Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  This movement ultimately threatened the sultan, who put an end to it. But the sultan's grand vizier had learned its chief lesson: on his deathbed he advised the sultan to rule with "an appearance of religion and justice."22

  Over two hundred years later, the spiritual children of these preachers vied with Ataturk's secularists for control of the tottering empire. When the absolute rule of the sultan became a kind of constitutional monarchy in 19o8, Muslim leaders were furious.

  A preacher called "Blind Ali" denounced the constitution in the mosque of Fatih. On 7 October 1908 he led a large Ramadan crowd to Yildiz to see the Sultan, who appeared at a window. Blind Ali told him: "We want a shepherd! A flock cannot exist without a shepherd!" The fundamentalists demanded the rule of sheriat, the prohibition of taverns, theatres and photography, and an end to Muslim women's freedom to walk around the town."... A fundamentalist newspaper, Volkan, was started in November with the programme "to spread the light of divine unity in the capital of the Caliphate."... On 3 April 1909 the Society of Muhammad was established and held meetings in Aya Sofya [the conquered Hagia Sophia cathedral] hostile to the [reformist] Committee: "Forward! If we fall as martyrs, do not retreat!"

  At that time, Muslim leaders were divided over the fundamentalist agenda, much as they are today. Mansel concludes: "Many sufis and imams supported it; senior ulama remained loyal to the constitution."24 But as always, those who were against the new republican arrangements justified their actions on the basis of the fundamental tenets of Islam.

  Religious uprisings have been a feature of the Turkish secular state virtually since its inception, and those desiring to restore Islam to centrality in public life have made steady gains. By the 195os, says Farah, the secular authorities "found it prudent henceforth to play up to Islamic loyalties and allow the ulama and other religious leaders a freer hand."25

  This prudence, however, wasn't enough to satisfy the proponents of a restored Islamic regime. The Turkish politician Necmettin Erbakan led pro-Islamic forces against the Kemalist regime for three decades. He was forthrightly anti-Kemalist: "only Islam, he argued, could shield the country from succumbing to unhealthy Western values."26 He even served as prime minister of the Kemalist state for a brief and tumultuous period (June 1996 to June 1997), during which he did what he could within Turkey's existing structures to restore Islam. Fierce opposition limited his effectiveness, but he was able to do enough that the American secretary of state, Madeline Albright, expressed her displeasure with the "drift of Turkey away from secularism. 1127

  The army (which is the bastion of Kemalist secularism in Turkey) ultimately forced Erbakan from power, but the struggle for Turkey's soul continues. The former mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is one of the most prominent of a new generation of antisecularists. Meanwhile, Turkey is home to a number of Islamic "brotherhoods." The Nurcus, followers of the Islamic theorist Said Nursi (1876-i96o), claim about five million followers (many of them Turkish emigrants in European countries) and continue to fight against Kemalism on Islamic grounds, along with other Muslim groups including the Suleymancis, the Nur community and the Fethullah Gulen group. The late Cemalettin Kaplan ("The Black Voice") even founded an "Anatolian Islam Federal Republic" with himself as caliph; the current caliph is his son Metin Muftuoglu, although not all members of this group have accepted his rule.28 Some of these groups have received funding from Iran and other militant Islamic sources.29

  Turkey's experience reinforces a primary lesson of Islamic history: there will always be some Muslims who will not rest until all traces of secularism and other Western influences are eradicated from their societies. This is not because of resentment of the West's power or wealth, but because of an abiding interest in guarding and maintaining the purity of the House of Islam.

  Secularization Defied

  It was the same story in Iran. The attempts by several shahs to follow Ataturk's lead and modernize Iran along Western lines were ultimately torpedoed by Khomeini's Islamic Revolution of 1979, which restored traditional Islam's strict dress code and swept away "music and most other `satanic arts"' as well as alcoholic beverages.30 Westerners were mystified by the spectacle of women wearing traditional Muslim garb, demonstrating against the shah who had tried to give them greater rights. But those who searched for economic or political causes for this revolution, or who were puzzled by the apparent popularity of the dour, scowling Ayatollah Khomeini, failed to recognize that "in the Muslim world, Islam is the only key to the hearts and minds of the people."" When Khomeini spoke to the Iranian people, he didn't talk about economics. His message was that it was time to restore the purity of Islam.

  The tension between Islam and secularism didn't start with Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and Khomeini. "In i9o6," says Amir Taheri, supporters of a constitution for Persia (Iran's ancient name) took "as a model the French Revolution's charter of human rights. Had they succeeded in imposing that model, as the mashru'eh mullahs [supporters of a traditional Islamic theocracy] feared, the road would have been paved for the secularization of the Iranian state."32 One of these anticonstitu- tionalist mullahs was arrested, tried and sentenced to death by the government that was newly in place. Just before he was hanged, he managed one last sermon: "Either this system must go or Islam will perish."33

  Long after his death, the mullah's cry would drive the shah from his Peacock Throne.

  This pattern is repeated throughout the Islamic world. Every government that goes too far in implementing Western principles encounters religious resistance. This was the case with Iraq's relatively secular Saddam Hussein, who received a tremendous boost to his legitimacy from the Persian Gulf War:

  The ulama [Islamic religious leadership] had resisted a declining status and continued to insist on their moral obligation to ensure that government actions meet Islamic requirements.... And on the eve of the launching of the war, the secular banner of Iraq was embroidered with the Islamic battle cry "God is Great" in order to rally more Islamic sentiment. Being an observing Muslim, like most of his Sunni followers, Saddam's demonstration of loyalty to the faith was accelerated by the war. Since the end of the war, Islam's role in society and politics has received greater emphasis, and that is in a state once conceived as secular, socialist, democratic, and pan-Arab nationalist in character.34

  Pakistan also, in Farah's words, has struggled since its independence "to reconcile modern Western style institutions with the Shari ah of Islam."35 It was founded as a secular state, but Islamic activists resisted its secular character from the beginning. In 1956, eight years after independence, it was proclaimed an Islamic Republic. Amid a great deal of ongoing unrest, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto promised in 1977 to implement the Sharia. Shortly thereafter, President Muhammad Zia- ul-Haq, who had taken power in a bloody coup, declared that the Sharia was above Pakistan's civil law. Unrest has continued, and the small Christian community in Pakistan has suffered considerably under the Sharia. The Christian Ayub Masih, sentenced to death on a questionable charge of blasphemy, would never even have been arrested under the nation's original "Westernized" law.

  The same situation prevails in Sudan, where the Sharia was adopted in 1983, setting the stage for the persecution and enslavement of the nation's Christians, which continues to this day. In Algeria, proponents of the Sharia won a ballot-box victory in 1992 by calling for "a renewal based on Islam to combat the festering problems of unemployment, lack of economic well-being, and social inequalities stemming from vestiges of colonial rule. 1116 They were prevented from taking power at that time, but they have by no means given up their vision of a land made great again by the purity of Islam.

  Desire to restore the purity, and thus the glory, of the umma is also the impetus behind the rise of Osama bin Laden and other Muslim terrorists today. Setbacks in the Islamic world commonly result in the diagnosis that the defeat resulted from insufficient religious fidelity. In 1948, the Egyptian Islamic radical Sayyid Qutb surveyed the House of Islam and wrote passion
ately, "We only have to look in order to see that our social situation is as bad as it can be." Yet "we continually cast aside all our own spiritual heritage, all our intellectual endowment, and all the solutions which might well be revealed by a glance at these things; we cast aside our own fundamental principles and doctrines, and we bring in those of democracy, or socialism, or communism."37

  In other words, the key to success is more Islam. This has always been the reaction in times of crisis. According to Bernard Lewis, as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ottoman officials looked at the weaknesses in their society and government and came to the conclusion that "the basic fault ... was falling away from the good old ways, Islamic and Ottoman; the basic remedy was a return to them."38

  V. S. Naipaul discovered this kind of diagnosis to be very much alive in modern Pakistan, where "failure led back again and again to the assertion of the faith."39 He quotes an article in the Pakistan Times by A. H. Kardar, "the former cricket captain of Pakistan, and an Oxford man." Says Kardar of modern Pakistan: "Clearly, the choice is between materialism and its inseparable nationally divisive political manifestoes, and the Word of God."40 Dinesh D'Souza reconstructs this way of thinking: "The Koran promises that if Muslims are faithful to Allah, they will enjoy prosperity in this life and paradise in the next life." When the House of Islam is not prospering, it is solely because "Muslims are not following the true teaching of Allah!"4' A new severity invariably follows.

  If Islamic orthodoxy were differently constituted, it wouldn't be so vulnerable to exploitation by fanatics and demagogues who invoke religious principles as the basis of their legitimacy-but that's precisely the problem. And it's a problem that calls for careful examination by everyone who believes that the House of Islam can easily be secularized and fit into place as another ingredient in a global multicultural society.

  Can Science and Culture

  Flourish under Islam?

  THIS CYCLE OF DEFEAT FOLLOWED BY CALLS FOR religious revival not only marks a great deal of Islamic history, but also colors the Muslim approach to science and culture.

  Islamic cultural achievements are legendary. While Europe trampled the glories of pagan Greece and Rome and degenerated into the savagery of the Dark Ages, Islam was becoming a beacon to the world. "For while [the caliphs] al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy," says the historian Philip K. Hitti, "their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were reportedly dabbling in the art of writing their names."'

  Islam burst forth from Arabia in the seventh century with awesome energy, as a great and terrible force that swept all before it and quickly established its superiority. "Only a hundred years after the death of Muhammad," Hitti observes, "his followers were the masters of an empire greater than that of Rome at its zenith, an empire extending from the Bay of Biscay to the Indus and the confines of China and from the Aral Sea to the lower cataracts of the Nile."2 By the time of the great Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the Islamic imperial capital of Baghdad "had grown from nothingness to a world center of prodigious wealth and international significance, standing alone as the rival of Byzantium."3

  Not only did the Muslims of the seventh through the twelfth centuries build a great empire; they also fashioned a grand civilization that led the world in technology, science, literature, philosophy and more. Hitti concludes: "No people in the early Middle Ages contributed to human progress as much as did the Arabs."4

  Medieval Islamic Achievements

  In astronomy, Muslims refined the astrolabe, allowing for tremendous breakthroughs in our knowledge of the heavens. Abu Raihan al-Biruni (973-1048) developed precise methods for determining the positions of the sun and even completed groundbreaking work on longitude and latitude, long before the rest of the world caught on. Hitti also notes that one will find "under the roll of Islam's most distinguished astronomers the celebrated name of Umar al-Khayyam [1048-11311-the author of the even more celebrated Rubaiyat. "5

  In architecture, Muslims built some of the grandest structures the world has ever seen, including the Taj Mahal and the Blue Mosque. Hitti describes Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock as "an architectural monument of such noble beauty that it has scarcely been surpassed anywhere."6 He calls the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque in Damascus a "jewel of architecture which still attracts lovers of beauty. 117

  Nor were Islamic architectural achievements restricted to these grand edifices, as the English traveler Robert Byron confirmed in his charming 1933 book The Road to Oxiana. Traveling from Beirut through Jerusalem, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, he uncovers (between adventures) unknown marvels of Islamic art and architecture hidden away in remote mosques. In Isfahan in Iran, for instance, he tours the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah, where the interior "pageant of colour and pattern," he says, "must astonish the European ... because he can previously have had no idea that abstract pattern was capable of so profound a splendour."8 Even the poor black-and-white accompanying photo in the current edition of his book discloses a structure that is indeed breathtaking. In Yezd he enters the Friday Mosque and finds "fourteenth-century mosaics in perfect condition."9 Afghanistan's Shrine of Khoja Abu Nasr Parsa in Balkh (Bactria) possesses "an unearthly beauty."" And Byron finds comparable gems virtually everywhere he goes.

  In medicine, Caliph al-Rashid's Islamic empire saw the establishment of the umma's first hospital. His son Abdullah al-Mamun (813-833) broke new ground in establishing professional standards for physicians and pharmacists, which later caliphs continued to require. "Following a case of malpractice," according to Hitti, "a distinguished physician was ordered by the caliph in 931 to examine all practicing physicians and grant certificates only to those who satisfied the requirements. Over eight hundred and sixty such men in Baghdad passed the test and the capital rid itself of quacks.""

  Abu Bakr ar-Razi (865-925), known in the West as Rhazes, wrote an encyclopedia of medical information and a book of alchemy that, rendered into Latin, became principal bases for the understanding of medicine and chemistry in medieval Europe. Another Muslim famous for his philosophical work, Ibn Sina or Avicenna (980-1037), authored a medical textbook that was preeminent with European doctors from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries." Still another philosopher/physician, Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes (1128-1198), contributed a notable medical text as well.

  In mathematics, the ninth-century theorist Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarzimi (790-850) "composed the oldest work on arithmetic and the oldest work on algebra, which was translated into Latin and used until the sixteenth century as the principal mathematics textbook of European universities and served to introduce into Europe the science of algebra, and with it the name."" The word algebra comes from the title of his mathematical treatise Al-Jabr wa-al-Mugabilah, and algorithm is derived from his name.

  In literature, The Thousand and One Nights has had untold influence on later writing of all kinds: history, fiction, fantasy, memoir. And that (along with the Rubaiyat of Umar al-Khayyam, immortalized by Edward FitzGerald's English translation) is just the work that's best known in the West. A wealth of fine Persian and Arabic poetry stands with the greatest literary achievements of any culture of any period. It would be impossible to list all the classics of Islamic literature, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention at least the twelfth-century Sufi Farid ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds, a splendid and wise allegory of the mystical journey. The eminent Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) has likewise inspired mystics for centuries, and is enjoying a new vogue today among New Agers.

  Virtually from the beginning of Islam, the poetic tradition was strong, especially in mystically minded Persia. There was the sensual Persian poet Abu Nuwas (75o-81o); the poet/chronicler Abu Tammam Habib ibn Aus (805-845); the magnificent panegyrist al-Mutanabbi (915-965), whose poetry was so highly regarded that he came to be known by this surname, which means "one who pretends to be a prophet";14 the epic poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi (932-1025), who attracted attention in the Engl
ish-speaking world in the nineteenth century through translations by the English poet Matthew Arnold; the lyric poet Hafiz (1325-1390); the heterodox Turkish Sufi Nesimi (d. 1417);11 and a host of others who are worth reading even in the driest scholarly translation.

  In addition to the poets, there were prose writers. The prolific scholar Abu cUthman cAmr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz (776-868), whom Bernard Lewis calls "the greatest master of the essay and indeed of Arabic prose," wrote more than two hundred books over the course of his long life, encompassing a multitude of subjects including politics (The Institution of the Caliphate), zoology (the seven-volume Book ofAnimals), cuisine (Arab Food), and practical living (Sobriety and Mirth; The Art of Keeping One's Mouth Shut).' Muhammad Abu Ja'far al-Tabari (839-923) completed a universal history as well as a respected commentary on the Qur'an. Another historian, al-Baladhuri (d. 892), contributed a key early history of the Arabs.

  Somewhat later, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was centuries ahead of his time in his studies of sociology and economics. His Muqaddimah stands as the earliest attempt at a systematic analysis of the study of history that "takes due cognizance of the physical facts of climate and geography as well as of moral and spiritual forces."" To Bernard Lewis, he was "the greatest historian of the Arabs and perhaps the greatest historical thinker of the Middle Ages.""

  In music, the Sufis of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran and Turkey created a rich and varied tradition. The ninth-century philosopher alKindi even wrote treatises on musical theory, which "indicate that measured song, or mensural music, was known to the Moslems centuries before it was introduced into Christian Europe."19 Hitti notes that "the refined and dazzling court of Harun al-Rashid patronized music and singing, as it did science and art, to the extent of becoming the center of a galaxy of musical stars.""