April 15, 2008
Illusions of an Islamic State
Ali Eteraz
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-eteraz/illusions-of-an-islamic-s_b_96698.html
Tarek Fatah, a pacifist, a controversial leftist activist and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, recently published a book challenging Islamism, which he refers to as Islam's right-wing. The book is called Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.
Fatah argues that since Islam's advent, there have been two parallel strains of the religion that are in clash.
The first, "state of Islam" is a person's moral compass; the way Islam governs an individual's personal life. Fatah has no issues with this Islam. In fact, he says that whether one is ultra-conservative or a secular Muslim should be no one else's concern.
In contrast, the second -- "Islamic State" -- occurs when a political entity uses Islam to govern and control society. Fatah has a great problem with this phenomenon, as he believes it connected to terrorism, fundamentalism and subjugation of women. His book is a sustained critique of the historical, political and theological bases upon which the idea of an Islamic state is premised.
As case studies, Fatah looks at Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Palestine, and reveals how in each place Islamist ideas found their genesis, how they were promoted, how they were actualized and how they have fared. He shows how leaders of dubious character have used the utopia of an Islamic state to acquire illegitimate dominance and demand cult-like obedience. The sections on Pakistan -- where Fatah was once a prominent student leader -- and Palestine -- a cause which he has supported since the 60's -- most ably demonstrate Fatah's thesis: the Islamist impulse leads to a retardation of civil society, leads to the subjugation of women, minorities and expression, and foments unnecessary crisis with external groups.
In order to diagnose the Islamist malaise, Fatah engages the intellectual argument upon which the Islamist narrative is built: the assertion that the Islamic state represents the most authentic vision of Islam. Fatah questions this vehemently. He points out that neither Muhammad nor the Quran provide for a political model, an assertion he shares with numerous other Muslim thinkers, including the current Mufti of Egypt (who takes this silence to mean that personal Islam is compatible with liberal democracy).
However Fatah goes further and shows that it was not Muhammad's intent to establish an Islamic state. Fatah's argument is novel. He says that if Muhammad had wanted to establish an Islamic state, then when he took over Mecca he would have provided for an Islamic constitution; after all, for ten years Muhammad was the de facto ruler of the city-state of Medina and there he had sought a constitution. Fatah argues that the lack of a political document in Mecca, taken in conjunction with one of Muhammad's assertions in his last sermon -- "I have completed the religion for you" -- means that Mecca was not an Islamic state, just a state ruled by a man named Muhammad where Muslims were free to establish a personal relationship with God based on their individual judgment on what constituted piety.
Fatah then delves into the lives of the Four Caliphs that followed Muhammad, painstakingly detailing how the idea of an Islamic state slowly came to prominence - not as a result of the Prophet's Companions fulfilling some religious obligation, but as a way to dominate their political opponents. Here again Fatah demonstrates ingenuity. He reveals that the title that Abu Bakr, the first caliph, took for himself, was not "Caliph of God" as later day caliphs, sultans and kings took on, but something akin to "Representative of Muhammad." Fatah believes that this fact undermines the Islamist idea of linking political power with God; after all, Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, Muhammad's closest friend, a figure that Islamists purportedly follow, didn't even take such a dramatic step. Fatah also notes that the second caliph, Umar, also celebrated among Islamists, also didn't take the mantle "Caliph of God." It wasn't until the third caliph, Usman, that the term became acceptable.
Fatah ends up taking his analysis of Muslim states all the way to the end of the Abbasid Empire in the 13th century. Along the way his basic assertion is corroborated repeatedly. The states that Muslims were running were just political entities, and weren't focused on their Islamic flavor. Had that been the case, then these formative states wouldn't have made a distinction between Muslims as they did. Fatah wonders, for example, how Islamists can assert that the early Muslims lived in an Islamic state when there were classes of Muslims who had to pay the jizya (minority tax), or classes of Muslims that couldn't legally marry Arab women, or classes of Muslims based on when they had converted to Islam? If these previous states were truly Islamic states, then they wouldn't have made distinctions between Muslims -- which they readily did.
There is, Fatah believes, only one conclusion to be drawn from this: the historical Islamic states were not organized around Islam, but ethnicity (Arab over non-Arab), power (vis a vis Persians and Byzantines), and expansion (both through conflict and conversion).
In other words, Fatah concludes, the Islamist idea of an Islamic state is just a mirage. It is neither corroborated in the original sources of Islam -- the Quran and the Prophet's practice -- nor in the actual practice of the first generations of Islam.
Fatah's ideas represent a formidable intellectual challenge to Islamism.
I did, however, find some shortcomings in this book. While the first half of the book -- focusing on the case studies -- reads easily, the discussion about Muhammad and his companions becomes incredibly dense. The conclusions aren't always fleshed out and have to be inferred.
In addition, throughout the book, the sourcing is shoddy and inconsistent. On reading many assertions, I found myself wishing there were better footnotes. This is especially important when the discussion shifts to the contentious historical narrative.
Also, the book attempts an interesting synthesis -- by bringing together Sunni and Shia sources, using both to illuminate the discussion. This approach can be successful, such as when Ayatollah Modarresi used both the Sunni and Shia account to look at the history of Quranic compilation. However, the two pronged critique also has its down-side because of the historical enmity between Sunni and Shia, and the vast amount of polemics that infect this area of Islamic scholarship.
Further, throughout the book, one issue I kept wondering about was whether Fatah advocated opposing Islamists to such an extent that he would accept a secular dictator over democratically elected Islamists. There is no conclusive answer to this, but at one point in his life Fatah did consider General Nasser of Egypt his hero, which is troubling. He also seems to suggest that in Palestine, Abbas' Fatah Organization is presumptively better than Hamas because the former is secular and the latter is Islamist -- whereas experience suggests that Abbas' secularism hasn't made him any less violent.
In addition, the book contains a passing reference to the idea that anyone who calls himself a Muslim is a Muslim. Secular Muslims often like to stress this point but I have never understood why. If religion doesn't matter to you in the public sphere, then you aren't all that likely to be publicly affirming your Muslim identity anyway; so why bother with this point?
Finally, there is the figure of Fatah himself. Formerly a Marxist leader and activist for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, ever since his arrival in Canada he has had a love-hate relationship with the Muslim communities. He has accused CAIR, ISNA, MSA and ICNA of being shadow-Islamists, which has earned him little love. His own efforts to create a North-America-wide Muslim group called Progressive Muslim Union of North America, were a failure largely because many progressive Muslims, like Muqtedar Khan and Omid Safi, were put off by Fatah's confrontational style and left the group. Further, even as he fought against Sharia in the Canadian legal system, he had a public falling out with Irshad Manji (though he thanks her in the acknowledgments). In other words, there are few Muslim figures who generate negative vibes from both the conservative and liberal side of Islam and Fatah is one of them.
I, personally, don't agree with many of Fatah's positions -- having criticized him in the past.
I, personally, come from the contingent of activists who thought that Fatah did create some of the tension that led to the downfall of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America (I say that as an observer as I was not a member). Unlike him, I don't think Islamic finance as practiced by Western banks strengthens Islamists, rather it forces the entire scheme to be more beholden to international regulation. Unlike him, I don't find any thing particularly threatening about the free and consensual wearing of the hijab. Unlike him, I believe that the theologian Ghazali and segments of Islamic traditionalism are not natural allies of Islamism (of clericalism, certainly).
Having said that, I think this book is a positive contribution to the discussion about contemporary Islam and certainly a valuable addition to the voices that are critically looking at Islam's right-wing. Fatah speaks about Islamic leaders with familiarity and respect, while engaging their ideas critically. He comes from the left so has vehemently opposed American interventionism for decades -- he says he writes to wake up his Muslim brethren, not attack them. He deconstructs Islamic history to separate it from the political reading that dictators, tyrants and fundamentalists have given it. Fatah writes well, has novel ideas, participates in the Islamic tradition, and he is clearly passionate about his private practice of Islam (he has made the hajj twice). Agree with him or not, I don't think there is any other public intellectual in the North American arena -- Muslim or other -- who could have written this book.
Get your copy of:
Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State
Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State
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