Music As Treason
Oddly enough, however, orthodox Sunni Islam in its traditional form bans musical instruments and frowns on music in general. These strictures have always been widely ignored, but they are very much on the books. Reliance of the Traveller, the Islamic legal manual that embodies Sunni orthodoxy, quotes the Prophet:
Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance.
On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress.
Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage.
"This Community will experience the swallowing up of some people by the earth, metamorphosis of some into animals, and being rained upon with stones." Someone asked, "When will this be, 0 Messenger of Allah?" and he said, "When songstresses and musical instruments appear and wine is held to be lawful."
There will be peoples of my Community who will hold fornication, silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful.21
Muslim rigorists still try to enforce these strictures of the Prophet whenever and wherever they attempt to reestablish the fullness and purity of Islamic practice. The reformer Muhyi al Din Aurangzeb (1658-1707) made a campaign against music a central element of his effort to purify Islam in India.22 In our own day, young John Walker Lindh, as he learned more about his new religion, ultimately realized that he had to stop listening to his beloved rap records. The Indonesian militant group Laskar Jihad considers music "a distraction from God."23 The Taliban was criticized worldwide for actually enforcing the legal ban on music.
In the Malaysian state of Kelantan, reports Aid to the Church in Need, "there was a new law forbidding songs, dances and even the sound of church bells. Such activities, according to the government controlled by Islamic fundamentalists, were contrary to religion. Singing and dancing, especially in the evening, could lead to `immoral' activities."24 Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini remarked several years ago with his characteristically flamboyant vehemence:
Music corrupts the minds of our youth. There is no difference between music and opium. Both create lethargy in different ways. If you want your country to be independent, then ban music. Music is treason to our nation and to our youth .21
Indeed, Khomeini's vision of Islam was singularly joyless-by his own account:
Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.26
Yet even Khomeini betrayed something of the umma's longstanding ambivalence toward song and sensual experience. While thundering against music, he wrote some delicate little examples of Shi'ite poetrywhich with its mystical bent is firmly in the tradition of classical Persian verse, and bears many similarities to the Sufi mystical tradition. It is strange but true that this sonnet came from the pen of the irascible and fantastic old man:
Openness to Other Cultures
Muslims built their great medieval civilization with an attitude of openness to what they could learn from non-Muslims. Bernard Lewis has remarked upon "the unique assimilative power of Arab culture, sometimes misrepresented as merely imitative."28 Islam in its glory days never hesitated to borrow from other cultures. Indeed, all great civilizations have done this, taking up and improving upon what came before them.
The architectural design of mosques, with their imposing domes, is the pride of Islam. While the calligraphy that decorates the walls is a Muslim invention (and, indeed, a uniquely beguiling art form), the shape of mosques is derived from the structure of the Byzantine church, whose dome is meant to represent the cosmos in miniature. According to historian Bat Ye'or, the first of these magnificent mosques, the seventhcentury Dome of the Rock, was "of Byzantine conception and execution."29
The astrolabe, though perfected by Muslims, was developed long before the Angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad to recite the words of Allah. The Thousand and One Nights owes a debt to the Odyssey, just as Avicenna, Averroes and the other Muslim philosophers built upon the work of a Greek pagan.
The preservation of Aristotle's thought during a time when the Christian West largely neglected its pagan heritage was not an achievement of Muslims alone. The Arab-speaking world became acquainted with Aristotle through the work of a fifth-century priest named Probus of Antioch.30 During the ninth-century reign of Caliph al-Mamun, the importance of learning from non-Muslims was so universally recognized that translation became a virtual industry. Many of those who did the translating were non-Muslims, including the Christian Hunayn ibn- Ishaq (809--873), whom Hitti calls "the sheikh of the translators."31 According to historian Elias B. Skaff, he "translated most of the works of Aristotle and Galen into Syriac, which his son and nephew rendered into Arabic. He is also said to have translated Hippocrates' medical treatises and Plato's Republic. "32
Christians also contributed to the Muslim ascendancy in medicine and other sciences in the early period, as Bat Ye'or shows:
The first known scientific work in Arabic was a treatise on medicine, written in Greek by Ahrun, a Christian priest from Alexandria, and translated from Syriac into Arabic in 683 by Masarjawayh, a Jewish doctor from Basra (Iraq).... Ibn Bakhtishu (d. ca. 771), a Nestorian physician summoned to Baghdad by the caliph al-Mansur, established a hospital there, where his son (d. 8oi) became the leading practitioner. Yuhanna b. Mas- awayh (777-857), a Jacobite physician, translator, and ophthalmologist, wrote the first treatise on ophthalmology in Arabic.33
Muslims combined what they derived from non-Muslims with their own labors to build something new, and something great. Seyyed Hossein Nasr sums up the guiding principle of this achievement: "Coming at the end of the prophetic cycle, Islam has considered all the wisdom of traditions before it as in a sense its own and has never been shy of borrowing from them and transforming them into elements of its own worldview. "34
The borrowings, of course, went both ways. Most famous to Westerners among the achievements of the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages are the works of the eminent Muslim philosophers who had a tremendous influence upon the Christian philosophers of medieval Europe. Averroes, Avicenna and others blazed new intellectual trails during a time when scarcely any significant Christian philosophy was being done. For later Christian thinkers like St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas who made extensive use of Aristotle, the work of these Muslims in explicating Aristotle's writings was an essential reference point.
Philosophy
In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, philosophy was much more closely tied to science and other disciplines than it is now. (Aristotle was a naturalist; Avicenna and Averroes were physicians.) Thus, the waning of Muslim philosophy provides a window on some of the reasons why Islamic civilization itself went into decline.
From its origins, philosophy in Islam, just as in Christendom, strove mightily-and with notable success-to reconcile faith and reason. Islamic philosophy, according to Muslim apologists Mohamed Azad and Bibi Amina, "recognized no theoretical limits other than those of human reason itself; and it assumed that the truth found by unaided reason does not disagree with the truth of Islam when both are properly understood." Hitti observes that "it is to the eternal glory of medieval Islam that it succeeded for the first time in the history of human thought in harmonizing and reconciling monotheism... with Greek philosophy."35 Islamic philosophers struggled to harmonize the Qur'an with the necessary truths they were deriving by the light of reason. "To the Moslem thinkers," says Hitti, "Aristotle was truth, Plato was truth, the Koran was truth; but truth must be one. Hence arose the necessity of harmonizing the three, and to this task they addressed themselves. "36
Some philosophers, however, considered this effort misguided. Abu
Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi (8oi-873), a physician and philosopher, suggested that "prophets and philosophers have different and independent ways to the highest truth available to man."37 Philosophers needn't labor to reconcile the pure truths of philosophy with the Qur'an, he thought. Another physician/philosopher, Rhazes, even went so far as to say that only philosophy leads to the highest truth .31
Avicenna (Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina), whose influence spread into the West, was somewhat more circumspect. He distinguished between "the faculty of prophetic knowledge (the `sacred' intellect)" and "revelation (imaginative representation meant to convince the multitude and improve their earthly life)."39 But if revelation was only "imaginative representation," the door to skepticism lay open. This was too much for more religiously inclined Muslims. Avicenna's views, according to the historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband, were "regarded with jealous eyes by Mohammedan orthodoxy, and the scientific movement experienced such violent persecutions in the tenth century that it took refuge in the secret league of the `Pure Brothers.' Avicenna himself was also persecuted."40
The growing rift between philosophy and orthodox Islam ultimately developed into an open war, in which the philosophers were greatly outnumbered. The orthodox party's champion was a Sufi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1128), whose classic work The Incoherence of the Philosophers took brilliant aim at virtually the entire Islamic philosophical tradition-and scored a direct hit.
For al-Ghazali, most philosophy was simply a veil for heresy. Many philosophers, he said, were teaching truths that they themselves had discovered and that had no more attestation than their own word. They were denigrating the holy Qur'an. They were guilty of "denial of revealed laws and religious confessions" as well as "rejection of the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks."" Indeed, the teachings of these philosophers (chiefly the outstanding Muslim thinkers al-Farabi and Avicenna) "challenge the [very] principles of religion."42
Al-Ghazali was no anti-intellectual, and his quarrel was not so much with philosophy per se as with heresy. He employs quite sophisticated philosophical arguments in The Incoherence of the Philosophers in order to refute the philosophers' pretensions. He takes issue particularly with the idea that Allah's revelation consisted of mere "imaginative representation," i.e., parable rather than literal truth. Discussing the Qur'an's depictions of heaven and hell, he insists that "what has come down [in the law] describing paradise and the fire and the detailing of these states has attained a degree [of explicit statement] that does not [render it] subject to metaphorical interpretation." That is, the Qur'an is true to the letter. Discussing the possibility of the resurrection of the body, he says simply, "The religious law has declared [the resurrection]. It is [in itself] possible, and, hence, must be believed."43
According to Tilman Nagel, a scholar of Islam, al-Ghazali "was inspired by a notion that we frequently see in Islam's intellectual history: the notion that everything human beings can possibly know is already contained in the Koran and the hadith; only naive people can be made to believe that there is knowledge beyond them."44 And whatever contradicts the Qur'an must give way.
With chilling fidelity to Islamic law, al-Ghazali poses a final question at the end of The Incoherence of the Philosophers: "If someone says: `You have explained the doctrines of these [philosophers]'; do you then say conclusively that they are infidels and that the killing of those who uphold their beliefs is obligatory?"45 He then answers this himself: "Pronouncing them infidels is necessary in three questions": their teachings that the world existed eternally, that Allah does not know particular things but only universals, and that there is no resurrection of the body. AlGhazali doesn't say that the philosophers should not be killed, because Islamic law says they should be. Reliance of the Traveller declares, "When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed."46
Al-Ghazali's masterwork heralded the beginning of the decline of Islamic philosophy, although the victory of the views he represented was not immediate. To counter him there arose another great Muslim philosopher whom the West knows as Averroes (Abul-Waleed Muhammad ibn Rushd). This rationalist took al-Ghazali to task, most notably in his reply to The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which he entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence, where he insisted that those who pursue philosophy "need not adjust its certain conclusions to what theologians claim to be the correct interpretation of the divine law."47
But the damage was done. Islamic philosophy became suspect to a large party of those who considered themselves guardians of religious orthodoxy. Indeed, even before al-Ghazali it was suspect. In his History of Islamic Theology, Nagel says, "All attempts to incorporate the philosophical tradition into a way of thinking that was based on Islam failed. Playing with philosophy could be an enjoyable pastime, but even as early as the tenth century the general opinion among the educated was that no faithful Muslim and faithful follower of the Sharia could practice it seriously."48
A rationalist school of Islamic philosophy would continue. The Ash'arite sect followed the Mu'tazilites in trying to secure a place for rationalism in the study of the Qur'an, but by the twelfth century, says Nagel, "the few who practiced rationalist that is to say, largely Ash'arite- theology were considered troublemakers who dared criticize the Prophet's sunna."49 As late as the seventeenth century, the Persians Muhammad Baqir Mir Damad (d. 1631) and his disciple Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi,1572-164o) did work of tremendous significancewhen they weren't being rebuked by the ulama for, among other things, daring to interpret the Qur'an allegorically.
Although Islamic philosophy lived on, it never regained the influence it had in the early centuries. And however deserving they may have been, no Muslim philosopher after Averroes gained the worldwide attention that the early Islamic philosophers justly attracted.
Closing to the Outside World
Although al-Ghazali himself probably would have disapproved of such a development, The Incoherence of the Philosophers helped reinforce an anti-intellectual strain of thought that was present in Islam from the beginning. This anti-intellectualism developed from core theological propositions: The Qur'an is the perfect book. What other book do I need? What other book is worth reading?
This kind of thinking is summed up by a story told of Caliph cUmar, one of the Companions of the Prophet, when he conquered Alexandria in the seventh century. In a notorious episode that may contain as much legend as fact (Bernard Lewis holds that it didn't happen), he ordered that city's famous library burned to the ground. "If what [the books] say agrees with the Koran, they are superfluous," explained the caliph. "If what they say disagrees with the Koran, they are heretical."50
cUmar may not have said it, but many other Muslims thought it. As Lewis puts it, during the heyday of Islamic culture "in the Muslims' own perception, Islam itself was indeed coterminous with civilization, and beyond its borders there were only barbarians and infidels."51 Such an attitude may have contributed to the decline of Islamic thought and culture, which Hitti describes thus:
In no branch of pure or physical science was any appreciable advance made after Abbasid days.52 The Moslems of today, if dependent on their own books, would indeed have less than their distant ancestors in the eleventh century. In medicine, philosophy, mathematics, botany and other disciplines a certain point was reached-and the mind of Islam seemed to stand still.... In fact the whole Arab world had by the beginning of the thirteenth century lost the intellectual hegemony it had maintained since the eighth.53
Osama bin Laden's biographer Yossef Bodansky suggests that Islamic anti-intellectualism was in part a defensive reaction to the House of Islam's unprecedented defeats in the First Crusade (io99) and in Spain at around the same time. Muslims had never known defeat on this scale, and their theology gave them only one way to interpret it-as a religious failing:
The result of these setbacks was a back
lash. Ruthless military commanders emerged to lead the armies of the believers to reclaim the lands of Islam. Most famous were Saladin, the Kurd who defeated the Crusaders in 1187 to 1192, and Abdul Mumin from Morocco, who defeated the Christian armies in Spain in 1146 to 1163 and again in 1195. But as these and other military leaders rose to power, the once glorious Islamic culture and civilization crumbled. Having consolidated power by the strength of their swords, the new conquerors-turned-rulers had to prove their uniquenesstheir "Islamness." They revived religious extremism as the source of their legitimacy while accusing their enlightened and sophisticated predecessors of causing the Muslim world's earlier defeats.54
Throughout Islamic history this temptation to uphold Islam against enlightenment and sophistication has competed with the openness to other cultures that first helped make Islamic civilization great. Jordan's late King Hussein summed up what happened when he said, "Islam was very open as it spread throughout the world. It made major contributions. Then, in the tenth century or so, Islam changed course and went into decline."55 From around the time of the Crusades onward, the idea that non-Muslims might know something that Muslims could benefit from learning fell so far out of Islamic consciousness that in the eighteenth century, when the Ottoman state employed Western experts in various fields, "for Muslims, in Turkey and later elsewhere, this brought a shocking new idea-that one might learn from the previously despised infidel."5G
Civilizationat Suicide
Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith Page 15