Two articles on Humeira Iqtidar’s work, Secularising Islamists, seem to make an attack on Iqtidar’s integrity rather than tackle the substance of her work, which is quite detailed and wide in focus. But first, secularism as a political idea is different from secularisation as a social process, which is what Iqtidar talks about.
Ayesha Siddiqa accuses Iqtidar of “rationalising jihadi discourse” and Afiya Shehrbano makes the startling claim of the academic in question being “anti-secular” (whatever that means). Both authors are well-respected and, in the past, have produced immense works of quality and substance. But, on this point, both academics could not be more wrong.
Let us first take the issue of secularisation. For this I use Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s brilliant work, The Ulema in Contemporary Islam. Zaman writes about contemporary Islamism in Pakistan by taking Maulana Maududi as its chief intellectual architect. If we take the issue of religious authority, Zaman confirms that nowhere in Maududi’s writings is there a place for the clergy to assume political power. The clergy and ‘Islamists’ are distinct social entities — they are not one and the same.
Indeed, Islamists of all shades, from the liberal to the theocrat, envisage shrinking the role of the clergy and the obscure seminary debates replete in classical Islam to bring religious discussion into the public sphere. The defragmentation of religious authority in Pakistan has been spectacular — the role of the televangelist is the best example of where classical religious authority has receded in the face of new forms of religious discourse. Now just because the role of the traditional clergy has shrunk does not mean a new liberal religiosity will take its place — indeed nowhere does Iqtidar make such a bold claim.
But the massive gap in both Siddiqa’s and Shehrbano’s articles is the striking inability to think about Islamism. Let us take the example of Rachid Al Ghannouchi. Robin Wright, in her work, argues that Ghannouchi is a proponent of gender equality, minority rights, electoral politics, free media and human rights whilst maintaining that he can justify all these principles by using religious philosophy and religious values (which is detailed in the book, Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat within Islamism).
The example of Ghannouchi is to prove a point, and that point is that, for too long, we have lazily identified Islamism with violence and extremism. Indeed, in a recent publication, Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, noted scholars Don Emmerson and Daniel Varsco both write that, after conducting research and analysis, “We both agree that the term Islamism should not be linked exclusively with political violence and militancy.”
By bringing Islam into the public sphere, religious norms are being contested like never before. The fluctuating nature of contemporary Islamic discourse is unlike anything we have seen in the classical tradition. The modern culture of democratic politics has transformed Islam, forcing it to keep abreast of political events by compelling a revaluation of religious ideas. Iran is the best case study for Pakistanis to observe — Charles Kurzman has indeed identified an “Islamic critique” of Islamic Iran in his work, Critics Within: Islamic Scholars’ Protests Against the Islamic State in Iran.
Indeed, Mohammad Ayoob, another scholar who studies Muslim political and social movements, writes of a promising trend in ‘Islamist politics’: “If there is a discernible long-term trend in Islamist politics, it points toward moderation and constitutionalism, not violence and extremism.” The word ‘Islamist’ on its own does not tell us anything about what type of political values are held and cherished. The Islamist rather should be, in the words of an American scholar, Graham Fuller, someone “who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim world and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion”.
We need to be more articulate in the way we deal with religious parties and religiously inspired political actors in the Muslim world. Fuller writes again: “Other terms are then required to describe various places along that spectrum: violent, radical, quietist, democratic, reformist, moderate, pragmatic, ideological — whatever. But in the absence of a term to describe the full spectrum of the Islamist phenomenon, we in effect close our minds analytically to the encouraging evolution of Islamism in more positive directions.”
Islamism itself can be constituted as a reaction to the colonial project of the nation-state. Again Iqtidar treats this subject brilliantly in her book but our esteemed authors seem to totally ignore that thesis. Reacting to the state is a secularising tendency — religious ordinances are ignored in the course of political expediency as seen in Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini’s theory of Vilayat-e-Faqih (see the work of Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi).
The concept of the nation state, itself arguably born out of the experiences of the French and American Revolutions, which gave rise to the phenomenon of constitutionalism, codification of a positivist law and separation of powers, has presented unique challenges to Muslim societies. Indeed Islamism itself is a reaction to the political organisation of the ‘state’. There is no legal discussion in classical Islam about anything remotely close to the modern nation state — Islamism in all its forms has filled that gap. Indeed, the first shariah-based modern code of law, which set the pattern for all future codifications of the shariah, was not in the medieval age but in the age of modernity initiated by the Ottoman Empire in the 16 books of the Mecelle (subsumed under the Tanzimat Reforms) during the decade just preceding the drafting of the Ottoman Constitution (1869-1876), which can be seen as an attempt to create an ‘Islamic constitutionalism’ in response to the perceived encroaching juridical-political hegemony of the Europeans. Indeed, the aim to capture the state for your own ends is a radically modern and secular notion of political authority that is absent from classical Islamic scholarship as elaborated by Wael B Hallaq and Haider Ala Hamoudi. Islamism has been dragged into secular politics by contesting the nature of the state. The simple idea is that by bringing in religious ideas into the service of political ambition, they are inevitably reformed around pragmatic lines to respond to the mechanisms of democratic politics. This can either produce liberal or conservative realities but it does mark the ‘secularisation’ of religious dogma. The fact is that in different societies the breakdown of classical religious authority — the secularisation process is vastly different — this is a straightforward anthropological fact that cannot be disputed.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
He tweets at http://twitter.com/AhmadAliKhalid and can be reached at [email protected]