Commentary
Islamic dynasties: sacred politics or pragmatism?
History of muslim world is dynamic, but Bernard Lewis describes system of divine, unchanging law

By Adam Sabra

The following is the second of a two-part critique of Bernard Lewis’ book What Went Wrong? which appeared in the August 2003 edition of Middle East Report Online (www.merip.org) and is published here with permission.

A turning point came during the Buyid period (945-1055), when a group of Shiite soldiers established a dynasty that reduced the Sunni caliphs to symbolic figures. It was at this time that Sunni and Shiite Islam as we know them formulated their doctrines in the highly competitive atmosphere of Baghdad’s scholarly circles.
The leaders of the Imami Shiite community composed their authoritative works on hadith (the sayings of the Prophet and the Imams, whom Shiites view as Muhammad’s legitimate successors as heads of the umma), law and theology. The Imami community also developed a series of rituals and commemorations designed to reinforce their belief in the right of the descendants of Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, to rule the Muslim world. While other Shiite communities, such as the Ismailis, continued to struggle to overthrow the Abbasids, the Imamis focused on building their community and waiting for the return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam who they expected to appear at the end of time.
Meanwhile, the decline of Abbasid authority and the dismemberment of the Abbasid state gave further impetus to the rise of law as the basis of Sunni Islam. Increasingly, it was the lawyers, now organized into four major schools, who filled the ideological gap left by the dissipation of the caliphal writ. Although this development reduced the field of competing doctrines somewhat, uniformity was never achieved, even within the major sects. There continued to be multiple schools of law and theology, and furthermore, political authority in the Muslim world was increasingly separated from religious authority.
The next 500 years saw a series of military, tribal and even slave regimes rise to claim control over the Middle East, but even the most successful of them, the Mamluk sultanate, never succeeded in imposing Sunnism on all of its subjects. True, these dynasties presented their adherence to Islamic law as the basis of their legitimacy, but this did not change the fact that politics in the Islamic world was increasingly seen as a secular activity.
Indeed, the Ottomans, who succeeded the Mamluks in ruling what is now called the Middle East (excepting Morocco and Iran), were quite explicit in issuing secular edicts (qanuns) which were tailored to the local conditions and traditions of their highly diverse subjects, who included many Christians and Jews. Although the Ottomans presented themselves as adherents to Sunnism, many of their subjects were sympathetic to the family of the Prophet, especially to the descendants of his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.
Although these were the same persons venerated by the Shiites, this presented no problem for the Ottomans until the rise of the explicitly Shiite Safavids in Iran. The subsequent wars between the two powers forced the Turcoman tribesmen to choose one side or another, but even the descendants of those who chose the Ottoman side continue to be known as Alevis today. In other parts of the Muslim world, Sunnism has been compatible with reverence for the family of Muhammad (supposedly a Shiite doctrine), while many Sufis (the mystics of Islam, some of whom are venerated as saints in most of the Muslim world) have combined Islamic with Christian or “pagan” practices. For example, Muslim and Christian peasants in Egypt commonly attend one another’s saint festivals, while Muslims and Hindus in India often venerate some of the same holy men.
In short, religious doctrine and practice in the Muslim world have continued to be fluid and frequently syncretic. These factors, which influence the way in which Islam is practiced by hundreds of millions of Muslims, receive no attention in Lewis’s oversimplified account. Again, it is notable that Lewis devotes no space to Muslim traditions in countries like India, Malaysia or Indonesia, where religious norms are quite different from those in the Middle East.
Time and again, Lewis resorts to Islamic law (shariaa) as his source and explanation for Muslim political attitudes, paying little attention to the context in which shariaa was, or was not, applied. Thus, Lewis introduces the concept of the caliphate, but has little to say about the political and religious institutions that developed after the caliphate lost its power to rule the Muslim world.
While the complex relationship between the power of the sultans and the religious authority of the ulama does not reproduce the Western separation between church and state, it does show that pre-modern Muslims were quite pragmatic about the real, profane origins of political power in medieval Muslim societies. While the ulama attempted to persuade the sultans to rule their states in accordance with Islamic law, it was a separate group of bureaucrats, the kuttab, who actually administered the financial and diplomatic affairs of medieval Muslim states in most cases, frequently without reference to religious law. While courts applied Islamic law to private transactions, this practice differed from one region to another and one time to another.
Lewis recognizes that Islamic law was not immutable, but presents this fact as an example of hypocrisy, saying that changes were “always suitably disguised.” What many modern scholars have seen as the flexible character of Islamic legal practice, Lewis sees as a utopian ideal of divine, unchanging law, occasionally counteracted by a wink and a nod.
All of this feeds into what we might call Lewis’s “totalitarianism complex.” For Lewis, the essential characteristic of Islamic religious and political thinking is that it is totalitarian in character. Indeed, Lewis has long believed that this aspect of Islam makes it ripe for the picking by other totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism.
In a 1953 lecture to British policymakers, Lewis claimed to investigate “what factors or qualities are there in the Islamic tradition, or in the present state of Islamic society and opinion, which might prepare the intellectually and politically active groups in society to embrace Communist principles and methods of government, and the rest to accept them?” Among those qualities is what he called the “anti-Western motif,” whereby communists and Muslims share a common hostility toward the Western powers and the “Western way of life, Western institutions and ideas.”
In his lecture, Lewis rejected the idea that these feelings might be connected to the process of decolonization, because “even the removal of one or another grievance cannot bring more than a local and temporary alleviation” to this anti-Western hatred. Although the Soviet Union too was imperialist, in Lewis’s view this fact escaped the notice of Muslims. This was, of course, prior to the era of the Afghan and Chechen wars, but not so long before the “Arab cold war” in which Saudi Arabia allied itself with the US against self-described “socialist” states such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
Lewis went on to describe the “autocratic” political tradition of the medieval Islamic world, with an emphasis on Sunni quietism. Persons accustomed to “such doctrines,” which emphasize the obligation to obey the ruler, even if he is unjust, are supposed to prepare the Muslim believer to accept “communist disregard of political liberty and human rights” with equanimity. This is especially true since communism could offer an alternative to “ineptitude, corruption and cynicism.” Lewis invokes the theory of Oriental despotism to argue that members of these societies are prone to accepting the nationalization of the economy.
It may seem unfair to hold Lewis to things he said 50 years ago. Nonetheless, the ideas expressed in that lecture have recurred in Lewis’s writings ever since. While he no longer asserts that communism is a danger, he continues to argue that the existing regimes in the Middle East are a combination of socialist and fascist styles of government, which perpetuate their existence by blaming all of their problems on foreigners, principally Jews and Americans. These problems can only be addressed when Middle Eastern peoples cease blaming others and work to resolve their problems, presumably by adopting the Western values that they are so predisposed to hate.
In this light, it is clear that Lewis regards the contemporary Islamic movements as the latest installment in a series of totalitarian ideologies to dominate the Middle East, easily planted in the fertile ground of Islamic theocracy. As such, the Islamic world constitutes the anti-West, the perennial opponent to Western values of democracy and individual liberty.
As Lewis must know, this is a very old trope in Western thought. Its origins can be found in the horror felt by the ancient Greeks towards Persian imperialism, and it was resurrected during the early modern period by the Venetians who used the Ottoman Empire as an ideological foil to their own republican system of government. The Enlightenment made further use of this idea in its struggle for freedom of individual conscience.
Interestingly, the idea of the despotic East re-emerged during the Cold War, when theories of totalitarianism which had been constructed to explain similarities between the regimes of Hitler and Stalin were married to this traditional Orientalist trope. The most famous of these works was Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, which applied these “insights” to communist China. It is no coincidence that Lewis referred to Wittfogel in his lecture on “Communism and Islam.”
The advantage of this Manichean view of the world is that it is self-justifying. If the US, the West and Israel stand for democracy and individual liberties against totalitarianism (fascist, communist or Islamic), then their struggle is inherently just. This is not merely a struggle between civilizations, but for civilization against totalitarian barbarism. Naturally, the defenders of democracy are entitled to use force to achieve these ends, and the loss of life on both sides is to be blamed on those who threaten the Western way of life. The West should encourage Muslims to adopt its values, Lewis writes, but “the choice is their own.” That is, the burden is upon them to demonstrate their fitness to participate in international society, and the West will render judgment in accordance with its own criteria.
This attitude relieves the West of any sense of responsibility for current conditions in the Islamic world or elsewhere (“the blame game” as Lewis calls it), whether for imperialism, capitalism, short-sighted Western support for repressive regimes in the region or anything else. In his view, the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people and destabilization of the Middle East result purely from the unwillingness of Arabs and Muslims to face facts and look beyond grievances.
Lewis has no patience for the idea that at least some of these grievances may be well-founded. Nor does he consider the possibility that the Arab and Muslim states, like any other states, may have their own geopolitical interests which differ from those of the US. For Lewis, opposition to US policy in the Middle East is ideological, rather than political, in character. Until such time as the Muslim world makes the correct ideological choice, the West may have no choice but to vigorously confront its enemies.
As Lewis writes in the Wall Street Journal, speaking of instability in Iraq and friction with Iran, “the worst of all options is the line of submissiveness, which can only strengthen the perception of American weakness.” That perception was the impetus for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have just begun to dispel it.
In his history as well, Lewis believes that he can explain the development of the modern Middle East entirely through the lenses of ideology and Islamic tradition. He makes no effort to compare the Middle East to other parts of the world using economic, demographic or other indicators. The past 50 years have witnessed an important rapprochement between history and the social sciences, which has transformed history as a discipline. Yet Lewis continues to write literary, anecdotal history as if such developments had never taken place.
Indeed, he has expressed contempt for such efforts to integrate Middle Eastern history into the mainstream of the historical profession. In his 1976 essay, The Return of Islam, published in Commentary, he scoffs at those modern journalists who insist on interpreting the Islamic world using Western political concepts like right and left, or progressive and conservative, arguing: “Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficial phenomena.”
It is one thing to argue that culture matters. It is quite another to argue that it is all that matters. That such an antiquated view of history could appeal to so many in the policymaking world in the United States indicates just how fully they are committed to a cataclysmic conflict with the Islamic world. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such a conflict is exactly what Bernard Lewis and his disciples desire, and that they just may succeed in provoking it.

Adam Sabra teaches Middle East history at Western Michigan University