The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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After Shabbetai’s death, two radical Shabbatean movements led to the mass conversion of Jews into the dominant faith. In 1683, about 200 families in Ottoman Turkey converted to Islam. This sect of donmeh (“converts”) had their own secret synagogues, but also prayed in the mosques. At its peak, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sect numbered some 115,000 souls.63 It started to disintegrate in the early nineteenth century, when members began to receive a modern, secular education and no longer felt the need for any religion. Some donmeh youth became active in the secularist Young Turk rebellion of 1908. The second of these movements was more sinister and showed the nihilism that can result from a literal translation of myth into practical action. Jacob Frank (1726–91) was initiated into Shabbateanism while visiting the Balkans. When he returned to his native Poland, he formed an underground sect whose members observed Jewish law in public but in secret indulged in forbidden sexual practices. When he was excommunicated in 1756, Frank converted first to Islam (during a visit to Turkey) and then to Catholicism, taking his flock with him.
Frank did not simply cast off the restrictions of the Torah, but positively embraced immorality. In his view, the Torah was not merely outmoded but dangerous and useless. The commandments were the laws of death and must be discarded. Sin and shamelessness were the only ways to achieve redemption and to find God. Frank had come not to build but “only to destroy and annihilate.”64 His followers were engaged in a war against all religious rules: “I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own power.”65 Like many radical secularists today, Frank regarded all religion as harmful. As the movement progressed, Frankists turned to politics, dreaming of a great revolution that would sweep away the past and save the world. They saw the French Revolution as a sign that their vision was true and that God had intervened on their behalf.66
Jews had anticipated many of the postures of the modern period. Their painful brush with the aggressively modernizing society of Europe had led them into secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith. For most Jews, the path to the new world that was developing in the West led through religion, but this religion was very different from the kind of faith we are used to in the twentieth century. It was more mythically based; it did not read the Scriptures literally, and was perfectly prepared to come up with new solutions, some of which seemed shocking in their search for something fresh. To understand the role of religion in premodern society we should turn to the Muslim world, which was undergoing its own upheavals during this early modern period and evolving different forms of spirituality that would continue to influence Muslims well into the modern period.
2. Muslims: The Conservative Spirit
IN 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period. This was also an exciting and innovative time for Muslims; three new Islamic empires were founded during the early sixteenth century: the Ottoman empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa; the Safavid empire in Iran; and the Moghul empire in the Indian subcontinent. Each reflected a different facet of Islamic spirituality. The Moghul empire represented the tolerant, universalist philosophical rationalism known as Falsafah; the Safavid shahs made Shiism, hitherto the faith of an elite minority, the religion of their state; and the Ottoman Turks, who remained fiercely loyal to Sunni Islam, created a polity based on the Shariah, sacred Muslim law.
These three empires were a new departure. All three were early modern institutions, governed systematically and with bureaucratic and rational precision. In its early years, the Ottoman state was far more efficient and powerful than any kingdom in Europe. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), it reached its apogee. Suleiman expanded westward, through Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary, and his advance into Europe was checked only by his failure to take Vienna in 1529. In Safavid Iran, the shahs built roads and caravansaries, rationalized the economy, and put the country in the forefront of international trade. All three empires enjoyed a cultural renewal on a par with the Italian Renaissance. The sixteenth century was the great period of Ottoman architecture, Safavid painting, and the Taj Mahal.
And yet, while these were all modernizing societies, they did not implement radical change. They did not share the revolutionary ethos that would become characteristic of Western culture during the eighteenth century. Instead the three empires expressed what the American scholar Marshall G. S. Hodgson has called “the conservative spirit,” which was the hallmark of all premodern society, including that of Europe.1 Indeed, the empires were the last great political expression of the conservative spirit and, since they were also the most advanced states of the early modern period, they can be said to represent its culmination.2 Today, conservative society is in trouble. Either it has been effectively taken over by the modern Western ethos, or it is undergoing the difficult transition from the conservative to the modern spirit. Much of fundamentalism is a response to this painful transformation. It is, therefore, important to examine the conservative spirit at its peak in these Muslim empires, so that we can understand its appeal and strengths, as well as its inherent limitations.
Until the West introduced a wholly new kind of civilization (based on a constant reinvestment of capital and technical improvement), which did not come into its own until the nineteenth century, all cultures depended economically upon a surplus of agricultural produce. This meant that there was a limit to the expansion and success of any agrarian-based society, since it would eventually outrun its resources and obligations. There was a limit to the amount of capital available for investment. Any innovation that needed large capital outlay was usually ruled out, since people lacked the means that would enable them to tear everything down, retrain their personnel, and start again. No culture before our own could afford the constant innovation we take for