Hairyman
09-04-2006, 10:51 AM
The trail of political Islam
Apr 07
Pankaj Mishra | The New York Review of Books
In the fall of 1978, Michel Foucault travelled to Iran for Corriere della Sera to write about growing mass protests against Reza Shah Pahlavi's regime. Famous for his theoretical analyses of European attitudes toward madness, hospitals and prisons, Foucault knew little, by his own admission, about Persian or Islamic history; and he hadn't previously been a journalist or reporter. Nevertheless, as he put it, "we have to be there at the birth of ideas".
In Iran, where millions of demonstrators and strikers appeared united by their hatred for the American-backed Shah and admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault claimed to see a new form of "political spirituality".
He wrote admiringly of how the "Grand Ayatollahs" had "caused an entire people to come out into the streets", expressing "a perfectly unified collective will". He claimed to be witnessing the "first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane".
As it turned out, Khomeini kept Iran's authoritarian state more or less intact. Far from expressing a political spirituality, he installed clerics in powerful positions, and began to use the Shah's methods - secret police, torture, execution - against his real and perceived opponents, and on a larger scale than the Shah had.
However, Foucault could see how the experience of deprivation, loneliness and anomie made many Muslims in urban centres turn to, rather than away, from Islam; how there was little "protection" for the millions of uprooted Muslims except in "Islam, which for centuries has regulated everyday life, family ties and social relations with such care".
It was why Foucault believed that "Islam - which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilisation - has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men."
Unknown to Foucault, the powder keg was about to be set alight, even as he travelled across Iran, in neighbouring Afghanistan. Here, a Communist regime propped up by the Soviet Union tried to modernise hastily what it saw as a feudal and backward society. The subsequent backlash from radical Islamists was supported by the US, and turned, with the help of Pakistan's Islamist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and Saudi Arabia, into the first global jihad in Islam's long history.
It was the experience of training and fighting together during the decade-long anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that bound the Islamists together into an international community. It defined their enemy more clearly than before as the materialist and imperialist civilisation of the West in which both communists and capitalists were complicit, and it stoked their fantasy of a global Muslim ummah (community).
Over the past two decades, Islamists returning from Afghanistan have declared jihad against Westernised and Westernising elites in their respective countries.
Nevertheless, the eruption of jihadi rage and hatred in New York and London, and in the riots in France and elsewhere in Europe, seems to have bewildered many people in the West. Many journalists and political commentators trying to find out "why they hate us" conclude that Islam itself is, as Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator, wrote after last summer's bombings in London, the problem: the ultimate source of the nihilistic violence unleashed on the West. Defenders of Islam in turn describe it as a religion of peace and compassion, pointing to the Ottoman Empire, which was hospitable to Jewish minorities expelled from Catholic Europe.
One of the achievements of Reza Aslan's No God but God is that it gives Islam as much internal complexity and diversity as the concepts "the West" and "America" possess in our eyes. Aslan - who was born in Iran and teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara - pauses often in his narrative of the Prophet Muhammad's life and those of Muhammad's successors to explain controversial Islamic concepts.
He disputes the popular notion that jihad means "holy war", for example. "War, according to the Quran," he writes, "is either just or unjust; it is never 'holy'."
According to Aslan, Muhammad saw Jews and Christians as "spiritual cousins", and borrowed from Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements. He informs us that "throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran".
He describes how Muhammad gave unprecedented rights of property to women in the ummah he founded; and how these rights form the basis of contemporary women's movements in Iran and Turkey, which are "predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women's rights".
As Aslan sees it, Muhammad preached a "radical message" of "sweeping social reform" in Mecca, upholding "the rights of the underprivileged and the oppressed". But over the centuries, this crucial message of Islam was distorted by political and religious elites fearful of losing their power, especially the clergy or the Ulama, an "extremely small, rigid, and often profoundly traditionalist group of men", who institutionalised Islam by devising the Shari'ah as a comprehensive code of conduct for Muslims.
Aslan is at his best in tracing the origins of political Islam, which, he makes clear, lie in the fear, shared by many educated Muslims in the 19th century, that their coreligionists were helpless before European imperialists.
For Muslims in oil-rich countries, formal decolonisation of the Middle East after World War II brought no respite from foreign domination. With its growing energy needs, the US soon replaced France and Britain as the paramount power in the Middle East, committed to propping up the fundamentalist Wahaabi Saudi regime in Saudi Arabia, the secular shah of Iran and the Jewish state of Israel.
But by the 1980s, a better-educated and more politicised generation of Muslims had emerged in the Middle East - one that was more aware than its ancestors of aggressive foreign meddling in the region, and more inclined to channel its anger and frustration over corruption and unemployment in their countries against America.
This history explains why many Muslims today are likely to be suspicious of and resistant to democratisation and secularisation under Western auspices - a form of modernisation that may appear to them designed for the West rather more than for its presumed beneficiaries.
They are hardly likely to be persuaded otherwise by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the name of democracy.
Nevertheless, Aslan argues that a reformation is "already under way in most of the Muslim world". He sees the attacks on New York and Washington as "part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting - sometimes fanatically - to the 'fundamentals' of their faith".
But unlike many Western commentators on Islam, Aslan does not believe that Muslims have to depoliticise their religion, or even confine it to the so-called personal sphere, in order to be modern. He is convinced that the process of building democracy in Muslim states "can be based only on Islamic traditions and values".
The Prophet named no successors, and the Koran says nothing very specific about the nature of government best suited for Muslims. But the fundamentals of Islam, as defined by Aslan, do seem compatible with democracy.
However, the recent attempts in both Iran and Pakistan to build democratic states on Islamic values warn us against underestimating the clergy, which wields the all-powerful weapon of the Shari'ah. Aslan admits that it is "practically impossible to reconcile the traditionalist view of the Shari'ah with modern conceptions of democracy and human rights".
At the same time, he does not rule out a role for the clergy in an Islamic democracy. "The function of the clergy in an Islamic democracy," he writes, "is ... to reflect the morality of the state", and since it is "the interpretation of religion that arbitrates morality, such interpretation must always be in accord with the consensus of the community".
This sounds too optimistic. Given Islam's "quintessentially communal character", will not the clergy be well-placed to dictate the consensus of the community and stifle individual dissent?
In any case, questions like this are unlikely to be settled by writers and intellectuals in the West. Certainly, events in the Muslim world continue to surprise observers, especially those who believe that most Muslims, when given the choice, would opt for Western ways.
Despite its growing economy, Iran elected a known hardliner as its president in June. In Pakistan the same month, the democratically elected government of North-West Frontier Province authorised clerics to prevent unrelated men and women from appearing in public together, and to discourage singing and dancing. Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon have convincingly won sizable votes this year. American efforts to promote democracy in Iraq seem to have resulted in a Shiite-dominated Islamic republic backed by Iran.
These events not only repeatedly confound American expectations that regime change, elections and the free market will empower pro-American, "moderate" Muslims; they also tend to confirm what Foucault felt after witnessing the "first great insurrection against global systems": that Islam as a "political force" is an essential problem for "our time and the coming years".
Largely identified today with extremism and violence, political forms of Islam may shape Muslim societies long after the West has contained jihadi suicide bombers. In the meantime, few writers are likely to outline its possibilities and hint at its dangers as vividly as Reza Aslan does.
*No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. By Reza Aslan. Random House. 310pages. $55; $24.95 (paper).
*Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. By Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson. University of Chicago Press. 346pages. $US60; $US24 (paper).
Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He is a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His new book is An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.
Apr 07
Pankaj Mishra | The New York Review of Books
In the fall of 1978, Michel Foucault travelled to Iran for Corriere della Sera to write about growing mass protests against Reza Shah Pahlavi's regime. Famous for his theoretical analyses of European attitudes toward madness, hospitals and prisons, Foucault knew little, by his own admission, about Persian or Islamic history; and he hadn't previously been a journalist or reporter. Nevertheless, as he put it, "we have to be there at the birth of ideas".
In Iran, where millions of demonstrators and strikers appeared united by their hatred for the American-backed Shah and admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault claimed to see a new form of "political spirituality".
He wrote admiringly of how the "Grand Ayatollahs" had "caused an entire people to come out into the streets", expressing "a perfectly unified collective will". He claimed to be witnessing the "first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane".
As it turned out, Khomeini kept Iran's authoritarian state more or less intact. Far from expressing a political spirituality, he installed clerics in powerful positions, and began to use the Shah's methods - secret police, torture, execution - against his real and perceived opponents, and on a larger scale than the Shah had.
However, Foucault could see how the experience of deprivation, loneliness and anomie made many Muslims in urban centres turn to, rather than away, from Islam; how there was little "protection" for the millions of uprooted Muslims except in "Islam, which for centuries has regulated everyday life, family ties and social relations with such care".
It was why Foucault believed that "Islam - which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilisation - has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men."
Unknown to Foucault, the powder keg was about to be set alight, even as he travelled across Iran, in neighbouring Afghanistan. Here, a Communist regime propped up by the Soviet Union tried to modernise hastily what it saw as a feudal and backward society. The subsequent backlash from radical Islamists was supported by the US, and turned, with the help of Pakistan's Islamist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and Saudi Arabia, into the first global jihad in Islam's long history.
It was the experience of training and fighting together during the decade-long anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that bound the Islamists together into an international community. It defined their enemy more clearly than before as the materialist and imperialist civilisation of the West in which both communists and capitalists were complicit, and it stoked their fantasy of a global Muslim ummah (community).
Over the past two decades, Islamists returning from Afghanistan have declared jihad against Westernised and Westernising elites in their respective countries.
Nevertheless, the eruption of jihadi rage and hatred in New York and London, and in the riots in France and elsewhere in Europe, seems to have bewildered many people in the West. Many journalists and political commentators trying to find out "why they hate us" conclude that Islam itself is, as Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator, wrote after last summer's bombings in London, the problem: the ultimate source of the nihilistic violence unleashed on the West. Defenders of Islam in turn describe it as a religion of peace and compassion, pointing to the Ottoman Empire, which was hospitable to Jewish minorities expelled from Catholic Europe.
One of the achievements of Reza Aslan's No God but God is that it gives Islam as much internal complexity and diversity as the concepts "the West" and "America" possess in our eyes. Aslan - who was born in Iran and teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara - pauses often in his narrative of the Prophet Muhammad's life and those of Muhammad's successors to explain controversial Islamic concepts.
He disputes the popular notion that jihad means "holy war", for example. "War, according to the Quran," he writes, "is either just or unjust; it is never 'holy'."
According to Aslan, Muhammad saw Jews and Christians as "spiritual cousins", and borrowed from Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements. He informs us that "throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran".
He describes how Muhammad gave unprecedented rights of property to women in the ummah he founded; and how these rights form the basis of contemporary women's movements in Iran and Turkey, which are "predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women's rights".
As Aslan sees it, Muhammad preached a "radical message" of "sweeping social reform" in Mecca, upholding "the rights of the underprivileged and the oppressed". But over the centuries, this crucial message of Islam was distorted by political and religious elites fearful of losing their power, especially the clergy or the Ulama, an "extremely small, rigid, and often profoundly traditionalist group of men", who institutionalised Islam by devising the Shari'ah as a comprehensive code of conduct for Muslims.
Aslan is at his best in tracing the origins of political Islam, which, he makes clear, lie in the fear, shared by many educated Muslims in the 19th century, that their coreligionists were helpless before European imperialists.
For Muslims in oil-rich countries, formal decolonisation of the Middle East after World War II brought no respite from foreign domination. With its growing energy needs, the US soon replaced France and Britain as the paramount power in the Middle East, committed to propping up the fundamentalist Wahaabi Saudi regime in Saudi Arabia, the secular shah of Iran and the Jewish state of Israel.
But by the 1980s, a better-educated and more politicised generation of Muslims had emerged in the Middle East - one that was more aware than its ancestors of aggressive foreign meddling in the region, and more inclined to channel its anger and frustration over corruption and unemployment in their countries against America.
This history explains why many Muslims today are likely to be suspicious of and resistant to democratisation and secularisation under Western auspices - a form of modernisation that may appear to them designed for the West rather more than for its presumed beneficiaries.
They are hardly likely to be persuaded otherwise by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the name of democracy.
Nevertheless, Aslan argues that a reformation is "already under way in most of the Muslim world". He sees the attacks on New York and Washington as "part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting - sometimes fanatically - to the 'fundamentals' of their faith".
But unlike many Western commentators on Islam, Aslan does not believe that Muslims have to depoliticise their religion, or even confine it to the so-called personal sphere, in order to be modern. He is convinced that the process of building democracy in Muslim states "can be based only on Islamic traditions and values".
The Prophet named no successors, and the Koran says nothing very specific about the nature of government best suited for Muslims. But the fundamentals of Islam, as defined by Aslan, do seem compatible with democracy.
However, the recent attempts in both Iran and Pakistan to build democratic states on Islamic values warn us against underestimating the clergy, which wields the all-powerful weapon of the Shari'ah. Aslan admits that it is "practically impossible to reconcile the traditionalist view of the Shari'ah with modern conceptions of democracy and human rights".
At the same time, he does not rule out a role for the clergy in an Islamic democracy. "The function of the clergy in an Islamic democracy," he writes, "is ... to reflect the morality of the state", and since it is "the interpretation of religion that arbitrates morality, such interpretation must always be in accord with the consensus of the community".
This sounds too optimistic. Given Islam's "quintessentially communal character", will not the clergy be well-placed to dictate the consensus of the community and stifle individual dissent?
In any case, questions like this are unlikely to be settled by writers and intellectuals in the West. Certainly, events in the Muslim world continue to surprise observers, especially those who believe that most Muslims, when given the choice, would opt for Western ways.
Despite its growing economy, Iran elected a known hardliner as its president in June. In Pakistan the same month, the democratically elected government of North-West Frontier Province authorised clerics to prevent unrelated men and women from appearing in public together, and to discourage singing and dancing. Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon have convincingly won sizable votes this year. American efforts to promote democracy in Iraq seem to have resulted in a Shiite-dominated Islamic republic backed by Iran.
These events not only repeatedly confound American expectations that regime change, elections and the free market will empower pro-American, "moderate" Muslims; they also tend to confirm what Foucault felt after witnessing the "first great insurrection against global systems": that Islam as a "political force" is an essential problem for "our time and the coming years".
Largely identified today with extremism and violence, political forms of Islam may shape Muslim societies long after the West has contained jihadi suicide bombers. In the meantime, few writers are likely to outline its possibilities and hint at its dangers as vividly as Reza Aslan does.
*No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. By Reza Aslan. Random House. 310pages. $55; $24.95 (paper).
*Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. By Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson. University of Chicago Press. 346pages. $US60; $US24 (paper).
Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He is a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His new book is An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.