As anyone who reads the Friday SEN knows, I resumed writing my Earthborn column after the election. I think Im going to start posting them here, too; putting up each weeks after it appears in print. If you have thoughts, let me know.... Heres the first one from July 18: Colliding with the caliphate Hi, again. After taking a couple months off to run for Town Council -- thank you to all who voted for me and otherwise helped -- its a little difficult to pick a topic to write about. So much of whats going on in the world really hasnt changed much, and some of what seems big is smoke and mirrors when seen up close. A good case in point is the ongoing violence in Iraq, into which some of our neocons seem to want to get us more deeply enmeshed (again). Nobody benefits from that except their companies and the medieval-minded Saudi regime, yet they want us to believe its of utmost importance that we fight an equally medieval distortion of Islam called the Islamic State. With maybe a few thousand fighters in pickup trucks, the I.S. is not a threat to US interests, but it makes for a great way to keep the people afraid. I think theres some credibility to the argument it was essentially created by us and the Saudis, either unintentionally (because of our occupation of Iraq and support of the corrupt, inept Maliki regime in Baghdad) or intentionally (to fight the Assad regime in Syria and, by proxy, Iran). In case you havent been following it, the I.S. is the latest incarnation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (aka ISIS) -- a ragtag, divided radical Sunni rebel movement with pretensions to grandeur. A couple weeks ago, after taking over the city of Mosul with almost no combat (its hapless Iraqi garrison simply took off their uniforms and walked out), its leader Abu Bekr al-Baghdadi decided his trouble-making wasnt grand enough. He declared himself Caliph Ibrahim and started claiming the worlds billion-plus Muslims should follow him as Muhammads successor. Guess what -- the vast majority of Muslims ignored him, just like theyve ignored most of the previous self-important twits that claimed the same title over the centuries, and just like most Christians have ignored the periodic pop-ups of fools who claim to be Jesus returned. Like other sane human beings, average Muslims know pretention and lunacy when they see it. Unfortunately, each such pop-up has attracted some support, usually from the same basic kind of people -- people who feel outside interests have undermined their culture, and who see return to the idea of a centralized Muslim government-for-all as a way to fix that. Sometimes, such movements fade quickly; sometimes, they linger for years before being defeated militarily, often after the leaders autocracy alienates his own followers. Chances are very good this caliphate will follow the same path to self-destruction. One of the most recent strong occurrences is one you might actually have heard a bit about. Back in 1966, Charlton Heston starred as British Gen. Charles Gordon in Khartoum, a film about what historians call the Madhist War, in which the real Gordon died in 1885. Typical of Western films, it largely ignored the reasons why a man named Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi (roughly equivalent to the Second Coming in Christian end-times ideology) and set up his own state covering much of the central Nile Valley from 1881-98. He died before it did, and his successor took the title caliph. Ahmad wasnt directly targeting Britain, then the worlds top imperial power; he was formally rebelling against the nominally Ottoman regime in Egypt, which had conquered the Sudan in 1820 with British help and had been brutalizing its people ever since. Over the years, Egypt became a de facto British puppet state, and London formally took it from the Ottomans in 1882. Like Caliph Ibrahim, Ahmad used the periods media (newspapers and mailed letters) to try to drum up support from various Muslim governments, and was ignored. But the Anglo-Egyptian repression gave him a lot of Sudanese support initially. According to Gabriel Warburgs book Islam, Sectarianism and Politics in Sudan since the Mahdiyya, Ahmad based his claim to mahdiship “largely on his reputation as a Sufi shaykh [sheik] of the Sammaniyya order.” Ahmad claimed the Prophet had come to him in a vision to appoint him Mahdi and declare anyone who failed to recognize it “an unbeliever.” He said he was Muhammads successor (the literal meaning of the term caliph), declared his followers to be the Ansar (Muhammads helpers in the early days of Islam), renamed his four key lieutenants after the first four Muslim caliphs, and proclaimed belief in his new rank was now a sixth pillar of Islam and his verdicts were “infallible.” Only later did he cite any religious text to support his claim, after opposing Muslim scholars noted he was “failing to comply with the criteria indicated in the traditions” for the Mahdi (31). In response, Ahmad denounced them as “evil because of their exclusive dependence on written texts and their failure to accept him” (35). Sounds a lot like the current sociopath, doesnt it? Like Ahmad and Ibrahim, most other historical claimants to the caliphate tended to come out of the desert, and some actually succeeded in establishing states that lasted a while. The most famous, obviously, was the first one, the Muslim jihad of the 7th century which took a huge swath of land between Spain and Afghanistan and stayed united until the 10th century. Afterward, regional rulers claimed to be caliph -- sometimes several at once, despite the implication there can only be one, as with concurrent caliphs in Spain, Egypt and Baghdad around 1000. The title lost much of its meaning after the Mongols conquered the Middle East 250 years later, but periodically popped up as a political plaything of various dynasties until formally killed off with the abdication of the last Ottoman figurehead caliph in 1924. A few mostly minor rulers and jihadists have tried to resurrect it since then, but with no real support; the average Muslim doesnt want to go back to the middle ages.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 02:45:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015