Tag: religion

Al Azm on Islamism

In an important new essay in the Boston Review, Time Out of Joint, the Syrian philisopher Sadik Al-Azm looks at some of the root motivations behind the nihilist Islamist movements exemplified by Al Qaeda and predicts that the current violence around the world is its death throes:

I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Like the armed factions in Europe who had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, and traditional communist organization in favor of violent action, militant Islamism has given up on contemporary Muslim society, its sociopolitical movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, mainstream Islamic organizations, the attentism of the original and traditional Society of Muslim Brothers (from which they generally derive in the way the 1970s terrorists derived from European communism), in favor of violence. Both were contemptuous of politics and had complete disregard for the consequences of their actions.

That thesis is not new — it was expressed by French arabists and “Islamologists” Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel in the 1990s — but Azm’s essay adds to it in his eloquent essay the anxiety and urgency that comes from a Muslim intellectual writing about his own intellectual heritage and future. When he writes about Arabs and Muslims perceptions of their role in history and their attitude towards modernity, he writes we, not they. It is an important difference.

In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective soul, we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories.

Read and re-read it all.

“Muslims teach their children to hate”

As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has sponsored a survey on perceptions of Muslims in the US, in which almost one third of respondents associate the term Muslim with a “negative image” (and only 2% with something positive). You can also see the entire survey here.

I find something like this interesting because it raises such a host of related questions. The way Islam is portrayed in the Western media for example, which is almost always as violent or irrational. Not to say that Islam can’t be very intolerant and isn’t used to spread intolerance (Muslims should ask themselves why about half of the American respondents said “Islam oppresses women.”) But I don’t think it’s the case with Islam more than with any other religion. I mean, when we talk about Islam as a violent religion, have we forgotten the Crusades? the Inquisition? Abortion clinic bombings?

Also, the way all conflict in the Middle East is reduced to religion. The Palestinians happen to be Muslims, but the violence in the Occupied Territories has to do with nationalism, not religion. That goes for a lot of Arab countries, where the roots of violent action are more political/social/economic, and religious terminology is used to frame and give legitimacy to grievances.

Finally, I think the current US administration bears a lot of responsibility for negative stereotypes about Muslims. Bush has made several disclaimers about how all Muslims are not terrorists. But if you want to be running a perpetual and amorphous war, and you want to drum up support for it, then you need a perpetual and amorphous enemy, and all the talk of “evil-doers” and “thugs” and “ideology of hate” has rendered the entire Middle East, in many Americans’ minds, one large hotbed of fanatical, freedom-hating, inhuman terrorists. This is convenient.

Yoga not halal

This is the kind of stupid thing that gives Muslims a bad name:

A religious edict saps the energy out of yoga enthusiasts in Egypt, where clerics say the 5,000-year-old practice violates Islamic law.

Answering a religious question put forward, Egypt’s highest theological authority called yoga an “ascetic Hindu practice that should not be used in any manner of exercise or worship.”

The undated but recent edict was signed by the mufti, Ali Gomoa.

The edict, published in the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Hayat and obtained Sunday by the Associated Press, called the practice of yoga “an aberration” and said mimicking it is “forbidden religiously.”

There is a serious problems with the use — and perhaps the tradition itself — of fatwas, especially when they are given out by a government appointed sheikh. There is not meant to be in Islam, as far as I can tell, an “official fatwa-maker.” This is why Ali Gomaa has occasionally clashed with Al Azhar University, which has a council of scholars that often give out fatwas. But in principle, fatwas can be made by any person, and are usually personal advice given to individuals, not a reflection of government policy (and indeed Egypt has not banned yoga). The problem is that when an idiot or extremist decides that yoga is haram, or that a certain writer has insulted Islam, or that it’s OK to kidnap Americans working in Iraq, it often looks like he’s speaking to all Muslims. Particularly if someone powerful — the state, a fundamentalist group, a university — had decided that this person is entitled to make fatwas.

Al Banna book ban

Gamal Al Banna is one of Egypt’s most prominent thinkers on Islam, although you wouldn’t think so from the treatment he gets from the “official” Islam of Al Azhar, the oldest Islamic university which is based in Cairo but influences all Sunni Muslims. Al Azhar has decided to ban a new book by Al Banna which continues his calls for a radical re-interpretation of Islamic law. As my friend Paul Schemm reports in the Christian Science Monitor:

In the now blacklisted book, “The Responsibility for the Failure of the Islamic State,” author Gamal al-Banna suggests ways for Muslim minorities in Europe and elsewhere to integrate into non-Islamic societies. He argues that it would be permissible for women to cover their hair with a hat, rather than a head scarf, and recommends men use an early Islamic tradition of temporary marriages, legal in the Shiite sect, to avoid intercourse outside of wedlock.

. . .

This is not the first time Banna has raised the ire of Al Azhar. Only a few years ago, he published a three volume work entitled “Towards a New Jurisprudence” that called for total reevaluation of Islamic law. He is also the brother of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood from which most present day militant Islamic movements take their inspiration. Gamal al-Banna, however, has much more moderate views of the religion than his sibling.

“We must open the doors for the freedom of thought without any restrictions at all,” Banna says. “Even if one wants to deny the existence of God.”

Al Banna, of course, is the brother of Hassan Al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1920s. The Muslim Brotherhood is the first modern Islamist movement, and has been for most of the past hundred years one of the leading political forces in Egypt. Its influence has also extended to elsewhere in the Arab world, from benign Islamist parties such as Jordan’s to more militaristic movements like Hamas in Palestine. Generally, it shuns terrorism, but supports it in Palestine where it sees it as a war of national liberation. The Brotherhood is much further to the right than Gamal Al Banna’s thinking, who is often grouped with a few other reformist thinkers as “leftist Islamists” because of his moderation and emphasis on social issues. In a sense, Al Banna’s precursors were the early Islamic reformers like Jamal Al Din Af Afghani and Muhammad Abdou who were, on the whole, much more moderate than the Muslim Brothers.

One of the tragedies of the political situation in most Arab countries in that these people have had little opportunity to make their voice heard, as they tend to be squeezed out of the political discourse between secular regime parties and organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which is on the right -wing of a much broader tendency to look for Islam for political guidance. People like Al Banna, who in the past has felt comfortable supporting both leftist and liberal figures (he is for instance a supporter of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who is interviewed in the CSM article and is a leading pro-US liberal in Egypt), are being silenced by fundamentalist Islamists, the stale official Islam of Al Azhar theologians and the decaying Arab regimes. This is why providing them a platform in the West — like Tariq Ramadan — is important if their works are to spread.

The American Brotherhood

The Chicago Tribune ran this interesting article on the Muslim Brotherhood’s US chapter a few days ago. It’s worth reading, if only to see the reach of one of the oldest modern political movements in the Middle East — one that continues to have much influence in its birthplace, Egypt, and far beyond:

Many Muslims believe that the Brotherhood is a noble international movement that supports the true teachings of Islam and unwaveringly defends Muslims who have come under attack around the world, from Chechens to Palestinians to Iraqis. But others view it as an extreme organization that breeds intolerance and militancy.

“They have this idea that Muslims come first, not that humans come first,” says Mustafa Saied, 32, a Floridian who left the U.S. Brotherhood in 1998.

While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic. The group also champions martyrdom and jihad, or holy war, as a means of self-defense and has provided the philosophical underpinnings for Muslim militants worldwide.

Many moderate Muslims in America are uncomfortable with the views preached at mosques influenced by the Brotherhood, scholars say. Those experts point to a 2001 study sponsored by four Muslim advocacy and religious groups that found that only a third of U.S. Muslims attend mosques.