Islam and the West in world history

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 545-562

  Akhavi, Shahrough ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ISLAMISM; POLITICAL CONFLICT; POLITICAL RELATIONS; WESTERN WORLD;

EID: 33746458881     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000084465     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Such as Daniel Pipes & John Emerson, for example. See Abd al-Wahhab al-Affandy, 'Terrorism by any other name', Middle East International, 615, 24 December 1999, pp 25-27.
2. Samuel P Huntington, 'The clash of civilizations?', Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, pp 22-49.
3. It was later developed into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996. Note that the question mark in the journal article title has disappeared in the book title.
4. The argument, in my opinion, is flimsy and tendentious. Harvard historian Roy Mottahedeh - a colleague of Huntington - has put paid to the 'clash' thesis on both theoretical and empirical grounds in his scintillating essay, 'The clash of civilizations: An Islamicist's critique', Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, 2, 1996, pp 1-26.
5. These are definitions three and five under the entry, 'Religion', Oxford English Dictionary, Vol XIII, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp 568-569.
6. Muslims adhering to this view never tire of declaring that 'islam din wa dawla' ('Islam is [both] religion and state').
7. I am aware that posing matters in terms of 'minimalist' and 'maximalist' views risks constructing misplaced polarities. Nonetheless, for the purposes of developing the argument at this juncture, I will put the analysis in the form of a dichotomy.
8. Since law is the queen of the Islamic sciences and 'trumps' theology, 'orthodox' seems inappropriate usage here because it denotes a church-sanctioned creed. In Islam, creeds lack the sanction of a synod or curia. Hence, 'Muslims are more concerned with right conduct or orthopraxy, rather than with right belief [orthodoxy]'. The word 'mainstream' seems more apposite and is utilised here as a synonym for 'Sunni', which relates to a pre-Islamic root meaning a well trodden path. In early Islam, 'Sunni' referred to the exemplary model of the Prophet's thoughts and deeds - his Sunna. Upon the consolidation of the Islamic community in the 'Abbasid caliphate (749/50-1258), the Sunnis came to be identified as those adhering to the well established and articulated way. Sunnis believed that either sectarian or Sufi (mystical) movements were marginal and unworthy to be followed. The citation is from W Montgomery Watt, Islamic Creeds: A Selection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994, p 34.
9. The emphasis upon the consensus of the members of the community as to what is best for it is associated with the Sunni perspective and contrasts with the Shi'i view, which emphasises that the community's welfare depends upon the knowledge of immaculate, inerrant and charismatic individuals - Imams - deemed the 'proofs' of God's existence.
10. Herbert J Liebesny, The Law of the Near and Middle East, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975, pp 3-4.
11. W Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology: An Extended Survey, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985, pp 29-30, 41-42
12. and Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp 52-53.
13. 'Islamist' is a neologism in English, although the use of its equivalent in the Arabic plural - al-islamiyyun - goes back to the mediaeval thinker, Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari (873n4-935/36), who used it as a way of objectifying Muslim beliefs in an action sphere of reference. In doing so, he was suggesting that many Muslims had left off being actively engaged in promoting the faith and had become passive bystanders for whom the divine injunctions to call people to the true faith had become emptied of any requirement to exert themselves for the sake of God.
14. Marshall GS Hodgson, The Classical Age of Islam, Vol I of the trilogy The Venture of Islam, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974, p 235.
15. The disputes between the Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites are summarised well in W Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973, pp 209-250, 303-318.
16. and Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, pp 46-55, 64-68.
17. To be sure, Muslim philosophers remained peripheral in the development of Muslim thinking more generally speaking. Thus, their important impact on Western thought remains one of the great ironies in the relationship between the Muslim and Western worlds. As Watt puts it: Through the great philosophers writing in Arabic, notably Avicenna or Ibn Sina (d 1037) and Averroes or Ibn Rushd (d 1198), Islamic civilization made a significant contribution to the development of philosophy in the Western world; and this might lead those unfamiliar with that civilization to suppose that the philosophical movement was a prominent part of the stream of Islamic thought. Yet this is far from being the case. The truth is rather that the Falasifa [Muslim philosophers] were never part of the main stream but at most an unimportant side channel - that is, unimportant for the great majority of Muslims. Watt, Formative Period, p 204.
18. Among the classic works on Islamic philosophy are EIJ Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, London: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
19. and Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
20. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp 12-13.
21. Ibn Taymiyya strove to eliminate the common practice on the part of the Muslim clergy of blind imitation of preceding generations of jurists. He advocated in place of such blind imitation a reverence of the practice of the Prophet, maintaining that later Muslims had deviated from the Prophet's teachings and had been guilty of superstitions and cultic practices that had no place in Islam. But ibn Taymiyya was hardly a spokesman for rationalism and especially attacked the philosophers' claim that they could acquire knowledge of God by rational means. Indeed, he is the principal jurist invoked by militant Islamist groups in the past 30 years when they condemn the rulers of their societies for being infidels. In this, they base themselves on ibn Taymiyya's famous fatwa (authoritative opinion) condemning the Mongols for being unbelievers, even though they had officially embraced Islam.
22. Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p48.
23. Christian efforts to oust Muslim power from the Iberian peninsula began as early as 718, but these were unsystematic. The aggressive spirit behind the anti-Muslim campaign known as the Reconquista began to take hold in the 11th century. Muslims in Grenada held on until the Spanish Inquisition (1490s), a phenomenon that spelled disaster for Jews as well as Muslims.
24. James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p 50ff.
25. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, p 50.
26. Voltaire was of two minds about the Prophet. He sometimes termed him a fanatic but at other times spoke in praise of his wisdom and tolerance.
27. The epithets levelled at Muhammad included such things as 'false prophet', 'hypocrite', 'fanatic', 'cut-throat', 'demoniac', 'lecher', and 'enemy of Civilization, Liberty, and the Truth'. Wells went as far as to assert that the Prophet had been a man of 'shifty character', characterised by 'vanity', 'greed', 'cunning' and 'insincere religious passion'. And he described the Qur'an as 'certainly unworthy of its Divine authorship'.
28. See James Piscatori, 'The Rushdie affair and the politics of ambiguity', International Affairs, 66 (4), pp 767-768.
29. See also Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960.
30. Some writers, such as Henri de Comte de Saint Saire Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) wrote positively of the Prophet as 'a rational, incomparable statesman and legislator superior to all those produced by ancient Greece' and approvingly noted that Islam was not a religion of mystery that might defy reason.
31. Lewis, Islam and the West, p 90.
32. For a probing of the significance of the basically negative image held by European thinkers for an understanding of Islam, see the polemical but scholarly work of Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Among Said's list of distorters of Islam and Middle Easterners who have not yet been mentioned are Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1765-1835), Heymann Steinthal (1801-1852), Eugene Burnouf (1823-1899), Jean Pierre Abel Remusat (1788-1832), Edward Henry Palmer (1840-1882), Gustav Weil (1808-1889), and Reinhart Dozy (1820-1893).
33. These are the famous 'capitulatory rights' or 'capitulations'. The term comes from the 'chapters' of treaties and conventions signed by the Ottomans with European governments and Renaissance city states as early as the 14th century. In the beginning these rights were magnanimously granted by powerful sultans to European supplicants appealing for the right to trade on the lands of the Empire. Later, they became modified to include exemptions from certain taxes; still later, they became converted into rights to speak on behalf of certain minorities; and finally, they became licences for outright intervention in the political affairs of the Empire. Capitulations were granted as follows: Genoa, 1352, Venice, 1384/87, Naples, 1498, Poland, 1553 France, 1569; Britain, 1580; Netherlands, 1612; Austria, 1699; Sweden, 1737; Sicily, 1740; Denmark, 1756; Prussia, 1761; Russia, 1774; Spain, 1783.
34. See Halil Inalcik & Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 192-195.
35. On the salafiyya reform movement, see Charles C Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt, London: Oxford University Press, 1933
36. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, London: Oxford University Press, 1961
37. and Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966.
38. The following list identifies territorial losses to European powers or derogations of influence as a consequence of European intervention in the Ottoman Empire and Iran since 1792 (includes break-away nationalist movements supported by the European states): Georgia, 1810; Bessarabia, 1812; Greece, 1827; Algeria, 1830; Alden, 1839; Cyprus, 1878; Bosnia Herzegovina, 1878; Serbia, 1878; Romania, 1878; Montenegro, 1878; Tunisia, 1881; Egypt, 1882; Persian Gulf Sheykhdoms, 1880s-1890s; Mauritania, 1904; Bulgaria, 1908; Libya, 1911; Morocco, 1912; Palestine, 1917; Syria, 1920; Lebanon, 1920; Iraq, 1920; Jordan 1921.
39. See the important book by Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976. Rodinson maintains that there is nothing in Islamic traditions and institutions to prevent the establishment of an effectively operating capitalist economic system.
40. Even the critical Orientalist scholar, Bernard Lewis, has declared that one 'can discern elements in Islamic law and tradition that could assist the development of one or another form of democracy' and notes that 'Islamic tradition strongly disapproves of arbitrary rule'. See Lewis, 'A historical overview', Journal of Democracy, 7 (2), 1996, p 55.
41. Jacob L Talmon, Totalitarianism, New York: Beacon Press, 1952, pp 1-11.
42. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking Press, 1963, pp 39-40. She notes: There is no period in history to which the Declaration of the Rights of Man [of 1789] could have harkened back. Former centuries might have recognized that men were equal with respect to God or the gods, for this recognition is not Christian but Roman in origin; Roman slaves could be full-fledged members of religious corporations and, within the limits of sacred law, their legal status was the same as that of the free man. But inalienable political rights of all men by virtue of birth would have appeared to all ages prior to [the French revolution] is... a contradiction in terms.
43. Crawford B MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, London: Oxford University Press, 1964, p 3.
44. Muhammad Iqbal, both a poet and a philosopher, was an Indian Muslim known for his assertion of an activist ethos, in contrast to a fatalistic and passive perspective. He had little patience with Islamic mysticism because of his view that mysticism encouraged passivity and introspection. He purported to find that Islamic traditions encouraged creative self-affirmation. There is little doubt that Iqbal was influenced in his thought by contemporary European thinkers, and in this context this meant Friedrich Nietzsche. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that lqbal was a Nietzschean pure and simple. Paradoxically, he believed that self-affirmation and self-realisation could be achieved mainly by adherence to ideals of brotherhood and belonging, and even self-sacrifice after the idealised model of the Prophet. See, for example, his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, London: Oxford University Press, 1934.
45. and The Secrets of the Self, trans RA Nicholson, London: Macmillan, 1920.
46. What I have discussed is the Sunni perspective of Islam, which emphasises the charisma of the community of believers as the basis for belief in the finality of the Islamic message. Shi'i Muslims emphasise the charisma of the Imams, instead, because of their understanding that ordinary Muslims are too ignorant to be aware of what God's law is.
47. Political Islam is a term that has been used interchangeably with a variety of others, including 'Islamic fundamentalism' and 'Islamism'. The central idea is the sharpened political consciousness of the believer in regard to the integration of religion and politics in Islam; and the demand to replace existing legal arrangements in Muslim societies - systems that are hybrids of Islamic personal status and aspects of Islamic criminal law and Western penal, commercial, labour, financial and constitutional law - with the holy law. Islamist movements are not necessarily violence-prone, although they may be so.
48. See also footnote 11.
49. The following are among the better works on 'political Islam': Said Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
50. François Burgat & William Dowell, eds, The Islamic Movement in North Africa, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997.
51. Dale Eickelman & James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996
52. JJG Jansen, The Neglected Duty, New York: Macmillan, 1986.
53. Serif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.
54. Henry Munson, Jr, Islam and Revolution in the Middle East, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
55. Jammes Piscatori, ed, Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis, Chicago, IL: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
56. Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986
57. Bruce Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998
58. Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990
59. and Sami Zubaida, Islam, The People and the State, London: IB Tauris, 1993.
60. The relevant portions of 5:44, 5:45 and 5:47 had traditionally been interpreted as follows: 'those who do not judge according to Allah's revelation are unbelievers'; 'those who do not judge according to Allah's revelation are oppressors'; 'those who do not judge according to Allah's revelation are evil doers'. Similarly, the relevant parts of 12:40 and 12:67 had been traditionally interpreted as: 'judgment belongs to Allah alone' (the language is the same in the two verses). Intriguingly, much of Khomeini's argument also focuses on the triliteral root, h-k-m, this time identifying the active participal form, hakim. He maintained that the traditional rendering of this word as arbitrator or judge was wrong and that it should be understood to mean ruler. It should be noted that the root, h-k-m, has both the meaning of judging, arbitrating, judgement, arbitration, etc, and ruling, exercising authority, rule, rulership.
61. For some of these trends, see John Esposito & John Voll, Islam and Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
62. and Augustus R Norton (ed), Civil Society in the Middle East, two vols, Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995, 1996.
63. To my knowledge, the only militant Islamist to have done so is Osaina bin Laden, who is not qualified to issue such a verdict since he is not a jurist.