Discovering Islam 1

Contents Preface to the Revised Edition ix Foreword by Lawrence Rosen xiii Preface xix 1 Introduction: discovering Islam 1 Part One The Pattern of Islamic History 2 Muslim ideal: holy Book and Prophet 15 3 A theory of Islamic history 30 1 Ideal caliphs 33 2 Arab dynasties: Umayyads and Abbasids 38 3 The flowering of Islamic civilization 44 4 Decline and fall 51 5 Shias: revolution in the revolution 55 6 Mahdism and millenarian movements 61 4 The great Muslim empires: Ottomans, Saffavids and Mughals 65 1 Ottomans: facing Europe 65 2 Saffavids: Shia state 69 3 Mughals: encounter with Hinduism 72 4 Obsession and synthesis 86 5 Sufis and scholars 90 1 Sufis, saints and mystics 91 2 Two scholars of Islam: Al Beruni and Ibn Khaldun 98 vii CONTENTS 6 Islam of the periphery 107 1 On the periphery 107 2 The Muslim minority in China 110 3 Muslims in the USSR 111 7 Under European rule: the colonial impact on Muslim society 117 1 The disintegration of society 118 2 The myth of the noble savage: Muslim tribesman 132 Part Two Contemporary Muslim Society 8 Princes and paupers: Muslim societies in Saudi Arabia and south India 143 1 Saudi Arabia: the reawakening of the peninsula 144 2 The Andalus syndrome in south India: à la recherche du temps perdu 158 9 Muslim society turned inside out: ethnicity, women and refugees 172 1 ‘Dubai chalo’: ethnic encounters between Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim societies 172 2 Muslim women 184 3 Afghan refugees: displacement and despair 196 10 The reconstruction of Muslim thought 200 1 Contemporary Muslim scholarship 200 2 Creating Islamic social sciences 208 11 Only connect 217 1 American society: Great Satan or paradise on earth? 217 2 Connecting 221 3 Conclusion: the discovery of Islam 227 Appendix: Muslim chronology 232 Glossary of Islamic terminology 237 Bibliography: suggested readings 238 Index 240 viii Preface to the Revised Edition On his death in Karachi my father implored me to write a history of Islam. It is dangerously misunderstood, he pleaded; it would be the greatest contribution any scholar could make. The message of the great scholars and saints of Islam, sulh-i-kul or ‘peace with all’, was in danger of being lost in the anger and hatred that could be seen in and around Muslim society. I loved and respected my father, a man of wisdom and gentle compassion. But I refused. As a straightforward social anthropologist bristling with the orthodox jargon recently acquired after my Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London I felt I was simply not qualified. What I did not know at Princeton—where I was spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study—was that my father was dying. When visitors came to see him he would become animated about the book on Islam he wanted me to write. When I rang from Princeton to talk to him I was stunned to be told he had passed away. I fought back the tears; the public exhibition of raw emotion must be controlled in the institutions of higher learning. A colleague walked into my office and asked what I was working on. In a daze, as if from far away, I heard myself saying: ‘A book on Islam’. I embarked on a journey after that event to understand Islamic history and society. It has been a long, sometimes difficult, journey and it has not ended. The book that became Discovering Islam also started a journey twenty years ago, a journey I have been observing with fascination. Discovering Islam grew into the BBC six part television series called Living Islam and the accompanying book of the same title. From Living Islam came Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World. Lord Nazir Ahmed launched Islam Today at the House of Lords in London in 1999. The cultural commentator, Melvyn Bragg and Chris Smith, the then Culture Secretary, spoke with warmth about the book and its value in building bridges between Islam and the West. When on September 11, 2001, the hijackers of the four American planes ix PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION caused murder and mayhem on an unprecedented scale, there was an immediate and widespread interest in Islam. I was invited to appear as the guest to explain Islam on the Oprah Winfrey show. The power of her words propelled Islam Today into the public gaze: it became one of the three books on Islam recommended by Amazon.com. Looking back, from the time the book was conceived twenty years ago to now when Islam is the most discussed religion in the world, I find that, while some things have changed, the book retains what is important. There have been significant changes in the world since the book was written: the Soviet empire has collapsed and six new Muslim states have come into being in Central Asia as a result, but the structure of Muslim societies, the pattern of the relationship between Islam and the West, and the outstanding problems that create so much anger and outrage in the Muslim world remain the same. Many of the problems I wrote about have continued to grow and assumed global proportions: the general lack of respect for scholarship in the Muslim World; the corruption and mismanagement of the political elite; the lack of justice in society; the gap between the rich and the poor; the failure to develop a message of love and compassion against that of hatred and anger. On the other side, deliberate misunderstanding and caricature of Islam continue to flourish in the Western media. The central explanation of the book for Muslim behavior holds true. The closer Muslims are to the ideal, the greater the stability in Islamic society, I had argued. The ideal which consists of ideas of justice, tolerance, and compassion remains elusive. But it is a noble and essential objective for Muslims. For non- Muslims who wish to understand Muslims there can be no better way than to look at the Islamic ideal. I also set myself the task of challenging the sense of anger and hatred in the Muslim world. I believed such emotions diminished the human capacity to discover the glory and compassion of God: they also created imbalance and insecurity for us here on earth. Not everyone agreed with me. The global transformations were causing upheavals in even traditional societies and the seeds of conflict were being sown across the world. The hijackers of September 11 would have been young boys growing up in the Muslim world when I began this book. The sociological and psychological conditions that directed them to their unspeakable crimes still exist. In that sense, little in essence has changed. Technology has advanced still further but Discovering Islam was already arguing that technological innovation was changing the nature of the growing clash between Islam and the West. Twenty years later, the book continues to throw light on contemporary Muslim society and point out the relevance of Muslim history. I am grateful to Professor Lawrence Rosen of Princeton University for writing the thoughtful, sympathetic and incisive Foreword to this new edition of Discovering Islam. I have known Professor Rosen from the time I was at the x PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION Institute for Advanced Study and hold him in high esteem as a friend and scholar. The book could have no better blessing than his benediction. The message of sulh-i-kul is more relevant than ever before in the wake of September 11. Sulh-i-kul is the message to carry into the twenty-first century. I believe it was the reason my father wanted me to write this book. Akbar S.Ahmed The Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations, American University, Washington, D.C. 8 November 2001 xi Foreword Lawrence Rosen Challenged by a request from his father that he initially felt neither disposed nor capable of fulfilling, Akbar Ahmed came to this book only after he had found his voice both as an anthropologist and as a believing Muslim. It is a happy coincidence of orientations for the reader who joins him in this venture, for this is not a book to be read as a member of an audience nor even as a text from which didactic expertise is to be sought. For all its deceptive appearance as straightforward description and analysis, the book is, I believe, best approached as an opportunity to look over the shoulder of one who is unflinchingly trying to explore and assess his cultural and religious heritage. Indeed it is a book that is almost oral in nature, an attempt to engage those who are willing to walk in the author’s shoes for a while in a genuine conversation, one that teases up the readers’ own assumptions, experiences, and reactions in the hope, not of overcoming them, but of engaging and even incorporating them. ‘Part autobiography, part history, part literature, and part science’ (as the author himself describes it), ‘its aim was political’ (as he later said)1 in the sense that it engages us in imagining a world where power may indeed come to be shared through mutual comprehension. Seen in this light a strategy for reading the book necessarily suggests itself—as the sincere invitation of a host who so respects his guest as to share and attend to the exchange of honest views. For even though the reader cannot reply directly, at each point in the presentation one can hardly fail to sense, even without knowing the author, the openness for dialogue that suffuses his life and his work.

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