Global Intifada

Ali Eteraz has written yet another brilliant article on the so-called “Death” of Progressive Islam. I use quotation marks around “Death” because, like the Salafi dawah, although progressive Islam has receded, it is certainly not dead. As an intellectual movement, it may be in crisis, but is nonetheless in the process of re-organization and possibly regeneration.

The reason I can say with certainty that Progressive Islam is merely reorganizing itself and may very well regenerate altogether is primarily because what has been termed “Progressive Islam” is a contemporary extension of a pre-existing movement that arose as a reaction to teh crisis of colonialism: the “Modernist” movement. It is merely an indigenous Westernized post-modernist manifestation of the previous non-indigenous Westernized colonial Modernist movement that was comprised of the nationalist leaders “founding fathers” and intellectuals such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal. The defining characteristic of this group was their use of a predominantly Western epistemological framework in calling for the reform of Islam in order to promote autonomy and revival. Like the original Modernists, the Progressives of today often come from the bourgeois class of Muslim society and, as such, operate within a completely different intellectual paradigm from Fundamentalists and Traditionalists.

Colonization by Western powers resulted in a profound crisis within Muslim societies that resulted in a fragmentation of intellectual authority. According to Sayyid Hossein Nasr, the Muslim world developed three novel responses to this crisis: 1. Fundamentalism, 2. Modernism, and 3. Millenialism (deferral to the Mahdist prophecy). Colonialism placed a concerted attack on the ‘Ulema as an intellectual class by depriving them of authority in the political sphere (which was further eroded by the rise of the nation-state through the process of centralization of state power) and were also undermined in the social sphere due to the rise of public education and mass literacy. The latter lead to the formation of an entirely new intellectual class that were educated in Western traditions.

What is significant about the rise of the professionals that came out of the vocational systems was that it was largely a by-product of the hegemonic relationship between Western colonizers and the Muslim colonized. Thomas Macaulay, the British colonialist, said it best when he said that the goal of the British in India to was create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste.”

According to Hannah Arendt, the two key characteristics of colonialism are racism and bureacracy. The professional elites were clearly created to support the colonial bureacracy, and is also not surprising that they adopted, in essence, the same disdain for their fellow Muslims (especially the ‘Ulema) that the Colonizers had for the Colonized. The professional elites often adopted the same purported “reformism” that was used to justify imperialism in the first place. Just like the “White man” had reached the pinnacle of human evolution and it was his duty to uplift the lesser races from their anthropological shortcomings, so did the professional elites view themselves as the pinnacle of Islamic history and had achieved material success and, thus, it was their duty to uplift the Muslim masses from their decadence. This cannot be manifested more clearly than in the discourse on Islam itself as being a problem not between complex interrelated social, political, and economic forces, but a Manichean struggle between “faith” and “reason”; such concepts that were directly borrowed by Orientalists. Either ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the vehement theological debates over the role of reason of Islam, what the modernists argued was that classical Islam was incompatible with “Reason” with a capital “R”. By “Reason”, they were referring to the Eurocentric understanding of reason that was imported by the Colonizers. The fact that the Islamic theology was strongly influenced by Aristotelan philosophy and ultimately seeped into jurisprudence through the development of Mantiq by Imam Ghazzali was ignored by the Modernists. For them, it was inconceivable that the classical Islamic traditions could be considered rational, even though for all purposes, they were entirely rational, on par with Western traditions. Their presumption that their was an instrinsic inequality between Islamic and Western traditions reinforced the larger hegemonic discourse that interplayed between Western Colonizers and the Muslim Colonized.

Whether they realized it or not, this class was a competitor to the ‘Ulema and, unsurprisingly, often lead to conflict with them. Some of the ‘Ulema recognized this and responded by creating learning institutions in order to preserve their traditions, which they deemed were under attack. For example, in India, we see the rise of the Deobandis who inferred that the inevitable effect of this class would be ultimately to support the expansion of British imperialism.

From the perspective of the ‘Ulema, the crticisms that Modernists had of classical Islamic jurisprudence was not concerned with a reformulation of the methods of extracting legal rulings (i.e. an usool) for the sincere objective of creating an equitable legal system, but was more focused specifically on particular legal conclusions that were deemed incompatible with modern times. It was not out of coincidence that the legal conclusions that Modernists adopted were the same legal conclusions that were being advanced by the Colonizers. The ‘Ulema saw the former as nothing but the puppets of the latter. Thus, the hijab came under attack, not because the Modernists were concerned with a critique of the legal reasoning behind hijab, but because it was deemed to be bulwark to progress by Feminists. In other words, what Modernists failed to see was that their treatment of classical Islam as “the object” failed to take into consideration that the Modernists were “objects” within the Universal Subject as well. Instead of asking whether Hijab was truly an obligation or not that resulted in inequality between the genders, the ‘Ulema often wondered why such a question arose in the first place and saw a causal connection between these questions that assumed particular answers that were not coincidentally also being advanced by the Colonizers. Thus, such discourse itself was hegemonic in nature. Modernists failed to apply equal criticisms between Islamic and Western traditions, thus delegitimizing their claim to being concerned with objective truth. In their push for “progress”, they failed to properly analyze what progress was or why it was important or how one defined progress or whether progress even existed within human history. For example, in the West, the true cause of female liberation was not because a class of philosopher-kings congregated and concluded that men and women were equal or ought to be equal and then passed legislation to accommodate such philosophical conclusions, but because their was a shortage of male labor that was caused by World War I and World War II. The Modernists often used anthropology as a source of criticism for classical opinions such as by arguing that Islamic jurisprudence treated men and women differently because of the infiltration of patriarchy due to the overwhelming dominance of male scholarship. However, they failed to recognized that such legal conclusions arose from a positive interpretation of Islamic texts (such as direct commands from Allah (subhana wa ta’ala) and, more importantly, didn’t apply such a high level of criticism against the values that they presumed to be true. Thus, instead of scrutinizing the history of democracy and the fact that only 5% of Americans supported the Constitution or supporting feminism without examining its relationship with capitalism, Modernists applied criticisms in an unequal manner and focused more on reforming Islam rather than objective issues of social justice. The clear imbalance in focus lead many scholars to conclude that the Modernist discourse had its direct origins and sustenance through Western hegemony.

Nonetheless, the professional class gave rise to some of the most brilliant nationalist leaders that were able to inspire the masses. The liberation of Muslim countries from colonization in most Muslim countries came through the leadership of political Modernists. The post-colonial period was largely a victory for the Modernists. Virtually all over the Muslim world, governments were formed out of the Modernist group.However, since Modernists assumed the epistemological framework of the Colonizer, they often had no serious alternatives to deal with the realities of the Muslim world. Nationalism, socialism, democracy, capitalism, fascism were all experimented by the Modernists and all ultimately failed because of a lack of a coherent criticism. Modernists were too busy “reforming” the decadent classical traditions in order to stop and ask themselves whether the ideas they espoused were even viable alternatives. Since they devoted their anthropological and ideological criticisms to traditional Islam, their myopia prevented them from seeing that Western traditions were built upon certain presuppositions and historical events that might not be adequately applied to Muslim societies. However, what lead to the ultimate demise of Modernism was not its philosophical shortcomings, but its failure to meet up to its promises. The end of the yellow brick road that led to the Emerald City was not the home of a powerful wizard, but a charlatan who used smoke and mirrors to cover up his own inadequacy. Capitalism, communism, socialism and every other ideology that operated within the Western epistemological framework could not successfully liberate Muslim countries from their economic dependency upon Western governments. Abandoning Islamic traditions and modernizing was nothing more than a delusion, it had not nor would ever lead to the elimination of the Master-Servant relationship. What was previously, at best, a hypothesis, was made brazenly obvious in the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The unflinching support that Western nations gave to Israel, in flagrant violations to the very human rights that were declared to be universal by Western nations in the first place shattered the legitimacy of the Modernists forever. It became apparent then that the foreign policy objectives of Western governments was nothing more than to reinforce the dominancy of Western civilization over other cultures in the form of neo-colonialism, i.e. colonialism that was not direct, but for all purposes, was more invasive, yet more subtle, and thus ultimately more dangerous than imperialist colonialism. This event, amongst others, provided the impetus for other movements that were developing within the Muslim world, the antithesis of Modernism: Fundamentalism.

As was stated above in the introductory paragraph, the three novel responses to the crisis of colonization were modernism, fundamentalism, and millenialism. Fundamentalism was energized by the incapacity of the Modernists which was due to their short-sightedness and identified itself as a movement that would empower Muslims and remove global inequalities between Western and Muslim nations. The governments that were formed out of the Modernists ultimately became corrupt, nepotistic, incompetent, tyrannical, and, most importantly, failed to eliminate the hegemony of the West in Muslim societies. Fundamentalism began forming almost immediately after the colonization of Muslim lands, but it did not become a challenge to governments until the post World War II when it began dawning upon Muslims that political independence did not translate into autonomy due to the imbalance in economic and legal relationships between Muslim governments and their Western counterparts. Muslim governments were seen as charlatans and often coalesced to what was perceived as gross injustices, such as the support for America or Israel. Since an entirely separate article can be written about Fundamentalism, what is important about Fundamentalism for the purposes of this article is that it lead to a reaction within the post-colonial Modernist tradition: the Progressive movement.

“Progressive Islam” is nothing more the post-modernist, neo-colonialist logical outgrowth of colonial Islamic modernism. The major distinction between the Progressives and Modernists is not philosphical or ideological, but spatial and chronological. The Progressives existed in a different historical period (post-colonialism) and place (Western countries as Muslim minorities) than the Modernists. Like the Modernists of old, the Progressives often come from the professional elites and thus, have either intentionally or inadvertently adopted many of the same hegemonic pressuptions that are imbedded within the Western social sciences just like the Modernists of old did. Although Progressives always claimed that they were just as equally critical of Western hegemony as they were of social inequities and injustices that were caused by Muslims, the reality is that the stigma of reformism was always deemed as the ultimate goal of Progressive Islam. From the Traditional and Fundamentalist perspective, Progressive Islam would lead to nothing more than complete and total integration into Western paradigms. Given their lack of a coherent systematic epistemology, it was inevitable that they assumed the only viable epistemology that was available, which happened to be the same epistemological framework that was often imposed by the Western Colonizers. Hence, it is no surprise that the focus of Progressives was on reforming Islam itself and not adequately addressing Western hegemony, which still existed even after the post-colonial period. Although they recognized the apparent inequality between Western and Muslim countries, they did not attribute this to colonialism which they perceived was ended by the Modernist Nationalist leaders, but because Millenialists, Traditionalists, and Fundamentalists were preventing Muslim societies from progressing. In other words, the Muslim world had not “Westernized” enough which could only be accomplished by interpolating Western value systems and ethical norms into Islamic theology and jurisprudence. In terms of objectives, the Progressives differed very little from the Modernists.

The intellectual incoherency of the Progressive movement was not shattered from within, but like the Salafi movement as pointed out by Br. Umar Lee, was ultimately annihilated by the War on Terrorism. Just like the Arab-Israeli conflict ultimately lead to the realization that the adoption of Western paradigms by the Modernists would probably never reduce the inequalities between the West and Islam, the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere lead to the realization that certain Western countries were merely utilizing the guise of liberation and Westernization to reinforce hegemony. The call for democratic humanistic reform by the Progressives was completely overshadowed by similar calls by certain Western governments, all the while bombing and invading Muislims and violating the very democratic humanism that they were purportedly violating for. If the identification between Progressive Islam and Western hegemony was not apparent before, it was certainly apparent now. For example, the call for equality between Muslim men and women that was dramatically presented by Amina Wadud was overshadowed by celebration of Afghani women taking off their Burqa after the defeat of the Taliban. While some Progressives saw this as a “victory”, most Traditionalist and Fundamentalist Muslims saw this as a brazen manifestation of the historical contination of colonization. America alone was not responsible for this paradigm shift. A handful of terrorist attacks in other Western countries lead to the rise of hysterical xenophobia in Europe and Australia that manifested itself in the Danish Cartoons and comments by the Pope, not to mention the vociferous attacks on the Hijab and Niqab. The inherent supposition that Western civilization was inherently superior to Islamic civilization was made visible by such events, not to mention the comments by the Prime Minister of Italy, Berlesconi as well as the recent decision by German courts banning the hijab in public schools, but not the headscarves worn by nuns or the yarmulkes worn by Orthodox Jews since they were “occidental” in their origins. The Progressives became caught between a rock and a hard place. Fundamentalists argued that the West was out to get Islam itself and didn’t care about humanistic values. The spread of Islamophobia that came as a result of the War on Terrorism reinforced such beliefs. Progressives argued for feminine autonomy and the open interpretation of texts. Feminine autonomy was being denied in Western countries due to the interest of “integrating Muslims” in order to prevent a potential fifth column. The open interpretation of texts resulted was utilized by Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists to justify horrific attacks on innocent civilians. The Progressive movement pinned between two tidal waves, that of Jihad and McWorld; the same hegemonic and anti-hegemonic conflict that delegitimated the Modernists before them.

The War on Terrorism exposed the lie of colonization “We will uplift you out of your inhumanity and make you fully human like us” into the truth of hegemony “We are superior to you and even if you live amongst us, we will always be better then you.” The Colonizer’s treatment of the Colonized even amongst their midst is illustrated by the fact that they are deprived of human rights because they are less than human. Thus, “Terrorists” are deprived of the due process of law because due process is given to human beings and terrorists don’t desesrve them because they are sub-human. What is terrifying of this treatment is that once legal rights degenerate, human rights are soon to follow. Just like the Nazis had to first relegate the Jews to second class citizenship before depriving them of the right to liberty, property, and finally life itself, contemporary Western governments are treading upon a slippery slope by depriving the “Other” of human rights. Europe, although not as brazen as in America in its treatment of suspected terrorists in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, is progressing exactly along the lines of the Totalitarian movements the culminated in World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Such trends completely undermined the message of the Progressive Movement. Along with its lack of a systematic epistemology rooted in the Islamic tradition as an alternative to those that were rooted in Western hegemony, the War on Terrorism has done more damage to the Progressive Movement than any Fundamentalist or Traditional preacher could have done in a Maddrasseh or through a fatwa. Amina Wadud’s movement dissipated because (a) it was based upon faulty premises and overexaggerated sociological problems within Muslim communities and (b) such issues were overshadowed by a wider societal discussion on the integration of Muslims and refusing to recognize Muslim female autonomy and imposing Eurocentric standards of decency upon Muslim women. What happened to this movement also happened to the Progressives and Modernists on a larger scale.

With that said, post-modern Islam, whether Fundamentalist, Traditional, or Modernist is like philosophy; it is not a series of arguments, but a dialogue; a dialectical process rather than a linear progression of intellectual evolution. The Salafi view of the evolution of history from the Salaf to the Philosophers to the Mu’tazila to the Asharis to the Salafis is just as short-sighted as the Progressive/Modernist and Traditionalist view of history. Each group views itself as the natural inheritors of Islamic civilization and will ultimately be the group that leads the Ummah to improvement and victory through the crisis of neo-colonialism. Irrespective of whether one is a Traditionalist, Modernist, or Fundamentalist, such a view is naive, immature, and unrealistic. What Muslims today must realize is that the discourse between these groups is a result of a historical problem; a problem that still exists today and will continue to exist for at least for several more generations. The true flaw in all three of these movements is their failure to adequately resolve the inequalities between Islamic and Western societies. What is required now, of all three movements, is a functional program for social justice at the microlevel and macrolevel of Muslim societies and for humanity as a whole. Perhaps what is needed now is for the formulation of a liberation theology which is something that does not require one to be a Traditionalist, Progressive, Fundamentalist, but just a Muslim or human being.

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