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A history of political Islam I


by Come Carpentier de Gourdon [http://www.vijayvaani.com/AuthorProfile.aspx?pid=106] on 21 Dec 2013
Islam articulated as a political ideology is present and influential on four continents in many forms, but its current
situation raises more questions than it provides answers about its destiny. Several events since the high tide of the
Arab Spring of 2011 have set it back in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Sudan, Somalia and Mali
as well as in Yemen and even in Qatar. In brief, Islamic movements have failed to take power, have only held it
briefly before being pushed back into legal or clandestine opposition or have had to back down on their ambitions.
Meanwhile, Iran elected a new moderate and pragmatic president who has sought to bridge the gap with Western
powers, whereas legal Islamic parties in Morocco and Algeria dont espouse the ideal of a socio-religious revolution
and are instead supportive of the status quo in both countries. Even Saudi Arabia, the bedrock of conservative
fundamental Islam, is trying to reform its institutions to make them more consonant with international norms and
institutions by mitigating the theocratic character of its policy.
After unifying most of the Arabic peninsula during the life time of the Prophet (PBUH), the Islamic state rapidly
expanded throughout West Asia and North Africa under the four first khalifs before stabilizing as a tri-continental
commonwealth of faith, culture and juridical institutions under the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers. It is often pointed
out that in Islam there is no separation between religion and politics, but that can also be said of most creeds that
are followed by a vast majority of the people in a particular area. However the fact that there are no specific founding
socio-political documents for the Muslim ummah outside the Quran and the Hadith has led most Islamic social
thinkers and political theorists throughout history to base all their recommendations and recipes on those texts.
The noted Shafii jurist Al Mawardi (972-1058 CE) who codified most extensively the institutions of the khalifate in
his Ordinances (Al Ahkam al Sultania) was criticized by other ulema for being too much of a rationalist, under the
influence of the reformist and hellenizing Mutazilite school of philosophy, but the predominance of legal theories in
Islamic political culture, defined by its attitude to Sharia (the religious legal code), is striking. Unlike other
civilizations, the Muslim world is customarily divided according to which school (madhab) of law (Fiqh) is being
followed in a particular region as there are differences, notably on who is and is not a Muslim depending upon his
actions and views in many diverse areas. The madhabs are regarded almost like the separate denominations or
sects in Christendom because they are indeed theologically conflictive.
Mutazilites who called themselves Ahl al Tawhid wal Adl (the men of unity and justice) exemplified a pragmatic
though orthodox current of thought that generally supported the Abbasid imperial state in Baghdad and held reason
to be supreme as there was no sacred precedent that could be valid for all times and places. They also sought to
separate the realm of social relations from the domain of religious prescriptions (faraid). Mutazilites were reviled by
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hardline Sunni doctrinaires for their moderate middle path views and their refusal to take sides between the
warring Sunnis and Shiites.
They backed the Mihna, an ideological inquisition carried out by some of the Khalifs to purge extremist trouble
makers who agitated to overthrow the reigning dynasty to bring back the primeval Arab polity set up by the Prophet.
Thus struggle between realists and apocalyptic revolutionaries is an enduring aspect of history of Islamic societies
and the Mutazilites may be regarded as predecessors of more recent pragmatic reformers who wish to separate
social norms and regulations from purely religious obligations.
Conservative, fundamentalist currents usually designated as Salafist (from the qualification given to the
companions of the Prophets, the predecessors: Salaf or companions: Sahaba) are associated with the Hanbali
juridical school, revived by Ibn Taimiya, that rejects innovations (bidah), analogical interpretations (qiyas), personal
innovations (rayy), speculation (nazar) and mere consensual opinions (ijma) among religious scholars when not
specifically supported by the foundational texts, contrary to the majoritarian Hanifi school and to the Medinite
Maliki madhab which takes into account the customs and rules in practice in the first century of Islam more than the
literal text of the Hadith. However all Islamic jurisprudence is based on the real or alleged precedents provided by
the Salaf, so that no artificial distinction should be made between the various traditions on that score.
Hanbalism also known as Takfirism harks back to the original customs and institutions of Arabic Islam under the
four well guided (rashidun) khalifs. Shafiism, the school that is prevalent in Syria, Egypt, East Africa, Yemen and
the Malay regions, shares the same tendency, but has been less militant in general although it holds that Jihad is
justified not only in response to injustice but also to destroy idolatry (kufr).
However it must be noted that even Hanafism has bred intellectual lineages that are also rigidly literal in their
interpretations of Islamic legislative practice. Sufism is not as a whole a socially moderate school of thought either,
since it is primarily focused on mans individual perception of and relations with the Divine and rarely interfered
historically with political and military agendas. Many of the great Muslim warriors and conquerors from Mahmud of
Ghazni to Timur Leng, Mehmet Fatih and Aurang Zeb were followers of Sufi Sheykhs or Peers.
It might be said that political theories and practices in the Muslim world have been largely determined by legal
doctrines as the essence of government lies in the dispensation of justice which crowns and subsumes all other
functions of the sovereign. It is due to this concept of society that political ideologies and parties appeared only in
the rather recent past in the muhammedan world and have generally not developed. The distinctiveBaathist form of
Arab socialism was coined mostly by Christians and other minority groups, while the pan-Arab secular modernist
creeds of national leaders such as Gamal Abd el Nasser of Egypt, Houari Boumedienne of Algeria, Saddam
Hussain of Iraq or Muammar Al Qadaffi of Libya manifested in one-party militaristic states centered on the
personality of the charismatic Rais: the leader, not too dissimilar in form from the Turkish model created by Kemal
Ataturk whose personal prestige helped him to break the hold of religion over his countrys institutions.
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The Prophet had not left any clear instructions about how his community should rule itself, although he seems to
have indicated a preference for his nephew and son-in-law Ali bin Abu Taleb to succeed him. The divisions between
those Muslims who saw Ali and his descendents as the legitimate chiefs of their expanding state and those who
wanted the ablest and most meritorious to inherit the Khalifate evoke in western minds familiar conflicts between
royalists and republicans, but both camps, which offer the only endogenous analogy to the western political parties
at least in certain respects, accepted the principle of theocracy although the split between the majority Sunnis and
the minority Shiites (partisans of Ali) assumed ethnic dimensions and has become a chasm in recent years. Mass
killings are a regular occurrence in Syria, Iraq and to a lesser extent in Yemen and Lebanon between the two parties
and they threaten to escalate into a wider civil war from Turkey to Iran and Yemen.
Iran experienced early a de facto separation between Church and State since it recovered its full independence
under the indigenous Safavid dynasty in the late fifteenth century CE as the Shiite faqihs did not grant divine
legitimacy to the Shahs who were not of Alis lineage, from which alone theocratic rulers could come. The long-
standing tensions between temporal power and religious authority erupted in the 1979 revolution which overthrew
Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. Contrary to Sunni states whose kings generally sought their legitimacy from the
successive, real or nominal khalifs in Baghdad, Cairo or Istanbul, Iranian Islam had no living visible king and priest
for many centuries and even the Supreme Leader of todays Islamic Republic is only a custodian of the nations faith
and polity on behalf of the expected Hidden Imam (Mohammed Al Muntazer) who will come before the Last Day.
The Ottoman Sultans took on the mantle of the Khalifate after 1517 and managed until their downfall in the early
20th century to retain at least the spiritual allegiance of most Sunni Muslims worldwide. In that long period however,
the power of Islamic states steadily declined as a result of European overseas conquests in America, Africa and
Asia, and of the Western industrial revolution. Before the end of the 19
th
century, during the heyday of the Christian
colonial empires and especially after the fall of the last Moghul Emperor of India at the hands of the East India
Company, some reformist intellectuals in the Middle East realized that Muslim territories were falling one by one
under the sway of the triumphant West and that a endogenous reaction had to be organized.
One of the first and well known such pioneers of a revival was J amaluddin Afghani (1838-1897 CE) who, in keeping
with the time honoured shiite practice of Takiya (dissimulation), took pains to hide his Persian identity by claiming to
be an Afghan, as he wanted to appeal to all Muslims and knew that Sunnis in general would not easily heed the
word of an Iranian heretic, although his views were probably inspired by the new thinking that was emerging in the
Persian clergy.
Afghani was studying in British India during the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 and spent much of his later life traveling
the world and spreading his call for a new unified, modernised Islamic movement that could push back western
invaders and occupiers. He sought and temporarily gained the hesitant support of the Turkish Sultans who had
embarked on a path of gradual and halting secularization of their empire through theTanzimat reform initiated in
1839. However, J amaluddin found the imitation of western models embraced by the Istanbul Divan undesirable,
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particularly the adoption of a civil code based on the French Code Napoleon, as he advocated borrowing all suitable
western science and technology in order to make Muslims equal to the Europeans but sticking to Islamic precepts of
governance.
Although he was not a practicing Muslim, and was even suspected of atheism as a member of the fiercely secular
and leftist Grand Orient Masonic Order of France after being expelled from the Scottish Rite for agnosticism, he
held Islam to be a force capable of fighting enemies back by bringing together all its followers.
It is not the last time that we will see a Muslim reformer evince secular agnostic convictions in his personal life, while
upholding the faith as a political force. Another one was the founder of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali J innah, a non-
practicing anglophile Shiite lawyer who married a Parsee woman.
In the same period, a similar modernizing movement unfolded in India under the intellectual leadership of Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan who founded the Aligarh Anglo-Oriental Muhammadan College, later to become the Aligarh Muslim
University. Sir Syed and his colleagues, most of whom belonged to the aristocratic and learned landed elites, wished
to equip the Muslim Indian upper class with all the knowledge and technical skills of the Europeans while protecting
their traditional culture and way of life from both the British occupiers and the Hindu majority.
By 1906, the All India Muslim League had come into being under the chairmanship of Sir Agha Khan III
(although he was the exiled Persian leader of a schismatic Shiite minority sect) and it soon attracted
stalwart personalities such as the brothers Shaukat Ali and Ali J auhar, the poet and philosopher
Mohammed Iqbal and the barrister J innah, many of whom were westernized and rather secular
personally, but believed that Muslims were a separate nation by virtue of their faith and civilization,
destined to carve out their own nation within the British Indian Empire. They also saw the worldwide
Islamic community as a potential super-state.
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=3049 [http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?
aid=3049]
A history of political Islam II
by Come Carpentier de Gourdon [http://www.vijayvaani.com/AuthorProfile.aspx?pid=106] on 22 Dec 2013
Unlike the organizations inspired by the message of J amaluddin however, the League was not fundamentally anti-
colonial and indeed was opposed to violent uprisings against the British rulers which it saw as preferable to an
independent Hindu-dominated India. They advocated certain social reforms in keeping with the original message of
the Quran, but were rather politically conservative and economically oligarchic, except perhaps Iqbal who often
voiced his opposition to the upper classes of his community whom he accused of not being truly committed to
Islamic values and practices.
Other leading Muslim figures of India such as Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad rejected the Leagues political philosophy
and agenda, arguing against the case for a separate Islamic state and upholding instead Indias unity as a multi-
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religious nation of equal citizens. Azad, who was half-Arab through his mother and was born in Mecca, had socialist
convictions and had also been attracted to Afghanis message. He had led the Indian movement to support the
threatened Ottoman khalifate in its final years, but held that the religious allegiances of Muslims were compatible
with loyalty to their respective countries as was the case for Roman Catholics worldwide.
Afghanis disciple Muhammed Abduh and Near Eastern intellectual heirs, Rashid Rida, Said Qutb and Hassan al
Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al Muslimun) in 1928, broadly adhered to the
guidelines set by him, but paradoxically all were in some way associated with Salafism. Modernisation of society in
technological terms was for them not incompatible with an atavistic return to the past in matters of political
organization, social mores and culture since, for most of them, as for earlier reformers such as the Indian 18th
century theologian Shah Waliullah of Delhi, a revival of the original institutions of the religion in the days of the
Prophet was the best way to regenerate and strengthen Muslim polities. Reform to them meant going back to
original forms.
J amaluddin Afghani had not advocated separation of powers, parliamentary democracy or emancipation of women
as they existed in Europe since he did not believe in the soundness of the political systems he found in the
colonialist West and probably concluded that they would not be compatible with a dispensation based on Quranic
injunctions and precepts. The common concern of those neo-conservative reformers was to unify the Islamic world
under a strong, incorruptible and capable leadership that could adapt the scientific innovations of the current age to
the timeless prescriptions inherited from the Prophet and his immediate successors. One of the rulers inspired by
them was Amir Habibullah Khan of Afghanistan.
Rebuilding the Khalifate for the worldwide ummah was a part of the plan for regeneration and since a para-statal
hierarchy had to be created to combat and replace the colonial regimes and the decadent and submissive
indigenous governments, the pyramidal structure of Free Masonry, often combined with the traditional structures of
Sufi orders (silsilas, tariqas) was adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood. That was the time when Fascist movements
and parties were arising in Europe, the Americas and the Far East and it is unsurprising that the Ikhwan were
influenced by the zeitgeist and are still often accused of operating as a fascist organization, an accusation which
their secretive and clandestine top down methods do little to discredit.
As opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood which created an international federation of branches that extend even today
from West Africa to Central Asia, each with its own guide (masul) and inspired like-minded parties in Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey (the AKP: Adalet ve Kalikinma Partisi founded in 2001, in succession to a series of
previously banned similar outfits and in power since 2003 is an ideological sibling of the Ikhwan), Pakistan (Jamaat
e Islami), Palestine (Hamas) and even in Shiite Iran, the unreconstructed Salafis led by Abdul Wahhab in the 18th
century made a pact with the ruling clan of Saud from the region of Nedjed and laid the basis for a theocratic
monarchy founded on close cooperation between the religious authority of the descendents of Abdul Wahhab,
the Ahl ash Sheykh, and the royal power of the scions of Ibn Saud. As a result there arose a specific nationalistic,
tribal and nationalistic version of Salafism, that became gradually estranged from the pan-Islamic, republican
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Muslim Brothers whose own rival chain of command poses a threat to traditional aristocracies which it sought to
replace.
The breakup became apparent when the Saudi Arabian government decisively backed the military coup in Egypt
against President Mohammed Morsi and his MB led administration in 2011, paradoxically calling for a military,
secular regime against an Islamic one, although as a result of Riyadhs choice, the Egyptian Al NourSalafist party,
generously financed by the Saudi kingdom, opportunistically joined the uprising against the Brotherhood after
leaving the government to become part of the opposition and the subsequent transitional military-backed regime.
The politically conservative Wahhabis are thus ranged, together with the majority of the Shafiite Egyptian ulema who
defer to the clerical leadership of the Al Azhar University, against the reformist or arguably revolutionary
Brotherhood, which is as conservative socially but has a different strategy and a divergent political agenda.
The Ikhwans doctrine seems to imply that sooner or later they will govern a one-party state wherever they reach
power, whereas the Salafists shun the concept of political parties altogether as they prefer to operate through
militant cells for preaching and combat to pave the way for a Salafist theocracy. They may not all be satisfied with
the situation in Saudi Arabia and with the policies of the royal family there, but they dont have a definite alternative
model to propose, apart from making the Wahhabi system in force in the Saudi Kingdom more rigid and puritanical,
on the lines laid out by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Lashkar e Taiba in South Asia, the Hizb ul
Tahrir in Central Asia, the Al Shabab in Somalia, the J abhat al Nusra and kindred groups in Syria, Al Qaida in Iraq
and in the Arabian peninsula, the Ansar al Din in the Sahara region and Boko Haram in West Africa, among the
many other fighting para-military outfits that have proliferated in the Islamosphere.
Hence the mother of the global Ikhwan nebula, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is once again in the political
wilderness and under the threat of a ban with confiscation of all its assets, although it runs a legal political party
which officially renounced the use of violence in 1949 and yet was banned in 1952 in its homeland and in Syria in
1982 after the famous uprising it led in Hama under the iron rule of President Hafez Al Assad. In Egypt, it kept a low
profile during the first stage of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution against Hosni Mubarak, who had allowed it to survive
in a legal no-mans land under close surveillance. But it should be noted that Mubaraks predecessor Anwar al Sadat
was killed by officers under Salafist influence and apparently unaffiliated with the Brotherhood.
Contrary to the grand vision of the Brotherhood for an intercontinental khalifate, Salafist movements, whether in
Nigeria, Mali, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Afghanistan, insofar as they have a clear political agenda beyond
defeating and expelling infidels and heretics, seek to restore local emirates. Ayman al Zawahiri of Al Qaida fame,
who is probably the foremost Salafi ideological leader nowadays, has condemned the Brotherhood for espousing
democratic methods, making compromises with Islams enemies and not embracing the armed struggle against the
West and polytheist countries such as India.
Conversely, the Ikhwan have repeatedly accused the militant Salafists of giving a bad name to the religion by their
ruthlessly violent actions which have led to the deaths of large numbers of innocent Muslims and mobilized the
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Bhaskar Menon
21 Hours agoaid=3051
[http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=3051]
A hi st or y of pol i t i cal Isl am III
by Come Carpentier de Gourdon
[http://www.vijayvaani.com/AuthorProfile.aspx?pid=106]
on 23
Dec 2013
One can detect there an idiosyncratic reflection of the western
rationalistic prejudice against any evocation of the Supernatural,
but that attitude has led to the destruction of much of the
architectural, sociological and artistic heritage of the countries
where those radical reformers take power, as was the case in
Afghanistan, in Malis ancient city of Timbuktu as also in Egypt,
Libya, Tunisia and since several decades in Saudi Arabia,
where the hegemonic religious elite has caused the destruction
western powers against the ummah while not really causing any major harm to the Zionist regime and rather,
arguably, giving it a shot in the arm.
Both the Salafists and the Brothers want to lead Islamic lands to the fore of technological progress while bringing
their people back to an idealized version of the early religious past. Yet they also reject many of the traditions and
practices of the intermediate historical periods that elapsed between the end of the reign of the first four khalifs and
the centuries of submission to western imperialism. They tend to frown upon the nostalgic perpetuation (taqlid) of
those customs and institutions, including Sufism, syncretism and the veneration of saints, which they see as un-
Islamic and possibly tainted with polytheism or superstition (shirk). http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?
aid=3050 [http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=3050]
Comment:
Publishing the views of "White Hindus" is a sure way to confuse and mislead Indian Hindus. This article is typical in
presenting a very European view of Islam.
It makes no mention that the Islam-Christian confrontation that began during the life of the Prophet and continues till
today, has been the single most important political factor that has shaped the Ummah.
The article refers to Saudi Arabia as if it were an independent Islamic entity rather than a proxy state created by
Britain to outflank the Ottoman Empire. The whole "clash of civilizations" concept is a bid to mobilize Christendom
against Islam, and Bush Sr. merely dusted it off to replace the Cold War as the organizing principle of international
life.
I could go on citing such errors of fact, nuance and judgment, but this should be enough. If Vijayvaani must carry
this tripe there should be a warning: "The views of the author are subversively European and Indians are cautioned
to treat them with extreme caution." .
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of many ancient shrines illustrative not only of pre-Islamic
Arabian culture, but also of the lives of the Prophet and his
family.
The financial might of the oil rich Gulf monarchy has helped to
spread its own rigid version of the Deen all over the world, but
nonetheless has not always protected its rulers from
condemnation by Islamic scholars who accuse Wahhabis of
vandalizing the common heritage of Muslims and making
the ummah culturally poorer and more estranged from the rest
of mankind. A coalition of ulema from various madhabs, the All
India Ulema and Mashaik Board, led by Maulana Syed
Muhammed Ashraf Kichhauchchawi has even mounted a
nationwide campaign in India to condemn and reject Salafist
doctrinal and cultural influence which is resented and feared
even in the Gulf region where Ibadite Oman and Yemen and
Maliki Bahrain, UAE and Qatar do not accept the Wahhabi
dogmas upheld by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The long standing attempt to modernize Islam through
involution started by J amaluddin Afghani has hence had some
undesirable results, partly because it has not forged a model of
government that can enable Muslims to navigate away from the
opposite extremes of military dictatorship and political
disintegration. In South Asia, the Muslim League and the
J amaat have broken up into various factions after becoming
junior partners to the hegemonic armed forces in Pakistans
polity and failing to build a stable political system.
The Leagues call for Islamic unity between all sects of the
religion failed to prevent the increasing alienation between the
Sunnis and the Shiite, Babi, Bahai and Ahmadiya minorities. On
the other hand, more traditional states like the monarchies,
including those ruled by descendents of the Prophet such as
Morocco and J ordan, have been able to combine rather
successfully so far ancient forms of tribal organization with a
theocratic socio-political philosophy which rejects social
innovations viewed as incompatible with the ancestral status
quobased on hereditary dynastic power supervised by
the ulema. As the Muslim League seeks to and as the Turkish
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AKP also does, those countries espouse social conservatism
with economic liberalism, both of which are characteristic of
Muslim societies.
One factor that emerges from the study of these contemporary
societies is that none has been able or willing to embrace the
democratic ideology in its totality as it clearly stands in
contradiction to the essentially platonic principle of Gods rule
(hukm) through the verdicts of the learned who are to advise the
leader and his appointed lieutenants (walis) and ministers
(wazirs). In Islamic political doctrine there is room for popular
debate and participation through an assembly (shura or majlis)
but it is only consultative, in keeping with the original meaning
of the word parliament or the Russian duma whose members
could express their views and voice suggestions but had no
sovereign decisional or legislative power. Such a theory of
government is at the core of the constitutions of most Muslim
nations, from Morocco to Afghanistan.
There can be no western-style democracy if all citizens must
subscribe to Islams extensive and detailed instructions for daily
life and if unanimity of the religious scholars is required, instead
of popular majority in elections, to make a decision legitimate.
Indeed, for an orthodox Muslim simple popular majority
decisions have no legitimacy if they are go against the Divine
Law articulated as Shariah, Fiqh, Qanun and Kalam. Likewise,
human freedom is an enduring matter of debate among
theologians and jurists, some of whom
uphold Jabr (predestination) which sees all actions as
emanating from the will of God whereas others
emphasize Qadr: human free will that can go against the divine
commands but has to pay the price.
Freedom, individual or collective, cannot be seen as total, in the
western agnostic sense, if Gods writ as enshrined in the Holy
Book, dictates all behaviour and if its transgression is severely
punished by society. There is also a problem with the
ambiguous notion of Taklif whereby an evil deed or action may
find casuistic justification if it is deemed to be willed by God for
the sake of a greater good. Too many use that to justify the
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ruthless or terrorist use of violence, even against personally
innocent victims, with the excuse of pursuing a higher goal i.e.
the triumph of the true faith.
Reformers of Muslim nations, however influenced by modern
European ideas they may have been, were aware of that reality
and most of them were allergic to liberal parliamentary
democracy but even more so to Communist egalitarian
materialism. The first president of the worlds most populous
Muslim society, Mohammed Soekarno promoted guided
democracy which is practiced in Indonesia even today.
Influential, religiously inspired contemporary statesmen and
political thinkers such as the late Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus
Dur), Mohammed Khatami, Hassan al Turabi, Fethullah Gulen
and Chandra Muzaffar are generally skeptical about the
desirability or applicability of multi-party democracy, even in
non-Islamic societies. Unsurprisingly, Iran has perhaps been the
most successful in building a system of governance in keeping
with its own brand of Islam that allows room for a degree of
democracy, probably due to the early split between religion and
state pointed out earlier.
In the Arab sphere, apart from the oil rich, sparsely populated
kingdoms, Morocco has so far been a relatively successful,
stable nation that is currently governed by an offshoot of the
Muslim Brotherhood under the aegis of a theocratic monarch.
Economic prosperity and stability is also evident in the minority
communities that are ruled by their hereditary traditional leaders,
such as the Ibadites of Southern Arabia and East Africa, the
Ismailis of the Aga Khan, the Ahmadiyas, the African Muridis
and others which share many features of the Sufi orders in their
internal hierarchies.
Near the other extremity of the Muslim space, multi-ethnic and
multi-religious Malaysia and Indonesia have managed hitherto
to contain tensions between their composite national identities
and a resurgent Islamic militancy in their confessional majority.
In the turbulent sea of fractious Sunni politics that often leads to
anarchy, absent an iron-fisted potentate, those nations and
groups appear as islands of stability and wellbeing. Indeed, the
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1300 million Muslims of the world are probably too diverse and
spread out to accept a unified leadership and hence the dream
of a globally integrated Ummah appears even more distant than
it did in 1924 when Ataturk abolished the Osmanli khalifate.
In 2013, an ad hoc coalition between secular forces in Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria, Shiite movements led by Iran, and
the BRICS countries spearheaded by Russia and China,
stopped the seemingly irresistible onslaught of radical Sunni
Islamist forces, not so covertly supported by the NATO countries
and Israel which seem to have seen some benefit in the
destabilization of the entire North African-West Asian region.
The AKP government in Turkey finds itself weakened and in
difficulty because of the defeat of its allies, as it actively
supported both the Muslim Brotherhood and many Salafist
Sunni rebel groups in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in
furtherance of a neo-ottoman agenda that now appears rather
short-sighted and unrealistic. Prime Minister Erdogans
government is also faced with a domestic backlash against its
creeping attempts to introduce stricter Islamic laws and rules of
conduct in a society that has become largely secular and
westernised, at least in urban areas.
Although tiny Wahhabi Qatar has been jolted by the political
blowback of its policies to support Takfiri armed groups as well
as the Muslim Brotherhood all over Asia and Africa, and has had
to take a low profile since its ambitious Amir was forced to
abdicate in favour of his son, Saudi Arabia continues to foster
and fund Salafist militancy, as it is wont to, in Syria, Iraq and
North Africa. But on the other hand, it has helped the Egyptian
army and the more secular part of the population to overthrow
the Islamic Brotherhoods government.
Saudi Arabia and its GCC confederates are torn between their
ideological commitment to theocratic traditional forms of
governance and their fear of the very fundamentalists who
would like to replace their ruling clans with their own warlords.
Salafists have not admitted defeat and the failure of the
Brotherhood to take over various states through elections and
other democratic methods imported from the West has only
Page 11 of 12 A history of political Islam -- Come Carpentier de Gourdon
23-Dec-2013 http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/12/a-history-of-political-islam-come.html
comforted the hardliners in their conviction that only war and
uncompromising enforcement of their radical socio-political
agenda can bring them victory.
The vast majority of Muslims do not live under strictly Islamic
regimes and are unwilling to submit to the strictures and
sanctions that such reactionary dispensations would enforce.
Their attempt to combine the Mutazilite call for the rule of
reason with the Salafist demand for religious purity and
ideological rigidity doomed many Muslim reformers of the last
two centuries to failure. Seeking inspiration from mystical
philosophers like Al Farabi, Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sina and from
pragmatic and enlightened more modern thinkers such as Emir
Abdel Kadir of Algeria, Maulana Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan of India and Gus Dur of Indonesia, the Ummah must find
a way of retaining its faith while cultivating a pluralistic modus
vivendi that as the prophet called for, rejoices in diversity: Ikhtilaf
ummati rahma.
(Concluded)
(Concluded) http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?
Posted 7 hours ago by Srinivasan Kalyanaraman

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23-Dec-2013 http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/12/a-history-of-political-islam-come.html

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