Rethinking Islam

Common Questions, Uncommon Answers

Mohammed Arkoun, Robert D. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A Berber from the mountainous region of Algeria, Mohammed Arkoun is an internationally renowned scholar of Islamic thought. In this book, he advocates a conception of Islam as a stream of experience encompassing majorities and minorities, Sunni and Shi'a, popular mystics and erudite scholars, ancient heroes and modern critics. A product of Islamic

1
Imagining Islam

Can one speak of a scientific understanding of Islam in the West or must one rather talk about the Western way of imagining Islam?

In a small book designed for a broad Western audience, it is useful and even necessary to start with this question. We can, in fact, wonder whether the Western understanding of Islam is valid and objective. Ever since the 1950s, when national liberation movements emerged, there have been continual debates on this issue, many of them sharp and passionate. If I evoke the war for Algerian independence (1954-1962), for example, every French person who was alive then remembers the accompanying polemics and deadly confrontations about the Arab world and Arab culture generally seen in the context of Nasserism, the emergence of the Third World at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and the Zionist struggle for the establishment of the state of Israel. The links of these polemics to religious and political quarrels dating from the Middle Ages augmented their propensity to provoke violence.

The Algerian war ended, but the polemics continued as a result of other events, such as the revolution in Iran. The Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power produced a fresh outpouring of emotions around the world, most notably in the United States, which exerts an influence in the Middle East that is widely recognized. The Iranian revolution touched vital Western interests in the Middle East, and the reactions that event provoked and continues to provoke have revived and enriched the Western way of "imagining" Islam. The Gulf War constituted yet another climax in the confrontation between two collective imaginaries: the Arab-Islamic and the Western.

The notion of "imagining" evoked in the question is new; the nonspecialist is not likely to grasp it, for even the experts have not succeeded in mastering the shape, function, and operation of this faculty we call imagination. To be brief, I will say that the "imaginary" of an individual, a social group, or a nation is the collection of images carried by that culture about itself or another culture—once a product of epics, poetry, and religious discourse, today a product primarily of the media and secondarily of the schools.¹ In this sense, of course, individuals and societies have their own imaginaries tied to their own common languages. There are thus French, English, and German ways of imagining Islam—imaginaries, as they have come to be called—just as there are Algerian, Egyptian, Iranian, and Indian imaginaries of the West. Since the 1950s the powerful, omnipresent media, drawn daily to report on the violent happenings of the moment—national liberation movements, protests, and revolts in the numerous and diverse countries inhabited by Muslims—have fed the Western imaginary of Islam.

The misperceptions inherent in this imaginary go beyond current events. Although the problems of Muslim societies have indeed become knottier and more numerous since the emergence of national states in the 1950s and 1960s, another serious confusion—one that has contributed directly to the shaping of the Western imaginary of Islam—has also emerged in this short time. That is, all the political, social, economic, and cultural shortcomings of Muslim societies are hitched together and to Islam with a capital "I." Islam then becomes the source and the prime mover of all contemporary history in a world that extends from the Philippines to Morocco and from Scandinavia, if we take account of Muslim minorities in Europe, to South Africa.

It is true that the sort of Islamic discourse common to fundamentalist movements, especially those engaged in the most decisive political battles, proposes the powerful image of a single, eternal Islam, the ideal model for historic action to liberate the world from the Western, imperialist, materialist model. The media in the West seize upon this monolithic, fundamentalist view of Islam that dominates the contemporary Muslim imaginary and transpose it into a discourse suitable to the social imaginary of Western countries without any intermediate critique from the social sciences. The field of perception is open to the confrontation of two imaginaries overheated by accumulated confusions about each other.

This everyday labor of stimulating and amplifying the two imaginaries is complicated by a much older and more serious issue, one that reaches to the most sacred origins of the three monotheistic religions. Ever since the emergence of Islam between 610 and 632, there has been continuous rivalry among three religious communities— Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—all striving to establish a monopoly on the management of symbolic capital linked to what the three traditions call "revelation." The issue is enormous and primordial, yet it has nonetheless been buried by secularized, ideological discourse: the ideologies of nation building, scientific progress, and universal humanism in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe. Then, beginning with the Nazi catastrophe and the wars of colonial liberation, the question of revelation was buried under the no less deceptive rhetoric of decolonization, of development and underdevelopment (in the 1960s), and of nation building in Third World countries that had just recovered their political sovereignty.

To this day, no one has studied revelation in its Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arab manifestations and as a function of the historical and anthropological conditions for the emergence of these three traditions. That constitutes a failure of the comparative history of religions, of social science, and of the human sciences, which have left the task of "managing the goods of salvation" to the theologians of each community. That is to say that they have perpetuated theological discourse in its function of legitimating the drive for power of each community. This fact condemns discourse to the confines of a cultural system that excludes all those others who have the sacrilegious pretension to draw upon the same symbolic capital.

It may seem excessive to claim that revelation has not been studied anywhere in its three historical manifestations, while an immense literature on the subject clutters the shelves of our libraries. I want to emphasize, however, the following evidence: In constructing a Judeo-Christian vision of the story of salvation, Christianity, on both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, annexed the Old Testament to the New in such a way that Jews protested the dissolving of their Talmudic and prophetic tradition; as for Muslims, they remained excluded from this theological structure by the fact that Islam follows Christianity chronologically and because the structure portrays Jesus Christ as the final expression of the Word of God. Already in Medina between 622 and 633 A.D., Jews and Christians refused to recognize Muhammad as a prophet in the same spiritual line as Moses and Jesus in salvation history.²

To this historical evidence must be added the abdication of the social and human sciences, loath to take on all the disputes bequeathed by theological structures as problems of religious and anthropological history. I can testify that these problems have not yet been approached in a comparative perspective combining history and cultural-religious anthropology. Islam is always considered apart from other religions and from European culture and thought. It is often excluded from departments of religion and taught instead as a part of Oriental studies.

Another aggravating factor in the old quarrel between Islam and the West is that Islam, as a force in the historical rise of societies, took control of the Mediterranean area from the seventh to the twelfth centuries and again, with the direction of the Ottoman Turks, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The cultures of the Mediterranean region share a single historical destiny that the scientific study of history, independent of the ideologies that divide the northern and southern or the eastern and western coasts of the Mediterranean, is far from confronting. The Mediterranean region I refer to is more cultural than geographic and strategic; it encompasses all those cultures that have been influenced historically by Iranian religions and the great ancient cultures of the Near East, including the Mesopotamian, the Chaldean, the Syriac, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and the Arabic—all before the intervention of Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and "Islam."

I should note in passing the influence of the vocabulary used to evoke the plurality of cultures in the Near East. In speaking of the Aramaic, the Syriac, and the Byzantine, I am including Christianity. In speaking of the Hebraic, I am referring to the Jewish religion. But Islam, linked of course to Arabic, designates both the religion begun by Muhammad and the vast empire quickly built by the new power center in Damascus, which shifted to Baghdad and Cordoba. For this reason I have put quotation marks around the word "Islam."

The confusion between Islam as religion and Islam as historical framework for the elaboration of a culture and a civilization has been perpetuated, and has grown ever more complex to this day. Nonetheless, Islamic societies must be examined in and for themselves, as French, German, Belgian, U.S., or Polish societies are. It is certainly legitimate for research to identify common factors that generate a single Islamic discourse in very different societies, but then it must also come back to the history of each of these societies and to its own culture. It is important to identify the ideological obstacles that retard the study of the Mediterranean area as a whole and obscure its pertinence to a modern revival of the history of religions, philosophy, and cultures.

The lesson provided by Fernand Braudel in his great book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II,³ has not carried so far as to modify history curricula in high schools and universities. The southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean continue to be the domain of specialists in Arabic and Turkish studies—that is to say, of that nebulous "science" we call Orientalism. What is taught about the Arab or Muslim Mediterranean is highly conditioned by the European perspective on the Mediterranean world.

The European perspective has itself been relegated to the background ever since the U.S. Seventh Fleet established strategic control of the whole of the Mediterranean area extending to Iran. Meanwhile, Europe has dedicated all its resources and energies to the construction of a community in which Germany, a country utterly foreign to Mediterranean culture, occupies a central position. Will the presence in the European Community of Greece, Spain, and Portugal eventually reestablish a long-lasting and effective interest in the Mediterranean dimension of the Community by including Arab and Islamic contributions in the powerful, dynamic history of European construction? These are crucial political and cultural issues for the coming decade. It is clear that definitive peace between Israel and the Palestinians would generate hope of almost apocalyptic dimensions for all peoples in the Mediterranean sphere of influence.

I aim here only to reestablish proper historical perspective on the political, economic, and strategic stakes of the unending wars around the Mediterranean. More fundamentally, the task of historians of religions, cultures, and philosophy is to show how ethnocultural groups of varying size and dynamism have dipped into the common stock of signs and symbols to produce systems of belief and nonbelief that, all the while assigning ultimate meaning to human existence, have served to legitimate power drives, hegemonic empires, and deadly wars. All "believers," whether they adhere to revealed religions or contemporary secular regions, would thus be equally constrained to envisage the question of meaning not from the angle of unchanging transcendence—that is, of an ontology sheltered from all historicity—but in the light of historical forces that transmute the most sacred values, those regarded as most divine by virtue of their symbolic capital and as inseparable from necessarily mythical accounts of the founding, and from which each ethnocultural group extracts and recognizes what it calls identity or personality.

It is in this new field of intelligibility, beyond the dogmatic definitions that continue to safeguard the mobilizing, ideological force of revealed religions, that the phenomenon of revelation must be reexamined. Only when this perspective holds sway will multidisciplinary and crossdisciplinary analysis of a phenomenon with many faces and functions penetrate to the radical imaginary⁴ common to the societies of the Book/books.

First, though, we need to revise history textbooks in France, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere. We must acknowledge the intellectual and cultural poverty of the brief chapters devoted to Islam in high school courses. As for the universities, rare are those even now with history departments willing to tolerate the intrusion of a historian of Islam.⁵ The teaching of the history of "Islamic cultures"⁶ is all too often left to the department of so-called Oriental languages, where one exists. This observation, which holds for most universities in the West, demonstrates the extent to which an ideological vision of the history of the Mediterranean area has been translated administratively and institutionally into the universities themselves. And the field is open for essayists and journalists to construct imagery of Islam and Muslims based on current events and locked into a short-term perspective dominated by Nasserism, Khomeinism, Israel, and the Palestinians.

To be fair in this description of mutual perceptions of "Islam" (I repeat: This global designation of multiple and different realities is very dangerous; hence I use quotation marks) and of "the West" (another, no less dangerous global designation⁷), I must speak briefly of the situation from the Muslim side. First I must distinguish the perceptual framework of classical Islam from that of contemporary Islam. For classical Islam, the inhabited world was theologically and juridically divided between the home of Islam (dār al-islām), where the Divine Law applied, and the land of war (diā al-hḥrb), where "infidels" always threatened to substitute "pagan" laws for the True Law, as they did in Mecca and Medina in the time of the Prophet. (A similar division existed for Christianity before Vatican II in 1965.) The Divine Law, revealed in the Qur'an,⁸ was rendered explicit and applied by the Prophet and the so-called "orthodox caliphs" in Medina from 622 to 661, and for the Shi'a by the line of designated Imams. From this division of the world into two parts came a special status for "protected peoples" (dhimmī), Jews and Christians recognized as peoples of the Book firqa al-nājiya). Todays Jews and Christians are wrong to use this status as a theme of firqa al-nājiya). Todays Jews and Christians are wrong to use this status as a theme of polemics against today's Muslims; they should rather deal with this problem as historians would, avoiding the anachronism of projecting the philosophy of human rights and religious liberty—conquered late in the West (French Revolution) on a theoretical level and still incompletely and randomly applied on a practical level—onto a theological mentality common to the three revealed religions.

The theological vision similarly divides time into before and after the founding moment of the new salvation history. Jews, Christians, and Muslims thus have their respective eras, and all face this question about the theological position of human beings who lived before the "final" revelation was manifest.

Understanding that space and time are for all human beings the coordinates of every perception of an object of knowledge, one can measure the impact of theological systems on all modes of intelligibility in the societies of the Book, where the revealed, Holy Book has engendered all other books containing the knowledge constitutive of each cultural "tradition." Scholars have not yet abandoned these frameworks of perception, and my observation about textbooks and departments of history shows how the conditions for intelligibility in a desacralized, secularized time and space carry forward in ideological form the prevailing distinctions established by religions.

Inside theological space and time, Muslim geographers of the classical epoch wrote and taught "profane" perceptions of peoples and cultures outside the Muslim domain.⁹ What is interesting about this vast geographi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Imagining Islam
• 2 Islam and Muslims
• 3 Church and State
• 4 Secularism
• 5 Nationalism
• 6 Revelation
• 7 The Qur'an
• 8 Exegesis
• 9 Muhammad
• 10 Hadith
• 11 Tradition
• 12 The Ideal Community
• 13 Women
• 14 Dogmas
• 15 Sacerdotal Power
• 16 Authority
• 17 Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism
• 18 The Greek Heritage
• 19 Islam, Science, and Philosophy
• 20 Sufism
• 21 The Person
• 22 Human Rights
• 23 Ethics and Politics
• 24 Mediterranean Culture
• Glossary
• Other Works by Mohammed Arkoun
• About the Book and Author