The sultans tried to adapt, but their efforts were superficial. Sultan Selim III (ruled 1789–1807), for example, saw the Western threat in purely military terms. There had been abortive attempts in the 1730s to reform the army along European lines, but when he ascended the throne in 1789 Selim opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students became acquainted with European languages and Western books on mathematics, navigation, geography, and history.23 Learning a few military techniques and a smattering of modern sciences, however, would not prove sufficient to contain the Western threat, because Europeans had evolved an entirely new way of life and thought, so that they operated on entirely different norms. To meet them on their own ground, the Ottomans would need to develop a wholly rational culture, dismantle the Islamic structure of society, and be prepared to sever all sacred links with the past. A few members of the elite might be able to achieve this transition, which had taken Europeans almost three hundred years, but how would they persuade the masses, whose minds and hearts were imbued with the conservative ethos, to accept and understand the need for such radical change?
On the margins of the empire, where Ottoman decline was most acutely felt, people responded to the change and unrest as they had always done—in religious terms. In the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) managed to break away from Istanbul and create a state of his own in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. Abd al-Wahhab was a typical Islamic reformer. He met the current crisis by returning to the Koran and the Sunnah, and by vehemently rejecting medieval jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy. Because they diverged from this pristine Islam, as he envisaged it, Abd al-Wahhab declared the Ottoman sultans to be apostates, unworthy of the obedience of the faithful and deserving of death. Their Shariah state was inauthentic. Instead, Abd al-Wahhab tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on the practice of the first Muslim community in the seventh century. It was an aggressive movement, which imposed itself on the people by force. Some of these violent and rejectionist Wahhabi techniques would be used by some of the fundamentalist Islamist reformers during the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest.24
The Moroccan Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1780–1836) had quite a different approach, which also has its followers in our own day. His solution to the disintegration of life in the peripheral Ottoman provinces was to educate the people and make them better Muslims. He traveled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, addressing the people in their own dialect, teaching them how to perform the ritual of communal prayer, and trying to shame them out of immoral practices. This was a grassroots movement. Ibn Idris had no time for Wahhabi methods. In his view, education, not force, was the key. Killing people in the name of religion was obviously wrong. Other reformers worked along similar lines. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tigrani (d. 1815), in Medina, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim Sameem (d. 1775), and in Libya, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) all took the faith directly to the people, bypassing the ulema. This was a populist reform; they attacked the religious establishment, which they considered to be elitist and out of touch, and, unlike Abd al-Wahhab, were not interested in doctrinal purity. Taking the people back to the basic cult and rituals and persuading them to live morally would cure the ills of society more effectively than complicated fiqh.
For centuries, Sufis had taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan paradigm in their own lives; they had also insisted that the way to God lay through the creative and mystical imagination: people had a duty to create their own theophanies with the aid of the contemplative disciplines of Sufism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these reformers, whom scholars call “Neo-Sufis,” went one step further. They taught the common people to rely entirely on their own insights; they should not have to depend upon the scholars and learned clerics. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim sage and saint, however exalted, except the Prophet. He was thus encouraging Muslims to value what was new and to cast off habits of deference. The goal of the mystical quest was not union with God, but a deep identification with the human figure of the Prophet, who had opened himself so perfectly to the divine. These were incipiently modern attitudes. Even though the Neo-Sufis were still harking back to the archetypal persona of the Prophet, they seem to have been evolving a humanly rather than a transcendently oriented faith and were encouraging their disciples to prize what was novel and innovative as much as the old. Ibn Idris had no contact with the West, never once mentions Europe in his writings, and shows no knowledge of or interest in Western ideas. But the mythical disciplines of Sunni Islam led him to embrace some of the principles of the European Enlightenment.25
This was also the case in Iran, whose history during this period is better documented than that of Egypt. When the Safavids conquered Iran in the early sixteenth century, they made Shiism the official religion of the state. Hitherto, the Shiah had been an intellectual and mystical esoteric movement, and Shiis had as a matter of principle refrained from participation in political life. There had always been a few important Shii centers in Iran, but most Shiis were Arabs, not Persians. The Safavid experiment in Iran was, therefore, a startling innovation. There was no doctrinal quarrel between Sunnis and Shiis; the difference was chiefly one of feeling. Sunnis were basically optimistic about Muslim history, whereas the Shii vision was more tragic: the fate of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad had become a symbol of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, justice and tyranny, in which the wicked always seem to get the upper hand. Where Sunnis have made the life of Muhammad a myth, Shiis have mythologized the lives of his descendants. In order to understand this Shii faith, without which such events as the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 are incomprehensible, we must briefly consider the development of the Shiah.
When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, he had made no arrangements for the succession, and his friend Abu Bakr was elected to the caliphate by a majority of the ummah. Some believed, however, that Muhammad would have wished to be succeeded by his closest male relative, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was his ward, cousin, and son-in-law. But Ali was continually passed over in the elections, until he finally became the fourth caliph in 656. The Shiis, however, do not recognize the rule of the first three caliphs, and call Ali the First Imam (“Leader”). Ali’s piety was beyond question, and he wrote inspiring letters to his officers, stressing the importance of just rule. He was, however, tragically assassinated by a Muslim extremist in 661, an event mourned by Sunnis and Shiis alike. His rival, Muawiyyah, seized the caliphate throne, and established the more worldly Umayyad dynasty, based in Damascus. Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, whom Shiis call the Second Imam, retired from politics and died in Medina in 669. But in 680, when Caliph Muawiyyah died, there were huge demonstrations in Kufa in Iraq in favor of Ali’s second son, Husain. To avoid Umayyad reprisals, Husain sought sanctuary in Mecca, but the new Umayyad caliph, Yazid, sent emissaries to the holy city to assassinate him, violating the sanctity of Mecca. Husain, the Third Shii Imam, decided that he must take a stand against this unjust and unholy ruler. He set out for Kufa with a small band of fifty followers, accompanied by their wives and children, believing that the poignant spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching in opposition to tyranny would bring the ummah back to a more authentic practice of Islam. But on the holy fast day of Ashura, the tenth of the Arab month of Muharram, Umayyad troops surrounded Husain’s little army on the plain of Kerbala outside Kufa and slaughtered them all. Husain was the last to die, with his infant son in his arms.26
The Kerbala tragedy would develop its own cult and become a myth, a timeless event in the personal life of every Shii. Yazid has become an emblem of tyranny and injustice; by the tenth century, Shiis mourned the martyrdom of Husain annually on the fast day of Ashura, weeping, beating their bodies, and declaring their undying opposition to the corruption of Muslim political life. Poets sang epic dirges in honor of the martyrs, Ali and Husain. Shiis thus developed a piety of protest, centering on the mythos of Kerbala. The cult has kept alive a passionate yearning for social justice that is at the core of the Shii vision. When Shiis walk in solemn procession during the Ashura rituals, they declare their determination to follow Husain and even to die in the struggle against tyranny.27
It took