Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (23 page)

What happened, then, to that liberal trend? And what gave us all the militancy and authoritarianism that exists right now in many corners of the Muslim world?

One answer to this important question is that Islamic modernism was an idea whose time had not yet come. Its proponents were a small cadre of elites, and most of the societies to which they appealed were still premodern. The middle class, among whom liberal ideas tend to flourish, was still quite weak—and in some places even nonexistent.

But this is not a full explanation. The modernist elite could have continued to push for reform, and Muslim societies could have shifted gradually toward liberalization. What happened instead was that the modernist elite slowly disappeared—replaced by a more reactionary, anti-Western, and illiberal one. Even a few modernists, such as the pro-Dreyfus Rashid Rida, slowly shifted to the more strident camp.

F
ROM
I
JTIHAD
TO
J
IHAD

The reason for this marked change of spirit becomes quite clear when we look at the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In just a few decades, nearly the whole Muslim world was attacked, invaded, and occupied by non-Muslim nations. The Ottoman Empire, the last big Muslim power, was destroyed in World War I, and almost all the Muslim states that arose from its ashes were colonized by Britain, France, or Italy. These European countries, whose liberal values had impressed and inspired Islamic modernists, were now seen as trampling on the honor of Muslim nations, whose very borders were created arbitrarily by the new masters.

Russia and the subsequent Soviet Union also played a role by crushing the whole Islamic presence, including the Jadidist movement, in Central Asia, after brutally suppressing the Basmachi Revolt (1916–23), a Turco-Islamic uprising against Russian and then Communist rule.

The foreign invasions changed the entire intellectual landscape of Islamdom. The West was no longer a model to emulate but rather an intruder to eradicate. The question, “How can we be like the West?” would soon be replaced by “How can we resist the West?” And the push for
ijtihad
would be overshadowed by the drive for
jihad
.

In her comprehensive article on “The Revolt of Islam,” Nikki R. Keddie, an American professor of Middle Eastern history, clearly sketches out the causes of the rise of this militancy. She notes that, with the curious exception of Wahhabism, militant
jihad
movements in the modern era began and grew mostly as a response to Western colonialism. The earliest ones, in the eighteenth century in Sumatra and West Africa, emerged in the face of “disruptive economic change influenced by the West.” In the nineteenth century, a broader wave of
jihad
movements cropped up in Algeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Libya as “a direct response to French, British, Russian and Italian colonial conquest.”
⁹⁸

Even the very centers of Islamic modernism were negatively influenced by Western threats. “Periodic backlashes against westernized modernism tended to come in response to Western aggressiveness, as in the dismemberment . . . of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of Egypt and Tunisia by Britain and France.”
⁹⁹

In
The New World of Islam
, written in 1922, American political scientist Lothrop Stoddard was feeling the whirlwind. “The entire world of Islam is today in profound ferment,” he wrote, with “discontent at Western rule and desire for independence.” “What the precise outcome of all this will be,” he added, “no one can confidently predict.”
¹⁰⁰

The outcome, as we can observe today, was deep-seated distrust and even enmity against the West, and against Western ideas such as liberalism. The latter was further eclipsed by the rise of the communitarian spirit instead of the individualistic one, as Pakistani scholar Nasim A. Jawed explains:

After a brief period of popularity of liberal democratic values among the modern educated Muslim intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberalism began to wane everywhere in the Muslim world as the focus shifted from the freedom of the individual to the freedom of the community, the achievement of which required solidarity.
¹⁰¹

This would push nearly the entire Arab world into a synthesis of nationalism and socialism—which were, interestingly, also Western ideas, yet ones perceived as providing ways to resist the West. After World War II, the anti-Western tendency would be further strengthened by the Arab reaction to the establishment of the state of Israel and, more important, to its subsequent expansion and occupation of Arab territory. This reaction would also foster a fierce wave of anti-Semitism, “with an import of anti-Semitic ideas from Europe, but not with Islam as a religion.”
¹⁰²
The ideology that appeared last in the Middle East, Islamism, would be based on the cumulative legacies of all these missteps.
¹⁰³

Notably, only three former Ottoman states escaped colonialism in the post-Ottoman era. The first was the poor and politically irrelevant North Yemen, which no one bothered to colonize. The second was Saudi Arabia, homeland of Wahhabism, the most rigid interpretation of Islam.

The third was Turkey, the very heart of the former Ottoman Empire. Yet it would soon turn out to be a very different Turkey from what it used to be.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Romans, Herodians, and Zealots

Fundamentalism is religion under siege.

—Benjamin R. Barber, American political theorist
¹

O
N DECEMBER 7, 1925,
a cold winter day, a group of policemen knocked on the door of a modest house in Fatih, one of Istanbul’s oldest districts. An old woman opened the door, surprised to see men in uniform. “We are looking for Atıf Hodja,” one of them said. “He just needs to come with us to headquarters.”

Atıf Hodja, a fifty-year-old Islamic scholar with a white beard and white turban, led a very pious life. He was originally from I˙skilip, a small town in central Anatolia. His sermons and books had made him a leader among the pious, and he was a teacher of Islamic sciences at the
madrasa
(classical Islamic school) in Fatih.

Atıf Hodja and his family thought that the police must have come for a simple matter. They were wrong. The teacher would be kept in police custody for weeks, banned from seeing his family. His wife and daughter were traumatized, unsure of what would happen or what to do. Then Atıf Hodja was taken to court, where he and his family discovered that his “crime” was publishing a booklet two years earlier—a booklet with the peculiar title
The Brimmed Hat and the Imitation of Francs
.

“Francs” was the name Muslims had commonly used to refer to Europeans since the time of the Crusades; to Atıf Hodja, the brimmed hat was a symbol of the Frankish—thus non-Islamic—way of life. Conservative Muslims like him were not happy to see some of their countrymen embrace that lifestyle and wear alien headgear instead of the traditional fez or turban. Moreover, the brim kept a man from putting his forehead on the floor, as the Muslims do in prayer, so it seemed to give the message: “I don’t bow down to God.” In his booklet, Atıf Hodja expressed all such criticisms and called on fellow Muslims to stop “imitating” the Europeans. Muslims had to acquire Western science and technology, he argued, but also to preserve their identity.

Yet, what Atıf Hodja opposed in his booklet suddenly became part of the compulsory dress code in November 1925, when Mustafa Kemal, Turkey’s new ruler, introduced the brimmed hat as the new national headgear and banned all traditional Islamic ones. Atıf Hodja’s booklet was clearly at odds with this cultural revolution. His “crime,” in other words, was an ideological one.

However, there’s a crucial detail: Atıf Hodja had written the booklet a year and a half
before
the Hat Reform. Its first edition had already sold out and there was no plan for a reprint. So, while trying him for his views was unfair, trying him for views he expressed before the revolution was absurd. That’s why the first court found him innocent and granted his release.

But the new regime, eager to crush all opponents of the brimmed hat, needed a scapegoat for teaching a lesson to all dissidents. So an order came from Ankara, the new capital, for Atıf Hodja’s rearrest and retrial in the Independence Tribunal—an arbitrary court that the new regime, following the example of the French Revolution’s Tribunal Révolutionnaire, had established for eliminating political opponents. After a brief trial, the Independence Tribunal announced its verdict, which came as a shock to almost everyone. Both Atıf Hodja and a cleric named Ali Rıza, his “collaborator,” were sentenced to death; both were hung on the gallows on February 4, 1926. Other so-called collaborators were sentenced to prison terms.

Nor were these men the only victims of the Hat Reform. Right after Mustafa Kemal’s August 1925 declaration that all Turks must wear brimmed hats, dissatisfaction grew in many parts of Anatolia. Protests in late 1925 and early 1926 were brutally suppressed. In Maras¸, people marched in the streets, shouting, “We don’t want hats,” and twenty “reactionaries” were executed while others were sentenced to prison terms of three to ten years.
²

In the city of Erzurum, a local sheikh and his supporters petitioned the governor for permission to continue to wear traditional headgear—which was not only culturally preferred but also better suited to the cold winters of Eastern Anatolia. After the governor’s dismissal of the request and his order that the spokesmen be arrested, protests grew and gendarmes opened fire on the crowd, killing as many as twenty-three people.
³

In Rize, a town on the Black Sea coast, a similar protest erupted, soon becoming a full-blown uprising. In response, the government sent a warship to bombard the rebellious villages. A British consular document reports that government troops suffered a hundred or so casualties while suppressing the insurgency.
⁴
The number of civilian casualties, which probably was much higher, is unknown.

A T
ALE OF
T
WO
M
ODERNIZATIONS

The Hat Reform was only one of the many components of the Kemalist Revolution, which is named after Mustafa Kemal, the war hero who saved Turkey from foreign invasion after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. When he announced the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Kemal’s goal was to completely rid it of its Ottoman past and form a whole new nation that would replicate the “advanced” nations in Europe. He took the first bold step by abolishing the caliphate, which symbolized the unity of all Ottoman Muslims, if not others, in March 1924. In the next few years, he outlawed all Islamic schools, banned all Sufi orders, and closed down any society that had any Islamic identity. To mark the cultural shift, he replaced the Islamic calendar with the Gregorian one and the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one. The teaching of Arabic was banned, as was, for a while in the 1930s, the performance of Turkish music. The goal was to make everyone enjoy “modern” (i.e., Western) tunes. According to a Turkish historian at Harvard University, this was a cultural revolution whose extent and zeal paralleled that of Mao Zedong in Communist China.
⁵

Alas, this is not the kind of modernization that we saw in the Ottoman Empire. How did things change so dramatically?

The story goes back to the nineteenth century. At the time, political ideas in Europe were quite diverse, and a strong illiberal trend existed alongside the liberal one, and both influenced those Muslims who looked to the West for new ideas. In the words of historian Bernard Lewis:

In the reform movements and activities of the nineteenth century [in the Muslim world], two distinct trends can be discerned, between which there was continuous struggle. One derived from the Central European enlightenment, and brought ideas which were welcome and familiar to authoritarian reformers. They too, like their Central European models, knew what was best for the people and did not wish to be distracted by so
-
called popular government from the business of applying it. . . .

The other view drew its inspiration from Western rather than Central Europe, and was inspired by doctrines of political and, to a lesser extent, economic liberalism. For the disciples of this trend, first in Turkey and then in other countries, the people had rights which were to be secured, along with the general advancement of the country, by means of representative and constitutional government. Freedom was seen as the true basis of Western power, wealth and greatness.
⁶