Muslim vs. Muslim: Turkey’s Ambition to Be the New Ottoman Empire Fuels Violent Clashes with Saudi Arabia, Repeating the Wars of Previous Centuries

A map of the world deceptively divides Islam into a number of various nation-states. These divisions function like administrative districts, and are sometimes vehicles for the ambitions of their respective rulers. Islam itself is the primary unit.

“The long struggle for supremacy in the muslim world,” as Yaroslav Trofimov phrases it, must be understood as a sort of civil war within Islam. What seems to be a conflict between nation-states is in fact an intramural dispute. Within the Islamic world, the concept of ‘nation-state’ may not apply at all.

Islam unifies the Muslim world, as a social, political, and military movement. Islam functions primarily this way, and less as a meditative personal spirituality.

In these civil wars within Islam, “Turks and Saudis have been enemies for centuries.” The city of Jerusalem has been fought over, besieged, defended, and conquered many times over the centuries. The bloodiest battles for Jerusalem involved neither Christians nor Jews, but rather occurred when one Muslim army sought to take the city from another Muslim army.

Two Islamic armies, the Seljuk Turks on one side, and the Egyptian Fatimids on the other, fought each other several times for control of Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslim soldiers killed each other, and the city changed hands back and forth (e.g., in 1071 and 1098) between the two warring factions.

Recounting a “gruesome episode in the shared history of Turkey and Saudi Arabia,” Yaroslav Trofimov recounts how,

two centuries ago, in the fall of 1818, the Saudi monarch was brought to Istanbul in chains. He was displayed in a cage to the cheering crowds outside the Hagia Sophia mosque, and then, amid celebratory fireworks, his head was chopped off.

In the long history of warfare between Turkey and Saudi Arabia - or, sometimes, between Turkey and the House of Saud - the beheading of the Saudi king is merely one instance. This particular beheading, one of many, happened after

an Ottoman expeditionary corps comprised mostly of Turkish and Albanian soldiers seized the Saudi capital of Diriya, on the outskirts of Riyadh, on Sept. 11, 1818. The city was razed. According to a Russian diplomatic dispatch, the Turkish sultan then had the captured Saudi ruler, Abdullah bin Saud, escorted to Istanbul, alongside the chief Wahhabi cleric. After the deposed Saudi monarch was beheaded outside the Hagia Sophia, his body was propped up in public for three days with his severed head under his arm. (As for the Wahhabi imam, he was sent to Istanbul’s bazaar for beheading, the diplomat reported.)

Throughout much of Islamic history, the chief rivals have been the Muslims of Turkey, i.e., of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, struggling against the Muslims of Arabia or Saudi Arabia. The terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’ are used, and the lands of Iran and Iraq are mentioned, but the internal dynamic of Islam is often more dominated by Turkey and Arabia than by those other segments.

The Turks had mounted their 1818 attack on their fellow Muslims because,

in Ottoman eyes, the Saudis were bloodthirsty murderers who had plundered the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, slaughtering 4,000 civilian inhabitants (most of them Shiite), and later destroyed many shrines in Mecca and Medina.

By the time the Turks beheaded the Saudi king in 1818, Muslims had been slaughtering each other for over a millennium. Since then, the pattern has not changed. “The long legacy of rivalry between the two Sunni Muslim powers,” notes Jaroslav Trofimov, “has fueled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s determination to punish the House of Saud.” The wars of past centuries live on in the Muslim mind, and fuel today’s violence.

This, of course, is also the role that the House of Saud sees as its natural right because of the kingdom’s control over Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, and over the hajj pilgrimage that brings more than two million Muslims there each year.

Iran and Iraq are major objects of interest on the global scene, but inside Islam, they aren’t the main contenders.

In this contest, Iran — whose Shiite version of Islam represents a small minority of the predominantly Sunni Muslim world — can’t really compete. For now, Tehran is happy to watch from the sidelines as its two main regional rivals undermine each other.

From an outsider’s perspective, it is easy to get the impression that Islam’s hatred is directed toward Europeans and Americans, toward Jews and Christians. But a more careful look at the Muslim world reveals that Muslims direct huge amounts of hostility toward each other.

In addition to warfare and assassinations, it’s worth noting that a great deal of Islamic terrorism targets competing Muslim groups. Again, the outsiders may assume that Islamic terror is aimed primarily at Europeans, American, Jews, and Christians. But insiders see it differently.

Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has tried to assert Riyadh’s ambition to lead the Middle East ever since his father ascended to the throne in 2015. In a major departure from Saudi Arabia’s previous policy of behind-the-scenes checkbook diplomacy, Prince Mohammed has built a coalition of Sunni states such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to launch a war against Iranian allies in Yemen. He imposed an embargo that unsuccessfully sought regime change in Qatar. He also attempted to meddle in Lebanese politics by forcing that nation’s prime minister to announce during a stay in the kingdom that he would resign, a decision that the prime minister rescinded once he was home.

The maneuvering and scheming for power and influence continues nonstop among the Saudis and the Turks. Neighboring countries are pawns in this power struggle.

A number of organizations who operate in both politics and terrorism serve as further tools which the rivals use against each other. To identify these groups as either ‘terror groups’ or ‘political parties’ is to miss the point that the two are inseparable and interrelated in this context. “Saudi Arabia and its allies also have relentlessly pursued the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement,” writes Trofimov. Typical of such groups, the Muslim Brotherhood is linked to other terrorists: “its affiliates include Hamas.”

Though professing a commitment to democracy under Islamic law, the Brotherhood has turned autocratic when in power in Egypt and Sudan. Mr. Erdogan has supported the group across the Arab world since the 2011 revolutions of the Arab Spring.

As the leader of the Turkish government, Erdogan is willing to use his connections with terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to attack the Saudis.

Mr. Erdogan has made several efforts to resist Saudi Arabia’s rise. He sent Turkish troops to protect Qatar, ousted Saudi allies from Somalia and announced a deal to lease an island across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia in Sudan, possibly for a military base. He has also become a vociferous champion of traditional Muslim causes, such as Palestine, and of new ones, such as the suffering of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Istanbul has turned into a favorite hub for Islamist dissidents from across the Arab world.

Erdogan hopes to win the long struggle and become the leader of Islam. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire saw itself as the rightful government of the Muslim world. Erdogan wants to draw on that older attitude. Turkey is the modern remnant of the Ottoman Empire.

But the Saudis also see themselves as the rightful leader of Islam. So the same contest continues. Only the names change.

“The Turkish president’s foreign policy strategy aims to make Muslims proud again,” said Soner Cagaptay, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of a recent biography of Mr. Erdogan, “The New Sultan.” “Under this vision, a reimagined and modernized version of the Ottoman past, the Turks are to lead Muslims to greatness.”

There is a long history behind that claim. For four centuries, the sultan in Istanbul was also the religious leader, or caliph, of the entire Muslim world. His spiritual authority was recognized well beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire, which at its peak included parts of central and eastern Europe, north Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

In previous centuries, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire fought with the Muslims of Arabia for a chance to be the leading force within Islam. In the twenty-first century, Turkey is fighting against Saudi Arabia. The fight remains the same; the names have changed.

There was an interval, however, when it seemed like the situation might get better. When the Ottoman Empire ended, around 1923 or 1924, a modern Turkey started to emerge under the leadership of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, a popular president of the country. During Ataturk’s time, Turkey began to shed the rigid demands of Islam. The harsh demands of Sharia law were relaxed, and a modern trend made itself felt in education and politics.

Turkey seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. Ataturk ended the Caliphate, the Islamic notion of imperial government, and the country moved toward rule by freely-elected representatives. Freedom of speech and modern universities were starting to emerge. Ataturk’s dream didn’t include wasting lives and energy fighting with the Arabs for control of Islam.

Sadly, Erdogan’s effort have been to do the very opposite of Ataturk’s. Erdogan is working to reinstate the harsh oppression of Islam in every area of live and society.

The Arabs did not engage in the type of modernization that Ataturk brought to Turkey:

The caliphate was abolished only in 1924, six years after the Ottomans lost control over Mecca and Medina to a British-sponsored Arab revolt during World War I. The modern, secular Turkish Republic, which rose from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat by the Allied powers, banished the last sultan, Mehmed VI, to Europe in 1922. With the Ottomans gone, the House of Saud quickly expanded from its desert strongholds to much of the Arabian peninsula, first capturing Mecca and then establishing a powerful new state in 1932.

With Turkey pursuing a modernized path, and Saudi Arabia clinging to the strict enforcement of Islam, the two nations could peacefully coexist, because they were each pursuing different goals. They weren’t in competition.

Until Mr. Erdogan’s embrace of neo-Ottoman politics — and more authoritarian rule — a decade or so ago, the modern Turkish state wasn’t much interested in leading the Muslim world and was content to leave religious proselytizing to Saudi Arabia. Turkey joined NATO, sought membership in the European Union and nurtured close military links with Israel.

But when Turkey abandoned modernization, and Erdogan began to instate an oppressive Islamic regime, Turkey and Saudi Arabia came into conflict: they were in competition, each wanting to be the source of leadership in Islam.

Mr. Erdogan’s new Turkey, by contrast, presents a major challenge to Saudi Arabia by offering an alternative Islamic model, said Madawi al Rasheed, a Saudi professor at the London School of Economics and the author of a history of Saudi Arabia. “It is an existential threat to Saudi Arabia because of Turkey’s combination of Islam and a kind of democracy,” she said. “After all, Erdogan is still ruling over a republic that has a parliament, opposition parties and a civil society — while Saudi Arabia has nothing like that.”

Erdogan has not been able to erase all traces of modernization. Those remaining fragments of modernity give Turkey an edge over Saudi Arabia. But how long can those shreds of modernization last under Erdogan’s imposition of strict Islamic social and political concepts?

While Turkey seems to be sliding back into the darkness of Islamic oppression, Saudi Arabia seems never to have left it.

Indeed, today’s kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a monarchy as absolute as they come. It’s also the third state run by the House of Saud since the family’s alliance with the puritan preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab rallied the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of an uncompromising new creed (since known as Wahhabism) in 1745.

Understanding the conflicts within Islam is essential for understanding the past and present of the Muslim world. Europeans and Americans can tend to think of themselves as the primary target of Islamic hate, but Muslims are often more likely to be the victims of Islamic terrorism than Jews or Christians.

Pivotal Points in Islam’s Assault on Europe: When Did the Tide Turn?

Historians debate about exactly when it became clear that Europe would not collapse under the weight of ongoing Muslim attacks. In 711 A.D., Islam made its first major invasion into Europe, conquering most of Spain.

“The notion of historical turning points has proved irresistible: especially, of late, the watershed between expansionist Islam and” defensive Europe, as historian Colin Thubron writes. The decisive turning point could have been the Battle of Tours, or the fighting around Vienna. Both battles featured outnumbered European defenders offering brave, and ultimately successful, resistance to invading Muslim troops:

This crucial event has been assigned inter alia to the Battle of Tours in 732, where the Frankish leader Charles Martel turned back the Moorish army flooding across France, and variously to the siege and the Battle of Vienna (in 1529 and 1683), which checked the Ottoman advance into Eastern Europe.

So which is it? Tours or Vienna? When was that moment at which it was clear or inevitable that Europe would survive, and that Islam would fail to destroy Europe?

The Battle of Tours was certainly significant: Charles Martel turned back the Muslim army which had been flooding across France.

The fighting around Vienna was also significant: the defending Europeans stopped the Islamic advance into eastern Europe.

Colin Thubron offers a third option. The big turning point might have happened in the Mediterranean, at Malta and at Lepanto. To understand the military actions at those two places, a bit of background is necessary. The setting takes place between

1565 and 1571, when the Ottoman Turks pushed westward across the Mediterranean. Their empire was then at its height. They had absorbed Egypt and almost the whole North African littoral; to the east they were battering on Persia, to the north threatening Vienna. Over the Mediterranean itself — ancient Rome’s “center of the world” — the imperial Turkish navies and their corsair auxiliaries were spreading terror down the coasts of Italy and even Spain. But lying strategically across their path, in a pendant below Sicily, was the tiny island of Malta.

From Malta “the Knights of St. John, soldier-monks” offered resistance to the Muslim navies.

In those years, Islam had expanded westward across the Mediterranean; the Muslim navies attacked the coasts of Italy and Spain.

Malta was one small point of resistance, a place which refused to allow Islamic armies to invade and occupy.

The great turning-point in the Mediterranean may have happened at two points of resistance: Lepanto and Malta.

Malta’s survival of the great Ottoman siege in 1565 was to become one of the redemptive epics of Christendom. And a greater one was to follow. In 1571 the western Mediterranean powers — Spain, Venice, the Papacy — united at last in fear, put an end to Turkish maritime expansion at the horrifying Battle of Lepanto.

The Muslim siege on Malta in 1565 and the Muslim attack at Lepanto in 1571 were two major military offensives. Again the Europeans were outnumbered and on the defensive. Their survival showed that Europe refused to collapse in the face of attacking Muslim troops.

A Complex Set of Texts: Foundational Documents and Conflict in the Muslim World

It is at least an oversimplification, and more probably simply wrong, to reduce Islam to the Qur’an (“Koran”). There are several texts which are foundational to Islam as a socio-political vision.

Scholar Timothy Furnish describes the textual basis for Islam:

For Muslims two authoritative poles of religious reference exist: the Qur'an, and the Sunnah plus the Hadith (Arabic plural Ahadith). The Sunnah is the customary practice of the Islamic community as derived from the actions and words of the prophet Muhammad.

For the practical purposes of Islam, i.e., sorting out the details of Sharia law, and especially the non-negotiable core of Sharia, which is called Hadd or Hudud, Muslim scholars must rely on the primary texts.

But not all primary texts are viewed with equal trust. It is the task, and the conflict, of Islamic scholars to rank these various texts in terms of their reliability.

Hadiths are narrative accounts of the these same actions and pronouncements, rather like “hearsay” records of what Muhammad did and said. Hadiths are not the word of God in the sense that the Qur'an is, but they are of only slightly lesser importance. They were almost certainly orally transmitted for some time before being redacted in the first few centuries of Islamic history. A specialized field of hadith criticism and analysis developed as a means of sorting the wheat of legitimate traditions - that is, ones that ostensibly truly went back to Muhammad - from the chaff of forgeries.

The opportunity both for ambiguity and for dispute is apparent. Because Islam in practice is more of a socio-political program than a personal meditative spirituality, points of textual interpretation are less about conceptual abstractions regarding the nature of the deity, and more about concrete details of communal living.

More than a millennium’s worth of armed conflict within and between Muslim communities fuels, and is fueled by, the prioritization of one text over another.

The complexities of Islamic politics cannot be explained by the Qur’an alone. Any student of Islam must survey a much broader variety of principle texts which form an underlying basis.

Systems in the Past: Arrangements in Former Times

One prominent textbook is titled World History: Patterns of Interaction, and with two good reasons. First, the actual events of history manifest certain deep structures which recur: archetypes. Second, the human mind and the structure of its consciousness is designed to find patterns.

The study of history will inevitably include the comparison and contrast of one situation to another. Generations of students and teachers alike have labored under the burden of essays written in response to a prompt to “compare and contrast.”

Writing about these patterns, scholar George Will gives several examples, including

Mancur Olson’s seminal The Rise and Decline of Nations, which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

One pattern, then, combines the accumulation of ossified bureaucracies with class of individuals who make ambitious careers, not by creating things of value, but rather by skillful navigation of bureaucracy: an essentially parasitic arrangement.

This pattern, in which a small but increasing percentage of society gets a paycheck and social advancements, not by contributing something to the community, but rather by exploiting the system, can be seen in the later phases of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the British Empire.

A second pattern in history emerges when the reader becomes acquainted

with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

In a nation governed by freely-elected representatives, i.e., a ‘republic’ in the strict sense of the word, there is a consistent temptation for those in power to represent themselves instead of the voters. Societies hope to avoid succumbing to this temptation, in part by hoping for representatives of good character, and in part by imposing mechanisms like term limits and the separation of powers.

This is, of course, a corollary to Lord Acton’s famous principle about how power corrupts.

An example is seen in the etymology of the word ‘administrator,’ which originally meant one who supplied assistance and materials to another. Yet in modern bureaucracies, an administrator often denotes a supervisor rather than an assistant. The origin of the verb to ‘administer’ means to ‘help.’

A third pattern deals with the government’s “ever-deeper penetration into society.” One might justify increasing governmental domination by arguing that it

serves equality. Actually, big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

So, even in those instances in which governmental intervention into society is done with the best and most altruistic of motives, it serves only to create a sort of aristocracy.

Consider governmental anti-poverty measures. Not only do they fail to end poverty, but rather, they end up increasing poverty. Along the way, they also create an elite of bureaucrats and politicians who manage the ineffective anti-poverty measures, and who make entire careers out of doing so.

A fourth pattern emerges in situations in which the government is seen as the dispenser of favors. Instead of competing in the free market to see who can offer good work for a good wage, citizens compete for government benefits.

Citizens form groups which lobby for legislation which favors their profession or their geographical region of the country; demographic segments hope to influence policymakers and enjoy the benefits of government funding or loopholes in regulations.

Instead of working together to contribute to their civilization, citizens are pitted against each other by the notion that the government is a provider:

Of course Americans distrust one another more as more and more factions fight one another for preferential treatment by government. Of course government becomes drained of dignity, and becomes corrosive of social cohesion, as it becomes a bigger dispenser of inequality through benefits to those sufficiently clever and connected to work its levers.

When citizens compete with each other, hoping to nudge the government’s policies into one direction or another - directions, naturally, which favor them - cynicism abounds. Governments and their leaders are no longer trusted, but rather, citizens hope to manipulate governments, even as the citizens are aware that the government is attempting to manipulate them.

Trusting the government less, and competing with each other, the citizens finally trust each other less.

Not only do we “tend to trust our institutions less,” we also “tend to trust each other less.” Of course there are parallel increases in distrust: Government’s dignity diminishes as government grows to serve factions of those sophisticated at manipulating its allocation of preferences. Social solidarity is a casualty of government grown big because it recognizes no limits to its dispensing of favors.

Given the consistent manifestation of the law of unintended consequences, the increase of governmental action yields only harm. Anti-poverty measures increase poverty; anti-crime programs increase crime; peace programs lead to violence; educational programs lead to illiteracy.

The only way forward is to limit or trim government, as George Will notes:

Suppose there were not 16 government agencies “to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways.” Suppose there were none. Such barnacles on big government institutionalize the scramble for government favors; these agencies are a standing incitement to bend public power for private advantage. Hence they increase distrust of government, diminish social solidarity and aggravate the most indefensible inequality — that driven by government dispensations.

These patterns recur on all six inhabited continents, over the last 6,000 years of recorded history, uniformly across different languages, religions, and cultures. These are the ‘patterns of interaction,’ seen in the reign of Gaozu, also known as Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty in China, and in the reign of Wang Mang, who overthrew Gaozu’s descendants several generations later.

These patterns are seen in the Merovingian Dynasty’s ascent, when it unified and energized the Franks in the former Roman colony of Gaul, and in the Merovingian Dynasty’s decline, when it became complacent and allowed Charles “the Hammer” Martel to do the royal work, and therefore gain the royal title.

Santayana’s all-too-often quoted epigram might give rise to yet another variant. Even if one does remember the past, one might still have to repeat it.

Imposing Misery, Jailing Dissidents: Venezuela Repeats Standard Socialist Patterns

In February 2014, a article in The Michigan Daily carried the headline, ‘Venezuelan opposition head waits to hear about charges.’ This was merely episode in a long protracted struggle between Venezuela's socialist dictatorship and its freedom-oriented dissidents.

The story, from an AP wire item, explained that an opposition leader was being ‘held at a military jail’ for his opposition to ‘15 years of socialist rule.’

This particular leader was named Leopoldo Lopez, and the dictator who put him in jail was Nicolas Maduro, but the general pattern of a liberty-seeking dissident being jailed by a socialist dictator has been the pattern for several decades in Venezuela.

The net impact of socialism in Venezuela follows a standard pattern which was clear in the various Soviet-bloc countries until 1990. The planned economy with high taxes and extreme regulation of all aspects of business, along with state ownership of almost all assets, leads to declining standards of living and brutal repression of civil rights and human rights.

These symptoms lingered and intensified both during the decade of rule by dictator Hugo Chavez, and during the reign of his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

The declining standards of living led to outright poverty, with shortages in basic goods, like food and toilet paper. Medical care deteriorated, and the average lifespan among Venezuela citizens’s shortened considerably.

By 2018, the condition of the nation was desperate, with many citizens near starvation. These sad developments were, however, reliably predictable twenty years earlier: such is the pattern of socialist governments.

Toward a New Global Balance of Power: China and Russia Pose Threats to Small Independent Nations

The world’s geopolitical equilibrium during the first two decades of the twenty-first century was shaped by several factors. Russia discovered or invented its post-Soviet identity. China relapsed into autocracy after its flirtation with a less personality-driven power structures. Condoleezza Rice’s firm hand on Putin was replaced by Hillary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s ambiguous and indecisive approach to Russia. The world in general moved away from its now irrelevant Cold War configurations and wondered how to respond to Islamic terrorism.

By 2018, it had become clear that the new, post-Soviet Russia was not a clear friend or ally to Europe, to NATO, or to the United States. Robert Maginnis writes:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seems immune if not somewhat irritated by Western sanctions over his seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his ongoing misadventure in eastern Ukraine, which some label a civil war. Putin responded to Western sanctions with disinformation campaigns against Western elections, significant saber-rattling along Russia’s Western border with former satellite states, and increased harassment of NATO and US military vessels and aircraft across the world.

Parallel to Putin is China’s leader, Xi Jinping. While Russia had a readymade substantial military establishment leftover from the Cold War, China was still in a phase of military ascendancy. While China had nuclear weapons since 1964, it lacked an army, navy, and air force of global stature.

In the early twenty-first century, China, in contrast to both Russia and the United States, has gone on a diligent and focused building spree, developing world-class capabilities to strike anywhere.

China’s ability to intimidate militarily works in conjunction with its financial and political influence. It has been able to advance toward its goal of controlling shipping in and around the South China Sea, marginalizing the other nation-states in the area - Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc. - and having at its mercy a disproportionately large percentage of the world’s shipping.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is an autocrat as well with a great vision for a modern, global armed forces and an economic arm reaching broadly, thus pushing China’s influence abroad seeking to dominate the globe’s democratic regions, a view shared by China experts in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a total, protracted struggle for regional and global supremacy,” said retired Navy Captain Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief who testified in May 2018. “This supremacy is the heart of the ‘China Dream.’ China’s arsenal in this campaign for supremacy includes economic, informational, political and military warfare.” Rick Fisher, a China expert with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, testified that this poses “grave challenges” for American security and warned the US has “about a decade” to take action to counter the threat.

The Chinese Navy’s hold on the South China Sea, as well as the construction, arming, and weaponizing of artificial islands there, is one early step in a larger plan.

Although China and Russia do not have, at this time, an explicit alliance, observers like Robert Maginnis see some form of cooperation as both likely and dangerous. Militarily, Putin could continue bullying eastern Europe, and Xi Jinping would bully the Pacific. Economically, Russia exerts its influence by means of energy supplied to Europe, while China is poised to have even more economic influence than Russia by means of its manufacturing and cyber-technology assets.

A global balance of power dominated by China and Russia would not bode well for smaller nations hoping to retain their sovereignty and enjoy some measure of personal freedom and political liberty. If the United States fails to strengthen itself to the degree at which it represents a credible counterbalance to China and Russia, the notion of a free society governed by freely-elected representatives could become a rare thing on the planet.

The Textual Basis of Islam: Historic Consensus

When Muhammad died in 632 A.D., he left behind a powerful organization, but no authoritative written texts. The Qur’an (Koran) would not be written until decades later.

In the absence of an official text, various traditions about what Muhammad might have said about different topics emerged: vacuums attract filling.

Collections, both written and spoken, appeared, presenting themselves as the words of Muhammad. These collections were not always mutually compatible. When the contradictions became evident, crisis and conflict arose.

If Islam were to continue as a viable social and political order, some harmony would be needed.

In legal matters, e.g., some foundational core of unchanging doctrines was necessary for establishing sharia. There would be some flexibility for interpretation and competing regional precedents, but there would also be fixed set of axiomatic laws.

A non-negotiable axiom within sharia is called a hadd (the plural form is hudud). The collected hudud constitute the basis of sharia and of the broader Islamic social worldview.

To formulate hudud and other invariable Islamic doctrines, early Muslim scholars began to sift through the competing collections of sayings. These collections were called hadith. In the meantime, the Qur’an was beginning to emerge in written form. The need to harmonize the hadith with each other, and with the Qur’an, was growing.

These scholars worked to form a consensus about which hadith would be regarded as authoritative, as Timothy Furnish writes:

Two aspects of individual hadiths became the focus of scholarly criticism within the early Islamic world: the matn (plural mutun or mitan), or “text,” and the isnad (plural sanad), or “chain of transmission.” A matn might well be rejected on the grounds that it seemed to contradict the Qur’an. But the focus of hadith criticism was channeled into investigating the isnads rather than the matns. The number, credibility, and seamless­ness of the transmitters became more important than what the tradition actually said. And so as long as a hadith text did not actually contradict the Qur’an, it had a shot at being accepted by at least some segment of the early Islamic community, especially if what it said proved useful in some manner, usually political. Hadiths were ranked into three categories based on the trustworthiness of their chains of transmission going back to the Prophet: sahih, “sound”; hasan, “good”; and da'if, or “weak.”

So it was that Qur’an began to accumulate out of various fragments which were circulating at the time. Simultaneously, some hadith were gaining recognition as authoritative while others were being relegated to a questionable status.

Two processes were happening, and they overlapped somewhat in time: the process of composing the final edition of the Qur’an, and the process of sorting out various hadith. These two processes most probably influenced each other.

Together, the two processes formed the finished social and political order which is Islam.

This categorization was largely worked out by Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafï i (d. 820 CE), who had been disturbed by the proliferation of questionable, even down­right false, traditions in his time and developed the gauge of isnad legiti­macy as a means of differentiating spurious hadith from acceptable ones. If a consensus of scholars agreed a particular hadith was acceptable, then it was deemed so for the entire Islamic world.

This scholarly consensus shaped the history of Islam permanently. Not only were the Hudud fixed, but more significantly, the nature of Islam as political and social movement was determined.

The fact that modern Islam is less about the agency and personhood of the deity, and more about public and communal paradigms which humans should institute and maintain, can be traced to the formative stage of development in which the texts of Islam were accreted and given their relative degrees of authority.