> Secondly, what *is* "Sharia" as far as you're concerned?
>
Forget what *I* think Sharia is, look at the sources. It's a complex
question, given various weightings of Koran and Hadith, but the Koran has
extensive and relatively detailed legal and ethical writings and these are
the basis of Sharia.
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 bureaucratic
> state-building. The very gesture of Political Islam is modernist: it was
> founded as a movement of itjihad, which
> is as Enlightenment as it gets.
>
This is very misleading. The first real example of Islamic Revolution was in
Iran. It began in 1963 when Ayatollah Khomeini made a ruling that the Shah
was not a legitimate part of the expression of Sharia in Iranian law. He
asserted what is common to all Islamic Republics - that Sharia is a legal
sub-Constitution beneath the Constitutions of Islamic states and that all
Constitutions in Islamic nations get their legitimacy from Sharia.
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 (although
> there 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-Azhar
> mosque-university in Cairo (the world's oldest university). This is the
> tradition of reformism in political Islam.
>
There are, of course, Muslims who are rationalists. Also many Islamists cast their movement in terms of the French Revolution and Martin Luther. But that does not make Islamism a modern, enlightenment or democratic movement.
All Muslims have the personal responsibility to read the Koran and live by its edicts as written. Shiites have a clergy which Muslims are permitted to "imitate" because they themselves judge this clergy to be learned in Koran and Hadith, but Muslims also have the responsibility to stop imitating or following any Imam whom they find to be preaching things contrary to the Koran.
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 is untrue. Even in the Koran itself there is a division of questions
which should be decided in a religious or a practical way. But what is
unquestionable is that the Koran is the basis of supreme juridical
authority. Among Shiites there is a great deal of discussion as to what
level of subjugation to the clerics is appropriate. However, the Iranian
Revolution was the acceptance of the maximum authority of the mullahs.
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
>
The "jurists" referred to here are the Imams and mullahs. It has, of course,
been the job of Muslim clerics to explain how the secular behavior of their
military and political leaders was Koranically acceptable. But that is
EXACTLY what Khomeini sought to END. Khomeini refused to whitewash the
Shah's power and THAT is what made him an Islamic Revolutionary. Islam
allows muslims to get rich and powerful and all kinds of things, but it
always asserts the supreme juridical authority of the Prophet (PBUH)
… 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".
>
And this "arbitrary", power-serving theology is exactly what the Islamists seek to end. Of course serious Islamic theology is not "arbitrary". But Muslim theology has been interfered with by poltical figures, just as Christian and Jewish theology has been interfered with.
Thirdly, the Islamic Revolution (the one in Iran I mean) did not result in
> Sharia law.
>
No, you're wrong. It did.
> 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 vilayat-i faqih.
>
The Vilayat-i Faqih is JUST what I described. It is the belief, among Twelvers Shiites, that the Faqih or Faqihs should be - must be - the supreme juridical authority. I cannot stress the words "supreme juridical authority" enough, because in Shia Islam, the job of being a religious leader and a jurist are essentially the same job. Ayatollah Ali Sistani and those of the Khomeini school may differ about the WAY in which the Vilayat-i Faqih is expressed - time place and manner restricitons, if you will - but the underlying concept of the Vilayat-i Faqih is that Sharia is the supreme law. The only question is how and to what extent individual Muslims must find their own way to Sharia. In Shia Islam, the Faqih have the responsiblity to guide them and a true Faqih is divinely chosen or anointed to some extent I don't quite understand. Shia declares the divinity of the 12 Imams and the Faqihs are, I think, thought to carry this anointing.
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).
>
But note the words "affairs of the country", not "laws" but "affairs". The founding ideas of the Islamic Republic of Iran represent a relatively conservative, authoritarian branch of Shiite Islam. I think the main input from the people is a sort of presumed, indirect judgment as to whether the faqihs are true and worthy Imams and knowledgable jurists.
> > 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 invite
> a considerable variety of interpretation.
>
This is misleading. The supreme textual basis for Islamism is Sharia. There
is just no question about that.
Political Islam's radicalism or conservatism is rooted to some extent in its
> class politics. You raised the Islamic revolution – don't forget that at
> the time one of the big actors in it was
> the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a Marxist-Islamist formation. It argued strongly
> that political democracy was rooted in
> Islamic concepts such as the shura. They are not alone. Khalid Muhammad
> Khalid and Hassan Hanafi have
> argued much the same.
>
But the main stem of both Sunni and Shia Islamists cite Sharia as that which gives them legitimacy. Even the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam calls Sharia the basis for human rights.
For contemporary Islamists, tyranny is the main enemy. Even the nominal
> commitment to the restoration of the
> caliphate (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 potential
> ally, 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.
>
But what all Islamists and especially Al-Sadr believe and are saying is that THEY are the rightful leaders because THEY and not the present legal authorities are legitimized by SHARIA. With Al-Sadr there's no question of that as he is an adherent to the Khomeini line of reasoning on the Vilayat-i Faqih.
There is not a "nominal" commitment to the restoration of the caliphate or, to be inclusive, the Ulema. Islamism is the re-affirmation of the power of the Ulema or what one might conceivably call the new Ulema. Islamism is the idea that, without the Ulema, a government cannot govern Muslims.
And that's the problem. Since Islamism is inseparable from the idea of the supremacy of Sharia and the Ulema, it MUST be reactionary. Unless Islam develops a new movement of Ulema, it will be very difficult if not completely impossible for islamism to move Muslims leftwards. And I doubt VERY much that Marxists are going to have an influence on Muslim clerics. I suppose it's worth a try, but let's be rational here and accept the facts as they are, not as we would like them to be.
boddi
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