The model of religious cycle: theory and application

Muawiyah was the nephew of the third caliph, Uthman, and a governor of Syria. His revolt against Ali initiated the second civil war in Islam after Ali crushed the rebellion led by Aisha, Muhammad's widow and the daughter of the first caliph, Abu Bakr. In the struggle with Muawiyah, Ali did consent to arbitration, which nevertheless failed to produce conclusive results and instead allowed the dissident governor to retain his seat. After the Kharijites murdered Ali, Muawiyah managed to seize power in the caliphate and established the absolute rule of the Umayyad dynasty.

The Umayyad monarchy lasted for less than one hundred years, from 661 to 750 CE. Politically and militarily it was an immediate and phenomenal success. As Esposito points out, in the short period of its rule “the Umayyads completed the conquest of the entire Persian and half the Roman (Byzantine) empire… [They] captured the Maghreb (North Africa), Spain, and Portugal…and extended the empire's borders to the Indian subcontinent” [4, p. 42]. In the midst of such impressive international advances, the empire suffered from domestic disturbances. “During the reign of Muawiyah's son, Yazid,” as Esposito explains, “another round of civil wars broke out. One of these, the revolt of Ali's son Husayn, would lead to the division of the Islamic community into its two major branches, Sunni and Shii, and shape the worldview of Shii Islam” [4, p. 45].

Ali, the cousin of the Prophet, was married to “Fatima, the only surviving child of Muhammad and [his first wife] Khadijah, with whom he had two sons, Hasan and Husayn.” The supporters of Ali known as Alids, “believed that leadership of the Islamic community should remain within the family of the Prophet and that, indeed, Muhammad had designated Ali as his rightful successor and heir” [4, p. 39]. When the son of Muawiyah, Yazid, became the next Umayyad caliph in 680 CE, a group of Alids convinced the son of Ali, Husayn, to head a rebellion. Unfortunately for Husayn and his followers, the Umayyad army soon crushed them. As Esposito writes, the “memory of this tragedy…provided the paradigm of suffering and protest that has guided and inspired Shii [Muslims for whom] the original injustice [of successorship was] repeated, thwarting the rightful rule of the Prophet's family [4, p. 45].

The period of the Four Righteous Caliphs also gave rise to the Sunni branch of Islam, which in contrast to Shia orthodoxy represents its classical stage, and, as is the case with other world faiths, enjoys the majority of adherents and serves as the model of Muslim spirituality. As Esposito points out, the rule of the righteous caliphs was “especially significant not only for what they actually did, but also because the period of Muhammad and the Rightly Guided Caliphs came to be regarded in Sunni Islam as the normative period” [4, p. 38]. The second caliph, Umar, established a new procedure for political and military succession in the Islamic state that was to guide the selection of the next two caliphs: “…a process of consultation, nomination and selection by a small group of electors who, after pledging their allegiance, presented the caliph to the people for acceptance by public acclamation” [4, p. 40]. With the rise of the Umayyad dynasty in 661 CE this practice was replaced by a hereditary rule that would extend to the subsequent Abbasid caliphate as well.

The Muslim caliphs exercised absolute power both in political and military affairs. They were also regarded as religious leaders of the community who reigned in the name of Allah and whose purpose was to spread the law of Islam by sword and conquest. At the same time, the interpretation of the Qur'вn, especially of its legal portions, was beyond their sphere of authority. It was a separate group of people, the religious scholars called ulama, who developed the Islamic law of Sharia on the basis of scriptural sources, rational interpretations and the consensus of community. By the tenth century CE both the scriptural canon and the system of Islamic law were finally completed and accepted as authoritative by the Sunnis.

In the course of the following evolution of the Muslim faith, its Sunni and Shia branches each developed its own distinct vision of religion, politics, and history. Central to those differences was the notion of the Shia imamate in contrast to the Sunni caliphate. The caliphate allowed for a degree of separation between religion and politics. The caliph exercised political power while religious scholars provided authoritative interpretations of Islamic law.

In the Shia idea of the imamate, this distinction was completely erased in the figure of the Imam who was supposed to be the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad in both the political and religious spheres. The Imam had the authority to rule the people and to produce interpretations of the scriptures. According to Shia views, Ali was the first Imam and the line of succession should have remained within the descendants of Ali and his son Husayn. As Esposito puts it, in Shia Islam, the figure of the Imam stands as “the divinely inspired, sinless, infallible, religiopolitical leader of the community…a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and Ali…the final authoritative interpreter of God's will as formulated in Islamic law” [4, p. 45].

Sunni and Shia Muslims also have different views of Islamic history. For Sunni Muslims, the early successes and military expansion of the caliphate reaffirmed that Islamic community lived in accordance with the will of God who supported them. For Shia Muslims the rise of the caliphate meant the betrayal of Islamic teaching and resistance to God's will. They identified themselves with the Biblical David and his fight against Goliath whose initial victories may seem impressive but whose ultimate defeat is inevitable. Inspired by the examples of Ali and Husayn, Shia Muslims viewed “history [as] the theater for the struggle of an oppressed and disinherited community to restore God's rule on earth over the entire community under the Imam” [4, p. 46].

The Shia community itself, however, suffered from a series of splits. The three largest Shia groups were the Twelvers, the Zaidis, and the Ismailis, each claiming their own Imam as the legitimate successor to Ali and Husayn [12]. Some of those Shiite communities have been able to establish independent political states. “The Zaydis,” for example, who “claimed that Zayd ibn Ali, a grandson of Husayn, was the fifth Imam…were the first Shii to gain independence when Hasan ibn Zayd founded a Zaydi dynasty in Tabaristan on the Caspian, in 864.” A Zaydi state was also created in 893 CE in Yemen where it survived until 1963 [4, p. 46].

By the ninth century CE, the hereditary succession of Imams was interrupted in the largest Shia community, that of the Twelvers. As a result, they developed a belief in the “hidden” Imam and his return as the future savior, Mahdi “at the end of the world to vindicate his loyal followers, restore the community to its rightful place, and usher in a perfect Islamic society in which truth and justice will prevail” [4, p. 47] Until the Imam returns, the community recognized as authoritative the interpretations of Islamic law by ulama.

In the meantime, some of the Shia groups still believed in the continuation of the Imamate and kept founding alternative Shiite dynasties. In the tenth century, for example, one of the splinter groups, the Ismailis, established the “Fatimid dynasty [which was] named for Fatima, the Prophet's daughter, from whom the ruler [who proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi] claimed descent” [4, p. 47]. Ruled by infallible and hereditary Imams from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, the Fatimid caliphate “successfully competed with a weakened, fragmented Abbasid [Sunni] empire, spreading their influence and rule across North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Syria, Persia, and Western Arabia to the Sind province of India” [4, p. 48].

In addition to the its two major Shia and Sunni branches, Islam has also developed a faction, which, historically speaking, is relatively new but may still exemplify a reformist stage of the Muslim faith. I am referring to Wahhвbism, a movement that was founded in the eighteenth century by Mu?ammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhвb (1703-92) and since then has served as a model for other versions of Muslim revivalism.

There is an essential difference between Wahhвbism and later nineteenth-century revivalist movements, on the one hand, and Islamic responses to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the other.As Esposito points out, “premodern revivalist movements were primarily internally motivated, [while] Islamic modernism was a response…to the external political and religiocultural threat of [European] colonialism.” Islamic modernists were mostly preoccupied with the issue of “the compatibility of Islam with modern Western thought and values” [4, p. 124].

The difference between Wahhвbо revivalism and later Islamic modernism runs parallel to the difference between the Lutheran Reformation and the following European Enlightenment in Christianity. Wahhвbism closely followed the spirit of the Protestant Reformation but applied it in accordance with the theological doctrines and historical practice of the Muslim faith. That is why, in practical terms, I discuss it as the third branch of Islam.

The self-proclaimed goal of Wahhвbism consisted of stripping Islam of all innovations, which had been accumulating over the centuries in Muslim tradition and which Wahhвbо supporters considered as deviations from true faith. The purification of Islam, Wahhвbоs argued, was necessary in order to return to the straight path of faith that was drawn by Muhammad and his early followers. Similarly to Martin Luther, who proposed a return to Christian origins and to the Bible, al-Wahhвb promoted a vision of Islam that is renewed by the example of the Prophet and the Sunni.

Since the lives of the founders of Christianity and Islam were so different, the results of the respective reforms in both religions turned out to be opposite to each other. Following in the footsteps of Muhammad, al-Wahhвb envisioned a social and moral transformation by means of jihad--a militant revolution against the enemies of Allah and false doctrines. He joined forces with a tribal chief, Mu?ammad ibn Sa?ыd (d.1765), and together they launched “a religiopolitical movement that waged holy war [and] viewed all Muslims who resisted as unbelievers, enemies of God who must be fought” (117-18). In the end, the Wahhвbо “reformation” of Islam resulted in the founding of Saudi Arabia as a modern Islamic monarchy that is governed by Wahhвbо ideology and Sharia law-- soon followed by the establishment of other revivalist Muslim states in African countries such as Nigeria, Libya and Sudan.

Remarks in Conclusion

I began this paper with the hypothesis that religions share a common pattern in their historical development. In order to trace those commonalities, I formulated an abstract model of religious cycles, which was based on the idea that any historical religion--a religion centered on written scriptures--represents a semantic system whose evolution depends on the interpretation of its key texts. The development of a religious system, then, can be understood in terms of the interplay between its revelatory and interpretive elements, or, in other words, between its sacred scriptures and sacred traditions. Based on a distinct correlation between the first and the second, I distinguished six common phases in the evolution of religion, namely, its formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical, and post-critical stages.

In the course of its development a religious system undergoes two types of crises that shake its structural or systemic foundations. The structural crisis poses a challenge to the sacred tradition or scriptural interpretations within an established religion and results in the formation of new and alternative confessions or denominations within the system. The systemic crisis represents a challenge to the foundation of the religion itself by way of questioning its sacred scriptures. Such a crisis is usually resolved with the inception of new religions in the midst of their mother-faiths.

When applied to the world's spiritual traditions, this model of religious cycles reveals astounding similarities among various faiths. To begin with, traditional religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam follow a nearly identical pattern in their development by passing through all six stages, from the formative through the post-critical. In all those cases the establishment of new sacred traditions was related to the creation of additional scriptural texts or at least alternative interpretations of the existing scriptures. Also, in all of those cases different sacred traditions that corresponded to various stages of religious evolution did not cancel each other out but instead co-existed, stimulated, interacted with, and often enriched each other.

The systemic crisis of religion usually leads to the rise of new religious movements and their eventual split from and rivalry with their mother-faiths. However, even a crisis of such proportions does not result in the disappearance of older, spiritual ways of life. After giving birth to new faiths, older religions not only recuperate but even experience a revival of their own traditions and successfully compete with younger challengers. Two cases in point--the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism, and also the one between Judaism and Christianity. In the language of theology, we might say that God never forgets his previous commitments and always keeps his part of the bargain while creating new covenants with humanity.

Finally, the evolution of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam was such that the systemic crisis of those spiritual traditions occurred almost simultaneously, starting with the eighteenth century when European thinkers formulated the ideology of the Enlightenment, which in the following two centuries spread all over the globe. The systemic challenge that affected those three religions reached its peak in the twentieth century, and as a result, our contemporary spiritual condition can be characterized as a total crisis of religious consciousness, which is well attested to in modern art and literature.

Appendix 1: Phases of Religion: A Comparative Table

Appendix 2: Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Tradition in World Religions

buddhism christianity islam religion

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