Islam in the Modern World
Trevor Mostyn is a Lecturer in Middle East History at the University of Oxford teaching a course on “Islam in the Modern World”
Writing a book on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I introduced myself to the town councillors of Fujairah in my best classical Arabic. Delighted, they promptly closed down their offices and produced a feast for me. “You are a Muslim. You speak the word of God”, they said. I told them that actually I was a Catholic and believed that Jesus was the son of God. “Oh, we believe that Jesus is the ‘Ruh’, the ‘breath’, the ‘spirit’ of God”, they said, “so there is little difference between our religions.” I tell this anecdote to my students at Oxford.
I also tell them of Muhammad Asad, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist who befriended the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, known to Westerners as Ibn Saud. Sitting with sheikhs in a Bedouin tent, Asad suddenly articulated his revulsion for the hypocrisy of Muslims he had met. At the end of his rant the sheikhs pulled their fur-lined abayas (cloaks) about them. The only sound was the wind blowing through the desert. Eventually, one of the old men turned to Asad and said quietly, “But you are a Muslim. You do not know it, but you are a Muslim” This was the moment of Asad’s conversion to Islam.
The course I teach, Islam in the Modern World at the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education (CONTED), aims to show students how far away genuine Islam is from the militancy of the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the Deobandis of India or Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in The Levant. The Sufism, the Islamic mysticism, that most enlightened Muslims, Sunni or Shia, espouse, brings them close to Christians and Jews. The stories of the Qur’an are the stories of the Old Testament and the virgin birth of Mary in the New is lyrically told in the Qur’an’s Sura of Miriam (Mary).
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria was to be the start of a “civilising” mission which pitted traditional Islam against the secular world of revolutionary France. Napoleon had just expelled the Knights of Malta, who were mainly French. Nevertheless, in Egypt he claimed ingeniously to be closer to Islam than the Mamluk (“Slave”) dynasty he had replaced. Surrounded by savants, engineers and scientists, he embarked on a scientific and cultural tour de force but the Egyptian Ulema (clerics) were not convinced by his empathy and the expedition ended in humiliation, its fleet sunk by Nelson, its army eventually escorted out of Egypt under British protection. However, French cultural influence remained and flourished. Napoleon’s successor Muhammad Ali exploited the chaotic void left by the Napoleonic adventure to gain control of Egypt and open it up to European innovation and progress. He sent Rifaat al-Tahtawi, a Muslim cleric and key figure in the Nahda (Arab renaissance), to Paris to learn how political and social systems worked. In the Senate, Tahtawi was astonished to witness the sort of vitriolic debates unheard of in Egypt.
While a genuine debate flourished at Cairo’s Al Azar University, Saudi Arabia fell under the sway of Wahhabi hardliners after the failure of the Arab Revolt promising the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca a kingdom extending from Yemen to present-day Türkiye. The broken promises highlighted by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, both heralding a Jewish state in Palestine, angered the Sharif who refused a deal with Britain. Given the British green light, Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan (stormtrooper ‘Brothers’) quickly seized Mecca and Medina and the cosmopolitan Hejaz Province. Obscurantist Wahabi ideology with its penalties for heresy, its revulsion for Shia sects and, until very recently, its prominent religious police, became firmly established, soon enriched by massive oil wealth.
Until the Persian Safavids adopted Shi’ism (the ‘sect’, ‘shia’, of Ali) in 1501 the Sunni-Shia divide for many was unclear, Shi’ism tending to represent the resistance of the disenfranchised ones against the ruling Sunnis (Sunna, the ‘practise of the Prophet Muhammad’), and to begin with, Arab, elite. It attracted the Mawalis, clients of the Arab leadership. Many were Persians who had inherited the pre-Islamic culture of sophisticated kingship and were influenced by Greek rational thinking espoused by the Mutazilites of the early 800’s as well as by the mysticism that would develop into Sufism.
The Sunnis revere the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali as the fourth Caliph (Khalifah), the Shi’as first Imam. Twelver Shi’a (those who revere the 12 Imams, infallible, spiritual leaders), apart from the ghulat (extremists), revere Muhammad as God’s final Prophet and perform the Hajj to Mecca.
Arguably, the only critical difference is that Sunnis recognise the first four Caliphs while the Shi’a believe that the Prophet should be represented by the ‘Family of the House’ (of the Prophet, Ahl al-Bayt), in short by Ali and his descendants. Extremist Shi’is resort to Sabb, the vilification of the first three caliphs.
During the first two centuries of Islam the Shia divided into three main groups who revere the imams, the descendants of Ali. The mainstream Twelvers maintain that the 12th Imam had gone into concealment (ghayba) to return one day to bring justice to the world. The Seveners, the Ismailis, today represented by the Aga Khan, likewise revere the seventh Imam and the Fivers, the Zaydis of Yemen, the fifth. The Zaydi Houthis of Yemen are now suffering a devastating war with hardline Sunni Saudi Arabia despite the fact that Zaydism is the closest of the Shia sub-sects to the Sunnis. During the Yemeni civil war of the 1960’s Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi imams against the Republicans supported by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Orthodox Sunnis condemn the Alawites (a sect of Islam, predominantly found in Syria, that splintered from early Shia during the ninth century). The hardline cleric Ibn Teymiyya (d 1328), who would inspire the fundamentalist Wahhabis of Arabia, considered them to be heretics deserving death and even many Shia see them as ghulat. However, the Lebanese Shia cleric Musa Sadr issued a fatwa (legal opinion) confirming them as Shi’is and Ayatollah Khomeini accepted the Alawites as Shia during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. The political alliance with Syria would allow the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and the Lebanese Hezbollah (‘party of God’) to flourish in the region.
Today the Sunni-Shia divide reflects the polarisation of Iranian and Saudi Wahhabi influence since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini, and since the irredentist influence of Iran sparked by the fall of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-oriented Ba’thist regime in 2003 in Iraq, which is 70% Shia. The standoff has echoes of the historic polarisation of Persia and the Arab Levant.
The split has been exacerbated today by the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), with Saudi Arabia implicitly allied with Israel, its erstwhile enemy, in an astonishing volte face. Enmity with Israel since its creation in 1948 has been replaced by hostility towards Iran whose Islamic Revolution laid claim to the support of all Muslims, both Sunni and Shia.
In contrast with Islamist militants there are many modern Islamic reformers today. The most flamboyant is, perhaps, the Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali who explains in her memoir Infidel why she abandoned Islam, mostly over the role of women. She had made a film called Submission with the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh who was murdered in 2004 by an Islamist militant. Another thinker is Ed Husain who in 2007 established a thinktank in Britain called Quilliam, named after a Victorian-born Muslim called Abdullah Quilliam. Husain explains in his book The House of Islam how “it was necessary to take the lead and show how Islam was being politicised by Arab political anger.”
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.
