The Common Cause of Bernard Lewis and Usama bin Laden

Here's a thought-provoking article by S. Parvez Manzoor in which he serves up a nice dose of the painful truth. It seems to be based on a lecture that he gave in the not too distant past, although I've been unable to determine when or where. Personally, I could do without the untranslated German words, and for those of you who feel likewise, Gesellschaft is usually translated as "society" and Gemeinschaft as "community". I'm not going to provide any hints as to what my hopefully thought-provoking title is getting at, since I want to encourage everyone to read the article in order to find an answer...

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From Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft:
or
Engagement beyond Dialogue

by S. Parvez Manzoor

The senseless violence and terror of our times has acquired an 'Islamic' face. Rather than as faith, civilization or culture, Islam is now perceived, thanks to the umpteen mechanisms of representation that our civilization commands, as the ideology of Islamism. But most lamentably for an age that prides its secularity, Islam now provides an excuse for the return of the Manichaean rhetoric in the language of politics. Little wonder that all uncontrollable passions today either have to do with the assertion of Islam or with its containment.

Naturally, this both grieves and perplexes ordinary Muslims, the overwhelming majority, who feel appalled by this secular transubstantiation of a sacred faith into a politics of immediate return. It grieves us because the messianic violence perpetrated in the name of Islam represents a total negation of the Islamic values. It perplexes us because, though carried out in the name of jihad, the doctrine of inner struggle, purification and penance, the Jihad of our zealots is, like the worst caricature of the Islamophobic imagination: it is little more than an 'ideology of holy war'. Its champions are far too willing to sacrifice, at the altar of their home-grown politics of parochial causes, primeval passions and selfendorsing piety, every vestige of Islamic faith, reason, compassion and law! Little wonder that divorced both from Islamic ethics and its juristic norms, cut off from all sources of Islam's humanity and morality, the jihadi enterprise can only redeem itself in the moral wasteland of modern nihilism.

Though saddened and perplexed, we find little comfort in discovering that the Islamic face of terror is nothing but a secular mask; that our jihadis are, in terms of their methods and tactics at least, direct disciples of the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe. Or, as has been expressed far less circumspectly: "If Osama bin Laden has a precursor; it is the nineteenth century Russian terrorist Sergei Nechaev."¹ Like Communism and Nazism, then, radical Islamism is a modern heresy.

Far more difficult to dismiss, however, is the following statement which claims that 'the conflict between Al-Qaeda and the West is a war of religion. The Enlightenment idea of a universal civilization, which the West upholds against radical Islam, is an offspring of Christianity. Al-Qaeda's peculiar hybrid of theocracy and anarchy is a by-product of western radical thought. Each of the protagonists in the current conflict is driven by beliefs that are opaque to it.'² The globalisation regime promotes, we are made to believe, a passionate, tribal politics of difference as well as an overbearing imperial rule. Whether right or wrong, this sombre insight must compel us to seek a future beyond the logic of Terror and Empire. We must not allow ourselves to become hostages to the unleashing of opaque passions. This, I presume, is the rationale behind the present gathering. This, most certainly, is my reason for being here.

To move beyond the responsibility of dialogue is also to advance from the logic of Gesellshaft to the emotion of Gemeinschaft. The forces of modernity and globalisation, it is evident, are quite successful at the creation of a world gesellschaft, a network of economic, social and legal institutions that are universal in scope. Their contribution to the emergence of a world gemeinschaft, a human community united in the pursuit of common moral goals, is far less impressive. The search for a human community however entails a reflection on the problem of world-order; for, the moral and the political are quite simply impossible to disentangle in this discourse. By rejecting all theocratic and redemptive visions of global order, but at the same time pursuing a politics of common humanity, we can set definite limits and conditions for any dialogue between civilisations.

As a Muslim, therefore, I would like to exercise my right to question the credentials of 'political Islam'; its claim to represent my own tradition. I would openly challenge its cardinal assertion that in the Islamic scheme of things, religion and politics are one; that faith without a polity does not come to fruition. That there always exists, at a deeper level of consciousness, an organic link between worldviews and political goals, is not a point of contention. This, after all, is a trivial insight that is valid as much for Islam as for any other faith or civilisation. No, I question this claim when it comes with the label of Islamic specificity. Whether it be the war cry of a beleaguered fundamentalism or that of an equally intransigent Islamophobia, I challenge it on the grounds of history.

Only from the canons of a dogmatic theology may we envision one and a half millennia of Islamic history, in all the four corners of the ancient, medieval and modern worlds, as an eternal wandering in the no-man's land of spurious, sub-Islamic, existence! Or, conversely, the historical Muslim state, with its flagrant disregard of the Islamic rule and the manifestly 'un-Islamic' conduct of its rulers, could only have convinced the believers that it was an incarnation of their faith if they had been brain-dead! Clearly, Islam produced its own criteria for distinguishing norm from history, ideal from reality and power from authority. In fact, Islam succeeded in transforming itself into a civilization mainly by securing a separation of faith and governance. To claim therefore that Muslims were strangers to the logic of historical compromise, or that Islamic doctors always chose Divine Governance over Caesar's rule is to revel in a fundamentalist fantasy or to draw an Orientalist caricature. Ironically, in the propagation of this ahistorical vision, western scholars and Muslim radicals have found a common cause. It is here that we find Bernard Lewis in bed with Usama bin Laden!

The same goes for the claims about Islam's putative incompatibility with democracy or secularism. To take secularism first. Like a darling child secularism has many names. It has been conceived, either humbly, as a rejection of ecclesiastical authority, a model for pluralism, a theory of society, a doctrine of governance; or augustly, as a philosophy of history, a creed of atheism, an epistemology of humanism; or even more grandiosely, as a metaphysics of immanence that corresponds to the ultimate scheme of things. Needless to say, not everyone championing the cause of secularism ascribes to these claims, nor is every expression of the secularist, this-worldly, conscience and morality inimical or antithetical to Islam. As long as secularism does not lay claim to being a metaphysics, as a theory of 'all that is', inasmuch as it does not behave as if it were a doctrine of redemption (Heilslehre), Islam can cohabit with it. As for secularism being a form of government that guarantees freedom of religion in pluralistic societies, even Muslims find it preferable to the suppression of religious conscience that is hallmark of theocratic rule.³ At any rate, Islam's compatibility with secular politics may not remain an issue for long, for all politics is in some sense secular politics and if the Muslims aspire to become actors in history, they'll have to adapt to the ways of the world.

As for democracy, what militates against its growth in Muslim societies is not any hurdles set up by the Islamic doctrine, but the refusal of current regimes to grant their Muslim citizenry the most fundamental of rights - freedom of conscience and religion–which the secular state takes for granted. Secularism in the Muslim context is construed not as a formal separation of church and state but as an absolute ban on Islamic political conscience, an adamant denial of its right to partake in public debate and propose public policies–no matter how peacefully and 'democratically' this civic conscience articulates its societal aspirations! In the final analysis, it is not an issue of Islamic obduracy or militancy but that of the despotic, absolutist and undemocratic nature of the secular Muslim regimes (and the civilisation in power that sustains them). A democratic Muslim state, it is my belief, is better equipped to meet all the challenges of secular morality and appease all the demands of Islamic conscience!

Despite all the goodwill on the part of the part of our hosts, I fear, we may find ourselves in a situation where, paradoxically, engaging with the Islamic world is not the same as engaging with the Islamic conscience. While economic, diplomatic, strategic and other concerns would require that the logic of gesellschaft be predominant in this dialogue with 'official Islam', it is my hope that another encounter, within the warmth and congeniality of gemeinschaft, also takes place between the European Geist and the Islamic conscience; a conscience which is not bound by territoriality and whose quest for meaning stretches beyond the horizons of politics and history.

It is in this vein that I conclude by citing an eminent Historian of religion, W. C. Smith, whose words, fifty years after they were first uttered, have still not lost their actuality. He says: "If it is a question whether Islam can adjust itself to Western civilisation, it is also a question whether Western civilisation is able to develop so as to include Islam."⁴

Let's hope that our efforts to conduct a practical conversation, here and now, also help us discover a common moral ground and a sense of community which, according to the Islamic tradition, comes from being the children of Adam.⁵

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Notes
1. Gray, John: Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. London, Faber and Faber, 2003. p 21.
2. Ibid. p. 117.
3. Bencheikh, Sohaib: Marianne et le Prophète. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1998. The author who is the ‘mufti of Marseilles’ is critical of those French policies which do not fully extend the regime of laicité to Islam.
4. Smith, W.C.: Islam in Modern History. New York, Mentor Books, 1957. p. 217. Further, despite the apocalyptic mood of our times, some Western scholars are also pleading for a more inclusive and irenic attitude towards Islam. Vid. Bulliet, Richard: The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. New York, Columbia University press, 2004.
5. Koran: 33:72.