Islam and the West: Essays dispense with hidden mythologies
The Daily Star – Book Reviews – Islam and the West: Essays dispense with hidden mythologies
The stated aim of “Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation” is to steer a middle course between the two extremes of academia and the media. According to its jacket, it seeks to “go beyond the media presentation of the impact of a politicised notion of Islam in the region and to consider the reality that lies behind current issues in the region and the role that an embedded Islam has played or may play.” Admittedly a book should never be judged by either its cover or its jacket, but editor B. A. Roberson’s introductory essay goes on to reaffirm that the book’s objective is to attempt to offer a more balanced view of the region than traditionally presented in the Western media “from news to film which very often trades on the incompatibility of Islamic or Muslim culture and ideas with modernity.
One of the few criticisms that can no longer be levelled against the West is that it has no interest in Islam. For years the West only understood Islam through the scholarly filters of classical religious texts, etymology and arcane philological discourse, but those days are long gone. Orientalism has since given way to a multitude of modern academic disciplines seeking to provide intellectual frameworks to grasp what Islam is and how it functions in the world. These new methodologies gave themselves the additional task of asking whether the terms of their analysis influenced the conclusions they reached – a concern alien to 19th century orientalism, whose absolute epistemological certainty made self-criticism an unnecessary exercise. It has become something of a commonplace to note that one of the unintended consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks has been a dramatic growth of interest in all things Islamic, but what is less often pointed out is that this interest is satiated in a manner which is as unrelentingly untheoretical as the orientalism of 100 years ago. News media, paperback bestsellers and television documentaries share an all too familiar certitude, comfortable in their conviction that there is no need to explain their use of terms such as “terrorism” or question truths which are ostensibly self-evident. Islam is all too often linked with extremism in media discourse. Whether the connection is explicit or implicit is almost irrelevant – the point is that the connection is unconsidered.
The stated aim of “Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation” is to steer a middle course between the two extremes of academia and the media. According to its jacket, it seeks to “go beyond the media presentation of the impact of a politicised notion of Islam in the region and to consider the reality that lies behind current issues in the region and the role that an embedded Islam has played or may play.” Admittedly a book should never be judged by either its cover or its jacket, but editor B. A. Roberson’s introductory essay goes on to reaffirm that the book’s objective is to attempt to offer a more balanced view of the region than traditionally presented in the Western media “from news to film which very often trades on the incompatibility of Islamic or Muslim culture and ideas with modernity. Those images and this media discourse […] fan out across western society, the academic establishment and government variously affecting perceptions of the region and what goes on there.” Roberson goes on to explain that although academic intellectual production is important and can provide considerable insight, this “usually occurs within the social science context which is not generally read by the public.” Instead, “what emerges, and is more generally absorbed, are a rustle of ideas within which are hidden mythologies, conceptual inadequacies of actual inadequacies and ideological agendas that create at best a [sic] ambiguous sense of reality.” This refutation of the crude images of Islam popularized by the media sounds like a manifesto against dumbing down, but its principles could equally apply to more reflective genres. Even the sophisticated discourses of the social sciences or foreign policy are not immune to having their sense of reality distorted by hidden mythologies and ideological agendas.
The first essay of the collection is “The Politics of the Umma: States and Community in Islamic Movements” by Fred Halliday, which is an avowedly academic study of the way the term umma has shifted in meaning from its earliest usages in the Koran to its most recent semantic evolution at the hands of Al-Qaeda. Halliday recounts familiar yet essential ground in describing how even Koranic usage of the word covered a variety of meanings: a community of believers (in the first instance Muslims), but also other communities based on belief and even communities based on something other than religion. He goes on to look at the ways the word has been used in more modern times, after the age of nationalism, detailing its deployment by thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood. There is an interesting section on how even secular Arab nationalists were able to make use of the word’s polyvalent meanings in the slogans of popular Baathism and a brief diversion into the ways in which other religious words (fidaiyyin, mujahideen, jihad) have been taken up by otherwise secular and even anti-Islamic regimes.
Of greater interest than his accurate but well known words on Ayatollah Khomeini are his thoughts on Al-Qaeda, where he argues against the more conventional understanding of the network as a “free-floating, deracinated” force and points out Al-Qaeda had “and needed to have, a base of a particular territory and the support of a particular state.” There are no prizes for guessing which state(s) he is referring to here.
The theoretical debate which provides the dynamic for Halliday’s essay is essentially whether political discourse shapes politics or whether politics uses discourse to get what it wants. Halliday comes down unashamedly on the latter side of the argument: “Modern political movements have an instrumental relation to the substratum and use whatever is available for contemporary purposes.” The semantic range of words such as umma is sufficiently flexible to be adapted to meet the exigencies of modern politics: rather than limiting options or determining outcomes, culture can provide an instrument to legitimize and reinforce political aspirations. Halliday goes on to suggest that rather than focusing on ideas, perceptions and cultures as it did for most of the 1990s, international relations should discuss “something more concrete, namely states and popular movements.” Between the lines, he seems to be saying IR’s “ideational turn” of the last decade or so has distracted attention away from what should be more pressing concerns – aptly illustrating the point that conceptual inadequacies and an ambiguous sense of reality are not shortcomings confined to the media.
Rudolph Peters’ essay “From Jurists’ Law to State Law” examines how the slogan of implementing Shariah law soon runs up against familiar problems when translated into reality. Although the popular image is that Shariah is a ready-made set of laws whose application will restore righteousness, in reality it is an unwieldy morass of legal rulings known to as fiqh, a scholarly discourse elaborated by jurists containing an overwhelming variety of often conflicting legal viewpoints. The ruler, not the jurists, decide exactly how fiqh is translated into reality. Peters points out that although jurists and scholars are the only legitimate producers of Shariah, regimes which have re-Islamized their legal systems have done so by using Western concepts of a codified law, which sets out illegal acts and their punishments in a clear and consistent manner, rather than detailing the options that judges may choose from according to their own reasoning. Incidentally, codifying the law just happens to mean that control of the law remains in the hands of the state, rather than in those of the jurists.
Halliday and Peters are examples of the type of essay where “Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation” comes into its own, using the tools of the social sciences to engage with real issues of real importance. There are no mythologies hidden here: These essays state their terms of analysis, argue for them and defend them against criticism, all the while ensuring that questions of method remain secondary to the main argument. Other essays have a more traditional value: Annabelle Bottcher’s detailed study of Sunni and Shiite networks in the Middle East is a mine of factual information, but has little that can be extrapolated to other contexts. Quintan Wiktorowicz’s “Islamic Activism and Social Movement Theory: A New Direction for Research” has many potential theoretical implications, but little immediate application to real world issues.
Noah Feldman’s “After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy” is by contrast immersed in real world issues. “After Jihad” is a polemic – a considered, intelligent, liberal, humanist, on the side of the forces of good polemic with its heart in the right place (on its sleeve) – but a polemic nevertheless. And like all good polemics, it says more about the state of the wider debate than it says about the headline issues it addresses. The question Feldman sets himself is: “Can democracy prevail in the lands where Islam prevails?” He notes that the time for revolution and jihad has ended: Muslims across the world are tired of violence; Islamists who seek political influence have now taken up the cause of democracy. This is in part because they consider democracy a way to safeguard themselves from the repression which secular nationalist regimes have inflicted upon their Islamist challengers, but Feldman also sees a “hunger for Islamic democracy [which] is growing.” He demolishes the idea that there is an outright contradiction between the doctrines of Islam and the tenets of democracy: both are founded on a fundamental premise of equality, he explains, and see all men as created equal. It is irrelevant that the U.S. has a secular constitution and gives sovereignty to the people, whereas a future Islamic democracy will have a constitution founded on religion which gives sovereignty to God. If both systems agree that men have inalienable rights which rulers cannot take away from them, is the source of those fundamental rights incredibly important? Islam and democracy are what Feldman calls “mobile ideas,” concepts which have a simple essence which appeals to people across civilizations and cultural divides, but remain flexible enough to be modified according to local conditions. Just as the reality of democracy varies from India to Idaho, so too does the reality of Islam vary from Morocco to the Moro Islands.
Feldman’s book excels not in what it says about the Middle East or Islam, but in what it says about the current state of U.S. foreign policy debate. Feldman is critical of the way the U.S. has supported dictatorships around the world in the interests of short-term stability. He swings hard behind the argument linking democracy with security – in both its pre-9/11 formulation that democratic regimes do not go to war with each other and its post-9/11 reincarnation which asserts democracy will give the unenfranchised a means of expressing their opinions so that militants can blow off stream at home without having to blow up bits of the West. Democracy in the Arab world would, according to Feldman, have the additional benefit of putting in place governments which could negotiate a peace with Israel which their publics would accept.
Feldman’s genius lies in his ability to muster arguments which appeal to differing sections of the American political elite to rally bipartisan support for his vision for the future development of U.S. foreign policy, whilst seeming to avoid the taint of inconsistency or opportunism. In tackling the issue of how to neutralize the rampant anti-Americanism sweeping the world he advocates that the U.S. use its superpower status to support and be seen to support pro-democracy forces in the Muslim world. This line can be sold to old-school realists, who have no time for the liberal critique of U.S. power and who like to see power actually used, as well as to those who would criticize the U.S. for imposing its hegemony but might, just might be persuaded that flexing American muscles for democracy justifies the enduring might of American supremacy.
Feldman is on shakier ground when he tries to suggest how America might encourage democracy. He describes “positive incentives grounded in economics, trade, aid, and political co-operation,” for example, but does this differ from Europe’s traditional policy of constructive engagement? As the policy’s critics point out, constructive engagement hasn’t done a great deal to improve the position of the reformists in Tehran. (Although, as its defenders retort, at least it hasn’t done anything to shore up the power of the hard-liners, unlike the heavy-handed U.S. approach.) This is a familiar vicious circle which Feldman has neither the time or space to break. Similarly, Feldman fails to deal convincingly with the equally familiar “Islamist dilemma” – the fear that Islamists will use democratic means to gain power before introducing repressive theocratic rule. A vibrant civil society will help to lessen this danger, he argues, as will the fact that Islamist parties rely so much on mass constituencies for support, which means they will necessarily need to remain closer to grassroots demands. He skims over the problems this in itself may cause – public pressure to adopt a more militant attitude toward Israel or the U.S. could be the least of future concerns – and responds by asserting the path will not be easy, but will be worthwhile in the long run. “The greater struggle,” as Feldman quotes the Prophet Muhammad as saying, “comes after jihad.”
Daniel Neep is Associate Fellow of the Middle East Program at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
