boddi satva wrote:
>Yoshie, it's unreasonable to call Leftists "ignorant" when you
ignore and ignore and >ignore and ignore THE central concept of Islamism and
Islamic Revolution: Sharia.
First of all, I hope your chosen cognomen is steeped in irony, otherwise you are a massive hypocrite.
Secondly, what *is* “Sharia” as far as you’re concerned? Why do you think it is somehow anti-‘modern’and must therefore ‘compromise with it? There is nothing more modern than the Islamic Revolution. The ‘Islamic Republic’ draws directly from its French forebear, not least with its Jacobin courts and bureaucraticstate-building. The very gesture of Political Islam is modernist: it was founded as a movement of itjihad, whichis as Enlightenment as it gets. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the first to advocate a version of Political Islam, was a moderniser and a reformist. He, like Luther, encouraged the direct study of Islamic texts themselves (althoughthere was not a politically potent clerical hierarchy for him to challenge). His Egyptian disciple, Muhammad Abdu, was a rationalist who went on to influence many reformers and particularly graduates of the Al-Azharmosque-university in Cairo (the world’s oldest university). This is the tradition of reformism in political Islam.
Islam is always-already secular in this respect: a properly Islamist state, in the sense of government by the clerics, would involve the subjugation of all economic and political questions to spiritual ones, at least formally. This has never been the case in traditional Islamic countries. The Umayyad-Abbasid state, according to Mohammed Arkoun, “is secularist: the ideological theorising by the jurists is a circumstantial product using conventional and credulous arguments to hide historical and political reality … Military power played a pre-eminent role in the caliphate, the sultanate and all later forms of Islamic government … Orthodox expressions of Islam (sunni, shi’i. Khariji, all of which claim the monopoly of orthodoxy) arbitrarily select and ideologically use beliefs and practises conceived to be authentically religious”.
Thirdly, the Islamic Revolution
(the one in Iran
I mean) did not result in Sharia law. The
shari’a is taken as a source of legislation, but there is nevertheless “a
dualism in the Iranian constitution between the sovereignty of the people
(derived from the dominant political discourses of modernity) and the
sovereignty of God, through the principle of the vilayet-i faqih. Article 6 of
the constitutions states that ‘the affairs of the country must be administered
on the basis of public opinion expressed by means of elections.’” (See Sami Zubaida “Is Iran
an Islamic State?”, in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork eds, Political Islam: Essays
from Middle East Report, 1997).
> Why would Islamists go in our direction at all? Why is it more likely that
the >Islamists will go towards us>and not the capitalist power elite? Why is
Islamism not >something that drives the people of these nations>FARTHER from
socialism?
Because the textual bases on which one formulates an ‘Islamist’ political outlook is so indeterminate as to invitea considerable variety of interpretation. Political Islam’s radicalism or conservatism is rooted to some extent inits class politics. You raised the Islamic revolution – don’t forget that at the time one of the big actors in it wasthe Mujahedin-e Khalq, a Marxist-Islamist formation. It argued strongly that political democracy was rooted inIslamic concepts such as the shura. They are not alone. Khalid Muhammad Khalid and Hassan Hanafi haveargued much the same.
For contemporary Islamists, tyranny is the main enemy. Even the nominal commitment to the restoration of thecaliphate (which has been abandoned by many Islamist sects) is in the hands of the conservative Muslim Brothers,say, not much different to a modern Presidency - while he executes the shari'a on behalf of the community of believers, he has no religious sanction himself. (See Gudrun Kramer, "Islamist Notions of Democracy" in Political Islam).
Ultimately, religion is too tribal to offer a long-term basis for social organisation, especially in this time. However, given the current way in which secularism is being used as a resource for imperialism, we have to be wary of how its claims are pressed, specifically against Muslims. We don't have to see every Islamist movement as a potentialally, and I don't think anyone does, but I think Yoshie is right to see the Sadrists as the key basis for a nationalist revolt in Iraq.
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