Download Reading Reform into the Past: Power and Piety in Islamist

Reading Reform into the Past:
Power and Piety in Islamist Articulations of Muslim History1
Hania Sobhy
Introduction
Confronted with colonialism and local despotic regimes and faced with the novelty and
threat of westernization, Islamists saw pan-Islamic nationalism and armed struggle
(jihad) as a weapon against colonialism, and rejected the abandonment of Sharia (Islamic
Law), and changes to the status of women. They were primarily motivated by a need to
explain and reverse what they saw as Muslim backwardness, decline and weakness.
They proceeded to read Islamic history as supporting their arguments and claims on these
matters. This paper argues that in so doing, they articulated a distorted understanding of
Muslim history and offered little systematic support for their claims, largely imposing
their desired vision on that history. It is however through this articulation of Muslim
history that they sought to craft and re-imagine Muslim community and polity.
The articulation of a particular reading of Muslim history constitutes a central piece of
the appeal and message of political Islam, from moderate to militant, politically active or
focused on social reform, and across actors with a whole spectrum of positions on issues
such as women, non-Muslims, jihad and democracy. In weekly Friday sermons, Islamist
writings and the discourses of popular television preachers, Muslims are portrayed as
1
This paper was presented as part of the ‘Perspectives on Power’ Conference run by Quest and
sponsored by the AHRC. This article is from Issue 4 of Quest which contains the proceedings of the
conference. It, and the other papers presented at the conference can be downloaded from
http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUEST/JournalIssues/
having been powerful and glorious in different spheres of life (military, economic,
scientific, cultural and artistic), under previous Muslim empires, and in stark opposition
to their present day „decline‟. They were not ruled or occupied or humiliated by „others‟.
At the same time, Islamists also argue that piety and justice permeated and defined the
earlier Muslim Caliphate. Thus a return to „true Islam‟ would restore both justice and
power to Muslim societies.
Critics of Islamism on the other hand argue that there is little proof to support these
historical claims. Their critique amounts to an argument for disentangling piety, power
and justice, and therefore undermining the powerful appeal of such entanglement.
Reading Reform into the Past: The Search for Power
The important 19th century Muslim reformer Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani can in a sense be
seen as the father of modern „political Islam‟. He saw Islam as a way of uniting Muslims
to confront colonialism and despotism. His ideas were reflected in the works of his
famous disciples Muhammad Abduh and Rasheed Rida. Afghani‟s revivalist paradigm
concretizes the vital principle for the unity and cohesion of national bodies. For Afghani,
the vital spirit is operative only when it impels national bodies with a desire for
excellence and distinction in wealth as well as glory and power (‘izz) (Al-Azmeh 1993,
86). But once corruption sets in, once the essence is diluted, the auguries of national
calamity become manifest (ibid).
Hasan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential Islamist
group in the Muslim World, was writing in the 1920s at the height of ongoing
decolonization struggles to gain independence from the British. According to Al-Banna,
history testifies that
...when Muslims held on to the teachings of Islam they were masters and builders, and spread
civilization on earth and lit up for humanity the path to success and pleased the world with a
civilization that still is and will continue to be the joy of life and the symbol of virtue… After that,
they abandoned their religion and became ignorant of it and ignored it… so they reached where
they are now and will remain this way until they return to their religion. (al-Banna cited in
Ghanim 1992, 207)
Decline (inhitat) for Al-Banna constitutes essentially of the loss of the position of
mastery (siyada)/power/hegemony by Muslims and the transfer of the leadership of
humanity to the West (Ghanim 1992). The deterioration of the Islamic nation for AlBanna occurs when
“the principles of Islam were ignored, western social approaches were adopted, so our society
disintegrated as well as the impact of Islam in our selves, so we abandoned jihad for our rights and
freedom and were fooled by tribal calls, so unity was torn… and we preferred comfort, passivity
and ease to effort and labour towards knowledge and work, and we became dependent on what we
receive from them (the West/ colonizers) so they monopolized the bounties of our countries and
the products of our lands, and we came to import everything even flour” (al-Banna cited in
Ghanim 1992).
Based on these arguments, this basic premise of Islamism gets reproduced endlessly in all
brands of Islamist discourse. Different positions and pronouncements are articulated with
this premise embedded as a founding assumption. Due to limitations of space, this paper
cannot expand on further examples of Islamist articulations from a diverse set of actors
(see for example Noor 2006 and Khaled 2003 for very different varieties of Islamism). In
essence, as Mohammed Arkoun puts it, a glorious, perfect and unique history had been
formed and its ideological force compels us to distinguish between the truth that
scientific thought seeks and the psychological-social truth imposed by popular
movements by force (Arkoun 1996).
Two Utopias?
It is important to note however, that the Middle Eastern Islamic heritage provides not one
but two basic constellations of historical society, two golden ages, two paradigms, each
of which has generated its own characteristic repertoire of political institutions and
political theory (Lapidus 1992, 13).
The first instance of utopia is the Early Caliphate and it is the one that has commanded
the imagination of Islamists the most in terms of reviving a utopian past. In appealing to
this era as a model for reform, Islamists refer to a repertoire of incidents and patterns that
demonstrate the piety and justice that characterized this early era. This was the period
immediately after the death of the Prophet, when four of his closest Companions
successively took over the leadership of the community. They were among the most
pious and religiously knowledgeable members of the community. From the reigns of
these four caliphs and especially the second and fourth (Umar and Ali), Islamists have
pointed to the examples of the ascetic austere lives led by the leaders, the strict financial
accountability they enforced on their appointed governors, the welfare entitlements they
ensured to all their subjects and examples of the justice extended to non-Muslim subjects
of the growing Muslim state.
The second historical paradigm is the later hereditary empires (including the different
Abbasid and Ottoman dynasties), where rulers governed not by religious norms but by
the laws of political survival.
In brief, these were seen as times of expansion,
domination, flourishing of the arts, poetry, architecture, philosophy, sciences, as well as
jurisprudence and religious scholarship. It was a time of power, military might, and
precisely the kinds of civilizational flourishing whose loss Islamist lament.
On the one hand, while notions of the desired power might have existed in the second
utopian model, they did not coincide with the piety and justice associated with the first
model. In the second utopian model, severe repression, lack of political accountability,
and decadence of rulers coincided with application of Sharia, traditional roles for women,
relative stability, regional hegemony and the flourishing of poetry, architecture,
philosophy and jurisprudence.
In an explicit sense, the Islamist emphasis is always on the first golden age as an
inspiration for reform.
However, it becomes clear that in most if not all Islamist
discourses, there is to varying degrees an appeal to the power, affluence and success of
the later empires. It is typically seen as a time when „Islam‟ was not yet “abandoned”, in
the sense of the application of Sharia, more conservative sexual conduct, more traditional
roles for women and perhaps more observance of Muslim rituals.
Critiques
Since Taha Husayn‟s (1977) seminal works on Muslim history, Muslim writers have
analyzed and challenged these dominant historical constructions. Khaled Abul Fadl has
argued that the prime and nearly singular concern of Salafism and Wahabism is power
and its symbols (Aboul Fadl 2001). The main purpose was not to integrate particular
values within Islamic culture, but to empower Islam against its civilizational rival (see
also Al-Azmeh 1990, 13). Aboul Fadl argues that modern nationalist thought exercised a
greater influence on the resistance ideologies of Muslim and Arab national liberation
movements than anything in the Islamic tradition (Aboul Fadl 2001). By emphasizing a
presumed golden age in Islam, the adherents of Salafism idealized the time of the Prophet
and his companions, and ignored or demonized the balance of Islamic history and
remained uninterested in critical historical inquiry (ibid).
Islamist discourses on Muslim history, such as Al-Banna‟s, make important statements
about the unity of Muslims, their piety and that of their rulers and the behaviour and
status of women in utopian Islam, compared to the present. However, a number of key
undisputed incidents of the early and later Caliphate show that the power of the
community and immunity against internal strife and external attack were not correlated
with its piety or the piety of its rulers (see Husayn 1977 and Aslan 2006). For example,
the piety of the third and fourth Caliphs Uthman and Ali articulated in Islamist discourses
does not prevent the strife, disintegration and collapse characterizing their reigns. The
piety of the first Caliph Abu Bakr does not prevent divisions and strife in his reign either.
Critics have drawn on examples from the reigns of different Caliphs to shed light on
divisions, strife, rebellions, wars, rival Caliphs, severe repression and sometimes
massacres, mass murder, looting…etc, coinciding with reigns of piety or of power in
Islamist discourse (see Husayn 1977, Fudah 2003, al-Hammad 2006 and Aslan 2006).
Fudah (2003) and others have emphasized the evidence on the wealth of early
companions and later Muslim rulers, as well as the ample evidence regarding the
„decadence‟ (lack of piety) of later Muslim rulers of the „powerful‟ utopia. This is in
contrast with the often cited Islamist argument that the decadence and wealth of
contemporary Muslim rulers was/is a cause for Muslim „decline‟. There is a set of
related, extremely important and enduring arguments of Islamists which equally read the
desired „reform‟ and power into the past (more traditional roles for women, more piety
and more unity lead to power and have led to power „in the past‟).
For example,
according to Hasan Al-Banna, the transgression (tughyan) of women is the first indicator
of the encroachment of corruption into the essence of a strong nation (Ghanim 1992)2.
One conclusion of these critical works is the argument that Muslim history is not
different from the history of other peoples with regards to political power, its acquisition
and retention. Al-Hamad argues against those who try to distort history by denying
negative incidents and situations, assuming that those whose piety the history texts
expound cannot commit the negative acts that these very texts narrate (al-Hammad 2006).
Conclusion
It is important to note that many of these Muslim critics are not arguing that there is no
notion or reality of piety, justice and accountability in early Islam, as narrated in classical
historical texts and referred to by Islamists and Muslims throughout Muslim history.
They are also not arguing against notions of flourishing or power under different empires.
The just outcome or instance is one of many possibilities in Muslim history and many
would argue that it has been more the exception and rare occurrence than the rule. The
„powerful‟ outcome is also one which is in many senses separate from the just,
accountable, pious, unified or tolerant outcomes attributed to early Islam. In more fully
appreciating the balance of Muslim history, it becomes more difficult to see that piety or
the application of Sharia will, or have in Muslim history, necessarily correlated with or
generated justice, Muslim unity, political stability, power and freedom from domination,
or civilizational flourishing.
2
This transgression by women is seen as: exceeding the limits set by religion and the laws of
nature and thier function in life and adopting more sexually liberal attire and attitudes (Ghanim 1992).
The power and appeal of the Islamist message is made possible in large part by implicitly
combining the Islamist construction of a history of piety and its links to justice (political,
social and economic) in the first instance of utopia, with ideas about the power and
flourishing of later empires- the second instance of utopia. In accepting and adopting
these entangled Islamist constructions, many Muslims have become committed to the
idea that they can achieve what they want most (all-encompassing reform/ justice/
power), only if they become pious or adhere to what is constructed as „true Islam‟
(typically centred on ritual, the application of Sharia, traditional positions on women and
sexual morality). In accepting the Islamist articulations of Muslim history, there is little
need to raise and explore questions about the logical relationships between these forms of
piety and the desired forms of power and reform.
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