102. Karen Armstrongthe Sufi lifestyle which can make everyone an indomitable
hero of a battle waged perpetually in the cosmos and within
the soul. The Mongol invasions had led to a mystical move-
ment, which helped people come to terms with the catastro-
phe they had experienced at the deeper levels of the psyche,
and Rumi was its greatest luminary and exemplar. The new
Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited po-
tential of human life. Sufis could experience on the spiritual
plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial
politics.
Others responded to the upheavals of the period very dif-
ferently. The destruction of the invasions, when so much had
been lost, led to an intensification of the conservatism that al-
ways characterized agrarian society. When resources were
limited, it was impossible to encourage inventiveness and
originality in the way that we do today in the modern West,
where we expect to know more than our parents' generation
and that our children will experience still greater advance.
No society before our own could afford the constant retrain-
ing of personnel and replacement of the infrastructure that
innovation on this scale demands. Consequently, in all pre-
modern societies, including that of agrarian Europe, educa-
tion was designed to preserve what had already been achieved
and to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the indi-
vidual, which could undermine the stability of a community
that had no means of integrating or exploiting fresh insights.
In the madrasahs, for example, pupils learned old texts and
commentaries by heart, and the teaching consisted of a word-
by-word explication of a standard textbook. Public disputa-
tions between scholars took for granted that one of the
debaters was right and the other wrong. There was no idea, in
the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing the clash
of two opposing positions to build a new synthesis. Thus the
madrasahs promoted an acceptance of those notions that