Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS: CRISIS AND CONFRONTATION TODAY

Already in the middle of the nineteenth century in many Islamic countries, the rule of theShari‘ah as a legal system was either limited to personal laws governing the family, inheritance, and so on or replaced by Napoleonic codes or English common law and European-style courts. By the time most Islamic countries gained their independence after World War II, the fullShari‘ah was applied only in a few lands such as Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, and Afghanistan.

These countries may have had various political and economic problems, but at least they did not experience the tension between two different legal systems and philosophies that other Islamic countries did. Unfortunately, the application of theShari‘ah did not prevent Yemen and Afghanistan from being invaded by foreign forces and having their traditional patterns of life, including their legal aspects, deeply disturbed and in some places shattered.

Despite these tragedies, however, Shari‘ite Law played a central role in preserving the religious character of the life of the people of these countries even under great duress.

Despite all the political turmoil in the Islamic world during the past half century, there has been an attempt in most Islamic countries to return to the Divine Law as contained in theShari‘ah , while incorporating and taking into consideration human laws associated with modern situations in which Muslims find themselves. Moreover, there continues to be extensive discussion on theShari‘ah itself.

In the Sunni world, as already mentioned, many want to open the gate of ijtihad again, and there are those who speak of combining rulings from different classical schools of Law such as the Shafi‘i and the Hanafi. Also, there are now a number of lay lawyers (not formal members of the class of ‘ulama’, the traditional custodians of theShari‘ah ) who believe that they have the right to make juridical decisions(fatwas) and formulate new Shari‘ite rulings. Even in Shi‘ite Iran, where the ijtihad is practiced afresh in every generation, a number of modernized religious thinkers speak of the “dynamicShari‘ah ,” which they contrast with the old static one. In the field of law, just as in the field of politics, which is closely related to it, there is much debate and discussion going on throughout the Islamic world, but there is no doubt that the question of the revival of theShari‘ah after its eclipse during the colonial period is at the center of the concerns of contemporary Islam.

THE DIVINE LAW, ETHICS, AND THE RELIGIOUS ETHOS

TheShari‘ah is not only concrete positive law, but also a set of values and framework for the religious life of Muslims.

The books of jurisprudence(fiqh) contain the specific laws of theShari‘ah , but theShari‘ah itself also includes ethical and spiritual teachings that are, strictly speaking, not of a legal nature, although the legal is never separated from the moral in Islam. On the basis of the Quran andHadith , theShari‘ah teaches Muslims to respect their parents, to be kind to their neighbors, to be charitable, to be always truthful, to keep their word, to be honest in all affairs, and so forth. The whole ethics of Islam is related on the individual and social plane to theShari‘ah , while the inner purification of the soul and the penetration into the inward meaning of theShari‘ah are for the spiritual path, or the Tariqah, which is of necessity always based on the formal practice of the Divine Law.

Today, in many parts of the Islamic world, Divine Law, or theShari‘ah , is no longer fully practiced on the level of law, but the ethics that are contained in its teachings still permeate Islamic society. TheShari‘ah , in fact, determines the religious ethos of Islam on both the personal and the social level and is inseparable from the life of faith. For the vast majority of Muslims, the practice of the injunctions of theShari‘ah is their manner of practicing their surrender to the Will of God and of living a virtuous and righteous life leading to felicity and salvation in the Hereafter. Even those who do not practice theShari‘ah but still consider themselves Muslims draw their ethics, their understanding of right and wrong, and their frame of reference in the chaos of this world from theShari‘ah . And those who aim to reach God in this life and to walk the path of the Tariqah to that Truth, or Haqiqah, which is the source of both the Law and the Way are more aware than anyone else how indispensable the Divine Law is, the law that alone can provide the sacred forms that are the sole gateways in this world of change and becoming to the immutable empyrean of the Formless.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE VISION OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY

People were one community and God sent unto them prophets as bearers of good tidings and as warners, and revealed therein the scripture with the truth that it might judge between people concerning that wherein they differed.

Quran 2:213

This community of yours is a single community.

Quran 21:92

THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY

One of the key concepts of the Quran and of Islam as a religion is that of community(ummah) . There is no doubt that Islam meant to create a community based on justice, one in which the pursuit of the Divine Law was made possible, not just injunctions for private behavior. In the debate between those who claim the primacy of society and those who emphasize the primal significance of the individual, Islam takes a middle course and believes that this polarization is in fact based on a false dichotomy. There is no society without the individual; nor can the individual survive without society. The social nature of the human being is part of the wisdom of God’s creation, and the Quran asserts, “There is no secret conference of three but He is their fourth, nor of five but He is their sixth, nor of less that that or more but He is with them wheresoever they may be” (58: 7). This truth does not refer only to God’s omniscience, but also to the profound reality of God’s Presence in all human assembly. He is present in human community as He is within the heart or center of the individual.

Yet the role of religion is to save human souls, and on the Day of Judgment, according to Islam, human beings are judged individually and not collectively. The human community is judged in the Quran according to the degree to which it allows its members to live the good life, in the religious sense, based on moral principles. It judges a community to be good to the degree that it reflects the constant presence of the Transcendent Dimension in human life and is based on spiritual and religious ideals. A community as a whole can be judged and punished by God in this world, but a whole community does not enter paradise or hell as a collectivity. Only individual souls do so. Hence our personal responsibility before God remains, in whichever community we happen to live.

Islam recognizes communities according to their religious affiliation. Christians are referred to as the ummah, or community, of Christ and Jews as the ummah of Moses, as Muslims constitute the ummah of the Prophet. Abraham himself is called an ummah “obedient unto God” (16:120), and each community has a set of rites chosen for it by God, “And for every community have We appointed a ritual” (22:34). Originally there was only one ummah: “People were only one community” (10:19), but with the passage of history, different communities came into being and many faded away or were destroyed. The Quran depicts in elaborate terms the rise, decay, and falling away of various communities, which can also be understood as nations in the biblical sense. In fact, “every community has a term, and when its term comes, they cannot put it off an hour nor yet advance [it]” (7:34). And the decay and destruction of communities or nations has happened, according to the Quran, not because of loss of wealth or economic power or even military defeat, but because of moral corruption and straying from the religious norms willed by God for the community in question. The earth belongs to God, and He allows deserving communities or nations to rule over it as long as they deserve to do so. Once they lose their moral authority, they are replaced by God with other communities or nations.

For Islam, community implies above all a human collectivity held together by religious bonds that are themselves the foundation for social, juridical, political, economic, and ethical links between its members. In our period of human history, there is not one, but many communities or nations, which means many religions, as mentioned in Chapter 1, and this is set in the Quran as a condition willed by God, for, “Had God willed, He could have made them one community” (42:8). It is within the context of a world with many communities, all of which Islam sees in religious terms, that the Islamic understanding of itself as an ummah must be situated and understood.

First of all, Islam emphasizes the unity of its own ummah. Although after the first few years of Islamic history various theological and political rifts began to set in and although after the end of the Umayyad caliphate in the East in the eighth century the political unity of Islam was never again realized, the ideal of the unity of the ummah has remained strong throughout Islamic history. In modern times it has manifested itself in various pan-Islamic movements going back to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the nineteenth century. The unity of the Islamic community lies, however, primarily in ethical and spiritual realities within the hearts of the true believers, who emphasize the Quranic dictum that “Verily the believers are brothers” (49:9). Yet although this theme is repeated endlessly in sermons in mosques and elsewhere on various religious occasions, in practice some Muslims have made a mockery of it. This sense of unity and brotherhood, which also includes of course sisterhood, has become weakened by many ethnic, sectarian, and personal factors over the ages, especially in modern times.

Besides seeing themselves as an ummah ordered by God to “call to the good,” Muslims also see themselves as the “middle community” in the world on the basis of the famous Quranic verse in which Muslims are addressed as follows: “Thus We have appointed you a middle community (ummah wasat.ah) that you may be witnesses unto the people and the messenger may be a witness unto you” (2:143). This verse can be and in fact has been understood in many ways. On the most external level, it means that Islam was destined to occupy the middle belt of the classical world from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, with many non-Muslim communities and peoples to the north and south. On a theological level and within the Abrahamic family, Muslims interpret this verse to mean that while Judaism emphasizes laws for this world and Christianity otherworldliness, Islam came to emphasize the middle ground, to strike a balance between this world and the next. Another interpretation, which is primarily ethical, is that “middle community” means that God chose for Muslims the golden mean, the avoidance of extremes in ethical and religious actions. Yet another meaning of this verse, with global implications, is that Muslims constitute “the middle community,” because they have been chosen by God to create a balance between various communities and nations.

This last interpretation, however, does not at all mean that Muslims see themselves as the chosen people in the Jewish sense of the term. On the contrary, Muslims see all communities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to have been chosen by God, given their own sacred institutions and rites, and

held responsible to Him. The role Muslims have always envisaged for themselves in the arena of human history as the “middle community” does not mean that other human collectivities do not have their own God-ordained roles to play. Nothing is further from Islam’s traditional understanding of itself than being God’s chosen people, unless one expands this claim to say that all ummahs, or communities, are God’s chosen people, each brought into this world to perform a function in accordance with the Divine Wisdom and Will.

Today in the Islamic world, the ummah is politically more divided and even culturally more fragmented, as a result of the impact of modernism, than at any time in its history. And yet it would be a great mistake to underestimate the significance of the Quranic vision of community that most Muslims bear within their hearts and minds. This vision is still very much alive and manifests itself in unforeseen ways not only politically and economically, but also socially and culturally, not to mention within the domain of religion itself.

DAR AL-ISLAM AND DAR AL-HARB

The Islamic idea of community, or ummah, is closely related to that ofdar al-islam , or the “Abode of Islam,” which corresponds in many ways to the Western notion of Christendom.Dar al-islam is the geographic area in which the Islamic ummah lives as a majority and where Islamic Law is promulgated and practiced, although there may be other ummahs such as Jews and Christians living within its borders. Classically,dar al-islam was juxtaposed withdar al-harb , or the “Abode of War,” in which Muslims could not live and practice their religion easily because theShari‘ah was not the law of the land, although there were in practice always Muslim minorities living in various parts of it. Later Islamic jurists added a third category, daralsulh , the “Abode of Peace.” By this category they came to mean a land that was not part of the Islamic world but one in which Muslims could practice their religion in peace. In the contemporary context Muslims living in America or Western Europe could be said to be living in dar al-sulh, in contrast to those living in the former Soviet Union or present-day Burma, who would be or are living indar al-harb .

The presence of the “Abode of War” did not necessarily mean, however, that the Islamic world should be at war with that region, as some have claimed. According to the Islamic law of international treaties, Muslims could make treaties of peace and live at peace with countries outside ofdar al-islam if they themselves were not threatened by them. The best example of such a situation is the friendly relations the Prophet himself had with then Christian Abyssinians, who had in fact given refuge to some of the Muslims from Mecca shortly after the advent of the Quranic revelation. Many instances of such peaceful coexistence are also to be seen between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in Spain and Hindu and Muslim states in India. In this domain the Islamic principles must not be confused with matters of political expediency and particular actions of this or that ruler over the ages. What is important is to understand the Islamic principles involved.

As far as living indar al-harb is concerned, Islamic Law requires that Muslims in such a situation respect the laws of the land in which they live, but also insists that they be able to follow their own religious practices even if to do so is difficult. If such a way of living were to become impossible, then they are advised to migrate to the “Abode of Islam” itself. As for following local laws and practices, as long as they do not contradict Islamic laws and practices, the same injunctions hold for dar al-sulh as they do fordar al-harb . The Shi‘ites, who have been a minority during most of their history and often suffered persecution, have added the principle of dissimulation(taqiyyah) , according to which they should hide their religious beliefs and practices from the larger public if revealing them would endanger their lives or property.

MUSLIM MINORITIES

In the same way that throughout history many Christians have lived outside of Christendom, throughout Islamic history parts of the Islamic ummah have lived outside ofdar al-islam in many different cultural and religious settings from West Africa to China. Today, the largest single minority in the world is the Islamic community in India, which has a population of around 150 million. There are also tens of millions of Muslims living in China, possibly 20 million in Russia, sizable minorities in many Black African countries, and small but old and firmly established communities in the Balkans, Finland, Bulgaria, Greece, Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

There are also, of course, newer Islamic communities in most European countries as well as in North and South America. As already mentioned, in the United States alone there are some 6 million Muslims.

In practice, the situation of such minorities has varied and still varies greatly from country to country. In some places they have established a notable local culture of their own; in others they have remained as an enclave within the much larger society, clinging to their religious identity but not able to express much creativity on the larger cultural scene.

These minorities have represented over the ages an Islamic presence in different parts of the world and have interacted with many diverse cultures, often acting as a bridge between those non-Islamic cultures anddar al-islam . Such Muslim minorities now have a major responsibility to fulfill this task as far as the relation of the Western world todar al-islam is concerned.

MINORITIES WITHIN THE “ABODE OF ISLAM”

Except for the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, there is no area in the “Abode of Islam” where there are not minorities belonging, from the Islamic point of view, to other ummahs. In the heartland of the Islamic world these minorities have been usually Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, but there have also been and continue to be other minorities, such as the Druze, the Yazidis, and the ‘Alawis, who have survived over the ages in the very cradle of Islamic civilization. Traditionally Islam has categorized societal groups on the basis of religious affiliation, and therefore categories of minorities based on factors such as race or language have been of much lesser consequence.

Kurds, who are linguistically a distinct minority, have become rulers of Arabs, as have Blacks, who in some cases were members of a racial minority in those lands where they gained political power.

Islamic Law requires the lives, property, and freedom of religion of religious minorities to be guaranteed if they are a “People of the Book,” a category applied widely during Islamic history. On the basis of the verse of the Quran that speaks about fighting nonbelievers and those who do not acknowledge the Religion of the Truth even among the People of the Book “until they pay the jizyah” (9:29), religious minorities were required to pay a special religious tax(jizyah) and given in return protection from external attack and security for their lives and property. In the modern world, where the idea of the modern nation and citizenship in it has become prevalent, the classical Islamic theory has been often criticized, and in the contemporary Islamic world it is not even always practiced. That is because even in the Islamic world, on the outward level for certain groups loyalty to the state and the modern nation has lately come to replace to some extent loyalty to religion, something that did not occur even in Europe until fairly recently.

The Islamic system must be understood in terms of the premises of the Islamic conception of society, whose goal is to provide a just system and a beneficial environment for the spiritual and religious growth of human beings. From that point of view, minorities in the Islamic world certainly did not fare worse than those in the West, as one can see in a comparison of the history of Judaism in the “Abode of Islam” and its history in Europe. Also during five hundred years of Ottoman domination of Greece, Mt. Athos remained the most vibrant and living center of Orthodox spirituality. As for economic life, it might seem a paradox, but in most Islamic countries the religious minorities are in a better economic situation than the Muslim majority, as one can see in the case of the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt.

Of course, no human institution is without imperfections and abuses. Each theory of viewing the component communities that make up society is based on certain premises and provides certain advantages as well as disadvantages.

The Islamic system, sometimes called the millat system (the word millah, “community,” also means “nation” in the biblical sense), first of all eradicated distinctions based on race, ethnicity, or language. Second, by according protection to minorities on the basis of religion, it therefore created the means for these religions to survive in contrast to the situation

in, let us say, Europe, where after Christianization, other religions such as those of the Druids and the ancient Germans were totally eradicated, as were certain later movements within Christianity such as the Cathars.

In the Islamic world today, however, no nation lives any longer under the old Ottoman millat system, but people live according to the Western-style idea of citizenship in a nation. The modern nation-state system removes distinctions based on religion, at least in theory, but at the expense of subordinating minority and majority religious laws to secular laws. And yet within that system based on nationalism, people continue to insist upon the significance of religious laws and practices, and the very tension between the two has made the question of minorities more difficult than before. In days of old the Kurds did not have the same problems with the Turks and Iraqi Arabs that they do now, nor did the Copts in Egypt experience the same tensions they now face with the so-called fundamentalists, who are themselves reacting to the secularization of the laws of the land.

ISLAMIC SOCIETY: THE IDEAL AND THE PRACTICE OF THE GOOD LIFE

It is essential to distinguish between the ideal society described in the Quran andHadith and historical Islamic society. If the two were identical, there would be no evil or shortcomings in the world, and the world would not be the world with all its imperfections. In fact, throughout their own history, Muslims have looked upon the society of Medina at the time of the Prophet as the ideal society, as the golden age of Islam, religiously speaking, and have sought to emulate that society to the extent possible, but have always fallen short. Generations of young Muslims have been told stories of that period, when, one might say, Heaven and earth touched either other. I remember as a child hearing stories about the Prophet or other great early saints helping the poor, being honest in all affairs, administering justice, and the like from my parents and others.

Almost always, numerous contemporary actions in society were contrasted with the ideals set forth by them. Yet tallying up and bemoaning shortcomings is far less profitable than seeking to understand the extent to which Islamic ideals have been implemented and realized in each Islamic society despite the imperfections inherent in the human state, imperfections that the original teachings of Islam itself have taken into consideration. Although every subsequent generation of Muslims has fallen below the standards established by the Prophet in Medina and despite human frailties, each generation until modern times has in fact realized many of the values established by Islam within the society in which it lived.

The ideal norms of society as envisaged by the Quran andHadith include the establishment of justice and equality before the Divine Law, economic fair play, and the just distribution of wealth, while legitimizing private property and encouraging economic activities, equitable treatment of all human beings (Muslims and non-Muslims living as members of their own respective religious communities within Islamic society), and the creation of a religious social environment in which the presence of the Transcendent is never forgotten. In such a society family bonds are honored over tribal ones, but the truth is considered to be above even family affiliations. It was Christ who said, “Leave all and follow me” and that one should hate one’s parents if they oppose the truth. Likewise, the Quran states, “We have enjoined on human beings kindness to parents, but if they strive to make you join with that of which you have no knowledge, then obey them not” (29:8).

Since the goal of Islamic society is to make possible “Thy will be done on earth,” in the ideal society it is the duty of each Muslim, as stated in several Quranic verses, to “enjoin the good and forbid the wrong” (3:110). This does not mean that individual Muslims should interfere in the affairs of others; rather, each person has the social responsibility to make certain that moral authority reigns in the community.

In such a society keeping the peace and fostering social harmony are requirements, but if moral authority is destroyed for one reason or another and the religious norms flouted by those who wield political power, then there is a right to rebellion and the reestablishment of an order based on ethical norms and the Divine Law.

Also in the ideal Islamic society, virtue, goodness, and knowledge should be the only criteria for honoring and elevating individuals. The hierarchy of society should be based on the God-fearing quality called taqwa and on knowledge, both of which the Quran refers to explicitly. All other honors and distinctions should be evaluated in light of the truth of the transience of the world. This ideal has not been totally realized, but devout Muslims remain very much aware of it, as seen in the attitude of many powerful rulers toward the saintly and the knowledgeable. Even in my own life I have witnessed the great respect shown to virtuous and pious scholars not only by ordinary people, but also by the wealthy and the politically powerful.

Islamic social teachings also include support and help for those who have been oppressed or deprived in one way or another. In the reform that Islam carried out in Arabian society, it sided with the poor, and, like Christ, who said, “Blessed are the poor,” the Prophet said, “Poverty is my pride.” Of course, in both instances poverty means, above all, spiritual poverty, but also on the material level the Prophet, like Christ, lived in simplicity and was closer to the poor and weak than the wealthy and the powerful.

Although the Prophet said that wealth is like a ladder with which one can either ascend to Heaven or descend to hell, he always emphasized that the poor must be helped and respected regardless of their lack of worldly provisions.

Likewise, Islamic social ideals emphasize being kind to slaves, treating women gently, and being generous to those who have suffered economic loss and are in debt or others in society whom modern sociologists would call the deprived classes.

Again, these and other ideals were not always fully realized by later Islamic societies, but as ideals set forth for one generation after another, they are crucial for the understanding of the dominant values in Islamic society. Of course, the sentiment that “my religion is the best” is to be found of necessity in every religious climate, and the Islamic is no exception. The Quran, in fact, refers to Muslims as the best community. But in practice individual Muslims often found that certain virtues that were supposed to be displayed among members of the Islamic community were in fact lacking in their own but found in members of other religious communities. For example, usually those who have performed the hajj and are called hajjiare deeply respected as pious and trustworthy, a reputation most have lived up to, but there have been exceptions, deceptive hajjis who, in the guise of piety, have often dealt dishonestly with their customers in the bazaar. In my own family in Persia we always bought our carpets from an extremely honest Jewish rug dealer, and everyone in the family used to say that he was as honest as a real hajji. In any case the dynamics between ideals and everyday practices for Muslims, as for Jews, Christians, or Hindus, is a complicated matter.

They should not lead to either a self-righteous attitude or the deprecation of one’s own religious community as being devoid of any virtues. As far as the Islamic world is concerned, both of these attitudes have been expressed by outsiders as well as by small groups within Islamic society itself in

modern times. The phenomenon has led to unfortunate extremist positions and movements.

THE STRUCTURE OF ISLAMIC SOCIETY

Of course, not all Islamic societies are exactly alike and it would be wiser to speak of Islamic societies rather than society if one were to analyze every part of the ummah in detail. But for our present purpose and concentrating on the heartland of the Islamic world, where classical Islamic civilization was created, it is possible to speak about Islamic society when trying to bring out salient features of social structure shared by countries as far apart as Morocco and Persia. In contrast to the West and also Hindu India before modern times, Islamic society did not possess as rigid a stratification and there was, relatively speaking, more dynamism and fluidity within Islamic society than was the case with its two neighbors in medieval times. Social mobility in Islamic society was achievable, especially through the acquiring of religious knowledge, on the one hand, and personal, military, and administrative prowess, on the other.

There was, strictly speaking, no feudal system in Islam, and there was nothing corresponding exactly to the landed aristocracy in the West with its lords and other feudal powers, although, in certain lands such as Persia and what is today Pakistan, powerful landowners existed and in fact still exist.

Nor did the peasantry play as important a role as it did in medieval European society.

One important factor present in Islamic society but absent from the Christian West was the nomadic element.

In fact, as the great fourteenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, whom many consider to be the father of sociology, wrote, the rhythm of Islamic history can be understood as the constant interplay between sedentary people and nomads. The Arabs were originally nomads, while Islam arose in Mecca, which was a sedentary environment.

Yet something of what one might call “nomadic spirituality,” with its emphasis upon the transience of the world, closeness to nature, love of language, and respect for the power of the word, is contained within the spiritual perspective of the Islamic revelation itself and is manifested clearly in Islamic art. On the social level also the constant dynamic between the nomad and the urban dweller continued throughout most of Islamic history.

The Prophet sought to replace tribal bonds with those of the Islamic community, or ummah, dominated by the truth of the Quranic revelation. Although he succeeded to a large extent, tribal allegiances did not by any means disappear and occasionally burst forth in political movements based on tribal affiliations. This tension between the unifying force of Islam and the dispersing and centripetal forces of tribalism has manifested itself in many ways in Islamic history and is still alive under new forms. Some have, in fact, interpreted the present opposition of local cultural, ethnic, and religious forces to globalization as “tribalism” and have considered both tribalism and globalization to be enemies of democracy. Such an analysis must not, however, be confused with the role and function of tribalism in Islamic history, which was witness to the tension between the nomads and sedentary people but also to the positive role of the tribal nomads in the constant renewal and revival of sedentary life and even in the unification of vast areas of the Islamic world under one “global” order as we see with the

Seljuqs and Ottomans. The civilization of Islam, which was global in its own way, was created in urban environments, and, in fact, during the medieval period the Islamic world had many cities of much greater population than the largest European cities of the time. But the city is at once the locus of refinement in the arts and sciences, on the one hand, and moral decadence and excessive luxury, on the other. The city has produced great sages and saints, but it is also the only place that has produced skeptics and even atheists.

History has not recorded any nomadic agnostics or skeptics, not to mention atheists. Even the Quran alludes to the fact that every city will be punished one day before the end of time.

In the Islamic world, nomads, who constantly threatened the cities, would invade and dominate them once decadence had set in. The nomads would inject new energy into the city, revive its moral character, and help keep the fire of tradition burning. Then they in turn would become sedentary, gradually losing their nomadic virtues and becoming immersed in decadent luxury until they were themselves swept over by a new wave of nomadic invasion. The Islamic world knew not only Arab nomads, but also Turkic ones, who began to migrate to the heartland of the Islamic world from the tenth century onward, and later the Mongols, who destroyed much of Islamic sedentary life, but also rejuvenated its art and architecture as well as its political power. To this day, despite the forced settlement of so many nomads, there are still Arab, Black, and Berber nomads in all of North and Saharan Africa, Turkish and Turkic nomads in Anatolia, Persia, and Central Asia, Arab nomads in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, and even Iranian tribes such as the Pashtus, some of whom have now settled, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even Egypt, which has been a sedentary society from time immemorial, has nomads in the south. Just recently, while visiting the tomb of a great Sufi saint in southern Egypt, I was surprised to discover that the Egyptian desert near the Sudanese border is still dominated by nomadic tribes. So one can hardly overemphasize the importance of the nomadic element, socially, psychologically, and spiritually in Islamic society. Moreover, one must not forget that something of the nomadic spirit survives even among those who have become settled in towns, for as the Arabic adage affirms, “You can take a nomadic boy out of the desert, but you cannot take the desert out of that boy.”

As for classes within sedentary Islamic society, the most important before the advent of recent social changes included the learned and the scholarly (‘ulama’), the ruling and military class, the merchants, the guilds, and in certain areas such as Egypt and Persia the peasantry. The ‘ulama’, meaning literally “those who know,” referred originally to savants in every field, including astronomy and medicine, not only Islamic Law, and it is still used to some degree in this general sense. But gradually it gained the more particular meaning of religious scholars, especially those who specialized in knowledge of theShari‘ah . Although there is no priesthood in Islam, this class is the closest to that of rabbis in Judaism and to a lesser extent priests in Christianity or the Brahmins in Hinduism, although their religious function is not exactly the same. Throughout Islamic history the ‘ulama’,

who to this day usually wear the dress of the Prophet and a turban to follow his example, have been the guardians and interpreters of theShari‘ah . As a result, they have wielded great power and before modern times supervised both the educational and judicial activity of Islamic society. They were also traditionally protectors of the people against the power of political and military authorities. Generally Twelve-Imam Shi‘ite ‘ulama’ have been more powerful than Sunni ones because, in contrast to the latter, they have been traditionally independent of political power and collected religious taxes directly, so that they have also been to a great extent economically independent. The Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979 would not have been possible if such a power had not existed at the same time. The direct political rule of the ‘ulama’ in Iran today, for the first time in Islamic history, has, however, posed important challenges to it as a distinct religious class within Persian society and to its role and function within that society.

Many Sufis have been among the ‘ulama’, and most Sufi masters are also well versed in Islamic Law, but they do not constitute a distinct class in Islamic society. They, in fact, constitute a “society” within society to which men and women from all walks of life can belong. According to ahadith , “There is no monasticism in Islam,” and the Quran states, “The monasticism which they invented for themselves, We did not prescribe for them” (57:27). Therefore there is no distinct class of monks in Islamic society, but the ideal of leading a spiritual life devoted wholly to God has been realized within the Sufi orders, which are integrated outwardly within society at large. It is also interesting to note that although Islam did not accept the monastic institution, the Prophet and, following him, generations of Muslims have looked very kindly upon Christian monks.

There is, moreover, a Sufism meant for the spiritual elite, who usually study advanced texts of Sufism combined with advanced spiritual practice, and there is a popular Sufism that brings the blessings, or barakah, of Sufism to a large number of people who usually participate in it passively and do not travel actively on the path to spiritual perfection of the first group. This distinction between the elite (khawass ) and commoners (‘awamm ), so conspicuous in Sufism, can in fact be found throughout Islamic society and must not be confused with “elitism” in the modern sense. Today the word “elite” is disliked in public discourse especially in America, but in fact it exists in various domains of life and corresponds to what is widely practiced openly in its Islamic sense. For example, a small number of mathematicians know advanced mathematics. They are the elite of this field, while the rest of us are “commoners” in this domain. But one of the commoners can be an elite in knowledge of the medical properties of herbs, in which a mathematician who belongs to the elite in mathematics is a commoner. It is in this sense that the important category of khawas and‘awamm used by the Sufis and elsewhere in Islamic society must be understood. When used in an absolute sensekhawass refers to those who possess advanced spiritual knowledge and exceptional virtue.

The practitioners of Sufism on all its different levels constitute an important group in Islamic society, even if not sociologically distinct as a class, and they have exercised great influence over the ages on fields as far

apart as the inner life and public ethics, psychology and art, metaphysics and the guilds, poetry and politics. Sufism cannot be reduced to its social manifestations or analyzed simply in sociological terms. But one cannot understand the structure of Islamic society without considering fully the significance of the Sufis along with the ‘ulama’ and other distinct classes.

If in a sense the ‘ulama’ and the Sufis, at least their leaders, correspond to the sacerdotal class in medieval Christianity, the political and military classes in Islam can also be compared to their counterpart in the Christian West, although the differences between the types of monarchy and political aristocracy in the Islamic world and the West as well as differences in hereditary titles must be fully considered.

Besides the supreme ruler of society, whether he is a caliph, sultan, or amir, whom we have already discussed, Islamic society has always had two groups involved in the political and military life of the country. The first is the class of administrators and the second that of the military.

The class of administrators developed early in Islam on the basis of older Persian Sassanid models. In earlier Islamic history this class was practically the only one in Islamic society outside of the cadre of ‘ulama’ to be well educated as a class in the arts of reading, writing, logic, and so forth; it even played a role in the development of a new style of Arabic associated with the activity of those who worked in the various diwans, which came to be known later in the West as ministries. The contribution of this class to Islamic learning, literature, ethics, and political thought as well as the running of the state has been of great importance in Islamic history. During the ‘Abbasid caliphate, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, while the Arabic element was primarily associated with religion and the Turkic element with military power, the Persian element was associated most of all with administration, and some of the most outstanding grand-viziers, or prime ministers, of the Arab caliphs or later Turkic sultans were Persian.

The military class has of course been important throughout Islamic history, as it has been in other societies, although Islam never emphasized the hereditary aspect as much as did many other traditional cultures. With the breakdown of the traditional political structures in modern times, however, many Islamic countries were witness to a military coup followed by a military rule very different from the traditional Islamic political order. Traditionally, a new military commander who was able to establish rule became a sultan or amir, but he was still bound by theShari‘ah and traditions of rule. Such is not the case with the modern military dictators who took over the reins of power in so many Islamic countries during the second part of the twentieth century.

The merchant class has always played a major role in Islamic society and has been an important guardian of Islam. The Prophet began his adult life as a merchant and his wife Khadijah was also a major merchant in Mecca.

From the beginning, the profession was considered a very honorable one, and the merchant class played a greater role in Islamic society than did the mercantile class in medieval Europe before the rise of the bourgeoisie in Italy during the Renaissance. To this day the bazaar is not only the heart of business activity in the still relatively traditional Islamic cities, but the

religious heart of the urban environment as well, where major mosques and religious schools are usually located. In Persian as in other Islamic languages, the term bazari, that is, a merchant in the bazaar, is associated with piety and religious fervor, and this class has always been close to the ‘ulama’. I still remember my childhood days when during the mourning period of Muh. arram my mother would take me to the Tehran bazaar, where I was so moved by all the black flags and curtains covering everything. To this day the most intense religious activities, such as religious processions in streets and functions within mosques, in Persia are associated with the bazaar. Nor are matters different in the Arab world. The heart of Cairo is the mosque of Ra’s al-H. usayn, and whenever I visit it, inevitably I also pay a visit to the Khan-Khalili bazaar adjacent to it, where one observes clearly the wedding between religious piety and trade.

In traditional Islamic society a major institution associated with the bazaar and the production of goods was the guilds (as.naf). Considered to have been founded by ‘Ali ibn AbiTalib, the guilds combine apprenticeship in various arts and crafts with moral and spiritual discipline. In the guilds the masters are usually also moral and spiritual teachers, and apprentices receive initiation into a guild once they meet the moral and practical qualifications for acceptance.

The Islamic guilds are like the medieval European guild of masons, which was a secret organization with knowledge of both theory and practical techniques that was transmitted orally. In fact, Freemasonry began when the guild of masons became “speculative” and cut off from the practice of masonry and turned into a secret organization with particular political and social goals. Although European Freemasonry came into the Islamic world through colonizing powers in the nineteenth century, the Islamic guilds themselves never underwent such a transformation. They remained closely wed to Sufism and the spiritual practices of the Islamic religion. With the advent of modern technology and the introduction of industrialism into many parts of the Islamic world, many of the guilds disappeared, but some survive to this day from Fez to Benares. It is interesting to note that the famous Benares silk has been made and is still made to a large extent by Muslim guilds of weavers and cloth printers. A few decades ago when I visited this holiest of Hindu cities, I was astonished to see the traditional Islamic guild still very much alive; the master of the guild that made the most beautiful saris was one of the dignitaries of the local branch of the Qadiriyyah order, which is one of the oldest Sufi orders.

Finally, in discussing the structure of Islamic society one must mention the peasantry, which of course exists throughout the Islamic world but which, except in certain areas, has not played the same central historical role it has in the West. In such lands as Egypt, parts of Persia, and the Punjab, there has always existed a large peasantry, which has usually been educated religiously from urban centers.

In such lands the peasantry has also been a conservative social force and has provided many of the religious students for madrasahs in bigger cities, students some of whom later became major religious leaders. Popular Sufism has also been strong among the peasantry, as we see among the

fillah in of Egypt and in the spread of Maraboutism, which is a popular Sufi movement, in North and West Africa.

INTELLECTUAL AND THEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

In addition to those variations delineating Sunnism and Shi‘ism and the numerous sects, there have existed since the beginning of Islamic history, within the mainstream, different theologies and philosophies that have contributed to diversity within the Islamic world, even within a particular school of Law. When one thinks of Islam, it is important to remember that, on the intellectual and theological levels, as well as on the juridical one, Islam is not a monolithic structure, but displays remarkable diversity, the elements of which are bound together by the doctrine of tawhid, or unity. Over the centuries, Islam has created one of the richest intellectual traditions of the world, favorably comparable in its depth and diversity to those of India, China, and the Christian West. In medieval times, in fact, many Jewish and Christian theological and philosophical schools in Europe were created as a result of the influence of and in response to Islamic philosophical and theological teachings.

To discuss in depth all the different theological and philosophical schools or even the most important ones would not be possible here. What is important in the present context is to at least mention the best-known schools and point out that even on some of the most important central religious issues-the meaning of Divine Unity especially in relation to multiplicity, the nature of God’s Names and Qualities, the relation between faith and works in human salvation, predestination and free will, revelation and reason, the relation between God’s Mercy and His Justice, and questions of eschatology, not to mention political philosophy-there have existed numerous views, sometimes opposed to each other.

In theology, which in Islam is called ‘ilm al-kalam or simply kalam, there developed in the Sunni world in the eighth century, first of all, the Mu‘tazilite school, which favored extensive use of reason in the interpretation of religious matters, a position to which certain strict literalist interpreters of the Quran and Sunnah, such as the Hanbalis, were opposed. In fact, the Hanbalis have remained opposed to all forms of kalam until today, as has their Wahhabi offshoot.

To this day the teaching of any form of kalam is forbidden in religious universities in Saudi Arabia.

In the tenth century a new school of kalam called the Ash‘arite arose in Baghdad with the aim of creating a middle ground on many questions, such as the use of reason in religious matters. Ash‘arism, which many orientalists have identified with Islamic theological orthodoxy as such, spread quickly among the Shafi‘is and reached its peak in many ways with al-Ghazzali, who did, however, hold some non-Ash‘arite views, and with Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Gradually Ash‘arism spread among the Hanafis and Malikis as well and became the most widely held school of kalam in the Sunni world until the contemporary period. But there were also other Sunni schools of kalam that held sway in certain localities, such as Maturidism in Khurasan and Central Asia and T. ahawism in Egypt. Since the late nineteenth century, certain Muslim “reformers” such as Muh.ammad ‘Abduh of Egypt have sought to revive Mu‘tazilism, because it

made greater use of reason rather than relying predominately on the tenets of the revelation.

In Shi‘ism also, kalam has had a long history. Isma‘ili kalam, which began to be developed from the eighth century onward, was closely allied to Isma‘ili philosophy and took greater interest in what in the West would be called mystical theology than Sunni schools of kalam. As for Twelve-Imam Shi‘ite kalam, it developed along more intellectual lines than Ash‘arite kalam and received its systematic formulation in the thirteenth century in the hands of Nas.ir al-Din T. usi, who was also one of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers of Islam. The Zaydis adopted more or less Mu‘tazilite kalam, which therefore survived in the Yemen long after it had become eclipsed by Ash‘arism after the eleventh century in the intellectual centers of the heartland of the Islamic world in the Arab East and Persia.

Islamic philosophy was developed by Islamic thinkers rooted in the Quranic revelation and meditating upon translations of Greek and Syriac texts into Arabic. The result was the integration of ideas drawn mostly from Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Stoicism into the Quranic worldview and the creation of new philosophical perspectives.

Various schools were developed, starting with the Peripatetic (mashsha’i) and Isma‘ili from the ninth century onward. This early period produced such famous philosophers as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina(Avicenna) , and Ibn Rushd(Averroës) , whose influence on the medieval West was immense. One cannot conceive of either the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages and such figures as Albert the Great, St. Thomas, and Duns Scotus or medieval Jewish philosophy as represented by such masters as Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides (who wrote his most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, first in Arabic), without consideration of the influence of early Islamic philosophy and to some extent kalam upon them.

Although the influence of Islamic philosophy upon the West came more or less to an end in the thirteenth century with the translation of Averroës and earlier Islamic philosophers into Latin, Islamic philosophy itself not only did not come to an end, but was revived in the eastern lands of Islam and especially Persia. In the twelfth century Suhrawardi founded a new school of philosophy called the School of Illumination(ishraq) and in the seventeenth century S. adr al-Din Shirazi created a major synthesis of philosophy, doctrinal Sufism or gnosis in the sense of illuminative and unitive knowledge (‘irfan), and theology in a new school he called “the transcendent theosophy” (al-h. ikmat al-muta‘aliyah). Both of these schools are still very much alive and have played a major role in the intellectual life of Persia, India, and as far as the school of ishraq is concerned, to some extent, Ottoman Turkey.

Another major school that developed in the later history of Islam is doctrinal Sufism, or gnosis, associated with, more than anyone else, the name of the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi Muh. yi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi, the most influential intellectual figure in Islam during the past seven centuries.

His teachings spread from Sumatra and China to Mali and Mauritania, and his school produced numerous major thinkers and poets in nearly every Islamic land.

All of these schools of kalam, philosophy, and gnosis along with the philosophy of law, methods of Quranic commentary, and the study of other transmitted sciences with which we cannot deal here, as well as various schools of the sciences from medicine to astronomy, all of which are so important for both Islam and the development of science in the West, had both their adherents and opponents, and all of them must be seen as so many strands in the total tapestry of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Although they were all concerned with either the intellectual aspects of the religion, the cosmos in light of the truths of revelation, or purely theoretical knowledge, they often also exercised either direct or indirect influence on the popular level. In any case, their diversity must be considered when studying the spectrum of Islam in its totality. Their very existence also demonstrates the remarkably open universe of intellectual discourse within the framework of the Islamic tradition, an openness that marked many periods of Islamic history yet did not lead to rebellion against the sacred framework established by Islam, as was to happen in Christianity in the West after the Middle Ages.

THE QUESTION OF ORhTHODOXY AND HETERODOXY

The question of orthodoxy in any religion is of the utmost importance, for the very word means “correctness of belief or doctrine.” If there is truth, there is also error, and if nothing is false, then there is no truth. As the Quran says, “The truth has come and falsehood has perished” (17:81).

Orthodoxy means possession of religious truth, and orthopraxy, the correct manner of practicing and reaching the truth. In the context of the totality of the Islamic tradition and in light of what has been said of the spectrum of Islam, orthodoxy and orthopraxy can be understood as the state of being on the “straight path” (al-s.irat. al-mustaqim); Islam itself is sometimes called the “religion of the straight path.”

There is no magisterium in Islam, as there is in Catholicism, to determine the correctness of doctrine, and on the level of belief and doctrine Islam has been less stringent than Catholicism in determining what is orthodox. Usually acceptance of the testifications of faith, that is, “There is no god but God” and “Muh.ammad is His Messenger,” has sufficed, even if opposition has been made to other beliefs and interpretations of a particular person or group. Like Judaism, Islam has insisted more on the importance of orthopraxy than orthodoxy. Although it has been lenient on the level of orthodoxy as long as the principle of tawhid and the messengership of the Prophet have been accepted, it has been more stringent on the level of practice of the daily prayers, fasting, pilgrimage, and so forth; in observing dietary laws such as abstention from pork and alcoholic drinks; and in following moral laws dealing with sexual relations, theft, murder, and so on.

As to what plays the role of the magisterium in Islam, the best response is the ummah, or the Islamic community itself, and for Shi‘ism the guidance of the Imam. Throughout Islamic history, the consensus of the community has decided in the long run what new interpretations of the Quran andSunnah on the level of both thought and action are permissible and what is to be rejected. But this action by the community must always remain subservient to the teachings of God’s Word and those of His Prophet. At that level any innovation (bid‘ah) has always been seen as a major sin and deviation from the “straight path,” but the strong rejection of bid‘ah in its technical religious sense has never meant opposition to adaptation and application of the immutable principles of Islam to new conditions and situations, as has happened often throughout Islamic history.

With these definitions in mind, we can now turn to the spectrum of Islam and pose the question “What constitutes orthodox Islam?” In most Western studies, orthodoxy is limited to its exoteric aspect, and when Islam is considered, the four Sunni schools of Law alone are considered orthodox.

But this appraisal is totally inadequate. There is an exoteric orthodoxy and orthopraxy and there is an esoteric orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Traditional and orthodox Sufism is not only part of Islamic orthodoxy, but is its heart and must not be seen as analogous to various mystical and occult manifestations in postmedieval Christianity that are called heterodox. Sufism is as much a part of Islamic orthodoxy as Franciscan or Dominican spirituality was part of Catholic orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.

To understand the position of Shi‘ism within the Islamic tradition, one must compare it not to Protestantism, which arose many centuries after the foundation of Christianity as a protest against Catholicism, but to Eastern Orthodoxy, which has been there from the beginning. Although Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been at odds with each other for nearly one thousand years, both belong to the totality of Christian orthodoxy. The same holds true for Sunnism and mainstream Shi‘ism of the Twelve-Imam School. One might say that in the middle of the spectrum of Islam as far as orthodoxy and heterodoxy are concerned stand Sunnism and Twelve-Imam Shi‘ism. On the side of Sunnism leaning in the direction of extremism stand the Khawarij and similar groups, and on the side of Shi‘ism after the Zaydis and moderate Isma‘ilis stand those called Shi‘ite extremists(ghulat) , including eclectic forms of Isma‘ilism and the various sects described above. Certainly on the formal and exoteric level all the four schools of Sunni Law, Twelve-Imam Shi‘ism, Zaydiism, as well as those at the two sides of the central bands of the spectrum, whether they be Isma‘ilis or ‘Ibadis, as long as they practice theShari‘ah , belong to the category of Islamic orthodoxy, as does of course all normative Sufism that bases itself on the practice of Shari‘ite injunctions. In fact, because of the centrality of orthopraxy one could say that Muslims who practice theShari‘ah belong also to Islamic orthodoxy as long as they do not flout the major doctrines of the faith such as the Prophet being the seal of prophecy, as do the Ah. madiyyah.

The use of such terms as “heterodox” and “sect” must be weighed closely in light of the nature and structure of the Islamic tradition. One should never refer to Shi‘ism as a whole as a sect, any more than one would call the Greek Orthodox Church a sect. Nor should one call Sufism heterodox, unless one is pointing to a particular figure or group which has adopted either beliefs or practices that are indeed heterodox as judged by the consensus, or ijma‘, of the mainstream community on the basis of the Quran and the Sunnah, but such a phenomenon pales into insignificance when compared with the vast reality of Sufism.

Authentic esoterism, far from being heterodox, lies at the heart of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in their most universal sense.

CULTURAL ZONES IN ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

People often speak of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish Islam as if they were three Islams. In reality there is only one Islam, but with local coloring related to the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural traits of the different peoples who became part of the Islamic community. Wherever Islam went, it did not seek to level the existing cultural structures to the ground, but to preserve and transform them as long as they did not oppose the spirit and form of the Islamic revelation. The result was the creation of a single Islamic identity. The vast area of the “Abode of Islam” (dar al-islam ) therefore came to display remarkable diversity on the human plane while reflecting everywhere the one message of the Quran revealed through the Prophet. This cultural and ethnic diversification must therefore be added to all of the factors already mentioned to make clearer the patterns that, superimposed upon each other, have created the great diversity in unity found in Islam.

The first cultural zone in the Islamic world is the Arabic zone, which stretches from Iraq and the Persian Gulf to Mauritania and before 1492 into the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Needless to say, in contrast to what many in the West think, the Arab world is not by any means synonymous with the Islamic world. In fact, Arab Muslims constitute less than a fifth of all Muslims, being around 220 million in number, but since the Quran was revealed to the Arab Prophet of Islam and the first Islamic society was established in Arabia, the Arabic zone of the “Abode of Islam” is the oldest part of the Islamic community and remains central to it. One of the great mysteries of early Islamic history is that as the Arab armies came out of Arabia, the lands that they conquered to the north and the west became both Islamicized and Arabized. The word “Arab” is a linguistic and not an ethnic term when used in a phrase like “the Arab world.” There was also much Arab migration into this world, but what made it decisively Arab was the adoption of the Arabic language from Morocco to Iraq. Even a country with such an unparalleled ancient past as Egypt became Arab and in fact remains to this day the center of Arabic culture. In contrast, the people of the Persian Empire under the Sassanids, who were conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, became Muslim, but they did not adopt the Arabic language. Rather, they developed Persian on the basis of earlier Iranian languages and retained a distinct cultural zone of their own. Iraq was the only exception. Although the seat of the Sassanid capital, it became Arab and in fact the center of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, but it always retained strong Persian elements.

It is interesting to compare this development with the spread of Christianity into Europe. Through becoming Christian, Europe also became to some extent a part of the Abrahamic world, but remained less Semiticized than the non-Arab Muslims who embraced Islam, because through St. Paul Christianity itself had already become less “Semitic” before spreading into Europe. That is why the Christianization of Europe was not accompanied by the spread of Aramaic or some other Semitic language in the same way that Arabic spread in the Near East and Africa and also among Persians and Indians, who belonged to the same linguistic and racial stock as the Europeans.

Not only were the Gospels written in Greek and not Aramaic, which Christ spoke, but also the Bible itself was translated early into Latin as the Vulgate and became linguistically severed from its origin. Latin became the closest in its role as the language of religion and learning in the West to what Arabic was in the Islamic world, with the major difference that Arabic is the sacred language of Islam as Hebrew is that of Judaism, whereas Latin is a liturgical language of Christianity along with several other liturgical languages such as Greek and Slavonic. The Arabization of what is now the Arab world and the significance of Arabic among non-Arab Muslims cannot therefore be equated with the Christianization of Europe and the role of Latin in the medieval West, although there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the two worlds.

The Arabic zone, characterized by the use of Arabic as not only the language of religion, which is common to all Muslims, but also as the language of daily life, is further divided into an eastern and a western part, with the line of demarcation being in the middle of Libya. The western lands, called in classical Arabic al-Maghrib, that is, “the West,” are further divided into the “near West,” including western Libya, Tunisia, and most of Algeria, and “the far West,” including western Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and in earlier periods of Islamic history al-Andalus, or Muslim Iberia. Also within the western zone are important non-Arab groups, the most important being the Berber, who inhabit mostly the Atlas Mountains and who have their own distinct language.

The second zone of Islamic culture, whose people were the second ethnic group to embrace Islam and to participate with the Arabs in building classical Islamic civilization, is the Persian zone, consisting of present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan (with certain cities in Uzbekistan).

The dominant language of the people of all these countries is Persian, known locally by three different names, Farsi, Dari, and Tajik, all of which are the same language; the differences between them are no greater than differences between the English of Australia, England, and Texas. This zone also included southern Caucasia, the old Khorasan, Transoxiana, and parts of what is today Pakistan before the migration south of Turkic people from the tenth and eleventh centuries and subsequent ethnic and geopolitical changes. The people of this zone are predominantly of the Iranian race, which is a branch of the Aryan or Indo-Iranian-European peoples, and Persian is related to the Indo-European languages as are other Iranian languages spoken in this zone, such as Kurdish, Baluchi, and Pashtu.

This zone has a population of some 100 million people, but its influence is felt strongly beyond its borders in other zones of Islamic culture in Asia from the Turkic and the Indian to the Chinese.

The first Persian to embrace Islam was Salman-i Farsi, a slave whom the Prophet caused to become free, making him a member of his “Household.” From the beginning the Persians were deeply respectful of the “Family of the Prophet” and many of the descendants of the Prophet, including the eighth Imam, ‘Ali al-Rid.a, are buried in Persia.

But it would be false to think that the Persians were always Shi‘ites and the Arabs Sunnis. Shi‘ism began among Arabs and in the tenth century

much of the Arab east was Shi‘ite, while Khorasan, a major Persian province, was the seat of Sunni thought. It is only after the establishment of the Safavids that Persia became predominantly Shi‘ite and this majority increased when Afghanistan, a part of Baluchistan, and much of Central Asia, which were predominantly Sunni, were separated from Persia, and Iran in its present form was created. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, during the Safavid period until the eighteenth century it was part of Persia. Then the leader of the Afghan tribes defeated the Safavids and killed the last Safavid king.

Shortly thereafter Nadir Shah, the last oriental conqueror, recaptured lands all the way to Delhi, including what is today Afghanistan. After his death, however, eastern Afghanistan became independent, and in the nineteenth century finally, under British pressure, Persia relinquished its claim on Herat and western Afghanistan, and thereafter Afghanistan as we now know it came into being.

The third zone of Islamic culture is that of Black Africa.

Among the entourage of the Prophet, in addition to Salman, there was another famous companion who was not Arab. He was Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi, the muezzin or caller to prayer of the Prophet, who was a Black African.

His presence symbolized the rapid spread of Islam among the Blacks and the creation of the Black African zone of Islamic culture, encompassing a vast area from the highlands of Ethiopia, where Islam spread already in the seventh century, to Mali and Senegal. The descendants of Bilal are said to have migrated to Mali, forming the Mandinka clan Keita, which helped create the Mali Empire. Some of the companions of the Prophet also migrated to Chad and established Islam there a generation after the Prophet.

Altogether Islam spread in Black Africa mostly through trade, and such tribes as the Sanhaja, who themselves embraced Islam early, became intermediaries between Arab Muslims to the north and Black Africans. By the eleventh century a powerful Islamic kingdom was established in Ghana, and by the fourteenth century the Mali Empire, which was Muslim, was one of the richest in the world; its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, one of the most notable rulers in the whole of the Islamic world.

In East Africa, which received Islam earlier than West Africa, the process of Islamization took a different path and was influenced greatly by the migration of both Arabs and Persians into the coastal areas of West Africa. By the twelfth century a Swahili kingdom was established with its capital in Kilwa, and from the mixture of Arabic, Persian, and Bantu the new Swahili language, perhaps the most important Islamic language of Muslim Black Africa, was born.

But in contrast to the Arab and Persian worlds, where one language dominates, the Black African zone of Islamic culture consists of many subzones with very distinct languages ranging from Hausa and Fulani to Somali. Some of these languages are also spoken by Christians and are culturally signficant for African Christianity.

Although the north of the African continent was already Arab a century after the rise of Islam, the area called classically the Sudan, which included

the steppes and the grasslands from present-day Sudan to Senegal, also became to a large extent Muslim over a millennium ago. It is, however, only since the nineteenth century that Islam has begun to penetrate inland into the forest regions south of the classical Sudan. There are of course also intermediate regions between the Arabic north and Black Africa where the two zones become intermingled, such as present-day Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. The zone of Black African Islamic culture with a population of well over 150 million people is bewilderingly diverse and presents a remarkable panorama of ethnic and cultural diversity within the local unity of Black African culture and the universal unity of Islam itself.

The fourth zone of Islamic culture is the Turkic zone, embracing all the people who speak one of the Altaic languages, of which the most important is Turkish, but which also include Adhari(Azeri) , Chechen, Uighur, Uzbek, Kirghiz, and Turkeman. The Turkic people, who were originally nomadic, migrated south from the Altai Mountains to conquer Central Asia from the Persians, changing its ethnic nature but remaining culturally very close to the Persian world. By the time they had entered the Persia of that historical period, they had already embraced Islam and in fact became its great champions. Not only did they defeat local Persian rulers such as the Samanids, but they soon pushed westward toward Anatolia, defeating the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt in Turkish) in 1071. This was one of the pivotal battles of Islamic history. It opened the Anatolian pasturelands to the Turkic nomads and led to the Turkification of Anatolia, the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, and finally to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The Turks were powerful militarily and ruled over many Muslim lands, including Persia and Egypt, and their role in later Islamic history can hardly be exaggerated. Today the Turkic peoples, composed of more than 150 million people, are spread from Macedonia to Siberia and all the way to Vladivostok and are geographically the most widespread ethnic and cultural group within the Islamic world. There are notable Turkic groups also within other areas that are not majority Turkic, including Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Russia, which has important Turkic minorities who are remnants of people conquered during the expansion of the Russian Empire under the czars.

The fifth major zone of Islamic culture is that of the Indian subcontinent. Already in the first decade of the eighth century, the army of Muh.ammad ibn Qasim had conquered Sindh, and thus began the penetration of Islam into the subcontinent during the next few centuries, but Islam spread throughout India mostly through Sufi orders.

There were also invasions by various Turkic rulers into India, and from the eleventh century onward and until the British colonization of India Muslim rulers dominated over much of India, especially the north, where the Moghuls established a major empire in the sixteenth century. Indian Islam is ethnically mostly homogeneous, with some Persian and Turkic elements added to the local Indian population, but it is culturally and linguistically very diverse. For nearly a thousand years the intellectual and literary language of Indian Muslims was Persian, but several local languages, such as Sindhi, Gujrati, Punjabi, and Bengali, also gained some

prominence as Islamic languages. Gradually, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new language was born of the wedding of the Indian languages and Persian with Turkic elements added and became known as Urdu.

Written in the Arabic-Persian script, Urdu became, like Swahili, Ottoman Turkish, and several other Islamic languages, a major language of Islamic discourse and was later adopted as the official language of Pakistan. The Indian zone of Islamic culture includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, Muslims of India and Nepal, and the deeply rooted Islamic community of Sri Lanka. There are some 400 million Muslims in this region, more than in any other. The reason for this vast population is the rapid rise of the general population in all of India since the nineteenth century, including both Hindus and Muslims, and the fact that more than one-fourth of Indians had embraced Islam, which was able to provide providentially a path of salvation for those who could no longer function within the world of traditional Hinduism. They have created some of the greatest works of Islamic art and culture, and although ruled often by Turkic dynasties, they have been very close in cultural matters to the Persian world until modern times.

The sixth zone of Islamic culture embraces the Malay world in Southeast Asia. Islamicized by Arab traders from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea and also by merchants and Sufis from India from the thirteenth century onward, Malay Islam displays again much ethnic homogeneity and possesses local traits all its own. Influenced deeply from the beginning by Sufism, which played a major role in the spread of Islam into that world, Malay Islam has usually reflected a mild and gentle aspect also in conformity with the predominant ethnic characteristics of the people. Dominated by Malay and Javanese languages, Malay Islam embraces Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and sizable minorities in Thailand as well as the Philippines and smaller minorities in Cambodia and Vietnam. Altogether there are over 220 million Muslims in this zone, and although this part of the Islamic world is a relative newcomer to the “Abode of Islam,” its adherents are known for their close attachment to Mecca and Medina and love for the Prophetic traditions.

As is the case with Africa and India, Malay Islam is highly influenced and colored operatively and intellectually by Sufism.

Besides these six major zones of Islamic culture, a few smaller ones must also be mentioned. One is Chinese Islam, whose origin goes back to the seventh century, when soon after the advent of Islam Muslim merchants settled in Chinese ports such as Canton. There has been a continuous presence of Islam in China since that time, but mostly in Sinkiang, which Muslim geographers call Eastern Turkistan.

The Islamic population of China includes both people of Turkic origin, such as the Uigurs, and native Chinese called Hui. Even among the Hans there are some Muslims. The number of Muslims in China remains a great mystery and figures from 25 to 100 million have been mentioned. There is a distinct Chinese Islamic architecture and calligraphy as well as a whole intellectual tradition closely allied to Persian Sufism. The Islamic

intellectual tradition in China began to express itself in classical Chinese rather than Persian and Arabic only from the seventeenth century onward.

Then there are the European Muslims-not Turkish enclaves found in Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia, but European ethnic groups-that have been Muslims for half a millennium. The most important among these groups are the Albanians, found throughout Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, and Bosnians, found mostly in Bosnia but to some extent also in Croatia and Serbia. These groups are ethnically of European stock, and the understanding of their culture is important for a better comprehension of both the spectrum of Islam in its totality and the rapport between Islam and the West in today’s Europe.

Finally, there are the new Islamic communities in Europe and America, including both immigrants and converts (or what many Muslims prefer to call reverts, that is, those who have gone back or reverted to the primordial religion, which is identified here with Islam). These include several million North Africans in France, some 3 million Turks and a sizable number of Kurds in Germany, some 2 million mostly from the Indian subcontinent in Great Britain, and smaller but nevertheless sizable populations in other European countries. In America there are both immigrants, mostly from the Arab East, Iran, and the subcontinent, and converts, primarily among African Americans but also some among whites. The spread of Islam among African Americans began with Elijah Muhammad, who created the Nation of Islam, which espouses reverse racism against whites. This movement later split into two groups and most of its members, along with other African American Muslims, soon joined the mainstream of Islam.

In this process the role of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, was of particular significance. There are some 25 million Muslims in Europe, some 6 million (although some have claimed other figures ranging from 5 to 7 million) in America, half a million in Canada, and perhaps over 2 million in South America. To view the spectrum of Islam globally, it is necessary to consider also these Islamic communities in the West, especially since they play such an important role as a bridge between the “Abode of Islam” (dar al-islam ), from which they come, and the West, which is their home.

These zones of Islamic culture described briefly here display a bewildering array of ethnicities, languages, forms of

art and music, and differing habitats for human life. Islam is practiced from the jungles of Borneo to the Hindu Kush mountains to the deserts of Mauritania. It includes whites, blacks, yellow-skinned people, and practically every intermediary type. Its followers have black as well as blond hair, brown as well as blue eyes. But within this remarkable diversity there reigns the unity created by Islam, a unity that can be seen in the recitation of the Quran in Arabic from east to west, in the daily prayers in the direction of Mecca, in the emulation of the single model of the Prophet, in the following of theShari‘ah , in the spiritual perfume of the Sufi orders, in the universal patterns and rhythms of Islamic art, and in many other factors. Unity in Islam has never meant uniformity and has always embraced diversity. To understand both this unity and this diversity within unity is to grasp the way in which Islam has been able to encompass so many human collectivities, to respect God-given differences and yet create a vast civilization unified and dominated by the principle of tawhid, or unity.