Islamic Tendencies
Traditionalism, Modernism and Fundamentalism--Three Major Islamic Tendencies
Although there have been many developments in Islamic thinking since colonialism decisively impacted the Middle East in the late 19th century, three ongoing tendencies provide the standard frame of reference-- traditionalism, modernism and "fundamentalism" (also called "Islamism”). The rivalry among these three tendencies has simmered within a historical context of Islam on the defensive, with military dictatorships monitoring ulama and mosques, trouble spots spreading and flaring up repeatedly, and Western powers vying for control of resources in a region where wealth has always been maldistributed. In this context, Islam has been the only mass-based frame of reference. Historically, the rhetoric of democracy has been used by Western powers and ruling elites to quash any actual possibilities of it. In the present circumstances, it should not be difficult to understand the suspicion and distrust that rhetoric elicits throughout the region. Whether democracy and Islam are "compatible" (a "Westernizing" question in the Middle East) is hard to say from this distance. But we should be alert to the different perspectives these three tendencies bring to socio-political changes and challenges in the region.
Traditionalism
Most Muslims across the world participate in the traditional Islamic way of life whose essentials have been practiced for 14 centuries. At least in the English-speaking world, the best-known contemporary spokesperson for traditionalism, defending it against the "extremes" of both fundamentalism and modernization, is the Iranian thinker Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Writing about fundamentalism, Nasr works hard to combat American stereotypes, while acknowledging the unpleasant political realities. "Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist, illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. But for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both modernism and fundamentalism, are of central concern" (The Heart of Islam [2002], pp. 111-112).
This same spirit of toleration and accommodation has made ulama the target of attacks by both modernists and fundamentalists. Both movements blame traditionalism for the inertia and weakness they find throughout the Muslim world. The traditional role of the ulama, however, has been to take the long view, with time-tested caution about innovations (bida). Significantly, their task is to serve as mediators between political powers and the civil society. (In Egypt, for example, the ulama issued fatwas in the 1960s justifying Nasser's socialism, then did the same in the 1970s under Sadat to justify his turn towards capitalism.) Behind this is the "Doctrine of Necessity," as al-Ghazali (d. 1111) called it, arguing that a bad ruler is always better than anarchy. Even Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who is the chief medieval authority for today's fundamentalists, wrote that sixty years of an unjust ruler is better than one day without a ruler. While the masses may suffer under a tyrant, it is assumed that they would suffer even more under chaotic conditions. And traditionally, any ruler who allows people to practice the basics (the “five pillars") of Islam is at least tolerated.
Modernism
The liberalizing movement within Islam, usually called "modernism," tends to draw from Western as well as Islamic influences, in countering both decadence within and threats from without. In our reading handout from Amina Wadud's Qur'an and Woman (1999), Wadud (p. 6) derives her "hermeneutical model" for a gender-equal Quran from the great Pakistani modernist scholar, Fazlur Rahman. The "spirit" of the Quran-- its overall intent-- must be distinguished from passages obviously referring to seventh century Arabia. In the 1960s, Fazlur Rahman battled Abul A'la Mawdudi and his Jamaat-i Islami party over the direction of Islam in Pakistan. Rahman's program for a progressive Islamic society, developed under Pres. Ayyub Khan's sponsorship, was politically defeated in 1968. Rahman had maintained that the Quran was both the infallible word of God as well as (what was controversial) Muhammad's own personal word. Conservatives called him a disbeliever and organized mass demonstrations. Rahman was forced to resign from the Pakistani cabinet as well as from the Institute for Islamic Research, where he had been director. In 1969, Rahman moved to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death in 1988. There he wrote two of the best-known defenses of the liberal Islamic tradition in English-- Major Themes of the Qur'an (1980) and Islam and Modernity (1982).
In the late 19th century in Egypt and Syria, the liberalizing movement called itself the nahda, or Arab “renaissance.” Muslim writers influenced by Western cultures hoped to revitalize Islam with a more assertive, politicized vision that could unify the entire umma against colonialism. In the context of Egyptian resistance to British influence and occupation (1882), a sequence of three thinkers is usually cited. Jamal al Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) traveled the Middle East calling on Muslims to resist colonialism by uniting behind a more militant caliphate. Exiled to Paris in 1884, he established a radical Islamic journal there along with his student Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), who became the leader of a speculative, rationalist revival movement when he returned to Egypt. Abduh balanced two goals: a commitment to Islam's relevance to modernity and public life and a return to the early values of Islam that had disappeared into a stagnant traditionalism. Abduh's most distinguished follower was Rashid Rida (d. 1935), who after WWI became more conservative than modernist. He promoted a return to the values of the salaf, the "pious elders," meaning Muhammad and his “rightly guided”companions. His followers called themselves the salifiyya, a term that has been adopted by fundamentalists. Rida's Quran commentary was the model for Sayyid Qutb's own major commentary, known as the Zilal. But Rida's pragmatic openness, especially in political matters, makes him a bridge between the Arab Nahda movement and the Muslim Brotherhood that arose in the late 1920s.
One of the most famous modernist thinkers is Ali Shariati of Iran. In the 1960s Shariati returned to Iran from Paris and adapted themes from Marx, Sartre and Fanon to the egalitarian message of the Quran. As opposition to the Shah intensified, Shariati’s youth-oriented message of prophetic-revolutionary sacrifice became a major force behind the 1979 revolution. Khomeini's subsequent extermination of the student-based left-wing movements identified with Shariati is a collective memory that profoundly informs the liberalizing reformers’movement in Iran today.
Fundamentalism as Four Movements: Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian Brotherhood, Mawdudi's Jamaat-i Islami in Pakistan, and Khomeini's Shiite Revolution in Iran
I have suggested the advantage of treating fundamentalism, or Islamism, in terms of four independent movements, each with its own social and historical context. Where they overlap, some specificity is required to sort things out. Since each of these movements has its own complexities, and since much of the work we've done in the study group hooks into at least one of them, I'll not go into detail here. It's important to remember that, with the signal exception of Wahhabism, each of these movements developed as an intellectual as well as an activist tradition. But the influence of fundamentalist thinking across the Middle East has been on the rise ever since the defeat of Arab Nationalism in 1967, and it appears to increase with each Western-based intervention.
What follows are a few brief notes about key Islamist figures and movements for reference purposes.
Wahhabism began in the mid-18th century as an alliance between a self-appointed puritanical (anti-Shiite) prophet named ibn Abd al-Wahhab and an Arabian tribal chief, Muhammad ibn Saud of Dariyya (near Riyadh). This alliance produced a religiopolitical movement uniting tribes throughout Arabia with the goal of re-creating the purity of Islam's seventh century beginnings. In the early 20th century, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (1873-1953) reasserted his family claims to Arabia and led a political movement that eliminated Sharif Hussein from Mecca in the late 1920s. He turned Wahhabism into a powerful force that attacked Shiite tribes in the south of the newly established mandate state of Iraq. In practice, Wahhabism has accused those with less rigorous interpretations of the Quran of unbelief (kufr), which could justify taking arms.
Abul A'la Mawdudi (1903-1979) was an Islamic scholar and writer, raised by a religious family in Dakkan, India, who led the struggle of Muslims in India to preserve their autonomy in the face of growing Hindu political strength. In the process he developed many of the basic ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. Mawdudi's Islamist politics was launched by his participation in the Khilifat movement in the early 1920s, when Indian Muslims demanded that the British intervene to prevent the newly secularized Turkish nation from abolishing the caliphate. After it was indeed abolished by Ataturk in 1924, Mawdudi became a fierce opponent of nationalism, arguing that it was an anti-Islamic, Westernizing invention. In 1941 he founded the Jamaat-i-Islami Party, an elitist Muslim vanguard committed to Islamic renewal but opposed to a separate Pakistani nation-state. Following the 1947 partition, however, Mawdudi pragmatically accepted the new situation, committing his party to the task of building strength through elections and alliances.
Mawdudi's chief contributions to Islamist ideology were his linkage of nationalism with Western colonialism-- which he likened to the pre-Islamic pagan society of "ignorance" (jahilliya)-- and the goal of politicizing Islam. Mawdudi assumed that a grass-roots power base could be established through collective obedience to the Quran and Sharia. He was pragmatic and non-violent in pursuing his objectives, in contrast with Qutb's revolutionary adaptation of them in the quite different political context of Egypt in the 1960s.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was founded in 1927 by Hasan al-Banna, a schoolteacher who was killed by the Egyptian secret police in 1949. Although individual Brotherhood members were accused of plots and assassinations, the organization was committed to non-violence before the era of repression under Nasser. Al-Banna promoted the political and educational development of the Muslim Community in Egypt, in opposition to secularism (Arab Nationalism).
Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) shaped the terms of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, or Islamism, in his writings of the early 1960s in Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood was brutally suppressed by Nasser's secular nationalist military regime. Qutb had been a secular educator and thinker before visiting the U.S. in 1948. Strongly reacting against what he considered the moral decadence of American society, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood on returning home in 1956 and became its leading theorist. He was radicalized by the Egyptian government's massacre of 23 imprisoned Muslim Brothers in 1957. Thereafter he promoted a militant revival of Islam, based on a repudiation of the politically co-opted ulama class and a return to the single-minded purity of the first Islamic caliphs-- the salafi, or "pious ancestors". Qutb called for a new hijra, an emigration of the umma (the believing community) away from the decadence of Western jahilliya to a society where Islam can succeed as a total system, unified through collective surrender to God's will. During his final years in prison before his execution by the Nasser regime in 1966, Qutb wrote Milestones, a passionate manifesto for the Islamist struggle that quickly became the movement's most influential text.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1979) became the leader of the clerical opposition to the Shah of Iran in the early 1960s. He was sent into exile in 1964, eventually settling in Najaf, the major Shiite educational center in Iraq. At the time an Iraqi Shiite clerical movement (called the Dawa) was actively challenging the traditionally apolitical interpretation of religious duties. It was a propitious intellectual context for Khomeini’s development of a revolutionary theory of an Islamic republic run by a single Grand Ayatollah. In early 1970, Khomeini gave a series of lectures in Najaf on the “guardianship of the jurist” (velayat-e faqih), which became the model for the revolutionary government he established in Iran in 1979.
10-25-03
