Against Muslim statist ideologies

I would recommend reading the review article in the Summer 2005 edition of The Muslim World Book Review, entitled 'Taproot to Terrorism' by Robert Dickson Crane. Some excerpts (I have collapsed the paragraphs):

Traditional Conservatism recognises that the real causes of terrorism are not poverty and oppression per se, but rather the bankruptcy of materialist ideologies, like Neo-Conservativism [...] The central doctrine of Neo-Conservatism is "democratic capitalism". This is the ultimate oxymoron, because in practice the political pluralism that should underline democracy cannot exist in a climat of economic plutocracy [...] Its public relations experts call for "freedom and democracy" without a framework of higher values. They fail to comprehend the need for a paradigm of justice and therefore are blind to what concerns mosr of the people in the world. This failure is the taproot to terrorism [...] Terrorism has arisen as the new threat to civilization because the "terrorists" know that all the dominant paradigms of the twentieth century are bankrupt. In their hopless rage they will not even consider the possiblity of anything else, other than their own blind rampage of desctruction. What they do not know is that they are creatures of this bankruptcy. They are part of the problem, not of the solution. Terrorists are products of Western cultural disintegration, even though they will die for the illusion that they are not.

Crane continues concentrating on the solution to injustices in the modern world:

The modernist solution to felt injustice has always been to seek power. Failure in this pursuit can turn moderates into extremists, and failure to secure justice once has grabbed power can generate still more extremism from the victims of the political quest. Lord Acton once declared that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but this generalization is too abbreviated. The quest for power corrupts more than its possession, because madness comes from the arrogance of believing that once can acquire absolute power and keep it [...] Since it is in human nature to seek the absolute, the quest for material power can turn into a false god. As the utopias of the twentieth century confirm, false gods of whatever kind in the world are the primary source of evil [...] The power of such polytheism, defined as the pursuit of anything as one's highest goal other than personal awareness and submission to God, is most clearly seen in not only in the dementia of extremist Neo-Conservatives in America by in the Islamist extremists who would reduce Islam de facto to a political movement, modelled, perhaps unconsciously, after the twentieth-century totalitarianism, and designed oxymoronically to establish an "Islamic state" [...] The foutainhead of such extremism is the paradigm that defined the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) exclusively as a place where this modern conception of an Islamic state is established, while the rest of the world is House of War (dar al-harb) [or] dar al-zlum, the land of evil [...] but the substance of their war is the same, namely, to invent an instigate a clash of civlizations and to declare a holy war with the slogan "no substitute for victory" [...] This political paradigm [has] the ultimate aim of [acquiring] absolute power here on earth. The basis for right or wrong becomes the relativistic reduction of justice to one's own narrow self-interest in a clash with everyone else, so that blowing up Jewish babies and oneself can easily be justified and even sanctified in the pursuit of a higher cause.

Crane's article takes in reviews of works from traditionalists, who decry the loss of the Transcendent in the modern world. He reviews a variety of books include some focused on contemporary American politics, like Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution, by Russell Kirk, The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World by Russell Hittinger, and Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal by Willaim Hutchison. Hutchison explores an interesting concept of 'pluralism' where he seeks a solution to the problem of integration and assimilation. Criticising the lack of freedom inherent in the demands for 'assimiliation', he comes up with the innovative 'pluralism by participation'. This is something that I personally also find appealing, because participation involves the "individuals and groups [sharing the] responsibility for the forming and implementing of the society's agenda". In other words, we can get away from talk of 'disenfranchised' young people being led into a life of either total apathy or terrorism, if we suggest that these people have a stake in the world around them. Of more importance to the global debate amongst Muslims, are the collection of essays in Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars, edited by Joseph E. B. Lumbard and The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States by Naveed S. Sheikh. Crane closes his article by citing T. J. Winter's masterful essay "The Poverty of Fanaticism". It is the emergence of an "ideologized neo-Islam of the revivalists" that Winter finds the anti-thesis of the Islamic heritage and traditions, where a young person

one morning picks up a copy of [...] Qutb frmo a newsstand and is 'born-again' on the spot [...] Repentance (tawba) in its traditional form, yields an outlook of joy, contentment, and a deep affection for others. The modern form of tawba, however, born of insecurity, often makes Muslims narrow, intolerant, and exclusivist.

What is need urgently are Muslim critiques of Maududi's Islamic State, Khomeyni's vilayat-e-faqih, and pan-Islamism as a movement for political hegemony. These must not only centre on theological quibbles or disagreements on interpretations of our history which point out doctrinal differences (which have their place, of course). It cannot be denied that at some point traditional or quietist outlook has abandoned Muslims caught in severe strife, often under the jackboot of foreign nationalisms. Yet the solution is not to adopt the garb of the oppressor, merely to lust after an inversion of fortunes.

The criticisms must start with the modern nation-state, a highly intrusive and ideologically closed space, which has been adopted wholesale by modern Islamist ideologues. Although Islamism may cry that 'God is sovereign', it is the modern state that seeks to usurp sovereignty and loyalty exclusively for itself. It seeks to authorise all that is legitimate in society and stamp out all that it deems threatening or different. Islamist ideologies concentrate on using apparatus of the modern state to create an Islamic Society, without realising that historically there has never been an Islamic State of this form, and that morally it is a bankrupt position to hold. Having erected this Golden Calf, they have no option but to merge Islam and the state making it one; God has all but vanished. Hegel's idea of the 'state as God's march on earth' has been swallowed wholesale by the self-proclaimed anti-modern and anti-western Islamists!

Comments

[haroon]

This is a brilliant analysis; what I find so promising -- and what you quote Winter as hinting at -- is the spiritual, individual component, the lust for power that is at bottom a personal failing -- which is responsible for much of terrorism: a failure to discipline and enlighten and improve the self, but rather to wallow in self-congratulatory victim complexes.

In order for Muslims to preserve the Islamic point of view, Muslims must offer critiques that continue to revolve around the moral absolutes and moral directives that Islam preaches, and the system that Islam promotes in improving first the self and then the society the self participates (there's that word) in.

Good stuff, Thabet.