Liberal Islam and Islamdom
Written
By: Aziz Ali Dad
The emergence of Islam after the
end of the cold at the centre stage of history poses several challenges for the
social scientists because it defies all the existing frameworks of explanation.
Since its emergence in Arabian Peninsula, Islam carved out its own historical
trajectory, but in the subsequent centuries its destiny intermingled with
destiny of other diverse civilizations, religions and ideas. What we are
witnessing today as Islam is not an entity frozen in time and space; rather it
is a product of factors, actors, ideas and experiences that are both indigenous
and exogenous to its society and history.
One of the difficulties in explicating presence of
Islam in the post-religion era stems from the fact that the dominant analytical
framework is a product of disenchanted epistemology, but it is entrusted with
the task of studying an enchanted worldview. This epistemological incongruity
contributes to the failure of scholarship about Islam by what is labelled as
liberal Islam. The engagement of Islam with history and profane affairs has
also made it more terrestrial and less transcendental.
Unfortunately, the scholarship of what is termed
liberals and Islamists fail to see involvement of transcendent in mundane, and
influence of mundane on the representation of transcendent reality. This essay
tries to take stock of contemporary debate between proponents of liberal Islam
and Islamists to show how both camps are trapped within the dogmatic enclosure
and unable to analyse factors emanating from not so much ideological and
theological context than changing dynamics and objective realities in the
Muslim societies.
Despite the heterogeneity of historical and social
forces operating on Islam, the analysis, diagnosis and prognosis of modern
scholarship on Islam suffers from essentialist, ahistorical and anachronistic
view. It is owing to the fact that their scholarly view is still trapped in the
classical frameworks that were evolved in the formative and consolidative
phases of modernity. As a result the chasm between ways of seeing and reality
is increasing. The liberal debate regarding place of religion in the public
sphere also suffers from ossified mind that has taken liberal principles as the
articles of faith. In other words both religion and liberalism cultivated a
culture of total rejection by wiping out even the iota of doubt to establish
enclosure for the truth of their respective worldviews.
Liberalism is a social and political thought that
attaches importance to individual rights, and individual freedom of choice. It
is this emphasis on freedom in various domains of personal and social life that
enabled the West to create a new society and economy. Liberalism came to the
Muslim lands in tandem with colonialism. Since colonial rule was based on the
binary logic of the West versus the Rest, the liberal ideals including freedom
of choice and decision were not extended to the colonialised. That is the
reason a vanguard of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, refused to extend the
liberal concept of liberty to Indians for he deemed “barbarians have no rights
as a nation.”
Also, the advent of liberal thought in Muslim
societies coincided with the gradual decline of Muslim power in different parts
of the world on the one hand, and ascendency of the Western colonial powers on
Muslim lands on the other. So the first exposure of Muslims with liberalism was
its material and military facets not intellectual. The Muslim intelligentsia
started soul searching after witnessing disappearance of old order of things
and withering away of their power. Impressed by military might, scientific
achievements and impressive production of knowledge, the Muslim intelligentsia
tried to make Islam compatible with liberal ideals.
At the core of liberal project of Muslim
intellectuals in colonial period was deep sense of inferiority in terms of
intellectual capital and economic prosperity. It was in that historical
context, the structure of liberal thought in Islam took shape. With the passage
of time the thought has taken an essentialist form in post-colonial period for
the binary schema of thinking has become even more palpable and instrumental to
universalise liberal agenda after the end of cold war.
The radical Islam of today is not a result of
people’s love of some archaic Islam of the past, rather it is a product of
modernity. But the reductionist view of liberals regarding Islam sees 1400
years of Muslim history through the experiences of the last 17 years after
9/11. Such a view reduces diversity of historical experiences and processes to
single cause. As a corollary of teleological reasoning of liberalism, liberal
scholarship tries to forge a false cause by explaining the effect. The
dominance of teleology and diminishing of space for diversity in liberal
discourse has given birth to a dogmatic enclosure of thought. This process
denotes closing to liberal mind to pressing questions of the day that demands
imaginative solution to intractable challenges of today’s world, including
place of religion at what Francis Fukuyama calls, “The End of History”.
What is peddled today as moderate Islam by scholars,
popular writers, public speakers and liberal intellectuals is a product
necessitated by the needs of will to power not will to knowledge. Now the
proponents of liberal and Islamist narratives are trapped in the straight
jacket of binary logic. Both see the world in black and white, and thereby
close the possibilities for emergence of critical reason and creative
imagination.
Both liberal Islam and Islamism feed on each other to
perpetuate their hegemony on truth about Islam. In their recently published
book Islam After Liberalism,
Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi have brilliantly exposed the intellectual
hegemony of liberal Islam. According to Devji and Kazmi, “The intellectual
hegemony of liberal Islam has also placed limits on any alternative, even
nonviolent vision of Islamic thought and practice that challenges the liberal
state.” They are of the view that “This has also bolstered institutional
orthodoxies that have little room for the free expression of ‘heretical’
religious tropes and impulses. In this way, rather than expanding the sphere of
Muslim liberty, Muslim liberalism can act as a disciplining force, buttressing
religious orthodoxy together with the authority of the state.”
The
ideological war that is being fought on binary trenches of liberals and
Islamists create a zone where every thought that ventures to leave its position
is killed. Algerian scholar and thinker, Muhammed Arkoun, declares such
unthinkable zone in Islam as ‘Official Closed Corpus”. Like religion,
liberalism has also created its own official closed corpus where all the
possibilities of burgeoning of the flowers of creative, aesthetic,
hermeneutical and critical thought are nipped in the bud for the liberal
theology follows the rule of either with us or them.
Due to its strong soteriological and theological
character in late modernity, liberalism can be included among what German
philosopher Karl Jaspers calls post-axial age religions. The situation is
worsened because of neoliberalism’s thrust to impose its monolithic political
and economic agenda across the globe through ideological apparatus and war
machine. Hence, we see great leveling of diversity across the globe through
liberal wars for salvation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other
parts of the world.
In the post 9/11 period, liberal Islam found a new
life with emergence of an array of institutions and actors that want to infuse
a moderate version of Islam. The liberal tendency to see supporters of the ideology
of radical Islam as the followers of ancient-cum-tribal Islam of Arabia is a
mistaken view. The new cadre of actors and writers espousing liberal Islam have
not emerged on the intellectual scene due to an intellectual urge for
empathetic understanding, but because of the fact that moderate Islam sells
well in the market of ideas of today.
Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi think that intellectual
hegemony of liberal Islam is consequence of commodification of Islam. “This has
been in no small measure a consequence,” claim Devji and Kazmi “of the state’s
role in the construction of ‘moderate’ Islam and the immense governmental
resources ploughed into the counter-extremism agenda, which has helped
commodify it.”
A common strand between the thought of different
actors and institutions projecting moderate Islam is the binary nature of their
discourse and belief in linear view of history. They interpolate the philosophy
of linear history of liberalism to define the historical trajectory of other
societies including Muslim societies across the globe. Under the guidance of
linear view, the liberal Islam tries to divert multiplicity of historical
trajectories into the single path dictated by essentialist liberalism.
Today the reductionist view of history has permeated
into intellectual discourse among Muslim intelligentsia of liberal persuasion.
An oft-repeated mantra of liberal scholarship is the dire need for reformation
in Islam. The movement of reformation took place in the Western historical
context where social, economic and political contradictions and dynamics
necessitated a movement that called for reforms. It succeeded because there was
an intellectual homework behind that provided alternate ways of dealing with
self, society and the universe. Subsequently, the intelligentsia in the West
created an intellectual space where issues related to private, pubic, state and
religion were scrutinised through philosophical lens. It was the expansion of
horizons of mind that subsequently paved the way for expansion of pubic sphere
for other spheres of life and entities, institution, ideas and actors of
society.
Unfortunately, the very foundation of liberalism in
Islam during early modernity is marked by imitation and instrumental approach
to create space for Muslims within new web of power relations created by
colonial structure. Thus, the tendency among the liberals to mimic the outward
manifestation, and proposing reforms in Islam on the same line as Christianity.
Such an approach was nonstarter for the reason that reforms or revolution is
demanded when old order either disintegrates or cannot cure the ailments
begotten by it. Montgomery Watt in his books Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad in Madina attributes startling success of
Islam in Arabia within the short period of 19 years to the disintegration of
tribal system, and iconoclastic message of the prophet Muhammad.
Since
the inception of Islam, Muslim societies witnessed collapse of the systems of
thought and power structures myriad times. Subjugation of Muslim societies to
colonial power was also a result of disintegration of old system of power and
worldview. The question arises here is: Why Muslim societies failed to reform
or form themselves anew by equipping with new paradigm of seeing and managing
the world? They failed to develop a new paradigm in modern age because of
intellectual deficit. When the objective conditions were ripe for change and
the old order was disintegrating, the Muslims did not have an alternative
worldview because Muslim intelligentsia had not done their intellectual
homework. Take the example of Mughal Empire. When the empire collapsed, it left
only the rubble of old edifice and poetry not a philosophical legacy to make
sense of the new age.
Today the situation is similar, as the Muslim
scholarship has failed to craft a vocabulary that resonates with their
existential condition. Even than the conceptual categories of modern knowledge
are not invested with thought that connects concepts with the lived experiences
of Muslims. Hence, the intelligentsia resorts to alien words that carry their
own historical bag, baggage and bigotry. This tendency to rely too much on
alien terminology without investing thinking in it is due to intellectual
lethargy. Appropriation of terminology is a normal practice but it is employed
to ground claims in the historically contingent contexts. It is important to
merge experience of contingent in the universal vocabularies so that the
conceptual categories loose their timelessness quality to capture lived
experience of the life world.
Orientalist scholarship is criticised not only for
its reductionist and essentialist approach, but also for its impacts on
perception and representation of people about themselves. Once the spurious
scholarship is accepted without the knowledge of actors and factors contributed
to discursive formation of object of the knowledge, then it is internalised and
the understanding is communicated through same categories that at the same time
defame and distort. The movement for reform and revival of learning of Eastern
knowledge in colonial India was initiated not because of relevance or their
intrinsic worth. It is started because the Eastern knowledge was instrumental
to colonial policy of subjugating the mind.
According
to Nasir Abass Nayyar the Eastern knowledge was beneficial for the reason that
through this knowledge the colonial power can subjugate the mind. Nayyar in his
Urdu book “Mabad Nau Abadiat: Urdu Kay
Tanazur Mein (Postcolonialism: the Context of Urdu)” claims
that it was not a novel idea. Actually, it was derived from Royal Asiatic
Society whose purpose of overall research about Eastern knowledge was to
establish hegemony over the Eastern mind.
The conceptual blunder of liberal scholarship about
Islam is that it has propensity to conflate political Islam with theological
Islam. Therefore, every political or militant facet of Islam is attributed to
Islamic theology. This conceptual mistake leads to analytical error of reading
religious phenomenon in essentialised way at the expense of rootedness of
religious practices in the complexity of socio-political and economic
processes. It is very important to take into consideration the nuances
that contribute to analytical edifice of scholarship on Islam. But sifting of
each category in the modern discourse about Islam is a daunting task. So the
easy way out is to employ ready-made terms without the operation discursive
analyses. It results in the failure of imagination and forces mind to take
refugee within the comfort of ideological cocoon.
Marshall Hodgson was one of the exceptional scholars
who invested deep thinking into analytical categories employed for the study of
Islam. Whenever a word fails to define a phenomenon or process suigeneri to Islam, he coined
words to avoid conceptual pitfalls. In his magisterial book The Venture of Islam, Hodgson
identified the problems with the use of analytical categories without taking
into consideration the locale, context and relationship of sacred to
contingent. His repertoire of conceptual categories is rich because of
intellectual rigour and clarity. Unlike liberal scholarship that treats Islam
as theology and society confusingly, Hodgson restricts “the term ‘Islam’ to the religion of Muslims, not using
that term for the far more general phenomena, the society of Islamdom and its
Islamicate cultural traditions.” Islamicate refers to the Islamdom of the
society, which “has been naturally shared in by both Muslims and non-Muslims
who participate fully in the society of Islamdom.”
Corruption of words precedes the eruption of violence
in society. The proponents of liberal Islam and Islamism are strange bedfellows
for they unconsciously subscribe to the vocabulary employed for the war of
ideas. Conflation of categories proves beneficial to the Islamicists because
they interpreted every political issue related to Islamdom to Islam as religion
and vice versa. The repertoire of vocabulary in the ideological arsenal of
liberals and Islamists has turned into sanguinary concepts because they have
assumed timeless characters to serve the will of power. There is no denying the
fact that Islam contains elements of violence in its theology, but at the same
time it has creative, aesthetic, literary, artistic and other dimensions as
well.
Most of the “analysts” especially those associated
with think tanks tend to see strong causal link between Islamic religious
injunction and practices of Muslims. In reality, like other ideologies and
beliefs, there is a huge chasm between theory and practice among Muslims. This
is evident from social behaviour and civic norms of Muslims in Muslim
societies, and the Muslims living in non-Muslim societies like the West.