God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Later Ottoman Turks, supplanting the Mamluks as standard bearers of holy war jihad, developed their own slave-soldiers, the Janissaries, as devoted to military life and to Islam as the Mamluks had been, and used their heroic dedication to capture Constantinople from the Byzantine Christians and build the greatest empire the Muslim world had ever seen.

  The demands of war against the crusaders, the Mongols and the Byzantines militarised Islam. This militarisation brought victories against their non-Muslim enemies but also acted as an armour plate for them against rivals in the Islamic world. It favoured autocracy and worked against the play of discussion, counsel and consent found in the West which could have served, however imperfectly, to check trends to despotic rule.

  Crusade and jihad were twins and the one reacted on the other, raising the importance of Jerusalem as a goal of pilgrimage for Muslims and Christians alike, making a small parcel of land that was once Herod’s Temple into an object that was of the highest importance to all three monotheist religions.

  One important difference between Islam and the West lay in Gregory VII’s insistence that the aims of the Church and of secular leaders were different and that the Church must be set free. Thereafter Western rulers had to reckon with an independent force which in debates, conflicts and manoeuvres over the centuries acted as a check on their authority. This separation of powers never existed in the East. There the tradition of Muhammad was to combine religious, political and military power, a tradition handed on to the great caliphs of the age of conquest and into the time of the hereditary caliphates. With the decline of the Abbasids’ power came an alteration: secular powers began to manipulate caliphs to their advantage, even in later centuries appointing young candidates or men of straw to suit their convenience. But the central fact remained: there was no check in the Islamic world of the kind that existed in the West against autocracy through the claims to independent authority of popes, archbishops and bishops.

  Discussion in the West led to the assertion of secular rights in Magna Carta, which rallied the baronage to fend off the invasion headed by a French prince and took on new vitality in the seventeenth century as a focus against the Divine Right of Kings, later enshrined in the Bill of Rights both in seventeenth-century Britain and in eighteenth-century America, while in the fourteenth century the financing of war gave bargaining power to the House of Commons. Similarly in Europe of the sixteenth century, the Reformed religion of Luther and Calvin was used by states as a rallying point to shake off the dominance exercised by the Holy Roman Empire under Habsburg leadership. Nothing of this kind diminished autocracy in Islam and in the late stages of Ottoman history the rise of the power of the harem was yet another force in favour of arbitrary despotism.

  The past exerts its sway both to bane and to benefit. The term crusade in the West has passed into common currency as a way of describing any selfless determined movement to uproot an evil; in this way the United States, for example, has seen a movement by teetotallers to outlaw alcohol, called the Crusade for Temperance. In the Near East it has a poisonous resonance, which many Westerners have not understood. President Bush made a profound error when he described the actions taken against terrorism in the struggle against the jihadis following the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 as a crusade. Ambassadors of western nations in the Near East, well aware of the assumptions of the governments with which they deal and of the complexities of Muslim history, have too often been disregarded by both Britain and the United States.

  The continued existence of the strand of scholarship emphasising the peaceable interpretation of striving in the path of God was vividly demonstrated by the response of distinguished Muslim scholars to the attack on the Twin Towers. Resident in different parts of the Muslim world and adducing slightly different arguments, they were nonetheless united in their utter repudiation of this act of terrorism as incompatible with the principles of Islam.

  Ali Juma, professor at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, believed that there were criteria for making war in the Quran, but they were strictly limited and certainly not met by the Twin Towers episode. He could see a possible need for the use of force to preserve the environment, to remove tyrants and to serve the common good. He does not believe that the great conquests of the early centuries were responsible for conversions to Islamic belief, which took place only slowly, and adduces the case of China, where there were no Islamic conquests but many conversions. Revelation in sura 21 107, envisaged the Messenger of God bringing with him the rule of mercy, and sura 8 61, urged believers to make peace whenever their enemies showed a wish to do so.

  Jawdat Said, a Syrian scholar resident in the Golan Heights, by contrast wrote as an avowed pacifist, adducing the story of the sons of Adam in one of the hadiths and the attitudes there inculcated as proof that the Prophet would reject violence, even when used in self-defence. Violence, he believed, was a ‘disease’ in the modern world. He accepted the existence of bellicose verses in the Quran but believed they could have no weight in the modern world, in the absence of any authority which could legitimately issue a command to the faithful. Sura 22 256 – ‘let there be no compulsion in religion’ – was a vital text.

  Wahiduddin Khan, president of the Islamic Institute in New Delhi, believes that in Islam war can only be allowed in exceptional circumstances. He notes that warfare was a way of life in the pre-modern age. Now, however, conflict is to be obviated by peaceful means. Sharia law was not to be held as rigidly sacrosanct but should be adapted to meet modern needs. Commands to fight in the Quran related to particular circumstances and could have no validity today. Peaceful activism would bring about change, and would automatically bring in its wake needful political and social reforms. In sura 10 25, ‘God calls to the Home of Peace’, and sura 41 33–4, declares that ‘good and evil deeds are not alike’ and urges the faithful to ‘repel evil with good’, leading to the result that ‘he who is your enemy will become your friend’. Suicide terrorism is condemned by Wahiduddin Khan: ‘we may become martyrs but must not seek martyrdom.’

  Muhammed Fathullah Giillen, a Turkish scholar now living in Pennsylvania, is a Sufi and attaches importance to the inner growth of the dedicated individual, ‘sieved’ by Sufi practices, humility and patient forbearance in good times and bad. He cannot exclude warfare, the lesser jihad. The armed struggle of the Prophet he sees, just as the Indian scholar Whaddudin Khan did, as required by special circumstances. The defence of honour, of children and the like may require the use of force, but the major stress of his exposition lies on peaceful activism, the battle with evil desires and on the revival of a holistic Islamic education with respect for life and creation. He rejects terrorism out of hand, as the work of a tiny minority of opportunists who have no grasp of Islamic principles. Doing good to others is, he believes, the fundamental Muslim principle.

  It is a tragedy that the response of such Islamic scholars to the attack on the Twin Towers has been given so little publicity.

  The Muslim world continues to suffer from corrupt and dictatorial leadership. The struggles in the Middle Ages for a caliphate doing justice have echoes in modern times. Now as then anger is caused by disregard of the Prophet’s insistence on the need to surrender wealth and deploy it for the relief of the poor and the cause of Islam in the world. The spectacle of elite cadres heaping up wealth and rewarding relatives may lead to a sharp reaction, as is the case with Boko Haram in Nigeria who blame the West for their problems and the distortions in other people’s lives, reacting so profoundly as to dismiss any form of Western clothes.

  The words crusade and jihad have continued to have immense potency. The Young Turks sought victory against the western Great Powers and manipulated jihad for their own political purposes by making their caliph declare jihad in 1914. To a reading Western public, ‘Who did win the crusades?’ was emotive, but Abdul-Hamid II was not fair to the medieval crusaders when he likened the nineteenth century situation to the past. The First Crusade sought to recov
er Jerusalem. It was a religious objective. Although some, such as Baldwin the Conqueror, sought land, the vast majority came to take Jerusalem and then returned home. The colonial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were concerned with territorial expansion and political influence and distorted the past to justify political expansion. The Bolshevik publication of the Sykes–Picot agreement was designed by them to show that the capitalist world was corrupt and that the Marxist approach was infinitely better. There was humbug in both the British and the French use of their League of Nations mandates to serve their colonising purposes and try to make up for the grievous personal and financial losses both had suffered in the First World War.

  One strand of opinion within embattled Israel has observed that the claim of the state of Israel to be the only truly democratic state in the Near East cannot hold if the Arab citizens within Israel keep the vote, as democracy requires, for the greater fertility of Arab households is bound over time to alter the population balance to the detriment of the Jews. Logic in this argument imposes a two-state solution, with independence for an Arab state. No doubt jihad/intifada is so well established that it would certainly not die away at once but the only alternative involves an Israeli government resorting to precisely the kind of racialism lying behind anti-Semitism over many years – only in reverse.

  The misunderstanding between West and East has always had consequences. There have been incidents where a clash of cultures has caused problems. Only those in the West who have studied Islamic society can begin to understand the complex nature of Islam and its adherents, with wide cultural differences and diversities of belief, exacerbated by the strains on simple societies of sudden wealth produced by the discovery of oil. Muslims may have problems in understanding divisions in belief and practice within Christianity. Crudely to classify Christians as crusaders or Muslims as jihadis is unjustified.

  A proof of the extraordinary range of belief and practice in contemporary Islam lies in the singular case of the Ismaili adherence of the Aga Khan, who in 1818 broke on personal grounds with his superior, who had given him this Persian pet name of honour, moved away from Iran and eventually settled in India. He used the inherited powers of the Fatimid imamate to attract a host of followers, some 15 million at present scattered across more than twenty-five countries, who accept his beneficent doctrinal decisions. The Nizaris under the Aga Khans supported British rule in India, were peace-loving and occupied a position of honour in international affairs, one of them presiding over the League of Nations. Designation, the Shiite nass, has been used by them to nominate successors, albeit broadly in a hereditary line. Within Ismaili range of doctrines lay exotic Gnostic beliefs but in modern times they probably matter much less than the links of personal solidarity, their meeting places (not in mosques) and their musical inheritance. Faithful adherence to the Quran in their case has led to tolerance of other beliefs and a rejection of polygamy and under-age marriage. At present the holder of office, Karim Aga Khan IV (born 1936), transferred the centre of Nizari Ismailis to London and combines charitable, tolerant activities with a genial love of racing. Tithes paid by followers provide a powerful financial base for charitable works.

  The cross carries implications for Muslims. A modern practising Muslim with Christian friends and much knowledge of Christianity likes to say her prayers in Christian churches in England but finds the sight of crosses disturbing because they remind her of the wars carried out by Western armies under this symbol. In Turkey, the rejection of veil, scarf and hijab through the secularisation policies of Atatiirk was welcomed by women who saw these restrictions in public dress as symbols of subjection and have spoken with sorrow of their reactions to a reversion to traditional practice. In France, too, outlawing this symbol of Islamic faith has caused problems, with defiance of the state seen in schools and elsewhere. The struggle for women’s education, so gallantly carried on against obscurantism in Pakistan and leading to the award of a Nobel Prize, is another facet of a major, worldwide effort. On the other hand, Islamic revival has brought fruit of an unexpected kind in business as the practice of Islamic virtue, as followed most notably by Saladin after his personal conversion, the bonds of honesty and reliability in all dealings has brought rewards for a class of Anatolian Tigers who have built up international companies on the strength of their care and trustworthiness, bringing much needed economic growth and employment to their country.

  The failure of an Iraqi government to sustain co-operation between Sunni and Shiite has given opportunity for an adventurer taking the name of Caliph Abu Bakr to preach jihad, call for an Islamic empire and assemble an army guilty of atrocities on a wide scale against their fellow Muslims, Shiites and Kurds as well as Yazidis and Christians. It is not Quranic, neither is the practice of suicide terrorism. Suicide is condemned in the Quran unequivocally. There is a clear distinction between the soldier who fights bravely for a good cause, takes risks and then suffers death and the suicide terrorist who deliberately destroys his life to detonate a bomb. Suicide terrorism seems to have originated in Saddam Hussein’s Iran–Iraq war, ostensibly a Sunni–Shiite conflict, when a thirteen-year-old Shiite blew himself up with grenades to stop an enemy advance. It resurrects harshnesses of the seventh and eighth centuries, neglects moments of diplomacy and mercy in the life of the Prophet and his insistence on the respect due to the Peoples of the Book, Christians and Jews. The familiar doctrine of the continuance of crusading and the need for Muslims to fight against it has been used to condemn Kurds on the strange grounds that they are instruments of the West.

  Anger against Shiites was, however, a starting-point for this conflict, and a seedbed for the trouble lay in the conviction of moderate Sunnis that they were being put at a heavy disadvantage by Shiite manoeuvring. A very long-lasting dispute, with rival narratives of cruelties and deceptions, inevitably comes to have a life of its own, as the experience of disputes and warfare in Ireland will recall to British readers, although the seeds of the Sunni–Shiite conflict go back to the seventh century while the conflict within Ireland goes back only to the sixteenth. And yet those who despair of any end to this conflict recurring, and reviving a grievous wound in Islam, have underestimated the possibilities of healing and compromise stemming from within the Muslim world. Such possibilities benefit from the extreme difficulties of all modern dictatorships in suppressing information appearing on the internet and on social media, such as Facebook. In Iran modern communications may yet work against the dictatorship of scholars and Ayatollahs attempting to impose their understanding of Twelver Shiism and their version of Islamic law on a young, growing population. This new generation, aware of other possibilities of democracy without crude Western hedonism and of fulfilling their faith in ways not envisaged by religious police, are able to communicate in a manner inconceivable even in the nineteenth century. Dishearteningly, as sophisticated propaganda from Isil reaches out to Muslims in Britain, America and Europe, it obscures its true nature and leads teenagers to join, believing that they are fulfilling their faith by becoming jihadis.

  Islam, past and present, offers precedents for healing. Nur al-Din himself, wishing to draw believers together to expel crusaders from the sahil, espoused an ecumenical Sunnism with openings for some Shiites. There are modern-day members of the Sunni majority who take pride in being able to work with Shiites and stress their common links in belief. The Naqshbandi order of Sufis has had an extraordinary success in bridging the gulf between Islam and the West under the leadership of the late Sufi scholar and preacher Nizam al-Haqqani, widely travelled and holding views which leave behind the crudities of Shiite–Sunni conflict. British Muslims, at risk to themselves, have rejected the threats of jihadis and whole communities have repudiated assassinations and mendacious propaganda.

  Scholarship can bridge gaps and Britain, because of its imperialist experience and the knowledge which flowed from it, has nurtured a body of respected investigators at home in dialogue with their opposite numbers. The cha
llenge to Christianity presented by the Enlightenment – which believed that more than a century had elapsed between the writing of the Gospels and the events they described, and that they consequently included a body of myths and inventions – has been met by a line of scholars working to establish the time-scale of writing and the means of transmission of texts. By contrast, the text of the Quran awaits deeper analysis. Hugh Kennedy has given good grounds for accepting the main lines of the classic life of Muhammad by ibn Ishaq against many sceptics; scholars, perhaps given confidence by this, need to go back to clarify the obscurities of words in the Quran. The talent is there to do it.

  The late Fathi Osman, once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the assassins of President Sadat of Egypt, believed that hatred was the child of misinformation and that the Islamic world and the West had come to live in fear and dislike of each other because they knew far too little about their respective beliefs and problems. In a lifetime of study he has moved from the Brotherhood to ecumenical contacts, reorganising narrowly conventional Islamic courses. Dictatorship, he came to see, bred terrorism. If Muslims were free to practise democracy and discuss issues, they would not need to turn to the gun to make their views prevail. He asked his fellow believers to re-examine jihad and replace it with ijtihad. Both words mean struggle, but ijtihad refers to intellectual struggle, leading to reinterpretation. He has called for a more profound study of the Quran, where vague passages give vantage points for leaders wishing to twist verses for their own ends. His masterwork of 1,000 pages, called Concepts of the Quran, has replaced analysis sura by sura with an examination of issues such as jihad in the light of the sacred writing as a whole. The human mind opens Scripture, he taught, and illuminates it; to refuse rational analysis is to back into a closed and stagnant world. Osman’s honesty and lack of any political connections or desire for reward have protected him from obloquy and such dedication has a powerful potential for the future.