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By: Published by the Foreign
Policy Research Institute October 30, 2015
By
Jonathan P. Berkey*
We
live in an age of identity politics. We define ourselves by one or more
objective measures: measures of race, ethnicity, gender, politics, religion,
sexual orientation, to name just a few. Those measures then define who we are
to others. They determine our place in society, the communities with
which we identify, our attitudes towards others and other communities.
The
politics of identity are fraught, and they interact in ways that both liberate
and confine. On the one hand we prize diversity. On the whole, this is a good
thing, since it reflects a larger transformation in American life. Like it or
not, the fact is that we are becoming, have become, a “multi-cultural society.”
No matter what terms we use to define diversity—racial, ethnic, religious,
sexual, gender, whatever—we are more diverse now than we have ever been, and we
are destined to grow more so. Multi-culturalism is not an option; it is the
future. The only question is how, and how well, we are going to deal with it.
On
the other hand, the politics of identity can at times stoke tension between the
different identities which make up our social mosaic. Moreover, our celebration
of diversity masks a contradictory truth: that we are at the same time caught
up in a larger, deeper historical process of cultural homogenization.
This process of homogenization is the product of the same historical forces which
have encouraged us to embrace diversity. Globalization has brought us
together—both individuals and entire societies. Proximity can breed contempt,
but it has also contributed to a spirit of tolerance which transforms diversity
from something to be feared into something to be embraced. But globalization is
also undermining the structural foundations of that very cultural diversity.
One need only think, for example, of the alarming disappearance of distinct
human languages. One language disappears, on average, every fourteen
days: it disappears, that is, in that the last remaining speaker of the
language dies, and carries with him the cultural legacy of his spoken tongue.
There are currently 7,000 languages in daily use; by the next century that
number will have been cut in half.[1] What sort of diversity will be possible
when English, or some barbaric mutation of English, is the only language the
world’s billions of humans will speak?
This
tectonic process of cultural homogenization is important for us because it lies
behind much of the tension and violence that has been endemic in the modern
Middle East. Some years ago, at the invitation of a commercial press, I began
writing a narrative history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam in the
seventh century down to the present day.[2] One of the reasons I took up the
challenge was the opportunity the book presented to play with an idea that had
been piquing me for some time. As a medieval historian, when I look at the modern
Middle East, what I see is a region which has for the last two centuries
suffered from a series of political movements which have, in different ways,
embraced the forced homogenization of cultural difference. This was true of nationalism,
an ideology which gathered steam toward the end of the nineteenth century, and
then dominated the politics of the region for much of the twentieth. Whether in
the form of Arabism, or Zionism, or any of its other manifestations,
nationalism encouraged its adherents to embrace a particular expression of
cultural and political identity to the exclusion of others. And nationalism has
had no monopoly on this exclusivist vision of cultural and political identity.
It is certainly characteristic of the radical religious ideologies which are
now eclipsing nationalism in much of the region.
The
inexorable homogenizing tendencies of these modern political developments stand
out to me, as a medieval historian, because they present a sharp contrast to
the relatively tolerant atmosphere of the pre-modern Islamic world. I am not
trying to depict classical Islamic society as a happy utopia which knew no
discrimination, as some apologists will do. There was plenty of
discrimination in pre-modern Islamic societies, which we will come to shortly.
But the discrimination was a reflection of the fact that the Middle East was
extraordinarily diverse. We in the twenty first-century United States are
becoming multi-cultural. The Islamic Middle East was multi-cultural from
the very beginning, and its peoples of necessity had to work out mechanisms for
dealing with its diversity.
One
of the first things to note is that some of those things by which modern humans
frequently define their personal, social, and political identities were not
important to the inhabitants of the pre-modern Middle East—or at least were not
important to them in the way they are important to us now. A salient example is
that of class. Americans don’t like to talk about class—or, more precisely, we
are often told that we don’t like to talk about class. But in fact class has
been one of the most important markers of political identity for the last
century and a half, especially in Europe but also here in the United States. Of
course, some of those things which help to define class as an analytical
concept—things like wealth, occupation, property—were naturally present in the
pre-modern Middle East, and sometimes they had political implications. But
class was generally not important to social and political identity for the
inhabitants of the region before the modern period.
There
were exceptions, although they may be exceptions which prove the rule. An
interesting example was a group known as the Qarmatians. The Qarmatians were
sectarian Shi`is who, in the tenth century, rebelled against the Islamic
caliphate and established a utopian regime in northeast Arabia. Most accounts
locate their origins in peasant communities and associate their rebellion with
efforts to overthrow the authority of oppressive landowners. Some
accounts of the Qarmatians describe them as creating a sort of classless
society, in which property was shared in an egalitarian manner—their property,
and their women, too. Those accounts may reflect less what the Qarmatians
actually did than what their Sunni enemies believed they did. But even if there
was a kind of levelling, a flattening out of social distinctions based on
wealth, this did not necessarily result from what a Marxist would call class
consciousness. Rather it was driven, and justified, by a radical religious
creed grounded in millenarian expectations—that is, in expectations of a
looming end time when the chosen instruments of God’s will would overthrow a
corrupt social and political order.
By
contrast, one of the principal markers of personal identity in the pre-modern
Islamic world is (theoretically, at least) absent from our own: namely, the
distinction between those who were slaves and those who were free. Slavery was
a widespread phenomenon in the Islamic Middle East. In Istanbul, the capital of
the Ottoman Empire, at the turn of the seventeenth century, approximately 20%
of the population held slave status. Slavery took many forms in the pre-modern
Middle East, but in general meant something very different than what it did,
say, in the antebellum United States. There was very little brutal
plantation-style slavery—a few notable exceptions, such as the Zanj of southern
Iraq in the ninth century, aside. Most slaves served in some sort of
domestic capacity—as cooks, cleaners, household servants—and as such were
frequently treated in effect as members of the owners’ families. Certain types
of slavery carried with them an almost exalted status. Concubines, for
example, female slaves purchased specifically for the sexual pleasure of their
masters, often held a position in the household not at all inferior to
free-born wives. And if a concubine bore her master a child, that child was
free and fully legitimate—no less so than the offspring of a man and his wife.
Other
markers of identity which are common in our world were also common in medieval
Islamic societies, although the experiences of them in those two settings
differ significantly. Take, for example, ethnicity. Ethnicity—that is, social
distinctions rooted in cultural and especially linguistic differences,
distinctions which may under some circumstances have political consequences—was
a meaningful marker of identity in the pre-modern Middle East, and a comparison
to our own conceptions of ethnicity is therefore a useful exercise. On the one
hand, there is an important principle of Islamic law that ethnicity should not
matter. “We have created you male and female,” says the Qur’an, “and [have]
made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most
noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.”[3] The usual
interpretation of this verse is that what we would call the ethnic diversity of
the human race is a sign of the splendor of God’s creation. No one—no ethnic
group, no tribe—is to be preferred to any other: we are all equal in the eyes
of God. The only thing which meaningfully and legitimately distinguishes
one human from another is the degree of individual piety. This
egalitarianism became a distinct and, for most Muslims, a normative element in
Islamic juristic discourse.
Nonetheless,
ethnic identity mattered and shaped political experience in many ways. Perhaps
the most important example is the way in which Arab identity shaped the
contours of the early Islamic polity. By the time a consensus had been reached
about the substance of Islamic law in the ninth and tenth centuries, Islam had
been largely detached from its Arab roots, and Muslim discourse had come to
insist upon the priority of religious rather than ethnic identity. But that was
the end result of a long and contentious process. There is much debate among
historians over these matters, but in broad terms it is fair to say that, in
its origins, Islam was tied very closely to Arab identity. Islam was probably
conceived of by its earliest practitioners as a monotheistic faith for the Arab
people. The Jews had their religion, and the Christians theirs; Islam was a
monotheistic faith for a people, the Arabs, who had not previously been given
their own revelation. For some decades after the rise of Islam, in order to
convert to the new faith, a non-Arab couldn’t simply embrace Islam. It
was necessary for a Muslim Arab or his tribe to embrace him as a “client” (mawla,
pl. mawali)—a sort of adoptive Arab status. Over the first century of Islam,
several caliphs actively discouraged the conversion of non-Arabs to Islam—for
complex reasons, not least because the conversion of non-Arabs would undermine
the tax basis of the early Islamic state.
Eventually,
the pietistic view—that, as the Qur’an said, “the most noble of you in the
sight of Allah is the most righteous of you”— won out. Nonetheless, the
preeminence of the Arabs in early Islam left its residue on later, more
cosmopolitan versions of the faith. So, for example, there are plenty of
statements from the early Islamic period, some of them attributed (probably
inaccurately) to the Prophet, that Arabs should refrain from marrying
non-Arabs. As late as the ninth century, an Arab poet could write a satirical
poem comparing the miscegenation of Arabs and non-Arabs to Arab women
fornicating with donkeys.[4] The ethnic hierarchy of early Islam survived in a
rather arcane doctrine of Islamic law which allowed a woman’s male guardian to
object to her marriage to a socially unequal male—and one recognized ground for
such inequality is the preeminence of pure-blooded Arab families.[5] More
important is the consensus of Islamic political theorists that a legitimate
caliph can only be chosen from among the descendants of the Prophet’s own tribe
of Quraysh. This principle has played a role in recent political
developments, as the so-called Islamic State has gone to some lengths to
establish that its current “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is in fact an Arab
of Qurashi descent.
To
be sure, there was nothing in the pre-modern Middle East resembling ethnic
nationalism. Nationalism as an ideology is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It
is a product of historical contingencies—for example, the rise of a politically
active middle class—which were not in place before the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Before the nineteenth century, it would not have occurred to most
Arabs, or Egyptians, or Jews, or Turks, that what we would call their “ethnic
identity” should be the fundamental basis of political community and legitimate
government. Nonetheless, people were aware of ethnicity, and sometimes ethnic
identities clashed or found themselves in competition.[6] Other than the
complex relationship of Arab and Muslim identity, the most important example of
an ethnic identity with political ramifications was that of the Turks.
Beginning in the late ninth century, growing numbers of Turks from Central Asia
began to infiltrate the Islamic Middle East. Turks were praised for their
martial abilities, and soon they constituted the core of the Muslim empire’s
armies. Before long, those same Turks became politically dominant, eclipsing
and eventually replacing the authority of the established Muslim governments.
From the eleventh century down into the modern period, the ruling elites in
most states in the Middle East consisted of groups who were, in some sense,
“Turkish.” Consequently, Turks as an ethnic group became associated in people’s
expectations with government, with ruling. According to an apocryphal
statement in an eleventh-century text, Muhammad advised his followers to “Learn
the language of the Turks, for their dominion will be long.”[7] That
association of Turks with government was probably a factor in perpetuating the
long drawn-out twilight of Ottoman rule in the Middle East—although ultimately
it was also a factor in the rise of Arab nationalism.
Another
important marker of identity in the pre-modern Middle East was gender.
Gender probably shaped an individual’s experience more firmly than any other
marker of identity. After all, a slave might always be freed, and a Jew or
Christian might convert to Islam. By contrast, a woman was a woman, and a man a
man—the notion of a flexible construction of gender being incomprehensible to
the inhabitants of the pre-modern Middle East.
The
importance of gender as a marker of identity is apparent to anyone with even a
superficial knowledge of Islamic law. It was not simply that the lawyers spent
much time outlining the responsibilities of women regarding matters such as
marriage, the family, sex, childrearing, and other matters which might have
special resonance in women’s lives. It was also that one’s gender defined one’s
rights and responsibilities in a variety of more public arenas: for example,
where and how one should pray, or whether and what a woman might expect to
inherit from her father, or what value would be accorded to her testimony in a
court of law.
So
important was gender identity to the Islamic lawyers that they went to great
lengths to resolve those rare cases in which an individual’s gender really
was—that is, was objectively—ambiguous. Hermaphrodites, or “inter-sexed”
individuals, who had external genitalia of both male and female, posed an
almost existential problem for the classical Muslim lawyers. As the
Qur’an made clear, gender was a part of the fabric of the universe,[8] so every
individual had to be either male or female—a person could not be both. More
immediately, one’s social role was largely defined by gender. For
example, in a mixed congregation, men should pray at the front, women behind;
the prayers of a man who prays while standing behind a woman are invalid. So
what were the lawyers to do with an individual whose sexual identity, on the
basis of his (or her) external genitalia, was ambiguous? What they did was to
go to great lengths to establish criteria for determining gender—crafting, for
example, elaborate rules for observing whether a hermaphrodite urinated as a
male or as a female (or, in cases in which it did both, measuring the quantity
of urine which emerged from male and female organs).[9]
In
Islamic constructions of political authority, however, there was no ambiguity
whatsoever. The jurists were virtually unanimous in insisting that
politics was an exclusively male arena—this despite the well-known political
roles played by some of Muhammad’s wives. Some especially pietistic
jurists were willing to dispense with the ethnic requirement that a caliph must
be a Qurashi Arab. Their emphasis on piety and competence was reflected in
their dictum that anyone could be a caliph, “even a slit-nosed Abyssinian
slave,” so long as he ruled justly and administered the shari`a. But even they,
for the most part, could not countenance the possibility that a woman might
serve as caliph.[10] There were only three instances in which women ruled over
Muslim states in their own names—as “sultans,” a title adopted by most medieval
dynasties in place of the earlier title “caliph.” The most famous of
those involved a woman named Shajar al-Durr, the concubine of a sultan of Egypt
in the mid-thirteenth century who was briefly raised to the throne, and even
had coins minted in her own name—until a message arrived from the caliph in
Baghdad that emphatically rejected the right of a woman to rule.
Of
course, formal rule is not the same thing as political power. Human relations
being what they are, there were episodes when women might play an important
political role behind the scenes. Not infrequently, these episodes
provoked the wrath of male jurists and historians. Prompted by the influence wielded
by the women of the imperial household, an eleventh-century Persian vizier
warned his monarch about the wiles of women. Ottoman observers condemned a long
period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the mothers and
concubines of the reigning sultans wielded considerable power—a period the
critics dismissed as the “sultanate of the women.”[11] Such episodes aside,
however, politics more than any other sphere of life was one in which gender
identity formally and definitively circumscribed public behavior.
Of
all possible markers of identity, the most important and far-reaching was that
of religion. Islam was born into a world of diverse faiths: Judaism and
Christianity, of course, but also other historically significant, although
perhaps now less well known traditions, such as that of the Zoroastrians in
Iran. Indeed, the very idea of “religion” as we know it—that is,
“religion” as adherence to a discrete and mutually exclusive body of
convictions and practices—this notion of religion as a marker of identity is a
product of the religious competition which characterized the Middle East in
late antiquity. That means that Islam from the very beginning had to do what
American Christians are only now learning to do: to live in a world in which
theirs is not necessarily the dominant faith. How did they do so?
We
should start by remembering that Islam is a diverse phenomenon, and that the
Muslim experience has been very different in different times and different
places—just as, one might say, the Christian experience in twenty first-century
America is rather different than, say, Spain during the Inquisition. God is
One, or so, at least, Muslims, along with Jews and Christians, proclaim. But
even if God is One, humans have never been able to agree about very much more
concerning the divine, or how God should be worshipped. That is just as true of
Muslims as it is of others, and their differences of opinion have had a
profound impact on how Muslims have understood their own religious identity.
The
major division within the Muslim world is that between the Sunni and Shi‘i
branches of Islam. In the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978-9,
many Americans came to hold a number of mistaken perceptions about Shi‘i Islam.
For example, because Iran is overwhelmingly Shi‘i, and because the Iranian
revolution was waged on specifically Shi‘i terms, many Americans came to think
of Shi‘ism as a specifically Iranian form of Islam, as something that
distinguished Iranian (or Persian) Muslims from Arab Muslims. It is true, of
course, that the vast majority of Iranians are Shi‘is, although that has only
been true for the last 400 or 500 years: before the year 1500, that is, in the
pre-modern period, most Iranians, like most Muslims generally, were
Sunnis. But in no meaningful sense is Shi‘ism a specifically Iranian form
of Islam. Nor is it a particularly radical form of Islam; there are plenty of
“radicals” on the Sunni side, too, as well as large majorities of both who are
generally more “moderate.”
What,
then, is the difference between Sunni and Shi‘i identities? The root of the
difference is a historical one, and a political one. Basically, it has to do
with how a believer feels about certain events that took place almost fourteen
hundred years ago. This is an immensely complicated question, but in a
nutshell, the story is this:
When
Muhammad died in the year 632, he left no instructions about who was to succeed
him as leader of the Muslim community. Some Muslims came to feel that that
leadership should have passed—as it apparently did in fact—to some qualified
individual who was chosen and recognized by the community at large. There was
no question about this individual inheriting Muhammad’s status as a prophet.
But most Muslims came in time—this process took several hundred years—to feel
that the political leadership of the community should be vested in some
qualified individual who would be chosen through a process of consensus.
Religious authority, by contrast, passed to what the tradition calls the ulama—literally,
“those who know,” that is, the religious scholars. Over time—and this process
of separating Muslim sectarian identities took time, quite a bit of time, well
over a century—these Muslims came to be known as “Sunnis.” Today, they
constitute perhaps 90% of Muslims worldwide.
But
other Muslims felt differently. For them, leadership of the community, and
absolute authority over both its political and religious affairs, should have
passed after Muhammad’s death to his cousin and son-in-law, a man named `Ali, and
after `Ali’s death to his sons and descendants: that is, to the descendants of
Muhammad himself. This group came to be known in Arabic as the shi‘at ‘ali, the
“party of ‘Ali,” that is, the Shi‘a. They set themselves apart from other
Muslims by their conviction that the community made a terrible mistake in not
ensuring that ‘Ali and his descendants held effective rulership, and that the
community would be acting in contravention of the will of God until, through
some political revolution, the rightful heir of Muhammad, through his
son-in-law ‘Ali, was recognized as Imam, or “leader.” In other words, the
difference between Sunni and Shi‘i identities has nothing to do with being
Iranian, or radical, or anything like that; rather, it is a fundamentally historical
difference, and also a political one.[12]
The
second issue concerning religious identity I want to address is perhaps an even
more interesting one: namely, the historical relationship between Islam and the
diverse religious communities of the Middle East.[13] It is important to start
by reminding ourselves that the recurring image that many in the West have—of
Islam spreading through “the sword”—is very misleading. As a general rule,
forced conversion is repugnant to the Islamic tradition. Of course, there
have been exceptions, but by and large Muslims have adhered to the Qur’anic
principle that “there is no compulsion in religion.” Religious decisions, that
is, must be made freely.
This
is not to say that Islam has not had a violent side. The seventh century of the
Common Era was one of the most decisive in human history, precisely because it
was then that the newly-converted Muslim Arabs swept out of Arabia, and within
one hundred years had conquered all the territory between the Atlantic Ocean
and the borders of China. But during that period of conquest, when Islam really
did in a sense “spread by the sword,” there was little effort to convert those
who came under the rule of the Muslim Arabs. For almost a century, as we have
seen, the Muslims thought of Islam as the monotheistic religion of the Arabs.
Hence those efforts to discourage conversion by non-Arab peoples. It was only
later, from the eighth century on, and in part through competition with the
universalist imperative of Christianity, that Muslims overwhelmingly came to
think of their religion as one that was addressed to all of humankind.
That
points to a second element of the Islamic history of inter-faith relations
which is also important: namely, that for Muslims the question of religious
identity has also had a political dimension. Our notion that the sacred and the
secular can and should be separated, that church and state represent distinct
spheres of practice and authority, is in many ways an odd one in human history.
Some have argued that it has roots in Christianity itself. Jesus, after
all, is quoted in the Gospel as urging his followers to “render unto Caesar
that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” More historically,
it is true that, for its first three centuries, the church grew up, not so much
in opposition to the state, but in a separate sphere from the Roman state. But
after the conversion of the Roman emperors to Christianity in the fourth
century, Christians learned very quickly how to wield political power, and for
the next thousand years consistently defined their political institutions in
explicitly religious terms. The separation of church and state, the sacred and
the profane, is in fact a product of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century. It is the Enlightenment, together with the Enlightenment’s
skepticism regarding absolute religious truth, which has left a secularist
legacy on our own society. This separation of religion and politics is thus a
very recent thing.
From
the very beginning, by contrast, Muslims have claimed to find in Islam
political as well as religious authority. And ever since the seventh century,
Islam has been the religion of those who wielded political power in the Middle
East. For the whole of Islam’s history, in other words, Muslims have been in
charge. Indeed, in the medieval period, Muslim jurists debated among themselves
whether it was even possible to live as a Muslim in a land that was not ruled
by Muslims.
That
suggests a third point: namely, that the very principle around which many of us
might frame the question of inter-faith relations—that is, equality—simply was
not historically an issue for Muslims, at least until the irruption on the
scene of Western, secular political ideas in the last century and a half. There
is no question that, in pre-modern Islamic societies, non-Muslims were treated
as second-class citizens. Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians living under
Muslim rule were subject to certain restrictions: on what they could wear; how
they were to treat Muslims; whether they could carry arms or ride horses; the
degree to which they could build or repair their houses of worship; what
special taxes they had to pay. All that seems to us, committed as we are to the
principle of equality, to be unfair. But it may be that equality is the wrong
way to think about the problem, at least as far as the pre-modern Middle East
is concerned. In the first place, it is certainly the case that Jews and
Christians in the pre-modern Middle East were treated much better than were
religious minorities (Jews, mostly) living in Christian Europe. For the most
part, pre-modern Muslim history is devoid of the kind of pogroms and massacres
which medieval and early modern Christians often inflicted on Jews. So, for
example, when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Jews out of
Spain in 1492, many of them ended up in the Ottoman Empire, which they chose as
a place of refuge because of the relatively high degree of tolerance and
freedom they found there. In the second place, as Bernard Lewis has observed,
second-class citizenship is a form of citizenship[14]—not perfect, perhaps, by
modern standards, but respectable for its day. And so while Jews and Christians
suffered from certain restrictions, and even from certain humiliations, they
were also guaranteed the protection of the Muslim state, and were allowed a
fair degree of autonomy, to order their lives and direct their own communities
as they saw fit.
And
so, for the inhabitants of the pre-modern Middle East, as for us today,
identity was a fraught and complicated matter. Identity shaped who they were,
and what sort of communities they belonged to, and how they related to the body
politic. What was fundamentally different was that, for most, identity involved
little or nothing in the way of choice. For us, of course, that is an
entirely different matter.
About
the author:
*Jonathan P. Berkey is the James B. Duke Professor of International Studies at
Davidson College. His research focuses on Middle East history since the rise of
Islam. Dr. Berkey is the author of multiple books on the subject; his book, The
Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Middle East, 600-1800, received
the top annual book prize from the Middle East Studies Association. He is
currently working on a narrative history of the Middle East since the rise of
Islam. Dr. Berkey received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Source:
This article was published by FPRI
Notes:
[1] Russ Rymer, “Vanishing Voices,” National Geographic (July, 2012).
[2] Shattered
Mosaic: The Middle East Since the Rise of Islam, to be published shortly by W.
W. Norton.
[3]
Qur’an 49.13.
[4]
Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (Columbia University Press,
1994), 213; Jonathan Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in
the Near East, 600-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 118.
[5]
Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry
(Oxford University Press, 1990), 85-8.
[6]
There are for example frequent reports of tension between Arabs and Berbers in
North Africa. A famous case of ethnic rivalry was that between Arabs and
Persians during what was known as the Shu`ubiyya movement.
[7]
Bernard Lewis, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople,
vol. 2: Religion and Society (Oxford University Press, 1987), 197.
[8]
See for example Qur’an 4.1.
[9]
Paula Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval
Islamic Law,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex
and Gender, ed. Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (Yale University Press, 1991),
74-95.
[10]
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (Columbia University Press,
2004), 57.
[11]
See Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman
Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993).
[12]
For a useful survey of Shi`i identity and history, see Bernard Lewis, “The
Shi`a in Islamic History,” Islam and the West (Oxford University Press, 1993),
155-65.
[13]
There is an excellent introduction to the history of relations between Muslims
and non-Muslims living under Muslim rule in Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam
(Princeton University Press, 1984), 3-66.
[14]
Lewis, Jews of Islam, 62.