"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."
(Book Review, Crescent International, May 2010.)
WHY AN ISLAMIC STATE? – THE LIFE PROJECTS OF TWO GREAT EUROPEAN MUSLIMS by M. A. Sherif. Pub: Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur, 2009 (www.ibtbooks.com). Pp: 49. Pbk: US$3.00.
Reviewed by Iqbal Siddiqui
Studying the recent history of the Islamic movement, one finds the names of numerous Muslims who have committed their lives to Islam and made great contributions to the Ummah, and in particular to the Muslim communities of their own parts of the world, only for their contributions to be belittled, disparaged or simply forgotten after their time. This is true not only of many who must inevitably remain nameless, but even of those whose names remain wellknown,but whose works are reduced in public consciousness to mere fragments,
or even parodies, of their real depth and significance.
Thus, to take but a few examples, Allama Muhammad Iqbal is often remembered only as the ‘national poet of Pakistan’; Abul Kalam Azad is remembered only as a ‘Congress Muslim’ who opposed the Pakistan movement; Uthman dan Fodio’s name will always be associated with the Sokoto Khilafah, but few know much about it or more about him; Ali Shariati has been hijacked by the opponents of the Islamic Revolution in Iran; Mawlana Maududi’s legacy is forever tainted by the political failures of the Jama‘at-e Islami; Sayyid Qutb is known to many (even many Muslims) only by the West’s labelling of him as the “godfather of Islamist terrorism”; and Kalim Siddiqui is remembered largely for the Rushdie affair and perhaps the Muslim Parliament. Many others are not even remembered that much. How many
Muslims can say anything about the important contributions of such figures as Ismail Gaspirali, Malek Bennabi or Marwan Hadid?
Part of the appeal of the small book under review, Why an Islamic State? - The Life Projects of Two Great European Muslims, the latest of the Islamic Book Trust’s Occasional Paper Series, is that it provides a useful reminder of the work of two Muslims whose full contributions are in danger of being forgotten, Muhammad Asad and Alija Izetbegovic. Asad’s name is well-known, of course, as his translation and commentary of the Qur’an remains widely read; he also has the advantage of being a prominent European convert to Islam, which conveys its own status. Izetbegovic’s name will also be known to many Muslims as president of Bosnia-Herzegovina during and after the Bosnian Muslims’ fight for survival in the 1990s. In both cases, however, there is much more to their work than even those major achievements, through which Muslims can understand much about both the men themselves, the times they lived in, and by extension the experience and evolution of the Islamic movement itself.
That the latter is a key part of the object of the book is clear from its title, and the author’s introduction to it. M.A. Sherif — Jamil Sherif to those who know him through his work in various British Muslim organizations since the 1970s — makes clear that one object of the study is to show that both Asad and Izetbegovic were parts of the 'Islamist' tradition, the understanding of Islam as a social, political and civilizational project as well as a personal, spiritual one. Further, he aims to show that there is far more to that tradition than the limited vision of it deliberately created by hostile commentators, particularly in the years since the attacks on the US in September 2001. In particular, Sherif aims to counter the suggestions that European Muslims represent a spiritual version of Islam, which is somehow more authentic than the political Islamic movement; and that political understandings of Islam are alien impositions on Islamic tradition originating only from the works of Mawlana Maududi, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb in the mid-20th century. (A common element of the latter line of attack, which Sherif does not mention, is that the emergence of Islamist thought was influenced by European fascism.)
Thus Sherif writes in his introduction:
Sherif aims to achieve these objectives through parallel discussions of the works and writings of the two men over their long and fruitful lives, which he believes can be divided into three phases: discovery and analysis, intense activism, and finally, reflection.
In Asad’s case, the first stage consisted of his conversion to Islam — he was born Leopold Weiss, an Austrian Jew, in 1900, and became a Muslim in 1926 — and his early reflections on Islam are represented in his classic essay Islam at the Crossroads published in 1934. For Izetbegovic, who was born to a Bosnian Muslim family in Yugoslavia in 1925, but suffered a crisis of faith in his teens, the equivalent formative period was his membership in the Mladi Muslimani (the Young Muslims’ Association) in German-occupied Yugoslavia in the early 1940s. The ideas cultivated by this experience (which included studying the writings of Asad) were outlined in his work Islam between East and West, which was written before his arrest in 1946 by the new communist regime of Yugoslavia.
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. Thus Asad writes in Islam at the Crossroads:
For Izetbegovic, in Islam between East and West:
That Islam is both din and dawlah is a well-established dictum and truism that has inspired generations over the last fourteen centuries. The writings and actions of Asad and Izetbegovic however indicate that while there was undoubtedly a period of spiritual questioning and rebirth, this public dimension of Islam served as a foundation for their subsequent social and political engagement and activism.
We believe that Islam, unlike other religions, is not only a spiritual attitude of mind, adjustable to different cultural settings, but a self-sufficing orbit of culture and a social system of clearly defined features.
Islam knows no specifically ‘religious’ literature in the European sense of the word, just as it knows no pure secular literature. Every Islamic thinker is a theologian, just as every true Islamic movement is also a political movement.
Sherif also quotes another passage from Asad’s Islam at the Crossroads that shows the depth of his understanding of the Muslim historical situation, and parallels the understandings of numerous other Muslim intellectuals:
From the point of view of the historical observer, the strong, one-sided influence which Western civilization exerts on the Muslim world — whether admitted or not by the Muslims themselves — is not at all surprising… But whereas the historian, being concerned with observation only, may be satisfied, for Muslims the problem remains unsettled. For us who are not mere interested spectators, but very real actors in this drama — for us who regard ourselves as the followers of the Prophet Muhammad — the problem only begins here…
And in a later chapter:
The problem facing Muslims today is the problem of the traveller who has come to a crossroads. He can remain standing where he is; but that could mean death by starvation. He can choose the other road bearing the sign ‘Towards Western Civilisation’; but then he would have to say goodbye to his past forever. Or he can choose the other road, the one over which is written: ‘Towards the Reality of Islam’. This is the road alone which can appeal to those who believe in their past and in the possibility of its transformation into a living future.
The echoes of the concerns about “occidentosis”, and the influence of the West on Muslim societies and thought expressed by figures such as Ali Shariati and Sayyid Qutb, are clear.
Although Sherif draws parallels between Asad and Izetbegovic as “European Muslims”, in reality they emerged from very different origins and experiences, one a convert from Judaism brought up in the classic Jewish milieau of central Europe, and the other a Bosniak (Slavic Muslim) brought up in the post-Ottoman Balkans. Inevitably these different experiences were reflected in the forms their activism took.
For Asad, without personal roots in a Muslim community or country, but a deep understanding of the universality of Islamic values, this meant a search for a place in which he could contribute to a real Islamic project. This took him to the Arabian Peninsula and the court of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in the late 1920s, to British India in the 1930s (where he was interned during the Second World War) and then to the Pakistan movement and the new 'Islamic State' when it was created in 1947. There he contributed to the debates over an Islamic constitution, and served as Director of the Department of Islamic Reconstruction. Even before the creation of Pakistan, however, he was worried about the future of the project; Sherif quotes an article he wrote in May 1947, in which he said:
The foremost slogan of the Pakistan movement is 'la ilaha illa Allah'… but, to put it bluntly, many of our brothers and sisters do not seem to care for the spiritual, Islamic objectives of Pakistan.
It is perhaps little surprise, therefore, that he left the country in 1954, and lived in various other countries before settling in Spain, where he wrote his classic The Road to Mecca, his translation of and commentary on the Qur’an, and numerous other works.
For Izetbegovic, living and working in communist Yugoslavia, the focus was inevitably more local, concerned primarily with the survival and expression of Islamic culture and values in an aggressively secularist society. The fact that his understanding of these still extended to public and political life was clear in his major work, The Islamic Declaration, written in the late 1960s. His work led to imprisonment between 1983 and 1988, before he and other Muslims, many of whom had shared his imprisonment, established the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) to represent Bosnians in the confused political situation following the collapse of communism. His leadership of the Bosnian Muslims through their fight for survival in the 1990s, in which he had to contend with the hostility of Western powers to a Muslim state in the heart of Europe, as well as the more blatantly genocidal intentions of the Serbs and the Croats, is well known.
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 reaffirmed their commitment to the ideals they had expressed in their youth, despite the hardships and difficulties they had faced. In Asad’s case, this is expressed in both his commentary on the Qur’an and in his small book The Principles of State and Politics in Islam, both published in 1980. Izetbegovic’s reflections are contained in a number of interviews and speeches. The fact that both, in their different ways, lived through severe hardships, difficulties and disappointments (the latter with their fellow Muslims, as much as anything else), and yet maintained their commitment to Islam as a total social and political project, Sherif highlights as instructive for Muslims today.
Like his subjects, Sherif too evidently has a deep commitment to Islam as a political project that transcends the vicissitudes of the times we live in, and the numerous failures of Islamic movements and projects that Muslims have witnessed in recent decades. This, combined with a fine understanding of the human element previously seen in his biography of Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Searching for Solace: IBT 1994), and an evident breadth of reading and depth of knowledge reflected in the book’s references, lifts this small book above the limitations of its size and format. Any reader will wish that Sherif had been able to go into more detail about the lives and works of his subjects, but none will fail to benefit from his insight into their thought and his analysis of their work and significance.
One can only wish that it would reach a wider audience than it is likely to, and that it would become part of a vibrant discourse of similarly sympathetic but analytical studies of the works of Islamic movement figures, for the benefit of Muslims everywhere. For, as Sherif says in his conclusion:
Whether Iqbal or Jinnah, Mawdudi or Qutb, Asad or Izetbegovic, their memories and achievements should be honoured. It is important to remember Khomeini’s observation that “Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to truth and justice”. Those who seek to instruct us on who is, or is not, worthy of respect are in effect appropriating our right to critique and assess our own history. The Muslim champions should inspire our next generation to hold fast to a vision of a political project grounded in the spirit of Islam, for even according to a critic of the track record of recent Islamic movements [the Iraqi Ali Allawi], “the demand for an Islamic state is fundamental to the future of Muslims and the appropriate government for Muslims.”
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