Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Monday, 5 November 2007
03/11: Some Umno myths young Malaysians should know about
Posted on Malaysia Today, 3/11/07
Category: General
Posted by: Raja Petra
by Fan Yew Teng
In the remaining months of the year in which we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Merdeka and the 44th anniversary of the formation of Malaysia, and to reflect on the meaning of nationhood, it is perhaps important and necessary to examine some of the more persistent myths upon which Umno, the predominant party in the ruling coalition for the past 52 years, grew and deceived - and are still deceiving - the populace, particularly the Malays.
For a start, after 61 years, Umno is still unashamedly the political party which claims to unite and represent all the Malays. Hence, the misnomer the United Malays National Organisation, always in English, however much you might want to remind them of their claim to be champions of Bahasa Malaysia and Malay nationalism.
Most Malaysians who have been around for the past quarter of a century would very likely know or remember the interesting power struggles within Umno during the Mahathir years (1981 - 2003). The Mahathir - Tengku Razaleigh contest for the Umno presidency in 1987, which spilled over into the deregistration of Umno itself, the fights between Team A and Team B backed by the then ailing former primer ministers Tunku Abdul Rahman and Hussein Onn, the massive 'Operation Lalang' crackdown on dissidents, and the highly sensational and controversial sacking of the top judge, Lord President Tun Salleh Abbas. And then, 10 years later, Mahathir's sacking and subsequent arrest of the then deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.
However, up to this very day, many Malaysians in general and many Umno members and supporters in particular are woefully ignorant of the tensions and undercurrents among the earlier generation of Umno leaders.
One of the enduring myths that has dominated Umno all these years is that its founding fathers - or at least the early leaders - were all self sacrificing and had always put party unity - and by extension, national unity - before personal interests.
The truth, however, is more complicated.
May 1946. Umno is born, as a movement of many Malay organisations and groups against the Malayan Union, a constitutional arrangement created by the returned British colonial masters after the Second World War.
Dato Onn Jaafar of Johore became the man of the moment after the British decided to withdraw the Malayan Union scheme, to be later replaced by the Federation of Malaya constitutional arrangement. Umno, as a confederation of Malay organisations throughout Malaya and Singapore, was triumphant. But there were already problems of disunity.
As a matter in fact, even before Umno was established, Dato Onn had faced some hostility from some influential Malay leaders in his home state of Johore. There were some strong differences between Dato Onn and Dato Abdul Rahman bin Mohd Yasin, a pre war Johore Treasurer in regard to the behaviour of Sultan Ibrahim over the MacMichael Treaties (for the Malayan Union).
Dato Abdul Rahman and some other Malay leaders in Johore had thought that Dato Onn was being too kind towards the Sultan. His two sons, Sulaiman and Dr Ismail (later Tun Dr Ismail) had refused to join Umno until after Dato Onn's resignation as Umno president in 1951.
More serious was the withdrawal of the Persatuan Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM), the Malay Nationalist Party, from the Umno confederation at the Umno meeting in Ipoh on 29 and 30 June, 1946. Ostensibly, the withdrawal was due to differences over the Umno flag. But, as Firdaus Haji Abdullah points out in his book Radical Malay Politics, "behind this issue, there were serious and substantive disagreements over policy."
The PKMM's proposal for the symbol was defeated by one vote. After a lengthy speech by Ahmad Boestamam, he and all other PKMM representatives and supporters walked out. The Malay left had broken ranks with Umno. At the same meeting, and for the same reason, the Persatuan Pekerja-Pekerja Junior Malaya also withdrew from Umno.
In mid 1947, when it was proposed to turn Umno into a political organisation and that affiliate member organisations should dissolve themselves and merge completely into Umno, the move was opposed by several organisations which, apart from the fear of losing their identity, were established long before Umno itself. Moreover, there were organisations whose leadership were drawn from the working class rather than the aristocracy and the English educated administrative group.
Thus, the Singapore Malay Association, the Sabak Bernam Malay Association and Saberkas of Kedah (which had some radical and 'socialist' orientation), chose to remain as associate member organisations only rather than dissolve themselves. The Perikatan Melayu Kelantan and the Kesatuan Melayu Johore withdrew completely from Umno.
More serious splits were to come.
In February 1950, mainly to draw away support from the Hizbul Muslimin, the Muslim Party formed during the second week of March 1948, UMNO formed a body within itself called the Persatuan Ulamak Sa-Malaya. Haji Ahmad Fuad, Dato Onn's friend, became the leader of this body.
(Consider for a moment the irony and hypocrisy of Umno leaders who now say that politics and religion shouldn't mix)
In June 1951, however, the Persatuan Ulamak Sa-Malaya teamed up with another Islamic group consisting of former adherents of the Hizbul Muslimin, at the former's meeting in Kepala Batas, Penang. At this moment, the Persatuan Ulamak Se-Malaya decided to change its name to Persatuan Islam Sa-Malaya,to be known in short as PAS.
Another shock was waiting for Umno. After Umno had rejected Dato Onn's proposal to open Umno to the non Malays and transform it into a Malayan political party, he resigned formally from Umno on 26 August, 1951. His position was taken over by Tunku Abdul Rahman, then an unknown deputy public prosecutor.
After Merdeka in 1957, the public perception of the Tunku as prime minister and Abdul Razak as his deputy was that their relationship was one of great harmony. Some even characterised it has a father and son kind of relationship. But it was only valid for a while.
For none other than the Tunku himself had exploded the myth that his relationship with Razak was as harmonious as commonly believed. Writing in the 29 August 1983 issue of The Star (and later reproduced in his book Contemporary Issues in Malaysian Politics), the Tunku related a telling incident in this vein: "Once at the Residency, Khalid Awang Osman, the former High Commissioner to India, mentioned in front of Tun Razak that he (Razak) would have to wait for a long time before he could become the Prime Minister. I could see the shocked surprise on the face of Tun Razak. As it happened, after that day I noticed his attitude took a change."
Well, well, from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The myth of an almost perfect political and working relationship was, well, just a myth. In an article published in The Star on 20 February 1978, the Tunku said that Asiaweek's M.G.G Pillai had alleged in the 17 February 1978 issue of that magazine that "many political figures still insist privately that the Tunku stepped down unwillingly in 1970 and that he was in fact pushed aside by Tun Abdul Razak."
The Tunku commented: "As regards the late Tun Razak pushing me aside, he made no attempt openly to do so but it must be admitted that he felt a bit small to be my deputy for so long, and being an ambitious man, he would no doubt have liked to take over as prime minister. Only those around him wanted to take over dramatically and with a blare of trumpets."
It may be true that Tun Razak made no attempt openly to push the Tunku aside. But did he make any attempt secretly to do so? And who were those around Razak?
Mahathir, Musa Hitam, Harun Idris, Syed Jaafar Albar? And some other Umno extremists or ultras?
It is interesting to note that the Tunku, in reference to what Khalid Awang Osman said, as mentioned earlier, had added: "I took the remarks as a joke, but soon after things began to happen."
What things began to happen?
Well, in an interview with Asiaweek, published on 10 May 1985, exactly 16 years to the day after the fateful general elections on 1969, the Tunku actually blamed Tun Razak and other colleagues for his political downfall. In relating the charged atmosphere just before the 1969 general elections, the Tunku said: "It started when one of them (alleged communists) was killed near the airport, and they asked for a funeral procession to bury the dead. I would never have allowed that. But I was not there. I was away campaigning. But my colleagues, who were trying to make trouble for me, gave permission, and so when the communists carried the body, they stopped at every corner to harangue the people, to curse the government, to curse me..."
Responding to further questioning, the Tunku actually said that "My deputy allowed it", meaning the procession.
To another question, the Tunku said: "I couldn't have stayed on. To stay, you have to be sure of the loyalty of your friends and colleagues. I wasn't sure. In fact I was very, ah, frustrated with the behaviour of some."
The Tunku had often said that he wanted to be the "happiest prime minister in the world" - but how could he be happy when some of his friends and colleagues wanted to stage a coup against him?
In order to get rid of the Tunku politically, some criminal elements and over ambitious leaders in Umno orchestrated the bloody May 13 Massacre which killed a few hundred Malaysians, maimed a few hundred more other Malaysians, burned down a few hundred shophouses and homes and looted some of them and burned scores of cars and other vehicles. All crimes against humanity.
No inquiry after 38 years. Who says law is law? Why then no rule of law as far as the May 13 Massacre is concerned? Why is this continued rape of law being allowed? In whose interests?
And what about other Umno crimes against humanity like the Memali Massacre in the mid 1980s? When will there be an accounting? Where is the transparency? And where is the much talked about integrity? Including the integrity of the law?
Saturday, 3 November 2007
Armenian Genocide - 1915-1918 - 1,500,000 Deaths
The Armenian Genocide, the first genocide of the 20th Century, occurred when two million Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportations and massacres.
For three thousand years, a thriving Armenian community had existed inside the vast region of the Middle East bordered by the Black, Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The area, known as Asia Minor, stands at the crossroads of three continents; Europe, Asia and Africa. Great powers rose and fell over the many centuries and the Armenian homeland was at various times ruled by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Mongols.
Despite the repeated invasions and occupations, Armenian pride and cultural identity never wavered. The snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat became its focal point and by 600 BC Armenia as a nation sprang into being. Following the advent of Christianity, Armenia became the very first nation to accept it as the state religion. A golden era of peace and prosperity followed which saw the invention of a distinct alphabet, a flourishing of literature, art, commerce, and a unique style of architecture. By the 10th century, Armenians had established a new capital at Ani, affectionately called the 'city of a thousand and one churches.'
In the eleventh century, the first Turkish invasion of the Armenian homeland occurred. Thus began several hundred years of rule by Muslim Turks. By the sixteenth century, Armenia had been absorbed into the vast and mighty Ottoman Empire. At its peak, this Turkish empire included much of Southeast Europe, North Africa, and almost all of the Middle East.
But by the 1800s the once powerful Ottoman Empire was in serious decline. For centuries, it had spurned technological and economic progress, while the nations of Europe had embraced innovation and became industrial giants. Turkish armies had once been virtually invincible. Now, they lost battle after battle to modern European armies.
As the empire gradually disintegrated, formerly subject peoples including the Greeks, Serbs and Romanians achieved their long-awaited independence. Only the Armenians and the Arabs of the Middle East remained stuck in the backward and nearly bankrupt empire, now under the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid.
By the 1890s, young Armenians began to press for political reforms, calling for a constitutional government, the right to vote and an end to discriminatory practices such as special taxes levied solely against them because they were Christians. The despotic Sultan responded to their pleas with brutal persecutions. Between 1894 and 1896 over 100,000 inhabitants of Armenian villages were massacred during widespread pogroms conducted by the Sultan's special regiments.
But the Sultan's days were numbered. In July 1908, reform-minded Turkish nationalists known as "Young Turks" forced the Sultan to allow a constitutional government and guarantee basic rights. The Young Turks were ambitious junior officers in the Turkish Army who hoped to halt their country's steady decline.
Armenians in Turkey were delighted with this sudden turn of events and its prospects for a brighter future. Both Turks and Armenians held jubilant public rallies attended with banners held high calling for freedom, equality and justice.
However, their hopes were dashed when three of the Young Turks seized full control of the government via a coup in 1913. This triumvirate of Young Turks, consisting of Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal, came to wield dictatorial powers and concocted their own ambitious plans for the future of Turkey. They wanted to unite all of the Turkic peoples in the entire region while expanding the borders of Turkey eastward across the Caucasus all the way into Central Asia. This would create a new Turkish empire, a "great and eternal land" called Turan with one language and one religion.
But there was a big problem. The traditional historic homeland of Armenia lay right in the path of their plans to expand eastward. And on that land was a large population of Christian Armenians totaling some two million persons, making up about 10 percent of Turkey's overall population.
Along with the Young Turk's newfound "Turanism" there was a dramatic rise in Islamic fundamentalist agitation throughout Turkey. Christian Armenians were once again branded as infidels (non-believers in Islam). Young Islamic extremists, sometimes leading to violence, staged anti-Armenian demonstrations. During one such outbreak in 1909, two hundred villages were plundered and over 30,000 persons massacred in the Cilicia district on the Mediterranean coast. Throughout Turkey, sporadic local attacks against Armenians continued unchecked over the next several years.
There were also big cultural differences between Armenians and Turks. The Armenians had always been one of the best-educated communities within the old Turkish Empire. Armenians were the professionals in society, the businessmen, lawyers, doctors and skilled craftsmen. And they were more open to new scientific, political and social ideas from the West (Europe and America). Children of wealthy Armenians went to Paris, Geneva or even to America to complete their education.
By contrast, the majority of Turks were illiterate peasant farmers and small shopkeepers. Leaders of the Ottoman Empire had traditionally placed little value on education and not a single institute of higher learning could be found within their old empire. The various autocratic and despotic rulers throughout the empire's history had valued loyalty and blind obedience above all. Their uneducated subjects had never heard of democracy or liberalism and thus had no inclination toward political reform. But this was not the case with the better-educated Armenians who sought political and social reforms that would improve life for themselves and Turkey's other minorities.
The Young Turks decided to glorify the virtues of simple Turkish peasantry at the expense of the Armenians in order to capture peasant loyalty. They exploited the religious, cultural, economic and political differences between Turks and Armenians so that the average Turk came to regard Armenians as strangers among them.
When World War I broke out in 1914, leaders of the Young Turk regime sided with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The outbreak of war would provide the perfect opportunity to solve the "Armenian question" once and for all. The world's attention became fixed upon the battlegrounds of France and Belgium where the young men of Europe were soon falling dead by the hundreds of thousands. The Eastern Front eventually included the border between Turkey and Russia. With war at hand, unusual measures involving the civilian population would not seem too out of the ordinary.
As a prelude to the coming action, Turks disarmed the entire Armenian population under the pretext that the people were naturally sympathetic toward Christian Russia. Every last rifle and pistol was forcibly seized, with severe penalties for anyone who failed to turn in a weapon. Quite a few Armenian men actually purchased a weapon from local Turks or Kurds (nomadic Muslim tribesmen) at very high prices so they would have something to turn in.
At this time, about forty thousand Armenian men were serving in the Turkish Army. In the fall and winter of 1914, all of their weapons were confiscated and they were put into slave labor battalions building roads or were used as human pack animals. Under the brutal work conditions they suffered a very high death rate. Those who survived would soon be shot outright. For the time had come to move against the Armenians.
The decision to annihilate the entire population came directly from the ruling triumvirate of ultra-nationalist Young Turks. The actual extermination orders were transmitted in coded telegrams to all provincial governors throughout Turkey. Armed roundups began on the evening of April 24, 1915, as 300 Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy and dignitaries in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were taken from their homes, briefly jailed and tortured, then hanged or shot.
Next, there were mass arrests of Armenian men throughout the country by Turkish soldiers, police agents and bands of Turkish volunteers. The men were tied together with ropes in small groups then taken to the outskirts of their town and shot dead or bayoneted by death squads. Local Turks and Kurds armed with knives and sticks often joined in on the killing.
Then it was the turn of Armenian women, children, and the elderly. On very short notice, they were ordered to pack a few belongings and be ready to leave home, under the pretext that they were being relocated to a non-military zone for their own safety. They were actually being taken on death marches heading south toward the Syrian Desert.
Muslim Turks who assumed instant ownership of everything quickly occupied most of the homes and villages left behind by the rousted Armenians. In many cases, local Turks who took them from their families spared young Armenian children from deportation. The children were coerced into denouncing Christianity and becoming Muslims, and were then given new Turkish names. For Armenian boys the forced conversion meant they each had to endure painful circumcision as required by Islamic custom.
Turkish gendarmes escorted individual caravans consisting of thousands of deported Armenians. These guards allowed roving government units of hardened criminals known as the "Special Organization" to attack the defenseless people, killing anyone they pleased. They also encouraged Kurdish bandits to raid the caravans and steal anything they wanted. In addition, an extraordinary amount of sexual abuse and rape of girls and young women occurred at the hands of the Special Organization and Kurdish bandits. Most of the attractive young females were kidnapped for a life of involuntary servitude.
The death marches during the Armenian Genocide, involving over a million Armenians, covered hundreds of miles and lasted months. Indirect routes through mountains and wilderness areas were deliberately chosen in order to prolong the ordeal and to keep the caravans away from Turkish villages.
Food supplies being carried by the people quickly ran out and they were usually denied further food or water. Anyone stopping to rest or lagging behind the caravan was mercilessly beaten until they rejoined the march. If they couldn't continue they were shot. A common practice was to force all of the people in the caravan to remove every stitch of clothing and have them resume the march in the nude under the scorching sun until they dropped dead by the roadside from exhaustion and dehydration.
An estimated 75 percent of the Armenians on these marches perished, especially children and the elderly. Those who survived the ordeal were herded into the desert without a drop of water. Being thrown off cliffs, burned alive, or drowned in rivers.
During the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish countryside became littered with decomposing corpses. At one point, Mehmed Talaat responded to the problem by sending a coded message to all provincial leaders: "I have been advised that in certain areas unburied corpses are still to be seen. I ask you to issue the strictest instructions so that the corpses and their debris in your vilayet are buried."
But his instructions were generally ignored. Those involved in the mass murder showed little interest in stopping to dig graves. The roadside corpses and emaciated deportees were a shocking sight to foreigners working in Turkey. Eyewitnesses included German government liaisons, American missionaries, and U.S. diplomats stationed in the country.
During the Armenian Genocide, the Christian missionaries were often threatened with death and were unable to help the people. Diplomats from the still neutral United States communicated their blunt assessments of the ongoing government actions. U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, reported to Washington: "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race..."
The Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia) responded to news of the massacres by issuing a warning to Turkey: "...the Allied governments announce publicly...that they will hold all the members of the Ottoman Government, as well as such of their agents as are implicated, personally responsible for such matters."
The warning had no effect. Newspapers in the West including the New York Times published reports of the continuing deportations with the headlines: Armenians Are Sent to Perish in the Desert - Turks Accused of Plan to Exterminate Whole Population (August 18, 1915) - Million Armenians Killed or in Exile - American Committee on Relief Says Victims of Turks Are Steadily Increasing - Policy of Extermination (December 15, 1915).
Temporary relief for some Armenians came as Russian troops attacked along the Eastern Front and made their way into central Turkey. But the troops withdrew in 1917 upon the Russian Revolution. Armenian survivors withdrew along with them and settled in among fellow Armenians already living in provinces of the former Russian Empire. There were in total about 500,000 Armenians gathered in this region.
In May 1918, Turkish armies attacked the area to achieve the goal of expanding Turkey eastward into the Caucasus and also to resume the annihilation of the Armenians. As many as 100,000 Armenians may have fallen victim to the advancing Turkish troops.
However, the Armenians managed to acquire weapons and they fought back, finally repelling the Turkish invasion at the battle of Sardarabad, thus saving the remaining population from total extermination with no help from the outside world. Following that victory, Armenian leaders declared the establishment of the independent Republic of Armenia.
World War I ended in November 1918 with a defeat for Germany and the Central Powers including Turkey. Shortly before the war had ended, the Young Turk triumvirate; Talaat, Enver and Djemal, abruptly resigned their government posts and fled to Germany where they had been offered asylum.
In the months that followed, repeated requests by Turkey’s new moderate government and the Allies were made asking Germany to send the Young Turks back home to stand trial. However all such requests were turned down. As a result, Armenian activists took matters into their own hands, located the Young Turks and assassinated them along with two other instigators of the mass murder.
Meanwhile, representatives from the fledgling Republic of Armenia attended the Paris Peace Conference in the hope that the victorious Allies would give them back their historic lands seized by Turkey. The European Allies responded to their request by asked the United States to assume guardianship of the new Republic. However, President Woodrow Wilson's attempt to make Armenia an official U.S. protectorate was rejected by the U.S. Congress in May 1920.
But Wilson did not give up on Armenia. As a result of his efforts, the Treaty of Sevres was signed on August 10, 1920 by the Allied Powers, the Republic of Armenia, and the new moderate leaders of Turkey. The treaty recognized an independent Armenian state in an area comprising much of the former historic homeland.
However, Turkish nationalism once again reared its head. The moderate Turkish leaders who signed the treaty were ousted in favor of a new nationalist leader, Mustafa Kemal, who simply refused to accept the treaty and even re-occupied the very lands in question then expelled any surviving Armenians, including thousands of orphans.
No Allied power came to the aid of the Armenian Republic and it collapsed. Only a tiny portion of the easternmost area of historic Armenia survived by being becoming part of the Soviet Union.
After the successful obliteration of the people of historic Armenia during the Armenian Genocide, the Turks demolished any remnants of Armenian cultural heritage including priceless masterpieces of ancient architecture, old libraries and archives. The Turks even leveled entire cities such as the once thriving Kharpert, Van and the ancient capital at Ani, to remove all traces of the three thousand year old civilization.
Refering to the Armenian Genocide, the young German politician Adolf Hitler duly noted the half-hearted reaction of the world’s great powers to the plight of the Armenians. After achieving total power in Germany, Hitler decided to conquer Poland in 1939 and told his generals: "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?"
Friday, 2 November 2007
MT archive: The true meaning of political doublespeak
Political emasculation of a people is a very potent tool towards creation of an "orderly society", and "peaceful transition" of the power structure in a nation state. One way or other, every nation with its own twists and turn in the constitution/ laws uses it for political expediency. Some are very open about it, some are more discrete and sophisticated.
One way or other, they all do the same thing, although not all apply crude and draconian measures to enforce it (in which case, it becomes labeled as a "totalitarian state"). Others plainly disregard rights enshrined in their constitution which is actually there for PR purposes or posterity, and indulge in "rules of the mob" using trojan horses to achieve their aim.
The following is an article that I came across in the Malaysia Today archives, by sheer chance. I believe, the website was then called "Loony Malaysia" which was the predecessor to what it is today.
This was long before I was anywhere close to what one may call "web savvy" (not that I'm that much better these days). So, Raja Petra was far ahead of us, as far as the blogging phenomenon is concerned .....Speaking of "political double talk", not much has changed as far as all known politicians are concerned, local or foreign - everything is said and done for the sake of political expediency & convenience for the "man of the day".
I couldn't have spun the things mentioned, any better .... LOL.
I somehow believe that many more politicians (in many more nations), would in due time create the need for such a convenience, to help them enforce and "maintain law & order for the sake of greater security and progress of the nation".
Anyway, here it goes with regard to the much dreaded "ISA" of Malaysia ,(Article 149 of the 1957 Constitution (Merdeka Constitution) has a clause that such laws would automatically lapsed upon the expiration of one year from the date on which they came into operation. However the sunset provision was removed in the Constitution Amendment Act 1960 and the position now is such laws would continue to exist indefinitely, unless both Houses of Parliament passed resolutions annulling them.) as in this case.
(For those who aren't aware of what is stands for, please click here. And to compare it with the Patriot Act of the great US of A, click here.
For an interesting discussion and comparison on the two, click here & click here .)
Friday, November 04, 2005
The true meaning of political doublespeak
Raja Petra Kamarudin
(First published in the Free Anwar Campaign website on 3rd June 2004)
June 2001 (Act 1 Scene 1)
Q: Mr President, why is the US so opposed to Malaysia’s arrest and detention of the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters under the Internal Security Act? Does the US not consider this as Malaysia’s internal matter, which the US should not interfere in? After all, Malaysia has a right to safeguard its nation’s security.
A: Matters concerning a violation of human rights cannot be regarded as an internal matter of any country. It is a matter that concerns the whole world. Malaysia arrested and detained the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters in April merely because they oppose the dictatorial government of Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The Internal Security Act is a draconian law. No country should any longer have laws that allow for detention without trial.
And we cannot allow Malaysia to use “safeguarding its nation’s security” as an excuse for it to continue using this most inhumane law. If the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters have committed a crime as alleged, then indict them and try them in an open court. If there is not enough evidence to try them in an open court, then how can there be enough evidence to detain them without trial?
Laws such as Malaysia’s Internal Security Act have no place in this modern world. The Internal Security Act should be repealed. It is an outdated and barbaric law. It is a law of medieval times.
June 2004 (Act 1 Scene 2)
Q: Mr President, what is the US response to Malaysia’s arrest and detention of the Sri Lanka businessman, B.S.A Tahir, under the draconian Internal Security Act? Should he not instead have been brought to trial if Malaysia has enough evidence of any wrongdoing on his part? And was his arrest more to satisfy US demands rather than the fact he is a threat to Malaysia’s internal security?
A: We cannot simply classify Malaysia’s Internal Security Act as a draconian law. Laws such as these are necessary to combat international Islamic terrorism and to maintain world peace.
B.S.A Tahir was involved in exporting to countries that are hostile towards the US certain components that could be used or aid in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, there is not enough evidence to bring him to trial so it was necessary for Malaysia to use the Internal Security Act against him, which sensibly allows for detention without trial in situations such as this where there is not enough evidence to secure a conviction. Malaysia’s Internal Security Act is a preventive law, which helps ensure would-be perpetrators are detained before they can commit a crime rather than after the crime has been committed. Laws such as these prevent a repeat of the 911 tragedy.
The US applauds Malaysia’s move to detain this despicable man who is a threat to the security of our nation. If more countries would act like Malaysia, then world peace would be guaranteed and international Islamic terrorism would be defeated. We look forward to more such arrests and detentions in the near future and we will help Malaysia in any way we can to put all these dangerous people out of business. Countries hostile towards the US should not be allowed to embark upon a nuclear arms program. And Malaysia has contributed greatly in ensuring Muslim countries never achieve the status of a nuclear power.
January 1988 (Act 2 Scene 1)
Q: Yang Berhormat, we can understand Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and Musa Hitam being strongly opposed to Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohammad. But you have never been known as a strong critic of Dr Mahathir before this. Why have you aligned yourself to Team B?
A: Dr Mahathir is a dictator. He is bad for Malaysia and bad for Umno. If we want to save Malaysia and Umno, Dr Mahathir must be removed. He uses draconian laws such as the Internal Security Act to silence his critics. He does not allow dissent. He is opposed to free speech. Dr Mahathir does not believe in and will not tolerate democracy. We need a more democratic leader who respects the rights of the people.
The rights of the people must be restored. Democracy must be restored. Dr Mahathir must be removed. The future of Umno and the Malays, in fact, of all Malaysians, depend on this. I cannot remain an Umno member as long as Dr Mahathir remains its president. I will not rest until he is ousted and Umno is once again headed by a truly democratic leader. I will remain outside Umno and fight for change. The day I rejoin Umno will be the day Dr Mahathir is sent packing.
January 1999 (Act 2 Scene 2)
Q: Yang Berhormat, can you give us your comments on your recent appointment as Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. What are your views on Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the President of Umno and Prime Minister of Malaysia? Do you feel, in light of your past history and strong opposition to him, you would face problems in working with him and supporting him as your boss?
A: Well, first of all, I would like to register my thanks and gratitude to Dr Mahathir for having the trust and faith in me by appointing me as Malaysia’s new Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. I am certainly greatly honoured.
Of course, as his number two, I shall give him my undivided and complete loyalty and support. A number two must always believe in and support his boss. If he cannot, then he should resign. There are no two ways about it. There is no way a number two can work with his boss if he does not subscribe to his boss’ policies.
Dr Mahathir has done a lot for Umno and the Malays. In fact, he has done more for this entire nation than all the previous Prime Ministers put together. This country needs a man like Dr Mahathir to lead it to greater heights. Only Dr Mahathir dares face more powerful nations like the US and tell it what he thinks about it. No other world leader has the guts that Dr Mahathir has in facing these countries that imagine themselves as the police of the world and tell them what he thinks of them.
Dr Mahathir will be recorded in the history books as the greatest Prime Minister this nation has ever been blessed with. I am honoured and delighted to have the opportunity to work with him. I also pledge him my undying support and loyalty.
October 1987 (Act 3 Scene 1)
Q: Yang Berhormat, what are your views on the recent arrest of more than 100 Malaysians under the Internal Security Act?
A: Laws such as the Internal Security Act have no place in modern Malaysia. It is a draconian and barbaric law. What offence have these people committed? All they did was oppose the government. Is this so wrong?
In a democratic society, there must be room for dissent. People must be allowed to express their opinions. And not all these opinions must be complementary to the government. We should also be able to accept criticisms.
Malaysia is going to be the laughing stock of the entire world. Only military regimes like in some African countries do things like arrest and detain people without trial. Malaysia is a Parliamentary democracy. It has a government elected through free elections. There is no place in Malaysia for outdated laws such as the Internal Security Act.
October 2003 (Act 3 Scene 2)
Q: Yang Berhormat, human rights groups and non-governmental organisations have come out strongly to criticise Malaysia on its arrests and detention of various individuals under the Internal Security Act. At the moment more than 100 people still remain under detention in Kamunting. They accuse Malaysia of using the Internal Security Act to silence critics and dissidents. They also allege that all those so-called, KMM, JI, and so on members are not really Islamic terrorists but that Malaysia is creating this illusion that Islamic terrorism exists so as to frighten the electorate, in particular the non-Muslims, and ensure they do not support the opposition.
A: This is utter nonsense. This is nothing but opposition propaganda. And these so-called human rights groups and non-governmental organisations are merely fronts for the opposition to oppose the government under disguise.
The Internal Security Act is a necessary law. Without the existence of laws such as the Internal Security Act, Malaysia will suffer the fate of the United States that saw a great tragedy known as 911.
We have never misused the Internal Security Act. All those detained under the Internal Security Act are proven threats to society. Thorough police investigations have been launched and the evidence reveals these people all intended to commit a crime that would threaten the peace and stability of this country.
No doubt, they have not actually committed any crime yet. If they had, then we could arrest them and charge them in court. But they have certainly been thinking of committing a crime. It was in their thoughts. So we need to detain them before they act on their thoughts.
The Internal Security Act is a preventive law. It is to ensure we can detain people before and not after they commit any crime. It is no use arresting them after they have committed a crime. Most likely they would be far away by then and we would never be able to find them. The Internal Security Act can catch them by surprise. Just as soon as they start thinking, we detain them and stop them from further thinking about it.
(First published in the Free Anwar Campaign website on 3rd June 2004)
June 2001 (Act 1 Scene 1)
Q: Mr President, why is the US so opposed to Malaysia’s arrest and detention of the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters under the Internal Security Act? Does the US not consider this as Malaysia’s internal matter, which the US should not interfere in? After all, Malaysia has a right to safeguard its nation’s security.
A: Matters concerning a violation of human rights cannot be regarded as an internal matter of any country. It is a matter that concerns the whole world. Malaysia arrested and detained the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters in April merely because they oppose the dictatorial government of Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The Internal Security Act is a draconian law. No country should any longer have laws that allow for detention without trial.
And we cannot allow Malaysia to use “safeguarding its nation’s security” as an excuse for it to continue using this most inhumane law. If the ten Anwar Ibrahim supporters have committed a crime as alleged, then indict them and try them in an open court. If there is not enough evidence to try them in an open court, then how can there be enough evidence to detain them without trial?
Laws such as Malaysia’s Internal Security Act have no place in this modern world. The Internal Security Act should be repealed. It is an outdated and barbaric law. It is a law of medieval times.
June 2004 (Act 1 Scene 2)
Q: Mr President, what is the US response to Malaysia’s arrest and detention of the Sri Lanka businessman, B.S.A Tahir, under the draconian Internal Security Act? Should he not instead have been brought to trial if Malaysia has enough evidence of any wrongdoing on his part? And was his arrest more to satisfy US demands rather than the fact he is a threat to Malaysia’s internal security?
A: We cannot simply classify Malaysia’s Internal Security Act as a draconian law. Laws such as these are necessary to combat international Islamic terrorism and to maintain world peace.
B.S.A Tahir was involved in exporting to countries that are hostile towards the US certain components that could be used or aid in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, there is not enough evidence to bring him to trial so it was necessary for Malaysia to use the Internal Security Act against him, which sensibly allows for detention without trial in situations such as this where there is not enough evidence to secure a conviction. Malaysia’s Internal Security Act is a preventive law, which helps ensure would-be perpetrators are detained before they can commit a crime rather than after the crime has been committed. Laws such as these prevent a repeat of the 911 tragedy.
The US applauds Malaysia’s move to detain this despicable man who is a threat to the security of our nation. If more countries would act like Malaysia, then world peace would be guaranteed and international Islamic terrorism would be defeated. We look forward to more such arrests and detentions in the near future and we will help Malaysia in any way we can to put all these dangerous people out of business. Countries hostile towards the US should not be allowed to embark upon a nuclear arms program. And Malaysia has contributed greatly in ensuring Muslim countries never achieve the status of a nuclear power.
January 1988 (Act 2 Scene 1)
Q: Yang Berhormat, we can understand Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and Musa Hitam being strongly opposed to Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohammad. But you have never been known as a strong critic of Dr Mahathir before this. Why have you aligned yourself to Team B?
A: Dr Mahathir is a dictator. He is bad for Malaysia and bad for Umno. If we want to save Malaysia and Umno, Dr Mahathir must be removed. He uses draconian laws such as the Internal Security Act to silence his critics. He does not allow dissent. He is opposed to free speech. Dr Mahathir does not believe in and will not tolerate democracy. We need a more democratic leader who respects the rights of the people.
The rights of the people must be restored. Democracy must be restored. Dr Mahathir must be removed. The future of Umno and the Malays, in fact, of all Malaysians, depend on this. I cannot remain an Umno member as long as Dr Mahathir remains its president. I will not rest until he is ousted and Umno is once again headed by a truly democratic leader. I will remain outside Umno and fight for change. The day I rejoin Umno will be the day Dr Mahathir is sent packing.
January 1999 (Act 2 Scene 2)
Q: Yang Berhormat, can you give us your comments on your recent appointment as Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. What are your views on Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the President of Umno and Prime Minister of Malaysia? Do you feel, in light of your past history and strong opposition to him, you would face problems in working with him and supporting him as your boss?
A: Well, first of all, I would like to register my thanks and gratitude to Dr Mahathir for having the trust and faith in me by appointing me as Malaysia’s new Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. I am certainly greatly honoured.
Of course, as his number two, I shall give him my undivided and complete loyalty and support. A number two must always believe in and support his boss. If he cannot, then he should resign. There are no two ways about it. There is no way a number two can work with his boss if he does not subscribe to his boss’ policies.
Dr Mahathir has done a lot for Umno and the Malays. In fact, he has done more for this entire nation than all the previous Prime Ministers put together. This country needs a man like Dr Mahathir to lead it to greater heights. Only Dr Mahathir dares face more powerful nations like the US and tell it what he thinks about it. No other world leader has the guts that Dr Mahathir has in facing these countries that imagine themselves as the police of the world and tell them what he thinks of them.
Dr Mahathir will be recorded in the history books as the greatest Prime Minister this nation has ever been blessed with. I am honoured and delighted to have the opportunity to work with him. I also pledge him my undying support and loyalty.
October 1987 (Act 3 Scene 1)
Q: Yang Berhormat, what are your views on the recent arrest of more than 100 Malaysians under the Internal Security Act?
A: Laws such as the Internal Security Act have no place in modern Malaysia. It is a draconian and barbaric law. What offence have these people committed? All they did was oppose the government. Is this so wrong?
In a democratic society, there must be room for dissent. People must be allowed to express their opinions. And not all these opinions must be complementary to the government. We should also be able to accept criticisms.
Malaysia is going to be the laughing stock of the entire world. Only military regimes like in some African countries do things like arrest and detain people without trial. Malaysia is a Parliamentary democracy. It has a government elected through free elections. There is no place in Malaysia for outdated laws such as the Internal Security Act.
October 2003 (Act 3 Scene 2)
Q: Yang Berhormat, human rights groups and non-governmental organisations have come out strongly to criticise Malaysia on its arrests and detention of various individuals under the Internal Security Act. At the moment more than 100 people still remain under detention in Kamunting. They accuse Malaysia of using the Internal Security Act to silence critics and dissidents. They also allege that all those so-called, KMM, JI, and so on members are not really Islamic terrorists but that Malaysia is creating this illusion that Islamic terrorism exists so as to frighten the electorate, in particular the non-Muslims, and ensure they do not support the opposition.
A: This is utter nonsense. This is nothing but opposition propaganda. And these so-called human rights groups and non-governmental organisations are merely fronts for the opposition to oppose the government under disguise.
The Internal Security Act is a necessary law. Without the existence of laws such as the Internal Security Act, Malaysia will suffer the fate of the United States that saw a great tragedy known as 911.
We have never misused the Internal Security Act. All those detained under the Internal Security Act are proven threats to society. Thorough police investigations have been launched and the evidence reveals these people all intended to commit a crime that would threaten the peace and stability of this country.
No doubt, they have not actually committed any crime yet. If they had, then we could arrest them and charge them in court. But they have certainly been thinking of committing a crime. It was in their thoughts. So we need to detain them before they act on their thoughts.
The Internal Security Act is a preventive law. It is to ensure we can detain people before and not after they commit any crime. It is no use arresting them after they have committed a crime. Most likely they would be far away by then and we would never be able to find them. The Internal Security Act can catch them by surprise. Just as soon as they start thinking, we detain them and stop them from further thinking about it.
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
TRANSCRIPT: How and Why Muhammad Made a Difference
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2664/pub_detail.asp
By Michael Cromartie
Posted: Sunday, July 16, 2006
EVENT TRANSCRIPTS
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: Faith Angle Conference
Publication Date: May 22, 2006
Michael CromartieMICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome to Key West. We’re delighted you could be here. We have a group of your colleagues who meet twice a year for lunch to talk about what the next conference should be about, and what topics we should cover. When we met last time, it was at the height of the cartoon controversy, and we wanted an expert on Islam and Muhammad to speak. Everybody in the room agreed that if we could get Professor Michael Cook, it would be great because Dr. Cook is one of the leading authorities, not only in this country but in the world, on the subject.
Professor Cook holds the Cleveland Dodge chair of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, a chair formerly held by his teacher, Bernard Lewis. He’s the author of many books. One of his most recent books is called A Brief History of the Human Race. One of our first questions to him will be: How does one write a brief history of the human race? I hope he’ll tell us.
MICHAEL COOK: I ought to start by apologizing for the fact that I am bringing you stale news. I’m a card-carrying medievalist. I’m here to talk about how and why Muhammad made a difference. Just about everything I’m talking about will be events that happened in the seventh century -- (laughter) -- but don’t get the idea that those events are therefore irrelevant to the present day. I suspect that some of them are deeply relevant, though sometimes in ways that I’m not good at articulating. I’ll try and come back to that at the end.
Michael CookI’m not going to drop you straight into the seventh century. That would be unkind. I want to back up a few centuries and give you some background about the rise of monotheism. Maybe you know all about that already. In that case, I’m just reminding you.
The rise of monotheism happened late in the day. For something like a thousand years, you had monotheism, and it didn’t make a significant dent on world history. For many centuries, it was the religion of the ancient Israelites, a small Near Eastern people, and of their descendants, the Jews. Even when it started to spread to non-Jews in significant numbers in the form of Christianity, Christianity remained for the best part of three centuries the religion of a persecuted minority. But that changed dramatically in the fourth century, and the guy who changed it was the Roman Emperor Constantine.
Constantine adopted Christianity as his religion and, by extension, as the religion of the Roman Empire. At that point, monotheism, in its Christian form, for the first time became a bandwagon. Down until the time of Constantine, you had to be pretty strongly interested in your eternal salvation for it to make sense to convert to Christianity. After Constantine, people like you and me are jumping on the bandwagon. Well, I shouldn’t speak for you, but people like me are jumping on the bandwagon. It makes excellent sense in this world to convert to Christianity.
What’s relevant from my point of view, from our point of view, is that this bandwagon effect is not confined to the Roman Empire. It’s very strong there, but it’s also pulling and tugging on peoples outside the empire. From the fourth century onward, a whole series of peoples around the Roman world decide to give up their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity. It’s the Franks; it’s the English; it’s the Irish; it’s the Goths; it’s the Armenians, the Georgians, the Ethiopians -- you name them. This is a big historical trend. But whenever you have a big historical trend, there’s going to be somebody out there bucking the trend.
For example, you have pagan holdouts -- people like the Lithuanians who are so incredibly obstinate that 1,000 years after Constantine, they still insist on worshiping their pagan gods. Or you have people who like to play the field, like the Khazars. The Khazars turn up their noses at Christianity, and they decide to take their monotheistic medicine in the form of Judaism.
Both those peoples are of some consequence if you study the history of the regions they lived in. But they didn’t, either of them, make a significant dent on world history; the Arabs did. How did the Arabs do it? First and perhaps most important of all, the Arabs did not convert to Christianity like everybody else. Neither did they cling obstinately to their ancestral paganism. Nor did they turn up their noses at Christianity and adopt Judaism. What they did was to come up with a monotheist religion of their own. That initiated an extraordinary series of events.
The Arabs, in their Arabian homeland, came together to form a state. Then they set out from their homeland and conquered an empire that stretched all the way from Spain to Central Asia and northwestern India. That empire was the crucible in which the Islamic world as we know it began to come into existence.
It’s an extraordinary sequence of events, and lots of people are involved in it. But the most crucial person is Muhammad, because he was the one who gave the Arabs their new monotheism and established their state.
How and why did he manage to make that difference, a difference that has made an enormous dent on the history of the world and continues to dent the world as we know it today? The prosaic answer is that he was 1) a successful prophet and 2) a successful politician.
First, Muhammad as a prophet. Muhammad was born about 570. Forty years later, around 610, he began to receive revelations from on high. He continued to receive those revelations for something like 20 years, and collectively, those revelations constitute the Koran. The Koran was put together in the exact form in which we have it today something like 20 years after his death in 632. Some time around 650 —--give or take a few years -- the Koran is put together the way it is now.
What I have to do now is give you the message of the Koran. How do I do that? In a talk of this length, I have reduced the Koran to a sound bite. I feel bad about that. What authority do I have to reduce God’s message to a sound bite? Fortunately, the early Muslims come to my aid. They didn’t have the concept of a sound bite, but they did develop by the end of the seventh century a concept to which I can give the name of a “coin bite.”
Let me show you a typical coin, a completely non-Islamic coin, an American quarter (Page 3). Does that look vaguely familiar? This is a classic recipe for a coin. One side is political; the other side you could call religious. On the political side, you have a guy’s head, and he’s your king, or if not, then some equivalent figure. This side, you have an eagle, because either you guys worship an eagle god, or else maybe the eagle is a national symbol.
Here is a seventh century coin, and it’s exactly the same recipe (Page 4). This is typical of the design of coins minted by the Persian Empire, which is the empire the Arabs knocked down when they set out to conquer the world. This style is a little different, but it’s the same recipe. You’ve got the guy’s head there -- that’s the Persian emperor. Unlike George Washington, he has a crown on his head. Over here, we have a Zoroastrian fire altar and a couple of attendants on either side. There’s the political side and the religious side -- same basic design.
But the odd thing about this coin is, as some of you may have noticed, we have a bit of Arabic script. What’s that doing here? This coin was minted long after the Persian Empire disappeared, some time in the 690s, and it was minted not under Persian rule but under the rule of the Arabs -- the Muslims. What on earth were the Arabs doing making propaganda for an empire they had destroyed and for a religion theirs had superseded? It’s a good question, and eventually they started to ask themselves that question. They decided it was time for something different (Page 5). It’s recognizable as a coin: It’s round, has two sides, but everything else is changed. There is nothing but words here. Nobody’s head, nobody’s symbol, just words. In fact, 45 words in Arabic script, and those 45 words are the coin bite.
I guess you guys don’t readily decipher Arabic script on seventh century coins, so let me make it a bit easier. If you can’t read it, never mind; I can.
First, there are eight words used for a purely business purpose. This dirham -- that’s the kind of coin this is -- was minted in 733 or 734. That’s all we get. No name of any ruler is mentioned. Everything else on this coin is made over to God, and the words are derived from the Koran. Here we have the Koran reduced to a coin bite, and let’s see what the Muslims in the late seventh century decided to put there.
“There is no God but God alone without companion.” That’s good: no-compromise, no-nonsense monotheism -- very clear. We flip to the other side, and here in the center we have a rather longer passage: “He is God, One. God, the everlasting refuge, who has not begotten and has not been begotten and equal to him is not anyone” (Koran, chapter 112.) That’s the same uncompromising monotheism, but note also a side swipe at the Christians. The Christians are notorious for believing that God has a son; hence, the denial here that God has begotten anyone.
Finally, down here around the margin, we have: “Muhammad is the messenger of God” -- that’s a parting of the ways with the Jews and Christians, who don’t believe that Muhammad is a prophet -- “whom He has sent with the guidance and the religion of truth” -- so Muhammad’s religion is the religion of truth, Islam is the religion of truth, and this Jewish and Christian stuff is not -- “that He may uplift it above every religion, though the unbelievers be averse” -- that’s what, in religion departments, is called triumphalism.
There might be things I personally would have liked to see included on their coin, but let’s just leave it at that; that’s what they chose to put there. That’s as much as I wanted to say about Muhammad as a prophet, so you’ve got his message.
Now, Muhammad as a politician. In the timeline I’ve given you (Page 1) there are three events from the career of the prophet as a politician: the migration from Mecca to Medina, the raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq and the submission of Mecca. Two of those events are very important -- the migration to Medina and the submission of Mecca -- but they’re not the ones I’m going to talk about at any length.
The migration from Mecca to Medina is the central political event of the prophet’s career. The prophet has a problem in Mecca, and he finds the solution in Medina.
The problem in Mecca is he and his followers are unpopular with the pagan population. Why? Because of their monotheist incivility: They go around trashing pagan gods, and that’s not appreciated. Muhammad has to get his followers out of Mecca and find somewhere where they’ll be more secure. The answer, after a long search, is Medina.
Medina is an oasis about 200 miles north of Mecca that is in an awful political mess. Some of the Medinans had a hunch if they brought in Muhammad, he could clear up the mess, get things together and life could be more tolerable for them. They invite Muhammad to come, and they let him bring his followers along, too.
Muhammad establishes himself in Medina, and once he’s established in Medina, he starts to build a state -- a rudimentary, rather tribal state. This is the depths of Arabia, but it’s a real state. Between 622 and 632, he is expanding the power of his state. One of the milestones in the expansion of that power over Arabia is the submission of his own hometown of Mecca in 630.
What about this raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq? By the standards of the other events just mentioned, this is a trivial event. That’s exactly why I’m going to tell you about it: Because I can use it to give you a sense of the texture of Muhammad’s political career. The map on Page 2 shows you Arabia -- in context -- Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Roman Empire up there, Persian Empire up there, and here is Medina where the prophet in 622 is beginning to establish his state.
Who are these Banu ’l-Mustaliq? They are a small tribal group that lives in the desert between Mecca and the sea. Why does Muhammad decide to attack them? He gets intelligence that they’re about to attack him, so it’s a preemptive strike. Of course, we don’t have their account of it. That’s how the story is told in our sources: that this is a preemptive strike.
Muhammad comes down from Medina with his troops, his followers, and he catches the Banu ’l-Mustaliq -- the tribe -- by surprise at a watering place, and there’s a battle. I think 10 members of the tribe get killed. Two hundred of them are taken captive; that means they are slaves. Some of those 200 are men, but many of them are women and children.
Muhammad has scored a victory. What has it cost him? Very little. Only one Muslim has been killed on the battlefield. Only one of his followers has been killed, and I’ll come back to that.
At this point, the military operation is over, and Muhammad turns around and takes his followers back to Mecca. At least that’s the military side of it. What about the politics?
First of all, there’s the Muslim that got killed in the battle. What I didn’t tell you is he didn’t die heroically fighting the enemy. It was a case of friendly fire. Another of Muhammad’s followers mistook him for the enemy and killed him, and this creates problems. The family of the slain man, under Muslim rules, has a claim to blood money. The slain man has a brother who lives in Mecca. Mecca at this time is pagan -- the brother is pagan -- but he comes to Muhammad’s camp, and he pretends that he’s converted to Islam. Muhammad thinks that the guy is playing by Muslim rules, and he makes arrangements for the guy to get the blood money. But when nobody is paying attention, the guy, who’s actually playing by pagan rules, kills the killer of his brother and absconds. He goes back to Mecca, extemporizing poetry about how now he’s through with being a Muslim and is going back to being a good old-fashioned pagan.
Muhammad has been had, and there’s nothing he can do about it. But not quite nothing. A few years later in 630, when Mecca submits to him, Muhammad behaves magnanimously, but he does have a hit list of certain people that he’s not going to forgive. This guy who had pretended to be a Muslim and killed the killer of his brother is one of them.
Now let me tell you about an incident that was much more threatening and dangerous. First, two bits of background. One, we’re still by the watering place, and a watering place in western Arabia is a pretty small affair. This is a very arid part of the world. If people are crowding around the watering place, there’s going to be pushing and shoving. Two, you may tend to think of Muhammad’s followers as being a band of brothers who will fight for each other to the death, who are totally loyal to each other, etc., and, at a certain level, you may be right. But it could be more accurate to think of Muhammad’s followers as a shaky coalition. One of several fault lines that runs through this coalition is the distinction between the prophet’s Meccan followers and his Medinan followers. The Medinans don’t like the Meccans that much. They feel resentful. Their view is: “We were so decent to these Meccan guys. We let them come here as refugees, and look at them! Now they’re taking over our oasis. Why are we putting up with this?”
So what happens at the water hole? Two men get into a shoving match. These two men are not people of any particular consequence, but they do have some connections, and one of them is connected to the prophet’s Meccan followers; the other is connected to the prophet’s Medinan followers. The shoving match escalates into a fight, and the two men then call out for help from their people.
I should mention here a character called Ibn Ubayy. He is a Medinan, and he’s a lukewarm Muslim. He goes along, but he’s not happy. The reason he’s not happy is before the prophet came to Medina, Ibn Ubayy was a powerful man with ambitions to make himself king of the oasis. When Muhammad comes, his ambitions disintegrate, and he’s sulky about it. He will never miss an opportunity to go to the prophet’s Medinan followers and say, “Why are you putting up with these Meccans?” That’s exactly what he’s doing on this occasion of the shoving match at the water hole. He’s going around, out of earshot of the prophet, saying to the prophet’s Medinan followers: “The first thing we should do when we get back to Medina is throw those Meccans out.” It’s not a good situation, and the prophet hears about it.
What is Muhammad to do? Like any sensible politician, the first thing he does is ask for advice. He gets advice from one of his Meccan followers who says: “You’ve got to take Ibn Ubayy and kill him right now.” But Muhammad is not happy with that idea because he’s afraid of the backlash. He gets advice from one of his Medinan followers, and the guy says: “You should be nice to this guy, because the bottom line is you are in a stronger political position than him.”
What does Muhammad actually do? As politicians often do, he does nothing. No, that’s not quite right. He does do something. He orders his followers to march back to Medina on the double. The result is they’re so exhausted they don’t have any energy left for bickering. Luckily, they don’t encounter a hostile armed force; that could have been a disaster. The plan works -- Muhammad gets them back to Medina. After that, Ibn Ubayy fades out; he loses credit with his own people and dies soon after. Muhammad can’t resist congratulating himself for making the right decision.
I’ve given you lots of detail. Let’s stand back from the trees and see if we can find a wood here.
The first one is the extraordinary success of Muhammad in initiating a chain of events that establishes the Islamic world. We’ve seen he has a message from on high. He has skill as a military leader and a politician. But how does he make the leap from a being a guy with a message and political skill to having this enormous impact on world history?
Let’s go back and think for a minute about Arabia. I’ve mentioned before that Arabia is an arid part of the world. Before the days of oil, Arabia is also poor. Very poor compared to the densely settled agricultural lands outside Arabia, and immensely poor compared to, say, northwestern Europe or southern China or the eastern United States. Poor environments are an unfriendly place for states. If you want to establish a halfway decent state, you need a nice, fat tax base, and you’re not going to find that in Arabia. Instead of states in Arabia, what you find are tribes. Because of the impoverished environment, these tribes tend to be rather flat -- they don’t have steep social hierarchies. That means in Arabia basically every adult male has to be a warrior and a politician in his own right. It’s a society with a high level of military and political skill and activity, but it’s also a society without any central coordination. The result is, through the centuries, the Arabs fritter away their military and political energy in small-scale conflict among themselves. That’s why, before the seventh century, the tribes are never a big danger to their neighbors outside Arabia. Sure, they come and raid and steal the chickens and kidnap a few people, but it’s nothing big.
What Muhammad somehow did -- using not only his political skills but also his monotheist message that came from outside the tribal system -- was to get the Arabs on the same page. If you could do that, even temporarily, you could send the Arabs out to conquer the world. Not in Muhammad’s lifetime, but a couple of years after his death, starting in 634 -- that’s when his followers conquer this empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia. They had never done it before, and they never did it again. Muhammad, in his dual role as prophet and politician, is the absolutely crucial factor that made it possible.
That’s one angle. For the other angle let me go back to what I was saying about Christianity becoming a bandwagon in the fourth century. Any world religion must have become a bandwagon at some stage in its history, or it wouldn’t be a world religion. But world religions vary with regard to the timing of the bandwagon effect. In the Christian case, you have to wait until the fourth century for the Christian bandwagon to start rolling. Before the fourth century, you have to be pretty concerned about your eternal salvation for it to make sense to become a Christian.
In the Muslim case, the timing is quite different. Once the prophet gets to Medina, once he establishes this state, there is already the beginning of a bandwagon. In other words, the bandwagon effect in Islam comes extremely early. What does this mean? It means three things. One is that the historical experiences of early Christianity and early Islam are completely different. In the Christian case, you have a religion that remains the religion of a persecuted minority for the best part of three centuries. All the basic shapes of the religion are already set before the bandwagon starts. By contrast, in the Islamic case, you have less than 12 years in which the Muslims are a persecuted minority in Mecca. From that point on, once they get to Medina, and the prophet starts building his state, the bandwagon is rolling.
If, as you listen to my stories of the prophet, you have the Gospels in mind, you must have a sense that these stories are very, very different. They not only relate different historical circumstances, but they are told to a different audience. The audience of the Gospels is people who are seriously concerned about their salvation. The audience of the stories I’ve told you -- well, the salvation-minded might be listening, too -- but these stories cater to the military and political elite of the Arab-Islamic Empire. They address people who are interested in military operations, who like to know about preemptive strikes and incidents of friendly fire. These stories are told for people extremely interested in politics, who are fascinated by the judgment calls required to keep a shaky coalition together.
I hope you see this difference, this interest in military and political affairs, which makes the life of Muhammad, as it is written, so different in texture from the life of Jesus, as it’s written in the Gospels. Think what it means that you have, at the present day, these two utterly different heritages, these two utterly different ways of approaching and describing the life of the founder of the religion. I think that helps explain both why Islamic fundamentalism has been such a relative success in recent decades, and why people coming from a Christian background find it incredibly hard to understand it.
(Applause.)
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you very much. Now we’ll take questions.
Kathleen ParkerKATHLEEN PARKER, TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES: Could you talk about how the phenomenon of Osama bin Laden evolved out of this phenomenon of Muhammad. Every time you talked about Muhammad, I’m seeing Osama bin Laden in my head.
MR. COOK: I know you are. I’m not going to make any judgment about whether Osama bin Laden is making a correct use of his (Islamic) heritage. But certain features of that heritage are relevant to him. Like the prophet, Bin Laden is a political character, and he is involved in intense military activity. So those aspects of the prophet’s heritage do a lot for bin Laden.
JOHN COCHRAN, CQ WEEKLY: You said you didn’t want to talk about whether Osama bin Laden had perverted his history. Why not? In the American political context, it is a sound bite that bin Laden has severely perverted a great religion, so your view on that would be interesting.
MR. COOK: That’s a fair question. Shortly after 9/11, there was a book published called How Did This Happen? that included an essay by Karen Armstrong in which she said a world religion has been hijacked by this band of fanatics. I don’t buy that for a minute. I think there are genuinely things present in this heritage that Osama bin Laden can legitimately use.
It gets tricky where you start asking exact questions about what he does. What is justified in terms of the heritage and what is not? That’s controversial in the Western academe. It’s also very controversial in the general Islamic fundamentalist milieu, too. For example, I understand that after 9/11 there was a great deal of discussion among Salafis -- that is, among Muslim fundamentalists of that streak -- about what in 9/11 was and wasn’t justified. You had a whole series of positions, including one that sticks in my mind, which said that the people in the building had it coming to them, but the people in the plane that was hijacked, they should not have been killed. I asked my source if that meant Osama bin Laden would go to hell because those people in the airplane had been killed. The answer was no, that was just an error of judgment.
E.J. DIONNE JR., THE WASHINGTON POST: Could you talk about the roots of the Koran in two ways. One, how closely does it parallel the Arab paganism in which Muhammad was raised, and how much did it break with it? Secondly, how aware was Muhammad of Christian and Jewish sources, and how do those play into it?
MR. COOK: The thing the Koran most obviously shares with the pagan tradition -- particularly in the early parts of the Koran, or what are taken to be the early parts of the Koran -- is a rhyming prose. Pagan soothsayers, according to the tradition, used to deliver their -- what do soothsayers deliver? -- sooths. Anyway, they used to deliver them in a certain style of rhymed prose, and there are parts of the Koran that are in a similar style of rhymed prose. The whole of the Koran tends to have an element of rhyme running through the verses. That’s something that looks like a pagan heritage. There’s not much else, apart from occasional references to particular pagan gods, but that’s what you’d expect.
Turning to Jewish and Christian sources. If you don’t think that the Koran was revealed by God, then it’s obvious Muhammad had Jewish and Christian sources. What people since the 19th century and long before have noticed is the accounts you find in the Koran of, say, the career of Noah tend to diverge from accepted narratives in Jewish and Christian sources. The question is why. One possible explanation would be Muhammad got it wrong. He misquoted his sources. The other possibility is he wasn’t getting it direct from Jewish and Christian sources. He was getting it downstream, by some chain of transmission. Nobody has a way of proving it’s one or the other, but the Jewish and Christian influence is unmistakable.
MR. DIONNE: Are there explicit references in the Koran to Christianity and Judaism?
MR. COOK: The Koran is full of references to Christianity and Judaism. The question is whether the information came from a Jew or a Christian, but got garbled, or whether it’s a downstream source that has already been through several transmissions.
MR. DIONNE: Could you elaborate on that? Muhammad was aware of Christianity and Judaism. He had various options; this is assuming the Koran is not purely divine revelation. He might have adopted Christianity or Judaism wholesale or in larger part than he did. Do we know why he chose his course instead of sticking with the two forms of monotheism he had available to him?
MR. COOK: The tradition tells he initially saw himself simply as the latest monotheist prophet and expected Jews and Christians to follow him. Christians weren’t relevant because there weren’t any in Mecca or Medina. Or if there were, they were in very small numbers. The Jews were relevant because there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, and they rejected him. You can follow the tradition and see his decision to come up with a new form of monotheism as a reaction to being rejected by the Jews in Medina.
To give you one example: There’s a series of confusing Koranic passages about the direction in which Muslims should pray. As the tradition explains it, the prophet originally told his followers in Mecca to pray towards Jerusalem. That’s a good Jewish thing to do. But then, when he starts having bad relations with the Jews, he receives a revelation that says turn around and pray towards Mecca.
This event is a nationalization of monotheism. It links to the belief that Mecca -- that is, the sanctuary known as the Kaaba -- was not originally a pagan sanctuary but a monotheist sanctuary established by Abraham and Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. So the Kaaba becomes a national monotheist sanctuary.
TERRY EASTLAND, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Somewhere, Bernard Lewis wrote about the famous story in the Gospels regarding the tribute money and Jesus (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.”) You made the observation that Christianity had within its original material that distinction, which later matured in the West. I think Lewis said this distinction was not present in the original materials of Islam.
If Muhammad and his followers were acquainted with that story, what was their reaction to it?
Since then has there been any movement in Muslim thought towards discovering that distinction?
MR. COOK: I don’t know of any early Muslim reaction to that particular passage in the Gospels. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, but I haven’t seen it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were no recorded reaction because the early Muslims had their Koran; they regarded that as the definitive revelation. As far as they were concerned, the New Testament and the Old Testament were suspect -- originally revealed texts but corrupted by subsequent followers of Moses and Jesus. You couldn’t rely on them, and they tended to ignore them.
Michael CookThat said, a lot seeped through from Christian and Jewish circles into Islamic circles. They had knowledge of things that went on in the Gospels. In the later Middle Ages, some Islamic scholars became extremely knowledgeable about the Gospels and the Old Testament. But neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is part of the mainstream Islamic tradition as texts. The main thing the early Muslims dwell on is passages in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament they interpret as predictions of Muhammad’s coming. Anything else doesn’t get too much attention.
Your second question: Did they develop something like that distinction later on, without having it in such a neat form as established by the founder of the religion? The answer is definitely yes. The Islamic state starts off being ruled by Muhammad, who is both a prophet and a politician. He then has successors who rule it after him. They are not prophets; they are Caliphs. But the Caliphs are nevertheless occupying an intrinsically religious office as well as an obviously political one. They have a religious authority as well as political power, so we still have the Islamic state here.
But at some point that nobody has exactly agreed upon, the Caliphate falls apart. It falls apart in material historical terms: The Islamic world breaks up into numerous distinct states. But it also falls apart morally in the sense that people ceased to recognize those who claimed to be Caliphs as having anything like the prestige, the rectitude, the authority of the early Caliphs who came immediately after Muhammad.
By the 11th century, Muslims are talking in terms of what you could call a dichotomy between religion and the state. In doing that, they are partly echoing a pre-Islamic Iranian Persian tradition, in which that dichotomy was a familiar dictum.
By the way, the pre-Islamic Persians are damnable unbelievers. They go to hell, they burn. But they were very good at certain things, and one of the things they were good at was statecraft. If you hear something they said about statecraft, you ought to pay attention. One of the things they said was that religion and the state are twins. They’re not the same thing, but they’re very closely connected. That became a paradigm. It didn’t have the authority of the prophet or the Koran. But nevertheless, it became accepted as a paradigm in the Islamic world, particularly the Eastern Islamic world, on the ruins of the Persian Empire.
By the 13th century, people are saying things like: “The people in power are sultans, not Caliphs.” The Caliph has to be a descendant of the tribe of the prophet. “The guys who are ruling now, they’re a bunch of Turks who have come from Central Asia. All they’re good at is warfare, and thanks to that, they’ve taken over. They don’t have any intrinsic religious status. The best we can hope is they at least defend Islam against its enemies and behave in a reasonably just fashion, as much as you can expect Turks to do that.”
When I talked about the contrast between the Gospels and the life of the prophet, as it was written up in the eighth century, one of the things I stressed about the prophet was the smartness of his judgment calls. That Gospel passage about the tribute money is perhaps the one place in the Gospels where one might say about Jesus, “That was a smart thing to say.” I mean it was a politically savvy thing to say.
JAMES HUNTER, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: I wanted you to elaborate on the difference between Persia and Arabia. Iran -- Persia -- is part of the pan-Islamic world, but it’s not part of the pan-Arab world. There are deep cultural differences that trace back into medieval times. Could you talk about those differences, but also talk about the contemporary relevance of those differences in global politics today?
MR. COOK: One fundamental difference is language. The Arabs of Arabia and all the other peoples we classify as Arabs today -- from Morocco to Iraq -- speak Arabic, whereas the people of Iran speak Persian. That may sound trivial, but it is actually quite significant. When the Muslims conquered Iraq, Syria, Egypt and later North Africa, the populations at the time of the conquest were speaking all sorts of different languages, but they all came within a few centuries to speak Arabic. You have an enormous historical process of Arabization in those areas. But after the Muslims conquered Iran, that did not happen. You might imagine over the centuries the people of Iran would have come to speak Arabic, but they didn’t. They held onto their ancestral language. That’s one thing, and it’s fairly obviously linked to something else.
Medieval Egyptians, just to give you one example, don’t have much memory of what Egypt was like before the Islamic conquest. They know there were the pharaohs and then the Greeks came and the Romans, that Egypt was converted to Christianity. In fact, they have a lot of information and misinformation about it. But they have no identification with the pre-Islamic past of Egypt. By contrast, there always survives in Iran an identification, albeit a qualified identification, with the pre-Islamic past: “Yes, those guys were damnable pagans, but they had a great tradition, and we want to hang on to some of that tradition, even though we are now Muslims.”
In the 10th century, you have scruffy military leaders who come from the mountains of northern Iran with their mercenaries and take over, trying to present themselves as heirs of the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. Presumably they’re trying to make themselves look good by identifying with the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. That tradition continues, though on a smaller scale, in Iran right down to the present day. It’s even taken out and dusted off in the middle of the 20th century by Iranian nationalists.
I think those two things -- hanging onto Persian and retaining a strong identification with the land’s pre-Islamic past -- make Iran different from Arabia.
MR. HUNTER: What about some of the extraordinary cultural accomplishments of the Persian Empire? Is that part of the historical consciousness it’s retained? Does that have any bearing in terms of openness to other cultures?
MR. COOK: It’s not the cultural achievements of the Persian Empire that get valued. It’s the military and political achievements. That’s what they’re seen to be good at. Yes, learned people do know something about the cultural side, but I think it’s much less prominent in the general public image.
CLARE DUFFY, NBC NIGHTLY NEWS: You talked about the fact that Islam did not share with Christianity a sense of being a persecuted minority, at least in its developmental stage. That sense can be a unifying force for any religious group. When did a sense of persecution develop? I feel like it did at some point; Shi’ism relies on a sense of being a persecuted. At some point, this did develop in Islam, did it not?
MR. COOK: Absolutely. Here we have a big distinction between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, the Sunnis being -- over most of the Islamic world, most of the time -- a people who were ruled by a state of their own kind. They had very little reason to develop a sense of being persecuted. By contrast, the Shi’ites lost out early on.
Down the centuries, Shi’ites have been ruled by non-Shi’ites, typically by Sunnis. The Shi’ites develop a strong sense of being a persecuted minority, and that sense is entirely pre-modern and traditional. All that happened in modern times is, it is dusted off and used for political purposes.
By contrast, a sense of being done in by the world is something Sunnis have only developed in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
MS. DUFFY: Back to the coins you showed us. Why did they make these coins? Who was reading them? Was that the way the religion was spread? How literate were people? Would they look at their money and go, “Hey, no God but God?”
MR. COOK: We don’t have a clue what literacy rates were like in this period. Some people could read and some couldn’t. My guess would be a substantial proportion of the political and military elite could read, and they could read these coins if they wanted to.
The crucial question, to my mind, is non-Muslims. This is obviously a message beamed at non-Muslims. It’s telling them to listen up and pay attention. Could they read these Arabic inscriptions on the coins? Initially, when most of them didn’t know Arabic, they couldn’t. But it does seem that early on in the Islamic period and maybe by about 700 -- actually, I shouldn’t say anything definite about the chronology because I don’t have the facts in my mind. But I think on the Christian side by about 700, certainly by the early eighth century, you’ve got evidence of Christians who knew and read Arabic.
One definitive piece of evidence is Christian ecclesiastic canons saying that Christians are not to have their sons taught the Koran by Muslim teachers. The point is not that these teachers are converting the kids. The point is that primary education in the Islamic community consisted of learning to read the Koran, and if you wanted to learn proper Arabic and be able to move in elite circles, as many of these Christians wanted to do, you had to learn your Koran. The church was getting worried about this and saying it has to stop. But the fact they’re saying you can’t do this obviously means that people were doing it. So those people -- Christians -- could definitely have read what was on the coins.
Nina EastonNINA EASTON, FORTUNE: Professor, I wonder if you could address a question this conference has wrestled with in the past -- that very delicate question of whether violence, or evangelism by violence, is an inherent piece of Islam, which seems to boil down to the question of: What is the definition of jihad?
MR. COOK: Is it inherent? You could certainly minimize it. What I mean is this: There are two kinds of jihad. One is defensive, and the other is offensive. Defensive jihad is straightforward. If the unbelievers are attacking you, then you have to fight back. Offensive jihad is going off and invading the territory of unbelievers who haven’t done anything to you.
What does the law say about offensive jihad? It says that some Muslims somewhere ought to do it, but provided some Muslims somewhere are doing it, no other Muslims have to do it. In other words, yes, a certain element of offensive jihad is inherent in the religion. But you can minimize it easily if you want to. You can also maximize it. If lots of Muslims go off and do it, then by the criteria of Islamic law, that’s a good thing.
MR. CROMARTIE: Is it in the Koran that it [jihad] can be preemptive or offensive?
MR. COOK: In the Koran, it’s hard to figure out whether the text refers to defensive or offensive warfare. There are certain passages the medieval scholars always cite, saying they show jihad should be offensive. But if you look at the passages carefully, it’s not that obvious. On the basis of the Koran alone you could mount a decent argument for saying offensive jihad is never a duty.
Michael CookIn Islamic law, it’s different. From things the prophet said or is said to have said, Islamic law develops the doctrine that it is a duty but, as I say, a duty you can minimize.
The other question here is that of coercion. Jihad means you go out and conquer people. But does it mean you’re actually going to force them to convert to Islam? The basic answer is no. This is straightforward in the case of Jews and Christians, because everybody recognizes that Jews and Christians, provided they submit to the Islamic state, can have a protected status in which they carry on being Jews and Christians. They still have to follow certain stipulations, and you could argue about the small print, but the basic conception is very clear.
There is also a strong stream of Islamic law that says that you can give the same protected status to any unbeliever with the single exception of Arab pagans. Arab pagans are not a big deal because they don’t exist after, say, the middle of the seventh century. So when you go and conquer India, you can give the Hindus protected status. There are other schools of Islamic law that say, no; you shouldn’t give the Hindus protected status because their idolatry is so way out you can’t tolerate it. But the Muslims who actually conquered large parts of India adhered to the school that said no problem tolerating Hindus.
Actually forcing people to convert is a different question. I can remember one medieval scholar who says forced conversions are the best thing ever: The person converted at the point of a sword -- all right, he doesn’t like it at the time, but after a while he gets used to it and becomes as good a Muslim as anybody else. That view does exist. But the general view is no, you don’t coerce people to enter Islam.
Rod DreherROD DREHER, DALLAS MORNING NEWS: Given how intimately and radically connected church and state are in Islam, is it just wishful thinking on the part of the West that we can impose, or at least lead, the Arab Muslim world into accepting our post-Enlightenment ideas of political structure -- i.e., separation of church and state? Would it not be the case that the Islamists are right: The more to which Muslim populations come to accept Western ideas of liberal democracy, the less truly Islamic they are?
MR. COOK: Partly you’re asking me for a policy recommendation about whether a certain policy is likely to work. I tend to be skeptical of that, but I’m not the person best qualified to set out an argument there.
But coming closer to my own turf, I would say it’s absolutely right that there is, in principle, a doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and democracy, and it’s a very straightforward incompatibility: if you believe the single most important thing in the world is God’s will, and if you believe that you know what God’s will is, then what on earth are you doing with elections? This is an argument that in principle would extend to Jews and Christians. But Jews and Christians don’t seem to have a whole lot of problems with democracy. I’m not sure the Islamic case is in principle all that different.
Let me give you an analogy. If you go back something like 100 years and take Catholicism and Catholic anti-modernism -- who was that pope in the first two decades of the 20th century who launched an anti-modernist crusade that said the church can have no truck with the corrupt values of the modern world? And there’s the document that says it must shore up its medieval tradition in the face of all these temptations and abominations? Isn’t it actually --
MR. CROMARTIE: The Syllabus of Errors.
MR. COOK: The Syllabus of Errors, exactly. Isn’t that where it says it is an error to believe the pope can accommodate himself to modern values such as blah, blah, blah, and democracy?
MR. CROMARTIE: Liberalism as well.
MR. DIONNE: That was the last error on the list and the culmination of the list.
MR. COOK: In that late 19th century, early 20th century period, it made good sense -- and a lot of people were saying it, both on the Catholic side and the anti-Catholic side -- to say Catholicism and democracy are incompatible; there’s no way they could be reconciled. When I tell this to my undergraduates in the early 21st century, and quite a few of them are Catholics, this sounds really bizarre. It corresponds to nothing in their experience.
Occasionally, the word comes out from Rome that contraception is banned, and the Catholic laity more or less ignores what they’re told by their hierarchy. There are some questions about whether the Catholic hierarchy should be telling Catholics not to vote for certain people. Yes, there’s friction. But a sense of a fundamental incompatibility between Catholicism and democracy -- I just don’t see it in our time. For all I know, in another 100 years, the idea of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy will be equally bizarre.
MR. CROMARTIE: Do we have to wait 100 years? That’s the question also.
MR. DREHER: To follow up: Just how will they do it? Because you can point to the foundational Christian documents, the scriptures, and you don’t find explicit support for the church and the state being one. But in your account, that was there from the beginning with Islam, and it is inherent to the nature of the religion. If one is a Muslim reformer and wants to see more Western-style liberal democracy that the West in the Muslim world, they’re going to have to make their case on the basis of the Islamic scriptures, right?
MR. DIONNE: Here’s a related question. The Second Vatican Council was instrumental in overturning The Syllabus of Errors. What mechanisms could there be [in the Islamic tradition] for a reformation? I use that term in this context with a small “r.”
MR. COOK: I can’t resist throwing in a comment about the idea of an Islamic reformation being a good thing. If you look at the European and the Christian Reformation, it ushered in a period of extraordinary bloodshed and fanaticism. It was not nice in the ways we like a political system to be nice. I’m not sure I would wish that on the Islamic world, and I’m not sure we even have to wish it on them. They’ve got it already. I think Wahhabism is the Islamic reformation, and we don’t like it. But yes, we’re talking about some kind of a change.
It is true Islam is unlike Christianity in not having this fundamental church-state dichotomy written into the original scriptures. Instead, if you look back to the beginnings, you have this unity of religion and politics.
But for most of Islamic history, that unity did not exist. I described the situation where the real holders of power are like Turkish sultans, and they’re clearly distinct from the religious establishment. Let us make a distinction between two ideas being logically or doctrinally compatible, and two ideas being able to live together in the minds of messy, incoherent humans. For most of Islamic history, some degree of recognition of a distinction between church and state was present and, therefore, could be again.
The problem seems that, in the present epoch, Islamic fundamentalism is on a high horse. That necessarily gives the moral high ground to the view that religion and politics are inseparable. That’s how it was in the beginning when everything was right; that’s how it should be again.
I would see a major change coming about not through people thinking up clever arguments. You can always think up clever arguments from a heritage that will get anywhere you want. But the fundamental thing that would have to change is Islamic fundamentalism would have to either be discredited or at least become much less appealing than it is at the present day.
MR. CROMARTIE: We did have the French scholar Gilles Kepel speak here a couple of years ago on this very question. He thought Islamic fundamentalism was on the wane, and that 9/11 was actually a last, desperate attempt get attention before it faded away. The question was: Will that be in 10 years or a hundred years?
Do you think Kepel is right that radical Islamic fundamentalism is actually going down rather than up?
MR. COOK: The shortest answer is I don’t know. I have read Kepel’s book [The Trail of Politicial Islam] (2004), and I am impressed by it. He has made a case, and he may be right, but I would prefer to wait another 10 or 15 years -- (laughter) -- before saying something on the record.
MR. CROMARTIE: So the short answer is --
MR. COOK: Kepel knows a great deal and is not a frivolous commentator. If he says that it is on the wane, then that is a serious possibility we have to consider.
MR. CROMARTIE: The question is, how long is it going to take?
MR. COOK: I bet in 500 years Islamic fundamentalism will have gone way down.
Lisa AndersonLISA ANDERSON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: When you talk to Muslims in the Arab world, you quickly realize there is an awareness -- from the lowliest peasant up to the political scientist -- that there was once greatness. This seems to inform the anger and resentment and humiliation felt in the Arab world: That they were once great, they are no more, and clearly someone is to blame, and it is probably us.
You said Muhammad found a way to unify the Arabs, to pull them together and lead them to this greatness. Can you talk about how Muhammad did that, or how you believe this was achieved, since this is clearly an aim with Osama bin Laden, the restoration of the caliphate and Sharia law and an Islamic world?
MR. COOK: I don’t have a confident answer to this, but my sense would be you have to look at the way somebody armed with a doctrine, and a transcendental authority, and the necessary political skills, can do an end-run around tribal fragmentation.
A while back I was reading a book about liberation theology in Venezuela and Colombia, and there was a chapter describing some particular village in Venezuela. This priest -- was he a Jesuit? -- a Catholic ecclesiastical figure -- comes in from the outside, bearing this liberation theology doctrine. He starts to do social work in an environment where none of the locals trust each other but if they could get together, they could do great things.
By virtue of being somebody with a transcendental authority, this Jesuit -- or whatever he was -- was able to use his authority to create trust in the community. It may not have mattered much what liberation theology actually said. He got them together to organize social projects that actually worked and did things for them.
That’s an analogy to what we’re looking at here. You have an authority that comes from outside a fragmented social system, and if you can get people’s attention and trust, you can start creating trust among them. Muhammad had a hard time getting his Meccans and Medinans to trust each other, but eventually they did. It is political engineering based on a transcendental mandate you can sell to people.
MS. ANDERSON: Do you think another figure could arise out of this crucible of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism around the world; another figure that might unify Muslims again, not in the same sense as Muhammad but in a similar way?
MR. COOK: Definitely not in the same sense because Muslims wouldn’t be operating in a pre-modern tribal context. I can imagine somebody acquiring immense moral authority, but to convert that into political authority is something else because you bump up against the geopolitics of the situation.
The only example I can think of in modern items is a bad example: Khomeini. He built up tremendous moral authority for himself in Iran, and he would have liked to project that authority onto the rest of the Islamic world. But the moment Khomeini tried to exert his moral and political authority in neighboring countries, the people in power in those countries got worried because Iran is a big country in that neighborhood. They can’t just think of Khomeini as somebody with the authority of a saint. They have to think of him as the boss of a rival outfit. They have to think geopolitically. What messes up that example is the Sunni/Shi’ite division that reinforced Khomeini’s failure.
I’ll give you an analogy of the international communist movement. At one stage, people had the sense it was one big movement. They were all together on the same page. Then the Russians and Chinese fell out, then the Chinese and Vietnamese; in other words, geopolitics took over. My guess would be that geopolitics would take over in this case, too.
MICHAEL PAULSON, BOSTON GLOBE: I wanted to ask about the state of Islamic studies in American universities.
Michael PaulsonFirst, what’s happening with folks who are teaching it; and second, who exactly is studying it? I had this sense, post-9/11, there might be some tension between Muslim scholars of Islamic studies in the U.S. and non-Muslim scholars. I would periodically get emails when I would quote non-Muslims saying, “Why are you quoting an orientalist; what’s wrong with Muslim scholars?
I also sensed there was a rush into classrooms to study Arabic and maybe contemporary Middle-Eastern issues, but I don’t know whether it has continued. At the time, I thought many universities were not prepared to deal with this and that the level of scholarship was not mature enough.
MR. COOK: Let me try to answer without taking swipes at the people I dislike locally in my own university. (Laughter.) There’s no question that 9/11 has meant a rapid increase in the level of demand. My sense is that level of demand has fallen off a bit but not drastically, so this was the window of opportunity for a small, rather despised field to get in there and be mainstream. At Princeton -- and my impression is probably other places too -- one side of this has gone well, and that’s the language teaching.
At Princeton we now have about three or four times as many undergraduate students who are interested in taking Arabic. Persian, Turkish; forget it. I’m devastated to see the nuclear crisis with Iran has not done anything for enrollments in Persian. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have the same effect, and I’m not sure why. But Arabic, yes, -- it’s a mixture of kids who are troubled and interested, and kids who see a career opportunity. I had one student who announced as a freshman she planned to take Arabic so she could become a spy. Actually, she didn’t take Arabic; she went and did geosciences and is now at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Many people change their minds. Maybe she didn’t. (Laughter.) That could be her cover.
Then there is the analytical side of the field. I’m a medievalist, and, as Islamic studies go, I’m in a quiet part of the field. The beginnings of Islam, yes, that can get hot, but all those centuries in between, nobody gets that excited about them. It’s the study of the modern Islamic world and modern Middle East where the problems are. There you find a real tendency towards polarization in the field.
On the philo-Islamic side, you have two categories of people. One may be Muslim scholars -- that is, scholars of Muslim background -- though they shouldn’t be stereotyped. But you do get academics who feel in this very American way they have to represent an ethnical religious constituency.
There’s also an element of philo-Islamic or philo-Arab academics who have no particular roots in either Islam or the Arab world or the Middle East, but who, by ideological conviction or whatever, have come to be strongly inclined that way. For example, I can refer to NYU. Our counterpart Near Eastern Studies Department at NYU is famous or notorious, depending on where you’re coming from, for its attitude. Such people are leftist, anti-Zionist, which doesn’t mean quite a few of them aren’t Jewish.
At the other extreme you have a few neo-cons and people inclining towards that end of the spectrum. But neo-cons are a sparse phenomenon in the academic world in general. In terms of who persecutes who, my own experience is it tends to be the leftists who persecute the neo-cons in the academic environment. It may be different out there in the real world, but that’s what happens within academia.
There are two fundamental problems of the field as I see it now. One, this boom of interest is different from the boom in East Asian or Japanese studies 15 or 20 years ago. That boom happened because, yes, the Japanese had an interesting culture and history, but they also had one of the world’s top economies. That is a healthy combination. In the case of Near Eastern studies, it’s not based on that. There is an attractive culture, although the features of it most often highlighted these days are not particularly attractive ones, but there isn’t a great world economy there. Instead there is oil and a lot of poverty. This is not a solid basis for a buildup of interest. Japanese studies have gone down quite a bit, but it’s still a real presence. And of course China is a rising star.
The other problem, as I see it -- and I spend enormous amounts of time sitting on search committees -- is that good people are scarce in the field, particularly under current market conditions. Why that is I don’t really know, but somehow the imaginations of good people are much more easily fired by East Asia, say, than by the Islamic world, and that just seems to be a fact.
MR. PAULSON: Can you tell me three scholars who study Islam in America whose work you respect? For completely pragmatic reasons, I’m looking for people to call. I’m always looking for good experts. I find a tremendous amount of both politicization and scholarly un-readiness.
MR. COOK: If I had a question about Salafis -- the Saudi strain of Islamic fundamentalists and also Salafis in other parts part of the world -- the first person I would go to would be Bernard Haykel who is currently at NYU. He combines knowledge of the pre-modern tradition and history with hands-on research on Salafis of the present day. He’s a native Arabic speaker as well as a native English and French speaker. He’s been spending a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. He’s very good at hanging out with people. He’s also hung out with Salafis in India. That’s somebody who’s well informed, and who is not marketing some political line.
CARL CANNON, NATIONAL JOURNAL: When you were showing the coins, you were focusing on one aspect of it -- the coin bite, how they spread religion. But the other thing I was struck by was: There’s no picture on that coin. It replaces the picture with words. Did the cartoon riots have their origins that far back in Islam?
MR. COOK: They have two origins that go pretty far back. One is a prohibition of images. When you start developing small print about that prohibition, there’s lots of room for disagreement about which kind of images are prohibited. Are they all prohibited or just some? The consensus is if any image is forbidden, it is images that depict humans. Depicting a human is already extremely questionable, and depicting the prophet is a whole lot worse than depicting any other human. Let me back up here.
The prohibition of images has a Koranic foundation, and it’s well developed by the eighth century. There’s plenty of evidence for that. The additional sensitivity about depicting the prophet, I don’t know how far that goes back, but there’s an interesting genre of miniature painting in the late Middle Ages, where you have representations of Mohammad, but always shown with a blank face, whereas other people in the picture have proper faces. There’s a clear sense there that when it comes to depicting people, the prophet is in a different category from other people.
MS.EASTON: Why are images prohibited? Is it an anti-pagan thing? What’s the root of that?
MR. COOK: In one sense, the root is simply that God and his prophet have said so, and if they said so, that’s it. But the underlying anxiety is idolatry; that once you have images, people are going to worship them.
To come back to the previous question: Defaming or slandering the prophet is a very serious offense; in Islamic law it incurs the death penalty. What’s more, you can’t get out of the death penalty even by repenting. The cartoons, in addition to depicting the prophet, were clearly insulting. The cartoonists did a pretty good job of covering all bases there. (Laughter.)
Bill AdairBILL ADAIR, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES: Could you talk about Mohammad personally -- what he was like before his revelation, which I guess didn’t come till he was about 40. What did he do? What his life like? Were there signs he would be a leader? Was he a charismatic person? In spite of the prohibition on images, do we have any sense of what he looked like? Was he handsome?
MR. COOK: To take the last point first: Yes, of course, the tradition tells us he was handsome. In addition, we get detailed descriptions of his features and body build. Whether those descriptions should carry any authority, I don’t know. Whether they go back to eye witnesses or whether they’ve just been embroidered later, I have no way of telling.
To pick out another thing you’re asking about, are there signs that point to his future greatness? Lots of them. There are stories about his birth that explain how at the moment when he was born supernatural events took place. His mother saw the castles of Syria by magic illumination. The evil spirits who used to listen in on conversations in heaven suddenly found they were no longer wired up; they couldn’t hear what was going on up there.
You have a lot of supernatural dimension to the birth of the prophet, and later on, various things happen. When he’s in early adolescence, his uncle takes him to Syria, and on the way they encounter a Christian monk, and the Christian monk says, ah ha, this guy’s going to be a prophet. Did any of that really happen? Your guess is as good as mine.
The other part of your question: Do we get a credible sense of his character as opposed to just the fact that he had all virtues? I’m not sure we do. I’d be hard put to it to give you a vivid thumbnail sketch of what the man was like. It’s partly that the sources tend not to be explicit, but partly also that they’re so concerned to talk about his virtues you don’t get much sense of a real personality.
MR. CROMARTIE: One of the journalists that couldn’t be here said: “Oh, you’re having Professor Cook, that’s interesting. I think I read his biography of Muhammad. He suggests” -- and tell me if he got this right -- “that Muhammad may not have existed.”
MR. COOK: No, no. I have never had any doubts about his existence. I have held some heretical views in the past about what he did --
MR. CROMARTIE: He confused you with someone else, then, about that point?
MR. COOK: It’s more likely he got my views wrong. (Laughter.) I never suggested that the prophet didn’t exist. There’s as good evidence as you’re going to get that he did. He’s mentioned in non-Muslim sources within two or three years of his death, and that’s good enough for me.
MR. CROMARTIE: Everybody’s eager to hear some of your heretical positions.
MR. COOK: There are some early non-Islamic sources that suggest that, in its origins, Islam was closer to Judaism for longer than the traditional account indicates. That essentially was the nature of my heresy.
MR. CROMARTIE: You agree with that account?
MR. COOK: I no longer subscribe to it because I think the non-Islamic evidence wasn’t sufficiently coherent.
WILLIAM GALSTON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Let me preface my question by saying that among Jews, although Moses is the highest and most nearly perfect prophet, there are still extensive discussions of his imperfections and his errors, at least one of which was serious enough to deprive him of his ultimate objective. It is a matter of some cultural significance that Moses is depicted as an imperfect human being, although the highest prophet. That raises some interesting questions: Are there, in the Hadith, for example, any stories pointing towards his imperfections or serious errors of judgment?
But my larger question has to do with the monotheistic triad. You pointed out that the Constantinian tradition was a latecomer in Christianity. So there’s always an oppositional stream of Christianity where faith can be a counterweight to public authority and not necessarily fused with it.
Rabbinic Judaism, and in particular Jewish law, developed in circumstances of political marginality and powerlessness. Therefore, Jewish law is not really public law. When the issue arose, in the founding of Israel, as to whether Jewish law should be the law of the state, there were people who took that position, but the realists won out; namely, that it is impossible to turn this into a body of public law. That decision has created the basic structure of legal argumentation in Israel ever since.
What strikes me as so important about Islam, and so distinctive, is that it is law that developed in circumstances of political majority and political power and not political marginality. That re-raises the question of whether Islamic law, authentically understood, can be private law, or does it inherently tend to be public law backed by the coercive power of the state? Let me raise two examples here for you to comment on. The first is the idea of religious liberty, out of which liberal democracy developed; namely, that you may change your religion, and the state may not intervene to prevent you. As I understand it, Islam has a different view of the matter.
The other question -- and I’m astonished I’m the first person to mention it this morning -- has to do with the public law of gender relations, which I happen to believe is the principal flashpoint between Islam and the West right now. It is not clear to me that Islamic law can accommodate the core of what the West believes to be non-negotiable on that question.
MR. COOK: When I was responding on the character of the prophet, I should have addressed that issue you raised about perfection and prophethood. The prophet in the earlier sources -- the Koran and early biographical accounts, and also in the Hadith -- is not depicted as a perfect human being. There are clear passages in the Koran where God is telling off his prophet: You did this wrong and undo it.
Michael CookIn that sense, our starting point is similar to the biblical account of Moses: Yes, a great prophet, the greatest ever, but he has his flaws; he can stumble.
Over the course of the centuries, a theological doctrine developed that prophets possess immunity to sin or error. Different people asserted it in different ways. For example, you could take a line that prophets are totally immune to sin or error, or you could take a line that they’re immune but only in matters directly concerning their prophetic role. As one medieval theologian interpreted it, they’re immune from error, not in the sense that they can’t commit error or sin, but only in the sense that they’re guaranteed to see their error and repent. There’s a spectrum of interpretations on this doctrine of immunity.
But there’s no question the drift over the course of Islamic history is towards a stronger and stronger assertion of prophetic immunity. It creates enormous problems when it collides with the evidence in the earlier sources -- a confrontation that generates reams and reams of small print.
Let me mention the single-biggest episode -- maybe you know it already. There is an account in the life of the prophet that ties up with a verse in the Koran. The verse says that while the prophet was still in Mecca, he was unhappy about the fact he was on such bad terms with his pagan fellow tribesmen. Being a nice guy, he wanted to be nice; he wanted everyone to be friends. On one occasion when he was receiving a revelation, he allowed Satan to get him to insert a verse that said to the pagan Meccans, my god is okay, and your gods are okay, and they’re a team together.
According to these accounts, the next thing that happens is Gabriel -- Gabriel is the intermediary between God and the prophet -- Gabriel comes down and says: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re a prophet, and you’ve gone and stuck this verse of Satan’s into God’s revelation.” Mohammad gets upset, and Gabriel feels sorry for him and says: “Don’t worry too much; God will sort it out.” And God indeed knocks the offending verse out of the revelation and puts the right one in.
So you have this story that the prophet compromised with idolatry on one occasion. It’s told in a human kind of way. You feel tremendously sympathetic towards the guy. Wouldn’t you have done the same in the circumstances? But when that clashes with the doctrine of prophetic immunity, you’ve got a real problem.
Just to take the story through to the present: The medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya -- I mentioned his opinion on immunity before -- is one of the gurus, to misapply a term, of the modern fundamentalists. They think he’s the greatest thing since the prophet. But Ibn Taymiyyah said a whole load of things the modern fundamentalists simply can’t take. One of them was: “Why shouldn’t this episode have taken place; it’s perfectly plausible, and we’ve got plenty of accounts of it. The only immunity that the prophet has is that he’s going to repent of it, and it’s going to be put right. No big deal.”
This view is something the modern fundamentalists cannot stomach, and they represent the other end of the development where prophetic immunity has become absolute. There’s a rich theological mess there. In a couple of years there should be a fine book out on this topic by a young professor at Harvard.
Back to your other questions. I think your fundamental point is well taken on a crucial difference between Sunni Islam and Rabbinic Judaism; that one develops in a situation of deprivation of political power, and the other develops in close association with political power. All I would do is qualify what you said.
On the Jewish side, you do have those tractates in the Talmud -- Nezikin and things like that -- that talk about matters of public law. Equally, if you go to Maimonides and the Mishneh Torah-- it’s a digest of Jewish law, and it sets out marriage and divorce and that kind of stuff, but you also get a blueprint for how we would run a Jewish state.
It’s plausible to me Maimonides put it there because he was so familiar with the Islamic case that he was influenced by it. Even if only a counterfactual basis, he felt, we’ve got to have it on our side of the fence. But it is there. If somebody were to come out of Meah She’arim (an Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem) and dominate the state of Israel, there is a program to bandy about for having a Jewish public law. But I agree with you that for practical purposes Rabbinic Judaism is well adapted to not having a state.
On the Muslim side, the qualification I would make is -- well, it’s true that we do have evidence the early caliphs made law. They respect what God and the prophet had said, but they make decisions and say, “This is the way it’s going to be.” This gets played down in later tradition but it’s there in the sources. The classical authorities of Islamic law, however, are not rulers legislating; they are scholars who say, “In my opinion, this is the way it ought to be.” In other words, they’re figures much like rabbis.
You also have the phenomenon of legal pluralism, with four distinct schools of Islamic law. Judaism and the Pharisees had Hillel and Shammai (two sages and, later, two schools). The four Muslim schools of thought were all founded by scholars, jurists who are private persons. Despite the presence of a Muslim state, there is something happening analogous to what the rabbis are doing. So I would moderate your contrast, but I would accept the fundamental contrast.
On the question of changing religion: Yes, absolutely; in Islamic law, that’s out. It’s not just that you can’t get away with apostatizing from Islam: that if you’re a Jew you can’t convert to Christianity. If you want to exit Judaism, the only way you can do it is by converting to Islam. But let’s compare that to the Christian and Jewish traditions. On the Jewish side, I’m thinking of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah where he talks about Rabbanites and Karaites. There’s a fierce bit where he says Karaites are apostates from Judaism and should be killed. Then he says, “I’m not talking about the descendents of those Karaites -- it’s not their fault, we get along fine with them -- but the people who actually apostatized from Judaism, they should be killed.” Certainly there is an illiberal attitude towards change of religion.
On the Christian side I’m sure if one went looking in canon law and whatnot, one would find plenty of cases of illiberal attitudes.
The final thing you asked about: gender relations. I agree with you that this is one of the points of maximum friction. In Islamic terms you have a religious law that is very different from the attitudes that pass today in the United States or any part of the Western world. There’s a real incompatibility. It’s not surprising: Gender relations touch on extremely intimate aspects of life; the issue is bound to stir up deep emotions.
When Muslim women buy into Western feminist attitudes, even if they’re repackaging them in Islamic dress, this is acting up. Muslim men then are squeezed between Muslim women acting up on the one side and the West on the other. That’s not a good place to be.
How is this likely to play out? My answer would be similar to what I said when asked about Islam and democracy: As long as you have fundamentalism riding high, and you take all this stuff in the religious law seriously, you’ve got an insoluble problem. But let me give you two comparative examples. One is Hindu India: Hindu law must be about as un-modern in its attitudes to women as Muslim law. I couldn’t give you a detailed comparison, but if you could do the comparison, I wouldn’t want to bet that Hindu law would come out ahead in liberal terms.
But in India at present, nobody pays much attention to those aspects of Hindu law. There may be a few traditional, isolated Brahman families that still keep this stuff going, but to a large extent, in modern circles in India, this is dead letter, and people aren’t being bothered by pietists coming and saying, “Hey, but in this text it says….”
In the same way, you go to Israel and spend 10 minutes on the beach at Eilat -- nothing Maimonides said about how women should behave is being observed there. (Laughter.) My sense is, yes, while fundamentalism lasts, this is going to be a major problem, but the problem could dissipate in due course.
AMY SULLIVAN, WASHINGTON MONTHLY: I’d like to return to the issue of Jewish and Christian traditions influencing the development of Islam. What would exposure to Jewish and Christian text and stories have been in the Arab world? Would the man on the street have known much about these traditions, or is this something that was limited to the elite? What would the cultural understanding have been of those traditions?
MR. COOK: We’re talking about Arabia because the Arabs were in Arabia then. I didn’t mention this before, but around the edges of Arabia you had a fair amount of conversion to Christianity. Not in the area where Islam begins, but in the north and east. The Arabs were always traveling, and I would reckon there must have been some knowledge of Christianity even among people who didn’t live in those edge regions. Christianity couldn’t have been completely off their radar.
In the case of Judaism, you have a substantial Jewish community in Medina. According to the traditional account, they were there before the Arabs, and then some Arab tribes moved in on top of them. The traditional account tells us there were two reasons why the Medinans invited Muhammad to Medina. One was they thought he could sort out their problems, but the other was that having lived side-by-side with Jews, they knew what a prophet was. They could recognize one when they saw one.
So people are not clueless. Do they actually read texts? That’s a different question. One of the prophet’s companions headed the committee that produced the final edition of the Koran, and he was put in charge because he was incredibly learned. The sources say he knew Syriac, Hebrew and you name it, he knew it. But he’s regarded as an exceptional figure. We don’t characteristically get Arabs shown to us reading Jewish or Christian texts.
AUDREY TAYLOR, ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT: I work in television, the world of sound bites, and the one we always hear is that Islam as a religion has been hijacked by a few who are crazy, and it’s only a few. But you’ve been saying, in terms of jihad, that necessarily isn’t the case. We try to simplify it, saying there are only a few crazy people out there, and this is not indicative of the Islamic world as a whole. How do you address that because it doesn’t seem to be accurate?
MR. COOK: One of the things about being an academic is that I don’t have to be a diplomat -- that would really bother me. As I see it, my role is simply to tell the way it is.
MS. TAYLOR: In terms of culture, is the Islamic world really outraged by what they’re seeing?
MR. COOK: Let me quote Gilles Kepel on that. The analysis I heard him give recently is that public opinion -- he was speaking specifically about the Arab world but it would apply elsewhere, too -- is immobilized by the present situation because on the one hand they don’t like the stuff bin Laden does. They think it’s nasty. They don’t think it is representative of their religion and -- no, perhaps I shouldn’t say that. They feel it’s way out, too nasty. But on the other hand, they don’t like the Americans, and bin Laden is socking it to the Americans. The result is they’re immobilized; they don’t know what to think.
If you say there is nothing in the original text of the religion that gives any comfort to jihadis, you’re lying. It’s not true. There is stuff there. What I would say, though, is that doesn’t for a moment mean you can predict the behavior of Muslims from what’s in their scriptures.
To give you an analogy I use with my students, there are three verses in the Gospels where Jesus says, you want to be my disciples, you’ve got to hate your parents. Now, it’s not just that moderate, wishy-washy liberal Christians in this country don’t believe they ought to hate their parents; even the Christian fundamentalists don’t think they should hate their parents, and yet Jesus said it. I’m sure they have ways of getting off the hook in the same way Muslims can find all sorts of ways of getting off their hooks. The fact it’s there in scripture doesn’t have much predictive value -- maybe none at all. So much comes down to the context in which people are doing things with scripture.
TERRY MATTINGLY, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE: The New Republic ran a piece a couple of weeks ago on what’s happening in Iran. Could you tell us some of the differences within the Sunni and the Shi’ite as illustrated by thousands of Shi’ites walking through the streets holding images of the Hidden Imam and the martyrs? Is this a part of the conflict in Iraq that the U.S. press is not describing at all?
MR. COOK: The first question I can answer. You go to Shi’ite religious law, and the attitude towards images is pretty much the same as in Sunni law. In terms of what you’re supposed to be doing, I don’t think there’s a real difference. But there is an enormous cultural difference, and it’s exactly what you described, that for a long time Shi’ites have had images.
There are things going on there (Shi’ites marching with images) that would make Salafis in Saudi Arabia extremely unhappy. It’s part of a whole milieu, particularly of popular Shi’ism, that Khomeini made effective use of and so couldn’t wholly disown; nor do his successors want to disown it. Popular piety among the Shi’ites is very different from what it is among the Sunnis.
What’s happening in Iraq -- I’m sure if you talk to Salafis, they would make a big deal of that and other differences. Whether that is actually fueling the conflict, I very much doubt it.
MR. MATTINGLY: What I meant was, it’s clear that the Sunnis consider the Shi’ites heretics: they’re almost worshipping the descendents of Muhammad and breaching the concept of absolute monotheism, and now they’re walking around in the streets carrying these huge pictures.
I haven’t read a single mainstream media report that explains these differences between Sunni and Shi’ite, and it seems to me to be an important story in Iraq.
MR. COOK: It is a very important story in Iraq.
One thing I find striking about the Islamic world is the extent to which you have an unreconstructed sectarianism of a kind you don’t have, say, between Protestants and Catholics outside particular ethnic contexts like Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shi’ites do not get along in Pakistan, they don’t get along in Iraq, et cetera, et cetera. There is a long tradition of differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites. It starts off with a political disagreement about who should have been the immediate successor to the prophet, and it blossoms into all sorts of other things, some of which are cultural, some of which are theological, some of which are legal. It’s a whole array of differences.
To a lot of Sunni Muslims who aren’t zealots, those differences don’t matter a lot, but they do matter to Salafis, and to the extent that Salafis are driving the current conflict, or a significant element in the current conflict in Iraq, that does matter.
If you take Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, to the best of my knowledge, nobody cares about transubstantiation — the difference between Protestants and Catholics on that issue. It’s not what they’re fighting about. They’re fighting about something else, which is a matter of two communities that are going hammer and tongs against each other in this world, for worldly reasons.
In the case of the Islamic world, I suspect much of the dynamic is similar, but the transubstantiation issues still get bandied about on a considerable scale. That’s not much of an answer, and it would take too long to give a proper answer.
MICHAEL LUO, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I have a basic question about terminology. We keep referring to “Islamic fundamentalism,” and in the short time I’ve been on the beat, it comes up a lot with sources that when we equate Islamic fundamentalism with extremism, it’s not really fair. It’s taking a term applied to American Christians and applying it to this situation. I wonder if there is a distinction, and how you address that question.
MR. COOK: A lot of people snipe at the term “fundamentalism.” I personally don’t have a problem with it, and I don’t have a problem with the fact it’s originally a Christian concept, because when it comes to words, we always transfer them from one context to another.
I also don’t have a problem with the concept of fundamentalism insofar as I understand it: It’s not just being pious or zealous, or for that matter fanatical; it’s specifically that you want to go back to the roots of your tradition. There are plenty of people who don’t want to go back to the roots of their tradition; they want the tradition as it came down to them. Hindus are typically like that. Fundamentalism is when you want to go back.
The term applies easily in the Islamic case in that you want to go back to the Koran and the sayings of the prophet. There is a corpus of texts you can point to as a fundamentalist and say, here’s where the real authority is in my religion, and what happened later is bunk. It seems to me the term applies quite well.
The term goes astray when the only context in which the public hears about Muslim fundamentalists is when they’re doing nasty, violent things, and therefore the public thinks that fundamentalism is a nasty, violent thing. I would caution against that and give the example of Christian fundamentalists. I don’t think the violent people in American politics are Christian fundamentalists, in the same way there are a lot of Muslims I would describe as fundamentalists who are not violent. There are people who are betwixt and between. For example, in India, I understand, you get the phenomenon of Salafis -- that is, people of the Wahhabi persuasion -- who say, “Yes, bin Laden, great guy, doing good stuff; get the Americans.” Then you say, “So do you want to engage in a bombing campaign here in India?” They say, “Oh no, no, no; we don’t want anything like that here. We Muslims are a vote bank. Democracy is good for us here.”
They’re schizophrenic about the question of violence. And lots of people there don’t have the violent side at all.
MR. LUO: There are people we would probably call moderate who are actually fundamentalists in your definition of wanting to go back to --
MR. COOK: Right. There are two different dimensions here, and one is whether people are violent or non-violent, and the other is whether or not they’re keen to go back to their foundations and be very pious about it. You might have a guy who is, from a Western liberal point of view, totally repressive of his daughter, but who doesn’t have the slightest interest in violence. They’re two different things there, and they tend to get conflated.
MR. HUNTER: It’s important to make a distinction between historic orthodoxy and fundamentalism. It seems to me that fundamentalism is orthodoxy in confrontation with modernity.
Fundamentalists all share a common narrative, which is that history has gone awry, and what went awry was modernity; in this case, Western modernity. Wahhabism has roots that go back a long way in this light. The goal of the fundamentalists, across the board, is to make history right again.
MR. COOK: Yes. The context here is Muslim societies trying to adapt to the rise of the West. One of their options is to adopt Western culture, but that obviously has a down side. In identity terms it’s pretty bad. Another option is to stay the same, but that doesn’t work either. Another option is to go fundamentalist, and fundamentalism isn’t stupid in the sense that the moment you become a fundamentalist, you have access to a way you used to do things but no longer do them. You have something that is de facto new. Who knows, maybe it will work.
MR. HUNTER: It’s possible to be orthodox and attached to the traditions of historic orthodoxy within a faith tradition and yet not be a fundamentalist in the way that we think about them today.
MR. COOK: There’s a nice principle in Jewish law, if I remember it right, that says the law is according to the later scholars. In other words, you can’t go behind the later scholars and say, hey, but the early ones said something different. You have to take it as it comes through the later scholars. I think that is the anti-fundamentalist attitude you are talking about.
JOHN SINIFF, USA TODAY: I was curious whether you’ve seen in academia a fear of candid discussion of some facets of Islam for fear of retribution.
MR. COOK: My sense is that people who don’t want to talk about the difficult stuff have actually internalized the attitude, and they think one shouldn’t talk about it, or they want to repackage it in such a way it appears not to be there. I’m betting people are doing a lot of kidding themselves.
MR. SINIFF: Is there a chilling effect in academia? What have you seen in academic discussions among colleagues?
MR. COOK: My sense is it’s not a chilling effect. It’s not that people are afraid to say things. You have the people that say them, and the people that think you shouldn’t say them and don’t say them. If you are an untenured professor at an academic institution, you have to be careful. You have to be careful about a whole load of things you don’t have to be careful about once you get tenure. But I don’t think in the kind of discussion we’re talking about any tenured member of an American university faculty has a good reason for being chilled.
MR. SINIFF: What was your view of the largely universal decision of the American press not to publish the Mohammad cartoons?
MR. COOK: I thought that was very sensible.
MR. DIONNE: Two quick questions. What I’d like to ask for is a Mort Saul routine: a two-minute university on the origins of the Sunni-Shi’a split. But the question I really want you to answer, if you want to pick one, is a Time Magazine-style question. Your account of Mohammad was fascinating, and I wanted to know: Was he the right man at the right moment, or was he the man who shaped the moment? Your account suggests a lot of people at the time were looking for something like what he had to offer.
MR. COOK: It’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer. In some alternative universe I would run the beginnings of Islam in my lab dozens of times with different values for the variables.
The quick answer would be I see a window of opportunity; if Mohammad had been born in the second century B.C. he’d have gotten nowhere. The rise of Islam presupposes the rise of monotheism outside Arabia. There was a sense seeping into Arabia: “Our paganism -- it’s what we’re used to but it’s not state of the art.” (Laughter.) I would see Constantine as a necessary condition for Mohammad.
As to closing the window, I would bet if Mohammad, or somebody like him, had not come along, then the Arabs would have converted to Christianity sooner or later, and the window would have closed that way.
TERRY EASTLAND,THE WEEKLY STANDARD: I’ll take you back to your century, the seventh century, for this last question.
MR. COOK: I appreciate that.
MR. CROMARTIE: But tie it into today if you could.
MR. EASTLAND: When the Arabs went out to conquer after the death of the Prophet, was there a doctrine of providence -- maybe that’s the wrong word -- a doctrine of eschatology that gave them confidence they could conquer the world, and this would be their destiny? How extensive was the definition of the world back then? Bringing us up to the present moment: Do we see such a confidence-building doctrine today, and what does it mean today to conquer the world?
MR. COOK: That’s a good question. I don’t think there is more than simply this doctrine of jihad that says offensive jihad is a good thing. In principle, the more you conquer, the better, and beyond that, I don’t detect in the sources anything like a doctrine of manifest destiny.
MR. EASTLAND: Today, what does it mean to conquer the world? Just the same answer, I guess: with jihad, the more the merrier.
MR. COOK: Yes. If you take seriously the foundations in Islamic law -- not necessarily in the Koran but in Islamic law -- of the doctrine of offensive jihad, then not only should Muslims defend themselves, but they should also be expanding the frontiers of Islam through jihad.
If you go to contemporary Muslim thinkers of a fundamentalist and extremist disposition, you will find that, from time to time, they do refer to offensive jihad and say it’s a good thing. In doing that, they’re essentially acting up against the rules of the international system as conceived in the West. Just about every jihad we actually witness in the Islamic world, perhaps every one, is conceived as defensive. The attack on the Twin Towers may have looked to us uncommonly aggressive, but in the minds of the people who justified it, it was self-defense; it was just a particularly daring example of self-defense.
There are reasons for this, for the fact that the emphasis is on defensive jihad. One is a human point, that if you want to motivate people, then telling them “these guys are out to get us” is a much more effective way to mobilize them than to say, “No, those guys aren’t out to get us but nevertheless we ought to go and conquer their country.”
But second, there is a significant difference between the obligations involved in aggressive and defensive jihad. In offensive jihad, provided somebody is doing it, nobody else has to bother. By contrast, with defensive jihad, anybody in the area that’s being attacked by the unbelievers -- any adult male has a duty, prima facie, of participating in that jihad. There is a much higher degree of obligation that you can appeal to if you declare a defensive jihad than if you declare an offensive one.
MR. CROMARTIE: Professor Cook, a sign of a good session is one we don’t want to end, and there are certainly more questions. We should thank one of our colleagues who could not be here today. Jay Tolson is the one who emphatically said, if you’re going to do that session, you’ve got to get Professor Michael Cook. We should thank Jay when we see him next because he was right, and let’s thank Dr. Cook. (Applause.)--Speakers at Pew Forum events are given an opportunity to review and approve their remarks. This transcript also has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.
By Michael Cromartie
Posted: Sunday, July 16, 2006
EVENT TRANSCRIPTS
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: Faith Angle Conference
Publication Date: May 22, 2006
How and Why Muhammad Made a Difference
Monday, May 22, 2006
Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Florida, in May 2006 for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle conference on religion, politics and public life. Conference speaker Michael Cook, widely considered among the most outstanding scholars on the history of Islam, is the author of several classic works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology, including A Brief History of the Human Race (2005) and Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2001) In this presentation, Cook vividly described the merging of politics and religion in the life of Muhammad and how this legacy shapes the Muslim world today.
Speaker:
Michael Cook, Cleveland Dodge professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
In Mr. Cook's presentation, he refers to a packet of visual aids he provided to the audience, which are relevant to his remarks. We recommend the reader download the pdf file before reading the transcript.
Michael Cromartie
Professor Cook holds the Cleveland Dodge chair of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, a chair formerly held by his teacher, Bernard Lewis. He’s the author of many books. One of his most recent books is called A Brief History of the Human Race. One of our first questions to him will be: How does one write a brief history of the human race? I hope he’ll tell us.
MICHAEL COOK: I ought to start by apologizing for the fact that I am bringing you stale news. I’m a card-carrying medievalist. I’m here to talk about how and why Muhammad made a difference. Just about everything I’m talking about will be events that happened in the seventh century -- (laughter) -- but don’t get the idea that those events are therefore irrelevant to the present day. I suspect that some of them are deeply relevant, though sometimes in ways that I’m not good at articulating. I’ll try and come back to that at the end.
Michael Cook
The rise of monotheism happened late in the day. For something like a thousand years, you had monotheism, and it didn’t make a significant dent on world history. For many centuries, it was the religion of the ancient Israelites, a small Near Eastern people, and of their descendants, the Jews. Even when it started to spread to non-Jews in significant numbers in the form of Christianity, Christianity remained for the best part of three centuries the religion of a persecuted minority. But that changed dramatically in the fourth century, and the guy who changed it was the Roman Emperor Constantine.
Constantine adopted Christianity as his religion and, by extension, as the religion of the Roman Empire. At that point, monotheism, in its Christian form, for the first time became a bandwagon. Down until the time of Constantine, you had to be pretty strongly interested in your eternal salvation for it to make sense to convert to Christianity. After Constantine, people like you and me are jumping on the bandwagon. Well, I shouldn’t speak for you, but people like me are jumping on the bandwagon. It makes excellent sense in this world to convert to Christianity.
What’s relevant from my point of view, from our point of view, is that this bandwagon effect is not confined to the Roman Empire. It’s very strong there, but it’s also pulling and tugging on peoples outside the empire. From the fourth century onward, a whole series of peoples around the Roman world decide to give up their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity. It’s the Franks; it’s the English; it’s the Irish; it’s the Goths; it’s the Armenians, the Georgians, the Ethiopians -- you name them. This is a big historical trend. But whenever you have a big historical trend, there’s going to be somebody out there bucking the trend.
For example, you have pagan holdouts -- people like the Lithuanians who are so incredibly obstinate that 1,000 years after Constantine, they still insist on worshiping their pagan gods. Or you have people who like to play the field, like the Khazars. The Khazars turn up their noses at Christianity, and they decide to take their monotheistic medicine in the form of Judaism.
Both those peoples are of some consequence if you study the history of the regions they lived in. But they didn’t, either of them, make a significant dent on world history; the Arabs did. How did the Arabs do it? First and perhaps most important of all, the Arabs did not convert to Christianity like everybody else. Neither did they cling obstinately to their ancestral paganism. Nor did they turn up their noses at Christianity and adopt Judaism. What they did was to come up with a monotheist religion of their own. That initiated an extraordinary series of events.
The Arabs, in their Arabian homeland, came together to form a state. Then they set out from their homeland and conquered an empire that stretched all the way from Spain to Central Asia and northwestern India. That empire was the crucible in which the Islamic world as we know it began to come into existence.
It’s an extraordinary sequence of events, and lots of people are involved in it. But the most crucial person is Muhammad, because he was the one who gave the Arabs their new monotheism and established their state.
How and why did he manage to make that difference, a difference that has made an enormous dent on the history of the world and continues to dent the world as we know it today? The prosaic answer is that he was 1) a successful prophet and 2) a successful politician.
First, Muhammad as a prophet. Muhammad was born about 570. Forty years later, around 610, he began to receive revelations from on high. He continued to receive those revelations for something like 20 years, and collectively, those revelations constitute the Koran. The Koran was put together in the exact form in which we have it today something like 20 years after his death in 632. Some time around 650 —--give or take a few years -- the Koran is put together the way it is now.
What I have to do now is give you the message of the Koran. How do I do that? In a talk of this length, I have reduced the Koran to a sound bite. I feel bad about that. What authority do I have to reduce God’s message to a sound bite? Fortunately, the early Muslims come to my aid. They didn’t have the concept of a sound bite, but they did develop by the end of the seventh century a concept to which I can give the name of a “coin bite.”
Let me show you a typical coin, a completely non-Islamic coin, an American quarter (Page 3). Does that look vaguely familiar? This is a classic recipe for a coin. One side is political; the other side you could call religious. On the political side, you have a guy’s head, and he’s your king, or if not, then some equivalent figure. This side, you have an eagle, because either you guys worship an eagle god, or else maybe the eagle is a national symbol.
Here is a seventh century coin, and it’s exactly the same recipe (Page 4). This is typical of the design of coins minted by the Persian Empire, which is the empire the Arabs knocked down when they set out to conquer the world. This style is a little different, but it’s the same recipe. You’ve got the guy’s head there -- that’s the Persian emperor. Unlike George Washington, he has a crown on his head. Over here, we have a Zoroastrian fire altar and a couple of attendants on either side. There’s the political side and the religious side -- same basic design.
But the odd thing about this coin is, as some of you may have noticed, we have a bit of Arabic script. What’s that doing here? This coin was minted long after the Persian Empire disappeared, some time in the 690s, and it was minted not under Persian rule but under the rule of the Arabs -- the Muslims. What on earth were the Arabs doing making propaganda for an empire they had destroyed and for a religion theirs had superseded? It’s a good question, and eventually they started to ask themselves that question. They decided it was time for something different (Page 5). It’s recognizable as a coin: It’s round, has two sides, but everything else is changed. There is nothing but words here. Nobody’s head, nobody’s symbol, just words. In fact, 45 words in Arabic script, and those 45 words are the coin bite.
I guess you guys don’t readily decipher Arabic script on seventh century coins, so let me make it a bit easier. If you can’t read it, never mind; I can.
First, there are eight words used for a purely business purpose. This dirham -- that’s the kind of coin this is -- was minted in 733 or 734. That’s all we get. No name of any ruler is mentioned. Everything else on this coin is made over to God, and the words are derived from the Koran. Here we have the Koran reduced to a coin bite, and let’s see what the Muslims in the late seventh century decided to put there.
“There is no God but God alone without companion.” That’s good: no-compromise, no-nonsense monotheism -- very clear. We flip to the other side, and here in the center we have a rather longer passage: “He is God, One. God, the everlasting refuge, who has not begotten and has not been begotten and equal to him is not anyone” (Koran, chapter 112.) That’s the same uncompromising monotheism, but note also a side swipe at the Christians. The Christians are notorious for believing that God has a son; hence, the denial here that God has begotten anyone.
Finally, down here around the margin, we have: “Muhammad is the messenger of God” -- that’s a parting of the ways with the Jews and Christians, who don’t believe that Muhammad is a prophet -- “whom He has sent with the guidance and the religion of truth” -- so Muhammad’s religion is the religion of truth, Islam is the religion of truth, and this Jewish and Christian stuff is not -- “that He may uplift it above every religion, though the unbelievers be averse” -- that’s what, in religion departments, is called triumphalism.
There might be things I personally would have liked to see included on their coin, but let’s just leave it at that; that’s what they chose to put there. That’s as much as I wanted to say about Muhammad as a prophet, so you’ve got his message.
Now, Muhammad as a politician. In the timeline I’ve given you (Page 1) there are three events from the career of the prophet as a politician: the migration from Mecca to Medina, the raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq and the submission of Mecca. Two of those events are very important -- the migration to Medina and the submission of Mecca -- but they’re not the ones I’m going to talk about at any length.
The migration from Mecca to Medina is the central political event of the prophet’s career. The prophet has a problem in Mecca, and he finds the solution in Medina.
The problem in Mecca is he and his followers are unpopular with the pagan population. Why? Because of their monotheist incivility: They go around trashing pagan gods, and that’s not appreciated. Muhammad has to get his followers out of Mecca and find somewhere where they’ll be more secure. The answer, after a long search, is Medina.
Medina is an oasis about 200 miles north of Mecca that is in an awful political mess. Some of the Medinans had a hunch if they brought in Muhammad, he could clear up the mess, get things together and life could be more tolerable for them. They invite Muhammad to come, and they let him bring his followers along, too.
Muhammad establishes himself in Medina, and once he’s established in Medina, he starts to build a state -- a rudimentary, rather tribal state. This is the depths of Arabia, but it’s a real state. Between 622 and 632, he is expanding the power of his state. One of the milestones in the expansion of that power over Arabia is the submission of his own hometown of Mecca in 630.
What about this raid on the Banu ’l-Mustaliq? By the standards of the other events just mentioned, this is a trivial event. That’s exactly why I’m going to tell you about it: Because I can use it to give you a sense of the texture of Muhammad’s political career. The map on Page 2 shows you Arabia -- in context -- Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Roman Empire up there, Persian Empire up there, and here is Medina where the prophet in 622 is beginning to establish his state.
Who are these Banu ’l-Mustaliq? They are a small tribal group that lives in the desert between Mecca and the sea. Why does Muhammad decide to attack them? He gets intelligence that they’re about to attack him, so it’s a preemptive strike. Of course, we don’t have their account of it. That’s how the story is told in our sources: that this is a preemptive strike.
Muhammad comes down from Medina with his troops, his followers, and he catches the Banu ’l-Mustaliq -- the tribe -- by surprise at a watering place, and there’s a battle. I think 10 members of the tribe get killed. Two hundred of them are taken captive; that means they are slaves. Some of those 200 are men, but many of them are women and children.
Muhammad has scored a victory. What has it cost him? Very little. Only one Muslim has been killed on the battlefield. Only one of his followers has been killed, and I’ll come back to that.
At this point, the military operation is over, and Muhammad turns around and takes his followers back to Mecca. At least that’s the military side of it. What about the politics?
First of all, there’s the Muslim that got killed in the battle. What I didn’t tell you is he didn’t die heroically fighting the enemy. It was a case of friendly fire. Another of Muhammad’s followers mistook him for the enemy and killed him, and this creates problems. The family of the slain man, under Muslim rules, has a claim to blood money. The slain man has a brother who lives in Mecca. Mecca at this time is pagan -- the brother is pagan -- but he comes to Muhammad’s camp, and he pretends that he’s converted to Islam. Muhammad thinks that the guy is playing by Muslim rules, and he makes arrangements for the guy to get the blood money. But when nobody is paying attention, the guy, who’s actually playing by pagan rules, kills the killer of his brother and absconds. He goes back to Mecca, extemporizing poetry about how now he’s through with being a Muslim and is going back to being a good old-fashioned pagan.
Muhammad has been had, and there’s nothing he can do about it. But not quite nothing. A few years later in 630, when Mecca submits to him, Muhammad behaves magnanimously, but he does have a hit list of certain people that he’s not going to forgive. This guy who had pretended to be a Muslim and killed the killer of his brother is one of them.
Now let me tell you about an incident that was much more threatening and dangerous. First, two bits of background. One, we’re still by the watering place, and a watering place in western Arabia is a pretty small affair. This is a very arid part of the world. If people are crowding around the watering place, there’s going to be pushing and shoving. Two, you may tend to think of Muhammad’s followers as being a band of brothers who will fight for each other to the death, who are totally loyal to each other, etc., and, at a certain level, you may be right. But it could be more accurate to think of Muhammad’s followers as a shaky coalition. One of several fault lines that runs through this coalition is the distinction between the prophet’s Meccan followers and his Medinan followers. The Medinans don’t like the Meccans that much. They feel resentful. Their view is: “We were so decent to these Meccan guys. We let them come here as refugees, and look at them! Now they’re taking over our oasis. Why are we putting up with this?”
So what happens at the water hole? Two men get into a shoving match. These two men are not people of any particular consequence, but they do have some connections, and one of them is connected to the prophet’s Meccan followers; the other is connected to the prophet’s Medinan followers. The shoving match escalates into a fight, and the two men then call out for help from their people.
I should mention here a character called Ibn Ubayy. He is a Medinan, and he’s a lukewarm Muslim. He goes along, but he’s not happy. The reason he’s not happy is before the prophet came to Medina, Ibn Ubayy was a powerful man with ambitions to make himself king of the oasis. When Muhammad comes, his ambitions disintegrate, and he’s sulky about it. He will never miss an opportunity to go to the prophet’s Medinan followers and say, “Why are you putting up with these Meccans?” That’s exactly what he’s doing on this occasion of the shoving match at the water hole. He’s going around, out of earshot of the prophet, saying to the prophet’s Medinan followers: “The first thing we should do when we get back to Medina is throw those Meccans out.” It’s not a good situation, and the prophet hears about it.
What is Muhammad to do? Like any sensible politician, the first thing he does is ask for advice. He gets advice from one of his Meccan followers who says: “You’ve got to take Ibn Ubayy and kill him right now.” But Muhammad is not happy with that idea because he’s afraid of the backlash. He gets advice from one of his Medinan followers, and the guy says: “You should be nice to this guy, because the bottom line is you are in a stronger political position than him.”
What does Muhammad actually do? As politicians often do, he does nothing. No, that’s not quite right. He does do something. He orders his followers to march back to Medina on the double. The result is they’re so exhausted they don’t have any energy left for bickering. Luckily, they don’t encounter a hostile armed force; that could have been a disaster. The plan works -- Muhammad gets them back to Medina. After that, Ibn Ubayy fades out; he loses credit with his own people and dies soon after. Muhammad can’t resist congratulating himself for making the right decision.
I’ve given you lots of detail. Let’s stand back from the trees and see if we can find a wood here.
The first one is the extraordinary success of Muhammad in initiating a chain of events that establishes the Islamic world. We’ve seen he has a message from on high. He has skill as a military leader and a politician. But how does he make the leap from a being a guy with a message and political skill to having this enormous impact on world history?
Let’s go back and think for a minute about Arabia. I’ve mentioned before that Arabia is an arid part of the world. Before the days of oil, Arabia is also poor. Very poor compared to the densely settled agricultural lands outside Arabia, and immensely poor compared to, say, northwestern Europe or southern China or the eastern United States. Poor environments are an unfriendly place for states. If you want to establish a halfway decent state, you need a nice, fat tax base, and you’re not going to find that in Arabia. Instead of states in Arabia, what you find are tribes. Because of the impoverished environment, these tribes tend to be rather flat -- they don’t have steep social hierarchies. That means in Arabia basically every adult male has to be a warrior and a politician in his own right. It’s a society with a high level of military and political skill and activity, but it’s also a society without any central coordination. The result is, through the centuries, the Arabs fritter away their military and political energy in small-scale conflict among themselves. That’s why, before the seventh century, the tribes are never a big danger to their neighbors outside Arabia. Sure, they come and raid and steal the chickens and kidnap a few people, but it’s nothing big.
What Muhammad somehow did -- using not only his political skills but also his monotheist message that came from outside the tribal system -- was to get the Arabs on the same page. If you could do that, even temporarily, you could send the Arabs out to conquer the world. Not in Muhammad’s lifetime, but a couple of years after his death, starting in 634 -- that’s when his followers conquer this empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia. They had never done it before, and they never did it again. Muhammad, in his dual role as prophet and politician, is the absolutely crucial factor that made it possible.
That’s one angle. For the other angle let me go back to what I was saying about Christianity becoming a bandwagon in the fourth century. Any world religion must have become a bandwagon at some stage in its history, or it wouldn’t be a world religion. But world religions vary with regard to the timing of the bandwagon effect. In the Christian case, you have to wait until the fourth century for the Christian bandwagon to start rolling. Before the fourth century, you have to be pretty concerned about your eternal salvation for it to make sense to become a Christian.
In the Muslim case, the timing is quite different. Once the prophet gets to Medina, once he establishes this state, there is already the beginning of a bandwagon. In other words, the bandwagon effect in Islam comes extremely early. What does this mean? It means three things. One is that the historical experiences of early Christianity and early Islam are completely different. In the Christian case, you have a religion that remains the religion of a persecuted minority for the best part of three centuries. All the basic shapes of the religion are already set before the bandwagon starts. By contrast, in the Islamic case, you have less than 12 years in which the Muslims are a persecuted minority in Mecca. From that point on, once they get to Medina, and the prophet starts building his state, the bandwagon is rolling.
If, as you listen to my stories of the prophet, you have the Gospels in mind, you must have a sense that these stories are very, very different. They not only relate different historical circumstances, but they are told to a different audience. The audience of the Gospels is people who are seriously concerned about their salvation. The audience of the stories I’ve told you -- well, the salvation-minded might be listening, too -- but these stories cater to the military and political elite of the Arab-Islamic Empire. They address people who are interested in military operations, who like to know about preemptive strikes and incidents of friendly fire. These stories are told for people extremely interested in politics, who are fascinated by the judgment calls required to keep a shaky coalition together.
I hope you see this difference, this interest in military and political affairs, which makes the life of Muhammad, as it is written, so different in texture from the life of Jesus, as it’s written in the Gospels. Think what it means that you have, at the present day, these two utterly different heritages, these two utterly different ways of approaching and describing the life of the founder of the religion. I think that helps explain both why Islamic fundamentalism has been such a relative success in recent decades, and why people coming from a Christian background find it incredibly hard to understand it.
(Applause.)
MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you very much. Now we’ll take questions.
Kathleen Parker
MR. COOK: I know you are. I’m not going to make any judgment about whether Osama bin Laden is making a correct use of his (Islamic) heritage. But certain features of that heritage are relevant to him. Like the prophet, Bin Laden is a political character, and he is involved in intense military activity. So those aspects of the prophet’s heritage do a lot for bin Laden.
JOHN COCHRAN, CQ WEEKLY: You said you didn’t want to talk about whether Osama bin Laden had perverted his history. Why not? In the American political context, it is a sound bite that bin Laden has severely perverted a great religion, so your view on that would be interesting.
MR. COOK: That’s a fair question. Shortly after 9/11, there was a book published called How Did This Happen? that included an essay by Karen Armstrong in which she said a world religion has been hijacked by this band of fanatics. I don’t buy that for a minute. I think there are genuinely things present in this heritage that Osama bin Laden can legitimately use.
It gets tricky where you start asking exact questions about what he does. What is justified in terms of the heritage and what is not? That’s controversial in the Western academe. It’s also very controversial in the general Islamic fundamentalist milieu, too. For example, I understand that after 9/11 there was a great deal of discussion among Salafis -- that is, among Muslim fundamentalists of that streak -- about what in 9/11 was and wasn’t justified. You had a whole series of positions, including one that sticks in my mind, which said that the people in the building had it coming to them, but the people in the plane that was hijacked, they should not have been killed. I asked my source if that meant Osama bin Laden would go to hell because those people in the airplane had been killed. The answer was no, that was just an error of judgment.
E.J. DIONNE JR., THE WASHINGTON POST: Could you talk about the roots of the Koran in two ways. One, how closely does it parallel the Arab paganism in which Muhammad was raised, and how much did it break with it? Secondly, how aware was Muhammad of Christian and Jewish sources, and how do those play into it?
MR. COOK: The thing the Koran most obviously shares with the pagan tradition -- particularly in the early parts of the Koran, or what are taken to be the early parts of the Koran -- is a rhyming prose. Pagan soothsayers, according to the tradition, used to deliver their -- what do soothsayers deliver? -- sooths. Anyway, they used to deliver them in a certain style of rhymed prose, and there are parts of the Koran that are in a similar style of rhymed prose. The whole of the Koran tends to have an element of rhyme running through the verses. That’s something that looks like a pagan heritage. There’s not much else, apart from occasional references to particular pagan gods, but that’s what you’d expect.
Turning to Jewish and Christian sources. If you don’t think that the Koran was revealed by God, then it’s obvious Muhammad had Jewish and Christian sources. What people since the 19th century and long before have noticed is the accounts you find in the Koran of, say, the career of Noah tend to diverge from accepted narratives in Jewish and Christian sources. The question is why. One possible explanation would be Muhammad got it wrong. He misquoted his sources. The other possibility is he wasn’t getting it direct from Jewish and Christian sources. He was getting it downstream, by some chain of transmission. Nobody has a way of proving it’s one or the other, but the Jewish and Christian influence is unmistakable.
MR. DIONNE: Are there explicit references in the Koran to Christianity and Judaism?
MR. COOK: The Koran is full of references to Christianity and Judaism. The question is whether the information came from a Jew or a Christian, but got garbled, or whether it’s a downstream source that has already been through several transmissions.
MR. DIONNE: Could you elaborate on that? Muhammad was aware of Christianity and Judaism. He had various options; this is assuming the Koran is not purely divine revelation. He might have adopted Christianity or Judaism wholesale or in larger part than he did. Do we know why he chose his course instead of sticking with the two forms of monotheism he had available to him?
MR. COOK: The tradition tells he initially saw himself simply as the latest monotheist prophet and expected Jews and Christians to follow him. Christians weren’t relevant because there weren’t any in Mecca or Medina. Or if there were, they were in very small numbers. The Jews were relevant because there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, and they rejected him. You can follow the tradition and see his decision to come up with a new form of monotheism as a reaction to being rejected by the Jews in Medina.
To give you one example: There’s a series of confusing Koranic passages about the direction in which Muslims should pray. As the tradition explains it, the prophet originally told his followers in Mecca to pray towards Jerusalem. That’s a good Jewish thing to do. But then, when he starts having bad relations with the Jews, he receives a revelation that says turn around and pray towards Mecca.
This event is a nationalization of monotheism. It links to the belief that Mecca -- that is, the sanctuary known as the Kaaba -- was not originally a pagan sanctuary but a monotheist sanctuary established by Abraham and Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. So the Kaaba becomes a national monotheist sanctuary.
TERRY EASTLAND, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Somewhere, Bernard Lewis wrote about the famous story in the Gospels regarding the tribute money and Jesus (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.”) You made the observation that Christianity had within its original material that distinction, which later matured in the West. I think Lewis said this distinction was not present in the original materials of Islam.
If Muhammad and his followers were acquainted with that story, what was their reaction to it?
Since then has there been any movement in Muslim thought towards discovering that distinction?
MR. COOK: I don’t know of any early Muslim reaction to that particular passage in the Gospels. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, but I haven’t seen it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were no recorded reaction because the early Muslims had their Koran; they regarded that as the definitive revelation. As far as they were concerned, the New Testament and the Old Testament were suspect -- originally revealed texts but corrupted by subsequent followers of Moses and Jesus. You couldn’t rely on them, and they tended to ignore them.
Michael Cook
Your second question: Did they develop something like that distinction later on, without having it in such a neat form as established by the founder of the religion? The answer is definitely yes. The Islamic state starts off being ruled by Muhammad, who is both a prophet and a politician. He then has successors who rule it after him. They are not prophets; they are Caliphs. But the Caliphs are nevertheless occupying an intrinsically religious office as well as an obviously political one. They have a religious authority as well as political power, so we still have the Islamic state here.
But at some point that nobody has exactly agreed upon, the Caliphate falls apart. It falls apart in material historical terms: The Islamic world breaks up into numerous distinct states. But it also falls apart morally in the sense that people ceased to recognize those who claimed to be Caliphs as having anything like the prestige, the rectitude, the authority of the early Caliphs who came immediately after Muhammad.
By the 11th century, Muslims are talking in terms of what you could call a dichotomy between religion and the state. In doing that, they are partly echoing a pre-Islamic Iranian Persian tradition, in which that dichotomy was a familiar dictum.
By the way, the pre-Islamic Persians are damnable unbelievers. They go to hell, they burn. But they were very good at certain things, and one of the things they were good at was statecraft. If you hear something they said about statecraft, you ought to pay attention. One of the things they said was that religion and the state are twins. They’re not the same thing, but they’re very closely connected. That became a paradigm. It didn’t have the authority of the prophet or the Koran. But nevertheless, it became accepted as a paradigm in the Islamic world, particularly the Eastern Islamic world, on the ruins of the Persian Empire.
By the 13th century, people are saying things like: “The people in power are sultans, not Caliphs.” The Caliph has to be a descendant of the tribe of the prophet. “The guys who are ruling now, they’re a bunch of Turks who have come from Central Asia. All they’re good at is warfare, and thanks to that, they’ve taken over. They don’t have any intrinsic religious status. The best we can hope is they at least defend Islam against its enemies and behave in a reasonably just fashion, as much as you can expect Turks to do that.”
When I talked about the contrast between the Gospels and the life of the prophet, as it was written up in the eighth century, one of the things I stressed about the prophet was the smartness of his judgment calls. That Gospel passage about the tribute money is perhaps the one place in the Gospels where one might say about Jesus, “That was a smart thing to say.” I mean it was a politically savvy thing to say.
JAMES HUNTER, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: I wanted you to elaborate on the difference between Persia and Arabia. Iran -- Persia -- is part of the pan-Islamic world, but it’s not part of the pan-Arab world. There are deep cultural differences that trace back into medieval times. Could you talk about those differences, but also talk about the contemporary relevance of those differences in global politics today?
MR. COOK: One fundamental difference is language. The Arabs of Arabia and all the other peoples we classify as Arabs today -- from Morocco to Iraq -- speak Arabic, whereas the people of Iran speak Persian. That may sound trivial, but it is actually quite significant. When the Muslims conquered Iraq, Syria, Egypt and later North Africa, the populations at the time of the conquest were speaking all sorts of different languages, but they all came within a few centuries to speak Arabic. You have an enormous historical process of Arabization in those areas. But after the Muslims conquered Iran, that did not happen. You might imagine over the centuries the people of Iran would have come to speak Arabic, but they didn’t. They held onto their ancestral language. That’s one thing, and it’s fairly obviously linked to something else.
Medieval Egyptians, just to give you one example, don’t have much memory of what Egypt was like before the Islamic conquest. They know there were the pharaohs and then the Greeks came and the Romans, that Egypt was converted to Christianity. In fact, they have a lot of information and misinformation about it. But they have no identification with the pre-Islamic past of Egypt. By contrast, there always survives in Iran an identification, albeit a qualified identification, with the pre-Islamic past: “Yes, those guys were damnable pagans, but they had a great tradition, and we want to hang on to some of that tradition, even though we are now Muslims.”
In the 10th century, you have scruffy military leaders who come from the mountains of northern Iran with their mercenaries and take over, trying to present themselves as heirs of the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. Presumably they’re trying to make themselves look good by identifying with the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. That tradition continues, though on a smaller scale, in Iran right down to the present day. It’s even taken out and dusted off in the middle of the 20th century by Iranian nationalists.
I think those two things -- hanging onto Persian and retaining a strong identification with the land’s pre-Islamic past -- make Iran different from Arabia.
MR. HUNTER: What about some of the extraordinary cultural accomplishments of the Persian Empire? Is that part of the historical consciousness it’s retained? Does that have any bearing in terms of openness to other cultures?
MR. COOK: It’s not the cultural achievements of the Persian Empire that get valued. It’s the military and political achievements. That’s what they’re seen to be good at. Yes, learned people do know something about the cultural side, but I think it’s much less prominent in the general public image.
CLARE DUFFY, NBC NIGHTLY NEWS: You talked about the fact that Islam did not share with Christianity a sense of being a persecuted minority, at least in its developmental stage. That sense can be a unifying force for any religious group. When did a sense of persecution develop? I feel like it did at some point; Shi’ism relies on a sense of being a persecuted. At some point, this did develop in Islam, did it not?
MR. COOK: Absolutely. Here we have a big distinction between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, the Sunnis being -- over most of the Islamic world, most of the time -- a people who were ruled by a state of their own kind. They had very little reason to develop a sense of being persecuted. By contrast, the Shi’ites lost out early on.
Down the centuries, Shi’ites have been ruled by non-Shi’ites, typically by Sunnis. The Shi’ites develop a strong sense of being a persecuted minority, and that sense is entirely pre-modern and traditional. All that happened in modern times is, it is dusted off and used for political purposes.
By contrast, a sense of being done in by the world is something Sunnis have only developed in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
MS. DUFFY: Back to the coins you showed us. Why did they make these coins? Who was reading them? Was that the way the religion was spread? How literate were people? Would they look at their money and go, “Hey, no God but God?”
MR. COOK: We don’t have a clue what literacy rates were like in this period. Some people could read and some couldn’t. My guess would be a substantial proportion of the political and military elite could read, and they could read these coins if they wanted to.
The crucial question, to my mind, is non-Muslims. This is obviously a message beamed at non-Muslims. It’s telling them to listen up and pay attention. Could they read these Arabic inscriptions on the coins? Initially, when most of them didn’t know Arabic, they couldn’t. But it does seem that early on in the Islamic period and maybe by about 700 -- actually, I shouldn’t say anything definite about the chronology because I don’t have the facts in my mind. But I think on the Christian side by about 700, certainly by the early eighth century, you’ve got evidence of Christians who knew and read Arabic.
One definitive piece of evidence is Christian ecclesiastic canons saying that Christians are not to have their sons taught the Koran by Muslim teachers. The point is not that these teachers are converting the kids. The point is that primary education in the Islamic community consisted of learning to read the Koran, and if you wanted to learn proper Arabic and be able to move in elite circles, as many of these Christians wanted to do, you had to learn your Koran. The church was getting worried about this and saying it has to stop. But the fact they’re saying you can’t do this obviously means that people were doing it. So those people -- Christians -- could definitely have read what was on the coins.
Nina Easton
MR. COOK: Is it inherent? You could certainly minimize it. What I mean is this: There are two kinds of jihad. One is defensive, and the other is offensive. Defensive jihad is straightforward. If the unbelievers are attacking you, then you have to fight back. Offensive jihad is going off and invading the territory of unbelievers who haven’t done anything to you.
What does the law say about offensive jihad? It says that some Muslims somewhere ought to do it, but provided some Muslims somewhere are doing it, no other Muslims have to do it. In other words, yes, a certain element of offensive jihad is inherent in the religion. But you can minimize it easily if you want to. You can also maximize it. If lots of Muslims go off and do it, then by the criteria of Islamic law, that’s a good thing.
MR. CROMARTIE: Is it in the Koran that it [jihad] can be preemptive or offensive?
MR. COOK: In the Koran, it’s hard to figure out whether the text refers to defensive or offensive warfare. There are certain passages the medieval scholars always cite, saying they show jihad should be offensive. But if you look at the passages carefully, it’s not that obvious. On the basis of the Koran alone you could mount a decent argument for saying offensive jihad is never a duty.
Michael Cook
The other question here is that of coercion. Jihad means you go out and conquer people. But does it mean you’re actually going to force them to convert to Islam? The basic answer is no. This is straightforward in the case of Jews and Christians, because everybody recognizes that Jews and Christians, provided they submit to the Islamic state, can have a protected status in which they carry on being Jews and Christians. They still have to follow certain stipulations, and you could argue about the small print, but the basic conception is very clear.
There is also a strong stream of Islamic law that says that you can give the same protected status to any unbeliever with the single exception of Arab pagans. Arab pagans are not a big deal because they don’t exist after, say, the middle of the seventh century. So when you go and conquer India, you can give the Hindus protected status. There are other schools of Islamic law that say, no; you shouldn’t give the Hindus protected status because their idolatry is so way out you can’t tolerate it. But the Muslims who actually conquered large parts of India adhered to the school that said no problem tolerating Hindus.
Actually forcing people to convert is a different question. I can remember one medieval scholar who says forced conversions are the best thing ever: The person converted at the point of a sword -- all right, he doesn’t like it at the time, but after a while he gets used to it and becomes as good a Muslim as anybody else. That view does exist. But the general view is no, you don’t coerce people to enter Islam.
Rod Dreher
MR. COOK: Partly you’re asking me for a policy recommendation about whether a certain policy is likely to work. I tend to be skeptical of that, but I’m not the person best qualified to set out an argument there.
But coming closer to my own turf, I would say it’s absolutely right that there is, in principle, a doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and democracy, and it’s a very straightforward incompatibility: if you believe the single most important thing in the world is God’s will, and if you believe that you know what God’s will is, then what on earth are you doing with elections? This is an argument that in principle would extend to Jews and Christians. But Jews and Christians don’t seem to have a whole lot of problems with democracy. I’m not sure the Islamic case is in principle all that different.
Let me give you an analogy. If you go back something like 100 years and take Catholicism and Catholic anti-modernism -- who was that pope in the first two decades of the 20th century who launched an anti-modernist crusade that said the church can have no truck with the corrupt values of the modern world? And there’s the document that says it must shore up its medieval tradition in the face of all these temptations and abominations? Isn’t it actually --
MR. CROMARTIE: The Syllabus of Errors.
MR. COOK: The Syllabus of Errors, exactly. Isn’t that where it says it is an error to believe the pope can accommodate himself to modern values such as blah, blah, blah, and democracy?
MR. CROMARTIE: Liberalism as well.
MR. DIONNE: That was the last error on the list and the culmination of the list.
MR. COOK: In that late 19th century, early 20th century period, it made good sense -- and a lot of people were saying it, both on the Catholic side and the anti-Catholic side -- to say Catholicism and democracy are incompatible; there’s no way they could be reconciled. When I tell this to my undergraduates in the early 21st century, and quite a few of them are Catholics, this sounds really bizarre. It corresponds to nothing in their experience.
Occasionally, the word comes out from Rome that contraception is banned, and the Catholic laity more or less ignores what they’re told by their hierarchy. There are some questions about whether the Catholic hierarchy should be telling Catholics not to vote for certain people. Yes, there’s friction. But a sense of a fundamental incompatibility between Catholicism and democracy -- I just don’t see it in our time. For all I know, in another 100 years, the idea of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy will be equally bizarre.
MR. CROMARTIE: Do we have to wait 100 years? That’s the question also.
MR. DREHER: To follow up: Just how will they do it? Because you can point to the foundational Christian documents, the scriptures, and you don’t find explicit support for the church and the state being one. But in your account, that was there from the beginning with Islam, and it is inherent to the nature of the religion. If one is a Muslim reformer and wants to see more Western-style liberal democracy that the West in the Muslim world, they’re going to have to make their case on the basis of the Islamic scriptures, right?
MR. DIONNE: Here’s a related question. The Second Vatican Council was instrumental in overturning The Syllabus of Errors. What mechanisms could there be [in the Islamic tradition] for a reformation? I use that term in this context with a small “r.”
MR. COOK: I can’t resist throwing in a comment about the idea of an Islamic reformation being a good thing. If you look at the European and the Christian Reformation, it ushered in a period of extraordinary bloodshed and fanaticism. It was not nice in the ways we like a political system to be nice. I’m not sure I would wish that on the Islamic world, and I’m not sure we even have to wish it on them. They’ve got it already. I think Wahhabism is the Islamic reformation, and we don’t like it. But yes, we’re talking about some kind of a change.
It is true Islam is unlike Christianity in not having this fundamental church-state dichotomy written into the original scriptures. Instead, if you look back to the beginnings, you have this unity of religion and politics.
But for most of Islamic history, that unity did not exist. I described the situation where the real holders of power are like Turkish sultans, and they’re clearly distinct from the religious establishment. Let us make a distinction between two ideas being logically or doctrinally compatible, and two ideas being able to live together in the minds of messy, incoherent humans. For most of Islamic history, some degree of recognition of a distinction between church and state was present and, therefore, could be again.
The problem seems that, in the present epoch, Islamic fundamentalism is on a high horse. That necessarily gives the moral high ground to the view that religion and politics are inseparable. That’s how it was in the beginning when everything was right; that’s how it should be again.
I would see a major change coming about not through people thinking up clever arguments. You can always think up clever arguments from a heritage that will get anywhere you want. But the fundamental thing that would have to change is Islamic fundamentalism would have to either be discredited or at least become much less appealing than it is at the present day.
MR. CROMARTIE: We did have the French scholar Gilles Kepel speak here a couple of years ago on this very question. He thought Islamic fundamentalism was on the wane, and that 9/11 was actually a last, desperate attempt get attention before it faded away. The question was: Will that be in 10 years or a hundred years?
Do you think Kepel is right that radical Islamic fundamentalism is actually going down rather than up?
MR. COOK: The shortest answer is I don’t know. I have read Kepel’s book [The Trail of Politicial Islam] (2004), and I am impressed by it. He has made a case, and he may be right, but I would prefer to wait another 10 or 15 years -- (laughter) -- before saying something on the record.
MR. CROMARTIE: So the short answer is --
MR. COOK: Kepel knows a great deal and is not a frivolous commentator. If he says that it is on the wane, then that is a serious possibility we have to consider.
MR. CROMARTIE: The question is, how long is it going to take?
MR. COOK: I bet in 500 years Islamic fundamentalism will have gone way down.
Lisa Anderson
You said Muhammad found a way to unify the Arabs, to pull them together and lead them to this greatness. Can you talk about how Muhammad did that, or how you believe this was achieved, since this is clearly an aim with Osama bin Laden, the restoration of the caliphate and Sharia law and an Islamic world?
MR. COOK: I don’t have a confident answer to this, but my sense would be you have to look at the way somebody armed with a doctrine, and a transcendental authority, and the necessary political skills, can do an end-run around tribal fragmentation.
A while back I was reading a book about liberation theology in Venezuela and Colombia, and there was a chapter describing some particular village in Venezuela. This priest -- was he a Jesuit? -- a Catholic ecclesiastical figure -- comes in from the outside, bearing this liberation theology doctrine. He starts to do social work in an environment where none of the locals trust each other but if they could get together, they could do great things.
By virtue of being somebody with a transcendental authority, this Jesuit -- or whatever he was -- was able to use his authority to create trust in the community. It may not have mattered much what liberation theology actually said. He got them together to organize social projects that actually worked and did things for them.
That’s an analogy to what we’re looking at here. You have an authority that comes from outside a fragmented social system, and if you can get people’s attention and trust, you can start creating trust among them. Muhammad had a hard time getting his Meccans and Medinans to trust each other, but eventually they did. It is political engineering based on a transcendental mandate you can sell to people.
MS. ANDERSON: Do you think another figure could arise out of this crucible of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism around the world; another figure that might unify Muslims again, not in the same sense as Muhammad but in a similar way?
MR. COOK: Definitely not in the same sense because Muslims wouldn’t be operating in a pre-modern tribal context. I can imagine somebody acquiring immense moral authority, but to convert that into political authority is something else because you bump up against the geopolitics of the situation.
The only example I can think of in modern items is a bad example: Khomeini. He built up tremendous moral authority for himself in Iran, and he would have liked to project that authority onto the rest of the Islamic world. But the moment Khomeini tried to exert his moral and political authority in neighboring countries, the people in power in those countries got worried because Iran is a big country in that neighborhood. They can’t just think of Khomeini as somebody with the authority of a saint. They have to think of him as the boss of a rival outfit. They have to think geopolitically. What messes up that example is the Sunni/Shi’ite division that reinforced Khomeini’s failure.
I’ll give you an analogy of the international communist movement. At one stage, people had the sense it was one big movement. They were all together on the same page. Then the Russians and Chinese fell out, then the Chinese and Vietnamese; in other words, geopolitics took over. My guess would be that geopolitics would take over in this case, too.
MICHAEL PAULSON, BOSTON GLOBE: I wanted to ask about the state of Islamic studies in American universities.
Michael Paulson
I also sensed there was a rush into classrooms to study Arabic and maybe contemporary Middle-Eastern issues, but I don’t know whether it has continued. At the time, I thought many universities were not prepared to deal with this and that the level of scholarship was not mature enough.
MR. COOK: Let me try to answer without taking swipes at the people I dislike locally in my own university. (Laughter.) There’s no question that 9/11 has meant a rapid increase in the level of demand. My sense is that level of demand has fallen off a bit but not drastically, so this was the window of opportunity for a small, rather despised field to get in there and be mainstream. At Princeton -- and my impression is probably other places too -- one side of this has gone well, and that’s the language teaching.
At Princeton we now have about three or four times as many undergraduate students who are interested in taking Arabic. Persian, Turkish; forget it. I’m devastated to see the nuclear crisis with Iran has not done anything for enrollments in Persian. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have the same effect, and I’m not sure why. But Arabic, yes, -- it’s a mixture of kids who are troubled and interested, and kids who see a career opportunity. I had one student who announced as a freshman she planned to take Arabic so she could become a spy. Actually, she didn’t take Arabic; she went and did geosciences and is now at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Many people change their minds. Maybe she didn’t. (Laughter.) That could be her cover.
Then there is the analytical side of the field. I’m a medievalist, and, as Islamic studies go, I’m in a quiet part of the field. The beginnings of Islam, yes, that can get hot, but all those centuries in between, nobody gets that excited about them. It’s the study of the modern Islamic world and modern Middle East where the problems are. There you find a real tendency towards polarization in the field.
On the philo-Islamic side, you have two categories of people. One may be Muslim scholars -- that is, scholars of Muslim background -- though they shouldn’t be stereotyped. But you do get academics who feel in this very American way they have to represent an ethnical religious constituency.
There’s also an element of philo-Islamic or philo-Arab academics who have no particular roots in either Islam or the Arab world or the Middle East, but who, by ideological conviction or whatever, have come to be strongly inclined that way. For example, I can refer to NYU. Our counterpart Near Eastern Studies Department at NYU is famous or notorious, depending on where you’re coming from, for its attitude. Such people are leftist, anti-Zionist, which doesn’t mean quite a few of them aren’t Jewish.
At the other extreme you have a few neo-cons and people inclining towards that end of the spectrum. But neo-cons are a sparse phenomenon in the academic world in general. In terms of who persecutes who, my own experience is it tends to be the leftists who persecute the neo-cons in the academic environment. It may be different out there in the real world, but that’s what happens within academia.
There are two fundamental problems of the field as I see it now. One, this boom of interest is different from the boom in East Asian or Japanese studies 15 or 20 years ago. That boom happened because, yes, the Japanese had an interesting culture and history, but they also had one of the world’s top economies. That is a healthy combination. In the case of Near Eastern studies, it’s not based on that. There is an attractive culture, although the features of it most often highlighted these days are not particularly attractive ones, but there isn’t a great world economy there. Instead there is oil and a lot of poverty. This is not a solid basis for a buildup of interest. Japanese studies have gone down quite a bit, but it’s still a real presence. And of course China is a rising star.
The other problem, as I see it -- and I spend enormous amounts of time sitting on search committees -- is that good people are scarce in the field, particularly under current market conditions. Why that is I don’t really know, but somehow the imaginations of good people are much more easily fired by East Asia, say, than by the Islamic world, and that just seems to be a fact.
MR. PAULSON: Can you tell me three scholars who study Islam in America whose work you respect? For completely pragmatic reasons, I’m looking for people to call. I’m always looking for good experts. I find a tremendous amount of both politicization and scholarly un-readiness.
MR. COOK: If I had a question about Salafis -- the Saudi strain of Islamic fundamentalists and also Salafis in other parts part of the world -- the first person I would go to would be Bernard Haykel who is currently at NYU. He combines knowledge of the pre-modern tradition and history with hands-on research on Salafis of the present day. He’s a native Arabic speaker as well as a native English and French speaker. He’s been spending a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. He’s very good at hanging out with people. He’s also hung out with Salafis in India. That’s somebody who’s well informed, and who is not marketing some political line.
CARL CANNON, NATIONAL JOURNAL: When you were showing the coins, you were focusing on one aspect of it -- the coin bite, how they spread religion. But the other thing I was struck by was: There’s no picture on that coin. It replaces the picture with words. Did the cartoon riots have their origins that far back in Islam?
MR. COOK: They have two origins that go pretty far back. One is a prohibition of images. When you start developing small print about that prohibition, there’s lots of room for disagreement about which kind of images are prohibited. Are they all prohibited or just some? The consensus is if any image is forbidden, it is images that depict humans. Depicting a human is already extremely questionable, and depicting the prophet is a whole lot worse than depicting any other human. Let me back up here.
The prohibition of images has a Koranic foundation, and it’s well developed by the eighth century. There’s plenty of evidence for that. The additional sensitivity about depicting the prophet, I don’t know how far that goes back, but there’s an interesting genre of miniature painting in the late Middle Ages, where you have representations of Mohammad, but always shown with a blank face, whereas other people in the picture have proper faces. There’s a clear sense there that when it comes to depicting people, the prophet is in a different category from other people.
MS.EASTON: Why are images prohibited? Is it an anti-pagan thing? What’s the root of that?
MR. COOK: In one sense, the root is simply that God and his prophet have said so, and if they said so, that’s it. But the underlying anxiety is idolatry; that once you have images, people are going to worship them.
To come back to the previous question: Defaming or slandering the prophet is a very serious offense; in Islamic law it incurs the death penalty. What’s more, you can’t get out of the death penalty even by repenting. The cartoons, in addition to depicting the prophet, were clearly insulting. The cartoonists did a pretty good job of covering all bases there. (Laughter.)
Bill Adair
MR. COOK: To take the last point first: Yes, of course, the tradition tells us he was handsome. In addition, we get detailed descriptions of his features and body build. Whether those descriptions should carry any authority, I don’t know. Whether they go back to eye witnesses or whether they’ve just been embroidered later, I have no way of telling.
To pick out another thing you’re asking about, are there signs that point to his future greatness? Lots of them. There are stories about his birth that explain how at the moment when he was born supernatural events took place. His mother saw the castles of Syria by magic illumination. The evil spirits who used to listen in on conversations in heaven suddenly found they were no longer wired up; they couldn’t hear what was going on up there.
You have a lot of supernatural dimension to the birth of the prophet, and later on, various things happen. When he’s in early adolescence, his uncle takes him to Syria, and on the way they encounter a Christian monk, and the Christian monk says, ah ha, this guy’s going to be a prophet. Did any of that really happen? Your guess is as good as mine.
The other part of your question: Do we get a credible sense of his character as opposed to just the fact that he had all virtues? I’m not sure we do. I’d be hard put to it to give you a vivid thumbnail sketch of what the man was like. It’s partly that the sources tend not to be explicit, but partly also that they’re so concerned to talk about his virtues you don’t get much sense of a real personality.
MR. CROMARTIE: One of the journalists that couldn’t be here said: “Oh, you’re having Professor Cook, that’s interesting. I think I read his biography of Muhammad. He suggests” -- and tell me if he got this right -- “that Muhammad may not have existed.”
MR. COOK: No, no. I have never had any doubts about his existence. I have held some heretical views in the past about what he did --
MR. CROMARTIE: He confused you with someone else, then, about that point?
MR. COOK: It’s more likely he got my views wrong. (Laughter.) I never suggested that the prophet didn’t exist. There’s as good evidence as you’re going to get that he did. He’s mentioned in non-Muslim sources within two or three years of his death, and that’s good enough for me.
MR. CROMARTIE: Everybody’s eager to hear some of your heretical positions.
MR. COOK: There are some early non-Islamic sources that suggest that, in its origins, Islam was closer to Judaism for longer than the traditional account indicates. That essentially was the nature of my heresy.
MR. CROMARTIE: You agree with that account?
MR. COOK: I no longer subscribe to it because I think the non-Islamic evidence wasn’t sufficiently coherent.
WILLIAM GALSTON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Let me preface my question by saying that among Jews, although Moses is the highest and most nearly perfect prophet, there are still extensive discussions of his imperfections and his errors, at least one of which was serious enough to deprive him of his ultimate objective. It is a matter of some cultural significance that Moses is depicted as an imperfect human being, although the highest prophet. That raises some interesting questions: Are there, in the Hadith, for example, any stories pointing towards his imperfections or serious errors of judgment?
But my larger question has to do with the monotheistic triad. You pointed out that the Constantinian tradition was a latecomer in Christianity. So there’s always an oppositional stream of Christianity where faith can be a counterweight to public authority and not necessarily fused with it.
Rabbinic Judaism, and in particular Jewish law, developed in circumstances of political marginality and powerlessness. Therefore, Jewish law is not really public law. When the issue arose, in the founding of Israel, as to whether Jewish law should be the law of the state, there were people who took that position, but the realists won out; namely, that it is impossible to turn this into a body of public law. That decision has created the basic structure of legal argumentation in Israel ever since.
What strikes me as so important about Islam, and so distinctive, is that it is law that developed in circumstances of political majority and political power and not political marginality. That re-raises the question of whether Islamic law, authentically understood, can be private law, or does it inherently tend to be public law backed by the coercive power of the state? Let me raise two examples here for you to comment on. The first is the idea of religious liberty, out of which liberal democracy developed; namely, that you may change your religion, and the state may not intervene to prevent you. As I understand it, Islam has a different view of the matter.
The other question -- and I’m astonished I’m the first person to mention it this morning -- has to do with the public law of gender relations, which I happen to believe is the principal flashpoint between Islam and the West right now. It is not clear to me that Islamic law can accommodate the core of what the West believes to be non-negotiable on that question.
MR. COOK: When I was responding on the character of the prophet, I should have addressed that issue you raised about perfection and prophethood. The prophet in the earlier sources -- the Koran and early biographical accounts, and also in the Hadith -- is not depicted as a perfect human being. There are clear passages in the Koran where God is telling off his prophet: You did this wrong and undo it.
Michael Cook
Over the course of the centuries, a theological doctrine developed that prophets possess immunity to sin or error. Different people asserted it in different ways. For example, you could take a line that prophets are totally immune to sin or error, or you could take a line that they’re immune but only in matters directly concerning their prophetic role. As one medieval theologian interpreted it, they’re immune from error, not in the sense that they can’t commit error or sin, but only in the sense that they’re guaranteed to see their error and repent. There’s a spectrum of interpretations on this doctrine of immunity.
But there’s no question the drift over the course of Islamic history is towards a stronger and stronger assertion of prophetic immunity. It creates enormous problems when it collides with the evidence in the earlier sources -- a confrontation that generates reams and reams of small print.
Let me mention the single-biggest episode -- maybe you know it already. There is an account in the life of the prophet that ties up with a verse in the Koran. The verse says that while the prophet was still in Mecca, he was unhappy about the fact he was on such bad terms with his pagan fellow tribesmen. Being a nice guy, he wanted to be nice; he wanted everyone to be friends. On one occasion when he was receiving a revelation, he allowed Satan to get him to insert a verse that said to the pagan Meccans, my god is okay, and your gods are okay, and they’re a team together.
According to these accounts, the next thing that happens is Gabriel -- Gabriel is the intermediary between God and the prophet -- Gabriel comes down and says: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re a prophet, and you’ve gone and stuck this verse of Satan’s into God’s revelation.” Mohammad gets upset, and Gabriel feels sorry for him and says: “Don’t worry too much; God will sort it out.” And God indeed knocks the offending verse out of the revelation and puts the right one in.
So you have this story that the prophet compromised with idolatry on one occasion. It’s told in a human kind of way. You feel tremendously sympathetic towards the guy. Wouldn’t you have done the same in the circumstances? But when that clashes with the doctrine of prophetic immunity, you’ve got a real problem.
Just to take the story through to the present: The medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya -- I mentioned his opinion on immunity before -- is one of the gurus, to misapply a term, of the modern fundamentalists. They think he’s the greatest thing since the prophet. But Ibn Taymiyyah said a whole load of things the modern fundamentalists simply can’t take. One of them was: “Why shouldn’t this episode have taken place; it’s perfectly plausible, and we’ve got plenty of accounts of it. The only immunity that the prophet has is that he’s going to repent of it, and it’s going to be put right. No big deal.”
This view is something the modern fundamentalists cannot stomach, and they represent the other end of the development where prophetic immunity has become absolute. There’s a rich theological mess there. In a couple of years there should be a fine book out on this topic by a young professor at Harvard.
Back to your other questions. I think your fundamental point is well taken on a crucial difference between Sunni Islam and Rabbinic Judaism; that one develops in a situation of deprivation of political power, and the other develops in close association with political power. All I would do is qualify what you said.
On the Jewish side, you do have those tractates in the Talmud -- Nezikin and things like that -- that talk about matters of public law. Equally, if you go to Maimonides and the Mishneh Torah-- it’s a digest of Jewish law, and it sets out marriage and divorce and that kind of stuff, but you also get a blueprint for how we would run a Jewish state.
It’s plausible to me Maimonides put it there because he was so familiar with the Islamic case that he was influenced by it. Even if only a counterfactual basis, he felt, we’ve got to have it on our side of the fence. But it is there. If somebody were to come out of Meah She’arim (an Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem) and dominate the state of Israel, there is a program to bandy about for having a Jewish public law. But I agree with you that for practical purposes Rabbinic Judaism is well adapted to not having a state.
On the Muslim side, the qualification I would make is -- well, it’s true that we do have evidence the early caliphs made law. They respect what God and the prophet had said, but they make decisions and say, “This is the way it’s going to be.” This gets played down in later tradition but it’s there in the sources. The classical authorities of Islamic law, however, are not rulers legislating; they are scholars who say, “In my opinion, this is the way it ought to be.” In other words, they’re figures much like rabbis.
You also have the phenomenon of legal pluralism, with four distinct schools of Islamic law. Judaism and the Pharisees had Hillel and Shammai (two sages and, later, two schools). The four Muslim schools of thought were all founded by scholars, jurists who are private persons. Despite the presence of a Muslim state, there is something happening analogous to what the rabbis are doing. So I would moderate your contrast, but I would accept the fundamental contrast.
On the question of changing religion: Yes, absolutely; in Islamic law, that’s out. It’s not just that you can’t get away with apostatizing from Islam: that if you’re a Jew you can’t convert to Christianity. If you want to exit Judaism, the only way you can do it is by converting to Islam. But let’s compare that to the Christian and Jewish traditions. On the Jewish side, I’m thinking of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah where he talks about Rabbanites and Karaites. There’s a fierce bit where he says Karaites are apostates from Judaism and should be killed. Then he says, “I’m not talking about the descendents of those Karaites -- it’s not their fault, we get along fine with them -- but the people who actually apostatized from Judaism, they should be killed.” Certainly there is an illiberal attitude towards change of religion.
On the Christian side I’m sure if one went looking in canon law and whatnot, one would find plenty of cases of illiberal attitudes.
The final thing you asked about: gender relations. I agree with you that this is one of the points of maximum friction. In Islamic terms you have a religious law that is very different from the attitudes that pass today in the United States or any part of the Western world. There’s a real incompatibility. It’s not surprising: Gender relations touch on extremely intimate aspects of life; the issue is bound to stir up deep emotions.
When Muslim women buy into Western feminist attitudes, even if they’re repackaging them in Islamic dress, this is acting up. Muslim men then are squeezed between Muslim women acting up on the one side and the West on the other. That’s not a good place to be.
How is this likely to play out? My answer would be similar to what I said when asked about Islam and democracy: As long as you have fundamentalism riding high, and you take all this stuff in the religious law seriously, you’ve got an insoluble problem. But let me give you two comparative examples. One is Hindu India: Hindu law must be about as un-modern in its attitudes to women as Muslim law. I couldn’t give you a detailed comparison, but if you could do the comparison, I wouldn’t want to bet that Hindu law would come out ahead in liberal terms.
But in India at present, nobody pays much attention to those aspects of Hindu law. There may be a few traditional, isolated Brahman families that still keep this stuff going, but to a large extent, in modern circles in India, this is dead letter, and people aren’t being bothered by pietists coming and saying, “Hey, but in this text it says….”
In the same way, you go to Israel and spend 10 minutes on the beach at Eilat -- nothing Maimonides said about how women should behave is being observed there. (Laughter.) My sense is, yes, while fundamentalism lasts, this is going to be a major problem, but the problem could dissipate in due course.
AMY SULLIVAN, WASHINGTON MONTHLY: I’d like to return to the issue of Jewish and Christian traditions influencing the development of Islam. What would exposure to Jewish and Christian text and stories have been in the Arab world? Would the man on the street have known much about these traditions, or is this something that was limited to the elite? What would the cultural understanding have been of those traditions?
MR. COOK: We’re talking about Arabia because the Arabs were in Arabia then. I didn’t mention this before, but around the edges of Arabia you had a fair amount of conversion to Christianity. Not in the area where Islam begins, but in the north and east. The Arabs were always traveling, and I would reckon there must have been some knowledge of Christianity even among people who didn’t live in those edge regions. Christianity couldn’t have been completely off their radar.
In the case of Judaism, you have a substantial Jewish community in Medina. According to the traditional account, they were there before the Arabs, and then some Arab tribes moved in on top of them. The traditional account tells us there were two reasons why the Medinans invited Muhammad to Medina. One was they thought he could sort out their problems, but the other was that having lived side-by-side with Jews, they knew what a prophet was. They could recognize one when they saw one.
So people are not clueless. Do they actually read texts? That’s a different question. One of the prophet’s companions headed the committee that produced the final edition of the Koran, and he was put in charge because he was incredibly learned. The sources say he knew Syriac, Hebrew and you name it, he knew it. But he’s regarded as an exceptional figure. We don’t characteristically get Arabs shown to us reading Jewish or Christian texts.
AUDREY TAYLOR, ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT: I work in television, the world of sound bites, and the one we always hear is that Islam as a religion has been hijacked by a few who are crazy, and it’s only a few. But you’ve been saying, in terms of jihad, that necessarily isn’t the case. We try to simplify it, saying there are only a few crazy people out there, and this is not indicative of the Islamic world as a whole. How do you address that because it doesn’t seem to be accurate?
MR. COOK: One of the things about being an academic is that I don’t have to be a diplomat -- that would really bother me. As I see it, my role is simply to tell the way it is.
MS. TAYLOR: In terms of culture, is the Islamic world really outraged by what they’re seeing?
MR. COOK: Let me quote Gilles Kepel on that. The analysis I heard him give recently is that public opinion -- he was speaking specifically about the Arab world but it would apply elsewhere, too -- is immobilized by the present situation because on the one hand they don’t like the stuff bin Laden does. They think it’s nasty. They don’t think it is representative of their religion and -- no, perhaps I shouldn’t say that. They feel it’s way out, too nasty. But on the other hand, they don’t like the Americans, and bin Laden is socking it to the Americans. The result is they’re immobilized; they don’t know what to think.
If you say there is nothing in the original text of the religion that gives any comfort to jihadis, you’re lying. It’s not true. There is stuff there. What I would say, though, is that doesn’t for a moment mean you can predict the behavior of Muslims from what’s in their scriptures.
To give you an analogy I use with my students, there are three verses in the Gospels where Jesus says, you want to be my disciples, you’ve got to hate your parents. Now, it’s not just that moderate, wishy-washy liberal Christians in this country don’t believe they ought to hate their parents; even the Christian fundamentalists don’t think they should hate their parents, and yet Jesus said it. I’m sure they have ways of getting off the hook in the same way Muslims can find all sorts of ways of getting off their hooks. The fact it’s there in scripture doesn’t have much predictive value -- maybe none at all. So much comes down to the context in which people are doing things with scripture.
TERRY MATTINGLY, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE: The New Republic ran a piece a couple of weeks ago on what’s happening in Iran. Could you tell us some of the differences within the Sunni and the Shi’ite as illustrated by thousands of Shi’ites walking through the streets holding images of the Hidden Imam and the martyrs? Is this a part of the conflict in Iraq that the U.S. press is not describing at all?
MR. COOK: The first question I can answer. You go to Shi’ite religious law, and the attitude towards images is pretty much the same as in Sunni law. In terms of what you’re supposed to be doing, I don’t think there’s a real difference. But there is an enormous cultural difference, and it’s exactly what you described, that for a long time Shi’ites have had images.
There are things going on there (Shi’ites marching with images) that would make Salafis in Saudi Arabia extremely unhappy. It’s part of a whole milieu, particularly of popular Shi’ism, that Khomeini made effective use of and so couldn’t wholly disown; nor do his successors want to disown it. Popular piety among the Shi’ites is very different from what it is among the Sunnis.
What’s happening in Iraq -- I’m sure if you talk to Salafis, they would make a big deal of that and other differences. Whether that is actually fueling the conflict, I very much doubt it.
MR. MATTINGLY: What I meant was, it’s clear that the Sunnis consider the Shi’ites heretics: they’re almost worshipping the descendents of Muhammad and breaching the concept of absolute monotheism, and now they’re walking around in the streets carrying these huge pictures.
I haven’t read a single mainstream media report that explains these differences between Sunni and Shi’ite, and it seems to me to be an important story in Iraq.
MR. COOK: It is a very important story in Iraq.
One thing I find striking about the Islamic world is the extent to which you have an unreconstructed sectarianism of a kind you don’t have, say, between Protestants and Catholics outside particular ethnic contexts like Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shi’ites do not get along in Pakistan, they don’t get along in Iraq, et cetera, et cetera. There is a long tradition of differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites. It starts off with a political disagreement about who should have been the immediate successor to the prophet, and it blossoms into all sorts of other things, some of which are cultural, some of which are theological, some of which are legal. It’s a whole array of differences.
To a lot of Sunni Muslims who aren’t zealots, those differences don’t matter a lot, but they do matter to Salafis, and to the extent that Salafis are driving the current conflict, or a significant element in the current conflict in Iraq, that does matter.
If you take Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, to the best of my knowledge, nobody cares about transubstantiation — the difference between Protestants and Catholics on that issue. It’s not what they’re fighting about. They’re fighting about something else, which is a matter of two communities that are going hammer and tongs against each other in this world, for worldly reasons.
In the case of the Islamic world, I suspect much of the dynamic is similar, but the transubstantiation issues still get bandied about on a considerable scale. That’s not much of an answer, and it would take too long to give a proper answer.
MICHAEL LUO, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I have a basic question about terminology. We keep referring to “Islamic fundamentalism,” and in the short time I’ve been on the beat, it comes up a lot with sources that when we equate Islamic fundamentalism with extremism, it’s not really fair. It’s taking a term applied to American Christians and applying it to this situation. I wonder if there is a distinction, and how you address that question.
MR. COOK: A lot of people snipe at the term “fundamentalism.” I personally don’t have a problem with it, and I don’t have a problem with the fact it’s originally a Christian concept, because when it comes to words, we always transfer them from one context to another.
I also don’t have a problem with the concept of fundamentalism insofar as I understand it: It’s not just being pious or zealous, or for that matter fanatical; it’s specifically that you want to go back to the roots of your tradition. There are plenty of people who don’t want to go back to the roots of their tradition; they want the tradition as it came down to them. Hindus are typically like that. Fundamentalism is when you want to go back.
The term applies easily in the Islamic case in that you want to go back to the Koran and the sayings of the prophet. There is a corpus of texts you can point to as a fundamentalist and say, here’s where the real authority is in my religion, and what happened later is bunk. It seems to me the term applies quite well.
The term goes astray when the only context in which the public hears about Muslim fundamentalists is when they’re doing nasty, violent things, and therefore the public thinks that fundamentalism is a nasty, violent thing. I would caution against that and give the example of Christian fundamentalists. I don’t think the violent people in American politics are Christian fundamentalists, in the same way there are a lot of Muslims I would describe as fundamentalists who are not violent. There are people who are betwixt and between. For example, in India, I understand, you get the phenomenon of Salafis -- that is, people of the Wahhabi persuasion -- who say, “Yes, bin Laden, great guy, doing good stuff; get the Americans.” Then you say, “So do you want to engage in a bombing campaign here in India?” They say, “Oh no, no, no; we don’t want anything like that here. We Muslims are a vote bank. Democracy is good for us here.”
They’re schizophrenic about the question of violence. And lots of people there don’t have the violent side at all.
MR. LUO: There are people we would probably call moderate who are actually fundamentalists in your definition of wanting to go back to --
MR. COOK: Right. There are two different dimensions here, and one is whether people are violent or non-violent, and the other is whether or not they’re keen to go back to their foundations and be very pious about it. You might have a guy who is, from a Western liberal point of view, totally repressive of his daughter, but who doesn’t have the slightest interest in violence. They’re two different things there, and they tend to get conflated.
MR. HUNTER: It’s important to make a distinction between historic orthodoxy and fundamentalism. It seems to me that fundamentalism is orthodoxy in confrontation with modernity.
Fundamentalists all share a common narrative, which is that history has gone awry, and what went awry was modernity; in this case, Western modernity. Wahhabism has roots that go back a long way in this light. The goal of the fundamentalists, across the board, is to make history right again.
MR. COOK: Yes. The context here is Muslim societies trying to adapt to the rise of the West. One of their options is to adopt Western culture, but that obviously has a down side. In identity terms it’s pretty bad. Another option is to stay the same, but that doesn’t work either. Another option is to go fundamentalist, and fundamentalism isn’t stupid in the sense that the moment you become a fundamentalist, you have access to a way you used to do things but no longer do them. You have something that is de facto new. Who knows, maybe it will work.
MR. HUNTER: It’s possible to be orthodox and attached to the traditions of historic orthodoxy within a faith tradition and yet not be a fundamentalist in the way that we think about them today.
MR. COOK: There’s a nice principle in Jewish law, if I remember it right, that says the law is according to the later scholars. In other words, you can’t go behind the later scholars and say, hey, but the early ones said something different. You have to take it as it comes through the later scholars. I think that is the anti-fundamentalist attitude you are talking about.
JOHN SINIFF, USA TODAY: I was curious whether you’ve seen in academia a fear of candid discussion of some facets of Islam for fear of retribution.
MR. COOK: My sense is that people who don’t want to talk about the difficult stuff have actually internalized the attitude, and they think one shouldn’t talk about it, or they want to repackage it in such a way it appears not to be there. I’m betting people are doing a lot of kidding themselves.
MR. SINIFF: Is there a chilling effect in academia? What have you seen in academic discussions among colleagues?
MR. COOK: My sense is it’s not a chilling effect. It’s not that people are afraid to say things. You have the people that say them, and the people that think you shouldn’t say them and don’t say them. If you are an untenured professor at an academic institution, you have to be careful. You have to be careful about a whole load of things you don’t have to be careful about once you get tenure. But I don’t think in the kind of discussion we’re talking about any tenured member of an American university faculty has a good reason for being chilled.
MR. SINIFF: What was your view of the largely universal decision of the American press not to publish the Mohammad cartoons?
MR. COOK: I thought that was very sensible.
MR. DIONNE: Two quick questions. What I’d like to ask for is a Mort Saul routine: a two-minute university on the origins of the Sunni-Shi’a split. But the question I really want you to answer, if you want to pick one, is a Time Magazine-style question. Your account of Mohammad was fascinating, and I wanted to know: Was he the right man at the right moment, or was he the man who shaped the moment? Your account suggests a lot of people at the time were looking for something like what he had to offer.
MR. COOK: It’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer. In some alternative universe I would run the beginnings of Islam in my lab dozens of times with different values for the variables.
The quick answer would be I see a window of opportunity; if Mohammad had been born in the second century B.C. he’d have gotten nowhere. The rise of Islam presupposes the rise of monotheism outside Arabia. There was a sense seeping into Arabia: “Our paganism -- it’s what we’re used to but it’s not state of the art.” (Laughter.) I would see Constantine as a necessary condition for Mohammad.
As to closing the window, I would bet if Mohammad, or somebody like him, had not come along, then the Arabs would have converted to Christianity sooner or later, and the window would have closed that way.
TERRY EASTLAND,THE WEEKLY STANDARD: I’ll take you back to your century, the seventh century, for this last question.
MR. COOK: I appreciate that.
MR. CROMARTIE: But tie it into today if you could.
MR. EASTLAND: When the Arabs went out to conquer after the death of the Prophet, was there a doctrine of providence -- maybe that’s the wrong word -- a doctrine of eschatology that gave them confidence they could conquer the world, and this would be their destiny? How extensive was the definition of the world back then? Bringing us up to the present moment: Do we see such a confidence-building doctrine today, and what does it mean today to conquer the world?
MR. COOK: That’s a good question. I don’t think there is more than simply this doctrine of jihad that says offensive jihad is a good thing. In principle, the more you conquer, the better, and beyond that, I don’t detect in the sources anything like a doctrine of manifest destiny.
MR. EASTLAND: Today, what does it mean to conquer the world? Just the same answer, I guess: with jihad, the more the merrier.
MR. COOK: Yes. If you take seriously the foundations in Islamic law -- not necessarily in the Koran but in Islamic law -- of the doctrine of offensive jihad, then not only should Muslims defend themselves, but they should also be expanding the frontiers of Islam through jihad.
If you go to contemporary Muslim thinkers of a fundamentalist and extremist disposition, you will find that, from time to time, they do refer to offensive jihad and say it’s a good thing. In doing that, they’re essentially acting up against the rules of the international system as conceived in the West. Just about every jihad we actually witness in the Islamic world, perhaps every one, is conceived as defensive. The attack on the Twin Towers may have looked to us uncommonly aggressive, but in the minds of the people who justified it, it was self-defense; it was just a particularly daring example of self-defense.
There are reasons for this, for the fact that the emphasis is on defensive jihad. One is a human point, that if you want to motivate people, then telling them “these guys are out to get us” is a much more effective way to mobilize them than to say, “No, those guys aren’t out to get us but nevertheless we ought to go and conquer their country.”
But second, there is a significant difference between the obligations involved in aggressive and defensive jihad. In offensive jihad, provided somebody is doing it, nobody else has to bother. By contrast, with defensive jihad, anybody in the area that’s being attacked by the unbelievers -- any adult male has a duty, prima facie, of participating in that jihad. There is a much higher degree of obligation that you can appeal to if you declare a defensive jihad than if you declare an offensive one.
MR. CROMARTIE: Professor Cook, a sign of a good session is one we don’t want to end, and there are certainly more questions. We should thank one of our colleagues who could not be here today. Jay Tolson is the one who emphatically said, if you’re going to do that session, you’ve got to get Professor Michael Cook. We should thank Jay when we see him next because he was right, and let’s thank Dr. Cook. (Applause.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
What they know are only the "doctored" versions in history books today, that don't really give room for question.
There appears to be no room for the ideas and ideals of Dato' Onn Jaafar, Samad Ismail, Ahmad Boestamam, Burhanuddin Helmi, Tun Dr. Ismail, or other early nationalists and Indian/ Indonesian influences towards their struggles. It is a known fact that many early nationalists took their cue from India (Gandhi, Nehru, Bose) and their Indonesian counterparts (Soekarno, Hatta). For history of early Malay Nationalists, Click here.
Why is it that we don't hear of these chapters in History? Why is it that we are faced with the primitive old world philosophies of "idol worship" and personality cults of those deemed as our leaders?
Who stole the past? Who stole our History? Who stole Malayan History? Who stole Malaysian History? Don't they know that one who cannot acknowledge and learn from history, are doomed in their future?
Do we even care?
Most youngsters today are much obsessed with "feel good infotainment" dished out by the state.
Any "dissenting" viewpoints or versions of history is frowned upon, and invites retribution in terms of educational or economic benefits.
What we have today is a generation of youth, cowed into submission- into indoctrination and apathy- for want of "easy comforts" in the seductive appeal of the NEP. The feel good mentality is quite unmistakeable, especially from the apathy and intellectual bankruptcy manifested in the students at our "Universities", who are unable to think beyond the indoctrination that they are exposed to.
The effect of this on the much trumpeted "educational excellence" in our institutions of higher learning and its products is quite telling. Taking into consideration our "educational excellence", some of the politicians who are most likely graduates of these very institutions, are to be forgiven for their infantile "words of wisdom", which is laughable at best. The same could be said of many a spin doctor and apologist for the myopic policies that are testaments to the "Malaysia Boleh", "Wawasan 2020", "Ketuanan Melayu" (and now - "2057") spirit!
These policies that keep the Malay minds in "philosophical straightjackets" has resulted in an UMNO that is unable to accept and respond constructively to criticism, to the detriment of the nation. Year after year, we are fed with choreographed events, which are meant to propagate primitive ideas as part of their propaganda, in what is called the AGMs. Gone are the days when there were democratic ideals by which they lived up to. Gone are the intellectuals. Gone are the healthy debates and criticisms.
All views that do not subscribe to "conventional wisdom" of certain quarters, are suppressed and repressed, so as to further their own selfish agendas. Platitudes upon platitudes ad nauseaum, ad infinatum, are heaped upon sleepy and yawning "great Leaders" - reminding one of totalitarian states of the third world. Political patronage has become the "in thing" - "bodek" is the name of the game .....
Yes indeed- UMNO needs to rethink its strategy for a dynamic, better and more progressive Malaysia (and Malays) in the 21st century, instead of playing the narrow, isolationist, "music of Malay hegemony" of a bygone era.
With the ballooning of the Malay population and UMNO membership,there is bound to be dissent within and without the community - the real challenge to UMNO is actually democracy within its folds, and not the threat from "non-bumis". The political threat from the "Chinese" community would be rendered obsolete within the next 5-10 yrs. The Indians are already insignificant as a political force.
They are quite aware that the non-Malay community can only dream of grabbing political power from the Malays, given the reality of demographics- and scaring them away with ethnocentric rhetoric, would only impoverish the Malays themselves.
So why the usual "racial undertones" at UMNO AGMs? A little introspection on the part of the "leaders" would go a long way, towards making Malaysia the economic powerhouse that it could and should have been, without the corruption, plunder and rape of its resources by the "goodfellas" of Malaysia.
Having said that, the sin of envy that is frequently drummed up against the rich "others" (while disregarding the ill-gotten gains of their own kind) for political mileage at AGMs every year, is actually killing them as a whole, by masking the other deadly sins that it permits. It has reinforced a seige mentality among its advocates, who are incapable of thinking out of the box (despite being awarded as educators).
It is time that the leadership learns to deal with the real problem at hand - the lack of, or repression/ suppression of the Malay intelligentsia, and the rise of the "Islamist right/ extremism". It is time that the leadership realizes that it is this very repression, that becomes the fertile breeding ground for the forces of extremism - both racist and religious - as desperate reactions to realities of the day.
On the occasion of the UMNO AGM, I wish all the best to UMNO members as a whole, and hope there will be some positive outcome this year, as opposed to the normal drivel for the past 25yrs.