| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Tariq Ali Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 4 of 6
You've raised this question before; it's a central question of this book: Why was there no Reformation in Islam?
The principal reason is that if you look at the two big regions and times when Islam could have been changed, one was the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, from the ninth century to the twelfth century -- big, big possibilities. That period was, in my opinion, the peak of intellectual achievement of Islamic culture, both in the Arab world and what was known as al Andaluce. This is where philosophy, science, everything was thrown into the melting pot. You ask yourself, why? The reason why it happened that way in this region is that Islamic thinkers had to engage on almost a daily basis with Christian and Jewish philosophers and thinkers and writers. There was an intermingling, a co-mingling of cultures, which meant that you couldn't just abuse or cut throats, you had to engage. The governments were not wiping people out. That, if it had been allowed to go on, probably would have produced a Reformation of some sort, which would have changed the way Islam is viewed or views itself.
But that was physically exterminated and wiped out by the reconquest, when Jews and Muslims -- and we worked very closely together -- were asked to leave the peninsula, chucked out, or forced to covert to the Inquisition's model of the Catholicism, which many of them did who didn't want to leave homes. So that affected Islam very deeply. It never totally recovered from that. That was one big opportunity gone.
The second opportunity was during the Ottoman Empire. Now, this was a great, sprawling empire which lasted from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century, and it had many opportunities. It was shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe. It had big exchanges. But here, the domination of the state by the monarchy and the centralized character of the state prevented any independent initiatives. That's the way the state was structured.
Secondly, the clerics played a very big role in determining ideology and innovation. For instance, when the printing press came into Europe, there was a reformist sultan in power in Istanbul on the Ottoman throne who said, "This sounds to me like a good idea. We should have a printing press." And immediately the clerics and the religious officers came and said, "Remember Martin Luther? Do you know how many copies of Martin Luther were printed on these printing presses which wrecked Christianity? Do you want that to happen here?" And so he retreated. And that retreat [was even broader]; for instance, clocks were not allowed because they said time is circular. "You don't need a clock to tell the time. When the muezzin calls the faithful to pray four times a day, that's how you tell your time."
So these are tiny examples, but that empire failed to modernize. One was a blow inflicted from outside Spain and Portugal, the other was a self-inflicted blow. And that's why whenever I go into that world, I say, "Yes, the American Empire, the West, has done a horrible thing; but that's not the total explanation."
You write about the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, "What Hasan al-Banna, the Brothers and their numerous successors today can never accept is materialism: not as a school of thought or a doctrine in the narrow sense of the word, nor even as a chance occurrence, but as an undeniable reality. Something that cannot be altered regardless of who rules the state... Thinking people search for truth in matter because they are aware that there is nowhere else for them to search." Comment on what you said there. Is there anything you would add to that?
What can one add? For me, it's so obvious as a lifelong materialist that that's how to understand the origins of life, the origins of the planet, the origins of the universe; there's no other explanation for it. You can totally understand the ancients trying to create their own image in the gods they believed in, and then the emergence of the monotheisms, in order to find in those times some other explanation which easily explained the world. The sort of beliefs I was most sympathetic to -- I mean, at least I understood them -- were those who tried to worship nature, because that was all-powerful: the sun, when it came out; the moon, what it did to the tides; trees on which food grew. That sort of worship you understand because that's what keeps you living.
But then with the arrival of the big three monotheisms -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- that all began to change, and you began a totally different structure. The needs for these monotheisms were different: they were political needs, in my opinion. But the fact that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have people who believe in creationism in this country -- ! This is probably the most religious country in the advanced capitalist world; more people here declare a belief in the supreme being than anywhere in Europe or in the Muslim world. I find it incomprehensible that we are still at that stage where they still believe in [creationism]. Materialism is so evident to me; how can they not believe it? It's beyond reason. It's such a violation of reason. In many parts of the Muslim world, that's what holds them back. Biology can't be taught in many Muslim countries, because to teach it means you give people other ideas. When I was growing up, the one subject we were not taught, even in those missionary schools, was biology.
So in the end, is it really this inability to separate religion from the state in the Islamic world that is the key problem? Or is the problem of the Muslim world's relation to the Western empire more important?
It's a combination of both. The critique, therefore, has to be a dual critique, both of the empire, but also of the failure of these regimes in [the Islamic] world to sort out their own problems. You can't blame everything, after all, on Western intervention. There's a whole period in that world where they could have gone on their own. It's true the empire intervened to stop them, but if they had behaved in a different way, they would have won. I'll give you one concrete example.
In the late fifties, there was a wave of nationalist revolutions in the Arab world -- Egypt, Iraq -- and there was a real possibility of creating a single Arab entity, or a dominant Arab entity, the "Arab Nation," which was the dream of the all the Arabs and their poets. There was first a union between Egypt and Syria in which the Egyptians should have shared more power with the Syrians instead of treating them as they did, seeing themselves as the dominant nation. Then you had a revolution in Iraq in 1958, and the new ruler of Iraq, Abdel Kerim Kassem, was a nationalist. Radio Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus were [all] preaching nationalist revolutions. The Saudi regime was trembling. The Iraqis proposed one Arab nation with three concurrent capitals -- Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus -- run as one entity, to be funded by Iraqi oil. Now, to my mind, if that had happened, it would have taken that world onto a different level altogether in terms of modernization, education of the population, etc., etc.
Why didn't it happen? People say, "Ah, the Americans used Israel to hit the nations in '67." That is true, but that was already when the attempt to create a single Arab entity had been defeated. So between '58 and '67, there were real possibilities in that world which they didn't take for foolish reasons, for reasons of political pride, narcissism, factionalism, stupidity. And we now pay the price for that.
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