Download PDF | Daniel Lav - Radical Islam and the Revival of Medieval Theology-Cambridge University Press (2012).
249 Pages
Radical Islam and the Revival of Medieval Theology With a scope that bridges the gap between the study of classical Islam and the modern Middle East, this book uncovers a profound theological dimension in contemporary Islamic radicalism and explores the continued relevance of medieval theology to modern debates. Based on an examination of the thought of the medieval scholar Taqı al-Dın Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the book demonstrates how long-standing fault lines within Sunni Islam have resurfaced in the past half-century to play a major role in such episodes as the Qutbist controversy within the Muslim Brotherhood, the split between radical salafıs and politically quietist ones, the renunciation of militancy by Egyptian and Libyan jihadist groups, and the radicalization of the insurgency in the North Caucasus. This work combines classical Islamic scholarship with a deep familiarity with contemporary radicalism and offers compelling new insights into the structure of modern radical Islam.
Daniel Lav is currently a PhD candidate in Islamic and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Introduction
This is a book on salvation and faith. Admittedly not everyone who writes on contemporary Islamic radicalism starts from these topics, nor did I necessarily think to do so at the outset. This is an emphasis that grew on me organically through my years of study of radical writings. If I may be permitted to borrow the words of an eminent historian who understood the importance of theology in quite another time and place, I might say that “what seized upon me and still directs me is the inner logic of the research.”1 One of the pioneers of the study of contemporary Islamic radicalism, Emmanuel Sivan, prefaced his Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics with the words: “[t]he extended essay that follows presents what I discovered about the transformation of medieval theology into modern Muslim politics, and the twist given to certain age-old Islamic ideas as they entered the contemporary world.”2 In the decades that have since passed, the volume of academic literature on Islamic radicalism has mushroomed, especially in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Among these are many excellent studies, and recent years in particular have seen a great qualitative advance in the literature.3
I have nonetheless found that, with few exceptions, serious inquiry into this central issue of the meeting of medieval theology and modernity has not advanced greatly since the 1980s. In other words, there has been much discussion of “modern politics,” but little of “medieval theology.” In parallel, the shape of Islamic radicalism has evolved in the intervening decades in a manner that renders theology ever more relevant. It may be true that some Islamists “no longer cultivate the historical [Islamic] forms of legal, theological, and philosophical knowledge,”4 but this is not so of the school that predominates today among global jihadists, commonly known as the salafı jihadı school (al-salafiyya al-jihadiyya). Consider the case of ʻUmar b. Mahmud AbuʻUmar, better known as Abu Qatada al-Filastını, who is currently under arrest in the United Kingdom. Britons will be familiar with his name from press reports, where he has been often described as “Osama Bin Laden’s righthand man in Europe.”5
He certainly has connections to al-Qaʻida, but he is also the author of a polemic against the theological views of a nineteenth-century rector of al-Azhar,6 coauthor of a reference work on the eleventh-century scholar Ibn Hazm’s evaluations of transmitters of hadı̄ th, 7 and editor of an influential twentieth-century Wahhabı work of theology.8 Similarly, the Saudi scholar Nasir b. Hamad alFahd, imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2003, has written some radical things indeed, including a ruling permitting the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States9 and an essay in praise of the 9/11 attacks;10 but he is likewise the author of a work of proposed corrigenda to an edition of the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya’s collected writings,11 and a book criticizing some of the theological positions of the fourteenth-century scholar Abu Ishaq al-Shatibı. 12
Were it merely that such modern-day radicals at times have a side interest in classical Islamic studies, we might be justified in ignoring their theological views, in which case this book need not have been written. But anyone who examines salafı jihadı writings will see that this is not so, and that there is in fact a robust connection between their theological positions and their “political” ones. Abu Qatada broached this issue in a work titled al-Jihad waʼl-ijtihad, written in the late 1990s. In a passage criticizing those he calls “Islamic thinkers” (as opposed to scholars in the classical mold), such as the Tunisian Rashid al-Ghanushı, the Egyptian Fahmı al-Huwaydı, and the Sudanese Hasan al-Turabı, Abu Qatada writes that they “do not speak as do individuals who are guided by the Noble Quran”: Instead of speaking to people – to the Muslim youth – about jihad, they began to speak about revolution and political struggle. Instead of presenting people with the expressions ʻubudiyya (servitude to Allah) and ʻibada (worship), they started to speak of national (watanı̄ ) obligation, Arab (qawmı̄ ) spirit, and social necessity. Instead of employing the incentives of love for Allah, fear of Allah, and hope for the afterlife, the discussion has come to be about the achievements of the movement, social security, food security, and Arab territorial integrity. And instead of speaking of Allah’s lost right to have His law and punishments implemented, their discourse has come to be about social liberty, social justice, oppression, and dictatorship.13 What is important for our purposes is not the accuracy or inaccuracy of this critique; what interests us is Abu Qatada’s conception of Islam, which precludes these forms of discourse that others may well view as entirely consistent with Islamic authenticity His is a distinctly salafı critique.
The word salafı is derived from salaf, which means “(righteous) forefathers,” and denotes an originalist tendency in Islamic thought. In the course of this work we will delve further into various, and at times conflicting, conceptions of what it means to be a salafı; it is clear, however, that if contemporary salafıs take their originalism seriously – and they do – then we ought to be interested in how precisely they understand the Islamic tradition and relate it to modern contexts. That is the task I have set before myself in this study. It is a large one, and I make no effort to encompass all its facets. Rather, I have focused on one topic that has proven to be especially significant to modern radicalism: the theology of faith. In particular, the present work seeks to demonstrate how the revival of an age-old and halfdefunct theological polemic over the nature of faith helped foster rifts within broader Islamic movements and contributed to the emergence of the salafı jihadıs as a discrete theopolitical school of thought. The majority of topics in Islamic theology deal with what one should believe; these include the issues of predestination versus free will, the ontological status of Allah’s attributes, and the question of whether the Quran is a created entity or is uncreated. Such topics were the main preoccupation of Muslim theologians throughout most of Islamic history, including those cases in which theological dispute intersected with politics. For example, the ʻAbbasid Caliph al-Maʼmun wielded the power of state in an attempt to enforce the belief that the Quran is a created entity; and in North Africa and al-Andalus, the Muwahhidun (Almohads), who believed in an allegorical interpretation of the divine attributes, waged war against the “anthropomorphist” Murabitun (Almoravids). The theology of faith, in contrast, deals with the issue of what faith itself is, and how one believes. Is faith a credo one must hold true in one’s heart, an act of verbal confession, or perhaps both? Or is it something more demanding: the ordering of one’s inner and outer life around the service of Allah, and the performance of acts of the heart (e.g., love for the Prophet) and acts of the limbs (e.g., prayer, or giving the zakat tithe)? And if the more demanding definition is adopted, how far may one fall short of this ideal and still be considered a believer? This set of questions constitutes the core of the Muslim theology of faith.
There have been two historical periods in which the nature of faith was a truly dominant concern in Islamic theology. The first was the formative period, which for our purposes can be taken to mean the century or so between the first theological writings that appear reasonably authentic (c. 70/690) and the emergence of early Sunnism. The second of these periods runs from the last decades of the twentieth century to the present day. These two periods are also the ones in which theology was most intimately linked with polemic over whether the rulers of Muslim polities were Muslim or apostate. In the formative period, it was in fact this theopolitical question that arose first and was only thereafter gradually generalized into normative doctrines on the theology of faith. At the end of this process, which was completed around the latter half of the second Muslim century, there emerged three competing tendencies in this matter: the Murjiʼite, the Kharijite, and the tendency that would come to be known as Sunni. The Murjiʼites were the most lenient and contended that acts were not included at all in the definition of faith. The Kharijites were the most exacting, arguing that acts were part of faith, and that any grave sin of commission or omission made one an apostate. The Sunnis fell in between these poles, although there remained divergences between different Sunni schools, with some remaining closer to the Murjiʼites and others closer to the Kharijites. In fact, it is intra-Sunni dispute on this topic that forms the subject matter of this study. This book traces the modern revival of the debate over the theology of faith and its application to the question of whether the rulers of Muslim countries today are Muslims or apostates. In other words, it examines the role of the theology of faith in what is often referred to today as radical Islam. The immediate context of this polemic is the rise of Sunni radicalism over the last few decades. The time period treated in this study opened with a number of significant episodes in which a new breed of radicals came into the public eye. In Egypt, the radical al-Takfır waʼl-Hijra group was put on trial for a political assassination in 1977, and the Jihad group assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981; in Saudi Arabia, Juhayman al-ʻUtaybı conducted an armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. In response to events such as these, the official religious establishments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia made concerted efforts to portray the radicals as heretics. The obvious way to do this was to compare them to the Islamic archetype of the fanatical religious radical, the Kharijites. This had been one of the principle lines of attack employed by enemies of the Wahhabıs since that movement’s origins,14 and had been likewise deployed against Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s;15 now it was used against Shukrı Mustafa, the leader of al-Takfır waʼl-Hijra,16 and many others to follow. Wherever employed, the meaning of the accusation of Kharijism is clear: It means to portray the radicals as renegade groups who have rebelled against legitimate authority, separated themselves from the religious community, and pronounced takfı̄ r on other Muslims (i.e., declared other Muslims apostate) in contravention of established Sunni doctrine.17
The radicals, of course, do not see themselves as Kharijites. With few exceptions, they claim to represent orthodox Sunnism; and as they view their own doctrine of faith as orthodox, they accuse their critics of being Murjiʼites. In other words, each party to this struggle strives to define itself as the upholder of Sunnism and attempts to define its antagonist as unorthodox. Unlike the accusation of Kharijism, however, the meaning of the accusation of Murjiʼism is not immediately self-evident.
It is tempting at first to connect it with a critique of political quietism;18 indeed, some modern authors of anti-Murjiʼite polemic do cite statements in which early Sunni authorities describe the Murjiʼites as a sect that is pleasing to the rulers.19 However, the contemporary radicals’ main line of argument is not that Murjiʼism is an explicitly quietist political doctrine. Rather, they take up the issue of Murjiʼism in its proper context of the theology of faith and make a more complex argument focused on the connection between Murjiʼite theology and the refusal of most ʻulamaʼ to make pronunciations of apostasy (takfı̄ r) against the ruling regimes. In this sense, the anti-Murjiʼite polemic may be schematically represented as a second stage in the development of modern Islamic radicalism.
The first preoccupation of these radicals was the argument that contemporary governments who rule by man-made law are apostate and must be overthrown.20 When the religious establishments and more moderate Islamists rallied to refute this thesis, they did so by promoting lenient positions on the theology of faith. The radicals’ focus then turned to these critics, accusing them of Murjiʼism. In a more profound sense, however, these polemics uncover a deeper theological stratum that was already implicit in the radical thrust, which the intellectual contestation between the radicals and their opponents merely served to bring to the fore. Modern anti-Murjiʼite polemic first emerged in the late 1960s or early 1970s within the radical wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
These Brotherhood radicals were followers of the hugely influential Egyptian radical thinker Sayyid Qutb. Qutb himself (like Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) did not normally employ the technical language of medieval theology, but his insistence that the Islamic world had reverted to jahiliyya – a state of pre-Islamic barbarism and ignorance – and his view that verbal pronunciation of the declaration of faith did not suffice to make one a true Muslim led his detractors to view him as a kind of Kharijite. I attempt to show that, notwithstanding the idiosyncratic nature of Qutb’s writings, these conceptions did owe something to the medieval debate, and that toward the end of his life Qutb likewise helped put in motion the process by which medieval theology of faith came to be common currency in modern Islamic radicalism.
This process began in earnest, however, only after his death: When the Muslim Brotherhood leadership attempted to check Qutb’s radicalizing influence by promoting a lenient theology of faith, the radicals countered by embracing the more exacting medieval school, and accused the leadership of Murjiʼism. In the 1980s, the polemic passed over to Saudi Arabia, where it was taken up by Safar al-Hawalı, who was at the time a doctoral student studying under the direction of Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muhammad. Al-Hawalı emerged as a prominent dissident scholar and a leader in the movement known as the Sahwa, which represented a confluence of Qutbist thought and the Wahhabı/salafı tradition of Saudi Arabia. Al-Hawalı’s doctoral thesis on the topic of Murjiʼism, later published in book form, has been rightly called a locus classicus of this debate.21 The 1990s then witnessed an eruption of anti-Murjiʼite polemic in numerous countries as the theology of faith turned into a proving ground between radical and politically quietist salafıs.
These radical salafıs have since come to be known as salafı jihadıs. To the extent that these authors are familiar at all to the wider public, it is for their close connections to al-Qaʻida; but those who manned the front lines in this often abstruse polemic were the movement’s scholars, who are less well known than the al-Qaʻida leadership but arguably no less important. These three stages of polemic – the critique of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Hawalı’s Qutbist anti-Murjiʼism, and the intra-salafı debates – are treated in the present study in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, respectively. In Chapter 5 I will argue, in addition, that these polemics were a central factor in the emergence of the salafı jihadıs as a distinct school, through an unfolding process of differentiation between themselves and their rivals and opponents.
Qutb was relegated to the role of an inspirational figure rather than a doctrinal bulwark as the salafı jihadıs inscribed themselves fully in the salafı-cum-Wahhabı milieu, and they reformulated Qutb’s key doctrines in the language of classical Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Within this salafı milieu, it was, more than anything else, their views on the theology of faith that set them apart, and it is thus no surprise that these became a major bone of contention between themselves and politically quietist salafıs.
Finally, in Chapter 6, I will offer some observations on the relation between these scholarly debates and the trajectory of radical militancy, with special reference to changes in the global jihadist coalition in the post-9/11 period. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book provide background necessary to understand the origins and meaning of the modern debate on the theology of faith. Chapter 1 describes the early emergence of Murjiʼism and its development from a theopolitical doctrine related to the early wars over leadership of the Caliphate into a general theological doctrine on faith. Chapter 2 discusses the theology of faith of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), the influential Hanbalı jurisprudent and theologian who begat a school that Western scholars have dubbed “neo-Hanbalism.”
In particular, the chapter details Ibn Taymiyya’s polemic against what he viewed as the Murjiʼite views of some other Sunnis, especially Hanafı theologians and the Ashʻarı school. Ibn Taymiyya’s writings on these topics are absolutely essential to understanding the modern polemic. Indeed, I hope to show that the fault line between radical Islamists on the one hand and moderate Islamists and mainstream ʻulamaʼ on the other is, to a large degree, the difference between those who have adopted Ibn Taymiyya’s theology of faith and those who have not. It is the salafı jihadıs’ doctrine of takfı̄ r that, more than anything, defines them as a group, and their defense of this doctrine is deeply indebted to Ibn Taymiyya’s antiMurjiʼite writings.
This modern debate on the theology of faith is one manifestation of the more general Ibn Taymiyya revival that has swept the Islamic world with increasing speed in the modern era. From the Middle Ages up until the recent past, Sunni Islam had been dominated by a kind of informal consensus, consisting of Ashʻarı theology (or its largely similar Maturıdı counterpart), recognition of the four established law schools in jurisprudence, and an acceptance of Sufism that extended to tolerance for popular Sufı forms of shrine-centered devotion. The conflict between this rough consensus and the minority Hanbalı school was a major fault line running through learned Sunni Islam in the Middle Ages.
Thus the famous Egyptian historiographer Taqı al-Dın Ahmad b. ʻAlı al-Maqrızı (d. 845/1442) wrote that the Ashʻarı school became so dominant: that the other schools were forgotten, to the point that today no opposing school remains apart from that of the Hanbalıs.... They held to the views of the salaf, believing that one should not explain [Allah’s] revealed attributes allegorically. Then, after 700 a.h.... Ibn Taymiyya al-Harranı rose to prominence in Damascus and its environs. He applied himself to championing the school of the salaf and was unsparing in his refutation of the Ashʻarıs, and spoke out in denunciation of them, the Shıʿıs, and the Sufıs. People split into two factions: one faction followed his example, relied on his opinions, acted on his views, and considered him to be “Shaykh al-Islam” and the most illustrious of Muslim traditionists; and the other faction pronounced him an innovator and heterodox.22
In fact, this second faction was historically the dominant one. Even though Ibn Taymiyya was cherished by a number of later revivalist movements, the majority of Islamic scholars up until the early twentieth century tended to consider him a heterodox gadfly, if not worse.23 Now, however, the increasing popularity of Ibn Taymiyya in contemporary Islam has combined with other factors to help call into question each of these elements of the medieval Sunni mainstream. What is truly remarkable is that despite Ibn Taymiyya’s fame (or notoriety), his theology of faith, which certainly challenged mainstream Sunni views as much as any of his other doctrinal positions, hardly figured at all in the medieval controversies surrounding him. The recent revival of his polemics on faith is thus a testament to the unique potency of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought; from beyond the grave, he continues to roil the Islamic world in new and highly important arenas of disputation. On this note I should add that because my aim in this book is primarily to present the arguments of modern Sunni radicals, it may at times appear that I am endorsing their claim to orthodoxy and their censure of various antagonists. In fact, my view is that the academic scholar of Islam should refrain from judgment on this question. For the scholar, Sunni orthodoxy can only be defined relatively – for example, what the majority of Sunnis have believed at a given time, or over the centuries. By this criterion, the Ashʻarı theology of faith might be considered orthodox, as it has been historically dominant, and the neoHanbalıs and their modern progeny would be considered aberrant. Yet this criterion is fraught with difficulty:
What are we to do with Ibn Taymiyya’s claim to represent an original consensus orthodoxy on the theology of faith that was only later displaced by what he considers to be Ashʻarı heterodoxy? We could provide a critical evaluation of his claims – indeed, this would be a worthwhile endeavor, albeit one that is beyond the scope of this study. Ultimately, however, this is a problem of definition, not one of data. I have thus limited myself to describing and analyzing the competing claims to orthodoxy while attempting to demonstrate the correlations between the medieval polemics and the modern ones. Likewise a note is in order about the use of the terms “radical” and “moderate” in this book. I use these terms primarily with regard to a given individual or movement’s position on whether the ruling regimes are Muslim or apostate and whether jihad should be waged against them. It should be thus borne in mind that my classification relates first and foremost to theological-political issues in the intra-Muslim arena. The terms of this discussion are not necessarily identical to those employed in public policy debates over whether certain groups (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood, quietist salafıs) should be considered moderate.
This book may well inform those debates, but it does not participate in them. Finally, it bears emphasizing that contemporary Islamism is a highly diversified phenomenon, and even within its radical wing this diversity should not be reduced to any one axis. My emphasis on the theology of faith does uncover a dimension of continuity underlying such divergent episodes as the Muslim Brotherhood prison debates, the enmity between quietist and radical salafıs, and changes in the map of Islamic radicalism in the post-9/11 period, but it is not meant as a monocausal explanation for any one of these. This book aims to contribute to our understanding of radical discourse, and as such may be seen as complementary to more context-specific studies. The reader is warmly encouraged to read it in conjunction with additional works in the field that offer other emphases and perspectives, and to think through the larger historiographical issues on the basis of all the relevant materials.
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