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“If fanaticism was the sickness in

Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in
Germany, then surely fundamentalism is
the sickness in Islam.”

Contemporary Islam is infected with a sickness

that is cutting it off from the richness of its own
tradition and history. In this impassioned, erudite
and deeply moving book, Abdelwahab Meddeb
traces the genealogy of this malady and at the same
time powerfully demonstrates the pluralist tradi¬
tion at the heart of Islam. In so doing, he disman¬
tles the common misconceptions of both western
scholars of Islam and Islamic fundamentalists, and
offers new paths for engagement between Islam
and the West.
Written in response to September 11, 2001,
with an afterword addressing the war in Iraq, The
Malady of Islam seeks to unravel today’s Islamic
fundamentalism which finds in the Qur’an only a
summons to war. Meddeb looks back across
Islamic history from the Medina of the Prophet in
the seventh century, to ninth-century Baghdad in
the time of Abbassids, to Damascus in the four¬
teenth century, after the Crusades and the collapse
of the Mongolian invasion, and most importantly
to Arabia of the eighteenth century and the
founding of the Wahhabism. His account details
the turning away from the creativity and pluralism
that marked the golden age of Islamic civilization
that has left the Islamic world “inconsolable in its
destitution.” But to understand contemporary fun¬
damentalism it is equally necessary to see how the
West—particularly the United States—has exacer¬
bated the “perversion” of the culture, by failing to
integrate Islam into the rest of the world, by
renouncing its own principles as soon as self-inter-
The Malady of Islam
The Malady
of Islam

Abd elwahab Meddeb

Translated from the French by

PIERRE JORIS AND ANN REID

BASIC

B
BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Originally published as La Maladie de I’Islam
Copyright © Editions de Seuil, 2002
Translation © 2003 by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No

part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address
Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in

the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organiza¬
tions. For more information, please contact the Special Markets
Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center,
Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298, (800) 255-1514 or
email [email protected].

Designed by Fisa Kreinbrink

Fibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meddeb, Abdelwahab.
[Maladie de Pislam. English]
The malady of Islam / Abdelwahab Meddeb ; translated from
the French by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-465-04435-2 (alk. paper)
1. Islamic fundamentalism. 2. Islam—Controversial litera¬
ture. I. Title

BP166.14.F85M4413 2003
320.5'5'0917671—dc21
2003007424

03 04 05 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

I Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 1

II A Genealogy of Fundamentalism 41

III Fundamentalism Against the West 93

IV The Western Exclusion of Islam 145

Afterword: War Chronicles 195

Notes 223
V.
The Malady of Islam
Part I

Islam: Inconsolable
in Its Destitution
 1

The spectacular attack of September 11, which struck the heart of

the United States, is a crime. A crime committed by Islamists. It con¬
stitutes the extreme point of a series of terrorist acts that have fol¬
lowed an exponential curve whose beginning I trace back to 1979, the
year that saw the triumph of Khomeini in Iran and the invasion of
Afghanistan by Soviet troops. These two events had considerable ef¬
fects that reinforced the fundamentalist movements and helped the
dissemination of their ideology. In order to understand the form this
ideology takes, we have to go far back in time. We have to recognize
exactly where the letter—the Qur’an and tradition—is predisposed to
a fundamentalist reading. We have to rediscover the exegetical and
theological tradition in order to unravel the way this letter enables
and encourages those who retain from its meaning only what sum¬
mons them to war. We have to discover where the tradition resists,
where we must allow a new interpretation that did not express itself
where such a tradition grew.

3
4 The Malady of Islam

It is important to know if we can read this literal text according to

the conditions offered by the mental landscape of our times. We must
also denounce the legerdemain that has perverted the heroic aspect of
Islam, by generalizing the concept of the enemy in peacetime. The sec¬
tarians at the origin of this operation have universalized and general¬
ized the concepts of anathema, excommunication and jihad, holy war,
whereas the tradition has often been careful when touching upon
these questions. It is imperative that we follow the course of such a
genesis, which has ended up producing monsters who have forgotten
the reasons of existence and which has transformed a tradition based
on the principle of life and the cult of pleasure into a lugubrious race
toward death.
On the very day that the two New York towers collapsed in a gi¬
gantic cloud of unbreathable dust, at the very moment when thou¬
sands of innocent people (whose ethnic, religious, and national
diversity is a sign of the city’s cosmopolitanism) died with the world
looking on, at that very instant television showed scenes of rejoicing
coming from Palestine and Lebanon. In light of what followed, these
images—pornographic at a human level, and politically disastrous—
revealed their marginal truth, and the local authorities managed to
control the street and to restore it to some decency. But from such im¬
ages, there arises a feeling and an emotion shared by many subjects
belonging to the Islamic masses, and I try to understand through what
trials or education an individual must have passed to be capable of re¬
joicing in such a crime.
There are internal and external reasons for this misery. In this
book it is my responsibility to insist principally on the internal rea¬
sons, without, however, excluding or neglecting the external ones. It is
part of the writer’s role to point out the drift of his or her own people
and to help open their eyes to what blinds them. I insist, as the saying
goes, on starting by sweeping in front of my own door. This book, a
translation from the original French version, will be read by numer¬
ous English-speaking readers concerned in one way or another by the
drama of their own Islamic origins. I address myself to all readers, but
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 5

I have a special concern for those readers who, like me, have constel¬
lated themselves symbolically within the faith of Islam.
To each entity its sickness. This affliction can become so conta¬
gious that it turns into a plague ravaging minds and souls. Voltaire
thus analyzed the sickness of intolerance that had kept up its ravages
until the Calas affair. In response to the death sentence imposed on
Jean Calas on March 9, 1762, by the tribunal of Toulouse, the philoso¬
pher of the Enlightenment wrote his Traite sur la tolerance (Treatise on
toleration). Begun in October 1762, in the middle of the campaign to
rehabilitate Calas, the book was published in Geneva in April 1763. In
this book, Voltaire recapitulates the horrors engendered by Catholic
fanaticism against the Protestants after August 24, 1572, Saint Bar¬
tholomew’s day, when the reformed Christians were massacred in Paris
and in the provinces. One of the reasons for the spread of fanaticism is
the survival of superstition among the people, and the best way to heal
this mortal illness is to subject the greatest possible number to the use
of reason. The word “sickness” appears in Voltaire’s book when the
author accuses the “convulsionary” Jansenists of cultivating supersti¬
tion among the people, which predisposes them to fanaticism. I hasten
to quote this passage even if the reader recognizes in it the biting irony
of the master from Ferney, the effect of which may seem inappropriate
to the gravity of my subject:

If there still are a few convulsive fanatics in remote corners of the

outlying districts, it’s only the basest part of the population which is
attacked by this parasitic disease. Each day reason penetrates further
into France, into the shops of merchants as well as the mansions of
lords. We must cultivate the fruits of this reason, especially since it is
impossible to check its advance.1

Thomas Mann had to deal with the German sickness, which led
him to write Doctor Faustus (published in 1947), an amplification
and radicalization of Death in Venice (1919). In it the author de¬
nounces the excess of the Promethean spirit, which brought so much
6 The Malady of Islam

harm to German thought and art and, as a consequence, to the Ger¬

man people themselves. Mann intended to show “the flight from the
difficulties of the cultural crisis into the pact with the devil, the crav¬
ing of a proud mind, threatened by sterility, for an unblocking of in¬
hibitions at any cost, and the parallel between pernicious euphoria
ending in collapse with the nationalist frenzy of Fascism.”2
Thomas Mann was thinking about Nietzsche. In the same work,
two pages later, he confirms the suggestion: It is indeed the author of
The Birth of Tragedy who is the unnamed model of the personage of
the musician he invented. Even if the German sickness did not spare
Nietzsche, one of his concepts of moral psychology nonetheless sheds
some light on an internal state that favors the eruption of the sickness
in Islam. It is this internal state that I propose to analyze. If fanaticism
was the sickness in Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in Ger¬
many, then surely fundamentalism is the sickness in Islam.
This is my thesis. That said, I do not, however, intend to claim
that there is a good and an evil Islam, that one has to honor the one
and denounce the other. Nor do I insinuate that fundamentalism is a
deformation of Islam. In Islam, there is no institution that legitimates
absolute doctrinal magisterium, but traditionally access to the letter
was protected: One needed to obey specific conditions to make it
speak or to speak in its name. However, unrestrained access to the let¬
ter was not prohibited and is not a peculiarity of our times. History
has often had to record the disasters such access provokes. Only to¬
day, thanks to the effects of demography and democratization, the
semiliterate have proliferated and the candidates who claim the au¬
thority to touch the letter have become much more numerous. Their
sheer number reinforces their ferocity.
The Qur anic letter, if submitted to a literal reading, can resonate
in the space delimited by the fundamentalist project: It can respond to
one who wants to make it talk within the narrowness of those con¬
fines; for it to escape, it needs to be invested with the desire of the in¬
terpreter. Rather than distinguishing a good Islam from a bad Islam, it
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 7

would be better for Islam to open itself to debate and discussion, to

rediscover the plurality of opinions, to set up a space for disagreement
and difference, to accept that a neighbor has the freedom to think dif¬
ferently. Better for Islam if intellectual debate rediscovers its rights
and adapts itself to the conditions polyphony offers. May the devia¬
tions multiply and unanimism cease; may the stable substance of the
One disseminate itself in a shower of ungraspable atoms.
As far as external factors are concerned, we may concede that
they are not the cause of the disease that gnaws at the body of Islam.
But they are certainly the catalyst. Because of them, the disease inten¬
sifies. If, by a miracle, they were to disappear, I do not know if the
sickness in Islam would disappear too, but it would not find a climate
favorable for the flourishing and propagation of its germs. What are
these external causes? They are, to list them, the nonrecognition of Is¬
lam by the West as representing an internal alterity; the way in which
Islam is kept in its status of the excluded; the manner in which the
West denies its own principles as soon as its interests demand it; and,
finally, the Western habit (and in our days, particularly the American
habit) of exercising its hegemony in total impunity, following the pol¬
itics of the double standard.
Without wanting to justify crime, many here in the Old World still
thought that the attacks on New York and Washington were an an¬
swer to an American policy based on partisan power. This opinion
seems to shock the Americans themselves, as Robert Malley, former
member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, reminds us:

In the Arab countries, in Europe and by a handful of American intel¬

lectuals, it was insinuated that American policy was the prime cul¬
prit: sanctions and strikes against Iraq, a pro-Israeli stance, the
backing of repressive regimes, that is what is understood as explain¬
ing the terrorists’ choice of target. The United States as victim of its
own policies? This was, understandably—and beyond the logical
flaw of the argument—difficult to accept.3
 8 The Malady of Islam

With all due deference to American common sense, I have to begin

by confirming that the three reasons specified as hypotheses are ex¬
actly those that feed the sickness in Islam and that help in its dissemi¬
nation. I would also like to know what Malley considers the “logical
flaw” of the argument. And who would find these hypotheses “diffi¬
cult to accept,” except the very conceivers and ministers of those poli¬
cies? Malley’s reservations are nothing more than unsupported
affirmations. I admit that the argument does not suffice to explain the
attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and a large wing of the
Pentagon, but it may constitute an a posteriori legitimation. The opin¬
ion was expressed not just by Muslims or Arabs, but also by the
French and other Europeans. It cannot be reckoned as a basic anti-
Americanism (even if such a feeling may be part of it).
If a country, a people, a state wants to remain the leader of the
world, it has to be impartial in its manner of governing. The choice
clearly lies between an imperialistic policy founded on war and an im¬
perial policy whose main concern is to keep the peace. Now, an impe¬
rial policy commends its promoter as the arbiter of conflicts flaring up
in the world, and by no means to be both judge and litigant. Take, for
example, the successful sequences that buttress one of the last histori¬
cal manifestations of such an imperial policy: the Ottoman empire un¬
der great sovereigns like Mehmet Fatih (1451-1481) and Suleiman
Kanuni (1520—1566). These leaders saw themselves as continuators of
the imperial structure developed along the rim of the Mediterranean
since its creation by Alexander, its strengthening by the Romans, its
continuation under the Byzantines and its attempted renovation dur¬
ing the Holy Roman empire. It’s with that mind-set that the Ottomans
successfully managed the mosaic of conflicts among minorities and
nationalities that have always existed in the Near East. Beyond the
emotions felt at the moment, there were many who realized that the
events of September 11 could constitute a response to a failure of
American policies, which have seemed imperialistic rather than impe¬
rial in matters concerning Islam in some of its areas or that touch
upon one or another of its sensitive symbols.
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 9

Who are those who died while spreading death in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania? Beyond their contamination by the
sickness in Islam, they are the sons of their times, the pure products of
the Americanization of the world: the same ones who turned the digi¬
tal into child’s play and television into personal memory, without hav¬
ing troubled to transmute the essential archaism of their minds and
their souls.4 Thus we see the technical and “aesthetic” success of the
event. The terrorists used the technical means masterfully, and they
accurately thought through the relays of the event’s diffusion as im¬
age. In fact, one wonders if the twenty-minute delay between the tar¬
geting of the towers were not an invitation to the cameras to film
“live” the banking turn that the second plane made before hitting its
target at the point foreseen for impact. We witnessed the optimum use
of today’s means, inviting this quasi-instantaneity between the event
and its transmission across all continents. That is one of the effects of
the universalization of technique and of the cathodic unification of
humankind in the age of the Americanization of the world.
What I insist on, though, is that we witnessed technique rather
than science. Since the seventeenth century the Islamic world is no
longer a creator of science; since the middle of the nineteenth century
it has tried, without success, to reconnect with the scientific spirit that
once upon a time radiated from its cities. But during the postcolonial
era (begun in the 1960s and corresponding to the first manifestation
of the Americanization of the world arising in the aftermath of the
war), Islam, along some of its fringes, was able to master technique.
The implication is more a mastering of the machine’s functioning than
its invention, or even its production. With technique, one is down¬
stream from the scientific process, the initiation of which demands
great mastery upstream.
Who are these terrorists but the children of the Americanization
of the world (as I have said and as I will repeat)? Children who suffer
from the open wound the Muslim subject feels from having been
turned from a ruler into someone ruled. Children who refuse the state
of submission in which they believe themselves to be, and who dream
10 The Malady of Islam

of restoring the hegemony of the entity to which they belong; of mak¬

ing Friday the universally adopted weekly holiday (rather than Sun¬
day); of substituting the year of the hegira for the year of the
Common Era (whose Christian origin they keep stressing). This is not
a caricature. I draw my conclusions from what I have read of the
ineptitudes they publish. But let us first see what specific historical
process produced these people. If indeed they are the result of the con¬
siderations that follow, it is important to specify at the outset that no
rationale inherited from the past can justify their crime. Furthermore,
the process of explanation transcends the specific case of these mon¬
strous figures whose vector is nihilism. The process I am trying to
throw light on is meant to identify the anthropological conditions in
which these terrorists were born, though these conditions did not by
themselves condemn them to be the monsters they became.
The Islamic world has been unceasingly inconsolable in its destitu¬
tion. It knew one very high point of civilization, accompanied by the
boldness of hegemony. If we go back to the notion of world capital, as
proposed by Fernand Braudel, it is reasonable to suggest that before
its displacement toward Europe, this concept was concretized in the
Abbasid Baghdad of the ninth and tenth centuries, in the Fatimid
Cairo of the eleventh and the Mameluke Cairo of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. After that, the world capital crossed over to the
north shore of the Mediterranean with the Genoa-Venice duo, before
it exiled itself, departing ever further from the Islamic world, by set¬
ting up first in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, then in London
in the nineteenth and in New York City in the twentieth century.
Hereafter, we will probably see a migration toward the Pacific coast in
the dense interactions between Asia and North America. Since the fif¬
teenth century, the world capital has thus moved geographically ever
further away from the Islamic space.

11
12 The Malady of Islam

For Islam, entropy has been at work since the fourteenth century,
but it was only toward the end of the eighteenth (with Bonaparte’s ex¬
pedition to Egypt) that the Muslims themselves began to become con¬
scious that they were no longer at the same level as the West. It was this
lateness, this lag, that allowed a number of countries belonging to the
Islamic territories to be colonized because they found themselves in the
situation of the colonizable. The Muslim individual, who claimed supe¬
riority to or at least equality with the Western individual, cannot grasp
the process that has led the Muslim to such weakness when faced with
the centuries-old counterpart, enemy or adversary, or at times partner
and even ally, depending on the circumstances. In reaction to this state
of affairs, ressentiment against the Westerners arose among Arabs and
Muslims. (I am taking up the very useful concept of ressentiment as de¬
veloped in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.1) Nietzsche himself
thought that the Muslim (or more precisely, the Arab) was someone
who belonged to a people who, throughout the ages, had acted more in
conformity with aristocratic morality, the morality of affirmation—
someone who illuminates, someone who gives without trying to re¬
ceive.2 The situation of the person of ressentiment, on the other hand, is
to be in the position of the one who receives but who does not have the
means to give; the person of ressentiment cannot affirm. Thus the Mus¬
lim is no longer the individual of the “yes” that illuminates the world
and creates a naturally hegemonic being. From sovereign being, the
Muslim has slowly become the person of the “no,” the one who re¬
fuses, who is no longer active but only reactive, the one who accumu¬
lates hatred and waits only for the hour of revenge. This sentiment,
initially unknown to the Islamic subject, will imperceptibly grow and
take over the person’s center. I believe that the fundamentalist actions
whose agent is the Muslim subject can be explained by the growth of
the subject’s ressentiment, a condition that had historically been un¬
known to the Muslim since his first appearance on the stage of history
as an individual.
This new feeling did not install itself mechanically after the defeat
of colonial confrontation: Much time passed before the germ of ressen-
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 13

timent started to grow. Consider Emir Abd el-Kader (1808-1883).

This Islamic ruler lost nothing of his aristocratic dignity despite the de¬
feat of 1847, his incarceration in France and his expatriation to the
Orient in 1852. He never knew ressentiment. This man of the sword
and the pen dedicated himself in his Damascene exile to the teaching of
the esoteric sciences, deepening the centuries-old furrow of his master
Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), whose works he interpreted and published.
During the troubles of 1860, he applied the Akhbarian doctrine that
preaches the equality of beliefs.3 Absent from Damascus when Mus¬
lims (carried away by the herd instinct that characterizes masses) at¬
tacked the Christians of the city, but hearing that vile events had
shaken the city, he hurried back and saved many lives. Gathering the
Christians in groups, he led them to safety in the citadel.
A Christian survivor, Mikhayil Mishaqa, bore witness to this ac¬
tion. Hundreds of fugitives (European consuls and Syrian Christians)
fled toward Abd el-Kader’s quarters on the banks of the river Barada,
and the excited crowd wanted to attack them. So the emir “had his
horse saddled.”4 In one of his mawaqif (spiritual stations), the same
emir recalled how during one of his Damascus sessions, he was ques¬
tioned by a member of the audience who was worried about the ef¬
fects of the defeat on the Muslims. The Muslims had started to imitate
the Christians (i.e., the Westerners) in the way they dressed, ate and
lived. In short, one is faced with an early questioning of the accultura¬
tion being experienced by the Islamic countries at the beginning of the
Westernization of the world.5
We cannot find the smallest trace of ressentiment in the emir’s re¬
sponse. After a traditional theological argument (if the Muslim faced
defeat, it must have been because he was tepid and negligent in the
service his God asked him to perform), he presented another argu¬
ment of psychological common sense (it is human nature that,
through fascination, the vanquished imitate the victor and will even
go as far as to learn the victor’s language). He then made an accurate
sociological observation (first adopted by the elite, the process of imi¬
tation then propagates like poison throughout the whole social body).
14 The Malady of Islam

Finally, the emir remembered the theory of divine names as con¬

structed by his medieval master, Ibn ‘Arabi, the names that govern all
human activities and preside over all events that occur. Thus he in¬
vented the divine name of Khadhil (the deserting god who abandons
you) to explain the defeat of the Muslim in the face of the European
(which was nothing else than the emir’s own defeat).
Even if such a name can be traced to a verbal form in Holy Writ
(the Qur’an says: “If Allah assists you, then there is none that can
overcome you, and if He forsakes you, yakddhulu-kum—who is there
then that can assist you after Him?”), it is clear that the emir’s inven¬
tion is of astonishing audacity.6 His boldness is the sign of a freedom
that can at least be assimilated to what traditional theology calls a
bid’a, a reprehensible innovation. All through his development, the
emir was inspired by the following verse: “God abandons the Muslims
without aiding the infidels. The defeat of the believer is due to God’s
abandonment; but the unbeliever’s victory does not result from His
help.” This vision of divine effect, negative for oneself without being
positive for the enemy, preserves the horizon of faith during the ordeal.
Thus aristocratic man believes himself to have enough sovereignty
to take the liberty to invent the actualization of tradition, and it is his
familiarity with the hermeneutical method of ta’wil that authorizes and
legitimizes his action. This familiarity predisposes him to emulate his
audacious predecessors. Such doctrinal boldness cannot be in the reach
of the half-educated, who today are legion in Islamic societies, which
during the period of decolonization have experienced democratization
without ever tasting democracy. It is in such a context that the mutation
took place: From being aristocratic, the Muslim subject gradually be¬
came the person of ressentiment, a frustrated, dissatisfied individual
who believes himself to be better than the conditions imposed on him.
Like every half-educated person, he turns out to be (in his accumulated
refusals and hatreds) a candidate for revenge, predisposed to insurrec¬
tion and all it demands in terms of dissimulation and sacrifice.
But the real origin of this development, which lies at the point
where psychology and ethics intersect, is the end of creativity, the end
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 15

of the contributions that made Islamic civilization. Aware of their

sterility, the Islamic people have grown inconsolable in their bereave¬
ment. Now, this state of affairs does not date from the colonial era; the
imperial role that the majority of Islamic countries experienced is not
the cause of their decline but the consequence of it: For the past several
centuries, Muslims have not been creative in the scientific domain, nor
have they been masters of technical development. It took them more
than a century to master technology, something that happened in the
postcolonial phase. As I have already said, the Americanization of the
world is what permitted this acquisition. It belongs to the domain of
consumption and functioning, and not to that of production and in¬
vention. It is useful primarily for the expansion of markets. However,
apart from some individuals of Islamic origin working in Western re¬
search institutions, Muslim individuals, inside the horizon of their own
symbolic and linguistic territoriality, remain excluded from the scien¬
tific spirit. They are not involved in the conception of the airplane, its
invention or even its production, but they can pilot the flying machine
very well, and go as far as to steer it to destruction.
 3

The major events in Islam happened very early on. But their muta¬
tion was interrupted too soon. The very beginning of the ninth cen¬
tury saw the birth of a rationalist movement animated by those whom
we call the Mu’tazilites. These thinkers tried to disrupt two then-
dominant ideas: They criticized the Islamic dogma that states that the
Qur’an (like God) is uncreated and has come down from heaven as it
is in itself and in eternity. Their answer to this dogma is that, indeed,
the Qur’an is of divine origin, but that the concretization of the Holy
Writ in an earthly language can only be created by God at the moment
of its revelation. These sectarians think that those who claim that the
Qur’an is uncreated are installing an Islamic equivalent of the Christ¬
ian sense of incarnation: The Qur’anic letter would thus be the in¬
carnation of God. The literalists could thus easily be mistaken as
Christians who identify Christ with God because he is His Word.
These Mu’tazilites removed God from the world; they gave him back
to his unknowability, they neutralized him in a transcendence that lib-

16
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 17

erated humankind from predestination and made humans alone re¬

sponsible for their actions.
This theological movement became the official state ideology. The
caliph himself, al-Ma’mun (786-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid,
w? -ted to impose it on all his subjects.1 The caliphate in fact set up a
sort of inquisition (the Mibna, inaugurated in 833) that attacked
with great violence the contemporary literalist school in the person of
its most eloquent representative, Ibn Hanbal (780-circa 855). It is
important to remember this moment in history. The genealogy of
fundamentalism must include this ninth-century personage, who was
subjected to the worst tortures because in the name of his literalism
he refused to accept the theses of the Mu’tazilites. His resistance
found resonance and support among people anxious for the return of
Qur’anic orthodoxy.
The great limitation of the Mu’tazilites’ rationalist movement was
that it failed to evolve into an enlightenment, above all because it
sought to impose its point of view through the most radical violence,
using the means at the disposal of an Eastern despot. (To extend his
power over the theological domain as a whole al-Ma’mun gave him¬
self the title of imam and imposed his interpretation on the consti¬
tuted bodies of the ulemas, scholars in theology.) Orthodoxy was
reestablished at the center of power as soon as Mutawakkil, the third
successor of al-Ma’mun, took over (847). Now the Mu’tazilites were
made to suffer in their turn—first by their complete marginalization
and then by their slow but certain extinction—the same hardships
they had made their adversaries suffer, who not only survived them
but prospered.
During this period (as precocious in its conflicts as in its complex¬
ity and promise), the caliph al-Ma’mun played an important role in ac¬
climatizing the Greek heritage in the Arab language. This caliph, so
tradition tells us, dreamed about Aristotle, who asked him to have his
books translated into Arabic. It is as if every process that leads to an
enlightenment were triggered by a love for the Greeks and the restora¬
tion of their ways of thinking and feeling. While on a campaign against
18 The Malady of Islam

the Byzantines, al-Ma’mun came across the Neoplatonic community of

the Sabsens in the Harran. A bold fatwa likened them formally to the
enigmatic Sabi’un, to whom the Qur’an had given the status of a peo¬
ple of the Book: “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews,
and the Christians, and the Sabsens . . . ”2 So the Holy Book put the
Sabsens on equal footing with the Muslims, the Jews and the Chris¬
tians. The Sabsens provided Islam with a number of scholars and trans¬
lators from the Greek.
The caliph al-Ma’mun encouraged the confrontation of ideas in
the heart of the city by organizing debates between sectarians of di¬
verse faiths and Muslim theologians of various schools of thought. Al¬
ready at this early period, the literalists were stubbornly opposed to
any foreign borrowing as well as to the presence, in the city, of contra¬
dictory voices, which their ears perceived as blasphemous. Yet this
staging of a forum for disagreement was itself the work of a ruler.
This point keeps us from affirming that the exercise of reason, in its
triumph, was accompanied by freedom—which remained the great
unknown, especially in its political form.
It was in this Baghdad of the first part of the ninth century that the
great scientific adventure of Arabic literature began, an adventure that
lasted into the sixteenth century. It was at this time that the school of
astronomy of Baghdad was created, founded both on speculative cal¬
culations and on observation. It was also in this city that algebra was
invented by al-Khwarizmi, who dedicated his treatise to al-Ma’mun.
Besides this scientific movement, there was born a poetic revolu¬
tion reminiscent of the nineteenth-century poetic revolution in France.
If the reader can transcend context and history, he or she can hear
how the words of these Arab poets resonate with those of Baudelaire,
Verlaine, Rimbaud and even Mallarme. In the body of work created
by these Arab poets, one can distinguish poetic processes as varied as
those of the French poets just cited. As just one example, consider the
recognizably Mallarmean case of the Syrian Christian poet Abu Tam-
mam (806-845). His father ran a tavern in Damascus. By using odd
syntactical devices, rare words, antitheses and abstractions, and by a
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 19

cultivation of paronomasia, he inflected the occasional verse that was

his chosen genre (panegyrics, threnodies, satires, description of bat¬
tles) toward a hieratic and hermetic poetry that demands interpreta¬
tion and that comes to its full realization only in the fullness of
commentary. His is the following rather compassionate and limpid
(he was able to write like that too) distich that speaks of the eternity
of love in a dialectic of absence and presence:

What is it consoles me in your absence

if not the memory of you which doesn’t fade

Of all the guests you are the closest and

even if you are far sadness brings you close3

To show a likeness with Baudelaire, the emergence of a critical

and scandalous individual making use of transgression as the engine
of the poem, I will evoke Abu Nuwas (762-circa 813), one of the
most radical figures of this poetic revolution. An Arab-Persian poet
writing very provocatively in Arabic, he sang the praises of wine (for¬
bidden in Islam) and homosexual love; he was an existentialist who
brought his own experiences to bear on his poems. The critics of his
era saw him as the main figure of the school of the Moderns (the
Muhdathun). In a polemical way, he turned his back on the poetry of
Arab origins rooted in the desert and in nomadism. He considered
that way of living a throwback to the poverty that marked the region
and to the difficult life such penury engenders; to the original desert
he contrasted the conquest of the metropolis and the pleasures it pro¬
vides, even down to the tragedy of profligate spending and excess that
make for the enjoyment of the provocative and reckless dandy as well
as for the dissipation he undergoes, diverted from religious practice by
what presents itself to his senses. Moreover, he helped impose a quasi¬
arithmetic formal unity and rigor onto a rhapsodic, discontinuous,
unbridled poetic tradition. We still read this poetry from the high
Middle Ages as if it had been written yesterday, as if the ink had not
20 The Malady of Islam

yet had time to dry. Just imagine those spectacular moments of cre¬
ation happening in that ninth-century Baghdad workshop! As you
can see, the attempt to reform took place very early on, but it was
aborted.
The following two poetic extracts illustrate the mischievous joy of
this lively transgressor, whose verbal lushness could certainly be
likened to the ‘abath, that scandalous vanity that discredits any art
form in the eyes of our narrow-minded contemporary fundamentalists:

Serve me and serve Joseph

this tasty wine
that makes one thrill

Push trouble out of your life

keep only its peace

Fill my glass to the brim

I don’t want cups
that are only half full

Put down the gourd

and beside it the Book

Drink three glasses

and recite a verse

Good has mingled with bad

and if God forgives

He will win in whom the one

has wiped out the other, basta!

Or, from another one:

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