The Gertrude Bell Jar

Ashura & Shiism

Ashura in New York. Great pictures, plus a very short history of the Shia/Sunni split from the Shia perspective:

It all started hours after Mohammad's death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad's burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet's named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement.

This is interesting for how much of the conventional Sunni narrative it leaves out, I think (you can see my summary here, if you skip down to the paragraph beginning “Following the death of Muhammad”; I didn’t know that I was summarizing Sunni-only accounts at the time that I wrote it). In the Sunni version, the split doesn’t date from the time of Abu Bakr, but from after the rule of all four “rightly-guided” Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, then finally Ali), and after the civil war over Ali’s succession. Then, finally, when the community accepts the rule of the Umayyads for sake of peace, this is when the Sunni accept the split between temporal and spiritual leadership the Umayyads represent, and the Shia do not. Presumably from the Sunni point of view, the problem doesn’t arise during the rule of the first four Caliphs because they believe those rulers were also legitimate spiritual leaders. A Sunni recounting of the tale will also never fail to mention that Abu Bakr was Mohammad’s father-in-law, and (possibly only according to Sunni sources?) the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife, Khadija. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sunni source mention that Ali was excluded from the shura council, or even note in passing that Shia Muslims complain that he was.

This kind of makes me wonder just how much the two groups differ in other areas of Muslim historiography. Shiism is pretty invisible in most mainstream scholarship on Islam, which rarely even bothers to note that Shia Muslims have radically different interpretations of some topics. Tmatt over at GetReligion frequently complains about the lack of attention journalists pay to explaining the differences between the two sects, but I have to say I’ve never come across a really good, comprehensive summary; I think I've probably only encountered a small slice of it in the course of reading other things.

Notes on Aisha

I encountered the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile (or "pedophile rapist" to be precise) again the other day in comments to a blog, and while it never seems quite worthwhile to answer this in blog comments, since the issue of Aisha’s age at marriage is complicated enough to take a bit of doing to discuss in full, and the person raising the issue rarely seems interested in hearing contradictory evidence anyway, I thought I would just do an entry here that I could link back to the next time the temptation to respond arises.

The Wikipedia article on Aisha has a good summary of the conflicting traditions and histories about Aisha’s age at marriage to Muhammad, and also of the difficulties resolution of this controversy pose to Islamic theological method. Another critic of the story that Aisha was married at the age of nine goes further and attacks the credibility of the narrator of the main hadith in question (the most important ones are attributed to Aisha, but hadith were preserved only as an oral tradition for about 170 years; M. Amir Ali is challenging the credibility of the transmitter of traditions attributed to Aisha and others, which were in turn collected and authenticated by al-Bukhari et al), finding also a few more hadith in addition to the historical sources cited in the Wikipedia article that seem to conflict with the marriage at nine story.

So that’s about as clear as mud. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the story clearly has been garbled in the transmission one way or the other. Why has 9 prevailed over the more customary marriage age of 13 or post-puberty for Arabs, which some sources also support as the marriage age for Aisha, in Muslim historiography? I think a partial answer may be found in D.A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr.

Spellberg relates two lists of attributes supposedly recited by Aisha herself in the works of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d. They are both related in the first person; the first is introduced with the words: I was preferred above the [other] wives of the Prophet by ten [attributes]:

1. He [Muhammad] married no other wife as a virgin except me.
2. He didn’t marry anyone else whose mother and father were both emigrants.
3. Allah sent down my innocence from heaven.
4. Gabriel brought him [Muhammad] my likeness in silk from heaven saying, "Marry her for she is your wife."
5. He and I used to wash from a single vessel and he didn’t do that with any of his wives except me.
6. He used to pray when I was in his presence. He did that with none of his wives except me.
7. He received revelation while he was with me. This didn’t happen when he was with any of his other wives.
8. He [Muhammad] died in my arms.
9. He died on a night which had been turned over to me.
10. He was buried under my house.

And introducing a second list, Aisha says "I received attributes which were not granted [any other] wife."

1. The Prophet of Allah took me as his wife when I was a girl of seven.
2. The angel brought Muhammad my likeness in the palm of his hand.
3. He [Muhammad] consummated the marriage when I was nine.
4. I saw Gabriel and no other wife saw him except me.
5. I was the most beloved of his wives.
6. My father was the most beloved of his companions.
7. The Prophet of Allah fell ill in my house.
8. I nursed him.
9. Muhammad died and no one witnessed it except myself and the angels.

Spellberg observes:

Four factors found in the two lists of Ibn Sa'd make specific mention of A'isha's marriage. In the first list, A'isha states that she was the only woman the Prophet married "as a virgin." (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8:58, 63; ibn Hisham, Kitab sirat rasul Allah, v.1 pt.2: 1001). This obviously prized though fleeting physical asset allowed A'isha to remind her husband that all his other wives, as widows, had been physically intimate with other men. Reference to her unique virginity, narrated on A'isha's authority, caused the Prophet to smile (Ibn Sa'd, 8:80). A'isha's virginity, defined as a special attribute, emphasizes her sexuality as the Prophet's marital prize, a mark of distinction which supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity. Unlike the Prophet's daughter Fatima, whose designation in later medieval sources as al-Batul, "the virgin," will allow her transcend aspects of more mundane female biology, not in the conception of her children but in matters of menstruation and parturition, A'isha's virginity merits no honorary epithet, but remains part of her sensual legacy as the Prophet's spouse.

The second list confirms the particulars of the marriage by explaining that A'isha was seven when she married the Prophet and nine when the union was consummated. A'isha's age is a major preoccupation in Ibn Sa'd where her marriage age varies between six and seven; nine seems constant as her age at the marriage's consummation. (Ibn Sa'd, 8: 58-62, where hadith concerning her age are repeated more than ten times. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4: 71.; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6: 118. Both al-Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal maintain the ages as six and nine.) Only Ibn Hisham's biography of the Prophet mentions that A'isha may have been ten years old when the Prophet consummated the marriage (Ibn Hisham, v.1 pt.2: 1001). All of these specific references to the bride's age reinforce A'isha's pre-menarcheal status and, implicitly, her virginity. They also suggest the variability of A'isha's age in the historical record. (For disputed date of birth, see al-Tabari, Ta'rikh, 4: 2135 and its contradiction within the same chronicle, 4: 1262. For her death date at sixty-seven, not sixty-six, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-a'yan, 3: 16).

So firstly it seems that a pre-menarchal age was always attributed to Aisha in early sources; it is only where this indirectly trips up other methods of historical dating linked to Aisha that we see any real disagreement. Secondly, her young age and therefore indisputable virginity were seen by her biographers (and perhaps Aisha herself if we can trust the sources) as evidence of her specialness to the Prophet.

And why is the specialness of Aisha important in Muslim history? Spellberg notes that Ibn Sa’d and the other medieval historians she quotes were writing just around the time when the ongoing dispute among Muslims about the status of Ali had finally been formalized into a sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Muhammad had died leaving no male children who survived into adulthood. Community leaders chose Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, as the first successor to Muhammad. Some members of the community thought that Ali, the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, should have been chosen instead. However, Ali was passed over two more times, in favor of Umar and Uthmann. When Ali was finally chosen as the fourth caliph to succeed Muhammad, Aisha led part of the community into a battle to prevent his succession. The battle was a bloodbath, but more so for Aisha’s side, and Ali assumed the Caliphate (but was soon thereafter assassinated, and the Umayyad dynasty began its rule of the Ummah).

Aisha’s presumed special status is understood by Sunni Muslims as evidence for the legitimacy of Abu Bakr as Caliph, and therefore implicitly the whole chain of succession after him, since the subsequent decisions of the leaders of the community are implicitly validated by the legitimacy of the first one. And Aisha herself was deeply involved in these controversies, and may have exaggerated some aspects of her history in order to legitimate herself (according to a standard that "supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity" to be sure) following her instigation of a battle that nearly destroyed the Ummah.

Or maybe Aisha really was nine when she married Muhammad. In a discussion on the islamicfeminist community (which unfortunately has since been deleted, and was also where I found the links above) at LiveJournal, one commenter noted that it was probably time for Muslims to begin taking a more anthropological view of Muhammad and the original Muslim community, viewing them as products of a very different society from ours in the far past, instead of treating every single thing they did as exemplary, and falling into the "trap" of trying to justify every aspect of their history, good or bad. This is probably easier said than done, since so much Islamic theology and jurisprudence uses the details of the lives of the Prophet and the Companions as guides to law and ethics. But it would simplify more than a few things, too.

This Year's Model

I laid Sacred Rage aside for a time, partly to read the New Political Religions book (which turned out to be disappointing, of which more later), and partly because the author's commitment to explaining Islamism as basically just Shiism was getting on my nerves. As I mentioned in the previous entry on this, the book was written in the mid-80s when the to-do was all about Iran and Hizbollah. And the thing is, Wright's a journalist, so she's just reporting what the experts are telling her. She does provide all the quotes and everything, including extensive quotes from Islamist sources and eyewitnesses in Lebanon and so forth, so it will be well worth reading at some point. But I got to the part where someone tells her that Shiism somehow wasn't causing a violent revolutionary movement for the previous 1400 years because it was busy "simmering," and that was just about enough for a little while.

So, on to a rare title (from 1994) focusing on the often overlooked Jama'at-I Islami of Pakistan that I found remaindered at Powell's a few weeks ago. The introduction states: "The study of Islamic revivalism has until now concentrated primarily on Iran and the Arab world and has, as a result, been somewhat restricted in its outlook. A comprehensive theoretical approach will need to consider revivalist activity elsewhere." Oh, you don't say. The book is entitled The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, of course. And actually the JI will be so indeed if they ever manage to assassinate Musharraf. Fun follows when, etc. (It's kind of hair-raising to imagine what it would have been like if 9/11 had had to be called off for some reason and never happened, and Jama'at sympathizers managing a coup in nuclear Pakistan became the thing that finally and suddenly got our attention instead. Apart from the whole riveting Islamists with nukes thing, everyone would be obsessing about these guys and totally ignoring al Qaeda, which would nonetheless still be very much al Qaeda.)

But 9/11 did happen, and Jama'at must soldier on in obscurity yet a little while longer. Remember Muslim Brotherhood-obsessed ex-CIA man Robert Baer? His colleague, "Anonymous," praises him effusively in the preface to his own book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, and then never mentions the MB again in the entire book. That's because in his book (published in 2004), Islamism is al Qaeda. Jama'at is also mentioned about a dozen times, in a detailed summary of all Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11, although the name is spelled 3or 4 different ways (apparently English transliteration of Arabic and Urdu is not very standardized), and it is sometimes only referred to as "a Pakistani group." (Although in fairness there are several Pakistani Islamist groups that could be the group being referenced; I haven't gone through and looked up the specific instances. JI is just the most active on average). I don't know if the different spellings have been left in the text because "Anonymous" doesn't actually know that they all refer to the same entity, or if he presumes that his readers don't, and doesn't want them to get all distracted from his thesis by noticing anybody other than Osama bin Laden.

Well, it's all beginning to look a bit like carelessness, if you ask me.

All Roads Lead To Denial

I picked up a remaindered copy of Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright last weekend; it's one of those insta-books that appeared shortly after 9/11. I've gradually realized that avoiding this particular publishing category in the assumption that it was likely to be hysterical and unhelpful was probably a mistake, for one thing because it has meant that I don't know what everybody else believes about Islamism based on that type of publication, and am continually flummoxed and irritated by what seems to me to be the extremely weird and beside-the-point sort of things people say about it in the media and in conversation. But it turns out this is actually a book originally published in 1985 by a journalist who had spent a lot of time in Iran, with a couple of new chapters about Al Qaeda slapped on at the end.

It's from the era people are talking about in publications from the 1990s when they say "Everybody expected the Islamic revolution in Iran and Khomeinism to have huge influence and impact throughout the Muslim world, but then it didn't so much." Not least, it appears, because the Sunni version of Islamism draws heavily on the theology of medieval-era Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who considered Shiism a form of apostasy. So it is that a 1981 conference Wright is warming up to do a chapter on, between Khomeinists and Sunni Islamists from several nations, which he describes as having been unjustly neglected by journalists at the time who only now are beginning to realize how important it was, has apparently been forgotten again, or at least hasn't been mentioned in any of the other more recent books and articles I've read.

The book begins by carefully noting that, even though Khomeini and the Iran-sponsored Shia Islamist group Hizbollah in Lebanon are at the top of the news right now for all of their attacks on Americans, Islamism doesn't really "come from" Iran or Shiism, then goes on to obsess about them anyway, much in the same way a current book might duly note that Islamism isn't merely an emanation of Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism before going on to talk about nothing else. (Incidentally, Wright does not use the term Islamism, which possibly had not yet been coined at the time. Instead he refers to "the Crusade," the nearest English language equivalent to jihad. The question of what effect different linguistic approaches to translating Islamic concepts has on how outsiders understand them would be an interesting one for somebody with a lot more time on their hands than myself). I wonder if the average person picking up this book would notice how it illustrates the contingent and ultimately self-preoccupied way Westerners tend to approach this subject, or simply conclude that Islamism "really" came mostly from Iran. (A book has recently been published on just that theory, actually, tracing it a little further back to mid-20th Century U.S. foreign policy there; it passed across my desk at the library a few weeks ago but I haven't read it).

In any case, we seem to have a persistent not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem in grappling with Islamism. It's a little dispiriting to me that, three full years past the point when this ideology finally captured the rapt attention of the Western public, many intelligent and educated people still consider "capturing Osama" and "destroying Al Qaeda" to be the alpha and omega of the war on Islamism and Islamist terrorism. It would of course be beneficial to capture Osama in particular; he is a very charismatic leader and therefore quite useful to the cause. But the primary contribution of Al Qaeda to the movement--that of bumping everything up one organizational tech level in terms of finally figuring out how to make the movement as transnational operationally as it has always been ideologically, in a way that greatly multiplies its effectiveness--is a permanent one that cannot be undone by capturing any number of Al Qaeda members, or even all of them.

There's a default sort of way of thinking about this, which tends to treat Al Qaeda as some kind of extremely insane and evil mafia or James-Bond-style supervillain organization, instead of as merely the latest iteration of a broad political movement that's been forming up for at least 100 years, and a major player in Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s. I liked this quote Robin Wright uses from Marvin Zonis:

The message from Iran--no matter how bizarre or trivial it sounds on first, second, fourth, or thirty-ninth hearing--is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology which has been proposed in the 20th Century since the Bolshevik Revolution … If we accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the 19th Century, then I want to argue that we've only had one good one in the 20th Century--and it's this one … This powerful message will be with us for a very long time--no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.

… mostly because it partly illustrates why it's hard to talk honestly about how powerful Islamism really is. Clearly there's a bit of a danger that one's abstract admiration for it as an ideological construct--the way it answers every question, and ties up every loose end of Islamic history into a very neat and attractive package, and twists the lens on Islam itself, bringing the background suddenly into the foreground, in an oddly compelling way that makes many say "Ah, yes, this is what is always has been and was supposed to be all along," the way it neatly enlists the logic and rhetoric of secularist revolutionary movements and re-deploys it to denounce their perfidy and failure in the Muslim world--can turn into real approval. Zonis of course was not alone in seeing Khomeinism at the time as an "authentic" Muslim liberatory politics. (Events have largely overtaken that interpretation in the West, but not so much in the East). To me the really interesting question is not why any Muslims in the Middle East have embraced Islamism to the extent of being willing to kill and die for it, but instead, why haven't they all?

I don't really know the answer to that question, but I suspect part of it might lie in how extensively Westernized the Arab and Muslim world already is. And it turns out we're in pretty deep denial about that as well. A friend sent me a link a while back to an essay by Ian Baruma, in which the author, in discussing the civilizational aspects of the Western-Islamist conflict, simply puts Nazism in the "non-Western" category, which allows a fairly interesting discussion of Eastern perceptions of the West to end up a nonsense. What has the Middle Eastern experience with Western secularism actually been? How much does this experience account for Eastern "ignorance" of Western virtues? Because of course Nazism and Communism are no less iterations of Western thought and history for having been ultimately defeated within it. We are accustomed to thinking of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "ours" because that's the way the Cold War sorted them, when the "other" was the Westernized Soviet Union rather than the East, but in any intellectual honest notion of a "clash of civilizations," Assad and Saddam and Nasser have been "ours" as well, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do understand the ideological need to define 20th Century Western totalitarianisms as "not us" for the purpose of preserving the gains we've made by defeating them, but it makes for one hell of a big blind spot (and perhaps a crucially enabling one) when discussing Middle Eastern politics in terms of "us" and "them." It also, I think, helps to obscure the obvious influence of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century on Islamist thought; the eerily familiar tone and vocabulary of Islamist rhetoric jumps so clearly off the page when you read unvarnished quotations that you would think this would be impossible to conceal. Yet we still seem to prefer to see Islamists as "medieval" or "savage." I once answered a person who said to me "The terrorists are just not like us, you know," with "No, they're pretty much like us, it's just that they're like the Nazis of us," which certainly ended the conversation. I think we like to think of Nazis as almost supernatural devils too, or the outcome of some unaccountable episode of German mass hysteria, or something local and containable like that, rather than as part of our collective history as Westerners, emanating in a logical way from risks posed by our secular and rationalist world view. Perhaps our habitual trivialization of the Islamist enemy (whether as confined to a single shadowy group, or as consisting of a purely reactive phenomenon that we can somehow control with our own behavior) ultimately serves as a similar type of false comfort.

Democracy Update

Some interesting reports on the Iraqi National Council elections (to form an interim National Council until general elections projected for January 2005) from Zeyad (who incidentally is pretty sanguine about both Sistani and stability in the Hawza) and Ali.

Why was it important for the National Council elections not to fail? UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had wanted to delay them until all groups (mostly Islamist groups and the Sadrists, although SCIRI is in), had agreed to participate instead of boycotting them, in order to enhance the perceived legitimacy of the interim National Council. And indeed it doesn't sound like anybody's happy with the number of Coalition-approved "list" members who made it onto the council. However it may have been better to have gone forward than not, if the outcome of Brahimi’s similar approach in Afghanistan is any guide. (Very long quote behind the cut since the Atlantic has suddenly gone entirely subscriber only, the chumpskies. I should point out that the author of this article, Laura Secor (writing probably in June), was arguing that Afghanistan had been an important learning experience for Brahimi and he would naturally be doing much better in Iraq):

Brahimi—whose official title is special adviser to the Secretary-General on the political situation in Iraq—is an odd match for the Bush Administration's Wilsonian project in Iraq. He does not see it as his business to engineer new democracies, or to impose outside visions on reluctant societies. On the contrary, he is a tough-minded realist who respects and understands power; his approach in similarly vexed situations has been to figure out which players are in charge on the ground and how to meet their minimum requirements. In Afghanistan, for instance, where he successfully negotiated a peace among competing armed factions after the U.S. invasion in 2001, Brahimi earned the enmity of human-rights advocates by allowing murderous warlords not merely to escape justice but to become officials of the new government. Assuring peace and stability, Brahimi explained, was a higher priority than realizing justice—and the surest way to restore peace quickly was to make the warlords stakeholders in the new government.

At the Afghan negotiations he chaired in Bonn, beginning in November of 2001, Brahimi worked out the following arrangement: an interim government would convene an emergency loya jirga seven months later, in order to select the government that would lead Afghanistan for two years after that. The loya jirga, organized by a commission of Afghans under UN supervision, has proved to be one of the most controversial undertakings of the seventy-year-old Brahimi's long career. Nader Nadery, an Afghan who worked as a human-rights activist during the Taliban era, served on the commission. He recalls that the Afghans drew up stringent guidelines excluding anyone who was known to be a human-rights violator from the loya jirga. "But Mr. Brahimi and the interim government were insisting that we invite the warlords," Nadery recalls. "He was pushing the commission to violate its own rules and procedures."

Whether the warlords were brought in on Brahimi's initiative or the Pentagon's is disputed. But Brahimi defended the idea in conversations at the time and in interviews afterward. He explained to the Afghans that if the warlords were not invited, they wouldn't accept the decisions of the loya jirga. He pointed out that the warlords, who had been armed and supported by the United States in the war against the Taliban, already controlled much of Afghanistan's territory; they could not be wished away. Four months later, in an interview conducted by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Brahimi said that although civil leaders claimed to be more representative of the Afghan people than the warlords were, they had no particular basis for asserting this. "Yeah, they are nice people; they want the good of their country; but to say that they are representative—how?" he asked. "You can't compare whether the others are more representative or not."

In the event, the warlords not only attended the loya jirga but occupied front-row seats and left the proceedings in possession of important government ministries. It was a turning point for the new Afghanistan and, Brahimi's critics say, a tantalizing opportunity wasted. Although few experts believe the warlords could have been excluded from the political process, most of those with whom I spoke thought that Brahimi, the United States, and the United Nations actually strengthened the warlords at a moment when they could have been weakened. Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based researcher for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, faults Brahimi for taking too little input from his own more experienced staff members, who might have told him that some of the warlords were "paper tigers," far from invincible. Nader Nadery recalls attending the pre-loya jirga election in Mazar-e-Sharif, where a handful of regional delegates were to be elected by secret ballot from among caucuses of about sixty local notables. One of the warlords, the notoriously brutal and much feared General Abdul Rashid Dostum, stood as a candidate. For the first time his lock on power was not assured. "When they were counting votes, I saw that his hands were shaking," Nadery told me. "He was very disturbed. He was concerned if he failed, if he lost, what will happen." He didn't lose—a fact Nadery attributes to the conspicuous presence of Dostum's thugs; but even more disappointing to his opponents was the legitimacy conferred on people like Dostum by an international community that saw them not as fading figures from Afghanistan's ugly past but as crucial interlocutors in determining its future. "General Dostum left the loya jirga tent a different person," Nadery claims. "A few days ago his hands were shaking. Now he left the tent the same person he was in 1992. He'd been honored by the international community and the government."

The trouble with Brahimi's approach was that stability and justice were never actually separable. Unsurprisingly, the warlords run their ministries as patronage rackets. Their political and economic entrenchment in power, along with their failure to disarm, has made it very hard for the central government to impose the rule of law more broadly on the country. Though overshadowed by the dramatic news of insurgency and prisoner abuse in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating.

Indeed, toward the end of his tenure as head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Brahimi seems to have realized that he could not guarantee long-term security there if key ministers in the Afghan government were criminals beyond the reach of the law. "As time wore on in his last year," one diplomatic source told me, "he realized that the continued role of the warlords would bring disaster to Afghanistan. He began to care much more about human rights. It was an evolution in his thinking. He began to realize that unless one had some kind of constitution and disarmament and rule of law, the process would not end up well." Shortly before he left Afghanistan, in January of this year, Brahimi delivered a rousing speech to this effect at the constitutional loya jirga.

I honestly don’t know what the ideal approach would be, but it’s clear that Shia groups are extremely suspicious of the UN approach, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the support it seems to enjoy with the Sunni Arab establishment.

Iraq Update

Shi’a Pundit has some interesting posts up about a small counter-insurgency group that has sprung up in Najaf. (Actually, Shi’a Pundit is always pretty interesting, but doesn’t update very often. I look forward to SP’s comments on the latest, if there are any.)

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past/D.A. Spellberg

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr by D.A. Spellberg.

Aisha is a pivotal figure in the Sunni/Shia split in Islam; a wife of Muhammad, her father was the first of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs in the Sunni version of Islamic history, and she later took the field to lead the opposition to Ali, the Shia candidate for legitimate successor to Muhammad. This book is a careful review of the treatment of Aisha in Medieval Islamic sources, tracing how the legacy of Aisha, with respect to the Shia/Sunni divide, Islamic notions of the feminine ideal, and theological positions on the role of women in society and politics, was shaped by the editing of and commentary on hadith literature relating to Aisha by both Sunni and Shia scholars. A good example of how interpretation of Islamic texts has been contingent on changing social and political contexts, in relatively lucid prose for an academic work.

Islam & Politics, Early History

Here's a stab at beginning to answer this notion, spotted frequently on some of the pro-war blogs I read, that the religion of Islam is inherently and irredeemably toxic. I've been putting this off for a while because for one thing I have limited confidence in my own bloviating on this subject (the sudden discovery of previously unsuspected false assumptions continuing to be a regular and frequent consequence of more reading, with no signs of tapering off), and for another I don't really know where to start.

At the beginning, I guess. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe residing in Mecca, a small urban community that thrived as a stop along a trade route and as something of a pilgrimage site because a polytheistic temple (the altar of which survives as the Kaaba) was located in the town. He was hired as the agent of a wealthy widow and tradeswoman (Khadija), and would have encountered Jewish and Christian communities while traveling north on her business. Khadija married Muhammad, and became the first convert to Islam when Muhammad told her of his visions of the angel Gabriel. A small number of Meccans converted to Islam (Abu Bakr being the first or one of the first among them, which will become important later), but on the whole monotheism received a cold reception in Mecca, not least because the gods populating the local temple were an important source of commerce from pilgrims. When Muhammad found himself being denounced and derided by members of his own tribe, he and his community of believers accepted an invitation from the Jewish and Christian communities (collectively referred to in the Koran as the Ansar, or "helpers") of Medina to shelter there. This remove is known as the Hejira, and the Muslim calendar dates from the year of this event.

At this point in time, only a small portion of the population of the Arabian peninsula was urbanized. Most Arabs were still organized into Bedouin tribes, and relations between tribes were mostly defined by warfare. Each tribe had its own god, and would routinely raid other tribes for treasure and slaves. The god of the loser would be smashed and repudiated by his or her previous adherents who had escaped the raid intact, and who would then sometimes adopt the god of the victors as evidently the stronger deity.

Muhammad sought to convert the Arabs to Islam by warfare in a similar fashion. For one thing, victory in warfare was the major sign of the efficacy of any god in the minds of the Arabs; for another, monotheism offered the promise, ultimately, of peace. Muhammad's innovation was to offer prisoners of war the option of conversion to Islam and membership in the Muslim community rather than execution or enslavement; his theory was that once all the Arabs were united under the god of Abraham, war itself would cease. In this theory and in this context, warfare for the sake of Islam was understood to be basically defensive, it being only a matter of time before any prosperous community, including any community of Muslims if it gained any traction or success, would be attacked and raided by another under a different banner. (The notion of preemptive "defensive" warfare, with the additional. purpose of creating the conditions for a more permanent peace, will perhaps be familiar to those following current events). In essence, the goal was to replace warring tribal affiliations with shared Muslim confessional identity as the basis of community.

Muhammad launched his military campaign from Medina in the period following the Hejira, and about half the verses of the Koran record the revelations of the Prophet from this period. Most of the Koranic sura announcing murderous intentions towards unbelievers and particularly polytheists date from this period; so does the Dhimmi contractual relationship between Muslims and non-Muslim "peoples of the Book," Jews and Christians. The notion at the time was total warfare against polytheists and death to those who would not convert, but tolerance of Jews and Christians within conquered communities, in recognition partly of their shared confessional relationship to the god of Abraham, and partly of the assistance of the Ansar of Medina. The Dhimmi authorizes a diminished role and certain limitations on the rights of Jews and Christians under Muslim rule; where Jews and Christians resisted Muslim conquest, they were fought and sometimes slaughtered as well. Sura from this period also both authorize the making and honoring of peace contracts with unbelievers, and breaking them when necessary for some strategic purpose or other.

Various Koranic sura relating to the initial Muslim conquest are frequently cited as evidence that Muslims believe they are enjoined by God to be in a state of permanent warfare with non-Muslims until conversion is universal. The notion of jihad, which signifies the faithful struggle towards any goal of the faith, including purely spiritual and ethical ones, is objectified as a central tenet of Islam, and defined primarily as "holy war." Both of these propositions are basically Islamist propaganda; commentators who urge us to "take what our enemies say seriously" err in assuming that these interpretations describe Islam itself rather than Islamism. In fact the word jihad is used in many contexts in the Koran, and the history of Islamic civilization is clearly not one of endless proselytizing warfare.

The Islamist interpretation of the Koran and Hadith represents a deep rupture with traditional Islam, which has been modified and qualified over time within specific political realities, most importantly the gulf that quickly emerged between Muhammad's ideal community of believers and the type of political organization subsequent generations were able to achieve. Muhammad instituted no church and chose no successors; the community of believers would eventually divide permanently over questions of succession and political legitimacy, and ultimately the story of assassinations and civil war surrounding these events would become, in Muslim consciousness, a story about why the Muslim community had a Caliph rather than an Imam at its head.

Following the death of Muhammad, the Companions of the Prophet decided to select Abu Bakr as successor to Muhammad's political and spiritual headship of the Muslim community. Abu Bakr was both an early convert to Islam, and the father of Aisha, one of Muhammad's wives (who had collectively been given the title Mothers of the Believers by Muhammad during his lifetime). Some members of the community felt that Ali ibn Abi Talib, both a cousin of Muhammad's and the husband of his daughter Fatima (the only child of Muhammad to both survive to adulthood and produce male progeny, Hasan and Husayn), and an early convert, should have succeeded, but he was passed over two more times, following the natural death of Abu Bakr a year later. Umar, another father-in-law of Muhammad's and an early Qurayshi convert, followed; his rule was ended with his death by private vengeance. Uthmann, another Qurayshi early Companion related to Muhammad by marriage was next. He was assassinated for political reasons; supporters of Ali were suspected. When Ali was finally chosen as successor, Aisha led the opposition to him in the Battle of the Camel, the first Muslim civil war. Aisha's faction was crushed, but Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, a close kinsman of Uthmann's (and a somewhat distant one of Muhammad's), challenged Ali's rule. After the two parties fought to a draw, they entered a period of negotiation during which Ali was assassinated, whereupon Mu'awiya assumed the Caliphate. Succession was basically hereditary from this point forward, passing from the Umayyad to the Abbasid branch of the Quraysh about a hundred years later.

Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthmann, and Ali are regarded as the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs of Islam, or el-Rashidun, by Sunni Muslims; Shia, or "partisans of Ali," regard the first three as usurpers, and Ali and his descendants as the rightful heirs to Muhammad's leadership of the community of Muslims (or Ummah). Both groups regard the Umayyads and the Caliphs who succeeded them as usurpers, but made their peace with this political reality in different ways.

Sunni Muslims base their belief in the legitimacy of the first four on their status as those selected by the consensus of the community arising from mutual consultation and deliberation (shura), and to a wealth of Hadith literature indicating Muhammad's preference for Abu Bakr during his lifetime, which Shia Muslims reject. The ascension of the Umayyads and the hereditary caliphate robbed the ulema (originally Companions of the Prophet and later the religious scholars who succeeded in their capacity as spiritual leaders of the Ummah) of their role in selecting their own political leader. However, the ulema elected to accept Mu'awiya's rule rather than engage in further warfare. This decision was based on numerous warnings against fitna, or rebellion, found in the Koran, and on a Koranic sura enjoining Muslims to obey "those who rule over you." From the ascension of Mu'awiya forward, Sunni Muslims have not regarded the Caliph as the spiritual leader or Imam of the Ummah in the way that Muhammad and the Rashidun were. Instead, the Caliph was required only to be a Muslim and to act as a sort of custodian of Islam, instituting the Shari'a through his courts and providing a social order within which Islam could flourish. The ulema would act as intermediaries between the people and their ruler, and would in some cases act as government officials, for example as judges in Shari'a courts, but would never again have a direct role in governing. In fact entire areas of administrative, commercial and civil law were instituted that had no relationship to Shari'a, the Koran being silent on many matters that concern an empire. (The Sunni attitude towards the caliphate somewhat resembled the European notion of the divine right of kings, though the ulema never had even a ceremonial role in legitimizing each new ruler).

Shia Muslims, in contrast, have never been so accepting of the authority of the Caliph, but can trace the bloodline of Ali only to his 12th descendant, Muhammad al-Muntazar, who disappeared in 874. There are many different Shia sects, but the largest one believes that this hidden or occulted Imam will someday reappear as the Mahdi, to provide legitimate and true guidance to the Ummah once again. The nature of this expectation is somewhat similar to that of Christians for the Second Coming; not even Ayatollah Khomeini dared to claim the title (though some of the more sycophantic mullahs would give it to him from time to time). The notion of the occulted Imam permits Shia Muslims to tolerate imperfect and Islamically illegitimate rulers while they wait; their traditional political stance has been quietism coupled with a culture of vigorous Islamic interpretation and debate to supply the missing guidance of the Mahdi.

Some aspects of the two foregoing paragraphs, it strikes me, might be revisionist history. There is some evidence that the Umayyads at least regarded themselves as rightful successors to Muhammad, and the mainstream of Islamic scholarship did not begin calling itself Sunni ("of the tradition") and the partisans of Ali Shia until the 4th century of Islamic scholarship. Previously, Shiism had merely been a stubborn and growing strain of criticism of the Muslim status quo. Sunni representation of the immediate period following the death of the Prophet may well be an attempt to legitimate the actual political development of this status quo long after the fact, in a way that accommodated the most stinging of Shia criticism while holding onto the legitimacy of the Rashidun by treating the ascension of the Umayyads rather than that of Abu Bakr as the critical change-point in Islamic leadership. Certainly representation of pivotal figures in the crisis of succession such as Aisha underwent substantial revision in medieval Muslim scholarship in a similar attempt to incorporate Shia criticism while maintaining the authority of Abu Bakr and Aisha and all the Hadith attributed to their authority. But for our purposes the point is how this way of understanding the Muslim past legitimated the disconnect between religious and political authority in the entire ensuing history of Islamic civilization, until the 20th Century.

That history is difficult to summarize. Following the Abbasid dynasty, the Caliphate breaks up a bit--in his industrious youth Mr. Bell Jar made a chart of all the dynasties that ruled all the various lands of Islamic civilization throughout its history, and between the monochrome Abbasids and Ottomans is a riot of color--but in general, Muhammad had united the Arabian peninsula during his lifetime, and subsequent rulers continued the expansion, though the lands of Islam were not always united under one Caliph. The name of jihad was given to many of these wars of conquest, but in most instances they were undertaken for the same reason any empire expands: acquisition of wealth and territory, strategic protection of existing possessions, etc. The notion of jihad in this history reflects imperial confidence in the superiority of its own rule over that existing in the lands it is conquering rather than a fanatical religious motivation for warfare. The idea of the Caliph as an Imam with a revolutionary and universalizing religious/political agenda was buried on the other side of the death of Ali, or so successors to the Caliphate must have hoped.

And so it stood for about 1400 years, more or less. (To be continued later, maybe ...)

Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Mr. Bell Jar suggested the title "The United Methodist Muslim" as a good title for a review of this book, and that does about sum it up. Nasr is a mainstream, traditionalist Muslim (touted as "the world's leading Islamicist" on the back cover) taking up the difficult task of representing his faith to a general English-speaking audience in the wake of 9/11. Unfortunately, he has chosen the easier option of simply glossing over many of the more difficult issues, in nearly complete denial, for example, that jihad ever meant holy war, or that the condition of women in Muslim societies is maybe not so good, or that Sufism is not exactly a central religious movement in the Middle East, or that there is ever any question among Muslims that the Sunni and Shia faiths are equally orthodox versions of Islam, or that there is any relationship whatever between the rather noticeable trend towards Islamization throughout the Islamic world, and the emergence of the sometimes violent Islamist political movement. He is not so much lying outright as permitting the reader to infer that his opinion about how things ought to be is the reality, and that all else is Orientalist or sensationalistic slander against Islam. This sort of dishonesty doesn't help in the long run, particularly since it takes a trivial amount of research or acquaintance with the subject to see the many bobbles in the text. He does present a good overview of the civilizational history of Islam, and a good discussion of Sufism as a spiritual practice. Points off for the whiff of anti-Semitism in his habit of referring to Israel as Palestine throughout the text, and for presenting, bang in the middle of his discussion of Islamic tolerance for the wide range of ethnic diversity among Muslims, a reference to the sizeable minority of Jews and Christians who used to live in Arab countries "until 1948," without a word of explanation as to what happened there, exactly.