The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam (2008). All about Afghanistan since the time of the Soviet invasion. After 30 pages I had to stop reading. Whether it was anger, or sorrow, or both, or a heart-bursting despair, I don’t know. Page 8, as we learn a little about why Lara, a Russian, has arrived at the secluded lakeside house and perfume factory of an elderly English convert to Islam…
From the various plants in the garden he derived an ointment for the deeply bruised base of her neck, the skin of their almost black about the right shoulder, as though some of the world's darkness had attempted to enter her there. He wished pomegranates were in season as their liquid is a great antiseptic. When the bus broke down during the journey, she said, all passengers had disembarked and she had found herself falling asleep on a verge. There then came three blows to her body with a tire iron in quick succession, the disbelief and pain making her cry out. She was lying down with her feet pointed towards the west, towards the adored city of Mecca a thousand miles away, a disrespect she was unaware of, and one of the passengers had taken it upon himself to correct and punish her.
Her real mistake was to have chosen to travel swaddled up like the women from this country, thinking it would be safer. Perhaps if her face had been somewhat exposed, the colour of her hair visible, she would have been forgiven as a foreigner. Everyone, on the other hand, had the right to make an example of an unwise Afghan woman, even a boy young enough to be her son.
What religion is so weak as to require propping up by this kind of oppression? How can such careless violence be nurtured? Who can seriously imagine that God cares about which way your feet point, and that he has appointed you to sort out the feet of others?
By the time we started to hear about the petty jealousies of local characters and the truly inhuman brutality of the Russian soldiers in the 1980s it was all too much.
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Friday, 28 August 2009
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Levtzion on the expansion of Islam
A wonderful summary of this is found in Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Towards a comparative study of Islamization’, in Levtzion, ed., Conversion to Islam (New York: Holmes & Maier, 1979), pp.1-23, reprinted as chapter I of the volume of Levtzion’s essays edited by Michael Abitol and Amos Nadan in 2007, four years after his death, and published by Ashgate under the title Islam in Africa and the Middle East: Studies on Conversion and Renewal.
Source Material on Conversion to Islam
From Muslim perspectives there are usually no written sources until a couple of centuries after Islam was established – historiography developed only after a class of litterati had emerged. The works are largely of legal import, which makes distinguishing fact from fiction tricky. (2) In areas where a written culture already thrived the arrival of Islam impoverished the region’s literary resources – as in Java in the 14th-16th centuries or among the Christian communities of the Middle East from the 7th century onwards. (3)
Travellers’ accounts (Muslim and Christian) provide some indications of Islam’s spread, but ew also need to look at name changes in places and populations, tax registers (3-4), and even at how the various Islamic legal schools influenced new areas of Muslim expansion (4-5). Accounts of dream-inspired conversions and oral tales of family histories may be a fruitful area of new research.
The Militant Expansion of Islam: The Role of the Nomads
Conversion as immediate reslut of conquest or political submission was limited to the Bedouins of Arabia and the Berbers of Maghrib, and a few minor cases. The political secession of the Arab tribes after the death of Muhammed was interpreted also as religious apostasy (ridda). The Berbers apostasized 12 times according to Muslim traditions, rebelling fiercely and compelling the Arab to withdraw from N. Africa several times. In other words, they were initially taken as submitting to Islam as religion as well as political force, such were the harsh measures used to ensure their complete submission [islam]. (6)
However, military conquest did not usually lead to immediate Islamization of populations. It did open the door to two factors that encouraged conversion in the longer term: colonization of lands by nomads, and the evolution of distintively Muslim government and institutions (7). The settling of Arab nomads in the Fertile Crescent took place after the establishment of Islamic government; the settling of Turkic nomads in Anatolia preceded centralised Muslim rule in that area and was therefore more violent and overall more thorough. In the Fertile Crescent conversion accelerated once non-Muslims were attracted to work in the Arab garrison towns (previously segregation and non-conversion were encouraged to preserve Arab-Muslim purity along with the tax base). The Balkans are an interesting blend – conquered by the Ottoman state with restricted nomad influx, they retained even more of their Christian character than the Middle East. (8)
Conversion under Muslim Rule
By no means enforced by the new rulers, but increasingly promoted by them. In Iran, the military elite converted immediately in order to retain their status; the bureaocracy converted after 150-200 years in order to keep their jobs. By the 11th century 80% of the population was Muslim. Many conversions were clearly motivated by economic and social pressures. ‘The process was aided further by the fact that once conversion to Islam took place, there was no backsliding.’ (9) [This is the particularly sinister move. Is it unique among religions to enshrine such a thing in law or to claim it to be an essential part of the faith?]
Initial liberal policies towards non-Mulism subjects, so as to use their skills in administration and scholarship, gave way to less and less tolerance as the proportion of Muslims increased and as the ulama gained more leverage over the governments. They exploited the Muslim masses’ resentment towards rich/influential non-Muslims and in times of crisis (war or famine) were able to capitalise on massacres and other persecuting measures to reduce the standing of the non-Muslims or to force them to convert (10).
Truly forced conversions were not as widespread as Christian sources claim, but more common than Muslims admit (11). Under the Seljuks, under the Mamluks, under the Ottomans (especially the devshirme system), under some Mughals (notably Aurangzib, 1658-1707) there were forced conversions (10). In general, the creation of the total environment that fostered the supremacy of Islam was the route that Muslim rulers generally took. (11)
The Encounter with Other Religions
‘In all cases of conversion from Christianity, Muslims had a political superiority, achieved by military conquest. The same was true in the case of Iran and parts of India. But in other aresa, in the further lands of Islam, Muslims were considered to be superior because of their literacy, magical and healing efficacy, and their wealth’ (11).
In Africa and Indonesia, Muslims infiltrated the syncretistic religions, while denouncing elements of their latitudinarianism, thereby gradually Islamizing the state and the society. (12) But in China, with neither military nor cultural superiority, the Muslims had to battle to survive – choosing to be Muslim in private but Sinicized in public.
In India there were conversions from all levels of society Islam did not particularly appeal to the dalits, instead it confirmed the power/status of the Brahmans, whether or not they converted. (13) In Iran, Richard Buillet argues, the lower classes tended to be attracted to sectarian Islam (or Zoroastrian revivals) since they had a lot to gain from overturning the status quo: the upper classes fought to preserve the orthodoxy that guaranteed their position, gaining increasing strength against the Arab dynasties and eventually able to reassert a Persian ruling dynasty. (13-14)
In West Africa being a chief and being a Muslim were not usually compatible, since conversion carried overtones of ‘clergy’ that struck at the chiefs’ self-esteem, even when large proportions of the populations had become Muslim.
Traders as Carriers of Islam
Beyond the nomads’ military reach the merchants took the message of Islam. The early garrison towns of the Middle East were a focus for trade as well as religion. ‘In Islam, migration to the town is considered meritorious because it is in the urban milieu that one can fully practice the Muslim way of life’ (15). Thus urbanization increased the rate of conversion to Islam. Interestingly, as Muslim traders moved around (with a very good reputation among other peoples), sustaining Islamic cultural links and joining up various Islamic groups, some chose to settle on the land, in the process becoming de-Islamicized as they were cut off from trade routes and urban centres (in Africa and China at least). (16)
Saints and Sufis as Agents of Islamization
Indigenous accounts of conversion to Islam hardly ever mention the traders so beloved of historians’ explanations. They focus instead on wandering saints who accompanied the traders (16). ‘The frontiers of Islam were extended not through the work of the learned urban ulama, but by the efforts of the rural rustic divines, many of whom were mystics and often also members of institutionalized sufi orders’ (17). They drew many non-Muslims who had not been able to get healing, etc., through their traditional religions. On Hausa Muslim says “without non-Muslims, Muslim scholars would starve”! (17)
Before the 10th century, conversion to Islam took place only in the lands ruled by Muslims. Growing trade in Central Asia initially spread Nestorianism and Manichaeism for only heterodox sects (Kharjis, Shi‘is and Isma‘ilis) propogated without state support. But once the sufi movement grew, from the 10th century, so Islam spread outside the borders of Muslim political control. The sufis also worked hard to Islamize populations newly conquered, such as in Anatolia, India and Sudan (17).
In Anatolia (conquest), Bengal (conquest) and Java (peaceful penetration) ‘Islamization was not so muh a process of individual conversion, but what might be described as a religious transmutation of the society, in which nearly the entire population became Muslim, or was assumed to be Muslim’ (18). [Which puts any given individual in a tight spot when it comes to declaring another religious faith. What is not assumed is not accepted...]
Communal and Individual Conversion
In Northwest India and East Africa conversion was more individual and piecemeal, since the local Muslims (Turks and Afghans; Swahili) retained a strong and proud ethnic-cultural difference from the non-Muslims. Conversion required the adopting of a whole new identity. Anatolia, Bengal, Java and West Africa were far more gradual and communal. (19)
The initial communal conversion of the Arabs and the Berbers required very strong measures to maintain, when the converts decided they weren’t really converts but had only offered temporary political submission! The Syrians and others in the Fertile Crescent tended to convert more slowly and individually, renouncing their former identity and kin completely upon conversion.
Reform or the Perfection of the Initial Adhesion to Islam
A.D. Nock differentiates “conversion” from “adhesion”. Islam, as a great prophetic religion requires “conversion”, but, ironically, its growth has depended on processes much closer to Nock’s “adhesion” (21). The exclusiveness was often toned down, demands on new converts were toned down, and only after Islam had gained a foothold did it ramp up the exclusivity and the prophetic critique of laxity. Groups convert to Islam over long periods, tending towards greater orthodoxy as reformist movements arise to purify the people’s faith. (21)
While accommodation to local cultures helps Islam to survive, espeically in the early centuries in a new area, reformist movements generally try to purge Islam of the syncretism, stirring up hostility from existing soft ulama (as in Senegal or Java, where many Muslims view their syncretism as a true Islam). (22) Reformist zeal is often accompanied by military will, however, and in West Africa as a result of the jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries new states were formed on the basis of their adherence to reformist Islam, challenging and replacing those Muslim kingdoms that were still engaged with the pre-Islamic heritage. Shari‘a became the law, and observance became the norm. (22)
Source Material on Conversion to Islam
From Muslim perspectives there are usually no written sources until a couple of centuries after Islam was established – historiography developed only after a class of litterati had emerged. The works are largely of legal import, which makes distinguishing fact from fiction tricky. (2) In areas where a written culture already thrived the arrival of Islam impoverished the region’s literary resources – as in Java in the 14th-16th centuries or among the Christian communities of the Middle East from the 7th century onwards. (3)
Travellers’ accounts (Muslim and Christian) provide some indications of Islam’s spread, but ew also need to look at name changes in places and populations, tax registers (3-4), and even at how the various Islamic legal schools influenced new areas of Muslim expansion (4-5). Accounts of dream-inspired conversions and oral tales of family histories may be a fruitful area of new research.
The Militant Expansion of Islam: The Role of the Nomads
Conversion as immediate reslut of conquest or political submission was limited to the Bedouins of Arabia and the Berbers of Maghrib, and a few minor cases. The political secession of the Arab tribes after the death of Muhammed was interpreted also as religious apostasy (ridda). The Berbers apostasized 12 times according to Muslim traditions, rebelling fiercely and compelling the Arab to withdraw from N. Africa several times. In other words, they were initially taken as submitting to Islam as religion as well as political force, such were the harsh measures used to ensure their complete submission [islam]. (6)
However, military conquest did not usually lead to immediate Islamization of populations. It did open the door to two factors that encouraged conversion in the longer term: colonization of lands by nomads, and the evolution of distintively Muslim government and institutions (7). The settling of Arab nomads in the Fertile Crescent took place after the establishment of Islamic government; the settling of Turkic nomads in Anatolia preceded centralised Muslim rule in that area and was therefore more violent and overall more thorough. In the Fertile Crescent conversion accelerated once non-Muslims were attracted to work in the Arab garrison towns (previously segregation and non-conversion were encouraged to preserve Arab-Muslim purity along with the tax base). The Balkans are an interesting blend – conquered by the Ottoman state with restricted nomad influx, they retained even more of their Christian character than the Middle East. (8)
Conversion under Muslim Rule
By no means enforced by the new rulers, but increasingly promoted by them. In Iran, the military elite converted immediately in order to retain their status; the bureaocracy converted after 150-200 years in order to keep their jobs. By the 11th century 80% of the population was Muslim. Many conversions were clearly motivated by economic and social pressures. ‘The process was aided further by the fact that once conversion to Islam took place, there was no backsliding.’ (9) [This is the particularly sinister move. Is it unique among religions to enshrine such a thing in law or to claim it to be an essential part of the faith?]
Initial liberal policies towards non-Mulism subjects, so as to use their skills in administration and scholarship, gave way to less and less tolerance as the proportion of Muslims increased and as the ulama gained more leverage over the governments. They exploited the Muslim masses’ resentment towards rich/influential non-Muslims and in times of crisis (war or famine) were able to capitalise on massacres and other persecuting measures to reduce the standing of the non-Muslims or to force them to convert (10).
Truly forced conversions were not as widespread as Christian sources claim, but more common than Muslims admit (11). Under the Seljuks, under the Mamluks, under the Ottomans (especially the devshirme system), under some Mughals (notably Aurangzib, 1658-1707) there were forced conversions (10). In general, the creation of the total environment that fostered the supremacy of Islam was the route that Muslim rulers generally took. (11)
The Encounter with Other Religions
‘In all cases of conversion from Christianity, Muslims had a political superiority, achieved by military conquest. The same was true in the case of Iran and parts of India. But in other aresa, in the further lands of Islam, Muslims were considered to be superior because of their literacy, magical and healing efficacy, and their wealth’ (11).
In Africa and Indonesia, Muslims infiltrated the syncretistic religions, while denouncing elements of their latitudinarianism, thereby gradually Islamizing the state and the society. (12) But in China, with neither military nor cultural superiority, the Muslims had to battle to survive – choosing to be Muslim in private but Sinicized in public.
In India there were conversions from all levels of society Islam did not particularly appeal to the dalits, instead it confirmed the power/status of the Brahmans, whether or not they converted. (13) In Iran, Richard Buillet argues, the lower classes tended to be attracted to sectarian Islam (or Zoroastrian revivals) since they had a lot to gain from overturning the status quo: the upper classes fought to preserve the orthodoxy that guaranteed their position, gaining increasing strength against the Arab dynasties and eventually able to reassert a Persian ruling dynasty. (13-14)
In West Africa being a chief and being a Muslim were not usually compatible, since conversion carried overtones of ‘clergy’ that struck at the chiefs’ self-esteem, even when large proportions of the populations had become Muslim.
Traders as Carriers of Islam
Beyond the nomads’ military reach the merchants took the message of Islam. The early garrison towns of the Middle East were a focus for trade as well as religion. ‘In Islam, migration to the town is considered meritorious because it is in the urban milieu that one can fully practice the Muslim way of life’ (15). Thus urbanization increased the rate of conversion to Islam. Interestingly, as Muslim traders moved around (with a very good reputation among other peoples), sustaining Islamic cultural links and joining up various Islamic groups, some chose to settle on the land, in the process becoming de-Islamicized as they were cut off from trade routes and urban centres (in Africa and China at least). (16)
Saints and Sufis as Agents of Islamization
Indigenous accounts of conversion to Islam hardly ever mention the traders so beloved of historians’ explanations. They focus instead on wandering saints who accompanied the traders (16). ‘The frontiers of Islam were extended not through the work of the learned urban ulama, but by the efforts of the rural rustic divines, many of whom were mystics and often also members of institutionalized sufi orders’ (17). They drew many non-Muslims who had not been able to get healing, etc., through their traditional religions. On Hausa Muslim says “without non-Muslims, Muslim scholars would starve”! (17)
Before the 10th century, conversion to Islam took place only in the lands ruled by Muslims. Growing trade in Central Asia initially spread Nestorianism and Manichaeism for only heterodox sects (Kharjis, Shi‘is and Isma‘ilis) propogated without state support. But once the sufi movement grew, from the 10th century, so Islam spread outside the borders of Muslim political control. The sufis also worked hard to Islamize populations newly conquered, such as in Anatolia, India and Sudan (17).
In Anatolia (conquest), Bengal (conquest) and Java (peaceful penetration) ‘Islamization was not so muh a process of individual conversion, but what might be described as a religious transmutation of the society, in which nearly the entire population became Muslim, or was assumed to be Muslim’ (18). [Which puts any given individual in a tight spot when it comes to declaring another religious faith. What is not assumed is not accepted...]
Communal and Individual Conversion
In Northwest India and East Africa conversion was more individual and piecemeal, since the local Muslims (Turks and Afghans; Swahili) retained a strong and proud ethnic-cultural difference from the non-Muslims. Conversion required the adopting of a whole new identity. Anatolia, Bengal, Java and West Africa were far more gradual and communal. (19)
The initial communal conversion of the Arabs and the Berbers required very strong measures to maintain, when the converts decided they weren’t really converts but had only offered temporary political submission! The Syrians and others in the Fertile Crescent tended to convert more slowly and individually, renouncing their former identity and kin completely upon conversion.
Reform or the Perfection of the Initial Adhesion to Islam
A.D. Nock differentiates “conversion” from “adhesion”. Islam, as a great prophetic religion requires “conversion”, but, ironically, its growth has depended on processes much closer to Nock’s “adhesion” (21). The exclusiveness was often toned down, demands on new converts were toned down, and only after Islam had gained a foothold did it ramp up the exclusivity and the prophetic critique of laxity. Groups convert to Islam over long periods, tending towards greater orthodoxy as reformist movements arise to purify the people’s faith. (21)
While accommodation to local cultures helps Islam to survive, espeically in the early centuries in a new area, reformist movements generally try to purge Islam of the syncretism, stirring up hostility from existing soft ulama (as in Senegal or Java, where many Muslims view their syncretism as a true Islam). (22) Reformist zeal is often accompanied by military will, however, and in West Africa as a result of the jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries new states were formed on the basis of their adherence to reformist Islam, challenging and replacing those Muslim kingdoms that were still engaged with the pre-Islamic heritage. Shari‘a became the law, and observance became the norm. (22)
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
(Religious) history is written by the victors
This is not merely a question of what words appear on the pages of textbooks out there somewhere. Everyday popular sentiments and prejudices are fuelled by this, too. The feelings and ‘truths’ of the victors operate at the level of conversations and reflex attitudes.
Consider the Caucasus: for centuries a hotbed of competition, oppression, violence, looming empires, local struggles, etc. For the last 300 years Russian domination of the region has led to injustice on a large and small scale, whether perpetrated by the Imperial, the Soviet or the present quasi-fascist Moscow government and its local puppets.
So far in this post, you might say, there is not too much evidence of the history of the victors being dominant – given that I am able to make historical claims that attack the ‘victors’ in the Caucasus, claims backed up in the more sober scholarly sources.
Perhaps this can be partly brought under the main heading? As a Westerner I am one of history’s victors, with a global perspective to match the spread of Western culture, a perspective derived largely from Western historiography and journalism which is not particularly sympathetic to (among other ‘others’) Russia.
The other side of this view of the Caucasus is of course the downtrodden, mainly Muslim people who live there. But who are they and how did they become Muslim? Ironically, their conversion to Islam, certainly to anyting approaching an ‘orthodox’ Sunni Islam, was facilitated by the Russian march southwards…
The militancy of the Khalidiyya [the brotherhood of Khalid] found expression in the Caucasus. In parts of Chechnya and Dagestan, Islam, as brought by the Tatars of Crimea, had been accepted only by the representatives of the upper classes, while the masses remained untouched by Islam until the eighteenth century, maintaining their ancestral rites and beliefs. The preaching of Imam Mansur, who led a jihad in the years 1785-91, addressed the peasants in simple and direct language. His most durable work was the Islamization of the population of the north-west Caucasus, preparing the way for the Naqshabandi [a sufi brotherhood that emphasized the shari‘a] preachers and the jihad of Imam Shamil.
Followers of Khalid [an influential Sufi leader, hajji in 1805] spread the tariqa [method of reaching divine reality] in Dagestan and Chechnya in the early years of the nineteenth century. Shaykh Isma‘il al-Kurdemiri, a follower of Khalid, was active in Shirwan in the 1810s. With the progress of the Russian occupation, many of the local rulers submitted to Russian rule, so that the traditional political establishment was increasingly discredited. In this context, the message of the renewalist Naqshabandiyya tariqa had strong popular appeal, and the movement grew under the leadership of Muhammed al-Yaraghi, a student of Shaykh Isma‘il. Al-Yaraghi’s first concern was to establish respect for and adherence to Islamic law and to reform local practice.
Hamid Algar asserts that the directives of Mawlana Khalid [who, after 1820, because of various splits and disagreements, was actually in Iraq and Syria, not the Caucasus] consistently guided the political activities of the Khalidi Naqshabandi shayks in Dagestan and Chechnya, and it was there that the Khalidiyya survived in its purest and most integral form. The jihad of Imam Shamil from 1832 to 1859, had an important internal dimension. He created a territory where the shari‘a was supreme, and eradicated various local dynasties that had been associated with practicing the local customary law.
[Nehemia Levtzion, ‘The Role of Shari‘a-Oriented Sufi Turuq in the Reform Movements of the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Islam in Africa and the Middle East: Studies in Coversion and Renewal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ch.XV, p.12.]
The end of the second paragraph sounds quite anodyne, but when we discover in the third paragraph that reform meant the eradication of those (in power, at least) who thought differently it makes me wonder what establishing respect for shari‘a involved!
Although these charismatic Muslim leaders – and for all their other-worldly and ‘spiritual’ reputation notice how involved the Sufis were in politics and political violence in the Caucasus (not to mention in Anatolia and India, though that’s a story for another day) – gained much legitimacy from the advancing Russian colonial machine, their greatest successes came in internal reform. The suppression of alternative practice and the imposition of Islamic law, a vital part of shaping the Caucasian Muslim consciousness today. What happened to those who demurred? We are not told. Where are the protests against the imposition of shari‘a in the 19th century? Where are the protests (by hand-wringing Western liberals or by conscientious Muslims) against the long term cultural changes, namely Islamization and destruction of traditional cultural elements, that came in the wake of Shamil’s jihad, crushed though it was in the end by the Russians? Nowhere.
(Religious) history is written by the victors.
In this chapter we have traced the history of the manifestations of Muslim resistance to colonial expansion back to an earlier stage of renewal and reform within Sufi turuq, which occurred almost simultaneously in all parts of the Muslim world in the eighteenth century. This was the culmination and crystallization of undercurrents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that reinforced the shari‘a orientation of Sufi turuq.
…
If the nineteenth century saw the rise of militant movements, and the eigtheenth century experienced the restructuring of shari‘a-oriented Sufi turuq, it was in the seventeenth century that Muslim scholars had begun to break out of the combination of legal taqlid and mystical pantheism. Sirhindi in India and al-Qushani in Medina, followed by Ibrahim al-Kurani, advanced the merging of Hadith and tasawwu [esoteric learning and practice], which became a prescription for shari‘a-oriented turuq. Indian scholars were important in the Haramayn as a result of the growth of the pilgrimage, during which they encountered Sufis and muhaddithun from North Africa, Egypt and Kurdistan. Pilgrims from the farthest lands of Islam – Indonesia, Africa and China – were initiated in the Haramayn into new turuq, and carried back to their homelands new ideas and the nuclei for more cohesive and structurally ognized Sufi organisations. It was in those countreis at the periphery of the Muslim world that the evolutionary process of Islamization reached a stage that called for a radical departure from past traitions, which could be achieved only through revolution.
[ibid., pp.26-7.]
A fascinating thesis by an expert on Isalmization, whose work is full of insight into Sufis and reformist Islam, particularly in Africa. I wonder why the murderous jihadi efforts of Shamil and others is not called colonial, though?
Perhaps history is written by the…
Consider the Caucasus: for centuries a hotbed of competition, oppression, violence, looming empires, local struggles, etc. For the last 300 years Russian domination of the region has led to injustice on a large and small scale, whether perpetrated by the Imperial, the Soviet or the present quasi-fascist Moscow government and its local puppets.
So far in this post, you might say, there is not too much evidence of the history of the victors being dominant – given that I am able to make historical claims that attack the ‘victors’ in the Caucasus, claims backed up in the more sober scholarly sources.
Perhaps this can be partly brought under the main heading? As a Westerner I am one of history’s victors, with a global perspective to match the spread of Western culture, a perspective derived largely from Western historiography and journalism which is not particularly sympathetic to (among other ‘others’) Russia.
The other side of this view of the Caucasus is of course the downtrodden, mainly Muslim people who live there. But who are they and how did they become Muslim? Ironically, their conversion to Islam, certainly to anyting approaching an ‘orthodox’ Sunni Islam, was facilitated by the Russian march southwards…
The militancy of the Khalidiyya [the brotherhood of Khalid] found expression in the Caucasus. In parts of Chechnya and Dagestan, Islam, as brought by the Tatars of Crimea, had been accepted only by the representatives of the upper classes, while the masses remained untouched by Islam until the eighteenth century, maintaining their ancestral rites and beliefs. The preaching of Imam Mansur, who led a jihad in the years 1785-91, addressed the peasants in simple and direct language. His most durable work was the Islamization of the population of the north-west Caucasus, preparing the way for the Naqshabandi [a sufi brotherhood that emphasized the shari‘a] preachers and the jihad of Imam Shamil.
Followers of Khalid [an influential Sufi leader, hajji in 1805] spread the tariqa [method of reaching divine reality] in Dagestan and Chechnya in the early years of the nineteenth century. Shaykh Isma‘il al-Kurdemiri, a follower of Khalid, was active in Shirwan in the 1810s. With the progress of the Russian occupation, many of the local rulers submitted to Russian rule, so that the traditional political establishment was increasingly discredited. In this context, the message of the renewalist Naqshabandiyya tariqa had strong popular appeal, and the movement grew under the leadership of Muhammed al-Yaraghi, a student of Shaykh Isma‘il. Al-Yaraghi’s first concern was to establish respect for and adherence to Islamic law and to reform local practice.
Hamid Algar asserts that the directives of Mawlana Khalid [who, after 1820, because of various splits and disagreements, was actually in Iraq and Syria, not the Caucasus] consistently guided the political activities of the Khalidi Naqshabandi shayks in Dagestan and Chechnya, and it was there that the Khalidiyya survived in its purest and most integral form. The jihad of Imam Shamil from 1832 to 1859, had an important internal dimension. He created a territory where the shari‘a was supreme, and eradicated various local dynasties that had been associated with practicing the local customary law.
[Nehemia Levtzion, ‘The Role of Shari‘a-Oriented Sufi Turuq in the Reform Movements of the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Islam in Africa and the Middle East: Studies in Coversion and Renewal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ch.XV, p.12.]
The end of the second paragraph sounds quite anodyne, but when we discover in the third paragraph that reform meant the eradication of those (in power, at least) who thought differently it makes me wonder what establishing respect for shari‘a involved!
Although these charismatic Muslim leaders – and for all their other-worldly and ‘spiritual’ reputation notice how involved the Sufis were in politics and political violence in the Caucasus (not to mention in Anatolia and India, though that’s a story for another day) – gained much legitimacy from the advancing Russian colonial machine, their greatest successes came in internal reform. The suppression of alternative practice and the imposition of Islamic law, a vital part of shaping the Caucasian Muslim consciousness today. What happened to those who demurred? We are not told. Where are the protests against the imposition of shari‘a in the 19th century? Where are the protests (by hand-wringing Western liberals or by conscientious Muslims) against the long term cultural changes, namely Islamization and destruction of traditional cultural elements, that came in the wake of Shamil’s jihad, crushed though it was in the end by the Russians? Nowhere.
(Religious) history is written by the victors.
In this chapter we have traced the history of the manifestations of Muslim resistance to colonial expansion back to an earlier stage of renewal and reform within Sufi turuq, which occurred almost simultaneously in all parts of the Muslim world in the eighteenth century. This was the culmination and crystallization of undercurrents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that reinforced the shari‘a orientation of Sufi turuq.
…
If the nineteenth century saw the rise of militant movements, and the eigtheenth century experienced the restructuring of shari‘a-oriented Sufi turuq, it was in the seventeenth century that Muslim scholars had begun to break out of the combination of legal taqlid and mystical pantheism. Sirhindi in India and al-Qushani in Medina, followed by Ibrahim al-Kurani, advanced the merging of Hadith and tasawwu [esoteric learning and practice], which became a prescription for shari‘a-oriented turuq. Indian scholars were important in the Haramayn as a result of the growth of the pilgrimage, during which they encountered Sufis and muhaddithun from North Africa, Egypt and Kurdistan. Pilgrims from the farthest lands of Islam – Indonesia, Africa and China – were initiated in the Haramayn into new turuq, and carried back to their homelands new ideas and the nuclei for more cohesive and structurally ognized Sufi organisations. It was in those countreis at the periphery of the Muslim world that the evolutionary process of Islamization reached a stage that called for a radical departure from past traitions, which could be achieved only through revolution.
[ibid., pp.26-7.]
A fascinating thesis by an expert on Isalmization, whose work is full of insight into Sufis and reformist Islam, particularly in Africa. I wonder why the murderous jihadi efforts of Shamil and others is not called colonial, though?
Perhaps history is written by the…
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Religious dialogue
In a fascinating book edited by N. Vaporis [Orthodox Christians and Muslims, (Brookline: Holy Cross, 1986)] the papers from a 1985 symposium held in the USA are presented. The twelve main papers, on various historical and theological topics, are all interesting. I expect to blog on one or two in weeks to come...
The foreword from Archbishop Iakonos makes a plea for ‘common understanding as to the role religion can play in a terribly turbulent society’ in which ‘men and women everywhere are looking for peace, security and humanitarian coexistence’ (p.2). He suggests that (presumably) in the 1970s and 80s at least ‘Christians are seeking unity, while Muslims are witnessing a worldwide resurgence’ (p.1) and this means there is a great need for each to approach the other. All very nice and well put, and as it’s only a brief welcome message it seems a shame to be picky, but there is a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship that needs to be flagged up. Both officially and unofficially, any attempt by a Christian to ‘convert’ (however construed) a Muslim, or any perceived criticism of Muhammed (etc) is a pretext for hostility – not merely intellectual but also physical. Let alone what happens to Muslims who do choose to leave Islam. When the very structure of the faith is set up to suppress discussion at particular points and to employ coercion to the point of death against those who demur, then ‘dialogue’ and ‘common understanding’ are severely hampered.
We should also note that the blasphemy and apostasy laws of Islam, whether or not the state happens to endorse them in various territories, cut the aggrieved moral high ground out from under those Muslims who wish to complain about proselytism, or who wish to demonstrate or assert openness to dialogue now or in some mythical glorious Islamic past. If the threat of death or ostracism against any who wish to identify with a different religion remains in the formal and popular teaching of Islam, we can dispense with the high horses and be honest about what the situation is. The nations of the earth rage against the LORD and his annointed one. Sometimes they pretend not to, but they do. This is not really a complaint about persecution, horrible and damaging though that is (and after all, many countries and systems now and in the past have persecuted Muslims), but a plea for honesty about the full-orbed nature of religio-political communities. For as long as peaceful Christian (or other) evangelism among Muslims is considered an affront and worthy of harsh response the potential gains for dialogue will come at the cost of half-truths, turning blind eyes and certain types of intelletual dishonesty – and the benefits will largely be felt by the academic and politial elites anyway.
Another day I’ll make the same complaint about the supposed ‘tolerance’ of secular pluralism
The foreword from Archbishop Iakonos makes a plea for ‘common understanding as to the role religion can play in a terribly turbulent society’ in which ‘men and women everywhere are looking for peace, security and humanitarian coexistence’ (p.2). He suggests that (presumably) in the 1970s and 80s at least ‘Christians are seeking unity, while Muslims are witnessing a worldwide resurgence’ (p.1) and this means there is a great need for each to approach the other. All very nice and well put, and as it’s only a brief welcome message it seems a shame to be picky, but there is a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship that needs to be flagged up. Both officially and unofficially, any attempt by a Christian to ‘convert’ (however construed) a Muslim, or any perceived criticism of Muhammed (etc) is a pretext for hostility – not merely intellectual but also physical. Let alone what happens to Muslims who do choose to leave Islam. When the very structure of the faith is set up to suppress discussion at particular points and to employ coercion to the point of death against those who demur, then ‘dialogue’ and ‘common understanding’ are severely hampered.
We should also note that the blasphemy and apostasy laws of Islam, whether or not the state happens to endorse them in various territories, cut the aggrieved moral high ground out from under those Muslims who wish to complain about proselytism, or who wish to demonstrate or assert openness to dialogue now or in some mythical glorious Islamic past. If the threat of death or ostracism against any who wish to identify with a different religion remains in the formal and popular teaching of Islam, we can dispense with the high horses and be honest about what the situation is. The nations of the earth rage against the LORD and his annointed one. Sometimes they pretend not to, but they do. This is not really a complaint about persecution, horrible and damaging though that is (and after all, many countries and systems now and in the past have persecuted Muslims), but a plea for honesty about the full-orbed nature of religio-political communities. For as long as peaceful Christian (or other) evangelism among Muslims is considered an affront and worthy of harsh response the potential gains for dialogue will come at the cost of half-truths, turning blind eyes and certain types of intelletual dishonesty – and the benefits will largely be felt by the academic and politial elites anyway.
Another day I’ll make the same complaint about the supposed ‘tolerance’ of secular pluralism
Thursday, 5 March 2009
What is going on?
In the world, and in my head...
Another old bit of paper swept away at the moving of a bookcase amid general shedding of bumph was some thoughts I had during the Cambridge Papers discussion of Colin Chapman’s response to Islamism and Islamic terrorism. Mostly fairly ignorant questions, they deserve some thought, and probably some attempts at answering by good, old-fashioned research one day!
What is their political goal, and to what extent does it involve gaining coercive powers over non-believers? [This really seems like the $64,000 question. Having read some very interesting essays on Islamic theology of law recently by meaty scholars such as Noth, Becker, Morony and Edelby I feel slightly closer to understanding this, at least in theory!]
Are there any Christians who want to capture the state? And what do they want to do with it?
How do postmillennial reconstructionists fit with Islam? What about postmillennialims in general?
Should the question of Islamism spur us to try to understand what the church’s relation to organised idolatries and false (eschatological) communities is? See Peter Leithart’s wonderfully provocative essay, Mirror of Christendom, on this.
Suffering victors… Muslims tend to measure triumph by expressions of power (as Colin Chapman pointed out, anger at the Crusades was fuelled by the fact they they lost so many battles to the barbarian Franks) but Christians don’t have to do that. Islam misses victory-in-suffering, but we have because our Lord has it. We don’t need to vindicate ourselves now, but Muslims do. [Or is that not quite accurate?]
Muslims have a good understanding of how to rule: Christians don’t. We know how to be in a minority, and how to be oppressed quietly, but they don’t!
A similar sentiment was expressed by the Syrian John bar Penkaye in the 8th century…
He promotes a particular view of the past which seems to say that Christians are better off if they are ruled by non-Christians, that Christians are ruined by peace and quiet and by the interference of Christian rulers in Church affairs. (p.16)
Michael G. Morony, ‘History and Identity in the Syrian Churches’, in J.J. van Ginkel, H.L. Murre-van den Berg & T.M. van Lint, eds, Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East Since the Rise of Islam (Leuven: Peeters, 2005) pp.1-33.
Monday, 8 December 2008
Forced or induced?
For all the criticisms levelled today by the victim-mentality apologists of Hinduism and Islam in India and Turkey (to name just a couple of places) – you know, the old ‘Western missionaries just exploit the poor, buying converts, indicing conversion with bribes, etc’ claims – it is remarkable to find this practice institutionalised in early Turkish Islam. Just one example among many…
One-fifth of the income from an eighteen-room khan at Yenibağche (outside Konya) was set aside to defray the yearly expenses for converts to Islam. I was to provide for the teaching of the Koran and prayers, the performance of circumcision, provision of shoes, clothes, and food to Christians, Jews, and pagans who apostasized to Islam. The wakf’s revenues came from three villages (two of which, Saradjik and Arkĭthanĭ-Arkĭt, were Christian), a number of shops, and a khan.
[Speros Vryonis, Jr, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971), p.353.]
Notice the particularly cheeky method of getting Christians to directly subsidize (as well as indirectly through ongoing punitive taxes and confiscations by the authorities who would then endow the Islamic institutions across Anatolia) conversions from their faith.
One-fifth of the income from an eighteen-room khan at Yenibağche (outside Konya) was set aside to defray the yearly expenses for converts to Islam. I was to provide for the teaching of the Koran and prayers, the performance of circumcision, provision of shoes, clothes, and food to Christians, Jews, and pagans who apostasized to Islam. The wakf’s revenues came from three villages (two of which, Saradjik and Arkĭthanĭ-Arkĭt, were Christian), a number of shops, and a khan.
[Speros Vryonis, Jr, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971), p.353.]
Notice the particularly cheeky method of getting Christians to directly subsidize (as well as indirectly through ongoing punitive taxes and confiscations by the authorities who would then endow the Islamic institutions across Anatolia) conversions from their faith.
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Nationality et al
It’s a messy sort of thing, working this out, especially in post-imperial contexts like the Balkans…
In a fascinating survey of travel writing and proto-nationalist writing in 19th-century Bulgaria Stoyan Raichevsky buils a case that the Pomaks, the name given to the roughly 300,000 Muslims living in Bulgaria, descendants of converts to Islam in the 17th and 18th centuries, were truly Bulgarian and knew it. They often lived side-by-side with Christian Bulgarians, repudiated the learning of Turkish, sang anti-Turkish songs, desperately tried to avoid serving in the Turkish army (p.75), sometimes supported resistance fighters, and, perhaps less importantly for the question of nationality, practised a local, syncretistic form of Islam.
‘The Muslims of the plains do not belong to the Turkish people. They are Christians who adopted Islam during the period of the oppression. It is true that they go to the mosque but in mixed areas they share with the Christians the same superstitions, almost the same azimas, and use the same amulets. Most of them speak Bulgarian and would return to their original religion with the same ease with which they deserted it. They don’t understand much of both the Koran and the Holy Scriptures’ (Albert Dumont in 1873, quoted on p.54).
Many ethnographers of the time called them Bulgarians, and it was the question of language that was most weighty in their mind: ‘Nationality is a community of people who are related by language, by origin, by tradition, by some common moral qualities, common sympathy, common aspirations… no matter whether they have political independence or not.’ (Petko Slaveikov writing in Mecedonia newspaper in 1867, quoted by Raichevsky on p.50)
But why were the Bulgarian Muslims treated so badly by the newly-independent Bulgarian state before the communist takeover? (It is perhaps easier to explain the brutalities of the communists – after all, they were communists!) Perhaps because these Bulgarian Muslims did not convert to Orthodoxy in great numbers after independence as many commentators had predicted.
For example, Austrian ethnographer and historian Felix Kanitz: ‘All religious hatred is alien to the Mohammedan Bulgarians, everywhere these Muslim Pomaks live in perfect harmony with their brothers by blood, the Christians. In the regions where they live together I never heard any complaint of animosity on both parts… [When the more numerous Christians establish their own rule over these regions] these crypto-Muslim Bulgarians will again return to the religion of their ancestors, the religion which they still practise secretly.’ (comment from 1877, quoted on pp.57-8)
Of course, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 had a massive negative impact on the population and sparked off mass migrations of the Pomaks to Turkey. This was compounded by Christians’ greed for their property, Turkish imams propaganda at religious schools, fear of anti-Muslim recrimination (even though they were personally innocent of siding with the Turks – even the pro-Turkish British military leader St Clair couldn’t get Muslim Bulgarians to oppose the Russian occupation, pp.78-79) and bad administration by the new rulers (pp.65-72). Furthermore, when some Pomaks wanted to return, having not been treated well in Turkey and without the language, the new Bulgarian administration was not especially helpful (1909 order of the ministry of Foreign Affairs and Religion offered no special help to Bulgarian Muslims wanting to return home, p.86, a real missed opportunity).
Amusingly, Polish political intrigue of the time sought to convince the Pomaks that they were of Polish origin, and, presumably, should therefore be loyal to Poland rather than to their present Ottoman masters or to the nascent Bulgarian state or the Russian Imperial patron (p.52).
In a fascinating survey of travel writing and proto-nationalist writing in 19th-century Bulgaria Stoyan Raichevsky buils a case that the Pomaks, the name given to the roughly 300,000 Muslims living in Bulgaria, descendants of converts to Islam in the 17th and 18th centuries, were truly Bulgarian and knew it. They often lived side-by-side with Christian Bulgarians, repudiated the learning of Turkish, sang anti-Turkish songs, desperately tried to avoid serving in the Turkish army (p.75), sometimes supported resistance fighters, and, perhaps less importantly for the question of nationality, practised a local, syncretistic form of Islam.
‘The Muslims of the plains do not belong to the Turkish people. They are Christians who adopted Islam during the period of the oppression. It is true that they go to the mosque but in mixed areas they share with the Christians the same superstitions, almost the same azimas, and use the same amulets. Most of them speak Bulgarian and would return to their original religion with the same ease with which they deserted it. They don’t understand much of both the Koran and the Holy Scriptures’ (Albert Dumont in 1873, quoted on p.54).
Many ethnographers of the time called them Bulgarians, and it was the question of language that was most weighty in their mind: ‘Nationality is a community of people who are related by language, by origin, by tradition, by some common moral qualities, common sympathy, common aspirations… no matter whether they have political independence or not.’ (Petko Slaveikov writing in Mecedonia newspaper in 1867, quoted by Raichevsky on p.50)
But why were the Bulgarian Muslims treated so badly by the newly-independent Bulgarian state before the communist takeover? (It is perhaps easier to explain the brutalities of the communists – after all, they were communists!) Perhaps because these Bulgarian Muslims did not convert to Orthodoxy in great numbers after independence as many commentators had predicted.
For example, Austrian ethnographer and historian Felix Kanitz: ‘All religious hatred is alien to the Mohammedan Bulgarians, everywhere these Muslim Pomaks live in perfect harmony with their brothers by blood, the Christians. In the regions where they live together I never heard any complaint of animosity on both parts… [When the more numerous Christians establish their own rule over these regions] these crypto-Muslim Bulgarians will again return to the religion of their ancestors, the religion which they still practise secretly.’ (comment from 1877, quoted on pp.57-8)
Of course, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 had a massive negative impact on the population and sparked off mass migrations of the Pomaks to Turkey. This was compounded by Christians’ greed for their property, Turkish imams propaganda at religious schools, fear of anti-Muslim recrimination (even though they were personally innocent of siding with the Turks – even the pro-Turkish British military leader St Clair couldn’t get Muslim Bulgarians to oppose the Russian occupation, pp.78-79) and bad administration by the new rulers (pp.65-72). Furthermore, when some Pomaks wanted to return, having not been treated well in Turkey and without the language, the new Bulgarian administration was not especially helpful (1909 order of the ministry of Foreign Affairs and Religion offered no special help to Bulgarian Muslims wanting to return home, p.86, a real missed opportunity).
Amusingly, Polish political intrigue of the time sought to convince the Pomaks that they were of Polish origin, and, presumably, should therefore be loyal to Poland rather than to their present Ottoman masters or to the nascent Bulgarian state or the Russian Imperial patron (p.52).
Thursday, 3 July 2008
Provoking those who observe the church
Theodore Abu Qurra (750-825AD) was an Orthodox bishop of Harran, living under Muslim rule of the Middle East as the Abbasid dynasty approached its cultural zenith under the tutelage of Christian scholars, translators, doctors and administrators. He composed several apologetic works (defending the Christian faith by comparison with Islam and occasionally Judaism). A brave and highly intelligent man. But very much of his time. For example, in his discussion of icons at the close of one of his treatises, he says
If someone says “The ‘outsiders’ may mock us because of the cross of Christ without seeing these icons” let that person know concerning those [‘outsiders’] who enter our churches, that if they do not see these icons in our churches, it would not occur to most of them to react in the way we have mentioned. As for the icons, they are what arouses their desire to mock us.
How sad that it was not the words or the lives of the Christians in those churches that would provoke a response from the ‘outsiders’. I do not intend to deny the effect of icons in provoking discussion, maybe even profitable evangelistic discussion – huge proportions of the Arab Christian controversial literature is taken up with their defence and their pointing to Christ – but where was the concern for everyday gospel living and gospel talking? Why does it not occur to the outsiders to mock the Christians (or take an interest) on account of their radical lifestyles, sacrificial love, and bold proclamation? Sure, the Christians were often ghettoised and suffered under serious discriminatory social constraints, but Theodore is envisaging visitors to the churches so he is not living in a situation of total community or individual ostracism.
Of course the Christians under Islam then and now walk a tightrope as regards their conversations and what they read and write. If anything in their behaviour is construed as trying to convert a Muslim then it provided (and still provides) a pretext for violence. Not always, but the threat is always there, and with local variations in how the law is applied, local tensions, international politics and the greed of people in the street all thrown into the mix, is it any wonder that icons-as-gospel-proclamation was defended so strongly? Not that it did much good, for there were plenty of pogroms, confiscations and vandalism carried out by Muslims on the grounds of iconoclasm. That particular retreat from the gospel, well intentioned though it may have been, turned out tragically to be no refuge .
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Writing (Christian) history again
The “consciousness of place” element that flows from old Christendom ideas of South America as a Catholic domain, and modern American ideas of Latin America as its hegemonic backyard are subtexts that remain in the English world’s conceptualization of history.
(from the multi-authored final chapter, ‘The Ongoing Task: Agenda for a Work in Progress’ in W. Shenk, ed. Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writing World Christian History [Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002], p.123)
Well, this particular resident of the English world is quite happy to upset the consciousness of place when it conflicts with the freedom to share the gospel of Christ. Labelling certain nations or regions as one religion or another seems rather defeatist to me! Such ideas of place may be there in the academy and in the minds of politicians and journalists, but hopefully not in the minds of those who are concerned with the Great Commission.
And do those subtexts remain only in the English world’s conceptualization of history? Consciousness of place (mixed with ‘race’) looms pretty large in the Islamic conceptualization of history.
Thursday, 12 June 2008
an Anatolian ramble
This evening, while Mrs L is away in Wales, PG and I watched The Count of Monte Cristo, a only- slightly dreary swashbuckler in the spirit of the 30s, rather passe to this 21st century viewer, but still quite fun.
Then I wandered over to zaman.com for some Turkey news. Having spent a bit more time on the book project recently (not to mention discussions regarding Israel) I have been pondering 'missionary' and 'anti-missionary' activities in the Middle East in history and today. As an evangelical, to me 'missionary' is a neutral or even positive word - I don't even shudder when someone says "Buddhist missionary" or "Muslim missionary" to me. But the word has troubling connotations for many people. Westerners probably can't imagine what Turkish commentators, whether rabidly secularist or openly Islamist, intend by the word "missionary".
Well, what did I find on Zaman but this intriguing article about a former missionary associate turned Muslim scaremonger. Respect to Zaman, they just about avoid spitting while saying "missionary", and even appear to be rather more suspicious of this chap (who, it turns out, is on the government payroll, or on the deep state payroll) than they are of Turkish protestants. This list of accusations, for example, is intriguing. Zaman tells us a little about an infamous book by this multi-tasking man...
Çınar had claimed in 2005 that international missionary institutions had allocated $73 billion for Turkey and that the missionaries in Turkey produced 15 million Bibles and distributed them for free. He also said there were 40,000 church-homes in Turkey, while claiming that foreigners were engaging in illegal missionary activities in Turkey, that they supported Kurdish and Alevi separatism and that they were involved in smuggling of some historical artifacts.
The members of the list are not exactly equivalent. Even allowing for my Westernised, Christianised bias, the distribution of free Bibles seems less than sinister. The presence of 'church-homes' (delightfully ambiguous, and unintentionally wonderfully encouraging for the cause of the gospel I'd say - when the nations start raging you know there must be a reason) in a country is also rather less than criminal. I would LOVE to know what the illegal activities were - are all 'missionary' activities illegal? What is a missionary activity? Does breathing on the part of a missionary count? Who counts as a missionary!? Support for separatism could be criminal, especially if it involved conspiracy to commit criminal activities - then again, someone who thought that a Kurdish state was a good idea might be accused of "supporting Kurdish separatism" even if all they did was mention their opinion to someone [working for the government?] down the pub. Smuggling, of course, sounds like something you can accuse people of - fair enough - don't think I condone crime as I mock Mr Çınar. Of course all these are potentially evil actions if you think that "missionary" is a swearword. Which just goes to show the power of language and of 'what everybody knows'.
All this sent me off on an interesting search - for Alevi separatism, of all things, not something I knew much about.
This dense academic piece reminds me once again just how complex everything is and how teeny my understanding will ever be. [Spot the Islamic missionaries on page 7 in amongst the cultural imperialism of the Sultanate in the late 19th century. Will Zaman raise its arms against that, one wonders. Will anyone sneak into the offices of zealous Sunnis and slit their throats for anything as terrible as being keen to see people convert to their way of writing the world...? Oh no, it's OK, it happened before Attaturk so it's all fine.]
Any number of online encyclopedia articles will give you a flavour of who they are and what their religious slant is. Religious differences and communal tensions with Sunni Turk and Sunni Kurd and who calls who a what and what the Kemalists tried to do about 'national' identity and all manner of interesting things will pop up at you.
There was a gruesome massacre of Alevis in 1993 which the police did nothing about. Seems to have been carried out by a Sunni 'Islamist' mob. Needless to say the Alevi diaspora is none too pleased with that.
Meanwhile, Alevi and Kurd and violence and terrorism seem to be words that get linked by many Turks - and not surprising, since lots of Alevis are Kurdish and lots of Kurds openly or tacitly cheer (or worse) for the PKK et al. As Mustapha Aykol points out on his White Path blog from January the reputation of Alevis for 'liberalism' is only partly deserved. [Watch out for the great and very revealing quote from respondent number two, All I can say is I disapprove of any separatist or self-segregating behavior by any community. All I can say is, separating from whom or what? Who gets to choose where the lines are drawn or how thick a line counts as anything in particular. And if the majority segregates (persecutes) the minority do they simultaneously 'segregate' themselves, thereby incurring Kerim's disapproval? Actually, that's not all I can say ;-)]
Beyond that I shall clearly have my work cut out to understand what is going on...
Then I wandered over to zaman.com for some Turkey news. Having spent a bit more time on the book project recently (not to mention discussions regarding Israel) I have been pondering 'missionary' and 'anti-missionary' activities in the Middle East in history and today. As an evangelical, to me 'missionary' is a neutral or even positive word - I don't even shudder when someone says "Buddhist missionary" or "Muslim missionary" to me. But the word has troubling connotations for many people. Westerners probably can't imagine what Turkish commentators, whether rabidly secularist or openly Islamist, intend by the word "missionary".
Well, what did I find on Zaman but this intriguing article about a former missionary associate turned Muslim scaremonger. Respect to Zaman, they just about avoid spitting while saying "missionary", and even appear to be rather more suspicious of this chap (who, it turns out, is on the government payroll, or on the deep state payroll) than they are of Turkish protestants. This list of accusations, for example, is intriguing. Zaman tells us a little about an infamous book by this multi-tasking man...
Çınar had claimed in 2005 that international missionary institutions had allocated $73 billion for Turkey and that the missionaries in Turkey produced 15 million Bibles and distributed them for free. He also said there were 40,000 church-homes in Turkey, while claiming that foreigners were engaging in illegal missionary activities in Turkey, that they supported Kurdish and Alevi separatism and that they were involved in smuggling of some historical artifacts.
The members of the list are not exactly equivalent. Even allowing for my Westernised, Christianised bias, the distribution of free Bibles seems less than sinister. The presence of 'church-homes' (delightfully ambiguous, and unintentionally wonderfully encouraging for the cause of the gospel I'd say - when the nations start raging you know there must be a reason) in a country is also rather less than criminal. I would LOVE to know what the illegal activities were - are all 'missionary' activities illegal? What is a missionary activity? Does breathing on the part of a missionary count? Who counts as a missionary!? Support for separatism could be criminal, especially if it involved conspiracy to commit criminal activities - then again, someone who thought that a Kurdish state was a good idea might be accused of "supporting Kurdish separatism" even if all they did was mention their opinion to someone [working for the government?] down the pub. Smuggling, of course, sounds like something you can accuse people of - fair enough - don't think I condone crime as I mock Mr Çınar. Of course all these are potentially evil actions if you think that "missionary" is a swearword. Which just goes to show the power of language and of 'what everybody knows'.
All this sent me off on an interesting search - for Alevi separatism, of all things, not something I knew much about.
This dense academic piece reminds me once again just how complex everything is and how teeny my understanding will ever be. [Spot the Islamic missionaries on page 7 in amongst the cultural imperialism of the Sultanate in the late 19th century. Will Zaman raise its arms against that, one wonders. Will anyone sneak into the offices of zealous Sunnis and slit their throats for anything as terrible as being keen to see people convert to their way of writing the world...? Oh no, it's OK, it happened before Attaturk so it's all fine.]
Any number of online encyclopedia articles will give you a flavour of who they are and what their religious slant is. Religious differences and communal tensions with Sunni Turk and Sunni Kurd and who calls who a what and what the Kemalists tried to do about 'national' identity and all manner of interesting things will pop up at you.
There was a gruesome massacre of Alevis in 1993 which the police did nothing about. Seems to have been carried out by a Sunni 'Islamist' mob. Needless to say the Alevi diaspora is none too pleased with that.
Meanwhile, Alevi and Kurd and violence and terrorism seem to be words that get linked by many Turks - and not surprising, since lots of Alevis are Kurdish and lots of Kurds openly or tacitly cheer (or worse) for the PKK et al. As Mustapha Aykol points out on his White Path blog from January the reputation of Alevis for 'liberalism' is only partly deserved. [Watch out for the great and very revealing quote from respondent number two, All I can say is I disapprove of any separatist or self-segregating behavior by any community. All I can say is, separating from whom or what? Who gets to choose where the lines are drawn or how thick a line counts as anything in particular. And if the majority segregates (persecutes) the minority do they simultaneously 'segregate' themselves, thereby incurring Kerim's disapproval? Actually, that's not all I can say ;-)]
Beyond that I shall clearly have my work cut out to understand what is going on...
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Demographics
Many political and cultural commentators are making noises at the moment about the population explosion of European Muslims, partly through immigration but mostly through the higher birthrate.
An essay by Vincensio Poggi, SJ, a professor of Near Eastern History at the Pontifical Insititute gives the ironic counterpart to this from the middle-late Ottoman period. Praising the Ottoman millet system for its success in holding together such a diverse empire and in ensuring some supression of ethnic and religious violence, Poggi notes that the Christians and Jews of Anatolia reproduced faster than the Muslims.
1520-35 / 358,000 Christians in
1570-80 / 571,000 Christians in
Growth rate of 9.8% as opposed to a Muslim growth rate of 9.3% [per what, Poggi doesn’t say, unfortunately for this tidy mind]
1831 – dhimmis constituted 11.3% of the population of Ottoman territories
1881 – this rose to 20.6%
1906 – 25%
‘Christians in the Second Ottoman Era’, in Habib Badr, ed., Christianity: A History in the Middle East (
Cynics among us might notice that the Muslims dealt with this by several significant culls. Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks did not do too well out of the final years of the Ottoman Empire or during the chaos surrounding the founding of the
Sunday, 11 May 2008
not from round here
We’ve seen it satirised in Hot Fuzz, where the local community dresses up like the Gloucester Klan and does away with any unruly or interfering blemishes to their village. But the satire has more than a grain of truth to it:
The freedom of country life is an illusion of the city dweller. It is real to him only as long as he doesn’t belong to the village community. That community demands strict adherence to its laws and customs. (1)
Kill a child before you kill adat (tradition) (2)
The coercive power of local community sentiment is remarkable. Jesus’ parable on the “friend” at midnight, as recorded in Luke 11 relies upon this. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his αναιδεια he will rise and give him whatever he needs (verse 8, ESV). Ken Bailey argues that αναιδεια needs to be translated ‘avoidance of shame’ – the neighbour does not want to be known as tight-fisted and since the local community can all hear the guy shouting up to him in the middle of the night he will certainly come and give him what he needs. (3) Ostracism by the local community that would be consequent on such shame, and would increase shame, is not something to be desired!
The purpose of that parable is to point out by contrast the tremendous generosity of God, unconditioned by such local community coercive sentiment, who delights to hear his people’s prayers and answer them. Nonetheless it wholly relies upon the prevalence of that sentiment and to a certain extent relies upon our approval of the coercive function.
This kind of local community traditionalism, enforced with ostracism and even violence is not part of the mindset of the urban Westerner but it is a reality across much of the world. It would be all too easy to point to Muslim communities as exemplary in this case. Even though they do display much of this conservatism and bring it to bear on religious questions (what an affront to the privatised religion of the Rationalist Secular West when it bothers to think about such subjects!) as well as ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ ones (having correctly recognised that such distinctions are fairly artificial) they are not alone in that. Prakke finds remarkable examples in the rural Netherlands persisting into the early 20th century – shopkeepers driven out of business, people carried bodily out of the local area, individuals completely shunned for not keeping local traditions or for leaving the ‘parish’ church in order to join a seccessionist church or house church. This was one of the reasons for the emmigration of hundreds of people from Drenthe to
But pointing the finger is not a simple matter. There are social mechanisms for restraining behaviours in almost every group one can think of, even the unselfconscious evangelical churches of the
(1) P. W. J. van den Berg, Het Karakter der Plattelanssamenleving, p.74, quoted in H. J. Prakke, Drenthe in Michigan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983 [Dutch 1st edn 1948]), p.62.
(2) Malay proverb
(3) Bailey, Poet and Peasant: A Literary-Cultural Appraoch to the Parables in Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), pp.119-133.
(4) Prakke, Drenthe, pp.62-65
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Philippines chess and more important things
The Philippines is a surprisingly distinguished chess nation - the world's first Asian Grandmaster (E. Torre) was from the Philippines and the youngest Grandmaster in the world right now is Wesley So, who is shooting up and up at the moment.
A curiosity to note: Filipino IM Tan-Cardoso won this stormingly weird game against David Bronstein, costing the wizard a shot at the world title in 1958.
More importantly, the gospel is advancing in the archipelago despite entrenched nominal and syncretistic Catholicism and despite a terrible history of Muslim-Christian encounter in its southern islands (Jonathan Fuller's recent book on the subject, Cross Currents, published by OMF in 2005, is one of the best historical books I have read [and I have read hundreds!] truly bringing his subject alive in a loving and fully Christian fashion).
And we are getting to know some lovely Filipino believers at Hope Community Church as we make our tiny contribution to the body of Christ here in Cambridge.
A curiosity to note: Filipino IM Tan-Cardoso won this stormingly weird game against David Bronstein, costing the wizard a shot at the world title in 1958.
More importantly, the gospel is advancing in the archipelago despite entrenched nominal and syncretistic Catholicism and despite a terrible history of Muslim-Christian encounter in its southern islands (Jonathan Fuller's recent book on the subject, Cross Currents, published by OMF in 2005, is one of the best historical books I have read [and I have read hundreds!] truly bringing his subject alive in a loving and fully Christian fashion).
And we are getting to know some lovely Filipino believers at Hope Community Church as we make our tiny contribution to the body of Christ here in Cambridge.
Monday, 11 February 2008
books I won't have time to read (1)
Unfortunately there are not enough hours in the day for this inspiring book. The video clip is powerful, though, and a reminder of the sovereign grace of God to save even when his servants do something foolish (Rassamni's wife married him when he was not a believer). How violence and hatred simply will not solve the problems of the world.
Jerry Rassamni, From Jihad to Jesus.
It reminded me of what John Piper (the link is to wikipedia as I can't get the Desiring God website to work) said soon after 9/11, like Islam the gospel does advance by death and killing and bloodshed - the blood of Christians, the deaths of Christians, the killing of Christians.
Jerry Rassamni, From Jihad to Jesus.
It reminded me of what John Piper (the link is to wikipedia as I can't get the Desiring God website to work) said soon after 9/11, like Islam the gospel does advance by death and killing and bloodshed - the blood of Christians, the deaths of Christians, the killing of Christians.
Monday, 7 January 2008
Arab right to return?
Something biased to make you think.
The largest banner ads around the article are for the dating agency www.singlemuslimcom. Is that ironic, or what?
The largest banner ads around the article are for the dating agency www.singlemuslimcom. Is that ironic, or what?
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
teddy bear madness
Nice to know it's not all madness.
Well done the Muslims of Canada.
The real question is, where do all these Sudanese Muslims find the time to march about a soft toy?
Perhaps some time spent in quiet reflection or acts of mercy to the poor might be time better spent.
Well done the Muslims of Canada.
The real question is, where do all these Sudanese Muslims find the time to march about a soft toy?
Perhaps some time spent in quiet reflection or acts of mercy to the poor might be time better spent.
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
the most surprising thing
is that the liberal media appears to be surprised about the fact that "lessons in hate" have been found at mosques across the country. (Yes, the Times does count as liberal!)
The remarkable ignorance in the West about some of the most basic aspects of Islamic history and theology has been a major factor in the current tense situation. A kind of patronising indifference towards Middle Eastern culture (blended with an Orientalist wonder at the trappings) bred of years of military preeminence, economic success and confidence in a (post-)'Christian' way of life means that suddenly we are all surprised when people who have been indirectly (and in some cases directly) hurt and offended by Western governments and companies start to respond with violence. But really, to find that surprising is more than a little naive.
Furthermore, the resources are there in the Islamic tradition to foster a culture of exclusivism and violence. [And, given the right technological advances, the conditions are there for ideologically-driven mass murderers to arise from among the people, not just in the board rooms of governments around the world.] We in the West might well be ignorant of the many Islamic cultures around the world that are generally 'nice' (in the sense of not supporting open hatred and terrorism), and we might indeed need to be reminded of the relative benignity of some Ottoman rule in the early modern period, particularly as compared with some of the brutality in Europe. However, we also need to be reminded of the historical roots of Islam - conquest, forced conversion and massacre. And of the intellectual roots - not just the hair-splitting of jurists down the centuries and modern-day so-called liberal muslims, but the Koranic text itself (which in places enjoins violence, however ambiguous a modern application might be, depending on your hermeneutic) an the reams of Hadith, which are very clear in their endorsement of violence.
It's enough to make anyone run into the arms of Fethullah Gulen. Which is what a lot of people are doing! And if I'd had the time, I would have toddled off to this fascinating conference in London at the weekend: Muslim World in Transition, Contributions of the Gulen Movement. Thankfully the proceedings of the conference are already up on he website (all 755 pages) so that will keep me occupied if I ever have a dull moment in the next few weeks!
(As it happens Kate and I were enjoying a film festival at L'Abri in Hampshire along with PG, who generously drove us there and back, which was tremendous fun in every respect!)
The remarkable ignorance in the West about some of the most basic aspects of Islamic history and theology has been a major factor in the current tense situation. A kind of patronising indifference towards Middle Eastern culture (blended with an Orientalist wonder at the trappings) bred of years of military preeminence, economic success and confidence in a (post-)'Christian' way of life means that suddenly we are all surprised when people who have been indirectly (and in some cases directly) hurt and offended by Western governments and companies start to respond with violence. But really, to find that surprising is more than a little naive.
Furthermore, the resources are there in the Islamic tradition to foster a culture of exclusivism and violence. [And, given the right technological advances, the conditions are there for ideologically-driven mass murderers to arise from among the people, not just in the board rooms of governments around the world.] We in the West might well be ignorant of the many Islamic cultures around the world that are generally 'nice' (in the sense of not supporting open hatred and terrorism), and we might indeed need to be reminded of the relative benignity of some Ottoman rule in the early modern period, particularly as compared with some of the brutality in Europe. However, we also need to be reminded of the historical roots of Islam - conquest, forced conversion and massacre. And of the intellectual roots - not just the hair-splitting of jurists down the centuries and modern-day so-called liberal muslims, but the Koranic text itself (which in places enjoins violence, however ambiguous a modern application might be, depending on your hermeneutic) an the reams of Hadith, which are very clear in their endorsement of violence.
It's enough to make anyone run into the arms of Fethullah Gulen. Which is what a lot of people are doing! And if I'd had the time, I would have toddled off to this fascinating conference in London at the weekend: Muslim World in Transition, Contributions of the Gulen Movement. Thankfully the proceedings of the conference are already up on he website (all 755 pages) so that will keep me occupied if I ever have a dull moment in the next few weeks!
(As it happens Kate and I were enjoying a film festival at L'Abri in Hampshire along with PG, who generously drove us there and back, which was tremendous fun in every respect!)
Monday, 15 October 2007
interesting
The Trinity. Why it is better than the alternatives (1 of 1,000,000,000...)
Solitary God = no good whatsoever.
A challenge to JWs, Muslims and Unitarians everywhere.
Solitary God = no good whatsoever.
A challenge to JWs, Muslims and Unitarians everywhere.
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
AK Party - the real story?
A friend, currently engineering in Central Asia, has two close Turkish colleagues who give amusingly opposite reasons for distrusting the AK Party who won this summer's general election in their home country.
(A) I am a secularist republican and this party smacks of Islamism and reactionary tendencies.
I hardly think so. Softening Ataturk's legacy would not do any harm, and no Islamist-led nation would make it into the EU in the forseeable future, which is something that Erdogan (PM) and Gul (President) are very keen on.
(B) I am a devout Muslim and this party is an American plot to undermine Islam by institutionalising it, thereby robbing it of its spiritual power.
Since when did institutionalising Islam do it any harm!? Apologies if I sound a little cynical, but that's one of the main reasons for its success and longevity. By its very nature Islam is a total system, an explicitly socio-political religion. And just because some of its institutionalising has happened at the level of village elders rather than the governments of nation states doesn't mean it hasn't happened and it hasn't worked. [Plus, the old "it's a foreign plot" line is wearing a bit thin; it has been used as a blanket excuse for quite a lot in that part of the world for quite a long time...]
Ironically, both these opinions sound extremely Western!
(A) I am a secularist republican and this party smacks of Islamism and reactionary tendencies.
I hardly think so. Softening Ataturk's legacy would not do any harm, and no Islamist-led nation would make it into the EU in the forseeable future, which is something that Erdogan (PM) and Gul (President) are very keen on.
(B) I am a devout Muslim and this party is an American plot to undermine Islam by institutionalising it, thereby robbing it of its spiritual power.
Since when did institutionalising Islam do it any harm!? Apologies if I sound a little cynical, but that's one of the main reasons for its success and longevity. By its very nature Islam is a total system, an explicitly socio-political religion. And just because some of its institutionalising has happened at the level of village elders rather than the governments of nation states doesn't mean it hasn't happened and it hasn't worked. [Plus, the old "it's a foreign plot" line is wearing a bit thin; it has been used as a blanket excuse for quite a lot in that part of the world for quite a long time...]
Ironically, both these opinions sound extremely Western!
Wednesday, 12 September 2007
music and martyrs
move me greatly. The other day, tears streamed down my face as I listened to Reineke's Undine Sonata (late 19th century passion) while reading about the tenacity and humble service of Filipino Christians in Saudi Arabia today - their patient endurance in the face of suffering and their willingness to sacrifice their lives for Christ is astounding.
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