Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (28 page)

Ibn Taymiyah propounded three main points. First, he said there was nothing wrong with Islam, nothing false about the revelations, and nothing bogus about seeing Muslim victories as proof of them. The problem,
he proposed, lay with Muslims: they had stopped practicing “true” Islam, and God therefore had made them weak. To get back to their victorious ways, Muslims had to go back to the book and purge Islam of all new ideas, interpretations, and innovations: they must go back to the religious ways of Mohammed and his companions, back to those values and ideals, back to the material details of their everyday lives: the earliest rulings were the best rulings. That was the core of his judicial creed.

Second, Ibn Taymiyah asserted that jihad was a core obligation of every Muslim, right in there with praying, fasting, abjuring deceit, and other sacramental practices; and when Ibn Taymiyah said “jihad” he meant “strap on a sword.” The Umma, he said, was special because they were martial. No previous recipients of revelations from God had “enjoined
all
people with
all
that is right, nor did they prohibit
all
that is wrong to
all
people.” Some of them did not “take up armed struggle at all,” while others struggled merely “for the purpose of driving their enemy from their l
and, or as any oppressed people struggles against their oppressor.” To Ibn Taymiyah, this limited, defensive idea of jihad was inaccurate: jihad meant actively struggling, fighting even, not just to defend one’s life, home, and property but to expand the community of those who obeyed Allah.

Ibn Taymiyah went to war himself, against some Mongols. The Mongols he was fighting had converted to Islam by this time, which raised a question about Muslims fighting Muslims. But fighting these Muslims was legitimate jihad, Ibn Taymiyah expounded, because they were not real Muslims. He also opposed Christians, Jews, Sufis, and Muslims of other sects than his own—chiefly Shi’is. He once overheard a Christian making derogatory comments about the Prophet, and that night, he and a friend tracked down that Christian and beat him up.

You can see why his aggressive stance might have resonated for some of his contemporaries. Basically, he was saying, “We can’t roll over for pagan Mongols and Crusaders; let’s come together and fight back, finding strength in unity and unity in singleness of doctrine!” This sort of rallying cry has inevitable appeal in societies under attack by outsiders, and by this time the Islamic world had been under fearsome attack for over a century.

Ibn Taymiyah expanded the list of those against whom jihad was valid to include not just non-Muslims but heretics, apostates, and schismatics. In these categories he included Muslims who attempted to amend Isla
m or promoted division by interpreting the Qur’an and hadith in ways that departed from what the texts literally stated.

Ibn Taymiyah never conceded that he was pressing for his interpretation versus some other interpretation. He maintained that he was trying to stamp out unwarranted interpretation per se and urging Muslims to go back to the book, implying that the Qur’an (and hadith) existed in some absolute form, free of human interpretation.

Some would say that singling out heretics and schismatics had not been the spirit of early Islam. Arguments about the succession, yes; even bloody arguments. But Mohammed himself and the early Muslims in general tended to accept that people who wanted to be Muslims
were
Muslims. (“Hypocrites”—traitors pretending to be Muslims in order to undermine the community from within—were obviously a different case.) With all would-be Muslims accepted into the group, the group could sort out disagreements about what “Muslim” meant. Ibn Taymiyah, however, insisted that there was one way to be a Musli
m, and the main Muslim duty was to ascertain that one way and then follow it. Interpretation did not come into it, since everything a person needed to know about Islam was right there in the book in black and white.

Ibn Taymiyah mythologized the perfection of life in that first community, referring to Mohammed’s companions as
al
-
salaf al-salihin
, “the pious (or pristine) originals.” Versions of his doctrines eventually reemerged in India and North Africa as the movement called Salafism, which is with us to this day. The word comes up often in news stories about “Islamists.” It started here, in the shadow of the Mongol holocaust.

In his own day, Ibn Taymiyah built up only a moderate following. The masses didn’t care for him much, probably because he punished Muslims for folk practices they had incorporated into their idea of Islam and also for visiting shrines. Ibn Taymiyah claimed that showing reverence for human beings, even great ones, went against the precepts of the Pious Originals.

The authorities liked him even less because he denounced rulings they accepted as established. When called before a panel of ulama to defend his rulings, he rejected their authority, charging that they had lost their legitimacy by succumbing to innovations and interpretations. On one disputed doctrine after another, Ibn Taymiyah would not go along to get
along. The actual points disputed will strike non-Muslims as minutely technical: for example, was a divorce uttered three times merely final or
irrevocably
final? The establishment said it was irrevocable; Ibn Taymiyah said final but not irrevocable. In this instance, the authorities settled the argument by clapping Ibn Taymiyah in prison. He spent a lot of time in prison. In fact, he died there.

Ibn Taymiyah does not sum up what Islam is, nor even what it was in the thirteenth century—there are so many schools of thought, so many approaches—but the very attitudes that made so many clerics and officials angry with Ibn Taymiyah led many others to admire him. Ibn Taymiyah belonged to the school of Muslim jurisprudenc
e founded by Ibn Hanbal, that Abbasid-era scholar who took a bulldog stand against the primacy and sufficiency of reason. Ibn Hanbal had favored the most literal reading of the Qur’an and the most literalist methods for applying it, for the most part rejecting even analogical reasoning as a way of expanding the doctrines, and so did Ibn Taymiyah. Both men had flinty, combative, unbending temperaments. The fact that both went to prison for their ideas tended to ennoble their legacy quite apart from whatever intellectual merits their ideas may have had.

The identification of courage with truth pops up often in history, even in our day: talk-show host Bill Maher was kicked off network TV for suggesting that the suicide hijackers of 9/ll were brave. Common decency demands that no positive character traits be associated with someone whose actions and ideas are vicious. Unfortunately, this equation enables people to validate questionable ideas by defending them with courage, as if a coward cannot say something that is true or a brave man something that is false. Ibn Hanbal had benefited from this syndrome and, now, so did Ibn Taymiyah.

Ibn Taymiyah reputedly wrote about four thousand pamphlets and five hundred books. With these, he planted a seed. The seed didn’t flourish at once, but it never died out, either. It just lay there, under the surface of Islamic culture, ready to bud if circumstances should ever favor it. Four and a half centuries later, circumstances did.

 

There was another response to the centuries of breakdown that climaxed with the Mongol holocaust, a more popular and gentler r
esponse than Salafism, and this was the efflorescence of Sufism, which was as broad-minded and undogmatic as Ibn Taymiyah’s ideology was literalist and restrictive. Indeed, ecstatic Sufism (as opposed to “sober Sufism”) disturbed Ibn Taymiyah almost as much as pagan invaders, because to him infidels were merely the enemy outside, assaulting Islam, whereas Sufism was the enemy within, insidiously weakening the Umma by enlarging and blurring the singleness of the doctrine that defined it.

Sufism was that characteristically Islamic type of mysticism which had some ideas and impulses in common with Buddhism and Hindu mysticism. Sufis were individuals who, dissatisfied with the bureaucratization of religion, turned inward and sought methods of achieving mystical union with God.

All Sufis had pretty much the same idea about where they were going, but diverse ideas about how to get there, so different Sufis espoused different spiritual techniques. Every time a Sufi seemed to break through, the word spread and other seekers flocked to the enlightened soul for guidance, hoping that direct contact with his or her charisma would fuel their own quest for transcendence. In this way, “Sufi brotherhoods” formed around prominent individual Sufis: groups of seekers who lived, worked, and practiced their devotions together under the guidance of a master called a
sheikh
or
pir
(both words mean “old man,” the one in Arabic, the other in Persian).

Typically, a few of a sheikh’s closest disciples earned recognition as Sufi masters in their own right. When a sheikh died, one of these disciples would inherit his authority and continue guiding his community. Some others might go off and form new communities, still expounding their master’s mystical method but attracting disciples of their own. Sufi brotherhoods thus evolved into Sufi orders, traditions of mystical methodology passed down directly from master to initiate, down through the years and the decades and the centuries.

Successful Sufi orders might boast of many enlightened sheikhs at any given time, living in different places, often with their
mureeds
(spiritual apprentices), in lodges called
khanqas,
where they also offered sustenance to travelers and comfort to strangers. In a way, then, Sufi brotherhoods became an Islamic equivalent of Christianity’s monastic orders which, in medieval times, built monasteries and nunneries throughout Europe, places where people retired to make spiritual effort their main occupation.

Yet Sufi brotherhoods also differed in crucial ways from monastic orders. For one thing, every monastic order had a set of strict rules that monks or nuns had to follow, under the direction of an abbot or abbess. Sufi brotherhoods were much looser and more informal, more about companionship and less about externally imposed discipline.

Furthermore, taking the vows of any of the Christian monastic orders meant renunciation of the world and some commitment to “mortification of the flesh.” That’s because Christianity focused essentially on personal salvation, and saw salvation as something people needed because they were born guilty of “original sin,” the discovery of sexuality in the Garden of Eden. For this sin, humanity had been sentenced to imprisonment in bodies that lived (and died) in the material world.

Monks or nuns joined an order specifically to separate themselves from the world, the emblem of man’s fallen state. Their devotions were aimed at punishing their bodies, because the body was the problem. They practiced celibacy as a matter of course, because Christianity saw spirituality as the remedy for sexuality.

In Islam, however, the emphasis was not on the personal salvation of the isolated soul but on construction of the perfect community. People were not sinners to be saved but servants enjoined to obedience. They were born innocent and capable of ascent to the highest nobility but also of descent to the lowest depravity.
²
The mureeds in a Sufi order joined up not to be saved but to attain a higher state; their rituals were aimed not at punishing their bodies but at focusing their energies on Allah alone; if they fasted, for instance, it was not to mortify their flesh but to strengthen thei
r self-discipline. They saw no equation between celibacy and spirituality and did not separate from the world. Sufis and would-be Sufis usually plied trades, bought and sold, married, reared children, and went to war.

In fact, some Sufi brotherhoods evolved into bands of mystical knights, espousing an ethos called
futuwwah,
which resembled the European code of knightly valor, courtly love, and chivalric honor. Whether the influence ran from west to east, or vice versa, or both ways is a dispute I won’t get into.

In any case, Sufis illustrated futuwwah ideals through mytho-poetic anecdotes about Muslim heroes of the first community. One such story, for example, told of a young traveler arrested for killing an old man. T
he victim’s sons brought this young man before Khalifa Omar. The traveler admitted his deed. Extenuating circumstances existed, but he refused to plead them; he had taken a life and so must forfeit his own. He did make one request, however: could the execution be delayed for three days while he went home and took care of a bit of business? He had an orphan in his care back there, he had buried this child’s inheritance in a spot no one knew about, and if he didn’t dig it up before he died, the child would be left penniless. It wasn’t fair that the child suffer for his guardian’s crime. “If yo
u let me go today,” the murderer said, “I promise I’ll come back three days from now and submit to execution.”

The khalifa said, “Well, okay, but only if you name someone to act as your proxy, someone who will agree to suffer the penalty in your stead if you don’t come back.”

Well, that stumped the young traveler. He had no friends or relatives in these parts. What stranger would trust him enough to risk execution in his place?

At that moment, Abu Dharr, one of the Prophet’s companions, declared that he would be the young man’s proxy. And so the murderer departed.

Three days later he had not returned. No one was surprised but they did weep for poor Abu Dharr who faithfully set his head on the chopping block. The executioner was just oiling his ax and getting ready to chop when the young man came galloping up on a dusty horse, all covered with sweat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was delayed,” he said, “but here I am now. Let’s proceed with the execution.”

The spectators were amazed. “You were free; you had totally escaped. No one could have found you and brought you back. Why did you return?”

“Because I said I would, and I am a Muslim,” the young man replied. “How could I give the world cause to say that Muslims no longer keep their promises?”