The
Political Problem of Islam by Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 3
The
Political Problem of Islam
Roger
Scruton Roger
Scruton is
an English philosopher who has published widely on an array of philosophical
and cultural questions. This article is adapted from his most recent book, The West and the Rest (ISI Books, 2002).
Islam is a world religion
with adherents far beyond the lands of
the Arabs. Moreover, between five and ten percent of Arabs are Christians, and
in recent times Christian Arabs have played a disproportionate role in the
revival of Arabic literature.It would therefore be a gross mistake to identify
Islam with Arabic culture, or to believe that a full understanding of Islamic
thought and politics can be obtained merely from a study of the Middle East. At
the same time, the faith, law, and worldview of the Muslim diaspora directly
derives from a text whose meaning and emotional weight is contained within its
language, and that language is Arabic. Although there arose in the wake of the
Koran an extraordinary civilization, and a literary and artistic culture which
matched those of contemporary Europe, the principal source of Islamic cultural
achievements is the single book from which the faith began.1
A
student of Muslim thought is immediately struck by how narrowly the classical
thinkers pondered the problems of political order, and how sparse and
theological are their theories of institutions. Apart from the caliphate—the
office of “successor to” or “substitute for” the Prophet—no human institution
occupies such thinkers as Al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya, or Saif Ibn ‘Umar al-Asadi
for long. Discussions of sovereignty —sultan, mulk—tend to be exhortatory, instructions for the ruler
that will help him to guide his people in the ways of the faith.2 The Filasafa (i.e., thinkers influenced
by Greek philosophy) composed their intellectual agenda by synthesizing the
Koran with what they knew of Aristotle and Plato. But the result is a
peculiarly frozen vision of the art of politics as the Greeks had expounded it.
Al-Farabi,
for example, describes the philosopher-king of Plato as the prophet, lawgiver,
and imam to his community, arguing
that “the meaning of imam, philosopher, and lawgiver
is one and the same.”3
He emphasizes
the distinction between reason and revelation, as pondered by the contemporary
Mu‘tazili school of theologians, who held that reason could supplement the
revelations provided by the Prophet. And he acknowledges the possibility of a
political system based purely on reason and directed to the earthly needs of
the citizens. But the true system, he insists, is founded in revelation, and
directed towards happiness in the world to come. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) likewise
gives precedence to revelation, and his ideal state is founded on prophecy and
guided by the immutable shari‘a. The constitution of such a state is The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton 4
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 prophetically revealed, and
is “our Sunna which was sent down from heaven.”4
Law
is fundamental to Islam, since the religion grew from Muhammad’s attempt to
give an abiding code of conduct to his followers. Hence arose the four
surviving schools (known as madhahib, or sects) of jurisprudence, with their subtle devices (hila) for discovering creative
solutions within the letter (though not always the spirit) of the law.5 These four schools (Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi and Maliki) are accepted by each
other as legitimate, but may produce conflicting judgments in particular cases.
As a result, the body of Islamic jurisprudence (the fiqh) is now enormous. Such
legal knowledge notwithstanding, discussions of the nature of law, the grounds of its
legitimacy, and the distinguishing marks of legal, as opposed to coercive,
social structures are minimal. Classical Islamic jurisprudence, like classical
Islamic philosophy, assumes that law originates in divine command, as revealed
through the Koran and the Sunna, and as deduced by analogy (qiyas) or consensus (ijma‘). Apart from these four
sources (usul) of law, no other source
is recognized. Law, in other words, is the will of God, and sovereignty is
legitimate only insofar as it reflects God’s will.
There
is nevertheless one great classical thinker who addressed the realities of
social order, and the nature of the power exerted through it, in secular rather
than theological terms: the fourteenth-century Tunisian polymath Ibn Khaldun.
His Muqaddimah
is a kind
of prolegomenon to the study of history and offers a general perspective on the
rise and decline of human societies. Ibn Khaldun’s primary subject of study had
been the Bedouin societies of North Africa; but he generalized also from his
knowledge of Muslim history. Societies, he argued, are held together by a
cohesive force, which he called ‘asabiya (‘asaba, to bind, ‘asab, a nerve, ligament, or sinew—cf. the Latin religio). In tribal communities ‘asabiya is strong, and creates
resistance to outside control, to taxation, and to government. In cities, ‘asabiya is weak or non-existent,
and society is held together by force exerted by the ruling dynasty. But
dynasties too need ‘asabiya
if they
are to maintain their power. Hence, they inevitably decline, softened by the
luxury of city life, and within four generations will be conquered by outsiders
who enjoy the dynamic cohesion of the tribe.
That
part of Ibn Khaldun’s theory is still influential: Malise Ruthven, for example,
believes that it casts light on the contemporary Muslim world, in which ‘asabiya rather than institutions
remains the principal cohesive force.6 But Ibn Khaldun’s secular theory of society dwells on pre-political unity rather
than political order. His actual political theory is far more Islamic in tone.
He introduces a distinction between two kinds of government—that founded on religion
(siyasa
diniya)
and that founded on reason (siyasa ‘aqliya).7 The
second form of government is more political and less theocratic, since its laws
do not rest on divine authority but on rational principles that can be
understood and accepted without the benefit of faith. But Ibn Khaldun finds
himself unable to approve of this form of politics. Secular law, he argues,
leads to a decline of ‘asabiya. Moreover the impediment (wazi‘) that constrains us to abide
by the law is, in the rational state, merely external. In the state founded on
the shari‘a this impediment is
internal, operating directly on the will of the subject. In short, the
emergence of secular politics from the prophetic community is a sign not of
civilized progress but of moral decline.
In
fact, Ibn Khaldun is rare among Muslim philosophers in seeing the political as
a separate form of human life, with its own laws (qawanin siyasiya), aspirations, and
procedures. His bleak view of political or- The Political Problem of Islam by Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 5 der is due to his bleak
view of the city generally. Without the pre-political ‘asabiya, cities inevitably decay.
Ibn Khaldun’s underlying purpose was to distinguish the caliphate (khilafa), which had persisted during
the reign of the four “righteous” caliphs, from the worldly sovereignty (mulk) that had gradually
replaced it. Only the caliphate had either the right or the power to survive
the collapse of earthly dynasties, and Muslims must work constantly to restore
it as the rule of God on earth.
For
all his subtlety, therefore, Ibn Khaldun ends by endorsing the traditional,
static idea of government according to the shari‘a. In short, the Muslim conception of law as
holy law, pointing the unique way to salvation, and applying to every area of
human life, involves a confiscation of the political. Those matters which, in Western societies,
are resolved by negotiation, compromise, and the laborious work of offices and
committees, are the object of eternal decrees, either laid down explicitly in
the holy book, or discerned there by some religious leader—whose authority,
however, can always be questioned by a rival imam or jurist, since the shari‘a recognizes no office or
institution as endowed with any independent lawmaking power.
Three features of the
original message embodied in the Koran have proved decisive for Muslim
political thought. First, the Messenger of God was presented with the problem
of organizing and leading an autonomous community of followers. Unlike Jesus,
he was not a religious visionary operating under an all-embracing imperial law,
but a political leader, inspired by a revelation of God’s purpose and
determined to assert that purpose against the surrounding world of tribal
government and pagan superstition. Second, the Suras of the Koran make no
distinction between the public and the private spheres: what is commanded to
the believers is commanded in response to the many problems, great and small,
that emerged during the course of Muhammad’s political mission. Laws governing
marriage, property, usury, and commerce occur side-by-side with rules of
domestic ritual, good manners, and personal hygiene. The conduct of war and the
treatment of criminals are dealt with in the same tone of voice as diet and
defecation. The whole life of the community is set out in a disordered, but
ultimately consistent, set of absolutes. And it is impossible to judge from the
text itself whether any of these laws is more important, more threatening, or
more dear to God’s heart than the others. The opportunity never arises, for the
student of the Koran, to distinguish those matters which are open to political
negotiation from those which are absolute duties to God. In effect, everything
is owed to God, with the consequence that nothing is owed to Caesar.
Third,
the social vision of the Koran is shaped through and through by the tribal
order and commercial dealings of Muhammad’s Arabia. It is a vision of people
bound to each other by family ties and tribal loyalties, but answerable for
their actions to God alone. No mention is made of institutions, corporations,
societies, or procedures with any independent authority. Life, as portrayed in
the Koran, is a stark, unmediated confrontation between the individual and his
God, in which the threat of punishment and the hope of reward are never far
from the thoughts of either party.
Therefore,
although the Koran is the record of a political project, it lays no foundations
for an impersonal political order, but vests all power and authority in the
Messenger of God. There are no provisions for the Messenger’s successor, or
even for a The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton 6
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 priesthood. The office of imam—the one who “stands in
front,” i.e., who leads the community in prayer—was assumed by Muhammad until
the day when illness prevented him from performing it and he asked his
father-in-law Abu Bakr to perform the office in his stead.
It
is still true that an imam
has no
institutional authority in the Sunni tradition and is merely a man whose
personal qualities and religious knowledge fit him for the role. The title of
Imam is reserved by the Shi‘ites for Muhammad’s first cousin ‘Ali and his
descendants, who are regarded as the true successors of the Prophet. But even
in the Shi‘ite tradition, there is no conception of a priestly office that
confers authority on the one who holds it: authority is bestowed directly by
the power of God. This point is made further evident by the fact that, according
to the Shi‘ites, the line of imams ceased after the twelfth, who is the still living
“hidden” imam, destined to reappear in the last days as the mahdi or “Director,” and who,
according to the Koran, will announce the Day of Judgment. Hence, no living cleric
can act with any greater authority than that conferred by his own personal
qualities in the eyes of God—unless he can show himself actually to be the hidden imam, revealed at last after
centuries of divine displeasure, a feat which the Ayatollah Khomeini set out to
accomplish, but with only transient success.
The
office of caliph began as an attempt to recapture a vanished personal
authority. Hence, caliphs repeatedly failed to give proof of their legitimacy,
and the first three of them began a lengthy tradition of dying at the hands of
assassins. Those who rule in the Prophet’s name seldom satisfy their subjects
that they are entitled to do so, since the authority that is looked for in an
Islamic ruler is—to use Weber’s idiom—a charismatic rather than a
legal-rational form. Islamic revivals almost always begin from a sense of the
corruption and godlessness of the ruling power, and a desire to rediscover the
holy leader who will restore the pure way of life laid down by the Prophet.
There seems to be no room in Islamic thinking for the idea—vital to the history
of Western constitutional government—of an office that works for the benefit of
the community, regardless of the virtues and vices of the one who fills it.
The reader of the Koran will
be struck by the radical change of tone that the revelations exhibit after the
Prophet has been forced into exile at Medina. The early Meccan Suras are short,
intensely lyrical, and written in a free rhyming prose that echoes the style of
the pagan poets of Muhammad’s Arabia. They invoke the natural world and the
wonderful signs of its Creator, being hymns of praise to the single omnipotent
God who speaks directly to his worshippers. They are the great dawn-vision of
an impassioned monotheist, from whose soul oppressive shadows are being chased
away.
The
Medina Suras are much longer and often cantankerous. They deal with the trials
and tribulations of leadership, and the revelations are often granted as
concrete responses to the problems of communal life. Muhammad’s project is
revealed at every step, and it is a remarkable one: to replace the tribal
society and its pagan gods with a new, universal order—the Islamic umma—founded on belief in the
one true God and on the acceptance of his commands. To achieve this result
Muhammad had to persuade his followers that he was God’s messenger; he had also
to give proof of God’s favor by success in war.
Although
the community at Medina had escaped from its persecutors, it retained a
powerful sense of belonging elsewhere. They were al-muhajiroun, the ones in emigration or
exile (hijrah), and the experience of The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 7 exile is invoked again and
again in the Islamic revivals of our times. The absolute tone of command of the
Medina Suras therefore goes hand-in-hand with an intense nostalgia, and it is
not surprising that the idea of pilgrimage to the distant home should have
rooted itself in Muhammad’s mind to become one “pillar” (rukn) among the five that
constitute the core duties of the Muslim.
I
mention this point because it helps to explain how alien the Koranic vision of
society is to any idea of territorial jurisdiction or national loyalty. In the
eyes of the Koran, the place where we are is not the place where we belong,
since the place where we belong is in the wrong hands. Our law therefore does
not issue from our present place of abode, and gives special privileges only to
the other place, which may one day be reconquered. This attitude greatly favors
the notion of law as a relation between each person and God, with no special
reference to territory, sovereignty, or worldly obedience. Although localities
are of enormous importance in the Muslim worldview it is not because they are
the sources of law but because they are
the object of law, declared holy by
God in his dealings with mankind. A holy place is precisely one subsumed into
the divine order of things, rather than the seat, like Rome or Paris, of a
territorial jurisdiction. This is of great significance in the current conflict
over Jerusalem, which for the Muslim is a place set apart from its earthly
surroundings just as Mecca is set apart, scarcely belonging to the geography of
the actual world but existing in the numinous region of divine imperatives.
After the initial
turmoils—in which the conflict between two of the righteous caliphs, ‘Uthman
and ‘Ali, led to the split between Sunni and Shi‘ite—the Muslim dynasties
gained territory by conquest. The caliphate emerged as a genuine institution,
though one increasingly deprived of political power. Nevertheless, the
experience of settled government led to serious attempts by learned men to
adapt the faith to the needs of government. This was the great period of the
hadiths—traditions, authenticated by pious examination, which recorded such
words and deeds of the Prophet as might offer guidance to a settled community.
These hadiths are markedly more peaceful and conciliatory than the Medina
Suras, and have clearly been shaped by the experience of a society in which
charismatic leadership is no longer the norm. They are an attempt to read back
into the prophetic source of Islam the real achievements of Islamic forms of
government. At the same time there arose the four schools of fiqh, which bring together the
reflections of jurists over generations, and show the attempt by ijtihad to establish a genuine rule
of law in places where law is nevertheless seen as issuing placelessly and
timelessly from the will of God.
Even
in that great period of jurisprudence, however, the shari‘a remained defective in the
crucial matter of legal personality. As Ruthven has pointed out, there is no
provision in Islamic law for the corporation as a legal person, with rights and
duties of its own.8
The city, the
committee, the mosque itself, do not occur as independent subjects of the law,
and although Muslim countries abound in charitable foundations—the awqaf (singular waqf)— they are conceived not
as property in the hands of a corporate person, but as property that has been
simply “removed” from circulation or which has “ceased” (waqafa). In Ruthven’s words,
there was no “juridical definition of the public sphere” in classical Islamic
jurisprudence,9
a fact which
greatly impeded the formation of a genuine political order. Hence “stealing
from the public treasury was not held subject to the hadd The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton 8
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 [i.e., the divinely
ordained punishment for theft], because the illegal act was not committed
against a juristic agent independent of the thief who was, along with every
other Muslim, considered part-owner of the mal Allah, and thus part-owner of what he had
stolen.”10
Two
momentous consequences follow from the adoption of the shari‘a. First, because it is a
law governing only Muslims, the shari‘a leaves the status of other communities undefined.
These other communities remain strictly “outside the law,” and must either
convert or accept the status of dhimma—which means protected by treaty or covenant. Only
“people of the book”—i.e., Jews, Christians, and (in Persia) Zoroastrians —have
traditionally been accorded this status. Dhimma is offered in return for the payment of taxes, and
grants no clear and justiciable rights apart from a general right of
protection.11 Although free communities
of Christians and Jews often thrived under Islamic law, there was no formal or
legal acceptance of their right to worship in their own manner, and their
property was subject to confiscation on more or less arbitrary grounds. The
Turkish millet
system
rectified this, but depended for its authority on the secular rule of the
sultan and had no authority in the shari‘a.
Second,
the way of life that grows under the aegis of the shari‘a is profoundly domestic, without
any public or ceremonial character except in the matter of communal worship.
The mosque and its school or madrasah, together with the souq or bazaar, are the only
genuine public spaces in traditional Muslim towns. The street is a lane among
private houses, which lie along it and across it in a disorderly jumble of
inward-turning courtyards. The Muslim city is a creation of the shari‘a—a hive of private spaces,
built cell on cell. Above its rooftops the minarets point to God like
outstretched fingers, resounding with the voice of the muezzin as he calls the
faithful to prayer.
I
mention these two features because they are often overlooked, despite their
enormous importance in the psychology and the politics of the Islamic world.
The Muslim city is explicitly a city for Muslims, a place of congregation in
which individuals and their families live side-by-side in obedience to God, and
where non-Muslims exist only on sufferance. The mosque is the link to God, and
the pious believe that no building should overtop the minarets. Many a Muslim
carries this image in his heart, and when he encounters the Western city, with
its open spaces, its wide streets, its visible interiors, its skyscrapers
dwarfing the few religious buildings, he is apt to feel both wonder and rage at
the God-defying arrogance that has so completely eclipsed the life of piety and
prayer. It is not merely of anecdotal significance that, when the terrorist
leader Mohammed Atta left his native Egypt for Hamburg to continue his studies
in architecture, it was not to learn about the modernist buildings that
disfigure German cities, but to write a thesis on the restoration of the
ancient city of Aleppo.12
When he led
the attack against the World Trade Center, Atta was assaulting a symbol of economic,
aesthetic, and spiritual paganism.
Those who see religion
simply as a set of doctrines concerning the origin of the world, the laws that
govern it, and the destiny of mankind will think of faith merely as a
substitute for rational argument, des- Ibn Khaldun The Political Problem of Islam by Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 9 tined to crumble before the
advance of science or to persist, if at all, as a jumble of tattered
superstitions in the midst of a world that refutes them. But doctrine is the
least important part of religion, as Muhammad came quickly to see. Communities
are not formed by doctrine, but by obedience, and the two great instruments for
securing obedience are ritual and law. The Muslim faith involves constant
rehearsal of the believer’s submission to God. The repetition of sacred words
and formulae, the exact performance of gestures whose only explanation is that
they have been commanded, the obligatory times of prayer, the annual fast and
all the duties required by it, the dietary laws, the pilgrimage to Mecca with
its myriad obligatory actions—all this, which is meaningless to the skeptical
outsider, is the stuff of consolation.13 Ritual places individuals on a plane of absolute equality; it
overcomes distance, extinguishes the self in the flow of collective emotion,
and refreshes the worshipper with a sense that he has regained favor in God’s
sight and hence his place in the community of believers. Ritual is a discipline
of the body that conveys and reinforces a discipline of the soul. It is the
outward manifestation of the collective act of submission (islam) that unites the community
of believers. And it is one undeniable source of the peace and gentleness of
the old Muslim city.
In
short, Islam offers an unparalleled form of membership, and one whose appeal is all the greater in
that it transcends time and place, joining the believer to a universal umma whose only sovereign is
God. Even if it may appear, to the skeptical modernist, as a medieval fossil,
Islam has an unrivalled ability to compensate for what is lacking in modern
experience. It rationalizes and validates the condition of exile: the condition
in which we all find ourselves, severed by the hectic motion of mechanized life
from the archaic need for membership. Nothing evokes this more clearly than the
collective rite in which the faithful turn to Mecca with their
prayers—projecting their submission and their longing away from the place where
they are to that other and holy place where they are not, and whose contours
are defined not by geography but by religious need.
Islam,
in other words, is less a theological doctrine than a system of piety. To submit to it is to
discover the rules for an untroubled life and an easy conscience. Moreover,
rooted in the ritual and taking constant nourishment from it is a system of
morality that clarifies those matters which must be clarified if people are to
live with each other in peace. It is a system that safeguards the family as the
primary object of loyalty and trust; that clarifies and disciplines sexual
conduct; that sanctifies ordinary obligations of friendship and kinship; and
that lays down rules for business which have a power to exonerate as well as to
blame. Even if this morality, like the rituals that feed it, threatens those
freedoms which Westerners take for granted and which the rising generation of
Muslim immigrants wish to exploit, it has the singular advantage of clarity. It
tells the faithful what they must do in order to be on good terms with God; and
what they must do is entirely a matter of private life, ritual, and worship.
The public sphere can be left to look after itself.14
In
the context of Western anomie and self-indulgence, therefore, Muslim immigrants cling to
their faith, seeing it as something superior to the surrounding moral Ayatollah Khomeini The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton 10
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 chaos, and therefore more
worthy of obedience than the secular law which permits so much sin. Their
children may rebel for a while against the strict sexual codes and patriarchal
absolutes of the Muslim family; but they too, in any crisis, are drawn to their
ancestral faith, which offers a vision of moral security they find nowhere in
the public space that Western political systems have devoted themselves to
generating.
The writ of holy law runs
through all things, but this does not mean that Islamic societies have been
governed solely by the shari‘a. On the contrary, in almost all respects relevant to the
government of a large society, the shari‘a is radically deficient. It has therefore been
necessary in every epoch for the ruler to lay down laws of his own which will
guarantee his power, facilitate administration, and permit the collection of
taxes. But these laws have no independent legitimacy in the eyes of those
compelled to obey them. They do not create a space outside religion in which
freedom is the norm. On the contrary, they merely add to the constraints of the
holy law the rules of a political order which is backed by no de jure authority, only by de facto power. In any upheaval they
are rejected entirely as the arbitrary edicts of a usurper. Hence, there is no
scope in a traditional Islamic society for the kinds of purely political
development, through the patient building of institutions and secular laws,
that we know in the West. Change, when it comes, takes the form of a crisis, as
power is challenged from below in the name of the one true Power above.
If
the only way in which a law can be legitimated is by deriving it from a command
of God, then clearly all secular laws are seen as mere expedients adopted by
the ruler. In such circumstances it is unlikely that any kind of
constitutional, representative, or democratic government will emerge. Although
the Ottoman Empire attempted reforms that would give legitimacy to its
centralized administration, these reforms —which led first to the destruction
of the Empire, and then to the emergence of the modern Turkish state under
Mustafah Kemal Atatürk—were explicitly “Westernizing,” involving both a
deliberate move away from Islamic ideas of legitimacy, and a ruthless
secularization of society, with the ‘ulama’ losing whatever power they had once possessed in
the educational, legal, and administrative process.
The
Westernizing of Turkey was made possible by its imperial history, which had
imposed the obligation to govern distant provinces and recalcitrant tribes by a
system of law which could only here and there be justified by some divine
genealogy, and which was therefore constantly seeking legitimacy of another
kind. By remaking Turkey as a territorial rather than an imperial power, and by
simultaneously secularizing and Turkifying the Ottoman culture, Atatürk created
a national loyalty, a territorial jurisdiction, and a form of constitutional
government. As a consequence, Turkey has been the only durable democracy in the
Muslim world—although a democracy maintained as such by frequent interventions
by an army loyal to the Kemalist project. This transition has not been without
cost, however. Modern Turkey has been effectively severed from its past. In the
ensuing search for a modern identity, young people are repeatedly attracted to
radical and destabilizing ideologies, both Islamist and utopian.
This
search for identity takes another but related form in the Arabic-speaking
countries, and the al-Qa‘eda organization should be understood as one
significant result of it.15
Of course,
terrorism of the al- Qa‘eda kind is an abnormality, repudiated by the majority
of Muslims. It would be the greatest injustice to confuse Islam, as a pi- The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 11 ous way of life, with
contemporary Islamism, which is an example of what Burke, writing of the French
Revolutionaries, called an “armed doctrine”—a belligerent ideology bent on
eradicating all opposition to its claims. Nevertheless, Islamism is not an
accidental product of the crisis that Islam is currently undergoing, and the
fundamental tenets of the faith must be borne in mind by those who wish to
understand the terrorist movements.16
Al-Qa‘eda is the personal
creation of Osama bin Laden, but it derives from three pre-existing
sociopolitical forces: the Wahhabite movement in Saudi Arabia; the Muslim
Brotherhood that emerged in modern Egypt; and, finally, the technological
education now available to disaffected Muslims throughout the Middle East.
The
Wahhabite movement has its roots in the sect (madhhab) founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855), whose
collection of 30,000 hadiths formed the basis of the Hanbali fiqh. The leading principle of
Hanbali jurisprudence is that law should not be formalized in rules or maxims
but constantly derived afresh from the original sources by an effort of ijtihad that renews both the faith
and the understanding of the judge. Hence, Muslims must be constantly returned
to the Koran and the words of the Prophet, the authority of which cannot be
overridden by political decrees or formal legal systems. Although Hanbalism has
always been recognized as a legitimate school of fiqh, its uncompromising
emphasis on the origins of the Muslim faith has made it a permanent source of
opposition to the established powers in Muslim countries.
Hence,
when Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al- Wahhab (1691–1765), a native of central Arabia,
sought to restore the true faith to the Prophet’s sacred territory, he
expressed himself in Hanbali terms. The aim was to return from the corrupt
practices that flourished under the Ottoman Empire and its factititous rules
and offices to the original teachings of the Prophet and his Companions.
Compelled to seek asylum in Deraiah, al-Wahhab attracted the local chieftain,
Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud, to his cause. And it was Ibn Sa‘ud’s grandson who, with a
fanatical and puritanical following, “liberated” Mecca from the idolatrous
practices that had rooted themselves there, establishing at the same time a
short-lived kingdom in Arabia, and thereafter paying for his presumption with
his life.
Despite
this political failure, Wahhabism took root in the Arabian peninsula. The
Wahhabis preached purity of lifestyle and absolute obedience to the Koran, free
from all compromise with the dar al-harb. They rejected the official schools of fiqh, including the Hanbali madhhab that had inspired their
founder, and argued that whoever can read the Koran can judge for himself in
matters of doctrine. After the death of the Companions, therefore, no new
consensus (ijma‘)
could be
admitted.
In
the early twentieth century a group of Wahhabis gathered around a descendent of
the original Ibn Sa‘ud to form a brotherhood (ikhwan) dedicated to the re-establishment of a purified
faith by jihad. Starting out with a
handful of followers in 1902, ibn Sa‘ud, as the world now knows him, gradually
drove the Turkish clients from their paper thrones in the Arabian peninsula. By
the time that the Ottoman Empire collapsed, ibn Sa‘ud was able to declare a
kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the peninsula, and for a brief while the ikhwan exerted their influence
over the holy places, causing widespread alarm in the region. However Ibn
Sa‘ud, now a player on the stage of international politics, came to see that he
must negotiate with the British for the secure possession of his kingdom, and
that the suppression of his following would be a The Political Problem of Islam by Roger Scruton 12 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 necessary price.
Although
the ikhwan were brought to heel, many
of them through absorption into the Saudi National Guard, they did not forget
their original intention, which was to engage in a jihad against the infidel. Nor
did they forget that this aim had been diverted in the interests of a secular
power. Instead of returning the sacred places to God, they had handed them over
to an earthly sovereign, and one who had the impertinence, moreover, to name
this holy territory for himself. It has never been forgotten by the puritan ‘ulama’ of Saudi Arabia, therefore,
that the spiritual legacy of Wahhabism has been betrayed by the family that
purported to fight for it.
The other important Islamic
movement in the formation of al-Qa‘eda was also an ikhwan. The Muslim Brotherhood was
founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al- Banna, then a twenty-two-year-old
elementary school teacher in Ismailia, a featureless new town controlled by the
Franco-British Suez Canal Company. Surrounded on all sides by the signs and
symbols of the infidel way of life, living under a jurisdiction that had lost
authority in Muslim eyes and which stood idly by as the Muslim way of life
decayed, al-Banna, who had received a rigorous Islamic education and had
already acquired a reputation for piety, responded to the appeals of his
contemporaries to found a movement that would bring faith, hope, and charity to
the rural migrants who were crowding into the shanty towns around the cities.
For al-Banna, however, charity was an insufficient proof of faith: a jihad was also needed, which
would expel the infidel from Muslim soil. Islamic clubs and discussion groups
abounded in the Egypt of the time, but the Brotherhood was to be different—a
return to the militant Islam of the Prophet, the goal of which would be to
re-establish the reign of purity and piety that the Prophet had created in
Medina.
Hassan
al-Banna was profoundly influenced by the Wahhabite movement. The conquest of
the Holy Places was a triumphant proof of what could be achieved by faith, ‘asabiya, and violence. Within a
decade the Brotherhood had become the best organized indigenous political force
in Egypt. Its anti-British sentiment caused it to look to the Axis powers in
World War II, hoping for the liberation of Egypt and its own seizure of power
thereafter. After the Allied victory, it confined itself to a campaign of
terrorism, through which to “bear witness” to Islamic truth against the infidel.
This
campaign was to provide the model for future Islamist movements in Iran and
Lebanon. Cinemas were blown up, along with the haunts of the “infidels and
heretics,” while women wearing “inadequate dress” were attacked with knives.
Prominent public figures were tried by the Brotherhood in absentia and found guilty of
“causing corruption on earth”: their deaths followed as a matter of course. Two
prime ministers and many other officials were murdered in this way. Young
Muslims from elsewhere in the Middle East were recruited to the Brotherhood,
which operated in secret, al-Banna denying all involvement in terrorism until
his arrest and execution in 1949. By this time the Brotherhood had trained over
a hundred terrorists from other Islamic countries, who traveled to their
homelands to initiate the same kind of destabilizing mayhem that had brought
chaos to Egypt. This unrest facilitated the army coup which led to the
destruction of Egypt’s fragile monarchy and the assumption of power by Gamal
Abdul-Nasir (or Nasser, as he is generally known in the West).
The
Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed and savagely repressed by Nasser. But it lived
on as a secret society, proliferating through cells formed to study the letters The Political Problem of
Islam by Roger
Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 13 sent from prison by its new
leading personality, Sayyed Qutb (1906–66), who had lived in the United States
from 1949 until 1951, and who preached the impossibility of compromise between
Islam and the world of ignorance (jahiliyya). Qutb was a selfconscious intellectual in the
Western sense, who attempted to give Islam a decidedly modernist, even
“existentialist” character. The faith of the true Muslim was, for Qutb, an
expression of his innermost being against the inauthentic otherness of the
surrounding world.17
Islam was
therefore the answer to the rootlessness and comfortlessness of modernity, and
Qutb did not stop short of endorsing both suicide and terrorism as instruments
in the self-affirmation of the believer against the jahiliyya. In place of the credo quia absurdum of Tertullian he preached
the facio
quia absurdum (I
do it because it is absurd) of the existentialist, believing that this
absurdity would also be a triumph of the spirit over the surrounding pagan
culture.
Qutb and hundreds of his
followers were executed by Nasser in 1966, but not before their message had
spread through a younger generation that was enjoying for the first time a
Western-style university education and the excitement of global communications.
Although Sadat and his successor, Hosni-Mubarak, have tried to accommodate the
Brotherhood by permitting it to reorganize as a political party, with a share
in power accorded to its official leaders, the real movement continued independently,
not as a form of politics, but as a form of membership, whose “brothers” would one
day be martyrs.
Many
of the ideological leaders of the Egyptian Islamist movement have been, like
Mohammed Atta, graduates in technical or scientific subjects. Some have had the
benefit of postgraduate study in the West. Their scientific training opens to
them the secrets of Western technology while at the same time revealing the
emptiness of a civilization in which only technology seems to matter. Although
Osama bin Laden is a Saudi by birth, his most active followers are Egyptians,
shaped by Western technology and Qutbist Islamism to become weapons in the
fight to the death against technology. Al-Qa‘eda offers them a new way of life
which is also a way of death—an Islamist equivalent of the
“being-towards-death” extolled by Heidegger, in which all external loyalties
are dissolved in an act of self-sacrificial commitment.
Al-Qa‘eda appeals to North
African Muslims partly because it is an Arabist organization, expressing itself
in the language and imagery of the Koran and pursuing a conflict that has its
roots in the land of the Prophet. It has given to the Sunni and Arab branch of
Islamism the same sense of identity that the Shi‘ite and Persian branch
received from the Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Khomeini. Indeed, its vision is
virtually indistinguishable from that of Khomeini, who once described the
killing of Western corrupters as a “surgical operation” commanded by God
himself.
Khomeini’s
sentiments do not merely reflect his reading of the Koran. They are the fruit
of a long exile in the West, where he was protected by the infidels whose
destruction he conjures. They are a vivid testimony to the fact that the
virtues of Western political systems are, to a certain kind of Islamic mind,
imperceptible—or perceptible, as they were to Qutb and Atta, only as hideous
moral failings. Even while enjoying the peace and freedom that issue from a
secular rule of law, a person who regards the shari‘a as the unique path to salvation may see
these things only as the signs of a spiritual emptiness or corruption. For
someone like Khomeini—a figure of great historic importance—human rights and The Political Problem of
Islam by
Roger Scruton 14
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 secular government display
the decadence of Western civilization, which has failed to arm itself against
those who intend to destroy it. The message is that there can be no compromise,
and systems that make compromise and conciliation into their ruling principles
are merely aspects of the Devil’s work.
Islam
originally spread through the world on the wings of military success. Conquest,
victory, and triumph over enemies are a continual refrain of the Koran, offered
as proof that God is on the side of the believers. The Shi‘ites are remarkable
among Muslims, however, in commemorating, as the central episode in their cult,
a military defeat. To some extent they share the Christian vision of divinity
as proved not through worldly triumph but through the willing acceptance of
failure. Like Christians, Shi‘ites take comfort in an eschatology of
redemption, looking forward to the return of the Hidden Imam in the way that
many Christians anticipate the Second Coming of Christ.
Hussein
Ibn ‘Ali, whom the Shi‘ites recognize as their third Imam, was killed, together
with his followers, by the armies of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid at the battle of
Karbala in 680. Hussein was, for his followers, a symbol of all that is pure,
innocent, and good in the Islamic way of life, and Yazid a proof that the
community formed by the Prophet had fallen into the hands of corrupt and evil
usurpers. By each year lamenting the defeat of Hussein, in rituals that may
extend to excesses of self-inflicted injury, the Shi‘ites rehearse their
conviction that Islam must be constantly returned to its original purity, and
that the powers that prevail in the world will always seek to corrupt it. At
the same time Shi‘ites internalize the goal of self-sacrificial death as the
final proof of merit. This last feature became immensely important in the war
against Iraq, which succeeded the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Following in the
tradition of the assassins, Khomeini issued a new call to martyrdom, which was
taken up by children and teenagers who expended their lives in clearing
minefields.
The
example set by the followers of Khomeini was soon projected around the world.
Sunni Muslims, who believe on the authority of the Koran that suicide is
categorically forbidden, have nevertheless been sucked into the Shi‘ite maelstrom
to become martyrs in the war against Satan. The cult of death seems to make
sense of a world in which evil prevails; moreover it gives unprecedented power
to the martyr, who no longer has anything to fear. The cult is both a protest
against modern nihilism and a form of it—a last-ditch attempt to rescue Islam
from the abyss of nothingness by showing that it can still demand the ultimate
proof of devotion.
And
the attempt seems to have succeeded. It is not too great an exaggeration to say
that this new confluence of Sunni orthodoxy and Shi‘ite extremism has laid the
foundations for a worldwide Islamic revival. For the first time in centuries
Islam appears, both in the eyes of its followers and in the eyes of the
infidel, to be a single religious movement united around a single goal. Nor is
it an exaggeration to suggest that one major factor in producing this unwonted
unity is Western civilization and the process of globalization which it has set
in motion. In the days when East was East and West was West it was possible for
Muslims to devote their lives to pious observances and to ignore the evil that
prevailed in the dar
al-harb.
But when that evil spreads around the globe, cheerfully offering freedoms and
permissions in place of the austere requirements of a religious code, so that
the dar
al-islam is
invaded by it, old antagonisms are awakened. This is what the West now faces.
The
Political Problem of Islam by Roger Scruton THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002 15
1.
See, for example, the outstanding study by Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World (Harmondsworth, 1984, 2000);
the review of modern Islamic politics by Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power (London, 1982); and the
scholarly account by Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago, 1988). 2. The most
accessible survey of the classical sources remains that of Erwin I. J.
Rosenthal, Political
Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cambridge, 1958). 3. Quoted
in Rosenthal, 131. 4. Ibid., 155 5. See, for example,
Nabil Saleh, Unlawful
Gain and Legitimate Profit in Islamic Law: Riba, gharar and Islamic Banking (Cambridge, 1986). 6.
Ruthven, op.
cit., 99.
7. See the summary in Rosenthal, op. cit., 94-102. 8. Ruthven, op. cit., 178. 9. Ibid. 10. G. von Grunebaum, quoted
in Ruthven, 178; mal
means horde
or store, and the mal
Allah is
the traditional name for the public purse. 11. See Antoine Fattal, Le Statut légal des non-
Musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Impr. Catholique, 1958). 12. See Michael Mehaffy and
Nikos Salingaros, “The End of the Modern World,” www.openDemocracy.net for
January 2002. Aleppo, whose Arabic name, Halab, means “milk,” is still one of
the most vital and best preserved of Middle Eastern cities—although the city
sustained considerable damage during Hafiz el-Asad’s exterminatory attack on
the indigenous cadre of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982. 13. On the rituals and
the prayers of orthodox Sunni Islam, see Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombeynes’s
classic account in Muslim
Institutions,
tr. John P. MacGregor (London, 1950). 14. Since law derives from God and not
the ruler, there is in any case a complex problem, for the Muslim, posed by
enforcement. See Michael Cook’s exemplary work of scholarship, Commanding Right and
Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge 2001). 15. See the thorough account by
Peter L. Bergen, Holy
War Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (London, 2001). 16. See
Daniel Pipes, “Islam and Islamism: Faith and Ideology,” The National Interest No. 59, Spring 2000. 17. See
Leonard Binder, Islamic
Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988).