Of diversity in Islam
[ by Charles Cameron — against either / or thinking — a graphic reminder? ]
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Islam is “a mosaic, not a monolith”.
Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, offered us a 177-page exposition of that theme in a book of that title published by the Brookings Institution (2003), expanding on an earlier and shorter essay of the same title. Of the book-length version, he writes:
Presenting such a wide-angle view in a relatively small space requires the free use of generalizations, summaries, and categorizations that must leave out many nuances of history.
1.
There’s no doubt that some currents within Islam preach a continuing war against “Crusaders and Zionists” — and make no mistake about it, this is a religious movement, claiming its sanction in scripture and its path as submission to the will of God, as indicated by David Martin Jones and MLR Smith in Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency [see Zen’s comments here]:
The process of radicalisation is obviously a complex one. Certainly, the passage to the act of terrorism cannot be reduced solely to religion. Nevertheless, it is somewhat naive, if not perverse, to dismiss it completely. The bombings of the Madrid and London transport systems in March 2004 and July 2005 respectively, and even the 9/11 assaults, are, whatever else, Islamist acts in a Western setting. The view that religion is at best a secondary motive defies the evidence. All the groups that have undertaken high-profile terrorist acts dating from 9/11 and stretching from Bali to Madrid, London and Mumbai have acted in the name of a militant understanding of Islam. Such a pattern of worldwide attacks, exhibiting a profound devotion to a politically religious cause intimates, if nothing else, a religious dimension to jihadism. In fact, to reduce jihadism to individual social pathology attempts to explain away political religion as a social fact. Rather worryingly, it assumes that when a highly motivated jihadist claims to undertake an operation to advance a doctrine, he does not really mean it.
This might seem so obvious as to require no comment — yet Jones and Smith follow this paragraph with a question:
we need to resolve this paradox: why do counterinsurgency theorists exhibit this reluctance to confront the ideological or politically religious dimension of modern insurgency?
— and there are no doubt other segments of the media, intelligence and policy communities of which the same question might be asked.
One aspect of the answer, I believe, lies in the general tendency of post-enlightenment thinkers to “push religion into the background of their story” (Richard Landes‘ words, which I quoted here in a different context a week ago).
2.
The young man pointing a gun at the viewer on a Facebook page (h/t Internet Hagganah) is the avatar of a net-salafi in Germany whose sequence of avatars looks like this:
Quintan Wiktorowicz defines a salafi thus:
The term “salafi” is used to denote those who follow the example of the companions (salaf) of the Prophet Mohammed. Salafis believe that because the companions learned about Islam directly from the Prophet, they commanded a pure understanding of the faith.
As he notes in another article:
The Salafi movement (often referred to as the Wahhabis)1 represents a diverse community. All Salafis share a puritanical approach to the religion intended to eschew religious innovation by strictly replicating the model of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the community is broad enough to include such diverse figures as Osama bin Laden and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia. Individuals and groups within the community reflect varied positions on such important topics as jihad, apostasy, and the priorities of activism. In many cases, scholars claiming the Salafi mantel formulate antipodal juristic positions, leading one to question whether they can even be considered part of the same religious tradition.
The avatar-salafi depicted above sums up his own existence and “aim in life” by pointing a gun at you.
3.
Not so the lady leading a child by the hand in the lower of the two images, from a photo taken in India.
She offers us, in fact, a vividly contrasting picture of Islam to that of the salafi. She, a woman who is clearly observant of the demure dress code given in Qur’an 33.59 and wearing a niqab, is leading by the hand a joyful child arrayed in the finery of Krishna — beloved flute-playing avatar of Vishnu (avatar in its original sense) among her Hindu neighbors.
You might consider the pair of them together as monotheism hand-in-hand with polytheism. But then again, you might see them as peace and delight together, walking hand-in-hand.
You might see them as expressive of the Quranic proclamation (49.13 ):
O people, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into races and tribes so that you may know each other. Surely the most honored of you in the sight of God is the one who is the most righteous of you.
4.
To bring this back to contemporary politics, we may have our views about Islamist politics, and in the context of the changing scene across the Arab world it is worth pondering this recent quote from Rachid Ghannouchi, founder of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, indicating another significant aspect of the contemporary evolution of Islamist thought:
Freedom is a fundamental principle in Islam, religion can not be forced on believers … Religion is not meant to give us guidance in all areas of industrial management, agricultural innovation, and governance, those subjects require human reason. Religion, however, gives us a code of values and principles.
Islam is not merely diverse, it is self-renewing.
5.
In light of all this, we need a far richer awareness of the mosaic that is Islam that our tendency towards black and white, war or peace, either / or thinking easily allows.
Consider these Quranic verses (35.27-28):
See you not that Allah sends down rain from the sky? With it We then bring out produce of various colors. And in the mountains are tracts white and red, of various shades of color, and black intense in hue. And so amongst men and crawling creatures and cattle, are they of various colors.
Again, the delight in diversity!
Now take another, closer look at those two folks from India:
Beautiful.