THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE h& Columbia University Press b7e~vyovk
dons raised by believers in a fashion that convinces the believers of their correctness. A nationalist governor or party leader might attempt to answer people's questions, too, of course; but lacking a grounding in religious authority, his answers will always ring hollow compared with those emanating fiom people to whom questioners have turned because of their manifest piety, religious learning, or other sign qualifying them for religious leadership. Nationalistic answen that once seemed heady and progressive, buttressed by a purported superiority of cultural and intellectual values originally imported from the West, now fall flat &fore the whispered-r shoutedsuspicion that they are actually symptoms of the malignancy of cultural imperialism. By contrast, answers that purport to be rooted in Islamic tradition, even when the reading ofthat tradition departs substantially from anything that has gone before, have a much stronger WteWood of winning the questioner's confidence and loyalty. This description of the popular acclamation of religiously credited leaders that undergirds today's Islamic activism will be illustrated and elaborated in the final chapter of this book, wherein I will try to explain why I believe that the future of the Muslim world lies with the Islamic political alternative. But it would be pointless to enter upon such a discussion without first explaining how, why, and when this particular structuring of religious authority came into being. This will require more than a historical summary, however, because the history of Islam as commonly narrated leads in the wrong direction. One must loolc with different historical eyes to see the pattern that seems to me most significant. The purpose of this book is to provide this different view of the past, primarily for its own sake but also to help clarify a different view of the present. These chapters culminate my twenty-five years of involvement with nontraditional sources for Islamic history and are inspired by a deep dissatisfaction with the usual way of recounting that history. We are living in a crucial period of Islamic history, arguably the most intellectually and spiritually vigorous of the last thousand years. Muslims around the world are looking to their illustrious past for solace and guidance in changing times, and non-muslims are scrutinizing that same history for clues to the nature and fortune of con-
INTRODUCTION human effort, but even more of historical currents beyond contemporary perception or control. At the center of the story seen from this angle are the ulama, today called mullahs in Iran or hojas in Turkey, that remarkable body of religious scholars and moral guides holdiulg the conscience of Islam in its grasp down to the present day, though not without serious challenge from new sources of religious leadership in the late twentieth century But the ulama are not present as the tale begins. The view from the edge is very much the story of when, how, and why this group of people came into existence, destined, as they were, to be the instrument of drawing Islam together and, today, of helping to guide it through a new and dangerous period of change. Though the view from the center focuses upon a succession of great capital cities, almost to the exclusion of the countryside, the view from the edge is not that from a geographical (or political) periphery. The edge in Islamic history exists wherever people malce the decision to cross a social boundary and join the Muslim community, either through religious conversion, or, under modern conditions, through nominal Muslims rededicating themselves to Islam as the touchstone of their social identity, or recasting their Muslim identities in a modern urban context. For the first two centuries the edge was virtually everywhere. Non-Muslims were the majority. The problems and contributions entrained by their adoption of Islam were felt from the Pyrenees to the Indus River. But they weren't felt uniformly. Each locality had its own microhistory of Islam. Each one was a spring; over the centuries, some springs went dry, others were stopped up, and still others were channeled into larger streams. Even those who might be inclined to conceptualize Islam in later times as a single grand river can benefit from contemplating the variety of its sources, and contemplating the dry courses of channels not taken. This being said, it must also be apparent that the view from the edge can never be seen whole. There are too many fragmented stories, too many different locales, and, most important, too little data. The richness ofislamic historical sources favors the view from the center. The lives and deeds of Muhammad and his companions have been preserved with great piety and detail. Annalists beholden to caliphs