Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

They said the core of Islam was the belief in tawhid: the unity, singleness, and universality of Allah. From this, they argued that the Qur’an could not be eternal and uncreated (as the ulama proclaimed) because if it were, the Qur’an would constitute a second divine entity alongside Allah, and that would be blasphemy. They argued, therefore, that the Qur’an was among Allah’s creations, just like human beings, stars, and oceans. It was a great book, but it was a book. And if it was just a book, the Qur’an could be interpreted and even (gasp) amended.

God, they went on to say, did not have attributes, such as justice, mercy, or power: ascribing attributes to God made Him analyzable into parts, which violated tawhid—unity. God was a single indivisible whole too grand for the human mind to perceive or imagine. What human beings called the attributes of God only named the windows through which humans saw God. The attributes we ascribe to Allah, the Mu’tazilites said, were actually only descriptions of ourselves.

From their conception of Allah, the Mu’tazilites derived the idea that good and evil, right and wrong, were aspects of the unchanging reality of God, reflecting deep principles that humans could discover in the same way that human beings could discover the principles of nature. In short, this or that behavior wasn’t good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover. Reason, therefore, was itself a valid instrument for discovering ethical, moral, and political truth independently of revelation, according to the Mu’tazilites.

The ulama were in a good position to fight off such challenges. They controlled the laws, education of the young, social institutions such as marriage, and so on. Most importantly, they had the fealty of the masses. But the Mu’tazilites had advantages too—or rather, they had one advantage: the favor of the court, the imperial family, the aristocrats, and the top officials of the government. In fact, the seventh Abbasid khalifa made Mu’tazilite theology the official doctrine of the land.

Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school of law, the last of the orthodox schools to develop, and the most rigidly conservative of them all. Ibn Hanbal was born in Baghdad in 164 AH, just thirty-six years after the Abbasid dynasty began.

Above all, he declared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul’s safety only by following in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation. The other schools of Islamic law gave analogical reasoning (qiyas) a high place as a way to discover how the shari’a applied to new situations, but Ibn Hanbal drastically demoted such methods: rely only on Qur’an and hadith, he said.

When Ibn Hanbal refused to disavow his views, he was physically beaten, but it didn’t change his mind. He was clapped into prison. Still he clung to his principles: never would he let reason trump revelation, never!

When the aging, aching Ibn Hanbal was released from prison, reverent crowds greeted him and cheered him and carried him home. Seeing this, the imperial court developed some reservations about Islamic philosophy and the Greek ideas from which it derived. The next khalifa demoted the Mu’tazilites and heaped honors upon Ibn Hanbal, which signaled the waning prestige of the Mu’tazilites, and with them the philosophers.

In reaction, perhaps, to the luxurious lifestyles of Muslim elite, some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called suf in Arabic, for which reason people began to call these people Sufis.

In Basra, for example, lived the poet Rabia al-Basri, whose life is now laced with legend.

As a little girl, she had been traveling somewhere with her family when bandits hit the caravan. They killed her parents and sold Rabia into slavery. That’s how she ended up in Basra as a slave in some rich man’s household.

but in her day, her fame was great: many journeyed to Basra just to see Rabia for themselves. Many came away convinced that she had found the key to union with Allah. To her, the key was not fear but love, utterly abandoned, reckless, and unlimited love.

Hungry seekers hung around with the charismatic mystic herself, hoping to catch her passion like a fever. Some did catch it, they said, which of course brought more seekers to her gates. I don’t call them students, because no books were involved, no scholarship, no study. Rabia of Basra did not teach. She simply radiated, and people in her vicinity changed. This became the pattern in Sufism: direct transmission of techniques leading to enlightenment from master to mureed, as would-be Sufis were called.

Hallaj means “cotton carder.” This was his father’s profession, and he too started out in the family trade; but the longing for union with God sank talons into his heart, and he abandoned his home to search for a master who would initiate him into Sufi secrets. At one point, he spent an entire year standing motionless in front of the Ka’ba, never uttering a sound.

But the sober Sufis began to back away from him, because Hallaj was saying things like, “My turban is wrapped around nothing but God.” And again, “Inside my clothes you’ll find nothing but God.” And finally, in case someone didn’t get his point, “I am God.” Well, actually, he said, “I am Truth,” but “Truth” was famously one of the ninety-nine names of God and given Hallaj’s recent history, no one could miss what he was getting at.

The authorities did not just execute Hallaj. They hung him, cut off his limbs, decapitated him, and finally burned his corpse. Oddly enough, it didn’t work. Hallaj was gone, but Sufism continued to proliferate. Charismatic individuals kept emerging, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all across the civilized world. Some were “sober” Sufis like Junayd and some were the God-intoxicated variety, like Rabia Basri and Hallaj.

At this juncture, one of the intellectual giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the province of Khorasan. His name was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.

Ghazali came to their rescue. The way to beat the philosophers, he decided, was to join them enough to use their tricks against them. He plunged into a study of the ancients, mastered logic, and inhaled the treatises of the Greek. Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called The Aims of the Philosophers. It was chiefly about Aristotle.

One has to admire Ghazali’s fair-mindedness. He didn’t set up a straw man for himself to knock down. His account of Aristotle was so lucid, so erudite, that even hard-core Aristotelians read the book and said, “Aha! Now at last I understand Aristotle!” Ghazali’s book made its way to Andalusia and from there into Christian Europe, where it dazzled those few who could read. Western Europeans had pretty much forgotten classical Greek thought since the fall of Rome. For most, this was their first exposure to Aristotle. Somewhere along the way, however, Ghazali’s preface had dropped out, so Europeans didn’t know Ghazali was against Aristotle. Some, indeed, thought he was Aristotle, writing under a pen name. In any case, The Aims of the Philosophers so impressed Europeans that Aristotle acquired for them an aura of imposing authority, and later Christian philosophers devoted much energy to reconciling church doctrines with Aristotelian thought. Meanwhile, back in Persia, Ghazali had written his follow-up to The Aims of the Philosophers, a second seminal volume called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Here, Ghazali identified twenty premises on which Greek and Greco-Islamic philosophy depended, then used syllogistic logic to dismantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my mind, was his attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among material phenomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think fire causes cotton to burn, because fire is ...

Ghazali allowed that mathematics, logic, and even the natural sciences could lead to true conclusions, but wherever they conflicted with the revelations, they were wrong. But if science is right only when it reaches the same conclusions as revelation, we don’t need science. All the truth we need we can get from the revelations. Some of the philosophers struck back. Ibn Rushd (known to Europeans as Averroes) wrote a riposte to Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence , but it did little good: when the smoke cleared, Ghazali had won the day.

Ghazali won tremendous accolades for his work. He was appointed head of the prestigious Nizamiya University in Baghdad, the Yale of the medieval Islamic world. The orthodox establishment acknowledged him as the leading religious authority of the age. Ghazali had a problem, however: he was an authentically religious man, and somehow, amid all the status and applause, he knew he didn’t have the real treasure. He believed in the revelations, he revered the Prophet and the Book, he was devoted to the shari’a, but he wasn’t feeling the palpable presence of God—the very same dissatisfaction that had given rise to Sufism. Ghazali had a sudden spiritual crisis, resigned all his posts, gave away all his possessions, abandoned all his friends, and went into seclusion. When he came out of it many months later, he declared that the scholars had it right, but the Sufis had it righter: The Law was the Law and you had to follow it, but you couldn’t reach Allah through book learning and good behavior alone. You needed to open your heart, and only the Sufis knew how to get the heart opened up.

Ghazali now wrote two more seminal books, The Alchemy of Happiness and The Revival of the Religious Sciences. In these, he forged a synthesis between orthodox theology and Sufism by explaining how the shari’a fit in with the tariqa, the Sufi method for becoming one with God. He created a place for mysticism within the framework of orthodox Islam and thus made Sufism respectable.

Public opinion rarely believes or disbelieves anything based on proof. Besides, hardly anything in philosophy is ever definitively proven right or wrong.

In the years that followed, more and more people turned in this direction. The assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral matters allows people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no two people having exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doctrines that assert unambiguous rules promote social solidarity because they enable people to cohere around shared beliefs, and when no one knows what tomorrow may bring, people prefer to clump together.

Various clues suggest to me that in the early days of Islam, women had more independence and a greater role in public affairs than they had later on, or than many have in the Islamic world today. The Prophet’s first wife Khadija, for example, was a powerful and successful businesswoman who started out as Mohammed’s employer. The Prophet’s youngest wife Ayesha led one major party during the schism that followed Othman’s death. She even commanded armies in the field, and no one seemed surprised that a woman would take on this role. Women were present at the iconic early battles as nurses and support staff and even sometimes as fighters. In the battle of Yarmuk, the chronicles tell of the widow Umm Hakim fighting Byzantine soldiers with a tentpole for a sword.2 Also, details about some of the battles come from women bards, who observed the fighting and composed poems about it, essentially acting as war correspondents.

since the fact of their public arguments with Khalifa Omar are recorded—and yet Omar appointed a woman to administer the market in Medina.3 Besides all this, women figure prominently among the scholars of early Islam. In the first century after the Hijra, women such as Hafsa, Umm al-Darda, Amra bin Abdul Rahman, and others rose to eminence as authorities on hadith. Some were famous calligraphers. They and others taught classes, took in students of both sexes, and gave public lectures.

The practice of relegating women to an unseen private realm derived, it seems, from Byzantine and Sassanid practices. Among the upper classes of those societies, women were sequestered as a mark of high status.

The same forces that squeezed protoscience out of Islamic intellectual life, the same forces that devalued reason as an instrument of ethical and social inquiry, acted to constrict the position of women.

Ghazali devotes one-fourth of his oeuvre, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, to a discourse on marriage, family life, and the proper etiquette for the sexes. Here, he says that a woman “should remain in the inner sanctum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter and exit excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard her husband in his absence and in his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs. . . . She should not leave his home without his permission: if she goes out with his permission, she should conceal herself in worn-out clothes . . . being careful that no stranger hear her voice or recognize her personally. . . . She should . . . be ready at all times for (her husband) to enjoy her whenever he wishes.”4 Ghazali also discusses men’s obligations to their wives, but add up all his remarks and you can see that he’s envisioning a social world divided strictly into public and private realms, with women restricted to the private one and the public realm reserved exclusively for men.

One Umayyad nobleman skipped the party. This man, the last of the Umayyads, a young fellow by the name of Abdul Rahman, fled Damascus in disguise and headed across North Africa, and he didn’t stop running until he got to the furthest tip of the Muslim world: Andalusian Spain.

Abdul Rahman impressed the locals in Spain. A few hard-core Kharijite insurgent types skulking about there at the ends of the Earth pledged their swords to the youngster. There in Spain, so far from the Muslim heartland, no one knew much about the new regime in Baghdad and certainly felt no loyalty to them. Andalusians were accustomed to thinking of the Umayyads as rulers, and here was a real-life Umayyad asking to be their ruler. In a less tumultuous time, Abdul Rahman might simply have been posted here as governor and the people would have accepted him.

At first, this was only a political fissure, but as the Abbasids weakened, the Andalusian Umayyads announced that they were not merely independent of Baghdad but were, in fact, still the khalifas. Everyone within a few hundred miles said, “Oh, yes, sir, you’re definitely the khalifa of Islam; we could tell from the very look of you.” So the khalifate itself, this quasi-mystical idea of a single worldwide community of faith, was broken in two. The Umayyad claim had some resonance because their Andalusian capital of Córdoba was far and away the greatest city in Europe.

Non-Muslims had to pay the poll tax but were exempt from the charity tax. They were excluded from military service and the highest political positions, but all other occupations and offices were open to them. Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived in fairly amicable harmony in this empire with the caveat that Muslims wielded ultimate political power and probably radiated an attitude of superiority, stemming from certainty that their culture and society represented the highest stage of civilization, much as Americans and western Europeans now tend to do vis-à-vis people of third world countries.

The story of King Sancho illustrates how the various communities got along. In the late tenth century CE, Sancho inherited the throne of Leon, a Christian kingdom north of Spain. Sancho’s subjects soon began referring to him as Sancho the Fat, the sort of nickname a king never likes to hear his subjects using with impunity. Poor Sancho might more accurately have been called Sancho the Medically Obese, but his nobles could not take the large view. They regarded Sancho’s size as proof of an internal weakness that made him unfit to rule, so they deposed him. Sancho then heard about a Jewish physician named Hisdai ibn Shaprut who reputedly knew how to cure obesity. Hisdai was employed by the Muslim ruler in Córdoba, so Sancho headed south with his mother and retinue to seek treatments. The Muslim ruler Abdul Rahman the Third welcomed Sancho as an honored guest and had him stay at the royal palace until Hisdai had shrunk him down, whereupon Sancho returned to Leon, reclaimed his throne, and signed a treaty of friendship with Abdul Rahman.1 A Christian king received treatments from a Jewish physician at the court of a Muslim ruler: there you have the story of Muslim Spain in a nutshell.

When the Abbasids decided to rule as Sunnis, they revived the Shi’ite impulse to rebellion. In 347 AH (969 CE) Shi’i warriors from Tunisia managed to seize control of Egypt and declared themselves the true khalifas of Islam because (they said) they were descended from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, for which reason they called themselves the Fatimids. These rulers built themselves a brand new capital they called Qahira, the Arabic word for “victory.” In the West, it is spelled Cairo.

In Cairo, the Fatimids built the world’s first university, Al Azhar, which is still going strong.

In short, as the millennium approached, the Islamic world was divided into three parts. THE THREE KHALIFATES

Just like the Roman emperors, the Abbasid khalifas surrounded themselves with a corps of bodyguards, which became the tail that wagged the dog. In Rome, this group was called the Praetorian Guard, and it was (ironically) well staffed with Germans recruited from the territories of the barbarians north of the frontiers, those same barbarians with whom Rome had been at war for centuries and whose excursions posed a constant threat to civilized order. The same pattern emerged in the Abbasid khalifate. Here, the imperial guards were called mamluks, which means “slaves,” although these were not ordinary slaves but elite slave soldiers.

(There were no Turks in what is now called Turkey; they migrated to this area much later. The ancestral home of the Turkish tribes was the central Asian steppes north of Iran and Afghanistan.) As the Romans had done with the Germans, the Abbasids imported some of these Turks—purchasing them from the slave markets along the frontier—and used them as bodyguards. The khalifas did this because they didn’t trust the Arabs and Persians whom they ruled and among whom they lived, folks with too many local roots, too many relatives, and interests of their own to push. The khalifas wanted guards with no links to anyone but the khalifas themselves, no home but their court, no loyalties except to their owners. Therefore, the slaves they brought in were children. They had these kids raised as Muslims in special schools where they were taught martial skills. When they grew up they entered an elite corps that formed something like an extension of the khalifa’s own identity. In fact, since the public never saw the khalifa anymore, these Turkish bodyguards became, for most folks, the face of the khalifate.

Of course they were arrogant, violent, and rapacious—they were raised to be. Even while keeping the khalifa safe, they alienated him from his people, their depredations making him ever more unpopular and therefore unsafe and therefore ever more in need of bodyguards. Eventually, the khalifa had to build the separate soldier’s city of Samarra just to house his troublesome mamluks, and he himself moved there to live among them.

Meanwhile, a Persian family, the Buyids, insinuated themselves into the court as the khalifa’s advisers, clerks, helpers. Soon, they took control of the bureaucracy...

The Buyids, like the khalifas, began importing the children of Turkish barbarians to Baghdad as slaves and raising them in dormitories over which they had absolute control, to serve as their personal bodyguards.

The Buyids, then, became a new kind of dynasty in Islam.

At last the Turks grew too strong to suppress, both inside and outside the khalifate. In some of those little outlying kingdoms, mamluks killed their masters and founded their own dynasties.

A light did shine at the edges, however, under a Persian dynasty called the Samanids. Their kingdom radiated from cities on either side of the Oxus River, which now forms the northern border of Afghanistan. Here, in the great urban centers of Balkh and Bokhara, the literary culture of ancient Persia revived, and Persian began to compete with Arabic as the language of learning. But the Samanids, too, had mamluks, and one of their mamluk generals decided he would rather give orders than take them. Goodbye, Samanids; hello, Ghaznavids. The new rulers were called Ghaznavids because they moved their capital to the city of Ghazni, southeast of Kabul. The Ghaznavid dynasty peaked with a long-lived conqueror named Mahmud, a Charlemagne of the Islamic East.

Just as Charlemagne saw himself as a “most Christian emperor,” Mahmud considered himself a most Muslim monarch. He appointed himself coruler of the Muslim world, giving himself the brand new title of sultan, which means something like “sword arm.”

From his day until the twentieth century, there was always at least one sultan in the Muslim world.

One of these literati was the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the beginning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets. In the Middle World he has a stature comparable to Dante. Mahmud extravagantly promised this man one piece of gold for each couplet of his finished epic. He was shocked when Firdausi finally presented him with the longest poem ever penned by a single man: The Book of Kings has over sixty thousand couplets. “Did I say gold?” the sultan frowned. “I meant to say silver. One piece of silver for each couplet.”

The Book of Kings represents all of history as a struggle between the descendants of two legendary brothers, Iran and Turan, who (it is often thought) represent the Persians and the Turks, respectively: Iran is the good guy, and Turan the bad guy. Not surprisingly, The Book of Kings is now the national epic of Iran, and I wonder if it was actually the cost of the book that gave the sultan pause: maybe he didn’t like seeing Turks presented as the bad guys of history.

Sultan Mahmud was not only first in patronage of the arts; he also prided himself on the number of Hindu temples he sacked and how thoroughly he sacked them and what quantities of loot he snatched away from infidel fingers. He hauled his plunder home to ornament his capital and pay the nine-hundred-plus literati living at his court. His invasions of India and his slaughter of Hindus made him, he felt, a hero of Islam.