Egypt and North Africa
Peter von Sivers
In May 1989, an eighteen-year-old woolcarder set fire to the Husayn Mosque in Cairo. The incident was written up in an Islamic newspaper by a journalist who deplored the act. The article began by asking why this young man would travel from his northern suburb all the way downtown to pray in a mausoleum-mosque—a place where, because of his stance on saint veneration, he believed prayer would be invalid; could he not instead have gone to any of the many mosques of Cairo that did not have tombs? In the remainder of the article, the journalist presents authoritative opinions by establishment figures on the specific requirements of order and decorum during mausoleum visits and on ordinary Muslims wrongly taking the law into their own hands. The article concluded that the woolcarder’s act was indefensible.1
This incident illustrates a typically modern conflict in northern Africa. A Muslim accepting the teaching of absolute separation between God and his creation literally takes drastic action to end the deeply rooted popular tradition of saint veneration in Egypt. And a believer in the traditionally broad Sunni orthodoxy defends saint veneration, provided it occurs in an orderly fashion according to accepted custom (adab). The conflict is not without precedent in earlier centuries, but it is only today that the two positions are seen as irreconcilable.
This chapter deals with, first, the formation (700–1250 C.E.) and dominance (1250–1800 C.E.) of a broad Sunni orthodoxy as the religion of the majority of the inhabitants of northern Africa; and second, modern efforts at political centralization and a narrowing of orthodox Sunnism, both of which have contributed to the rise of contemporary Islamism (1800 to the present).
The Formation and Dominance of Sunni Orthodoxy (700–1800)
The promotion of a specific religion as orthodoxy by an empire is a relatively late phenomenon in world history. The first to be so promoted was Zoroastrianism, adopted by the Persian Sasanids (224–651 C.E.) as their state religion. Islam, supported by the Arab caliphal dynasties of the Umayyads and Abbasids as the religion of their far-flung empire after their rise in the seventh century C.E., was the most recent. In all cases—be it Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, or Islam—the endorsed religion was attributed to a founding figure who preceded the empire. These religions went through more or less extended formative phases in the empires before they crystallized into dominant orthodoxies and a variety of heterodoxies that either died out or became marginal.2
Christianity, the state religion of the Roman-Byzantine Empire from the fourth century C.E., was in the last stage of its doctrinal evolution toward imperial orthodoxy when the Arabs occupied Byzantine Syria and Egypt in 634–55. It appears that it was the still unsettled question of a Christian orthodoxy for the Byzantine Empire that inspired the rulers of the new Arab empire to search for their own, independent, religion. Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705) was the first to leave us an idea of the beginnings of this new religion in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (691). He called this new religion “Islam” and proclaimed its superiority over Christianity.3
During the early seventh century, Byzantium had been racked by the controversy between the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria over the orthodox interpretation of Christology. Constantinople advanced the doctrine of Christ’s mysteriously double nature, divine as well as human (the Nicene Creed). Alexandria insisted on the more rational doctrine of God’s single, divine nature descending into the human form of Jesus (Coptic monophysitism). While the emperors vainly sought to impose a compromise formula, the caliphs took advantage of their disarray. “Do not speak of three (gods),” warns one of the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, disposing of Christology altogether.4 Islam was presented as the new, superior religion, built on a clear, rational separation between a single, non-Trinitarian God and the world.
Proclaiming a new religion was one thing; turning it into an orthodoxy was another. Inevitably Islam underwent the same process of rancorous divisions as did Christianity before orthodoxy eventually emerged. The rancor began over the nature of the caliphate and its ability to define doctrine. The caliphs interpreted themselves as representatives (caliphs) of God, and said that their decisions, therefore, were divine writ. On the other hand, it was claimed that because the divine word was laid down (probably by the 700s) in scripture, in the Quran, no one was privileged over anyone else to make law; the interpretation of scripture was held, in this view, to be a collective right.
At first the caliphs continued to issue laws and formulate dogma as they saw fit, but in the ninth century the tide turned. Pious critics, claiming to speak for all Muslims, increasingly gained the initiative. What had hitherto been caliphal law now was turned into the alleged precedents (hadiths) established by the prophet Muhammad. Ad hoc dogmas promulgated by the caliphs were replaced by a progressively systematic theology formulated by the critics. By the mid-thirteenth century, the separation between religion and state was complete: the critics, now officially recognized as the autonomous body of “religious scholars” (ʿulamaʾ), controlled dogma and law; the rulers had been demoted to the position of executive organs of religion.5
While the ʿulamaʾ were busy establishing the basics of scriptural orthodoxy, a parallel development was occurring on the level of religious practice. Early evidence comes from what began as a military institution during the period of the Arab conquests—the sentry post (ribat). Such posts—towers, forts, castles—existed by the score in northern Africa, along the Mediterranean coast, and in Anatolia, for protection against Byzantine counterattacks. In the ninth century, many of these posts lost their military purpose and evolved into autonomous religious foundations (waqfs), in conjunction with agricultural enterprises, mosques, and meeting rooms, and supported by alms and gifts. In the ribats, committed Muslims met for Quran recitation and ascetic practices, imitating the prophet Muhammad’s life. (The Quran and the biography of the Prophet became available as scriptures probably in the early 700s and 800s, respectively.) Many were mystics (sufis) and wrote manuals on how to acquire divine knowledge (maʿrifa), or were revered as “friends of God” (walis)—that is, saintly figures whose prayers and rituals for rain, healing, or exorcism were reported as effective and who attracted pilgrims and religious fairs to their ribat.6
As orthodoxy was being hammered out during these early centuries, dissenters essentially had two choices. Either they rejected the authority of caliphs and scholars altogether, a position taken by the so-called Kharijis (“Seceders”), and made the fulfillment of all laws and duties incumbent on Muslims as individuals. Or they deplored the caliphal retreat from law and dogma as a betrayal and labored for the reestablishment of the true caliphate, or “imamate” [(true) leadership], whose holder was held to be divinely empowered. The latter position was taken by the Shiʿis (“partisans” of ʿAli, who is traditionally listed as the fourth caliph). At the center of the Islamic Empire, adherents of both positions were ruthlessly persecuted and they therefore generally mounted their oppositional movements on the periphery.
North Africa, or the Maghrib (the “West”—that is, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) was one such peripheral refuge for dissenters. It was a sparsely inhabited imperial province of limited agricultural resources located on the coastal plains along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the adjacent mountains (the Kabylia in eastern Algeria, the Atlas in northern Morocco), and the oasis clusters of the northern Sahara. The steppes of the vast interior high plateau supported only pastoralists. The sedentary, mostly Christian population of indigenous Berbers in Byzantine Tunisia and Morocco (Tangier and Ceuta) had officially surrendered to the Arabs by 711 after half a century of intermittent fighting. The mountain villagers, high-plateau pastoralists, and desert nomads, fiercely devoted to their independence, either avoided the new Arab conquerors or fought them, stirred into action by Khariji refugees from the Arab heartlands.
In the middle of the eighth century, the Khariji refugees and local Berber converts founded a number of small mountain and oasis states that quickly supplemented their limited agricultural resources with camel-borne trans-Saharan trade. Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire, was in the process of developing into a cosmopolitan cultural and economic center with intensive trade interests in East Africa, India, China, Scandinavia, and the western Mediterranean. Cordoba, the capital of the Spanish Umayyads, was an almost equally impressive rival. The trade in both empires was based on a bimetallic monetary system of gold and silver coins. Most of the gold was obtained from Nubia, on the upper Nile to the south of Egypt, and West Africa, in the region of the upper Niger and Senegal Rivers. Nubia and West Africa were outside the Islamic empire. The merchants were Egyptian Copts and North African Kharijis who traded cloth and copperware for gold, ivory, and slaves. The Kharijis maintained permanent residences as well as mosques in the northern market towns of the Sudanic kingdoms and thus were the first carriers of Islam into West Africa.
As opponents of any strong central political authority, the Kharijis were content with small realms, far removed from the caliphs and religious scholars in Baghdad. By contrast, the Shiʿis favored a return to the original concept of the caliph as the sole representative of God—a concept that was being transformed in emerging Sunni orthodoxy into the caliph-ʿulamaʾ coregency. When their emissaries preached the message of the mahdi to establish a realm of justice, peace, and unity on earth, they clearly had the replacement of the Abbasid caliphate and its clerical scholars in mind.7
But even the Shiʿis had to start their proselytizing far away, in the mountains of Lesser Kabylia in eastern Algeria. There, at the end of the ninth century, a missionary from Iraq converted the Kutama Berber villagers to the cause of the Ismaʿiliyya, a Shiʿi branch devoted to immediate revolutionary action. The missionary Abu ʿAbdallah was part of a worldwide network of missionaries (daʿi, plural duʾat). They carried a religious message in the name of the descendants of Ismaʿil, the eldest son of Jaʾfar the sixth imam of the Shiʿa. Ismaʿil died before his father and his supporters, the more militant among the Shiʿis, rallied around his son Muhammad, and split from the main stream of the Shiʿa.8
In the early 900s, the Kutama Berbers conquered Tunisia from a local dynasty of Abbasid governors. The original missionary relinquished leadership to Ubayd Allah the Mahdi, who had lived in an Ismaʿili center in Syria before he was forced by Abbasid persecution to flee to the Maghrib. Once in power, the first Fatimid caliph began to implement his idea of the utopian realm of justice on earth (909–34). He and his descendants interpreted this to mean no less than the vanquishing of the Abbasid Empire—a feat they in fact almost accomplished. In 969, they conquered Egypt, Syria, and western Arabia; and in 1058/59, a Fatimid general briefly held power in Baghdad. Impressive as these conquests were, however, reality soon fell short of utopia: the justice of the Fatimids was no more equitable than that of the ʿAbbasids. They collected the same heavy taxes from the peasants and confiscated the properties of merchants and officials with the same arbitrariness. Furthermore, in spite of major propaganda and conversion efforts, they never succeeded in supplanting the nascent, but tenacious, Sunni orthodoxy in their empire. When the Fatimids eventually collapsed in 1171, their version of Islam disappeared rapidly from the central Islamic lands.9
Not surprisingly, while Fatimid imperialism was still dangerous it instilled militancy into the rising Sunni orthodoxy. From the mid-eleventh century onward, newly converted ethnic groups—Turks from Central Asia and Berbers from northern Africa—made themselves the champions of nascent Sunnism against the Shiʿis, the Christian Crusaders in Palestine, and the Christian reconquistadores in Spain.
The rural Berbers in northern Africa had barely been touched by Islam prior to the eleventh century. However, camel-breeding nomads such as the Sanhaja Berbers in the western Sahara had been involved in the trans-Saharan trade ever since the Kharijis pioneered this trade. The Saharan merchant city of Awdaghost, which had Muslim residences and mosques, was initially in the Berbers’ pastural territory, but around the turn of the tenth to the eleventh century it recognized the authority of the king of Ghana, a non-Muslim.
In 1035–36, a Sanhaja chief from near Awdaghost went on his pilgrimage to Mecca. On his return journey, seeking an Islamic instructor for his tribe, he met a Sunni scholar in Qayrawan, Tunisia. He recommended to him another scholar, the head of a school in southern Morocco, a sunni stronghold in the midst of a country infested with heresies. One of his disciples, Abdallah Ibn Yasin (d. 1059), accompanied the Sanhaja chief to the Sahara.
Ibn Yasin succeeded in harnessing the Sanhaja into a disciplined movement, the murabitun, known in Europe as Almoravids. They were committed to strictly observe the letter of the law, according to the Maliki madhhab. At its height, the Al-moravid empire (1042–1148) encompassed Mauritania, Morocco, western Algeria, and the southern half of Spain. However, both Almoravid military power and religious orthodoxy were on shaky foundations: The original tribal troops were not easily transformed into a professional army, since most troops preferred settlement over continued service, and their nontribal replacements, recruited in the conquered territories or from abroad, failed to coalesce into effective units. As for Almoravid orthodoxy, “guardsman” Islam proved too narrow in comparison with theological developments in Islamic civilization generally. In the twelfth century, eminent scholars (e.g., Abu Hamid al-Ghazali; d. 1111) were proposing the limited use of philosophy, mainly for the interpretation of dogma, so as to combat more easily the counterorthodoxy of Shiʿism; they wanted to explain with the help of rational arguments the superiority of Sunni Islam. The Almoravid scholars, unfamiliar with philosophy, lacked theological sophistication and therefore found it difficult to defend their narrow Sunnism.10
On both military and religious grounds, the Almoravids were thus unable to consolidate their empire. Their regime was challenged at the beginning of the twelfth century by the Almohads. The founder of the Almohad movement, Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Tumart (d. 1130), a Masmuda Berber from the Anti-Atlas mountains in southern Morocco, staunchly supported Ghazali’s theological position within rising Sunnism. Ibn Tumart’s central doctrine was that of the unity of God as distinct from the multiplicity of the things making up the world. Since all-encompassing divine oneness is rationally incomprehensible Ibn Tumart proposed to interpret it with the help of the theological tool of analogy (taʾwil). The followers of this theological interpretation, called al-muwahhidun (“Unitarians”), or Almohads, built an empire that at its height was even more impressive than that of the Almoravids, comprising all of the Maghrib as well as Islamic Spain (1148–1269).11 Like its predecessor, the Almohad empire disintegrated during the transition from fielding conquering armies to garrisoning troops, although its religious legacy—a broad Sunni orthodoxy—proved to be a lasting accomplishment. The empire was succeeded by a set of regional successor states in the Maghrib and Spain.
By this time (mid-thirteenth century), Sunni orthodoxy had reached its mature phase: law and theology had been fully formulated and the mystics and saints who had hitherto practiced Islam in the ribats began to move into lodges (zawiyas; lit. “retreats”) in the countryside. Scriptural Islam was taught and studied in urban colleges, such as the Qarawiyyin in Fez and the Zaytuna in Tunis. Mystical and popular Islam began to include the population outside the cities and away from the coast. The zawiyas in the countryside, with their saint’s mausoleums, guardian families, and religious rituals were supported by alms from the surrounding peasants or nomads and provided basic education in reading and writing to promising young men. The rituals were named after their patron saints and often became the distinctive practices of entire brotherhoods of lodges, called tariqas, with branches throughout the Islamic world.
The earliest saint whose full biography and writings we possess was Abu Madyan Shuʿayb Ibn al-Husayn (1126–90), a Spaniard who became the patron saint of Tlemcen in western Algeria. One of his disciples was Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1256), a Moroccan whose Shadhiliyya tariqa became one of the most influential and widespread brotherhoods in the Islamic world (today it has its own website).12 Thus it is only from the thirteenth century and the establishment of Sunni orthodoxy onward that we can speak of the full Islamization of the Maghrib.
In Egypt, the final establishment of Sunni orthodoxy occurred when the Kurdish-descended Saladin (Salah al-Din; ruled 1171–93), with his Turkish cavalry troops, destroyed the Fatimid empire in 1171. Saladin was a champion of the Turkish-endorsed version of broad Sunni orthodoxy that Ghazali had formulated half a century earlier. Two types of new urban institutions were devoted to the promulgation of this orthodoxy, the college (madrasa) for the teaching of scripturalism and the seminary (khanqa) for the teaching of mysticism. Both were religious foundations similar to the ribats mentioned above, financially independent from the government and maintained by rents collected from urban real estate or villages. Both madrasas and khanqas maintained salaried professors and instructors and provided lodging and scholarships for their students. As in the Maghrib, the ribats gave way to zawiyas that dotted city neighborhoods and the countryside. Here the general population received oral instruction in the basics of Islam and congregated for the practice of local religious customs.13
Saladin’s descendants, the Ayyubids (1193–1250), and the Turkish Mamluks (1250–1517) further broadened orthodoxy by endowing sufi seminaries and encouraging the teaching of the Shafiʿi law for the people of lower Egypt, the Maliki law for the people of upper Egypt and Alexandria, and the Hanafi law for Syrian residents and for the Turkish-speaking elite.14 The same broad orthodoxy was maintained by the Turkish Ottomans who conquered Egypt in 1517 and established tributary regimes in Algeria (1518), Libya (1551), and Tunisia (1574). In fact, under the Ottomans the previously distinct career paths of ʿulamaʾ and sufi shaykhs in Cairo and Alexandria merged, and only brotherhoods and lodges with distinctly local practices and customs remained separate. During the Ottoman period (1517–1798), religious scholars at the prominent Azhar University could be enrolled in as many as two dozen sufi circles, and many sufi shaykhs were distinguished teachers of law.15
Only a small handful of ʿulamaʾ/sufi shaykhs expressed discomfort with local saint cults or brotherhood practices that they considered to be beyond the pale of orthodoxy. On a theological level, they criticized the concepts of sainthood and miraculous powers as “associationism” (shirk), “unbelief” (kufr), and blameworthy “innovation” (bidʿa), since God alone was all-powerful. On a moral level, they criticized the pilgrimages, processions, fairs, music, dances, self-mortifications, and exorcisms connected with a number of popular tombs and brotherhoods as unruly, disorderly, and against prevailing custom. However, combating heterodox minority movements of the Khariji and Fatimid variety was one thing; taking on heterodox popular religious customs supported by perhaps as many as 90 percent of the Egyptian population was quite another. Hence the absence of any resonance among the population at large.
Only one case is known where criticism provoked a commotion, and that was short-lived. This case involved a Turkish preacher, Ibrahim Gülsheni, who in 1711 incited his listeners to go out from his mosque and combat blameworthy innovations in the Turkish and Arab shrines. A crowd surged forth to the Zuwayla Gate (which was believed to be the seat of the unseen master of all saints) and attacked the dervishes (popular sufis) holding ad hoc sessions on the streets around the gate. The chief jurisconsults (muftis) issued legal opinions (fatwas) in which they affirmed the reality of miracles and refused to transform saintly retreats into law colleges. The chief judge (qadi al-askar) refused to debate the preacher and on the second day the government put down the riot. The Turkish preacher was exiled and his mosque closed down. A poet who witnessed the events cleverly turned the preacher’s own moral argument against him: “He exceeded the proper bounds, he exaggerated, he incited the army against us!”16
In Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia, the Ottomans pursued the same broad policy of Sunni orthodoxy. Since they were not numerous enough to impose a firm regime on the tribal populations of the interior, they tacitly allowed many zawiya shaykhs to assume rudimentary political functions, such as arbitration in tribal disputes, collection of taxes, and even maintenance of auxiliary cavalry troops. Morocco remained outside the Ottoman Empire, mainly thanks to the rise of the Saʿdids, a southern Moroccan family of zawiya shaykhs claiming descent from the Prophet.
The Saʿdids (1510–1613) were self-declared champions of the liberation of the country from the Portuguese, who had held all major ports for varying time periods (1415–1578). Unwilling to exchange one set of invaders for another, the Saʿdids vigorously repelled the Ottomans. In 1591 the Saʿdi Sultan al-Mansur sent a Moroccan expedition force across the Sahara. With the superiority of firearms the Moroccans defeated the Songhay kingdom, and took possession of Timbuktu. The Pashalik of Timbuktu was ruled directly from Morocco during a short period (1591–1618), and then became autonomous until the second half of the eighteenth century.17 After a period of disunity in the country, another Prophet-descended zawiya family, the ʿAlawids from central Morocco, established a more modest regime (1668 to the present).18
Political Recentralization and Religious Reform (1800 to the present)
By the 1700s, Europe had completely supplanted the Middle East and northern Africa as the main commercial hub of the world. Not surprisingly, after the Middle East had been relegated to secondary status, the ensuing financial crisis crippled the central institutions in the existing empires. Northern Africa was no exception. The Ottomans were barely able to hang on to control in Egypt, and they lost Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya to autonomous rulers or even dynasties whose own power, in turn, was largely limited to the coasts. In Morocco, the ʿAlawids effectively controlled only about one-third of the country, largely on the central plain around Rabat. After the shock of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, northern African rulers bestirred themselves and introduced reforms designed to recentralize their states’ institutions.
Muhammad ʿAli (ruled 1805–48), the Ottoman governor in Egypt, set the pace for this recentralization. In the religious domain, in 1812 he issued a decree that installed the sufi shaykh Muhammad al-Bakri (d. 1880) as the head of all brotherhoods, lodges, and saints’ mausoleums. Although al-Bakri’s family had held the position since the seventeenth century—in part by virtue of their claim to be descendants of Abu Bakr, traditionally the first caliph—their role had been without executive power. The Bakris led the annual celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid); for the rest, religious institutions administered themselves as they saw fit. Now the position was given teeth: all shaykhs had to receive official appointments from al-Bakri before acceding to their positions as heads of their brotherhoods, lodges, or saints’ mausoleums. Muhammad ʿAli’s primary intention was to put some structure and organization into the diffuse amalgamation of theologically and financially autonomous religious organizations. But he also aimed at curtailing the reach of Azhar University, the country’s flagship institution, whose professors in his view were double-dipping in a large number of religious brotherhoods. Finally, through this act of “divide and rule,” Muhammad ʿAli sought to minimize resistance against his subsequent land- and tax-reform decrees of 1812–14, which affected the landholdings of all religious institutions.19
Although intended to increase the supervisory control of the state, Muhammad ʿAli’s decree changed very little in the intricate web of religious institutions. Furthermore, since his successors’ energy slackened in the recentralization drive, the government’s declared assumption of power over the religious appointments remained theoretical. Much more drastic was the centralization process in Algeria, where it was carried out by the French through their policy of colonial centralization. An initial French expedition in 1830 resulted in the removal of the autonomous Turkish regime on the coast, and further efforts in 1841–47 brought about the destruction of a state under the zawiya of ʿAbd al-Qadir (d. 1883) in the interior;20 but this system broke down when the zawiya embarked on his own centralization drive. Once fully in control, however, the French systematically destroyed the autonomy of the brotherhoods, sometimes with the help of military repression and land confiscation.
The most spectacular destruction of a brotherhood occurred in 1871, when France had been defeated in its war against Prussia. At this moment, when the colonial regime appeared to be vulnerable, a tribal leader, Muhammad al-Muqrani, and a Rahmaniyya shaykh, Haddad, concluded an alliance and led a powerful uprising that engulfed most of eastern Algeria. At first the rebels achieved surprising successes against the depleted French troops, but after the death of Muqrani in one of the battlefield encounters, the uprising lost its momentum, and a year later it was completely crushed. The consequences were devastating: some eight hundred thousand Algerians (one-quarter of the population) were condemned to fines of 35 million francs and the loss of 450,000 hectares of agricultural land (equivalent to 70 percent of their properties). Thereafter, the autonomy of the population in the interior of the country, including the lodges and brotherhoods, was essentially broken.21
As recentralization took hold in Egypt and Algeria, lodge and brotherhood leaders who were determined to maintain the autonomy of their institutions had little choice but to establish themselves in regions traditionally outside the reach of northern African states, such as southern Libya, Mauritania, and Africa south of the Sahara.
Libya was a special case: the Ottomans, in pursuit of their own centralization program, deposed the provincial dynasty of governors in 1835 and reestablished direct rule. But after crushing a few rebellions in the north they dug in on the coast around Tripoli, Benghazi, and Derna and left the interior of the country (except for the Fezzan oasis) largely to its own devices. Thus, for the two hundred thousand or so inhabitants of the remote eastern province of Cyrenaica (Barqa), little was altered from the preceding century. In 1841, shaykh Muhammad Ibn ʿAli al-Sanusi (d. 1859) arrived there with his followers to found a brotherhood eventually known as the Sanusiyya.
Al-Sanusi was an Algerian from Mostaghanem who had spent nearly two decades in Mecca as a student of one of the most prominent scholarly sufis of the time, the Moroccan Ahmad Ibn Idris (d. 1838). Other students of Ibn Idris would become the founders of brotherhoods in Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea; thus, Ibn Idris’s mystical treatises became influential not only in Libya, Chad, and Niger, but also in eastern Africa. The Ottomans in Cyrenaica abandoned their initial suspicions after they had assured themselves of the immense learning of al-Sanusi; it was more advantageous for them to deal with one man seeking to maintain order than with hundreds of tribes playing hide-and-seek and disrupting the security of the country. The Sanusi family dutifully asked the Ottoman authorities for building permits and religious foundation status for its lodges dotting the oases of the Libyan Sahara. After their expansion to the Sahel, the Sanusis obtained similar permits from West African rulers. By 1900, there were close to 150 lodges.22
The southward movement of another of the Algerian brotherhoods, the Tijaniyya, followed a different trajectory. The brotherhood was founded by Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815) in the western Algerian Sahara at the end of the eighteenth century. The Tijanis had successfully defied the Turks on the coast and—advancing an unusual bid for preeminence—they claimed to have superseded all previous brotherhoods. But after a failed bid for a Saharan state, they submitted to the French and one descendant even married a Frenchwoman. They established lodges in all the Maghribi countries and, via the affiliation of Mauritanian pilgrims returning from Mecca in 1789, extended their influence to the far southwest of the Maghrib.23
Mauritanian society had undergone a drastic restructuring in the centuries after producing the Almoravids. Bedouin tribes had arrived from Arabia, Arabizing most of the Maghribian Berber nomads, except for the Tuareg, as they swept through North Africa. When they established themselves in Mauritania, a complex system of tribal dependencies emerged. On the one hand were the unarmed zawaya tribes claiming saintly status and supporting a high level of legal education and practice; on the other hand were the secular warrior tribes. The latter depended on the zawayas for the conclusion of truces and occasional periods of peace, but they also collected tribute from them, both in oases and when the zawayas were traveling as merchants. Both the zawayas and the warriors controlled the tributary farmers and pastoralists who made up the bulk of the population. Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, most zawayas were affiliated with the Qadiriyya, the oldest brotherhood in the Islamic world. The Tijanis, in spite of their efforts, managed to enroll only one, hitherto mostly unaffiliated, zawaya tribe in Mauritania. As proud believers in Tijani supremacy, they had no other choice but to carry their beliefs further south of the Sahara. There the Tijanis became spectacularly successful through the jihad-leader Hajj ʿUmar (d. 1864).24
To return to the situation in Egypt: al-Bakri worked diligently during his long and respected tenure to bring administrative order into the diffuse world of brotherhoods, lodges, and saintly mausoleums. What initially had been a purely administrative mandate of centralization gradually shifted into a government-led redefinition of what constituted Sunni orthodoxy. The traditional division between state and religion, in force since the thirteenth century, was attenuated. Few Egyptians seemed to mind, except perhaps those whom al-Bakri administered. In fact, a few Egyptian administrators and Western-educated professionals expressed embarrassment about “crude” popular religious practices that they viewed as incompatible with (Western) “civilized” life. Thus, during the turbulent years after 1876 when a heavily indebted Egypt lost its sovereignty to a French-British financial commission, a number of Azhar shaykhs, Western-educated journalists, and European consuls supported a drastic religious-reform decree devised by the new khedive of Egypt, Tawfiq (ruled 1879–92), and promulgated in 1881.25
According to this decree, the following rituals were to be removed from all religious meetings and parades: the use of swords, needles, and other instruments for self-mortification; the eating of live coals, serpents, and glass; chanting the liturgy; hyperventilating while chanting the name of God; the alternate bowing of adepts facing each other in rows; jumping up and down from one foot to the other; beating drums and other musical instruments; carrying anything but banners; and riding on horseback over a carpet of prostrate adepts. The list amounted to a virtual outlawing of any ecstatic state, and hence of mysticism itself if a brotherhood’s practices were deemed unbecoming to a modern, progressive, civilized nation,26
As it turned out, the 1881 decree moved no further than the paper it was written on—as with its predecessor of 1812. Muhammad al-Bakri had died just prior to the promulgation of the decree and he was succeeded by his thirty-year-old son Muhammad Tawfiq al-Bakri (d. 1911), who lacked both the erudition and experience of his father. The government was in no position to enforce the decree, and even the British, who took over in 1882, were unwilling to assemble the totalitarian state that would have been necessary to suppress popular culture. The decree was reissued in 1905, but its only effect was a discreet disappearance of some brotherhoods from the streets into private homes.27
It appears that the prominent religious reformers of the late-nineteenth century, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905), had no influence on the 1881 decree, although they greeted it warmly, of course, and in their subsequent writings advocated similar reforms. Thus the important movement of the Salafiyya (from salaf; “ancestors”) that they inspired and that advocated a return to the allegedly pristine, rational, and progressive religion of the ancestors surrounding the prophet Muhammad was a consequence, rather than the fountainhead of the narrow orthodoxy that came to dominate the twentieth century. The line from the broad traditional to the narrow modern Sunnism of northern Africa clearly passed through the modern, centralizing state of Muhammad ʿAli.28
Paradoxically, both Abduh and many Salafis of the subsequent generation of religious reformers were well trained in sufi practices. They therefore did not categorically condemn mysticism as unbelief, but they made clear that it was quite unnecessary for the faith of the reformed Muslim, just as were the detailed legal compendia from the time of broad orthodoxy (1250–1800). All a Muslim needed was the Quran, the Prophet’s biography, and the precedents Muhammad set for living an Islamic life (called hadiths)—all as formulated by Islamic scholars in the period between the late-eighth and eleventh centuries.
In the 1930s, Egypt experienced its first stage of industrialization, with a beginning rural-urban migration, rising birth rate, and expanded literacy. But it also felt the effects of the worldwide economic crisis following the U.S. stock market crash of 1929. Islamic fundamentalism or “Islamism”—that is, the narrowed Sunni orthodoxy of the Salafiyya that was disseminated in the form of popular tracts—became an attractive alternative to the secular, formal democracy of the wealthy Egyptian landowners who were in control of Egyptian politics. Although there was still opposition to the alleged unbelief of mystics, Islamists were more concerned with condemning secular democracy and praising strict religious rule under a caliphate they wanted to see reestablished. (The Turks had abolished the caliphate in 1924 when they created the Republic of Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.) By far the largest Islamist movement was, and is, that of the Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan al-Muslimun), founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949), a modern-trained school teacher. The movement expanded rapidly in the late 1930s and in the 1940s to several hundred thousand members. In the Maghrib, still under complete French colonial control, the tumultuous 1930s were experienced in more muted form, but even there, small Islamic associations devoted to adult education and social activities left their mark.29
After World War II, these fundamentalists were overshadowed by nationalist parties fighting for independence in northern Africa. These parties recruited their militants from the nontraditional urban professional, student, and worker milieus. The members were usually at least nominal Muslims who, once in power after independence, focused on the pursuit of large, state-led industrialization programs and expanded education. The educational curricula included a strong dose of what one perhaps can call a secularized version of Islamism. In this version, it was not the allegedly original Islam of Muhammad, his companions, and the early caliphs that was emphasized, but the alleged Arabism of these figures. Arabism was assumed to have been corrupted in the later centuries, particularly during the period from 1500 to 1800, when the Ottoman Turks were said to have oppressed the Arab nation. Given the appropriate circumstances, however, it was easy for students to shift from Arabism to Islamism.
These circumstances arrived in the 1960s. Once again, urbanization, birth rates, and literacy rose, this time explosively. In contrast to the 1930s, the urban masses were much larger, crowded more densely together in dysfunctional cities, and 50 percent of them were youths under twenty-one years of age. Not surprisingly, Islamism experienced a rebirth, beginning in the late 1960s and expanding rapidly in the 1970s. Tracts were again written and distributed in large numbers. Nationalism and socialism were condemned as godless Western ideologies—alien to northern Africa—that had corrupted the Muslims. Mysticism was denigrated as a relic of the past. When the governments hastened to de-emphasize their nationalist roots and socialist programs and expressed their support for a “moderate,” broadly defined Sunni orthodoxy, small militant minorities went over to terrorism. In the eyes of these terrorists, the secular, Westernized government elites were composed of “hypocrites” (munafiqun) and unbelievers whom good Muslims had a holy duty to destroy.
The Tunisian and Moroccan governments succeeded in suppressing their small terrorist movements after brief episodes in the 1980s. In Egypt, too, terrorist organizations, operating since the early 1970s, were largely mastered by the late 1990s. Only Algeria was racked by a protracted stalemate between the government and Islamists. There have been more than seventy thousand victims of violence in Algeria since 1992, when the government canceled an electoral victory of the Islamists. The chances for an Islamic solution, however, seem to be dim since the Algerian government so far has been able to hang on to large revenues from exports of gas and oil. Behind the scenes, the military and its pervasive secret service have regained the initiative and since spring 1999 terrorism has declined sharply.30
The ultimate problem for Islamists is that in spite of the huge demographic burgeoning in all northern African countries, they have failed so far to attract more than, at most, 20 percent of the populations. Particularly in Egypt, the broad orthodoxy of mysticism and popular Islam discussed above is alive and well. Today’s Egyptian governments have retreated from Muhammad ʿAli’s all-too-close control of religion in the name of administrative centralization. Short of becoming totalitarian, no government would be able to gain control over popular religion and destroy allegedly unorthodox practices. Consequently, the decrees of 1812 and 1905 were abrogated, and a much broader and more tolerant new decree concerning the organization and practice of religion was issued in 1976. Defenders of the traditional, broad orthodoxy feel far less intimidated now to engage in public debates, as the reaction to the mosque incident cited at the beginning of the chapter demonstrates. Perhaps traditional broad orthodoxy will weather the current Islamist assault.31
1. Story taken from Johansen 1996.
2. For a comparative discussion of empires devoted to the promotion of monotheism, see Fowden 1993.
3. During the last three decades, a number of scholars have begun to distinguish between the historical and the theological origins of Islam. The sources on the Arab occupation of Syria and Iraq in the seventh century C.E. say very little about the religion of the occupants. By contrast, the Islamic sources of the eighth and following centuries present a detailed picture of the seventh-century origins, but with the theological intent of demonstrating the development of a fully developed religion of Islam in the Arab desert, prior to its imperial expansion by the Arabs beginning with Syria and Iraq. See Wansbrough 1978; Crone and Cook 1977.
4. On the significance of the Dome of the Rock for the formation of Islamic religion, see Rippin 1990.
5. On the history of the caliph-ʿulamaʾ dispute and its role in the formation of orthodoxy, see Crone and Hinds 1986.
6. A detailed discussion of the evolution of ribat is found in Halm 1991, chapter entitled “Ribat and Gihad.”
7. The leading specialist on the Kharijis is Lewicki. See especially Lewicki 1960, 1962, 1971, and 1976. A more recent study is Schwartz 1983.
8. On the early Ismailiyya, see Daftary 1990.
9. The two leading historians on the Fatimids are Halm (1991) and Madelung (1961).
10. Norris 1971; Levtzion 1979.
11. The best study in English of the Almohads is Le Tourneau 1969.
12. Mackeen 1971; Ibn al-Sabbagh 1993.
13. Fernandes 1988.
14. Ibid., 33–110.
15. Winter 1992.
16. Ibid., 158–60.
17. Cook 1994.
18. el-Mansour 1990.
19. de Jong 1978, 7–95.
20. Danziger 1977.
21. von Sivers 1994, 555; the best survey of modern Algerian history is Ruedy 1992.
22. Vikør 1995.
23. Abun-Nasr 1965.
24. Scholarship on Mauretania is woefully underdeveloped. An exception is Oßwald 1986.
25. de Jong 1978, 96–97.
26. Ibid., 97–121.
27. Ibid., 124–68.
28. Ibid., 97 n. 8. See also Keddie 1972; Kerr 1966.
29. Mitchell 1969; Merad 1967.
30. Kepel 1985; Burgat and Dowell 1993.
31. Johansen 1996.
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