A Sceptical Islamist

Balancing the external and internal elements of the Islamic movement's work

(Perspectives, Crescent International, July 2010.)

The key objectives of the Islamic movement are the reassertion of Islamic values in Muslim societies, and the establishment of Islamic states in place of the corrupt, self-serving regimes that currently predominate in the Muslim world. Achieving these broad objectives depends on two key elements of the movement’s work. The first is external, to defeat the enemies of Islam whose aim is to prevent this from happening and to ensure that the Muslim world remains divided, weak and easily exploited. The second is internal, to understand what is involved in the reassertion of Islamic values and the establishment of Islamic states, and to make progress towards these objectives. The inability of many Muslims to understand that both these elements are equally important, and to balance them, accounts for many of the issues that the movement currently faces.

The Islamic movement needs institutional platforms for intellectual discourse

"The global Islamic movement is not organizationally or institutionally a single entity; instead it consists of countless scholars, intellectuals, activists, groups and movements, operating separately and independently, and following different strategies, methods and priorities according to their perceptions of the circumstances in their own parts of the world. Despite their theoretical understanding of the unity of the Ummah, most of these activists and movements have trouble relating their own struggles with those of other movements and of the fragmented Ummah as a whole...

"The movement is full of writers, commentators, analysts and scholars producing information, insights and ideas, and putting them out for public consideration as articles and papers; but most unfortunately are reaching only limited audiences, and few are effectively engaging in any meaningful exchange of ideas with others in similar positions. The main reason for this is that the platforms on which such writings are published tend to be of limited perspective and reach; and the few that aspire to be something more usually fail because of the limitations of their resources, quality and management. What the Islamic movement lacks is a larger institutional infrastructure for the circulation and exchange of ideas"

Book Review: The Islamic projects of Muhammad Asad and Alija Izetbegovic

"Discussing these early analytical works by Asad and Izetbegovic, Sherif points out that, without any influence from political Islamic movements in the Middle East, both men conclude from their reflections on Islam that it contains public and political elements as much as personal, spiritual ones, and that it is impossible to be a Muslim individually without striving also to build a community based on Islamic values...

"Fortunately for Sherif’s argument, and unlike so many Islamic activists whose lives have been cut short in one way or another, Asad and Izetbegovic both lived beyond their periods of activism to be able to look back and reflect on their lives and experiences in maturity. And in doing so, Sherif emphasises, both re-affirmed their commitment to the ideals they had expressed in their youths, despite the hardships and difficulties they had faced."

British Muslims and the problem of mainstream politics

"As in all general elections, British Muslims have been bombarded with advice as to whether and how they should vote. All the parties have appealed to the Muslim vote in constituencies where it has the potential to affect the result, while making sure they do not make promises to Muslims that can be used against them by their opponents... At the same time, there has been a variety of voices from within the Muslim community giving equally conflicting advice... Faced with this confusion, several British Muslim organizations have organized meetings to discuss how Muslims should engage with mainstream politics, and how they should use their votes to maximum effect.

"The problem is that the months and weeks before an election is the wrong time to be thinking about such issues, simply because there is no time to do anything about it. The immediacy of the situation forces Muslims into reactive and short-term responses, instead of more considered ones..."

Muslims intellectuals must take on the universal myths of democracy

"Sooner or later Muslim intellectuals, particularly those operating within Islamic movements, must take on the task of challenging the universal myth of democracy instead of pandering to it, and dare to define their ideas and the aspirations of the Ummah in purely Islamic terms. Until that happens Muslims will never achieve the conceptual clarity that will enable them to articulate their political ideas in terms that will offer a genuine and credible alternative to the seductive but oh-so-dangerous myths of democracy."

Lessons for the Islamic movement seven years after the invasion of Iraq

"This month marks the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion was no surprise of course; it was preceded by months of international politicking as the neo-con Bush administration tried to build international consensus for the war. Before that too, the US had been waging a soft war against Iraq for over a decade, and many commentators had predicted that the US would use the attacks on New York and the Pentagon in September 2001 as the pretext for finally invading.

"Muslims have watched subsequent events unfolding in Iraq with horror. While most attention worldwide has been US-centric, focussing on the political problems of the Bush administration, Muslims have paid more attention to the problems of Iraq’s long-suffering people. On the one hand, they have faced the ruthlessness with which the US dealt with all resistance to their occupation, symbolised by the near-genocidal assault on Fallujah in 2004... On the other has been the total failure of Islamic movements and leaders in the country — Sunni and Shi‘i alike — to provide the sort of wise and principled leadership required in the difficult situation created by the US invasion."

The Ikhwan’s difficult path between accommodation, repression and militancy

"The election last month of Mohammed Badei as the eighth Murshid al-‘Am (General Guide) of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, and the results of December’s elections for the Ikhwan’s Maktab al-Irshad (Guidance Bureau), have caused ructions among many western and secular observers of Egyptian politics...

The problem for secularists and the west is that the Egyptian public have repeatedly confirmed the Ikhwan as the country’s most popular and credible political party..."

The centrality of Arabic to the unity of the Ummah

"The fragmentation of the Ummah has been more than just political; just as serious has been its intellectual disintegration. Where once there was an Ummah-wide network of intellectual discourse that linked Muslims all over the world, today the Ummah is fragmented into Muslim communities with more interaction with the countries of their former colonial masters, be they Britain, France or Russia, than with each other; and increasingly even those channels of communication are being replaced by the cultural hegemony of America. One factor above all has been central to this process: that of language.

"Mustafa Kemal famously ripped Turkey away from its Islamic roots by westernising its language, replacing its Arabic script with Roman letters, and making the country’s Islamic heritage inaccessible to subsequent generations of Turks. Similar policies were pursued in other Muslim countries, particularly those under communist rule. What is less recognised is that Muslims all over the world have been similarly distanced from Islam by another linguistic process: the marginalisation of Arabic."

Palestinian politics settle into familiar pattern after hints of radical change

(News/Analysis, Crescent International, January 2009.)

For a few short weeks in the fall, after Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas announced that parliamentary and presidential elections would take place this month, and that he would not be standing for re-election, Palestinian politics seemed on the point of a radical shake-up. Last month, however, the various dislodged pieces settled back into a familiar, sterile pattern, and it quickly became clear that nothing had changed at all.

The importance of history for resisting the "imperialism of the mind"

"The decades of colonialism and postcolonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon), but which is still un-noticed by most Muslims. This is a cultural and intellectual hegemony that takes different forms but has a single net effect: that of encouraging (if not forcing) people to think in terms defined by Western discourses, whatever subject they are thinking about...

"Winston Churchill, a proud imperialist himself, famously said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”; that unfortunately is where we are today."