Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse

EIGHT. Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange

The Qur’an words, amid the heat of the war against Mecca, revealed a sense of torment about the raison d’être of the war:“They have hearts they cannot comprehend with; they have eyes they cannot see with; and they have ears they cannot hear with. They are like beasts—indeed, they are more misguided.”1 Apart from the war’s profane and visible association with the potential for economic remuneration, it remained more lodged in an incomprehensible resistance of the old system of belief to natural extinction .2 But while this perception was simmering among the estranged Muhajirun (Meccan Muslims in Medina), the rest of infidel Quraysh went about its business as usual, with no apparent concern for the possibility that the small raids on its caravans by the former could escalate into a fullscale war. The difference in attitudes was most evident at the battle of Badr, the first major confrontation between the two sides, where a Muslim contingent of three hundred warriors defeated a Qurayshan convoy protected by three times their number. Traditional accounts lengthily portray the prebattle determination of the Muslims, sharply contrasting it with the unwillingness of many Qurayshans, who were more traders than warriors , to engage in a real fight. The hastily marshaled Qurayshan army was meant largely as a show of strength; its mission was only to camp in the 231 eight Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange area of Badr for three nights and then stage an orderly withdrawal back to Mecca rather than to actually fight according to a preset stratagem. The Muslims’ swift attack caught it by complete surprise, especially because most Qurayshans continued to entertain the belief that the blood relations between them and the Muhajirun could not possibly be superseded to the extent of intertribal war waged in the name of a transtribal faith.3 But another dimension of the story here, which nonetheless should not be too exaggerated, had to do with the comparative ontology of life and death. The Muslims’ battle adversaries knew of no other life than this one. For them, justice could not be postponed to another life or relegated to a weak deity that had no jurisdiction over this area of human relations. In sharp contrast to the restless, vengeful attitude of Mecca after its defeat in Badr, the remembrance of the Qur’an for the Muslims killed in Uhud was overwhelmingly compassionate, with no mention whatever of a need to avenge their deaths. Rather, they were portrayed as enjoying the richness of paradise, desiring only to be joined in it by their other comrades, and repudiating the survivors’ need to mourn their glorious fate.4 With the consolidation of such an ontotheological development, one of the ancient standards of behavior attached to the concept of honor, namely insuring the certitude of avenging unnatural death, was demurred. death, subjectivity, and identity In neighboring social contexts, however, natural death was a final destination that had nullified the need for grandiose individual planning in life, especially under nomadism. An outstanding example occurs in Tarafa’s ode, where death is shown to reduce all contrasting virtues—the niggardly and the indulgent wastrel—into a sameness of nonbeing: All you can see is a couple of heaps of dust, and on them slabs of granite, flat stones piled shoulder to shoulder. (c. 64) Here, death equalizes all and erases all difference. Death is the permanent abode of the same. The awareness of this impending sameness is mobilized here to negate the purposefulness of the present quest after, or demand for, an ethical difference (which in this case is related to a difference in social status). Here, there is a clear, overpowering desert landscape that 232 • Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange furnishes the immense background of the two similar grave markers, where an anonymity of death blurs vision and makes distinctions improbable . Past achievement, human effort, projects, designs, life itself are all so visibly ephemeral. This fundamentally nomadic conception of natural death was inherited by the pre-Islamic sedentaries, whose differentiated socioeconomy was yet to provide a more differentiated idea of natural death, an idea that would be expected to exist in tandem with the new conceptions of the virtue of status and the introduction of more-stable social hierarchies. To be sure, the Qur’an itself seems at some points to allude to an archaic image of death, articulated in terms quite distant...