Changing Ottoman Empire, TE Lawrence, Ba'ath Party, Zionism & Israel

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell

This book is very informative in an interesting way, however I'm getting a bit bored of rehashing what I read. But I've come this far and have only two chapters left -- yeehaw!  I think I will list things in a different way on this post.

This chapter talked about:

1. How the Ottoman Empire went from a tolerant society to a police state with the rise of nationalism.  Armenians were mentioned specifically as they were uprooted from their land and many of them murdered.

2.  T.E. Lawrence and how he thought the Arabs needed assistance as together they fought for the "restoration of Arab glory."

Lawrence of Arabia

3. How the Arabs and Lawrence used each other to accomplish goals.  How the British made deals with three different groups (between Sharif Husayn and Henry McMahon regarding the formation of an Arab state, with the French in the Sykes-Picot agreement and with the Zionists regarding the land of Palestine) and while all may be fair in love and war, it doesn't mean playing people against each other and making false promises won't cause hurt feelings. 

4. How the British lied to the Arabs concerning Syria and it lead eventually to a mandate system (where the colonists ruled for a time until the natives would be granted independence)

5. How Zionism was a nationalistic movement in a period when the world was very nationalistic. In that regard, it was nothing special.  However it differed from most by making claim to a land that hadn't been occupied by a majority of Jews for nearly two thousand years.  

Zionism was a socialistic group with their Judaism based on ethnic, rather than religious, ties

6. "In England, support for Zionism stemmed from the same source as support for Arab independence. Most of the men who governed the British Empire had gone to schools whose curriculum was heavily influenced by both the Bible and the classics of Rome and Greece. The result was a deep affinity for the Holy Land,...shame and guilt over the ill treatment that Jews had suffered throughout most of the medieval and early modern period -- and there was also anti-Semitism, which led members of the British ruling class to prefer the idea of Jews living somewhere else."  (pg. 251)

7.  Michel Aflaq, a Christian Arab helped form the Arab nationalistic Ba'ath party which was, by the way, corrupted as Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party was very different from the one Aflaq created.  Aflaq used Islam as the glue for holding Arabs together. Although a Christian, he believed Arabs of all faiths should revere Muhammad as a hero and live together in coexistence.

Aflaq called Islam 'the most precious element of Arabism'

8.  How the creation of Israel was such a humiliation to Arabs and 1948 became an end rather than a beginning.  Many Jews were expelled from Arab lands so the peaceful coexistence of centuries past ended with the creation of the Zionist State.


Thoughts?


Only one chapter left - hang in there!  :-P

Westerners for Islam; Blunt's Thoughts on Imperialism

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell

Yesterday I introduced you to a Muslim reformer Muhammad Abduh. Since there was more to share from that chapter, I broke those notes into two parts. Here is the second part.


Abduh's friend in the Western world was Wilfrid Blunt, an Englishman "who devoted his life to fighting against imperialism and to defending Islam to a skeptical English public."  Although he was in the ruling class, he was out of the mainstream.  He and his wife were not content in England so they lived ten years riding their horses in parts of Africa and Arabia.  Apparently they loved hot, dry desert rather than cool, wet England!  Blunt found the Bedouin traits the most democratic and where "'liberty, equality, and fraternity are more than a name.'"   He insisted that Europeans were "culturally deficient" to the Arabs not the other way around.

Lady Anne Blunt

Blunt argued against England's new interventionist policy which changed from the former where you intervened only when absolutely necessary to the new:  intervening everywhere!  Blunt "believed that imperialism was not just wreaking havoc on the globe but destroying England and its cherished liberalism."  If a country "used brute force to control the destiny of others [soon it would] be incapable of nurturing the values of democracy and liberty in its own citizens."  (pg. 233)

I found the brief account of William Marmaduke Pickthall very interesting. He was another one who fell in love with all things desert/Arab/Muslim when he traveled to the northern end of the Suez Canal in order to learn Arabic.  While reading Arabian Nights in Arabic, he was struck with the "'joyousness of that life compared with anything [he] had seen in Europe'" despite the "'decay and poverty'" of the Near Eastern world. (pg. 235)

William Marmaduke Pickthall converted to Islam

A few last things from this chapter:

1.  By the end of the 19th century, "Europeans had exported not only technology but ideas, and the belief in progress had taken root almost everywhere."

2.  Abduh believed "the notion of 'progress' ... was embedded in [the culture of the Arab/Muslim world]," and "one of the strengths of classical Muslim states was their ability to evolve."  (pg. 239)

3.  The British were occupying Egypt at this time and often treated the natives like children.  Karabell says the Egyptians were often "repelled by these patronizing attitudes. ... Who were the British, they mused, to lecture us about religious tolerance and liberty when Copts, Muslims, and Jews had lived side by side for fourteen hundred years...?  Who were they to tell Egypt about civilization when the inhabitants of the Nile Valley had created a society thousands of years before the English had even learned to write?  [Hahahahahaha! I thought that was so funny!] Admiration for what Europe could offer sat side by side with indignation about what Europeans often did offer."  (pg. 241)


The chapter ends with the author sharing the prevailing attitude of both the European and Muslim worlds. For Europe, "that war and disease would disappear in the twentieth century," and for the Muslim, "that the twentieth century would see an end to imperialism and the revival of Muslim societies." 

How well do you think these dreams were realized in the 20th century?


Thoughts?

Muslim Reformers vs. European Attitudes

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell

This chapter - The Age of Reform - begins with the expansion of Western influence into Muslim lands where "there were some who enthusiastically embraced the mores and manners of the West, and others who resisted at all costs."  Some Muslims traveled abroad to study "the fundamentals of Western science and philosophy, and returned home to lead a new wave of reform" while others "retreated more deeply into the comfortable lassitude of the past, clinging to dreams that the West would retreat as surely as the Crusaders had left Palestine centuries before."  (pg. 223)

The author discussed a couple Muslim reformers who thought Islam was compatible with science and reason and, therefore, no need existed to throw out religious beliefs in the name of progress such as was the trend in Europe.  Muhammad Abduh and his teacher Jamal al-Din al-Afghani were mentioned as two men who tried to reform Muslim society.  Afghani debated Western intellectuals such as Ernest Renan who "believed that all religions were antithetical to innovation, and that religion stood in the way of human progress."  (226)  A former seminary student, Renan was "fluent in Hebrew, versed in the Quran and had devoted years to the study of the Orient. He admired the Persians, but had little respect for what Arabs had wrought over the centuries." He thought Persians had done better than Arabs "because they were less in thrall to orthodox Islam."  Religion "resting on the infinite power of God the creator" did not nurture any scientific spirit which was based on "the limitless capacity of human reason and intellect."

What do you think? Is Renan correct in saying that religion and science were at odds?  Can one only have religion or science and not both? Does religion stand in the way of progress by default or perhaps only when it is abused?  Do you think religions have purpose in that they give standards of what is right and wrong or does even this naturally evolve from the innate goodness of people?

Afghani countered that Islam was "unique in its embrace of reason and its warmth toward science."  He gave examples of the great Islamic philosophers who were often mystics as well.  "They used reason, and they were also men of faith, who submitted to the mystery and power of God even as they employed logic to probe the meaning of his creation."  (pg. 227)

Muhammad Abduh agreed. He believed the first Muslims - the Salaf - "had prospered because they combined reason with faith."  They were "ecumenical and tolerant" just as Abduh sought to make Egyptian society. He saw how Muslims, Jews and Christians all benefited from their history of coexistence and he desired to make Egypt like those glorious days.   He would be appalled with how others disagreed and tried to emulate the Salaf as a "tight-knit community of believers whose strength lay in the rejection of the message given to the People of the Book and their willingness to silence any who challenged the word of the Quran and the hadith."  Abduh thought the Quran was opened to being interpreted in light of current issues rather than it being stuck with one interpretation good for all times no matter how societies progressed.

Abduh argued that ignorance was a greater threat than the West and he sought to take Egypt out of this "backwardness."  "He reserved his most stringent criticisms not for the conquerors but for the failings in his own society that made it unable to resist Western encroachment."  (pg. 230)

Thoughts?

Reason Over Religion; Restructuring Government and Divided Loyalties

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell

I promise y'all one of these days I *will* be done with this book!  It's interesting, but just lots of stuff for me to note.  Sorry if it bores you. Not many chapters left!  :-)

The French Revolution and its influence on Muslim lands were topics of this chapter. Karabell shared how Napoleon and his army went into Egypt and how disgusted the Egyptians were with their uncouth behavior.  The Egyptians thought of these French aggressors as a Christian army although Napoleon, with his love of reason and science and hatred for religion especially the Catholic church, would not have agreed in the slightest.  This was a time in history where answering to king and God was cast aside as progress was measured by man's ability to shed primitive forces, purge past impurities (such as organized religion) and obtain the highest levels of civilization based on inquiry, reason and science.  Islam wasn't being picked on by Napoleon because it was Islam, but simply because it was religion - another faith to be shed in the eyes of these secularists.

Next the author discussed Muhammad Ali an Albanian guy on a quest to modernize Egypt.  He got rid of the Mamelukes who were controlling Egypt by inviting them to a banquet, sealing the doors and ordering his soldiers to kill them while they ate.  Karabell says all but one Mameluke was killed and Muhammad Ali emerged as the sole ruler answerable only to the sultan.  However he and the sultan had their clashes, which at one point lead to European states having to help the Ottoman sultan send Ali back to Egypt.

Muhammad Ali sent Egyptians to the Western world for education.  He wanted them "to take what they could from Europe and apply it to the betterment of Egypt."  Instead of separating faith from progress Ali and his followers tried to implement a model where faith was compatible with progress. They took the parts of the European model that they liked and skipped the ones that were not favorable to them.

About European expansion the author says it "combined a passion for progress with pure power politics. The utopian impulse to create a better world, where human reason and ingenuity would invent technologies to make hunger, war, and disease obsolete, walked hand in hand with the ancient human desire to conquer and control." (pg. 216)

Also in this chapter the author tells how the Ottomans tried to restructure their government by copying the Europeans with their strong central governments.  The Ottomans saw how this worked favorably in Europe with the Europeans' advances in technology and army power. So they gave all people basically the same rights and privileges which was good, however, these reforms made people start seeing themselves as separate millet community groups instead of a united empire.  It's like they saw themselves as Catholics, Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Greek Orthodox instead of Ottomans and they became loyal to their own groups more than they were loyal to the empire.  

This section reminded me of the United States in the sense that we have fifty states within the country.  In reading about Civil War history, I was always struck with how the Southerners fought for states' rights over the strong central government telling them what to do from hundreds of miles away.  In fact when General Robert E. Lee had to choose between staying with the United States army or fighting with the South, he said he could not fight against his state of Virginia and led Confederate troops.  I believe for many back then loyalty to and connection with the state rather than the nation was of more importance. Of course we know states' rights suffered a blow when the North defeated the Confederates and the southern states were forced back into the Union.  I'm guessing that these Ottomans seeing themselves as "states" first lead to the empire's demise just as southern states seeing themselves as "individuals" led to war.

Any thoughts or comments to share?

Ottoman Decline & Rise of the West; A New Messiah for the Jews

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell


After explaining how Islam spread to vast regions in the first thousand years after Muhammad died, the author says Muslims - like Christians - were not a cohesive group.  Muslims in West Africa hardly resembled the Muslim in Mecca or Indonesia.  In fact when Sufism came on the scene it "became a grab bag of Islam and pre-Islamic traditions."  Despite all the talk of "the Muslim world" or the umma, Islam was - and still is - made up of a variety of cultures. 

The author described the Ottoman millet system where, say, a chief rabbi was over his community of Jews and a bishop was over a Christian group for the purpose of self-governing and collecting taxes for the empire.  He said Catholics were often rigid about granting divorces so sometimes Christians would convert to Islam "for the sole purpose of ridding themselves of a troublesome spouse."  Ha, ha!  This millet system seemed to work very well and even garnered praise for keeping rival groups' fighting to a minimum.

The millet system declined later in Ottoman rule as they started copying European models of a centralized government and Turkish nationalism and intolerance for other groups emerged. Nationalism "was hostile to religion [and] rested on a secular view of the world.  [It] would prove far more lethal to groups like the Armenians than the Ottoman ruling class ever was."  (pg. 184)

Ottomans discouraged conversion to Islam.  Conversions brought change and the Ottoman were all about keeping things unchanged and peaceful.  Karabell said they even had people in place over each millet community to make sure people did not convert to Islam. 

The author discusses a Jewish man who came on the scene. Some thought Sabbati Sevi was a great man and he got many followers throughout the empire and in European countries. Others believed he was a madman.   He was a follower of the school of Isaac Luria a mystic rabbi who "developed a secretive reading of the Torah" that explained the creation story as a metaphor for the "fragmentation of the divine."  He "suggested that the divine had been splintered and that the point of human life was to help it reassemble. At some point, an intermediary would appear who would enable both God and man to become whole once again***."  (pg.  189)  Sabbati claimed to be this person, this messiah and he got a number of followers.  In fact thousands of them came to Istanbul as Sevi believed he could march "convinced that waters would part, the sultan would bow, and a new age would begin." Instead the sultan offered him a choice: convert to Islam or die. Sevi reportedly converted "willingly, even cheerfully" to the astonishment and horror of his followers.  A few believed this was part of Sevi's plan while the majority "drifted away, shocked that their messiah had committed an act of apostasy and embraced Islam rather than dying for his faith."  (pg. 190)

Towards the end of this chapter, Karabell shares about the Ottoman empire's decline and how tolerance was the first casualty.  For all the good of the Ottomans, their weakness was "lack of curiosity about the wider world" and this eventually led to their decline.  While other nations were looking around, fighting each other and thus having to improve their technology, the Ottomans, it seemed, were rather content and this lead to their vulnerability as the Western nations started looking outward. 

I thought this part about the rise of the West was interesting. The author says while there are many theories, it "remains one of the great unsolved riddles of the modern world."  But he offers this:  "The countries of Europe had fought one another to a standstill for so long that they had been forced to innovate, and to find new sources of revenue and better technology. European nations were forged in a cauldron of war and hatred, and emerged on the world stage uniquely capable of fighting.  They combined the ruthlessness of all great powers past and present with the means to enforce their will."  (pg. 197)

Hmmm, I'm really not getting a great sense of goodness about my Westernness and European roots from this book!  Seems we are a bunch of divided fighting machines!  :-P


***  While I disagree with the thought of the divine splintering as Luria believed, I do often think of sin as breaking the relationship between God and man and Jesus the Messiah as the one who restores that fellowship.


Any thoughts? Anything catch your attention that you want to expound upon?

The Ottomans as an example of religious tolerance and blessing the Jews

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell


This next chapter dealt with the Ottoman empire in particular Mehmed and Suleyman.  While the author admitted they could be brutal - like anyone else - overall I came away with a fairly good impression of them. Granted these chapters are hardly in-depth history since they cover empires and dynasties in a matter of twenty-five or thirty pages. But still, I was pleasantly surprised with most of what I read about the Ottomans.  First the author assures us that religion - meaning the spread of Islam - was hardly the motivating factor.  Power was and "religion was at best an instrument of control." He explains further, "If the mantle of religion could be used to justify expansion, all the better. If religious toleration helped pacify subject peoples and maintain stability, so be it."  (pg. 169)  The author noted Protestant Reformer Martin Luther as one who looked to the Ottomans as an example of religious toleration - a way of life he desired in his world of religious wars.  

Ottomans didn't care what religion you were. Granted you had to be a Muslim to do certain tasks, but for the most part the Ottomans were perfectly fine with people worshiping however they wished.  Jews expelled by Christian Europe - who very much cared about your religious identity - were welcomed by the Ottomans. In fact Jewish artisans and engineers designed weapons for the Ottomans that were sometimes used against the Europeans.  Ironic that the ones expelled (the Jews) were able to help the ones who took them in (the Ottomans) against the intolerable ones (Christian Europe) who had told them to leave!

Reading these words made me ponder about a few things.  First the fact that the Europeans were more concerned with what religion a person was -- is this true today? I know in America we don't have ID cards stating what religion we practice or were born into. Sure we may take polling data to find out these stats, but it's not official government record. On the other hand, I know in Syria, for instance, they do put such things - whether you are Muslim or Christian - on your registration papers. I think it's a pretty big deal to get it changed if you decided to follow a different religion.   So I was thinking to myself I wonder when and why things changed. If we can consider the Ottomans as the Muslim world and Europe as the Christian world at that time, it seems the Christians were more concerned with the religious preferences of its subjects yet today is may be the reverse is true.  Now I'm curious if Europeans concern themselves with such things or if most Muslim-majority countries are like Syria in keeping up with religion on national ID cards. Maybe it's totally not a Muslim-majority country thing, but the somewhat dictatorial rulers who may or may not be religious at all who come up with these control mechanisms.  Hmmm, now I am curious.

How is it in YOUR country and ones you are familiar with?  [Edited to add: I was informed that Germany does take note of such things when you register there.]

While reading about the Jewish contribution benefiting the Ottomans who welcomed them, I remembered people saying that God blesses those who help and are friends with the Jews.  This is more from the way I was raised -- very pro-Jewish bunch compared to Europe where Jews were often persecuted and accused of being Christ killers.  Of course when I read how the Jews helped the Ottomans I wondered more about this and whether or not it were true historically.

The author stated that "Jews, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Copts, and others [lived] in peace and security and [were able] to practice their beliefs unmolested. There are many reasons why the Ottomans were so successful and so resilient, but perhaps the most important was that they gave people just enough autonomy to keep them content, loyal, and uninterested in change."   (pg. 172)

Karabell reminds us that the sultans' actions were not driven by the Quran or hadith. At times it became "a spur and justification for war, but they drew on the legacy of Muhammad and the warrior culture of the early Arab conquests only when it suited them."  Many things they did were not condoned in Islam, but few would speak up against the powerful rulers' anti-Islamic actions.  "Islam, like any great religion, is an umbrella that encompasses a wide range of virtues and a multitude of sins."  (pg. 179)

Maimonides, al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Khaldun, Alfonso X

Notes and reflections on Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence by Zachary Karabell

This chapter - Philosopher's Dream - introduced me to several noteworthy thinkers and their ideas about God and man and the separation between the two.  It started off with Moses Maimonides and how his family left Cordoba when that region fell under the rule of the Almohads who were not as tolerant of nonMuslims as the previous rulers had been.  I rather liked that the author said Maimonides "had only scorn for those who preferred to play the victim."   He realized the world "was not kind" and it was "foolish...to expect otherwise."  He also thought it was foolish "to bow one's head and accept punishment and oppression. God had given man ingenuity and choice, and thus the tools to survive and thrive."  (pg. 138)

At this point the author tells us the Maimonides family converted to Islam, but such false conversions in Spain were common depending on who was ruling and persecuting whom.  (When the Christians took power, many Muslims "converted" to Christianity.  The author refers to an Arabic practice called taqiyya which was a "prudent form of faking it.")  Maimonides "had no patience for those who took a purist line and advocated martyrdom and death rather than survival." If survival meant a nominal conversion to Islam, so be it.

The author then shares about Abu Hamid al-Ghazali not because he was in Spain, but of his attempt in Baghdad "to resolve the split between philosophy and theology." He was born before Maimonides, but both men were thinkers and Ghazali "was as essential to the evolution of Muslim theology as Thomas Aquinas was to the development of Catholicism" and "his brilliance was to synthesize science, philosophy, mysticism, and law." He was OK with mysticism as long as it was within the bounds of the Quran and tradition.  The same with reason and intellect.   The Quran and tradition of Muhammad were the top priority. The sad part is that when Ghazali died, Muslims "sanctified" him to the extent that the door to interpreting the true meaning of the Quran and tradition of Muhammad stopped. The questions al-Ghazali asked ceased to be asked, debate was discouraged and "Islamic law and theology became more rigid."  (pg. 141)

Next the author mentioned Ibn Arabi who "attempted to close the gap" between God and man. Why, he wondered, "was there such a distance between God and his creation?"  He consulted and "drew on centuries of Jewish, Greek, Christian and Muslim learning to arrive at a unique conclusion: man's separation from God was a product not of God but of man's limited ability to perceive the truth."   The fact was.. this gap was all an illusion and we were as close to God as two can be without being one.  "Man is God's way of seeing himself and God's way of knowing himself."  We were God's mirrors!  (pg. 143)

About these men and a few others mentioned the author writes: "they deployed their intellect and channeled their passion not to attack but to illuminate. They walked the path of love and compassion, and served as guides to seekers trying to find their way to God."  (pg. 143)

An odd thing though is that Maimonides "was a seeker who rejected the notion that all are created equal."  While Islamic and Jewish mystics believed all people could have an intimate relationship with God if they were "willing to walk the long and arduous road," they also had ideas of "elitism, which said that the world is inherently corrupt and that the true path is open only to those pure and wise enough to take it." He believed that there "were truths that the masses could grasp and messages that any common man could hear and that there were truths accessible only to the learned, the wise, and the religious."

As a result of these ideas, for Judaism there was "an increasing disengagement from society." For Islam it was "a growing unwillingness to engage new ideas" which resulted in most turning to orthodoxy, the minority toward mysticism and "Muslim culture in the Arab world slowly began to wither."  (pg. 145)


The second topic of this chapter dealt with the gradual decline of Muslim power in Spain.  Historian Ibn Khaldun noted a pattern that when the Muslim tribes were cohesive and disciplined in the desert Islam spread as Muslims brought down two "formidable adversaries -- the Byzantines and the Persians." However as the empire grew and piety began to fade, the rulers became "soft and corrupt."  This "decay" would be punished by God with the Muslims being defeated.  Apparently this is what Ibn Khaldun saw happening in Spain.  So as this chapter ends, Christians are now back in control of Spain. Initially they treated the People of the Book (now Muslims and Jews) fairly and "recognized the Muslims of Andalusia as a worthy adversary....Christian writers simultaneously condemned Islam and praised Muslims."  (pg. 151)

Alfonso X used a variety of  people to help him in his quest "to preserve the heritage of the Iberian Peninsula, ... [yet] establish the superiority of Christianity."  Sadly as the Christians became more powerful, they started treating Jews and Muslims with intolerance. It was convert or leave.

"What we are left with, then, is two very different histories.  One is of a Muslim Spain that with notable exceptions rested on a foundation of coexistence and cooperation between the three faiths.  The other is a Christian Spain that with few exceptions thrived because of a crusading ideology that rejected Muslims and Jews."  When the Ottomans took over the last Christian empire in the Near East and the once great city of Constantinople fell, "it reinforced a belief, already prevalent in the Christian West, that Muslims were the enemy."  (pg. 157)