Liberal Islam?
By: Anshuman A Mondal
Islam's reformers of the 19th century failed to reconcile their faith with modernity. Is there any more hope today for the emergence of political liberalism in Islamic states?The prospects for Islam’s accommodation with the liberal-democratic societies of Europe and North America is one of the most urgent questions of our times. Why, ask western commentators, does Islam appear to have a problem with democracy and liberalism? Why did Islamic societies not experience modernity in the same way as the west? Is there anything about Islam itself-as religion or culture-that precludes development along such lines?
From Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the Islamic world’s encounter with modernity shook it with such force that it was never to be the same again. All Muslims, from peasants to pashas, would in the course of the next 200 years feel the aftershocks as the economic, political, social and cultural horizons to which they had become accustomed were changed by the new global reality of European dominance. Accompanying this was a growing sense of decline, as Muslims measured their own societies against those of the west and found them wanting.
The gloom also gave way to efforts at renewal, resulting in the greatest flurry of intellectual activity within the Islamic world since the early centuries of Islam. Thinkers such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Muhammad Abduh and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid from Egypt, Rashid Rida from Syria, Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal in India, and the Persian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, grappled with the new questions. They formed a transnational class of intellectuals, administrators and reformers that emerged in the early 19th century, reaching its apogee in the 1920s. They had their disagreements but collectively their efforts represent the best attempt to reconcile Islam with the principles of secular-liberal modernity.
Enthused by the overwhelming strength of Europe, they sought the secrets of that potency in detailed analysis of its political, economic and cultural history. They became aware of democracy and the institutions that supported it; they discovered new ideas concerning popular sovereignty and nationhood; they studied the rule of law and the emphasis on rationalism and intellectual enquiry. Having acquired this knowledge, they turned back to their own heritage and tried to reformulate Islamic principles with European modernity in mind.
It is a testimony to the extent of their failure that so few are nowadays even aware of this intellectual history, and such ignorance is not restricted to the west. As Fred Halliday reflected in Prospect (November 2001), almost no young Muslim in any part of the world would today recognise the names of the lost generation of Islamic liberals. The reason for this has as much to do with the history of Islam prior to the encounter with modernity as with the methods and reasoning of the reformers themselves.
Western critics often claim that the failure of Islam to modernise is due to the fact it has had no Reformation. The Reformation, it is said, loosened the intellectual shackles of medieval Christendom and led to the development of capitalism and the emergence of the rational individual as the basic constituent of society. The development of Protestantism is also seen as instrumental in the secularisation of European society. Together, these developments crystallised into political institutions that were constitutional and democratic.
Underlying the argument is the assumption that Islam’s moribund state is due to its lack of individualism, a lack which stultifies intellectual growth and encourages despotism. In fact, in its origins, Islam was highly individualist. Bringing to the tribal Arabs an eschatology derived from Judaism and Christianity, Islam emphasised the responsibility of the human individual for his or her own actions. This in turn meant that virtue was transferred away from the tribe and into the hands of its members. The Koran brought the human face-to-face and one-to-one with God. Historically speaking, this reflects the transition in the Arabian peninsula from a nomadic, tribal society to a more settled, agricultural and mercantile one in which the old solidarities were replaced by a new individualism based on Mecca as a trade centre.
On the other hand, the fundamental premise of Islam-as in premodern Christianity-lies in the unity of God and the world, so that divine writ covers every aspect of existence. Unlike the New Testament, however, the scope of the Koran’s injunctions to the individual spreads over every dimension of life. Islam is a total way of life incorporating habits and practices that do not directly relate to worship but nevertheless demonstrate virtue. In order that the Muslim may effectively practise this way of life, Islam requires a political order that guarantees it. Islam, from its outset, has involved the exercise of power.
The twin parameters of Islam are the individual and the Islamic state. Divine law, as revealed to Muhammad and manifested in the Koran, held these two together. It is for this reason that jurisprudence is far more important in Islam than theology. Western political theory suggests that the relationship between the state and the individual is mediated by a third term, society. But in Islamic theory the relationship between the state and its members is mediated only by the faith itself. From the inception of the Koran onwards there has been a lack of any concept of the public sphere in Islamic thought. Of the 6,000 or so verses in the Koran, only about a tenth are concerned with legislation and of these the vast majority are concerned with religious matters. Those that can be strictly defined as legal do not touch on any form of social relationship outside the family. The result is a legislative vacuum in just the area where it is most required if the ideal of Islam as a total social system is to be realised.
During the Prophet’s lifetime, Muhammad himself clarified any ambiguous points of law. But in the years following his death it became increasingly apparent that the Koran on its own, or the Prophet’s sayings and practices (the sunna), could not serve as an adequate basis for the formulation of Islamic law.
With the Prophet gone and the Islamic community transformed by conquest and expansion into a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire including sophisticated urban populations as well as simpler agricultural communities, the problem of interpreting divine law became acute. The development of the Shari’a, the system of Islamic law, took place in the context of a rapidly expanding polity as well as the disintegration of that polity into ideological, ethnic and factional disputes.
What emerged as the Shari’a and the “Sunni consensus” reflected a need to contain the potentially limitless range of interpretations of the divine message. The codification of Islamic law was thus intimately connected to the need for political stability. Whereas in the desert environment of early Islam the solidarity of faith which replaced the solidarity of the tribe could, in practice, continue to be supplemented by the customary social practices of the Bedouin, in more complex urban environments, such as Baghdad or Cairo, social and political stability had to be manufactured through a standard legal system.
This was the task for the codifiers of Islamic law. In the early decades of Islam it had grown up in an ad hoc manner and was based around individual interpretations (ijtihad) of the Koran and the sunna by legal scholars. In time, these scholars formed a community (the ulama) that arrogated to themselves the regulation of the law. The consensus of scholars that resolved the problem of interpretation agreed that only four recognised schools of law should be allowed, and that all legal decisions would be based on their judgements. New interpretations, which may have threatened this consensus were discouraged and, from the tenth century onward, creative readings of the Shari’a were anathematised. As the Muslim saying goes, the gates of ijtihad were shut.
The institutions which emerged from the Sunni consensus concentrated power. Building on a saying attributed to the Prophet that, “My community will not agree on an error,” consensus as opposed to dissent was seen as the only way of preserving the state and the truth which it existed to guarantee. As a consequence, relatively autonomous centres of power were obstructed. In Islamic societies, the sources of power were reduced to two: the state, embodied in the ruler, and the ulama who upheld the legal consensus. The individual, the pivotal idea of liberalism, which was fundamental to early Islam, disappeared from view until the 19th century.
The islamic modernists of the 19th and early 20th centuries who did so much to revitalise a moribund intellectual tradition found themselves confronted with a Europe that was vastly stronger militarily and economically. The source of Europe’s strength lay in its technological advances and these, the Islamic modernists believed, were the result of its rationalism. Looking at their own societies, the reformers felt that reason had been weakened as a result of the closing of the door of ijtihad. They wanted to recover what they saw as the rationalism of early Islam and especially the obligation to exercise intellectual effort in the pursuit of truth (ijtihad shares the same root as jihad, and means effort in the cause of truth). Once this door was re-opened, they supposed that the exercise of reason would stimulate Muslims to find modern solutions to current problems. The individual was thus reintroduced as a significant category in Islamic thinking.
The reformers also sought to discover how the pristine Islam of Muhammad and his immediate successors (known as the salaf period) anticipated everything that was good and useful about modernity. As devout Muslims, they accepted without question that Koranic revelation was the pinnacle of God’s wisdom and that an omniscient deity could not have had the absence of mind to omit anything important in his last word to humanity. The reformers found much of what they were looking for: the Islamic concept of welfare (maslaha) was seen as the equivalent of utility; consensus (ijma) was equated with public opinion; the guidance to rule by consultation (shura) anticipated parliamentary democracy; and “those who bind and loose”-traditionally the religious scholars-were felt to correspond to members of parliament.
They even re-appraised the relevance of the Shari’a to social life. For the early reformers, like Abduh and Afghani, this was not an option. The Shari’a was paramount and exhaustive; within it lay a boundless capacity for legal innovation according to the needs of the times. Their successors, however, drew on a well-known distinction in the Shari’a between rules concerning devotion and worship and those concerned with social relations to argue that it was possible to reconcile it with secular law. The Shari’a is remarkably precise as regards the former and rather imprecise as regards the latter. The reformers argued that this allowed, indeed it invited, humans to exercise reason and free will in order to solve their social problems. On this basis, the Egyptian journalist Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid stated: “We believe categorically that making utility the basis for action is a credo which does not conflict with the monotheistic faith.”
In retrospect, the reasons for the failure of the reformers to reconcile Islam with secular-liberal modernity are clear. Most importantly, they assumed that the principles of Islam and those of modernity were the same. They believed that modern knowledge was akin to the rationalism of early Islam. However, they failed to understand that even if Islam was “rational,” its rationality was of a different order to that of modern science. Like all Muslims, then and now, they accepted that the Koran represented the sum of all knowledge. Modern knowledge thus had to be in agreement with it. For them, it was just not possible that the two might conflict.
Two very different kinds of intellectual processes-religious and secular-are at work here. On the one hand there is the belief in an originating point of knowledge, a sacred text, which can be interpreted, glossed and footnoted. Here knowledge returns to its point of origin, the metaphysical absolute that guarantees truth. Modern scientific rationalism, on the other hand, has no point of origin and its trajectory is quite different. It is a text that is always liable to be rewritten and has no outward limitation to its enquiry; Islamic knowledge must, ultimately, be circumscribed by the revelation. It is immovable object and unstoppable force, and it is always likely that revelation and science will come into conflict.
It is with this in mind that the Islamic reformers always qualified their insistence on free interpretation. It was simply not permissable for anyone to think what they liked. Ijtihad might be necessary but it could not be limitless. In order to ensure the compatibility of reason with revelation, the reformers suggested that such limitations should be regulated by developing a consensus among those qualified to practise legal interpretation. If this sounds suspiciously similar to the settlement that had closed the door of ijtihad in the first place, that is because it is. In their minds, what is specifically modern about this new settlement is that those who are qualified to make new legal interpretations must be acquainted with modern knowledge. The result was an exact replication of the concentration of social power in the hands of the two agencies that had always possessed it: the religious authorities and the state.
It is here that a comparison with the history of Christianity is illuminating. The origins of Islam lie in a political revolution fuelled by social alienation in a changing society; by contrast, Christianity began as an effort at spiritual renewal within a decadent Pharisaical tradition. Politics was secondary-the result of creating enemies, and of persecution at the hands of Rome. Moreover, the laws of the church had always had to compromise with the existence of secular Roman law. This compromise with secular law-“render unto Caesar”-was also made easier by the fact that the gospels are long on parables and metaphors but short on prescriptive guidance on how to be a Christian in society. Islam, however, could brook no such compromise. It was the glue that held together the fragile tribal coalitions that Muhammad had woven into a revolutionary social force. Its raison d’etre was the acquisition of political power and the administration of the sacred law.
So, whilst Christianity could accommodate the formulation of secular common law, Magna Carta, and the authority of the state on all matters not directly threatening the interests of the church, the Islamic world would, within a short time, see its institutions reflecting the concentration of power that lies at the heart of the Koran, and is implied in the name of the religion itself (surrender to God). This precluded the development of secularism in Islam.
For if the religious sensibility rests on a metaphysical point of origin which governs all relations within its worldview-a point of origin outside the material world of existence-secularism conceives of power as distributed in matter and, in the human world, it is thus dispersed across society. The state, then, is a necessary construction by which to accommodate, manage and regulate this dispersed power so as to prevent anarchy. This, in effect, is the argument put forward by Hobbes.
In time, this would result in the development of the modern liberal-democratic state as the institutional expression of secularism, with modern science as its epistemological corollary-resting on the assumption that knowledge cannot be unified to a singular point of origin, which is why we live in a world of specialists and experts.
But if the Rubicon that no Muslim worthy of the name would cross is belief in the absolute omniscience and omnipotence of Allah, then it becomes hard to accommodate secularism. Very few Islamic thinkers have self-consciously espoused secularism, even among those who passionately desired modernity. Secularism was one of modernity’s less appealing aspects and many thought of it as an optional extra that they could accept or reject without consequence. They were wrong.
All of this suggests that Islam is impossible to secularise. What, then, of Islamic societies in the world today? Must they choose only between western secular-liberalism and an increasingly recalcitrant Islamic fundamentalism?
To say that Islam is probably incompatible with secularism is not the same as saying that there is no room in Islam for the secular. No Islamic state has ever been a full theocracy-including the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, from the outset, the relationship of the state to the Shari’a has been a troubled one. The state, in Islamic theory, possesses no sovereignty, which rests in the final analysis with God and the Shari’a. However, the state must exist in order to guarantee the Shari’a as the highest authority. A Muslim ruler is, therefore, in principle subject to its authority just like any other human. Since the ruler is unable to legislate and his power is only executive and judicial, his legitimacy rests on his ability and willingness to enforce and obey the divine law. But at some point the idealism of the divine law, vague as it is on matters of state and society, always comes into conflict with the secular needs of the ruler. As states and societies evolved through history, they became more removed from the conditions to which the Shari’a originally obtained. As such, it came to be regarded by Islamic rulers as less relevant to their needs and eventually it was restricted, in practice, to devotional, family and personal matters, with matters such as public order and criminal law left to the absolute ruler. In practice, the ruler could do what he wanted as long as he could find religious scholars to justify it. In times of political instability, this was not difficult since the scholars surmised that even a tyrannical or dissolute ruler was preferable to none.
Throughout Islamic history, then, the secular has played a significant role since there has always been a de facto separation of powers. This offers considerable scope for pragmatism, of which there is a venerable tradition in the Islamic world. Indeed, the conflict between the idealism of faith and the practical needs of a political movement has marked Islam from its inception. The Prophet himself is known to have compromised in order to further the political interests of the nascent community. In the modern world, most Islamic countries have continued this tradition.
Turkey is perhaps the only example of a specific ideological commitment to secularism. In Turkey, the state has been officially secularised and efforts have been made to secularise civil society as well, often by force. This has not been successful and the rise of the Islamist movement there, although less dramatic than in some other countries, testifies to the difficulties inherent in secularising Islam. In effect, although the apparatus of the Turkish state seems determined to suppress Islamist influence, it is still growing and there exists an uneasy but pragmatic balance between the state apparatus (in effect, the military) on the one hand and Islam in society on the other. This balance may have been decisively altered by the recent landslide victory of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AK). Given that the AK is only four seats short of the number required to change the constitution, some Islamicisation of the Turkish state looks likely. But the political sophistication and moderation of the AK leaders hold out the hope of a form of Islamic democracy that can co-exist with Turkey’s secular traditions.
The other major Islamic states-with the notable exceptions of Iran and Saudi Arabia-are almost all secular in the sense that either the Shari’a does not exist in any form or a secular statutory law co-exists with it. In the latter case, the Shari’a is usually applied to personal and family matters; criminal and civil law remain secular. Again, this is due to a mixture of pragmatism, history and social context. Almost all Islamic states as currently configured are the fallout, in some combination, of colonialism, the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, and nationalism-especially the latter. Nationalism in Islamic societies began to institutionalise the de jure separation of the state from Islam. The existing de facto separation was given a new legal basis. Sovereignty lay not with Allah but with the people.
What this meant was that a secular legal code that expressed the constitutional sovereignty of the people-as opposed to the sovereignty of God over all Muslims regardless of nationality-had to be formulated in order to conform to the new international order. The radical Islamist challenge has altered recently to recognise that the nation is itself a legitimate target, the basis of an historical capitulation that has led, in their view, to the emasculation of Islam. Recent jihadist groups such as al Qaeda deploy a transnational rhetoric of Islamic solidarity and conceive of the jihad in global terms, whereas previous fundamentalist movements-such as Hizbollah, Hamas and the FIS in Algeria-operated within the arena of the national, linking their Islamist agenda to the struggle for national liberation.
Nevertheless, what we have in the world today-again, except in Iran and Saudi Arabia-are nations which are predominantly Islamic, as opposed to Islamic nations. This creates a significant bulwark against radical Islam. Other than in conspicuously failed states, such as Afghanistan, most Muslims still conceive of themselves in national as well as religious terms. In other words, they have an emotional investment in the current structure of an officially secular nation state co-existing with a predominantly Islamic society. They might not like the state, they might despise its political elite, but it does not follow that they wish for the demise of the nation state in favour of a transnational Islamic polity.
This is particularly true of the multi-religious states such as Indonesia and Malaysia. A secular judicial and political system is necessary to keep their fragile communal and religious constituencies in some form of balance. The imposition of the Shari’a in southeast Asia is thus unlikely. The main Islamic groups in Indonesia and Malaysia do not espouse the creation of an Islamic state. And the response of most of Indonesia’s Muslims to the Bali bomb testifies to the isolation of the violent jihadist groups.
It has often been noted that Asian Islam is of a different character to Arab Islam, that it is more secular and moderate. It has even been suggested that the future of Islam may belong to Asia, just as its past belonged to Arabia. Whilst it may be true that more heterogeneous populations in Asia have created more syncretic versions of Islam, it is equally true that south Asian Islam, for instance, has often been as dogmatic as any in the middle east. The Deobandi movement in 19th-century India launched a vitriolic assault on modernity and reformers like Sayyid Ahmed Khan, and their spiritual heirs in what is now Pakistan have nourished, and continue to nurture, hopes for the Taleban.
It is sometimes suggested that an alternative route to the liberalisation of Islam might come through Muslim minorities in the west. As minorities they have no prospect of institutionalising Islam in their states, leaving “western Islam” free to reintroduce the primacy of the individual. The large number of “cultural” Muslims in the west demonstrates the extent to which Islam and secular-liberalism may indeed be compatible. We should, however, be cautious here. Cultural Muslims represent an elite that has, in effect, rejected Islam as a religion in favour of an Islamic “identity.” But the vast majority of Muslims in the west do not aspire to a Muslim identity devoid of significant religious content. For them, Islam remains both a religion and a way of life, although one that has to be pragmatically accommodated within a secular society. As the recent introduction of Islamic mortgages shows, western governments can help this accommodation and lessen the feeling of alienation Muslims often feel in the west. But most Muslims in the west, even young second generation Muslims, tend to reject secularism and individualism and their faith is often expressed in even more collectivist forms than in the Islamic world itself.
Moreover, just as some countries in the west are more significant than others, so some Islamic countries possess greater weight in determining the future shape of Islam. Despite the fact that Islamic populations outside of the middle east are becoming increasingly prosperous, prominent and powerful-especially in the west itself-the Arabian peninsula and its surroundings remain the symbolic and spiritual heart of Islam; its importance is likely to grow, not diminish, even on western Muslims.
For Islam is, and always has been, as much an idea as a political force, and its symbolic power is potentially magnified by the global media. Since last September, western commentators have noted with surprise the impact of the satellite station Al-Jazeera. It is unsurprising, however, that Muslims should turn to such stations given that most of them live in countries with strict state control of the media. Al-Jazeera offers an opportunity to bypass censorship without having to fall back on western news services, thereby making the management of public opinion increasingly difficult for those Muslim states that seek to take a pragmatic, relatively pro-western, stance.
Increasingly, the Muslim world is being unified, not on the basis of doctrine but issues. An ideological coherence is emerging that is broad in its scope but relatively empty in content. This involves a few limited but potent touchstones: Israel/Palestine; the US military presence in the Arabian peninsula; and Iraq. It is no coincidence that each is located in the middle east. The effect of the global telecommunications revolution in the Muslim world will be to concentrate Muslim perceptions on these issues at the expense of the lived flexibility of Muslim life elsewhere. The coherence is superficial but it does make it hard for pragmatic Muslims to espouse a more secular society. This dilemma is most pronounced in the country where the confrontation between idealism and pragmatism is assuming epochal proportions: Iran.
In Iran, all power is concentrated in the hands of the state and the religious scholars. The Byzantine political structure effectively circumscribes the elected officials of the state by vesting real power in the hands of a small number of unelected bodies that are staffed almost exclusively by the clerics and their appointees. This is what maintains the strict Shi’a interpretation of the Shari’a formulated by Khomeini and his allies as the country’s legal system. Whilst the successive elections of President Khatami and his reformist allies in the assembly testify to the groundswell of popular support for liberalisation and reform, the hardliners have gathered themselves from the shock of defeat and are flexing their political muscles to thwart it. The result is political stalemate.
For a number of reasons, the outcome of the struggle in Iran is significant for the future of Islam. Iran offers an imperfect working model of how to reconcile Islam with democracy. This is in part due to its Shi’a heritage. On the one hand, there is an imperative towards justice over stability and, on the other, in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, who would be the supreme spiritual authority, Shi’a doctrine places responsibility for the resolution of religious matters firmly in the hands of the scholars. It is an imperative that in order to achieve justice scholars must exercise their judgement. So, far from closing the door of ijtihad, Shi’ism insists on it remaining open. The Shi’ite tradition has therefore been intellectually more dynamic than its Sunni counterpart. This confluence of intellectual and political activity in the pursuit of justice was resurrected by the broad coalition that toppled the Shah. After the revolution, the hardliners led by Khomeini turned the apparatus of the state upon their more secular allies in the popular front and exterminated political opposition. Nevertheless, a form of democracy has survived and has begun to flourish-Islamic democracy may indeed be possible.
The stalemate between democratic demands and hardline conservative opposition reflects the contradictory pressures upon Islam in the world today. The complexities of modern life lead, inevitably, to a need for new secular legislation to encompass unprecedented dilemmas, but a big constituency rejects this in favour of the simple reassurances of faith and dogmatism. This constituency is growing in every Islamic country except Iran, which suggests that it is precisely democracy-a democracy derived from, and not in spite of, Islamic principles-that offers the most viable route to rapprochement between Islam and the west. Conversely, it is the frustration caused by authoritarian regimes that fuels fundamentalism.
If western governments are serious about democracy in the Islamic world then they must be prepared to help. But doing so is fraught with risk. The modern state in the Muslim world is still a plaything of elites. The majority of their populations feel alienated, disenfranchised and resent everything these states once represented: liberalism, secularism and a corrupted, and corrupt, form of western modernity.
The dilemma for the west is that if it withdraws support, as it should, from brutal and undemocratic regimes, it may allow radical Islamists to capture the state. This in itself would not necessarily be disastrous, if democracy could be guaranteed, since the radicals are likely to be rejected by the electorate eventually-as in Iran-but there is a short-term risk of instability. A more measured transition to democracy, with a combination of carrots and sticks is preferable if it is possible, with the west pushing the elites towards necessary reforms.
Modern Islam’s relationship with the west therefore does not depend on the possibility of a doctrinal reconciliation with secular-liberalism; what matters is the creation of conditions in which pragmatism and democracy may flourish. If, as many people in the west suggest, the real Islam is tolerant, humane and essentially liberal, then the best way for Islamic societies to remain true to the spirit of their civilisations is for western societies to try to observe their own ideals in dealings with them.
