What The West Sowed Now It Reaps

Pull up a log and sit around the fire.  It is history time, folks.  Specifically it is time to consider the sea change in the nature of Islam which started in the mid-Nineteenth Century and continues at an accelerating pace today.  More, it is time to take a look at how the nature and focus of Western understandings of the basis of organized social, political and, yes, religious life had the unintended consequence of letting loose the forces of political Islam including its violent, armed expression which constitutes the greatest threat facing the West today and into the future.

The necessary starting point, however, is today.  Right now.  A poll conducted by the highly respected and very careful Pew Research Center shows that in several key Muslim majority countries a majority of people want their religion to play a central role in politics.  This means that, among other matters, the majority want to see the harsh penalties of Shariah imposed.  They want the strictures of Islamic doctrine to be applied to economic and social matters.  The majority have accepted the view that no government which does not operate in all respects according to the dogma of Islam as interpreted by religious scholars is legitimate.

If, a hundred years or more ago, this poll had been conducted, the results would have been dramatically different.  Even as recently as the start of the Twentieth Century the majority of Muslims were not of the opinion that their religion had a direct political dimension.  The predominant understanding then was--as it had been for several centuries--that Islam operated directly on the individual in his inner life and in the way in which he interacted with and related to other individuals.

A century and more ago the predominant form of Islam was that of the Sufi.  Religious life was internal, predicated on ritual and liturgy.  The goal and intent of religious practice was to achieve a sense of merging with the godhead on one hand and living life in full accord with the personally perceived will of Allah.  Charity, compassion, empathy, accommodation, peaceful relations with all and the quest for peace internally were the primary features of the kind, gentle, and essentially non-doctrinal approach of the Sufis.

Sufis espoused a religion of practice, not doctrine.  They advanced an Islam of wordlessness, not one of dogma over which arguments and disputations could occur--and blood could be shed.  From Somalia to Afghanistan and throughout the Ottoman Empire, the Sufi understanding was the majority view of Muslims.

Largely, it was for this reason that the Ottoman Empire could survive so long even with its decrepit, inefficient, massively corrupt bureaucracy, and ineffective military forces.  It was for this reason that Muslim, Christian, and Jew could and did coexist within the Ottoman Empire with a very high degree of peace, mutual tolerance, and even friendship.  It was for this reason as well that Shia and Sunni could live harmoniously in the province of Iraq.

The Sufi view with its emphasis on the mystical, the inexpressible nature of Allah, the necessity of seeking internal peace and reflecting that inner quality in daily relations had no need of a written creed enforced by clerical decree.  To the Sufi understanding, the written word was largely irrelevant, the idea of dogma or doctrine unthinkable, the notion of killing over differences of interpretation anathema.

When apologists for Islam speak of the religion as one of "peace and tolerance," they are speaking of an understanding of Islam which is long gone.  A form of Islam killed by the ascendancy of creedal Islam, an Islam based on the written word as interpreted by clerical experts.  The Islam of today is an Islam predicated on scripture, scripture which is malleable in the hands of trained exegetes, an Islam which is usable as a political tool.

The shift away from the Islam of the Sufis started in the mid-Nineteenth Century and accelerated slowly at first but with increasing speed for one reason and one reason alone. That reason was the impingement of the West.

The West is a word based entity.  The majority religion of the West--Christianity--is a word based religion without superior.  For centuries in the West the written word was the supreme authority.  All bowed before the totem of the written word.  More importantly, men fought to the death over the written word--and fine points of interpretation.

The cruciality of the written word, of dogma and doctrine to Christianity, became obvious very early in the life of the religion.  During the Great Schism, seventeen hundred years ago, men fought and died over abstruse points--even the existence of a single syllable--regarding the nature of Christ.  Later, doctrine and dogma served as the key litmus test of adherents, of orthodoxy, of the purity of faith.

The word, which is to say the approved words of doctrine and dogma, served to define Christianity as well as to assure that the faith was communal more than individual.  The Reformation and Counter-Reformation served to further embed this dynamic just as two other fulcrum events were taking place.  These were the rise of nationalism and the introduction of movable type printing.

To simplify slightly, the combination of printing and the rise of self-conscious nation-states provided the launching pad for a key definer of the West.  This is simply the primacy of the law before which all are presumed to stand equally.  The law demands the written word and hard fought battles over the precise meaning and applicability of the words as written.

States and organized societies could not exist without the written word any more than Christian denominations could define themselves without it.  National "creeds" joined with religious ones to define and motivate people.   This assured the foundational nature of the written word.  By the Seventeenth Century at the latest, it was literally impossible for people of the West to conceive of a "wordless" faith or of a society which did not invoke the majesty of the written word to solve the frictions within.

The encroachment of the West on the Muslim societies of not only the Ottoman Empire but the very loosely organized polities on the Muslim fringes brought with it a very real clash of cultures.  The clash was, at root, between the "wordy" and the "wordless."

By the late Nineteenth Century it was obvious to the politically articulate of the Muslim societies that the "wordy" folks of the West were getting the best of the interaction.  This started the process of displacing the Sufi understanding from its long held position of prominence.  As the West gained an ever larger hold on the Muslim societies, as the Western footprint grew, one reaction was the development of a more word based form of Islam.

The development of Islamic dogmas and doctrines was a defensive reaction to the encroachment of the West.  It sought to use the prime tool of the West--the word--as an effective counter to the West.  At the same time, the growth of creedal Islam allowed for effective definition of believers as a discrete community with an interpretive center--the cleric.  It provided for Muslims as it had earlier in the Christian West an armature around which self-conscious and self-defined communities could coalesce.

By mid-Twentieth Century, Islam was no longer a religion of individuals, it was no longer a mystical quest for wordless experience of the godhead, it was no longer a faith which sought accommodation, fostered compassion and empathy, but rather was a religion of sects and doctrines, of orthodoxy and apostasy.  In this Islam echoed the earlier experiences of Christianity.

With the word as supreme in Islam, it was not only possible but inevitable that the scripture would be mined for those features which best suited the political aspirations or popular fears of any given moment.  As Islam on paper is the most totalistic of the monotheistic faiths, the quest for political ammunition, for means to define a community as differing from and being better than others was successful.  This, in turn, meant that with faith being communal rather than individual, there was no chance of any separation of faith and political power.

The coming of the word assured that Islam would become political in its focus with the certainty of water flowing downhill.  With the advent of a communal scripture and doctrine based faith, it was also inevitable that there would be a race to the most demanding, most extreme, most austere, most purportedly pure version of Islam as interpreted by the far from neutral clerics.

This particular version of Crane Britton's "co-option to the left" is seen quite explicitly in the sudden reemergence of the Shia-Sunni split in mandated Iraq, in the ascendancy of Salifism and Wahhibism in North Africa and Saudi Arabia, and in the (literally) explosive growth of violent political Islam in the past quarter century.  Once the word based West had put its heavy imprint on the Muslim societies, the consequent response and its later outgrowths had a horrid sort of inevitability which could have been predicted by an unusually perceptive historian of the Western experience.

Of course no such paragon of the historian's craft existed and the West cruised on with its haughty sense of the superiority of its word based views of all aspects of life.  In many, perhaps most, aspects of human experience, this sense of superiority is justified.  The accomplishments of the word are self-evident.  But, like most all good things in life, there is a downside.

That downside is now facing us.  Islamic populations have embraced the word--including all of its potentials as a definer of people and a source of violent conflict with avidity.  It is not shocking that the "co-option to the left (or extreme)" has resulted or that Muslims demand more direct and total use of faith in the political realm.

By understanding the historical context more accurately, we in the West can cast aside the bogus explanations of Muslim hostility such as the "sins" of colonialism or "exploitation" and realize that the word is all conquering.  The Muslims embraced the word because word based approaches to life and its problems work best.  It is a very unfortunate collateral damage that by doing so the Muslims have empowered the most extreme ideas abroad in their intellectual universe with consequences damaging not only to the West but to Muslims as well.

We can take some small comfort in the fact that we in the West have lived through the battles of the words before and come out the better for it.  We can also take some comfort in the fact that by understanding the nature of the intellectual battlefield today, we can fight the long counterinsurgency before us with better tactics and tools.  When night falls the truth remains: Words are defeated by better words.