[Reader-list] Last gasp for global Islam

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/09/last-gasp-for-global-islam/

Last gasp for global Islam
Robin Yassin-Kassab
  4th September 2009  —  Issue 162
Islam’s global revival is a hollow shell—and the Muslim world must
heed Ali Allawi’s devastating account of how its leaders are failing
their people

The contemporary religious revival is a complex business. In the same
period that Muslim societies, in their weakness, seem to have
re-embraced Islam, America, in its strength, has re-embraced
Christianity. Western Europe remains avowedly secular.

Despite the contradictions within the west, mainstream Orientalism
holds that all cultures are developing towards the universal—or, more
specifically, globalised—model of secular modernity and the market.
According to this view, the Muslim world experiences backwardness to
the extent that it resists secularisation. The Crisis of Islamic
Civilization, a subtle and erudite book by former Iraqi minister Ali A
Allawi, challenges this thesis. Surveying the Muslim world’s social,
economic and moral failures, and the terror espoused by certain
Islamist groups, Allawi suggests the problem might not be too much
Islam, but too little.

Islam is a civilisational framework that rests on the tripod of
private ritual, public ethics and individual spiritual striving—and
the legs of the tripod must balance each other. But, Allawi argues,
the current Islamic “revival” is operating only in the field of
religiosity: focusing on naked symbols and rules, proclaiming the
superiority of Islam while adopting indiscriminately the technology,
economics and cultural products of the west. It emphasises Sharia as a
set of fixed punishments rather than as a framework of legislative
principles. For the revivalists, the public sphere is too often
reduced to the state—and their political project is simply to seize
control of repressive state apparatuses.

The result is a discomforting disjunction between inner and outer
worlds, symbolised by contradictory Muslim landscapes: home interiors
spotlessly clean, while the streets outside are strangled by plastic
bags. For Allawi, the courtesy, hospitality and warmth still met with
in the Muslim world are the mere remnants of Islamic civilisation, and
the religious revival may be its last gasp.

So what happened? Allawi doesn’t romanticise the Islamic past, yet he
rejects the Arabcentric myth of continual decline since the Mongol
destruction of the Abbasid empire in the 13th century. As he sees it,
a dynamism and internal coherence—and a universalism that in the 14th
century allowed Ibn Battuta, trained in Tangiers, to find work as a
judge in the Maldives—lasted until the European penetration in the
early 19th century. Even then, the first responses to western
imperialism came on Islam’s own terms, from leaders such as Chechnya’s
Imam Shamil or the Algerian Abd al Qadir, whose legitimacy derived
from their ethical Sufism as much as from their championing of law.
Abd al Qadir waged jihad against the invading French in the 1830s and
1840s, and later saved thousands of Christians from the mob in his
Damascene exile.

After military defeat by colonial powers, the Sufi orders degenerated
(Allawi concedes they were in many cases already mired in
superstition), were co-opted by imperial powers and encouraged to
ignore the problematic public realm. As a result, the tariqat—meaning
the “way” or “path” and denoting the pursuit of spiritual truth via
Islamic law—became irrelevant, and Muslims lost the heart of their
tradition. Sadly, the process continues today, in the form of the tame
and supposedly Sufi-oriented Quilliam Foundation, whose co-founder has
opined on “the racist Arab psyche.”

Almost everywhere, Allawi maintains, Islam experienced a traumatic
rupture rather than an evolution into modernity. Colonial powers and
then westernised ruling classes dismantled the institutions of Islam,
from seminaries to the Caliphate. The work ethic disappeared with the
guilds connected to urban Sufi orders, leaving a corrupt marketplace
and a culture of backstabbing. Kemalist Turkey not only substituted
more “modern” Roman letters for Arabic script in the 1920s, but even
criminalised reading Osmanli Turkish (contrast this with the
self-consciously modern state of Israel, which re-established Hebrew
script).

Allawi holds up Japan’s Meiji restoration of 1867-68 as a modernising
response to external challenges that was achieved on the basis of
Japan’s own cultural framework, and wishes Muslims had managed
something similar. He points out that where Islam did evolve towards
modernity in countries beyond western control, the results were
encouraging. During the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906-09,
for example, Najaf-based ayatollahs promoted “the liberty of the
general public from arbitrary and unaccountable government by force,”
and described freedom as “a rational process and one of the pillars of
the Islamic faith.” The Iranian parliament was established as a
result. Despite the existence of Islamic concepts allowing for
democracy (shura), freedom of speech (naseeha and ra’i) and social
justice (’adl), however, voices such as those from Najaf have been
exceptions to the rule of defeat and stagnation across the Muslim
world.

In one of its most engaging sections, the book focuses on Islam’s
urban crisis. The colonial separation of “old” and “new” cities
epitomised the initial civilisational rupture of the 19th century—and
post-colonial regimes have committed even greater vandalism since. The
Wahhabi House of Saud has, for instance, demolished 95 per cent of
historical buildings in the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina for fear
of idolatry. And it has done so to make way for the true idols of the
time: consumer outlets and gated accommodation. Meanwhile, Gulf
city-states are characterised by what Allawi summarises as “rampant
commercialism, brand worship, gigantism, strict class segregation and
a calendar of ‘festivals’ and ‘events’ designed by marketers.”

The economic news is worse still. For all the oil wealth and
untrammelled capitalism, the 57 member countries of the Organisation
of the Islamic Conference (the OIC) account for 22 per cent of global
population yet generate only 6 per cent of world GDP. An Islamic alms
tax (zakat) of 2.5 per cent on the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf
countries would produce an annual $75bn wealth transfer to the poorest
Muslim states, but this isn’t on the agenda. Key Islamic values like
justice, fairness and education have been ignored. Meanwhile, an
illusory counter-movement to the collapse has been led, in the Sunni
world, by Wahhabism. This puritanical reform movement is painfully
literalist, unimaginative, and viciously sectarian. As
anti-intellectual as it is anti-mystical, it rejects the flexibility
of the traditional schools of law. Its influence has been projected
far beyond the central Arabian desert by oil money and the ungodly
Saudi-US alliance. The result is a schizophrenic response to the
west—passivity and collaboration on the one hand, nihilistic terrorism
on the other.

Unlike those (such as Hazel Blears) who assume all visions of a
potential Islamic superstate can be equated with al Qaeda’s, Allawi
suggests that “it is the absence of any formal and substantial Islamic
political presence at the global level that contributes to instability
and disorder.” Chinese-Confucian and Indian-Hindu civilisations have,
more or less, territorial contiguity. The west is represented by two
powers—the EU and the US—and by institutions from Nato to the World
Bank. But since the loss of its multi-national empires, Islam is
splintered between weak states lacking popular legitimacy and very
often governed by client regimes. Muslim countries have thus become
adjuncts of the established civilisational blocks—Morocco to Europe,
for instance, or Malaysia to China—with no serious power capable or
willing to defend suffering Muslims internationally. It is noteworthy
that one of the only Muslim voices to have condemned China’s
oppression of Uighur Muslims is al Qaeda.

Allawi could be criticised for skirting too close to Huntington’s
“clash of civilisations” thesis. His constant application of the
“Judaeo-Christian” epithet to the west is slightly annoying—surely the
west is Hellenistic too, and for that matter Islamic, through Spain
and the scientific heritage. But he avoids the fallacy of absolutely
discrete cultures, and it is refreshing to read a Muslim participating
in a “civilisational” discourse that has usually targeted Muslims.

The book’s insistence on the role of the divine in public life will be
controversial in the west, but not in most of the Muslim world.
Seventy-nine per cent of Pakistanis, 70 per cent of Moroccans and even
43 per cent of Turks consider themselves to be Muslims before citizens
of their respective nation states. Again, Allawi’s argument is not
theological but civilisational: he calls for a culture confidently
aware of its core values and able to act upon them.

The Crisis of Islamic Civilization offers a comprehensive sweep of
Muslim world issues, from banking to human rights and the role of
Muslim migrants. It introduces some remarkable but little known
Islamic thinkers such as Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss),
Pakistan’s first ambassador to the UN, Iranian dissident Abd el Karim
Soroush, and the Sudanese Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who understood those
sections of the Koran revealed at Mecca to be of universal spiritual
relevance, but the Medinan verses to be limited to the Prophet’s
specific moment. In its rich and diverse portrayal of Muslim thought,
the book is a corrective to the simplistic Orientalism of the Bernard
Lewis school.

Allawi tries hard to find positive signs. He praises the work of
architect Hassan Fathy in re-establishing traditional Islamic rather
than western building techniques, the anti-sectarian Amman message (an
influential joint statement made in 2004 by senior clerics of various
sects, calling for Muslim unity and tolerance) and the current
resurgence in Sufism even in the Wahhabi heartland. He mourns missed
opportunities, such as Mahathir Muhammad’s proposed gold-based
currency for intra-Islamic trade. And he stresses these ideas are
still there for the taking. But ultimately, the book is more a lament
than a programme for renewal. Waiting for the renewal, the Muslims
suffer with Libyan novelist Ahmad al Faqih, who wrote, “A time has
passed and another time is not coming.”