Haroon Moghul May 2, 2003

Tags: Genocide , Law , Development , Weapons , Wars , Resistance , Reform , Secularism , China , Iran , Iraq , India , America

The two extremes and the great pipe dream

href="/tag/Iraq">Iraq’s Information Minister in the last few days of the war is the perfect picture frame for the last few decades: We are broken and nobody knows how to put us together again.

It would not be so much of a challenge to be Muslim if only it were a black and white clash of civilizations – one would only have to pick sides. Us or them, with one side right and one side wrong. But neither the West or the rest are innocent, nor is there a true clash of civilizations: Iraq would not have been targeted by the West were it not for the weakness, instability and decadence of the Middle East. Unfortunately for some, there is no grand Western conspiracy against the Islamic bloc, no secret Zionist-sponsored Crusade to feed upon our carcass and toss the pickings to corporations operating like jackals. Rather, it is a simple fact that can explain this and many previous. Power abhors a vacuum.

Consider the broader sweep of the Middle East. There was one overly ambitious dictator, who has now been done away with, leaving behind middling despotisms (Egypt) and failed dictatorships (Saudi Arabia), all of whom are robbed or absent of potential for a variety of reasons. With the importance of this part of the world, how can the economic hegemony of our time simply pass it over? This is not to justify the US-led war – I do not believe it can be justified – but only to say that such conflicts are and have been inevitable, and will only increase in coming years. The Muslim world has been shown to be a paper tiger, and nothing excites the militaries of the world like the smell of blood in the water. Therefore mark my words: If America does not attack Syria, Iran or other regimes in the region, another rising power will do so within several decades. Perhaps China or India will try their hand. In a region cursed with rich resources, instability is both a temptation and a fear. Power will always intervene to restore order to its benefit.

And what to do in the meantime? Already there are Iraqis in the street, marching for the United States to end its occupation. Though the United States had no casus belli – where are the weapons of mass destruction? Probably on a United States naval vessel, being shipped to Iraq to be miraculously discovered (It is only taking this long because they have to add Cyrillic lettering, or perhaps North Korean identification markers). But were the United States to leave today, Iraq would soon descend into a clash of clerics, Kurds and corporate interests, reducing a bruised country to a broken one. For now, the United States needs to continue its occupation, if only to give the Iraqis a goal to work towards (for it will be a long-term goal, with a lot of time for learning from one’s mistakes). Perhaps then and only then will the Iraqis do what most of the Muslim world has not yet been politically able to do: Work together at something that works.

I knew what I felt when Baghdad fell: The United States, which in 1991 killed hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqis, used weapons of mass destruction in the form of depleted uranium, and then enforced sanctions sick enough to be genocide (killing at least half a million Iraqis, mostly children), was victorious. Scenes of Iraqi celebration at their supposed liberation were sometimes faked, or more often, covered in total disregard to popular hatred of the United States: Indeed, I was heartened to see that most Iraqis were not blind enough to miss that this war only replaced one oppressor with another. Oil lies under some Muslim states, but anger is a resource all Muslims share, in supplies to last centuries. But this anger has not birthed any change, it has only burst here and there as so many signposts along a trail of worsening failure.

So what led us to this? First Afghanistan, then Iraq, and perhaps next ______.

After September 11th, blame was cast entirely at the door of Wahhabism. In brief, Wahhabism began as an internal reform movement in Eastern Arabia, stressing that the corruptions and accretions of heretical Sufism and innovative religious practices had separated Islam from its potent monotheistic birth. Soon the doctrine became part and parcel of the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in the 1960’s and 1970’s, co-opted the Salafist movement, which was similarly reformist, but was instead open to the ideas and challenges of the day in a proactive fashion. Salafism as a result suffered and was stifled, leading to a domination of the Wahhabi movement by its extreme tendencies.

While initially the Wahhabi movement represented a valuable and much-needed burst of fresh air, reforming corrupted and decadent Muslim societies, it has degraded and fell off its original aims, such that it has reached its current nadir: Excessive literalism, a lack of intellectual depth, a distaste for philosophy, rationalism and even sophisticated argument, which produces a natural and predictable propensity for extremism, if not violence.

As an example: Many groups that quality as Wahhabi today fail to understand that while the Qur’an is for Muslims the word of God, all interpretations of it in successive ages are only and necessarily imperfect attempts to ascertain the meaning and the spirit of its injunctions in light of differing conditions. As such, these interpretations are open to modification and alteration; perhaps more importantly, since they are the products of necessarily imperfect human minds, no interpretation can absolutely capture the intent of the Lawgiver (God). Thus, since interpretations can always be criticized for their lack of authoritativeness (for example, the interpreter is not sufficiently versed in law, or Arabic language, or the like) or the content and conclusions of their argumentation, they cannot be, or at least should not be considered, authoritarian – the roots of Islamic pluralism. But this point seems to pass entirely over the heads of not only Wahhabis, but their supposed opposition, the mostly unnoticed rise of extremists almost as dangerous.

Recently, there has been an upsurge in groups and scholars that defiantly label themselves representatives of “traditional Islam” (what traditional means, nobody has been able to adequately and coherently explain), but among them are those who carry this “tradition” to such extremes that they have become caricatures of an opposing extremism, for all intents and purposes Wahhabism’s Sufi doppelganger. Thus, for the duration of this article, references to Wahhabis and traditional Islamists will point to the extremists on both sides, unwittingly allied by the same mentality: a fantastic intolerance, invisible to the bearer of it, who is altogether unable to understand that accepting different points of view in the Islamic custom means accepting views that one does not initially want to agree with. Accepting the ideas of one’s own party is not tolerance.

Traditional Islam and Wahhabism are both forms of frozen Islam. A significant problem with the Wahhabi weltanschauung is its idealization of the early years of Islam, to the exclusion of the vigor and diversity of Islamic civilization thereafter, thus reducing the Wahhabi’s capacity to understand history, society and law: As a result, most Wahhabis live in dream worlds, epitomized to the extreme by the likes of Bin Laden, who called for global resistance to America, imagining that there was in fact an existent Islamic polity capable of such struggle. Rightly have such extremists been blamed for bringing more violence and instability to a Muslim world still trying to steady its footing, yet the extremist advocates of traditional Islam have not offered anything significantly better.

The traditional Islamist does not reject the idealization of the early Islamic golden age, he simply extends it by a millennium, calling acceptable Islamic utopia off somewhere around the Ottoman retreat from Vienna and the fall of the Mughals and the Safavids (Around the 17th Christian century). As a result, the traditional Islamist may seem more lenient and tolerant in his or her understanding of the world, but this can be a façade. The fact is, the inability and unwillingness of these groups to accept another point of view, and to limit themselves to only one possible reading of the development of Islam (and the possibility of a “return” to an idealized state), that has made them so dangerous to the Muslim world, for they do not simply choke off new debates, but send the current ones back centuries into the past. Tellingly, both Wahhabi and traditional Islamist are unable to cope with the existence of historical facts that crush their worldview. Thus both are unlikely to offer constructions alternative to secular modernity, for despite their claims to the contrary, they do not understand its emergence, but attempt to encapsulate it within what I can only call a mythic sequence of historical regression.

To bolster this argument, I cite below a paragraph from an advocate of traditional Islam, the text of which presents his explanation for why the Muslim world has fallen so far behind the West. Moreover, it presents his mode of thinking, for the astute reader will note that, while the argument refers to historical facts and attitudes, as well as the role of technology and organization, it fails to grasp the truth of the problem, resorting instead to an explanation that, I argue, is not only erroneous but also dangerous. This thinker is unable to consider that mundane factors in the march of history may have also been responsible for what ailed and continues to ail the Islamic world, instead allowing himself an argument confined to a narrow worldview:

“In the early nineteenth century, the Ottomans lost a series of disastrous wars against Russia. The main reason was the superior discipline and equipment maintained by modern European armies. But the ulema [scholars], and the janissary troops, resisted any change. They believed that battles were won by faith, and that firearms and parade grounds diminished the virtue of futuwwa, the chivalric… code of the individual Muslim warrior. To shoot at an enemy from a distance rather than look him in the eye and fight with a sword was seen as a form of cowardice. Hence the Ottoman army continued to sustain defeat after defeat at the hands of its better-equipped Christian enemies.”

Firstly, the argument is incorrect. Secondly, the mentality behind the argument is troublesome; if carried to its logical conclusion, it will produce nothing different from the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Islam’s current spread of extremist sects. Let us begin in that order, considering the rightness of the argument before its consequences: Are we to believe that an army would intentionally let itself linger in a losing streak that stretched the French Enlightenment to the age of Positivism?

Ottoman power came with their taking of Europe’s so-called line in the sand, the city that Islamic armies had cast themselves against in vain as early as 671. And it was Sultan Muhammad II, named afterwards the Conqueror, who accomplished the task with the use of a massive, disciplined army, armed with rifles, cannon and long-range artillery, of a scope and spread that no Christian force had ever encountered. Some of Sultan Muhammad’s cannons measured in the yards, firing shot that could sink a galley from miles away. These were the largest weapons of the time, and the fact that the Ottomans couldn’t look into the eyes of those they pummeled never seemed to bother them. If at the height of their power – which, we might assume, was when they were most blessed by God – they were using this weaponry, what led them to such a drastic change in attitude in later centuries, well after that weaponry had become widespread?

Now consider that someone actually believes that the Ottomans would allow themselves defeat after defeat to the Russians, who threatened significant Ottoman territories such as the Caucasus and the Balkans: the former, holding the gateway to Anatolia, the latter the center of the Empire and home to a huge population of Muslims. The Ottomans tried desperately to hold their ground, using guns and cannon wherever possible in every such engagement from the mid-15th century onwards, but to decreasing effectiveness. Likewise, it was the Ottomans that made the decision to enter World War I, despite every indication that it would mean disaster. And how did their end begin? Two Ottoman-allied German warships sailed into the Black Sea and began to shell Russian naval facilities, followed by a declaration of jihad against England, France and the aforementioned Russians, by the Caliph in Istanbul. I have never been on a warship, but I can rather confidently suggest that one cannot see the people one is firing upon from the deck.

My second criticism of the above paragraph is the danger behind its attitude, for taking Islam’s idealization of the past to a level which is manifestly unhealthy, for its production in the Muslim an all-too visible hatred of the present, fear of the future and debilitating nostalgia for an imagined past. To argue that technology is but a necessary evil, something we never wanted to develop (again, this is historically an incredibly inaccurate argument, for Muslims were often at the forefront of technological change) is in effect to say that today’s post-industrial age is inherently repugnant to God. By catching up to the West and others, we would be increasing our share of that repugnancy. On the one hand, this immediately reduces the likelihood that any catching up or defense of the Ummah will be accomplished. Secondly, it creates such a sharp distaste for the world of modernity that it produces either escapism or extremism, manifest in the output of many Wahhabis and traditional Islamists.

One of the things that most upsets me and worries me as a Muslim is that we have no – or very little -- great Islamic culture, unless one counts tiny efforts here and there. Extreme Wahhabists deny the existence of culture (too ridiculous a claim to even respect with counter-argument), while traditional Islamists argue that only the culture of the past (what they label traditional) is relevant: But one cannot live in the past, just as much as one cannot live in the future. One can only live when and where one is alive. I have hailed Al-Jazeera as an excellent example of the great potential of new Islamic and Arabic media, both for its successes and its immense popularity, speaking to a desperate want amongst Muslims for an art, a broadcast, a lifestyle and an entertainment that is indigenous yet relevant, engaging yet enlightening. However, the extremists on both sides prevent this, which will be especially dangerous as American media increases its influence over our populations.

It has reached such a pitiable state that traditional Islamists now fire off fatwas on the (subjective) aesthetic sense, arguing that the post-industrial age is entirely incapable of producing beauty – unless it resorts to carbon copying previously existent structures, which of course never produces any significant aesthetic achievement (Consider, for example, the general blandness of the Gulf Arab states, which have little architectural achievement but much blind and boring borrowing). I have personally been told by traditional Islamists that new mosques, such as the Shah Faisal in Islamabad, are ugly because they are not “traditional.” As a writer, such blanket condemnations of new courses in our aesthetics necessarily upset me, not least because I find Shah Faisal to be an impressive, and quite frankly, beautiful structure. But I am told that it is ugly, without possibility of salvation, because it is “modern,” “Western,” and “not traditional,” as ill-defined as these terms are. In other words, I am told that my capacity to differentiate between beautiful and ugly is deficient, if not entirely absent. Perhaps I have been struck in the head by someone firing from a distance, from where I could not see him.

When I offer a counterpoint, that their glorious and solely “legitimate” Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal architecture was based on Christian, Zoroastrian and Hindu antecedents respectively (which perhaps magnifies their wondrous and appealing designs, and further demonstrates the current potential for Islamicate societies creating cultures united by faith but specific and diverse in their local ethnies, languages and the like), such facts are dismissed, as easily as one can blame fifteen million Jews for somehow conspiring to assassinate 1.4 billion Muslims.

The first step in learning from a loss is to accept the loss. Only then can any meaningful reflection and correction begin. But the strong influence of extremist groups, choking off Islam’s previously flexible and tolerant legal tradition, has prevented this, and for quite simple reason: Such groups rely on narrow perceptions of history, refusing to consider other points of view. As such, when reality contradicts their philosophy, they wrongly deny the reality and continue to hold to the validity of their philosophy. It has become so bad that the solutions proffered by such thinkers and movements result in the problems they seek to avoid in the first place.

Today, Wahhabis and traditional Islamists live in simple worlds and offer simple answers, which not surprisingly completely backfire. It was Ayatollah Khomeini who feared the Shah’s secularization and in reaction created the conditions that led to the Western secularism he so loathed: Iran is the first Muslim clerical theocracy, the first instance in which the clergy have become a definite class with specific rights and privileges not accorded other, lesser mortals. All Muslims are equal, but some are more equal than others.

From the horrific violence of the Armed Islamic Group, Takfir wa’l-Hijra and the like, to the secular nationalist projects of Ataturk, Saddam Hussein and Reza Shah Pahlavi, we have only seen (failed and failing) attempts to wholly purify, to construct a monolithic discourse where there has never been one. Everyone wants to create a perfect world by wrecking entirely the one before it, using new constructions to justify what cannot be justified. Ataturk’s changing Turkey was but an insane drive to obliterate all he hated about himself – while Wahhabis and the traditionalists want to eradicate all they hate in the world. If Ataturk were religious, he’d be an intolerant Islamist, agitating for crudely conceptualized Divine Law when least appropriate: He removed dress, he changed script, he altered architecture, all because he could not accept the existence of facts irrelevant to the issues at hand, but which nevertheless upset his puritanical vision.

I believe both Wahhabism and traditional Islam have given the Ummah significant benefits, but that these are now gradually in danger of being outweighed by the aforementioned unfortunate mentality. In the event that this mentality can be improved upon, so as to emphasize what is in fact the necessity of Islamic community, these two groups would fast contribute to real, positive and beneficial change in our lands.

Wahhabism rightly rejects the introduction of clerical hierarchy, which has entered from Christianity and exerted its worst influence in Shi’i Iran post-1979, in the unnecessary authority delivered upon scholars as a class. By doing so, Wahhabism paves the way for universal clerisy, which is essential for an appropriate Islamic response to the times. But in their haste for purity, Wahhabis often abandon aesthetics, spirituality, culture and art, leaving a dry Islam that is often alienating, if not crushing and deadening. To this, traditional Islam could offer welcome balance, by emphasizing respect for the environment, spirituality, and the like, strengths of Islam marked by the civilization’s production of enduring artists such as Ghalib, Iqbal, Hafez and of course Rumi.

But alas, such cooperation and consideration of Islam’s inherent pluralism are only referred to and never realized. Not much of a surprise that the Muslim masses stood shocked on April 9th as Baghdad fell. Even the extremists were quiet. A good thing, too, because they have led us to this abyss and they will never lead us out.

So long as our prominent figures build themselves castles in the sky, refusing cars but wanting horses, riding on clouds in the sky while the rest of humanity bothers with gravity, there shall be no progress. After Iraq, other countries will fall. Those already oppressed will see an increase in it. Factionalism, sectarianism and intolerance will only sap what little strength we have left, perhaps leading us to a situation like Iran, where crime, drug abuse, suicide and similar statistics have been propelled to levels only seen in secular societies. Are we content to throw up more political, social and aesthetic dictators, who only wish to bend others to their wishes, waiting in this until another power comes and casts us into further humiliation and alienation? I should not think so.

The problem with Islam today is simple. Humans worship God because He is perfect and we are not: This is the essence of Islam, but it seems a lesson increasingly lost. Though the statues of Saddam fell, there are still countless statues made of flesh and bone, thinking themselves high above all else, and for what reason but that their interpretation must be right. We might as well begin bowing to ourselves. It would be as painful as it sounds.

Indeed, it has been.