The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
I am delighted that Claire picked up on the question that I posed in response to her exceedingly valuable and instructive posts on Hassan al Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood and on Sayyed Qutb, but I am not sure that she understood properly what I had in mind – so I will pose it again for her and for others to consider.
This is what I wrote initially in response to her discussion of Qutb:
There is another question that needs to be posed and properly answered if we are to understand the drift of things in the Islamic world and the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and its admirers. What I have in mind is the question whether Hassan al Banna and Sayyed Qutb are closer to being right about the basic thrust of Islam than are those who call themselves Muslims but stand firmly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood. The fact that most Muslims are not militant is no more revealing than is the fact that most Christians are lukewarm. The question that needs answering is whether there are resources within the Sunni tradition for a depoliticization of Islam -- i.e., for the position that shar'ia binds the conscience only and should not be enforced by the polity. My suspicion -- which makes me a pessimist regarding the relatively near-term prospects for the Islamic world -- is that the only real obstacle to a political takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood is laxness on the part of the faithful. Is there a substantial opposition to the great Islamic revival underway that is devoutly (not tepidly) Muslim?
To this Claire responded in the comments on the last of the posts linked:
| How would you measure devotion? Would you do it by opinion poll? What would you ask? "How deeply do you identify as a Muslim?" "How deeply do you believe in God?" "How close is your relationship to God?" What would these answers really tell us? Are you asking, in a sense, whether in fact there are only two real categories of Muslims--militant lunatics, and atheists who for cultural reasons cling to the label of "Muslim?" On the face of it, that's unlikely, and contradicted by my experience. |
And I responded in turn:
No. The two kinds are the devout and the lukewarm. There is no doubt another group and there always has been – discreet unbelievers such as Alfarabi and Averroes who take one stand in public and another in private, but they have always been comparatively few in number.
My question is whether there is among the devout a strong tradition of political secularism and of the treatment of religion as a private matter.
My focus was not on the faithful and the faithless but on a difference within the body of the faithful between the devout and the lukewarm. Among Christians, of course, these categories are well-known. There is even an allusion to the difference in the Gospels. But the difference is also evident among Muslims.
I was once married to a Turk. She called herself a Muslim but never went to a mosque to pray. The same could be said concerning her parents. Nor were the members of this family in any evident way observant. In the two years in which I lived in Istanbul and in my trips back – which are less frequent now that I have four young children and a non-Turkish wife – I met a great many Turks who called themselves Muslims but who never went to the mosque to pray, never fasted during Ramadan, never expressed any desire to go on the Haj to Mecca, and who most definitely did not refrain from drinking alcohol. I have been to Tunisia and Egypt, and I have visited the Palestinian territories more than once. In all three places, I met Arabs who fall into the same category. I could not read the hearts of these Muslims. I would certainly not call them faithless. But, as Muslims, they were lukewarm and not devout. Moreover, all or nearly all of the Turks to whom I refer greatly admired Atatürk – who put an end to the Caliphate and founded in Turkey a secular republic – and they tended to express disdain and suspicion for those who prayed frequently, fasted fastidiously, made the Haj, wore beards to advertise the fact, and strongly disapproved of those among their compatriots given to imbibing beer, wine, and raki. Islam is different from Christianity in one particular. It is less a religion of faith than a religion of holy law (shari’a) – and so it is observance first and foremost that distinguishes the devout from the lukewarm. I do not doubt that among the observant one can find hypocrites, but I would nonetheless insist that it is the devout -- especially the learned among them -- who define a religious sect.
So let me repeat myself. My question is whether there is among the devout a strong tradition of political secularism and of the treatment of religion as a private matter. I have read a fair amount about Islam, and I have lived with Muslims. But I cannot pretend to expertise. I do not know Arabic, and I have not studied in fine detail the Koran and the hadith. I cannot express a conviction, but I can hazard a suspicion – to wit, that the answer to my question is a resounding no. And if I am right, this means that Hassan al Banna and Sayyed Qutb really are closer to being right about the basic thrust of Islam than are those who call themselves Muslims but stand firmly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood. Among other things, this would help explain the strength of their appeal in the larger Muslim world and that of Osama bin Laden.
In the Arab world, nationalism as an organizing principle has clearly run its course, and the same may possibly be true in Turkey as well. If I am right in my suspicions, the Islamic revival sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood has a good chance of achieving cultural hegemony. In these circumstances, our chief reliance is on the lukewarm – which is a slender reed – for ordinarily, at least in the short term, the drift of things is far more powerfully influenced by men of firm conviction.
In the long run, however, the lukewarm may win out, and for that reason, if for no other, we must do what we can to help them. We should always insist, as we have been doing under both Bush and Obama, that our quarrel with the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring is not a quarrel with Islam as such but with its misinterpreters, and we should continue to proffer temptation (as we have done now for a very long time).
In his Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu once observed that that “as a general rule invitations contribute more forcefully to changing religion than do penalties,” adding that it is a surer strategy “to attack religion by favor, by the conveniences of life, by the hope of fortune; not by that which warns one of one’s mortality but by that which makes one forget it; not by that which provokes indignation but by that which casts one into a disposition lukewarm so that other passions act on our souls & those which religion inspires fall silent.” In the face of challenges such as those posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, we may simply have to exercise patience. Islam, at least as Hassan al Banna and Sayyed Qutb conceived of it, does not provide an answer adequate to the political and economic needs of today's Muslims. This much is evident in Iran already, and it will someday be evident as well in Turkey and in the countries where Arabic is the dominant language. At that point, the teaching of the Prophet may be reinterpreted by the learned and devout in such a fashion as to make it compatible with liberal modernity.
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Comments :
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Paul, I'd say it depends. I saw a very hopeful piece of (not yet published) work by a Turkish sociologist claiming that fully 75% or 80% of the second-tier executives at pious Muslim organizations (including the AKP) actually profess a politically liberal faith where they want the freedom to act devoutly but not force their neighbors to do so, believing in freedom of conscience. If this is true, it's encouraging (though of course may not be determinative). Saudi money and the prestige they have as custodians of the holy cities have allowed them to present reactionary Wahhabism to be "authentic" (when in fact it's an eighteenth-century invention), so a lot of the devout these days have taken that line. That said, those who worship and believe the way their grandparents did are the intersection of the devout and the "moderate" as Claire calls them. I'd guess they're likely the largest cohort of "moderates" (rather than more secular or Westernized folks) but probably also the least politically active, most places, so as to who speaks for them—it's not at all clear.
Sep '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Bill,
How strong is Radical Islam in non-Arabic speaking regions?
Oct '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Where is the Muslim Sisterhood?
May '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Where is the Muslim Sir Thomas More?
I have no problem with so-called moderate Muslims making their efforts without religious arguments or open piety. But there must also be moderates who are fervently devout in public life to convince fellow Muslims that they are not being asked to place their allegiance to government and political ideas above their allegiance to Allah.
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Bill Walsh may be right about Turkey. When I lived there (1984-86) and for a long time thereafter, I thought that it was the place where a Muslim analogue to the Christian Democratic movement in Italy, Germany, and France would be most likely to emerge. I remain to be persuaded that Erdogan's party is the real deal, however.
May '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
The more I learn about what's in the Islamic texts and the theology around them, the more it seems the answer to Paul's question is no.
Dec '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
This thread seems to be about Fundamentalist Religion vs Moderate Religion, and Belief vs Observance or behavior.
The later distinction is unimportant, because belief and behavior tend to quickly fall in line with each other: belief, of course, leads to action, but the reverse occurs too, which is why taking a action is spoken of as "making a commitment".
Religious Fundamentalists tend to swallow the "holy book" whole, and let the secular chips fall where they may. Religious moderates negotiate, trying to preserve some aspects of secular (or other) life.
Islam makes such negotiation very difficult: The Koran is heavy on explicit commands, and light on ambiguous metaphor. It also prohibits picking and choosing among contradictory injunctions.
Muslims, more than Christians or Jews, are pushed to choose between fundamentalism and apostasy (and if they choose the latter, are supposed to be killed).
Oct '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
I repost here from the previous thread referred to by Dr. Rahe:
Good Berean
I think Professor Rahe's question relates to what Cornelius Van Til terms "epistemological self-consciousness". That is, to what degree are we aware of how our belief system determines our thoughts and our actions. This self-awareness of ideology tends to create a self reinforcing cycle of ideological reformation with the result that those who are epistemologicly self conscious tend to appear more "radical" than those who are not. This process is part and parcel of what Christians refer to as "revival". If such a revival is occuring in Islam, than the Brotherhood, through it's "fundamentalist" intrepretation of the Qur'an, is behaving in an epistemologicly self conscious manner.
May '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
The Kurds in Iraq have a tradition of political secularism.
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Paul, thank you so much for this lucid and thoughtful post. This has clarified the discussion admirably, and I have a feeling it will help me quite a bit to make some order of my own thoughts. Very well done. I'll respond, but I'll take a bit of time to think first. You've set out the terms of the discussion in a very useful way and made quite a number or important points and observations. I want to respond as thoughtfully as you have, so I'll take a few days to mull this over. Thanks again.
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
I look forward to your next set of ruminations on this. Among other things, I may be dead wrong. My chief suspicion is that, as a religion of holy law meant to be enforced by the political authority (with the Sultan being a Caliph in an ideal world), Islam is fundamentally a political religion. Privatizing it runs against the grain -- and this means that among the Sunnis what we call a moderate Muslim is someone trying to square the circle. The weight of Sunni tradition is against him.
Nov '10
Re: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
I've had this on my "conversations I'm following" since Rahe posted it -- one of the best posts on Ricochet. Still wondering when Berlinski will answer Rahe...
Edited on Feb 1, 2011 at 12:16pmRe: The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam
Ah, I completely lost track of this one, Robert. Let's take it up again here.