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The Arab Civilisation
It is often believed that Arabs are by nature nomads. Many of them were and they appear to have developed from herdsmen rather than from tillers, chasing or following their animals in search of pastures. However, turning to agriculture or establishing towns started millennia ago so the nomadic lifestyle is hardly an identifying feature of this civilisation.
Treating Islam as the defining feature of the civilisation is also a mistake. The mosques are not houses of God, they have no sacrificial altars. These are only prayer halls. There is also no clergy, the imams being only prayer-leaders. Mahomet himself was an imam, as were all the caliphs. An imam is someone who can read and interpret the Koran. And since the Koran cannot be translated, the imam must know Arabic, at least, sufficiently to read it if not to understand it. In each mosque near the pulpit, there is an ornamental niche which indicates the direction of Mecca towards which all those praying should face. The sources of belief are the Koran and the tradition called the Sunnah. The Sunnah is composed of comments and notes on the Koran by oldest commentators. The Sunnites are orthodox, while the Shiites reject tradition and do not recognize the first three caliphs. The Shiites live in Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mongolia and in the oases of Algeria. The Arab world is Sunnite as is also Turkey. Both branches preach five basic duties: prayer, alms, pilgrimages, fasts and participation in holy wars.
There are some customs derived from Judaism such as the ban on pork and sacral slaughter of animals. Jesus is considered a Prophet and Mary a Virgin but they believe that treating Jesus as the Son of God is deemed a polytheistic idea. It was Mahomet who imposed the monotheistic idea on the Arabs. He is also responsible for introducing the ban on intoxicating drinks and games of hazard but he gave no restrictions on polygamy or slavery. Islam is a simple religion with little popular understanding. Few Muslims know the Koran. It is full of regulations about hygiene and contains an exact family and property law, entering even into minor details. It also contains an ethical system. The woman is not manls equal and does not pray with the man in the mosque. Only the husband may divorce his wife. The veil and sack dress are not demanded by the Koran so it is practiced in some Islamic communities but not in others. The attitude to fine arts is assessed precisely but generally only negatively. Since representations of living beings are banned, Arab art is directed towards exquisite ornamentations (arabesques).
The Koran, thus, touches on categories of health, prosperity, beauty and goodness. In the category of truth, it is little concerned with the supernatural (there is practically no theology) and not at all with the natural. Family and property law constitute the whole of jurisprudence. However Koranls shortcomings from the point of view of civilisation go deeper. All its injunctions are concerned with family life alone, at most with the clan and it knows only private law. There is no law of government in the Koran, so how could government be based on the Koran? Government is left to the will and pleasure of the authority, so that the arbitrary will of the ruler becomes an indispensable part of the law. This inevitably leads to the arbitrary will of every official. In fact the Koran is stretched to meet the needs of the State. Military service is in the name of holy war. Taxation comes under the duty of alms giving. As a result, care for the needy becomes entirely a state responsibility. Of Moslem government, it is said that it is patched with the Koran and lined with self-will, and accordingly unable to do without terror. Government consists of applying a magnified private law into public affairs. A separate public law could not develop until a break was made with the principle that Koran is the source of law. Two schools developed, one for which only what is contained in the Koran and the Sunnah is worthy and the other claiming that everything that is not condemned in the Koran is allowed.
Based on these two trends various sects developed and stretched even to polytheistic ones (in Pakistan). Some, as for example, the Shiite Assassins were fanatically cruel, functioned in the Turanian world and were eventually dealt with by the Mongols in a very typically Turanian manner - they were physically liquidated together with their families by mass executions performed by an obedient military force. Everywhere, Islam adapted according to the character of the local society. Islam is present in many civilisations. Not everything Arab belongs to the whole of Islam and not all that is Moslem to the Arab civilisation. One must distinguish those who received the Koran from the Arabs and those who received it from the Turanians, Turks, or Iranians. These are completely different worlds as far as civilisation is concerned. Arab scholars consider the Turks as something worse than the giaours (heathen), as barbarians of Islam. There is also Islam in other civilisations, in the Brahmin (with the caste system maintained), in the Chinese (Dzungaria -with polygamy modified to wife + concubines) and others. Islam does not define the Arab civilisation.
Islam did not create a sacral civilisation in the sense that Judaism and Brahmanism did. The Arab civilisation is only semi-sacral. Fully sacral are only the most extreme of the Shiite sects, among the Mozabites of the oases of Algerian Sahara. Ethnically these are not Arabs but Berbers. They are bound to their holy cities, to which they must return, because their women are not permitted to leave them. The womenls faces are covered most closely. Not only drinking but also smoking of tobacco is forbidden. The supreme appellate authority is a college of men learned in the Koran which exists in each town. Apart from this exception nowhere did Islam create its own civilisation.
In Islamic lands, a separate civilisation arose, only where the interpretation that everything is permissible that is not forbidden in the Koran was adopted. In those areas, Islam quickened civilisation into abundant growth, as it were, over and above, or besides the Koran. This is how the Arabic civilisation arose, called after the Arabic language in which the Koran is written, but not after the ethnic element with which it was in no way linked. It is not Arabs that spread Islam. But their language, thanks to the Koran, became the language of a brilliant civilisation of intellectual splendour extending considerably beyond the frame of the Koran. In this way, already in the 8th c., a separate philosophy of law emerged (Abu-Hanif, d. 772). The whole of Arab civilisation enjoys non-sacral law as well as the authority of the Koran. Law can exist outside the Koran, provided it is not in conflict with it. The source of law is learning. Learning is treasured and schools of superior kind were always part of this civilisation. The scholarliness of the Arab civilisation rescued Aristotle for posterity (later taken over by the Latin philosophers). Arab mathematics (algebra) is particularly famous, based on the Arab numerals the whole world has now adopted (imagine long divisions or multiplications using Roman numerals!). Public law is derived from the private, with the complication that it must somehow be deduced from the Koran which contains only private law. From the private law, a social system developed. Much of public life is despotic, the state intervening at any time in any social matter. In smaller communities, the sheik decides everything and the same authority served the ruler of the great historic Arab states. Yet, it is always so that the ruler is subject to the supreme authority of the Koran (not so in the Islamic parts of the Turanian civilisation, where the law is derived from the Koran but its interpretation is a prerogative of the ruler alone). In relation to time, the Arab civilisation knows the era, but has no historical awareness.
The contact with the Latin world following the invasion of Spain and parts of France by the Moors (Mauritanians) led to the development of the most advanced culture of the Arab civilisation (Cordovan). The architectural treasures of Cordoba, Seville and Grenada are witness to the glory of that culture. In the Cordovan culture emerging from its clan organisation, an emancipation of the family was achieved, due to adopting monogamy. As a result, spiritual forces started to organise separately, outside of state organisation. Wherever this occurs, a new opportunity is born for public life, for the development of an opposition, a legal opposition, morally permissible, not constituting anything improper and being a manifestation of the emancipation of spiritual forces from physical ones. The Cordovan culture proves that such emancipation is possible in the Arab civilisation.
Today, in dealing with Islamic terrorism, it is important to distinguish Islamic fanaticism born within the Turanian civilisation and akin to that of the Assassins, from the religious fidelity to the Koran present within the Arab civilisation.