1918-2018: The conflict that shaped a century
Professor David Thomas, Canon Theologian: Islam
The Qur’an, the community and the caliph. This, before 1918, was the way in which the Islamic world was structured, at least in principle. The Qur’an was God’s eternal utterance given to humankind through the Prophet Muhammad. It was God’s final guidance, intended for the whole world, comprehensive in its precepts, and the foundation by which both individuals and the community could flourish. The Islamic community was the religious society made up of women and men from all races and colours, constituted to achieve justice, prosperity and harmony for its members by obeying the teachings of the Qur’an.
This was made possible by the caliph, a title that means ‘representative’ or ‘successor’, the individual chosen to guide the community according to the teachings of the Qur’an, and to maintain the faith as God willed in accordance with the example established in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad.
There had been something climactic about the career of Muhammad, in Muslim eyes the moment when the society he founded in western Arabia achieved perfect harmony in all its parts. His immediate successors as leaders of the community had maintained this God-given harmony, for which they were known as the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and they handed on a model for men and women to follow for ever after. In the centuries that followed, their successors as caliphs belonging to various dynasties ruled from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul, some of them strong, many weak.They inherited the headship of the community by virtue of birth, but all were regarded as the symbolic pivoton which the Islamic world turned, legitimators of actions taken in the name of Islam, and ultimate guarantors that the community continued to live according to the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad.
The caliph was both political and religious leader of the Islamic community, roughly equivalent to pope and emperor in one person. As the centuries progressed, the reality of the caliphate fell short of the religious ideal, though that ideal itself remained strong in the popular Muslim imagination, and the figure at the centre of the Islamic world still stood for continuity with the Prophet and represented the perfection of Islam. As late as the eighteenth century, when the caliph in Istanbul was enfeebled by the power of Western governments and rendered helpless by debt to Western financiers, believing Muslims as far away as the Philippines could appeal to him for the defencethey believed he could bring against oppressive Western colonialists.
The Ottoman caliphate was weakened further through the nineteenth century, when many were convinced that ‘the sick man of Europe’ was in terminal decline. That actually proved to be true soon after the First World War. In the war the caliph, more commonly known as the sultan at this time, allied his empire to Germany. With German defeat the victorious allies meeting in Versailles dismembered the Ottoman Empire, leaving only Anatolia to the Turks. The new leader of what became Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, abolished the sultanate in 1922, stripping away what little power lay with the Ottoman ruler, and in 1924 he abolished the caliphate itself, bringing to an end thirteen hundred years of a sacred office that Muslims throughout the world regarded as given by God. It is little wonder that as far away as India movements were founded to re-establish the caliphate.
What was the Islamic world to do without this symbol of unity and legitimacy, the visible link with the foundation of Islam itself back in seventh century Mecca and Medina, the guarantor that the community was still following the guidance of God and the perfect example of the Prophet? The ancient Hebrews had plaintively asked: ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ Muslims in the twentieth century might ask how they could reliably follow the teachings of the Qur’an through the uncertainties of a broken community that was divided up into nation states mostly controlled by Britain and France. How could they know whether Western innovations were Islamic, the printing press, free thinking based on Enlightenment principles rather than the hallowed teachings of scripture, the order for women to remove head covering and for men to wear Western style trousers and jackets? What was acceptable to God and what was not?
World War I completely re-ordered the political and cultural map of the Islamic heartlands. The majority of Muslims faced the uncertainties this brought by carrying on with their daily prayers, attending to their ritual observances, and following the old ways as they had always done. But intellectuals and religious scholars were aware they must find answers to the new questions posed to every detail of their lives by the hazy reality in which they now lived, not least innovative Western ways that were streaming into their world. A number of answers were provided.
Even in the nineteenth century there were Muslims recognised that Western society, unlike their own, was progressive, and that it could bring renewal to the Islamic world in the form of Industry and new ideas. The opening up of the means of production to more efficient processes, and the opening up of the way for human minds to attain knowledge of the world appeared to some intellectuals in India, Egypt and Syria as welcome changes to old ways. They did not see them necessarily as threats to the old ways, and thought that by judicious selection Western industrial practices, cultural norms and intellectual procedures would bring progress in the Islamic world without destroying the old ways or flouting God-given truths.
From the time that Western powers brought new alterations to the heartlands of Islam to the present there have been Muslims, pious men and women, who have understood that the new and the different need not be a threat to the established and the familiar.
But in this lay a danger that many Muslims were quick to see. If the Qur’an was God’s final utterance to humankind, containing all that was necessary for the individual and society, and if Muhammad’s example was perfect and the community he established was complete and final, then not only were Western innovations unneeded, but by definition they were ungodly and an impairment to the perfect faith that the caliphs had been duty-bound to maintain.
From early in the twentieth century, and even further back to the nineteenth century, Muslims had been wary about new intrusions from the West as ungodly. Among many movements that shunned the new and reached back to the early generations of Islam for pure examples to follow, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Wahhabis in Arabia spearheaded resistance to the West, which they condemned as an active enemy intent on dismantling Islam and installing a Christian-based society which was dependent on the West and its disjointed ways of thinking and living.
The most venomous expression of this stance that rejects everything that is not of Islam asharmful, and insists that Islam does not need outside resources, have in recent decades been the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Isis. The Taliban acted to rebuild Afghan society on the model of the Prophet and to follow his teachings to the letter, destroying all that appeared to be counter to this and effectively returning the country to the seventh century. Their former leader, Mullah Omar, supposedly possessed the Prophet’s cloak, which countless caliphs had worn as a symbol of their office; it was supposed to endow him with the same esteem and authority.
Al-Qaeda went further, seeking to wound the satanic powers they saw threatening to dilute or destroy pure Islam: in New York, Washington, London and other capitals they bombed and slaughtered in the name of God, on the principle that unless they destroyed they and their faith would be destroyed.
The most obscene expression of the notion of the autonomy and completeness of Islam is Isis, creating a so-called state according to their version of the qur’anic and prophetic example, and not hesitating in their enactments of the most literal readings of traditional Islamic teachings. The emergence of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as their ‘caliph’ was a shallow effort to return to the old ways, though their superficial interpretations of their holy texts injured Islam by presenting it as a set of impossible rules, with sadistic punishments for the disobedient and defiant, presided over by a petty-minded deity with a lust for vicious and blood-stained mayhem.
The stunted distortions of Islam that have permitted the inhuman crimes committed by Isis and its equivalents open up the major problem with which Islam has been wrestling throughout the century since the First World War. If in the hundred years since 1918 the Christian Churches, for their part, have been engaged in the problem of how to demonstrate the need for a God in a world where God’s loving presence is veiled or undetectable, the Islamic world has been faced with the corresponding problem of how to know God’s will in an ever-changing world. The Qur’an and the model set by Muhammad remain, but they speak in a language and to a society of fourteen hundred years ago, set in a time and culture that is in many respects unrecognisable to Muslims striving to survive in Damascus or, enjoying the delights of Dubai. If Muslim men and women are not to be forced back to the seventh century to dress and behave like the first Muslims, how are they to know God’s will in the uncharted expanse of the twenty-first century? In other words, who can interpret God’s guidance given in the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example to present-day society? That was always the task of the caliph and his religious advisers. With the abolition of the caliphate, the ship has lost its rudder.
The Churches strive to see where or, indeed, whether God is present in today’s society. The equally daunting challenge to the mosques that has continued since the time of the last caliph is to understand how or whether God’s eternal guidance given fourteen hundred years ago can be made to speak to today’s world. The legacy of the First World War for Islam is the absence of the clear voice of God.