Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (18 page)

made possible the rise of communities of varying sizes—city-states, duchies, republics, nations, and empires. In 1500 Europe had within it more than 500 states, many no larger than a city. This variety had two wondrous effects. First, it allowed for diversity. People, ideas, art, and even technologies that were unwelcome or unnoticed in one area would often thrive in another. Second, diversity fueled constant competition between states, producing innovation and efficiency in political organization, military technology, and economic policy.
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That’s how feudalism ultimately worked in favor of freedom in Europe. The fertile land produced enough revenue to allow the rise of powerful lords, who would compete with kings for power and force them to sign liberal texts such as the Magna Carta. And when Martin Luther was excommunicated by the pope, he found support from the powerful princes of Germany who could afford to disobey Rome.

But the arid and flat Middle East only produced the “semifeudalism” of the
iqta
system. Here the land continued to belong to the central power and was granted only temporarily to the landlord, leading the latter to “mere pillage rather than to private development of the lands granted.”
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The ultimate result was the hindrance of an “independent, responsible, and non-alienated feudal class”—and the hindrance of political pluralism.
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In short, while the fortunate environment of Europe helped the advance of liberty, the unfortunate environment of the Middle East established what Karl Marx called “oriental despotism” and Max Weber redefined as “patrimonialism”—a system of governance in which all power flows directly from the leader.

There was nothing inherently Islamic about this authoritarian system—no wonder it also has dominated non-Islamic countries of the East, such as Russia and China. But, alas, the connection between Oriental patrimony and Islam worked in the former’s favor as it left its mark on the latter.
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According to Bryan S. Turner, a leading scholar on the sociology of Islam, here was the main reason why the religion took a less rationalist and creative form after its initial centuries:

It was under the patrimonial dynasties of mediaeval Islam, starting with the Abbasids, that a different culture with its attendant view of appropriate motivation which stressed discipline, obedience and imitation came to dominate Islam. With the formation of an alliance of necessity between the military and the ulama [scholars], the
shari‘a
as a formalized and unchanging code of life came to embody the only legitimate language of conduct. . . . It was under these conditions that Islam was to be characterized as a slavish, fatalistic religion, a religion of accommodation to patrimonial rule.
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The problem was not, Turner adds, that Islam lacked something similar to the “Protestant ethic” that fostered capitalism in Europe. The urban merchants of medieval Islam, after all, “adhered to a distinctively Muslim form of rationality.”
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The Mutazilites (or the Murjiites), as we have seen, even extracted liberal principles from that rationalism. They just could not overcome the constraints of the Middle East.

Islam, one could say, had produced the seeds of freedom; regrettably, they just were not rooted in fertile soil.

Given this background, one hopeful question arises: If the fall of economic dynamism led to the decline of Islamic rationality and liberty a millennium ago, can the rebirth of economic dynamism revive them? To put it another way, can socioeconomic progress in Muslim societies also lead to progress in religious attitudes, ideas, and even doctrines?

We will explore the answer by looking at modern-day Turkey as a case study. But first, there are a few more stones to turn over.

PART II

The Modern Era

When there is a general change of circumstances, it is as if the whole creation had changed, and all the world had been transformed.

—Ibn Khaldun, medieval Muslim scholar

CHAPTER SIX

The Ottoman Revival

We always explained that the constitutional regime was legitimate and suitable for the sharia. It was not banned by it, on the contrary, our sharia ordered a constitutional regime. . . . We tried to explain what freedom, brotherhood meant; what the meaning of equality was.

—s¸eyh-ül I˙slam Musa Kazım Efendi, top cleric in the late Ottoman Empire
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O
NCE THE MEDIEVAL WAR
of ideas between the Rationalists and the Traditionists of Islam ended with the latter’s dominance, Islamdom entered into an intellectually stagnant age that would last for several centuries. There were occasional bright spots, but the overriding attitude in the Muslim world, especially among the Sunnis, was defined by a strict obedience to custom and a strong distaste for innovation.
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This equilibrium would be punctured only by the intrusion of an outside power: the modern West, which, from the eighteenth century on, was a colossal force of innovation, one that Muslims could not afford to ignore. Some Muslims faced this reality and decided to reform their ways. Others decided to resist change, and even fight back. The result would be a new war of ideas—this time, a modern one.

A telling moment in this new saga was the 1856 revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the Hejaz, the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula and the home of Islam’s holiest sites. At this time, the Ottomans controlled the whole Arab world, often ruling indirectly through local chieftains. But one chieftain, Grand Sharif Abdulmuttalib of Mecca, had been stirring up opposition to the Ottoman authorities by denouncing their “irreligious” ways—such as Sultan Abdülmecid’s ban on the slave trade. According to Ahmet Cevdet Pas¸a, the official Ottoman chronicler of the time, Abdulmuttalib even believed that “the Turks have become apostates,” by simply “allowing women to uncover their bodies, to stay separate from their fathers or husbands, and to have the right to divorce.”
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The grand sharif was also enraged by the friendly relations the Ottoman Turks established with “the infidels,” and the consulates that the British and the French opened in the nearby town of Jidda.
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One British diplomat would later describe Abdulmuttalib as “a fanatical Wahhabee” who believed that all Christians were “dogs that ought to be swept from the face of the earth.”
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In his chronicles, Cevdet Pas¸a, also a scholar of Islamic law, tried to explain that the grand sharif was wrong on all these matters. Banning slavery was not against the Shariah, the Ottoman sultan was indeed the sacred law’s best protector, and the maintenance of friendly relations with the infidels was not necessarily forbidden by Islam.
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But Abdulmuttalib remained unconvinced by such arguments, and soon he launched his rebellion, declaring,

O the people of Mecca, wage
jihad
on the Turks for that they have become Christians and Francs! Those who will be killed from you will enter heaven; those who will be killed from them will enter hell.
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His men began to attack Ottoman officials, killing them as well as some pilgrims at the Ka’ba—only to be quickly defeated and captured by Ottoman forces.
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Yet this was neither the first nor the last uprising the Ottomans faced in Arabia. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the Wahhabis had denounced them for “innovations” such as Sufism, the mystical tradition that they saw as a deviation from the Shariah. In the nineteenth century, Ottomans introduced even more disturbing “innovations”—more rights for women, more contacts with non-Muslims, and less tolerance for slavery. For the Wahhabis, all such reforms were heresies that needed to be fought against.

For our story, though, these reforms are inspiring—for they constitute the most extensive, and coherent, Islamic effort to embrace liberal democracy yet.

H
ERE IN THE
L
AND OF THE
T
URKS
. . .

The Ottoman story goes back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, when a group of Muslim Turks led by a leader named Osman established themselves as a tiny principality in northwestern Anatolia. (The term
Ottoman
comes from the Turkish word
Osmanlı
, or “the sons of Osman.”) It was the time when the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was destroyed, and the Arab Middle East was devastated, by the brutal Mongol invaders. The decline of the Arabs made way in Islamdom for other peoples, especially the Turks.

The Turks, like the desert Arabs, were nomads from an arid region—this time, the steppe. Hence they lacked a sophisticated culture to bring into their new religion. But, unlike the desert Arabs, who carried their pre-Islamic conservatism and fatalism into Islam, the nomadic Turks experienced a radical rebirth. They completely “surrendered themselves to their new religion” and “sank their national identity in Islam as the Arabs and the Persians had never done”—to a degree that even the name
Turk
came to be almost synonymous with Muslim. The result was a passionate devotion to the faith. “In the earnestness and seriousness of their loyalty to Islam,” observes Bernard Lewis, “the Turks are equaled by no other people.”
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The Turks had not only the passion but also the military skills to serve Islam by expanding the borders of Islamdom toward the West—first under the Seljuk dynasty, which ruled parts of Central Asia and the Middle East from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and later the Ottomans. The latter gradually pushed back the borders of the Byzantine Empire, bringing it to an end in 1453 by conquering its capital, Constantinople (which would later be known as Istanbul). The Ottoman state grew rapidly, and, in the early sixteenth century, became an empire that extended from Budapest to Yemen, Algiers to Basra. It became, one could say, the world’s superpower.

In line with Islam’s acceptance of the People of the Book, the Ottoman Empire was a pluralist state that allowed non-Muslim communities to preserve their identities and religious practices. Thus, Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, or Bulgarians remained Christian. In the early sixteenth century, Selim I “the Stern,” a particularly heavy-handed sultan/caliph, had considered converting all his Christian subjects to Islam forcibly, simply for the sake of homogeneity. Yet he was convinced by his s¸eyh-ül I˙slam, the superior authority on the issues of religion, that this would have been unlawful.
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Thanks to their belief in the supremacy of law, along with their pragmatism, Ottomans continued to recognize the rights of their Christian subjects and even Protestants fleeing Europe—generating admiration from Martin Luther, the Christian reformist, and Jean Bodin, the French philosopher.
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The highest praise came in the seventeenth century from the Greek patriarch in Jerusalem, who praised God for putting “into the heart of the sultan of these Ottomans an inclination to keep free the religious beliefs of our Orthodox faith.”
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(Yet such positive images of the Ottomans would be replaced by much more negative ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when more than two dozen post-Ottoman nation-states needed to glorify their genesis by depicting a “dark age” in the past.)
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The Ottoman Empire was even more comforting to Jews, at a time when they were routinely persecuted in Christian Europe. From the late fourteenth century onward, Jews expelled from Hungary, France, and Sicily found refuge in Ottoman lands. In the early fifteenth century, Rabbi Yitzhak Sarfati, who had emigrated from Germany to Edirne, in what is now western Turkey, felt secure enough to write to Jewish communities in Europe entreating them to leave behind the torment they were enduring under Christianity and find a safe haven in the Ottoman Empire. “Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing of which to complain,” the rabbi said. “Every one of us lives in peace and freedom.”
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In 1492, a large portion of the Sephardic Jews expelled by Spain heeded this advice and set sail for Turkey, where they were warmly welcomed by Sultan Beyazid II, one of the most pious of all Ottoman rulers. The Ottoman hospitality to Jews would continue well into modern times; prayers were said in Istanbul synagogues in the late nineteenth century for the victory of Ottoman armies against the onslaught of Russia and its Balkan allies.
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