Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (10 page)

Islam not only guaranteed the protection of wealth but also encouraged its creation through economic activity. The Qur’an promoted work and trade and defined commercial profit as “God’s bounty.”
³⁸
The Prophet, himself a merchant, is on the record with such sayings as: “He who makes money pleases God.”
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He is also known to have rejected calls for price-fixing, noting that only God governs the market.
⁴⁰
“Muhammad,” as French historian Maxime Rodinson succinctly put it, “was not a socialist.”
⁴¹

With that encouragement, Islamdom in its earliest centuries integrated Middle Eastern merchants into “a vast free-trade zone”
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and established “financial and commercial capitalism.”
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Muslim scholars developed some economic practices and techniques that soon made their way into Europe. The method of charging interest without going against the religious ban on usury,
muhkatara
, soon became
mohatra
in Latin. The Arabic term
mudaraba
, which referred to a business partnership, is most likely the origin of the Italian
commenda
, the precursor of the modern “limited company.”
⁴⁴

The journey of the Arabic term
sakk
, which means “written document” and referred to the papers that medieval Muslim merchants used instead of currency, is more clear: It is the origin of the French word
checque
and the English word
check
.
⁴⁵

These are just a few examples. “Anything in western capitalism of imported origin,” notes Fernand Braudel, the great French historian, “undoubtedly came from Islam.”
⁴⁶
It was no accident that Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar and philosopher of twelfth-century Spain, complained of Jewish traders doing business in an “Islamic manner.”
⁴⁷

The extent of “what the West owes to Islam” is debated frequently among historians. There is, for example, an interesting theory on the possible Islamic origins of the British common law, which clearly resembles the Shariah in its “judge-made” nature—different from the state-imposed Roman law tradition of continental Europe.
⁴⁸
But obvious exports from Islamdom to the West can easily be traced today in English words with Arabic roots. A short list would include algebra, alchemy, alkali, almanac, amalgam, alembic, admiral, alcove, mask, muslin, nadir, zenith, tariff, sugar, syrup, checkmate, lute, and guitar.
⁴⁹
And, of course, there are the Arabic numerals.

A
N
E
ASYGOING
R
ELIGION

The West was importing from Islamdom for a reason. From the eighth to the thirteenth century, the latter was “the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world.”
⁵⁰
Muslim scientists had made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, astronomy, and optics.
⁵¹
“Had there been Nobel Prizes in 1000,” argues an American historian, “they would have gone almost exclusively to Moslems.”
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Islam’s theologians anticipated many of the complex issues their Christian counterparts would address much later.
⁵³
Islamic cities were much cleaner and more polished than European ones. That explains why a nun in the tenth century was so impressed with Cordoba, a city in then–Muslim-ruled Spain, that she called it “the ornament of the world.”
⁵⁴

The freedom Islam offered to the peoples of the Orient, and the way it stimulated the individual, was critical to this grandeur. This was “an unusually flexible social order, which gave anyone who became a Muslim an opportunity to develop his talents on a scale that was relatively unfettered by pre-modern standards.”
⁵⁵
An outcome of this flexibility was rapid urbanization. Thanks to its individualism, Islam had “opened the way for the rise of the recognizably modern city, in which unrelated, ethnically diverse citizens interact with one another under accepted codes of legal and personal conduct.”
⁵⁶
No wonder that by the year 800, “the Middle East had thirteen cities with populations of over fifty thousand, while Europe had only one—Rome.”
⁵⁷

In the face of this success, there came both admiration and bitterness from Europe. Christian priest Paul Alvarus in the ninth century voiced the latter when he wrote, with annoyance:

Christians love to read the poems and romance of the Arabs. They study Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas! All the talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books.
⁵⁸

The Christians who were fascinated by Muslim culture were soon dubbed by their more conservative co-religionists as
Mozarab
—a term that literally meant “Arab wannabe.”
⁵⁹
There were understandable reasons for this. The library in Cordoba, during the reign of Caliph al-Hakam II in the tenth century, is said to have 400,000 manuscripts, whereas the library of Charles V of France, “Charles the Wise,” who lived four centuries later, had only 900.
⁶⁰

Another appeal of Islam for medieval Christians was that it seemed to be a more easygoing religion. “The chief attraction of Islam was that it was practical; it did not demand seemingly superhuman efforts,” argues Orthodox theologian Nicolas Zernov:

The Christian East on the eve of the Islamic conquest had forgotten the limitations of human nature. Many members of the Church desired to imitate the angels; hence the mass movements towards the sexless life of monks and nuns; hence the exodus from towns and villages into the desert; hence the feats of self-mortification which showed the extent to which men could subdue their bodies at the dictates of the spirit. Some of these Eastern ascetics slept only in a standing position, others immured themselves in dark cells or lived on pillars, or ate only herbs, and even those not more than once a week.

Islam stopped all these excesses. It swept away the exaggerated fear of sex, discarded asceticism, banished the fear of hell for those who failed to reach perfection, quenched theological enquiry.
⁶¹

The Christians’ “exaggerated fear of sex” continued until modern times, whereas Islamdom remained more sex-friendly until, again, modern times. Even the more conservative scholars of the Shariah had written about “women’s right to sexual pleasure.”
⁶²
Attitudes toward intimacy, too, were remarkably different in premodern Islamdom and the West. Whereas Westerners in premodern times viewed the sexual act as a “battleground” where the male exerts his supremacy over the female, Muslims saw it as “a tender, shared pleasure.” Sexual satisfaction, Muslims also believed, “leads to a harmonious social order and a flourishing civilization.”
⁶³

These contrasts between Islamic and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages are all the more striking when one considers how completely the tables have turned since then. Today, it is Muslim clerics who complain about the fascination of their youth with the attractive Western culture. It is Islam that is seen as an extremely strict, disciplined, and sometimes even self-torturing religion. And it is Islamic societies that often appear sexophobic.

Today, it is the West that is free, easygoing, and wealthy. And it is Islamdom that clearly is not.

But why? What happened? If Islam enlightened the Orient so remarkably, what went wrong?

CHAPTER THREE

The Medieval War of Ideas (I)

Liberal politics are incompatible with . . . a [religious] community, unless it is further believed that the individual members of the community have been endowed with reason and free will by their Creator and that they have no certain knowledge of what were/are the Creator’s intentions.

—Leonard Binder,
Islamic Liberalism
¹

I
T WAS A SEARING
J
ULY DAY
in the year 657, and the banks of the Euphrates River were impossibly dry. At a site called Siffin, a breathtaking scene: Two Muslim armies—both comprising thousands of men bearing swords and lances—faced each other. One was led by the Ali, the fourth caliph and the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. The other army was led by Muawiyah, the governor of the newly conquered province of Syria, a vast territory that included modern-day Syria, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan. The dispute had begun a year earlier when Uthman, Ali’s predecessor as the third caliph, was assassinated by a gang of Muslim rebels. Ali had replaced Uthman, but Muawiyah, who was from the same tribe as Uthman, blamed Ali for failing to punish the murderers. He also declared his own caliphate—initiating the first
fitna
(civil war) in Islam.

The two armies had encamped at Siffin (in present-day Syria) for almost three months, waiting for their leaders to come to an agreement. Unable to do so, Ali finally ordered a full attack, which he joined personally with his legendary bravado. The Battle of Siffin lasted three days, the death toll spiraled, and the supporters of Ali seemed to be winning.

Muawiyah, who opted to watch the fighting from a pavilion, became increasingly pessimistic. But he had one final ploy. Inspired by a suggestion from one of his advisers, he told his bodyguards to put pages from the Qur’an on the points of their lances and shout, “The law of the Lord! That shall decide between us!” This chant meant that the two sides should cease fighting and settle matters by peaceful arbitration. Most of Ali’s soldiers could not resist that call. So the swords dropped and talks resumed.

But this strategy also failed. The arbitration, set for several months after the battle, ended indecisively, and the two sides remained hostile. The de facto solution would be to keep the status quo: Muawiyah would rule over Syria, whereas Ali would rule the rest of the Muslim territories—Arabia, Iraq, and Persia.

Over time, Ali’s followers would become known as “the supporters of Ali,” or Shi’atu Ali, or, simply, the Shiites. Muawiyah, who would outlive Ali, established the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled Islamdom for the next ninety years. The mainstream Islamic current formed under this empire would become known as the Sunnis.

A third Muslim faction started with a group of soldiers who broke away from Ali’s army when he accepted arbitration with Muawiyah. Such a “human intervention” in a matter that should belong only to God, they said, was heresy. Soon this faction declared Ali and Muawiyah to be infidels and vowed to fight against both. They were labeled Kharijites, or “the Dissenters.” Four years after the Battle of Siffin, a Dissenter assassinated Ali with a poison-coated sword.

Only a quarter of a century after the Prophet’s time—“the age of happiness,” as Muslims called it—fellow Muslims were spilling each other’s blood. What happened to the idea that all believers were brothers in faith?

T
HE
C
URSE OF
P
OLITICAL
P
OWER

The answer lay not in faith but in another factor that created trouble for Islam from the very beginning: political power. No theological dispute made enemies out of Ali and Muawiyah—or, in a previous dispute, out of Ali and Aisha, the Prophet’s widow. Rather, they disagreed over a somewhat mundane question: Who had the authority to rule? Interestingly, the disagreement in politics would gradually create schisms in theology as well. Shiites soon developed a doctrine holding that the only legitimate heirs of the Prophet were descendants of Ali. Sunnis argued that no matter who the ruler was, he should be obeyed for the sake of order and stability. The fanatic Dissenters—who were, in the words of a Muslim commentator, “the first terrorist movement in Islamic history”—swore to convert or kill all other Muslims.
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