Political Islam and it's Discontents (Part Two). posted by Richard Seymour

Continuing from where I left off .

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.