Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (16 page)

The same is true for Islam. Muslims have understood their faith in all sorts of ways, because they had all sorts of mindsets that were shaped by the age and the milieu in which they were living. Their contexts, in other words, have strongly influenced how they understood their sacred text.

No wonder when we look at the background of the “medieval war of ideas” explored in the previous chapters we can clearly see the influence of context in the formation of different trends and schools that contrasted and sometimes conflicted with each other. When we look at their contexts, in fact, a whole new picture emerges to explain why the Mutazilites were rationalist, the Hanbalis antirationalist, and others whatever they were. This even explains why, in the long run, the winners won and the losers lost.

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Let’s begin with the Kharijites, the Dissenters, who, after the war between Ali and Muawiyah, blamed both parties for apostasy and thus withdrew from and fought against both. This first “terrorist” movement in Islamic history—and not the last one, as current events show—was the most fanatic of all early Islamic sects. They denounced as “infidels” every Muslim who disagreed with their doctrine and then set about killing them. They were so inclined to violence that they put it at the top of their agenda, making
jihad
the sixth pillar of Islam, in addition to the five peaceful ones that almost all Muslims accept.
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Their most extreme wing, like today’s al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups, even disregarded the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, killing not only men but also their wives and children.
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Now, as many historians have noted, all this fanaticism and militancy was directly linked with the Kharijites’ preexisting social structure. Most of them were Bedouin, the nomadic Arabs of the desert, whose culture, in the words of a contemporary Arab scholar, was shaped by a “prolonged historical process of adaptation to the harsh conditions of the desert environment.” The result was the glorification of “courage, gallantry, power, fierce vitality, confrontation, attachment to and mastery of arms, manhood, pride, rivalry, defiance, heroism, and austerity.”
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The Bedouin way of life, in other words, was “nothing but raids and wars.”
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One of the telltale episodes about this culture comes from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. On one occasion, it was reported, he kissed his grandson in front of a Bedouin. The latter was surprised and said, “I have ten children, and I have never kissed any of them.” The Prophet answered: “He who does not spread mercy will not find mercy.”
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In other words, mercy and affection was Islam’s message, but that Bedouin was not particularly inclined to internalize it. That’s why the Qur’an warned the Prophet: “The desert Arabs are more obdurate in disbelief and hypocrisy, and more likely not to know the limits which God has sent down to His Messenger.”
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This did not mean that “the desert Arabs” did not become Muslims. They did. But they also brought their harshness into the religion, which was manifested in the Kharijite militancy.

If militancy was one the main characteristics of most Kharijites—albeit not all of them, to be fair—a strong sense of communalism was another. This, too, was an extension of one of their pre-Islamic traits—tribalism. They formed small groups quite similar to sub-tribes or clans, “as if they were trying to restore the former groups in which they had lived, but on an Islamic basis.”
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They also spoke of their own group as “the people of paradise” and all others as “the people of hell”—reflecting the pre-Islamic Bedouin belief that the individual’s life gained significance only by membership in a closed community.
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This tribalism was a feature of the desert Arabs, but it also appealed to some urban dwellers who were in search of such a tightly knit group. Thus, in the cities, the Kharijites “became a focus for discontented elements” and attracted “the young, the obscure and many ex-slaves and converts.”
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The similarity of this Kharijite base to that of contemporary militant Islamism—the tribal, Taliban-like groups in the rural areas, the disenchanted youth in the big cities—is most remarkable.

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OSMOPOLITAN VERSUS THE
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Despite their appeal to the discontented, the Kharijites were a marginal force in the formative centuries of Islam. The real and definitive power struggle was between the Rationalists and the Traditionists, as explained in the previous chapter. And both schools had their own distinctive backgrounds.

The Rationalists were the complete opposite of the desert-based, tribal Kharijites. It surely was no accident that the Rationalists thrived in the big cities of first Syria and then Iraq, dynamic centers of trade and culture. The Qadarite movement, for example—the earliest defenders of the free-will idea—had emerged from the “urban culture of the new classes of merchants and educated people.”
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Their heirs, the Mutazilites, were similar: well-educated, cosmopolitan intellectuals exposed to various peoples, traditions, and philosophies. That is why they were driven to create a coherent and rational Islamic theology that would appeal to the intellects of the Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Manichaeans and also cope with the works of Greek philosophers.

As a case in point, consider Abu Hanifa, the leading figure of the Rationalist school of jurisprudence. His thinking closely paralleled that of the Rationalist Mutazilites and the pluralist Postponers. Hence, his critics accused him “of neglecting the Sunnah in favor of analogical reasoning and of making immoderate use of his own opinion.”
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He was also a proponent of human freedom. “Neither the community nor the government is entitled to interfere with the liberty of the individual,” Abu Hanifa held, as long as the individual has not violated the law.
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And these views were connected to Abu Hanifa’s context. He was based in Kufa, Iraq, the Abbasid capital before the creation of Baghdad. Kufa was a center for not only intellectuals, but also tradesmen. And Abu Hanifa was both. He was a lifelong merchant, and a pretty worldly one:

He even went to Basrah to debate the opinions of the advocates of various sects, and even of the Dahrites, who were atheist materialists. . . . In his city, Abu Hanifa rubbed shoulders with Greeks, Indians, Persians, and Arabs, and their sundry cultures came in addition to the many different trends of thought. . . . Those features were to exert obvious influence on his thought, as, indeed, was his constant involvement in trade. His legal thought was directly confronted with the reality of customs, trading, and financial practices and the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of failing to take into account the interests of the people. His reading of the [religious] texts is therefore naturally impregnated with the requirements of reality and of people’s daily life.
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Now, compare that description, written by Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim reformist of our times, to the life of Ahmad Hanbal, the radical cleric in Baghdad who denounced all “innovators.” Hanbal, “a petty landlord,” was not only aloof from the market but also strongly opposed to it.
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His followers were known for two things: “a profound knowledge of hadith as well as an aversion to the outside world.”
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He told his followers that anyone outside their Traditionist community was corrupt. Thus, anything those outsiders built, inhabited, produced, sold, or gave away constituted contamination. Hanbal even enjoined his followers not to drink water from wells built on roadsides or buy merchandise from street vendors. The goal—and the effect—was to “isolate the community from the economic mainstream.”
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No wonder Hanbal’s message found a following not among the merchants and intellectuals of Baghdad but among the less-educated classes. Their opponents called the movement
hashwiyyah
, meaning “vulgar populace.”
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Their religious vision “stressed loyalty to the past” and was “communal” in nature, which was also reflective of their class.
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This probably also explains why the Hanbalis were “people with a taste for the concrete and specific, and a dislike for the theoretical and abstract.”
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Even the extreme piety of Imam Hanbal and his followers can be traced to the “antiluxurious” tendencies of the masses. For example, the most luxurious form of art, sculpture, which required “the greatest aristocratic or priestly taste and resources,” was entirely banned by the Hanbalis; the art that “every class could indulge in,” poetry, was almost never condemned.
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In short, the war of ideas between Rationalism and Traditionism in the formative centuries of Islam had much to do with the backgrounds and contexts of the followers of these two camps. The former represented the Islam of the urban cosmopolites, who engaged with different ideas thanks to the dynamism created by commerce. The latter represented the Islam of those who were more parochial. Both camps consisted of devout believers, but they were looking at the world, and their religion, from quite different perspectives.

In fact, a similar dichotomy could also be observed in Christendom—albeit not until the seventeenth century. One of the religious controversies in Europe at that time was the issue of toleration, and some of the most tolerant views came from merchants “whose vocations exposed them to the benefits of pluralism.” It was the time when “the economic dynamism of the Dutch Republic” helped create a new narrative in which “prosperity and toleration were seen as twins.”
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This economic dynamism kept on pushing for “innovations” in the West, leading to changes in religious ideas, along with developments in the arts, sciences, and philosophy; the emergence of democracy; and the advance of freedom.

Perhaps, then, the question should be: Why did the same economic dynamism fail to prevail in Islamdom?

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CONOMY,
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SSENTIALIST

Mahmood Ibrahim, professor of Islamic history at California State Polytechnic University, has a compelling theory that offers a possible answer. He starts by showing what we have observed so far: The Rationalists, particularly the Mutazilites, constituted an economic class. Most were merchants, others were “artisans or were associated with artisans.”
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Their opponents, the Traditionists, were led by the opposite class: the landlords.
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So the war of ideas between these camps was “not merely a theological or doctrinal dispute, but a social conflict fought on an ideological plane.”
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Politically speaking, the turning point of this dispute, as noted in the previous chapter, was the arrival of al-Mutawakkil, the Abbasid caliph who ended the brief pro-Mutazilite policy of his direct predecessors and supported the Traditionists. But there was also an economic side to this change. Quite tellingly, al-Mutawakkil established a new economic system that elevated the role, and the revenues, of the landlords. This system, called
iqta
, was a form of land grant. The caliph would temporarily grant a piece of land to a landlord who could then tax the peasants who lived on the land. The landlord, to make sure that the peasants continued to produce crops for him, would recruit many soldiers.

The resulting system increased the power of landowners and the soldiers they employed—at the expense of the merchants. The caliphs after al-Mutawakkil would continue to prefer this system, for they could tax land, as visible wealth, more easily than they could tax merchants’ profits.
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The role of the soldiers would be further consolidated in the face of the threat posed and the destruction caused by the Crusaders and the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

According to Dr. Ibrahim, this transition in Islamdom from “a commercially based capitalistic period” to “an agrarian based semi-feudal one beginning with the Caliphate of al-Mutawakkil” was quite fateful.
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It was the very infrastructure of the transition from Rationalism to Traditionism.