A deficit in global justice is very apparent. Local injustices do travel globally, and global injustices get their way to localities. What we mean by global justice is what Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naâim describes in Muslims and Global Justice (2011) as âglobally inclusive conceptions of justice to be realized by human beings for themselves, everywhere, through their own self-determinationâ. Global injustice is mobile now and permeates especially vulnerable economies and societies. There was hope that World War I and World War II could be the last catastrophes of a large scale. But the changes they have brought to particular geographies, frontiers, and demographies will apparently still have repercussions in the foreseeable future. The focus of our research as well as this volume concerns a particular geography and culture: the Arab world , by which we mean a heterogeneous world far away from being condensed in one description or narrowed down to one picture, be it cultural, religious, political, or whatsoever. The factors, internal and external, that interact in and with this particular world are many, and singling one or few ones, and ignoring the rest of factors misrepresents the dynamics of such a world and its diversity.
This mobile injustice has intensified for the last 5 years since the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring or Arab awakenings , ignited by the self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010. The USA and Europe are not sheltered from similar moments of unrest. Social protests in Greece and Spain, the looming rise of right wing populism across Europe, demands for protection against police brutality by people of colour in the USA coupled with a rise in xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump , and the bloody conflict in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and most devastatingly in Syria are no longer local problems; they migrate beyond borders; the predicament in the Arab world is no longer only Arab, and it has not been purely Arab for the last two centuries. Terrorists of al-Qaeda and now of ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq), either as results of the sociopolitical predicament in the region or as its consequence, or both, are hitting in the capitals of Europe and everywhere else to terrorize the world. The vast majority of victims of this terrorism are Arab-Muslims.
The thesis of âfailure of political Islamâ (of Olivier Roy 1994) appears rhetorical, seeing all the events political Islam has caused or has been involved in. The radical version of political Islam is now seen as a form of âislamization of radicalism â, as the French scholar Olivier Roy argues in Le jihad et la mort (Jihad and Death 2016), in opposition to the more âculturalistâ view of his compatriot Gilles Kepel who focalizes the big role of religion in this radicalization in Terreur dans lâexagone: genĂ©se du jhad (Terror in France: Genealogy of Jihad 2015). These two opposing French perspectives on the issue have become more apparent after the two terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015. A third voice from within the French context is that of Francois Burgat who replies to both scholars above, in Comprendre lâislam politique: une trajectoire de recherche sur lâalteritĂ© islamiste 1973â2016, in 2016, and sees that they both ignore the geopolitical factor in their analyses of Islamic radicalism and violence (Understanding Political Islam: A Search for an Islamic Alternative 1973â2016). These scholarly examples summarize in general the intensity of the debate in and around Europe and its connection to the Arab world . Their present and future, like their past, seem bound together. This boundedness, however, is not easy. It is not here that we intend to review the major political and intellectual trajectories in the modern Arab world. Doing so would require a minimum consideration of also the political and intellectual trajectories in the modern Europeâand also the USA. Such a task is difficult in one work or through one approach because it is obvious that each geography and entity of the two, or three if the USA is considered an independent apart from Europe though it is in many ways its continuity, is plural and heterogeneous. It is against essentialisms and generalizations that more serious work has to be done.
The Arab intellectual tradition has stood against invisibilty or disregard in world scene and against obscurantism in its region. The early revivalist movements since the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, the Arab naháža (Renaissance ), have opened the tradition to the modern world and its various issues. Albert Houraniâs Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798â1939 (1962) captures well this moment. The legacy of this period still lives, but it is obscured by both internal and external factors. This early movement was led by religious scholars and later was joined by political liberation leaders, who also had religious trainings or were religious scholars as well. It was mosques and religious schools that trained those early pioneers of reform and revival , before the modern school took space in the educational system in the vast Arab and Islamic world. Concentrating on liberation from European colonialism, on translation of the modern sciences and social theories, and on the education of the masses were the major priorities of these avant-guardist theologians, scholars, political activists, journalists, and public intellectuals.
The post-colonial period that broadly ranges from the 1940s to the 1960s marks another wave of intellectual dynamics in the Arab world . This again is in no way separate from European history and politics: the horrible Holocaust in Nazi Germany, among other factors religious and political, has led to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 in the geographic centre of the Arab world, considered the heartlands of the vast Islamic world. The religious motives of creating a Jewish State have given reasons for the rise of a religious motive from the Islamic side: the rise of political Islam, especially its radical wings, cannot and should not be studied without comparative studies of the growth of the place of religion in the discourse of state formations in this particular region. Early modern Arab reformists did not reflect that much on the religiosity or secularity of the state in their reform agendas, particularly because the Ottoman Caliphate was still a reality till 1924. It was independence, liberation, and cultural awakening that were at the heart of the early reformists, and not the state and its form, religious, secular, or âseculareligiousâ, to borrow the description of the political sociologist Assef Bayat for the Egyptian state (2007). This does not mean that an alliance of religious and secular forces was not already taking shape in newly formed Arab or Islamic states , as is the case with Saudi Arabia and its connection with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his movement, or as is the case with the formation of the state in Pakistan in 1947 (see Muslim Zion of Faisal Devji, 2013), and both antecede the formation of Israel , for example. This to say that religion-state formation does not concern a particular tradition or geography alone; if Europe solved the issue over the centuries, other parts of the world have a different history, and a different perspective on the matter, made complicated by various global factors now, which Europe did not face when it was forming and reforming its nation states.
Since the emergence of religion, and Islam in particular, in the global scene as a force of action, during and after the Cold War , it is not the âArabâ world per se that has taken prominence in scholarship ...