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Democratization
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Democracy, Islam and the culture of modernism

George Joff
a a

The deputy director, The Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London Available online: 26 Sep 2007

To cite this article: George Joff (1997): Democracy, Islam and the culture of modernism, Democratization, 4:3, 133-151 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510349708403528

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Democracy, Islam and the Culture of Modernism

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GEORGE JOFF
The Islamic world seems to lack the ability to confront the challenge of modernism and has chosen instead to turn inwards towards Islam as a political paradigm. As a result, there appears to be a reluctance to adopt democratic principles of government. This is due at the level of ideas to a failure to embrace secularism in the collective sphere, as occurred in Europe. The cause for this failure lies in the marginalization of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition in the twelfth century, despite the role of the falsafah movement. Yet contemporary moderate Islamic and Islamist thinkers are turning back to such paradigms in order to be able to incorporate the political implications of modernism into the new Islamic project. One of the most striking features of the contemporary Islamic world, particularly the Arab world, is the way in which it seems to have lost its way in the centuries immediately preceding the colonial period, and has not apparently been able to recover its intellectual and cultural vigour since the colonial period ended. This is in spite of the splendours of medieval Arab and Islamic civilization. It is, of course, true that this period of apparent decline - from about the fifteenth century onwards - actually saw the development of three major Muslim empires - the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires - each of which, certainly during its period of growth, made major contributions to Islamic culture and history. On the surface, at least, this hardly appears to confirm a sense of secular decline. Nevertheless, it is striking that, after the combined threats of, first, the Crusader Kingdoms in the Levant and, second, the Mongol invasions of Asia and the Middle East, there seems to have been a loss of inspiration and vitality, from which the Islamic world still suffers. It is as if the modern world has set challenges to which Islamic civilizations have yet to find, not just an answer, but also the intellectual and cultural dynamism, spontaneity and originality from which such answers would arise. This is not to denigrate the truly remarkable economic and social progress now found in large parts of Muslim Asia. After all, Malaysia is counted amongst the 'tiger economies' of South-East Asia and Indonesia is
George Joff is the deputy director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. Democratization, Vol.4, No.3, Autumn 1997, pp.133151 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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set to join the same class. Nor is it intended to disparage the efforts made by the Arab states of the Gulf - and, indeed, Brunei - to accommodate to the uncomfortable problems of oil wealth. Whatever their political problems, these states have successfully created modern economies which have the potential of surviving the oil era as viable entities in an ever more globalised world. Yet, the economic miracle in South-East Asia is not intrinsically 'Islamic'; it has little to do with the intellectual development of Islamic economics, for example, although the region has taken a lead in this direction. Indeed it seems to have much in common with other such developments in non-Muslim states and nations. In the case of the Gulf, oil rent has far more to do with development than Muslim culture or society. Nor are the emerging political structures of the Islamic region specific in this respect - at least, not beyond the level of political rhetoric. Indeed, in cultural terms, at least, the Islamic world today seems to be increasingly on the defensive, in the face of what it feels is an aggressive, threatening and potentially hostile Western cultural offensive which it finds difficult to incorporate or even resist. Even the refuge of an Islamic revivalism which is itself a modernist experience, particularly in the political sphere, seems to be couched in strangely defensive terms. It is as if its very selfconsciousness revealed its own inner insecurity, which could only be covered by an aggressive and dismissive disdain for those it perceives to be its opponents, whether domestic or foreign. There is, in short, a sense that the Islamic world, in terms of its cultural heritage and vitality, is losing out to the modernism inherent in contemporary Western culture. Of course, it could be argued that Western culture itself has been defeated by its own introspection in the blind alley of post-modernism, although this is an issue which is not really relevant to the issues posed above. Nor are these comments in any sense a statement about the internal coherence and eternal significance of Islam as one of the three great monotheistic religions in the modern world. The object is simply to question why, within the temporal, collective arena of modern society and politics, the Islamic cultural paradigm seems apparently unable to cope with the implications of modernism, as manifested in what is today the dominant culture of the secular West. One of the most evident aspects of this stagnation occurs in the political sphere in Islamic countries. It is generally extremely difficult for such states to accept the implications of democratic political systems, largely at a popular level at least - because they are perceived to be Western constructs and therefore alien. Representative democracy is seen as alien to Islam; consultation (shura) and consensus (ijmac) are sought instead.1 Although Islamists claim this to be integral to their project for society and thus to be derived from Islamic precept, this conviction has a far wider purview.

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For most Muslims, the linkage between religious doctrine and social order, epitomized in the adage, 'din wa dunya' - 'faith and society'(the secular word) - carries an echo of 'dawla' - state as well. It stems from the implicit contract at the base of Islamic constitutional theory2 which has been absorbed into the general political culture of the Islamic world. It stimulates an instinctive preference for familiar archetypes in the resolution of conflict and the imposition of socio-political order. Yet, at the same time, the normative3 implications of democratic political systems, in terms of personal freedom and socio-legal equality, attract considerable support, albeit to the exclusion of some of the other concomitants they imply, particularly where the moral arena is involved. However, the Islamic ambivalence over democracy also has to do with the holistic nature of normative Islamic society; its failure, to date, to have completed the transition from - in Durkheimian terms - an organic to a mechanical society and thus an inability to cope with the socio-political atomism implicit within the democratic project. In short, the Islamic world has not yet fully accepted the ideological implications of modernism. The European Cultural Heritage Modernism, as usually defined, refers to the European artistic and literary movement of the latter years of the nineteenth century. There is, however, another meaning which has developed, in European thought at least, in the past three decades. Here 'modernism' refers to the social and intellectual developments in Western culture that created the scientific and industrial revolutions. In this respect it differs from 'modernity', although it is contained by it.4 Modernism is usually perceived to start somewhere between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries - from the late Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. Its essential content has been well caught in Ernest Gellner's phrase, when he described himself as an humble adherent of 'Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism'.5 By this he meant that, although he did not accept that revealed absolute truth exists in the real, external and temporal world, there are certain absolute and transcultural philosophic and analytical principles, rooted in rationalism (the rejection of conclusions based on anything but experience and inductive or deductive reasoning) by means of which facts can be explored and principles of analysis and explanation established. His comments were, in fact, part of a critique of post-modernism which he saw as the relativization, not only of principle but also of analytical method, and thus incapable, in the last analysis, of even producing conclusions that can be discussed or generally understood. But they were also part of an analysis of the role of political Islam in the construction of modern society; a role which,

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incidentally, he did not see as inherently or even practically negative. Gellner's comments provide a useful starting point for the discussion that follows with, perhaps, the expansion of his definition to include the suggestion that modernism, or rationalism, is also based on the ability of the analyst to engage in speculative reasoning without restraint. This does not mean, however, that constraints do not exist, for clearly they do. Some are inherent in the process of thought and logic, others result from linguistic constraint and, whilst these are implicit constraints on speculation, there are explicit constraints too. Personal conviction and morality, as well as imagination, are perhaps the most obvious. But the crucial point is that none of these are restraints which are the result of external edict; none of them reflect the imposition of socially, doctrinally or legalistically defined limits on speculation. Now, of course this situation did not spring phoenix-like from the ashes of medieval obscurantism - if, indeed, the European Middle Ages were as irrational and obscurantist as they are usually portrayed. In fact, during the Renaissance, one of the great dramas was the attempt by the Church to hinder precisely the development of such speculative reasoning if it threatened religious doctrine. Not only was Giordano Bruno martyred for his scientific pantheism in 1600,6 but Galileo's proof of the accuracy of Copernicus's description of the rotation of the earth about the sun suffered Papal condemnation in 1633. Admittedly, change had occurred within the Church. For, although Bruno was burnt at the stake, Galileo was eventually merely confined to his home and, so legend has it, murmured, 'But still it moves', after his condemnation.7 This evinced an irreducible commitment to scientific, as opposed to religious, truth - except, of course, he believed that there was no distinction between them. And, only four years later, in 1637, Descartes published his Discourse on Method, the book which, more than any other, was eventually to define the Age of Enlightenment. These events, however, occurred in a rapidly changing political and intellectual context; so that, by the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was already on the defensive against the onslaughts of the Reformation. Indeed, the Reformation is the second key intellectual influence which informed the era of modernism, alongside the Renaissance which re-introduced the rationalism of the Greeks, mediated through the innovative exegeses of Islamic science and philosophy, into the medieval world of Europe. It was not the philosophical or doctrinal discoveries and innovations of the Reformation which were so important, however. Indeed, Luther rejected speculation as a means of understanding God and argued that salvation came through faith alone. Calvin enunciated the terrifying doctrine of predestination and was quite prepared to burn heretics at the stake, as happened to Michel Servetus (who was accused, as Bruno had

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been by the Inquisition, of pantheism).8 Instead, the growing individualism, or rather, individuation of belief, as authorities based on doctrinal justification multiplied through the process of the Reformation, was what was important. This meant, in effect, the loss of the idea that intellectual authority was divinely and thus uniquely sanctioned. It meant the growth of the sense that, for practical purposes, power, authority and interpretation could be confined and legitimised within the temporal, rather than the spiritual world. There was, in effect, a secularization of the intellect. For now there could be several truths, even over religious doctrine, rather than just one; and they could be developed through personal interpretation, rather than through divine sanction as mediated by the Church. They could not, of course, be mutually acceptable, but, after the Thirty Years War, they could and did coexist, for it was the Peace of Westphalia which brought the war to an end which finally resolved this issue. It is this which is the real meaning of the Augsburg Compromise of 1555. That established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, in effect meaning that a prince could establish the form of religion practiced in his territory.9 This principle, sanctified by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ushered in the European world of nation-states when, as Professor Tawney pointed out, '... the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world.' He goes on to say, in a striking passage in his famous study, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science amongst others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.10 The term 'intellectual analysis' could easily be substituted for 'political theory' in this passage without outraging its meaning, so that the secularization of the intellect has now been partnered by the secularization of politics. In fact, by the Age of the Enlightenment, the scene had also been set for the third of the great secularizations that defines the modernist world; that of economic life. After all, in the Middle Ages, economic activity also fell under divine sanction and the Church frowned on such activity undertaken for its own sake. 'Christians should not be merchants', ran the accepted dictum and the condemnation of usury was even stronger. Indeed,

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economic life was essentially based on agriculture and the moral hierarchies of feudalism. It was not until the Enlightenment that the essential precursor of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution - the market system, with its tradable components of land, labour and capital - had fully developed, although its origins lie in the thirteenth century and the subsequent collapse of the feudal system after the Black Death. In essence - and at the risk of dangerous over-simplification - this transformation of economic life was the transition from a moral economy to one based on the impersonal operation of the market for the sake of profit; a secularization, in other words, of yet another sphere of collective life and the precursor of modern capitalism." In so far as this tripartite process of secularization destroyed the operation of an overriding divinely sanctioned moral authority, secularism became the essential partner to intellectual speculation about the natural and the temporal worlds. The only absolutes now were the rules and methods which established how speculation should proceed, how its conclusions could be reproducibly tested, but not the nature of the conclusions it could reach. This comprises the essence of modernism and, in intellectual terms, at least, the causative factor that has led to the scientific and technological civilization embodied in the concept of 'The West'. It is crucial to realize that this system has developed not because of some innate quality of European culture to which other societies and civilizations have no access, but because of a specific and particular historical nexus of factors that led ineluctably to such a result. The historian, Paul Kennedy, for example, roots this unique European experience primarily in geography which then led on to socio-political differentiation.12 Because of Europe's differentiated geography and natural resources, trade was stimulated and the political system was decentralized - no state could gain sufficient advantage to dominate the others for long, and all became engaged in technological competition for military supremacy. With the development of both trade and naval power, European aggressiveness was externalized and the development of empire fed the growth of a market-based mercantilism and, eventually capitalism. Had the right conditions existed elsewhere, then the same 'miracle' could have theoretically developed elsewhere as well. The question is, however, whether such developments would have been possible without the concomitant intellectual evolution; indeed, whether that, too, could have occurred elsewhere and - if not - why not? The Islamic Experience Contemporary Islam differs from Christianity in at least one crucial respect: its values, principles and doctrines have an acute relevance to the formal

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organization and legitimization of Muslim society. The process of the secularization of social and political principles has not taken place as it did in the Christian world before the nineteenth century. This does not mean, of course, that systems of individual or personal morality may not have a general social relevance. For such systems continue to operate in Western societies, too - most obviously in Middle America today. The issue is more one of the legitimizing principles underlying the organization of society and the sanctioning of the power and the legal system of the state - things which in Western societies and states are purely secular in nature, but which in the Islamic world refer back to Islamic archetypes. Nor does it matter that many political systems in the Islamic world use such referents cynically; the important fact is that no other system of legitimization seems to be valid. In the Arab world, where, for decades the principles of Arab nationalism served such a purpose, there are few states today that would depend only on that as a system of legitimization. And even those which do, still seek to demonstrate that they also operate in accordance with the principles of Islam and the sharcia. In part such a process is a statement about what appears to be culturally appropriate within societies that have felt betrayed by the alternative paradigms that they have been offered, particularly since independence. As such, it is a reflection about the need to create confidence in a social and political order that derives from innate cultural assumptions which inform daily life as well as political and social institutions. However, it is also often an explicit political manifestation of rhetoric and ideology that seeks its legitimacy from an absolute, revealed truth. As such - and particularly since such truth is not only absolute but also universal - this political, or, perhaps more accurately, politicized, Islamic vision carries its own moral and intellectual tinge. Sayyid Qutb, admittedly a personage excoriated by many for his role within the Egyptian Ikhwan Muslimin but none the less a recognised Islamic and Islamist intellectual, once remarked [Islam] offers to mankind a perfectly comprehensive theory of the universe, life and mankind ... a theory which satisfies man's intellectual needs. It offers to men a clear, broad and deep faith which satisfies the conscience. It offers to society legal and economic bases which have been proved both practicable and systematic.13 The counterpart to such certainty can easily be a rejection of the freedom for individual speculative reasoning which, as has been suggested above, has played a major role in the evolution of Western culture. Indeed, in so far as such convictions depend on belief in revealed absolute truth, this must be the consequence, since, by definition, other truths are excluded. The problem is neatly defined in a book entitled The Concept of Knowledge in

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Islam by the Malaysian writer, Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, where he writes: "The unity of God who is Truth, the Light, logically implies the unity of knowledge, that is, the unity of prophethood (nubawwa) [sic. nubuwwa]. The unity of knowledge ... means ... that there is no bifurcation between what is called secular and religious sciences.'14 But, of course, it is precisely this bifurcation which was to prove essential to the dynamism of Western technological, intellectual and literary culture after the end of the Renaissance. Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that all Muslims adhere to such positions. Many, perhaps a majority, do not and have sought to come to terms with the intellectual implications of Western culture ever since the Islamic world has had to confront its more aggressive manifestations - after the Battle of Palassi (1757) in India and as a consequence of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798). What is striking, however, is the way in which this has been done in the Islamic world. Unlike, for example, Meiji Japan in the 1850s and 1860s - particularly after the Revolution of 1868 when the old feudal regime and its 'traditional castes' (the term is Braudel's15) were overthrown - the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East, returned to its own indigenous cultural sources to find the intellectual vigour with which to undertake the process of reform. The Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman empire led to the Young Ottoman movement which itself was paralleled by al-Afghani's Salafiyya movement. And the name of his movement alone seems to reveal an important truth, for it referred back to the salaf- the ancestors, those who had had access to the purity of early Islam and who thus held the key to an intellectual revival which could confront and match the innovative qualities of Western culture. This is, after all, a recurring theme in the Islamic response to Western modernism which links together al-Afghani, through Muhammad cAbduh, Rashid Rida and Chekib Arslan, to Hasan al-Banna, Mawlana Maududi and the evolution of the modern Islamist movements of the Sunni Islamic world. A similar pattern could be defined for Shi'a Islam, ranging from the Constitutional Movement in Iran which led to the 1906 revolution and the dominant political role of the Shi'a culama\ through to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, in Ernest Gellner's view, moved politicised Shi'a Islam '...very close to the puritan version of Sunni High Islam.'.16 And it is Sunni High Islam or scriptualist Islam that Gellner believes is best suited to dealing successfully with the modern world. That conclusion is open to considerable question. In essence, divinely revealed truth cannot deal effectively with Western modernism because it denies itself the very quality which has made the modernist vision so successful: the ability for unfettered rational speculation according to an established epistemology, which lies at the basis of scientific analysis and

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innovation. Furthermore, the dominant reaction in the Islamic world is to seek solutions to temporal problems by referring back to the eternal verities of Islamic doctrine. This is itself a cultural statement that bears analysis and has a specific relevance to the issue at hand. Islamic revelation must also reflect its own historic specificity, just as the development of Western modernism did. And in its origins there may lie clues as to how alternative Islamic responses to the enforced co-habitation of the Islamic world with the West may be formulated. Origins and Consequences The development of philosophical speculation in the Islamic world is, interestingly enough, almost the exact reverse of the European experience. That is to say that, after the initial evolution of Islamic doctrine, a period of dispute and discord marked the early years of Islam. During this period the Islamic world incorporated the Greek scientific and philosophical tradition. Then consensus and conservatism developed, producing an apparently immobile doctrinal and socio-political vision which was eventually confronted by European colonialism. Because that vision was itself a statement of absolute revealed truth, the only coherent response to this threat could be to attempt to restate its basic elements, after an intense selfexamination designed to purify itself of aberration and distortion. As Amr Sabet recently suggested (admittedly with reference to the Iranian revolution, but his remarks have a wider relevance): The Iranian Revolution reflects an Islamic response to the manifestations of modernity's value and structural impositions. In fact, it represents a culmination of a long evolving soul searching process in most Islamic countries in reaction to the Western systems of knowledge which were perceived to be detrimental to Islam and Muslim's self-identification. Those systems' biased ethnocentricity and their damaging impact in terms of traditional institutional decay and value dependency have increasingly become the focus of Islamic resentment and rejection.17 The suggestion here seems to be that there is a corpus of received wisdom about the Islamic Weltanshauung which has been disrupted by the impact of Western modernism and that in itself must be rejected, presumably by reemphasizing Islam and Islamic values - precisely the view inherent in the salafiyya movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That view, however, bears further examination. Is there such a corpus and, if there is, how did it develop and how immutable is it in reality? That there is such a corpus is undeniable. The orthodox statement of this

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position is that it consists of the literal word of God as revealed in the Qur'an, buttressed by the sunna and the hadith - the practices and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad - and exemplified in the sharcia Islamic religious law. Its relevance to the temporal order which is subordinate to it is defined by the principle of tawhid; unity, the unity of God.18 Interpretation and amplification of the sharcia is possible through the institutions of ijmac consensus - qiyas argument by analogy or, in theory, by ijtihad - innovative reasoning but in accordance with the principles of sharcia and thus ultimately on the basis of revelation as the underlying epistemological principle. The practice of ijtihad, however, has been largely excluded within Sunni Islam for many centuries, although it is still a vital part of the Shi'a tradition. This corpus, moreover, is not simply a doctrinal statement about the personal relationship with the divine, but a prescription for collective social and political order as well. It is, furthermore, considered to be the reification of a religious tradition and a tradition of religious analysis stretching back to the very origins of Islam itself. In its modern form, therefore, it is the distillation of the doctrinal essence of Islam in its original purity as demonstrated by historical continuity and, as such, represents a set of revealed, unquestionable truths. This seems to be open to several questions. First of all, despite the tradition that the essence of Islamic belief was established in the seventh century - during the lifetime of the Prophet and shortly thereafter; certainly during the period of the Rashidun caliphate - the fact is that there was a much longer period of confusion during which essential issues of dogma and consensus had to be thrashed out. Quite apart from Western attempts to identify the links between early Islam and Judaism, as exemplified in the concept of Hagarism (put forward by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone),19 there are Muslim thinkers and historians who reject the received account as well. Said Ashmawi in Egypt, for example, has argued strongly against the idea that early Islam was a political and social dispensation as well as a doctrinal statement about personal redemption. For him 'political Islam' is a far later concept and a reaction to the collapse of the concept of the caliphate in 1924, not part of an unchanging holistic tradition stretching back to AD 632. The concept of social justice in Islam, on which its social prescriptions are based, has been a largely secular creation, building on a meagre Qur'anic legacy, for only 200 of the Qur'an's 6,000 verses actually deal with matters of social legislation.20 His views may be extreme, but he is not alone within the modern liberal Islamic tradition. In fact, such a long period of gestation for mature Islamic doctrine would not be surprising. In the case of Judaism, the evolution of the mishnah took eight hundred years and, in Christianity, the same type of doctrinal development took at least three hundred years, if not longer.

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Furthermore, Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, also had to deal with the Greek philosophical tradition which has always sat uneasily on the religious stomach. There were two attempts to do this and, until they had been resolved, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to speak of a coherent, internally integrated Islamic tradition. The first was that of the Mutazilites who sought to associate the rationalism of Greek philosophy with Islamic revelation and who reached the peak of their influence under the Caliph al-Mamun in the ninth century.21 The moderate traditionalist compromise interpretation of Islam by Ibn Hanbal and al-Ashari led, however, to a general rejection of mutazili analysis, although the issue had not been finally solved. It was left to the falsafah movement to confront the issue again, particularly to its two most famous exponents, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Neither doubted the essential principles of Islam but each, in his own way, argued that an awareness of God was possible through the power of the intellect; that rationalism could parallel belief in achieving revelation. In this they were confronted by al-Ghazzali who, although using Aristotelian techniques of analysis and thus acknowledging an intellectual debt to the Greeks, rejected the neoPlatonism of the falsafah philosophers, in favour of the primacy of the mystical vision. He argued his case so effectively than falsafah doctrine was effectively discredited within the general Islamic tradition, although it was to linger on, re-emerging in the arguments of the Young Ottomans in the nineteenth century. Ibn Rushd, who lived in Muslim Spain after alGhazzali's death and passionately disagreed with him, also apparently believed that rationalism could be applied, independently of Islamic doctrine, to analyse the natural world. He believed that conclusions arrived at in this way were 'true' in that they had internal consistency, coherence and, presumably, reproducibility - a view that comes very close to the view that was to develop in Europe as part of the Enlightenment. Nor was he alone in this, for similar views seem to have been held by Ibn Sina. Members of the falsafah movement would not have recognised any distinction between this kind of truth and the absolute statements they evolved over the divine world through their exploitation of the neo-Platonist legacy. There was however, an essential distinction between it and the absolute truth that rationalism could generate about that world, which was paralleled by the revealed truth of the Qur'an. As Montgomery Watt says of Ibn Sina: He probably felt that the Greek scientific and philosophical learning belonged to a different sphere from Islamic doctrine, and that there was no fundamental opposition between them ... Nineteenth century

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European scholars thought that his mysticism was extraneous to his philosophy, but fuller acquaintance with his writings makes it clear that this is not so.22 Yet it is in this apparent division of the nature of truth that the falsafah movement, particularly its most famous exponent, Ibn Rushd, is of importance to the theme here.23 Had it been able to continue, such a distinction could have provided the opportunity for the development of rational speculation about the real or natural world, unfettered by the dictates of revelation. That would have paralleled the crucial separation of religious dogma and intellectual rationalism in eighteenth-century Europe which led to the development of modernism there. In fact, this was not to be the case; for the Islamic world generally preferred the approach of al-Ghazzali who developed the technique of using the tools of Greek philosophical rationalism to justify truth achieved through revelation and mystical awareness.24 There was thus an implicit indeed, an explicit - rejection of the falsafah approach25 and, slowly thereafter, philosophical speculation about the natural world outside the principles of revealed religion ceased to form part of the Islamic world's intellectual horizon. Instead, there was a growing conservatism and rigidity which emphasised the role of divine knowledge to the detriment and eventual exclusion of its profane counterpart. As Braudel remarks, 'So Muslim philosophy, despite what is sometimes said, did not die an immediate death under the powerful, desperate blows of Al-Ghazzali. In the end, however, it did die, together with Muslim science, before the end of the twelfth century.'26 This development, however, poses the question as to why it happened and what the consequences were to be. There appears to be no simple explanation of what caused the sudden decline, although it is clear that intellectual and political preferences played a part. The mysticism of revelation has a powerful hold on the imagination, in ways to which rationalism can offer no satisfactory alternative. For it offers an internalized conviction about certainty that does not depend on argument and logic with their implication of doubt, reductionism and explication. The occultation of political power through divine sanction also exercises an irresistible attraction on rulers, and the subordination of the culama' to temporal power, which occurred at about this time, certainly eased the victory of revelation over rationalism. This, however, cannot be the complete explanation and it has been suggested that the sudden susceptibility of the Islamic world to attack from outside - as Berbers, Seljuk Turks and Mongols threatened to replace the established political order - marginalised intellectual speculation in the face of the imperious need for survival through political Downloaded by [FNSP Fondation National des Sciences Politiques] at 07:10 14 September 2011

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cohesion and commitment. Whatever the reason, there is no denying the fact that conservatism and intellectual rigidity came to characterise Muslim thought so that, by the fifteenth century in the Sunni world, bab ijtihad or the "door" to ijtihad the only remaining avenue still available for relatively unfettered speculation - had been closed and was to remain shut until the present day. Matters were far less restricted within Shi'a Islam, but there, too, the proper objects of study increasingly came to be concerns related to doctrinal issues, to the exclusion of the natural world. There seems to be little doubt that this pre-eminence of doctrine over logic was also related to the close interrelation of revelation to collective, in addition to and as opposed to individual, life within the Islamic world. The concept of truth in terms of personal religious insight became the mirror of the social and political order. Unlike the European experience, revelation could and usually did dictate the mode of analysis of the natural world and the conclusions it produced. No wonder, then, that Salafiyyism sought its philosophical insights, through which it would deal with European technological superiority, in the philosophical and doctrinal truths of early Islam.27 Modernist Holism Nothing said so far, however, is intended to suggest that the Islamic world today is excluded from operating within the intellectual environment which has been created in the modern world as a result of the technological civilization that developed from the European philosophical paradigm of the Enlightenment. This is self-evidently not the case, as a simple survey of the global scientific and intellectual community would demonstrate. Nor is the intention to suggest that religious belief is an irrelevance in the modern world. That could hardly be the case, given the evidence of the rapidly growing interest in and commitment to the religious ideal in the lives of millions of people in Europe and America. However, there has been a growing separation of spheres of interest - which is, in the modernist vision, absolute - between the concepts of truth in religion and in the temporal sphere. This corresponds, not only to a distinction between personal revelation and scientific analysis, but also to a rigid separation between the personal and collective worlds. There is, in short, a potential conflict between revealed, absolute truth and our understanding of the temporal world in which we live and between absolute, revealed truth and the way in which we organise that collective, temporal world. Although Ibn Sina would have never accepted the distinction, the sceptical rationalism of scientific modernism is implicitly based upon it - an assumption which has crucial implications for the Islamic world today,

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particularly if the holism of much conventional orthodox Islamic philosophy is maintained. The fact is that analysis and synthesis in relation to the world in which we live is based on rationalism and that the culture of modernism recognises no other master. The organization of social, economic and political life is, in that sense, 'scientific' in that it is based on expediency and rational analysis, not on moral imperatives or revelation. And those who wish to operate within it or to master its projects can only do so by understanding and exploiting its underlying rationale. The moral economy of Islamic economics, for instance, will stand very little chance of imposing itself within the world economic system unless it can demonstrate its superior efficiency, not its superior moral purpose; expediency, not morality, is the issue. The cultural implications of 'Islamic science', for example, do not imply superior scientific outcomes, whatever the claims of its practitioners, and thus offer little to persuade the dominant scientific community to abandon its reliance on sceptical materialism. And the same could be argued for the other branches of knowledge where, today, there is a growing desire - not just amongst Muslim intellectuals, it should be said - to dispute the trans-cultural nature of the principles on which Western modernism is based. Despite this divide, there is still clearly a moral and cultural component to intellectual activity in general. Clearly, cultural preferences and prejudices - Western as much as any others - determine intellectual choices and can affect conclusions. But they cannot determine the process by which analysis occurs. If conclusions are reproducible in other words, given the same information, the same conclusion results from the application of analytical principle - then they are scientifically true - whether we use 'fuzzy logic'28 or not. Indeed, if this were not the case, the modern material world could not exist. Nor does the expediency of modern enquiry exclude the operation of morality; the enthusiasm for eugenics, for example, did not survive the bestialities of the Second World War. Certain disciplines, indeed, have a moral, or at least an ethical component built into their basic assumptions. The 'dismal philosophy' of economics, for example, is based on the assumption that its objective is to maximize human material good. Even the development of nuclear weapons was originally justified by many of the scientists involved by reference to the morality of the 'just war'. And some, like Professor Rotblat, actually abandoned their participation in the Manhattan Project when they decided that those moral issues were being sidelined. It is, in short, not helpful to condemn modernism simply because of the apparently value-free nature of its analytical and synthetic principles. Moral choice is still an essential component within its operations - but such choice is an individual responsibility, not the consequence of externally

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imposed restraints derived from universal revelation. Perhaps the most acute arena in which this confrontation takes place today is that of politics. The democratic political paradigm - which, after all, in essence, merely suggests that communities are better administered when their members participate in the process of decision-making than when they do not - is contrasted to its disadvantage with the project of a divinely ordered community - one held to be innately superior because of divine sanction. Leaving apart the issue that the democratic model also contains the seeds of dictatorship (Lady Thatcher's favourite economist, Friedrich Hayek, used to argue that its only advantage was that it provided a mechanism for removal of government without violence),29 it is not clear that there is any innate superiority in the alternative model that has been proposed! Once again, it seems that the true test is not one of moral comparability but of expediency; in short, which system provides an innately fairer, more just solution to the problems of social and political order where individual and collective interests inevitably clash. The Islamist argument, which ultimately rests on the assumption that its political model is by definition superior because of its origins, not because of its content, simply begs the issue. And it is interesting to note that at least one leading Islamist intellectual, Rachid Ghannouchi, has implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted the role of expediency within the political sphere by accepting that Islamists can lose, as well as win, elections and must then abide by democratic choice!30 Indeed, there is another implication to be drawn from this, for his position seems to be surprisingly close to that of Christian democracy and Christian socialism in Germany, as formulated after the Second World War. Nor, indeed, is he unique in this respect, for there is a whole school of moderate Islamic and Islamist thinkers who accept this point of view, including the Iranian scholar, Abdolkrim Soroush.31 In essence, by accepting that those who do not favour the Islamist position may impose their views upon those who do - through the process of electoral choice the Islamist liberal is also accepting that divine sanction is not the basis on which choices about collective socio-political organization must be made, even if it is his or her preferred option. Doctrinal truth is thereby trapped within the private, rather than the public sphere, and the argument between Islam and modernism fades away. The Islamic weltanshauung, in short, comes to terms with the modern world and with the role of Western-inspired modernism within it. It preserves its own doctrinal insights and revelation intact but cedes the public space. It originally strayed into that space for largely secular, rather than religious reasons, if commentators such as Judge Ashmawi are to be believed. It integrates the trans-cultural analytical principles of modernism without sacrificing its moral or spiritual values, in

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what was the real purpose of Salafiyyism. There remains one final question, however. Can it really be said that the modernist vision is the final word on social and political organization when we consider the moral chaos and decay that seem to be present in Western society? Is there no room for a moral order within collective life and does not the political order have some responsibility for imposing it on the society over which it rules? There is here a real contradiction; between voluntarism and restraint, individual morality and social responsibility, freedom of expression and ethical constraint. Indeed, it is a contradiction apparently entailed in the very principle on which modernism has been based, that of unfettered speculation and its corollary, unlimited experience. Yet there is nothing in the modernist credo that denies the key role of morality; simply a requirement that this is a personal obligation that cannot be effectively imposed by external edict. There is, however, the 'threat' of post-modernism - the argument that absolutist principles of analysis do not exist, that analysis itself is relativist and personal and that moral principle, even at an individual level, is an unreasonable constraint on experience, for those principles themselves are relativized and contingent. Only the text can speak, not its creator, and all readings of it have their own intrinsic validity. There, perhaps, lies the real danger, of which modernism is not yet fully aware but which the Islamic paradigm instinctively fears!32

NOTES 1. Y. Choueiri, 'The Political Discourse of Contemporary Islamist Movements,' and C. Tripp, 'Islam and the secular logic of the state in the Middle East', in A.S. Sidahmed and A. Ehteshami (eds.) Islamic Fundamentalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), pp.24-5 and 62-3 respectively. 2. See N. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam: an introduction to Islamic political theory: the jurists (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.87-103. 3. I leave aside here discussions of the inherent nature of democracy in the Middle Eastern and Islamic contexts, particularly the criticisms made of it from a post-modernist and Marxist point of view. See P. Gran, 'Studies of Anglo-American political economy: democracy, orientalism and the Left', in H. Sharabi (ed.), Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses (London: Routledge 1990), pp.228-39. 4. Modernity may be best described as the age marked by constant change - but aware of being so marked ... In other words, modernity is an era conscious of its historicity. Human institutions are viewed as self-created and amenable to improvement ... The substitution of new designs for old will be a progressive move, a new step up the ascending line of human development. 'Modernity' in J. Krieger (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.592-3. 5. E. Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), p.80. 6. B. Dunham, The Heretics (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963), pp.317-20. 7. G. de Santillana , The Crime of Galileo (London: Mercury Books,1961), p.329 - 'Eppur si muove' is the traditional phrase. 8. Dunham, pp.293-4, 424.

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9. G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe 1517-1559 (London: Fontana, 1963), p.266. In fact, this Latin tag does not occur in the recess of the Diet of Augsburg which established religious peace in Germany during its deliberations between February and September 1555. 10. R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1922), pp.20-21. 11. I. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), pp.18-19. 12. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989), pp.20-38. 13. Qutb (Kotb), Sayyid, Social Justice in Islam (Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies, 1953), p.279. 14. Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, The Concept of Knowledge in Islam (London and New York: Mansell, 1989), p.12. 15. F. Braudel (trans. Mayne R. 1993), A History of Civilizations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p.292. 16. Gellner, p.17. 17. Sabet A., Iranian Journal of International Affairs, Vol.7, No.1 (1995), p.59. 18. J.L. Esposito (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp.3-4. 19. P. Crone P. and M. Cook, Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 20. N. Ayubi, Political Islam: Region and Politics in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1991), pp.203-4. 21. See M. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Longman, 1983) for a detailed description of the Mutazili movement. 22. W. Montgomery-Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1962), p.97. 23. As Fakhry points out (p. 276): 'For Ibn Rushd this postulate [the unity of philosophical and religious truth] not only involved the methodological necessity of recourse to interpretation (taw'il); in addition it implied the tacit recognition of the parity of philosophy and Scripture, of reason and revelation, as the two primary and infallible sources of truth.' The important point, however, is that there is a parity between the two and that, through philosophy, religious truth is accessible. For the Quran (3:5) allows 'those confirmed in knowledge' to interpret scripture where ambiguity (mutashabih) exists. Ibn Rushd's concept of the soul, furthermore, emphasised his essential materialism which was similar to that of his mentor, Aristotle, and led to his attempt, which had been anticipated by Ibn Sina, to give religion a 'scientific status'. (J. Schacht and C.E. Bosworth (eds.), The Legacy of Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.358.) Ibn Sina, following Aristotle, argued that God was engaged in self-contemplation and thus had no direct interest in the exterior worlds except in their creation. Reason was the means by which access to understanding was possible, because it reflected universal images which were themselves inherent in the universal science that was the only means of apprehending God. Truth, in this context, was a quality of the 'intelligible form' of knowledge: 'By truth is understood the state of the word and the intellect which refers to the state of the external thing, when it coincides with it ... Truth is the identification of the speech with things' - or, in the medieval reconstruction of Ibn Sina by St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Veritas est adequaetio orationis at rerum' or 'Veritas est adequaetio rei et intellectus'. In other words, it dealt with the real world, although it was linked to revealed truth (A.M. Giochon (trans. M.S. Khan, 1969), The Philosophy of Avicenna and its Influence on Medieval Europe (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1942), pp.92-3.) The result was that: In fact it was religion which was to pay the price of this 'agreement'. It was philosophy which was to discount the apodeictic truth; religion did no more than 'clothe' the images to bring them to the level of the mass of people. This accounts for the attempt of some Christian thinkers to interpret this attitude as the acceptance of a 'double truth' which the Commentator [Averroes - Ibn Rushd] would have professed and which they would have willingly accepted as their position. But in fact it meant destroying religion and

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theology, since it was estimated that on the essential points they would be in contradiction with reason (Schacht and Bosworth, p.384).

24. Al-Ghazzali identified twenty errors in Ibn Sina, seventeen of which were bidac (innovation - heresy) and the remaining three were kufr (unbelief). He went on to argue for the predominance of religious revealed truth over philosophical truth:

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... there is a whole area outside the scope of reason into which philosophy cannot venture. Al-Ghazzali was therefore right to argue that 'with respect to whatever lies outside the scope of human cognitions, it is necessary to resort to Scripture [al-sharc]' In certain cases, human reason is incapable of acquiring a form of knowledge indispensable for man's felicity. In other cases, it is incapable because of accidental impediments or simply the difficulties inherent in the subject matter itself. In all such cases, revelation necessarily supplements rational knowledge (Fakhry, p.284). Ibn Rushd rejected al-Ghazzali's arguments on the grounds that they negated causality, yet the concept of 'efficient causation' (in Aristotle's formulation) was essential for there to be action and, without action, God could not act upon the world. Furthermore, he argued that 'genuine knowledge is essentially the act of eliciting the causes underlying a given process ... whoever repudiates causality repudiates reason' (Fakhry p.286). This, in turn, denies the concept of a wise Creator - who demonstrates wisdom by action - and is thus contrary to the Qur'an. 25. It should also be borne in mind that, as Montgomery-Watt points out, both Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were to be marginal influences on the Islamic world. This was partly because of the Muslim preference for consensus as well as because of the intellectual dominance of alGhazzali, even though they were major influences on medieval Europe. A devout Muslim saw essential truth as revealed and not discoverable. Philosophy only had relevance if it defended and explained this position, 'Consequently he looked on the Falasifa with suspicion, for they were first and foremost believers in philosophy and science who then but only in the second place tried to reconcile revealed truth with philosophy' (W. Montgomery-Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1973), p.205). 26. Braudel, p.84. 27. This is not to say, however, that the Salafyyists rejected European modernism. On the contrary, they embraced it, simply looking for its justification within the Islamic corpus to modify, rather than reject the culture that it embodied. Indeed, MuhammadcAbduh, a leading figure of the movement alongside its founder, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, turned back to the neo-Platonist Mutazili school of philosophers for his justification of the rationalism of Western political models. As he himself said: I took it upon myself to plead the cause of two great issues. The first was the liberation of thought from the shackles of blind imitation, and the comprehension of religion according to the rules laid down, before the emergence of conflict, by the ancestors of the community, and the return, in acquiring religious knowledge, to the original sources, considering them in the light of human reason. The second issue was the reform of the Arabic language ... The other issue that I espoused ... and is the pillar of social life was the differentiation between the entitlement of government to obedience from the people, and the people's right to justice from their government. (Abduh M. (1980), al-Acmal alKamila (ed. cAmara M.) Al-Mucassasa al-cArabiyya Ii'1-Dirasat (Beirut), II, pp.318-19; cited in Y. Choueiri., Islamic Fundamentalism (London: Pinter Press, 1991), p.38. 28. As opposed to Cartesian logic, 'fuzzy logic' attempts to allow for non-linearity of systems in practice and reflects the concerns of chaos theory. It still, however, operates on the same basic logical rules adapted to allow for non-linearity. 29. F. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p.152. 30. In his lecture to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London) on 9 May 1995, Dr Ghannouchi stated:

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Islam is unique in that it alone recognises pluralism within and outside its own frontiers. Within, no religious wars are known to have ever taken place. While on the one hand Islam guarantees the right of its adherents to ijtihad in interpreting Quranic text, it does not recognise a church or an institution or a person as a sole authority speaking in its name or claiming to represent it. Decision-making, through the process of Sharia, belongs to the community as a whole. Thus, the democratic values of political pluralism and tolerance are perfectly compatible with Islam (p.58). He went on to say: 'Tunisian Islamists have never rejected modernization in the sense of rationalising politics, administration and the economy. They recognise human dignity and civil liberties, accept that the popular will is the source of political legitimacy and believe in pluralism and in the alternation of power through free elections' (p.62). The speech is reproduced in Maghreb Quarterly Report, 18 (1995), pp.56-66. 31. According to Soroush, the political application of Islam (what he calls 'Islamic ideology') deforms religion and prevents true popular participation in the process of government. The only form of religious government which does not do this is one that is democratic, for democracy is a form of government which is compatible with a multitude of political cultures including Islam. According to one commentator, he argues that, 'Any religious government that rules without societal consent, or restricts this right, abrogates the public's conception of justice and sacrifices its legitimacy.' In short: Democracy is both a value system and a method of governance. As a value system, it respects human rights, the public's right to elect its leaders and hold them accountable, and the defense of the public's notion of justice. As a method of governance, democracy includes the traditional notions of the separation of powers, free elections, free and independent press, freedom of expression, freedom of political assembly, multiple political parties and restrictions on executive power. Soroush argues that no government official should stand above criticism, and that all must be accountable to the public. Accountability reduces the potential for corruption and allows the public to remove, or restrict the power of incompetent officials, Democracy is, in effect, a method for 'rationalizing' politics. V. Vakili, Debating Religion and Politics in Iran: the Political Thought of Abdolkarim Soroush (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), pp.21-3). 32. I do not intend here to decry the very real power of post-modernist analysis, nor, indeed, to reject the Rorty-esque vision of democracy within a post-modernist setting. It is merely that, as much as post-modernism undermines the principles on which modernism is based, it must also do the same to the Islamic paradigm. This indeed prompts a debate which has not yet properly begun except, perhaps, in anthropology, in the context of dialogics. See Abu-cLughod L. (1990), 'Anthropology's Orient: The Boundaries of Theory on the Arab world', in H. Sharabi (ed.), Theory, Politics and the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.91-2.