Introduction

Instead of seeing the religious and secularists--representing mythos and logos, respectively--as coexisting peacefully, he developed a Hegelian vision of a dialectical clash of opposites leading to the synthesis of Redemption. The secularists clashed with the religious, but in this rebellion the Zionists were pushing history forward to new fulfillment. The whole of creation was being propelled, often painfully, toward a final reunion with the divine. One could see this in the evolutionary processes described by modern science, Kook believed, or in the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein, which seemed to destroy traditional ideas but which led to new understanding. Even the agony of the First World War could be seen, in Lurianic terms, as a “breaking of the vessels,” part of the creative process, which would eventually reinstate the sacred in our world. This was how religious Jews should see the Zionist rebellion.
“There are times when the laws of the Torah must be overridden,” Kook argued audaciously. When people were searching for a different path, everything was new and unprecedented, so “there is no one to show the legitimate way and so the aim is accomplished by a bursting of bounds.”
It was “outwardly lamentable but inwardly a source of joy!”
Kook did not gloss over the difficulties. Between religious and secular Jews “there is a great war.” Each camp had right on its side:
the Zionists were correct to struggle against unnecessary restrictions, while the Orthodox were understandably anxious to avoid the chaos of a premature abandonment of tradition. But each side had only a partial truth. The conflict between them would lead to a wonderful synthesis that would benefit not just the Jewish people but the whole world.
“All the civilizations of the world will be renewed by the renaissance of our spirit,” he prophesied; “all religions will don new and precious raiment, casting away all that is soiled, abominable, and unclean.” It was a messianic dream. Kook really believed that he was living in the last age and would shortly witness the final fulfillment of human history.
Kook was evolving a new myth, relating the extraordinary developments of his time to the timeless symbols of the Kabbalah. But as a man of the modern period, he directed his myth to the future; it depicts a painful and turbulent dynamic that is driving history onward. Instead of persuading his Jewish readers to accept the way things are and have to be, Kook argued that it was necessary to smash the sacred laws of the past and start afresh. But despite this modern thrust, Kook’s myth still belongs in one important respect to the premodern world. His vision of the two camps, the religious and the secular Zionist, so similar to the old perception of mythos and logos, presented an equal division of labor. It was the rational pragmatists who were driving history forward, as logos had always done, while the religious, who represented the world of mythos and the cult, gave meaning to this activity.
“We lay tefillin [phylacteries],” Kook was fond of telling the Orthodox, “and the pioneers lay bricks.” Without the myth, the Zionists’ activities were not only meaningless but potentially demonic.
The Zionists might not realize it, Kook believed, but they were the instruments of God, helping to bring about his divinely orchestrated plan. It was this alone that made their religious rebellion acceptable, and very soon--Kook indicated that this could happen in his own lifetime--there would be a spiritual revolution in the Holy Land and history would be redeemed.
True to the disciplines of the conservative age, Kook did not intend his myth to become an ideology, to be a blueprint for action. In any case, he had very few followers, and in his own lifetime was regarded as something of a crank. Kook put forward no political solution to the pressing problems of Zionist activity in Palestine. God had everything in hand. Kook’s mythos simply enabled his followers to see what was really going on. Kook seemed utterly indifferent to the political form the future Jewish state should take.
“As for me, my main concern is the spiritual content, grounded in holiness,” he wrote to his son, Zvi Yehuda (1891--1981). “It is clear to me that, no matter how matters develop on the governmental level, if the spirit is strong it can lead to the desired goals, for with the sublime manifestation of free, shining holiness, we shall be able to illuminate all the paths of government.” In the present, unredeemed age, politics were corrupt and cruel.
Kook was “disgusted with the terrible iniquities of ruling during the evil age.” Fortunately, Jews had not been able to take an active political role since they had lost the Holy Land in 70 c.e. and gone into exile; until the world had been morally and spiritually transformed, Jews should stay out of politics.
“It is not for Jacob to engage in government, as long as it entails bloodshed, as long as it requires a knack for wickedness.” But very soon, “the world will be refined,” and when that happened, Jews could put their minds to the type of polity and practical policies they wished to implement.
“Once the Lord’s people are established on their land in some definite way, they will turn their attention to the geopolitical realm, to purifying it of its dross, to cleansing the blood from its mouth and the abominations from between its teeth.” In the premodern world, myth was not supposed to be translated into practical action; that was the job of logos and--in Kook’s scheme--of the pioneers.
Kook still felt that, in the present dispensation, religion and politics were incompatible, a conviction that had acquired the force of a taboo in the Orthodox world. The Zionists, who had cast off religion, were doing all the practical work.
Kook died in 1935, thirteen years before the establishment of the State of Israel. He did not live to see the terrible expedients to which Jews would feel driven in order to create a state for themselves in Arab Palestine. He never witnessed the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, nor the Arab and Jewish blood spilled in the course of the Arab-Israeli wars.
Nor did he have to face the fact that, fifty years after the creation of the State of Israel, most of the Jews in the Holy Land would still be secularists. His son, Zvi Yehuda, would see these things, and, in his old age, would make his father’s mythos a program for practical, political action and create a fundamentalist movement.
But in these terrible times, was it possible for Jews to keep out of political life? Not only was modern society becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, but secularism was making great inroads into Jewish communities and undermining the traditional way of life. In eastern Europe, modernization was only just beginning. Some of the rabbis of Russia and Poland continued to turn their backs on the new world and held aloof from politics. How could any Jew worthy of the name soil his integrity by taking part in the bargaining and compromise that were an essential part of modern political life in a democratic state? How could they square this with the absolute demands of the Torah? By making deals with gentiles and getting involved in their political institutions, Jews would bring the profane world into the community, and this would inevitably corrupt it. But the principals of the great Misnagdic yeshivot and the Hasidim of the Polish town of Ger disagreed.
They could see that the various Zionist parties and the Jewish socialist parties were enticing Jews into a godless way of life. They wanted to stop the drift toward secularism and assimilation, and believed that these essentially modern dangers must be met on their own terms in modern ways. Religious Jews must fight the secularists with their own weapons. That meant the creation of a modern political party to protect Orthodox interests. This was not a wholly new idea, they contended. For a long time, the Jews of Russia and Poland had engaged in shtadlanut (political dialogue or negotiations) with the government to safeguard the welfare of the Jewish communities. The new Orthodox party would continue this work, but in a more efficient and organized manner.
In 1912, the Misnagdic rosheyyeshivot and the Ger Hasidim founded a new party, Agudat Israel (“The Union of Israel”). They were joined by members of Mizrachi, an association of “religious Zionists” formed by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839--1915) in 1901. Mizrachi was quite different from and less radical than Rabbi Kook, who saw the secular Zionist enterprise in Palestine as a profoundly religious development.
More strictly Orthodox, Reines did not agree: the political activities of the Zionists had no religious significance whatsoever, but the creation of a Jewish homeland was a practical solution for a persecuted people, and therefore deserved the support of the Orthodox. If a homeland was established in Palestine one day, this might well, in the view of Mizrachi, lead to a spiritual renewal and to devout Torah observance there. In 1911, however, the Mizrachi delegates had walked out of the Tenth Zionist Congress at Basel, when the Congress failed to grant them equal funding for their religious schools in Palestine.
Since they could no longer cooperate with mainstream Zionism, which seemed committed to radical secularism, they were prepared to throw in their lot with Agudat Israel, which soon had branches in both eastern and western Europe.
But the members of Agudat in the West saw the movement in a very different light from the Russian and Polish Jews, who still felt very cautious about direct activism. The Jews of Russia and Poland saw Agudat as a defensive organization only; its task was simply to safeguard Jewish interests at this crucial time when the governments of eastern Europe were trying to modernize. They kept their activism to a minimum, worked to improve the lot of Jews within a modern political framework, abjured Zionism, and professed loyalty to the Polish state.
But in the West, where modernization was far advanced, Jews were ready for something different. Most Agudat members in the West were Neo-Orthodox, which was itself a modernized form of Judaism. They were now accustomed to the modern world, and no longer sought simply to contain the shock of the new but wanted to change it. Instead of seeing their party as a defensive organization, some wanted Agudat to go on the offensive and were developing an incipient fundamentalism.
For Jacob Rosenheim (1870--1965), the founding of Agudat was not simply a slightly regrettable necessity, as it was for the eastern Jews, but a cosmic event. For the first time since 70 c.e.” Jews had “a unified and will determining centre.” Agudat symbolized God’s rule over Israel and should become the central organization of the Jewish world.
Nevertheless, Rosenheim still felt slightly queasy about politics, and wanted Agudat to confine its activities to maintaining Jewish schools and protecting Jews’ economic rights. Younger members were more radical, and were closer in spirit to Protestant fundamentalists. Isaac Breuer (1883--1946) wanted Agudat to take the initiative and start a campaign for the reform and sacralization of Jewish society. Like the premillennialists, he could see “signs” of God’s activity in the world.
The Great War and the Balfour Declaration were the “footsteps of the Messiah.” Jews must reject the corrupt values of bourgeois society, cease to cooperate with the governments of Europe, and create their own sacred enclave in the Holy Land, where they would build a theocratic, Torah-based state. Jewish history had gone awry; Jews had defected from sacred tradition; it was now time to put Jewish history back on track and, if Jews took the first step, made the exodus from the corrupt Diaspora, and returned to their original values, living according to the Torah in their Land, God would send the Messiah.
The Jewish scholar Alan L. Mittelman notes that the early experience of Agudat shows the way fundamentalism works. It is not an immediate, knee-jerk response to modern secular society but only develops when the modernization process is fairly advanced. At first, traditionalists--like the eastern European members of Agudat--try simply to find ways of adapting their faith to the new challenge. They adopt some modern ideas and institutions, and attempt to prove that these are not alien to tradition, that the faith is strong enough to absorb these changes. But once society has become more completely secular and rational, some find its innovations unacceptable. They begin to realize that the whole thrust of secular modernity is diametrically opposed to the rhythms of conservative premodern religion, and that it threatens essential values. They begin to formulate a “fundamentalist” solution that returns to first principles and plans a counteroffensive.
The muslims we are considering had not yet reached this stage.
Modernization was far from complete in Egypt, and had not really begun in Iran.
Muslims were still either trying to absorb the new ideas in an Islamic context or adopting a secularist ideology. Fundamentalism would not appear in the Islamic world until these early stratagems had, in the eyes of some Muslims, proved to be inadequate. They would see secularism as an attempt to destroy Islam, and, indeed, in the Middle East, where Western modernity was being implemented in a foreign context, it often appeared very aggressive indeed.
This was obvious in the new secular state of Turkey. After the First World War, the Ottoman empire, which had fought on the side of Germany, was defeated by the European allies, who dismembered the empire and set up mandates and protectorates in the old Ottoman provinces. The Greeks invaded Anatolia and the old Ottoman heartland. From 1919 to 1922, Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk (1881--1938) had led Turkish nationalist forces in a war of independence, and had succeeded in keeping the Europeans out of Turkey and in setting up a sovereign state, run on modern European lines.
This was an unprecedented step in the Islamic world. By 1947, Turkey had acquired an efficient bureaucracy and a capitalist economy, and had become the first multi party secular democracy in the Middle East. But this achievement began with an act of ethnic cleansing. Between 1894 and 1927, successive Ottoman and Turkish governments had systematically expelled, deported, or massacred the Greek and Armenian inhabitants of Anatolia to get rid of these foreign elements, who comprised about 90 percent of the bourgeoisie. Not only did this purge give the new state a distinctively Turkish national identity, but it gave Atatiirk the chance to create a wholly Turkish commercial class which would cooperate with his government in creating a modern industrialized economy. The massacre of at least one million Armenians was the first act of genocide in the twentieth century, and showed that, as Rabbi Kook had feared, secular nationalism could be lethal and certainly as dangerous as the crusades and purges conducted in the name of religion.
Atatiirk’s secularization of Turkey was also aggressive. He was determined to “Westernize” Islam and reduce it to a private creed, without legal, political, or economic influence. Religion must be made subordinate to the state. Sufi orders were abolished; all the madrasahs and Koran schools were closed; Western dress was imposed by law; women were forbidden to wear the veil, and men the fez. Islam made a last-ditch stand, when Shaykh Said Sursi, head of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, led a rebellion, which Atatiirk crushed swiftly and efficiently in two months. In the West, secularization had been experienced as liberating; it had even, in its early stages, been regarded as a new and better way of being religious. Secularism had been a positive development that had led, for the most part, to greater tolerance.
But in the Middle East, secularization was experienced as a violent and coercive assault. When later Muslim fundamentalists claimed that secularization meant the destruction of Islam, they would often point to the example of Ataturk.
Egypt did not achieve either independence or democracy as quickly as Turkey. After the First World War, Egyptian nationalists had demanded independence; there were riots, Englishmen were attacked, railway lines torn up, and telegraph lines cut. In 1922, Britain allowed Egypt a measure of independence. Khedive Fuad became the new king; Egypt was given a liberal constitution, and a representative, parliamentary body.
But this was no true democracy. Britain retained control of defense and foreign policy, so there was no real independence. Between 1923 and 1930, the popular Wafd Party, which demanded the withdrawal of the British, won three large electoral victories under the liberal constitution, but each time it was forced to resign under pressure from either the British or the king. The new democratic structures were only cosmetic, and this dependence would not help Egyptians to develop the autonomy that was essential to the modern spirit. Moreover, the more the British were seen to tamper with the electoral process, the more tainted the democratic ideal appeared.
Nevertheless, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, leading Egyptian thinkers seemed to lean toward a secularist ideal.
Islam played very little part in the work of Lufti al-Sayyid (1872--1963), who was one of Abdu’s disciples. He was convinced that the secret of Western success was the ideal of nationalism, and felt it essential to graft modern institutions onto an Islamic base. Lufti’s view of Islam was entirely instrumental.
Certainly religion played an important role in the creation of modern national consciousness, but it was one element among many. Islam had nothing special or distinctive to offer. It would have to be the state religion of Egypt, because most Egyptians were Muslims; it would help them to cultivate the civic virtues, but in another society, another faith would do the job just as well. Even more radical was the book al-Islam wa usul al-hukm (“Islam and the Bases of Power,” 1925) by All Abd al-Raziq (1888-1966), which argued that modern Egypt should sever its connection with Islam altogether. He pointed out that the institution of the caliphate was not mentioned in the Koran and that the Prophet Muhammad had not been the head of a state or a government in the twentieth-century sense, so there was nothing to stop Egyptians from setting up a wholly secularist, European-style polity.
There was a great outcry against al-Raziq’s book. In particular, the journalist Rashid Rida (1865--1935) declared that this kind of thinking could only weaken the unity of the Muslim peoples and cause them to fall prey more easily to Western imperialism. Instead of taking the secular option, Rida became the first Muslim to propose the establishment of a fully modernized Islamic state based on the Shariah.
In his monumental work al-Khalifa (1922--23), he argued for the restoration of the caliphate. Rida was the biographer and fervent admirer of Abdu, but even though he was well versed in Western thought, he never felt as much at home with Europeans as Abdu had done. The caliphate was necessary because it would enable Muslims to unite effectively against the West, but this was a long-term solution. Before a truly modern caliphate could be established, there would have to be a lengthy period of preparation. Rida saw the future caliph as a great mujtahid who was so expert in Islamic law that he would be able to modernize the Shariah without diluting it. He would thus create laws that modern Muslims could truly obey because they would be based on their own traditions, instead of being imported from abroad.
Rida was a typical Muslim reformer in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyyah and Abd al-Wahhab. He wanted to counter a foreign threat by returning ad fontes. Modern Muslims could create a new and vibrant Islam only by returning to the ideals of the salaf, the first generation of Muslims.
But Rida’s salafiyyah movement was not a slavish return to the past.
Like other reformers at an early stage of the modernization process, he was trying to absorb the learning and values of the modern West by placing them within an Islamic context. He wanted to establish a seminary where students could be introduced to the principles of international law, sociology, world history, the organization of religious institutions, and Western science, at the same time as they studied Islamic jurisprudence. In this way, a new class of ulema would emerge, who, unlike the scholars at the Azhar (whom Rida considered to be hopelessly behind the times), would truly be men of their time, able to exercise an innovative ijtihad that was faithful to tradition. One day, one of these new ulema might become the modern caliph. Rida was no fundamentalist;
he was still trying to effect a marriage between Islam and modern Western culture instead of creating a counter discourse but his work would influence the fundamentalists of the future. Increasingly, toward the end of his life, Rida drew away from the Egyptian nationalists. He did not think that secularism was the answer. He was appalled by Atattirk’s atrocities. Was this what happened when the state became the supreme value and there was nothing to restrain a ruler from pragmatic but cruel policies to further the interests of the nation? Rida believed that in the Middle East--if not in the Christian West--persecution and intolerance were due to the decline of religion. At a time when many of the leading thinkers of Egypt were turning away from Islam, Rida came to believe that the modern Muslim states needed the restraints of religion as much as, if not more than, they had ever done before.
If in Egypt, people had come to believe that the “secret” of Europe’s success was nationalism, Iranians in the early years of the twentieth century believed that this “secret” was constitutional government. At this point, like many Egyptians, Iranians wanted to be like the West.
In 1904, Japan, which had recently adopted constitutional rule, inflicted a stunning defeat upon Russia. It was not long since Japan had been as ignorant and backward as Iran, the reformers argued, but now, thanks to its constitution, it was on the same level as the Europeans and could beat them at their own game. Even some of the ulema had become convinced of the need for representational government to curb the despotic rule of the shahs. As Sayyed Muhammad Tabatabai, a liberal mujtahid, explained:
we ourselves had not seen a constitutional regime. But we had heard about it, and those who had seen the constitutional countries had told us that a constitutional regime will bring security and prosperity to the country. This created an urge and an enthusiasm in us.
Unlike the Egyptian ulema, who had retreated defensively into the world of the madrasahs, the Iranian ulema were often in the vanguard of change and would continue to have a decisive role in forthcoming events.
In December 1905, the governor of Tehran gave orders that the feet of several sugar merchants be beaten for refusing to lower their prices as ordered by the government. They claimed that the high import duties made their high prices necessary. A large group of ulema and bayaris took sanctuary in the royal mosque of Tehran, until ejected by the agents of Prime Minister Am al-Dauleh. At once, a significant number of mullahs followed Tabatabai into one of the major shrines, whence they demanded that the shah establish a representative “house of justice.” The shah agreed and the ulema returned to Tehran, but when the prime minister showed no signs of fulfilling this promise, rioting broke out there and in the provinces, and popular preachers denounced the government from the pulpits, stirring up the common people. Finally, in July 1906, the mullahs of Tehran staged a mass exodus to Qum, while some 14,000 merchants took refuge in the British legation.
Business came to a halt, while the protesters demanded the dismissal of Am al-Dauleh and the establishment of a majlis (“representative assembly”), and the more knowledgeable reformers began to discuss a mashruteh (“constitution”).