mamdani on islam:
The public debate that followed 9/11 was defined by two prominent semi-official intellectuals, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. As in every debate, their disagreement unfolded within a common frame. The ground they shared has come to define political “common sense” in the United States. This common sense is driven by a presumption that the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever. That fever used to be thought of as tropical, now it is more likely to be imagined as desert fever. Prior to 9/11, Africans were considered the quintessentially pre-modern people; now the characterization is more likely to be use with regard to Muslims. It is said that except for a founding prophetic moment and some monuments, Muslims tend to live their culture as a destiny. The claim is that you can read the politics of Muslims from their culture.
(...) The Iraq war was supposed to be a realization of this inspiration. It was said that once bad Muslim were overthrown good ones would rise to the occasion, as indeed Eastern Europeans had done; they would garland American soldiers and that would be the dawn of democracy in Iraq. But, lo and behold, the history of Iraq since 2003 is testimony to thousands, even millions, of so-called good Muslims turning bad overnight. Anybody who followed the public discussion in the US about good and bad Muslims soon realized that good and bad were not adjectives describing the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They were actually adjectives describing Muslim attitudes to Western power. They were not cultural adjectives; they were political adjectives.
(...)This, then, is my first point: all culture, like all politics, is historical; all, without exception. It is not a particularly profound point. Rather, it is simple, and should be obvious, but is not. One would have thought this was settled with the struggle against colonialism. That it is not shows that the power of ideas does not simply flow from their internal consistency and explanatory power, but also from their relationship to the world of power.
(...) There is also no doubt of the existence of political Islam, nor about the
existence of a tendency in political Islam – called jihadi Islam – that has embraced political violence as the way to change the world. So is culture unimportant? I don’t think so. What I want to dispense with is not the notion of culture but the idea that the culture of some peoples is historical and that of other peoples is not. I simply think that culture has to be understood historically.
(...) When I read Sayyid Qutb’s book, Signposts, I was struck by the kind of
resonance it produced in a person like me, that is, one who came of political age in the 1960s and 70s. Sayyid Qutb says in the introduction to Signposts that he wrote this for the Islamist vanguard; I thought I was reading a version of Lenin’s What is to be Done. And when I read the text and encountered Sayyid Qutb’s main argument that you must make a distinction between friends and enemies, because with friends you use persuasion and with enemies you use force, I thought I was reading Mao Zedong on the correct handling of contradictions amongst the people.
(...) Are we to accept Huntington’s and Bernard Lewis’ contention that the history of thought is best understood as developing inside containers called civilizations; one Islamic, another Hindu, another Confucian, another Christian?
(...) Was not Mawdudi’s disillusionment with Islam as a social project and his embrace of a statist project part of a larger shift that had occurred in different types of nationalism, religious and secular? Was not Sayyid Qutb’s embrace of political violence in line with a growing romance with armed struggle in movements of national liberation in the ‘50s and ‘60s – many driven by a presumption that armed struggle was not only the most effective form of struggle but also the only genuine mode of struggle? The fact is that both Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb were involved in multiple conversations: they were in a debate not only with Islamic intellectuals, whether contemporaries or of previous generations, but also with contending intellectuals anchored in other modes of political thought. And the main competition then was Marxism-Leninism, a militantly secular ideology which influenced both their language and their method of organization and struggle.
(...) We may be able to speak before 1491 of civilizations as separate containers, with transactions at their borders, but no longer after 1491. Globalization begins with modern colonialism, for modern colonialism break the levies of cultural life. Even if European intellectuals – those born and working in European languages – could continue to function exclusively in European languages and think of the European experience as universal, this luxury was not available to intellectuals from the colonized world. For the colonized intellectual, it became a matter of necessity, indeed of survival, to function in languages other than one’s native tongue. The colonized intellectual had no choice but to go universal, which meant to work in more than one family of languages, and become immersed in a deterritorialized culture. We need to distinguish between culture and politics. Politics is overwhelmingly territorial, as in the expression geopolitical. But not culture. The rupture between culture and territory has always been there, but it has been particularly radical since 1491.
(...) Both were non-religious intellectuals; Mawdudi was a journalist; Sayyid Qutb
was a literary critic. It is worth noting the fact that none of the key intellectuals of contemporary political Islam – from al-Afghani to Mawdudi to Said Qutb to Ali Shariati in Iran – have come from the religious domain. In this they resemble key intellectuals that have shaped contemporary political Hinduism, even political Zionism. How does one explain this? To understand why it was so easy for non-religious intellectuals in Islam to come into the religious domain, we have to understand that we were dealing with a religion organized differently from Christianity. Western Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has historically been organized on the model of the Roman empire; and Protestantism has been organized on the model of the nation state. There is an institutionalized hierarchy of power inside the Church, from the floor to the ceiling. Organized power in institutionalized religion has historically functioned parallel to organized power in the state. Part of the question of secularism in the West has been that of policing the line of demarcation between two different powers, in the state and in the Church.
There is no such religious hierarchy in Sunni Islam. There is only the prayer leader, not even a priesthood. In spite of attempts by states to create a hierarchy from the top-down there really isn’t one. This was also true of Shi’a Islam until the creation of vilayat-i-faqih by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think of Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation as preemptive, as a safeguard against intellectuals from the secular domain, intellectuals like Ali Shariati. We may also note that Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation is no longer universally accepted in Shia Islam. The most,prominent challenge has come from Ayatollah Sistani, who has argued for religious leaders to
function as a moral presence outside the state, and not as a political force in the state.
(...) Bigotry, however, is not blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from the inside. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. I have argued that a defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.
(...) Blasphemy was aimed at the Church as an institutional
power, which is why it is more of a European than an American tradition. I have already pointed out that institutionalized religion in medieval Europe was organized as a form of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling. No earthly place symbolized the Church as an institutionalized power more than Calvin’s Geneva. Every act was governed by rigid spiritual rule: drunkards, dancers and adulterers were excommunicated; a child who struck his parents was beheaded; and men and women who transgressed Calvin’s code were burnt at the stake. R. H. Tawney wrote of it as “a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police.” In this context, blasphemy was a weapon against religiously-sanctioned terror.
(...) The problem, according to this point of view, is
that the laws reflect the cultural sensibility of particular countries in a particular historical period, so that blasphemy laws tend to protect the state religion only, such as Anglicanism in England and Lutheranism in Denmark. Europe also has laws against certain forms of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In England, the net is cast a little wider. The Race Relations Act prohibits the use of a language which would incite racial hatred. But it has yet to prohibit the incitement of hatred against groups defined culturally and religiously. Tariq Modood has pointed out that it has not even been 15 years since Britain’s Commission on Racial Equality denied that the vilification of Muslims was a form of racism. In France, laws limit or outlaw debates on certain issues. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust. But French law also makes it compulsory for schools to teach that colonialism was beneficial for those who were colonized.
(...) What is striking about the Dworkin piece is its silence about hate speech and bigotry and how to confront it. Ask yourself: what, after all, is the rationale for criminalizing Holocaust Denial? Clearly, not free speech. Rather, it is the more urgent imperative for peaceful coexistence between Christians and Jews in post-Holocaust Europe. Let us remember that the very notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization is mainly a post-Holocaust political project. Prior to the Holocaust, mainstream politics did not hyphenate Judaism with Christianity, but opposed one to the other.
(...) My sense is that we are now entering a period where Islamophobia is maturing into an ideology of hate, a grand ideology driven by a core explanation of what is wrong with the world: hence the growing claim that there is a clash of civilizations. The clash of civilizations is, in turn, the ideological arm of the war on terror. This is why it is particularly significant that when the Danish cartoons met with protests, the response was to up the ante from that of defense of free speech to a defense of civilization.