NEW ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

On 16 November 2010, four US-based scholars launched the Society of Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCTIW). Alina Gharabegian, Seema Golestaneh, Jason Mohaghegh, and Lucian Stone want to 'promote new directions in scholarship and creative activities related to the interface of Eastern and Western movements' by establishing a multi-disciplinary network of 'professional academics representing a diverse array of fields'. This diversity is already reflected by the backgrounds of the initiators, New Jersey City University Assistant-Professors Gharabegian and Mohaghegh work in the fields of English literature and World literature respectively, but their interests also include contemporary Armenian literature, 'Middle Eastern interpretations of the elegy', and contemporary avant-garde circles in the Middle East. Seema Golestaneh is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Columbia University working on contemporary Sufism in Iran (see also the post of  27 August on this blog). Stone, now an Assistant-Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Dakota is not only a specialist on the philosopher Simone Weil, but was also involved in the Library of Living Philosophers project, contributing to the volume on the Iranian-born thinker Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Although its geographical remit indicates that the society wishes to showcase developments in the Islamicate world, the Society regards it as 'a kind of limitless zero-world, a vast territory of thought, experience, and imagination'. This open interpretation combined with the involvement of scholars not confined by the philological-historical inclinations which for so long determined the way Islam and the Muslim world was studied holds great potential of innovative and original ways of engaging with the pluralist civilizational heritage of the Muslim world.

At present membership is free, to register click here.

For a flavour of what might be in store for the future, here are some of the publications by members of the steering committee:

:

SECOND THOUGHTS? AN ASSESSMENT OF ISLAM AND STATE IN INDONESIA

LSE IDEAS, the centre for the study of diplomacy, international affairs and strategy at the London School of Economics, hosted a seminar on Islam and the State: A Southeast Asian Perspective, featuring Dr. Bahtiar Effendy, a lecturer at State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah in Jakarta, with Prof. Gilles Kepel, Director of the Moyen/Orient/Méditerranée Programme at Sciences Po in Paris and holder of the Phillipe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs, acting as discussant, and Tan Sri Dr Munir Majid, head of the Southeast Asia International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, in the chair.

Dr Effendy's talk was largely based on his book Islam and the State in Indonesia (2003), a published verion of his PhD thesis at Ohio State University, defended in 1994. Notwithstanding the fact that Indonesia's political landscape has changed unrecognizably since the fall of Soeharto's New Order Regime, Effendy's study has only been updated with a relatively brief  'post-script' containing just a summary discussion of developments from 1999 to 2000. While earlier parts of the book contain valuable discussions of the role of a new Muslim intelligentsia in creating the 'New Islamic Intellectualism' of the 1970s and 1980s, which transformed the debate on religion and politics from a legal-formalist and exclusivist into a substantialist and inclusivist discourse, there is no mention of the rise of two ensuing generations of Muslim intellectuals, consisting of scholars from the State Islamic Universities in Jakarta and Yogyakarta (including Effendy himself) and younger intellectual-activists connected through networks such as the Jaringan Islam Liberal (JIL, Liberal Islam Network) or associated with the young cadres of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), referred to as NU Muda. Part heirs, part critics of the pioneers of this substantialist Islamic discourse they have been instrumental in the further shaping of an Indonesian variant of Islamic civil society.

Dr Bahtiar Effendy

Also from Effendy's presentation it was difficult to get a clear sense of where he sees Indonesia going. Having identified the early twentieth-century, the end of the Cold War, and post-9/11 as three key moments when the discussion of the relation between Islam and modernity and between religion and politics became particularly acute, he then restricted his discussion primarily to the domestic Indonesian context. 

Throughout the Soekarno and Soeharto years, Islamic political parties were considered as potential contenders for political power and were therefore clamped down on. Only in the 1950s, when a system that can be described as liberal and democratic was allowed to briefly flourish, were Islamic parties able to profile themselves uninhibitedly. This was reflected by their unsurpassed success in the 1955 elections, when the four Islamic parties together received 43% of the vote --- still, not a majority in a country that is 85-90% Muslim. Evidently, even then, large segments of Indonesia's Muslim intelligentsia did not want Islam as the basis for statehood.

The New Order Regime approached the Islam with the same suspicion as Soekarno had in the 1940s and during the 'Guided Democracy' of his later years. Islamic Parties were generally reduced to an outsider role in the political process  It was not until the 1970s, when this earlier mentioned new generation of intellectuals and technocrats formulated a non-formalist alternative Islamic discourse. Because it was no longer regarded as explicitly anti-state the state allowed more room for this kind of activism. In fact, the Muslim intelligentsia were not only co-opted in the government's development policies; eventually the state itself saw the usefulness of religion for driving its own objectives. and began boosting its own Islamic credentials. The power of Islamic courts was strenghtened in regards to personal and family law, the country began experimenting with Islamic banking, and the government established a kind of Islamic think tank, the 'Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals' (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia, ICMI), led by Minister of Technology and later Vice-President and President B.J. Habibie.

In the democratic transformation that followed the fall of Soeharto in 1998, more than 181 new political parties emerged, of which 42 bore an Islamic or Islamist signature. It also spelled the return of the legal-formalist political and religious discourse. There was a sense of deja-vu, as it became clear that the Islamic parties still bore a historical stigma, according to Effendy. The majority of the Muslims preferred a substantialist understanding over the legalist interpretations associated with political Islam. As an explanation for this hesitation, Effendy suggests that three factors played a role: the fear it may thwart Muslim social mobility, the fragmentation of the community due to the competition between a plethora of Islamic parties, and the sense of alienation felt by younger generations of Muslims, who never experienced the struggles during the first fifty years of independence. Again, elections results reflected these sentiments. Between 1968 and 1998 support for Islamic parties oscillated between 15 and 30%. In the three free elections that have been held since then the Islamic parties received 37% (1999), 38% (2004) and 24% (2009) of the votes.

Effendy concludes that the intellectual transformation effectuated between 1970 and 1990 still dominates at the expense of the advocates of a legal-formalist Islamic model: The Jakarta Charter of 1945 (forcing Muslim citizens to abide by Islamic law) was never inserted into the constitution and only select elements of Islamic law have been implemented. As long as Muslim politicians do not disrupt the idea of a nation state they wuill be allowed some maneuvering space, but the exact place of Islamic principles in the political constellation is still not defined. Whereas Effendy expresses the hope that political and religious elites will reach an appropriate settlement, he gives no indication what such an agreement should encompass. Nor did he tell anything about the vibrant intellectual milieu in which younger scholars, intellectual-activists, and writers current discuss possible scenarios for a future civil Islam.

Prof Gilles Kepel

As the author of Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Gilles Kepel responded by providing a wider context by drawing on examples from other parts of the Muslim world. Comparing developments in Indonesia with those in Turkey and Algeria, he sees similarities in the implicit association of Islam by its detractors as threatening to the nation-state and a step backwards, or their use of political Islam as the scapegoat hampering state-building and development. However, when political opponents of authoritarian regimes want to challenge the incumbents they often opt for employing an 'Islamic vocabulary', although this must not be automatically equated with legal-formalist aspirations. 

In the same vein, Kepel further suggests that Turkish civil society-building has more of a 'Muslim' dimension than that it envisages an Islamic -- let alone Islamist -- agenda. It is important to acknowledge the sheer diversity of Islamic discourses, with civil society movements on one end and totalitarian Islamist ideologies on the other end of the spectrum. Given this multitude of voices, the questions to ponder are: Who controls Islamic discourse?; Why do so many different groups feel the need to take recourse to rhetoric coated in Islamic idiom and symbolism?; What are the reasons for the resurgence of cultural Islam? Returning to the Indonesian situation, Kepel ventured the speculation that, notwithstanding all the criticisms, whether there is not something to Clifford Geertz's  (in)famous taxonomy  distinguishing between between Santri (pious, practicing Muslims) and Abangan (syncretic Javanese belief and practices professing nominal allegiance to Islam).

In response to a query whether aside from the legal-formalist aspirations of Islamic parties and the substantialist view of the proponents of cultural or civil Islam, there are no initiatives on the part of Muslim activists to address other 'substantial' issues such as economic developments, generic human rights, justice etc., Effendy claimed that this was not the case. According to him, those driving the Islamic agendas continue to subscribe to legal-formalist interpretations focussing on ritual practice and symbolism. The Chair Dr. Munir Majid doubted whether this is so. Invoking the distinction between the Islamic notions of  fard ayn (individual obligations) and fard kifaya (collective obligations), he admitted the former tend to be overamplified, but the later offer a vehicle for social activism and civil society building.

Yours truly was also surprised that Effendy did not recognize the remarkable parallels, rightly noted by Kepel,  between the historical trajectories in Indonesia and Turkey (apart from an anecdotal reference to the personal friendship of ex-President Habibie with former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan --dating back to their student years in Germany). Perhaps it is a lack of familiarity with developments in the latter country, that prevented Effendy from detecting the undeniable commonalities in the Indonesian and Turkisch experiences with Islam in the public sphere and the accommodation of religion and politics. 

In spite of his discussion of  the intellectual trends circulating among Indonesian Muslims in the 1970s and 1980s, Effendy's presentation missed an updated account of developments during the past turbulent decade and failed to venture beyond a narrow focus on the issue of statehood and Islamic parties role in the formal political process, and unpack the development of substantialist Islamic discourse. For an intellectual from a generation who can be considered to have inherited the legacy of 1970s New Islamic Intellectualism he almost seemed disenchanted and having doubts whether it had all been worth the effort..

FEATURED REVIEW: POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Routledge has included my review of Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion in its selection for the American Academic of Religion (AAR) Article Collection, which will be featured at the upcoming Annual Convention of the (AAR) in Atlanta from 30 October to 1 November 2010. The review is freely accessible until 31 December by clicking on the banner below.

For more information on Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion edited by Purushottama Bilimoria and Andrew B. Irvine click on the image below.

 

Assessing Sayyid Qutb: The Importance of 'Thick Description'

In a recent lecture at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics on the prominent Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), Dr. John Calvert, Associate Professor of History at Creighton University and an expert on radical Islamism, stressed the importance of taking into account the complex identity of such figures associated with political Islam, especially in view of caricaturistic representations in the media coverage of this phenomenon.

Although radical Islamist ideologies and their exponents are not within the ambit of this blog, as it seeks to introduce 'critical Muslims' provided alternative visions of the place of religion in the Muslim world, a number of remarks made by John Calvert in his talk at LSE merit mention here -- as they can be considered helpful in acquiring a more balanced and nuanced impression of the multilayered personality of Sayyid Qutb. Not least also because the impact of his ideas on contemporary Islamic discourse can hardly be exaggerated. Moreover, when taking into consideration the full width of his intellectual legacy, Sayyid Qutb can be considered as a 'critical Muslim' in his own right, notwithstanding the vast differences between his vision and the outlook of other progressive and though-provoking intellectuals with more liberal dispositions.

To understand what motivated individuals such as Sayyid Qutb, and those present-day and equally controversial exponents of Islamic radicalism and extremism who draw their inspiration in no small measure from his writings, a degree of empathy for their way of looking at the world is required, if we are to get even an inkling of what makes such activists (including those perpetrating despicable acts of violence) tick. In order to account for both 'the objective circumstances and subjective experiences' of a figure like Sayyid Qutb, Dr Calvert argues that it is necessary to engage in 'thick description' --- a term used by one of America's leading anthropologists of the late 20th century, the late Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), who applied this approach to his own research in the field of the anthropology of religion.

No matter how controversial the ideas they expound may be or how objectionable the actions they perpetrate or condone, if we are to comprehend the authors of radical Islamist discourses and make sense of what they stand for, these Islamist ideologues and activists must be studied on their own terms.

 In the case of Sayyid Qutb this evinces a gnostic disposition that suffuses all his writings, including the radicalized ones of the final years of  his life, which -- as as it was cut short by his execution in 1966 -- has left us with what Calvert refers to as an 'open-ended Islamism'. This in my view very apt characterization points at one of the most problematic aspects of Sayyid Qutb's Islamist ideology -- namely what his often self-proclaimed heirs have done with his legacy. It raises important questions as to the extent to which authors can be held responsible for what others say or claim to do in their name or on the basis of their writings.

In the course of his presentation, Dr Calvert explained how the doctrinal anchorage of Sayyid Qutb's ideas regarding the need for a radical transformation of Egypt, and indeed all Muslim societies, was grounded in his abiding interest in humankind's spiritual disposition and his personal preoccupation with the Transcendent. It was on these grounds that Sayyid Qutb consistently argued that Muslim identity eventually trumped all other loyalties or human associations.

The transformation of a bookish writer preoccupied with literary and broader cultural interests into a radicalized political-religious ideologue must, according to Calvert, be primarily attributed to the torture Sayyid Qutb suffered  at the hands of the Nasser Regime during his lengthy incarceration between 1954 and 1964 . It was this life-changing experience that is presented as an explanation for Sayyid Qutb's shift from his discussions of the dichotomy separating a spiritual East from a materialist West towards another binary opposing 'true Muslims' to those sleepwalking through existence with the false consciousness associated with the state of 'Jahiliyya'. Originally referring to a specific period in Arab history, namely the time prior to the mission of Muhammad and the revelation of the Qur'an, Sayyid Qutb interpreted it as a primordial disposition afflicting those unfamiliar with the true meaning of the Islamic teachings. Contrary to many of those appealing to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the man himself did not take the step of condemning individual Muslims as infidels or apostates, but used it as a notion describing the collective state of mind in which contemporary Muslim communities find themselves.

For a detailed account of this fascinating figure of modern and contemporary Islamic thinking, read John Calvert's latest book: Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (For more information click on the image below).

 

Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010): Trailblazer for new approaches to the study of Islam

After Mohammed Abid al-Jabiri (cf. blog post of 16 May 2010) and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (cf. blogpost 6 July 2010), a third innovative Muslim intellectual has just passed away as well. Mohammed Arkoun died yesterday in Paris at the age of 82.

Carool Kersten with Mohammed Arkoun (London, October 2009)

An Algerian Berber educated in French and Arabic in Oran and Algiers, in 1954 Arkoun moved to France in for postgraduate studies. In Paris, he studied under eminent scholars such as Jacques Berque, Robert Brunschvig, Louis Massignon and Paul Ricoeur, while his teaching duties in Strasbourg brought him into contact with Claude Cahen, who in turn introduced Arkoun to the historians of the Annales School, which had emerged in that city a quarter of a century earlier. This proved to be a revelation which left an indelible mark on Arkoun's scholarship. Notions like the 'history of mentalities' and the 'unthinkable' developed by the school's founders Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, or Braudel's conceptualization of the Mediterranean as a 'geo-historical space' found their way into Arkoun's pioneering historiographies of Islamic thought.


Coinciding with the Algerian war of independence and the student uprisings of 1968, Arkoun's postgraduate studies overlap with the Aufbruch of the French political, cultural and academic scene. His years as a doctoral student  are also framed by global events like the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring twelve years later, thus matching almost exactly with what Patricia O'Brien has called 'the milestone dates in the chronology of dislocation’ characterizing the intellectual upheaval in the postwar era.

In his subsequent scholarship, which must primarily be regarded as setting a new agenda for the study of Islam as a field of scholarly inquiry, Arkoun has drawn from across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, using the latest advances made in the Western -- and in particular the French -- academe. Aside from the Annales school,  the structural linguistics and anthropology developed by Saussure, Benveniste and Levi-Strauss, the semiotics of Greimas, the sociology and political philosophy of Cornelius Castoriades, Foucault's discursive formations, as well as his archaeologies of knowledge and power, or Derrida's poststructuralist deconstructions; have all left their traces in Arkoun's rethinking of Islamic studies. 

Initially conceived as a 'Critique of Islamic Reason', he moved on to a more constructive proposition for a new research programme for studying Islam and the Muslim world. Presented under the name 'Applied Islamology'., this project envisaging a collaborative effort requiring the participation of international teams of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars, was not only inspired by the French ethnographer Roger Bastide's 'Applied Anthropology', but also informed by the Luso-Tropicology (Tropicalism) of the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre. 


Arkoun's ability to draw all these different strings and strands of thought together into a coherent whole betrays the influence from yet another of his intellectual mentors, Paul Ricoeur. Just as the latter's generous or charitable interpretations had enabled him to reconcile conflicting philosophical positions on knowledge and understanding, Arkoun adhered to a similar catholic approach. Following his master through the 'narrow gate' of structural-linguistic analysis, Arkoun's insistence that 'accurate description must precede interpretation; but interpretation cannot be attempted today without a rigorous analysis, using linguistics, semiotic, historical, and anthropological tools’, reflects Ricoeur's hermeneutic adage that 'to explain more is to understand better'.


In the final years of his career, Arkoun repeatedly expressed regret that his methodological suggestions often fell on deaf ears among scholars of Islam. But that did not deter him the least. In fact, in the last ten years or so, he actually expanded his horizons from the study of Islamic thought to a critique of all forms of reason and rational thinking, proposing an almost Kantian philosophical recalibration, which he called the 'Emerging Reason Project' and continued to advocate and propagate until the very end.


Last year, in October 2009, the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) in London organized a symposium in honour of Arkoun's efforts to renew the study of Islam (cf. blog post of 11 October 2009). For links to some of Arkoun's publications, click on the images below.