Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (8 page)

Right after his entrance into the city without bloodshed, the victorious Muhammad marched toward the Ka’ba. Arabs believed that this ancient shrine was built by Abraham, their monotheist ancestor, to worship God. Over time, however, it had become a pagan pantheon, and when Muhammad opened its gates, he found it filled with more than three hundred idols. One by one, he shattered the idols with his own hands. “Truth has come,” said the verse he recited, “and Falsehood has vanished.”
⁴⁹

Muslim sources report that among the icons in the Ka’ba, only the frescoes of Jesus and Mary were spared, for they were deeply respected in the Qur’an.
⁵⁰
This was a sign of the fact that Islam, which abhorred paganism, regarded Christians, as well as Jews, as members of partly misguided yet still valid faiths. Designated by the Qur’an as “People of the Book,” these fellow monotheists would be granted the right to live and practice their faiths under the rule of Islam.

In just twenty years, Muhammad had stunning accomplishments. Soon, as other Arab tribes came to accept his message, he became the most powerful man in the Arabian Peninsula. But this was not his personal triumph. “When God’s help and victory have arrived and you have seen people entering God’s religion in droves,” the Qur’an told him, “then glorify your Lord’s praise and ask His forgiveness.”
⁵¹

This theocentricity would remain as the most fundamental character of Islam. By rejecting any intermediaries between man and God—such as an established church—Islam did not become an “organized religion” in the Western sense, so it continued to empower the individual. The result was not the modern individual with civil liberties that we have today, but it was a clean and progressive break from the tribalism of the age of paganism. “Muhammad could not . . . produce a full-blown individualism to satisfy our present Western liberal ideas,” argues Karen Armstrong, “but he had made a start.”
⁵²

Another commentator who touched upon the liberalizing mission of Islam was Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968), one of the founders of the American libertarian movement. (Most Americans would also recognize her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, from her legendary novel
Little House on the Prairie
.) In her 1943 book,
The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority
, Mrs. Lane devoted a special chapter to Islam. Her argument was that there had been three great attempts to establish free societies on earth. The first she credited to Abraham, who saved men from “the tyranny of capricious gods.” The second attempt was made by Muhammad, whom she defined as “a self-made business man” who “establish[ed] the fact of individual freedom in practical affairs.” The third great attempt, Lane argued, was the American Revolution.
⁵³

Today this might sound a bit counterintuitive to many Americans and other Westerners, who think that the liberal ideas that have flourished in Western civilization do not have many parallels in the Muslim world. And the current state of freedom, or the lack thereof, in the Islamic East seems to justify that point of view.

One scholar who noticed and commented on this paradox is David Forte, an American professor of law:

There is a great mystery in Islam. Islam should have been the first civilization to have abandoned slavery; it was the last. Islam should have been the first to establish complete religious liberty; today, non-Muslims suffer egregious persecution in Muslim lands. Islam should have been the first to establish social equality for women. Instead, women who stray outside the family’s code of behavior are murdered with impunity. Islam should have been the foremost civilization to observe the humanitarian laws of war, but its empires have been no different from others; some claim they have been worse.
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But why? What happened? Why did the start that Muhammad made not reach its logical conclusion?

It will take a few more chapters to find an answer—and we will start with what went right.

CHAPTER TWO

The Enlightenment of the Orient

The medieval Islamic world . . . offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and most of its successors.

—Bernard Lewis, historian of the Middle East
¹

I
n 632
, shortly before his death, the Prophet Muhammad made his final pilgrimage to Mecca, where he delivered his Farewell Sermon, which has had historical significance for all Muslims since then. “O people,” he said to a large crowd of Muslims, “your lives and your property are inviolable.” He went on to condemn usury, blood vengeance, and murder. “Verily you owe your women their rights,” he reminded the men, “and they owe you yours.” He also denounced tribal, ethnic, and racial divisions. “All mankind is from Adam and Eve,” he said, and added: “An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab. . . . Also a white person has no superiority over a black person, nor a black person over a white person except through piety and good deeds.”
²

A few months after the Farewell Sermon, the Prophet became ill and suffered pain and weakness for several days. On June 8, 632, he silently passed away in the arms of his beloved wife Aisha. For the Muslim community that had been following him since the first revelation twenty-three years earlier, this was a challenging moment. Some refused to believe the bad news, others were shocked. But Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s closest companions, took the lead and addressed the community. “Whoever amongst you worshipped Muhammad, Muhammad is dead,” he famously declared. “But whoever worshipped God, God is alive and will never die.”

The Prophet had not left behind any institution or heir—a curious matter to which we will return. At this point in time, the Muslim community had to decide what to do next. After some discussion, they decided to choose the most trusted among them, Abu Bakr, as the “caliph” (the “successor” of Muhammad). Abu Bakr’s “caliphate” would be followed by those of Umar, Uthman, and Ali—other prominent companions of Muhammad. Sunnis regard these four as the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” of Islam, whereas the Shiites only revere Ali and consider the other three to have been usurpers of the authority that Ali deserved.

The most notable work of the Rightly Guided Caliphs was territorial expansion. When the Prophet died, Muslims were dominant only in the Arabian Peninsula. In just three decades, they formed an empire stretching from Libya to Afghanistan. These conquests would continue under the Umayyad dynasty, which followed the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the Islamic Empire would extend as far as Spain in the West and India in the East. Later on, parts of Africa, Asia Minor, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia were also Islamized. Although military conquests continued to play an important role in Islam’s expansion, in some areas, such as East Africa, India, China, and Indonesia, Islam spread via peaceful merchants and preachers.

This vast Muslim-dominated part of the world—Islamdom—would be the stage for Islam’s experience in history. And its saga would be shaped by two separate dynamics: On one hand, the message of Islam would inform and transform the peoples of Islamdom; on the other hand, the preexisting and long-established cultures of these peoples would affect, and sometimes overshadow, Islam’s message.

A R
ELIGION OF THE
S
WORD
?

If Islamdom owes its expansion mostly to military conquests that were carried out under the banner of
jihad
(struggle), should we then conclude that Islam is “a religion of the sword”?

Not exactly. The conquests expanded the political rule of Muslims, to be sure, but the conquered peoples were not forced to convert to Islam, and many of them retained their religions. The Qur’an had announced, “There is no compulsion in religion,” and, with the exception of a few cases—such as the fanatic Almohavids in North Africa—forced conversion remained anathema in Islamdom.
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Why, then, did the Muslims decide to conquer the world?

One major goal was to “spread the Word of God,” to ensure that it would become known to all. The Arabic word used for the conquests was
fath,
meaning “opening.” So a land conquered by Muslims would be “opened” to Islam, while non-Muslims could continue to live there. The object of
jihad
, in other words, was not to convert by force but “to remove obstacles to conversion.”
⁴
(Similar views were expressed by St. Thomas and St. Bernard with regard to the Christian crusade.)
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A second purpose of conquests was to spread what the Muslims believed to be a just political order. A third motivation, especially after the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, would simply be the lust for wealth and power.

The non-Muslim peoples in the conquered lands received
dhimma
(protection) by Muslims. In return for the safeguarding of life and property and the right to worship freely, the
dhimmis
(the protected) paid a special tax and had to accept certain social limitations that implied their capitulation to Muslim rule. (Over time, these limitations expanded, and the status of non-Muslims became less favorable, as Muslims adopted the preexisting attitudes of the Orient toward religious minorities.)
⁶
Christians and Jews were the first groups to be given
dhimma,
but as the rule of Islam spread, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others were also included by way of
ijtihad
(independent reasoning).

When compared with the modern notion of equal citizenship rights, the unequal
dhimma
of course would be unacceptable. But according to the norms of that era, it was quite advanced. The earliest non-Muslims who found the
dhimma
a lifesaver were the Christians of Syria and North Africa, who were persecuted by the dominant Christian power of the time, the Byzantine Empire, because of differences in theology. The Byzantines believed in the Chalcedonian Creed, which held that Jesus Christ had two natures, divine and human. Most Christians in Egypt and Syria were Monophysites, who believed in one divine nature. This theological dispute imposed not just religious suppression but also heavy taxes on the Monophysites. Thus, when Muslim armies appeared at the gates of their cities, with insouciance to intra-Christian theological disputes and leniency on taxes, most Middle Eastern Christians welcomed the conquerors, regarding “their Arab fellow Semites as deliverers from Greek tax-gatherers and orthodox persecutors.”
⁷

At times, these local Christians even actively helped the Muslim conquests. When Byzantine-ruled Damascus was besieged by the Arab army in 634, the city’s Monophysite bishop secretly informed the Muslim commander, Khalid, that the east gate of the city was weakly defended, and he supplied the Muslim troops with ladders for scaling the wall. After the conquest, the city’s Cathedral of St. John was divided into two: one half was used as a church, the other half became a mosque.
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In most conquered territories, early Muslim rule not only allowed the survival of Christian churches, it also permitted the building of new ones, as the archaeological record indicates.
⁹

Jews, too, found their position improved under Arab Muslim rule. In an apocalyptic Jewish work of the time, God was praised, for “He has only brought the Kingdom of Ishmael,” that of the Arabs, in order to save Jews from the “wickedness” of Byzantium.
¹⁰
Until modern times, many Jews considered life under Islamic rule preferable to that of medieval Europe, and often they found safe haven in Muslim lands after being persecuted in Christian ones.
¹¹

T
HE
R
ULE OF
L
AW,
N
OT THE
R
ULER

The
dhimma
system was just one of the many implications of a basic idea that the Qur’an introduced: Humans have rights ordained by God, and no other human can violate these rights. This idea would allow Muslims to create a civilization based on the rule of law.

Here we should stop to consider what “rule of law” means. The lack of law, and an authority that imposes it, can easily lead to anarchy and chaos, under which it would be impossible to protect the rights and freedoms of human beings. But the mere existence of law, and an imposing authority, is not necessarily a blessing, because the law can also be unjust and tyrannical. The “rule of law” under Stalin, for example, was horrendous. In that case, the purpose of the law was to protect not the rights and freedoms of individuals but the ideologies and interests of the Communist Party. Whenever a ruler or oligarchy makes laws to protect its own interests, the “rule of law” will be unjust and unfree.