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Printed in the Muslim World Book Review;
22:3 (April-June 2002); pp 5-14 |
Against the Nihilism of
Terror:
Jihad as Testimony to
Transcendence
After September
11, no Muslim writer venturing to articulate absolutely anything about Islam may
expect any reprieve from the inquisitorial fury of the reigning orthodoxy. What
transpired on that fateful day was not merely evil and ungodly, monstrous and
inhuman, it also showed, we are made to believe, the true face of a fanatical
faith. Not the evil that is in the souls of men but the hate that is in the
hearts of Muslims is what accounts for the unspeakable barbarity of the
terrorists. Nothing unfathomable about evil, no mystery to the darkness of the
soul, if it shows a Muslim visage! Indeed, there is no Original Sin, only
Muslim sinfulness. For all their pride in the discernment of ‘the human
condition’, the architects of meaning in the West, sadly, did not annunciate anything
transcending the wrath and humiliation of their political self. Their strident
refrain, “the pain and loss is ‘ours’, the civilized and the noble; the shame
and disgrace is ‘theirs’, the barbaric and the heartless”, drowned every other requiem.
The spiritual and moral insights of the West, it appeared, had neither any
relevance for the Muslim nor any cure for his perversity
and malice. Only by depriving Muslims of their humanity, it was obvious, could
the bereaved West convey its own grief.
Very few, if any,
among the cultural elites entrusted with the decipherment of this indecipherable
tragedy realized, let alone conceded, that even Muslim eyes cried, that even
Muslim heart felt the pain and that even Muslim soul recoiled in horror over
this wanton loss of human life. That the Muslim’s pain was all the more
unbearable because these unholy deeds were justified in the name of his holy
faith, found no mention in the litany of sorrows that engulfed a whole world.
The ransoming of Islam’s universality for parochial causes, the sacrifice of its
humanity for primal passions, the repudiation of its legal reason for self-endorsing
piety, the relinquishing of Divine justice for messianic terror, all of which were
the distinguishing marks of these terrorist deeds, have still not entered the
public debate. Islam, there’s no mistaking, is as much of a victim in this
tragedy as any other. If there is an ‘Islamic connection’ to this horror, it is
by default: for, no matter what the ‘Islamic’ trappings of these terrorists’ putative
rhetoric, Islam itself has been devoured by the nihilism of modernity. It is
modernity, with its rejection of transcendence, its project of immanent utopia,
its gospel of political salvation, its idolatry of the collective self, which provides
the key to their perverse ideology.
Muslims thinkers
need not, I insist, accept the facile complicity of Islam with the 9/11 terror.
Despite our continued sorrow, despondency and anguish, we must refrain from breast
beating and self-calumny, even if it happens to be the only politically-correct
way a Muslim may prove his credentials as a ‘moderate’, or defend Islam as a
moral tradition. Despite all the rhetoric and rationale of the perpetrators
(?), the justification for terror cannot be ascribed to Islam, not to the Islam
of the learned, the pious or the ordinary. Indeed, it cannot even be ascribed
to the Islam of the empire and the armies, to the imperative of jihad or the
intoxication of power. We must not, in other words, allow the acute pain of the
moment, and the partisan passions that it arouses, to besmirch the legacy of a
civilization that was, by any standards that can be commonly applied to all
enterprises of historical order, no more barbaric, blood-thirsty and murderous
than the rest. We must, in short, damn political correctness if it comes at the
price of moral duplicity.
What is required
of the Muslim thinker is not the annunciation of a political charter that
establishes Islam’s compatibility with current world-order, but a moral
vision that addresses the malaise of our common humanity. While the mundane
logic of history and the exigencies of political existence do no doubt require
that we recognize the pragmatic claims of powers-that-be, these matters must be
debated within the discourses of national security and public policy that is
specific to each Muslim polity. Islamic intellect must not allow itself to be
recruited in the cause of parochial interests and secular raison d’état.
Only by the cultivation of a moral vision that is universal, only by heeding to
Islam’s original call, as it were, may the Muslim thinker remain faithful to
his commitment. And it is here, in holding fast to Islam’s transcendent
moorings and mission, that the Muslim thinker is summoned to unmask not only
the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the current discourse of power but also the
moral ambiguity and unresolved aporias (duplicity and confusion to the critics)
of our own tradition!
No matter how shadowy
and non-existent the evidence, how opaque and tenuous the link, how intellectually
intractable the demonstration of complicity between Islam and terror, we must
re-examine the seminal issues of faith and violence, transcendence and
existence, politics and morality that all intersect in the case of war, and
which have been the subject of unending debates and controversies within Islam
and outside it. More specifically, we must return to the seminal doctrine of
Jihad, to which Muslims have tenaciously clung to despite all attempts at
vilification from the outside and all efforts to deplete it of existential
finality and decisiveness from the inside. Needless to say that it is in the
nature of such a comprehensive and definitive doctrine, whose reflexive ground
is the concrete moment in history when Muslim Self and its Other (the self
determined to terminate Muslim existence) are locked in a mortal combat, that
the tension between the moral and the political imperatives of Islamic
conscience can never be fully resolved. For, one may affirm Muslim existence through
wilful action, and may even achieve such an objective, but it can be done so only
at the cost of another human life! Yet, it is also in the nature of Islam’s transcendent
moorings that Jihad can never be a war for the sake of war, a war of
instrumental reasoning and worldly glory. Whenever such a war takes place, no
matter what the identity of the combatants, it is indisputably un-Islamic.
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Works Discussed in the Article Jihad in
Classical and Modern Islam. By Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics. By
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Any contemporary
Muslim attempt to re-appropriate the theory of Jihad in the light of the modern
experience runs into formidable difficulties, not the least demanding of which
is the conceptualization of transcendence in such a manner that it promotes a neutral,
universal conversation without denying the possibility, if not the actuality, of
the Islamic revelation. But we have an equally recalcitrant problem of history,
as every attempt to grasp the immanence of the human condition, underwritten by
modern philosophy’s attempt to explain temporality and historicity, terminates
in the cul-de-sac of relativity and nihilism. The claim of the meaningfulness
of human existence, which can only be derived from the postulation of a
transcendent source, may be bartered for an immanent, temporally contingent and
intellectually graspable reality, but such a reality is indifferent to the
human quest for meaning. The conundrums of norm and history, existence and meaning,
Self and Other, in other words, afford no transparent
view of the human condition, and what goes under the rubric of scholarly
critique is often nothing more than a veiled apology for the writer’s own
political constituency.
Given these
aporias, it is hardly surprising that much of the literature examined here that
purports to probe Islam’s relationship with violence either makes a very shrill,
overtly partisan statement, or merely scratches at the surface of a deeply
disquieting human issue that admits of no intellectual laxity or moral
complacency. Islam, for most of these writers, either represents a closed –
medieval and pre-modern but sovereign and self-referential - textual tradition
that is the sole preserve of the jurists, or an incredibly fluid and amorphous
historical reality that may be theorized without any regard to its own
normative criteria. In short, either a normative discourse devoid of all
historicity, or a historical inquiry uninformed by any Islamic normativity!
Then there is the discontent of the comparative perspective, which either
contrasts the putatively Islamic ‘theory of warfare’ with that of the ‘Western
tradition’ (thus positing a unity of medieval, Christian and modern, secular
history), or projects an archetypical ‘religious’ perspective against an
equally paradigmatic ‘secular’ one. Needless to say that Islam, according to
this binary vision, belongs squarely to the ‘religious’ camp, and is therefore
impervious not only to the pragmatic charm of modernity’s territorial order but
also to the ‘secular’ logic of self-interest and historical compromise! Little
wonder that such lopsided, anachronistic and controlled representations of
‘Islam’ appear tendentious in Muslim eyes.
The most
intractable intellectual problem in discussion on war is, without doubt, the
notorious ambiguity, nay ‘con-fusion’, of ethics and politics. While moral
theorists annunciate their insights in terms of universally valid norms and
tenets that are, ostensibly at least, independent of the historical context,
existential concreteness is the alpha and omega of political consciousness. The
political self, in other words, articulates its identity through the affirmation
of difference; or, through the construction of a primordial and seminal
antithesis between 'friend' and 'enemy', as claimed by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s
original, albeit controversial theory that the political incarnates existential
totality and determines a choice between being and nothingness also allows us
to examine jihad and its controversies without the squeamishness and sanctimony
of the modern critic.
Given the
possibility of actual, physical killing in a friend-enemy encounter, Schmitt
maintains, the political cannot be made subordinate to any other set of values
or institution, whether religious, moral, aesthetic or economic. The political
transcends all norms and upholds the sovereignty of the existential over
the theoretical. Thus, 'war, the readiness of combatants to die, the
physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy - all this
has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only,
particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no
rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no programme no matter how
exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy or legality
which could justify men in killing each other for this reason.' (The Concept of the Political. New Brunnswick, 1976. Pp. 48-9; my
italics). In short, if there is no existential threat to one’s own life,
if there is no danger that the collective self may be annihilated, then war and
killing cannot be justified. There’s no mistaking then the doctrine of Jihad is
the supreme embodiment of the political conscious of Islam and its ultimate justification
lies in its being fought for preserving the very existence of the Muslim community.
Schmitt also
holds that, in the final analysis, the political, inasmuch as it is sovereign,
cannot be evaluated and measured by norms that are external to it; nor can it
be avoided. The political is the fundamental fact of existence, the basic
characteristic of human life from which man cannot escape; or, expressed
differently, man would cease to be man by ceasing to be political. From the
inevitability of the political - existential - strife in the temporal world,
pessimistic thinkers have also come to the conclusion that pacifism is a lost
cause and conciliatory visions of a universal humanity are nothing but pious
delusions. For Christian thinkers like Augustine, the state is a consequence of
the Original Sin. Others too have found historical existence profoundly unsatisfying
and meaningless. Islam rejects all such, radically gloomy world-outlooks and
willingly accepts all the moral challenges of the historical existence. By so
doing, however, it also puts its own existence at stake. Or, stated
differently, the depressing claim that jihad exists for no other reason than
that the Muslim community exists need not be as scandalous as it appears, for
it merely reiterates Islam’s resolve to bear the burden of history. The
paradox, however, is that Islam does not affirm history for its own sakes;
history is not a prize to be won but a challenge to be faced for
trans-historical goals. The rationale for the preservation of Muslim existence
is therefore not ‘political’ in the Schmittian sense;
for Islam does not accept the ‘sovereignty’ of the worldly, the existential,
the historical, but that of the trans-existential, the moral, the normative.
Muslim existence is to be preserved because it must be a living testimony for
the truth of transcendence and against the lie of nihilism.
Among the Western
academic studies that deal with this subject, though invariably focusing on the
military aspects of it, Rudolph Peter’s Jihad in Classical and Modern Times
is notable for being a compendium and a primer that presents selected Muslim texts
along with the author’s own studies on the re-emergence of jihad in the modern
political discourse. Needless to say, Peters’ approach is scholarly, his tone
educational and informative and his concerns the issues of international law
and world-order. He recognizes that jihad, like revolution, is a protean
concept that means different things to different people, that it acted as an
ideology of resistance against colonialism, and that its re-entry in the
language of politics is part of the general trend towards the Islamization of national discourses in the Muslim world. Though
not intended to be a comprehensive survey (it bypasses the moral, literary and
mystical interpretations of this seminal doctrine), Peters’ study is
nonetheless a lucid presentation that makes a valuable contribution to the
current debate.
John Kelsay’s Islam and War, written in the aftermath of
the Desert Storm, is more ambitious and analytical in terms of history of ideas
and war ethics. It also makes a sensitive contribution to the discourse of Just
War, inviting even Muslim thinkers to elaborate on jus in
In the Holy
War Idea in Western and Islamic Tradition, James Turner Johnson pursues the
same theme as Kelsay, though with greater passion,
polemical candour and self-righteous rancour. No wonder that to the Muslim
reader of the book, it appears as a stern and unending reprimand. Johnson
builds his case against the classical jurists of Islam (notably Shaybani in Khadduri’s
translation) and contrasts them against the laudable representatives of his own
tradition, both Christian and secular. (The West, for him, stands for Western,
Catholic, Christianity and for secular Euro-America; Orthodox Christianity is
not part of the West.) The visible cause of his ire is the juristic, though not
the Qur’anic, division of the world into Dar-al-Islam
and Dar-al-Harb, which he construes literally
as a theory of world-order:
‘The Islamic distinction between dar
al-harb and dar
al-islam was fundamentally different [i.e. from
the Augustinian scheme of the heavenly and the earthly cities] in origin and
conception; not only was it juristic rather than theological, aiming at
ensuring right behaviour rather than right motivation, but it defined the world
in control of territory rather than the invisible progress of divine grace, and
it defined membership in the two spheres by behaviour (submission to God’s will,
islam, whether or not it was accompanied by
faith, iman) and not the invisible presence of
divine grace.’!
Unfortunately,
Johnson is so blissfully ignorant of Islam that neither his invidious
comparison nor his squeamish Christian rhetoric calls for a rejoinder; any
common Western scholar of Islam ought to remove those lapses of knowledge and
perception that vitiate his whole statement. Suffice it to say that the
jurist’s discourse, as it has been duly recognized within Islam, is zahiri; it is concerned with the outward,
empirically verifiable aspects of the social reality. One may even say that
juristic reason represents the Islamic variant of raison d’état. Thank
God that the poor jurist did not try to measure ‘the invisible presence (or
progress) of divine grace”, or the inner reality of iman,
and incorporate it in his praxis. Had he done so, he would have become indistinguishable
from any inquisitor of the Western church, and perhaps
as cruel as well! The notion of divine grace, however, is indispensable to his
system (Cf. MWBR, 22:1; pp. 3-13), though,
blissfully, he does not wield it as a confessional scourge! That the Muslim
jurist devised a legal scheme, which was based on ‘rule of law’ and
territory rather than on ‘the invisible presence of grace’, today stands
against him. However, when the same principles, territoriality and legal
sovereignty, become, under the aegis of the West, the defining characteristics
of statehood, they are deemed salubrious for mankind (Cf. Kelsay,
above.)!
Johnson and Kelsay’s edited volume, Cross, Crescent, and Sword,
represents an earlier attempt by a group of academics to examine the medieval,
Islamic and Christian, arguments for the justification and limitation of war.
It is a sober and scholarly work whose ideological balance and intellectual earnestness
are not reflected in the tabloid title of the book, which appears to pander to
common tastes by insisting on the pernicious dichotomy of Islam and the West! Outcome
of a conference held at
A work of similar
nature, though more ambitious and comprehensive in scope and vision, is the
collection of essays edited by Terry Nardin: The
Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives. Since the
basic divide within this framework is between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’
worldviews, it is but natural that it situates the Christian discourse of Just
War within a broader, cross-cultural perspective. Not only Islam and Judaism,
but also the pacifist and feminist critics of the established ethical systems
have been duly represented in this dialogue which, according to the editor, is
meant to be ‘a conversational and comparative inquiry into different views
about a common topic – not a debate that can be won or lost, but an exchange of
information.’ In other words, it is from an ideologically less assertive
position that this cautious inquiry with uncertain goals is being pursued.
For all this,
however, it is an intellectually exciting, though morally daunting, work that provides
a befitting testimony to the ethical pluralism and foundational relativism of
our age, including its ‘messianic’ hopes and Utopian dreams. Ted Koontz, for
instance, argues from an ‘abolutionist perspective’
that the main focus of our inquiry ought not to be the ethics of war but the
construction of a just international order in which law will substitute for
war! (How we will find a common basis for such a transcendent law is, however,
left unexplained!) The two Muslim contributions are quite uneven and disparate;
while Sohail Hashmi
delivers a reflective, often perceptive statement (‘Interpreting the Islamic
Ethics of War and Peace’), Bassam Tibi,
on the other hand, is unduly critical of the Islamic tradition, examining it,
as duly noted by the editor, ‘through the lens of a self-confessed
internationalist’ (‘War and Peace in Islam’)!
Paul Fregosi’s Jihad is so outrageously polemical and
inflammatory that it merits a mention in this review only because of its publisher’s
abiding interest in spreading blatantly anti-Islamic tracts. With the
publication of this volume, Prometheus Books have fortified their enviable reputation
as the leading crusaders against Islam.
An earlier French
study by
One must pause
here, for even if jihad may, in ultimate terms, be construed as an expression of
personal piety beyond the calculus of politics and rule, a religious obligation
beyond the logic of victory and defeat, it is nonetheless never totally severed
from the historical mission of the community. Only when this link is intentionally
broken, only when the interests of the community are made subservient to the pursuit
of partisan politics, may the imperative of jihad turn into nihilistic
anti-politics. Without the mediating, instrumental logic of fiqh,
without the disciplined deliberation of the jurists, without the sacrament of Ijma´, jihad becomes a caricature of faith.
Our tragedy is that the fiqh has lost its
intellectual vigour, and fuqaha
their moral authority. For all its discontents and limitations, therefore, the
rule of fiqhi reason must return to Islam, but
it must be a reason that has become thoroughly reinvigorated by the absorption
of all forms of knowledge, from within the Islamic tradition and outside it.
Paradoxically,
despite their explicit concern with the issues of world-order and the ethics of
war and peace, none of the works mentioned so far assists us in understanding
the political world as it is, or as it its evolving. For all their intellectual
acumen, ethical sensitivity and polemical fervour, these works speak not only
of a bygone Islam (Dar al-Islam) or a bygone Christianity (Christendom),
but also of a bygone West, the West of the sovereign states, of national
cultures, of local economies. What we are witnessing today is far more radical
a transformation of our world, of its power structures, its economic
enterprises, its technological projects, indeed of its moral discourses, than
can be captured by the innocuous concept of ‘globalization’, or by the pert
jargon of ‘pax americana’.
It would be more apt to conceptualize our situation in terms of Empire. Such,
at least, is the argument presented in a radically original and provocative
study that, despite its associations with a totally different, and for most
Muslims wholly unfamiliar, discourse, is as relevant to our inquiry as anything
else discussed so far.
Empire by the Italian political philosopher,
Antonio Negri, and his American colleague and former
translator, Michael Hardt, is a monumental, daunting,
exhilarating piece of writing that is both liberating and frightening. Ideationally
erudite and ideologically incisive, yet always lively and absorbing, it is a
political tract that is also a philosophical reflection, a materialistic
account of the world that has its own premonitions of transcendence. An
intellectual tour de force and an ideational feast, a political
manifesto and a blueprint for resistance, a scholar’s dissertation that
presents a panorama of the entire terrain of modern thought, Empire is
the key to the understanding of global politics, economics, ideologies.
Notwithstanding its ‘Western’ perspective, its secular idiom and its
materialistic vision, Empire is a work of contemporary history that
demands the Muslim thinker’s fullest attention. If Islamic discourse is not to
be a synonym for obsolete sentimentality and gutless nostalgia, it must learn
to look at Empire in the eye.
Empire, the
authors contend, is materializing before our very eyes. For, along with the
global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, ‘a
new logic of structure and rule – in short a new form of sovereignty.’ Their
thesis is that sovereignty today is composed of a series of national and
supernational organisms that are ‘united under a single logic of rule’. If
sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of the colonialist order,
Empire, by contrast, establishes no territorial centre of power: ‘it is a
decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule
that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,
expanding frontiers.’ Empire also manages hybrid identities, flexible
hierarchies and plural exchange. The authors also warn that Empire should not
be misconstrued as the emergence of a single world-power. Hence, they claim,
the
For Hardt and Negri, Empire is not a metaphor,
but a concept that calls for a theoretical approach. The more harrowing
aspect of Empire, a single-sovereignty world, may then be spelled out as:
‘Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality… (It)
presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as
an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state
of affairs for eternity.’ In a true Hegelian vein, Empire proclaims that
this is the way things will always be and it is also the way they were always
meant to be! In short, ‘Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in
the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in a
sense outside of history or at the end of history.’ The most frightful vision
of Empire however is that it ‘operates on all
registers of the social order extending down to the depth of the social world.
Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very
world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks
directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in
its entirety.’ (All italics are mine.)
The authors’
point of departure for the study of Empire is the emergence of a new notion of right,
or rather a new inscription of authority, along with new modalities of
the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that are already in
force today. Indeed, Hardt and Negri
regret the return of jus ad bellum logic in world-politics (pace Kelsay and Johnson!): ‘There is certainly something
troubling in this renewed focus on the concept of bellum justum
[Just War], which modernity, or rather modern secularism, had worked so hard to
expunge from the medieval tradition.’ The new model of imperial authority,
underwritten by the claims of ‘universal values’ and right of intervention’,
presents them with a set of disquieting questions:
‘Should we assume that since this new right of
intervention functions primarily toward the goal of resolving urgent human
problems, its legitimacy is therefore founded on universal values? Should we
read this movement as a process that, on the basis of the fluctuating elements
of the historical framework, sets in motion a constitutive machine driven by
universal forces of justice and peace? Are we thus in a situation very close to
the traditional definition of Empire, the one promulgated in the ancient
Roman-Christian imaginary?’
Hardt and Negri have
no illusions that ’the Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of
oppression and destruction’. Nevertheless, this fact should not, they plead,
make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to
Empire and its processes of globalization, they are convinced, also offer new
possibilities to the forces of liberation. However, what is salient in their
strategy of resistance is the realization that ‘the struggle to contest and
subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will take
place on the imperial terrain itself.’ Or, in plainer language, it is within
the institutions and structures of the one-sovereignty world that that our
struggle will take place – a point which must also be pondered by Muslim
activists, who often dream of constructing alternative structures, of confining
Islam to a ghettoized existence. The most visible victim of this spineless
purism is Islamic discourse itself! A frank and honest encounter with Empire,
the idea and the reality, ought to awaken Muslim thought from its long-lasting slumber.
In the end, if Hardt and Negri
may dream that ‘the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a
new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire’, the
Muslim may also hope that a new form of jihad, a jihad that is moral and
spiritual rather than violent and militant, will prevent Empire’s march towards
global nihilism.
Islam and Empire
may be incompatible, ideationally, morally, metaphysically, but Muslim
historical existence and humanity’s quest for world-order, albeit currently,
and in modern times, under the aegis of Western powers,
need not become bereft of the compromise of history and politics. To promote a
discourse and perpetuate a vision that conceives Islam and the West, or even
more viciously Islam and the USA, as absolute opposites, as mortal enemies, is
a defeat of the cosmopolitan intellect and universal reason; it is a rejection
of Adam’s khilafa in Islamic terms and a
renunciation of humanity’s bid for enlightenment in the Western ones. No Muslim
thinker worth the name can become accessory to the promotion of such an
inhumane, treasonous and suicidal ideology without betraying his Islamic
commitment.
A transcendent
faith, whose ultimate goal is beyond world and history, gets entangled in
violence because the inviolable beyond is violated by the agents of nihilism.
Terrorism holds nothing inviolable and is therefore the offspring of the same nihilism
which is the antithesis of faith.