Faith Communities

March 15, 2008

I am beginning Marshall Hodgson's classic history The Order of Assassins. He begins by quickly sketching early Islam so that he can contextualize this radical Shi'a group.. and he makes a point that has long interested me:

An alternative way [to justify a faith] was through accepting the continuity of a community which claimed the allegiance of all men. Increasingly since Hellenistic times men had come to be aligned in religious communities, in conscious groupings devoted to explicit religious tradition, and claiming an ultimate human loyalty. Mohammed had from the first taken for granted the alignment by religious community. [5]

Hodgson is identifying a tendency during a particular period of history for human beings to find their primary identity in a religiously grounded community. We often refer to these communities by shorthand as a "state".. but that is somewhat anachronistic. Thinking of the world into which Islam was born, the primary competitors would have been the Persians and the Byzantines.. each explicitly founded on a faith. In the first volume of The Venture of Islam Hodgson refers to these as "confessional empires." Even when a faith community was divided between competing local powers, the legitimacy of a ruling group was grounded in their ability to defend and propagate their faith.

I think as moderns used to a global system of nation states we often are at a loss to imagine the experience of a medieval person. We find a complete absence of nationalism (thus the ability of many peoples to put up with rulers who were not ethnically related) and at the same time a high level of what we might call "religionism." This religionism allowed for large scale groupings of people and settled the grounds upon which rulers could compete for legitimacy. Even in periods when the Middle East is factually split into smaller states, there would always be the notion that these diverse groups could be brought together were a sufficiently strong ruler to arise. The concept of the nation state starts to put an end to that idea of a large scale community spanning ethnic groups.