by Djelloul Marbrook - Algerianamericans.com - February 20, 2010
The world is God's shadow
- Ibn al Arabi (Died 1148)
The life of Abd el Kader (1808-1883), the Algerian emir who heroically resisted French colonization and became a legend, illuminates the problem of terrorism in our time if we let it.
The emir would have found the screeds of Osama bin Laden irreligious and the Taliban unenlightened. He was almost certainly aware of the puritanical teachings of Abd el Wahhab (1703-1792), which underpin the Saudi Arabian state and much of today’s fanaticism, including the Taliban’s, but he looked instead to Sufism, the mysterium within Islam, for daily guidance.
Like all Sufis, he would have deemed legalitarian and canonistic strictures to be obstacles along the spiritual path. And in this he illustrates an inherent tension not only within Islam but also within Christianity and Judaism, the other two great monotheistic religions. Christianity had its Peter the Hermit, preaching jihad, but it also had its Saint Teresa of Avila consorting with angels. Islam had its Ibn al Arabi, the emir’s 11th Century spiritual guide, but also its Hasan ibn al Sabah, lord of the assassins. It had its enlightened Abbasids and Umayyads and its bloody-minded Almoravids. Judaism had the Qaballah but also the Zealots.
Sufis, like Christian mystics, do not insist that others are wrong and they are right. And this inevitably makes them suspect in the eyes of religious zealots who insist there is but one right way, one path to union with divine principle. Sufis, like Christian mystics, are always under suspicion in authoritarian states. In the best of times in such states they are tolerated subversives. But under enlightened rule, such as Umayyad Spain and Elizabethan England, they have thrived and shown astonishing creativity. It is difficult to imagine how impoverished poetry would be worldwide without mystics.
The mystical tradition within Islam is irreconciliably at odds with fanatics like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and most of the Saudi clerics. An enlightened foreign policy emanating from Washington would take this into account, knowing that Sufism is a far greater force in Islam than the current paroxysm of terrorist rage. Terrorism is rooted in fear. Sufism is rooted in love, as is the Christian inner tradition. Unfortunately, American foreign policy seems more comfortable dealing with fear than love.
In the West the mystical path—read Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism for an overview—diverges from all narrow and fundamentalist views of religion. And no matter how many times doctrinaire or simplistic preachers seem to prevail, mysticism reemerges as if refreshed by oppression. This phenomenon is as familiar to Muslims as it is to Christians. That is why Emir Abd el Kader’s example and leadership is so memorable. It is why he is remembered with reverence while Bin Laden will be remembered through history as a bilious murderer. Abd el Kader believed in equanimity, chivalry, forgiveness, all Sufic traits. Bin Laden believes in slaughter.
Fundamentalism, however, is one thing, Islamophobia and plain looniness quite another. Islamophobes are hard at work trying to make both Israeli and Muslim extremists instruments of the Apocalypse. A narrow view of religion does not necessarily make one an Islamophobe, and Jews would be wise to remember that today’s Islamophobe is tomorrow’s Jew-baiter. I’m thinking of the Crusaders who warmed up for the First Crusade in 1096 by killing thousands of German Jews in Mainz.
Abd el Kader is the leader the Arabs need today. Instead they have venal, corrupt and hypocritical leaders who encourage extremism on the sly while cozying up to the West officially. It would be difficult to cite a single Arab leader today for magnanimity, compassion and scholarship, virtues for which Abd el Kader is celebrated. Certainly not the murderous Al Qaeda jihadists, and certainly not the corrupt leaders with whom we regularly consort.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser was still alive his portrait was ubiquitous in the Muslim world, and today he is still regarded in some quarters as a kind of modern Saladin. But a better role model is Abd el Kader, because Nasser, while savvy and bold, was neither a scholar nor a metaphysician. He had a vision of pan-Arabism but no world view. If the Arabs wanted to test the West’s intentions towards them instead of entertaining the idée fixe that the West is irredeemably exploitative, they would raise up the likes of Abd el Kader among themselves. France failed his test because its intentions were mixed at best and rapacious in practice. What of ours?
The war on terrorism is ill-named for many grave reasons, not least of which is that if we must wage war it should be on zealotry. Then it would logically have to be waged not only on Muslims but also on Christians and Jews. We do not wish to carry the war to the West Bank or to Texas, where it also belongs and where extremists often are the tail wagging the dog, as indeed they do almost everywhere else, and so we fight foolishly at exorbitant cost in Afghanistan and pretend that our generals know best simply because they are trained to win wars.
This is the right moment, the exact moment in American history to step back from a mindlessly accelerating conflict and take in the breadth of the entire picture. For decades Saudi Arabia, acting diplomatically as if it is our best friend in the Middle East, has countenanced and even financed fundamentalist madrasahs that have bred implacable enemies of the West. The British used to warn us about this, but what have we ever chosen to learn from them? Israel, putatively our closest ally in the Middle East, has countenanced Zionist extremists who have no intention of negotiating with the Arabs about anything, especially not land seized in war. And we have winked at banks too big to fail that have fattened on our war debt. The money we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been much better spent encouraging Muslim moderates through education, medical science and diplomacy. War is a shortcut to nowhere. The Saudis have set the example we ourselves should follow: education. Where they have educated terrorists we should educate moderates. But our own extremists, and Israel’s, go all gaga about war because it is so easy to misdirect patriotism and so difficult to explain that extremism in all its guises and in all nations is the real enemy.
But if the Arabs need the great emir, so does the West. So does Israel. As surely as the United States would have crumbled without Abraham Lincoln, so we will continue to polarize and pull apart if we do not find leaders of his stature who will conserve our human and capital wealth to rebuild our diminished prosperity and close the gap between rich and poor that has been widening since the 1970s.
With the help of a media establishment in the service of an amoral corporate oligarchy, we have fashioned a culture that fears knowledge and prefers received ideas, a culture that spawns fanaticism. The media’s impulse to hype the slightest disagreement and to turn discourse into contest has, with the lucre-vending lobbyists, polarized the population.
It was Ibn al Arabi’s grand idea that we are co-creators of an evolving cosmos, recruited and anointed by a divine principle to co-create the world by our actions and thoughts. This profoundly alchemical idea instructed Abd el Kader in his long conflict with French colonialism and won for him worldwide and lasting admiration. Ibn al Arabi’s enduring and extremely influential ideas do not readily coexist with legalitarian and canonistic interpretations of Islam or any theology. They are essentially theophanic and therefore worrisome to anyone who intends to use religion to inhibit inquiry. Moreover, Sufism, like Christian mysticism, is essentially hermetic, so that it may be said that any regime that deems it necessary to suppress it is by definition regressive.
Abd el Kader waged war wisely and as honorably as it can be waged. He spared prisoners and often returned them if he could not shelter and feed them. He showed mercy and wisdom. He waged no war on the innocent and he despised the cruel as much as he despised the French exploiters whom he fought. In a land with a profound Sufic tradition he never uttered a word that suggested that as a ruler he might oppress hermeticism.
Had not the old enmity between Arab and Berber prevented him from raising the Berber Kabylia region against the French he might well have defeated them. That enmity in itself is a backstory to the larger conflict between tolerance and fanaticism, for it was an army from Kabylia led by fanatics that brought down the famously tolerant caliphate at Cordoba. This same calamity returned to haunt Abd el Kader. And today the Amazigh people, who comprise at least a third of Algeria’s populstion and are called Berbers by others, clamor for the autonomy required to preserve their culture. It is not unlikely Abd el Kader, unlike the present government, would have given it to them. Like Barack Obama, he was a synergistic thinker whose prime impulse was to unify rather than divide. But this impulse was no more in vogue in his day than it is in ours, because it is so much more personally profitable to leaders to divide us than to unite us. Polarizers, extremists, that is, should on the face of things be distrusted, but to civilization’s great misfortune they are often seductive. A unifier like the emir and Abraham Lincoln is exceedingly rare, but extremists are cheaper by the dozen.
His place of honor in the Western mind is admirably defined in Abd el Kader in British and American Literature, published last year by the CELAAN Review at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Edited by Rachel Heavner, it is a compendium of letters, poems, songs and press clippings about the emir. The review’s editor, Hedi Abdel Jaouad, is the director of Skidmore’s Center for the Studies of the Literature and Arts of North Africa. He is writing a biography of Abd el Kader.
Djelloul Marbrook
dmmarbrook@valstar.net
www.djelloulmarbrook.com
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