Religion as a Discourse of Opposition and an Inspiration for Rebellion
Any discussion of empire and religion is primarily about how particular ruling elites have instrumentalized the latter to justify the former. That is not to question the religious sincerity of ruling elites, but rather to stress that we are concerned here with ideological and public manifestations of faith as a support for imperial government rather than private personal beliefs.
In response to such manipulation of religion by imperial regimes, political dissension and sometimes outright rebellion often took sectarian or heterodox form. Conversely, heresy was rarely a purely religious affair and frequently asserted local identities at odds with the hegemonic political and economic as well as religio-ideological impulses of empire (see further Wagner, chap. 12).Again, this does not imply that religious opposition was not genuinely religious at some level, but rather that many kinds of opposition naturally sought their legitimation in religion and gained emotive power from it, a phenomenon still in evidence today. Generally, imperial discursive traditions depended upon sacralizing a hierarchy which was inherently unequal, while resistance was articulated through appeals to egalitarianism or a counter-hierarchy. In addition to intra-religious contestation, inter-religious rivalry could also cause or legitimize opposition to imperial structures, or create local disturbances which imperial administrators had to resolve.
Just as the imperial use of religion tended to become more hegemonic as universal monotheism gained sway, so too did competing universalist visions. Christianity itself began life as a subversive creed which destabilized traditional Greco-Roman beliefs in the distinction between rulers and ruled, Greco-Romans and barbarians, and posited a new dispensation in which the dichotomy lay between Christian and non-Christian.
It also, of course, subverted the distinction between Jew and Gentile, giving it the universal appeal that Judaism could not have. However, once Christianity had become the religion of the later Roman Empire and the Byzantines sought to impose a state orthodoxy, rival Christian sects resisted Orthodox Christology and by the same token Byzantine imperial hegemony.The most obvious manifestation of this was the deep division between the Orthodox Diophysite state church and the many Monophysite communities of the Near East, including the Armenians, Nestorians, and Copts. These communities represented regional churches, and their flocks who had no wish to accept Byzantine Orthodoxy as well as suzerainty and expressed their resistance through armed rebellion on occasion. Many Nestorians migrated to Sasanian territories to avoid the implacable logic of the Byzantine Empire, that all Christians had to subscribe to the same theology.
Similar resistance movements occurred within the Sasanian Empire as a result of the steady codification of Zoroastrianism by the Sasanians and their chief priests, notably Kidir in the late third century ce, but also the political centralization and marginalization of regional Parthian dynasties that this implied. One result of this was the development of a rival strand of Mazdaean religiosity which challenged the static social hierarchy of four estates with the privileges it enshrined and inspired the militant reform movement of Mazdak which flourished in the sixth century ce. Mazdak has traditionally been interpreted as a rather anarchic religious reformer who espoused communal ownership of property and women to avoid the jealousy created by inequalities in wealth and marriage. However, the rebellion also had political implications for the position of the aristocracy, leading the Sasanian emperors to vacillate between exploiting and suppressing it.[739]
The early history of Shi‘ism provides another example of entwined religious and political resistance to a dominant imperial idiom, in this case that of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates.
The Partisans of Ali or Shi‘at Ali rebelled numerous times against the ruling caliphs on the grounds that the religio-political succession to the Prophet Muhammad should be the possession of his lineal descendants, starting with his cousin and son-in-law Ali. As Crone points out, this struggle was “religious” from the outset since following the right caliph or imam was essential for a believer’s salvation.[740] Over the centuries, however, it also became theological and, in its Isma‘ili form, Shi‘ism inspired a new series of religio-political revolutions in the ninth-tenth centuries ce which gained most of their grassroots support from marginalized groups in the Abbasid Empire, such as the Arab tribes of Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and the Kutama Berbers in North Africa. The revolutionaries successfully established the Shi‘i Fatimid caliphate, but subsequent political fractures within the ruling cohort could only be understood as religious schisms. The best-known religious opposition movement created in this way was the infamous “Assassin” sect.[741]In addition to sectarianism, mysticism has also functioned as an idiom of subversion and rebellion from mendicant monks or holy men who challenged hierarchies of wealth and power to activist religious orders operating across the boundaries of empire. Although Islamic mysticism or Sufism faced considerable criticism in the nationalist era as quietist, or worse as collaborationist with European imperial powers, its history provides examples of a more varied nature. The ‘Abbasids considered early ecstatic Sufis a major threat to social order as the execution of the wildly popular ecstatic al-Hallaj in 922 shows. Sufism subsequently functioned as an aid to government in the non-imperial political environment occasioned by the rise of small military states, and also in the new imperial context of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal age.
However, its subversive potential remained and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was Sufi brotherhoods that launched a series of rebellions against irreligious rulers across North Africa.
These rebellions were articulated in a religious idiom but a key aspect of the “irreligiosity” of the rulers in question was heavy taxation and other financial and political demands.[742] It was these same brotherhoods who led early anti-colonial resistance to the French and Italians in the Maghrib,[743] successfully undermining the new boundaries of empire through their networks and asserting that Muslims had an obligation to resist the “infidel.”Closely associated with this type of rebellion against the perceived injustice, corruption, and irreligiosity of existing empires are messianic and millenarian uprisings, the most radical form of religiously inspired revolt, designed not simply to oppose an empire but to overthrow an entire system. Such uprisings may call for the restoration of a religion’s true, usually more egalitarian, tenets, or may be inspired by a revolutionary new religious message formed in the crucible of social and economic change and dislocation. In the Islamic world there was a recurrent identification of individuals as the mahdi, the Muslim equivalent of the messiah, who will appear at a time of corruption (fasad) to restore justice in the form of the true Islamic order. One notable example is the twelfth-century Almohad revolution centered in what is now Morocco whose leader and mahdi, Ibn Tumart, asserted that his syncretic blend of Sunnism and Shi‘ism was the true and final monotheistic dispensation to which all Muslims, Christians, and Jews should subscribe. He and his successor (caliph), Abd al-Mu’min, mobilized his fellow Masmuda Berber tribesmen and a growing number of other Berber and Arab tribes for a massive jihad which swept away its political predecessors in the Maghrib and Iberia.[744]
In later times, the onset of European colonial empire in its myriad forms generated numerous moments in which new religious and ideological forces combined with severe phases of social and economic upheaval to generate revolutionary and often syncretic movements.
One of the most dramatic of these movements was the Taiping rebellion (1851-1864) against the Manchu dynasty in southern China. Inspired by an idiosyncratic Chinese Protestant tract, Liang’s Good Words, and Confucian moral utopianism, the Taiping movement’s leader, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, came to see himself as the second son of Jehovah, sent to institute a new moral and social order in place of the corrupt, rapacious, and violent society he saw around him. He and his associates recruited members of their own Hakka ethnic group into a God-worshipping society which went on the military offensive to create a new Heavenly Kingdom. Rapacious landlords, widespread banditry, famine, and the destabilization caused by the growing European commercial presence in Shanghai enabled the Taipings to broaden their support base considerably, to capture the important city of Nanking, and seriously threaten the Manchu imperial order for a decade.[745]Crucial to Taiping success was the revolutionary religious framework within which they operated which enabled them to transcend, albeit temporarily, the socioeconomic and ethno-linguistic divisions within the population. However, mil- lenarian movements tended to falter despite their great initial appeal: either they were politically successful and became a new routinized “establishment,” often characterized by similar flaws to the regime that they had ousted, or the apocalyptic new order never came to be, its leaders were exterminated and their teachings classified as heresy. The Almohads could not replace earlier forms of Islam or persuade Christian and Jewish minorities of the validity of their new monotheistic vision, and in 1228 an Almohad caliph publicly denied that Ibn Tumart had been the mahdi. In the case of the Taiping revolutionaries, intense rivalry among the small circle around “Jehovah's son,” Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, led to successive purges and massacres which fatally undermined the movement, and Taiping teachings were denounced by both Europeans and the Chinese ruling elite.