9

Civil Islam as an Alternative to Islamism

IN THIS BOOK I have made an effort to describe the ideology of Islamism to Western readers and to dissociate it from the faith of Islam. I have argued that Islamism is not the heritage of Islam but is a contemporary political interpretation of Islam based on an invention of tradition. Among the themes running throughout this book is the tension within Islamic civilization. As in the past, when Islamic rationalist philosophers—from al-Fatabi to Ibn Rushd (Averroës)—stood against the fiqh orthodoxy, liberal Muslims today stand against Islamism. Islamism is not Islam, but neither does Islamism stand outside of Islam. The stereotype of a monolithic Islam must be done away with. Both the Islamists and (genuinely) Islamophobic Western writers argue in a simplistic manner—of course with different intentions—that there is only “one Islam.” In fact one encounters in both Islam and Islamism simultaneous unity and diversity.

Why Is Islamism Not Islam?

The major argument of this book can be rephrased as follows: In a time of both normative and structural crises, some Muslim political activists have reinvented Islamic traditions to produce something new, called Islamism. These figures included Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abu al A’la al-Mawdudi, and various successors such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi. A marginal tradition from 1928 to 1967, Islamism became a major current in the Sunni Arab world in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967. Islamism is an example of an invented tradition which brings previously marginal elements of Islam, especially its anti-Jewish currents, to the center. This is done by selectively choosing passages from the Qu’ran and the commentaries on it, the hadith, and taking them out of their context. The result is an antidemocratic, totalitarian vision that aims at reshaping the order of the state and subsequently the entire system of world politics. Islamism seeks to replace the existing system of sovereign states that emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 with an order of the state centered on a conception of divine law. Following the French Revolution and the European expansion, the international system created under the Peace of Westphalia spread around the world. The doctrines of Islamism envision a reversal of this historical process. Islamism is at its core a form of Jew hatred because it believes that “the Jews” rule the world and hence are in conflict with Islam. Islamism also rejects democracy, a branch of it justifies violence, and it has no objection in principle to the use of terror. The advocacy of shari’a law, which it represents as a return to traditional practice, is a modern invention. Islamism subjects the individual to an all-encompassing ideology that is a new form of totalitarianism. It is the Islamists’ ability to evoke the traditions of Islam, however distorted or inaccurate, and their claim to Islamic authenticity that accounts for their ability to reach a broad audience of Muslim populations. Western writers who belittle Islamism as marginal, or who view it as a secular cover for social concerns such as the expression of grievances, fail to understand how an invented tradition becomes appealing and powerful via a selective reading of the much larger traditions of Islam itself.

In this book I take issue, first, with the Islamists themselves, deconstructing their claim to be the correct interpreters of Islam; second, with those in the West who wrongly believe that Islamism is the logical outgrowth of the religion of Islam; and third, with those in the West who are favorable to Muslims—sometimes in the name of realism—but embrace those Islamists labeled “moderate Muslims” because they reject terrorism. None of these three groups of people seem to grasp what Islamism is. I analyze each of the six historically specific, distinctive features of Islamism in a separate chapter. In Chapter 8 I find in Islamism a new totalitarianism.

Why do I believe this book is urgently needed? Why did I write it as the last work of my academic career? I wrote this book as a social scientist in an effort to describe and explain a new phenomenon; the politicization of the religion of Islam to a concept of state order. The basic distinction between Islam and Islamism is a means by which to elucidate the related issues. While in substance this book is an academic inquiry, I have repeatedly professed two other leading concerns. First, I hope to defend Islam against Islamism (and against defamation through its association with terror); and second, I hope to contribute to the bridging of the divides between the civilizations of the West and of Islam. Neither of these goals is realistic without first establishing the distinction between Islam and Islamism.

World events wait for no author. While I was writing, for example, a controversy arose over a proposal to build an Islamic center, including a mosque, near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Without engaging in a comprehensive analysis of this debate, I find in the controversy relevance to the theme of this book. As the New York Times reported on August 8, 2010, “While a high profile battle rages … in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out … across the country.” The Times added that “in all of the recent conflicts opponents have said their problem is Islam itself.” One finds the same view expressed in many other influential publications. For instance, a former federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, writes in The Grand Jihad, “I’m not a Muslim, and I appreciate that there is a plethora of Islamic forms.… Hair-splitting between Islamism and Islam runs the risk of doing exactly what we must avoid doing: minimizing the challenge confronting us.” It is amazing to see that McCarthy, who is not favorable to Islam at all, approvingly quotes the founder of Islamism, Hasan al-Banna, who believes his Islamist ideology to be true Islam. McCarthy comments, “Banna was right,” and supports this allegation with the argument that if all Muslims and Islamists share the belief that “shari’a is obligatory,” then there exists no distinction between Islam and Islamism. Yet in chapter 6 of this book I elaborate on the Islamist invention of shari’a tradition, acknowledging that the Islamist shari’a al-Banna advocates is not classical shari’a. Furthermore, McCarthy quotes the Turkish prime minister Recep T. Erdoğan’s comment that the distinction between Islam and Islamism is “offensive and an insult to our religion.” “Is it wrong, then,” McCarthy asks, “to shrink from the conclusion that the real problem is Islam?” He answers this question by quoting Andrew Bostom, who contends that “Islam and Islamism were synonymous.”1 My answer to McCarthy’s question is that he and Bostom are wrong: Islamism is not Islam.

Three Basic Distinctions

I have in this book argued that for a proper understanding of Islamism, one needs to look at three basic distinctions:

1. Political religion and the problematic of political order. Islamism emanates from a politicization of religion. If this politicized religion were simply an indication of cultural differences, we could make room for it in the name of diversity. But Islamism, as an Islamic variety of the global phenomenon of religious fundamentalism, is uniquely focused on the international order. Islamists mobilize on religious grounds in the pursuit of not only an Islamic state but a remaking of the world. The jihadists among them engage in irregular war as a means of establishing a totalitarian order. The shari’a state is not an Islamic variety of constitutionalism but the nucleus of an order embedded in the Islamist quest for a global pax Islamica. This goal is shared by nonviolent as well as jihadist Islamists.

2. The practice of violence as a holy terror and irregular war of nonstate actors. Not all Islamists are jihadists, but all jihadists are Islamists, who fight for their goals not by political means but on a battlefield whose definition—abhorrently to non-Islamists—has been expanded to include office buildings, subways, and urban sidewalks. While institutional Islamists forgo violence and publicly distance themselves from this jihadism, they have not abandoned their ambitions for Islamic governance and the Islamist order. On the other hand, jihadist Islamists practice violence as “holy terror” within a war of incompatible value systems. To be sure, all Islamists are Muslims, as they stand within Islam. To criticize them is not an offense, since non-Islamist Muslims are the majority of the “Islamic umma” of 1.7 billion people living across the globe.

3. Islamism and the conceptual framework of religious fundamentalism. Political Islam or Islamism (the terms are interchangeable) is conceptualized as a religious fundamentalism. Some scholars dispute the application of the term “fundamentalism” to Islam. For instance, Robert Lee confesses: “I side with those who do not find this term helpful.”2 Unfortunately, he does not support this objection with any substantive arguments. It is true that the term has become a cliché, but beyond its considerable life as a sound bite it remains a useful concept for studying the politicization of religion. The Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences establishes the concept’s scholarly authority. The politicization of religion is a global phenomenon of which Islamism is an important instance.

In short, Islamism is a vision of a world order based on politicized religion, a movement that contains a branch committed to sacral violence, and an expression of the worldwide phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. These three aspects define Islamism as religionized politics. The nonstate actors of the jihadist branch of Islamism can never be countered by state armies, as the United States is still attempting to do in Iraq and Afghanistan with no success in sight. There is a need for more complex strategies—true also for dealings with Iran—where Islamism is in power. The West also needs a strategy for dealing with institutional nonviolent Islamism, which presents the most powerful opposition to several existing governments—and may have taken power in one or more nations by the time this book is published. Nonetheless, the West lacks such strategies.

Islamism, Europe, and the World at Large

Over the past few decades, Islamism has gone global; it exists both in the world of Islam and in its diaspora in the West. For a number of reasons, Europeans are more directly confronted by Islamism than the United States is. Among these reasons are the geopolitical neighborhood—the world of Islam is at Europe’s borders—and the rapidly increasing size of the Islamic segment of Europe’s population (23 million in 2010). Europe needs to learn how to live with Islam and truly engage its Muslim immigrants by granting them a citizenship of substance, beyond merely giving them passports. In Europe there is a process of ethnicization of Islam, from which Islamism not only benefits but actively takes advantage.3 This can be averted only by integrating Muslim immigrants into full citizenship, by making them “citizens of the heart.” Just as democracy is hollow if it exists only at the ballot box and is not a part of people’s everyday values and expectations, citizenship is hollow if it exists only on paper. By the same token, Muslim passport Europeans are not real Europeans if they reject Western values and prefer to live in enclaves legitimated as communitarian parallel societies.

The totalitarian movement of Islamism acts within a geopolitical triangle consisting of the Islamic states, Europe, and the Muslim diasporic culture in the West. There is a need for policy—not for policing, and certainly not a “war on terror”—to better integrate relations among these three sides. Of course one has to counter jihadist terrorism, but the rhetoric of crusade only defeats that purpose. To deal effectively with Islamism and Islam, the United States and Europe—despite being allies—need different strategies because they are in utterly different situations and do not share entirely the same interests.

There is, of course, a Muslim community in the Unites States, and while part of it is sympathetic to Islamism,4 that group is a small fraction of the Muslim population, and it presents less difficult problems than does European Islamism. Muslims have certainly faced discrimination in the United States, but because they are among many immigrant populations in a country with a long tradition of (eventually) accepting newcomers, they are not as ghettoized as they are in Europe. The U.S. approach to Islamism is more focused on foreign policy. President Obama’s first two visits to Islamic countries, in April and June 2009, promised a wind of change, and the mere fact of such visits and significant speeches so early in his presidency testified to his (and the United States’) sense of the region’s importance. I repeat the combination of applause and criticism: the Obama administration aims to bridge the divide, but it fails to account for the distinction between Islam and Islamism and does not deliver what it promises.

The challenge of Islamism for Europe is tougher than for the United States,5 and there is no wind of change. Europe is host to a tremendously growing yet barely integrated Islamic diaspora, and Europe is next door to the Islamic world. As a longtime resident of Germany, I can testify to the Europeans’ failure to win the hearts and souls of Muslim immigrants, to integrate them as true Europeans, or even to see that this is something at which they should make an effort.6 The contradictory extremes of policing and facile goodwill pronouncements aside, Europe is doing little to avert the hijacking of the diaspora, especially its youth, by Islamism.

Some authors view Europe today as the battlefield of Islamism, while others see it as the place where Islam can be reformed and made compatible with the principles of civil society. Islamists have been successful in abusing their religious rights in European civil society to establish Islamic enclaves where fundamentalists can gain influence. This European connection is pertinent, but it should not conceal the fact that the threat of Islamism is not restricted to Europe but is general and even global.7 To fight radical ideologies of all sorts, including political Islam, one needs a strategy that avoids entrenchments. In Europe I have put forward the concept of Euro-Islam8 as a bridge between civil Islam and enlightened inclusionary Europe. The values of the open society9 are to be unambiguously stated and protected. For the world at large one needs a cross-cultural morality to prevent “the clash of civilizations.”

Is Islamism Anti-Islamic?

Given that Muslims constitute more than one quarter of humanity, the competition between civil Islam and Islamist totalitarianism matters to everyone. It certainly matters to those who live with Islam, whether within their own borders or in their geopolitical neighborhood. The bottom line for living together in peace is to solve Islam’s predicament with modernity.10 This requires that the Islamic world not only free itself from the misery of authoritarian regimes and embrace secular democracy but also resist Islamism’s presentation of itself as “the alternative,” or al-hall al-Islami, the Islamic solution.

Islamism is not an alternative for a civil society because it does not accept the core values that, in a civil society, must be shared by all. Islamists refuse to share power, and therefore the pluralism of civil Islam is alien to them. Islamist ideology rejects modernity, democracy, and civic culture.11 Nonviolent Islamists pay lip service to a democracy that is reduced to a procedure of a ballot box, but vehemently dismiss its values. They do not abandon the hopeless goal of Islamization. Only non-Islamist Muslims can solve the crisis Islamic civilization is undergoing, but they must avoid solutions that only deepen the crisis.

Given that Islamism is the new totalitarianism, Muslims cannot afford to let Islamists speak for their civilization. Above all, they cannot put their future in the hands of a movement that leads them nowhere. The message to the West is that it must forgo the luxury of cultural blind spots it can no longer afford. The Enlightenment produced countless benefits, but it also led Westerners to adopt a particular view of the proper relation between the secular and the sacred—and then to absorb this view so thoroughly that they seem to forget that it is not universally shared. While in London in January 2008 for the opening of the University of London’s new Center for the Study of Radicalization, I heard an address given by Jacqui Smith, then the Labour British secretary of the Home Office. The next day, the Daily Mail gave this account of her speech: “Ministers have adopted a new language for declarations on Islamic terrorism. In future fanatics will be referred to as pursuing ‘anti-Islamic activity.’ Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that extremists were behaving contrary to their faith.… Miss Smith repeatedly used the phrase anti-Islamic.… Her words were chosen to reflect a new government strategy on labeling terrorists and their recruiting agents.”

This prompted an editorial comment in the same issue: “If al-Qaeda attacks tomorrow, the bombers should, according to Miss Smith, not be described as Islamic terrorists, but as engaging in anti-Islamic activity. It is like describing the Nazis as being engaged in anti-German activity. Goebbels would have been proud of such doublespeak.”12

To give the home secretary credit for honesty, her concern should be cited: “Linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion.” But this is precisely why we need to grasp the distinction between Islamism and Islam. One must be able to condemn Islamist terror while respecting the religion of Islam. Otherwise we are simply buying into the jihadists’ self-definition as representing all of Islam. Smith, like most other Western politicians—including President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan—misses this point. If scholars were to follow her absurd characterization, then Islamists could continue to defame any criticism as Islamophobia and make a false parallel between antisemitism and anti-Islamism to camouflage their quest for an Islamic world order.13

Among the great disadvantages of secularization is that it results in profanation. This is what makes so many people blind to the distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as religionized politics. The British government, which could not separate the jihadists from Islam except by resorting to the unbelievable assertion that the former are “anti-Islamic,” exemplifies the larger problem. Europeans (and some American scholars) no longer understand the meaning of religion and its use in politics. As the Dutch scholar Johannes Jansen argues, these people think the combination of religion and politics “should simply not exist. If it is political, it can be fought. If it is religious, constitution or conscience dictates that it should be tolerated. By being both, Islamic fundamentalism forcefully demonstrates the weakness … of the modern world itself.”14

This is exactly what many people in the West fail to understand. Islamism is not only a quest for a political order, it is also a “messianic religious dream.” Though Islamist leaders themselves fervently believe in this dream, they also know how to employ doublespeak; they present their political agenda as a legitimate religion to which they are entitled as a right by Western constitutional standards. They rebuff Western constitutionalism but take advantage of its privileges to further a war of ideas against it. Lenin remarked that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them”; his successors in totalitarianism similarly hope to use the West against itself.15

Understanding how Islamism is related to Islam may help us change the balance in favor of open civil society, an effort in which civil Islam is an ally. Ultimately the Islamists must have their day. Political and cultural pluralism is a universal good,16 but one of the prices we pay for it is susceptibility to short-term manipulation. A liberal democracy cannot censor or exclude institutional Islamists. They must be given the chance to embrace in deeds the democratic political culture to which they have paid so much lip service (for example, the AKP in Turkey). At that point they will be revealed for what they truly are. As Karl Popper has argued, open society must then have the right to defend itself through democratic responses, because intolerance cannot be admitted in the name of tolerance.17 Totalitarian movements do not last forever: they fade on a scale of decades rather than centuries. We may hope that the present phase of the crisis of Islamic civilization18 will give way to religious reforms and cultural changes that will lead to true democracy. I have suggested that Islamism is a response to a civilizational crisis, but it is not the movement that will resolve this crisis. In defending the universal values of cultural enlightenment against the counterenlightenment of Islamism, we must look to the humanism that has always been a part of the heritage of Islam.19

Who Are the Moderate Islamists?

The mainstream of Islamism consists of nonviolent institutional Islamists, who present themselves in the garb of “moderate Islam.” One finds this institutional Islamism in Egypt and Turkey, among other countries. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers have abandoned the radical language that once gave the government a pretext for persecuting them. They have not changed their mindset. Despite continuing electoral fraud by the Mubarak government, the Islamists have managed to put several of their leaders into the Egyptian parliament. It is not only President Obama and some Washington policymakers who see the Muslim Brothers as partners in promoting Egyptian democracy. Reliable sources tell me that the EU leadership in Brussels has been seeking contact with the Muslim Brothers through back channels in a questionable effort at cultural diplomacy. European think tanks feed the illusion that “Europe’s engagement with moderate Islamists” could help curtail “Islamist radicalization.”20 This is disturbingly myopic, but this myopia is becoming the rule since the Arab Spring of 2011.

In Turkey three Islamist parties existed from the early 1970s until the late 1990s: Selamet, Refah, and Fazilet. Each in turn was banned by the supreme courts as unconstitutional. Turkish Islamists learned from this history. Their new party, the AKP, abandoned all Islamist rhetoric and since 2002 has ruled the country almost as a one-party state. The AKP uses the discourse of democracy to camouflage its politics of creeping Islamization.21 It employs no Islamist jargon but instead presents itself as an “Islamic conservative” party comparable to Germany’s Christian-Democratic Union. But despite the AKP politicians’ claim that they are no longer Islamists, the support they receive from American and European leaders alienates the West from liberal Muslims and secularists. As I showed in Chapters 1 and 4, the AKP has been successful in moving Turkey in an Islamist direction. In 2010 some Western politicians started to reconsider their positive views about the AKP and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, following Turkey’s rapprochement toward Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and its suppression of press freedoms22 and interference with the judicial system.

Before their apparent conversion from religious fundamentalism to moderate Islamic conservatism, Turkish Islamists were less inclined to hide what was on their minds. At a rally in December 1997 in the city of Siirt, Erdoğan, then the mayor of Istanbul, quoted an Islamist poem approvingly: “The mosques are our barracks; the minarets are our bayonets. The domes are our helms. The believers are our soldiers.” After a formal indictment by the state prosecutor on grounds of inflammatory speech, the Ankara High Court forced Erdoğan to step down as mayor and sentenced him to jail. Upon his release, he declared his intent to “continue the struggle to return to the political scene even more powerful than before.”23 The Turkish Supreme Court then issued a ban on Erdoğan’s party, Fazilet Partisi. This is the experience that underlay the founding of the AKP in 2002. From then on Erdoğan styled himself a “Muslim-conservative European” rather than a “neo-Ottoman pan-Turkish Islamist.” But it is not clear that the leopard actually changed his spots. Zeyno Baran convincingly shows that the substance of AKP politics since 2002 consists of lip service to Kemalist secularism alongside the intent to “reshape the republic, chiefly along Islamist lines” as pursued in a politics of a “creeping … top-down Islamization.”24

The AKP cannot yet publicly state its Islamist commitments. Any such declaration would prompt its legal banning. Turkey is not yet completely in Islamist hands: it still has a secular constitution and a constitutional court. Yet the recent constitutional referendum suggests that the tension between the AKP’s clear Islamist tendencies and the secular elements of Turkish society is bound to increase. The WikiLeaks disclosures cited in Chapter 4 show that U.S. diplomats in Ankara are aware of the true leanings of the AKP’s leaders. It is possible that once the new constitution is in effect, with a weakened judiciary and reconfigured Supreme Court, these leaders will be more outspoken about their mindset and more aggressive in pursuing Islamist policies. In fact, developments in the spring and summer of 2011 have tended in that direction. There has been a shake-up in the Turkish court system, with some judges forced to accept early pensions and others exiled to rural areas, and the constitutional court stripped of its independence from the government, all as part of an AKP effort to weaken the judiciary. Meanwhile, in the other pillar of the secular republic, the entire officer command of all branches of the armed forces of Turkey resigned in July 2011 to protest AKP prosecution of the bogus “Ergenekon” conspiracy, a pretext to arrest and hold without trial opposition judges, officers, and journalists.25

Modernity, Islam, and Enlightenment

Modernity must be understood in the terms of the European Enlightenment set out by Immanuel Kant. As Jürgen Habermas phrased it, “Kant … installed reason in the supreme seat of judgment before which anything that made a claim to validity has to be justified.”26 Lest this be seen as Eurocentric, I would note that this recognition of the primacy of reason also existed in medieval Islamic rationalism.27 Thus the rationalist view of the world can be shared cross-culturally by people of different civilizations. As the late Moroccan philosopher Mohammed al-Jabri argued, Islamic rationalism is in line with modernity. Clearly, Islamism is not “the other modernity,” because it is totalitarian.28

The Islamist worldview is not in line with the tradition of Islamic rationalism founded on the work of Avicenna and Averroës. This tradition should be considered a genuine enlightenment29 even if it did not ultimately move the Islamic world into modernity. I refer again to the great Islamic rational philosopher Mohammed al-Jabri of the University of Rabat, Morocco, to argue with him that the rationalist spirit of Averroism “is adaptable to our era because it agrees with it on more than one point: rationalism, realism, axiomatic method, and critical approach.” Jabri writes of “the universality and historicity of knowledge” approved by Averroës and contends that the Islamic revival must be specific to “the survival of our philosophical tradition, i.e., what is likely to contribute to our time, [which] can only be Averroist.”30 The existence of this variety of Islamic philosophy supports the contention that there can be only one, cross-cultural modernity, based on a shared recognition of the primacy of reason.

The humanist scholar Zeev Sternhell, in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition,31 mounts a strong defense of this rationalist modernity. Sternhell extensively discusses Hannah Arendt and defends her work against critiques, in particular Isaiah Berlin’s objection that an analysis originally developed around fascism could not then be applied to Soviet communism. Sternhell sees Arendt’s theory, which I have extended further, as fully generalizable. In Sternhell’s view, the totalitarian impulse Arendt identified, whose purest expression was in the concentration camps and Gulags, emerges from a long history of cultural counterenlightenment that has developed alongside the rationalist tradition. He confines the debate to the intellectual history of Europe, but I want to extend his approach to view Islamism not as an “other modernity” but rather as an antimodernity, a counterenlightenment. I have largely confined my application of Arendt’s approach to the two levels of ideology and movement—theory and practice, if you will—but Sternhell’s analysis adds a third layer: totalitarianism as part of the antienlightenment tradition. As the new totalitarianism, Islamism would return the individual to the straitjacket of an allegedly divine collectivity. Islamism contradicts not only European Enlightenment but also the rationalist tradition of Islamic humanism.

The political order of hakimiyyat Allah, God’s rule, by demanding that its followers dismiss popular sovereignty in the name of Islam, in effect contests the rule of humans over themselves as free individuals. Following an invented tradition of Islamic law, Islamists subject humanity to a constructed and essentialized supranatural will of God. The aql (reason) and its authority are replaced by the authority of wahi (revelation) fixed in scripture. The revelation is, of course, a strictly Islamist interpretation, arbitrary and highly selective, of the text.

For many decades to come, the West will be challenged by the problems of the world of Islam, including Islamism. This world is characterized by the diversity of local cultures. The political theorist John Brenkman sees “an uncomfortable truth … to be faced: most of the dangers are coming from the Muslim world.… Europe must learn how to deal with … conflicts generated within and between Muslim countries, and between radical Muslims and the West.… The crisis of Muslims’ relations to the West is condensed.”32

Some may dismiss this assessment as Islamophobic, but it is only a strategic overview of the present state of the world. What to do? One has to talk to Muslims, and President Obama did the right thing in his speech of June 4 when he invited Muslims in Cairo to join in a dialogue. Still, no proper politics can be pursued without considering the distinction between Islamism and Islam; one has to ensure that one has one’s dialogue with the right party. There is a need for bridging, but how and on what foundations, and above all, with whom? At this juncture, we may note that the West cannot afford to overlook the distinction between Islam and Islamism, as well as the tensions between civil liberal Islam and Islamism. Whatever garb Islamists may appear in, they are not a pro-democracy movement.

Politics and the Ambivalence of the Sacred

The task is to acknowledge the place of Islam and Islamism in the present global conflict without overlooking the need for secular solutions. Others have different solutions; they upgrade the sacral in politics. For instance, Scott Appleby, formerly the cochairman of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, seems to have forgotten the pitfalls of politicized religion. In The Ambivalence of the Sacred, Appleby argues that if the sacral is the problem, it has to be included in the solution. “Religion … inspired, legitimated, and exacerbated deadly conflicts,” he writes, but it “contributes consistently to their peaceful resolution.” Appleby believes that men and women of political religion “without sacrificing their unique identity … as religious actors,… must become central players.”33 Is this an approval of religionized politics and an abandonment of the need to separate religion from politics? I doubt that any solution along these lines is feasible. Take the case of Malaysia, an ethnically and religiously diverse nation where Muslims make up a little more than 50 percent of the population but nearly monopolize political power. Exclusively Muslim solutions to religious conflict will surely not be acceptable to the country’s Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, yet fundamentalism admits no compromise. The Middle East is another case: the solutions proposed by Hamas and Hezbollah are not acceptable to Jews or to liberal secular Muslims. Religionized politics not only creates an impasse but entrenches it. Again, solutions to conflict have to be secular if they are to be accepted by all players.

This is not an ideology of secularism, but rather recognition that secular solutions can be shared by people of different faiths. This prospect seems to be more promising than the religionized politics that Islamism tries to impose. Sternhell concludes his book this way: “To prevent people of the twenty-first century from sinking into a new ice age of resignation, the enlightenment vision of the individual as creative of his or her present and hence of his or her future is irreplaceable.”34

A liberal civil Islam supports this secular option. Enlightened Islam has a tradition of Islamic humanism. Islamism, by contrast, insists on religionized politics and dismisses enlightenment as an “imported solution.” In the past four decades, having traveled throughout the world of Islam, I know of many Muslims who prefer rationalism to religionized politics. While writing an early draft of this chapter I went to two cities to discuss the future of Islam. In Fez, Morocco, prominent Arab-Muslim thinkers and opinion leaders gathered at the invitation of a Berber-Muslim professor, Moha Ennaji, under the patronage of the liberal Muslim king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, to discuss diversity and pluralism in the world of Islam. For the first time in my life I heard educated Arabs publicly acknowledging not only European and other non-Muslim sources of Arab culture but also Jewish sources.

The second event took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, under the patronage of the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs and the graduate school (UIN) of the Hidayatullah Islamic State University. This conference carried the challenging title Debating Progressive Islam. It was made clear that a progressive Islam—one that approves the separation of religion and politics, pluralism, individual human rights, and secular democracy—stands in clear opposition to Islamism. One of the mentors of civil Islam in Indonesia, Azyumardi Azra, a major opinion leader and the former president of Hidayatullah University, was among the speakers. He clearly rejected political Islam and its ideology of an “Islamic shari’a state” in favor of a civil Islam “compatible with democracy.”35 Similarly, M. Syafi’i Anwar, who runs the Center for the Promotion of Pluralism, argued for a progressive liberal democratic Islam that approves secular pluralism. These are highly promising statements. It is sad to see that many Western academics view these exemplary liberal Muslims as a “small slice,” to be written off.36

If the West were to construe Islamism as somehow representative of all of Islam, it would be a tragedy on multiple levels. First would be the failure to recognize the liberal Muslims who should be the secular rationalists’ natural allies.37 Second would be the success of the war of ideas Islamism has waged for so many decades. Finally, and by far the most important, would be the tragedy of the people forced to live under a system that perverts their faith into a form of totalitarian rule. I have written this book to enlighten readers about the danger of this multiple tragedy. This message is meant not only for Western readers, but also for the “other Muslims”38 who are the true revivalists of the classical heritage of Islam39 that underpinned one of the most developed civilizations of the world.40 We must understand the call for an Islamic revival as breathing life into the buried tradition of Islamic civilization. Our goal must not be a restoration of the supremacist glory of medieval times, when it was—as the late scholar of Islam Marshall G. S. Hodgson stated—“supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim … based … on the strategic and political advantages of Muslims … [and] also on the vitality of their general culture.”41

In their nostalgia for the past greatness of Islamic civilization, combined with their resistance to cultural change,42 Muslims today suffer what Daryush Shayegan, an Iranian Muslim scholar who has taught in Teheran and Paris, diagnoses as “cultural schizophrenia.” This syndrome results from being torn “between ideas based on nostalgia for a golden age and psychological behavior patterns rooted in centuries of laicism and secularization.”43 The invented tradition of Islamism is an expression of this cultural schizophrenia. It is not a solution to the predicament. There exist genuine Islamic alternatives.44

In place of Islamism’s unresolvable tensions between an invented tradition and modern reality, I argue for cultural change in the Islamic civilization toward a mindset of pluralism,45 in a world where all civilizations interact and respect one another on an equal footing. We liberal Muslims do not seek to replace the hegemony of the West with the hegemony of a united Islamicate. The Kantian idea of democratic peace is nobler than the agenda of global jihad.46

Coda

My editor at Yale University Press keeps reminding me that a book cannot stop history: even if it is completely up to the minute when the proofs are finished and sent to the printer, something will happen the next day and the day after that. The world overtakes it even before the ink is dry on the paper. I have therefore tried not to give the most recent events too much weight.

Yet the Arab Spring of 2011 and the Islamist movements’ successful efforts to use it to climb the ladder of power are not ordinary events but a development of world-historical significance. Therefore, it is fitting that I close this book, the last one of my forty-year academic career, with some final thoughts about the challenge the Islamist rise to power poses to the findings presented here. The competition between civil Islam and Islamism will determine the future of democracy in the Middle East in the shadow of the Arab Spring. What will follow in the wake of the toppled authoritarian regimes in the Arab core of Islamic civilization? Will there be a truly democratic order committed to pluralism?

In his book Fi shar’iyat al-Ikhtilaf (On the legitimacy of discord and dissent), the Moroccan Muslim philosopher Ali Oumlil offered what I believe is the most persuasive criterion for assessing what happens in the years to come. Oumlil wrote the book in 1991, when the priority among Arab Muslims in postcolonial development was “national unity.” The Islamists translated this dictum into “Unity of the Umma” and used the idea to suppress dissent based on disagreement (al-Ikhtilaf). In response, Oumlil wrote that “today we need to turn to recognizing diversity instead of unity” because the right to ikhtilaf is the substance of democracy. He added: “Every democratic system not only admits diversity, but also rests on its legitimacy as a system based on pluralism.… Arab Muslims do not need unity, but rather three basics: democracy, pluralism and individual human rights.”47

The Nizam al-Islami of the shari’a state does not support any of these three values. Will the shari’a state be the outcome of the Arab Spring? In Tunisia, the Islamist al-Nahda (Ennahda) Party has been voted into power. In Libya the Islamists, with Western military support, toppled Qadhafi and executed him. In Egypt, the Muslim Brothers appear poised to take control of the government. In all three cases, the commitment to the shari’a state has been made unambiguously clear. Will these Islamists, once they are in power, honor Oumlil’s three basic values of democracy, pluralism, and individual human rights?

The Arab Spring was initiated not by Islamists but by ordinary Arab Muslims who finally became fed up with authoritarian rule. But Islamists, who are better organized than any other political groups, have so far been the revolts’ chief beneficiaries. Will they allow space in their shari’a state for the democratic idealists who launched the Arab Spring? Or will the moderate face Islamism shows the West turn ugly? Most of us can only wait and see.