Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies

by Cheryl Benard

Overview

Islam's own internal struggles make it difficult for outsiders to understand the actors and the issues. The author sheds light on these issues and suggests ways for the international community to cope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780833034380
Publisher:	RAND Corporation
Publication date:	02/15/2004
Edition description:	New Edition

Read an Excerpt

Civil Democratic Islam

Partners, Resources, and Strategies

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By Cheryl Benard

Rand Corporation

Copyright © 2003 RAND Corporation
All right reserved.

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Chapter One

MAPPING THE ISSUES: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE RANGE OF THOUGHT IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAM

The notion that the outside world should try to encourage a moderate, democratic interpretation and presentation of Islam has been in circulation for some decades but gained great urgency after September 11, 2001.

There is broad agreement that this is a constructive approach. Islam is an important religion with enormous political and societal influence; it inspires a variety of ideologies and political actions, some of which are dangerous to global stability; and it therefore seems sensible to foster the strains within it that call for a more moderate, democratic, peaceful, and tolerant social order. The question is how best to do this. This report identifies a direction.

We begin by setting the scene for the main ideological fissures in the discussion over Islam and society. The second chapter analyzes the pros and cons of supporting different elements within Islam. The final chapter proposes a strategy.

Immediately following September 11, 2001, political leaders and policymakers in the West began to issue statements affirming their conviction that Islam was not to blame for what had happened, that Islam was a positive force in the world, a religion of peace and tolerance. They spoke in mosques, held widely publicizedmeetings with Muslim clerics, invited mullahs to open public events, and inserted Quranic suras into their own speeches.

In a typical formulation, for example, President Bush asserted that "Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world" and that "has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's a faith based upon love, not hate" (Bush, 2002).

This approach has not been unique to the United States but is also prevalent in Europe, where it led some commentators to note sarcastically that the political leadership "collectively appears to have acquired an instant postgraduate degree in Islamic studies, enabling them to lecture the population concerning the true nature of Islam" (Heitmeyer, 2001).

In part, this demonstrative public embracing of Islam by opinion leaders and politicians had a domestic rationale: Western leaders were attempting to prevent a backlash that might have inspired acts of violence and hostility aimed at their respective Muslim minorities. In addition, there were at least two foreign policy motivations, one short term and the other longer term. In the short run, the goal was to make it politically possible for Muslim governments to support the effort against terrorism by detaching the issue of terrorism from the issue of Islam. In the longer run, the Western leaders were attempting to create an image, a vision, that would facilitate the better integration of Islamic political actors and states into the modern international system.

The academic community quickly joined in, trying to make the case that Islam was at a minimum compatible with, if indeed it did not demand, moderation, tolerance, diversity, and democracy. In his introduction to Abdulaziz Sachedina's The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, Joseph Montville expresses the purpose of such studies and the motivation of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in funding this one,

We knew that, like every great world religion, Islam embraced certain universal human values that could be recognized and accepted as the basis of community by non-Muslims ... Prof. Sachedina ... knew he could highlight those parts of the Koran ... that emphasized the dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, and God's love for all creatures, People of the Book and even people without a book. (Sachedina, 2001, p. 1)

And the author himself explains,

This work undertakes to map some of the most important political concepts in Islam that advance better human relationships, both within and between nations. It aims at uncovering normative aspects of Muslim religious formulations and specifying their application in diverse cultures to suggest their critical relevance to the pluralistic world order of the 21st century.... The goal here is not to glorify the Muslim past but to remember it, retrace its path, interpret it, reconstruct it and make it relevant to the present. (Sachedina, 2001, p. 1; emphasis added)

However, even as one group of authors was seeking to "highlight" one set of values to be found in the Quran and tradition, other authors were successfully finding and energetically publicizing quite another set of values.

Even as liberal scholars within and outside the Muslim world were gathering intellectual arguments that supported liberal, tolerant Islam, the terrorists were making equal reference to Islam, asserting that their mission and methods were mandated directly by their religion. The celebratory tone taken in some Islamic communities following the attacks soberingly showed that this view was shared by a certain-and not a small-segment of the Muslim public. Even a year after the event, radical clerics meeting in London to celebrate the September 11 attacks averred in their press conference that these had been an exercise in "just retribution" and thus a proper Islamic act (Bowcott, 2002).

Western leaders and supportive governments in the Muslim world have tried hard to detach the terrorists' goals from Islam; the radicals are equally determined to keep the issues joined.

For many Western opinion leaders, the goal of opposing terrorists, of preventing the conflict from turning into a "clash of religions," and of discrediting the radicals' interpretation of Islam, made it seem all the more advisable to support the more benign strains within Islam-but which ones, exactly, and with what concrete goal in mind? Identifying the elements that should be supported, choosing appropriate methods, and defining the goals of such support is difficult.

It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If "nation-building" is a daunting task, "religion-building" is immeasurably more perilous and complex. Islam is neither a homogeneous entity nor a simple system. Many extraneous issues and problems have become entangled with religion, and many of the political actors in the region deliberately seek to "Islamize" the debate in a way that they think will further their goals.

THE SETTING: SHARED PROBLEMS, DIFFERENT ANSWERS

Islam's current crisis has two main components: The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness; many different solutions, such as nationalism, pan-Arabism, Arab socialism, and Islamic revolution, have been attempted without success; and this has led to frustration and anger. At the same time, the Islamic world has fallen out of step with contemporary global culture, as well as moving increasingly to the margins of the global economy.

Muslims disagree on what to do about this, on what has caused it, and on what their societies ultimately should look like. We can distinguish four essential positions, as the following paragraphs describe.

The fundamentalists put forth an aggressive, expansionist version of Islam that does not shy away from violence. They want to gain political power and then to impose strict public observance of Islam, as they themselves define it, forcibly on as broad a population worldwide as possible. Their unit of reference is not the nation-state or the ethnic group, but the Muslim community, the ummah; gaining control of particular Islamic countries can be a step on this path but is not the main goal.

We can distinguish two strands within fundamentalism. One, which is grounded in theology and tends to have some roots in one or another kind of religious establishment, we will refer to as the scriptural fundamentalists. On the Shi'a side, this group includes most of the Iranian revolutionaries and, as one Sunni manifestation, the Saudi-based Wahhabis. The Kaplan congregation, active among Western diaspora Turks and in Turkey, is another example.

The radical fundamentalists, the second strand, are much less concerned with the literal substance of Islam, with which they take considerable liberties either deliberately or because of ignorance of orthodox Islamic doctrine. They usually do not have any "institutional" religious affiliations but tend to be eclectic and autodidactic in their knowledge of Islam. Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Hizbut-Tahrir, and a large number of other Islamic radical movements and diffuse groups worldwide belong to this category.

The fundamentalists do not merely approve of the Islamic practices of the past. More significantly, they expand on them, applying some of the more stringent rules more rigorously than the original Islamic community ever did, exercising an arbitrary selectivity that allows them to ignore or drop more egalitarian, progressive, tolerant aspects of the Quran and the sunnah, and inventing some new rules of their own. This is particularly true of the radical fundamentalists.

Not all fundamentalists embrace or even endorse terrorism, at least not the indiscriminate type of terrorism that targets civilians and often kills Muslims along with the "enemy," but fundamentalism as a whole is incompatible with the values of civil society and the Western vision of civilization, political order, and society.

The traditionalists are also divided into two distinct groups: conservative traditionalists and reformist traditionalists. The distinction is significant.

Conservative traditionalists believe that Islamic law and tradition ought to be rigorously and literally followed, and they see a role for the state and for the political authorities in encouraging or at least facilitating this. However, they do not generally favor violence and terrorism.

Historically, they have grown accustomed to operating under changing political circumstances, and this has led them to concentrate their efforts on the daily life of the society, where they try to have as much influence and control as they can, even when the government is not Islamic. In the social realm, their goal is to preserve orthodox norms and values and conservative behavior to the fullest extent possible. The temptations and the pace of modern life are seen as posing a major threat to this. Their posture is one of resistance to change.

Additionally, there are often important differences between conservative traditionalists who live in the Islamic world or in the Third World generally and those who live in the West. Being an essentially moderate position, traditionalism tends to be adaptive to its environment. Thus, conservative traditionalists who live in traditional societies are likely to accept practices that are prevalent in such societies, such as child marriage, and to be less educated and less able to distinguish local traditions and customs from actual Islamic doctrine. Those who live in the West have absorbed more-modern views on these issues and tend to be better educated and more linked to the transnational discourse on issues of orthodoxy.

Reformist traditionalists think that, to remain viable and attractive throughout the ages, Islam has to be prepared to make some concessions in the literal application of orthodoxy. They are prepared to discuss reforms and reinterpretations. Their posture is one of cautious adaptation to change, being flexible on the letter of the law to conserve the spirit of the law.

The modernists actively seek far-reaching changes to the current orthodox understanding and practice of Islam. They want to eliminate the harmful ballast of local and regional tradition that has, over the centuries, intertwined itself with Islam. They further believe in the historicity of Islam, i.e., that Islam as it was practiced in the days of the Prophet reflected eternal truths as well as historical circumstances that were appropriate to that time but are no longer valid. They think it is possible to identify an "essential core" of Islamic belief; further, they believe that this core will not only remain undamaged but in fact will be strengthened by changes, even very substantial changes, that reflect changing times, social conditions, and historical circumstances.

The things that modernists value and admire most about Islam tend to be quite different and more abstract than the things the fundamentalists and the traditionalists value. Their core values-the primacy of the individual conscience and a community based on social responsibility, equality, and freedom-are easily compatible with modern democratic norms.

The secularists believe that religion should be a private matter separate from politics and the state and that the main challenge lies in preventing transgressions in either direction. The state should not interfere in the individual exercise of religion, but equally, religious customs must be in conformity with the law of the land and with human rights. The Turkish Kemalists, who placed religion under the firm control of the state, represent the laicist model in Islam.

These positions should be thought of as representing segments on a continuum, rather than distinct categories. There are no clear boundaries between them, so that some traditionalists overlap with the fundamentalists; the most modernist of the traditionalists are almost modernists; and the most extreme modernists are similar to secularists.

Each of these outlined positions takes a characteristic stance on key issues of controversy in the contemporary Islamic debate. And their "rules of evidence" for defending these positions are also distinct, as sketched in Table 1 (starting on page 8).

In the contemporary Islamic struggle, "lifestyle" issues are the field on which the contending positions try to stake their claims and that they use to signal their control. Doctrine is territory and is being fought over. This explains the prominence of such issues in an ideological and political contest.

The utility of "mapping" the views of the various Islamic positions is that, on issues of doctrine and lifestyle, they adhere to fairly distinct and reliable platforms, which define their identity and serve as identifiers toward like-minded others-a kind of "passport."

Thus, while it is possible for groups to dissimulate concerning their attitude to violence, to avoid prosecution and sanctions, it is not really possible for them to distort or deny their views on key value and lifestyle issues. These are what define them and attract new members.

Conservative traditionalists accept the correctness of past practices, even when they conflict with today's norms and values, on the principle that the original Islamic community represents the absolute and eternal ideal, but they no longer necessarily attempt to reinstate all of the practices. Often, however, their reason for this is not that they would not like to do it, but that they assess it to be temporarily or permanently unrealistic to do so. Reformist traditionalists reinterpret, rebut, or evade practices that seem problematic in today's world. Modernists see the same practices as part of a changing and changeable historical context; they do not regard the original Islamic community or the early years of Islam as something that one would necessarily wish to reproduce today. Secularists prohibit the practices that conflict with modern norms and laws and ignore the others as belonging to the private sphere of individuals.

Secularists do not concern themselves with what Islam might or might not require. Moderate secularists want the state to guarantee people's right to practice their faith, while ensuring that religion remains a private matter and does not violate any standards of human rights or civil law. Radical secularists, including communists and laicists, oppose religion altogether.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Civil Democratic Islam by Cheryl Benard Copyright © 2003 by RAND Corporation. Excerpted by permission.
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