Dancing in the Streets (12 page)
Read Dancing in the Streets Online
Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich
A Note on Puritanism and Military Reform
Almost two hundred years after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, something strikingly similar occurred in a very different setting. A Muslim scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, launched a crusade to reform and purify Arabian Islam, which had been corrupted, in his view, by such practices as the veneration of saints and shrines and ecstatic forms of worship involving dancing, singing, and chanting. Wahhab went about axing holy trees (much as English puritans had attacked maypoles), smashing shrines, and attempting to crush traditional ecstatic rituals. His view of religious practice was every bit as austere as John Calvin's: There were to be no decorations or music in the mosques, no route to salvation except through prayer and obedience to religious teaching, in the Islamic case, sharia law. And like Calvin, Wahhab and his followers aimed at the establishment of a theocratic state with strict control over individual behaviorâno hashish, for example, no “sexual perversions” or female immodestyâa goal still pursued by his ideological descendants, the militant Islamists of our own time.
The parallel between the Protestant Reformation and the Wahhabi movement within Islam has been noted before. Samuel P.
Huntington, for example, writes that “both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline.”
1
In the Islamic world, the role of Catholicism was played by Sufismâa current of Islam dating from the eighth or ninth century and offering a richly diverse, in some ways even florid, set of spiritual possibilities. Like Catholicism, Sufism had its intellectuals, mystics, and poets; like Catholicism, it was open to a proliferation of saints and popular festivities, some of which may have originated in pagan practices. In both the Islamic and Christian cases, the “reformers” claimed to be returning to the foundations of their religionâstripping away the gaudy excrescences, the sensory delights, the carnivals and color, and arresting the slide toward polytheism as represented by the veneration of saints. The idea, in both cases, was to achieve a “purified” form of religion focused on the struggle for holiness within the individual soul.
Huntington, for example, writes that “both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline.”
1
In the Islamic world, the role of Catholicism was played by Sufismâa current of Islam dating from the eighth or ninth century and offering a richly diverse, in some ways even florid, set of spiritual possibilities. Like Catholicism, Sufism had its intellectuals, mystics, and poets; like Catholicism, it was open to a proliferation of saints and popular festivities, some of which may have originated in pagan practices. In both the Islamic and Christian cases, the “reformers” claimed to be returning to the foundations of their religionâstripping away the gaudy excrescences, the sensory delights, the carnivals and color, and arresting the slide toward polytheism as represented by the veneration of saints. The idea, in both cases, was to achieve a “purified” form of religion focused on the struggle for holiness within the individual soul.
What is baffling about this parallel is the apparent lack of any parallel conditions within the societies involved. The Protestant Reformation took place in a Europe already possessed of large cities and teetering on the verge of the industrial revolution. Wahhabism, in contrast, found its first converts in the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, a place still occupied by tribal nomads based around oasis settlements. Capitalism and industrialism, for all their alleged role in the Protestant Reformation, were at best distant rumors in the tiny town of Ad Dir'iyyah, where Wahhab made his base. And while sixteenth-century Europe was beginning to expand into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, eighteenth-century Arabia was a backwater within the Ottoman Empire, which was itself already in decline. Anyone looking for a “materialist” explanation of both Islamic and Protestant puritanismâthat is, one based on concrete economic circumstancesâcan only throw up her hands in despair.
Possibly there were no common conditions underlying the two “reformations,” Protestant and Islamic. After all, Wahhab was hardly the first puritanical reformer within Islam. The conflict
between a cold and legalistic form of Islam, centered on sharia, and the more accessible Sufist tendency goes back many centuries. What distinguished Wahhabism from most earlier Islamic “reform” movements was the patronage of a tribal chief, Muhammad ibn Saud, who transformed it from a theological challenge into an armed campaign. One attraction of Wahhab's teachings to the Saudi leader was that they justified raids on neighboring tribes, which could be judged as “infidels” according to Wahhab's rigorous standards. Thus Wahhabism provided a loophole in the Muslim prohibition against attacking fellow Muslims: If they did not accept a purified Islam in the form of Wahhabism, they could be killedâor offered the opportunity to convert. According to one of the best-known historians of Saudi Arabia, “Wahhabism was an ideology of military expansion and raids from the outset,”
2
and it spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula at sword point.
between a cold and legalistic form of Islam, centered on sharia, and the more accessible Sufist tendency goes back many centuries. What distinguished Wahhabism from most earlier Islamic “reform” movements was the patronage of a tribal chief, Muhammad ibn Saud, who transformed it from a theological challenge into an armed campaign. One attraction of Wahhab's teachings to the Saudi leader was that they justified raids on neighboring tribes, which could be judged as “infidels” according to Wahhab's rigorous standards. Thus Wahhabism provided a loophole in the Muslim prohibition against attacking fellow Muslims: If they did not accept a purified Islam in the form of Wahhabism, they could be killedâor offered the opportunity to convert. According to one of the best-known historians of Saudi Arabia, “Wahhabism was an ideology of military expansion and raids from the outset,”
2
and it spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula at sword point.
Though perhaps not entirely at sword point. There is one clue suggesting a possible common thread between the religious reform movements in sixteenth-century Europe and eighteenth-century Arabia. According to an Arabic text dating from at least the nineteenth century, it was Wahhab who introduced the use of guns to the Saudi tribe: “They [the Saudi tribe] followed Wahhab in religion and in worldly affairs as in managing wars, interests, and hostilities ⦠and he ordered the people of Dir'iyyah to learn how to shoot guns. He [Wahhab] was the one who obtained for them the guns that they now have.”
3
Firearms were not new to Arabia, of course, but until Wahhab, the nomadic Arabians fought largely with swords and bows and arrows. He may have been a traditionalist, aiming to restore a pure and original form of Islam, but he was also a modernizer.
3
Firearms were not new to Arabia, of course, but until Wahhab, the nomadic Arabians fought largely with swords and bows and arrows. He may have been a traditionalist, aiming to restore a pure and original form of Islam, but he was also a modernizer.
Within Europe, guns have been credited with redressing the imbalance of power between mounted aristocrats and the common people.
One lowly fellow with a gun could potentially bring down an armored nobleman with a sword, and it was this possibility, in part, that made carnival seem increasingly dangerous to the powerful. But used in war, guns had a very different effectâgrinding down the individual soldier to the level of a cog in a giant war machineâand this process drew enthusiastic support from the new puritans of the Protestant Reformation.
One lowly fellow with a gun could potentially bring down an armored nobleman with a sword, and it was this possibility, in part, that made carnival seem increasingly dangerous to the powerful. But used in war, guns had a very different effectâgrinding down the individual soldier to the level of a cog in a giant war machineâand this process drew enthusiastic support from the new puritans of the Protestant Reformation.
The pre-Reformation, medieval European style of fighting, featuring mounted aristocrats armed with bladed weapons, had always allowed for plenty of downtime among the foot soldiers, much of it devoted to revelry. Guns, which became the weapon of choice in the sixteenth century, required far greater discipline among the rank and file, in part because of the very primitiveness of the available firearms. Since muskets and harquebuses could not be aimed with any precision, they worked best when fired in volleys by a great many men at the same time. And since they took several minutes to reload, the men had to be adept at the process and trained to spend every moment when they were not actually firing preparing to fire again. This was a job not for “warriors” in the old-fashioned, individualistic sense, but for men who should perhaps be considered the first true proletariansâthe rigidly disciplined, dully obedient soldiers of the new mass armies. Any discussion of the suppression of carnival in Europe would be incomplete without mentioning the disciplining of Europe's fighting men, who had to be forcibly restrained from the drinking and carousing that had once enlivened military service for so many reluctant conscripts.
It was a Calvinist, the Dutch aristocrat Maurice of Orange, who first applied the spirit of Calvinism to the business of war. In the early 1600s, three hundred years before the American efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor transformed factory work by breaking it down into a series of repetitive gestures, Maurice devised a detailed schedule of motionsâthirty-two in allâfor each soldier to follow while firing, reloading, and firing again.
4
His new system required endless practice, marching, and reloading, to the point
where the necessary motions were automatic enough to be performed in the stress of battle. But in Maurice's system, the “drill,” as it came to be known, went well beyond what was necessary for practice; the point was to fill the soldier's time entirely, and when he was not drilling, he was assigned tasks formerly disdained by fighting men, like digging trenches and constructing fortifications. “Idleness,” as the historian William H. McNeill writes, “was banished from military life. This was a great departure from earlier custom, since waiting for something to happen occupies almost all of a soldier's time, and when left to their own devices, troops had traditionally escaped boredom by indulging in drink and other sorts of dissipation.”
5
As the military historian M. D. Feld observed, “The changes instituted in the Dutch armed forces corresponded strikingly with the outlook expected of a middle-class society,” and he was referring to a middle-class
Calvinist
society.
6
4
His new system required endless practice, marching, and reloading, to the point
where the necessary motions were automatic enough to be performed in the stress of battle. But in Maurice's system, the “drill,” as it came to be known, went well beyond what was necessary for practice; the point was to fill the soldier's time entirely, and when he was not drilling, he was assigned tasks formerly disdained by fighting men, like digging trenches and constructing fortifications. “Idleness,” as the historian William H. McNeill writes, “was banished from military life. This was a great departure from earlier custom, since waiting for something to happen occupies almost all of a soldier's time, and when left to their own devices, troops had traditionally escaped boredom by indulging in drink and other sorts of dissipation.”
5
As the military historian M. D. Feld observed, “The changes instituted in the Dutch armed forces corresponded strikingly with the outlook expected of a middle-class society,” and he was referring to a middle-class
Calvinist
society.
6
Another Calvinist, the English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, took the new military discipline a step further, banning outright all the soldier's usual diversions: drinking, gambling, looting, womanizing, even cursing. War had always been a dangerous and uncomfortable occupation for the common man, but it had also offered a break from routine, a chance to travel and carouse. But Cromwell's “New Model Army” offered no carnivalesque entertainments, only the effort of functioning as one tiny part of a vast, smooth-running machine. This was a prospect that, however appalling to a fun-loving peasant boy, thrilled Calvinist ideologues, and not only on account of its potential military advantages. “Above all creatures [God] loves soldiers,” according to one English Calvinist preacher, referring to the drilled and disciplined Calvinist type of soldier.
7
Even without the threat of war, even for civilians, the drill seemed to Calvinists an admirable use of time. “Abandon your carding, dicing, chambering, wantonness, dalliance, scurrilous discoursing and vain raveling out of time,” urged another preacher, “to frequent these exercises.”
8
7
Even without the threat of war, even for civilians, the drill seemed to Calvinists an admirable use of time. “Abandon your carding, dicing, chambering, wantonness, dalliance, scurrilous discoursing and vain raveling out of time,” urged another preacher, “to frequent these exercises.”
8
The new Calvinist armies were hugely successful. Maurice used
his to defeat the Spanish troops occupying Holland; Cromwell won out over the aristocratic Cavaliers, who practiced a non-Puritan form of Protestantism and still fought in the old, disorderly, aristocratic style. Soon monarchs and generals all over the Western world were imposing the drill and the new Calvinist discipline on their own armies, regardless of whether these armies were Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Thus, with the help of reformed and reforming religions, Europe adjusted to the imperatives of gun-based warfare, and the changes have been with us ever since.
his to defeat the Spanish troops occupying Holland; Cromwell won out over the aristocratic Cavaliers, who practiced a non-Puritan form of Protestantism and still fought in the old, disorderly, aristocratic style. Soon monarchs and generals all over the Western world were imposing the drill and the new Calvinist discipline on their own armies, regardless of whether these armies were Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Thus, with the help of reformed and reforming religions, Europe adjusted to the imperatives of gun-based warfare, and the changes have been with us ever since.
European historians in the Marxist tradition have tended to look to the “means of production” as a determining social force, omitting what the anthropologist Jack Goody terms the “means of destruction.” Thus they are more likely to see the industrial revolution as the change underlying the Protestant Reformation than to consider the role of the
military
revolution wrought by guns. But gun-based warfare, no less than industrialization, required social discipline on an unprecedented scaleâhuge numbers of men (and in our own time, women too) trained to obedience and self-denial, and the new Protestantism helped to provide it. Wahhabism may have served the same function in tribal Arabia, whichâthanks to Wahhab himselfâwas making its own adjustment to gun-based warfare.
military
revolution wrought by guns. But gun-based warfare, no less than industrialization, required social discipline on an unprecedented scaleâhuge numbers of men (and in our own time, women too) trained to obedience and self-denial, and the new Protestantism helped to provide it. Wahhabism may have served the same function in tribal Arabia, whichâthanks to Wahhab himselfâwas making its own adjustment to gun-based warfare.
Was military discipline linked to religious puritanism in the mind of Wahhab or his patron, Muhammad ibn Saud? Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing. What we do know, however, is that Saud was, like Wahhab, a military innovator. According to a Frenchman who had been on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt and served as French consul in Aleppo at the time when the Wahhabis invaded Syria:
It was at Diriyah that Ibn Saud began to realize his designs of conquest, neglecting nothing in order to ensure their success. His
soldiers, who were already accustomed to fatigue, became even stronger and more indefatigable through the drilling which he instilled in them. He did away with horses, replacing them with dromedaries. This animal is as swift as the horse, but stronger; nature created it for the desert which would be uninhabitable without it. Ibn Saud ordered that each dromedary should be mounted by two soldiers. He rationed not only the soldiers' food, but also that of the animals.
9
soldiers, who were already accustomed to fatigue, became even stronger and more indefatigable through the drilling which he instilled in them. He did away with horses, replacing them with dromedaries. This animal is as swift as the horse, but stronger; nature created it for the desert which would be uninhabitable without it. Ibn Saud ordered that each dromedary should be mounted by two soldiers. He rationed not only the soldiers' food, but also that of the animals.
9
The reference to “drilling” provides a startling link to the puritan-led military reforms of seventeenth-century Europe. It is unlikely that Saud's men, who numbered about six thousand, drilled by repetitive marching, as the Europeans did, because they were not foot soldiers but what Europeans would call cavalry. Possibly, the shift from horses to two-man dromedaries was an adaptation to the use of guns that Wahhab insisted on. The guns available at the timeâprobably musketsâwould have been of little use to a single man on horseback: It was hard enough to reload a musket on the ground, much less from the back of a moving animal. But with two men on a dromedary's back, one could manage the animal while the other devoted himself to the tricky business of shooting. Thus the drilling instituted by Saud may have been practice in shooting and reloading from the back of a moving dromedary.
But drilling is not just a matter of forcing men to master a particular military technology; its universal goal is to inculcate an iron level of discipline. Saud wanted his men to be “indefatigable”; he even hardened them by limiting their rations. These concerns are entirely consistent with the asceticism and self-denial demanded by puritanical religious reforms. In both the European and the Arabian cases, one real function of religious puritanism was to make fighting men internalize the discipline that the new gun-based mode of fighting required: Not only the generals insisted on sobriety and obedience among their troops; according to the puritanical reformers, so did God.
By the nineteenth century, military modernization and religious puritanism were clearly linked in other parts of the Muslim world. In 1826, the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II destroyed his own army of janissaries, about one hundred thousand elite foot soldiers, who were resisting military reforms. The janissaries may have been condemned by their record of palace coups, but it is interesting to note that they were also closely associated with a particularly ecstatic stream of Sufism. In Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha, who governed throughout the early nineteenth century, introduced Europeanstyle military reforms along with a wide-ranging attempt to discipline his population. He cracked down on Sufism generally and attempted to outlaw the
mulid
, a saint's day festival similar to European carnival. In “modernized,” early-nineteenth-century Egypt, the anthropologist Michael Gilsenan writes, “military parades, marching in new time to the new drum rhythm, were approved, productive and expressive of order and hierarchy; Sufi processions and banners were violently attacked, as they still are, as productive and expressive of precisely the opposite, as well as being denounced by some authorities as un-Islamic.”
10
mulid
, a saint's day festival similar to European carnival. In “modernized,” early-nineteenth-century Egypt, the anthropologist Michael Gilsenan writes, “military parades, marching in new time to the new drum rhythm, were approved, productive and expressive of order and hierarchy; Sufi processions and banners were violently attacked, as they still are, as productive and expressive of precisely the opposite, as well as being denounced by some authorities as un-Islamic.”
10
Could there have been a connection between the repression of festivities and the need for disciplined mass armies in other parts of the world? The Roman Empire, for example, relied on a rigidly drilled infantry, and it would be interesting to know whether the Romans' intermittent hostility to ecstatic religions could be traced, in any way, to this aspect of the Roman military.
Then there is the intriguing case of China. Max Weber observed that the Chinese had abandoned their ecstatic traditions very early, so that by the time of large-scale empire, “dances are not to be foundâthe old war dance had vanishedânor are sexual, musical, or other forms of toxic orgies found.”
11
According to Weber, “all orgiastic elements were strictly eliminated” from the state religious cult, which deemed ecstatic rituals “as dangerous as the Roman nobility once considered the cult of Dionysos.”
12
It may be relevant that ancient China had undergone its own military revolution,
beginning in the seventh century BCE, when foot soldiers armed with crossbows began to replace aristocratic warriors in chariots. Quite possiblyâand I leave it to the appropriate historians to explore this furtherâthe crossbow played a role in the culture of ancient China similar to that of the gun in early modern Europe or eighteenth-century Arabia. The project of disciplining large numbers of ordinary men to the repetitive use of an action-at-a-distance weaponâthe crossbow or gunâmay have required a level of social discipline that is incompatible with traditional festivities and ecstatic rites.
11
According to Weber, “all orgiastic elements were strictly eliminated” from the state religious cult, which deemed ecstatic rituals “as dangerous as the Roman nobility once considered the cult of Dionysos.”
12
It may be relevant that ancient China had undergone its own military revolution,
beginning in the seventh century BCE, when foot soldiers armed with crossbows began to replace aristocratic warriors in chariots. Quite possiblyâand I leave it to the appropriate historians to explore this furtherâthe crossbow played a role in the culture of ancient China similar to that of the gun in early modern Europe or eighteenth-century Arabia. The project of disciplining large numbers of ordinary men to the repetitive use of an action-at-a-distance weaponâthe crossbow or gunâmay have required a level of social discipline that is incompatible with traditional festivities and ecstatic rites.
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