Islam, international affairs and the danger of a single story
We should never reduce the Other to our enemy, to the bearer of false knowledge… always within him or her there is the Absolute of the impenetrable abyss of another person.
– Slavoj Zizek (2002: 67)
On 7 December 2015, then Republican candidate for president of the US Donald Trump declared, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” (Johnson, 2015). On another occasion, he called for all Muslims to wear identification badges and stated, “I want surveillance of these people” (Vitali, 2015). Trump’s declarations came amid his critique of President Obama for not using the phrase “radical Islam” when talking about Muslims (Nakamura, 2016; Qiu, 2016). Granted, there is a need for vigorous debate about defining the nature of those who commit global terror; however, the problem with Trump’s rhetoric is that the only Islam he speaks of is radical Islam, thus linking Muslims with the adjective radical in the minds of those who listen to him. But the President’s rhetoric reflects a deeper problem. The labels many Americans use when referring to phenomena throughout the world are deeply flawed because they fail to account for the ideas or actions of the US in creating, sustaining and shaping the very phenomena under question.
In response to Trump’s calls for surveillance and use of the phrase “radical Islam,” the social media activist Marwa Balkar, as part of the #notinmyname campaign, attached a peace sign to her clothing as her identification. Her response went viral. “As long as Trump continues to make statements like this,” she said, “I will continue to fight back, because I need to protect who I am” (Fusion, 2016; Balkar, 2015). Miss Balkar’s statement can be interpreted as a response to worlding, to borrow the label from the Routledge series in which the present volume is a part. The concept of worlding is best understood as a complicated process in which social constructions and structures of power interact to affect knowledge and shape perceptions, especially of the “Other.”
Sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann introduced the term “social constructions” in 1966 with the publication of their influential work, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann demonstrated how people, after naturally forming themselves into groups, create concepts and representations of others that become accepted as reality. Moreover, Berger and Luckmann demonstrated how these social constructions of reality become institutionalized, embedding meaning and knowledge into the very fabric of a society. A year later, Berger built on The Social Construction of Reality with his work The Sacred Canopy, in which he introduced his concept of world construction. “Every human society is an enterprise of world-building,” he wrote. “Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise” (Berger, 1967: 3). Accordingly, Berger showed how “society is the product of man” and “man is the product of society” (Ibid).
Yet, for Berger, the individual does not merely absorb “the social world”; rather, social worlds are actively “appropriated” by people (Ibid, 18). Thus, “The socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering of experience. A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals” (Ibid, 19). Language is paramount in world construction and the social construction of reality. “Language nomizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience,” stated Berger. “As an item of experience is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux and given stability as the entity so named” (Ibid, 20). The case of Donald Trump referring only to Islam when it is prefaced by the adjective radical, and by othering Muslims as uniquely different from non-Muslims, is a real-world example of worlding or world construction, and it is also an example of religion building.
Religion building is the practice of one group ascribing and prescribing meaning for a religious tradition of another group to an extent that it becomes generally accepted as truth. One important work on this subject was the historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s (1962) book The Meaning and End of Religion. Smith differentiated between “faith” and what he termed “cumulative tradition,” and argued that these concepts have been inaccurately combined and subsumed within the modern concept of “religion.” Religion, as a clearly defined ideology with a particular name, encapsulated within certain communities of people and organized around a set of creeds, is a modern, Western invention. No classical language – neither the Greek of the New Testament, the Sanskrit of the Vedas or Upanishads, nor even the Arabic of the Quran – has a word that represents the modern concept of religion.
The cumulative tradition of Muslim societies has been nomized by being named Islam and thus has been given a sort of stability that distracts from understanding it as a community of discourse. Granted, the faith and cumulative tradition of Muslims were revealed by God with the built-in name of islam as their din (Smith, 1962: 80). However, as scholars such as Ebrahim Moosa have repeatedly demonstrated, there are significant differences between the Quranic concept of din and the post-Enlightenment European concept of religion (Moosa, 2014: 39; Moosa, 2016).1 The adoption by Muslims of the word din to denote the European concept of religion can be understood as a conceptual capitulation to European geopolitical and intellectual hegemony and its ensuing ability to define the terms of the conversation about the meanings and ends of religion.
A major theme of modern history has been the interaction between communities of Muslims with “the West” as a locus of cultural and political power.2 Religion building and world construction have been one component of Western power in these interactions. As scholar of religion Richard King reminds us, “religion and culture are the field in which power relations operate” (1999: 1). As King also cogently observed, the concept of “the West” is rooted in as much essentialism and as many stereotypes as “the East,” but the crucial difference is that the social construction of the idea of the West occurred in the hands of those with dominant power while the social construction of peoples in “the East” was received by those without power as an inversion of “the West” (King, 1999: 3). The concept of “the West,” as a unique identity-entity, is important not only for how persons who self-identify as “Western” view themselves in their interactions with others but also for how Muslims, too, have understood their place in history and in international relations. Alluding to Berger’s thesis, the public intellectual and scholar of Islam Hamid Dabashi wrote, “[I]n the forced binary manufactured between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West,” Muslims as Muslims are deprived of agential autonomy to worldliness – the world in which they find themselves is already determined” (2013: 11). “In this essentialist distinction,” he continued, “‘Islam’ is often posited as a monolithic and entirely ahistorical proposition, while “the West” is presupposed in equally categorical and definitive terms – having attained in fact an ontological disposition” (Ibid).
Language is a repository of our conditions of being, called ontology. Inherent in the process that language goes through to attain an “ontological disposition” are the meanings attached to labels and whether these meanings are descriptive or prescriptive. In 2004 Robert Orsi argued that the key words of modernity, such as religion or secularism, are, in fact, prescriptive. “They make up a disciplinary nomenclature that tells us how the world must be, or as some part of the world’s population wants and insists that it be,” he argued (2004: 779). The concept of religion, as part of the disciplinary vocabulary of modernity, now has prescriptive meanings, and many of these meanings have been used to justify geopolitical power struggles between the West and other parts of the world.
One of the prescriptions for religions and religious persons in the modern era is secularism. Secularism has emerged as a perceived requisite to the nation-state model of international affairs. As such, it has presupposed “new concepts of ‘religion,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘politics,’ and new imperatives associated with them” (Asad, 2003: 1–2). Within this Western cultural paradigm of secular normativity, the religions of ostensibly non-secular peoples have long been seen as a source of violence. Westerners have portrayed and prescribed Islam as particularly so. “Experts on ‘Islam,’ ‘the modern world,’ and ‘political philosophy’,” wrote Talal Asad, “have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots” (Ibid, 10).
Islam has always been an important factor in world building and social constructions of reality in Christian societies and, later, the West. Over centuries, a nomized Islam was viewed as a cultural and historical other that is essentially different from Christian societies and exceptionally violent.3 In her book Muslims in the Western Imagination, scholar of philosophy and religion Sophia Rose Arjana traced 1,300 years of history to document how Western societies have continuously portrayed Muslims as “demons, giants, cannibals, vampires, zombies, and other monsters” and argues that these “imaginary Muslim monsters have determined the construction of the Muslim in Western thought” (2015: 1). The Crusades, of course, might be the most popular example from this history, and this spirit of religious warfare inspired countless writings and works of art. Dante, in his Inferno (ca. 1314), describes Muhammad being torn apart in Hell; this literary scene was visually depicted by the artist William Blake in 1827. A popular illustration titled “La vie de Mahomet” (1699) by Humphrey Prideaux depicts Muhammad wearing a turban and Alladin-esque garb, sword in one hand and crescent moon in the other, trampling on a globe, a cross and the Ten Commandments. As Arjana states, Christians viewed themselves as “determinative of normative humanity, while everything else existed as strange, foreign, and monstrous” (2015: 4). The Protestant Reformation in Europe (1517–1648) added a new dimension to this understanding of Islam because it allowed Europeans to begin calling for a similar reformation within Islam. Near the turn of the 20th century, British Consul-General in Egypt Lord Cromer declared Islam to be a “great failure” and made its reformation official British policy, hoping to inculcate “a distinctly Christian code of morality” among Muslims (Tignor, 1962: 225; Moosa, 2009: 162–163).
Although Cromer’s beloved British Empire is gone, his calls for a reformation of Islam are not. On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced, “We need an Islamic reformation, and I think there is real hope for one” (Lobe, 2004). Many others joined Wolfowitz in calling for an Islamic reformation because of the persistent belief that Islam is somehow incompatible with the Western world order. Although recent scholarship has conclusively shown how Muslims and Islam are compatible with democracy,4 the Western prescription that Islam is incompatible with the democratic, liberal world order and, therefore, needs reforming remains a stubborn part of the international affairs discourse.
A 2003 report for the RAND Corporation, a veritable arm of the US government, exemplifies this. The report’s author, Cheryl Bernard, refers to Islam as a clearly identifiable “thing” with maladies that can be itemized and diagnosed. “Islam’s current crisis has two main components,” she wrote:
A failure to thrive and a loss of connection to the global mainstream. The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness… the Islamic world has fallen out of step with contemporary global culture… (2003: ix).
The solution to the “backwardness” of Islam and Muslims is reformation according to Western models and norms, she argued. “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex” (2003: ix, 3).
Bernard claimed that the greatest threat to the US is “traditionalist Islam” – as distinct from militant groups, such as al-Qaeda, which she categorizes as fundamentalist. According to Bernard, “the philosophical underpinnings” of Islam and modernity are incompatible. “Modern democracy rests on the values of the Enlightenment; traditionalism opposes these values and sees them as a source of corruption and evil. Traditionalism is antithetical to the basic requirements of a modern democratic mind-set” (2003: 33). Bernard rejected any possibility of cooperation between the US and “traditional” Muslims for three reasons, as pointed out in a critical review by the late Saba Mahmood: first, their belief in the divinity of the Quran and a failure to regard it as a historical document; second, their failure to realize that Muhammad was a product of his time whose life offers little of practical value to solving the exigencies of modern existence; and, last, their inability to denounce the juristic tradition for its deficient and contradictory character (2006: 334).
Bernard’s conclusions formed the basis of an actual US government programme called Muslim World Outreach. The goal of this programme was “to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself” to spark a reformation, which was defined as a vital national security interest of the US. In more than two dozen countries, the US-funded Islamic radio and television shows, course work in Muslim schools, Muslim think tanks, political workshops and other programs that promoted “moderate Islam” (Kaplan, 2005). Referring to the government’s goal of creating an Islamic reformation, Wolfowitz stated, “This is a battle of ideas and a battle for minds. To win the war on terror, we must win a war of ideas” (Ibid).
The rhetoric of Wolfowitz’s “war on ideas” is rooted in the (mis)perception that there is an essentially historical difference between the peoples and ideas of the West and the non-West – that the peoples of “the West” emerged from entirely different historical trajectories than did the peoples of the non-West. The creation of “the West” as a self-conscious identity-entity, in opposition to a socially constructed Islam, is a consequence of a series of historical events “whereby knowledge, ownership, subjectification and subjection become intertwined through incredible violence” (Dressler and Mandair, 2011: 8). One such event was Martin Luther’s claim of a divided self, which is derived from his Thesis 95. This thesis states, “It is a subtle evil to say that the love of God is, even in intensity, the same kind of love as that for creatures.” With this proclamation, Luther opened an intellectual space for rejecting the notion that love for God required love for other beings (Ibid).
Luther’s decoupling of the implied connection between love for God with love for others held important implications. It allowed other intellectuals, such as Kant, to create an ontological schema of human existence divided between God, self and world, in which a self-conscious, rational human being has the capacity to become itself through the other and can no longer be itself without the existence of that other. “One is conscious of oneself only as one appears to oneself,” wrote Kant. “Not as one is” (Brook, 2013). Any object of thought, in other words, must separate itself from itself. Thus, while Christians and Muslims share the same belief in God (Smith’s “faith”) and emerged from the same interconnected web of shared human history, Christendom and later Europe drew on a schema of historical difference and categorization to determine the other. Religion building (Smith’s “cumulative tradition”) was an important component of this process. The Kantian notion of self and other was expanded on by Heidegger, who analysed how the creation of the self in opposition to others eventually places the self at the centre of imagination of the world. “What Heidegger alludes to,” according to Dressler and Mandair, “is that this peculiarly modern form of thinking gradually produces the birth of the West as a self-referential system of thought, universalizing its position and discourse, claiming objectivity about human societies and cultures” (2011: 9).
The “peculiarly modern form of thinking” found in the West also provides it with a form of power, to define itself according to itself and to define others. Foucault described this form of power as the ability of those in power to divide groups of people as subjects, which, of course, is rooted in language. “The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others,” said Foucault. “This process objectivizes him” (Foucault, 2001: 326). As examples, Foucault provided the categories of the “mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “good boys,’” though from our perspective in 2017 we can extend Foucault’s analysis to include the creation of the categories of “moderate Islam” – as the RAND report called for – and Trump’s “radical Islam.” The annales historian Fernand Braudel drew on Foucault’s concept of power and the coinciding ability to divide in formulating his concept of a civilization. Foucault’s rendering of power deserves “close attention,” wrote Braudel, because “A civilization attains its true persona by rejecting what troubles it… expelling from its frontiers and from its inner life any value that it spurns” (Braudel, 1994: 31).
Foucault’s concepts of power and division, combined with Braudel’s concept of civilization and its “centuries-long distillation of a collective personality” (Ibid) illuminate a genealogy of ideas found beneath the RAND Corporation’s argument that Islam has lost its “connection to the global mainstream.” The “global mainstream,” of course, is meant to be the US, or the West, more broadly. Scholars certainly take issue with the categorization of “the West,” but it remains a fundamental point of reference by Americans and Europeans who perceive themselves to be a part of such a “civilization,” especially as divided from Muslims and Islam. As political commentator Roger Cohen wrote for the New York Times: “Across a wide swath of territory… the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization” (2015).
Cohen continued to write, “Islam is a religion that has spawned multifaceted political movements whose goal is power” (Ibid). This echoes many other comments by Americans – political commentators and scholars – who argue that Islam is incompatible with modernity or American values because Muslims stubbornly cling to mixing religion and politics.5 Western scholars have labelled this practice “Political Islam” or “Islamism.” The invention of this label is intrinsically tied to the Western project to reform Islam because it provides a category of what the West does not want. As one scholar put it, “Political Islam is generally understood as being virulently antiwestern and as a major force contributing to global instability” (Woodward, 1996: 2).
The invention of the label Political Islam was a product of international affairs analysis in the twentieth century that fell under the paradigm of secularization theory. This theory held that modernity and world order would be characterized by secular, democratic nation-states. For example, in a 1965 volume titled Islam and International Affairs, the noted historian H. A. R. Gibb pondered, “The first question we must ask is whether the subject proposed for this discussion makes sense… Is there any real (i.e., effective) relation between religion and political action in the modern world?” (Proctor, 1965: 3). The global resurgence of religions, beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, answered Gibb’s question in the affirmative. In the 21st century, scholars and analysts agree that, throughout the world, “religion is on the rise… The major world religions are all taking advantage of the opportunities provided by globalization to transform their messages and reach a new global audience” (Thomas, 2010).
Despite a theoretical separation of “church” and “state,” some of the most significant examples of mixing religion and politics come from the US. The 2016 Republican Party platform demands that lawmakers use religion as a guide when legislating, stipulating “that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights” (Peters, 2016). Referring to his preparations for the 2003 American war in Iraq, President George W. Bush stated, “I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will.… I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible.” Later, when asked if he ever sought his father, former president George H. W. Bush, for advice, President Bush replied, “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to” (Hamilton, 2004). Recall also that the leader of the American civil rights movement was not the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Other examples of religion in international affairs outside the US include Vladimir Putin drawing on the narrative of Russia as the seat of Orthodox Christianity to augment his expansionist foreign policy and even the increasing religiosity of the Likud and other far-right parties in Israel.
These events not only reveal the emergence of “public religions” but also reveal the transformation of secularism itself. Jose Casanova influentially argued that that religion is a part of what modernity is (Casanova, 1994). However, Talal Asad argues that this line of analysis is itself a dimension of religion building. “For when it is proposed that religion can play a positive role in modern society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever,” writes Asad. “Only religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal discourse are being commended, in which tolerance is sought on the basis of a distinctive relation between law and morality” (2003: 183). Even the most ostensibly secular of societies, then, such as France, accept some degree of Christianity in public life, but not Islam, which is assumed to be incompatible with “the assumptions of liberal discourse.” An example of this includes French police forcing Muslim women on beaches to remove their “burkinis,” while allowing Catholic women to remain on beaches covered in their habits (Campanella, 2016). The transformation of the secularization paradigm into a project by the West to build religions compatible with modernity is an important component of international affairs in the modern era. It reflects the Western ability to separate the cultural self, as both distinct from the rest of the world and the centre of it, from an Other. The West calls in a self-referential manner for secularism in the rest of the world even though the West itself is not as secular as it might claim to be.
The interactions of different Muslim states in international affairs reflects a spectrum of islams. It is difficult to discuss how Islam coincides with international affairs not only because Islam is not a “thing” that can be easily categorized but also because international affairs – as it is known today – largely emerged in situations unique to non-Muslim peoples. The nation-state emerged as a unit of political analysis in Europe because of certain events unique to Europeans’ historical experiences.6 Unlike in the European case, the basic unit of analysis in Muslim political thought has not historically been the state, nor has identity construction centred on different nations. Until the events surrounding the First World War, Muslim political thought concentrated on non-state units of analysis, such as the community (umma, jama‘a), justice (‘adl, shariah) and methods of leadership (khilafa, imama, sultan; Salim, 2008: 16; Scott, 2010: 13; Ayubi, 2009: 21).
The concept of “state” became a unit of analysis in Islamic thought beginning in the latter half of the 19th century. This process was cemented after the First World War because of the European imposition of nation-states in historically Muslim lands that occurred alongside the abolition of Ottoman claims to the caliphate in 1924. The word in Arabic chosen to denote this new concept of state was dawla. This word comes from the root d-w-l, which indicates something that rotates, alternates, takes turns or occurs periodically. Granted, the word dawla does appear throughout the Quran, and it is found in the writings of medieval Muslim scholars. However, in these sources the word is used to convey the fortunes, tribulations or ups and downs that any government or polity naturally experiences. According to Bernard Lewis, the first time the word dawla (devlet) appeared in its modern meaning of state, as distinct from dynasty or government, was in a Turkish memorandum of about 1837 (Ayubi, 2009: 21).
The identification of a state by a particular nation is largely foreign to the Muslim historical experience. Historically, a Muslim considered herself loyal to God; beside this, feelings of patriotism were directed towards the umma, the global Muslim community. The concept of patriotism to a territorially bounded nation-state did not arise until the late 1800s with the writings of Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, who reinvented the concept of watan (homeland) to denote “the specific meaning of territorial patriotism in the modern sense” (Hourani, 1983: 79; Dawn, 2011: 376). Before this, the word watan was “a focus of sentiment, of affection, of nostalgia, but not of loyalty, and only to a limited extent of identity” (Lewis, 1993: 136, 167–168).
Although the nation-state is not an indigenous product of Muslim history, Muslim peoples throughout the world have readily adopted it, albeit infused with soundings from Muslim political theology based on conceptions of the caliphate (Moosa, 2015: 109; Piscatori, 1986). A significant debate today among Muslims is how to adapt the empire-based jurisprudential tradition to the contemporary system of nation-states. Both Christianity and Islam have histories of political theologies being developed to fit the framework of empires. The process of the “progressive eclipse of Christendom by Europe” and the organization of politics and humans within nation-states began, according to historian Mark Greengrass, in the 16th century (Greengrass, 2014, xxviii). The fall of Christendom led to the emergence of the non-religious label “Europe” to describe the lands that were historically part of Christian empires. The lands historically part of various Muslim empires, however, are still usually referred to as the “Islamic world,” thus perpetuating the Western prescriptive notion of a primacy of religion in shaping all aspects of Muslim life.
The distinguished historian Marshall Hodgson made a crucial observation when he observed: “It has been all too common, in modern scholarship, to use the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic’ too casually both for what we may call religion, and for the overall society and culture associated historically with the religion.” Hodgson distinguished among the terms Islam, Islamic and Islamicate or Islamdom, the latter referring “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims” (1977: 157– 159). With this schema, one can see the problems with the Western tendency of labelling things “Islamic” – whether art, architecture, law, politics or society itself. Using the adjective Islamic creates a false binary that is “the product of the Orientalist imagination – branding, consuming, and alienating things from the vantage point of the Orientalists’ location” (Dabashi, 2013: 25).
There is no normative “Islamic” theory of international affairs or statecraft (Boroujerdi, 2013: 2). Aside from the shariah (not to be conflated with human law), Muslim countries differ in significant ways in terms of domestic and international law. Many countries, such as Tunisia, Algeria, Pakistan, Iran or Indonesia, are governed by secular, civil law; shariah is reserved for family law and related matters (Moosa, 2015: 111). Others, such as Saudi Arabia, continue to operate in the mode of political theology of empire. One way of illuminating this is to look at blasphemy laws. Tunisia not only eschews the death penalty for apostasy, but Article 6 of the 2014 constitution protects its citizens by making illegal any attack on them based on accusations of apostasy.7 Although there is no civil penal code in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom imposes the death penalty on actual or accused apostates based on some collections of hadith. These include “[i]f a Muslim discards his religion, kill him” or
[t]he blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshiped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: in qisas (revenge) for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse, and the one who reverts from Islam and leaves the Muslims.8
The juxtaposition between Tunisia’s blasphemy laws and Saudi Arabia’s blasphemy laws demonstrates the difference between one Muslim state that operates within a political-theological model adhering to the norms of contemporary nation-states and another Muslim state that operates within a political theology created by Muslims who were living in an age when empire was a typical mode of socio-political organization. The various hadith that Saudi Arabia uses to legitimate its laws, however, have more to do with treason – a political crime – than they do with blasphemy – a religious wrongdoing. In the political context of 7th-century Arabia, conversion to Judaism or renouncing monotheism altogether was likely to have been the result of switching allegiance to a different, more powerful, political-military group (“tribe”) than the Prophet Muhammad and his followers. However, in 2016 the conversion to a religion other than Islam has nothing to do with political allegiance between empires.
The entire preceding discussion about Islam and international affairs demands the question of what exactly is meant by Islam. Here the issue of linguistics and the normative (or prescriptive?) connotations of grammar become illustrative. In the English language, the word Islam is written with a capital letter I – as a proper noun – to denote the cumulative tradition of Muslims. The purpose of a proper noun in the English language is to denote what is properly a particular person, place or thing: Nicholas Paul Roberts refers to me as an individual and to no one else. Therefore, the itemizing of the cumulative tradition of Muslims is embedded in the very language used to describe it. The word as it was revealed by God to the Prophet in the revelation of the Quran, however, is not a noun at all. According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the word islam in Arabic is a masdar, or a verbal noun, of the fourth form of the root s-l-m, which refers to the action of submission and surrender (to God). As Shahab Ahmed argued, then, islam is foremost “an action: it is something a person does, and it is by doing islam that a person makes himself or herself, in terms of that act – or, more properly, array of acts… a Muslim” (2016: 5, 101; Smith, 1962: 112).
No two persons can perform the same action in the same way. The cumulative tradition of Muslims, when referred to as the religion of Islam, is properly understood as a “community of discourse” – a mosaic of islams as varied as the Muslims with different races, ethnicities, languages, histories and identities who perform the act of islam for their shared faith. The concept of a community of discourse was first articulated by the sociolinguist Martin Nystrand in 1982. It was later expanded on by the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow, who wrote:
“Discourse subsumes the written as well as the verbal, the formal as well as the informal, the gestural or ritual as well as the conceptual. It occurs, however, within communities in the broadest sense of the word: communities of competing producers, of interpreters and critics, of audiences and consumers, and of patrons and other significant actors who become the subjects of discourse itself. It is only in these concrete living and breathing communities that discourse becomes meaningful.
(1989: 16; Voll, 2010: 8)
Although the discourse community of Muslims does have the built-in name of islam in Arabic, use of the English-language name Islam as a proper noun to describe it has provided a concrete normativity that has, inevitably, reduced it as a “living and breathing” community and prescribed it as a thing to be othered. The Western reification and prescription of Islam as a “thing” to be othered belie what has always been a key part of the cumulative tradition of Muslims, according to Shahab Ahmed: “[e]ngaging relationally – that is inter-textually and inter-epistemologically – with themselves and each other across this hermeneutical array” of islams (Ahmed, 2016: 99).
One way Ahmed’s claim becomes evident is to look at the different geopolitical blocs or alliances Muslim states have tried to form amongst themselves. The dissolution of the caliphate in 1924 left a void for an institution to unify the umma in geopolitical terms. In the decades between the world wars, most newly formed member states remained under the influence and organization of British and French colonial governments. There were no significant geopolitical blocs among Muslim states that did not involve the British or French (or Americans). After the Second World War, the primary cause for cooperation among Muslim states was resistance to the newly formed state of Israel. The creation of Israel, and its ideological basis of religious nationalism in the form of Zionism, was a significant catalyst for the formation of Arab nationalism (and, later, pan-Islamism). The middle decades of the 20th century were consumed by wars with Israel that ended in defeats for Muslim states. In 1949, 600,000 Israelis defeated the combined armies of 40 million soldiers from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq and Lebanon.
The 1948–49 war led to concerted efforts to unify the newly formed Arab states. Leading this effort was President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who formed the United Arab Republic (UAR) with Syria in 1958. Muslims throughout the world viewed Nasser as a steward of the umma, someone who would represent Muslim states with strength and pride on the world stage. This was made particularly evident when Nasser lobbied the US, the Soviet Union and the UN to force the withdrawal of Great Britain, France and Israel from the Suez Canal Zone in 1956. The event was perceived as a new era of Arab and Muslim strength in international affairs. This feeling, however, was short-lived. Domestic unrest in Syria led to the dissolution of the UAR in 1961. The Arab League Summit, held in Cairo in 1964, brought no solutions to the question of geopolitical organization and cooperation. The catastrophic defeat of Egypt and Syria by Israel in the 1967 war destroyed the militaries of these two countries and worldwide faith in Nasser. Yvonne Haddad described the feeling at the time: “While the Israelis felt bolstered in confidence and powerful in their strengthened position and holdings, the Arab world, defeated, stood once again naked, vulnerable, the laughingstock of the world” (1982: 41).
The 1967 defeat had a transformative effect on how many Muslims mobilized themselves in politics and international affairs. An important characteristic of Muslim states until around the 1970s was an almost radical secularism in politics and governance. Contrary to popular perception today, the history of the Middle East and other Muslim states in the modern era is largely secular or, at the very least, not dominated by religiously informed ideologies. The Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria were secular socialists. Two of the most notorious Palestinian liberationists, Leila Khaled and George Habash, were radically secular Marxists – Habash was not even Muslim. Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of Algeria, was, likewise, a secular socialist. President Bourguiba in Tunisia famously tore the veils off women in the streets, and he symbolically drank orange juice on live television during Ramadan. Outside the Arab world, President Sukarno in Indonesia steered the country further to the Left throughout his time in office between 1945 and 1967.
Because, in part, of the failures of secularism, many Muslims began drawing increasingly on Islam both conceptually and symbolically in domestic and international affairs discourses. An early display of this was the formation, in response to an attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1969, which refers to itself on its website as “the collective voice of the Muslim world” (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, 2016). The formation of this group with Islam as a defining adjective of it demonstrates the growing transition in the 1960s and 1970s from secular ideologies such as socialism, Marxism or Pan-Arabism to what has been labelled “Islamism.” Interestingly, many Muslim intellectuals looked to Israel as a positive example of using religious heritage to frame the identity of the state. As the prominent Muslim Brotherhood intellectual Muhammad al-Ghazali argued, Muslim states were ruled by the heritage of certain families, such as the Sauds or Mutawakkili. If the Israelis had done the same, says al-Ghazali, their government would be called the “Weizmannite government.” Yet, he argues,
[t]he Jews have… returned to their ancient history, dug out its roots and appeared two thousand years after Christ with the name of “Israel.” This name is the symbol of their attachment to their religion and their respect for their sacred memories. It should be observed that the Jews who have chosen to follow this course are themselves the greatest of capitalists, scientists, politicians and economists… None of these men felt ashamed to belong to their religion or thought of discarding it.
(1953: 21; Roberts, 2015: 86).
The most decisive display of the practice in Muslim states of turning to the cumulative tradition of Islam to shape politics, government and international affairs is the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. To be certain, this event was part of a global resurgence of religion in public life. However, because of the Western experience of self-referential thinking, the Iranian revolution contributed to the entrenched dogma that Islam needs a reformation or that Islam is somehow an impediment to the Western-led march toward the “end of history.”9 In fact, the “Islamic resurgence” reveals Islam today as an inherent part of world events and as a community of discourse – as a mosaic of islams represented by a strikingly varied discursive engagement with contemporary international affairs within the Islamic framework.
There are significant debates today among Muslims not only on the nature of the state and what Islam has to do with the state but also on secularism. The basic concept of secularism – as an institutional separation between religion and politics – becomes problematic in the Muslim context precisely because the modern concepts of secularism and religion are consequences of historical events and experiences (such as the Protestant Reformation or the European Enlightenment) unique to Europeans. Many Muslim intellectuals argue that it is possible to be both religious and secular, or “seculigious” (Voll, 2015). Similarly, the growing trend of “Muslimism” “engages aspects of modern life while submitting that life to a sacred, moral order” (Cevik, 2016: 201). For many Muslims, “religion” – as an institutionalized set of persons and practices organized around a creedal entity – is only one part of what Islam is. As Yusuf al-Qaradawi says, “[m]any think that all that is Islamic is also religious, but the fact is that Islam is broader and larger than the word ‘religion’.” As Qaradawi notes, religion/faith (din) is only one of the five components of the maqasid al-shariah (2001: 57–58).
Another important Tunisian intellectual is Rachid Ghannouchi, who argues that it is possible for a state to be both secular and religious because secularism in his conceptualization protects religion from abuses of the state. “An Islamic state is not a religious state,” he said because a religious state would denote a normative conceptualization of religion, rather than allowing the free and unobstructed worship of Islam by Muslims as they wish. “In our context,” said Ghannouchi, “the problem is one of liberating religion and keeping the latter in the societal realm, open to all Muslims to read the Qur’an and understand it in the manner that they deem appropriate” (2012; Roberts, 2015: 125).
In this way, Muslim intellectuals are at the front of important changes throughout the world in the 21st century (Roberts, 2017). As one group of scholars put it:
[T]he rise of politically active religion not only encroaches on the supposed relationship between religion and secularism, thus challenging our thinking about the public role of religion, but it also queries our operative notions of secularism. The rise of politically active religious movements complicates our ideas about modern life.
(Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen, 2011: 6)
These movements and the intellectuals who lead them complicate the basic assumptions of those, like Bernard, who argue that Muslims are backward and not part of the global mainstream.
Bernard’s line of analysis remains dominant in international affairs discourse today. In September 2014, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a speech to the UN: “Our hopes and the world’s hope for peace are in danger. Because everywhere we look, militant Islam is on the march” (Haaretz.com, 2015). The most decisive display of the “militant Islam” that Netanyahu refers to is the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. Former Republican candidate for president of the US Carly Fiorina summed up the popular Western narrative about ISIS when she stated, “What ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.… ISIS wants to take its territory back to the Middle Ages” (Holsinger, 2015). Fiorina is incorrect. The territory held today by ISIS was, in the time of the Middle Ages, at the centre of human progress while the territory known as Europe today was in the throes of what Europeans label the “Dark Ages.” The present-day Middle East was the land of the people who held the most ornate libraries and who gave birth to the university. As historian Paul Kennedy wrote, “[i]n mathematics, cartography, medicine and many other aspects of science and industry – in mills, guncasting, lighthouses, horsebreeding, the Muslims had enjoyed a lead” for centuries (1987: 3–4, 9–13; Roberts, 2015: 4).
Fiorina’s claims are consistent with statements from numerous American and Western officials. The tendency to label groups like ISIS as “medieval,” and to use their existence as evidence for the need of an Islamic reformation, is the latest iteration of the West portraying Muslims as stagnant or backward. The standard narrative in this line of analysis holds that, soon after its initial expansion under the Rashidun, the world of Islam began disintegrating under the Abbasid rulers in the 10th century. This decline, it is argued, was cemented by the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258. The journalist Walter Lippman described this era as characterized by “backwardness and stagnation that afflicted the Moslem world between the fall of Baghdad… and the renaissance of the twentieth century” (Voll, 2010: 5). Other scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have continued this narrative, with titles such as What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power. Popular books such as these works by Lewis or Pipes have encouraged a perception of Islam in the West that is not necessarily grounded in fact.
The narrative of Muslim stagnation in modern world history, and of a clash between “Islam” and “modernity,” is incorrect in two major ways. First, “the standard gloomy picture of the Islamic world” as stagnant and receding following the Mongol invasions does not represent the actual world situation at the time. In fact, the world of Islam continuously expanded in terms of territory and cultural influence well into the 17th century (Voll, 2010: 6). William McNeill provided a particularly succinct account of this:
We are so accustomed to regard history from a European vantage point that the extraordinary scope and force of this Islamic expansion, which prefigured and overlapped the later expansion of Western Europe, often escapes attention. Yet an intelligent and informed observer of the fifteenth century could hardly have avoided the conclusion that Islam, rather than the remote and still comparatively crude society of the European Far West, was destined to dominate the world in the following centuries.
(1991: 485)
Second, the idea of an irreconcilable clash between “modernity” and “Islam” is false. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the emergence of the West as a cultural and geographic entity has been founded in an assimilation of Eastern inventions and ideas.10 Rather than bifurcated trajectories, human history and modernity, itself, must be interpreted as processes. As German philosopher Nor-bert Elias argued:
[N]o civilizing process in any particular human group… represents an absolute beginning. It never proceeds in vacuo, without reference to other – earlier or contemporary – civilizing processes undergone by other human groups.… Civilizing processes in every society [are] parts of still longer-term civilizing processes which encompass humanity as a whole.
(Mennell and Goudsblom, 1998: 18)
Elias’s concept of the interconnectedness of civilization itself is a necessary temper to the question of whether there is a clash between Islam and modernity. It also provides a corrective to the notion that groups like ISIS are evidence of the backwardness of Muslims.
Another reason why the existence of groups like ISIS cannot be used as evidence for a clash between Islam and modernity is because fundamentalist-style groups, such as ISIS, al-Qaeda or the Taliban, are part of what modernity is.11 As fundamentalist-style groups, they are against the ideology of modern ism, but they are themselves entirely modern (and strikingly Western) in how they organize themselves, how they interact in international affairs and even how they spread their messages. The image of al-Baghdadi giving his first public sermon, after declaring himself “caliph,” while wearing a conspicuous Rolex watch represents this. The Taliban, who have also been described as “medieval,” are active on a variety of social media platforms and recently created a smartphone app for their Voice of Jihad website (Amiri and Stancati, 2016). The very fact that al-Baghdadi refers to his organization as the “Islamic State” demonstrates just how rooted in modernity and, in fact, Western history it actually is. Despite the group’s intentions to root its philosophy and practice in classic Islamic texts, by referring to themselves as a “state” they are organizing themselves (at least politically) according to certain Western norms.
There has been a lively discussion among scholars and observers about the nature of ISIS. On one side of the spectrum is the journalist Graeme Wood, who published an article seeking to defy “a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.” Wood concluded, “The Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” As evidence, he cited Princeton professor of Islamic studies Bernard Haykel, who declared that those who seek to brand ISIS as misguided or un-Islamic are “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required” (Wood, 2015). On the other side of the spectrum, the anthropologist and historian Daniel Martin Varisco wrote, “To the extent that what ISIS leaders are doing is repudiated by just about every reputable Islamic organization and scholar and the vast majority of Muslims everywhere, it is irresponsible to say what they are doing is very Islamic” (Lawrence, 2015). Similarly, the historian Juan Cole said, “Very large numbers of ISIS are just criminals who mouth pious slogans. They engage in drug and other smuggling and in human trafficking and delight in mass murder. They are criminals and sociopaths” (Cole, 2015). Yet, as the sage professor of religion Bruce Lawrence says, this discourse revolves around the “slippery” issue of “Who is a “real” Muslim?” (Lawrence, 2015). Even Professor Haykel alluded to the slippery issue of defining and reifying Islam when he said, “As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’!” (Wood, 2015). However well-intentioned this debate might be, it can be interpreted as a present-day example of Western prescriptions of what Islam is or isn’t.
The notion of a clash between Islam and modernity or the tendency to view ISIS as evidence of the need for an Islamic reformation demonstrates the failure to view Islam as a community of discourse. It is rarely covered in Western media or analysis that the largest Muslim group in the world, Nadhlatul Ulama in Indonesia, which claims more than fifty million members, has engaged in a relentless campaign to counter the ideology espoused by ISIS. “We are directly challenging the idea of ISIS, which wants Islam to be uniform, meaning that if there is any other idea of Islam that is not following their ideas, those people are infidels who must be killed,” stated Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary to the Nahdlatul Ulama supreme council. “We will show that is not the case with Islam” (Cochrane, 2015). Accordingly, the group released a film in several different languages that explores the cosmopolitan essence of Islam in Indonesia.12 The film draws on traditional Indonesian Buddhist and Hindu concepts and symbols in framing a spiritual interpretation of Islam that transcends territorial and identity boundaries.
Human history has always been characterized by interconnected webs of human interaction. As such, ISIS might be “Islamic, very Islamic,” but it is also Western – organized around a state bureaucracy, using Western military tactics. It is also modern, very modern. The concept of “human webs” received its most complete articulation from father-and-son historians J. R. and William McNeill (2003). The McNeills argued that history can be characterized by human webs, including rivalry and cooperation, worship, economic or ecological exchange and even military competition. The modern states of Yemen and Oman might be part of the Arabian Peninsula and thus tied to its identity and history, but they are also part of the Indian Ocean basin and its mixture of Persian, Indian, African, British, Portuguese and Arabian identities. Saudi Arabia or Qatar might view themselves as upholders of a pristine, unadorned Islamic tradition rooted in Wahhabism, but their skylines – built by peoples from places such as the Philippines, Bangladesh and India – demonstrate the epitome of a Western-influenced modernity. The tangled natures of how identities are constructed were also illustrated by Norbert Elias. In The Civilizing Process, Elias developed his idea of “psychologization.” This concept is linked to the idea that
as webs of interdependence spread, more people become involved in more complex and impenetrable relationships.… This produces pressures toward greater consideration of the consequences of one’s own actions for other people on whom one is in one way or another dependent.
(Mennell and Goudsblom, 1998: 18)
Thus, it becomes nearly impossible to separate the rise of ISIS from decades of American sanctions in Iraq and the utter destruction of that country in the American-led 2003 war. ISIS might be “Islamic, very Islamic” but the factors that led to its rise and, so far, maintain its presence also make it American, very American. With this ontology of human webs of interaction, then, it becomes nearly impossible to discuss “Islam and international affairs” because any discussion of Islam necessarily requires a discussion of Christianity, of Judaism, of Hinduism, of the West and of the building of these religions throughout history, of the emergence of secularism and so forth until eventually the discourse becomes too convoluted to even consider.
An analytical framework rooted in human webs of interaction rather than self-referential binaries of opposition makes it easier to see how concepts such as religion – or any other form of identity – are constructed in reference to an Other. In the classic words of Edward Said, “[n]o one today is purely one thing” (1994: 407). It is the outsider who creates identity labels and reifies them as denotable existents. It is, therefore, profoundly important to construct, as much as possible, historical or cultural analysis from the perspective of those under study. One way of looking at current aspects of religion building in public consciousness is by observing the means of knowledge production. In 2016, the Internet is a major source of knowledge. Perform a simple Google search of the phrase “Islam in Egypt,” and the titles of some of the first results produced are “The Process of Islamization in Egypt,” “The rise of Islam in Egypt, and Islamic persecution of Christians” or “History of Jihad against the Egyptian Coptic Christians.” The titles of these search results do not reveal that, in fact, the largest Muslim organizations in Egypt are non-political Sufi organizations, which have absolutely nothing to do with “jihad” or “Islamic persecution of Christians.” A Google query of “Sufism in Egypt” reveals very little of serious academic study. Conversely, a query of “Salafism in Egypt” immediately reveals rigorous academic studies from reputable sources, such as the Carnegie Middle East Center, Harvard University and George Washington University.
The effects of prescriptive religion building and world building are real. In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal dated 9 June 2016, Carolyn Disco of Merrimack, New Hampshire praised Bernard Lewis on his 100th birthday for reminding “the West of 14 centuries of conflict with Islam, in which Islam’s ascendancy for a millennium is not forgotten, but to be reclaimed.” While a historical account of fourteen centuries of conflict between “the West” and “Islam” could be crafted, so, too, could an account of fourteen centuries of largely peaceful exchanges of peoples, ideas and goods between “the West” and “Islam.” Some readers might object to this line of analysis, countering that not all Americans, for example, hold views similar to Disco’s. However true, such an argument fails to account for the institutionalized, structural dynamics of power in shaping public discourse and perceptions of reality. According to a 2014 Zogby Associates poll, Arabs and Muslims have the highest unfavourable ratings and the lowest favourable ratings amongst Americans. According to a 2014 Pew poll, Muslims are rated by Americans most negatively of all religious groups, more negatively even than atheists. According to a 2015 Public Religion Research Institute survey, 56% of Americans believe that “Islamic values” are at odds with “American values” (Islamic Networks Group, 2018). According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hate crimes against Muslims in the US surged in 2015 to their highest levels since September 11, 2001 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2016). These effects do not only apply to non-Muslims. A serious concern today is growing “Islamophobia” of Muslims (or persons of Muslim heritage) against other Muslims. In February 2016, Adonis, often considered the greatest living poet of the Arabic language, stated that Islam could not be modernized and that it produced nothing of any intellectual significance (Meister, 2016).
In the final analysis, there are as many different islams as there are Muslims, and these islams are at the forefront of important changes taking place throughout the world today. The terms that have been customarily used to analyse international affairs are becoming increasingly obsolete as things like the nature of states and democracy and secularism are challenged. In the first decades of the 21st century, the West’s monopoly on ideas is being eroded, and an entire social and political lexicon is becoming obsolete (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2014). This is a process still underway, and to conclude something about it as yet would likely be proved wrong. However, what is certain is the need in the new glocal age to move away from interpreting human events through the old binaries of Western prescriptive constructions of the world.
In a presentation titled “The Danger of a Single Story,” the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes how those in power have nkali. Nkali is a Nigerian word referring to the ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the defining story of that person. And all stories, of course, are open to debate. “Start the story of the United States with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story,” she says. “Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story” (2009).
We could just as easily say the following: Start the story of ISIS with certain verses of the Quran and hadith, or books of classical Islamic law that deal with thievery or slavery, and ISIS becomes Islamic, very Islamic. Start the story, however, with decades of American support for dictators in the Middle East, American funding, training and support of Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, more than a decade of American sanctions against the Iraqi people that killed half a million innocents, including several hundred thousand children, or with the American invasion of Iraq that shattered the country and killed hundreds of thousands more civilians, or with the American prisons in Iraq that incubated radicalism, and ISIS becomes American, very American.
The labels and methods used by many analysts in the US when studying phenomena throughout the world are deeply flawed because they fail to account for the ideas or actions of the US as causal factors in creating, sustaining and shaping the very phenomena under study. The US creates a single story for the world and falls victim to this story’s own myopia. As Adichie says, the danger of a single story is that it emphasizes how people are disconnected rather than tied up in impenetrable human webs. “We should never reduce the Other to our enemy,” warned the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “Always within him or her there is the Absolute of the impenetrable abyss of another person” (Zizek, 2002: 67). In 2018, with increasing calls for Muslims to collectively apologize for the actions of a few or calls for American Muslims to disavow shariah or be deported, the danger of a single story – when faced with a shared human web of human history – makes the effort to transcend superficial prescriptions of identity absolutely crucial.
1 Drawing on classical works of lexicography and philology, Ebrahim Moosa characterizes din as “a divinely assigned order or salvation path” that is intimately and indissolubly linked “to the embodiment of character, moral excellence (khuluq) and performative acts (‘amal).” “Din in the Qur’anic lexicon is imagined to be almost identical to an approved ethos of how to do things in the right way,” he states. The renowned Indian scholar and philologist-lexicologist Muhammad A‘la al-Tahanawi (d. ~1777) noted that one of the literal meanings of din is ‘ada, custom or convention. Moosa cites Tahanawi further defining din to literally mean accountability, decree, compel, or obedience. “In its most explicit sense,” notes Moosa, “din is about the everyday and regular living in accordance with a prevailing ethical standard or norm.” See Ebrahim Moosa, “Qur’anic Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies, ed. by Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah, forthcoming.
2 For how the West has developed as a concept see L. Hunt (2012), The Making of the West, 2 vols., New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
3 See Richard King’s illuminating discussion of the genealogy of the category ‘religion’ in a Christian context in Chapter Two, “Disciplining Religion,” in his Orientalism and Religion.
4 See J. Esposito and J. Voll (1996), Islam and Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press; J. Esposito, T. Sonn, and J. Voll (2016), Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring, New York: Oxford University Press; M. Fish, (2011), Are Muslims Distinctive?, New York: Oxford University Press; J. Esposito and D. Mogahed (2007), Who Speaks for Islam?, New York: Gallup Press.
5 Oklahoma state legislator John Bennett claimed, in 2014, “Islam is not even a religion; it is a social, political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.” Former national security advisor to the president of the US, Michael Flynn, claimed, “Islam is a political ideology [that] hides behind the notion of it being a religion.” Popular websites such as www.PoliticalIslam.com claim to use “statistical methods” to “prove” that “Islam is far more of a political system than a religion.” See Michael Schulson, “Why do so many Americans believe that Islam is a political ideology, not a religion?” The Washington Post, February 3, 2017, accessed November 2, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/02/03/why-do-so-many-americans-believe-that-islam-is-a-political-ideology-not-a-religion/?utm_term=.6e6fc52d2891.
6 For an excellent overview of pre-modern and modern states, see S.E. Finer (1997), The History of Government. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press.
7 An unofficial English translation of the 2014 Tunisian Constitution is available at www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Tunisia_2014.pdf. See also “Laws Criminalizing Apostasy in Selected Jurisdictions,” The Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center, accessed April 27, 2016, www.loc.gov/law/help/apostasy/apostasy.pdf.
8 Sahih Bukhari, Vol. 9, Book 83, No. 17. Available at: www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/083-sbt.php#009.083.017. As Fred Donner suggests, this particular hadith can be interpreted along the lines of political theology of empire; the Prophet might very likely have not been referring to a Muslim converting to Christianity or Judaism but, rather, any muslim (one who submits to God) renouncing monotheism and joining the political/military ranks of enemy pagan tribes. See F. Donner (2012), Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
9 See F. Fukuyama (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press.
10 See M.G.S. Hodgson and E. Burke, III (1999), Rethinking World History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); J. Hobson (2004), The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; J. Abu-Lughod (1991), Before European Hegemony, London: Oxford University Press; A. Frank (1998), ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
11 For more on fundamentalism and modernity see B. Lawrence (1989), Defenders of God, New York: Harper & Row.
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