Is Islamism the Muslim Form
of Liberation Theology?
by Alain Gresh & Asef Bayat
[Note: I have bracketed my comment's to separate
them from the original article - re slater]
There is no doubt that Islamism, in its various forms, plays a major role in the evolution of Muslim societies, in the struggles that are developing there. What explains this centrality? Can we draw a parallel between Islamism and Christian liberation theology?
Interview
Alain Gresh. — Why is Islamism the dominant political language in the Arab world, the Islamic world? There was a time when there were other languages, socialism, Arab nationalism. . .
Asef Bayat. — Let me begin by making clear what I mean by Islamism, in particular the type that has emerged since the 1970s. By Islamism I am referring to those ideologies and movements that want to establish some kind of Islamic order—an Islamic state, sharia law and moral codes in Muslim societies and communities. Of course, the Islamist trends vary in terms of how to achieve these goals—they may be reformist, revolutionary, jihadi, or quietist. Yes, before the prevalence of Islamism, there were other kinds of largely secular political languages, like Arab nationalism or socialism. But I think Islamism of the 1970s emerged primarily because of the (perceived or real) failure of those political models in what they had promised. So, historically speaking, Islamism has been the political language, not simply of the marginalized but particularly of high-achieving middle classes who saw their dream of social equity and justice betrayed by the failure of secular nationalist project, capitalist modernity (represented by regional monarchs and sheikhdoms), and socialist utopia (embodied in the post-colonial modernist secular and populist states). Islamists aspired to an alternative social and political order with roots in “indigenous”, Islamic history, values and thought. Even though different currents of Islamists have adopted different ways to achieve their ultimate goals, they have all used a religious, Islamic language and conceptual framework, favoring conservative social mores and an exclusive social order; they have displayed a patriarchal disposition and often intolerant attitudes towards different ideas and lifestyles. Theirs, then, has been an ideology and a movement resting on a blend of religiosity and obligation, with little commitment to the language of rights.
Clearly then, Islamism has been oppositional. But the interesting question, as observers like Bobby Sayyid suggest1, is not whether Islamism is oppositional, but rather why so much of political opposition in the Muslim world takes an Islamist form. I think that the resiliency of Islamism—despite its failures, transformations, and post-Islamization—lies primarily in its serving as (1) an identity marker in a global time that is deeply invested in the politics of “who we are”. (2) Secondly, Islamism offers an ideological package filled with seemingly consistent components, clear responses, and simple remedies, such that it automatically ejects philosophical doubts, intellectual ambiguities, or skeptical probing. And finally, (3) Islamism continues to project a utopian image of itself in a world in which the grand ideals and dreamlands (such as communism, democracy, freedom) have collapsed or being questioned; it continues to project itself as a unique combatant, revolutionary and emancipatory ideology.
A. G. — While Islamism is challenging the imperialist domination, is it challenging the neoliberal order? And what does it mean to challenge the imperialist order when you support neoliberalism?
A. B. — Well, the notion of “anti-imperialism” has traditionally held a normative stand, referring to a just struggle that is waged by often secular progressive forces to liberate subjugated peoples from the diktat of global capitalism and imperial (economic, political and cultural) domination; wanting to establish self-rule, social justice, and support for the working people and the subaltern subjects—women, minorities, and marginalized groups. The Zapatista movement in the Mexican Chiapas, and Anti-Globalization Movement may be said to represent such anti-imperialist struggles. In this understanding, the notion of “empire” is different from the liberal concept, where, according to Kenneth Pomeranz, “leaders of one society rule directly or indirectly over at least one other society”,2 using instruments that differ from those they used to rule at home. In the liberal conception, empire is not all that bad, in the way that the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson speaks of the British and the US empires3, because it spreads liberal values and the institutions of democracy across the globe.
The anti-imperialist thinking, however, draws on a left-critical notion of empire, something close to what David Harvey views as a mix of “neoliberal restructurings worldwide and the neoconservative attempt to establish and maintain a coherent moral order in both the global and various national situations”; in this understanding, imperialism results from the need for capital to dispose of its surplus, which by necessity involves geographical expansion. Put crudely, capital needs the state to clear the way for a secure and less troubled context for overseas expansion, which would involve not just economic restructuring but also political, ideological and military influence. Today’s imperialism is so ingrained in neoliberal normativity that it is hard to imagine how anyone can claim to challenge the empire while taking neoliberalism for gran.
[This is also so with America's neoliberal capitalism which progressive Christians have been rejecting in favor of a trans-democratic polyplural blending of cultural, religious, and ethnic identity. Opposed to these ideas is the effort of Trumpian conservative Christians supporting a religious form of anti-democratic imperialism (e.g. "Kingdom Reconstructionism") rejecting the equal rights of a polyplural democracy in favor of a much stricter imposition of church interpretation and so-called "biblical" ruling over societal rights known as Christian dominionism. In other words, God and the bible, is hardly different from the anti-democratic forms of Islamist interpretations of Allah and the Koran - re slater]
During the cold-war era, Islamic groups and thinkers were often competing with their key ideological rival—Marxism—to pursue anti-capitalist, populist and social justice postures. We saw this in the socialist ideas of Mahmoud Taha in Sudan, anti-capitalism of Syed Qutb, Islamic left of Hasan Hanafi in Egypt, economic Marxism of Ali Shariati in Iran, or distributionist perspective of Muhammad Baqir Sadr in Iraq. So, while some kind of left populism characterized the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, we see today a tendency towards neoliberal populism among both Islamists and post-Islamists—for instance, in the thinking of figures like Ahmadinejad of Iran, Kheirat al-Shater of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, Turkey’s Erdoğan, or the so-called Costa Salafis4 who are not interested in distribution and welfare, but “prosperity” through individual entrepreneurship. This represents a significant shift to what might be called “neo-Islamism” of our neoliberal times. This “neo-Islamism” basically takes the market society for granted, but focuses instead on “cultural” struggles and violent methods (by militant Jihadies) to deter western imperial hegemony. Indeed, no other political force in recent years seems to have inflicted more economic, geopolitical, and physical injury to Western powers than militant Islamism.
But how liberatory has this fight been for the ordinary Muslims? In other words, what is there in the Islamist “anti-imperialism” for the Muslim subaltern—the poor, the marginalized, the excluded? In the book Revolution without Revolutionaries (see below), I suggest that Islamist “anti-imperialism” has been non-liberatory, to say the least, even oppressive -
(1) it’s violence has triggered “war on terror” victimizing the mostly ordinary Muslims;
(2) it has emboldened autocratic regimes to quell dissent in the name of anti-terror campaign; and,
(3) when Islamists have had a chance to rule, they have established authoritarian religious rule, exclusivist social order and moral discipline (theirs has been somewhat similar to Robert Mugabe’s “anti-imperialism”).
Islamists’ “anti-imperialism” has been largely self-serving; their “cultural struggle” in particular has served to shield their ideological hegemony from the barrage of competing ideas and lifestyles that globalization unleashes. Such “anti-imperialism” does not necessarily bring anything better for the Muslim subaltern. It is on such grounds that I am increasingly inclined to forego the whole notion of “anti-imperialism” in favor of accentuating the objective of “liberation”—by which I mean freeing the populace from all types of (social, economic, political, ethnic, religious, or patriarchal) subjugation by establishing an inclusive and egalitarian social order. In other words, the goal is not anti-imperialism per se, but liberation. Because anti-imperialism does not necessarily cause liberation, but liberation is inescapably anti-imperialist.
[These suggested pro-liberal Islamist objectives would then be in line with progressive Christian objectives to recognize an inclusive and egalitarian social democracy within a post-capitalistic economy centered on the inherent value of the individual and local community networking towards social justice, education, health, wage labor, and anti-discrimination across all social fronts. - re slater]
A. G. —What are the differences between the theology of liberation and Islamism?
A. B. — Despite that both Islamism and liberation theology (in Latin America) often deploy religious language in their outlooks, they are quite different in other respects. Whereas Islamism takes the establishment of an “Islamic order” as its principal objective from which social justice and the advancement of the deprived may follow, the liberation theology considers the “liberation of the poor” as its point of departure; the Gospel is then reread and reinterpreted to achieve this fundamental goal. The principal question for liberation theology was “how we can be Christians in the world of misery?” “We can be Christians, authentic Christians, only by living our faith in a liberating way”, the theologians Boff brothers replied.
Originally liberation theology was a reaction to, and a reflection of, the hideous imperial legacy of the Catholic Church in Latin America. In contrast to the Islamic ulema (scholars) who were mostly involved in anti-colonial struggles in the Middle East, the Latin American Catholic Church was an instrument of Iberian colonialism, which was to bring riches to Spain and Portugal and to Christianize the colonies. Not only did the Church support colonial rule, it continued to back the wealthy conservative classes in society after independence was achieved. Even some rethinking during the 1930s, reflected in the “New Christendom” and the subsequent emergence of Christian Democratic Parties, failed to overturn the Church’s old conservative disposition. Yet dramatic social and political events (such as poverty and oppression, military coups, American support of the elites, the failure of the Christian Democratic Parties, the sudden victory of the Cuban Revolution and the wave of popular guerrilla movements) had pushed the Church to the brink of social irrelevance. There was a need to intervene to save Catholicism from the conservatism of the Church’s elites. In this sense, liberation theologians were similar not to Islamists but to post-Islamist intellectuals and critical clerics who were concerned with rescuing Islam as an inclusive religion from the exclusivist practices of authoritarian Islamism; “republican theology” became the central thrust in post-Islamist religious discourse, as I have shown in my book Making Islam Democratic (2007). But the post-Islamist embrace of market was no match to the socialist developmentalism of the Latin American liberation theology.
So, unlike Islamism, liberation theology was not so much an expression of cultural identity in the sense of self-preservation vis-à-vis a dominating Western “other”; it was rather imbedded in the indigenous discourse of development, underdevelopment, and dependency that Latin America was fiercely debating at the time. In fact, the phrase “theology of liberation” emerged in the context of clerics exploring a “theology of development”. It was Gustavo Gutierrez who, during the Conference of the World Council of Churches held in Switzerland in 1969, replaced that term with the “theology of liberation”; he popularized the concept through his book, Liberation Theology. Central to this notion was, of course, the emancipation of the subaltern.
In contrast, Islamism had a different birth and birthplace. Broadly speaking, Islamism emerged since the 1970s as a language of self-assertion to mobilize those (largely middle class high achievers) who felt marginalized by the dominant economic, political, or cultural processes, those for whom the failure of both capitalist modernity and socialist utopia made the language of morality (religion) a substitute for politics. In a sense, it was the Muslim middle-class way of saying “No” to those whom they considered their “excluders”—their national elites, secular governments, and these governments’ Western allies. So Islamists rejected Western cultural domination, its political rationale, moral sensibilities and cultural symbols, even if in practice many of them shared those traits, as in their neckties, food, and technologies. As an alternative to existing models they attempted to offer an alternative society and state for Muslim humanity.
While Islamists aimed to Islamize their society, polity and economy, liberation theologians never intended to Christianize their society or states, but rather to change society from the vantage point of the deprived. Liberation theology, then, had much in common with humanist, democratic, and popular movements in Latin America, including labor unions, peasant leagues, student groups and guerrilla movements, with whom it organized campaigns, strikes, demonstrations, land occupations and development work. Here, as a partner of a broad popular movement, liberation theology aimed not to proselytize, nor to make the coalition partners Christian, but to help advance the cause of the liberation movement in general. More importantly, liberation theology shared a great deal with humanist Marxism. Indeed, both Latin American Marxism and liberation theology had been influenced by the language of the radical “dependencia” of the 1960s and 1970s that originated primarily in the South American continent. Prominent priests such as Clodovo and Leonardo Boff (Brazil), Gustavo Gutiérrez (Peru), José Míguez Bonino (Venezuela), and Camilo Torres (Colombia) were intellectual theologians equipped with the discourse of dependency and Marxist humanism.
A. G. — Can we see the emergence of an “Islamic left?”
A. B. — As I pointed out earlier, old Islamism of the cold-war period did have quite strong anti-capitalist, populist, distributionist, and social justice postures, even though it was socially conservative, politically authoritarian, and ideologically exclusivist. The current post-Islamist currents want to address the authoritarian and exclusivist shortcomings of Islamism by speaking of inclusion, pluralism and citizen rights (for instance, the Iranian “reformists”, Tunisia’s al-Nahda Party, the Justice and Development Party AKP in Turkey until 2010, and the like). But, despite their pluralistic tendencies, post-Islamists (just like the neo-Islamism) have invariably embraced capitalist rationale, leaving people’s welfare to the impulse of the market, and making no programmatic commitments for equality and social justice. Look at AKP, al-Nahda and others, they are happy to go along with marketization, privatization, urban gentrification, as if the demands for social justice can be addressed by a few acts of charity and free iftar during the Ramadan. If post-Islamism as a project is to have a future, it needs to address not just “personal liberties,” but also social justice for the meagre and marginalized. It needs to turn into some kind of “Post-Islamist Social Democracy.” It can resurrect the ideals of the “Islamic left” without abandoning its embrace of pluralist democracy.
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Alain Gresh - Is the Publication Director of Orient XXI. A specialist in the Near East, he is the author of several books, including De quoi la Palestine est-elle le nom ?, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2010 and et Un chant d’amour. Israël-Palestine, une histoire française, with Hélène Aldeguer, éditions La Découverte, 2017.
Asef Bayat - Is the Catherine & Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Trans-national Studies, teaches Sociology and Middle East studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, 2009, 2013) and Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007). Last book : Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, (Stanford, 2017).
[R.E. Slater - Relevancy22; I have bracketed my comment's to the article above to help separate them from the original article herein given by Gresh and Bayat.]
* * * * * * *
Why Pan-Islamism is the biggest roadblock for Muslims' integration with modernity
by Arshia Malik, December 05, 2016
Why Pan-Islamism is the biggest roadblock for Muslims' integration with modernity. It is this very nature of Pan-Islamism, of excluding culture and ethnicity as primary factors in its goal of 'Ummah' unification, that I object to
Pan-Islamism is a political movement advocating the unity of Muslims under one Islamic state – often a Caliphate - or an international organization with Islamic principles. As a form of religious nationalism, Pan-Islamism differentiates itself from other pan-nationalistic ideologies, for example, Pan-Arabism, by excluding culture and ethnicity as primary factors towards unification.
I started searching for the role of Muslims in 1947 in the formation of Pakistan and came up with the Hijrat of 1920. This lead me to the book Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918 By M. Naeem Qureshi. Which further brought up Jamal al-Afghani and his famous disciple Muhammad Abduh, who surprised me, or at least his Wikipedia entry did. His views on Islam seem very modern and liberal and he was definitely called an infidel according to his biographers, by his contemporary Muslims and both teacher and disciple fell in and out of favor with various Sultans and Kings of the then fragmenting Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East and Central Asia.
Their zeal for Pan-Islamism was in response to the hegemony of European Colonialism that they saw in their travels to various Muslim lands. But then they did not stop at just criticizing the West. Muhammad Abduh, in fact, went further and advocated that:
''...the two greatest possessions relating to religion that man was graced with were independence of will and independence of thought and opinion; and because Western civilization was based on these two principles, it had progressed to a much happier stage in the evolution of mankind."
Pan-Islamism went through its various stages, starting from the early days of Islam as a ''religious concept'' and moved on to become a ''modern political ideology'' in the 1860s and the 1870s at the height of European Colonialism when Turkish intellectuals began discussing and writing about it as a way to save the crumbling Ottoman Empire, according to the Oxford Islamic Studies site. From becoming the ''favored state policy'' as a ''defensive ideology'' directed against European political, military and economic, and missionary penetration in the East, ruling bureaucratic and intellectual Pan-Islamist elites of the fast-becoming obsolete Ottoman Empire, sought to pose the Sultan as a universal Caliph to whom Muslims everywhere would owe allegiance and obedience.
It is this very nature of Pan-Islamism, of excluding culture and ethnicity as primary factors in its goal of 'Ummah' unification, that I object to. As much as its early advocates continue to surprise me as I explore the translations of their writings, it is this core principle at its heart which stands out as a sore to seculars like me who live in places where a myriad of Islam is seen, followed and believed in. No doubt, the early advocates of Pan-Islamism wanted to offset military and economic weakness in the Muslim world by favoring central government over the periphery and Muslims over non-Muslims in dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the Great War (World War I), but to me this ''sociopolitical solidarity'' which seeks coordination through political and economic cooperation internationally has now become an important ''political tool'' for the recruitment of extremists and terrorists in the perceived foreign aggression post-World War II.
Muhammad Abduh's conclusions from his vast array of works do not convince me that he was a true liberal and believer in social justice, even though both Jamal al-Afghani and he faced opposition not only obviously from the British rulers and diplomats but also from their own fellow compatriots and other Muslims, even down to what, we may in modern times call, inspiring their personal trolls to declare them as infidels. Abduh's quote,"Muslims suffer from ignorance about their own religion and the despotism of unjust rulers'', could very well fit into what I often call the ''Misgovernance of Kashmir'' - a term taken from the champion of Kashmiris, Robert Thorpe, a young British Army Officer who arrived as a tourist in the Valley in 1865 and wrote his first-hand observations in his book Kashmir Misgoverned and was probably poisoned because of it and lies buried in the Christian Cemetery in Srinagar.
Another quote attributed to Adbuh is uncannily similar to what independent observers post 90s started speaking of when they visited Muslim lands and their writings/observations came in the public domain due to social media networks, for example, the works of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Hari Kunzru, Rabih Alameddine, Aatish Taseer, Kenan Malik, the various documentaries about the Middle East showing life as it truly is and the latest popular Ali A. Rizvi on his life in Saudi, Pakistan and in Canada straddling three civilizations. The quote goes: ''I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but no Islam.''
Why I am still suspicious of these two revolutionary men is because no evidence was found in their works and activism to show that they leaned towards favoring political democracy or parliamentarianism. According to both their biographers and research experts like Nikki Keddie on al-Afghani and Mark Sedgwick on Abduh, both of them were no dangerous fanatics or religious enthusiasts and belonged to the broadest schools of Muslim thought, holding political creed akin to pure republicanism. They were most obsessed with “the overthrow of individual rulers who were lax or subservient to foreigners, and their replacement by strong and patriotic men, rather than Constitutional, Civil Law and Social Reform". For me the test for a true liberal and emancipator is what they think of women's rights and I am sure they both would have failed my test in the 1800s.
Also the fact that their actual intentions of liberating men from enslavement, providing equal rights to all, abolishing the monopoly of the mullah's (religious scholar's) exegesis, and advocacy for abolishing of racial discrimination and religious compulsion was suppressed and hijacked by latter-day organisations such as the Muslim World League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Their agenda of modern Pan-Islamism projected these two as the founding fathers of the Wahabbi/Salafist ideologies (indoctrinating strains of Islamic thought, jurisprudence, interpretation and philosophy culminating in the formation of the barbaric and brutal ISIS) by linking them with leading Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Maududi, and Ayatollah Khomeini who actually stressed their belief that a return to traditional Sharia law would make Islam united and strong again (an early Islamic Kharijite extremist concept which practised takfir) is what brings me back to the ''hijacking of movements by Islamists'' for their own agendas as has been done in Kashmir since the 90s.
What could have been a simple protest against the high-handedness, interference, and pampering of India of the ruling elite turned to be a Pak-sponsored armed revolt which left a generation dead, disappeared and maimed for life, physically and mentally. The 'Tanzimat'' reform period in the Ottoman Empire has a similar disgruntlement echoing when secularization of the leadership, so that the Christian population would feel more a part of the Empire, through the promotion of a sentiment of equality for all citizens, and would be less likely to agitate for the right to self-rule; led to the formation of a constitution and a legislature. This was being achieved and had been achieved to some extent in Kashmir after 1947 but for the corrupt rule of the elite dynastic party the NC.
Similarly, the West needs to be careful who it chooses as ambassadors from the Muslim communities, now with the mass migration of Muslims into the West. For in the example of these two, one can see how organizations like CAIR/Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas can operate among the white-guilt-ridden Western countries. A much better example is to be found in my initial starting point of the role of Indian elite Muslims of the 1940s who were responsible for the Khilafat movement and found a supporter in Gandhi too. That is to be explored next.
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