Islamism

Schedule

Tuesday

Assignment

Read Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, Introduction and chapters 1-2 ("The Unique Qur'anic Generation" and "The Nature of the Qur'anic Method").  (If you didn't buy this book, it is available online here and here; please print out the text and bring it with you to class.)

On D2L, submit a one-paragraph commentary describing Sayyid Qutb's attitudes toward two or more of the various aspects of Islam we have studied so far this term:  the Qur'an, the Prophet's biography, and Hadith; the classical discourses of law, theology, and Sufism; Islamic rituals; Islamic art and architecture; and/or Muslims' relationships with the Christian West.  For example, you could identify which of these things he considers authoritative or legitimate, and which ones he rejects as unislamic.  Or you could describe his attitudes toward Hadith and classical law.  Please cite phrases that illustrate the attitudes you describe.

Notes from class

We did pretty well fitting Sayyid Qutb (SQ) into the mosaic of different Muslim authors we have read.  He didn't fit neatly into our categories, but that is good because it shows that we are not forcing him into our categories, but are listening carefully to his unique claims:

• Our three models of Islam
  • SQ definitely regards Islam as comprehensive guidance for all of life.  Unlike the jurists, however, he does not think that guidance can be formulated as an abstract system of laws.
  • This is because he thinks a personal commitment to submitting to God alone is a prerequisite to figuring out what God requires.  So his guidance model is based on a relational model of Islam:  one's personal attitude of submission toward God comes first, and it is expressed in obedient action, and only then can one figure out the details of God's law. 
  • But how does one obey without having figured out the law?  Apparently SQ thinks there is a simpler intuitive kind of obedience that does not require lists of duties (rather like those hadith in al-Nawawi that advocated basic kindness and other virtues instead of giving lists of actions).
• The Qur'an
  • SQ emphasizes the Qur'an above all else, as the only pure source of Islam, from which the Prophet's companions "drank."  Any other source of values should be rejected.
  • Like al-Shafi`i, SQ says the Qur'an contains comprehensive guidance for all of life (even for politics).
  • But the first and most basic message of the Qur'an is tawhid - the oneness of God - which entails submission to God alone.
• The Prophet's biography
  • Unlike Nasr, who made the Prophet the source of all being and guidance, SQ regards the Prophet as non-essential.  An Islamic society can come about just as well in his absence as in his presence, since the Qur'an is the only source one needs.
• Hadith
  • Given our analysis of the effect transmitters had on the content of hadith, SQ could have rejected hadith as contaminated with human ideas.  In fact he does not reject them, but he hardly refers to them, because he regards them as merely derivative of the pure Qur'anic source.
• Law
  • SQ agrees with al-Shafi`i and other jurists that the Qur'an provides complete guidance for every area of life, and he even expresses that using the metaphor of a tree that overshadows all areas of life, just as the classical jurists compared law to a tree.
  • But SQ completely rejects the jurists' systems of rules (fiqh), calling them human contructs, and complaining that they are influenced by foreign (Jewish and Greek) ideas.
  • Most importantly, he rejects fiqh because it is a theoretical that exists in the mind regardless of whether it is being followed in practice.
  • SQ's view of guidance is not a preformulated legal system (fiqh) that purports to represent the meaning of the Qur'an and hadith, but rather a legal system that grows organically out of the community's practice of submission to the Qur'an. 
  • Such a system seems to require no jurists and no enforcement, because obedience occurs naturally.  Even the Prophet's Companions did not need the Prophet's authority to enforce God's law. 
  • But then SQ also says the Qur'an dictates certain legal and political structures, and he speaks of the need for power to legislate and enforce laws.  He just won't say what those structures will be, or how legislation and enforcement will take place.
  • Why does SQ not want to spell out what the Qur'an's legal and political prescriptions would look like?  Why does he insist one must first create a truly committed Muslim society?  He seems frustrated with classical jurists and modern reformers who want to figure out what God's law is before they implement it, but why does he think that is so wrong?  Perhaps it's because he is so concerned to achieve a living faith rather than just a body of doctrines and rules.  But al-Ghazali managed to find "living faith" in the rules of worship.  Let's return to this question next time.
• Theology
  • SQ rejects classical theology as influenced by foreign ideas (i.e. Greek thought).
  • He also rejects it as purely theoretical and non-practical.
• Sufism
  • He does not directly mention Sufism, but we presume that he would reject drunken Sufism and the "unity of being," and would charge (perhaps rightly) that it was based on "foreign" (Neoplatonic) ideas.
  • He does share Nasr's and the Sufis' concern that personal transformation should precede social reforms; but he regards that transformation as a matter of outward action just as much as inner attitudes, so he does not really share the Sufi emphasis on the inner dimensions of religion.
  • Unlike Cornell, who regarded intuitive knowledge of what is good as a stage of knowledge beyond theoretical knowledge of the law, SQ says intuitive obedience comes first, based on personal faith, and elaboration of a legal system comes only later.
• Ritual
  • (He seemed more concerned with regulating society than with personal performance of rituals.  But we have seen that rituals can shape society.  Let's see if he ever addresses the role of ritual.)
• Art and Architecture
  • He considers "Islamic art" to be influenced by foreign values.  Our analysis of the Dome of the Rock agreed.
  • He probably would not have appreciated the emphasis on ascent to God that we found in the Dome of the Rock's architecture.
• The Christian West
  • He rejects all Western values, because:
    • They are man-made rather than Qur'anic.
    • Western political systems (including not only democratic capitalism but also socialism even the Arab nationalism championed by Egypt's ruler Nasser) all require submission to humans, which is idolatry. 
      • We wondered, however, how his political system would manage to avoid having humans submit to other humans.  He argues that in a truly Islamic society everyone would obey God's law naturally, but he also speaks of the need for the power to legislate and enforce.  Would that power be only temporary, and become unnecessary once society became truly Islamic?  Would exemplary Muslims provide enough inspiration to motivate others to follow God's law?  Or would Islamic law be just another form of human rule, under the guise of a theocracy?
  • He does not reject Western technology, however.  When we look at the web sites of American Muslim organizations, we will have to think about whether technology and values can really be separated.

Thursday

Assignment

Read Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, chapters 3 and 4 ("The Characteristics of the Islamic Society" and "Jihad in the Cause of Allah") (available online here and here; please print out the text and bring it with you to class).

Also read the historical background notes below, and begin to read Esposito, "Contemporary Islam" (ch. 15 of the Oxford History of Islam, online starting here).  I suggest you read pages 643-656 (stop at the heading "Political Islam"), and leave the rest for next week.

Notes from class

First we located SQ on our chart, identifying what it is that makes him an islamist:

• Method: 
  • SQ rejects human legislative processes as idolatrous.
  • SQ distrusts classical legal method, which he thinks is infected with Jewish and Greek thought.  Nevertheless, he does appeal to a classical jurist's interpretation of the Qur'an's verses on jihad, and to the classical jurists' concept of abrogation, to make his case for jihad.
  • SQ prefers to reinvent Islamic society from scratch from the Qur'an.  He recognizes the validity of hadith, but doesn't use them much.
• Societal vision: 
  • SQ accepts modern Western technologies, but rejects Western social and political and cultural institutions and values.  He denounces racial and class divisions, and greed.
  • SQ distrusts classical Islamic fiqh, and dismisses it as a mere theoretical system, so he does not call for simply implementing classical Islamic law as a blueprint for society.  (He does at one point praise Abbasid civilization, which seems inconsistent, but can be explained by the typical islamist nostalgia for the great Islamic past that preceded colonialism.) 
  • SQ doesn't exactly want to recreate a 7th-century Arabian society either; for instance, he is quite open to technological innovations.  The aspect of early Islamic society that he does want to recreate is the process by which that society formed itself, starting with the Qur'an's message of devotion to God alone, and constructing itself into a way of life and a social movement on that basis alone.  (He can accept a certain amount of preislamic influence in the Qur'an, because the Qur'an claims the religions of Moses and Jesus as genuine revelations compatible with Islam.)
  • But SQ leaves the precise form of his social vision undefined.

We also identified a number of paradoxes or difficulties in SQ's thought:

• He won't say what Islamic law looks like, because it is supposed to grow organically out of devotion to God; but he says that law must be imposed on non-Muslims before they can become devoted to God.
  • In speaking of this ideal Muslim community, SQ is quite idealistic, believing that a just society will just emerge organically from belief in the Qur'an's message, without any formal interpretive method, and without any supposed divine spokesperson to interpret the Qur'an and enforce its law (though he does require absolute loyalty to the leadership of the movement).
  • But in speaking of non-Muslims, he says personal conversion to faith the Qur'an's message does not precede establishment of the law.  On the contrary, Islamic law must be established and enforced, by force if necessary, and non-Muslims must follow it.  Only then, when they are no longer forced to obey humans, will non-Muslims be truly free to become devoted to God alone.
• He says Islamic law needs no interpreter and no enforcer, but then calls for establishing and enforcing Islamic law, which requires that someone have the power to give the law some specific form and interpretation, and that someone have the power to enforce it.
• He says Islam ensures freedom of belief, but not freedom to live out the implications of belief.  So the freedom of religion he proposes is really just freedom of purely intellectual belief, which he says is not really religion - religion is a way of life, and that is not free.

SQ says establishing the Islamic way of life, and demolishing the movements and structures that oppose it, requires a physical jihad. 

• Preaching can only change ideas; changing concrete structures require concrete jihad. 
• This will include creating new civil structures, but it also includes demolishing existing governments and institutions, by force if necessary. 
• He justifies this by quoting a classical Hanbalite scholar's argument that offensive jihad abrogated the restraint and defensive warfare that the Prophet practiced earlier in his career.
• Like al-Sulami, he views jihad as offensive, and a permanent obligation.
• The purpose of jihad is to eliminate all structures that force people to obey humans, and thus prevent the spread of Islam.

Finally, we watched "Fitna," a recent and very controversial short film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, which argues for curtailing the growth of Islam in the Netherlands by linking Islam with various forms of violence.  It does so principally by presenting Qur'anic verses alongside images of violence.  Of course such violence does not simply stem directly from Qur'anic verses, so we began to lay out all the complicating factors we have encountered in our study of Muslim voices, which lie in between the Qur'an and any act of violence that one might claim is based on the Qur'an.  So far we have:

• The diversity of Qur'anic verses about non-Muslims and violence.
• The diversity of interpretations that can be given to any one Qur'anic verse.
• The diversity of ways of resolving conflicting Qur'anic verses - by abrogation, or by other devices of legal theory such as particularization and qualification.  SQ uses abrogation, resulting in a call for jihad against non-Muslims; Ayatollah Mutahhari used a device called qualification, resulting in a call for only defensive warfare.
• The Qur'an's verses about non-Muslims and violence stem from different situations in the Prophet's life, which we have seen can be interpreted as either one of pacificism and reluctant defensive fighting, or as one aimed at spreading Islam by the sword.  Interpretations of the Prophet's life tend to be shaped by polemical situations, such as William Muir's engagement with evangelistic polemics with Muslims in India, and PBS's response to Christian polemics and popular American conceptions of Islam.
• The Qur'an, according to al-Shafi`i and most Muslims since, must be interpreted through the lense of hadith.  al-Nawawi's hadith contained some that seemed to make offensive physical jihad a duty, and some that called instead for gentleness or for more spiritual pursuits.
• We have seen that neither the Qur'an nor hadith actually determines the content of Islamic law.  The Maliki jurist Ibn Abi Zayd and al-Sulami both said offensive physical jihad was a collective obligation; but we have seen that there are plenty of ways for jurists to reinterpret or even ignore the Qur'an and hadith in order to bring the law into line with their own social values and the demands of the situations they face.  So laws regarding jihad will always be a reflection of social norms and situations, not just of the Qur'an.
• Political scientist Robert Pape has marshalled a lot of evidence suggesting that one form of jihad, suicide terrorism, is motivated almost entirely by geo-political considerations (the desire to get democracies to withdraw from territories the terrorists consider their own), and not by religious ideas.

We will pick up with this exercise next week.

Historical background

Political History Timeline

To understand the emergence of modern calls for the restoration of the Islamic community, we need to back up and review briefly the political history of the Muslim community after the time of the Prophet.  (Details are in The Oxford History of Islam, chapters 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13.)

Pre-modern Reformers: the drive to recover original Islam.

Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) was a would-be reformer who critiqued the established legal traditions of his day and called for a fresh return to the sources of law through ijtihad. His vision had little effect in his day, but it was revived in various forms by reformers in the 18th century:

Muhammad Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab, inspired by Ibn Taymiyya, established a strict enforcement of a purified Shari`a in Arabia, which continues today in the Saudi Arabia.

Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, India, likewise called for a return to the Sunna and the Shari`a through ijtihad.  He was a Sufi, whereas Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab were virulently opposed to some aspects of Sufism.

Other examples of early reform movements are described in The Oxford History of Islam, in the first part of chapter 12.

Colonialism

European colonialism brought a number of challenges to Muslim societies, including dramatic economic changes, modern science and technologies, Christian missions, and secular parliamentary forms of government.

More details are in The Oxford History of Islam, chapter 13.

Four responses to colonialism and modernity

Secularism:

Adopt European social and governmental forms; relegate Islam to the private sphere. 

This was the policy pursued by the governments of most of the new nation states in the 20th-century Islamic world.  For example, Ataturk, who founded the Turkish Republic after World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, made education thoroughly secular, imposed the use of a Latin alphabet in place of the traditional Arabic script, and otherwise attempted to make Turkey a secular state modeled on European states.

Traditionalism:

Defend classical Islamic law and institutions against the modern challenge.

This was the response of many traditionally trained Islamic scholars (`ulama'), who saw their legal and educational authority undermined by the new secular governments.

Modernism

Reform Islam in line with modernity.

(We will discuss modernists next week.)

Islamism

Build a modern society on a restored pristine Islam.

Like modernists, islamists (also often called fundamentalists by analogy to Christian fundamentalists) inherited from Ibn Taymiyya and the Reformers of the 18th century the goal of recovering the original true Islam, but unlike modernists they held that this true Islam was the antithesis of modern Western values (though not of modern science).

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood gave the islamists a concrete institutional structure to further their efforts internationally. It has come into violent conflict with secular Arab governments. Its most prominent spokesman was Sayyid Qutb, whose experience of confrontation with the secular Egyptian government led him to condemn all existing societies, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, as unislamic.

Traditionalists respond with scorn to the islamist vision of reform, which they regard as based on amateur Islamic scholarship.

Note that Esposito calls modernists "neomodernists," he calls traditionalists "conservatives," and he calls islamists "neorevivalists;" but like us he calls secularists secularists.