by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Jan 2015
This class is on Modern Middle East history. It starts in the late 1700's with the rise of Wahhabism in the central Arabian peninsula and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The strongest impression I have from the first week of this class is how much similarity there is in what happens in what are seen as radically different social movements, when viewed from the perspective of how people are thinking -- across centuries and cultures, so much is the same.
The first example of this is what was said about the rise of Saudi kingdom in the central Arabian peninsula. This took place in the 1700's and happened when a local prophet, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, teamed up with the leadership of an ambitious tribal family, the Saudis. This combination of priest and warriors was able to unify the tribes of the central Arabian peninsula, but then got no further. They were no match for the Ottoman Turks who had already unified the areas east, north and west of what the Saudis unified. The Saudis got the center of the peninsula because the Turks didn't care -- that part of the world was too scruffy and poor for them to waste manpower on. In that era these central arabians were the hillbillies of the Middle East. Oil wealth wouldn't become important until the 1920's. (then they became the equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies.)
What is the "same old song" about this is the theme of the priest -- "The existing clergy and people are no longer following the true meaning of our founding prophet. It is time to go back to our roots."
This is also the theme of Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual founders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. And it is the theme of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Joseph Smith, to name a few other religious revivalists of other faiths and eras.
How many times have I heard this as the theme of a fundamentalist religious revival? ...I don't haven enough fingers and toes. <sigh>
It's the same old song...
The difference is how much violence to attach to the enthusiastic evangelism. As the people of the community get more prosperous and Industrial Age-oriented, the amount of violence supported by evangelical followers declines. This difference in the stage of Agricultural-to-Industrial Age cultural evolution seems to be the big difference between evangelical followers of today with their roots in the Middle East and those with their roots in Europe and America.
In chapter two of the text book, the Islamic Rituals and Institutions section (pg 23), describes how much attention the Arab conquers paid to being tolerant and adapting the Islam they brought with them to the existing local conditions. Reading this lead to an "Ah-Hah!" for me. This explains why "back to the roots" movements such as Wahhabism and Muslim Brotherhood were so numerous and persistent throughout Islamic regions. On the one hand you have the worldly conquerors who are busy adapting and tolerating, and on the other you have the regional purists who are saying, "You're not saying what Mohammed said any more. What he said was..."
It is also interesting that this tolerance feature of Islam has lost so much influence in the modern Middle East. It seems the "Us"-oriented country bumpkins and disenfranchised urban youth are now dictating the mainstream of Islam's destiny in the Middle East and Europe.
Page 28 talks about The status of women in the Quran (Koran). It says that Mohammed was being revolutionary in the rights he was giving them in his teachings. This brings another interesting pattern to light for me. It seems that in the earliest phases of many successful revolutions there are many women involved. Another example that comes to mind is Amelia Earhart in the early days of flying. But pretty consistently over time their influence wanes in the revolution, and the community embracing it. It seems the men stay at the cause, the women move on to other things, and then the men take full credit for the successes when the story gets written. How much of this pattern is due to the contemporary revising of history to bring more women into the stories of past events, I don't know.
--The End--