Strife

The Academic Blog of the Department of War Studies, King's College London

You are here: Home / Archives for islam

islam

Influence on the Arabic world by Macron’s Al Jazeera interview

by

By Clara Didier

 

What the Article I of the 1958 French Constitution has never been that threatened in decades and even more recently with the beheading of the French teacher, Samuel Paty. The Article I is at follows: ‘France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.’ In this article, we are going to analyse how France is fragilized between respecting all religions and denouncing religious extremism. For this purpose, a survey has been conducted, regrouping 24 answers from 87.5% being students both French or English, between 20-30 years old, 57.1% of woman, all from different religious backgrounds or none.

The three simultaneous terrorist attacks which happened the 13th of November 2015 in Paris, killed 130 people and injured 413. But not only they have hurt people, but they also explicitly attacked freedom and freedom of expression written in the articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Since then, a campaign against Islamism was ordered by François Hollande, the former French president. This fight against extremism, violence, reinterpretation of Islam is now continued by Mr Macron. Nonetheless, he is being misunderstood and we can ask ourselves if his policies towards Islamism are the right ones.

President Macron has enacted several controversial laws and actions. The first law on separatism at school and the second one being the authorization – or at least letting it happen – of circulating cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in schools. It happened in a context of national mourning, with the death of the French teacher Samuel Paty, decapitated because he showed those cartoons in class. But this authorization created an outrage among the Muslim community, both French and abroad. Boycotts were implemented against France and the French President has been severely criticized by numerous leaders and populations, it involved Turkey, Bangladesh, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even said that ‘Macron needs mental treatment’.

In this context, Mr Macron delivered an interview with Al-Jazeera, a Qatari satellite television channel. French newspaper Liberation, talks about a ‘well-calibrated clarification operation’. Not only because of the Qatar-based channel’s notoriety and extensive Arabic-speaking audience, but because it has been at the forefront of relaying anti-French criticism across Arab-Muslim countries. The interview was given a day after the attack in Nice’s church. What can be remembered from his speech is his feeling of being widely misunderstood. Indeed, the Arab-Muslim world understood that he was the one authorizing cartoons to be showed to children. The cartoons of the Prophet were not published at the initiative of the government but by ‘free and independent newspapers’, he explained. He underlined, ‘I understand that one can be shocked by cartoons, but I will never accept that violence can be justified. Our freedoms, our rights, I consider that it is our vocation to protect them.’ Translations of his speeches were incorrect and as his interviewer Salam Kawakibi explains: ‘It is a lesson that is necessary in countries where all expression is locked by power and where people cannot imagine that a newspaper publishes what it wants without a green light from above’.

Through the survey I have made, I analysed the repercussion of this interview. I noticed a clear divergence of opinion, on the one hand some people thought that the speech was ‘inflammatory’, ‘unnecessary’ or even ‘paternalist’. On the other hand, some people thought it was a ‘straightforward communication from Macron’, ‘he clearly distinguishes between Islamist terrorists and moderate Muslims who practice their faith peacefully’ and that ‘any accusations of Islamophobia regarding Macron’s speech are totally unwarranted (and unfortunately politically motivated)’. 54.2% think that the last law from the French government regarding separatism and secularity is not Islamophobic, against 41.7% who think it is. Subsequently, 62.5% do not believe that showing cartoons of the Prophet in schools is Islamophobic. Almost all of those interviewed, knew the difference between Islam and Islamism. Furthermore, 70.8% condemn the boycotts against France.

Through the analysis of this survey, it has come to my understanding that it is still unclear for people how Macron is handling Islamism in France. Answers by French individuals were more straightforward and informed contrary to English ones. So, was his interview understood by everyone? And more importantly by the Arabic world? According to Qatari newspaper, the French president’s interview was ‘a world-class media event’.

Probably one of the most spectacular reactions is from the UAE Foreign Minister, Anwar Gargash. In the German daily Die Welt, he said: ‘You should listen to what Macron really said in his speech: he doesn’t want the ghettoisation of Muslims in the west, and he is absolutely right’. He added: ‘with his attacks on France, Erdogan is manipulating a religious issue for political purposes’, Muslims ‘are in need to be integrated in a better way; the French state has the right to search for ways to achieve this in parallel with combating extremism and societal closure.’ The Egyptian editorialist Waël Qandil wrote in the columns of the Qatari website Al-Araby Al-Jadid ‘Macron: more than a step back, almost an excuse’. According to him, ‘he has completely changed his language and adopted a conciliatory tone’. This statement is to be put in contrast with his last column before the interview, calling Mr Macron an ‘obsessive racist’ who ‘shoots hate bullets’ at Muslims. This reaction from some Arab media outlets suggests that this interview did have a positive impact, even if considered as an ‘excuse’, the Arabic world (for most countries), better understand Macron’s policies now.

Nonetheless, when we look at the other end of the Arab political spectrum, with Hakem Al-Mutairi for example, one of the founding members of the Salafist movement in Kuwait, reacted on his Twitter account: ‘Macron’s retreat on Al-Jazeera is a diabolical ruse. The Islamic boycott must continue until the official stop of the exhibition of the drawings and until there is a real apology for this serious aggression against Islam’.

On Monday 7 December 2020, Mr Macron met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi. The latter told the press at the Elysée that religious values must have supremacy over human values and that ‘human rights come second’. His French counterpart replied: ‘The value of man is superior to everything’. Once again, the French president shows his determination to govern a secular country that respects everyone. However, the award of the Legion of Honour given to the Egyptian president was a sensation, once again questioning the words and convictions of President Macron.

To conclude, France is attacked on all its fronts, on all its borders and on all its values but will never stop to respect everyone.

 

My name is Clara Didier, I’m a 20 years old French International Relations MA student at King’s College. I would like to become a war reporter in the future and work especially in two regions, the Middle-East and South America. I’ve always been interested in war related subjects as my father taught history and geography when I was younger. And more recently, since the Bataclan’s attacks as a family member was in the front line, in terrorism. Regarding war I am particularly interested in secret wars, secrecy, hidden intelligence, what is happening backstage and the results of it, sometimes leading to dirty consequences. Regarding terrorism, it’s a human and sociological curiosity that pushed me in studying how someone (especially citizens in democratic countries) can decide to enroll, radicalise and use violence.

Religion as an Impediment for Social Distancing in Bangladesh

by

by Shuva Das

Thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims gather for the funeral of a popular Islamic preacher on Saturday, April 18, 2020. (Image credit: CNN)

For a few months now, countries from across the globe sustained lockdowns in various forms to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus known as the SARS-CoV-2. This development exposed a clash between some requirements of the prescribed measures for social distancing and the traditions of major religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. In the world’s eighth-most populous country, Bangladesh, as elsewhere, the pandemic keeps the entire nation at high risk with a persistent rise of cases from 8 March 2020 onwards. In April, the United Nations issued a warning to Bangladesh, arguing that the country could face two million deaths from the fatal virus.

Yet the measures that Bangladesh adopted so far to maintain social distancing in its ongoing lockdown have remained ineffective at best. Several reasons stand out, yet chief among these are daily shopping, financial considerations, and religious commitments. In the densely populated country, daily gatherings of people effectively emasculated the social distancing measures, with crowds coming together in markets without virtually any caution. Besides, since scores of people live hand to mouth, the allegedly corrupted government system for relief distribution and the uncooperative stance of many private industries including the monumental garment sector further aggravated the poor implementation of the lockdown; and with it, the plight of the country’s citizens. Thus, people of this economic line cannot but attend to their work.

Moreover, religion also appeared as a significant hurdle and concern for social distancing measures in the majority Muslim country because of certain sensitive issues pertaining to the (observation of) religion. In this article, I will explain this particular aspect.

Islamic preachers of Bangladesh in Waz Mahfils (instructive and explanatory Islamic discussion) presented outlandish divine conspiracy theories for the outbreak of coronavirus. Their coronavirus-related speeches are widely shared sensations on social media pages of Bengali speaking people around the world. Over the eruption of the coronavirus in China, Kazi Ibrahim, a prominent Islamic preacher, claimed that an Italian Muslim resident held a heavenly conversation with the virus in his dream. According to Ibrahim, the coronavirus told the dreamer that the almighty Allah sent it as soldier to attack the Chinese for repressing and harassing the Uyghur Muslim population.

Another popular Islamic scholar Tarek Monowar told in a speech that a singer execrating Azan (prayer) has lately visited Bangladesh and performed at a stadium. Monowar then vented the coronavirus was looking for enemies of Islam to terminate them. Another cleric came up with an idea that except for adherents of Islam, the rest of the world would soon be infected by the virus. Other similarly invented tricky statements after the virus spread in Iran and also other Muslim countries including Bangladesh. Iran is supposedly paying dearly for its presumed distortion of the Islamic faith, while Muslims of other countries must not be pious enough to be saved.

Such kind of remarks by these so-called religious scholars injects blind faith among the laity and was lambasted by renowned atheist scholars like Richard Dawkin and Christopher Hitchens for long. A professor of Islamic Studies at Dhaka University, Bangladesh, said to the New Age, a national daily newspaper, those spurious speeches of the clerics ─ who, without any expertise nor knowledge about the disease gave an expert opinion on the matter ─ wrongfully represented Islam, a religion of peace and harmony.

What the Islamic pundits of Bangladesh try to establish through their lectures filled with manipulation and bigotry is to erroneously show the superiority of Islam and to increase their followers. In this regard, there is an indirectly substantial resemblance between Bangladeshi Islamic scholars and India’s Hindu nationalists belonging to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the present ruling party of India. Some leaders of the BJP have prescribed cow urine and dung for the prevention and remedy of the coronavirus. Not surprisingly, cow urine drinking party was arranged by Hindu hardliners on 14 March 2020, to seek divine intervention against the scourge of the virus. Also, they boast that the traditional greeting system with “Namaste”, vegetarian eating culture, and traditional treatment of medicine (Ayurveda) of Hinduism have protected India from any epidemic.

In reality, India, however, experienced several pandemics, namely cholera, dengue fever, and malaria. Through such false, irrational narratives, the messages of Indian Hindu nationalists are generating intolerance and religious hatred among Hindus against the Muslim minority in the country. Similarly, the Muslim preachers of Bangladesh can breed the same bigotry sentiments among Muslims to the other religious groups. Such groundless statements by the Bangladeshi Islamic scholars are a looming threat to the social distancing measures of the country. Its population has a very tender mindset and they are highly gullible to religious teachings by the clerics. In so doing, social distancing measures are ignored by a vast number of Muslims, with many people prioritising their religious practices above safety measures against the virus to score more “points” in securing their ticket to Paradise.

On 18 April 2020, after defying the lockdown order of government, around 100,000 people participated in the funeral of a famous Islamic preacher in eastern Bangladesh, this against the backdrop of the ongoing outbreak in the country. The swarmed event caught the attention of the international media and rightfully drew a lot of criticism. The police could not do anything to prevent the unexpected flood of the mass. In turn, the government immediately tried to exonerate themselves by withdrawing several important police officers from the region. It is a method similarly used by the authoritarian Chinese government to uphold their positive image during a bad situation, by blaming or suspending responsible government officials.

The above-mentioned gathering was a follow-up of a recent mass prayer in Bangladesh where an estimated thirty thousand Muslims attended to seek holy intercession against the virus. Two big consecutive failures of the government to prevent the mass religious gatherings indicate not only their haplessness but a form of appeasement policy to Islamic groups. Yet it is an old pain. Every ruling government of Bangladesh maintains such a policy in order to secure Muslim votes and regime support.

In addition, though the Bangladesh Islamic Foundation, a government organisation affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urged people not to take prayer in mosques with more than five to ten people. This specific order has been breached in many places, even with several violent incidents. One person has recently died and several others got injured in a violent clash over who could pray at the mosque. Here, it is important to mention that general people of the country have seemingly nothing but God for their mental gratification and their battle against the pandemic.

As per Islamic instructions, if any persons including the sick could get affected by a risk of death or epidemic, it is allowed to pray at home. The Prophet Muhammad also gave clear instructions to Muslims in quarantine: ‘If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place’. Islamic instructions like this ought to be reiterated by religious scholars; to prevent a massive number of people from attending a funeral, a religious gathering, or prayer places amid the epidemic.

The failure of the Bangladesh government to address religious gatherings, fanaticism, propaganda, and religious manipulation led to an ineffective implementation of social distancing measures. It was reported earlier that unchecked religious practices triggered infection considerably in some countries: in Korea by Shincheonji Church; in India by Tablighi Jamaat; in Israel by Ultra-Orthodox Communities; and so on. Bangladeshi people and its government ought to learn from these countries. The government should also counter those lockdown-disrupting clerics by legal decrees and establish a strong monitoring system to filter out any misinformation from social media. As always, it will remain true that ‘religion is for individuals while the pandemic can be for all’.

Shuva Das holds a BSS (Hons) degree in International Relations from Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University in Gopalganj, Dhaka, Bangladesh. His articles have appeared in Synergy: The Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies and in The Oxford University Politics Blog, among others.

 

Book Review: “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?”

by

Reviewed by: Millie Radovic

Gurcan, Metin. What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?: Understanding Counter-Insurgency Efforts in Tribalized Rural and Muslim Environments. Helion and Company, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-911096-00-9.

 

The term ‘Counter-Insurgency’, also known as COIN, has in the post-9/11 era become synonymous with Afghanistan. Nearing its sixteenth year, the NATO-led campaign to defeat the Taliban insurgency that followed the US invasion in 2001, is not short of critical literature. In Metin Gurcan’s What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?, the author tackles several questions: Why have so many efforts in Afghanistan been futile? Why has this been such a persistent conflict? And, what are we missing in our current understandings of the Afghan state and society? His answer to all these is Tribal Rural and Muslim Environments (TRMEs) and it is their characteristics that he goes on to analyze.

As a seasoned veteran in the practice and theory of Western military interventions, Gurcan uses his personal experiences of growing up in a rural Muslim environment in Turkey and working in Afghanistan as a military consultant between 2000 and 2008 to introduce a new perspective on COIN strategy - the primacy of tribalism. In other words, he argues that TRMEs are the defining feature of Afghanistan[1]. While conventional literature deems these ‘ungoverned’[2], he contends that they very much are regulated by their own norms, rules, and structures. In the first chapter, Gurcan defines TRMEs and outlines their key characteristics in relation to the state, family, Islam, justice, and violence. Thereafter, he uses this framework to examine modern Afghan history, and finally outlines the implications that TRMEs have on the nature and success rates of NATO-led COIN efforts in Afghanistan.

Gurcan’s key contribution to the current modern literature on Afghanistan is his emphasis on the importance of tribal order, a unique prevalence of Islam, and a rural landscape. Tribal order, as he defines it, “is a particular form of socio-economic and political control that completely rejects other belief systems introduced by the outsiders into the traditional way of life.”[3] He highlights that tribal orders are not resistant to adaptation and change, but that any transformation must be on their terms and that the very core tenets of their modus operandi do not change. Therefore, “any political solution disregarding the fact of territorial identities of the tribes or violating them may be confronted by strong reactions from the tribes.”[4] Gurcan’s well-defined framework of the Afghan tribal order and its relationship with society lends a perspective into Afghan society that is often undermined or ignored in COIN literature, and implies that our failures in COIN have been fashioned by our misunderstanding of the local environment. For example, Gurcan observes that state borders are meaningless for tribes[5], how in TRMEs “authority not reasoning comes to the conclusion about correct action”[6], yet that also “battles between tribes are never fought so fierce that one side attempts to annihilate the other completely”[7]. His observations challenge common value-based perceptions of what the social structure of a state ought to be.

Another highlight of Gurcan’s book is his poignant use of anecdotes and hypotheticals. He immerses the reader in the milieu of a local Afghan in the middle of the insurgency. His continual use of hypotheticals to explain the mentality of tribal leaders, or to explain the dilemmas of ISAF commanders, and show the importance of interpreters offer a candid picture of the Afghan environment.

The niche theme suggests that the target audience is not broad, but aims at a readership that has already in some way engaged with COIN and Afghanistan before. If this indeed is the case, many of components of the book are arguably redundant and unnecessary. For example, the second chapter spends much unnecessary time on outlining the geography, demography and modern history of Afghanistan. If an informed audience is assumed, then the section itself is excessive. It gathers commonly known facts into a chapter to conclude that these factors have had four commonly known impacts on rural Afghanistan. Such impacts are the removal of tribal structures from governance, the emergence of new networks of political Islamists under the Taliban’s flag, the development of violence as a ‘norm’ in settling socio-political and economic issues, and the destruction of traditional economic structures making room for warlordism.[8] Meanwhile, in the final chapter, Gurcan states that he will address ‘generally unknown’ issues of COIN strategies in Afghanistan. However, much of it reads like a compilation of existing work on counterinsurgency theories – those of David Galula, David Kilcullen, and John Nagl – together with contemporary literature on Afghanistan and the Taliban. However, Gurcan’s first-person insight into Afghan society makes this book authentic.

Finally, all of Gurcan’s arguments on how we have misunderstood Afghanistan are convincing, yet his angle of analysis is so narrow that he straps himself into a policymaking straightjacket. By stressing local level understanding as the sole most important component of COIN efforts, Gurcan avoids broader overarching factors. His understandings of corruption, even norms, and security and justice appear solely defined by his experience of Afghanistan. This eliminates any value-based judgment of the issues and – as he admits himself – setting this book up for a problem-structuring, but not problem-solving narrative. As such, in order to yield results, this book must be accompanied by multiple other readings on the issues he refers to and a thorough knowledge of the COIN campaign in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, with vast tactical implications, What Went Wrong in Afghanistan is an essential contribution to the literature on COIN in Afghanistan. It is yet another reminder that as books like Gurcan’s improve our understanding of Afghanistan, our efforts must begin capitalizing on them.

Millie Radovic (@millie_radovic) is a final-year British student reading for a BA in International Relations at the Department of War Studies in King’s College London.

Notes:

[1] Gurcan, Metin. What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?: Understanding Counter-insurgency Efforts in Tribalized Rural and Muslim Environments. Helion and Company, 2016. p.15

[2] See Mills, Greg. “Calibrating Ink Spots: Filling Afghanistan’s Ungoverned Spaces.” The RUSI Journal 151, no. 4 (2006): 16-25; Rabasa, Angel. Ungoverned territories: Understanding and reducing terrorism risks. Vol. 561. Rand Corporation, 2007; Schetter, Conrad. “7 Ungoverned territories.” The Spatial Dimension of Risk: How Geography Shapes the Emergence of Riskscapes 27 (2012): 97.

[3] Metin, What Went Wrong in Afghanistan? (2016). p.33

[4] Ibid. p.35

[5] Ibid. p.52

[6] Ibid. p.39

[7] Ibid. p.50

[8] Ibid. p.91

Feature image credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

Review: 'The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East' by Efraim Karsh

by

Reviewed by: Bradley Lineker & Samar Batrawi

images

 

Efraim Karsh. The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East. London & New York: Bloomsbury/ Continuum, 2015. ISBN: 978-14-72-91046-2. Pp. 236. Hardcover. £21.99.

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East is the latest book from Efraim Karsh, professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and King’s College London. While situated in his wider project of challenging the supposed orthodoxies inherent in the study of the region, Karsh’s core argument in this book is the alleged need to shift explanations for the region’s instability away from external pressures and instead place them squarely upon ‘Middle-Easterners’[i] themselves.[ii]

While the simplicity of the book’s title intimates that this argument is embedded into a straightforward package, the ambiguity of the subtitle (for the uninitiated, it reads: ‘a complex discourse in a complex geographical region’) hints at the dichotomy between the stated aim and the text’s actual structure and content. On the one hand, Karsh manifestly fails to give a voice to the apparent orthodoxy inherent to scholarship on the Middle East – which considerably weakens his claim to disprove it – and on the other hand, Karsh, instead of taking an approach based on assessing the work of other scholars, chooses to try and prove how this other position is incorrect by retelling the history of the modern Middle-East across a paltry 192 pages of generously-spaced text. While these two dichotomies would be themselves enough to mar the text, together, with the book’s polemical style, Karsh’s blithe historical determinism, the use of a narrow selection of English-orientated sources, and the seemingly random selection of chapter topics, they mortally undermine any attempt to construct a convincing platform to change approaches to the Middle East.

Situated within the same paradigm of Karsh’s other work, then, this book is at best a sketch of the professor’s reading of the formation and present make-up of the modern Middle East, book-ended between an argument that does not explicitly resonate in the detail of the text; at worst, it is a disjointed collection of chapters written to support a charged political stance without enough meaningful evidence-based discussion, aesthetically covered by a singular-deterministic narrative on a region known for its complexity. Indeed, ‘Middle Easterners’ (as Karsh calls them[iii]) are subject to sweeping and unverifiable generalisations, such as the following assessment:

‘[f]or Western observers, the passage “from dark into light” that was the “Arab Spring” meant transition to a liberal, secular democracy. For Middle Easterners it meant a return to the Islamic sociopolitical order that had underpinned the region for over a millennium[,] as the schizophrenic state system established in its place after World War I failed to fill the void left by its destruction.’[iv] Perhaps the most toxic misunderstanding of ‘Middle Easterners’ and Muslims in Karsh’s book is illustrated by his casual replacement of the word ‘Islamist’ by ‘Islamic’, equating the collective, organised, and political Islam, denoted by the word ‘Islamist’, with the personal religious devotion designated by ‘Islamic’.[v]

The book begins in the early 20th century[vi] and is thereafter divided thematically into 8 other chapters that follow a loose chronological structure and which range from the Israel/Palestine conflict,[vii] American policy in Iran,[viii] Soviet engagement in the Middle-East,[ix] an assessment of American policy since 2001,[x] as well as a breezy chapter on today’s Middle East. While historical in scope, the book is stylistically a right-leaning polemic tentatively based in international relations discourse. Indeed, one of the core historical premises used by Karsh is that Islam was born in fire[xi] and that this ‘imperial aggressiveness,’[xii] and the wider predisposition towards violence,[xiii] survived the fall of the Ottoman Empire ‘to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics … [in] the twenty-first century.’[xiv]

However, at times, it appears that Karsh has constructed – with a remarkably fine-tooth comb – a specific historical narrative, coloured by patterns of thinking that have emerged in the post-American intervention world, to support his own political stance on the modern Middle East. His own narrative, as he openly admits, is to expel the influence of foreign powers on the Middle East;[xv] to thereby pointedly blame indigenous groups for the relative instability. This is mirrored in the detail used to prove fairly basic points, which does not, as he surmises, facilitate reader understanding but rather seems self-serving and out of place. This is certainly evident in his discussions of the birth of Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians: the former is accorded significant attention and detail – to promulgate a specific founding narrative – whereas, in the case of the latter, he makes no mention of the forced displacement in 1948, excepting one cryptic defensive paragraph that makes the bold claim that Palestinians left despite the wishes of the Jewish forces.[xvi] Moreover, in the sub-section ‘Courting Hitler’, Karsh lists every Arab overture to the great enemy of ‘perfidious Albion’[xvii] in the 1930s and 1940s in a way that is inescapably spiteful, especially upon reflection of the way his argument unfolds in the rest of the book. For instance, while Arab overtures towards Hitler are judged in moral terms,[xviii] Karsh upholds the same patterns of behaviour – of playing one great power off against another – as the accepted norm in international relations in his depictions of the Cold War (he essentially glorifies Egypt on this regard)[xix]. Finally, Karsh often criticises the Middle East’s preponderance to harmful religious exclusivism, while, often within the same sentence, arguing that Israel is an example against this trend – despite evidently being an entity enthused with patterns of institutionalised religious exclusivism.[xx]

While ultimately lop-sided to Karsh’s political paradigm, the book does manage to provide a decent overview of some of the events that it covers: such as the politics behind the post-First World War fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire’s possessions in the Levant and ancient Mesopotamia, as well as a good American-based summary of the intelligence failure during the Iranian Revolution. However, even the book’s strongest sections are marked by the fact that the issues they cover are always better covered elsewhere in more specialised studies.

 

Bradley Lineker is currently a fully-funded ESRC doctoral candidate in the War Studies Department, King’s College London, where he studies refugee shelter provision in Jordan. He has extensive experience working as a consulting research analyst with the UN and the private sector on contexts like Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia and Syria. Follow him @BradleyLineker.

Samar Batrawi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she studies social movements in Palestine. She has worked for the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Palestine, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in London, and the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague. Follow her at @SamarBatrawi.

 

 

Notes:

[i] Karsh, The Tail Wags the Dog, p. 2, p. 157.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 1-2.
[iii] Ibid., p. 157.
[iv] Ibid., p. 183.
[v] Ibid., p. 188.
[vi] Ibid., p.9.
[vii] Ibid., pp. 31-48, pp. 49-62.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 63-80.
[ix] Ibid., pp. 81-102.
[x] Ibid., pp. 153-174.
[xi] Ibid., p. 188.
[xii] Ibid., p. 155.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 187.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 155.
[xv] Ibid., p. 2.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 59.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 19.
[xviii] Ibid., pp. 35-37.
[xix] Ibid., pp. 1-2.
[xx] Ibid., p. 189.

 

 

 

 

Revisiting the ‘Islamic Reformation’: Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s approach will not work

by

By Samar Batrawi and Bradley Lineker:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. New York, USA: Harper Collins., 2015. Pages: 288. $14.99 (hardback). ISBN: 9780062333957

Recent discourse on Islamic radicalisation and extremism has placed increased emphasis on the role of violence supposedly inherent within Islamic scripture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation can be seen as a continuation of this modality of thought. Contrary to claims that the ideas and methods of groups like the Islamic State or Boko Haram are ‘un-Islamic’,

Hirsi Ali argues that Islamic scripture itself contains the core justification for radical action, rather than a wider plurality of explanations that other commentators have emphasised. [i] Consequently, in the book, Hirsi Ali puts forward the conditions by which she thinks an ‘Islamic Reformation’ should occur. This review will critically evaluate her diagnosis of radicalisation and violence as stemming directly from Islamic scripture, while situating her work within the wider discourse on radicalisation, violence and Islam.

The Five Points of Hirsi Ali’s Islamic Reformation

The core part of Hirsi Ali’s argument consists of the identification of five theological principles that should be the subject of an Islamic Reformation. The first is ‘Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina.’[ii] The second principle is ‘[t]he investment in life after death instead of life before death’[iii], which Hirsi Ali strongly associates with violent jihad.

The third principle focuses on Islamic jurisprudence, Sharia, which she approaches from two different directions. On the one hand, she argues that Sharia problematically institutionalises legal norms found within the religious texts, which were designed as part of the initial political project of the Prophet Muhammad amid the rapid expansion of the original Caliphate. On the other hand, these norms are depicted as building into an informal process of social censorship and self-regulation. Thus, Hirsi Ali particularly notes how concepts like honour reinforce power dynamics, which are built to ensure compliance with specific norms. This taps into Hirsi Ali’s fourth point of reform: ‘[t]he practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong.’[iv]

Finally, in her fifth area of needed reform, Hirsi Ali addresses ‘[t]he imperative to wage jihad, or holy war’[v], an area that perhaps represents the culmination of the preceding four principles, which she unconstructively says must simply be ‘take[n] … off the table’[vi].

Scripture Alone is an Insufficient Explanation

The core thematic argument that suffuses Hirsi Ali’s book is that Islamic scripture is the root problem in the Islamic world; a process which finds expression in the repression of women and religio-ethnic minorities, social conservatism, radicalisation and religious violence.

This is a problematic position since, as William McCants argues, scripture is a constant feature of the history of Islam, and yet radicalisation and violence are not. Scripture itself informs the basic framework which a variety of diffuse Islamic groups around the world use to order their respective worlds. Though Islamic scripture may build into a general explanation, on its own it is not sufficient to account for modern extremism in the way that Hirsi Ali contends. Contextual factors, like socio-economic grievances, and – possibly even more important according to Shiraz Maher – the search for identity and belonging .

Hirsi Ali argues that Islam’s preoccupation with the afterlife inevitably leads to violence and other negative outcomes. However, investing one’s life for the purposes of life after death is itself a positive constant in many strands of moderate and conservative strand of religions, including Islam. Indeed, life before death is not, as Hirsi Ali insists, meaningless to Muslims; it is regulated by cultural-religious norms that are often institutionalised, and cannot be logically developed into ready-made extremism.

This is also the case with her fourth principle of reform, ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’, which may be unique in view of its comprehensiveness within modern Islam, yet it is undeniable that most religions have been constructed along these lines. Hirsi Ali’s emphasis on Islamic scripture and jurisprudence, at the expense of more fluid contextual variables, threatens to not only overlook much of the complexity that underpins the desirability of rigid structures of social control, but also to relegate this social model as a type of barbarianism that is somehow unique to Islam.

Islam against the West

Bearing this in mind, Hirsi Ali’s arguments on scripture are themselves – much like the book in general – situated within a wider Western intellectual trend that, as Edward Said famously argued, approaches Islam from a position of ‘dominance[,] … confrontation [and] cultural antipathy’.[vii] The analogy that Hirsi Ali uses throughout the book, the comparison between West and East in the Cold War – itself recently used, for example, by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in response to the Tunisia attacks in July 2015[viii] – are symptomatic of Said’s general diagnosis.

There are two consequences of this position: the Islamic Reformation is framed as a zero-sum ‘war of ideas’[ix], between a newly reformulated East and West; and the liberal capitalism of which Hirsi Ali speaks is presented as a superior Western commodity which Muslims can only humbly aspire to one day import. This intellectual structure permeates many of the book’s examples, which are in fact an accumulation of sensationalist, out-of-context events that – owing to their diversity – are difficult to generalise into broader narratives.

The book also falls down in respect to its lack of engagement with Salafism in any meaningful way – despite it being the broad ideological inspiration for many of the groups that Hirsi Ali assesses. For example, she claims that ‘[t]he IS agenda is in some respects not so different from that of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Saudi Wahhabist teachings; it is just that their methods are more exposed.’[x]

Yet these groups cannot be reduced to points on a scale that only measures brutality, as both doctrine and method have been acknowledged to differ substantially among Salafists. For example, on the one hand, Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups have often operated within existing (un-Islamic) political systems – such as Hamas’ participation in the Palestinian elections in 2006. On the other hand, IS deems these systems as heretical and illegitimate, and aims to dismantle and replace them. As has been noted elsewhere, [xi] attitudes towards political participation reflect just one of many ongoing intra-Salafist debates[xii]; a complexity that is swept aside by Hirsi Ali’s narrow focus upon the primacy of Islamic scripture and simplistic logical pathway to extremism that this supposedly engenders.

As noted above, this intellectual trend regarding Islam is not new, but seems to be intricately linked to the process that Edward Said once described in his book ‘Covering Islam’. Said’s observations help describe the deeper historical problems within Western understandings of Islam. Perhaps Said’s most important lesson is one the West still has not learned more than 30 years after he wrote it, and which is painfully embedded in Hirsi Ali’s liberal capitalist case for an ‘Islamic Reformation’: that the Islamic World is defined negatively as that with which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework limiting knowledge of Islam.’[xiii] Hirsi Ali’s book is undoubtedly situated within the most radical fringes of this paradigm, as her approach expresses deep cultural antipathy towards the Islamic world.

Conclusion

Ultimately, then, Hirsi Ali’s attempt to demarcate an ‘Islamic Reformation’ has merely vocalised a troubled Western conception of Islam that will do little to actually germinate the process that she is ostensibly trying to create.

This dichotomy itself is found in her choice of the first part of her title – ‘Heretic’ – and her project – of developing the principles for an ‘Islamic Reformation’ – the former involves polarisation, whilst the latter infers a process of amelioration. This depiction of Islam in zero-sum terms – much like Bernard Lewis in his essay ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, which would inspire Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, between the civilising liberal-capitalist ‘West’ and the barbarous traditional ‘East’ – threatens to over-simplify and divide discourse and opinion on Islam in terms reminiscent to the fear and mistrust of the Cold War. While, for example, the literal and uncritical enforcement of the Sharia system of jurisprudence – itself clearly designed for past social structures – is indeed problematic for human rights discourse in the modern age, polarisation and division will never be the solution to untying this particular Gordian knot.

Moreover, simply escaping Islam, as Hirsi Ali advocates for those ‘trapped between their conscience and the commands of Muhammad’[xiv], is also neither practical nor desired for many Muslims.

These issues are part of the wider debate – touched on briefly in this piece – of the West’s relationship with Islam, and, in the face of Hirsi Ali’s book, it is clearer than ever that more people, other than just self-proclaimed ‘heretics’, need to be involved in this discussion to avoid the monopolisation of the ‘Muslim voice’ in the West.

Samar Batrawi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she studies Salafism in Lebanon. She has worked for the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Palestine, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in London, and the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague. Follow her at @SamarBatrawi.

Bradley Lineker is currently a fully-funded ESRC doctoral candidate in the War Studies Department, King’s College London. He has extensive experience working as a consulting research analyst with the UN and the private sector on contexts like Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia and Syria. Follow him @BradleyLineker.

NOTES

[i] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 22

[ii] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 24

[iii] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 24

[iv] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 24

[v] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 24

[vi] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 206

[vii] Said, E. (1981), Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage Books), p. xvii

[viii] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11138344/David-Cameron-Fight-against-Islamic-extremism-is-like-World-Wars.html

[ix] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p.220

[x] Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), pp. 163-164

[xi] See Hegghammer (2009), Jihadi-Salafis or Revolutionaries? On Religion and Politics in the Study of Militant Islamism, in Meijer (ed.), Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurst & Co), pp.258-262

[xii] For an excellent collection of perspectives on global Salafism and the different intra-Salafi debates, see Meijer, R. (ed.) (2009), Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurts & Co)

[xiii] Said, E. (1981), Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage Books), p. 163

[xiv] Hirsi Ali maintains that she believes that leaving Islam as she did is still the best choice for Muslims ‘who feel trapped between their conscience and the commands of Muhammad’, Hirsi Ali, A. (2015), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: HarperCollins), p. 51