The Crisis of Islamic Civilization

Ali A. Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

 

Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people” (or any army, the general added)? What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux replied, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle said, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by Mao–some combination of communism and nationalism–and “to some degree by Nasser”–that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism. De Gaulle offered a correction: “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, would not shift the current or guide it. But Islam–dismissed, disparaged religiosity–might do so. As an army officer de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “haven’t made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the bedrock beneath the course of events even then?

Ali A. Allawi also finds that bedrock, albeit much eroded. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed one of the Middle East’s last remaining Nasserites, Saddam Hussein, he found there not liberation but sectarian murder and corruption. After servicing as Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance in the new government, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself to time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, Allawi wants to understand how and why the current passes–specifically with respect to the decline of “the spirit of Islam”–and how that decline might be reversed. He attends not simply to Islam as a set of religious beliefs but as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility. Fundamentally and more generally, “can a modern society, with all it complexities, institutions, and tensions, be built on the vision of the divine?”

In the forty years since de Gaulle and Malraux conversed, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called political Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abdl A’ala Mawdudi into practice with real regimes. But Islamic civilization has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.” By “political” Allawi means what Machiavelli means: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity in commanding. By “civilization” he means a sense of balance, of proportion, between “the individual and the collective” and “between worldliness and otherworldliness.” He means something like what Aristotle means by political rule: not command but reciprocity in rule, ruling and being ruled–the way of a husband and wife, not of parent and child, much less of master and slave.

The modern West lacks genuine civilization, he argues, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success, effective acquisition; much of the modern East (Japan and China leading the way) now pursues such success as well, albeit corporately not individualistically. In this pursuit, West and East conjure such impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces as markets and technologies. West and East succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?)

In response, Muslims pay but also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states… claim, in one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists nonetheless that only Islam, among the religions, might go beyond a mere critique of modernity and reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing the intellectual advances of modernity, most notably the discoveries of modern science. He does not go so far to deem this likely. Considering the Muslims of the 18th and 19th centuries, the first to collide with the modern West, he writes, “No wonder many thought they had been abandoned by God.”

“Nearly always coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”–and, it might be added, rule of Muslims over non-Muslims–Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad’s founding. It did so, Muslims believed, by divine right and divine aid, morally and politically. “The bedrock of any Islamic sensibility must be the textual certainty of the Quran as the unaltered and unalterable word of God.” With respect to morality, the Quran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts endowed to individual souls, who should cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, the Sharia. The Sharia finds support in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consists of several elements. First of these has been empire, but empire of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort–“a relatively loose, non-institutional affair, mainly connected with generating revenue for the needs of the ruler and the functioning of the government” by means of tribute. Governmental functions include the administration of Sharia law (“the Islamic political world is infused by the sacred”) and of military defense as well as military “expansion and conquest.” The characteristic Muslim regime has been kingship, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

Muslims underestimated the modern West, assuming they had little or nothing to learn from proponents of imperfect religions. As for Western adherents to the new irreligion, Machiavellianism, Muslims correctly judged the modern state to be un-Islamic, against the Ummah, the body of believers. Surely God would favor Islam against such institutionalized atheism.

Nor did all Muslims recline in complacency. Allawi recounts the recommendation of the Algerian Emir Abd el-Qadir, a contemporary of Tocquevile, who proposed to filter Western technology through the existing network of Sufi civic associations and guilds–all governed under Sharia law. For awhile, Abd-el-Qadir remained confident, invoking “the power of Islam” derived from “the grace of the One and Only God.” But with Islamic strength pitted against Machiavellian strength, and with the strength of Islam unaccountably faltering, Abd-el-Qadir surrendered; “when it was impossible for me any longer to doubt that God for inscrutable reasons had withdrawn from me, I decided to withdraw from the world.”

This reclusion opened Sufism to the riposte Machiavelli aims against Christians, an argument Allawi calls “astonishing”: “that it was the spiritual dimension of Islam, distorted by the Sufi orders, that led to the decay and decrepitude of Muslim countries and opened them to foreign exploitation and conquest.” For their part, Western imperialists encouraged such quietism wherever they found it; the original moderns and the modernist critics of Islam within Muslim countries concurred in identifying the source of Muslim weakness as Muslim spirituality.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, a project seen most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. ‘Political’ Islam stood up even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Ad-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of these two forces, modernism and Islamism–to which Allawi adds a third, Western imperialism–“by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural, and psychological unit of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam–both severed from Islam’s spiritual roots–guaranteed Muslims’ political imbecility from then more or less until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed boith secularism and the non-spiritual, merely legalistic and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam,” a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”: Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld Abd-el-Qadir’s civil-associational strategy against satism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabik who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms (minus the atheism) as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stupefying victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes that directed those armies. The enrichment of the oil-rich Saudis {and thereby the Wahhabis) in the 1970s, along with the Iranian revolution of 1979 brought ‘political’ Islam to power in core Muslim states. Too little, too late, Allawi argues. Any scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Quran, has lost much of its original meaning, as many words have taken on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. For example, in modern Arab deen means religion; in Quranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life–the regime–of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity. The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions–secularism, historicism–far removed from Islamic learning.

As for the madrassas, the schools controlled by clerics, insofar as they teach `political’ Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined” legalist-literalist Islam, the Islam of the Wahhabits and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connections with the classical schools of law.” The classical schools of law had been moderate, restrained, and subtle in their decisions, and allowed for considerable leeway in their implantation,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. The rigidity of contemporary Islamic legalism yields a rigidity and at times outright fanaticism of practice, a Muslim procrusteanism that amputates all too many arms and legs. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding. All its vitality, originality and appositeness fade away, which turns it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

Allawi defends an Islamic politics that accommodates the variety of sects within Islam as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the eleventh-century theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad ib Muhammad al Ghazali, who argued along lines familiar to readers of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the religio-political question requires no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully but rather an acknowledgment of a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike: within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shi’a Muslims to hold high offices under the Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabis and Salafists Allawi adapts a phrase coined by a none-too-pious political thinker to make this point: “The closing of the Islamic mind, at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

Had Muslims glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance they might have conducted themselves along a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the nurturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islamic civilization by European powers.” Had this not happened, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” its own “version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” This legacy stems from “a short but decisive Quranic verse (Quran 42: 38), demanding that consultation should be the basis of any system of authority”: The Muslims’ “communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to “the entire community”–“in effect” “the entire population,” and not merely tribal elders or even adult males. So interpreted, this verse would form the foundation of a genuinely political life in Muslim communities, a foundation upon which a republican regime might have been constructed in a measured way, over time, perhaps along the lines enfranchisement widened under the British constitution in the 19th century.

Would such a politics, a “civilized” politics, include non-Muslims in the ruling body of the regime? Allawi does not explicitly say if “accommodation” entails shared rule. He inclines to wave away non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of Westerners.” But, he asserts, in places like Southeast Asia Muslim conquests were not really conquests at all, for the most part, but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” Dhimmitude–the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes–was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

Protect them from whom? This description of peaceable and accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring, were it quite believable. From its beginning, Islam comes to sight as a fighting faith. It combines the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always had imperial ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible, but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it even less.

Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so: but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve strategically and for now, would he deem `live and let live’ a Godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern natural rights derive from western convention, “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”–a violation of Islamic law, which allows conversion to Islam but never from Islam. Impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, this means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is–negotiable.

Allawi further assures his readers that Islam, alone among the major religions, rules no major state–no “core state,” in Samuel Huntington’s terminology–and therefore portends no new empire. Perhaps so, but has that not made terrorism–a technique intended to cause the centralized modern state to ‘de-center’ and collapse–all the more attractive to some self-described Muslims? The destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, the intended attack on the White House: none of these could make America collapse, but were they not rather costly in blood and treasure? No matter: “Islamist groups, when they succeed in achieving power, are soon bogged down in the minutiae of governing and remaining in power.” Well, yes–decisions, decisions. Shall it be ten stripes or fifteen for this heretic? A mullah’s work is never done. Although Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, these categories do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts.

And so we learn, “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself, reinforcing its `outsider’ status in the constellation of states and civilizations.” If so, then why has the West refrained from assaulting Muslim-ruled countries that have not (a) launched attacks against the West; (b) sheltered their co-religionists who launched such attacks; or (c) invaded neighboring countries?

Such criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well, and that’s a lot. He strikes me as a successor to the sober and moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to `privatize’ religion, to reduce religion’s authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively `privatized’ himself? Can his form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home–except in exile? Despite his longings, is he finally most nearly at home only in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jew, and Quaker so long as they “demeaned themselves as good citizens”?