| Religions of the Desert In the middle of the Second Millenium B.C. a new type of religion emerged in the Middle East. The emergence constituted a clear break with the past. The original religions of mankind, both of the Mother and the Father, were intimately connected with nature, one from the point of view of the farmer, and the second from the point of view of the animal breeder. Both religions eventually merged into the classical Pantheon of Gods. The new type of religion was born in the desert. The old religions were attuned to nature; indeed they were religions of nature. The religions of the desert were not only far from the past, from rites of nature, they were violently opposed to them. The Jews battled against the rites of Astarte, atIeast part of Jewish dietary laws and other restrictions were designed to keep the simple people from crossing the boundary lines between the true faith and the alluring rites of Astarte. The great number of laws and the fulminations of the prophets in historical times show that it was not an easy task. Ernest Renan wrote1 that the new religions, especially that of the Jews, was generated by the simplicity of life of the Bedouin in the desert, the antipathy they felt against the voluptuous worship of Syria with their temple prostitutes and human sacrifices. They yearned for the simplicity of ritual, the absence of temples, etc. It may be so, but it still leaves a number of questions. It is possible that to a Bedouin, living in an empty desert, the fertility rites of Astarte did indeed seem to be abominations. It might have seemed different from the point of view of a farmer who lived in more fortunate regions. They knew what fertility meant; they also knew what danger awaited them if the fertility cycle was broken. If the price was participation in the rites with temple prostitutes, eating a sacred meal of a kid cooked in its mother's milk, or other similar practices, it did not seem too demanding. The alternative could have been to suffer the goddess's displeasure. What caused the appearance of the monotheistic religions was not so much the hurt feelings of the desert dwellers because of the depraved practices of the dwellers of sown areas, but the fact that they lived in the desert which was growing all the time and life did become harder all the time. The effects of the desert are in the monotheistic religion. This chapter deals with three of them. The fourth, Christianity, was an offshoot of Judaism, and it became very early a European religion. The three monotheistic religions appear in the following chronological order, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Islam. There were about 2000 years between the appearance of Judaism and that of Islam. The differences between the first and the last, as far as civilizational elements are concerned, are very visible. If one examines the holidays and festivities of the Jewish religion, one finds that most of the holidays have dual meanings, one of the nature of the old religion, and the second, that of the monotheistic creed, divorced completely from nature. This dualism exists in the Zoroastrian religion too. It is missing completely in Islam. It is obvious that the emergence of monotheistic religions was in the Middle East, and especially in those parts of the Middle East, which suffered most from the climatic change. The reasons for the new type of religion can be found in the Bible, in the Books of Genesis or Exodus, in the Book of Job, and in those six clay tablets on which the original Job story was written.2 What exactly is meant by religion of the desert? First and above all, religions are an expression of hope. People do not know the future. They are painfully aware of the stumbling blocks the future might hold. A hunter leaving for the hunt is perfectly aware of the slight margin of success. He might not find the hunted animal, he might miss the throw of the spear, the hunting net might break, and the wounded animal might escape, and so on. He must have some reassurance of eventual success. It is important. His life and those of his family can depend on his success. Trust in some deity, who was appeased by a sacrifice before the hunt can increase the chance of success. Even contemporary businessmen are aware that trust in success is an important element of success. So the primitive man will tie the antlers on his head, dance around the fire acting the part of the animal's deity, hoping that the sympathetic magic will bring the deer to his snare or before his spear. The same with farmers. He hopes for rain, for a good harvest. He knows that before sowing and harvesting, he has to pray to the gods and propitiate them to help nature. He knows perfectly well that gods control nature. As the hunter with the antlers, so the farmer or his leader has to enact a fertility rite, otherwise there will be no harvest. So the Egyptian Pharaoh or the Japanese Emperor has to perform a ritual in which they unite with the goddess in the furrow to be sown, otherwise there will be no fertility, no harvest and the people will starve. Religions of nature are, therefore, religions of hope, rewards and results. People hope for success, reward the gods by sacrifices and prayers, and the result arrives in due course. It it doesn't, it might be because the bribes were insufficient, the rites were faulty or there was some hidden sin in the people. The fault is never with the gods. What happens in the desert? Outside the desert the hierarchies are clear-cut.: The gods give fertility, rains, harvests, etc. They have identities, names and faces. The goddess who gives fertility has breasts like Artemis of Ephesos, or wide hips like the Willendorf Venus. What god can be applied to in the desert, where there is nothing? One has to return to the Bible and carefully read the story of the Exodus. There is no water? Somebody creates a miracle and water comes out of a rock. There is no food? Somebody creates a miracle and manna falls out of heaven, and partridges fly into the camp. There is no fertility cycle, no rain, no harvest, only miracles from a nameless, faceless god. This is monotheism. However, men are built on hope and one cannot live on hope for miracles. So, one can hope that if this life is bad, and there was no doubt that life in the desert and in the slavepens of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-daro were bad, then after this life there is another life in the hereafter, and that will be much better. Thus, the people had fresh hope and a new religion. Monotheism, in the sense in which it was created, is a hopeless hope. No hope for a more successful hunt or better harvest, but hope for something which cannot be described or imagined. In addition to providing hope for a better life in the hereafter, there is another task which monotheistic religions can carry out. All monotheistic religions provide a complete framework of laws to govern the life of the people. Religions of nature do not provide a framework of organized life; they have no need. Laws, which tie a people together, make them stronger. Stronger people might have a chance of breaking out of their hell, into some better land, flowing with milk and honey, if only they will remain strong and keep the laws which made them strong. This is the main story of monotheism, the story of a people who were punished for something which they had no recollection of doing. Being a religious people, and everybody at that time was religious, they had to come to terms with reality. Living in the desert, in the reality of the disaster, they could not accept the joy of fertility myths; which must have seemed to them a bitter mockery. Hence the monotheistic religions, laws instead of nature because nature deserted them for some unknown reasons. It is an interesting phenomenon, which happened many times later too, that a new religion incorporates all existing beliefs of the people, So did the Christian Church, when it replaced the patron gods of Roman cities with Christian patron saints with identical names, So did Islam, when it incorporated the existing rites of the Ka'aba in Mecca into the new religion. It was probably so with the religion of the Mother, by assimilating the prehistoric statues of the various Venuses into their Pantheon. So did the Jews, who incorporated existing beliefs into their creed. When the Jews escaped from Egypt and Moses shaped the new religion during the 40-year wanderings in the desert, there were already widespread habits and beliefs in the Middle East. One of them was the taboo against eating the flesh of pigs. . The pig or the boar was closely interwoven with the religious beliefs of the Middle East. It was Seth, in the form of a boar, who killed Osiris. Attis and Adonis both were killed by a boar, Adonis by Apollo in the guise of a boar, and the enemies of Tammuz were also embodied in boars. At the Babylonian New Year festival a boar symbolized the enemy. It was so in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor as well. 3 The similarities are too great for pure coincidence. We shall probably never know the exact basis of the region-wide taboo. It might have originated in real prehistoric times, before the Atlantic winds veered to the north and desiccated the Middle East. It is possible that the boar was sacred to the Moon because of its crescent-shaped tusks, just as the cow might have been sacred to other cultures for the same reason, the similarity of the horns to the Moon crescent.4 The hare was taboo too in Egypt and in the Middle East. It is interesting to note that there was a taboo against eating pig and hare in ancient Britain. Until recently a pig taboo survived in Wales and in Scotland.5 The believers of the new religion assimilated those taboos in an extreme way. The Jews were forbidden to eat pork and hare altogether. The Egyptians and the Canaanites, who also had taboos against these animals, allowed eating them once a year, at the festival of the winter solstice, at the end of December. The Jews had other dietary taboos too, but they belong directly to the history of the Jews and have no civilizational aspects. There are other views too, which place the origin of the taboo against eating pork not in mythology but in the more sober fields of ecology and economy. According to this view, breeding pigs is the most economic way of converting feed to animal protein. For every 100 pounds of feed the pig produces 20 pounds of meat, compared with 7 pounds from cattle. In terms of calories, pigs are three times as efficient as cattle, and twice as efficient as chickens. There is, however, a catch to this bounty. The pig is essentially a creature of forests, riverbanks and the edges of swamps. It is maladapted to high temperatures and direct sunlight, it has no sweat glands, it is used to live in the shadow of forests. Normally it feeds on tubers, fruit and nuts of the forest. With this type of food it is efficient. Unlike cattle and other ruminants, it cannot digest straw, stalks, leaves or grass. When the pig was domesticated, there were extensive forests in the Middle East, and swamps in the Nile Valley and the Mesopotamian river system. The extensive farming and demographic pressure eventually turned the forests into grasslands and the grasslands into desert. Continuing raising pigs in these conditions would have meant taking away grain from humans to feed it to pigs. In regions of plenty, like Europe and North America, it is a question of price. In destitute areas, like the Middle East, it is prohibitive. In order to prevent it, the pig was tabooed altogether.6 The reason that they remained in Egypt and eaten on special feasts, was the fact that the herds of swine were used to tread the seeds into the Nile flood plain, as part of the planting process. In addition, there were permanent swamps and wetlands in the Nile Delta, where the pigs could be bred efficiently. However, swineherds were the most despised caste in Egypt; they were forbidden to enter the temples. It was not only the meat. Europe had no real alternative to the fat which was used in cooking. In the Middle East, there were olives, sesame seeds and butter, which could replace animal fat. There was one more Middle Eastern habit, which was taken over by the shapers of the new religion. Probably their believers, before the codification of the religion practiced it, but now it received the force of law, It was circumcision. It was a custom that spread from East Africa and Ethiopia to Egypt and from there to parts of the Middle East. If the establishment of the Jewish religion started with the Exodus from Egypt, the custom of circumcision started much before.7 In Ethiopia and in Egypt it was a common practice, but in Syria, Palestine and in the countries east of them it was not generally common. The story of the marriage of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, with Schechem would not make sense if it was a general practice.8 According to the Bible, those who left Palestine for Egypt were all circumcised, and so were those who returned from Egypt. Probably, they saw in the circumcision a unifying symbol. The circumcision and culinary restrictions are unifying signs in North Africa and the Middle East today, without distinction of religion. Jews, Christians and Muslims follow the same taboos. It might have been so from the beginning. Judaism Judaism was the first of the monotheistic religions. Tradition and the Bible tells about Moses, who led his oppressed people out of Egypt, after performing miracles which convinced Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. After going through the Red Sea, which parted before them, they wandered forty years in the wilderness, enduring ordeals of thirst, starvation and raids by enemies, eventually reaching the Promised Land. Moses, however, was not allowed to enter Canaan, died outside the Promised Land, and was buried in some unmarked and unknown grave. So far the legend. As with any legend, there are a number of questions. The first of those questions is about Moses himself. The name Moses is undoubtedly Egyptian, its meaning is 'son'. It never appears alone in Egyptian. However, it entered the Hebrew language, where it has no meaning, although there were attempts to assign some meaning to it. In Egyptian it does not make much sense. It is as if somebody were to be called 'son' in English, or Mac in Irish. In Egyptian it always appears as a 'son of someone'. The famous Egyptian name Ramses is really Ra-mose, the Son of Ra, or Tutmes is Tut-Mose - the Son of Tut. So it seems that Moses was an Egyptian. In addition, his life fits exactly the pattern of lives of all ancient heroes9 according to which: - The hero is the son of parents of the highest station. - His conception and birth are always impeded by difficulties. - After his birth an order is given to kill him or to expose him to extreme danger - Animals or poor people save the child. - When grown, he recovers his status, is recognized by his people, attains fame and greatness The life of Moses, so far as we know from the Bible, fits this pattern. So do the lives of many others. The list is endless : Sargon of Akkad, Cyrus, Romulus, Oedipus, Paris, Perseus, Heracles, Gilgamesh and countless others. Tradition says that Moses had difficulty in speaking, hard of speaking is the description in the Bible. It might mean that he stammered. It might also mean that he spoke the language of 'his people' with difficulty. However, if Moses was indeed an Egyptian, what brought him to lead a nation of slaves, who were not his people at all? According to one theory, the first monotheistic religion was formulated not by Moses, but by the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who replaced the state religion of the pantheon of gods, led by Amon, and substituted it with the religion of Aton, the Sun God. Since the change involved the deposing of the deeply entrenched priesthood of Amon, there was a violent reaction to the change. After Ikhnaton was deposed, Moses who was probably one of the confidants of the deposed Pharaoh, exploited the confusion in Egypt and led a nation of slaves to freedom, to re-establish the religion of Aton outside Egypt. When the new Pharaoh, Horemheb, re-established the central authority in Egypt, Moses and 'his people' were already out of his reach. There is a chapter in the Book of Exodus that contradicts this. In an obscure passage of the Bible, it is said that God was angry at Moses because he was not circumcised. Moses' wife, Ziporah, a Midianite, saved her husband from the wrath of God by herself performing the operation. Egyptians were all circumcised.10 Theoretically, since the Covenant of Abraham, so were the Israelites. However, as it was still before the establishment of a formal religion, the custom might have been in abeyance. If we accept the testimony of the Bible, then Moses was an Israelite and not an Egyptian. There are many more questions, mainly about the sojourn of the 40 years in the wilderness. Hebrew tradition claims that Moses received from God the two tablets with the Ten Commandments on top of a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula. According to experts on religions, the Midianite Jahweh who was accepted by the Hebrews as their God, was a volcano-god. However, there were no volcanos on the Sinai peninsula.11 It is possible that in their wanderings, the Hebrews passed Sinai, entered the Arabian Peninsula where there were volcanos and from there reached the east bank of the Jordan, from where they entered the Promised Land. The importance of the story is in the result and not the road to it. Sigmund Freud wrote in his book: Moses and Monotheism, that Jahweh, the volcano-god was a "rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty. He had promised to give them a 'land flowing with milk and honey' and he encouraged them to rid the country of its present inhabitants". It might be so, but at the same time Moses brought down two stone tablets with Ten Commandments from the mountain, which is still the basis of all ethics on earth. For the first time in history, a people emerged out of the desert, carrying a set of laws, created by the desert, and took over an agricultural country as their own. It changed the world, it certainly changed religion. The principles of the religion shaped by the desert were much different from the religion of nature. However, now the desert religion entered a country that was then, and still is, based on agriculture. The result was an interesting synthesis of the two religions, and an unending fight between the purists of the new religion against the obvious wish of the population to participate in the rites of nature. It seems that if the Israelites had not been defeated by the Babylonians and carried into exile, they would have assimilated to the religion of Nature. The prophets were fighting a losing battle. It must have been very difficult to convince an Israelite farmer to disregard the cycles of the year and enjoy the renewal of life. If one examines the holidays of the Jewish religion, one finds that its holidays have double meanings, one based on the old religion of fertility and the second on the religion of the desert. This phenomenon of a set of holidays with double meaning is probably unique to the Jewish religion. Below is the list of the Jewish holidays and their double meanings. One is the meaning as measured by the agricultural cycle of life, and the second is the meaning as measured by religious or nationalistic notions. It should be added here that in the conditions in which the Israelites were, there could not have been any difference between religion and nationality, they were one and the same. It is still so, in that part of the world. Holiday Content according the Original Superimposed Easter (Pesach) Spring festival Exodus from Egypt from the first day of Easter to mark the beginning of the harvest. During the harvest season there are no festivities, marriages, etc. One should work. La'G (33) of Summer solstice. Memory of an incident Omer One-day relief from the from the revolt of seven weeks of abstinence Bar-Kochba against during harvest It probably Rome in 133 AD meant that the harvest was in, only the threshing remained. Pentecost Harvest festival Anniversary of the acceptance of the Law on Mount Sinai New Year New Year festivities Start of a period when every Jew must make self-criticism and ask forgiveness for sins. Day of Atonement End of the period which started on New Year's day. Day of Divine Judgment. Tabernacles Autumn festival Memory of Exodus. End of season for grapes and Stay in 'Succoth' in Sinai. olives. People sit in tents (Succoth) to guard their fields and orchards. Custom exists even now. Simchat Tora Prayer for winter rain Festival of the Law Hannukah Winter solstice. Maccabean revolt Lighting candles as done Purification of the Temple everywhere inthe world. (Christmas, Yule, etc.) This dualism accompanied the Jewish religion from the conquest of Canaan until the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians, and the exile.The eventual meeting of the Jews, the people of the Bible, and the Persians, the people of the Avesta, had a great influence on both of them.12 It shaped the Jewish religion to its present form, and created an alliance which formed the backbone of Eastern resistance to Western encroachment, at least until the emergence of Islam 1,200 years later. Zoroastrianism The second Middle Eastern monotheistic religion, that of Zoroaster was a close political ally of the Jews. Its origin is traditionally dated to the 6th Century B.C., although there are many objections. Greek classical writers, like Aristotle and Plutarch, placed its origin before 6,000 BC. There were others, like Euxides, who thought that Zoroaster lived 6,000 years before Plato. Others have placed it in the period when Persia was emerging from the Stone Age, between 1,750 and 1,000 BC According to Zoroastrian tradition, the prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster in the Greek spelling, was born 258 years before Alexander's conquest of Persepolis, which puts the date at 558 BC According to some, Pythagoras studied with him. The legend of Zoroaster follows closely the pattern of the lives of heroes. The question mark about the dates of the foundation of the religion is mainly caused by the state of the religion today. The Zoroastrian religion practically ceased to exist after a few centuries of Muslim rule. At the time of their conquest they gave protected status to Zoroastrians, as they did with Christians and Jews, but within three centuries of the conquest, most Zoroastrians converted to Islam. There was a small minority that fled to India, where they have a small, but rich community. Since the Zoroastrian religion does not encourage conversion or intermarriage, their number is diminishing. The religion is sometimes called Mazdaism , because of the basic principles of the religion. According to its dogma, the world is ruled by two principles. One is the principle of Good, embodied by Ahura-Mazda - 'The Wise Lord' and the Evil, represented by Ahriman. The struggle is between these two spirits, which should end with the victory of Good over Evil. The religion was ordered according to strict rules. No blood sacrifice was allowed and intoxicating drinks were banned. The dead were not allowed to be buried or burned, only exposed to the elements or birds of prey. Their temples always had an eternal fire burning. These practices were common in Iran much before Zoroaster's time. The religion was extremely nationalistic, even more than that of the Hebrews. No conversion of strangers to the faith and no intermarriage. Mazdaism was the religion of the Aryans, who emigrated out of "Airyane Vaejah" - the Heartland of the Aryans. One branch of the Aryans reached Iran and settled there. Another branch reached India. The language of the ancient Iranians, the Avesta, was a sister language of the Indians, Sanskrit. The priesthood of the Zoroastrian religion, the Magi, was a priestly caste like the Brahmins of India. 13 Today, the remnants of the Zoroastrian faith are an insignificant numerical minority in India, although with disproportionate economic power. In the context of this book, they are extremely important. The conflict between East and West, between the Middle East and Europe, appeared first on the scene of history only with the appearance of the Persians. When Cyrus conquered Mesopotamia from the Babylonians, thereby destroying Semitic rule there, he found the Jews in their Babylonian captivity. He released the Jews, allowing them to return to their land and rebuild their temple. With this gesture he began an alliance of some 1,200 years in duration, which had serious political implications. The Persians showed favor to the Jews, who in turn served them loyally. For centuries after that, there was a high degree of collaboration between the Persians and the Jews, against the Westerners, Greeks and Romans. This collaboration was first of all in Palestine but in other countries too, under Western rule.14 This cooperation brought the Jews into enmity with all the peoples of the Middle East, as well as with the Greeks and the Romans. The Egyptians saw in the Persians foreign conquerors, just as they saw conquerors in the Greeks and the Romans. The Jewish garrison maintained by the Persians in Egypt did not endear the Jews to the Egyptians. It is possible that this Persian-Jewish cooperation was the underlying reason for European anti-Semitism and not the ostensible role of the Jews in the crucifixion of Christ. The collaboration continued from the time of Cyrus until the Muslim conquest. The Jews, who were jealous of their monotheism, accepted the disciples of Zoroaster as monotheists. They saw in the teaching of Iran an analogy to the teachings of Hosea and Isaiah. It was truly an alliance of arms and spirit. The Persians made the first of the organized attacks of the East against Europe. According to Herodotus, it was a conscious attack to cleanse the East from Western influence.15 This operation has expressed the spirit of the area, even of those parts that were under Greek influence for at least a thousand years. An invasion by Xerxes failed. 150 years after that invasion, Alexander of Macedon led the Greeks against the Persians to avenge the earlier invasion. During his journey through Cilicia, there were towns whose inhabitants preferred to commit suicide rather than encounter the hated invaders. The custom of the East, to fight to the death against the West, was born in Cilicia, with many such to follow later. Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire, and organized a huge, well-advertised wedding between Macedonian soldiers and local girls. He certainly brought Greek influence to Central Asia. However, in 247 BC the Parthians, another of the Iranian tribes, overthrew their Greek overlords and reinstated the Zoroastrian religion, which eradicated all western influence from Iran. 16 The well-advertised marriages did not work out. The last of the Iranian-Jewish cooperation against the West, (whether represented by Greece, Rome or Byzantium), was in the war of the Persians against the Byzantines, just before the eruption of the Muslims from Arabia, which eliminated Zoroastrianism, if not Persia, and fatally weakened Byzantium. Islam Islam was the third monotheistic religion that appeared in the Middle East, if Christianity is excluded from consideration as a Middle Eastern religion. The next chapter will give an explanation for this startling decision in classification. Islam appeared in the 7th Century AD, nearly 2000 years after the appearance of Judaism. Much has happened in the Middle East during these two millennia. Old empires crumbled, new empires emerged and crumbled in turn. The Middle East was under foreign rule for the last thousand years, with continuing Eastern resistance to the Western encroachment. The eastern resistance took many forms, but usually it was Zoroastrian Persia, under Parthian or Sassanid rule, which led the fight, with loyal Jewish assistance. The battlefields were in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, Armenia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt. The last few hundred years before the emergence of Islam saw an unprecedented religious turmoil in the Middle East, in addition to the usual national and political struggles. A new religion was born in Palestine; it eventually conquered the known world, at least that part of the world which belonged to Rome or to Byzantium in Europe. Although that religion was of Eastern origin, it started its life as a reform movement within Judaism, but after its acceptance by the Roman Empire, it gradually lost its Middle Eastern patina and became a western religion, with Latin or Greek variations. At the time there was no official separation of the churches, but since the political separation within the Roman Empire was a fact from the end of the 4th Century AD, the eventual separation of the churches was a foregone conclusion. The pending schism in the Christian church was not only between Rome and Byzantium, but between the North and the South as well. Even in the south there were contending churches, the Monophysites and the Nestorians. In the early 7th Century AD, the Christian world was thoroughly sundered. The political situation was volatile. At the beginning of the century there occurred the last round of the perennial Byzantine - Persian wars, in which the Persians and their Jewish allies overran Syria, Palestine and Egypt. In order to show that Persians and Jews do not fight against Arab Christians, the Arabs were spared, while every Greek the Persians could find was killed. It was obviously a civilizational and not a religious conflict. Eventually, Byzantium succeeded in repulsing the Persians, but the long war left both sides utterly exhausted. And also very poor. The Byzantine Emperor, Heraclios , convinced the Church to sell the church jewels for raising an army to relieve the Middle Eastern provinces. The jewels were sold, the provinces freed, but both the State and the Church were financially exhausted. It is not the intention of this book to tell the story of the rise of Islam, of its principles, the struggle led by its Prophet until it was accepted first by the Arabs, and after that by other nations in the Middle East. The only aim of this book is to place Islam in a civilizational context. There are many books about the rise of Islam; after all it is one of the central issues of the history of the last fourteen centuries. Islam has succeeded in converting first the Arabs, then the Middle East, and finally the periphery of the Middle East in all directions, west to North Africa and the old Carthaginian colony of Spain, East to India, Malaysia and Indonesia, North to Central Asia and South to sub-Saharan Africa. The expansion of Islam was much faster and wider than the expansion of Christianity in Europe. Marija Gimbutas wrote that her native Lithuania was converted to Christianity only in the 14th Century AD, then the people relapsed into paganism, and were converted finally by Jesuits in the 17th Century. Islam succeeded in converting the Middle East and North Africa in less than three centuries. What was the reason for the success, and for the cohesion shown by Islam since then? There are many reasons. First, Islam has incorporated all common customs and traditions of the Middle East. It was not alone in that practice, so did the Jews in their time and the Christians too. It incorporated even the old pre-Islamic custom of venerating the Ka'aba in Mecca, which was the center of pre-Islamic pilgrimage and veneration.18 It incorporated those Middle Eastern prohibitions, which were commonly acknowledged by all. So, it has forbidden eating the flesh of pigs, just like the Jews and other nations, drinking intoxicating drinks, just like the Zoroastrians, and continued the practice of circumcision common in the Middle East. 19 By the time of the spread of Islam, the whole of the Middle East was monotheistic, so the acceptance of Islam, a monotheistic religion, and which accepted all the customs of the Middle East, was easy and caused no conflicts. Monophysite Christians, the Copts and the Ethiopians saw in Jesus an emissary of God, but worshipped only God. The Muslim religion venerated Jesus as the forerunner of Muhammed but worshipped only one God. There was nothing that a Monophysite Christian would object to in Islam. It was the same with the Persians. Edward Gibbon wrote that when Islam began to spread from Medina, the commander of the Persian garrison in Yemen was among those who accepted the new faith. There were a number of additional elements that helped the dissemination of Islam. Compared to other monotheistic religions, Islam was simple and easy to understand. To understand Christianity at that time was a major exercise in logic and philosophy. It is possible that the Fathers of the Church understood what they were talking about, but it is extremely doubtful that simple people understood the difference between homousion and homoiousion. The dogma of Judaism was probably simpler to understand, but by last count there were 613 laws and prohibitions. Jews needed an expert to advise them on the do's and don'ts of everyday life. Islam is simplicity itself. There were a small number of simple requirements, which were easy to comply with. - Acceptance of the oneness of God and the role of the Prophet. - Praying five times a day. - Fasting during the month of Ramadan. - Almsgiving. - Pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime. It was so simple that there was no need for professional religious leaders. To people accustomed to religious hierarchies and their cost, the Muslim system must have been extremely attractive. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabb III, complained that tens of thousands of Christians went over to Islam, as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa - the home of Augustine - the entire population fell away to Islam at once. The first major Islamic victory, at the river Yarmuk in 636, was achieved because 12,000 Christian Arabs went over to the enemy. The Christian Monophysites - Copts, Jacobites, etc. - nearly always preferred Muslims to Catholics. Five centuries after the Islamic conquest, the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, wrote: "The God of Vengeance, who alone is the Almighty...raised from the south the children of Ishmael to deliver us by them from the hands of the Romans." A Nestorian chronicler wrote: "The hearts of the Christians rejoiced at the domination of the Arabs - may God strengthen it and prosper it."20 Islam brought back the martial spirit to the peoples of the Middle East. It should be remembered that when Islam spread over the Middle East, it had endured a thousand years of Western occupation. The Persians alone had remained to fight for the Eastern way of life. The Jews, their allies, were all but destroyed by then. Muhammed was a Prophet and a military leader too. The new religion restored the fighting spirit to those who had lost it a long time ago.21 Last but not least, Islam brought equality to the people. In principle, at least, everybody was equal before God. There were no religious hierarchies who were supposed to be nearer to God than ordinary people, so each person had an equal standing before God. Of course there was a temporal ruler, and that temporal ruler did whatever he wished, but it was no surprise to anyone. This is how authority had behaved since time immemorial. The slaves and serfs who were proud of their Pharaoh or King, now were proud of their Sultan or Caliph. In theory, there was equality between peoples, as they were all Muslims, but it was so more in theory than in practice. All were equal, but the Arabs were more equal than others. Ibn Khaldun wrote in the 14th Century22 that the sister of Haroun ar-Rashid fell in love with Ja'afar ben Yahya ben Khalid, who was a Persian, the vizier of her brother. Ibn Khaldun wrote : "How could she... stain her nobility with a Persian client?" So there were limits to equality too. Probably the most important effect of the spread of Islam was that it brought the peoples, the customs and spiritual values of the Middle East into the modern world as a civilizational entity. First of all, it created a form of super-state, which transcended all nation states.23 It created a unified civilization from a backward Bedouin society, which had no central organization before. This was probably the most important civilizational difference between Christianity and Islam. Christianity was imposed upon the Roman Empire, which was at the height of its strength, and needed only moral and spiritual reform. In the case of Islam, it had to create from scratch a complete social, political and economic order, which was based upon a religion.24 This is the reason why in Islam, separation of secular and religious spheres makes no sense at all. Talking about 'fundamentalism' in connection with Muslims makes even less sense. One can talk about Westerners being fundamentalists. Western political and social systems are not based upon religion. First, Westerners are much closer to the religion of the Mother and the Father, than to their Middle Eastern source, of which not much has remained. In addition, the West has passed the stages of enlightenment and scientific revolution, which put an even greater distance between a typical Westerner and his religion. So if a Westerner believes that the world was created in six days and that good people go to paradise, then he is a 'fundamentalist' indeed. There are not many of them. Muslim society is completely different. The name of religion in Arabic is 'din', meaning law or justice. Everyone, who lives in a Muslim society must accept the law, there is no other. There are Muslim states that imposed, or had imposed upon them, Western customs and habits, but at best it is a thin layer upon a base, which refuses to accept the layer as authentic. Not because of 'fundamentalism' but because one cannot mix two opposing ways of life, without causing conflicts and crises. One has only to open a daily newspaper or switch on the TV to watch the latest conflict. Kemal Ataturk imposed Latin letters, Western dress and political institutions upon Turkey. He even abolished the fez and the veil, but he did it in a time of utter national crisis, after a lost war. He decided that the only solution was to transform Turkey into a modern nation-state. It is doubtful that his reforms will last very long. It will be interesting to see how long the reforms will survive. There is a type of aggressive Muslim behavior, which is called 'fundamentalism' by the West. It is probably an explosive mixture of the age-long sense of deprivation, extreme nationalism, the sense of power given by the near-monopoly on oil and the martial sense, which was the original gift of the free Arab tribes to Islam. It is worthwhile quoting here a speech made by the so-called arch-fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini 25 on September 8, 1979: . "All the problems of the Easterners and, among them, our problems and miseries, are caused by our losing ourselves. In Iran, until something has a Western name, it is not accepted. Even a drugstore must have a Western name. The material woven in our factories must have something in Latin script in its selvedges and a Western name put on it. Our streets must have Western names. Everything must have Western color in it.... Writers put a Western name on the books they write...If our books did not have these titles, or our material did not contain that script and if our drugstores did not have that name, we would pay less attention to it... Our universities were at that time Western universities. Our economy, our culture were Western. We completely forgot ourselves...As long as you do not put aside these imitations, you cannot be a human being and independent.... As long as these names appear on our streets and our drug- stores and our books, and our parks and in all our things, we will not become independent. It is only the mosques which do not have Western names and that is because the clergymen, until now, have not succumbed." Replace the word "Western" with "American", "Iran" with "France" and the speech could have been made by Charles de Gaulle, or it could be an excerpt from the book : " Le defi Americain" (The American Challenge) written by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. They are not fundamentalists, neither are the Muslims. In the Middle East there is an ideological conformity which is not known in the Western world. The conformism is based upon acceptance of common beliefs, customs and laws. One can live in the Middle East, be fundamentalist, e.g. accepting the basic principles of the common values, and not being extreme at the same time. In a Muslim environment, extremism is not equivalent to fundamentalism. On the other hand, it is also correct to say that the sense of common fate and common purpose is much stronger among people of the Middle East than among those of the Western world. Europeans can be nationalistic for their nation, but they might not be enthusiastic about defending Western values. It is one of its achievements, or deficiencies, that Islam has put civilization above the nation-state. There is a simple reason for it. Pre-Islamic Arabia was in a chiefdom stage, it never had nation-states. Notes: |
