CHAPTER 4

Society

1. INTRODUCTION

When we sought to identify the assets and liabilities of our three religious heritages with regard to political identity, the only Western counterpart that required prior attention was nationalism. Once we turn to social values, however, things are more complicated. We have to reckon with two major axes along which social values may vary. On one axis the alternatives are egalitarianism and commitment to a hierarchic social order; on the other axis the contrast is between a high valuation of solidarity and a preference for a more loosely bound society, for example, one that leaves space for individualism. Combinations of these alternatives give us distinct ideological packages. These packages have played a prominent role in modern Western history, and have influenced the non-Western world to a greater or lesser extent. They form a trio:1 conservatism, leftism, and liberalism.² Seen from the liberal center, conservatives are those who put too much faith in the past, while leftists are those who put too much in the future.

Conservatism represents the combination of hierarchy and solidarity. Because it has not been a particularly successful export, it is the option that will concern us least. There are two reasons for this limited marketability outside the West. One is intrinsic: conservatism is not a comfortably cosmopolitan value since by its nature it seeks to conserve a particular heritage. The other is a consequence of its role in modern European history. The point of conservatism may once have been to restore the social order of the ancien régime, but no conservative party seeking power in a democracy could win an election on such a program. The result is that European conservatism has been more a matter of ad hoc resistance to the futuristic excesses of the left than a grand vision of a return to the pre-modern past. Even a conservative as determined and doctrinaire as Mrs. Thatcher could hardly be seen as aiming to turn the clock back any further than the nineteenth century. This is not to deny that there have been plenty of people in the non-European world of modern times who could broadly be described as conservative or that conservatives across the world share some significant values and can offer each other sympathy and inspiration. But European conservatism did not offer non-European societies a ready-made ideology that could easily be imported as a package, and even if it had done so, that ideology would have been unlikely to fit the particular past with which any given set of non-Western conservatives sought to keep faith.

Leftism represents the combination of equality and solidarity—or as French republicanism came to call it, fraternity. Unlike conservatism, leftism was a wildly successful export while the going was good, with wide appeal in the non-European world. Here the attraction of solidarity rested on two bases: it was a better fit with the values of the prevailing traditional cultures of the non-European world and sticking together seemed a better bet in a confrontation with European power. Moreover leftism did something that nationalism can also do, but did it more consistently and coherently: it provided a vantage point from which one could be both extremely hostile to European hegemony and extremely iconoclastic toward one’s ancestral traditions. What adds to the interest of the phenomenon is its sudden collapse with the demise of the Soviet Union; we can thus observe with some clarity what happens in each of our three cases when leftism loses its plausibility.

Liberalism represents the combination of equality and and loose binding, specifically individualism. Its compelling quality owes a lot to the fact that, of the three European ideologies treated here, it has hitherto proved by far the most successful in sustaining the innovation that generates wealth and power. But its reception in non-European societies has been ambivalent: while its egalitarianism has often been straightforwardly attractive, its loosely bound quality has not—for the same reasons that made the leftist commitment to solidarity appealing. In its libertarian form it has accordingly been a notably unsuccessful export. In addition, there are features of recent Western egalitarianism that may not transpose easily onto non-Western societies: the extension of equality to women and to believers in all religions or none. The first can easily fall foul of non-European traditions of family values—a problem also for leftism; the second may collide with non-European conceptions of the proper relationship between religion and politics. But as we will see in a later chapter, some of the specifically political values of liberalism may prove considerably more palatable.3

There is also the more general question of the way in which our three European ideologies relate to religion. Conservatism is the most sympathetic: from the point of view of conservatives, the religious traditions of their own societies are typically a good thing and an aspect of the past with which they wish to keep some kind of faith. Leftism is the most hostile: for leftists the religious traditions of their own and other societies are typically a bad thing and an aspect of the past with which they seek to break. Liberalism is indifferent: unlike leftism, it is not in the business of persecuting religion, but unlike conservatism it has no particular sympathy for it. It accordingly declines to make any distinction between true and false believers and practices an indiscriminate toleration of diversity of religious belief—and of religious behavior too provided it is not seen as markedly antisocial.

This account of European ideological resources is highly schematic. It does not attempt to do justice to the range of European thinking, nor does it take into account the fact that ideologies need not be imported as packages. But these simple thoughts may nevertheless help to set the scene for the discussion of the social values of each of our three religious heritages that follows.

2. ISLAM

One might suppose that a major religious tradition would have something identifiable as its vision of the ideal society and that Islam would be no exception. Indeed, as we will see in a later chapter, the Islamic heritage unquestionably possesses an image of the ideal polity.⁴ But does it provide a comparable image of the ideal society? It certainly has an idea of what a virtuous society would be: one in which everyone observed Islamic norms. But does the heritage give us a sense of what would be distinctive about the ideal society other than its virtue—what it would look like? The answer would seem to be that it does not, and this for two reasons.

The first is that while Muḥammad created a state, he did not create a society. On the political front he found no state in existence when he arrived in Medina, and he brought none with him from Mecca; instead, he synthesized one in a previously stateless society. But no such blank slate confronted him on the social front. There was thus a large measure of social continuity among both his Meccan and his Medinese followers. The confluence of the two did lead to one interesting social innovation: soon after he came to Medina, Muḥammad paired off his followers as brothers in God, with each pair typically consisting of a Meccan and a Medinese.5 But in retrospect this was a fleeting response to a transient situation, not an institutional building-block of future Islamic societies.

The second reason why the Islamic heritage does not possess a vision of the ideal Muslim society arises from the conditions created by the conquests in the generation after Muḥammad. The broad shape of society in this formative period was that the Muslims held military and political power, while economic activity was in the hands of the subject non-Muslims. Traditions that doubtless arose at a time when this structural feature of the conquest society was decaying reveal a strong sentiment in favor of this division of labor. Thus an eschatological tradition ascribed to an eighth-century Syrian scholar describes a land reform to be implemented by the Mahdī, the redeemer who will come toward the end of time: he will return all land in Syria to the subject Jews and Christians (ahl al-dhimma) and redirect all Muslims to jihad.⁶ In another tradition the Prophet warns his followers that when they give themselves up to agricultural pursuits and abandon jihad, God will impose humiliation upon them until such time as they return to their religion.⁷ Yet other accounts relate that when the Caliph ʿUmar (ruled 634–44) heard that the Muslims in Syria had planted a crop, he ordered it to be burnt; in the same spirit he wrote to them that he would impose the poll tax due from subject non-Muslims (jizya) on any Muslim who took up agriculture and was content to live by it.⁸ In other words, the ideal behind these and other such traditions9 was not a complete Muslim society in which all roles were assumed by Muslims but rather a composite society in which the Muslims formed a minority dedicated to warfare against the unbelievers beyond the frontiers. Such a division of labor was, of course, historically unsustainable, and to insist on it struck later generations as absurd; as an eleventh-century scholar put it, God preserve the Commander of the Faithful from having burnt the crops of the Muslims, destroyed their property, and made them pay poll tax.¹⁰ Nor was this just the view of scholars centuries later: countertraditions in favor of agriculture are ascribed to the Prophet himself.¹¹

Despite the absence of a distinctive vision of the ideal society, we do find embedded in the Islamic heritage two social values that have immediate relevance for us: equality and solidarity. Let us start with equality.¹²

In a celebrated verse the Koran declares that “the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most godfearing of you” (Q49:13). More straightforwardly, the Prophet is quoted as saying that “people are equals like the teeth of a comb,” though this tradition is not included in authoritative collections. A much better attested tradition relates that the Prophet once came out to his Companions, whereupon they demonstrated their respect for him by rising to their feet; in response he instructed them not to stand up to honor people, as was the Persian practice.¹³ But the most vivid illustration of the egalitarian values of early Islam is a story already alluded to, the one that recounts the visits of the Arab envoys to the Persian general Rustam on the eve of the battle of Qādisiyya around 636.¹⁴ One of them was an unkempt bedouin. To receive him Rustam sat on a throne surrounded by a magnificent display of carpets and cushions. But the bedouin envoy did not dismount when he reached the edge of the carpeted area, and when he did dismount, he walked toward Rustam using his spear to jab holes in the carpets and cushions as he went. Another envoy showed how little he was in awe of the Persian general by sitting down beside him on his throne. When the Persians reacted with anger, he told them, “We Arabs are equals,” only enslaving each other in warfare. He added with a pretense of naïveté that he had taken it for granted that the Persians behaved in the same way to each other; he was not to know that some of them were the owners of others. This incident elicited a divided response from the Persians present: while the common people approved of what the Arab had said, the nobles complained that this was what their slaves had always liked to hear. But there is more: When asked by Rustam why the Arabs had come to Iraq, one envoy answered that God had sent them to deliver those who so wished from being servants of men to being servants of God.15 Another similarly included among the basic principles of Islam a commitment to “delivering men from being servants of men to being servants of God”; he added a belief in the full brotherhood of men, all alike descended from Adam and Eve.

This egalitarian view of society underlies many of the stipulations of Islamic law. Thus, in setting out the rules of retaliation (qiṣāṣ) for killing, the Koran specifies “freeman for freeman, slave for slave, female for female” (Q2:178); within the set of free males, no distinction is made here between high and low. Likewise a tradition from the Prophet says that the blood of the believers is of equal value (al-muʾminūn tatakāfaʾu dimāʾuhum); again social hierarchy makes no appearance here.¹⁶ Conversely, another tradition has Muḥammad condemn earlier communities in which lowly offenders were punished while noble ones were let off.¹⁷ The condemnation is in place: Roman law in imperial times prescribed very different treatment for criminals depending on their social status.¹⁸ In fact, the same old pattern of lenience toward members of the elite was to reappear in Muslim society and even find a measure of formal recognition there,¹⁹ but by the standards of the age, Islamic law seems to have been unusual in the extent of its egalitarian character.²⁰

Though real, this egalitarianism was not congruent with that of the present-day West. Most obviously, it did not extend to women, unbelievers, and slaves.21 That a pre-modern society should affirm such inequalities and give legal force to them is in comparative terms unsurprising, but we should nevertheless pay some attention to the particular forms they took in the Islamic case. They constituted part of the bedrock of traditional Muslim society.

The Koran is clear about the fact that women are not the equals of men. Men are a step (daraja) above them (Q2:228). They are also in authority (qawwāmūn) over them, and reasons are given for this (Q4:34). Significant asymmetries appear in the law of marriage: polygyny is permitted (Q4:3), but polyandry would seem to be unthinkable; divorce (ṭalāq) is something men do to women (Q2:230–32, 236; Q33:49; Q65:1), not the other way around. In other connections women may not be left out altogether, but men get preference. Thus in the matter of inheritance, women are entitled to a share just as men are (Q4:7), but their shares are typically half those of men (Q4:11, 176); and when it comes to witnessing a loan, where two male witnesses are normally required, there is a provision that if two men are not available, then two women can take the place of one of the men (Q2:282). There are nevertheless other contexts in which men and women are referred to in ways that put them on the same footing. Thus male and female believers alike perform the prayers, pay the alms tax, and obey God and his messenger; and God has promised both alike that they will dwell eternally in Paradise (Q9:71–72, and compare Q33:35). At the other end of the scale of virtue, men and women who commit adultery incur the same hundred lashes (Q24:2), just as men and women who steal have their hands cut off irrespective of their sex (Q5:38). The Koran is concerned that women be treated decently (e.g., Q2:229, 240–41); but all told, it does not regard them as equal. The development of these themes in the larger Islamic tradition is not out of line with these scriptural foundations.

With regard to unbelievers, the Koran provides a basis for allowing them to continue to practice their false religions within certain limits, on condition that they humbly submit and pay tribute to the Muslim state: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book—until they pay the tribute (jizya) out of hand and have been humbled” (Q9:29). By common consent the “people of the Book” include at least the Jews and Christians, the tribute they are to pay is an annual poll tax, and the puzzling limitation of toleration to the atheists among them is ignored. We hear of Muḥammad imposing such a tax on the edges of his domains,22 and it was to become the classical fiscal accompaniment of the Muslim ascendancy over subject non-Muslim populations. By contrast, Christian scripture provides no comparable basis for tolerating the practice of false religions. How things worked out in practice for non-Muslims under Muslim rule naturally brought in a range of other factors. Thus, in the later fifteenth century a Moroccan scholar made waves by fulminating against the Jews of North Africa and the Sahara. Their insolence and wrongdoing were in his view such that the terms of their submission to the Muslim community were now void, with the result that they could legally be killed, their property seized, and their women enslaved.²³ But there were different opinions on such questions among the scholars,²⁴ as was also the case in a later dispute. In 1612 a local ruler established a new city in southwestern Morocco, and the Jews who settled there proceeded to build themselves a synagogue.²⁵ Some scholars took the view that, as a synagogue newly built in the lands of Islam, it had to be demolished. Others, however, held that there was no need for this since at the time of the Muslim conquest the Jews had submitted and been allowed to continue to practice their religion on terms that entitled them to do just what they had now done; thereafter they had paid their poll tax and been humbled precisely as the law required. Opinions could also differ as to whether the presence of non-Muslims was useful to Muslims. Not everyone thought so: one seventeenth-century Ottoman writer deplored the fact that so many of those who worked in the bakeries were unbelievers who kneaded the dough with their unwashed hands while their sweat and lice poured into the tubs; he wanted the Grand Vizier to take action, either by ensuring the employment of Muslims in the bakeries or, failing that, by imposing sanitary standards so that the Muslims would have pure bread to eat.26 What was axiomatic within the mainstream of Muslim thought was the ascendancy of Islam and the Muslims over such unbelievers.

The third inequality was that between free people and slaves. The Koran accepts the existence of the institution of slavery without offering a justification for it.²⁷ Within this framework it enjoins kindness to slaves (Q4:36) and regards manumission as a virtuous act (Q90:12f), sometimes prescribing it as a form of expiation (Q5:89). Slavegirls are available to their masters as concubines (Q70:29–30) but should not be compelled to become prostitutes if they wish to remain chaste (Q24:33). That slaves are not the equals of the free is taken for granted.

Islamic egalitarianism was thus limited to free Muslim males. Even then it did not, of course, mean that Muslim societies down the ages had no sense of hierarchy. When Jabartī (d. 1824–1825) remarked of the French who invaded Egypt in 1798 that they followed the rule (qānūn) that “great and small, high and low, male and female are all equal (mutasāwiyān),” it was not just the equality of men and women that he would seem to have found jarring.²⁸ In the same way the Ottoman proclamation issued in response to the invasion included in its account of the outrageous beliefs of the French their view that “all men are equal in humanity and alike in being men.”²⁹ These negative reactions had a lot of social history behind them: those Muslim societies that had the resources to support a steeply hierarchic social structure over the centuries seem to have been perfectly comfortable doing so.³⁰ They regularly articulated this comfort by distinguishing between the elite (khāṣṣa) and the masses (ʿāmma), with a clear sense that the elite were better; by the time of Jabartī they had been doing this for over a millennium.³¹ Indeed, Baranī, as often a bit of an extremist, considers that talent and virtue are inherited among the high-born, and vice among the low-born; hence promoting the low-born can never be a good idea.³²

What the Islamic tradition had not done in the course of the millennium was to give formal recognition to sharp social cleavages of the kind that characterize aristocratic or caste societies.33 There were minor exceptions. One example concerns the law of marriage: because nobody wants their womenfolk to marry down, there was considerable discussion of what constitutes equality of status between marriage partners,³⁴ and the opinions held by the jurists varied; yet a sharp binary opposition appears only in the minority view that Arab women should not marry non-Arabs. Another example is the widespread recognition of the prestige of descent from Muḥammad, but there were few Muslim societies in which his descendants constituted anything like an aristocracy. This absence of caste or aristocracy in Islamic societies was real enough to strike observers with comparative experience in pre-modern times. Thus a Korean Buddhist pilgrim who visited Iran in the 720s found it noteworthy that among the Arabs the king and the common people wore the same kind of clothing, and he was struck by the fact that when eating they made no distinction between noble and commoner, helping themselves from the same plate.³⁵ A European who spent some years in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century was deeply impressed by Turkish meritocracy: “No distinction is attached to birth among the Turks,” he wrote privately to an old friend, whereas “with us there is no opening left for merit” since “birth is the standard for everything.”³⁶ He may have exaggerated, the Ottoman case may have been untypical, and as we will see at least one Ottoman memorialist of the next century seems to have thought that a hereditary aristocracy would be a good idea;³⁷ but some of what appeared in Europe only with the French Revolution was a given in the Islamic case. In the same way Bīrūnī had a valid point when he described the Muslim belief that everyone is equal except in piety as the greatest barrier between the Hindus and Islam.³⁸ Muslims are brothers in a way that Hindus are not.

What did this brotherhood mean for specifically economic inequality? As we might expect, the Islamic heritage lays great emphasis on bringing about a measure of redistribution from the rich to the poor through charity. God prescribes that alms (ṣadaqāt) are for eight categories of people, the first two being the poor (fuqarāʾ) and the needy (masākīn); this is incumbent as a divinely imposed obligation (farīḍatan min Allāh) (Q9:60). The verse indicates that such obligatory almsgiving had already been institutionalized, since the third of the eight categories consists of those who collect the alms (al-ʿāmilīna ʿalayhā). This institution (usually known as zakāt) is one of the five “pillars” (arkān) of Islam, and in accounts of it in Ḥadīth and law, it is the poor and needy who get the lion’s share of the attention.39 In addition, the foundational texts provide extensive commendation of voluntary almsgiving (ṣadaqa); here again gifts are not confined to the poor, but those that go to them earn a far higher reward.⁴⁰ There is much evidence that in Muslim societies the rich did indeed convey some of their wealth to the poor.⁴¹

At the same time one form of poverty enjoyed a certain social prestige in Islamic societies, namely the elective poverty of the Ṣūfī saints. Such holy poverty is not written into the foundations of the religion, as it is in Christianity. No doctrine of the absolute poverty of the Prophet and his Companions could have even begun to look plausible; they may have chosen to lead simple lives, but they did not seek to be poor.⁴² Of course, some of Muḥammad’s followers were indeed poor, as in the case of those homeless, ill-clad, hungry Companions of his who slept in the mosque in Medina.⁴³ But they were poor because of their immediate circumstances, not by choice.⁴⁴ We learn that they were fed by Muḥammad and others until God brought the Muslims wealth;⁴⁵ its arrival would seem to have provided a prosaic but effective solution to their problem. A high valuation of elective poverty was nevertheless to emerge among the Ṣūfīs. One Ṣūfī authority describes those who stand close to God as owning nothing, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, and accepting nothing.46

What is not conspicuous in the Islamic case is the preference for the poor that is so marked in the New Testament. Occasional suggestions of such reverse discrimination can indeed be found in the foundational texts. In the context of the division of the spoils of war, the Koran refers to the poor among Muḥammad’s Meccan followers in ennobling terms: expelled from their homes and despoiled of their wealth, they were giving their support to God and His messenger.⁴⁷ But the tone of Muslim scripture is generally matter-of-fact and confers no apocalyptic shimmer on the poor.⁴⁸ Traditions from the Prophet are somewhat more promising. There is, for example, one in which Muḥammad avers that poor Muslims will enter Paradise five hundred years before the rich.⁴⁹ But in the foundational texts as a whole such traditions do not bulk large, and they are obliged to coexist with Muḥammad’s reproof to a wealthy but poorly dressed follower: “When God gives you wealth, the mark of His beneficence and generosity should be seen on you.”⁵⁰

Finally there is solidarity, a value less at home with liberalism than equality but attractive in many contexts in the world today. It need not detain us here since we have already discussed it at length in the context of identity, noting such typical Islamic expressions of it as the Koranic affirmation that the believers are brothers (Q49:10) and the insistence of one of the envoys to Rustam that “the Muslims are like a body, parts of a whole.”⁵¹

If this, in outline, is the character of the heritage, how would it be to invoke its resources under modern conditions? For convenience let us order the issues under the rubric of the three European ideologies distinguished above.

As already noted, conservatism is not a cosmopolitan doctrine, and is thus the least exportable of the three ideologies.⁵² But if we think in terms of a local conservatism within Muslim societies, the heritage would clearly be supportive with regard to the inequalities affecting women, unbelievers, and slaves. All three of these inequalities mattered to conservatives in the Muslim world as it fell under Western hegemony.53 Of conservative sentiment with regard to female equality, there is no end. Saʿīd Ḥawwā, for example, explains why men are in authority (qawwāmūn) over women (Q4:34) by listing some twenty respects in which God has preferred men to them,⁵⁴ and he proceeds to complain about the activities of the “merchants of politics” who go around leading people astray in the name of the freedom and equality of women.⁵⁵ Turning to the status of unbelievers, it is recorded that, after the Ottoman proclamation of 1856 declaring all subjects of the empire to be equal irrespective of religion, many Muslims complained that “the Islamic community, which was the ruling community (millet-i ḥākime), has now been deprived of this sacred right,” and saw the occasion as one for weeping and mourning.⁵⁶ In a similar spirit the Shāfiʿite Muftī of Egypt at the time of the British invasion of 1882 remarked that things had come to such a pass that “unbelievers would ride horses or carriages with Moslems running in front of them” and that they would “extend their feet with those black shoes to Moslems in order to have them polished by them.”⁵⁷ With regard to slaves, the British ambassador to Istanbul reported that, when in 1840 he raised the question of action against slavery and the slave trade, the response was “extreme astonishment”; he added that the Turks were “far from thinking our wisdom or our morality greater than their own.”⁵⁸ Likewise a letter of 1842 from the British consul in Tangier to the Sultan of Morocco received a response couched in a tone of uncompromising religious righteousness: “As to what regards the making of Slaves and Trading therewith,” the Sultan wrote, “it is confirmed by our Book as also by the Sunna [practice] of Our Prophet.” He went on to say that there was no disagreement among the Muslim scholars on the matter and that no one may “prohibit that which is made lawful” by God. He added that “our sacred religion is not regulated by men’s counsel or deliberation” but rather inspired by God “through the tongue of our Faithful Prophet.”59 Where the foundational heritage does leave the conservative high and dry is with regard to the hierarchic relationship between elite and masses among the free, male, and Muslim population. We have already met the case of the descendants of the Prophet in Ḥaḍramawt;⁶⁰ another example would be the “feudal” landlords of Pakistan.

Unlike conservatism, leftism is—or was—very much an ideology for export.⁶¹ It had a strong potential resonance with the Islamic heritage in the sense that both combined commitments to equality and solidarity. But Islam, or more precisely Sunnī Islam, lacked a counterpart to the Marxist proletariat—a downtrodden segment of society conspicuously marked out for future glory; the Sunnīs were traditionally the victors of history, not its victims. The Christian heritage assigns such a role to the poor, but as we have seen, the echoes of this in the Islamic tradition are rather faint; they are strongest in Ṣūfism, but this side of the Islamic heritage has been largely ignored in modern times as a resource for Islamist politics. Shīʿism, by contrast, does have a counterpart to the proletariat, and it has not been ignored.⁶² But looming behind all this is the fact that leftism does not sit well with religion. Leftism could be expected to be dismissive of Islam and Islam to be correspondingly allergic to leftism. These expectations are borne out by the historical outcome of the interaction between the two, and this in a number of ways.

One is that, even before the rise of Islamism, there were indications that leftism did not in general fare as well in the Islamic world as it did in other Third World regions. There was a sense at the time that the presence of Islam displaced the political spectrum to the right. One effect of this was a certain opportunistic reticence on the part of leftists in the Islamic world when it came to the manifestation of antireligious sentiments. To engage in uninhibited displays of godless zealotry was to ask for trouble of the kind that arose in Syria in 1967 when an army magazine published an article denouncing God as “an embalmed toy in the museum of history.”63 “Our socialism believes in God,” as one Egyptian journalist wisely put it in 1962.⁶⁴ Likewise, the Sudanese Communist Party was careful to keep on the right side of Islam and to stress that Communism and Islam had the same goals.⁶⁵ Another effect was geopolitical: almost the only fully fledged Marxist regime to emerge endogenously in the Islamic world was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, alias South Yemen. Moreover, this idiosyncratic state never served as a leftist beacon in the Muslim world in the way that Cuba did in Latin America. No one sees Bin Laden as a Western stooge for his vendetta against the Yemeni Marxists,⁶⁶ whereas any Latin American who had played such a role with regard to Cuba would have harvested a very mixed reputation.

Just as significant was the relative immunity of Sunnī Islamism to leftism. Arab socialism might believe in God, but as far as the Islamists were concerned, God did not deign to return the compliment. The Communist world and the socialism it came to encourage beyond its borders were, of course, realities that Islamist thinkers had to confront. They had to show that, whatever the Communist system could do, the Islamic system could do better, and they were under pressure to demonstrate this superiority in the field of social policy. But one gets no sense that Communism, or for that matter socialism, served as a stimulus to the religious imagination. One observer of the Islamists describes them as “hostile to even the slightest tinge of Marxism.”⁶⁷ Why this should have been so is a good question. Part of the explanation may be that any attraction leftism might have had for Islamists had been preempted by its adoption on the part of the very regimes they sought to overthrow, be it in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, or Algeria—though we should note that Sunnī Islamists seem to have been no more open to leftism in countries whose rulers did not adopt some variety of socialism. Another part of the explanation is no doubt the general hostility of leftism toward religion. To that we should add the capacity of Sunnī Islamists to buck global consensus in other areas: many of them rejected nationalism and democracy. But the point I would like to develop here is the absence from the Sunnī heritage of a counterpart to the proletariat.

Thus, if we turn to the attitude of Mawdūdī and Quṭb to the poor, we find no hint of liberation theology.68 Mawdūdī is not unsympathetic to them: “The life of the poor man is difficult.”⁶⁹ He notes, however, that the individual members of a society vary in their abilities and talents, with the result that some come to be wealthier than others. Since this situation is natural (fiṭrī), Islam acknowledges and regulates it;⁷⁰ the means of regulation are the alms tax (zakāt) and the public treasury (bayt al-māl).⁷¹ The poor do indeed have rights, and it is a serious matter when the rich deny these.⁷² “The rich should come to the help of the poor.”⁷³ But it does not seem that any particular virtue attaches to the poor or that they will have a disproportionate role to play in the achievement of a better future. Quṭb has considerably more to say about the poor than Mawdūdī and is undoubtedly concerned for their welfare; he was, after all, the author of a work on social justice. He too is seriously concerned with almsgiving.⁷⁴ Yet, for the most part his tone lacks emotional exuberance. He tells us that the poor have rights vis-à-vis the rich in accordance with their needs and the interests of a well-balanced society.⁷⁵ But it is labor that is sacred,⁷⁶ not poverty; the way to solve the problem of the misery of poverty is to provide employment for all able-bodied men and social security for the rest.77 The effects of poverty on those who suffer from it are merely ugly: they either hate the rich or lose their self-respect and fawn on them.⁷⁸ This is not at all a rich man’s perspective, for Quṭb also tells us that the poor in every age are the victims of the rich.⁷⁹ But despite the fact that he is clearly to Mawdūdī’s left, it is in the end equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes, to which he is committed.⁸⁰ Just as with Mawdūdī, there is no hint of a preference for the poor, no sense that God regards them with particular tenderness.⁸¹ In this respect, despite occasional exceptions,⁸² Mawdūdī and Quṭb seem broadly representative of Sunnī Islamism at large.⁸³ Thus the founder of Sipāh-i Ṣaḥāba in Pakistan “had a reputation for being much concerned with the welfare of the poor and the helpless,”⁸⁴ and a later leader of the movement emphasizes the place of social justice in the early caliphate,⁸⁵ but neither begins to sound like a Latin American Liberationist—a point that applies more generally to the social work undertaken by Islamist movements among the poor.

If Islamists were largely immune to leftism, we would not expect the professional scholars to be susceptible. There have nevertheless been occasional Sunnī scholars who were genuinely attracted to modern social radicalism. In the Indian context in particular, as has recently been shown, such scholars had a tendency to focus on a small number of long-forgotten passages in the works of their medieval forebears; these stimulating finds could be seen as supporting a leftist orientation from within the tradition.86 One thing dependence on such passages highlights is the lack of an Islamic counterpart to the scriptural basis of the Liberationist identification with the poor.⁸⁷

This is not to deny that Sunnī Islamism can be socially subversive, whether by supplying social services that the state is unable to deliver, as in Egypt, or by fomenting class divisions that happen to coincide with sectarian fissures, as in Pakistan. But unlike Shīʿite Islamism, it is not an articulate program of social revolution; here again, liberation theology has been conspicuously absent from Sunnī Islamism.⁸⁸ Moreover, the widespread delegitimation of Ṣūfism in modern times has precluded any contemporary relevance for Ṣūfī ideas of elective poverty. In short, for those who imported leftism into the Sunnī world, the fit with the commitment of the heritage to equality and solidarity was largely wasted.

The one success story in the interaction between Islam and leftism relates to Shīʿism in Iran—though in crude political terms the success was entirely on the Islamist, not the leftist side. There were two key figures in the development of Shīʿite opposition to the rule of the Shāh. The first was Sharīʿatī (d. 1977), who read Frantz Fanon and other leftist thinkers and translated their secular ideas into the language of his own religious tradition.⁸⁹ He writes that he was able to convince Fanon that “in some societies where religion plays an important role in the culture, religion can, through its resources and psychological effects, help the enlightened person to lead his society toward the same destination to which Fanon was taking his own through non-religious means.”90 So where Christian Liberationists could focus on the sacralization of the poor, Sharīʿatī could play on the Shīʿite cult of the oppressed.⁹¹ The verbal key to this alchemy was a Koranic term meaning “deemed weak,” “oppressed” (mustaḍʿafūn); in a few contexts this was a group whose very wretchedness in the present marked them out for future deliverance (Q7:137, 8:26, 28:5).⁹² Sharīʿatī accordingly used the term to translate Fanon’s “wretched of the earth.”⁹³ He further described the Prophet as assuring his poor and weak followers that they would come to rule the world,⁹⁴ and he saw the history of Shīʿism as “the history of the spirit of Islam, the soul which has been the victim of its own body.”⁹⁵ Sharīʿatī was not alone in developing such ideas,⁹⁶ but politically the new doctrine fared no better in the short run than Liberation Theology in Latin America. What changed everything was the adoption—indeed the hijacking—of this Shīʿite liberationist idiom by Khumaynī (d. 1989), the second key figure, in the 1970s.⁹⁷ His appropriation of it may have been shallow, but it was stunningly effective and did much to enable him and his supporters to emerge as the victors of the Iranian revolution of 1979. This event could well be seen as the greatest political triumph of liberation theology in the entire history of the phenomenon. It is as if the Sandinista revolution had transferred power into the hands of Nicaragua’s bishops, and the plausible suspicion that something like this could only have happened in the Islamic world could be seen as an indication of the terms on which Islam and leftism interact there. But there was no Sunnī Sharīʿatī,98 any more than there was a Sunnī Khumaynī, and the reasons go deeper than personality or the circumstance that leftism looked good in Iran because the Shāh was against it.

That leaves liberalism broadly conceived as the prime locus of interaction with European ideologies. Unlike conservatism, this was an ideology for export, and unlike leftism, it was not actively hostile to religion. The egalitarianism of the liberal tradition could thus be expected to resonate with that of the Islamic heritage, despite reservations with regard to its more recent commitment to female equality and its long-established practice of unlimited religious toleration. But the lack of a strong liberal commitment to solidarity was less likely to play well.

The writings of the Islamists on these issues do much to bear out these expectations. Mawdūdī lays strong emphasis on egalitarianism. For him, the social organization that the prophets sought to establish was founded on human equality. It was a basic principle of the early Islamic state that all were equal in the eyes of the law, a connection in which he cites Muḥammad’s condemnation of earlier communities in which lowly offenders were punished while aristocratic offenders went free.⁹⁹ Appealing to his unusual doctrine of what we might call the caliphate of all believers,¹⁰⁰ Mawdūdī states: “A society in which everyone is a caliph of God and an equal participant in this caliphate, cannot tolerate any class divisions based on distinctions of birth and social position. All men enjoy equal status and position in such a society.” He also expresses the same point with a touch of local color: “In the divine darbar, in the presence of God, all belong to one class.” He quotes sayings of the Prophet, such as the simile “people are equals like the teeth of a comb” and another in which is embedded the Koranic statement that “the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most godfearing of you” (Q49:13). It is this equality that uproots the tree of that most vicious of evils, human—as opposed to divine—sovereignty (ḥākimiyya).¹⁰¹

Quṭb likewise articulates an Islamic egalitarianism that resonates strongly with modern values. For him, too, the underlying principle is that dominion over men belongs only to God. He tells us that Islam was born in an age when inequality was rampant, a fact he illustrates with reference to Iran, India, Rome, and even the Arabs; in the Indian case he shows his awareness of the Vedic account of the origin of the Hindu classes.102 By contrast, the message of the new religion was absolute equality among all humans. In support he quotes the same Koranic verse, and he too repeats the saying of the Prophet that “people are equals like the teeth of a comb.” But in rhetorical terms by far his most effective proof-text is the story of the Arab emissaries to Rustam. In one of the passages in which he quotes their statement that the mission of the invaders is to deliver those who so wish from being servants of men to being servants of God, he comments that in these few words are concentrated “the fundamental principle of this creed (qāʿidat hādhihi ʾl-ʿaqīda),” and that in them is manifested “the nature of the Islamic movement that arose from it.” Admittedly this original Islamic equality did not last: massive economic and social distinctions soon emerged within Islamic society, and a class of idle aristocrats appeared. But Quṭb could still claim that Islam had anticipated the French Revolution.¹⁰³

Other Islamists hold similar views. Thus Ḥawwā’s treatment of the equality that obtains among Muslims is not as vibrant as Quṭb’s,¹⁰⁴ but he too can give an account of the history of the Indian caste system, complete with a quotation from Manu.¹⁰⁵ The invocation of the French Revolution apart, the jihadis seem comfortable with Quṭb’s style of thinking. Speaking of the early conquests, Bin Laden boasts: “We were the pioneers of the world. We rescued people from the worship of human beings, for the worship of the God of people.”¹⁰⁶ He describes Islam as the religion of “total equality between all people,”¹⁰⁷ and he too quotes the tradition about discrimination between lowly and aristocratic offenders, observing that such is the Muslim predicament today.¹⁰⁸ Another jihadi articulates the theme more concretely. The preparations for the battle of the Khandaq in 627 centered on the digging of a trench, heavy labor in which Muḥammad worked side by side with his followers. Our jihadi recognizes here a spectacle of humility and equality—an equality that is unheard of today.109 He quotes with approval a passage in which another author notes what Muḥammad did not do on this occasion: he did not stage a pompous groundbreaking ceremony, holding a pickax with the tips of his fingers to convey the illusion of participation.¹¹⁰

Predictably, the attitude of Islamists toward the extension of equality to women is more conflicted; on this front Western mores—which have tended to become increasingly egalitarian over time—were a peculiarly intimate challenge to traditional Muslim values and touched matters closely related to notions of male honor. Mawdūdī was in principle an egalitarian. As he declares in his book on purdah: “None can deny the fact that as human beings man and woman are equal.”¹¹¹ Women are thus fully entitled to express their opinions since they too are repositories of the caliphate (another echo of his doctrine of the caliphate of all believers).¹¹² But he has no liking for the incessant “propaganda of the equality of the sexes” of modern times.¹¹³ There are distinctions to be made. Men and women may indeed be “equal in moral status and human rights,” but this should not mislead us into adopting the “wrong concept of equality,” a concept according to which women are “free to undertake the same sort of jobs” as men and “moral restrictions” on the sexes should be equally loose.¹¹⁴ More specifically, it is for the man to earn a living and for the woman to bring up the children; authority within the family can only be vested in the man.¹¹⁵ The same is true of the polity: in an Islamic state “the posts of responsibility … cannot be entrusted to a woman”116—though Mawdūdī was prepared to waive this principle when he found it expedient to do so.¹¹⁷ In addition, there must be “safeguards” to prevent this virtuous domestic pattern from being disrupted by “foolish and senseless people.”¹¹⁸ These salutary safeguards are, of course, synonymous with purdah, “the set of injunctions which constitute the most important part of the Islamic system of community life.”¹¹⁹ These injunctions are not to be weakened; indeed current conditions in India (Mawdūdī was writing in the 1930s) require that they should be “strictly enforced rather than relaxed.”¹²⁰ Thus, despite his acceptance of female equality in principle, in practice Mawdūdī appears as a social conservative.

Like Mawdūdī, Quṭb asserts a qualified egalitarianism. Women do indeed enjoy “full equality” (musāwāt tāmma) in most matters, but with qualifications relating to “some specific situations connected with natural and recognized capacities, skills or responsibilities, which do not affect the essential nature of the human situation of the two sexes.”¹²¹ While this sounds like Mawdūdī, there is a significant difference. Quṭb presents the harem not as something instituted by Islam but rather as the product of later injustice; he conveniently assigns particular blame to the Turks.¹²² This is exactly the move that Mawdūdī does not make in his discussion of purdah, and the result is that Quṭb’s thinking has a more modern tone. Women must indeed dress and behave decently; Quṭb’s distaste for Western licentiousness is painfully evident in his reminiscences of his time in America.¹²³ But they are otherwise free to come and go, as they were in the time of the Prophet.124 In short, Quṭb is a puritan, and he is not a feminist, but neither is he a conservative. In this respect his thinking perhaps reflects the attitudes of an age that was socially more liberal than the present;¹²⁵ contrast the tone of Ayman al-Ẓawāhirī’s incidental observation that one of the unacceptable implications of the democratic principle of equality is that it abolishes “man’s dominion over woman.”¹²⁶

Islamist attitudes to the relationship between Muslims and unbelievers in the Muslim polity tend to be similarly conflicted; any challenge to the subordination of conquered unbelievers to Muslims is an attack on the Muslim ascendancy, and yet to affirm that such subordination is right and proper is to court the disparagement of Islam as discriminatory. The response of the early Islamist thinkers was to concentrate on defending the justice of Islam. This religion, Mawdūdī states in a work first published in 1939, is good to its minorities: “Islam does not want to eliminate its minorities, it wants to protect them and gives them the freedom to live according to their own culture.”¹²⁷ A work he published in Pakistan in 1948 has similar provisions.¹²⁸ Of course, the Islamic state must by its very nature discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims.¹²⁹ But the concern of the work is nevertheless to show the moral superiority of the Islamic system over others; thus, the opening pages systematically contrast the treatment of minorities by Islamic and national-democratic states,¹³⁰ and the conclusion affirms that the only guarantee of the security of non-Muslims resident in Pakistan is the establishment of an Islamic government there, not of a secular (lā dīniyya) democratic state on the Indian model.131 Likewise, his account of the collection of the poll tax from non-Muslims makes no mention of the humiliation prescribed in scripture (Q9:29),¹³² a strong sign that his purpose is to vindicate the justice and fairness of Islam, not to put non-Muslim minorities in their place.¹³³ In the same way, Quṭb’s primary concern is to vindicate the exemplary fairness and sensitivity of the Islamic system,¹³⁴ rather than to call for the reimposition on the minorities of their former subordinate status. It is not that he has forgotten the idea of the Muslim ascendancy: Islam is indeed a creed of ascendancy (istiʿlāʾ) and pride (iʿtizāz, kibriyāʾ), and once the spirit of Islam awakens in a Muslim, he will not stand for anyone overtopping him (an yaʿluwa ʿalayhi aḥad).¹³⁵ But Quṭb’s purpose in this passage is to explain why Islam is a danger to colonialism; the local non-Muslim population is not in sight. Today, as he says in a discussion of the Koranic verse about the poll tax, this issue is “purely historical, not current.”¹³⁶ Thus, we should not expect him to say, as Saʿīd Ḥawwā does, that equality between Muslim and non-Muslim is a disgusting idea (fikra khabītha).¹³⁷ Nor does he display the virulent hatred of the Copts that was later to characterize the activities of the Jamāʿa Islāmiyya in Egypt.¹³⁸ The leaders of al-Qāʿida do not concern themselves much with the status of non-Muslims in the Muslim state, but a passing remark shows how they too have moved away from the apologetics of Mawdūdī and Quṭb. We encountered above one reason why Ẓawāhirī finds the democratic principle of equality unacceptable;139 another is that it means the abolition of the poll tax.¹⁴⁰ But by implication this reminds us that the jihadis can at least tolerate Jews and Christians in good conscience—something that is by no means clear in the case of their relations with Shīʿites.

There is also the question of the status of slaves, but for the most part this is an issue only in relation to the past. Mawdūdī takes up the challenge in a pamphlet on human rights in Islam, and argues that Westerners, in view of their own past misdeeds, have no standing to criticize Muslims on this score. He does not deny the persistence of slavery under the Islamic dispensation but explains it as a humane solution to the problem of disposing of those prisoners of war who were not exchanged or ransomed.¹⁴¹ In contrast to his views on women, what he has to say about slavery suggests no substantive continuity with the conservative Muslim attitudes that were still, as we have seen, very much alive in the nineteenth century. Instead, his concern is purely apologetic. Likewise for Quṭb, the fact that Islam did not abolish so inegalitarian an institution outright is a significant embarrassment, and he explains it as best he can.¹⁴² The arguments of both Mawdūdī and Quṭb reflect the fact that Muslim societies, however resistant to European abolitionism in the middle of the nineteenth century, had gradually adapted to the dismantling of the slave trades that traditionally supplied their slave markets. Since then, some jihadis have reportedly revived the enslavement of captives deemed not to be Muslim, but as might be expected the leaders of al-Qāʿida are not in the business of defending this practice.

It hardly needs to be added that Islamists set great store by Muslim solidarity. We have already seen the pan-Islamic aspect of this as represented by the Islamist disparagement of nationalism: Mawdūdī was strongly committed to that “precious mantle of international brotherhood,” and Quṭb insisted that a Muslim has no nationality other than his creed, by virtue of which he is a member of the Muslim community.¹⁴³ But the high valuation of solidarity also finds expression in the rejection of Western individualism,144 a rejection for which support is found in a Prophetic tradition about some people in a boat: one of them starts making a hole in the keel, and the fate of the rest of them depends on how they react to this.¹⁴⁵ Islam, as Mawdūdī puts it, does not approve of “unreined individualism.”¹⁴⁶

The most salient feature on the social front is thus the resonance between modern European and Islamic notions of equality. At the same time, the Islamic valuation of solidarity remains attractive in the modern world, despite the fact that it finds less resonance in mainstream European values, particularly as Sunnī Islamists have on the whole displayed little patience for the European tradition of radical democracy—a disdain that bears some relation to the fact that the Sunnī (as opposed to the Shīʿite) heritage provides only limited encouragement for a liberation theology. Overall, the fact that the heritage has a much less determinate social than political vision has shaped its use in modern times: the general notions of equality and solidarity apart, those who have invoked it most strongly have usually done so in a conservative vein, to defend at least some of the inequalities inscribed in the heritage.

3. HINDUISM

The law book ascribed to Manu opens with a scene in which the sages ask him to “tell us, properly and in order, the duties of all classes and also of the people who are born between.”¹⁴⁷ The book is his response to this request, and it naturally has much to tell us about social hierarchy. The overall vision is aptly encapsulated in the account—already enshrined in the Ṛg Veda—of the origins of the four classes in the body parts of a primeval god.¹⁴⁸ Of the three twice-born classes, the Brahmin was made from his mouth, the Kṣatriya from his arms, and the Vaiśya from his thighs; for our purposes there is no need to elaborate further on their elevated or at least respected place in society. But that, of course, left the feet of the primeval god, and from them was made the Śūdra, whose duties and liabilities are correspondingly humble, not to say humiliating. Thus he should be stigmatized by bearing a name that breeds disgust—whereas the names of members of the twice-born classes should evoke auspiciousness, strength, and property respectively.149 He should not have attitude: a Śūdra who is obedient to his superiors, gentle in his speech, and without egotism is rewarded by being reborn into a better class in his next life,¹⁵⁰ whereas one who has the temerity to shout abuse at a Brahmin suffers physical punishment in this life.¹⁵¹ The Brahmins whom a Śūdra serves “should give him the leftovers of their food, their old clothes, the spoiled parts of their grain, and their worn-out household utensils.”¹⁵² He should not amass wealth, as Brahmins find this annoying.¹⁵³ Other sources contribute in the same vein. The Śūdra, we read, “is at the beck and call of others, he can be made to rise at will, he can be beaten at will.”¹⁵⁴ Some hold that any Brahmin who touches a Śūdra must purify himself by sipping water or taking a bath.¹⁵⁵ Such matters remained a favorite topic of later works of Hindu law.¹⁵⁶

The jurists do not deal so systematically with the forerunners of today’s Untouchables. They did not think of them—as people do today—as a kind of fifth class of society (the pañcamas) below the Śūdras;¹⁵⁷ indeed, in the eyes of the ancient grammarian Pāṇini, it is clear that even the Cāṇḍāla was a kind of Śūdra.¹⁵⁸ What the jurists did possess was a well-developed notion of people who for one reason or another were not to be touched (aspṛśya). They ranged from one’s wife while she was menstruating through such occupational groups as fishermen and butchers to Cāṇḍālas; thus on touching a Cāṇḍāla one should plunge into water.¹⁵⁹ Punishment is accordingly prescribed when an untouchable person deliberately touches one of the twice-born.¹⁶⁰ The social implications of all this are mitigated by the fact that on certain occasions characterized by the presence of crowds touch is not polluting; cases in point are a religious procession, a marriage, a festival, or a battle.161 But for Untouchables—not to mention Śūdras—who have developed attitude, as so many have today, the tone of the jurists is less than diplomatic.

How far do ideas about charity soften the contours of this highly inegalitarian social vision? Charity is indeed meritorious, just as one would expect. Thus Manu states: “By giving almsfood, a twice-born householder obtains as much merit as he does by giving a cow to a poor man.”¹⁶² As this suggests, what is distributed is primarily food. The recipients do indeed include the indigent;¹⁶³ they are among those who are to be fed after guests and pregnant women have been attended to.¹⁶⁴ Moreover, food should be given not just to a Śūdra, but also to dogs, Cāṇḍālas, outcastes, and crows (though for the last four it should be thrown on the ground).¹⁶⁵ Yet it appears that charity to the involuntary poor is considerably less salient in the Hindu than in the Islamic or Christian cases. Most of the juristic discussion of almsgiving in fact relates to recipients whose poverty is elective. Thus it would seem that the twice-born householder gives alms food mainly to fellow members of the higher castes who are at a different stage (āśrama) of the four-phase life cycle. These may be students engaged in their Vedic studies;¹⁶⁶ as one text says of the student, “making himself poor and feeling no shame, he begs for almsfood.”¹⁶⁷ Or the recipients of alms food may be mendicants living a life of wandering asceticism.¹⁶⁸ This flow of charity within the twice-born classes is nicely caught in the prescription that when the householder finally wearies of giving alms and making offerings, he becomes a mendicant himself, and as such is fit for the eternal state.169 The involuntary poor, by contrast, seem to take a back seat.

As this indicates, Hinduism has a high regard for elective poverty and enshrines it in the classical schema of the four-phase life cycle of the twice-born adult male: student, then householder, then forest hermit, then wandering ascetic.¹⁷⁰ All but the householder are marked by some measure of religious poverty, but the effect is strongest in the case of the wandering ascetic: he should “wander forth … abandoning his relatives and free of possessions.”¹⁷¹ More precisely, he carries only a bowl, a staff, and a water pot.¹⁷² The major differences between this schema and actual practice are that in reality many householders did not become mendicants, and many of those who did become mendicants started young.¹⁷³ But there is nothing in the mainstream Hindu tradition that would extend this glow to the involuntary poor. Rather than a preference for the poor, we have a preference for the twice-born.

All in all, we could say that if any major religion can lay claim to a distinctive vision of the ideal society, it would be Hinduism. This social paradigm is the very incarnation of hierarchism: it is built around the system of classes (varṇas), realized on the ground in terms of castes (jātis). One key feature of this system was thus its inherently inegalitarian character: while there might be a considerable degree of equality among the members of a given class or caste, the inequalities between groups—both as prescribed in the normative texts and as observed in practice—were often very salient. The other key feature was that these groups were only loosely bound together into a larger unity: Hindu society as whole was more like a scattered archipelago than a solid continent. At the same time, each of these features worked against a focus on the involuntary poor as a locus of need or virtue.

Both features could be problematic under modern conditions. But it was the hierarchism that proved a public relations disaster, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the Indian social model had no counterpart in Europe, past or present. From a modern European perspective, aristocratic societies—hierarchic and tightly bound—are familiar if thoroughly old-fashioned, whereas caste societies—hierarchic and loosely bound—are outlandishly iniquitous. There was accordingly nothing in the European tradition that could be invoked to mitigate the incompatibility of the traditional Hindu social ideal with modern egalitarianism.174 In addition, we should not forget the standard inequalities relating to women, false believers, and slaves. Admittedly the last two were not of great consequence. With regard to false believers, the Hindu heritage was more broadly tolerant than that of Islam, let alone Christianity;¹⁷⁵ and as in the Islamic case, the worldwide abolition of slavery meant that this traditional institution came to be more or less irrelevant. But the situation with regard to women looked far worse from a European perspective: child brides were married off even younger, and widows belonging to respectable castes were not permitted to remarry—indeed they might even be expected to immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Altogether, the flagrantly exotic inegalitarianism of the Hindu heritage did not fit well with the liberal view of things, and it did even worse with the leftist perspective, consecrating a social order that any leftist worth his salt would itch to demolish. There was thus little in the Hindu tradition that could be expected to resonate positively with European social values of any stripe, and this under conditions of prolonged European rule over the subcontinent.

The other, and ultimately more potent, reason for the public relations problem was a change affecting the mass of the Indian population. The British slowly set about introducing the institutions of electoral democracy to their Indian empire, and these institutions have been maintained and developed in independent India far more successfully than in most non-Western societies. In such a setting an unbending hierarchism is not a viable basis for mass politics, for the same reason that a return to the ancien régime would not fly in Europe: emancipated majorities will not vote for it.

The result was that only conservatives with no stake in mass politics had much reason to invoke the Hindu heritage as a social vision, and even in their case its attractiveness in the end was limited. Some conservatives, of course, were robust enough to persevere. Śraddhā Rām in the nineteenth-century Punjab was unflinching: “If we are Hindus … then we should accept the commands of the Dharma Shastras without the why and the how of it, and if we accept the Dharma Shastras then we must also certainly accept the prohibition against touching low castes and eating things from their hands. … Meeting, touching, eating, drinking with them is forbidden in our Shastras.”176 Likewise a twentieth-century professor of Hindu law in Benares has no truck with Western notions of equality, whether between members of different castes or between the sexes (the latter a topic on which his observations are calculated to give even the mildest feminist apoplexy).¹⁷⁷ He emphasizes that the Hindu social system “has, at no place and for no purpose, admitted the truth of the principle of equality,”¹⁷⁸ and he contrasts “the unnatural doctrines of equality and freedom” with “the fundamental principles behind the Hindu Social Order.”¹⁷⁹ Naturally “the hereditary caste” forms an integral part of this social order, alongside “the patrilineal family.”¹⁸⁰ Another twentieth-century Hindu traditionalist is equally inflexible: “The alteration or abrogation of the varṇa plan by the State or mass action is not permissible, in the view of Dharmaśāstra, and it will also be futile, as it rests on Divine sanction and births are regulated by an inflexible law of Karma.”¹⁸¹

But such intransigence presented too inviting a target to an increasingly vocal enemy. Phule called on the “cunning Aryan Brahmins” to “totally destroy their wicked books” that enjoined them to treat Śūdras and Untouchables as “serfs and helots,”¹⁸² while Āmbeḍkar urged his people to convert to another religion because Hindu law (dharma) “cannot change as it is eternal.”183 In the face of such attacks, a different tone was in order. Thus Ṭiḷak, himself a Citpāvan Brahmin, is said to have taken the bull by the horns in addressing a low-caste audience in 1918: “If God were to tolerate untouchability I would not recognize Him as God at all.”¹⁸⁴ Others backed away from the old forms of caste discrimination with less rhetorical panache. The early Hindu nationalist who complained about “water-tight compartments” argued for cross-caste marriages to bind society together.¹⁸⁵ In 1981 a large number of Tamil religious figures assembled at a Hindu Solidarity Conference in the very village where so many Untouchables had recently caused public outrage by converting to Islam; they solemnly declared “that our Vedas and Shastras have not mentioned untouchability in any form, anywhere but have propounded only complete brotherhood.”¹⁸⁶ Brotherhood aside, they may have had a point regarding the Vedas, but what they said about the traditional legal literature was at best a saffron lie.¹⁸⁷

The irreconcilable tensions at work in all this are dramatized in the iconic—and anti-iconic—role of Manu. In the nineteenth century Dayānand clung to the book even as he moved away from its conception of social hierarchy,¹⁸⁸ whereas Phule roundly denounced it¹⁸⁹—he would doubtless have placed it at the head of the “wicked books” he urged the Brahmins to destroy. In the twentieth century Manu became a favorite target of low-caste intellectuals and politicians, who sometimes destroyed the book themselves. Achūtānand strongly criticized it.¹⁹⁰ Āmbeḍkar burnt it in 1927 on the suggestion of a Citpāvan Brahmin associate, thereby causing shock in the higher reaches of Hindu society and awe among the Untouchables.¹⁹¹ The same use was made of the book in the Tamil country, for example in 1928.192 Nearly fifty years after Āmbeḍkar’s burning, the Dalit Panthers repeated the outrage.¹⁹³ In the debate on the Maṇḍal report in the legislature in 1982, one Untouchable speaker—a member of a pig-herding caste—denounced caste hierarchy as inherent in Hinduism and cited Manu to prove his point.¹⁹⁴ Kānśī Rām stigmatized the twice-born as “Manuists” (Manuvādīs) and in 1998 demanded that a statue of Manu be removed from the premises of the Jaipur High Court;¹⁹⁵ in the same year a member of his party explained in an interview that “humans have a birth right to live in dignity and honour but this Manuwadi social structure … took away from me this basic human right.”¹⁹⁶ When the RSS organized a Hindu unity procession directed against the Muslims in Poona in 1982, they still had the cheek to carry with them a copy of Manu; but they deftly neutralized it by bearing giant portraits of Phule and Āmbeḍkar (not to mention Gandhi), together with bells intended to “symbolically toll for the death of Untouchability.”¹⁹⁷ The same sensibility can be discerned in the call of a VHP leader in 1993 for the incorporation of Āmbeḍkar’s “preachings” into “a new Manusmriti for a modern Hindu society.”¹⁹⁸ Manu may still be something of a conservative icon, but if left unreconstructed he is also a serious liability.

So it is not surprising that the Hindu nationalists, despite the origins of their movement among the higher castes and its continuing affinity for them, do not campaign on the basis of the preservation or restoration of the class system. In this respect they are a long way out from their heritage and in a situation very different from that of the Islamists. Moreover, their distance from their heritage lies not just in their sometimes halfhearted rejection of the inequality of the traditional social vision but also in their wholehearted call for solidarity—something the Islamists can find in their heritage with no trouble at all. Hence the best the Hindu nationalists can do in their quest for solidarity is to emulate the Muslims.199 At the same time their heritage gives them few resources with which to cultivate a relationship with the poor—it took Gandhi’s fertile imagination to synthesize a liberation theology in the Hindu context.²⁰⁰ The tradition of religious poverty does do something for them but only by conferring authority on Hindu nationalist saints like Ritambarā.

4. LATIN AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

The shape of the ideal Christian society is, if anything, even less determinate than that of its Islamic counterpart. The message of the Gospels presupposed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God; in the meantime what Christians had to do was not to try to reform the society in which they found themselves but rather to drop out of it—even to the extent of hating their own parents and parting with all their possessions in order to become disciples of Jesus.²⁰¹ In the event, of course, the Kingdom did not come, and Christians gradually adapted to this. Yet a figure as late and influential as Augustine (d. 430)—a century after the conversion of Constantine (ruled 306–337)—still saw Christians as strangers to the surrounding society, relating to it in a manner that was at once transient and pragmatic; in effect they were a celestial diaspora.²⁰² Hence it is not surprising that Christianity has proved comfortable with societies of a variety of shapes—including, for example, the caste society of colonial Latin America—and that it has readily accommodated the standard inequalities affecting women, false believers, and slaves. This does not mean, however, that there is no distinctive social message to attend to in the foundational texts of the religion. In particular, the New Testament has a lot to say about the poor—a feature of the religion that had precedent in ancient Israel and was to an extent inherited by Islam. We can arrange the material under three heads.

The first is charity. Here we find the familiar idea that it is virtuous for the rich to contribute some of their wealth for the welfare of the poor and that they will be rewarded for doing so in the next world. Thus Jesus takes it for granted that giving alms is in itself meritorious when he teaches that in order to be rewarded one must do it inconspicuously (Matt. 6:1–4). The implication is that the rich may continue to be rich provided they are generous to the poor. Thus Jesus tells his Pharisee host, “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind,” in reward for which he would be recompensed at the Resurrection (Luke 14:13–14), and Paul writes to Timothy that he should instruct those who are “rich in this world” to be “rich in good works, ready to distribute” (1Tim. 6:17–18). A more drastic case concerns a wealthy but repentant tax collector who has much to atone for; he finds grace when he declares that he will give half his goods to the poor (Luke 19:8). All this encourages the rich to take measures to alleviate the poverty of those less fortunate than themselves. It does not aspire to abolish either wealth or poverty; as Jesus memorably points out to his disciples, “Ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good” (Mark 14:7; cf. Matt. 26:11 and John 12:8). Overall, there is nothing distinctive about this emphasis on charity: as we have seen, it is also conspicuous in Islam and present in Hinduism.

Alongside this emphasis on charity we have the voluntary poverty of Jesus and his followers. When he sends out the twelve disciples to preach to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he instructs them: “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves” (Matt. 10:9–10; similarly Mark 6:8–9; Luke 9:3). Likewise when he sends the seventy ahead of him, he tells them, “Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes” (Luke 10:4). On one occasion he was accosted by a rich young man anxious to secure eternal life. When the young man pressed him with the question what he should do over and above keeping the commandments, Jesus replied: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me” (Matt. 19:21, Mark 10:21, Luke 18:22; and cf. Luke 12:33, 14:33). Jesus himself shared in this holy poverty: as Paul wrote about him to the Corinthians, “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). This is not to say that the New Testament supports the later Franciscan idea of the absolute poverty of Jesus and his apostles: on one occasion Jesus was alone at a well because “his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat” (John 4:8).203 But their relative poverty is not in question. Like charity, holy poverty is a familiar theme; it is more deeply rooted in Hinduism than in Islam, but it is present in both.

The third head brings us to something much more distinctive: the sense that the very poverty of the poor confers on them a special status in the present and marks them out for a glorious future from which the rich are pretty much excluded. Thus, in Nazareth Jesus gave it to be understood that the Lord had anointed him “to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4:18, quoting Isaiah 61:1). To return to the rich young man in quest of eternal life, at first Jesus had told him that he had only to keep the commandments (Matt. 19:17, Mark 10:19, Luke 18:20), but after the young man had departed sorrowfully, Jesus made the comment: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25). The parable of Dives and Lazarus carries the same message: after their deaths the rich man who dines sumptuously goes to hell, while the poor man who had desired to be fed from the crumbs falling from the rich man’s table is carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19–31). Another striking formulation comes in the Sermon on the Plain: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. … But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation” (Luke 6:20, 24; cf. Matt. 5:3). As we read in the epistle of James: “Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?” (James 2:5). The echoes of this preference for the poor are only faintly audible in the Islamic heritage and entirely absent from that of Hinduism.

How early Christian attitudes to the poor played out in Christian societies down the ages is a story we must leave aside, but by way of illustration a recent study conveys a vivid sense of what these values meant for the newly Christianized high society of late antiquity. There was a major contrast between pagan and Christian values with regard to charitable giving.204 Traditional Roman aristocrats were generous, but their generosity was directed to those who had particular claims on them—their relatives, clients, dependents, and above all fellow citizens. Many of these might happen to be poor, but their poverty was not of the essence; for a rich aristocrat the most imaginatively gripping act of generosity was to display his love of his home city (amor civicus) by spending vast sums on splendid edifices and spectacular games, in return for which he would receive the loud acclamation of the assembled citizens.205 By contrast, what gripped the Christian imagination was the disbursement of charity to the poor irrespective of worldly ties and in expectation not of any immediate acclamation on earth but rather of the eventual enjoyment of treasure accumulated in heaven.²⁰⁶ This was a far-reaching reshaping of the emotional economy of giving, and with all due qualification it is also likely to have had a palpable impact at a more material level.²⁰⁷ The respect of the elite for voluntary poverty was less of a novelty; in place of the Cynics there were now monks practicing absolute poverty,²⁰⁸ not to mention occasional aristocrats inspired by the Gospels to sell all they had and give the proceeds to the poor.²⁰⁹ But one aspect of the Christian focus on the poor still remained latent in this period and long after: the sense of the poor as the beneficiaries of a coming redemption.²¹⁰

What, then, has this heritage meant under modern conditions? Catholicism in Latin America has interacted with conservatism, with leftism, and with liberalism. But we can best leave the interaction with liberalism to a later chapter.²¹¹

On the conservative side traditional Catholicism has shown a predictable elective affinity for the right: progressive secular ideologies are the common enemy of conservatives and believers. We see this affinity at work in a diffuse form in the tendency for political and religious conservatism to overlap in Latin America at large, with a small number of organizations representing the Catholic right playing a limited role in the background.²¹² The interaction had a sharper focus in the intense confrontation of the Cristero rebels with the Mexican state. But the sharpness of focus in this case was primarily a reaction to the flagrantly anticlerical—indeed antireligious—policies of the revolutionary regime. In the social domain it would be hard to identify anything we could call a Cristero vision of the ideal society, over and above the fact that it would not be godless. For one thing the Cristeros came from two very different social milieux: the insurrection drew its leadership from educated urban Catholics but found much of its rank and file among a peasantry that practiced an Amerindian folk Catholicism.213 For another thing the peasantry itself was riven by quarrels over land, and the massive intervention of the revolutionary state in these festering disputes through land reform produced as much entropy as polarization in the countryside.²¹⁴ Thus neither the heritage of the Cristeros nor their situation favored the articulation of a coherent social vision.

On the leftist side our main concern is with Liberation Theology.²¹⁵ But the social concern that we see in Liberationism was not, of course, new to the Church. Social Catholicism was already a significant strain in nineteenth-century Europe, where it received a real if qualified endorsement from Leo XIII (in office 1878–1903) in his encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891.²¹⁶ As might be expected, this European development influenced Latin American Catholics. Thus in the first decade of the twentieth century, Catholic congresses were meeting in Mexico to consider what landlords should do for rural laborers, the plight of the Amerindian population, and the problems of urban workers.²¹⁷ In 1899 a Brazilian priest had written that the mission of the Brazilian clergy should be “to show the weak, the poor, the proletarians, that they are the preferred people of the Divine Master.”²¹⁸ Indeed already in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bolivia was ruled for a few years by a populist with radical ideas who “expressed himself in terms of Christian socialism.”²¹⁹ But such Catholic social concern had never before been so widespread or so prominent as it became in the second half of the twentieth century, when the Liberationists gave it expression in a new and radical idiom.

As we will see in a later chapter, Liberation Theology can be thought of as a Catholic reception or emulation of Marxist revolutionary thought.220 Crucial to the facilitation of this interaction was the New Testament attitude to the poor. It did not, however, extend to every aspect of this attitude. The Biblical endorsement of charity did not really suit the purposes of the Liberationists. Being modern and progressive, their ambition was not to alleviate poverty but to abolish it. As Gutiérrez tells us: “Poverty is an evil, a scandalous condition. … To eliminate it is to bring closer the moment of seeing God face to face.”²²¹ He reads this radical rejection of poverty into scripture: “In the Bible poverty is a scandalous condition inimical to human dignity and therefore contrary to the will of God.”²²² Moreover, the Liberationists sought to eliminate poverty not by persuading the rich to be more generous with their almsgiving but by enabling the poor to liberate themselves. The idea of holy poverty was considerably more appealing for the Liberationists than that of charity since it encouraged them to go about their work in a style that resonated with the poverty around them. “Christian poverty, an expression of love, … is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty. … It is a poverty lived … as an authentic imitation of Christ.”²²³ The church itself was accordingly to be a poor church.²²⁴ But the key thing the New Testament had to offer the Liberationists was its preferential view of the poor. It provided the basis of their “solidarity with the poor,” identified as “those privileged members of the reign of God.”²²⁵ The Liberationists could thus share “God’s predilection for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history,” for “the weak and abused of human history.”²²⁶ At one point Gutiérrez quotes the Magnificat: “He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away” (Luke 1:53). He then transposes the exultation of scripture into a modern Liberationist idiom: “The future of history belongs to the poor and exploited. True liberation will be the work of the oppressed themselves; in them, the Lord saves history.”227 Here we have the heart of what we can fairly call the Liberationist cult of the poor.

The devotion of the Liberationists to social work in this spirit undoubtedly had a real impact on the lives of some ordinary Latin Americans. The extent of this impact can be hard to assess because it has often been studied by researchers who have more or less bought into the Liberationist self-image.²²⁸ But one has the impression that at its most effective the appeal of Catholic activists to local populations was somewhat analogous to that of saints moving into rural communities in earlier epochs.²²⁹ The activists possessed manifest sincerity and conviction, they could open the eyes of the uneducated to wider horizons,²³⁰ they were outsiders to the petty feuds of the local society in which they went to work (often outsiders to Latin America altogether), and they benefited from the brand image of the church;²³¹ the result was that they could create a degree of trust among local actors who had previously mistrusted each other and thereby get them to cooperate in some measure.²³² All in all, the Liberationists did much to articulate and implement a socially concerned Catholicism.

And yet there seems to have been a profound mismatch between what the Liberationists wanted from the poor and what many of the poor wanted from the church. One does not have to be a cynical outsider to see that there must be a real question whether lay people who heard the liberationist message from their priestly mentors actually internalized it; the issue was already raised by a sympathetic but realistic Jesuit writing in the early 1980s.233 Part of the trouble was the initial tendency of the Liberationists to reject popular Catholicism²³⁴—a form of religion that struck them as superstitious and reactionary. But of more concern to us is the point that many, if not most, Catholics were not interested in having their religion packaged with social activism.²³⁵ Two ethnographic works about localities in Brazil provide clear evidence of this allergy.

One is a study of São Jorge in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro based on fieldwork done in 1987–1988.²³⁶ The author regards his work as “partly an effort to assist Catholic pastoral agents and clergy by identifying the external and internal obstacles to their project”;²³⁷ thus his attitude, though critical, is far from sour. He describes the negative views of Catholics who do not participate in Liberationist activities. “The Church is for praying,” says one such woman, “not for talking about potholes.”²³⁸ A man comments: “That’s the problem with these new priests. They’re mixing religion and politics.”²³⁹ “In the Assembly, they don’t mix things,” affirms a young Pentecostalist, drawing an unfavorable contrast between the Catholic church and the Pentecostalist Assembly of God.²⁴⁰ All this, of course, is predictable.

Less so is the extent to which these attitudes are shared by members of the laity who do participate in services, though without getting involved in social activism. In a common move one such woman tones down the Liberationist message by understanding it in traditional terms: “The Church is reminding us to help our brother, to practice charity.” Going on to confront the Liberationist project a bit more directly, though hardly head-on, she adds, “Some do those other things, but I don’t like them.”²⁴¹ She, too, echoes the mixing theme: “Sometimes the priests, they mix things together, they get agitated.”²⁴² A woman who had dutifully learnt the Liberationist discourse acknowledged that, as far as the social practice was concerned, she was “pretty disconnected from that stuff” and went on to say that politics “shouldn’t be mixed with religion.”243 During a service she was asked to read out a letter from the bishop calling for a march against violence. She did so, keeping to herself her view that this was “mixing politics and religion.” A man in the congregation was less discreet, commenting: “This is absurd! That’s not something to do in church!”²⁴⁴

More telling still are the attitudes of people who not only attend the services but also join in the social politics. One woman cuts this activism down to size: “Movements are fine. But they will get you nowhere; they are to improve a little, not to transform anything. The world will only be transformed when Jesus comes.”²⁴⁵ Another woman, who knew the discourse and participated in activist causes, simply fails to connect the two. Asked by the ethnographer why she attended a certain demonstration, she explains that Carmen had asked her to: “Well, I go to these things. I mean, when someone asks me, I go.” Heavy prompting from the ethnographer about the relevance of Jesus’ message eventually elicits a religiously correct response: “Yes, right, that’s what Jesus wants us to do.” But asked if she was thinking of that when she went on the march, she responds unhesitatingly, as if to a silly question: “No, of course not. I went because Carmen told me about it, said we should go.”²⁴⁶

Not everyone is like this: there are people for whom it all comes together, but they are very much a minority. They speak the Liberationist discourse fluently, are involved in social movements, and consistently explain this involvement in Liberationist terms. “It was very exciting,” says one such activist of her involvement in the scene that developed around the Liberationist Father Orlando, priest of her parish. “It all made sense to me, that the people had to organize and fight for its rights.”²⁴⁷ When the struggle did not go well, “it was the faith that Jesus had come for us, the poor and oppressed, that gave me courage.”²⁴⁸ But this woman, like others in the same category, was by no means representative of the Brazilian poor: she was well educated, and had she been born into a more meritocratic society she would easily have made the transition to the middle class.249 If we leave aside this activist niche, it seems clear from this study of São Jorge that what the Liberationists were eager to supply was not what the market demanded; and the author adduces evidence that the problem was not just a local one.²⁵⁰

The other ethnographic study is about the Morro da Conceição—a poor neighborhood in the northeastern city of Recife—and is based on fieldwork done in 1990–1991.²⁵¹ The ethnographer tells a dramatic story with a background in the high politics of the church. From 1964 to 1985, Dom Hélder Câmara was archbishop of Olinda and Recife. A man of ebullient enthusiasm, in his youth he had combined the priesthood with a prominent role in the Integralist movement—“a simple green-shirted priest from Ceará,” as he then liked to call himself.²⁵² But times had changed, and by now he had a new love, Liberation Theology. Under his benevolent episcopal aegis, the church on the Morro was entrusted in 1978 to Reginaldo Veloso and in his hands became a Liberationist hotbed.²⁵³ However, on the archbishop’s retirement in 1985 the Vatican appointed a conservative to replace him, an expert on canon law who lacked the social grace and personal charm of his predecessor.²⁵⁴ A confrontation gradually built up between the new archbishop and Reginaldo, climaxing in 1990 with the eviction of Reginaldo from his church (that is to say, the community’s church, or the Church’s church, depending on one’s point of view). Perhaps a little tactlessly, the eviction was effected by five truckloads of armed riot police.²⁵⁵ Yet Reginaldo, though he lost his church, would not leave the community, which was now riven by schism between his Liberationist supporters and the traditional Catholics who rallied to the newly installed priest.²⁵⁶ The schism would not go away, though Reginaldo’s support tended to dwindle—particularly when he married a woman half his age and thereby forfeited his claim to the priesthood.257

Against the background of this grand narrative of schism we get to see the attitudes of the lesser folk involved in the conflict. We encounter a familiar theme: “I saw that it wasn’t religion, it was politics.”²⁵⁸ What is new is that we get a better sense of just what it is about this mixing of religion and politics that the traditionalists dislike so much. Two significant points emerge here. One is that the poor may value the very disconnection of the church from the heartless world of everyday life; as the author of the study puts it, “Reginaldo had removed their one sure solace and replaced it with reminders of the very problems from which they needed relief.”²⁵⁹ The other is that the poor may regard Liberationism as politically foolish. Does it really pay to prefer weak community organization to strong links with powerful patrons? One exasperated parishioner responded in this way to Reginaldo’s extravagant denunciations of the rich: “We always need the rich. They do favors for us. Why should we alienate them? They have been our friends for years.”²⁶⁰ Another complained about the way Reginaldo had driven away the rich people who used to help out with the annual religious festival that brought numerous pilgrims to the Morro. He told the rich that “there was something wrong with them because they were better off than we are.” And so indeed they were. “But we need help from people like that. It’s just another way Reginaldo hurt the community.”²⁶¹ A similar accusation was that the Liberationists with their unending protests—such as banging pots and pans in a demand for piped water on the Morro—“embarrassed us at city hall.”²⁶² Angering those in power seemed a sure recipe for jeopardizing the potential gains of the community in the future.263 In actual fact the Liberationists appear to have been rather successful with their pots and pans: in place of the old well, there was now piped water three or four days a week.²⁶⁴ But the traditionalists were not about to see it that way.

Studies such as these are no substitute for the comprehensive information that we do not have, and doubtless never will. But they are enough to suggest a fundamental dissonance between Liberation Theology and the attitudes of the masses it sought to mobilize. This helps to explain the fact that the Church’s option for the poor was not reciprocated: as the witticism has it, the Church chose the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostalists. That is to say, they chose a form of religion characterized, among other things, by the absence of social radicalism,²⁶⁵ one more attuned to individual success in a market economy. This does not mean that Pentecostalists are inherently apolitical;²⁶⁶ but political commitment is not central to their religious convictions, and the political activity they do engage in is not radical. Theirs is a milieu for which faith healing is of great importance and “liberation” (liberación) means exorcism.267 It fits with this that by far the most effective Catholic response to the Pentecostal threat came not from Liberation Theology but from Charismatic Catholicism, which has been a serious competitor in the Latin American religious marketplace since the 1970s.²⁶⁸ It was Catholicized Pentecostalism, not Catholicized Marxism, that was in demand.

5. RELIGIOUS ELITES

Before we end this chapter, there is one further topic that needs a brief treatment, namely the role of religious elites. We can best address this by taking our three heritages together. In each case there was a readily identifiable, though not sharply delimited group in which the society’s religious expertise was disproportionately vested. In the Muslim case, a saying of Muḥammad had it that the scholars (ʿulamāʾ) were the heirs of the prophets;²⁶⁹ and in historical fact they had undoubtedly found recognition as Muḥammad’s heirs within a century or two of his death. As a learned religious elite their role matched that of the Jewish rabbis, though it had taken the rabbis far longer to establish themselves as the heirs of Moses.²⁷⁰ In the Hindu case, unlike the Muslim one, the basic qualification for a role of religious expertise, at least in mainstream settings, was lineage: when the four classes were assigned their tasks, teaching and learning went to the Brahmins271—though by no means all of them would in fact be active members of the religious elite. The Catholic case was different again: lineage came to be formally excluded though the development of a celibate clergy, but this exclusion was more than compensated for by a powerful ecclesiastical organization. And yet the Muslims scholars, who in general lacked either lineage or organization, proved remarkably resilient.

In the modern world these religious elites have suffered from the rise of a religious egalitarianism that emboldens lay believers to think for themselves about religious issues that concern them.²⁷² As Ḥasan al-Bannā puts it, “All Muslims from the least to the most outstanding of them, are ‘religious authorities.’ ”²⁷³ This is one factor tending to limit the role of all three religious elites in modern politics. Of the men in saffron we need say only that their role in the Hindu nationalist movement has been rather marginal.²⁷⁴ Something similar could be said of the largely clerical exponents of Liberation Theology in Latin America with respect to leftist politics. Likewise the Muslim scholars have not been immune to the diminution of their religious authority; Ḥasan al-Bannā is typical of the antipathy of Islamists, who are mostly laymen, to anything resembling a monopoly of religious authority on the part of the scholars.²⁷⁵ The Shīʿite experience, in which the clerics were able to establish a political hegemony through the Iranian revolution of 1979, is, of course, quite exceptional in the way it has swum against the tide of lay modernity.276 But the decline in the authority of the Sunnī scholars, though real, has not been catastrophic,²⁷⁷ and they retain a significant amount of soft power in the political arena. One jihadi writing confidentially to another about the struggle in occupied Iraq lays great emphasis on the importance of not alienating the scholars under present conditions; he writes that it is simply a fact, whether we like it or not, that the scholars are the keys to the Muslim community (mafātīḥ al-umma) and its leadership.²⁷⁸

6. CONCLUSION

If we are looking for a heritage with a clear and distinctive vision of what society should look like, then the only one of the three that can offer this is Hinduism. Under contemporary conditions, however, this vision is a public relations disaster. There is no way to square its ostentatious hierarchism with modern European—now global—values and no way to market it to those at the bottom of society once they have other options. Even such euphemisms as telling the Untouchables that they are eligible for high-level positions in sanitation departments are likely to prove counterproductive.²⁷⁹ Not surprisingly the Hindu nationalists, who despite the fact that they often come from high-caste backgrounds are in the business of mass politics, do not base their ideology on this aspect of the Hindu heritage; quite the contrary, their aspiration is to create out of the medley of the Hindu castes “one single homogenous family.”²⁸⁰ By contrast, neither the Islamic nor the Catholic heritage offers a comprehensive social vision to match that of Hinduism. Where the Islamic heritage stands apart is in providing a compelling parallel to European egalitarianism. Without question this has been one of the most attractive features of this heritage under modern conditions, a source of almost lyrical inspiration to leading Islamists. The parallel is, of course, an imperfect one. First, Muslim egalitarianism does not apply to all and sundry—leaving Mawdūdī to underline the point that the wrong concept of equality is not to be applied to women. Secondly, this egalitarianism goes with a higher valuation of solidarity than is to be found within the liberal mainstream of European values. But the resonance is real. Meanwhile the Catholic heritage stands out by virtue of the scriptural foundation it provides for the Liberationist cult of the poor, an asset that in the Latin American context made possible a Catholic appropriation of some of the central ideas of Marxism. This syncretism may have had only a limited appeal among the Latin American poor, but it tapped a resource in the Catholic heritage to which Hinduism offered no parallel and that had a serious Islamic counterpart only among the Shīʿites.

___________

1 The unutilized combination here is a conception of society as hierarchic and loosely bound—a gap that will be relevant when we come to the Hindu case (see 194–95).

² Note that I leave aside fascism here because of its lack of staying power and use the words “liberal” and “liberalism” in a European, not an American sense.

³ See chap. 7, especially 319–21, 327–30.

⁴ See 309–11.

⁵ For the muʾākhāt, see Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 1–2: 504.20 = 234–35.

⁶ Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād, Fitan, 218.19 (the traditionist is the Ḥimṣī Arṭāh ibn al-Mundhir (d. 779–780)); see Kister, “Land property and jihād,” 284–85, and D. Cook, Studies in Muslim apocalyptic, 165, 166.

⁷ Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, 3: 274–75 no. 3462 (ijāra 20); Bayhaqī, Sunan, 5: 316.19; Ṭabarānī, Musnad al-Shāmiyyīn, 3: 328–29 no. 2417; and see Kister, “Land property and jihād,” 276–77, with numerous other references.

⁸ Ibn Ḥazm, Muḥallā, 8: 211.5, 211.8; and see Kister, “Land property and jihād,” 282.

⁹ For a rich collection of such material, see Kister, “Land property and jihād,” especially 276–85.

¹⁰ Ibn Ḥazm, Muḥallā, 8: 211.10; compare the comment of the eleventh-century Central Asian jurist Sarakhsī that there is nothing wrong if one section of the community cultivates the land and another section wages jihad (Kister, “Land property and jihād,” 280).

¹¹ Kister, “Land property and jihād,” 290–94, 300–303.

¹² For this heritage and what became of it, see generally Marlow, Hierarchy and egalitarianism, and Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 334–37, 340–46.

¹³ For references see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 292.

¹⁴ See 22. For references and more detail see ibid., 289–90.

¹⁵ The wording echoes a letter from the Prophet to the people of Najrān in southwestern Arabia.

¹⁶ Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, 4: 181 no. 4530 (diyāt 11). One scholar notes that this entails equivalence between the blood of noble and commoner (al-sharīf waʾl-waḍīʿ)—as also of freeman and slave (Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, 1: 176.1).

¹⁷ Friedmann, Tolerance and coercion, 50 (the tradition contrasts the treatment of the sharīf and the ḍaʿīf).

¹⁸ For this discrimination between honestiores and humiliores, see A.H.M. Jones, Later Roman Empire, 519.

¹⁹ See Fierro, “Idraʾū l-ḥudūd bi-l-shubuhāt,” 229–37, especially 233–35.

²⁰ Like late Roman law, the criminal code of the T’ang dynasty discriminated systematically, but as might be expected the system was more complex and more state centered (see W. Johnson, T’ang Code, 1: 23–25). Hindu law tends to treat Brahmins more leniently (Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 395–99).

²¹ “The rank of a full member of society was restricted to free male Muslims. Those who lacked any of these three essential qualifications—that is, the slave, the woman, or the unbeliever—were not equal” (B. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 8).

²² See, for example, Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 3–4: 525.16 = 607 (Ayla); 526.21 = 608 (Dūma); Bukhārī, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 2: 291.15 (jizya 1)(Hajar).

²³ Ḥajjī, Ḥaraka, 269.5; Hunwick, Jews of a Saharan oasis, 28.

²⁴ See Hunwick, Jews of a Saharan oasis, 33–35, 71–73.

²⁵ Ḥajjī, Ḥaraka, 272.4.

²⁶ Kitâbu mesâlihi’l-Müslimîn ve menâfi‘i’l-mü’minîn, 106–8 = 74f (ch. 43).

²⁷ For what the Koran has to say about slaves, see Hunwick and Trout Powell, African diaspora, 2–5; for selections from Prophetic tradition on the subject, see 5–7.

²⁸ Moreh, Al-Jabartī’s chronicle, 12.1 = 43; “high and low” is al-jalīl waʾl-ḥaqīr, which strongly suggests membership of different social strata.

²⁹ B. Lewis, Muslim discovery, 183.

³⁰ Marlow, Hierarchy and egalitarianism, 6–8.

³¹ Ibid., 9.

³² Baranī, Fatāwā, 296.16; Habib and Khan, Political theory, 97–98.

³³ As Lewis says of Islam: “In principle and in law, it recognizes neither caste nor aristocracy” (B. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 8).

³⁴ Marlow, Hierarchy and egalitarianism, 30–34, and see 63 on the case of weavers and cuppers.

³⁵ Yang et al., Hye Ch’o diary, 53 (for the Chinese original, see 103, 105); he also noted correctly that the law of the country did not prescribe prostration (sc. to fellow humans). For the dating of his travels, see 14–15. I owe my knowledge of this source to Kevin van Bladel.

³⁶ Forster and Blackburne Daniell, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, 1: 154–55.

³⁷ See 263.

³⁸ Bīrūnī, Taḥqīq, 48.20 = Alberuni’s India, 1: 100.

³⁹ EI², art. “Zakāt” (A. Zysow), 415b.

⁴⁰ Ibid., art. “Ṣadaḳa” (T. H. Weir and A. Zysow), 713.

⁴¹ Thus for late medieval Egypt, see Sabra, Poverty and charity, 50–58, 85–94; for this record in a comparative perspective, see 169–77, also Lev, Charity, endowments, 156–59.

⁴² There is a tradition in which Muḥammad says, “Let me live as a pauper (miskīn), and let me die as a pauper,” but then again there is another in which he says that “poverty is almost infidelity” (Sabra, Poverty and charity, 21).

⁴³ For these ahl al-ṣuffa, so called because they lived in the portico (ṣuffa) of the mosque, see EI², art. “Ahl al-ṣuffa” (W. M. Watt); for our purposes the key account is the set of traditions from Wāqidī (d. 823) quoted by Ibn Saʿd (Ṭabaqāt, vol. 1, part 2:13–14), since these are not yet affected by Ṣūfism.

⁴⁴ As pointed out by one medieval critic of Ṣūfī poverty, see Sabra, Poverty and charity, 23.

⁴⁵ Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt, 1:2:13.12.

⁴⁶ Sabra, Poverty and charity, 18, emphasizing that this view is typical among the Ṣūfīs.

⁴⁷ Q59:8 (lil-fuqarāʾi ʾl-muhājirīn).

⁴⁸ See, for example, Q2:177, 215, 271, 273; Q9:60; Q76:8.

⁴⁹ For references, see Wensinck, Early Muhammadan tradition, 181b (like many traditions, this one occurs in slightly varying forms, but the message is the same). For other traditions relating to the poor, see 188a–b.

⁵⁰ Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, 4: 51 no. 4063 (libās 15); and see Goitein, “Near-Eastern bourgeoisie,” 589–90.

⁵¹ See especially 20–22.

⁵² See 165–66.

⁵³ Slavery, of course, is only marginally relevant at the present day, though the treatment of imported servants in some Muslim societies and reports of the revival of enslavement on the part of jihadis constitute exceptions.

⁵⁴ Ḥawwā, al-Asās fī ʾl-tafsīr, 1053.10.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 1055.18.

⁵⁶ Cevdet Pașa, Tezâkir 1–12, 1: 68, cited in Mardin, Young Ottoman thought, 18. The passage in the reform decree that provoked this response reads as follows: “Every distinction or designation tending to make any class whatever of the subjects of my empire inferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be forever effaced from administrative protocol” (Hurewitz, Middle East, 1: 316b).

⁵⁷ Peters, Islam and colonialism, 81; for the source, see 185n113.

⁵⁸ Toledano, Slavery and abolition, 116–17.

⁵⁹ B. Lewis, Race and slavery, 156 (reproducing a contemporary translation). In another letter of the same year, the sultan told the consul that the legitimacy of the slave trade required “no more demonstration than the light of day” (3, 151).

⁶⁰ See 89–90.

⁶¹ For a brief survey of the history of Communist activity in the Middle East, see EI², art “Shuyūʿiyya” (J. Couland et al.).

⁶² See 182–84.

⁶³ Seale, Asad of Syria, 115.

⁶⁴ Abdel-Malek, Égypte, 281.

⁶⁵ Warburg, Islam, nationalism, 148–52. There was a significant antireligious group in the Party, but it was expelled in 1956 (150).

⁶⁶ L. Wright, Looming tower, 153–54.

⁶⁷ Sivan, Radical Islam, 10, and cf. 57–58, 59, 76. When Sivan speaks of the doctrines of Sayyid Quṭb as a “liberation theology,” he means simply that they are both religious and revolutionary (108).

⁶⁸ In fact, the social concerns of Quṭb in particular have more in common with mainstream social Catholicism (see 203) than with liberation theology (I owe this comparison to Andrew March).

⁶⁹ Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, 245 (for this work, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 37 no. 72).

⁷⁰ Mawdūdī, Muʿḍilāt al-iqtiṣād, 54.8 = Maududi, Economic problem of man, 31 (for this work, dating from 1941, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 35 no. 34). See also Maudūdī, “Political concepts,” 207 (this work gives a translation of extracts from Mawdūdī’s Tafhīm, compiled and translated by the editor, see 163), and Nasr, Mawdudi, 105, 132.

⁷¹ Mawdūdī, Muʿḍilāt al-iqtiṣād, 64.7 = Maududi, Economic problem of man, 37; see also Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, 191 (chap. 5 of this work is an extensive discussion of zakāt). For the wider modern discussion of zakāt, see EI², art. “Zakāt,” section 8.

⁷² Mawdūdī, Muʿḍilāt al-iqtiṣād, 25.11= Maududi, Economic problem of man, 14.

⁷³ Maudūdī, “Political concepts,” 205.

⁷⁴ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 83–85 = 97–100, 131–35 = 162–68.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 32.17 = 38; similarly 68.17 = 78–79.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 113.9 = 179 (qadāsat al-ʿamal); similarly Quṭb, Maʿraka, 57.6. This work was first published in 1950.

⁷⁷ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 257.2 = 343.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 109.19 = 133. Poverty also leads to crime and moral degradation (256.20 = 342–43).

⁷⁹ Ibid., 208.16 = 259.

⁸⁰ Quṭb, Maʿraka, 60.3, and cf. 20.16; Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 31.19 = 37. For Quṭb’s views on these matters, see also Sivan, Radical Islam, 76.

⁸¹ One student of Quṭb’s thought writes: “Like a true liberation theologian, Quṭb exhorts the weak … to rise against the oppressive status quo” (Abu-Rabi‘, Intellectual origins, 181, citing Quṭb, Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān, 2096.2; I was unable to locate the statements about the poor that Abu-Rabi‘ goes on to cite from the Ẓilāl). However, the Koranic verse in question (Q14:21) is set in an eschatological context in which the time for exhortation has long passed; in the face of impending doom, the weak (ḍuʿafāʾ) among the unbelievers protest that they had been followers of the strong, but this avails them nothing. Quṭb’s commentary is appropriately unsympathetic to the weak, stressing that their weakness is no excuse for their supine conduct (2096.5, and cf. 2096.15); like the Koranic verse, it contains no exhortation.

⁸² For two Morrocan Islamists with a focus on the poor, see Munson, Religion and power, 155–57, 164–66, 170; particularly evocative is the statement of ʿAbd al-Salām Yāsīn (d. 2012) that the hearts of the oppressed masses are full of real faith (166).

⁸³ Thus the view of Ḥasan al-Bannā is similar in tone (Bannā, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 395.3). The only trace I have noted of an interest in the poor among the jihadis is an anonymous verse quoted by Bin Laden: “I am not on the side of the wealthy, if exaltedness is on the side of the poor” (Lawrence, Messages, 271; I have not seen the original). Though this might sound sound promising, it is the second line of a pair, and the context makes it clear that it is in fact for the first line that Bin Laden quotes these verses.

⁸⁴ Zaman, Ulama, 125.

⁸⁵ Zaman, “South Asian Islam,” 78.

⁸⁶ See Zaman, Modern Islamic thought, 224–25, 228, 236, 238–39, 241–42, 243. The three passages in question are from the works of Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 981), Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), and Shāh Walī Allāh.

⁸⁷ Cf. 201.

⁸⁸ The only Liberationist movement that I have encountered within the geographical limits of the Sunnī world is the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, which describes itself as “an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians” (http://www.sabeel.org, and see also Ateek, Justice; I owe my knowledge of this movement and these sources to Rochelle Davis).

⁸⁹ See Kepel, Jihad, 39, 107–8. I am indebted to Negin Nabavi for help with the literature on Sharīʿatī.

⁹⁰ Shariʿati, What is to be done, 19; and see Nabavi, Intellectuals, 101. For Sharīʿatī’s relations with Fanon, see Rahnema, Islamic utopian, 126–27.

⁹¹ It does not seem to be clear whether Sharīʿatī himself was aware of the Latin American parallel (contrast the editor’s note in Shariʿati, What is to be done, 28n15, with the somewhat polemical remarks of Boroujerdi, Iranian intellectuals, 109). For interest in Fanon among the Catholic Liberationists, see Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 186n36, and cf. Boff and Boff, Introducing liberation theology, 39.

⁹² I borrow the phrasing from M. Cook, Muhammad, 51–52.

⁹³ Abrahamian, Khomeinism, 47. The translation is felicitous, since in Q28:5 God speaks of “those that were oppressed in the land” (alladhīna ʾstuḍʿifū fī ʾl-arḍ). Cf. also Shariati, Hajj, 77–78.

⁹⁴ Shariʿati, What is to be done, 81–82, and cf. 54, 88, 98 (the latter speaking of the “poor and oppressed people” of the day as “humiliated by the two superpowers”).

⁹⁵ Ibid., 38. In effect the Sunnīs get the blame for the victimization.

⁹⁶ Thus, for the thought of the well-known Arab Shīʿite scholar Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlallāh, an Iraqi living in Lebanon, see Abu-Rabi‘, Intellectual origins, chap. 7; Abu-Rabi‘ speaks of Faḍlallāh’s ideas as his “liberation theology” (see, for example, 221), and the term seems to be apt (see especially 228–37). In India the dissident Bohra Asghar Ali Engineer expresses rather similar ideas, see his “Aspects of liberation theology,” especially 1–3, 5–6.

⁹⁷ Kepel, Jihad, 40–41, 111–12; Abrahamian, Khomeinism, 26–27, 31–32, 47–49.

⁹⁸ As noted by Kepel (Jihad, 108).

⁹⁹ See 170.

¹⁰⁰ See 332.

¹⁰¹ For these views of Mawdūdī’s, see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 303–4.

¹⁰² On this point see Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 50.5 = 57. This is the account given in the Puruṣasūkta (see below, 191–92).

¹⁰³ For these views of Quṭb’s, see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 304–5.

¹⁰⁴ Ḥawwā, Islām, 2: 73.22.

¹⁰⁵ Ḥawwā, Rasūl, 2: 168.7, 168.21.

¹⁰⁶ See Lawrence, Messages, 217 (nunqidhuhum min ʿibādat al-ʿibād ilā ʿibādat rabb al-ʿibād, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 384.3).

¹⁰⁷ Lawrence, Messages, 166.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 196.

¹⁰⁹ Shinqīṭī, Numūdhaj, 3.11; see also 2.9. I owe my copy of this text to Nelly Lahoud.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 4.3. The passage is from Būṭī, Fiqh al-sīra, 339.18, though the fingertips and the illusion have dropped out in Shinqīṭī’s quotation. Given the close relations maintained by Būṭī (d. 2013) with the Syrian regime, his reluctance to condemn rulers as unbelievers, and his espousal of nonviolence, he is a somewhat surprising authority for a jihadi to cite (see Christmann, “Islamic scholar,” 63, 73, 74, 75).

¹¹¹ Maududi, Purdah, 112–13; thus “the claim for equality is absolutely justified” (113; for this work, first published in 1939, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 39 no. 103).

¹¹² Maududi, Political theory of Islam, 41 = Mawdūdī, Naẓariyya, 46.5 (for this work, first published in 1939, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 35 no. 44; an abbreviated version of it appears as Maudūdī, “Political theory of Islam,” see 161n32). The context is political.

¹¹³ Maududi, Purdah, 21.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 12; see also 113 on the idea that “the man and the woman should have the same field of activity.”

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 121–22.

¹¹⁶ Maudūdī, “Fundamentals of Islamic constitution,” 282 (for this work, first published in 1952, see 271, and Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 36 no. 47). Nor can women be elected to the legislature, though they could have a separate assembly of their own elected by female voters; this institution would mainly concern itself with “the special affairs of the women,” but it would also have the right to offer criticism relating to “the general welfare of the country” (Maudūdī, “Some constitutional proposals,” 345–46; for this work, which dates from 1952, see 335, and, perhaps, Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 34 no. 8).

¹¹⁷ For this embarrassing episode, see Nasr, Vanguard of Islamic revolution, 41–42.

¹¹⁸ See the summary at Maududi, Purdah, 121–22.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 18.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 218.

¹²¹ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 53.19 = 61; cf. Carré, Mysticism and politics, 131–32.

¹²² Quṭb, Maʿraka, 111.9, 113.4.

¹²³ Quṭb, al-Islām wa-mushkilāt al-ḥaḍāra, 73–84 (I owe my knowledge of this account to Mike Doran; the work was first published in 1962); note particularly his disapproving reference to “freedom of the mixing of the sexes” (ḥurriyyat al-ikhtilāṭ al-jinsī, 73.11). This Western licentiousness was an old theme (see B. Lewis, Muslim discovery, 287–90); to go no further back than 1798, in that year the French invaders brought their shameless womenfolk to Egypt, and the chronicler Jabartī was duly disgusted by their lewd behaviour (Moreh, Al-Jabartī’s chronicle, 12.4 = 43).

¹²⁴ Quṭb, Maʿraka, 112.7, 112.18; but contrast Carré, Mysticism and politics, 129.

¹²⁵ Compare his insistence that there is no such thing as Islamic dress (Quṭb, Maʿraka, 89.1).

¹²⁶ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 135; he quotes Q4:34.

¹²⁷ Maududi, Political theory of Islam, 35; cf. Mawdūdī, Naẓariyya, 39.16 (the Arabic differs from the English, speaking not of minorities but of ahl al-dhimma and making no reference to cultural freedom). Likewise “the Islamic State confers all basic human rights on its non-Muslim citizens” (Maudūdī, “Political concepts,” 201), and in comparison to other systems of government Islam enjoins “the most just, the most tolerant and the most generous treatment” of its minorities (Maudūdī, “First principles,” 265; for this work, first published in 1952, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 36 no. 48).

¹²⁸ Mawdūdī, Ḥuqūq ahl al-dhimma, 13.6, 19.8 = Maudūdī, “Rights of non-Muslims,” 304, 308; for this work, first published in 1948, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 36 no. 50.

¹²⁹ Mawdūdī, Ḥuqūq ahl al-dhimma, 4.12 = Maudūdī, “Rights of non-Muslims,” 296. Non-Muslims can always join the ruling community (al-jamāʿa al-ḥākima) if they choose to convert (5.7 = 297).

¹³⁰ See especially the summary at Mawdūdī, Ḥuqūq ahl al-dhimma, 6.12 = Maudūdī, “Rights of non-Muslims,” 299.

¹³¹ Mawdūdī, Ḥuqūq ahl al-dhimma, 36.17, 37.9 = Maudūdī, “Rights of non-Muslims,” 320.

¹³² Mawdūdī, Ḥuqūq ahl al-dhimma, 21–25 = Maudūdī, “Rights of non-Muslims,” 310–12.

¹³³ By contrast, his hostility to the Aḥmadīs was intense (cf. Nasr, Mawdudi, 43).

¹³⁴ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 93.9 = 110–11, 132.5 = 162; Quṭb, Maʿraka, 114.7; Quṭb, Dirāsāt Islāmiyya, 250.15; Quṭb, Naḥw mujtamaʿ Islāmī, 115.6, 118.19. In the last passage cited he specifies that his polemic is directed against those who call in question the justice of Islam (ʿadālat al-Islām). On his treatment of these matters in his Koran commentary, see Carré, Mysticism and politics, 112–15, 181–82.

¹³⁵ Quṭb, Dirāsāt Islāmiyya, 174.1; cf. below, 313.

¹³⁶ Carré, Mysticism and politics, 306.

¹³⁷ Ḥawwā, Islām, 2:74.2. True and false believers cannot be equal in an Islamic society (73.20). Ḥawwā nevertheless continues the apologetic concern: he remarks that Islam’s superior treatment of other religions (except Arab paganism) is shown by the fact that you won’t find a single Muslim in Spain, whereas you will find Christians and Jews in Syria even now (Rasūl, 2:220.7).

¹³⁸ See Kepel, Jihad, 276, 282, 283, 285–86, 290–91, 294.

¹³⁹ See 188.

¹⁴⁰ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 135.

¹⁴¹ Mawdūdī, Human rights in Islam, 19–21 (in a talk of 1975, see 7).

¹⁴² Quṭb, Dirāsāt Islāmiyya, 11.2; see also Quṭb, Naḥw mujtamaʿ Islāmī, 78.10; Carré, Mysticism and politics, 169–71, 172–73; and Quṭb, Ẓilāl, 229.32.

¹⁴³ See 42–43.

¹⁴⁴ Tripp, Islam, 48, 52–54. See also Maududi, Political theory of Islam, 42 = Mawdūdī, Naẓariyya, 46.13; Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 60.2 = 68 (note the final sentence of the paragraph in the translation).

¹⁴⁵ M. Cook, Commanding right, 514–15.

¹⁴⁶ Mawdudi, Let us be Muslims, 238.

¹⁴⁷ Manu, Laws, 3 (1.1–2).

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 6–7 (1.31). For a translation of the account given in the Puruṣasūkta (Ṛg Veda 10.90.12), see Basham, Wonder that was India, 240–41.

¹⁴⁹ Manu, Laws, 20 (2.31).

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., 232–33 (9.335).

¹⁵¹ Ibid., 181 (8.267). The twice-born are merely fined.

¹⁵² Ibid., 249 (10.125).

¹⁵³ Ibid., 250 (10.129).

¹⁵⁴ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 2: 35 (citing the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa).

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., 2: 162.

¹⁵⁶ Derrett, Dharmaśāstra and juridical literature, 56–57.

¹⁵⁷ For the prehistory of this notion, see J. Leslie, Authority and meaning, 27–29.

¹⁵⁸ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 2: 167–68.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., 2: 168–73.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid., 2: 176.

¹⁶¹ Ibid., 2: 175–76.

¹⁶² Manu, Laws, 53 (3.95). In this instance, however, I quote the translation in Olivelle, Manu’s code of law, 113 (3.95); for the reading adopted by Olivelle, see the text at 464.11 and his discussion at 261, 925–26.

¹⁶³ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 86–87 (5.21), 180 (2.5.19).

¹⁶⁴ Ibid., 198 (2.13.5).

¹⁶⁵ Ibid., 274–75 (11.9–10).

¹⁶⁶ For students begging, see ibid., 10 (1.3.25), 136 (1.3.16), 270 (7.9), 279 (11.68). The student may in fact seek alms food from people of all classes, though not from outcastes (82 (2.35), and cf. 136 (1.3.17)).

¹⁶⁷ Ibid., 138 (1.4.7).

¹⁶⁸ Ibid., 83 (3.14–15), 193 (2.11.22), 207 (2.18.4), 273 (10.7). It is likewise said that the mendicant may obtain alms food from all classes (208 (2.18.14)).

¹⁶⁹ Ibid., 204 (2.17.16–17).

¹⁷⁰ For a summary of the schema, see Basham, Wonder that was India, 158–59.

¹⁷¹ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 193 (2.11.16); for the absence of possessions, see also 272–73 (10.6).

¹⁷² Manu, Laws, 122 (6.52).

¹⁷³ Basham, Wonder that was India, 159.

¹⁷⁴ One could, of course, respond that the absence of caste in Europe was Europe’s problem, not India’s. In 1898 a conservative Konkaṇastha Brahmin explained that Indian society, being older than that of Europe, had evolved further, and that Europe too would in due course advance to the level of a caste society (Lederle, Philosophical trends, 203–7). But in British India this ingenious argument was unlikely to cut much ice.

¹⁷⁵ An interesting Hindu discussion of toleration and its limits is found in the Āgamaḍambara, a play by the tenth-century Kashmiri scholar Jayanta Bhaṭṭa (Bhaṭṭa Jayanta, Much ado about religion). In a nutshell, religions whose beliefs one considers false, like Buddhism and Jainism, may be tolerated if they are old-established; religions that should be persecuted by the political authorities are those subversive of the social order (see, for example, 120–21, 130–31, 134–37, 250–53). Whether a newly formed but nonsubversive religion can be tolerated is left unclear. The limits of traditional Hindu toleration perhaps deserve more attention than they get in the secondary literature.

¹⁷⁶ K. W. Jones, “Two sanātan dharma leaders,” 230, 231. Compare the Varṇāśrama Dharma movement established by Tamil Brahmins in 1915, and denounced by a fellow Brahmin as an “obscurantist body” (Irschick, Politics and social conflict, 299–301).

¹⁷⁷ For example, he says of the wife: “As her personality is to merge in that of her husband, naturally, she is to be … continuously under his complete domination” (Deshpande, Dharma-shastra, 49).

¹⁷⁸ Ibid., 139.

¹⁷⁹ Ibid., 145.

¹⁸⁰ Ibid., 47, 154. Caste is “the main social unit of this order” (145).

¹⁸¹ Rangaswami Aiyangar, Hindu view of life, 99. Compare the remarks made by the Śankarācārya of Purī in Poona, above, 104.

¹⁸² Phule, Collected works, 2: 11, quoted in A. Sharma, Modern Hindu thought, 146.

¹⁸³ Gokhale, From concessions to confrontation, 164.

¹⁸⁴ Keer, Lokamanya Tilak, 395. To this, however, he added a less encouraging statement: “Many ask me what I am prepared to do personally in this behalf. I answer it is not my work.” For his caste background, see Lederle, Philosophical trends, 244.

¹⁸⁵ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 20–21. See above, 95.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid., 349. See above, 78.

¹⁸⁷ See the discussion in Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 2: 164–79.

¹⁸⁸ Jordens, Dayānanda Sarasvatī, 44, 62, 231–32, 249, 283–84.

¹⁸⁹ O’Hanlon, Caste, conflict, 125, 146, and cf. 147–48; Phule, Collected works, 2: 31, 51, 84.

¹⁹⁰ Jaffrelot, India’s silent revolution, 203. For an Ādi-dharm view of Manu, see Juergensmeyer, Religion as social vision, 45–46.

¹⁹¹ Gokhale, From concessions to confrontation, 94; Jaffrelot, India’s silent revolution, 203.

¹⁹² Irschick, Politics and social conflict, 339 and n68; Jaffrelot, India’s silent revolution, 171. See also Richman, “Ramasami’s reading,” 177, 182, 199n26.

¹⁹³ Gokhale, From concessions to confrontation, 95.

¹⁹⁴ Jaffrelot, India’s silent revolution, 329.

¹⁹⁵ Ibid., 391 and n12.

¹⁹⁶ Ibid., 406.

¹⁹⁷ Jaffrelot, “Politics of processions,” 76. For another example of Hindu nationalist deference to “Mahatma Phule” and Āmbeḍkar, see Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalism, 277 (and see 264, 266 for Āmbeḍkar).

¹⁹⁸ Hansen, Saffron wave, 227. He goes on to say that “the beauty of Hindu society is its infinite capacity for change,” an aesthetic that would not be shared by the Salafīs.

¹⁹⁹ See 95, and cf. 237.

²⁰⁰ See 434–35.

²⁰¹ See, for example, Luke 14:26–27, 33, and cf. below, 440.

²⁰² As a sixteenth-century English preacher put it, “Paradise is our native country” (Walzer, Revolution of the saints, 130). For Augustine’s views see also below, 297–98.

²⁰³ For other verses that presuppose that the disciples had money to buy provisions, see John 6:5, 13:29. These were key proof-texts for the anti-Franciscan argument (see Lambert, Franciscan poverty, 140).

²⁰⁴ See P. Brown, Eye of a needle, chaps. 3–4.

²⁰⁵ See, for example, ibid., 53, 59, 62, 64–65, 68, 73, 87.

²⁰⁶ See, for example, ibid., 53–54, 72, 75, 83–84.

²⁰⁷ For the qualifications, see ibid., 53, 59–60, 75, 80–81.

²⁰⁸ Cf. ibid., 265–66, 319.

²⁰⁹ For a wry account of a young couple who made a career of this, see ibid., 291–300. As a hard-line Pelagian statement of 414 put it: “A rich man who remains in his riches will not enter the Kingdom of God unless he sells all that he has” (320).

²¹⁰ Perhaps the closest we get to it is the idea that Christ might be hiding among the poor (ibid., 319, 509–10).

²¹¹ See 352–53.

²¹² See, for example, Peña, Theologies and liberation, 21–25 on the indigenous Sodalitium Vitae, and 26–32 on the international Opus Dei.

²¹³ See Purnell’s account of the folk Catholicism of the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro, centered on the dancing cult of the Lord of the Miracles (Purnell, Popular movements, 139–41).

²¹⁴ For an intriguing study of the local dynamics of the rural Cristiada, see Purnell’s account of the rivalry between the two neighbouring Purépecha villages of San Juan Parangaricutiro and Paricutín in Michoacán (ibid., chap. 6); the first joined the Cristero rebels, the second fought for the regime.

²¹⁵ I am indebted to Paul Hooper for valuable research assistance with the bibliography of Liberation Theology.

²¹⁶ For the nuances of Rerum novarum, see Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe, 214–22. For the later development of such thinking, see Curran, Catholic social teaching, 198–209.

²¹⁷ For this record, see Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, 15–17.

²¹⁸ Mainwaring, Catholic Church and politics, 37.

²¹⁹ For the presidency of Manuel Isidoro Belzú (1848–1855) see Klein, Bolivia, 128–30.

²²⁰ See 353–56.

²²¹ Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 168, and cf. xxi, 163, 171.

²²² Ibid., 165, and cf. xxii, xxv, 40, 164. In support he cites extensively from the Old Testament (166–68); the passages he quotes denounce the maltreatment of the poor but do not in fact condemn the existence of poverty as such.

²²³ Ibid., 172. For the poverty of Jesus see also 162–63. We need not concern ourselves with the way in which Gutiérrez understands “spiritual poverty” (xxv, 169–71).

²²⁴ Ibid., xli, xlv.

²²⁵ Ibid., xviii. For this solidarity with the poor, see also xxv, 68, 172; for the poor as the privileged members of the reign of God, see also xxxiii. Here as elsewhere, “kingdom” would fit better than the translator’s “reign.”

²²⁶ Ibid., xxvi, xxvii.

²²⁷ Ibid., 120.

²²⁸ For one example among many, see Berryman, Stubborn hope, 11–13 (on a district in Guatemala in the 1970s). It would not be unfair to say that there is a dearth of properly academic writing on Liberation Theology; most studies are strongly colored by commitment, whether for or against. Hindu nationalism is significantly better served in this respect.

²²⁹ I base this impression on D. H. Levine, Popular voices, especially chap. 8.

²³⁰ “So I joined in all that and boom, my eyes were opened,” as one layman put it (ibid., 275).

²³¹ This brand image is the payoff for the high overheads of the Catholic church (which are noted in Gill, Rendering unto Caesar, 179–80). By contrast, if a jumped-up Pentecostal pastor runs off with your wife and your money, you may have no institution to call to account.

²³² Levine, Popular voices, 285, 290, 298, 313. Compare the role of the Liberationist bishop Samuel Ruiz (d. 2011) of San Cristóbal (in office 1959–2000) as mediator in the stalemate following the military but not political failure of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in 1994 (Womack, Rebellion in Chiapas, 44, 47; for a sketch of Ruiz, see 23–33).

²³³ Carvalho Azevedo, Basic ecclesial communities, 94–95; for the dating, see 251.

²³⁴ Mainwaring, Catholic Church and politics, 174–75, 176–77.

²³⁵ Ibid., 175.

²³⁶ Burdick, Looking for God (for the location, see 10–12).

²³⁷ Ibid., viii.

²³⁸ Ibid., 204.

²³⁹ Ibid., 205.

²⁴⁰ Ibid., 206. The Assembly of God is Brazil’s largest Pentecostal church (4).

²⁴¹ Ibid., 186, and see 185.

²⁴² Ibid., 187.

²⁴³ Ibid., 188–89.

²⁴⁴ Ibid., 189.

²⁴⁵ Ibid., 191.

²⁴⁶ Ibid., 192.

²⁴⁷ Ibid., 199. Perhaps it was a little too exciting: the scene folded when Father Orlando had an affair with a married woman and had to leave the church (211).

²⁴⁸ Ibid., 197.

²⁴⁹ Ibid., 197–98.

²⁵⁰ Ibid., 5–6.

²⁵¹ Nagle, Claiming the Virgin: the broken promise of liberation theology in Brazil. The subtitle is misleading in suggesting a polemic against Liberation Theology. The author has not in fact bought into the worldviews of either side, even as a friendly critic, and has a fine eye for the human—not to say comical—dimensions of the story. The narrative core of the book stands out in the literature on Liberation Theology as immensely readable and illuminating.

²⁵² Todaro Williams, “Integralism,” 444–45. Ceará is on the northeast coast of Brazil.

²⁵³ Nagle, Claiming the Virgin, 51–52.

²⁵⁴ Ibid., 58–59.

²⁵⁵ Ibid., 82–83.

²⁵⁶ Ibid., 55.

²⁵⁷ Ibid., 94, 156–57.

²⁵⁸ Ibid., 72.

²⁵⁹ Ibid., 76. Compare Nagle’s account of the attitude of the conservative archbishop: “For him, the church is a sanctuary of hope, calm, and forgiveness, an oasis of peace in a chaotic world” (57–58). A similar sentiment was expressed by Edmund Burke in response to a politically radical sermon preached by a nonconformist inspired by the French revolution: “No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.” He likewise goes on to say, “Surely the church is a place where one day’s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind” (Burke, Reflections, 157).

²⁶⁰ Nagle, Claiming the Virgin, 16–17.

²⁶¹ Ibid., 68.

²⁶² Ibid., 151, and more generally 149–51.

²⁶³ Ibid., 76.

²⁶⁴ Ibid., 151, and cf. 153.

²⁶⁵ This indifference to social activism was not inherently Protestant. A strain of Protestant Liberation Theology did exist in Latin America (see Deiros, “Protestant fundamentalism,” 165–66, 188n76; Sigmund, Liberation theology, 53–55), and it could draw on the same scriptural resources as its Catholic counterpart. A Presbyterian missionary who at one time lived in Peru and was close to Haya de la Torre writes that the latter “made the discovery that in the writings of the Old Testament prophets and in the teachings of Jesus were more incandescent denunciations of oppression and wrong than he or his companions had ever made” (Mackay, Other Spanish Christ, 194; for Mackay’s relationship with Haya de la Torre, see Pike, Politics of the miraculous, 47). Indeed one does not even have to be a Christian to be vouchsafed this insight: in a book published in 1873, Phule mentioned Christ and the Buddha as examples of popular heroes who protected the weak from oppressive authority (O’Hanlon, Caste, conflict, 137). But for whatever reasons, Liberationism was a predominantly Catholic persuasion, and Pentecostalism was not socially activist. One relevant point may be that most Pentecostalist pastors did not come from elite backgrounds and had not been students—Marxists, we should remember, are people who look down on the petty bourgeoisie, whereas Pentecostalist pastors have been known to dress up to make themselves look like executives (see Birman, “Future in the mirror,” 67, in an account of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a Pentecostalist movement in Brazil).

²⁶⁶ The findings of the recent Pew Forum survey of Pentecostals and Charismatics in ten countries suggest that “the widespread perception of pentecostals as basically apolitical in outlook might need rethinking” (Pew Forum, Spirit and power, 2). More specifically, though focused on spiritual matters, many Pentecostals and Charismatics “also say there is a role for religion in politics and public life” (7), and they tend to the view that “religious groups should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions” (61, and see table, 62). On the other hand, “relatively few spend much time actually discussing political issues”; indeed, “in every country surveyed majorities of pentecostals say they never discuss politics with their friends and family or that they do so only once or twice a month” (66).

²⁶⁷ For faith healing see Chesnut, Competitive spirits, 7, 45, 81, 152; for exorcism see 5.

²⁶⁸ For the rise of the Catholic Charismatic renewal in Latin America, see ibid., chap. 4. Significantly, these Charismatics initially referred to themselves as “Pentecostal Catholics” (65); like Pentecostalism, the movement originated in the United States (66). In Latin America it expanded very rapidly in the 1980s (79). By the early 1990s, even in Brazil, Charismatics outnumbered members of base communities by a ratio of two to one (92). A rare writer on Liberation Theology to acknowledge the phenomenon is Nagle (Claiming the Virgin, 56, 179n3); researchers with Liberationist sympathies tend to have little empathy for the concern with spirit possession and faith healing that is central to Charismatic Catholicism, as it is to Pentecostalism.

²⁶⁹ Wensinck, Early Muhammadan tradition, 234a.

²⁷⁰ Moses was the greatest of the prophets but not the last (Deut. 18:15–19, 34:10–12), and the Jews began to claim that the age of the prophets was over only after the rise of Christianity; by contrast, the Muslim consensus rejecting the idea that there could be prophets after Muḥammad took shape very early (for this contrast see Friedmann, Prophecy continuous, 68–69). At the same time, the establishment of the Israelite temple cult was associated both with a strong assertion of the religious authority of the king (1 Kings 5–8) and with a hereditary priesthood.

²⁷¹ Manu, Laws, 12–13 (1.88).

²⁷² I owe this point to Patricia Crone.

²⁷³ Euben and Zaman, Readings in Islamist thought, 73.

²⁷⁴ See 103–5.

²⁷⁵ In this respect the Islamists are in tune (if a musical metaphor may be permitted) with an adventitiously modern feature of eighteenth-century Wahhābism. Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb wrote a short epistle clearly intended for the laity in which he set out the basics of monotheism in the form of four simple principles (qawāʿid). The epistle exists in many different texts; one version is distinguished, among other things, by the fact that it does not just instruct ordinary believers, it shows them how they themselves can use the simple arguments of the epistle to confound the polytheists around them (see, for example, the text in Ibn Qāsim, al-Durar al-saniyya, 2: 19–21). Another text of the epistle, drawn to my attention by Samer Traboulsi, is to be found in the chronicle of the Yemeni historian Luṭf Allāh Jaḥḥāf (d. 1827–1828) under the events of the year 1797–1798 (Durar nuḥūr al-ḥūr al-ʿīn, 653–56); he records it in connection with the reception of Wahhābism in ʿAsīr. The point of interest is that he describes how the text was used in instructing people in their religion: it was memorized by all and sundry (old and young, male and female, free and slave), and they in turn would teach it to their families and anyone else they could spread it to (653.6, 656.15).

²⁷⁶ For an Indian Sunnī scholar who favored such an arrangement in the mid-twentieth century, see Zaman, “South Asian Islam,” 65–67.

²⁷⁷ For a balanced assessment of this effect, see Zaman, Ulama, 1–2, 83–86.

²⁷⁸ Letter to Abū Muṣʿab al-Zarqāwī (d. 2006), the leader of al-Qāʿida in Mesopotamia, from a certain ʿAṭiyya, 2005 (dated 10 Dhū ʾl-Qaʿda 1426), 3.38 = 9 of the English translation on the same website).

²⁷⁹ See 420.

²⁸⁰ See 80–81.