"...not like a Christian at all."

Alexander Herzen cherished warm memories of "old Filvmonov," his jailer at the Krutinsky  Monastery, converted into a police barracks--"a simple creature," Herzen recalls, "kind-hearted himself and grateful for any kindness that was shown him, and it is likely that not much had been shown him in the course of his life."  Old Filmonov liked to tell stories of his past.

He served in Moldovia, in the Turkish campaign of 1805; and the commander of his company was the kindest of men, caring like a father for each soldier and always foremost in battle.  'Our captain was in love with a Moldavian woman, and we saw he was in bad spirits; the reason was that she was often visiting another officer.  One day he sent for me and a friend of mine--a fine soldier he was and lost both legs in battle afterwards--and said to us that the woman had jilted him; and he asked if we were willing to help him and teach her a lesson.  "Surely, Your Honor," said we; "we are at your service at any time."  He thanked us and pointed out the house where the officer lived.  Then he said, "Take your stand tonight on the bridge which she must cross to get to his house; catch hold of her quietly, and into the river with her!" "Very good, Your Honor," said we.   So I and my chum got hold of a sack and went to the bridge; there we sat, and near midnight, the girl came running past.  "What are you hurrying for?" we asked.  Then we gave her one over the head and; not a sound did she make, bless her; we put her in the sack and threw it into the river.  Next day our captain went to the other officer and said: "You must not be angry with the girl: we detained her; in fact, she is  now at the bottom of the river.  But I am quite prepared to take a little walk with you, with swords or pistols, as you prefer."  Well, they fought, and our captain was badly wounded in the chest; he wasted away, poor fellow, and after three months gave back his soul to God.

'But was the woman really drowned?'  I asked.

'Oh yes, Sir,'  said the soldier.

I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story.  He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

'You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.'

--So Alexander Herzen, Childhood, Youth and Exile (OUP Paperback 1980).   Russians have long experienced a, shall we say challenging, relationship with the Muslim people on their southern border.

Muslim Roots

I mentioned a while back that I was curious about the roots of Islam and in particular, how the new learning, ahem, nuances the old.  Brad warned me that the topic would drive me crazy but he needn't have worried: in my case, ADD trumps OCD , and my mind will wander away long before any serious damage has done.   Still, I did stick around long enough to finish the Tom Holland book on the subject and to follow up on some attendant threads.  I'll say more about Holland in a moment but first some context.

Try this: it seems to me that there are two different rhetorical strategies by which one might undertake to exhume the history of a religion.  You can go big picture and try to show how the received version just isn't plausible in terms of what we know about the surrounding historical context.  For example, if you are exploring Judaism you might point out that it is unlikely Solomon married 700 daughters of kings because there probably weren't that many kings in the catchment area.   Similarly if you are considering Christianity, you will likely try to situate it in the tectonic shift of cultures that generated so much religious activity around the time of the birth of the Roman Empire.  This approach is beguiling and can be productive: it  makes for good copy.  But pretty soon it falls victim to the curse of cross-examination: just who did what when and how do the pieces fit together?

Or you can approach the task in micro, trying to dope out the meaning and context of individual relics or shards of vocabulary. Heaven knows we have whole heaps of Judaic and Christian rubble. With both Christianity (Greek, but also Hebrew and Latin)  and Judaism (Hebrew, but also Greek and a bit of Latin) we have reams of linguistic analysis.  This approach of promise of being more challenging and more persuasive but it also may leave you sleeping in the doorway with a brown paper bag.

The inquirer after Islam faces a similar range of choices, in a context even more stark.  We have the "received account" of a religion that appears more or less ex nihilo--from God's mouth to Muhammad's ear, as it were, with essentially nothing by way of preparation or intermediation.  

For a secularist inquirer, such a stance is inherently implausible.  We live in a mind-set where nothing comes out of nothing, and the suggestion that it does an amounts to an invitation to find out why it does not.

I think this framework might help the reader to understand what it is that Holland is up to in his book, and why he seems to take so long in getting to the point.    The remarkable fact that the "Islamic" part of the book comes only in the last couple of chapters. Prior to that, he is romping all over the Mediterranean  and Middle , tracking "original" Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids and heaven knows else in the centuries that precede the rise of Islam.  The point, although Holland doesn't make it s explicit as he might, is that this is the cultural apparatus into which the Muslims obtrude.  On the hypothesis that they must have got their material from somewhere, this is what they got and this is where they got it.

 Put the point another way: there was  a lot of contact in the centuries preceding Muhammad between the Arabs and their neighbors, the desert and the sown.  The Arabs had countless occasions to stand by as astonished observers, or to join as participants in the affairs of the sown. For their part the sown didn't take the Arabs particularly seriously as full human; still, they did recognize their desert neighbors as the baddest dudes in the neighborhood, to be deployed in conflict as appropriate, to be treated with caution.

Holland's telling of this story is somewhat uneven.  He seems most at home with the Rome/Byzantine parts of his story, less so with the Sassanids.  He is most convincing when he is sketching the outlines of the bloody and interminable religious wars. But even here, there is an odd sort of diffidence about him, together with some plain bloviating.  I  can't quite tell why this might be true.  My guess is that he doesn't feel sufficiently at home with the Sassanid parts of the story.

Or perhaps, here and in the later (Islamic) parts of the book, he is simply cagy, wanting to tell his tale, but aware of the fact that this  is a field where a scholar of even modest secularist sympathies may find himself pitched out of a window.   Understandable perhaps, but perhaps also more cautious than is entirely necessary. For the fact is that there is a large and apparently growing body of secularist scholarship that treats Islam the way one might treat Christianity or Judaism.  Holland cites some of work in his bibliography, though his coverage seems a bit patchy.  Perhaps he should have taken more heart.  There was a time, and not too long ago, when students of Christianity and Judaism horrified themselves by the seemingly necessary implications of their inquiries.  These days, that kind of study is mainstream.  Sooner or later there will come a time when we can study Islam with the same mix of curiosity and detachment.    As a way station on the road to that eventuality, good popularizations are one thing we very much need.

Bernard Lewis Again

Followup notes on Bernard Lewis and his Notes on a Century; Reflections of Middle East Scholar. For a man of 96, and one who has placed himself t the center of the passions (if perhaps not the actions of his time, Bernard Lewis has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled life. Grant the odd kerfuffle: a public feud here, a grotesque lawsuit there (Paris, actually), a failed marriage back home--grant all this and grant also that it's a good thing he had a few such encounters or his life would have been boring almost beyond tears. He found his calling early; he got people to pay him what he enjoyed doing, and since before most of his professional peers were born, he has pretty much defined the study of Islam in the West.

Almost boring, then, in its virtually uninterrupted fecundity. Lewis has produced more polished works--monographs, overviews, (semi-) popular accounts, polemics--than many of his aspiring competitors have years in their lives--more than half of all these, in retirement. He has played a dominant role as one who explains Islam to the West, but he has made any number of particular contributions of his own--on slavery under Islam, for example, on the Muslim view of the West, perhaps most important on the place of Jews under Islam. Recognizing that a memoir is only a record of a life--not a life, still on reading Lewis, one is hard put to figure out how he got it all done. For Lewis appears also to have been an indefatigable globe trotter; for all his time in the library, he must have spent a comparable amount of time in the airport departure lounge, on his way to conferences, seminars, festschrift presentations, consultations with potentates and whatnot. Among his many talents, Lewis seems to have been a natural guest: cultivated, affable, easy to have around, an adornment to almost any scholarly gathering. When Lewis says "and so I told the Pope," he means just what he says: he is talking about a real Pope and a real conversation. Thus we get to enjoy the amusing ironies that accompany a Jew explaining Islam to the head honcho among the Catholics.

Of course Lewis' role as the primo interpreter of Islam in the west has not been quite as sedate as his memoir might suggest.  Far from anodyne, he has built his life around a worldview and a model of scholarship that have put him in the center of contention not only of how we understand Islam but for how we conduct scholarly issue.  He doesn't really elide these issues in the memoir; rather he presents them with a kind of austere dignity that makes it easy to overlook just how fraught these issues may be.  In this light, perhaps the centerpiece of the book is a chapter/essay articulating his view on the place of the scholarly inquirer.  It's as good an introduction to the topic as you might imagine; I'd rank it alongside Max Weber's great lecture, "Science as a Vocation,"   But perhaps the critical word here is "inquirer:" scholarship, on Lewis' presentation, begins with the unknown, not known, with hypothesis, not with thesis.  It's a view not always evident among his adversaries nor even (dare one say it) among his friends.  But Lewis makes a strong case for the proposition  as a guiding principle in his own life.

Beyond the basics, I'd say the easiest way to understand Lewis s in terms of three other public figures, two of them obvious linkages, the third perhaps less so.


The first, as Lewis explains with bleak irony, is Osama bin Laden.  By the sheerest chance, a book by Lewis entitled What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response appeared in bookstores just weeks after 9/11.  It gave Lewis a kind of minor/major celebrity that  most academics only dream of.  "Osama bin Laden made me famous," Lewis observes with no particular relish.  "I was interviewed, quoted, filmed, and I even made the front page of The Wall Street Journal."


No doubt Lewis' new-found notoriety was enough to dismay the second of the defining figures in his life--Edward Said, the doyen of what has come to be known as "post-colonial studies."  In his pathfinding Orientalism (1978), Said had done Lewis the courtesy of singling out Lewis for special venom.  The two continued to define and redefine each other until the end of Said's life (he died in 2003).   Lewis, with the gift of longevity, has the last word.  He states his case crisply and with vigor, but I wouldn't say he overdoes it.

The third may be not quite so obvious a choice.  I'm thinking of Abba Eban, known to the world as Israel's public face at the United Nations during the critical formative period for the new Jewish state.  But "public face" scarcely does it: by his dynamic and magnetic presentation, I suspect Eban did as much as, or more than, any one person to breath life into the new nation.

Lewis calls Eban "Aubrey," his non-public name.  He doesn't discuss Eban at length in the book; he doesn't mention that he spoke at a memorial service for Eban (who, like Said, died in 2003), where he declared that they had been friends for 70 years.  But it is almost uncanny how closely those two lives parallel.  They were born just over a year apart; they grew up in modest circumstances in London.  Each achieved a dazzling record at University, in each case not least because of their knack for languages.

From there, their careers part, although they run in parallel.  Eban, far more the public man, devoted the larger part of his career to Israel and to Zionism.    Lewis sustained a passionate curiosity about Israel (late in life, he said he visited there every year).  But his main public presence was in the Muslim countries--Turkey first, but so many other states as well.  What's remarkable in retrospect is how much these two men, Eban and Lewis--three, if you count Said--continue to define so much of what we know, or thought we knew, about Islam and Israel and the Middle East.

Sharia Law Comes to Kentucky

Link.  But cf.  link.

There's Hope

Muslim Brotherhood has a sense of humor (link).

Trial Balloon: Secular Islam

Here's a tantalizing little amateur trial balloon: the good folks over at American Interest are taking a flutter at the notion that there may be room for a bit of dialog over what you might call the "true history" of Islam--a dialog, that is, with Muslims.  We have here, for example, Peter Berger,  respectably credentialed as a sociologist of religion, offering up the snoozer headline "The Koran and Historical Scholarship."  Safely past the headline, Berger introduces plans "for a professional association of Koranic studies."  It's an interesting notion and it clearly has Berger's juices flowing, as he savors the possibility of a collaborative effort joining Christians westerners* and Muslims in a "critical" or "historical" study of Islamic tradition. Berger concedes that these are "words [which if] used in connection with the Koran ... could get you killed in many parts of the Muslim world." Nevertheless he sketches a picture of a world in which it might just be possible.

Berger's blogging neighbor, Walter Russell Mead, picks up the baton. For a student of diplomacy, Mead begins on what would appear to be a far less diplomatic note: "Will Historical Criticism Pick the Koran to Bits?" The body of his post his a good deal tamer. "Scholarly studies" (who?) are moving "cautiously, gingerly" (heh!) towards "a hard look at the Koran with the powerful and skeptical tools that have been used on the Bible."

The language of both posts seems at least as carefully chosen as the language of the Balfour Declaration. Both Berger and Mead seem to be doing everything they know how to sidestep the inflammatory headwinds generated by Islamocritics like Robert Spencer (Berger's commentators are not misled, however).

But also, that can't be much doubt that both Mead and Berger know that aside from the flamers, there is a durable and persistent strain of respectable scholarship that tends to desacralize the history of Islam in the same way that inquirers regularly desacralize the history of Christianity and Judaism in the west. Go here for an interesting recent review of a new book by Tom Holland.

Berger and Mead understand this: they both anchor themselves in the observation that secular inquiry into religious tradition is nothing new in the west. Noted, but it still seems to come as news to a lot of readers and listeners. Books like The Bible Unearthed and The Invention of the Jewish People get treated as if they are scholarly bombshells whereas both are just recent entries into a long conversation. Bart Ehrman has made himself a minor-major celebrity with a series of skeptical/critical accounts of Christianity, for a popular audience; yet the enterprise of trying to police Ehrman seems to enjoy they same kind of strength and persistence as the enterprise of trying to police Paul Krugman  (see, e.g., link, link, link; cf. link).

Of course it is still anybody's guess whether a "secular conversation" over Islam will get any traction--without, that is, interruption by the odd sacerdotal murder. On the other hand secular analysis of Christian and Jewish traditions have so well established a presence in the West, it's hard to imagine the same tendency not spreading to Islam.
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*There are Muslims in the west. I know. An expository oversimplification.

Who is

Fethullah Gülen?

Ignoto knows (link).

Thanks, Ignoto.

Factoid, with Enhancements

From Sunday NYT:

In 1986, there was one mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, according to government statistics. By 2005, there was one mosque for every 745 people — and the population has nearly doubled.

Link. I guess that's two factoids. The story was billed as one about frustration about "Egypt's young," but it is better described as being about "Egypt's young men." Aside from taking the veil, the story doesn't really offer much insight into what the women are up to. Rather, the story focuses on one Ahmed Muhammed Sayyid, 28, who has "a degree in tourism" and makes less than $100 a month as a driver. Here's a snippet on new-age protest:

Mr. Sayyid’s resigned demeanor masks an angry streak. He said he and his friends would sometimes enter a restaurant, order food, then refuse to pay. They threaten to break up the place if the police are called, intimidating the owners. He explains this as if to prove he is a victim. He tells these stories with anger, and shame, then explains that his prayers are intended as a way to offset his sins.

If memeory serves, that line echoes the dominant motif from this movie.