What does Bawa Muhaiyaddeen think Islam’s positive role should be?
In Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s strikingly non-triumphalistic view, Islam’s task is to unify humanity in an inclusivist fashion. He thus considers virtually all scriptures as divine Word (including the Hindu Puranas and Zoroastrian Avesta). People must seek to view the world as God sees it rather than from partisan perspectives. He stands thus at the opposite end of the spectrum from, say, Sayyid Qutb and other recent “radicals,” who have had enough of patience and long-suffering. But Bawa’s efforts to build a community of peace-seekers near Philadelphia provides a wonderful example of one contemporary Muslim spirituality and will offer every reader much to ponder.
Where, in general, do religion and political power come together?
Virtually every religious tradition has had to come to terms with its relationship to civil authority and power. As often as not, the relationship varies at least slightly from one political setting to another. Even in the United States many traditions have shifted their positions historically. Even the standard and seemingly straightforward principle of “separation of church and state” has been reinterpreted in various ways, with prominent religious figures seeking and winning national elected office as high as the U.S. Senate. The situation has historically been still more complex where political rulers have declared one religious tradition the “state creed.” That has often meant hard times for members of faith communities that have not enjoyed official patronage and protection. Popular perception nowadays tends to label Islam as the tradition most likely to take political shape, as though no other has ever done so. But ample data from the history of religion suggests that questions the relationship of temporal to spiritual power have arisen for virtually every major tradition at some time or other.
Are there characteristically Muslim views about the convergence of religion and political power?
Muslims often describe their tradition as a “total way of life,” a comprehensive approach that goes far beyond mere ritual observance or showing up at the mosque once a week. Some believe that such an all-encompassing teaching must ultimately be expressed in political terms, referring to early Muslim community life under the Prophet’s leadership in Medina as the ideal. Throughout history Muslims have experimented with various models for balancing or integrating religious and civil authority. Some have worked well enough, allowing for freedom of religious practice and expression among members of religious minorities under Muslim rule. In fact, the historical record suggests that Muslims have been at least as successful as any other group at administering religiously sponsored regimes fairly and evenhandedly. Muslims in various parts of the world today continue to believe that an Islamic government represents the best hope of justice in a troubled world. But in a world where religious pluralism is increasingly evident, dividing humankind along religious lines seems a less than desirable option. The challenge now, as in the past, is to live by the Quranic dictum “There is no compulsion in religion.”
Is it ever really useful to label conflicts as “religious wars”?
Wars are very seldom fought for purely religious reasons. Communities of faith often develop side-by-side in relative harmony. When problems arise, they are almost always initially political, economic, and social. Then, often enough, those who wish to keep the pot boiling invoke age-old religious differences as though they were the cause of every conflict. They remind their constituents that if they really want to be loyal, they will not rest until some ancient slight to the faith has been set right. Underneath it all is the awareness that wanting to destroy a people’s will requires attacking the most powerful symbols of their identity, some of which are bound to be religious. So, for example, in Bosnia during the 1990s, a major thrust of Serb policy was to obliterate as completely as possible all visible signs of Muslim presence, destroying especially ancient mosques and libraries and leaving paved parking lots in their place. Numerous contemporary examples of significant conflict in predominantly Muslim lands feature Muslim-on-Muslim violence, even if the aggressors “dress up” their rhetoric to gather “religious” sympathy by insisting that the people they kill are in fact not “true” Muslims at all.
If Muslims all believe that Islam is not “just a religion” but a “total way of life,” doesn’t that imply perfect consonance of religious and civil/political spheres?
Americans often criticize Islam as inherently flawed because it allegedly refuses to distinguish between religious and civil spheres. On the contrary, there have historically been at least as many Islamically related regimes with separate administrative structures to deal with religious affairs as those that made no policy distinction between religious and civil spheres. This view also conveniently ignores centuries of European and American history. The critique might have some credibility except that those who voice it most loudly are the very people who increasingly insist that their own religious convictions are a legitimate standard of political action. A fine example of the melding of religious and civil spheres in America is the rhetoric of more than a few recent State of the Union addresses, in which a president hints that because of divine guidance, America is virtually infallible. But there are, and always have been, other far more spectacular examples of political ideology cloaked in the garb of religion.
How can one sum up the various models of administration and governance in Islamic history?
At various times in Islamic history different models of leadership have predominated. By far the single most important has been that of the caliphate. In that model, the successor to the Prophet, the caliph, has ideally served as both political and spiritual leader, Commander of the Army and of the Faithful. After its beginning in Medina and reestablishment for some eighty-nine years in Damascus, Baghdad was the caliphate’s center for some five centuries; but the caliphate’s authority did not go uncontested. Several rival caliphates laid claims, most notably in Cordoba and Cairo (under an Ismaili Shi’i dynasty called the Fatimids). In the mid-tenth century the caliphate suffered a severe abridgment when a Turkic dynasty overcame Baghdad and vested the caliph’s temporal power in a new parallel institution called the sultanate. After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, various dynasties made largely symbolic attempts to prop up or otherwise revive the moribund institution. Nowadays the caliphate is a memory, though some still dream of its resurgence.
Why do religious beliefs so often seem to be associated with intolerance?
Human beings dislike shades of gray. They prefer to convince themselves that they can keep truth and falsehood neatly separated. There is “us” and there is “them,” and they know who has the truth. Stereotyping and demonizing are natural next steps. Not only are “they” wrong religiously, they are somehow not quite up to most people’s standards of humanity and thus are to be pitied if not simply dismissed as irrelevant. Intolerance of religious diversity is a serious historical evil, a force that can easily be exploited by people of ill intent. And yet it costs so little to approach the massive fact of religious pluralism with an open mind.
Have there been other movements based on other models?
Claimants to leadership of the imamate type arose from time to time. Mahdist movements (Sunni groups that focus on the return of a divinely “guided” person called the Mahdi) have been attempted with varying degrees of success until modern times. One abortive attempt at such a movement occurred as recently as 1979, around the beginning of the Iranian revolution and the storming of the American embassy in Tehran. At that time Sunni and Shi’i Muslims alike were observing the beginning of the fourteenth Islamic century. In Tehran Twelver Shi’ites relived the suffering of Husayn against the evil tyrant in their struggle against the evil Shah and the United States in regular observances that mark the beginning of every year, but take on renewed importance at the turn of a century. In Mecca a small Mahdist group, recalling the tradition that with each new century God