Bog-boys and fire-children

In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Sethe is haunted by the flesh and blood ghost of her murdered infant; this ghost is represented as a grown woman who mysteriously surfaces out of the water at the beginning of the novel (p. 50). Like Dante at the bottom of Hell, Beloved exists somewhere between life and death (‘I am not dead I am not’ (p. 213)). Her existence is temporally arrested (‘it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching’ (p. 210)). And she is ready to surface from the depths at any point, to remind Sethe (and the reader) of her unjust death and the horrific beginnings of African American history. A number of novels about the Second World War also begin with children rising from graves of mud and fire to haunt the living with their first-hand knowledge of atrocity. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) begins in the middle of the London Blitz. His protagonist, a boy later given the name Matty, emerges from a street engulfed in flames: ‘where now, humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world – at that point where the world had become an open stove … right there … something moved’ (Darkness Visible, p. 12). So impossible is it that a human child could have survived such conditions that Matty seems to be partly supernatural, a spectre sent directly from Hell. Looking into the flames, a fireman thinks he is looking at ‘a version of the infernal city’ (p. 11).

In the last chapter, I discussed what Hell might mean to a contemporary secular Westerner. Here I would like to shift the focus to what narratives of Hell characteristically do and, in terms of their formal attributes and generic characteristics, how they work. In Bakhtin's view, literary genres are defined by their chronotopes, their distinctive representations of time and space and the human image within that timescape. Of the two elements that comprise a chronotope (time and space), the most important one for defining the particular characteristics of a genre is time. In Gary Saul Morson's paraphrase of Bakhtin, ‘each narrative genre implicitly manifests a specific model of temporality.’ To say of an experience or event that ‘it was Hell’ is to evoke a generic horizon of expectation in the listener or reader. ‘Hell’ itself is a chronotope whose most familiar inherited temporal and spatial features include: narrow constraints on spatial movement, an absence of future orientation, experienced by an individual both separate and alienated from his or her environment and from other people, despite often being crowded into close proximity with others in an undifferentiated mass. But if we are to appreciate the ways in which contemporary writers have challenged and redefined the horizons of traditional katabatic narrative, we need to examine this generic inheritance in considerably greater detail.

Generic features of katabatic narrative

Although often found as an episode embedded in other types of narrative, the story of an infernal journey may still be described as a distinct genre in itself in that it codifies a particular world-view, operates according to a certain narrative dynamic, and draws upon an inherited set of motifs and imagery.

Primo Levi is a writer who, by his own admission, ‘strive[s] … to pass from the darkness in to light.’ He repeatedly emphasises that retrospectively, he derived positive value from his year of imprisonment at Auschwitz. I would argue that what he has to say about Auschwitz is informed by certain premises: that meaning can be derived from nihilistic experience, that reason can help us to compass insanity, that while language might fail to communicate the fullness of horror, it should nevertheless be used, because silence is self-internment and an expression of despair in other people. In my view, Levi is a katabatic writer for whom Hell is refashioned into a journey and a process through which one gains a more complex and rigorous understanding of selfhood in extremis.

To align Levi with the ‘talkers’ rather than the ‘silent’ survivors of a journey into Hell is to situate his writing somewhere in relation to the tradition of Dantean katabasis. Levi's major allusions to Dante's Inferno, along with his explicit verbal echoes of the poem, have already been discussed by Risa Sodi and others. In brief, Levi alludes to Dante both to verify his own experience of Hell – what Dante imagined, the prisoners actually experienced – and to underline the important contrasts – Dante's Hell is an expression of divine Justizia, Auschwitz of human injustice. Like Dante, he presents himself as an observer of Hell, and as we shall see, he also exploits the distance between the naive ingenue in the camp (Dante's pilgrim or protagonist) and the survivor-witness he became (Dante the poet or narrator).

Ismailism first came to the attention of the authorities in 891, when villagers from the countryside of Kufa were reported to have been infected by a new heresy. By then, as it turned out, lower Iraq had hosted an Ismaili mission for some sixteen years while other missions had sprung up, or were fast appearing, in Baḥrayn, Iran, Yemen, India, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Baghdad itself. Where was it all coming from? The answer proved to be from Salamiyya in Syria, where a family, originally from al-Ahwāz in Khuzistan, was directing a grand movement to take over the Muslim world in the name of a new creed. By the time the ‘Abbāsids discovered this, the leader of the sect, the fourth member of the family to hold the leadership, had fled. He reappeared in 909 in what is now Tunisia as ‘Ubaydallāh al-Mahdī, founder of the Fatimid dynasty which ruled North Africa before moving to Egypt, where they held sway from 969 until 1171, when Saladin removed the dynasty.

THE EARLY DOCTRINE AND ITS ADHERENTS

The believers

The founders of Ismailism were probably breakaway Imamis. Practically all the early missionaries were Imami Shī‘ites by origin, as were many of their converts. Their first mission, in lower Iraq, is said to have begun in 261/874 or three years later, either way not long after the eleventh imam of the Imamis had died without an apparent successor (in 260/874).

As seen in Chapter 1, early Muslims tacitly assumed humans to have originated in a politically organized society based on revealed law, and to have recreated such a society whenever God sent them a messenger with a new law. In the ninth century they began to enquire into their own presuppositions. Why do humans live social lives? Must their societies be based on religious law brought by a prophet or might man-made law and morality suffice? Could one manage without a monarch? Must government be monarchic, or indeed autocratic, or could alternative forms of political organization be envisaged? Their answers mostly, though not always, endorsed the assumptions with which they had started out, but they did so with a plethora of explicit argumentation which often raised new questions and which continued beyond the period considered in this book. The debate was dominated by philosophers, mutakallims, and Shī‘ite thinkers rather than by religious scholars from the Sunni camp, but the latter accepted many of the ideas it produced. Since the arguments are scattered in works of the most diverse genres and the study of them is still in its infancy, what follows is merely a preliminary survey.

Why do humans live in societies?

Most educated persons in the Near East before the rise of Islam knew the answer to this question, ultimately from Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.

Scholars had appeared within all parties, in all Muslim settlements, in the course of the Umayyad period. By the late Umayyad/early ‘Abbāsid period some of them had come to form a party of their own under the label aṣḥāb alḥadīth, ‘adherents of Ḥadīth/reports’, or ‘Ḥadīth party’, or, as the term is more commonly translated, ‘Traditionalists’. Initially they seem to have been concentrated in Iraq and the Ḥijāz, but they soon spread to Khurāsān, Egypt, and elsewhere.

The adherents of Ḥadīth believed that the Prophet's practice (sunna) could be recovered from Ḥadīth, ‘traditions’, that is short statements reporting the Prophet's solutions to legal or doctrinal problems as they had arisen in his time. Most aṣxyhāb al-ḥadīth were active compilers, teachers, and transmitters of such reports (muḥaddithūn, ‘traditionists’). In the late Umayyad period Ḥadīth reporting the practice of the Prophet, as opposed to that of a Companion or later figure, had great rarity value. They also had great popular appeal, for they were typically transmitted orally, with just one transmitter per generation in the chain of authorities (isnād) attached to them, so that hearing one was almost like hearing the Prophet himself. The Muslim world was soon to be flooded with reports from the Prophet, but initially, Prophetic traditions were in the nature of relics, which also induced a sense of direct contact, and the social prestige accruing from the possession of such treasured items was great.

As we have seen, medieval Muslims generally held the best polity to be one based on religion because people had to subordinate their individual interests to those of the collectivity when they lived together and could best be made to do so in the name of higher things. The highest of all things were God and the next world. Forming a single polity thus meant submitting to God and whoever represented Him as leader of the polity in question; vice versa, submitting to God meant entering a polity in which God set the rules of human interaction, laying down how one was to behave with other people and with Him.

In other words, revealed religion was first and foremost about collective interests. “Religions are never established for private benefit or individual advantage but always aim at collective welfare,” as al-‘Āmirī noted. “The meaning of religion (dīn) in Arabic is communal obedience to a single leader,” as the Brethren of Purity observed. Modern Westerners, conditioned to thinking about religion as a relationship of spiritual love between God and an individual, or as a set of convictions about the metaphysical world, usually have trouble with this view of things, and of course there was much more to religion than collective organization by the time these statements were made. But whatever else God was about, he stood for common interests, the public order, the Muslims at large.

The Sunnis have their roots in, and derive their name from, the partisans of ḥadīth who came to prominence in the ninth century under the name of ahl alsunna wa'l-jamā‘a. It is probably safe to say that by the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century the majority of Muslims had come to accept their political convictions. Numerous though the Shī‘ites were in those centuries, most Muslims were neither Shi‘ites nor Khārijites; and most of those identifiable in negative terms could now also be identified in positive terms as accepting the four-caliphs thesis and holding communal togetherness to be more important than rightly guided leadership. But the adherents of communal togetherness (jamā‘a) were still divided over theology and law. They disagreed not only over concrete doctrines, but also over the rules by which doctrines were to be derived and explained. The partisans of ḥadīth concentrated all authority in God and His prophet: what came from them was authoritative information of super-human origin (sam‘) which had to be taken on trust, just as it stood (bilā kayf), whether or not it made sense in terms of such rationality as humans possess. The jurists (fuqahā˒) and theologians (mutakallims), both of whom had begun their system-building before the traditionalists appeared on the scene, maintained that one could not answer questions about either the law or the articles of faith without employing human reasoning (which the jurists initially called ra˒y, sensible opinion, thereafter qiyās, analogy, while the theologians spoke of naẓar).

What services did medieval Muslims expect from the state? Religious scholars often answer the question in the form of lists of the ruler's shar‘ī functions (i.e. those required by the Shar‘īa), along the lines of “the Muslims must have an imam to execute their laws, apply their ḥudūd, despatch their armies, marry off their (female) orphans and distribute the booty (fay˒) among them”. But such lists are too concise to be meaningful to a modern reader, and they do not mention any non-shar‘ī functions, nor do they say what would happen to the shar‘ī functions if the imam disappeared. What follows is an attempt at a fuller answer.

SHAR‘Ī DUTIES

Validation of the community

A modern Westerner would answer the question of what government is for by starting with internal order and external defence, but medieval Muslim scholars never did, for government to them was first and foremost about the maintenance of a moral order, a law. It is with the moral order that we shall have to start as well, then.

The early Muslim community was constituted by allegiance to its imam (originally the Prophet, thereafter the caliphs). Without this leader, there was no saving vehicle in which to travel along the legal highways revealed by God: the law would not be in use; differently put, it would be suspended. If the imam was replaced with another type of ruler, the result would be the same, for whereas any kind of ruler would do for the avoidance of anarchy, only an imam would do for the avoidance of amorality.

Both the Khārijites and the Mu‘tazilite anarchists restated the libertarian aspect of the tribal tradition in Islamic form. With the Shī‘ites, by contrast, we encounter a thinking that can only be described as authoritarian. All Shī‘ites held the imam to be something more than an ordinary human being and explained his special status in terms of his kinship with the Prophet. Yet Shī‘ism also began among the conquerors, as has often been stressed, and the authoritarian style of thinking may well have tribal roots as well. For if the tribesmen of Arabia resisted kings, they also deferred to sanctity, as they showed when they accepted Muḥammad (and on many later occasions too). Early Shi‘ism boiled down to the claim that power should be handed to a man of sanctity, defined as somebody more closely related to the Prophet than the Qurashīs originally seen as constituting his family. A kinsman of the Prophet was bound to be rightly guided: it ran in the blood. It is an odd idea to a modern reader, but it made sense in medieval times, and not only to tribesmen. In a world in which social roles were overwhelmingly allocated on the basis of descent it seemed self-evident that humans were replicas of their forebears: children everywhere tended to step into their parents’ positions. The Shi‘ites thought that things had gone wrong because the Prophet's descendants had not been allowed to step into his.

How did medieval Muslims think that humans had come to live under government? Differently put, how did they explain the origin of the state? The short answer is that they did not normally see government as having developed at all, but rather as having existed from the start. It is worth examining this answer in greater detail, however, for it brings out some of the most basic assumptions behind their political thought. It is to such fundamental concepts and ideas that this chapter is devoted.

Terminology

The word ‘state’ in modern parlance refers sometimes to a set of governmental institutions which constitute the supreme political authority within a given territory (as when we grumble about the state and wish that it would wither away) and sometimes to a society endowed with such institutions, that is a politically organized society or polity (as in the expression ‘nation state’). In the question of how the state originated, the emphasis is on the agency, but the two meanings are closely related. Medieval Muslims had no word for states in either sense, however. They saw themselves as governed by persons rather than institutions and would speak of a ruler, such as a caliph (khalīfa) or king (malik), where we speak of the state in the first sense of the word; and they would identify the society of which the ruler was in charge as a nation (umma) or a religious community (milla), where we speak of states in the second sense of the word.

The political thought of the first two centuries after the conquests, the subject of the chapters that follow, was dominated by the tribal tradition of the conquerors, especially that of the northern Arabs, to whom Muḥammad and his first followers belonged. One of the most striking features of this tradition was its libertarian character: all adult males participated in political decision-making; nothing could be done without consensus. Modern scholars sometimes characterize the tradition as ‘democratic’. But it was not libertarian, let alone democratic, in the modern style. For one thing, it owed its character to the absence of a state, not to constitutional devices; and the tribal attitude to kings was ambivalent, as has been seen. For another thing, tribesmen did not see themselves as endowed with individual rights against the groups to which they belonged. If they resisted kings, they submitted to the tyranny of kinsmen. There was an immense premium on helping fellow-tribesmen (‘cousins’), staying together with them, deferring to the majority view, and respecting consensus. Kinsmen hung together so as not to hang separately. In short, the tribal tradition was not just libertarian, in the sense of opposed to overweening rulers, but also communitarian (or communalistic), in the sense of strongly attached to communal unity and solidarity.

The reader is warned that there are a lot of names, dates, and Arabic terms in this chapter. The first four caliphs, the first civil war, and its aftermath form part of the elementary vocabulary without which one cannot even begin to understand what medieval Muslims said about government. What follows is an attempt to serve the requisite knowledge in as short and simple a manner as possible.

The succession to the Prophet

We saw in the previous chapter that the leader of Muḥammad's community (umma) was called the imam. The dictionaries define an imam as somebody to be imitated, whether head of state or not. A simple prayer leader was an imam: you stood behind him and did as he did in performing the ritual prayer. Other righteous leaders were imams too: one modelled oneself on what they said and did. Great scholars, for example, came to be known by that title. But the head of state was the supreme imam. His imitators were not merely a small group of people at prayer or a major school founded by a great scholar, but rather the entire community of believers, the entire umma. At some point his leadership was dubbed ‘the great imamate’ (al-imāma al-kubra/‘uẓmā) to distinguish it from leadership of other types. Unless otherwise specified, the imamate always means the great imamate in this book.

The Greek tradition was less opaque to the early Muslims than the Persian, having long been Christian, but its role in Islamic culture was nonetheless more marginal, largely thanks to the fact that the Arabs only succeeded in conquering the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire. Greeks were poorly represented in the caliphate. The metropolitan elite remained outside it, and their number was limited even at a provincial level, for many Greeks left Syria and Egypt when the Arabs took over: unlike the Persians, they still had an empire to go to. Of the educated men, Greek or non-Greek, who stayed behind, few were as steeped in imperial culture as their Persian and Persianized counterparts in Iraq, who had the Sasanid capital at their doorstep. Facility in Greek was of course required for a career in the local bureaucracies, and Syrian bureaucrats did play a role in the transmission of Greek political ideas under the Umayyads: it was a secretary of the caliph Hishām (724–43) who translated the Pseudo-Aristotelian letters to Alexander into Arabic. But the Syrian contribution was limited, and the Egyptians do not seem to have contributed at all. Paradoxically, it was overwhelmingly in Iraq, not in the former Byzantine provinces, that Greek learning resurfaced, and it did so in response to caliphal demand rather than pressure from Greek or Hellenized converts. What the translators made available was moreover the legacy of the ancient Greeks (al-yunāniyyūn, literally the Ionians), not the culture of the contemporary Byzantines (al-rūm, literally the Romans).