Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam
Encyclopedia
Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam are academic discourses by Soviet
Marxist
theoreticians about Islam
, its origins and development based on Historical materialism
and Muslims. The central question of this discourse was how Muslim society would fit into the general development of human history
. Prominent Soviet orientalists
include Mikhail A. Reisner, Evgenii Beliaev, Liutsian I. Klimovich, Mikhail L. Tomara, V. Ditiakin and Sandzhar D. Asfendiarov.
brought the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
to power. The Soviet Union had a large Muslim population
of various ethnicities. Therefore, there was a pressing need for original research as Marx
, Engels
only dealt with the subject superficially. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks created new institutions and organizations intended to produce devoted Marxist scholars of Oriental studies. Foremost among them was the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies
, a party
school created in 1920 mainly for the requirements of the Soviet foreign service. Its counterpart for educating party workers and
administrators from the Eastern regions and republics of Russia and the USSR, as well as for training communists from abroad, was the Communist University of the Toilers of the Orient
, a school founded in 1921. The new Marxist discourse on Islam was dominated by scholars from these political teaching and research institutions.
, but they found that communism was even more prominent in the tradition of Islamic Sufism
. Under the
cover of Sufism communist ideas and movements emerged that had nothing to do with Islam and religion whatsoever. These movements were driven by Muslims—poor nomad
s as well as peasant
s and urban craftsmen—longing to overthrow the feudal order
of their times, i.e., the Abbasid, Seljukid
, and Ottoman dynasties
in the Near East
. As examples the Navshirvanovs mentioned the Shiʿi Ismailites, the Anatolian Futūwa and Akhī organizations, and the Bektashi order of dervishes
. The climax of this supposed anti-feudal Sufi communist movement was Sheikh Bedreddin of Simavna who was executed by the Ottomans in 1416 as a heretic; his disciples led peasant rebellions against Ottoman rule and set up what the Navshirvanovs called the “first revolutionary government of Anatolia”.
This theory suffered from lack of sufficient historical evidence and was superseded by other theories.
. His interpretation of Islam can be found in two articles on “The Koran and Its Social Ideology”, published in 1926 in a Soviet literary journal. In these studies Reisner maintained that Islam was the religion of the Arab merchants of Mecca
. He distinguished between the big merchants, that is, the rich families of Mecca
, and the less affluent and poor merchant families. Due to the disunion of the Arab tribes
, trade caravans
were constantly running the risk of being raided by nomads. These caravan
s were organized as joint ventures of rich and less affluent trade families of the Quraysh tribe, but the poorer merchants invested, and therefore risked, a higher percentage of their capital than the rich families. For this reason the idea of a union of the Arab tribes under one monotheistic religion
was developed by the poorer families of the Quraysh, for only such a union would eliminate the raids. Their speaker became Muhammad, who himself hailed from one of the less privileged Quraysh clans
.
Reisner maintains that the Koran portrayed Allah
as "a rich, powerful and smart capitalist
". In Medina
, Muhammad acted not so much as a prophet and preacher but as a skillful organizer. He was successful not because people were eager to join a new religion but because they longed for a law
that would unite them. The Koran, Reisner continues, only guarantees the right to property and creates a “World Trade Company of Believers” (mirovaia torgovaia kompaniia veruiushchikh) under God’s own leadership. Many elements in the Koran reflect a merchant’s position: the prayers and rituals are not very complex and do not require “spiritual contortions”; the pilgrimage
to Mecca
(ḥajj
) is linked to a trade fair; tithe
s (zakāt
) is restricted to a moderate level, and believers are exhorted not to squander their money; while usury
is forbidden, Muslims are encouraged to make moderate profits; and, of course, the Koran emphasizes the importance of oaths, correct measurements, and the faithful return of the deposit.
Reisner explains that mystical elements, which tended to supersede the clear class distinctions, were to enter Islam only much later, mainly stemming from the Persian tradition.
Reisner’s interpretation turned out to be very influential among Soviet scholars of the late 1920s.
grew with the wealth of the merchants. Islam emerged in the late 6th century as a movement of the less wealthy, “intermediary and lower Meccan bourgeoisie” against this “‘aristocracy’ of avaricious traders and pitiless usurers.”
In contrast to Reisner, however, Beliaev did not see anything progressive, liberating, or even revolutionary in this initial Islam: for instance, Islam did not stand up against slavery. Beliaev compared the image of God in the Koran to that of a despot and slave owner.
According to Beliav, a similar struggle was taking place in Medina, where some clans became dependant upon others, and especially upon the Jewish
clans
, whose wealth was based on “usury capital
” (rostovshchicheskii kapital). The gradual dissolution of the ancient tribal and clan structures in Muslim Medina must not be ascribed to the religion of Islam but rather to the development of Meccan trade capital, and in general to the transition to private property in slaves, cattle, and other possessions. “With an eagerness and love for detail that is characteristic for the petty bourgeoisie, the boring, depressing and dull Suras of the Medinan period lay down the regulations for property and inheritance as well as buying and selling”.In Medina Muhammad changed the prayer direction
from Jerusalem to Mecca; “praying to the Muslim God, they bow down before the only god that they respect, namely capital.” When the “medium wealthy” traders finally took over Mecca, they reached their goal: together with the rich “Quraysh of the Center” they found themselves at the helm of the “trade capitalist organization of the Hijaz” which eventually united the tribes of Arabia. The nomads, by contrast, did not play an active role in Beliaev’s scenario; after Muhammad’s death they easily committed apostasy
and had to be forced back to Islam by the first caliph, Abu Bakr
.
According to Ditiakin, Marx and Engels understood that pre-Islamic Arabia
was characterized by two different environments, that of nomadic Bedouin
s and that of settled urban traders. As the correspondences of the two thinkers show, the Bedouins could hardly be characterized as bearers of high culture, whereas the population of the southwestern Arabian peninsula was a “civilized” Oriental high culture. Obviously, Engels had access to publications on petroglyphs from Yemen
, which, in his mind, reflected “the ancient, national Arabic tradition of monotheism”. However, in the centuries immediately before Muhammad the old culture of Yemen was destroyed by incursions of the Ethiopia
ns, and consequently also the Arabian trade route to the north via Mecca was in decay. This decline of trade in the period before Muhammad was, as Engels
wrote to Marx in 1853, “one of the chief factors in the Muhammadan revolution”.
To quote Engels again, “it seems that Mohammad’s religious revolution, like every religious movement, was formally a reaction, an alleged return to the old, the simple”. “the movement [of Muhammad] has seemed to me to have the character of a Bedouin reaction against the settled but degenerate fellahin of the towns, who at that time had also become very decadent in their religion, mingling a corrupt nature-cult with corrupt Judaism and Christianity.” The decline referred to by Engels was thus economic and religious.
According to Ditiakin, Engels’ statements led to the apparent contradiction that the uncivilized Bedouins, who were defeated and driven out of their country by foreign invaders, created an “ideological system
” that would ultimately rescue Arabia and soon rule over
a huge part of the world. In Ditiakin’s mind, this apparent contradiction can only be solved by the following line of reasoning: The cradle of Islam was characterized by a coexistence of the nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins and the formerly highly developed trade economy of the “urban fellahs
”, which was however in decline, but still “potentially” stronger than the Bedouin culture. A series of “revolutionary blows” was necessary to dissolve the contradictions between the two, and to free the trade formation from its restrictions. These blows came in the form of foreign invasions, as Engels had
suggested in 1853: “The expulsion of the Abyssinia
ns took place about forty years before Mohammed and was obviously the first act of the awakening Arabian national consciousness, which was also spurred by Persian invasions from the North, pushing forward almost to Mecca”.
For Ditiakin, Islam had a Bedouin character, and Bedouin lifestyle had a huge impact on the new religion. Due to the course of the Islamic expansion, however, the emergent religion of Islam was soon adapted to the foundations of urban economy. Accordingly, Islam eliminated the relics of the clan-based society and became the ideology of an urban society. The old nomadic and Bedouin cultural heritage of Islam, however, turned out to be strong enough to prevent Islam from becoming dominant in Europe. Ditiakin came to the conclusion that Muhammad’s fight against the Quraysh of Mecca was “a revolution of the dying Bedouin culture against developing trade capital”—seemingly the exact contrary to Reisner’s trade capitalism theory.
Asfendiarov regarded Islam as the product not of the merchants of Mecca, as Reisner did, but
of the Arab nomads. To him, the Islamic expansion was a huge emigration wave of about one million nomads from the Hijaz and Najd
regions of Arabia to the outside world. Asfendiarov maintained that Islam emerged as the last huge expansion of Semite tribes from Arabia. However, Asfendiarov insisted that this expansion resulted from changes in the nomadic economy, not from climate change.
According to him, the Arabs were beyond the formation of “primitive patriarchal nomadism”; rather, they possessed a “developed”, modified cattle breeding economy. By the 7th century, Arabia suffered from a scarcity in land for cattle breeding. The Byzantine and Persian empires in the North, and the Persian and Ethiopian interventions in Yemen, resulted in an isolation of
Central Arabia, as well as in a heightened competition for the available pastures. Due to this scarcity and competition, Arab
tribes now occupied the oases and towns of the Hijaz, like Mecca and Medina, which had hitherto been inhabited mainly by Jews and other settled populations. The Arabic tribes that conquered these settlements took over the agricultural and merchant activities that had been in place. Some Bedouin tribes, like the Quraysh, therefore
turned into trading tribes. Due to the increased mutual raiding and warfare among cattle-breeders, more and more Arab nomads lost their livestock, settled around these settlements as pauperized and dependant clans, and took on agricultural work to make a living.
For all of these reasons, the tribal economy of 7th-century Arabia constituted more than just a primitive patriarchal society, for the majority of transhumant cattle-breeders was supplemented by Arab traders and Arab agriculturalists (or “semi-agriculturalists”, as Asfendiarov had it, for they still had connections to the nomadic way of life). Taken together, these three social groups still made up one single economic formation, one that was characterized by a certain amount of economic specialization with all ensuing social contradictions, especially a marked distinction between rich and poor. What they all had in common was their tribal organization, which did not evolve into a community- or neighborhood-based social organization. The tribal organization, according to Asfendiarov, was not simply a “residue” (perezhitok) of the past that was doomed to vanish, but rather a very functional element necessary for survival in all three economic environments. He concluded that the Orient was characterized not by a historical sequence of primitive-patriarchal, feudal, and capitalist society, as in the West, but by one tribal
formation that combined elements from all three formations. According to Asfendiarov, this tribal formation was retained at least until the 16th century.
Islam, in Asfendiarov’s mind, was nothing but the event that triggered off the social expansion of the Arab tribes, uniting the tribes to break the isolation of Arabia. It was an “unconscious impulse”, an “almost secondary reason” for the movement of the tribes. Islam should therefore be
understood as an economic movement of the tribes. Accordingly, Asfendiarov strongly criticized Reisner’s view that Islam embodied the interests of the Meccan traders.
forward by the economist Mikhail L. Tomara. Tomara’s article in the Ateist special issue of 1930, entitled “The
Origin of Islam and Its Class Basis”, points at the role of peasants
and agriculture in seventh-century Arabia. Tomara listed up a vast
number of witnesses, taken partly from al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), but
mostly from European travellers like Niebuhr, Burton and Palgrave,
and especially from Aloys Sprenger’s Das Leben und Werk des Mohammed
(1861–1865), showing that Arabia’s agricultural and horticultural
population vastly exceeded its Bedouin population, not to speak of
the merchants.
In Tomara’s mind, agriculture was mainly taken up
by impoverished Bedouins; under the general climate change in
Arabia, Bedouins whose pastures dried up would either emigrate or, when the emigration was blocked as was the case before Islam,
dig wells and settle down to pursue agriculture with the help of
artificial irrigation. The continuous transformation of pasture land
into fields led to an intensified struggle between the Bedouins and
the peasant population. Tomara assumed that the agriculturalists
consisted mainly of clients (mawālī, sing. mawla) of powerful
clans, manumitted slaves and other dislocated people. Poor agriculturalists
would become dependent on usurers and often lose their
house, land, and cattle, thus being forced to work as hired pastors
(Russ. batraki) for rich neighbors. Tomara thus distinguished three
“classes”: nomads, well-to-do peasants, and impoverished peasants
who lived a semi-transhumant or even transhumant life (obviously,
while herding the Bedouins’ cattle). Incidentally, he provided no source for his assumption that impoverished peasants sold their labor as pastors.
Tomara further maintained that trade was only slightly developed
in 7th-century Arabia, and therefore Islam cannot be credited to it:
“Islam was born in the trade city of Mecca, but only as an expression
of the dissatisfaction of the poor strata of the city; and it turned
out to be unsuccessful there. Trade capital, as a fierce opponent of
Islam, defeated Islam and drove it out of Mecca”
Subsequently,
Islam found a solid class basis in Medina, an exclusively agricultural
town. The Koran’s endorsement of charity, so Tomara, the use of
alms to support the poor, to manumit slaves, and to relieve debtors
from their financial burdens, shows clearly that Islam emerged as
the religion of the urban poor. The poor emigrants (muhājirūn) from
Mecca joined the urban poor of Medina and broke the power of
the rich Medinan landowners who had opposed Muhammad at
several occasions. As indicated in Koran 59:7, Muhammad allotted
agricultural lands in and around Medina to his poor supporters as
well as to people who flocked to him from other agricultural communities
in Arabia. The increasing need to reward peasant supporters
led to the expulsion, and later annihilation, of the Jewish clans of Medina, for they held the best arable land in and around the oasis.
By contrast, Muhammad did not invest much energy into the fight
against the Quraysh, for there was no peasant land to gain from
dry Mecca; the few famous battles like Badr (in 624) were mere
skirmishes, and the later battle at Uhud and the Meccan siege of
Medina show that Muhammad was clearly on the defensive against
his hometown. Tomara found support for his “peasant theory” in
the Koran; its ban of interest, in his mind, expressed the interests
of agriculturalists who suffered from exploitation by usurers. Also,
he suggested that the Koranic inheritance laws reflect the ongoing
splitting-up of agricultural land in Medina.
The nomads, by contrast, did not play an active role in Tomara’s
scenario; they were unreliable as warriors,75 and they accepted Islam
only superficially. Also, “if Islam was the religion of the nomadic
cattle-breeders, then Paradise would have been depicted [in the
Koran] as infinite steppes of high grass, similar to the way how
American Indians imagined their reward in the Hereafter as hunting
grounds in prairies with plenty of bisons and other wild animals.”
Accordingly, in the War of Apostasy (ridda) after Muhammad’s death
the Bedouin tribes tried to reclaim the pasture lands they had lost
to the poor Medinans and to agriculture. But this rebellion was
crushed by Abū Bakr, and the nomads found themselves forced to
emigrate. As both the Sassanid and the Byzantine empire were now
in political and economical disarray, the Bedouins found an easy
outlet by emigration to Persia, Syria, and Egypt. In result, and
somewhat surprisingly, the Islamic expansion under the first caliphs
was mainly undertaken by nomads driven out of their territories by
Islam itself. Thus, in its beginnings Islam was the ideology of the
peasants, and only later, under the Abbasids after 750, did Islam
become “the ideology of trade capital in the form of Mu’tazilism, and the ideology of the feudal classes of Persia in the form of
Shi’ism.”
Tomara’s interpretation thus does not ignore the role of nomadic
Bedouins and urban traders, and even assigns them meaningful roles
in the emergence and spread of Islam. Their functions, however,
were mainly defined in the negative. Because Tomara
pointed out the crucial role of the poor agriculturalists in and around
the towns, his concept would be regarded by his opponents as a
mere “peasant theory”.
I. Klimovich (1907–1989), in his first major scholarly article, entitled “On the Origin of
Islam”, made references to a
considerable number of Western Orientalists (like Dozy, Nöldeke,
Muir, Weil, von Kremer, Lammens, and Sprenger) and largely followed Mikhail Reisner’s theory that Islam emerged from Meccan trade
capitalism. The opposition of the poor merchant families was directed
against the rich clans and their pagan cult at the kaaba. This opposition
manifested itself first in the movement of the Arab Hanif
monotheists which was later to develop into Islam. Klimovich maintained
that this movement was originally atheist, progressive and
revolutionary in character; when Muhammad became its figurehead
the movement took on religious traits, yet without losing its progressive
character right away. After the hijra to Medina Muhammad
turned into a dexterous politician for whom Islam was nothing but
a means to gain power. Similarly, the Arab tribes that joined the
movement were only interested in booty, not in religion. After a
series of battles the reactionary merchants of Mecca decided to
embrace the new religion, because they understood that Islam would
provide them with a new instrument for ruling over the Arab tribes.
It is at the hands of these rich merchant families, according to
Klimovich, that Islam finally turned from a revolutionary movement
into an instrument for oppression and spiritual enslavement of the
Muslim masses. It seems that with his insistence on the “progressive” character of early Islam Klimovich intended to develop a new and specific strategy for anti-Islamic propaganda, one that would pull the carpet from underneath the believers’ feet.
After graduating in 1929 Klimovich returned to his hometown
Kazan, where he was a member of the local branch of the League
of the Militant Godless (Soiuz Voinstvuiushchikh Bezbozhnikov, SVB).
That same year he published his first two books. In Sotsialisticheskoe
stroitel’stvo na vostoke i religiia, Klimovich maintained that the Muslim
periphery of the Soviet Union was witnessing an ongoing revival of
Islam. Under the conditions of the New Economic Policy, reformist
mullahs tried to convince the Muslim masses that Islam was perfectly compatible with socialism.
Klimovich warned that this was a deception,
for socialism was based on Marxism, materialism
, and the
dialectical method, and diametrically opposed to religion and its
idealism
. Atheist propagandists, however, were often helpless in their
discussions with the believers. What Klimovich considered necessary,
therefore, was basic information on Islam for the anti-religious
activist. This was the purpose of his second book of 1929, Soderzhanie
korana (“The Contents of the Koran”). This book was
basically a compilation of quotations from the Koran. Klimovich
explained the book’s structure, the Koranic image of God, as well
as its narratives on the creation of the world, Judgment Day, Paradise,
and Hell. Above all, he emphasized internal contradictions in the
Koranic message and the scientific inaccurateness and simplicity
of the scripture.
Klimovich’s Koran book still followed Mikhail Reisner’s view that
Islam emerged from Meccan merchant capitalism. The Koran,
according to Klimovich, was an “Arabic law book” which demanded
discipline in the interest of the merchant corporation, whose codex
it represents. Besides trade, a second “way” demanded in the holy
book of Islam is endurance and obedience to God, the Prophet and
his family, as well as to the “people in power”, which, in Klimovich’s
mind, clearly reflected the reactionary turn of Islam. The third “way”
of Islam is jihād, the call to fight and kill the unbelievers. As martyrs
would directly go to heaven, Klimovich regarded jihād as “a lottery
in which one cannot lose”.
sources were necessary to make sense of it at all. In result, the time gap between Muhammad’s alleged lifetime and the first written
sources was so huge that we cannot suppose that any of the information given in these sources is authentic. According to Klimovich,
also references to Muhammad in Christian sources were anything
but convincing. Klimovich concluded that nothing is known for
sure about the historical Muhammad, and that it is even likely that
he never existed. Quite consequently, Klimovich assumed that the
Koran was not Muhammad’s work but the product of a whole
group of authors. Muhammad was created by later historians as
a myth, designed to explain the emergence of the Islamic community
out of the Hanif movement. The prophet was an invention to cover
up early Islam’s character as a social protest movement.
Islam which Ditiakin had already published in 1927, without, however, giving any credit to Ditiakin. As we have seen, Engels remarked that religion was a “fantastic” reflection on life, that Islam was the “reaction of the Bedouins” as well as the “first act of the awakening Arabian national consciousness”, a “return to the old”. Taking these quotes together, Klimovich concluded that Islam had to be classified as reactionary.
Klimovich now contended that Islam resulted from a process of “feudalization”
and centralization of the Arabic tribes, which was reflected in the
centralization of the religious cults in the Kaaba. Put in these terms,
Islam emerged as the “ideology of feudal lords (Russ. feodalov)”,
representing exploitation and inequality.
Already in previous years Soviet anti-religious activists in the Muslim peripheries attacked Muslim landowners alongside mullahs, claiming that Islam supported feudal exploitation. In
the early 1930s, however, Islam itself started to be regarded as a feudal product. At the same time, the tone of the debates became
even more aggressive. One of the earliest contributions to this develop
ment was a review essay written by one Kh. Naumov in 1932, which appeared in Revoliutsionnyi Vostok.
Naumov’s review essay attacked
Evgenii Beliaev, who had recently published a textbook with Russian
translations of Western European Orientalists. Naumov attacked Beliaev harshly not only for “popularizing” the
achievements of bourgeois Orientalists but also for presenting the
three economic environments distinctly, and for adding them up
“mechanically”. Instead of being separated, he insisted, “the three
systems were distinct parts of a unified economy of Arabia in those
days, with the trade regions having a dominant role on the basis
of their feudal relations”. Naumov
nowhere explained this relationship between trade and feudalism,
nor did he provide any sources.
Naumov quoted Engels to the effect that “all religion (…) is
nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external
forces which control their daily live”. This quote alone sufficed
him to maintain that “the Koran is the distorted fantastic expression
of the reality of those times”. Consequently, it is wrong to regard
the Koran as a source for early Islam. Naumov went on to explain
that it is also inacceptable to make a distinction between Muslims
and non-Muslims, as Beliaev had done when he mentioned that the
Muslims of Medina were attacking the caravans of pagan Mecca.
Making a distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, so Naumov,
means to take over the position of “missionaries” who sort out the
non-believers (as we will see, the accusation that Orientalists become
missionaries, that scholarship serves religion, was becoming a convenient
and widespread instrument of defamation in the 1930s).
Naumov also attacked many other Marxist Orientalists, including
Liutsian Klimovich for his view that Islam was a “social revolution”
of the “progressive elements of Arabic trade capital”.
Naumov’s leveling of Muslims and non-Muslims, his disregard for
religion as a special factor, can probably best be characterized as an
ultra-leftist position. In general, however, his rejection of the importance
of religion and personalities and his deterministic emphasis
on materialism can still be linked to the school of M.N. Pokrovskii.
“The centralization of the
monetary capital in some Arabian cities, above all in Mecca, the
struggle against the ‘colonizers’ [i.e., the Ethiopians and the Persians],
the dissolution of natural (economic) relations, and the process of
class warfare in general pushed the Arabs with iron inevitability
towards the creation of an Arabic state.”
Klimovich embraced the Feudalism theory wholeheartedly and attacked Navshirvanov and Tomara
Klimovich attacked the “trade capitalism theory” of Reisner with
similar harshness; to be sure, Reisner had died some years before,
but as seen above, his theory had been taken up and modified by
Evgenii Beliaev and others.
The change in the general political atmosphere of the country and
in Islamic studies in particular prompted many authors to readjust
their positions. This produced a weak but unified Soviet theory on
Islam that would henceforth be regarded as dogma. In the following years it became impossible to describe Islam in
any meaningful manner. The surviving participants in the Soviet
discourse on Islam had to subscribe to the dogma that linked Islam
to feudalism. At the same time it was carefully avoided to ascribe
any content to the term “feudal”, or to explain its relationship with
the “trade capitalists”.
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
theoreticians about Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, its origins and development based on Historical materialism
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
and Muslims. The central question of this discourse was how Muslim society would fit into the general development of human history
World History
World History, Global History or Transnational history is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective...
. Prominent Soviet orientalists
Oriental studies
Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies...
include Mikhail A. Reisner, Evgenii Beliaev, Liutsian I. Klimovich, Mikhail L. Tomara, V. Ditiakin and Sandzhar D. Asfendiarov.
Background
The October RevolutionOctober Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
brought the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
to power. The Soviet Union had a large Muslim population
Islam in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was a state comprising fifteen communist republics which existed from 1922 until its dissolution into a series of separate nation states in 1991. Of these fifteen republics, six had a Muslim majority, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan...
of various ethnicities. Therefore, there was a pressing need for original research as Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
only dealt with the subject superficially. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks created new institutions and organizations intended to produce devoted Marxist scholars of Oriental studies. Foremost among them was the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies
Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies
Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies ) was a university-level educational institution that operated in Moscow, Russia, in 1920-1954. It was created as a result of merging Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and the Oriental studies departments in Moscow's other higher educational...
, a party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
school created in 1920 mainly for the requirements of the Soviet foreign service. Its counterpart for educating party workers and
administrators from the Eastern regions and republics of Russia and the USSR, as well as for training communists from abroad, was the Communist University of the Toilers of the Orient
Communist University of the Toilers of the East
The Communist University of the Toilers of the East or KUTV was established April 21, 1921, in Moscow by the Communist International as a training college for communist cadres in the colonial world. The school officially opened on October 21, 1921...
, a school founded in 1921. The new Marxist discourse on Islam was dominated by scholars from these political teaching and research institutions.
Communist Theory of Islam
In 1923, Zinatullah Navshirvanov (a Volga Tatar communist who was also active in the formation of a communist party in Atatürk’s new Republic of Turkey) in the journal Novyi Vostok proposed that there were several forms of communism in Islamic history. The authors detected a “primitive communism” already in the activities of some of Muhammad’s companionsSahaba
In Islam, the ' were the companions, disciples, scribes and family of the Islamic prophet...
, but they found that communism was even more prominent in the tradition of Islamic Sufism
Sufism
Sufism or ' is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a '...
. Under the
cover of Sufism communist ideas and movements emerged that had nothing to do with Islam and religion whatsoever. These movements were driven by Muslims—poor nomad
Nomad
Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...
s as well as peasant
Peasant
A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...
s and urban craftsmen—longing to overthrow the feudal order
Feudalism
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
of their times, i.e., the Abbasid, Seljukid
Seljuq dynasty
The Seljuq ; were a Turco-Persian Sunni Muslim dynasty that ruled parts of Central Asia and the Middle East from the 11th to 14th centuries...
, and Ottoman dynasties
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
in the Near East
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
. As examples the Navshirvanovs mentioned the Shiʿi Ismailites, the Anatolian Futūwa and Akhī organizations, and the Bektashi order of dervishes
Bektashi
Bektashi Order or Bektashism is an Islamic Sufi order founded in the 13th century by the Persian saint Haji Bektash Veli. In addition to the spiritual teachings of Haji Bektash Veli the order was significantly influenced during its formative period by both the Hurufis as well as the...
. The climax of this supposed anti-feudal Sufi communist movement was Sheikh Bedreddin of Simavna who was executed by the Ottomans in 1416 as a heretic; his disciples led peasant rebellions against Ottoman rule and set up what the Navshirvanovs called the “first revolutionary government of Anatolia”.
This theory suffered from lack of sufficient historical evidence and was superseded by other theories.
Trade Capitalism Theory
Mikhail A. Reisner (Michael von Reusner, 1868–1928), ethnic German historian of law and publicist produced a detailed Marxist analysis of the Koran from the perspective of social studiesSocial studies
Social studies is the "integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence," as defined by the American National Council for the Social Studies...
. His interpretation of Islam can be found in two articles on “The Koran and Its Social Ideology”, published in 1926 in a Soviet literary journal. In these studies Reisner maintained that Islam was the religion of the Arab merchants of Mecca
Mecca
Mecca is a city in the Hijaz and the capital of Makkah province in Saudi Arabia. The city is located inland from Jeddah in a narrow valley at a height of above sea level...
. He distinguished between the big merchants, that is, the rich families of Mecca
Mecca
Mecca is a city in the Hijaz and the capital of Makkah province in Saudi Arabia. The city is located inland from Jeddah in a narrow valley at a height of above sea level...
, and the less affluent and poor merchant families. Due to the disunion of the Arab tribes
Tribes of Arabia
Tribes of Arabia refers to Arab clans hailing from the Arabian Peninsula.Much of the lineage provided before Ma'ad relies on biblical genealogy and therefore questions persist concerning the accuracy of this segment of Arab genealogy...
, trade caravans
Trade route
A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long distance arteries which may further be connected to several smaller networks of commercial...
were constantly running the risk of being raided by nomads. These caravan
Convoy
A convoy is a group of vehicles, typically motor vehicles or ships, traveling together for mutual support and protection. Often, a convoy is organized with armed defensive support, though it may also be used in a non-military sense, for example when driving through remote areas.-Age of Sail:Naval...
s were organized as joint ventures of rich and less affluent trade families of the Quraysh tribe, but the poorer merchants invested, and therefore risked, a higher percentage of their capital than the rich families. For this reason the idea of a union of the Arab tribes under one monotheistic religion
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...
was developed by the poorer families of the Quraysh, for only such a union would eliminate the raids. Their speaker became Muhammad, who himself hailed from one of the less privileged Quraysh clans
Banu Hashim
Banū Hāshim was a clan in the Quraysh tribe. Muhammad, was a member of this clan; his great-grandfather was Hashim, for whom the clan is named. Members of this clan are referred to by the Anglicised version of their name as Hashemites, or Huseini or Hasani...
.
Reisner maintains that the Koran portrayed Allah
Allah
Allah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...
as "a rich, powerful and smart capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
". In Medina
Medina
Medina , or ; also transliterated as Madinah, or madinat al-nabi "the city of the prophet") is a city in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia, and serves as the capital of the Al Madinah Province. It is the second holiest city in Islam, and the burial place of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, and...
, Muhammad acted not so much as a prophet and preacher but as a skillful organizer. He was successful not because people were eager to join a new religion but because they longed for a law
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
that would unite them. The Koran, Reisner continues, only guarantees the right to property and creates a “World Trade Company of Believers” (mirovaia torgovaia kompaniia veruiushchikh) under God’s own leadership. Many elements in the Koran reflect a merchant’s position: the prayers and rituals are not very complex and do not require “spiritual contortions”; the pilgrimage
Pilgrimage
A pilgrimage is a journey or search of great moral or spiritual significance. Typically, it is a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith...
to Mecca
Mecca
Mecca is a city in the Hijaz and the capital of Makkah province in Saudi Arabia. The city is located inland from Jeddah in a narrow valley at a height of above sea level...
(ḥajj
Hajj
The Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is one of the largest pilgrimages in the world, and is the fifth pillar of Islam, a religious duty that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so...
) is linked to a trade fair; tithe
Tithe
A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government. Today, tithes are normally voluntary and paid in cash, cheques, or stocks, whereas historically tithes were required and paid in kind, such as agricultural products...
s (zakāt
Zakat
Zakāt , one of the Five Pillars of Islam, is the giving of a fixed portion of one's wealth to charity, generally to the poor and needy.-History:Zakat, a practice initiated by Muhammed himself, has played an important role throughout Islamic history...
) is restricted to a moderate level, and believers are exhorted not to squander their money; while usury
Riba
Riba means one of the senses of "usury" . Riba is forbidden in Islamic economic jurisprudence fiqh and considered as a major sin...
is forbidden, Muslims are encouraged to make moderate profits; and, of course, the Koran emphasizes the importance of oaths, correct measurements, and the faithful return of the deposit.
Reisner explains that mystical elements, which tended to supersede the clear class distinctions, were to enter Islam only much later, mainly stemming from the Persian tradition.
Reisner’s interpretation turned out to be very influential among Soviet scholars of the late 1920s.
Beliaev’s Modification of the “Trade Capitalism Theory”
Evgenii Beliaev (1895–1964) was the only professional trained in Oriental languages among all participants in the early Soviet discourse on Islam. In his contribution to the 1930 special issue of Ateist on the origins of Islam, Beliaev argued that Islam emerged from the merchant environment of Mecca. The pagan religion served the purpose of trade, and the authority of the gods in the kaabaKaaba
The Kaaba is a cuboid-shaped building in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and is the most sacred site in Islam. The Qur'an states that the Kaaba was constructed by Abraham, or Ibraheem, in Arabic, and his son Ishmael, or Ismaeel, as said in Arabic, after he had settled in Arabia. The building has a mosque...
grew with the wealth of the merchants. Islam emerged in the late 6th century as a movement of the less wealthy, “intermediary and lower Meccan bourgeoisie” against this “‘aristocracy’ of avaricious traders and pitiless usurers.”
In contrast to Reisner, however, Beliaev did not see anything progressive, liberating, or even revolutionary in this initial Islam: for instance, Islam did not stand up against slavery. Beliaev compared the image of God in the Koran to that of a despot and slave owner.
According to Beliav, a similar struggle was taking place in Medina, where some clans became dependant upon others, and especially upon the Jewish
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
clans
Jewish tribes of Arabia
The Arab Jewish tribes are the Arab tribes professing the Jewish faith that inhabited the Arabian Peninsula before and during the advent of Islam. It is not always clear whether they were originally Israelite in ancestry, genealogically Arab tribes that converted to Judaism, or a mixture of both...
, whose wealth was based on “usury capital
Usury
Usury Originally, when the charging of interest was still banned by Christian churches, usury simply meant the charging of interest at any rate . In countries where the charging of interest became acceptable, the term came to be used for interest above the rate allowed by law...
” (rostovshchicheskii kapital). The gradual dissolution of the ancient tribal and clan structures in Muslim Medina must not be ascribed to the religion of Islam but rather to the development of Meccan trade capital, and in general to the transition to private property in slaves, cattle, and other possessions. “With an eagerness and love for detail that is characteristic for the petty bourgeoisie, the boring, depressing and dull Suras of the Medinan period lay down the regulations for property and inheritance as well as buying and selling”.In Medina Muhammad changed the prayer direction
Qibla
The Qiblah , also transliterated as Qibla, Kiblah or Kibla, is the direction that should be faced when a Muslim prays during salah...
from Jerusalem to Mecca; “praying to the Muslim God, they bow down before the only god that they respect, namely capital.” When the “medium wealthy” traders finally took over Mecca, they reached their goal: together with the rich “Quraysh of the Center” they found themselves at the helm of the “trade capitalist organization of the Hijaz” which eventually united the tribes of Arabia. The nomads, by contrast, did not play an active role in Beliaev’s scenario; after Muhammad’s death they easily committed apostasy
Apostasy in Islam
Apostasy in Islam is commonly defined in Islam as the rejection in word or deed of one's former religion by a person who was previously a follower of Islam...
and had to be forced back to Islam by the first caliph, Abu Bakr
Abu Bakr
Abu Bakr was a senior companion and the father-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He ruled over the Rashidun Caliphate from 632-634 CE when he became the first Muslim Caliph following Muhammad's death...
.
Ditiakin
V. Ditiakin, an expert on the history of Marxism, took as his starting point the works of Marx and Engels instead of Islamic tradition, nor Western Oriental studies or even Reisner. Ditiakin conceded that Marx and Engels had only limited sources at their disposal and never devoted a special study to Islam; nevertheless he believed they came to important insights on this topic.According to Ditiakin, Marx and Engels understood that pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabia refers to the Arabic civilization which existed in the Arabian Plate before the rise of Islam in the 630s. The study of Pre-Islamic Arabia is important to Islamic studies as it provides the context for the development of Islam.-Studies:...
was characterized by two different environments, that of nomadic Bedouin
Bedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...
s and that of settled urban traders. As the correspondences of the two thinkers show, the Bedouins could hardly be characterized as bearers of high culture, whereas the population of the southwestern Arabian peninsula was a “civilized” Oriental high culture. Obviously, Engels had access to publications on petroglyphs from Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
, which, in his mind, reflected “the ancient, national Arabic tradition of monotheism”. However, in the centuries immediately before Muhammad the old culture of Yemen was destroyed by incursions of the Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
ns, and consequently also the Arabian trade route to the north via Mecca was in decay. This decline of trade in the period before Muhammad was, as Engels
wrote to Marx in 1853, “one of the chief factors in the Muhammadan revolution”.
To quote Engels again, “it seems that Mohammad’s religious revolution, like every religious movement, was formally a reaction, an alleged return to the old, the simple”. “the movement [of Muhammad] has seemed to me to have the character of a Bedouin reaction against the settled but degenerate fellahin of the towns, who at that time had also become very decadent in their religion, mingling a corrupt nature-cult with corrupt Judaism and Christianity.” The decline referred to by Engels was thus economic and religious.
According to Ditiakin, Engels’ statements led to the apparent contradiction that the uncivilized Bedouins, who were defeated and driven out of their country by foreign invaders, created an “ideological system
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
” that would ultimately rescue Arabia and soon rule over
a huge part of the world. In Ditiakin’s mind, this apparent contradiction can only be solved by the following line of reasoning: The cradle of Islam was characterized by a coexistence of the nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins and the formerly highly developed trade economy of the “urban fellahs
Fellah
Fellah , also alternatively known as Fallah is a peasant, farmer or agricultural laborer in the Middle East and North Africa...
”, which was however in decline, but still “potentially” stronger than the Bedouin culture. A series of “revolutionary blows” was necessary to dissolve the contradictions between the two, and to free the trade formation from its restrictions. These blows came in the form of foreign invasions, as Engels had
suggested in 1853: “The expulsion of the Abyssinia
Habesha people
The term Habesha ābešā, Ḥābešā; al-Ḥabašah) refers to the South Semitic-speaking group of people whose cultural, linguistic, and in certain cases, ancestral origins trace back to those people who ruled the Axumite Empire and the kingdom known as DʿMT .Peoples referred to as "Habesha" today...
ns took place about forty years before Mohammed and was obviously the first act of the awakening Arabian national consciousness, which was also spurred by Persian invasions from the North, pushing forward almost to Mecca”.
For Ditiakin, Islam had a Bedouin character, and Bedouin lifestyle had a huge impact on the new religion. Due to the course of the Islamic expansion, however, the emergent religion of Islam was soon adapted to the foundations of urban economy. Accordingly, Islam eliminated the relics of the clan-based society and became the ideology of an urban society. The old nomadic and Bedouin cultural heritage of Islam, however, turned out to be strong enough to prevent Islam from becoming dominant in Europe. Ditiakin came to the conclusion that Muhammad’s fight against the Quraysh of Mecca was “a revolution of the dying Bedouin culture against developing trade capital”—seemingly the exact contrary to Reisner’s trade capitalism theory.
Bedouin Theory
Another interpretation of the role of the Bedouins was brought forward by the Kazakh communist and historian Sandzhar D. Asfendiarov (1889–1938). In 1928, during his brief directorate of the Moscow Oriental Institute, Asfendiarov published his first booklet on the “Reasons for the Emergence of Islam”.Asfendiarov regarded Islam as the product not of the merchants of Mecca, as Reisner did, but
of the Arab nomads. To him, the Islamic expansion was a huge emigration wave of about one million nomads from the Hijaz and Najd
Najd
Najd or Nejd , literally Highland, is the central region of the Arabian Peninsula.-Boundaries :The Arabic word nejd literally means "upland" and was once applied to a variety of regions within the Arabian Peninsula...
regions of Arabia to the outside world. Asfendiarov maintained that Islam emerged as the last huge expansion of Semite tribes from Arabia. However, Asfendiarov insisted that this expansion resulted from changes in the nomadic economy, not from climate change.
According to him, the Arabs were beyond the formation of “primitive patriarchal nomadism”; rather, they possessed a “developed”, modified cattle breeding economy. By the 7th century, Arabia suffered from a scarcity in land for cattle breeding. The Byzantine and Persian empires in the North, and the Persian and Ethiopian interventions in Yemen, resulted in an isolation of
Central Arabia, as well as in a heightened competition for the available pastures. Due to this scarcity and competition, Arab
tribes now occupied the oases and towns of the Hijaz, like Mecca and Medina, which had hitherto been inhabited mainly by Jews and other settled populations. The Arabic tribes that conquered these settlements took over the agricultural and merchant activities that had been in place. Some Bedouin tribes, like the Quraysh, therefore
turned into trading tribes. Due to the increased mutual raiding and warfare among cattle-breeders, more and more Arab nomads lost their livestock, settled around these settlements as pauperized and dependant clans, and took on agricultural work to make a living.
For all of these reasons, the tribal economy of 7th-century Arabia constituted more than just a primitive patriarchal society, for the majority of transhumant cattle-breeders was supplemented by Arab traders and Arab agriculturalists (or “semi-agriculturalists”, as Asfendiarov had it, for they still had connections to the nomadic way of life). Taken together, these three social groups still made up one single economic formation, one that was characterized by a certain amount of economic specialization with all ensuing social contradictions, especially a marked distinction between rich and poor. What they all had in common was their tribal organization, which did not evolve into a community- or neighborhood-based social organization. The tribal organization, according to Asfendiarov, was not simply a “residue” (perezhitok) of the past that was doomed to vanish, but rather a very functional element necessary for survival in all three economic environments. He concluded that the Orient was characterized not by a historical sequence of primitive-patriarchal, feudal, and capitalist society, as in the West, but by one tribal
formation that combined elements from all three formations. According to Asfendiarov, this tribal formation was retained at least until the 16th century.
Islam, in Asfendiarov’s mind, was nothing but the event that triggered off the social expansion of the Arab tribes, uniting the tribes to break the isolation of Arabia. It was an “unconscious impulse”, an “almost secondary reason” for the movement of the tribes. Islam should therefore be
understood as an economic movement of the tribes. Accordingly, Asfendiarov strongly criticized Reisner’s view that Islam embodied the interests of the Meccan traders.
Peasant Theory
A completely new interpretation of the rise of Islam was broughtforward by the economist Mikhail L. Tomara. Tomara’s article in the Ateist special issue of 1930, entitled “The
Origin of Islam and Its Class Basis”, points at the role of peasants
and agriculture in seventh-century Arabia. Tomara listed up a vast
number of witnesses, taken partly from al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), but
mostly from European travellers like Niebuhr, Burton and Palgrave,
and especially from Aloys Sprenger’s Das Leben und Werk des Mohammed
(1861–1865), showing that Arabia’s agricultural and horticultural
population vastly exceeded its Bedouin population, not to speak of
the merchants.
In Tomara’s mind, agriculture was mainly taken up
by impoverished Bedouins; under the general climate change in
Arabia, Bedouins whose pastures dried up would either emigrate or, when the emigration was blocked as was the case before Islam,
dig wells and settle down to pursue agriculture with the help of
artificial irrigation. The continuous transformation of pasture land
into fields led to an intensified struggle between the Bedouins and
the peasant population. Tomara assumed that the agriculturalists
consisted mainly of clients (mawālī, sing. mawla) of powerful
clans, manumitted slaves and other dislocated people. Poor agriculturalists
would become dependent on usurers and often lose their
house, land, and cattle, thus being forced to work as hired pastors
(Russ. batraki) for rich neighbors. Tomara thus distinguished three
“classes”: nomads, well-to-do peasants, and impoverished peasants
who lived a semi-transhumant or even transhumant life (obviously,
while herding the Bedouins’ cattle). Incidentally, he provided no source for his assumption that impoverished peasants sold their labor as pastors.
Tomara further maintained that trade was only slightly developed
in 7th-century Arabia, and therefore Islam cannot be credited to it:
“Islam was born in the trade city of Mecca, but only as an expression
of the dissatisfaction of the poor strata of the city; and it turned
out to be unsuccessful there. Trade capital, as a fierce opponent of
Islam, defeated Islam and drove it out of Mecca”
Subsequently,
Islam found a solid class basis in Medina, an exclusively agricultural
town. The Koran’s endorsement of charity, so Tomara, the use of
alms to support the poor, to manumit slaves, and to relieve debtors
from their financial burdens, shows clearly that Islam emerged as
the religion of the urban poor. The poor emigrants (muhājirūn) from
Mecca joined the urban poor of Medina and broke the power of
the rich Medinan landowners who had opposed Muhammad at
several occasions. As indicated in Koran 59:7, Muhammad allotted
agricultural lands in and around Medina to his poor supporters as
well as to people who flocked to him from other agricultural communities
in Arabia. The increasing need to reward peasant supporters
led to the expulsion, and later annihilation, of the Jewish clans of Medina, for they held the best arable land in and around the oasis.
By contrast, Muhammad did not invest much energy into the fight
against the Quraysh, for there was no peasant land to gain from
dry Mecca; the few famous battles like Badr (in 624) were mere
skirmishes, and the later battle at Uhud and the Meccan siege of
Medina show that Muhammad was clearly on the defensive against
his hometown. Tomara found support for his “peasant theory” in
the Koran; its ban of interest, in his mind, expressed the interests
of agriculturalists who suffered from exploitation by usurers. Also,
he suggested that the Koranic inheritance laws reflect the ongoing
splitting-up of agricultural land in Medina.
The nomads, by contrast, did not play an active role in Tomara’s
scenario; they were unreliable as warriors,75 and they accepted Islam
only superficially. Also, “if Islam was the religion of the nomadic
cattle-breeders, then Paradise would have been depicted [in the
Koran] as infinite steppes of high grass, similar to the way how
American Indians imagined their reward in the Hereafter as hunting
grounds in prairies with plenty of bisons and other wild animals.”
Accordingly, in the War of Apostasy (ridda) after Muhammad’s death
the Bedouin tribes tried to reclaim the pasture lands they had lost
to the poor Medinans and to agriculture. But this rebellion was
crushed by Abū Bakr, and the nomads found themselves forced to
emigrate. As both the Sassanid and the Byzantine empire were now
in political and economical disarray, the Bedouins found an easy
outlet by emigration to Persia, Syria, and Egypt. In result, and
somewhat surprisingly, the Islamic expansion under the first caliphs
was mainly undertaken by nomads driven out of their territories by
Islam itself. Thus, in its beginnings Islam was the ideology of the
peasants, and only later, under the Abbasids after 750, did Islam
become “the ideology of trade capital in the form of Mu’tazilism, and the ideology of the feudal classes of Persia in the form of
Shi’ism.”
Tomara’s interpretation thus does not ignore the role of nomadic
Bedouins and urban traders, and even assigns them meaningful roles
in the emergence and spread of Islam. Their functions, however,
were mainly defined in the negative. Because Tomara
pointed out the crucial role of the poor agriculturalists in and around
the towns, his concept would be regarded by his opponents as a
mere “peasant theory”.
Klimovich
LiutsianI. Klimovich (1907–1989), in his first major scholarly article, entitled “On the Origin of
Islam”, made references to a
considerable number of Western Orientalists (like Dozy, Nöldeke,
Muir, Weil, von Kremer, Lammens, and Sprenger) and largely followed Mikhail Reisner’s theory that Islam emerged from Meccan trade
capitalism. The opposition of the poor merchant families was directed
against the rich clans and their pagan cult at the kaaba. This opposition
manifested itself first in the movement of the Arab Hanif
monotheists which was later to develop into Islam. Klimovich maintained
that this movement was originally atheist, progressive and
revolutionary in character; when Muhammad became its figurehead
the movement took on religious traits, yet without losing its progressive
character right away. After the hijra to Medina Muhammad
turned into a dexterous politician for whom Islam was nothing but
a means to gain power. Similarly, the Arab tribes that joined the
movement were only interested in booty, not in religion. After a
series of battles the reactionary merchants of Mecca decided to
embrace the new religion, because they understood that Islam would
provide them with a new instrument for ruling over the Arab tribes.
It is at the hands of these rich merchant families, according to
Klimovich, that Islam finally turned from a revolutionary movement
into an instrument for oppression and spiritual enslavement of the
Muslim masses. It seems that with his insistence on the “progressive” character of early Islam Klimovich intended to develop a new and specific strategy for anti-Islamic propaganda, one that would pull the carpet from underneath the believers’ feet.
After graduating in 1929 Klimovich returned to his hometown
Kazan, where he was a member of the local branch of the League
of the Militant Godless (Soiuz Voinstvuiushchikh Bezbozhnikov, SVB).
That same year he published his first two books. In Sotsialisticheskoe
stroitel’stvo na vostoke i religiia, Klimovich maintained that the Muslim
periphery of the Soviet Union was witnessing an ongoing revival of
Islam. Under the conditions of the New Economic Policy, reformist
mullahs tried to convince the Muslim masses that Islam was perfectly compatible with socialism.
Klimovich warned that this was a deception,
for socialism was based on Marxism, materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
, and the
dialectical method, and diametrically opposed to religion and its
idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. Atheist propagandists, however, were often helpless in their
discussions with the believers. What Klimovich considered necessary,
therefore, was basic information on Islam for the anti-religious
activist. This was the purpose of his second book of 1929, Soderzhanie
korana (“The Contents of the Koran”). This book was
basically a compilation of quotations from the Koran. Klimovich
explained the book’s structure, the Koranic image of God, as well
as its narratives on the creation of the world, Judgment Day, Paradise,
and Hell. Above all, he emphasized internal contradictions in the
Koranic message and the scientific inaccurateness and simplicity
of the scripture.
Klimovich’s Koran book still followed Mikhail Reisner’s view that
Islam emerged from Meccan merchant capitalism. The Koran,
according to Klimovich, was an “Arabic law book” which demanded
discipline in the interest of the merchant corporation, whose codex
it represents. Besides trade, a second “way” demanded in the holy
book of Islam is endurance and obedience to God, the Prophet and
his family, as well as to the “people in power”, which, in Klimovich’s
mind, clearly reflected the reactionary turn of Islam. The third “way”
of Islam is jihād, the call to fight and kill the unbelievers. As martyrs
would directly go to heaven, Klimovich regarded jihād as “a lottery
in which one cannot lose”.
Existence of Muhammad
In November 1930 Klimovich came up with what he probably believed to be a fatal blow to Islam and at the same time a revolution within Islamic studies. That month he gave a lecture in the Communist Academy (probably in Kazan), asking the provocative question, “Did Muhammad Exist?” This lecture amounted to a wholesale refutation of Islamic historiography on the early Muslim community. According to Klimovich, no contemporary sources on Muhammad’s life have come down to us; the earliest known reports and biographies of the prophet, like that of Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, were written by Muslim authors of the mid-8th and 9th centuries. By that time, however, the Muslim scholars themselves had no reliable information on Muhammad’s life at their disposal; all they had was the Koran, and therefore their biographies and the ḥadīth material is nothing but a late illustration and commentary on the Koran. In fact, by that time the language of the Koran itself was so incomprehensible even to Arabs that the new additionalsources were necessary to make sense of it at all. In result, the time gap between Muhammad’s alleged lifetime and the first written
sources was so huge that we cannot suppose that any of the information given in these sources is authentic. According to Klimovich,
also references to Muhammad in Christian sources were anything
but convincing. Klimovich concluded that nothing is known for
sure about the historical Muhammad, and that it is even likely that
he never existed. Quite consequently, Klimovich assumed that the
Koran was not Muhammad’s work but the product of a whole
group of authors. Muhammad was created by later historians as
a myth, designed to explain the emergence of the Islamic community
out of the Hanif movement. The prophet was an invention to cover
up early Islam’s character as a social protest movement.
During the Stalinist Era
During the Stalinist Era and the domination of Feudalism theory, Klimovich understood he had to withdraw from his view that Islam had initially been a progressive social protest movement. The starting point could no longer be the Koran, the Arabic tradition, or the critique of “bourgeois” Orientalism; instead, one had to start with the works of Marx and Engels. In a lecture held at the KUTV in May 1933, 120 Klimovich basically listed up all quotes by Engels onIslam which Ditiakin had already published in 1927, without, however, giving any credit to Ditiakin. As we have seen, Engels remarked that religion was a “fantastic” reflection on life, that Islam was the “reaction of the Bedouins” as well as the “first act of the awakening Arabian national consciousness”, a “return to the old”. Taking these quotes together, Klimovich concluded that Islam had to be classified as reactionary.
Klimovich now contended that Islam resulted from a process of “feudalization”
and centralization of the Arabic tribes, which was reflected in the
centralization of the religious cults in the Kaaba. Put in these terms,
Islam emerged as the “ideology of feudal lords (Russ. feodalov)”,
representing exploitation and inequality.
Feudalism Theory
This theory remained dominant throughout the Stalinist era and afterward because it confirmed the official Soviet doctrine. The other theories were rejected as "Revisionist" and "Trotskyist"Already in previous years Soviet anti-religious activists in the Muslim peripheries attacked Muslim landowners alongside mullahs, claiming that Islam supported feudal exploitation. In
the early 1930s, however, Islam itself started to be regarded as a feudal product. At the same time, the tone of the debates became
even more aggressive. One of the earliest contributions to this develop
ment was a review essay written by one Kh. Naumov in 1932, which appeared in Revoliutsionnyi Vostok.
Naumov’s review essay attacked
Evgenii Beliaev, who had recently published a textbook with Russian
translations of Western European Orientalists. Naumov attacked Beliaev harshly not only for “popularizing” the
achievements of bourgeois Orientalists but also for presenting the
three economic environments distinctly, and for adding them up
“mechanically”. Instead of being separated, he insisted, “the three
systems were distinct parts of a unified economy of Arabia in those
days, with the trade regions having a dominant role on the basis
of their feudal relations”. Naumov
nowhere explained this relationship between trade and feudalism,
nor did he provide any sources.
Naumov quoted Engels to the effect that “all religion (…) is
nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external
forces which control their daily live”. This quote alone sufficed
him to maintain that “the Koran is the distorted fantastic expression
of the reality of those times”. Consequently, it is wrong to regard
the Koran as a source for early Islam. Naumov went on to explain
that it is also inacceptable to make a distinction between Muslims
and non-Muslims, as Beliaev had done when he mentioned that the
Muslims of Medina were attacking the caravans of pagan Mecca.
Making a distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, so Naumov,
means to take over the position of “missionaries” who sort out the
non-believers (as we will see, the accusation that Orientalists become
missionaries, that scholarship serves religion, was becoming a convenient
and widespread instrument of defamation in the 1930s).
Naumov also attacked many other Marxist Orientalists, including
Liutsian Klimovich for his view that Islam was a “social revolution”
of the “progressive elements of Arabic trade capital”.
Naumov’s leveling of Muslims and non-Muslims, his disregard for
religion as a special factor, can probably best be characterized as an
ultra-leftist position. In general, however, his rejection of the importance
of religion and personalities and his deterministic emphasis
on materialism can still be linked to the school of M.N. Pokrovskii.
“The centralization of the
monetary capital in some Arabian cities, above all in Mecca, the
struggle against the ‘colonizers’ [i.e., the Ethiopians and the Persians],
the dissolution of natural (economic) relations, and the process of
class warfare in general pushed the Arabs with iron inevitability
towards the creation of an Arabic state.”
Klimovich embraced the Feudalism theory wholeheartedly and attacked Navshirvanov and Tomara
Klimovich attacked the “trade capitalism theory” of Reisner with
similar harshness; to be sure, Reisner had died some years before,
but as seen above, his theory had been taken up and modified by
Evgenii Beliaev and others.
The change in the general political atmosphere of the country and
in Islamic studies in particular prompted many authors to readjust
their positions. This produced a weak but unified Soviet theory on
Islam that would henceforth be regarded as dogma. In the following years it became impossible to describe Islam in
any meaningful manner. The surviving participants in the Soviet
discourse on Islam had to subscribe to the dogma that linked Islam
to feudalism. At the same time it was carefully avoided to ascribe
any content to the term “feudal”, or to explain its relationship with
the “trade capitalists”.
See also
- Islam in the Soviet UnionIslam in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union was a state comprising fifteen communist republics which existed from 1922 until its dissolution into a series of separate nation states in 1991. Of these fifteen republics, six had a Muslim majority, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan...
- Society of the Godless
- Pre-Islamic ArabiaPre-Islamic ArabiaPre-Islamic Arabia refers to the Arabic civilization which existed in the Arabian Plate before the rise of Islam in the 630s. The study of Pre-Islamic Arabia is important to Islamic studies as it provides the context for the development of Islam.-Studies:...