Modern Islamic Political Thought

In the twentieth century, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the gradual withering of the colonial system, Muslim peoples achieved the status of nationhood one after another. The result was that, in the new phase of Muslim self-assertion, concern with the criteria of nationhood began to prevail over the notion of patriotism, especially in the minds of Arab writers. This marked the beginning of an ideological controversy among the Muslim intellectuals which is still continuing. It centred round the basic contradiction between nationalism as a time-bound set of principles related to the qualities and needs of a particular group of human beings, and Islam as an eternal, universalist message, drawing no distinction between its adherents except on the criterion of their piety. The problem was particularly acute in the case of Arab nationalism after the First World War, when it appeared on the political scene as a distinct ideology – for two reasons. First, the goal of Arab unity, embracing as it did large numbers of people of diverse characteristics and inhabiting a vast expanse of territories, represented a larger vision than that of the movements with more limited scope, such as Turkish, Egyptian or Syrian nationalism. Hence it could not be easily stigmatised as being divisive. Second, there is the intimate, subliminal association between Arabism (‘urūbah) and Islam. The Arabs cannot promote their identity without at the same time exalting Islam, which is the most abiding source of their pride, and the most potent stimulant of that identity down the ages; conversely, the fact that Islam was first revealed to the Arabs, and in their language, emboldens some Arab nationalists to try to pre-empt Islam as a primordially Arab religion. Some Arab writers try at first to prove that there is no contradiction between Islam and Arab nationalism. But they often end up confirming the Arabic identity of Islam. A typical illustration of this attitude can be found in the views of ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān al-Bazzāz (d. 1972), an outstanding exponent of Arab nationalism, and Iraq’s Prime Minister in 1965–6. He starts off by criticising the misrepresentation of the notion of religion among Arabs under the impact of ‘cultural imperialism’, and the Western usage of the term. Islam, he says, does not admit a narrow view of religion by restricting it within the limits of ‘worship, specific rituals and spiritual beliefs’. Contrary to Christianity and Buddhism, and ‘in its precise meaning, Islam is also a social order, a philosophy of life, (a system) of economic rules, and of government’.⁶ After quoting Bertrand Russell’s definition of Islam as a ‘political religion, namely, a socially-orientated religion’, Bazzāz concludes that ‘Islam does not necessarily contradict Arab nationalism unless their political aims differ, but this is unthinkable’⁷ precisely in view of the substantive links between the two. He then proceeds to correct another misunderstanding – this time connected with Arab nationalism. Some people believe that Arab nationalism can only be built upon racial appeal or racial prejudice, and would therefore be contrary to the ‘all-pervasive nature’ of Islam. He concedes that the exaggerations or excesses of some Arab nationalists have been responsible for this misconception, and that no doubt what some Umayyad governors, princes and rulers committed in consequence of their tribal prejudice and racial propaganda collided with the nature of Islam. ‘But,’ he assures the religious-minded critics, ‘the Arab nationalism in which we believe, and for which we call, is based, as has been stipulated in our [Iraqi] National Covenant, not on racial appeal, but on linguistic, historical, cultural and spiritual ties and fundamental interests in life.’⁸ Notwithstanding these arguments, and as if sensing that no amount of reasoning along these lines would convince his incredulous detractors, he resorts to his final argument that Islam, although being ‘a universal religion, fitting for all peoples, and having been disseminated among numerous nations and races, was revealed primarily, and essentially (b’idh-dhāt) for the Arabs’. In this sense, it is their particular religion. The Qur’ān is in their language, and the Prophet from them.’ He provides some detailed evidence to substantiate his claim:

The actions of early Muslims confirm the Arabic nature of Islam. ‘Umar greatly hesitated to conquer lands outside the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent. He consented to receive a double alms-tax (zakāt) from the well-known Arab tribe of Banū Taghlib when the latter found the payment of poll-tax (jizyah) to be humiliating. Many Christian Arab tribes participated in the conquest of foreign lands. The Muslims accepted the poll-tax from the adherents of other religions outside the Peninsula, but in the interior, they offered [to non-Muslim Arabs] the choice between conversion to Islam and emigration. All this proves that the Arabs and their land occupy a special status in Islam. That a group of the fuqahā’, in discussing the problem of the equality [of husband and wife in social status, kafā’ah, as a condition of sound marriage] maintained that a non-Arab is not equal to an Arab, even if they were equals in other respects, is proof of the privileged status [mumtāz] of the Arabs in Islam and Islamic civilisation. I can emphasise that many of the principles that Islam has asserted, and have become part of it, are ancient Arab traditions which were refined by Islam, and invested with a fresh character. The veneration of, and paying pilgrimage to, the Ka‘bah, are an ancient Arab tradition, and so are many of the rituals of the pilgrimage itself. The respect for Friday, which the Arabs used to call ‘the Day of Arabism’ [yawm al-‘urūbah], and its adoption as a day of ‘festivity and adornment’, as has been mentioned in the tradition, is another proof of the Arabic character of Islam. Arabic viewpoints abound in the rules of inheritance and statutory shares [farā’iḍ], especially in granting the right of inheritance to paternal relatives, and concern for relatives of the first degree.⁹

In defining its relationship with Islam, Arab nationalism thus often ends where it started: with the glorification of Arabism as a commanding value in Islam. On this point, most theoreticians of Arab nationalism seem to be in agreement – whether they are Muslims or non-Muslims, religionists or secularists. Some of them are, of course, at pains to underscore their recognition of Islam as a religion for the whole of humanity and not just for one particular branch of it. Nevertheless, their works impart an unmistakable impression that the Prophet Muḥammad almost acted as the first hero of Arab nationalism by uniting all Arab-speaking inhabitants of the Peninsula under his banner.¹⁰ This view certainly sounds blasphemous to many devout Muslims,¹¹ Arab or non-Arab, but it bespeaks a sentiment deeply ingrained in the Arab consciousness, however well camouflaged, or hedged in with the kind of qualifications that would make it palatable to dogmatically severe Muslims. A logical extension of the same attitude is the nationalists’ favourable verdict on those periods of Arab–Islamic history which do not normally pass muster with pious Muslims. For instance, while the Iranian Muslims condemn the Umayyad dynasty (41–132/661–750) for violating the Islamic norms of equality by virtue of its discriminatory policies against non-Arab Muslims (not to speak of its antipathy towards the members of the Prophet’s family), and while such fundamentalists as Rashīd Riḍā also hold Mu‘āwiyah, the founder of the dynasty, responsible for the degeneration of the Caliphate because of his role in turning it into hereditary rule (mulk) in the ‘tradition of Caesars and Khusraws’, Arab nationalists praise the Umayyad era as one of the ‘glory of the Arab consciousness’ (‘izzat al-wa‘y al-‘Arabī).¹²

Obviously, this attitude towards Islam is something unique to Arab nationalists, or more precisely, to those Arabs, whether Muslim or Christian, who regard themselves first and foremost as members of a single and as yet unfulfilled entity called the ‘Arab nation’. But for an Arab who owes his primary allegiance to an entity smaller, and for that reason more immediate and more real, than the ‘Arab nation’, as do vast numbers of ordinary citizens of Arab states today, then the status of Islam can become problematical, and its relevance to their tangible territorial, ethnic or parochial interests considerably diminished. Here the particularistic and often conflicting demands of individual Arab states can take precedence over the unifying ideals of Islam. However, it is to the non-Arab varieties of nationalism among Muslims that this statement applies with particular force, because in the case of the Turks, for instance, and as will be further explained below, Iranians, nationalism has no intrinsic link with Islam, and even sometimes implies its total negation. The cultural campaigns of Atatürk in Turkey and Riḍā Shāh in Iran were aimed at eliminating or weakening the Islamic components of the Turkish and Iranian personalities. Even the liberal brands of nationalism in these countries have often found themselves at odds with the religionists because of promoting the pre-Islamic legacies of their nations.

We now have to leave the nationalist attitude towards Islam, and resume our study of the reverse side of this picture – namely, the religious attitude towards nationalism. In the nineteenth and earlier decades of the twentieth centuries, this attitude was easily definable because most of the pioneers of Islamic modernism unhesitatingly tended to oppose nationalism in so far as it was incompatible with Islamic universalism. Sometimes their opposition had political motives: so long as the Ottoman Empire lasted, many Muslims supported it as a bastion against Western expansionism and in the name of an illusory consensus called ‘Pan-Islamism’, which only served to perpetuate the Ottoman despotism. But by the time the modernists like ‘Abd ar-Rāziq were denouncing the nationalistic exploitation of Islam, the emergence of separate Muslim states, each jealously guarding its independence, had relegated the designs of Muslim unity to the realm of visionary politics. This caused important frictions inside the religious camp. Of those who adhered to the previous, orthodox malediction of nationalism the most outspoken were the fundamentalists both inside and outside the Arab world. Unmoved by changing political realities, men like Bannā’, Navvāb Ṣafavī, Sayyid Quṭb, Ghazzīlī and Maudūdī have taken an unequivocal stand against all varieties of nationalism: linguistic, ethnic and liberal. For them, resistance against foreign domination, which can be the only legitimate ground for such particularistic creeds, does not have to be formulated in the language of nationalism: Islam possesses enough ideological and emotional resources to galvanise the masses in the cause of independence. Even patriotism of the vaunted nineteenth-century type is discarded from the lexicon of these leaders, because the only homeland they recognise is not the familiar one associated with specific ethnic groups, but the global ‘abode of Islam’ – though this time called, not by the traditional term dār al-Islām (the ‘abode of Islam’), but by the newly-coined al-waṭan al-Islāmī (the Islamic homeland).

Other religious factions have been less consistent, because they have been forced to take account of new political circumstances. In our particular area of study there have been two groups of the ‘Ulamā’ whose attitudes indicate a mentality which is not only different from that of the fundamentalists, but is also ready to contradict itself in response to the changing political scene. The first are the ‘Ulamā’ of al-Azhar who, on several occasions in Egypt’s recent history, openly supported the nationalist ideology, and the second, the Shī‘ī leaders and writers in Iran. Before surveying the position of each of these two groups separately, we have to make a caveat on the way in which the divergence between the nationalists and their Muslim detractors has found expression in, or (as Marxian authors would put it) has been caused by, a clear division in the social structure of their countries. Nationalism has rarely been the conscious credo of the Muslim masses, whether urban or rural, except in its vaguest and most general anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist slogans. As in the West, the most articulate spokesmen and heroes of nationalism in Muslim countries have arisen from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the aristocratic establishment. Accordingly their constituency has normally been found among civil servants, teachers, middle-rank army officers, and relatively well-to-do tradesmen and shopkeepers. The bazaar merchants have often played an ambiguous role, with affiliations in both camps, maintaining family and business ties with both the ‘Ulamā’ and liberal nationalists. But whenever the lower strata of urban people have rallied in great numbers to the nationalist platforms it has been, first of all on issues of extreme national concern, giving rise to an unusual degree of harmony between social classes – such as the oil nationalisation movement in Iran in 1951–3, the Suez crisis in Egypt in 1956, and the Bangladesh war in 1971; and second, their support for the nationalist cause has been on sufferance of the ‘Ulamā’ – by virtue of either their explicit approval or their equanimity. This pattern of the alignment of social forces has had another consequence not exclusively related to the nationalist movement: whereas an orderly, gradual increase in political liberties, such as in Egypt from 1923 to 1939, or in Iran from 1945 to 1949, created favourable conditions for more or less all political groups alike, a sudden relaxation of official controls, allowing the release of long-suppressed, popular frustrations, benefited the religionists more than other factions (examples are: Iran after 1941, 1949, 1961 and 1978; Pakistan after 1971, Egypt after 1967 and 1971, and – with essential qualifications – Turkey after 1950). This has been particularly true of the urban areas, where the means of political communication, organisation and activity have been more available. That is why economic development and urbanisation have often paradoxically contributed in the long run to Islamic revivalist movements. This state of affairs is by no means eternal, or endowed with any sacrosanct character: there is no doubt that the spread of literacy and political education, accompanied by the responsible enjoyment of guaranteed rights of expression and assembly, would eventually reverse the situation, assuring the liberal nationalists of greater influence among the ‘disinherited’, urban masses, leaving only the traditional-minded, illiterate strata as the preserve of the religionists. This is precisely what differentiates the case of Turkey from that of other Muslim countries, despite the relative failure of her attempt at complete secularisation, and the uneven record of her democratic experience: a higher rate of literacy, and the existence of certain institutionalised liberties in that country since 1950 have visibly strengthened the position of secular political groupings, enabling them to make inroads into the same social classes which, in a country like Iran or Pakistan, would normally be considered as the breeding ground of Muslim fundamentalism – the unskilled workers, and the ‘lumpen’ proletariat.

The combination of the factors underlying these issues – the doctrinal irreconcilability between Islam and nationalism, the simplicity of Islamic tenets for the masses, versus the relative sophistication of the nationalist ideals (in contradistinction to the facile appeal of anti-imperialist, anti-Israeli slogans), the rough correspondence between the nationalist-religionist rift, and the ‘patrician–plebian’ dichotomy in the social structure, has had one definite result: in any real trial of strength between the nationalists and the religionists, the latter enjoy a potential tactical advantage in terms of popular support, which can be turned into actual superiority through shrewd leadership and manipulation of the masses.

The Azharites’ initial attitude towards both Egyptian and Arab nationalisms after the First World War was, in concert with that of fundamentalists, one of outright condemnation. No less an authority than the Rector of al-Azhar, Muḥammad Abu’l-Faḍl al-Jizāwī, and the Muftī of Egypt, ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān Qurrah, led the attack on the nationalist ‘heresy’ as late as 1928, when Arab nationalists were only starting their campaign across national borders,¹³ and the earlier amorphous movements were evolving into more determinate political ideologies and trends such as Wafdism and Kemalism. Arabs and non-Arabs, they declared, are unified in a single brotherhood under Islam, in which nationality can only rest on the bonds of faith. Later, in 1938, another eminent religious figure, Shaykh Muḥammad Ghunaymī, stressed Islam’s opposition to all forms of geographic or ethnic particularism (iqlīmiyyah). Even by 1938, namely at the height of the Arab revolt against Jewish immigration into Palestine, when nationalism had clearly become the most powerful creed in the East as much as in the West, the new Rector of Al-Azhar, Shaykh Muṣṭafā al-Marāghī, reiterated Islam’s hostility to racialism, and called upon Arab Muslims to strive ‘towards Islamic unity, rather than allowing themselves to be preoccupied with Arab unity.’¹⁴

The watershed in the transformation of al-Azhar from a champion of Islamic internationalism into one of the spiritual citadel of Arab nationalism came several years after the Second World War, in 1952, when the Egyptian monarchy was overthrown by the Free Officers’ coup – the ‘July Revolution’. Ignoring decades of condemnation of nationalism, the Azharites threw their full weight behind its newest and most ardent protagonist in the whole region. How could this change of heart be explained? The easy answer would be that al-Azhar was simply cowed into submission. Although this explanation would apply particularly to the period after Jamāl ‘Abd an-Nāṣir’s accession to power in 1954, its general validity does not detract from the importance of other, less apparent, reasons for the Egyptian ‘Ulamā”s conversion to nationalism. One such reason is that if they had any illusions about their own ability to compete with secular nationalists of the Wafdist type before, and for some time after, the Second World War, such illusions evaporated in the face of the Officers’ regime, whose record was unsullied by any corruption or association with the West, and was therefore a more formidable rival. Moreover, what was formerly a creeping Zionist threat – one of the essential promoters of Arab nationalism – had now crystallised in the state of Israel after inflicting a most grievous blow to Arab pride, and this plainly called for the kind of militant response that could not possibly be provided by al-Azhar’s hitherto sober catholicity. Although during the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–9 al-Azhar had appropriately adoped a vociferously patriotic attitude, it had now been forced to carry that posture to its logical conclusion by taking a conspicuous stand in favour of Arab unity. Its own expedient calculation also pointed in the same direction: by joining the Arab nationalist movement, it would not only immunise itself against charges of disloyalty, but also gain a leverage over a leadership which, if abandoned to its own devices, might degenerate, at best into a secular Kemalist, and at worst into an atheistic, Communist state. This was necessitated all the more by a phenomenon which had existed since the twenties, in Egypt as well as in many other Muslim countries, but had now assumed alarming proportions: Islam’s diminishing prestige with the rising generation of ‘progressive’, Westernised youth whose main characteristic was a readiness to identify Arab backwardness with adherence to Islam, and, in general, to regard religion as an ally of reaction. It was indeed from this same generation that the new rulers had emerged. Hence it was essential for the Azharites to take advantage of the change of regime, and demonstrate Islam’s real revolutionary spirit by supporting the policies of the new regime, including its campaign for Arab unity. What lightened the Azharites’ heart-searchings was that it was not, of course, they alone who needed the Free Officers’ goodwill to enhance their own, and Islam’s, image among the people; the Free Officers themselves also needed the ‘Ulamā’s blessings to consolidate their power, and – as we shall soon see – to thwart their left-wing challengers. Be that as it may, al-Azhar welcomed the Revolution of July 1952 with an effusiveness that served, among other things, to suggest its own vulnerability in the new political climate. Its ostensible justification at the outset for doing so was the Revolution’s role in liberating the ‘Ulamā’ from a deadening and un-Islamic quietism. It poured scorn on the overthrown monarchy for having done its best to ‘confine Islam to the mosque, so that its principles may not extend to the social field, popular institutions, and cultural organisations’, while in the same breath giving generous praise to the new regime: ‘God has blessed humanity with this Revolution,’ wrote Muḥibb ud-Dīn al-Khaṭīb, Editor-in-Chief of the review of al-Azhar, ‘[an event] which has united the “heirs of the Prophet” [i.e. the ‘Ulamā’] in their stand on Islam. The Revolution has refuted all the excuses to which some of the ‘Ulamā’ resorted in the past to justify their [passive] attitude to the implementation of the Islamic mission, whenever their conscience reminded them of the obligations with which God has entrusted them.’¹⁵ This was at one and the same time a reaffirmation of their status as the ‘heirs of the Prophet’ and arbiters of all areas of national life – moral, cultural and social – a dutiful acknowledgement of the blissful turn of events, and a warning to the Free Officers against any secularising intentions. As it happened, the regime went ahead with its wide-ranging reforms without much heeding such pious enunciations. Nevertheless, the Azharites continued to display their trust in the Officers as ‘the followers in the footsteps of ‘Umar and ‘Amr ibn al-Āṣ’, i.e. the earlier heroes of Islamic militarism, and put an Islamic construction on all their social and economic schemes for the new Egypt – including the controversial land reform. But, more relevant to the topic at hand, they were drawn ever more deeply into the rising chorus of Arabism under Nāṣir’s conductorship. This could not be done lightly, not only in view of the contradiction between Islam and nationalism, but also because of al-Azhar’s past record.

However, the solution that the Azharites eventually found to their dilemma was none other than the one we noticed in the case of Bazzāz: the complete identification of Islam with Arab nationalism. This could be observed in many of their statements from 1956 onwards: that is from the time that Nāṣirism began to overshadow all other ideological trends in the Arab world. In an editorial entitled ‘Has the Giant Woken up?’, marking the breakthrough in al-Azhar’s search for an identifiable political stance, Khaṭīb depicted the many vicissitudes of Islam and Arabism in history to prove that they have always stood and fallen together. By ‘Giant’ (‘imlāq) was meant the Arab nation, and even more specifically, the corporate personality of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, who, under the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, had carried the ‘banner of justice’ to the three known continents of that age – Asia (North), Africa and Europe – simultaneously establishing the existence of Arabism (kiyān al-‘urūbah) and humane Islam (al-Islām al-insānī). Khaṭīb’s diagnosis of the decline of Islam, though merely repeating ‘Abduh’s and Riḍā’s analysis, underlined his nationalistic approach to history. Islam started to decline, he said, when its system of government was Persianised, and when the ‘Giant’ was benumbed, among other things, by the ‘absurdities of Greek philosophy, and the hallucinations of Brahmanist Ṣūfism’. Consequently, the ‘Giant’ went into a slumber that lasted many centuries, during which time foreigners, from Mongols and Crusaders to the Portuguese, Dutch, British and French colonialists, occupied many territories in the eastern and western parts of the Muslim world. ‘But has the Giant now woken up?’, asked the author, ‘Are we now passing through a new phase in the history of Arabism and Islam, in which the history of Mankind expects us to resume our mission so as to perform on the arena of life another chapter in the story of justice and good deeds?’ His answer was that the ‘Giant’ was now in a state midway between sleep and awakening. It had just recovered from ‘the benumbing effect of colonialism in its military and political aspects’. Although there were still many other soporifics keeping it from resuming its mission, the Egyptian Revolution had firmly set the trend in the direction of a full renaissance of the entire Islamic community.¹⁶

As was noted, the significance of Khaṭīb’s article is that it typifies the official, religious rhetoric of the time, in support of Arab nationalism. Such rhetoric, by postulating a complete equation between Islam and Arabism on the one hand, and between Arabism and humanity on the other, left no room for any doctrinal contradiction to mar the case for an alliance between Islam and Arab nationalism. But the whole situation contained an irony which made itself felt outside the realm of speculative politics: the Azharites were making these sanguine statements about the revival of Islam under Nāṣir’s leadership at a time when his regime was launching a devastating campaign against an organisation in Egypt which laid claim to representing the real Islam – the Muslim Brothers, who, as we mentioned in the previous chapter, after their unsuccessful attempt on Nāṣir’s life, had become the butt of a fierce repression, occasioning strident protests from their sympathisers in Syria, Jordan, Iran and Indonesia.

The case of the Iranian Shī‘ī ‘Ulamā’ is more complex. This is primarily because of the different significance of nationalism both as an idea and a movement in Iran’s modem history. Arab nationalism is a quest for the unity of all Arabic-speaking peoples who lost their independence and identity as a political force after the overthrow of the ‘Abbāsīd dynasty by the Mongols in 1258. The prime concern of the political leaders and theoreticians of Arab nationalism during the last two centuries has, therefore, been to vindicate the essential unity of Arabic-speaking peoples despite their geographic, ethnic, confessional, social and economic differences, and to arouse them to a sustained struggle for recovering this unity. Their task has been rendered particularly onerous because of the divisive effects of Arab subjugation by a variety of foreign rulers – Ottoman, British, French and Italian. Polemical discussions on the concept of nationhood, attempts at an exact definition of the Arab nation, romanticisation of early history and appraisal of the role of religion and language in promoting Arabism have been some of the more important themes of modern Arab political literature. By contrast, what is called Iranian nationalism has been concerned less with the problem of nationhood than with that of freedom. We find scant or only marginal references in the relevant writings of nineteenth-century Iranian intellectuals to such questions as the oneness of the Iranian nation, the constituents of its identity, and the conflict between Iran’s pre-Islamic culture and her Islamisation.¹⁷ In their place we find persistent demands for democracy, parliamentarism, and the rule of law; criticism of the existing state of affairs; and wistful comparisons of modernisation with backwardness. This is simply because, since at least 1502, Iran had been an independent state, and the unity and identity of her people had been an accomplished fact. True, the loss of some territories to the Ottomans, Russians and Afghans prompted calls for national vigilance in the face of foreign predators, and even occasional spells of xenophobia; so did the growing rivalries between the Russians and the British to secure financial and commercial concessions in the country. But these never developed into intellectual arguments over the distinct place of the Iranians in history, or into efforts to reach for the past in search of the antecedents of Iranian culture and personality. Hence the Shī‘ī religious writers scarcely felt the necessity to pronounce their views on nationalism. Whenever they did, they had no hesitation in denouncing it as an imported heresy undermining Muslim unity. This fact has often been obscured by the objective or practical association between the ‘Ulamā’ and Iranian nationalism, whether it be against the Ottomans in the Ṣafavīd period, or against the Russians after the wars of 1813 and 1828, or against the British in the Tobacco Rebellion in 1890–2, or perhaps most important of all, against internal despotism in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. It has been this association, plus the Iranian historical contributions to the flowering of Shī‘ī theology, jurisprudence and philosophy, which accounts for a widely held notion in the West about an inherent, mutual dependence between Shī‘īsm and Iranian nationalism. But the truth is that there is nothing in the theoretical principles of Shī‘īsm to make it more amenable to ethnic or racial particularism than Sunnīsm. In point of fact, so far as Arab particularism is concerned, Shī‘īsm may be considered to be, if anything, more Arabist than Sunnīsm, because of insisting on the existence of a set of virtues in one particular group of the Arabs, the House of the Prophet Muḥammad, to the exclusion of all other human groups. There are indeed some Shī‘ī traditions which ascribe certain superiority to the Iranians over Arabs in terms of their allegiance to the members of the Prophet’s family, but even these make the virtue of being an Iranian seem to be relative to Arab excellence: Iranians are praiseworthy only to the extent that they are loyal to the family of the Prophet. And in any case, such traditions have never been allowed to attain the status of even an implicit article of faith for the Shī‘īs. No wonder then that those few Iranian Shī‘ī writers who have discussed nationalism within a deliberate religious framework have condemned it or expressed their preference for Pan-Islamic trends. Even in the nineteenth century when Pan-Islamism was a transparent Ottoman policy of rallying support from Muslims outside the empire, as well as inside, there were authors like the Qājār Prince, Abu’l Ḥasan Mīrzā, known as Shaykh ar-Ra’īs, who, in a tract entitled Ittiḥād-i Islām (‘Islamic Unity, 1894), felt no qualms in arguing that the best hope for Muslims to save themselves from decline was for them to submit to the leadership of Abdulhamīd, ‘this enlightened, wise Sultan, intent on unifying the Muslim world.¹⁸ Shaykh ar-Ra’īs had certainly unorthodox views on many subjects, but his position on nationalism was shared by the ‘Ulamā’, as was shown later, about ten years after the publication of his tract, during the Constitutional Revolution, when one of the main worries of the religious opponents of constitutionalism was its deleterious effects on the purity of Islamic beliefs. But it was in the twentieth century, after Riḍā Shāh embarked on his systematic policy of cultural nationalism, glorifying Iran’s pre-Islamic civilisation at the expense of Islamic values and symbols, that opposition to nationalism became a criterion of doctrinal rectitude. Naturally this opposition could not be made public so long as official suppression continued. Even the removal of the suppressive machinery after Riḍā Shāh’s abdication in 1941 did not lead to an immediate expression of Islamic internationalism, since it coincided with a swelling tide of revulsion against the Allies’ occupation of Iran, culminating in the short-lived, nationalist–religious coalition during the oil nationalisation movement of 1951. The bitter memories left by the collapse of that coalition made a lasting impact on the political stance of religious groups in the course of following decades. The collapse was caused both by personal rivalries between the two principal leaders of the popular movement against the British, Muḥammad Muṣaddiq and the Āyatullāh Sayyid Abu’l-Qāsim Kāshānī, and certain fundamental differences between them over the methods of reorganising Iranian society after the immediate aim of the movement, namely nationalising the oil industry and expelling the British, had been achieved. The two leaders’ outlooks mirrored their class and cultural backgrounds: Muḥaddiq opted for a Western-type democracy, while Kāshānī, although being equally a champion of political liberties, naturally showed more concern for the observance of Islamic precepts. The nationalists, deeply hurt by what they saw as a cynical co-operation between their religious opponents and the royalist or pro-British elements, launched a campaign during the closing months of the Muṣaddiq era, making full use of all the familiar clichés common to the Westernised political élites of most Muslim countries, portraying the religionists as the natural allies of British imperialism. The mutual recriminations continued after the overthrow of Muṣaddiq, even when most of his religious foes, including Kāshānī himself, became victims of royalist suppression. But the religionists now enjoyed a clear advantage: they could still substantially influence public opinion through the mosques at a time when the nationalist parties and press had no such possibility. The urge to eliminate the vestiges of the nationalist campaign of 1952–3 was later compounded by another necessity: the royalists, having weathered the popular upheavals of the fifties and the early sixties, slowly resumed the promotion of Iran’s pre-Islamic culture in an attempt to secure the historical legitimacy of the prerogatives of kingship. It was against this backdrop that religious writers, from the mid-sixties onwards, resorted for the first time in Iran’s modern history to an explicit condemnation of her pre-Islamic civilisation. The earliest example of a similar campaign which comes to mind is the reaction of some of the Iranian Muslim grammarians and historians, such as Tha‘ālibī (d. 429/1038) and Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) against the protagonists of the Shū‘ubiyyah movement, which claimed racial superiority for the Iranians over the Arabs.

Among modern religious polemists against Iranian cultural nationalism, the most influential has been Murtaḍā Muṭahharī (d. 1979), Professor of Islamic Philosophy at Tehran University, and one of the leaders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Together with that most popular exponent of Shī‘ī modernism, ‘Alī Sharī‘atī, and a number of religious teachers and preachers, he founded the Ḥusayniyyah-i Irshād in Tehran, a centre of religious education and propagation dedicated to disseminate ‘true Islam’ among the youth. Eventually the Centre was closed down because of both the government fear of the oppositional implications of its activities, and the hostility it aroused among the more traditionalist ‘Ulamā’. The first major publication of the Ḥusayniyyah was a scholarly volume on the Prophet Muḥammad which purported, among other things, to oppose the current official and intellectual belief about the virtues of Iran’s pre-Islamic civilisation by demonstrating the social injustice and moral depravity of the Sassanian state. Muṭahharī follows the same line in many of his writings. It consists essentially of two arguments against those nationalist writers as well as Western Iranologists who claim that the Islamisation of Iran was never genuine because Islam was imposed on her by force, and that it has always been an alien culture for the majority of Iranians. First, he says, ‘those who speak of the military conquest of Iran by the Arab armies as being synonymous with the Islamisation of the country can perhaps present in support of their thesis arguments claiming that the newly-converted Persian performed public prayer because of what might be termed ‘public pressure’. But they find it difficult to explain why the Persians produced so many great Islamic scholars. It might be thought that a people, if forced, could submit outwardly to another pattern of life, but not that a people could be forced to contribute creatively and profoundly to this pattern unless it were transformed inwardly by the new way of life.’¹⁹ Second, he argues that if Islam is alien to the Iranians because of having originated outside their geographic borders, then so should Christianity be to the Europeans, Buddhism to the Chinese, and Communism to the Russians. But none of these people have ever expressed a sense of specifically cultural alienation towards their religion or ideology.²⁰ The fact is that Islam, contrary to the contention of Arab nationalists, is not bound by any ethnic predilection; it treats all human individuals as equally capable of grasping its truths. The Islamisation of Iran, concludes Muṭahharī, took place not at once but gradually.²¹ In the meantime, the Iranians were free under the Muslim rule to practise their pre-Islamic beliefs, and had therefore no need to fabricate Shī‘īsm to camouflage their ancient traditions. They converted to Islam because they were discontented with the Sassanian autocracy and corruption, and thirsty for a new message of justice and equality. They developed a deep affection for the members of the Prophet’s family because they found them the most sincere and most fearless champions of Islamic ideals.²² There are indeed some Shī‘ī traditions which give weight to the contention that the Iranian admiration for the Imāms is connected with the marriage between the third Imām, Ḥusayn, and Shahrbānū, the daughter of Yazdigird, the last Sassanian king. These traditions should be treated with the greatest caution, because, according to Muṭahharī, some of their narrators have been proved, by the standards of the ‘science of tradition’, to be unreliable. He indulges in further polemics against European and Iranian exponents of the family link between Shī‘īsm and Iranian nationalism, and says that if inter-marriage were to give rise to sectarian preferences, the Iranians had an equally valid reason for loving the Umayyads, because the Caliph Walīd Ibn ‘Abd al-Malik is also reported to have married Shāh-āfarīd, another descendant of Yazdigird.²³

We are not concerned here with the historical accuracy of some of Muṭahharī’s arguments. He himself tends to be cautious in the best scholarly tradition whenever dealing with specific historical details. What should be of greater interest to us is his attitude towards the whole phenomenon of cultural nationalism in modern Iran, an attitude which is shared by all those thinkers who insist on the authenticity and primacy of the Islamic components of her historical conscience, and so willy-nilly collides with the nationalists. Any upsurge of nationalism inevitably leads to a renewal of this conflict, as long as Iran does not, or cannot, part with her pre-Islamic heritage, a heritage which is to a considerable extent embedded in her language and culture. There are other Muslim nations which have had varying degrees of attachment to their pre-Islamic legacies – the Egyptians to the Pharaonic, the Lebanese to the Phoenician, the Tunisians to the Carthagian, and the Iraqis to the Babylonian. But the temptations of these pristine glories have so far been offset by the countervailing pull of the Arabic language and culture, which, in their turn, can secure some kind of symbiosis between Arab nationalism and Islam. Many Arab nationalists have managed to profess to be good Muslims at the same time by putting an Islamic construction on their pride in Arabism. Iranian nationalists, by contrast, have often found themselves driven to underlining the purely Iranian elements of their culture, mostly reminiscent of pre-Islamic times, or of the resistance to the Arab invasion during the first two centuries of Islam. In their eyes, the real renaissance of the national self-consciousness starts with the great epic poet Firdawsī (d. 411/1020), whose account of the Arab conquest remains to this day the most poignant epitaph on the destruction of the Sassanian state.²⁴ Some ‘Pan-Iranist’ enthusiasts have even joined the campaign for ‘pure Persian’, eliminating foreign, mostly Arabic, words, from the national language, something which deeply offends not only the guardians of the Islamic heritage, but also many classicists. Hence, although any nationalism is fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, Iranian nationalism is more so than its Arab counterpart, and by the same token its conflict with Islam is much more difficult to resolve.

Although since the Second World War Muslim peoples have gained their independence from Western powers, and have even, in some cases, succeeded in achieving some degree of national integration, few of their political or intellectual leaders can honestly claim that this by itself has solved any of their major political, social and economic problems. In many cases, independence has been vitiated by economic backwardness and continuing dependence on Western powers. National unity has also been placed under severe strain as cultural self-consciousness and political separatism have gained in strength among infinitely diverse ethnic groups, often artificially under external pressures. Nourishing the sense of frustration have been the persistence of autocratic forms of government, and the apathy of vast masses after brief periods of outbreak of nationalistic fervour. The struggle for democracy has been one way of overcoming this frustration.

The difference between the Islamic and classical Western concepts of equality is reflected partly in the political terminology of the two cultures. The Qur’ān recognises Man (insān), irrespective of his beliefs and political standing, but has no word for citizen. That is why Muslims in modern times have had to invent new terms for the concept: muwāṭin in Arabic, shahr-vand in Persian, and vatandàş in Turkish, are all neologisms. However much the political rights of the individual may be considered to be undefined or ill-defined in the traditional sources of Islamic political thought, the position of Man himself, in his pre-social state, is ennobled in the Qur’ān as God’s ‘vicegerent on the earth’ (2 : 30). Conversely for the Romans, the Latin word homo, the equivalent of Man, ‘suggested originally somebody who was nothing but a man, a rightless person, therefore, and a slave’.²⁷

To go back to the doctrine of equality, if Islam is antithetical to nationalism, it is because of its negation of all racial, ethnic and hereditary criteria of distinction among human beings, and of its belief that all of them form one community. The only valid Islamic ground on which an individual may be superior to another is his fear of God, or piety (taqwā). It might be objected that what Islam grants with one hand by positing the basic equality of all human beings, it takes away with another by ruling that non-Muslims living in an Islamic state should be inferior to Muslims by incurring heavier financial liabilities and civic deprivations. The answer to this objection is that no egalitarian school of political thought provides for absolute equality – unless it is hopelessly utopian, or has no intention of achieving political power. In our times, any democratic system of government inevitably imposes certain implicit or explicit discriminations in favour of all those who pay allegiance to a set of ideals, norms and symbols, forming the subject of a presumed consensus, whether it be the ‘American way of life’, or ‘scientific socialism’, or a liberal–monarchical democracy. Moreover, the exercise of all civic liberties is limited by that commonplace and oft-abused proviso that freedom of any individual should end whenever it interferes with the freedom of another individual. But none of these limitations per se disqualifies any of these political systems from being called democratic by its beneficiaries. Islam’s treatment of the ‘People of the Book’, or its denial of political rights to atheists, can be similarly justified in terms of the constrictions necessitated by the nature of any political regime. But what ultimately decides whether a regime is or is not genuinely dedicated to the principle of equality despite these limitations should be whether the ostensible factor giving rise to them is permanent and unremovable, such as the membership of a race or caste, or conversely accidental and temporary, such as the membership of a party, or the status of foreign residents of a state. And the decisive fact is that the limitations placed by the Sharī‘ah on the rights of non-Muslims are not permanent and unremovable, because non-Muslims always have the option to convert to Islam, and thereby overcome their political incapacity.

Likewise, if by democracy is meant a system of government which is the opposite of dictatorship, Islam can be compatible with democracy because there is no place in it for arbitrary rule by one man or a group of men. The basis of all the decisions and actions of an Islamic state should be, not individual whim and caprice, but the Sharī‘ah, which is a body of regulations drawn from the Qur’ān and the Tradition. The Sharī‘ah is but one of the several manifestations of the divine wisdom, regulating all phenomena in the universe, material or spiritual, natural or social. The use of multiple words in the Qur’ān to define this normative character of God’s wisdom – sunnat allāh (the way or tradition of God), mīzān (scale), shir‘ah (another term for the sharī‘ah), qisṭ and ‘adl (both meaning justice) – is perhaps one way by which Islam has tried to impress its significance on the minds of the faithful. Again, at a purely abstract level, all this satisfies another pre-requisite of democracy which is the rule of law. Some authors maintain for the same reason that a proper Islamic state should be called, not a theocracy, but a nomocracy. The distinction may not be of much value when one considers that what is sacred and binding in Islam is not law in general, but only the Law, which is of divine inspiration. But what is pertinent to our discussion is that by upholding the Sharī‘ah Islam affirms the necessity of government on the basis of norms and well-defined guidelines, rather than personal preferences. This alone should establish considerable common ground with all the opponents of personal rule, so that the dispute as to whether the norms and principles should be determined by reason or revelation, or both, or what kind of authority is to decide whether a particular policy or attitude is sanctioned by the Sharī‘ah or not, and how controversies over the correct interpretations of the Qur’ān and Tradition can be settled to the satisfaction of all those concerned, may be put off until a later stage. The derivation of the concept of man-made law from the notion of the Sharī‘ah may seem to any Westerner and Westernised Muslims to be an unsatisfactory way of deducing so vital an element of social engineering. But remaining within the frame of reference of the same critics, one cannot in all fairness find much fault with this method, except in its being rather archaic, because in the history of Western political thought also the modern concept of law was a by-product of the development of the medieval debates on the divine wisdom. The idea of law as ‘a rational ordering of things which concern the common good; promulgated by whoever is charged with care of the community’ was extracted by men like St Thomas Aquinas²⁸ from the perception of the reason of God as the source from which all the levels of the cosmic order emanate.

Islam can pass yet another moral test of democracy, which although being of a formal nature is indispensable to its functioning, namely, the requirement that a government should not only rule by law, but also reckon in all its decisions with the wishes of the ruled. This requirement is met by the principles of shūrā (consultation) and ijmā‘ (consensus), which are drawn from both the Qur’ān and the Tadition. In enumerating the qualities of a good Muslim, the Qur’ān mentions consultation on the same footing as compliance with God’s order, saying the prayers and payment of the alms-tax. The Prophet and the first four Rightly-Guided Caliphs (Rāshidūn) are known to have accordingly made consultation with, and in some cases deference to, the opinions of their critics, an abiding characteristic of their rule. According to Maudūdī, they took counsel not from a bunch of ‘hand-picked men’, but only from those who enjoyed the confidence of the masses. These practices were admittedly discontinued after the assassination of ‘Alī, except for brief, exceptional periods of the rule of just and pious rulers. But Muslims were henceforth generally less tolerant of disaffection within their own ranks, than of non-Muslim groups, or the ‘People of the Book’. The Muslims’ record, over the whole span of history, on this rare civic virtue in inter-cultural relationships is decidedly superior to that of Westerners. Anti-Semitism, in the form prevalent in European history, was unknown among Muslims, and in any case there were no Islamic equivalents of the mass expulsions of the Jews such as those which took place in Germany, Spain, France, England, Romania and Poland. The Muslim tolerance of other great religions may not be directly connected with the moral prerequisites of democracy, but as a concrete historical precedent, especially when added to the practices of the Prophet and the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, it provides a persuasive subsidiary argument in favour of Muslim democrats against advocates of intolerance.

To the extent that there are such theoretical affinities between Islam and democracy, the exertions of some Muslim writers either in devising a theory of Islamic democracy or in demonstrating the democratic temper of Islam cannot be dismissed as an unfounded and desperate presentation of Islam in a form palatable to the rising generation of unbelieving, politicised youth. Some of these writers adopt a philosophical standpoint, concerning themselves not with the social and political history of Muslims, nor even with the formal principles of the faith, but rather with its underlying concepts. Thus the Indian Muslim Humāyūn Ẓahīruddīn Kabīr tries to show the common grounds between Islam, democracy and science. He starts off by describing the three basic concepts governing the growth of science in human history.²⁹ These are, according to him, the uniformity of the universe, the universality of the laws of nature, and the value of the individual instance. He then goes on to prove that democracy is but the application of these three concepts to the social life of human beings. ‘From the homogeneity and unity of the world,’ he says, ‘follows the universal application of moral and political laws. From the uniformity of the laws of nature follows the equality of all before the law. From the emphasis on the particular instance follows the recognition of the dignity of the individual human being.’³⁰ After explaining these principles, he observes ‘the remarkable similarity’³¹ between them and the fundamental teachings of Islam. The first presupposition of both science and democracy is the existence of a unitary world, in which Islam declares its belief by emphasising the unity of Godhead in a ‘manner which has been rarely equalled by any other religion.’ Islam accedes to the second principle of science and democracy, namely, the universality of the law, by holding that ‘as a religion valid for all times, it must reveal the eternal nature of truth’, and that ‘since God is one, and reason seeks to express his nature, the Laws of reason cannot but be the same for all.’ Finally, Kabīr deduces the third principle, the reverence for the individual, from Islam’s denial of any distinction between the phenomenal and the transcendent, and its appreciation of nature not as a symbol of something hidden, but for its own sake. ‘When the reality of the empirical is recognised, the particular comes to its own, for the empirical is always revealed in the particular as the human personality. On this basis, many theosophical schools in Islam, including the wujūdī (existential) and the shuhūdī (intuitive) have emphasised that the individual cannot be regarded as a mere element in a universal system, because it has an independent status of its own. ‘The overriding unity of God,’ concludes Kabīr,’ seems to be challenged (in Islam) by the uniqueness of the individual.’³²

The question as to why the very reverse has happened in Islamic history, with the personality of the individual crushed under the weight of an overawing collectivity, lies outside the scope of Kabīr’s philosophical discourse. Living in independent India, a country where at least elementary political rights and liberties have been ensured, despite the tragic history of communal strife, to a degree unequalled by any Muslim state, Kabīr could afford to indulge in abstract thinking on democracy. But Muslim writers living in more difficult times, and under much harsher regimes, have had to pay attention to more tangible issues bearing on the concrete safeguards against unscrupulous tyrannies. Hence one favourite exercise of successive generations of Muslim proponents of democracy since the middle of the nineteenth century has been to scour religious literature in search of prescriptions for the rights of the individual, and checks on state power. Their writings, from the Iranian Mīrzā Yūsuf Mustashār ud-Dawlah’s Yak kalimah (‘One Word’, ?1870) to the Egyptian ‘Abbās Maḥmūd al-‘Aqqād’s Ad-dimuqrāṭiyah fi’l Islām (‘Democracy in Islam’, 1952) are certainly impressive examples of ingenious political pamphleteering. The Qur’ān admittedly contains few specifically political verses, and the Tradition, although richer in this respect, can be the subject of violent disagreements. Historical precedents are even less helpful because again, except for the period of the Prophetic mission and of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, they indeed give more weight to the cynics’ taunting that, for the better part of their history, Muslims have known no political system other than the most arbitrary. As regards the Sharī‘ah, it was never implemented as an integral system, and the bulk of its provisions remained as legal fictions. Nevertheless, it is neither inordinately difficult nor illegitimate to derive a list of democratic rights and liberties from all these sources, given a fair degree of exegetical talent.

The Egyptian writer Aḥmad Shawqī al-Fanjarī has compiled perhaps the most comprehensive catalogue. He allows himself considerable latitude by following the example of Ṭahṭāwī, the famous pioneer of cultural Westernisation in Egypt, who maintained that ‘what is called freedom in Europe, is exactly what is defined in our religion as justice (‘adl), right (ḥaqq), consultation (shūrā), and equality (musāwāt). . . . This is because the rule of freedom and democracy consists of imparting justice and right to the people, and the nation’s participation in determining its destiny.’³³ Pursuing the same point, Fanjarī says that every age adopts a different terminology to convey the concept of democracy and freedom. In his opinion ‘the equivalent of freedom in Islam is kindness or mercy (raḥmah), and that of democracy is mutual kindness (tarāḥum)’. In the Qur’ān, he reminds us, Muḥammad is instructed to show leniency and forgiveness in the same verse as he is ordered to consult the believers in the affairs of the community. Muḥammad is reported to have said that God ‘has laid down consultation as a mercy for His community.’ ‘Alī is also quoted as having prescribed to Mālik Ashtar, whom he appointed as Governor of Egypt, to adopt as his motto kindness towards the people under his rule.³⁴ Thanks to these terminological and conceptual idiosyncracies, Fanjarī is able, on a much larger scale than that of his predecessors, to deduce every conceivable democratic right and liberty from the Qur’ān, the Tradition and the practice of the first four Caliphs. A few examples will suffice to show his method as well as the scriptual basis of the whole genre of theoretical expositions of Islamic democracy.

The sanctity of human life, as the most fundamental principle of any civilised community, is inferred from the verse: ‘. . . he who slayeth any one, unless it be a person guilty of manslaughter, or of spreading disorders in the land, shall be as though he had slain all mankind; but that he who saveth a life, shall be as though he had saved all mankind alive’ (5 : 32), and from the Prophetic saying: ‘[Three things of] a Muslim are prohibited for another Muslim: his blood, his property, and his reputation’, which is the most concise textual authority for respecting the triple individual rights of life, ownership and freedom.³⁵ In the same category, the inviolability of domicile is expressly declared in the verse: ‘Enter not into other houses than yours, until you have asked leave, and have saluted the inmates. This will be best for you. . . . And if ye find no one therein, then enter it not till leave be given you’ (24 : 27–8).³⁶

Equal rights for women are said to be ensured by two verses in particular: ‘And it is for the women to act as they [the husbands] act by them in all fairness’ (2 : 228), ‘And their Lord answereth them, “I will not suffer the work of him among you that worketh, whether of male or female, to be lost” ’ (3 : 195), as well as by the Prophet’s encouragement to his favourite wife ‘Ā’ishah, to take an active part in the political, legal and scholastic activities of the young Muslim community.³⁷ The right to elect rulers is easily found in the institution of bay‘ah, or the contract of the appointment of Caliph – but no reference is made to the endless theoretical and practical problems that Muslims have faced in history to make it work. Apparently the practice of the first four Caliphs is considered to be convincing proof of its practicability.³⁸ As regards freedom of opinion, the matter cannot be settled simply by quoting any particular Qur’ānic verse or Prophetic saying. So the concept is subtly examined in its negative sense – namely, in the sense of the absence of restrictions on the freedom of expression, and then this is deduced from such provisions as the necessity of removing all barriers between the rulers and the ruled (suhūlat ’al-ḥiab), the absence of the practice of imprisonment, the prohibition on presuming the bad faith of others, and the obligation of every Muslim to ‘adjudicate justly’ (4 : 58).³⁹ The right to criticise rulers is inferred from two Qur’ānic verses – ‘Clothe not the truth with falsehood, and hide not the truth when ye know it’ (2 : 42), and ‘God loveth not that evil be matter of public talk, unless any one hath been wronged’ (4 : 148) – and from the general obligation of the believers to ‘enjoin the good and forbid the evil’.⁴⁰ The licence to form political parties is thought to be granted by the verse (9 : 122), declaring that the believers should not all go out to the wars, but of every band of them only a party should go forth, so that those who are left behind may gain sound knowledge in religion, and warn the other people when they come back from the battlefields to beware.⁴¹ (Incidentally, it is the same verse which is cited by some commentators, particularly the Shī‘īs, to prove the legitimacy of the function of the ‘Ulamā’ and the mujtahids in the social structure of Islam.) Personal immunity against intimidation and torture is asserted on the basis of the Prophetic saying: ‘My community is exonerated in three matters: error, forgetfulness, and that into which it has been coerced’, and a saying by the Caliph ‘Umar: ‘A man is not secure in his person when he is starved, or degraded, or imprisoned to make a confession against himself.’⁴²

It may be easy to find fault with such deductions on both methodological and substantive grounds. They may well prove to be questionable on the touchstone of traditional exegetics, since they sometimes treat the Qur’ānic verses out of context, with no regard for their ‘cause of revelation’ (sha’n nuzūl) or context. The citation on the equal rights for women also fails to mention the remainder of the verse: ‘ . . . and men are a step above them’ (2 : 228). More seriously, such quotations may be censured in terms of an integral theory of democracy. Safran rebukes ‘Aqqād for tending ‘to view democracy, which he understood to mean as essentially the right to vote, as a primary natural right rather than as a system expressing and applying certain fundamental ideals’, and for his intention ‘to interpret the general bay‘ah of Islam as the equivalent of the right to vote, and hence as evidence that Islam is democratic’.⁴³ Since in all the accepted Islamic definitions of the term sovereignty belongs only to God, and without sovereignty the popular vote is but a hollow shell, Safran’s objection is hard to refute. He also disagrees that ijmā‘ can be made – as it has been made by ‘Aqqād and many exponents of Islamic democracy – a political as well as a judicial concept, and that its validity can be extended to ‘the thing which comes nearest to it (that is, majority)’, because Safran rightly regards ijmā‘ as ‘the traditional ex-post-facto sanction of change already established, resting on the divine assurance that the community would never agree on what is wrong.’⁴⁴ Similarly, when he attacks ‘Aqqād for his disdain of ‘questions of expediency and practicality’,⁴⁵ he is referring to a flaw in the political thinking of numerous modern Muslim writers whose total attachment to lofty ideals has prevented them from making due allowance for practical matters – although we tried to show in the previous chapter how men like Rashīd Riḍā and Maudūdī are free of this flaw by reason of their honest concern for the feasibility of most of their suggestions.

But strictures on the modern theories of Islamic democracy have not come only from non-Muslim scholars. An Iranian Muslim political scientist, ‘Abdul-Hādī Ḥāiri, has similarly criticised Muḥammad Ḥusayn Nā’īnī, an eminent Iranian Shī‘ī theologian of the era of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and the author of the only known systematic treatise in defence of parliamentary democracy by a religious figure at the time. He finds Nā’īnī’s understanding of freedom to be ‘completely traditional’, not going beyond the Islamic interpretation of the freedom of expression. This is because, says Ḥāiri, Nā’īnī ‘did not know the meaning of freedom as it was interpreted in the West. Being misled by the Muslim modernists, Iranian or otherwise, Nā’īnī had simply learnt that the principles of democracy were similar to those of Islam without paying much attention to the sharp distinctions found in their meanings.’⁴⁶

But these criticisms risk missing the main point about most of the contemporary Muslim writings on democracy. First of all, what is conspicuously omitted or not sufficiently conceded by the critics is that there is no universally accepted definition either of democracy in general, or of its Western version in particular. Any formulation of democracy, therefore, stressing one or the other of the known attributes of a democratic system – whether it be the right to vote, or of self-expression, or of assembly – can be valid, provided it enjoys a reasonable degree of internal coherence. ‘Aqqād may be wrong in equating democracy with the right to vote, but by doing so he is expressing a view over which controversy is still raging among Western scholars themselves. Hence his opinion cannot be summarily rejected by asserting that voting is not what democracy is all about. There is a respectable school of thought in the West, acknowledging its debt to Rousseau and Mill, which holds a high conception of voting, not as act by itself, but, in the words of Stephen Lukes, as ‘the culminator of long, thoughtful, and fair consideration of the relevant issues.’⁴⁷ In Schumpeter’s theory also, of the two strands of the ‘democratic method’, one is voting. He has defined the ‘democratic method’ as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’⁴⁸ Comparative politics apart, in most ‘Third World’ countries, where despotism has always been the dominant norm of rulership, often revered as part of a divinely sanctioned, pre-destined scheme of things, and where the majority of people are illiterate and apathetic, appeals for the right to choose the rulers, or to participate in political decision-making through voting, is the shrewdest, the most direct and popularly the most comprehensible method of creating an urge for democracy. Second, even if there existed a single definition of democracy in Western political theory, Muslim writers are not rationally bound to adhere to it rigidly, especially if their primary concern is not to devise a theory of Islamic democracy, but to explain democracy in Islamic terms. At best, their writings should be treated – and this brings us back to what we held to be the main point about them – as nothing more than an attempt to live down the legacy of generations of intellectual inertia by trying to show that submission to stultifying political practices and institutions has no sanction in religious dogma. This is demonstrably the case in the ideas of earlier Muslim modernists. Asad-ābādī (Afghānī) and ‘Abduh, for instance, both coupled their enumeration of the virtues of government by popular consent with persistent and vigorous attacks on the popular belief in divine predestination, arguing that Islam is a religion of free will.⁴⁹ But it would be patently wrong to conclude from this that in their definition of popular participation the doctrine of free will figures as the central element. To mention another example, many of them attach great importance to the necessity of reviving the practice of ijtihād as a sine qua non of breaking the spell of all irrational forms of authority, whether political or religious. However, although the actualisation of democratic ideals is thus made dependent on the permissibility of ijtihād, there is no suggestion of an inherent, necessary link between the two. For this reason, scholarly faultfinding with the innovations in the nomenclature of Islamic institutions similarly fall wide of the mark. Redefinition of terms like ijmā‘ and bay‘ah as equivalents of ‘public opinion’ and ‘social contract’, by a whole generation of Muslims, from ‘Abduh, through the authors of the resolution of the Turkish National Assembly on the Caliphate in 1924, to ‘Aqqād and recent Azharites, do indeed deviate from their traditional usage, but they are no more removed from their original meanings than modern European models of democracy are from the ancient Greek demes.

What is blatantly missing from contemporary Muslim writings on democracy, in spite of all the claims to the contrary, is an adaptation of either the ethical and legal precepts of Islam, or the attitudes and institutions of traditional society, to democracy. This is obviously a much more complex and challenging task than the mere reformulation of democratic principles in Islamic idioms. It is because of this neglect that the hopes of evolving a coherent theory of democracy appropriate to an Islamic context have remained largely unfulfilled. Perhaps the neglect is deliberate or unavoidable, because – as we mentioned at the beginning of our discussion – all efforts to synthesise Islam and democracy are bound to founder on the bedrock of that body of eternal and unchangeable doctrines which form the quintessence of every religion. Those Muslim thinkers who face this issue boldly, and free of any compulsion to keep their faith abreast of ephemeral political fashions, normally come up with the open admission that Islam and democracy are irreconcilable. The contemporary Iranian Shī‘ī philosopher Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabā’ī, author of an authoritative, multi-volume commentary on the Qur’ān, Al-mīzān, makes the same point. After arguing that no other great religion, or even worldly ideology, can rival Islam in its concern for social problems, he takes issue with those Westernised intellectuals in the Muslim countries who claim that the social norms of Islam are no longer applicable to the conditions of the modern world, in which it is the will of majorities which is expected to determine the nature of social laws and relations. He rejects this claim by recalling that in history usually the reverse has been the case: at their inception, all great religions conflicted with, rather than pandered to, the wishes of the majority. Human beings often dislike what is right and just. The Qur’ān confirms this repeatedly: ‘Or do they not recognise their apostle; and therefore disavow him? Or they say, “A Djinn is in him?”; but the truth most of them abhor. But if the truth had followed in the train of their desires, the heavens and the earth, and all that therein is, had surely come to ruin’ (23 : 70–1). It is therefore wrong, says he, to treat the demands of the majority always as just and binding.⁵⁰ Elaboration of the hazards of acceding to popular wishes leads Ṭabāṭabā’ī to a critique of libertarian interpretations of the Qur’ān.⁵¹ He finds such interpretations to be false so far as they give the impression that Islam subscribes to freedom in the same sense that is cherished by the modern, materialistic civilisation – that is, abolition of all manner of moral restrictions on human behaviour, and total subordination of matters lying outside the penumbra of law to unfettered individual will. He takes particular exception to the claim that Islam sanctions the freedom of opinion. He admits that Islam has granted the Man the licence to enjoy all pleasant and beautiful things in life, provided that He does this in moderation (Qur’ān, 7 : 32, 2 : 29, 45 : 13). But it would be absurd to conclude from such verses, especially the one on the absence of ‘compulsion in religion’ (2 : 256), that opinions are free in Islam. How can Islam lay down the freedom of opinion while belief in the unity of God, the prophecy of Muḥammad, and the certainty of Hereafter, constitutes its unquestionable premises? However, this should not deter Muslims from collective reflection and debate on religion,⁵² in order to become profoundly convinced of the truth of its injunctions, and avoid disagreement and disunity among themselves – an enterprise to which they are expressly instructed by the Qur’ān (4 : 59, 82, 83; 16 : 43–4; 29 : 43; 39 : 18).⁵³ Under no circumstances should force or coercive measures be used to impose an opinion. This is the meaning of the ‘absence of compulsion in religion’, and not the permissibility of adhering to any idea at will. Ṭabāṭabā’ī expatiates on the same point from a more general, philosophical standpoint as well, when he tries to answer the criticism of ‘some dialectical materialists’ that, by attempting to eliminate all contrariness in ideas, Islam aims to contravene the ‘principle of contradiction’, which is the driving force of all evolution in human history, thus dooming the community of its followers to be static, and insulated against the invigorating effects of conflicting opinions. Ṭabāṭābā’ī could have retorted simply by saying that dialectical materialism also seeks the same aim since in the ideal society of Communism too all contradictions are dissolved or ‘sublimated’. But instead he prefers to answer the charge through an excursus into epistemology. All valid propositions, he says, are of two categories: some are relative, capable of infinite permutations, others are absolute and eternal, needless of any adaptation. Science and technology belong to the former category, and the more frequent their change the greater their contribution to human welfare. Universal religious truths are of the latter kind, but, in Ṭabāṭabā’ī’s view, their constancy cannot arrest, or accelerate, social change for the simple reason that they cannot affect social life. Indeed, how can doctrines such as ‘the universe has a creator’, or ‘God has transmitted his laws for the happiness of Mankind through his prophets’, or ‘God will one day bring together all human beings in one place to give them full recompense of their actions’ be held responsible for the stagnancy of a society? So the democrats have nothing to fear from the eternal truths of Islam which are concerned with matters unrelated to their political convictions. When all such arguments in the direction of assuaging the fears of ‘progressive’ Muslims are exhausted, Ṭabāṭabā’ī appropriately resorts to the final reasoning of all those conservative schools, whether in Western or Islamic political philosophy, whose ancestry can be traced back to that arch-critic of democracy – Plato. Why should right-minded people, he asks, be infatuated with change, which is after all the hallmark of imperfect societies? A proper Islamic state does not need change because it is perfect.⁵⁴

Inasmuch as Ṭabāṭabā’ī meets the problematic of freedom of opinion in Islam head-on, his stand is much more sincere and courageous than that of all the theoreticians bent on an artificial integration of democracy in Islam. But the problematic is not so simple as he describes it, and his reluctance, as a philosopher, to spell it out in more concrete examples, makes his theses appear much more opposed to democracy than they actually are, and likewise of much value to all the not-so-philosophical factions who try to suppress their rivals in the struggle for political supremacy. Certainly reconciliation between Islam and democracy would have been much easier if the topics on which free opinion is not allowed in Islam were confined to the three basic principles that he mentions (unity of God, prophecy of Muḥammad, and certainty of Hereafter). But the fact is that, as all experiments in the Islamic state have shown in our time, the taboo subjects do not remain limited to these sublime axioms, but involve much lower, pedestrian problems whose number and nature are both determined by the rulers. In these conditions even minor disagreements with the state, let alone the right to criticise major policies and resist injustice, can be alleged to ultimately impinge on any of those principles, or run counter to a holy consensus.

Ṭabāṭabā’ī stands for a tradition in Islamic thought which thrives on philosophical speculation. But the type of objections he raises against democracy can be found in the pronouncements of many writers, some of whom have an outlook diametrically opposed to his. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Badrī, for instance, has set forth some of the same ideas, although from the austere perspective of the jurists, in a little book, Ḥukm al-Islām fi’l ishtirākiyyah (‘The Ruling of Islam on Socialism’, 1965), which has been endorsed by Shaykh Amjad az-Zahāwī (d. 1967), one of the most respected Sunnī scholars of Iraq, and the Muftī of Baghdad. The book has an added interest for us, because it is one of the few publications from Saudi Arabia on a topical ideological theme. Badrī is not only opposed to democracy, but also strongly disapproves of even the use of such modern political terms. He admits that in the history of Islamic sciences there has never been any interdiction on newly coined terms (la mushāḥḥah fi’l iṣṭilāh, ‘there should be no dispute over terminology’, says an old scholarly maxim). But, warns Badrī, when the concept behind a term is un-Islamic the term itself also becomes exceptionable. This is evident, according to him, from that Qur’ānic verse (2 : 104) which forbids the Muslims to use the verb rā‘inā (look at us), instead of unẓurnā (regard us), because the Jews used rā‘inā in Hebrew, by a slight mispronounciation, as an insult, meaning ‘our bad one’.⁵⁵ Even the epithet Islamic cannot expurgate the term democracy, because in his opinion Islam recognises only rights (ḥuqūq) and limitations on them (ḥudūd), or penalties, but never liberties (ḥurriyyāt).⁵⁶ He is semantically right when he says that in Islam ḥurr can mean free only as the opposite of slave (‘abd), but what he fails to mention is that since the early days of Islam some Muslims, not all of them heterdox, also advocated the doctrine of ikhtīyār (literally, to choose the good, hence option or free will), which is at least a substantive precondition for the acceptance of the concept of freedom as understood in Western political philosophy.

If the periods of liberalism, mainly in the form of parliamentary rule (in Egypt from 1923 to 1952, with some interruptions; in Iran from 1941 to 1953; in Turkey from 1950 to 1960; in Pakistan, between 1959 and 1976), ended in failure, it was not, of course, solely because of the flaws in some of the Muslim ideas of democracy as studied in this section. In fact, with all their protestation of loyalty to national cultures, the protagonists of liberalism in these countries (the Wafd in Egypt, the National Front in Iran, the Democrats in Turkey, and so on) often espoused a totally Western notion of democracy, thus avoiding the problems faced by those who wanted to incorporate democracy into Islam. But this still did not save them from failure.⁵⁷

The failure has certainly been caused not so much by conceptual incoherence as by the absence of specific social and economic formations, including an autonomous, conscious, and articulate middle class. Aggravating the effects of all these factors have been phenomena of a more general character, such as educational backwardness, widespread illiteracy, and the prevalence of servile habits of thinking and blind submission to authority. Perhaps no less important are the periodic crises of Western democracies themselves – in the thirties, with the rise of Nazism and Fascism, and in the sixties, with the reluctance of the United States and some West European powers to adjust themselves to the realities of the post-colonial era. The result in each case has been the further discrediting of liberal trends in the Muslim countries, and the commensurate strengthening of the groups seeking radical, violent, sweeping and élitist solutions to their political and economic problems – a process which gained further impetus with the growing world-wide prestige of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and other socialist states, particularly their popularity among Muslim peoples because of their anti-imperialist posture, as well as with the rise of the Third World as the embodiment of new hopes and visions in international politics. It was in deference to this complex situation that some Muslim thinkers turned their faculties to a new ideological enterprise – Islamic socialism.

Nevertheless, the new socialism in the official ideology was decidedly Fabian: the rulers always accompanied their statements of the belief in the primacy of class interests with a firm denial of the inevitability of class struggle or warfare, or the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. They claimed that the aim of their socialism was merely to remove class distinctions, emancipate the exploited, and safeguard their rights without ‘inflicting retribution on former exploiters or taking revenge on past oppressors’. The purpose was to create, not a classless society, but ‘conditions in which diverse classes, each performing a valid function, and all free from domination and exploitation’ could peacefully live together. Stemming directly from this evolutionist, conciliatory view of social life was respect for religion – not Islam alone, but all great religions. It is here that we can locate the point of both tension and fusion between the Nāṣirite school of Arab socialism and Islam. On the one hand, the intention to emancipate the exploited masses necessitated extensive acts of sequestration, nationalisation and other forms of encroachment on the right of private ownership – acts which are held by a considerable body of orthodox opinion to be against Islamic sanctions of private property. On the other hand, the reverse side of this task, namely avoidance of class hatred and warfare, which was held to be an equally important pillar of Arab socialism, stood in need of appeals to the moral precepts of Islam. In between the two sets of issues lay the broad desiderata shared by Islam and socialism tout court: securing social justice by fostering the spirit of fellowship and mutual help among individuals, discouraging or prohibiting the accumulation of wealth, and an idealised respect for the poor and disinherited.

While it was thus conceivably possible to weld together some Islamic and socialistic concepts into a wholly new synthesis, matters were further complicated by the ambivalent attitude of the Egyptian leaders and their intellectual sympathisers towards Islam in their new ideological orientation. This ambivalence was epitomised by Nāṣir himself: while in private life he was a staunch practising Muslim-a fact which must have been decisive in bringing the Free Officers close to the Muslim Brothers before 1952 – in public he often acknowledged the role of Islam only as a subsidiary or contributory element of Arab nationalism – just as before him that other great Egyptian patriot, Muṣṭafā Kāmil (d. 1908), also prized Islam only in so far as it buttressed the Egyptian sense of self-identity. On many occasions Nāṣir certainly did pay tribute to Islam on account of its predominant share in Arab glory, particularly whenever he faced the challenge of an alien ideology. When, for instance, the relations between Egypt and the Soviet Union became strained in 1959 as a result of the Soviet support for a new claimant to the leadership of Arab nationalism, Iraq’s President ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Qāsim (d. 1963), Nāṣir launched a fierce, though short-lived campaign against his Communist critics in which he invoked manifestly religious terms and themes in denunciation of Communism.⁶⁰ But more typical of his assessment of Islam was the oft-quoted statement in his manifesto The Philosophy of Revolution identifying Islam as only one of the three circles centred on Egypt (the other two being Africanism and Arabism).⁶¹ This stance received further emphasis after 1961, when the uplifting of socialism, added to the already highly cherished symbols of Arab nationalism, left little room for even lip-service to Islam. All the authoritative Egyptian sources for the study of Arab socialism in the sixties testified to this diminished stature of Islam in the official thinking. The maximum compliment that their authors were ready to pay to Islam was to acknowledge its contribution to Egypt’s greatness in the past, and its continuing relevance as merely one of the numerous bases of her foreign policy. They also declared respect for all the ‘divine missions in the world and their moral teachings’.⁶²

Such casual treatment of Islam must have aroused grave fears in religious circles regarding the place of Islam in the future scheme of things. Even if such fears were allayed occasionally by the pious assurances of officials on its continuing role as the state religion, they were undoubtedly strengthened by the declarations of many Egyptian theorists of Arab socialism who, in conditions of strict censorship, freely published their views. Some of these theorists openly remarked that attachment to Islam, although potentially a motive for political dynamism, and an indispensable element in the fabric of the Arab national life, had now become incapable on its own of tackling the problems of the ‘Arab homeland’ – the ultimate focus of the loyalty and concern of the Arab progressives. In the opinion of one of them,⁶³ Islam had proved a failure, together with the other two solutions to the ‘problems of the Arab destiny’ suggested by some intellectuals, i.e. pragmatism (‘trial and error’) or negation of ideological commitment, and its opposite, Marxism, because Islam is a universal religion, unbounded by time and space, and not intended to meet the particular requirements of different ethnic groups. To make Islam an effective solution, it was imperative to derive from the comprehensive body of its doctrinal and legal precepts ‘a system or programme (minhaj), consonant with the living conditions of the Arab homeland in the Twentieth Century’. But, lamented the writer, the religionists did not meet this challenge and tried ‘to identify Islam with either capitalism or socialism, instead of substituting it for both of them; consequently, the problem remained unsolved. . . . The Arabs had therefore to start their search for a solution from the most difficult point – from scratch.’⁶⁴ Elsewhere the same author identified the causes of Islam’s incapacity to solve this problem, not only in such well-known causes as the multi-religious character of the Arab peoples, but also in the vanishing role of religion as a valid denominator of divisions within the human community: ‘The religious associateships have dissolved, and it is incumbent on the Arab progressives to break free from religious prejudice.’⁶⁵ What was then to be done? The official reply to this question was a philosophical blend of materialism and idealism: the evolution of human society is governed by not only spiritual and intellectual values, but also Man’s material and economic needs,⁶⁶ a point which the religious leaders often ignore until they find their message rendered obsolete by the onrush of materially superior cultures. Two Egyptian authors, in a joint book devoted to a defence of the ideas of the young Marx, as the epistemological foundation of the ruling ideology, tried to show, rather over-confidently, that of all the existing systems of thought only Arab socialism attained the Excellent Mean between capitalism and Communism: ‘Arab socialism’, they wrote, ‘is based on a completely new balance [of thought]. If we describe its position as the Excellent Mean between two extremes, this should not be understood to mean that our socialism stands midway between Capitalism and Marxism [sic], because we are not talking of an arithmetic or geometrical average. What we mean is that while Arab socialism stands midway between Capitalism and Marxism, it represents a jump forward with regard to these opposite poles. . . . This balance between the two poles has asserted itself as a result of the development of universal thought which, according to dialectical logic, has proceeded from thesis to anti-thesis, and then to state [the synthesis], in which the opposites are reconciled. Thus Capitalism gave rise to Marxism, and then these opposites gave rise to Arab socialism.’⁶⁷

It was one thing to downgrade Islam to the position of a secondary source of official thinking; quite another thing was to legitimise the thoughts of Marx, whether young or old, as an ingredient of Arab socialism. And from 1961 onwards, while official publications took good care not to mention Marx except in dissociating Arab socialism from his atheism, officially sponsored political literature showed a distinct drift in the direction of Marxism. A number of Egyptian intellectuals openly acknowledged their debt to Marxism, and even indulged in an ‘historical’ criticism of Islam (a criticism, that is, which concerned itself, not with the theological or metaphysical principles of Islam, but rather with the false representations of its ideals in conventional literature).⁶⁸ Others, taking advantage of the recognition and respectability enjoyed by the New Left as a result of the de-Stalinising campaign throughout the European parts of the ‘Socialist Camp’, unabashedly preached the ideas of Sartre, Gurevitch, Brecht and others. True, the vast majority of these intellectuals, no less than the official pamphleteers, favoured a modus vivendi with Islam; but the net result of all their efforts, official and unofficial, was an unintegrated conglomerate of doctrines to which Islam contributed only a crust of moral values and a belief in God, while at the bottom the bulk of the epistemological and ideological propositions were borrowed from a cohort of Western thinkers ranging from Marx to the most avant-garde, ‘committed’ writers and poets. A situation had thus arisen by the mid-sixties in which, while Egypt was constitutionally regarded as a Muslim state, and the regime assiduously respected all the observances and symbols of Islam, the emerging socialist mentality considered Islam to be, at best, providing only half of the solution to the problem of the country or the Arab homeland.

The response of the ‘Ulamā’ to the combination of these challenges was inspired partly by the government pressure on al-Azhar to reform itself, and partly by the realism (or opportunism?) of a number of astute shaykhs and Western-educated professors, such as Muḥammad Ḥasan al-Bahī, who were anxious to prove that Islam by itself contained all the provisions of socialism, thus rendering any resort to an alien ideology unnecessary. An Egyptian academic summarised the situation at the time to this author in these terms: ‘While the crypto-secularists [in the Government and the intelligentsia] strive to vindicate socialism through Islam, the Shaykhs are trying to prove Islam through socialism.’

The spokesmen of Islamic socialism in Egypt during the early sixties mostly acknowledged their debt to the pioneering work of a Syrian, Muṣṭafā as-Sibā‘ī, sometime the Dean of the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence and School of Law in the University of Damascus. His book entitled Ishtirākiyyat ’al-Islām (‘The Socialism of Islam’) was for a long time recommended to any inquirer both inside and outside al-Azhar as the most acceptable exposition of the congeniality of Egyptian socialism with Islam. The fact that it had been produced by the official publishing house was also evidence of the government approval of its contents. All this was rather ironical, since Sibā‘ī was also the leader of the Syrian organisation of the Muslim Brothers (called the Islamic Socialist Front). So while, as we saw before, their comrades were being persecuted in Egypt, the work of their leader was promoted in the same country as an authentic Islamic confirmation of the state ideology.

A number of reasons can be adduced in partial explanation of this apparent paradox. First of all, that a leader of the Muslim Brothers should commit himself to a socialism of sorts should by no means be surprising, since the ideas of social justice and reform, which are identified by some Brothers with the whole of socialism, have always constituted one of their cardinal principles. Since the Brothers have always contended that Islam itself contains all the elements of a socialistic regeneration, it is also natural that they should translate socialism as they understand it into a purely Islamic body of dogmas. The second reason should be sought in the tactical divergence between the Egyptian and Syrian Brothers in the late fifties.⁶⁹ At that time – contrary to what is happening at the moment this book is being written, when they are locked in a deadly struggle against the Ba’thist regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad, and contrary to their Egyptian comrades, who have often adhered to militant if not terroristic activities – the Syrian Brothers preferred peaceful struggle under the leadership of their ‘mild and devout shaykhs’.⁷⁰ It was presumably because of this difference in attitude that the Brothers and their sympathisers in Syria, who until 1955 had actively taken part in, and in fact fostered, an anti-Nāṣir campaign, were gradually divided after the revelation of the terroristic activities of their Egyptian counterparts, and particularly following Nāṣir’s successive exploits on the international scene. The ‘idealists’ stuck to their previous ideas and categorically opposed the union of their country with Egypt; the ‘realists’ either chose to be silent, or were won over to the Free Officers’ cause. The fact that Sibā‘ī’s book was written in 1959, i.e. when the union between Syria and Egypt was still in existence, and that its few references to the United Arab Republic are innocuous, shows that its author must have belonged to the ‘realist’ wing, although one could not assess how much this weakened his leadership of the Brothers’ movement as a whole. The year 1959 also marked the height of the Nāṣirite–Communist conflict which had started with the Iraqi coup of July 1958. A side-effect of that conflict was the spontaneous rallying of all the traditionalist forces, including the Brothers’, on the side of Nāṣir. This can account for the pronounced anti-Communism of Sibā‘ī’s book, which manifests itself through his frequent contrasting of Communism with Islam.⁷¹

One may not find anything particularly novel or original in Sibā‘ī’s arguments. Most of these could be found, in one form or another, in numerous books and publications which appeared before 1959 in various Muslim countries. But the main value of his book lies in its comprehensive collection and lucid presentation of all these arguments, although throughout the book Sibā‘ī relies unfailingly on firsthand sources.

Sibā‘ī is basically concerned in his book with the anticipations, or elements, of socialism in Islam. He sets out to adumbrate all the Islamic rules of ‘state control over the social uses of wealth’, realisation of state provision for all members of society, and state assurance to them of a life of dignity. Nowhere in his book does he attempt a serious discussion of the principles and ideas of socialism in any of its known versions. In the introduction of his book he admits that socialism has multiple varieties, resembling ‘a creature with twenty heads’, but he says that all these varieties share ‘a belief in the necessity of state control over the use of wealth in the society and in the realisation of “mutual social responsibility” (to be defined later) for all its members, so that they can partake of a life in which human dignity and human confidence in his present as well as future are guaranteed’.⁷² Elsewhere, he also offers, as we just said, a series of contradistinctions between Islam and Communism. These are focused on such specific points as ‘freedom of constructive competition [which, according to him, is promoted by Islam, but destroyed by Communism], class conflict [which Islam denounces but Communism fosters], and religious and moral values [which, he emphasises, form the cornerstone of Islam, but have no place in Communism]’. He also contrasts Islam with capitalism in an endeavour to underline the independence of Islamic socialism of Eastern and Western extremes.

But Sibā‘ī’s major concern in writing his book, as stated in its introduction, is to refute ‘the misconception of some people that Islam is alien to socialism because it has asserted [the right of] private ownership and approved of the institution of inheritance, and of big landlordism, giving the rich absolute freedom in disposing of their wealth’.⁷³

In Sibā‘ī’s view ‘the socialism of Islam’ is composed of four elements: (1) natural rights for all citizens (muwāṭin – sic), (2) laws for guaranteeing these rights and regulating them, (3) laws of mutual social responsibility (at-takāful al-ijtimā‘ī), and, finally, what Sibā‘ī terms as (4) ‘supports’ or sanctions (mu’ayyidāt) for ensuring the implementation of the previous three sets of laws.

Of these, the first and the third elements are particularly relevant to Sibā‘ī’s purpose and therefore claim his greater attention. The right of ownership, among the natural rights of individuals, repeatedly comes up for discussion in the various chapters of the books, and is studied in some detail. The author’s overwhelming concern for this right is shared by nearly all those Egyptian exponents of socialism, whether Islamic or secular, who try to establish the compatibility of socialism with Islam. This has been in response to the attitude of the majority of the orthodox detractors who, in castigating socialism, identify it, next to materialistic heresy, with the expropriation of individuals.

Under the heading ‘The Origins of Ownership’, the author opens his discussion by saying that in Islam the real owner of things is God (Qur’ān 2 : 284). This fundamental belief, says the author, has two benefits: first, it dispels vanity and arrogance from the heart of the property-owning mortals; second, it obliges him to abide by the Sharī‘ah rules on ownership. But God, though being the original and ultimate owner, has liberally and freely put all his worldly possessions at the disposal of human beings (Qur’ān 22 : 65). Sibā‘ī derives two conclusions from this Qur’ānic statement: first, there is nothing in the material world which cannot be possessed by Man given determination, intelligence and effort. Second, all groups of people are equally entitled to make use of ‘the good things of the earth’. Once a person has taken possession of a thing through honest means, he is recognised by Islam as its rightful owner. And no means is more honest in attaining ownership than work. Consequently ownership based on begging, injustice, deceit and harm is forbidden. But possession of a thing is not an end in itself: just as its origin should be honest work, its aim should also be honest and useful, both individually and socially: in Islam individual ownership is a social duty.⁷⁴

The most interesting and important part in Sibā‘ī’s discussion on ownership is his justification of the nationalisation (ta’mīm) of certain categories of property. He recognises multiple rules and institutions in Islam which make nationalisation an essential feature of its socialism. Foremost among these is a prophetic tradition, reported by Aḥmad and Abu Dawūd, to the effect that ‘People own three things in common: water, grass and fire’; another tradition mentions salt too. Sibā‘ī says that since these things were the basic necessities of desert life at the time of the Prophet their enumeration should on no account be regarded as exhaustive or exclusive. Thus, in a modern context, ‘water’ can be taken to stand for the entire installations of water-supply, ‘fire’ for electricity, and ‘grass’ and ‘salt’ for all the indispensable requirements of contemporary life. In a word, the Prophet’s saying should be interpreted as warranting the communisation of any resource and material which, if allowed to remain in private hands, might lead to monopolised exploitation of public need. This tradition, together with its interpretation as suggested by Sibā‘ī, figures prominently in the apologetics of Egyptian socialists at the time against orthodox attacks.⁷⁵ On the institutional side, the writer mentions waqf and ḥimā. ‘According to the legists’, he says, ‘waqf consists of removing the object of an endowment from the possession of its owner, so that it ceases to be the property of only one person, and its unsufruct becomes confined to those for whom the endowment is intended – and this is nationalisation’. Ḥimā is to reserve a piece of land as a grazing ground for public use. The Prophet Muḥammad and the Caliph ‘Umar are known to have appropriated land for creating ḥimā. Underlying this institution is a regard for the needs of the poorer classes, and the necessity of assigning them priority in enjoying the protection of the State. Sibā‘ī therefore feels justified in widening its scope to include the principle of land nationalisation in cases of necessity. The provisions for nationalisation are supplemented by three other Islamic rules: the first deprives the foolish (sufahā’) of the right of ownership, requiring that their properties should be given over to the community (Qur’ān 4 : 5); the second prescribes that the properties of persons dying without heirs should also revert to the public treasury, and the third disapproves of (yakruh) concentration of property in a few hands. This last principle is borne out, according to the author, by both the Qur’ānic injunctions on the division of the spoils of war (inter alia, 59 : 7), and by the famous ruling of the second Caliph ‘Umar (13–23/634–44) that the Muslim conquerors of Iraq and Syria should leave the occupied lands in the possession of their previous owners in return for land tax (kharāj) because he feared that this division among Muslim conquerors should lead, through inheritance, to concentration in the hands of one or two owners.

The state can thus interfere in numerous ways with the right of ownership – not to speak of its authority to collect zakāt and other taxes from property-owners. All this proves that in Islam the right of ownership – as indeed the rest of the natural rights – is subordinate to the collective interests of the Muslim community.⁷⁶

As regards the laws of ‘mutual social responsibility’ (at-takāful al-ijtimā‘ī), although this responsibility is to be shared by all the members of the Muslim community, yet it appears from Sibā‘ī’s analysis that here also it is the state which should carry the heaviest responsibility of all. He enumerates twenty-nine laws, all deduced from the Qur’ān, Tradition and authoritative books of jurisprudence, which are aimed at protecting the individual as well as the society against poverty and injustice, but at the same time underline the great scope allowed in Islam for state interference in the affairs of the community.⁷⁷ The application of the term ‘law’ (qānūn) for all the arrangements connected with ‘mutual social responsibility’ is Sibā‘ī’s own invention, and the question is whether all of them possess enough obligatory character to qualify for this designation. An obvious example is the institution of ḍīyāfah (hospitality) according to which every Muslim is expected to provide accommodation for his guest at least for one night. As Sibā‘ī himself admits, this is regarded by the majority of jurisconsults to be merely a sunnah or tradition. But this example illustrates his ubiquitous method of placing every act of altruism in the category of wājib (obligatory) when sometimes mustaḥabb (recommended) seems to be the correct classification. The Qur’ānic prescription of these acts is based on the condition that they should emanate from their author’s true love for God (2 : 177), otherwise they may be followed by his ‘taunt and injury’ towards his beneficiary, and this will completely nullify the merits of his acts (2 : 264).

Finally, Sibā‘ī analyses the ‘supports’ or sanctions which Islam has provided for materialising its socialist aims. These are divided into the credal, moral, material and legal sanctions. His account of the material sanctions purports to substantiate further the case for state control, especially his description of ḥisbah, or the office of muḥtasib (censor) whose business it is to see that the religious and moral instructions of Islam are obeyed. Because of the all-pervading character of the Islamic state, the functions of muḥtasib cover a wide range of financial, administrative, political, social and moral matters.

Sibā‘ī’s discussion of the legal sanctions is also significant because of the emphasis it lays on the built-in mechanism in the Islamic legal system for its adaptation to social changes. This adaptation is mainly ensured by the permissibility of discretionary treatment of new social problems. The necessity of ijtihād is thus demonstrated. He recognises three sources of Islamic legislation to be particularly germane to Islamic socialism:

1 istiḥsān (literally, ‘to consider something good’) which was initiated by Imām Abū Ḥanīfah, and aims at settling the problems of legislation in conformity with the requirements of everyday life. It consists of disregarding the results of qīyās (analogy) when it is considered harmful or undesirable to meet the strict demands of theory.

2 istiṣlāḥ (literally ‘to consider something appropriate or expedient’) which is devised to ensure the interests of the Muslim community. These interests are of three kinds: those recognised by the Sharī‘ah, those not recognised by the Sharī‘ah, and those which are new, without any precedents at the time of the Prophet. According to the consensus of ‘Ulamā’, interests of the first kind, such as the protection of the beliefs, lives, intellect, properties and honour of Muslims, as well as the guarantees of their five natural rights, should be respected and upheld. The interests of the second kind, such as those of a profiteering wine-seller, or of a usurer, and the other harmful groups should in no way receive recognition. But the interests of the third category, which are unprecedented, should be recognised and protected in so far as they can be justified on grounds of expediency (maṣlaḥah); and the simplest definition of expediency is given by Ghazālī: ‘the aim of the shar‘’, he says, ‘is to protect the religion, the life, the intellect, the generation and the properties of the people; whatever involves the protection of these five principles is maṣlaḥah, and whatever destroys them is mafsadah [opposite of maṣlaḥah, inexpediency]’.

3 ‘urf, which is the general practice or usage governing the three above-mentioned categories of human interests. Accordingly, it can be of three kinds: practices created by the Islamic lawgiver, those rejected by him, and those without precedent. The rules concerning these practices are exactly like those relating to the corresponding interests involved in them. Thus all practices based on the third kind of interests which do not contradict the stipulations of the Islamic law are valid and can form a basis of legislation. The tendency of the people to recognise only those social practices which would contribute to their welfare, facilitate their transactions and protect their legitimate rights and interests, is the best safeguard against possible abuses of this dispensation.

In addition to these legal sources, Sibā‘ī claims his Islamic socialism to be also vindicated by what he calls the ‘legal formulae.’ These are in fact a set of both common-sense axioms and jural postulates either taken from the Qur’ān and Tradition, or inferred from the whole body of Muslim law, which have gained currency among the legists, and can serve as further justification for any new measure of socialisation. Below are given some of these rules by way of example:

‘And nothing shall be reckoned to a man but that for which he hath made efforts’ (Qur’ān 53 : 39). ‘God will not burden any soul beyond its power’ (Qur’ān 2 : 286). ‘Repelling the harmful should be prior to obtaining the useful’ (legal formula). ‘Necessities remove prohibitions’ (legal formula). ‘Individual losses should be borne for the sake of preventing collective losses’ (legal formula). ‘[State] interference in the affairs of individuals should depend on expediency’ (legal formula).⁷⁸

As it was said before, the apologetics of the ‘progressive ‘Ulamā’ ’ in Egypt in defence of their pro-Revolution stance were mostly either a repetition of, or an elaboration on the above disquisition. Evidence of this can be found in the report of the proceedings of the First Congress of the Association for Islamic Research which was convened in Cairo, under the auspices of al-Azhar, in March 1964. The primary aim of the Congress, which represented the Muslims of forty-one countries of the world, was avowedly to call the attention of Muslim scholars to the most urgent legal, social and political problems of our age, and to help find enlightened solutions to them within the framework of Islamic doctrine. The report of the proceedings, as published by al-Azhar, contains a score of papers, all from the Egyptian participants, dealing with such topics as the limits of private ownership in Islam, the share of the poor in the properties of the rich, and the institution of ḥisbah.⁷⁹ The common denominator of all the papers is an attempt, along the lines of Sibā‘ī’s thoughts, to find Islamic regulatives and precedents for state control over the individual in the interest of Muslim community.⁸⁰

The final Declaration and Resolution of the Congress, however, indicates that their ‘progressive’ sponsors have had to make certain concessions to the demands of the conservative opposition, whether inside or outside Egypt. Contrary to the expectation raised by a perusal of the papers read at the Congress, the Declaration and Resolution make no reference to any topic connected with socialism, except a new recommendation that the subject of zakāt and other sources of state income in Islam should be carefully studied by the next Congress. Besides, the sponsors seem to have gone out of their way to stress in article 3 of the Resolution the basic sanctity of the right of ownership, and to restrict the sphere of state interference with this right to extreme cases of necessity.⁸¹ The sole revolutionary feature of the Resolution – apart from its familiar denunciation of imperialism and Zionism – is a blunt assertion of the right of ijtihād. The documents of the Second Congress pay greater attention to the problems raised by the expansion of state activities; for instance, they declare the permissibility of measures of social security, re-emphasise the prohibition of usury, fix the minimum value for the liability of commercial goods, cash money and other assets to zakāt, and stress the necessity of payment of zakāt in addition to official taxes of recent origin.⁸² But like those of the First Congress they also carefully avoid any issue connected with the socialistic blueprint or achievement of the Egyptian Government, and even indicate intensified restiveness on the part of the orthodox participants by calling upon all Muslim states to adopt the Islamic jurisprudence as the basis of their legislations, and by openly condemning any state legislation for birth control. In spite of the declarations of some of the Azharites in support of the Government policy on birth control, the religious opposition on this score remained strong, even in the mosques controlled by the Ministry of Endowments, under the Nāṣirite regime.

Such opposition to official socialism, and indeed to all imported ideologies that existed inside al-Azhar did not find any outlet to express itself openly until after the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, when the regime allowed the release of pent-up frustrations. But there was another form of religious opposition which did manage to express itself, because its authors felt under no obligation to avoid giving offence to the rulers at any price. This came chiefly from Sayyid Quṭb, the chief spokesman of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers after the dissolution of their Society in 1954. Basically his teachings were no different from those of Sibā‘ī. He also professed to be striving towards a transformation of Islam from ‘a religion seeking an irrelevant, static, purely transcendent ideal’ to ‘an operative force actively at work on modern problems’.⁸³ In Sayyid Qutb’s works too ‘mutual social responsibility’ (at-takāful al-ijtamā‘ī) was offered as Islam’s solution to the problems of social injustice and poverty. Contrary to the conservative ‘Ulamā’, nowhere did he regard the individual right of ownership to be absolute and sacrosanct, and therefore an obstacle to the communisation of the basic necessities of life (he, too, mentions the ḥadīth on the collective ownership of ‘water, grass and fire’ to substantiate his point). Where he parted company with Sibā‘ī is in refusing to use the alien symbols which the latter employs to describe Islamic ideals. He did not approve of such terms as Islamic socialism and Islamic democracy which as he said could only result from the confusion of a divine order with man-made systems.⁸⁴ Perhaps for the same reason he did not even use such novel Arabic words as ta’mīm (nationalisation) in describing the Islamic provision for state ownership.

But his fundamentalism revealed greater differences from Sibā‘ī. The most outstanding points in this fundamentalism which were obliquely tantamount to an implicit criticism of Egyptian socialism, can be summarised as follows:

1 Islam and socialism are two separate, comprehensive, and indivisible systems of thought and living. No reconciliation, or synthesis, is therefore possible between them. If there are occasional similarities between them, this does not warrant their identification with each other, just as the similarities between Islam and Communism cannot be taken as proof that they are congenial or based on the same principles.⁸⁵

2 Genuine belief in Islam starts with absolute submission to the will and sovereignty of God alone. The reader was left to draw two conclusions from this: first, the cult of personality which had developed under Egyptian socialism was un-Islamic. Second, if the Egyptian leaders were genuine in their professions of faith in Islam they should have rejected mundane creeds such as socialism.

3 In the realm of ideas, the real choice today lies between Islam and jāhiliyyah⁸⁶ (i.e., pre-Islamic ignorance). The latter now pervades the whole human community, including the societies which call themselves Muslim but in practice violate the Sharī‘ah.⁸⁷

4 Socialism, like Communism and capitalism, is an excrescence of jāhilī thought, and therefore carries all the vestiges of its corrupt origin. It stresses such notions as social welfare and material prosperity at the expense of moral salvation.⁸⁸ Islam never neglects the material aspect of human life, and this can be particularly demonstrated by its detailed scheme of ‘social justice’. But Islam considers the first step towards the realisation of this scheme to be the liberation and purification of the soul. Without this moral catharsis no attempt at improving human life can be successful.⁸⁹

5 Egyptian socialism is closely bound up with nationalism – another jāhilī creed which is repugnant to the spirit of Islam.⁹⁰

6 Although because of the interruption in the growth of Islamic jurisprudence, some of the Islamic tenets stand in need of reinterpretation, the means of achieving this aim is not in having recourse to any of the brands of Western political philosophy, or to materialistic ideas. Islamic jurisprudence itself possesses adequate resources for adaptation to unforeseen circumstances.⁹¹ The Islamic socialists admit this, but in their casuistical arguments succumb to foreign ideological influences.

The crisis of Nāṣirism from the mid-sixties onwards resulted, among other things, in weakening the appeal of Arab socialism in Egypt and of its Islamic encrustment to baffled Arab–Muslim masses. The frustrations bred of the Arab defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 had naturally created a fresh hankering among the militant youth in the Arab countries as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world, for a more vigorous political doctrine. This was the background to the appearance of a new variant of Islamic socialism. It differed from the model presented by Sibā‘ī and his Egyptian or Syrian imitators by virtue not only of its independence of the political exigencies of officialdom, but also of an innovation hitherto unthinkable in an Islamic context – reconciliation with Marxism. This was, as mentioned before, undoubtedly the result of the growing popularity and influence of the Soviet Union and other countries of the ‘Socialist Camp’ in the Third World as a whole, a process which had started with the death of Stalin in 1953, and had momentous implications at both theoretical and practical levels. A by-product of the campaign of de-Stalinisation was to rehabilitate the ‘independent roads to socialism’ and the ‘Third Worldist’ ideologies in general, and this in its turn had enabled the Soviet leaders to overcome some of their old doubts about the nature of national bourgeois movements in the Third World. It was such doubts that had caused a paralysing ambiguity in the Soviet policy towards the nationalist regime of Muḥammad Muṣaddiq in Iran between 1951 and 1953. By contrast, the Soviet policy towards Nāṣir from 1954 onwards was one of active support and involvement in neutralising the Western challenges to his status as the hero of Arab nationalism. In particular, the attitude of the Soviet Union during the Suez crisis of 1956 greatly enhanced its prestige with the masses throughout the Muslim world. This trend was later strengthened by the Iraqi Revolution of 1958, the heightening of the Algerian War of Independence, and the prevalence of a general mood of anti-Westernism everywhere in the Middle East. So by the time the humiliation of the Six-Day War was inflicted on the Muslim conscience, the ground had been prepared for an ideological synthesis which would satisfy both the urge for a more tightly knit plan of political action, and the requirement of apparent loyalty to Islamic tenets. The blossoming-out of an assortment of Marxist or Marxian schools of thought – revisionism, the New Left, and the motley streams arising from the critique of Marxism–Leninism by Sartre, Lefebvre and others – meant that in the post-Stalin thaw such a synthesis belonged no longer to the realm of intellectual day-dreaming.

Roughly the same process repeated itself in Iran, although it started at least a decade earlier, with the Anglo-American-engineered overthrow of Muḥammad Muṣaddiq’s government in 1953. Whereas during the oil nationalisation movement of 1951 nationalism of liberal orientation commanded immense loyalty among the middle classes, even those attached to religious leaders, this was not the case in the period after 1953. As the Iranian national consciousness gradually absorbed the traumatic effects of the failure of Muṣaddiq’s ‘middle-of-the-road’ experience in democratic politics, a conviction gained ground among politicised youth that his fiasco was caused as much by liberalism as by the CIA conspiracies. It was the dispute over this interpretation of the events of 1951–3 that caused deep divisions inside the nationalist groups in the early sixties, and prevented them from taking advantage of the respite gained by them as a result of the internal crisis of the Shāh’s regime in 1962–4, and the resultant popular uprisings which were ruthlessly suppressed. Symptomatic of the radically changed political atmosphere of the times was the attitude towards the United States: if in the period prior to 1953 there were many nationalist liberals, and even socialists, who regarded the United States as a ‘friendly’ or ‘harmless’ power which could at least be played off against British imperialism, or Soviet threat, there were extremely few leaders who nursed such illusions in the aftermath of Muṣaddiq’s fall. Thus by the mid-sixties one could already detect a marked leftward tendency among oppositional, and some religious groups, and this was mirrored in their updated political rhetoric, which could not now be easily differentiated, especially in its anti-imperialistic, anti-capitalistic propositions, from that of the left. But the impact of this gradual conversion had again been somewhat impaired by the newly won recognition and respectability of the ‘independent left’ in a de-Stalinised world.

Exercises in reconciling Islam with Marxism have never been explicit: their initiators have been wiser than that, making sure that the synthesis they seek always takes an implicit, piecemeal and abstruse form. The label ‘Islamic Marxism’ which is sometimes used in designating this synthesis is in fact a ploy used by its adversaries to discredit it in the eyes of traditionist Muslims. One could say that the outcome of this reconciliation is, if anything, potentially a serious challenge to orthodox Marxist–Leninist parties in the Muslim countries, since it can act as an alternative carrier of their ideals of social and economic justice without incurring the blemish of irreligiosity or atheism. Its most forceful representative in the Muslim countries to the east of Egypt has been perhaps Sāzmān-i Mujāhidīn-i Khal (the Organisation of the Fighters of the People), a guerrilla organisation created in the early seventies in Iran. In addition to the denunciation of imperialism and despotism – an invariable plank of the platform of all revolutionary groupings – the most outstanding features of the Mujāhidīn’s outlook are indeed persistent attacks on the institution of private ownership as the root cause of all social evils, and an unfailing emphasis on class struggle as an ever-present process in history. Both result predictably in a plea for public ownership of all means of production. But their ingenuity in ideological synthesising suggests itself most strongly in their application of ‘dialectical materialism’ to the Qur’ānic exegesis and some of the most memorable vicissitudes of the lives of Prophet Muḥammad, ‘Alī and Ḥusayn. Again what they do is to use this concept and its subsidiary categories as an analytical tool, without actually naming it. Thus they employ the notion of sunnat allāh (the tradition or path of God) interchangeably with the idea of the ‘law of evolution’ as ‘one of the substantial and basic (‘umdah va asāsī) laws of the world of creation’.⁹² Any phenomenon, they aver, which is incapable of adjusting itself to this sunnah is doomed to vanish, ‘for instance, the capitalistic system and the world of imperialism, being no longer in harmony with the vital and historical realities of [human] society, nurture in their side their own enemy and antithesis, namely the working and toiling class, which adopts a novel and progressive posture. The contradiction between the means of production and relations of production intensifies daily with the increase in production, and the advancement of technology, placing the capitalistic system under the pressure of the toiling class. At the end, with the revolution of the oppressed masses, the gigantic power of capitalism will be destroyed, and the working class will inherit the power, and the means of production, and above all, will become God’s successors on the earth.’⁹³ As the illustration, as well as divine testimony, of this vision of history, a Qur’ānic verse is quoted: ‘And we were minded to shew favour to those who were brought low in the land, and to make them spiritual chiefs, and to make them heirs’ (28 : 5). In Shī‘ī theology, this verse is usually invoked as evidence of the certainty of the return of the Mahdī; but radical Muslim opinion of whatever denomination now interprets it more in the direction of a historicist conviction that human life moves inexorably towards the final triumph of the ‘disinherited’ and the weak (mustaḍ‘afūn) over their exploiters. Similarly, metaphysical concepts such as ‘divine assistance’ (naṣr min allāh) and revelation (waḥy), and the function of angels are perceived as a manifestation of the same ‘tradition of evolution’ in the universe: what is called God’s help is nothing but conformity with this tradition, which always assists all those who pursue its direction; revelation is but the exertion of the power that is an essential characteristic of every object, whether animate or inanimate (such as honey-producing for the bee, magnetism for the lodestone, etc.); and, finally, angels are merely a metaphor for the ‘natural forces’ which operate generally on the basis of the laws of causality.

This kind of desacralisation of Qur’ānic terms is certainly not exclusive to latter-day Muslim radicals. One could find examples of it in, for instance, some of the modernistic interpretations of the Qur’ān by Indian and Pakistani Muslims of an entirely different outlook.⁹⁴ What is new in the radical literature is, however, the subordination of such a ‘scientific’ understanding of the scripture to the demands of an activist political ideology. One should also point out that every instance of desacralisation is accompanied by strong affirmation of the supremacy of God and His will to dispel any accusation of blasphemy or heresy against its authors. The indispensability of human will and struggle is also stressed to underline the essential difference between this new philosophy of Islamic socialism and all the fatalistic but secularist ideologies which preach faith in a blind historical necessity, in a determinism guaranteeing the ultimate victory of the oppressed. But the overall impression is one of a syncretism of religion and politics, with a visible slant towards the latter, and predicated on a set of principles which are no different from those of dialectical or historical materialism except on account of the religious idioms and scriptural citations used in their embellishment.

Most of the adherents of this outlook have been profoundly inspired by the idealism of ‘Alī Sharī‘atī (1933–77), the most popular mentor of Islamic radicalism in modern Iran. As a teacher, orator and theorist, Sharī‘atī has exercised an influence which is rarely matched by any other contemporary Muslim thinker anywhere in the Muslim world, not only in the development of the conceptual foundations of Islamic socialism as espoused by the educated youth, but also in the dissemination of the characteristics of militant Islam. His writings may be open to criticism by the scholastic criteria of traditional religionists, and they do indeed fall outside the penumbra of strictly religious literature because of their inclusion of alien terms or concepts, as well as reinterpretation of orthodox doctrines. His heavily sociological understanding of Islam is also bound to be bitterly resented by spirits akin to Henri Corbin’s mystical perception of Islam, and especially Shī‘īsm. True, Sharī‘atī too perceives religion as idealism, but an idealism which constantly calls for struggle. The ubiquitous motto in his writings is the saying attributed to the third Imām, Ḥusayn: ‘Life is verily faith (‘aqīdah) and fight (jihād)’, or its variations. All facets of Islamic culture (mythology, history, theology and even some elements of jurisprudence) are subordinated in his teachings to the compelling necessity of this fusion between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’, which is but one manifestation of the principle of tawḥīd (oneness of God). He is the first Iranian writer on religion to have turned this hitherto theological doctrine into a ‘world-view’ (jahān-bīnī), a term coined originally by Iranian Marxists in the early forties as an equivalent for a secular, political system of beliefs, or Weltanschauung, since in classical Persian the compound is more suggestive of a mind which is preoccupied with the material world (jahān) rather than spirit or soul (jān). In this sense, tawḥīd means something much more than the ‘oneness of God’, which is, of course, accepted by all monotheists. ‘But’, says Sharī‘atī, ‘what I have in mind (when I use this term) is a world-view. So what I intend by “the world-view of tawḥīd” is perceiving the entire universe as a unity, instead of dividing it into this world and the thereafter, the physical and metaphysical, substance and meaning, matter and spirit. It means perceiving the whole of existence as a single form, a single, living and conscious organism, possessing one will, intelligence, feeling and aim. . . . There are many people who believe in tawḥīd, but only as a “religious–philosophical” theory: God is one, not more than one – that is all! But I understand tawḥīd as a world-view, just as I see shirk (polytheism) also from the same standpoint, that is, a world-view that regards the universe as an incoherent combination, full of division, contradiction and incongruity, possessing conflicting and independent poles, diverging movements, and disparate and disconnected essences, desires, calculations, criteria, aims and wills. Tawḥīd sees the world as an empire; shirk as a feudal system.’⁹⁵ The social and political implications of tawḥīd are further spelled out by declaring that such a unitarian outlook involves the negation of all contradictions hampering the development of Man, whether these are ‘legal, class, social, political, racial, ethnic, territorial, cognatic, genetic, intrinsic and even economic’. Such a world-view, accompanied as it is by the rejection of materialism and empiricism, by no means reflects on Sharī‘atī’s standing as a deeply religious thinker, although his strong emphasis on the essential compatibility of matter and spirit does clash with the Qur’ānic denigration of the worldly life (6 : 32; 47 : 36; 57 : 20). But it goes a long way towards disarming, or gratifying, the partisans of dialectical materialism by showing Islam to be also preaching that human salvation, whether material or spiritual, is but the summation of a dialectic – an inner, ceaseless struggle which goes on at all levels of individual and social life until the final triumph of the principle of tawḥīd, which reunites the conflicting, separated parts of Man’s existence, brings nature and society within an integrating sketch of the universe, and restores absolute equality as the primeval state of social life. Sharī‘atī uses the term dialectic freely; contrary to some of his Arab counterparts, he does not deem it necessary even to find an Islamic (Persian or Arabic) equivalent for the term (such as jadalī, or jidālī, or jidāliyyah, which are of medieval origin). For him, the two crucial applications of the principle of dialectic are the philosophy of history, and sociology. Using the story of Abel and Cain as a metaphorical framework, he depicts history as a conflict between two opposing forces represented by these two characters. The Qur’ān refers to the story in a most laconic manner, without mentioning Abel and Cain. It is only in the commentaries that their names appear. This enables Sharī‘atī to interpret the story in terms which have never figured in classical exegetics, without appearing to advance any heterodox position. The story has an obvious moral import, and has always been treated as such by religious commentators, Muslim or otherwise, who have seen in it nothing other than a condemnation of greed and murder, especially fratricide. Sharī‘atī too takes cognisance of this moral dimension, laying stress on the contradiction between the two types – Abel, ‘the man of faith, peaceable and self-sacrificing’, and Cain, ‘the voluptuous, the transgressor and the fratricide’. But Sharī‘atī does not rest content with the moral aspect of the story; he tries to delve into its deeper meaning by means of what he calls ‘psychological analysis, and on the basis of a scientific and sociological examination of their environment, their occupations and their class.’⁹⁶ The outcome of this examination is that the real cause of the conflict between Abel and Cain lay in their contradictory types of work, infrastructures of production and economic systems – in one word, in their differing class status: Abel being a pastoralist, representing the age of common ownership of the means of production, and Cain being a landowner, representing the age of agriculture and the establishment of the system of private ownership. His reasoning in support of this claim consists mainly of eliminating most of the conceivable factors of the diverging characters of the two brothers. Their difference, he says, could not be put down to their family background or environment, because they both had the same father and mother, belonged to the same race, and were brought up in identical circumstances. Educational and cultural factors could not be held responsible either, because social life at that primitive stage had not yet developed to the extent that differences on this score could be of much consequence. So there remains, in Sharī‘atī’s examination, only the economic life and class status to account for the cleavage.⁹⁷ It is noteworthy that his analysis makes no reference to a factor that in a typically religious explanation would normally rank as the most decisive: the innate nature (fiṭrah) of every individual, in the sense of a pattern of behaviour which, either through the divine will or human initiative, or a combination of both, is preordained to lead to perdition or salvation. The same viewpoint is given sharper focus in the survey of the ‘dialectic of sociology’ and the stages of history. He quotes Marx’s classification of history into five stages (primitive communism, slavery and serfdom, feudalism, capitalism, and the ‘triumph of the proletariat’), but criticises it on the ground that it confuses the criteria of the form of the ownership, the form of class relations, and the form of the tools of production, whereas Sharī‘atī finds the first four stages to share basically the same infrastructure, that is, private ownership of the tools and the resources of production; only the last stage is characterised by common ownership of both. Throughout history, then, ‘only two infrastructures have existed, and there cannot be more than two’.⁹⁸ What differentiates feudalism, for instance, from capitalism is not infrastructure but the tools of production, the form of production, and consequently the outward form of the relations of production: just as the reverse of this may sometimes take place, namely the tools, form and relations of production can remain the same, but the infrastructure may substantially change; for example, an agrarian society may attain socialism through revolution, or war, or coup d’état, without undergoing the capitalistic transformation of the tools of production. The conclusion that Sharī‘atī draws from this exercise in sociological critique is the reaffirmation of his previous thesis: in history, just as in society, there are only two poles: (1) the pole of Abel, consisting of milk (ownership), mālik (owner) and mala’ (or mutraf, plutocracy), and their ally rāhib (priesthood); (2) the pole of Cain, consisting of Allāh (God), and nās (people), the two terms that the Qur’ān uses interchangeably whenever it speaks of the rights of the society as a whole.⁹⁹ In predicting the outcome of the conflict between these two poles. Sharī‘atī replaces Marxian determinism with the Shī‘ī millenarian rehabilitation of the universe: the conflict will end, according to him, only with an ‘inevitable revolution’ which will restore ‘the system of Abel’ in the world – the system of unitarianism as opposed to that of polytheism; religion of consciousness, movement and revolution, as opposed to the religion of deceit, stupefication and justification of the status quo; the system of human justice and unity, as opposed to that of class and racial discrimination.¹⁰⁰

Such fearless blending of religious lore with modern, alien concepts can by itself be already highly provocative to the religious thinkers and scholars of conventional formation. But when it is compounded by a ‘progressive’ ideology presented in the name of a reinvigorated Islam, and accompanied by severe strictures on a deviant, hieratic class masquerading as defenders of the faith, then the hostile reaction of large segments of Iranian Shī‘ī orthodoxy to Sharī‘atī’s views becomes understandable. Some of this hostility evidently correlates with the misgivings of the religious allies of the wealthy classes over the radical implications of his teachings. But some of it also arises from the genuine concern of those religionists who are committed to the safeguarding of the timeless truths of Shī‘ī spiritualism against the ‘perils of socialisation’. The fact that Sharī‘atī himself was not an ‘ālim has also made him an easy target for all the authentic or self-appointed advocates of the necessity of immunising the religious leadership against the intrusion of the uninitiated. Much of this variegated hostility was submerged in the wave of pro-Sharī‘atī feelings that swept all over Iran after his death, and particularly during the Islamic Revolution of 1978–9. But it does not lie far below the surface, and re-emerges in periodic campaigns against ‘eclectic trends in Islam’.¹⁰¹ Whatever reservations one might have about the legitimacy of this kind of eclecticism, one can have scant doubt that Sharī‘atī’s potent mixture of dialectic and Islamic, especially Shī‘ī, ideals of social justice, have done more than any other form of religious indoctrination to make Islam the sole ideology of struggle in contemporary Iran for vast numbers of militant young people, who would have been otherwise attracted to secularist, left-wing doctrines.

Most revivalist movements in the history of great religions have had ramifications in the form of egalitarian and anti-authoritarian doctrines which have sometimes provoked popular uprisings. The peasant revolts of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries (in France in 1251, in England in 1381, etc.) were no doubt caused primarily by social and economic discontent. But the influence of the teachings of John Wyclif, John Huss, and Martin Luther in precipitating them can by no means be gainsaid. Islamic revivalism has similarly produced its corollary of proletarian ideologies. Nevertheless, the difference with European history lies in the fact that radical Islamic ideas have often been expressed in a vocabulary unfamiliar for the overwhelming majority of the population to which they have been addressed. That is why, although they have sometimes inspired heroic, revolutionary acts on the part of the radical youth in the face of seemingly invincible tyrannies, they have often stopped short of attaining the status of mass movements in the Muslim countries, and have even touched off a popular backlash at the behest of an alarmed orthodoxy.

4 Nationalism, democracy and socialism