There is an account in
a French diplomatic despatch of 1892 of an encounter between the Ottoman sultan
Abdulhamid II and the head of Sufi orders in Egypt, Shaykh Muhammad Tawfiq
al-Bakri. ‘I wish for you to understand that I am not a simple mollah’, boasted
Shaykh al-Bakri. ‘I am a political man, I have general ideas, and I have read
Aristotle, Montesquieu, J. J. Rousseau, Spencer, Leroy-Beaulieu, etc.’ The
simple mollahs have since disappeared; political ideology suffuses religious
thought. And the foreign influence is pervasive, although one more readily
detects traces of Marx than of Montesquieu. The result is what some call
ferment.
In this study, the late
Hamid Enayat has succinctly described the modern mutations of Islamic political
thought, ably summarizing representative texts for the student and general
reader. The abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 is the author’s point of
departure for a discussion of the rivalry between concepts of a Muslim state,
and Muslim responses to the imported principles of nationalism, democracy and
socialism. A parallel theme is that of specifically Shi’i modernism and
Shi’i-Sunni reconciliation. We are again in the familiar company of Rashid
Rida. Ali Abd al-Raziq, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Mustafa al-Siba’i, Sayyid Qutb,
Mawdudi and Shari’ati. As a descriptive survey, Modern Islamic Political Thought is of great
value, and doubtless will win deserved recognition in the classroom.
But another aim of this
book is to advance a subtle argument, signaled by a caveat in the preface.
The question of any
ulterior or hidden motive that these [surveyed] authors may have harboured has
been kept out of the analysis, not only because a thorough examination of them
threatens to turn a history of ideas into histoire
événementielle, but also because ideas seem to have a life of their
own people, especially those of the generations subsequent to the authors’,
often tend to perceive ideas with little or no regard for the authors’
insidious designs, unless they are endowed with a capacity for mordant
cynicism.
This is how Enayat
would dispense with that higher criticism that has interpreted the writings of
Muslim reformists through their mundane transactions and esoteric teachings. It
was this sort of inquest which led to a radical reappraisal of Afghani’s,
Abduh’s, and Malkum Khan’s religious writings, and cast the early history of
Muslim reformism in a severe light. Now historical scholarship is poised to
examine the sincerity of the next generation of reformists. Those who still
share the reformist attitude, locked as they are in a struggle with an
ascendant fundamentalism, will be discomfited.
Enayat conveys, in the
subtlest language, his personal conviction that this battered modernism is not
a spent force, that a balance can yet be struck between authenticity and
accommodation. To buttress this belief, Enayat feels obliged to shield the
icons from the iconoclasts. Characteristic is his lengthy defense of Ali Abd
al-Raziq’s al-Islam wa usul
al-hukm. This book, published in Egypt shortly after the abolition
of the Ottoman caliphate, argued the controversial view that the caliphate was
not immanent in Islam, and made a case for the separation of religion and
politics. Enayat goes to great lengths to establish that the work was a step
toward ‘a new Sunni consensus on the relationship between Islam and the modern
state’, but was ?misunderstood’ and so evoked a ‘regrettable’ assault by the
Azhar establishment. He passes in silence over the work of political historians
who suggest that the book was written to thwart a scheme of the Egyptian royal
house to claim the caliphate, and was regarded by contemporaries not as a
theoretical inquiry but as a partisan tract.
A similar sort of
omission mars Enayat’s account of the ‘religious response’ of a group of
leading Azhar ulama to the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate. Enayat dwells on
the ease with which these divines discarded their allegiance to the deposed
caliph, and accepted the abolition as a fair accompli. ‘[The] resolution of the
scholarly gathering shows that even in this body, despite its orthodox
pronouncements, there was a willingness to come to terms with the new
development’. Here were ‘evident clues to the readiness for accommodation with
non-traditionalists’. But Enayat notes that these scholars met under the
chairmanship of Shaykh al-Azhar al-Jizawi and President of the Supreme
Religious Court al-Maraghi. Now these two very complex mollahs were accomplices
of the royal palace, and there is ample documentary evidence that the aim of
these deliberations was to clear the theological boards for an Egyptian
caliphate. This resolution was not a scholastic finding but an intrigue, and
was then widely recognized as such.
A similar judgment
concerns the circumstances which surrounded the issuance in 1959 of the famous
ecumenical fatwa authored by Shaykh al-Azhar Shaltut. Enayat makes much of this
document, which recognized the validity of worship according to Twelver Shi’i
doctrine and denied the existence of sects within Islam. The step ‘established
a distinct trend towards greater Sunni-Shi’i understanding. The credit for this
should be largely put down to Shaltut’s generally temperate vision of Islam’.
But Shaltut was no simple mollah either, and so momentous a response would
never have been issued without the full approval, if not upon the insistence,
of a calculating President Nasir. This fatwa, like so many reformist doctrinal
texts, cannot be allowed to speak for itself, even in a history of ideas. Yet
Enayat will not concede the role of political exigency in the gestation of
political thought, apparently because that thought is today in dire need of the
credential of sincerity.
Enayat’s own critique
of reformism is strictly tactical, for it is made from within. Reformism failed
in Egypt because of the ‘over-confident, intemperate mood of some of the
modernists, which made them insensitive to whatever potential for reform
existed inside the religious community. Instead of developing this potential by
adopting a more discriminating approach, the modernists launched an offensive
which, simultaneous as it was with the secularisation of Turkey, lent
plausibility to the traditionalists’ charge that what the modernists sought was
not a simple modification of religious attitudes, but the very eradication of
Islam as an all-inclusive system of moral, social and political guidelines’. In
other words, Egyptian modernists, in order to disarm traditionalist criticism, should
have been more dissimulating.
Now this plea for more
guile is fundamentally Shi’i, and in Iran, Enayat leads us to believe,
discretion is the better part of reformist valour. Consider Murtada Mutahhari,
whom Enayat credits with inspiring this book. A professor of philosophy at
Tehran University, Mutahhari was deeply involved in progressive reformist
societies, secured the rank of ayatullah after the revolution, and became a
leading light in the new order. So convincingly did he embrace the role that in
May 1979, anticlericalist guerillas elected to assassinate him. But most modern
Shi’i reformists in Iran have been surprisingly guileless, and so have
overplayed their hand. What Enayat writes of Ali Abd al-Raziq?that he was
needlessly ‘provocative’?applies no less to Ali Shari’ati, who laced his
writings with quotations from French orientalists and vexed the elders of Qumm.
A jealous clergy has had no trouble weeding out Iran’s reformists, and Enayat’s
chapter on Shi’i modernism may be read as an adieu.
Also overwhelmed by the
tide of events in Iran has been the Shi’i-Sunni reconciliation which Enayat
seeks to establish as the first fruit of modernist influence. Reflecting,
probably at the last revision, upon the Iran-Iraq war, Enayat concedes ‘the
extent to which religion can become a handmaiden of politics, rendering any
sectarian peace vulnerable to the unpredictability of international relations’.
Yet he maintains that among Shi’is, ‘there has been much deprecation of the
schismatic attitudes of the past’, and cites, of all things, Shi’i appeals for
‘conformity to majority norms’ during the Meccan pilgrimage. Already this
‘considerable degree of intellectual harmony’ between Shi’is and Sunnis has
vanished like a morning mist, and the Iranians have made themselves the
troublesome bêtes noires
of the pilgrimage.
For dogmatism is the
rage. Enayat provides a solid account of modernism’s fundamentalist rival,
particularly the Arab Ikhwan al-Muslimun, the Iranian Fida’iyan-i Islam, and
the Pakistani Jama’at-i Islami. Interestingly, he omits any discussion of
Khumayni’s Islamic
Government. But he finds Mawdudi’s identical vision of an Islamic
state unworkable, for the premise ‘that rulers can be kept out of mischief by
adhering to a certain set of doctrines, or leading an ascetic way of life’, is
a ‘noble idea, but one which has so far rarely worked in practice. Maududi does
not provide any evidence that his ideological state would be an exception to
this depressing observation of history’. Nor has Enayat any faith in ‘the
overweening attitude of militant Shi’is and their confidence in Man’s flawless
ability to overcome all social and political imperfections’.
These doubts find some
new confirmation daily. What is remarkable is that some of the disillusioned
have found solace in the Shari’atis and Bani Sadrs, who evoke Lord Cromer’s
comment on the too-well read Shaykh al-Bakri: ‘Was this fin de siècle sheikh, this
curious compound of Mecca and the Paris Boulevards, the latest development in
Islamism? I should add that the combination produced no results of any
importance’.
