(One may not agree with some of the content, but it is worth reading analysis and opinion.) F. Sheikh

The word “takfīr” (pronounced “tuck – feer”) is one of the most fearsome words in the Islamic lexicon. Deriving from the same root as “kāfir” – infidel – it refers to the act of declaring someone who is nominally a Muslim to be an infidel. And, of course, as the whole world knows by now, a Muslim who has become an infidel is worthy of being killed as an apostate under strict Islamic law. The institution of takfir is not new in Muslim societies, but it has generally been a marginal one. Today, it is at the core of the jihadi extremism that has set the world on fire from Nigeria to India and from Peshawar to Paris. The extremists do not kill based only on takfir – the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not Muslims to begin with – but this idea is central to their ideology, which specifically targets Muslims who, in their opinion, have lost the right to live because of their infidelity. Among these are numbered the 136 innocent children gunned down in Peshawar and the soldiers of the largest army of any Muslim majority country in the world. More broadly, its remit extends to entire sects, such as the Shi’as and the Ahmadis, who have been targeted repeatedly in Pakistan.

However, another version of takfir is now afoot in the world. Call it “reverse takfir”. Unlike the militant version, it is well-intentioned and self-consciously humane, but it is also dangerous. This “benign” version of takfir is epitomized by the idea that the acts of violence being committed by self-proclaimed holier-than-thou Muslims are not the acts of “real Muslims” and do not represent “real Islam”. In effect, it declares the terrorists to be infidels! The idea is widespread, and is espoused in four different contexts: By well-meaning non-Muslims (such as Presidents Bush and Obama) seeking to avoid stereotyping and the implication of collective guilt; by ordinary Muslims wishing to dissociate themselves from the beheaders; by Muslim sectarians wishing to separate their brand of orthodoxy from that espoused by terrorists; and – most ironically – by Muslim governments and security forces seeking an “Islamic” justification for attacking extremist fellow Muslims, thus implicitly buying into the central jihadi argument of apostasy as a capital offense. The urge to do this reverse takfir is understandable and not without factual basis: Most Muslims are indeed not violent extremists who wish to kill infidels. And it does help protect innocent Muslims from backlash, which is rather important. The problem, however, is that it also feeds the narrative of denial and deniability that allows the militancy to thrive.

As with most organized religions, the foundational texts and beliefs of Islam can support both peaceful versions and violent ones. Until people recognize and admit that all of these are, in fact, “real Islam”, the issues underlying the problem of jihadi militancy cannot be addressed. If the violence is “not real Islam”, the implication is that Islam – as practiced by most Muslims – needs no reform. But that is manifestly not the case. The scourge of violence in the name of Islam will be removed only when Muslims in general come to reject all instances of violence in the name of Islam, including those that are celebrated in scripture and history. When conquerors who killed “infidels” are regarded as heroes of the faith; when the world is seen as divided into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war”; when dying for God is considered better than living for the sake of fellow humans; when non-Muslims are regarded as morally inferior; when many standard prayers end by asking God for “victory against the infidels”; and when apostasy and blasphemy are regarded as capital crimes – how can jihadi violence be seen as anything but the logical conclusion of such ideas and practices? And yet, these are all part of “mainstream” Islam – some of them derived directly from holy texts. What the extremists are doing is merely taking these ideas more literally and acting on them. The main thing separating most ordinary believing Muslims from the extremists is not so much the narrowness of belief – which they both share – but the willingness to match that belief with action. Small wonder, then, that the militants see non-violent Muslims as hypocrites, which in many ways is worse than being an infidel.

This raises a painful question: Can true Muslims only be either militants or hypocrites? Is there no other alternative? And that’s where the solution must begin. The only way to find an alternative – “third way”, so to speak – is to move away from literalism and absolute interpretations. Muslims must ask themselves why Jews don’t still stone adulterers or Christians still conduct witch burnings. They made these changes, not by rewriting holy texts, but by reinterpreting them for a different time and context. If Islam and its texts are indeed “guidance for all times” as Muslims believe, surely their interpretation must change with changing times, or they will become obsolete. What we see unfolding before us is the refusal of a whole faith to recognize the fact of such obsolescence and the need for reinterpretation, which has to be the first step on the path to reformation. And this cannot be done by outsiders preaching humanism at Muslims; it requires Muslims themselves to liberate their faith from the clutches of regressive clerics and begin viewing it more rationally. They can continue to be good Muslims and revere the unchanging words of scripture, but they cannot continue to be literalist reactionaries enforcing orthodoxy by force. That just isn’t compatible with the real world – especially the modern world. People will have to be allowed to make individual decisions with regard to their faith and live! In other words, religion will need to become a private matter, and certainly not something for the State to legislate or vigilantes to enforce.

The interesting – and tragic – fact is that this dilemma is mainly a modern one. For the first few centuries of Islam, Muslims were far less inhibited about practical reinterpretation. Indeed, much of what is regarded today as Islamic law (the shari’ah) is derived from the interpretation of holy texts by early leaders, jurists and scholars. They were certainly not liberal humanists by today’s standards, but they were eminently practical people. Over time, this practicality gradually gave way to rigidity, until the so-called “door of interpretation” was officially declared shut. Even so, Muslim rulers were seldom willing to be bound by rigid religious edicts, and significant movement continued, albeit at royal whim. Some among the royalty, such as Akbar and Dara Shikoh in India, went further, trying actively to move towards more syncretic and humanistic interpretations of Islam.

The roots of the current fundamentalism lie not so much in the early history of Islam as in its recent history of disempowerment and revivalism. As Muslim societies lost power in the face of modernity, the role of ruling elites in reinterpreting religious edicts (mainly for selfish political reasons) diminished or disappeared, and the process of reform became intertwined with Westernization and modernization. This produced various responses, two of which are especially relevant today. First, during the colonial period and immediately after, a re-emerging class of Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Jamaluddin Afghani, and later Sayyid Qutb andMawdudi, sought a revival through variations on the same theme: Creating a semi-mythological and idealized version of a glorious Muslim past where near-perfect men acted as the instruments of God’s will. And, in their own ways, all of them converged on the notion of a single, ideal Islamic state – a “house of Islam” – ruled over by the righteous. One concrete result of these neo-revivalist ideas was the creation of Pakistan as an ideological Muslim homeland, though many ultra-orthodox Muslim scholars opposed it. Another was the emergence of trans-national ideological organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e Islami. All this laid the theoretical framework for today’s trans-national militancy.

The second response was the empowerment of more fundamentalist schools of Islamic thought that already existed but had generally been held in check by Muslim rulers and societies. A fateful moment occurred when one such movement – led by the originalist cleric Ibn Abdul-Wahhab in Western Arabia – made a political alliance with a regional ruling family: The future House of Saud. Over two centuries, a nexus of mutually-influencing ultra-orthodox ideologies developed from India to Morocco, but remained largely without political or economic power. All that changed with the rise of Saudi Arabia as a rich kingdom with an interest in exporting both oil and ideology. The ideal opportunity arose – less by planning than chance – in the form of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the revival of global Islamic zealotry as fuel for the Afghan jihad, the empowering of seminaries preaching ultra-orthodox ideologies, and the inevitable seeping of these toxins into the body politic of Muslim societies. The rest is a history that is too well-known – and painful – to repeat.

Today, the two threads generated in response to Muslim disempowerment and modernity have merged. The resulting movement has inherited the trans-national character, anti-humanist ethos and regressive ideology of its parent movements. It has also been strengthened by the strategic calculus of the Great Game that has been afoot in South and Central Asia for several decades. Some may consider it natural that the movement’s most vocal expression has occurred in Pakistan, given its founding vision. However, such an assumption would be incorrect. The areas that form Pakistan were, in fact, not very amenable a priori to an exclusivist ideology, and were pervaded by a much more syncretic and humanistic version of Islam. It took several decades and great geopolitical events – such as the Afghan jihad – to bring Pakistan to the point it is at today. All appearances notwithstanding, it is not a natural home for a militant, ahistoric ideology. Obscurantism? yes; militancy? no.

http://brownpundits.blogspot.com/2015/01/unreal-islam.html?m=1

posted by f. sheikh

A Chapter on Muhammad Iqbal from my book, Introduction to World Philosophies: A Chronological Progression.

Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal

1873 – 1938

Poet and philosopher, Iqbal was the greatest versatile genius of the Muslim renaissance in the sub-continent of India and the Muslim world. His writings gave birth to the ideology of Pakistan, a separate state created in 1947 by partitioning India which was under British rule at that time. Iqbal first studied Arabic and philosophy in Lahore, now a city in Pakistan. He then went to Cambridge to study law where he entered Trinity College and studied Hegel and Kant. His passion for philosophy took him to Germany, where he received his doctorate in philosophy. Bergson and Nietzsche among the philosophers of the West had the greatest influence on him. His best-known book is a work of philosophy, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) in which Iqbal entwined Eastern and Western elements, together with Sufism and traditional concepts, into a single world view of a revived Islam. During this period of his life Iqbal had already been writing great poetry in Urdu, a national language of Pakistan that is widely understood throughout the Indian subcontinent. However, his best poetry is in Persian, and he is recognized as one of the greatest poets in that language.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, reflecting his main ideas, is encyclopedic. For him philosophy is the recognition of religion as the most perfect form of social consciousness. He says, “Philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis.”¹ He never denied the role of science and philosophy in the process of cognition, but was convinced that religion alone is capable of delivering mankind from its plight. He was very much influenced by Bergson’s esoteric views, which he found similar to those of Rumi, but was critical of Bergson’s idea of the élan vital as being unteleogical. Iqbal identifies God as the vital impulse whose creative force is conscious and has an open-ended purpose rather than a predetermined plan. God is the creative consciousness and in Him thought and being are one.

Iqbal’s philosophy and metaphysics were greatly influenced by Rumi, whom he revered as his spiritual mentor. Inspired by Rumi’s concept of the individual, Iqbal developed his philosophy of khudi, “selfhood,” or life of the ego consisting of the experiences, feelings, and volitions of the self. To grasp the nature of khudi it is necessary to cultivate an intuitive insight of what is behind this flux. The activity of khudi is essentially personal and private, just as one’s pleasures, pains, desires, and thoughts are exclusively one’s own. For Iqbal the life of the ego, or khudi, is directive energy; an organic unity of will, perception, and judgment that wills, directs, selects, and creates. It is judged by its aspiration, desires, aims, attitude, and judgments. Iqbal said, “My experience is only a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the unity of directive purpose. My whole reality lies in my directive attitude. You cannot perceive me like a thing in space or set experiences in temporal order; you must interpret, understand and appreciate me in my judgments, in my will, attitudes, aims and aspirations.”²

Iqbal said, “The ultimate of ego is not to see something, but to be something. . . . The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it. The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego and sharpens his will . . .”³ Khudi is the individuality of a man; the higher it is, the more supreme is the selfhood, individuality, personality, and uniqueness. His concept of khudi also reflects Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch―in English Superman―a man of will, capable of heroic living.

Iqbal argued that in God’s creativity many things appear that involve suffering and reflect moral evil. He explicated that to think of life without suffering is to have an unrealistic grasp of the nature of life. For him suffering is a natural phenomenon. Even the immortal soul is not without suffering as it graduates after death to higher forms of struggle. Satan is a mythic figure who stands for resistance, initiating the fall of man as an awakening from consciousness to self-awareness. Iqbal as a monadologist, viewed universe composed of atomic selves, and the more a self is self-conscious, the nearer it is to God.

Iqbal criticized the strong empiricism in Western thought for leaving religious experience out of its account. After all, according to Iqbal, the religious experience has played a vital role in human history. Why should the evolutionist place more weight on the instinctive knowledge of animals than on the higher experiences of the seers, saints, and prophets? If some religious claims based on intuitive experience have proved inadequate, the same can be said of some scientific accounts based on sense perception that have turned out to be false. It is the nature of all the sources of human knowledge to be corrected as their understanding progresses. Although realizing that present-day intellectual deliberations cannot afford to go against scientific assertions, Iqbal argued that it is intuition that can reveal and explain the true nature of material world.

Iqbal’s experience of Europe impressed him very much.  European scientific achievements and cultural and philosophical richness were very exciting for him, but he found the effects of capitalism to be inhumane. This convinced him of the superiority of Islamic values in the preservation of a balanced civilization. In his view a combination of God’s revelation and human experience and achievement was needed. He also found that the achievements of Western science were in part due to Islam. Islamic thought in its interaction with Greek philosophy gave birth to the “inductive intellect” that penetrated Europe via the Muslim universities of Arab Spain and the philosophers of the Muslim world.

Iqbal strongly opposed the European idea of nationalism. As he returned to India he preached a universal Islam beyond national sentiments. He was disturbed by factionalism and the narrowness of traditional dogma in Islam. Iqbal was the only thinker with an Eastern temperament and knowledge of European philosophy who carried Islamic philosophy and traditions with him. Thus a synthesis of three great world philosophies elevated him to become a towering figure in the world, especially in Germany, where famous Orientalist Annemarie Schimmel was one of his main followers. His works have been widely translated into many languages throughout the world. ― MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF

Notes:

1. Iqbal: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 1962, p. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 103.

3. Ibid., p. 198.