Andalusia, 1992.
The Moors are on the march again.
But these Moors are really Christians in make-up.
The Muslim forces left Spain forever, 500 years ago.
Mosque became church.
Yet what remains here from Muslim times can still inspire wonder and sorrow.
O Holy Mosque of Cordoba, shrine for all lovers of art, pearl of the one true faith, sanctifying
Andalusia's soil like holy Mecca itself.
Such glorious beauty will be found on earth only in a true Muslim's heart, nowhere else.
O Holy Mosque of Cordoba, shrine for all lovers of art, pearl of the one true faith, sanctifying
Andalusia's soil like holy Mecca itself.
Granada was the final stronghold of medieval Muslim Spain.
When it fell to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492, bells rang and choirs sang in celebration
across the breadth of Europe.
Europe's gain was Islam's loss.
It was a loss that has not been forgotten through 500 years.
Ever since the final expulsion of the Moorish coast in 1609, in other words, more than a
hundred years after the conquest, reconquest of Granada in 1492, from that date the name
Andalus, in other words Moorish Spain, Granada, Alhambra, Alhambra has always meant for Muslim
visitors, Muslim visitors from North Africa, Muslim visitors from India, sort of a lost
spirituality.
I think throughout the centuries this has been more or less stable.
In recent years there have been many more Islamic tourists who are coming in contact
with the Alhambra and they walk through the Alhambra as if they were right at home.
So in a way, thanks to modern communications, it is being reconquered both for them and
for us, in other words for Muslims and for non-Muslims.
So it's very important for everyone.
It's actually universal, the Alhambra in that sense.
In that sense do you think it has a message for Europe in the 1990s?
Yes, it has a message for Europe in the 1990s and in the next century.
I think if one word would have to describe the civilization, the culture of Moorish Spain,
of Alhambra, it would be cultural syncretism.
In other words, all the tendencies, theological tendencies coming together because here Judaism,
Christianity and Islam lived side by side for many, many centuries.
It was a time of extreme tolerance, much more than today.
Walking through the remains of the thousand year old pleasure palace of the caliphs at
Cardoba, my feelings as a Muslim are bitter sweet, pride in such magnificence, sorrow
at such desolation.
Ten thousand craftsmen once labored here to create a miracle of marble, jasper and gold,
the hub of a brilliant society, of scientists and soldiers, of mullahs, musicians and merchants.
Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and played together in peace and tolerance.
Above all, scholars from the three faiths translated Greek and Arab knowledge into Latin,
the language of European scholars, thus laying the foundations of the European Renaissance.
The loss of Andalusia haunts Muslim memories to this day, the fear of extinction after
centuries of glorious civilization.
I call this the Andalusian syndrome.
Muslim Spain is a lesson in the transnational worldly power.
Tied ancient pillars taken from the ruins of Carthage by silent colonnades and empty
chambers, Muslim palace walls bear these words, God is the final conqueror.
Outside, the barbarians were at the gates.
In 1276, Moors and Christians battle for the little hill town of Alcoy in eastern Spain
with the help, legend tells us, of Saint George.
The annual pageant celebrates the Catholic victory in a mixture of folk theater, religious
ritual and commercial kitch.
But in spite of the good humor, the festival bears a sobering message that Christian and
Muslim are forever enemies.
It makes me sad to find such popular pride and joy in the destruction of one of the world's
great civilizations.
Nowhere in the Muslim world are Christian, Hindu or Jewish defeats celebrated like this.
Here is the way to keep ancient enmities on the boil.
What followed the Christian conquest was an early example of ethnic cleansing.
Jews and Muslims were expelled or forcibly converted.
For centuries, the holy inquisition prescribed the torturers' rack, the executioners' sword
and public burning at the stake for those accused of being secret Muslims or Jews.
Moranos, they were called pigs.
Jews and Muslims were outlawed from Spain until just over a hundred years ago.
The cross replaced the crescent in the west.
But at the other end of Europe, in the east, the standard of Islam was being raised again.
Now Muslim power reached its peak, stretching from Morocco to the Himalayas.
New empires arose, creations of Mongol and Turkish speakers from Central Asia.
They were the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal.
As we go on our journey, we shall see how the confrontation with faiths already established
in these lands influenced the development of the empires.
That confrontation continues to shape the thinking of Muslims today.
In the same year that Islam was finally defeated in Spain in 1492, the Spanish discovered the
New World.
But 40 years earlier, in 1453, Islam had achieved a most substantial, even symbolic victory
in the Old World.
For it was in that year that the Turkish Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror captured the ancient
seat of Christianity and the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in the east, Constantinople.
The Turks renamed the city Istanbul and for nearly 500 years it was the capital of another
great empire, the Islamic Empire of the Ottomans.
This was once the greatest cathedral in Christendom.
Santa Sofia built for Justinian, emperor of Eastern Rome during the lifetime of the prophet
of Islam.
One day his followers would inherit it.
What Christian crusaders had once sacked and looted, Muslims treated with the greatest
reverence.
Justinian had boasted of his church, Oh Solomon, I have surpassed you.
It is said that when Mehmet the Ottoman conqueror first entered here, he fell to his knees in
humility.
Santa's stone was damaged or destroyed.
The Holy Family, who Muslims revere but may not depict, were simply whitewashed over.
They were uncovered again in the secular 1920s when the mosque which had been a church became
a museum.
Today the people of Turkey, a secular state seeking association with the European community,
are once again reasserting their Muslim identity and returning the museum of Santa Sofia to
the worship of God.
This side room has just reopened as a mosque.
Santa Sofia is a perfect symbol of the history of Turkey, balanced precariously between East
and West, between Christendom and Islam.
At the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, poet and patron of the arts, the Ottoman Empire
was the greatest in the world, pushing ever further into Christian lands and establishing
borders that are now, once again, the focus of religious war, from the Balkans in the
West to Azerbaijan in the East.
Ottoman rulers called themselves Sultans of Rome.
Less than half the population of the Empire was Muslim.
Yet the doorways of the Topkapi, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, bear the Kalima, the
declaration of faith.
La ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasoolullah.
There is no God but God.
Muhammad is the messenger of God.
The Ottomans claimed to be caliphs, successors to the Prophet, and therefore at the head
of the entire Muslim world.
Sultan Saleem reinforced that claim by conquering Egypt, carrying off the caskets that contained
the holy relics of the Prophet, his coat, his military banner, and installing them here,
in the Topkapi.
He and his successors grounded the Empire firmly on the Sharia.
Topkapi was at the center of educational life.
This is the Topkapi harem.
Here, every year, Mozart's abduction from the Seraglio is performed.
But Europeans never really understood.
In ignorance about the truth of life in the Topkapi harem, where the ruler and his family
lived with their servants and slaves, European artists proceeded to invest it with the products
of their own lascivious fantasies.
Fantasies that add lurid color to Western perceptions of Muslim women, even today.
Orientalist art reached its height in the 19th century with sumptuous paintings that
dwelt on themes of sex and violence, what some scholars call Orientalism.
This painting by Delacroix is one example.
It shows that the conventions of Orientalist art were so popular that they were applied
to themes that long predated the birth of Islam.
Here, in a sadomasochistic fantasy, the last king of Nineveh looks on dispassionately as
his naked women and animals are slaughtered.
Whatever the reality of life in the harems of the Ottoman Empire, this art has nothing
to do with Islam, which is above all a religion of modesty.
In fact, even the harem was inherited from Eastern Rome.
The Ottomans merely added polygamy to the Byzantine rituals of royal seclusion and
household slavery.
In these gloomy courts and passages lived eunuchs and women who, though of course Muslim,
mostly came from Christian families of European race.
Turkey bestrides the Bosphorus, one foot in Europe, one in Asia.
But catastrophic defeat in the First World War pushed her firmly into the European camp.
This man, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, known as Ataturk, father of the Turks, led his country in abandoning
her Islamic past.
The Khalifat was abolished, religious orders were suppressed, the veil was discouraged,
wearing the fez became an offence.
The Arabic alphabet was replaced by the Latin, the Shariah, by the Swiss civil code.
Turkish state television is still poking fun at the Islamic past.
Here, the young Ataturk objects to learning the Arabic alphabet.
But despite this attitude, Islam is returning.
In few other parts of the Muslim world would teachers of religion or their students be
seen wearing western suits and ties.
But there's no mistaking the dedication of these students, and their numbers are growing
by 10% per year, every year.
As elsewhere, Islamic religious awareness and political awareness go hand in hand.
Books, magazines, posters, all proclaim the unity of the world of Islam.
As elsewhere, the focus is on Al-Quds, Jerusalem.
As elsewhere, Israel, America and Britain are the targets of student demonstrations.
But the pull of Europe is still as strong as the pull of the East.
When most young people claim to be observant Muslims, only one in six wants closer ties
with the Islamic world.
For most young Turks, it seems, Islam is a private matter of culture and identity, the
legacy of the Ottomans.
I think that this is the reversion to the sources, because Islam belongs to our native
roots, and Islam, for the vast majority of Turks, is a matter of identity.
It's a refuge.
It's a solace.
It's their culture.
It's them.
So I think that this reversion to the native roots is a very normal phenomenon, which was
bound to happen, especially after the democratization of Turkey, because you know that right after
the republic, we had some decades of what I call militant secularism, during which Islam
was sermonized to keep a low profile.
And of course, now that there is an electoral process in Turkey, and the leaders need our
votes, they have to be more attentive to the sentiments of the population.
It's political because Islam is our nationality at the same time.
We assert our nationhood by saying that we are Muslims.
So all Turks are Muslims?
All Turks are Muslims.
By definition?
By definition, sociologically, not legally, of course.
In a secular state, we couldn't say that.
But sociologically, it would be a nonsense to say for a person to be a non-Muslim and
Turk.
You may be a non-Muslim and Turkish citizen, but not an ethnic Turk.
This is Mashhad in northeast Iran.
The shrine of Imam Raza, one of the twelve leaders of the Imam-i Shia sect and the greatest
national martyr of Iran.
Today is the Imam's birthday.
Shia religious beliefs hardly differ from those of the majority Sunni Muslims.
The dispute is over who should rightfully have succeeded the Prophet as leader of the
faith.
Shias recognize only his direct descendants through his son-in-law Ali.
The 12th and 9th disappeared, became occluded or hidden in the year 873, according to Shias.
His return is expected.
Where other Muslims strive for serene and dispassionate display of faith, Iranians emphasize
sorrow and suffering.
The greatest heroes of Iran are their martyrs.
They believe that Imam Raza, the eighth descendant inclined from the Prophet, like the others,
was martyred for his beliefs.
His strength of commitment, of passion and suffering has always been part of Shia Islam.
Shia Islam has come to represent Iran's unique national identity within the wider Muslim
world, an identity championed intensely.
Just as it may be impossible to be non-Muslim and yet a Turk, so an ethnic Iranian has come
to mean a Shia Muslim.
The Safavid dynasty began as a brotherhood of Sufi mystics in the Turkish west of the
country.
In the early 16th century, their leader Ismail proclaimed himself Shah and reunited Iran
more or less within its present borders.
Faced with enemies on all sides, disputing territory with the Ottomans, the Uzbek Turks
and the Moghuls, all Sunnis, Ismail declared that henceforth the state religion would be
Shia.
Even today, national pride leads Iranians to see themselves as the Islamic elite, producing
in the city of Isfahan, one of the greatest of all jewels of Islamic art.
For today's Turks, the Ottomans provided an Islamic identity.
That's why the empire is remembered with nostalgia by Muslims.
But there's little nostalgia here in Iran, the old Persia, for the Safavid Empire.
Here the greatest Safavid ruler Shah Abbas built this magnificent mosque in this beautiful
city of Isfahan.
It was the flowering of the Persian artistic genius.
The Safavids established Shia Islam as the state religion and henceforth power would
oscillate between royalty and clergy.
The final struggle would see the emergence of the best known clergyman of our times,
Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution did not come out of the blue.
Standing here in the city of Isfahan, the Safavid capital, I wonder whether the revolution's
seeds were not sown by the dynasty's founder himself nearly 500 years ago.
Shah Ismail claimed power on behalf of the hidden 12th Imam.
He took the title, the shadow of God, a dangerous claim, for he could well be accused of not
living up to God's standards.
Shah Abbas, Elizabeth of England's great contemporary, created one of the world's masterpieces of
architecture in the religious buildings of Isfahan.
In his own private mosque, the brilliance of the floral decoration, the elegance of
the calligraphy were visible evidence of his faith.
But leading clergy of the day were already warning him that it was they, not he, who
would judge how well he was discharging his responsibilities as the hidden imam's representative
on earth.
The conflict between king and clergy finally came to a head here, south of Tehran, in the
old city of Qom.
Qom is Iran's holiest city, the burial place of the sister of Imam Raza.
She is the model of selfless piety for Iranian women.
Here, the earth is considered sacred, as is the sky.
No aircraft is permitted to fly overhead.
It is the Oxford University of Iran.
Its dreaming spires belong to the oldest theological colleges in the country.
Though Islam has no priesthood, mullahs must be learned men who only qualify after years
of study.
At the start of this century, Iranian clergy were allowed to organize themselves into an
official hierarchy.
It was a fateful step.
The hierarchy quickly became a power center in its own right.
It had its own ideas about how the values of the hidden imam concerning man's relations
with God should be realized in government.
The principle is called vilayate fakih.
We think that the new society has ignored some parts of human entity, and that is the
spiritual part.
The institution of vilayate fakih is in fact an institution to look after this ignored
part of human entity, and that is the soul of humanity, the human beings, to look after,
in addition to the welfare of the society, the spiritual part of it.
The aim is not political, but it's unavoidable.
They should interfere with politics.
They should say that how should you live, for example, in a way that you do not lose
the spiritual entity of the society.
It was Ayatullah Khomeini who later developed the idea of vilayate fakih to its inevitable
conclusion.
Any Iranian ruler is simply standing in for the hidden imam.
But the modernizing, westernizing Shah's commitment to Islam was doubtful.
So who best represented God's laws on earth?
Was it not the Ayatullah?
Should not the clergy rightly rule?
This is the last Shah's tent at Persepolis on the site of the ancient capital of Persia.
Here the Shah, Muhammad Raza, staged a gaudy passion celebrating two and a half thousand
years of Iranian history.
But Darius and Cyrus the Great lived in the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian era.
For the Shah publicly to claim to be their successor was to combine vanity and heresy.
In 1979 Khomeini returned from exile.
The Shah had fled.
The popular revolt had many causes, but the outcome was inevitable.
An Islamic republic based on the deep Shia conviction that only the just and the pious
have the right to rule.
This was the legacy of the Safawids.
Our journey through the history of Islam finally brings us to my part of the world, South Asia,
where one third of the world's Muslims live.
And the pattern of the past is becoming clear.
Each of the late great Muslim empires was shaped by the forces confronting it.
The Ottomans by their inheritance from Christian Europe.
The Safawids by their need to resist the Sunni powers surrounding them.
Right here, in what are now India and Pakistan, Muslim rulers faced a new and different challenge.
How to govern a country which was neither Muslim nor even monotheist?
How to avoid the fate of previous conquerors, absorption and assimilation by Hindu India?
The third great Muslim empire that we are visiting on our journey was that of the Mughals
of India.
But they weren't the first to bring Islam to India.
It came centuries before, with travelers, scholars and the Sufi saints.
One of the earliest and greatest Sufi saints was Fawzia Moeddin Chishti.
And it was at his shrine here in Ajmed, in Rajasthan, that Mughal emperors like Akbar
visited to pay homage.
And we're here because in one sense it expresses perfectly the nature of Islam in South Asia,
even today.
In South Asia, sanctity was never exclusive.
Holy men of whatever faith appeal to all, transcending differences of religion and sect.
The qawwali, the popular Muslim music in praise of the saint of the shrine, is the South Asian
equivalent of gospel singing.
It shares its musical roots with the other religions of India.
And the pilgrims here giving alms could as well be Christians, Sikh or Jain as Muslim.
And don't be misled by appearances.
These visiting women are Hindus. The custom of strewing flower petals on the shrine could
equally be seen in a Hindu temple.
So why have you come here?
Ten times.
But that does not mean that the saint's own faith was in any way a compromise.
The holy man of Ajmer may have been a Sufi, but his mysticism was strictly in accord with
orthodox Islam.
Some, like the Mughal Emperor Akbar, came to Ajmer with devotion and love in their hearts.
Others, like his great-grandson Aurangzeb, came more grudgingly, disapproving of what they saw
as the worship of shrines and saints, both frowned upon in Islam.
Akbar made a pilgrimage to this shrine at Ajmer every year to pray for his son.
It was he who donated this giant cooking pot used for feeding the poor.
To mix with ordinary people, to serve them humbly, is an act of piety for all believers,
even emperors and academics.
Eventually, Akbar's son Jahangir was born.
The grateful emperor built a new capital city in the village of Sikri, the home of Sheikh Salim,
a disciple of the Ajmer saint.
Fatehpur Sikri, he called it.
Inscribed by the entrance is a saying attributed to Jesus.
The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no house upon it.
But after 14 years, the water supply failed and Fatehpur Sikri became the world's most
beautiful ghost town.
This white marble shrine is that of Sheikh Salim.
Yet the design with its sensuous tracery and sinuous curves clearly shows that Akbar's
inspiration was not wholly Islamic.
These airy Indian pavilions are in marked contrast to orthodox Muslim austerity.
Akbar's passion for mixing the different Indian traditions went much further than architecture
and with that he was beginning to tread on very dangerous ground.
It's the 16th century, Akbar's on the throne of India.
He already has a capital.
So why this new capital, Fatehpur Sikri?
Well, there were administrative and economic reasons for it, but Fatehpur Sikri also was
intended to demonstrate the power, the glory and the might of the Mughal Empire.
And here he wanted to create an architecture which would represent different architectural
traditions in India.
What you see here is a beautiful specimen of Jain architecture.
Jain, the religion?
Yes, it is a religion like Buddhism in India and it had a very large number of followers,
but it still has.
This Akbar is the Padak Khana.
You must have heard about it and we've already a great deal about it.
This is the place where representatives and leaders of different religious creeds would
assemble and Akbar would conduct discussions with them on various religious and theological
issues.
Akbar sought all kinds of religious knowledge from within and without the Muslim faith with
extraordinary zeal.
Even Jesuit priests from Goa, more accustomed to delivering attacks on Islam, were invited
to debate.
Akbar's great grandson, the orthodox Aurangzeb, led the backlash.
Here he kneels on a prayer mat.
He imposed strict observance of the faith, increasing in his old age.
Aurangzeb and Akbar have come to represent the two faces of Muslim leadership in the
subcontinent.
I think Akbar, it's very important to remember that Islam in India represented multiple ideological
strands and in this multiplicity Akbar and Aurangzeb have come to symbolize two very diverse
strands or traditions.
For right or wrong reasons Akbar has become a reference point, a rallying point for secularism,
for secular forces in this society.
Whereas Aurangzeb is treated and interpreted as somebody who represents a major departure
from that tradition, rigid, narrow-minded, bigoted and so on and so forth.
Whereas I understand that in Pakistan it's the other way around.
Aurangzeb is regarded as an idol, as a good Muslim who in fact adheres to the Shariah
and followed the dictates of Islam.
Whereas Akbar is treated as an aberration.
It's unfortunate that present-day prejudices or present-day ideas are projected into our
history and we establish a certain continuity of ideas but the fact of the matter is that
this is how it is.
The Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan is Aurangzeb's great contribution to Mughal architecture.
Under the pious and brave Aurangzeb, Mughal power reached its zenith.
New schools of Islamic learning were opened but his strictness was not liked by all.
Dangerous cracks appeared in the empire.
Above all, the British attained a foothold in India.
Akbar's way risked the dissolution of the Islamic faith into Hindu India.
Akbar's way led to the strengthening of the Islamic faith and the eventual separation
of Muslim India into Pakistan.
A single unbroken chain of ideas can be said to link the emperor who built the Badshahi
Mosque with the scholar Allama Iqbal buried outside its walls.
The guard of honor reflects the reverence in which Iqbal is held as the inspiration
behind the state of Pakistan.
Allama Iqbal was our century's greatest Urdu philosopher poet.
Like Aurangzeb the great Mughal, two hundred years before him, Iqbal's concern was to preserve
the purity of Indian Islam.
But while Iqbal supplied the ideas and the poetic inspiration, it was another man, known
as the Qaid-e-Azam, the founder of the nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who against all odds
made Pakistan a reality.
In spite of the birth of their own state, Pakistan's Muslims are still uncomfortably aware of the
huge Hindu majority with whom they share their subcontinent and their history.
Malia Lodi edits Pakistan's English language daily, The News.
Well, Pakistan was unique along with Israel as the only nation state founded in the 6th
century on the basis of religion.
And in fact to understand the influence that Islam exercises over various aspects of life
in Pakistan, we have to understand how an Islamic identity first had to be reasserted
vis-a-vis the overwhelming Hindu majority that lived in the subcontinent.
And the demand for Pakistan as it evolved over the years pre-partition was very much
the attempt of the Muslims to establish that they were a separate nation, which meant establishing
that everything ranging from clothes to food to literature to language was something distinct
from the rest of the people who inhabited the subcontinent.
Now when Pakistan is created on this basis, naturally there was always this dichotomy
between those who maintained that Pakistan was simply an area where the Muslims of the
subcontinent had found a homeland and now they could live their independent lives.
But there was also the other argument of the religious parties which maintained that no,
Pakistan is not simply a Muslim majority homeland.
It is a country which must express itself in Islamic ways in terms of having an Islamic
state and society must also be Islamized.
Here at the Red Fort in Delhi built by Akbar's grandson, the very last Mughal emperor was
deposed by the British in 1857.
What an irony it lends to this inscription, if there be paradise on earth, it is here,
it is here, it is here.
We've come a long way from the great mosque in Kordoba to the Red Fort in Delhi, but I'm
left with the same feeling I started with, a sense of pride, of nostalgia, of loss.
The Andalusian, the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal empires are all gone.
Now where are the great Islamic civilizations, the art, the ideas, the power?
What may we Muslims leave our children and our grandchildren?
That is the challenge of the past.
It was the fate of the Muslim empires to fall behind the emerging European powers who colonized
our lands.
The great Iqbal best summed up modern Muslim dilemmas in one of his most popular poems.
Complaint and answer is about the glory of the past and the need to rediscover an Islamic
identity in the face of the spread of Western modernity.
Concentrate in a civilized manner to restore the above- slogan of a civilized, old-time
I will not let you go
My love is like a fire that burns me
I am complaining to Allah
He is my only home