Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Religion and foreign policy
Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Political Islam versus modernity
Political Islam versus modernity
The hard truth is that the clash between the value systems of political Islam and modernity is so total as to make them incompatible, writes Tarek Heggy
"Bear witness for us, O pen/ That we shall not sleep/ That we shall not dither between 'yes' and 'no'" -- Amal Donqol
It is my view that whether political Islam is defined as a religious theocratic movement or a political movement in the modern sense of political movements, the currents of political Islam have a position concerning the type of value system that contemporary intellectuals in advanced societies recognise as constituting the foundations of a culture of progress and modernity.
So a conversation must be held between some of these value systems and the mentality and behaviour of exponents of currents of political Islam. This is what I shall attempt to do in this essay, which aims to place political Islam side by side with a number of values associated with modernity and progress.
The conception of the modern state: modern Islamists are unable to understand or accept or even admire the modern state system, which is the product or the result of centuries of political, cultural, social and economic struggle over the course of human progress. When the Prophet took ill (during the last days of his life) he tasked his close companion, Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, with deputising for him in leading the prayer. When the prophet passed away shortly afterwards, a large number of Muslims considered that this entrusting of the leadership of the prayer constituted an indication from the Prophet that Abu Bakr was to be his preferred successor. And this is what in fact took place in the aftermath of the problems associated with the Saqifa compact (saqifat bani sada). From the very first day Abu Bakr became "the prophet's 'deputy'" or successor.
It is this historical model that dominates Islamists' thinking. This model (necessarily a simplistic one in step with the simplicity of a time of experimentation) prevails still over the mind-set of most Islamists, in whom the interweaving of "religion" and "politics" is a thoroughgoing one. Some decades later, attempts were made to philosophise and theorise this experiment in a number of books known today as works on Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniya (Rulings on Governance), such as Al-Mawardi's Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniya. Even though the specifics of such rulings do no more than reflect the condition and level of evolution in man's political thinking over a period of five centuries starting from the seventh century AD, specifics which are simplistic and in many instances downright primitive and silly, the mind-set of contemporary exponents of Islamism still retains an admiration for them as something presenting a comprehensive alternative to the system of the modern state.
PLURALISM: There is little doubt that the culture of more progressive societies, and their general intellectual climate, are founded upon the premise that "pluralism" constitutes one of the most important markers of human existence in its most advanced stage, and indeed that it is one of the prerequisites of human progress. There can be no progress for peoples who do not believe in pluralism or who fail to construct their culture and general climate upon the acceptance of what pluralism achieves. Just as Marxism presented a nemesis for pluralism when all of its social, cultural, economic and political systems were founded upon the dismissal of everyone and everything that opposed the basic foundations of Marxism, political Islam can do naught else but lead to this same dismissal -- for all the Islamists' declarations of belief in pluralism. This is because the Islamist is dominated by the thought that he is 100 per cent in the right. After all, how can this not be the case given that God himself enters with him into all epistemological, cultural, economic, political, legal and constitutional arenas? And scientific arenas too: where is the Islamist, for example, who accepts the theory of evolution?
OTHERNESS: This (or the acceptance of the other) is the product of the debate on pluralism. If life (for those who believe in pluralism) is founded upon a broad pluralism in various spheres of living, organisation, thinking and principles, the first thing it demands of modern man is to accept the other (in all that "other's" various forms). But if the Islamist -- who believes that God stands at his side and that he is the closest to truth in all manner of arenas -- maintains any belief in accepting the other, his acceptance is a relatively moderate (or at times microscopic) one. He may tell us that he believes in the rights of woman, but he will then tell us that women are qualified to work in "most" but not all posts! And he will tell us, unequivocally, that a woman (and even a non-Muslim) cannot become a head of state. He will also tell us, in his own words, that he believes in religious freedom, but he will lay down for others what it is that they may believe in. For the Islamists in Egypt (writing now in 2012) are saying that a man has a right to be a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian but he does not have the right to be a Buddhist or a Bahaai. In the same way, Islamists cannot agree that freedom of religion means that a Muslim can leave Islam.
RELATIVISM: Out of the womb of faith in pluralism issues faith in otherness (the acceptance of the other). And out of the womb of either comes "relativism". By this I mean that in the culture and climate of a more progressive society the concept of the relative nature of opinions, rulings, theories and interpretations is widely shared. The Islamist may say, in his own words, that he believes in relativism, yet a discussion with him on the subject of women, non-Muslims, the theory of evolution or opposing viewpoints will always go to prove that the Islamist cannot welcome relativism. For by his nature he must extend the "absolute" beyond the realm of the private and personal onto the realm of public affairs. Consequently he alone -- as opposed to anyone else on the face of the planet today -- is the one who, in his ideology, possesses "permanent solutions" that may not be changed to face up to problems which by their very nature are changeable. If you were to say to him that these solutions are the product of specific times and places he will become angry and simply reject this logic. For a number of weeks now (writing in August 2012), the former supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mahdi Akef declared that anyone who disagrees with the conceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood is "stupid and ignorant". Words such as these encapsulate the Islamists' view and opinion concerning any alternative perception.
THE RIGHTS OF MAN: The rights of man, including the right to think and the right to express his views, alongside other rights, are the product of mankind's struggle conducted over long periods. The problem the Islamist has with the rights of man is that he can only accept their presentation as something that he believes to be the will of God. If we were to say to him that it is a human right to be a Buddhist or a Bahaai, he will reject this and say that the rights of man in this respect are limited to the three Abrahamic faiths. If we were to say to him that it is a woman's right to dress as she pleases he would refuse this on the basis of his morals that he also sees as expressing the will of God. And if we were to say to him that it is a Muslim's right to become a Jew or a Christian he will once again employ his (absolutist) morals to refuse this human right. Thus, for the Islamist, there is an upper ceiling, or a number of upper ceilings, to the rights of man, ceilings that in his conception are also the will of God.
WOMANKIND: Women as such, the fear of them and the desire that they inspire, and at the same time the wish to place her in a cage and keep her under constant supervision, these are some of the most conspicuous Islamist standpoints vis-Ã-vis womankind. There is no doubt that the Islamist sees the woman as a lesser being (albeit only marginally) than the man. He even makes use of what nature has imposed on women in order to establish that she is religiously inferior (that the onset of a woman's monthly period places her in the eyes of the Islamist on a lower religious footing than that of a man). Most Islamists are preoccupied -- to the point of hysterical delirium -- with women. The result of their delirium (much as with the case of the Haredi Jews) is that she becomes in their conception the source and the cause of most sins. The Islamist, generally, sees that this dangerous source of sinfulness must be hedged in with restrictions. Despite an Islamic society like Saudi Arabia surrounding the woman with unprecedented levels of restrictions, this society has been and is still witnessing the greatest degree of chaos in sexual relations.
Instead of concerning himself with punishing the man (the wolf), the entire focus of the Islamist is fixed on imprisoning "the victim" under observation in a cage. As I always say: instead of keeping the flies off, we choose to lock up the honey in cupboards! In the light of such a mentality, the rights of women have the lowest ceilings imposed upon them. Anyone can put this to the test by asking any Islamist to take another look at such things as the following: the testimony of a woman in court or elsewhere as being worth half the testimony of a man (in a Saudi court of law the testimony of a woman, such as Madame Curie who has won two Nobel Prizes in science, would be worth half the testimony of a man who has barely finished primary school). Alternatively you will not find an Islamist who is prepared to take another look at the inheritance of a woman being half that of the man, or whether a woman is qualified to occupy the office of head of state, or whether he would agree to a woman being in a position to licence marriage or divorce, or have custody of her sons and daughters, and so on.
THE RULE OF LAW IN ITS MODERN CONCEPTION: The Islamist is of the firm conviction that submission to positivist constitutional and legal rules (that is, those that have been set down by man) is a grievous sin. It is a sin on the religious level and a sin on the social level too, in that the Islamist believes deep down that mortals are not qualified to shape a constitutional and legal system governed by mortals. Ever since Egypt in 1883 transferred to a modern positivist legal system, Islamists remained critical of the existence of a legal system set down by mortals. When the writings of Sayed Qotb (1906-1966) became the most important literature in political Islam (many of them taken from the Indo-Pakistani Islamist Abul-Ela Al-Mawdudi whose writings are some of the most important causes of wars between Pakistan and India) the philosophy of the Islamists vis-Ã-vis positivist laws has been the following: God alone is cognizant of man's failings and consequently their non-qualification to fashion laws governing relations between men in all its various forms. This is the core of the theory of Al-Hakimiya that all Islamists hold to, even if they differ on the period of time required to apply this theory. One of the most important by-products of this theory, and which is the essence of the Islamist mind-set, is that man should not lay down rules governing relations between men but instead observe the rules established by God and not mankind. Even now no leader of any current of political Islam undertakes to review the concept of Al-Hakimiya presented by Sayed Qotb in his famous work Milestones on the Way (which is considered to be a regurgitation of earlier ideas propounded by Abul-Ala Al-Mawdudi).
Thus the Islamist is faced with a continuing difficulty vis-Ã-vis all positivist, legal, constitutional foundations. Even if a great legal scholar such as Al-Sanhouri -- the author of the 1984 Egyptian Civil Code -- says that he sees nothing in all of the regulations and materials of this code derived from French civil law that contradicts the principles of Islamic Sharia, nevertheless this counts for nothing among the currents of political Islam. The Islamist continues to believe that his primary political mission is to apply a comprehensive legal system derived from Islamic Sharia, that is -- in his view -- the laws that express the will of God.
VIOLENCE: It is clear that the leadership of most currents of political Islam refuse to describe suicide operations undertaken by many Islamists against non-combatant individuals as terrorist operations. There is no doubt that most of these leaders do not consider someone such as Osama bin Laden to be a terrorist. Indeed most of them have, and still do, look upon Bin Laden brimming with appreciation and admiration for him.
When an Islamist candidate for the post of president of the Republic of Egypt was asked a few months ago whether he considered Osama Bin Laden a terrorist or not, he replied "America is terrorist". The truth is that the Islamist cannot condemn "violence" against civilians in all its shapes and forms. Nothing demonstrates this more than the failure of contemporary man to agree on a universally accepted definition of terrorism. Islamists are one in maintaining that it is their right -- and indeed their duty -- to distance themselves from any agreement on how to define terrorism before such time that they have fully attained power. I make the claim that no less than half the sons and daughters in societies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen would reject someone like Osama bin Laden being described as a terrorist.
A BALANCED INTELLECTUAL FORMATION: I have always believed, and still do, that not a single fanatic upon the surface of the Earth is the product of a balanced intellectual formation. None of the various fruits of human inventiveness in all or most of the spheres of intellectual and cultural creativity have ever found their way in a balanced, measured form into the mentality of the Haredi Jew or the fundamentalist Muslim. Or to put it another way, if any of the fruits of human inventiveness initiated by the ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, or the fruits of the Renaissance and the period following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, or the most important products of human creativity over the last three centuries (which are the richest centuries in human history) should make their entry into a man's mental composition, then that man simply cannot be a fundamentalist or a fanatic. I was fortunate enough to be granted the opportunity to see up close what it is that a Haredi Jew or a Salafist Muslim, or the militant Muslim followers of the Hanbali school or those who admire the fatwas of Hanbali faqihs and proselytizers like Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Qayim and Mohamed Abdel-Wahab (among whom feature all the clerics of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all the lands of Sunni Islam) take for reading material. I got to know up close that the bulk of these folk have never read, and still do not read, anything beyond the literature of their specific religious denomination.
Indeed, I might add that I have heard the warnings issued by dozens of prominent clerics in Saudi Arabia against reading what I would call the fruits of human creativity -- from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare and Racine to Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau and Diderot, from Descartes to Kant, from Victor Hugo to Albert Camus. And I know intimately their rejectionist position on symphonic music, the figurative arts and theatre. Perhaps the following anecdotes demonstrate the tragedy we are writing about here: in August 2012, Chinese astronauts returned to their launch base and a picture was published of a female Chinese astronaut exiting the spaceship aided by one of her colleagues. A Salafist Internet website ran the photograph with a commentary that did not address the various aspects of brilliant achievement represented by the picture. Instead the commentary focussed on the "degeneracy" represented by the image of a female astronaut with her colleague supporting her arm to help her exit the spaceship! A few years ago a fire broke out in a girls' school in Saudi Arabia; many of the girl students attempted to leave the burning building but were turned back by the school's firemen with the result that they burned to death, since they were not wearing their veils at the time they were attempting to escape incineration.
HUMANITY: The literature, culture and thinking of Islamists is based upon the division of the world (and of its peoples) into two: the first called the Abode of Islam, the second named the Abode of War. This division prevails still over the Islamists' mind-set, which, in light of the authority of this literature, has difficulty in understanding, digesting, embracing and accepting the modern concept of humanity and the influence it has had on breaking down barriers and frontiers between cultures and societies. I have no doubt that Islamists look upon the other (who necessarily belongs to the Abode of War) as an enemy in one form or another -- an enemy constantly held to be responsible for all of their problems, starting from colonialism and including everything that has happened up to the present day. Two years ago Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a famous leading light in the Muslim Brotherhood who entered the electoral race for the Egyptian presidency in May 2012, issued a book in which he stated that all the problems of contemporary Islamic societies were caused by colonialism. Abul-Fotouh did not explain to us why it is that the Europeans embarked on colonising us instead of us colonising the Europeans. Similarly Abul-Fotouh did not tell us why most regions of the Arabian Peninsula have remained deeply backward for a century despite the fact that they were never colonised.
TAQIYA (CONCEALMENT): Taqiya is a Shia concept that seeps into the political practices of contemporary Islamist groups be they Shia or Sunni. The concept of taqiya means that at such time as the Islamists on the ground constitute the weaker power, they have the right to proclaim in public precisely the opposite of what they hold in secret. This manifested itself clearly in the behaviour of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of the former President Hosni Mubarak. The positions they adopted were often contradictory to that which they had previously declared even just a few months earlier.
The danger of taqiya comes to the fore whenever Islamists make declarations, in their meetings with representatives of cultures that despise mendacity, on such matters as their repudiation of violence and their respect for the rights of women or their respect for non-Muslims. To make such declarations as these -- which fly in the face of what their minds actually think and intend -- is religiously permitted for them for as long as they have yet to attain total empowerment. I have no doubt that had Niccolò Machiavelli himself heard from some Muslims of the concept of taqiya he would have agreed with them and considered them even more Machiavellian than himself.
In short, after 40 years of studying political Islam, its literature and writings -- including university theses on the Islamic system of hadd punishments -- I can see no possibility of there being any agreement between political Islam and the values of progress and modernity. At the same time I believe that the pragmatic practice of politics (in the light of contemporary constitutions and laws) may permit developments that may render Islamist political parties similar to Christian parties in Europe. But I am speaking here of a possible, and by no means certain, trajectory, and I am talking of a long journey, which up to now I see no tangible evidence of having been embarked upon.
The writer is a political analyst.
Religion and foreign policy
When religion defines foreign policy it will inevitably clash with national interests, creating the grounds for wars that only elites who rule in the name of religion win, writes Gamil Matar
That Egypt's president cites Quranic verses and uses religious phrases in his public addresses does not surprise me. If we are accustomed from an early age to using them in our school compositions, there is nothing inherently odd in the president peppering his speeches with them, especially given that he is a religious man and a prominent member of an Islamist organisation that elevated him to his current office. Nevertheless, I must confess that I was taken aback by the prologue to the speech he delivered at a recent conference in Iran and in which he made mention of the companions of the Prophet and cited a verse from the Quran. Something about that prologue did not ring true. It's intent was consummately political and it conveyed the sense of a future policy orientation, which may well have been the intent of the speechwriters.
The conference in which this speech was delivered was the last summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This movement is made up of numerous member states whose peoples have diverse religious affiliations. What bound these states together from the outset and protects them to this day as a non-aligned grouping is a set of political principles and interests that have no direct bearing on religion.
Clearly, the political point of employing religious references in a speech at a conference in which religion was not on the agenda was to deliver a "religious" message or, more accurately, a sectarian message to the host people, which in this case were the Iranians. I doubt that such a message could ever have been delivered in the era of NAM's founding fathers or in any of the subsequent conferences. Nothing in the substance of this message addressed a single one of that set of principles established by the conferences of Bandung and Belgrade and that set the course for generation after generation of Third World leaders and diplomats for the next 60 years.
Of course, our president was hardly the first political leader to use religious language for political ends. History is filled with accounts of the practice of mixing religion with politics in order to promote narrow interests or ambitious policies. Perhaps the architects of Western colonial policies set world records in the use of religion to accomplish imperial ends. History is similarly full of stories in which religion and politics are blended in order to evangelise or spread a religious calling, or to instil noble morals and ethics in international political practices. As we know, there are long-established schools in international relations that specialise in the connection between politics and ethics, and also power.
The stories abound and their conclusions and consequences are varied. Certainly no Arab or Muslim will forget the story of President George W Bush when he deliberately inserted the word "crusade" in his televised speech on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. I recall that at the time many international affairs specialists anticipated the onset of an age in which religion would interweave with international relations to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Their prediction came true. To read the political studies and minutes of Congressional hearing sessions of this period one would think that American scholars, politicians and diplomats had begun to regard religion as a state enterprise.
What this means is that US diplomacy can use religion to further US national interests. It does this through the application of the "religion by proxy" theory, which holds that people place their faith in the hands of a religious ruling minority that represents or claims to represent the pious majority. There are many testimonies to this transformation in US foreign policy design. Take, for example, how the US has changed its approach to religious movements in various parts of the world. The rule in US diplomacy used to be that since the US constitution insists on the separation of church from state, US diplomats should avoid dealing with religious parties and leaderships even if the aim is to further US interests. This rule vanished with the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001. From then onward, US statesmen and diplomats made it their business to deal with foreign religious parties and political forces, as well as to furnish all possible support to Christian evangelistic groups and organisations which became more energetic than ever in their campaigns to spread their ideas in South America, Africa and China.
In short, the US now began to follow in the heels of the erstwhile European colonial powers, when the imperialistic drive donned a religious mantle and blazoned the fiction of the Christian civilising mission in order to justify the occupation of the continents of the South and the East for the purpose of plundering their national resources and reducing their peoples to subjugation. Some people claim that the US added other pretexts to that flagrantly religious mission, namely the missions to spread democracy and human rights and liberties, and that sometimes it jumbled the lot of them together.
Others make a distinction between how the Europeans and how the Americans use religion in foreign policy. For example, Javier Solana, the former EU foreign affairs commissioner, warned against the danger of the American use of religion in foreign policy. The Americans are "absolutists," he said. Everything to them is either black or white, good or evil, with us or against us. Therefore, he argued, it is hard for them to be tolerant with other peoples or other religions, unlike the Europeans who had learned over centuries the true meaning of religious hatreds. Because the Europeans had had to pay a horrific toll for their religious wars, they eventually became among the most tolerant people on earth and the most accepting of the "other," which today is reflected in their foreign policies, or so argue the defenders of the properties of European culture and policy.
A foreign policy academy in the US has cautioned that the mixing religion with politics can frequently give rise to the "hijacking of religion". Unethical political leaders may take advantage of -- or feel compelled by -- certain circumstances to use religion as a cover for the pursuit of personal ends or for promoting narrow partisan interests. There are also many instances of political leaders who drew on religious passions to turn their people against other peoples, which only serves to make conflicts much more complex and intractable.
Others have been prompted by developments in their own countries or societies to warn against excessive blending of religion and politics. It is natural for different communities living side-by-side to fall into dispute and for disputes to erupt into violence. It is equally natural for local authorities to seize the opportunity to diffuse the situation before it spirals out of control, even before central authorities become aware of the situation. But in this day and age of ours, local disputes are increasingly becoming a cause of general concern because they offer an opening for foreign powers to meddle on the pretext of protecting a minority sect or ethnic group, and because the foreign meddling often causes the disputes to escalate into civil strife or even civil war. I am not sure of the scale of injustice being inflicted on the Muslims of Burma. Perhaps it is of a degree that merits such worldwide attention and international intervention. However, I am certain that other Muslims in northeastern India and in Bangladesh, itself, which is a Muslim nation, are the victims of grave injustices, while the "international community" remains unconcerned.
In all events, with Burma, as in many other cases, religion is being used to serve the "national" interests of other countries, in spite of the well-known "cost" of this practice, which is exorbitant and usually very bloody. This is not to say that the international community should stop supporting oppressed groups in Sankyang, Tibet, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and in many Arab and Islamic countries. Rather, the point is that the intervention should avoid inflaming the religious sensitivities of the peoples concerned. As history has shown, this practice has often created the soil upon which groups that originally existed on the fringes of society could develop into mass religious or sectarian movements with transnational dimensions. Or, more dangerously, it sparked the rise of terrorist groups that wrought fear, destruction and chaos and some of which were enlisted into the intelligence agencies of some governments in order to perform these governments' dirty work in other countries.
In certain quarters there is this assumption that communities or peoples that share the same religious affiliation rarely fight or engage in war. In my opinion, this theory is just as fallacious as the famous one that holds that democratic countries never make war on one another. As many international politics experts will tell you, the prime engine of the foreign policy of any state is national interest. The idea was first formulated by the father of the science of international relations, Hans Morgenthau, and the overwhelming majority of political scientists and statesmen still subscribe to it. Some of these go on to assert that the goal of realising national interests sometimes gives politicians the incentive to pursue actions that defy ethical principles. The eminent political scientist Arthur Schlesinger coined a now famous term for this phenomenon. He called it the "necessary immorality" in the manufacture of foreign policy.
This concept brings us to an inescapable reality. "Religious states" go to war just as "secular states" do and "religious states" can become embroiled in gruelling wars with other "religious states", including those that share the same religion and even the same religious denomination. The history of the Middle East, since the dawn of religion, is filled with religious wars, some of which lasted decades and left disastrous and long-lasting effects. Otherwise put, when religion enters into the equation as a shaper of foreign policy, it will inevitably clash with the chief engine of foreign policy, which is national interest. The winners in this game are never the people and the advancement of their societies, but only the elites who claim to rule in the name of religion and who will have no compunction about going on the warpath against other ruling elites who are their coreligionists in another country. There is an endless train of such wars, from the eras of the Islamic caliphates in Damascus, Baghdad and Istanbul, to the clash in Europe between the eastern and western Christian empires. In the Arab and Islamic world, alone, we have had the wars between Egypt and Yemen, Libya and Chad, Iraq and Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, the Turks and the Persians, and western Pakistan and eastern Pakistan or the "land of the Bengals."
The forced or artificial mixture of religion and foreign policies is fraught with risks, especially when the political elites who forge the policy decisions or orientations are "religious" in their political orientation or definition of their identity.
The writer is a political analyst and director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Political Islam versus modernity
Political Islam versus modernity
The hard truth is that the clash between the value systems of political Islam and modernity is so total as to make them incompatible, writes Tarek Heggy
"Bear witness for us, O pen/ That we shall not sleep/ That we shall not dither between 'yes' and 'no'" -- Amal Donqol
It is my view that whether political Islam is defined as a religious theocratic movement or a political movement in the modern sense of political movements, the currents of political Islam have a position concerning the type of value system that contemporary intellectuals in advanced societies recognise as constituting the foundations of a culture of progress and modernity.
So a conversation must be held between some of these value systems and the mentality and behaviour of exponents of currents of political Islam. This is what I shall attempt to do in this essay, which aims to place political Islam side by side with a number of values associated with modernity and progress.
The conception of the modern state: modern Islamists are unable to understand or accept or even admire the modern state system, which is the product or the result of centuries of political, cultural, social and economic struggle over the course of human progress. When the Prophet took ill (during the last days of his life) he tasked his close companion, Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, with deputising for him in leading the prayer. When the prophet passed away shortly afterwards, a large number of Muslims considered that this entrusting of the leadership of the prayer constituted an indication from the Prophet that Abu Bakr was to be his preferred successor. And this is what in fact took place in the aftermath of the problems associated with the Saqifa compact (saqifat bani sada). From the very first day Abu Bakr became "the prophet's 'deputy'" or successor.
It is this historical model that dominates Islamists' thinking. This model (necessarily a simplistic one in step with the simplicity of a time of experimentation) prevails still over the mind-set of most Islamists, in whom the interweaving of "religion" and "politics" is a thoroughgoing one. Some decades later, attempts were made to philosophise and theorise this experiment in a number of books known today as works on Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniya (Rulings on Governance), such as Al-Mawardi's Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniya. Even though the specifics of such rulings do no more than reflect the condition and level of evolution in man's political thinking over a period of five centuries starting from the seventh century AD, specifics which are simplistic and in many instances downright primitive and silly, the mind-set of contemporary exponents of Islamism still retains an admiration for them as something presenting a comprehensive alternative to the system of the modern state.
PLURALISM: There is little doubt that the culture of more progressive societies, and their general intellectual climate, are founded upon the premise that "pluralism" constitutes one of the most important markers of human existence in its most advanced stage, and indeed that it is one of the prerequisites of human progress. There can be no progress for peoples who do not believe in pluralism or who fail to construct their culture and general climate upon the acceptance of what pluralism achieves. Just as Marxism presented a nemesis for pluralism when all of its social, cultural, economic and political systems were founded upon the dismissal of everyone and everything that opposed the basic foundations of Marxism, political Islam can do naught else but lead to this same dismissal -- for all the Islamists' declarations of belief in pluralism. This is because the Islamist is dominated by the thought that he is 100 per cent in the right. After all, how can this not be the case given that God himself enters with him into all epistemological, cultural, economic, political, legal and constitutional arenas? And scientific arenas too: where is the Islamist, for example, who accepts the theory of evolution?
OTHERNESS: This (or the acceptance of the other) is the product of the debate on pluralism. If life (for those who believe in pluralism) is founded upon a broad pluralism in various spheres of living, organisation, thinking and principles, the first thing it demands of modern man is to accept the other (in all that "other's" various forms). But if the Islamist -- who believes that God stands at his side and that he is the closest to truth in all manner of arenas -- maintains any belief in accepting the other, his acceptance is a relatively moderate (or at times microscopic) one. He may tell us that he believes in the rights of woman, but he will then tell us that women are qualified to work in "most" but not all posts! And he will tell us, unequivocally, that a woman (and even a non-Muslim) cannot become a head of state. He will also tell us, in his own words, that he believes in religious freedom, but he will lay down for others what it is that they may believe in. For the Islamists in Egypt (writing now in 2012) are saying that a man has a right to be a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian but he does not have the right to be a Buddhist or a Bahaai. In the same way, Islamists cannot agree that freedom of religion means that a Muslim can leave Islam.
RELATIVISM: Out of the womb of faith in pluralism issues faith in otherness (the acceptance of the other). And out of the womb of either comes "relativism". By this I mean that in the culture and climate of a more progressive society the concept of the relative nature of opinions, rulings, theories and interpretations is widely shared. The Islamist may say, in his own words, that he believes in relativism, yet a discussion with him on the subject of women, non-Muslims, the theory of evolution or opposing viewpoints will always go to prove that the Islamist cannot welcome relativism. For by his nature he must extend the "absolute" beyond the realm of the private and personal onto the realm of public affairs. Consequently he alone -- as opposed to anyone else on the face of the planet today -- is the one who, in his ideology, possesses "permanent solutions" that may not be changed to face up to problems which by their very nature are changeable. If you were to say to him that these solutions are the product of specific times and places he will become angry and simply reject this logic. For a number of weeks now (writing in August 2012), the former supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mahdi Akef declared that anyone who disagrees with the conceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood is "stupid and ignorant". Words such as these encapsulate the Islamists' view and opinion concerning any alternative perception.
THE RIGHTS OF MAN: The rights of man, including the right to think and the right to express his views, alongside other rights, are the product of mankind's struggle conducted over long periods. The problem the Islamist has with the rights of man is that he can only accept their presentation as something that he believes to be the will of God. If we were to say to him that it is a human right to be a Buddhist or a Bahaai, he will reject this and say that the rights of man in this respect are limited to the three Abrahamic faiths. If we were to say to him that it is a woman's right to dress as she pleases he would refuse this on the basis of his morals that he also sees as expressing the will of God. And if we were to say to him that it is a Muslim's right to become a Jew or a Christian he will once again employ his (absolutist) morals to refuse this human right. Thus, for the Islamist, there is an upper ceiling, or a number of upper ceilings, to the rights of man, ceilings that in his conception are also the will of God.
WOMANKIND: Women as such, the fear of them and the desire that they inspire, and at the same time the wish to place her in a cage and keep her under constant supervision, these are some of the most conspicuous Islamist standpoints vis-Ã-vis womankind. There is no doubt that the Islamist sees the woman as a lesser being (albeit only marginally) than the man. He even makes use of what nature has imposed on women in order to establish that she is religiously inferior (that the onset of a woman's monthly period places her in the eyes of the Islamist on a lower religious footing than that of a man). Most Islamists are preoccupied -- to the point of hysterical delirium -- with women. The result of their delirium (much as with the case of the Haredi Jews) is that she becomes in their conception the source and the cause of most sins. The Islamist, generally, sees that this dangerous source of sinfulness must be hedged in with restrictions. Despite an Islamic society like Saudi Arabia surrounding the woman with unprecedented levels of restrictions, this society has been and is still witnessing the greatest degree of chaos in sexual relations.
Instead of concerning himself with punishing the man (the wolf), the entire focus of the Islamist is fixed on imprisoning "the victim" under observation in a cage. As I always say: instead of keeping the flies off, we choose to lock up the honey in cupboards! In the light of such a mentality, the rights of women have the lowest ceilings imposed upon them. Anyone can put this to the test by asking any Islamist to take another look at such things as the following: the testimony of a woman in court or elsewhere as being worth half the testimony of a man (in a Saudi court of law the testimony of a woman, such as Madame Curie who has won two Nobel Prizes in science, would be worth half the testimony of a man who has barely finished primary school). Alternatively you will not find an Islamist who is prepared to take another look at the inheritance of a woman being half that of the man, or whether a woman is qualified to occupy the office of head of state, or whether he would agree to a woman being in a position to licence marriage or divorce, or have custody of her sons and daughters, and so on.
THE RULE OF LAW IN ITS MODERN CONCEPTION: The Islamist is of the firm conviction that submission to positivist constitutional and legal rules (that is, those that have been set down by man) is a grievous sin. It is a sin on the religious level and a sin on the social level too, in that the Islamist believes deep down that mortals are not qualified to shape a constitutional and legal system governed by mortals. Ever since Egypt in 1883 transferred to a modern positivist legal system, Islamists remained critical of the existence of a legal system set down by mortals. When the writings of Sayed Qotb (1906-1966) became the most important literature in political Islam (many of them taken from the Indo-Pakistani Islamist Abul-Ela Al-Mawdudi whose writings are some of the most important causes of wars between Pakistan and India) the philosophy of the Islamists vis-Ã-vis positivist laws has been the following: God alone is cognizant of man's failings and consequently their non-qualification to fashion laws governing relations between men in all its various forms. This is the core of the theory of Al-Hakimiya that all Islamists hold to, even if they differ on the period of time required to apply this theory. One of the most important by-products of this theory, and which is the essence of the Islamist mind-set, is that man should not lay down rules governing relations between men but instead observe the rules established by God and not mankind. Even now no leader of any current of political Islam undertakes to review the concept of Al-Hakimiya presented by Sayed Qotb in his famous work Milestones on the Way (which is considered to be a regurgitation of earlier ideas propounded by Abul-Ala Al-Mawdudi).
Thus the Islamist is faced with a continuing difficulty vis-Ã-vis all positivist, legal, constitutional foundations. Even if a great legal scholar such as Al-Sanhouri -- the author of the 1984 Egyptian Civil Code -- says that he sees nothing in all of the regulations and materials of this code derived from French civil law that contradicts the principles of Islamic Sharia, nevertheless this counts for nothing among the currents of political Islam. The Islamist continues to believe that his primary political mission is to apply a comprehensive legal system derived from Islamic Sharia, that is -- in his view -- the laws that express the will of God.
VIOLENCE: It is clear that the leadership of most currents of political Islam refuse to describe suicide operations undertaken by many Islamists against non-combatant individuals as terrorist operations. There is no doubt that most of these leaders do not consider someone such as Osama bin Laden to be a terrorist. Indeed most of them have, and still do, look upon Bin Laden brimming with appreciation and admiration for him.
When an Islamist candidate for the post of president of the Republic of Egypt was asked a few months ago whether he considered Osama Bin Laden a terrorist or not, he replied "America is terrorist". The truth is that the Islamist cannot condemn "violence" against civilians in all its shapes and forms. Nothing demonstrates this more than the failure of contemporary man to agree on a universally accepted definition of terrorism. Islamists are one in maintaining that it is their right -- and indeed their duty -- to distance themselves from any agreement on how to define terrorism before such time that they have fully attained power. I make the claim that no less than half the sons and daughters in societies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen would reject someone like Osama bin Laden being described as a terrorist.
A BALANCED INTELLECTUAL FORMATION: I have always believed, and still do, that not a single fanatic upon the surface of the Earth is the product of a balanced intellectual formation. None of the various fruits of human inventiveness in all or most of the spheres of intellectual and cultural creativity have ever found their way in a balanced, measured form into the mentality of the Haredi Jew or the fundamentalist Muslim. Or to put it another way, if any of the fruits of human inventiveness initiated by the ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, or the fruits of the Renaissance and the period following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, or the most important products of human creativity over the last three centuries (which are the richest centuries in human history) should make their entry into a man's mental composition, then that man simply cannot be a fundamentalist or a fanatic. I was fortunate enough to be granted the opportunity to see up close what it is that a Haredi Jew or a Salafist Muslim, or the militant Muslim followers of the Hanbali school or those who admire the fatwas of Hanbali faqihs and proselytizers like Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Qayim and Mohamed Abdel-Wahab (among whom feature all the clerics of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all the lands of Sunni Islam) take for reading material. I got to know up close that the bulk of these folk have never read, and still do not read, anything beyond the literature of their specific religious denomination.
Indeed, I might add that I have heard the warnings issued by dozens of prominent clerics in Saudi Arabia against reading what I would call the fruits of human creativity -- from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare and Racine to Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau and Diderot, from Descartes to Kant, from Victor Hugo to Albert Camus. And I know intimately their rejectionist position on symphonic music, the figurative arts and theatre. Perhaps the following anecdotes demonstrate the tragedy we are writing about here: in August 2012, Chinese astronauts returned to their launch base and a picture was published of a female Chinese astronaut exiting the spaceship aided by one of her colleagues. A Salafist Internet website ran the photograph with a commentary that did not address the various aspects of brilliant achievement represented by the picture. Instead the commentary focussed on the "degeneracy" represented by the image of a female astronaut with her colleague supporting her arm to help her exit the spaceship! A few years ago a fire broke out in a girls' school in Saudi Arabia; many of the girl students attempted to leave the burning building but were turned back by the school's firemen with the result that they burned to death, since they were not wearing their veils at the time they were attempting to escape incineration.
HUMANITY: The literature, culture and thinking of Islamists is based upon the division of the world (and of its peoples) into two: the first called the Abode of Islam, the second named the Abode of War. This division prevails still over the Islamists' mind-set, which, in light of the authority of this literature, has difficulty in understanding, digesting, embracing and accepting the modern concept of humanity and the influence it has had on breaking down barriers and frontiers between cultures and societies. I have no doubt that Islamists look upon the other (who necessarily belongs to the Abode of War) as an enemy in one form or another -- an enemy constantly held to be responsible for all of their problems, starting from colonialism and including everything that has happened up to the present day. Two years ago Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a famous leading light in the Muslim Brotherhood who entered the electoral race for the Egyptian presidency in May 2012, issued a book in which he stated that all the problems of contemporary Islamic societies were caused by colonialism. Abul-Fotouh did not explain to us why it is that the Europeans embarked on colonising us instead of us colonising the Europeans. Similarly Abul-Fotouh did not tell us why most regions of the Arabian Peninsula have remained deeply backward for a century despite the fact that they were never colonised.
TAQIYA (CONCEALMENT): Taqiya is a Shia concept that seeps into the political practices of contemporary Islamist groups be they Shia or Sunni. The concept of taqiya means that at such time as the Islamists on the ground constitute the weaker power, they have the right to proclaim in public precisely the opposite of what they hold in secret. This manifested itself clearly in the behaviour of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of the former President Hosni Mubarak. The positions they adopted were often contradictory to that which they had previously declared even just a few months earlier.
The danger of taqiya comes to the fore whenever Islamists make declarations, in their meetings with representatives of cultures that despise mendacity, on such matters as their repudiation of violence and their respect for the rights of women or their respect for non-Muslims. To make such declarations as these -- which fly in the face of what their minds actually think and intend -- is religiously permitted for them for as long as they have yet to attain total empowerment. I have no doubt that had Niccolò Machiavelli himself heard from some Muslims of the concept of taqiya he would have agreed with them and considered them even more Machiavellian than himself.
In short, after 40 years of studying political Islam, its literature and writings -- including university theses on the Islamic system of hadd punishments -- I can see no possibility of there being any agreement between political Islam and the values of progress and modernity. At the same time I believe that the pragmatic practice of politics (in the light of contemporary constitutions and laws) may permit developments that may render Islamist political parties similar to Christian parties in Europe. But I am speaking here of a possible, and by no means certain, trajectory, and I am talking of a long journey, which up to now I see no tangible evidence of having been embarked upon.
The writer is a political analyst.
Religion and foreign policy
When religion defines foreign policy it will inevitably clash with national interests, creating the grounds for wars that only elites who rule in the name of religion win, writes Gamil Matar
That Egypt's president cites Quranic verses and uses religious phrases in his public addresses does not surprise me. If we are accustomed from an early age to using them in our school compositions, there is nothing inherently odd in the president peppering his speeches with them, especially given that he is a religious man and a prominent member of an Islamist organisation that elevated him to his current office. Nevertheless, I must confess that I was taken aback by the prologue to the speech he delivered at a recent conference in Iran and in which he made mention of the companions of the Prophet and cited a verse from the Quran. Something about that prologue did not ring true. It's intent was consummately political and it conveyed the sense of a future policy orientation, which may well have been the intent of the speechwriters.
The conference in which this speech was delivered was the last summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This movement is made up of numerous member states whose peoples have diverse religious affiliations. What bound these states together from the outset and protects them to this day as a non-aligned grouping is a set of political principles and interests that have no direct bearing on religion.
Clearly, the political point of employing religious references in a speech at a conference in which religion was not on the agenda was to deliver a "religious" message or, more accurately, a sectarian message to the host people, which in this case were the Iranians. I doubt that such a message could ever have been delivered in the era of NAM's founding fathers or in any of the subsequent conferences. Nothing in the substance of this message addressed a single one of that set of principles established by the conferences of Bandung and Belgrade and that set the course for generation after generation of Third World leaders and diplomats for the next 60 years.
Of course, our president was hardly the first political leader to use religious language for political ends. History is filled with accounts of the practice of mixing religion with politics in order to promote narrow interests or ambitious policies. Perhaps the architects of Western colonial policies set world records in the use of religion to accomplish imperial ends. History is similarly full of stories in which religion and politics are blended in order to evangelise or spread a religious calling, or to instil noble morals and ethics in international political practices. As we know, there are long-established schools in international relations that specialise in the connection between politics and ethics, and also power.
The stories abound and their conclusions and consequences are varied. Certainly no Arab or Muslim will forget the story of President George W Bush when he deliberately inserted the word "crusade" in his televised speech on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. I recall that at the time many international affairs specialists anticipated the onset of an age in which religion would interweave with international relations to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Their prediction came true. To read the political studies and minutes of Congressional hearing sessions of this period one would think that American scholars, politicians and diplomats had begun to regard religion as a state enterprise.
What this means is that US diplomacy can use religion to further US national interests. It does this through the application of the "religion by proxy" theory, which holds that people place their faith in the hands of a religious ruling minority that represents or claims to represent the pious majority. There are many testimonies to this transformation in US foreign policy design. Take, for example, how the US has changed its approach to religious movements in various parts of the world. The rule in US diplomacy used to be that since the US constitution insists on the separation of church from state, US diplomats should avoid dealing with religious parties and leaderships even if the aim is to further US interests. This rule vanished with the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001. From then onward, US statesmen and diplomats made it their business to deal with foreign religious parties and political forces, as well as to furnish all possible support to Christian evangelistic groups and organisations which became more energetic than ever in their campaigns to spread their ideas in South America, Africa and China.
In short, the US now began to follow in the heels of the erstwhile European colonial powers, when the imperialistic drive donned a religious mantle and blazoned the fiction of the Christian civilising mission in order to justify the occupation of the continents of the South and the East for the purpose of plundering their national resources and reducing their peoples to subjugation. Some people claim that the US added other pretexts to that flagrantly religious mission, namely the missions to spread democracy and human rights and liberties, and that sometimes it jumbled the lot of them together.
Others make a distinction between how the Europeans and how the Americans use religion in foreign policy. For example, Javier Solana, the former EU foreign affairs commissioner, warned against the danger of the American use of religion in foreign policy. The Americans are "absolutists," he said. Everything to them is either black or white, good or evil, with us or against us. Therefore, he argued, it is hard for them to be tolerant with other peoples or other religions, unlike the Europeans who had learned over centuries the true meaning of religious hatreds. Because the Europeans had had to pay a horrific toll for their religious wars, they eventually became among the most tolerant people on earth and the most accepting of the "other," which today is reflected in their foreign policies, or so argue the defenders of the properties of European culture and policy.
A foreign policy academy in the US has cautioned that the mixing religion with politics can frequently give rise to the "hijacking of religion". Unethical political leaders may take advantage of -- or feel compelled by -- certain circumstances to use religion as a cover for the pursuit of personal ends or for promoting narrow partisan interests. There are also many instances of political leaders who drew on religious passions to turn their people against other peoples, which only serves to make conflicts much more complex and intractable.
Others have been prompted by developments in their own countries or societies to warn against excessive blending of religion and politics. It is natural for different communities living side-by-side to fall into dispute and for disputes to erupt into violence. It is equally natural for local authorities to seize the opportunity to diffuse the situation before it spirals out of control, even before central authorities become aware of the situation. But in this day and age of ours, local disputes are increasingly becoming a cause of general concern because they offer an opening for foreign powers to meddle on the pretext of protecting a minority sect or ethnic group, and because the foreign meddling often causes the disputes to escalate into civil strife or even civil war. I am not sure of the scale of injustice being inflicted on the Muslims of Burma. Perhaps it is of a degree that merits such worldwide attention and international intervention. However, I am certain that other Muslims in northeastern India and in Bangladesh, itself, which is a Muslim nation, are the victims of grave injustices, while the "international community" remains unconcerned.
In all events, with Burma, as in many other cases, religion is being used to serve the "national" interests of other countries, in spite of the well-known "cost" of this practice, which is exorbitant and usually very bloody. This is not to say that the international community should stop supporting oppressed groups in Sankyang, Tibet, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and in many Arab and Islamic countries. Rather, the point is that the intervention should avoid inflaming the religious sensitivities of the peoples concerned. As history has shown, this practice has often created the soil upon which groups that originally existed on the fringes of society could develop into mass religious or sectarian movements with transnational dimensions. Or, more dangerously, it sparked the rise of terrorist groups that wrought fear, destruction and chaos and some of which were enlisted into the intelligence agencies of some governments in order to perform these governments' dirty work in other countries.
In certain quarters there is this assumption that communities or peoples that share the same religious affiliation rarely fight or engage in war. In my opinion, this theory is just as fallacious as the famous one that holds that democratic countries never make war on one another. As many international politics experts will tell you, the prime engine of the foreign policy of any state is national interest. The idea was first formulated by the father of the science of international relations, Hans Morgenthau, and the overwhelming majority of political scientists and statesmen still subscribe to it. Some of these go on to assert that the goal of realising national interests sometimes gives politicians the incentive to pursue actions that defy ethical principles. The eminent political scientist Arthur Schlesinger coined a now famous term for this phenomenon. He called it the "necessary immorality" in the manufacture of foreign policy.
This concept brings us to an inescapable reality. "Religious states" go to war just as "secular states" do and "religious states" can become embroiled in gruelling wars with other "religious states", including those that share the same religion and even the same religious denomination. The history of the Middle East, since the dawn of religion, is filled with religious wars, some of which lasted decades and left disastrous and long-lasting effects. Otherwise put, when religion enters into the equation as a shaper of foreign policy, it will inevitably clash with the chief engine of foreign policy, which is national interest. The winners in this game are never the people and the advancement of their societies, but only the elites who claim to rule in the name of religion and who will have no compunction about going on the warpath against other ruling elites who are their coreligionists in another country. There is an endless train of such wars, from the eras of the Islamic caliphates in Damascus, Baghdad and Istanbul, to the clash in Europe between the eastern and western Christian empires. In the Arab and Islamic world, alone, we have had the wars between Egypt and Yemen, Libya and Chad, Iraq and Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, the Turks and the Persians, and western Pakistan and eastern Pakistan or the "land of the Bengals."
The forced or artificial mixture of religion and foreign policies is fraught with risks, especially when the political elites who forge the policy decisions or orientations are "religious" in their political orientation or definition of their identity.
The writer is a political analyst and director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
