living islam _ Islamic tradition

Muslim - Christian Dialogue
Promise and Problems,
Edited by M Darrol Bryant and S.A Ali
Paragon House, ISBN 1-55778-764-6

Raficq Abdullah

I CANNOT HOPE to address all the details of this complex and
extremely important topic in a short essay. Therefore, I intend to
limit myself to a few observations, which, while they may seem only
to touch the edges of the subject, may help us to understand
something about the assumptions and attitudes which make up the world
of "Islamic Fundamentalism."

First, I want to clarify the issue of nomenclature. The
term "fundamentalism," like the terms "blasphemy," "democracy"
and "sovereignty," do not easily translate into an Islamic lexicon.
They convey primarily Western notions and can be profoundly
misleading. In a sense, all Muslims are fundamentalists insofar as
they believe that the Qur'an is the literal word of God and therefore
infallible; they agree on the basic rules, regulations and the
universal values set out in the Holy Text, and in the religious law
or Shariah which has developed from it. However, while it would be
justifiable to call all Muslims "fundamentalists" as long as we so
limit the meaning of the word, such a move would be unenlightening,
since the word has developed wider resonances. Not all Muslims
are "fundamentalists" in this broader sense where the word refers to
the type of person who uses religion as an all-encompassing ideology
with undertones of fanatical commitment and a tendency to the use of
violence to achieve his or her dogmatic goals.

Now the word "fundamentalism" does not translate easily into Arabic.
Muslim writers use a variety of expressions which carry very
different connotations. For example they may use the word islah
(reform) or salafiyya signifying a return to the prelapsarian
practices of the founding figures of Islam who have a sacred,
mythical status for all believers. Sometimes, the words tajdid
(renewal) or nahda (renaissance) are used. With the more radical
movements, new concepts have come into existence, such as takfir (the
heralding of something or someone as un-Islamic) or hijra (the flight
from unbelief). New vociferous radical groups, adopting these
concepts as their slogans or programs, have come into prominence
during the last decade in the Islamic world; they have, with some
doctrinal plausibility, politicized religious belief by making Islam
the blueprint of an ideal and completely sacred social order based on
a set of rules which are divinely ordained, eternal and entirely
independent of the will of mankind. However, a more appropriate term
for these Muslim ideologues would be "Islamists" or "Radical Muslims"
which distinguishes them from the mass of Muslim believers. I shall
use the former term, always keeping in mind, however,
that "Islamists," like "fundamentalists," are not in themselves
sufficient explanatory notions or synecdoches for the complexity,
fluidity and richness of the culture and civilization which goes by
the name of "Islam" and which does not correspond to a stable entity
existing as a natural fact. There is a continuous struggle over the
definition and the representation of the culture involving not only
the vagaries of the grand narratives of meaning and value about which
there may be common assent in the communal imagination, but also
translating into particular social issues on matters concerning
orthodoxy, specific legislation, immigration, justification of
violence and so on. Notwithstanding the assertions to the contrary of
Western conservatives and the Islamists who enjoy unconscious
affinities which, in spite of their overt hostility, unwittingly
expose some common ground between themselves, Islam is not some
mythically pure entity free from the contamination of history.
Therefore, to talk portentously about a so-called "Clash of
Civilizations" as Sam Huntington does in a recent edition of Foreign
Affairs is a preposterous and dangerous proposition. 1 Huntington's
thesis, which is that Islam is a civilization which basically rejects
western values, creates false antithetical essences. He takes no
account of the erosive effects of history or the hybridity of notions
such as the "West" or "Islam." There are indeed different values in
the Islamic world as there are also values, especially ethical
values, which are shared with the West (not particularly surprising
since Western and Islamic cultures are contiguous and are derived
from common roots). However, difference does not automatically imply
rejection. As I have indicated above, Huntington's view manifests a
curious correspondence with the attitudes projected by the Islamists.

Edward Said is right when he observes, "So the real battle is not a
clash of civilizations, but a clash of definitions." 2 And the main
or most interesting battle of definitions is occurring within the
world of Islam in which many voices are striving to be heard. This
idea may be too subtle or nuanced for polemicists like Huntington who
are more used to the hurly-burly of journalism and "policy making"
which thrive on blanket condemnations or approvals, at least in
public. However, the idea merits serious consideration, and the
Islamic world deserves a more refined analysis of its condition than
either the policy makers of the West or the Islamists are prepared to
grant it.

Not only should we tread lightly with regard to cultural differences,
but also constantly remind ourselves about the inherent shortcomings
of language which never reflects the complex, mercurial nature of
reality, of the "world-out-there," but at best, acts as a rough and
ready short-hand for our representations of this reality.
Therefore, "fundamentalism" or Islamic radicalism, like "Islam," is
what we make of it, or, to be more accurate, what the media and the
pundits or the intellectuals who help to construct information make
it for us in their bid to influence public consciousness.

It has now become commonplace in the Western world to associate Islam
with terrorism, fanatical militancy and vitriolic, anti-democratic,
anti-Western sentiment. There is a growing belief among some Western
opinion-formers who seem to be incapable of thinking other than in
stereotypes, that the Islamic world has replaced the now defunct
Soviet Union and Communism as the common enemy. There is, indeed, an
underlying strata of latent racism in the plethora of lurid images of
Islam spewed out daily by the Western media which inevitably produce
a reductionist and inimical representation of Islam, suggesting an
almost genetically inscribed difference between Western, secular
culture and a more viscerally-compelled yet rule-bound Islamic world.

This negative attitude is reflected by an equally paranoid if perhaps
more justified feeling in the Muslim world that the expansive,
imperial power of the West is the "real" threat to their interests
even where the threat may in fact derive from endemic flaws in their
own societies. The oppressive facts of colonialism and imperialism
are still a living legacy to the subaltern and disabled communities
of third-world countries.

We can see that the representation of a distrusting West and
vulnerable and materially deprived Muslim world which is resentful of
Western hegemony and yet dependent upon it-antagonistic, fixed
entities with battle lines drawn-leads to an unstable and divisive
relationship between the two cultures which, as I have suggested, may
have an empirical, if shifting, existence but also register a
spectral imaginary penumbra. This strain of mutual antipathy
encourages a racist rejection by Western conservatives of different
cultures and plugs into the aggressive rhetoric and hyperbolic
tirades of the Islamists. Both camps indulge in a self-fulfilling
process of "mutual satanization" in which one side regards the other
in terms of a totally alien and inimical essence; the world is
dichotomized into dangerous and illusory oppositions.

Since fear of Islam is not new, the images of blood-thirsty Muslims,
enraged with modernity, incapable of rational reflection, bent on
fanatical destruction in the name of obscurantist and mediaeval
notions of right and wrong, are easy to come by. However, the fixing
of labels does not teach us to understand the reasons and causes for
the actions of the Islamists. As John L. Esposito so succinctly puts
it: "Selective and therefore biased analysis adds to our ignorance
rather than our knowledge, narrows our perspective rather than
broadening our understanding, reinforces the problem rather than
opening the way to solutions. 3

In order to at least open the way, if not quite to a solution, then
to the beginnings of a better understanding of the Islamists, I want
to bring out some of the assumptions implicit in their world-view.
Certain key ideas form the basis of their philosophy and some of
these ideas create a profound rift or theological, metaphysical and
ideological dichotomy between Western cultural expectations and the
values propounded by the Islamists.

These ideas have an immense attraction for the Muslim masses,
especially the vast army of the young, dispossessed and unemployed.
There is a potent thrust of support for Islamist actions and postures
by those who suffer from the dire consequences of socio-cultural
dislocation, pauperization, and the profoundly alienating effects of
marginalization. These millions of men, women and children are left
without hope in an increasingly uprooted modern world. Modernity has
nothing to offer them. According to the Islamists, it embodies the
virulent return of jahilliyah or ungodliness which now infests the
entire world, including Muslim societies. The Islamists are obsessed
by what they see to be the omnipresence of a perfidious corruption
infecting humanity. It is justified by man-made laws which transgress
God's legislative authority as enshrined in the religious law or
Shariah. This comprehensive failure to abide by the only sovereign
law which is God's exclusive attribute and prerogative, is, in the
opinion of the Islamists, the cause of the moral decay and spiritual
bankruptcy prevalent in modern societies. A true Muslim's only shield
against this seemingly intractable threat to his or her sense of
identity is a reversion to the authentic experience of Islam as it
was practiced during the lives of the Prophet and the rightly-guided
Caliphs who ruled the Muslim umma or community in the early years of
the Faith. This was a golden age before the wear and tear of history
had set in, when the One God's revelation was new and the hearts of
Muslims were open to its divine influence; God was in direct
communication with the umma and Islam was identical with its society.
In this way the Islamists commit epistemological legerdemain by
projecting their deeply nostalgic version of events of the founding
moment of Islam as ahistorical categories, as givens which it would
be sacrilegious, indeed blasphemous, to place under critical scrutiny.

As I have suggested earlier, Islam is not a monolithic
entity "outthere" so to speak, nor in fact are the ideological
constructions of radical Islam as propagated by the Islamists
monolithic. In the first place, we need to recognize the initial
divide in doctrine and spiritual alienation between Sunnis and Shias.
Thus the Iranian revolution under the guidance of Ayatollah Khomeini
has not had the ideological impact on Sunni radical thinking one
might have expected. However, there are some remarkable similarities
in the overall pattern of Islamist thinking across the SunnilShia
divide. Both feel that "Islam" is threatened by modernity and by
the "West" which epitomizes, indeed creates, the demoralizing notions
of modernity and which wields overweening influence and power in the
world today. For the Islamists, Muslim society, which was once so
pure, is contaminated today by some western values which are
inherently decadent and corrupt. The Islamists claim to provide a
unique solution or cure for the pervasive, pestilential, virulent
conditions of societies immersed in jahilliya. They have a formula
for survival for the Muslim masses who are trapped in the several
dystopias of which they are nominally citizens, states marked by
disorderly development, the destruction of traditional values, urban
congestion, unemployment, endemic corruption-all of which threaten to
break over them like a tidal wave. Since it is perfect and the only
way (al-hal-wahid), "Islam is the solution" is a slogan with which
the Islamists intend to persuade (with some success) Muslims that
they, the Islamists, as the vanguard of the pure, can lead them out
of the shadows of the jahilliya into the light of Islam; back to the
final eruption of the Truth or `ilm, the right knowledge revealed to
the Holy Prophet Muhammad by God. An essential part of the process of
re-sanctification of the umma is the removal of the apparatus of the
modern state, by violence if necessary, and also the creation of a
new no-nonsense self-image for people torn from their villages, clan,
lineage, under the protective shadow of the Qur'an and the shariah.

The key to the battle against ungodliness is hijra or psychological
and, whenever possible, physical withdrawal from those who have lost
the True knowledge, from the new Pharaohs and their victims, in order
to prepare for the inevitable struggle, or jihad against them. This
course of action has a sacred precedent since the Holy Prophet
Muhammad also withdrew from his native city of Mecca whose powerful
citizens had become his enemies, to the city of Medina where he built
a separate and potent community. So too, the Islamists are intent on
building separate and distinct communities which prepare themselves
for the inevitable conflict with their enemies and therefore the
enemies of God. Withdrawal from jahilliya is absolutely necessary in
order to create and preserve a pure identity fixed on carrying out
God's Will and reinstating the Truth. Only then can the vanguard of
true Muslims become strong enough to wage jihad, the projection of
God's politics by other means. The Algerian scholar, Mohammed Arkoun,
describes the Islamists' compulsion towards jihad when he
comments: "This intolerable situation renders the divine promise
irrelevant, annihilates the work of the Prophet, and necessitates, as
a result, recourse to combat on behalf of God-that is to say, in
order to stay within the Covenant (mithaq) established between God
and His creatures." 4

This sanctified combat or jihad, placed at the forefront of the
Islamist armory of religious obligations and generally described by
Muslims as "struggle," has taken on, in Islamicist discourse, a more
aggressive connotation. The jihad of the Islamists is derived from
the ideas of a mediaeval theologian, Ibn Taymiyya, who used the
notion to invoke violent struggle against the Mongols. The Islamists
regard the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya as valid today and argue that
the solution of taking the battle to the enemy is prescribed by God
himself in the verse of the sword which reads: "When the holy months
are over, kill polytheists wherever you find them; capture them,
besiege them, ambush them." (Qur'an 9.5) Thus the Islamists
legitimize violence by an extremely selective, decontextualized
reading of the holy text by way of a contrived system of abrogation
which chooses to ignore 114 other verses in the Qur'an which preach
tolerance, and by citing other texts (such as that of Ibn Taymiyya)
which are regarded as touching on the status of the sacred through
the ostensible assent of the umma. In this way, the Islamists gain a
degree of legitimacy by apparently holding fast to sacred history and
to holy text. Thus, according to al-Mawdudi, the Pakistani precursor
of Sunni radicalism, Islam is "a revolutionary ideology," and its
followers are, as a consequence, an "international revolutionary
party" who are committed to the creation of a true Islamic polity, a
nomocracy in which the shariah prevails. In order to carry out the
will of God, the "revolutionary party" must seize political power and
dismantle the state as presently constituted. The new elite,
revitalized by the Qur'anic revelation and empowered by the complete
implementation of the shariah, can proceed to put humanity upon the
right path and purify the modern world of its chronic and godless
barbarism. One can see how such a doctrine, which speaks in
condemnatory and comforting generalities (Islamists are curiously shy
of detailed political programs) can exercise an immense attraction
for people who feel beleaguered by modernity and by the implacable
impact of a rapacious and amoral global economy or New World Order.

Incapable of envisaging the Qur'an as a linguistic space which
contains a multiplicity of discourses (including the prophetic,
legislative, eschatological, narrative, metaphysical, spiritual),
Islamists choose to ignore the fact that they are interpreting a
mythical past and carrying out a partial, generally decontextualized,
reading of the words of God.

As Arkoun comments: "The principle of return to founding texts is
maintained, even rigidified, but the semantic and discursive
manipulation of the texts is entirely subordinate to the ideological
ends to the exclusion of all `scientific' procedures (syntax,
semantics, rhetoric, history, theology, even philosophy), that every
legal expert (imam mujtahid) was supposed to master. "5

Encased in a form of hardening of the epistemic arteries which
attaches them to a mediaeval mode of thinking, and fixated on the
rejection of modernity, Islamists do not recognize the possibility of
practicing any form of natural theology which would compel them to
acknowledge a system of problematics at work both with the texts they
revere and against the cultural, political, ideological and
anthropological contexts in which these texts were created in the
first place. Such a course of action would be likely to reveal levels
of significance unacceptable to their way of thinking. There is a
sense in which fundamentalist thinking of any sort may be regarded as
a form of respite care in which the fundamentalist wins permanent
respite from personal accountability and from the responsibility of
independent choice. Armed with the divinely-inspired weaponry of
revelation, vulnerability does not come naturally to extremists, be
they Jewish, Christian or Muslim. They invariably pound their
followers with the ineffable righteousness of their cause. Dogmatism
prevails and authoritarianism follows. There are no voices among this
rampant brotherhood which are prepared to explore the limits of their
vision, never mind the possibility of transgression. A pivotal trait
in the Islamists' worldview is an abhorrence of innovation or bid'a.
There is only one model, that is their version of the life of the
Prophet and the ideal community which he established in Medina.
Paradoxically, they have no sense of the Islamic notion of hudud or
limits which is profoundly connected to compromise and tolerance.
Unable to detect the hidden or implicit processes, contradictions and
telling lacunae in all knowledge, including the knowledge received
through revelation, they are imprisoned by their own construction of
the Divine Law. Correct belief, and even more importantly, correct
practice becomes the basis for a stable society and any alternative
belief or value is regarded by the Islamists as apostasy, which is a
capital offence akin to treason. In such a moral environment, the
traditional values of mercy and compassion so emphatically enshrined
in the Qur'an are disposed of in the quest for purity. Thus, as we
have seen recently in Pakistan, the Shariah, or Islamic Law, is used
to repress minorities who have different beliefs and to delegitimize
any form of intellectual questioning. The Islamists dream of a pure,
cleansed society modeled upon the archetypal community of the Holy
Prophet in Medina. The danger, of course, is that in their zeal to
create a sacred utopia, they in fact bring about a society which is
based upon fixed and authoritarian structures, political and
psychological. Any deviation from this dystopia of misguided
religious zeal is considered by the Islamists as a sin deserving of
the most severe penalties. They dream of a potent, orderly and God-
fearing society which, if realized, is likely to be a society of fear
and terrible moral blight.

NOTES

1. See Sam Huntingdon, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs,
Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer, 1993.

2. Edward Said, "Interview with A. Coburn on `What Is Islam,"' in New
Statesman & Society, 10 February 1995, pp. 20-22.

3. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 173.

4. Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam (Denver, CO: Westview Press,
1994), pp. 96-97.

5. Ibid., pp. 97-98.