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Hermeneutics against Instrumental Reason: national and post-national Islam in the 20th century

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01436590801931512

1360-2241

Mohammed A. Bamyeh,

Religious Education and Schools

Abstract Islamic identity and secular anti-colonial nationalism implied initially similar approaches to modernity in the Middle East. Islamic currents of the time reinterpreted Islam in an ‘instrumental’ fashion as an accompaniment to developmental nationalisms, elaborating their cultural aspects. However, new Islamic currents of recent decades reject secularism in favour not of instrumental Islam but of a hermeneutic one. Unlike instrumental Islam, in which the project was to organise society, the goal in the emerging hermeneutic movement is to organise knowledge. While instrumental Islam mirrored the nationalism of the time, articulating many of its themes in spiritual format, the hermeneutic movement seems to be moving away from it. Therefore it does not easily fit the concept of cultural nationalism, appearing to go beyond the nation towards a post-national and postmodern world-view in which questions of development and cultural identity are subordinated to questions of universality, human existence and the possibility of knowledge. Notes An earlier version of this article appeared in The Macalester International (2005). I would like to express thanks to Michael Bodden and especially Radhika Desai for lengthy and discerning comments that greatly helped improve this work, and also for the kind invitation to take part in the lively workshops at the University of Victoria, from which I learned a great deal and enjoyed wonderful company. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers who helped improve the quality of this article. 1 The saturation of US politics with a variety of religious expressions, both liberal and fundamentalist, has become more obvious over the past three decades. Jimmy Carter was the first ‘born-again’ president in the contemporary period. For an overview, see S Diamond, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right, New York: Guilford, 2000. 2 The larger issue of Turkey's accession to the European Union casts a wider net around these debates, as it becomes a question of integrating an entire Muslim country rather than small immigrant communities. For an excellent recent collection on this issue, see C Leggewie (ed), Die Türkei in Europa: Die Positionen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. The cultural side of the debate in this collection clusters around inherently murky and insoluble issues concerning ‘the identity of Europe’. When the debate moves to practical matters, however, such as specific economic, political and legal reforms that Turkey must undertake in order to join the EU, it becomes clearer, focusing only on Turkey's ability to follow through on what is required. 3 For an elaboration of this concept, see M Bamyeh, ‘Postnationalism’, Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Inter-Faith Studies, Autumn/Winter, 2001. 4 Family law is an exception, evolving more conservatively than other branches and still viewed by the religious establishment as its proper domain. 5 Even after the dissolution of the Empire, its very last Sheyhulislam simply continued, in exile, to write arcane commentaries on medieval Muslim philosophers with no apparent relevance to contemporary realities, much less to the needs of the high office he had assumed. See F Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 6 The reforms in Egypt were directly motivated by the failure of the old Mamluk system to defend Egypt against occupation by Napoleon's forces in 1798 – 1801. In the Ottoman Empire the reforms were also directly related to successive military losses against European powers over a longer period. The military institutions of the Ottomans were modernised at a faster pace than other parts of the system, which may partially explain why Turkish modernity following World War I tended to be led by the military, with an authoritarianism combined with the notion of the military as a guardian institution supplementing the mythical status of Atatürk. 7 Charles Kurzman argues that Abd al-Raziq's thesis would have been perfectly acceptable just a few years before its appearance. A more accurate reading of the affair is that a few years earlier such a thesis would not have needed to be proposed. 8 I am using ‘conservative’ here to refer, conveniently, to institutional rigidity and reluctance to change patterns of behaviour embedded in institutions, not to refer to doctrines. For example, the Ottoman Empire officially subscribed to the Hanafi School of Islamic jurisprudence, that is, the most ‘liberal’ legal school within Sunni Islam. 9 The point might become more apparent if we were to compare it to the situation in the Muslim middle ages, where the Abbasid caliph was maintained for centuries as a rallying focal point of cosmopolitan Muslim loyalties, long after he had lost effective power. 10 See H Enayet,Modern Islamic Political Thought, London: Macmillan, 1982. For a critique of the Khilafat movement, see H Alavi, ‘Ironies of history: contradictions of the Khilafat movement’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, XVII (1), 1997. 11 See HAR Gibb, ‘The evolution of government in early Islam’, Studia Islamica, 4, 1955, pp 1 – 17. 12 M Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, London: Oxford University Press, 1934. 13 That was indeed Maududi's and the ji's main complaint about the Pakistan project. Though well entrenched in social networks, they nonetheless exercised little influence over the state or in parliamentary politics until the late 1970s. 14 As condensed in its semi-official website, http://www.ummah.net/ikhwan. 15 See Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna, ed C Wendell, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. 16 See, for example, DJ Sullivan, Private Voluntary Organizations in Egypt: Islamic Development, Private Initiative, and State Control, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994. 17 Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, ‘Ar-Risalah ath-Thaniya min al-Islam’, in Taha,Nahwa Mashru’ Mustaqbali Lil-Islam, Beirut: Al-Markiz ath-Thaqafai al-Arabi and Kuwait: Dar Qirtas, 2002, p 141. 18 For a recent appraisal, see M Hakan Yavuz & JL Esposito (eds), Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Global Impact of Fethullah Gülen's Nur Movement, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. 19 Soroush, of course, does not call himself Nietzschean, but the underlying similarities are striking. That being said, his major references include various Islamic philosophical traditions, Western philosophy of science, and Sufi poetry (notably Rumi's Mathnavi). 20 This feature appears to be the basis of the idea that Islam promotes cross-class alliances. See, for example, Y Atasoy, Turkey, Islamists and Democracy: Transition and Globalization in a Muslim State, London: IB Tauris, 2005, p 167. Yet the notion of ‘alliance’ misconstrues larger roles played by Islamic social discourse. These seem connected less to creating common agendas across the social fabric than to establishing structures of moral accountability and means of adjudicating conflicts. For a historical exposition of this latter role, see the discussion of the heteroglossic role of Islam in M Bamyeh, ‘Global order and the historical structures of Dar al-Islam’, in M Steger (ed), Rethinking Globalism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.