Reinventing political Islam
ONCE upon a time Islamic civilisation was a bastion of intellectual debate and freedom of thought. It pioneered algebra and spherical trigonometry, the concept of zero, public hospitals, public libraries and academic degree-granting universities. It gave the world innovative surgical and astronomical instruments, ushered in a scientific revolution in optics and helped lay the foundations of modern medicine.
It gave us the awe-inspiring architecture of Moorish Spain and Mughal India. Muslim thinkers pursued love, poetry, and philosophy with equal zeal and taught the equality of men and woman. So influential were the contributions of this age of discovery that it hastened a European Renaissance.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and things are very different. What has happened in these years for Islamic civilisation to be reduced to the state it is in today? Writers and scholars have been trying to decipher the reasons for the rise and fall of this Islamic Golden Age.
They point to the political mismanagement by some of the later caliphs, the Crusades, the Mongol invasion, the fall of the Ottomans and the subsequent colonisation by European empires. With the devastation of the rich heritage that followed, one very important aspect of Islamic thought seemed to have become ossified in history --ijtihad.
It is the independent and reasoned interpretation of the Qur'an and the Sunnah and was a commonly used legal practice in early Islam. This was based on the understanding that every new generation of Muslims have to reinvent and reinterpret their religion to make it relevant against the existing social, economic and political context.
The freezing of ijtihad in dominant Sunni tradition has had many a negative effect on political Islam. Shari'ah or "Islamic Law" for example, is a human creation, an effort to understand the divine will in a specific context. As such, it is less law and more a problem-solving methodology. But conservative interpretations have elevated it to divinity itself and presented it as an immutable set of guidelines.
Islam makes it an obligation on every Muslim to seek knowledge. In early Islamic civilisation, all knowledgeable men, which consisted of scientists, artists, littérateurs, philosophers and theologians were deemed as the ulama. With the decline of ijtihad the ulama increasingly came to comprise only religious scholars.
Take jihad and its over-simplified meaning, holy war. Its more important spiritual connotation of inner struggle and intellectual endeavour in ones personal and social life has been lost in translation. Similarly ijma, the third fundamental source of Shari'a, has been narrowly understood to be a consensus among Islamic clerics. Yet it is the consensus of the entire community, embodying participatory and democratic governance.
However, it would be a mistake to say that this decontextualisation and reductionism in political Islam has not been challenged. Many reformist scholars and intellectuals such as Jamaluddin Afghani, Mohammad Abduh and Mohammad Iqbal led the calls for ijtihad at the beginning of the last century. More contemporary thinkers such as Ziauddin Sardar, Amina Wadud and Abdullah an- Naim are at the forefront of it today.
Yet this spirit of scholarly enquiry and reform has neither percolated among the Muslim community nor been internalised. The Muslim world struggles to engage with modernity, continuing to export medieval times and applying it to an ill-fitting reality. It has produced autocracies, theocracies or dictatorships where oppressive brands of Islam sit comfortably with their political ideology.
America's direct and indirect political alliances with these actors haven't helped the scene either. Be it during the Cold War by supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or the present day dictators in the Middle East, American foreign policy has also played a role in fanning extremist political Islam.
With very little political freedom to channel grievances, the reaction to both domestic despotic leaders and Western hegemonic architecture has been violence. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have become mirror images of what they are fighting against. The common Muslim is faced with no real political alternatives that strive to solve the problems of his day-to-day life.
Colonialism and the subsequent geo-political fragmentation of the world has led to the ummah or global community of Muslims to be reduced to the nation state. It is from here that a reformed political Islam should emerge, in order to be in harmony with the diverse practices of Islam, which reflect local cultures and customs.
Hard-line organisations themselves will have to moderate their stance in order to appeal to the masses. Muslim leftists, secularists and reformists must become more visible and their ideas accessible to the public. They should coalesce to produce home-grown political ideologies that champion equality, justice and pluralism.
International human rights norms or a liberal democracy are not irreconcilable with Islamic values. That is something which Muslims need to understand and believe in order to bring about change -- in the personal and the political sphere of life.
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