Sandra Halperin

Accusations of ‘Western’ malevolence and ignorance: a reply

In response to my talk a few weeks ago at the University of Sussex (The Post-Cold War Political Topography of the Middle East), Julian Symes raises a number of issues that I feel require a riposte. My concern is not to argue with Mr. Symes for consistently misrepresenting my remarks; the full texts of my talk and of Mr. Symes’ response are posted at this website, so readers may read them and draw their own conclusions. What I want to discuss are those comments in his response that I feel serve to promote and promulgate misunderstandings about Islam and its relationship both to democracy and to ‘the West’.

Issue #1: Basic Terms

As Mr. Symes takes me to task for using the term ‘Islamism’ (though, in fact, I never use it), I begin by clarifying this and a number of related terms that feature prominently in discussions of the matters noted above.

‘Islamism’ is a term used to refer to a group of ideologies that reject secular forms of government and institutions as inconsistent with a true Muslim society. I never use this term, as the text of my remarks shows, so I will assume that it is the term ‘Islamist’ to which Mr. Symes objects. ‘Islamist’ may be used to describe individuals, groups, or movements that advocate Islamism. But since this comprises a very broad and varied terrain, and my talk was concerned with only one current within it, I characterised this current as representing (both in Sunni and in Shi’i Islamism, as well as in Judaism, Christianity and other religions) the aspirations, ideas, norms, and tactics generally associated with the theocratic far right.

Before elaborating on this, I should point out that neither term (‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamist’) is a ‘[Western] press term’, as Mr. Symes seems to think, but are widely used in discussing the issues that were the subject of my talk, and appear, among other places, in the titles and text of hundreds of articles by Muslim scholars, as a scan of academic journals (and websites) devoted to the Middle East and to Islam will readily show.

The term ‘fundamentalist’ might seem better suited to describe the religious far right: it is probably more familiar, and is often used both in scholarly and ordinary usage to refer to those (Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus) who would make all aspects of social and political life conform to what they believe to be inerrant and immutable sacred texts. However, those who have been called ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ do not refer to themselves this way (though some Iranian clerics did, at least in the 1980s): they speak of themselves either as ‘Muslims’ (implying that only those who hold their views are ‘real’ Muslims) or as ‘Islamists’ (Islamiyyun). This latter term is preferable, in my view, not only because it is of Muslim provenance, but because by its form it suggests a distinction (as the term ‘fundamentalist’ does not) between Islam, on the one hand, and its use as a political ideology, on the other.

Mr. Symes writes that it is ‘laughable’ to try and make a single term encompass the diversity represented by al-Qu’ida, the Taleban, Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy, and Saudi Arabia’s hereditary monarchy. ‘The only thing they really seem to have in common’, he says, ‘is an ostensible commitment to religious law’. But that is not at all the case. Most governments in the Middle East have ‘an ostensible commitment to religious law’. What distinguishes far right Islamist movements and states, and is common to all of them despite the fact that they vary greatly in their doctrines and strategies, and irrespective of whether they are Sunni or Shi'i, is their insistence that there can be no distinction between religion and politics in Islam and their commitment to the creation of some form of theocratic Islamic state. 

The notion that Islam does not distinguish between religious and political spheres of social life has been actively promoted by ideologues of the Islamist far right and widely accepted by Western scholars and journalists. But the reason these Islamists feel compelled to continually emphasize this notion is because they know that this is not how the overwhelming majority of Muslims interpret their religion and that, as a matter of historical fact, throughout most of the history of Islam, religious and political insitutions have been separate. According to some scholars, the particular synthesis of religion and politics that these Islamists promote is not only rare, but unprecedented, in Islamic history (see, e.g., Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, 1997).

Islamist movements emerged within the context of various efforts to address the decline of the Muslim world and its political subordination to Western colonial powers and, specifically, from among those calling for a return to Islam through the re-introduction of Sharia (Islamic law). Initially, the dominant view was that this should be achieved from ‘below’ by, first, rebuilding a social base and then gradually reintroducing Sharia to public life. Eventually, a second, ‘top down’ view emerged which held that the return to Islam could only be achieved by means of the ‘governance’ (Welayah) or ‘dominion’ (Hakemeya) of God through the establishment of an ‘Islamic state’. This became the basis of an explicitly political ideology and movement, a ‘political Islam’ whose increasing assertion in the political arena helped to consolidate a third current of thought. This third current links Islamic renewal to consensual governance and pluralism and interprets religious texts in ways that emphasize their compatibility with freedom of choice, individual responsibility, pluralism, democracy, and human rights.

The second current of thought is the one that I refer to as the religious far right (e.g. with reference to al-Qu’ida). In relation to the other two, and in common with the theocratic far right in Judaism and Christianity, it is authoritarian and intolerant. Its central concern seems to be with alien ‘infidels’ and domestic ‘apostates’ and with purging them from Islamic society by means of religiously-based authoritarian government and policies of exclusion (for further discussion of these various currents, see Mansoor Al-Jamri, ‘Contemporary Currents in Islamist Political Thought’, Al-Quds [London] 22 January 1999).  My talk was concerned with the consequences of the campaign waged against the left during the Cold War (1918-  ) by governments and wealthy groups in the Middle East, with help from Britain and the US; its success in eradicating not only communists and socialists, but also liberal, left-of-center, and reformist elements; its success, as well, in encouraging the growth of a religious far right as a bulwark against the left; and the absence today, as a consequence, of a left, center or, even moderate right sufficiently organized to successfully compete in an open election with the religious far right.

Issue #2: Islam and democracy

The three currents of thought discussed above represent three different views on how to reconcile the tenets of Islam with modern notions of democracy. This is a question that is much debated throughout the Middle East and within the Muslim world generally. This, I must emphasize, is a debate that is internal to the Muslim world and not, as Mr. Symes seems to suggest, imposed from outside of it. It is taking place between Islamists and their various political rivals and within each camp, and among all of these and Muslim human rights and women’s groups (further discussion of these matters can be found at the website of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy, www.islam-democracy.org, an organisation devoted to countering widely-held prejudices and misconceptions about these matters among both Muslims and non-Muslims).

As the burgeoning literature on the subject by Muslim writers and scholars shows, much of the debate is focussed on fundamental disagreements over divine versus popular sovereignty. In general, the far right Islamist position represents the view that popular sovereignty is incompatible with the sovereignty of God, and that the Sharia together with the Quranic principle of consultation or shurah (on the interpretation of Sharia) comprises a complete legal and moral system and requires no input from any other. Others argue that, while it is clear that in the Quran and Shari'a God is the ultimate sovereign, there is nothing in either source to suggest that the particulars of popular sovereignty violate the overall sovereignty of God. This view ostensibly gets support from, among others, the Muslims who vote in the US, as well as from the hundreds of millions of Muslims who practice some form of democracy in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere.

Some Muslims who renounce ‘Western’ democracy, seem to do so in order to defend Islamic cultural ‘authenticity’ against Western encroachment. But as other Muslims point out, many who oppose ‘Western’ democracy as ‘inauthentic’ seem not to have similar concerns about systems of dictatorial rule which are envisioned by some Islamists and which seem more incompatible with Islam than any other. In fact, any system designed to force Muslims to obey Sharia seems utterly inconsistent with the notion of submission to God's will (‘Islam’ is a verbal noun meaning ‘surrender’ [to God]; Muslim, a participle meaning ‘surrendered’ [to God]). According to the Quran, when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham ‘surrendered himself [to God]’. It seems inconsistent to view a Muslim as one who is forced to submit to God’s will). As for the notion that democracy is, not only un-Islamic but ‘Western’, in what sense are the values of democracy owned by the West (and isn’t ‘the West’, after all, in many important respects a product of ‘the East’)? 

Issue #3:  ‘Huntington-in-reverse’ 

Mr. Symes castigates me for remarks that, in his view, exemplify both the absence of ‘a serious attempt to comprehend the core precepts of Islam, and their projections in the political dimension’; and that suggest to him the ‘polarised caricatures of Muslim political consciousness provided by apologists and politicians, and echoed in lazy and complicit journalism’. He then calls for ‘increasing the levels of unprejudiced and genuine understanding between Islamic and Western social and political culture and heritage, at all levels’.

But it seems to me that many of his own comments are designed, not to edify, but to inflame.

 

Mr. Symes attributes to me and to ‘the West’ a series of ‘false connections’, i.e. crude and offensive caricatures of Islam, which are, in fact, only familiar to everyone because they are constantly repeated, not by ‘Westerners’, as Mr. Symes insists, but by Islamists and others who, like Mr. Symes, seem to repeat them only to castigate and denigrate ‘the West’ for purportedly having made them. He derides people in the West, and presumably it is my remarks which inspire him, for ‘using the situation [of recent events] as the excuse to open up broader political and ideological fronts against an unfamiliar belief system, particularly when there has been thus far so little real effort to comprehend it’.

 

But in characterising Islam as an ‘unfamiliar belief system’ which the West has made so ‘little real effort to comprehend’, Mr. Symes must surely be aware of the hundreds of thousands of  mosques and Islamic societies, associations, foundations, information centres, and councils which are found throughout ‘the West' and which, everywhere, are integral to its richness and dynamism. As a student, he is surely aware of the abundant scholarly resources devoted to Islam in the West -- the thousands of University libraries, centres for Middle Eastern studies, and institutes for Islamic studies; news sources, on-line catalogues and bibliographies from University libraries and other research institutions around the world, directories of Islamic scholars, electronic journals, and news and media databases of daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers, news magazines, and radio broadcasts from everywhere in the Islamic world. Here in Brighton, he is sure to know about the academic exchange of information and research on Islam through activities sponsored by the Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES), the European Network of Middle Eastern Studies, the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

In defending, in this way, what he calls ‘mainstream Islamic beliefs’ against the malevolence and ignorance of the West, Mr. Symes is contributing to a project of which he may, in fact, not approve. Mr. Symes may believe that he is serving Islam by reversing Huntington’s statements in ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ but, as Khalid al-Haroob has argued, this is irrational and naïve; for, among other things, differences among Muslim countries are probably far wider than those that are presumed to exist between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ (‘The Naivety of an "Islamic-Huntington" view’, posted at: www.islam21.net). However, despite his castigation of Western ignorance, Mr. Symes, himself, seems very far, indeed, from comprehending the contemporary Muslim world in all its complexity and dynamism: he seems unaware of rival interpretations of Islamic doctrine and history, and rival conceptions of democracy; of the intensive debates, and the issues they address; and, in particular, the perspectives, ideas and norms which guide the action of the various Islamist groups, liberals, secularists, women groups and Muslim and non-Muslim minorities involved in them. 

The issue is how to advance and express ideas in ways that do not appeal to prejudice and myth and which do not serve to fortify the boundary between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’. For, as Edward Said wrote recently (‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation, 22 October 2001) while it may by much simpler ‘to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with’, what in fact we are dealing with in reality is ‘the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs"’.

Dr Sandra Halperin, University of Sussex, s.halperin@sussex.ac.uk