Online event of interest entitled Celebrate Mercy. Many speakers.
Celebrate Mercy
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Where religion and civil society meet
The US-Islamic World Forum – held this weekend in Qatar – will once again explore the nature and possibilities of the power dynamics between these two entities, one a nation state, the other, ostensibly a religion.
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: August 12, 2009
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
Published: August 12, 2009
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Egypt debates true meaning of faith
CAIRO // Egyptians of all faiths take pride in their religiosity and according to a recent Gallup poll are the world’s most religious people. But critics in Egypt – secular and religious – believe today’s love of religion is superficial and is in fact responsible for a decline in values throughout Egyptian society.
“I tried a lot to prevent myself from writing about this thorny issue because I know what it means to criticise the widespread apparent and superficial religiosity among us Egyptians,” Emad Sayed, a blogger, recently wrote on a website called Masriyoun, or Egyptians.
“We all know the weak points that we and our society are suffering from, but we severely attack anyone who talks about them and try to cover up and deny they exist.”
According to the Gallup poll, 100 per cent of respondents said religion plays “an important role in their daily life”.
Since the report was issued in February, many here have been trying to explain the meaning of religiosity and how it can exist in a society so riven with corruption.
“We are the most religious nation in the world, that’s what the Gallup poll says,” Egyptian TV presenter Khairy Ramadan said on The House is Yours, the prime talk show on Egypt’s state TV. “Our religiosity is evident: just listen to us when we talk, all our sentences are preceded by ‘God willing’ and ‘Thank God’, while reality says that we are among the nations who work least, while bribes, nepotism, hypocrisy and corruption are abundant.”
Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily Al Destour, agreed, but he put the blame on the rise in religious observance in recent decades.
“In the 1950s and the 1960s, when Egypt was not veiled and was not claiming to be religious and people were not greeting each other with religious greetings, people were more merciful and compassionate with each other,” he wrote recently.
“Now all Egypt is claiming to be religious, and cosmetic religiosity is everywhere, and more than 80 per cent of Egyptian women are veiled, at the time when illegitimate street children number one million across Egypt.”
An estimated 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80m population is Christian, mostly Coptic.
“Muslims and Christians are worship addicts,” said Rev Ikram Lami, from the Evangelical Church. “Churches and mosques are full with worshippers … But they don’t know the true meaning of religiosity. The chaos of Egyptian streets is proof that Egyptians are not religious at all. Newspapers are full of crimes of incest, murder, and theft.
“Egyptians resort to religion in order to escape from the problems and their inability to cope with modern civilisation,” he said.
The symbols of religion are everywhere in Egypt. There are tens of thousands of mosques and churches across the country, most Muslim women are veiled – and there is a growing number wearing the niqab, or the veil that covers the face except the eyes – and many men are growing beards long in order to emulate the Prophet Mohammed.
“I don’t believe in the results of the poll or the apparent religiosity and double standards around us,” said Amany Haidar, 25, a marketing executive. “The poll should have tried to make sure of the sincerity not appearances of religiosity.”
“We are lacking good role models, even many preachers are not sincere, and using religion as a profession, which is misleading many youth, and spreading an inauthentic religiosity,” said Mohammed Taha, 54, a training manager at a private company.
“I don’t agree that 100 per cent of Egyptian society is religious, but I also disagree with those who are denying that there is sincere religiosity among many in the society, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of the negative aspects in our lives,” said Dina Hamed, 35, a veiled housewife. “There is no society of angels, even during the Prophet’s time.” Analysts and religious figures have struggled to explain the current phenomenon of religiosity.
“We didn’t need the Gallup poll to discover that we are the most religious in the world,” said Samer Soliman, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo. “That is what we have been witnessing since the late 1960s. The problem is that the leaders of the religiosity process in Egypt based their prescription that Egypt and Egyptians were lacking religiosity to reform their morals.
“I guess they are, like us, suffering from the results of their intensive remedy: more moral deterioration, lying, selfishness, sexual harassment, prostitution etc … The question is when are they going to admit that they were wrong?”
Hoda Zakariya, a sociologist at Zagazig University north-east of Cairo, attributes the apparent religiosity to the waves of Egyptians who went to work in the more conservative Gulf states in the 1970s and returned with a stricter brand of Islam.
“This kind of religiosity is not being translated into a constructive force or better morals, because this version of religiosity is fake and destructive to the mind and religion at the same time,” Ms Zakariya said.
“Egyptian society has no choice but to escape this dilemma or die.”
“I tried a lot to prevent myself from writing about this thorny issue because I know what it means to criticise the widespread apparent and superficial religiosity among us Egyptians,” Emad Sayed, a blogger, recently wrote on a website called Masriyoun, or Egyptians.
“We all know the weak points that we and our society are suffering from, but we severely attack anyone who talks about them and try to cover up and deny they exist.”
According to the Gallup poll, 100 per cent of respondents said religion plays “an important role in their daily life”.
Since the report was issued in February, many here have been trying to explain the meaning of religiosity and how it can exist in a society so riven with corruption.
“We are the most religious nation in the world, that’s what the Gallup poll says,” Egyptian TV presenter Khairy Ramadan said on The House is Yours, the prime talk show on Egypt’s state TV. “Our religiosity is evident: just listen to us when we talk, all our sentences are preceded by ‘God willing’ and ‘Thank God’, while reality says that we are among the nations who work least, while bribes, nepotism, hypocrisy and corruption are abundant.”
Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily Al Destour, agreed, but he put the blame on the rise in religious observance in recent decades.
“In the 1950s and the 1960s, when Egypt was not veiled and was not claiming to be religious and people were not greeting each other with religious greetings, people were more merciful and compassionate with each other,” he wrote recently.
“Now all Egypt is claiming to be religious, and cosmetic religiosity is everywhere, and more than 80 per cent of Egyptian women are veiled, at the time when illegitimate street children number one million across Egypt.”
An estimated 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80m population is Christian, mostly Coptic.
“Muslims and Christians are worship addicts,” said Rev Ikram Lami, from the Evangelical Church. “Churches and mosques are full with worshippers … But they don’t know the true meaning of religiosity. The chaos of Egyptian streets is proof that Egyptians are not religious at all. Newspapers are full of crimes of incest, murder, and theft.
“Egyptians resort to religion in order to escape from the problems and their inability to cope with modern civilisation,” he said.
The symbols of religion are everywhere in Egypt. There are tens of thousands of mosques and churches across the country, most Muslim women are veiled – and there is a growing number wearing the niqab, or the veil that covers the face except the eyes – and many men are growing beards long in order to emulate the Prophet Mohammed.
“I don’t believe in the results of the poll or the apparent religiosity and double standards around us,” said Amany Haidar, 25, a marketing executive. “The poll should have tried to make sure of the sincerity not appearances of religiosity.”
“We are lacking good role models, even many preachers are not sincere, and using religion as a profession, which is misleading many youth, and spreading an inauthentic religiosity,” said Mohammed Taha, 54, a training manager at a private company.
“I don’t agree that 100 per cent of Egyptian society is religious, but I also disagree with those who are denying that there is sincere religiosity among many in the society, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of the negative aspects in our lives,” said Dina Hamed, 35, a veiled housewife. “There is no society of angels, even during the Prophet’s time.” Analysts and religious figures have struggled to explain the current phenomenon of religiosity.
“We didn’t need the Gallup poll to discover that we are the most religious in the world,” said Samer Soliman, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo. “That is what we have been witnessing since the late 1960s. The problem is that the leaders of the religiosity process in Egypt based their prescription that Egypt and Egyptians were lacking religiosity to reform their morals.
“I guess they are, like us, suffering from the results of their intensive remedy: more moral deterioration, lying, selfishness, sexual harassment, prostitution etc … The question is when are they going to admit that they were wrong?”
Hoda Zakariya, a sociologist at Zagazig University north-east of Cairo, attributes the apparent religiosity to the waves of Egyptians who went to work in the more conservative Gulf states in the 1970s and returned with a stricter brand of Islam.
“This kind of religiosity is not being translated into a constructive force or better morals, because this version of religiosity is fake and destructive to the mind and religion at the same time,” Ms Zakariya said.
“Egyptian society has no choice but to escape this dilemma or die.”
Monday, 13 July 2009
Were Syria’s conservatives just testing the water?
Most Syrians may never know that a controversial draft law, dubbed by its opponents the “Taliban initiative”, was rejected last week by the country’s parliament. Nor may they believe the level of controversy it created during the one month period after it was leaked to activists and a circle of Syrian intellectuals.
Though the chance of the draft ever becoming law may have been slim, the discussion it created provided a revealing look at the dance between ultra-conservative Islamists and their nemeses in Syria, which include secularists, the renewal movement known as Tajdeed – Islamists who aim to renew Sharia by going back to the essence of Islam – and a long list of minority groups who feel their rights would be jeopardised by an Islamic state. Whether the ultra conservatives were just testing the waters or whether they believed that their efforts would succeed is difficult to determine. What is certain is that the contents of their draft law would have sent Syria back centuries in time, and would have probably shocked most Syrians, especially women and minorities, if only they had known about it.
The draft law managed to circumvent all the usual channels that the public relies upon to remain informed of the latest legislation proposed in the government. Draft laws usually show up in the local press, generating reaction from readers, but in this case the press was banned from covering it. The Syrian parliament also posts draft laws on a website so affected parties have a chance to comment, but again, not in this case.
The reasons behind these cloak and dagger tactics were unclear. If it hadn’t been for a leak in early June, not even the activists would have learnt of it.
Even more mysterious, the law was the product of a secret committee commissioned by the head of parliament, the Syrian prime minister Naji al Otri. The committee worked on the draft for two years, and until now the names of the committee members could only be guessed at, except for one man, Hassan Awad, a professor at the Sharia law school in Damascus who came forward on public radio. Mr Awad is now in Sudan doing research, and he did not respond to repeated queries asking him to comment.
The draft law would have required women to travel only if accompanied by a mahram, a close male relative. A loophole in the draft law would have allowed a Christian man to take on a second wife and Christians would have discovered their right to divorce, despite any objections from their own church. As Father Antone Musleh, a patriarch of the Orthodox Church, put it: “The draft law dares to infringe on marriage within Christianity, which to the Church is a sacrament. It’s a Divine hand that plays into the life of humans, and the Church is the first and last party responsible for interpreting this for its flock.”
The draft law provided that a girl as young as 13 could take her parents to court and make the judge pressure them to allow her to marry.
A complete stranger could sue the couple next door if he thought one of them had become an apostate, which is enough reason to annul their marriage before a Sharia court.
“This is the most dangerous part of the draft law, the introduction of apostasy legal code,” said Dr Mohammed Habash, a parliamentarian and Islamic scholar and one of the leading figures of the renewal movement in Syria.
Apostasy laws were used for decades during Islam’s beginnings, usually with the purpose of punishing men who defected from a Muslim army to join the enemy’s lines at a time of war. But used in the context of the draft law’s proposal, Dr Habash explained, apostasy laws “undermine the family, which is the essence of society’s fabric”.
This law, known also as hasba, was used infamously in Egypt in 2001 by Islamists who tried to annul the marriage of Nawal al Saadawi, a feminist author, after deeming her an apostate for her writings. An Egyptian emergency court overturned the verdict after an international outcry.
Perhaps most absurdly, the “Taliban initiative” would have technically prohibited the legal marriage of any apostate, even to another non-believer.
The Syrian foreign minister Walid al Muallem told me during an outing with his family: “The president has already said he will not sanction it. It’s already dead in the water.”
But in the meantime, in true Syrian form, there were conflicting statements from the people’s assembly, who said that the draft law was thrown out, and the parliament, which insisted it was “still under review”.
Opponents breathed a sigh of relief when one week later parliament issued a statement saying it “rejected the contents of the draft law”, sending it back to the Ministry of Justice “to take a fresh look at the issue”.
But at least one activist thinks this development is a small victory for real reform in Syria. He has already pledged to keep “a very close eye on extremist views, and to publish them for everyone to know”. He is also launching an aggressive campaign to push for progressive reforms, such as ensuring better rights for divorced women, allowing all mothers to pass on to their children Syrian citizenship and to better address domestic violence and child abuse.
“Starting today, we will knock on the doors of official and non-official organisations, political and religious, everyone, and hold them responsible for all the issues that affect women and children in Syria,” he said.
“No more usual excuses like ‘this is because of cultural norms and traditions or class warfare’. And no more procrastinations like ‘it is not the right time or we have other, more pressing issues’.”
Though the chance of the draft ever becoming law may have been slim, the discussion it created provided a revealing look at the dance between ultra-conservative Islamists and their nemeses in Syria, which include secularists, the renewal movement known as Tajdeed – Islamists who aim to renew Sharia by going back to the essence of Islam – and a long list of minority groups who feel their rights would be jeopardised by an Islamic state. Whether the ultra conservatives were just testing the waters or whether they believed that their efforts would succeed is difficult to determine. What is certain is that the contents of their draft law would have sent Syria back centuries in time, and would have probably shocked most Syrians, especially women and minorities, if only they had known about it.
The draft law managed to circumvent all the usual channels that the public relies upon to remain informed of the latest legislation proposed in the government. Draft laws usually show up in the local press, generating reaction from readers, but in this case the press was banned from covering it. The Syrian parliament also posts draft laws on a website so affected parties have a chance to comment, but again, not in this case.
The reasons behind these cloak and dagger tactics were unclear. If it hadn’t been for a leak in early June, not even the activists would have learnt of it.
Even more mysterious, the law was the product of a secret committee commissioned by the head of parliament, the Syrian prime minister Naji al Otri. The committee worked on the draft for two years, and until now the names of the committee members could only be guessed at, except for one man, Hassan Awad, a professor at the Sharia law school in Damascus who came forward on public radio. Mr Awad is now in Sudan doing research, and he did not respond to repeated queries asking him to comment.
The draft law would have required women to travel only if accompanied by a mahram, a close male relative. A loophole in the draft law would have allowed a Christian man to take on a second wife and Christians would have discovered their right to divorce, despite any objections from their own church. As Father Antone Musleh, a patriarch of the Orthodox Church, put it: “The draft law dares to infringe on marriage within Christianity, which to the Church is a sacrament. It’s a Divine hand that plays into the life of humans, and the Church is the first and last party responsible for interpreting this for its flock.”
The draft law provided that a girl as young as 13 could take her parents to court and make the judge pressure them to allow her to marry.
A complete stranger could sue the couple next door if he thought one of them had become an apostate, which is enough reason to annul their marriage before a Sharia court.
“This is the most dangerous part of the draft law, the introduction of apostasy legal code,” said Dr Mohammed Habash, a parliamentarian and Islamic scholar and one of the leading figures of the renewal movement in Syria.
Apostasy laws were used for decades during Islam’s beginnings, usually with the purpose of punishing men who defected from a Muslim army to join the enemy’s lines at a time of war. But used in the context of the draft law’s proposal, Dr Habash explained, apostasy laws “undermine the family, which is the essence of society’s fabric”.
This law, known also as hasba, was used infamously in Egypt in 2001 by Islamists who tried to annul the marriage of Nawal al Saadawi, a feminist author, after deeming her an apostate for her writings. An Egyptian emergency court overturned the verdict after an international outcry.
Perhaps most absurdly, the “Taliban initiative” would have technically prohibited the legal marriage of any apostate, even to another non-believer.
The Syrian foreign minister Walid al Muallem told me during an outing with his family: “The president has already said he will not sanction it. It’s already dead in the water.”
But in the meantime, in true Syrian form, there were conflicting statements from the people’s assembly, who said that the draft law was thrown out, and the parliament, which insisted it was “still under review”.
Opponents breathed a sigh of relief when one week later parliament issued a statement saying it “rejected the contents of the draft law”, sending it back to the Ministry of Justice “to take a fresh look at the issue”.
But at least one activist thinks this development is a small victory for real reform in Syria. He has already pledged to keep “a very close eye on extremist views, and to publish them for everyone to know”. He is also launching an aggressive campaign to push for progressive reforms, such as ensuring better rights for divorced women, allowing all mothers to pass on to their children Syrian citizenship and to better address domestic violence and child abuse.
“Starting today, we will knock on the doors of official and non-official organisations, political and religious, everyone, and hold them responsible for all the issues that affect women and children in Syria,” he said.
“No more usual excuses like ‘this is because of cultural norms and traditions or class warfare’. And no more procrastinations like ‘it is not the right time or we have other, more pressing issues’.”
Islamic Civilization in Peril
By ALI A. ALLAWI
I was born into a mildly observant Muslim family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term — "Muslim world" — was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.
To an impressionable child, it was clear that society was decoupling from Islam. Though religion was a mandatory course in school, nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast during Ramadan. We memorized the shorter verses of the Koran, but the holy book itself was kept on the shelf or in drawers, mostly unread. The elderly still made the pilgrimage to Mecca to atone for their transgressions in preparation for death — more an insurance policy than an act of piety. I don't recall ever coming across the word "jihad" in a contemporary context. The political rhetoric of the day focused on Arab destiny and anti-imperialism. A bit of religious fervor surfaced during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the radio broadcasts out of Cairo blared out martial songs calling for divine support against the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion, but that was an anomaly. Women, not only in my own family but also throughout the urban middle class, wore only Western-style clothes. They had long ceased to wear the hijab, or head scarf. My only connection to a premodern past was my grandfather, who continued to dress in the dignified robes and turbans of an old-line merchant.
Apart from religious holidays, there were few public observances of Islamic rituals. The rites of Muharram, a Shia Muslim practice to commemorate the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein, during which participants often indulged in self-flagellation, was celebrated, sometimes wildly, but I was advised to stay far away; such ceremonies were considered unbecoming of genteel folk, who preferred to hold semiliterary soirees to remember the passion of the martyr.
Modernity was flooding in everywhere. Cinemas and snack bars; cabarets and country clubs, freely flowing alcohol and mixed-sex parties; Baghdad was turning into Babylon, its hedonistic predecessor of yore. Things were not much different, as memoirs of the era testify, in Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, and Tehran.
When I first left Iraq, in 1958, whatever lingering interest I had in religion was ground down further by my exposure to the stifling atmosphere of an Anglican boarding school in England. Enforced attendance at chapel and endless formulaic sermons helped nurture an abiding distaste for organized religion. But in hindsight, I can see that the seeds of my rekindled interest in Islam may well have been planted during this time. I instinctively reacted to the slights against Islam that ran throughout the curriculum — the depiction of the Crusaders as brave knights defending against marauding Saracens, for example, or the casual dismissal of the leaders of the so-called Indian Mutiny against 19th-century British rule as bloodthirsty barbarians.
There were other Muslims in the school, mostly from Britain's shrinking empire. They were no different from me; we all came from the same type of secularized background. Despite our resentment at the depiction of Islam, our presence in England seemed proof that modern civilization was anchored firmly in the West. Our Islamic past may have been glorious, but it was just that — the past. The future was in the West — the more Western, the better. I spent most of my last year at school dreaming of America.
In 1964, when I began my studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was impossible not to be swept up in the cultural and political convulsions of the era, even if you were an outsider. I enthusiastically participated in sit-ins and teach-ins, civil-rights and antiwar protests. I was fascinated by the struggle for black empowerment in America, which demonstrated that a spiritually charged movement could effect great change. Martin Luther King Jr. was a far cry from the establishment churchmen I had encountered in England. And Malcolm X was a practicing Muslim. I began to think about Islam as a force for social transformation.
Later, like many young people during the 1970s, I was preoccupied with the search for a meaningful ethic to fill the spiritual and moral void of the times, to find an inner balance against the excesses of the counterculture. Those thoughts crystallized in the unlikely setting of 1976 London, amid a disintegrating British economy beset by labor strife and the first whiffs of hyperinflation. Between April and June, London was host to the World of Islam Festival, an event designed to convey to the West the richness and diversity of Islam's culture and civilization. More important, it showed the unity of Islamic civilization across its component nations, languages, and cultures.
The festival was animated by the spirit of one of Islam's great unsung heroes of modern times, the Raja of Mahmudabad, who had helped support the initial idea for the project. Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan — or Raja Sahib, as we all knew him — died in 1973. In the late 1960s, I had befriended one of his relatives, who then introduced me to the Raja. While I was doing postgraduate work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I frequently sought out his company at his small home, adjacent to the Regent's Park Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center, where he was director. The raja was a deeply idealistic and egalitarian person; his Islam was anchored in a commitment to good works. To express his solidarity with the poor, he performed manual labor and frequently wore coarse homespun clothes and walked barefoot. He was spiritual, even mystical, in his leanings, and his passion came through during the evenings in his company. He somehow combined deep fealty to Islam with a radical and even revolutionary personal predisposition. The raja left a powerful imprint on me, but I would not appreciate its significance until the 1976 festival.
The festival has since been criticized for being elitist and insufficiently representative of the social and political dimensions of Islam. In retrospect, some of that criticism may have been valid. The political dimension was overlooked partly because the Muslim diaspora in the West was not yet controversial, and partly because political Islam had not yet exploded on the scene. The festival was wide ranging, but the mark of the traditionalists — the philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the art historian Titus Burckhardt and the museum curator Martin Lings — was clear in a number of publications and events, which had a sharp tilt toward the inner dimensions of Islam. Traditionalists, who followed in the path of the French metaphysician René Guénon, linked the creative vitality in Islamic civilization primarily to its spiritual core, to the drive that propelled the believer to seek, find, and then express the manifestations of God in the outer world. To them, the heart of Islam resided as much, or more, in its spiritual dimension than in dogma, doctrine, or the sacred law, the Shariah. Traditionalist thought has not been free of controversy, either then or now, especially in its eclectic understanding of Islam and other world religions, and in its assertion that all great religious traditions meet at some commonly shared higher principle of spirituality. But at the time, it was a very unexpected, novel, and refreshing treatment of Islam.
Without actually seeking it, I had stumbled across an entirely new perspective on Islam, one no less resonant with possibilities for the future than the gathering forces of political Islam, which accelerated throughout the 1970s as Islamist movements began to rise up in the Middle East and beyond.
Often conflicting, those two currents of Islam have dominated my life ever since — the mystical, inner dimension of the faith, and the outer political and social expressions of it. But it is the eclipse of the former, and the way in which Islam is increasingly, even exclusively, understood in political and doctrinal terms, that makes me fear for the future of Islamic civilization.
A few years after the London festival, the world was turned on its head by the Iranian revolution. Political Islam burst on to the global stage, and whatever we may think of it, the Shiite-led revolution embodied the hopes and fears of millions of people around the world. Meanwhile a parallel upheaval was engulfing Sunni Muslims.
The jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan marked the rise of an extreme brand of militant Islamism. The people of the world — and Muslims in particular — were confronted with a host of questions and assertions about the proper place of Islam in society. Must Muslims strive for the establishment of an Islamic state? Is the Shariah compatible with modernity, democracy, and human rights? I daresay that every Muslim has been exercised in one form or another by the ascendance of political Islam — whether recoiling in alarm, perplexed and anxious, or enthusiastically embracing a more assertive role for religion in politics.
For a long time, the two worlds of Islam, the outer world of political and social action and the inner world of spiritual and moral realization, seemed entirely at odds with each other. One was angry at Islam's subordination, insistent on recognition and power, on challenging the status quo; the other was serene, introspective, and immersed in the intangible. The canvas of the first was societies and nations; of the second, the self and the individual.
The rituals of worship in Islam were supposed to bridge those disparate worlds, but they were quickly bent to suit the demands of one or the other. Mosques became recruiting grounds for jihadis, while repressive governments manipulated Islam, often by demonizing other Muslim groups to cement their control and power.
The essential unity of Islam was greatly diminished, if not quite yet destroyed. People could no longer move effortlessly between the two realms of Islam. Muslims divided into warring sects, and the closing of the Muslim mind was an inevitable consequence of the growing significance of an intolerant and exceptionally doctrinaire strain of Islam, Wahhabism, cynically fueled by the largess of Saudi Arabia.
The Islamists have been strengthened by the momentous crises that have shaped the Muslim world over the past few decades. As I became more involved in politics, through writings, speeches, and then as an active member of the opposition to the Baathist regime in Iraq and subsequently as a cabinet minister in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, it became clear that few of the Muslims I encountered in the political arena were concerned with the spiritual aspects of Islam. In practice, Islamists behaved no differently, and often worse, than their secular counterparts. Abuse of power, squandering or outright theft of public resources, and corruption were all endemic to Islamist-led governments. Their brand of Islam was largely devoid of any deep, ethical content and was at odds with my understanding of Islam's own legacy.
The preoccupation of the vast majority of Muslims with their outer material conditions, or often just survival, is not in any way reprehensible, but it is deficient. The crises that Muslims face cannot be addressed solely by the political, social, or jurisprudential aspects of the religion. The moral education of individual Muslims does not much interest the leaders of the Muslim world, whether in power or in opposition, in mainly Muslim lands or in the West. Muslims may have been overwhelmed by the scale of the real or imagined disasters befalling them — the legacy of colonialism and Western intervention, and their relative underperformance in a globalizing world — but that should not have prevented them from holding a mirror up to themselves. That mirror would have revealed a fading of their own civilizational drive and an increasingly obvious indifference to, and often abandonment of, the ethical and spiritual foundations of their faith.
Over the past 30 years, the divisions within Islam have triggered paroxysms of violence. Sectarian, ethnic, and racial hatreds have trumped the ideal of Islamic unity. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and the internecine struggle that accompanied the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, are a few such examples. In post-Saddam Iraq, however, the full extent of the dissonance between Islamic political and religious life was laid bare. The murderous violence that was unleashed by radical Wahhabi-inspired Islamists was sanctioned with laborious jurisprudential "justifications" from leading religious figures. Saudi-based clerics applauded the egregious acts of violence and mayhem perpetrated by the Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, especially when they targeted the Shiites, a heretical group in Wahhabi demonology. Those rulings were accepted by many Muslims around the world, and they legitimated the slaughter of innocent civilians. The brutal response of the Shiite militias that followed, a counterterror in its own right, focused on the Sunnis of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and millions displaced or exiled. The country descended into chaos and strife.
Political Islamists of all stripes jettisoned entire ideologies supposedly based on an Islamic reading of politics and ethics — for which many of their allies had given their lives — in indecent haste as they scrambled for political advantage in the post-Saddam order. Not once during my three-year stint in the Iraqi government did I witness an Islamist party, Sunni or Shia, promote an Islamic cause that they had earlier propounded in their manifestoes. Gone were their proposals for an Islamic economy, an Islamic system of laws, or an Islamic state. For example, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party, from which emerged consecutive prime ministers, Ibrahim Jaafari and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, showed no interest in pursuing any even mildly Islamic program once they were installed in office. The ruling parties were driven by an obsessive desire for material gain and a desire to keep in the good graces of Washington.
A sad and dispiriting spectacle, it was evidence that Muslims had become divorced from the wellsprings of Islamic ethics: the search for a felicitous life, a harmonious and just society, and moral virtue, which in turn is a pathway to the Unseen. Isn't the entire Koranic message addressed to "those who believe in the Unseen"? I began to systematically reflect on this dilemma, to try to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam, and what the future might entail if that process is not halted or reversed.
Islamic civilization has its own perspectives on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the powers and responsibilities of the state, and the appropriate balance between human rights and duties, as well as the nature of justice, freedom, and equality. Such views are different from those held by other civilizations, and in particular from the dominant, Western-style world order. Almost by definition, Islamic civilization has to acknowledge the role of the transcendent (or the sacred or divine — call it what you will). If that element is absent, Islam cannot modernize without diminishing the integrity of the faith.
In classical Islamic doctrine, individual autonomy is constrained by the individual's ultimate dependence on God. Consequently the entire edifice of individual rights — derived from either man's natural state or a secular, ethical, or political theory — is alien to Islamic thought. The individual Muslim generates within himself or herself the virtues of the community, and vice versa. The result, ideally, is a bond between the individual and the group, with little possibility of ethical atomization at the individual level or an oppressive conformity at the group level.
The crisis in Islamic civilization arises in part from the fact that Muslims have been unable to chart their own path into contemporary life. Islam as a religion — or even as a remnant of a civilization — has never fully surrendered to the demands of a desacralized world. Those who rule over Muslims may behave atrociously, continuing a venerable tradition of misrule, violence, and corruption that has long plagued the Muslim world, but tantalizing thoughts of "what might be" still reverberate among the masses — and even among some of the elite.
In the past, the Shariah connected Muslims' outer world with their inner realities. The eclipse of the Shariah by secular civil, commercial, and criminal law severed that connection. Some people see a desacralized world as a fertile ground for nurturing the private faith of the individual. Other religious traditions, especially those that form the basis of Western civilization, long ago withdrew from the public arena, effectively putting their seal of approval on the separation of church and state. But Islam cannot easily coexist with a political order that takes no heed of its inner dimensions. The integrity of Islam requires a delicate balance between the individual's spirituality and the demands of the community as a whole.
Islam's encounter with the West and the ascendant forces of modernity have made deep inroads into the outer world of Islam and, equally important, into the minds of Muslims. Some may deny it and fight numerous rear-guard actions, but this reality cannot be effaced until Muslims confront another harsh fact: All civilizations have an inner and outer aspect, an inner world of beliefs, ideas, and values that inform the outer aspects of institutions, laws, government, and culture. But the inner dimensions of Islam no longer have the significance or power to shape the outer world in which most Muslims live. Most Muslims — knowingly or not — have lost sight of the centrality of sacredness to their historic civilization. The Muslim world has effectively become desacralized, and that has changed how Muslims think, believe, and behave. Islam's outer expressions — laws, institutions, governing structures, economic and cultural principles — have been in constant retreat.
The idea of the nation-state challenged the traditional notion of the Islamic political entity. The cohesion of families was threatened by shifting economic foundations and the advent of women's rights. The Shariah had to acquiesce in the new canons of secular civil and criminal law. The open marketplaces of bazaars and traditional exchange patterns gave way to the international corporation, interest-based finance, and foreign investment. Those are the arenas in which the debate about the future of Islam is typically waged. But the answer to the question of whether a uniquely Islamic order can ever be recreated again does not lie only there.
The insatiable pursuit of ever-rising standards of living, coupled with an almost fetishistic belief in science and technology, is a nearly universal condition. The West has accepted secularization as an inevitable consequence of increasing wealth and power. That same recipe is now being offered to Muslims. Liberal reformers in the Muslim world, and their allies beyond, are in effect calling for a Christianization of Islam: concede the public arena to secularism and acknowledge that the break between Islam's sacred interior world and the profane external world is definitive and legitimate. The reformers, advocates of Muslim liberal democracy, are at least honest in that they forthrightly call for the wholesale adoption of the institutions and processes of modernity. But their vision of Islamic civilization is empty — a vague spirituality wafting over a society with a shallow cultural distinctiveness, one that has effectively merged with the dominant order.
The radical Islamists, on the other hand, and even the rank and file of so-called "rationalist" Muslims who insist that Islam has all the elements of Western-style humanism already embedded in it, suffer from a different conceit — namely that a happy compromise can be fashioned between Islam and modernity simply by running modern ideas through the filter of the Shariah: What is acceptable will be embraced, and what is not will be rejected. That approach, which has been entertained for more than a century, has produced neither material progress nor the foundations of a revivified Islamic civilization. The fundamental conundrum facing both rationalists and radicals is that the forces of modernity are the product of a different and ascendant civilizational order. Those forces can be internalized successfully only if they are refashioned, and then transcended, in a uniquely Islamic framework.
Such a framework must be rooted explicitly in the Islamic virtues of justice, moderation, the respectful accommodation of other cultures and religions, and the rejection of oppression and gross inequalities. Those immutable principles are spelled out in the Koran. They are milestones for the believers' pathways to God. They should guide an ethical rereading of the Shariah that will not only revitalize Islam's outer world, but also bring Islam closer to providing a new, constructive, and potentially appealing response to the growing problems facing humanity — including environmental degradation, the coarsening of public life, economic inequity among nations and peoples, and overconsumption. The Shariah has traditionally been pitted against modern practices and values, with the implication that it should give way to the prevailing ethos. Or the Shariah has been seen in entirely static terms, a blueprint for reviving some golden age of Islam. The latter is the approach of fundamentalist Muslims.
But an Islam reimagined along the lines sketched above can go beyond the travesty that is "Islamic banking" and produce institutions and enterprises that emphasize risk-sharing and cooperative finance. It can push for technological innovations that focus on conservation. In the hard sciences, Islam can privilege research that seeks to reveal the unseen substructures that underlie the physical world — what the great theoretical physicist David Bohm called the "implicate order," which has not been investigated with the necessary energy because it counters the prevailing methods of scientific inquiry. Islam can open up entirely new vistas to find unity and wholeness in the natural world.
Muslims cannot simply partake of the technological fruits of modern civilization while simultaneously rejecting or questioning its premises. That makes them nothing more than inert consumers of the effort and creativity of others — even if they continue to smugly assert the superiority of their spiritual ways. That is the ultimate fallacy of the Islamists. Alternatively, Muslims might choose to package the products of Western civilization in ways that are culturally or politically acceptable to their own societies. They can even participate in the dominant civilizational order and risk fatally undermining whatever remains of Muslims' basic identity and autonomy. That appears to be the path of the Gulf states, which have exuberantly embraced a frantic hypermodernity that is scantily garbed in Islamic idioms. This path also appeals to the Westernized professional classes who view their Islam as little more than a cultural ornament.
If Muslims want an outer life that is an expression of their innermost faith, however, they must rescue their own civilization from years of inactivity, lassitude, and indifference. Such an achievement requires overcoming conditions of great imbalance and adversity. The challenge is not insurmountable, but it will test to the limit Muslims' commitment to Islam as a complete way of life. Muslims must invent a new means of expressing the outer dimensions of their religion, a new Shariah — ethics-based rather than rules-based, tilted toward social action rather than preserving the status quo. Muslims must confront the twin temptations of seeing the Shariah either as a malleable garb for whatever modernity throws their way, or as a fixed creed of intricately detailed rulings.
I have no doubt that Islam as a religion or as a code of outer conduct and transactions will continue. But I cannot say the same about Islamic civilization — a universe that is recognizably Islamic and that draws its vitality and inspiration from the inner and outer aspects of Islam and the bridge that connects the two. It is that world that is in danger of disappearing.
Ali A. Allawi is a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University. He has just been named one of the first two Gebran G. Tueni human-rights fellows at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His latest book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, was published in March by Yale University Press.
I was born into a mildly observant Muslim family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term — "Muslim world" — was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.
To an impressionable child, it was clear that society was decoupling from Islam. Though religion was a mandatory course in school, nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast during Ramadan. We memorized the shorter verses of the Koran, but the holy book itself was kept on the shelf or in drawers, mostly unread. The elderly still made the pilgrimage to Mecca to atone for their transgressions in preparation for death — more an insurance policy than an act of piety. I don't recall ever coming across the word "jihad" in a contemporary context. The political rhetoric of the day focused on Arab destiny and anti-imperialism. A bit of religious fervor surfaced during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the radio broadcasts out of Cairo blared out martial songs calling for divine support against the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion, but that was an anomaly. Women, not only in my own family but also throughout the urban middle class, wore only Western-style clothes. They had long ceased to wear the hijab, or head scarf. My only connection to a premodern past was my grandfather, who continued to dress in the dignified robes and turbans of an old-line merchant.
Apart from religious holidays, there were few public observances of Islamic rituals. The rites of Muharram, a Shia Muslim practice to commemorate the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein, during which participants often indulged in self-flagellation, was celebrated, sometimes wildly, but I was advised to stay far away; such ceremonies were considered unbecoming of genteel folk, who preferred to hold semiliterary soirees to remember the passion of the martyr.
Modernity was flooding in everywhere. Cinemas and snack bars; cabarets and country clubs, freely flowing alcohol and mixed-sex parties; Baghdad was turning into Babylon, its hedonistic predecessor of yore. Things were not much different, as memoirs of the era testify, in Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, and Tehran.
When I first left Iraq, in 1958, whatever lingering interest I had in religion was ground down further by my exposure to the stifling atmosphere of an Anglican boarding school in England. Enforced attendance at chapel and endless formulaic sermons helped nurture an abiding distaste for organized religion. But in hindsight, I can see that the seeds of my rekindled interest in Islam may well have been planted during this time. I instinctively reacted to the slights against Islam that ran throughout the curriculum — the depiction of the Crusaders as brave knights defending against marauding Saracens, for example, or the casual dismissal of the leaders of the so-called Indian Mutiny against 19th-century British rule as bloodthirsty barbarians.
There were other Muslims in the school, mostly from Britain's shrinking empire. They were no different from me; we all came from the same type of secularized background. Despite our resentment at the depiction of Islam, our presence in England seemed proof that modern civilization was anchored firmly in the West. Our Islamic past may have been glorious, but it was just that — the past. The future was in the West — the more Western, the better. I spent most of my last year at school dreaming of America.
In 1964, when I began my studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was impossible not to be swept up in the cultural and political convulsions of the era, even if you were an outsider. I enthusiastically participated in sit-ins and teach-ins, civil-rights and antiwar protests. I was fascinated by the struggle for black empowerment in America, which demonstrated that a spiritually charged movement could effect great change. Martin Luther King Jr. was a far cry from the establishment churchmen I had encountered in England. And Malcolm X was a practicing Muslim. I began to think about Islam as a force for social transformation.
Later, like many young people during the 1970s, I was preoccupied with the search for a meaningful ethic to fill the spiritual and moral void of the times, to find an inner balance against the excesses of the counterculture. Those thoughts crystallized in the unlikely setting of 1976 London, amid a disintegrating British economy beset by labor strife and the first whiffs of hyperinflation. Between April and June, London was host to the World of Islam Festival, an event designed to convey to the West the richness and diversity of Islam's culture and civilization. More important, it showed the unity of Islamic civilization across its component nations, languages, and cultures.
The festival was animated by the spirit of one of Islam's great unsung heroes of modern times, the Raja of Mahmudabad, who had helped support the initial idea for the project. Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan — or Raja Sahib, as we all knew him — died in 1973. In the late 1960s, I had befriended one of his relatives, who then introduced me to the Raja. While I was doing postgraduate work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I frequently sought out his company at his small home, adjacent to the Regent's Park Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center, where he was director. The raja was a deeply idealistic and egalitarian person; his Islam was anchored in a commitment to good works. To express his solidarity with the poor, he performed manual labor and frequently wore coarse homespun clothes and walked barefoot. He was spiritual, even mystical, in his leanings, and his passion came through during the evenings in his company. He somehow combined deep fealty to Islam with a radical and even revolutionary personal predisposition. The raja left a powerful imprint on me, but I would not appreciate its significance until the 1976 festival.
The festival has since been criticized for being elitist and insufficiently representative of the social and political dimensions of Islam. In retrospect, some of that criticism may have been valid. The political dimension was overlooked partly because the Muslim diaspora in the West was not yet controversial, and partly because political Islam had not yet exploded on the scene. The festival was wide ranging, but the mark of the traditionalists — the philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the art historian Titus Burckhardt and the museum curator Martin Lings — was clear in a number of publications and events, which had a sharp tilt toward the inner dimensions of Islam. Traditionalists, who followed in the path of the French metaphysician René Guénon, linked the creative vitality in Islamic civilization primarily to its spiritual core, to the drive that propelled the believer to seek, find, and then express the manifestations of God in the outer world. To them, the heart of Islam resided as much, or more, in its spiritual dimension than in dogma, doctrine, or the sacred law, the Shariah. Traditionalist thought has not been free of controversy, either then or now, especially in its eclectic understanding of Islam and other world religions, and in its assertion that all great religious traditions meet at some commonly shared higher principle of spirituality. But at the time, it was a very unexpected, novel, and refreshing treatment of Islam.
Without actually seeking it, I had stumbled across an entirely new perspective on Islam, one no less resonant with possibilities for the future than the gathering forces of political Islam, which accelerated throughout the 1970s as Islamist movements began to rise up in the Middle East and beyond.
Often conflicting, those two currents of Islam have dominated my life ever since — the mystical, inner dimension of the faith, and the outer political and social expressions of it. But it is the eclipse of the former, and the way in which Islam is increasingly, even exclusively, understood in political and doctrinal terms, that makes me fear for the future of Islamic civilization.
A few years after the London festival, the world was turned on its head by the Iranian revolution. Political Islam burst on to the global stage, and whatever we may think of it, the Shiite-led revolution embodied the hopes and fears of millions of people around the world. Meanwhile a parallel upheaval was engulfing Sunni Muslims.
The jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan marked the rise of an extreme brand of militant Islamism. The people of the world — and Muslims in particular — were confronted with a host of questions and assertions about the proper place of Islam in society. Must Muslims strive for the establishment of an Islamic state? Is the Shariah compatible with modernity, democracy, and human rights? I daresay that every Muslim has been exercised in one form or another by the ascendance of political Islam — whether recoiling in alarm, perplexed and anxious, or enthusiastically embracing a more assertive role for religion in politics.
For a long time, the two worlds of Islam, the outer world of political and social action and the inner world of spiritual and moral realization, seemed entirely at odds with each other. One was angry at Islam's subordination, insistent on recognition and power, on challenging the status quo; the other was serene, introspective, and immersed in the intangible. The canvas of the first was societies and nations; of the second, the self and the individual.
The rituals of worship in Islam were supposed to bridge those disparate worlds, but they were quickly bent to suit the demands of one or the other. Mosques became recruiting grounds for jihadis, while repressive governments manipulated Islam, often by demonizing other Muslim groups to cement their control and power.
The essential unity of Islam was greatly diminished, if not quite yet destroyed. People could no longer move effortlessly between the two realms of Islam. Muslims divided into warring sects, and the closing of the Muslim mind was an inevitable consequence of the growing significance of an intolerant and exceptionally doctrinaire strain of Islam, Wahhabism, cynically fueled by the largess of Saudi Arabia.
The Islamists have been strengthened by the momentous crises that have shaped the Muslim world over the past few decades. As I became more involved in politics, through writings, speeches, and then as an active member of the opposition to the Baathist regime in Iraq and subsequently as a cabinet minister in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, it became clear that few of the Muslims I encountered in the political arena were concerned with the spiritual aspects of Islam. In practice, Islamists behaved no differently, and often worse, than their secular counterparts. Abuse of power, squandering or outright theft of public resources, and corruption were all endemic to Islamist-led governments. Their brand of Islam was largely devoid of any deep, ethical content and was at odds with my understanding of Islam's own legacy.
The preoccupation of the vast majority of Muslims with their outer material conditions, or often just survival, is not in any way reprehensible, but it is deficient. The crises that Muslims face cannot be addressed solely by the political, social, or jurisprudential aspects of the religion. The moral education of individual Muslims does not much interest the leaders of the Muslim world, whether in power or in opposition, in mainly Muslim lands or in the West. Muslims may have been overwhelmed by the scale of the real or imagined disasters befalling them — the legacy of colonialism and Western intervention, and their relative underperformance in a globalizing world — but that should not have prevented them from holding a mirror up to themselves. That mirror would have revealed a fading of their own civilizational drive and an increasingly obvious indifference to, and often abandonment of, the ethical and spiritual foundations of their faith.
Over the past 30 years, the divisions within Islam have triggered paroxysms of violence. Sectarian, ethnic, and racial hatreds have trumped the ideal of Islamic unity. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and the internecine struggle that accompanied the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, are a few such examples. In post-Saddam Iraq, however, the full extent of the dissonance between Islamic political and religious life was laid bare. The murderous violence that was unleashed by radical Wahhabi-inspired Islamists was sanctioned with laborious jurisprudential "justifications" from leading religious figures. Saudi-based clerics applauded the egregious acts of violence and mayhem perpetrated by the Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, especially when they targeted the Shiites, a heretical group in Wahhabi demonology. Those rulings were accepted by many Muslims around the world, and they legitimated the slaughter of innocent civilians. The brutal response of the Shiite militias that followed, a counterterror in its own right, focused on the Sunnis of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and millions displaced or exiled. The country descended into chaos and strife.
Political Islamists of all stripes jettisoned entire ideologies supposedly based on an Islamic reading of politics and ethics — for which many of their allies had given their lives — in indecent haste as they scrambled for political advantage in the post-Saddam order. Not once during my three-year stint in the Iraqi government did I witness an Islamist party, Sunni or Shia, promote an Islamic cause that they had earlier propounded in their manifestoes. Gone were their proposals for an Islamic economy, an Islamic system of laws, or an Islamic state. For example, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party, from which emerged consecutive prime ministers, Ibrahim Jaafari and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, showed no interest in pursuing any even mildly Islamic program once they were installed in office. The ruling parties were driven by an obsessive desire for material gain and a desire to keep in the good graces of Washington.
A sad and dispiriting spectacle, it was evidence that Muslims had become divorced from the wellsprings of Islamic ethics: the search for a felicitous life, a harmonious and just society, and moral virtue, which in turn is a pathway to the Unseen. Isn't the entire Koranic message addressed to "those who believe in the Unseen"? I began to systematically reflect on this dilemma, to try to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam, and what the future might entail if that process is not halted or reversed.
Islamic civilization has its own perspectives on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the powers and responsibilities of the state, and the appropriate balance between human rights and duties, as well as the nature of justice, freedom, and equality. Such views are different from those held by other civilizations, and in particular from the dominant, Western-style world order. Almost by definition, Islamic civilization has to acknowledge the role of the transcendent (or the sacred or divine — call it what you will). If that element is absent, Islam cannot modernize without diminishing the integrity of the faith.
In classical Islamic doctrine, individual autonomy is constrained by the individual's ultimate dependence on God. Consequently the entire edifice of individual rights — derived from either man's natural state or a secular, ethical, or political theory — is alien to Islamic thought. The individual Muslim generates within himself or herself the virtues of the community, and vice versa. The result, ideally, is a bond between the individual and the group, with little possibility of ethical atomization at the individual level or an oppressive conformity at the group level.
The crisis in Islamic civilization arises in part from the fact that Muslims have been unable to chart their own path into contemporary life. Islam as a religion — or even as a remnant of a civilization — has never fully surrendered to the demands of a desacralized world. Those who rule over Muslims may behave atrociously, continuing a venerable tradition of misrule, violence, and corruption that has long plagued the Muslim world, but tantalizing thoughts of "what might be" still reverberate among the masses — and even among some of the elite.
In the past, the Shariah connected Muslims' outer world with their inner realities. The eclipse of the Shariah by secular civil, commercial, and criminal law severed that connection. Some people see a desacralized world as a fertile ground for nurturing the private faith of the individual. Other religious traditions, especially those that form the basis of Western civilization, long ago withdrew from the public arena, effectively putting their seal of approval on the separation of church and state. But Islam cannot easily coexist with a political order that takes no heed of its inner dimensions. The integrity of Islam requires a delicate balance between the individual's spirituality and the demands of the community as a whole.
Islam's encounter with the West and the ascendant forces of modernity have made deep inroads into the outer world of Islam and, equally important, into the minds of Muslims. Some may deny it and fight numerous rear-guard actions, but this reality cannot be effaced until Muslims confront another harsh fact: All civilizations have an inner and outer aspect, an inner world of beliefs, ideas, and values that inform the outer aspects of institutions, laws, government, and culture. But the inner dimensions of Islam no longer have the significance or power to shape the outer world in which most Muslims live. Most Muslims — knowingly or not — have lost sight of the centrality of sacredness to their historic civilization. The Muslim world has effectively become desacralized, and that has changed how Muslims think, believe, and behave. Islam's outer expressions — laws, institutions, governing structures, economic and cultural principles — have been in constant retreat.
The idea of the nation-state challenged the traditional notion of the Islamic political entity. The cohesion of families was threatened by shifting economic foundations and the advent of women's rights. The Shariah had to acquiesce in the new canons of secular civil and criminal law. The open marketplaces of bazaars and traditional exchange patterns gave way to the international corporation, interest-based finance, and foreign investment. Those are the arenas in which the debate about the future of Islam is typically waged. But the answer to the question of whether a uniquely Islamic order can ever be recreated again does not lie only there.
The insatiable pursuit of ever-rising standards of living, coupled with an almost fetishistic belief in science and technology, is a nearly universal condition. The West has accepted secularization as an inevitable consequence of increasing wealth and power. That same recipe is now being offered to Muslims. Liberal reformers in the Muslim world, and their allies beyond, are in effect calling for a Christianization of Islam: concede the public arena to secularism and acknowledge that the break between Islam's sacred interior world and the profane external world is definitive and legitimate. The reformers, advocates of Muslim liberal democracy, are at least honest in that they forthrightly call for the wholesale adoption of the institutions and processes of modernity. But their vision of Islamic civilization is empty — a vague spirituality wafting over a society with a shallow cultural distinctiveness, one that has effectively merged with the dominant order.
The radical Islamists, on the other hand, and even the rank and file of so-called "rationalist" Muslims who insist that Islam has all the elements of Western-style humanism already embedded in it, suffer from a different conceit — namely that a happy compromise can be fashioned between Islam and modernity simply by running modern ideas through the filter of the Shariah: What is acceptable will be embraced, and what is not will be rejected. That approach, which has been entertained for more than a century, has produced neither material progress nor the foundations of a revivified Islamic civilization. The fundamental conundrum facing both rationalists and radicals is that the forces of modernity are the product of a different and ascendant civilizational order. Those forces can be internalized successfully only if they are refashioned, and then transcended, in a uniquely Islamic framework.
Such a framework must be rooted explicitly in the Islamic virtues of justice, moderation, the respectful accommodation of other cultures and religions, and the rejection of oppression and gross inequalities. Those immutable principles are spelled out in the Koran. They are milestones for the believers' pathways to God. They should guide an ethical rereading of the Shariah that will not only revitalize Islam's outer world, but also bring Islam closer to providing a new, constructive, and potentially appealing response to the growing problems facing humanity — including environmental degradation, the coarsening of public life, economic inequity among nations and peoples, and overconsumption. The Shariah has traditionally been pitted against modern practices and values, with the implication that it should give way to the prevailing ethos. Or the Shariah has been seen in entirely static terms, a blueprint for reviving some golden age of Islam. The latter is the approach of fundamentalist Muslims.
But an Islam reimagined along the lines sketched above can go beyond the travesty that is "Islamic banking" and produce institutions and enterprises that emphasize risk-sharing and cooperative finance. It can push for technological innovations that focus on conservation. In the hard sciences, Islam can privilege research that seeks to reveal the unseen substructures that underlie the physical world — what the great theoretical physicist David Bohm called the "implicate order," which has not been investigated with the necessary energy because it counters the prevailing methods of scientific inquiry. Islam can open up entirely new vistas to find unity and wholeness in the natural world.
Muslims cannot simply partake of the technological fruits of modern civilization while simultaneously rejecting or questioning its premises. That makes them nothing more than inert consumers of the effort and creativity of others — even if they continue to smugly assert the superiority of their spiritual ways. That is the ultimate fallacy of the Islamists. Alternatively, Muslims might choose to package the products of Western civilization in ways that are culturally or politically acceptable to their own societies. They can even participate in the dominant civilizational order and risk fatally undermining whatever remains of Muslims' basic identity and autonomy. That appears to be the path of the Gulf states, which have exuberantly embraced a frantic hypermodernity that is scantily garbed in Islamic idioms. This path also appeals to the Westernized professional classes who view their Islam as little more than a cultural ornament.
If Muslims want an outer life that is an expression of their innermost faith, however, they must rescue their own civilization from years of inactivity, lassitude, and indifference. Such an achievement requires overcoming conditions of great imbalance and adversity. The challenge is not insurmountable, but it will test to the limit Muslims' commitment to Islam as a complete way of life. Muslims must invent a new means of expressing the outer dimensions of their religion, a new Shariah — ethics-based rather than rules-based, tilted toward social action rather than preserving the status quo. Muslims must confront the twin temptations of seeing the Shariah either as a malleable garb for whatever modernity throws their way, or as a fixed creed of intricately detailed rulings.
I have no doubt that Islam as a religion or as a code of outer conduct and transactions will continue. But I cannot say the same about Islamic civilization — a universe that is recognizably Islamic and that draws its vitality and inspiration from the inner and outer aspects of Islam and the bridge that connects the two. It is that world that is in danger of disappearing.
Ali A. Allawi is a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University. He has just been named one of the first two Gebran G. Tueni human-rights fellows at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His latest book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, was published in March by Yale University Press.
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Muslims and the West Desperately Seeking Occidentalists
If relations between the West and the Muslim world are to be improved, writes Maulana Waris Mazhari, Muslims must make a serious attempt not only to study both the positive and the negative aspects of Western thought, civilisation and history, but also to learn from them
Maulana Waris Mazhari: "In many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness" | The issue of strained relations between Muslims and the West is a long-standing one, and it has taken a new turn since the attacks of 9/11. In recent years, much has been written on the subject by both Muslim and Western scholars. Following the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations in the late 1990s, a large number of Western scholars concluded that reconciliation between Muslims and the West is impossible and that a clash between them is inevitable.
Influential Western think-tanks have aggressively pursued this line of thinking, as have extremist religious and political forces, particularly Christian evangelicals and Zionist organisations across Europe and America. In this context, the crucial question arises as to how the situation can be changed, as indeed it must. Do Muslims have any proper strategy or programme in this regard? My answer is firmly in the negative.
Superficial knowledge of the West
Despite the massive anti-Western movements and sentiments that have characterised much of the Muslim world over the last one hundred and fifty years, the fact remains that Muslim intellectuals, particularly the ulema, have only a very superficial understanding and knowledge of the West. In actual fact, there has been no serious attempt on the part of Muslim scholars to properly study and evaluate Western thought, civilization and history.
Today, our religious scholars have the same sort of stereotypical views about the West as the West had about Muslims and Islam several centuries ago at the time of the Crusades. Our religious scholars believe, and this is what they tell their followers, that the West simply stands for drunkenness, sexual license, immorality and all other sorts of wanton desires and pleasures.
Because of this approach we have not been able to learn from the good things that the West has to offer, not even about aspects of the Muslim scientific heritage that the West adopted from us and then built on.
Instead, in many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness. This mentality developed during the colonial period, and it should have been done away with the end of the European colonial empires. However, instead of that happening, it has been greatly reinforced and strengthened, and has now become so deeply rooted that Muslim reformers find it virtually impossible to combat.
Critical, dispassionate study of the West necessary
Scores of institutions for the study of Islam and Muslim culture and history have been established in the West, and several Western universities have special departments dedicated to these fields. They have produced a massive amount of literature. In contrast, there are probably not even two or three scholarly institutions in the Muslim world devoted to the study of the West using modern scholarly methods.
Universities in Muslim countries should have set up departments of Western studies, and there should have been private- and government-funded institutions for the study of the West, but, unfortunately, none exist. We desperately need such institutions to study Western history and culture in a critical yet dispassionate way, so that Muslims can understand not only the limitations or drawbacks of contemporary Western civilisation, but also its virtues, which they could adopt.
Muslim double standards
Today, most Muslims have a double-standard approach to the West. On the one hand, many of them are vociferously opposed to the West and insist that Muslims should stay away from Western culture as far as possible. At the same time, many of them fervently desire to migrate to the West!
I have been twice to America, where I met several Muslims who brand America as "the Great Satan" but still continue to live there for the economic benefits and opportunities that America provides them. They show-off their American passports or, if they do not as yet have them, are impatiently awaiting the day when they will be granted American citizenship. Why, one must ask, these double-standards? If these Muslims are so anti-America, why don’t they leave the country and return to what they consider dar ul-Islam, "the abode of Islam", where many of them came from?
I believe that there are numerous aspects of Western culture and society that reflect the virtues that characterised the early history of Islam. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, groups that want to serve the cause of Islam are under severe restrictions. It is unfortunate that virtually the whole focus of Muslim groups in the West is on seeking to get recognition for Muslim cultural identity, often to the point of excess.
Take, for instance, the case of women’s dress. Hijab (modest dress) is adequate, yet some Muslims in the West make a big hue and cry, demanding that the naqab (face-veil) be allowed. Some go even further, unmindful of the fact that this might lead to a further escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment in society. Some extremist self-styled Islamic groups in the West, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, even raise the simplistic idea of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the West, completely forgetting that the liberty to do so is not even available in the so-called dar ul-Islam.
The real conflict between Muslims and the West today is in the realm of ideas. Militarily, Muslims were defeated by the West two centuries ago, and, far from seriously hoping to overwhelm the West with military force, Muslim countries are thoroughly dependent on the West for military aid. In order to defend themselves effectively, Muslims must first understand the West, and for this we need Occidentalists, counterparts of the West’s Orientalists.
However, unlike the classical Orientalist approach to the Orient, these scholars should not be blindly critical of the West, but should, in an objective fashion, examine both its drawbacks and its virtues. Most Orientalists, as Edward Said so brilliantly pointed out in his magnum opus, Orientalism, did not adopt such a balanced approach, and actually served as tools of Western imperialism. The Muslim world, on the other hand, needs Occidentalists who evaluate the West objectively.
Islamophobia in the West
Some time ago, I met a Muslim professor who teaches at an American university. I asked him about the future of Muslims in America. He seemed very pessimistic and even said that Western countries might one day ask their Muslim citizens to leave. Personally, I do not think that this would be easy. Muslim and Western countries are too inter-dependent for that to happen.
This is why it is vital that they work seriously to counter the present climate of hatred and mistrust between Muslims and the West. Unfortunately, the simplistic approach and egotism of some Muslim groups in the West and the propaganda of some Christian and Jewish religious and semi-religious forces are giving a tremendous boost to Islamophobic sentiments across the West.
The practice of the Prophet Muhammad was to seek to create normal or settled conditions by accepting the terms and conditions set by his opponents in order to do away with the climate of hatred and conflict. This is what Muslims must seek to do, without compromising on the necessities of their faith.
Muslims must also desist from viewing the West and Western culture in stark, Manichaean terms. They must seek to learn from the good things that the West has to offer while abstaining from its draw-backs, for everything that is good, no matter what its source, is of value to the whole human community.
Maulana Waris Mazhari
Maulana Waris Mazhari: "In many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness" | The issue of strained relations between Muslims and the West is a long-standing one, and it has taken a new turn since the attacks of 9/11. In recent years, much has been written on the subject by both Muslim and Western scholars. Following the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations in the late 1990s, a large number of Western scholars concluded that reconciliation between Muslims and the West is impossible and that a clash between them is inevitable.
Influential Western think-tanks have aggressively pursued this line of thinking, as have extremist religious and political forces, particularly Christian evangelicals and Zionist organisations across Europe and America. In this context, the crucial question arises as to how the situation can be changed, as indeed it must. Do Muslims have any proper strategy or programme in this regard? My answer is firmly in the negative.
Superficial knowledge of the West
Despite the massive anti-Western movements and sentiments that have characterised much of the Muslim world over the last one hundred and fifty years, the fact remains that Muslim intellectuals, particularly the ulema, have only a very superficial understanding and knowledge of the West. In actual fact, there has been no serious attempt on the part of Muslim scholars to properly study and evaluate Western thought, civilization and history.
Today, our religious scholars have the same sort of stereotypical views about the West as the West had about Muslims and Islam several centuries ago at the time of the Crusades. Our religious scholars believe, and this is what they tell their followers, that the West simply stands for drunkenness, sexual license, immorality and all other sorts of wanton desires and pleasures.
Because of this approach we have not been able to learn from the good things that the West has to offer, not even about aspects of the Muslim scientific heritage that the West adopted from us and then built on.
Instead, in many Muslim circles, hatred of the West is considered to be the biggest sign of religiousness. This mentality developed during the colonial period, and it should have been done away with the end of the European colonial empires. However, instead of that happening, it has been greatly reinforced and strengthened, and has now become so deeply rooted that Muslim reformers find it virtually impossible to combat.
Critical, dispassionate study of the West necessary
Scores of institutions for the study of Islam and Muslim culture and history have been established in the West, and several Western universities have special departments dedicated to these fields. They have produced a massive amount of literature. In contrast, there are probably not even two or three scholarly institutions in the Muslim world devoted to the study of the West using modern scholarly methods.
Universities in Muslim countries should have set up departments of Western studies, and there should have been private- and government-funded institutions for the study of the West, but, unfortunately, none exist. We desperately need such institutions to study Western history and culture in a critical yet dispassionate way, so that Muslims can understand not only the limitations or drawbacks of contemporary Western civilisation, but also its virtues, which they could adopt.
Muslim double standards
Today, most Muslims have a double-standard approach to the West. On the one hand, many of them are vociferously opposed to the West and insist that Muslims should stay away from Western culture as far as possible. At the same time, many of them fervently desire to migrate to the West!
I have been twice to America, where I met several Muslims who brand America as "the Great Satan" but still continue to live there for the economic benefits and opportunities that America provides them. They show-off their American passports or, if they do not as yet have them, are impatiently awaiting the day when they will be granted American citizenship. Why, one must ask, these double-standards? If these Muslims are so anti-America, why don’t they leave the country and return to what they consider dar ul-Islam, "the abode of Islam", where many of them came from?
I believe that there are numerous aspects of Western culture and society that reflect the virtues that characterised the early history of Islam. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, groups that want to serve the cause of Islam are under severe restrictions. It is unfortunate that virtually the whole focus of Muslim groups in the West is on seeking to get recognition for Muslim cultural identity, often to the point of excess.
Take, for instance, the case of women’s dress. Hijab (modest dress) is adequate, yet some Muslims in the West make a big hue and cry, demanding that the naqab (face-veil) be allowed. Some go even further, unmindful of the fact that this might lead to a further escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment in society. Some extremist self-styled Islamic groups in the West, such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir, even raise the simplistic idea of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the West, completely forgetting that the liberty to do so is not even available in the so-called dar ul-Islam.
The real conflict between Muslims and the West today is in the realm of ideas. Militarily, Muslims were defeated by the West two centuries ago, and, far from seriously hoping to overwhelm the West with military force, Muslim countries are thoroughly dependent on the West for military aid. In order to defend themselves effectively, Muslims must first understand the West, and for this we need Occidentalists, counterparts of the West’s Orientalists.
However, unlike the classical Orientalist approach to the Orient, these scholars should not be blindly critical of the West, but should, in an objective fashion, examine both its drawbacks and its virtues. Most Orientalists, as Edward Said so brilliantly pointed out in his magnum opus, Orientalism, did not adopt such a balanced approach, and actually served as tools of Western imperialism. The Muslim world, on the other hand, needs Occidentalists who evaluate the West objectively.
Islamophobia in the West
Some time ago, I met a Muslim professor who teaches at an American university. I asked him about the future of Muslims in America. He seemed very pessimistic and even said that Western countries might one day ask their Muslim citizens to leave. Personally, I do not think that this would be easy. Muslim and Western countries are too inter-dependent for that to happen.
This is why it is vital that they work seriously to counter the present climate of hatred and mistrust between Muslims and the West. Unfortunately, the simplistic approach and egotism of some Muslim groups in the West and the propaganda of some Christian and Jewish religious and semi-religious forces are giving a tremendous boost to Islamophobic sentiments across the West.
The practice of the Prophet Muhammad was to seek to create normal or settled conditions by accepting the terms and conditions set by his opponents in order to do away with the climate of hatred and conflict. This is what Muslims must seek to do, without compromising on the necessities of their faith.
Muslims must also desist from viewing the West and Western culture in stark, Manichaean terms. They must seek to learn from the good things that the West has to offer while abstaining from its draw-backs, for everything that is good, no matter what its source, is of value to the whole human community.
Maulana Waris Mazhari
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Bombs away
Across the Arab and Muslim world, jihadists are beginning to renounce violence as a means to change their societies – and not just because they lost, writes Nathan Field.
The need for revival has been a central theme in recent Arab history: for more than a thousand years, Arab countries dominated (or at least saw themselves as dominating) their western rivals. But in the last two centuries, colonialism and globalisation made it painfully clear to Arab thinkers that their countries had fallen behind politically, economically and technologically. The region’s intellectuals have therefore long been preoccupied with devising ways to revive Arab society from its slumbers – and to return it to its previous glory.
Some looked outward in search of answers: for the great Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, who had studied in France, mimicking Western Europe was the key to revival since, in his view, Egypt had always been more Mediterranean than Eastern or Islamic. Like many in his era, Gamal Abdel Nasser looked favourably at how Soviet-style socialism had transformed Russia, a backwards agriculture-based economy, into an industrial super power in the span of two decades, and tried to apply that approach to Egypt.
For Islamists, most prominently the Muslim Brotherhood, the path to revival required a more inward -looking approach. In their view, countries like Egypt and Algeria had declined and fallen prey to colonial dominance because they had minimised the significance of Islam, the source of the society’s original greatness. Rather than copying non-Islamic models from the West, the Islamist approach has been to attempt a re-Islamicisation of Arab society, to rid it of corrupting western influences.
The majority of Islamists have always taken a peaceful approach to this reform process. But radical elements are a feature of most political movements, especially those aiming at reform; everywhere Islamist movements have flourished, small minority factions have seen violence – usually framed in the language of jihad – as a legitimate tool to change society. In Algeria and Egypt during the 1980s and 1990s, radical groups of this sort engaged in prolonged and bloody clashes with their governments – and similar, if smaller, battles, took place in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Morocco. To many outside observers, this violence appeared random and irrational, but we must understand it as the jihadists themselves did: as part of the same movement for reform that has been the dominant strain in Arab intellectual thought throughout the modern era.
During the last decade, however, this local violence has declined dramatically. In Egypt violence from organised militant groups has disappeared. The country’s two main jihadist groups, al Jihad and al Gama’a al Islamiyya, have both published books denouncing their past actions, usually referred to as the “Revisions”, and most of their members have since been released from jail. In Algeria, the overwhelming majority of the violent Islamists of the 1990s have embraced the National Reconciliation project and returned home. And in Saudi Arabia, several hundred arrested jihadists have passed through “rehabilitation” or “re-education” and been reintegrated back into society.
These developments have generally been regarded as separate and distinct events. There are differences, to be sure: in Egypt the shift came from within the jihadist movement, while in Saudi Arabia the state funded and sponsored the “re-education” programmes. But we must begin to understand them as local versions of a broader regional trend resulting from sustained religious reflection, in which jihadists have recognised the mistakes of their violent attempts at reform and begun to formulate non-violent alternatives. In the last three decades, small factions within the Islamist movement shifted decisively toward violence, but today we are seeing a reversal of this intellectual trend.
Some observers contend that the departure from violence has been caused not by internal reflection but by harsh treatment at the hands of the state. Egyptian intellectuals I have interviewed – many of them harsh critics of their government – tend to emphasise the brutality of the security forces as the critical factor driving the change. It is true, of course, that everywhere jihadists fought their governments they lost, and it cannot be denied that such defeats – and the long jail terms that followed – must have encouraged radicals to rethink their approach.
But there is ample evidence to suggest that jihadists reached this conclusion on their own, without being coerced into doing so. In Algeria, for example, there has been a spate of recent defections from the al Qa’eda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) with militants “coming down from the mountains” to surrender. When al Gama’a announced its initial ceasefire in 1997, it took Egyptian authorities, who viewed it as a trick, entirely by surprise. Several reports in the Arabic-language media have presented evidence of a non-violent turn inside al Jihad even before the group’s one-time leader, Sayyid Imam – also known as Dr Fadl – published his “Revisions” in 2007.
It seems likely, in fact, that religious reflection has been the most important factor in the move away from violence. Even violent radicals require some imprimatur from religious authorities, and in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, at least in the past, there were some among the ulema (the scholars who are the arbiters of Islamic law) who were ambivalent or approving – just enough legitimacy for a jihadi seeking it. There was also, at least initially, some degree of social support among the population for their actions.
But in each of these countries, the situation has changed as society – and more importantly, religious scholars – have turned strongly against violence. Given the emphasis on religious conformity in Islamic societies, no group claiming to act in the name of Islam and the people can retain support if both denounce its actions.
A recent Al-Hayat interview with Hassan Hattab, the founder of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, but now a major advocate of reconciliation, demonstrates this clearly. Asked why he embraced reconciliation after such a violent past, he pointed to the change in the ulema’s position: “We noticed that the ulema turned against the continuation of violence and this was an essential factor in our decision to stop operations. There wasn’t a single cleric who supported our fight against the government. Where previously they were silent about what was happening, now they take a clear position against the violence.”
Some commentators have argued that the retreat from violence is insincere, a ploy by jihadist factions to get themselves out of jail or obtain lenient treatment. In certain cases this may be true, but given that few of those released from jail have returned to violence, until they do, it is necessary to give them the benefit of the doubt.
We can measure the depth and seriousness of a group’s conversion by studying their efforts to formulate alternative strategies for reform. For while some jihadists have renounced violence as a means to reform, the conditions that drove them to violence in the first place have not changed.
Egypt’s al Gama’a al Islamiyya has gone the furthest. Not only did they denounce violence as a tool of change, outlined in several books published in 2002-2003, but it is trying, despite being prohibited from doing so, to enter mainstream politics. On its website, the group issues statements on current affairs not dramatically distinct from those of the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups considered mainstream. When Barack Obama was elected president in November, the group posted a statement congratulating him and called on him to repair relations with the Muslim world – hardly the type of behaviour associated with hard-core religious fanaticism.
Dr Fadl’s vaunted 2007 “Revisions” are not as significant as al Gama’a’s moves toward reform, as they do not lay out a formula for dealing with the conditions that drove the group to violence in the first place. Fadl merely says that trying to overthrow the ruler is wrong if the group does not have the ability to do so – which seems to imply it would be right if they did. Meanwhile, according to a recent article at Islam Online, the Libyan Armed Fighting Group, nominally affiliated with al Qa’eda, is on the verge of issuing its own “Revisions”, supposedly based on an even more far-reaching formula for reform than that of Egypt’s al Gama’a. If true, this would be extremely significant.
There are, of course, significant caveats to temper excess optimism about the end of jihadist violence. The trend toward non-violent means has included organised groups but not necessarily individuals or smaller factions. Most Egyptian analysts argue that violence has “stopped” but not “ended”: the underlying conditions remain unaltered and there is no predicting the actions of isolated violent individuals.
These revisions, furthermore, are relevant only to “near enemy” violence – against Arab states and populations – and may have little bearing outside of tactical readjustment on al Qa’eda actions against the United States or its allies. The revisions in Egypt, the Saudi re-education programme and the Algerian reconciliation are concerned only with the morality of Muslim-on-Muslim violence inside Muslim countries.
In every country there are some holdouts who refuse to accept this change, but they are a very small minority of the total number who once embraced violence. The broader trend – across the Arab world – reflects the firm position of Arab publics and Islamic scholars against internal violence, and it would appear a formidable obstacle to future groups who seek to affect change with violent means.
Nathan Field is a journalist who writes about Egyptian politics.
The need for revival has been a central theme in recent Arab history: for more than a thousand years, Arab countries dominated (or at least saw themselves as dominating) their western rivals. But in the last two centuries, colonialism and globalisation made it painfully clear to Arab thinkers that their countries had fallen behind politically, economically and technologically. The region’s intellectuals have therefore long been preoccupied with devising ways to revive Arab society from its slumbers – and to return it to its previous glory.
Some looked outward in search of answers: for the great Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, who had studied in France, mimicking Western Europe was the key to revival since, in his view, Egypt had always been more Mediterranean than Eastern or Islamic. Like many in his era, Gamal Abdel Nasser looked favourably at how Soviet-style socialism had transformed Russia, a backwards agriculture-based economy, into an industrial super power in the span of two decades, and tried to apply that approach to Egypt.
For Islamists, most prominently the Muslim Brotherhood, the path to revival required a more inward -looking approach. In their view, countries like Egypt and Algeria had declined and fallen prey to colonial dominance because they had minimised the significance of Islam, the source of the society’s original greatness. Rather than copying non-Islamic models from the West, the Islamist approach has been to attempt a re-Islamicisation of Arab society, to rid it of corrupting western influences.
The majority of Islamists have always taken a peaceful approach to this reform process. But radical elements are a feature of most political movements, especially those aiming at reform; everywhere Islamist movements have flourished, small minority factions have seen violence – usually framed in the language of jihad – as a legitimate tool to change society. In Algeria and Egypt during the 1980s and 1990s, radical groups of this sort engaged in prolonged and bloody clashes with their governments – and similar, if smaller, battles, took place in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Morocco. To many outside observers, this violence appeared random and irrational, but we must understand it as the jihadists themselves did: as part of the same movement for reform that has been the dominant strain in Arab intellectual thought throughout the modern era.
During the last decade, however, this local violence has declined dramatically. In Egypt violence from organised militant groups has disappeared. The country’s two main jihadist groups, al Jihad and al Gama’a al Islamiyya, have both published books denouncing their past actions, usually referred to as the “Revisions”, and most of their members have since been released from jail. In Algeria, the overwhelming majority of the violent Islamists of the 1990s have embraced the National Reconciliation project and returned home. And in Saudi Arabia, several hundred arrested jihadists have passed through “rehabilitation” or “re-education” and been reintegrated back into society.
These developments have generally been regarded as separate and distinct events. There are differences, to be sure: in Egypt the shift came from within the jihadist movement, while in Saudi Arabia the state funded and sponsored the “re-education” programmes. But we must begin to understand them as local versions of a broader regional trend resulting from sustained religious reflection, in which jihadists have recognised the mistakes of their violent attempts at reform and begun to formulate non-violent alternatives. In the last three decades, small factions within the Islamist movement shifted decisively toward violence, but today we are seeing a reversal of this intellectual trend.
Some observers contend that the departure from violence has been caused not by internal reflection but by harsh treatment at the hands of the state. Egyptian intellectuals I have interviewed – many of them harsh critics of their government – tend to emphasise the brutality of the security forces as the critical factor driving the change. It is true, of course, that everywhere jihadists fought their governments they lost, and it cannot be denied that such defeats – and the long jail terms that followed – must have encouraged radicals to rethink their approach.
But there is ample evidence to suggest that jihadists reached this conclusion on their own, without being coerced into doing so. In Algeria, for example, there has been a spate of recent defections from the al Qa’eda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) with militants “coming down from the mountains” to surrender. When al Gama’a announced its initial ceasefire in 1997, it took Egyptian authorities, who viewed it as a trick, entirely by surprise. Several reports in the Arabic-language media have presented evidence of a non-violent turn inside al Jihad even before the group’s one-time leader, Sayyid Imam – also known as Dr Fadl – published his “Revisions” in 2007.
It seems likely, in fact, that religious reflection has been the most important factor in the move away from violence. Even violent radicals require some imprimatur from religious authorities, and in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, at least in the past, there were some among the ulema (the scholars who are the arbiters of Islamic law) who were ambivalent or approving – just enough legitimacy for a jihadi seeking it. There was also, at least initially, some degree of social support among the population for their actions.
But in each of these countries, the situation has changed as society – and more importantly, religious scholars – have turned strongly against violence. Given the emphasis on religious conformity in Islamic societies, no group claiming to act in the name of Islam and the people can retain support if both denounce its actions.
A recent Al-Hayat interview with Hassan Hattab, the founder of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, but now a major advocate of reconciliation, demonstrates this clearly. Asked why he embraced reconciliation after such a violent past, he pointed to the change in the ulema’s position: “We noticed that the ulema turned against the continuation of violence and this was an essential factor in our decision to stop operations. There wasn’t a single cleric who supported our fight against the government. Where previously they were silent about what was happening, now they take a clear position against the violence.”
Some commentators have argued that the retreat from violence is insincere, a ploy by jihadist factions to get themselves out of jail or obtain lenient treatment. In certain cases this may be true, but given that few of those released from jail have returned to violence, until they do, it is necessary to give them the benefit of the doubt.
We can measure the depth and seriousness of a group’s conversion by studying their efforts to formulate alternative strategies for reform. For while some jihadists have renounced violence as a means to reform, the conditions that drove them to violence in the first place have not changed.
Egypt’s al Gama’a al Islamiyya has gone the furthest. Not only did they denounce violence as a tool of change, outlined in several books published in 2002-2003, but it is trying, despite being prohibited from doing so, to enter mainstream politics. On its website, the group issues statements on current affairs not dramatically distinct from those of the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups considered mainstream. When Barack Obama was elected president in November, the group posted a statement congratulating him and called on him to repair relations with the Muslim world – hardly the type of behaviour associated with hard-core religious fanaticism.
Dr Fadl’s vaunted 2007 “Revisions” are not as significant as al Gama’a’s moves toward reform, as they do not lay out a formula for dealing with the conditions that drove the group to violence in the first place. Fadl merely says that trying to overthrow the ruler is wrong if the group does not have the ability to do so – which seems to imply it would be right if they did. Meanwhile, according to a recent article at Islam Online, the Libyan Armed Fighting Group, nominally affiliated with al Qa’eda, is on the verge of issuing its own “Revisions”, supposedly based on an even more far-reaching formula for reform than that of Egypt’s al Gama’a. If true, this would be extremely significant.
There are, of course, significant caveats to temper excess optimism about the end of jihadist violence. The trend toward non-violent means has included organised groups but not necessarily individuals or smaller factions. Most Egyptian analysts argue that violence has “stopped” but not “ended”: the underlying conditions remain unaltered and there is no predicting the actions of isolated violent individuals.
These revisions, furthermore, are relevant only to “near enemy” violence – against Arab states and populations – and may have little bearing outside of tactical readjustment on al Qa’eda actions against the United States or its allies. The revisions in Egypt, the Saudi re-education programme and the Algerian reconciliation are concerned only with the morality of Muslim-on-Muslim violence inside Muslim countries.
In every country there are some holdouts who refuse to accept this change, but they are a very small minority of the total number who once embraced violence. The broader trend – across the Arab world – reflects the firm position of Arab publics and Islamic scholars against internal violence, and it would appear a formidable obstacle to future groups who seek to affect change with violent means.
Nathan Field is a journalist who writes about Egyptian politics.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Restoring faith in religious schools
When a car bomb went off in Damascus last September, killing mainly civilians, antiterrorism officers found a network of private Islamic institutes had spiralled out of control. Now these religious academies are under strict new rules.
DAMASCUS // It was an unremarkable Saturday morning in Damascus, right up until 8.45am when the bomb exploded on the main airport road, killing 17 people and wounding more than a dozen others.
There had been previous bombs in Syria; there have been assassinations and political disappearances. But the assault of Sept 27 2008 was different. It was the deadliest of its kind for decades and, although apparently targeting a security service office, the victims were overwhelmingly civilian.
Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Turkey – Syria’s neighbours – had all become more or less intimate with this type of attack and the repercussions; the immediate panic and confusion, struggling with mass casualties, the gruesome work of sifting through body parts to identify the dead, trying to hunt down the perpetrators.
Syria, however, was caught off guard. And if the numerous security agencies were blindsided by the bombing itself, they were also shocked by the results of their inquiry into how it happened.
Antiterrorism officers discovered that a network of influential private Islamic schools had spiralled dangerously out of control.
Religious schooling in Syria has expanded rapidly since 2005, when there were just 30 state-run religious education institutes with 7,000 students. According to official figures, by 2008 that number had risen to 127 Islamic academies with about 21,000 students.
However, it was the 32 private schools in Damascus that set alarm bells ringing. Although opened with government permission, they had for years been running largely unconstrained by rules or regulations. No firm system had ever been put in place to monitor their teachings or ideologies, or to prevent the spread of radicalism among their thousands of students.
Less than two months after the 200kg car bomb was detonated, Syrian state television aired the confessions of nine men and one woman, who said they had orchestrated and carried out the attack. All admitted to being members of Fatah al Islam, a Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group.
Fatah al Islam fought a bloody war against the Lebanese army in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in 2007, a conflict that killed more than 300 people.
Among the Syria bombing suspects was Abdul Baqi Hussein, who claimed to be Fatah al Islam’s security leader and to have carried out guerrilla attacks against the Americans in Iraq. He also said he had studied for two years at the Fatah institute in Damascus, one of the city’s major private Islamic schools.
In his televised remarks, Hussein portrayed the institute as a magnet that “attracts many Arab and foreign students” who shared a “hard-line” Islamic ideology. It was at the school that his own militancy had been incubated, he said, and the place where he had met like-minded colleagues.
The mosque and teaching rooms of the Fatah institute are a short distance from the Christian quarter of the Old City and separated from Bab Sharqi, a major historical site and tourist landmark, by a congested road.
The institute was established in 1965 by Mohammed Salih Farfor and initially had 200 students. Today, it is administered by his son, Hussam Eddin Farfor, and has 5,500 students from around the world, including Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, although most are Syrians from conservative Sunni families.
In the aftermath of the bombing it came under close scrutiny. Government investigators realised they had little information about key aspects of the school’s operations.
It was teaching from a syllabus that had never been approved by either the ministry of education or the ministry of religious affairs.
Foreign students were not properly vetted by the security services, and little was known about teaching staff and their beliefs. Crucially, the sources of the institute’s funding were unclear.
A senior figure within Syria’s religious schools community, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Fatah institute had an annual budget of some US$3.3 million (Dh12m), and that the authorities had only been able to accurately trace a fraction of it back to its sources.
The rest came from unknown private donors.
When the televised confessions implicated the institute in the bomber’s ideological development, there were public demands from secular elements of Syrian society that it be forcibly closed to prevent a spread of Islamic militancy.
Moderates inside the ruling elite reportedly harboured similar fears: that Syria’s Sunni majority population – significant numbers of whom probably quietly advocate Syria being run as an Islamic state, rather than as a secular-leaning republic – may have passed the point where it could be controlled.
In an interview at the Fatah institute, Mr Farfor said the school taught a modern and moderate curriculum – including western philosophy and languages – and placed a heavy emphasis on tolerance. The bomber was an anomaly, he said, and had not learned violence there.
“We have a good history, one man cannot deform us,” he said. “In the days of the Prophet Mohammed there were liars and hypocrites, do we blame Mohammed for that? This man does not represent our academy, we have good professors and students who become key figures in society, why does anyone want to delete our history?”
Mr Farfor pointedly warned against closing private Islamic schools, saying it would only serve to exacerbate problems of extremism, driving young Muslim scholars perilously out of sight.
“Let’s teach the youth in the light, not let them go underground where they will get a fanatical or extremist interpretation of Islam,” he said.
The Fatah institute was not the only Islamic establishment affected by the lax, confused government regulations. All of the private institutes were in a similar situation. The largest, oldest and most illustrious of the schools, the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Institute – also known as Abu Noor – has as many as 8,000 students enrolled at any one time, some 300 of whom are non-Arabs, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco.
Its annual budget is about $4.8m, much of which comes from a registered Islamic charitable foundation, al Ansar, which has declared annual finances of $2.8m. The remaining funding for the Kuftaro institute, $2m, comes from private donors whose identities are unknown to the authorities.
Such opaque financial arrangements opened the possibility that money was coming from ultraconservative Islamic groups that may have deliberately wanted to stir up militancy in Syria to undermine the regime. Sunni extremists have made it clear they consider Syria’s largely secular authorities to be un-Islamic, a tension heightened because the ruling Syrian elite are Alawite, a sub-sect of Shia Islam considered heretical by Sunni hardliners. Damascus’s close relationship with Shiite Iran has also angered Arab regimes and Sunni hardliners, all fearful that Shiism is spreading in the region and growing in power.
The large number of foreign students and private teaching staff exacerbated potential for trouble in the Islamic institutes. The combination of factors raised difficult questions for the Syrian authorities. “Where were they getting the money from?” asked one government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There were 1,000 private teachers, all paid much more than normal teachers, and they got their salaries from private sources, and we didn’t evaluate them. There are about 500 foreign students who had visas without thorough checks of their backgrounds.”
Private academies maintain that the overwhelming majority of students are peaceful and moderate. But one of the most well-respected schools admitted that foreign students are proving difficult to track. Again, speaking on condition of anonymity, a leading institute administrator said he had concerns before the bombing.
“The Syrian students are not so much of a worry, and most of the foreign students live on campus so we know what is happening with them. But one third of students live off campus and they are much harder to monitor. We don’t know where they go, who they meet, what ideas they are getting. We’d rather they all lived inside the academy.”
Of most immediate concern to the authorities, however, was the unregulated curriculum, which enabled some of the institutes to teach nakedly sectarian agendas. A member of a religious schools review committee, established in the wake of the bombing, said sectarian intolerance had been taught in classrooms.
“They did not have to have their books approved, or their curriculum,” the committee member said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. “In some Sunni schools they were using books that said it was against God for Muslims to visit the tombs and holy shrines, which are Shiite cultural practices.
“And some of the Hawza [Shiite religious schools] taught negatively about the caliphs who followed the Prophet, a criticism aimed at Sunnis.”
The impact of these teachings was to emphasise differences between Sunnis and Shiites, a dangerous subject, particularly following the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, and the perpetually simmering torment in Lebanon. Syria, with a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a sizeable Christian minority and various other communities, has been at pains to avoid igniting any sectarian fires on home soil.
Most of the problems arose because no single government ministry was ultimately responsible for the private religious schools. They were licensed by the ministry of religious affairs, funded by charities overseen by the ministry of labour and social affairs, and had broad curriculum directions mapped out by the ministry of education.
As the Islamic institutions quickly developed in size and number, the absence of clear regulations and co-ordinated oversight swamped the ability of Syria’s often-dysfunctional bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on. Laws governing religious schools were still based on a decree issued in the late 1950s, when Syria and Egypt were joined as the United Arab Republic, under the leadership of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The Sept 27 bombing came as a wake-up call to the authorities, underlining the need for quick and effective reforms. It also apparently galvanised normally obstinate ministries into actually taking action. Rather than closing any of the private schools, by the end of last year – a few months after the bombing – they were all brought under the direct control of the ministry of religious affairs.
A unified, government-approved curriculum was established in consultation with the institutes’ heads, removing all books that spread sectarian discord. Texts making disparaging remarks about either Sunnis or Shiites were prohibited from classes.
New financial regulations were introduced. Since the end of 2008 it has been a requirement that comprehensive, detailed accounts be submitted to a government finances committee for audit. Donations from charities no longer pass directly into the hands of the institutions, instead needing prior approval from government observers.
In an effort to draw a clear line between the funding charities and the schools, anyone working in a religious capacity within a private Islamic teaching institute is no longer allowed to hold an official position within a charity providing finance to that school.
Two other key changes are being implemented, concerning teachers and foreign students. Whereas overseas students used to be able to register for study at any school prepared to accommodate them, new regulations mean all foreign students will be compelled to register at a single centre, the Badr al Deen al Hasseni school in Damascus’s Old City.
Controlled by the ministry of religious affairs – which will also be responsible for obtaining entry visas and screening students – it will make it easier to identify any Islamic extremists. The days of the Abu Noor institute attracting hundreds of foreign students are effectively over.
Control over school staff will also be passed fully into government hands, with all teachers to be brought on to government payrolls, in effect nationalising staff at private religious schools.
“Each school will get its donations and money through a committee headed by an employee who works for the ministry,” Mohammad Bukheet, director of the religious education department at the ministry of religious affairs, said in an interview with Syria Today magazine.
“We [the government] want to know where all monies are coming from and where and when they are being spent.”
Mr Bukheet, who is in charge of day-to-day oversight of the religious schools, made it clear that private institutes would have far less freedom from now on. “We will be the decision-makers,” he said. “We can now hire and fire any teacher and we will pay their salaries.”
The religious schools have had little option but to embrace the changes ordered by Syria’s authoritarian administration.
In November leaders of all the major private Islamic institutes were invited to meet with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, to talk about the new regulations. According to one institute official, the president made it clear the schools were not under threat but that they had to be brought under a coherent legal framework. The president also reportedly said the raft of new controls would be tested for a year and then reviewed.
“The political leadership wants to lead by consensus on this,” said the official. “It doesn’t want a crackdown and the measures it has introduced are moderate, they respect our rights.”
At the Kuftaro institute, Salah al Deen Kuftaro, the school director, said he supported the new rules.
“We are happy with the new measures. We work in a transparent way so we are not angry.
“I don’t see these things as negative points. For example, with a unified curriculum approved by the government, it means our qualifications will be officially recognised. In the past we had graduates with certificates that were not accepted for government jobs.” Mr Kuftaro also said the decision not to shut all private Islamic schools had been a moderate and sensible solution.
“We have to accept there has been a rise in Islamic sentiments in the region. We have to recognise that phenomena, not try to ignore it.
“To have our young people studying in our schools is better than them going to other countries where they may learn strange ideas or end up with teachers who tell them the real Islam is violent.
“We don’t need people going abroad to return with radical and wrong ideas. The best solution is to have them studying in the open here in Syria.”
psands@thenational.ae
DAMASCUS // It was an unremarkable Saturday morning in Damascus, right up until 8.45am when the bomb exploded on the main airport road, killing 17 people and wounding more than a dozen others.
There had been previous bombs in Syria; there have been assassinations and political disappearances. But the assault of Sept 27 2008 was different. It was the deadliest of its kind for decades and, although apparently targeting a security service office, the victims were overwhelmingly civilian.
Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Turkey – Syria’s neighbours – had all become more or less intimate with this type of attack and the repercussions; the immediate panic and confusion, struggling with mass casualties, the gruesome work of sifting through body parts to identify the dead, trying to hunt down the perpetrators.
Syria, however, was caught off guard. And if the numerous security agencies were blindsided by the bombing itself, they were also shocked by the results of their inquiry into how it happened.
Antiterrorism officers discovered that a network of influential private Islamic schools had spiralled dangerously out of control.
Religious schooling in Syria has expanded rapidly since 2005, when there were just 30 state-run religious education institutes with 7,000 students. According to official figures, by 2008 that number had risen to 127 Islamic academies with about 21,000 students.
However, it was the 32 private schools in Damascus that set alarm bells ringing. Although opened with government permission, they had for years been running largely unconstrained by rules or regulations. No firm system had ever been put in place to monitor their teachings or ideologies, or to prevent the spread of radicalism among their thousands of students.
Less than two months after the 200kg car bomb was detonated, Syrian state television aired the confessions of nine men and one woman, who said they had orchestrated and carried out the attack. All admitted to being members of Fatah al Islam, a Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group.
Fatah al Islam fought a bloody war against the Lebanese army in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in 2007, a conflict that killed more than 300 people.
Among the Syria bombing suspects was Abdul Baqi Hussein, who claimed to be Fatah al Islam’s security leader and to have carried out guerrilla attacks against the Americans in Iraq. He also said he had studied for two years at the Fatah institute in Damascus, one of the city’s major private Islamic schools.
In his televised remarks, Hussein portrayed the institute as a magnet that “attracts many Arab and foreign students” who shared a “hard-line” Islamic ideology. It was at the school that his own militancy had been incubated, he said, and the place where he had met like-minded colleagues.
The mosque and teaching rooms of the Fatah institute are a short distance from the Christian quarter of the Old City and separated from Bab Sharqi, a major historical site and tourist landmark, by a congested road.
The institute was established in 1965 by Mohammed Salih Farfor and initially had 200 students. Today, it is administered by his son, Hussam Eddin Farfor, and has 5,500 students from around the world, including Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, although most are Syrians from conservative Sunni families.
In the aftermath of the bombing it came under close scrutiny. Government investigators realised they had little information about key aspects of the school’s operations.
It was teaching from a syllabus that had never been approved by either the ministry of education or the ministry of religious affairs.
Foreign students were not properly vetted by the security services, and little was known about teaching staff and their beliefs. Crucially, the sources of the institute’s funding were unclear.
A senior figure within Syria’s religious schools community, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Fatah institute had an annual budget of some US$3.3 million (Dh12m), and that the authorities had only been able to accurately trace a fraction of it back to its sources.
The rest came from unknown private donors.
When the televised confessions implicated the institute in the bomber’s ideological development, there were public demands from secular elements of Syrian society that it be forcibly closed to prevent a spread of Islamic militancy.
Moderates inside the ruling elite reportedly harboured similar fears: that Syria’s Sunni majority population – significant numbers of whom probably quietly advocate Syria being run as an Islamic state, rather than as a secular-leaning republic – may have passed the point where it could be controlled.
In an interview at the Fatah institute, Mr Farfor said the school taught a modern and moderate curriculum – including western philosophy and languages – and placed a heavy emphasis on tolerance. The bomber was an anomaly, he said, and had not learned violence there.
“We have a good history, one man cannot deform us,” he said. “In the days of the Prophet Mohammed there were liars and hypocrites, do we blame Mohammed for that? This man does not represent our academy, we have good professors and students who become key figures in society, why does anyone want to delete our history?”
Mr Farfor pointedly warned against closing private Islamic schools, saying it would only serve to exacerbate problems of extremism, driving young Muslim scholars perilously out of sight.
“Let’s teach the youth in the light, not let them go underground where they will get a fanatical or extremist interpretation of Islam,” he said.
The Fatah institute was not the only Islamic establishment affected by the lax, confused government regulations. All of the private institutes were in a similar situation. The largest, oldest and most illustrious of the schools, the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Institute – also known as Abu Noor – has as many as 8,000 students enrolled at any one time, some 300 of whom are non-Arabs, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco.
Its annual budget is about $4.8m, much of which comes from a registered Islamic charitable foundation, al Ansar, which has declared annual finances of $2.8m. The remaining funding for the Kuftaro institute, $2m, comes from private donors whose identities are unknown to the authorities.
Such opaque financial arrangements opened the possibility that money was coming from ultraconservative Islamic groups that may have deliberately wanted to stir up militancy in Syria to undermine the regime. Sunni extremists have made it clear they consider Syria’s largely secular authorities to be un-Islamic, a tension heightened because the ruling Syrian elite are Alawite, a sub-sect of Shia Islam considered heretical by Sunni hardliners. Damascus’s close relationship with Shiite Iran has also angered Arab regimes and Sunni hardliners, all fearful that Shiism is spreading in the region and growing in power.
The large number of foreign students and private teaching staff exacerbated potential for trouble in the Islamic institutes. The combination of factors raised difficult questions for the Syrian authorities. “Where were they getting the money from?” asked one government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There were 1,000 private teachers, all paid much more than normal teachers, and they got their salaries from private sources, and we didn’t evaluate them. There are about 500 foreign students who had visas without thorough checks of their backgrounds.”
Private academies maintain that the overwhelming majority of students are peaceful and moderate. But one of the most well-respected schools admitted that foreign students are proving difficult to track. Again, speaking on condition of anonymity, a leading institute administrator said he had concerns before the bombing.
“The Syrian students are not so much of a worry, and most of the foreign students live on campus so we know what is happening with them. But one third of students live off campus and they are much harder to monitor. We don’t know where they go, who they meet, what ideas they are getting. We’d rather they all lived inside the academy.”
Of most immediate concern to the authorities, however, was the unregulated curriculum, which enabled some of the institutes to teach nakedly sectarian agendas. A member of a religious schools review committee, established in the wake of the bombing, said sectarian intolerance had been taught in classrooms.
“They did not have to have their books approved, or their curriculum,” the committee member said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. “In some Sunni schools they were using books that said it was against God for Muslims to visit the tombs and holy shrines, which are Shiite cultural practices.
“And some of the Hawza [Shiite religious schools] taught negatively about the caliphs who followed the Prophet, a criticism aimed at Sunnis.”
The impact of these teachings was to emphasise differences between Sunnis and Shiites, a dangerous subject, particularly following the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, and the perpetually simmering torment in Lebanon. Syria, with a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a sizeable Christian minority and various other communities, has been at pains to avoid igniting any sectarian fires on home soil.
Most of the problems arose because no single government ministry was ultimately responsible for the private religious schools. They were licensed by the ministry of religious affairs, funded by charities overseen by the ministry of labour and social affairs, and had broad curriculum directions mapped out by the ministry of education.
As the Islamic institutions quickly developed in size and number, the absence of clear regulations and co-ordinated oversight swamped the ability of Syria’s often-dysfunctional bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on. Laws governing religious schools were still based on a decree issued in the late 1950s, when Syria and Egypt were joined as the United Arab Republic, under the leadership of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The Sept 27 bombing came as a wake-up call to the authorities, underlining the need for quick and effective reforms. It also apparently galvanised normally obstinate ministries into actually taking action. Rather than closing any of the private schools, by the end of last year – a few months after the bombing – they were all brought under the direct control of the ministry of religious affairs.
A unified, government-approved curriculum was established in consultation with the institutes’ heads, removing all books that spread sectarian discord. Texts making disparaging remarks about either Sunnis or Shiites were prohibited from classes.
New financial regulations were introduced. Since the end of 2008 it has been a requirement that comprehensive, detailed accounts be submitted to a government finances committee for audit. Donations from charities no longer pass directly into the hands of the institutions, instead needing prior approval from government observers.
In an effort to draw a clear line between the funding charities and the schools, anyone working in a religious capacity within a private Islamic teaching institute is no longer allowed to hold an official position within a charity providing finance to that school.
Two other key changes are being implemented, concerning teachers and foreign students. Whereas overseas students used to be able to register for study at any school prepared to accommodate them, new regulations mean all foreign students will be compelled to register at a single centre, the Badr al Deen al Hasseni school in Damascus’s Old City.
Controlled by the ministry of religious affairs – which will also be responsible for obtaining entry visas and screening students – it will make it easier to identify any Islamic extremists. The days of the Abu Noor institute attracting hundreds of foreign students are effectively over.
Control over school staff will also be passed fully into government hands, with all teachers to be brought on to government payrolls, in effect nationalising staff at private religious schools.
“Each school will get its donations and money through a committee headed by an employee who works for the ministry,” Mohammad Bukheet, director of the religious education department at the ministry of religious affairs, said in an interview with Syria Today magazine.
“We [the government] want to know where all monies are coming from and where and when they are being spent.”
Mr Bukheet, who is in charge of day-to-day oversight of the religious schools, made it clear that private institutes would have far less freedom from now on. “We will be the decision-makers,” he said. “We can now hire and fire any teacher and we will pay their salaries.”
The religious schools have had little option but to embrace the changes ordered by Syria’s authoritarian administration.
In November leaders of all the major private Islamic institutes were invited to meet with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, to talk about the new regulations. According to one institute official, the president made it clear the schools were not under threat but that they had to be brought under a coherent legal framework. The president also reportedly said the raft of new controls would be tested for a year and then reviewed.
“The political leadership wants to lead by consensus on this,” said the official. “It doesn’t want a crackdown and the measures it has introduced are moderate, they respect our rights.”
At the Kuftaro institute, Salah al Deen Kuftaro, the school director, said he supported the new rules.
“We are happy with the new measures. We work in a transparent way so we are not angry.
“I don’t see these things as negative points. For example, with a unified curriculum approved by the government, it means our qualifications will be officially recognised. In the past we had graduates with certificates that were not accepted for government jobs.” Mr Kuftaro also said the decision not to shut all private Islamic schools had been a moderate and sensible solution.
“We have to accept there has been a rise in Islamic sentiments in the region. We have to recognise that phenomena, not try to ignore it.
“To have our young people studying in our schools is better than them going to other countries where they may learn strange ideas or end up with teachers who tell them the real Islam is violent.
“We don’t need people going abroad to return with radical and wrong ideas. The best solution is to have them studying in the open here in Syria.”
psands@thenational.ae
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Only older men allowed in mosques
HOTAN, CHINA // It is Friday afternoon and the scene in front of the Jama mosque in the old city of Hotan, once a trading point for jade along the historic Silk Road, is much as it has been for centuries, save for the few cars and motorcycles fighting for space with the donkey carts laden with produce and travellers.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.”
“Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools.
There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.
The street is lined with pedlars selling myriad goods: live poultry and rabbits, lamb’s head, donkey and camel meat, and Muslim hats, known in Uighur as doppa.
A stream of men, many with long wispy beards, push through the narrow door of the mosque, taking off their shoes and donning white hats before beginning their prayers.
But something does not seem right. The worshippers are all older men. Children, university students, women and government employees are all curiously missing, prohibited from entering the mosque in the Muslim majority province of Xinjiang in north-west China, where the government fears separatist tendencies among the Uighur majority, a Turkic ethnic group that bridles at Chinese control of the area.
Observers say that the Chinese government is carrying out nothing less than a systematic cultural destruction. The fear in Xinjiang is so strong that not one of the local people quoted in this story would agree to use their names.
“There’s an ever-increasing degree of invasiveness in people’s daily lives,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, and an expert on the province. “What the Chinese government is trying to do is remake the social fabric of Xinjiang.”
He said there is a huge pressure regarding anything that involves cultural identity, which he says the government views as a political threat. “Culture is the battlefront of national security for the country,” Mr Bequelin said. “They are destroying the whole cultural heritage.”
“Beijing perceives Uighurs as an ethno-nationalist threat to the Chinese state, and it views Islam as feeding Uighur ethnic identity,” said Nury Turkel, former president of the Uighur American Association, and a lawyer in Washington. “The Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB] officials in East Turkestan believe they won’t be able to dilute Uighur culture unless religion is wiped out entirely.”
Like many other Uighurs who do not recognise Chinese control, Mr Turkel refers to the area as East Turkestan.
Uighurs say state interference is pervasive. Imams are selected by the government and are closely monitored. In addition, religious schools and books on Islam are controlled or banned.
Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plain-clothes police watch who comes and goes. In recent weeks, seven Muslim schools have been shut down, according to an announcement last week by the World Uighur Congress, which is based in Germany.
There is also interference in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year, when strict fasting is observed. Mr Bequelin said officials of the RAB were ordered to reduce the influence of Ramadan.
The government attempts to restrict fasting during this period, trying to ferret out which government officials are observing the practice by seeing which homes have lights on in the very early morning hours, when families are preparing their morning meal before fasting begins at dawn.
Uighurs claim that local officials force restaurants to remain open during the fasting period. State units organise lunches for government employees, and in some areas, say students in Hotan, universities provide free lunches for students, hoping to encourage them to break the fast.
A list of 23 prohibited religious practices pertaining to Uighur Muslims was posted on local government websites in the region last year. Such activities as having an imam say a particular prayer at a wedding, mourning ceremonies, and people praying together outdoors were banned. Each of more than a dozen mosques visited had large posters containing the State Council’s Religious Affairs Regulations, which lay out government control of religion in China.
Uighurs are only allowed to participate in the haj under the strict auspices of the Chinese government. Quotas limit the number of Uighurs allowed to travel there and the few who can go pay exorbitant fees. Throughout the old part of Kashgar, an admonition has been stencilled on the walls of houses in both Arabic script and Chinese: “Unauthorised religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
More seriously, Mr Turkel said, the government has seized virtually every Uighur person’s passport to prevent people from travelling abroad.
“Passports have been systematically confiscated,” he said. “Getting a passport is almost impossible for a Uighur individual. The world needs to know about this.”
“Everyone’s passports have been taken away,” confirms a student standing in the large square in front of the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, nervously looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is listening. “You can get a passport to go abroad to study, but it’s very difficult, unless your family has a lot of money or government connections.”
Mr Turkel said the Chinese see religion as a “stumbling block to the full assimilation of the Uighurs into China proper,” adding that the travel restrictions are another way of controlling Islam.
“They want Uighurs to be less religious, less spiritual,” he said. “For the Chinese government, having a group of Uighurs who have been outside China would result in more exposure of the human abuses against the Uighurs.”
He adds that the Chinese do not want Muslims to have a real sense of Islam. “They want Uighurs to continue believing the Chinese government trained imams’ teaching and preaching of Islam,” he said. “They want to impose the Chinese version of Islamic beliefs.”
A graduate student in Hotan who has researched education said that in 2012 the teaching of the Uighur language will officially be halted in Xinjiang schools.
There has also been pressure on students and government employees not to grow beards, a common practice among Muslim men.
“During the National People’s Congress in March, Chinese TV showed minorities entering the Great Hall of the People wearing all sorts of minority costumes,” a high school teacher said behind the closed doors of a small electronics shop in Hotan. “But here we can’t even wear a Muslim hat.”
Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority, was incorporated into China in 1884, during the Qing dynasty, although it enjoyed several short periods of independence before being brought back into the Chinese empire in 1949, when the Communists came to power.
Since then, the Chinese government has encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Han from overpopulated coastal cities to Xinjiang. The immigration programme has resulted in a demographic shift in the province of 18 million: what was once 90 per cent Uighur is now more than 40 per cent Han. In 1949, the Han made up just six per cent of the total. And the proportion is expected to grow even larger when the rail line between Urumqi, the capital, reaches Hotan next year.
“A lot of people are worried about this,” the education researcher said. “With the arrival of the railway, a lot more Chinese will come here. The majority of the people are strongly against this.”
Uighurs also denounced the forced transfer of young women to eastern China to work in factories, arguing it is an attempt to reduce the Uighur population and break the tradition of women serving as the propagators of Islam among children.
Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, which has sent secret investigators to interview the women, says “hundreds of thousands” of children have been sent into “slave labour”. “They’re locked up, can’t call their parents and can’t leave,” he said. “And if they do flee, their parents will be severely punished.”
The graduate student expressed indignation that teenage girls from his village were being sent away to work in factories as the government was encouraging Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang. In many large hotels and government agencies, the staff is predominantly – if not completely – Han.
“Why are they sending so many of our women away and then bringing in Chinese here to work?” he asked while sitting in a Hotan restaurant.
Perhaps most disappointing to Uighurs in Xinjiang is that the Muslim world has remained silent.
“Muslim countries aren’t doing anything to show concern about how the Chinese government is abusing the faith of nine million Muslims,” said Mehmet Tohti, the vice president of the World Uighur Congress. “Not one has said anything on behalf of the oppressed Uighur Muslims in China,” he said. “All the countries that could have said something are politically leveraged by Beijing. Speaking up for the Uighurs is too costly for them economically and politically.”
Mr Bequelin said that even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, whose website says its goal is to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world”, has remained silent. “The Uighur issue is a forgotten issue for most Muslim countries,” he said.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Brothers gonna work it out?
On March 25 Mohammed Mehdi Akef, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, told an Egyptian newspaper that he would not seek a second term and will step down within a few months. The coming election of his successor marks an interesting and important moment in the history of the Brotherhood, with broad implications for the future of moderate Islamist movements in general.
The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, remains the most influential mainstream Sunni Islamist group, and the identity of Akef’s successor – and the means by which he is chosen – will offer important insights into the Brotherhood’s internal direction on matters ranging from democracy to al Qa’eda to relations with the United States.
Akef’s decision to not seek a second term comes at a sensitive time in the Brotherhood’s relations with the Egyptian government and the West. The Mubarak regime is in the midst of planning its own transition, with most observers suggesting that Hosni Mubarak hopes to see his son Gamal replace him in the President’s office. The massive popularity of Hamas in the wake of the Israeli attack on Gaza has strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand inside of Egypt and deepened fears within the regime. And there are still uncertainties about the new Obama administration, and whether it might be more open to engaging with the Brotherhood than was the Bush team.
The Brotherhood’s deputy guide, Mohammed Habib, recently complained on Al Jazeera that the Egyptian government was trying to tarnish the Brotherhood’s image in Washington to block any changes in Washington’s policy toward Islamist parties – and to deflect attention from its own failings.
The selection of Akef’s successor will also shape the ongoing policy debate in the West over the relationship between the Brotherhood and al Qa’eda. “Firewall” theorists see it as a strong organisation with a more moderate ideology than the salafi-jihadists of al Qa’eda, one which acts as a barrier to the infiltration of salafi-jihadist radicalism.
But the Brotherhood is certainly not liberal – it is the essence of Islamism, deeply committed to spreading conservative religious identity and values throughout the Muslim world in pursuit of a truly Islamic state. Many analysts therefore regard it as a “conveyor belt”, a movement that facilitates the recruitment of disaffected Muslims into more radical terrorist groups.
In reality it probably plays both roles, depending on the context: Brotherhood chapters vary widely in their organisational strength and attitudes from country to country with little central control from Cairo. But the supreme guide is nevertheless the symbolic face of the Brotherhood, and his identity will send a powerful signal about how the organisation will approach the coming period.
The simple fact of Akef’s decision not to seek another term stands in sharp rebuke to the norms of the Arab Middle East, where no leader has voluntarily surrendered power in recent history. As the Egyptian analyst Amr Choukbi said, it would be an “historic step” for the Brotherhood and for Egypt. But it isn’t entirely a surprise. Akef had promised not to seek a second term when he took office in January 2004, and repeated his intention to stand down at the end of his term when he turned 80 last year. Sources inside the Brotherhood complain that any controversy over Akef’s decision to step down has been manufactured.
Still, it is extremely significant that this succession is happening in the Muslim Brotherhood rather in the palaces or in an avowedly “liberal” party. The election is also historically unprecedented for the Brotherhood: past supreme guides have typically served until death. What is more, Akef will be replaced in a process that includes significant elements of internal democracy. The supreme guide is elected by a simple majority of the Brotherhood’s Shura Council, a body of 100 members, of which 80 are directly elected by the membership and 20 are current or former members of the Guidance Council (itself an elected body). Akef himself told the London-based Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat that the only reason for all the fuss over his decision was that “in Egypt there are no former officials... there are only dead officials”.
The Muslim Brotherhood has come a long way since its creation in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al Banna. The Brotherhood quickly grew to be a powerful political force across the Arab world under the simple slogan “Islam is the solution”. During the 1950s, the extreme repression of the nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser drove the Brotherhood underground, into prison or exile. In response, Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb produced a far more radical set of ideas rejecting existing society as jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance), whose spread inspired Islamist radicalism around the world.
The Brotherhood itself repudiated ed Qutb’s most extreme ideas with the publication in the late 1960s of Preachers, Not Judges under the name of then-Supreme Guide Hassan al Hudaybi. During the 1970s, the government of Anwar Sadat released the Brotherhood from the prisons and invited them into the political process as a counterweight to the left. Ever since, in Egypt and beyond, it has participated in elections and public life wherever permitted (in the universities, professional associations and national elections) and has built a vast public network of social services.
******************
Over the last few years, the Egyptian Brotherhood has come under intense pressure from the Mubarak regime – which most interpret as punishment for its too-successful participation in democratic elections and its potential threat to the transition to his son. A number of its senior leaders have been arrested and tried in military courts, including the still-imprisoned moderate icon Khairat al Shater.
Conservatives inside the movement grumble that they have received nothing but grief for their decision to enter the political realm: their determined moderation has seen the constitution changed to prevent them from contesting the presidency, a series of elections rigged against them and an ongoing campaign of arrests and intimidation. They call for a retreat from politics and a return to more traditional forms of religious activism. The repression has weakened the hands of the pragmatists, whose advocacy of democratic participation has offered few rewards, and may have strengthened the position of the rising religious “salafi” trend within the movement. The selection of a new supreme guide may therefore reveal the current balance of forces within the Brotherhood.
Akef, who was elected as the seventh supreme guide in January 2004, has always been something of a cipher. His public speeches tend toward the uncompromising, with a hard line on Israel, the United States and most public issues. He has repeatedly inflamed controversies with his fiery rhetoric, offering plenty of fodder for Brotherhood-bashers seeking to demonstrate the organisation’s true radicalism. He has been quoted praising Osama bin Laden as a “mujahid”, promising to send thousands of Brothers to fight in Gaza, and more. Even his supporters admit that he has often been carried away by his passions and given voice to extreme views which thrill his base but tarnish the Brotherhood’s image with the wider public.
At the same time, he has presided over a supreme guide’s office dominated by pragmatic, politically-orientated reformers who have charted a difficult but quite impressive path through Egypt’s political turbulence.
Under Akef the Muslim Brotherhood participated fully in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, and then remained committed to the democratic process despite intense regime repression and repeated provocations (including wide-scale arrests of its members and the wholesale banning of its candidates from municipal and upper-house elections). Akef nurtured the emergence of a new generation of young, reformist Brotherhood members. When many of those young reformists began publishing their criticisms on blogs, he helped protect them from internal censorship and nurtured their independent thought (at least until the public debates became fodder for the Brotherhood’s opponents, who cast their open discussions of internal matters as a sign of a split within the organisation).
He oversaw the drafting of a controversial political party platform, which drew fire for its proposal of a new religious council to oversee legislation and its refusal of a female or non-Muslim president, but which in other respects was a remarkably democratic document. And under his guidance the Brotherhood has consistently and rapidly condemned al Qa’eda terrorist attacks everywhere (though, consistent with the widespread Arab and Muslim distinction between terrorism and “resistance to occupation”, his Muslim Brotherhood refused to condemn Hamas violence and was conflicted on the violence in Iraq).
******************
So who will replace Akef? Despite reports that Brotherhood figures in Europe, Jordan and Syria are being considered, it is highly unlikely that a non-Egyptian will be selected. The global Muslim Brotherhood organisation has always been more notional than real, and it would be difficult to conceive of a non-Egyptian playing the guide’s role effectively.
The supreme guide has always been an Egyptian, and Egyptians hold a majority of the seats on the Guidance Council. Should a non-Egyptian be selected, it would be an powerful signal of a revolutionary shift towards a global rather than national conception of political and religious action. But few expect this to happen.
The choice of a reformist leader, such as the political pragmatists Abd el Monem Abou el Fattouh or Essam el Erian, would be a powerful signal of the commitment to the democratic game and moderate doctrine. But the leading liberal figures are very unlikely to command sufficient support across the organisation to win election.
By far the strongest reformist candidate would be the wealthy financier Khairat al Shater, the moderate deputy supreme guide who is serving seven years in prison after a much-criticised trial in a military court. But it is difficult to imagine the Brotherhood selecting a leader currently in prison.
The selection of a conservative, dawa-orientated leader such as Mahmoud Ezzat or Mohammed Morsi would please the rank and file of the movement, even as it would signal frustration with politics and a more inward-looking organisation. Such leaders would likely steer the Brotherhood away from politics and back into the social sector and religious indoctrination.
For the politically-orientated Brothers, the best hope is probably the other current deputy supreme guide, Mohammed Habib – a more cautious, softer-spoken and wily pragmatist who would likely avoid Akef’s unpredictable style but may have difficulty inspiring the cadres. Habib would most likely signify continuity with Akef’s tenure, balancing the religious and political trends while maintaining a commitment to the political process and resisting a complete turn towards the religious sector.
Whether the Brotherhood chooses a politically or a religiously-orientated guide matters for three big reasons. First, it will reveal a lot about the real distribution of opinions inside the organisation, as very little is known about the political views of the rank and file of the Brotherhood. While there will be no organisation-wide election, the preferences of the 100 elected members of the Shura Council could tell outside observers a lot about the real support for the highly visible reformists or the much-rumoured but little-studied conservative salafi trend.
Second, the new supreme guide may or may not continue Akef’s general policy of tolerance for the open expression of diverse opinions within the organisation. Muslim Brotherhood reformists worry that many of the leading candidates to replace him played a role in shutting down the 2007 “Brotherhood bloggers” experiment and that anyone who replaces Akef will be less tolerant of internal diversity.
Prominent bloggers such as Abd al Monem Mahmoud were already wondering about the future of the Brotherhood’s reformists even before Akef’s announcement, and that question has become even more urgent. Younger political activists and politically-orientated leaders within the Brotherhood would chafe at moves to quash internal dissent, and might even opt to repeat the ill-fated experiment of the Wasat Party in the mid-1990s by splitting off and trying to form a new political movement – which would tip the balance of power inside the movement even more sharply towards religious conservatives.
Finally, the election of a more religiously-orientated guide might lead the Brotherhood to retreat from its current engagement in the political sphere. Participation in democratic institutions represented a major development in the evolution of moderate Islamist political thought and practice, and encouraged the emergence of a pragmatic leadership. Retreating from the political could distance the Brotherhood from the rest of society, and encourage a turn towards more radical religious orientations.
The Egyptian government may well prefer such an outcome, even if it contributes to the longer-term radicalisation of the movement, since it would reduce the risk that the United States might reach out to the Brotherhood as a potential alternative to the current regime. But this would be a disastrous outcome for those who see a moderate, pragmatic Islamist movement as a key component to the battle against salafi-jihadism and radical extremism.
Marc Lynch is associate professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and co-director of the Insitute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. He writes a blog on Arab politics and media for Foreign Policy.
The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, remains the most influential mainstream Sunni Islamist group, and the identity of Akef’s successor – and the means by which he is chosen – will offer important insights into the Brotherhood’s internal direction on matters ranging from democracy to al Qa’eda to relations with the United States.
Akef’s decision to not seek a second term comes at a sensitive time in the Brotherhood’s relations with the Egyptian government and the West. The Mubarak regime is in the midst of planning its own transition, with most observers suggesting that Hosni Mubarak hopes to see his son Gamal replace him in the President’s office. The massive popularity of Hamas in the wake of the Israeli attack on Gaza has strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand inside of Egypt and deepened fears within the regime. And there are still uncertainties about the new Obama administration, and whether it might be more open to engaging with the Brotherhood than was the Bush team.
The Brotherhood’s deputy guide, Mohammed Habib, recently complained on Al Jazeera that the Egyptian government was trying to tarnish the Brotherhood’s image in Washington to block any changes in Washington’s policy toward Islamist parties – and to deflect attention from its own failings.
The selection of Akef’s successor will also shape the ongoing policy debate in the West over the relationship between the Brotherhood and al Qa’eda. “Firewall” theorists see it as a strong organisation with a more moderate ideology than the salafi-jihadists of al Qa’eda, one which acts as a barrier to the infiltration of salafi-jihadist radicalism.
But the Brotherhood is certainly not liberal – it is the essence of Islamism, deeply committed to spreading conservative religious identity and values throughout the Muslim world in pursuit of a truly Islamic state. Many analysts therefore regard it as a “conveyor belt”, a movement that facilitates the recruitment of disaffected Muslims into more radical terrorist groups.
In reality it probably plays both roles, depending on the context: Brotherhood chapters vary widely in their organisational strength and attitudes from country to country with little central control from Cairo. But the supreme guide is nevertheless the symbolic face of the Brotherhood, and his identity will send a powerful signal about how the organisation will approach the coming period.
The simple fact of Akef’s decision not to seek another term stands in sharp rebuke to the norms of the Arab Middle East, where no leader has voluntarily surrendered power in recent history. As the Egyptian analyst Amr Choukbi said, it would be an “historic step” for the Brotherhood and for Egypt. But it isn’t entirely a surprise. Akef had promised not to seek a second term when he took office in January 2004, and repeated his intention to stand down at the end of his term when he turned 80 last year. Sources inside the Brotherhood complain that any controversy over Akef’s decision to step down has been manufactured.
Still, it is extremely significant that this succession is happening in the Muslim Brotherhood rather in the palaces or in an avowedly “liberal” party. The election is also historically unprecedented for the Brotherhood: past supreme guides have typically served until death. What is more, Akef will be replaced in a process that includes significant elements of internal democracy. The supreme guide is elected by a simple majority of the Brotherhood’s Shura Council, a body of 100 members, of which 80 are directly elected by the membership and 20 are current or former members of the Guidance Council (itself an elected body). Akef himself told the London-based Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat that the only reason for all the fuss over his decision was that “in Egypt there are no former officials... there are only dead officials”.
The Muslim Brotherhood has come a long way since its creation in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al Banna. The Brotherhood quickly grew to be a powerful political force across the Arab world under the simple slogan “Islam is the solution”. During the 1950s, the extreme repression of the nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser drove the Brotherhood underground, into prison or exile. In response, Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb produced a far more radical set of ideas rejecting existing society as jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance), whose spread inspired Islamist radicalism around the world.
The Brotherhood itself repudiated ed Qutb’s most extreme ideas with the publication in the late 1960s of Preachers, Not Judges under the name of then-Supreme Guide Hassan al Hudaybi. During the 1970s, the government of Anwar Sadat released the Brotherhood from the prisons and invited them into the political process as a counterweight to the left. Ever since, in Egypt and beyond, it has participated in elections and public life wherever permitted (in the universities, professional associations and national elections) and has built a vast public network of social services.
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Over the last few years, the Egyptian Brotherhood has come under intense pressure from the Mubarak regime – which most interpret as punishment for its too-successful participation in democratic elections and its potential threat to the transition to his son. A number of its senior leaders have been arrested and tried in military courts, including the still-imprisoned moderate icon Khairat al Shater.
Conservatives inside the movement grumble that they have received nothing but grief for their decision to enter the political realm: their determined moderation has seen the constitution changed to prevent them from contesting the presidency, a series of elections rigged against them and an ongoing campaign of arrests and intimidation. They call for a retreat from politics and a return to more traditional forms of religious activism. The repression has weakened the hands of the pragmatists, whose advocacy of democratic participation has offered few rewards, and may have strengthened the position of the rising religious “salafi” trend within the movement. The selection of a new supreme guide may therefore reveal the current balance of forces within the Brotherhood.
Akef, who was elected as the seventh supreme guide in January 2004, has always been something of a cipher. His public speeches tend toward the uncompromising, with a hard line on Israel, the United States and most public issues. He has repeatedly inflamed controversies with his fiery rhetoric, offering plenty of fodder for Brotherhood-bashers seeking to demonstrate the organisation’s true radicalism. He has been quoted praising Osama bin Laden as a “mujahid”, promising to send thousands of Brothers to fight in Gaza, and more. Even his supporters admit that he has often been carried away by his passions and given voice to extreme views which thrill his base but tarnish the Brotherhood’s image with the wider public.
At the same time, he has presided over a supreme guide’s office dominated by pragmatic, politically-orientated reformers who have charted a difficult but quite impressive path through Egypt’s political turbulence.
Under Akef the Muslim Brotherhood participated fully in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, and then remained committed to the democratic process despite intense regime repression and repeated provocations (including wide-scale arrests of its members and the wholesale banning of its candidates from municipal and upper-house elections). Akef nurtured the emergence of a new generation of young, reformist Brotherhood members. When many of those young reformists began publishing their criticisms on blogs, he helped protect them from internal censorship and nurtured their independent thought (at least until the public debates became fodder for the Brotherhood’s opponents, who cast their open discussions of internal matters as a sign of a split within the organisation).
He oversaw the drafting of a controversial political party platform, which drew fire for its proposal of a new religious council to oversee legislation and its refusal of a female or non-Muslim president, but which in other respects was a remarkably democratic document. And under his guidance the Brotherhood has consistently and rapidly condemned al Qa’eda terrorist attacks everywhere (though, consistent with the widespread Arab and Muslim distinction between terrorism and “resistance to occupation”, his Muslim Brotherhood refused to condemn Hamas violence and was conflicted on the violence in Iraq).
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So who will replace Akef? Despite reports that Brotherhood figures in Europe, Jordan and Syria are being considered, it is highly unlikely that a non-Egyptian will be selected. The global Muslim Brotherhood organisation has always been more notional than real, and it would be difficult to conceive of a non-Egyptian playing the guide’s role effectively.
The supreme guide has always been an Egyptian, and Egyptians hold a majority of the seats on the Guidance Council. Should a non-Egyptian be selected, it would be an powerful signal of a revolutionary shift towards a global rather than national conception of political and religious action. But few expect this to happen.
The choice of a reformist leader, such as the political pragmatists Abd el Monem Abou el Fattouh or Essam el Erian, would be a powerful signal of the commitment to the democratic game and moderate doctrine. But the leading liberal figures are very unlikely to command sufficient support across the organisation to win election.
By far the strongest reformist candidate would be the wealthy financier Khairat al Shater, the moderate deputy supreme guide who is serving seven years in prison after a much-criticised trial in a military court. But it is difficult to imagine the Brotherhood selecting a leader currently in prison.
The selection of a conservative, dawa-orientated leader such as Mahmoud Ezzat or Mohammed Morsi would please the rank and file of the movement, even as it would signal frustration with politics and a more inward-looking organisation. Such leaders would likely steer the Brotherhood away from politics and back into the social sector and religious indoctrination.
For the politically-orientated Brothers, the best hope is probably the other current deputy supreme guide, Mohammed Habib – a more cautious, softer-spoken and wily pragmatist who would likely avoid Akef’s unpredictable style but may have difficulty inspiring the cadres. Habib would most likely signify continuity with Akef’s tenure, balancing the religious and political trends while maintaining a commitment to the political process and resisting a complete turn towards the religious sector.
Whether the Brotherhood chooses a politically or a religiously-orientated guide matters for three big reasons. First, it will reveal a lot about the real distribution of opinions inside the organisation, as very little is known about the political views of the rank and file of the Brotherhood. While there will be no organisation-wide election, the preferences of the 100 elected members of the Shura Council could tell outside observers a lot about the real support for the highly visible reformists or the much-rumoured but little-studied conservative salafi trend.
Second, the new supreme guide may or may not continue Akef’s general policy of tolerance for the open expression of diverse opinions within the organisation. Muslim Brotherhood reformists worry that many of the leading candidates to replace him played a role in shutting down the 2007 “Brotherhood bloggers” experiment and that anyone who replaces Akef will be less tolerant of internal diversity.
Prominent bloggers such as Abd al Monem Mahmoud were already wondering about the future of the Brotherhood’s reformists even before Akef’s announcement, and that question has become even more urgent. Younger political activists and politically-orientated leaders within the Brotherhood would chafe at moves to quash internal dissent, and might even opt to repeat the ill-fated experiment of the Wasat Party in the mid-1990s by splitting off and trying to form a new political movement – which would tip the balance of power inside the movement even more sharply towards religious conservatives.
Finally, the election of a more religiously-orientated guide might lead the Brotherhood to retreat from its current engagement in the political sphere. Participation in democratic institutions represented a major development in the evolution of moderate Islamist political thought and practice, and encouraged the emergence of a pragmatic leadership. Retreating from the political could distance the Brotherhood from the rest of society, and encourage a turn towards more radical religious orientations.
The Egyptian government may well prefer such an outcome, even if it contributes to the longer-term radicalisation of the movement, since it would reduce the risk that the United States might reach out to the Brotherhood as a potential alternative to the current regime. But this would be a disastrous outcome for those who see a moderate, pragmatic Islamist movement as a key component to the battle against salafi-jihadism and radical extremism.
Marc Lynch is associate professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and co-director of the Insitute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. He writes a blog on Arab politics and media for Foreign Policy.
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