The holy war "made in Germany"

by C. Snouck Hurgronje

The whole set of laws which, according to Islâm, should regulate the relations between believers and unbelievers, is the most consequent elaboration imaginable of a mixture of religion and of politics in their mediæval form. That he who possesses material power should also dominate the mind is accepted as a matter of course; the possibility that adherents of different religions could live together as citizens of the same state and with equal rights is excluded. Such was the situation in the Middle Ages not only with the Mohammedans: before and even long after the Reformation our ancestors did not think very differently on the matter. The difference is chiefly this, that Islâm has fixed all these mediæval regulations in the form of eternal laws, so that later generations, even if their views have changed, find it hard to emancipate themselves from them. This emancipation became all the more difficult because both the multitude and the scribes clung the more tightly to this questionable legacy of their ancestors, the more circumstances seemed to flout the realization of this mighty program. It is a fact that in the countries of Islâm all through the centuries little care has been given to the education of the masses, and the idea of a future world-domination was too pleasing to their vanity to be lightly discarded. The jurists, in their narrowness, did not partake of the fulness of real life; they anxiously preserved the forms of the ancient ideals without noticing that their contents had vanished. To them the appreciation of religious freedom by intellectual Turks, such as the friend quoted above, was and still is a frivolous concession to the debased spirit of the times.

Nevertheless the minds went on their forward march, in the past century often with surprising rapidity. Through the very harshness of Mohammedan society and the inefficiency and corruption of the Mohammedan governments the whole territory of Islâm, in contrast to its conscious program of world-dominion, gradually came under European influence. This has gone so far already that more than ninety per cent. of all Mohammedans live in conquered territory or in protectorates under the political rule of European powers, whereas the independence of the remaining part, chiefly Turkey, is maintained in appearance only by a certain cleverness in balancing between the large powers which are vying for its tutelage.

This coming into contact of the territory of Islâm and the world outside which has ended with the total loss of the former’s political independence, was originally brought about by the necessity of Europe to expand economically, that is, by the self-interest of the nations which were able to shake off the dust of the Middle Ages and which overtook the Mohammedans in a spiritual as well as in a material sense. Later on only did the narrow idea of exploitation give way to that of annexation and eventually to that of complete absorption of the conquered territories, in the sense that the population was to be educated into partaking, as far as they could and was deemed expedient, of the culture of the conquerors. This was not done at one stroke; the struggle between the egotism of the guardians and their sense of duty to their wards is still in full swing. But the European guardians, even those for whom the consequent application of the newer principles is often too hard a task, would even now be ashamed to profess any other principle of government but that of a pure harmony between the interests of two nations, of which one has been subordinated by history to the other. The Mohammedans under direct or indirect European government have already derived considerable benefit from this; and one may say that on the whole they are better off than their co-religionists in the quasi-independent states, where they suffer the disadvantages both of a corrupt administration and of the struggle for economic gain between the great powers of the West. Still, the oppression under which the population labours in such a country as Turkey has also excited aspirations to intellectual development. The Young-Turk movement of these late years loudly speaks for that.

In the more highly developed circles of all Mohammedan countries the conviction has become general that the mediæval mixture of religion and politics, which the system of Islâm wanted to uphold for ever, is not of our times. The Mohammedans have become inferiors in this world, politically and socially; so much so that the idea of a world-dominion founded on their religion could not keep anything of its attraction for all but the ignorant. The others are almost ashamed of the presumption expressed by the teaching of the jihâd, and try hard to prove that the law itself restricts its application to circumstances which do not occur any more.

The lesson of tolerance was least easily impressed on the nations which had stood in the front rank in the political heyday of Islâm, least of all on the Turks who had played the leading part in the last scene of glory. When in 1258 Bagdad was destroyed by the Mongols and the Abasside Caliphate, dating more than five centuries back, was wiped out, the Mohammedan world was not lifted from its hinges, as would have happened if the Caliphate still had had anything to do with the central government of the Mohammedans. In fact, this princely house had already been living three centuries and a half on the faint afterglow of its ephemeral splendour; and if during that time it was not crowded out by one of the many powerful sultans, its very practical insignificance was the main reason for that. So insignificant had these caliphs in name become that certain European writers sometimes have felt induced to represent them as a kind of religious princes of Islâm, who voluntarily or not had transferred their secular power to the many territorial princes in the wide dominion of Islâm. To them the total lack of secular authority, coupled with the often-manifested reverence of the Moslim for the Caliphate, appeared unintelligible except on the assumption of a spiritual authority, a sort of Mohammedan papacy. Still, such a thing there never was, and Islâm, which knows neither priests nor sacraments, could not have had occasion for it. Here, as elsewhere, the multitude preferred legend to fact: they imagined the successor of the Prophet as still watching over the whole of the Moslim community; as, according to historical tradition, he really did during the first two centuries following the Hijrah, and this long after the institution of the Caliphate had disappeared in the political degeneration of Islâm. However, they did not imagine him as a pope, but as a supreme ruler; above all as the amîr-al-mu’-minîn, commander of the legions of Islâm, which sometime would make the whole world bend to its power.

The Caliph, the lieutenant of Allah’s Messenger, and the jihâd, the holy war against the whole world outside Islâm: with those two names was indissolubly connected the remembrance of those two brilliant centuries in which the course of circumstances seemed to justify the Mohammedan ambition for world-dominion. Whatever disappeared in reality survived in legend; the worship of the shadow-Caliphs of Bagdad made it easier for many Mohammedans to forget the failure of their political ideal.

When Bagdad had fallen and a large part of the Abasside family had been exterminated, this political fetishism still had its after-effects; the sultans of Egypt availed themselves of it by making one of those who had escaped murder continue the tradition of the dummy-Caliphate in their capital and thus creating the impression that their territory had now become the centre of Islâm. But this shadow of a shadow was to fade away entirely when the sun of the Ottomans reached its zenith. Under their direction Islâm ventured its last attempt, not to subdue the world, to be sure, but at least to become a world-power of the first rank. They succeeded in taking Constantinople (1452), a task at which the greatest Moslim princes of yore had vainly tried their strength. When in 1517 they had conquered Egypt and subsequently also the province of the holy cities of Arabia, Mecca and Medina, they felt themselves strong enough to try resuscitating the tradition of the real Caliphate; or, at least, to assume the part of fetish themselves. They were not deterred from this even by the express prescription of the law, which requires that he who shall occupy the Caliphate shall be descended from the noble Arabian house of Qoraish. The sophistry of complaisant jurists helped them to remove this objection, and the multitude did not resist these tricks, seeing that the dreams which they connected with the Caliphate now seemed to turn into realities. The conqueror of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Western Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the empire of Byzantium, whom a large part of Europe considered as a formidable foe, might confidently substitute his sword as a fetish for the powerless pedigree of the Abassides.

This re-born Caliphate consequently lacked important traditional characteristics; and in other respects also it could not be considered as the regular continuation of its predecessor. Several of the oldest Mohammedan countries remained entirely outside the Turkish sphere of influence; and those were not only such where, as in Persia, a dynasty opposed to the Turks raised the banner of heresy, but also perfectly orthodox countries in Central Asia, in India, in North-Western Africa, where the Turkish sword found no occasion to assert itself. In Morocco the Turkish Caliphate was even directly ignored, as the local princes, descendants of the Prophet, themselves assumed the highest title. Elsewhere, simultaneously with the rise of the Ottomans or after, there arose new Mohammedan dominions which have never come into contact with any real or supposed political centre of Islâm; such as those in the Far East of Asia and in Central Africa.

Indeed the usurpation of the Caliph-title by the Ottoman Sultans had only this significance, that in their political period of splendour they wished to have it established beyond dispute that no other Moslim prince could compare with them in importance. This could in no wise be more aptly done than by adding to all their high-sounding Persian and Turkish titles the name of the most exalted office which had ever existed in Islâm. To their power this nominal title of Caliph has never added anything; they ruled only what their armies had conquered and outside those limits they did not exert the slightest influence.

The Turkish sword soon lost its edge; long before the policy of the great European powers gnawed off piece after piece from the realm of the Ottomans, several provinces had developed into separate feudal dominions under hereditary dynasties. Since Turkey, entirely dependent in its policy upon non-Mohammedan powers, can only claim about five per cent. of the Mohammedans of the world as its subjects, it would sound highly ridiculous to have the Sultan of that realm called “Lieutenant of God’s Messenger, Supreme Commander of the Faithful,” if also outside Turkey one were not used to much traditional nonsense in princely titles.