The Malady of Islam
Paul Monk
Abdelwahab Meddeb is a Tunisian poet
and novelist, who has made his home in Paris and teaches comparative
literature at the University of Paris. He has been a visiting professor at
Yale University. He is a kind of French Tunisian Harold Bloom. His book
La Maladie de l’Islam, (Editions du Seuil, 2002), was published in New
York last year, as The Malady of Islam, and in London, under the
title Islam and Its Discontents. It is very Bloom-like in its temper
and style. One thinks especially of Bloom’s The American Religion
(1992) and Kabbalah and Criticism (1979).
Whereas Bloom derives his critical
élan from being a secularized Jew in love with the Western canon, Meddeb
derives his own critical freedom from being a liberal scholar steeped in the
Arabic canon, but more at ease in the secular West than in the Islamic
world. He rejoices in heterodoxy and celebrates the heretics, Sufis,
theosophists, libertines and free thinkers who punctuate the history of
Islam. He declares, “I must confess that I felt something like shock with
the reveiling of women in one of the strongholds of freedom and Western
culture, Paris, France.”
None of this will endear him to
those of his co-religionists who seek to restore Islam to what they imagine
as its pristine truth. He, in turn, sees their project as an “insane
absolute theocentrism.” He states forthrightly that “no rationale inherited
from the past can justify” the acts of Osama bin Laden and his confederates.
He derides the Taliban regime as having been “ridiculous” and “archaic” and
denounces the works of the leading proponents of Islamic jihad, the
Pakistani Abu al-A’la Mawdudi (1903-1979) and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb
(1929-1966) as a “radical and terrifying vision” in which the whole of
civilization other than radical Islam “merits annihilation”.
Meddeb wants to see the Islamic
world modernized. He decries the failure of the Islamic world to overcome
“the despotic atavism at the foundation of the [Arab Islamic] tradition”. A
United Nations Development Program report of 2002, he notes, documented the
“catastrophic situation of the Arab present” and could not be dismissed as
anti-Islamic or anti-Arab propaganda, given that “its researchers and
authors are specialists native to the countries concerned.” It concluded
that “the (combined) gross national product of all Arab countries…is less
than that of Spain” and the number of books translated into Arabic each year
is fewer than those translated into Lithuanian, though there are 300 million
Arabs and only one and half million Lithuanians.
There are, of course, many who blame
the West for the backwardness of the Islamic world, or who even assert that
the term backwardness is a term of abuse. Such views are myopic. It is not
the West that has retarded the development of the Islamic world. It is the
tradition of despotism and religious obscurantism in the Arab and Islamic
world that has done so. The West’s worst contribution to backwardness and
repression in the Islamic world has been to refrain from frank criticism of
the cultural roots of both. Meddeb’s book is a useful antidote to such
self-defeating evasion.
“Between fear and political
correctness, it’s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense
about Islam”, wrote historian Alexander Stille in The New York Times
on 2 March 2002. He had a point. Yet there are those who have written other
than sugary nonsense about Islam, notable among them Ibn Warraq (Why I Am
Not a Muslim), Bernard Lewis (What Went Wrong? and The Crisis
of Islam), Robert Spencer (Islam Unveiled) and Azar Nafisi (Reading
Lolita in Tehran). Meddeb is of this company. He states, at the
beginning of his book, that in order to understand where the fanaticism of
contemporary radical Islamists comes from, “we have to go far back in time.
We have to recognize exactly where the letter – the Qur’an and tradition –
is predisposed to a fundamentalist reading.”
He takes for granted that we should
critically analyse Islam to separate the benign from the dangerous, the
false and pernicious from the insightful and dignified. Meddeb neither
rejects his Islamic cultural tradition wholesale, nor embraces it
defensively, nor even insists that his modernist and decidedly liberal
response to it is the only correct one. Rather, he says, it is vital that
both Muslims and non-Muslims better understand the complex history of Islam
and converge on a creative reshaping of it for the 21st century
world – a secularization of it, by any other name. What he does not make
clear is how or by whom this counter project is to be undertaken and brought
to fruition.
“The Qur’anic letter, if submitted
to a literal reading”, he concedes, “can resonate in the space delimited by
the fundamentalist project. It can respond to one who wants to make it talk
within the narrowness of those confines; for it to escape, it needs to be
invested with the desire of the interpreter. Rather than distinguishing a
good Islam from a bad Islam, it would be better for Islam to open itself to
debate and discussion, to rediscover the plurality of opinions, to set up a
space for disagreement and difference, to accept that a neighbour has the
freedom to think differently. Better for Islam if intellectual debate
rediscovers its rights and adapts itself to the conditions polyphony
offers.”
This sounds very liberal and
imaginative, of course. The problem is that it is more of a literary
flourish than a practical policy recommendation. Meddeb’s real heroes are
not Muhammed and the first caliphs, but Abu Nawas, Ibn Rawandi, Ibn Hazm and
al-Ma’arri, all iconoclasts in the classical Islamic world and by any clear
definition not actually Muslims at all. Abu Nawas was a poet who celebrated
wine and women, in the manner of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam. Ibn Hazm was
a skeptic in the Greek Pyrrhonist tradition, while al-Ma’arri conceptually
did away with all religions. When, therefore, Meddeb calls for polyphony, he
is, in reality, calling on the Muslim world to give up not only violent
persecution of others, but the core notion that it is founded on a divine
revelation.
The Islamic tradition that Meddeb
disdains is the Salafist tradition, dating back to the 9th
century fundamentalist, Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), an Old
Testament style prophet who called for radical purification of Islam after
the Mongol invasions and the sack of Baghdad. But this is precisely the
tradition invoked by our contemporary Islamists and they trace its
development up through the efforts of the Arabic Savonarola, Mohammed Ibn
Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna
(1906-1949) and the fusing of Egyptian Azhari radicalism with Saudi
Wahhabist radicalism after the 1967 Six Day War.
This tradition pointedly rejects the
kind of polyphony Meddeb calls for. One of its greatest 20th
century theoreticians, Sayyid Qutb, explicitly argued in his most widely
translated manifesto, Milestones, that the humanities and social
sciences should be rejected as sources of knowledge about man, society and
reality, because they programmatically undermine Islam as a revealed
religion. It was Qutb’s teaching that Islam is unique, that it cannot be
mingled with what he called jaahilii (non-Islamic or pagan) beliefs
and values and, most alarmingly, that, in the words of Ahmed Bouzid, “the
transition from jaahiliyyah to the Islamic order can be successfully
carried out neither gradually nor through persuasion, but only through an
abrupt confrontation with the prevailing jaahilii order.”
Al Qaeda and many similar bodies in
the Islamic world in our time are grounded in this kind of thinking. Meddeb
scorns it and dismisses Qutb as a virtual illiterate, but he was no more
illiterate than was Lenin. He was a systematic thinker and widely read in
the Western philosophical and sociological works he decisively rejected. His
ideas have a wide appeal among the rancorous and ignorant in the Islamic
world, as Lenin’s used to have among the colonized and exploited. They need to
be countered as one would counter a contagion like SARS.
The problem is that the contagion is
already at the level of a pandemic. It is the malady of Islam and it
is not a perversion of the old religion, but a virulent reassertion of it
against a world the Islamists see as corrupt and Godless. What, then, to do
about the contagion? Meddeb has only the vaguest of ideas. He is a man of
broadly Islamic culture, with whom it is clearly possible to talk
polyphonically. He does not, however, provide any clue as to how we are to
deal with the Islamists, who are not disposed to such talk, but simply call
upon us, as Abu Bakar Bashir did after the Bali bombing, to convert as
quickly as possible to Islam. If we dismiss them or describe them only as
terrorists, we miss the point and our mark. The cultural and economic future
of the Islamic world are at stake and the Islamists have a vision of both
and a plan of action. Do you? |
