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Archive for the ‘Islam’ Category

Strong Beliefs

Posted in Academics, Book Review, Iran, Islam, tagged , , , , , , on July 21, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

When recently reading with growing interest Patricia Crone’s latest book about The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran – Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012) I came across a most unlikely reference, Reinhold Loeffler’s interviews of Boyer Ahmadian tribe villagers in the southern Zagros mountains in the early and mid 1970s (Islam in Practice – Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village. State University of New York Press, New York 1988). Crone noted  (p. 210) that

“In a tribal village in the southern Zagros mountains studied in the 1970s there were still people who believed the duration of the world to be 50,000 years; others dismissed this as an erroneous idea of the mullahs (sic), claiming that it was the Day of Judgement that would last 50,000 years, a well-known popular view in Iran. Among the adherents of the erroneous idea of the mullahs was an old trader, who said that there were 50,000 years from Adam to the Day of Judgement, of which 11,380 years had already elapsed; but there had been another kind of men before Adam, and before that as well, for the world had never been empty and never would be; after the day of judgement God would make another creation. The cycles postulated by this man, a devout person who served as the model of orthodoxy in the village, were not limited to seven, and he was not a believer in reincarnation, but apart from that he was unwittingly perpetuating a tradition first attested for the followers of Abdallah b. Muawiya.”

(Abdallah b. Muawiya was a cousin of the fourth Shi’a imam’s son, Zayd ibn Ali, who revolted in Kufa in 739/40 against the Umayyads. Abdallah and the Harbiyya rebelled in western Iran after Zayd had been killed in the battle in Kufa and his son Yahiya was killed in Jawzjan in Khurasan in 743.)

Reinhold Loeffler and his wife Erika Friedl had settled and lived with the people in the remote village altogether for more than seven years. They became friendly with Loeffler and Friedl so that both, besides their fieldwork as anthropologists, were able to record  intensive and quite intimate talks with inhabitants of the village. Loeffler’s account comprises altogether 21 interviews about religion (“world views”) with a cross-section of the male villagers with quite different backgrounds, the mullah, teachers, traders, an orthodox, a fundamentalist, a doubtful etc. There is remarkable consonance when it comes to the core (as the villagers understand it) of Islam, demanding strive for pleasing God by working hard, caring for people avoiding day-by-day temptations and sins, emulating Ali, Husayn and the other Imams (not to forget the Prophet). About which sins will be forgiven and when and how. And tiny but interesting differences as regards cosmology, the Day of Judgment, and what happens with the soul during one’s demise and the coming of the former.

After 40 years (and 33 years into the Iranian Islamic Revolution), this world appears to be gone now, although I am not sure as regards the century (millennia?)-old religious beliefs of the common people in Iran’s countryside. When reading Loeffler’s series of interviews a disdain for the mullah in particular and the ulama in general is striking (while the shah’s dictatorial rule over Iran was, in general, regarded benevolent, even agreeable to God). A large number of folk-beliefs which are expressed in the interviews would not really please the  Ayatollahs presently ruling Iran. It would be interesting to further assess whether Karl Marx’ statement, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” does really apply here. These settled tribesmen still live in accord with nature which might at time be utterly cruel. But nature doesn’t oppress, although it needs to be comprehended and controlled in order to avert harm, illness, or destitution; to meet some of the basic aspirations in life, health, marriage, children and their well-being. Few of these, well, superstitious beliefs expressed here are actually based on orthodox Shi’a Islam as imposed on the Iranians after 1979.

Both Loeffler and Friedl do author each of a chapter of the Boyer Ahmadi (supplemented with a few rare pictures taken in the 1980s by Nasrollah Kasraian) in Richard Tapper’s and Jon Thompson’s The Nomadic Peoples of Iran (Thames & Hudson, London 2002) about which I had written before, see here.

July 21, 2012 @ 11:15

Last modified July 21, 2012.

 

 

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An Iranian Blend

Posted in Academics, Book Review, Iran, Islam, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Up to the so-called Sunni Revival long after the conquest of much of the Islamic World, and foremost Iran, by the Seljuqs in the first half of the 11th century, the religious denomination of Iranians has never been so clear. After the Arabs under caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab had brought the Sasanian empire and its last shah Yazdegerd III to their knees in the battles at al-Qadisiyyah (near the capital Ctesiphon) in 637 and Nahavand (near Hamadan) in 642, Iran’s state religion, Zoroastrianism, had not just vanished. Albeit victory of Islam was inevitable at first sight. The rapid Arab conquests after their Prophet Muhammad’s sudden demise in 632 took indeed place before the Muslims’ holy book, the Qur’an, had been compiled into an official, standardized, version by Uthman ibn Affan in about 650 (as legend tells). So, the conquests of Palestine and Syria in 634-6, Jerusalem and Ctesiphon in 637, and Egypt in 639 had probably little to do with a compelling new religion. One main factor for the rapid success of the Arab conquest of Iran was, of course, the peripheral location of its capital, Ctesiphon, and its early fall and that simple fact is stressed early in Patricia Crone’s new book [1] on the “nativist prophets” [2] of the first two centuries after the conquest in Greater Iran .

How did the Iranians respond to forcible imposition of yet immature Islamic ideas, which, by definition, blend those of the older religions Judaism and Christianity? Well, they rebelled. But not so fast.

The Revolts

Much commenced with the Persian general Abu Muslim Khorasani (d. 755) and Islam’s third civil war (749/50) when members of the Hashimiyya in Khorasan revolted against the ruling Umayyads [3]. Abu Muslim’s origin, whose original Persian name was Behzadan, remains obscure, though. During the rebellion against the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II, Abu Muslim was sent to Khorasan by the leader of the Abbasid rebellion, Ibrahim bin Muhammad, where he headed the uprising since 747. When Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah was proclaimed first Abbasid caliph in 749, Abu Muslim assumed office as governor in Khorasan where he gained almost legendary status among Muslims (both Shi’tes and Sunnis), Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians alike. Relations with the caliph and his successor deteriorated, though. Abu Muslim was eventually ordered to Madain by caliph al-Mansur when he unavailingly tried to appoint Abu Muslim governor in Egypt and Syria. There he was killed and his mutilated body thrown into the river Tigris in 755.

The Iranian revolts took mainly place before and after this third civil war, when the Abbasid Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah (the “blood shedder”) had eventually defeated the troops of Marwan II on the banks of the Great Zab river  in Northern Iraq. Times were troubled indeed. Before and after, Alids had tried to rebel as well.  In Kufa, Zayd ibn Ali, son of the fourth Shi’a Imam Ali ibn Husain Zayn al-Abidin,  revolted in 739/40 and was killed in a battle with the Umayyad governor there. His son Yahiya ibn Zayn continued his father’s struggle. He went to Khorasan through Mada’in and remained in disguise in Balkh until he was arrested. He was imprisoned for some time until he was able to escape after the death of Umayyad Caliph Hashim ibn Abd al-Malik with many Shi’ites from Khorasan gathering around him. He headed toward Nishapur and engaged there in a battle with its governor, Umar ibn Zurarah al-Qasri, whose army he defeated. In 743 he was wounded in the forehead at Jawzjan and killed at the battle arena at the age of only 18 years while his forces dispersed [4]. Crone mentions  sources (p. 104) in her new book as to which Yahiya might have been a descendant of another propagandist in Transoxiana after Abu Muslim’s killing in 755, Ishaq al-Turk. Whether Ishak “had allegedly fled from the Umayyads to Turkish Transoxiana and later adopted Muslimi beliefs by way of camouflage” (taqiyya?) is questionable. Crone writes, “It probably reflects the fact that Yahiya b. Zayd was a hero to many of those who venerated Abu Muslim, for Yahiya was a member of the same holy family that Abu Muslim had worked for, and both had been victimised by the ‘Arabs’ who did not understand what their own prophet had preached,” and “One sub-group of the Ishaqiyya claimed that their imam had fled from the Umayyads and the Abbasids to the land of the Turks, where he was now staying and whence the mahdi would come forth, speaking only Turkish. Their Ishaq sounds like our refugee from Sunbadh’s (see below) army mixed up with Yahiya b. Zayd, the refugee from the Umayyads.” Also Abdallah ibn Mu’awiya, Zayd’s cousin and Yahiya’s uncle, and his followers, the Harbiyya/Janahiyya, rebelled after both had been killed. Ibn Mu’awiya’s revolt was joined by the Zaydiyya and even Kharijites. He was killed on behalf of the Abbasids in 748 just by Abu Muslim, to whom he had fled in hope for cooperation, while imprisoned in Herat.

Abu Muslim’s killing in 755 sparked further revolts. One of the insurgents in the Jibal was his close friend Sunbadh (d. 755), a former member of the Iranian aristocracy and now leader of the Muslimiyya. He rebelled in Rayy in 755 but was defeated after only 70 days. Sunbadh denied Abu Muslim’s death and was inclined to deify his friend. And he must have been the founder of the Khurramites, a sect and political movement which has its roots in proto-socialist Mazdakism, a heresy re-introduced in the early 6th century by a Persian reformer and religious activist, Mazdak. Khurramis were Shi’ites but most of their doctrines were those of the Zoroastrians.

As Crone stresses Khurramism was not an intrinsically subversive or rebellious creed but rather friendly and pacifist. Anyway, in Azerbaijan it was the utterly cruel and bloodthirsty Khurramite leader Babak (d. 838) who rebelled against the Abbasids under caliph al-Ma’mun,  and his rebellion lasted for more than 20 years. Al-Mamun’s successor Abu Ishak al-Mut’asim appointed in 835 his general Haydar bin Kavus Afshin to fight Babak and his Khurramites  in Azerbaijan. Afshin got hold of him only two years later. Babak was executed under torture in 838.

Further to the East, in Sogdia in Transoxiana, it was another ethnically Persian insurgent who went into hiding a couple of years after Abu Muslim had been killed and started a rebellion (around 768), al-Muqanna (d. 779?). It might even be that he also had been a commander under Abu Muslim. His original name was Hashim al-Hakim, or Ata, but he became famous under the name he gave himself, al-Muqanna, or the veiled one. Al-Muqanna claimed to be a prophet, or even re-incarnation of God, a role which had passed to him via Abu Muslim, Ali and Muhammad. He used magic to impress his followers, the Mubayyida. When besieged in his fortress he committed suicide. He, too, was a member of the Khurramiya. While other Khurramite followers at that time wore red clothes, those of Al-Muqanna wore white in opposition to the black clothes of the Abbasids [5].

Khurramism and Beyond

Albeit an orthodox version of Zoroastrianisms had been re-established as sort of state religion under the Sasanids (224-651 CE), there had never been only Zoroastrians in Iran. As Patricia Crone writes in her preface,

“This is a book about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts that the Muslims triggered there, and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. It is also a book about a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has shown remarkable persistence in Iran over a period of two millennia. The central thesis of the book is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and has occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi’ism on Iran.”

While the first part of Crone’s book entertains and summarizes what had been published before, in particular by Elton L. Daniel, the second part deals with specific religions and their heresies and beliefs which met in pre-Islamic and early-Islamic Iran, including and with a focus on Khurramism.

The name of the Khurramis is derived from Persian khurram, “happy, cheerful”. It is a blend with much (albeit utterly heretic)  Zoroastrian belief in it. Antinomianism, cosmological principles of light and darkness, repeat reincarnation of any creatures. Cleanliness and purification. Non-violence, except when raising the banner of revolt; including avoidance of killing animals and vegetarian diet, or shockingly (for Muslims) only allowing carrion. Or equally scandalous, sharing of women at least by mutual consent. Drinking wine. In brief, freedom of enjoying all kinds of pleasure as long as nobody was harmed.

For the apparent panpsychism of the Khurramis, i.e. their conviction that everything is alive and endowed with sould, spirit, or mind; and likewise their strong belief in reincarnation biblical-type monotheism was intolerably reductionist. Crone explains (p. 273ff),

“From the Khurrami point of view the Christians were better than the Jews and Muslims in that they accepted the idea of God incarnating himself in human beings and also spoke much about the holy spirit. The Gnostics were even better, and best of all were the Platonists, whether pagan, Gnostic, Christian, or Muslim. It is not for nothing than Platonism became an integral part of Iranian Islam.”

The other major characteristic of Khurramism is alienation, in particular political which started with their unhappy encounters with Muslim society when Iran was colonized, postrevolutionary violence, ruined lives.

“Everybody else had followed imams of error; only they (the Khurramis) knew that the guardianship of the Prophet’s message had passed to Abu Muslim or Khidash (a Hashimite missionary in Khurasan, who had been repudiated for having adopted the Khurramite heresy already in 737), who had been betrayed and killed by the powers that be. The Muslimiyya would curse the killers and weep over their martyrs, clearly identifying their dire fate with their own. Eventually they enrolled the Persian kings as imams, and so implicitly as martyrs too. The followers of Abdallah b. Mu’awiya were also defined by loyalty to a martyred hero. So too, of course, were many Shi’ites who were not Khurramis and who wept over al-Husayn. In all cases the evil powers were humans, usually the caliph and his supporters, the ‘Arabs’ who called themselves Muslims, and no attempt seems to have been made to retell the story of the evil powers on a cosmic scale, as an account of the creation. In line with this, what the devotees of martyred heroes dreamed about was not escape from the world, but rather vengeance: the hero would come back, or a descendant of his would do so, and he would kill the oppressors, purify the world, and restore the oppressed minority to power.”

As Crone notes (p. 275), like Shi’te extremism, Khurramism was meant to insulate people, “building  religious walls around their communities when the mountains no longer sufficed.” The Muslim conquistadors reduced the countryside to urban subservience and imposed their single transcendent God which was intolerable for the mountaineers. Crone (p. 276),

“They opted out in the name of the nearest they could find to their own religion in Islam, meaning Shi’ism stretched to the limits to accomodate their views. They did so as Khurramis, as Qarmatis and other kinds of Ismailis, above all the Nizaris, and eventually as members of all the quasi-Islamic communities that appeared in regions from the Jibal to Anatolia after the Mongol invasions. But it was not until the Safavid conquest of Iran that the mountaineers got their revenge, with consequences that are still with us.”

In her preface, Crone recommends readers to start with chapter 1 which introduces the actors and sets the scene for Khurranism which it dealt with extensively in chapter 2. It’s a good one. As usual, her new text is heavy stuff, not easy to digest. Crone’s dense writing is demanding, and quoting so numerous  hardly accessible Arabic, Persian, Pahlavi, Greek, Syriac, Buddhist, Manichaean primary sources, including Middle Iranian texts recovered from Central Asia and Central Asian archaeology is stunning and highly admirable. In chapter 3, Crone tries to systematically examine specific marital patterns and reproductive strategies discernible behind Muslim accusations of ‘wife-sharing’. While in the eastern part of Iran fraternal polyandry was indeed widely practiced, in the west it was temporary co-marriage, somethind which is custom even in present-day Iran (nikah al-mut’ah). Anyway, when and wherever Muslims invaded the former Sasanian empire they brought with them a new marital regime and denounced alternative customes as barbarian and incest, a form of, well, pre-modern Orientalism. What closingly follows is a description of the role of sharing wifes and property in the formation of an ancient communist utopian ideal, namely Mazdakism, in Sasanian Iran.

See Patricia Crone’s lecture on The Acculturated Native Who Rebels: Nativists, Nationalists, and Western-Born Jihadists in Historical Perspective of 24 April 2012 at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton here or click on the video at the bottom.

Notes

[1] The following is about Patricia Crone’s fascinating account on one of the enigmas of Islam, how and why the century-long civilization of Iranians did surrender to Arabs from the desert and how they “Persianized” the new creed which was imposed on them (Crone P. The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012). The book-jacket displays the mirror image of two men riding a camel of a Sogdian mural painting from the 7th century. Russian archaeologists began excavating the ruins of the hill-fort Afrasiyab, northeast of modern Samarqand, in 1880. A small museum at Afrasiyab exhibits Sogdian artifacts including a series of 7th century colorful mural aintings from the royal palace. According to the legend to the picture on the book-Jacket, a gift-bearing procession is shown. The eyes of the man in white garment had later been scratched, while the other man in brown-red displayes an anxious face.

[2] Who are nativists? The rebellion in response to the Arab conquest were, so we are told by Crone (on p. 160ff), not nationalistic. Despite Sasanid “state religion” Zoroastrianism, the rural population in the Jibal, Azerbaijan, Khurasan, Transoxiana kept alive their own religious beliefs and cults, traditions. Prime loyalties, above family level, did not include the king or his high priests or army commanders, but village, tribal chief, and/or religious community.

“Nativism is a different type of reaction to foreign rule. The word usually stands for opposition to immigration and other formes of xenophobia among members of a a hegemonic society, but it is also used of hostility to hegemonic foreigners in societies that have been subjected to colonial rule, and that is the meaning of relevance here. Nativism in this second sense is attested with great frequency in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania in the wake of the European expansion, especially in the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. … “The movements were alway messianic and/or millenarian: the expulsion of the invaders would be followed by paradise on earth, usually inaugurated by a redeemer figure. Because the rebels came from strata that had not enjoyed the supra-local organization that the aristocracy and religious leaders had possessed (if there had been a kingdom in the region) their revolts were often small-scaled uprisings of a local nature. It is on the nativist pattern that the Iranian revolts conform.”

[3] There were earlier, largely unsuccessful, revolts against the Umayyads, well-known those of Husayn ibn Ali in Kerbala in 680 and his grandson Zayd ibn Ali in 739/40 in Kufa, both marking different schisms in Islam, representing the Imami (“Twelver”) Shi’a as regards the former and the Zaidiyyah in case of the latter (there is another major Shi’a branch, Ismailism, after Ismail ibn Jafar, another generation later). The Armenian bishop and historian Sebeos (wr. 661) tells of an even earlier revolt and heavy resistance in the Jibal, former Media, in northwestern Iran, but “thereafter a ghostly silence descends on the Persian plateau” for almost 100 years as Patricia Crone (on p. 6f) describes the fact that, “Like other non-Arabs the Iranians had to enter the Muslim community to acquire visibility,” which takes time.

[4] When I had been invited to join a pilgrimage to Mashhad in Khorasan by Kuwaiti Shi’ites a couple of years ago, we also visited the small village of Miyami on the road to Sarakhs at the border to Turkmenistan with its tiny (almost ruined but now under reconstruction) Emamzadeh Yahiya, built in the 16th century. Imami (“Twelver”) Shi’ites (the branch my Kuwaiti friends belonged to) hold that Yahiya’s father Zayd had apparently accepted not to be the Imam who would succeed his father (in fact, the Imami consider Muhammad al-Baqir, father of celebrated Ja’far as-Sadiq, as fifth Imam); while adherents to the Zaydi branch of Shi’ism (a heresy according to Imami Shi’ites) regard him the righteous fifth Imam. His son Yahiya bin Zayd, though, is believed to have actually been a Zaydi, and he even seemed to have had expressed aspiration for following his father in the Imamate. “It is at this point that the Zaydi sect takes form and its way becomes separate from that of the Shi‘ah Imamiyyah and Ithna Ash‘ari. The followers of the Zaydi sect do not even refer to the infallible Imams,” as can be read at al-islam.org. It was amazing to note the devout visit of the site by these Kuwaiti Twelver Shi’ites.

[5] As Crone explains (p. 22), Mazdakism has its origin in a Zoroastrian heresy which had appeared already in the 3rd century CE, founded by a certain Zardusht, son of Khrosak or Khurrak, a Zoroastrian heresiarch, a contemporary of Mani (d. 277).

“He proposed to remove strife from this world by eliminating desire, not by training people to suppress it, but rather by enabling all to fulfill it in equal: the remedy was equal access to the main sources of conflict, namely women and property, coupled with abstention from harm to any living being. Women and property were to be shared; war was evil; and animals were not to be killed for food. His ideal relating to women were taken up by the emperor Kavadh in the first part of his reign (488-96). Kavadh was expelled, returned, and displayed no signs of heresy thereafter. When he died in 531 a Zoroastrian priest by the name of Mazdak also tried to implement Zardusht’s ideas, this time those relating to the sharing of women and property alike, as the leader of a major revolt in Iraq and western Iran (c. 531-40). It is thanks to his revolt that the heresy came to be known as Mazdakism.”

July 15, 2012 @ 18:03

Last modified July 16, 2012.

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Three Thousand Years

Posted in Book Review, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Two years ago, I had written a brief essay on Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) mystic Night Journey to Jerusalem and then further into Heaven which is commemorated by many Muslims today, 27 Rajab, al-’Isrā’ wal-Mi‘rāj. According to the Holy Qur’an (Q17:1) and aḥādīth the Prophet was taken to the “furthest mosque”, al-masjid al-aqsa,by al-Buraq, the mythical white-winged mare, and ascended to heaven from the Rock on the Temple Mount. The journey took place about one year before the Prophet’s hijra, 621 CE, and he testified afterwards to the Quraysh of Makkah what he had seen in Jerusalem.  But what had he actually seen?

Fact of the matter is that during a rather short period of time, between 614 and 629, Christian almost three centuries long control over Jerusalem had been adjourned by Persian rule. In 614 Jerusalem had been besieged for 21 days by the army of Shah Khosrau II’s General Sharbaraz and after the city’s surrender most Christian inhabitants were massacred and all churches destroyed. Even the True Cross was taken as a trophy to the Capital Ctesiphon. But Persian reign lasted only until 629 when the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reconquered the city and returned the True Cross to the rebuilt Holy Sepulchre.

What the Prophet of Islam might have seen when for the first and last time in Jerusalem I had mainly derived from Oleg Grabar’s book on early Islamic Jerusalem, The Shape of the Holy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1996) which provides some computer-generated images of the city around 600 CE, one and a half decade before the Persian conquest. One has to assume that in 621, the year of the mystical Night Journey, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of Resurrection, and the Church on Mt. Zion commemorating the Last Supper and the large Church Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos lay in ruins.

A few decades after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE, around 700 CE, the Umayyad Caliphs Abd’ al-Malik and his son al-Walid erected, in commemoration of Muhammad’s Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock (from where he ascended to Heaven) and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon’s First and post-Babylonian exile Second Temple, and Herod’s reconstruction which had finally been destroyed in 135 CE by the troops of Roman Emperor Hadrian.

Oleg Grabar, who has deceased last year, has co-edited with Benjamin Z. Kedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Where Heaven and Earth Meets: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade (Yad Ben-Zvi Press, Jerusalem and the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas 2009) which assembles an impressive panel of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars who present many unknown facts in three thousand years’ history and stunningly illuminate the unique historical, religious, spiritual, cultural, and political importance of this true interface between, focus of, the three monotheistic, revealed, religions (the not less-charged significance for Christians is derived from Jesus’ relation with and acts in Herod’s Temple). The for Jews significant Western Wall of the Esplanade is not forgotten in the account.

Due to the unsolved political situation of Israel occupying East Jerusalem, al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, is seriously endangered. But there is hope. Grabar, in a personal statement concludes:

“There are legal and technical mechanisms for the preservation of what is deemed beautiful and historically significant, but the implementation of these mechanisms requires decisions about governance and responsibility which cannot be exclusively in the hands of political and religious authorities. Alternate possibilities, through UNESCO for instance, have failed so far. But, if one mediates on the eschatological component of the Haram as the space where Go[o]d will be made prevail and man will be judged, one can perhaps imagine that a space shaped by the Antique world long gone and constantly enhanced by the living culture of Islam could become a place for reconciliation and mutual understanding rather than of strife and contest. Hope springs eternal.” (Emphasis added.)

 

June 17, 2012 @ 17:20

Last modified June 17, 2012.

 

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A Culture of Ambiguity

Posted in Book Review, Islam, tagged , , , , , on December 4, 2011 | 1 Comment »

It is a daring hypothesis which is outlined in this year’s second eye-opener by Verlag der Weltreligionen (after Angelika Neuwirth’s tour de force of a European approach to the Qur’an; see my review here), Thomas Bauer’s Other History of Islam. In general, the 450 pages of the book are enjoyable reading telling a quite different story about the nature of Islam and Islamic societies. Bauer’s highly surprising conclusion is that heavily ambiguity-tolerant Islam had been “Islamicized” only after post-Enlightenment highly ambiguity-intolerant Western cultures had come into contact with Muslim societies as colonialists.

Bauer is Professor for Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. He explains in his book that Arabs, Turks, and Persians were very much fond of all kinds and levels of ambiguity, something which seems not to be compatible with ideologies, and something which comes as a surprise. In fact, in particular Islam is described in the 21st century as intolerant, fundamentalist, relentless. Bauer does away with the myths of an unambiguous final version of the Qur’an, explains why the rashidun Caliphs of the 7th century intentionally avoided diacritical marks, thus allowing for different meanings of a text which is to be recited anyway. The writing was always used only as aide-mémoire.

It is intriguing when Bauer compares the work on the right reading of the Qur’an by 15th century Damascene Ibn al-Jazari (d. 1429) with that by contemporary Saudi Arabian (and Salafi) Sheikh Ibn Uthaymeen (1925-2001). The former tolerant to any ambiguities, who had accepted that the Qur’an is a manifold, unlimited, hyper-textually structured, nonlinear text whose final meaning can never be comprehended in its entirety; the latter afraid of any ambiguity and fundamentalist (there is only one final version of the Qur’an). But that seems to be the by far dominant opinion of both Muslims and non-Muslims at the moment.

It might be questionable to designate whatever had been created in Islamic countries after the Arab conquest of the 7th century as Islamic as if there is no and has never been any secular life in Muslim societies. But anyway, examples for the amazing lust for ambiguity in Poetry reminds us of other fields of Islamic art which can be found on monuments and in the weavings of women. Isn’t Islam (and has always been) a cultural system rather than merely a religion?

What might stun the reader most is Bauer’s chapter on sex. It is true that in Islamic cultures sex had long been a rather uncomplicated issue. Bauer’s examples of “normal” and widely accepted same-sex relationships and the plenty of literature on it are very much intriguing. Apparently, that must have changed, since presently rather prude (Victorian!) manners seem to be more or less characteristic for particularly Arabic societies (and Iranian after their revolution).

Bauer offers an interesting explanation, namely that missionary zeal of (Victorian) Western colonialists, who were so shocked when meeting with fun-loving Egyptians (see Juan Cole’s Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East ); and, at the same time, the desire of the well-educated middle class in Arabic countries to adopt Western values might have been the cause for an ambiguity crisis which ultimately led to shameful oppression of sexuality (a term which had been introduced in the West not before the 19th century) and, for instance, homophobia.

That hadad, or serious punishment under sharia law (for instance stoning for adultery or sodomy) had, in previous centuries, hardly ever been executed comes again as a big surprise. Bauer reports on just one case he came across, a qadi of the 17th century who had imposed the death penalty on a women for adultery. But it seems logic when considering that four witnesses would be necessary who could report on the act in detail, something which can usually never happen.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamists in certain provinces in Nigeria who fought for more independence had applied had punishments in the last decade of the 20th century and had terrified the Western public. Now, after Western values had changed again after WWII, the “otherness” of Islamicized Islam could again be established. And now the West seems to have an interest in imposing a “sexual revolution” and “women’s lib” in particular on societies in Afghanistan and Iraq which had just abandoned their high tolerance for (sexual) ambiguity (one should remember how Kabul looked only in the 1970s).

Bauer’s book has an easily readable style although it contains numerous very valuable footnotes. It has the depth and breadth of, for instance, Edward Said’s Orientalism, but is unfortunately not yet translated into English. In the current discussion about “Islam as an ideology” it might be enormous helpful. It addresses both Western and Muslim audiences who might wonder what had happened to the richness of their culture in not only two centuries. What has caused the alleged decline and retardation of Islamic societies might just be the Western push during and after the 19th century for abandoning any ambiguity.

Last modified December 4, 2011.

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Religious Minorities after the Revolution

Posted in Iran, Islam, Religion, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2011 | 1 Comment »

 

 

The different Iranian/Persian Empires have ever been home of a large variety of religious dominations, besides Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, in particular Jews (who can be traced for more than 2500 years); Christian Apostolic Armenians, Nestorian Assyrians, Catholic Chaldeans; Buddhists, and Zoroastrians, whose religion had been founded in Iran millennia ago; and more recently adherents to the Baha’i faith.

While religious tolerance of the Zoroastrian Sassanid rulers (3rd until mid 7th century) for Christians and Jews can be regarded high, the Arab conquest of Iran after the fall of Ctesiphon in the battle of Al Qādisiyyah in 637 CE led to mass conversion to Islam, the violent incorporation of the country into Dar al-Islam, or house of Islam; and degradation of resistant adherents to the other monotheistic religions (the “people of the book”, or Ahl al-Kitab) to dhimmis, or protected people under Islamic rule. It should be noted that they were, for a long time, well-regarded and respected, though. In particular the Abbasid caliphs (after 750 CE) were very much reliant on numerous non-Muslim scholars, scribes, technicians and artisans which helped establishing one of history’s most glorious eras, Islam’s Golden Age.

 

Shi’ites in Iran

But this period was also shaken by rebellions of the adherents of the later Shi’a Imams, descendants of the Prophet of Islam, who confronted in particular the Abbasid Caliphs Harun ar-Rashid (d. 809) and his son Al Mamun. For Iran, especially the alleged conflict between Al Ma’mun (d. 833) and Ali bin Musa ar-Ridha (Imam Reza) is important as he died (or was poisoned) in 818 in Tus in Khorasan. His tomb in Mashhad has become Iran’s most important pilgrimage site.

On its face, the main difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites is that the latter believe in a particular spiritual and political authority of the Prophet’s descendants through his daughter Fatimah who was married to Muhammad’s cousin Ali ibn abi Talib (d. 661). He and his two sons Hasan and Husayn belong to the Prophet’s closer household, or Ahl al-Bayt, and are considered the first three Imams. Shi’ites reject in particular the official successors to the Prophet, i.e. the rashidun (or rightly guided) Caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman, and their Umayyad and Abbasid successors. The ultimate split of the ummah, or Islamic community occurred after the battle of Karbala in 680 when Ali’s son Husayn together with his small army was killed (martyred) by troops of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid.

In order to get a deeper understanding of the strict ritual purity doctrine of Shi’ites one has to recall that the rise of this branch of Islam went along with a deep sense of monstrous injustice (for instance, sidelining Ali as the only righteous Caliph three times), the honorable defeat of an upright minority (in the Battle of Karbala), and martyrdom (most Imams have actually been poisoned or otherwise killed). If a newly emerging religion actually needs a strong creation myth, Shi’ites may in fact be very much satisfied. Legends about the twelve Imams’ and their family members’ righteous lives, their rebellion and inevitable martyrdom are now filling whole libraries, in Najaf, Qom, Mashhad and elsewhere.

It is not by chance that in particular the Iranian mindset found the belonging to the “other” and a deep desire to separate and disassociate  quite attractive. Persians have a long tradition of culturally changing something non-Persian intruders and conquerors brought to the country into something downright Persian [1]. The term Persianization has been coined for that phenomenon and it comes to one’s mind when recalling that most Shi’ites nowadays live in Iran and neighboring countries Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, or Afghanistan which have been under Persian influence for millennia.

 

The State Religion

As state religion, the Twelver, or Imami, Shi’a branch of Islam has only been established in Iran (with a short break in the first half of the 18th century under the reign of Nader Shah) with the rise of the Safavid dynasty in the early 16th century. Among all religious minorities in Iran in particular Jews were facing tremendous hardships especially towards the end of the reign of Abbas I (d. 1629). Abbas was apparently somewhat more tolerant of Christianity. He forcefully settled, for instance, Armenian Christians on the southern river banks of his new capital Esfahan where he created a New Jolfa after the Armenian frontier town Julfa had to be evacuated in fear of raids by Ottoman troops (and was later completely destroyed). His relative tolerance was not directed towards Jews, though. Due to their perceived ritual impurity [2] and in order to avoid any physical contacts they were not allowed to attend public baths and were forced to wear a distinctive badge and headgear.

 

Najasah

Daniel Tsadik lists a large number of fatwas of 19th century Iranian clerics which tackle questions about how to deal with the impurity (najasah) of Jews in daily life, as well as dhimmah regulations [3]. There is certainly no need to detail all of these abominations [4] but it instantly becomes clear that, based on harsh discrimination laws Jews in all likelihood comprised only the lowest social status in Iran’s society. With a few exceptions, Jews were typically peddlers or were forced to choose vocations which are usually forbidden to Muslims, such as tanner, dyer, scavenger, cleaner of excrement pits, and the like.

It is important to note that the Shi’a discrimination of Jews (which in fact is downright anti-Semitism) and, in general, all religious minorities in Iran has its root in a perceived superiority of the faith [5], the exclusivity of Shi’a Islam, the “otherness” (aqaliat) of the utterly erring religious minorities; with grave consequences, which Tsadik describes without even mentioning the word anti-Semitism once in his dissertation.  The forced conversions and pogroms of Jews during the Qajar period and in particular Shah Nasir al-Din Qajar’s lengthy reign (1848-96) in Tabriz and Shiraz (1830), Mashhad (1839), Barforush (1866), and numerous incidents in Hamadan (1860’s, 1875, 1880s) are well-documented. As Turkey has not acknowledged its genocide of the Armenian population during WWI, the Iranians have in fact to come to terms with their own darker sides of history, as well. There is little hope, though, that that will be done under the current regime, an out-of-time fundamentalist Shi’a theocracy. However, one has to know about Jews and other religious minorities having had endured century-long discrimination and persecution in Iran when asking questions about present day anti-Semitism in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

 

After the Revolution

The common demonizing of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West includes grave concerns about religious minorities, not so much as regards Zoroastrians but in particular Jews, Baha’is and Christian converts. They might be justified. In particular as regards the two latter groups one has in fact to expect persecution if not extermination. Apostasy (Baha’is are considered apostates as well) is a capital offence in the Islamic Republic. The Baha’i faith emerged from messianic Shi’a Islam in Iran in the 19th century. One of the early faith’s founding figures, Seyyed Ali Mohammad Shirazi, or Bab (executed in 1850), declared himself to be the Hidden Imam. Mirza Hossein Ali Nouri, known as Baha’u’llah (d. 1892), regarded himself as the messianic figure which had been predicted by Bab.

Since the Baha’is enjoyed at least some protection under the reigns of the two Pahlavi shahs, they are considered, in post-revolutionary Iran, as royalists. It is a popular, albeit erroneous, belief among Muslim Iranians that the Bahai’s (as other non-Muslim religious minorities) had even enjoyed a privileged status then. Their alleged association with Israel and the West adds to widespread, systematic and uninterrupted persecution, not only by the government and the ulema but also the vast majority of common, devout Shi’ites in Iran. Due to forced adherence to secrecy it has always been difficult to estimate the number of Baha’is in Iran. There might still be between 150,000 and 300,000 [6] which do not comprise more than five per cent of their total number worldwide.    

Missionary work of non-ethnic Christians, including building schools and hospitals, went long hand in hand with foreign penetration of colonial powers, France and, in particular, Britain. Attempts to abandon these activities had been made already by Reza Shah in the 1930s [7]. As regards Christian converts, exact figures of how many are living in the Islamic Republic of Iran are very difficult to obtain. While ethnic Christians such as Armenians (mainly Apostolic with few Protestants or Catholics, decreasing numbers of adherents since the 1970s from 250,000 to between 150,000 and 200,000), Nestorian Assyrians, Catholic Chaldeans (decreasing from 30,000 in the mid-1970s to 16,000-18,000 in 1992 [8] ) continuously enjoy being respected by the Islamic authorities with even overrepresentation in the majlis, or parliament, converts are doomed to live in secrecy.

Although still being the largest community in the Middle East outside Israel, the number of Jews in Iran has constantly dropped since 1948. In the 1930s, Reza Shah’s pro-Nazi sympathies seriously threatened the Jewish community. At the time of the foundation of Israel as a state, more than 100,000 Jews lived in Iran, but between 1948 and 1953 more than 30,000 emigrated to Israel. Interestingly, most emigrants in this first wave were from rural areas belonging to the lower-classes [9]. Shah Reza Pahlavi’s reign since 1953 and the close and friendly relationship with Israel granted the most prosperous era for the Iranian Jewish population which rose to about 80,000 in 1978. Within one year of the revolution, it dropped to 50,000-60,000 [10] and is now estimated to be between 20,000 and 25,000. All recognized religious minorities have representatives in the majlis. Jews have one representative. Currently seen emigrations to, for instance, the USA are still due to economical strain rather than persecution.

 

Being Marginalized

Living in a Shi’a theocracy as a (recognized) religious minority (aqaliatin) may have tremendous disadvantages. Iran has been a predominant Muslim country since 637 CE. Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian populations are considerably older. As has been outlined here in some detail the rise of the Safavids in the early 16th century and the establishment of discriminating Shi’a faith (or superstition) as state religion must be considered as the most crucial incident for adherents to, in particular, monotheistic religions. It was and is the ulema, Muslim legal scholars, who disregard(ed) fundamental human rights when writing about najasah and second-class citizenship of Ahl al-Kitab. The apparently further decreasing numbers of adherents to recognized religious minorities in Iran (I suppose that at the moment the trend has been halted not accelerated, but exact data are missing) may lead to further marginalization in the society [11]. As Eliz Sanasarian concludes [12],

“Scapegoating non-Muslim marginal groups has been a historical blemish for Iran, its version of Islam, and state politics. If a community or society does not admit its mistakes, it cannot address them realistically, and it is bound to repeat them again. Blaming others is the easiest way of denying personal responsibility. Unless mindsets are altered, no change is deserving of praise. In the end it is essential to contemplate the perils of marginality for those who experience them and those who cause them. Failure to contemplate the situation and change behavior will guarantee the mindless repetition of the patterns examined above in the not too distant future.”  

 

Notes

[1] One striking example may be the famous Mongolian ruler of the Ilkhanid dynasty in Iran Öljaitü (d. 1316) whose mausoleum in Soltaniyeh has been described as Iran’s Taj Mahal. As his mother was a Christian, he was baptized but converted in his youth to Buddhism but then first to Sunni and then, after coming into contact with Shi’ite scholars, Shi’a Islam. He later re-converted to Sunni Islam after Shi’ite clerics had turned down his rather weird idea to re-entomb the bones of Imam Ali (in Najaf) and Imam Husayn (in Karbala) in his own mausoleum in Soltaniyeh.

[2] Both Christians and Jews are regarded Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book, by Muslims. Both Christians and Jews, though, have allegedly distorted the revealed scriptures. Daniel Tsadik (see note below) refers in his thesis “Between Foreigners and Shi’is” to the fatwa collection of Abu al-Qasim Qummi (d. 1816 CE) who regards the ritual impurity of Christian and Jews as commonplace. It is mainly based on surah 9:30, 31 which describes Jews and Christians as polytheists.

“9:30 The Jews call ‘Uzair (Ezra) a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!

9:31 They take their priests and their anchorites to be their lords in derogation of Allah, and (they take as their Lord) Christ the son of Mary; yet they were commanded to worship but One Allah: there is no god but He. Praise and glory to Him: (Far is He) from having the partners they associate (with Him).”

Polytheists are, according to surah 9:28, impure.

“9:28 O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.”

[3] Daniel Tsadik. Between Foreigners and Shi’is. Nineteeth-Century Iran and its Jewish Minority. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2007, pp. 17ff.

[4] Hasan Najafi (d. 1850) explains, according to Tsadik (pp. 28ff), how (Shi’a) Muslim rules are imposed on dhimmis, which reads as if it directly originates from Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935 or Dolf Sternberger’s “Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen”. For example as regards a desired distinction between Muslims and dhimmis in clothing, hairstyle, riding habits, and agnomen,

“Dhimmis should wear an item of clothing differing in color from the color of the rest of their garments; for instance, one piece of the Jews’ costume may be honey-colored. Dhimmi women should wear one red shoe and one white. Nonetheless, the dhimmis are not forbidden to wear first-rate (fakhir) clothes. Since the prophet parted his hair, the dhimmis are not allowed to part theirs; they should clip the front (maqadin) of their heads, and cut off their hair. The dhimmis are not allowed to ride horses, since horses are considered powerful (or: honorable; Arab. ’izz) beasts. They are, however, permitted to ride on any other beast, but without a saddle, and their legs must be placed on one side of the beast, while their back is turned to the other side. They cannot gird swords or carry weapons. Finally, the dhimmis cannot employ Muslim agnomens, such as Abu Muhammad and Abu ‘Abd Allah.” 

[5] As Tsadik writes on p. 30,

 “The Jews displayed the trait of stubborn obstinacy (lajaj-i ’inad) toward their own major prophet, frequently rebelling against Moses as attested in the Torah. They opposed their other prophets and, in fact, killed some prophets sent to guide them.

According to this line, the Jews rejected the truth, and persistently denied God’s prophets and indubitable proofs. They went further and devised an oral law that was an illegitimate innovation, whereas their written code could at best have predicted the emergence of Muhammad (e.g., Deuteronomy 18:18) and the twelve Shi’i Imams (Genesis 17:20) and the supremacy of Islam.

“The Jews misunderstood their Torah and therefore misinterpreted God’s will; with the passage of time they introduced deviant rituals and customs as well as flawed beliefs.”

[6] Eliz Sanasarian. Religious Minorities in Iran. Cambridge University Press 2000, p. 53. Persecution also took place in Morocco in 1962. The Baha’i faith was banned in Egypt in 1960 and in Iraq since 1970.

[7] Ibid., p. 44.

[8] Ibid., Table 2, p. 36f.

[9] Ibid., p. 47. Although in the beginning of this emigration wave economic strain might have been the main motivation for emigration to Israel, Muslim anti-Israel sentiments soon after the proclamation of the State of Israel led to calls for boycotting merchandise in Iran’s big bazaars. Mossadegh’s short episode in power and the subsequent CIA orchestrated coup d’état which reinstated Shah Reza Pahlavi aggravated anti-Israel and anti-Jews sentiments, as well.  

[10] Ibid., p. 48. Numbers may not be reliable. In the mid-1990s according to Iranian estimates (e.g., reported in Iran Times 1996, footnote #72) about 35,000 Jews were living in Iran, an unrealistic figure, as Sanasarian claims.

[11] The current regime in Iran is fully aware of being scrutinized by western organizations and governments as regards treatment of adherents of religious minorities in Iran. Sanasarian lists a couple of strategies (p. 159f) of the regime in order to respond to international criticism, including invitations to religious leaders from around the world and aggressively claiming liberties of non-Muslims (which are rather limited). Pointing to religious discrimination in the West may be another (sad to say, legitimate) tactic.

[12] Ibid. p. 163.

[13] The picture depicts the famous Investiture of Ali at Ghadir Khumm of a 1308/09 Ilkhanid manuscript by Ibn al-Kutbi of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni’s (d. 1048) original text Kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiyah `an al-qurūn al-khāliyah, or The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries. The illustration is in particular of significance for Shi’ites since they believe that the Prophet himself, only three months before he passed away, had made a choice in favor of Ali ibn abi Talib as his successor.

 

Last modified March 13, 2011.

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