Jews had anticipated many of the postures of the modern period. Their painful brush with the aggressively modernizing society of Europe had led them into secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith. For most Jews, the path to the new world that was developing in the West led through religion, but this religion was very different from the kind of faith we are used to in the twentieth century. It was more mythically based; it did not read the Scriptures literally, and was perfectly prepared to come up with new solutions, some of which seemed shocking in their search for something fresh. To understand the role of religion in premodern society we should turn to the Muslim world, which was undergoing its own upheavals during this early modern period and evolving different forms of spirituality that would continue to influence Muslims well into the modern period.
2. Muslims: The Conservative Spirit (#ulink_cc2fe19b-3894-5735-9c86-e85e2fa462d9)
(1492–1799) (#ulink_cc2fe19b-3894-5735-9c86-e85e2fa462d9)
IN 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period. This was also an exciting and innovative time for Muslims; three new Islamic empires were founded during the early sixteenth century: the Ottoman empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa; the Safavid empire in Iran; and the Moghul empire in the Indian subcontinent. Each reflected a different facet of Islamic spirituality. The Moghul empire represented the tolerant, universalist philosophical rationalism known as Falsafah; the Safavid shahs made Shiism, hitherto the faith of an elite minority, the religion of their state; and the Ottoman Turks, who remained fiercely loyal to Sunni Islam, created a polity based on the Shariah, sacred Muslim law.
These three empires were a new departure. All three were early modern institutions, governed systematically and with bureaucratic and rational precision. In its early years, the Ottoman state was far more efficient and powerful than any kingdom in Europe. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), it reached its apogee. Suleiman expanded westward, through Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary, and his advance into Europe was checked only by his failure to take Vienna in 1529. In Safavid Iran, the shahs built roads and caravansaries, rationalized the economy, and put the country in the forefront of international trade. All three empires enjoyed a cultural renewal on a par with the Italian Renaissance. The sixteenth century was the great period of Ottoman architecture, Safavid painting, and the Taj Mahal.
And yet, while these were all modernizing societies, they did not implement radical change. They did not share the revolutionary ethos that would become characteristic of Western culture during the eighteenth century. Instead the three empires expressed what the American scholar Marshall G. S. Hodgson has called “the conservative spirit,” which was the hallmark of all premodern society, including that of Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the empires were the last great political expression of the conservative spirit and, since they were also the most advanced states of the early modern period, they can be said to represent its culmination.
(#litres_trial_promo) Today, conservative society is in trouble. Either it has been effectively taken over by the modern Western ethos, or it is undergoing the difficult transition from the conservative to the modern spirit. Much of fundamentalism is a response to this painful transformation. It is, therefore, important to examine the conservative spirit at its peak in these Muslim empires, so that we can understand its appeal and strengths, as well as its inherent limitations.
Until the West introduced a wholly new kind of civilization (based on a constant reinvestment of capital and technical improvement), which did not come into its own until the nineteenth century, all cultures depended economically upon a surplus of agricultural produce. This meant that there was a limit to the expansion and success of any agrarian-based society, since it would eventually outrun its resources and obligations. There was a limit to the amount of capital available for investment. Any innovation that needed large capital outlay was usually ruled out, since people lacked the means that would enable them to tear everything down, retrain their personnel, and start again. No culture before our own could afford the constant innovation we take for granted in the West today. We now expect to know more than our parents’ generation, and are confident that our societies will become ever more technologically advanced. We are future-oriented; our governments and institutions have to look ahead and make detailed plans that will affect the next generation. It will be obvious that this society of ours is the achievement of sustained, single-minded rational thought. It is the child of logos, which is always looking forward, seeking to know more and to extend our areas of competence and control of the environment. But no amount of rational thinking could create this aggressively innovative society without a modern economy. It is not impossible for Western societies to keep changing the infrastructure to make new inventions possible, since, by constantly reinvesting capital, we can increase our basic resources so that they keep pace with our technological progress. But this was not feasible in an agrarian economy, where people channeled their energies into preserving what had already been achieved. Hence the “conservative” bent of premodern society did not spring from any fundamental timidity but represented a realistic appraisal of the limitations of this type of culture. Education, for example, consisted largely of rote learning and did not encourage originality. Students were not taught to conceive radically new ideas, because the society could generally not accommodate them; such notions could, therefore, be socially disruptive and endanger a community. In a conservative society, social stability and order were considered more important than freedom of expression.
Instead of looking forward to the future, like moderns, premodern societies turned for inspiration to the past. Instead of expecting continuous improvement, it was assumed that the next generation could easily regress. Instead of advancing to new heights of achievement, societies were believed to have declined from a primordial perfection. This putative Golden Age was held up as a model for governments and individuals. It was by approximating to this past ideal that a society would fulfill its potential. Civilization was experienced as inherently precarious. Everyone knew that a whole society could easily lapse into barbarism, as Western Europe had done after the collapse of the Roman empire there in the fifth century. During the early modern period in the Islamic world, the memory of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had still not faded. The massacres, the vast uprooting as whole peoples had fled before the approaching hordes, and the destruction of one great Islamic city after another were still recalled with horror. Libraries and institutions of learning had also been destroyed, and with them centuries of painstakingly acquired knowledge had been lost. Muslims had recovered; the Sufi mystics had led a spiritual revival, which had proved to be as healing as Lurianic Kabbalah, and the three new empires were a sign of that recovery. The Ottoman and Safavid dynasties both had their roots in the massive displacement of the Mongol era; both had originated in militant ghazu states, led by a chieftain warrior and often linked to a Sufi order, which had sprung up in the wake of the devastation. The power and beauty of these empires and their culture were a reassertion of Islamic values and a proud statement that Muslim history was back on track.
But after such a catastrophe, the natural conservatism of premodern society was likely to become more pronounced. People concentrated on recovering slowly and painfully what had been lost rather than on striking out for something new. In Sunni Islam, for example—the version of the faith practiced by most Muslims and the established religion of the Ottoman empire—it was agreed that “the gates of ijtihad (“independent reasoning”) had closed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hitherto, Muslim jurists had been allowed to exercise their own judgment in order to resolve questions that arose in relation to theology and law for which neither the Koran nor established tradition had an explicit answer. But by the early modern period, in an attempt to conserve a tradition that had almost been destroyed, Sunni Muslims believed that there was no need for further independent thought. The answers were all in place; the Shariah was a fixed blueprint for society, and ijtihad was neither necessary nor desirable. Instead, Muslims must imitate (taqlid) the past. Instead of seeking new solutions, they should submit to the rulings found in the established legal manuals. Innovation (bidah) in matters of law and practice was considered as disruptive and dangerous in Sunni Islamdom during the early modern period as was heresy in doctrinal matters in the Christian West.
It would be difficult to imagine an attitude more at odds with the thrusting, iconoclastic spirit of the modern West. The idea of putting a deliberate curb on our reasoning powers is now anathema. As we shall see in the next chapter, modern culture developed only when people began to throw off this type of restraint. If Western modernity is the product of logos, it is easy to see how congenial mythos was to the conservative spirit of the premodern world. Mythological thinking looks backward, not forward. It directs attention to the sacred beginnings, to a primordial event, or to the foundations of human life. Instead of looking for something fresh, myth focuses on what is constant. It does not bring us “news,” but tells us what has always been; everything important has already been achieved and thought. We live on what was said by our ancestors, especially in the sacred texts which tell us everything we need to know. This was the spirituality of the conservative period. The cult, ritual practices, and mythical narratives not only gave individuals a sense of meaning that resonated with their deepest unconscious being, but also reinforced the attitude that was essential for the survival of the agrarian economy and its built-in limitations. As the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco showed so clearly, myth is not meant to initiate practical change. It creates a cast of mind that adapts and conforms to the way things are. This was essential in a society that could not sustain untrammeled innovation.
Just as it is difficult—even impossible—for people living in Western society, which has institutionalized change, to appreciate fully the role of mythology, so too it is extremely difficult—perhaps impossible—for people deeply and powerfully shaped by conservative spirituality to accept the forward-looking dynamic of modern culture. It is also supremely difficult for the modernist to understand people who are still nourished by traditional mythical values. In the Islamic world today, as we shall see, some Muslims are very concerned about two things. First, they abhor the secularism of Western society, which separates religion from politics, church from state. Second, many Muslims would like to see their societies governed according to the Shariah, the sacred law of Islam. This is deeply perplexing to people formed in the modern spirit, who, with reason, fear that a clerical establishment would put a brake on the constant progress that they see as essential to a healthy society. They have experienced the separation of church and state as liberating and shudder at the thought of an inquisitorial body closing the “gates of ijtihad.” In the same way, the idea of a divinely revealed law is profoundly incompatible with the modern ethos. Modern secularists regard the notion of an unalterable law imposed on humanity by a superhuman being as repellent. They regard law not as the product of mythos but of logos; it is rational and pragmatic, and must be changed from time to time to meet current conditions. A gulf, therefore, separates the modernist from the Muslim fundamentalist on these key issues.
In its heyday, however, the idea of a Shariah state was deeply satisfying. This was the achievement of the Ottoman empire, which drew legitimacy from its fidelity to Islamic law. The sultan was honored for his defense of the Shariah. Even though the sultan and the governors of the various provinces had their divans, the audience-chambers where justice was administered, it was the qadis who presided over the Shariah courts (which the Ottomans were the first to organize systematically) who were regarded as the real judges. Qadis, their consultants the muftis, and the scholars who taught Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) in the madrasahs were all state officials in the Ottoman empire. They were as essential to the government as the military and administrative personnel. The inhabitants of the Arab provinces could accept the hegemony of the Turks because the sultan’s authority was mediated through the ulema, the religious scholars, who had the sacred authority of Islamic law behind them. The ulema were thus an important link between the sultan and his subjects, between Istanbul and the distant provinces. They could bring grievances to the sultan’s attention and had the power to call even him to order if he violated Islamic norms. The ulema could, therefore, feel that the Ottoman state was their state, and the sultans for the most part accepted the constraints put upon them by the clergy because the partnership enhanced their authority.
(#litres_trial_promo) Never before had the Shariah played such a prominent role in the daily affairs of state as it did in the Ottoman empire, and the success of the Ottomans during the sixteenth century showed that their fidelity to Islamic law had indeed put them on the right path. They were in tune with the fundamental principles of existence.
All conservative societies (as already noted) looked back to a Golden Age, and for the Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman empire this was the period of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632 CE) and the four rashidun (“rightly guided”) caliphs who immediately succeeded him. They had governed society according to Islamic law. There had been no separation of religion and the state. Muhammad had been both prophet and political head of the community. The Koran, the revealed scripture that he brought to the Arabs in the early years of the seventh century, insisted that a Muslim’s first duty was to create a just, egalitarian society, where poor and vulnerable people were treated with respect. This demanded a jihad (a word that should be translated as “struggle” or “effort” rather than as “holy war,” as Westerners often assume) on all fronts: spiritual, political, social, personal, military, and economic. By ordering the whole of life so that God was given priority and his plans for humanity were fully implemented, Muslims would achieve a personal and societal integration that would give them intimations of the unity which was God. To fence off one area of life and declare it to be off-limits to this religious “effort” would be a shocking violation of this principle of unification (tawhid), which is the cardinal Islamic virtue. It would be tantamount to a denial of God himself. Hence, for a devout Muslim, politics is what Christians would call a sacrament. It is an activity that must be sacralized so that it becomes a channel of the divine.
Concern for the ummah, the Muslim community, is deeply inscribed in the “pillars” (rukn), the five essential practices of Islam, binding on every Muslim, Sunni and Shii alike. Where Christians have come to identify orthodoxy with correct belief, Muslims, like Jews, require orthopraxy, a uniformity of religious practice, and see belief as a secondary issue. The five “pillars” require each Muslim to make the shehadah (a brief declaration of faith in the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad), to pray five times daily, to pay a tax (zakat) to ensure a fair distribution of wealth in the community, to observe the fast of Ramadan as a reminder of the privations suffered by the poor, and to make the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, if circumstances allow. The political health of the ummah is clearly central to zakat and the Ramadan fast, but it is also strongly present in the hajj, an essentially communal event, during which pilgrims wear a uniform white garment to underline the unity of the ummah and to obviate the differences between rich and poor.
The focus of the hajj is the cube-shaped shrine of the Kabah, situated in the heart of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz. The Kabah was of extreme antiquity even in Muhammad’s day and may originally have been dedicated to Al-Lah, the High God of the Arabian pagan pantheon. Muhammad Islamized the ancient rites of the annual pilgrimage to the Kabah and gave them a monotheistic significance, and the hajj to this day gives Muslims a powerful experience of community. The structure of the Kabah conforms to the geometric pattern found by psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) to have archetypal significance. At the heart of most ancient cities, a shrine established a link with the sacred which was regarded as essential to their survival. It brought the primal, more potent reality of the divine world into the fragile and insecure urban communities of mortal men and women. The shrine was described by such classical authors as Plutarch, Ovid, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as either round or square, and was thought to reproduce the essential structure of the universe. It was a paradigm of the order that had brought the cosmos out of chaos and, by making it viable, had given it reality. Jung believed that it was not necessary to choose between the square and the circle; the geometric figure representing this cosmic order, the foundation of all reality, was, he believed, a square inserted into a circle.
(#litres_trial_promo) The rituals performed at this shrine reminded the worshippers of their duty to bring this divine order into their world of potential chaos and disaster, submitting themselves to the fundamental laws and principles of the universe in order to keep their civilization in being and prevent it from falling prey to illusion. The Kabah in Mecca conformed exactly to this archetype. Pilgrims run in seven ritual circles around the granite cube, whose four corners represent the corners of the world, following the course of the sun around the earth. Only by making an existential surrender (islam) of his or her whole being to the basic rhythms of life can a muslim (one who makes this submission) live as an authentic human being in the community.
The hajj, which is still the peak religious experience of any Muslim who makes the pilgrimage, was thus deeply imbued with the conservative spirit. Rooted in the unconscious world of the mythical archetype, like all true mythoi, it directs the attention of Muslims back to a reality that is so fundamental that it is impossible to go beyond it. It helps them at a more profound level than the cerebral, to surrender to the way things essentially are and not to strike out independently for themselves. All the rational work of the community—in politics, economics, commerce, or social relations—takes place in this mythical context. Situated at the heart of the city and, later, at the heart of the Muslim world, the Kabah gave these rational activities meaning and perspective. The Koran also expressed this conservative ethos. It insists repeatedly that it is not bringing a new truth to humanity, but revealing the essential laws of human life. It is a “reminder” of truths known already.
(#litres_trial_promo) Muhammad did not believe that he was creating a new religion, but was bringing the primordial religion of humanity to his Arabian tribe, which had never been sent a prophet before and had no scripture in their own language. From the time of Adam, whom the Koran sees as the first of the prophets, God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth to tell them how to live.
(#litres_trial_promo) Unlike animals, fish, or plants, who are natural muslims, since they submit instinctively to the divine order, human beings have free will and can choose to disobey it.
(#litres_trial_promo) When they have disregarded these basic laws of existence, creating tyrannical societies that oppress the weak and refuse to share their wealth fairly, their civilizations have collapsed. The Koran tells how all the great prophets of the past—Adam, Noah, Moses, Jesus, and a host of others—have all repeated the same message. Now the Koran gave the same divine message to the Arabs, commanding them to practice the social justice and equity that would bring them into harmony with the basic laws of existence. When Muslims conform to God’s will, they feel that they are in tune with the way things ought to be. To violate God’s law is regarded as unnatural; it is as though a fish were to try to live on dry land.
The stunning success of the Ottomans during the sixteenth century would have been regarded by their subjects as proof that they were making this surrender to these fundamental principles. That was why their society worked so spectacularly. The unprecedented prominence given to the Shariah in the Ottoman polity would also have been seen in the context of the conservative spirit. Muslims in the early modern period did not experience divine law as a curb on their freedom; it was a ritual and cultic realization of a mythical archetype which, they believed, put them in touch with the sacred. Muslim law had developed gradually in the centuries after Muhammad’s death. It was a creative enterprise, since the Koran contained very little legislation and, within a century after the Prophet’s demise, Muslims ruled a vast empire stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees which, like any society, needed a complex legal system. Eventually, four schools of Islamic jurisprudence developed, all very similar and regarded as equally valid. The law was based on the person of the Prophet Muhammad, who had made the perfect act of islam when he had received the divine revelation. Eyewitness reports (hadith) were collected about the Prophet’s teaching and behavior, which, during the ninth century, were carefully sifted to ensure that Muslims had an authentic record of his sayings and religious practice (sunnah). The law schools reproduced this Muhammadan paradigm in their legal systems, so that Muslims all over the world could imitate the way the Prophet spoke, ate, washed, loved, and worshipped. By emulating the Prophet in these external ways, they hoped also to acquire his interior submission to the divine.
(#litres_trial_promo) In true conservative style, Muslims were conforming their behavior to a past perfection.
The practice of Muslim law made the historical figure of Muhammad into a myth, releasing him from the period in which he had lived and bringing him to life in the person of every devout Muslim. Similarly, this cultic repetition made Muslim society truly islamic, in its approximation to the person of Muhammad, who in his perfect surrender to God was the prime exemplar of what a human being should be. By the time of the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, this Shariah spirituality had taken root throughout the Muslim world, Sunni and Shii, not because it was forced on the people by caliphs and ulema, but because it did give men and women an experience of the numinous and imbue their lives with meaning. This cultic reference to the past did not, however, imprison Muslims in an archaic devotion to a seventh-century way of life. The Ottoman state was arguably the most up-to-date in the world during the early sixteenth century. It was, for its time, superbly efficient, had developed a new-style bureaucracy, and encouraged a vibrant intellectual life. The Ottomans were open to other cultures. They were genuinely excited by Western navigational science, stirred by the discoveries of the explorers, and eager to adopt such Western military inventions as gunpowder and firearms.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was the job of the ulema to see how these innovations could be accommodated to the Muhammadan paradigm in Muslim law. The study of jurisprudence (fiqh) did not simply consist in poring over old texts, but also had a challenging dimension. And, at this date, there was no real incompatibility between Islam and the West. Europe was also imbued with the conservative spirit. The Renaissance humanists had tried to renew their culture by a return ad fontes, to the sources. We have seen that it was virtually impossible for ordinary mortals to break with religion entirely. Despite their new inventions, Europeans were still ruled by the conservative ethos until the eighteenth century. It was only when Western modernity replaced the backward-looking mythical way of life with a future-oriented rationalism that some Muslims would begin to find Europe alien.
Further, it would be a mistake to imagine that conservative society was entirely static. Throughout Muslim history, there were movements of islah (“reform”) and tajdid (“renewal”), which were often quite revolutionary.
(#litres_trial_promo) A reformer such as Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus (1263–1328), for example, refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” He lived during and after the Mongol invasions, when Muslims were desperately trying to recover from the trauma and to rebuild their society. Reform movements usually occur at a period of cultural change or in the wake of a great political disaster. At such times, the old answers no longer suffice and reformers, therefore, use the rational powers of ijtihad to challenge the status quo. Ibn Taymiyyah wanted to bring the Shariah up to date so that it could meet the real needs of Muslims in these drastically altered circumstances. He was revolutionary, but his program took an essentially conservative form. Ibn Taymiyyah believed that to survive the crisis, Muslims must return to the sources, to the Koran and Sunnah of the Prophet. He wanted to remove later theological accretions and get back to basics. This meant that he overturned much of the medieval jurisprudence (fiqh) and philosophy that had come to be considered sacred, in a desire to return to the original Muslim archetype. This iconoclasm enraged the establishment, and Ibn Taymiyyah ended his days in prison. It is said that he died of a broken heart, because his jailers would not allow him pen and paper. But the ordinary people loved him; his legal reforms had been liberal and radical, and they could see that he had their interests at heart.
(#litres_trial_promo) His funeral became a demonstration of popular acclaim. There have been many such reformers in Islamic history. We shall see that some of the Muslim fundamentalists of our own day are working in this tradition of islah and tajdid.
Other Muslims were able to explore fresh religious ideas and practices in the esoteric movements, which were kept secret from the masses because their practitioners believed that they could be misunderstood. They saw no incompatibility, however, between their version of the faith and that of the majority. They believed that their movements were complementary to the teaching of the Koran and gave them new relevance. The three main forms of esoteric Islam were the mystical discipline of Sufism, the rationalism of Falsafah, and the political piety of the Shiah, which we will explore in detail later in this chapter. But however innovative these esoteric forms of Islam seemed and however radically they appeared to diverge from the Shariah piety of the mainstream, the esoterics believed that they were returning ad fontes. The exponents of Falsafah, who tried to apply the principles of Greek philosophy to Koranic religion, wanted to go back to a primordial, universal faith of timeless truths, which, they were convinced, had preceded the various historical religions. Sufis believed that their mystical ecstasy reproduced the spiritual experiences of the Prophet when he had received the Koran; they too were conforming to the Muhammadan archetype. Shiis claimed that they alone cultivated the passion for social justice that informed the Koran, but which had been betrayed by corrupt Muslim rulers. None of the esoterics wanted to be “original” in our sense; all were original in the conservative way of returning to fundamentals, which alone, it was thought, could lead to human perfection and fulfillment.
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One of the two Muslim countries we shall be examining in detail in this book is Egypt, which became part of the Ottoman empire in 1517, when Selim I conquered the country in the course of a campaign in Syria. Shariah piety would, therefore, predominate in Egypt. The great university of al-Azhar in Cairo became the most important center for the study of fiqh in the Sunni world, but during these centuries of Ottoman rule Egypt fell behind Istanbul and lapsed into relative obscurity. We know very little about the country during the early modern period. Since 1250, the region had been governed by the Mamluks, a crack military corps composed of Circassian slaves who had been captured as boys and converted to Islam. The Janissaries, a similar slave corps, were the military backbone of the Ottoman empire. In their prime, the Mamluks led a vibrant society in Egypt and Syria, and Egypt was one of the most advanced countries in the Muslim world. But eventually the Mamluk empire succumbed to the inherent limitations of agrarian civilization and by the late fifteenth century had fallen into decline. However, the Mamluks were not entirely vanquished in Egypt. The Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the country by making an alliance with Khair Bey, the Mamluk governor of Aleppo. As a result of this deal, Khair Bey was appointed viceroy when the Ottoman troops left.
At first, the Ottomans were able to keep the Mamluks in check, quashing two Mamluk uprisings.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the late sixteenth century, however, the Ottomans were just beginning to outrun their own resources. Severe inflation led to a decline in the administration and, gradually, after several revolts, the Mamluk commanders (beys) reemerged as the real rulers of Egypt, even though they remained officially subservient to Istanbul. The beys formed a high-ranking military cadre which was able to lead a rebellion of Mamluk troops in the Ottoman army against the Turkish governor and install one of their own number in his place. The sultan confirmed this appointment and the Mamluks were able to retain control of the country, apart from a brief period toward the end of the seventeenth century when one of the Janissaries seized power. Mamluk rule was unstable, however. The beylicate was divided between two factions and there was constant unrest and internecine strife.
(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout this turbulent period, the chief victims were the Egyptian people. During the revolts and factional violence, they had their property confiscated, their homes plundered, and endured crippling taxation. They felt no affinity with their rulers, Turkish or Circassian, who were foreigners and had no real interest in their welfare. Increasingly, the people turned to the ulema, who were Egyptians, represented the sacred order of the Shariah, and became the true leaders of the Egyptian masses. As the conflict between the beys became more acute during the eighteenth century, Mamluk leaders found it necessary to appeal to the ulema to ensure that their rule was accepted by the people.
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The ulema were the teachers, scholars, and intellectuals of Egyptian society. Each town had between one and seven madrasahs (colleges for the study of Islamic law and theology), which provided the country with its teachers. Intellectual standards were not high. When Selim I conquered Egypt, he took many of the leading ulema back to Istanbul with him together with the most precious manuscripts. Egypt became a backward province of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans did not patronize Arab scholars, Egyptians had no contact with the outside world, and Egyptian philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and science, which had flourished under the Mamluk empire, deteriorated.
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But because they were a major channel of communication between the rulers and the people, the ulema became extremely powerful. Many of them came from the peasant class of fellahin, so their influence was considerable in the rural areas. In the Koran schools and madrasahs, they controlled the whole educational system; because the Shariah courts were the chief dispensers of justice, the ulema also had a monopoly of the legal system. Moreover, they held important political office in the divan,
(#litres_trial_promo) and, as the guardians of the Shariah, could also lead a principled opposition to the government. The great madrasah of al-Azhar was next to the bazaar, and ulema often had family links with the merchant class. If they wished to protest against government policy, a drumroll from the minaret of the Azhar could close the bazaar and bring the crowds onto the street. In 1794, for example, Shaykh al-Sharqawi, the rector of the Azhar, marched at the head of a mob to protest against a new tax, which, he declared, was oppressive and un-Islamic. Three days later, the beys were forced to rescind the tax.
(#litres_trial_promo) But there was no real danger of the ulema leading an Islamic revolution to replace the government. The beys were usually able to keep them in check by confiscating their property, and mob violence could not offer a sustained challenge to the Mamluk army.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, the prominence of the ulema gave Egyptian society a distinctly religious character. Islam gave the people of Egypt their only real security.
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Security was at a premium in the Middle East by the late eighteenth century. The Ottoman state was now in serious disarray. The superb efficiency of its government in the sixteenth century had given way to incompetence, especially on the peripheries of the empire. The West had begun its startling rise to power, and the Ottomans found that they could no longer fight as equals with the powers of Europe. It was difficult for them to respond to the Western challenge, not simply because it occurred at a time of political weakness, but because the new society that was being created in Europe was without precedent in world history.
(#litres_trial_promo) The sultans tried to adapt, but their efforts were superficial. Sultan Selim III (ruled 1789–1807), for example, saw the Western threat in purely military terms. There had been abortive attempts in the 1730s to reform the army along European lines, but when he ascended the throne in 1789 Selim opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students became acquainted with European languages and Western books on mathematics, navigation, geography, and history.
(#litres_trial_promo) Learning a few military techniques and a smattering of modern sciences, however, would not prove sufficient to contain the Western threat, because Europeans had evolved an entirely new way of life and thought, so that they operated on entirely different norms. To meet them on their own ground, the Ottomans would need to develop a wholly rational culture, dismantle the Islamic structure of society, and be prepared to sever all sacred links with the past. A few members of the elite might be able to achieve this transition, which had taken Europeans almost three hundred years, but how would they persuade the masses, whose minds and hearts were imbued with the conservative ethos, to accept and understand the need for such radical change?
On the margins of the empire, where Ottoman decline was most acutely felt, people responded to the change and unrest as they had always done—in religious terms. In the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) managed to break away from Istanbul and create a state of his own in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. Abd al-Wahhab was a typical Islamic reformer. He met the current crisis by returning to the Koran and the Sunnah, and by vehemently rejecting medieval jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy. Because they diverged from this pristine Islam, as he envisaged it, Abd al-Wahhab declared the Ottoman sultans to be apostates, unworthy of the obedience of the faithful and deserving of death. Their Shariah state was inauthentic. Instead, Abd al-Wahhab tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on the practice of the first Muslim community in the seventh century. It was an aggressive movement, which imposed itself on the people by force. Some of these violent and rejectionist Wahhabi techniques would be used by some of the fundamentalist Islamist reformers during the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest.
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