Why is Islam against ‘Roshan Khayali’?


	The clergy at large associates the idea with General Musharraf's 'enslavement' by the United States. The secular opposition parties ridicule it from two distinct points of view. The rightwing rejection is part pro-clergy and part anti-American. The 'liberal' secular rejection is delivered on the basis of President Musharraf's 'ambivalence' towards the religious parties and his crypto-fundamentalist army background. The 'liberal' secular party faces a dilemma of its need to draw strength from the combined opposition in parliament. But the stances of both the parties are 'negotiable' in power politics


	In the non-Arab world, liberal Islam is residually in evidence. The diaspora used to be liberal when the process of assimilation and integration with the host culture had not yet been rejected by the émigré Muslims. One factor in the hardening of the Muslim mind is 'the zone of contact' between the non-Arab Muslims and the Arabs in Europe and the United States. (This zone of contact doesn't exist in the Middle East because of the language barrier and because of the unequal status of the non-Arab Muslim migrant labour in the Middle East)


	Islam is how it is interpreted. But in all states and societies in the Muslim world, tradition and modernism form two poles of argument. Between the two poles exists a vast majority of Muslims nursing what Olivier Roy calls an 'inactive creed'

ver the past century, the Islamic establishment of clerics has steadily rejected new labels to Islam. The process actually goes back to medieval times when doors to ‘innovation’ were firmly shut. The one recurring character of this labelling is bringing Islam to accept modernity. It was once called Islam reform, and was rejected, then it was called ‘modern’ Islam, and was rejected; and now ‘liberal’ Islam or ‘enlightened’ Islam is in the process of being rejected by the Muslims.. How is it that such labels can be floated? Is there a sanction within Islam to float such ideas? A seminar in 2002 on ‘Liberal Islam’ in Washington invited a number of Islamic scholars to give their views ( Journal of Democracy , April 2003, Washington).

Dormant or liberal? Islam is how it is interpreted. But in all states and societies in the Muslim world, tradition and modernism form two poles of argument. Between the two poles exists a vast majority of Muslims nursing what Olivier Roy calls an ‘inactive creed’. Muslim scholars like Radwan A Masmoudi think that Muslim majorities are liberal in thinking but they are silent. There are three kinds of liberals in these silent majorities: those who think that the Quran prohibits coercion (ikrah) in faith and therefore gives freedom of thought; those who think that Islamic teachings are neutral towards the idea of liberalism; and those who think that there is a clash but it can be overcome through discussion.

Surprisingly, the ‘liberal’ majority in Islam behaves just like any liberal majority in the world. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has a tough time getting its liberal support base to come out and vote. The same problem is faced by Democrats in the United States. If President Musharraf thinks that the silent ‘liberal’ majority in Pakistan will ever come out to support his liberal ‘enlightened’ agenda he may be in for a disappointment. It is in the nature of liberalism to be passive. Among the masses, liberalism springs from a disposition of ‘not being provoked enough’. On the other hand, the conservative voter is aroused enough by his extreme views to write letters in the newspapers and come out in large numbers on the voting day. Liberal-dominated societies may therefore still appear extremist in terms of assertion of views.

Reformist, liberal, enlightened Islam: Such a big mass of silent liberal population has had its effect on the conservative rejectionist. The Islamic orthodoxy has been compelled to add the label of ‘enlightened’ to their venture of Islamisation because of the overwhelming presence of those with a passive creed. Usually it is a ‘winning’ argument against political creeds that come from the West. Islam is already enlightened, it is said. In fact Islam was the first enlightened religion to appeal to the mind of man. The label enlightened has replaced ‘scientific’, ‘natural’ and ‘liberal’ because of their association with the West through of the works of some 19th century ‘reformist’ (jadeed) Muslim thinkers. ‘Liberal’ went out of fashion because of the decline of the term in the West first. In Pakistan, ‘liberal’ (not translated) today is almost a term of abuse. It is used in place of ‘permissive’ when describing a ‘society of sin’.

The label ‘enlightened’ too has been attacked by an array of elements in Pakistan for their very separate reasons. The clergy at large associates the idea with General Musharraf’s ‘enslavement’ by the United States. The secular opposition parties ridicule it from two distinct points of view. The rightwing rejection is part pro-clergy and part anti-American. The ‘liberal’ secular rejection is delivered on the basis of President Musharraf’s ‘ambivalence’ towards the religious parties and his crypto-fundamentalist army background. The ‘liberal’ secular party faces a dilemma of its political location: the dysfunction of its exiled leadership and its need to draw strength from the combined opposition in parliament. But the stances of both the parties are ‘negotiable’ in power politics.

Comeback of Islamism: Fundamentalism has been rejected by the Islamic world as a term of communication between Islam and the West. The new label is Islamism and carries the same association with coercion and violence as was sought to be conveyed through fundamentalism. The idea of coercion (jabr) is today very much the creed by Arab Islamists, led by Al Qaeda’s Aiman Al Zawahiri who accepted the creed of turning a Muslim society into one abiding by the sharia through violence. It went back to the verdict of the jahiliyya by Syed Qutb as borrowed by him from Syed Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan. Earlier Muslim thinker in this line of thought was Ibn Taymiah who apostatised such ‘liberal’ thinkers as Ibn Arabi in the mystical tradition. Fundamentalism – ‘the creed of every Muslim’ – has found its strength in the doctrine of apostatisation.

Islamic scholar Abdelwahab El Effendi points out that many new Muslim states were created by leaders who were ‘instinctive liberals’, like the ‘founding fathers’ of Pakistan and Malaysia, who equated Islam with democracy. Also included in this category are the monarchies of post-independence Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. Much of what passes for ‘liberal’ in Pakistan today hides behind the ‘instinctive’ creed of the founding fathers. The state of Pakistan has however moved forward (sic!) from the liberalism of the founding fathers through the doctrine of apostatisation. The acceptance of apostatisation – originally dated with Ibn Taymiah – is validated largely because it was brought in through an amendment to the 1973 Constitution by the country’s biggest mainstream liberal party when it was in power. In a way it validated the party itself as a legitimate player. The trend away from the ‘liberal’ early phase in the state-building process is visible elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Islamic world and its intellectuals: Thinkers of ‘liberalism, enlightenment or modernism’ in Islam are at work in various parts of the Islamic world, and some of them have been made to run away to the West. Purely in terms of intellectual effort they are superior to the Islamic orthodoxy and Islamists like Al Zawahiri whose work takes us forward from Syed Qutb into a world of change through violence. Morocco’s gifted thinker Abdou Filali-Ansary has listed the ‘enlightened’ great men who sought to bring Islamic thought up to date: Ali Abdur Razziq of Tunisia, Dr Fazlur Rehman of Pakistan and Abdul Karim Soroush of Iran. The last two of course were driven out of their countries by the orthodoxy with the help of the state. The case of Iran is set apart by the fact that even the orthodoxy of ayatollahs there accepts the mu’tazila tradition of rational discussion. Soroush went beyond the threshold of discourse set by it. Muhammad Arkoun, probably the most impressive Sunni Muslim intellectual today, has to live abroad because of his support of the rational discourse and freedom of discussion.

The most glaring attribute of ‘enlightened’ Islam is its equation of Islamic principles with liberal democracy. There is a tacit acceptance of the idea among Muslims in the Islamic world and that contributes to the over-all population of silent liberals in Islam. But Radwan Masmoudi makes an erroneous conclusion when he says – perhaps reductively on the basis of his observation of the Arab world – that liberal or ‘enlightened’ Islam is alive and well only in the West. He thinks that Islam does not betray signs of making a decisive detour in favour of enlightenment, except that the Muslim diaspora in the West might finally bring enlightenment to their home countries upon their return or somehow the ideas they conceive in the West would find resonance in the Islamic world in some future time.

In the non-Arab world, liberal Islam is residually in evidence. The diaspora used to be liberal when the process of assimilation and integration with the host culture had not yet been rejected by the émigré Muslims. Muslim rejection of integration in Europe and the principle of ‘separate but equal’ rights in the United States have shaped a new Muslim community that is more anti-liberal than the orthodoxy in the Islamic world. One factor in the hardening of the Muslim mind in ‘zone of contact’ between the non-Arab Muslims and the Arabs in Europe and the United States. (This zone of contact doesn’t exist in the Middle East because of the language barrier and because of the unequal status of the non-Arab Muslim migrant labour in the Middle East.) A number of Pakistani clerics who have their clientele in the Western diaspora have become inclined to rejecting the liberal equation of the sharia with liberal democracy.

Fear of clergy and a scared clergy: The Muslims of diaspora are increasingly unwilling to accept the equation of Islam with liberal democracy. In the Islamic world too the realisation that democracy has elements that are not compatible with Islam has been publicised by the religious parties strong enough to take part in the electoral process with impressive results. This tends to create a two-way street of fear. The first fear is that dictatorships subservient to the West might annihilate Islam itself through secularism. The new fear is that the Islamic parties, after coming to power, might undo the very edifice of liberal democracy which would allow them to come to power. The FIS in Algeria actually promised to do this. In Pakistan the MMA has promised to undo such liberal reforms as joint electorates and women’s reserved seats in parliament and assemblies after coming to power.

Rejection of enlightened Islam in Pakistan is varied and multi-faceted. Yet a consensus has formed that it is somehow hostile to Muslim society and is somehow a part of the global hostility towards Islam. The consensus is of the unlike rather than of those who are compatible in thought. Some elements of the consensus may actually get hurt after it has moulded society in favour of the religious parties who are the final arbiters of what this consensus means. Many ‘pro-Islam reforms’ carried by liberal parties to gain acceptance among the masses have benefited only the clerical orthodoxy in the country by reason of their status as arbiters. The Constitution has many elements that actually bestow this status on the clergy. This latest rejection will no doubt strengthen the hold of the orthodoxy on the population and weaken the intellectual foundations – already flimsy by reason of the dictates of state ideology – of the liberal political parties.