Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (22 page)

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Umar, the second caliph, came to power thirteen years after the death of the Prophet; his official Abu Musa al-Ash
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ari was one of the first Muslim governors sent abroad to administer conquered territories. The two moments suggested as symbolic of the break with the past and the beginning of a new time were thus the date that Allah revealed to the Prophet his mission and the time of the Hejira, thirteen years later. The Prophet was fifty-three years old when he decided to leave Mecca, which had become antagonistic and violent toward him since the city notables realized that he did not intend to compromise but rather to destroy the idols of the Ka
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ba. If this second option is the true one, the beginning of the calendar coincided with the access of the Muslims to the management of the riches of the world.

In another version I find intriguing,
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Umar is supposed to have not even understood what dating meant:

Here we hear the very idea of a calendar questioned in
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Umar’s “What does assigning dates mean?” However, we must approach this account with caution;
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Umar was no savage bedouin, but a member of the merchant aristocracy of that city of cities, Mecca. And when you say merchant, you say documents dated and registered. The Arabs did not just excel at managing debt; Mecca was situated astride the great international trading route of the time. The Companions of the Prophet had trade in their blood. They amazed the Ansar because they always found time for making war for the triumph of Islam while also conducting business in their rare moments of repose. It is difficult to believe that
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Umar didn’t know what assigning dates meant. It seems more plausible that in his time it was decided to use the calendar in a systematic and official fashion as a manifestation and incarnation of the new administration that would quickly become an empire.

There is one detail in the story that is very significant for the present state of confusion in the Muslim world. During the session related above, when
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Umar was contemplating the institution of the calendar, some of his entourage suggested using the Persian or Roman calendar:

Those who suggested borrowing the Persian or Roman calendar certainly had no understanding of Muhammad’s new order, which was based on autonomy vis-a-vis the neighboring powers. This anecdote reminds us how dependent we have become, since we now find it “natural” to follow the Western calendar.

The pre-Islamic Arabs did not have a unified calendar. According to Tabari, “each tribe established its own
tarikh,
beginning with an event that took on a special significance for it, a disaster, a famine, a war. . . . “
¹⁴
With each tribe creating its
tarikh
as it pleased, one can imagine the resulting confusion in intertribal and intercity exchanges and communications. The Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet which controlled Mecca, had a calendar that dated events beginning with the
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am al-fil
(Year of the Elephant), when the Abyssinian army, mounted on those impressive beasts, conquered Mecca around A.D. 570, the year of the Prophet’s birth.
¹⁵
It was decided to begin the new calendar with this date because seeing elephants in the environs of Mecca, not a common occurrence, represented an unforgettable landmark event.

The lack of unity among the Arabs in the handling of time is well illustrated in the muddle created by that curious month Nasi
. According to Tabari, the Arabs named Nasi
the month for hunting or conducting raids, whereas custom had declared it
shahr haram,
the month when all violence was forbidden.
¹⁶
For al-Mas
⁵
udi, this month of Nasi
had another function: it was intercalated every three years to compensate for the short lunar months. He begins, as was his custom, by situating us within the context of the time before telling us precisely what Nasi
⁵
is:

The two interpretations are not necessarily contradictory, however. One can imagine, as often happens when political decision making gets muddled, that the tribesmen, who, keen on hunting and raiding, would not respect the respite of the
shahr haram
and would refuse to insert a Nasi
month every three years.

Islam gave to a disunited, disorderly people a means of taking hold of time and making use of the stars and their stations. Supremacy over earth is achieved through mastery of the heavens. If President Saddam Hussein had reread Tabari’s introduction to his
Tarikh
, he would have quickly come to the conclusion that
al-zaman
, “time,” in the elementary meaning of the succession of hours, belonged to Washington D.C. Even a strategist as limited as I would immediately conclude that if you want to “take the oil away from the Westerners and put it into the service of the Arabs and Muslims,” you must first of all anchor your strategy in the heavens, with the beneficent and indispensable surveillance of the stars, real or artificial. This was obvious to our Prophet, who spent most of his time before the age of forty meditating on power and how to obtain it. As soon as you focus on determining the hour, day, or night, you immediately come to that conclusion. Without the help of the stars, a Muslim cannot go far. They are there to allow us to find our bearings and set our calendar. It is in such terms that Tabari explains the following verse 12 of sura 17:

Great strategists guarantee the success of their armies by careful attention to apparently minor matters like the location of wells, the control of resupply and routes and passes, and especially the orchestration of operations according to a rigorously calculated time schedule. Apparently Saddam Hussein neglected one small detail that ended up assuring the success of his enemies—namely, that willy-nilly he was plugged into Coordinated Universal Time, a time that he was completely blind to, a time that is the prerogative of his enemies, who never undertake an act of war without “consulting the stars.”

Like Saddam Hussein, Tabari, although born in the province of Tabaristan in 224/838, lived most of his life in Baghdad, where he taught theology and jurisprudence. In his era, establishing the time schedule for any activity that involved the community, whether it was the writing of a book of history or the conquest of new territory, was the first act to be undertaken. If Saddam Hussein had reacted as Tabari did more than a thousand years earlier and had begun his campaign by determining the time system that governed his action, he would have immediately realized the obvious: his time system is Coordinated Universal Time, which is dictated by Western satellites.