Another Muslim leader "Speaking Out" on Islamic Fundamentalism
Zuiko Azumazi
by Sophie Boukhari and Bassam Mansour. It's available on the UNESCO -
Courier portal if anyone's seriously interested in sober debate by Muslims
themselves, rather than the artificial Muslim stereotypes ignominiously
portrayed in the popular western media, over the "Apocalyptic Blogosphere",
and by ignorant Islamophobe interlocutors in this forum.
At a glance: Born in Tunisia in 1946, Abdelwahab Meddeb moved to Paris as a
student, where he studied literature and art history. Poet, novelist,
essayist, and translator, he has a deep understanding of both Western and
Arab culture. He is editor of the international French-language literary
journal, Dédale and is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Paris X in Nanterre.
http://portal.unesco.org/es/ev.php-URL_ID=14320&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Interview extract:-
Sweeping our own backyard
The Tunisian writer and poet [Abdelwahab Meddeb] examines the genealogy of
Islamic fundamentalism. In the current climate, he believes that
self-criticism is the surest way to lift the Muslim world out of the moral
and political crisis it is plunging into.
Q: Do you see terrorist attacks as a religious phenomenon or a symptom of
the political frustration of Muslims?
A: The fundamentalist movement is fed in two ways. It is an insurrectionary,
revolutionary movement and a phenomenon that draws on elements of history
and the Islamic tradition. However, one cannot say that the attacks are a
religious phenomenon. The use of suicide in the name of politics or religion
to kill blindly has never existed in Islam, never. Some people claim the
contrary, referring to the attacks perpetrated by the Ismaelians in the
Middle Ages. But that was a very specific phenomenon. These were attacks by
the thousand-year-old Shi'ite movement against the Sunni authorities. And
the Ismaelians carried out political assassinations in a highly targeted
way, without ever harming civilians. They targeted their enemies, the
theologians or representatives of authority. No, what is happening today has
a lot more to do with the Western nihilist movement.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: This movement began with the anarchists in the 19th century. It was
described by Dostoyevsky in The Possessed. It drew its followers from the
ranks of the frustrated. The Italian writer Solmi showed that the typical
revolutionary comes from semi-intellectual circles, often school teachers,
in other words aspiring intellectuals, who lack what it takes to be
recognised as such. In the same way, the Muslim terrorists recruit
semi-literate people.
Given the demographic circumstances and the spread of mediocre education,
these semi-literates constitute an immense mass of people gnawed away by
resentment. Many Muslims cannot bear the position of weakness that they have
occupied since Bonaparte. Since the end of the 18th century, Islam has not
found ways to face up to the Western hegemony. Many people currently feel so
powerless in the face of the American hyper-power that sacrificial violence
seems to them to be the only response.
Q: You say in your book La Maladie de l'islam (The Malady of Islam) that
this religion is, more than any other, fertile ground for fundamentalism.
Why?
A: It is true that the form of radicalism that preaches takfir
(excommunication) sprang from the first sect of Islam, the kharijites,
beginning in the 7th century. It is also true that a debate began raging
with the second generation of Muslims, often ending in armed clashes between
literalists and allegorists, in other words those who held that the Koran
has only one meaning and those who believed its message was ambivalent and
therefore open to interpretation. However this debate is not unique to
Islam, it runs through all religions.
All systems generate a sickness, a malady. If Christians are doing better
than others these days, it is because they have spent centuries denouncing
the malady of Christianity. All that is new in the Western tradition after
the Middle Ages has been built on the criticism of religion, against itself.
Thinkers from Erasmus to Schopenhauer, including Voltaire, Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard, have all denounced the evils of Christianity. They attacked
both its driving force and its illusions.
The problem is that in Islam, this kind of criticism has hardly even begun.
Even enlightened Muslims cannot bear to have the metaphor of a malady
applied to their beliefs, which is why the title of my book in Arabic had to
be changed (see box). However, since the terrorist attacks in Riyadh and
Casablanca, this metaphor has started to appear, even among theologians. Of
course, I am not saying that other religions do not also need to examine
their conscience. But it is not my job to write about the malady of Judaism
or Protestant Puritanism. I prefer to sweep my own backyard.
Q: Could you outline the development of fundamentalist Muslim ideology?
A: This ideology originates from a combination of three things. For the
first, you have to look at the text of the Koran itself. There is, for
example, the infamous "verse of the sword" which gives the order to pursue
and kill all polytheists. The fundamentalists argue that this verse cancels
out all the nuances of tolerance found in the Koran. The second element
refers to the literalist thinking that developed over the centuries, and
which found a spectacular incarnation in Ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder
of one of the four schools of orthodox Islam.
This theologian fought against the mu'tazilites, the rationalist current
supported by the Baghdad authorities in the 9th century. He was imprisoned
and persecuted for his hard-line beliefs. After his death, his disciples
radicalized his thinking. For example, fundamentalists today, who claim to
have their roots in Hanbalism, often evoke takfir, even though Ibn Hanbal
challenged this notion.The second key figure in this traditionalist trend is
the Hanbalist thinker Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). Within his monumental body
of work is a little book entitled As-siyassa ash-Shar'ia ("Politics in the
name of divine law"), which is like a bible for the fundamentalist. In his
time, Ibn Taymiyya was criticized, even from within the Hanbalist school,
and spent part of his life in prison. But today, he is a central reference
point for fundamentalists.
The third pillar of fundamentalist ideology is a figure called Ibn Abd Al
Wahhab, who called for a radical return to the most literal interpretation.
Taking up the theory of Ibn Taymiyya, he refused any form of intercession
between God and man. He was responsible for the disappearance of all the
tombs of saints on the Arabian Peninsula and the destruction of the rites of
popular Sufism, which were very rich from an anthropological point of view.
The ideas of Abd Al Wahhab (1703-1792) were decried while he was alive, but
later became the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia.
Q: And what are the external causes?
A: They go back to Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, and the momentous
encounter with the West. The people of the Middle East discovered that
Europe was powerful and that henceforth they themselves would occupy a
position of weakness. The first reaction, around 1830, was Muhammad Ali's
plan to modernize Egypt. The intellectual Rifaa Al-Tahtawi (1801-1874)
represented this school of thought. He undertook the huge job of translating
scientific manuals. In the politico-theological sphere, sheikhs Al-Afghani
(1838-1897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) then created what we call the
salafiyya, a form of fundamentalism, not to be confused with Muslim
fundamentalism.
Q: What is the difference?
A: Afghani and Abduh were defeated historically but their approach was
wider. What were they searching for? They wanted to return to the
foundations of Islam and adapt them so that Muslim societies could rebuild
themselves, taking Western contributions into account, particularly
democracy and parliamentary government. Their plan was to use these concepts
to fight against the hold of colonialism and local despotism. In fact, they
used to meet in a cafe in Cairo called Al-Barlaman (the Parliament).
Q: How did we get from this modernist fundamentalism to Muslim
fundamentalism?
A: It was a gradual process. Rashid Ridha (1865-1935) served as an
intermediary link in the ancestry of this form of fundamentalism. He began
by taking up the ideas of Abduh and criticising Wahhabism, making a name for
himself in the early 20th century, and eventually taking power on the
Arabian Peninsula in 1932. But towards the end of his life, Ridha changed
his opinions and wrote a text supporting Wahhabism, which was not as
opportunist as it sounds. He pointed to the evolution of man at a time of
colonial conquest which sparked the rise of anti-Western feeling.
Q: So fundamentalism was born in the 1920s...
A: Yes, with Rashid Ridha's pupil, Hassan Al-Banna (1906-1949), who remains
famous for creating the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun) in Egypt
in 1928. Next came a virulent wave of anti-Western sentiment, with democracy
portrayed as trickery and an ideology of domination. If democracy existed,
Hassan Al-Banna asked, how could there be colonialism? He concluded that
Muslim countries do not need the West but instead need to renew their
political systems in their own way. You could say that there was a move from
a watchword of modernizing Islam to another, which preaches an Islamization
of modernity. For example, instead of defending the parliamentary system, we
turn to the Koran and substitute the word choura for the word barlaman. But
choura has nothing to do with parliamentarianism. It is not founded on
elections or equality, but is simply a matter of consultation, to guide the
prince in making decisions.
Q: How were these ideas received?
A: At first, the Muslim Brotherhood experienced repression, nationalist
tyranny and the emergence of the post-colonial totalitarian State. Despotism
has traditionally taken place where there is little State intervention. But
in an age of technical progress, all Arab countries have moved towards
maximum state intervention. The model of the party-State has triumphed. And
the fundamentalists have gained ground as this model has reached its limits.
They benefited from the failure of Arab nationalism, the defeat by Israel in
1967, the failure to develop and from the elimination of any form of
political expression. The rise in power of the Saudi rulers after the 1973
oil crisis added a new element. Petrodollars helped the spectacular spread
of a hard-line form of Islam, founded on a single orthopraxy: the strict
observance of prayer became the basis of social censure and wiped out local
practices in favour of a uniform Islam.
Q: But how did we veer towards terrorism?
A: The end of Nasserism and the arrival in power of Sadat in Egypt saw a
migration of semi-literate Egyptians to Saudi Arabia, where the Muslim
Brotherhood had married their ideas with those of Wahhabism. Then there was
a second, explosive, encounter in Afghanistan. Egyptians, Saudis and
Pakistanis joined together in the jihad, orchestrated and supervised by the
United States to fight against the Soviet invasion. You know what happened
next.
Q: How do you see the future?
A: Today, the Muslim world is in a state of civil war. But internal
criticism is growing. The French revolution of 1789 was preceded by two
centuries of intellectual effort. Faced with violence, critical thought is
spreading, particularly in the Shi'ite world. In Iran, the concept of
vilayat e-faqih introduced by Khomenei has been criticised by theologians.
In Iraq, the idea of spiritual caliphate, which presupposes a separation of
religion from politics, seems to be gaining ground among the Shi'ite
majority. As for Saudi Arabia, if it does not want to implode it must
resolve the contradiction between its religious discourse, which leads to
anti-Western sentiment, and its geo-political alliance with the United
States.
Q: And which way is public opinion likely to lean?
A: Since the 1970s, a diffuse fundamentalism has developed in Arab-Muslim
societies. But that may be beginning to ebb away. The terrorist attacks in
several Muslim countries have shocked the public. The challenge now is to
separate Islam from Islamism. We must make sure that Islam plays a role in
the war against fundamentalism.
End interview.
--
Peace
--
The opinion of the intelligent is worth more than the certitude of the
ignorant. [Arab Proverb]
Zuiko Azumazi
zuiko....@gmail.com