June 15, 2003

The relegation of Islam to a mere dogma is both a Muslim and non-Muslim preoccupation in which its reformative, mundane and egalitarian portents have been side-tracked by dismissive obscurants as well as abrasive modernists

WHEN Leonard Binder, the American academic, finished his research on Pakistani politics immediately after Independence, he felt skeptical of an uneasy intermingling of religion and politics. Half-a-century later, the combined religio-political parties govern two provinces, and have a sizeable representation in the federal parliament. More than the mainstream politicians, they are the ones now confronting the military ruler on domestic and foreign issues.

Their ascendance, despite the Legal Framework Order, is no less astounding to those analysts who, while aware of their street power, simply underrated their electoral potentials. The entire generation of Pakistani political observers, who had essentialized a peripheral performance of these elements, is now interpreting the MMA’s salience as just one-off.

This misperception is no different from that of their Indian counterparts who, in the early 1990s, took the BJP and Ayodhya issue merely as an aberration with polity soon settling back to its secular moorings. One may differ with the dictum of the religio-political parties, but to write them off merely as the beneficiaries of anti-Americanism or the rehash of a military-mullah axis is fallacious.

Religion, as witnessed in the former Eastern Europe, the United States, Israel, North Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and now Iraq has refused to coexist as nationalism’s junior partner. It is now in the driving seat.

The American Neo-Conservatives, Likud Zionists, Kar Sevaks and Jihadis are all imbued with a reinvigorated energy and newfound power vacuum in their respective societies where ‘liberals’ and modernists are deemed incorrigibly corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.

The rise of religio-political constellations is a global phenomenon and not essentially confined to the Muslim world, as the Neo-Orientalists may like to suggest. Of course, the world of Islam has its enduring politico-economic problems besides the hackneyed views of a static Sharia — formulated many centuries ago, and several years after the Prophet — yet Islam is the rallying cry both for the societal and statist forces.

The recourse to Islam — away from the East or West — is as much a retort to external highhandedness as it is an abysmal despondency. For instance, the dogmatic adherence to a rather stultified Kemalism maintained by an overpowering military synchronized with a greater sense of humiliation felt by all the Turks (and Kurds!) from scornful European pundits.

Northern Cyprus and former Eastern European countries have all joined the EU, whereas Turkey, the largest contributor to NATO, has been endlessly sidelined. “Turkey’s values are different from ours,” many Europeans, including the former French president, unhesitatingly propound. In the meantime, the Turkish economy and nationhood remain tarnished thanks to uneven policies where non-development sector and a unilateral Turkification have aggravated the despair.

Like the Pakistani Supreme Court, the Turkish senior judges outlawed the Rifaah Party under the pretext of Kemalism, which has rebounded with more public support for religio-political elements. They balloted these elements into power, which espoused a long overdue ideological consensus and autonomous foreign policies.

In their single-minded pursuit to invade Iraq without any legal or moral justification, the Anglo-American leadership, by default and also to their deep consternation, offered the religio-political elements a comeback. If Washington and London turn irreverent to the Shias, Iraq may become another Algeria where military and France joined hands together to thwart the elected religio-political parties. More than one hundred thousand dead and the country in a shambles, that is the result of resisting the people’s verdict.

Instead of welcoming an electoral strategy adopted by such forces, their marginalization and suppression only militarizes them further. These are the populist forces of have-nots — a massive underclass of highly politicized and enraged people — and the best way to handle them is through a constructive engagement.

In the post-Second World War decades of optimism and polarized realism, religion was considered to be less of a unifying force and more of a nuisance in nation-building. Nationalism, despite its racist and fascist undertones in Europe, was perceived by scholars such as Eli Kedourie and Hans Kohn to be a liberationist ideology with secular elite homogenizing the emerging post-colonial states.

“Modernization”, not just to these Jewish liberals, but also to the sociologists such as Ernest Gellner, Carl Deutsch and Clifford Geertz, after all, was a mundane project where its Western prototypes could hold truth for all. [Gellner was an exception in a sense, as he saw no clash between Islamic civil society and democracy.]

Jinnah, Nehru, Kenyatta, Fannon, Mao, Gandhi, Soekarno and Nkrumah were all modernists in their own ways though this generation was soon to give way — in several cases — to the “men on the horse-back” being welcomed as the new, post-national modernizers.

Simultaneously, the embryonic mediatory discourse on Islam and modernity as spearheaded by Al-Afghani, Abduh, Syed Ahmed, Muhamamd Iqbal, Maulana Azad, Fazlur Rahman and Allama Shariati was left asunder. The shining armour, inflated chests full of jingling medals and their associations with the Sandhurst and West Point, were sufficient credentials of these generals — adored by Samuel Huntington and the others of his Harvard clan.

Instead of scholar-activists and intellectuals interfacing across diverse traditions, Muslims were bequeathed to the simplistic and autocratic whims of uniformed harbingers of modernization and the development. The role of feudal intermediaries of the colonial days were now taken over by these khaki bureaucrats, submissive to their patrons yet regressive to their own peoples.

However, by the 1980s and especially after the end of the Cold War, these modernizers were found seriously lacking in proper representative, professional and accountable wherewithal. They were devoid of competence and conviction to run these plural societies and in the process invariably turned out to be unpopular tin-pot dictators, who proved to be a liability to their Western backers.

Despite their serious shortcomings, the Western powers, for their own partisan interests, had steadily used them as surrogates — Ayub, Yahya, Pincohet, Numeiri, Saddam, Zia, Suharto, Ershad, and the list goes on. But the current mantra resounds with the desirability of empowerment of civil society, pre-eminence of democratic universalism and the reconstruction of a non-hegemonic modernity.

Thus, the khaki leaders, like their other monarchical counterparts, largely stay exposed of their inherent weaknesses and inadequacies and if they are still in power it is largely due to external backing and internal divisions.

While the post-colonial world has reasons to be cynical of being used as guinea pigs for all the run-away ideologies and neo-colonial facades, it is equally bewildered by the pre-eminence of ‘traditional’ conglomerates.

By using religion both as a vehicle and a legitimiser in their ultimate quest for capturing polities, these religio-political outfits are preaching simplistic, divinely ordained utopias based on universal equality and distributive justice.

Bullet and ballot are their two vehicles though their greatest asset is the pervasive dissatisfaction and sense of humiliation in these societies, themselves yearning for new Messiahs and Mehdis. However, the redeeming factor is their willingness to operate within the available parametres and structures of the nation-state.

It is still no less astounding given their apparent penchant for trans-regionalism, such as one Ummah, a larger-than-life Hindu Rashtra, an ascendant Zionism or a global Messianic order.

While scholars such as Asghar Ali Engineer and Ishtiaq Ahmed are mindful of the impossibility of an Islamic state to the viability of a Muslim state (espousing redefined secular characteristics), the Ikhawan, Jamaat, Jamiats, Nadwas, the Khomeinities and other Salafiaya groups fervently hope and aspire for a theocracy, reflective of the former. This kind of intellectual debate urgently needs to reach some consensus as otherwise Muslim peoples, while getting out of a simmering pan may simply fall into a raging fire.

Replacing one kind of unilateral oppression with another type of dictatorship, however koshered it may be, is totally unacceptable. These differing intellectual groups need to focus on the areas of agreement as well as divergences, but in a tolerant and civic manner without dishing out rancour and fatwas.

While the Muslim states are seriously lacking in many areas their substitutions must offer something tangible and all-encompassing, rather than adding on to anarchy and violence. A simplistic view of Muslim past — both for idealization or even for dismissal — is not a healthy way forward. It is a complex world and requires complex, well-thought-out strategies, but it is equally a rational world seeking logical solutions and not the emotive outbursts.

This is not to suggest that the contemporary rise of religio-political outfits — using mish-mash ideologies such as Hindutva (Ram Raj) or Hukumat-i-Ilahiyya (Allah’s kingdom) — are just the temporary outbursts against the corruption and inability of the modernists. They have been there for sometime, but have only recently graduated from cultural paradigms into full-fledged political movements.

The studies of Islam in South Asia — cognizant of ‘High Islam’ and ‘Folk Islam’ — have traditionally confined themselves to two well-familiar but self-limiting channels of Deobandis (literalists) and Brelvis (syncretists) though most of the time the focus has been on parties such as the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Hind (its future branches in Pakistan) and Jamaat-i-Islami.

A few studies did cover the Mashaikh and Sajjada Nashin, but only in reference to occasional politicization. A feeble tradition of intellectual history pioneered by Aziz Ahmed, Rafiudddin Ahmed and Farzana Shaikh has attempted to seek the historical interface between Islam and politics of identity among the South Asian Muslims.

Concurrently, most of the analyses centre on high history of a few individuals — the modernists — arrayed against the losing side of traditionalists. Pakistan, for instance, was portrayed as an incident of history, masterminded by the Whitehall and a few London-returned, seasoned lawyers. Thanks heavens, some of these analysts — without naming the names — are coming back to ascertain multiple factors, including ideologies and traditions.

The relegation of Islam to a mere dogma is both a Muslim and non-Muslim preoccupation where its reformative, mundane and egalitarian portents have been side-tracked by dismissive obscurants as well as abrasive modernists. Both of them fell into the trap of Orientalists, who saw the East mainly inhabited by emotional and half-cultured mobs, whose Westernization was a fait accompli and equally a White Man’s burden.

The leading contemporary proponent of such a premise is Bernard Lewis, to whose Eurocentric outlook Islam is still lost in a mediaeval time gap earnestly awaiting a renaissance. To Lewis, Islam’s resuscitation has to come from the West; otherwise its centuries-old crisis intermeshed with a severe inferiority complex remains unbridgeable and prone to terrorist outbursts.

This hypothesis has been greatly energized in the West after 9/11, though scholars such as Edward Said, the late Albert Hourani, Fred Halliday, John Esposito and Karen Armstrong have been wary of it. While one may find several problems with the Neo-Orientalists like Lewis or Daniel Pipes, Fouad Ajami, Frank Graham, Pat Roberston and Oriana Fallaci, it is still fair to suggest that Political Islam has yet to mature into a workable and just order.

So far, as forcefully posited by Khalid B. Sayeed, the models of Political Islam varying from Saudi Arabia to Ziaist Pakistan, Khomeinite Iran to the Talebanized Afghanistan, severely lack accommodation for pluralism, a universal empowerment, an egalitarian economic order and a dynamic self-confidence. To their civil societies, they have been atrociously repressive.

In all the above cases, it has been a familiar story of repression, unilateralism and intolerance. Millions were mobilized in the name of Islam, Sharia and Nizam-i-Mustafawi soon to abysmally fall victims to the unnecessary and unworthy causes, whereas the problems kept on compounding.

No wonder, Muslim masses are not only the victims of violence from the ‘outside’, they are also the sufferers from within. Just using West-and-the-Rest as an alibi for the entire Muslim predicament may be a convenient strategy for the Muslim dictators, but for how long?

The pervasive Muslim disempowerment is mainly owed to their own leaders, and likewise their internal schisms are due to the vicious clericalization of this otherwise holistic civilization, which, in its pristine form, had broken loose from such a bondage.

This sad situation is not to undervalue the role of Islam as a mobilizer, aggregator and de-hegemonizer. Both the literalists and syncretists have been steadfast actors in the Afro-Asian decolonization, but this tradition of resistance and sacrifice predictably falls victim to waywardness and schisms. Thus, like the modernists, if Islamists of today are unable to radically improve the quality of life and fail to enthuse and lead their societies to a better, peaceful and prosperous future, their fate will not be different from the others.

They must realize that the contemporary problems are too complex to be resolved through mere emotional rhetoric and plain dismissal. In a plural and highly interdependent world, the way forward is through innovative cooperation and coexistence rather than a permanent state of antagonism or introversion. After all, undisputedly this is the world of knowledge, science, universal human rights and sustained democratic institutions.

The denial of science, democracy, gender rights, lack of clarity on economic issues and sheer muzzling of ijtihaad (innovation) and tanqid (critique) have to be shunned for a fresh start. Obscurantism has to give way to forward-looking dynamism and the romanticization of the bullet has to give way to ballot where civic forces celebrating the best in humanity rule the roost.

Ritualistic and selective implementation of rather coercive measures in the name of an uncritiqued Sharia are only going to further divide the House of Islam. After all, these societies have already suffered for centuries and do not deserve any more collective punishment even if it is in a divine name.

The proponents of Political Islam need to trust, protect and celebrate their masses, and a radical redirection of energy and resources on the eradication of poverty away from militarization and violence deserves prioritization. It is only through the people’s power and prosperity that Political Islam may become a balm, instead of a taxing and perplexing ideology.

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