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What Islamic Enlightenment?

15 Saturday Apr 2017

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Islamic EnlightenmentDe Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. 432 pp.

The end of the Cold War did not usher in a thousand years of peace; nor did it see the end of History. Instead, even as the victorious Western alliance was popping champagne, a new menace was taking shape in the Islamic world. Terrorism was certainly not a new phenomenon, but the global reach and sophistication of what emerged in the closing decade of the second millennium was unsurpassed. Samuel Huntington famously – controversially – called it a clash of civilisations. Whether he was right or not, the Age of Terrorism has come to be deeply linked to Islam. It is this perception that Christopher de Bellaigue hopes to dispel. His latest book, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, is meant to be a riposte against Western historians, politicians, and commentators who repeatedly demand that Islam join the 21st century, that it should “subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.” To those who clamour for an Islamic Enlightenment, Reformation, and Renaissance, to those insisting that the religion of Muhammad develop a sense of humour, de Bellaigue’s response is that it already has, albeit with a particular cultural touch.

Westerners have not generally come to the East with open minds and in their inability to see past a European universalism, de Bellaigue contends, have missed the fact that not all Muslims are primitive, regressive terrorists. In fact, the Islamic world has not shown any more hostility towards modernity than Christendom did a couple of centuries earlier. The author dates the clash between European modernity and Islam in 1798 with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army on the shores of Egypt. De Bellaigue astutely observes that Western ideas were initially absorbed with greater success when they were perceived to be universal than later, after World War I, when they were seen as the business end of a hostile ideology.

Islamic Enlightenment locates the foci of modernisation in Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran, where numerous figures, nationalists, litterateurs, monarchists, as well as the ulema, engaged with Western science, technology, and political science to adapt them to the needs of Islamically-minded societies. However, many of the modernisers were inspired not by the trinkets and gimmicks of European innovation but by the achievements of classical Islamic civilisation. De Bellaigue narrates the tales of modernisers of all shades. Some were intrinsically hostile to Western methods yet awed by them such as Abdulrahman al-Jabarti; others infused the “genius of Islam” in the universal knowledge the West possessed such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Some of the reformers were optimistic of Western intentions in the Muslim world such as Muhammad Abduh, while others felt forced into reforms such as the Ottoman sultans Abdulmecid I and Abdulaziz. There were, of course, a few who saw modernity as a means to power and pursued Western knowledge with a purely secular interest such as Muhammad Ali Pasha. Regardless, the author notes, a liberalising, modernising tendency had emerged strongly in the Middle East.

This pushback against Islamophobia is laudable yet eventually flawed in its conception. Fundamentally, Islamic Enlightenment tries to pack into one term what in Europe properly describes at least four zeitgeists – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to imagine, at least in Europe, an Enlightenment that was not preceded by the Reformation and the Renaissance. It was the rediscovery of the classical world and an emphasis on humanism based on reason that caused the first crack in the totalising edifice of the Christian faith. Renaissance intellectuals did not necessarily reject religion but there was, nonetheless, a subtle shift in the way they approach it. The Reformation continued this trend in two important ways – first, and more obvious, is the theological schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, and second, the savagery and horrendous toll of the Thirty Years’ War – between a third and half of the population of Europe – finally broke the power of the Church in temporal matters after the peace at Westphalia in 1648.

These two short yet turbulent epochs paved the way for the Enlightenment. Made receptive to a gradual shift from faith to reason, autocracy to democracy, European society broadly supported the principles of the Enlightenment even if not the pace of some of its most forceful advocates. The Counter-Enlightenment remained a German nationalistic rebellion against French supremacy in the arts rather than a full-blooded critique of the Enlightenment itself. Various aspects of Enlightenment thinking – in the arts, political reform, economic reorganisation, religious reconceptualisation – were realised over the next century and half in step with the Industrial Revolution.

De Bellaigue’s brief history of 19th century reform movements in the Middle East – to which he devotes half the book – describes abortive attempts at modernisation that underscores this point further. Middle Eastern – Islamic? – attempts to replicate Europe’s material successes failed precisely because they focused purely on the material aspects of the European experience without adequately contemplating on the socio-cultural reformations that had taken place since the late 14th century that had brought Europe to a place whence the Enlightenment was possible. ‘Enlightenment with an Islamic flavour’ deviates sufficiently from the European experience that it cannot be herded under the same umbrella.

As de Bellaigue narrates, most Muslim modernisers were enthralled by Western science and technology but retained their faith in the supremacy of Islam. Even secular, power-hungry rulers and administrators were loathe to go to war against the ulema in the name of Western science or progress for fear that they would destabilise their kingdoms and lose their thrones, or worse, their lives. This was not an altogether unfounded fear, as Mirza Taki Khan Farahani found out in a bathhouse in Kashan.

Reforms with largely material goals in mind can hardly be termed an Enlightenment. If technology were the sole arbiter of progress, some of today’s most visious terrorist groups such as the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and ISIS could be said to be progressive. All the major terrorist groups in the 21st century have access to highly sophisticated weaponry and knowledge of explosives and tactics to challenge most national armies, an equation that Middle Eastern rulers of two centuries ago would have yearned for. The pitfall of such progress is visible – although the armies of Muslim states reduced the technological gap between themselves and their European counterparts over the 19th century, there was a backlash against cooperation with Europe after World War I that returned the socio-political situation almost to where it had been a hundred years earlier.

It is also difficult to understand how de Bellaigue considers the fervour of the 19th century as an Enlightenment when many of the most influential actors, be they pashas, clerics, or men of science, continued to cast a sheep’s eye on Islam. Nor was this the Islam of the 10th century Mu’tazilites, a relatively open faith not allergic to external knowledge or inquiry. By the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, it was well past the era of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali or Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya and the closing of the Muslim mind. This Islam, intrinsically regressive as Shiraz Maher argues in his excellent Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea, looked to the era of its prophet and his companions as the most perfect era in human history and was, thus, fundamentally antithetical to reason. This is not to say that such a society cannot change, but there is certainly a big question mark on whether such a society is capable of an Enlightenment.

Finally, the European Age of Imperialism was not an epoch of liberalism in the Middle East. None of the bold reformers of Egypt, Turkey, or Iran were democrats in the spirit of Jacques Pierre Brissot. In fact, all of de Bellaigue’s examples were despots whose liberal tendencies ended outside the throne room. The question for the author becomes whether it is possible for autocrats to usher in an Enlightenment. Unintentionally, Islamic Enlightenment serves as a warning to Western politicians who believe that they can play midwife to liberal democracy in the Middle East: even when such an endeavour had local support, it was not quite liberal and eventually failed.

All said and done, de Bellaigue is not wrong in his larger point. There is a tendency to view Islamic societies as intrinsically defective and prone to violence. This is no more true for them than it is for Christian societies, especially in the past, even the recent past. A little nuance beyond the sterile dichotomies an attention-deficit media churns out is required in reading the politics of the Middle East. However, nuance cannot be an excuse to whitewash all sorts of regressive social customs and political beliefs. No one sane thinks all Muslims are terrorists but there is a gradation of radicalisation in the Muslim world from terrorists to those who, for example, think blasphemy and apostasy should be punishable by death, to a far more tolerant and humanist sample. Although our attention is held mostly by one extreme end of the spectrum, it is only prudent to consider whether problems also lie further along the spectrum. Furthermore, while a more pleasant distant past holds out hope, it is only natural that it is the stormy present that educates our policies and beliefs.

It is tragic that those who are convinced of de Bellaigue’s broader message probably do not need his book as much and are already familiar with the research of scholars like Majid Fakhry, Lenn Goodman, Marshall Hodgson, and Ira Lapidus. Those who are not convinced, however, will likely not be persuaded by his book or even read it.

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The Quest for Democracy in Syria

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Middle East

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In the March of 2011, the turbulence of the Arab Spring reached Syria. What began as agitated demonstrations quickly escalated into a civil war that has now claimed some 340,000 lives, displaced over seven and a half million people, and involves nearly a dozen countries. After almost five years of fighting, the situation still appears bleak and has become even more complex. Yet could this conflict have been resolved earlier before the various factions had become set in their demands? This is a dangerous yet tantalising counterfactual: if the Western powers had not been so insistent upon using the revolution to remove Bashar al-Assad from power, would Syria have turned into such a quagmire?

When the Arab Spring hit Syria, many wondered at what would replace the Ba’athist tyranny. Quick on the revolutionary bandwagon, Western leaders salivated at the chance of finally removing a pro-Russian government from power. The fall of Saddam Hussein had inadvertently promoted Iran up the ranks of regional powerdom and with Iraq still tottering on the brink of viability, the opportunity for a friendly if not necessarily pro-Western government in Syria was welcome. It is in the pursuit of this goal that the United States and its European allies constructed a narrative of bringing democracy to Syria. Assad must go for any peace to come to Syria, they argued, because it was the democratic will of the people. Years of bitter fighting has now changed this rosy view.

Had it merely been press statements and patronising editorials, Western policy could have been dismissed as the usual blend of naïveté and realpolitik. Unfortunately for the Syrian people, it has come at a far greater cost. What has been almost forgotten in recent commentaries on Syria is that Russia had approached the West with a peace deal in February 2012, when casualties stood around 7,500. According to Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, had approached him with a three-point plan. The Russian plan was simple and what the United States and Europe have come around to accepting only a couple of months ago as the best alternative. As Ahtisaari recalls, Churkin said, “Martti, sit down and I’ll tell you what we should do. One – we should not give arms to the opposition. Two – we should get a dialogue going between the opposition and Assad straight away. Three – we should find an elegant way for Assad to step aside.” Ahtisaari took this message to the American, British, and French delegations at the UN but they ignored the proposal, convinced that Assad was going to be booted out in a matter of weeks.

To be clear, Assad is no boy scout. He is a typical Arab authoritarian leader like Saddam Hussein was and the House of Saud is. Despite the trouble brewing in his neighbourhood all through 2010, he refused, just weeks before the unrest started, to relax his hold on the government. There would be no political pluralism, diversity of ideas, or greater tolerance on expression. During the civil war, Assad has been indiscriminate in his use of force in population centres, used heavy weapons such as cluster bombs, barrel bombs, thermobaric weapons, chemical weapons, and even Scud missiles against the rebels. Such behaviour has encouraged recruits into the ranks of ISIS, analysts point out. On a purely humanitarian basis, it is not difficult to see why anyone would wish Assad away.

However, it remains unclear as to what other options exist that are in any way better than Assad. Defeating ISIS, it is said in Western capitals, can only happen in conjunction with the removal of Assad from power. Yet the Syrian opposition gives little reason for confidence. Most of them are almost as conservative as Da’esh, albeit more restrained in their implementation of Islamic law. The West has always harped on moderate elements among the Syrian opposition but what that means in the Syrian context may not be entirely savoury. There is also this to be considered: can the moderate factions bring stability to Syria after Assad is gone and ISIS has been eliminated? Or will we see a bloodier version of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with sectarian strife ripping the country apart?

Other than Assad’s forces and ISIS, one of the strongest orgainsations in Syria is the Jabhat al-Nusra. The group is essentially the al-Qa’ida front in Syria with the explicit near-term aim of overthrowing the Assad government and bringing Syria under Islamic law. However, the Nusra Front has pursued a smart long-term strategy focused on embedding itself into Syrian society. They have shown restraint in their application of the harsher tenets of sharia and have portrayed themselves more as nationalists than as Islamists to garner support of the Syrian people. For example, the Nusra Front is immediately more concerned with the ouster of Assad than global jihad. As a result, the group has become popular despite having an ideology almost as vicious as that of ISIS. The Nusra Front is also loyal to its parent organisation; over the years, Turkey and Qatar have repeatedly tried to bring the group out of the al-Qa’ida fold to make them more acceptable to the West as potential successors to the Assad regime but to no avail.

Another powerful group in the anti-Assad coalition is the Ahrar al-Sham, arguably the strongest faction in Syria both politically and militarily. The secret of its success lies in sustained backing from Turkey and Qatar, with even Saudi Arabia showing some interest of late. Again, the group is avowedly Islamist with loose ties to al-Qa’ida in the past but it is, like the Nusra Front, committed to ejecting Assad from power. Ahrar al-Sham also benefits from excellent organisation, which, according to Charles Lister, a senior consultant to the Shaikh Group and involved in Syria Track II dialogues, has allowed it to survive major losses such as the gutting of its leadership in September 2014. This administrative acumen indicates an able pool of people to run a post-Assad Syria but their ideology is just as unpalatable as the Nusra Front and the US Central Intelligence Agency has declined providing the Ahra al-Sham with training and weapons.

A third group worth mentioning as contending for a role in a new Syria is the Jaish al-Islam. The result of a merger of fifty or so smaller Damascene groups in September 2013, the Jaish al-Islam is a powerful militia in the conservative Islamist fold that is backed by Saudi Arabia. There have been consistent rumours that Riyadh has not only extended financial assistance to the group but also recruited instructors from Pakistan to provide them training, primarily because the Saudis were afraid that the Nusra Front had become too dominant a force in Syrian politics. Curiously, however, the ideology of the Jaish al-Islam is also Islamist in the al-Qa’ida mould, with the group’s leader, Zahran Alloush, calling Nusra Front fighters as his brothers and addressing Osama bin Laden with honorifics such as rahimahu Allah. However, the Jaish al-Islam is as devotedly anti-ISIS as it is anti-Assad and has released several videos that show the mass execution of captured ISIS fighters. Its battle strategy is as gruesome as that of ISIS, oftentimes using civilians as human shields to evade Allied air strikes. While their ideologies do not align perfectly, Jaish al-Islam has in fact cooperated with the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham on the battlefield in the past.

Groups like the Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham hold a reluctant interest for the West because they have been extremely effective against ISIS, more so than the more publicised Kurdish peshmerga. Furthermore, despite their unequivocally anti-ISIS and anti-Islamist stance, the Kurdish factions pose a problem in the long run because their Arab neighbours are wary that the price of Kurdish assistance against ISIS would be independence or at least autonomy. Interestingly, the one thing that unites everyone in Syria, from Assad to the Syria-focused Islamists, is the unity of the country. At a recent seminar in London organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Lister stated that in his two and half years of close talks with the Syrian opposition, the overwhelming consensus – 90 to 95 per cent – was that Syria must stay as a single and unified state. Unfortunately for the West, the only groups who seem to be capable of holding a post-Assad Syria together are staunchly Islamist.

These prominent Islamist factions pose a more immediate problem too: they are Sunni extremists and as such, virulently against Syria’s several minority groups such as the Shia, Alawi, Druze, and Christians. Any anti-Assad coalition that includes groups like the Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, and Jaish al-Islam will never gain the acceptance of minorities that have steadfastly remained loyal to Assad. In their opinion, a secular dictator is supremely preferable to a religious tyrant; they see little difference between the massacre of Yazidis around Sinjar by ISIS in August 2014 and the massacre of minorities in Adra by the Nusra Front and the Islamic Front, in December 2013. Any suggestion of incorporating Islamist groups into a Syrian political settlement is a non-starter while keeping the Islamists out would mean a long, bloody and protracted civil war.

There are, to be sure, scores of moderate, nationalist factions in the Syrian civil war too. Judging from the assessment made by the British Joint Intelligence Committee, this segment numbers about 75,000 fighters divided between 105 to 100 groups. The largest two, the Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army and the Northern Free Syrian Army, comprise 58 factions fielding 25,000 fighters and 14 factions fielding 20,000 fighters respectively. Both these groups have been amenable to a political settlement to the civil war but again, to the West’s misfortune, these groups have proven ineffective against Assad’s forces. In September 2015, the secretive US Military Operations Command in Amman withdrew support to the Southern Front after a string of battlefield failures against the Syrian Army. This has led to signs of splintering in the group, with some elements allegedly reaching out to more successful yet Islamist groups such as the Ahrar al-Sham.

With a lack of feasible anti-Assad options on the field of battle, there is also this to be considered: are Syrians capable of democracy, that too one with multicultural hues? Such questions are usually summarily dismissed as racist but it is worth bearing in mind that a democratic system is the embodiment of values already present in the people. Thus can be explained, for example, the institutional failure and weak democracy of India. The successful implantation of a democratic framework in West Germany and Japan after World War II can easily be countered by the failed democracies of over a dozen postcolonial African states, Pakistan, and Iraq. Hussein and Assad, little Stalins that they have been, may not nourish the lofty ideals of free expression and political freedom but at least they saved their countries from descending into sectarian bloodbaths. The hypocrisy of the West in demanding a perfect solution to the Syrian question can be seen among its regional allies in Saudi Arabia, a state that many have compared to ISIS unfavourably. The Western pursuit of democracy, or realpolitik, in the Middle East has unlocked an enormous wave of human tragedy.

Had the proposal that came to Ahtisaari in February 2012 been pursued, the Syrian tragedy might have been averted. Assad’s own infractions may have been responded to, at least partially, via sanctions and diplomatic pressure. Given that the country is surrounded by US allies, this would not have been too difficult. However, some diplomats from the P3 (Britain, France, United States) have alleged that no such proposal existed, or if it did, it was not serious. If this is true, it would still have been worth considering a future of Syria in which Assad had a role, at least temporarily. After all, a nationalist dictator might make for an uneasy region but a global jihadist ideology is inherently expansionist and an international ulcer. This latter event has been the cost of the Western pursuit of “democracy” in Syria.

This article first appeared in the December 2015 print edition of Swarajya.

An Old W(h)ine In A New Bottle

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in India, Opinion and Response, South Asia

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There has always seemed to be some resentment among the non-Anglicised nationalists of India at the usage of Western terminology to describe India and her history. Western vocabulary is particular to the European historical experience, the argument ran, and the untranslatability of many core concepts of Indian culture means that India deserves her own frame of reference and cannot merely be a European Other. One can sympathise with this argument, but unfortunately, little has been done – at least in English – to further substantiate it with data and reasoning.

One term that has become louder as the political fortunes of the allegedly Right Bharatiya Janata Party have swelled is “civilisational state.” There does not appear to be much theoretical analysis of what this term means except that it is advanced as an alternative to the Western idea of the nation-state. The recent political upheavals around the globe are held as examples of the failure of the nation-state and – as in the case of the wannabe Caliphate – a call for civilisational ties over narrower, national ones. Furthermore, it is posited that the nation-state paradigm, at least as imagined by Benedict Anderson, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, or Anthony Smith, does not quite hold with India. Finally, the post-modernist trope of the novelty of the nation-state is dragged out – a concept so new and invented can surely not be suited to capture an old civilisation like India?

Unfortunately, many theories emanating from the Right can do with a little subjection to the fires of scholarly debate, particularly from different perspectives. The notion of a civilisational state, for example, is not only terribly flawed but it is also not original. The strength of the idea lies in its ambiguity more than in its merit and like the other intangible it is supposed to replace – nation – its supporters rally behind it for they can imbue the label with whatever they want it to mean.

First, the definitional problems of “civilisational state” – when Indian nationalists on the Right of the political spectrum use that term, it is a safe assumption that they imply a state based on Indic culture, or more accurately, dharma. Contrary to popular belief, dharma is not religion; it is a wider set of social practices and customs that have governed life in South and Southeast Asia. While dharma may not satisfy a legalistic standard of definition, that is so by design. However, a state is a legalistic entity – how is one to marry an amorphous ‘civilisation’ with a legalistic ‘state’? More crucially, does this mean that India should have territorial ambitions over other states in South and Southeast Asia who are also a part of the same dharmic culture? Is an open-border union like the European Union envisaged by this civilisational Indian state? And if not, what is the basis of the Indian state that is merely one stump of this common dharmic culture?

Second, the idea is certainly not new or unique to India. Civilisational states have had very little success historically. The Greeks, for example, who saw themselves as a civilisation and everyone else as barbarians, were a fragmented and fractious lot that spent more time warring against each other than against common enemies; despite Islam’s protestations about an ummah, the fact is that they have never been a united civilisational state. Just like the Greeks, Muslims fought against each other as often as they fought infidel “outsiders.” Christianity also tried its hand at a united civilisational state and even fought an ill-conceived war in the Middle East in the name of their faith. However, it too left little to show for all the effort. More recently, the Ottoman sultans tried to bind his subjects to a common non-Turkic identity but that was also not meant to be.

The one possible exception to this rapidly familiar trend of failed civilisational states is the Roman Empire. However, this too is an imperfect example and there are too many difference between India and Rome to get into here. Rome certainly followed the Greek example of self-barbarian recognition, but what united Romans more than a single, even heterogenous, culture was law and the force of arms. The civic culture of Rome was very different from India’s dharmic past though both do qualify as civilisational in a sense.

Third, what does civilisational state actually mean for quotidian life? What are its policies, what are its values, what are its citizens – or is it subjects – meant to do to follow its guidance? Unless this is clear, there is little value in discussing alternatives to the West or to the nation-state; one cannot merely be against something but has to be for something too. It is in the concretisation of this idea of civilisational state, one suspects, that the difficulties will arise. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the foremost scholars of Aristotelian politics and virtue ethics, which he advocates as a healthier mode of being than the modern liberal state. However, the most intractable problem for MacIntyre is that modern society does not reflect ancient Athens. We do not live in city states where the voting population is not more than 100,000 men. Scalability becomes a problem for even what is in many ways an intriguing suggestion. Similarly, even if the political order of ancient India was an exquisite balance of duties, responsibilities, and rights, even if law & order was rarely threatened, that system worked in a different time and may not apply to India today.

Fourth, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations seems to have had its misprint in the minds of civilisational state theorists. Yet what they hold as examples of civilisational reordering is wishful thinking in the minds of a minuscule minority. The Caliphate, for example, has its enemies among Muslims as well as among infidels; furthermore, many of the groups who have sided with the terrorists have done so for selfish material reasons rather than any spiritual or historical-civilisational awakening. The case of Turkey being refused membership in the European Union is similarly misunderstood – though there is no doubt that some in Europe see a religious chasm separating them from Ankara, many raise legitimate concerns about the vast difference between Turkey and Western Europe in terms of social, political, and economic freedoms. Interestingly, despite the accusation that religion factors into decision-making in the EU or in the lives of Europeans, church attendance has been seeing a steady decline over the past fifty years. And not to point out the obvious, but despite the formation of a customs and currency union, European states are still having trouble letting go of their individual national identities. Civilisational statehood, it seems, is a potent political and social force only in the minds of its advocates.

Church attendance Church attendance - Catholics

If the advocates of civilisational statism intend to argue for the establishment of India as a Hindu country, they should do so without subterfuge or masking their motives in obfuscation. After all, there is nothing sacrosanct about the Indian state as it is now and it is indeed true that Western theories of nationalism based on language, religion, and ethnicity fail to adequately describe India. Perhaps those ideas of the nation are inadequate because India is a meta-nation. No matter, these are ideas to be discussed openly and fiercely. But for now, “civilisational state” does not seem to hold water.

This post appeared on FirstPost on December 08, 2014.