Tag Archives: Islam

What does ISIS want? Rethinking difficult questions

09 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Graham Wood recently published a widely-read article entitled “What ISIS really wants and how to stop it” and has received much praise for his insights. His article is not without its problems, however, and I highlighted some critiques in a short posting on my personal blog.

I want to engage a little more with some of the questions that are being asked by Wood and others, starting with a key pattern of discourse that I see repeatedly. A recent interview by Sky News’ Kay Burley with Cerie Bullivant of Cage UK exemplifies this:

Burley is not known for her nuanced and sensitive reporting. However, asking Bullivant whether he condemned the beheadings ascribed to Londoner Mohammed Emwazi in the way she did is simply a more boorish form of a demand to take responsibility for others’ crimes that is often made of Muslims but not others, as numerous commentators have repeatedly pointed out ever since the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, and indeed before that. This cartoon from The Muslim Show, referring to the killing of Americans Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Muhammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, outlines this in simple terms:

The Muslim Show

The Muslim Show

The thinking behind this kind of demand for condemnation implies that ‘Islam is somehow to blame’ and that ‘Muslims must condemn’ atrocities committed by other Muslims in order to justify their place in society to non-Muslims. It is a classic case of the No True Scotsman fallacy, as I described last year – ‘true’ Muslims would not do such things, so to prove one is a ‘true’ Muslim one must condemn such acts.

Burley was engaging in classic Islamophobia, as Bullivant noted, but he was trying to point to something more – that there are social and political factors that create particular responses. The post-Westphalian nation-states we have in Europe rest upon  offering security and stability to those who live in them in exchange for allowing a Weberian monopoly of force. But what happens when the monopoly of force is misused and the promised stability and order becomes uncertainty and threat?

Islamophobia is a long-standing problem in the UK (cf. the original 1997 Runnymede Trust report), and harassment of Muslims by government authorities and others is widespread, whether it be attempts to recruit Muslims to work for the security services (e.g. 2009 and 2013), the targeting of Muslim charities (2014), the impact of counter-terrorism measures on all areas of life (2011), or everyday street harassment (e.g. 2014 and follow-up); that is before I even begin to point to systemic hate speech from the Daily Mail and other elements of the right-wing and gutter press. All this is happening all the time in the UK, before we even begin looking further afield at the continued attacks on Muslim innocents by the UK and its close allies, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine or elsewhere.

Although Burley did not want to hear it, all this frames the lives of many Muslims in the UK. It can hardly come as a surprise that resentment against the nation-state – that supposedly promises stability and security – then grows.

“The Koran for Dummies”

Whilst growing up with state harassment might be the norm for those of our fellow citizens going to fight for ISIS, it seems a fair number have very little in-depth knowledge of the Islam that Burley and her ilk seem to assume is their motivation. That two British men wanting to fight in Syria had in part prepared themselves by buying The Koran for Dummies and similar titles highlights their ignorance of Islam, rather than their inspiration from it.

It is not, then, some diffuse conception of ‘religion’ that provides the motivation for jihad, but an understanding of profound injustice inflicted upon the individual and their family, friends and their ‘imagined community’ (pace Benedict Anderson) that leads to a disillusionment with the ideal of a nation-state governed by the monopoly of force guaranteeing stability and security. It is not a surprise that such injustice elicits a response – in fact, I would go so far as to say that wanting to respond to injustice is a natural reaction.

Of course, what that response might be is still a decision for the individual – murder is not a pre-determined outcome of outrage at injustice; I would hope for a different response. However, once the decision to go down that route has been made, self-justification becomes necessary, and that is where (mis-)understandings of a tradition can arise. None of this is new. For example, Prussian (predominantly Protestant) soldiers on the German side in World War I wore belt buckles that had “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”) stamped onto them, whilst British Anglican bishops spoke of a Christian “crusade” to kill Germans – both sides using the breakdown of political and social order to pursue war, and both sides then claiming (the same Protestant!) God to be on their side. The war was not a Christian war in any meaningful sense, but the (mis-)interpretation of Christian belief was used to motivate the poor soldiers who had to fight in it.

From the very beginning Wood’s article falls for the fallacy that ISIS is about ‘Islam’: ‘It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs…’ or ‘The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.’  But such statements do not help understanding – do we measure ‘Islamicness’ on a scale of 1 to 10? Whilst certain aspects of his article offer pointers to appropriate geopolitical responses to ISIS (e.g. parts of section IV – always presuming ISIS is as predictable as he is suggesting), describing ISIS as ‘very’ Islamic is not very helpful.

Of course, doing something about the manifold injustices in our societies and the ways in which our governments lead and encourage the attacks on marginalised communities is much more difficult than claiming ‘their Islam’ needs to change – but in the longer-term the former is undoubtedly more effective. Instead of asking Muslims to condemn certain crimes, or arguing about ‘how Islamic’ a movement is, changing the way our society relates to Muslims who are an integral part of it, as well as those abroad, can create the spaces for responses that are more positive (and dare I say it, more hopeful) than the responses of the tiny minority joining ISIS just now. Deconstructing understandings of ‘religion’ in society is a part of that – but deconstructing our society’s self-understanding in order to address systemic injustices is a far more wide-reaching issue that emphasises our collective responsibilities in creating a more just world.

The Discourse on Good and Bad ‘Secularism’ in France

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, Uppsala University

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In this blog-posting I will take the opportunity to share some thoughts from a article that I am currently working on. In the article I discuss the rise of what I call the discourse on good and bad ‘secularism’ in France.

In a recent book the eminent scholar of French ‘‘secularism’’ (laïcité), Jean Baubérot, expresses concern for what he considers to be a falsified ‘secularism’ (La laïcité falsifiée, Paris, La Découverte, 2012). Baubérot’s concern is similar to that of Western political leaders who portray Islam as a ‘religion’ that can be hijacked and used by fundamentalists for political and mischievous purposes, which has been analyzed by authors like Mahmood Mamdani and Rapahël Liogier.

However, to Baubérot it is not Islamic fundamentalists that are the perpetrators. Instead, as Baubérot suggests, the perpetrators are the French conservatives and the far-right; like the former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) and the new far right icon Marine Le Pen’s Front nationale (FN). ‘Secularism’ has been UMPLepinized, as Baubérot has it (a neologism of UMP and Le Pen). Baubérot informs us how these parties have managed to twist ‘secularism’ into something hostile towards Islam and Muslims, which would be contrary to its original meaning.

These falsifications have occurred during the many ‘Islamic Affairs’ that have been occupying the media and the political center in France the last 25 years or so; e.g. the 1989 Islamic Veil Affair, the 2004 law banning the Islamic veil in public schools, the 2010 law banning the full face veil in public space, and Le Pen’s statement that France is suffering under an Islamic occupation in 2011. Baubérot is far from alone in this analysis and I do agree on the matter that the conservatives and far-right has appropriated ‘secularism’ in a seemingly new manner. But what I find curious is that this supposed falsification is portrayed as a rupture in an otherwise liberating historical unfolding of ‘secularism’.

Just to explain the logic in play let us consider a similar case. In the 2014 European Parliament Election special by the leftist daily La Libération the journalists Jonathan Bouchet-Petersen and Antoine Guiral analyze the success of Marine Le Pen. They state: “Pour la France, pays des droits de l’homme, le symbole d’un FN en tête fait tache. (To France, country of human rights, the symbol of FN in the lead is a blot)”. As if France, the country of the colonial civilizing mission par excellence, the Dreyfus Affair, the Vichy Régime, the recent illiberal laws against Muslims, the extra-legal detention centers for third country nationals, the violent Roma expulsions, and so on, only finally, betrayed the imagined and glorified heritage of human rights?

Now, to put ‘secularism’ back on tracks, to stop its falsification, Baubérot urges us to go back to its roots and fully apply the famous Law of 1905 separating church and state; or, as I understand it from Baubérot’s writings, the foundational Law of ‘Secularism’. However, as Baubérot himself has pointed out, as has many other scholars, the Law of 1905 separating the church from the state was unequally applied in the French colonial empire. In French Algeria its non application on the Muslim population led to a state-gallican model, or, a tutelage role of the state in relation to Muslims and practiced Islam, meaning that the state could keep Algerian mosques on a tight leash. Moreover, Muslims were not given the status of full citizens and were deemed incapable of being ‘secular’. Not only did this contribute to making ‘Muslim’ into an ethnic marker, it also rendered ‘secular’ into a marker for Christian Europeans.

Thus, if ‘secularism’ has a proper history as a particular phenomena (as I understand Baubérot’s writings), I wonder what the differences are between contemporary and historical ‘secularism’? For sure, in metropolitan France the Law of 1905 targeted the Catholic Church’s influence on the French Republic, however, Muslim Algeria was also a part of France. This makes me wonder, if a historical continuity can be ascribed to ‘secularism’, does not ‘secularism’ from its very birth have to have been a marker of identity for the ‘secular’, the non-‘secular’, and the potentially ‘secular’ as well as a political technique to police and govern the borders in-between?

I will develop these arguments in the text, but here I want to point to a potential problem of ideology. The desire to find an untainted historical ‘secularism’ leads to an idealized and normative analysis blind to power and ideology. Instead of properly understanding how ‘secularism’ functions and what power relations it is part in creating and sustaining, one easily slips into an anachronistic discussion on the should-and-should-nots of ‘secularism’; i.e. into a discourse on good and bad ‘secularism’ all too reminiscent of the discourse on good and bad ‘religion’. The category of ‘secularism’ becomes an a-historical and an a-political truth and the battle of who is the most ‘secular’ or the mostly correct ‘secular’ casts a shadow over the exercise of violence it legitimates.

‘Religion’ and the study of ‘religious leadership’: some observations from Lebanon

29 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, Harvard University

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The distinctive thing about religious leadership is that it is religious. The clue is in the name. Nor do religious leaders themselves let us forget it, setting themselves apart from non-religious leaders and the general public by means of their outlandish dress, their publicly pious practices, their religious expressions and references, and even their personal grooming habits. The very obviousness of this religious nature leads to assumptions of a difference between religious and non-religious leaders that goes far deeper than appearances. In the case of Lebanon, where religious leaders of various Muslim and Christian stripes wield a great deal of power, such assumptions have become so essential to the expression of secular modernist ideals that I devoted my doctoral research to exploring them. Here I will outline a few of the misconceptions I have encountered, some or all of which may be familiar in other contexts.

‘Religious leadership’ is one of several categories of actor treated regularly in general works on politics in Lebanon. One recent book, for instance, includes this conventional section in a chapter on non-state elites: ‘Whereas state elites act directly within the political arena… these unelected elites’ influence politicians from ‘the shadows’ [El-Husseini 2012: 122]. Lebanon’s religious leaders are introduced as follows:

The clergy has always had an impact on political life in Lebanon owing to the confessional nature of the country’s political allegiances. Indeed, the concept of national citizenship has not taken hold in Lebanon in the same way that it has in Western nations. Loyalty to the family, the clan, and the religious community overrides other allegiances, leaving little room for national patriotism [140]

Here the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘religious leadership’ are taken to be self-explanatory, a natural and permanent feature of the social universe. Further, religious phenomena are contrasted with modern structures and concepts of nation, state and citizenship, as both their precursors and their presumed opponents.

Framing ‘religious leadership’ in this way prompts certain kinds of questions: Why, for instance, has the rise of secular leadership in a modernising state like Lebanon not resulted in the decline of religious leadership, as the secularisation thesis would have us expect? Under what conditions do these religious leaders become politicised? Attempts to answer such questions serve only to obscure the origins of ‘religious’ institutions and merge their various historical dynamics.

Several general theories have been proposed to explain the ‘persistence’ of Lebanon’s powerful religious leadership. One is that Oriental religions – both Islam and Eastern branches of Christianity – are by nature more resistant to secularisation. Another links the failure of secularisation to the weakness of the Lebanese state: if people do not find security in the modern state, they look to their traditional leaders instead. A third refers to a religious resurgence that is part of a reaction against globalisation. Sometimes one or other of these theories appears to fit a particular religious institution or community at a particular time, but they all fail to give the kind of generalizable explanation that they claim to provide. Part of the problem is in the way research projects are formulated. The category of religion, while encouraging analyses of religion as a discrete phenomenon, has in practice led researchers to focus on individual religious communities as independent spheres of action.

The tendency to circumscribe scholarship on each religion has also produced an alternative approach that uses the particularities of different religions or sects to explain the roles of their religious leaders. For example, Sunni Islam is characterised by the overlap of umma and state, so the Lebanese Mufti, who is paid from the state budget, is considered a relic of the privileged place of Sunnis in the Ottoman Empire. The Shi‘ite Council, by contrast, was only set up in the late 1960s by populist Imam Musa al-Sadr, and tends to be linked to a global ‘Shi‘ite awakening’ and a latent revolutionary tendency in Shi‘ism. And the Druze Sheikh al-‘Aql has always had a central role, it is said, because of the insular, tribal character of Druze religion, which has clung to its traditions despite centuries of persecution. Such explanations often lead, in my view, to an uncritical reproduction of clichés, which risks feeding prejudices.

These conventional narratives – whether of religious particularism or of religion in general – project essentialised images of religion(s) onto actual social formations, and in doing so obscure the modern historical context. So going back to the three examples above: it was only in the 1930s and 40s that the Mufti of Beirut was elevated above other clerics and turned into a national figurehead for a newly defined Sunni community. The Shi‘ite Council and its authoritative presidency may have been created later, but they were designed to match the model of the Sunni Islamic Council and its president, the Mufti. Thus the Shi‘ite leaders are paid by the state in much the same way. The title of Sheikh al-‘Aql had long existed among the Druzes, but at the time Lebanon’s borders were drawn there were two Sheikhs in the area, not one. Two were finally reduced to one only in 1970, in order to bring Druze religious leadership into line with the other Lebanese communities.

Once viewed comparatively, it becomes clear that these various institutions have been shaped into their modern forms by the context of the Lebanese state and its new multi-confessional public space, in which ‘religious leadership’ has acquired the meaning we now take for granted. Yet explanations of their contemporary prominence continue to hinge on their supposed natural connection with ‘primordial’ allegiances among the population.

An essential distinction is conventionally drawn between the Lebanese communities’ ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ spokesmen. Ironically, it has not been uncommon for commentators to judge the ‘religious’ leaders more representative than their ‘secular’ counterparts. A classic text of the 1960s popularised the idea that religious leaders comprised a ‘shadow parliament’ able to express sectarian viewpoints that were excluded from Parliament by the moderating effect of the electoral process [Meo 1965: 55]. A more recent article by a popular blogger refers to ‘the various religious bodies’ as a ‘de facto Senate’, whose members ‘traditionally get up in arms’ in defence of their communities [Hamoui 2012].

Confused perceptions of an organic connection between religious leadership and religious community result in these figures being linked to sectarianism as both a product and a cause. On one hand they are assumed to ‘resonate’ [Rabbath 1986: 93] in some mystical way with their coreligionists; on the other, they are accused of retarding Lebanon’s development from sectarianism to nationalism through their undemocratic interference in politics.

My own study finds that the official ‘religious leaders’ of each sect are sustained above all by the state’s recognition and legislation of their roles. Indeed, taking a closer look at the way they actually use this public platform, we see a discourse heavily imbued with national patriotism, aimed not at inciting sectarian hatreds but responsible citizenship and submission to a strong central state. One of the reasons their role is so misunderstood is that commentators dismiss what they have to say because it is delivered in ‘religious’ terms, couched in the preaching of moral values. Whether the clerics’ pacific ‘religious’ discourse is suspected of insincerity – public platitudes covering for private support of militancy – or considered naïvely well-intentioned, the assumption being made is that such discourse is ineffective, detached from real power politics. We need to be reminded, as Lynn Staeheli puts it, that ‘the invocation of responsibility, care and ethics does not deny or obviate politics’ [2008: 17]. Once again the isolation of religion as a category obscures very real power dynamics, especially the negotiation of knowledge across the imaginary religious-secular divide. Religious leaders are no less part of the contemporary systems of meaning that define the salience of leadership, citizenship, and national belonging; their own roles are articulated in these terms, and like others they participate in the interpretation of the language that shapes the Lebanese public sphere.