The distorted notion that Islam spread through the military means ignores how the faith gained traction thanks to the pacifist Sufi tradition with its emphasis on equality and justice from Africa to Indonesia
By Sameer Arshad Khatlani
In the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad challenged entrenched ideas of superiority and inequalities determined by kinship, affiliation, and wealth to create a society in Arabia that took care of its weak. He struck a balance between idealism and pragmatism to uproot the oppressive structure and a cycle of constant warfare to usher in unity, order, peace, and justice by giving warring tribes a sense of community.
Equality was the essence of the Prophet’s moral and ethical mandate for the community. His successors provided the budding Muslim community with effective leadership and helmed its rapid advancement with social justice as the foundation. In the second half of the seventh century, the inauguration of the Arab Umayyad Empire changed these dynamics.
The Umayyads facilitated the opening of new routes and linked a vast region politically and economically for the first time since Alexander the Great’s reign. They promoted trade and created wealth but at the cost of a moral crisis with the transformation of Muslim society through the creation of elites more interested in power and wealth than upholding the foundational ideals of egalitarianism, and justice. The Prophet’s grandson and Islam’s spiritual custodian Imam Hussain opposed the distortion of Islamic values including through the inauguration of the dynastic Umayyad Empire on the lines of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Hussain’s refusal to legitimize Umayyad ruler Yazid triggered the Battle of Karbala in 680 and the massacre of the imam and his 72 companions and family members.
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Sufism, or Islam’s mystical branch, would take forward the legacy of Imam Hussain, whose father Imam Ali is seen as the foremost basis of spiritual knowledge in Islam. It emerged as a spiritual counter to the worldliness of the Umayyads. Sufism is an esoteric expression of Islam interested in outer and inner meanings to the Quran and the prophetic traditions with reverence to those believed to grasp the more inward meaning. Sufi saints are revered as intermediaries between humans and God. They are seen as capable of interceding with God for divine healing blessing, and forgiveness.
As Muslim empires became busy expanding their territories often riding a roughshod over religious values, Sufis, who mostly traced their lineage to Imam Ali, played a key role in the spread of Islam from Africa to Indonesia. Contested empires represented the political sphere while the Sufis the ethics, mysticism, devotion, and esoterism. None of this is reflected in the general discourse of the West about Islam.
The demonization of Islam and its over one billion adherents worldwide has played a part in stoking Islamophobia, including via its projection as a religion of conquest bereth of spirituality, beyond the Western world given the primacy of its narratives. The insistence on Islam having spread through violent conquest is a manifestation of the vilification of Muslims from medieval, early modern, and contemporary western literature, and art, to cinema and the popular media. The dehumanizing representation impacts perceptions of Muslims today and prevents the West from engaging meaningfully with Muslims.
The 1,000 years of the West’s anti-Muslim ideas and images, as Jonathan Lyons argues in his book Islam Through Western Eyes, formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders have been perfected in the newsrooms of television networks such as Fox News to create a grand totalizing narrative about Muslims. The same ideas have led to avoidable catastrophies such as the 2003 American invasion of Iraq on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction.
The civil war the invasion sparked with Saddam Hussein’s removal devastated Iraq. It also came to the edges of Bab al-Sheikh, a maze of streets on the eastern bank of the Tigris in Baghdad. But Bab al-Sheikh residents prevented sectarianism from driving a wedge between Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, and Christians, who continued living there cheek by jowl rebuffing the fresh dose of the toxic mix of religion and politics injected in to prevent a broad-based resistance against the American occupation.
Bab al-Sheikh is no ordinary locality. It the site of the final resting place of the 12th-century saint Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani (1077-1166), who is believed to watch over the neighbourhood and bound the neighbourhood together. Bab al-Sheikh remained an island of calm every time divisions were engineered.
Gilani was an intellectual, scholar, and moral teacher, who spent 25 years wandering in the deserts of what is now Iraq as an ascetic. In 1127, he returned to Baghdad to preach with welfare particularly of the weak and vulnerable the essence of his teachings. He considered the service of mankind a spiritual duty. His shrine within the walls of Baghdad’s old city became the mother shrine of his Qadiriyya Sufi Order when the saint was buried there. The Qadiriyya is the biggest Sufi order globally, making the saint among the most familiar in the Muslim world. He is known as Sulṭan al-Awliya’ (king of the saints), Muḥiyyiddin (reviver of the faith), Ghaus-ul-Azam (great helper), and Dastageer (hand-holder) in different parts of the world.
The saint’s familiarity in the Muslim world has been likened to figures such as St Paul, one of the leaders of the first generation of Christians and the most important Christian figure after Jesus, or St Patrick, who is believed to have played a key role in converting the Irish to Christianity. Gilani is an integral part of the spiritual life in Kashmir, the Himalayan Valley he never visited over 4,000 km from his burial site in Baghdad. Popular devotion turned him into a saint with local characteristics even farther—8,166 km from Baghdad—in Indonesia .
A 19th-century text appears to suggest Gilani was the fountainhead of a Javanese Muslim mystical tradition corresponding with a popular belief in West Java later that he brought Islam to to the region. West Java Legends invariably associate the saint with the sacred cave at Pamijahan in West Java’s Karangnunggal district, the site of the shrine of revered Java saint Shaykh Abd al-Muhyi, who introduced the Shattariyya Sufi order to the island.
The Sufi movement, or Islamic mysticism, helped spread Islam from Africa to Southeast Asia, which is home to about 25% of the world’s Muslims, notably Indonesia. Representing one of the most striking forms of pluralism globally, Indonesians belong to multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups, and speak over 525 languages. They are bound together by the national ideology Pancasila for peaceful co-existence.
Pancasila comprising five principles such as humanism, democracy, and social justice was enshrined in the Indonesian Constitution’s Preamble in 1945. It complements Islamic teachings. The acceptance of Pancasila is a key illustration of the Islamic roots of pluralism in Indonesia in line with the Quran, which speaks about the diversity of tribes, sects, nations, people, races, and languages.
Pancasila is seen to embody the spirit of the modus vivendi the Prophet Muhammad created through Mithaq al-Madinah, or Medina Charter, after his flight from Mecca. The Charter called all groups of Medina, including Jews, as one nation (ummah) together with Muslims with the same rights and duties. It was a formula for a state based on social and religious pluralism. The state of Medina represents the root of Islamic pluralism. Pancasila was a part of an effort to depict the early community as type of equalitarian participant nationalism.
Muslims in the wider South East Asia adopted Islamic middle path or ummah wasat. Civil society organizations Nahdlatul Ulama, and Muhammadiyah follow this moderate path and have been promoting pluralism, democracy, human rights, justice, gender equality, etc.
The history of Islam in Africa likewise does not bear the distorted notion that military means compelled people to embrace it. Academic Lamin Sanneh’s 2016 book Beyond Jihad is an important work that dispels this negative representation of Islam. The book explores Islam’s pacifist tradition in Africa, where around 27% of Muslims globally live, and shows how the religion took hold peacefully.
Clerics relying on religious scholarship and persuasion promoted Islam in Africa. Sanneh inquired into movements of radical reform that launched Islam into the world and concluded the military use of the term jihad became secondary to the spiritual in the historical process contrary to most people’s image of Islam as a conquering religious.
Islam took root in society through a community of scholars devoted to promoting the faith. Sanneh studied how those communities of scholars developed and took responsibility for promoting Islam which spread across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco in the 7th century and Spain in the 8th century.
Sanneh, an expert on Islam’s pacifist tradition, argued it created a community of religious identity that spanned European and African regions. He considered how the development of a Muslim community requires education. Educators and teachers emerged in time to inculcate the religion to help fulfill the obligations and requirements of Islam, which prescribes practices in the cycle of the lunar calendar making literacy its basic demand. Learning the religion and attending the mosque is needed to carry out the injunctions.
Sanneh looked at the Empire of Ghana where scattered populations adopted Islam soon after it was introduced sometime in the 9th or 10th century, creating a mixed community of Muslims and non-Muslims living peacefully cheek-by-jowl with no reports of religious violence. Sanneh came upon a class of religious scholars and traveling instructors who identified themselves as professionals living by offering religious services. This class of educated clerics distinguished themselves from the warrior class and political elites.
In Mali, the king converted in the 11th century by seeking prayers to end a severe drought. The conversion persuaded a section of his subjects to embrace Islam too when Mali was the most famous empire and the king wealthiest and most powerful man in Africa. The king caught the attention of European cartographers who put Mali on maps of the world in the 14th century. The faith made the king willing to be subject to the scrutiny of scholars, which acted as a brake on political tyranny and despotism. He did not have a complete license to do as he wished because of the moral constraint he felt as a Muslim.
Islamic scholars played an important role in fostering political moderation, religious tolerance, and social pluralism in Mali, where Arabs, Berbers, and Africans mixed amicably. They spoke different languages but developed a sense of a common humanity untrammeled by race, color, geography, and ethnicity. Islam built into it a tendency toward a cosmopolitan and more universal view of the human family. Islam’s elevated view of human identity went beyond clan, tribe, and race.
The Muslim community leaders Sanneh met in the course of his research and subsequently showed their commitment to tolerance. Sanneh was impressed by their modesty, their humility, and their fidelity to scholarship and learning. They lived in very obscure towns and villages in Mali, Senegal, Guinea, and adjoining countries. Sanneh found their habit of retreat and withdrawal to preserve their reputation of avoidance of politics made it difficult to keep pace with their work. Sanneh argued their professional dedication to religion and scholarship should be a reminder that Islam’s spiritual power has not diminished over the centuries.
Sanneh tried to account for this spiritual force and its accompanying Sufi component by separating it from the two other spheres that make up the great legacy of Islam. He argued that law and ethics were invested not in the state or government but in civil society where religious professionals took responsibility for it.
The religious scholars and Sufi masters were the main engines of Islam’s expansion and whenever the state got involved in promoting the region, it created difficulty for Muslims and attracted unease and protest from the scholars. Sanneh argued these demarcations distinguished Islam’s spiritual heritage in law, ethics, and religion from the affairs of state and rulership. The religious scholars identified with the heritage of the Prophet Muhammad and could turn to law and ethics as the organizing force of civil society. The Sufi orders became the missionary force of Islam’s momentum, using persuasion, teaching, and the exemplary lives of devotees.
Sanneh’s fieldwork persuaded him there was substance to the claim of a pacifist Muslim heritage. He faced a lot of resistance from scholars focused on ‘jihad studies’ who could not reconcile his pacifist inquiries with revolutionary political overtones. The sources were so strong and the clerical leaders he met were so persuasive that he felt encouraged to persist against the odds. Sanneh felt the force of a hidden compact with these rustic clerics to tell their story by allowing the evidence and the personalities they created to stand as vindication of their cause. What impressed Sanneh particularly was that the pacifist teaching was not sectarian.
Khatlani is a journalist and an author
