, to the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels and conflict. He raised balanced opposition to a higher structural level as the new Muslim tribes unified in the face of the infidel enemy. Bedouin raiding became sanctified as an act of religious duty. With every successful battle against unbelievers, more Bedouin joined the umma. Once united, the Bedouin warriors turned outward, teaching the world the meaning of jihad, which some academics today say means only struggle but which, in the context of early Islamic writing and theological debates, was understood as holy war.

The Arabs, in lightning thrusts, challenged and beat the Byzantines to the north and the Persians to the east, both weakened by continuous wars with one another. These stunning successes were followed rapidly by conquests of Christian and Jewish populations in Egypt, Libya, and the Maghreb, and, in the east, central Asia and the Hindu population of northern India. Not content with these triumphs, Arab armies invaded and subdued much of Christian Spain and Portugal, and all of Sicily. Since the Roman Empire, the world had not seen such power and reach. Almost all fell before the blades of the Muslim armies.

Conquest of vast lands, large populations, and advanced civilizations is a bloody and brutal task. Most accounts of Islamic history glide over the conquests, as if they were friendly takeovers executed to everyone's satisfaction. Boston University anthropologist Charles Lindholm, for example, wrote, "The Muslim message of the equality of all believers struck a cord with the common people of the empires, who, theoretically at least, were liberated from their inferior status by the simple act of conversion. The rise of Islam was both an economic and social revolution, offering new wealth and freedom to the dominions it assimilated under the banner of a universal brotherhood guided by the message of the Prophet of Allah."[7] It may have been the best of all possible worlds, so long as one had not been one of the slain, enslaved, expropriated, suppressed, and degraded.

There are some accounts that address the Islamic conquests more frankly. Andrew Bostom, an associate professor of medicine at Brown University who edited a collection of primary source descriptions of jihad, provides lengthy quotes from major Islamic authorities, ancient and modern, verifying the obligation upon all Muslims to make holy war against infidels.[8]

The Arab and Islamic conquests were not unlike tribal raids against distant, unprotected peoples, but on a much larger scale. One of the main characteristics of the Arab empire was the enslavement of conquered peoples.[9] During conquest, men were commonly slaughtered while women and children were taken in slavery. Muslim invaders spared men who willingly converted but still enslaved their wives and children. In conquered regions, Muslim troops often took children from parents while along the periphery, it was normal to raid for slaves.

Bostom and other scholars provide historical accounts of such jihad.[10] One Greek Christian account describes the Arab invasion of Egypt as "merciless and brutal." Not only did the Muslim invaders slay the commander of the Byzantine troops and his companions, but they also put to the sword all who surrendered including old men, babes, or women.[11] Similar slaughters occurred across Palestine and Cyprus. Muslim troops were particularly brutal toward non-Muslim religious institutions. During the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, many Christian monks were put to death. One Muslim historian estimated that Arab armies destroyed 30,000 churches throughout Egypt, Syria, and other central lands.[12] An Armenian historian reported that, following a rebellion in 703, General Muhammad bin Marwan invaded the province, massacring and enslaving the populace. He wrote a letter to the nobility, giving guarantees of safety in return for surrender. They surrendered, at which point the Arab invaders shut them in churches and burned them alive.[13]

While writers today depict the Muslim civilization in medieval Spain as tolerant, a Grenadan Muslim general from the late thirteenth century wrote that "it is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden, if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them." He further advised razing cities and doing everything to ruin non-Muslims.[14] Muslim generals instituted similar practices in Afghanistan and India.

Tribesmen can treat non-members with disdain. Tribal identity coalesces in opposition to the "other." Common Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims reflect the influence of these tribal values. The historical evidence for the degradation of Christian and Jewish dhimmi [subjugated religious minority] in Muslim lands is overwhelming, both in quantity and near unanimity in substance. Much is documented in Bat Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.[15] In eleventh-century Al-Andalus, for example, Abu Ishaq, a well-known Arab poet and jurist of the day, expressed outrage at the presence of a Jewish minister in the court of the ruler of Granada. He argued that the Muslim leaders should "[p]ut [the Jews] back where they belong and reduce them to the lowest of the low … Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them." Soon after his call, local residents slaughtered approximately 5,000 Grenadan Jews.[16] Such sentiments were not exceptions limited in time and scope. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat spoke in closely parallel terms to Abu Ishaq's when, on April 25, 1972, he declared, "[The Jews] shall return and be as the Qur'an said of them: ‘condemned to humiliation and misery.' … We shall send them back to their former status."[17]

Arab Muslims frequently subjugated their non-Muslim brethren across the width and breadth of the Muslim world. The Spaniard Badia y Leblich traveled in Morocco at the end of the nineteenth century as a Muslim named Ali Bey and reported the Jews there to be "in the most abject state of slavery."[18] William Shaler, the U.S. consul in Algiers from 1816 to 1828, described the Jews of Algiers to be "a most oppressed people," not even permitted to resist any violence from a Muslim and subject to conscription for hard labor without notice.[19] Contemporaneous chroniclers describe the Jews of Tunis and Benghazi similarly.[20]

Such treatment is rooted in the Muslim belief that Islam was God's word and God's way and any other religion or belief was false. Muslims believe Judaism and Christianity to be superseded by Islam. All non-Muslims were infidels who should be subject to Islam. Jews and Christians were to be allowed to live as inferiors and subordinates, dhimmis, but with obligatory, legally-mandated humiliation; other infidels, such as Hindus and pagans, could choose between conversion to Islam and death although, in practice, many Muslim conquerors preferred to derive economic benefit from their enslavement.

The theological foundation of the Arab empire was the supremacy of Islam and the obligation of each Muslim to advance its domination.[21] The relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is thus defined by Islamic doctrine as one of superiority versus inferiority and of endless conflict until the successful conquest of the non-Muslims.

Islam also reflects tribal notions of honor with regard to women. Within the Arab tribal society in which Muhammad was born, women's reproductive capacity was necessary for lineage strength. The ability of the lineage to allocate women where needed most for strategic purposes, whether endogamously to contribute to the number of offspring or exogamously to establish or maintain an alliance, required obedience. The close attention of community members to the sexual behavior of women reflects not only a concern for fulfilling community norms but also a keen self-interest in rank competition and the way different groups may rise or fall.

But have Muslims carried down views expressed in the fourteenth century C.E. to the present day? Here anthropologists contribute to the discussion. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, later professor of social anthropology at Oxford University, had close contact with the Bedouin of Libya during World War II. In his studies of eastern Libya encapsulated in The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, he observed that the Bedouin saw it as their special religious responsibility to carry out holy war, jihad, leaving others to pray and study the Qur'an.[22] When the Italians invaded Libya early in the twentieth century, the Bedouin of Cyrenaica were unwilling to accept Italians as rulers under any terms, no matter how generous. Although the Bedouin were heavily outgunned, they chose to fight for decades until they were virtually exterminated.

From a political point of view, Islam raised tribal society to a higher, more inclusive level of integration. But it was not able to replace the central principle of tribal political organization. Framing Muslims in opposition to the infidel preserved the balanced opposition. As with tribal lineage, affiliation and loyalty became defined by opposition.

The basic tribal framework of "us versus them" remains in Islam. The conception "my group, right or wrong" does not exist because the question of right or wrong never comes up. Allegiance is to "my group," period, full stop, always defined against "the other." An overarching, universalistic, inclusive constitution is not possible. Islam is not a constant referent but rather, like every level of tribal political organization, is contingent. People act politically as Muslims only when in opposition to infidels. Among Muslims, people will mobilize on a sectarian basis, as Sunni versus Shi‘a. Among Sunni, people will mobilize as the Karim tribe versus the Mahmud tribe; within the Karim tribe, people will mobilize according to whom they find themselves in opposition to: tribal section versus tribal section; lineage versus lineage, and so on.

The structural fissiparousness of the tribal order makes societal cohesion difficult. Affiliation places people and groups in opposition to one another. There is no universal reference that can include all parties. Oppositionalism then becomes the cultural imperative. While the tribal system based on balanced opposition effectively supports decentralized nomads, it inhibits societal integration and precludes civil peace based on settlement of disputes through legal judgment at the local level.

Islam's Bloody Borders
What does this mean today? The tribal notion of balanced opposition has profound implications on modern conflict. The Arab-Israeli debate is polarized and almost every "fact" contested by the other side. Too often, though, Western academics, journalists, and policymakers focus on the debate without reference to how Arab culture shapes and impacts the conflict.

Any outside observer without any prior knowledge of the Arab-Israeli conflict would find the unrelenting rejection by Arabs of Israel to be confusing. It would be difficult to fathom why Arabs who currently struggle to get along with one another would not look with enthusiasm to neighbors who could and would assist them in bettering their circumstances. The Arab situation, compared to Israel's, is bleak. In all spheres of life except for religion, Arab society and culture has declined in importance and influence. In global competition with other societies and cultures, Arabs have for centuries been losers. Israel, on the other hand, is a parliamentary democracy with established civil liberties. It is perhaps the most multiracial and multicultural state in the world, gathering as it has Jews from all corners of the world. It has also accepted and, albeit imperfectly, incorporated a substantial population of Arab Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian. Israeli science and technology makes major contributions to medicine and high technology. IBM and Intel each have three research and development centers in Israel while Microsoft and Cisco Systems have built their only non-U.S. facilities there. Motorola has its largest research and development site in Israel. Israelis are close cousins of the Arabs. Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages. And, even religiously, Jews are a fellow "people of the book."

Rather than accept any Israeli contribution—even Arab countries at peace with Israel refuse, for example, to accept disaster relief from the Jewish state—the Arab rejection of Israel is close to absolute. Four factors contribute to Arab rejectionism: (1) conflicting material interests, (2) use of Israel as an external enemy by Arab leaders to diffuse internal discontent, (3) Arab organizational principles based on opposition, and (4) the challenged honor of the Arabs. These last two factors are perhaps the most important. Not by coincidence, they derive from Arab tribal culture and are now incorporated as general principles in Arab cultures.

Conflicts in material interest—such as over land and water—are important, but they are common whenever people live together. Seldom do they become intractable. Arab rulers' diversion of internal discontent outward toward Israel is also important. But it is the balanced opposition drawn from tribalism that impacts enmity more. The Arab saying, "Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the world," holds true. Take for example the situation of Libya in the years prior to World War I: Prior to the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, Arab Bedouin there fought Turkish overlords. But, rather than stay neutral or join the Italians, the Bedouin instead sided with their co-religionists against the Italians. For much the same reason, Arabs will unite in enmity to any non-Arab, let alone non-Muslim. In the conflict with Israel, the most basic Arab social principle is solidarity with the closer in opposition to the distant. "Right" and "wrong" are correlated with "my group" (always right) and "the other group" (always wrong). The underlying morality is that one must strive always to advantage one's own group and to disadvantage the other group.

For Arab Muslims confronting Jews, the opposition is between the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, and the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels. The Muslim is obliged to advance God's true way, Islam, in the face of the ignominy of the Jew's false religion. Islamic doctrine holds that all non-Muslims, whether Christian or Jewish dhimmi or infidel pagans, must be subordinate to Muslims. Jews under Qur'anic doctrine are inferior by virtue of their false religion and must not be allowed to be equal to Muslims. For Muslim Arabs, the conceit of Jews establishing their own state, Israel, and on territory conquered by Muslims and, since Muhammad, under Muslim control is outrageous and intolerable. As Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University and an expert on Arab politics explains, "Underneath the modern cover there remained the older realities of sects, ethnicity, and the call of the clans."[23] There is no way, in this structure, to reach beyond the Arab versus Israeli and Muslim versus Jew opposition to establish a common interest, short of an unimagined attack on both Arabs and Israelis by some group more distant. In this oppositional framework, it is impossible to seek or see common interests or common possibilities. Israel will always be the distant "other" to be disadvantaged and, if possible, conquered.

A corollary principle, also with roots in Arab tribalism, is honor. Arab honor consists of the warrior's success in confrontations against outsiders. Only the victorious have honor. The more vanquished are the defeated, the greater is the victor's honor. As Ajami observes, in the Arab world, "triumph rarely comes with mercy or moderation."[24] Arabs are taught, and many have taken to heart, that honor is more important than wealth, fame, love, or even death. Imbued with such a sense, today's Arab finds himself in an untenable situation: Juxtaposing their recent history to the years of glory under Muhammad, Arabs can see only defeat visited upon defeat. First there was the breakdown of Arab solidarity and fighting among the Arabs themselves, then the Turkish Ottomans conquered the region. The decline and fall of the Ottomans led to conquest and occupation of almost all Arab lands by the Christians of Europe. Even their successful anti-colonial struggles turned into empty victories with Arab populations subject to power-hungry rulers, sadistic despots, or religious fanatics.

What honor can be found in defeat and oppression? And what self-respect can Arabs find without honor? In a world of defeat and failure, honor can be found only in resistance. Arab self-respect demands honor be vindicated through standing and fighting, no matter what the cost. In a 2006 interview, Pierre Heumann, a journalist with the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, asked Al-Jazeera editor-in-chief Ahmed Sheikh whether enmity toward Israel is motivated by self-esteem. Sheikh explained, "Exactly. It's because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab."[25] Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi echoes a similar theme in his 1979 volume Wounded Thunder in which he laments the failure of the Arabs to defeat Israel. "How heavy is the shame," Hawi asks. "Do I bear it alone?"[26]

These four factors—the defense of honor, segmentary opposition, transference of discontent outward, and conflicting material interests—militate in favor of alienation between the Arabs and Israel and the tenacious rejectionism of the Arabs. The two cultural factors—honor and opposition—are influences deeply embedded in Arab character. What appears to be reasonable to Westerners will not appear reasonable to Arabs. Such is the power of culture.

The conflict between Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, is not the only major conflict between Muslims and others. On the contrary, military contests along the borders of lands dominated by Muslims are pervasive. Samuel Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, observed, "The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts … have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While at the macro or global level of world politics, the primary clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the micro or local level it is between Islam and the others."[27] Among the conflicts enumerated by Huntington are the Bosnians versus the Serbs, the Turks versus the Greeks, Turks versus Armenians, Azerbaijanis versus Armenians, Tatars versus Russians, Afghans and Tajiks versus Russians, Uighurs versus Han Chinese, Pakistanis versus Indians, Sudanese Arabs versus southern Sudanese Christians and animists, and northern Muslim Nigerians versus southern Christian Nigerians.

Indeed, everywhere along the perimeter of the Muslim-ruled bloc, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. Muslims may only comprise one-fifth of the world's population, but in this decade and the last, they have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of any other civilization.

Leadership
Muslim Middle Eastern countries, from Morocco to Iran, are dictatorships. None are ranked free, and some, such as Egypt, Iran, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, are ranked not free, the lowest category.[28] The propensity of Arab states and Iran to dictatorship also has roots in tribal culture. There is an inherent conflict between peasants and nomads. Peasants are sedentary, tied to their land, water, and crops while tribesmen are nomadic, moving around remote regions. Peasants tend to be densely concentrated in water-rich areas around rivers or irrigation systems while pastoral tribesmen, in contrast, are spread thinly across plains, deserts, and mountains.

To state leaders, cultivators are vulnerable and rewarding targets who cannot escape without sacrificing their means of making a living. In comparison to peasant cultivators, pastoral nomads are much less vulnerable than cultivators to state importunity. Both their main capital resource, livestock, and their household shelter are mobile. While farming follows a rigid schedule of planting and exploitation, nomadism requires constant decisions and initiative, which instill willfulness and independence. Mobility and guerilla prowess make tribesmen less vulnerable than peasants to state control.

States struggle to impose effective control over the nomads. State authorities do not, however, always take a modest, compromising attitude in dealing with tribes. The Ottomans tended to be a bit more stringent in their own heartland. If tribes in Anatolia were deemed to be too independent, the government responded rigorously. Ottoman authorities forcibly settled unruly tribes and, in the 1920s and 1930s, Reza Shah subjected and forcibly settled in villages Iran's nomadic tribes—the Qashqai and Basseri of the southwest, the Lurs of the west, the Kurds of the northwest, the Turkmen of the northeast, and the Baluch of the southeast.[29] When occupying British officials deposed Reza Shah in 1941, many of the tribesmen reverted to nomadism.

In order for states to retain control over and exploit the production of their subjects, they must transform tribesmen into peasants. Governments cannot extract taxes and recruit soldiers from tribesmen, but they can do so from sedentary populations. Peasants are socially fragmented because the state has monopolized responsibility for collective action. Fast forward to the modern day. This tribal dynamic leads to dictatorship. Dictatorship occurs in one of two ways: In some societies, political leaders must use repression to stymie the centrifugal force inherent in tribalism. In countries, though, such as Libya or some Persian Gulf emirates, tribes are encapsulated in the national government. Tribal leadership morphs into the governing structure. Tribal notables become regional if not national elites. Either way, a rigid governing structure takes root.

Conclusions
What part does tribal organization and culture play in contemporary Middle Eastern life? Is it possible to say that tribes in the Middle East are primarily of historical interest with little influence in modern Middle Eastern societies, at least outside the state? After all, in the Middle East, there are established state organizations with governments, bureaucracies, police, courts, armies, and political parties. If Middle Eastern states are developed countries with modern institutions, then it might be easy to assume that the influence of tribes and tribal life and culture is minimal or nonexistent. It would then follow that the argument that Middle Eastern culture is imbued with tribal culture and organization and that balanced opposition underlies many aspects of contemporary Middle Eastern life must be heavily discounted or rejected altogether. Middle Eastern societies are not "modern," however, in the sense that European and American societies are. The tribal spirit holds sway. Its influence upon Islam permeates even the most cosmopolitan Arab states even if the tribal influences enshrined in the religion espoused or revealed by Muhammad are, almost fourteen centuries later, forgotten. Indeed, had Islam, whatever its many dimensions and complexities, not incorporated the balanced opposition structure of the tribal society that it sought to overlay, it is doubtful whether it could have been as accepted and successful as it was.

Philip Carl Salzman is the author of Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), on which this excerpt is based.

[1] Fredrick Barth, Nomads of South Persia (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1961), pp. 98, 104-11.
[2] William Lancaster, The Rwala Bedouin Today (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1997).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Louise Sweet, "Camel Raiding of North Arabian Bedouin: A Mechanism of Ecological Adaption," American Anthropologist, 67 (1965): 1132-50; William Irons, "Livestock Raiding among Pastoralists: An Adaptive Interpretation," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, 50 (1965): 393-414; Lancaster, The Rwala Bedouin Today, p. 141.
[5] E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949); Emrys L. Peters, The Bedouin of Cyrenaica: Studies in Personal and Corporate Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[6] Marshall Sahlins, "The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion," American Anthropologist, 63 (1961): 322-43.
[7] See, for example, Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 79.
[8] "Part 3: Muslim Theologians and Jurists on Jihad: Classical Writings," in Andrew Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2005), pp. 141-248.
[9] Andrew Bostom, "Part 2: Jihad Conquests and the Imposition of Dhimmitude—A Survey," in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, pp. 86-93.
[10] "Part 6: Jihad in the Near East, Europe, and Asia Minor and on the Indian Subcontinent," pp. 383-528, "Part 7: Jihad Slavery," pp. 529-88, "Part 8: Muslim and Non-Muslim Chronicles and Eyewitness Accounts of Jihad Campaigns," pp. 589-674, in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad; P.M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds. The Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
[11] Demetrios Constantelos, "Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East," in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, p. 390.
[12] Ibid., p. 393.
[13] Aram Ter-Ghevondian, "The Armenian Rebellion of 703 against the Caliphate," in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, p. 412.
[14] C.E. Dufourcq, "The Days of Razzia and Invasion," in Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, pp. 419-20.
[15] Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
[16] David G. Littman and Bat Ye'or, "Protected Peoples under Islam," in Robert Spencer, ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2005), p. 93.
[17] The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 24, 1995.
[18] Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, quoted in Littman and Ye'or, "Protected Peoples under Islam," p. 99.
[19] An 1826 report by Shaler, quoted in Littman and Ye'or, "Protected Peoples under Islam," p. 101.
[20] Littman and Ye'or, "Protected Peoples under Islam," p. 102.
[21] Bat Ye'or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 40-1.
[22] Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, p. 63.
[23] Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 155.
[24] Ibid., p. 134.
[25] Pierre Heumann, "An Interview with Al-Jazeera Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Sheikh," World Politics Review, Dec. 7, 2006.
[26] Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, p. 97.
[27] Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996), pp. 254-8.
[28] "2007 Subscores," Freedom in the World (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2007), accessed Sept. 28, 2007.
[29] Hassan Arfa, Under Five Shahs (London: John Murray, 1965), p. 253-7.

[ramana]

Reply by
T. Greer
09 October, 2013 at 2:57 pm

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Balochistan, and the Mahgreb (and to a lesser extant, much of the Turk homelands) were organized along tribal lines when the Caliphate began its expansion, and they have more or less remained organized along those lines to the present day. I will talk about this a bit more in the next piece, but part of the brilliance of the Islamic order was its ability to adapt to (I would even say 'hijack') existing tribal values and guide tribal conflicts to the benefit of the system as a whole.

In many ways Pakistan follows the model better than any of the actual Arab states do – see, for example, endogamy or female literacy rates in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh. The stark difference between Pakistan and Bangladesh's endogamy rates (a pretty good marker of Islamic tribalism) is particularly revealing.

In some parts of the world tribalism is not as strong, but the Saudis do try their best to spread the mind set of Najdi tribalism by setting up Wahhabi schools all around the globe. I was a little astounded when I learned Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a Najdi. It all started to make sense…

Of course, Najdi tribal values by themselves do not a terrorist make. Arab tribalism and the Islamic order it spawned have existed for ages. Violent terrorism is a newer innovation. But you have to understand the system and the pressures it is now under to understand why its more radical (or conservative?) elements think savage terrorist attacks will work as an effective political method.

But that is what part II is for.

[ramana]

Imtiaz Mahmood on FB

Muslims believe in fiction created by the Abbasids.
1. Mecca didn’t exist in the 7th Century (at best a hamlet)
A. No archeological evidence
B. No historical evidence
C. No or very little water
2. Mecca (only mentioned once in the Quran) wasn’t on any historical map until 900.
The Quran talks about a fertile place, which is not Mecca.
A. A stream
B. Fruits
C. Olive trees
D. Fields etc.
None of which Mecca had in the 7th, 8th, 9th 10th, to the late 20th centuries when Saudi started to have water desalination plants built.
3. Medina was an insignificant little place.
4. The term ‘Mohammad’ (Praised One) was first found on a Christian coin in 661 referring to Jesus, the coin had Christian symbols.
5. The term Mohammad was used by Arab Christians for Jesus until the mid-8th century.
6. The Mohammad that Muslims think of was an Abbasid invention in the late 8th century or early 9th century.
Mohammad is mentioned four times in the Korans/Qurans, the Muslim/Abbasid Mohammad in the Quran is the last of the four (Surah 33:40), is an Abbasid interpolation, and the first three refer to Jesus.
7. The Dome of the Rock was not a Mosque; it was built by Abdul al-Malik as an anti-trinitarian Christian building.
Both Abdul al-Malik and his brother were anti-trinitarian Christians and used Christian symbols on their coins.
8. Abdul al-Malik sent a directive throughout his Kingdom saying that the term ‘Mohammad’ should refer to Jesus.
9. The only original parts of the Dome of the Rock are the inner ambulatories and the Mohammad’s written on them refer to Jesus (in fact the term Jesus is on one of them), and they are decorated with lots of grapes, a Christian symbol.
10. There were no Islamic Korans/Qurans in the 7th Century. The proto-Quran was in fact Christian lectionaries written in Aramaic and old Arabic. This has led to many mistranslations in the much later Islamic/Abbasid Quran. For example, it is not the Virgins that men get in Paradise but Grapes!
Conclusion; What Muslims believe today is a fraudulent story started by the Abbasids when they came into power in 749. The Abbasids ******** the Arab Anti-trinitarian Christian lectionaries (combined with the mistranslations) to form their Qurans to suit their agenda.

One thing is Yathrib disappeared.

[ramana]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMeXNm88Z-g

[sanman]

[chetak]

closer home

The clown identifies Indian history, almost in its entirety, with mughal "history". This suited the sly britshits and the "fearing for their lives djinnahs" who did not want the Hindus to learn about how inhumanely their barbarous abrahamic invaders had treated them and the untold bestial injustices that these two had visited on them and that included slavery, human trafficking, and genocide, both cultural and civilizational.

BTW, the britshit favored term indentured labor is a fancy name for bonded labor, aka slavery....

no amount of "culturing" and railwaying" is going to erase those horrendous historic memories, even though stupendous BIF efforts were made for over seven decades (to re educate the Indians, reminiscent of paki, nazi and leninist techniques)) and still continue to be made even today

the abrahamics are hell bent on burying invader history because they do not want Indians today to be aware of what happened the last time around.

They also want to bury the horrors of the partition.

Both are being deliberately done because the abrahamics plan to do both in the future and the BIF are setting the stage for act 2

#NCERT removes entire Mughal Era from Class XII syllabus!Are the decision makers of NCERT idiots?

Having no sense about History?

Nazi Germany took such self-destructive steps.Indian Civilization was enriched by Mughals.

History of India is incomplete without knowledge about Mughals.

Omitting the Mughals from school textbooks is not the answer; including them, then describing in detail their barbarity, debauchery, and jihadism is.

We don't want our next generation to not know about the Mughals; we want our next generation to know the truth about the Mughals.via@ARanganathan72

[Cyrano]

Agree with AR !

[hgupta]

Omitting the Mughals from school textbooks is not the answer; including them, then describing in detail their barbarity, debauchery, and jihadism is.

We don't want our next generation to not know about the Mughals; we want our next generation to know the truth about the Mughals.via@ARanganathan72

Problem with that approach is that it would be construed as anti Islamic and Islamophobia and end up in courts which it will be most assuredly reversed by the mi-lords. So better to delete it than modify it to avoid court fight.

[chetak]

Problem with that approach is that it would be construed as anti Islamic and Islamophobia and end up in courts which it will be most assuredly reversed by the mi-lords. So better to delete it than modify it to avoid court fight.

hgupta ji,

let them try.

Reversal in court is not the issue but the earlier act of callously doctoring shameful abrahamic history is the actual issue

Like horses for courses, its sauces for geese and ganders.

A one sided narrative doesn't work in democracies, as the truth is bound to surface, as it is doing now. Far superior minds than ours have okayed it.

Let the leftist turds bring it on

It would allow the sanatanis to wash a lot of dirty linen in public, singeing many BIF and abrahamic nether regions along the way.

or was this a mere coincidence, according to you....

"कांग्रेस राज में 1947 से 1977 तक भारत के केंद्रीय शिक्षा मंत्री रहे five नाम"
(Translation: 5 names who were the Union Education Minister of India from 1947 to 1977 under Congress rule)

1. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
2. Humayun Kabir
3. Mohammad Karim Changla
4. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed
5. Nurul Hasan

The text on the top reads: "कांग्रेस राज में 1947 से 1977 तक भारत के केंद्रीय शिक्षा मंत्री रहे five नाम" (Translation: 5 names who were the Union Education Minister of India from 1947 to 1977 under Congress rule)

The text on the bottom reads: "अब समझ में आ गया होगा कि बाबर, औरंगजेब, खिलजी जैसे क्रूर शासक महान कैसे बनाए गए थे...?" (Translation: Now it must be understood how cruel rulers like Babur, Aurangzeb, Khilji were glorified)

and now, there are multitudes of woke Hindus, both in India and abroad, who help them to continue their job that was actually conceived some years prior to the partition of India by a cabal of britshits and djinnahites to safeguard themselves from the long anticipated and coming blowback

[hgupta]

Ok but the BJP does not want another fight on its hands. It is totally focusing on winning the elections and cannot afford any sidetracking or distractions.

[chetak]

Ok but the BJP does not want another fight on its hands. It is totally focusing on winning the elections and cannot afford any sidetracking or distractions.

It's election time

The BJP is looking for a fight.

But the BJP knows how to play this out, and in KAR, the opposition is already quite apprehensive of raising such issues, and not without good reason

[Zynda]

I think deletion of material from text books is not the right approach as stated by AR & others...remove the glorification part & present both positives & negatives...strangely I think deletion is detrimental is one topic on which both the left & right agree up on (for different reasons though).

Already the narrative of how Modi/BJP govt is continuing fascism has started to appear in usual outlets.
Indian Textbooks Purged of Material Modi’s Party Finds Objectionable

The changes removed or shrank references to Hindu extremism, the country’s secular foundation and India’s long Muslim history.

[A_Gupta]

"Gauhar Jaan was one of the first recorded artists of India.. One of the earliest Holi recordings too in early 1900s".
Mere Hazrat ne Madeene me Manaayi Holi


What we need to understand is - what makes this possible? what makes this impossible?

[ramana]

Its a veneer of Islam that was put on these folks.
Same in Iran.

[A_Gupta]

Important. Interesting things happening in Indonesia.

[bala]

Don't know whether this is the thread but we need to understand the Bloody History of Islamic Conquest of India.
40,000 temples were destroyed in 500 years. 80 million perished. 25 lakh women were sold of as slaves.



The Britshits of course exceeded the Islamic hordes in their cruelty - 100+ million perished in famines and mowing down by gunfire.

[vimal]

Consciousness of Muslim Identity in South Asia Before 1947

Consciousness of Muslim Identity in South Asia Before 1947

The question of Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent may be analysed on the basis of social, religious, and political consciousness. Socially, the Muslim communities of India have never been united as a single cohesive entity. Their religious identity was transformed from a passive state to an active one according to the changing priorities of the ruling classes. They invoked religious sentiments when they fought against Hindu rulers and suppressed them when the shariah hindered their absolute rule. The concept of a Muslim political identity was a product of British rule when the electoral process, the so-called democratic institutions and traditions were introduced. British rule that created a minority complex amongst Indian Muslims and thereby a consciousness of Muslim political identity. After passing through a series of upheavals, the Muslim community shed its minority complex and declared itself a nation, asserting its separateness.

Northern India remained the centre of Muslim power, historically. The class of leading Muslim elites played an active role in determining and affirming Muslim identity according to their economic and political interests. Muslims of the other parts of India followed in their footsteps and looked at issues and problems from the point of view of northern Indian Muslims. We shall look at the changing concepts of Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent before 1947.

Three elements were amalgamated in the making of Muslim communities in India, namely conquerors who came from the north-west, immigrants, and local converts. The conquerors and their entourage had a sense of higher rank and superiority as it was they who wielded political power. Arab, Persian, Turkish, Central Asian, and Pathan immigrants, who came to India to make careers for themselves, were treated as if they shared a common ethnic background, and were integrated with the conqueror class as the ruling elite. Local converts, on the other hand, were treated as being lower down the social ladder and never accorded an equal place in the ethnically divided Muslim society. Thus, ethnic identity was more powerful in dividing Muslim society than the religious factor was in unifying it.

We can find an example of this in Chachnama, which is a basic source of the history of Sindh. Muslim conquerors of Sindh are referred to in the Chachnama as Arabs. Similarly, the early conquerors of northern India were known by their ethnic identity as Turks. After the foundation of their kingdom (AD 1206) they maintained their exclusive ethnic domination and did not share their power and privileges with other Muslim groups. The same policy was followed by other Muslim dynasties. The founder of the Lodhi dynasty, Bahlul (1451-1489), did not trust non-Afghan Muslims and invited Afghans from the mountains (Roh) to support him.

Locally converted Muslims were excluded from high positions and were despised by their foreign (Muslim) brothers. Ziauddin Barani (fourteenth century) cited a number of examples in the Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi when the Sultan refused to appoint lower caste Muslims to high posts, despite their intelligence, ability, and integrity. Barani propounds his racist theory by advising Muslim rulers to appoint only racially pure family members to high administrative jobs. He suggested that low caste Muslims should not be allowed to acquire higher education as that would make them arrogant. The theory of racial superiority served to reserve the limited available resources of the kingdom for the benefit of the privileged elite who did not want to share them with others. The ruling dynasties kept available resources in the hands of their own communities and excluded others.

The Mughals wrested power from a Muslim dynasty (AD 1526). On their arrival, therefore, they posed a threat to other Muslim rulers as well as to Hindu rulers. The danger of Mughal hegemony united Muslim Afghans and Hindu Rajputs in a common cause. They fought jointly against Babar in the battle of Kanwaha (AD 1527). However, Mughal rule changed the social structure of the Muslim community in India, as a large number Iranaians and Turks arrived in India after the opening of the North-West frontier. These new immigrants revived Iranian and Central Asian culture which had been in a process of decline during Afghan rule. To monopolize top positions in the state, Muslims of foreign origin formed a socially and culturally privilged group that not only excluded locally converted Muslims but also Afghans who were deprived of high status jobs. The Mughals were also very conscious of their fair colour, which distinguished them from the converted, darker complexioned Muslims. Since being a Muslim of foreign origin was considered prestigious, most of the locally converted Muslim families began to trace their origin to famous Arab tribes or to prominent Persian families.

The social structure of the Mughal aristocracy changed further when the empire extended its territories and required more people to administer them. Akbar (AD 1556-1605) as the emperor, realized that to rule the country exclusively with the help of Muslims of foreign origin posed a problem as there would not be enough administrators for the entire state. He realized that the administration had to be Indianized. Therefore, he broadened the Muslim aristocracy by including Rajputs in the administration. He eliminated all signs and symbols which differentiated Muslims and Hindus, and made attempts to integrate them as one. Despite Akbar’s efforts, however, the rigid social structure did not allow lower class (caste) Hindus and Muslims to move from their lower position in society to a higher status. Class rather than faith was the true dividing line. The Muslim aristocracy preferred to accept upper caste Rajputs as their equals rather than integrate with lower caste Muslims. Akbar’s policy was followed by his successors. Even Aurangzeb, in spite of his dislike of Hindus, had to keep them in his administration. He tried to create a semblance of homogeneity in the Muslim community by introducing religious reforms. But all his attempts to create a consciousness of Muslim identity came to nothing. During the entire Sultanate and Mughal periods, politically there was no symbol that could unite the Muslims into a single cohesive community. In the absence of any common economic interest that might bind the different groups of Muslims, they failed to cohere and achieve homogeneity as a single community. Biradaris, castes, professions, and class interests kept them politically and culturally divided.

The ulema made strenuous attempts to foster a religious consciousness and to build a Muslim identity on such consciousness, by dividing Indian society into believers and non-believers. They fulminated against ‘Hindu rituals’ being practised mainly by lower-class Muslims and warned them to reform and keep their religion ‘pure’. Their attitude towards locally converted Muslims was particularly hostile. They argued that by retaining some of their indigenous Indian customs, they were half Muslims and half Hindus. The ulema further argued that true Islam could be understood only through knowledge of Arabic or Persian. Therefore, to integrate with the ‘Muslim Community’ locally converted Muslims should abandon their vernacular culture and learn Arabic and Persian (the everday language of the ruling elite). By that definition, Muslims of foreign origin were taken to be better than those who had been locally converted. These latter were categorized as ignorant, illiterate, and bad Muslims. However, it must be said that in that period (AD 1206-1707) when the power of the Muslim rulers in India was at its height, no attempts were made to arouse religious, political, or social consciousness on the basis of a Muslim identity. It was only in the period of Akbar, when Rajputs were being integrated with Mughal nobility, that some ulema raised a voice against his religious, political, and social reforms and asserted the separateness of Hindu and Muslim communities. Later on, Aurangzeb tried to rally Muslim support by trying to unite them under a state-imposed version of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), compiled as the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri. But all his efforts failed to arrest the process of political disintegration which he was thus trying to avoid.

During the later period, the decline of Mughal political power dealt a heavy blow to the ruling Mughal aristocracy. Immigrants from Iran and Central Asia stopped coming in due to lack of patronage. The dominance of the Persian language weakened. Urdu emerged as the new language of the Muslim elite. The social as well as the political hegemony of Muslims of foreign origin was reduced. Locally converted Muslims began to claim and raise themselves to a new, higher status.

The rise and successes of the East India Company undermined the role of the Muslim ruling classes. Defeats in the battles of Plassey (AD 1757), Buxar (AD 1764) and, finally, the occupation of Delhi by the British (AD 1803) sealed the fate of Mughal power and threatened the privileged existence of the Muslim ruling elite, as the Mughal emperor became incapable of defending their interests.

Under these circumstances, after Shah Alam II, the practice of reciting the name of the Ottoman caliph in the khutba began. This was meant to indicate that the Ottoman Caliph, and no longer the Mughal emperor, was the defender and protector of the Muslim community in India. Another significant change was that with the eclipse of the political authority of the Mughal emperor, the ulema began to represent themselves as the protectors and custodians of the interests of the community. They were now contemptuous of the Mughals whose decline they attribute to their indifference towards religion. They embarked on revivalistic movements which they claimed would lift the community from the low position to which it had fallen. Their revivalism was intended to reform the Muslim community and infuse homogeneity in order to meet the challenges that confronted them.

Sayyid Ahmed’s Jihad (AD 1831) and Haji Shariatullah’s Faraizi movements’ were revivalist and strove to purify Islam of Hindu rituals and customs. Their ultimate goal was to establish an Islamic state in India and to unite Muslims into one community on the basis of religion. Two factors played an important role in reinforcing the creation of a separate identity amongst Indian Muslims. They were, firstly, the activities of Christian Missionaries and secondly, the Hindu reformist and revivalist movements. Muslims felt threatened by both. The fear of Muslims being converted into another faith, and of being dominated by others, led the ulema to organize themselves ‘to save Muslims from extinction’. Recognizing the authority of the ulema, Muslims turned towards them for guidance. They sought fatawa over whether they should learn the English language, serve the East India Company, and regard India as Dar-ul-Islam(under which they could live peacefully) rather than as Dar-ul-Harb (which imposed upon them an obligation to rebel). Thus, external and internal challenges brought the Muslims of India closer together. Religious consciousness paved the way towards their separate identity. The madrassa, mosque, and khanqah became symbols of their religious identity. However, the hopes that they placed in religious revivalism as the path to political power came to an end when Sayyid Ahmed was defeated and his Jihad movement failed to mobilize Muslims to fight against British rule. Bengali Muslims were subdued with the suppression of the Faraizi movement, and the brutal repression that followed the uprising of 1857 reduced the Muslim upper classes to a shadow of what they had been.

Indian Muslims were demoralized after the failure of the rebellion of 1857. Sadness and gloom prevailed everywhere. Muslims felt crushed and isolated. There came a challenge from British scholars who criticized Islamic institutions as being unsuitable for modern times. Never before had Indian Muslims faced such criticism of their religion. This frightened and angered them. In response, Indian Muslim scholars came forward to defend their religion. This led them to study Islamic history in order to rediscover that they believed to be a golden past. In reply to Western criticism they formulated their arguments, substantiated by historical facts, that Europe owed its progress to the contributions of Muslim scientists and scholars, which were transmitted to it through the University of Cordoba in Moorish Spain, where, under Umayyid rule, there was a policy of religious tolerance towards Christians and Jews. Muslim contributions to art, literature, architecture, and science, thus enriched human civilization. To popularize this new image of the role of Muslims in history, there followed a host of historical literature, popular as well as scholarly, to satiate the thirst of Muslims for recognition of their achievements. Such images of a golden past provided consolation to a community that felt helpless and folorn. Images of the glories of the Abbasids, the grandeur of the Moors of Spain, and the conquests of the Seljuks healed their wounded pride and helped to restore their self-confidence and pride. Ironically, while glorifying the Islamic past outside India, they ignored the past of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India. In their eyes, the distant and outside past was more attractive than the past they had actually inherited. It was left to the nationalist historians of India, mainly Hindu, to reconstruct the glory of Muslim India in building a secular, nationalist ideology in the struggle against British rule.

Muslim search for pride in their Islamic past, thus, once again turned the orientation of Indian Muslims towards the rest of the Muslim world. That consciousness of a greater Muslim identity obscured their Indian identity from their minds. Their sense of solidarity with the Muslim world found expression, especially, in sympathy for the Ottoman empire. Although most educated Indians were quite unaware of the history of the Ottomans, it became a focal point of their pride, displacing the Mughals. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, while explaining the attachment of Muslims to Turkey, said ‘When there were many Muslim kingdoms we did not feel grief when one of them was destroyed. If Turkey is conquered, there will be great grief, for she is the last of the great powers left to Islam.

During the Balkan wars (AD 1911-1914), when the existence of the Turkish empire was threatened, the sentiments of the Indian Muslims were deeply affected. Muhammad Ali expressed those feelings in these words ‘The Musalman’s heart throbs in unison with the Moors of Fez… with the Persians of Tehran… and with the Turks of Stamboul. The highly emotional articles that appeared in Muslim newspapers such as al-Hilal, Zamindar, Hamdard, Comrade, and Urdu-i-Mualla, aroused feelings of religious identity. Even secular Muslims turned towards religion, growing beards and observing religious rituals.

The Khilafat movement extended the consciousness of a greater Muslim identity amongst Indian Muslims. It also united the ulema and Western educated Muslims. The Muslim League, in its session of 1918, invited leading ulema to join the party. They grasped the opportunity and soon established control of the movement. When Gandhi supported the Khilafat issue and launched his non-cooperation movement (AD 1919-20), he brought out Hindus to protest in solidarity with the Muslims. But the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement and the eventual collapse of the Muslims, their unity with the Hindus evaporated.

Support of Pan-Islamism and the Khilafat by the Indian Muslims was the emotional need of the growing Muslim middle class, which was in search of an identity. Rejecting the territorial concept of nationhood, they turned to the Muslim world in order to add weight to their demands. The failure of the Khilafat Movement weakened their relationship with the Muslim world and the logic of extra-territorial nationalism came to an end with the end of the Turkish caliphate. The Muslim elite realized that to fulfil their demands they had to assert their separate identity in India. In the words of Prabhha Dixit, the Khilafat movement ‘constituted an intermediary stage in the transformation of a minority into a nation’.

The assertion of a separate national identity by the Indian Muslims brought them into conflict with the Hindus. The factors that had contributed to distance the two communities were the uneven development of Western education among them, the Urdu-Hindi conflict, the partition of Bengal, the Muslim demand for separate electorates, their demand for quotas for government jobs, and political representation. Communalist feelings in both communities were deepened by revivalist movements of the 1920s. In 1928, in response to the Shuddhi (purification) and Sangathan (Hindu unity) movements of Hindus, the Muslims formed Tabligh (proselytizing) and Tanzim (organization) movements to protect Muslim peasants from reconversion to Hinduism. In order to ‘purify’ the Muslims peasants, Muslim preachers visited far off villages and thus made them conscious of their religious identity. The consequently heightened awareness of their religious identity affected their relationship with the Hindu peasants and communalism greatly damaged their cordial and long-time social and cultural relationship.

This heightened religious consciousness was fully exploited by Muslim politicians when the question of distribution of government jobs and political representation arose. The Muslim elite, in order to get a better share in the name of the Muslim community, made full use of appeals to Muslim identity. Thus, the two-nation theory arose out of political necessity, and for the first time it highlighted the differences between Muslim and Hindu culture, social life, and history, as well as religion.

Muslim intellectuals provided the theoretical basis of the two-nation theory by reconstructing Indian history on the basis of religion. Those Muslim conquerors who had long been forgotten and had vanished into the dry pages of history, were resurrected and presented as champions of the Muslims of India. The conquests and achievements of those heroes infused Muslims, high and low, with pride. Ahmad Sirhindi of the seventeenth century and Shah Waliullah of the eighteenth, who were not so well known in their own time, were re-discovered by the Muslim elite who searched their writings of legitimation of their theory of two nations in India. Ahmad Sirhindi was the first Indian Muslim ‘Alim’ who declared that cow slaughter was an important ritual of Islam and should never be abandoned.

There followed an abundance of published literature which was widely read by the Muslim educated classes during this period. The novels of Abdul Halim Sharar, the poems of Hali and Iqbal, and the writings of Muhammad Ali enthralled Indian Muslims and reinforced the consciousness of a distinct Muslim identity. This was essentially on an emotional basis rather than by rational arguments.

The ulema also contributed to the infusion of religious feelings amongst ordinary Muslims by organizing milad festivals and giving a call to go ‘Back to the Quran, Back to the Prophet’. They mobilized the common people to take an active part in the religious and political issues concerning the interests of the Muslim community.

The political developments of the 1930s promoted further the consciousness of a Muslim identity. The propaganda of the Muslim League, the success of the Indian National Congress in the 1937 election, and the emergence of Jinnah as the sole spokesman of Indian Muslims, widened the political gulf between the two communities that led ultimately to the partition of the subcontinent.

In the first phase of the history of Muslim rule, the fact that the Muslim elite was in power, kept Muslim religious consciousness dormant. It was invoked only when its grip on power was threatened. For example, Babar appealed to the religious sentiments of Muslim soldiers on the eve of the battle of Kanwaha but forgot it once the crisis was over. Rather than a religious identity, the Muslim ruling elite asserted an ethnic identity in its bid to hold political and economic privileges. In the second phase, the fall of the Mughals deprived that elite of political power. The task of reviving the sense of their past glory was then left to the ulema. The Jihad movement of Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed and the Faraizi movement of Haji Shariatullah were outwardly religious but aimed at political goals. These leaders, however, sincerely believed that only after the revival of the pure and orthodox faith, could worldly and material success be achieved. Religious piety and political ambitions were interlaced and both provided the incentives to those movements.

In the third phase, the association of the Muslim elite with pan-Islamism was an attempt to derive strength and protection from the Muslim world in order to respond to challenges from the Hindus and the British Government. That movement united Western educated Muslims with the ulema. Anti-imperialist sentiments, on the other hand, brought them closer to the Hindus. In their efforts to maintain unity they gave up some of their religious symbols such as cow slaughter. The end of pan-Islamism and the break-up of Hindu-Muslim unity brought about a radical change in Indian Muslim politics. This led to the politicization of religion.

Thus, in the last phase, consciousness of Muslim identity was exploited by the leadership not so much for a religious cause but for achieving political goals. The leadership was privately secular, but in public they greatly emphasized religion and its values. It is here that the foundations of hypocrisy in appeals to religion were laid, which has persisted to this day. The Partition was regarded as the recognition of the separate identity of the Indian Muslims. But that identity instead of solving their problems has created more crises for the Muslims of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.

[SSridhar]

^Phenomenal write-up. Thanks, Vimal, for posting

[A_Gupta]

Transcript of the Battle for the Soul of Islam at:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/in-the- ... -of-islam/

Key paragraphs:

Democracy is a core principle to them. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim majority state and the world’s largest Muslim democracy, and that’s not something they want to change. On the contrary, that is something they want to uphold. They’re strong believers in pluralism and as I mentioned before in the example of abolishing the category of a kafir and replacing it with the notion of a citizen, it’s equality and equity for all irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion. To give you one example, last year the Minister of Religious Affairs in Indonesia who is a member of Nahdlatul Ulama, he’s the former head of their militia, was criticised for congratulating the Bahais on one of their holidays and in response to the criticism, he said, they are Indonesian citizens, even if it’s not one of the six religions that Indonesia officially recognises, they are Indonesian citizens and that’s as such I greet them.

One of the major distinctions I think between Nahdlatul Ulama and many other Muslim states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, which only conditionally endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and are particularly concerned about the articles 18 and 19 that relate to religious freedom, Nahdlatul Ulama endorses the declaration, unambiguously no conditions, no restrictions.

[ramana]

Vimal thanks for posting that article and highlighting the key points.
The important thing is Islam in India is far away from West Asia and survives due to patronage from secular Hindus who are slowly realizing its Darwinian end an not patronizing them with political power except in pockets.

Also with this, the ulema will lose their grip on the Muslim society as they have in Indonesia an other far away lands.

[ramana]

If Shiv is reading this would like him to draw a graphic of greenness with distance and political patronage.
For instance, Islam in the US is growing virulent but towards Hindus.
Its being encouraged by#Hinduphobia by Democrats/Progressives.

[bala]

In this startling and original documentary, writer and historian, Dan Gibson, shows that descriptions of Mohamed’s original holy city – as detailed in the Qur’an and Islamic histories, do not match that of the Mecca we know today. Gibson not only finds the location of the original Mecca but also provides a convincing argument as to how such a great misunderstanding in Islamic history came about.

The first Mosques constructed after establishment of Islam had their direction of prayer marked in a Qibla. Originally Petra in Jordan was the qibla i.e. city towards which they pray (e.g. Umayids who ruled over Sryia/Jordan). Later the Abbasids changed it to mecca; Petra was known as becca (weeping). Becca and Mecca sound similar, in fact, the arabic writing changes ever so slightly from 'b' to 'm'.

[NRao]

I was not aware that the Abrahamic Adam landed in India, after he left Eden. There are a lot of interesting nuggets.

[ramana]

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/ ... i-matthee/

“Angels Tapping at the Wine-­Shop’s Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World” by Rudi Matthee
Wine Drinking in a Spring Garden, ca 1430 (Metropolitan Museum) Wine Drinking in a Spring Garden, ca 1430 (Metropolitan Museum)

Why are we surprised that, while Islam forbids wine, Muslims have been known to imbibe? Doesn’t Christianity prohibit adultery? In Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop Door, Rudi Mathee explores the contradiction between the formal ban on alcohol and the essential cultural role of wine in Muslims societies over the ages.

At first glance, the prohibition of wine appears straightforward. Islam’s scriptures consider wine impure, drunkenness improper, and drunkards excluded from heavenly rewards. But historically practices were more complicated. As long as drinking did not disturb the social order, eg tippling in private, religion tended to turn a blind eye. Drinking without getting drunk had the approval of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, dominant in Ottoman lands. Other traditions argued that only grapes were to be avoided, allowing for date and fig wine, especially the distilled versions. Still others taught that distillation removed impurities from grape wine, making raki a particularly favored drink in Turkey. Scientists like Avicenna recommended wine for medicinal purposes, turning it into an oft-sought after remedy. Many Muslims societies tolerated drinking, along with other transgressive behaviors, for young men, with the expectation that age 40 would bring repentance and sobriety.

{40 was the 60 of that time!}[/i}

Tolerated or excused on the basis of manifold justifications, wine remained “integral … to Islamic culture … putting it at the center of Islam, making it almost its defining issue,” writes Mathee. This centrality resulted from three fundamental cultural factors.



Angels Tapping at the Wine-­Shop’s Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World, Rudi Matthee (Hurst, April 2023, Oxford University Press, June 2023)

Islam arose and spread in a wine-drinking culture. The ancient Arab poets celebrated wine. In the first lands conquered by Islam, Syria, Egypt and Iran, vineyards could be found everywhere. For centuries the Muslims were a minority within the Muslim empire. They shared wine with their Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish neighbors. Later, as more people converted to Islam, they did not necessarily give up the bottle. This is especially true in the Balkans and in the Caucasus. Even in Turkey, the Alevi sect is known for combining religious rituals with imbibing, perhaps as part of a pre-Islamic practice.

This points to another important factor: wine itself enhanced religious experiences. Not just piety and asceticism brought believers closer to the Godhead, but also intoxication. Wine was frequently associated with love-making, which many Muslim poets and philosophers characterized as training wheels for the mystical journey. For Hafez and many other Persian poets, wine provided temporary and temporal ecstasy, while also acting as a potent metaphor of mystical union with God. It “opens a universe beyond good and evil, unlocking the treasure box of eternal wisdom and truth.” Mathee’s discussion of the role of wine in poetry and mysticism moves beyond the cliched formulation of wine being either real or metaphorical, arguing it is simultaneously both.

More prosaically, wine-soaked sociability oiled the gears of society. Kings and their courtiers frequently got drunk together, ensuring frankness and trust up and down the hierarchy. Many East Asian cultures still use alcohol in this way. Mathee speculates that the Islam’s medieval Turco-Mongol overlords brought with them the habits of the steppe nomads whose drinking bouts attained epic proportions. Most of Tamerlane’s descendants, for example, died from drinking. An exception was Babur, who had the hardest time giving it up while establishing the Mughal empire.



Despite the Ottomans, Timurids and Safavids belonging to a tradition of hard-riding and hard-drinking horsemen, as they grew in dignity and orthodoxy, several sultans and shahs tried to ban alcohol. More often they died of cirrhosis. The doctors of religion had a point about drinking: it brought down more than one ruler. The problem became more acute when the realms of Islam were menaced by the imperialists powers. It’s not as if the Russians, French and British didn’t drink. But their leaders tended not to spend the whole day in a drunken stupor.

Modernizing critics attacked this feckless ruling class of pashas, mirzas and nawabs, trying to rein in the centuries-old drinking culture. They were increasingly joined by fundamentalists, who reminded everyone that Islam had forbidden wine in the first place. Rejection of alcohol became an excuse for imposing a rigorist version of Islam. As a result, a certain amount of civility has been lost. As Mathee puts it, “Modern Muslim fundamentalists exclusively focus on the textual dimensions of Islam, as if they had inherited colonialism’s ignorance of the religion’s history of diversity and tolerance.” Some of his most poignant observations concern recent history in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, where ostentatious liquor bans have not reduced alcoholism, but simply driven it underground.

Much of this book is a romp through 1,400 years of history and across 3,000 miles of territory. This provides an element of exhaustivity that is exhausting, rather like an endless pub crawl. The real interest of Mathee’s survey is his sensitive and nuanced exploration of the inner lives of people with whom, though remote in time and place from us, we would have enjoyed sharing a drink.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art, and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). His forthcoming book Horse Power will be published by WW Norton in 2023.

And in some cultures, opium took the place of wine as its not mentioned. Humayun fell from the tower in Old Delhi after getting intoxicated with Opium.

[ramana]

Alos not it was the Persio-Arab and Turkish phases of Islam that narcotics took off.

[ramana]

Book review of Caliph and Imam.

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/ ... atthiesen/

“The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism” by Toby Matthiesen


Western scholars have tried, since the 18th century, to explain the differences between Sunni and Shia traditions of Islam; Muslim scholars have tried since the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Epistemological problems beset these efforts. How to describe beliefs, held by individuals across 5,000 miles and 1,400 years?

Toby Matthiesen tackles this problem head-on by taking a very long view and exploring an exhaustive list of Sunni and Shia thinkers. The result is a convincing argument for accepting ambiguity. The distinction between Sunnism and Shiism is much less clear cut than many writers, both Muslim and non-Muslims assert. Over long periods of time the sharpness of that distinction often has more to do with politics than theology. For most of their common history, Sunnis and Shia have shared a common destiny, living side by side. Current extreme positions, like that of ISIS or the Taliban, are the historical exception—we hope of short duration.

Matthiessen repeatedly emphasizes that toleration was at least as common as conflict across these 1,400 years.

The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism, Toby Matthiesen (Oxford University Press, January 2023)


At the death of Muhammad in 631 CE, a dispute arose whether his successor, or caliph, should be an early supporter, Abu Bakr, or the Prophet’s son-in-law and nephew Ali. Though Ali eventually was elected as the fourth caliph, his partisans, Shi’a in Arabic, claimed primacy for Ali and later his descendants, the Alids, calling them the leaders, or imams. Others followed the tradition, Sunna, of the elected caliphs; these were the Sunnis. This dispute about authority gave rise to different interpretations of the Quran, and different ways of performing religious duties. As time passed these different practices became codified into incompatible laws, in areas like marriage, inheritance and legal procedure.

This was probably inevitable in an era before mass media. People followed their local leaders, who transmitted oral traditions from their masters. In the first century of Islam, a wide variety of teachings prevailed. The caliphs of Damascus and then of Baghdad made great efforts to systematize Islamic laws, eventually imposing a choice of four recognized schools, each with its own jurisprudence. One of these schools, the Shafii, showed a great deal of sympathy for the Alids and respected some Shia practices. The Shia, in turn, when they did not openly revolt against the caliphs, rejected the authority of the four schools, and developed several of their own. The least extreme Shia emphasized respect for the Alids, while tolerating the de facto political supremacy of the caliphs. The most extreme Shia publicly cursed the caliphs, and added Ali’s name to the profession of faith. This often resulted in deadly conflict between the two traditions. Some scholars and statesmen on both sides strived for peaceful coexistence; others stoked the fires of sectarianism.

The mid-18th century eruption of the Sunni Wahhabis into the narrative is as epochal of that of the Shia Safavids.

Matthiessen repeatedly emphasizes that toleration was at least as common as conflict across these 1,400 years. The fact that there are sizable Shia minorities in many otherwise Sunni-dominant states, speaks for an attitude of live-and-let live. A major exception is the 16th century Safavid revolution in Iran, when a millenarian, militant sect conquered the country and forced most of the population to convert to Shiism. But even under the Safavids, many rural populations remained Sunni. In 18th and 19th century Iraq, the Sunni Ottoman government protected and patronized the large Shia community, partly to ensure their loyalty in any conflict with Shia Iran, and partly to enlist their support against the rising threat of the Wahhabis of Arabia.

The mid-18th century eruption of the Sunni Wahhabis into the narrative is as epochal of that of the Shia Safavids. At the dawn of the modern age, they defined a new extremist position, which, thanks to improved transportation and emerging mass media, spread quickly from Arabia to Calcutta. At the same time, the modern state increasingly interfered and organized private lives; people had their identities thrust on them by census takers, judges or border surveyors. This dynamic prevailed both in British India and in the Ottoman empire. The tolerance of the old “don’t ask, don’t tell” ethos was lost, and communal conflicts began to spiral out of control.



Matthiessen’s interweaving of the Indian subcontinent’s narratives with those of Egypt, Iran and Syria, adds much depth. He untangles the complex history of Sunni/Shia relationships in such problematic situations such as Yemen and Oman, forcing the reader to reimagine Islam’s history at a much more granular level, much closer to the lived experience of people than the grand, simplifying narratives of previous histories.

The closer he gets to contemporary events the denser and more twisted the narrative thread becomes. Occasionally the reader feels ambushed by sentences that make no sense until the reader supplies the missing word or replaces the wrong word (eg, “he commanded the Qajar governor for limiting festivities in the city”; “commended” is obviously intended) but persistent readers will be rewarded with many insights into current events, like the rise of militant Shiism in Lebanon, or the politics of the Assad family in Syria.

Covering 1,400 years of history however, does make it hard to get the flavor of each era correct. Oddly, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna is called Ibn Sebuktagin. The author refers to Afghan emir Abdulrahman Khan as “Khan” and occasionally confuses Pashtuns (a people) and Pashtu (their language). In a book of this length, it is hard to get all the details right. Muhammad Shah was not the last Mughal emperor, but rather the last effective one. Shah Abbas did not found Isfahan, but he rebuilt it. These are minor quibbles in a 800-page book, including 400 pages of footnotes, but speaks to a need for better copy editing.


Surprisingly, for such a detailed survey, there is a lack of vivid anecdotes about the disputed doctrines themselves, but Matthiessen does offer one pertinent example. Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah is said to have originally been an Ismaili, and later converted to Twelver Shiism. Following his death, the execution of his estate turned into a legal imbroglio. Jinnah, embracing the pan-Islamic ethos of early Pakistan, had refused to acknowledge allegiance to either school. Ismailis and Twelvers, though both Shia, differ in the treatment of men versus women in inheritance. So, his survivors battled away for years to establish Jinnah’s religious preferences in order to score the biggest share of his estate.

Different rules about inheritance reflect, ultimately, disagreement as to who provides a more authentic transmission of the Prophet’s teaching, Ali and his descendants, or the caliphs and their scholars? One can ask the same question about Matthiessen’s book. With over 400 pages of footnotes, we are left wondering whether his sources are accurate or not. Certainly, for some controversial figures, like Iran’s Nader Shah who tried to reconcile Shiism and Sunnism, we may never get to the truth of his original intent. It is fitting that The Caliph and the Imam itself be subject to epistemological uncertainty. The luxury of certainty is only enjoyed by the fanatics of ISIS and the Taliban.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). His forthcoming book Horse Power will be published by WW Norton in 2023.

[ramana]

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/ ... -el-hibri/

“The Abbasid Caliphate” by Tayeb El-Hibri


Few families have had as much success shaping history as the Abbasids. Descended from one of the Prophet Muhammad’s four uncles, they used their reputation for probity and piety to take over and rule the Arab Empire for 37 reigns. Deftly managing family feuds, they enjoyed a century of unimaginable splendor, followed by four centuries of highs and lows. They survived by pitting powerful external forces against one another: Arabs versus Persians, Northern Arabs versus the Southerners, Muslims versus non-Muslims, Sunni versus Shi’a. They allied with Charlemagne to put pressure on the Byzantines, with the Tang Dynasty to contain the Turks. They were the ultimate dynasty of fixers.

As a result of their balancing and inclusiveness, the culture and art of the ancient world flourished in their palaces in Baghdad, Raqqa and Samarra, where Greek and Persian were spoken alongside Arabic. Like their allies the Tang dynasty, they were open to new products or ideas: “It should be no shame for us to honor truth and make it our own, no matter whence it may come, even though from far distant races and peoples who differ from us”, said al-Kindi, one of their great philosophers. As a result, we look upon the Abbasid era not only as the golden age of Islam, but one of the world’s golden ages, period.


The Abbasid Caliphate, Tayeb El-Hibri (Cambridge University Press, April 2021)


Given the importance of the Abbasids, it is surprising how little has been written in recent years about them. The last decade has seen just one book each on Harun Al-Rashid, on the early Abbasids, and on the Abbasid Revolution. Dynastic histories have fallen out of favor, and historical narrative has been neglected in favor of thematic histories or idea-based histories. The result, writes author Tayeb El-Hibri, is to detach the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of this golden age from the lives of the men and women who delivered them. The Abbasid Caliphate addresses this lacuna.

El-Hibri, a specialist in Arabic historiography, uses contemporary or near-contemporary sources to bring to life the thrills and spills of the Abbasid era. He places the rock-star personalities of the era in the context of the reigns under which they served. The personalities of the rulers themselves are explored through their prodigious city and palace building, the magnificence of their weddings and festivals, and the contrasting harem intrigues, poisonings, and betrayals. The author provides a deep reading of the source texts to make it clear that even those writers struggled to make sense of the saga of the Abbasid family.

Their legacy is uncontestable. The Abbasids created Islam as we know it. The preceding dynasty, the Umayyads, had been content to rule as Arab Kings, paying very little attention to religious dogma or practice. Brought to power on the back of an Islamic revivalist movement, the Abbasids for the first time sought to sacralize their authority, rewarding religious scholars and encouraging the codification of Islamic law and lore. They were the first “Custodians of the two shrines (Makkah and Medina)”, a title used today by the Saudi ruler. This fusion of political and religious authority has been a feature of Islam ever since.

The Abbasids were, however, famously tolerant. Islam today has four schools of law, reflecting the Abbasids’ refusal to impose a single interpretation on the Muslim communities, unlike the pope or the Byzantine Emperor in the Christian world. This did not reflect a love of diverse opinions, but rather a prudence about potentially backing the wrong horse. On one occasion when the Abbasid ruler took a hard stance it ended in failure. Even in the fraught Sunni-Shi’a, conflict the Sunni Abbasids played a careful game. This is all the more surprising because they had a horse in this race.

The Abbasids descended, and claimed their legitimacy, from Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. The Shi’a argued the claim of the Alids, descendants of the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali. The Shi’a were bitterly disappointed that an Abbasid and not an Alid was chosen to lead the Muslims after the fall of the Umayyads. Yet the Abbasids treated Alid pretenders with kid gloves, in some cases bringing them tantalizingly close to power. The Abbasid ruler Ma’mum designated the Shi’a Imam Reza as his successor. The young Imam then died (and is buried in what is now Iran’s greatest pilgrimage site, Mashhad). Was he poisoned? By Ma’mum? This remains one of those many troubling episodes in the Abbasid saga, and highlights again the Abbasids’ proclivity for frenemies.

In the course of 500 years the Abbasids’ capacity for managing conflicts diminished. The Shi’a constantly strove to undermine their legitimacy. Iranian warlords took advantage of distance to alienate parts of the empire as inherited fiefdoms. Turkish slave soldiers became a law unto their own. Soon the Abbasids were reduced to acting as little more than Islamic popes, with no divisions. El-Hibri shows, however, that they managed, like the popes, to wield immense soft power. Such was the prestige of the last Abbasid that the Mongol conqueror Hulagu Khan, having sacked Baghdad, hesitated to harm him, fearing divine punishment. Only when a Shiite freethinker reassured Hulagu, did the Mongol Khan have the unlucky Abbasid trampled by his horses.

Readers who find themselves getting bogged down by the floods, assassinations, revolts and celebrations should read the last chapter, where El-Hibri steps back from dynastic chronology and tackles thematic questions around the Abbasids. Did they want to be popes or emperors? How successful were they in defining religious and cultural norms? Why did their soft power extend so far across the Muslim world? When they were overthrown why were they not restored?

El-Hibri’s telling is nuanced and well-reasoned, echoing the tone and style of the great Arabic historians. For general readers who want to understand the history of the Middle East, the evolution of Islam, and the Sunni-Shi’a rivalry, this book offers an excellent survey. For students it will serve as an entry point to more specialized studies.

[g.sarkar]

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ ... 123326.ece
No Waqf Board has authority to expel community from a religion: Smriti Irani amid Ahmadiyya row
Ms. Irani said, "I only want to say that all Waqf Boards come under the Act of Parliament.
July 26, 2023
Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday said no Waqf Board in the country has the authority to expel a person or a community from a religion, remarks that come amid a row over the Andhra Pradesh Waqf Board passing a resolution describing the Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims.
Prominent Muslim organisation Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind on Tuesday backed the Andhra Pradesh Waqf Board's stance on the Ahmadiyya community, claiming that this is the "unanimous position" of all Muslims.
Asked about the issue, Ms. Irani said, "I only want to say that all Waqf Boards come under the Act of Parliament. No Waqf Board can act contrary to the dignity of Parliament and violate laws made by it. No Waqf Board has permission that it changes a fatwa into a government order." "No Waqf Board has authority, under the Act of Parliament, that it expels a person or a community from a religion. We have sought a reply from the Andhra Pradesh chief secretary. We have requested him to put the facts before us because the Ahmadiyya Muslim community had appealed to the Minority Affairs Ministry," she told reporters outside Parliament.
.....
Gautam
Also see:
https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... d-8860211/
Ahamadiyyas are not Muslims: Jamiat backs Andhra Waqf Board
In 2012, the Andhra Pradesh State Waqf Board passed a resolution declaring the entire Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims
Esha Roy
.....