A question of faith By challenging religious orthodoxy, Kanan Makiya has offended Left and Right, Jew and Muslim
Nick Cohen Sunday May 12, 2002 The Observer Kanan Makiya has a good claim to be the Solzhenitsyn of Saddam's Iraq, if such a grand title can be given to a modest scholar who offers you coffee and digestives in his London flat. In the mid 1980s, he wrote Republic of Fear, a remorseless chronicle of murder and torture in a prison state. Seventy publishers returned the manuscript before the University of California Press accepted it. One of the best descriptions of state terror from the crowded twentieth-century field was met with silence. The West and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies supported Saddam and the Western Left was afflicted with a kind of Orientalism which indulged, and continues to indulge, Arab despotism. Very few outsiders wanted to know about Saddam's crimes until he suddenly grew horns when his troops invaded Kuwait. A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad. He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists. The dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is undoubtedly the first monument from the great flowering of Islamic culture. The rock of Haram al-Sharif is also, depending on your superstition, where Adam crash-landed after his fall from Paradise, where Abraham prepared to kill one of his sons, where David prayed to avert God's wrath, where Solomon's temple was built, where Jesus preached and where Mohammed stood before he ascended to Heaven. The disastrous second intifada began in September 2000 when Ariel Sharon, a man who has wasted his life and many others persecuting Palestinians, toured the rock. His visit wasn't a simple assertion of Israeli power. If you have access to an internet search engine, type in 'Third Temple' and you will find serious proposals from Jewish fundamentalists to demolish one of the holiest Islamic sites and replace it with a successor to Solomon's temple, levelled by the Babylonians, and the second temple, levelled by the Romans. Christian fundamentalists are as keen to get the bulldozers moving because they've been assured that Christ won't come again until the third temple is up. You may dismiss these plans for an anti-Muslim pogrom in East Jerusalem as babblings, a thought which is encouraged by the babblers' discussions of whether a red heifer needs to be found before a new temple can be built. But Sharon has brought into his government Effi Eitam, who wants drive all the Palestinians from East Jerusalem and all the other occupied territories into the Sinai Desert and Jordan, and Uzi Landau, who says that Israel should treat the Palestinians as Saddam treated the Kurds. Dick Armey, the majority leader of Bush's Republicans in the House of Representatives, said last week that he agreed with them and was 'content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank'. The lunatic fringe is moving to the mainstream with remarkable speed and Haram al-Sharif has the potential to be the most dangerous place on earth. Makiya's reply is The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem (Constable, #14.99.) It is a novel but, as the 60 pages of historical explanation at the end show, it is also an attempt to smuggle the latest research on the Prophet Mohammed to an Arab audience. Censorship and the appeasing of Islamic fundamentalism means that historians tend to hide their work in obscure academic journals for fear of receiving the Rushdie treatment. Makiya believes their conclusions deserve a wider readership. To simplify, as journalists must, the scholars have found that apart from the Koran, almost nothing is known about the life of the Prophet. The first biography did not appear until 800AD, 150 years after the beginnings of what became Islam. The earliest quotes from the Koran are not found from surviving copies from the seventh century - there aren't any, and the Koran may well have been complied long after Mohammed's death - but in the inscriptions from 692 in the Dome on the Rock. They, the accounts of contemporaries who witnessed the explosion of Islam and the internal evidence in the Koran itself, suggest that early Islam was a messianic alliance between Arabs and Jews against the Christian Byzantine Empire which held the Holy Land. These conclusions are, to put it mildly, unpopular in many quarters. To fundamentalist Jews and Christians, the Dome is a desecration of the site of the old Jewish temple. To fundamentalist Muslims, it commemorates the Prophet's night journey to Heaven. The idea that it may celebrate an alliance between Muslims and Jews from a time when the distinctions between the two were fluid offends just about everyone. Makiya is happy to do just that. He despairs of a Middle East where the right to slaughter is based on a pseudo-historical game of 'we were here first' - Jews claiming they have returned to a land their ancestors left a mere couple of millennia ago, Palestinians asserting that there never was a Jewish temple on the rock and that they are the descendants of the Biblical Canaanites. Makiya's hero is Ka'b al-Ahbar, a Yemenite Jew who advised Umar, the caliph who conquered Jerusalem in 635. Early Islamic sources treat him as a wise man. That he was castigated in the twentieth century as the 'first Zionist' by Islamic fundamentalists proved, yet again, that there is nothing quite as modern as a traditionalist. Makiya uses the findings of contemporary historians to show the Dome on the Rock being built as the third temple to overawe the Christian churches and announce Islam as a continuation of Judaism. The inscriptions on the Dome support him. There is no mention of Mohammed's night journey to Heaven from Jerusalem, which is almost certainly a myth invented after the Dome was built by twisting an ambiguous passage in the Koran. Rather, they denounce Christianity in terms that Muslims and Jews would have supported. 'Believe in God and His Messengers, and say not Three. Refrain; it will be better for you. God is one. Far be it from His glory that he should have a son.' Writing like Makiya's can lead to trouble. He points out that in the tenth century, when Islam was open to intellectual dispute, there were learned debates on whether God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac or Ishmael. Now Muslims have to say the son was Ishmael because Jews say Isaac was the boy at risk. Egyptian feminist Nawal el-Saadawi was persecuted for saying that the pilgrimage to Mecca was a vestige of pagan practice. Fundamentalists tried to get the courts forcibly to dissolve her happy marriage. Meanwhile, Professor Nasr Abu Zeid and his wife went into exile rather than have their marriage broken up. His crime was to say that the Koran should be studied in its historical context. There was a small but revealing argument in Britain last year when my Observer colleague Martin Bright wrote in the New Statesman on the findings of the new historians of Islam. His bitterest critics weren't Muslims but the professors. Patricia Crone of Princeton University attacked him with the usual academic venom: 'As everyone knows [or used to know] modern historians are not interested in the truth or falsehood of the religion. Religion does not belong in the domain open to proof or disproof by scholarship or science.' This, I'm afraid, is nonsense. Most believers in sacred texts want to know if they are true or not and no amount of postmodern twittering about whether any fact can be truly established will console them if it turns out that the Koran or Bible or Talmud is wrong. Western Christianity was undermined not only by Darwin but by the nineteenth-century search for the real Jesus of history. When people are threatened by religious power, knowledge is liberating and a weapon they can use in their defence. Kanan Makiya knows this. He hopes that Islamic fundamentalism, which has failed to produce a society worth living in, is heading in the same direction as Saddam's secular tyranny, and that an understanding of what has been found out about early Islam will help it on its way. He is that rarity in the Middle East: an optimist who believes in the power of the enlightenment.
