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In which John Green teaches you about how Islam has interacted with politics during it’s history, and how it continues to do so today. Islamist movements are in the news a lot lately, but how did that happen. John will point out that Islam has alway been tied to political movements. Mohammed was not only a religious leader, he led an empire. So how did this lead to modern movements like ISIS? Islam has traditionally been a pretty egalitarian religion, and its scriptures value peace, so it is surprising in a lot of ways that such a violent fundamentalist movement would come out of it. What is a caliphate? What is a Caliph? John will teach you all about it. Take it easy in the comments, y’all. Be kind and respectful to each other.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we’re going to talk
00:04
about the Islamic state. A story ripped from the headlines!
00:07
Mr. Green? Wait. No, no, no, no this is not history this is news and also for me
00:11
it’s not even news – it’s the future. Yeah, Me from the Past, it turns out that
00:14
history is a continuous process, and that even current events have a history.
00:28
All right, let’s begin with the headlines.
00:30
In 2014 ISIS – the Islamic State In Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL and Islamic
00:35
State, and many other things. Anyway, they declared a caliphate in the territory that
00:40
the group controls, prompting many Americans to wonder what a Caliphate is.
00:45
Well, if you’ve seen our episode on the emergence of Islam, the caliphate is an Islamic
00:49
state, modeled on the original Islamic community that was founded by the prophet Muhammad in
00:54
the 7th century. Now Muhammad was not a caliph, because the
00:57
word means successor and they were the successors to Muhammad.
01:01
But the first four political leaders who led the community and turned it into an empire
01:05
have come to be known as the Four Rightly Guided caliphs.
01:08
And when groups like ISIS that are trying to reestablish this kind of government look
01:12
back on it they see it as being kind of the golden age.
01:16
That this was a time of not just of growth for the Islamic empire but also of political
01:20
stability and unity.
01:21
Which as it happens it really wasn’t. Like even under the Four Rightly Guided caliphs
01:25
the Islamic world was tremendously diverse and had huge disagreements.
01:29
I mean of the Four Rightly Guided caliphs, three were assassinated.
01:33
But anyway, the ideal version of that type of state is what ISIS and some other Islamists
01:38
mean when they talk about reconstructing a caliphate although what the boundaries of
01:42
a modern-day Caliphate might be are far from clear.
01:45
I mean are you going to try to include Indonesia, but anyway, according to historian Michael
01:49
Cook, “the restoration of the caliphate is a political ideal for many Islamists – and
01:53
for some a political project,” But I want to be clear, that is not the case
01:57
for the vast majority of Muslims. So when I use the term Islamism I mean something
02:01
very specific. For me, Islamism is the idea that Islam can be the basis of government;
02:06
it’s not the same as fundamentalism, although it’s often related to it.
02:10
And it’s certainly not the same thing as Islam – which is a diverse and complicated
02:14
and world wide religious tradition. Now, Islamism is a potent political force,
02:18
but it’s a relatively recent one, and in many ways it developed as a response to our
02:22
old friend, Western-style nationalism. That said, the idea that Islam can guide nation
02:27
states or new kinds of states is much older than, you know, 2001. But it became much more
02:34
relevant to Americans then with the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
02:38
Since then there has been more and more attention paid to the argument that Islam and Western
02:42
civilization were at-best incompatible and at-worst locked in a mortal clash of civilizations.
02:48
That clash of civilizations idea has become so ingrained that even though I don’t really
02:53
agree with it i think we need to at least acknowledge what we’re talking about when
02:58
we talk about us and them. Us, usually refers to European style nation
03:03
states such as those which became dominant in the 19th century. These states tend to
03:06
value democracy or at least pluralism, and, to varying degrees, they espouse political
03:11
values such as egalitarianism and individualism. National identity in these states has at least
03:16
traditionally been in a sense ethnic – based on some sense of shared language and culture
03:21
if not exactly kinship – and it’s secular rather than religious.
03:25
And then the arguments goes that the Islamic world is the opposite of this, but I am not
03:30
convinced that that’s accurate. For instance, there are lots of religious
03:33
connections in European style nation states and there are lots of conversations about strengthening
03:38
those religious connections or even making laws according to religious dictates.
03:42
And in the Islamic world there are lots and lots of nation states.
03:45
But let’s start with the idea that the Islamists are out of step with the modern political
03:50
reality of the nation state. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
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So Islam is a universal religion that is supposed to transcend ethnic identity. According to
03:57
the Quran, “The believers indeed are brothers.” (Q49:10)
04:00
The universal nature of Islam didn’t mean that ethnicity didn’t matter at all of course;
04:04
it did. Early on and for a long time Arab ethnicity was privileged in the Islamic world
04:09
and this was especially true during the period of conquest. This was despite Muhammad saying
04:13
“Truly the Arab has no superiority over the non-Arab, nor the non-Arab over the Arab,
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nor the black over the white, nor the white over the black, except in piety.”
04:22
But their amazingly rapid and far reaching conquest granted the Arabs huge prestige that
04:26
lasted until the 18th century.
04:28
Now, from the beginning being a Muslim meant being part of a political community, because
04:32
unlike Jesus or the Buddha, Muhammad was also a political leader in addition being a religious
04:38
one. But at least to an extent the tight connection between political and religious identity really
04:42
ended with the assassination of the Fourth Rightly Guided Caliph Ali. According to the
04:46
writer Tamim Ansary, “After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire.” But as
04:51
the empire grew and became more diverse, it became impossible to hold it together as a political unit.
04:56
So, even though the idea of a caliphate doesn’t square so well with western notions of ethnically
05:01
homogenous nation states, ethnicity has always mattered in the Islamic world, as we can see
05:05
if we go to Turkey, or Egypt, or Pakistan. In each of those places, the experience of
05:11
being a Muslim is affected by the experience of one’s ethnicity.
05:15
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So this idea that the Islamic empire wasn’t always a caliphate
05:19
for much of its history, was just an empire is really important.
05:23
Because it gets to how not-different ways of organizing people are when it comes to
05:28
like us and them. Now I’m not trying to make a false equivalence
05:31
or say that all people are the same or whatever But like let’s look at a defining western
05:34
political value – egalitarianism. In its earliest incarnations, Islam was unusually egalitarian,
05:41
especially for its time. The religion structurally avoids hierarchy
05:44
except perhaps based on piety. The Quran (49:13) states: “the noblest among you in the sight
05:48
of God is the most godfearing of you,” and there’s a quote from Muhammad that “people
05:53
are equals like the teeth of a comb.” To which I say. What’s a comb?
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Also, Islamic law, unlike, say Hammurabi’s code, doesn’t make class distinctions among
06:03
Muslims, only between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Muhammad is quoted as saying that the
06:07
blood of believers is always of equal value. In fact, that Islam lacks caste and formal
06:12
aristocracy was noted by many Europeans, who thought it was weird.
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Now this canonical idea egalitarianism is not the same thing as equality – at least
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the equality that we’ve come to think about in the present day.
06:24
Like in the Quran, and in the sayings of Muhammad called Hadiths, Women and men are alike in
06:28
the performance of prayer and their obligation to pay the alms tax and their expectations
06:33
of eternal life in paradise And women did have some inheritance rights
06:36
in the early Islamic community that they did not enjoy in pre-Islamic Arabic communities.
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And that they also wouldn’t have had in Byzantium or, god forbid, Rome.
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And then there’s the inequality between Muslims and ‘unbelievers’ which is pretty
06:47
well known; like other “peoples of the book” Christians and Jews, could live and work in
06:51
Muslim empires provided they paid a special tax called the jizya.
06:54
Which was far better than the life of a Muslim under Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain.
06:58
And then there’s the issue of slavery, which the Quran accepts. In general Muslims have
07:02
avoided enslaving other Muslims, showing that there is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity
07:07
among believers, but overall to quote a historian “Islamic egalitarianism was … limited
07:12
to free Muslim males.” Of course, if you’ve watched our US History
07:15
series you may remember that early American egalitarianism was limited to like land-owning
07:21
Christian males. My point here, is that if you look for historical
07:25
precedents, you can generally find them. That’s true in the Islamic world, it’s also true
07:29
in the rest of the world.
07:31
Now today, in Europe and the United States, most citizens expect their states to be, in
07:35
at least some degree, democratic, and republican, and constitutional.
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So when people in the west look at the early Islamic empire we have a way of imaging Caliphs
07:42
as kings because, like, you know, we had kings. But Caliphs were important in different ways,
07:47
for starters, they were the successor to the prophet.
07:50
Now, maybe that’s similar to what the Roman Catholic papacy became over time but it’s
07:54
not like a king – except for the king of England. King Henry VIII, founder of my church, who
07:58
was like “I need to be the head of the church so that I can get divorced.”
08:02
But this combination of religious and political authority is important as is, at least initially,
08:07
there was no hereditary succession of caliphs. And then there’s the concept of bay’a
08:12
which is a kind of political allegiance, like according to Michael Cook, “an agreement
08:16
is made between the future caliph and the future subject whereby each party is to have
08:21
specified rights and duties.” A closely related theme is shura, “the duty
08:25
of the caliph to consult with others before making his decision.”
08:29
Like, according to tradition, when Abu Bakr accepted the role of the first Caliph he claimed
08:33
that Muslims had no duty to obey him if he disobeyed God and the Prophet.
08:38
Now that’s not democracy, but it is limited rule and it gives people some participation
08:43
in the government. And then there’s another Western value that
08:45
is often bandied about as something that isn’t part of the Islamic world – freedom.
08:50
Islam, as you may know, means “submission.” And a Muslim is a person who submits to God.
08:55
And to some Westerns that seems like the opposite of freedom.
08:57
But the tradition within Islam, is that by releasing people from domination by other
09:02
people, and making them servants of God – there is freedom.
09:06
Freedom is a famously abstract concept, but if we think of it as the opposite of slavery,
09:11
then being free from having to serve other people is freedom.
09:16
That said, in contemporary Islamism, political freedom is not generally held in particularly high esteem.
09:21
Which is one of the reasons why Islamists were less relevant in the Arab Spring uprisings
09:25
of 2011 than people tend to think. But in at least one way, the caliphate can
09:30
be thought of as enshrining republican (with a little “r”) values; Islamism emphasizes
09:35
the rule of law and that even the caliph is subject to it. Since ultimate sovereignty
09:40
belongs only to God, men to quote Michael Cook, “are not entitled to exercise lordship
09:46
over each other.” And the much talked about Shari’a law, coming
09:49
from a source outside the political process (whether that’s God or religious scholars) acts as
09:54
a huge check on rulers becoming dictators. Right. like Iran’s government has many problems,
10:00
but its president is not a dictator. But that same complete sovereignty of God
10:05
over the people makes it difficult for Islamists to embrace democracy, because it’s based
10:09
on the idea that the people themselves are sovereign.
10:12
And the most radical Islamists, like Ayman al Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda really do hate democracy.
10:17
He called democracy, “a new religion that deifies the masses.” And the completely
10:21
extreme and absolutely horrifying Boko Haram in Nigeria have exclaimed that they, “will
10:27
never accept any system of government apart from one stipulated by Islam,” and will,
10:32
“keep on fighting against democracy, capitalism, socialism and whatever.”
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Yes, the “and whatever” is a quote. If you belong to a group that is fighting blank,
10:42
blank, blank, and whatever – you need to leave that group.
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So it’s easy and relatively common for people in the West to say that Islam is inimical
10:50
to political values like freedom, equality and democracy.
10:53
And when we talk about certain groups of radical Islamists, that’s true.
10:57
But in the West we also really, really struggle to see the other complexely, and to understand
11:02
the incredible diversity in response to the revelation of the Quran.
11:06
In my opinion, the clash of civilizations model oversimplifies the world into this group and
11:11
that group, and imagines that this group sees the world only that way and that group sees
11:15
the world only this way. In fact, it’s complicated. For one thing, modern Islamism itself, is
11:21
a very recent phenomenon, and in large part it’s a reaction to western imperialism and
11:25
nationalism, and it doesn’t always reflect the ideas of Islam OR Islamic history.
11:30
Humans have a storied tradition of calling upon certain facets of our history to inspire
11:34
us toward what we already kind of want. And those seeking to recreate the caliphate
11:40
want a more powerful and unified Arab world, if not, an Islamic world.
11:44
And so they look toward history for inspiration, taking parts and leaving many others.
11:49
What really happened, is that for the most part European style nationalism took hold
11:52
in the Islamic world at the same time it rose in Europe, as the creation of Turkey shows
11:57
quite clearly. But in trying to understand the allure of
11:59
the caliphate it’s important to understand that Islam is not just a religion. From the
12:03
beginning, it was a civilization. As the historian Tamim Ansary wrote: “Islam
12:08
might just as validly be considered as one item in a class whose other items include
12:13
communism, parliamentary democracy, fascism, and the like, because Islam is a social project
12:18
like those others, an idea for how politics and the economy ought to be managed, a complete
12:24
system of civil and criminal law.” But it’s also a very diverse system shaped
12:29
by everything around it and everything inside of it – like any civilization.
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So when we try to discuss a topic as complex and charged as contemporary Islamic thought
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and practice and political worldviews, we don’t just need to be sure that we have
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some sense of history. We also need to be sure that we’re all talking about the same
12:47
thing. There is nothing bright about the lines between
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politics and religion and history and nation. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next week.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.