<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/2/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">www.leninology. <a href="http://blogspot.com">blogspot.com</a></b> <<a href="mailto:leninology@hotmail.com">leninology@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:
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<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">First of all, I hope your chosen
cognomen is steeped in irony, otherwise you are a massive hypocrite. </p></div></blockquote><div>Yeah, it is, duh.<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Secondly, what *is* "Sharia" as
far as you're concerned?</p></div></blockquote><div>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.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Why do you
think it is somehow anti-'modern'<br>and must therefore 'compromise with it?<span> </span>There is nothing more modern than the Islamic
Revolution.<span> </span>The <br>'Islamic Republic' draws
directly from its French forebear, not least with its Jacobin courts and <span> </span>bureaucratic<br>state-building.<span> </span>The very gesture of Political Islam is
modernist: it was founded as a movement of itjihad, which<br>is as Enlightenment
as it gets.</p></div></blockquote><div>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.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the
first to advocate a version of Political Islam, was a <br>moderniser and a
reformist.<span> </span>He, like Luther, encouraged
the direct study of Islamic texts themselves (although<br>there was not a
politically potent clerical hierarchy for him to challenge). His Egyptian
disciple, Muhammad <br>Abdu, was a rationalist who went on to influence many
reformers and particularly graduates of the Al-Azhar<br>mosque-university in Cairo
(the world's oldest university). This is the tradition of reformism in
political Islam.</p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Islam is always-already secular
in this respect: a properly Islamist state, in the sense of government by the <br>clerics, would involve the subjugation of all economic and political questions
to spiritual ones, at least formally.</p></div></blockquote><div>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.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">This has never been the case in
traditional Islamic countries.<span> </span>The
Umayyad-Abbasid state, according to <br>Mohammed Arkoun, "is secularist: the
ideological theorising by the jurists is a circumstantial product using <br>conventional and credulous arguments to hide historical and political reality</p></div></blockquote><div>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)
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"> …
Military power played a <br>pre-eminent role in the caliphate, the sultanate and
all later forms of Islamic government … Orthodox <br>expressions of Islam (sunni,
shi'i. Khariji, all of which claim the monopoly of orthodoxy) arbitrarily
select <br>and ideologically use beliefs and practises conceived to be
authentically religious".</p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p>Thirdly, the Islamic Revolution
(the one in Iran
I mean) did not result in Sharia law.</p></div></blockquote><div><br>No, you're wrong. It did. <br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><p>The
shari'a is taken as a <br>source of legislation, but there is nevertheless "a
dualism in the Iranian constitution between the sovereignty of <br>the people
(derived from the dominant political discourses of modernity) and the
sovereignty of God, through <br>the principle of the vilayat-i faqih. </p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br><br> <br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p>Article 6 of
the constitutions states that 'the affairs of the country must be <br>administered
on the basis of public opinion expressed by means of elections.'"<span> </span>(See Sami Zubaida "Is Iran
an <br>Islamic State?", in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork eds, Political Islam: Essays
from Middle East Report, 1997).</p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p><span class="q">
> Why would Islamists go in our direction at all? Why is it more likely that
the >Islamists will go towards us<br>>and not the capitalist power elite? Why is
Islamism not >something that drives the people of these nations<br>>FARTHER from
socialism? </span></p>
<p>Because the textual bases on which one formulates an 'Islamist'
political outlook is so indeterminate as to invite<br>a considerable variety of interpretation.</p></div></blockquote><div>This is misleading. The supreme textual basis for Islamism is Sharia. There is just no question about that.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p>Political Islam's radicalism or conservatism
is rooted to some extent in its class politics.<span>
</span>You raised the Islamic revolution – don't forget that at the time one of
the big actors in it was<br>the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a Marxist-Islamist formation.<span> </span>It argued strongly that political democracy
was rooted in<br>Islamic concepts such as the shura.<span> </span>They are not alone.<span> </span>Khalid Muhammad Khalid and Hassan Hanafi have<br>argued much the same.</p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><p>For contemporary Islamists, tyranny is the main enemy. Even
the nominal commitment to the restoration of the<br>caliphate (which has been
abandoned by many Islamist sects) is in the hands of the conservative Muslim Brothers,<br>say, not much different to a modern Presidency - while he executes the shari'a
on behalf of the community of <br>believers, he has no religious sanction himself.<span> </span>(See Gudrun Kramer, "Islamist Notions of
Democracy" in <em><br>Political Islam).</em></p>
<p>Ultimately, religion is too tribal to offer a long-term
basis for social organisation, especially in this time.<span> </span>However, <br>given the current way in which
secularism is being used as a resource for imperialism, we have to be wary of
how <br>its claims are pressed, specifically against Muslims. We don't have to see every Islamist movement as a potential<br>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
<br>revolt in Iraq.</p></div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br><br>boddi<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><hr>Be one of the first to try <a href="http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
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