This is reflected in education. There is no school in Muslim countries in which religious studies do not exist. But the teacher of religion is usually not also a teacher of the secular studies. The two fields are becoming entirely independent of each other.
Thus Egypt, for example, has alongside of and separate from its ancient Azhar—the world's' oldest university—three modern, secular universities which are largely Western in organization and spirit. The central problem facing Arab Muslims, and indeed all Muslims, today is how to find a new way of life—Islamic in character—which will be halfway between the East and the West and which will provide the internal stability necessary to enable Muslims to face their problems independently.
The Arab World can borrow technology from the West but it must find the answers to its deeper problems within itself. One need only observe book-buying habits to see the strong interest in Islam still alive today. In Cairo any book discussing Islam is sure of a big sale. This shows that people are not drifting away from religion. It is a fact also that the world struggle between democracy and communism has led Muslims to make a fresh evaluation of their religion to see where it stands in relation to these two conflicting movements.
How far does Islam really penetrate into the hearts of Muslims today? What tangible effects does it have in their lives? There is no simple answer and much depends on exactly what is meant by Muslims. Those who have a good understanding of Islam—unfortunately, the minority—are inspired by their religion with pride and self-respect, and a desire for freedom. The Muslim Brotherhood is the extreme expression of this side of Islam.
Hasan el-Banna, the founder of the movement, called on Muslims to be "leaders in their countries and masters in their homelands. This spirit underlay this century's continuous revolts against foreign rule, and we see it at work now in North-Africa.
Islam inspires its followers to cleave to the Islamic community and be absorbed by it. I indicated above that Islam emphasizes the freedom of the community at the expense of the freedom of the individual. The truth is that the individual enjoys vast freedom, so long as he remains inside the Muslim community.
But if he goes against it, he loses his liberty, or to put it more precisely, he loses his standing in Muslim society. Sheikh Mohammed Abdu—the great reformer, who died in —once wrote, "If someone says something implying unbelief in a hundred ways and implying belief in one single way, his words should be taken as belief rather than unbelief. Islam inspires its followers to sanctify the mind, reject the miraculous, and meditate on God's creation to confirm belief.
Mohammed did not prove the validity of his message by miracles. The Koran is full of verses which call us to the knowledge of God through reason alone. Abdu maintained that Islam demands faith in God and His unity through rational inference, and that the belief in God should come before the belief in the prophecies.
Islam instructs its followers to believe in this world and the world to come in such a way as not to have one overpower the other. The Muslim has the right to enjoy the pleasures of this world, because it was created for him. And there is a well-known proverb widely spread among Muslims: "Work for this world as though you will live forever, and work for the next world as though you will die tomorrow. Different Muslims have reacted to the incursion of Western ideas diversely.
The Egyptian writer, Ahmad Ameen, said frankly: "The reform of Islam will come about in two ways: one, by separating science from religion, and advancing in science as extensively as possible; the other, through the practice of absolute Ijtihad.
Another contemporary Muslim writer has advocated implicitly that free interpretation should be applied to matters pertaining to Islamic doctrine and not to matters of jurisprudence alone.
But the conditions of Muslims today do not yet permit this absolute freedom of interpretation, though they are moving toward it. A third position, which calls for the separation of religion from the state, but not from society, has been advocated by Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razik in his book Islam and Principles of Rule and by a powerful writer of the younger generation, Khalid Mohammed Khalid, whose From Here We Start has been widely read.
While, to be sure, the Muslim Brotherhood disagrees with this line of thought, the majority of cultured Muslims tend to endorse it. In fact , almost all the Muslim world now uses secular civic law, with some slight Islamic modifications rather than the old religious code. Only the laws covering "personal status"—marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like—have remained unchanged. And even the old Muslim code is civil to some extent, particularly in marriage, which is carried out by a written contract, the conditions of which are dictated by both parties.
There are also certain traditional concepts which facilitate the modification of Muslim law; the idea of "free interpretation" applies in this field as does that of "consensus of opinion. The Muslim Brotherhood's call to return to religious legislation is clearly one of its program's weakest points, and has caused continuous disputes with the various Egyptian governments to this day.
The jurist el-Banna expressed the liberal view when he wrote: "We should know that the glorious Koran is not based upon the laws Very often, many of the assumptions underlying human rights have to do with ways of life that are recognized as Western. Many things are found insufferable in the Third World merely because they are in the Third World. Things in the West are not found quite so insufferable simply because they are part of a different more prestigious way of life.
I was reminded of this again when I was reading the Christian Science Monitor recently. There was a long article on Qatar, which is said to be relatively liberal and tolerant, and so on. Qatar is portrayed as a progressive society, therefore as one of the more interesting societies in the region.
The examples given to support this claim, quite unselfconsciously, are that Doha has Starbucks' cafes, that people eat Subway sandwiches, that there are malls. And of course they are also America's crucial military allies in the region at a time when Saudi Arabia is shuffling its feet in the coming war against Iraq. I am not trying to trash Qatar, of course. What I am saying is that the conception here, automatically and quite unselfconsciously put forward, is that "they are becoming more like us".
There is another important aspect to this human rights issue, one that has international dimensions. Many of the conditions of disenfranchisement in the Third World are due not only to brutal dictators but also to the way in which these societies are connected to the global system.
The point is that conditions inside a country are not thought of as being anybody's responsibility but that of the national government. The trouble with the way human rights violations are conceived is that they invest the sovereign state with legal responsibility for all the sufferings of its people.
There is some reason for this, historical as well as political, but increasingly around the world this notion makes nonsense of the way in which the violation of people's rights should be understood. The notion that lack of education, poverty and misery of various kinds has only to do with those countries themselves is absurd. Of course it is grandly conceded we in the West have an obligation to give aid and they in the Third World have an obligation to follow the sound policies urged on by the IMF and the World Bank that lend them money.
But beyond that each Third World country is responsible for its own miseries - and its own human rights abuses. In other words the responsibility cannot lie here with Western countries as far as any human rights violations in the Third World are concerned. So it is that as well. There are really a number of different things that contribute to people thinking in particular ways about human rights violations, and therefore to more violations "there" than "here".
Some Muslim states such as Nigeria and Pakistan have attempted in various ways to implement Shariah law, attempts that have frequently been contested and criticized, since there is a prevailing belief that Shariah law is "backward" and anti-modern. Is it possible for Shariah law to be accommodated by the centralized and coercive system of law that is so crucial to the modern state?
Can it be accommodated? Aspects of it cannot be accommodated, and have not been accommodated of course since the 19th century - commercial law particularly, but also procedural law, and so on, have long been abandoned in most Muslim countries. Criminal law as well but that has less to do with how the modern capitalist state works than with certain kinds of liberal values for instance, ideas of what is really cruel and insufferable and what is not.
There is a rejection of punishments that have to do with the body, they are anathema to the liberal sensibility. I happen to have the same sensibilities but logically Shariah punishments are not inconsistent with the demands of a "centralized and coercive system of law so crucial to the modern state".
As far as family law is concerned, it is quite clear that this has been adjusted and accommodated in and by modern states in all sorts of ways. And now there is increasing demand for equality on the part of women in relation to particular kinds of laws that discriminate against them. Here the Shariah has come under pressure. Again I would stress that there are movements of re-interpretation going on among various Muslims who are keen to introduce liberal values into the Shariah, who would like to re-write the Shariah from its foundations, as it were, so that it has both some kind of attachment to the historical tradition but at the same time is more palatable to a Western liberal sensibility.
In principle, I do not see why this is impossible, and indeed, it may very well happen to a greater or lesser extent. In this country, there is for instance an interesting woman, Azizah Al-Hibri, a lawyer and a law professor at Richmond University, who has been very concerned to develop liberal interpretations of the Shariah in this country. Surely there are movements of this kind and they will be accommodated by a liberal democratic state.
What is the relationship between modern forms of power and the way in which questions about religion and human rights and secularism are framed? This is a large question. And short of repeating myself, I would only say that many of the things claimed about liberal tolerance should be questioned. There are various kinds of intimidation and coercion that go on both covertly and overtly to make things acceptable to liberal sensibilities.
Power is exerted not only in the ways people are allowed to speak or not speak, but in what it is that makes sense to them. Rather than thinking of power only in terms of the question of freedom of expression and its limitations, we should also pay attention to the kinds of power that go into the formation of listening subjects, of subjects who can open their minds to something that is strange or uncomfortable or distasteful.
I think we need much more investigation of what people regard as poppycock and of what they are willing to open their minds to. Secularism has tended to regard religious traditions as either making nonsensical claims about public knowledge or as having dangerous consequences when they are allowed to enter the political realm.
William Connolly, for instance, has been trying in many of his writings to re-theorize the political arrangement of secularism as it is has been understood historically so that a more compassionate, open-minded attitude can be invited into modern politics.
You have been accused of sympathizing with nativism, "Islamic fundamentalism", and the like. Recently one critic charged you along with others of cultivating an "aura of authenticity". How would you respond to such a charge? My first reaction would be to say that I only answer charges in a court of law! I find this rather disappointing, frankly. It is a reflection of much of the careless thinking that is going around in the human sciences these days.
It is the kind of carelessness which has some rather unfortunate and worrying moral implications. The people who say this are not unlike Bush who says, "You are either with us, or against us," and not unlike people who condemn attempts at understanding disturbing events as nothing more than attempts at excusing.
I do not think quite honestly that anybody who has read my work carefully could think that I am for irrationality and for the kind of fanaticism that is associated with fundamentalism a term I prefer not to use for theoretical reasons as well as political ones. I know also that at least one critic has said that I have endorsed an "aura of authenticity" - and that, in his eyes, is clearly a great political failing on my part.
What I have to say in response to this is not only that the person concerned has not read my work carefully but also that he has not read Walter Benjamin carefully, from whom the expression "aura of authenticity" is derived, particularly from his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
Many people in cultural studies and anthropology who invoke that text do not seem to have noticed that Benjamin had a very ambivalent attitude towards "authenticity". If you re-read that essay, you will see that on the one hand, he looks forward with approval to a time when certain kinds of authority are undermined, he particularly expects the end of religious authority with the collapse of cultic aura and envisages a consequent enhancement of freedom that the technique of mechanical reproduction will make possible.
We know, of course, that this optimism has not been justified. At the same time, Benjamin's idea of authenticity and aura is a very complex one. It is also a notion that relates to historicity, to the historicity of the authentic thing. It is precisely because a thing is authentic, because the same thing moves from one time to another that it acquires, as it were, certain qualities of ancientness and genuineness, an aura.
Its authenticity as an ancient thing guarantees its historicity. Benjamin recognized ambivalently that the undermining of aura, in the complex sense in which he was talking about it, might also mean the undermining of historicity. Thus it is precisely the fact that certain ancient documents are authentic documents, that they show, as it were, the "real" wear and tear of their historical experience, which makes it possible to use those documents to construct a reliable historical account of something.
In other words, Benjamin had a notion of aura not only as essential to modern concepts of historicity but also as intrinsic to "tradition". This lends his work a productive tension because it is not straightforwardly progressivist.
I find that what Benjamin has to say there is much more complicated and dialectical, much more suggestive, than is often vulgarly assumed by progressivists. So I would say that whoever accused me of sympathizing with fundamentalism because I'm supposed to have endorsed the idea of "aura of authenticity" that Benjamin dismantled, has done a rather superficial reading not only of my own work but of Benjamin's as well.
You have spoken of self-criticism within the Middle East. For strategic reasons, the US has now also discursively complicated its reading of Islamic tradition; it speaks of a plurality or rather, a duality - the regressive and the modern of traditions within Islam, and declares its aim to be to encourage the more modern, democratic element.
What is the difference between your appreciation of the complexity of Muslim tradition and the US schema? Is there any commonality between the forces that the US seeks to encourage, and the sources of criticism that you gesture towards? And even if many Islamists do not share the democratic culture of the demonstrators, the Islamists have to take into account the new playing field the demonstrations created.
The debate over Islam and democracy used to be a chicken-and-egg issue: which came first? Democracy has certainly not been at the core of Islamist ideology. And Islam has certainly not been factored into promotion of secular democracy.
Indeed, skeptics have long argued that the two forces were allegoric or even anathema to each other. But the outside world wrongly assumed that Islam would first have to experience a religious reformation before its followers could embark on political democratization—replicating the Christian experience when the Reformation gave birth to the Enlightenment and then to modern democracy.
In fact, however, liberal Muslim intellectuals had little influence in either inspiring or directing the Arab uprisings. The development of both political Islam and democracy now appear to go hand in hand, albeit not at the same pace. The new political scene is transforming the Islamists as much as the Islamists are transforming the political scene.
Today the compatibility between Islam and democracy does not center on theological issues, but rather on the concrete way in which believers recast their faith in a rapidly changing political environment. Whether liberal or fundamentalist, the new forms of religiosity are individualistic and more in tune with the democratic ethos. Democratization was first raised as an issue in the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The initial debate centered mainly on modernization of the state—meaning secularization of the state, specifically as the basis for law and selection of leaders. Additional pressures to modernize and secularize came from outside the Arab world. They played out during European colonial rule in the Arab world.
As Arab countries gained independence, mostly between the s and s, the outside world assumed that the transition to democracy would rely on an enlightened authoritarian leader who could facilitate democratization but also serve as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. Islamists responded by arguing that their religion was an all-encompassing system that could solve any political, economic, or social problem raised by modernization.
Early Islamists did not totally dismiss democracy as irrelevant. They often pointed to a central tenet of the faith—the shura or advisory council, where ideas were debated before submitting proposals to the amir, or leader. When Islamism gained ground during the s and s, it was initially dominated by revolutionary movements and radical tactics. Over the next thirty years, however, the religious revival in Arab societies diversified. Movements took on individual identities and goals. Social shifts also reined in radicalism.
The toll of death and destruction also diverted interest away from militancy. Even the proliferation of media outside state control played a role. In the mids, al Jazeera became the first independent satellite television station. Within a generation, there were more than stations.
Many offered a wide range of religious programming—with hosts ranging from traditional sheikhs to liberal Muslims—which in turn introduced the idea of diversity. Suddenly, there was no single truth in a religion that had preached one path to God for fourteen centuries.
Islam literally means submission, as in submission to God. Islamists also changed through both victory and defeat—or a combination of the two.
In Algeria, Sunni Islamists were pushed aside in a military coup on the eve of an election victory in The party was banned, and its leaders imprisoned. A more militant faction then took on the military, and more than , people were killed in a decade-long civil war.
As a result of their experience, Islamists increasingly compromised to get into or stay in the political game. In Egypt, the Muslim Brothers ran for parliament whenever allowed, often by making tactical alliances with secular parties. In Kuwait and Morocco, Islamists abided by the political rules whenever they ran for parliament, even when it meant embracing monarchies that contradicted their own ideologies.
A generation of Islamic activists forced into exile also played a major role in redirecting their movements. Most leaders or members ended up spending more time in Western countries than in Islamic nations—and, notably, not in Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the West, the Islamists came into contact with other secular and liberal dissidents as well as nongovernment organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House, that facilitated the flow of ideas.
In the s, exiled activists increasingly framed their agendas in terms of democracy and human rights. Islamists have changed because society has changed too.
The rise of Islamists has reflected the social and cultural revolutions as much as a political revolution. A new generation has entered the political space, especially in the major cities. The young are better educated and more connected with the outside world than any previous generation. Many speak or understand a foreign language. The females are often as ambitious as their male counterparts.
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