The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (19 page)

5

The Revolt of Islam

On 2 November 1945, political leaders in Egypt called for demonstrations on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. These rapidly developed into anti-Jewish riots, in the course of which a Catholic, an Armenian, and a Greek Orthodox church were attacked and damaged. What, it may be asked, had Catholics, Armenians, and Greeks to do with the Balfour Declaration?

A few years later, on 4 and 5 January 1952, during the struggle in the canal zone in Egypt, anti-British demonstrations were held in Suez. In their course, a Coptic church was looted and set on fire, and some Copts were killed by demonstrators. The Copts, though Christians, are unquestionably Egyptian-none more than theyand it is certain that no attack on them was intended or desired by the Egyptian nationalist leaders. Yet, in the moment of crisis and passion, the mob in fury felt instinctively that their own Arabicspeaking but Christian compatriots and neighbors were on the other side, and they acted accordingly. For both these incidents there may be explanations deriving from local circumstances. But both undoubtedly reflect a common Muslim perception, that the basic division of the world is into two groups, the Muslims and the rest, and that the subdivisions of the latter are ultimately unimportant. It is in the same spirit that the Algerians found their response to the French slogan of "Algerie francaise," not "Algerie arabe" or "Algerie algerienne," but "Algerie musulmane," Muslim Algeria.

From the beginnings of Western penetration in the world of Islam until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels, rather than of the nation or country overrun by foreigners. The most powerful movements of reaction and revolt, those that have aroused the strongest passions and evoked the widest response, have also been religious or communal in origin and often also in expression. In its long confrontation with the civilization of the West, the Islamic world has gone through successive phases of revival and resistance, response and rejection. Until the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and, in some areas, in the twentieth century, it was in religious terms that problems were formulated and different solutions propounded and argued. In the period when nationalism and other Western-derived ideologies dominated political thought in Middle Eastern countries, religious sentiments and loyalties did not figure prominently in the programs and manifestos and polemics of modernizing politicians and professors, journalists, and intellectuals. They retained, however, their hold on the mass of the population, and particularly on the small merchants and craftsmen of the cities. In times of stress and disillusionment, they assumed a new importance and urgency. There was a time, not so long ago, when many were willing to assert that the secularization of political discourse in the modern Middle East had passed the point of no return. But few would be rash enough to make such an assertion today.

An Israeli scholar defined the difference between the religious and nationalist approaches to events in this way: "As believers in a religion, our forefathers gave praise to God for their successes, and laid the blame for their failures on their sins and shortcomings. As members of a nation, we thank ourselves for our successes, and lay the blame for our failures on others."`

The first reactions by Muslim thinkers to the facts of the decline and relative weakness of Islam were, in this sense, religious and not national. In Turkey, a series of memorialists examined the ways in which the state had fallen away from the high standards of the past and made recommendations on how to return to them. They had little or no effect. The really crucial new developments occurred among the Muslims in India who, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exercised a little-known but very important influence on their coreligionists in the Middle East.

In India, where the Portuguese had arrived at the end of the fifteenth century, followed later by the Dutch, the English, the French, and others, there was an authentic religious revival, which brought new life and vigor to the Islamic faith and community. It was associated with the Naqshbandi order, a Sufi brotherhood of Central Asian origin, which became the vanguard of renascent traditional Islam. Islam in India was gravely weakened by laxness, heresy, and eclecticism; it was threatened by both the insidious return of Hinduism and the militant Catholicism of the Portuguese. The great religious teacher Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624), concerned with the syncretism of Akbar rather than with any direct infidel threat, tried to show how a measure of mystical faith could be combined with the intellectual discipline of orthodox theology and the social discipline of the holy law. An outstanding figure among his successors was Shah Waliullah of Delhi (1703-1765), whose lifetime coincided with the collapse of Muslim power and morale in India, following the breakup of the Mogul Empire, and who, like Sirhindi, tried to bring new unity and vigor to the faith at a time of division and discouragement.

The militant revivalism of the reformed Naqshbandi order spread to the Middle East, to which it was brought from India. As early as 1603/1604, the Indian Sheikh Taj al-Din Sambali, a rival of Sirhindi and a codisciple of his Central Asian teacher, settled in Mecca, where he translated a number of Naqshbandi works from Persian into Arabic. Other disciples and preachers followed. Such, for example, was Murad al-Bukhari (1640-1720), a native of Central Asia who went to India in his youth and was initiated there into the Naqshbandi order. He later traveled extensively in Turkey and the Arab lands, settling in Damascus in about 1670. He played a role of some importance in introducing and establishing the reformed Naqshbandi order in the Ottoman Empire. His work was continued by his son and descendants. A contemporary of some importance was the mystic theologian, teacher, and traveler `Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641-1731), a native of Nabulus in Palestine and a recruit to the Naqshbandi order. He had many pupils. Shah Waliullah himself had in several works used Arabic instead of the more customary Persian, thus deliberately addressing himself to a larger, Middle Eastern Islamic public. One of his pupils, Sheikh Muhammad Murtada al-Zabidi of Bilgram (1732-1791), went to Arabia and then to Egypt, where he made an important contribution to the revival of Arabic learning toward the end of the eighteenth cen tury. Shah Waliullah's son Shah `Abd al-Aziz continued his work. One of his pupils was the Kurdish Sheikh Khalid Diya al-Din alBaghdadi (1775-1826), who visited India in 1809.

Shah Waliullah himself was strongly drawn to Arabia and the Arabs. "We are strangers in this land [of India]," he wrote in his testament,

Our fathers and grandfathers came to live here from abroad. For us Arab descent and the Arabic language are causes of pride, because these two things bring us nearer to the Lord of the First and the Last, the noblest of Prophets and Apostles.... We must give thanks to God for his supreme grace by holding on as much as possible to the customs and traditions of the ancient Arabs, from whom the Prophet came and to whom he addressed himself, and by safeguarding ourselves from the penetration of Persian traditions and Indian habits.'

Arabia, for him, was the source of the authentic, original Islam, undefiled by Persian and Indian accretions. In 1730 he went to the Hijaz, where he stayed for a year, studying tradition and Maliki law under Arab teachers; in May 1732 he went on a second pilgrimage and returned to Delhi at the end of the year.

Shah Waliullah's idealization of the Arabs and their faith, coming at a time when the empire of their Turkish masters seemed to be in the last stages of decrepitude, must have evoked a ready response among his teachers and fellow students in Arabia. There is, however, no direct evidence of influence or contact between him and his contemporary Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1787), the founder of the Wahhabi religious movement. Muhammad b. `Abd al-Wahhab was a Najdi who studied in Medina at about the same time as Shah Waliullah, spent some time in Basra, and eventually returned to Najd. In 1744, with the support of the local amir of the house of Su`ud, he launched a campaign of militant, puritanical revivalism. His object was to restore the pure Islam of ancient Arabia by removing all subsequent accretions and distortions, notably the saint worship and other idolatrous innovations of the Sufis. The attack was extended to the ordinary Sunni schools, which in his view were contaminated by heretical practices and ideas. The Saudi amirs of Dar`iyya enthusiastically adopted the Wahhabi cause and dedicated themselves to promoting it by force of arms. After conquering much of central and eastern Arabia, they found themselves, at the end of the eighteenth century, face to face with the Ottoman Empire. Accepting the challenge, they raided Iraq, sacked Karbala', and in 1804 to 1806 captured and purged the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Saudi amir sent a defiant letter to the Ottoman sultan, denouncing him as a heretic and a usurper. The sultan at last took action and arranged with the pasha of Egypt to send an expeditionary force to Arabia to destroy the Wahhabi power. The task was completed in 1818, when the Saudi capital was occupied and the Saudi amir was sent to Istanbul to be beheaded. The Wahhabi Empire was destroyed, but the Wahhabi faith lived on, to enjoy more than one revival and to exercise a considerable, if indirect, influence beyond the borders of Arabia.

The Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century is in many ways significant. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was suffering defeat and humiliation at the hands of Christian enemies, the Wahhabi revolution marks a first withdrawal of consent from Ottoman Turkish supremacy. Although without any conscious or explicit Arabism, it was a movement of Arabs directed against the predominantly Persian and Turkish ideas and practices that had reshaped Islam since the Middle Ages, and the first considered rejection of the Ottoman Turkish right to govern. The Naqshbandi influence from India had revitalized Arab religion and the Arabic religious sciences; the Wahhabis, perhaps stimulated by the Indian revival, went a step further and showed the way to an activist, militant attack on the religious and political order that, so they believed, had brought Islam to its present parlous condition. Although the Wahhabi state collapsed and the full Wahhabi doctrine found few converts in the Middle East, the religious revivalism that it brought influenced Muslims in many lands and helped infuse them with a new militancy in the impending struggle against European invaders.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this struggle was engaged in many parts of the Muslim world. Akif Efendi, an Ottoman official, saw the danger clearly. In a memorandum of 1822 he describes the imminent threat to the Ottoman Empire and urges its people to defend themselves; otherwise they would suffer the fate of the Crimeans and Tatars conquered by Russia and of the Indians conquered by England and be reduced to servitude.

The attack, when it came, was not on the central lands in the Middle East, but on certain outlying areas; the resistance was led and inspired not by sultans or ministers, generals or ulema, but by popular religious leaders, who were able to evoke and direct strong passions and great energies.

Three of these leaders in particular are outstanding: the near contemporaries Ahmad Brelwi of northern India, Shamil of Dagh istan, and `Abd al-Qadir of Algeria. They have much in common. All three led armed popular resistance to infidel encroachments- Brelwi against the Sikhs and the growing power of the British in India, Shamil against the Russians in Daghistan, and `Abd al-Qadir against the French in North Africa. All three were religious leaders: `Abd al-Qadir was a chief of the Qadiri order; Shamil of the Naqshbandi order, introduced into Daghistan in the eighteenth century and revived in a militant form only a few years previously; Brelwi was a Naqshbandi initiate and a Wahhabi at the same time. All three won widespread and passionate support and waged a bitter struggle for Islam against the infidel: Brelwi from 1826 to 1831, `Abd al-Qadir from 1832 to 1847, and Shamil from 1830 to 1859. All three were overwhelmed by superior force, and their countries were pacified and incorporated into the conquering empires.

It was in these empires that the next phase in the Islamic response to the West can most clearly be seen, the phase of adaptation and collaboration. In India, where the Muslims were going through another period of defeat and discouragement after the failure of the Mutiny in 1858, a new leader arose in the famous Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), the founder of the "Mohammedan AngloOriental College" at Aligarh and a pioneer of educational reform and of Islamic modernism. A great admirer of English civilization and a proud and loyal citizen of the British Empire, Sir Sayyid urged his people to learn English and thus open the way to the modem science and knowledge that were necessary for their recovery and progress. True Islam, he claimed, could not be in contradiction to this knowledge and these purposes. Where it seemed so, some reinterpretation of old principles and practices was necessary, much of it of the kind that Richard Koebner called "creative misinterpretation." It is not surprising that Sir Sayyid found many opponents, especially among the ulema, who saw in him a corrupter of Islam and a collaborator with the infidel enemy.