Tag: Sunnis

Endless expertise

On By Martin Kramer


Werner Ende (1937-2024), who passed away on August 6, was described in these words in an obituary by a former student, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

His students now work in intelligence services, media outlets, and universities: Werner Ende, who profoundly influenced modern Islamic studies in Germany, has passed away. 

In Germany, research into contemporary issues of the Middle East doesn’t have a long tradition. Philologists and cultural scholars were often too afraid of being co-opted for political purposes. For a long time, they preferred to focus on ancient manuscripts and retreat into the academic ivory tower. When the world became interested in the Islamic world after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was little from the Orientalist departments that could explain what was happening in neighboring regions. This has changed; today, Islamic studies as a branch of Orientalism is no longer seen as an obscure or irrelevant field. 

This shift is thanks in part to Werner Ende, a pioneer in modern Islamic studies.

It was this role that drew me to Ende, the German scholar with whom I had the closest relationship. By the time I met him in 1986, he had moved beyond his early work on Arab nationalist historiography to establish himself as a leading expert on Salafi Islam and Shi‘ism in its Arab contexts. Sunni-Shi‘ite polemics became his special field of interest, and he approached them from both sides with the factual and philological precision characteristic of the German scholarly tradition.

Like my mentor, Bernard Lewis, Ende insisted that the politics of Islamic movements could not be understood without a profound grasp of early Islamic history. Only Ende could explain, with absolute authority and clarity, how today’s Saudi-Iranian dispute over a cemetery in Medina encapsulated centuries of Wahhabi-Shi‘ite rivalry. His study of the Shi‘ites of modern Medina is a typical gem, all the more remarkable since, as he admitted, he had “not been able—and most probably never will be—to do research on the spot.” These deep dives into difficult texts revealed him as a virtuoso researcher, whose resourcefulness was truly astonishing.

In 1986, I went to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he held the chair in Islamic studies, to spend a month under his tutelage. Ende became my guide to many things that summer: the revival of the German Orientalist tradition after the devastation of the Second World War, Shi‘ism in Lebanon (where he had spent several years before that country’s civil war), and Wahhabi ideology. His tutorials over Kaiserstuhl wine atop Freiburg’s Schlossberg were unforgettable.

We stayed in touch; I last saw him over breakfast in Berlin in 2016. He had retired by then and moved to the reunited capital. (In his youth, he had lived in East Berlin near the Wall and escaped to the West in pursuit of freedom. Life under communism made him wary of all forms of indoctrination.) I last corresponded with him in 2023, when he told me he had fallen seriously ill and had returned to the care of family in Freiburg, where he passed away.

Ende was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world. He published some articles in English, but not a book (apart from two co-edited volumes), and he didn’t attend conferences in America. However, he exhibited a keen and mischievous curiosity about the battles over Middle Eastern studies across the Atlantic. While he kept his distance from the Arab-Israeli conflict, he did not distance himself from Israel or Israeli scholars. His most accessible summary of Sunni polemics against Iran’s revolution appeared (in English) in an Israeli conference volume—an article that is more relevant than ever today.

More important than international renown, he was a devoted mentor to many students, who attest to his lasting influence on their work and careers. They compiled a fine collected volume in celebration of his 65th birthday, the title of which takes on a different meaning today. It played on his name: Islamstudien ohne Ende (‘Islamic studies without end’). Now Islamic studies in Germany are without Ende, but hopefully not without his standards of rigorous scholarship.

In 1988, he reviewed my first book, Islam Assembled, published in 1986. I reproduce it at this link (translated from German) not because it flattered me. My book was a revised doctoral dissertation, and from my present perspective, I’m embarrassed by its flaws. It’s also true that by the time Ende wrote his review, we were already on friendly terms. But it reflected his generosity of spirit, and his emphases suggest why we connected. Rereading it now, almost forty years later, it strikes me as a model of how a senior scholar should review the work of a promising junior one. There is always fault to be found, but it should be weighed against the value of unqualified praise for someone launching a career. I shall always be grateful for his kindness.


Header image: Baqi‘ cemetery in Medina. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The revenge of the Sunnis

On By Martin Kramer

ISISWhy are Sunni Arabs generating waves of terror and zeal for the caliph? I argue that it’s a reaction to a century of steady erosion of Ottoman-era Sunni dominance, especially in the zone between the Mediterranean shore and the Persian Gulf. It’s not a sudden collapse, it’s a long-term unwinding that has taken Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad out of Sunni hands. The Shiites (and Jews), once last, are now first—and Arab Sunnis blame the West. (I also have something to say about the Sunni-mania in Israel.) Read the entire piece here, at Mosaic Magazine.

When Minorities Rule

On By Martin Kramer

A presentation by Martin Kramer to the Policy Forum of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, December 15, 2004. Martin Kramer shared the podium with Ammar Abdulhamid, Syrian writer, intellectual, and coordinator of the Damascus-based Tharwa Project , a program devoted to religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. A summary of Abdulhamid’s remarks appears here. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

When we hear the phrase “minority rule,” the first inclination is to think that it is something abhorrent. It is precisely the phrase that was used to categorize South Africa under apartheid: white minority rule. We assume that such rule is illegitimate by definition. The European ideal of the nation, as it formed in the nineteenth century, is predicated on the nation as a numerical majority, formed by people who share some fundamental attribute of culture, be it language, ethnicity, religion, or shared descent. The numerically smaller groups within the polity that do not share this attribute are described as minorities, and as such should be entitled to various protections even as they are offered avenues of assimilation. What is insufferable is minority rule; that is an inversion of the natural order.

Historical legacy

But this is a very modern and very European idea. Minority rule has long been the norm in the Middle East. The traditional Muslim polity was not concerned with establishing the numerical superiority of Muslims. Indeed, in the most dynamic Muslim empires, Muslim minorities ruled over non-Muslim majorities. We do not have hard figures, but the evidence suggests that in the great Arab empires, Muslims did not form the majority of the population until the early Middle Ages. In the Ottoman empire, for most of its existence, and while it encompassed the Balkans, Muslims were in the minority. In the Moghul empire in South Asia, the Muslims formed a thin ruling crust resting upon a predominantly Hindu society.

Muslims did not agonize over their status as numerical minorities in these situations. The natural order since time immemorial had been imperial rule by elites who embraced a different culture, language, and religion than those of the populations over which they ruled. And since sovereignty belonged to God, and through him to the divine-right ruler, the question of who was in the majority or the minority had no relevance. Legitimacy had other sources, in Islamic law, and in the ideal of just rule.

Muslim empires generally ruled according to the precept that “there is no coercion in religion,” and because non-Muslims were subject to extra taxation, it actually served the rulers to remain in a minority. The result was that the Middle East, even after the Islamic conquests and the gradual conversions to Islam, remained home to a plethora of religious and other minorities, which enjoyed considerable autonomy. This gave rise to the mosaic that we see today, comprised of enclaves of different religions, sects, and ethnic groups. This is a consequence of the kind of social contract that prevailed across the Islamic Middle East for centuries: authority tolerated the autonomy of varied groups in society, and society accepted rule by an elite minority.

Now there are debates about the nature of this system, and the tradeoffs it involved. There is the harsh view of Bat Ye’or, who believes that the traditional system of state relations with non-Muslim minorities constituted a kind of thousand-year apartheid, systematically discriminating against non-Muslims, leaving them in an endemic state of insecurity. She has named this sort of apartheid dhimmitude, after the word dhimmi, which means a Christian or Jew living as a subordinate protected person under Islamic rule.

There is the rather more nuanced view of Bernard Lewis, who argues that the cases of actual persecution of minorities were few, certainly as compared to Europe, and that they occurred as a consequence of general societal crises. Lewis holds that in most places and times, minorities did thrive in their own autonomous space. He has been keen to stress that such tolerance was not equality, which would have been a dereliction of Islamic law, but his is a generally favorable assessment.

Finally, there is a view best articulated by the late Elie Kedourie, who believed that the Islamic system in its last, Ottoman phase had achieved a nearly perfect equilibrium among social groups. He regarded European nationalist ideas as a virus that brought disease, and the destruction of the Ottoman empire in the First World War as an act of hubris, one that unleashed the very worst forces, and substituted a “wilderness of tigers” for an ordered world in which everyone had a defined place.

Whatever you think of these approaches, it is clear that the Middle East since the end of the Ottoman empire, if not also in its last days, has been a dangerous place for many minorities. The list is long: the Armenian tragedy or genocide; the depradations against Assyrians upon Iraq’s independence; the persecution of ancient Jewish communities across the Arabic-speaking lands; the enslavement and massacre of non-Muslim blacks in Sudan; and the list goes on. As a result, parts of the Middle East have become much less diverse than they were two generations ago. Just visit Alexandria, which was once a Mediterranean melting pot, and that has become a bleak and monolithic city with its back to the sea. Just visit Bethlehem, now largely emptied of its Christian population. There are many such cities and towns and villages across the Middle East, where monotone has replace mosaic.

That change was the result of coercive nationalism, which declared that you must either shed all your particular beliefs and traditions, in order to join the Arab (or Egyptian or Syrian) nation; or you will be regarded as a foreigner and fifth-columnist of imperialism, and be gradually dispossessed and driven out. It is true that both Britain and France used minorities as allies in their efforts to find economical ways to exert imperial control. They recruited from minorities, as a counter-balance to the very same Arab nationalism they had once promoted. But the Arab nationalists then took this as a license to suppress and dispossess those very same minorities. The predominant effect of half a century of Arab nationalism has been this: those who would not or could not conform, had to submit or leave. Christians submitted or left. Kurds and Shi’ites in Iraq faced a similar choice. Jews left or reassembled in Israel, a kind of redoubt for a minority that made a programatic plan to become a majority in one place, and so chart its own course.

Now the interesting thing about Arab nationalism is that, while it purports to represent the identity of the majority of Middle Easterners, many of its prime promoters have been members of minorities. Many of its early ideologues were Christians, who saw in Arab identity a way to escape their own subordinate status in an Islamic state. The Hashemites, who were installed in Transjordan, Iraq, and briefly before that in Syria, were outsiders—a small ruling clique imported from Arabia. In Syria, it was minority groups, such as Alawis, Druze, and Ismailis, who seized the mantle of Arabism from the old Sunni elite, and used it to make Syria into a pan-Arab champion. And in Iraq, when the minority regime of the Hashemites fell, it was eventually replaced by minority regimes of Sunni Muslims who concocted a notion of Arabo-Iraqi identity, precisely to deflect the charge that they were ruling on behalf of a minority sect. Jordan is a case of minority rule twice over: by the imported Hashemites, and by the native East Bankers in preference to the imported Palestinians, who form a majority.

So even in the era of nationalism, the Middle East, east of Suez at least, continued to be ruled by minorities. This applied not only to Sunni-ruled Iraq, Alawi-ruled Syria, and Hashemite-ruled Jordan. It has also come to apply to the Arab Gulf states, in which the number of foreigners now wildly exceeds the number of natives. This is one of the paradoxes of Arabism: it was used by regimes to give themselves a veneer of populism, when in fact these regimes had their bases in minority groups.

Democracy vs. social order

Outsiders, especially Westerners, look at this and say to themselves: this is not legitimate and it cannot last. Each person should be allotted one equal vote. If that means that power will shift from the Sunnis to the Shiites in Iraq, so be it; if that means it will shift from the Alawis to the Sunnis in Syria, so be it; if that means it will make the Shiites into Lebanon’s power-brokers, so be it; and if that means dominance will shift from the Hashemites and the East Bankers to the Palestinians in Jordan, then so be it. Minority rule is a vestige of the past; let it be phased out, through the implementation of real democracy.

This is the reason democracy promotion is so feared in the Middle East. We see democratization as a noble enterprise to erode authoritarian rule. They see it as a foreign demand for a fundamental shift of power among sectarian and ethnic groups. In a homogenous place like Egypt, and in other parts of North Africa where the rulers come from the majority social or ethnic group, democracy does not have that same association. But across the Fertile Crescent, to empower “the majority” means to take power away from a long-empowered sectarian or ethnic or kinship group that happens to be smaller, and vest it in one that happens to be larger.

The problem with this is that minority rule can sometimes be more respectful of difference, more tolerant, and more open than majority rule. That certainly was the case in the Ottoman empire for much of its history. It has arguably been the case in places like the progressive Gulf states and Jordan. In Iraq, of course, minority rule was a disaster. In other words, minority rule may be good, or it may be bad; it may be enlightened or it may be despotic; it depends on the circumstances.

The same goes for majority rule. The principal effect of the removal of Saddam Hussein has been to bring the Shi’ites to the fore of politics in the Arab world. The United States, willy-nilly, has allied itself to Shi’ite power, by dint of its democratizing message. But it is by no means certain that Shi’ite power will be tolerant of the pluralistic values that democracy is supposed to nuture and protect. Indeed, in Iraq, the prospects for such an outcome would seem to rest on the shoulders of one 74-year-old man, Ayatollah Sistani. In Lebanon, too, it is not at all clear that an enhancement of Shi’ite power would make the country more open and tolerant of differences, be they political, cultural, or religious. And would we really want Palestinians, with their historic long-running grievances, to set the course of Jordan?

The democracy agenda tampers with much more than the political order. It tampers with the social order, in a number of places where that order functions passably. These are conservative societies; they fear disorder; and if democracy means overturning ethnic and sectarian balances, and opening the door to possible conflict, they are bound to suspect it.

In fact, the unseating of such minorities already has a reputation for serving as a precursor to civil strife. It could well be argued that Lebanon would not be Lebanon without the Maronites; in the same measure, Iraq would not be Iraq without the Sunnis. These minorities founded both states, and they legitimized their separate existence. In Lebanon, the decline of the Maronite minority has left a vacuum that persists to this day, and that makes it uncertain even now whether the country can be restored to sovereignty. The same holds true of Iraq: the displacement of the Sunnis, who have always been the hinge of Iraq, has unhinged the country. One does not have to be a follower of the Phalanges or the Baath party to realize that these two communities have cultural roles in both countries beyond their numbers, and that their marginalization might be as fateful for pluralism as the earlier marginalization of Jews, Greeks, and the other groups that leavened Middle Eastern society.

America’s inadvertent overturning of the group hierarchy is one of the reasons why “they hate us.” The people who really hate America think that it will do everywhere what it has done in Iraq: shift power to the benighted Shi’ites, in the name of democracy. The empowerment of the Jews via the creation of Israel overturned one traditional order, but empowering Shi’ites is an escalation that reaches into the very essence of Islam. That is what fuels the insurgency in Iraq, and that is what keeps new recruits coming to Al-Qaeda. All one has to do to find evidence is look at the jihadist websites to see what they say about Shi’ites. We are tampering with a 1,400-year-old hierarchy, the product of untold generations of struggle within Islam.

Self-determination first

If democracy contains within it the seed of disorder, what is the alternative? The problem in the Arab world is not a lack of democracy. It is a lack of self-determination. Here I do not mean national self-determination; I mean latitude for ethnic, religious, and kinship groups to exercise the maximum autonomous control over their collective lives. This is what has been eroded by the cancerous growth of the state over the past fifty years, exemplified by Iraq. The problem is the overbearing state, which has achieved efficiency in one thing only: depriving the Middle Easterner of the freedom he most cherishes, which is to be left alone to practice his faith, speak his language, and enjoy the traditions of his sub-national community.

This community does not always value democracy. In Iraq’s Sunni triangle, they like their tribes and they might want a tough-minded sheikh to keep order among them; in the Shi’ite south, they might wish to venerate a white-bearded recluse in a turban, and have him resolve all their disputes; and so on. What they crave is not democracy, but sub-national self-determination, for both majorities and minorities. More important to them than one-man one-vote, are guarantees for social, religious and linguistic freedom, implied by the retreat of the state.

To what point should it retreat? Ideally, to the distance at which the Ottomans stood. We have much more to learn from the Ottoman way of empire in the Middle East than from the British or the French. The European imperial powers also overturned heirarchies, which is why they constantly had to put down the kind of insurgencies that the United States now faces in Iraq. The Ottomans obviously had certain advantages over Europeans: first, they were Muslims, and second, the peoples of the Middle East were not at a heightened level of political consciousness until the empire’s last days. But the Ottomans ruled for as long as they did because they did not threaten their subjects with an all-intrusive state, and did not seek to turn the social order on its head.

An interviewer once asked the late Elie Kedourie whether he was nostalgic for the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires. Kedourie replied:

Nostalgia is not a very profitable sentiment nor is there any sense in regretting something that cannot be revived. All one can say, is that these political systems and institutions, contraptions, or call them whatever you will, worked while they were there. They functioned; and considering the societies that that Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians ruled, they did not do a bad job of it. What one can also say, is that the successor states have failed lamentably.

He went on to praise the Ottomans for their “very sensible attitude to the problems raised by large groups of people who were under their control. When it came to insurrection, the Ottomans were quite ruthless. But apart from that they tried very hard to maneuver, to meander, to try and conciliate.”

America cannot revive the Ottoman empire, but it might take a lesson from its legacy: that empire is most effective when it is invisible, that there are things worse than minority rule, that there is no greater evil in the Middle East than an intrusive state, that people who do not rebel deserve to be left alone to run their affairs as they see fit, and that it is wisest not to overturn existing heirarchies, but to maneuver and meander within them. Pursue the idea of majority rule, come what may, and we may eventually find the majority of the Middle East agreed on one thing: that America is an evil empire. That kind of consensus is bound to undermine American interests, and would be the worst outcome of the best intentions.