7

Islamism, Purity, and Authenticity

AMONG THE BASIC FEATURES of Islamism is the aspiration for purity, put forward as a claim of authenticity.1 Religious fundamentalism is in all cases a response to the challenge of cultural modernity, and the specific case of Islamism emerges from a modernization2 that has largely failed. A generation ago, American scholars looked at modernization in non-Western societies as Westernization, which was conceived in wholly secular terms. Today, no one can speak of “Westernization” in academic circles and emerge unscathed. Not only has the linkage the term suggests generally been discarded, the very concept of evolutionary modernization has become suspect. In dissociating themselves from this thinking, some U.S. scholars go to the opposite extreme and tend to view Islamism as a legitimate opposition to Westernization, arguing that it presents an alternative model of development. The Islamist venture is seen as a legitimate response to the crisis of modernity. This includes a search for authenticity that draws on Islamic tradition. In fact, the Islamist authenticity project is based on an agenda of cultural purification. This agenda is alien to the classical heritage of an open Islam enriched by cultural borrowing from the non-Muslim other.

In fact, Islamism is neither traditional nor authentic. The Islamist is a thoroughly modern male, yet a deeply conflicted one: his “modernity” is really a semimodernity, which approves the adoption of scientific and technological tools (such as e-jihad) while firmly rejecting the cultural values that gave rise to them.

Max Weber understood modernization as the adoption of rational, secular ways of thinking. In rejecting the Weberian frame of reference, cultural relativist postmodernism finds itself navigating the same waters as neoabsolutist political Islam. Islamism aims at a desecularization understood as purification, while postmodernists speak of postsecular development and of multiple modernities. Of course, the incentives vary, but the targets resemble each other.

This chapter relates to Chapter 3, as one aspect of the search for authenticity includes the Islamization of antisemitism. Islamists want to purify Islam of “Jewish influence.” The idea of a pure and “uncontaminated” Islam is recent. It can be traced back, once again, to the work of Sayyid Qutb and is expressed in the clearest terms by his current heir, the Egyptian Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi challenges any cultural borrowing from the non-Muslim other; Western-educated Muslim liberal elites are vilified in the third volume of his trilogy al-hall Islami (The Islamic solution) as mustaghribun (Westernized).3 They are described as infected by an alien virus and thus no longer authentic Muslims.

This rejection of Western ideas is one of the things that separates the two varieties of Middle Eastern antisemitism. Pan-Arab nationalists openly adopted their antisemitism from Europe. Islamism, which renounces cultural imports, must pretend not to simply copy from Europe as the secularists did and therefore engages in a cultural authentification that depicts a war with the Jews as an essential element of the entire history of Islam. Antisemitism thus becomes an expression of cultural and religious purity.

Among my arguments in this book is that the crisis of modern Islam is exacerbated by a predicament with modernity as well as by a crisis of development related to the Arab world’s unsuccessful modernization. The resulting woes are seen by the Islamists as stemming from a so-called conspiracy of taghrib, Westernization. They wish to go back to their roots: they answer the crisis of modernity with a return of the sacred. Any secularization of society is thus questioned in the name of purity and condemned as a Westernization aimed at destroying Islam. The search for authenticity pits itself against all that is secular and all that has been adopted from the West.

With the exception of Europe, the retreat from secularism is global. However, Islamic migration to the West brings religion and the related conflicts back to Europe. Europeans fail to understand this. Religious fundamentalism characterized by purity and desecularization is a hallmark of our age, and it thrives in the Islam diaspora in the West. Is this the “post-secular society” Habermas proclaims? Support for the retreat from secularism in the name of purity and authenticity is often accompanied by no proper knowledge of the Islamist agenda of authenticity. Islamists understand their jihad against the “wicked master plans of the Jews” as a defensive fight for purity against a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the umma. Part of this “Jewish master plan” is an agenda of secularization meant to discredit Islam by depriving it of authenticity, thus steering people away from God. Islamists believe that “Jewish genius” is a “hidden hand” acting “in the dark,” by proxy. In the past, the proxy was the “European crusaders”; at present it is the United States, allied with the Westernized Muslim elites. This conspiracy-driven narrative may be found in dozens of widely disseminated books by major Islamists, who propose an agenda to thwart this “devilish Jewish plan” aimed at secularizing Islam. In their venture the Islamists claim to purify the religion of Islam by casting out all “inauthentic” ideas and influences. They believe that the ghazu fikri (intellectual invasion) is the source of this contamination of the world of Islam in modern times.

I begin this chapter by addressing the Islamist view of secularity as an assault on authentic Islam. In their belief that Islam is din wa dawla, a concept of political order, Islamists maintain that Islam does not separate religion from politics. Purity lies in a divine order. Then I show how Islamists employ the concept of authenticity in the realm of cultural purification. I look at Islamic history to reveal that the truth is exactly opposite to the Islamist agenda: cultural borrowing not only happened in medieval Islam but was a driver for the glory of Islamic civilization at its height. Cross-cultural fertilization enriched Islam to the point that it has become an essential part of its heritage. On the basis of this history I argue that the classical heritage of Islam is more authentic than is the contemporary purification agenda of Islamism. This contrast reveals how different the Islamist mindset is from that of genuine Islam.

The Islamist Meaning of Authenticity

In his depiction of modernity, Weber equated secularization and rationality. Both contribute to Entzauberung (disenchantment). Islamists reject this understanding in favor of a sentiment of self-victimization. They accuse Europeans of launching a program of global secularization. It is ironic that in the face of these attacks, Europeans seem uninterested in defending the core values and accomplishments of cultural modernity. It is most perplexing when Christian guilt seems to succumb to the Islamist claim to authenticity and to support its opposition to secularity—for instance, when a Swedish foundation sponsors a symposium under the title “The Secular State and Society” and invites Tariq Ramadan to lecture the Swedes about “The Islamic Mission in Europe.” This mission seems to be based on proselytizing Islam as the solution to Europe’s crisis of secularism.

One of the Islamists who leads the debate on Islam and secularism is Faruq Abdul-Salam. In an influential book entitled Political Parties and the Separation between Religion and Politics he states that the Jews stand behind “secularism, rationalism and Macchiavellianism.” These “Jewish” pursuits are supposed to be “the goals of a Zionist movement.” Secularism, Abdul-Salam argues, is a means to weaken other religions in order to promote Jewish world rule. Furthermore, “documents and serious studies disclose the hidden Jewish hand that generated the separation between religion and politics.”4 These alleged documents provide evidence of the takhtit al-yahudi al-alami (Jewish world master plan) to extend “the principle of the separation of religion and the state.” One page later, Abdul-Salam refers to a book by another prominent Islamist, Anwar al-Jundi, who in Al-Mukhatatat al-Talmudiyya al-Sahyuniyya al-Yahudiyya (The Talmud-based Jewish-Zionist master plans) claims to present “evidence” for a conspiracy that justifies cultural purification.

Despite their professed regard for authenticity, Jundi and other Islamists support their views by quoting at length from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One is entitled to wonder what is authentic about this, and where the claimed purity lies.

Let us for a moment return to Abdul-Salam, who prides himself on “uncovering” the “Jewish-Zionist master-plan of secularization.” It is puzzling to encounter his additional argument that the Jews invented individual human rights. Why did they do that? Abdul-Salam explains:

In addition to the secularization agenda, which is the foremost destructive innovation [bid’a] of modern times, the Jews invented human rights. The rationale is that the Jews claim human rights to put themselves on equal footing with non-Jews with regard to civil and political rights. In so doing, they make instrumental use of human rights, employ them as a ladder to claim to high positions in society. In this manner, they have been able to position themselves in a place from which they infiltrate society in order to implement their secret plans. These are listed in the Zionist Protocols. Their pursuit is the establishment of the Jewish world government imposed by themselves on others in the belief to be the chosen people by God. They thrive to achieve this goal after the vanishing of all other religions.5

I am discussing secularization and desecularization in a chapter on authenticity and purity because Islamists themselves pair these two themes. For them, secularization is a “Jewish master plan” to be countered by Islamization. We can best look at the Islamist strategy of authenticity, al-asalah,6 through the eyes of the foremost ideologue of these themes, the Egyptian Anwar al-Jundi. In unequivocal language he insists on the purity and the supremacy of Islam and rejects any dialogue with non-Muslims, let alone cultural borrowing from the non-Muslim other. Jundi wrote dozens of books, which continue to be influential. I will mention just three of them, published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, because this author is highly repetitive and tends to fill his books with the same ideas, rehashed over and over. The first is Min al-tabai’iyya ila al-asalah (From dependency to authenticity), in which Jundi argues against interfaith dialogue: “In the past years many events were organized in Beirut, Tunis, and Cordoba, etc., to promote an approach of rapprochement between religions.… The underlying assumption of this venture is that Islam is only a faith, with no ties to society, law, and the system of governance. Any pursuit in this direction is to inject a poison, a most killing one, into the world of Islam. Behind the plan for an interfaith dialogue lies an agenda of proselytization and Westernization.”7

Two pages later, “efforts at a Christian proselytization” are disclosed as the hisab (agenda) of al-sahyuniyya al-alamiyya (world Zionism). The book ends with the warning: “The efforts of rapprochement and dialogue are clearly … a master-plan of world Zionism.” To counter this “conspiracy,” Jundi recommends to his fellow Islamists the politics of authenticity.

The purification agenda of this politics discloses what “authenticity” really means. In a nutshell, every thought in the purity debate revolves around the “Jewish-Zionist master plan.” In his second book, Ahdaf al-taghrib (The goal of Westernization) Jundi claims to have uncovered a conspiracy of “Westernization” embedded in the overall “Jewish conspiracy.”8

The Islamist notion of authenticity is often referred to positively by scholars who do not read Arabic and thus lack the ability to see how this notion is actually used by Islamists when they are not speaking for Western ears. Some of these people think my reading of Islamist writers on al-asalah, or authenticity, is based on the work of “marginal authors.” This idea may be refuted by a quick look in any Arabic-language bookstore. Jundi, for instance, is anything but marginal.

In the first book of three cited above, Jundi presents asalah as the proper response to cultural and economic dependency. A closer look at his use of “asalah” reveals unambiguously that this concept is based on cultural purification. The Jews are singled out and held responsible for all the wrongs that happened to Islam in its civilizational exposure to the West. In general one finds in Islamist writings that the Westernizing of Muslims and their civilization is identified as ghazu fikri (intellectual invasion).9 As I have said, we find here the Islamist idea of authenticity viewed as an instrument to purify Islam from the “poisonous Jewish influences”—thus the combination of authenticity and purity. Jundi equates the opening of one’s mind to other cultures with “opening the door to world Zionism as happened in Palestine.” Muslims who engage in a dialogue with non-Muslims submit to “this master plan, which is of the making of world Zionism.” Again, this purification agenda is an Islamist invention and it is alien to the classical heritage of Islam.

A third book by Jundi is al-Mu’asarah fi itar al-asalah (Modernity in the framework of authenticity). Here he acknowledges that modernity is based on the Enlightenment, but asserts that “the word Enlightenment itself is a Jewish vocabulary. It intends to lead the West away from Christianity to secularism and thus consequently to atheism.… This is a Jewish conspiracy against the entire humanity as is made clear in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.… The venture ends up in putting forward the claims of the Jews to Palestine.”10 He adds that a mu’amarat al-istishraq (conspiracy of Orientalism) is at work.

The supposed Jewish roots of the Enlightenment are emphasized again and again. The Jewish plan has three faces: one is liberal, another is Marxist, and the third is Zionist. All are designed “by the conspiring Jews as disclosed in the protocols” and disguised as “modernity” and “secularity.” The sahwa (awakening) of Islam is aimed at defeating this Jewish conspiracy. Jundi tells his readers, “There is only one way to avert and to beat the conspiracy of Jews. It is the path of Islam.” To be sure, when Jundi speaks of Islam, it is to be read as “political Islam,” or Islamism. Islam as a faith and a culture is limited to spirituality. The “Islam” of Jundi is based above all on the concept of a nizam siyasi, a political system of governance. The attentive reader knows already that this view reflects precisely the basic feature of Islamism that distinguishes it from the faith of Islam.

The politics of authenticity targets not only the “Jewish master plan of Westernization” but also the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who produced the thought and literature of the Arab-Muslim liberal age.11 These great minds are all referred to by name in Jundi’s book, in an inventory reminiscent of a secret police dossier of wanted dissidents. The docket includes Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ihsan Abdul Qaddus, Anis Mansur, Zaki Najib Mahmud, and the first and so far only Arab-Muslim Nobel laureate, Najib Mahfuz. For a Muslim such as myself who lives in Germany, this Islamist list is reminiscent of the Nazi culture of purification. In those days all German scholars and intellectuals who were found to be undeutsch (un-German) were eliminated. One of them was Einstein, the incomparable originator of “Jewish physics” (that is, relativity), who rightly ridiculed the attenuated “German physics” that resulted from the purge of Jews from German universities. Today, for an Islamist to call another Muslim un-Islamic because of “infection” by a foreign virus invokes the Nazi mindset of purification. What would remain in the Arab-Muslim world if this purification were to happen is only the rubble on which totalitarianism is built.

The Nazis, in purifying German culture of un-German influences, targeted not only Jews but all elements of the Enlightenment. The de-Nazification of Germany after 1945 was therefore a kind of re-Westernization. Similarly, the victims of the Islamist purification are not only Jews but all enlightened and democracy-loving Muslims. Why are the parallels not understood in the West? Those Westerners who benignly praise Islamist authenticity seem either not to know what they are talking about or not to be informed about what happens in the world of Islam. I assume that most of these liberal scholars would reconsider their endorsement if they became familiar with what this notion really means in Islamist writings.

Was Islamic Falsafa Rationalism Authentic?

The Islamic cultural legacy that exists in a heritage of Islamic rationalism is a historical fact. I refer to it as falsafa rationalism. This tradition was explicitly based on cross-cultural fertilization. A conflict emerged within classical Islamic civilization between falsafa (rational philosophy) and fiqh (orthodoxy).12 I translate fiqh in a free way as “orthodoxy,” knowing that it rather means in Arabic (sacral) jurisprudence. This tradition in Islam reflects, however, orthodoxy. Based on a decade of studying this conflict, which seems to be poorly known in Western Islamic studies, if one can judge by the occasionally bizarre comments of peer reviewers, I maintain a conflict between falsafa and fiqh as two rival traditions in Islam.

In the aftermath of the death of the Prophet in 632, Muslim scribes were at pains to transform Islamic faith into a ritual legal and cultural system. In the course of this development, four madhahib (schools) of shari’a emerged. This term is understood today as a religious equivalent to Western law, but this is not quite right. Shari’a is not law but a system that regulates ibadat (cult) and mu’amalat (interaction, but restricted to inheritance, marriage, and divorce). In classical Islam this system was named fiqh (proper knowledge). The scribes constituted the fiqh orthodoxy. A sociologist of religion would think of these scribes as clergy, even though Islam claims to not have any clergy. But in the institutional reality of Sunni Islam (for example, the position of mufti) and Shi’ite Islam (ayatollahs) these scribes constitute a de facto clergy.

Starting in the ninth century, a rival tradition to this scriptural Islam emerged through a process of Hellenization. This new tradition was falsafa (rationalism), based on cultural borrowing and on the primacy of reason. Falsafa and fiqh have been at odds ever since.

Which of these two traditions is really authentic in Islam? Is it scriptural orthodoxy, or the rationalism of Avicenna and Averroës?13 On which of these traditions does identity politics14 in Islam rest today? If we assert that one is “authentic,” does that mean that the other is not?

And is it permissible today to learn from the non-Muslim cultural other? Let me briefly leave off bashing the left and devote some attention to the right. There are (genuinely) Islamophobic Westerners who respond to the irrational thinking of Islamism by asserting that “Islam has no tradition of any enlightenment.” Most authors of this caliber confuse the unenlightened attitudes and irrational behavior of Islamists with Islam itself. They obviously do not know that the classical heritage of Islam contained the seeds of an enlightenment that resembles European cultural modernity.15 I am inclined to qualify this as an Islamic “Enlightenment.”16 The seeds of this rationalism were suppressed by the Islamic fiqh orthodoxy but are nonetheless entitled to be viewed as authentic and deserve to be revived. The late Moroccan philosopher Mohammed al-Jabri believes that cultural modernity is in line with that earlier Islamic tradition. I would argue that the Islamic tradition of rationalism17 is fully consonant with cultural modernity as summarized by Habermas: “In modernity … religious life, state and society, as well as science and morality … are transformed … as abstract subjectivity in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.… Kant carried out this approach … [and] installed reason in the supreme seat of judgement before which anything that made a claim to validity has to be justified.”18

Could this European notion of modernity apply today to Islam? Islamists refer to an invented Islamic authenticity to defame this understanding of modernity as a Jewish master plan directed against Islam. Unlike medieval Muslim rationalists, who revered the non-Muslims Plato and Aristotle, today’s Islamists embrace an identity politics that requires the creation of fault lines between cultures. In contrast, Jabri refers to the Islamic rationalism of Averroës to argue that modernity is authentic for Muslims. Western theorists of politics of authenticity who reject Weber’s and Habermas’s approach to cultural modernity and instead support the Islamist claimants of authenticity presumably don’t know of this ideology’s “purification” agenda. Robert Lee, for instance, writes that “modernity has eroded cultures, values and identities … [which] the advocates of authenticity would attempt to repair.”19 Such views, which are standard in U.S. Islamic studies, end up—wittingly or unwittingly—legitimating the Islamist agenda. It is a great mistake to view Islamism as a liberation theology characterized by an “attempt to repair.” No, it is an agenda of cultural-totalitarian purification.

The project of enlightenment, understood as recognition of the primacy of reason, is universal and thus accessible to all cultures, including those of Islamic civilization. It runs counter to any purification. Al-Jabri argues that such enlightenment existed in medieval Islam. It follows that rationalism was authentically Islamic and constitutes a part of the classical heritage of Islam. For a few hundred years—between the ninth and twelfth centuries—there was an ongoing tradition of Muslim reasoning based on cultural borrowings from Hellenism and the acceptance of the primacy of reason. It is perfectly “authentic” to learn, like great Muslim minds in the past, from non-Islamic sources.

It would be dishonest to depict Islamic rationalism as the prevailing tradition in its time. It was not. It was relatively short-lived, eradicated by the Muslim orthodoxy of fiqh scribes. There were seeds of enlightenment, but the Islamic Aufklärer (enlightened thinkers) failed to generate a wide-scale Enlightenment in their civilization. Still, there is a precedent worth emulating, and it is more authentic than the tradition invented by contemporary Islamism.

Moreover, even if the Muslim rationalists were not able to shape the worldview of the entire Islamic civilization, they were not wholly ineffectual. Much as Europe had its Descartes and Kant, Islam had its Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroës). Not only were they rationalists, but intellectually they were of the same caliber as their European peers. In Europe, however, the thinking of Descartes was institutionalized and built upon, both philosophically and mathematically. A reason-based (res cogito) philosophy had been able to shape the prevailing European worldview. In contrast, Muslim rationalists were denied the opportunity to shape the course of Islamic civilization and its worldview, as George Makdisi tells us. Enlightened rationalism in classical Islam was not included in the curriculum of the madrasa (“Muslim college”). Its impact was therefore confined to these philosophers’ private circles.20 Some of them managed to enter the court of the caliph and exert some influence. But lacking institutional continuity and the support of the wealthy and powerful, the Golden Age of Islamic learning petered out. The last great mind of the era of Islamic rationalism was Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406. Why did Islamic civilization not produce a single thinker of great caliber after that?

Great Muslim thinkers of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century were aware of this long lapse. Therefore they undertook efforts to revive the tradition of Islamic rationalism.21 These efforts were undertaken by Muslim liberals against the fiqh orthodoxy in a cultural development that lasted until the rise of political Islam. At the moment they appear to have failed. Yet despite the odds, Jabri has given his fellow Muslims a wake-up call: “A better future of Islam can only be Averroist.”22 If Islamic civilization fails to follow the Averroist rationalist path, he believes, then the alternative is a resumption of the age of darkness. Certainly the flat-earth epistemology of Islamism suggests a bleak future.

If contemporary Islamism and Salafism were to prevail, their agenda of purification would set the people of Islam back centuries. The rationalism of Avicenna, Averroës, and al-Farabi23 is a better choice. The classical heritage of Islam is intrinsically more authentic than the invention of tradition being promoted by the followers of Sayyid Qutb.

Islamist Purity and the Exclusion of the Non-Muslim Other

The rich cultural heritage and precious accomplishments of Islamic rationalism are based on borrowing from classical Hellenism. If this were left behind it would be unimaginable for Islamic civilization to flourish. The lesson to learn today is that we must not overlook the vastly different historical contexts. Hellenization in medieval times was the appropriation of the treasures of a weaker civilization by a more powerful Islamic one. Still, the attitude of learning from the cultural other need not depend on context. The Muslim modernizers of the liberal age also learned from the cultural other. But there is a difference. The medieval Islamic rationalists rethought and extended what they borrowed. The Muslim liberals basically copied items from modernity without really accommodating its rationality in their culture. They did not change their worldview. This did not, however, let them escape the Islamist accusation of cultural treason.

Despite their propensity to culturally exclude the non-Islamic cultural other, Islamists—their xenophobia not withstanding—have a valid point in their complaints about the harm European civilization did to Islam. The problem is that they draw the wrong conclusions. Ignorant of Islamic history, they fail to realize that Islamic rationalism competed with, and lost out to, fiqh orthodoxy. Science and philosophy flourished in Islamic civilization in spite of this orthodoxy. The Islamists fall into the trap of contradiction when they boast that Europe owes a great deal of its Renaissance to cultural borrowing from Islam while at the same time ignoring and trying to obliterate what the West adopted from Islamic tradition. In fact, pre-Renaissance Europe adopted from medieval Islam the tradition of Islamized Hellenism, which is the one but definitely not the pure fiqh tradition. Ideologically blinkered Islamists reveal not only that they are ignorant of the real history but that they are selective about what they do choose to know.

Despite their purist rejection of any learning from the contemporary West, Islamists do not hesitate to adopt modern instruments of science and technology.24 For this mindset I have coined the term “semimodernity.” Islamists divide modernity into two parts: the instruments to be adopted and the values to be vehemently rejected. The traditional fiqh orthodoxy does not share this semimodernity. Contemporary Islamists25 pair modern politics with medieval fiqh. They are products of modernization who, reacting against their failure to accommodate modernizing development, invent tradition in a search for authenticity and in fact engage in cultural purification.

Can the purifying agenda of the “Islamic solution” ever achieve anything like actual authenticity? Could it ever be the expression of a purely (even if incomplete and selective) Islamic tradition and no other? Probably not. Robert Lee, who did important research on this subject, writes: “The quest for authenticity requires a scale of politics that conforms to what is legitimately ours rather than theirs.” He adds: “The search for authenticity is a search for foundations.”26 Now: what are these foundations?

In the Arabic language, the word for “foundations” is usul. Usuliyya in modern Arabic means fundamentalism. The competition in medieval Islamic civilization between falsafa (rationalism) and fiqh (orthodoxy) was also a fight over what is specifically Islamic and what is not. To be sure, the term asalah (authenticity) is itself a modern addition to the Arab language. It refers to what is to be recognized as “foundation” and harks back to the earlier battle between falsafa and fiqh. In the search for authentic foundations, the local and the global mix in an odd way. Cosmopolitan world citizenship and ethnicity mingle with identity politics in a way that, on the one hand, precludes learning from the cultural other, but on the other is fully imbued with modernity. In this context the “foundations” are blurred. There is a kind of authenticity that elevates what Lee calls “irrationalities of condition.” Despite my criticisms of Lee, I join him in “mistrusting proclamations of difference and otherness whether they come from Orientalists or Islamic militants.”27 In fact, as Lee points out, “the search for authenticity founders” on the rock of reality.

In the established meaning of authenticity, which focuses on divisions between the self and the other, the polarizing effects of an exclusive mindset are often overlooked. Why can’t we, instead, give the term a different meaning and say that to be authentic is to maintain the self while borrowing or learning from the cultural other? Islamic falsafa would then be its most authentically Islamic tradition. Cultural learning from Western theories would become legitimate, and no longer “inauthentic,” as postmodernists and Islamists—despite their different mindsets of cultural relativism and neoabsolutism—come together to argue. If this proposition is accepted and cross-cultural fertilization is permitted, then one can revive the tradition of Muslim rationalists and dissociate authenticity from the Islamist agenda of “cultural purification.”

With the exception of fiqh orthodoxy, in classical Islam there existed no fault lines between the “self” and the “cultural other.” The conflict between rational knowledge and fiqh jurisprudence over what is authentically Islam took place within Islamic civilization. Today’s conflict is different: it revolves around the exposure of Muslims to a modernity that exerts its pressure from outside the umma. Since the nineteenth century this exposure has triggered a variety of responses, none adequate to the challenge. Islamists today are compelled to live with this legacy. Escaping cultural modernity is not really an option.

The contemporary exclusionary and purist Islamist mindset did not exist in early Islamic modernism. The first Muslim imam to go to Paris, Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, lived there from 1826 to 1831, and he opened his mind to the non-Muslim other: to Europe and to modernity. He was amazed to find that when Europeans talked about science, knowledge, and scholars, they meant something different from what Muslims meant. In Arabic, the term alim (plural: ulema) means scholar, but it refers to a cleric, a man of religion. In French, the same vocabulary points to a different meaning. Tahtawi wrote in his Paris Diary28 that secular knowledge, not religion, is the concern of a European scholar. In Islamic scholarship, which consists of “commentaries and supercommentaries” for the interpretation of the Qur’an, an alim is a person who has a mastery of religion and is thus a cleric. The Islamic identification of knowledge with religion was gradually abandoned, but the Islamic view of the world changed only slightly, with the result that Islam suffered an intensifying predicament with cultural modernity.29

Unlike Tahtawi, who acknowledged that Muslims needed to learn from others, contemporary Islamists have chosen to close their minds and engage in cultural purification. Earlier in this book I took issue with Tariq Ramadan’s claim that his grandfather Hasan al-Banna, the founder of Islamism, was an intellectual descendant of the nineteenth-century revivalist al-Afghani. This alleged continuity never existed: the comparison between al-Afghani and al-Banna is baseless. Afghani was open-minded; he related the decay of Islamic civilization to the “ignorance” of Muslims. The rise of the West and its colonial rule over others, Afghani acknowledged, relates to the superiority of their scientific knowledge over that of non-Europeans. He specifically described the Muslims of his time as juhala’ (ignorants)30—which is pretty strong language. In Islam, jahl (ignorance) is associated with unbelief, and jahilliyya is used to describe the Arab world’s pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Afghani’s usage, then, was roughly similar to an Englishman’s describing his countrymen as “heathen” or “savages” and recommending that they absorb the values of another culture. The Islamist al-Banna, with his agenda of cultural purification, takes the exact opposite view.31

Islamism considers the superiority of Islam to be beyond question and takes it as grounds for the claim to purity. Islamists are reluctant to acknowledge that Muslims today lag not only behind “Western science” but also behind the earlier standards reached by their own civilization.32 A complacent sense of superiority and consequent reluctance to learn from the cultural other is a hazard for any civilization; but it has reached new highs in the recent Islamist agenda of the cultural purification of knowledge. The need of a “knowledge society” is not on the Islamist agenda.

I have repeatedly drawn on Hedley Bull’s idea of a “revolt against the West.” This is not only about contesting Western hegemony. The revolt is also directed against “Western values as such,” including the idea of a continuous advancement of knowledge. De-Westernization thus includes purification against science. This antiscience33 attitude is combined with the instrumental adoption of science and technology. This happens in a mindset of semimodernity, which means to adopt the instruments and reject the underlying values. This mindset prevents Muslims from developing their own science and would keep them forever borrowing technologies from the cultural other. This flaw is combined with all of the unpredictable cultural effects that new technologies create. The need for ever more stringent forms of purification would be never-ending. Muslims would remain trapped in their predicament with cultural modernity.

The discourse of Islamic civilization in its high days was determined not by the search for purity, but by openness to learning. Unlike the Muslim rationalists of the past, today’s Islamists engage in a politics that generates ever-increasing cultural tensions emanating from the Islamist purification agenda based on fault lines between the self and the cultural other. This drive is detrimental to the future of Islamic civilization. Muslims, rather, need a way to open themselves to the cultural other without abandoning their own authenticity. They need to revive the legacy of their medieval Islamic heritage for promoting cultural change. The tradition of Islamic rationalism is in line with modern science and with Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.”34 It offers the way out of the predicament with modernity.

I have often been accused of Orientalism (or, given my background, “self-Orientalization”) simply because I take a Weberian approach in my study of Islam. There are, of course, pitfalls to Orientalism, but one must also beware of Orientalism in reverse. Postmodernists tend to promote antisecular and antiscience views in the name of authenticity. But today Muslims need science. One may respect cultural particularisms, and also authenticity, and yet set limits and subscribe to a universal thinking based on humanism. I contend that this humanism existed in the Islam of Averroës and Ibn Khaldun. These men were not only universal rationalists but authentic Muslims who, if they lived today, might also find themselves condemned by Westerners for “self-Orientalization.” It is not Orientalism to oppose the Islamist antiscience position.

Bringing Back the Humanism of Islamic Rationalism

Given that the purity ideology of political Islam not only lacks authenticity but is also detrimental to Muslims, a revival of Islamic rationalism is a far better option. In their own interest, Muslims need to engage in creating a new tradition that includes interaction with other cultures. There is a lesson to be learned from the Islamic past: Muslims cannot both have their cake and eat it. A new tradition cannot succeed without a clear and unequivocal stand against fiqh orthodoxy and Islamism.

The process of Hellenization was initiated by the Christian Nestorian translators in the late eighth century and lasted from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. These translations made Greek writings available in Arabic. In The Beginnings of Western Science, the historian David Lindberg tells us: “By the year 1000 A.D. almost the entire corpus of Greek medicine, natural philosophy, and mathematical science has been rendered into usable Arabic versions.” Then Lindberg asks: “Was there a religious price that had to be paid for the acceptance of Greek science?”35 The answer is that Islamic rationalists had fallen under the illusion that they could come to terms with the fiqh orthodoxy, and they paid dearly for this belief: accused of damaging the purity of Islam, they were excommunicated from the umma. Their mistake was that they did not take a clear stand and did not defend their school of thought. Their conciliatory attitude did not pay off; their books were burned in public.

The purity argument revolves around what is acceptable as a cultural source of knowledge. In the Salafist Islamic orthodoxy tradition, the foremost knowledge is that which is transmitted through revelation as fixed in the Qur’an. The acceptance of Greek science suggested a competing view: a pattern of knowledge based on human reason and also acquired from non-Islamic sources. The resulting clash between fiqh and falsafa led to a continuing rivalry between Islamic orthodoxy and reason-based Muslim thinkers. There are Muslims who open their minds to the cultural other and those who close their minds in the name of authenticity of knowledge. The competing options are articulated in the classical formula bi al-wahi aw bi al-’aql (either by revelation or by reason). One or the other is supposed to be the sole source of valid knowledge. This dichotomy stands in contrast to Averroës’s haqiqa muzdawaja (double truth), advanced by Muslim rationalists in an effort to honor the divine while recognizing a separation between knowledge based on the religious worldview and rational knowledge that emanates from human reason. Each has its own domain. Today, the source of knowledge is the central issue in Islam’s predicament with modernity.36

It is difficult for a Muslim like myself to conceive that there are Muslim scholars teaching at Western universities (for instance, the British-Muslim professor Ziauddin Sardar)37 who disparage Cartesianism, the rationalism of cultural modernity, as “epistemological imperialism.” In Islam, there were once better times. During the Abbasid period, under caliphs like the great Harun al-Rashid and his son al-Ma’mun, philosophers were honored and promoted. The caliphs “cultivated a religious climate that was relatively intellectual, secularized, and tolerant,”38 and also supported the Mu’tazilites as “defenders of reason.”39 Other centers for these cultural borrowings and their integration into Islam were in Córdoba and Toledo in Islamic Spain. Unlike Mawardi,40 who put wahi (revelation) above aql (reason)—and unlike the vigorous philosophers of the French Enlightenment—Islamic rationalists compromised in an attempt to avoid conflict. In arguing that revelation and reason could coexist, they believed that they had solved the problem. Unlike Voltaire, they refrained from applying their rationalist ideas to a rethinking of religious doctrine.

It is a sad fact that knowledge in Islamic civilization has been primarily determined by the ulema orthodoxy and its establishment. These clerics succeeded in undermining the development launched by the Hellenization of Islam. The ulema also established a hostile distinction between “alien sciences” or “sciences of the ancients” (the Greeks, the qudama’) and Islamic sciences. The first were reason-based, while the latter were related to the study of religious doctrine, primarily the exegesis of Qur’an and hadith. These “Islamic sciences” also include shari’a learning, as well as the philological disciplines required for dealing with the divine texts. The fiqh scholars insisted on the holistic validity of revelation as the sole and unrestricted source of true knowledge in all realms. Even though the caliph al-Ma’mun established the dar al-hikma (house of wisdom) as a kind of Islamic academy of sciences, this vision was never realized. The major institutions of Islamic learning remained exclusively in the hands of the ulema. As George Makdisi writes in The Rise of the Colleges, Islamic orthodoxy controlled the madrasa as the Islamic institution of higher learning and maintained its purity against the impact of the alien ulum al-qudama’ (science of the ancients). Lindberg tells us, “Greek learning never found a secure institutional home in Islam.… Islamic schools would never develop a curriculum that systematically taught the foreign sciences.… From the middle of the ninth century until well into the thirteenth, we find impressive scientific work in all the main branches of Greek science being carried forward throughout the Islamic world … but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic sciences went into decline, and by the fifteenth century, little was left.”41

Thus if we wish to know why rational and scientific thought in Islam did not gain a permanent foothold, the historical record helps us eliminate two proposed answers. Rationalism did not fail because it was an alien system of thought imposed on Islam by Jews and crusaders: Hellenism flourished well before either group was in a position to force anything upon the Islamic world. Nor did it fail because the Muslim scholars were simply translators who added nothing to the Greek learning they appropriated, as alleged by certain racist German Orientalists. (Despite my reservations about the Saidist cult of Orientalism, the accusation fits those who advance this prejudice.) There is no doubt that Islamic scholars did a great deal to develop their adopted Greek legacy. Historians of science agree that Muslim civilization in the medieval age had the most advanced science in the world.42 The reason for its decline lies elsewhere. In Meaning and Moral Order, Robert Wuthnow argues that the institutionalization of knowledge is most essential for the maintenance of science.43

Systematically excluded from institutions of education, scientific thought could not be successfully diffused into the Islamic worldview. It could not strike roots. In a needless war between rationalism and faith, rationalism lost out, and the tradition of science in Islamic civilization failed to give birth to modern science.

It would be wrong to infer from this that the sciences were marginal in Islam. Naturalization, if not partial assimilation, took place to a certain extent. But it was undermined by the orthodoxy. The control of the educational system allowed fiqh orthodoxy to prevent the spread of scientific thought and thwarted the efforts of Islamic rationalists. The inherited religious conception of the world’s divine order continued to prevail in Islamic civilization.

The absence of a rationalist view of the world, of humanity, and of nature has had enduring and detrimental effects. The cultural and institutional drive toward purity created by fiqh orthodoxy that ruined Islamic civilization in the past continues to burden the present. It was not “a conspiracy hatched by Jews and crusaders against the world of Islam” that caused the decline of Islamic civilization but rather the very insistence on purity that fiqh orthodoxy by then imposed and Islamists of today wish to reclaim. Only in the most ironic sense can Islamism be termed an “Islamic revival,” as a revival of this fiqh tradition. Yet the contemporary Islamist agenda of purification is quite recent and in this shape unprecedented in Islamic history.

The cultural and epistemological agenda of Islamism heralds a setback into an age of flat-earthism. That agenda is formulated by the Saudi-funded International Institute of Islamic Thought as follows: “The pursuit of knowledge in Islam is not an end in itself; it is only a means of acquiring an understanding of God.… Reason and the pursuit of knowledge … are subservient to Qur’anic values.… In this framework reason and revelation go hand in hand. Modern science, on the other hand, considers reason to be supreme.”44

The Islamist alternative to modern science employs an epistemology that would purify Islamic thinking and alienate Islamic civilization from modern scientific knowledge. Epistemologically, Islamism fails to meet the requirements for a “knowledge society.”45 Politically and historically it falls back behind the accomplishments of Islamic heritage, in particular with regard to a rational thinking about the proper polity.46

The Futility of Dogma

The phrase “Islamic revival” is widely misused in the West; already I have questioned this formula. The foremost Muslim thinker of the nineteenth century, Afghani, was a genuine revivalist, but contemporary Islamists are clearly not. Afghani argued that the European powers were able to colonize the Islamic Middle East through their superior knowledge of the world. The Islamist slogan al-hall huwa al-Islam (Islam is the solution) advocates lesser knowledge of the world. Afghani believed that the dominance of Europe over the world of Islam reflected “the hegemony of states and peoples, who have science and thus are able to dominate over those who are weak.… In other words, power and science enable [one] to rule over weakness and ignorance. This is a cosmic law.”47 The only similarity between Afghani and the Islamists is that both related modernity to instruments and not to a rational worldview. The reform Afghani envisioned failed because he was not poised to change the Islamic worldview.

Afghani was keen to see himself as the Martin Luther of Islam. But because he lacked the courage, or perhaps the will, to introduce to Islam the religious reform and related cultural change that Luther had introduced to Christianity, Afghani remained a lesser figure. The comparison between them is not only presumptuous but baseless. Nonetheless, Afghani was better than the Islamists, because he was sincere about the adoption of modernity and never engaged in a fake authenticity based on a fictitious and fickle ideology. But his revivalism had a limited scope, and his attempted religious reform failed.

If a religious reform is established on the grounds of a religious dogma that remains unquestioned, then this way of thinking presents insurmountable obstacles to modernization. The sociologist of religion Niklas Luhmann, commenting on the social function of a religious dogma that seeks to answer all cosmic questions, observed that “religious dogma departs from unanalyzed abstractions and thus … it does not consciously reflect on its social function but rather understands itself, its concept of dogma, dogmatically.… On the other hand, it rests on a universal and contextless applicability, hence on a certain disregard of the bonds it interprets.”48

Despite their great differences, Islamists and revivalists share a similar understanding of the religious dogma in that they fail to rethink, or even question, the validity of dogma itself. But while nineteenth-century Islamic modernism remained basically scripturalist, acting exclusively within dogmatic confines, Islamism engages in an invention of tradition that is imbued with modernity. Islamism engages in an instrumental adjustment to modernity but resists any effort at cultural modernization.

The Islamist project of “semimodernity”49 attempts to separate modern instruments from cultural values and as a result leads to an impasse. The commitment of Islamists to authenticity based on a purification agenda is a venture that leads nowhere. In this sense early Muslim modernists were better off, because they were more open minded.50 On the model of Karl Popper’s “open society,” I have coined the notion of “open Islam” to denote a tradition from others and thus navigators in different waters from those of Islamist purification.

The futility of religious dogma in Islam can be illustrated on the bulk of the contemporary literary production in Arabic. This literature is quantitatively enormous but mostly poor in substance. Among the hundreds of thousands of books written by Muslims in the recent past one seldom encounters as courageous a book as Critique of Religious Thought51 by the Yale-educated Muslim philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm. It was not a surprise to see that his thinking was not welcomed. After the book’s publication, al-Azm was hounded by the state, by the fiqh orthodoxy, and of course by Islamists. His Yale education was invoked to support an accusation of lack of purity. He was accused of kufr (unbelief or heresy), an ugly weapon employed by Islamists. The Islamist takfir—that is, the classification of a Muslim as having “become an unbeliever”—is not idle, since it could legitimate an assassination as a divine execution. In dogmatic Islam, there is no liberty of conscience. Talk about purity and authenticity does not resemble a free academic debate in which disagreement is supposed to be tolerated. Powerful scholars in a free society have many ways to undermine unwelcome knowledge, but they cannot execute their foes.

Free debate on Islam’s predicament with modernity exists neither in the world of Islam nor in the West. There are not only threats and repression but also sanctions by those who do not admit that there is any such predicament. Most fearful are the accusations of heresy or cultural treason made in the name of protecting authenticity, whether by Islamists or by authorities intent on safeguarding a politically correct academic culture. It is sad to see how some liberal Europeans and Americans not only embrace Islamism but also dismiss any distinction between Islam and Islamism.

Mohammed al-Jabri and I are both Muslims who believe that the future can only be Averroist. Al-Jabri writes that “the survival of philosophical tradition is likely to contribute to our time.… The Averroist spirit is adoptable to our era, because it agrees with it on more than one point: rationalism, realism, axiomatic method, and critical approach.”52 In the name of the authentic Islamization of knowledge, Islamists promote a competing agenda. The International Institute of Islamic Thought summarizes it this way: “Fiqh, usul al-fiqh, and shari’a are the greatest expression of Islamic spirit, it is absolutely necessary to make these contents readily available to the research school in each of the specific disciplines of modern times.… Fiqh and shari’a are the quintessence.”53

The old conflict within medieval Islam between the fiqh orthodoxy and falsafa rationalism is inflamed again, but under different names and circumstances. There is once again a fight between scientific thought of a rationalist worldview and the divine, but this time it is presented as a conflict between Islam and the West. In fact one can find advocates on both sides in both civilizations.

It is amazing to see these similarities between the past and the present. Today, Islamists argue that all scientific findings should be subjected to shari’a. Like proponents of the medieval fiqh orthodoxy, they check the compatibility of modern thinking with Islam and only on these grounds admit its validity. When I read what David Lindberg writes about that past, I am reminded of the present on all counts: “Conservative religious forces made themselves increasingly felt.… Science became naturalized in Islam—losing its alien quality and finally becoming Islamic science, instead of Greek science …—by accepting a greatly restricted hand-maiden role. This meant a loss of attention to many problems.”54

A similar Islamization of knowledge is taking place today in the name of authenticity and purity. The result is a general Islamist purification not recognized in the U.S. academy, where scholars are obsessed with upgrading the instrumental adoption of science in a mindset of religious orthodoxy to an “other modernity.” As a Muslim political scientist I fail to see in this semimodernity an authentic “other modernity.” Its flat-earthist epistemology reminds me of the disastrous past when the Islamic fiqh orthodoxy ended the tradition of rational science in Islam.55 The inference is clear: Islamism is neither a postmodernity nor the other modernity.

If Islamism prevails, then the loser is Islamic civilization in its predicament with modernity. The only U.S. political scientist known to me who masters Arabic like a native-speaker, John Waterbury, shares this assessment. Waterbury, who was professor at Princeton University before he assumed the presidency of the American University of Beirut, 1998–2008, knows intimately the world of Islam. Waterbury believes that if Islamization of knowledge succeeds, then “a new era of flatearthism” would be the outcome. In his view a kind of epistemological authenticity “may emerge in the Middle East in which the epistemology underlying social inquiry will be rejected as a culturally alien importation, a tool of the adversaries of Arabs and Islam.”56 Waterbury wrote this forecast in a chapter to the 1988 book The Next Arab Decade, edited by the late Palestinian Muslim historian Hisham Sharabi. As described in this chapter, that era has come to pass, just as the present book sees light, a sad reality for Arabs and Muslims. Waterbury is also the coauthor of the authoritative book Political Economy of the Middle East. There he begins one chapter with the question “Is Islam the Solution?”—an allusion to a major Islamist slogan. He ends the chapter: “The answer to the question at the beginning of this chapter is no.”57 Since I couldn’t agree more, I have nothing to add.