Religion and secular power in the Almoravid dynasty

I just came across a set of notes I made back in 2007 that I thought I would turn into a blog post. They have to do with the Almoravid ascendancy in what is now Spain.

The Umayyad dynasty endured in the Islamic Caliphate from 657 to 750. In Islamic Spain, however, the Umayyads ruled for another two and half centuries until 1031, more or less factually independent of the Caliphate, which they nevertheless formally recognized. They were eventually succeeded by the Almoravid dynasty.

12th century Almoravid gold coin

The Almoravids were a reform movement that originated among the Berber tribes of North Africa, in the Sahara. It advocated a return to the basics of Islam, interpreted as always with its own particular emphasis. Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn (died 1106) founded the dynasty based on the Sanhaja group of Berber tribes. Ibn Tāshufīn established Marrakesh as his capital, around 1062. At that time, the Almoravids controlled the Berber parts of Morocco and western Algeria.

By this time, Islamic Spain was ruled by local kings in several different small states, making them vulnerable to the Christian Reconquista. King Alfonso VI of Castille and Leon (1040—1109) took Toledo and pressed for further conquests of Muslim-held areas.

Carlos Fuentes writes in El Espejo Enterrado (1992), "But if the Reconquista was indeed a war against Islam, it was also a war of the Christian kings among themselves." Yet "this combat was also an embrace" because of the complex and shifting alliances involved. In Alfonso VI's drive on the southern Muslim kingdom of Grenada, his most famous warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043-1099), better known to history as El Cid, allied with the Muslim king of Zaragoza. El Cid had earned his reputation as a great Christian warrior against the Muslims ("Moors"); ironically, his name comes from Arabic, meaning "my lord." But his main subordinate commander made a competing alliance with the king of Grenada. In feudal times, loyalty could be a complex and shifting quality, founded on a much different basis than that to which we are now accustomed.

El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar; 1043-1099)

But the Muslim kings didn't have to pick only from Christian allies. Several of the remaining Spanish Muslim petty monarchs called on Ibn Tāshufīn for assistance. After defeating Alonso VI i the Battle of Zallāqah in 1086, the Christian advance was halted. Ibn Tāshufīn and his Almoravids were eventually left in control of the remaining Muslim areas of Spain.

The Berber reformer Ibn Tūmart was born around 1080, in the era when Ibn Tāshufīn had become the most powerful leader in western Islam. After study in the great centers of Islamic earning, Córdoba, Alexandria, Baghdad and Mecca, Ibn Tūmart became the founder of yet another back-to-basics Berber reform movement, the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn) movement, their name meaning "those who recognize the unity of God." styled himself as the mahdī, an eschatological savior in Islamic thought. The mahdī is more often associated with Shi'a Islam but has also been part of the Sunni tradition.

By 1147, Ibn Tūmart and his successor ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (1145-63), who was also a close disciple of Ibn Tūmart Islamic renewal beliefs, had taken Marrakesh and were in control of the former Almoravid kingdom in northern Africa.

Once again, Islamic Spain splintered politically, and it was Alfonso VII (c. 1104—1157) this time who attempted to exploit their military weakness. And, again the Spanish Muslim kings invited the rulers in Marrakesh, this time ʿAbd al-Muʾmin and the Almohads, to help. ʿAbd al-Muʾmin reversed the territorial gains of Alfonso VII and expanded Almohad rule into the whole Maghreb. Eventually the Almohads rule Islamic Spain and what is now Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

But the Almohads' impressive moment of historical prominence lasted only a century or so. As Fred Donner writes in "Muhammad and the Caliphate" (The Oxford History of Islam [1999]):

During the last decades of the twelfth century the Almohads had to overcome the stubborn resistance mounted by the last Almoravid holdouts from the Balearic Islands (near the eastern coast of Spain), who had seized much of Ifriqiya. In Spain the Almohads were engaged in a continuing struggle against the Christian kingdoms, particularly those of Castile and Portugal. Despite promising offensives into Castilian territory in the 1190s, the Almohads were crushingly defeated in 1 212 by a Christian coalition at Las Navas de Tolosa (in southern Spain), the battle that really sealed the fate of Islamic Spain. Almoravid control in Spain unraveled over the next two decades, and Christian forces seized in rapid succession the major cities of Andalusia: Merida (1231), Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), Murcia (1261), and Cádiz (1262). Virtually all that remained of Muslim Spain thereafter was the small, brilliant kingdom of Granada, which hung on until 1492, partly because of the skill of its rulers, the Nasrids, and partly because in r 244 one of the rulers had signed a treaty recognizing the vague overlordship of the kingdom of Castile.

W. Montgomery Watt, the great Western scholar of Islam, took up the question of "The Decline of the Almohads" in the Summer 1964 issue of History of Religions. His article focuses on ways in which the religious reform movement aspect of the leadership of Ibn Tūmart and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin may have facilitated their political and military success. And, conversely, how the decline of the worldly power of the Almohads was related to changes in their religious orientation. But 1230, the Almohads embraced a more Orthodox Sunni Islam and the Mālikite variety of sharia (Islamic law).

Watt looks at why the back-to-basics Almohad religious movement faded so quickly. He uses the Prophet Muhammad's original founding of Islam as a reference point.

Watt suggests that part of the answer lies in the following areas. Ibn Tūmart emphasized peripheral ritual issues such as forbidding the use of musical instruments, which Watt sees as in large part a protest by rural tribesmen "against the soft life of the city-dwellers, not an attempt to reform themselves." The Prophet's original movement was an urban-based one, addressing issue which made broader demands for reform necessary and which called for real self-examination. "For one thing," Watt writes, "Muhammad is more concerned with basic social injustice, as, for example, in the perversion of traditional custom for the advantage of individuals."

Ibn Tūmart asserted doctrinal points against his Almohovid opponents. He argued for an abstract, non-anthropomorphic concept of God, stressed the role of reason and criticized the Almorovids' approach to the Mālikite school of sharia. But, Watt writes:

If Ibn-Tūmart's moral and social preaching was peripheral and sectional, his doctrinal emphases are a hotchpotch; that is to say, they consist of a number of unrelated and apparently incompatible points, which have been adopted because of some immediate practical relevance. The root of the difficulty is that Ibn-Tūmart has no radically new conception of the state or a way of life. Basically he accepts the Sunnite conception of the Islamic polity and way of life.

Ibn Tūmart was a charismatic leader, a role which had a strong tradition among the Berbers. But Watt suggests that their religious doctrines lacked a corresponding appeal. Watt credits the emphasis on reason in Almohadism as being what "made possible the flourishing of philosophy in Spain in Ibn-Ţufayl and Averroes (Ibn-Rushd). Yet the section of the population which experienced the need for a rational religion must have been small; and the problem of how a rational theology was to be related to the religion of the masses was never adequately solved in Spain."

Watt's comments on the Prophet's original movement by way of contrast to Ibn Tūmart's are intriguing:

There will always be something of a mystery about the growth and development of Islam, as indeed there is about all the great religions. When one reflects on the facts, it is truly astounding that the message of the Qur'an, originally addressed to the relatively uncultured citizens of Mecca, should have been capable of becoming the basis of a great civilization whose leading exponents stood for centuries in the highest ranks of human culture. It might be suggested that military success contributed to the development, together with the existence of a situation in which military success on the scale of the Arab conquests was possible. Yet the military success itself owed something to the religion and, at the same time, was never more than one facet of the whole. ...

The conclusion that the failure of Almohadism was essentially a failure to make converts from all sections of the community and converts of sufficiently high quality is supported when we turn back to look at the prophet Muhammad. As already noticed, in the moral and social field he was constantly aiming at the reform of his own community; though he accepted current morality in certain respects (e.g., the blood-feud or corporate responsibility for crime), most of the points he emphasized were central and concerned with basic social injustice. From a doctrinal and general point of view he was putting forward a radically new conception of the community and way of life. ... Thus the Islamic community came to be regarded as a community actually constituted by its possession of a divinely revealed way of life-the way or sunna of Muhammad, given to him by God and practiced by him. It was above all this conception of the charismatic or divinely founded and guided community that inspired countless men to labor at the solution of the practical and intellectual problems confronting the Islamic body politic in its early centuries. They were not merely converted but made to respond from the depths of their being.

Progressives and Islamophia

When rightwing Republicans created a controversy over the Park 51 community center in New York - the Ground Zero Mosque as the FOXists preferred to call it - it was clear that Islamophia had worked its way higher in the Republicans' arsenal of ways to induce mass fear and hatred. So I've been paying more attention to it since then.

As several news organizations have been reporting lately, such controversies are occurring in Europe, as well. On a recent visit to Austria, my wife and I were both struck by the number of people we heard repeating the most dubious claims about Muslims in Austria. We were especially disturbed at speaking to an attorney that we've known for years, who insisted on telling us about the impending takeover of Austria by Muslims and the imposition of sharia law (Islamic religious law).

The essential argument was no different from that we hear from American Islamophobes. He claimed that German courts were making rulings based on sharia. He pretended not to notice when I told him that I found that impossible to believe because German like (as in all EU countries) is secular. When I asked him for an example of a case in which this occurred, he couldn't cite anything, not a name, not a place, not a date. (And this guy is an attorney!) Nor did he seem to know anything at all about sharia other than that it was Muslim and scary and evil.

He claimed that second and generation Turks in Austria (Turks are the largest Islamic minority in Austria) harbored secret plans to overthrow the existing constitution and impose sharia. But he couldn't name any actual Turks or Turkish groups in Austria advocating such a thing. Nor could he name a single member of Parliament proposing replacing the Austrian secular law with sharia. If not one single member of Parliament is favoring such an idea, it's pretty obvious a threat so distant as to be downright delusional. If they had an Austrian version of FOX News, I'm sure it would find some Muslim kook living in Austria who advocates all sorts of hair-raising things.

He didn't seem to know that Turkey itself doesn't operate under sharia, in fact has been under strict secular law since Attaturk's rule in the 1920s. I can tell the difference in a conversation like this between someone who's prejudiced, someone who's well-meaning but poorly informed, and outright fanatics. This guy was clearly operating on fanaticism. And when you try to engage a fanatic on what he's actually saying, you get some strange conversation. He told a story about some lawyer he knows who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution who told him about how the Muslim theocrats imposed their rule, something that's hardly a secret one needs to learn by whispers from an Iranian acquaintance. And he said, "They want to do the same thing here." I asked him, "Are you saying that Persians are trying to take over Austria?" "No!" he said, "The Muslims!"

One of the things that's somewhat problematic for liberals/progressives to deal with when faced with Islamophobia. On the one hand, it's bigotry that rightwingers are using to promote fear and hatred, and to validate notions like waging an illegal, aggressive war against Iran. It's pretty clear in the actual American political context, where many Republicans are now convinced - speaking of fanaticism - that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim revolutionary, in that context anti-Muslim hate-mongering is also a surrogate for good old all-American white racism, too. So it's not something that Democrats (of the capital-D or small-d variety) can ignore.

But, of course, there are real criticisms that Westerners have about some social practices in Muslim countries and communities that come in conflict with Western moral assumption and sometimes the law. Many of those have to do with women's rights and women's status. In public appearance, conservative Republican Christianists, many of whom also hold some troubling ideas and attitudes on women's rights, like to forefront the alleged evils of the "sharia" bogeyman in their anti-Muslim hate propaganda. That was a prominent feature of the impressive report Christiane Amanpour made this past weekend on ABC's This Week, 10/03/2010, in which the anti-Muslim polemicists made just that charge.

But there are legitimate criticisms to be made of real existing Islamic practices on that score, all of which are being made by Muslims themselves.

Michelle Goldberg, whose excellent Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) is one of the best journalistic treatments of the Christian Right in recent years, addresses this dilemma of American progressives confronting Islamophobia in The Un-Reluctant Fundamentalist Democracy Journal Fall 2010. It is a review of the book Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,former member of the Dutch Parliament who now lives in the United States and works for the conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Insitute (AEI), which is also known as Neocon Central.

For the right-wing think tank, landing such a brilliant, cosmopolitan heroine was a coup. The American right often alleges that liberals, full of mushy-headed cultural relativism, can’t even bestir themselves to defend their own values against reactionary Islam. The liberal intellectual establishment’s rejection of Hirsi Ali appeared, at least on the surface, to bear this out.

That’s certainly what Paul Berman argues in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist," he writes of Hirsi Ali, asserting that the left’s failure to rally around her is evidence of deep intellectual corruption. Pointing to her liberal critics, particularly the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, he says, "The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press."

Here's how Michelle addresses that charge:

But there is a problem with this perspective. Hirsi Ali is, in many ways, immensely admirable. But she can also be reactionary, glib, and sloppy, and judging by Nomad–a painfully disappointing book–these tendencies have gotten worse since she joined AEI. Nomad brims with attacks on unrecognizable straw feminists, bizarre statements about the United States, and, strangest of all, a tendency to romanticize religions outside of Islam. Hirsi Ali remains, she says, an atheist, but she’s developed an odd admiration for the Catholic Church, which, she suggests, should try to civilize Muslims through conversion. There is in Nomad a new concern for private property and a shout-out to gun rights. She ladles praise on her AEI colleague Charles Murray, author, most famously, of The Bell Curve, which purported to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Hirsi Ali attacks Islam in the name of liberalism, but she’s more than willing to jettison her liberalism for the sake of her anti-Islamism. Perhaps if she had found a home on the left, Hirsi Ali’s thinking would have developed in a different direction. One could blame liberals or feminists or mainstream intellectuals for letting her down, for driving her into the arms of the neoconservatives. But to do so is to condescend to a woman who has always taken responsibility for forging her own path. [my emphasis]

No one is constrained to think in simple-minded terms. Progressives can sympathize with the situation of a woman like Hersi Ali who fled her country after death threats from Islamic extremists but recognize it if she, as Michelle puts it, is "reactionary, glib, and sloppy" or "shows contempt for fundamental American values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion". Her claims have to be judged on their merits. She may reject Islam. But it sounds as though her attitudes about the so-called traditional family and her hostility to feminism are very similar to those of the Christian Right.

On Hirsi Ali's criticisms of Western feminism, Michelle writes:

To be blunt, Hirsi Ali has no idea what she’s talking about. Western feminists have consistently stood up for women’s rights in developing countries–including Muslim countries–inspiring endless polemics by both Christian and Muslim conservatives blasting “feminist colonialism.” Long before September 11, the Feminist Majority Foundation was a lonely American voice against the Taliban’s sexual apartheid, and today, the New York-based feminist group Women for Afghan Women runs domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan. The American feminist movement lobbies, fiercely and consistently, for family planning programs in poor countries, including Muslim countries. American feminists–including Muslim feminists–have set up domestic violence shelters that serve women trapped in violent homes in insular religious communities. American feminists have also played a crucial role in the global campaign against female genital mutilation, both by getting the U.S. government to exert its influence on countries reliant on American aid, and by supporting women working in Africa to end the practice.

In other words, liberals and anyone else concerned to counter crass hate-mongering against Muslims can reject falsehoods and demagoguery without becoming apologists for every aspect of every Muslim culture. Nor does it means soft-pedaling legitimate criticism of Muslim practices or Islamic religious beliefs. Nobody is compelled to be willfully stupid about the issues involved, in other words. And no one should be under any illusion that Republican Islamophobia is anything but poisonous to democracy.

As far as the Christian religion, promoting mindless hate is also inconsistent with honest Christian values. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham shouldn't be surprised or whine about feeling rejected if the value of their Christian teachings are judged in part by their deliberate and dishonest promotion of hatred.

Michelle reminds of something else that we should keep in mind when we hear Republican Christianists criticising real or imagined discrimination against women by Muslims:

American conservatives, meanwhile, have consistently attacked programs that help to liberate women in the developing world. They’ve slashed funding for reproductive health clinics abroad, and have put pressure on foreign governments to maintain restrictive anti-abortion laws. They’ve fought efforts to expand women’s rights in international law, helping to ensure that the United States remains one of the few countries that have refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women–putting it in the company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. In 2007, the evangelical activist Janice Crouse, a Bush delegate to a 2002 United Nations summit on children, attacked the Convention in explicitly relativist terms: "It is like the old colonialism. . . . [H]ere you have the UN taking up the same kinds of principles and saying to countries you have to do things my way. You have to do things in the way of Western nations."

Indeed, when it comes to women’s rights, American conservatives often ally themselves with the very governments Hirsi Ali decries. As Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post in 2002, "Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences." He quoted a U.S. official saying, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

Tags: islam, islamic law, islamophobia

Varieties of Islāmic law

The Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570/571-632) in a depiction from ca. 1315

With all the hate-mongering going on over the "Ground Zero Mosque" - which isn't on Ground Zero nor a mosque - one of the things we're hearing a lot from people like Sean Hannity is about the danger of "sharia" (Islāmic law) being imposed on us good Christian Real Americans. This sharia bogeyman is also used by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremists in Europe. So, for anyone who actually cares to know a tiny bit more about the historical context of Islāmic law (sharia), I'm posting this brief description I originally did in March 2006, with only minor changes except for the addition of material about Afghanistan. It's based largely on the scholarly account by the Christian ecumenical theologian Hans Küng.

But I'm adding these introductory paragraphs. In one sense, the US discussion on this is just plain silly. American law is secular. It's not based on religion. On the contrary, for the national or state governments to adopt or enforce purely religious laws would be unconstitutional.

The conservative fear-mongering over "sharia" can't easily acknowledge this for several reasons, some of them obvious and others not so obvious. Pointing out that it would require a change in the entire Constitutional order to impose sharia law in the US wouldn't make it sound like an immediate threat to freak out over. Also, many conservative Christian Republicans want Christian religious ideas to be enacted and imposed by law, however much they might comma-dance around admitting it. (See Julie Ingersoll, Washington Post Story Gets Christian Reconstructionism Wrong Religion Dispatches 08/16/2010.)

The pseudohistory promoted by the scamster David Barton that is popular among Christian fundamentalists in the US - and forms the basis of history lessons at Glenn Beck University (there really is something called that!) - argue that US Constitutional law actually is founded on Christianity. (See J. Brent Walker, A Critique of David Barton's Views on Church and State 04/01/2005 on the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty website and Steve Foster, Beck U. – Leave Those Kids Alone The Donkey Edge 07/08/2010.)

It's also worth remembering that other religious groups have their own laws that are considered binding on their members, e.g., Catholic canon law. As a general rule, American law doesn't enforce those religious laws and doesn't interfere with their enforcement within religious institutions. Ask any Catholic who has had to have a marriage annulled. There are lots of "gray areas", of course, which sometimes produce much rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth among Christian political conservatives. Civil and criminal responsibility of church officials in case of sexual abuse of minors may be affected by the types of internal rules and oversight a church has exercised. But the basic rule is if religious law contradicts civil law, civil law overrides it. That applies to Islāmic religious law just as it does to Christian canon law or other kinds of religious regulations churches adopt.

Finally, Islām is a religion of law. Much of the development of Islāmic tradition has been in the context of the development of religious law, sharia, as compared to Christianity or Judaism, where theological disputes as such have had a greater role. (As always, this kind of broad historical generalization should be understood as just that.) That is due in no small part to the fact that in the traditional Islāmic lands, separation of church and state didn't develop as it did in Christian Europe. Islām has never been organized around a central religious hierarchy comparable to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches. As referenced below, there are certainly problems within the Islāmic world around issues of law and what we call "separation of church and state." But there's a difference in understanding them realistically and making a scary bogeyman out of sharia.

Following is the text from March 2006; it references what at the time were current events and I've left those comments because they also provide context:

Up until not long ago, the President's [Bush's] most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan. Yes, the dominant Islāmic law tradition in Afghanistan historically is not the gruesome fundamentalism of the Taliban government ousted in 2001. To what extent the Hanafi school in Afghanistan has been corrupted by three decades of more-or-less continuous war with no end in sight, I don't know. In an undated article at GlobalSecurity.org (Hanafi Islam accessed 08/24/2010), they write:

Broad-minded without being lax, this school appeals to reason (personal judgment) and a quest for the better. It is generally tolerant and the largest movement within Islam. The Hanafi school is known for its liberal religious orientation that elevates belief over practice and is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities. ...

An estimated 84% of Afghanistan's population is Sunni, following the Hanafi school of jurisprudence; the remainder is predominantly Shi'a, mainly Hazara. In March 2003 Ayatollah Mohammad Asef Mohseni, leader of the predominantly Shia Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan, proposed that, along with the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence, the Shia Ja'fari school of jurisprudence be included in the new constitution as an official sect.

Taliban legal practices were particularly influenced by the Deobandi tradtion in Sunni Islām.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna (religious tradition), development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

The Times' public editor blows whistle on goofy op-ed

Remember that stinker of an op-ed by Edward Luttwak that the New York Times published back in May about how Obama was an "apostate Muslim" according to sharia (Islamic law) and that he would be the target of assassination attempts because of it? (I don't recall a 10-minute rant from Keith Olberman about how it was wicked for the Times to use the word "assassination".)

Careful readers (like Neil at The Blue Voice) could see that it reeked, even without consulting with experts on Islamic law.

Weeks later, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt comments on the article in Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? New York Times 06/01/08. Short version of Hoyt's conclusions: "I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong."

And, in what was apparently a further display of total ditziness, Luttwak sent Hoyt what was supposed to be a defense of his claim in the op-ed:

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, “You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist.”

Tags: edward luttwak, islamic law, sharia

Islām and war

The Prophet Muhammad ascending to Heaven

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has an article available online (they keep them online for a few weeks) by Malise Ruthven, How to Understand Islam 11/08/07 issue. It has some worthwhile thoughts on the Islāmic religious doctrines on war. It also has several quotes from Hans Küng's excellent book Islam: Past, Present and Future, one of the volumes he's reviewing. (Küng is my own favorite contemporary theologian.)

But there are some definitely problematic things about Ruthven's argument, too.

On the useful side, he gives the following description of the concept of sharia, or Islāmic law.

The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad — independent reasoning — in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As [John] Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

Ruthven's focus is not on Islāmic law as such, but his article is valuable background not only on the way Muslims think about just war issues as well as on sharia more generally. Sharia is not a single body of jurisprudence in the Anglo-American or European Continental sense. There are four major schools of Sunni sharia, called the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbalite schools.

There are also two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs, compared to the Sunni schools of sharia. (I posted on sharia at more length in Varieties of Islāmic law 03/19/06).

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

(For more on the that trio Mawlānā Abu'l-A‛la Mawdūdī, Hasan al-Bannā and Sayyid Qutb see my posts Sayyid Qutb 09/06/04 and Intellectual godfathers of jihadism 03/22/05.)

On the negative side, Ruthven argues - or rather implies fairly disingenuously - that the 9/11, London and Madrid bombings were somehow a direct application of Islāmic principles:

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle - his "just war" - against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics - will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" - their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. (my emphasis)

But the argument he makes doesn't begin to carry the weight of such a charge. Most people in the world recognize some form of the just war, and at least a lot of us apply some kind of religious viewpoint to making judgments on whether a war is just. The question of whether the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" has been a basic part of the Christian doctrine of the Just War for centuries, at least since the days of St. Augustine, i.e., since the end of the Roman Empire.

That's in itself isn't necessarily a persuasive argument of its value, given the bloody history of the Christian world. But you have to be a person like say, Dick Cheney to not try to make some kind of judgment whether "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good", especially when you're talking about war and killing.

I'm not making any judgment on whether Sheikh al-Azhar's statement against terrorism is totally satisfactory. I'm just saying that Ruthven's argument is exceptionally weak. More specifically, he makes a very broad generalization about "official Islamic authorities" that he doesn't really support in his article.

This has been a big failing on the part of Western critics and scholars, especially the neoconservatives, is that they denounce Islāmic religious leaders for not speaking out enough against terrorism. And then when they do speak out against it in the name of Islām, there's just dissed, as Ruthven does in that paragraph.

I also notice that these mostly unidentified "official Islamic authorities" fail in Ruthven's eyes because they "usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy". Just what does that mean? That they see Al Qa'ida as a legitimate political authority? To say that is a stretch would be to understate how off the charts it is. Whatever the problems within the Islmaic religion, the "official Islamic authorities" conferring political legitimacy on Al Qa'ida is not one of them.

In making this argument, he smoothes over the degree of radical departure from Sunni Islām by thinkers like Qutb. Qutb is a strong influence over jihadist thought. His brother, who shared much of his outlook, was actually one of Osama bin Laden's teachers in the university. The other fundamentalist founding fathers that he mentions, Mawdūdī and Hasan al-Bannā did not go nearly so far as Qutb. (All of those three were Sunnis.)

One of the key elements of Qutb's contribution to the jihadist ideology practiced by violent Salafist groups like Al Qa'ida was the notion that even Sunni Muslims who didn't share the particular, eccentric brand of Islam are not real Muslims and therefore they can be regarded as legitimate targets for killing.

Ruthven cites Muhammad's struggles with the pagan Quraysh tribe dominant in Mecca, which is certainly important to examine in this context, because Muhammad and his four immediate successors as caliph (they are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided caliphs") are taken as especially important models for right practice and interpreting the Qu'ran, including on matters of war.

But Muhammad sought to convert the Quraysh in Mecca, not to kill them. The Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh of Medina did have battles. But in the end, Muhammad negotiated a peace with the Quaraysh. When Muhammad's fighters took Mecca, it was through a peace agreement, not by fighting their way into the city or laying seige to it. How blowing up commuters in Madrid is any kind of obvious application of the lessons of the Prophet's dealings with the Quraysh escapes me.

As Karen Armstrong describes in Islam (2000), the peace treaty that the Prophet made with the Quraysh of Mecca was unpopular among both the Meccans and the umma (the Muslim people, the followers of the Prophet). "Many of the Muslims were eager for action," she writes, "and that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammand was determined to achieve victory by peaceful means."

It's worth noting the intellectual figures of the 19th century that Ruthven cites as hopeful directions in Islamic theology:

The intellectual groundwork for change has been laid in the works of modernist reformers who have been revisiting the sources of Islam for more than a century. They include Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) and Syed Ameer Ali (1848–1928) in India and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), the influential chief jurist of Egypt. The problems do not lie in the realm of theology, where Muslim intellectuals have charted retreats from the received certainties of the medieval paradigm that are just as ingenious and (for true believers) just as plausible as the efforts of Western theologians. The obstacle lies rather in the absence, in the majority traditions, of structures of leadership through which reformist ideas can be effected at the popular level.

But why he couldn't have given more emphasis there to some contemporary examples of reformist Islāmic theologians like Adkolkarim Soroush or Mohammed Arkoun, I don't know. He does mention Arkoun in connction with Hans Küng's comments on historical-critical analysis of the Qu'ran.

A strange article, all things considered.

Tags: hasan al-banna, islam, islamic law, mawdudi, sayyid qutb, sharia

Varieties of Islāmic law

Up until not long ago, the President's most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna, development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is not now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

See also Index to Posts on Hans Küng's Der Islam

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

Abdolkarim Soroush

One of the valuable things about Hans Küng's Der Islam (2004) is that he mentions a number of contemporary Muslim thinkers who are trying to define new Islamic approaches to contemporary challenges. One of those he mention in this regard is the Iranian expatriate Adkolkarim Soroush, who was profiled in this article: Iran's leading reformist intellectual tries to reconcile religious duties and human rights by Laura Secor Boston Globe 03/14/04.

If Iran's democratic reform movement has a house intellectual, it's Abdolkarim Soroush. A small, soft-spoken philosopher with fiercely expressive eyebrows, Soroush specializes in mysticism, Sufi poetry, Islamic theology, chemistry, pharmacology, and the philosophy of science. Although he once worked for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary government, he now advances a powerful argument for democracy and human rights - and he does so drawing not only on John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, but also on the deepest intellectual traditions of Shi'ite Islam. Religion must remain aloof from governance, he is fond of saying, not because religion is false and would corrupt politics, but because religion is true and politics corrupts it.

Secor's article is a reminder of the kind of goals that motivated most supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary movement in 1979. And she talks a bit about Soroush's approach to Islam:

In '92, Soroush established the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Science. It was Iran's first program of its kind. At the same time, his philosophical writings on Islam and democracy began to circulate through an eclectic intellectual journal called Kiyan. In these writings, Soroush directly challenged the political power of the clerics, even advocating that they cease working for pay so that they would no longer be corrupted by worldly interests. "They must remain lovers rather than dealers of religion," he explains in an e-mail. With these and other writings, Soroush became a professor with a following.

She gives an example of how he uses the theology of the Mu'tazilites as a way to look at Islam in a democratic perspective:

The Mu'tazilites, who drew on ancient Greek philosophical sources, believed that the Qu'ran was a created text, rather than an eternal one - meaning that it was situated in the moment of its historical creation and could conceivably have been different, had external circumstances been different. Most intriguingly, the Mu'tazilites believed justice did not derive from God but guided God's actions. Therefore an action was not good or bad because God commanded or forbade it; God commanded or forbade it because it was good or bad. What this meant was that morality stood independent of God and in fact inhered in the actions themselves. It could be apprehended with reason, even by someone ignorant of God's injunctions. Soroush calls this vision of justice "moral secularism."

Though the Mu'tazilites produced the official doctrine of the Baghdad caliphate from 765 through 848, they were unpopular elitists who resorted to violent repression. When they were displaced by the orthodox Ash'arites, who held reason to be subservient to revelation, the Mu'tazilites went into near-permanent eclipse. Sunni Muslims embraced the Ash'arite view and came to see Mu'tazilite ideas as heretical. But the often subterranean Mu'tazilate influence became woven into the theology of the Persian Shi'ites and the Yemeni Zaydis.

And Secor gives us a glimpse of how Soroush's view of Islam and government avoids both theocracy and secularism:

Soroush believes that religious institutions and political ones should be kept separate. Doing so will allow religious life to truly flourish, because it will be chosen rather than imposed. But if this sounds like Western-style liberal secularism, it isn't. Rather, Soroush envisions what he calls a democratic religious society. Its goal is the freedom of believers to practice and live by their faith without compulsion - but also without the "profanity" that pervades Western secular life.

Shari'ah law provides the Islamic framework for moral living, and Soroush does not seem prepared to do away with it, although he is clear that scripture should never form the sole basis of legislation. Indeed, Soroush sees Shari'ah as a form of religious knowledge rather than an article of religious faith. And so, in his view, it should be subject to rational discussion and adjustment.

Superficially, Soroush's approach may sound more compatible with conservative American views. For instance, he is emphatic in condemning homosexuality as immoral. But in fact, he represents a democratizing trend in Islam, and his approach provides a very different perspective on the religion than the dogmatic "Islam is violent and evil" view that many Christian and secular conservatives take of it.

Tags: adkolkarim soroush, hans küng, hans küng's der islam, islam, islamic law

Sayyid Qutb

This post is about Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist who is considered a major influence on today's Islamic extremism. Since most of the sources I've used are not online, I've listed them at the end and refer to them by number in the text.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologist and leader, who is considered a key intellectual figure for present-day Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda. But his influence extends to Islamists who do not share the terrorist approach of Al Qaeda, as well. Rohan Gunaratna calls Qutb "the leading ideologue of Egyptian fundamentalists" and a "pioneer" of "the Islamist revival in the Middle East." (2) Karen Armstrong has written:

Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili [barbaric] ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. (4)

Qutb provided a religious justification for fighting against Muslim rulers and for considering Muslims who didn't share the radical goals of the Islamists as not being true Muslims. He took the idea of "jahiliyya" and gave it a new meaning. For most Muslims, jahiliyya refers to the society in Arabia before the Prophet's revelation, a time of ignorance of God's true religion. Gilles Kepel suggests that "barbarism" may be the closest translation. (6)

Qutb was a journalist who also wrote essays and novels. Up until 1945, his interests were mainly literary. When he first started writing political pieces, he wound up having to leave Egypt in 1948 to avoid arrest by the royalist government, though his political friends arranged for him to do so on the government's dime. He came to live in the United States, an experience which he found quite unpleasant. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1951, he was ready to join up with the fundamentalist ("Islamist") Muslim Brotherhood.

It's interesting to speculate in what ways his encounter with America as such shaped his views, as opposed to the experience of effectively being exiled and taken away from his regular community and his country under those circumstances. John Voll suggests that Qutb's hostility to the West had been influenced by British behavior in Egypt during the Second World War and by what he saw as Anglo-American encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. Voll sees Qutb's stay in America as having reinforced those ideas:

He found Americans to be materialistic and lacking in spiritual values and was disturbed by the popular and media support in the United States for the nascent state of Israel. After his return to Egypt, he wrote that in the United States, "any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed and any human element other than ego is not recognized. Where the whole life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production. The result is class struggle which becomes inevitable and visibly evident." (1)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir) seized power in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Nasser favored a much more secular approach to government than the Muslim Brotherhood sought. Qutb wound up going to prison for a three months in 1954. After Qutb's release, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Nasser in October of 1954. Qutb was rearrested, and was incarcerated in the Tura concentration camp until 1964. The experience of persecution by the Nasser regime and the conditions of the concentration camp were the context in which he prepared his most influential works, Milestones and Under the Aegis of the Koran (also in English translation as In the Shade of the Qu'ran), a long commentary on the Qu'ran.

Arrested again in 1965 in a government move against another alleged Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy, Qutb was hanged in August 1966, making him a martyr to the Islamists.

A Muslim Brother who was Qutb's cellmate in the Tura camp, Muhammad Hawwash, said that Joseph had appeared to him in a dream and gave him a message: "Tell Sayyid Qutb that in my sura he will find what he seeks." (6)

Joseph's sura (# 12) in the Qu'ran relates the story of Joseph being imprisoned in Egypt after his master's wife had attempted to seduce him. There, two of his fellow prisoners related dreams to him. (In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the story is in Genesis 40.) Before interpreting their dreams, he tells them:

This knowledge my Lord has given me, for I have left the faith of those that disbelieve in Allah and deny the life to come. I follow the faith of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We must never serve idols besides Allah. Such is the fight which Allah has bestowed upon us and all mankind. Yet most men do not give thanks.

Fellow-prisoners! Are numerous gods better than Allah, the One, the Almighty? Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has reveal no sanction. Judgement rests with Allah only. He has commanded you to worship none but Him. That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it. (5)

This concept of idolatry was key to Qutb's interpretation of jahiliyya. Qutb applied the term to present-day Muslim societies, including his own Epypt under the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb's most important book is Milestones (also known in English as Signposts and Signs Along the Path or Signposts Along the Road), which he wrote in the Tura camp and was published in 1964. In it, he wrote: "Nowadays, the entire world lives in a state of jahiliyya as far as the source from which it draws the rules of its mode of existence is concerned." (6) This allowed Qutb and his followers to view Muslim societies and Muslim leaders as enemies of Islam and enemies of God.

Qutb also emphasized that in struggling against the jahiliyya, no doubt having in mind in particular the repressive Nasser regime, true Muslims must not restrict themselves to jihad in only the sense of internal struggle or of defensive war. Instead, they must be prepared to propagate true Islam by "the sword" as well as by "the Book." The "jahiliyya regime" of Nasser, writes Kepel interpreting Qutb, "had to be fought in the way pagans were fought."

Qutb stressed that true Islamic faith must be expressed in action against the jahiliyya rulers.

The notion of idolatry was at the core of Qutb's new definition of jahiliyya. Those thought of themselves as Muslims had actually made gods of other things besides God himself. One of those idols is the concept of national sovereignty:

The principle on which [jahiliyya] is based is opposition to God's rule over the earth and to the major characteristic of the Divinity, namely sovereignty (al-hakimiyya): instead it invests men with this, and makes some of them gods for the others. This transference of sovereignty does not occur in the primitive manner of the pre-hegira jahiliyya [of Mohammad's time], but by allowing man to unduly arrogate to himself the right to establish values, to legislate, to elaborate systems, and to take positions, all without regard to divine ethics (minhaj allah lil-hayah), but rather in accordance with what He has expressly forbidden! Now, to oppose the rule of God in this way is to be the enemy of His faithful.

The degradation of man in general in the collectivists regimes [including Nasser's], the injustice suffered by the individuals and people dominated by capital and colonialism, are only the effects of this opposition to the rule of God, the negation of the dignity that God bestowed upon man! (6)

Earlier Islamists had considered Communist, democratic-capitalist and other non-Muslim societies to be jahiliyya, but Qutb's innovation was to place Muslim societies in that category as well.

Qutb argued that a vanguard of the ummah (Muslim society) must lead the drive for a truly Muslim form of rule. The vanguard must purge itself of idolatrous influences by returning to the true faith of the first Muslims, Muhammad and the first four caliphs who succeeded him as leader of the ummah, also known as the rightly guided caliphs.

Once a vanguard has been established with a truly Islamic consciousness and truly Islamic practice, "In the meantime the battle begins between this nascent society that has declared its secession ... from jahiliyya society" and the jahiliyya society itself. and the latter..." (6)

One chapter of Milestones, that was replaced in many editions published after 1981 according to Kepel, Qutb defines jihad in his theology, insisting that jihad against the jahiliyya cannot be restricted to nonviolent measures alone:

To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to power out of the hands of those of His worshippers who have usurped it and to return it to God alone, to confer authority upon divine law (shari'at allah) alone and to eliminate the laws created by man ...all this will not be done through sermons and discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word alone, otherwise the task of His messengers would be far more easily done. (6)

John Voll summarizes the significance of Qutb's view for the Egyptian Islamist movement:

The major conceptual contribution of Qutb was to provide an intellectual and theoretical foundation for the concrete rejection of Nasserism and the other Western-based radical ideologies of his day. One could no longer simply attack the state as being a foreign puppet. Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler of the country for millennia. Egyptians had gotten what they wanted: a successful nationalist committed to social transformation. Qutb explained why true Muslims could not accept this. (1)

The "establishment" Muslim view of Sayyid Qutb, as enunciated by the authorities of Egypt's al-Azhar university, was simply that Qutb was a heretic and an agitator. But in fact, Qutb's ideas had a huge impact on the Egyptian Islamist movement, an impact which was taken in different ways by those who used his ideas.

Among the more militant strain, one of the most prominent in Egypt was the Society of Muslims, led by the agronomist Shukri Mustafa, who believed that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society in order to prepare to attack it. A more "moderate" interpretation within the Muslim Brotherhood and among other Islamists praised Qutb's ideas but had to refute parts of Qutb's Milestones.

If the concept of "moderate" Islamists seems strange, since Islamists as a group represent a "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islam, it's worth remembering that in 1997 even Al Qaeda disassociated itself, both in its pronouncements and in practice, from the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) after its repeated massacres of ordinary Muslims not associated with theAlgerian regime. GIA had also proclaimed the right to hold women captured in military actions as slaves. Al Qaeda, however, did manage to bring key operatives from GIA's European network into a new group, the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) which became part of the Al Qaeda network. (2)

One of Sayyid Qutb's most important interpreters was his own brother. Muhammed Qutb taught Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. At the university in Jeddah, he made a deep impression on one of his young students, Osama bin Laden.

In 1975, Muhammad Qutb published a piece in a journal of the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood defending Sayyid Qutb's views. He quoted the latter as having said repeatedly, "We are preachers and not judges. Our objective is not to legislate against people, but to teach them this truth: that there is no god but God. The problem is that people do not understand what this formula requires of them." (6)

Muhammad Qutb insisted that his brother's work should not be interpreted as the cult-like Society of Muslims did, to mean that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society. But he also opposed interpretations which sought to blunt the political-revolutionary implications of his brother's ideas. It's a measure of Sayyid Qutb's influence that the less militant tendencies in Egyptian Islamism, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s, still tried to interpret his ideas in ways favorable to their approach.

1. "Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" by John O. Voll in Fundamentalisms Observed (1991) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.

2. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna (2002)

3. Is This the Man Who Inspired Bin Laden? by Robert Irwin Guardian (UK) 11/01/01

4. Islam by Karen Armstrong (2000)

5. The Koran, N.J. Dawood, translator; 1974 Penguin edition

6. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh by Gilles Kepel; trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild (1985). Kepel's book uses the translation Signposts as the name for Milestones.

7. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terrorism" by Paul Berman New York Times Magazine 03/23/03

8. Sayyid Qutb's America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality NPR 05/06/03. This has more details about Qutb's stay in the US, which was mostly in the conservative town of Greeley, Colorado.

9. Truly, Madly, Deeply Devout by Jonathan Raban Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

Additional Web sites:

Young Muslims, a Canadian Islamic site with links to an English-language text of Qutb's Milestones. The NPR site above links to the Milestones text. It's perhaps a general indication of the perspective of this site that one of the two articles on Qutb currently featured on this page says that describing Muslim extremist violence as "terrorist" is the practice of the "mouthpiece of the zionist establishment in America."

The 9/11 Commission Report mentions Qutb briefly in Chapter 2. The brief analysis there is not too impressive.


Tags: islam, islamic fundamentalism, islamic law, jihadism, muslim fundamentalism, sayyid qutb, sharia