Articles
Articles
Note from MENGOS: While this is an old article by renowned Syrian professor Sadiq J. Al Azm, we found it of particular importance and relevance to re-publish it.
Looking at You/ Looking at Us
A note on Islam, Secularism and the West.
Professor Sadiq J. Al Azm
From a lecture at Damascus, May 1997
I would like to start by taking note of a certain state of affairs and also by establishing the metaphors via which I shall deal with that state of affairs:
The problems, difficulties, suspicions, enmities, hostilities and so on that we all know currently bedevil Muslim-Western relations show that the two sides are looking at each other not only through a fractured mirror but through a 'glass darkly' as well. I do not think that this condition can be completely remedied or wholly overcome, but I do think it can be mitigated and alleviated by greater critical self-awareness on the part of the two sides eyeing each other in the above mentioned manner. What does this critical self-awareness concretely involve? It involves the following:
a- The clear and frank admission from the outset that the problems, issues, difficulties etc. plaguing the relationship of the two sides (that is darkening the glass) are affairs neither of the pure spirit nor of mere clashes of religious ideas, nor of conflicting theological interpretations nor simple matters of images and perceptions, but are affairs of real history, power politics and clashes of material forces and vital interests. Without this kind of candid recognition, the condition of the fractured mirror would get immeasurable worse.
b- The clear and frank admission that the looks are being exchanged by two extremely unequal entities: unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science and technology, and the list may be extended at will. This should not be interpreted as a kind of counsel of despair, but as a contribution to the much needed realization that the responsibilities and obligations of the strong, while exchanging looks with the weak, are incommensurably greater and far more ominous than those of its counterpart, if the acts of mutual staring are not to degenerate into dissing and its destructive consequences. In other words the fiction of the formal equality of the two looking sides, each objectifying the other to a comparable and/or equivalent degree, will simply not do. It can only darken more an already darkened glass, it can only fracture more an already fractured mirror.
The clear and frank admission that it is ridiculous to think that the looks cast by Islam at the West somehow form a serious threat to the vital interests of Europe, the United States and the West in general. The sooner the staring West gets rid of this fiction, the greater the chances become of improving the condition of the fractured mirror. For all intents and purposes the glances of Islam stopped forming a serious threat to Europe since the failed second siege of Vienna. The absolute majority of the regimes, governments and ruling elites of Islamic countries have never been more subservient to the looks of the West than they are now. To think that under the present circumstances of importance, structural dependency, under development and general decay characterizing the Islamic world at large, that Islam's glances can somehow still pose a serious threat to the vital interests of an obvious triumphant West is laughable. In fact, from our side of the eyeing divide Europe and the West in general seem, at this moment, so powerful, so efficient, so successful, so unstoppable that it is we who are scared out of our wits - not the West. This is not to say that the Western media do not play on some kind of irrational hysteria over the threat of Islam, and this is not to say that Western politicians do not cynically profit from this hysteria and this is not to say that our politicians do not cynically promote themselves by saying to their own gullible people, HEY! Look how scared the mighty West is of Islam! But the real centers of power in Europe and the West know very well, and without either fictions or illusions, the real nature of the balance of power obtaining between Europe and Islam, between the West and Islam at this stage of history.
d- The clear and frank admission that Terrorism is often part of the weapons of the weak and Islam is no exception. The tendency dominating the stern and austere looks of the West in general and the United States in particular to selectively and arbitrarily erase the boundaries between terrorism on the one hand and all forms of violent resistance to foreign occupation, national liberation struggle, insurrectionary action against intolerable oppression on the other, simply shows that a hard staring West is not seriously interested in either mending the fractured mirror or in even slightly clearing the darkened glass. In other words, extending the range of meaning of terrorism a la American, to cover every act of violence, insurrection and rebellion that the West does not like simply robs the concept of terrorism of all content and significance making it purely a discretionary idea serving the immediate interests of the more powerful looking side. A more discriminating and carefully defined concept of terrorism on the part of the strong will, I think, help alleviate some of the difficulties plaguing Islamic-western relations. When the concept of terrorism is more carefully circumscribed, more seriously defined and more precisely pinpointed, then Islamic terrorism will be put in proper perspective, especially when compared to the home grown European type of terrorism once practiced by the Red Brigades, Action Directe and the Bader-Meinhoff gang all of whom operated at a German - ad not Middle Eastern or Muslim- level of efficiency, precision and effectiveness.
In fact my favorite term for armed insurrectionary Islam is: 'Action Directe Islam and Islamist.' Just as the 'action directe' types of armed factions and fractions in Europe had given up society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, traditional communist organization, the inert masses in favor of blind and spectacular activism, heedless and contemptuous of consequences, long term calculations of the chances of success or failure and son on, similarly our 'action directe Islamist' have given up on contemporary Muslim society, its socio-political movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, their endemic false consciousness, mainstream Islamic organizations, the Attentism of the original and traditional society of Muslim Brothers (from which they all hail in the same way the original 'action directe' hailed from European Communism), in favor of their own brand of blind and spectacular activism also heedless and contemptuous of consequences, chances of success and failure and so on.
One time Michel Foucault was asked about the social and/or revolutionary significance of his books. He answered something to the effect that they are no more than molotov cocktails, hand grenades, or sonic bombs hurled at the system which consume themselves in the act of exploding and have no significance beyond the flash they engender. Translate this to the somewhat more primitive Activist Islamist idiom and you will have what some Islamists call an act of rage in favor of God's cause (Ghadab Allah) and against the system, an act which need not have any immediate significance beyond itself and is not expected to have any importance, beyond the flash it engenders. As a result, far from producing alternative programs of action, they resort to short cut solutions, assassinations, hostage taking, kidnappings, petty intrigues and so on.
This is the common illusion of the short cut course to the restoration of an authentic Islamic order or an authentically humane socialist society in Europe and the West. By the way, the Action Directe Islamists, like their European counterparts, are not rabble or anything of the sort. They are more often than not petty bourgeois, upwardly mobile university educated youths. They unknowingly share with their European equivalents a sense of entrapment within an alienating monolythic socio-political reality, an ontology of total rejection of that reality and a tragic world view centered around the salvational potential of the supreme moment of crisis as also the supreme moment of truth in an enveloping world of untruth, false consciousness and misleading appearances. Escape from this 'Societe du specatcle', to quote the title of a famous European book, takes the form of pushing their way willy-nilly towards the moment of crisis out of which the moment of Islamic or some other kind of Truth will explode.
e- The clear and frank recognition on the part of all those concerned that the Western gaze directed at Islam is in depth asking our side of the eyeing divide certain fundamental questions:
* Are Islam and Modernity compatible>
* Are Islam and Secularism compatible?
* Are Islam and Democracy compatible?
* Are Islam and Free Speech compatible?
* Are Islam and Religious Tolerance compatible?
* In brief, are Islam and Secular Humanism compatible?
But the Western gaze here is fractured, clouded, dimmed, etc., by an already presumed answer which says, "no they are not and cannot be."
Let me put before you my own Ijtihad concerning these questions, in the hope of improving, even if very slightly, the condition of the fractured mirror: Islam as a coherent static ideal of eternal and permanently valid principles, is of course compatible with nothing other than itself. As such, it is the business of Islam to reject, resist and combat secularism and humanism to the very end - like any other major religion viewed under the aspect of eternity. But Islam as a living dynamic evolving faith, responding to widely differing environments and rapidly shifting historical circumstances, incontrovertibly proved itself highly compatible with all the major types of polities and varied forms of social and economic organization that human history produced and threw up in the lives of peoples and societies: from kingship to republic, from tribe to empire, from ancient city state to modern nation state. Similarly, Islam as a world-historical religion stretching over 14 centuries has unquestionably succeeded in implanting itself in a whole variety of societies, a whole multiplicity of cultures, a whole diversity of life-forms, ranging from the tribal-nomadic to the centralized bureaucratic to the feudal-agrarian to the mercantile-financial, to the capitalist-industrial. In light of these palpable historical facts, adaptations and precedents, it should be a bit clearer that Islam has had to be very plastic, adaptable, malleable and infinitely re-interpretable and resizable to survive and flourish under such contradictory conditions and widely varying circumstances as referred to above. This is why I can conclude that there is nothing to prevent historical Islam in principle from coming to terms and making itself compatible with such things as secularism, humanism, democracy, modernity and so on. Whether it actually does and/or evolves in that direction is a historical contingency and a socio-cultural probability depending on what actually living and kicking Muslims do as historical agents.
Let us not forget for a moment that at the height of the Islamic revolution in Iran the Ayatollahs, in their moment of victory, did not proceed to restore the Islamic Caliphate - and there was a shi'i Caliphate in Islamic history as we all know - nor did they erect an Imamate, or vice Imamate, but proceeded to establish a republic for the first time in Iran's long history with popular elections, a constitution (which is a clone of the 1958 French constitution) a constituent assembly, a parliament (where real debates take place) a president, a council of ministers, political factions, a supreme court of all sorts - all of which have nothing to do with Islam as history, orthodoxy and dogma, but plenty to do with modern Europe as history and political institutions. What makes this phenomenon doubly important is the fact that the Iranian clerics and guardians of shi'i orthodoxy and dogmatic purity have on the whole been ferocious opponents of republicanism and the republic, denouncing it as absolutely un-Islamic. They successfully frustrated all previous attempts at declaring Iran a republic by earlier reforming rulers in the name of orthodox Islam and the rejection of European models, imported institutions and so on.
In spite of the Islamic idiom, the politico-ideological discourses, debates and polemics of the Iranian clerics and guardians of correct belief are substantively dictated by the historical conditions of the present socio-economic political conjuncture and not by the dogmatic requirements of orthodoxy. This is why we find the public discourse of Iran's ruling Mullahs dealing with and discussing not so much of theology, dogma, the Caliphate, the Imamate and so on, but of economic planning, social reform, redistribution of wealth, imperialism, economic dependency, the role of the popular masses (as against that of technocratic elites) as well as such issues as identity, modernization, authenticity and so on. Obviously the historical republican necessity won the day in Iran against the purist anti-republican, Muslim, dogmatic tradition.
As far as the Arab world is concerned, one source of confusion about its relationship to secularism lies, as it seems to me, in the fact that Arab societies never witnessed a high dramatic Kemalist instant where the state is declared from the top secular and officially separate from religion, as happened with the emergence of modern Turkey from the ashes of the First World War. this process attained its climatic moment in Mustafa Kemal's famous abolition of the Caliphate in 1924.
In contrast to the Turkish-Kemalist instance, the secularization process in key Arab societies has been slow, informal, hesitant, adaptive, absorbant pragmatic, graudalitsic, full of halfway houses, partial compromises, transient marriages of convenience and plenty of temporary retreats and unending evasions, but no striking moment of high drama. That sort of climatic point could have come to pass- somewhat on the Kemalist model - at the hands of President Nasser of Egypt soon after the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 ( a heroic and immensely popular act all over the Arab World). But, Nasser never took that step and the real high drama arrived with the reaction to all that in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, revivalism, armed insurrectionary Islam and so on.
Nonetheless it remains a fact that in such key countries as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria etc., there is hardly anything in society, economy, polity, culture, and law that is run anymore according to Islamic precepts, administered along the lines of Shari'a law or functions in conformity with theological doctrine and/or teachings. Outside the realm of personal status, individual belief and private piety and/or impiety the role of Islam has unquestionably receded to the periphery of public life. In other words, inspect, in any one of those states, the factory, the bank, the market place, the officer corps, the political party, the state apparatuses, the school, the university, the laboratory, the court-house, the arts, the media etc., and you will quickly realize that there is very little religion left in them.
I will also point out that even in a state like Saudi Arabia where the ruling tribal elite wraps itself so conspicuously in the mantels of strict Muslim orthodoxy, moral purity, bedouin austerity and social uprightness, the contradiction between outward official pretense, on the one hand, and the real substance of life on the other, has become so wide, sharp and explosive, that those still taking their religious pretenses seriously staged the armed insurrection which occupied the Meccan Holy Shrine in 1979, shaking the kingdom to its foundations in the process. Their declared goal was no more than rectifying that schizophrenic condition, i.e., putting an end to that ludicrous discrepancy between official ideology and reality by bringing the substance of Saudi life again in strict conformity with religious orthodoxy as officially announced and propounded.
In the above mentioned countries, the modern secular-nationalist calendar, with its new holidays, symbols, monuments, historical sites, battles, heroes, ceremonies and memorial days, ha come to fill the public square, relegating, in the process, the old religious calendar and its landmarks to the margins of public life. This is why the truly radical Muslim fundamentalists speak not so much about the unsecualrizability of Islam, but rather about "Islam's eclipse and isolation from life," about "the absence of Islam from all realms of human activity, because it has been reduced to mere prayer, the fast, the pilgrimage and alms giving," about how "Islam faces today the worst ordeal in its existence as a result of materialism, individualism and nationalism," about how "school and university curricula, though not openly critical of religion, effectively subvert the Islamic world-picture and its attendant practices," about how "the history of Islam and the Arabs is written, taught and explained without reference to divine intervention," causal or otherwise, about how "modern and nominally Muslim nation-states, though they never declare a separation of State and Mosque, they nonetheless, subvert Islam as a away of life, as an all-encompassing spiritual and moral order and as a normative integrative force, by practicing a more sinister de facto form of functional separation of state and religion." Obviously these radical fundamentalists have a superior appreciation, in their own way, of the nature of the modern forces and processes gnawing at the traditional fabric of Muslim societies, cultures and polities, than the social scientists, experts and mainstream and fundamentalist Mullahs and clerics who keep repeating the formula 'Islam is unsecularizable.'
Consequently the radical insurrectionary Islamists keenly resent the fact that contemporary historical Islam has gone a long way in the direction of privatization, personalization, and even individualization, to the point of allowing its basic tenets to turn into optional beliefs, rituals and acts of worship. To reverse this seemingly irreversible trend, they literally (and not figuratively) go to war in order to achieve what they call the re-Islamization of currently nominally Muslim societies, cultures and polities.
They resent no less keenly:
* the extent to which traditional gender hierarchies continue to be destabilized, shaken and altered in contemporary Muslim societies;
* the slow erosion of the traditional power of males over females accompanying such major social shifts as urbanization, the switch to the nuclear family, the wider education, training and gainful employment of women;
* the steady growth of competing obligations, opportunities and openings attracting women from strictly traditional roles;
* the tendency towards greater egalitarian gender relations in marriage and life in general;
* the reproduction of society, through the socialization of children, according to norms that they regard as totally un-Islamic.
Hence, their anger over the whole feminist issue, their nervous discourses over the Muslim family and its fate, their preoccupation with Muslim socialization of children and their militant demands for such measures as the reimposition on women, the young and the family in general of the norms of traditional respect, obedience, gender segregation and undivided loyalty to the male head of the household.
It should not escape attention in this connection, that Muslim countries in general and Arab societies in particular have witnessed, since the end of the last century, an uninterrupted commotion of sharp debates, discussions, polemics, rebuttals, counter rebuttals and struggles over the gender issue and its ramifications or the family, the role of women in society at large, the socialization of children and the kind of norms according to which society is to reproduce itself.
I would like to end by emphasizing my general point by the following citation from one of Naguib Mahfouz's articles describing the murky and confused condition of a typical Cairene Muslim struggling willy-nilly with the paradoxes, anomalies and antinomies generated daily by a long-term historical secularization process, glimpsed by most only intermittently and through a glass darkly:
-"He leads a contemporary [i.e. modern] life. He obeys civil and penal laws of Western origin and is involved in a complex tangle of social and economic transactions and is never certain to what extent these agree with or contradict his Islamic creed. Life carries him along in its current and he forgets his misgivings for a time until one Friday he hears the Imam or reads the religious page in one of the papers and the old misgivings come back with a certain fear. He realizes that in this new society he has been afflicted with a split personality: half of him believes, prays, fasts and makes the pilgrimage. The other half renders his values void in banks and courts and in the streets, even in the cinemas and theaters, perhaps even at home among his family before the television set."
