The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (6 page)

THE NATURE OF THE VACUUM

In 1933, the prominent jurist Yusuf al-Dijjawi (d. 1365/1946)
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decried with great chagrin that various puritan orientations were deprecating the Islamic tradition by enabling people with a very limited education in Islamic jurisprudence to become self-proclaimed experts in Shari’a.
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The fears of al-Dijjawi were not only well founded, but things were to become much worse than he could have ever imagined. The vacuum in au- thority meant not so much that
no one
could authoritatively speak for Islam, but that virtually
every
Muslim with a modest knowledge of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet was suddenly considered qualified to speak for the Islamic tra-

dition and Shari’a law—even Muslims unfamiliar with the precedents and accomplishments of past generations. Often these self-proclaimed experts were engineers, medical doctors, and physical scientists. In fact, the leaders of most Islamic movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qa’ida, have been engineers or medical doctors.

As these self-proclaimed and self-taught “jurists” reduced the Islamic heritage to the least common denominator, Islamic intellectual culture witnessed an unprecedented level of deteri- oration. The sad reality is that Islamic law and theology in the contemporary age were reduced to the extracurricular hobby of pamphlet readers and writers. Marginalized and displaced, Islamic law was now a field ripe for pietistic fictions and crass generalizations, rather than a technical discipline of complex interpretive practices and sophisticated methodologies of so- cial and textual analysis.

To bring the problem closer to mind, imagine Rabbinic law being suddenly usurped by Jewish engineers and medical doc- tors. Soon nothing would remain of the Rabbinic tradition ex- cept unsystematic anecdotes and meditative speculations. Regardless of how interesting the collective outcome might be, the Rabbinic tradition, as a cohesive legacy, would be gone. The role played in Islam by self-proclaimed experts is partly explained by the paradoxical nature of Shari’a itself. As noted earlier, Shari’a is, on the one hand, the sum total of technical legal methodologies, precedents, and decisions; it is also, on the other hand, a powerful symbol of the Islamic identity. For the trained jurist, Shari’a is a legal system full of complex processes and technical jargon, but for the average Muslim, Shari’a is a symbol for Islamic authenticity and legitimacy. Throughout Is- lamic history, the layperson (who in all likelihood knew very little of the technicalities of Shari’a) revered Shari’a as a sacred bridge to the Almighty God. For example, in a well-known

passage, the famous Muslim jurist Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350–1) conveys a sense of the reverence and adoration with which the Shari’a was held in Islamic history. He states:

The Sharia is God’s justice among His servants, and His mercy among his creatures. It is God’s shadow on this earth. It is His wisdom which leads to Him in the most exact way and the most exact affirmation of the truthful- ness of His Prophet. It is His light which enlightens the seekers and His guidance for the rightly guided. It is the absolute cure for all ills and the straight path which if followed will lead to righteousness. . . . It is life and nu- trition, the medicine, the light, the cure and the safe- guard. Every good in this life is derived from it and achieved through it, and every deficiency in existence re- sults from its dissipation. If it had not been for the fact that some of its rules remain [in this world,] this world would become corrupted and the universe would be dis- sipated. . . . If God would wish to destroy the world and dissolve existence, He would void whatever remains of its injunctions. For the Sharia which was sent to His Prophet . . . is the pillar of existence and the key to suc- cess in this world and the Hereafter.
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In this passage, Ibn al-Qayyim is speaking of Shari’a not as a technical legal system, but as a symbol, which despite its re- markable diversity and pluralism represents the unified Mus- lim identity. Because of Shari’a’s symbolic role and its ability to appeal to and mobilize popular Muslim sentiment, activists and the leaders of puritan movements have found it necessary to exploit Shari’a in order to win significant popular support. In fact, in the 1970s various governments, such as those of Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Sudan,

were complicit in supporting various Muslim movements in order to counter the spread of Marxist and leftist organiza- tions. These governments also hoped to bolster their own power base by appearing to support Islamic movements that raised the banner of Shari’a and called upon Muslims to rally around it. However, this honeymoon period between secular governments and puritan movements was short-lived because these governments soon discovered that puritan movements posed a serious threat to the stability of secular governments. For the many despotic Muslim states, the 1979 Iranian Revo- lution, in particular, came as a rude awakening that drove home the terrifying realization of the power of Shari’a to mo- bilize the masses and overthrow powerful secular govern- ments. Moreover, the 1981 assassination of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat by a puritan group only added to the apprehen- sion and animosity of the various despotic governments against the puritan movements.

By the early 1980s, in an effort to get rid of the puritan danger, many governments in the Muslim world replaced the short-lived honeymoon with vicious repression. Political re- pression, however, only succeeded in further radicalizing these puritan movements. It also generated considerable broad-based sympathy for the puritans, who were seen as “victims” of injustice and barbaric cruelty. In the 1970s and early 1980s, most Muslims sympathized with puritan move- ments as a statement of protest against the repression of the corrupt and despotic governments in power, but they did not necessarily agree with or approve of the puritan interpreta- tion of Islam.

But other than political repression, there were other histor- ical factors that led up to the puritans’ exploitation of Shari’a as a powerful symbol of legitimacy in an effort to fill the vac- uum of religious authority plaguing contemporary Islam.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, was flooded by nationalistic ideologies and anti- colonial movements. Ideologies of Arab nationalism and pan- Arabism were staunchly secular; Islam was seen as a hindrance to developmental progress and modernization. Be- cause of the social power of Islam and its ability to mobilize the masses, secular nationalist and pan-Arabist states at- tempted to strictly regulate religion and then use it to lend support to their cause. For example, Egypt’s President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser tried to do this by making the once prestigious Azhar University entirely dependent on the government, and then had it lend support to all governmental policies (includ- ing Nasser’s severe repression of Islamic groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood).
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A more recent example of this phe- nomenon was when Saddam Hussein, the leader of the zeal- ously secularist Ba’th party, put “God Is Great” on the Iraqi flag and plunged into speeches about the duty of jihad in a failed effort to get Iraqis to fight to defend his regime.

As in the case of Saddam, the effort in the 1950s and 1960s to exploit religion in a shamelessly opportunistic fashion lacked credibility, and only succeeded in exacerbating the crisis in re- ligious authority felt around the Muslim world. The 1967 war, in which Israel defeated several Arab countries, rubbed salt in the wound by underscoring the collective weakness of Muslim countries. The 1967 war also severely undercut the credibility of Arab nationalist and pan-Arabist ideologies. But the loss of Jerusalem to Israel was a blow not just to Arab countries, but to Muslims around the world. This blow to Muslim sentiment had deep historical roots; for instance, in 1187 when Saladin reconquered Jerusalem from the Franks, the Qadi of Damascus stood in the Aqsa Mosque and praised “Saladin by whose deeds the dignity of Islam was restored.” So with the loss of the Aqsa Mosque to Israel, many Muslims felt that Islam had lost

its former glory, and some even felt that Islam was in danger. The military defeats and resulting devastation to the national pride of many Muslim countries augmented the sense of frus- tration with prevailing political orders and also made the crisis in religious legitimacy much more acute. After the loss of Jerusalem, and the spread of the sense that secular governments had neither developed their nations nor restored to Muslims their lost sense of pride, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed what some scholars have described as the Islamic revival or the re- turn to Islam. However, the Islamic revival consisted of the emergence of mass movements, which were often led by self- proclaimed experts in Shari’a who took advantage of the exist- ing vacuum in religious authority. In response to the severe blows to the national pride of Muslims, these self-proclaimed experts were not interested in furthering the integrity or devel- opment of Islamic law or thought. Increasingly, their central in- terest became to augment the Islamic tradition’s mass appeal by transforming it into a vehicle for displays of power symbolisms. The objective of these power symbolisms was to overcome the pervasive sense of powerlessness and to restore the pride of Muslims by clinging on to Islam as a symbol of resistance and defiance. Furthermore, these power symbolisms became a means of expressing resistance to Western hegemony in the contemporary age, as well as a means of voicing national aspi- rations for political, social, and cultural independence through- out the Muslim world.

This meant placing the Islamic tradition at the service of political objectives and nationalistic causes, which had two further effects. First, as the Islamic intellectual heritage was persistently made to support shifting and temperamental polit- ical causes, the Islamic intellectual tradition and Islamic law suffered increasing degradation and deconstruction. Second, to the non-Muslim world, Islam became wedded to certain

political causes, so that it became difficult for Westerners to think about Islam without reference to these political causes. The most obvious example of this is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so that, for instance, many people in the West are un- able to think of Islam except in terms of how Islam affects that conflict. I often encounter this problem in teaching Islamic law. Many of my students enroll in the class thinking that a course on Islamic jurisprudence will inevitably focus on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. When I announce that alas the course will not address this conflict at all, a considerable num- ber of students politely withdraw from the course. Another rather typical example: Yale Law School organizes an impres- sive annual international symposium on Islamic law; and for as long as I have been involved with this symposium, the whole conference has been spent discussing the Arab/Israeli conflict. Leaving aside the unfortunate but understandable confusion about the relationship of Islam to political issues and causes, as far as Islamic thought was concerned, the highly impoverished intel- lectual climate was ripe for exploitation by various “evangelical” mass movements, two of which were fated to become particularly influential: the
Salafiyya
(Salafis) and the Saudi Arabia–based
Wahhabiyya
(Wahhabis). It bears emphasis that these two movements were not the only ones to find the impoverished in- tellectual climate suitable for growth and expansion—indeed, there were many such mass movements around the Muslim world that contributed to the insufferably chaotic conditions plaguing the world of Islam. At the same time, in my view, by the 1980s and afterward there is no doubt that the Salafis and Wahhabis had become the most influential puritan movements throughout most of the Muslim world, and also had the most far-reaching impact upon the contemporary theology of puri- tan Islam. Eventually, these two, more than any others, be-

came the defining ideological forces for puritan Islam.

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THE RISE OF

THE EAR LY PURI TANS

THE WAHHABI ORIGINS

The story of puritanical Islam should properly start with the Wahhabis. Even after 9/11 and the world’s rude awakening to al-Qa’ida’s violence, it is impossible to quantify the impact that the Wahhabis have had on modern Muslim thinking. It is unequivocal, however, that they have influenced every puri- tanical movement in the Muslim world in the contemporary age. Every single Islamic group that has achieved a degree of international infamy, such as the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, has been heavily influenced by Wahhabi thought.

The foundations of Wahhabi theology were set in place by the eighteenth-century evangelist Muhammad bin ‘Abd al- Wahhab (d. 1206/1792). The main theme of ‘Abd al-Wahhab was that Muslims had gone wrong by straying from the straight path of Islam, and only by returning to the one true religion could they regain God’s pleasure and acceptance. With a puritanical zeal, ‘Abd al-Wahhab sought to rid Islam of all the corruptions that he believed had crept into the religion; for ‘Abd al-Wahhab these included mysticism, the doctrine of intercession, rationalism, and Shi’ism as well as many prac- tices that he considered heretical innovations.

By ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s day, modernity had revolutionized human conceptions of reality around the world by introducing the destabilizing awareness of the relativity and subjectivity of all human knowledge, and also by introducing scientific em- piricism. Modernism had also added considerably to the com- plexity of social and economic arrangements, which augmented the sense of alienation in traditional societies struggling to develop and modernize. In the Muslim world, different societies, cultures, and movements responded to the destabilizing impact of modernity in a variety of ways. Some, like the Kemalist movement in Turkey, for example, responded by attempting to Westernize and move as far away from Islam as possible. Others, while rejecting Western culture, attempted to reconcile Islam and modernism by emphasizing that scien- tific and rational thought is completely consistent with Islamic ethics. Wahhabism responded to modernity’s destabilizing forces, and to its overpowering moral and social insecurities, by running for shelter. In this case, the shelter consisted of clinging on to particular Islamic texts for a sense of certitude and comfort. It is as if Wahhabism inoculated itself from the challenges and threats of modernity by forcing religious texts to provide definitive and incontestable answers to practically all individual and social issues.
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