Islamic law and Genghis Khan's code
by Joe Palmer
[ politics | opinion - may 03 ]
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad. - Walter Bagehot
This is not a review of the current exhibition of Mongol art that was held recently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: The Legacy of Genghis Khan, Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 that traces the Mongol unification of Asia with artifacts and pieces such as beautiful tent hangings, tapestries, elaborate draperies and panels used in portable abodes, one large enough to hold 2,000 people, that were taken all the way from Northeast Asia to Hungary by Genghis' heirs, among whom were Kublai Khan in China, Hulegu in Baghdad, and the Il-khans in Persia, whose abolition of the Muslim Caliphate affected the entire subsequent history of Islam. Nor is this a comparison of the Mongol Invasions and American imperialism, although one might find certain parallels between the Pax Mongolica and the new world order.
No, this is a look at a clash between the 13th century Mongols and Islamic fundamentalists, who were so offended by the Mongols' ways that the result was fatwa, condemnation, and jihad, holy war, ancient religious decrees. I was trying to find out how peaceful, benevolent Islam could engender violent radicals such as the Muslim Brotherhood who occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, paralyzing the Saudi government until the French Army flooded the tunnels where the rebels were hiding and electrocuted them, and who had deposed King Farouk of Egypt and then publicly murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981, and had tried to assassinate the grandfather of King Abdullah of Jordan. What was the thinking in Arabia behind Abd al Wahhab's 1703 decree that innovation is a sin? Why was Sayyid Qutb's book 'Signposts' a bestseller in Egypt? It declares American culture foul and empty, and Islamic countries similarly corrupt, barbaric and sinful. His writings led to his execution by hanging in 1966.
Through the years many individuals have been punished for abjuring Islam. In 13th century Baghdad, Ibn Kammuna, a Jewish scholar, criticized all three of the monotheistic faiths. He had to flee for his life. In 1960 in the Sudan, Mahmud Taha, the theologian and reformer, was hanged. His works were destroyed. In 1967 the Syrian journalist Ibrahim Khalas labeled religions as "mummies that should be kept in museums." He got life imprisonment. Rashid Boujedra in 1983 got a fatwa against him by writing that Islam is absolutely incompatible with a modern state, and that further the Algerian Islamicist Party was like the Nazi Party of the 1930s. In 1989, Salman Rushdie, the novelist, earned a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini for publishing his comedy 'The Satanic Verses'. In 1992 in Saudi Arabia, Sadek Malallah slandered God, Muhammad, and the Koran, a crime "punishable by death irrespective of repentance." He was beheaded. Then the Taliban hanged President Muhammad Najibullah of Afghanistan from a light post with his genitals in his mouth. Then they hanged his brother.
I had been saddened by the actions of the Taliban and Mojahidin in March, 2001, who on instruction from their spiritual leader Mullah Omar destroyed religious artifacts in the Kabul Museum and seventh century statues of the Buddha in the Bamian Valley. They banned females from schooling and work outside the home, and forced men to wear beards. And then there was 9/11.
The Crusades seem to be on again, if we take 'Crusades' to mean enmity between Islam and the West. Everyone for some time thought that they were a thing of the past. In the 1930s the intrepid traveler Patrick Fermor could report that the coffee houses and croissants of Vienna were all that was left of the siege of 1683 when the Turks almost took the city. The Turks had left behind the new drink, coffee, and rolls shaped like the half-moons of the Sultan's flag. "They mark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant," he wrote.
The Muslims did not carry out the original Crusades, of course. Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 began it all with his promises of plenary indulgences and a ticket to Heaven for those who would occupy the Holy Land in the name of the True Church. Clashes between Muslims and others and among themselves have continued to occur in one form or another until today. Treaties following World War I [1914-1918] divided up the Middle East among the Western conquerors, reshaping the center of the Islamic world much as it is arranged now. The 'Crusades' of today take new forms with new motives driving the combatants, with terrorist acts a principal feature of holy war, jihad.
Holy war? Why is the phrase not a contradiction in terms, some Greek word we can ignore? In what way can the murder of combatants and innocents be made holy? Or the murder of anyone - psychopaths, cold-blooded killers, convicted felons? The Israelis have recently changed the Sixth Commandment to "Thou shalt not murder," perhaps trying to justify their depredations in Palestine. What is the difference between killing and murdering? What justifies the taking of life? Is the question itself not absurd, a logical impossibility?
The quiet, old Islam we knew is no more. The Islam I have lived with and respected as part of my personal religious faith and experience has now shown a wild, atavistic side, a throwback to a puritanical past, a reactionary defense against the modern world. Islam, the most tolerant and accommodating of religions, the oldest and final religion, they say, has had little to fear from other religions or creeds. Yet it contains, paradoxically, people of little faith who must prove their piety and righteousness with destructive deeds. It must be the case, I thought, that little faith, like extreme anger, causes people to condemn others and to perform violent acts. It is because their faith is shaken that they turn vicious, just as frustration leads to anger. They are threatened by a different understanding, as if truth were absolute, as if it were not a factitious thing that we make up into legends and myths.
Islam teaches that it is not a new religion, and that Islam is, in fact, the oldest and final, that is, the all-encompassing, monotheistic religion, the revelation of one God, the True God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Through the Koran, the Angel Gabriel corrected errors in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Thus Islam has been since its inception the most accommodating, tolerant, and expansive of religions, having nothing to fear from other religions. Like Unitarians, Universalists, and Baha'is, Muslims have traditionally tolerated Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, animists, and shamanists, among others. According to Islam, they must eventually see the light.
Originally among the Muslims, the jurists and temporal heads of state were priests, the caliphs. They were jurists first of all, and then priests after the fact. Their secular duties came first, just as in the West, and as is the case today among the largest Muslim group, the Sunnis. Comprising 85 per cent of Muslims today, the Sunnis normally choose their political leaders through more-or-less democratic or traditional processes.
The Sunnis have had a glorious history. Four caliphs in the early years [661-750 CE] of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties came to world power, it is held, in a golden age of civilization, proof of God's guidance and the truth of Islam's mission in the world. The five pillars of Islam: faith, prayer, tithing, fasting, and pilgrimage were sufficient to assure righteousness. They waged war only for defense, jihad meaning to them the personal, individual struggle against base instincts and selfish ambition.
In sharp contrast to the practices of the Sunnis, the Shiites, the minority Muslims, have imams who become priests first, and then they also become jurists and governmental leaders, the reverse of the Sunni practice. Among them the imams, the divinely appointed, sinless, infallible successors of Muhammad, make the law. To jihad, the struggle against Satan, they add a strongly political dimension. The Shiites claim descent from the Prophet's family - his daughter Fatima - and her husband Caliph Ali, who exercised both temporal and spiritual leadership. Found throughout the Muslim world in varying proportions with the Sunnis, they are majorities in Iran, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. They remember bitterly Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, who had thousands of them killed. Theological differences among them have often led to political acts. They assassinated Caliph Ali and, lately in 1981, Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Among them sinners must die. People are either true believers or not. Other Moslems may be untrue sinners. They too must be excommunicated or killed like unbelievers. Questions of political and religious leadership, of theology and of law in the face of modernity and Westernization, have caused severe frustration among the most extreme, the Kharijites, as they do among the Wahhabi, the Taliban, and Al Qa'ida today. Think of the hand of a thief, or of Khomeini and his fatwas, the pronouncements against sinners. Of the one billion or so Muslims alive today, it is said that only one per cent are fanatic, hardly a comforting thought: one per cent of one billion.
Among the Sunni, the moderate and modernized Muslims, the social order is a more important consideration than matters of individual sin. For them, only God can truly judge a sinner, especially a ruler. Religious, political, economic and social forces must find accommodation to ensure peace and justice. Religion, politics, and society must remain in balance. Technology and science are compatible with Islam, while the past, with its many lessons, is not so important as the future. Nobility of character, broad-mindedness, tolerance, and generosity are characteristic of these compassionate and humanitarian people, who have always called the pagans to peace, leaving the religious to their own devotions. The Arabs, in particular, never persecuted the Christian religion. In fact, they favored it, honoring and benefiting the priests, saints, churches, and monasteries, never forcing Islam upon anyone.
Among some groups today, however, a seemingly corrupted Islam must be purified, and unbelievers destroyed. These groups are the fundamentalists who seek reformation in a supposed image of a pure past. There was a precedent reformer, whose teachings they follow, a puritanical Muslim cleric of the early 14th Century named Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya [pronounced Time-ya], a theologian and jurist of the Hanbali school of Islamic thought in Damascus who lived from 1263 to 1328, the inspiration of the Wahhabi extremists, the 19th and 20th Century Jihad organizations.
Ibn Taymiyya held that the purpose of religion is not to know or love God, but to serve Him through worship and obedience. According to Ibn Taymiyya, only tradition and authority hold the truth. He issued a fatwa against the Mongols who had taken Baghdad, Samarkand, and Bukhara, formerly Muslim strongholds, and who had converted to Islam. The Mongols had built mosques and schools, and had accommodated themselves to the local cultures, having learned from their great leader Genghis Khan that a subjugated people must be kept happy and productive in order for the conqueror to be able to wrest the maximum amount of profit from them.
However, it was evident to some Muslims that the Mongols were not following the sharia, Islamic law, although they had converted to Islam. Instead, the Mongols persisted in following the Great Yasa of Genghis Khan. In this they were as bad as the pre-Islamic polytheists, the kafirs, the unbelievers. They must be excommunicated. Living without the sharia, they were apostates, backsliders, and therefore the objects of holy war, jihad.
The Great Yasa [Code] of Genghis Khan? What were those egregious violations of God's Law that so upset Ibn Taymiyya? What were the ways of life and legal practices of the Mongols? On what traditions and practical judgments had the maximum leader Genghis Khan based his decrees and decisions? And, more interestingly, what do modern Western democracies owe to the principles that Genghis Khan set out in the Great Yasa, and how are Western governments, and particularly Anglophonia, the United States, Britain and their dependencies, similar to the Mongols?
The problem that Genghis Khan had to solve was how to govern his conquered peoples, much as Douglas MacArthur, another single-minded, self-righteous autocrat, had to govern the Japanese after World War II [1939-45]. The Mongols, by the way, unlike the Americans, did not subjugate the Japanese, who were saved by a typhoon, the kami kaze, the divine wind that destroyed the fleet of the invading Mongols in 1274.
Imperious, draconian measures and rules were the obvious solution to the problem of governing the newly conquered populations. The Mongols had to accommodate themselves to many ethnic groups and governments in order to manage their affairs efficiently. That they succeeded in becoming a part of the people they controlled could be seen in the relics displayed in the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. That large, elegant and sedate historical exhibit contained illustrated books with pictures of the history of the Mongols as they experienced it, their syncretic view of the world in which Franks wear Mongol armor and the birth of Muhammad is a Byzantine Christian nativity scene!
The Mongols apparently understood their subjected peoples nearly as well as the West understands the Japanese, that is, not very well. However, they generally made every effort to get along. Genghis' son Hulegu met the Assassins, the Ismaili Muslim sect of the Shiites, the Druzes in Persia, who then joined the Mongols against the Sunni Muslim Abbasids in Baghdad, who fled to Egypt. Many Mongols were Nestorian Christians, members of the Assyrian Church in Iraq, Iran, India, and Turkestan.
The Mongol invasion of the Muslim heartland, Mesopotamia, the land between the waters, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, now called Iraq, brought to an end six centuries of high culture, scholarship, libraries, and technology there. The agricultural infrastructure, particularly the elaborate system of canals, was not fully replaced until the Twentieth Century. The Mongols' introduction of paper money failed, destroying trade. They brought gunpowder from China and developed firearms, but they were finally absorbed by Islam. The Egyptian Mamlukes defeated the Mongol army of Hulegu at the battle of Ain Jalut near Nazareth in 1260, thereby recovering Syria, mainly because, it is said, the Mamlukes' horses wore shoes.
In 1300 the Mongol chief Ghazan re-conquered Jerusalem. A rumor held that he was going to give the Holy Land to the Christians, but he declared Islam the official faith. The Holy Land remained subjected to various Muslim dynasties and the Ottoman Empire until 1917, except for the Crusaders' Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th Century. The modern State of Israel was created in Palestine by United Nations decree in 1948.
Genghis Khan and his followers unified animists, shamanists, totemists, Buddhists, Taoists, Tibetan Lamas, Nestorian priests, Franciscan missionaries, and Muslim mullahs and theologians. However, Genghis claimed to be the earthly representative of Eternal Heaven, with a holy mission and magical powers, whose judgments were final. "Divinely decreed," the new governments brought the equivalent of a new order of the ages and the motto Annuit Coeptis, "God has approved our beginnings."
Genghis Khan's Great Yasa was a faith and a way of life, a religion and a social order like that of Islam, but it contained a set of values and principles in direct contrast to the laws of Islam.
Under his system of governance there were very few and different punishments for violation of the code of laws that he decreed, the Great Yasa. The main punishment expected for any infraction was death, greatly simplifying the law, and making the offender quite grateful when punishment was not carried out.
No original copy of the Yasa exists, only fragments written in the Uighur script, but it has been reconstructed by Russian scholars. As interpreted today the precepts of Genghis Khan, the Son of Heaven, are similar in many ways to the tolerant practices of pluralistic Western countries. They form a practical, underlying cultural base for society, expressing values that a modern Westerner would find unremarkable in their familiarity, and which a strict Islamic apologist would find abhorrent. Many of the rules are practical regulations about the regimentation and comportment of the Mongol army, rules about the behavior of the hordes, the mounted troops, those swift archers who conquered more sedentary peoples, but most of the rules have to do with the way Mongols are to treat other people. They go like this:
- Condemn the wicked
- Love one another, a golden rule
- Do not steal
- Honor the righteous, the pure, the innocent, the poor, the aged, the learned, the sages, and the hermits of every tribe. This pleases God
- Respect all people. Show no preference to any sect or religion. Do not belong to any religion. Follow no creed. Avoid fanaticism. Do not put one faith above another. Respect all religions
- No taxes or duties are to be paid by fakirs, ascetics, religious devotees, lawyers, physicians, scholars, muezzins, and those who wash the bodies of the dead
- Always taste food before serving it. Do not eat without sharing. Do not eat more than others. Do not step over a cooking fire or serving dish when people are eating. A passerby must stop to eat when he sees people eating. They must invite him to eat
- Draw water with vessels, not bare hands. Rinse the dishes with boiling broth. Water is precious
- Do not urinate into water or ashes. The campfire was the Mongol hearth. Although they were nomadic, they did not wander with their herds. The regular camps were their homes, owned traditionally by families
- Do not slaughter animals in the Muslim fashion by slitting their throats. Instead, open their breasts and squeeze their hearts. Ritual slaughter ['halal'] is essential to Muslims
- The capital crimes are adultery, sodomy, lying, sorcery, third-time bankruptcy, aiding captives, and harboring runaway slaves. If the Mongol practice of enslaving people is abhorrent, think about who sews your shirts and athletic shoes in Indonesia and China
- It is forbidden to say that anything is taboo. Nothing is unclean. For example, wine and swine are fine
- Women must accompany their men, and do the men's work when they are in battle
- The penalty for murdering a Muslim is forty gold coins [balysh]; for a Chinese one donkey
- A stolen horse must be returned with a fine of nine additional, similar horses in restitution, or nine children.
There is a refreshing absence of rules of the sort that guide Muslims' daily lives. For example, Mongols must have found risible the command to squat to urinate so as not to get any urine on the clothing or person, which must be washed off immediately. Saudi Airlines, conveying pilgrims on the hajj, confronted this problem. Muslim ablutions require the use of water to clean the body before prayer five times a day. Paper is not acceptable. Turkish-style toilets, comprising the trough or sink that is the toilet hole, are a consequence of this injunction. Furthermore, a rule states that if one drips urine or breaks wind during prayer, prostrating oneself with the buttocks in the air [namaz], the prayer is useless.
Enlightened principles that the West perhaps owes, to some extent, to the Great Yasa of Genghis Khan are the following rights that may or may not obtain under Islamic rule:
- Free expression without censure
- Worship as one pleases, or not to worship
- Separation of church and state
- Bareheaded women to drive to school to further their careers
- Freedom from discrimination by race, sex, or creed
- Freedom from cruel punishment
- To be oneself, individuality.
