Islamic revolution

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communal entry

The concept of an Islamic revolution went through several substantial shifts from the emergence of Islam itself in the 7th century. At that time, Islam was an evangelical expansionist movement that sought to replace various tribal religions, and the fairly degraded forms of Christianity and Judaism that existed in Arabia and Egypt at the time. It was very successful at doing so, except for a few isolated regions and large cities, so by the end of that first expansion in the mid 7th century, it was practiced by people from Morocco to India. This was not so much a revolution as an invasion, led by the early Rightly Guided Caliphs (a Sunni term).

However, there was soon after a split between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam, mourned as the "tragedy of Karbala" in 680. The rise of the Umayyad dynasty sundered the Sunni, who followed the victorious political leader Yazid, from followers of Husain who became the Shia. The Islamic caliphate from that point on was a political not religious entity. While early leaders had been elected by elders, a process that the Shia had objected to on grounds that leadership belonged with the ProphetMuhammad's family, Yazid and after were simply dynastic rulers by force. His father Muawiyah said "I am the first king in Islam." And so he was. Until him, the movement had been remarkably coherent and religiously motivated.

Muslim civilization evolved through the next few centuries, flourishing and developing near-modern concepts of ecological stewardship (for which the desert origins of the faith had prepared it well), urban planning, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, history and science. As the so-called "Dark Ages" covered Europe, Baghdad was the center of the most advanced civilization on Earth, comparable to China in its complexity and capacity for invention - and exceeding it in many important capacities that later were to spark the Reformation and Renaissance in Europe. Among other innovations were the college and university and library and guild in the same form in which they entered Europe. Most of the serious study of scientific topics took place in the Muslim world at this pivotal time. Over the five centuries of Abbasid Caliphate there was economic and social progress, but, political division and minor wars between Muslim states.

Though no religiously motivated revolutions occurred in the 8th through 11th century, there was a slow steady growth in capacities and confidence that led, by the time of The Crusades, a series of aggressive colonial invasions and genocides (that did not target Muslims only but also Cathars and Jews), to a society that was far more civilized and cultured than those invading it. Over the course of these bloody wars, the religious notion of jihad, a sort of inner struggle to master the self, was adapted for warfare as a doctrine of efficient military resistance to invaders on Muslim lands. This was a key to the success of Saladin's ejection of the Crusaders and the elimination of the Crusader States. Note: this rhetoric has been very effective also in the modern struggle of Arabs against the state of Israel, although most scholars believe that the doctrine has been very broadly abused.

Nor were Christians the only genocidal invaders. By the time of the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols, there were 36 public libraries in that city. Comparisons to the Sack of Baghdad by looters in 2003 after the US invasion might be apt. Although it should be noted that in the 2003 event a) the looters were Iraqis, and b) WRT the Iraqi archaeological and bibliological archives, there were less than a thousand missing pieces in the end, hardly the 100,000 pieces claimed by the Baathist-appointed Director of the system.

However, the capacity of Muslims to defend themselves, and religious liberty and right to argue rulings in sharia, extended even to the ordinary citizen, was itself a threat to the power of the ruling elites. In the 15th century, fearing an Islamic revolution that would remove them from power, the various states and kingdoms that would become the Ottoman Empire led a trend to "shut the door of ijtihad", the rules by which fiqh (classic Islamic jurisprudence) was challenged. In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of denying citizens the right to appeal judgements to higher courts or to argue their cases themselves. This was the end of a long series of steps in which the ulama, or learned, monopolized the right to argue itself.

The most notable year in European history was the fall of Muslim Spain and discovery of the New World - both in 1492, and both the projects of Ferdinand and Isabella, who transformed a multi-cultural kingdom into a unified, monolithic, and aggressively expansionist (but also "colonial") state that specifically persecuted or forcibly converted both Muslims and Jews. It was this society that Miguel de Cervantes satirized a century later, with the class divisions created by this forced conversion still clearly evident. However it should be noted that while Muslim governments generally didn't force others to convert to Islam overtly, socio-economic mechanisms were put in place to make life inconvenient for those that did not, starting with a form of second-class citizenship for non-muslims. The sole exception to this being for money changers, given the Quranic prohibition against muslims charging each other interest on loans.

The Baroque period was marked by several struggles between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, notably in the Balkan region. The legacy of these struggles were such anomalies as many European-descended Muslims in Bosnia and Turkey (some descended from the Janissary forces, Christian children raised as bodyguards and sex slaves to the Sultan, a tradition of white slavery that continues to this day but receives little coverage from any media), and a patchwork of polities in that region that remains disunified to this day. Religion was sometimes a factor in these struggles, but usually not. The Seige of Vienna marked the end of this period, and of Ottoman expansion. A religious establishment co-operated with Ottoman power throughout this period: there was no significant challenge to the power of the urban Turkish elite, and colonial powers (like Napoleon) eventually took over Algeria, Egypt, and other Muslim states.

At the edges of these empires, and far from Ottoman control, the mostly-Sufi tarika were adapting Islam to local conditions. It was spreading through Africa, India, Western China and South-East Asia. By the time of The Enlightenment, missionary groups had encountered many of these, and most were prone to dismiss Islam as a chaotic and disunified faith with no central hierarchy capable of controlling local variations. The fact that the invaders were Roman Catholics probably played no small part in this contempt of variety - Protestant missionaries weren't common until later.

Nearer the imperial center, the Turks forged the Ottoman Empire into a technologically modern but politically backward state similar to Czarist Russia. Its fate was also similar:

The Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 after World War I and the Armenian Holocaust, including an extended campaign called the Arab Revolt sparked and led by the Saud family and British officer/adventurer/tactician Lawrence of Arabia. Perhaps deeming the Arab contribution to have been small, the subsequent council in Paris in 1921 failed to deliver a truly independent and unified Arab state. The seeds of the modern discord in the Mideast were laid: Arab states were created based on the old Ottoman provinces (Iraq being three of them) and the British Empire simply became a more benevolent colonist. It established such institutions as the Baghdad Museum, the Anglo-American Oil company, and effectively turned Syria (which included Lebanon then, as it effectively does today) into a French colonial state. Under Vichy rule in 1940, the Baath Party was formed based on the model of the Nazi Party. This movement spread to Iraq and played a major role (along with Nasser's Egypt) in the pan-Arabism that reached its flash point with the creation of the state of Israel by the UN in 1948.

Religion remained subdued. Turkey, meanwhile, under Emil Ataturk, had become a wholly secular state with the military taking an explicit constitutional role in preventing Islam from dominating secular polity. Every attempt was made to shrug off the Ottoman legacy - except for retaining Kurd lands which to this day constitute the entire eastern third of Turkey, as well as brutal supression of Armenian national aspirations. This leads to the complex modern debate over Kurdistan as such.

In part to prevent an Islamic revolution, Ataturk abandoned Arabic script, rendering all text written in Turkish in this script unintelligible. It was a master stroke, rendering in one generation the entire legacy of the Ottoman theology unreadable. This may have played a part in the evolution of a more democratic Islamist movement in Turkey, which by 2004 was effectively a civil rights movement, opposed to military domination of civilian polity, against corruption in goverment, for religious freedom - and the ruling party.

Iran in 1979 had a Shia-led Islamic revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini was able to recruit significant numbers of followers due, at least in part, to US farm subsidy policy, which dumped cheap grain on the Iranian markets and drove Iranian farmers out of business or back to subsistence farming. Displaced farmers and farm workers migrated to cities to live off the Shah's public welfare (and US food) while becoming targets of dissident propaganda produced by Khomeini's followers.

While Western thinkers (including Michel Foucault) were quite supportive initially, the relatively degraded fiqh and painful history of Iran under colonial power did not give rise to a very democratic government - though it followed the forms of democracy, much as had Eastern Europe under the Soviets. As of 2004, there was pressure for reform of this system, which ranged from calls to simply replace the Mullahs who serve as a sort of Supreme Court (Supreme Council of the Revolution), to reforming the fiqh to modern and progressive models from France, England and Turkey (none of which apply very well since they are authored by Sunni reformers not by Shias), to replacing the theocratic state altogether with one based on secular humanism.

Also in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Egyptian peace with Israel drastically changed the political landscape of the Muslim World. The mujehadeen in Afghanistan were embraced by the United States under Ronald Reagan who saw them as fellow religiously motivated freedom fighters. Money and help and volunteers poured in from the Arab states that were allied to the US, including Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida group. It should be noted that, contrary to the claims of western leftists, bin Laden never received funding from the US. He channelled arab oil money specifically and saw US financial and logistical support to be a competitor for influence among the mujehadeen.

Later events in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Iraq were relatively strongly influenced by these events. Today there are groups calling for Islamic revolution in nearly all Muslim nations. It would seem that the Ottomans only delayed the problem, leaving it for the English-speaking invaders. No doubt they are laughing now!

However, those proposing Islamic revolution today are hardly in support of any sort of democratic reforms or representative government, indicating they are merely thugs intent on deposing current thugs-in-charge. Particularly, in the case of Iraq, Zarquawi has released statements in January 2005 stating that his forces would destroy "the evil that is democracy and which is against the Quran", in reference to warnings against Iraqi citizens participating in their first multi-party election since the 1950's.