A Terrestrial Religion II

Poul Anderson suggests here that resurgent Islam is neither a single movement nor merely an Arab phenomenon. Maybe we can discern four groups.

(i) Many Muslims live peacefully within existing societies.

However, some of those who are dissatisfied or disaffected:

(ii) aim to seize control of existing states in order to impose sharia law on entire populations;

(iii) or aim to overthrow existing states, modelling themselves on Mohammed's military campaign against Mecca;

(iv) or seek common cause with secularist campaigners against perceived injustices.

I know Muslims in groups (i) and (iv). Group (ii) needs to be opposed politically. Group (iii) is a security threat. All groups should be recognized as responding in different ways to current circumstances, not as implementing a centuries-old plot or conspiracy - any more than the present Pope is secretly advancing an ancient scheme for a global theocracy! (I refer here to some sectarian Protestant thinking. And, by the way, the Queen of England, having privately met a previous Pope, is now secretly preparing to return the Archbishopric of Canterbury to the Church of Rome...)

It is good to move between the current real world and future fictitious worlds. History is one even though we can only speculate about the part of it that is our future: the "shape of things to come." News media inform us about Islamic State. Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization informs us about Aycharaych's diabolical machinations on Aeneas and also about Olaf Magnusson's disaffection from the Terran Empire and consequent loyalty to the God.

A Terrestrial Religion

"We see a resurgent Islam and wonder how to deal with it - and start by witlessly taking for granted that the proper article is 'a,' that there is just one Muslim world and they're all a bunch of Arabs."
-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT pp. 193-194.

No religion is a single group with a single purpose throughout history. Religious institutions survive social changes by changing their base of support. Thus, in different historical periods, mosques and imams have been funded by:

Arabian traders;
imperial bureaucrats, landowners and merchants;
and modern industrialists -

- while meanwhile offering consolation to the poor and oppressed.

Popular Islam has incorporated older religious practices like cults of saints or relics regarded as idolatrous by the orthodox;

Sufis emphasize mystical and magical experiences rejected by fundamentalists;

Khomeini denounced 1,300 years of Muslim history, claiming that true Islam had lasted for only a brief period after its inception.

Appropriately, in Past Times, "The Discovery of the Past" immediately precedes "Flight to Forever" - from the interpreted past to the imagined future.