On the dilemma of religious
reform in Islam
The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) has precipitated a new wave of calls for religious
reform in Islam. The proliferation of contradictory religious
fatwas, and the rising number of Muslim “televangelists” on
satellite channels, according to these calls, have made Islam
incomprehensible. Muslims are thus divided into rival teams
that accuse each other of infidelity and consider the spilling
of each other’s blood permissible.
And indeed, while the ‘Islamic State’ was gaining new ground,
imposing its dark shadow on millions of people, practicing
ethnic cleansing and committing the worst kinds of crimes in
the name of true faith, official Islamic organizations
maintained a dishonorable silence for a number of reasons,
both political and doctrinal. This further pushed reformists
to increase their demands on official institutional Islam to
declare a definitive stance vis-a-vis this terrifying
organization, and against all forms of religious radicalism.
A closer look at the question of religious reform in Islam
will, however, confront us with two fundamental points:
The first is that for several movements that came about since
the 18 t h century, religious reform in Islam has already
occurred. The Wahhabi, Senussi, Khatmya, and Mahdi movements
have all claimed that they had come to fix religion after it
had reached a dangerous level of decline and became a tool for
charlatans to enflame public opinion and mobilize the masses.
Examining these reformist movements in their historical
contexts would however reveal that they emerged in societies
which were experiencing various crises centered around the
relationship between authority and society, and thus between
two divergent understandings of the dominant ideology- which
is Islamic piety, naturally.
The second important point is that reform tends to embody the
demands and interests of social groups that are self-aware and
thus aware of their crises and predicaments. A case in point
is religious reform in the church and the appearance of
Protestantism which many consider the ideology that gave birth
to the European bourgeoisie at the beginning of the
renaissance era and around the onset of capital amassments
(notwithstanding the criticism mounted against this thesis,
especially by Marxists).
Therefore, it is important to distinguish between two types of
reform movements in Islam: the first was led by tribal leaders
and local notables who stirred up in Islam the clan mentality
in order to achieve political ends. In other words, they
reverted to the ideological mobilization aspect of religion
typical of past centuries. As for the second type of reform,
it was an attempt to “rationalize” or “modernize” religion in
order to keep up with the times. Of course we cannot compare
the Wahhabi and Senussi movements with the efforts led by
Muhammad Abdo and Jamal al-Deen al-Afghani without taking into
account the significant differences in the respective
environments that gave rise to those two type of movements and
varying degrees of awareness of the desired reform.
Nevertheless, it remains true that those “reforms” which have
relied on group dynamics- regardless of whether we can
evaluate them as good or bad, consider them “real” reforms or
“reactionary” one – ultimately reflected the political and
social reality of the communities that have embraced them.
And, if we are to digress, it would be apt to remember the
Almohad Caliphate which, as a kind of religious reform,
adopted the radical Zahiri doctrine for the purpose of
bringing uniformity to the tribal alliance which battled the
Murabitun in Morocco. The same can be said of the conflict
which broke out between Abed al-‘Aziz Al-Sood and the
puritanical ‘brotherhood’ movement in the 1920s when the
imperatives of the emerging Saudi state collided with the
literal application of Wahhabism.
Now, if we look into the contemporary “sociological” realities
of the Arab societies: their composition, their divisions, the
dominant forces and ideas in them, their sources of income and
their relationships with each other and the outside world, we
may not in fact find any solid ground for all these calls for
religious reform. In other words, we may not find an
“audience” that is receptive to the new ideas. Combatting a
dominant reality will of course always be a struggle, but
which party will carry the banner of the struggle here? And
what are its financial resources? And what are its
intellectual references? And which focal political, social and
cultural points does it rally around?
In other words: which are the factions that will move the
wheel of reform in Islam? And in which direction? Keeping in
mind that the moderate attempts by Muhammad Abdo (1905) did
not achieve the success hoped for despite the fact that they
occurred in a cultural and political atmosphere that was far
less charged than what we are experiencing today.
Our assumption is that these two questions, and other
questions which fall under a historical approach to emphasizes
the relationship between religion and society, override in
importance theoretical debates regarding women’s position in
society, for instance, or research into the compatibility of
this or that fatwa with the reality of the era in which
Muslims live.
There is another aspect of the reform question that requires
thinking once we move from the vague slogan of “reform” to
practical matters that should actually be “reformed”.
Oftentimes, calls for reform are directed at an unspecified
Islam. When looking at the Protestant Reformation, we find
that it was directed at a homogenous system of beliefs and
religious practices represented by the Catholic church. That
was also the case for the Enlightenment Jewish reformation,
the Hascala movement, and other reformation movements. In
Islam, what is exactly the confessional system that should be
targeted by reform?
The need to provide an accurate answer to this question is
often overlooked, although it is generally understood by this
proposition that the target of reform is the entirety of the
four Sunni schools- with more focus on the Salafi-Habali
doctrine with its Wahhabi teachings since this is the ideology
that has been fervently embraced by the most vocal armed
Jihadi groups- those who have dominated the media narrative in
the past few decades.
There is a kind of inverted approach in this call. The
doctrine that has come to dominate would not be possible if it
wasn’t for the great promotional efforts expended by various
parties, Gulf official ones and even western ones, and which
reached unprecedented levels since the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan (1979) and have continued since. These promotional
efforts should not be exonerated. But for the promoted ideas
to take root, the targeted audience should first be receptive
to those ideas and the land should be fertile to receive those
seeds. There are dozens of studies that deal with the reasons
of these campaigns’ success and the disasters they have led
to. We won’t repeat them here except to note their broad
outline: the projects of the state, modernity, development and
society in Arab and Islamic nations have all experienced
general failure.
This climate further complicates the concept of reform because
it transforms it from a problem that is at the heart of Islam
and its jurisprudential structure to a problem between Islamic
sects. It is common for some to argue that the Hanbali-Wahhabi
doctrine contributes to the dissemination of violence because
it relies on Prophetic sayings that are rejected in other
Islamic schools and because it adheres to civil verses and
paragraphs as opposed to Meccan ones. There are even some who
feel a new doctrine must be formulated along the lines of what
Hasan Hanafi did in his statements about the Islamic left.
On the Shiite side, it appears that Ahmad al-Qabanji, in his
quest to deny the validity of the tales which sanctify the
prophet’s descendants and which attribute divine powers to the
awaited Mahdi (Muhammad Ben al-Hasan al-‘Askari), is the most
radical in his attempts at “reform”.
For instance, in his book Refining Shiite tales and in his
general refutation of the narratives and tales that figure in
Shiite books which include anything from Qafi to Qulayni to
Bahar al-Anwar to Majlisi, he virtually eviscerates the
entirety of the Shiite doctrine and relegates it to a new
Sunni doctrine that is closer, in reality, to the Hanafi
doctrine. And this is something that Shiite clerics obviously
reject; they objected less vehemently to Ahmad’s book which
deals with the evolution of political Shiite thought and in
which the author criticizes some of the founding tenets of the
Shiite doctrine and rejects the principle of the state of alFaqih, calling instead for the nation to be its own state.
It should be said, at this juncture, that judging the
seriousness of these attempts at reform should be subject to
the examination of the social context in which they were
undertaken rather than their academic-methodical soundness.
The crisis is not confined to the Hanbali doctrine but
encompasses, first of all, everything that has to do with
social Islam and, secondly, Islam and what it generates in
terms of history, doctrine, the interpretation of sacred
texts, the authorities’ output and its entanglements with
authority.
On the other hand, I want to draw attention here to the
abundance of fatwas issued by the “new religious scholars”
some of which are at odds with human instinct and common sense
before being at odds with the principles of Islamic
jurisprudence which was laid out over a period of hundreds of
years. We can explain this abundance by linking it to the
political dynamics in which Jihadists have been engaged for
years and their need to manage the multiple aspects of the
conflicts they’re waging.
It may be the paradox of this era that while Sunni Islam
supposedly closed the door on Ijtihad hundreds of years ago
following the victories of the Ash’ari school, today we have
this strange stream of jihadi fatwas which deal with the day
to day and family life of Muslims. Here, the problematic
concerning the content of this flood of fatwas comes into
sharp relief as well as the question of how to classify and
categorize them according to school of thought or doctrine. It
would be easy to simply dismiss all that flows from the mouths
of Mufti fighters, and their secret and outspoken supporters,
and to look at it as pointless chatter lacking any doctrinal
or religiously sound basis. However, the sheer volume of
fatwas, opinions and judgments that are advanced as authentic
and legitimate will most certainly leave their mark on the
meaning of Ijtihad and the role of actors that are beholden to
those textual analyses.
While the “advocates of malls and commercial complexes” such
as Amr Khaled and his imitators who appear on television and
address the social factions that have benefited from oil rents
and labor in the gulf and have embraced consumerism, have
retreated of late, new kinds of preachers have emerged. The
new preachers are those who advocate mowing heads and
displaying them in public parks; those kinds of preachers
address the poorer and less educated classes of the suburbs
and the countryside, of the Sinai desert and Hadramout and the
deserts of al-Sham and Iraq which have in common not just
social and political marginalization but also the kind of
poverty that breaks people.
So how can we get out of this dilemma? What’s shocking is that
the Sunni religious establishment (which some still insist
does not exist), and which is represented by Al-Azhar and the
committees of the most prominent religious clerics in Arab and
Islamic states, is maintaining an odious silence in response
to the actions and activity of Jihadi militants.
Like most phenomena in which intellectual, cultural, social
and political aspects overlap, this silence can be interpreted
on several levels…
The political explanation: since this religious establishment
is beholden to state apparatuses, it sees the need for an
actor to temper internal and external changes that could
destroy the status quo. Jihadists are hindering the
democratic-liberal turn of the Arab revolutions- a case in
point is Syria- and they are emptying those revolutions of
their meaning like they did in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. At the
same time, they are a crucial tool in preventing Iran from
gaining influence and in thwarting its strategy as was the
case in Iraq.
The intellectual-doctrinal interpretation (so to speak) boils
down to the catastrophic inertia that has plagued the Sunni
school for hundreds of years and has turned it into a
phenomenon of repetition and rumination that is devoid of any
revolutionary approach capable of accommodating suggestions
which include rethinking religious history, the interpretation
of sacred texts and the stance vis-a-vis science and
philosophy, especially since Jihadi Sheikhs claim their fatwas
are authentic and belong to a solid doctrinal tradition. It is
no wonder, then, that the religious establishment is always
turning a blind eye to scandals committed in the name of Islam
(such as the farces of television preachers) or else
implicitly adopting what is no less farcical and trivial like
the promotion of what is known as “scientific miracle in the
Quran” instead of expressing a modern and progressive opinion
vis-a-vis the successive scientific revolutions. This state of
things has reached a point where what is committed in the name
of religion is being ignored in order to stay clear of
controversies from which traditional Fiqh would not emerge
unscathed and to avoid examining problems which the religious
establishment would rather distance itself from.
Taking a hypocritical and shifty stance vis-a-vis contemporary
challenges, under the pretext of not compromising Sunnis and
the Quran, has led to an incurable disease that whose
parasites are growing in Islam, however we look.
It is apparent that calls for reform often originate outside
the religious establishment which is committed to remain
silent about the massacres and shameful practices that are all
carried out according to fatwas deemed legitimate. But what is
even more clear is that the exploitation of this silence,
which came at the request of political authorities and enjoys
popular support even today, stands at best as the expected
position vis-a-vis what this Jihadi insane violent wave will
yield.