Faith and the Dialogue of Civilizations - Part 4 of 8
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
The Mongol Invasions of the 13 th century
The eruption of the Mongols in the thirteenth century was an event of global import. Starting with the year 1219 CE, the forces of Genghiz Khan overran much of the Eurasian continent. These included the territories which are at the present time in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan (up to the Indus River), Iran, Iraq, Eastern Turkey, Syria, Northern Israel and Palestine.
The devastation was total. Ninety percent of the population of these territories perished. Libraries were burned. Dams were demolished. Cities and towns were razed. Decimated were the cities of Samarqand, Bukhara, Ashkhabad, Balkh, Ghazna, Kabul, Isfahan, Tabriz and Baghdad. China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea and the Caucuses were subdued. And for a while it looked like the world of Islam would be extirpated.
Even in its darkest hour, the resilience of Islam asserted itself. Several Sufi shaykhs met with Genghiz Khan in 1222 in the city of Samarkand and briefed him about the tenets of Islam.
There began a three-way tug-of-war between the Christians, the Muslims and the Buddhists for the soul of the Mongols. Delegations from Constantinople (the capital of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire) arrived in the Mongol capital of Karakorum carrying gifts and offers of alliance against the Muslims. In its darkest hour, it was the Sufi shaykhs who carried the day. Far from the destruction of the cities, the Sufis kept the light of faith burning, imparting to the marauding Mongols the spiritual tenets of Islam.
The contest between Christianity, Buddhism and Islam for control of Central Asia was decided in 1302 when Ghazan, The Great of Persia, accepted Islam. The Tartars were converted and the Mongols were subdued. The new converts became the standard bearers of Islam. Asia remained Muslim while Christianity receded to Europe.
The aftermath of the Mongol-Islam dialectic was the rise of Sufism and the Aklaqhi school, best summarized in Akhlaq e Nasiri of Nasiruddin al Tusi (d 1274). The century witnessed the appearance of a galaxy of great Sufi Shaykhs, including Khwaja Nizamuddin Chishti of India (d 1235 CE), Mevlana Rumi of Turkey (d 1273 CE), Ibn al Arabi of Spain (d 1240 CE) and Shadhuli of Egypt (d 1252 CE). It was this spiritual stream, focused more on the soul and the spirit that dominated the world of Islam for the next five hundred years.
The Spiritual Decay of the 17 th century
By the end of the 17 th century, there was a general decay in the ethics and spirituality in the principal centers of the Islamic world, namely, India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. The rot pervaded the entire body politic, from top to bottom. Greed had replaced valor. Chicanery had taken the place of integrity. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to this sad state of affairs is to be found in a letter written in 1704 by the last Great Mogul, Aurangzeb to his third son Azam. In words that are as full of pathos as they convey the heartrending loneliness of a pious emperor, the Great Mogul laments:
“My son, my soul, life of my life . . . Hameeduddin is a cheat . . . Siadat Khan and Muhammed Amin Khan in the advanced guard are contemptible . . . Kulich Khan is worthless . . . Sarbarah Khan, the Kotwal, is a thief and a pickpocket . . . Arshi Khan gets drunk and smells of liquor . . . Akbar is a vagabond in the desert of infamy . . . Kam Baksh is perverse. I myself am forlorn and destitute and misery is my lot.”
Concurrent with this decay was an increase in extremism. Originating initially in the political struggles between Safavid Persia and Mogul India for the control of Afghanistan, and between the Ottoman Turks and Safavid Persia for the control of Azerbaijan, it soon deteriorated into Shia-Sunni rivalry. In the courts of Delhi, the emphasis shifted from the liberal spirituality of Sufism to the rigid legalism of the ulema. Mogul rule which had hitherto reached out to its Hindu subjects became narrow in its perspective, excluding the Hindus from the echelons of power. Jizya was imposed. Correspondingly, in Shia Iran, the emphasis shifted to legalism and an anti-Sunni bias.
It was this decaying Muslim body politic, spiritually spent and ethically exhausted, that came up against the expansive European joint stock companies in the 18 th century. The Muslims, smug in their self-righteousness, did not understand the nature of the European challenge. As opposed to the Europeans who were keen observers of the crosscurrents in the Islamic world and exploited them to their advantage, the Muslims had little intelligence about their adversaries.
The sciences and technologies of Europe were rejected as un-Islamic and Western. For instance, the printing press which was introduced into Europe in the fifteenth century was not introduced into the Ottoman Empire until 1728. In Mogul India it was introduced even later. The ulema were against the printing press lest it defile the Sacred Word if it came in contact with printing blocks made of wood or iron. This smugness cost the Muslims dearly.
A resurgent Europe, riding high on new ideas and new technologies, flush with Mayan gold and Aztec silver and the huge profits from the Atlantic slave trade, exploited the weaknesses of the Muslim empires. India was the first non-Western civilization to fall to the West. In the Battle of Plassey of 1757, a handful of British officers successfully bribed the generals of the Nawab of Bengal and demolished a large opposing host. Using the resources of India, England, and later other European powers embarked on a colonial conquest which ultimately subdued almost all of Asia and Africa. (Continued next week)
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