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<\/p>\nby Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A significant tendency of commentators is to assume that it is best to look at Islam through the prism of its ideology. But what if that’s a mistake? What if the peculiar features of Islam make it more enlightening to look at it in terms of the institutions that sustain it. This is why it’s worth going back and rereading Gellner’s old book, because that’s what he suggests. Ernest Gellner’s Muslim Society<\/a><\/em> reminds us that analysis of the religious ideology is not the whole story. But on top of suggesting we examine the religion’s sustaining institutions, he also points out that when we are looking at the Islamic ideology we might find it helpful if we notice that there isn’t one. There are two.<\/p>\n The idiomatic or stylistic contrast between the scholarly, puritanical Islamicists of the cities with their theology of the Book, on the one hand, and the pugnacious, tribal warriors in the mountains and deserts and their religion of the Saints, on the other hand, is stark. It is a contrast between Islamic John Knox’s and Islamic Nietzscheans and one that offers a much wider set of options for Muslims as modernity encroaches than many seem to think. Those who argue that Islam has only a limited repertoire and can’t be compatibile with modernity ignore the millions of Muslims who are already living in modern liberal and pluralistic societies and also this range of options for Muslim society from within Islam itself.<\/p>\n A spectre of one is haunting the other. It is an old spirit, an authentic ghost with claims at least as legitimate as its dominant rival. The spirit shimmers out of memories of the maraboutic hedra, the cult of saints, those local festivals that had once been the predominant form of Islam for a rural, tribal society articulated in terms of clans and segments, and one well placed to mediate between town and countryside. Ecstatic rituals, dances, music, rural festivals, local shrines, the mingling of the profane and sacred gave this religious style a distinctly sexy, earthy, Apollonian feel. It is a spirit that has been hidden for so long that any visibility comes as a bit of a shock, both to insiders and outsiders. It is a spirit that was lost from view because of the peculiar social transformations faced by those places in which it had for so long thrived. Its features were ill-suited to the introduction of modernity and the preservation of self identity in the face of foreign colonial pressures. It is still hidden, but maybe in plain sight. Perhaps its Dionysian, Nietzschean materiality has within it strands that, weirdly, are not obviously incompatible with non-bourgeoise elements of a modern urban modernity, and antinomian types from within the bourgeoise, who may find a dour ascetic puritanicalism (of any stripe – religious or secular) unappealing. And most obviously it is apparent in warrior groups.<\/p>\n Nietzsche famously developed a materialist philosophy that went head to head with the dominant ascetic style of life that in developed modern societies has been regarded as a norm. He linked the ascetic with Monotheism and the deification of Truth ratified by Plato and Socrates, spread as a lifestyle by Christianity and continued in secular guise as a set of norms for cognition, technology and economic life in our predominantly modern urban setting. Nietzsche proposed an alternative style of life, the Dionysian, seeing its roots in Homeric pre-Socratic philosophy and underpinned by advances in scientific materialism that undermined the metaphysical and ontological justifications for religious asceticism.<\/p>\n But his target wasn’t to show that ascetic religion and morality were false. Nietzsche’s philosophy disputed the value we put on truth, so proving religion or asceticism false would hardly be his overall aim, indeed would be self-cancelling. His aim was to inaugurate a different way of living, give life a different vision, a different style, a new meaning. He wrote in ‘The Gay Science<\/a><\/em>‘: \u2018 …[T]his will to truth, to \u201ctruth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us….Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and \u201cknow” everything…. Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial\u2014out of profundity.’ He held Homeric values in contrast to the ascetic. The old traditional religious spirit of Islam is similarly Nietzschean.<\/p>\n In 1893 Andre Gide<\/a> went to Algeria on an avowedly Nietzschean pilgrimage. In the oasis town of Biskra he prayed to the unknown Apollo of Biskra: \u2018 Take me! Take all of me \u2013 I cried. I belong to you. I obey you. I surrender myself. Decree that all in me should be light; yes! Light and lightness. In vain did I struggle against you till this day. But now I recognize you. Thy will be done: I resist no more; I surrender to you. Take me.’ Ernest Gellner thinks he is responding to D’Holbach’s \u2018System of Nature’ : \u2018 Be happy, seek happiness, without fear. Do not resist my law. Vain are the hopes of religion. Free yourself from the yoke of religion, my proud rival. In my empire there is freedom \u2026 Make no mistake; I punish, more surely than the gods, all crimes on the earth. The evildoer may escape the laws of man, but not mine.’ It is an episode that throws light on a contrasting style within the religion of Muslims. The anti-religion of D’Holbach is linked with Nietzsche’s anti-religion and materialist philosophy. And what Gide found in traditional Islam was Nietzschean\/Homeric materialism of the sort that D’Holbach’s system promised. It was the religion of the modernist anti-ascetic.<\/p>\n Gide understood what he was doing in Algeria as overcoming his puritanical, ascetic roots, writing, \u2018 \u2026 my puritan education had formed me thus, gave such importance to certain things, that I could not conceive that certain issues which troubled me, did not bother humanity at large \u2026 I was Prometheus, astonished that men could live without the eagle and without being devoured. And yet, without knowing it, I loved that eagle \u2026 but began to haggle with him. The problem remained the same\u2026 which problem\u2026? D’Holbach’s \u2018The System of Nature<\/a><\/em>‘ presents a conflict between two forces, the religious on the one hand and the naturalistic (which includes materialism and empiricism) on the other. The religious is anything that supposes that there are spiritual forces of any kind, in any non-material element in humankind, in freewill, in belief in divine creation or interference, and on morals that are anything more than epicurean, utilitarian hedonism. It attacks the anti-rationalism of religion. But its main thrust is against any anti-materialism supposing discontinuities between matter and thought, determinism and freewill. It is an anticipation of Comptean positivism. The first chapter warns against personifying nature. In chapter two he argues that movement and matter are the sufficient facts for creation. He invokes Leibniz and says there is a diversity of substances and endless change. Chapter three expands on this insight. Chapter four discusses psychology and the logic of explanation. \u2018It takes a Newton to feel that the fall of bodies is a phenomenon worthy of all attention.’ He wonders whether perceived mystery is pathological or profound, wants to say that its pathological for religious wonder but profound for scientific but the base of this distinction seems ad hoc. In asserting his thoroughgoing materialism he gives examples from physics and politics \u2013 \u2018a whirlpool of dust and political convulsion.’ Chapter five is about order and how it’s possible without a designer. Gellner<\/a> writes: \u2018 D’Holbach attributes both more and less to nature than the theists do. He gives it power so as to eliminate the extramundane interferences, and denies it constituents that destroy it’s unity and which could appear to be intrusions from some other realm. For him explanations must be both intranatural and materialistic.’<\/p>\n In chapter six he discusses the nature of man. Man falls under the same rules as everything else. Humans have a special way of acting, like everything else. Determinism applies to man as much as to the rest of nature. But there is a hiddeness and complexity to mankind’s actions that is mistaken for illusions of freewill and spirit. Dualism is based on these illusions. Everything changes. Mankind hasn’t always existed and is tied to the conditions producing him. The seventh chapter continues to attack spiritualistic theories. Chapter eight develops a unitary vision of man, arguing that our intellect is based on our faculties of perception like a proto-Jesse Prinz. Feeling is no different from gravity or electricity. It is about material stuff being modified in some way. Everything required to explain mental phenomena is in the brain. The soul is affected by the material and so is material.<\/p>\n Chapter nine discusses diversity as the base of society. Everything, including morality, is caused by physical causes. Gellner notes that \u2018 Not even man may himself be seen anthropomorphically. Existentialism later, and Kant at the same time, maintain dualistic, non-naturalist views of men at the price of at least partially opting out of science.’ Morality is based on utility and diversity not convention nor supernatural sources. Habit is often confused with nature but this is a mistake. Education inculcates habits and transmits culture. Politics is vicious when determined by passions, caprice and utilities of the governors rather than nature, experience and general utility. He tries to get a theory of moral critical politics from materialism. \u2018A society that does no good has no rights over its citizens,’ summarises Gellner. Absolute government is just brigandage.<\/p>\n Chapter ten says there’s nothing innate in our ideas because we are thoroughly material and so our thoughts are all derived from our sensing. He attacks Descartes and Berkeley. He finds Locke profound. Religion and metaphysics are just sciences of words. The eleventh chapter is about liberty. Partizans of liberty have confused constraint with necessity. Free of constraint, a person may still not be metaphysically free. Freedom from constraint is compatible with determinism. Gellner writes that for D’Holbach \u2018Education is necessity displayed to children\u2026 is generally so bad because it is based on prejudice. When it is good it is then unfortunately contradicted or destroyed by the evil there is in society.’ He is a fatalist: \u2018 The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.’<\/p>\n In chapter twelve he dismisses the idea that fatalism is dangerous because truth can’t harm us, even if it’s disagreeable. Morality is possible in terms of utility even in a deterministic world. We don’t have the freedom to be passive. Chapter thirteen dismisses the immortality of the soul because the soul is identical with the body. We’re like clocks; once broken we’re no longer able to work. He cites Bacon: \u2018Men fear death as children fear darkness.’ Such fear aids tyranny. Chapter fourteen argues that education, morals, and laws are enough to restrain men and that when men are bad it’s because government is bad. There is no need for supernatural restraints. The foundations of all morality are natural and materialistic. The fifteenth chapter asserts that utility is the ultimate decider of value. He argues for hedonism. \u2018Interest is what each of us deems necessary to his felicity.’ They are natural and only ignorance of the real causes of our desires creates the illusions of religion. The seventeenth chapter says that only true naturalistic ideas can remedy human ills. Moralists have failed in the past because they root their reasons in illusions. \u2018Only passions are the real counterweight to the passions.’ Reason is about choosing the best passion for happiness. He quotes Sallust: \u2018No one is good for no reason.’ I add: ‘No one is bad for no reason’ too.<\/p>\n In the second volume he writes: \u2018 Nature is self-existent: she will always exist; she produces everything; contains within herself the cause of everything; her motion is a necessary consequence of her existence; without motion we could form no conception of nature; under this collective name we designate the assemblage of matter acting by virtue of its peculiar energies.’ He writes that \u2018the simplest observation will prove [to man] incontestably that everything is necessary, that all the effects he perceives are material; that they can only originate in causes of the same nature\u2026 Thus mind, properly directed, will everywhere show nothing but matter, sometimes acting in a manner which his organs permit him to follow, and others in a mode imperceptible to faculties\u2026 will see that all beings follow constant, invariable laws, by which all combinations are united and destroyed\u2026 the great whole remaining the same. Thus cured of idle notions with which he was imbued\u2026 he will cheerfully consent to be ignorant of whatever his organs do not enable him to compass\u2026’ He ends with a kind of stoicism \u2018rather than the progressive, happiness-through-enlightenment-and-secularism outlook that is more generally characteristic’ as Gellner notes. It is an alternative moral outlook; although positive knowledge about nature saves us from illusions of religion and superstition it incorporates a minor key \u2018older recipe, salvation by acceptance, the avoidance of false hopes.’<\/p>\n The vision overall militates against dualistic religion. But it has internal difficulties. It fails to examine whether materialism and empiricism are mutually possible, or in Gellner’s terms, whether and how \u2018 the paradigm of explanation \u2013 in terms of structure of matter \u2013 and of information \u2013 in terms of sensing’ fit, nor does it explain how in a deterministic world people can free themselves from the tyranny of illusions. It underestimates the roots of conflict and evil that knowledge of our naturalism will remove, has archaic views in it such as an empirical theory of maths and a phylogistic theory of physiognomy, sees too little of the difficulty of how to have both the determinism of nature and normativity, is indecisive about whether it is democratic-liberal or progressive-paternalistic, is unaware of the problem of having empiricism on the one hand and an essentialist determinism on the other, or of the problem of having irreducible diversity of things, on the one hand, and the intelligibility of nature on the other. There is also no awareness of the tension between the relativism of the theory and the absolutist claims being made for it.<\/p>\n But there are two things to note; one is that it doesn’t have the Enlightenment as progression and secularism as its moral (which undermines views of people like John Gray<\/a> who want us to believe that such a moral is a necessary feature of the Enlightenment), and because of this, it is amenable to a more nuanced attitude to religion than Enlightenment philosophy generally is supposed to have. And here’s where the connection with traditional marabout, saintly Islam<\/a> comes in. Put another way; D’Holbach’s system couldn’t explain why it wasn’t itself an inside-out religion. Perhaps the reason for this was that it was. Traditional Islam was one version of how the programme might be instantiated, just as Homeric Greece was the example used by Nietzsche.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This materialist Islam is earthy, hedonistic, erotic and sensual. Jacques Berque<\/a>, writing about the inner structure and life of North African tribes in 1955, wrote: \u2018These saints\u2026 help us to understand the specific traits of the style of life resulting from a \u2018saintly origin’. Their prestige is unconnected with any idea of merit, any moral evaluation \u2026 [they have] fewer inhibitions. The saint is he who lives fully. One allows nature to speak through him, even in the form of unbridled desires\u2026 One seeks through him a kind of complicity with heaven.’ The connection is the unbridled spirit of nature. Berque comments that \u2018This saint can turn his life into a kind of carnival. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, one may say of him that he can be the warmest of all warm beasts.’<\/p>\n Saint worship was a means of achieving Muslim identity, especially for those not approaching the faith through the Book. Reverence for the saints was always conjoined with irony in some quarters. General Daumas, French consul at the court of Amir Abd el Kader wrote: \u2018There is always a snake in a zawiya’ (maraboutic lodge). Secular warrior chiefs competed with the saints and so their ambivalence was understandable. Even as late as 1914 historian Ch.-R. Ageron, who in 1899 had reported that \u2018 maraboutism is the real religion of the natives of Africa Minor’, could report that; \u2018Muslim Algerians \u2026 remained as faithful to their broherhoods and indulged with the same good conscience and even enthusiasm the cult of their saints, as according to all indications they did prior to 1930.’<\/p>\n It’s a religious style born out archaic conditions serving illiterate tribes. Resolving feudal disputes, organizing festivals, witnessing collective oaths were what the marabouts did. The spirit that Gide recognized was the Nietzschean Apollonian one of ecstatic liberation and naturalness. It was anti-ascetic. It didn’t revere an abstract, deified monistic concept. It did not embody rigorous intellectual training and knowledge, a dour and impressive, all encompassing moral tone, a stiff-necked, puritanian rigor . It was, as Berque noted, life as carnival, as acceptance and celebration of ones nature.<\/p>\n Vanessa Maher<\/a> notes how this style of religion affects attitudes to work, kin, women and government. Women are not veiled, they work, brides are exchanged between social groups that are well defined and visible, religion is found in the festivals not in any scripturalist form, and the women participate fully in them. This contrasts with the Reformed Muslims, who have an urban style which, says Gellner, is \u2018based on commercial or bureaucratic employment, in which womanfolk are secluded, and veiled when they come out, where the market is (for the family if not the bride) relatively freer and less kin \u2013constrained, where bride price is high and indeed the object of inflationary pressure, where groups are more ambiguous and ill-defined, and where ritual life is more sober, rule bound, scripturalist, individualistic, anonymous and has a much more marked tendency to exclude women.’<\/p>\n Maher writes that there is a tension between these two visions of Islam, clearly apparent at the boundary between small market towns and the villages where \u2018Everyone goes to the hedra [ecstatic dancing under marabouts patronage] except the Shurfa [descendants of Mohammed] who say that it is a scene of licence\u2026 Although cultivated Arabs and Arabised Berbers come to [the village] from [the town] they regard the proceedings with explicit contempt and call them barbarous.’ Maher comments that \u2018\u2026 the hedra \u2026 can be viewed as an assertion of the validity of Berber cultural forms, which wherever they come into contact with Arab values, are demeaned\u2026’<\/p>\n The old style is demeaned by its rival, and historical circumstance has meant that this rival is by far the most dominant style. But the reasons for the dominance of Reformed Islam are clear: its severe Puritanism, its sobriety, literacy, formal egalitarianism, Unitarianism, individualism that spurns mediation with a deity or any supernatural forces, its lack of a clergy nor caste nor priesthood but only an open literate class of scribes who are merely exegetes and guardians, all these make it an excellent religion for an urban, mobile, anonymous and literate population. Ali Merad<\/a> writes, \u2018 the creation of a petite bourgeoisie converted to European civilization diminished the field in which maraboutism could operate. The petite bourgeoisie (teachers, civil servants in central or local government, entrepreneurs) was almost cut off from the people \u2026 Moreover, the use of its leisure (and no doubt its concern with respectability) prevented it from taking part in collective religious and folklore displays.’ Reformed Islam requires values and behaviour exactly continuous with those norms of all middle classes everywhere. Threats arise on both sides: from the poorer sections of the population who find the demands of the puritans too demanding for too little reward (if you ain’t got nothing, then you ain’t got nothing to lose by bouts of ecstatic earthy immediately gratifying pleasures), on the other from tendencies of the educated to secularise.<\/p>\n The Reformed Islam was also a form of proto-Nationalism that didn’t need to be overtly nationalistic to achieve a nascent nationalism. By seeing off its religious rival, it was the only candidate for theological sanction and a programme of nationalist identity. As Gellner writes, for many nations, \u2018[w]ehen Independence came, Reformist Islam was virtually the only usable ideology deeply implanted and intelligible inside the country.’ Blair’s claim that Islam is incompatible with modern liberal democracy is belied by so much evidence, but this as well. Islamic reform succeeded precisely because it was compatible. As Gellner puts it: \u2018 It was once supposed that Islam was incompatible with modernization, or with the requirements of industrial society. This may well be true of the erstwhile Apollonian of Biskra, which once was typical enough of a very great part of the rural and tribal Muslim world. But the severe discipline of puritan Islam may in fact be compatible with, or positively favourable to, modern social organization.’<\/p>\n Interestingly, co-existence has been the result of the Reformist movement and the dominance of the scripturalist version of Islam. Algeria, for example, sees the old stylists in charge of oil, the army and state whilst the bourgeois and the ulama look after business and legitimacy. And Puritan Islam can adapt to modernity along the whole political spectrum, from political conservativism to radicalism. Neo-liberal politicians favour the conservative over the radical. Saudi Arabia is feted. Gadaffi looked like \u2018a kind of Reformist-Maoism’, as Gellner puts it.<\/p>\n Gadaffi left his tribal units under the impact of oil. He was able to exaggerate his Reformist zeal given the small scale of his population and the erosion of rural encampments. He was taken out because he smelled of Maoist radicalism to the USA and offended the politically ultra \u2013conservative Saudi’s. It was politics not religion that decided his fate. Turkey emerged from the Ottoman Empire. It has a strong state and a weak society, reversing the traditional Muslim social organisation. Turkey modernized against Islam. Turks largely internalized a secular modern state and therefore didn’t need to adopt Reformist Islam. It already was a strong Muslim state and so the need to purify the alternative traditional, rural spirit was absent. Turkey is troubled by religious opposition precisely because Reformist Islam is not<\/em> the state. Ottoman\/Turkey is an exception to the rule, although, as Gellner himself admits, it’s a pretty huge exception.<\/p>\n What makes Islam special is that unlike other monotheistic religions, \u2018Islam is the blueprint of a social order.’ Islam officially has no clergy and no church organization because church and society are coextensive so that, as Tocqueville<\/a> put it, \u2018\u2026 all the acts of civil and political life are regulated more or less by religious law.’ Theologian and lawyer are conflated roles. Its history explains this. Islam, unlike Christianity, was rapidly successful from the off. It never had to presume political modesty. Its revealed message was complete. Political success made it less necessary to hand over power to others. Having a completed revelation meant there was no room for rival schemes. These two factors made Islam pervasive.<\/p>\n The place of Islam in society is very different from the place of rival religions. Questions that make sense of alternatives don’t make sense of Islam. For example, in the Augustan age, still regretting the loss of classical civilization, Gibbon and Hume asked about the role of religion in the rise and fall of empires. James Frazer included this as part of his tripartite theory of religion and society in \u2018The Golden Bough<\/a><\/em>‘. His first theory sees it as a staging post in a three-tier process of human society’s evolution from magic through religion to science where from the off we’re all proto-David Humes’ wondering how to justify knowledge from observations. This view is oddly pervasive despite its implausibility. It’s what makes the new atheism of Richard Dawkins<\/a> and his merry band unpersuasive, as well as earlier theories such as Popper’s. His second theory was the Augustan one about the role of Christianity in bringing down the Roman Empire. His third is, as Gellner puts it, \u2018\u2026 a kind of C.G. Jung\/T.S. Eliot romp amongst the archetypal symbols dredged up from the unconscious of a wide variety of cultures.’ But our interest is in this: Frazier’s theories assume religion as being just a part of society, not identical with it. But for a religion that is a blueprint for society, none of them make sense.<\/p>\n However, on the cusp of the modern age, Weber<\/a> asks what role religion played in the genesis of industrial and bureaucratic modernity. Weber’s question is pressing. But Muslim societies were not imputed with having any role in bringing about modernity. Unlike Christianity, it is not to blame and might even claim to be a victim of modernity. Unlike Christianity, it hasn’t needed to secularise itself nor, like Confucianism, has it been repudiated by ruling elites. Nor, like Hinduism, is it merely a folk religion despised and\/or used by the elite in much the same way as Christianity is in the US. Islam is modernisable.<\/p>\n Islam is fundamentally a dialogue. This dialogue is within itself and is between binaries of \u2018knowledge and ignorance, political order and anarchy, civilization and barbarism, town and tribe, Holy Law and mere human custom, a unique deity and usurper middlemen of the sacred.’ So there are two variants of Islam: the folk and the scholarly, and these are its spirits. In the transition to modernity, the folk can be disavowed as culturally backward and in cahoots with colonialist oppressors, scapegoats for everything that went wrong in the past. Nevertheless folk religion was a depository of traditional identities long before the Reformists, no matter what the reformists say. Islam’s scholarly urban version of the religion is presented as pure, literate, egalitarian and potentially able to \u2018expand towards embracing the entire community, and thus the \u2018protestant’ ideal of equal access for all believers can be implemented.’ This has the advantage over European Protestantism of fusing egalitarian universal literacy with nationalism. European Protestantism merely prepared the ground for nationalism. Unlike attempts to purify and modernize other religions, there are no inegalitarian, hereditary or hierarchical elements in its core to prevent this fusion.<\/p>\n As I claimed at the start, Gellner warns against a basic error of assuming that ideology is the key to understanding this religion, as it is with Christianity. We are better off looking at the institutions that maintain it. Islam has an ideology, of course, but perhaps the difference between it and other religions is better understood in terms of the balance of power which exists in Muslim societies. Gellner, as noted earlier, says that the Islamic ideology is quite as well equipped to have inaugurated modernity as Protestant Christianity: \u2018I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Poitiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber’s \u2018The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/em>‘ which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth century neo-Kharejite Puritanism in northern Europe.’ And he summarises by saying that \u2018by various obvious criteria \u2013 universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematization of social life \u2013 Islam is, of the three great Western monotheisms, the one closest to modernity.’<\/p>\n David Hume developed an oscillation theory of religion in his \u2018The Natural History Of Religion<\/a><\/em>.’ Religions oscillate back and forth from polytheism to montheism for non-rational reasons. \u2018It is remarkable that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatory to theism, and to sink back from theism to idolatory.’ It happens for reasons of a \u2018competitive sycophancy’ where \u2018\u2026 in an idolatorous nation\u2026 though men admit the existence of several limited deities, yet may there be some one God, whom, in a particular manner, they make an object of their worship and adoration \u2026 his votaries will endeavor, by every art, to insinuate themselves into his favour; and supporting him to be pleased, like themselves, with praise and flattery, there is no exaggeration, which will be spared in their addresses to him. In proportion as men’s fears or distresses become more urgent, they still invent new strains of adulation; and even he who outdoes his predecessor in swelling up the titles of his divinity, is sure to be outdone by his successor in newer and more pompous epithets of praise. This they proceed; til at last they arrive at infinity itself, beyond which there is no farther progress: And it is well, if, on striving to get further, and to represent a magnificent simplicity, they run not into inexplicable mystery\u2026’ The sycophancy removes the deity to a realm too inaccessible and too distant.<\/p>\n The pendulum then swings in the opposite direction. \u2018[E]levating the deities to the utmost bounds of perfection, [they] at last beget the attributes of unity and infinity, simplicity and spirituality. Such refined ideas, being somewhat disproportioned to vulgar comprehension, remain not long in their original purity; but require to be supported by the notion of interior mediators or subordinate agents, which interpose between mankind and their supreme deity. These demi-Gods or middle beings, partaking of human nature, and being more familiar to us, become the chief objects of devotion, and gradually recall that idolatry, which had formally been banished by the ardent prayers and panegyrics of timorous and indigent mortals.’<\/p>\n Once we’re in the state of idolatry the competitive sycophancy begins again \u2018\u2026 as these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar conceptions, they at last destroy themselves and by the vile representations which they form of their deities, make the tide turn again towards theism. But so great is the propensity, in this alternative revolution of human sentiments, to return back to idolatry, that the utmost precaution is not able to effectually prevent it. And of this, some theists, particularly the Jews and Mohametans, have been sensible, as appears, by their banishing all the arts of statuary and painting, and not allowed the representations, even of human figures, to be taken by marble or colours, lest the common infirmity of mankind should thence produce idolatry.’ Gellner draws out the clear parallels: \u2018it is the historical struggle of Jehova against the Baalim of Canaan, of the Reformation against Popery, and of Islam with its own pluralistic tendencies.’ Hume writes: \u2018The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in Popery, and holy dervishes in Mohametism.’<\/p>\n Gellner thinks Hume’s argument is rather too psychologistic and contains a contradiction. Hume admired Classical paganism for its civic and this-worldly values. He disliked Catholicism for promoting selfish individualism and other-worldliness and yet his oscillation theory promotes Catholicism as a thinly disguised version of paganism. Nietzsche was clearer than Hume: \u2018… in the Renaissance there was a brilliant-sinister reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble style of evaluating things; Rome itself stirred like an awakened apparent corpse under the weight of the new, superimposed Judaised Rome, which had the aspect of an ecumenical synagogue and was called \u2018church'”. For Hume, pluralists were socially tolerant, monists not. But then, how was he to explain the greater tolerance of Protestant Monist England and Holland over Catholic pluralist Absolutist states like France and Spain?<\/p>\n The contradiction is explained in terms of a distinction between \u2018superstition’ on the one hand and \u2018enthusiasm’ on the other, found in Hume’s essay \u2018Of Superstition and Enthusiasm<\/em>.’ Superstition is priest-ridden pluralism. It opposes reason and civil liberty. Enthusiasm is the initial violent zeal of the monotheistic but it eventually dies down and becomes a friend of civil liberty. This allows Hume to deepen the monist\/pluralist schema of his \u2018Natural History of Religion<\/em>‘. Pluralist priests may be found within a unified, all-encompassing hierarchy opposing liberty, as in Catholicism, or fragmented into many smaller units and rival organizations, as in Muslim organizations. As Gellner explains, \u2018 an enthusiastic (monistic, putritan, scripturalistic) bourgeoisie may indeed be an enemy of liberty and a friend of the state, when caught between the state and tribesmen; while it may become a friend of liberty when it is weak enough to abandon hopes of imposing its forcible views on others and yet has nothing other than the state monopoly of religion to fear, when the state has tamed or eliminated both baron and tribesman.’<\/p>\n In \u2018Of Superstition and Enthusiasm<\/em>‘ Hume is close to putting forward Weber’s famous Protestant theory of the emergence of modern liberal society. In \u2018The Natural History of Religion<\/em>‘ he puts forward his oscillation theory where he explains the dying down of monist Puritan zeal in a weak theory, claiming that all zealous sects burn out into \u2018remissness and coolness’. Weber realized that it wasn’t the burning away of a priesthood that caused the zeal to dampen down, but that everyone became a priest and so priestly duties were shifted onto everyone. It was the preservation of priestly zeal in everyone that made the monists end up \u2018friends of liberty. It was the effectiveness of the inner light which helped make American democracy possible, as Tocquiville noted’ says Gellner. Hume preferred Monism for its rationality. But people were monists for the wrong reasons (fear and sycophantic attempts to alleviate it) so monism’s intellectual merit was circumvented. They might as well be pluralists : \u2018better civil minded-idolaters than craven Unitarians’ is the slogan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gellner claims that by combining the insights of the two works the contradiction is ironed out. Yet the theory remains deeply psychologistic. References to social structures are introduced in a rather ad hoc fashion to shore up difficulties. Ibn Khaldoun<\/a> is a sixteenth century Muslim historian whose theory is exclusively about communities and social environment. Geller argues that by combining his insights with Hume’s, a compelling vision of traditional Muslim society emerges.<\/p>\n Ibn Khaldoun<\/a> thought that political, social and civic virtues were fostered by tribal life. Civilisation and refinement were fostered by urban life. The vision is tragic: you can have either civic values or civilization but not both. This is close to Plato : \u2018We are to study not only the origins of society, but a society which enjoys the luxuries of civilization\u2026 We shall have to enlarge our state again\u2026 the territory which was previously sufficient will now be too small\u2026 we shall need a slice of our neighbour’s \u2026 this means the addition of an army\u2026’ Both Plato and Ibn Khaldoun<\/a> agree that civil society members don’t fight. Plato because of specialized division of labour and Khaldoun because civilization is inherently incompatible with social cohesion and the martial spirit.<\/p>\n The Ancient Greek city was the paradigm of community. An Islamic city is both the model and antithesis of community. It is a place for piety but confronts tribal community life. \u2018Bedouin are closer to being good than sedentary people\u2026 are more disposed to courage than sedentary people\u2026. The reason for this is that sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease. They are sunk in well-being and luxury. They have entrusted the defence of their property and their lives to the governor and ruler who rules them, and to the militia which has the task of guarding them. They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications which protect them \u2026 Successive generations have grown up in this way of life. They have become like women and children, who depend on the master of the house. Eventually, this has come to be a quality of life’ writes Khaldoun. This is sharp contrast to Europe where peasants were there to be oppressed and burghers enjoyed a limited freedom.<\/p>\n Ibn Khaldoun doesn’t regard city dwellers as real citizens. Only tribes have community spirit and civic values. Urban civilization lacks these values. Ibn Khaldoun notes how they are combined. All tribesmen are warriors and carry arms. They are fierce. Tribesmen are prepared to fight anyone. The tribes are held together by religion. They live away from cities. They have their own chiefs. \u2018Each of these little societies elects its own chiefs whom they call Sheiks and they jointly discuss their own affairs\u2026’ They don’t disarm their tribesmen. \u2018Their leaders needs them mostly for the group spirit that is necessary for purposes of defence. He is, therefore, forced to rule them kindly and to avoid antagonizing them. Otherwise, he would have trouble with group spirit, resulting in his undoing and theirs.’<\/p>\n The model is an alternative to the feudal European one. The tribes are nomadic pastoralists. Not tied to land, they were less easily enslaved and oppressed. You can’t tax people who can run away and hide, and who can carry with them their wealth in jewellery and other mobile capital. Peasants, tied to land, couldn’t do that. As Ibn Khaldoun notes: \u2018the plough brings submission in its train. By contrast, pastoralism tends towards an at least relatively egalitarian society, which does not normally or seriously segregate a specialized stratum of warriors.’ A vocation of violence is rooted in raiding others for cattle and sheep. Tribal solidarity was a way of protecting yourself against raids from other tribes. Solidarity and civic values are imperative. Alone, you can’t survive a raid, nor mount one. Group spirit and tribal, kinship-based loyalty is what is important to these rural pastoralists.<\/p>\n Ibn Khaldoun stresses the interdependence of urban luxury and intellectual taste. This encourages literacy and worship of the uncreated Word. The written word was to nail a contract not convey a message. A town was where the rural pastoralist tribesmen went to get urban products. Merchants and artisans therefore clustered in the towns. Towns formed a matrix of literacy, which is both a skill and an endorsement of all the other skills clustered in a town. This constitutes urbanity. Literacy was able to provide a self sustaining and undelimited set of divinely uttered propositions, socially sustained by privileged class who are literate. Because revelation was closed those with access to its truth were able to use it as a charter of legitimacy without the threat of innovation.<\/p>\n Literacy flourishes best amongst specialists. It is capable of codifying the minutia of social life. Regulation like this is sharply contrasted with the uncodified regulation of the illiterate tribesmen. Unwritten regulation depends on stable, non-anonymous, non-urban populations. Literacy in the urban setting was divine, and so offered a link between the tribesman and the urban literary specialists, despite the differences. \u2018So the cult of the Word is pushed to an extreme point where it endows the carriers with great moral authority and, at the same time, pastoralism is developed to a limit at which it endows pastoral mutual-aid collectives (\u2018tribes’) with great cohesion, and fatally weakens any polity other than one based on some coalition of such tribal collectives.’<\/p>\n Ibn Khaldoun recognized that this fusion of the pastoralism and scripturalism is the classical world of Islam. It inverts European assumptions. Rural units are strong because the state is weak. Khaldoun assumes that rulers are corrupt. They are born in the desert, recruited to protect the scripturalist specialists in the city, and lead only so long as they can hold their group together. \u2018Leadership exists only through superiority, and superiority only through group feeling.’ Government is by tribe, \u2018the gift of the tribe to the city’. Soviet anthropologist Khazanov<\/a> noted that \u2018nomads become less egalitarian in proportion to their involvement with the state\u2026 The capture of the political citadel by a tribe or group of tribes then constitutes the extreme position along this spectrum: the tribe becomes extremely stratified in so far as one of its number becomes the sultan, and his clan his ministers, who also constitute the pool of his potential successors. At the same time, its political institutions, having been intermittent or \u2018dispositional’ in their natural habitat \u2013 only activated into being by the need arising from conflict \u2013 acquire a state-like permanence and continuity.’ Education and law-abidingness are useless for authority in this context. \u2018Those who rely on laws and are dominated by them from the very beginning of their education and instruction in the crafts, sciences, and religious matters, are thereby deprived of much of their own fortitude. They can scarcely defend themselves at all against hostile acts. This is the case with students, whose occupation it is to study and learn from teachers and religious leaders\u2026’ says Khaldoun the scholar. Education undermines social cohesion. \u2018Only tribes held together by group feeling can live in the desert.’ The feeling is often expressed in terms of \u2018kinship’ and \u2018blood’ but that’s just a way of talking. \u2018Clients and allies belong in the same category.’ These links only make sense, however, in a rough, ungoverned or ill-governed environment such as inhabited by the tribes.<\/p>\n The urban population needs the Bedouin pastoralists to defend them when they travel and to fight raiders of towns. \u2018When sedentary people mix with the Bedouin in the desert or associate with them on a journey, they depend on them. They cannot do anything for themselves without them,’ says Khaldoun. But the Bedouin rely on the sedentary types of the cities economically: \u2018 the Bedouin need the cities for their necessities of life, the urban population needs the Bedouin [only] for conveniences and luxuries. Thus, as long as they live in the desert and have not acquired royal authority and control of the cities, the Bedouin need the townsmen.’ Tribesmen then are dependent on urban artisans and literate religious specialists. Most of them, above the craftsman and below the religious nobility spurn specialisation.<\/p>\n So the tribesmen need the towns for economic reasons and the towns need the tribes politically, to protect them. The countryside is ordered by tribal society, whose members are all armed, whose leaders therefore can’t dominate them but have to rule through group feeling. There are three types, wolves, sheepdogs and sheep. The wolves defy authority and taxation and remain cohesive. Sheepdogs are drawn from the wolves and gain royal status, defending the town and its outlying regions. Sheep submit to authority and therefore show that they never had enough of the right spirit and moral fiber in the first place. Patronage networks are therefore a key to all this. Kin-patronage politics is the system even in modern conditions.<\/p>\n The system is dynamic. The group that through cohesion is strongest is able to take over the kingship role in the city. But this leads inevitably to corruption and the cohesion drains away. Mercenaries may be brought in to defend itself but eventually the ruling tribe is defeated and thrown out, becoming wolves again. The cycle is a four generation cycle from wolves capturing the city to dwindling and losing out to the next tribal wolf. This pattern predates Islam. It is a circular or reversible pattern of most arid zone topographies. A.M. Khazanov<\/a>, an authority on the Scythians, writes: \u2018In the course of nearly three thousand years, within the nomadic world of Eurasian steppes, circular developments clearly predominated over cumulative ones, and if the latter nevertheless had their place, this was largely due to stimuli emerging from the agrarian world.’ Another Soviet specialist on nomadism, G.E. Markov<\/a>, writes: \u2018 when we come to nomads, the facts bear this testimony: the transition in social organization from \u2018communal-nomadic’ to the \u2018military-nomadic’ and vice-versa are reversible phenomena. After the disintegration of nomad empires, new governments appear in the agrarian regions subject to them; with the mobile pastoralists, the communal-nomadic organization reappeared in one form or another.’<\/p>\n Fusing David Hume’s oscillation theory with Ibn Khaldoun’s model of traditional Muslim society eradicates the psychologicalism and contradictions of Hume. Particular social organizations prefers particular religious styles. The segmentary style explains the Bedouin tribal society. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard<\/a> elaborated this theory: \u2018Each section of a tribe, from the smallest to the largest, has its Shaikh or Shaikhs. The tribal system, typical of segmentary structures everywhere, is a system of balanced opposition between tribes and tribal sections from the largest to the smallest divisions, and there cannot be any single authority in a tribe. Authority is discriminated at every point of the tribal structure and political leadership is limited to situations in which a tribe or segment of it acts corporately. With the tribe this only happens in war or in dealings with outside authority\u2026 There cannot obviously, be any absolute authority vested in a single Shaikh of a tribe when the fundamental principle of tribal structure is opposition between its segments, and in such segmentary systems there is no state and no government as we understand these institutions.’ In segmentary society the feud is a characteristic institution. Power isn’t always diffused equally. Big Men do arise. Sometimes they are big enough to be tyrannical. But not typically.<\/p>\n Marxists thought the theory was merely a description. So, for example, G. Badia and R. Gallisot write \u2018\u2026 segmentary remains purely descriptive, and causes societies to hang in thin air, through neglecting the analysis of their productive activities.’ As good Marxists they presume that the explanation of the social springs from elsewhere, from the mode of production. But segmentary society is explained by the solution to a political rather than an economic problem: \u2018How is order maintained in the absence of a central law-and-order enforcing agency?’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This segmentary style of politics engendered a particular religious style. Without political centralization, the threat of violence is present at every level rather than just centrally. Yet the system doesn’t collapse into anarchy. The religion prevents this. In the tribal areas the pervasive religious institution is the saint, (the dervish or marabout).The saint is the possessor of routinised charisma inherited in terms of descent from the Prophet. Saints supervise political progress, sanction and supervise legal collective oaths, mark spatial markers for frontiers, provide temporal markers and supply the means for the Islamic identity of tribesmen. Illiterate, they are the opposite of scholarly Islam. They ensure that the faith is mediated by special and distinct (usually pacifist) holy men, non-puritanical and scholarly, incarnated in a person and with an ethics of loyalty not rule observance. This religious style is hierarchical, discontinuous from tribal custom agreed by equal elders which is consensual. The authority of the Saint is absolute.<\/p>\n Urban Islam requires a different religious style. The ruler appoints literate judges. Learned piety mirrors the dignity of commerce. It is dignified in a scripturalist, Unitarian Puritanical sort of way. Theology is scarcely distinguishable from the law. Separation of powers rests on the fact that there is no legislature. The law is given. The judiciary can be independent from the executive: the laws are God’s not the ruler’s. The literate class are therefore powerful even though not able to resist the ruler. Judges can’t make laws but consensual interpretation can extend it. Social norms and ideals are available to anyone who can read. \u2018The Norm is extra-ethnic and extra-social, and not too easily susceptible to political manipulation.’<\/p>\n Shi’itsm is nuanced: they claim expertise in the founder-martyr’s biography. That the founder fell foul to a Muslim ruler \u2018makes it even easier for the religious leaders to de-legitimise political authority and mobilize opposition, in a way that must be the envy of more self-consciously revolutionary ideologies.’ The Martyrdom was fiercely avenged and its symbolism can destabilize Muslim rulers. Pahlevis was overthrown without being militarily defeated and with still military and financial power intact. The Shah of Iran was thrown out by being seen as Yazid, murderer of Hussein. (Ironically, if Iran had been subject to British colonialism it would have probably not led to the revolutionary religious eruption: The Shah managed to be more Westernised than colonialists using indigenous leaders would have been).<\/p>\n Iran has both administrative and populist mystical ulama \u2013 religious scholars \u2013 serving the religion and the state on the one hand and the religious needs of the people on the other. The battle between Shi’ite’s with PhDs on the one hand and populist mullahs on the other is part of the inheritance of the Iranian revolution according to Gellner. Modern conditions helped urban bazari make revolution without rural help but there is evidence that they get displaced by tribesmen once the state is established, as in the Mahdia in Sudan. This nuance contrasts with the Sunni version where the opposition is between scholar and Sufis. In the Shi’ite version the division is within the scholar class itself.<\/p>\n Success as a revolutionary requires truth and tribal cohesion. This is rare and difficult to achieve. Friedrich Engels writes: \u2018Muslim risings, notably in Africa, make a remarkable contrast [with Christendom]. Islam suits Orientals , especially the Arabs, that is to say, on the one hand townsmen practicing commerce and industry, on the other hand, nomadic Bedouin. But there is in this the seed of a periodic collision. Townsmen, growing opulent and ostentatious, become lax in the observations of the \u2018Law.’ The Bedouin, poor and hence austere in their manners, contemplate the wealth and enjoyment with envy and lust. They unite under the direction of a prophet, a Mahdi, to punish the faithless, to reestablish the ceremonial law and true faith, and by way of recompense to appropriate the treasure of the faithless. A hundred years later, naturally, they find themselves at exactly the same point as their predecessors; a new purification is required; a new Mahdi emerges; the game re-starts. So it has come to pass since the wars of conquest of the Almoravides and the African Almohades in Spain till the latest Mahdi in Khartoum\u2026 It was the same, or very nearly, during the convulsions in Persia and other Muslim lands. These movements are born of economic causes even if they have a religious camouflage. But, even when they succeed, they leave the economic conditions intact. Thus nothing has changed, and the collision becomes periodic. By contrast, for a popular rising in the Christian West the religious camouflage is only the banner and mask for an attack on the crumbling social order: in the end, that order is overturned; a new one emerges; there is progress, the world moves on.’ This was written in 1894\/5. He had read Ibn Khaldoun. Marx marked Ibn Khaldoun in the index of his reading of Kovalevsky.<\/p>\n He was wrong on some things. Muslim burghers were not ostentatious. Nor was the state engendered by class conflict. Young Marx couldn’t grasp the idea that the stability of the social structure wasn’t a colonialist projection. But Engels shared the same vision. The \u2018traditional Muslim state is simultaneously and without contradiction both a Robber state, run for the benefit of a dominant group, and a moralistic state , bound to promote good and proscribe evil. It is carried by and identified with the dominant group, yet it also has an inbuilt vocation towards the implementation of a sharply identified divine order on earth’ writes Gellner. Modern industrial states are too complex for dominant groups not to have to be devious in claiming its resources. But socialism has some of the moralism of the moralistic tradition. \u2018Islamic Marxism is only superficially paradoxical’ says Gellner.<\/p>\n The city burghers are sober and ratified by scholarly religion. The city poor require an externalized, ritualized, and personal religion. So the faith of scholars sets the tone of religion in the city but there are also the small groups and their more mystic religion. They are not always in opposition. But they are often in a latent opposition to each other where the scholars see the mystic religion in terms of superstition, cults, tribal and customary law, and all of it eroding the primacy of Islamic Law and the Book.<\/p>\n Urban pure scripturalism is caught between the threat of lax pre-literate tribesmen on the one hand and, with the advent of industrial modernism, modern townsfolk literate to the point of skepticism. Tribal religion is not about class or status but time-scale and political occasion. Small scale saints can mark time and space, in festivals of seasons and boundary marking. When something momentous is needed to unite the tribes \u2013 perhaps in a time of invasion \u2013 then rather than these small scale religious specialists an impressive scholarly Unitarian preacher is required.<\/p>\n Here the oscillation found in Hume attaches to the sociology of Ibn Khaldoun. Sufism \u2013 personalized, organized, hierarchical, ecstatic, unpuritanical, unscriptural religion- is required to hold together the tribes and the urban poor. \u2018Sufism is then the opiate of the people.’ But the urban towns and city require scholarly, sober Unitarian piety to dominate its economics and civilization, but not its politics. Mongomery Watt calls it a nomocracy not a theocracy.<\/p>\n This picture of classical Muslim society combines Ibn Khaldoun’s tribal version of the circulation of elites with David Hume’s theory of flux and reflux in religion as two sides of the same coin. A weak state and a strong culture is the formula. It reverses the European, Western assumption of a strong state and a weak culture. Modernity brings with it the modern state which must monopolise violence. This stabilizes the pendulum, centralizes everything and so threatens to end tribalism. It therefore undermines the tribal style of religion, the Sufi, who become denounced as frauds degrading the true Muslim faith of the scripturalist, scholastic and sober urbanite. Everything is tilted towards the urban style.<\/p>\n Colonialisation led to the taming of the tribes. The urban poor were a problem. As urbanism has grown the tribal style of religion loses its prestige. As Gellner keeps insisting, the scholarly, scripturalist style is inherently modernisable. \u2018The scripturalist version can be presented as a national ideology, defining all Moslems in a given territory as one nation (even if that, as in Pakistan, leads to a dilemma as to whether faith or nation is the basis of the state.)’ It is dignified and has a style that easily fits with industrial modernity’s bureaucratic, bourgoise style.<\/p>\n Two versions of Muslim responses to the impact of modernity are on offer: one against religion and one for it. Turkey and Tunisia opted for secular nationalism. Kemalist style nationalism can drive the opposing styles of religion together in an alliance against secularisation and so create a permanent religious problem. Post war Turkey hinges on this secularist dilemma: either have free elections and hand over to the religiosity of countryside and small town, or uphold Kemalism at the cost of overruling the vote. The millet system of the old Ottoman State developed autonomous quasi-national communities. Modern states can’t function with cohabiting specialized communities and so via the ethnic cleansing that largely defined the twentieth century they became nations. Lebanon didn’t and remains a precarious explosive balance of communities without a state.<\/p>\n Where struggle with a dominant foreign power is prevalent religion is radicalized, entwined with nationalism. Muslim states modernizing in the name of reformed Islam avoid the Kemalist issue but face pressures from their own extremists as well as literate urban secularists. Fundamentalism against modernism has still no clear outcome. As an emerging modern state discipline and self-sacrifice, orderliness and literacy, obedience to abstract rules imposed by a disembodied central authority is compatible with the style or spirit of the urban religion, unlike that of the tribes. \u2018Whether that spirit can also remain compatible with an economically developed society, as opposed to a developing one, remains to be seen’ writes Gellner.<\/p>\n Tribalism can still be significant. In Somalia it was illegal to refer to your tribe and now social organisation is tribal in many areas. But the enormous wealth created by oil has allowed scripturalist Islam to be applied more rigorously than with normal economic constraints. As we noted, Gaddafy pushed an extreme scripturalism that released him from normal legal-theological constraints. He suspended the Sunna (the codified traditions, as opposed to the Koran) and reformed the Muslim calendar, based on the prophet’s death rather than the Hijra. The idea of just depending on the Koran was proclaimed in 1909 in Egypt but had never before actually been put into practice. It was a move that undermined the ulama class; \u2018neither mufti nor marabout nor shaikhs’ appeared in a Libyan daily announcing this. The ulama offered orderliness and sobriety and were like a judicial committee protecting the burghers. Gaddafy left this class defenceless. A theologian commission in Saudi Arabia under the Qadi of Medina found him guilty of apostasy. What is noteworthy is that when a Muslim society affirms its roots against outsiders it doesn’t resort to ruralism as in Germany, the USA, Russia or England, but goes for an urban Puritanism. It also seems like a socialist, mystical radicalism of unspecified aims. An alternative option, at the other end of the spectrum, is the example of the Aga Khan who used the Ismaili cult of personality to free himself from scripture and community.<\/p>\n Modern Muslim countries are like European states facing twentieth century issues superimposed on those of the sixteenth. They face choices: do they become socialist or liberal states? Traditionalist ruling elites based on kin-based recruitment policies face anti-tribal modernists. Religious rigorists face the lax. The egalitarian scripturalist religion is useful and well suited to a technical and mobile society. Insulated and protected, it can help inaugurate modernity by keeping the other style at bay whilst at the same time maintaining continuity with its ancient identity and simultaneously justifying a great leap forward. Old style puritans as in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria feel different from new style individualistic puritans who emerged after fierce colonialism as in Algeria and Libya. It’s a rich tapestry.<\/p>\n When we look at emerging patterns of Muslim states it is interesting to see how they appeared in 1981 when Gellner’s book came out. Algeria and Libya were examples of religiously fundamentalist but socially radical states. Turkey was religiously moderate and socially radical. Saudi Arabia and Nigeria were fundamentalist and politically conservative\/traditionalist. Morocco was religiously moderate and politically conservative\/traditionalist. Iran had moved into the fundamentalist camp when Khomeiny took over, and the question was whether it would end up politically radical or conservative\/traditional. The recent election there has opened up interesting possibilities. Turkey<\/a> seems currently in a flux between fundamentalism vs secularism\/moderates and social radicalism vs political conservatives\/traditionalists. Pakistan is religiously fundamentalist and politically conservative\/traditionalist. It’s inability to decide whether nationalism or Islam is to be its unifying ideology hinders its arrival into full modernity.<\/p>\n Turkey didn’t oscillate. Turks developed their own political theory in the fifteenth century in the \u2018Cycle of Territory’ theory. It was, as noted earlier, the massive exception<\/em> to Ibn Khaldoun’s theory. But Gellner argues that, \u2018inside every Mamluk state, there appear to be many Ibn Khaldounian social formations hidden away and signaling wildly to be let out \u2013 and many frequently succeeding, whether by a political upheaval or a probing anthropologist.’ Gellner also claims that \u2018\u2026 it explains how their distinctive fusion produced its stabilities and tensions, and continues to influence the various paths along which it is finally entering the modern world.’<\/p>\n The Arab Spring, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Egypt again \u2013 there’s a need to understand what is happening<\/a> in all these hot spots. With Gellner’s thirty year old critique I’m out of date and prediction is always difficult without hindsight! However his message that we focus less on Islamic religious content and more on the various institutional structures sustaining it seems increasingly pertinent.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/9780142180020.jpg\")
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\nIn the name of God, what ideal forbids me to live according to my nature? Till now I had lived according to the morality of Christ, or at least according to a certain Puritanism which had been taught me as the morality of Christ .. I had succeeded only in causing a grave disturbance to my whole being \u2026 the demands of my flesh did not know how to dispense with the consent of my spirit\u2026 I came to doubt whether God requires such constraint \u2026 whether, in this struggle in which I bifurcated myself, I need \u2026 put the Other in the wrong\u2026’ Gide understood that he had found the Nietzschean Islamic Apollonian spirit.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/755955.jpg\")
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