Islam became so multifaceted and all-encompassing in part because Muhammad and Islam were a prophet and a faith for their place and time. Muhammad is usually understood in his familiar roles as warrior and prophet. But it is in some ways more revealing and interesting to view him in another role—that of a tribal leader. Muhammad’s achievement in this capacity was to create a new religiously based community out of the loosely organized elements of tribal Arab society. In short, he was as much the founder of a “supertribe” as a religious and military figure.
There is general agreement that Muhammad existed, though little is known for certain of his life. But while we cannot verify the facts of his biography, what can be surmised is that he was a product of the kin-based social order that then prevailed throughout the Middle East.
Before Islam, there was kinship. Families, clans, and tribes are the basis of organization in all pre-state societies. The basic social unit is the lineage, a group of families united by their descent from a common ancestor. Each family is part of a lineage; many lineages make up a clan; many clans make up a tribe. All in turn are thought to be descended from a single (mythological or semidivine) founder.
But while they are united by the fiction of common descent, these kin groups are decentralized and fractious, frequently riven by feuds that can go on for generations. Strong leadership is needed to unite them if they are not to degenerate (as they did in the West) into mere shared names with next to no bonds of mutual allegiance. This was the case in Muhammad’s time. It was still the case fourteen hundred years later when T. E. Lawrence united the Bedouin tribes against the Turks in World War I. It was also true of my own native Somali environment.
In this world of shifting interests and allegiances, tribal leaders arise through personal qualities of strength, cunning, and innate magnetism. The tribal leader plays many roles: he is lawgiver and judge, businessman, war chief, and head of the tribe’s religious cult. He is also a source of patronage and distributes the bounty of commerce and war. Honor and personal loyalty (often reinforced by strategic marriages) are the primary bonds that support the tribal leader and hold the system together. Based on what we know of him from Islamic sources, Muhammad fulfilled all these roles. He transcended tribal disorder by claiming the leadership position for himself alone and demanding complete submission.
We are told that Muhammad was born a member of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh, a powerful mercantile tribe that controlled the Arabian trade routes through Mecca. The Quraysh were a typical corporate kin group: subdivided into many clans, the tribe was itself a subdivision of the larger Banu Kinanah tribe. All these clans and tribes were loosely united by their supposed descent from the mythical wanderer Ishmael. This gave them a remote connection to the Jewish descendants of Abraham. It is therefore not an accident that the new Islamic “supertribe” incorporated Abraham and Jesus into its lineage.
The Quraysh rose to prominence when a tribal leader named Qusai ibn Kilab obtained control of the Kaaba, an ancient pagan shrine that attracted numerous pilgrims. This was a lucrative franchise and Qusai ibn Kilab placed family members in control of it, distributing responsibilities (and profits) among the clans of his tribe. Their rivalries continued, however, apparently growing more intense during Muhammad’s lifetime.
Muhammad was a religious revolutionary who introduced Abrahamic monotheism into a polytheistic culture. Arabs at that time believed in a supreme deity but also in various lesser gods or tribal deities. Mecca was the center of this polytheistic system. Muhammad’s revelation attracted many followers but also drew opposition from powerful clan leaders, whose authority (and income) relied on control of the pilgrimage trade.
In Mecca, Muhammad preached what in today’s terms was a religion: prayer to one God, charitable contributions, and the like. The rejection of his message by the polytheists is etched into Islam as a period of persecution of Muslims. To this day, followers of Muhammad’s example who encounter the slightest resistance to their preaching speak of persecution.
In 622, these rivals drove Muhammad and his small Muslim community out of Mecca. Muhammad fled to Medina, where he built up his power base through alliances with larger tribes such as the Bakr and Khuza’a. Strategic marriages strengthened his ties with these clans; he himself married the daughters of Abu Bakr and Umar, while Uthman and Ali (Muhammad’s cousin) married his daughters. Thus he had family ties with the first four caliphs who succeeded him after his death. During this time Muhammad also promulgated a comprehensive system of moral and political rules, known as the Constitution of Medina, which served to unite the tribes in a community of faith and practice. It was at this point that many tribal practices became an integral part of what evolved to become sharia.
Eight years later, having assembled a large army (known as the Prophet’s Companions), Muhammad marched on the Quraysh, who are said to have surrendered without a fight. He then returned to Mecca, married the daughter of the head of the Quraysh, and proceeded to incorporate the other tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into the new Islamic community.
After Muhammad died in 632, a series of lightning conquests by his successors extended Muslim control over an enormous territory—one of the largest empires the world had ever seen. These conquests were extremely brutal and the conquered populations were given a stark choice: convert, die, or (if they were Jews or Christians) accept second-class status as taxpaying dhimmi. Most chose conversion and were incorporated wholesale into the growing Muslim supertribe or ummah. Yet in many ways the social psychology of Islam remained that of a persecuted tribe, with a powerful “insider/outsider” mentality.
During Muhammad’s lifetime, tribal and nationalistic differences within the Islamic community were strongly discouraged. After his death, however, clan rivalries reemerged to shape dynastic struggles in the Caliphate. The Quraysh claimed control and supplied the first three ruling dynasties: the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid. The Sunni/Shia split was originally a war of succession between two rival lineages—unlike the schisms of Christianity, as we have already noted, it was initially not theological in nature. The passions aroused by this ancient tribal blood feud still divide the Muslim world today.
Medina welcomed Muhammad in part because the local tribal leaders believed their feuding residents might be able to unite around his teachings. Islam would defuse the discord within the city and become a rallying cry against enemies outside. Thus, from the start, Muhammad entered Medina charged not just with spreading his religious message, but also with creating a political order.
The other monotheistic religions were different. The Torah was recorded long after the kingdom of Israel had fallen into ruins. Christian doctrine evolved over centuries, always in the context of a preexisting Roman Empire, one of the strongest polities of the entire premodern period. In Islam, by contrast, the Qur’an was revealed in tandem with its rise and early conquests. In fact, Muhammad’s empire began to take shape before all of the verses were compiled in one book. Thus, for Islam, faith and power were from the outset intertwined—indeed inseparable.
Muhammad himself differed in a crucial way from Abraham and Jesus. He was not only a prophet but also a conqueror. He is said to have personally led numerous military campaigns and raiding expeditions. Sahih Muslim, one of the six major authoritative hadith collections, claims he undertook no fewer than nineteen military expeditions, personally fighting in eight of them.2 Nor did he hesitate to mete out violent reprisals or to enjoy the spoils of war. In the aftermath of the 627 Battle of the Trench, for example, “Muhammad felt free to deal harshly with the Banu Qurayza, executing their men and selling their women and children into slavery.”3 In this way the Prophet became a conquering chieftain. Thus the Qur’an declares, “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee” (33:50).4 (It is, of course, passages
such as these that groups like Islamic State or Boko Haram use to justify their actions.)
From a Muslim Reformer’s perspective, one of the main problems with Islam is that the tribal military and patriarchal values of its origins were enshrined as spiritual values, to be emulated in perpetuity. The Qur’an emphasizes that all Muslims form one community of believers, the ummah (2:143). Although this community superseded prior tribal allegiances, the new religion retained many traditional tribal customs and enshrined them as religious values. These values pertain especially to honor, male guardianship of women, harshness in war, and the death penalty for leaving Islam. As Philip Salzman explains, “Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents’ attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict.”5
Prior to the rise of Islam, Arab tribes had fought one another, through raiding expeditions and perpetual feuds. Salzman notes that Islam imposed a measure of unity while retaining the traditional tribal habit of the feud “by opposing the Muslim to the infidel, and the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam and peace, to the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels and conflict.”6 What had been tribal raiding now “became sanctified as an act of religious duty”: holy war, or jihad.7 What mattered to Muslims was conquering as much territory as possible and bringing it under Islamic sovereignty, ruled through Islamic holy law.8
Muhammad also left behind—true to tribal form—detailed instructions on the division of the bounty gained by Muslim troops through conquest. In Qur’an 8:1 such spoils of war are legitimized. The hadith are full of detailed instructions on what are really norms of tribal conquest. In the authoritative collection Sahih Bukhari alone, there are more than four hundred stories describing military expeditions led by the Prophet Muhammad, and more than eighty stories containing instructions on the appropriate division of booty.9
These various residues of tribalism matter because even if Islam is reformed, they are likely to persist. A separation of religion from politics—a distinction between Mecca and Medina—would not do away with the problems created by these inherited tribal norms.
The Honor/Shame Dynamic
Among the most crucial features of the tribal system institutionalized by Islam is the concept of honor. This requires careful explanation for Western readers, whose understanding of terms like “family” and “honor” is fundamentally different. The family structure to keep in mind is an extended kinship group (or clan) whose numbers are increased through practices such as polygamy and child marriage. By having boys marry when they are as young as fifteen or sixteen, the space between generations shrinks, and the number of descendants grows. This kind of family is much like an old talal tree, with a deep main root, a solid stem, and myriad branches. Leaves bud, grow, and fall off; branches may be cut and new ones take their place; but the tree stands. Each of its components is dispensable, but the tree itself is not. That is the most important “family value” instilled into children. The individual barely registers in this scheme.
Each person within the kinship group has value to the tribe as a whole, but certain members are more valuable than others: young men who can go into battle to defend their kin are more useful than young girls or old women. Marriageable girls are more highly valued than older women because they are necessary to produce sons, and can also be traded. Each family’s worst nightmare is to be uprooted and destroyed. Given all the possibilities for destruction, the longer a kinship group survives, the stronger it is. Families draw a sense of pride from their history of resilience, passed on through oft-repeated stories and poems about the bloodline.
That pride was what made my grandmother teach me my line of descent back so many generations and hundreds of years. She made it clear to me that it was the duty of young people not only to bask in the inherited glory of their bloodline, but also to maintain it above all else, even if that might cost them their property or their lives. I was also taught to regard anyone outside the bloodline with extreme wariness.
Before Islam was founded, the various extended families of Arabia collaborated and also competed through a network of complex commercial and marital alliances, sometimes allying in battle, sometimes fighting against one another. In this world, conflicts within the clan had to be defused as quickly as possible to preserve the image of strength; infighting would lead to the perception of weakness and make the clan vulnerable to attack. Honor was all-important. Anyone who insulted or humiliated the bloodline must be punished. If one man killed another, for example, the victim’s father, brother, uncle, cousin, or son must take revenge, to uphold the clan’s honor. And this revenge might be inflicted not just on the killer, but also on his entire family.
Anthropologists since Ruth Benedict’s study of Japan in World War II have made a distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In the former, social order is maintained by the inculcation of a sense of honor and shame before the group. If our behavior brings discredit on our tribe, it may punish or even expel us. In a guilt culture, by contrast, a person is taught to discipline himself by means of his own conscience—sometimes backed up by the threat of punishment in the life to come. Most Western societies went through a thousand-year transformation from shame to guilt, a process that coincided with the gradual breakup of tribal family structures. Europeans underwent a long process of detribalization, beginning with subjection to Roman law, conversion to Christianity, the imposition of monarchical rule over baronial power, and the gradual rise of nation-states with their concept of individual citizenship and equality before the law.
The Arab world in which Islam first triumphed did not undergo a similar transition. As Antony Black writes in The History of Islamic Political Thought, “Muhammad created a new monotheism fitted to the contemporary needs of tribal society.”10 The effect was to perpetuate tribal norms by freezing them in place as holy writ. Arabs could see themselves as “the chosen people” with “a mission to convert or conquer the world.” According to Muhammad, each of the great monotheistic religions was an ummah—a community or nation defined by its adherence to the teachings of its prophet. Jews were defined as an ummah through their adherence to the book of Moses. Christians were an ummah united by adherence to the teachings of the prophet Jesus. The Islamic ummah, however, was meant to supersede these other groups. Within the ummah, all Muslims were brothers and sisters. Yet this notion did not displace the older ties of the bloodline. As it is set down in the Qur’an: “Blood relations among each other have closer personal ties in the Decree of Allah than (the Brotherhood of) Believers” (33:6). Despite the rise of a pan-Islamic religious identity in which all individuals notionally submitted to Allah, Islam therefore retained elements of the shame culture.
From its origins as a new faith community, Islam had the overwhelming need to remain unified or risk reverting back to tribal fragmentation. The first schism over the question of succession nearly led to the collapse of the religion. Within Islam, fitna—strife or disagreement—was therefore seen as fundamentally destructive. Dissent was a form of betrayal; heresy as well. These individualistic impulses had to be suppressed to preserve the unity of the larger community. Those who wonder at the ferocity of Islamic punishments for dissent fail to grasp the threat that skepticism and critical thinking were believed to pose.
In a clan setting, shameful behavior constitutes a betrayal of the bloodline. In the wider Islamic setting, heresy constitutes a comparable threat, as does outright unbelief—apostasy—both of which are punishable by death. Those who betray the faith must be weeded out to maintain the integrity of the ummah.
This belief in the danger of dissent has had powerful consequences, but perhaps the greatest has been to suppress innovation, individualism, and critical thinking within the Muslim world. Muhammad himself, as both the messenger of God and the founder of the Islamic “supertribe,” is revered as an irreproachable s
ource of wisdom and a model of behavior for all time. To question his authority in any way is considered an unacceptable affront to the honor of Islam itself.
It is not fashionable today in academic circles to discuss the legacy of Arab clan structures in the development of Islam. It is considered ethnocentric, if not downright orientalist, even to bring it up. But today the Middle East and the wider world are increasingly at the mercy of a combination of the worst traits of a patriarchal tribal society and unreformed Islam. And because of the taboos over what can and cannot be said—taboos backed up by the threat of violent reprisals—we are unable to have an open discussion of these issues.
The Sacrosanctity of the Qur’an
If Muhammad is unique among the prophets, the Qur’an is unprecedented among religious texts. Muslims today are taught that the Qur’an is a complete and final revelation that cannot be changed: it is literally God’s last word.
The Qur’an and its related texts are the fundamental source of the Islamic veneration of the afterlife, as well as the call to jihad. They make explicit the concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong and the specific dictates of sharia. In turn, these concepts would not have such enduring power were they not so entwined with the belief in the timeless, all-powerful, and immutable words of Allah and the deeds of Muhammad. Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done—question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture—it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.