The Islamic World

Andrew Rippin, Andrew Rippin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136803505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Islamic World is an outstanding guide to Islamic faith and culture in all its geographical and historical diversity. Written by a distinguished international team of scholars, it elucidates the history, philosophy and practice of one of the world's great religious traditions. Its grounding in contemporary scholarship makes it an ideal reference source for students and scholars alike.

Edited by Andrew Rippin, a leading scholar of Islam, the volume covers the political, geographical, religious, intellectual, cultural and social worlds of Islam, and offers insight into all aspects of Muslim life including the Qur'an and law, philosophy, science and technology, art, literature, and film and much else. It explores the concept of an 'Islamic' world: what makes it distinctive and how uniform is that distinctiveness across Muslim geographical regions and through history?

Part I The Geo-Political Islamic World

The Arab Middle East

Martin Bunton

DOI: 10.4324/9780203019139-1

The Arab Middle East is a term that refers to a region stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to Syria and from Egypt to Iraq. Many important markers point to a special attachment between Islam and this region, among them the importance of the Arabic language and the presence of sites endowed with great religious and cultural significance. The historical commonalities are particularly important: the last century of interactions of political economy and foreign intervention, the four preceding centuries of Ottoman rule, and, prior to that, eight centuries of various types of Arab-Islamic rule. Nonetheless, the difficulties of defining the region as a coherent subject of study must be recognized. On the one hand, it is a complex mosaic of distinct and intersecting identities (embracing significant non-Muslim Arab communities and non-Arab Muslim communities) while on the other hand (as will become evident in this chapter) it is difficult to study the history of the region in isolation from Arab North Africa, or for that matter other neighboring Muslim countries (Turkey, Iran, Sudan, for example).

Most modern politico-religious movements in the Arab Middle East have two outstanding features in common. One is the evident consensus on seeking the necessary solutions to the problems of their state’s institutional structures from “golden ages” of early Arab-Islamic empires. A second feature is that, for all its transnational linkages, Islam’s Arab core is similar to the rest of the world in that its politics is overwhelmingly determined by local political systems. Here lies a paradox. Whereas the first feature, of a shared “golden age,” may encourage conceptualizations of basic, essentialized forms and patterns of religious behavior over the centuries, the second feature of a shared political context pushes one to focus on the very modern and fluid, but also specific, processes of state formation. The more religious movements, in their political manifestations, call for a return to an idealized Muslim community of 1,400 years ago the more they need to be recognized as modern phenomena, who address specific oppositional groups and whose actions are circumscribed by the consolidation and evolution of the modern state. The importance of core rituals can be recognized within a community or nation, united in belief in the message of the Qurʾān, but who otherwise differ on the political, economic or moral organization of that society. This can be seen in the development of the historical caliphate in the Middle East, as well as in the diverse, multilayered and local manifestations of contemporary politico-religious activity.

Map 2 Expansion of the Muslim Empire

Islamic caliphate in the Middle East and North Africa

Upon the Prophet Muḥammad’s death in 632, Arab forces first asserted their authority over the Arabian peninsula and then, expanding the Muslim community northwards, wrested control of territories from the weakened or decaying Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Within a decade, Arabs had captured towns in Syria and Mesopotamia and had begun the conquest of Egypt. Subsequent campaigns marched into Tunisia in 670, conquered all of North Africa by 712, and moved into Spain shortly afterwards. The Byzantine empire remained strong enough to check Arab expansion in Europe, ensuring a continually contested frontier between Christendom and Islam. In the east, however, the collapse of Sasanian rule opened the Iranian plateau to Arab forces, from where they moved into India. Thus was established, in a huge area of multiple ecological zones and political influences, what Ira Lapidus (2002: 34) has described as “the geographical arena for the eventual diffusion of a common culture and a common sociopolitical identity in the name of Islam.”

The Arab forces who conquered this massive land mass were a cohesive group, but such an expansive political entity required new, more regional forms of government. In Arabia some confusion over governing the Islamic polity had emerged upon the death of the Prophet, and those disputes over power grew substantially as the community encompassed richer lands in the north. It was a situation that lent itself to the emergence of personal and factional differences, in particular the competition between claims of authority legitimated by closeness to the prophet and claims based upon family nobility and power. In the rush of early conquests, the term caliph (khalīfa) came to designate the leader of the Islamic umma, and the office became known as the caliphate. The first four caliphs, all recognized for their personal closeness to the prophet, succeeded by acclamation in accordance with tribal custom. But a civil war erupted in 656 when the claim to leadership of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, a cousin and son-in-law of Muḥammad, established himself as caliph in Kufa, Iraq, but was unable to impose his authority over the whole community. His claim was contested by Muʾāwiya, the governor of Syria, and in 661, the title of caliph was claimed by the Umayyad dynasty which moved the centre of power from Mecca to Damascus, with its Byzantine administrative legacy.

In 750, one ruling family replaced another in a second civil war as the caliphate was claimed by the Abbasids. The capital was moved to Baghdad, a new city but one that was strategically located on trade routes linking Syria and Egypt with Iran and beyond. For nearly two centuries the Abbasids’ elaborate governing structures ruled the Middle East through a broad alliance of interests, bringing together soldiers, landlords, scribes, merchants and others to serve the central regime. Various cultural traditions mingled together under the patronage of the Abbasid rulers, and Baghdad became widely recognized for its artistic and intellectual communities. The Abbasid caliphate enjoyed considerable economic growth, but maintaining centralized authority over such a vast empire eventually overwhelmed it.

Nominally, the capital of Baghdad remained the seat of caliphs until 1258, but the structure of government broke down by the middle of the tenth century. In Baghdad

Figure 1 Aleppo Citadel, Aleppo, Syria, thirteenth century and later. Though dating back to antiquity, the site of Aleppo's imposing citadel, which is surrounded by a deep moat, took its current form in the thirteenth century Source: © Photographer Michel Ecochard/Aga Khan Trust for Culture

itself, more and more power was exercised by soldiers of Turkish regiments who had served various caliphs. Elsewhere, successor states emerged, ruled by independent dynasties whose influence extended from their capitals to shifting frontiers, not easily demarcated on a map.

One way to approach the political history of the Arabic-speaking peoples from the tenth century on is as a series of regional histories centered around three areas: Iraq (frequently linked to Iran), Egypt (often ruling over parts of Syria and Egypt), and North Africa (where regimes formed at the heart of trading and cultivation networks). Though the caliphate at Baghdad might still be recognized as both a symbolic position and a unifying entity, sultans and emirs elsewhere developed their own regional blends of local and Islamic practices. In this way, weakness and decay in one area of the Islamic Middle East can be understood in a context in which the reinvigoration and enrichment of Islamic traditions happened in other areas. No single political or cultural entity can be said to have embraced the totality of Islam: William Cleveland (2004: 20) emphasizes the continual existence at this time of Islamic pluralism when he asserts that Islamic societies were “diverse and dynamic, not static and monolithic.” It is a perspective which stands in contrast to the widespread notion of a rise and fall of an Islamic empire.

Nonetheless, this was the politically fragmented order that came under attack from Christian Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, initiating a troubled relationship in which Islam and the Arab world acquired its problematic place in the European imagination as a threat. In the thirteenth century, the destructive Mongol invasions dealt the caliphate a fatal blow. Southern Iraq became more of a frontier zone, contested between Iran and the more stable orders established by the Mamluks in Cairo and, further west, the Hafsids in Tunis. By the fifteenth century, however, the cumulative effects of population decline, caused by the plague epidemic, and by the increasingly adverse balances of trade with an expanding Europe, had clearly weakened the existing political orders. As a result, neither the Mamluk dynasty nor those in North Africa were able to match the resources of a new and expanding Turkish dynasty which had emerged as a small Anatolian principality in the wake of the Mongol invasions.

Named after its founder, Osman, the Ottoman dynasty came to wield one of the most effective militaries, and navies, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the exception of parts of Arabia and Morocco (which developed under a separate dynasty also seeking legitimation by protecting religious law), all the Arab regions of the Middle East and North Africa came to be ruled by the Ottoman empire, with its capital at Istanbul. On its eastern border, a continual seesaw struggle with the rival Safavid empire for control of Iraq meant that Baghdad was conquered in 1534, lost in 1623, and then taken again in 1638. Economic and strategic factors clearly played a key role in the Ottoman defense of the frontier in the Persian Gulf, but the prolonged conflict exposed religious tensions that continue to influence political activity to this day. Whereas the Safavids established Twelver Shiʿism as the official religion, as it consolidated dynastic rule over Iran for the first time since the Sasanians, the Ottoman empire increasingly proclaimed an adherence to Ḥanafī Sunnism.

It should be noted that the Ottomans did make an effort to claim the title of caliph of the Muslim umma. Though the caliphate had continued as the centerpiece of Muslim political thought, the idea had, as L. Carl Brown (2000: 36) observes, “long been quite divorced from operative reality.” Its use by the Ottoman sultans reflected more of a local claim to authority, a religious sanctioning of power, than a kind of universalist or exclusive authority. Rather than based on the claims of a title, the consolidation of the Ottoman empire as, what Hourani (1991: 221) terms, the “last great expression of the universality of the world of Islam” reflected their place as guardians of the holy cities (thus controlling the pilgrimage routes), protectors of religious law, and defenders of the frontiers. When made, claims to the title were as often as not rooted quite specifically, and strategically, in attempts to bolster their credibility in the eyes of the Great Powers of Europe by playing a pan-Islamic card.

The pragmatic ruling institutions established and maintained by the Ottomans for over 400 years drew together disparate populations from throughout the Middle East. Islamic leaders (ʿulamāʾ) were organized into an official hierarchy and religious judges and teachers were appointed throughout the empire, playing an important role that stood parallel to, and equivalent to, the other pillars of the sultan’s centralized administration, the military and bureaucratic elite. The Ottoman bureaucracy was one of the most highly developed of any Muslim empire, in large part because of their successful elaboration of the Byzantine political structures they inherited. Despite this, little attempt was made to impose religious doctrine. In addition to the sharī ʿa, the sultan issued his own orders and regulations, thus creating an institutional dualism between new legal codes and the traditional sharī ʿa court system, and further entrenching a separation between religion and state.

This separation is a particularly salient feature of the period of legal and administrative reform commonly referred to as the Tanzimat (1839–76). The transformation was instituted as part of a concerted effort to revitalize imperial structures in the face of Europe’s relative strength. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the nature of global trading patterns had changed in ways that positioned the Ottoman empire as an importer of manufactured goods and an exporter of raw materials. It was an important marker of the changing balance of power with Europe. The Tanzimat reorganization failed to stop European economic penetration, and political domination predictably increased. Technological advances, particularly in the military, gave an even sharper edge to European influence so that by the nineteenth century actual annexation of Ottoman lands was accelerating. France occupied Algeria in 1830 and Tunisia in 1881, Britain took Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882.

From this rapid survey of governing structures established by the coalition of Arab nomadic conquerors in the seventh century through to the comprehensive, if pressed, institutional restructuring by Ottoman bureaucratic rulers in the nineteenth century, two significant themes emerge. One is that the multiple ways by which religious law has been separated from the political sphere outweigh the number of examples of the sharī ʿa actually forming the basis of political structures. One cannot overestimate the importance that the idea of the political organization of earlier Muslim communities has acquired in the Middle East today as a reservoir of political ideas; however, it is equally important to recognize the reality of the diversity of that political behavior over the centuries. Muḥammad’s successors were forced from the beginning to build their states and develop their governments through adaptation and borrowing. In this sense, early governing practices emerged in the Middle East that necessarily owed a great deal to the more ancient institutions and cultures into which Islam extended. Gradually the legacies and traditions of Byzantium and Persia were absorbed into the political, administrative and legal structures of Islam. As Albert Hourani writes:

No doubt this process involved some “adulteration” of law and tradition, the creation of new traditions in order to give a cover of Islamic respectability to what was not Islamic by origin; but it also worked in the opposite way, by the selection of customs and practices, the rejection of some and acceptance of others, and the modification even of those which were accepted, in the light of the teaching of Islam.

(Hourani 1983: 9)

Either way, Islam over the centuries took on what Sami Zubaida (1993: 42–3) describes as “diverse and overlapping forms, many of which bore only a tenuous relation to orthodox, scriptural Islam.” The variations are multiple and multilayered: in addition to the improvisations of governing structures, and the diversity of religious manifestations that formed around the question of succession, one can note the conflicting orientations that emerged between the perceived orthodoxy of urban Islam and the heterodoxy of more traditional rural districts.

Recognition of the problems of essentializing Islam, or of simplifying its relation to governance structures, leads to a second important theme revealed by an examination of the caliphate’s checkered history: that, in the words of Nazih Ayubi (1991: 156), “the Islamic theory of politics was developed gradually and piecemeal (and mainly in response to social and ideological opposition from various protest movements), by jurists who played the role of the ideologues of rulers.” For example, it was the Shī ʿ ī opposition to the right of the caliph to rule that obligated those who accepted the caliph’s power to explain the reasons for the caliphate and to elaborate upon its nature. Several twists and turns later, the caliphate would be justified by Ottoman sultans in an attempt to cushion their standing within the boundaries of their empire, but with no claim to be authoritative teachers of Islamic doctrine.

The continuing or renewed presence of religious politics into the twentieth century is therefore to be understood less in terms of essential characteristics of religious belief than by an account of its active reconstruction in particular contexts. It is only by paying attention to specific historical conjunctures that one can understand both the contemporary significance and multiple diversity of Islamic politics.

Islam and the modern state

World War I and the treaties that followed mark the major turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. As noted at the outset, contemporary religious movements are mobilized and organized to impact upon the political practices within a particular context. From the colonial period on this context has been defined by the territorial state, despite the fact that the legitimacy of the state system has remained open to challenge on the grounds of breaking up the Muslim community. Indeed, the postwar secular leaders of Turkey saw the abolishment of the caliphate in 1923 as an essential part of their assault on the ancien régime. As for the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I The Geo-Political Islamic World
• PART II The Religious Islamic World
• PART III The Intellectual Islamic World
• PART IV Biographies
• PART V The Cultural Islamic World
• PART VI Social Issues and the Islamic World
• Glossary
• Index
• Index of Qur’ an citations