« Editorial in the Telegraph about the lack of a Moderate Islam... | Main | Research about why women might not be naturally monogamous... »
July 14, 2005
Well, there is at least one Moderate Moslem...
An Arab intellectual named Sadik al-Azm published an essay called Islam and Secular Humanism. Worth the read
- ...I would argue that today the accurate and realistic answer to the question “Is Islam compatible with secular humanism and its components?“, is: Dogmatically no, they are not compatible; historically, yes, they are compatible. I would also add that in general, whenever the dogmatic no in Islamic history, correct as it may have been scripturally and literally in its own time, came in outright conflict with the historical yes, incorrect and unorthodox as it may have seemed at its own moment, the historical yes tended to prevail over the dogmatic no. This victory used often to reach the point of completely obliterating and supplanting the purist no of the moment.
Let me restate my answer in a somewhat different and perhaps clearer form: Islam as a coherent, static ideal of eternal and permanently valid principles is, of course, compatible with nothing other than itself. As such it is the business of Islam to reject, resist and combat secularism and humanism to the very end, like any other major types of polities and varied forms of social and economic organisation that human history produced and threw up in the lives of peoples and societies. From kingship to republic, from slavery to freedom, from tribe to empire, from ancient city state to modern nation-state. Similarly, Islam as a world-historical religion stretching over 14 centuries has unquestionably succeeded in implanting itself in a whole variety of societies, a whole multiplicity of cultures, a whole diversity of life forms ranging from the tribal-nomadic to the centralized-bureaucratic, to the feudal-agrarian, to the mercantile-financial, to the capitalist-industrial.
In light of these palpable historical facts, adaptations and precedents it should be clear that Islam has had to be very plastic, adaptable, malleable and infinitely reinterpretable and reversible to survive and flourish under such contradictory conditions and widely varying circumstances as referred to above. This is why I would conclude that there is nothing to prevent historical Islam in principle from coming to terms and making itself compatible with such things as secular humanism, democracy and modernity. Whether it actually does and/or evolves in that direction is a historical contingency and a socio-cultural probability, depending on what actually living and kicking Muslims do as historical agents.
His comments on Turkey are facinating:
- It is certainly noteworthy that Turkey, the only Muslim country with a developed and explicid secular ideologoy, tradition and practice, should be also the only major Muslim society to produce a democratic Muslim political party – something like Europe’s Christian Democratic Parties – capable of ascending to power without a catastrophe befalling the whole polity, as has happened elsewhere.
This novel development generates the following most intersting paradox: as is well known, the currently ruling Islamic party in Turkey is the most eager proponent and promoter of Turkey’s membership in the European Union – a “Christian Club“ as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once called it. At the same time, the Turkish military establishment, traditionally the staunchest guardian of Turkish secularism and the bastion of its Kemalist experiment, is now the most important opposer of Turkey’s membership in the secular European Union.
What are we to make of this paradox? It is clear to me that this Turkish Muslim democratic party hopes that EU-membership will help put an end to the military’s traditional meddling in the affairs of the Turkish state. The army generals know this very well and react accordingly by doing their best to delay and abstruct the process for as long as possible. This is why I think the EU would do all parties concerned a great favor and an enduring service by taking Turkey by the hand and helping it through this difficult and risky transition period – pretty much the way it had aided Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal to overcome their troubled fascist, militaristic and authoritiaran pasts respectively. Certainly, Turkish membership in the EU would make it almost impossible for the military there to revert to type and distort their country’s fragile democracy. It would also make it just as difficult for any Islamic party or coalition of such parties, to revert to type in the future and ruin Turkey’s promising experiment by one form or another of Muslim fundamentalism, scripturalism and literalism.
Both the Arab world and Islam in general are in dire need right now of a reasonably free, democratic and secular model that works in a Muslim society. Turkey is at the moment the most likely place for such a model to develop and mature, given the assistance of the EU-membership and the safeguards it provides. In other words, what we need here is a credible functioning counter-example to the failed Muslim Taliban instance that the Americans left us with in Afghanistan not so long go, with all its horrors and deformities.
Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Martin Kramer.
Posted by rakhier at July 14, 2005 04:12 PM