The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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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.5 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.6 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.7 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.8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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,