Political Islam and Its Discontents... Part One. posted by Richard Seymour

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.

In Part Two, I'll have a look at the traditional political roles of Islam, the state of political Islam today, and its possible futures. Should be fun. I'd definitely come back tomorrow if I were you.