Feb 10, 2026
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My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
by Doniphan Blair
Members of a Wahhabi militia, the Ikhwan, raiding Transjordan, the old name for Jordan, 1923. photo: unknown Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
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ALAS, THIS SUFI SUCCESS, TOO, SERVED
to conceal a problem: the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Sufis came to the West, enjoyed its religious freedoms and cultural and financial opportunities, as well as the esteem of its intellectuals and some celebrities (notably English author Doris Lessing and American actor Edward G. Robinson), they didn’t complain, let alone write journalistic exposes, about Sufism being under attack by Muslim “reformers,” first the religious then the political. Ancestral lands should be places of knowledge and spirituality not tyranny and sectarian conflict, at least symbolically, they believed. The Ottomans had the most Sufi orders of any society, from Rumi’s Whirling Dervishes to the Janissaries, a widely respected, if sometimes brutal, military brigade, but Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, outlawed them all in 1925. That's because the Sufis controlled the guilds and opposed Ataturk's innovative project to secularize society, abolish Ottoman identity hierarchies, and switch Turkish from being written in Arabic script to Roman.
As it happened, the Ottomans had just spent the previous century fighting the Sufis’ worst nightmare, the army of Sunni radicals which galloped out of the Arabian desert in the late-1700s. Called the Wahhabis, they were led by two Muhammads, the indefatigable preacher Wahhab and his wily warrior buddy, bin Saud. After the first Muhammad's conquests as a prophet, any Arabian warlord worth his salt needed a fiery preacher to rally the troops. Determined to destroy what they deemed un-Islamic, the Wahhab-Saud “jihad”—which means striving or struggle as well as war against unbelievers—was an understandable reaction to Ottoman corruption and archaic Sufism. Indeed, it was similar to other austere movements that emerged from the desert but also the back-to-basics theology and aggressive proselytizing of the Protestants, who started two centuries earlier in Germany. After overturning Catholic corruption and hierarchies and translating “The Bible” into local languages, the seemingly progressive Protestant Reformation unleashed a storm of sectarian wars and deranged witch hunts, lasting 150 years, and a fanatical evangelism, which is still with us today.
A 17th century Puritan woman. illo: unknownA bit like the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts, the Wahhabis prohibited all rituals not listed in “The Quran”, music, all art except poetry, grave stones, flags, birthdays, and all unnecessary displays of the central symbol of matriarchal power, the female body. While “The Quran” directs “believing women to restrain their looks, and to guard their privates” (Surah 24:31), it says nothing about covering their hair, let alone faces, only breasts and bottom areas. Alas, Muhammad’s wives concealed their faces voluntarily, out of courtesy, to avoid arousing unnecessary sin among men living nearby (which made sense given Muhammad's sex life and some matriarchs' ecstatic vocalizing). Conservative clerics used that behavior as well as Muhammad's division of his space with curtains, when he had guests, to protect his women, and other trumped up doctrinal precedent to force women to veil, starting four centuries after Muhammad. Until the rise of Wahhabi fundamentalism in the 19th century, however, they did this only periodically, after blaming war, pestilence or famine on women's elevated sexuality (which was natural, so soon after the matriarchal era) and their failure to fully “submit,” the root word expanded into “Islam” and “Muslim," to the one, true and male god. (Arabic linguistics builds concepts by adding syllables.) A fanatic of the "fallen woman" theology, Wahhab once killed a woman on the spot after she confessed to him her adultery.
The Wahhabis went on to murder many women accused of adultery, polytheism or witchcraft (much like the Protestants), but that's a traumatizing tradition enforced mostly by more macho clans, while many families hid or quietly married off accused women, and it's easier to relieve religious angst by scapegoating minorities. A readily available “other” was the Shi’a, a seventh of all Muslims, who followed additional rituals, worshipped their intellectuals and sometimes considered them the "mahdi," a messiah figure—hence their division into innumerable subsects, some quite esoteric—and the Sufis, about three percent of today's Muslims but more back then. There were also smaller groups like the Yazidis, who mixed monotheism with polytheism. Although the Sufis were mostly Sunni, they liked to invent mind-altering meditations, refine them into rituals, and not only pray to Allah but "meet" or "join with" him.
The mystics of Islam were much closer, conceptually and geographically, than their Abrahamic cousins to the ancient Asian theology of “becoming one with god,” but that violates monotheism’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before me," according to conservatives. The Sufi saint al-Hallaj was martyred by the Abbasids, in 922 CE, in Baghdad, despite being warned repeatedly and placed under house arrest, because he refused to stop saying he was intimate with God. Allah is everywhere and in everything, of course—“As close as your jugular vein,” as the Islamic aphorism goes—and monotheism is a unified field theory, but it does separate humans from the godhead and uses a form of dualism, given “God divided the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4), good from evil, and physicality from spirituality. Islam tried to integrate politics and religion, which joins terrestrial power dynamics with God, but nothing else. The Wahhabis considered the dedication of Sunni Sufis to their sheikhs and saints, which included fetishizing their cloaks, artifacts and graves, and their use of dance, chanting and other techniques to achieve ecstatic states to be “shirk,” Arabic for idolatry and sinful. They also rejected the Sufi embrace of women.
Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, was the lover of Julius Caesar and wife of Marc Anthony, after she showed up after in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown The Third Secret of the Middle East: Matriarchies
Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the Greek and Roman male fertility gods, during their festivals.
Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origin story, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.
Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws and customs the men passed or established. Some women operated and even dressed as patriarchs, but the vast majority preferred to use womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies. That made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase.
Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals across the ancient Middle East. Matriarchal culture remained so powerful, in fact, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar with the reigning priestess or in antechambers with "sacred prostitutes," who were skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (qualities still exemplified by Japanese "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably matchmaking, the choosing of the mate. Also called "sexual selection," it is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after his earth-shaking announcement of "natural selection" in 1859. The matriarchs also managed sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing or, as the fearful patriarchs often called it, witchcraft.
Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the radical shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for years, and lingering matriarchal memories gave women great power. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help visualize how to present our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).
'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown Regardless of patriarchal or feminist critiques, or scholars who ridiculed matriarchal history as exaggerated or invented—arguments assisted by errors in popular '60s-era books like "When God Was a Woman" by Merlin Stone (1976)—Islam is a mere 14 centuries old. Hence, there are plenty of archeological findings, writings from the day, and ongoing folk tales, as well as sacred texts, which speak volumes from between their God-dictated lines. For example, it is widely accepted that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was an older, wealthy businesswoman, who was both his boss and his suitor in marriage—a great matriarch, in other words! Or that Islam’s holiest building, the Ka’aba in Mecca, is cared for today by a clan called Guardians of the Old Women. Until about 1400 years ago (it will be exactly that long in 2029), the Ka’aba housed dozens of polytheist idols, mostly depicting goddesses, and was surrounded by hundreds more. It was also encircled by brass and leather panels bearing poems, some ribald, by the winners of Mecca's popular poetry contests. Yes, Muhammad destroyed the Ka’aba's figurines in December 629 after conquering Mecca peacefully, through negotiation, but he kept one, the Ka’aba Stone. That became the central icon of his new, idol-free faith, in keeping with syncretism, the universal tradition of repurposing older beliefs, buildings or symbols, or of blending religions. Unfortunately, the Ka’aba Stone was engraved with a "yoni" (a "Y" mark signifying vagina), which served to preserve matriarchal memories, especially after being touched by millions of Muslims during their Hajj pilgrimage. Interestingly, the Ka’aba is called “al-Haram,” meaning both “sacred” and “forbidden," which helps illustrate its history of theological gender switching but adds the philosophical quest to integrate opposites, a popular theme in Arab culture.
"I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that austere desert and mountain society, which seems notoriously misogynist until one learns about Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, the female fighters of the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or the poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist.
Majrouh describes the Afghan tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East. They are almost always used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men whom they have sexually selected, either by speaking with them surreptitiously in the street, when their minder is distracted, or via written messages carried by confidents. Forced to innovate by their society's social suffocation, such poetic liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives did come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men typically flee, but the women stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically, socially and evolutionarily). This powerful, secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase the longings for freedom, romance and sex among women.
A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown The Middle East is home to humanity's first written love poem, in fact, by an unknown Babylonian woman who lived around two millennia BCE, and it is rather sexy, even by post-internet-porn standards. Indeed, it includes the line, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure.” The first extant poem penned in the first-person, meanwhile, is two centuries older but also Babylonian and on love, albeit for Inana, the goddess of sex and war. It was by Enheduana, the high priestess of Ur and beloved daughter of Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, the earth’s first multi-nation civilization (nation being a multi-tribe and tribe a multi-clan), which flourished around 2,300 BCE. Sargon was the son of a great matriarch, as he announces in his autobiography (which also chronicles the origins of agriculture): “[M]y mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not… in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes… The river bore me up and carried me to Akki [probably Baghdad], the drawer of water [who] took me as his son and reared me [and] appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, [the Goddess] Ishtar granted me her love.” (Inanna and Ishtar are the Sumerian and Akkadian/Babylonian names for the same deity.)
The first great poetess of the Sufis, as well as the Persians in general, was Rabi’ah Balkhi who lived in tenth century Balkh, Afghanistan (Middle Easterners sometimes use their birthplace as their last name). Indeed, she remains highly revered across the region, from poetry classes to girl names or those of institutions, like Kabul's Rabi’ah Balkhi University (which is still called that, in January 2025, despite the patriarchal Taliban's reconquest in 2021). Rabi’ah fell madly in love with a slave, Bektash, refused to break it off, and was attacked by her relatives. As she bled out, however, she inscribed her romantic revelations on the wall in blood, including the lines: "I knew not when I rode the high-blooded stead; The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed,” and “When you see things hideous, fancy them neat; Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet." Persian, Arab and Jewish women were known for their romanticism, passion and libidos, which is the natural result of a lingering matriarchal society that encourages female sexual expression as well as male sexual selection of those traits. Much of this is detailed in the eyeopening book “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (1994), by the increasingly respected researcher and novelist Geraldine Brooks.
Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh, a talented writer and a Sufi. In his book short-story-like anecdotes, he tells of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” which is code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.
Bedouin women fetching water, Middle East, early 20th century. photo: unknown Patriarchy: From the Loins of Matriarchs
Muhammad could be a pushy preacher and tough crusader on occasion, but he was also, at other times, a creative visionary, a responsible merchant, a loving person and a dedicated family man—a well-socialized mystic, in other words. He worshipped Khadija, who courted him, may have been his first lover, bore him six children, and taught him the romantic ways of Arab women. When asked by a disciple how to excel at that, Muhammad recommended sending the beloved messages, like short poems, as befits “The Messenger of God,” while implying romantic love itself is a message from God. Head over heels in love with her young, dynamic husband, Khadija rewarded his backbreaking work, leading her camel trains across the desert, with an annual month off. Muhammad would retire to a cave on a mountain north of Mecca, eat little and pray a lot, which was one of his three favorite things in life, along with perfume and women. That mystical practice became Ramadan, Islam’s month of daytime fasting.
Khadija and Muhammad modeled how empowered women and men could cooperate, which must have been fairly common as the matriarchal era transitioned to the patriarchal. Pair bonding and reciprocal altruism is practiced by most animals, but it was advanced algebraically by the romanticism of the Middle East, which expanded from Babylonian bacchanals into "The Bible"'s workingclass but equal parts visionary and lascivious "Songs of Solomon". Attributed to the 10th century BCE Jewish king but most likely written by a cadre of poets, male and female, 700 years later, "The Songs" were a welcome dose of matriarchal levity in the middle of our Ur-patriarchal text.
After ten years of Muhammad meditating on the mountain one month a year, he received his first revelation. Fearing he was possessed by a spirit, however, he ran the five miles from his cave to downtown Mecca and the house of Khadija, who assured him that, in fact, he was hearing the one, true God. Essentially midwifing his prophecies, she “submitted” to his new faith and became the first Muslim as well as his greatest ally, along with his cousin Ali. Submission may seem like a strange metaphor for a religion based on unity, equality and justice, but it symbolizes how a strong matriarch would cede dominion to an emerging patriarch, to fully empower his hard work, leadership and romance, or how we mortals must accept the mysterious unfolding of an all-powerful Lord or universe.
Women organized our earliest clans, we can assume, since Paleolithic men didn't study birthing or childrearing and spent a lot of time away from camp, hunting. Although some research is fuzzy or disputed, a lot is obvious and accepted, as with goddess culture. For starters, as Homo sapiens developed their massive brains (“sapiens” being Latin for “wise”), it became harder for them to pass their mother's birth canals. Although women began birthing children prematurely, their larger heads still caused bleeding or death to mothers or infants, who also needed more calories and time to achieve adulthood. This put evolutionary pressure on women, obliging them to shift some of that cost to men, by getting them to bring more meat back to camp, to replace blood lost during estrus ("time of the month") or giving birth, or for better sustenance during pregnancy and postpartum. As many biologists have noted, the human race is a hybridizing experiment run by women.
Although Christians claim Eve is a fallen woman who betrayed the Lord, the Biblical authors indicated she derived knowledge from researching reproduction and remained its great repository, while Adam was a naive adolescent until forced to become a farmer after expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Image: Titian Since nothing lives forever, entities that live must master reproduction shortly after simple survival. That women’s wisdom emerged from research into reproduction is suggested in “Genesis”, where the Snake in the Garden of Eden obviously symbolizes "penis" (as people who have held snakes can testify). But it is proven by science, from Darwin’s second theory of evolution, sexual selection, to cutting-edge gendered behavior and brain studies (despite the diminishment of late due to concerns about, accusations of, or actual sexism). To cite easily observable brain function differences, female Homo sapiens have language centers in both brain hemispheres (unlike the male's left only); they become verbal earlier as toddlers; and they are more talkative as teens and adults. Indeed, gossip provides the intelligence alpha females needed to manage their community’s sexual selection and reproduction life.
Many academics credit hunting as the driver of abstract language, but hunters often use silent communication and don't need to identify as many complex activities as women running families or clans, which certifies "Reproduction 101" as the first fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Not only did seizing the means of reproduction cause "Eve," the first self-aware woman (or symbol thereof), to be ejected from the Garden of Eden, the natural kingdom governed by genetic evolution, it triggered a "cultural big bang," that of speech, art and early romantic behavior. Signaling in service of sex has been central to life ever since the first unicellular split into sexes two billion years ago, and "secondary sexual characteristics" evolved to indicate health and fertility, but it only became fully symbolic only among Homo sapiens. Once women had enough language to count back nine months from a baby's birth and identify its father, they could dispel paternity uncertainty, the mandatory first data point men need to build a patriarchy. Once women could articulate full sentences with subject, object, verb, concepts became modular, and they could leverage male desire through logic and truth but also lies and subterfuge. Estrus was hidden biologically in Homo sapiens, unlike most animals, which helped women manage sexual selection intellectually. Given all this, abstract, grammatical spoken language was probably invented by women between 70 and 140,000 years ago (Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari favors the former date), and soon fostered vast improvements in lifestyle, clan organization and tool use as well as gender relations.
The great matriarchs must have guided our evolution, genetically and socially, for tens of millennia, at least back to the time of the Paleolithic “Venus figurines,” which are up to 42,000 years old. Those few-inch-long icons, often depicting fat, fantastically-breasted women, were most likely fashioned by tool-using men to honor their clan’s most successful mothers (and their own memories of nursing, boosted by the mnemonic aid of language), who were also their mates, priestesses and leaders. (The figurines may also have been used as a trade good.) In addition to language, women’s reproductive research obviously drove the invention of agriculture, which is merely the usurping of another species' reproductive process, and full-blown romance, the development of behavior and art based on mating signals. Exploiting these agricultural and romantic discoveries, small clans grew into tribes and towns and then, after a mere half-dozen millennia, cities, nations, empires and civilizations. That "cultural inflation" occurred first in the Middle East, with its three great rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Nile), shortly thereafter along the Indus and Yellow Rivers (in Pakistan and China, respectively), and then worldwide.
During that expansion, however, the great matriarchs must have noticed diminishing returns from their organization of families with multiple fathers or how they got men to work the fields (which required a full day's labor, not hunting’s half) or to fight invading marauders to the death (hunters generally flee overwhelming force). After mastering language, women realized they could negotiate more advantageous exchanges of their services and products (sex and children) for male-supplied edibles, shelter and safety. After learning the women's new language and what they wanted, men flocked in from the wild bearing food, furs, firewood and more to join the family project, simply because it was an easier avenue to sex and reproduction than force.
The large breasts of the 34,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf, found near that Austrian town in 1908, were thought to be stylization or from sickness but more likely represent a healthy mother who nursed many children. photo: unknown The "great socialization of man" is mythologized in "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (also circa 2000 BCE) when Enkidu, boon buddy of the eponymous hero, is seduced into joining civilization by a temple prostitute by the name of Shamhat who liked to cook and have heroic sex (their first encounter lasted "six days and seven nights," after which Enkidu's animal friends rejected him), a strategy undoubtedly devised by the high priestess of Uruk (150 miles south of Baghdad). To counter Gilgamesh, the first articulate male (or symbol of same), who had finally grown smarter than the matriarchs and was abusing them, the priestess realized she had to find another, equally strong man, and set them against each other. After their initial fight, which wrecked Uruk, Gilgamesh and Enkidu became great friends and took a mythical, homo-erotic road trip to solve the mystery of death, previously understood only by women. Men were always involved in reproduction, of course, but until Gilgamesh and Enkidu (or the men they symbolized), they lacked the understanding of life pioneered by women, who started religion as well as language based on researching reproduction and child rearing.
Their augmenting of male participation and responsibility, until men became the leaders of society (patriarchy) and the universe (monotheism), was another stroke of female genius, which doubled down on their exchange of sex and children for more male contribution, using primitive romance. Perhaps not surprisingly, getting men to renounce their rough folkways, be more responsible fathers, work harder, and be more romantic remains a bone of contention between the sexes today. Back in the Paleolithic, however, our very survival rested on the rapid evolution of men from adolescent hunters to adult fathers, farmers, fighters, builders and poets, usually inspired or led by more articulate women.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and bad times beget better ideas. Khadija believed her husband's new theology provided precisely that for her tribal group, the Arabs, who had long pined for a monotheist prophet of their own, and her city, Mecca, which was famous for its poetry contests, religious cults, and oaths to remain peaceful during festivals, but was beset by feuds between powerful priestesses and matriarchs and male warriors, merchants and poets. Successful societies grow, by definition, but when communities get too large, they exceed the "Dunbar number" of 150 (the maximum amount of people who can maintain strong personal relationships simultaneously). When this happened, the vast adaptability and output of women’s work, networking and deeply-bonded small groups, and the matriarchs' use character aggrandizement or assassination to increase her power, was overshadowed by the strength and efficiency of large male groups, which used hierarchies, teacher-student fealty and shallower friendships, as well as non-injurious competition honed to a hard edge through constant play. To parse this tricky transition, Khadija ceded to Muhammad authority over her self, family, houses and businesses, not to mention the once-female universe, and together they forged the Arabs’ late but rapid and successful transformation to patriarchal civilization.
Regendering a society is not easy, as we are realizing. Christian theologians thought monotheism would be improved by making God more forgiving and accessible, marriage sacred, and sex a sin (even within marriage, if not for procreation). Alas, that didn’t cure Christian cravings for power or sex, as we well know, and Muhammad must have noticed among his Christian relatives, Meccan friends or those he met in Jerusalem, where he travelled for trade. Returning to Judaism’s more matriarchal matrimony, he permitted divorce and hailed sexual pleasure as a natural gift from God, even incorporating it into Islamic heaven, an interesting rejiggering of monotheist metaphors.
Muhammad famously adored women and, after Khadija died, took a dozen wives and concubines (perhaps compensation for a quiet youth), although he limited men to four wives, who have to be loved equally. That directive suggests Muslims are better served by monogamy, with which monotheism shares a prefix and inherently supports, due to its "worship of a single lord paradigm." Islam went with polygamy, however, probably because it mirrored matriarchal families, where a grandmother-run home, sometimes with dozens daughters and granddaughters, is orbited by up to a hundred men, an equitable, efficient arrangement when they work at long-distance trading, herding or raiding. In fact, Muhammad can be considered a feminist for his day. “The Quran” refers to men and women as equals and states that “both men and women are guardians of one another” (Surah 9:71); it grants women property rights and half the male's inheritance; and Muhammad supported female sexual satisfaction (to deter polytheist revanchism but also bless natural feelings), all of which he must have decided in close consultation with Khadija. In Christianity’s more feminized culture, however, women had no real rights to inheritance, property or publicly acknowledged pleasure until the 19th century.
A Baghdad gate, 19th century. illo: Arthur Aletrilly, 1882 By reversing Christianity's separation of church and state and restrictions on sex and marriage, and Judaism's entrustment of children to women, Islam became monotheism's most masculine iteration, a quality increased by its late arrival to civilization building and its need to rapidly raise male discipline and armies. Although Muhammad adored and respected women, Islam's masculinity pushed it toward ending matriarchal power instead of balancing it, as in Judaism, or transforming its romantic aspects into religious fervor, as in Christianity. Muslim men wield full authority over their female family members as well as children, whom they retain after divorce. While Christianity forbade divorce and Jews required a rabbi’s approval, a Muslim man merely informs his wife, three times before witnesses, “I divorce you,” (which can liberate women, when an abusive husband does so in a fit of rage, according to the brilliant Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi). This parallels Islamic conversion, which is based on the thrice oathtaking of “There is no true god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” While it may seem simplistic, compared to Christian prayer and baptism or Judaism's year of study, it reflects monotheism's cerebral nature, where words are holy acts and a monotheist's word is their bond. The power of language is amplified algebraically, however, when spoken words are frozen into writing, an inherently masculine process, given its dependence on tools and ability to vastly increase authority.
To attract polytheists to their movement, Christians introduced a goddess figure, Mary (considered a virgin, despite Christ’s older siblings), and her literal god child, both of whom are deeply revered by Muslims (save for deifying Christ), earning them 31 and 90 citings respectively in “The Quran”. The Hebrews, for their part, made their Sabbath a goddess holiday: women do the first prayer, don’t do any chores (unlike Christian and Muslim women), and are encouraged to pursue reproduction, religion or relaxation. Powerful Jewesses appear throughout “The Bible”, some of whom reappear in “The Quran”. “The Old Testament” does call for stoning adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22), to end sexually permissive polytheisms and solidify male paternity certainty but, in practice, Jews often tolerated pre- or extra- marital sex. This is due to monotheism's increased individualism and human rights as well as ongoing esteem for matriarchs, which is integrated into Judaism. The Hebrew's first millennium, chronicled in "The Bible", was largely patriarchal, but as they were conquered and oppressed by the Babylonians, Romans, Christians and Muslims, the Jews reverted to matriarchy, notably how Jewish men served as partners to ruling elites and Judaism's legal descent through the female line. Unlike Christian kids, who are born in sin and must be baptized, any offspring of a Jewess is inherently Jewish. Muslims, meanwhile, are born with "fitrah," meaning innate purity while also referring to charitable donations during Ramadan. “Free women don’t commit adultery,” according to Hind, Mecca's most powerful priestess and wife of the chief who fought but eventually surrendered to Muhammad (causing her to disown him), which translates into legalese as: Free women are entitled to sexually select their mates, copulate at will, and their children have full legal rights.
Christianity tried to control male sexuality by shaming sex and reverting to prelapsarian innocence. The Jews emphasized self-control and symbolized sexual restraint through circumcision, which they enshrined as their central sacrifice to the one, true God. Many scholars say circumcision was adopted to promote cleanliness in a water-scarce environment (which it does), but cutting off the tip of the penis obviously signifies suppressing sex (much like amputating hands emphasizes "Thou shalt not steal"). Moreover, removing the penis's protective sheath unveils its inherent beauty, a body modification undoubtedly enjoyed by matriarchs. The Christians rejected circumcision, assuming their "sex is a mortal sin" psychology would be an adequate inhibitor, but the Muslims reintroduced it. Although it is not in "The Quran", circumcision is covered in “The Hadith”, the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, and “The Old Testament”, which Muslims also consider sacred (“He sent down the Torah and the Gospel,” Surah 3:3). Most Muslim boys are circumcised in their seventh year, albeit not seventh day, as with Jews. Unfortunately, sex was extremely enjoyable and seductive, according to the many Muslims close to the matriarchal era plagued by its colorful memories, hence a second circumcision was needed: of women. The "mullahs" (Sunni clerics) endorsed female genital mutilation (FGM), even though it's not mentioned in “The Quran” or “The Bible”, can cause severe injury or death, and can decimate or eliminate the pleasure Muhammad considered a gift from God. FGM is still encouraged or enforced by many Sunni societies, largely in Africa, with the highest rates being in the Horn of Africa. To this day, a majority of Egyptian women undergo FGM, despite Cairo's institution of a legal ban and media campaign around 2005.
Desert travelers stop for the night: perhaps how Muhammad and his disciples looked in the 7th century. illo: unknown, circa 19th century Muhammad was an orphan: his father died before he was born and his mother passed at six. Although he was probably skinny, nerdy and perhaps sickly, making him an interesting patriarchal hero, he assiduously built up his body and character, which was why Khadija sexually selected him. He worked hard on his theology, meditating and praying on long desert hikes or during his annual month off on the mountain. After ten years of strenuous mystical practice, he received visions, which he developed in discussions with Khadija and others and then preached, passionately and poetically, in downtown Mecca, directly in front of the polytheist idols of the Ka’aba. His early revelations abided Judeo-Christian notions that the kingdom of God would be created voluntarily and peacefully, in accord with the Jewish prophet Zechariah (500s BCE), “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit,’ saith the Lord,” (Zechariah 4:6), and Jesus, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God," (Matthew 5:9). Indeed, “The Quran” says, “[I]f they incline to peace, then you should incline to it; and put your trust in God,” (Surah 8:61). Alas, after being persecuted by Meccan authorities, fleeing to Medina, and entering into a war with his hometown, which pushed Khadija into an early grave (Muhammad mourned her for a year), he changed his mind. Instead of a slow transition from polytheism to monotheism, he reasoned, Islam could provide more benefit to more people, faster—which is one definition of “good”—by explaining in simple, local terms how monotheism works, by proselytizing aggressively, so everyone can hear the good news, and by defending Muslims, including going on offense.
Already a charismatic speaker, Muhammad transformed himself into an adept politician and strategically-brilliant general and led the outnumbered, ill-equipped Muslims to many heroic victories. As the messenger of God but not son, however, there were some defeats and mistakes, notably with his wives and the Jews.
After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem 500 years earlier, the Jews dispersed across the Middle East, the “Jewish diaspora,” including a Hebrew kingdom in Yemen and large, respected communities all over western Arabia, including Medina. Islam’s holy day became Friday, in fact, because that was the Jews' market day (before their work-free Sabbath), and the many Muslims who liked trading with Jews were available that day to attend mosque. Muhammad even began adjusting his ideas to attract Jews, as evidenced by the Medinan Surahs of “The Quran”, which were more aggressive and political than the Meccan Surahs. Although God often praised the Jews as the first monotheists, according to Medina Muhammad, they lapsed into sin and need to follow the new prophet, the standard pattern of syncretist religious reform movements followed by Martin Luther nine centuries later. A few Jews converted and some sided with Muhammad against Mecca, but others didn’t, and there were various treaties, attempts by Jewish clans to remain neutral, and Muslim accusations of treason. After a one-month siege of the Banu Qurayza, a Meccan Jewish tribe, Muhammad ordered 800 men and boys massacred and commandeered the chieftain's wife, Safiyya (Sofia), a famous Jewish beauty. Safiyya acquiesced to conversion and marriage but continued to assist her people clandestinely, a common practice among matriarchs conquered by patriarchs. "Khaybar," the name of another Jewish community near Medina, remains a battle cry among Muslims today, even though its people negotiated a stable surrender by paying a tribute.
Alas, 7th century Arabian politics were complex, as was the art of receiving revelations, editing sacred books and establishing a new religion. “The Quran” has contradicting dictums, as do the also God-given texts of the Jews and Christians, and it includes pronouncements for and against alcohol, gambling, murder, fate, free will, and the Jews. "You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them. But pardon them and bear with them. God loves those who do good” (Surah 5:14), is a typical begrudging but fair Quranic comment about the Jews, attuned to both monotheist morality and the stiff competition in monotheism's marketplace of ideas. Such obvious incongruities oblige rational monotheists to eschew the letter of divine law and embrace its spirit, to decide logically in a given situation, which scriptural statement better advances their faith's core concepts of justice, cooperation and mercy.
As the birthplace of our oldest cities and civilizations, the Middle East harbors some of our most intractable conflicts and psychological problems. After the stoic, hedonist, intellectual and militaristic Roman Empire gave way to the romantic, chaste, emotive and pacifism-preaching Christians, the Arab intelligentsia was marooned between the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Persian Empire, which was mostly Zoroastrian (a millennium-old monotheism with polytheist proclivities), and the polytheist tribes of the mountains and deserts, which were almost always at war with the civilizations given their economies depended on robbing trade routes.
Pharaoh Akhenaten with wife Nefertiti and three daughters under the God Aten. courtesy: Wikipedia, please donate here Regardless of divine origins, theories about God have to be periodically updated, from incremental adjustments and syncretic blending to major revisions or outright new religions, usually at 300 to 500 year intervals. It started with Atenism, the first recorded monotheism, which Pharaoh Akhenaten installed in Egypt around 1350 BCE but was overturned after he died. Then came Moses, or someone like him (or someone telling stories about someone like him), around 1100 BCE; the prophets of the Jewish revival, after their Babylonian conquest and exile, starting around 550 BCE; Jesus Christ and other Jewish mystics, like the Essenes; Christianity’s First Council of Nicaea (Turkey) in 325 CE (which deleted of dozens of “apocryphal” books from “The New Testament”); and, three centuries later, Islam. In keeping with this chronology, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to a church door in Germany in 1517, almost exactly a millennium and a half after Christ’s ministry, although he was not considered a prophet. That appellation would have to wait until the 19th century, when Joseph Smith started the Mormons in middle America and Baha’u’llah began the Bahá'ís in Persia, although they eventually fled to Utah and Israel, respectively.
Muhammad revered Judaism and Christianity, and opposed polytheist tribes and empires, making him a card carrying member of Western Civilization, but he also adjusted monotheism and satisfied some pressing needs, given Islam’s extraordinary expansion: twice the size of the Roman Empire in half the time. This was especially true in harsh mountain or desert climes, where Islam's masculine tone and warrior guidelines was a major selling point to discipline and manage newly patriarchal men. Nevertheless, Muhammad balanced that with benevolence, justice and peace, from the first phrase of each of “The Quran”’s 114 Surahs (chapters), “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, most merciful,” and the many one-line revelations, like “There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:257), to Islam's universal greeting, “As-salamu alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”). There are also many of Muhammad's “Hadith” sayings, from his theory of jihad, where “the greater jihad” is against the ego and “the lesser" is political struggle, to his many exhortations to tolerate disagreement and forgive enemies.
Sufism does not derive from ancient fertility cults, as some scholars say, according to most Sufis, rather Muhammad’s private oral teachings, thought to be more metaphysical than his public pronouncements, “The Quran” and “The Hadith”. Such secret knowledge may be apocryphal, but Muhammad surely communicated concepts not written down, and the Sufis were dedicated to his lived example, which integrated a serious spiritual practice with work, family and women, who were often excluded from male mystical fraternities. Yes, the vast majority of Sufis were men, devout Muslims and patriarchal, but many accepted women as fellow tariqa members, teachers or saints, notably the first Rabi’ah. The 8th century Rabi’ah al-Basri (from Basra, 300 miles south of Baghdad) came from a respectable if poor family, but they were attacked during a journey, and she was sold into prostitution or slavery. Eventually freed, due to her dedication to prayer and good works, she became a poet and self-actualized Sufi, or even a proto-Zen master. "You know of the how, but I know of the how-less," was her explanation to Hasan al-Basri (642–728 CE), the Sufi, scholar and founder of the rational Muʿtazile school, as well as her suitor in marriage. Rabi'ah declined and remained chaste but defined a doctrine of divine love, making her the first saint of Sufism’s Religion of Love. In fact, it can be said that Sufis developed more female and romantic values and art than any other religious, social or literary movement in history by basing their beliefs on monotheism and social responsibility but devoting their free time to exploring rapture, art, romance and other alchemies of the material world.
Scholars and pupils, probably including some Sufis, at Baghdad's House of Wisdom, late Abbasid era. illo: Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, 1237, courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale de France & Wikipedia (please donate here)The Inherent Liberalism of Monotheism
Islam’s vast conquests in under a century—west to southern France and east to northern India—was a world record and a wonder to behold. Indeed, Islam's armies often featured fearsome warriors riding spectacular Arabian steeds, sometimes wielding swords impaled with copies of “The Quran”. Religious war can be brutal and depraved, but those Arab-lead armies often abided advanced rules of war and negotiated fair surrenders. When Umar, the second of the four "rightly guided caliphs" who followed Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 637 CE, he allowed the ruling Christians to resume normal life and the return of the Jews they had expelled. Many populations converted to Islam voluntarily, starting with Medina, which invited Muhammad to rule after experiencing extreme Jahiliyyah problems. Jews and Christians were accepted as fellow believers in the one, true God, which the former called “Yahweh” or “Elohim” and the latter "Jesus Christ" or "The Trinity" (a combination of Christ, Yahweh and mystery spirit), and Muslims “Allah.” Nevertheless, Christians and Jews were second-class monotheists, or “dhimmis,” and saddled with special taxes and restrictions, like prohibitions against riding horses or carrying weapons, although both were exempted from military service.
Many Muslim regimes encouraged the liberal side of monotheism. Shari’ah Law, Islam's precedent-based legal system, often liberated people from oppressive rulers, arcane rituals and racist caste systems, which was why Islam was welcomed by many in India. It frequently reduced poverty, illness and ignorance by increasing rule of law, opportunity, trade and literacy. It so supported Jewish and Greek thought, the two foundations of Western Civilization, some say Islam saved Western Civilization after the Europeans left them to rot. Books in its lingua franca, Arabic, became the era’s internet, spreading science, philosophy and poetry faster and further than ever before in history, along the many silk, spice and trade routes of a world globalized in antiquity. Towns devoted to scholarship, like Alexandria or Timbuktu, went so far as to prohibit books from transiting their jurisdiction without their scribes having the opportunity to make copies for their libraries.
Despite Islam's amazing successes, however, tribalism, sectarianism, wealth disparities, slavery, tyranny and war, plus vestigial polytheist practices, remained. Out-of-wedlock sex continued in rural areas, crowded cities (where veiling helped women have affairs), and among merchant families (where men were obliged to travel, sometimes for years at a time). Slavery was pervasive, from the massive slave trade (almost double the European) of both black Africans (which could include castration) and white Eastern Europeans (the word "slavery" comes from the Slavic people, enslaved in Roman times) and western European sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates, to Islam’s ubiquitous concubines and “slave armies.”
To prevent constant palace coups, boys from tough tribes were kidnapped, educated in Islam, trained in the art of war, and sworn to the sultan as “slave soldiers,” a respected status. Driven by the same danger of scheming family members, sultans often surrounded themselves with Christian, Jewish or Sufi advisors. Muhammad advocated freeing slaves, which many Muslims did, after which slaves could become full citizens (if they submitted to Islam), marry and serve in the regular army. “Slave generals,” for their part, sometimes seized power, became sultans and mounted their own slave armies.
Protestors at the United Nations' 'Isaiah Wall,' featuring Isaiah’s 'Beat their swords into plowshares' quote, 2015. photo: unknownNevertheless, many monotheist ideals and metaphors are inherently liberal. While each grandmother goddess birthed her own human species physically, a single masculine lord had to create them mentally and metaphysically, indicating he made all humans simultaneously, equally and in his image. Allowing humans the free will to choose good over evil, instead of programming them to do so animalistically, actually proved God’s greatness. “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, far from depicting “The Fall” inflicted by a woman disobeying God, dramatizes our development from matriarchy to patriarchy, and from genetically-governed natural and sexual selection (living au natural in the Garden of Eden) to “conscious selection” (the identification and choosing of facts and building of abstract worldviews that represent reality).
While monotheism failed to fully establish the justice suggested by divine law, it did fully symbolize those values, both on earth and in the afterlife. Polytheist heavens were crowded, incestuous and crime-ridden communities, much like the ancient towns on which they were modeled, and even moreso in the Middle East after the passings of the golden ages of Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, and the mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse (12th century BCE). After so much rapid and elevated culture and content creation, the Middle East simply had too many civilized societies and citizens with high self-regard but too few willing to accept full adult responsibility. Patriarchal monotheism may smack of misogyny to modern observers, but it was eminently logical after tens of millennia of matriarchal polytheism. Indeed, making the universe male and men central to it can be considered one of religion’s most important innovations, and it was facilitated by women, as Khadija indicates.
Based on books, monotheism fostered literacy and abstract thinking but also personal prayer, meditation and ethics. More intellectual and rational than polytheism, with its colorful rituals, titillating stories and mystery-cult metaphysics, monotheism eventually eschewed the sacrifice of living beings, which was how polytheists placated their deities and divined the future (the soothsayers of the Middle East, usually women, often examined the liver of a sheep or goat for color, blemishes and other signs). Monotheism emphasized individual souls over the collective spirits of forbears, castes or priestly hierarchies (although the Catholics and Shi’a did resurrect strong priesthoods). The mere concept of one Lord implied justice between tribes, nations and classes as well as individuals; it favored internalized guilt over external tribal shame; and it provided more hope, optimism and romanticism than polytheism, with their flexible celestial morals and future. In fact, a single, all-powerful God must know all or have a plan, including finding each of us a true love around which we can build our life, as emphasized early in “The Bible”: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, therefore shall a man cleave unto his wife,” (Genesis 2:24). Deep spousal bonding contradicts the family structure of both matriarchies and patriarchies, where the newlyweds stay in the mother's or father's dwelling and serves them. Romanticism also reinforces the tough task of defending the family and community, adding intense emotion to hero tales and folkish origins, which inspired extra effort and struggle from men. Increasing romanticism was essential, in fact, because successful communities are eventually threatened by greedy neighbors, hungry marauders, corrupt charlatans or fascists.
Although the Judeo-Christian version is well known, the Golden Rule is trans-cultural. illo: unknownMonotheism provided an ethical foundation for liberal democracy through its unified field system and ability to organize diverse achievements and cultures. The citizens of Greece's city-states invented or improved almost all of civilization’s disciplines or systems, from democracy, math and science to theatre, architecture, sculpture (the first realistic carvers) and the Olympics. Without overarching coordination, however, most Greek speakers abandoned their classical culture to became Christian peasants by the 5th century CE. The Jews, meanwhile, preserved their patrimony through terrible travails and extensive rethinking and, in the 1800s, integrated Greek ideas (a second time, since they also did so after Alexander conquered Judah in 331 BCE). Almost all tribes employ forms of democracy, from weak to strong forms, and the Norse, Native American and others contributed enormously to democratic development through egalitarian councils, advanced ethics and dedicated friendships. But few tribal federations were able to establish or expand full equality and suffrage before the Enlightenment in Europe, which emerged there in the 18th century largely due to their long study of Judaic theology and Hellenic science. As it happened, monotheist Muslim scholars helped preserve and expand the Greek and other sciences, which led to the Renaissance, starting in 14th century Italy, the closest Europeans to Islam.
Indeed, monotheism reveals the fullness of liberal, democratic values in a single sentence, rightly called “The Golden Rule”. Based on the reciprocal altruism of animals and how true friends treat each other, “The Golden Rule” figures prominently in all three Abrahamic faiths: Jesus’s "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” delivered during the Sermon on the Mount; the Hebrew’s, "Love your neighbor as yourself," (Leviticus 19:18), and the Muslim, from “Hadith”, “Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you.”
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 3 Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 03:58 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Members of a Wahhabi militia, the Ikhwan, raiding Transjordan, the old name for Jordan, 1923. photo: unknownGo to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
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ALAS, THIS SUFI SUCCESS, TOO, SERVED
to conceal a problem: the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Sufis came to the West, enjoyed its religious freedoms and cultural and financial opportunities, as well as the esteem of its intellectuals and some celebrities (notably English author Doris Lessing and American actor Edward G. Robinson), they didn’t complain, let alone write journalistic exposes, about Sufism being under attack by Muslim “reformers,” first the religious then the political. Ancestral lands should be places of knowledge and spirituality not tyranny and sectarian conflict, at least symbolically, they believed. The Ottomans had the most Sufi orders of any society, from Rumi’s Whirling Dervishes to the Janissaries, a widely respected, if sometimes brutal, military brigade, but Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, outlawed them all in 1925. That's because the Sufis controlled the guilds and opposed Ataturk's innovative project to secularize society, abolish Ottoman identity hierarchies, and switch Turkish from being written in Arabic script to Roman.
As it happened, the Ottomans had just spent the previous century fighting the Sufis’ worst nightmare, the army of Sunni radicals which galloped out of the Arabian desert in the late-1700s. Called the Wahhabis, they were led by two Muhammads, the indefatigable preacher Wahhab and his wily warrior buddy, bin Saud. After the first Muhammad's conquests as a prophet, any Arabian warlord worth his salt needed a fiery preacher to rally the troops. Determined to destroy what they deemed un-Islamic, the Wahhab-Saud “jihad”—which means striving or struggle as well as war against unbelievers—was an understandable reaction to Ottoman corruption and archaic Sufism. Indeed, it was similar to other austere movements that emerged from the desert but also the back-to-basics theology and aggressive proselytizing of the Protestants, who started two centuries earlier in Germany. After overturning Catholic corruption and hierarchies and translating “The Bible” into local languages, the seemingly progressive Protestant Reformation unleashed a storm of sectarian wars and deranged witch hunts, lasting 150 years, and a fanatical evangelism, which is still with us today.
A 17th century Puritan woman. illo: unknownThe Wahhabis went on to murder many women accused of adultery, polytheism or witchcraft (much like the Protestants), but that's a traumatizing tradition enforced mostly by more macho clans, while many families hid or quietly married off accused women, and it's easier to relieve religious angst by scapegoating minorities. A readily available “other” was the Shi’a, a seventh of all Muslims, who followed additional rituals, worshipped their intellectuals and sometimes considered them the "mahdi," a messiah figure—hence their division into innumerable subsects, some quite esoteric—and the Sufis, about three percent of today's Muslims but more back then. There were also smaller groups like the Yazidis, who mixed monotheism with polytheism. Although the Sufis were mostly Sunni, they liked to invent mind-altering meditations, refine them into rituals, and not only pray to Allah but "meet" or "join with" him.
The mystics of Islam were much closer, conceptually and geographically, than their Abrahamic cousins to the ancient Asian theology of “becoming one with god,” but that violates monotheism’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before me," according to conservatives. The Sufi saint al-Hallaj was martyred by the Abbasids, in 922 CE, in Baghdad, despite being warned repeatedly and placed under house arrest, because he refused to stop saying he was intimate with God. Allah is everywhere and in everything, of course—“As close as your jugular vein,” as the Islamic aphorism goes—and monotheism is a unified field theory, but it does separate humans from the godhead and uses a form of dualism, given “God divided the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4), good from evil, and physicality from spirituality. Islam tried to integrate politics and religion, which joins terrestrial power dynamics with God, but nothing else. The Wahhabis considered the dedication of Sunni Sufis to their sheikhs and saints, which included fetishizing their cloaks, artifacts and graves, and their use of dance, chanting and other techniques to achieve ecstatic states to be “shirk,” Arabic for idolatry and sinful. They also rejected the Sufi embrace of women.
Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, was the lover of Julius Caesar and wife of Marc Anthony, after she showed up after in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the Greek and Roman male fertility gods, during their festivals.
Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origin story, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.
Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws and customs the men passed or established. Some women operated and even dressed as patriarchs, but the vast majority preferred to use womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies. That made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase.
Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals across the ancient Middle East. Matriarchal culture remained so powerful, in fact, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar with the reigning priestess or in antechambers with "sacred prostitutes," who were skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (qualities still exemplified by Japanese "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably matchmaking, the choosing of the mate. Also called "sexual selection," it is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after his earth-shaking announcement of "natural selection" in 1859. The matriarchs also managed sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing or, as the fearful patriarchs often called it, witchcraft.
Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the radical shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for years, and lingering matriarchal memories gave women great power. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help visualize how to present our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).
'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown "I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that austere desert and mountain society, which seems notoriously misogynist until one learns about Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, the female fighters of the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or the poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist.
Majrouh describes the Afghan tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East. They are almost always used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men whom they have sexually selected, either by speaking with them surreptitiously in the street, when their minder is distracted, or via written messages carried by confidents. Forced to innovate by their society's social suffocation, such poetic liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives did come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men typically flee, but the women stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically, socially and evolutionarily). This powerful, secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase the longings for freedom, romance and sex among women.
A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown The first great poetess of the Sufis, as well as the Persians in general, was Rabi’ah Balkhi who lived in tenth century Balkh, Afghanistan (Middle Easterners sometimes use their birthplace as their last name). Indeed, she remains highly revered across the region, from poetry classes to girl names or those of institutions, like Kabul's Rabi’ah Balkhi University (which is still called that, in January 2025, despite the patriarchal Taliban's reconquest in 2021). Rabi’ah fell madly in love with a slave, Bektash, refused to break it off, and was attacked by her relatives. As she bled out, however, she inscribed her romantic revelations on the wall in blood, including the lines: "I knew not when I rode the high-blooded stead; The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed,” and “When you see things hideous, fancy them neat; Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet." Persian, Arab and Jewish women were known for their romanticism, passion and libidos, which is the natural result of a lingering matriarchal society that encourages female sexual expression as well as male sexual selection of those traits. Much of this is detailed in the eyeopening book “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (1994), by the increasingly respected researcher and novelist Geraldine Brooks.
Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh, a talented writer and a Sufi. In his book short-story-like anecdotes, he tells of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” which is code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.
Bedouin women fetching water, Middle East, early 20th century. photo: unknown Muhammad could be a pushy preacher and tough crusader on occasion, but he was also, at other times, a creative visionary, a responsible merchant, a loving person and a dedicated family man—a well-socialized mystic, in other words. He worshipped Khadija, who courted him, may have been his first lover, bore him six children, and taught him the romantic ways of Arab women. When asked by a disciple how to excel at that, Muhammad recommended sending the beloved messages, like short poems, as befits “The Messenger of God,” while implying romantic love itself is a message from God. Head over heels in love with her young, dynamic husband, Khadija rewarded his backbreaking work, leading her camel trains across the desert, with an annual month off. Muhammad would retire to a cave on a mountain north of Mecca, eat little and pray a lot, which was one of his three favorite things in life, along with perfume and women. That mystical practice became Ramadan, Islam’s month of daytime fasting.
Khadija and Muhammad modeled how empowered women and men could cooperate, which must have been fairly common as the matriarchal era transitioned to the patriarchal. Pair bonding and reciprocal altruism is practiced by most animals, but it was advanced algebraically by the romanticism of the Middle East, which expanded from Babylonian bacchanals into "The Bible"'s workingclass but equal parts visionary and lascivious "Songs of Solomon". Attributed to the 10th century BCE Jewish king but most likely written by a cadre of poets, male and female, 700 years later, "The Songs" were a welcome dose of matriarchal levity in the middle of our Ur-patriarchal text.
After ten years of Muhammad meditating on the mountain one month a year, he received his first revelation. Fearing he was possessed by a spirit, however, he ran the five miles from his cave to downtown Mecca and the house of Khadija, who assured him that, in fact, he was hearing the one, true God. Essentially midwifing his prophecies, she “submitted” to his new faith and became the first Muslim as well as his greatest ally, along with his cousin Ali. Submission may seem like a strange metaphor for a religion based on unity, equality and justice, but it symbolizes how a strong matriarch would cede dominion to an emerging patriarch, to fully empower his hard work, leadership and romance, or how we mortals must accept the mysterious unfolding of an all-powerful Lord or universe.
Women organized our earliest clans, we can assume, since Paleolithic men didn't study birthing or childrearing and spent a lot of time away from camp, hunting. Although some research is fuzzy or disputed, a lot is obvious and accepted, as with goddess culture. For starters, as Homo sapiens developed their massive brains (“sapiens” being Latin for “wise”), it became harder for them to pass their mother's birth canals. Although women began birthing children prematurely, their larger heads still caused bleeding or death to mothers or infants, who also needed more calories and time to achieve adulthood. This put evolutionary pressure on women, obliging them to shift some of that cost to men, by getting them to bring more meat back to camp, to replace blood lost during estrus ("time of the month") or giving birth, or for better sustenance during pregnancy and postpartum. As many biologists have noted, the human race is a hybridizing experiment run by women.
Although Christians claim Eve is a fallen woman who betrayed the Lord, the Biblical authors indicated she derived knowledge from researching reproduction and remained its great repository, while Adam was a naive adolescent until forced to become a farmer after expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Image: Titian Many academics credit hunting as the driver of abstract language, but hunters often use silent communication and don't need to identify as many complex activities as women running families or clans, which certifies "Reproduction 101" as the first fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Not only did seizing the means of reproduction cause "Eve," the first self-aware woman (or symbol thereof), to be ejected from the Garden of Eden, the natural kingdom governed by genetic evolution, it triggered a "cultural big bang," that of speech, art and early romantic behavior. Signaling in service of sex has been central to life ever since the first unicellular split into sexes two billion years ago, and "secondary sexual characteristics" evolved to indicate health and fertility, but it only became fully symbolic only among Homo sapiens. Once women had enough language to count back nine months from a baby's birth and identify its father, they could dispel paternity uncertainty, the mandatory first data point men need to build a patriarchy. Once women could articulate full sentences with subject, object, verb, concepts became modular, and they could leverage male desire through logic and truth but also lies and subterfuge. Estrus was hidden biologically in Homo sapiens, unlike most animals, which helped women manage sexual selection intellectually. Given all this, abstract, grammatical spoken language was probably invented by women between 70 and 140,000 years ago (Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari favors the former date), and soon fostered vast improvements in lifestyle, clan organization and tool use as well as gender relations.
The great matriarchs must have guided our evolution, genetically and socially, for tens of millennia, at least back to the time of the Paleolithic “Venus figurines,” which are up to 42,000 years old. Those few-inch-long icons, often depicting fat, fantastically-breasted women, were most likely fashioned by tool-using men to honor their clan’s most successful mothers (and their own memories of nursing, boosted by the mnemonic aid of language), who were also their mates, priestesses and leaders. (The figurines may also have been used as a trade good.) In addition to language, women’s reproductive research obviously drove the invention of agriculture, which is merely the usurping of another species' reproductive process, and full-blown romance, the development of behavior and art based on mating signals. Exploiting these agricultural and romantic discoveries, small clans grew into tribes and towns and then, after a mere half-dozen millennia, cities, nations, empires and civilizations. That "cultural inflation" occurred first in the Middle East, with its three great rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Nile), shortly thereafter along the Indus and Yellow Rivers (in Pakistan and China, respectively), and then worldwide.
During that expansion, however, the great matriarchs must have noticed diminishing returns from their organization of families with multiple fathers or how they got men to work the fields (which required a full day's labor, not hunting’s half) or to fight invading marauders to the death (hunters generally flee overwhelming force). After mastering language, women realized they could negotiate more advantageous exchanges of their services and products (sex and children) for male-supplied edibles, shelter and safety. After learning the women's new language and what they wanted, men flocked in from the wild bearing food, furs, firewood and more to join the family project, simply because it was an easier avenue to sex and reproduction than force.
The large breasts of the 34,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf, found near that Austrian town in 1908, were thought to be stylization or from sickness but more likely represent a healthy mother who nursed many children. photo: unknown Their augmenting of male participation and responsibility, until men became the leaders of society (patriarchy) and the universe (monotheism), was another stroke of female genius, which doubled down on their exchange of sex and children for more male contribution, using primitive romance. Perhaps not surprisingly, getting men to renounce their rough folkways, be more responsible fathers, work harder, and be more romantic remains a bone of contention between the sexes today. Back in the Paleolithic, however, our very survival rested on the rapid evolution of men from adolescent hunters to adult fathers, farmers, fighters, builders and poets, usually inspired or led by more articulate women.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and bad times beget better ideas. Khadija believed her husband's new theology provided precisely that for her tribal group, the Arabs, who had long pined for a monotheist prophet of their own, and her city, Mecca, which was famous for its poetry contests, religious cults, and oaths to remain peaceful during festivals, but was beset by feuds between powerful priestesses and matriarchs and male warriors, merchants and poets. Successful societies grow, by definition, but when communities get too large, they exceed the "Dunbar number" of 150 (the maximum amount of people who can maintain strong personal relationships simultaneously). When this happened, the vast adaptability and output of women’s work, networking and deeply-bonded small groups, and the matriarchs' use character aggrandizement or assassination to increase her power, was overshadowed by the strength and efficiency of large male groups, which used hierarchies, teacher-student fealty and shallower friendships, as well as non-injurious competition honed to a hard edge through constant play. To parse this tricky transition, Khadija ceded to Muhammad authority over her self, family, houses and businesses, not to mention the once-female universe, and together they forged the Arabs’ late but rapid and successful transformation to patriarchal civilization.
Regendering a society is not easy, as we are realizing. Christian theologians thought monotheism would be improved by making God more forgiving and accessible, marriage sacred, and sex a sin (even within marriage, if not for procreation). Alas, that didn’t cure Christian cravings for power or sex, as we well know, and Muhammad must have noticed among his Christian relatives, Meccan friends or those he met in Jerusalem, where he travelled for trade. Returning to Judaism’s more matriarchal matrimony, he permitted divorce and hailed sexual pleasure as a natural gift from God, even incorporating it into Islamic heaven, an interesting rejiggering of monotheist metaphors.
Muhammad famously adored women and, after Khadija died, took a dozen wives and concubines (perhaps compensation for a quiet youth), although he limited men to four wives, who have to be loved equally. That directive suggests Muslims are better served by monogamy, with which monotheism shares a prefix and inherently supports, due to its "worship of a single lord paradigm." Islam went with polygamy, however, probably because it mirrored matriarchal families, where a grandmother-run home, sometimes with dozens daughters and granddaughters, is orbited by up to a hundred men, an equitable, efficient arrangement when they work at long-distance trading, herding or raiding. In fact, Muhammad can be considered a feminist for his day. “The Quran” refers to men and women as equals and states that “both men and women are guardians of one another” (Surah 9:71); it grants women property rights and half the male's inheritance; and Muhammad supported female sexual satisfaction (to deter polytheist revanchism but also bless natural feelings), all of which he must have decided in close consultation with Khadija. In Christianity’s more feminized culture, however, women had no real rights to inheritance, property or publicly acknowledged pleasure until the 19th century.
A Baghdad gate, 19th century. illo: Arthur Aletrilly, 1882 To attract polytheists to their movement, Christians introduced a goddess figure, Mary (considered a virgin, despite Christ’s older siblings), and her literal god child, both of whom are deeply revered by Muslims (save for deifying Christ), earning them 31 and 90 citings respectively in “The Quran”. The Hebrews, for their part, made their Sabbath a goddess holiday: women do the first prayer, don’t do any chores (unlike Christian and Muslim women), and are encouraged to pursue reproduction, religion or relaxation. Powerful Jewesses appear throughout “The Bible”, some of whom reappear in “The Quran”. “The Old Testament” does call for stoning adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22), to end sexually permissive polytheisms and solidify male paternity certainty but, in practice, Jews often tolerated pre- or extra- marital sex. This is due to monotheism's increased individualism and human rights as well as ongoing esteem for matriarchs, which is integrated into Judaism. The Hebrew's first millennium, chronicled in "The Bible", was largely patriarchal, but as they were conquered and oppressed by the Babylonians, Romans, Christians and Muslims, the Jews reverted to matriarchy, notably how Jewish men served as partners to ruling elites and Judaism's legal descent through the female line. Unlike Christian kids, who are born in sin and must be baptized, any offspring of a Jewess is inherently Jewish. Muslims, meanwhile, are born with "fitrah," meaning innate purity while also referring to charitable donations during Ramadan. “Free women don’t commit adultery,” according to Hind, Mecca's most powerful priestess and wife of the chief who fought but eventually surrendered to Muhammad (causing her to disown him), which translates into legalese as: Free women are entitled to sexually select their mates, copulate at will, and their children have full legal rights.
Christianity tried to control male sexuality by shaming sex and reverting to prelapsarian innocence. The Jews emphasized self-control and symbolized sexual restraint through circumcision, which they enshrined as their central sacrifice to the one, true God. Many scholars say circumcision was adopted to promote cleanliness in a water-scarce environment (which it does), but cutting off the tip of the penis obviously signifies suppressing sex (much like amputating hands emphasizes "Thou shalt not steal"). Moreover, removing the penis's protective sheath unveils its inherent beauty, a body modification undoubtedly enjoyed by matriarchs. The Christians rejected circumcision, assuming their "sex is a mortal sin" psychology would be an adequate inhibitor, but the Muslims reintroduced it. Although it is not in "The Quran", circumcision is covered in “The Hadith”, the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, and “The Old Testament”, which Muslims also consider sacred (“He sent down the Torah and the Gospel,” Surah 3:3). Most Muslim boys are circumcised in their seventh year, albeit not seventh day, as with Jews. Unfortunately, sex was extremely enjoyable and seductive, according to the many Muslims close to the matriarchal era plagued by its colorful memories, hence a second circumcision was needed: of women. The "mullahs" (Sunni clerics) endorsed female genital mutilation (FGM), even though it's not mentioned in “The Quran” or “The Bible”, can cause severe injury or death, and can decimate or eliminate the pleasure Muhammad considered a gift from God. FGM is still encouraged or enforced by many Sunni societies, largely in Africa, with the highest rates being in the Horn of Africa. To this day, a majority of Egyptian women undergo FGM, despite Cairo's institution of a legal ban and media campaign around 2005.
Desert travelers stop for the night: perhaps how Muhammad and his disciples looked in the 7th century. illo: unknown, circa 19th century Already a charismatic speaker, Muhammad transformed himself into an adept politician and strategically-brilliant general and led the outnumbered, ill-equipped Muslims to many heroic victories. As the messenger of God but not son, however, there were some defeats and mistakes, notably with his wives and the Jews.
After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem 500 years earlier, the Jews dispersed across the Middle East, the “Jewish diaspora,” including a Hebrew kingdom in Yemen and large, respected communities all over western Arabia, including Medina. Islam’s holy day became Friday, in fact, because that was the Jews' market day (before their work-free Sabbath), and the many Muslims who liked trading with Jews were available that day to attend mosque. Muhammad even began adjusting his ideas to attract Jews, as evidenced by the Medinan Surahs of “The Quran”, which were more aggressive and political than the Meccan Surahs. Although God often praised the Jews as the first monotheists, according to Medina Muhammad, they lapsed into sin and need to follow the new prophet, the standard pattern of syncretist religious reform movements followed by Martin Luther nine centuries later. A few Jews converted and some sided with Muhammad against Mecca, but others didn’t, and there were various treaties, attempts by Jewish clans to remain neutral, and Muslim accusations of treason. After a one-month siege of the Banu Qurayza, a Meccan Jewish tribe, Muhammad ordered 800 men and boys massacred and commandeered the chieftain's wife, Safiyya (Sofia), a famous Jewish beauty. Safiyya acquiesced to conversion and marriage but continued to assist her people clandestinely, a common practice among matriarchs conquered by patriarchs. "Khaybar," the name of another Jewish community near Medina, remains a battle cry among Muslims today, even though its people negotiated a stable surrender by paying a tribute.
Alas, 7th century Arabian politics were complex, as was the art of receiving revelations, editing sacred books and establishing a new religion. “The Quran” has contradicting dictums, as do the also God-given texts of the Jews and Christians, and it includes pronouncements for and against alcohol, gambling, murder, fate, free will, and the Jews. "You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them. But pardon them and bear with them. God loves those who do good” (Surah 5:14), is a typical begrudging but fair Quranic comment about the Jews, attuned to both monotheist morality and the stiff competition in monotheism's marketplace of ideas. Such obvious incongruities oblige rational monotheists to eschew the letter of divine law and embrace its spirit, to decide logically in a given situation, which scriptural statement better advances their faith's core concepts of justice, cooperation and mercy.
As the birthplace of our oldest cities and civilizations, the Middle East harbors some of our most intractable conflicts and psychological problems. After the stoic, hedonist, intellectual and militaristic Roman Empire gave way to the romantic, chaste, emotive and pacifism-preaching Christians, the Arab intelligentsia was marooned between the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Persian Empire, which was mostly Zoroastrian (a millennium-old monotheism with polytheist proclivities), and the polytheist tribes of the mountains and deserts, which were almost always at war with the civilizations given their economies depended on robbing trade routes.
Pharaoh Akhenaten with wife Nefertiti and three daughters under the God Aten. courtesy: Wikipedia, please donate hereMuhammad revered Judaism and Christianity, and opposed polytheist tribes and empires, making him a card carrying member of Western Civilization, but he also adjusted monotheism and satisfied some pressing needs, given Islam’s extraordinary expansion: twice the size of the Roman Empire in half the time. This was especially true in harsh mountain or desert climes, where Islam's masculine tone and warrior guidelines was a major selling point to discipline and manage newly patriarchal men. Nevertheless, Muhammad balanced that with benevolence, justice and peace, from the first phrase of each of “The Quran”’s 114 Surahs (chapters), “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, most merciful,” and the many one-line revelations, like “There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:257), to Islam's universal greeting, “As-salamu alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”). There are also many of Muhammad's “Hadith” sayings, from his theory of jihad, where “the greater jihad” is against the ego and “the lesser" is political struggle, to his many exhortations to tolerate disagreement and forgive enemies.
Sufism does not derive from ancient fertility cults, as some scholars say, according to most Sufis, rather Muhammad’s private oral teachings, thought to be more metaphysical than his public pronouncements, “The Quran” and “The Hadith”. Such secret knowledge may be apocryphal, but Muhammad surely communicated concepts not written down, and the Sufis were dedicated to his lived example, which integrated a serious spiritual practice with work, family and women, who were often excluded from male mystical fraternities. Yes, the vast majority of Sufis were men, devout Muslims and patriarchal, but many accepted women as fellow tariqa members, teachers or saints, notably the first Rabi’ah. The 8th century Rabi’ah al-Basri (from Basra, 300 miles south of Baghdad) came from a respectable if poor family, but they were attacked during a journey, and she was sold into prostitution or slavery. Eventually freed, due to her dedication to prayer and good works, she became a poet and self-actualized Sufi, or even a proto-Zen master. "You know of the how, but I know of the how-less," was her explanation to Hasan al-Basri (642–728 CE), the Sufi, scholar and founder of the rational Muʿtazile school, as well as her suitor in marriage. Rabi'ah declined and remained chaste but defined a doctrine of divine love, making her the first saint of Sufism’s Religion of Love. In fact, it can be said that Sufis developed more female and romantic values and art than any other religious, social or literary movement in history by basing their beliefs on monotheism and social responsibility but devoting their free time to exploring rapture, art, romance and other alchemies of the material world.
Scholars and pupils, probably including some Sufis, at Baghdad's House of Wisdom, late Abbasid era. illo: Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, 1237, courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale de France & Wikipedia (please donate here)Islam’s vast conquests in under a century—west to southern France and east to northern India—was a world record and a wonder to behold. Indeed, Islam's armies often featured fearsome warriors riding spectacular Arabian steeds, sometimes wielding swords impaled with copies of “The Quran”. Religious war can be brutal and depraved, but those Arab-lead armies often abided advanced rules of war and negotiated fair surrenders. When Umar, the second of the four "rightly guided caliphs" who followed Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 637 CE, he allowed the ruling Christians to resume normal life and the return of the Jews they had expelled. Many populations converted to Islam voluntarily, starting with Medina, which invited Muhammad to rule after experiencing extreme Jahiliyyah problems. Jews and Christians were accepted as fellow believers in the one, true God, which the former called “Yahweh” or “Elohim” and the latter "Jesus Christ" or "The Trinity" (a combination of Christ, Yahweh and mystery spirit), and Muslims “Allah.” Nevertheless, Christians and Jews were second-class monotheists, or “dhimmis,” and saddled with special taxes and restrictions, like prohibitions against riding horses or carrying weapons, although both were exempted from military service.
Many Muslim regimes encouraged the liberal side of monotheism. Shari’ah Law, Islam's precedent-based legal system, often liberated people from oppressive rulers, arcane rituals and racist caste systems, which was why Islam was welcomed by many in India. It frequently reduced poverty, illness and ignorance by increasing rule of law, opportunity, trade and literacy. It so supported Jewish and Greek thought, the two foundations of Western Civilization, some say Islam saved Western Civilization after the Europeans left them to rot. Books in its lingua franca, Arabic, became the era’s internet, spreading science, philosophy and poetry faster and further than ever before in history, along the many silk, spice and trade routes of a world globalized in antiquity. Towns devoted to scholarship, like Alexandria or Timbuktu, went so far as to prohibit books from transiting their jurisdiction without their scribes having the opportunity to make copies for their libraries.
Despite Islam's amazing successes, however, tribalism, sectarianism, wealth disparities, slavery, tyranny and war, plus vestigial polytheist practices, remained. Out-of-wedlock sex continued in rural areas, crowded cities (where veiling helped women have affairs), and among merchant families (where men were obliged to travel, sometimes for years at a time). Slavery was pervasive, from the massive slave trade (almost double the European) of both black Africans (which could include castration) and white Eastern Europeans (the word "slavery" comes from the Slavic people, enslaved in Roman times) and western European sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates, to Islam’s ubiquitous concubines and “slave armies.”
To prevent constant palace coups, boys from tough tribes were kidnapped, educated in Islam, trained in the art of war, and sworn to the sultan as “slave soldiers,” a respected status. Driven by the same danger of scheming family members, sultans often surrounded themselves with Christian, Jewish or Sufi advisors. Muhammad advocated freeing slaves, which many Muslims did, after which slaves could become full citizens (if they submitted to Islam), marry and serve in the regular army. “Slave generals,” for their part, sometimes seized power, became sultans and mounted their own slave armies.
Protestors at the United Nations' 'Isaiah Wall,' featuring Isaiah’s 'Beat their swords into plowshares' quote, 2015. photo: unknownWhile monotheism failed to fully establish the justice suggested by divine law, it did fully symbolize those values, both on earth and in the afterlife. Polytheist heavens were crowded, incestuous and crime-ridden communities, much like the ancient towns on which they were modeled, and even moreso in the Middle East after the passings of the golden ages of Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, and the mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse (12th century BCE). After so much rapid and elevated culture and content creation, the Middle East simply had too many civilized societies and citizens with high self-regard but too few willing to accept full adult responsibility. Patriarchal monotheism may smack of misogyny to modern observers, but it was eminently logical after tens of millennia of matriarchal polytheism. Indeed, making the universe male and men central to it can be considered one of religion’s most important innovations, and it was facilitated by women, as Khadija indicates.
Based on books, monotheism fostered literacy and abstract thinking but also personal prayer, meditation and ethics. More intellectual and rational than polytheism, with its colorful rituals, titillating stories and mystery-cult metaphysics, monotheism eventually eschewed the sacrifice of living beings, which was how polytheists placated their deities and divined the future (the soothsayers of the Middle East, usually women, often examined the liver of a sheep or goat for color, blemishes and other signs). Monotheism emphasized individual souls over the collective spirits of forbears, castes or priestly hierarchies (although the Catholics and Shi’a did resurrect strong priesthoods). The mere concept of one Lord implied justice between tribes, nations and classes as well as individuals; it favored internalized guilt over external tribal shame; and it provided more hope, optimism and romanticism than polytheism, with their flexible celestial morals and future. In fact, a single, all-powerful God must know all or have a plan, including finding each of us a true love around which we can build our life, as emphasized early in “The Bible”: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, therefore shall a man cleave unto his wife,” (Genesis 2:24). Deep spousal bonding contradicts the family structure of both matriarchies and patriarchies, where the newlyweds stay in the mother's or father's dwelling and serves them. Romanticism also reinforces the tough task of defending the family and community, adding intense emotion to hero tales and folkish origins, which inspired extra effort and struggle from men. Increasing romanticism was essential, in fact, because successful communities are eventually threatened by greedy neighbors, hungry marauders, corrupt charlatans or fascists.
Although the Judeo-Christian version is well known, the Golden Rule is trans-cultural. illo: unknownIndeed, monotheism reveals the fullness of liberal, democratic values in a single sentence, rightly called “The Golden Rule”. Based on the reciprocal altruism of animals and how true friends treat each other, “The Golden Rule” figures prominently in all three Abrahamic faiths: Jesus’s "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” delivered during the Sermon on the Mount; the Hebrew’s, "Love your neighbor as yourself," (Leviticus 19:18), and the Muslim, from “Hadith”, “Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you.”
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 3 Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 03:58 PM
