Friday, February 16, 2007 AD
I've just finished reading Barnaby Rogerson's book The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, the sequel to The Prophet Muhammad, which I have mentioned in passing before.
As with its predecessor, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad is a great work of storytelling, a highly readable introduction to a fascinating (and critically important) period of history. Rogerson is not a Muslim, but a very sympathetic observer of Islam. At times this goes too far: Rogerson bemoans the takeover of the nascent Islamic state by the "tough-minded generals [and] scheming politicians", even while his books make clear that the careers of Muhammad and the four "Rightly Guided Caliphs" who followed him had no shortage of war and politics. However, the transition described (and deplored) by Rogerson is still real enough.
Rogerson's greatest ability, however, and the reason why I wholeheartedly recommend both his books, is to help the western reader understand and to some extent inhabit the historical mindset of early Islam. While a more sober history will give you the facts about the early decades of Islam, Rogerson makes you feel the tragedy of them, a tragedy which (he argues) still lies at the heart of the Islamic identity today.
It is impossible not to be moved by Rogerson's presentation of figures such as Ali or his brutally-slain son, Husayn. Ali - son-in-law of the Prophet, hailed by all Muslims as one of the great spiritual figures of early Islam, but regarded by Shias as having been cheated of his inheritance before Muhammad's body had even grown cold - eventually became the fourth Caliph, but was murdered at the end of years of civil war within the Islamic state. His son, the Imam Husayn, then died with his family and was beheaded after making his desperate, doomed last stand at Kerbala in AD 680. He had been summoned to rescue true Islam from the politicians and dynastic monarchs who had now taken it over, only to be abandoned by those who had called him to the fight.
The book is subtitled, "And the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism", and looks at the fifty years following Muhammad's death. The split between Sunni and Shia has its origins in those years - indeed, its origins go back to the hours immediately following the death of Muhammad. And Ali, "the linchpin of the whole tale of the Heirs of the Prophet", is a key figure in this split between Sunni and Shia.
As Rogerson writes towards the end of the book:
By contrast:
It is interesting how the myth of a golden age lost and betrayed can be a spur to activism, of the desire to recreate that age of purity in the world today. This is presumably because, if you believe perfection was possible once, then it follows it is possible again. On the other hand, if you believe that even the so-called "golden age" was itself complex and ambiguous, then this can lead to a greater acceptance of the limitations of human endeavour, a greater realism - but it can also lead to a complacent acceptance of the second-rate and unjust.
To that extent, Shia Muslims find their counterparts in some strange places: in a certain type of "confessional" Christian, calling the church back to a repristinated age of orthodoxy; or, at the other end of the scale, in the type of liberal Christian who weeps tears of frustration at how the pure, simple vision of Jesus the Galilean teacher of righteousness was usurped and betrayed by Paul.
Cross-posted at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please see the post on that site for any comments.
As with its predecessor, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad is a great work of storytelling, a highly readable introduction to a fascinating (and critically important) period of history. Rogerson is not a Muslim, but a very sympathetic observer of Islam. At times this goes too far: Rogerson bemoans the takeover of the nascent Islamic state by the "tough-minded generals [and] scheming politicians", even while his books make clear that the careers of Muhammad and the four "Rightly Guided Caliphs" who followed him had no shortage of war and politics. However, the transition described (and deplored) by Rogerson is still real enough.
Rogerson's greatest ability, however, and the reason why I wholeheartedly recommend both his books, is to help the western reader understand and to some extent inhabit the historical mindset of early Islam. While a more sober history will give you the facts about the early decades of Islam, Rogerson makes you feel the tragedy of them, a tragedy which (he argues) still lies at the heart of the Islamic identity today.
It is impossible not to be moved by Rogerson's presentation of figures such as Ali or his brutally-slain son, Husayn. Ali - son-in-law of the Prophet, hailed by all Muslims as one of the great spiritual figures of early Islam, but regarded by Shias as having been cheated of his inheritance before Muhammad's body had even grown cold - eventually became the fourth Caliph, but was murdered at the end of years of civil war within the Islamic state. His son, the Imam Husayn, then died with his family and was beheaded after making his desperate, doomed last stand at Kerbala in AD 680. He had been summoned to rescue true Islam from the politicians and dynastic monarchs who had now taken it over, only to be abandoned by those who had called him to the fight.
The book is subtitled, "And the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism", and looks at the fifty years following Muhammad's death. The split between Sunni and Shia has its origins in those years - indeed, its origins go back to the hours immediately following the death of Muhammad. And Ali, "the linchpin of the whole tale of the Heirs of the Prophet", is a key figure in this split between Sunni and Shia.
As Rogerson writes towards the end of the book:
All Muslims revere Ali as the most enlightened spiritual figure after the Prophet Muhammad. All acknowledge him as a Caliph. All Muslims agree that with the assassination of Ali in 661, the era of holiness within the Islamic community is over.This is the tragedy of the first half-century of Islam:
[J]ust a generation after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the rule of the enlightened Heirs of the Prophet is finished. So after just thirty years, the tough-minded generals, the scheming politicians, the police chiefs and the old clan chiefs are once again back in power. By 661 men of the ilk of Muawiya, Amr and Mughira have triumphed over the Muslim Empire of the Arabs. No one doubts this, whether they are Sunni Muslims or Shia Muslims.The difference between the two groups lies in the question, not of whether the example of Muhammad was betrayed by his successors, but how quickly:
For the Shia the betrayal of the inheritance of the Prophet begins within a few hours of Muhammad's death, while the Sunni consider that despite the slow creeping decay in spiritual values, this first generation of the Heirs of the Prophet set an example that can usefully be studied by mankind.Hence the collective example of the first four Caliphs - Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman and Ali - are taken by Sunnis as a "heroic role model" for the Muslim community.
By contrast:
The Shia concentrate their spiritual energy on a sense of immediate loss, of a divine vision so quickly betrayed by mankind. They argue that only Ali was qualified to uphold the spiritual values that underpinned the whole essence of Islam. This is a melancholic vision, though on another level it allows the Shia to aspire to create a holy state such as Ali might have instituted on this earth.As such, the Sunni/Shia split seems to follow a pattern and dichotomy found quite often in human affairs, one from which the church itself is far from immune.
It is interesting how the myth of a golden age lost and betrayed can be a spur to activism, of the desire to recreate that age of purity in the world today. This is presumably because, if you believe perfection was possible once, then it follows it is possible again. On the other hand, if you believe that even the so-called "golden age" was itself complex and ambiguous, then this can lead to a greater acceptance of the limitations of human endeavour, a greater realism - but it can also lead to a complacent acceptance of the second-rate and unjust.
To that extent, Shia Muslims find their counterparts in some strange places: in a certain type of "confessional" Christian, calling the church back to a repristinated age of orthodoxy; or, at the other end of the scale, in the type of liberal Christian who weeps tears of frustration at how the pure, simple vision of Jesus the Galilean teacher of righteousness was usurped and betrayed by Paul.
Cross-posted at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please see the post on that site for any comments.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 AD
Today was devoted, as is traditional for the feast of St John in this realm of England, to post-Christmas sales shopping, in our case in Leeds.It was a successful trip, and part of my haul included Eamon Duffy's book Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570" (which neatly used up the book tokens I'd been given for Christmas). I greatly enjoyed Prof Duffy's classic book on pre-Reformation English Christianity, The Stripping of the Altars (even if I think Duffy's thesis in that book involves a degree of straw-manning in his depiction of the "common-accepted view" of late medieval Christianity), and this looks like being another treat.
It's a gorgeous book, full of reproductions of beautiful medieval Books of Hours. However, Prof Duffy's subject in this book is not a conventional study of Books of Hours. Rather, his focus is on the handwritten amendments made to these books by their medieval owners, and by later protestant censors (and just plain vandals - one Book of Hours that Duffy came across in his research had been signed in biro!). As Prof Duffy writes in his preface:
[T]he additions were very varied: portraits of the owners, or customised prayers into which their names had been inserted: extra prayers in Latin, French or English...: detailed information about times of birth for use in the casting of horoscopes: charms and cures and recipes: notes on financial transactions...Prof Duffy goes on to point out that the history of prayer "is as difficult to write as the history of sex, and for some of the same reasons":
Here was an extraordinary archive, a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.
Both activities are intensely personal and in the nature of things not readily accessible to objective analysis. As a consequence, the history of prayer, like that of sex, is prone to elicit from historians a good deal of slack thought and overheated comment.Hence Prof Duffy's concentration on "a very concrete body of evidence", the marginalia of Books of Hours, "beyond all question the most intimate and important book of the late Middle Ages".
This did cause some confusion among the librarians who assisted Prof Duffy in his research, however. One librarian emailed Prof Duffy to say that:
...she felt sure some mistake had been made. The order I had placed for photographs ... listed pages on which the pictures had unfortunately been scraped or blotted or cut out completely, and some had no pictures at all, only ugly scribblings. So she wondered if I had inadvertently written down the wrong folio numbers, and suggested that I might prefer pictures of some of the more handsome adjacent pages.Another librarian's reaction to being told of Books of Hours being defaced by Tudor protestants was to exclaim, "Well, I only hope they were they own, and not borrowed from a library!"
So I'm now looking forward to embarking with Prof Duffy on what he describes as:
...a journey through the odd but revealing things that people write in, on or outsider their books, hoping, in the process, to catch a glimpse of the inner lives of people who lived in an even more turbulent age than our own.But I'll try to resist the temptation to add bizarre and inconsequential notes in the margin for the purpose of confusing future historians...
Labels: book of hours, devotion, eamon duffy, history, liturgy
