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CounterPunch
August
28, 2002
Islam and Politics
by Fawzia Afzal-Khan
In the wake of 9/11, an event that changed world
history and whose one-year anniversary is around the corner,
it behooves us to take stock of the role religion and politics
have played in shaping public opinion around the globe regarding
the causes and the meaning of such a cataclysmic event. Since
the subject of Islam has been so much at the center of these
debates following 9/11, it is a truism to state that religion
and politics cannot be separated. However, the statement becomes
a little clearer and bolder if we one makes the next logical
observation: that Islam, as we know it today, and the very methods
by which we try to understand it, the discourse within which
we seek to place it (what we might call the politics of
Islam)- is a western, imperialist construct. I will go one step
further: there is no "true" Islam separate from this
context-just as there has never been any "true" or
"essential" Islam (or for that matter "true"
or "essential" Christianity or Judaism etc) separate
from any of the different socio/cultural and political contexts
throughout its 1400-year old history.
What do I mean by that? Lets look at
a few widely-circulated statements from newspaper articles by
John Pilger and Thomas Cahill written in the months following
9/11. Writing in the British paper The Mirror, Pilger
reminds us:
Brezinski not long ago revealed that
on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress,
President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500 million to create
an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic
fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilize" the
Soviet Union. The CIA called this "Operation Cyclone"
and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic
training schools in Pakistan ("Taliban" means student")
Zealots were sent to CIA training camps in Virginia-where future
Al-Qaeda members were taught "sabotage skills"-i.e.
terrorism. Others were trained in an Islamic school in Brooklyn.
In Pakistan, they were trained by British MI6 officers and trained
by the SAS The result, quipped Brezinski, was "a few stirred
up Muslims" meaning the Taliban.
(John Pilger, "The Colder War,"
The Mirror, Jan 29, 2002)
In such a context, what does "Islam"
signify?? Virtually nothing.
As Thomas Cahill in the sunday edition of the New York Times
of February 3, 2002, points out, Christian Crusaders in the 12th
and 13th centuries spewed forth similarly hateful rhetoric as
the Islamic jihadis of today, and committed crimes far worse
in scale than any that the relatively impotent but angry jihadis
have. What possible understanding of Christianity can we hope
to cull from the ignominious era of the Crusades? The only worthwhile
understanding here would be one that is sensitive to context:
why did the Crusades happen when they did? How was (a certain
type of) Christian rhetoric employed to stir up the masses, by
whom, for what purpose/gain, etc? Just as real estate brokers
tell you, "location, location, location" when considering
where to buy a home, the appropriate mantra to repeat here would
be: context, context, context!
In fact, the best scholarly studies of the Quran and the Hadith
that I know are those, such as Fatima Mernissi's (The Veil
and the Muslim Male Elite, Scheherezade Goes West etc)-which
place these Islamic religious texts in their specific historical
contexts, to help us ascertain their significance and help us
interpret them with the hindsight afforded us by our own very
different historical circumstances. One of the hadith-and ascertaining
the veracity of hadiths is a science unto itself-attributed to
the prophet and recalled by Abu Bakra, a longtime companion of
Mohammed, who was a slave prior to his conversion to Islam, and
then went on to become a notable of the city of Basra--the city
where Aisha decided to establish her headquarters from whence to
issue her challenge to Ali. The Prophet is supposed to have said: "Those
who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity"
(qtd. in Mernissi's The Veil and the Muslim Male Elite,
p. 49). Now, one can either accept this hadith at face value
and from it deduce Islam and its prophet's essential misogyny
toward women, or one can undertake, as Mernissi did, to ascertain
its context: that is, to ask, " who uttered this hadith,
where, when, why and to whom? No Muslim is barred from undertaking
such an historical and methodological investigation. And the
results of such an inquiry are worth noting because they allow
one to reinterpret the hadith in a non-essential, historically-informed
way, that could certainly lead one away from essentializing either
the hadith, or the Quran, or Islam itself. The tools and methods
of such historicist research enlighten us to the fact that such
a hadith was recalled by Abu Bakra, to whom the people looked
for guidance and leadership, at the moment when the early Islamic
state and society faced the imminent threat of civil discord,
with the Caliphate of Ali (the prophet's nephew) being challenged
by the Prophet's last wife and widow, Aisha. The historical circumstances
surrounding the Prophet's own utterance of the hadith were rather
similar too: civil war was threatening to further erode the power
of the Persian Sassanids, already scarred from interminable wars
with the Romans, around 628 AD. There was a period of great instability
within the Muslim Sassanid empire between A.D 629 and 632, and
various claimants to the throne emerged, including two women.
This, most likely, was the incident that led the prophet to pronounce
the hadith against women. Even more interesting is the fact that
recalling this hadith proved very fortuitous for Abu Bakra following
Aisha's defeat by Ali. Abu Bakra could claim that his reason
for not participating in the war (on either side) was because
one of the armies was headed by a woman! Such an excuse conceivably
let him off the hook with Ali, who could have punished him--as
he did some others--for having refused to fight.
My reason for dwelling on this example
is to underscore the need to understand that access to the reality
or "truth" of any religion-Islam in this case-is always
already bound by the rules of discourse. Discursive reality,
in turn, is a highly mediated form of representation, with those
who have access to power able to represent their mediated, subjectively-inflected
knowledge, as the historical truth. If we wish to draw attention
to different, competing truth-claims, we need to, in the now-famous
dictum coined by one postcolonial critic, "throw incendiary
devices within dominant discourse."
At this particular historical moment,
then, the job of the engaged intellectual is to enunciate alternative
discursive positions to those that are terrorizing us in the
name of democratic secular values on the one hand, or Islamic
extremism on the other.
Firstly, it is important to point out
that the very assumption that "secularism" is a principle
associated with the rise of democracy in the west, is an orientalist
and imperialist one, which the extremists (and even some well-meaning
but misguided moderates) on the "Islamist" divide repeat
for historical, political reasons. Cahill is no exception. He
tells us that it was the forces of Enlightenment that exalted
tolerance in the west, which then led to the Christian Reformation
and to the creation of societies like America where the principles
of secularism took hold because America decided to take a generally
agnostic view of religious truth: "you may believe what
you like, and so may I, and neither can impose belief on the
other." Cahill goes on to expound that Islam too has roots
to build similar tolerance, but clearly, neither the faith, nor
its societies of believers around the world, have reached that
historical point.
I guess Mr Cahill is unaware of the Quranic
injunction," lakum deen o kum, waaley ya din." Translated,
it goes, "my religion is mine, yours is yours." Sounds
like a pretty secular religious approach to me! Ayesha Jalal,
a MacArthur award-winning historian of South Asia, puts forward
another way to approach the issue of secularization: and that
is, to reevaluate its meaning. I think she is quite right in
pointing out that the popular consensus that a secular society
is one which has managed to push religion out of the public sphere
altogether is perhaps not quite accurate. After all, she observes,
"even the West has not managed to push religion into the
private sphere." Witness only the phrases invoked and repeated
ad nauseum by the leaders and in the media post-Sept 11th here:
God Bless America etc., and the rise of Christian political parties
with fundamenatlist/right wing leaders like Ronald Schill and
Edmund Stoiber of the conservative German Christian Social Union
and Christian Democratic Party, who did extremely well in pre-election
opinion polls. "Secularization," proclaims Jalal ,
"insofar as it is an open-ended historical process by which
human beings assume responsibility for their affairs, is not
alien to the spirit of Islam." (Interview in the Herald,
Jan. 2002, vol. 33/no.1).
How does one assume such a position of
responsibility toward oneself and others? Not by talibanizing
society, by letting loose a reign of terror upon one's fellow
countrymen and women in the name of anything! Not by oblierating
the lives of innocents in the name of a "war on terror"
as the US and Israel continue to do daily. Certainly, within
the annals of Islamic History, we have examples of materially
thriving, intellectually vibrant, sensually alive and spiritually
tolerant societies that fit such a revalorised definition of
secularization. Think only of the Abbasid caliphate under the
reign of the "sexy caliph," as Fatima Mernissi calls
him, otherwise known as Harun-ar-Rashid!
To be a foreigner in the Abbasid court
was not really a drawback since the culture encouraged diversity
and rewarded people for speaking many langages and bringing the
richness of their own backgroundsIn fact, during the AD, scholars,
artsists, poets,and litterateurs came from a variety of ethnic
backgrounds (speaking Aramaic, Arabic, Persian and Turksh), colors
(white black and mulatto), and creeds (Muslim, Christian, Jew,
Sabian and Magian). It was this cosmopolitanism and muliculturalism
of Baghdad that made for its enduring strength as a great center
of culture
(Scheherezade Goes West,
124)
To think that the discourse of 20th century
"western" secular multiculturalism has at least some
of its roots in the 7th and 8th century Islamic empires of the
Ommayyid and Abbasid dynasties--roots, by the way, that have
been denied and systematically destroyed by the politically regressive,
economically corrupt and greedy, religiously fanatic forces of
BOTH the Islamic "East" and the so-called "Civilized
West (the real "axis of evil," US and Britain)-- is
indeed a sobering thought. Which brings me back to the point
I began with: unlike Rushdie, who insists with great venom in
an OpEd piece published last October in the New York Times
that "This [meaning the current conflagration] IS About
Islam," as though Islam could be reduced to some simplistic
essentialist label, I do not believe there is a "real"
Islam any more than there is a "real" Christianity
or Judaism-apart from its discursive, historical context. And
that context today has created a dominant discourse in the Islamic
world that is regressive, backward-looking and utterly incompatible
with those values of Islamic doctrine allied with progressive
thought, tolerance, and justice which, when these have been dominant,
have led to Islamic societies that were "secular" in
the broadest and best sense of the word.
The choice facing Muslims and non-Muslims
alike today, then, is fairly simple and obvious. One that, rather
ironically, was outlined by Rushdie's narrative alter ego, Saladdin
Chamcha in the infamous Satanic Verses. One of the hijackers
(a woman, interestingly enough)-of a plane whose passengers are
ultimately doomed to die, poses the following existential question
of Faith (be it religious or political or both):
When a great idea comes into the world,
a great cause, certain crucial questions are asked of it. History
asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising,
absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers,
who compromise, trim and yield?
Saladdin's response to her diatribe is:
"unbendingness can also be monomania.it can be tyranny,
and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also
be humane, and strong enough to last" (The Satanic Verses,
81).
Such a pity the writer of those wise
words is dead. His place has been taken by Bushdie--someone
not much different from the monomaniacal guntoting hijacker of
his provocative novel. His path, parallel to that of terrorist
hijackers of Islam, will not bring salvation to our troubled
world. For that, we must learn to experience faith within a carnival
of Bakhtinian heteroglossia or multiple discourses, leading to
the possibility of genuine dialogue between the Self and the
Other, and perhaps more importantly, of the Other within the
Self.
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is a professor in the Department of English
at Montclair State University and can be reached at: khanf@mail.montclair.edu
Texts Quoted/Referenced:
Cahill, Thomas. "The One True Faith:
Is it Tolerance?" The New York Times, Section 4,
February 3, 2002, p.1.
Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the
Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam.
Addison-Wesley, 1987.
-----------------. Scheherezade Goes
West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. Washington Square
Press, 2001.
Pilger, John. "The Colder War."
The Mirror, January 29, 2002.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses.
Viking-Penguin, 1988.
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