The Islamic reformation, Reza Aslan

KVB Tharoor — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:00:00 +0000

On the 20th century "Islamic reformation"

The roots of the modern reformation of Islam - the growing individualisation of Islam - lie in the experience of colonialism and the geopolitical fragmentation of large parts of the Arab and Muslim world into nation-states, often fabricated from without. There was an attempt to recreate the umma (the universal community of believers) through ideologies like pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. But those identities failed. As new generations arise very comfortable with their nationalist identities, the new sense of individualism and nationalism is no longer seen to be anathema to Islam and is quite comfortably absorbed into "the Muslim mindset".

Despite the diverse movements of reform in the 20th century, which included "modernists" like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Iqbal as well as radicals like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, everybody agreed who was at fault for the decline of Islam in the face of the west: the ulema.

People think of Qutb as being part of the clerical establishment itself, as being an alem himself. Quite the contrary, he was reacting to the institutions of Islam which he believed had become so stultified that they ceased to be important. The Muslim Brotherhood was a deliberate challenge to the clerical establishment, it wasn't part of the clerical establishment. We tend to think of such religious movements and institutions as one-and-the-same. That is a fundamental mistake.

The response to colonialism was as much a response to the institutionalisation of Islam. The forms of Islam that arose out of colonialism, from modernism to what we now refer to as fundamentalism, were equally an attack on Islam as on the west of the Europe.

On Iran's intellectual evolution

It's very useful to think of Iran's political and cultural evolution as separate from these larger Arab issues. Iran has several advantages. First, it has very a deep sense of nationalism. The country was not created by outsiders. An often exaggerated feeling of nationalism has allowed Iran to absorb external ideas more easily than much of the Arab world as the latter struggles to define itself in opposition to the west. Even after the Iranian Revolution, the constitution of the Islamic Republic was essentially based, if not plagiarised, from the Swiss constitution.

Second, the legal ideas of Shia Islam are much more fluent than in Sunni Islam. This has allowed Islam in Iran to evolve much faster, to be able to reconcile disparate notions, to be able to modernise Islamic law, and to deal with matters as complex as abortion, stem cell research, and transgender identities. Iranian Shia law answers such questions whereas Arab Sunni law has a very difficult time handling such issues of modernity because it is so mired in the regurgitation of the accumulation of Islamic law

The concept of ijtihad - innovation or interpretation - is far more central to Shia thought than Sunni. It is commonly said that in the Sunni schools of law, the "gates of ijtihad" closed around the 12th century. Since then, the idea of innovation has been considered almost a sin in Sunni Islam. In fairness, the picture is not so black and white; innovation is much more robust than it appears. Nevertheless, there is still a great measure of restraint in Sunni legal practice and theory.

In Shia Islam, ijtihad is one of the primary means through which Islamic law is formed. It's even more important, some would say, than the Koran, because an ayatollah has the ability to use his rational judgement to make a declaration that can go against the Koran itself. Shia Islam thus has much more of a capacity for evolution than Sunni Islam.

On the contemporary Shia-Sunni divide

Despite such structural differences between Sunni and Shia Islams, recent attempts to characterise the civil war in Iraq and other conflicts in the middle-east as "religious" are not only incorrect, but dangerous. What is happening in Iraq is not a religious war. To think that people are killing each other in Iraq over who should have succeeded the prophet Muhammad is imbecilic. That's like saying the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland were killing each other because one believed in sola scriptura and the other didn't.

Unquestionably, the foreign jihadi fighters in Iraq - the Sunni puritans - are killing Shia for religious reasons. They are not the primary force of the Sunni insurgency by any means. The sectarian strife is much more sociologically, politically and even economically motivated than dogmatically or theologically-based.

Thinking about it in religious terms is not only wrong, but in muddying the issue, it keeps us from meaningful engagement with the crisis.

On political Islam and democracy

Certain modern Islamic ideologies, even if articulated in peaceful terms, do pose a threat to democracy. The problem with activist and political Islamist groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir is that they're only interested in democracy as the means through which their kind of politics and ideas become ascendant. This is the new kind of Islamist democratic position, evident in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon: the idea that democracy is the means through which institutions and groups like them can gain control.

That's far different from what the notion of democracy is supposed to mean; it's illiberal, not liberal democracy.

It's hard to talk about the motivation behind these groups, but the notion of somehow melding democracy with a "caliphate" is ridiculous. There are very few Muslims in the world who know what a caliphate is, let alone desire its return. That idea is so antiquated that it's really hard to have political discussion about modernity that begin with the recreation of the caliphate.

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The Islamic reformation, Reza Aslan