It has been claimed that there are two Islams, one which is peaceful and generously pluralistic, the true Islam, often associated with Sufism, and another Islam, one which is violent and militaristically expansionist, the false Islam. This popular caricature often spills over into discussions of how Sufis represent the gentler Islam, and how the violence of groups like ISIS do not have a basis in true, classical Islam as understood and taught in Sufism. This notion of "two Islams" is deeply flawed, misleading, and ultimately false. The present analysis demonstrating this thesis is via a response to an article written by what can fairly be called a moderate, anti-extremist Sunni Muslim, a Western convert and Shaykh, one informed by classical Sufism, who studied in Cairo and in Saudi Arabia, is currently Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, Director of Studies at Wolfson College and the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, and who in 2012 was voted the 50th most influential Muslim in the world by the “Royal Islamic Strategic(!) Studies Centre.” (A matter of public record, feel free to look up his biographical information on Wikipedia, or a site affiliated with him: http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/, and elsewhere.)
Born Timothy Winter, the second paragraph of Islamic scholar Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad’s article, “Spiritual Life in Ottoman Turkey [the full article is appended below],” states, “The slow infiltration of Islam among the Turks from the ninth century onward replaced the ozan with the Muslim figure of the ata, who transmitted a rudimentary form of Sufism to his people. The ata also taught the virtues of the gaza, the war for God.”
From this it is clear that Sufism itself taught “war for God” which, not being pacifist, is not in and of itself a critique of Sufism. As I will show, however, Murad’s article goes further than this and affirms that the doctrine of “war for God” was waged specifically against Christianity and Christian culture as embodied in Byzantium, a "war for God" against Christendom which was taught specifically by the Sufis.
The opening lines of his article say it clearly: “the Ottoman state typically grounded its claims to legitimacy in its successful implementation of the gazi tradition of triumphant war against Byzantium.” Notice Murad's use of the word "tradition," a "tradition" of war against Christian civilization. Now, few people would say that the Ottoman Empire was not fundamentally Islamic, and so again we see how unambiguously Islam can identify itself precisely as that which wars against Christians. Now it needs to be kept in mind that Byzantium was not a generic empire (as if there is such a thing), it was “the” Christian empire for over a thousand years, populated by the “people of the Book.”
The city of Constantinople was founded by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, during the historic turn of Rome from paganism to Christianity in the fourth century. The Ottoman empire’s legitimacy, then, in its own eyes, even its very identity, was established in its being functionally anti-Christian. Murad said of the Ottoman empire that it “typically grounded its claims to legitimacy [as a specifically Muslim empire] in its successful implementation of the gazi tradition of triumphant war [of God] against [Christian] Byzantium.” It was precisely in this “war for God” against a Christian government with its Christian people that made them legitimate in their own eyes as Muslims in their own right. In other words, their self-defining characteristic was war against the Christians. In order to even be fully Muslim, they had to maintain this "war for God" against Byzantium. The Muslim empire was therefore inextricably bound up in its very ethos with a religious conquest of Christendom.
Yet Sufism did not distance Islam from this violence against Christians, for “this Sufi vision cherished by simple cavalrymen gave the Turks a military prowess whose achievements in some ways recalled the early conquests of Islam.” It is thus according to Murad precisely the “Sufi vision” which empowered even the "simple cavalrymen" to violence and “recalled the early conquests of Islam.” Yet, who did the early Islamic conquerors (seek to) defeat? Christians! One would hope that Sufism would attempt to lessen the violence against the “people of the Book,” but here we see Sufism being the very means and motive for establishing a continuity of violence with perpetual conquest stretching all the way from the earliest Islamic expansionism onward all the way to the Ottoman form. The factor that is constant is precisely this warring against Christians and Christendom.
He goes on to say, “The most prominent example was Ak Semseddin (d.1459), the physician, mystic poet and Sufi instructor (seyh) who encouraged Mehmed II to conquer Constantinople, and who preached the first Friday sermon at the former cathedral of Aya Sofya.” In other words, the Sufis were at the center, directly encouraging and advocating violence, imperialism, and triumphalism against Christians at the highest political levels. After Mehmed II defeated Constantinople, his Sufi advisor entered into one of the most famous sites of Christian worship, preaching the conquest of Islam in one of the holiest Christian cathedrals in the world, a place worshipped in by Christians for almost a thousand years: Hagia Sophia.
Oddly enough, the author is clear to show that the Ottoman ruler, who he stresses was well educated, was not acting independently, but in direct reliance on his Sufi advisor: “The power of his spiritual impact, as well as the Islamic sophistication of the ruler, are evident in much of Mehmed’s poetry, as in a lyric poem where the sultan uses the classical Sufi metaphors of spiritual drunkenness to affirm his dependence on his preceptor:” In short, "dependent on his preceptor," it was a marriage of the esoteric and the exoteric, Sufism and Imperial might, which together sought to wrest Constantinople from the Christians as an expression of a, if not the, perfectly legitimate form of Islam. The Sufis therefore helped to engineer the conquering and subjugation of the Christian empire and its peoples.
And no longer merely “unlettered Turkish nomads” with military might, no longer “men of the sword with little time either for a sophisticated contemplative mysticism or for formal scholarship,” to match their swords they now are characterized by Murad as having achieved great intellectual sophistication: “The Conqueror’s refined spiritual literacy was the product of over a century of cultural development in the Ottoman realm.” If one wanted to claim an enlightened Islam for the Ottomans, refined and spiritual, one would therefore also be forced to include systematic violence and aggressive expansionism against Christians as a necessary expression of this “enlightened Islam.”
Neither simpletons nor innovators, their war against Christianity was motivated from “a more classical Islamic piety by Sufi poets of a didactic and orthodox tendency, who wrote in the vernacular so as to be understood.” It was therefore seen at the highest levels as a classical and orthodox expression of Islam to practice Islamic conquest against Christians, and so cannot be seen merely as an aberration or an exception to the rule put forward by a few “radical fundamentalists.” Not all Islam may be "radicalized" like ISIS, but that in no way lessens its militaristic and expansionist spirit. It was a centuries long effort (Byzantine Alexandria was conquered less than ten years after Muhammad’s death, deeply wounding Byzantine economy), a Muslim tradition of conquest of Christians guided by their highest teachers and their highest Islamic principles, a religious obligation motivated to fulfill a “prophecy” of Muhammad stating that his people would conquer Christian Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire, and therefore the empire itself.
According to “authentic” chains of transmission (according to one source these are: Ahmad, al-Musnad 14:331 #18859 [sahih chain according to Hamza al-Zayn] al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak 4:421-422 [sahih according to him and al-Dhahabi concurred] al-Tabarani, al-Mu`jam al-Kabir 2:38 #1216 [sahih chain according to al-Haythami 6:218-219] al-Bukhari, al-Tarikh al-Kabir 2:81 and al-Saghir 1:306 Ibn `Abd al-Barr, al-Isti`ab 8:170 [hasan chain according to him] al-Suyuti, al-Jami` al-Saghir [sahih according to him]) Muhammad is said to have said, “Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!” In other words, the military conqueror of the capital of Christendom is actually praised by Muhammad. If this is not an explicit religious sanction for expansionist, aggressive violence permanently enshrined at the root of the Islamic religion, and clear motive for it, then I don't know what a religious sanction for violence even could be. The mention of an army indicates clearly that it was to be violent as well. Another example of this theme in the hadith is: "As one of these signs, Imam Ahmad reports in his Musnad that Abdullah bin Amr bin Al-‘As (ra) mentioned: 'Whilst we were around the Prophet (saw) writing he was asked, ‘Which of the two cities will be opened first, Constantinople or Rome? ‘He (the Prophet Muhammad) answered, ‘The city of Heraclius [Constantinople] will be opened first!'” Muhammad thus sees Islam as totally conquering both East and West, Constantinople and Rome. Other prophecies predict the military(!) conquering of several other Christian cities and regions, including Europe, as a matter of religious prophecy in their minds, a permanent mindset to conquer, and so if the intense drive to fulfill religious martial prophecy which motivated the conquest of Constantinople through force of arms is any indication, Europe was and will be no less of a prize in the mind of even traditional, non-radicalist Muslims. For a Muslim to not advocate this would, in a very real sense, be to contradict the very utterances and intentions of the Islamic prophet.
As Murad said, the Muslim gospel included violence against their enemies, but this was not simply the expression of a single Sufi school, a decentralized grassroots movement, or an unorthodox or nontraditional school of law: “Thanks to such literary proselytising, and under the sultans’ guidance and patronage, by the time Constantinople had been won for Islam in 1453 the Ottoman state and much of the urban population had committed itself definitively to the orthoprax Hanafi school of law, the orthodox Moturidi theology, and to a variety of Sufi tarikats.” This quote also shows that it was not only one form of Sufism which was committed to this violent enterprise, but a “variety” of Sufi traditions, or “tarikats.” The Qadiris, founded by al-Qadir al-Jilani, a Sufi Order still in existence today and quite popular, numbered among its members spiritual advisors to Mehmed II, “the Conqueror.”
Murad’s article also shamefully rationalizes this subjugation of Christians and the purposeful destruction of a thousand year old Christian empire by saying: “the Ottoman system seemed to provide an opportunity for Muslims to seek perfection through the exercise of political power, and for Christians to seek perfection by renouncing it in the manner required by the Gospels.” This clearly shows how Islam sees its own perfection in political terms, terms of acquiring and exercising political hegemony, and also that it has no difficulty seeing itself as the divinely ordained martial power which “provide[s] an opportunity… for Christians to seek perfection by renouncing” political power, or rather, in truer terms, having it wrested from them by intentional, systematic, and centuries long violent expansionism performed against them in the program of Islam’s self-expression to “seek perfection through the exercise of political power.” The violent seizure of political power is therefore natural to Islam, even in the minds of its most orthodox and spiritual leaders.
A case in point concerning their spiritual triumphalism is when the author even claims that Saint Gregory Palamas, a hero of Christian Orthodoxy, who was captured by Muslims (in the last few years of his life), was himself likely to have derived some of his techniques of prayer from them, when in fact his texts concerning inner prayer were all written prior to his abduction by Muslim pirates and so long before he was delivered by them as a political prisoner to the Ottoman court. Moreover, there is a clear tradition of Christian prayer as practiced by Gregory going back centuries, as evidenced in the "Philokalia," a compendium of texts on prayer and the inner life dating from the fourth to the fifteenth century, spanning over a thousand years. If anything is more likely, it is that Islam derived its esoterism from conquered Christian peoples.
The author even goes so far as to say that the centuries long expansionist violence, which had systematically crippled the Byzantine Empire, actually helped "preserve" the Church: “The Muslim conquest had preserved the Greek Church from the threat of annihilation by the growing power of the Latin West.” How, in an effort to fulfill Muhammad's prophetic martial directives, the Muslims intentionally create severe problems for the Byzantines by critically weakening them through centuries of attempted conquest, and then translate this into “preserving” them from the Latins (who the Muslims also sought to conquer), is really a marvel of apologetics. If Islam was a “religion of peace,” then the Byzantines would not have needed to be “preserved” by Muslim subjugation in the first place, for they wouldn't have conquered so much of Byzantium to begin with. One must ask why the Muslims sought to expand with such martial fervor at all. It was not merely for food or gold, but to fulfill their prophetic injunction to "war for God" and claim the known world in the name of Islam. As such, it is in fact conceivable and arguable that the Islamic aggression and consequent economic havoc wrought on the Christians in the East and on the Christians in North Africa and Spain along the Mediterranean Sea, restricting or even ending trade and commerce across many areas, contributed to the collapse of the Roman Christian empire, the historical exigencies of this resulting, as a consequence of Islam, in the divided East and West.
In sum, Murad’s article confirms that even the most “spiritual” population of Islam, the Sufis, contributed directly to the war-mongering of the Ottoman Muslims. It shows that there is a strong religious commitment to violence against Christians motivated and maintained throughout Islamic history and at the highest levels of Muslim spiritual authority, from Muhammad’s “prophecies” to the urgings of Sufi Shaykhs. This can also shed light on why Islam seems to have so few theological checks against political violence and is so easily co-opted into the rhetoric of violence, for it is ideologically violent from its founder all the way to those who seek to realize his predictions of conquest. From the first “rightly guided caliph” to Mehmed the Conqueror, from the gates leading outside of Arabia to the northern shores of Spain, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to the mud outside of Vienna as late as the end of the seventeenth century, Islam has sought purposely and as a matter of “prophetic” fulfillment to seek to conquer Christendom (and likely anyone else, if the Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs be asked) whenever and wherever possible and by means of force. For Muslims, then, political control by violence is a legitimate means of expressing one’s Islam in the eyes of even classical Islamic Sufism, and nothing intrinsic to Islam can be shown to contravene this global inheritance of violence.
Though no empire is innocent of crime in history, Murad's essay shows that the violent expansionism of Islam must be seen not as an aberration but as the natural expression of Islam itself, for there is precious little theologically in Islam to mitigate this propensity towards violence such as is found in the Christian Gospel. Though Christians have erred in their practice of government, there is within the New Testament itself a clear, categorical, and unambiguous mitigation of both violence and “this-world” politicking such that errors of Christian government can be clearly shown to be exactly that: aberrations and errors, deviations from the Gospel. Christianity inherited the Roman Empire, and once it became Christian, it did not demonstrate anywhere near the expansionist ferocity which was later to be demonstrated by Islam. In Islam, however, Muhammad himself, unlike Christ, set the agenda via his "prophecies" to practice military conquest, the "war for God" to subjugate all things non-Muslim; and even the Sufis, who have been made to seem in culture today as the “peaceful Muslims,” and no doubt there truly are many peaceful Muslims who would not so much as harm a fly, even the Sufis have been instrumental in the ideologically driven waging of war against Christendom, even taking pride in conquering the "people of the Book."
Though I am not advocating pacifism as my standard of critique of Islam, nor suggesting that there is a such thing as an “innocent empire,” the fact of violent and intentional expansionism by Muslims against Christian territories (and all other non-Muslim civilizations) from the very beginning is historically incontrovertible; and furthermore it is found to be rooted and motivated both in primary texts, such as the hadith(sayings) of their prophet, if not the Qur’an itself, and also in well-known historic precedent as exemplified by the Ottomans as well as by other Muslim empires such that it seems inescapable to conclude that Islam is inherently politically violent as a matter of both outward and inward spiritual promptings, not only as a matter of exoteric exigency but also via its esoteric motivations and deepest spiritual yearnings. Thus any theory which seeks to locate a truer, gentler Islam in the Sufis is false. Despite the reality that there are peaceful Muslims, there is no way to extricate the tradition of aggressive religious expansionism such as to say that the more violent ones are somehow less Muslim. There is only one Islam, and its false gospel necessarily includes military and political hegemony. We therefore must remember that Byzantium is part of Western history, part of the history of Western, Christian civilization, and that the conquering of Byzantium was not a conquering of the "other," but of us, and that the urge to conquer will not end in the mind of Muslims until they realize the violent dreams of their prophet. Realizing this, we may be able to learn before it is too late.
O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance!
