The ghosts of the muslim past

What happens when Muslims acting as heaven-sent resistance to egregious oppression turn their fury on fellow believers? It is troubling that, at best, Muslims will generally only shake their heads and cluck, “This is not Islam.” but, argues Haroon Moghul, this is in part a dark face from the Muslim past, returned.

Page 15
Q-News, Issue 358
December 2004

I argue with pessimism. Firstly, because of the self-destructiveness inherent in radical Islamic ideology, and secondly, the widespread Muslim reluctance to critically confront or seriously engage with such manifestations of fanaticism.

If we consider more seriously how elements of Islam are deployed to sustain radical ideologies, what is most worrisome is not just the predictable discovery of links between recent Muslim thinkers and the justifications of extremism, but that such extremism has clear ideational antecedents in an earlier period of Muslim in-fighting. Indeed, this earlier fanaticism helped create today’s Islamic politics, such that modern radicals rage in part against tyrants their forebears helped empower. So Muslims might fairly argue: we have been here before, and the consequences, the first time around, were devastating for the health of the Islamic community. Who wants a part deux?

According to the Islamic weltanschauung, humans are imperfect not because they are fallen, but rather, because we are inherently and essentially forgetful. The very word for “person” in Arabic, insan, comes from the root “nun-sin-ya,” meaning “forgetful.” If left unchecked, Islam teaches, this forgetfulness devolves to a social and moral ignorance, a spiritual and social barbarism of injustice and iniquity. For that reason, the Muslim belief that God sent a host of Prophets, each serving as a reminder against the aforementioned forgetfulness. As the impact of each reminder faded, another Prophet was selected to renew the divine message. This process is, in the view of Islamic theology, predicated upon the fact of human forgetfulness, which cannot be escaped.

Hence, should the Muslim scholar cite the era before the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, became a Prophet, in the year 610, he would refer to it as Al-Jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance. For, in this period, the majority of the Arabs were harshly fratricidal, living a bloody and, as the Quran is at pains to note, “unreasonable” existence, following emotions and passions without any higher, guiding principles. According to the view of Islamic historiography, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, ended this age of ignorance with his calling. But as Muslim belief recognises no further Prophets, their prophetic, reminding function was assumed by the Quran: The book describes itself as “a reminder to all the nations,” an eternal antidote for humanity’s forgetfulness.

And in the initial centuries of the Islamic era, it did appear that the reminder had won a permanent victory. While there were defeats and retreats, most notably in Andalusia (the Reconquista began with the internecine ta’ifa wars of 1009 AH, extinguishing the Spanish Umayyads by 1031 AH), Islam was nonetheless the primary world civilization for a substantial span. It was impossible to imagine a reversion to the era before Islam, that age of ignorance requiring divine intervention - for there could be no more such interventions. The current Muslim penchant for millenarian discourse is thus more understandable in light of the uniquely trying phase of history the global Muslim community, the ummah, finds itself mired in.

While colonisation has mostly passed, those states created in its wake enjoy little meaningful sovereignty, having commonly failed to inspire their peoples with any gripping social visions. The divisiveness plaguing the Muslim world reminds the observer of al-jahiliyyah, marked as it was by futile feuding (in 1987, the Arab League endorsed a resolution declaring Iran a greater threat to the Arabs than Israel, while Iran had begun a program of Arabisation and was relenting on exporting its Revolution - one can imagine the effect this decision had on the perceived legitimacy of the constituent Arab governments responsible for such declaration). A variety of dictators, monarchs, pundits and scholars have tried their hand, attempting to remedy this elusive illness, whose sources are often obscure, but whose consequences are plainly felt. The interpretations of one such ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, most concerns me here.

In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt, advocating a slow and steady re-Islamisation of society, a strategy that has met with considerable success: the Brotherhood focuses on tajdid, renewal, and islah, moral correction, through individual exertion, charity and education. The majority of the Brotherhood’s members, and especially its leadership, have eschewed violence or uprising as a productive or pious route, especially in recent decades. But Sayyid Qutb, a prominent member of the Brotherhood, opted for an alternate ideological approach - relevant to us because it is in part via an arguably foreseeable development of his more radical ideas that the Muslim world finds itself in its current dilemmas.

A secular littérateur who only joined the Brotherhood after a brief, unrewarding stay in the United States, Qutb spelled out a more radicalised Islamic revivalism in his Ma’alim fi al-Tareeq (Signposts Along the Way - a book the smallness of which belies its incredible impact). Through this work, Qutb argued that the Islamic world had come full circle: man’s forgetfulness had overtaken the guidance of the Prophet, peace be upon him. The Islamic vision had been upturned by tyrant rulers who governed in the name of “idols” such as nationalism, communism, socialism and democracy - ideologies representative of a new jahiliyyah (or, alternatively, the return of a suppressed jahiliyyah). Further, because most Muslim societies were structured around these “idols,” such societies were operating against the spirit of Islamic monotheism, which is generally ferocious in its resistance to all forms of idolatry and intermediaries. Whether or not Qutb would have advocated violent resistance, let alone the kind of terrorism that now passes for jihad, is beside the point. His worldview lent itself, too easily, to justifying illegitimate forms of violence: his call to fight idolatry resonated with many Muslims the world over, raised as they were on an emphatically unitary vision of God.

In order to silence what he saw as a grave threat, Gamal Abdel Nasser - Egypt’s leftist, pan-Arab dictator - ordered Qutb imprisoned and soon thereafter, executed. But Qutb would outlast Nasser nonetheless. In 1967, Israel demolished combined Arab armies (including Egypt’s) in a matter of days, a disaster widely interpreted by religious activists as a sign of God’s disapproval of leftist, “atheist” thought. Nasser died in 1970, and pan-Arabism with him. In the ideological vacuum, Islam was increasingly viewed as the only element sufficiently independent of the West to buttress resistance.

However, while legitimate Islamic movements rose to challenge authoritarianism (such as the Brotherhood), Qutb’s more radical ideas caught hold among the periphery, a margin emboldened by Khomeini’s toppling of the Shah, establishment of an Islamic Republic and consequent defiance of the United States, as well as by concurrent mujahideen successes against the Soviets. By the 1990s, radical Islam had taken Iran, Afghanistan and the Sudan, while seriously threatening states such as Algeria, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. To such radicals apparently on the verge of overwhelming jahil, or fundamentally ignorant, Muslim regimes, God had gifted men utopia. Men only had to establish it. There was no room for human interference in what was supposedly the perfect society, as illustrated by the Qur’an and the earliest Muslims. Any additions, such as democratic procedures, nationalist appeals, or socialist economics, were not only unnecessary, but heresy.

Because Qutb’s arguments reduced Islam to an immature, single-minded statism, those of his followers in power soon floundered, incapable of handling the compromises necessary to real-world politics. Unwilling to see a distinction between dissent and apostasy, radical regimes ensconced themselves in power, maintaining their grip through state-sponsored violence.  Rather than learn from the popular Muslim rejection of their stifling rule, these empowered radicals reacted to their shortcomings with blind fury, unable to see that an interpretation of the divine law is not equivalent to the law itself.

For those who see al-Qaeda as an elaborate conspiracy (that has somehow conned that nemesis of the American right, al-Jazeera), and also to those Muslims who might harbor some misguided respect for the severe, ultimately hollow, piety of certain self-declared Islamic organizations, I offer a warning: as groups like al-Qaeda find it harder to hit the West, they will target the East instead, fast becoming indigenous imperialists. Attacks such as those over the past few weeks, highlighted by exploding vehicles killing sleeping persons in their homes or praying Shi’ah in mosques, may well become the norm. It is troubling that, at best, Muslims will generally only shake their heads and cluck, “This is not Islam.” Because in part it unfortunately is - a dark face from the Muslim past, returned.

In 656, the third Caliph of the young Islamic community, ‘Uthman, was assassinated. More accurately - especially for those who doubt that Muslims could be behind the recent carnage in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan - he was beaten to death, by fellow Muslims, whilst reading Quran. Thitherto an unknown phenomenon. After his death, his relation Mu’awiyah, the governor of Syria, claimed the Caliphate, arguing that the leadership in Madinah had done nothing to protect ‘Uthman. However, ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, peace be upon him, was, by the consensus of most major Muslim thinkers and figures, the Caliph. But because Mu’awiyah never recognized ‘Ali’s legitimacy, the dispute promised, and briefly resulted in, a ruinous civil war.

Potential disaster looming, ‘Ali chose arbitration against further struggle, believing that victory at any cost was not a worthy goal (a spirit lacking amongst extremists, for whom worldly conquest - that is, a secular concept of triumph - is the paramount goal, even if it consumes innocents along the way). But ‘Ali’s choice was his death sentence: because he offered to consider Mu’awiyah’s counter-claims, ‘Ali earned the wrath of a section of his supporters, who charged him with apostasy. Called the khawarij (from the Arabic “kha-raa-jim,” meaning “going out, emigrating”), they withdrew from the Muslim community and, in isolation, fumed. Why would ‘Ali not fight, they wondered, if he was Caliph and his cause was righteous? Crying La Hukma Illa Lillah, no judgment except God’s - that is, no human “interference” in what they superficially and erroneously considered divinely decided, and hence, closed matters - their solution was violence.

The khawarij sent two assassins, one after Mu’awiyah and the other after ‘Ali. The first only wounded Mu’awiyah, while the second fatally stabbed ‘Ali through the head, whilst he was prostrated in worship. Recall that the Khawarij were outwardly dutiful people, who claimed to support divine order, yet they are remembered best for killing the Prophet’s cousin, and more than that, during a congregational prayer he was of course leading.

‘Ali’s assassination, the fortunes of the Muslim community sank rapidly. Mu’awiyah, unchallenged, moved the capital to Damascus, there establishing what was to become an authoritarian dynasty. An argument may also be advanced that the Khawarij zealots sparked the first embers of what would soon become the break between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, dividing the Islamic community in the name of politicisation, over misrepresented figures and ideals.

Muslims must consider their reactions to present-day occurrences with a view to the past and also to the future, to see that, despite dubious claims of resisting American or Israeli aggression (blamed for everything from dictatorship to traffic jams), radicalism is not likely to help the Muslim community in any significant way. Radical Islam desires the subjugation of all competitors - no policies or procedures except shariah, as imagined by activists with brittle education but plenty of arrogance. Their immanent goals, when combined with wayward hopes of martyrdom (the only meaningful transcendent experience left for such religiosity) can only promise further moral outrage. The Muslim world was in such a position before, and today, has returned to that point. Except now, we have authoritarian leaders in comparison to days gone by, when those so challenged were at least of upright character. In such a dismal environment, what might be the impact of increasing terrorism upon our already dim regard for human rights, individual dignity and social development?