by John McHugo
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Long Nineteenth Century and the Coming of Western Dominance
I
Part Two of this book deals with the Sunni-Shi‘i divide over the past 200 years or so, and brings us up to the present day. The Muslim world has been a very different place during this period, no longer able to set its own terms of reference and decide its own agendas.
By the start of the nineteenth century even the great empires of Ottoman Turkey, post-Safavid Iran, and residually Mughal India could no longer deal with the major European powers on anything like equal terms. In the twentieth century, new states would come into being that were products of the colonial era. In earlier ages, boundaries had often been vague, represented by marchlands rather than neat lines on a map. They were rarely delimited on the ground unless they followed the course of a natural line such as a river (and this was, in any case, rare for boundaries in the Muslim world). The boundaries for the new states were often drawn by European powers, and reflected the interests of those powers rather than the aspirations of the people who lived in them. These people would generally have no choice but to become citizens of these new states, or to face exile.
As education became more secular, ideas such as nationalism, democracy and constitutionalism became the currency of debate in the new territorial units into which the Muslim world was now divided. This would often push questions of religion and sect into the background, but religion remained the bedrock of society virtually everywhere. Muslims – Sunnis and Shi‘is alike – had to absorb the new ideas that spread from the West. A new dynamic occurred as a result of the impact of the West. In the modern era, the history of Sunnis and Shi‘is cannot be treated in isolation from the broader questions of the thorny relations between Islam and the West and the impact of nationalism.
Religious and sectarian questions are not limited to the people of a particular country or state. Nevertheless, the carving up of the Muslim world into modern states defined by modern boundaries often leaves us with no choice but to deal with relations between Sunnis and Shi‘is as they developed within particular territorial units. In this way, once we reach the twentieth century we focus in particular on Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, while also looking at important developments elsewhere.
In the late eighteenth century, Muslim rulers of one stripe or another ruled over vast territories stretching from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, right through the Middle East, Central Asia and much if not most of the Indian subcontinent. Further east, Malaya and large parts of what we now call Indonesia were predominantly Muslim lands. Substantial areas of Africa south of the Sahara were also Muslim. By contrast, in 1914, only three completely independent Muslim states still survived: Ottoman Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. And there were even question marks over how real the independence of Iran and Afghanistan was.
In the 1790s, most areas of the Muslim world were overwhelmingly, often entirely, Sunni. Twelver Shi‘is predominated in Iran (which then included all of Azerbaijan), in Bahrain, and in parts of the Arabian mainland along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf. There were also some Twelvers in the Indian subcontinent, including several Twelver kingdoms, although most of their Muslim subjects were Sunni. In the Ottoman Empire, Jebel Amil in Lebanon, and the cities of Karbala, Najaf and Hilla in Iraq, were Twelver enclaves, and there were also pockets of Twelvers scattered around Central Asia. Zaydis predominated in large areas of the Yemeni mountains, while Alawis and Druze were locally dominant in some remote parts of Greater Syria.
The long nineteenth century was the period when the Muslim world fell under the hegemony of the West. The transformation that came to Muslim countries during this period and subsequently is essential background for understanding how Muslims would come to see themselves as they became part of the brave, new, Western-dominated world that emerged. It was not just Western technology, organisation, economic dominance and military might that changed their lives. It was also Western ideas. Foremost among these was nationalism. It was an idea that spread slowly but had begun to put down roots in many Muslim majority countries in the decades leading up to the First World War.
Nationalism is a sense of identity, a feeling of belonging to an ‘imagined community’ of people who share a passionate solidarity with each other even though they may have never met. It is a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’; a ‘fraternity’ which can inspire men to die for their country by the million.1 This solidarity comes from a consciousness of living in the same land, from sharing the same sense of history and a common culture, and speaking the same language. Religious identity, too, can play an important part in a sense of nationhood. The solidarity of nationalism binds people together against those who are perceived as outsiders, who thus come to be perceived as ‘the other’. It is not for nothing that Ernest Renan (1823–1892), a French philosopher and historian of Semitic civilisations, once quipped that nationalists are people who are united in a false understanding of history and a hatred of their neighbours.
Local loyalties had always been extremely important throughout the Muslim World; but religious affiliation had generally been the prime marker of identity. In the second half of this book we shall see that, as nationalism spread, Islam would sometimes be seen as an important element of national identity. At the same time, nationalism had to compete for Muslim hearts and minds with another idea: pan-Islamic solidarity. There would be those who saw Muslims as an ‘imagined community’ that transcended all national and other geographical boundaries. To a considerable extent, this would reduce the significance of the Sunni-Shi‘i divide.
Most Muslim states, including Ottoman Turkey and Iran, were forced to devote much of their energy to meeting the challenge posed by the onward march of the West. During earlier centuries there had been many wars between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. Antagonism between Sunnis and Shi‘is, and the resultant sectarian propaganda, had played a role in them, as we have seen. Now, however, Ottoman and Iranian rulers had other preoccupations and did not have the time or energy to make war against each other. The settlement between Nadir Shah and the Ottomans, at which we looked in Chapter Seven, endured. This permanently ended a major irritant affecting Sunni-Shi‘i relations.
II
In the nineteenth century, Ottoman sultans began to place stress on their status as ‘caliph’ in a way that was altogether new. Abdul Hamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, may even have seen his title of caliph as more important than that of sultan.2 In 1876 the Ottomans adopted a constitution: it began by proclaiming that ‘His Majesty the Sultan is, in his capacity as supreme Caliph, the protector of the Muslim religion’.3 As caliph, Abdul Hamid claimed a religious focus for the loyalty of his Muslim subjects – as well as for Muslims everywhere. It was a daring and clever idea – an attempt to assert jurisdiction over all Muslims across the world. In theory, this included Shi‘is, whom the Ottomans saw as Muslims who had erred but were still Muslims. As a matter of principle, they did not recognise Shi‘i sects as having the validity of a Sunni doctrinal law school, but were perfectly prepared to tax Shi‘is and conscript them into their armies. What Abdul Hamid II had done was recast Islam as a kind of super-nationalism that could be used for political ends.
There were weak foundations to the Ottoman sultans’ claim to be caliph in any sense that went beyond a title of honour. In the first place, as has already been shown at the beginning of Chapter Six, there had never been a successor to the Abbasid Caliphate with anything like a valid claim to attract the worldwide loyalty of Sunni Muslims. Since the ninth century, the role of defender and protector of Muslims was frequently exercised by a sultan, a ruler who exercised authority and claimed to be the protector of Muslims within his own dominions. The first sultans had appeared while the caliphate was still in existence, and drew their legitimacy from investiture by the caliph. By the time the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols, the concept of sultanate was well established, and it was soon obvious that new sul
tanates could emerge even though there was no longer a caliph.
It was only as the Ottoman Empire was rolled back by the European powers that emphasis began to be laid on the sultan’s role as caliph. In 1774 the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca required the empire to cede territories to Russia, ending Ottoman domination of the Black Sea. It was specified that the Crimea – a territory then inhabited predominantly by Muslim Tatars – would become an independent Khanate. The treaty described the sultan as ‘Caliph of all Muslims’, leaving him a spiritual authority over the Crimean Tatars. It was also a face-saving quid pro quo for the Ottomans to match the designation of Russia as protector of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Its significance was stressed again in 1784 when Russia annexed the Crimea. But a quarter of a century after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, Egyptians appealed to the Ottoman emperor to save them from the French invasion. Their approaches were made to him as sultan, not caliph.4
When Selim the Grim extinguished the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt in 1517 he brought the relics of the Prophet – his cloak, staff and seal – back to Istanbul. These had been kept at the Mamluk court in Cairo. He was accompanied on his way home by the last puppet Mamluk caliph, Mutawakkil III (r. 1508–1516 and again in 1517). Mutawakkil’s presence in Istanbul does not seem to have been particularly significant, because he was subsequently allowed to return to Egypt. At some point, a story was devised that he had solemnly transferred the office of caliph to the Ottoman sultans. The Ottoman scholar Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a conservative figure of great gravitas, wrote these words in 1861 at the time of the accession to the Ottoman throne of Sultan Abdulaziz, the first sultan to take the claim to be caliph seriously:5
When Sultan Selim conquered Egypt and brought the Abbasid caliph to Istanbul, the Abbasid caliph girded Sultan Selim with the sword [of Umar] and thus transferred the Islamic Caliphate to the house of Osman.6
The fact that some but not all Ottoman sultans had intermittently claimed the title of caliph before 1517 is a glaring inconsistency with this account. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha was either unaware of this or chose to ignore it. Another problem for the Ottoman claim was that many scholars across the centuries had argued that a caliph must come from the Quraysh. As the Abbasid Caliphate receded ever further into history, less stress was placed on this requirement. It had become, after all, a purely academic discussion – and it was a point on which the Hanafi doctrinal law school, which was the official form of Islam in the Ottoman Empire, did not insist. The Ottomans were not from the Quraysh, nor even Arab. As the very first sparks of what would develop into Arab nationalism began to appear in the later decades of the nineteenth century, the question of the Ottoman Caliphate could be a sensitive topic among the Sultan’s Arab subjects.
Abdul Hamid had a strategy to deal with this. Arab religious advisers were given important posts at court in a way that was new, and he created a kind of ‘Islamic Vatican’ at the Sultan’s Yildiz Palace in Istanbul.7 By the time he came to the throne, European concepts of nationalism were beginning to percolate into the elites of many Muslim countries. This already threatened to make a new sense of nationhood the focal point for identity, one that went beyond religious or sectarian boundaries. Islam as a political ideology – what was then called Pan-Islamism and is now generally called Islamism – recognised no racial or ethnic boundaries, but only those of faith. It could thus compete with the appeal of nationalism, and inculcate the sense of identity of belonging to an ‘imagined community’. Efforts were also made to educate Ottoman Muslims in the teachings and practice of their religion. All this had the effect of promoting Islam as a focus of identity against nationalist sentiment.
III
After the Crimean War, which ended in 1856, the Ottomans were accepted as a member of the Concert of Europe (or ‘Vienna Congress’ – the system whereby Europe’s conservative nations had maintained the balance of power since Napoleonic times). The thought that at least one Muslim power was recognised as an equal by the Western world was a great solace to Muslims everywhere; many were seeing their countries annexed or reduced to mere protectorates by colonial powers such as Britain and France. Ottoman envoys were sent to teach Muslims in the European colonial empires about the sultan-caliph and request that he should be remembered in the Friday prayers like the Abbasid caliphs of old. The universalist claims of the sultan-caliph to a right to suzerainty or even rule over all Muslims were deeply uncomfortable for the colonial powers. This was especially so as Ottoman Turkey was now doing what it could to modernise itself, even though 30 per cent of the budget had to service its debts to European bankers. Central control was spreading inexorably into even the outlying provinces of the empire, and was exemplified best, perhaps, by schemes to link it together by railways. Medina in the Hejaz was connected to Damascus and the rest of the empire in 1908 by a railway line crowd-funded by Muslims across the world. They contributed their money so as to facilitate the pilgrimage to Mecca, but the line also served to bring Ottoman administrators and troops to the Hejaz. The construction of the railway was a personal triumph for Abdul Hamid II, and a vindication of his policy of branding his empire as the Caliphate.
Yet the empire’s problems were probably insuperable. Abdul Hamid II was autocratic, secretive and inclined to paranoia. Despite his best efforts, the empire’s gradual dismemberment seemed set to continue. Things went from bad to worse. A coup was finally mounted in 1908 by nationalist officers known as the ‘Young Turks’, who took over the government. Although the Young Turks reconvened the Ottoman Parliament and saw themselves as liberals, their rule soon showed itself to be as autocratic as that of Abdul Hamid, who was deposed in 1909 after a failed counter-coup. His replacement as Sultan-Caliph, Mehmed V, was little more than a puppet. The Young Turks had much in common with violent revolutionaries elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They did not hesitate to subvert the constitutional order that had been their rallying cry on their journey to power.
There were also two ironies about the revolutionaries. The first was that their numbers included members from other communities in the empire, as well as ethnic Turks: Albanian and other Balkan Muslims, Jews, and even some Armenians. Yet an aggressive Turkish nationalism would become their guiding star. They were essentially secularist, and some of their leading figures would dream of turning the empire into a pan-Turkish state. Yet the role of Islam – Sunni Islam – in Turkish identity would prove to be too great a factor for them to ignore. This brings us to the other irony. The Young Turk leadership would continue to revel in the status the sultan enjoyed as sultan-caliph (even though they had taken all power away from him). Pan-Islamist feeling and calls for jihad mounted by the sultan-caliph remained useful items in their political toolbox. It helped to ensure that large numbers of Arab and other non-Turkish Muslims remained loyal to the bitter end.
Although Sunni Islam had been able to survive and thrive perfectly well after the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, the caliphate had always been mourned. It had remained in the hearts of Sunni Muslims as a symbol of the unity and power of Islam. They also found it a source of pride, which was renewed as modern scholarship began to make its cultural achievements better known. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, Muslim scholars were beginning to notice the debt modern Europe owed to the philosophers and scientists of the Abbasid era. For many Muslims across the world, the reinvented Ottoman Caliphate became a potent symbol and focal point for identity.
IV
And what of Shi‘i Iran, once the great rival of the Sunni Ottomans? From the 1790s through to the early 1920s, Iran was ruled by the Qajar dynasty, who stemmed from one of the old Kizilbash tribes. The Qajars were Twelvers who ruled a largely Twelver country, and made a point of ostentatiously demonstrating their piety. But their Turkic origins made it unrealistic for them to assert that they were descended from one of the imams as the Safavids had done, let alone claim to be a representative of the Hidden Imam.
They attempte
d to cultivate the religious scholars of the Usuli school, but with decidedly mixed results. The Usulis now predominated among Twelvers virtually everywhere except in Bahrain. The Usulis, it will be recalled, hold that analytical reasoning by learned and pious scholars should be used to establish the contents of the Sharia, which should not be determined purely on a literal reading of texts. These scholars were now completing the process of transforming themselves into a Usuli clerical class. They liked the institutional independence they had gained, and were not going to surrender it. They had also developed a hierarchy. At the bottom were the ordinary mullahs who gave judgments only on rules that were clear and unambiguous. Above them were the mujtahids, who had the knowledge of the principles on which the rules were based and were qualified to give independent rulings. At the very top, there were the scholars who had an absolute, all-embracing competence known as ijtihad mutlaq, literally ‘absolute ijtihad’. During the first half of the nineteenth century there were probably only a dozen-or-so such scholars, but more than 175 such mujtahids have been identified as active during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96). Ordinary believers (and ordinary mullahs) now had to follow a mujtahid as a Marja al-taqlid, a ‘source of emulation’ onto whom the individual believer ‘shifts his responsibility in matters of faith, subjecting himself to [the expert judgement of the source of emulation] and blindly following his decisions.’8 Sometimes a senior cleric would be widely recognised as the major or even the sole source of emulation. If the latter was the case, the idea that he was the sole source of emulation had to arise spontaneously among Twelver Shi‘is. In other words, it had to be discerned by the faithful. It was not something that could be imposed from above. On the death of a scholar who was the sole source of emulation, it would be unlikely that a single figure would already have the necessary pre-eminence to follow him. It was therefore probable that some time would elapse before another such figure emerged and, indeed, more than likely that this would not happen.