This year's Arab Spring in London (2) - Internet entrepreneur

In the wake of the epochal changes that are currently affecting North Africa and the Middle East, London was the scene of the launch of a new website advocating freedom of expression in the Arab world.

Arabs.com  is an initiative of Thunayan Khalid al-Ghanim. Although he had already built up a reputation as one of the most prolific and expansive buyers of  online domain names, the Kuwaiti-born internet entrepreneur was a bit of enigma. In late June, the once secretive internet pioneer, also known under the alias elequa, stepped out of anonimity. A member of a prominent Kuwaiti business family, which is also active in politics, often in opposition to the ruling family, Thunayan al-Ghanim was educated in Europe and the United States. Before turning to exploring and exploiting the opportunities offered by the internet revolution, he pursued an artistic career as a painter and sculptor.

Art work by Thunayan al-Ghanim

Future Media Architects (FMA)

Through a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands named Future Media Architects (FMA) he has managed to take control of literally tens of thousands of domain names. Although he professes no interest in politics, the Arabs.com initiative does make a political statement, as its website's subtitle reads 'Freedom of speech is a human right'.

Arabs.com launch

 Taking place in 40/30, the top floor  bar & restaurant in the Swiss Re Building, better known as 'The Gherkin', the launch of Arabs.com was given an appropriate allure. The event was organized by Orient Consulting Services and hosted by its CEO Lina Tayara.

Lina Tayara with Arabs.com founder Thunayan Khalid al-Ghanim

 The evening also featured Chris Cobb Smith, a  former military officer turned press security consultant, as keynote speaker. Not long ago he made headlines during the recent troubles in Libya, when he -- together with BBC Arabic Service journalist Feras Killani and cameraman Goktay Koraltay -- were captured by Gaddafi's forces and subjected to torture and coercion. Subsequently, the trio was awarded the 2011 MBI Award for Press Freedom.

Keynote speaker Chris Cobb-Smith

In the fringes of the launch, which attracted representatives of the media, the world of publishing and communications, as well as publicists and academics working on the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, there was a screening of a brief documentary film, entitled 'A Story Seldom told' and produced by the Zenith Foundation.

The launch was also covered on the  technocrati website.
Follow Arabs.com on Twitter

This year's Arab Spring in London (1) - A Syrian contribution

The next few posts will present a number of events that have taken place this Spring and Summer in London, confirming that the city is still in many respects at the centre of critical developments in the Arab and wider Muslim world.

Aziz al-Azmeh at AKU

On 21 June the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilization (ISMC) at the Aga Khan University (AKU) hosted the renowned Syrian Scholar of Islam Aziz al-Azmeh, who delivered a lecture under the title The Relevance and Irrelevance of Muslim Political Traditions. Beginning with an unexpected quote from Paul's Epistle to the Romans that there is 'no authority but God' and other references to the view of the Gospels that we must obey God rather than man, he provides some contrast with the perhaps more often cited statement in Matthew of rendering unto Caesar in order to challenge the generally held assumption that , unlike Islam, Christendom clearly separated State and Church.

His objectives in this talk were not to compare Islam and Christianity or oppose them to each other, but to reflect critically and present some purposeful discriminations. Al-Azmeh declared the argument that Scripture prescribed Europe's political system absurd, because it flies in the face of sociological evidence: Dogma and practice have always differed.

Sociological thinking insists that political systems cannot be reduced to cultures and that cultures cannot be reduced to Scripture. The great transformations of modernity have made social, political and cultural diversity and complexities only greater. This observation, al-Azmeh insists, that applies as much to the Muslim world as it does to the West.

However, regarding the latter, al-Azmeh discerns the same disinterest and lack of analytical rigour among Muslim and Western observers when studying Muslim societies. The prevailing presumption still is that the Muslim world in the 21st century is only just emerging from the Muslim traditions which require a religious legitimation for political structures. Muslims are 'frozen' into their traditions and the what he terms as 'Super Muslims' like to perpetuate this stultified view.

The profound changes in Muslim societies in the course of the last few centuries are still 'bracketed', in spite of the fact that -- although they may be unevenly distributed -- are very real. These changes may have been of European provenance, but they have been indigenized and adapted to local contexts.

Through his analysis of the characteristics of these changes in Muslim societies, al-Azmeh wants to transcend the tendency of coining the description of Muslim society and the history of the Muslim world in dogmatic terms.

In his responses to various questions, al-Azmeh rejected the contention that there are textual prescriptions for the organization of Muslim society or depiction of Islamic history in the Qur'an, as if Muslims are afflicted with some congenital nomocratic disposition . He wants to contest and break-down the 'logocentric clichés' which hold the analysis of Muslim societies captive. Prior to the nineteenth century, such articulations were unknown to the Muslim mindset, and al-Azmeh contends they are the result of the influence of both Catholic and Protestant traditions. 

In this respect, he argues that the Islamic concept of ijma' -- the consensus of the community of religious scholars -- was as multilayered as early Christian Patristics. Islamic theological traditions have been very diverse and were often in conflict with each other. Muslim history manifests different caliphates, Sultanic traditions, and other political systems.

He does not deny that the emphasis on scripturalism has been enormously influential, but, to further clarify the point he wants to make, this must be seen as a 'Protestant inflection' -- which can in turn be explained through  its disenchantment with Catholicism. Subsequently, this view has been transplanted and transposed into analyses of the Muslim world.

Pushing his argument even further, al-Azmeh maintains that there is no evidence of a specific political reading of the Qur'an prior to the twentieth century. In his view, the fuqaha' or legal scholars were practical men, and only ideologically disposed in a secondary sense. This demands a rethinking of Islam as jurisdictional and nomocratic -- at least in the reductionist fashion in which it is generally presented. The praxis of law in the Muslim world was complex, and very distinct from classical Islamic legal theorizing. Consequently, he dismisses the notion of Shari'ah as an 'artificial gloss'

The violence involved in imposing Islamic law in the way the Islamic Republic of Iran has tried to do it is at odds not only with standards of equity and justice in the contemporary world, but also at variance with both Islamic historical practice and legal theory. The way in which Islamists are implementing Islamic law makes for what al-Azmeh calls a 'bizarre spectacle'

Aziz al-Azmeh

Commenting on Muslim reformism, al-Azmeh does not deny that it tends to be apologetic and that there is a lot of 'social engineering' going on on the basis of an Islamic variety of scripturalism which some perceive as 'authentic'. In addition, aside from the emergence of political islamism along 'intellectually rudimentary' Salafi lines, social conservatism has also grown. The social salience of Salafism has pushed genuine reforms to the margins. Al-Azmeh dismisses its claim of being representative of the tradition as false, rejecting the 'scripturalist' reshaping of Islamic tradition as an unnecessary interpretational mode.

Interpretations such as those put forward by the likes of Abu'l-Ala al-Maududi or Sayyid Qutb would have been inconceivable to the medieval scholars who were truly intertextual in their outlook. Maududi and Qutb are products of modernity and their ideas do not reflect a revival of Islamic authenticity. In fact, there is no univocal answer to that constitutes a genuine 'Islamic tradition'. It was never fixed for all times, on the contrary: tradition has to be understood in the context of spatio-temporality. 

 It can be taken as a self-description, it can constitute religiosity as a personal belief and participation in certain rituals, it can be regarded as adhering to a 'minumum of social practices', or a more rigorous modification of personal behaviour and language reflecting a deeper piety. Finally, when the latter is reflected in political and social behaviour it can become stuck in a political framework and leading to a complete resocialization.

The same applies to the term 'Muslim' as used by al-Azmeh in the title of his lecture. This also requires a 'situational' understanding.

In this presentation al-Azmeh positioned himself in a discourse shared by other Syrian intellectuals such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (1) and Bassam Tibi (even though the latter and al-Azmeh himself have been working for decades in the West as 'exilic intellectuals'). Their work calls into question the overeasy pigeon-holing of Western thinking as somehow more susceptible to secularity than the Muslim intellectualism. Hopefully, it will be not for too long, before these kind of ideas are allowed to flourish again in Damascus and elsewhere in long-suffering Syria, ansd beyond.

(1) For an earlier appeal by al-Azm, dating back to 2005, calling on the Baath Regime to allow a 'Damascus Spring', click here.

The Arab Spring: Intellectual Underpinnings

The newly launched  Fair Observer Website has published an essay by yours truly on the intellectual discourses underlying the current social volatility and changes in the political landscape in North Africa and the Middle East.

 the outside world appears to be realizing that the region’s future is not limited to a choice between authoritarian strong-man regimes providing a precarious stability, or the uncertainties associated with an Islamist take-over. But what is still missing in analyses of these peoples’ revolutions - driven by rising Arab middle classes - is how political pluralism depends on intellectual openness. This is not only because policy makers, political pundits and other Middle East watchers focus primarily on the antagonism between existing regimes and their Islamist detractors. 

The article showcases Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi as an example of  what Mohammed Arkoun called the chercheur-penseur or 'scholar-thinker', whose contributions to a rethinking of Islam as a civilizational legacy were considered suspect by the political elites and controversial by the religious establishment and Islamists.

Hasan Hanafi

A former Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, by 1960 Hanafi had already moved away from the Islamist agenda, focusing instead on the potential of Islam’s wider intellectual legacy for the emancipation of not just the Middle East but the Third World in general, from regressing into a theocracy.  Hanafi was no stranger to controversy. Because of his revolutionary reinterpretation of Islamic thinking along the lines of Latin American liberation theology, he had been in trouble with both Egypt’s state security apparatus and the Islamists before.  

The ‘Heritage and Renewal’ Project which he has been developing for the last thirty years envisages a new way of thinking for citizens of Egypt, the Muslim world, and eventually the entire Developing World, by critically examining the failings of their heritage as well as the shortcomings of the West.  Unfortunately for Hanafi, it caused not only suspicion among the state authorities, but his criticisms of atrophied traditional Islamic learning and rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ also caught the ire of the Azhar establishment and the Islamists.

However, it appears that these progressive ideas are now finally percolating through to the growing middle classes of increasingly better educated and critical young Egyptians and Muslims elsewhere.

 Amr Hamzawy, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment whose name briefly circulated as the new minister of youth after Mubarak’s fall, used the Islamist attacks on Hanafi to illustrate Egypt’s lack of intellectual freedom.

Amr Hamzawy

 Only now, in the wake of the February 25^th revolution, is there a chance for the openness Hanafi has advocated for decades. In an article for al-Arabi Weekly, entitled ‘The Awakening of the Giant’, he  noted that: “The people broke the barrier of fear. They jumped forward along the historical path.” 

It seems that the Arabic-speaking parts of the Muslim world are catching up with other countries, where the space for lively intellectual debate has been less constricted:

Ironically, many of these thinkers have found more receptive audiences elsewhere in the Muslim world, in particular in Indonesia and Turkey [..]It is interesting to note how Indonesia and Turkey, two countries careful to avoid any direct reference to Islam in their constitutions, also appear to be the most open to lively debates on the place of religion in public life. This intellectual vibrancy is a crucial factor in the remarkable political transformations of the most populous Muslim nation-state in the world and the largest Muslim country in the Mediterranean. Indonesia and Turkey, too, suffered under military dictatorship while witnessing an increased display of personal Muslim piety. However, this is no longer pursued through political Islamic doctrines. Instead it has been translated into an agenda advocating economic development, universal standards of human rights, and democracy compatible with a moral compass based on Islamic values.

Hasan Hanafi in Indonesia

The read the full article, click here

The Legacy of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd: One Year On...

A year ago this week, the leading Egyptian Islamicist Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd died rather unexpectedly in Cairo (see my post of 6 July 2010). The Qantara website carries two articles to commemorate the event, the first one reports on the conference organized by Navid Kermani and Katajun Amirpur, bringing together scholars such as the Syrian scholars Sadiq al-Azm and Aziz al-Azmeh, the Iranian intellectuals Abdolkarim Soroush and Muhammad Shabestari, South Africa's Farid Esack and Amina Wadud from the USA.

But the fact that this conference with its star-studded guest list took place in Essen and not in Cairo, Tehran or Lahore is an indication of the lack of acceptance with which innovative approaches are met within the Islamic world. It is also a reminder of the fact that Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was declared divorced from his wife against his will in 1995 as a result of his very cautious attempts to stimulate reform in Egypt.

To read the whole article click here.

The other contribution was Yoginder Sikand's last interview with the Egyptian scholar.In response to the question how he sees his work, Abu Zayd replied:

 I see it as part of my long interest in Islamic hermeneutics, the methodology of understanding the Koran, the Sunnah and other components of the Islamic tradition. Of particular concern for me are certain assumptions in popular Islamic discourse that have not been fully examined, and have generally been ignored or avoided. Thus, for instance, Muslim scholars have not seriously reflected on the question of what is actually meant when we say that the Koran is the revealed 'Word of God'. What exactly does the term 'Word of God' mean? What does revelation mean?

In a historical understanding of the Koran one would also have to look at the verses in the text that refer specifically to the Prophet and the society in which he lived. Some people might feel that looking at the Koran in this way is a crime against Islam, but I feel that this sort of reaction is a sign of a weak and vulnerable faith. And this is why a number of writers who have departed from tradition and have pressed for a way of relating to the Koran that takes the historical context of the revelation seriously have been persecuted in many countries.

I think there is a pressing need to bring the historical dimension of the revelation into discussion, for this is indispensable for countering authoritarianism, both religious and political, and for promoting human rights

 For the whole interview, click here

Intellectual historian Ibrahim Abu-Rabi' dies in Amman

M. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi'

M. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi', a leading expert on contemporary Muslim thought passed away in Amman on 2 July 2011. An academic with appointments as Professor of Islamic Studies and co-Director of the Duncan Black MacDonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut and at the University of Alberta in Canada, Abu-Rabi' began making a name as a specialist in the intellectual history of the present-day Muslim world in the mid-1990s.

 A graduate of Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, Nazareth-born Abu-Rabi' held two MAs from the University of Cincinnati and Temple University, where he also completed his PhD in the study of religions. His studies of the writings and ideas of contemporary thinkers and scholars from the Arabic-speaking parts, published under the titles Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World and Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History are now regarded as seminal works on the intellectual history of the modern Middle East. He also edited the Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought.

More recently, Abu-Rabi's interests turned to Turkey, focusing in particular on the writings of the leading 20th-century thinker and Sufi, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (ca. 1875-1960) and Fethullah Gülen. This shift prefigures the new awareness among Arab-Muslim activists associated with the recent  seismic shifts in North Africa and the Middle East of the relevance of developments in Turkish civil society and its intellectual underpinnings for the further unfolding of the 'Arab Spring' of 2011 (cf. also my blog post of 5 February 2011). Sadly, Abu-Rabi' will no longer provide us with insights and reflections on what will most certainly be recognized in future assessments of these developments as both a political watershed and intellectual paradigm shift of magnitude even greater than the traumatic events of 1967.

For links to Abu-Rabi's publications, click on the images below