Contextualising Islamic societies

Many Metropolitan scholars have gained great insights into the history, religion, culture and multiple ways of life about the peoples of the colonised world.

Now, Guy Sorman, a French scholar, has written a competent book on Muslims; the French exposure to varied Muslim cultures during its colonial past has intellectually equipped Sorman to grapple with the complex inside story of Islam in different settings.

Sorman uses Rifaa, an Egyptian, as the reference point for Islam's "search for moderation" because Rifaa's writings and personal praxis have been around a kind of synthesis of western modernity and Islam.

After Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition against Egypt, "Rifaa stayed in France from 1826 to 1831 and ... came to the conclusion that a synthesis between Islam and progress was indeed possible and there was nothing to the Koran that opposed the modernisation of the Muslim world".

Since Rifaa is considered the founder of the "Arab Renaissance", a central issue raised by him about the possibility of a synthesis of western rationality and the Koranic revelation continues to divide the "moderate" and the "extremist and fundamentalist Muslims" in the Islamic world, especially the Arab-Muslims.

Not only this. Samuel Huntington's polemical work on the "clash of civilisations" and the post-September 11, 2001, foreign policy pronouncements and announcements of President George W Bush have created an anti-Muslim and anti-Islam environment in many European and North American countries.

Are Muslim fanatics determined to spread Islam with the help of the gun by targeting non-Muslim countries and societies? What has happened to the Arab renaissance and the children of Rifaa in Egypt, where (the) "debate has shifted from Parliament to the mosque" because the Crippled Wafad Party of Rifaa's children has been marginalised by religious Islamists in Egypt?

Sorman, in his very well-written twelve chapters, examines the positive and negative features of Islam to refute the thesis that Islam is coterminous with the Bin Laden type of Muslim bigots and fanatics.

He examines the reality of Islam in Egypt, Algeria, Malaysia, South Asian countries, and Indonesia to substantiate the argument that Muslim countries are not like the Islamic followers in Afghanistan and he supplements his knowledge of history and visits to some of the Islamic countries to substantiate his argument that the demonised Islam is a figment of imagination of some Western countries.

Sorman refutes the argument that Muslim countries do not have socio-cultural and socio-religious requisites for democracy just because Koran-based Islam is against secular-democratic traditions for governance.

He warns that "whenever there is a terrorist attack, people tend to club Islam, Islamism and fundamentalism together. Despots are quick to capitalise on these sentiments".

Sorman also suggests an explanation for the growth of sectarian fundamentalist Islam by stating that "for over thirty years now, growth and employment have been stagnating in Egypt.

The situation has provided Islamists a fertile breeding ground: unemployed youth are easy prey, their hotheadedness making them ideal candidates for fomenting agitation and revolt".

Indians can relate themselves with Sorman's explanation for the growth of Islamist fundamentalists and the rise of fanatic and fascist Hindutva in a social situation of serious depression created by the phenomenon of rising unemployment.

In one chapter of 23 pages, Sorman has given a remarkable account of the relationship between Saudi's export of Wahhabism and the emergence of phenomena like the Taliban or Al Qaeda et al.

Saudi Arabian Wahhabism is an extreme form of Islam and many liberal strands of Islamic societies like in Malaysia have nothing to do with it.

Islam is contextualised and Indonesian Islam is poles apart from the Saudi Arabian brand of Islam. This is the message of Sorman's contribution and his emphasis that Islam as it is practised in a large number of countries is not an antithesis of either democracy, or capitalism, or secularism.

Egypt had a great secular tradition of Muslims and Christians living together. Is Islam hostile to Christianity and if so how does one explain pluralism in Egypt, Malaysia, etc?

Another of Sorman's theses is that Islam and modernity are not fundamentally opposed to one another because it is absurd to maintain that Muslim countries cannot develop capitalism because of some Koranic injunctions.

What about Prophet Mohammad, who himself was a trader? In the absence of modern education, the clergy is the source of knowledge on Islam and in the absence of free dialogue conducted in an elected Parliament, the mosque is the only place left for debate among the believers.

While the author has immensely succeeded in exposing the propagandist anti-Islam writing of western scholars, he has assigned a task to the literati class in the countries of the south to examine whether religion can be accommodated in the overall schema of modern science, rationality, and Enlightenment-based ways of life.

The author rightly explains that Islamists from Jakarta to Dhaka and in the Arab-Islam world are successful because people are "beset by poverty, tyranny, alienation and disenchantment" and he is also correct in maintaining that it is not Islam versus the West, for fundamentalists like Bin Laden: "The real stake is to assume power in the Muslim countries."

It is like Hindutva in India. Sorman's methodology of contextualising Islamic societies and their geographical distribution has brought rich insights into Islamic societies.

The Children of Rifaa

Guy Sorman
Penguin
Pages: 288;
Price: Rs 250