Political Islam and Its Discontents
globalecho
Jesus Christ, Superstar, Takes on Mohammed
In an interview with Johann Hari of the Independent, Bernard-Henri
Levy accomplishes something very interesting indeed – he manages to
make a rather limp-wristed secular liberalism (avec bombes) look
vaguely macho and interesting. He considers himself "a human rights
activist in fidelity to 1968", (his wife considers him the modern
Jesus Christ). He compares "moderate" Muslims with dissidents in the
USSR during the Cold War. He condemns the war on Iraq as the wrong
war, yet was Chirac's personal ambassador to Afghanistan following
what he regarded as the 'right' war. He repeats the standard
non-choice of democracy vs. fundamentalism (as Slavoj Zizek points
out, the gesture is intended to produce only one reaction since no one
is likely to opt for fundamentalism – the vote is rigged).
Specifically, he contrasts Hamid Karzai, "a moderate, open-minded,
modern, democratic Muslim" with the "Islam of the warlords and the
Taliban". That's all the choice we get, is it? Karzai, the political
appointee of US homicide bombers, or Osama bin Laden, the political
spokesman for suicide bombers?
Levy, like a good many Orientalists before him, drastically
underestimates the Islamic world and the many possibilities within it.
Political Islam itself is a variegated species, ranging from far left
to ultra-right. And, if it is true that Islam never underwent a
Reformation, it is also true that Islam never had the experience of
Christian Europe, in which the Church was a component of the state.
The secularism whose absence in the Muslim world is so bewept by a
certain kind of intellectual is inherent in Islamic history – its
negation, whether in Iran or in the formations of the Muslim Brothers
across west Asia and north Africa, is a specifically modern
phenomenon. It is related to attempts at shoring up state power in
times of crisis, to attempts to crush the Arab and Muslim left, and to
the exercise of colonial and imperial power. It is no good simply
looking to "moderate Muslims" to repel the Islamists. Far better,
surely, to understand that Islam itself stands in complex relations to
the exercise of political power, and encourage the kind of radical
dissent in the Muslim world that has been in absentia, and whose empty
terrain has been temporarily colonised by the fanatics. In other
words, if the so-called "Islamo-fascists" are perversely articulating
an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist dynamic (that's what fascism
does, no?) then the answer is obviously to give such dynamics their
proper articulation in radical politics.
Islam and Secularism
Islam does not have a church or a clergy, in the elaborate
hierarchical style of Christianity, nor have the rulers of Islamic
states been traditionally men of religion (as opposed to religious
men). Khomeini was the first ruler of an Islamic state to achieve the
rule of the jurists – although Islamic scholars in other countries
have rejected the idea. Christianity is a faith, whereas Islam is
mainly a shari'a, so that while the former has little to say about the
precise running of the state, the latter appears to contain many rules
governing relations between man and man (mu'amalat), as much as
between man and God ('ibadat). Given the apparent impossibility of
separating religion from politics in this view, why do I insist that
Islam is always-already secular in some respect? Because the "truly
Islamic society" has never materialised in practise. The
Umayyad-Abbasid state, according to Mohammed Arkoun, "is secularist:
the ideological theorising by the jurists is a circumstantial product
using conventional and credulous arguments to hide historical and
political reality … Military power played a pre-eminent role in the
caliphate, the sultanate and all later forms of Islamic government …
Orthodox expressions of Islam (sunni, shi'i. Khariji, all of which
claim the monopoly of orthodoxy) arbitrarily select and ideologically
use beliefs and practises conceived to be authentically religious". I
think there is considerable merit in this position, since a properly
Islamist state, in the sense of government by the clerics, would
involve the subjugation of all economic and political questions to
spiritual ones, at least formally. This has never been the case in
traditional Islamic countries.
Islam and Modernism
Islamic societies are considered stagnant, backward, lacking political
ferment and technological innovation until they imported these
quantities from the West. It is true that 'the Muslim world' did not
develop modern capitalism, and that it existed in relative stagnation
or decline after the Middle Ages. However, it bears mentioning that
the rest of Asia and Africa were also in a similar state, contiguous
with the rise of the European colonial powers. Maxime Rodinson
suggests that, as there was no special quality in the Muslim world
which would have prevented it from developing into modern capitalism
(pace Weber's 'patrimonialism thesis'), it was the external factor of
colonialism, with its attendant train of exploitation, oppression and
cultural humiliation, which prevented these societies from
flourishing.
In times of weakness, societies often cling to tradition and
conservatism. In Islamic jurisprudence, there has been a conflict
between taqlid and itjihad, (between imitation of the past, and
independent judgment and interpretation). During the latter Abbasid
and Ottoman periods, the itjihad was suppressed, only to be revived by
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a scholar of Persian origin who was active in
Egypt and Turkey. He encouraged the direct study of Islamic texts
themselves, rather than obsessive reading of superfluous commentaries.
His Egyptian disciple, Muhammad Abdu, was a rationalist who went on to
influence many reformers and particularly graduates of the Al-Azhar
mosque-university in Cairo (the world's oldest university). This is
the tradition of reformism in political Islam.
On the other hand, the Wahhabi movement in Arabia in the eighteenth
century represents both a strict, puritanical reading of the works,
and a rejection of the itjihad tradition, considered to be responsible
for internal decay. In similar vein, the salafiyya tradition has been
revived. Salafiyya is the veneration of the tradition of early Muslim
leaders and jurists, represented intellectually by the likes of
Muhammad Rashid Rida in the 1920s and 1930s, and socially by the
Muslim Brothers launched in Egypt in 1928. They have not, so far,
produced a systematic applied theory for economic and social
organisation in spite of their many charitable and social services.
The renaissance in Islam was necessarily somewhat fragile, responding
as it did less to internal stimuli than to the confrontation with a
politically, economically and technologically dominated West. Nazih
Ayubi suggests that the "distorted and incomplete nature of the
capitalist transformation of Muslim societies stood in the way of a
full adoption of the values and thinking patterns of bourgeois
liberalism". Indeed, many Islamic modernists overcompensated for this
by conflating modernism with Westernism – Kemal Attaturk being a case
in point. Yet the resurgence of a more reactionary brand of Islam
during the 1970s and 1980s was also related to the failure of
Attaturkism, Nasserism, and Arab socialism (whether Ba'athist or
Marxist). Nasser, a political giant in the fifties and sixties, was
broken by the Six Day War with Israel which saw his air force pounded
to dust before they even took off. This event was given a particular
religious inflection by Islamist groups (which is not co-substantial
with an anti-Semitic world view). The other factor influencing the
rise of 'radical' Islamic groups was their sponsorship either by
political leaders (like Sadat) eager to crush the Left and also
appease popular religiosity, or by states (like America) who saw such
groups as an invaluable geopolitical weapon against the USSR and also
pan-Arab nationalism and socialism.
Iran's "Islamic Revolution".
Political Islam is not quite as ancient, or as Arabian, as it would
have us believe. In fact, it synthesises a backward looking appeal to
"true Islam" with modern, Western notions of nationalism. The Islamist
state would apply the shari'a and unify the umma under a renewed
caliphate, drawing on the "sacred-history" of the community-state of
Madina in the time of Muhammad. Yet, the assumptions underpinning the
nation-state are also evident in most Islamist ideologies. (Sami
Zubaida, "Is Iran an Islamic State?", in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork
eds, Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, 1997, p. 104).
The existence of Iran captures these contradictions perfectly. For,
although Khomeini's regime maintains the internationalist rhetoric of
Islamism, it also practises an Islamised nationalism. As Zubaida
explains:
"[T]he Iranian constitution and state practice enshrine Iranian
nationality as a condition for full citizenship in the Republic.
Article 115 states that the president must be Iranian both by origin
and nationality, and have a 'convinced belief in the … official school
of thought in the country', that is, he must be Shi'i … Iranian Islam,
being Shi'i, reinforces Iranian nationalism, confronting as it does a
predominantly Sunni Arab world and Turkey." (Ibid, p. 105)
The origins of the present Islamic state are to be found in the
revolutionary ferment in the years leading up to 1979, specifically
with the different anti-Shah factions competing for hegemony within
the revolution. On the left, the Marxist-Islamist Mujahedin-e Khalq
(People's Combatants) and the Marxist-Leninist Fedayin-e Khalq
(People's Sacraficers) tried to incite the masses to revolution
through demonstrative attacks on the institutions of the state. On the
right, Khomeini took advantage of religious processions and memorials
to foment insurrectionary feeling. He argued that moral force would
win the day, drawing on the Shi'ite themes of martyrdom and
self-sacrafice. While the former appealed to the Iranian working
class, to the poor and oppressed, Khomeini largely appealed to the
disgruntled middle-class, who saw him as a safe bet with their
property – but Khomeini also drew substantial support from the urban
working class who heard his calls for social justice, and the rural
workers who saw him as the man to bring roads, irrigation, and
schools. (Dilip Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism, 1988, pp. 166-8). It is
these competing social forces which were to be decisive in shaping the
"Islamic Republic" – most importantly, of course, the conservative
clerics who out-manoeuvred the radicals and leftists during the
revolutionary upheaval and after. It is partially because these forces
persisted after the revolution, in various forms, that the regime's
totalitarian tendencies have been frustrated in various ways.
The Iranian Constitution is not the shari'a. The shari'a is taken as a
source of legislation, but there is nevertheless "a dualism in the
Iranian constitution between the sovereignty of the people (derived
from the dominant political discourses of modernity) and the
sovereignty of God, through the principle of the vilayet-i faqih.
Article 6 of the constitutions states that 'the affairs of the country
must be administered on the basis of public opinion expressed by means
of elections.'" (Zubaida, op cit, p. 106). At the same time, every
Islamist movement in the world, including in Iran, has argued that the
only suitable kind of rule under Islam is that of the Just Faqih - the
vilayet-i faqih principle entails precisely the rule of the divine law
as interpreted by the Just Faqih. (Dilip Hiro, op cit, 1988, p.
162).And in practise, as Zubaida notes, the Council of Guardians –
which is supposed to scrutinize legislation and prevent any deviation
from the 'tenets of Islam' has in fact used its powers to veto such
policies as land reform, or nationalisation. Measures that interfered
with private property were consistently deemed contrary to the
shari'a. The interference became so extreme that Khomeini was obliged
to make a speech announcing that the Muslim nation may abrogate
shari'a principles if it chose to do so. In fact, the shari'a, being
as indeterminate as most systems of laws are, is supplemented by other
sources of law anyway. The Qur'anic penal code, which allows the state
to perform amputations and executions in the case of theft, for
instance, has been used – but selectively and usually with a political
motive. The 'revolutionary courts' set up by the regime are Jacobin
courts, punishing those who have committed crimes against the
revolution – that is, they are modern institutions of state
repression. (The term 'Islamic Republic' in fact owes itself to its
French forebear). The state, even though heavily Islamised in terms of
personnel, is arranged in modern bureaucracies, ministries populated
by bland functionaries wearing trousers and jackets. (Zubaida, op cit,
pp. 106-9). Modernisation, then, by any other name…
Islamism and Democracy.
In reply to yesterday's Guardian article by Osama Saeed, a Muslim
writes from Birmingham to protest that the point isn't to vote for one
or other party in the election but to challenge the system of "secular
democracy", to work from within to persuade people of its inaptitude
for a just society. Indeed, the enemies of "secular democracy" are
usually placed on the far religious right, and this might be where you
would place this gentleman – although, suffice to add, he would
probably consider notions of left and right irrelevant. In fact,
however, this scribe is merely repeating the gesture of Orientalist
ideology – for him, just as for the Orientalists, there is only one
true Islam, historically identical with the caliphate and incompatible
with pluralist democracy. Daniel Lerner, an Orientalist intellectual
himself, made a similar point when he suggested that the choice for
Muslims was between "Mecca or mechanisation". (Presumably, his choice
was between illumination and alliteration.)
There is not, of course, one interpretation of Islam. There is not
even one Islamism, as I have already hinted. Islamists are united on
the view that Islam is comprehensive, embodying spirit and world,
"religion and state". This is the view of integrationists in Egypt who
wish the state to be based on shari'a principles. There are, however,
distinctions to be made between the religious and political spheres,
and this is reflected in Islamic legal theory (fiqh) and the
distinction between ibidat (a person's relationship with God) and
mu'amalat (a person's relationship with society, economy and family).
And of course, the latter is subject to various interpretations.
Modern reformers within the Islamist tradition seek to define what is
flexible (al-mutaghayyir) in the shari'a as broadly as possible, while
conservatives seek to expand the dominion of what is decisively spoke
by God (al-thabit). The secularist 'Abd al-Raziq and the integralist
Muslim Brothers agree on one thing – the precise form of governance in
any society is to be left to human reason to define.
The issue of sovereignty and power revolves, for the Islamists, around
the duality of God and the community of believers (umma). Ultimately,
God is the source of all law. The power to interpret and apply that
law is, however, in the hands of the community of believers - and each
human being is born equal in the eyes of Islam. There is a radicalism
inherent in this (which may express itself in right-wing or left-wing
ways), because it marks a decisive shift away from the tradition of
subordination to a ruler, even an unjust one, and toward the assertion
of the will of the community. For contemporary Islamists, tyranny is
the main enemy. Even the nominal commitment to the restoration of the
caliphate (which has been abandoned by many Islamist sects) is in the
hands of the Muslim Brothers, say, not much different to a modern
Presidency - while he executes the shari'a on behalf of the community
of believers, he has no religious sanction himself. (See, in general,
Gudrun Kramer, "Islamist Notions of Democracy" in Political Islam, op
cit.)
Liberation Theology.
In their internal organisation, however, Islamist movements have
tended to be autocratic. The one regime which has issued from it, (the
Islamic Republic) has been an autocracy. (I would argue that this is
more because of the success of the conservative elements in
hegemonizing the post-revolutionary situation and their need to
suppress the desires of the rural poor and the urban working class.)
Just as I have insisted that there is nothing automatically
reactionary or 'backward' about Political Islam, it is also clear that
the forms in which it has persisted have not been able to solve the
problems which Islamists have addressed themselves to. Political Islam
has not provided a particularly Islamic society to aim for - and it is
hard to see how it could. It has, however, successfully filled a gap
produced by the collapse of the big battalions of the international
secular Left. Socialists do not share their purview, but we should
work with them when they oppose tyranny and work against imperialism.