Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity

277 Pages·2012·5.269 MB·English

by  Malise Ruthven

Malise Ruthven, described by the Guardian as ‘one of today’s most perceptive
observers and historians of religion’, is internationally recognised for his
work on Muslim thought and theology, fundamentalism, the social impact
of religion and migration and the nexus between contemporary politics and
belief. His many books include The Divine Supermarket: Travels in Search of
the Soul of America (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2012) and Mormonism: An
Introduction (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming).
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‘Malise Ruthven is the leading British authority on modern Islam. His
books are essential for understanding what is going on in the Middle East
today, and Encounters with Islam is an ideal entrée to his thinking on some
vital issues.’ – Robert Irwin
‘There is no better guide to analysing and explaining the West’s long
engagement with Islam than Malise Ruthven. Accessible and – even
more importantly – brilliantly judicious, his latest book is ever careful
in this most treacherous of territories filled as it is with myth and fear.
Here is a magisterial overview to help us understand these recent years
of violent confrontation and stubborn misunderstanding. We have much
to be grateful for in Ruthven’s wise insights.’ – Madeleine Bunting,
the Guardian
‘Malise Ruthven has spent a lifetime studying Islam: as a cultural force,
its role in politics, its place in international relations, and its place in
ordinary people’s lives. No one has been more consistent and persistent
in trying to understand the wider forces which have shaped Islam’s role
and presence in the modern world; and fewer still have been so successful
in educating the rest of us. It is therefore with great pleasure that I hold
a copy of Malise’s Encounters with Islam in my hand: he is as readable and
instructive as ever!’ – Anoush Ehteshami, Nasser Al-Sabah Professor of
International Relations, Durham University
‘Over the last decade Malise Ruthven has consolidated his position as
one of our most consistently stimulating and sophisticated writers on
contemporary religion in general and Islam in particular. The essays
here are as wide-ranging, versatile and intellectually curious as they are
well-written, witty and constantly surprising. In a crowded field Ruthven
remains way ahead of the pack.’ – William Dalrymple
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Malise Ruthven
EncountErs
with islam
On ReligiOn, POlitics
and MOdeRnity
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Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2012 Malise Ruthven
The right of Malise Ruthven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Modern Religion: 24
ISBN 978 1 78076 023 0 (HB)
978 1 78076 024 7 (PB)
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Designed and typeset by 4word Ltd, Bristol
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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Contents
Introduction vii
Part One A Clash of Civilisations? 1
1 Muamalat: Islamic Obligations at Home and Abroad 3
2 An Unnecessary Clash 13
3 The Birth of Islam: A Different View 19
4 Politics and the Prophet 27
5 Our Deputy Sheriffs in the Middle East 35
Part Two Faith, Power and Terror 41
6 Does Terrorism Work? 43
7 Signposts on the Road 47
8 Faces of Islam 55
9 The Rise of Muslim Terrorists 69
10 Deception over Lockerbie? 81
Part Three Muslim Societies 87
11 Onward Muslim Soldiers 89
12 Pasting Green Labels 101
13 Phantoms of Ideology 107
14 Storm over Syria 111
15 The Family 121
Part Four Iran in Focus 131
16 The Fall of the Shah 133
17 Was Weber Wrong? 145
18 Khomeini’s Rose Garden 155
19 Divided Iran on the Eve 159
20 The Cultures of Shi‘ism 171
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vi Encounters with Islam
Part Five Islam in the West 185
21 Europe’s Muslim Problem 187
22 The Muslim’s Cell 199
23 The Shrinking Sphere 207
24 The Satanic Verses Revisited 215
25 Made in the USA 225
Part Six Beyond Islam 233
26 A Holy (O)mission 235
27 Edward Said, 1935–2003 245
28 Rupees for Relief 251
Index 255
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Introduction
There may be a corner of Purgatory, unremarked by Dante, where those of
us who have worked in journalism and the media will be required to review
a lifetime’s hack-work and to confess our intellectual sins before being
admitted to Paradise. In preparing reviews and articles for this book – the
product of some 30 years’ observation and commentary on Islam and the
Middle East – I have striven to pre-empt the recording angel by weeding
out banalities and fits of intemperance before he (or she, or it) gets to see it,
and confronts me with some horribly embarrassing copy.
As a scriptwriter at the BBC World Service, I was required to make
programmes and write commentaries on a wide variety of topics – domestic
politics, economic and industrial issues, even theatre and the arts – as well
as Arab and Islamic questions. I am aware of how wonderfully approaching
deadlines – symbolised by the hands of the synchronised clocks that still
surface, unmelted, in my dreams – serve to concentrate the mind, forcing
words into consciousness, on to the page and from there into the micro-
phone. But I also recognise that the demands of the media are ephemeral,
and that true comprehension is not to be found on the spotlit surface of
events, but rather in the deeper human structures and configurations that
we think of as cultures. For a writer, radio has its virtues. The greatest of
these is the imperative of clarity, based on a simple, technological fact:
while a reader can re-read a sentence on the page of a book or newspaper,
the listener doesn’t get a second chance. But radio also has its drawbacks:
the medium is by definition transient – ‘in one ear, and out the other’ as
the saying goes.
In my case, the search for clarity of phrasing – however imperfectly
realised – has been matched by a quest for understanding. When it comes
to Islam and the Middle East, this cannot be achieved without some
heavy intellectual spadework: a knowledge, however inadequate, of its
languages; a grasp of its history and its anthropologies; a recognition that
religious experiences and identities are meaningful for some people; and
a sufficient awareness of one’s own culture to be able to make meaningful
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viii Encounters with Islam
correspondences between different cultural systems, so that terms and
concepts that seem alien are not entirely ‘lost in translation’.
In approaching the Islamic world, my preliminary spadework was not
the mandatory university course, but rather a spell of living alongside the
Huwaitat Bedouin in southern Jordan during my ‘gap year’ before attending
university, and a year of Arabic study at the Foreign Office-funded Middle
East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan, in Lebanon, after I
had graduated from Cambridge (in English Literature). MECAS, where the
Foreign Office trained its Arabists, was widely known as ‘the spy school’.
The locals assumed that the place, set in the splendid hills overlooking
Beirut airport, was some kind of James Bond establishment, where we
learned the black arts of seduction, cryptology and murder (if only…). I
recall an uncomfortable conversation with a taxi driver who took me to
downtown Beirut, half an hour’s drive from Shemlan:
‘You’re at the spy school, madrasat-al jassousiyya,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ I replied, ‘It’s just a place where they teach you Arabic.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘What about Kim Filibee and Georgie Blake?’
The cabbie was well-informed. Before his defection to the Soviet Union,
the spy Kim Philby, who had worked as a correspondent in Beirut, had
close associations with the school. George Blake, who fled to the USSR in
1966 after escaping from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where he was serving a
42-year sentence for espionage, had actually been picked up at MECAS by
Special Branch detectives.
‘Wrong team,’ I tried to explain. ‘Both were working for the other side.’
My sojourns in Jordan and Lebanon were informative, but only the
beginning of a quest for understanding. Arabic and other Muslim languages
may help, but they are not sufficient for embracing the phenomenology of
Islam, or the rich mosaic of Muslim ideas and societies, in an increasingly
complex, globalised world. As I suggest in my critique of Bernard Lewis
(see page 24) the textual knowledge or ‘coal-face scholarship’ of which
he is such a distinguished example can actually be misleading, unless it is
accompanied by a certain empathy and the intellectual humility that comes
with a willingness to learn from non-textual human sources (including
those conveyed by the social scientists and anthropologists whom Lewis
clearly disparages).
‘Why Islam?’ I used to be asked. ‘Are you a Muslim?’ a BBC colleague
queried, evidently bemused at the thought that anyone outside the Islamic
faith community could find the Islamic world interesting or exhibit
some knowledge about it. It may be the case that expertise on aspects of
Christianity – New Testament scholarship, for example – is largely restricted
to believers or professionals who belong to the faith, but the fact remains
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Introduction ix
that Christianity in a wider sense, as a dominant belief system that leaves
vast residues in literature, art, architecture and music, remains a perva-
sive presence in our Western culture. Islam (by contrast) is configured in
most Western peoples’ minds as ‘other’. (The American historian, Richard
Bulliet, addresses this issue in one of the books reviewed in these pages.)
Because our (Western) culture is received without question, absorbed, as it
were, by osmosis, the idea that a monumental statue, or classical portico, or
even a nude centrefold spread from a girlie magazine may appear ‘Christian’
to the non-occidental, simply never occurs to us.
In the West, when we use words such as Christianity or Christian, the
assumption may be that we are talking mainly about matters relating to
people of faith, a presupposition that is reflected in our use of words such
as Islam and Islamic. As a consequence, it becomes all too easy to confuse
cultural engagement with belief and belonging. There is a world ‘out there’
comprising approximately a fifth of humanity and its variegated cultures,
which is informed in some cases by Islamic beliefs and practices, but is not
necessarily religious.
The great American historian, Marshall Hodgson (1922–68), whose
three-volume masterwork, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History
in a World Civilization, published posthumously in 1974, has been a major
influence on my thinking, tried to address this problem by distinguishing
between phenomena he described as Islamic (pertaining to the religion)
and those he described as Islamicate (deriving from regions where Muslims
were culturally dominant, but not necessarily based on religion). Thus
poetry celebrating wine can be described as Islamicate, but not Islamic.
Hodgson’s terminology – he was a great coiner of new terms, which he
hoped would avoid the generally Eurocentric bias infecting the study of
Islam – has never really caught on, except in some academic circles, but the
distinction remains an important one. It informs many of the books – and
my essays about them – that feature in the following pages. For example,
in critiquing Christopher Caldwell’s account of the threat posed by Muslim
immigrants in Europe (see page 187), I suggest that he makes assumptions
about Muslims as believers that may be exaggerated. Virtually everyone
living in Western countries celebrates Christmas, yet only a minority go
to church – and a significant part of that minority may be once-a-year
attendees who have only a vestigial connection with Christian beliefs. The
same applies, a fortiori, to attendance at weddings and funerals. Muslims
who observe Ramadan or the big religious festivals may be conforming,
like regular Christmas-observers, to long entrenched social patterns. The
suggestion that such observance implies strenuously held religious beliefs
is clearly overdrawn.
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x Encounters with Islam
None of this means, of course, that there are no dangers posed by
Islamic radicalism, or that Islamic belief systems are somehow innocent of
atrocities committed using Islamic references. The following pages include
extensive review articles written in the wake of the 11 September 2001
attacks on New York and Washington, DC. A more detailed expression of
my thoughts will be found in A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America
(Granta Books, 2002/3) The point to make here is that Islamic labels can
serve to mobilise and legitimise. They form an extensive part of the political
repertory. ‘Islam’ – to express this crudely – serves as a kind of ‘branding’,
an argument made, in a different context, by Carl Ernst in his critique of
a Pakistan High Court judgment, where ‘Islam’ is compared to Coca-Cola
(see page 7). My argument, in A Fury for God, is that the ideology needs to
be distinguished from the labels used to ‘brand’ it. This has an important
bearing on discussion about the much abused term ‘Islamo-fascism’ which I
have been accused of coining.
I plead guilty to having used the term, in an article in The Independent
newspaper in 1990, in a glancing reference to the authoritarian regimes
that are now being challenged by protestors throughout the Arab region. I
doubt if I was the first person to use this term, though I did not consciously
borrow it from anyone else. It has stuck to me (like the proverbial albatross)
because internet search engines largely stop at 1990, when ‘wiki-history’,
as it were, began. Usages prior to that time are lost in the dust of libraries.
There may be parallels between today’s Islamists and 1930s fascists but,
I would argue, the differences are more compelling. Fascist movements
require organisation, discipline, a unified leadership and a monopoly over
the ideology. It may be the case that some Islamic movements – such as
the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – exhibit the first three qualities, but I
would argue that sustaining a monopoly over the ideology – in this case,
the interpretation of Islam, is an impossibility. The discourses of Islam, like
those of other religions, are too rich and varied to allow themselves to be
welded into a single doctrinal system. The dangers facing Muslim socie-
ties at the present time come from anarchy, on one side, and a restored
authoritarian rule on the other. ‘Islam’ is not the danger – but neither is it
the solution.
Saint Jacques de Néhou, France
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