Islam’s Rational Past Defies Views of Islamists
By
Nadeem F. Paracha
03 Jan 2021
In a 2012
lecture at the Institute of Advanced Studies, the late Danish-American
historian Patricia Crone described Omer Saeed Sheikh as an “acculturated
native” who had rebelled against his adopted cultural mores.
Illustration by Abro
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Sheikh is a
British citizen who was arrested in Pakistan for his role in the kidnapping and
murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Sheikh was born in London
to Pakistani parents who had migrated to England in 1968. They quickly adopted
British cultural norms and established a successful clothing business there.
Sheikh was enrolled at a prestigious private school in London and was then sent
to Lahore’s equally prestigious Aitchison College.
He returned
to England and enrolled at the famous London School of Economics. But he soon
dropped out and travelled to a war-torn Bosnia in the early 1990s. This is when
Sheikh threw himself completely into becoming a radical Islamist.
According
to Crone, acculturated natives embrace cultural norms of their adopted
societies. They do so to advance their status in these societies. These natives
may be living in regions where they do not have ancestral roots, or in their
ancestral regions that have been colonised by foreign powers. But when, despite
integrating the foreign cultural ethos, they feel that their progress is being
restricted by the producers of these ethea, they walk out from their
acculturated selves, rebel against it and adopt their ancestral culture.
But what
they believe is their ‘authentic/ancestral culture’ is often a romanticised
concoction, or even an unintentional caricature. In their rebellion against
their former acculturated selves, they may begin to dress in the manner they
believe people in their ancestral culture do (or ought to), or they may begin
to follow their religion in a more overt manner.
To Crone,
the acculturated non-European native’s anger, triggered by his inability to
achieve prestige and success despite adopting the ethos of a dominant western
culture, is a rebellion against modernity. On the other hand, according to
Crone, it is also a failure of Western modernity. The failure in this respect
is its inability to hold on to non-Europeans who had willingly adopted modernity
but then walked out to rebel against it. Crone says this is because of a fear
within the purveyors of modernity that their positions of power might be
usurped, by those who had adopted their ideas but were not from its race of
origin.
To Crone
this is not an irrational fear, but one that an idea needs to let go of if it
is to retain converts and grow. In her 2014 book The Nativist Prophets of Early
Islamic Iran, Crone writes that one of the main reasons behind the rapid growth
of Islam was the fact that its purveyors had made it extremely simple to
convert to the new faith.
The faith’s
first century was dominated by Arabs who lived in garrison cities, away from
the natives they had conquered. But the natives could enter the garrison cities
and enjoy all of its perks and power by adopting Islam. The acculturated
native, in this context, did not face any hindrances to progress or rise to a
position of power. According to Crone, this is why the native retained his
acculturated self and did not walk out or rebel against it, despite his dislike
of Arab hegemony. He may have rebelled against the Arabs but not the idea that
he had converted to.
Indeed, the
huge influx of non-Arab natives into the fold of Islam consequently overthrew
the hegemony of its original purveyors (the Arabs) — especially after the
Abbasid Revolution in 750 CE. But the faith continued to grow. In Pakistan,
however, from the mid-1970s onwards, certain political and constitutional
developments have led to the growth of a particular non-inclusive strand of
Islam, alienating those who may follow a different strand or may belong to a
different faith.
They
believe that, even if they acculturate themselves with this dominant strand,
they will not be able to achieve the kind of success or position that those who
were born into this strand can. They are thus more likely to walk out and leave
the idea of nationhood based on this strand vulnerable to contraction. And it
has been contracting.
From the
18th century onwards, Islam as an imperial power began to stagnate. Its nemesis
was the Muslim community’s slide into myopia. It was eventually overwhelmed by
European colonialism, powered by economic, militarist, political and social
modernity based on the principles of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ i.e. rationalism,
science, democracy, secularism and capitalism.
This saw
vast sections of colonised Muslims acculturating themselves to this modernity,
so that they were not left behind. But because of reasons pointed out by Crone,
many walked out of it, giving birth to radical Islamist ideas based on
romanticised notions of their faith and its history.
Interestingly,
according to the British academic Jonathan Israel, in the anthology The Secular
State and Islam in Europe, Muslims who had adopted modernity were actually
integrating ideas that were originally inspired by ancient Muslim rationalists.
This was also often pointed out by 19th century Muslim modernists such as Sir
Syed Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Abduh.
Israel
writes that, as the seeds of the Enlightenment were being sown in Europe, there
were European thinkers who were challenging monarchism and the Church by
debunking their hostile perceptions of Islam, and informing their audiences
that Islam was a rational and inclusive faith.
According
to Israel, not all purveyors of the Enlightenment agreed. But 18th century
Enlightenment philosophers such as Pierre Bayle, Henri de Boulainvilliers and
Denis Diderot presented Islam as a rational and tolerant faith. Israel writes
that these men were inspired by certain ancient Muslim thinkers, and their
ideas seeped into the overall construct of Enlightenment philosophies,
producing modernity.
Muslim
modernists have often reiterated this narrative, pointing out that, by adopting
Western modernity, Muslims were simply acculturating themselves with an Islamic
past that had been repressed by conservatives. Sir Syed understood this as a
battle between aqal (reason and logic) and naqal (tradition and ritual).
According to the 20th century Islamic modernist and scholar the late Fazal-ur-Rahman
Malik, Islam’s rational past does not fit the world view of ‘fundamentalists’
and radicals who, to challenge modernity, have constructed a largely
romanticised past to tout their disposition as being ‘authentic.’
In other
words, those who rejected acculturation (to modernity) by claiming it was
alien, were rejecting a repressed Islamic tradition that had inspired this
modernity, and falling back on a mythical understanding of the faith’s history
to justify their rebellion.
Original
Headline: THE ISLAMIST MYOPIA
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL:
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism