Islamic cosmopolitanism

Islamic cosmopolitanism The histories of Islam and cosmopolitanism are richly intertwined, even if scholars tend to focus on the apparent western origins and development of cosmopolitan ideas in the ancient and modern periods. While the Greek term kosmopolitês originated with Diogenes in the third century B.C.E. – he the uestio as put to hi hat ou t a he as, a d he eplied A Citize of the Wo ld – ideas of living without nations or of world politics had been current in Greek and Egyptian culture for centuries. As Eduard Zeller observed, most of the Stoic and Cynic philosophers who went on to develop such ideas came from the Near East – from Asia Minor, Syria and the eastern islands – and the philosophy they developed was that of the exile or the outsider, rather than the imperial power of the city state. It was, for example, the Cyrenian (Libyan) Aristippus ho a ou ed, I do ot shut self up i the fou o e s of a o u it , ut a a st a ge i e e la d . Roman writers continued to develop the ethical dimensions of the cosmopolitan idea, stressing the duties and gains of the good life which would come to those who saw the world as their home, athe tha all i g thei hu a it to a a o e g oupi g. As “e e a o se ed, you must live for othe s, if ou ish to li e fo ou self , hilst Epi tetus oted that Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren. View yourself as a citizen of the worldwide community and act accordingly. As a ha e o se ed, this u i e salis had a p ofou d i pa t on the development of Christianity, yet it is arguable that it had a still greater influence on Islamic thought. Isla i u i e salis a d o otheis e e afte all p ofou dl G eek i thei de elop e t, through the influence of Plotinus and neo-Platonic thought, but also through the great translation projects and subsequent cultural synthesis which gifted us a religion which drew heavily on ancient philosophy and which transmitted such knowledge to both the west and the east. The idea of the nation was always alien in the Islamic imaginary and the spe ial e e atio of Dioge es thought ensured that his ideas were seen as lying central to the classical canon by Islamic philosophers. I t igui gl , he Dioge es fa ous de la atio as t a slated i to A a i i the te th e tu C.E., by Al-Sijistani in his Muntakhab Siwān al-Hikma, it emerged not as a single word, but as the e p essio of a idea, i hi h the t a slatio ead: If you knew how big my home was, you would recognise that your house and all the houses in the world are too small to contain it, meaning that the world is its home and the sky its roof. In other words, our duty as men is to recognise that we live in a God-made world and that we should celebrate our status as world citizens in this place, recognising the common humanity we ought to see in the eyes of all people, for they too have been made by God in this shared place. It was this version of cosmopolitanism which then migrated into the western canon, via Ibn Fātik s book collection, the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, which was first translated into Castilian Romance (c.1230), then to Latin (c.1280), thence to French (c.1390), and finally into English (1477). There are therefore compelling reasons for believing that it was the medieval Islamic world kept the cosmopolitan idea alive at a time when, for political and theological reasons, the Christian world found it difficult to reconcile such a philosophy with the teachings of the Church. That this journey of translation was centred on Iberia should be no great surprise, for if Baghdad had been the heart of the project of translating Greek thought into Arabic, it was arguably the Andalusi cities of Cordoba, Seville, Granada and, above all, Toledo, where Islamic and Arabic knowledge was then transmitted to European cultures. The unique culture of al-Andalus had after all been profoundly cosmopolitan in its social practices as well as its intellectual culture from the earliest days of the establishment of an independent Umayyad emirate in the eighth century C.E. The nostalgic culture of exile of a ruling class who had been forced to flee their Syrian homelands by the Abbasids was nowhere better expressed than in the poetry of Abd al-Rahman I, the first great Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus: A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa, Born in the West, far from the land of palms. I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exile, In long separation from family and friends, You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger, And I, like you, are far from home. Even a king, then, might know what it was to live the life of a stranger, and to recognise the ethical, cosmopolitan duty to see the common humanity in others, in difference, in exiles, in refugees. In practical terms this engendered an Islamic culture which celebrated its borrowing from the civilization it found in Iberia, whilst Christian and Jewish cultures were also profoundly hybridised through their contact with Islam. This is nowhere better illustrated than in architecture, firstly in the Great Mosque of Cordoba, built under the aegis of Abd al-Rahman I, which took as its inspiration not only the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, with its own Byzantine influences, but also Roman construction techniques seen in the aqueducts of Hispania: Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B3rdoba,_Spain#/media/File:Mosque_Cordoba.jpg Equally, we should not be surprised that Jews began to build synagogues which revealed a profound respect for the styles and motifs of Islamic styles, as seen here in Santa Maria La Blanca in Toledo (later converted into a church): Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toledo#/media/File:V11p487001_Spain.jpg Fi all , e e at that late edie al o e t of the ‘e o uista he Ch istia ki gdo s e e moving southwards conquering Islamic al-Andalus, the veneration which Castilian and Aragonese elites had for Andalusi culture was everywhere apparent in the buildings which they constructed as expressions of their taste and power, such as the Alcazar of Seville: Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alc%C3%A1zar_of_Seville_%286931816658%29.jpg Such cultural borrowing had after all been present in Iberian Christianity since the development of Mozarabic communities in the eighth century, who were able to retain their faith under Islamic dominion, whilst choosing to dress, speak and eat as Arabs. We should not pretend that such hybrid identities were always expressive of cosmopolitan ideals, for we can of course find instances of identities and cultures being crushed and eliminated in the medieval world, yet it remains striking from a modern perspective, how so many Muslims, Christians and Jews were open to borrowing f o ea h othe s t aditio s, instinctively seeing themselves as belonging to a common humanity. In Iberia there is no doubt that it was the militant creation of the nation states of Spain and Portugal which ended this cosmopolitan heritage across the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as forms of social complexity and borrowing were replaced by political entities built around singular languages, faiths, cultures and peoples. Diversity was imposed either through legal compulsion or ethnic cleansing and we might say that the year 1492 C.E. marked a key axis in modern history as the cosmopolitan ideal was definitively defeated in Europe by the idea of the communitarian nation state. This was simultaneously exported through the globalising imperial impulses of such states into the Americas and thence across the world in the European empires of the modern period. Indeed, one might argue that it was precisely in the Islamic world that lived cosmopolitanism endured after this point, firstly through the homes offered to thousands of Andalusi Jews and Muslims across the Maghreb, the Levant and the Ottoman empire. Cosmopolitanism had always been associated with empires – cynics observe that it is in their interests to oppose nations and national feeling – but there is no doubt that the Ottoman world was grounded in familiar ideas of diversity and multiculturalism for quite practical as well as cultural reasons. Islam had always been a religion of movement, of trade, and the great cities of the faith had been economically successful precisely because they welcomed such openness and the economic goods it brought, as was also the case in European city states such as Venice. The development of the millet system recognised the kinds of freedom which needed to be accorded to rule across a vast empire which was comparatively lightly peopled and staffed by administrators and soldiers from the metropole, enshrining in law a system which valued difference as a means of holding together the social and political order of the collective. How, then, we might ask, can we revive these rich traditions of Islamic cosmopolitanism today? After all, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia are relentlessly seen as regions where the lives of minorities, difference and complexity are at risk in cultures where strong states and dogmatic versions of religion prevail. This is the world of Daesh, of Sunni-Shia sectarianism, the cleansing of Christians and Jews from countries such as Iraq (just as their forebears fled countries such as Algeria in the 1960s), the still greater threats to ancient faith communities such as the Yezidis and the Mandeians, and where cosmopolitan ideals are invoked they tend to be in shallow celebration of cities such as Dubai, which are praised for a diversity which is far from cosmopolitan in its being grounded upon the subjugation of a serf class of disrespected migrant labourers. It is important, however, to recognise that the deep roots of cosmopolitanism live on in a series of powerful ways in the contemporary Islamic world, which of course also includes the lives of Muslims living in the west and elsewhere. To take one compelling example, those countries which are home to the largest populations of refugees are all in the Arab-Islamic world, beginning with Pakistan, and then moving on to Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Iran, with Lebanon not far behind. Acceptance and openness to asylum seekers who are fleeing lives of awfulness wrought apart by war and civil disturbance is one of the most profoundly cosmopolitan of acts in our modern world. To welcome the stranger as a sister or brother in the world is to live in the spirit of Diogenes injunction. It is vital therefore that we recognise the global good which such places and their populations offer to all humanity in their generosity, often at considerable cost to the social fabric of the nation, for, as we have seen in countries such as Pakistan and Lebanon, the costs which are borne in choosing to recognise the humanity of others can be considerable for both political systems and for people in those places. These are certainly costs which rich western states are much more reluctant to bear, and are a telling example of the difference between cosmopolitan rhetoric and cosmopolitan action. In our world today, there is a great deal of discussion regarding the artificiality of the system of nation states which European empires established across the Middle East. In some cases this is overblown, but there is no doubt that the fragility of many borders in the Islamic world is in a positive sense a reflection of a long heritage of cosmopolitan empires which were expressive of ideas of collective and global citizenship, rather than the concentration of a set of goods and rents amongst an arbitrarily defined community of peoples within national borders. This is not to say that empires or ideas of collectives such as the umma are the only logical starting points for Muslim polities, for we should also remember that the cosmopolitan ideal thrived in more constrained spaces, most especially in the cities of the Islamic world. Here too, our world today provides us with signs of optimism that the deep heritage of cosmopolitanism is alive and to be found in the hearts and minds of women and men making the world. This was brought home to me in the Occupied West Bank, approaching the city of Bethlehem he e the i fa ous Pea e Wall hi h p events the free movement of Palestinians is decorated with a series of political murals, including this striking image: Photo: William Gallois One reason why one might optimistically choose to read such a mural as being emblematic of the latent power of the cosmopolitan ideal in the Middle East is the manner in which it expresses simple ideas which we find in the writings of Diogenes and the Stoics. In spite of the brutal realities of the here and now, in which exclusivist communitarian ideas define land as belonging to religious groups and claim absolute differences between people, the painter of this mural sees hope and peace emanating from the nearby city of Jerusalem. The rich multicultural architecture and the history of shared faiths of the Old City seen in the image is invoked, alongside a dove of peace which flies above the land and a ladder in which a deity sends love to the people of this place (or perhaps their love also travels upwards). The city here is a world in microcosm; a place of hope where heritage and the experience of peoples living alongside one another is meaningful in terms of imagining a better Palestine in which an instinctive love for the other is the starting point of human and political relationships. As Marcus Aurelius put it, The u i e se is a ki d of o o ealth ; it is shared rather than belonging to individuals or to groups. Once we rid ourselves of notions of ownership of space, we begin to return to the cosmopolitan ideals of the classical world and the optimism of Seneca s belief that The e is o e pa e t to all of us, the o ld . Ou dut is to li e as itize s of the o ld, to see hope in places such as Jerusalem, in the rich history of such places and in the people whom we meet there who encourage in us the idea that we are blessed with an equal humanity which possesses within itself great hope for the future. William Gallois Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean History Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies University of Exeter w.gallois@exeter.ac.uk