Download PDF | Reza Pankhurst - The Inevitable Caliphate__ A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present-Oxford University Press (2013).
294 Pages
INTERPRETING IDEAS AN INTRODUCTION
That many governments in Muslim countries are badly in need of reform is not in doubt […] But why has this sorry state of affairs not led to the emergence of domestic political movements seeking the creation of liberal democracy as we saw, for example, in Eastern Europe? What is different about the Muslim World? Noah Feldman1
Speaking in October 2007, the deputy head of northern Israel’s Islamic Movement Kamal Khatib boldly claimed that the world was “on the threshold of a new era.” Out with the old and in with a future that “belongs to Islam and Muslims.” Israel would soon cease to exist, and the whole country would fall under shari‘a law as a stage in the reconstruction of a global Islamic caliphate.2 In the summer of the same year, a crowd of 100,000 people filled Jakarta’s Gelora Bung Karno stadium to “push for the creation of a single state across the Muslim World,”3 the largest in a series of conferences and rallies that spread across diverse locations, from the United Kingdom to Palestine to Ukraine, organized by the Islamic political party Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Several other groups have also indicated their desire to establish a caliphate, from the secretive Indonesian based group Jemaah Islamiyya, to Moroccan opposition party Justice and Charity. Not to be left out, during aspeech aired in mid-2006, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden admonished his “brothers in Jihad” in “Baghdad, the home of the caliphate” that they “must not miss this opportunity to establish the nucleus of the caliphate.”4
Since the Arab uprisings which began at the end of 2010, a number of Islamic personalities from across the countries affected have publicly announced that the resultant changes in the Middle East were a step toward the re-establishment of the caliphate. These calls ranged from the address of prominent opposition leader Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani to crowds of supporters in Yemen5 and local scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Eid to demonstrators in the city of Daraa in Syria,6 to various exhortations on the re-establishment of the caliphate given from pulpits in major mosques in Egypt and broadcast across satellite channels, newly-launched in the more permissive post-uprising atmosphere,7 to the exuberance of the secretary general of the Tunisia en-Nahda party, Hamadi Jbeli, upon winning his election seat by telling his supporters “we are in the sixth caliphate, God willing.”8 Notwithstanding the apparent popularity in Islamic nations for the re-establishment of the caliphate, which appears to have some grassroots support as indicated by poll results released in 2007 showing that sixtyfive per cent of respondents from across four major Muslim countries wanted to live under a single state,9 the supposed revival of the idea has not been greeted with universal approval.
In particular the administration of George Bush Jr. was consistent in criticizing the concept of a global Islamic caliphate. In 2006 alone, the “caliphate” was mentioned more than fifteen times by Bush, once four times in a single speech.10 Part of the same administration, Bush’s Vice-President Dick Cheney warned that al-Qaeda wanted to “re-create the old caliphate,”11 and prior to his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Pentagon employees that the goal of extremists was to “establish a caliphate” on the back of the destabilization of “moderate mainstream Muslim regimes”12 (many of which were in any case subsequently overthrown by revolutions across the region). “Caliphate” has become a useful phrase on both sides of the Atlantic for politicians seeking to generate public fear to justify foreign excursions and military action, as exemplified by ex-British Chief of General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt’s words up to early 2010, explaining the justification for continued military presence in Afghanistan on the grounds that it was the front-line in the battle to prevent the “Islamist’s longterm objective” of restoring the “historic Islamic caliphate.”13 This went beyond concern over resistance to military occupation or the advocacy of violence against Western civilians to branding the political aspiration itself as a problem. Leaked Home Office documents outlining the then Labour government’s counterterrorism “strategy” showed that Muslims were branded as “extremists” if they “advocate a caliphate,” in other words “a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries,” irrespective of the means advocated to achieve such a state.14 Since 2011, the issue of the political resolution that would follow the Arab uprisings has also exercised the minds of Western politicians.
During the armed uprising that eventually removed Muammar Gaddafi, then Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned of the “serious threat” that would be posed by the emergence of any “Islamic Arab Emirate on the borders of Europe.”15 In the United States, and upon his return from a trip to his “spiritual homeland,” Israel, in August 2011 US Rep. Allen West warned that “this so-called ‘Arab Spring’ is less about a democratic movement, than it is about the early phase of the restoration of an Islamic caliphate, the last being the Ottoman Empire,”16 picking up on a theme initially raised by right-wing pundit Glenn Beck17 (which was widely derided at the time by sections of the media). It was not just Western interests or the interests of the perceived “moderate mainstream Muslim regimes” which were apparently threatened, with Esfahan’s representative to the Iranian Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri-Esfahani, stating that “the return of government to a form of caliphate is a great danger that must be avoided.”18 As the notion of a caliphate has been re-introduced into Muslim discourse, other bodies set up in its absence such as the Organisation of Islamic Conferences (OIC)—ostensibly created to represent the collective voice of Muslim States worldwide—have also felt the need to participate in the discussion, with Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanog stressing in 2010 that the OIC represents the same religious unity and solidarity that existed in the past under the caliphate, therefore fulfilling its function19 (which, if true, would lead to the logical conclusion that its reestablishment was a redundant issue). With the rhetoric calling for the re-establishment of a caliphate being introduced more openly into public and political spheres in the Middle East since 2011, it has become a topic of contention between the liberal elements of society and Islamic movements.
The leaders of groups that have publicly reconciled themselves to working within pluralistic, civil systems and adhering to a democratic discourse in the political sphere are often asked of their position vis-à-vis the caliphate in the media, generating a variety of responses which usually attempt to highlight their more “pragmatic” approach toward appeasing secular and liberal sentiments. When the head of en-Nahda, Rashid al-Ghannouchi, was asked about his position on re-establishment, he admitted that the caliphate was the hope and desire of all Muslims, though it had no role in his group’s political program (at least at this time).20 The head of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Ayad, was much more emphatic in his denial, denying that there were any plans whatsoever for the re-establishment of the caliphate by the movement in the wake of the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad,21 in an attempt to demarcate the goals of his movement from that of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the region. Meanwhile, the head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Mohammad Badie, stated that the re-establishment of the righteous caliphate and the revival of the Islamic State and shari‘a were the goals of his party,22 as stated by Hassan al-Banna, and that they were close to being achieved, perhaps responding to the growing debate within Egyptian Islamic circles regarding the caliphate. All of these discussions and debates around the caliphate, its relevance for the contemporary era, and how it applies to the political programs of the different movements in the region highlight its relevance today. With the opening of a civil space for more open political discourse in the Middle East as a result of the Arab uprisings, this has only increased. The last sustained period of global interest in the caliphate occurred more than a century earlier, with Sultan Abdul Hamid II emphasizing his role as the worldwide leader of Muslims to garner international support in an attempt to halt the decline of the Ottoman state during his rule between 1876 and 1909. In India, the Khilafat movement was established in 1919, attracting even non-Muslim leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi to its events, part of their work to support Muslim brethren in Turkey while resisting the colonial British. When Mustafa Kemal formally abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924, reaction from places as far apart as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and India highlighted the attachment felt to the institution,23 even though for all intents and purposes it had died years earlier.
The sudden collapse of the caliphate also reverberated around political and religious elites across the Middle East and wider Muslim world, with Sharif Husain of the Hijaz proclaiming himself caliph to the incredulity of the majority of the global Muslim community.24 A subsequent conference held in Cairo in 1926 was seen as a thinly veiled attempt by Egyptian monarch Ahmed Fu’ad to lay claim to the title himself. The conference had actually been scheduled for 1925, but due to various political complications was postponed. Among the reasons for the delay was the uproar surrounding the publication of a book called al-Islam wa usul al-hukm (Islam and the fundamentals of ruling), the main thrust of the text being that the caliphate was in fact an un-Islamic institution and that Islam, contrary to widely-held perceptions of the Islamic community over fourteen centuries, actually had nothing to do with politics. The author, an al-Azhar graduate called Ali Abdul-Raziq, was subsequently stripped of his qualifications and barred from work as a judge by the unanimous decision of a court made up of twenty-four of his peers.25 However, once the initial indignation and protestation over the ignoble end to a centuries-old symbol of Islamic history had ran its course, by the 1930s the question of the caliphate and any aspirations to it no longer seemed relevant, and the issue appeared to lay dormant in the political sphere.26 It is clear that the caliphate represented different things to its various supporters and detractors. In the early twentieth century, the supporters of the institution variously thought it to be a symbol of Islamic unity, a last hope against Western imperialism, a focal point to strengthen communal identity against other new nationalisms, and a useful tool to extend the elite’s political influence in the region. Its detractors claimed it was a symbol of a civilization whose time had passed; even antimodern, totalitarian leaders were afraid it could be used against them in their local political struggles with the various monarchies dotted around the region. The apparent absence of the caliphate from public consciousness for several decades and its subsequent re-emergence as part of what may be perceived as a broad Islamic revival, as well as the opening of public space for political discussion in the Middle East, raises many interesting questions.
These range from what the idea means to those who propagate it, how it is used in the counter-hegemonic discourses of the Islamic thinkers and groups engaged in a struggle to wrest power from entrenched regional ruling elites, and to what extent is it adopted as a symbol of reactionary rejection of modernity and Westernization rather than as a political alternative in its own right. There have been numerous works on different aspects regarding the caliphate, including Sean Oliver Dee’s “The Caliphate Question,”27 Mark Wegner’s “Islamic Government,”28 Soaud Ali’s thesis on Ali Abdul-Raziq,29 and Mona Hassan’s “Loss of Caliphate.”30 All of these focus on the period surrounding the abolition of the caliphate, covering Britain’s relationship with the Indian Khilafat movement, the debates in Egypt at the time of the abolition, analyzing the work of one of the opponents of the caliphate and comparing the reaction of the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, to the loss of the Abbasid caliphate to the Mongol invasion in 1258 respectively.
The intention of this book is to go beyond that period in time to provide a history of some of the movements making a claim to the call for the re-establishment of the caliphate over the last century, and how those claims fit within the reconstruction of a “Pan-Islam” that James Piscatori has defined as “giving concrete form to the idea of Muslim political unity”—trying to answer how these movements have articulated their belief that the spiritual unity of the Muslim community requires political expression31 either through the notion of the caliphate or other forms of transnational authority. It is hoped this will provide a unique contribution toward a greater understanding of the nature and nuances of Islam in politics and the path of Islamic revival across the last century. In so doing, it will examine the waning popularity of the caliphate in Muslim discourse and its subsequent re-emergence, understanding its differing importance to different actors and movements, the importance of symbols and their varying levels of meaning in forming and strengthening political positions against regimes which lack popular legitimacy, and how these ideas are diffused globally across movements and individuals. As an analysis of Islam and Muslim polity, the use of the liberal democracy as a universal yardstick is avoided and the categorization of Muslims into “Islamists” and others is also rejected, and instead uncovers a normative understanding of Islamic politics that exerts a growing pull upon Muslims today.
In place of the artificial paradigms which are unhelpful in understanding the differing trends of Islamic movements, the words of proponents of Islamic governance are placed within the political context they are addressing, while also taking into account their political position and religious understanding. Accordingly, it provides an alternate telling of history, told from within these move- ments and their surroundings, and encompasses the envisagement of an alternative future opposed to the standard story of progress as a move from the religious to the secular, as well as simply being an interesting story in itself.
Analyzing Islamic Politics Through Imposed Paradigms
Approaches to analyzing the politics of Islamic groups across the Middle East and Muslim world normally fall into two broad camps: Orientalists and their detractors (alternatively named “essentialists” and “contingencists”32 or “internalists” and “externalists”).33 The common narrative is that Orientalists hold a limited set of conceptual categories derived from the classical texts of Islam that are applied universally in their analysis of political Islam,34 whereas their opponents view the same approach as reductionist and instead argue that the various social movements and developments should be understood as the product of particular local socioeconomic and political woes.35 The first approach generally holds the incompatibility of Islam and ‘modernity’ as the trigger for regional discontent and support for various Islamic movements, whereas the second contends that factors such as the failure of secular nationalist movements to resolve the societal problems of poverty and denial of political representation are the main causes of the backlash. While some Orientalists consider that any calls for democracy by Islamic parties are purely utilitarian in nature,36 their opponents argue that any reference to Islamic tradition is used instrumentally or simply represents a call for participation and better governance articulated in a more culturally authentic form.37 However, for all their differences and arguments, since the end of the Cold War both sides have implicitly made liberal democracy the ultimate reference point in their approach and analysis, such that Michael Salla notes that “the relationship between liberal democracy and political Islam is unidirectional: Political Islam either responds to liberal democratic norms by demonstrating their consistency with the Islamic heritage; or reacts to them as contrary to the Islamic heritage.”38 Accordingly, the two schools of thought could also be categorized into those who believe in the incompatibility of Islam and liberal democracy, and those who argue its compatibility, with both sides implicitly accepting the assumption of the universality of liberal democratic norms, as well as its hegemony .
Since the opinion of the incompatibility school is to stress the oppositional nature of Islam and liberal democracy, any attempt by Islamic parties or groups to participate in local and national elections is seen as merely pragmatic and not grounded in any real belief or conviction in the process. As an example, David Brumberg argues that democracy is used instrumentally by both the current elites and the Islamic opposition as a means of addressing the social and economic crisis of failed regimes,39 but the goal of the opposition to ultimately establish a unified ethical order based on the shari‘a by initially embracing liberalism will inevitably lead to conflict between the two. Though many supporters of these and similar positions hold to the Orientalist view of a single, essential Islam, or perhaps more accurately a single, essential Muslim, another approach has been to dismiss the concept of an “Islamic State” as being a modern invention, an alternative to a world order imposed upon the Middle East by a domineering West. While the notion of a single essential Islam can be rejected, for writers like Bassam Tibi this modern invention is still strong enough to ensure an inevitable clash between the West and Islam. Tibi supports “inclusivist policies,” but the “inclusion of Islamists” will not change their worldview since “their goal of establishing an Islamic state cannot be shaken,” and any belief that such a state would be compatible with democracy is “naïve and politically dangerous.”40 Even though an essential Islam is rejected, an essential “Islamism” takes its place, with any nuance or differences in thought and method of the various groups and individuals submerged under the general heading of utilitarianism. The reaction to such essentialisms has been to de-emphasize the concerns of traditional Orientalists of the significance of Islam. This form of “anti-Orientalism” treats Islam as a nominalism, explained as an ethnicity, or as an ideology—in the Marxian mystifying role—or as simply the vocabulary through which legitimacy is represented. Rather than being a monolithic entity, Islam is decentered and dispersed as a collection of “little Islams.”41 As noted by Francois Burgat, “It is easier to study one eternal and intangible Islam than all the thousands of interpretations.”42 In such interpretations, the cause of the instability in the Middle East and the lack of movement towards the full adoption of a culturally acceptable form of liberal democracy are not due to Islam, but rather the failure of national, secular regimes to resolve the political and socioeconomic problems of the post-colonial era. As such, unwarranted Western interference rather than a rejection of Western political norms is behind the slow development of democratic structures in the Middle East. Rather than the resurgence of Islam in the political sphere being part of a worldwide “revolt against the modern age,” as posed by Bruce Lawrence,43 it is “an effort to find a legitimate basis for the construction of a modern state and a modern economy in the environment of contemporary technologies and sciences.”44 The underlying idea that Islamic activism is a reaction to a post-colonial vacuum is also evident in much of the work of John Esposito. Monumental events such as the failure of the 1967 war with Israel are seen as triggers for an identity crisis that led to a return to the old tradition of Islamic revivalism. To Esposito, the roots of Islamic reform are not simply a response to the challenge of the West, but rather “are both Islamic (its revivalist tradition) and Western (a response to European colonialism).”45 The return to Islam is again considered as a return to faith, identity and authenticity, with those promoting secularism (mainly the elites) perceived as indigenous colonialists, and modernizers as apologists. The evidence of several differing groups and programs proves that there is no monolithic version of Islam or political Islam, which is just “a recurrent Western myth that has never been borne out by the reality of Muslim history.”46 Though there may be some specific doctrinal points that do not conform to liberal democratic norms, the revivalists “need to bridge the gap between traditional Islamic beliefs and institutions and the socio-political realities of the contemporary world.”47 Esposito is not interested in the detailed ideas of the varying movements and individuals, but rather how compatible they are with a pluralistic form of governance. Another proponent of the “authenticity” explanation is Nazih Ayubi. Ayubi dismisses that modernization and a lack of secularization are the reasons for a rise in political Islam. Instead, the rise is linked to the failure of foreign “formulas” of communism and capitalism, while Islam is considered as more indigenous. The rise is explained as a reaction against the alienating policies of local elites in the name of modernization that have engendered a resentment to exclusion, resulting in the quest for a “cultural revolution” which seeks to install what Ayubi calls a “nomocracy,” a reign based on the Word of God and the rule of law rather than of any particular elite or theocratic group.48 This protest against exclusion is merely clothed in Islam, since the development of political Islam is seen as a reaction to the dissolution of the caliphate and loss of independence with no unique or alternative ideas intrinsic to its own framework of thought. Though Ayubi, Esposito and Burgat lie firmly within the compatibility school by virtue of their assertion that an Islamic form can exist within a pluralistic system based on liberal norms, a different approach, adopted by scholars like Olivier Roy and Fred Halliday, effectively renders Islam as secular and irrelevant; consequently “to ask of Islam the answer to basic questions about politics and society is spurious.”49 Islam is therefore compatible with liberal democratic norms since it actually has nothing to say about them. In Halliday’s view, any analysis of the Middle East should focus on the consequences of post-colonialism, just as in the explanation of any other post-colonial state or region. Islam cannot provide any fundamental ideas or programs, but rather is used as a purely mobilizing force in a utilitarian manner. The universality and supremacy of Western secular political norms is so sure to Halliday that “the issue is not, therefore, one of finding some more liberal, or compatible, interpretation of Islamic thinking, but of removing the discussion of rights from the claims of religion itself.”50 Whereas the Orientalists stress the primacy of Islamic texts in shaping the thoughts of Muslims, Halliday goes to the extreme of effectively denying they exist, since in his view Islam does not “tell us about the circumstances in which the state should be opposed or supported, whether there should be one state or many; whether believers should embrace modernity or tradition.” Yet a brief review of traditional Islamic sources provide narrations which mention when a ruler is to be obeyed or fought against, the obligatory nature of unitary rule, and the condemnation of basing actions on anything other than Islamic sources.51 Though these can be interpreted in varying manners, it is clear that Islam does say something about all these issues, and the real questions concern the interpretation of what it says and whether Muslims pay any attention to it. This is the view taken by Roy when stating that “the key question is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Koran says.”52 However, Roy’s own analysis suffers from a number of inaccuracies regarding aspects of Islamic law which are largely agreed upon within orthodox Islamic scholarship, as represented by the major schools of Islamic thought. One example is his claim that those who have conside- red Jihad to be a fard ‘ayn (individual duty) rather than fard kifaya (collective duty) have introduced an “obvious innovation (bid‘a)” within Islam,53 which in fact runs completely contrary to the consensus of classical Islamic opinion which states that Jihad becomes fard ‘ayn when Muslim land is under attack.54 He also dismisses those who claim that the re-establishment of the caliphate is a religious obligation as a bid‘a, on the grounds that “this has never been stated by any classical theologian.”55 Yet Abul Hasan Ali al-Mawardi, Mohammad bin al-Hussain al-Fara Abu Ya‘la and Imam al-Haramain Abdul Malik bin Abdullah al-Juwaini, among other noted historical Islamic figures, all state that it is agreed upon by the consensus of scholars that appointing a caliph is an obligation.56 In any case, Roy holds the opinion that political Islam has failed as a result of its co-optation by the state and has therefore become “normalised,”57 a thesis that can be safely applied to the most prominent political Islamic movement the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Once he has (re)established the failure of political Islam—he then asserts that its failure “means that politics prevail over religion.” He clarifies this by stating that the “Islamization of society has led to the Islamization of secular activities and motivations, which remain secular in essence, business, strategies of social advancement, and entertainment.”58 In such a paradigm, political Islam could never succeed because there is no such thing, since in his view, engagement in politics and government is ultimately a secular activity. Roy’s basic thesis is that “neo-fundamentalism,” a new form of religiosity that focuses on the universal Umma (community) rather than national and statist dimensions, is borne of the failure of political Islam and the rejection of some of its adherents to normalization within existing political frameworks. In such a narrative, the interest in a global caliphate is a result of the failure of local Islamic movements to sufficiently influence or succeed within the nation-state model. The existence of groups that have worked for global objectives from their inception such as the Khilafat movement in the early and Hizb ut-Tahrir in the late twentieth century raise questions about the validity of the theory, and it can be argued that many groups initially held universal and global objectives, such as the establishment of a pan-Islamic state, but subsequently had to submit to working locally due to the enormity of any universal, transnational project. It is the Algerian experience in the early 1990s in particular that is perhaps the closest to matching his theoretical framework. Another possible example is that of the Egyptian Jihad movement and al-Qaida, which is analyzed in detail by Fawaz Gerges,59 who relates his thesis specifically to the modern global jihadi movement borne out of local groups frustrated at being crushed by state apparatus throughout the last decade of the twentieth century. For Roy, like Halliday, secular liberal democracy is the benchmark in their analysis as it is for Esposito and Burgat, with the caveat that the word “secular” be removed. In one form or another, either by arguing the complete irrelevancy of Islam or its flexibility and lack of essential nature, the context they are looking at overrides any Islamic textual interpretations. As a result they see no problem with the compatibility of Islam and their own worldview. Those who fall within the incompatibility school focus on the essential nature of Islam, and the belief that any analysis of the politics of the region should primarily be read through interpretation of Islamic texts. While context may influence the reactions of various Islamic movements, in its essential form Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy and therefore there can be no lasting accommodation with Islamic activists. Both Orientalists and their opponents implicitly accept the universality of liberal democracy and subsequently make it their basis for analysis, failing to consider that the proponents of Islamic government may actually be offering viable alternative paradigms. Neither school strikes the right balance between interpreting discourses while evaluating the influence of context in order to understand the extent to which the ideas produced are merely reactive or derived systematically from alternative worldviews, as well as how symbols are constructed, perceived and used. This binary approach to analysis also dominates the media, as observed across the news networks during the Arab uprisings in 2011, where the dominant questions asked were how far the clearly popular “Islamist” parties were willing to participate within a pluralistic, liberal democratic framework. No thought or consideration was given to any alternative visions, ironically highlighting the lack of willingness, largely on behalf of the Western media, to accept fundamental political difference, even though the uprisings were targeted against erstwhile Western allies who represented various forms of secular tyranny combined with liberal economic policy and a willingness to largely abdicate their foreign policy for the geo-political concerns of others.
There is some work that takes a critical approach to the methodologies used in interpreting contemporary Islamic movements, including that of Elizabeth Hurd and Michael Salla. Hurd’s perceptive and valuable work highlights how even those groups willing to work within the existing frameworks in the Middle East region and Muslim world are commonly misunderstood due to the primacy of a secular epistemological approach to analysis which defines a “normal politics” far out of sync with reality in Muslim majority societies. Islamic-oriented movements are subsequently labeled as an aberration from this “normal politics,” and therefore “fundamentalist” and intolerant. Her own understanding is that “Political Islam is a modern language of politics that challenges, sometimes works completely outside of, and (occasionally) overturns fundamental assumptions about religion and politics that are embedded in the forms of Western secularism.”60 But rather than necessarily being an oppositional dialogue, it is more of a discursive tradition. There is an acceptance that the paradigm of secularism, the Western understanding of what is religion as opposed to politics, and their complete independence from one another, cannot be the methodological basis for gaining a real understanding of Muslim politics. Salla’s critique of the implicit assumption of the universality of liberal democracy that underlies much of the analysis of Islam and the Muslim polity has been touched upon earlier. In rejecting this worldview, he states that “it is therefore necessary to expand the debate concerning the study of Political Islam beyond the methodological approaches of the ‘essentialist’ and ‘contingencist’ camps, and into the ‘ideational’ or ‘discursive’ realms” where “Political Islam should be seen as representing a paradigm that is in direct competition with liberal democracy in terms of the universal appeal and scope of their respective norms.”61 His own proposal is what he calls the “new convergence thesis” where Political Islam is neither a reformist response nor a reaction against liberal democratic norms, but instead is an alternative universality that can be used to critique other epistemological paradigms. His assertion that those who adhere to or promote Political Islam are attempting to articulate a worldview that challenges the epistemological roots of Secularism is valid, and necessitates that one interprets the alternative ideas proposed by the various intellectuals and movements in their own terms to better understand the meaning of their discourse and symbols.
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