Preface

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ANYONE WHO LIVES IN THE early twenty-first century and follows the news will have noticed that ancient religions play a significant part in modern politics. These religions are not, however, by any means interchangeable in their political roles. Most obviously, it is hard to miss the fact that Islam today has a higher political profile than any of its competitors. But why should that be so? Is there something about the formal or substantive character of the Islamic tradition that makes its invocation an attractive option for Muslim individuals and groups that are politically active in a modern context—something that is not found in other religious traditions? Is there a reason why one can understand the contemporary politics of India and Latin America perfectly well without having heard of such medieval luminaries as Mādhava and Aquinas, whereas one cannot hope to understand the politics of the contemporary Islamic world without having heard of Ibn Taymiyya? This is a major question about the world we live in, but my sense is that much of the literature on the politics of the Islamic world tends either not to attend to the issue or to deal with it rather crudely. In this book I attempt to respond to the question with at least a partial answer.

To do this I have approached the Islamic case in a comparative setting. I thus seek to compare the role of Islam in modern politics with the parts played by Hinduism and Christianity—the latter mainly in the Latin American context. That I picked this particular pair is in some measure accidental, but there is also a certain logic to it: I wanted heritages to which large Third-World populations owe allegiance. This does not prevent me from referring occasionally to such faiths as Judaism and Sikhism, but I make no attempt to include them in a systematic way. The methods I employ throughout are those of a historian, since these are just about the only ones I know how to use. I would hope, however, that my disciplinary readership will not be limited to historians. Thus, political scientists may find some of the book of interest, though it will not attempt to emulate the methodological rigors of their discipline. So also may those engaged in the academic study of religion, though they may find my treatment rather philistine—my subject, after all, is religion in politics, not religion in itself. But I would also hope that the book will be accessible, and have some illumination to offer, to reasonably determined readers coming to it with nothing more than an interest in one or another of the relevant aspects of world affairs.

The answer I offer to the question I pose is partial not just for the obvious reason that my treatment is uneven and incomplete—what I know being nothing compared to what I don’t know. It is also partial because my primary focus is on the differences between the three traditions, even if I have a lot to say about the differences between the political contexts in which they are invoked or ignored. My main argument is that the three traditions offer significantly different combinations of assets and liabilities for those engaged in modern politics and that this makes them variously attractive or unattractive to such actors as political resources.1 In this connection I have sometimes been tempted to think of a religious heritage as a set of circuits that the politically inclined may or may not choose to switch on or as a menu from which they may or may not choose to make a selection; that is to say, an ancient religion, like a menu, provides its modern adherents with a set of options that do not determine their choices but do constrain them.2 There are, of course, very different ways to think about the relationship between ancient heritages and political action in the modern world—for example, one could see them as mascons exercising a subterranean pull on the political trajectories of their adherents; but such a conception is not central to my argument. In the same way there are many good questions other than mine to be asked about the role of religion in contemporary politics, but answering them is not at the core of the task I have set myself.

As a glance at the table of contents will show, the book, like Gaul, is divided into three parts, each devoted to a major comparative theme.

Part One is about the role of the three religious traditions in modern political identity. Its core argument is that Islam provides a political identity that, for all its limitations, is not adequately matched by Hinduism, let alone Christianity. Chapter 1 seeks to establish the balance between the ethnic and religious forms of political identity in the traditional Islamic world, Arab and non-Arab, and to gauge the strength of Muslim political identity in pre-modern times. It then goes on to ask what has become of the old balance, and more particularly of Muslim political identity, under modern conditions. Chapter 2 is about the limited extent to which the Hindu tradition provides a counterpart to Muslim political identity, and the mixture of success and failure that has attended the attempts of the Hindu nationalists to render this identity operational in recent Indian politics. Chapter 3 completes the argument by showing that in the context of Latin American Christianity a political identity of this kind is even more elusive than in the Hindu case.

Part Two is about the contribution of the three heritages to broadly political values in a modern setting.3 The organization is different from that of Part One: here each chapter is devoted to a theme, and provides coverage of all three religions. Chapter 4 is concerned with social values and inquires whether the values embodied in each heritage are likely to be assets or liabilities in modern politics; in each case it identifies one particular feature of the religion in question as particularly relevant, though the features differ greatly from each other. Chapter 5 moves on to attitudes to warfare; its primary focus is on the Islamic value of jihad, its political costs and benefits in the contemporary world, and the extent to which parallel phenomena can or cannot be found in Hinduism and Christianity. Chapter 6 is about the ways in which the three religions relate to various forms of culture. It tries to tease out differences in the extent to which these traditions claim sovereignty over particular cultural domains, and the degree to which they, or their adherents, are committed to maintaining that sovereignty. The contrasts that emerge are perhaps most striking in the legal domain. Chapter 7 takes up conceptions of the polity. On the one hand it shows that the three religions shared a pattern of close relations with kingship for most of their history; but on the other hand it brings out the distinctiveness of the early caliphate and its latter-day appeal. In different ways each of these chapters throws the Islamic case into relief.

Part Three is about fundamentalism, by which I mean the choice to return to the original foundations of one’s faith and take one’s religion from its earliest sources. Here I revert to the organization of Part One: I give each religion a separate chapter. The primary questions are how far each religion lends itself to fundamentalization, how far those invoking its heritage in modern politics are in fact fundamentalists, and—to the extent that they are—what their fundamentalism does for them (I take it for granted that people do not adopt fundamentalisms that do nothing for them). For the second and third questions in particular, the answers differ widely for the three religions. These chapters too bring out the ways in which the Islamic case is distinctive.

Each of the three parts of the book begins and ends with a short essay relevant to its theme; some of these excursions are broad and general, but others—notably those preceding and following Part Two—serve as an excuse to deal with specific matters not attended to in the main chapters of the book. For summaries of the wider argument, the reader should look rather to the conclusions of the individual chapters and to the afterword. Like most authors, I have written the book on the assumption that the reader will begin at the beginning, but anyone who prefers to jump in at some other point will get assistance from the cross-references. Indeed, some of the chapters of Part Two may be easier reading than those of Part One.

I should add some cautions about what the book does not do. First, though it has a lot to say about the pre-modern world, it does not provide an account of that world for its own sake, and anyone who read the book as if it did would be likely to come away with a seriously distorted picture. This is perhaps particularly so in the Islamic case—and for two reasons. One is that, to put it bluntly, Islamic civilization died quite some time ago, unlike Islam which is very much alive; we will thus be concerned with the wider civilization only when it is relevant to features of the enduring religious heritage. The other reason is that a major component—perhaps the major component—of pre-modern Islam was ūfism. Today ūfism is by no means dead, but it is not at the cutting edge of the developments that concern us; instead its role is mainly that of a target for movements that see themselves as propagating pure Islam. Second, my primary concern in this book is with “great traditions,” not with “little traditions” and their increasingly eroded autonomy. But even here my focus is not usually on the minutiae of doctrine; in the end what matters for my purposes is rather what can fire the political imagination. Third, I am not in the business of anticipating the Last Judgment. In particular, comparing the values of ancient heritages with those prevalent in the world today sometimes has the effect of making those heritages look good and sometimes of making them look bad. This is pretty much inevitable, since current values happen to be the ones we believe in, but it is irrelevant to my purpose which, like Bīrūnī’s in his study of India, is descriptive and analytical. Fourth, while I make occasional reference to Shīʿism, the main focus of this book is on Sunnī Islam.

It may be useful to say something here about the presuppositions of the book. Obviously I take it for granted that it does make a difference whether your religious heritage is Islamic, Hindu, or Christian. Though this assumption strikes me as common sense, not everyone will agree with it; those who disagree may still find some of the book useful in incidental ways.

It follows that I have no great sympathy with the idea that religious traditions are putty in the hands of exegetes—as if a heritage could successfully be interpreted to mean whatever one wanted and all interpretations were equally plausible to one’s fellow believers. Heritages do change under exegetical and other pressures, but they do so gradually and against considerable inertia—a force whose role in human affairs is by no means to be thought of as limited to physical objects. In the meantime, to borrow an insight from the history of early modern England, “what it is possible to do in politics is generally limited by what it is possible to legitimise. What you can hope to legitimise, however, depends on what courses of action you can plausibly range under existing normative principles.”4

Something analogous is perhaps worth saying about collective identities, particularly those that really matter to people—so much so that they may be willing to die for them. Identities of this kind, like values, can and do change, but they are not, as academic rhetoric would sometimes have it, in constant flux.5 The reason is simple: like shared currencies, shared identities are the basis of claims that people can make on each other, and without a degree of stability such an identity would be as useless as a hyperinflating currency. So it is not surprising that in the real world collective identities, though not immutable, often prove robust and recalcitrant, at times disconcertingly so. As the authors of a study of the politics of Ulster point out, “there is a major difference between thinking that identities are durable and maintaining that they are immutably primordial.”6

My approach likewise diverges from the view that there is no such thing as Islam, just many local Islams. This view is perfectly coherent in principle, and some fragments of reality do indeed help us to imagine what it would be like to live in a world in which it was true. A plausible example of the ever-increasing religious entropy that would characterize such a world may be found among the Muslim Chams of Indo-China, particularly those of Annam, as described by French observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their pantheon overlapped with that of their neighbors, the Hindu Chams, and included a mother goddess.7 They had a manuscript of the Bible that told of the creation of the sun god and moon goddess,8 and a central role in one of their rituals was played by a priestess.9 This is not to say that they had lost touch with other forms of Islam altogether. They still knew about Allāh; indeed such was their respect for him that they abstained from sex on Mondays, the day of his birth.10 They still recited texts that bore some relationship to the Koran, and while the laity observed only a three-day Ramaān, the priests fasted for the full month.11 Yet it does not take a card-carrying Wahhābī to feel an element of shock at this picture. We have here an example of a religion that has drifted so far from its origins as to be within sight of exemplifying a teasing idea developed by a philosopher of intellectual history: a tradition that has gradually changed over time to the point that no single element present at the start is still there at the end.12 But to think of the Muslim world as nothing but a mosaic of religious traditions like that of the Chams would be very misleading. In the world in which we actually live, such unchecked drift is unlikely to continue indefinitely. A few centuries ago Islam was undoubtedly more polylithic than it is today, but it has never been a heap of rubble13—the centrifugal forces of time and distance are countered by the pull of homogenization.14 Such homogenizing forces were already at work in pre-modern times; more metropolitan forms of Islam have always had the potential to trump local differentiation. Modern conditions have rendered the effect even stronger. The Chams are again a case in point: a French source of 1891 mentions that some years previously three Muslim villages had abruptly abandoned the worship of their Cham gods; this was after a foreign Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca was passing through and condemned such practices.15 The pilgrim from Mecca had clearly put the Chams on the spot. But in a world in which there really was no such thing as Islam, just many local Islams, there would have been no spot for him to put them on.

There is a wider point about religious commitment that arises from the Cham experience and is of some importance for the thinking of this book. If I adhere to a simple local cult that does not even have a priesthood, it may well be the case that there is nothing anyone can tell me about my religion that I don’t already know. But if I am, say, an Anglican Christian, the chances are that there is a great deal about my religion that I don’t know. Suppose, for example, that, being of a generous disposition, I tend to think that good people of all religions may be saved. I mention this to you as a fellow Anglican. But instead of assenting to my harmless platitude, you respond sharply by citing the eighteenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles adopted by the Anglican Church in 1562 “for the avoiding of diversities of opinions”—a text of whose existence I was perhaps vaguely aware but not one that I had ever gone so far as to read. The eighteenth article does indeed state that one is accursed if one presumes to say that “every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the light of Nature.”16 How might I respond to your rebuke? One response would be “personally I don’t bother with that stuff.” Another might be “wait a minute—do we really know that God in his infinite mercy would never choose to save a virtuous Buddhist?”17 Yet another could be “thank you for telling me, I didn’t know, and now I do.” But however I respond, you have put me on the spot by invoking not a specific Anglican belief that I actually hold but rather the general commitment to Anglican beliefs that arises from my membership of the Anglican church, irrespective of whether I actually hold those beliefs or am even aware of them. In the Anglican case the dilution of ecclesiastical authority in this day and age is such that the most likely response might well be the first—I brush you off. But the third response—accepting that one stands corrected—is exactly how the Muslims of the three Cham villages reacted to their critical visitor. That even members of a religious tradition that had drifted so far from anything recognizable to us as Islam should respond in this way is telling—they at least, one might have thought, would have shrugged their shoulders and said, “What’s that to us? This is what we do here.” That in turn suggests that more mainstream Muslims could easily be put on the spot with regard to disparities between what they currently believe and do and what their general commitment to Islam could be held to imply that they should believe and do.18

Something needs to be said about conventions. I use the terms “Islamism” and “Islamic fundamentalism” in distinct senses.19 By “Islamism” I mean “Islam as a modern ideology and a political program,”20 and I use the term synonymously with “political Islam.” By “Islamic fundamentalism” I mean, as indicated above, the choice to return to the original foundations of Islam. It is a contingent fact about the world we live in, and an important one, that many Islamists have a marked fundamentalist bent and that many with such a bent are also Islamists. But there is no lack of exceptions. An Islamist like Fethullah Gülen, who takes much of his inspiration from ūfism, is not a fundamentalist;21 apolitical Salafis are fundamentalists in many of their beliefs and practices, but they are not Islamists. Moreover Islamists are, as I see it, a reasonably well-defined group; fundamentalists, at least in the Islamic context, are not.

Turning from terminology to transcription, a book that ranges as widely as this one comes up against a variety of languages and scripts. Anglicized forms apart, where a language is written in the Latin script, as with Spanish or modern Turkish, I simply adopt its standard orthography. Where a language is written in some other script, as with Arabic or Sanskrit, I use the form of scholarly transcription standard for that language, including the appropriate diacritics. The major problem I have encountered is that for obvious historical reasons scholars working on India tend to recognize a much wider range of Anglicized forms than scholars working on the Middle East. For the sake of consistency I have thus tended to use transcribed forms more extensively than a South Asianist would do.22 A minor problem concerns the use of the underdot: for Arabic it marks emphatic consonants, whereas for Indian languages it marks retroflex consonants.

Finally, where I cite a passage in both the original language and a translation, I link the two references with an equals sign.

The idea of this book came to me several years ago in the course of my undergraduate teaching. At the time I had no prospect of finding the leisure to do the requisite research and thinking, and I therefore reluctantly added the project to a long list of those that I planned to take up, if at all, in my next life. I owe the unexpected opportunity to bring the idea forward to my present life entirely to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose generous three-year award of 2002 transformed my situation beyond recognition.

I am deeply indebted to those who read and commented on drafts of the book, discussed aspects of it with me, or—in the case of undergraduate students—contributed their thinking to the courses in which I developed my ideas. My colleagues Bernard Haykel and Qasim Zaman read the whole typescript and gave me numerous insights, cautions, corrections, and suggestions. So did Christophe Jaffrelot, Martin Marty, and Andrew March, who read the typescript for the Press; their comments have led me to make a large number of changes. Robert Wright read Part One in an early draft and helped me to sharpen the argument considerably. Patricia Crone read not one but two drafts of the entire book; the second draft was the result of her unwelcome but irrefutable judgment that the first needed drastic recasting. Brigitta van Rheinberg at the Press read my first draft, made numerous comments on it, and showed extraordinary patience as I revised it. I have also benefited greatly over the years from conversations with Shivaji Sondhi on Indian and other matters. In addition, numerous people have helped me on particular points, and my debts to them are acknowledged in their proper places. None of those thanked here bear any responsibility for the deficiencies of the book, but the reader can be assured that without their input it would have been a much worse one than it is. While writing the book I have never been in any doubt that I was trying to do something worthwhile, but I have often had misgivings about whether I was going about it in the right way.

A note of the form “See 73” (as opposed to “See ibid., 73”) is a cross-reference.

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1 This is, of course, complicated by the fact that what is an asset for one actor in one context may be a liability for another actor in another context, and also by the tendency of assets and liabilities to come packaged together.

2 As pointed out to me by Qasim Zaman, even this may exaggerate the degree of freedom of choice. Often one should perhaps think rather of a menu dispensed by a waiter anxious to sell the house specials.

3 For purposes of exposition, I use the term “values” in a sense that excludes identity. This is arbitrary but convenient; one could perfectly well treat identity as a value, and even if one does not, identities and values are manifestly linked.

4 Skinner, Liberty before liberalism, 105; see further his “Principles and practice,” especially 127–28.

5 People can, of course, have multiple identities in the sense that they can be members of a variety of groups. But which of their identities comes to the fore on a given occasion is likely to depend more on objective context than on subjective choice.

6 McGarry and O’Leary, Northern Ireland conflict, 32.

7 Baudesson, Indo-China, 275–77.

8 Ibid., 318.

9 Ibid., 305-8.

10 Ibid., 257.

11 Ibid., 267. Similar information may be found in other French accounts; thus for polytheism among the Muslim Chams, see also Aymonier, Les Tchames, 79, 89, 91, 95; Cabaton, Nouvelles recherches, 17; Durand, “Les Chams Bani,” 54–55, 60, 62; Leuba, Les Chams d’autrefois, 99–100.

12 Bevir, History of ideas, 202, 204; this book was brought to my attention by Qasim Zaman.

13 For an intriguing indication that the Islamic world may be culturally more homogeneous than might be expected, see Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, cultural change, 63, figure 2.4. This diagram, entitled “Cultural map of the world about 2000,” shows where a considerable number of the world’s nations fall on two axes: one represents the continuum from “traditional values” to “secular-rational values” and the other that from “survival values” to “self-expression values.” Nine of the eleven Muslim countries shown cluster closely together, the outliers being Azerbaijan and Albania in respect of the first axis. The data derive from the World Values Survey. But in this book I neither assume nor set out to confirm such cultural findings.

14 For this point see Robinson, “Islam and Muslim society,” especially 50, 56, 57.

15 Aymonier, Les Tchames, 79; and cf. Robinson, “Islam and Muslim society,” 53.

16 Church of England, Book of common prayer, 619; for the reference to “diversities of opinions,” see 607.

17 This and other conundrums that could encourage diversities of opinions are discussed in the learned and judicious commentary of Gilbert Burnet (d. 1715), bishop of Salisbury (see Gilbert Bishop of Sarum, Thirty-nine articles, 171–74).

18 It is this potentially open-ended commitment that is swept under the carpet by the adage of well-intentioned Western scholars that “Islam is what Muslims do.”

19 For these terms and their history, see Kramer, “Coming to terms.”

20 Ibid., 71b.

21 See Sarıtoprak, “Fethullah Gülen,” 160–69.

22 But I have not always tried to be consistent, let alone succeeded, as in my rendering of anusvāra.