Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 195 . Marginalization of Muslims – A Brief Review - 7
By Professor Dr Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA

 

In India, the Great Moghul Akbar, a consummate statesman who knew the value of folk Islam, produced a Sufi fusion of Islamic and Hindu elements and solidified the Moghul Empire (1565-1605).

Akbar was a zealous adherent of folk Islam and treated the Chishti Sufis with the highest honor. His initiatives created a cosmopolitan Moghul-Persian-Afghan-Rajput culture that survives to this day in India and Pakistan. Although there was an orthodox reaction, the principal exponent of which was Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi (d. 1526), Akbar’s reforms survived and prospered during the reign of Jehangir (d. 1627) and Shah Jehan (d. 1666). By 1650, this cosmopolitan culture had produced the Taj Mahal and the Jami Masjid of Delhi, while the Hindus found it possible to rise to the highest posts in the empire. Rai Raghunath served as the divan (prime minister) of Shah Jehan, while Rai Chandra Ban Brahman was the chief of his secretariat.

The syncretic tendencies of folk Islam showed themselves in the person of Dara Shikoh, heir apparent to Shah Jehan. Dara was a follower of Mian Pir, a Sufi shaykh of Lahore. When Mian Pir passed away, Dara became a follower of his disciple, Mulla Shah. Dara was a scholar of first repute and wrote several books including Majma-ul-Bahrain (1655) and a Farsi translation of the Upanishads. His works were translated into Latin in the 19 th century and had a major impact on the German Schopenhauer and the American Emerson.

Dara did not survive the struggle for succession after Shah Jehan. The Orthodox Sunni wing, led by Aurangzeb Alamgir (1656-1708) carried the day. Aurangzeb made the Moghul Empire an Islamic state. Jizya was re-imposed on the predominantly Hindu population of India (1679).  Discriminatory custom duties were added on goods belonging to the Hindus. The Rajputs who had provided their muscle for the empire, and had built familial ties with the emperors, withdrew their support. The Marathas in western India rose up in revolt. In the Punjab, the Sikhs were restless. As long as Aurangzeb was alive, his indefatigable energy, resilient character and puritan drive held the empire together. Within 15 years of his death (1707), the empire collapsed. Regional despots established their rule, only to be swallowed up one after the other by the British East India Company.

In Persia, the Safavid dynasty was a product of the Safaviyya Sufi movement in eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan (1500). It was the energy, zeal and commitment of the Safaviyya that enabled Shah Ismail I to consolidate his hold on Persia. Throughout the 16 th century, the Safaviyya Sufis and their military arm, the Qazilbash, played an important part in the Safavid state. By the year 1600, however, the Safaviyya had lost their revolutionary zeal and had become a part of the establishment. The reforms introduced by Shah Abbas I weakened the power of the Safaviyya and neutralized the power of the Qazilbash. Specifically, the standing army raised by Shah Abbas with recruits from Georgia and the Caucasus meant a decrease in the power of the Qazilbash, who resisted but lost the struggle. With a decrease in the power of the Sufis, the qanqas that had provided much needed social services in the countryside since the days of Hulagu Khan (1258) lost their effectiveness. The religious vacuum left by the Sufis was filled by the traditional ulema who had no stomach for the esoteric doctrines of the Sufis.

The religious transformation in Persia is illustrated by the changes in the inner court circles. In 1587, when Shah Abbas ascended the throne, his vakil was Murshad Kuli Khan Ustanjlu, a Turkoman and a Safaviyya Sufi. A hundred years later, when Sulaiman ascended the throne in 1694 as Shah Hussain, it was the traditional ulema who were at the center of power. Shah Hussain was so fastidious in his religious observations that some called him “Mulla Hussain”. Under the influence of the theologians, he turned Persia into a Shi’a Islamic state. The most influential of the theologians was Muhammed Baqi Majlisi (d.1699), a great scholar, but a man with limited political vision. He curtailed the privileges that had hitherto been enjoyed by the Zoroastrians, Armenians, Jews and Sunni Muslims. He zealously pushed Shi’a tenets on the population, backed up by the state apparatus. Persia, like Moghul India, turned its back on the composite folk religion of Sufic Islam and opted to become an Islamic state with Shi’a Islam the state religion just as Sunni Islam had become the state religion of India under Aurangzeb. Majlisi’s grandson, Mir Muhammed Hussain, became the principal theologian after him and followed his grandfather’s policies. Intolerance bred sectarian schisms.

The rising power of the ulema was in direct proportion to the lack of interest shown by Shah Hussain in state affairs. The forcible introduction of Shi’a ideas into non-Shi’a areas bred open rebellion. The first to erupt was Qandahar in southern Afghanistan, a predominantly Sunni area that had been wrested from the Great Moghuls of India by Shah Abbas I. Following the conquest, Shah Abbas settled the Abdali and Ghalzay (Sunni) tribes in the areas of Herat and Qandahar. These tribes were, in general, loyal to the Safavid throne in Isfahan and opposed repeated attempts by the Great Moghuls to recapture Qandahar. In the compulsive religious atmosphere introduced by Shah Hussain, they shifted their allegiance and looked to the Moghul governor in Kabul for help. Reaction from Isfahan was swift. The Shah dispatched Gurghan Khan at the head of seasoned Georgian troops to punish the Ghalzay. Gurghan discharged his responsibility with ruthless efficiency, captured their leader Mir Vais and sent him as a prisoner to Isfahan. Mir Vais, a shrewd politician, cultivated the friendship of the Shah and was soon let go. Gurghan Khan died in 1704. In 1709, the Afghans rose up again under Mir Vais and in 1711 inflicted a major defeat on Safavid forces at the Battle of Qandahar. At about the same time, the Sunni Abdalis in Herat also rebelled and moved away from the orbit of Safavid central power.

Rebellions broke out in other Sunni areas as well. The Azerbaijanis evicted the Safavid troops and appealed to the Ottomans for help. The Kurds rose up and moved on Hamadan. The Sultan of Oman occupied Bahrain and the islands in the Persian Gulf. Sensing an historic opportunity, Czar Peter of Russia moved south and occupied Darband. While the empire was aflame with open rebellion, the Shah was apathetic and the task of defending the empire fell on the Grand Vizier, Fath Ali Khan. Fath Ali, a Sunni from the Caucasus, tried to stem the tide of rebellion but fell victim to a Shi’a court conspiracy and was eliminated. His death infuriated the Turkomans of Shirvan who occupied Shamakhi and placed it under Ottoman protection.

Meanwhile, in Qandahar, a young soldier Mahmud became the leader of the Ghalzay. In 1721, he marched on Kirman at the head of 20,000 Ghalzay, Baluchi and Hazara Afghans and captured it. Continuing his march toward the capital, he was met by a Persian force of 40,000 near the village of Gulnabad on the outskirts of Isfahan. The demoralized Persians had no unified command, with the new Grand Vizier Muhammed Kuli Khan Shamlu and the vali of Arabistan sharing the command structure. The Afghans carried the day while the Persians retreated in disarray.

Even at this late stage, Shah Hussain made no attempt to raise a new army. He was under the influence of the theologian Mir Muhammed Hussain, grandson of Muhammed Baqir Majlisi. Mir Hussain had no aptitude for military affairs and his advice was consistently wrong. Under his influence, the Shah refused to evacuate the capital. In 1722, Mahmud laid siege to Isfahan. The Shah could not feed the huge population of the city. Food ran out. The situation was desperate. On October 22, 1722, the Shah surrendered and abdicated in favor of Mahmud. The Safavid dynasty disappeared, a victim of the excessive parochial zeal of the Shi’a ulema .

Sensing the demise of the Safavids, the Ottomans and the Russians agreed to carve up Persian territories in the northwest among themselves. In 1723 the Ottomans occupied Georgia, Kirman and Hamadan. The Russians moved deeper into Azerbaijan and occupied Baku. In Isfahan, the Ghulzay dynasty was short lived. Internal feuds broke out among the Afghans. In 1736, Nadir Quli Beg Afshar, belonging to the Afshar tribe, displaced the Ghulzay and ascended the throne of Persia under the title of Nadir Shah.

Over-arching all these factors, there was a general decay in spirituality and ethics among the Muslims . By the end of the 17 th century, the rot pervaded the entire body politic, from top to bottom. Gone was the faith that had propelled the mujahids from the deserts of Arabia to the hills of Andalus. Gone also was the zeal of the ghazis that had taken the Turks to the outskirts of Vienna, in the heart of Europe. 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 Aurangzeb Alamgir 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 Moghul 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.”

It was this decaying Muslim body politic, spiritually spent and ethically exhausted, that came up against the expansive European 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. This smugness is as characteristic of Muslims today as it was 200 years ago. Few Muslim institutions of higher learning train scholars who are as conversant with the philosophy, religion, ethics, sociology and culture of non-Muslims as they are with Islamic sciences. All too often, modern sciences are marginalized as secular and “Western”.

Institutions do not grow in a vacuum. They are a product of the legal, spiritual and historical experience of a people and provide them with a framework to work together, so that they can achieve uncommon results. The triumph of the West over the Islamic world raises a most profound and troublesome question for a Muslim thinker: Have the Muslims wandered so far away from their ethical roots that other civilizations have overtaken them in spirituality and ethics, which provide the binding cement for a civilization?

(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)