notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part II)
(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'
Showing posts with label sayyid qutb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sayyid qutb. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part I)
(7): By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The lwas of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as abiological necessity. In A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist writes that bombing originated as amethod of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversarires. The first bomb ever dropped from an airplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 11, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa. The first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force agains the Somalis of 1920. In the Second World War, Germany observed the lwas of war against the western powers but not against Russia. As opposed to 3.5 percent of English And American prisoners of war who died in German captivity, 57 percent of Soviet prisoners--3.3 million in all--lost their lives.
(7): When the mass murder of European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population 'in just those areas Hitler was after.' The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: 'the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.' The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique--but only in Europe.
(8): The first genocide of the twentieth Century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904.
(9): Fanon's critics know him by a single sentence from The Wretched of the Earth: "The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." This was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that the violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between the settler and the native. It was a claim that anticolonial violence is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress, that it is indeed a midwife of history. And last and most important, it was a warning that, more than celebrate this turning of the tables, we need to think through the full implications of victims becoming killers.
(30): Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? (...) Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of 'astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran...' They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: 'In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the 'Maragha School.'... The contemporary history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of Andalusia--Arabic-writing spain--in the historical study of the Renaissance.
(31): The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work, The African origin of Civilization, in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to disolacte the history of pharaonic Egypt--in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived--from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt.
(34-35, and whole chapter): important points about the constructedness of "culture," its situatedness in politics.
(36): The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.
(39): Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity.
(45): Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897)... Whereas early-nineteenth century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progres, al-Afghani highlighted modernity's contradictory impact. His religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof 'of our inferiority and decadence,' for 'we civilized ourselves by imitating the Europeans.' Al-AFghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?
(47): ...the development of political Islam has been more the work of non-clerical political intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in colonial India, and Abdul A'la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Ali Shariati in postccolonial Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran respectiviely. The glaring exception was Ayatollah Khomeini. The secular discourse in Iran has tended to resemble that in western Christianity precisely because only in revolutionary Iran has clerical power received constitutional sanction. Whereas fundamentalist clergy were the pioneers of political Christianity, the pioneers of political Islam were not the religious ulama (scholars), but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern.
(48): The shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the tranistion from colonialism to postcolonialism, and can be highlighted by the history of a single mass organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, in Egypt. The society was founded in MArch 1928 when Hassan al-Banna, a young teacher inspired by the ideas of al-Afghani, among others, heard a plea for action from workers in the town of Ismailiyyah. Echoing al-Afghani, he argued that Muslims must draw on their own historical and cultural resources instead of imitating other peoples. The six-point program of action that al-Banna devised focused on creating an extenisve wlefare organization and disavowed violence. It was the defeat of Arab armies in 1948 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel that convinced the society to expend its energies beyond welfare to armed politics... Said to be a state within a state, with its own 'armies, hospitals, schools, factories, and enterprises,' the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers... came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser's prions, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prion. The experience of such brutal represssion under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a raedical orientation in Egyptian Islamic thought.
(7): By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The lwas of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as abiological necessity. In A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist writes that bombing originated as amethod of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversarires. The first bomb ever dropped from an airplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 11, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa. The first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force agains the Somalis of 1920. In the Second World War, Germany observed the lwas of war against the western powers but not against Russia. As opposed to 3.5 percent of English And American prisoners of war who died in German captivity, 57 percent of Soviet prisoners--3.3 million in all--lost their lives.
(7): When the mass murder of European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population 'in just those areas Hitler was after.' The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: 'the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.' The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique--but only in Europe.
(8): The first genocide of the twentieth Century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904.
(9): Fanon's critics know him by a single sentence from The Wretched of the Earth: "The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." This was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that the violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between the settler and the native. It was a claim that anticolonial violence is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress, that it is indeed a midwife of history. And last and most important, it was a warning that, more than celebrate this turning of the tables, we need to think through the full implications of victims becoming killers.
(30): Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? (...) Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of 'astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran...' They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: 'In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the 'Maragha School.'... The contemporary history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of Andalusia--Arabic-writing spain--in the historical study of the Renaissance.
(31): The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work, The African origin of Civilization, in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to disolacte the history of pharaonic Egypt--in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived--from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt.
(34-35, and whole chapter): important points about the constructedness of "culture," its situatedness in politics.
(36): The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.
(39): Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity.
(45): Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897)... Whereas early-nineteenth century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progres, al-Afghani highlighted modernity's contradictory impact. His religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof 'of our inferiority and decadence,' for 'we civilized ourselves by imitating the Europeans.' Al-AFghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?
(47): ...the development of political Islam has been more the work of non-clerical political intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in colonial India, and Abdul A'la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Ali Shariati in postccolonial Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran respectiviely. The glaring exception was Ayatollah Khomeini. The secular discourse in Iran has tended to resemble that in western Christianity precisely because only in revolutionary Iran has clerical power received constitutional sanction. Whereas fundamentalist clergy were the pioneers of political Christianity, the pioneers of political Islam were not the religious ulama (scholars), but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern.
(48): The shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the tranistion from colonialism to postcolonialism, and can be highlighted by the history of a single mass organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, in Egypt. The society was founded in MArch 1928 when Hassan al-Banna, a young teacher inspired by the ideas of al-Afghani, among others, heard a plea for action from workers in the town of Ismailiyyah. Echoing al-Afghani, he argued that Muslims must draw on their own historical and cultural resources instead of imitating other peoples. The six-point program of action that al-Banna devised focused on creating an extenisve wlefare organization and disavowed violence. It was the defeat of Arab armies in 1948 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel that convinced the society to expend its energies beyond welfare to armed politics... Said to be a state within a state, with its own 'armies, hospitals, schools, factories, and enterprises,' the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers... came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser's prions, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prion. The experience of such brutal represssion under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a raedical orientation in Egyptian Islamic thought.
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