Justinian and Aurengzeb

These two great monarchs separated by more than a millennium, Justinian (b 482 - r 527 - d 565) and Aurengzeb (b 1618 - r 1658 - d 1707) are exemplars of the lost opportunity hidden by bitter military success. But in each case, it is not the lost opportunity that is well-known. Allow me to elaborate.

History readers give up on mystery to a great degree because generally when one studies a period, you know how it turns out. So when I speak of lost opportunities, I suppose I am re-introducing an element of mystery. The path not taken leads nowhere in the event, and speculations on where it might have led are fruitless if still potentially fascinating. So from prologue to provisos ... both men stood on the cusp of Central Asia. Justinian's empire crept up to Central Asia but never conquered it as Justinian wasted precious time in heading west; Aurengzeb's empire was a sort of fugitive from Central Asia and he famously turned his back on his origins and headed south.

Justinian was arguably the last great ancient emperor. We in the West prefer to think that Rome died in 476 with Odoacer's displacement of Romulus Augustulus ... one of the really lucky sods ever to rule in the western empire as he survived his displacement and lived out his life in comfort near Ravenna. But by then, Rome had been increasingly and predominantly eastern and Greek for at least two centuries. Justinian confronted on his eastern border the Persian Sasanian empire, another last of the ancients. I am not well schooled in the Sasanians, and, frankly, few are. They hung on for a couple of centuries, famously swept aside like so much dust by the Arabs at Qadissiya (in modern Iraq) in 637. But for the hundred years before then, they were more or less constantly at war with the Romans ... whom we prefer inaccurately to call the Byzantines, but I don't think they are Byzantine until after the Arab conuests, perhaps not until, say, 843 which is traditionally the date ascribed to the birth of Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Sassanian parts of what is now the Middle East, parts of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, had huge Christian populations, too little studied and known. Christianity was actually making great headway across Central Asia in a similar trajectory to what the Muslims would pursue only a century later. The Sassanians periodically repressed Christianity, primarily when adopted by their own nobility who, they felt, should stick to imperial Zoroastrianism. But the non-military Christian populations were allowed to muddle on, and by reason of the state's unconcern for orthodoxy, heterodoxy flourished particularly in the form of the Monophysites (i.e., Christ is of one divine nature, perhaps the right wing of the argument in which the Nestorians where Christ is of human nature are the left wing; the Orthodox and the Catholics fit in the middle where Christ is both and simultaneously divine and human ... theology is bunk, and one needs these little signposts to keep pressing through the historical issues). Such Christians might prefer the Persians over the Romans because their theological disputations would not end up in death or exile or some other moritification. That preference explains to a good degree why the Christians of the Middle East quickly accommodated to their Arab conquerors.

So my question is this: why didn't Justinian set himself to the task of destroying the Sassanians; why did he not look East in his early reign? He wasted his time reconquering Italy and North Africa, and they provided him with insufficient revenues to justify the expense of holding them, even when he increasingly stripped them of troops in favor of the "eastern front". In 542-3, a great plague ripped through the Mediterranean world, and the initiative had been lost, Justinian spent most of the rest of his reign ... he famously did not physically leave Constantinople for 50 years ... trying by subtle persuasions and brutal repressions to impose upon his entire empire his sole view of Christian orthodoxy.

He did not succeed. The combination of the ravages of the plague and Justinian's religious nonsense and the liminal character of much of what is now the Middle East led to a situation where imperial control was distant and imperial allegiances were absent. Cities atrophied and urban communities found their primary allegiance through a religious communitarianism in which the enemy was their heretical neighbor. When the Arabs conquered in a mad whirlwind dash only seven decades later, they found a society that did not care a whole lot who ruled them so long as they were left alone in their cellular religious particularism.

What would have happened if Justinian's early career had been devoted to crushing the Sassanids instead of the pointless exercise of resubjecting the littorals of the Western Mediterranean? If he had ignored the imperial self-absorption of requiring each of his subjects to have the identical view of the precise nature of the godhead? perhaps then the Arabs confront a society that resists over the centuries their religion, which subordinates the conquerors, as has so many times been the pattern, rather than the conqueror converting the conquered.

What ifs are perhaps best left to cocktail conversation ... and in defnse of this notion, as I write this I am down one sublime martini made with Dolin vermouth and Junipero gin and one "PampleRose" which is a gin and Campari invention of my excellent roommate and bartender R. But let me aver that the failure of Justinian to look past his religious Caesarism served to foredoom Roman Asia to Islam. Religious monomania is always destructive ... and I suppose that is subset of religion being the root of all evil.


This tragic false focus repeats itself a millennium later in northern India. Aurengzeb was as much a religious fanatic as Justinian, albeit a Muslim one, and it is his religious blindness that brought his dynasty, the Mughals, low and, one might argue, cursed India for centuries to come.

Aurengzeb was the sixth Mughal emperor, the last great one, and the only one of the great emperors to successfully overthrow his father, Shah Jahan, notwithstanding the shibboleth that the Mughal sons were prone to overthrow their fathers ... in fact only one succeeded, despite various other attempts. The important point is that the Turkic system of succession was designed to turn royal sons into generals and governors so that the ultimate winner would be best positioned to advance the interests of the dynasty. Jahangir tried to revolt against Akbar, but Akbar defeated his attempt. When Akbar died, Jahangir moved quickly, perhaps inspired by his unsuccessful revolt, to counter his potential enemies, including his son Khusraw whom he blinded. The future Shah Jahan revolted against Jahangir, but he too was defeated only to succeed a year later when dad died, and against the wishes of his father's favorite wife, the famous Nur Jahan.

Westerners tend to look at the Mughals in a comic-bookish sort of way. We remember the bizarre and corpulent lassitude of the hangers-on and placeholders whom the British used and abused and eventually displaced. And we warm to the aforementioned reductionist tales of sons tormenting fathers and all that. But the Mughal tale is a pivot in Indian history. As with many pivots, it did not have to turn out as it did, and contemporaneous observers of the early Mughals probably thought it would not turn out as it did. Babur (b 1483 - r 1526 - d 1530), a Chaghatay Turk said to descend from both Genghis Khan and Timur, generally known as Tamerlane, swept down from Afghanistan and showed northern India what Central Asia had known about Turks and Mongols on horseback. Babur, by the way, was certainly gay. His son Humayun (b 1508 - r 1530-1539 - r 1555 - d 1556) lost the empire to Sher Shah Suri, struggled with his brothers, found refuge with the Shiite Safavids in Persia, and then regained the empire just in time to die a bizarre death ... he caught his foot on his robe and fell to his death.

Humayun was succeeded by the great Akbar (b 1542 - r 1556 - d 1605) whose reign was the occasion of a grand experiment in religious and artistic syncretism. That experiment continued with the succession of his son Jahangir (b 1565 - r 1609 - d 1627) and his son Shah Jahan (b 1592 - r 1627-1658 - d 1666) whose artistic achievements were crowned by the Taj Mahal. But Shah Jahan was a decidedly more Islamic ruler, and less given to the syncretism that had slowly curdled since the death of Akbar.

The real story of the accession of Aurengzeb (b 1618 - r 1658 - d 1707) is religion. He was a Muslim fanatic, one of four brothers who went after each other during their father's sudden, only seemingly fatal illness from which he ultimately completely recovered. The key battle was between Aurengzeb and the oldest brother Dara Shukoh (sometimes Dara Shikoh). They met at Samugarh near Agra on May 30, 1658 ... one of those great turning point battles little known beyond locals and experts. After Samugarh and a long flight, Dara Shukoh was ultimately subjected to a cruel execution.

Dara Shukoh probably took his succession for granted, and certainly made errors of hubris in his war against his younger brother. Dara Shukoh was a religious syncretist, the pupil of a Sufi Shaikh who argued that Vedas and the Upanishads were the concealed scriptures mentioned in the Qur'an (Richards, page 152). His accession to the throne would have continued a religious experiment and perhaps created a party of syncretism that would exist to this day. More importantly, he would not have been the arrogant and unquenchable pursuer of Hindu rebels in the South that Aurengzeb became.

The state that Aurengzeb inherited was rich and stable and produced vast tax revenues. But he could not sit still; he spent precious little time in his capital and pursued for the bulk of his reign destructive campaigns against Hindu rebels in the South of whom the most storied is Shivaji Bhonsla (1627-80). Neither side could win, and they exhausted themselves in endless campaigns. Meanwhile, imperial authority in the north atrophied, and so did the authority of the dynasty and Aurengzeb's successors who were a bunch of nincompoops! That is what the British confronted as their power rose.

So to me Aurengzeb's victory over Dara Shukoh is the lost opportunity of a powerful kingdom with a syncretic ruler and patron of the arts confronting the British and negotiating a different sort of colonial encounter. His victory was a victory of orthodoxy, and orthodoxy stifles.

So Aurengzeb left a weakened empire that was conquered by Christians; he also bequeathed modern India its hard differentiation between Muslims and Hindus. And Justinian left a weakened empire that was largely conquered by Muslims, and bequeathed the modern Middle East a few weird Christian sects struggling for air in a vast Muslim sea.

Might it have been different? We'll never know.


Photos by Arod; any connection with the post is obviously enigmatic at best. The middle photo is one of the dolls that Winfield expertly makes for his Christmas tree.

Loss

This is a terribly sad post with which to end the year ... I have been avoiding finishing it for days. But it has been a hell of year ... a year of enormous loss. So with that ...

I spent the day wandering today ... I wanted to spend some time thinking about the film that my oldest friend, Ian Mackenzie, showed us last night. The film is called The Last of the Nomads, and it is part of a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) series called The Adventurers. (Bizarrely, the full version of the film is only available in Canada; if you are in Canada, see it here.) The film won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

The film is about Ian's 15-year work with the Penan people of Sarawak; Ian has some further material on the Penan and his work here.

The essence of the film is about loss ... in this case, the loss of language, heritage, and way of life of a people who practiced harmony in a land of plenty for countless generations. The loss is cruel, and heartless, the result of the immoral greed of the ruling caste of Malaysia that enables the rape of the primeval rain forest which is the ancestral home of the Penan. They tried to stop the bulldozers in the 80s with their bodies, but they were carted away. The film documents the moment when Ian discovers that the last of the nomadic Penan have settled and sowed crops.

There is no doubt that this was "inevitable" in the sense of the conflict between industrial power and greed against a people armed with sticks and time. Social structures morph and change, and they can come to an end. Countless nomadic societies have settled ... not only now but for thousands of years. But the inevitable aspect of this cannot mask that it did not have to be such a guillotining ... that a rational approach to forest resources could have allowed sustainable extraction and continued forest-living for the peoples who, by any standard of dispassionate justice, "own" that forest.

But this film is about loss ... about an execution ... about the terminal act in the assault of a government on one of its people who were in the way of greed.


So I took a large part of the day to think about loss both in the broad, historical context of what Ian showed us about the Penan and in a more personal sense. I went to Three Wells in Mill Valley, a place where a seasonal stream cascades through a forested gully. My old friend June grew up in Mill Valley and played there as a child in the 30s long before Mill Valley became the preserve of a rich liberal caste who seem to shun you as you walk the back roads ... perhaps a projection of my imagination since I have long observed how the rich look askance at those who invade their preserves without invitation. June showed Three Wells to our mutual friend Kurt, who was a mentor and best friend, and who perished of the plague in 1992. Kurt and I went to Three wells on several occasions to sit by its cascading waters and examine the Universe, as he would call our discussions.

Loss is everywhere in human existence ... it is the sine qua non of progress and change and both personal and social development. That is not praise for loss, nor does it equate one loss with another. We cannot hold back the hands of time, as it were, and the hands of time are driven by loss. My education in loss, as I have addressed from time to time in these scribblings, was AIDS ... "the Deaths", I have called it ever since ... and I had to come to grips with the unendurable. Not unique ... and I not so much comforted myself as assuaged my fears by thinking of other more horrible losses that at least someone survives.

Remember the 2004 tsunami. Ian was in San Francisco when it happened, and together we consumed the news insatiably. We had traveled together in Aceh, and knew some of the scenes. Watching the footage was addictive, not only because of the sheer horror or it, but also because of the vicarious participation in loss ... trying to fathom the unimaginable, trying to settle your mind on top of something that cannot be endured.

But, of course, it is endured. As one reads history, that is the remarkable thing about our species, that we endure against all odds. The results, let alone the causes, are not always pretty ... and there is endurance against that which cannot be controlled and endurance against that which ought never to have been.

There is also the less panoramic but more personal loss. Three local institutions emblematic of an earlier period in the history of the Castro (the San Francisco neighborhood where I live and where the defining early events of gay liberation occurred) ... Welcome Home, a hippyish greasy spoon that was a haven for gay clones in the 70s and 80s; All American Boy, a long-time clothier who supplied the clones with plaid shirts and jeans back in the day; and Gay Cleaners, the Chinese laundry run by the strangely cinematic and curiously named Gay family, apparently kicked out with a month's notice after 30 years by a greedy landlord who evidently does not read the Wall Street Journal. I am cranky about these losses because they signal the yuppification of our gentrified neighborhood, and I loathe all the cell-phone toting yuppies with their dumb-struck boyfriends in tow. I fear the loss of my neighborhood.

What sort of a loss is that by comparison with a people who lose their homeland or their way of life. Our society turns over at a furious pace ... an unsustainable pace, one might argue, but we still wait for the final proof on that. One has to be careful to balance one's sense of outrage at loss against the greater losses that we witness daily in the New York Times.

Loss. No future without it. Indeed, there is not past without it. One cannot address lass without thinking of one of my guiding aphorisms ... to whit, that there is no such thing as a zero sum game.

I won't spend a lot of time thinking of a loss from which greater gain was had ... do we have modern Europe without the guillotine, Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War, the two great wars? Probably not, although that is not to say that all the horrors were the sine qua non. Could it not have gone another way? It turns out that there is not a lot of support in history for a flower child notion that history would have been much better if only everyone just got along.

But that is never a justification for the horrors of the moment. It is no argument that we cannot "at this moment, at this time" (paraphrasing Obama) apply reason and find ways for all sides to benefit. I think of Gaza in that sense.

And I think of those poor last nomads, Ian's friends, living in a forest hut yards from their more settled cousins, wistfully and sadly, if not bitterly, contemplating a loss whose contours even they cannot fully measure. There is no good reason for it; only greed ... a well-known historical reason. I quibble with Ian about how he records the oral texts of this people before they disappear. But I admire his courage in being willing to witness up close the agony of people unjustly stripped of their heritage, and to be willing to bear witness so that people in the future may remember these last nomads.


As I thought about this and watched the water in Three Wells, I remembered old Kurt, dead these 15 years. I remembered talking with him about issues just like this as we together watched the water swirl at Three Wells. Loss, and the future, and the unimaginable that comes true no matter what.

Photos by Arod of Three Wells, Mill Valley, California.

Things You Should Know about Islam: Number One

I continually intend to post notes on what I am reading, but almost always ruminate too long until I have moved onto a new topic. That isn't working. There is an anarchy to the thought process in blogging ... say what's tickling you enough times and eventually you figure out the joke.

So in that spirit ...

My reading patterns have a distinct tendency to circle back, and the point of no return often ends up being the early years of Islam and the Arab Empire. So, in December I read a new book, The Heirs of Muhammad: Islam's First Century and the Origins of the Sunni-Shia Split by Barnaby Rogerson as preparation for re-reading the 1970s classics that redefined the study of early Islam.

So, first things first, Rogerson doesn't live up to his title. He is not a scholar, doesn't speak Arabic, and has no particular background in the subject. In his introduction he notes the eye-rolling skepticism he inspired in any number of Muslims he consulted on the project. Naturally, a man writing a popular reduction of the epochal issues that only just began to develop during the early caliphate (conventionally, 632-661 C.E., but there are deep problems with those dates) has to watch his step for there is all manner of incipient rage and riots waiting to greet the unwary. For some reason, scholars have tended to avoid being the subjects of riots, but the writers of for-profit writings have not been so lucky.

Well, by Rogerson, all the early folks of Islam were just peachy nice ... occasionally stern, occasionally cranky, but always genteel and devoted. Abu Bakr, the first caliph, was a kindly old man; Umar, the second, was stern; Uthman a tad muddled; and Ali just plain too bloody good for his good. This is not history, alas, and it is at bottom boring. But I ploughed through if only because I thought it probably presented the most conventional, in modern popular Islamic terms,Western-oriented presentation of the first four caliphs that I had ever read. Because ... I cannot avoid it ... I just prefer the intricate fulminations of professional scholars.

So I moved on to a re-read of the strident and compelling two volume Islamic History: A New Interpretation by M.A. Shaban, published in 1971 and 1976 respectively. I'll address Shaban at some point, but it is worth noting that the first of these volumes is essential reading for understanding just how it happened, in the event, that Muhammad ended up being one of the half dozen or so prophets who founded a religion that stuck.

Shaban's decidedly economic/tribal/military approach demands a return to the font ... Marshal G.S. Hodgson's magisterial three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Hodgson is concerned about world history, about great movements, and about the refraction of history through the the life of the mind, and the refraction of religion through history.

Hodgson's work played a big role in my graduate career and I have never left him behind. (He tragically died at 46 in 1968, a great scholarly life cut untimely short.) His first volume concerns the High Caliphal period of Islam (let's call it 632-945 C.E.), which came to a close, with a whimper and not a bang somewhere between 837 and 945 ... you pick which band of Turks sufficiently reduced the Abbasid caliphs to impotence that they could no longer be considered as actual rulers. So that will suffice as the first thing everyone should know about Islam ...first only in the sense that it is the first thing that I am writing about ... that the caliphate was captured and domesticated by the Turks about 200 years after the prophet died.

This fact is actually more significant for Arab history than Islamic history ... and that points to a deep misconception about the history of Islam. It started, certainly, as an Arab religion, but after the embers of the Arab conquests had cooled down, Islam became the consummate expression of what Hodgson calls the "Irano-Semitic" religious complex. This is not a desert religion, but a religion of the urban merchant classes. More properly, it is a religion that embodies in its constitutive contradictions that enduring contradiction of life in the middle of the Eurasian continent, to whit the long struggle between the urban elites or notables against the assorted marshal forces, whether imperial or nomadic-tribal, who dominated them politically.

Hodgson calls this the "a'yan-amir" complex, where a'yan is urban notable and amir is tribal military commander.

One of the great myths that we hear repeated ad nauseam is that there is no separation of church and state in Islam, and that Christianity differs thereby in allowing such a differentiation. It is not just that this is a reduction to the point of silliness ... it is rather that at every point in religious history, the relationship with the state is what drives the dynamic. In Islam, all the struggles ultimately are about the state. The Shia/Sunni split is about the state, and the Sunni compromise that dominates the Muslim world is based precisely on the separation of church and state ... or more properly, religion and state. (There is an excellent review of precisely this issue in L. Carl Brown's Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics.)

It was in the High Caliphal period that the separation of religion and politics in the consummate religion of oneness developed its broad lines. But it was in the long middle period of fractured rule and universalized civilization that the terms which ported to modern reality developed. This is the period of Islamic history which earnest liberals like to point to as being so much more developed and cosmopolitan than the corresponding period of Catholic dominated recalcitrance in Europe. But it turns out that neither caricature is precisely true, and in reaction to this long period, one civilization ultimately developed a flexibility that came to rule the world, while the other devolved drip by drip into a period of steadily more stultifying calcification. Why?

No simple answer to that, and I think that accident and happenstance have something of a role. But there is an critical role to the patterns of rulership and its struggle with religion that came to provide fertile ground on the one hand and barren on the other. Neither party in either case liked the terms, and it took centuries to play out.

I shall return to this theme regularly, and I will always mark these posts at least under the tag "Horses and Peoples" for ease of reference.

Thanksgiving

So, happy Thanksgiving!

This is not a holiday that means much to me ... even the four day weekend, no matter how welcome, has always seemed a bit prosaic. During the longue durée of my student life it meant fevered paper writing. Now it means kicking off the mad dash to get all of Christmas up in time for the big party this year on the 16th. "All of Christmas" refers to the gargantuan mass of decorations that I scatter meaninfully around the house.

Canadians celebrate a less meaningful Thanksgiving in October. Every year, the papers note that the first Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in Canada. Not sure to what degree that is true, especially given the mythology surrounding the American version, but it fits the national myth.

American Thanksgiving, evidently, is the consummate family holiday, and Christmas apears to suffer by reason of it. In noting this, I take the stance of being on an extended anthropological expedition here ... I have come to know the natives well, I like them, and they seem to treat me as one of their own .... but some of their habits still appear befuddling.
The mythos of Thanksgiving is all about the Pilgrims, as we know, and much is made nowadays about the native people whose land they took. So Thanksgiving is as close as we get to celebrating migration. It doesn't take a lot of history reading to come to understand that migration is at the core of the human experience. In our mythologies, it is both celebrated and reviled. I am not going to such a Polyanna as to decide in one sentence whether its a goodie or a baddie ... migration's effects depend upon where you sit. But, as with war, there is no human civilization without it, no matter how tortured are those who find themselves at the receiving end of migration.

When I was in Prague, I ws struck at the otherworldy beauty of the angry young faces. There was something decidely Asiatic about them. You're not allowed to say that now, of course, because it is an impression piled on a trope. I speculated that there was a little Hun or Mongol there, and that a population relatively genomically isolated for a millennium or so betrayed its past in its faces. I think that we know little about the particulars of the migrations of the Slavs after the fall of Rome (I mean the western version), but migrate they did. And somebody was there, and somebody had to move on or perish. We still fight about these things in the 21st century, not to mention the rather notable wars of the 20th century that stirred up mythologized memories of long past migrations.

The U.S. is mired in Central Asian ... never fight a land war in Asia! The Arabs in Iraq stem historically from the migrations after the Arab conquest of the 7th century, and they were migrated over by Turks and Mongols and Tatars. The Persians like to think that they have been there since ancient times, but they too have been migrated over successively. The Afghans are a boiling cauldron of the peoples who washed over their land, and the Pakistanis sport a new ethnic group of migrants who tell us more about the foundations of ethnicity than almost any people around ... the Mohajirs are just those who came from India at Partition. But in due course they had to assume the characteristics of an ethnic group in order to compete in the hellish politics of the islamic-ideology state.

If they had Thanksgiving in Pakistan, who would celebrate it, and on what day? Would it be about harvest in a new land, or would it be about real estate in Karachi? If they had Thanksgiving in Baghdad, would they celebrate the arrival of the Abbasid Mansur in 762 ... remember that the Abbasid revolution essentially started in what is now Afghanistan and swept the Ummayads off the face of the earth ... well a few of them managed to get to Spain where they founded a glorious dynasty whose tale is too little told. Why? Because that civilization was itself swept aside by a bunch of migrants ... not so much the conquerors of the Reconquista, as by the peasants who followed in their tracks and reseeded the lands with Catholicism late filled with Islam. If they had a Thanksgiving in Spain, would they mournfully celebrate the Moors who surrendered their civilization to make way for the Inquisition? Or would they celebrate the first burnings once the conquest was complete in 1492.

So Thanksgiving always rings a little hollow to me, and even the anti-Thanksgiving traditions do as well. But Christmas ... now there is a great holiday. Pure myth at its root, with another pure myth plastered on top of it, with a solstice underneath everything, and glittering lights illuminating its ancientness. By that, I mean, its pre-Christian roots along with the fairy tale of the birth of the boy king, all celebrated on the darkest day of the year with lights that remind us that spring is on the way.

Photos by Arod. Top photo: a student project at the major research university (MRU) where I work. Lower photo: commercial street art, Oak and Buchanan, San Francisco.

Rambling

I'm watching the fourth quarter of the Cal-USC game. Not really much of a football fan, but being a spurts junkie means watching women's bowling if there's nothing else on when you need a fix. Certainly college football is a damned sight better than any form of bowling ... and when the noble California Golden Bears have a shot at crushing the profoundly evil USC Parthians or Persians or some ancient non-Greeks ... can't remember which ones just now ... well, just gotta watch. Of course, I have three degrees from Cal. Currently tied 17-17 with ten and a half to go in the fourth quarter.

I feel kind of guilty about my Pakistan post ... how can I say that any nation is "worst". Plenty of folks around the world would quickly chime in that the good ole U.S. of A. is the worst for various reasons. What I mean by worst is that a place is horrible to live in, contributing essentially nothing, and causing or at least threatening tremendous harm.

USC just had a big pass play wiped out by a holding penalty. Such is the lot of those in league with the devil. I smile. Some people take the devil seriously, and I daresay there are plenty of the religious in Pakistan who count themselves among that number. I consider the notion of the devil as a longstanding and hilarious, albeit rather cruel, joke. It is a notion that readily serves as handbag for assorted complaints and fears and disappointments and hurts ... like this one ... USC, in league with the devil, scores a touchdown after a 95+ yard drive.

So back to Pakistan. It was founded on an idea, or at least it had ideology at the forefront of a founding that certainly had plenty of other interests at work. I decided I should review Pakistan's history given my post and shortly I shall re-read Owen Bennett Jones' comprehensive survey of Pakistan's history, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm ... sort of a drag, because I have been enjoying a fabulous tour of the middle period of the middle part of Asia ... the Turkic, Mongol, Tatar invasions and conquests. But there is a relationship between those middle-middle-middle events, and the historical impasse in which middle-middle-middle Asia finds iitself.

Put briefly, I refer to the notion of the third rule of history ... that any force given long enough turns into its opposite. (You can see my three rules of history at the top of this blog.) Modern Western historians like to emphasize how backward Europe was in the middle periods of human history, and how advanced and spectacular and populated were China and the Middle East and the vast stretch of steppe between them. But in those long millennia where the nomads on horseback repeatedly beat back civilization either capturing it or destroying, they bequeathed historical predilections that continue to haunt that vast middle even when the power of horsemen is now confined to that most backward corner of human life, the Sudan.

In other words, the successes of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane and the Seljuk and late Ottoman Turks and the Mamluks had the effect of freezing political and social innovation. How that worked I do not yet have words to describe ... but it is that which motivates me in my current re-reading of middle-middle-middle Asian history. And I write out this predilection here to challenge myself to come up with some of those words.

[Nate Longshore, Cal QB, just threw another fourth-quarter interception, and the game is essentially gone. Cal's failure this year has hung on his bad right ankle, but you have to begin to wonder if he is the guy who can take us there. He is still a junior, but we have a keeper in young Kevin Riley ... we just might have to go with him next year.]

So the "worstness" of Pakistan the nation, as I see it, along with the seemingly permanent fracturing of Afghanistan not so much as a nation as in terms of its being a cultural zone, is the playing out of historical dymanics that are several millennia old combined with the peculiar horrors of 20th-century ideology. To counter the straw-man notion raised above that the U.S. is the "worst" nation, we have only to point to the fact that its dynamics are of much more recent genesis, and so the possibility of re-working them seems closer to the surface. And we can consider that the basic ideas of American democracy are 18th- and 19th-century, where the driving ideas of the founding of Pakistan are a hellish brew that conflates the superstitions of the 7th century with the worst megalomanias of the 20th.

USC just made a first down with a minute to go. We're dead. Woe.

No first downs in Pakistan. It has been fourth and long since 1947.

Pakistan

At the risk of inviting a little opprobrium, I have to confess that I have long held that Pakistan is the "worst" country. That is not to say that the people are any worse than others, or in any way inferior. But it is to say that the sum total of what constitutes Pakistan the nation makes it a combination of being among the worst places to live, with the most deadly possibilities for a future and the least hope for some sort of progress, defined any way you want to look at it. It is not that Pakistan is worst in everything, but just that it is bad in most everything, and truly awful in some critical matters, and you put it all together, and there just does not seem to be much redeeming in its nationhood. Lovely people, of course, but what a country. Besotted by religion, infested by an army that is vastly too large and corporate and unchecked by other forces, ringed by tribes who have not emerged from the devastation of centuries of brutal warfare, awash in utterly insane ethnic conflicts, and, worst of all, possessed of nuclear weapons. It does have a middle class, apparently growing, but also largely trapped up in ethnicity and lineage and all the attendant insanity.

So, if I were cynical, which I am not, I would just have to say this ... so Pakistan is having another crisis ... imagine that.

The key to understanding the current crisis, I believe, is that Musharraf is attacking this middle class, not the Islamists who are not really a threat to him. I think he has fundamentally misread the situation, and that his apparently immeasurable hubris has swamped a mind that seemed to be working reasonably well for the first part of his rule. But that is neither here nor there. It seems remarkable to me that he could not bring himself to give up his position as head of the army ... but perhaps he knows that once he has shed that direct lever of control, he is simply twisting in the wind. So what ... he is twisting in the wind right now, waiting upon some other power base within the army to put him out of his misery.

As an aside, why do the plainclothes cops have to gratuitously punch and kick the black-and-white-clad lawyers as they load them up into paddy wagons? This is from the endlessly repeated CNN footage. The photographers seem to outnumber the lawyers, and they are allowed without interference to photograph every last little blow. So you have to assume that the regime has decided that it wants these images propagated, and that a few kicks and clubbings will demonstrate to the comfortable middle classes that this is what awaits protesters ... a rough handling and few nights in jail away from their estates and their armies of cowering servants fresh off the farm, as it were. Just as the blows are feeble, if real, so the regime shows itself as feeble, waiting for some force whose brutality is more visceral to come along and sweep it away.

It turns out that I am reading about Tamerlane, more appropriately Temur or Timur, the great and brutal Turco-Mongol who conquered Central Asia in the 14th century. I have a long fascination with horses and peoples, and my reading keeps returning to the early and middle periods of Islamic history. Tamerlane (I prefer the English versions of names because it is English I speak and because every language naturally domesticates the names of places and peoples it considers important) was a monster who, notwithstanding his intellectual, architectural, and literary fascinations, had the effect like Genghis Khan before him of destroying great cities and cultures so thoroughly that they have not recovered to this day. Witness Afghanistan. But that is the way it is with nomads when they overwhelm the urbane.

When Tamerlane conquered a resistant city, or especially a rebellious city, he committed horrible slaughters, none worse that when he piled 2,000 living sentient human beings into a tower and bricked them in to die and rot as a memorial to those who opposed him. The point of this was to warn others that submission was the only rationale option. Dictators still think that way. But when their exemplary violence is as flabby and unconvincing as Musharraf's latest round-ups, you have to wonder ... who is weaker, Musharraf or his lawyeristic opponents? We can be assured that the Islamist madmen who are the ostensible and requisite villains inn the piece would not stop at a few kicks. (Compare it, by the way, to the murderous brutality of the petty thugs who run Burma.)

I do not believe that the islamists have the power to come to power in Pakistan, and none of the analysis seems to deal with this. They cannot defeat the army, and they cannot capture it. So they can cause destruction and chaos here and there, but they cannot seize the state. I think that the Islamists are an important part of Musharraf's power ... without them, his only excuse for rule is that Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were corrupt. Big woop ... who isn't corrupt in power in a third world hellhole? But the possibility of an Iranian style state takeover? Not very bloody likely.

The tribal islamists serve another purpose as well that does not dovetail with Bushie 9/11-ism. Pakistan has essentially four borders, five if you count China. We hear little about the Iran border and I doubt it is troublesome. The India border is big power stuff, puffing and huffing and occasionally getting into a disastrous war. Kashmir is a bleeding sore that keeps some of the Islamists busy and provdes the army with a valuable raison d'être for its overweening control. Afghanistan is an open door to chaos. Pakistan wants a weak, troubled Afghanistan, and it wants its islamists to be more concerned with their criminal activites on that border than with bringing their premodern version of enlightenment to Pakistan's tumultuous cities. So the army needs the Islamists, and the Islamists need the army, and neither of them cares a whit about Bushite 9/11-ism except insofar as it feathers their beds (army) or provides a requisite great Satan figure (islamists.)

I think Musharraf suffers a coup from within the army within a month or two. Then fevered negotiations ... Condi's last gasp ... and semi-brokered elections presumably some time before November 2008 for another brief stab at democracy before the army takes over again in the face of another wave of arrogant civilian corruption and exemplary religious violence. Those elections in the good ole U.S. are easily as important to Pakistan as any legislative elections at home. That marks the level of desperation in this worst of nations.

Sheesh ...

Sheesh, I sure get hot under the collar quick when religion comes up. Thomas Cahill's reference to Augustine about which I wrote a few days ago got my back up, but I have cooled down. I left his Irish book by the wayside for a while and picked up something rather more to my typical taste ... Stephen O'Shea's lively review of "Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World" entitled Sea of Faith. And there on page 79, discussing the world after the fall of Visigothic Spain to the Muslims but also after their timely defeat by Charles Martel at Poitiers/Tours in 723 or 733, he writes this:

A commonplace of monastic chronicles and letters spoke of mundus senescit, the world grown old. That glum sentiment would have been deemed peculiar outside of western Christendom. The idea that a dying civilization was "saved," by the Irish of whomever, is parochial and would have been thought of as such by the denizens of the Mediterranean. By the yardstick of trade, intellectual inquisitiveness, and cultural interchange, civilization was doing quite well in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, with or without the monks.

If I have a single impression from having spent a year reading medieval European history, it would be precisely that. (That O'Shea takes an obvious swipe at the nevertheless engaging and talented Mr. Cahill is just a pleasantry.) The fall of Rome was cataclysmic, but life went on with its wearying combination of battles, migrations, disasters, and death alongside quotidien joys and boredom and countless lives lived passionately and anonymously. Alas, I cannot deny, having considered the matter long and deep for fifteen years, that I consider the irruption of Islam to have been, on balance, a tremendous blow to humanity. But the clash of civilizations (is a liberal allowed to say that?) has certainly been fascinating, and it deserves the full attention of every worldly citizen. (To be ecumenical, I consider the rise of Christianity to have been a blow to humanity as well ... let's be fair.)

The disaster of Islam is not without its upsides ... carpets, music, Ibn Khaldun, calligraphy, chanting, the Egyptian middle class, Rumi, graduate studies. But this was a monotheism that stripped away the ambivalence so thoroughly that it had to invent Sufism as a stand-in for the subtlety that its dominant demagogues so expertly crushed with their recitations. Since I wrote that piece a few days back, I have not been able to get this out of my mind: "[it was] Christianity's own fundamental ambiguities — torn between a picture of God as both present and absent from the temporal realm, an ambivalence powerfully represented by the paradoxes of the Trinity — that made it 'uniquely unstable,' subject to a plurality of interpretations that became institutionalized in sectarianism, and hence to several centuries' worth of devastating upheaval."

I studied Islamic history for a decade, primarily in service of a dissertation on Islamic chronicles from the early Malay world. And it is a fascinating history, no doubt, but a history whose peaks are early and whose declines are long. There are no escape valves in Islam. When Muslims pretend to seek to return to the halcyon days of the rashidûn — the first three or four rightly guided caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and then the ill-fated Ali, the latter three of whom were all assassinated — they can actually pull up some texts that are reasonably unambiguous about what sort of stick to use to clean your teeth, and appropriate methods for lopping off a foreskin or a hand or a head. Christian fundamentalists, generally speaking, seek a return to an era no further back than a few decades or a century or two at the most. The early days of Christianity were filled with tornadoes of hair- and ear-splitting discourses about body and divinity and trinity, and the presence or absence of a single iota. Hardly a Christian alive can sort all of that nonsense out, let alone give you a reasonably accurate representation of Leviticus.

So the middle ages of Islam is a slow sinking into torpor, and the middle ages of Christianity is the slow rising of a challenge to its institutionalized nonsense. And modern Islam is predominantly a revelling in the torpor, and modern Christianity is a thuggish ignorance of its own history and those who have defeated it again and again. That's what I think ... and more historically minded western liberals than care to admit agree in some measure notwithstanding all the palaver about multiculturalism and acceptance and the truly moronic notion of Islam as a religion of peace.



I actually sat down tonight to write about Alfred the Great ... I have a post in my head that insists on being stillborn ... but this is what came out. Within a day or two, O'Shea is going to hold forth about one of the most important forgotten battles in history, Manzikert in 1071. I can barely wait, even though "our side" will probably lose again ... it has in every account I have read so far.

Photo at top by Arod; detail of a poster about town these days advertising the ill effects of methamphetamine. Not sure why, but the head seems a propos. Image below from Wikipedia Commons, depicts the battle of Manzikert; I believe that the Turk Arp Arslan is using the defeated Byzantine Romanus IV as a stepladder to mount his horse. Both would be dead within little more than a year.

The Unreliable Author and the Reliable Critic

Thesis: The most intractable problem with the retreat of literary criticism as an academic discipline into theory is that it has failed to argue for the utility of its methods and insights in other disciplines, preferring instead the sterility of its isolation and pride.

So now let me ignore that thesis, though I will give it a passing shout at the bottom of this piece.

I am much impressed with Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, a social history of the high middle ages. But it was a little extra thrilling to read his take on what we can learn from the Expugnatio Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, the 12th-century story of the conquest of Ireland by the Normans and their allies. He writes:

The Expugnatio Hibernica of Gerald of Wales similarly answers the questions, who were the first Anglo-Normans in this island, and what are the roots of our colony? His partisanship is very specific, however, and not all invaders are heroes. He is the champion of a group within the conquering élite, the first wave, who came mostly from south Wales, and, in particular, of course, his own family. The text itself reveals the strain between this predilection for the fitzGeralds and the need to keep a wary eye on the changes of royal patronage the work was dedicated to Richard the Lionheart of English and contains a eulogy of Henry II in a passage with the rubric 'Praise of his family' ... Gerald writes: 'O family, O race! Always suspect for your numbers and inborn energy (innata strenuitas). O family, O race! Capable by yourself alone of conquering any kingdom, if envy, begrudging them their vigour (strenuitas) had not descended from on high.' We can hear in this passage the grating discontent of a conquest aristocracy which felt itself bridled by the less than whole-hearted support it received from the English Crown. Despite — or because of — the tensions it expresses, the Expugnatio was a successful work.

The thrill for me was that this argument, in particular its last sentence, pretty much matches what I wrote in my dissertation about authorial/rulership tensions as expressed in the Malay chronicles of ca the 15th century. But even more so, this is an inadvertent, even casual, demonstration of what literary criticism can bring to the study of history.

It is a commonplace to accept literary works as "reflecting" their times. But reflection in this sense is non-dialectical ... uni-directional such as to imply that the observer ought to be able to reliably infer a set of social circumstances by simple reflection upon what its chroniclers wrote about it. There is more than a little too much of this sort of thinking about, and it is such a simple idea to fall back on that one can hardly be surprised. But in fact, the most "reliable" texts are precisely those in which the tensions obscure or fracture intention, where the depiction of "reality" is unreliable because the narrator is pointedly, even openly, unreliable. Then you have a living text and the observer can engage with it as a living text and by teasing it extract from it not the facts of life, but the modalities of life.

So in the broadest sense what literary studies can bring to other disciplines is a deep investigation of the contradictions of unreliability in texts. But to do so, literary scholars have to remain involved with the texts, and I think that is where we have tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(Took the day off work today to clean house in preparation for the return of my oldest friend who lives upstairs ... so I had better post this bloody thing and get back home to clean the kitchen floor.)

Planet of the Apes and Religion and Rulership

Beware the beast man, for he is the devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust or greed. Yes, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair: For he is the harbinger of death. (23rd Scroll, 9th Verse)

Religion is always about power, whether the power to control and compel one's followers or the power to exclude the anathematized. It is a pity that we do not have more of the Ape Scrolls (quoted above) to play with, but this quote is good enough for a starting point. The psychology of religious political control is based on a dialectic of fear and submission. The sociology is based on the degree of force, whether armed force or the force of ideology as transmitted through social control, that religion can bring to bear upon rulership. As I tried to argue in my post about Gellner's take on the relations between Islamic piety and rulership, the Muslim relationship with power took place over a long stretch of history largely as an overt negotiation between an almost voluntarily subject pious urban population and a resident and tolerated "horseman" rulership.

The western Christian relationship between religion and rule is founded upon a long stretch of centuries in which the church was the centrifugal force, and rulership was a fractured centripetal force. Kingship did not arise instantly from the horsemen who drip by drip supplanted the Roman elites ... merging in some cases, dominating in others, and dropping almost instantaneously from historical view in yet others. Charlemagne stands out among the early definers of kingship, but even his famous coronation on Christmas Day, 800, was as much an attempt at episcopal usurpation for the purposes of the church as it was some sort of proto-constitutional establishment of the notion of divinely authorized kingship.

Even then, it was not until the 11th and 12th centuries that the church and the state settled into the pitched battles and fevered entanglements that set Europe on the path to its eventual liberation from the church ... a liberation that took another seven or eight hundred years to accomplish. What allowed western Europe to accomplish this was founded in the earliest moments of that relationship ... specifically, that the church had to confront rule as an alien force and not as a natural ally. It is exclusively in this sense that Christianity has a greater idea of the separation of church and state than Islam ... this idea is not in the theology but in the circumstances of the founding of modern Europe through the invasions of the horsemen at the expense of the Roman empire. Remember, theology is bunk, but religious history tells a tale that no one can sensibly ignore. Theology tail-ends events.

The proof of this paradigm is in the relative slavishness to power that one finds historically in the eastern church which was never free of the empire. Constantine dictated to the eastern chruch and this was a pattern that continued notwithstanding the various fights (for Arianism, for Monophysitism, against iconoclasm). The Byzantine church was an arm of the state. The western church sought to make the state an arm of the church, and in the event provided the venue in which the state eventually became independent of it.

That's my overview. It was not my intention in starting to write this blog that I would focus primarily on religious historical issues, notwithstanding that I have been reading almost exclusively for a year about the Middle Ages and in particular about the rise of Christianity. But having gone down this path, I thought it useful if only to me that I should put down the general lines of my arugment, and this is it. We shall see when I get back to it.

In the meanwhile, let's return to Planet of the Apes, a society in which church and state are fused. It is in that sense a fascist society, and that is the affect which the auteurs, if I might, used to inure the audience against its conceits. As much as rationalists rightly fear theocracy, we are not actually threatened by it at the moment in a Planet of the Apes type scenario, and the experience of the dubyaite cabal with the religious, and the speed with which it turned into bile, should frankly give us some comfort notwithstanding the hideous damage they have done. It is not that the bastards don't want to wrap us in a medieval cowl, it is that they still cannot notwithstanding that they are at their most dominant in a century. The religious have the upper hand in Planet of the Apes because they have a monopoly on the manipulation of fear, and it turns out to be an ancient fear that is well-founded. After all, Moses/Taylor/Heston ends the film wailing in the surf that human beings actually had destroyed themselves, and this "as-if" provided after the fact justification for the religious domination of rule in the society from which he is fleeing. The gift of this film, though, is that in the end we sympathize neither with the religious authoritiarianism nor with the rebel who is revealed as standing on sand.

Perhaps that is where we are now in society, recoiling at the religious madness but unable to find a hero.

Photo by Arod, Notre Dâme de Paris; click on the photo to go my Paris slideshow.

The Trinity and the Emperor

Theology is bunk, but religious history is endlessly fascinating. With that in mind, as I was padding around Paris a year ago, I had to admit that my background in the history of christianity was rather weak despite an extensive academic background in islamic history. And so I set into a year of reading on the middle ages and the history of the religion that rules our world. That is the background of this and future similar posts.

Thesis: the notion of the trinity was propagated by a pagan emperor for political purposes and visited upon a fractious bunch of mostly Greek christians most of whom disagreed, fought the decsion, but had little recourse in the long run.

Christians, broadly speaking, know little about the origins of their religion and know even less about its early history. There are several salient myths that we all know: the huddled downtrodden living in the catacombs, the noble martyrs fed to the lions, and then there is the miraculous conversion of Constantine on the eve of the battle of Milvian Bridge. Alas, either not true or so attenuated as to be in essence not true.

The real truth of early Christianity is that it was profoundly eastern empire in nature, predominantly Greek, overwhelmingly urban, and concentrated among the middle and upper classes. The repressions were sporadic, brutal when they occurred. The empire was primarily concerned not so much to supress christians, but to force them to sacrifice to the particular Roman gods associated with imperial rule. For every poor sod sacrificed in some colisseum, tens of thousand lived their lives quietly and in peace ... sort of like gay people before gay liberation, if you think about it ... official scorn and legal jeopardy, periodic savage repression, unpredictable episodes of violence and death in a large community who mostly led successful lives and whose acquaintances knew exactly what was going on.

Nice image ... early christians as the faggots of their era.

But the myth I am concerned about here is the myth of the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. It is pretty clear that Constantine did not personally convert before the battle in which by besting Maxentius he became the Augustus of the western Roman empire. There is some evidence that his troops may have had the chi-ro, or labarum, on their shields. There is, of course, no evidence that any supreme beings intervened in the skirmish.

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan the next year in which he granted tolerance not only to christianity but to all religions not previously tolerated in the empire, although Jews did not do as well as christians. Polytheistic religions whose members were willing to sacrifice to the Roman gods had always been tolerated. It was, to put it succinctly, the intolerant religions that were not tolerated because they eschewed the empire. More on christianity and empire below. But the evidence on the Edict of Milan points not to a Saul/Paul-type conversion, but rather to a savvy emperior whose prescience about the state of the empire and its future led him to understand that the existing politico-religious system was untenable or at least useless to him.

It took another dozen years of warring for Constantine to become sole emperor, and it was at this point that his understanding, I would argue, of the value of christianity for his place in history matured. He came to understand the future of the empire was Greek and eastern, and history proved him right for only in 1453 did his creation slip beneath the waves. He founded Constantinople and he set out to harness christianity by calling the Council of Nicaea in 325. He presided there on a golden throne, and it was there that he picked the trinity as orthodoxy notwithstanding that the arians almost certainly vastly outnumbered the trinitarians both at the council and in Greek society.

Why did he do it? I think, following the argument of Charles Freemen in The Closing of the Western Mind that he saw, whether explicitly or intuitively, that a trinity of divinities removed the figure of Christ from an ability to sponsor anti-imperial rebellion. Jesus' life, as depicted in the gospels written decades after his life by men who never met him, was one of a rebel against authority; now, in the service of empire a mere decade after that empire had legalized the religion invented in his name, he had to be subsumed into an unapproachable godhead so that his role in religion could become the psychologistic one of providing salvation for the compliant rather than the sociological one of providing means of liberation to the oppressed. The arian approach that Jesus was less than god, a human being taken to god, was just a little too real. What empire wants, as it had with its focus on sacrifice to its ancient gods before Milan, is a godhead that it controls and before which individuals are beseechers, meek and controllable.

Arianism lived on in the east for centuries, and it was the preferred religion of various barbarian horsemen probably more because they sought to differentiate themselves from the Romans they ruled than anything else.

It is remarkable the speed with which christianity turned into its opposite once it had been subsumed and adopted by empire. Things bite back, and the religion that proclaimed itself as the religion of the oppressed became the oppressor with a speed that must have been dizzying.

Nevertheless, those myths of martyrdom and conversion hung around. The present-day christian talk about a personal relationship with Jesus has a bit of an odor of arianism to me. Regardless, such thinking requires some supporting myths, and the greater context of a religion whose worldwide success arose from a deal with empire is not enough. So with a wink and a nod, just as it has been in one way or another for two millennia, the churches propagate myths that they do not believe or which undermine their claims. But then, theology is nothing if it is not contradictory.

Meanwhile, old Constantine finally died, converting only on his deathbed. He had succeeded in yoking christianity to his empire. That yoke remained in place in the eastern church thereafter; the western church had a long struggle with rulership ahead of it which relates to the role of the barbarian horsemen. But Constantine's big moment in Nicaea nevertheless became an orthodoxy for which countless more christians would perish than the few who provided a meal for Roman lions.

Image of Constantine by Markus Bernet (July 10, 2004) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Flux and Reflux

This post is really part of my Horses and Peoples thread, but it is going to take a bit to get there. I'm going to argue that a different relationship to the metaphorical Horse in this opposition informs a lot of what we need to know about the contradicion between secular power in the Euro-christian world and temporal power in the muslim world.

I have been thinking about Ernest Gellner's estimable study, Muslim Society, in which he quotes David Hume:

It is remarkable that the principles of religions have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism to idolatry.

I like ideas like flux and reflux, and notwithstanding the contradictions in Hume's religious thought, which Gellner coolly details, this paradigm has exceptional utility in looking at religion and, its "partner in crime", power. Hume postulates that fear-motivated "competitive sycophancy" (Gellner's term) can focus on a single god in a polytheistic context until it overwhelms all other gods and becomes increasingly unapproachable; thereafter, the reflux, as it were, is to throw up intermediaries who make the onetruegod more approachable. There's some food for thought here ... seeing the Reformation as a flux (or re-reflux) that sought to isolate the onetruegod from the numerous intermediaries mediated by the Catholic church, or seeing the Joel Osteens of the world as a re-re-reflux that allows the desperate faithful a way to access the onetruegod without having to swaller all this rapture, self-denial, authoritarian crap that the Falwell's of the world proffer to their profit.

The Islamic case is more difficult because reflux is both formally and essentially illegal ... Mohammed being the last prophet and all that. Historically, the reflux has tended to be sociological in the form of saint cults and Sufism and women's religion as well as charismatic mullahs. Shi'ism is a form of reflux because the imams are charged to represent the community to the onetruegod; but they in turn, by becoming hidden, had a re-reflux of their own.

So there's the idea. What has it got to do with political power in today's world?

Gellner goes on to discuss the rather sociological thought of the 14th-century muslim thinker, Ibn Khaldun. I have to state my bias here that I believe that Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (his introduciton to his world history) should be read every year by as many college kids as read Herodotus because its thesis is the best tonic to the simple idea that there is no separation between religion and state in islam. Ibn Khaldun is concerned about the relationship between an urban, literate society in which blood ties atrophy and the surrounding bedouin societies in which a relatively egalitarian communitarianism creates the ideal conditions for military prowess. The urbanites in this conjecture need militarily potent rulers to guard them against the ready supply of potential replacements in the surrounding tribes, and this reliance limits the ability of these urbanites to rule in their own name. In other words, better the devil you know than the devil you don't ... better the ruler you have than the one who would replace him ... better surrender power than have it taken from you.

Islamic history is replete with cases in which the military-imperial elite domesticated the institution of the bedouin/horsemen through mamlukes or janissaries (i.e., the "slave" soldiers recuited from peripheral non-muslims), but the principle is the same: the urbanites stick to piety and trade while the rulers stick to soldering and taxing. The flux and reflux here operates through the competition between the religious demands of the urban pious upon the ruling "tribesmen" and the exploitative demands of the horsemen upon their semi-captive urban pious.

Horsemen? Again channeling Gellner, the essence of being a soldier is being able to run away (or retreat, if you prefer), and tribesmen do that on horses. For the bedouin, victory means wealth, defeat means running away and trying again some other time; but the urbanites always stayed put and had to endure the victors no matter who they were. So the enduring dialectic of the urban pious and their horsey overlords meant precisely that power and religion confronted one another as aliens notwithstanding that the onetruegod meant that they had to speak in the same ideational language.

Meanwhile in Europe, the horseman barbarians were domesticated in an entirely different way. They were quickly localized, and their ability to run away was diminished because their power was in the fields and peasants who provided wealth, and later in a stone castle that did not travel well; defeat meant death and annihilation of the line. On the other hand, religion's epicenter was not a broad community of urban pious merchants and their sedentary clients, but a narrow and thickly interlaced group of specialists, the church, who negotiated and struggled directly with the horsemen/barbarians/nobles/kings over the centuries. This was the situation that the Enlightenment confronted in creating the political theorizing that led to democracy. Religion and state shared in and struggled over power overtly with specialized languages that were congruent but not identical; the masses, in particular the steadily rising numbers of urbanites, were in between, increasingly experienced at negotiating on their own behalf, and eventually able to seize that power directly.

This is idealized and reduced, of course, but I believe it is one of the essential things we need to know about islam: there is no concept of civil society in islam because the dialectic between power and religion was historically a radical separation that trapped the masses in religion, notwithstanding that both sides spoke the same language of the onetruegod. (In shi'ism, the train of historic defeats meant that power did not speak the same langauge as religion, and the concept of taqiyyah (dissimulation) interjected another mediator that further separated religion from power ... the curiosity of Iran is that the mullahs actually rule like sunnis, not shi'as ... another flux and reflux.) So in modern times, there is a deep historical/sociological expectation that power is best left to itself because confronting it can only lead to substitution of another power equally remote. That is the flux. The terrible reflux now being visited upon the planet is that islamism seeks to subsume the military power of the state within religion, in contradiction to the long historical pattern: by yet another cascade of competing sycophancy, the religious seek to conflate the onetruegod with the state and make it ever more and more remote from those it rules, just like the onetruegod.

And so historically, we might expect to find the tonic more in a new flux (a re-reflux, if you will) of intermediaries. Right now those are the self-styled mullahs. Will that change? Who, what, where, when? No signs on the horizon just yet.

Horses and Peoples

I took a class one semester as an undergrad at Cal from one Professor John Smith ... that's really his name. It was called something like Middle Islamic history. I remember the first class vividly because Professor Smith spoke so slowly, dryly, softly. "Now, how many hours does a horse have to spend eating in a day?" And he proceeded to figure that out, again slowly, deliberately, unhurried by the obvious impatience of the fidgety students. I thought I was bored stiff, and wondered what other class I could substitute. But something told me to hang in there, and I did.

The next class was nearly deserted. I felt sorry for Smith who seemed like a decent man, rather gray. I was older than most undergrads ... I started my academic careeer at 31 ... but still too young to understand that a tenured professor of such erudition and grace was rather pleased to be rid of the hordes of the uninterested. And that little something that told me to stick it out ended up exposing me to one of the most important influences in my thinking today.

What I took away from his class was a thorough fascination with the materials of everyday life, and how they frame history. More specifically, Professor Smith taught me the modalities of the movement of nomads into civilization. It is an error to believe that barbarians were merely murderous marauders. They were by and large small bands moving deliberately most of the time and suddenly from time to time. They enjoyed the advantage of movement over the sedentary in that they could go to resources rather than wait for them to grow, but also the associated disadvantage that once they have consumed they must move on. His approach was reminicent of the old saw about studying military history: battles are for amateurs, logistics are for professionals.

European civilization is the result of barbarians, and most national myths hearken back to them. But these myths are heroic rather than material, and it is here that the lessons of Professors Smith again came to good service in some recent reading: the impressive The
Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe by Patrick J. Geary of UCLA. His thesis is fundamentally this: the notion that these barbarians had ethnic identity is a back formation. Their identity was shifting. They started as small bands whose size varied according to their success. But once they seized a place ... and there are many ways in which they seized a place over the 5 or so centuries in which they did so ... it was only then that they began to develop ethnicity as we know it. That ethnicity developed as the new rulers needed it, or as the newly ruled chose to shift from one view of themselves to another, or as those who sought to coopt them set out to define them. It is only late in history ... in modern history ... that these ideas solidified into the nationalism that became the mark of modernity.

In general, I tend to think ethnicity is bunk ... not unreal sociologically or politically or economically ... but based ideationally on unsupportable myths. So in the modern world of the free individual, we succeed when we reduce ethnicity to a flavor, and we fail when we "force it" or "allow it" to be essential to a person’s being. By ”force it" I mean primarily through repression, and by “allow it” I mean primarily by indulging its conceits.

By origin, I am a white male middle class Anglo Canadian whose grandparents had surnames that were Scottish, English, Dutch, and German. By paternal decent I am a ninth generation Canadian, and by maternal decent, I think I am eighth generation, both through the male line. So what am I? Maybe that it why I am little skeptical of ethnicity as a hard concept, and prone to look at it as a banner. What is essential to us is our humanity; ethnicity is just the hue.

So back to the horses in Professor Smith’s class. When I look at Darfur, I wonder about their horses. When I listen to the claims of the Serbian nationalists, I remember that there is no good evidence as to how and when they became an ethnic group. When I think of Islamic political thinking, I am reminded of Ibn Khaldun's seminal comments on the relationship between nomadic military might and urban piety (on which subject I will write more on another occasion). And when I listen to the Hungarian-named President of France, I remember that the whole of idea of Frenchness was invented over millennia in response to innumerable pressures, no single one of which can be labelled the first cause.

But “civilization”, now that is an essential ...