An ambitious comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world from the mid-1800s to the present, Mansoor Moaddel's Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism provides a unique perspective for understanding the social conditions of these discourses. Moaddel characterizes these movements in terms of a sequence of cultural episodes characterized by ideological debates and religious disputations, each ending with a revolution or military coup. Understanding how the leaders of these movements formulated their discourses is, for Moaddel, the key to understanding Middle Eastern history. This premise allows him to unlock for readers the historical process that started with Islamic modernism and ended with fundamentalism.
An ambitious comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world from the mid-1800s to the present, Mansoor Moaddel's Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism provides a unique perspective for understanding the social conditions of these discourses. Moaddel characterizes these movements in terms of a sequence of cultural episodes characterized by ideological debates and religious disputations, each ending with a revolution or military coup. Understanding how the leaders of these movements formulated their discourses is, for Moaddel, the key to understanding Middle Eastern history. This premise allows him to unlock for readers the historical process that started with Islamic modernism and ended with fundamentalism.
Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse
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Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse
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Overview
An ambitious comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world from the mid-1800s to the present, Mansoor Moaddel's Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism provides a unique perspective for understanding the social conditions of these discourses. Moaddel characterizes these movements in terms of a sequence of cultural episodes characterized by ideological debates and religious disputations, each ending with a revolution or military coup. Understanding how the leaders of these movements formulated their discourses is, for Moaddel, the key to understanding Middle Eastern history. This premise allows him to unlock for readers the historical process that started with Islamic modernism and ended with fundamentalism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226533339 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2005 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
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ISLAMIC MODERNISM, NATIONALISM, AND FUNDAMENTALISM
Episode and Discourse
By MANSOOR MOADDEL
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-53332-2
Chapter One
Social Transformation and the Origins of Islamic Modernism
India, Egypt, and Iran had already experienced different yet profound social transformations when a group of Muslim scholars found themselves in a favorable social environment to reexamine the Islamic belief system in light of modern sociopolitical thought. This transformation involved the expansion of commerce, incorporation into the world capitalist economy, the development of capitalism, the decline of old and the rise of new social classes, the rise of the modern state, and the emergence of new and diverse cultural movements. As a result, the requisite social resources and space for culture production were provided, a pluralistic discursive field emerged, and the formulation of Islamic modernism became possible.
Three sets of historical factors contributed to the genesis of Islamic modernism: those that removed the institutional barriers to ideological innovation, those that provided the social space, resources, and need for this innovation, and those that formed the intellectual context in relation to which this new discourse was actually produced. The destruction of the absolutist state and the decline of Islamic orthodoxy were among the first set, the rise of the modern state and the formation of new social classes and class alignments were among the second set, and the emergence of a pluralistic intellectual market and the illumination of a series of ideological targets were among the last set.
The last of the three sets constituted the proximate conditions of Islamic modernism. The Islamic modernists developed a new set of ideas in relation to several distinctive ideological targets. One was the discourse of Islamic orthodoxy, which claimed a monopoly of legitimate religious expressions. The others were the secular discourses and religious ideologies that, as a result of the European interventions, started to invade the cultural landscape of Islamic countries with powerful force from the late eighteenth century on. These included the secular discourse of the Enlightenment, the narrower Europe-centered rationalist discourse of the think tanks connected to British colonial administrations and Westernizers, and the cultural and religious discourse of Christian Evangelicals. Islamic modernism was an ideological resolution of a group of Muslim intellectuals who attempted to address the intellectual problems that beset Islam as a result of the sweeping criticisms leveled against it by adherents of theses discourses. These criticisms by arousing the need among Muslim thinkers to defend their faith, compelled them to take new positions on various issues facing Islam, which resulted in the emergence of an Islamic modernist discourse. Understanding the determinants of Islamic modernism thus requires an understanding of traditional Islamic discourse and diverse critiques of it.
The process of change in India, Egypt, and Iran was by no means homogeneous. It carried different types of constraints and opportunities for the actors involved. In India, the decline of the Mughals and the outbreak of internecine conflicts among the Muslim and Hindu power contenders drove the zamindars (landowners) and merchants toward an alliance with the East India Company. The breakdown of the Mughal Empire and the establishment of British colonial rule over the Indian territories removed the institutional barriers to cultural change and facilitated the spread of Western culture on the subcontinent. In Egypt, cultural change was preceded by the rise and massive expansion of the bureaucratic and military apparatuses of the state in the first half of the nineteenth century. The state's need for skilled personnel knowledgeable in European military technology promoted the establishment of modern educational institutions, which in turn facilitated the diffusion of new ideas from Europe in Egypt. The state thus provided the necessary social space for the rise of modern discourses. In Iran, in contrast, the state remained conservative throughout the nineteenth century, and the Shi'i establishment maintained a strong grip on culture, effectively exhausting any attempt at cultural innovation and modernization. Iranian merchants, on the other hand, resentful of the increasing encroachment on their domestic market by Russian and British concerns and angered by the state's indifference to their interests, became the principle force behind nationalist demands for constitutional change. Ironically, a section of the ulama aligned with these merchants and, along with secular intellectuals, led the revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century that overthrew absolutism and established a constitutional system.
Religion and Politics in the Premodern Period
Premodern India, Egypt, and Iran were part of the three great empires, the Mughal, the Ottoman, and the Safavid, which sheltered almost the entire territory of dar ul-Islam (abode of Islam) from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Although this gives the history of Islam during these centuries a recognizable political and cultural pattern, there were considerable variations in social structure, state administration, and religious institutions not only among these empires but also within them. Each empire had its own political and security concerns. The Mughals were a Muslim minority ruling a majority of Hindu and other non-Muslim subjects. The Ottomans faced Europe and the political challenges of various rulers in different regions and principalities within their dominion. The Safavids were at work consolidating Shi'ism as the state religion and subduing challenges from diverse tribal groups in the country. These empires also had different religious profiles. Mughal India was religiously nonunified, the Ottomans belonged to the majority Sunni sect of Islam, and Iranians adhered to Shi'ism, a minority sect. The relationships between these three political entities, while mostly peaceful, on occasion broke into military confrontations. The wars between the Ottomans and the Safavids in the sixteenth century, with concomitant violent repression of their Shi'i and Sunni minorities living in their respective dominions, and between the Mughals and Nadir Shah of Iran in the eighteenth century are prime examples. It is thus difficult to find a pattern of historical behaviors and social relationships that are common to these empires or are constituting elements.
On Islam and the role of Islamic institutions under these empires historians are divided. One pole in the spectrum of views considers Islam an integral part of the traditional order. As a belief system, this view considers Islam impervious to change, incompatible with democracy and modern social institutions. Another pole considers Islamic theology rational and rejects the notion that Islam was a monolithic faith by emphasizing the presence of Islamic pluralism in the premodern period. There may be elements of truth in both positions. Our objective here is not to pass judgment on the role of Islam in history or, alternatively, assess the adequacy of the judgments passed on Islam by its nineteenth-century critics. It is rather to present an adequate description of traditional Islamic discourse, the structure of Islamic institutions, and ties to the existing power in order to gain an understanding of the nature of the issues being contested as a result of the cultural encounter between the West and the Islamic world and to explain why this encounter shaped the rationale for Muslim thinkers to reexamine their faith.
Islamic Jurisprudence and the Limiting of Rational Analysis: Closing of the Gate of Ijtihad
Generally, Islamic worldviews rested on a series of binaries, which defined Islam as a religion and its followers as members of a religious community (umma). These included wahy (revelation) versus 'aql (reason), towhid (divine unity) versus shirk (idol worshipping), shari'a (Islamic law) versus jahiliyya (the state of ignorance), dar ul-Islam (the abode of Islam) versus dar ul-harb (the abode of war), wilaya (delegation by God) versus mulk (hereditary rule), khilapha (spiritual authority) versus sultanate (temporal authority), and umma (universalistic Islamic community) versus asabiyya (particularistic tribal solidarity). The Islamic regulative and normative codes of conduct, which covered virtually all aspects of human endeavor, were formulated during centuries of doctrinal development marked by intense discussions and often acrimonious debates. By the medieval period, these codes had grown into a full-blown system of laws specifying the Islamic way of life (shari'a). The fiqh, or the knowledge of the practical rules of religion, was to regulate the actions of all Muslims, which fall into five categories: (1) required (wajib), (2) forbidden (mahzur), (3) recommended (mandub), (4) disapproved (makruh), and (5) merely permitted (mubah).
Four schools of Islamic jurisprudence laid the methodological foundation of Islamic laws in the Sunni sect. These schools were a medieval legacy, which came to fruition in order to address the problems Muslim administrators and generals faced as a result of the passage of time and the expansion of Islam into new territories. For these problems, there were no specific guidelines in the scripture or in the tradition of the prophet. They stimulated the need for rational reasoning to establish new principles that were Islamic and at the same time controlled the rule of the judges and regulated the conduct of the Arab administrators. Abu Hanifa was the first to introduce a new rule of reasoning known as qiyas (analogy), which went beyond the literal meaning of the Quranic text to uncover its causal ('illa) underpinnings. Because unfettered employment of qiyas resulted in abuse and encouraged casuistry, Malik Ibn Anas, the founder of the second school, gave primacy to the tradition of the prophet or local custom after the Quran, with qiyas to be used only as a last resort. Yet these two positions dissatisfied the founder of the third school, Muhammad al-Shafi'i, who extended the principle of ijma (consensus) beyond the jurists of Medina to include all the ideas and decisions that were agreed upon by all the competent authorities in Islam. The four roots of Islamic jurisprudence in the Shafi'i school of law were thus the Quran, the hadith, ijma, and qiyas. Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, the fourth and final authoritative figure in Sunni jurisprudence, attacked qiyas. For him, rationalist interpretation of the Quran and tradition was permissible, and thus the ijma was unlawful innovation (bid'a). After the death of Ibn Hanbal, the gate of ijtihad was considered closed among the Sunnis, and all the jurists were instructed to follow one of these four orthodox schools.
The early Shi'i believed that all laws were implicit in the Quran and the hadith and were to be discovered by the jurists, and that there was no need for ra'y (opinion), its offshoot qiyas, or ijma. With the passage of time, however, these theologians started to face practical problems similar to those encountered by their Sunni counterparts, which could not be resolved by reference to the Quran or the hadith. The Shi'i fiqh thus developed in a fashion similar to the Sunni and came to rest on the Quran, the hadith, ijma, and 'aql.
Islam and the Problem of Secular Politics
Islamic conceptions of politics also underwent profound changes after their early formulation in the doctrine of the khilafa (caliphate). As the successor to Muhammad, the khalifa (caliph) was to assume the activities and privileges exercised by Muhammad save the prophetic functions. The question of who had the necessary qualifications to be the leader of the Islamic community and how the Islamic conception of authority was to be reconciled with changing political reality after the death of the Prophet remained the arduous task of Muslim theologians cum political theorists. The Sunni theorists are unanimous about the legitimacy of the first four caliphs, given the honorific title of the Rashidun-exemplars of rightful Muslim rulers. Nevertheless, the changing political realities of the post-Rashidun caliphate under the Umayyads (661-750), the Abbasids (750-1258), and thereafter provided serious problems for Muslim jurists: How is one to reconcile the Islamic notion of sovereignty with the claims of a self-made caliph among the continuously emerging military leaders and tribal chiefs in different parts of the Islamic world?
In their sustained efforts to reconcile the theory of the caliphate and the existing political reality, Muslim scholars more and more departed from the conception of politics as the unity of the political and religious leadership in the person of the caliph to take positions that progressively amounted to the admission of the reality of secular politics-the differentiation between religious and political leadership. First Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Mawardi (972-1058), in his Ordinances of Government, attempted to legitimize the authority of the caliph vis-à-vis the challenges of the Muslim rulers who had effective power within their own territories. It bound the ruler of each successor state to the centralized spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliphate and gave him delegated legal authority in his own territory and a claim to the loyalty of his subjects. Later development, however, undermined al-Mawardi's formula. Effective power was in the hands of the Kurdish, Turkish, or Caucasian military elite, whose actions were dictated by the exigencies of political power rather than the shari'a. Thus, "to maintain that the sultan derived his power from the caliph was increasingly difficult as it became clear that in fact the caliph was set up and deposed by the sultan." A further concession to expediency was offered by Imam Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111)-the celebrated Shafi'i theologian, religious scholar, and mystic. Al-Ghazali argued that as long as the authority of the caliph was recognized, the sultan should be treated as lawful. Trying to unseat the sultan by declaring his power illegal would result in lawlessness and chaos (fitnih), a condition more detrimental to the welfare of Muslims than having a tyrant in power.
Clearly, in al-Ghazali's thinking there was a definite shift "from the origin of political power to its use." This shift was necessitated by the changing condition of the Muslim community. At the same time, it reflected the influence of Greek philosophy-in particular, the views of Plato and Aristotle-on Islam. Muslim philosophers like Abu Nasr Farabi (870-950) and al-Husayn Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037) were impressed by classical Greek views and attempted to resolve the problem of leadership in a manner acceptable to the philosophic mind and at the same time remain loyal to their faith. Their basic conclusion was unorthodox when they argued that, in Albert Hourani's summary, "the content of the divine law was attainable in principle by the unaided human intellect, and failing a prophet a good system of law could grow up in society in other ways." While such orthodox thinkers as al-Ghazali and Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) were suspicious of philosophy, traces of Greek philosophy and the views of Farabi and Ibn Sina could be detected in their works.
Noting a poor fit between the ideal Islamic state and the political reality of their time, later scholars as diverse as Ibn Taymiyya and Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1333-1406) conceded that the caliphate had ceased after the fourth caliph and that the sovereignty exercised by the Umayyads and the Abbasids had never been more than a "royalty." For Ibn Khaldun, royal authority was a form of social organization that "requires superiority and force, which expresses the wrathfulness and animality (of human nature)." Like their predecessors, these thinkers did not suggest the overthrow of the existing ruler. They worked out a formula for observing the shari'a while recognizing discretionary power. Ibn Taymiyya expanded the concept of the shari'a to bring within its scope the ruler's "discretionary power without which he could neither maintain himself nor provide for the welfare of the community." He did so by applying the principle of maslaha. Since God's purpose in giving laws was human welfare, the ruler's discretionary power was necessary not just for his own protection but also for providing for the welfare (i.e., maslaha) of the community. While his doctrine assured the legitimacy of the Mamluk government in Egypt, it also contained the precept that a "good government depended on an alliance between amirs, political and military leaders, and 'ulama,' interpreters of the law." In a similar fashion, Ibn Khaldun offered a way to incorporate Islam into the "natural life span" of dynasties so that a more stable and universalistic regime would be created.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Sociological Theories of Ideology and Cultural Change
Part One: The Rise of Islamic Modernism
Introduction to Part One
1. Social Transformation and the Origins of Islamic Modernism
2. Historical Discontinuity and International Transfer of Meaning
3. Europocentric Rationalism and Islamic Modernism in India
4. The French Enlightenment and Islamic Modernism in Egypt
5. Iran: The Bastion of Traditionalism and Conservative Reaction
Part Two: The Rise of Liberal Nationalism, Arabism, and Arab Nationalism
Introduction to Part Two
6. Egypt: The Rise of Liberalism and Territorial Nationalism
7. Syria: From Liberal Arabism to Pan-Arab Nationalism
8. Iran: From Constitutionalism and Anticlerical Secularism to Economic Nationalism
Part Three: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism
Introduction to Part Three
9. The Rise of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: From Moderate to Revolutionary Activism
10. Ba'athist Socialism and Militant Reformist Fundamentalism in Syria
11. Iran: The Monarchy-Centered Nationalist Discourse and the Origins of Clergy-Centered Revolutionary Shi'ism
12. Algeria: The Socialist Turn and Radical Islamism
13. Jordanian Exceptionalism: The Alliance between the State and the Muslim Brothers
Conclusion: Episode and Discourse: Ideology, Target, and Practice in the Islamic World
Notes
Bibliography
Index