Western commentators who believe the Islamic State is motivated to abolish the division of Syria and Iraq by the British-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 ignore that the separation, under foreign control, of the two Ottoman dominions was not based on whim. France was awarded Syria and Britain took over Iraq. But Syria and Iraq have been distinct for millennia. This is not a geographical accident: Syria before its Islamic conquest was Byzantine and Christian, and Iraq was under the control of Zoroastrian Persians, the long-standing enemies of the Byzantines. There could be few more significant cultural contrasts. Conquest by the Muslims did not unite them. Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad caliphate, which lasted from 661 to 750 CE; but once it was overthrown, its successor, the Abbasid caliphate, founded Baghdad as its capital and ruled there until the Mongol destruction in 1258. Damascus became the center of Sunnism. Shia history is embedded in Iraq, with its centers at Kufa, where Imam Ali, the last of the four righteous caliphs who succeeded Prophet Muhammad, and was the progenitor of the Shias, moved his caliphate from Medina in 657 CE; Najaf, where Imam Ali is buried, and Kerbala, where Imam Hussein was killed in 680 CE. The Islamic State seeks to obliterate these diverse identities by expelling or killing all Shias and Sufi Sunnis. Some minor caliphates of the past, such as that of the Almohads in Morocco and Muslim Spain from 1147 to 1269, pursued similar goals of violent, fundamentalist purification but the effect of their eruption into the Iberian Peninsula was to weaken the Spanish Muslims. The major caliphates were located on trade routes and benefited from commercial relations with the wider world. They did not call on all the Muslims across the globe to flee their native homes for the aggrandizement of the caliphs. Unfortunately, as noted in the Financial Times of July 7, the Iraqi provinces of Anbar, Nineveh, and Salahuddin, where the Islamic State has been declared, lack productive agriculture and energy assets, with no seaports. Mosul, if it remains in the hands of the caliphate, will likely be cut off from its trade along the Tigris River. These realities, it seems, impel additionally the call by the Islamic State for Sunnis from around the world to rush to the territory the terrorists have usurped. The pretensions of the ultra-Wahhabi Islamic State have been rejected by other radical Islamists, including the hate-mongering Egyptian-born and Qatar-based preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who, cited by Al-Jazeera on July 7, called the new caliphate void in Islamic law. Al-Qaradawi said, A group simply announcing a caliphate is not enough to establish a caliphate. Rachid Ghannouchi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader of Tunisia, was quoted similarly by Al-Jazeera, commenting derisively, Nations do not arise in this ridiculous way. While the Islamic State declares its enmity for Shias, its attempt to establish a theocracy is, paradoxically, closer to the conception of the Islamic Republic of Iran than to that of any Sunni precedent. Nowhere do the Quran or the Islamic traditions specify the form of a political state. Indeed, the early Meccan Muslims took temporary shelter in the Ethiopian Christian kingdom, the ruler of which Muhammad commanded them to obey. Furthermore, just as the Islamic State condemns Shias and Sunni Sufis as apostates, its extreme Wahhabism was deemed to be outside Islam by the Ottoman caliphate and other Islamic theologians. The Ottomans, from 1517 to 1924, were the most powerful caliphate in history; their religious ascendancy was recognized as far away as Southeast Asia. In addition, the Ottoman caliphate, although it fought against the Iranian Shias in wars the Islamic State seeks to evoke, was pluralistic in its social order. Political power was not held by clerics, but distributed through various institutions. A Jewish sociologist, Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923-2010), of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued that the classic Islamic societies, far from being despotic in their governance, embodied Islamic pluralism in which sultans, caliphs, clerics, pious foundations and Sufi orders maintained balance within society. In that panorama, powerful trade and craft guilds, and chivalric bodies of Islamic knights, played similar roles. The Ottoman caliphate rescued the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century and resettled them in the empire, encouraged the diversity of the four schools of Sunni legal interpretation at Mecca, and found a means for accommodation with the Shias who lived in Anatolia and developed into the heterodox Alevi sect. The Islamic State does not invoke the Ottoman caliphate in its propaganda. This omission may represent nothing more than Arabocentrism. But it demonstrates decisively the fake nature of the Islamic State. The world has changed irreversibly, and Muslims need to adapt to change. A caliphate is obsolete and the Islamic State is totalitarian. All conscientious Sunnis, worldwide, need to repudiate them soundly, even by force of arms.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 18:43:51 +0000
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