By Junaid S. Ahmad and SANIA SUFI for ISLAMiCommentary on APRIL 13, 2015
When reading dominant narratives about the Muslim world today, we are at pains to escape the imagery of beheadings, stonings, suicide bombings and ‘senseless’ violence in general. The picture has obtained its most concrete manifestation in the form of ISIS. The ‘Islamic State’ seems to embody all that is wrong with a people who have clearly not kept up with the pace of history, and in fact now are trying to offer an atavistic, medieval alternative to it.
However, a critical unpacking of the ideology behind ISIS — however millenarian and myopic it may be — reveals legitimate grievances rooted in an unjust global political architecture which exploits, dehumanizes, and fuels violence among Muslims the world over.
While political expressions of Islam have existed over the past century, the vicious, reactionary, and most obscurantist forms of such currents got their steroid injections through the Western-backed “jihad” against the Communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is clearly the first period of ‘radicalization’ — cradled, nurtured, and advanced by the powerful for their narrow, secular realpolitik.
The second period that dramatically increased terrorism — and not reduced it — has undoubtedly been engendered by post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ politics. Its ‘impressive’ framework of solutions include: torture techniques such as waterboarding and sexual humiliation, wars and occupations, unchecked surveillance and spying, human rights violations, and so on. Its premise has been twofold: that Muslims only understand the language of force, and that there are deep religio-cultural features of theirs that need to be revamped and remolded in order to cater to the demands of their powerful neo-colonial overlords.
Missing in the War on Terror’s assessment in tackling the phenomenon of terror, however, is the West’s own involvement in a brute legacy of subjugation and oppression rooted first in European colonization and now American empire. With such a historical context in mind, it is clear that a people’s belief in Islamist, rather than secular politics, is not the root cause of terrorism, but rather a hegemonic world system dependent on continuous warfare and economic exploitation. Religion — and Islam specifically — has become a convenient scapegoat for power-holders post-9/11, which explains the radical attempts to dismantle and adulterate Muslim identity and agency.
In this context, one project is declared supreme by the gatekeepers of Western secular liberal democracy: the desperate search for the moderate Muslim. The objective has been pursued vigorously throughout the Muslim world, and generous funding and support has been offered to those who present themselves as being the moderate, modernist, liberal, or progressive, alternative to radical or fundamentalist Islam. Such a reductionist binary — in which Muslims are categorized as either “moderate” or “radical” — is not a new phenomenon, but rather reminiscent of the colonial “divide and conquer” policy.
The search for the ‘moderate’ Muslim takes place as the voice of the people advocating a middle path — the Islamic call to liberation — is dehumanized and reprimanded as incompatible with the standards of western secular rationality. Grounded in the foundational concept of human reason, Enlightenment philosophy derides epistemology, which does not recognize the omnipotence of human intellect. Mainstream western political discourse might not view such an axiom as problematic. However, one must question how such discourse impacts non-western societies that ground at least some of their intellectual and political traditions in scripture or religious based knowledge.
Secular liberal thought, which traces its origins back to the Enlightenment era, similarly problematizes Islamic discourse while simultaneously trying to restructure it along secular ideology. Not only should such a re-framing of an Islamic ethos be of concern from an anti-war and anti-empire perspective, as it coincides with post-9/11 War on Terror narrative, but also from the perspective of a collective Muslim consciousness that compels Muslims to intellectual honesty and authenticity. The project of the ‘moderate’ Muslim must thus be seen in light of imperial expansionism and as a challenge to even the possibility of a collective Muslim identity and political consciousness.
The hegemony of the post-9/11 liberal or moderate Islam project also ignores the deep-seated issues of structural injustice that perpetuate an environment of violence and conflict. When this discourse of ‘moderation’ or ‘enlightenment’ is divorced from a systemic critique of institutional subjugation and oppression, then most ordinary people in the Muslim world see little relevance in its function. It is no wonder, then, that the architects of the liberal Islam project advance a watered down, apolitical Islam that ignores state sponsored structural matrices of patriarchal, racial/ethnic, and class hierarchies of society and the global order.
ISIS and all such brutal groups will continue to thrive in the Muslim world as long as grotesque social conditions, such as class inequality, warfare, and extreme poverty, persist in these societies. Western political elites must recognize the consequences of colonial/neo-colonial expansionism and take responsibility for, directly or indirectly, engendering extremist, reactionary ideologies such as those espoused by ISIS.
This would entail very simple steps which could be undertaken immediately: halt all invasions, bombs, drones, and occupations, end support for dictatorial regimes, and support meaningful development that privilege the needs of the local populations rather than foreign multinational companies.
The various religious expressions emerging in contemporary times in post-colonial Muslim societies also make themselves irrelevant as they cater to the demands of local elites (and very often, their Western backers) and not to those of the bulk of the population who yearn for a praxis-based theology offering a better existence in the here and now. In such conditions, Muslims must dig through the Islamic canon for a discourse far more liberating than merely the negation of beheadings or senseless violence or intolerance.
A theology of liberation exists within Islam, which advocates a Divine consciousness as the basis for challenging various forms of injustice. This Islamic tradition provides political agency through which not only is speaking truth to power prioritized, but also the necessity to engage in a concrete struggle for social transformation. The emancipation of the oppressed and suffering people ought to be the objective of such a theological discourse. The imperative is to respect global diversity and simultaneously assert an Islamic social responsibility that challenges the foundations of injustice and domination in the world. Though it may seem like a pipedream, it is probably only in the praxis of liberation theology that the Muslim world will find a way to disentangle itself from the grip of foreign powers, local despots, and reactionary social forces.
Junaid S. Ahmad is the Director of the Center for Global Dialogue at UMT (University of Management and Technology) in Lahore, Pakistan. Sania Sufi is a Political Science graduate of Loyola University Chicago. They jointly blog at decolonizingmuslimistan.blogspot.com.
ISLAMiCommentary is a public scholarship forum that engages scholars, journalists, policymakers, advocates and artists in their fields of expertise. It is a key component of the Transcultural Islam Project; an initiative managed out of the Duke Islamic Studies Center in partnership with the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations (UNC-Chapel Hill). This article was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author(s).
13 April 2015
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