Adonis Diaries

Urban Islam and Rural Islam

Western Europe (England, France, and Germany) of the 19th century was hooked to Orientalism: The aristocracies wore turbans and Ottoman attires.  They were carried away with the romantic notion of an Orient (Middle East and Central Asia)  as being the remaining original primitive races and conserving the roots of “spirituality” (sufism).

The Jew Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, was baptized at the age 12, but never relinquished his Jewishness.  Disraeli was a staunch Orientalist and categorized the Arabs as “Arab-Moses” and “Arab-Muhammad”  on the basis that they are the original races; thus, his classification was based on race.

Implicitly, Disraeli must have considered Arabs as a collection of tribes roaming arid desert lands and conserving their customs and traditions, not altered for centuries, in order to survive the influences of surrounding vast empires such as Persia, Byzantium, Romans, Greeks and so forth.

In the Near East, Antoun Saadeh, founder of the Syria National Socialist Party (SNSP) in 1933, divided Islam in his book as “Islam in its two messages: Islam-Christ and Islam-Muhammad.”  Implicitly, Saadeh classified Islam into two major sects:  Urban Islam (living near urban conglomeration and in fertile agricultural regions) and rural Islam (living in arid desert regions and rugged mountain areas.)

Consequently, Urban Islam or Islam-Christ is a set of sects that exhibit flexibility in changing customs, traditions, and have propensity to compromise and accepting even abstract dogma (constructs) to survive Imperial edicts (Byzantium, Persian and Caliphs…)

People in urban environmental setting are more concerned with commerce, trade, and freedom of opinion. In a sense, urban religious sects have tendency for assimilation into a culture that has demonstrated material supremacy over its surrounding neighboring people.

Rural Islam or Islam-Muhammad is a set of sects that refuse to consider abstract constructs and rely on sets of antique laws that regulate their daily life.  They are either petrified on mountain strongholds or arid desert regions that do not encourage easy communication and travel.  They lack financial means to trade for luxury items that might disturb the social fabric of equality in standard of living and the unity of the tribe.

There is a third class of religious sects than can resolve many difficulties in working out a taxonomy for religious sects.  They are the tribes living close to urban surrounding and fertile zones; they adopt nomadic characteristics, but have acquired flexible line of thinking.

They are the “conveyor belt” or the transmitters of cultural differences between the two major categories of sects.  They are the prime “intelligence gatherer or front-line intelligence agencies” for the powerful neighboring empires; they are the guides in time of wars; they guard the security of caravans crossing regions and extend facilities in water and supplies.

These third class of tribes have the mental agility to manipulating abstract dogma, though they preferred the freedom of keeping away from the lures of urban “decadence“.

It is no enigma why fundamentalist sects of all religions, and particularly the three monotheist religions (that I call “mono-idolatry religions”) move away from urban environment to far away regions, where they can exercise and apply their restrictive laws and not succumb to urban disastrous influences.

That what the Mormons did, the Calvinists, the Huguenot, and the Wahhabi did, and so on.

In the 20th century Europe, there were several kinds of Judaism.  You had the notable, professional urban Jews who were ready to be assimilated within the dominant culture of powerful nations; and you had the Jews of the “shtetl” in poor rural Eastern Europe and within non-advanced cultural regions; and you had the Jews of ghettos or tribes close to urban centers.

Obviously, there were Jewish tribes in harsh mountain regions in the Caucasus and other tribes in Northern Africa and the Middle East.  You had cosmopolitan Jews in Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Ottoman cities.

The Jews of the shtetl tended to accept the German ideology of the “volkish” or pure tribal blood with creative minds.  The volkish was a romantic notion that required to be settled on a piece of land for many centuries that conserved the folk spirit of the rural life style.

Thus, the various Zionist factions finally agreed on two fundamental notions:

First, the spirit of Judaism is rooted in the Orient and the Jews have to become the mediators between the Western and eastern civilizations.

The second principle was to finding a land and occupy it in order to satisfying the German per-requisite of the volkish ideology.

As Zionism settled in Palestine, it applied the two worst social and political structures of both civilizations.

First, it applied the apartheid and racist Western European ideology of “Teutonic vital space” (camouflaged under Biblical myths) by the sword and blood of utmost cruelty.

Second, Israel society was transformed into a caste system among its Jewish sects, for example Ashkenazim “European” sects and Sephardi Arab-Jew sects (and more blatantly with Palestinian minorities) in all its administrative and governmental services.  So much for Zionism mediation among civilizations.

Note 1: Antoun Saade proved that Islam-Muhammad was almost identical to Islam-Christ in the first 13 years of its proselytizing in Mecca.  It is after Muhammad settled in Medina (Yathreb) that Islam-Muhammad changed and had to institute laws governing the City -State of Medina.

To Saade, Jesus had no need for religious laws governing people, since Roman civil laws were the laws of the Land and because Jesus was against the 650 laws of the Pharisee sect, shackling people in restrictive daily life behavior and obliterating free reflection and liberty in thinking.

Note 2: The “conveyor belt” tribes close to major urban setting (Damascus, Aleppo…) were mostly of the kind of “heretic” Christian sects that refused central religious power. They had suffered from the frequent changes in religious belief of Byzantium Emperors…

Note 3:  This anecdote is reflective of the sameness in belief system at the beginning of Islam. Prophet Muhammad told his most beloved wife Aicha: “I know when you are happy and when you are angry with me.  When you are happy you say: “God of Muhammad” and when angry you say: “God of Jacob”…