THE TIDE OF ISLAM

T.B. Irving

Islam occupies much more of the world’s area than most people realize. Between 800 and 900 million Muslims make up about 20% of the world’s population, from Morocco to Indonesia. Islam also has contributed fourteen glorious centuries to the world’s history. This is mentioning the bald statistics only.

Yet currently the West finds itself in a serious confrontation with Islam that must be resolved if both parties are not to court disaster. The Portuguese finally left West and East Africa in panic because of this confrontation; they evacuated Angola and Mozambique in humiliation, leaving those former colonies to the mercy of the Cubans.

None the less the Portuguese, almost without knowing it, took Islam to Brazil three or four centuries ago when they kidnapped Africans and sold them as slaves in South America. Many of these slaves were nobles who were literate, and whose language of prestige was Arabic, just like the Malay nobles who were exiled to the Cape of Good Hope in the same sixteenth century. These are pages of world history that either have been ignored or are underestimated.

Similarly, the Spaniards finally lost their last toeholds in Morocco and Equatorial Africa only recently, while they still hang on to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, where they ‘refuse to permit any mosques to be built, just as they ban them in Spain itself. The only mosques permitted in Ceuta, for instance, on the continent of Africa, is in the basement of the city market next to the toilets, where farmers are allowed to pray. ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Dākhil’s great mosque of Cordoba can only be used for the noon and afternoon prayers, and at these times only grudgingly.

This Spanish attitude towards Islam and Black Africa was set in the mid-sixteenth century when Bartolome de las Casas from Seville preached Black slavery as a way of saving the American Indians from extinction, which was threatened by their serfdom under the Spaniards in the West Indies and Mexico. The expul­sion of the Spanish Muslims from Granada and Valencia spawned the North African corsairs, whose name shows that their model was really set in the island of Corsica. The American Marines took this European battle “to the shores of Tripoli” in Libya in 1804, as their anthem boasts, and President Reagan’s present policy continued this in 1981.

Yet no one tells us nowadays that the Maltese Muslims near by were also sold as slaves, because interest in their fate has vanished from our current history books. Their language is still Arabic laid on a Punic base but with a thick Italian Christian overlay. The Yugoslav Muslims living north of the Sawa River were likewise sold as galley slaves to the French navy by the Venetians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The French then intervened in Syria and Algeria, carving a new empire in the Islamic world after losing Canada and India to the British. Louis Massignon expressed his interest in and sympathy for Islam, but most of their experts have been “Orientalists,” which is a harsh word in Islamic circles because these officials tried to find out how to humiliate the Muslim and to make him “submit,” in their terminology, to Paris and London rather than to God Alone. French interference in Syria has left us Lebanon as an extravagant legacy that embroils the Middle East in further military and religious suppression.

The British had similar schemes in India and Egypt, where they continued this policy of subjection and bland patronage of decadent aristocrats. The legacy has continued in Pakistan and Bangladesh, both cut loose without adequate planning, and with-out the defensible and recognized borders that other people occupying Middle Eastern land loudly demand. Perhaps the brightest hope received from the British empire has been Nigeria that now leads West Africa as a new Islamic colossus. There 50 to 60 mil-lion Muslims live, out of a total population of over 80 million. It also has a score of universities which are engaged in freeing their departments of Islamic studies from the prejudice of their British-trained professors.

Nigeria might become the leading Islamic power in West Africa once the Yoruba and Ibo military are convinced that the assassination of Muslim prime ministers and presidents is a crime against humanity and not a national sport. My own book called Islam Resurgent on which this paper is based, was published in Lagos, although it could not be published by the usual publish­ing houses in the United States.

Islam has been accused of being “medieval,” but that is a false charge, though it is still current. When it might have lived in a middle age, Islam produced four great empires to give this judgment the lie.

The first such empire was the Moghul one in India, with its magnificent architecture and culture that was contemporary to the European renaissance. It ended in 1857 with the exile of its last emperor to Burma, but the 80 million Muslims in the Indian republic are still the most skilful and articulate minority in all the Islamic world despite the lynching that harass them.

Next door and contemporaneously, the Safavids of Persia under the great emperor Shāh ‘Abbās showed similar glory in architecture and empire. Half the world is Isfahān, they say. Persia fought off the Portuguese pirate and priest, then both the British coming from India and the Muscovite from the north. Afghanistan fought in the same struggle against the British and the Tsars, and trounced the English, sent them packing. Now it is engaged in a similar struggle against Russia, which calls for our assistance. It may lead to consequences within the Soviet sphere itself, as Poland seems to indicate further West.

The Ottomans likewise ruled the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean area in Anatolia and the Balkans for many centuries, long enough to be respectable by any historical or sociological standards. If Cyprus is Orthodox Christian and Hungary the only country in Eastern Europe with any Protestants, this is because of Turkish religious tolerance, not Venetian or Hapsburg occupation.

The Ottomans’ heir, the new secular republic, has been over publicized by the Western media and superficial scholars, since republican Turkey cannot maintain the prosperity of its now limit­ed Lebensraum. The adoption of the Latin alphabet has not made Turkish a subject of real study anywhere. The Turks might better have kept the Arabic script, as Iran has, since it is more beautiful and stores the records of Ottoman past glory.

Moreover, more ethnic Turks live today under Soviet rule than in diminished Turkey itself. This fact might be a source of strength for the West, provided its centres of Middle Eastern and Soviet studies could learn to understand Islam sympathetically and cease to take the other side in matters like the Cyprus confrontation. Hitler and Napoleon lost out on the road to Moscow by marching east. Washington’s contact with the Islamic world should be friendly in the future if the West is to survive, just as episodes like Biafra and Bangladesh have proved to be counter-productive diversions.

. The fourth Islamic empīre is Morocco. That country has been free since Rome, except for forty shameful years under French occupation when its king learned to drink wine and brandy. Morocco once produced two of the great African empires, the Murābits (or Almoravides in a typical European barbarism) of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Muwahhids (or Almohades) of the twelfth and thirteenth. The pure Arabic forms give these dynasties dignity once their meanings are clear, as they should be, in the historian’s mind.

The Muwahhids’ preoccupation with Tawhīd (God’s Oneness), shown in their very name, produced philosophers as towering as Ibn Tufail who ranks with Rene Descartes in his artistic analysis of epistemology, and his protḥgḥ Ibn Rushd (barbarised as “Averroes”), who provided the texts for the revival of Aristotle in the rising universities of Western Europe of his day. Morocco has imperial cities, as they say, where fine handicraft is commonplace in the marketplace and whose architects worked on stone, not plaster as the Granadines did in the last days of the Alhambra.

The past two hundred years have witnessed the ravages of colonialism on the Islamic body politic. Actually this decline began with the perfidy of Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros, that great genocide, when he repudiated the 1492 Treaty of Granada, and baptised the Granadine Muslims by aspersion, using a fire-horse one might say, before the conflagrations of the Inquisition, that “Holy Office” as it is called officially in Christian Spain.

Finally only Turkey, Iran and Arabia remained free from foreign occupation, although they all lived under some degree of outside pressure. Since the Second World War the remaining countries have slowly but gradually become free, though their intellectual institutions and politicians still need to achieve full independence. What is freedom when minds and economies are still enslaved?

The British generals Clive and Wellesley fought for the glory of the East India Company in the seventeenth century against Sirāj al-Dawlah and Tippū Sāhib. Then in the following century Indian Islam was transported bodily to Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and Natal with indentured labourers after Black slavery was abolished. Another mockery of freedom has left some fruitful scars. The Dutch likewise took Islam from Indonesia to Surinam in South America through the same form of serfdom. Except for Kashmir and the great cities of India like Delhi, Hyderabad, and Lucknow, the area is free now, though under military and political pressure, and the communal riots that too often end in lynching.

Napoleon, whom Arthur Wellesley (or the Duke of Welling-ton) later defeated at Waterloo, next tried to occupy, Egypt, taking a printing press there from the Vatican. Then the French occupied Algeria in the Flyswatter War of 1830, the same year as France lost her Pastry War against Mexico. Their frivolous names show the unscrupulous nature of these campaigns. Lebanon continues as an international nuisance because of similar French interference, because that unhappy patch of land is simply not big enough to form a viable state.

Unfortunately the Lebanese Maronites supply the West, especially the United States, with too many of its Near Eastern “experts” who pretend to understand Islam and interpret it for the State Department and the media even though the Maronites never understood it for fourteen long centuries in their own moun­tains. None the less it was again Islamic tolerance that left the Christians of Lebanon free in their mountain stronghold, just as by contrast the Muslims of Granada and Valencia were expelled from Spain, as they also were from Croatia and Serbia.

Explorers and missionaries soon went searching the Islamic world for souls to save and more land to occupy or conquer, men like Mungo Park and Foucauld in West Africa and Livingston and, the clown Burton in Central Africa. Cardinal Lavigerie had grandiose visions of occupying Algeria and Tunisia for the Vatican. In East Africa, the great port cities like Sofala, Kilwa, Lamu and Malindi, some of which were visited by lbn Battūtah in the fourteenth century, were devastated by the Portuguese and Jesuits two centuries later.

The ‘Urnānīs then came to Zanzibar, to free the sawādail or East, African “coastlands” and restore peace, trade and culture in the seventeenth century with British assistance, though the ancient ports were not rebuilt. Ki-Swahili remains as a daughter language to Arabic, which was married to Bantu through its syntax. Their trade before steam navigation and airlines had been based on the semi-annual winds of the monsoon trade, centuries even before Islam.

North Africa is Semitic today because the Phoenicians arrived there three millennia ago and founded Punic-speaking ports like Carthage and Algiers. Punic as a language survived in eastern Algeria at least until the time of St Augustine, who was bishop in Annāba or Hippo. The underlay you can find in the French and Italian museums of North Africa prove this fact, though the colonial museums and textbooks tried to make Vercingetorix into an Algerian hero and to forget Hannibal and his elephants, or Arius the Unitarian from Libya.

Thus Arabic became the language of trade in the cities in Tunisia almost as quickly as in Syria, and the Hilālī invasion later on affirmed this fact. The camel plus the Berber pack saddle tied the Maghrib to the Arab world, and also to West Africa across the Sahara. Salt and gold were the articles of commerce in a two way international trade that flourished between Sijilmāsa in southern Morocco and the Futa Jallon mountains of Guinea.

Thus West Africa was linked to North Africa through trans-Saharan trade, and merchant families of mixed blood, Berber and Black, sprang up on the great savannas of the Sudan, the fabled land of “the Blacks” which stretches from the Atlantic across Africa to the modern republic of that name. When Europe pierced the southern jungles from the sea and established ports for the cruel slave trade, West Africa spread with the banana and marimba music to Brazil, the West Indies and the southern United States.

An ancestral memory tells both the North and South American Blacks that their forefathers were Muslims if they were educated, as many of them were. The valiant Palmares republic in seventeenth-century Brazil reflected the inland empires of Ghana and Songhai along the upper Niger, while the Male cult of Brazil is a disguised Islam from Mali, like the Mandingos of Trinidad. Revolts during the past century reveal this Islamic process that fresh sociologists need to explore.

The stories of Brer Rabbit are a reflection of the jackals Kalila and Dimna who migrated from India through the Arab and Persian world to West Africa, and from there in the kidnapped Black slaves’ scanty baggage to the pages of Uncle Remus in Georgia. Other folklore of this sort needs to be sifted all over the American continent.

The less said about the shameful Italian role in its colonies of Somaliland, Eritrea and Libya, the better. The contemporary leaders of Libya still suffer from this trauma.

Indonesia and Malaysia need to be considered here,’ especially for their struggle against the evils of secularism and communism, twin remedies the West has applied to Turkey as well. Three hundred years ago, Malay nobles who were exiled to South Africa brought Islam to the country of South Africa almost as early as Christianity came, if the monsoon trade in the Indian Ocean had not brought it to harbours like Durban even earlier, as it had been to the ports destroyed by the Portuguese. No real research has been made on these facets of South and East African history so as to integrate them in a dignified way into its culture.

Since the Second World War there has been an affirmation of Islamic identity that began with the triumphant establishment of Pakistan and the hard fought Algerian War of Independence. Kashmir, Hyderabad and Bangladesh, however, were left as still festering sores on the subcontinent, just as Bakhara and Tashkent are in Central Asia.

West Africa followed suit with Ghana first of all, and then Nigeria, whose initial statesmen under independence were miser-ably assassinated by Christian army officers. This affront to democracy and religion must be erased through earnest atonement, possibly through its present president, Shehu Shagari, who must serve out his term of office in dignity. The northern Muslims of Nigeria must be assured of their security and institutions.

Sir David Jawara was bared from his native village in Gambia till he became a Muslim again. Let us hope his conversion is sin­cere. Nigerian schools and those in the Sudan, where Black imāms are trained, hold hope for the spread of Islam in other Black areas of Africa and America.

Recently there has come the Great Migration of Muslims to the cities of Western Europe and North America. Their hijrah opens up vistas for the spread of Islam in other countries we had never dreamed of before. The migrants are all of different nation­alities, with North Africans in France and the Low Countries, Turks in Germany, and Pakistani and Indian Muslims in England.

In Canada the new Muslims arrive educated and speaking English, so their immediate participation in society as professionals is assured. In the United States they are unfortunately disorganized, and the Blacks especially need more contact with the centres of Islamic teaching we have mentioned in West Africa. Washington simply does not know how to consult them to their mutual benefit.

Who is watching this great movement carefully, and with in­telligence and sympathy ? Each phase of it, in each separate country, is different, and they all require study, support and direction. There has been little research of this sort in the depart­ments of religious studies in either North America, Europe, or South Africa. They are concerned with other forms of academic freedom, and bring non-academics to lecture them on it.

In fact, if there is any research, it is generally done by socio­logists, as the French have done in North Africa and Brazil, sociologists who can find no message and little ideology in Islam. Not even the Western historians have contributed much, so the field lies wide open for our own students in the Islamic countries with research institutions.

French policy was fatal in the Near East and Africa, but now France is coming around, as that government realises its own true interest ever since the oil crunch. Yet the five universities that the French destroyed in Algeria are being restored by the Algerians, just as the demolished cities of Benghazi and Sfax were not rebuilt by the Germans and British who smashed them.

Iran and Lebanon, the two former French bases in the Middle East, have been lost to Paris through their own ineptitude, so now the French are courting Riyadh and send their senators to Peshawar to help the Afghans against the Soviets. Perhaps they may relieve some of the suffering of the Afghan refugees, and thus repay in some measure the agony of the Algerians who huddled in similar camps along the borders of Tunisia and Morocco twenty years ago. This tragedy underlines the irony of French policy over the years which they have only been able to reverse by losing everything and then starting over.

Meanwhile the Russians likewise have a problem in their own Muslim areas in the Caucasus, Central Asia and along the Volga where the occupation of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan started under Ivan the Terrible. Mass-produced Soviet arms and propaganda seem to be easier to assemble than are meat, potatoes and cabbage, or housing and clothing, so that the Soviets have occupied Afghanistan and threaten Iran and Pakistan. The Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs have partners in the menace of their neighbors.

Tsars and commissars express the same destructive policy, yet each Islamic area the Russians occupy raises the overall percentage of Muslims they must now deal with in their total population figures, so that occupation itself becomes a demographic nightmare for them and a strain upon their military. Babakhanoy is a pathetic figure, as he bears goodwill to the Muslim world and to visiting Muslims.

The British, fumbling and hypocritical as ever, are both cor­rupt and corrupting. Their Christian, Jewish and kāfir professors still try to love Islam, as the French loved their Franco-Musulmans. The Americans use these worn-out experts and some from, other countries in even their best universities, like Hamilton Gibb, Roger Le Tourneau, Bernard Lewis, and Gustav von Grunebaum. Thus their policy is paralyzed and aborted.

In Islamabad their diplomats may want to counter the burn­ing of their embassy by acting friendly to visiting American Mus­lims who can speak for them, while in Cape Town they treat the same ‘Muslims with contempt. Mobil Oil sponsors seminars on .Islam at universities where no Muslims are invited to speak, and policemen are posted at the door to give the impression that Muslims are violent. These propagandists need guidelines so that these lectures on the Middle East are not window dressing. Americans cannot hold the Middle East because they are not trusted there, if they are not despised for their duplicity and pro-vocative alliances.

For instance, in South Africa, what is the government policy towards Islam, and in fact towards Islam in all of Africa? Our religion is as old as Christianity in that country, because it arrived with the Malay nobles, princes and commoners who were trans-ported there as slaves. At the University of Cape Town only five students out of a class of-over a hundred had visited any of the sixty mosques in the Western Cape, and apparently because these students happened to be Muslims. Witwatersrand is more con­cerned with “academic freedom” as preached by non-academics like Jane Fonda than with any lectures on Islam. Perhaps because actors have achieved success in high spheres elsewhere, the stu­dents prefer actors to academics in their political and social activities.

This attitude resembles the study of the Black Muslims in North America which is carried on, if at all, by the departments of sociology, not by those of religious studies, and never by historians. No wonder serious investigators do not take these studies too seriously. Thus the United States finds itself paralysed in dealing with Muslims elsewhere in the world. Its methods of re-search on the Islamic world, including in its own territory, must improve, even at its best institutions.

For this reason let us now return to the ongoing mood of con­frontation with Islam that prevails in the West, especially with the government and the media in Washington and New York.

This attitude had its beginnings with Algeria in recent years, where, until the Algerians won their freedom twenty odd years ago, they were termed “terrorists’’. It has continued with Iran and Lebanon, and with Pakistan’s dilemma along her Afghan border, which has been badly handled by its sympathisers abroad, as well as in her relations with her generally hostile neighbour to the East. Pakistan’s position is extremely delicate, so the country should not be pushed or rushed into any hostile posture, but helped to face its problems calmly.

These problems none the less are not being handled with ex­pertise but with fumbling. This carelessness may lead the United States into a war on two fronts as happened precisely with Hitler,’ and led to his final defeat in a Berlin bunker.

The fault lies with the Orientalists in Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Chicago who advise Washington pathetically, just as almost the same persons advised Britain and France so ineptly that they had to abandon North Africa and the Middle .East. Those experts’ intellectual monopoly with the government and media vitiates any sound planning on the part of the United States. Now better experts must be trained to advise them:

The firm resistance of statesmen like Jinnah and Bourguiba till they achieved freedom for their countries has now yielded to the shriller revolutionary calls of Colonel Qadhdhāfī and His Eminence the Ayatollah Khomeini. What sort of reaction will the next phase bring?

We watch as the tide of Islam sweeps back over Asia and Africa, and brings forth an affirmation of basic human values into the cities of Western Europe and North America which can no longer be ignored. The world’s attitude must change with this tide; the Islamic fifth of mankind is at long last recognised as enjoying elemental human rights: this the same basically the right to organise and worship God Alone as they see fit wherever they may be, in Africa, in Western Europe, in Central Asia, in Sindbad’s many islands of the sea, or wherever they have made their home,