What is Political Islam

by Charles Hirschkind
published in MER205
Over the last few decades, Islam has become a central point of reference for a
wide range of political activities, arguments and opposition movements. The
term “political Islam” has been adopted by many scholars in order to identify
this seemingly unprecedented irruption of Islamic religion into the secular
domain of politics and thus to distinguish these practices from the forms of
personal piety, belief and ritual conventionally subsumed in Western
scholarship under the unmarked category “Islam.” In the brief comments that
follow, I suggest why we might need to rethink this basic framework.
The claim that contemporary Muslim activities are putting Islam to use for
political purposes seems, at least in some instances, to be warranted. Political
parties such as Hizb al-‘Amal in Egypt or the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in
Algeria that base their appeal on their Islamic credentials appear to exemplify
this instrumental relation to religion. Yet a problem remains, even in such
seemingly obvious examples: In what way does the distinction between the
political and nonpolitical domains of social life hold today? Many scholars have
argued that “political Islam” involves an illegitimate extension of the Islamic
tradition outside of the properly religious domain it has historically occupied.
Few, however, have explored this trend in relation to the contemporaneous
expansion of state power and concern into vast domains of social life previously
outside its purview -- including that of religion.
As we know, through this ongoing process central to modern nation building,
such institutions as education, worship, social welfare and family have been
incorporated to varying degrees within the regulatory apparatuses of the
modernizing state. Whether in entering into business contracts, selling wares
on the street, disciplining children, adding a room to a house, in all births,
marriages, deaths -- at each juncture the state is present as overseer or
guarantor, defining limits, procedures and necessary preconditions.
As a consequence, modern politics and the forms of power it deploys have
become a condition for the practice of many personal activities. As for religion,
to the extent that the institutions enabling the cultivation of religious virtue
become subsumed within (and transformed by) legal and administrative
structures linked to the state, the (traditional) project of preserving those
virtues will necessarily be “political” if it is to succeed. Within both public and
private school in Egypt, for example, the curriculum is mandated by the state:
those wishing to promote or maintain Islamic pedagogical practices necessarily
have to engage political power.
This does not mean that all forms of contemporary Islamic activism involve
trying to “capture the state.” The vast majority of these movements involve
preaching and other da‘wa (missionary) activities, alms giving, providing
medical care, mosque building, publishing and generally promoting what is
considered in the society to be public virtue through community action.
Nonetheless, these activities engage the domain we call the political both in the
sense that they are subject to restrictions imposed by the state (such as
licensing), and in so much as they must often compete with state or state-
supported institutions (pedagogic, confessional, medical) promoting Western
models of family, worship, leisure and social responsibility. The success of even
a conservative project to preserve a traditional form of personal piety will
depend on its ability to engage with the legal, bureaucratic, disciplinary and
technological resources of modern power that shape contemporary societies.
This argument diverges from the common one that Islam fuses religion and
politics, din wa dawla, in a way incompatible with Western analytical
categories. It is worth noting, however, that this frequently heard claim does
not deny the fact that Muslim thinkers draw distinctions
between din and dawla, only that the specific domains designated by these
terms, and the structure of their interrelations do not mirror the situation in
Europe in regard to European states and the Church. Moreover, this leaves
aside the fact that the division between religious and political domains even in
Western societies has always been far more porous than was previously
assumed, as much recent work has made clear. [1] Indeed, as Tocqueville long
ago observed, Protestant Christianity plays an extremely important role in US
politics in setting the moral boundaries and concerns within which political
discussion unfolds, and hence can be considered the premiere political
institution in some sense. I do not refer here to the lobbying efforts of church
groups and other religious advocacy associations, but rather to the way a
pervasive Christianity has been to varying degrees a constitutive element of
Western political institutions. What is clear, in any case, is that greater
recognition must be given to the way Western concepts (religion, political,
secular, temporal) reflect specific historical developments, and cannot be
applied as a set of universal categories or natural domains.
Lastly, although discussions of political motivation or class interest should
continue to be important parts of accounts of contemporary Islam, they are not
necessarily germane to a description of every problem the analyst poses.
Statements like the following have too long been de rigueur in accounts of the
Islamic sahwa(awakening): “Marginalized male elites experience
socioeconomic disparities as cultural loss, and they are drawn to participate in
fundamentalist cadres in order to militate against nationalist structures that
they deplore as un-Islamic because they are, above all, ineffective.” [2] Such
analyses reduce the movements to an expression of the socioeconomic
conditions which gave rise to them. The “marginalized male elites” speak
nothing new to us, as their arguments and projects, once properly translated
into the language of political economy, seem entirely familiar. Lost, in other
words, is any sense of the specificity of the claims and reasoning of the actors.
This is brushed aside as we reiterate what we already know about the universal
operation of socioeconomic disparities.
Grasping such complexity will require a much more subtle approach than one
grounded in a simple distinction between (modern) political goals and
(traditional) religious ones. Terms such as “political Islam” are inadequate here
as they frame our inquiries around a posited distortion or corruption of
properly religious practice. In this way, the disruptive intrusions or outright
destruction enacted upon society by the modernizing state never even figure in
the analysis. In contrast, the various attempts of religious people to respond to
that disruption are rendered suspect, with almost no attempt to distinguish
those instances where such a critical stance is warranted from those where it
is not. It is not surprising, in this light, that militant violence and public
intolerance have become the central issues of so many studies of al-sahwa al-
islamiyya(Islamic awakening), while the extensive coercion and torture
practiced by governments get relegated to a footnote.

The Arab Spring has led to significant political gains for Islamists in Egypt,
Tunisia, and Libya.* CFR’s Reza Aslan, an expert in religion and foreign policy,
says Islamist parties initially benefited from being the most organized and
having a reputation for being incorruptible, but are now faced with the
challenges of governing. "[W]hat these Islamists are starting to learn, across the
region, is that you can’t maintain your incorruptible image while also having
political power," he says, noting that the more political power Islamists gain,
the more splintered they become. Aslan says the United States should continue
to engage in these post-revolutionary states "in order to ward off the possibility
that greater conflict and instability will allow the religious groups to take full
control."

I asked Islamic Studies Professor Ebrahim Moosa a few months into the
Arab Spring whether political Islam was waxing or waning in the Middle
East, and his answer was, "We don’t know." About eighteen months have
lapsed since that conversation. Can you give an overview of where you
think political Islam stood in the region two years ago and where it is
now?

"I think what these Islamists are starting to learn, across the region, is that you
can’t maintain your incorruptible image while also having political power."

It was only natural that political Islam would rise to prominence in places like
Egypt, Tunisia, and so on, because the Islamists were the most well organized
and allegedly incorruptible opposition forces out there. So in the first election,
after the downfall of these dictators, they were in the best position to take
advantage of the political process. That’s precisely what happened. But, I think
what these Islamists are starting to learn, across the region, is that you can’t
maintain your incorruptible image while also having political power. That
power tends to corrupt. Now in Egypt, we’re seeing even former supporters of
the Muslim Brotherhood demanding the downfall of Mohammed Morsi’s
presidency.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest of these working political

organizations, and this Brotherhood-led government is currently
embroiled in a very tense political fight on the one hand with secularists
and liberals, and on the other hand with Salafis over Islam’s role in the
Egyptian constitution. How do you see this playing out?

I think the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is in a precarious situation, trying to

balance the concerns of its constituents as well as the demands of those
Egyptians—secularists, liberals and so on—who did not vote for them, but
whom the Muslim Brotherhood represents now as the ruling majority in
Egypt’s government. Frankly, the draft constitution, despite its many faults—
and there are many faults in this constitutional draft—is a good representation
of this delicate balancing act. It neither tips too far in the camp of the Salafis
who are looking for the state to become the arbiter of conservative Islamic
moral values, nor does it tip too far in the camp of the secularists and liberals
in making sure that it still pays homage to Islam as a source of law and to Islamic
ideals and values as a foundation for the state.

As you’ve mentioned, the Brotherhood and these other Islamist parties

were the predominant winners in a lot of these elections across the region
because they were well organized. How much do their wins represent the
ideological bent of the people versus just having the ability to get out the
vote and having name recognition?

I think we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the vast majority of the
population in Egypt is religiously conservative. Among that vast majority, an
even larger majority has repeatedly stated that it wants Islam to play an
influential role in their lives, in politics, in the government. So in many ways,
the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in the political realm is reflective of the
fact that they at least outwardly espouse the morals, the values, the concerns
and the worldview of the majority of the Egyptian population. That’s how
democracies work. People tend to vote for candidates not based on their
politics, or even on checkbook concerns. They tend to vote for those candidates
who share their worldview and perspective. And the Muslim Brotherhood was
able to take advantage of that.

Overall, how has the rise of political Islam changed the regional
dynamics? Who’s gaining in influence and who’s lost influence?

That remains to be seen. The one thing that I will say, however, is that for years,
scholars like myself have been saying that political participation has the power
to moderate radical ideology in this region. If Islamists can be convinced to put
down their guns and to pick up ballots, the necessity of governance, as opposed
to the simplicity of being the oppressed opposition, will force them either to
moderate their ideals or it will cost them their veneer of piety and
incorruptibility; they’ll be seen as nothing more than just another political
party, which is also a good thing. In other words, success means moderation,
failure means irrelevance. Either of those things are a much better outcome for
peace and prosperity in the region than the continued oppression of political
Islam.

How does this situation compare to the Iranian Revolution?

The Iranian revolution of 1979 bears no semblance whatsoever to what’s been
going on in the Arab Spring. It was an utterly unique event. First and foremost,
it should be noted that ’79 was by no means an Islamic revolution; that is
actually post-revolutionary propaganda. I was in Tehran during the revolution.
There were Marxists and Communists and secularists and Democrats, men,
women, Jews, Muslims, Christians, liberal clerics and conservative clerics: a
massive and diverse coalition of people united simply by their desire to see the
shah go.

Now it’s true that in the post-revolutionary chaos of Iran, particularly as a result
of Iran’s instant pariah status in the West and the almost immediate war that
began with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—an eight year war that left hundreds of
thousands of Iranians dead—in the midst of that chaos, the forces in Iran that
were most organized, that held the most currency with the masses, were the
religious forces. Hence, that revolution gave way to the religious totalitarianism
that we now see in Iran.

"The United States and the Western world must be deeply engaged
in post-revolutionary state building in order to ward off the
possibility that greater conflict and instability will allow the
religious groups to take full control."

If there really is a lesson to be learned from Iran, it’s not that political Islam
necessarily leads to theocracy. It’s that the United States and the Western world
must be deeply engaged in post-revolutionary state-building in order to ward
off the possibility that greater conflict and instability will allow the religious
groups to take full control.

The United States has engaged with the Brotherhood-led government of

Egypt, the Islamist-led governments of Libya and Tunisia. What has to
happen for it to engage with Hamas, which won a majority of seats in the
Palestinian elections many years before these other governments?

Well, first and foremost, it has to stop being afraid that the pro-Israel lobby will
punish it for doing so. Moshe Dayan famously said that you don’t negotiate with
your friends, you negotiate with your enemies, and frankly, even Israel is in
daily negotiations with Hamas when it comes to security matters, water
resources, etc. So the idea that because Hamas is labeled a terror organization,
the United States is forbidden from talking to it even to the benefit of its own
interests, even to the benefit of Israel’s interests, is, in my view, an ultimately
disastrous and self-defeating policy.

Do you think things have changed enough to open the way for this now
that political Islam is a mainstream political movement in the region?

The more that political Islam becomes successful in the region, à la what’s
happened with the AKP in Turkey, the more the pressure will be applied on
more radical groups like Hamas to moderate their own ideology. Not so as to
be accepted on the international stage, but because it is to the benefit of their
populations, as well as to themselves. So yes, if what’s happening in post-
revolutionary Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, leads to peace and prosperity, economic
and political development, then the path for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah
will be clear. It is just their responsibility to take it.

Several experts have noticed that Islamism is not monolithic. Some people
say the term "Islamist" is overused and sometimes lumps in schools of
thought that should be more carefully delineated. Can you talk a little
about when to use the term "Islamist" or "Islamism," and when to qualify?

Islamism means nothing more than religious nationalism of the Islamic variety.
It’s the same kind of religious nationalism that one sees among, for instance,
Christians in the United States. Scholars sometimes refer to them as
Dominionist or Christianists. It’s the same kind of religious nationalism that one
sees in Israel among the religious Zionists, whose loyalty, as they themselves
declare, is not to the state of Israel but to the biblical land of Israel. It’s the same
kind of religious nationalism that one sees in India amongst the BJP, who have
created a new kind of Hindu orthodoxy, Hindutva as they call it, whose purpose
is to fuse Hindu religiosity with the state. Religious nationalism, in other words,
is a universal phenomenon. Islamism is just the Islamic flavor of it. And as one
would expect, it comes in multiple versions, depending on the actual beliefs,
practices, and worldviews of the Islamists themselves.

What I find interesting is not so much the diversity of Islamism. That seems
obvious. What I find interesting is that the more these Islamists gain political
power, the more fractured they become. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example,
despite the aura of unity that it tries to present, both to the outside world and
to the Egyptian population, is more fractured today than it’s ever been. It’s
fractured along generational lines, along ideological lines. There are those
among the Muslim Brothers who feel as though the organization has stilted,
that its agenda is not suitable to the needs of modern Egypt. And there are
those, who happen to mostly be in leadership positions (for now), who want to
maintain the old struggles of the past among secularists, among Israel and the
West etc. So I think, in a way, the more we encourage the Islamist parties to join
the political arena, the more they are forced to present their ideas and agendas
to the public, to make them part of the open market place of ideas in society,
the more their ideology is going to fracture and moderate.

"What I will say is that in any stable and successful democracy, it is

not any single political party that is going to define the state; it’s the
rule of law that will define it."

What I will say is that in any stable and successful democracy, it is not any single
political party that is going to define the state; it’s the rule of law that will define
it. So what’s happening in Egypt as they are drafting this constitution, as they
are trying to negotiate all these post-revolutionary interests, that are clashing
both in parliament and on the streets of Cairo–that process itself is going to go
a lot further in defining the future of Egypt than whoever is president or
whoever runs parliament. So our focus should be less on the Muslim
Brotherhood and its ideals and more on the hard facts of the constitution and
its negotiating of rights and values, privileges, and the rule of law.

*Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Libya has
an Islamist-led government.

The Role That Religion Plays In Politics

Of The Middle East

Amir Kazmi

The role that religion plays in politics is embedded in the structure of the
Middle East. The important role of religion in politics arises partly from the
history of the region. Historically, both religion and tradition went hand in hand
to form the government systems of the region. Modernity in terms of
"secularism, individualism, democracy, [and] economic rationalism" have had
little latitude over the Middle East as a whole (Gerner 319). Hence, many
governments use religion to justify their authoritative political systems within
the Middle East. In this paper I will discuss how religion in politics is the most
critical issue facing the Middle Eastern countries today in regards to the region
regaining its leadership role in the issue of world affairs.

The religion and politics of the

Middle East have special significance
in view of the history and politics of
the Middle East. After all, the three
great monotheistic religions find
their roots in the Middle East.
Judaism was founded about four
thousand years ago and it is the first
religion to believe in one God. Jews
believe that they are the 'chosen
people' by God's will and it is through
this religious sentiment that their
"communal identity" comes from Judaism itself (321). Hence, the Jews have
placed their religion at the center of their life, community and the political
arena.

Therefore, one must understand the faith to understand the region's politics, as
there can be no severance between Jewish religious beliefs and Israeli politics
and society. History tells us that Jews, like Christians and Muslims "have used
religion to justify and legitimate expansion and warfare" (321). According to
the Hebrew Bible, God (Yahweh) was on the Jewish side when they fought
enemies of Zion. Like Judaism the other two Abrahamic religions, Christianity
and Islam, have also used religious revelation to rationalize holy war. The
Papacy took a political step under Pope Urban II, when crusades were launched
as holy war to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims. The massacres of Muslims
took place for political gain, which was a deed of the crusaders and were
justified through Christianity.

Furthermore, religion in politics plays a crucial role in the current Middle East
conflict. Islamic sharia is taken into serious consideration by Islamic countries,
when making political steps or creating new laws. Similarly, Jewish law known
as halakah is an important facet that encompasses most laws passed by Israel.
Israel is seen as the place "that would guarantee the survival and future of the
Jewish people" (331). Now, if the national interest of the country is the
protection of the Jewish people then obviously its political decisions will be
obscured by religion.

Also, it is important to note that many Jews see "terrestrial gains made in 1967"
as part of their promised biblical land, which makes it hard to find a neutral
solution for the Middle East crisis (332). A problem with religion in politics is
that it allows for terrorist organizations such as Gush Emunim or Hamas to
distort religion for political purposes. But in the end all these extreme groups
are fighting over a small portion of land resulting from the Middle East conflict,
which is the reason for their existence. Furthermore, it is interesting to see that
the one thing that the League of Arab Nations comes to consensus on is their
position towards the Middle East conflict. The reason the Arab nations come
together over the issue of Middle East and the future of Jerusalem is because
they share a common religion. Thus, it is fair to say, "Jerusalem symbolizes the
significance of religion in the politics of the Middle East" (330). But the leaders
of the Middle East have significantly different policies concerning world affairs.

Those wishing to regain leadership roles in world affairs have to understand

that religion in politics has proven to have a significant place in the Middle East.
Unlike the West where religion is greatly marginalized as a result of the
Enlightenment period and the experiences of the Renaissance, the Middle East
has had a resurgence of religion. Religious fever is partially due to the rejection
of Western secularism. The leaders of most Middle East nations understand
that implementation of Western technology is eminent for success in the world
community. After all it is very much possible to adapt the technology and reject
the social structure. Many societies in the Middle East feel that it is the social
structure of the West that is at war with their traditional or religious structure,
which entails the resurgence of strong religious sentiment. But many of the
leaders of the Middle East have abused this sentiment of the public to their
advantage.

If leaders of Middle East nations truly wish to see their countries play a key role
in globalism and secure a place in the world community, then they need to stop
using religion for their personal gain. It is evident that leaders of the Middle
East nations have used and still use religion to rally support in order to stay in
power. One of the main reasons politicized Islam has taken such a strong role
in the Middle East, is due to corrupt authoritarian leaders of the Middle East
who use religion to ensure their positions. For example, Saddam added
religious scripture to the national flag upon hearing of U.S. attacks because he
knew the Iraqi masses would support a religious cause.

In conclusion, I see religion in politics as a very important issue in the Middle

East because it determines the current and future role of the region in the world
community. Apart from the Arab nations, "Israel's very existence and identity
remains tied to Judaism" (339). Furthermore, I believe religion has allowed
many of the authoritarian regimes to stay in power even in postcolonial times.
For example, in the national news of Saudi Arabia the monarch, King Fahad bin
Abdul Aziz, is always referred to as 'the custodial of the two holy mosques'.

Over time, I believe many nations will see the fall of authoritative rule and a
move towards democracy. But we will not see the usual Western democratic
setup, but rather, democracy that has some religious basis such as structure of
Iran. In my view, religion will continue to play an important role in the future
for the Middle East as they decide the fate of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict,
determine the role of the Persian nation of Iran, and form the position of the
region as a leader in world affairs.
Islam and Arab NationalismThe Role of Religion in Middle Eastern Politics
For most Westerners the traditional religious world of Islam, despite the
postwar upsurge of the Orient, still remains an enigma.

JOEL CARMICHAEL / JULY 1, 1957

9
SHARES

A
As Universal religions, both Islam and Christianity make universal claims on the
lives of their adherents. Over the last three centuries, however, Christianity has
been forced drastically to curtail its claims, with the result that religious life in
the West has been restricted to a narrow sphere; the secular nature of society
is now taken for granted. Nationalism, erupting in the French Revolution, gave
political expression to secular tendencies that had heretofore found their outlet
in philosophy and science; it has been one of the strongest forces in bringing
about the sharp Western separation of the sacred and the profane in the West.
Nationalism asserted the priority of local interests and loyalties over the
universal and ecumenical interests embodied in the Church, and made the
nation-state rather than the body of the faithful the essential community.

Islam’s position today more closely resembles that of the medieval than of the
modern Christian church, for it still claims a loyalty that transcends (and
negates) national and secular ties, and in large measure it receives this kind of
loyalty even from Moslems who are no longer devout. Why is this? Why is the
conflict between religious universalism and nationalist parochialism so much
less sharply defined in the Middle East than was the case in the West? For one
thing, several generations, indeed centuries, were needed to reduce the
authority of religion in the West and make that of nationalism prevail; Arab
nationalism is trying to do the same thing in the space of a single generation.
And for another, whereas the Western nationalism had no overwhelming
enemy from outside the cultural and political sphere of Europe to reckon with,
their opponents all being found among indigenous traditional elements, Arab
nationalism sees its main antagonist in an external power, Western
“imperialism,” and not in the religious and dynastic forces at home. Arab
nationalism, insofar as it is anti-Western, calls on religion as an ally; it has
behind it a quasi-religious drive, mobilizes the fanaticism of believers, and
exploits Islam’s hostility to everything that is not Islamic. Hence in the Middle
East the opposition between secular nationalism and ecumenical religion
appears to be dissolved in the larger struggle against the non-Moslem world.

Yet the contradiction between nationalism and religion remains; it is as real and
potent in the Middle East as it has been elsewhere. What has happened is that
the conflict has transferred itself from the arena of politics to the psyche of the
individual—whence it re-enters politics as a highly complicating factor. Nor is
this the first time that religious universalism has contended with a form of non-
religious particularism within the Arab soul. In the Middle East, this inner
cleavage is ancient, with roots that antedate the Western or any other species
of modern nationalism.

_____________

The contradiction between the universalism of Islam and ethnic separatism lay
at the very origins of Islam, and it has survived to the present day. Indeed, it
was the effort to resolve the contradiction that gave Islam its eruptive force and
expansive élan during the first century of its life.

Before Mohammed the pagan nomads of the Arabian Peninsula—the “Arabs”

proper—did not think of themselves as a nation in any sense of the term; their
contact with the non-Arab world was far too restricted for them to become
conscious of themselves as a separate entity. Much less did they feel any such
thing as Arab solidarity. Like other more or less isolated peoples, they took
themselves for granted; their first allegiance was to family and tribe, and the
sphere of their political life did not extend beyond tribal conflicts and relations.

Mohammed set himself squarely against this primitive outlook, and the upshot
of his work and teachings was the replacement of the tribal divisions of the
Peninsula with a unitary Moslem community and a Moslem solidarity. Far more
than did medieval Christianity, Islam established itself as a dense complex of
behavior, belief, and authority embracing the whole of life. It was thanks to their
new unity in Islam that the Bedouin tribes were able to undertake aggressive
military and political action against the outside world and make their mark on
history.
In the beginning, however, Islam was, despite its universal implications, a
purely “Arab” affair. During the first decades of the Arab conquests, “Moslem”
was synonymous with “Arab,” and to become a Moslem meant entering the
Arab aristocracy. The Arabian tribes at this time were acutely “race”-conscious,
and the early Caliphate tried to preserve their separate ethnic identity; the
universal implications of the Islamic faith did not initially overcome Arab
exclusiveness. It is now generally admitted that the legend of Islam’s being
spread by the sword is nothing more than legend. It was in fact in the interest
of the Arabian Moslems to discourage conversions to Islam, since it was easier
to exploit non-believers. The Bedouin hosts that carried the banner of Islam
abroad were an essentially secular political force, despite the cardinal role their
religion played in unifying them as a group. Thus the Moslem-Arab occupation
of the Middle East was in its first stages similar in many respects to the British
occupation of Egypt twelve hundred years later: there was the same rigid
exclusiveness on the part of the ruling caste, the same abstention from
interference with “native” life, and the same financial exploitation of the
“natives” in order to cover state expenditures.

Yet Islam was the Arab banner, Islam kept the Arabs united, and the tenor of
Mohammed’s gospel was clear and unmistakable: not a parochial, aristocratic,
or exclusive message, it proclaimed that all were equal, or could become so,
under the new faith. In the long run, the equalizing tendencies at the core of
Islam proved inescapable: the Arabs could discourage but not prevent non-
Arabs from adopting their faith. The establishment of a religious community in
place of the tribal or blood group had given the great clans of Arabia effective
political and military cohesion, but their new religion was in its nature bound
to spread to non-Arabs; and the unequivocal universalism of Islam worked to
obliterate distinctions based on anything but religious adherence.

Thousands and then tens of thousands of non-Arabs, becoming converted to

Islam, were able to insinuate themselves into the Arab ruling class: religion,
which had originally been that class’s exclusive and defining prerogative,
ultimately became the very means by which its hegemony was overthrown.
Conversion not only relieved non-Arabs of the heavy taxes levied on infidels, it
enabled them to share in the exploitation of all those who remained infidels. In
the first stages of what rapidly became a mass movement, appearances were
kept up by providing new converts to Islam with “Arab” genealogies on the
classic tribal pattern, by making them “clients” of one Arabian tribe or another.
But the sheer number of new converts soon made this practice impossible.
In Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia the new converts streamed into the cities
from the land, their places being more or less taken by Bedouins pouring out of
Arabia in the hope of sharing in the spoils of conquest. These new Bedouins
were not part of the conquering armies of Islam—which had anyhow been
small in number. Since the Moslem conquests had been swiftly consolidated,
the Bedouin newcomers were needed neither in the army nor in the
administration. Yet as “automatic” Moslems they were exempt from many taxes
as well as possessed of other privileges. The presence of so many superfluous
but privileged individuals, together with the mass infiltration of the Islamic
religious community by non-Arabs, eventually put an intolerable strain on the
fiscal structure of the Arab empire and made necessary its thoroughgoing
reorganization. Thereafter the privileged position of Moslems as such with
respect to taxation was undermined—taxes had to be levied on a different
basis.

The remarkable success of the Arab colonization of the Middle East, which
imposed the Arab language and the Arab religion on whole peoples and over
vast areas, was hardly the result of a brutal military policy. It was—as the
celebrated historian, C. H. Becker, has put it—part of “the final consequences of
an economic process the Arabs had neither foreseen nor desired.” And among
the other consequences of this process was the destruction of the Arabs
themselves as a ruling class.

Once the conquered peoples—the Arameans, the Byzantines, the Persians, and
others—had been accepted into the fold of Islam and placed on an equal level
with the Arabs, their superior culture worked inevitably to give them the
ascendancy: they, and not their conquerors, became the principal exponents of
the new Islamic civilization.

Arab predominance in the Islamic empire lasted some one hundred and
twenty-five years after Mohammed. until about 750 C.E.; its decline was
signalized by the rise of the Abbasid dynasty and the removal of the capital of
the empire from Damascus to Baghdad. Thenceforth “Islam” stood for
something quite different from the essentially worldly rule of a Bedouin
oligarchy that was indifferent to the religion professed by their subjects. Now
“Islam” designated a universal state—in fact, the ancient Persian empire
resurrected—and a unitary civilization in which the Arabs were one of many
peoples, with only their language and some elements of religion remaining to
commemorate their role as midwives of the new society. In effect, the true
Arabs simply returned to the wastes of Arabia, and the new and unified state
they left behind them was thenceforth carried on the shoulders of the older and
more cultured elements among the variegated non-Arab peoples they had
conquered.

This state was ruled by a despotic, bureaucratic government which treated its
subjects as an undifferentiated mass that existed only for purposes of
exploitation. The Caliphate bureaucracy was a legacy of the ancient Orient, not
at all an Arab creation. The untutored Bedouins had no interest in devising a
new administrative apparatus to replace the old one in the countries they had
conquered; when they took the old one over they took with it its bureaucratism
and the absolutism at its top. The Arab prince, who originally had been primus
inter pares, now became an old-fashioned Oriental despot; with state power
concentrated in the hands of one or a few persons, both Arabs and non-Arabs
were reduced to a common level of subjugation, and the Arab oligarchy that had
accomplished the conquests was eliminated.

_____________

It was not Islam that produced the new unitary civilization of the Middle East;
rather, a unitary civilization whose origins antedated Islam and the original
Arabs took on the vestments of Islamic religion and the Arabic language. The
extraordinary expansion of the Moslem faith and of the Arabic language was
made possible by this essentiallv non-Arab civilization, in whose creation the
Arabs’ own role proved to be little more than that of a military and political
catalyst.

The peoples subjugated by the illiterate Bedouins despised their conquerors;

their conversion to Islam, by making them the Arabs’ equals, restored their
morale and enabled them to give effective political and social expression to
their disdain. A strong anti-Arab reaction made itself felt among the Arameans,
Persians, and Byzantines. This in turn inspired a new accession of religious
feeling among the Arabs—understandably enough, since all they could lay
claim to in the way of distinction vis-à-vis the urban peoples they had
conquered was the religion—and language—they had originated.
By 750 C.E., with the decline of the Arab dynasty of the Umayyads and the rise
of the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Arabs proper had lost all genuine power. It was
from this time on that religion, which had hitherto been largely a matter of
indifference to most Arabs, began to acquire a vital importance. In the
beginning they had showed an almost total lack of proselytizing zeal;
missionary activity had been left to the newly converted Arameans, Byzantines,
Persians, and Berbers. The Arameans, with their acquaintance with clericalism,
and the Persians, with their ancient familiarity with a state church and with
religion as something universal, gave the resurrected Persian empire its
finishing touch in the form of a state ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Once this hierarchy was established, it became a matter of interest to the state
itself co add to the flock of the faithful—an interest that had been lacking to the
aristocratic, non-clerical, purely Arab regime. Moreover, the learned scribes
who were so essential to the functioning of the Oriental despotic state, and who
had never existed among the Arabs of Arabia, found their role enhanced by the
new importance accorded to religion. The social levelling that occurred under
the absolutist Islamic state made it possible for the scribes, who were inspired
with an authentic religious fervor such as the Arab aristocrats had never been
capable of, to consolidate their spiritual influence over the people.

Only in the third and fourth centuries after Mohammed did Islam begin to
acquire the status of a religion that it possesses to this day. For the Arabs of
Arabia, the Islamic religion had been little more than a simple body of precepts
serving them as justificatory slogans and symbols in their assaults upon richer
lands. The very propagation of Islam, and of Arabic with it, was in the beginning
the work of a comparative handful of men, who owed their success to the
internal dissensions of the affluent and cultivated societies they infiltrated.

The Arabic language, the most precious possession of the otherwise barbarous
Bedouins, though it united the world of Islam, did not make it an Arab nation.
The conquerors were spread thinly over enormous areas, and as they
continued extending their conquests their relative numbers were reduced even
further. Owing to this disparity—and to the institution of polygamy—the
original Bedouins were ethnically submerged in their subject populations
within the course of a few generations.

_____________
II

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the term “Arab” only leads to
confusion if it is taken to have a uniform meaning over the past two millennia.
The term “Arab,” as referring to a political concept, did not exist until as
recently as the end of the last century. Before the rise of the national idea in
Europe itself, people simply did not think of themselves as members of any
“nation.” Their primary social identification was based on religion, class, or
locality. Until the emergence of Arab nationalism in our own day, an “Arab”
would think of himself primarily as a Moslem vis-à-vis the world at large, or as
a peasant, or as someone from a particular town or village. In Arabic
itself, arabi means simply “nomad”: thus in the Egyptian censuses of the first
part of this century, the term “Arab” is reserved to the 60,000 members of the
nomadic tribes wandering about the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere.

The Arabic language itself had no ethnic connotation in the past: anyone might
speak it, though it was conventionally understood that its vernacular was
spoken best among the “real” Arabs, the Bedouins of Arabia. In the heyday of
Islam, spoken Arabic was the lingua franca of a universal state as well as its
learned language; with the decay of Islam it became restricted to those peoples
among whom it had taken root as a vernacular. Only in this century, after
language had become the chief criterion of nationality in Europe, did Arabic
acquire its role as an ostensible symbol of potential nationhood.

The crowning anomaly of the contemporary Arab “national” resurgence surely

lies in the fact that its seed was sown by Christian missionaries, chiefly from
Britain, France, and America, who established missions, hospitals, and schools
in the Middle East in the latter part of the 19th century. Modern Arab
nationalism had its birth in Syria and Lebanon as the result of the convergence
of two interests: that of the Christian missionaries, and that of the Arabic-
speaking Christian communities of those countries.

What might be called the ideological interest of the Christian missionaries was
selfevident: the reconversion to the Christian faith of the vast schismatic
community that was Islam. But the form that this endeavor took cannot but
evoke a wry smile from the disinterested observer. The missionaries quickly
discovered that the conversion of any significant number of Moslems was out
of the question. From its very inception their enterprise proved futile. Yet the
collection of funds in Europe and America for missionary work among the
Moslems, as among other “backward” peoples, had acquired great momentum;
it was too much to expect such a source of income to be renounced. What
happened, inevitably, was that the good work was indeed carried on in the
Moslem countries, but only inside their Christian communities. To be sure,
there were “conversions”—not from Islam, however, but from one Christian
denomination to another. In effect, the missions to Islam were reduced to
poaching on one another’s preserves.

At the same time the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, tied to
Europe as they were by a variety of historical bonds, proved to be a natural
channel for the communication of European, and especially French, ideas to the
Arab world. For this reason they were the first Arabs to catch the nationalist
enthusiasm.

But the moment the old Christian communities consciously reached out toward
nationalism, they were faced with the question of what nationality. Hitherto,
Arabic-speaking Christians had defined themselves by their religion alone, in
common with the Moslems and almost all the other peoples of the Middle East.
In the past, an Arabicspeaking Christian would never have dreamed of calling
himself an “Arab”: he would have considered himself primarily a Maronite, a
Melkite, or a Greek Orthodox; secondarily as coming from a specific locality, or
being of a certain clan or family. The question of language would have seemed
trivial or irrelevant—certainly he spoke Arabic, as all sorts of people did, but
what did that signify?

This was the usual attitude throughout the Middle East until the latter third of
the last century. Then, influenced not only by European ideas, as pointed out
above, but spurred by a long-standing, deep-rooted resentment of the Ottoman
Turks, Arabicspeaking Christians began to see in “Arabism” a way out of the
ghetto in which they were confined. Arabism meant the Arabic language, the
only common denominator of Moslems and Christians in the Middle East. Hence
the initial impulse to what has since become Arab nationalism was furnished
by the attempt of Arabic-speaking Christians to burst their constricting social
bonds. It was the Arabic-speaking Christians who were the first to offer
themselves as political leaders to the “Arab world.”
Christian, and especially Protestant, missionaries played a seminal role in the
matter of language too, which was now becoming of cardinal importance in
Middle Eastern life. For it was they who actually revived Arabic as a modern
written language, first through Arabic translations of the Bible, and then as the
medium of a periodical press. Thus even such a fanatically prized Moslem
possession as the Arabic language was raised to its contemporary eminence by
the efforts of infidel missionaries.1

It was in the Christian communities of the Middle East, too, that the Arab
aversion, ancient and difficult to define, to the Turks first acquired effective
political expression. Dislike of the Turks turned out to be a profoundly
important factor in the genesis of the Arab national movement. Neither
Christians nor Arabic-speaking Moslems could get on with them. The “Arabs,”
as representative of a brilliant ancient culture possessing a great literature,
despised the Turks for their lack of cultivation. The Turks on their side, enjoying
military and political superiority, despised the “Arabs” as impoverished
peasants, primitive Bedouins, and grubby tradesmen. Nor were the Turks ever
distinguished for their Moslem piety; since Ataturk, indeed, Islamic solidarity
has become a negligible factor in Turkish spiritual life, and it scarcely counts
for anything more in the arena of political maneuvers.

So much for the historical roots of Arab rationalism, which in its present-day
form impresses the observer by nothing so much as its curious hollowness.
Owing its impulse largely to negative reactions—against the Turks, the French,
the British, and latterly and most virulently the State of Israel—Arab
nationalism lacks positive content most of all (as has been pointed out by a
number of contributors to these pages). A diffuse, farflung, stagnant society
threatening to disintegrate under modern pressures, Islam is basically
indifferent or hostile, not perhaps to the feeling of nationalism as such, but to
the formulation of the real guiding ideas and the positive ethos which
nationalism needs, and without which it seems condemned to remain rhetorical
extravagance and empty xenophobia.

The disharmony between the universal perspectives of Islam and the

parochialism of Arab nationalism is further complicated by the very number of
Arab states now in existence. If it is difficult enough for a Moslem to think of
himself as being an Arab by nationality, how much more difficult it must be to
think of himself as, say, an Iraqi. It is possible, after all, to conceive of Arab unity
on the basis of language, religion, tradition, and other things, including
the will to be Arab. But how is it possible to conceive of Iraqi, Syrian, or Saudi-
Arabian patriotism? As soon as they are stated clearly enough, these notions
crumble. Someone whose mother tongue is Arabic, whose religion is Islam, and
who comes from Basra, might—and does—make the leap from this particular
cluster of group identifications to an Arab identity, but how can he stop halfway
and call himself—with pride, naturally—a Jordanian?

Indeed, he seldom does, and it seems most unlikely that such ramshackle
administrative hangovers of the First World War as Jordan have much of a
future as a rallying point for patriotism. But the fact remains that the Arab
states exist, and however meaningless they may be in other respects, they all
now have their hosts of bureaucrats and army officers for whom the survival of
these states is a matter of immediate and compelling self-interest. The struggle
to preserve them has served to exacerbate the countless factional feuds and
rivalries that already rend Arab society.

Egypt is the only Arabic-speaking country in the Middle East which has been
successful in inspiring a local patriotism. A large part of the explanation for this
lies in the fact that her present national tradition (as well as state structure)
goes back to the opening up of the country by Napoleon; and after the
withdrawal of the French she remained a distinguishable political entity, first
under the Turks and then under the British. However, it is only in our own
generation that Egyptian national feeling has become more or less “Arabicized”:
most Egyptian nationalists used to look down on the “Arabs,” considering
themselves the heirs of a “Pharaonic” culture.

_____________

Thus Arab nationalism is handicapped in its effort to define itself by the

shorelessness of Islam on the one side, and by the self-interest of local
bureaucracies on the other. Yet it is impossible for Arab nationalism to detach
itself from Islam, which after all numbers more than 350 million people; and
the local governments of the Arab world, however jerry-built, do in fact exist
and hold political power. For these and other reasons, Arab nationalism has
been unable so far to derive anything positive from the fund of ideas it has
imported from Europe. Nor has it been able to kindle a fire among the mass of
Arabs themselves, who still live within the moribund but tenacious traditions
of old-fashioned Islam, and are paralyzed, on top of that, by a general economic
backwardness. Even among the Arab intelligentsia, who are, after all, the main
if not the only vessels of its ideas, nationalism has very little to show of
substance. Most Western-educated Arabs—and all the real political leaders of
the Arabs are Western-educated—strike one as being a sort of Luftmenschen,
people with no real economic place or function.

The gap between the old and the new in those Arab countries which are
exposed to Western culture is so vast, and the backwardness of the mass of the
population so extreme, that a difference in schooling produces an absolute
difference that is both social and psychological. In the Middle East, Western
education automatically puts one in an “upper class,” regardless of one’s
economic status which may well be rather low. Given the general backwardness
of the economy, with its very limited demand for specialists of any sort, the
educated young man coming from a family without substantial means—and
most Arab secondary school and university graduates come from such
families—finds himself looking to the government for a job and a livelihood.
The government expands its bureaucracy to wasteful proportions to meet this
expectation, but it still cannot take care of everybody. This situation accounts
for the typical Middle Eastern phenomenon of a swollen class of
educated Luftmenschen who are Luftmenschenbecause they belong socially to
an upper stratum while lacking an economic function.

The only refuge of these Luftmenschen is politics. But here too opportunities are
limited: the masses are backward intellectually as well as economically, and
completely indifferent to those abstractions of Western political thought which
form the main commodity that the elite has to offer. Here again the Arab
intellectuals are thrown back on themselves and forced to carry on their
political activity within abnormally shrunken, sterile, and self-stultifying limits.
It is the gap between ideas and actual consequences, between ambition and
responsibilities, that is: largely responsible for the hectic feverishness, the
combination of an extreme and bombastic intransigence of form with a vast
poverty of content, which is characteristic of intellectual life in quasi-colonial
countries. Real social and political needs become lost in a dense fog of intrigue,
factionalism, and wire-pulling that makes it impossible to put forward or fight
for any realistic program related to actual conditions.
What has been said of the young Arab intellectuals could doubtless be said of
thousands of young people elsewhere in the world who are educated “beyond
their station.” But in the West the educated classes as a whole possess a relative
stability, while in the Middle East rootlessness and dissatisfaction encompass
the entire educated element and constitute a decisive factor.

Nationalism in general originates in an awareness of contrast; it remains

striking nevertheless how little there is in Arab nationalism of
anything but contrast. The movement seems to have no inner life: one has the
feeling that without its obsessions—its hatred of Israel, France, Britain—it
would collapse for lack of any effective goals it has set itself. The goals of Arab
nationalism seem quite unrelated to the real problems of the Arab countries,
problems of which they have quite their fair share. Putting it another way, the
cohesiveness of Arab nationalism seems imposed on it from outside, so that it
resembles a soft substance squeezed into a semblance of firmness by an
external mold. In view of the fact that Britain and France have both been
expelled bodily from the Middle East, and that Israel amounts to a minute
fraction among the Arabic-speaking peoples and her territory to a still more
minute fraction of the Arabicspeaking lands (less than one four-hundredth!), it
is impossible to avoid the impression of an essential vacuousness at the core of
the movement.

_____________

The lack of real content or ideas on the part of the Arab political leadership does
not, to be sure, diminish its importance as a political actor, but it is well to be
aware of this lack. The weight of the “Arab bloc,” after all, does not derive from
the inherent strength of the Arab countries, but from the Middle East’s strategic
position in the tug-of-war between the great powers. International rivalries
have made it possible for the Middle East to become more and more
irresponsibly self-assertive. But it is evident that such a situation is inherently
explosive; tactical successes won by exploiting the conflicts of outsiders can
never make up for one’s own basic weaknesses.

And what of Islam today? As indicated above, Arab nationalist ardor possesses
a quasi-religious quality which has its source fundamentally in the general
Moslem reaction against the West. But if Islam is thus a source of vigor, it is also
a source of debilitating confusion. For Islam is not a community in any modern
sense of the word; it offers no real alternative to modern Western society, nor
can it prevent the break-up of the Moslem world into individual societies
pursuing their own goals and ready to recognize their “solidarity” with their
Moslem brethren only when it suits some concrete political or economic
interest—which in practice occurs astonishingly seldom. Arab political leaders
show little interest in exploring the practical significance of the nebulous
concept of an Islamic “community” based on theology and social customs.
Indeed, the process of modernization creates parvenu groups who are only too
ready to turn against what seems to them to be a musty and outmoded
tradition. However they may boast of Islamic tradition to outsiders, in their
daily lives they have committed themselves to the secularization and
nationalization of life that came into existence in the Western world
generations ago.

Yet at the same time that Islam provides no basis for an Arab unity more than
rhetorical, Islamic universalism encourages megalomaniacal dreams of empire
and world sway among Arab nationalists despite or perhaps because of the
difficulties inherent in launching the most indispensable social and economic
reforms. Contemporary Arab nationalism, which derives a large part of its
emotional sustenance from Islam while disdaining its spiritual goals in favor of
the fleshpots of the West, doubtless owes its overwhelming ambitions to the
boundlessness of the Islamic horizon.

The Middle East has been, politically, a parasite on the world community for a
long time; it has made no real contribution either to itself or others. It will not
speak with a positive, authoritative voice of its own until the movements now
agitating it cease being mesmerized by irrelevant phobias and learn somehow
to cope with the real distress, material and perhaps spiritual as well, of the
Arabs themselves.

_____________
1The Moslem world as a whole has been able to recall its splendid past with
historical fullness and exactitude thanks only to the labors of Europeans.
Popular memories of the ancient grandeur of the Caliphate, to the extent that
they survived at all, were thin and exiguous. Not until several generations of
great European scholars had pieced together the real substance of Islamic
culture in its heyday were Moslem Arab intellectuals able to speak
grandiloquently about their forefathers’ contributions to world civilization.
These triumphs of European erudition, however, had the effect of hiding the
present-day Arab reality from the Europeans themselves, by interposing the
glittering Arab past. From wretched, illiterate, and oppressed subjects of a
worn-out, rotting Oriental empire, the Arabs were transformed into chivalrous
Bedouin knights or glamor-out potentates d la Harun al-Rashid. The British
Colonial Office was to founder disastrously on both these stereotypes

o understand the Middle East’s seemingly intractable conflicts, we need to go

back to at least 1924, the year the last caliphate was formally abolished.
Animating the caliphate—the historical political entity governed by Islamic law
and tradition—was the idea that, in the words of the historian Reza Pankhurst,
the “spiritual unity of the Muslim community requires political expression.” For
the better part of 13 centuries, there had been a continuous lineage of widely
accepted “Islamic” politics. Even where caliphates were ineffectual, they still
offered resonance and reassurance. Things were as they had always been and
perhaps always would be.

Since the Ottoman Caliphate’s dissolution, the struggle to establish a legitimate

political order has raged on in the Middle East, with varying levels of intensity.
At its center is the problem of religion and its role in politics. In this sense, the
turmoil of the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, is only the
latest iteration of the inability to resolve the most basic questions over what it
means to be a citizen and what it means to be a state.

It is both an old and new question, one that used to have an answer but no
longer does. Islam is distinctive in how it relates to politics—and this
distinctiveness can be traced back to the religion’s founding moment in the
seventh century. Islam is different. This difference has profound implications
for the future of the Middle East and, by extension, for the world in which we
all live, whether we happen to be American, French, British, or anything else.
To say that Islam—as creed, theology, and practice—says something that other
religions don’t quite say is admittedly a controversial, even troubling claim,
especially in the context of rising anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States and
Europe. As a Muslim-American, it’s personal for me: Donald Trump’s dangerous
comments on Islam and Muslims make me fear for my country. Yet “Islamic
exceptionalism” is neither good nor bad. It just is.

Because of this exceptionalism, a Middle Eastern replay of the Western model—

Reformation followed by an Enlightenment in which religion is gradually
pushed into the private realm—is unlikely. That Islam—a completely different
religion with a completely different founding and evolution—should follow a
course similar to that of Christianity is itself an odd presumption. We aren’t all
the same, but, more importantly, why should we be?

***

That the Christian tradition seems ambivalent about law, governance, and
power is no accident. Islam and Christianity are, after all, meant to do different
things. Law, at least in part, is about exposing and punishing sin. Yet, when Jesus
died on the cross, he in effect released man from the burdens of sin, and
therefore from the burdens of the law.

Christianity’s salvation story, then, is one of progression, with humanity

passing though different stages of spiritual development. Jewish or Mosaic law
was provisional, meant for a particular place and time, and for a chosen people,
where Christianity was universal and everlasting. As the theologian Joshua
Ralston notes, reflecting on the writing of the early Christian theologian Justin
Martyr: “Christ is the new and final law, and thus the Law of Moses is abrogated.
... Justin argues that the God of Israel had promised the Israelites a new and
everlasting covenant. The Mosaic Law was never intended to be either
universal or eternally binding.”

If salvation is through Christ and Christ alone, then there is little need for the
state to regulate private and public behavior beyond providing a conducive
environment for individuals to cultivate virtue and become more faithful to
Christ. The punishment of sins is no longer a priority, since Jesus died for them.
In stark contrast, where theologians like Martin Luther famously fashioned a
dialectic between faith and good works, these two things are inextricably tied
together in Islam. Faith is often expressed through the observance of the law.
The failure to follow Islamic law is a reflection of the believer’s lack of faith and
unwillingness to submit to God. Salvation is impossible without law. This has
implications for the nature of the Islamic state. If following the sharia—for
example, refraining from alcohol and adultery, observing the fast, and praying
five times a day—is a precondition for salvation, then political leaders and
clerics alike have a role in encouraging the good and forbidding evil, a role they
played, to various degrees, for the entirety of the pre-modern period.

For much of the past 14 centuries, there was a great deal for Arabs and Muslims
to be proud of.

But could events that took place 14 centuries ago really matter all that much to
a modern predicament? At a recent Thanksgiving dinner with family and
friends in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, I was struck by how much they still did.
There were eight of us, all Muslims, from assorted backgrounds and levels of
religious commitment. Over generous helpings of turkey, mashed potatoes,
gravy, and stuffing, we found ourselves talking about the scourge of terrorism
and the responsibility of Muslims to say and do something about it. Soon
enough, we were talking about Yazid, the second caliph of the Umayyad Empire,
killing and beheading the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, at the
Battle of Karbala in the seventh century. It was like an open wound, and here
we were once again, as so many had before us, trying to make sense of how and
why something so unspeakable could have happened. This was the prophet’s
family, his flesh and blood. And yet Hussein and all of his men were slaughtered,
their bodies left to rot for 40 days.

It wasn’t dissimilar from the other questions we were asking ourselves that day
about the rise of the Islamic State, civil war, and the seemingly endless shedding
of blood: How could Muslims do this to each other? The Battle of Karbala is only
one story. We could have talked about Omar, Abu Bakr, Uthman, and Ali, the
prophet Muhammad’s closest companions and his successors as leaders of the
Muslim community, revered by Muslims for their piety and uprightness of
character.The first caliph, Abu Bakr, died of old age, but his three successors
were each assassinated by fellow Muslims. When we were growing up and
going to Sunday school (yes, Muslim Americans have Sunday school, too), Abu
Bakr, Omar, and Ali didn’t feel like historical figures but, rather, people who
were a part of our lives, reminders of both a glorious history and the internecine
killing that threatened to undo it.

The era of the so-called righteously guided caliphs didn’t last long, but it was
superseded by any number of other Islamic “golden ages,” which flourished for
far longer. The Abbasid caliphate, with Baghdad as its bustling center, was one
of the most successful empires the world had ever seen. From the eighth to 13th
centuries, the empire prospered, with unprecedented advancements in science,
medicine, and philosophy. Students from Europe flocked to Muslim
universities, hoping to study with the world’s greatest doctors, thinkers, and
theologians. Muslims today, particularly in the Arab world, enter into tortured
debates over what went wrong, with this history as subtext.

The dismal state of the Middle East is all the more difficult to accept knowing
that, for much of the past 14 centuries, there was a great deal for Arabs and
Muslims to be proud of. This dissonance is unsettling. Perceptions of decline
were often overlaid with a kind of theological determinism. Was the decline
some sort of divine retribution? After centuries of dominance, the various
Islamic empires were gradually eclipsed by a rising Europe.

Then came the trauma of colonialism, when much of the Muslim world fell
under direct, and often brutal, European control. Hard-won independence
offered a gleam of hope in the 20th century, but the promise of secular
nationalism ultimately disappointed, with young nations descending into
dictatorship. Perhaps God had forsaken the Muslims, punishing them for
straying from the straight path. After all, God had promised glad tidings for
those who followed his commands, and he had, seemingly, delivered for
centuries. The most devout—the prophet, his companions, and their earliest
followers—had enjoyed unimaginable success, conquering the entirety of
North Africa, then spreading out through Spain and into France within a
hundred years of the prophet’s passing. This must have been evidence of their
righteousness. That, though, could only mean that the territorial contraction of
once-great empires must have been evidence of sin and decadence.

The Ottoman Empire, hoping to stave off decline in the 19th century, launched
a series of internal reforms, known as the tanzimat. Though this wasn’t the
intent, the tanzimat hastened what Wael Hallaq, a scholar of Islamic law, calls
the “evisceration” of the sharia. In an attempt to codify and control what had
been an organic and constantly evolving body of law, the state was
strengthened and centralized, its authoritarian tendencies exacerbated, and the
clerics weakened. Secularists, meanwhile, believed that the Islamic state
couldn’t be reformed and that holding on to religious foundations would only
stand in the way of progress. If embracing secular nationalism had led to
Europe’s ascendance, they argued, then why shouldn’t it do the same for the
Middle East? Among elites, assorted secular ideologies—Marxism, socialism,
fascism, and liberalism—gained currency. Islamic modernists, the precursors
to modern-day Islamists, interpreted events quite differently, viewing the
deteriorating state of the region as yet more evidence of God’s displeasure. To
regain his pleasure would require returning to the unblemished purity of
Islam’s founding. This notion of return, novel in the late 19th century, would, in
mere decades, become ubiquitous to the point of cliché.

The prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a politician, a warrior, a preacher,

and a merchant, all at once. He was also the builder of a new state.

Born in 1929, the Islamist writer Muhammad Galak Kishk saw the triumph of
religion nearly everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places. In 1967, Israel
handily defeated the Arab nations not simply because of its military prowess,
he argued, but because it had something that the Arabs didn’t: the certainty and
clarity of religious devotion. As Fouad Ajami wrote in his first book The Arab
Predicament, “In Kishk’s account there is grudging admiration for the clarity
with which the Israelis saw the war, for the fact that young Israeli soldiers
prayed behind their rabbis at the Wailing Wall after their capture of Jerusalem.”
Kishk’s may not have been the most accurate reading of Israeli society, but it
was one of the more telling.

If this clarity—this purity of vision—had been lost, then where better to regain
it than at the beginning? This is what the various revivalist movements hoped
to do. The Islamic modernists hoped to recapture the spirit and intent of that
first generation of Muslims, while those who would come to be known as Salafis
believed not just in the “spirit” but in the “letter” of the law. They wanted to
imitate the particular habits of the first Muslims, whether that meant dressing
like the prophet (by cuffing their trousers at the ankle) or brushing their teeth
like the prophet (with a teeth-cleaning twig called a miswak). Oddly enough, for
these various Islamist strains, more recent Islamic history has grown more
remote. Outside Turkey, most Muslims would have trouble citing even one
Ottoman-era scholar. The Abbasid caliphate is remembered fondly, but its
memory doesn’t necessarily inspire fighting and dying for the cause. In
contrast, there is a closeness about the prophet and his companions that belies
fourteen hundred years of the passing of time. It is an odd, unusual effect—the
further one goes back in history, the more intimate it feels.

Muslims are, of course, not bound to Islam’s founding moment, but neither can
they fully escape it. The prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a politician, a
warrior, a preacher, and a merchant, all at once. Importantly, he was also the
builder of a new state. It is difficult to know when he was acting in one role
rather than the other (which has led to endless debates over whether some of
the prophet’s actions in certain domains were, in fact, prophetic). Some
religious thinkers—including Sudan’s Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and, later, his
student Abdullahi an-Na’im—have tried to separate these different prophetic
legacies, arguing that the Quran contains two messages. The first message,
based on the verses revealed while the prophet was establishing a new political
community in Medina, includes particulars of Islamic law that may have been
appropriate for seventh-century Arabia but are not applicable outside that
context. The second message of Islam, revealed in Mecca before the prophet’s
emigration to Medina, encompasses the eternal principles of Islam, which are
meant to be updated according to the demands of time and place.

Taha was executed by the Jaafar al-Nimeiry regime in 1985 and his theories
largely forgotten. But the basic idea of extracting general principles while
emphasizing the historicity of their application has, in less explicit form, been
advocated by a growing number of “progressive” Muslim scholars, many of
whom live in the West. There are reasons, though, that these theories have
struggled to gain adherents in the Muslim world. First of all, they’re not very
easily explained to those without a background in Islamic law. For many
Muslims, the point of Islam is that it is accessible and straightforward, at least
in its broad outlines. The notion that the Quran contains two distinct messages
is notstraightforward and makes a “simple” religion rather complex. Why
would a believing Muslim take a chance on a controversial and heterodox
interpretation of scripture when he or she can fall back on safer, mainstream
approaches that enjoy the backing of the vast majority of scholars?

One could go further and advocate not only for a progressive interpretation of
Islamic law but also for its basic irrelevance to public life—that the separation
of religion from politics forms the foundation of any pluralistic post-
Enlightenment liberal society. The heavy weight of Islamic history, however,
makes such a path as difficult as it is unlikely.

With the twin challenges of colonialism and secularism and the advent of
“modernity,” the state had become the nation-state—centralized, elaborate,
and overbearing. There were the massive bureaucracies, the large weaponized
armies, and the technology (and desire) to monitor citizens, all things that the
far-flung empires of the past could never claim. How could Islamic law,
designed for a pre-modern era, remain relevant in a time where subjects
became citizens and when religious allegiances were to be replaced with
national loyalties? This is a question that hasn’t found an answer, at least not
yet.

This article has been adapted from Shadi Hamid’s new book, Islamic
Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.

It’s not all about Islam: misreading secular politics in the Middle East
STACEY GUTKOWSKI 25 April 2015
Western policymakers once understood the dynamics of secular politics
in the Middle East, but this knowledge has been subsumed under a
fixation on Islam’s supposed threat to western security interests.

Erika
Szostak/Demotix. All rights reserved.

Much western, particularly French, media coverage of the January attacks on

the Charlie Hebdo offices and the kosher supermarket in Paris fell prey to an
old orientalist trope of the ‘War on Terror’: that Western secular culture is
innately peaceful, rational and tolerant, while Islam is distinctly ambiguous on
these matters.

In some of this coverage, the incident was reduced to an attack on secular

freedom. This not only failed to capture the complexity of the events. It also
failed to reflect accurately the tangled histories of secular ideas, political
settlements, and ways of living in the west and the Arab Middle East, shaped by
centuries of interaction, including empire and migration.

The so-called ‘War on Terror’ was an important chapter in these tangled

histories. War is always a social and cultural encounter between sides. One of
the by-products of this terrible chapter was the re-assertion of orientalist
binaries. Another, less appreciated by-product was increased western policy
and media attention to the terms of western secularism.

This is not to say in any way that the US and Europe have a monopoly on all
things secular. It is merely to point out that the salience of Islam to the ‘War on
Terror’ had the knock-on effect of drawing western attention to its own secular
political ‘truths’, and the Christian cultural provenance of these. This spawned
in the west both reaffirmation of the terms of western secularism(s) and some
self-critique.

This process of self-reflection did not quite translate into better understanding
of the dynamics of secularism as a political project in the Middle East, and the
complexities and contradictions of lived secularity there. Western
policymakers have improved their understanding of political Islamism since
2001. But their understanding of other dynamics in the region—including
secularisation and de-secularisation processes and their political impact—has
not received much attention.

Instead, a rather uncritical presumption that seemingly ‘secular’, westernised

actors are somehow more pragmatic and trustworthy partners for the west has
prevailed. This is too simple. To ignore this complexity is to misread the idioms
through which many aspects of Arab political and social life are animated and
contested, as well as the ways in which political authority is organised.

More recently, with the rise of Islamic State, mainstream western media outlets
have begun to report on Arab critics of religious authority over politics and
social life. Most famously, the case of Raif Badawi—sentenced to ten years in
prison, 600 lashes and a fine for his critique of the marriage of Wahhabism and
Saudi authoritarianism—drew popular western condemnation.

Not all of these Arab critiques come in an overtly secular political idiom, but
some do, calling for separation of religion and state, increased rights for women
and LGBT individuals, and a ban on apostasy laws. Like many Islamist groups,
these secular critics also frame their calls within the language of political
reform and democratisation.

Still, where once western policymakers better understood the dynamics of

secular politics in the Middle East, this knowledge has been lost, subsumed
under a fixation on Islam’s supposed threat to western security interests. In
what follows, I call for renewed attention to these dynamics.

Secular politics in the Arab Middle East: a historical snapshot

The label ‘secular’ is highly problematic, in theory and practice. Actors in the
Arab Middle East are more inclined to use terms such as leftist, liberal, Ba’athist,
communist, socialist and Marxist to describe their orientation, with a critique
of Islam’s influence implied in the term.

In the west, the designation ‘agnostic’, ‘atheist’ or ‘indifferent’ tends to mean

someone’s personal belief rather than their politics. In the Arab world there is
a public, political and performative aspect to these labels. Also, a person may
simultaneously declare a religious affiliation (Sunni, Christian, etc.) to mark out
their political identity in a national context.

As in the west, religious practice and discourse run along a spectrum in the Arab
world. Individuals situate themselves somewhere along the spectrum but
engage in practices and language that are a mix of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. There
is no binary between the two. Western ways of living secularly and secular
political settlements are heavily conditioned by their continuities with
Christianity. The same is true of the Arab Muslim context.

In the second half of the 19th century, intellectuals in Lebanon and Egypt began
to articulate secular political and social ideas. These were inspired by, but not
reducible to, contemporary European currents of thought. Intellectuals came
into contact with these ideas through imperial occupation but also through
their own study and travels to the west. The growth of Arab secular outlooks
received a boost after World War I, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
abolition of the caliphate, and extension of the British and French mandates in
the Levant.

The originators of both Arab nationalism and Ba’athism during this period saw
important continuities between Islam as heritage and the new, modernising
direction in which they hoped to move the region. They recognised that Islamic
practice would likely continue to be important to Arab populations. To a certain
extent, secular political and social ideas were, and continue to be, held by the
elite and middle class that emerged later in the twentieth century.

The secular forces of Arab nationalism, communism and Ba’athism vied with
more traditional, monarchical forces after the end of the Second World War.
During this period of the Cold War, US policymakers saw secular political
parties and regimes in Egypt, Iraq and Syria as well as Iran as reinforcing their
susceptibility to Soviet influence. In short, secular actors were seen as a threat.
However, with the rise of political Islamism—in response to the failure of Arab
nationalism, the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, the Iranian revolution, and the
end of communist parties as a credible political force in the region—the content
of secular political idioms no longer interested western policymakers. The PLO
and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria continued to pose a threat to Israel, but the region
was unlikely to fall under Soviet influence.

By the end of the Cold war, the two remaining Ba’athist regimes in Syria and
Iraq were seen as dangerous solely because of threats they posed to Israel,
Kuwait and regional stability. By 1993, secular Fatah (though not the PFLP) set
aside violent resistance and began to engage with the Israeli government under
the auspices of the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords. Indeed, the
ascendance of Bashar al-Assad in 2000 inspired some western optimism that
he might steer that secular Ba’athist regime in a more reformist, less
antagonistic direction, which would lead to further stability in the region.

The post-9/11 paradox

A new chapter in this tangled history began in 2001. As has been widely
discussed, the salience of Islam within Al Qaeda’s political idiom prompted
western policymakers to crudely associate the followers of a world religion
with security threats. In the middle of the twentieth century, secular Arab
actors were sometimes perceived as ideologically suspect and a threat to
western and Israeli interests. Now, it was Arab Islamist actors who were
viewed with a suspicion previously reserved for the post-revolutionary Iranian
regime.

I argued in my 2013 book, Secular War: Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence,
that a secular security habitus led the British—and potentially other western
militaries and policy-makers—to misread Islamic idioms, symbols and social
structures as both more and less dangerous than they actually were. Sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as ‘a set of dispositions which incline agents to
act and react in certain ways’, not all of which are fully conscious.

The contemporary British secular habitus is a mixture of liberal democratic

political tradition, Christian heritage, post-imperial multiculturalism, and
casual indifference towards religion. This social and political context shaped
British policy, which then had a knock-on effect on the populations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as Muslims in the UK.
Secular habits of understanding the world made it difficult for western security
services to come to grips with nuances within Muslim populations, to
understand what was truly threatening and what was just unfamiliar. Despite
ruling Muslim majority areas during centuries of empire, European
governments had limited recent, in-depth experience. The US government was
even more in the dark.

As Islamist groups turned their attention towards the Middle East during the
1990s, their salience to western security priorities trailed behind the so-called
‘new wars’ in the Balkans and Africa and containing Saddam Hussein. Despite
Al Qaeda attacks during the 1990s, western security experts were caught off
guard in 2001. Bourdieu has suggested that hysteresis—or lag in the habitus—
occurs when “the environment [it] actually encounter[s] is too different from
the one to which [it is] objectively adjusted”. It took western policymakers the
better part of the decade to catch up.

While by no means the main driver, these habits helped to facilitate the
imposition of security services into the lives of Muslims around the world,
including during the devastating occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Still,
global politics is full of contradictions, and the picture is not entirely negative.
Western habits of secular state neutrality made possible political support for
the participation of Islamists in Afghan- and Iraqi-led democratisation
processes. They also made possible financial support for further development
of Muslim civil society in Europe.
 Walter
Gaya/Demotix. All rights reserved.

The secular security habitus produced paradoxical effects. For example, while
on the one hand secular hysteresis contributed to British misreading of the
threat posed by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mehdi militia in 2003-4 (key
instigators of the 2006-7 civil war), British habits of political liberalism also led
them to work with Islamist politicians to facilitate representative democracy in
Iraq. While the intention may have been to secure western interests, actors
were able to capitalise on these opportunities and achieve some
autonomy. Still, this somewhat ambiguous openness to Islamism should not be
over-interpreted. Hamas and Hezbollah remained proscribed terrorist
organisations in western eyes.

The myth of ‘Islamic moderation’

This brings us back to the point about tangled histories. One of the many ironies
of the post-9/11 decade is that the western secular security habitus led
policymakers to focus on Islam. Paradoxically, western policymakers did not
pay very much attention to Arab secular critiques of Islamist politics or ways of
living with less Islamic influence during the decade after 9/11. And with the
occupation of Iraq, Arab secular critics saw Western governments as the
enemy, not an ally.
In the middle of the post-9/11 decade, western policymakers focused on the
potential of Arab politics articulated in a western-friendly Islamic idiom to
bring the containment of security threats against the West. Western
policymakers, influenced by a secular security habitus, created a range of
policies, programmes and campaigns which have depend on the notion that
‘moderate’ religion can be harnessed to promote alignment with western policy
objectives and contain threats against western targets. This is the logic that has
influenced western aid democratisation programmes and counter-terrorism
policies, among others. While it figures more prominently in US foreign policy,
the EU has started to follow suit.

In reality, moderation is always a social construct, contextually dependent, with

no real content. There are no inherent features—even non-violence—to which
one can look and say ‘this is moderate’. But western policymakers and security
experts continue to be wedded to the myth that there are features of
moderation in the Middle East that are consistent, identifiable, uncontested,
and that this will help them identify allies. One need only look to attempts to
arm Syrian ‘moderates’.

At the same time, Arab actors also seek to capitalise on the political and
economic opportunities that have opened up by portraying themselves as
‘moderate’. Certainly the picture is far from straightforward. Civil society actors
in the west and the Middle East capitalised on opportunities to manoeuvre
themselves into positions of international and domestic influence vis-á-
vis other groups, or to genuinely develop their community’s political and social
capacity, often from a position of structural disadvantage.

This has allowed smaller, quieter voices in civil society to exercise normative
persuasion over more powerful states. However, regimes in Muslim-majority
states in the Gulf and the Levant have also portrayed themselves as ‘moderate’
to successfully deflect western pressure to institute political reform or
recognise human rights.

The rise of the Islamic State and the re-emergence of jihadism at the top of
western security agendas have provided, and will likely only continue to
provide, more structural opportunities for self-styled Arab and ‘Muslim
moderates’.
It is unclear that western states can avoid relying on these alliances when Arab
states hold the key to containing what the west sees as multiple overlapping
security threats: state breakdown in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, the return of
Islamic State fighters to the west, and the maintenance of a potential nuclear
deal with Iran. The ability of the Islamic State to seduce supporters suggests
that western and Arab efforts to counter its narratives with ‘moderate Islam’
will likely only receive a boost from these regional developments.

Post-Arab Spring: secular security habitus 2.0?

By contrast, the Arab Spring forced western policymakers to pay more

attention to Arab secular politics when secular political parties began to assert
themselves. A less appreciated and understood knock-on effect of the western
secular security habitus was the impulse among western policymakers to trust
revolutionary actors they saw as ‘secular’.

Some of these actors, such as Nidaa Tounes in Tunisia and SCAF in Egypt,
articulate their politics in a secular idiom, pitting their social and legal agendas
directly against the Islamist positions of their competitors. Others, such as
Stronger Jordan which calls for equality between men and women, do not frame
their calls for less conservative religious influence on the state so explicitly.

Haysam
Elmasry/Dmotix. All rights reserved.
But it has become accepted wisdom among western governments and security
think tanks that actors that look ‘secular’ are likely to be trustworthy western
allies, that a certain rationality, pragmatism and consistency guides their
actions and that they are immune to ideology. They can be trusted to curb
jihadist threats against the west. The March museum attack in Tunis under the
eyes of the ruling secular party suggests that these two things are not related.

These two western security myths—of ‘religious moderation’ and ‘secular

moderation’—have inhibited the west from condemning authoritarian
brutality. The US and Europe tentatively supported the Muslim Brotherhood
government which ruled in Egypt between 2012 and 2013. However, their
condemnation of the coup that brought General Sisi to power, and of
subsequent violence against the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition
forces, was muted.

While western states were loathe to repeat the occupation of Iraq on Syrian soil,
in 2011-2013 they also feared that unseating Bashar al-Assad would bring
Islamist forces to power—either the Muslim Brotherhood or more radical
groups—which would threaten regional stability. While recognising Assad as
an egregious violator of human rights, western states figured a (more) secular
regime was the lesser of two evils.

This preference extends beyond the Arab states. Erdogan has escaped too much
western condemnation for his increasing authoritarianism, and not only
because Turkey is a key NATO ally on the Syrian and Iraqi borders. Lingering
western enthusiasm for Turkish laiklik (secularism) as an antidote to Islamist
extremism, so heavily touted by Erdogan in 2011-12, also plays a role.

Western states have long upheld anti-democratic regimes in the region because
it suits their interests. This is nothing new. However the secular
security habitus, which emerged in western security policymaking after 9/11
and continues to animate it, has provided an additional, underpinning logic to
these alliances.

These alliances may be pragmatic, but that is not their only feature. In some
ways, they are a continuation of past trends. Since the emergence of political
Islamism as a credible force in the 1970s, western policymakers have trusted
some (not all) secular dictators to stem threats to western interests—Sadat,
Mubarak, Bourguiba, Ben Ali, Bouteflika, and in the 1980s Saddam Hussein—
even while they cooperated with traditional monarchs. Obviously alliances
with authoritarian regimes are built on more than a loose sense of secular
affinity, but global politics is irrational and ‘seeming like me’ makes political
trust that little bit easier.

With the emergence in some states of secular, pro-democratic political actors

on the left, the west has had a variety of potential allies to choose since 2011.
However, particularly in North Africa, it has chosen to support regimes it knows
rather than destabilise them through support for the opposition.

The one notable exception is in Syria, where the training of so-called

‘moderates’, secular and Islamist, has come too little too late. Hope for these
leftist forces looks likely to come from the Tunisian model of self-assertion,
rather than through direct western sponsorship. While real political power for
these groups is seemingly still far off, a lack of western interference in their
political development is to be warmly welcomed.

Islamic State and the western secular security habitus

For nearly three and a half years, from late 2010, to mid-2014, jihadism was
temporarily eclipsed as the primary western security animus. With the
exception of the Amenas gas plant attack in Algeria in January 2013—in which
western hostages were taken and killed—jihadist militancy, spearheaded by Al
Qaeda, Boko Haram and Al Shabab, has been confined predominantly to non-
western targets.

Even the 2012 emergence of Al Nusra front as a key player in the Syrian civil
war was overshadowed in western security thinking by a reluctance to take on
the Syrian air force and get involved in yet another regional civil war. Western
governments resisted military action against Islamic State for nearly a year,
finally compelled not by the horrors suffered by people in the region but by the
spectacle of the beheading of western hostages, the flow of young western
Muslims to Syria, and plots against European targets.

Western policy and media discourse on Islamic State echoes many of the tropes
levelled at Al Qaeda after 9/11. Some echoes can also be seen among western
analysts who over-interpret the role of sectarianism in Iranian-GCC regional
proxy conflicts in Syria and Yemen. However, whether a Western secular
security habitus will have any appreciable impact on a response to Islamic State
remains to be seen.