The Iraq War by John Keegan Read Free Book Online Page A

preferably descend from Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, was to be elected and accepted by the faithful as long as he showed himself ‘rightly guided’ by the law of God; and a number of minorities, of which the Shi’a was the largest. The Shi’a hold that the succession was flawed from the start, believing that the Caliphate should have passed to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. This dispute gave rise to murder and civil war and divides Islam to this day. Nevertheless, neither faction diverged from the central idea, that Muslims live under the law of God, revealed in the Koran and to be upheld by Muhammad’s successor.
    Practical difficulties made the idea difficult to sustain; thehistory of Islam for many centuries is a record of dissent and dispute, often violent, of succession by victory in war, not election, and, at times, of competing caliphates. Internecine violence always, however, affronted pious Muslims, so much so that Islam invented a unique institution, that of slave soldiery, to absolve those in dispute of the sin of fighting fellow believers. A unified Caliphate was only reestablished in comparatively recent times when the Ottoman Turks, a non-Arab people from Central Asia who had been recruited to serve as slave soldiers, imposed their authority over the Arabs by military force and assumed the Caliphate by diktat. From the sixteenth century onwards the history of Islam became largely that of the Ottoman empire, with its seat at Constantinople (Istanbul). Areas of the Islamic world, notably in India and South-east Asia, never formed part of the Ottoman Empire; many of its subjects, in south-eastern Europe and the Near East, remained Christian. The empire, however, embraced the historic heartland of Islam and almost all Arabs were, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, directly or indirectly subjects of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph.
    Power in the Ottoman world, both secular and religious, was dynastic; sons succeeded fathers, though favoured wives were often able to evade the principle of primogeniture and new sultans commonly consolidated their accession by murdering brothers en masse. The traditional principle persisted nevertheless; birth and religious status were the bases of worldly authority. Religious status could be quite widely drawn; the servants of the Sultan-Caliph, his ministers and military commanders, derived their authority from association with him. Thus, for example, the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt, whose leaders ruled the country during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were legitimized as the Sultan-Caliph’s viceroys (Khedive). Unnervingly, alternative legitimate power could also arise spontaneously, through the appearance of a Mahdi, a man directly guided by God. The most famous Mahdi of modern times was Muhammad Ahmed, who became ruler of Sudan in the 1880s.
    Mahdism, dynastic usurpation, fragmentation of the Caliphateor patronage by it were the only means, until the twentieth century, by which power could be transferred in the Muslim world. The historic ideas of the
Umma
, the community of believers, of the Caliphate and of the overriding authority of the Supreme Being and his law as revealed in the Koran, impeded the emergency of secular politics. Much was changed in the Islamic and particularly the Arab world, however, by its penetration by European imperial powers in the nineteenth century. The conquest of Algeria by the French after 1830 and the subordination of Egypt to British rule after 1882 subjected large numbers of Muslim Arabs to the processes of European government, based not on the ideas of religious fraternity or divine authority but on those of administrative efficiency and economic development; with them the Europeans brought also secular education and law, both quite alien to the Muslim mind, which for centuries had used schools as a means of Koranic instruction and the courts as a forum for judgement by
Sharia
, Koranic