British and Muslim?
by
Abdal Hakim Murad
[Based on
a lecture given to a conference of British converts on September 17 1997]
It is said that the 19th
century French poet Mallarm can only be fully understood by those who are not
French, because they read him more slowly. Converts to Islam, the subject of
this essay, can perhaps claim the same ambiguous advantage in their reading of
the Islamic narrative. Several consequent questions impose themselves: can the
clarity of vision brought by novelty outweigh the absence of a Muslim
upbringing? Is adoption a more culturally fertile condition than simple son
ship? Has the dynamism of Islamic culture after the initial Arab era owed
everything to the energy of recent converts, with their own ethnic genius: the
Persians, and then, pre-eminently, the Turks; and if so, might the appearance
of converts in the West presage a larger revival of the fortunes of an aged and
tired Islamic ummah.
I hope to return to these
interesting queries at a later date. Here, I shall confine myself to the issue
that presents itself most sharply to those British people who, like myself,
have boarded the lifeboat of Islam. The issue is the question of British Muslim
identity.
Who is a British Muslim is
an easy question: it is anyone who follows Islam and holds a U.K. passport.
This is at once the easiest and probably the only workable definition. The more
teasing question, which I wish to raise in this article, is: what is a British
Muslim? The query raises two problems related to belonging. What does it mean
to be a British person who belongs to Islam? And, what does it mean to be a
Muslim person who belongs to Britain? How do we map the overlap zone in a way
that makes sense, and is legitimate, in terms of the co-ordinates of both of
these terms?
Clearly, by virtue of the
first definition, the British Muslim population, all 1.5 million of it, divides
into three groups. Firstly, and least problematically, there are men and women
whose cultural formation was not British, but who have migrated to this
country. This essay will not touch centrally on their own particular struggle
for self-definition, which is quite different to that addressed by converts.
Secondly, there are the
children of the first group, and occasionally now their grandchildren. These
people are usually seen to be torn between two worlds, but in reality, the
British world has shaped their souls far more profoundly then they often
recognise. Modern schooling is designed for a culture that puts an increasing
share of acculturation and upbringing, as opposed to the simple inculcation of
facts, on the shoulders of schoolteachers rather than of parents. Muslims who
have moved to this country have done so at precisely the time when British
education is also going into the business of parenting; most Muslim parents do
not recognise the fact, but Muslim children in this country always have a third
parent: the Education Secretary. Even those second-generation Muslims here who
claim to have angrily rejected Britishness are in fact doing so in terms of
types of radicalism, which are deeply influenced by Western styles of dissent.
Most noticeably, they locate their radicalism not primarily in a spiritual, but
in social and political rejection of the oppressive order around them. Their
unsettled and agitated mood is not always congenial to the recent convert, who
may, despite the cultural distance, feel more comfortable with the first rather
than the second generation of migrants, preferring their God-centred religion
to what is often the troubled, identity-seeking Islam of the young.
Thirdly, we have the
smallest group of all: the convert or so-called revert community. This group is
highly disparate, and it is not clear that one can make any meaningful
generalisations about it at all. Almost by definition, a British person who is
guided to Islam is an eccentric of some kind: one of the virtues, perhaps, of
the British is that eccentrics have always been nurtured or at least more or
less tolerated here. But the overall pattern is confusing. One can offer
certain sociological generalisations about British people who become Buddhists,
or evangelical Christians, or Marxists. But the present writer's experience
with new Muslims is that no discernable patterns exist which might shed light
on the routes by which people awaken to the truth of Islam. This failure to
discern patterns can only be described as lamentable, for were we to discern
such patterns, they could immediately be exploited for d’awah purposes. The
most we can say is that a clear majority of converts to Islam in Britain are
from Catholic rather than Protestant or Jewish backgrounds. Within this group,
in my experience the only clergy that convert are Jesuits; I am not aware of a
single member of another religious order that has become Muslim.
Other than this very general
and not terribly helpful observation, few patterns are discernable, and our
missionary efforts, never very coordinated, flounder accordingly.
But whatever the processes,
and we may be wise to accept traditional invocations of divine providence and
guidance, which transcend and make irrelevant any sociological pattern-finding,
this third group among British Muslims confronts certain sharp problems of
self-definition. Egyptian, or Indonesian, or Indian Muslims becoming British do
so slowly, perhaps over two or three generations. The identity problems can be
sharp: in particular, there can be painful challenges to the hopes and
expectations of parents. But the process is gentle in comparison with the
abrupt jolt, which typically welcomes the convert. The signposts of the
universe are not adjusted slowly, but all at once.
The initial and quite
understandable response of many newcomers is to become an absolutist.
Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the
circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its
simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen
in satisfying black and white terms of Them versus Us, good against evil.
This mindset is sometimes
called convertitis. It is a common illness, which can make those who have
caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears
off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of
excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a
necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual
significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to
faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial
excitement engendered by their conversion.
Most new Muslims, however,
soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or
intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside
Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those
individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to
wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the
perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of specialness
and superiority.
But actions are by
intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam
Abdallah Quilliam in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who
convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly
guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual
trouble. Just as the namaz [salaat] prayer is invisibly invalidated if the
niyya [intention] at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work
for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere questing for God's
good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in
our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the
right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to
start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to
bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed,
admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman -
none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of
Allah's grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are
only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to
look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic
Sunnahh. Renew your iman, a celebrated hadith enjoins.
So what are we?
Statistically, perhaps fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the
plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience,
rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity,
poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we
meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we
treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will
not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our
sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back
into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no
argument against us at the Resurrection?
More generally, what is our
view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions
of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more
prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly
or privately disown?
We can, of course, take the
easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the
mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so
easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to
maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the
Sunnah. Wa sahibhuma fi dunya m'arufan. Keep company with them both in
the world in keeping with good custom, says the Qur'an to converts who have
unbelieving parents. And the Sunnah explains that non-Muslim parents have
significant rights over their Muslim children.
But more significantly even
than this, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real
world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim
society. But for this, there would be no effective d’awah. People do not hear
the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers
Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a
wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of
Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social
contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a
prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.
There is nothing remotely
new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions
connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set
up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope
that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business
with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the
Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis,
down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably
and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.
If this is clear, then my
initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What manner
of creature is he, or she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other
British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or
Hindu: all these are recognised categories and a certain community of expected
response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The
Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.
My own belief is that the
future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by
our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for
converts, but which many of whose dimensions will come to apply also to
second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask
themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.
To frame a response, I think
it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic
history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam
usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as
opportunities for d’awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success
stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the
Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americas were Christianised.
Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness, at the hands of Sufis and
merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans,
the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the
Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be
impossible to find.
Perhaps no less
extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant:
Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring
Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New
World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed
in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and
indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion
that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam
is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist
provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A
mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles in key respects the patterns,
now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.
No less remarkable is the
ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local,
pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation.
In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Koranic doctrine of
Universal Apostleship; as the Koran says:
To every nation there has been sent a guide.
This conflicts sharply with
the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical
intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on
Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as
demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been
able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in
the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every
nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the
Other. Hence, for instance, we find popular Muslim poets in India, such as
Sayid Sultan, writing poems about Krishna as a Prophet. There is no final
theological proof that he was one, but the assumption is nonetheless not in
violation of the Koran.
Even among Muslim ulema, who
had not been to India, we find interestingly positive appraisals of Hinduism.
For instance, the great Baghdad theologian al-Shahrastani, in his Book of
Religions and Sects, had access to enough reliable information about India to
develop a very sophisticated theological reaction to Indian religion. He
accepts that the higher forms of Hinduism are not polytheistic. He notes that
that although the Hindus have no notion of prophecy, they do have what he calls
ashab al-ruhaniyat: quasi-divine beings who call mankind to love the Real and
to practice the virtues. He names Vishnu and Shiva as examples, and speaks
positively of them. He focuses particularly on the veneration of celestial
bodies: the sun, the moon, and the planets. The reason why he fixes on these
practices is that they seem to situate Hinduism within a recognisably Koranic
paradigm. The Koran mentions quite favourably a group known as the Sabeans, who
were by the second century identified with various star-worshipping but still
vaguely monotheistic sects in Mesopotamia. The Sabeans are tolerated in Islamic
law, although they are less privileged than the Jews and Christians, a position
reflected in the ruling in Shari’ah that a Muslim may not marry their women or
eat their meat.
Shahrastani explicitly
assimilates many Hindus to this category of Sabeans. They are to be tolerated
as believers in One God; and will only be punished by God if, having been
properly exposed to Islam, they reject it.
Another example is supplied
by the great Muslim epic in China. Those who believe that Muslim communities
can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with
majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the
leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for
instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of
Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China's four
religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading
admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.
In China, mosques look very
like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall
without idols, and the calligraphy is Koranic. In some of the most beautiful,
you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a
tablet:
Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages
arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage
of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though
separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.
In these examples from India
and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as
the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn:
Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to
all mankind.
It is not that the Koranic
worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In
fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new
worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some
things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara'li
man qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under
certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not
demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also
recognises the authority of urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom
is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction,
if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the
administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife
complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi [judge]
will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social
group, and adjudge accordingly.
All of these historical
observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a
universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also
makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The
traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different
cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns
set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud,
rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local
mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.
This point is obvious to anyone who
has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only
because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam
because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam
radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam
seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures
intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian
solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of
calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the
only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic
one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable.
That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.
These
young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are
either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For
them, the grace and rahma of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all
but a tiny fraction of the Ummah. These people are the elect; and all
disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.
We cannot
hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our
scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that,
given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos
in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their
shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic
problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.
Islam is,
and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern
culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position
as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the
protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other
regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only
legitimate Islamic ideal. So far, however, we have been too busy restating the
initial question with which this chapter opened, and defending its legitimacy,
to propose any substantive answer. It is time now to attempt a brief sketch of what
I construe our cultural position and prospects to be.
As I have
tried to emphasise, Islam's presence in Britain is not an Islamic problem.
Islam is universal, and can operate everywhere. It is not an Islamic problem,
but it may be a British problem. Europe, alone among the continents, does not
have a longstanding tradition of plurality. In medieval Asia or Africa, in
China or the Songhai Empire, or Egypt, or almost everywhere, one could usually
practice one's own religion in peace, whatever it happened to be. Only in
Europe was there a consistent policy of enforcing religious uniformity. The
reason for this lay of course in the Church's theology: unless you had some
part in Christ's redemptive sacrifice, you were in the grip of original sin,
and hence were an instrument of the devil. Medieval Catholics were even
expected to believe that unbaptised infants would be tormented in Hell forever.
Given that absolute view, it was only natural that Europe constantly strove for
religious uniformity.
Britain,
as part of the European world, has traditionally suffered the same totalitarian
entailments in its history. Hence, although it has always been possible to be a
Christian in a Muslim country, it was against the law to be a Muslim in Britain
until 1812, with the passage through parliament of the Trinitarian Act.
Nonetheless, three centuries before that, with Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy,
England cut itself off from formal submission to Vatican doctrines; and from
that time a type of religious diversity has been, within severe constraints, at
least a possibility. In fact, Britain was the first major European country to
break with the medieval European tradition of absolute religious conformity.
Perhaps it is because of this fact that exclusivist and xenophobic political
manifestations are less common in Britain today than in most Continental
countries. The National Front is a lunatic fringe party in the U.K., whereas
its equivalents regularly scoop twenty percent of the votes in some regions of
France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Austria.
When
England threw off the Papist yoke, opportunities arose for questioning ancient
errors of understanding, which had been introduced into Christianity by the
Church Fathers. These opportunities, however, were not properly grasped. The
English Reformation was an attempt not to extirpate bid'ah in the Muslim sense,
and return to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been distorted by
the Church on the basis of the Hellenising agendas of the anonymous gospel
authors, but to reform the doctrines and liturgy of the medieval church. Hence
the reformers did not attempt to return to the simple monotheistic worship of
the Apostles, but, in the Book of Common Prayer published in 1549, created a
new vernacular liturgy based largely on medieval trinitarian and incarnationist
precedents.
This
English willingness to challenge tradition, however, was to have immense
repercussions. Despite the lack of awareness of the instability of the gospel
texts, as revealed by 20th century scholarship, for the first time Europeans,
and notably Britons, were questioning the innovations of the Church
magisterium, and attempting to grope back towards the faith revealed by God to
His prophet Jesus, upon whom be peace.
One
repercussion of the Reformation on our ancestors was the revival of a mystical
tradition, whose most obvious manifestation was the Cambridge Platonists.
English mysticism has usually been of a moderate type: one thinks of the Cloud
of Unknowing, or Julian of Norwich. Extreme feats of asceticism, or extravagant
and obsessive preoccupations with visions and miraculous happenings, have never
been part of the English style of spirituality. The Cambridge Platonists drew
on this moderate mysticism, but insisted that mystical inspiration must work
hand in hand with rational judgement, and with sound doctrine derived from the
Scriptures. This position, which influenced John Locke in particular, again
evinces the English style of religion: profound but not verbose, rational but
not rationalistic, and scriptural but not literalistic.
This very
English approach to religion in due course led to serious questions being asked
about the centrepiece of medieval Christian dogma: the Trinity. Milton, and
later John Locke himself, are known to have held discreetly Unitarian beliefs,
having been unable to find convincing justification for trinitarian and
incarnationist views in the Scriptures. Locke's close friend Newton was even
more frank, writing of the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the
Trinity ... Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part, I can
make none.
The
period around the Civil War threw up many Englishmen who were likewise
concerned about the distortion of the teachings of Jesus by the Church; and the
term Unitarian comes into being sometime during this period. But side by side
with this tradition of dissent, and in often obscure ways interacting with it,
went an even more revolutionary change: improved information about the Blessed
Prophet of Islam.
The
medievals chose to remain in ignorance about Islam. For them, Muslims were
summah culpabilis: the sum of everything blameworthy. Knights from Britain had
been at the forefront of the Crusades. The sack of the Muslim city of Lisbon in
1147 during which perhaps 150,000 Muslims were massacred, was largely the work
of soldiers from Norfolk and Suffolk. But the same quest for simplicity and
honesty which made the Reformation possible, also made of England the first
country in Europe where medieval images of Islam could be challenged.
To an
extent, which we cannot now determine, largely because an excess of sympathy
with either Islam or Unitarianism could result in the dissenter being hung,
drawn and quartered, new perspectives on Islam informed and reinforced the
discreet Unitarian movement. This is implied by the title of Humphrey
Prideaux's hate-filled book of 1697, which he called, The true nature of
Imposture, fully displayed in the life of Mahomet ... offered to the
consideration of the Deists of the present age.
Prideaux
is clearly implying that some radical Dissenters were being drawn towards
Islam, and he is writing his polemic to hold back that tide. But a far clearer
insight into this process is supplied by another author, a certain Henry
Stubbe.
Stubbe is
the first European Christian to write favourably of Islam. In fact, he writes
so favourably that we can only conclude that he had thrown off the heritage of
Christianity, and privately adopted it. He was educated at Westminster and
Oxford, and worked as a physician in Warwick, and as personal physician to King
James. His biographer Anthony Wood described him as the most noted person of
his age that these late times have produced. He died in 1676, after being
accused of heresy, and spending some time in prison.
Stubbe
was a child of the Civil War, and the spiritual chaos of the Interregnum
prompted him to question the official tenets of his inherited Anglicanism. He
was also a scholar, who had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and was fully
conversant with the new critical scholarship on the Bible. Putting all these
gifts together, and thanks to his friendship with Pococke, the Laudian
Professor of Arabic in Oxford, he wrote a book, which for the nineteenth
century would have been advanced, but which for the seventeenth is positively
astounding. Just the title alone gives some hint of this: An Account of the
Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, and a Vindication of him and his Religion
from the Calumnies of the Christians.
The book
begins with a chapter demonstrating how the message of Jesus Christ has been
perverted by the Church. He stresses the fact that Jesus, upon him be peace,
had remained faithful to the Mosaic Law, and would have been horrified by the
idea that later generations might use his name to justify the eating of pork,
for instance. He says, of the Disciples:
They did never believe Christ to be the natural Son of God, by eternal
Generation, or any tenet depending thereon, or prayed unto him, or believed the
Holy Ghost, or the Trinity of persons in one Deity ... The whole constitution
of the primitive Church Government relates to the Jewish Synagogue, not to the
Hierarchy. The presbyters were not Priests, but Laymen set apart to their
office by imposition of hands . . . Nor was the name of Priest then ever heard
of. He concludes that the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and
the Eucharist, are pagan rituals introduced into Christianity several decades
after Christ.
Stubbe then provides a
chapter on a brief History of Arabia and the Saracens, followed by four on the
Prophet. Chapter Eight is a vindication of the Prophet; chapter 9 is a
vindication of Islam, and chapter 10 explains the moral necessity of the
doctrine of Jihad.
His
polemical intentions throughout are clear: he constantly shows Islam to be a
purer and more rational form of religion than Christianity. Here is Stubbe, for
instance, summahrising the Prophet's teaching:
This is the sum of Mahometan Religion, on the one hand not clogging Men's
Faith with the necessity of believing a number of abstruse notions which they
cannot comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of Reason and
common Sense; nor on the other hand loading them with the performance of many
troublesome, expensive and superstitious Ceremonies, yet enjoining a due
observance of Religious Worship, as the surest Method to keep Men in the bounds
of their Duty both to God and Man.
And a little further on he
adds:
Let us now lay aside our prejudices ... Their Articles of Faith are few
and plain, whereby they are preserved from Schisms and Heresies, for although
they have great diversity of opinions in the explication of their Law, yet,
agreeing in the fundamentals, their differences in opinion do not reach to that
breach of Charity so common among the Christians, who thereby become a scandal
to all other Religions in the world. Their Notions of God are great and noble,
their opinions of the Future State are consonant to those of the Jews and
Christians. As to the moral part of their Religion . . . we shall see that it
is not inferior to that of the Christians. And lastly, their religious Duties
are plainly laid down, which is the cause that they are duly observed, and are
in themselves very rational.
He allocates an entire
chapter to show the moral significance of the Jihad. This chapter is perhaps
the most remarkable in the entire book, since it had long been a Christian ide
fixe that Islam could only spread by the sword. He goes to some length, quoting
travellers to the Ottoman Empire, to show that Christian minorities are usually
protected better under Muslim rule than under the rule of their fellow
Christians. He observes, for instance:
It is manifest that the Mahometans did propagate their Empire, but not
their Religion, by force of arms . . . Christians and other Religions might
peaceably subsist under their Protection . . . it is an assured truth, that the
vulgar Greeks live in a better Condition under the Turk at present then they
did under their own Emperors, when there were perpetual murders practised on
their Princes, and tyranny over the People; but they are now secure from Injury
if they pay their Taxes. And it is indeed more the Interest of the Princes
& Nobles, than of the People, which at present keeps all Europe from
submitting to the Turks.
Having sung Islam's praises
in these terms, Stubbe could hardly expect to publish his book. He published
several others, but this one languished discreetly in manuscript form until
1911, when a group of Ottoman Muslims in London rescued it from obscurity and
published it.
At least six manuscripts
did, however, circulate in a more or less clandestine fashion. No fewer than
three of them were preserved in the private library of the Revd John Disney,
who at the beginning of the 19th century shocked the established church by
publicly converting to Unitarianism. Some historians have suggested also that
Gibbon was familiar with the work. For instance, Stubbe observes:
When Christianity became generally received, it introduced with it a
general inundation of Barbarism and Ignorance, which over-run all places where
it prevailed.
And Gibbon, several decades
later, closes his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the words:
I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. Gibbon himself
was known for his private scepticism about Trinitarian dogma.
Stubbe's book, as I have said, is the work of a brave pioneer. But it is also a considered reflection upon the religious instabilities of the interregnum period, which generated it. It shows a sensitive and immensely cultivated English mind shaking off the complications of old dogma, using modern scholarship to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and of the Prophet Muhammad. Instead of something exotic, we see here a very English kind of religion expressing itself. Stubbe is spiritual, but not superstitious. He likes simplicity: the blank, Puritan wall of the mosque rather than the elaborate stone metaphors of Catholicism or of the dizzyingly high Anglicanism of Charles. He values wholesome morality that is pragmatic rather than irresponsibly idealistic: so he commends polygamy, and shows the moral dangers of legally imposed monogamy. He regards with distaste traditional Christian strictures on the flesh - a century beforehand, Englishmen had rejected the arguments for a celibate clergy and had firmly quashed monkery as both unnatural and parasitic. For Stubbe, the Prophet's approach was in accord with nature: the love of woman is as natural as the love of God. The Prophet, like the great Hebrew patriarchs, showed that sacred and profane love can and indeed must go together.
A generation earlier, John Donne
had suffered passions for both woman and for God; and found his religion
finally unable to reconcile the two. His early poems are among some of the most
touching, and also sensual, love poems in the English language. Later, as Dean
of St Paul's, he realised that he must renounce the flesh as the instrument of
the Fall and the perpetrator of original sin. Hence his agonising, tragic
spiritual career, renouncing the flesh to serve God, composing poems wrapped in
his winding sheet: Donne's great Muslim soul caught in the flawed dialectic of
a theology that regarded spirit and body as eternally at war.
Stubbe is
also drawing on a particularly English pragmatism in his treatment of the
Jihad. Far from regarding the Islamic institution of the just war as a
reproach, he extols it, contrasting it with what he regarded as the insipid and
irresponsible pacifism of the unknown New Testament authors. Stubbe is an
English gentleman of a generation that had known war, and knew that there are
some injustices in the world that cannot be dissolved through passive
suffering, through turning the other cheek. He had sided with Parliament during
the civil war, holding, with Cromwell, that the righteous man may sometimes
justly bear the burden of the sword. An admirer of Cromwell, he became an
admirer of the Prophet. For him, the Prophet was not a foreign, exotic figure:
his genial vision of human life under God exactly conformed to what a civilised
Englishman of the seventeenth century thought necessary and proper. In Stubbe's
work, in other words, we find a vindication of Muhammad as an English prophet.
There is
more that can be said about the convergence of Islamic moderation and good
sense with the English temper. Tragically, the rise of Dissent in England
coincided also with the rise of nationalism and xenophobia, which reached its
intoxicating heights with the empire of Queen Victoria and the Edwardians.
Under such Anglocentric and frankly racist banners, sympathy with Islam became
once more a receding possibility. But there were exceptions. Perhaps the most
celebrated was that most English of intellectuals, Carlyle. Carlyle, like
Stubbe two centuries before, was a free spirit, unhampered either by obsessions
with Trinity, or modern delusions about the ability of material progress to
secure human happiness.
On May
the 8th 1840, in a stuffy lecture room in Portman Square, London's intellectual
elite were hearing Carlyle speak about the Prophet. They had anticipated the
usual invective; and they were astonished to watch him holding up the Prophet
as a heroic, adventurous figure, whose sacrifices had brought a natural theism
to his people, and had much to teach a materialistic Victorian England. The
climax came when the lecturer cried:
Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's world
to a dead brute Steam-engine . . . if you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they,
the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I
will answer, it is not Mahomet.
Stung to the quick, John
Stuart Mill leaped to his feet, and cried out:
No!
Carlyle was lecturing on The Hero
as Prophet; and again we see the English realism towards the use of force,
which had made possible the creation of the British Empire, inspiring a more
positive appreciation of the Prophet of Islam. The great Christian blindness
towards Islam has always been the belief that there can be only one type of
perfection, namely the pacifist Jesus, who taught men to turn the other cheek,
and who said, Resist not him that is evil. For minds nurtured on such an image,
the hero-Prophet is a difficult figure to comprehend. In the Far East, of
course, there is no such mental block. Spirituality and the cultivation of the
martial arts there went hand in hand. The love of women was also seen as a
necessary part of this ethos. The samurai tradition in particular, of the
righteous swordsman, a meditator who was also a great lover of women, ensures
that a Japanese, for instance, will have few difficulties with the specific
genius and greatness of the Prophet of Islam. But for Christians, there is no
such model, although knightly ethics in the early Middle Ages, learned from
Muslims in Spain and Palestine, dimly suggested it. But even for the Crusader
knights, the ideal of celibacy was often accepted: the Knights Templar, for
instance, a monastic warrior order, who were influenced enough by Islam to
comprehend the importance of a sacred warriorhood, but who never quite got the
point about celibacy.
With Carlyle, the Hero as Prophet,
or the Prophet as Hero, reveals itself as a credible type for the English mind.
And Carlyle’s insistence on the moral exaltation of the Prophet who transcended
pacifism to take up arms to fight for his people was understood by at least one
later British writer: George Bernard Shaw. For Shaw, as for Carlyle, there was
no doubt about the correct answer to Hamlet's question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a
sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
Edmund
Burke had already pointed out that for evil to triumph, it is enough that good
men do nothing. Shaw, like Carlyle, recognised that this principle calls into
question the Gospel ethic of passivity in the face of suffering and injustice.
Let me read to you a few words from Hesketh Pearson's biography of the
generally post-Christian Shaw:
For many years (this was 1927), Shaw had been meditating a play on a
prophet. The militant saint was a type more congenial to his nature than any
other, a type he thoroughly sympathised with and could therefore portray with
unfailing insight. In all history the one person who exactly answered his
requirements, who would have made the perfect Shavian hero, was Mahomet.
In his diary for 1913, Shaw
himself wrote:
I had long desired to dramatise the life of Mahomet. But the possibility
of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador - or the fear of it - causing the Lord
Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play, deterred me. And so, as Pearson
records, he wrote Saint Joan instead.
Perhaps
we can close this brief parenthetic summahry of the convergence between British
martial theory and traditions and Islam, with a final insight; this time
offered by Colin Morris, former head of the BBC in Northern Ireland:
The false prophet is a moralist, he tells the world how things ought to
be; the real prophet is a realist, he tells the world how things really are.
Let us try to sum up the above
arguments. Firstly, Islam is a universal religion. Despite its origins in 7th
century Arabia, it works everywhere, and this is itself a sign of its
miraculous and divine origin. Secondly, the British Isles have for several
hundred years been the home of individuals whose religious and moral temper is
very close to that of Islam. To move from Christianity to Islam is hence, for
an English man or woman, not the giant leap that outsiders might assume. It is,
rather, simply the logical next step in the epic story of our people.
Christianity, formerly a Greek mystery religion advocating a moral code against
the natural law, is in fact foreign to our national temperament. It is an
exotic creed, and it is now fatally compromised by its positive view of secular
modernity. Islam, once we have become familiar with it, and settled into it
comfortably, is the most suitable faith for the British. Its values are our
values. Its moderate, undemonstrative style of piety, still waters running
deep; its insistence on modesty and a certain reserve, and its insistence on
common sense and on pragmatism, combine to furnish the most natural and easy
religious option for our people.
I should close by saying that
nothing in what I have said is intended in a jingoistic sense. That the British
have a convergence with Islam is to the credit of our people, certainly. But I
am not commending any smug ethnocentrism; precisely because Islam itself came
to abolish a tribal mentality. Islam is the true consanguinity of believers in
the One True God, the common bond of those who seek to remain focussed on the
divine Source of our being in this diffuse, ignorant and tragic age. But it is
generous and inclusive. It allows us to celebrate our particularity, the genius
of our heritage; within, rather than in tension with, the greater and more
lasting fellowship of faith.
[Currently,
he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied at the
universities of Cambridge and al-Azhar, Egypt, and has also translated a number
of Islamic works including Imam al-Bayhaqi's The Seventy Seven Branches of
Faith (Quilliam Press, 1992).]
