Qunfuz

The contemporary religious revival is a complex business. In the same period that Muslim societies, in their weakness, seem to have re-embraced Islam, America, in its strength, has re-embraced Christianity. Western Europe remains avowedly secular. Despite the contradictions within the West, mainstream Orientalism holds that all cultures are developing towards the universal (or, more specifically, globalised) model of secular modernity and the market. The Muslim world experiences backwardness to the extent that it resists secularisation.

“The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation”, a subtle and erudite book by former Iraqi minister Ali A Allawi, challenges this thesis. Surveying the Muslims’ social, economic and moral failures, and the terror espoused by certain Islamist groups, Allawi suggests the problem might not be too much Islam, but too little.

He argues that privatised religion cannot work in Islam, a civilisational framework which rests on the tripod of private ritual, public ethics and individual spiritual striving. The three must feed into and balance each other, but the current ‘revival’ operates only in the field of religiosity, focusing on naked symbols and rules, proclaiming the superiority of Islam while adopting wholesale, and indiscriminately, the technology, economics and cultural products of the West. It emphasises the Sharia as a set of fixed punishments rather than as a framework of legislative principles. (Allawi perhaps doesn’t explain the distinction thoroughly enough). For the revivalists, the public sphere is too often reduced to the state, and their political project is simply to seize control of repressive state apparatuses.

The rest of the article can be read (free of charge) at Prospect Magazine.

Paragraph six was cut in such a way that it lost force and meaning. The original version is:

“After military defeat the Sufi orders degenerated (Allawi concedes they were in many cases already mired in superstition), were co-opted by imperial powers and encouraged to ignore the problematic public realm. As a result, the tariqat became irrelevant, and the Muslims lost the heart of their tradition. Sadly, the process continues today, as illustrated by New Labour’s romance with the tame and supposedly Sufi-oriented Quilliam Foundation, whose spokesmen opine on “the racist Arab psyche” and teach, for instance, that rejecting Zionism on principle is a sign of Islamic extremism – news to the anti-Zionist Christians and Marxists of the Arab world.”