Can Islam Be Reformed? A Response Essay To Daniel Pipes
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5078
In a past article, I already discussed some issues of
Islamic civilization which we are apt to neglect in our analysis of the current
situation in the Middle East. Obviously, the
potential force of democracy to conquer once primitive countries has been
greatly overestimated; nobody will disagree anymore on that count. However, the
explanations for this failure of democracy vary a lot, and quite independent of
the political alignment of the commentators: it appears that all shades of
opinion are quite confused by what is happening in countries recently
“liberated” by the Arab Spring. The main reason for this confusion, as I stated
before, is that most people in the west do not understand the wider civilizational
questions involved: first, can we equate any popular uprising with an
ideologically inspired revolution, but second, and most importantly, can
revolutions in the Islamic world ever resemble those in the West and why are we
so sure that the Islamic pattern of history must correspond to the earlier
Western? The first point has been conceded by many observers, albeit implicitly
and not in wider historical context, since today the dominant opinion is that
these countries were not “ripe” for democracy and that popular rule does not
necessarily imply democracy as we understand it in the west. The second point
requires more insight, and is not even addressed by most commentators or
journalists, although in fact to pose the question of essential differences in
culture is not at all new; indeed, it only implies further investigation of the
popular thesis Samuel Huntington developed about the “clash of civilizations”.
But since western nations have lived in peace for over sixty years now, and we
tend to believe that the whole world potentially is a prosperous and peaceful
place like the western nation states, the concept of wholly different
civilizations has become quite incomprehensible to most opinion makers.
Nevertheless, we shall see it is essential to understand the ordeal the Muslim
world is currently going through.
A few days ago Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East
Forum, wrote an article, “Can Islam be reformed?”. As a good neoconservative,
Pipes believes that Islamic culture will ultimately be able to adapt to western
standards and that a reformed, reinterpreted version of Islam will emerge from
the contacts with western democratic influences. In his article, he
expressly shows Islamic civilization in
a very un-civilizational light: the issues in Islamic history are made to
appear a variation on what happened in the history of other cultures, namely an
endless sequence of wars and political upheavals, according to the classical
pattern of rise and fall: the extremism that plagues the Islamic world is in
fact a reaction to the decline of Islam since its golden age, and will wither
away once a democratic, economically successful alternative has been offered;
in this sense, the Islamist movement is not unlike communism and fascism, both
ideologies cashing in on political and economic hardship. Moreover, Islam is
not all that different from Judaism and Christianity: both religions have in
the past embraced views we would now find unacceptable: Islam can adapt to
modernity like other religions have. Pipes concedes that Islam today poses many
problems and not all of its tenets are very humane, but he believes that Islam
could be, as it were, absorbed by the west. In his most recent commentary on
the military coup in Egypt,
he reiterated his view that Islamism is just an extremist political fraction
vying for influence among the electorate, and that the majority of the
population are moderate Muslims desperately in search of answers to the crisis
of modernity.
It is surprising that a man who is so knowledgeable on
Islamic and Arab history, really thinks the Islamic world could be reformed.
This is especially surprising, since in fact democracy and rule of law have
hardly taken root in the rest of the non-western countries, and it remains to
be seen whether the experiment will be viable in the long run, especially as
western values are receding in the West itself at least since the first world
war. Western self-confidence is at an historical low, so the first question is:
why is there anything necessary about Muslims taking over western values and
political institutions? I argued earlier that Islamic culture itself is not
heading for a particularly happy future, but neither is the west, and if Islam
does not take over Europe, it will still
probably remain the same ossified theocratic system it has always been in the
Muslim world itself. Besides, Pipes’ constant reference to the Islamic golden
age, as if it were some shining example of human achievement and a tolerant,
open-minded era, is disturbing to say the least: by now we should know that the
power of Islam in this period was only brought about by brute military
conquest, that its famous cultural achievements were largely the work of
Christian and Jewish dhimmis, and that the Islamic world controlled so many
material and cultural resources simply because it had invaded the lands of
other cultures and withheld the benefits of trade from the Christian world. And
of course, Pipes does not mention that this was not a “golden age” at all for
many people, such as religious minorities, Hindus, and women. The reason it was
called a “golden age” by Muslims is because it was a golden age for the Islamic
conception of life, but not for humanity. So, on closer scrutiny, it becomes
clear that Islam was always rigorous and it has not known any more humane
periods or ups and downs like other civilizations, except in the military
sense. The proper question that would invalidate Pipes’ designation of Islamism
as a totalitarian doctrine on the pattern of fascism and communism, is: would
the average Muslim throughout history have considered the deeds and beliefs of
today’s Islamists and Islamic terrorists unjustified? Does the average Muslim
today even see anything inherently inhumane or un-Islamic in the deeds of
terrorists? I think Pipes knows the answer to these questions as well as most
of us do.
Pipes warns us for adopting an excessively “essentialist”
view of Islam, which means relying solely on Islamic scripture and doctrine in
explaining Islamic history and the actions of Muslims; however, it seems Pipes
should watch out not to adopt the absurdly empiricist view that is also held by
many political correct pundits, and which implies that the deeds of Muslims
only have general “human” motives, and religion is simply a justification of
these universal motives. It is all very well that Pipes himself can provide his
own moderate interpretation of Islam and sees history in the light of this
interpretation, but in the end it is the Muslims who decide how to interpret
their religion, not western academics. As Bill Warner put it, we can only
understand the actions of Muslims and Islamic history by first understanding
Islam and what it actually is, not the other way around. Otherwise we would
just be fooling ourselves and evading the main question.
In the past I stated that Islam was not really a
civilization at all, and this was not meant as a counterjihadist canard. There
is a theory,- which could very well be true- developed by Robert Spencer among
others, that the prophet Mohamed did not exist. Now, as is the case with
investigations into the origins of other religions, new findings in that field
do not change anything about the religion itself, because after time the
origins of a religion become irrelevant to the people who practice it; by then
it has evolved into an ethical system and a way of life. But new discoveries
and alternative views on the origins of a religion can clarify certain aspects
of that religion: in the thesis of Spencer, the Arab conquests of the seventh
century were simply barbarian invasions like those of the Huns before them and
the Vikings and Mongols after them, and Islam was probably invented by Arab
rulers after those conquests to ensure the coherence of their empire and confer
a degree of legitimacy on their rule. In this aspect, the Arab conquests differ
from other barbarian conquests in a crucial way: while the latter always
integrated in the societies they overran and adapted to foreign cultures, the
Arab tribes developed a system that gave them enough self-confidence to uphold
their old tribal structure and mode of thought. Indeed, Islam has many of the
characteristics of a huge tribe, as Israeli professor David Bukay explains in a
recent article: on closer examination, Islamic scriptures seem to above all to
concentrate on the distinction between Muslims and “the others”, which is
characteristic of all tribal peoples. The tribal ethics are collectivist in the
extreme: there are no human rights, no human dignity outside the tribe, and the
only goal its members know is the expansion and prolongation of the tribe.
Superficial studies suggest a parallel between the “conservatism” of Islam, and
traditional Christianity, but this is to miss a crucial point. In Islam, there
is no concept of universal ethics: ethics apply very stringently to fellow
Muslims, but what Christians would call the deadly sins are not at all
forbidden to Muslims. On the contrary they can be freely practiced among
non-believers: murder, (sex) slavery, extortion, theft, are all permitted if
the victims are non-Muslims. Not a universal conception of human dignity is the
concern of Islam, but the strength of the tribe, the umma. Thus, Islam is a
unique phenomenon in world history: it is a tribe of civilizational
proportions, and its viciousness is to be explained by the tribal mentality
that still utterly dominates its adherents.
A point that is often stressed but the implications of which
are never fully understood, is that in Islamic culture there is no division
between religion and state. This in fact means that Islam is to Islamic
civilization what rational thought, individualism, and its products, the nation
state and human rights, are to western civilization: its essence. The Muslim
mindset is determined by the convergence of the temporal and eternal order: it
does not even know of any distinction between the two. The origins of Islam and
Christianity could not be more different, and reveal why it is nonsense to
speak of “monotheistic religions”: Christianity offered hope of a better afterlife
and spiritual comfort within a degenerating pagan political order; Islam
originated in the desire of the Arab tribes for a justification of their tribal
feeling of superiority, and as a tool to consolidate their power and conquests.
Pipes is right when says that Islamism shares many
characteristics with fascism and communism, but what they do not share are
their origins and their place within the civilizations where they were born,
and this is the crucial point in the debate. Communism was a product of the
western world- view: it fitted exactly into the theological pattern of
Christianity. First there is a period of unbelief and darkness, classical
antiquity, then comes the establishment of the true faith, Christianity (the
Middle Ages); what comes after that, is essentially the pursuance of the
heavenly vision. After the stabilization of the Middle Ages, western culture
lost its guidance, as individuals and currents of thought followed their own
ways to reach their goals. One of the consequences of the increasing diversity
of western culture and the decline of the authority of the church was the birth
of utopianism, the idea that all human problems can be solved not in heaven but
on earth – in other words, the Christian paradise transferred to earth.
However, as it became clear these utopian visions resulted in mass destruction
and it could be proven they would never wield the promised results, they
collapsed, as communism did (and as, one day, cultural Marxism will too); there
was simply no reason left to adhere to them.
The totalitarianism of Islam is similar in structure, but
the big difference is that Islamic culture has never known anything else than
this utopian vision, that the ideal way of life can be imposed by religious
order in this world. Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, divides
history in only two periods: the period of unbelief and the establishment of
the true faith and thus of the ideal human condition, which in Christianity is
only found in the afterlife (or in a very distant future). That the Islamic
vision of heaven is quite irrelevant to Islam as a whole, attests to this
truth: the Islamic heaven is useful as a promise to self-sacrificing warriors
and therefore is very materialistic; it is in no way comparable to the Christian
version of the afterlife. To understand
Islam, one should imagine a Soviet Union where
communism was not some modern experiment, but had been the dominant political
system for ages, moreover divinely justified, and where consequently people
would not know of any alternative, even if the totalitarian system is
manifestly not working. The French political scientist Marcel Gauchet once said
that while Christianity is the religion of the departure from religion, Islam
is the religion of the return to religion. This sums it up perfectly.
The above should also make clear that the nineteenth and
twentieth century in the Muslim world do not in any way prove that Islamism is
an aberration or a reaction to western imperialism just like other reactions in
colonized areas: what is called “Islamism” is simply true Islam reappearing at
the surface after a period of humiliation – the Islam that has been practiced
throughout the ages. The secularized version of Islamic society, represented by
Kemalism, Baathism and Nasserism, was in fact the real aberration in Islamic
history. The fact that Muslim elites were willing to modernize up to a certain
point, and Muslim societies did not produce terrorists and such aggressive
critics of the west as today, does not constitute proof that Islam was so much
more tolerant back then: it was simply weaker, economically as well as
demographically, while the west was relatively stronger than it is today,
certainly in terms of self-confidence. Islam simply did not have bargaining power;
it had to be submissive. As this culture regained its demographic and financial
strength, its elites prepared for Islam to assert itself on the world stage as
it had always done: through Jihad, open or by stealth. Even the supposed
weakness of Islam during the period of western imperialism is partly a myth.
While elites modernized and proclaimed as national ideology a mixture of
nationalism, socialism, and whatever sort of populist attitudes were in vogue
in western progressive circles at the time, the majority of the people never
abandoned “true Islam”. And this, not western intervention, economic troubles,
etc., is the reason for the rise of “Islamism” in the twenty-first century:
Islamic civilization claiming back its old form of political organization. That
Pipes cites the example of Ataturk is symptomatic of his confusion: in what way
did Ataturk’s ideas have anything to do with Islam? Ataturk advocated
separation of church and state on the secular French model, himself acting as
though Islam were similar to Christianity. The necessity of maintaining power
by military means made clear that the deeply pious Muslim population did not
think alike. Indeed, what is left of Islam without it having power of the
state? By definition, it cannot be called Islam anymore at that point. It is
telling that all the really Muslim reformers (i.e. who were not later branded
as apostates) of the colonial period were only concerned with taking over some
practical political institutions of the west, but never really thought of
rejecting the literal interpretation of the Islamic scriptures. And a really
secular and democratic strain of thought of course never actually developed
within Islamic intellectual circles.
Western values are simply utterly alien to Islamic culture,
so it is difficult to see how Muslims will readily embrace them, let alone
understand their real meaning. These values are the product of the long and
arduous development of the West, and cannot just be replicated in or
transferred to other cultures. Modernization posed enough problems during the
period of western dominance and self-confidence, when other cultures feverishly
tried to imitate the west. It also poses more than enough problems in the
Orthodox countries like Russia
and Ukraine,
whose cultures share much of our Christian civilizational outlook. So why
should it work with a culture so large and by its own nature so arrogant and
isolated as Islamic culture? There is no doubt that if the Islamic world would
ever attain the level of the West, Islam would have to go. Totalitarian systems
either conquer the world or collapse, but never reform: otherwise they would
not be totalitarian in the first place. And there is also much truth in the
belief of neoconservatives that “we should reform them, or they will destroy
us”. But that Islam and the Islamic world-view could miraculously disappear, is
almost impossible, certainly in the light of the current fragmented situation
in the Muslim world. Perhaps we should learn to accept that western values are
unique to the western world, and stop ascribing our own motives and thoughts to
people in other parts of the world. We should ponder Revel’s rhetorical
question “And if the Occident was simply an accident?”- and defend that
accidental highest achievement of mankind in our own countries, and improve our
cultural self-defenses, instead of hoping in vain that the rest of the world
will civilize and attain our standards.