Zaheer Kazmi on the (im)possibility of Liberal Islam

Zaheer Kazmi is a Professor in Belfast. As if that isn't bad enough, he was published an essay in Aeon. My comments are in bold.

We live in a liberal world. Actually, very few people- even in the 'West', live in a 'liberal world'. Ask a homosexual who has to move from the neighbourhood he grew up in to a particular area of a particular metropolis so as to enjoy the benefits of 'Liberalism'. In some senses, liberalism enjoys a global victory. Really? What 'senses' are those? Perhaps the author means that countries like China and India and Turkey embraced 'neo-liberal' economic policies and, to encourage f.d.i or limit capital flight, also paid lip service to a 'rules based' World Order of a Left- Liberal type. Even its opponents often make their case based on essentially liberal ideals of a society built on political liberties or free trade to best maximise individual freedom. Unfortunately, making or not making a case has been shown to have no discernible effect on anything. People who do so have been increasingly disintermediated from even the appearance of salience. In the vital details, liberalism comes in many guises. In other words, it is a meaningless 'Humpty Dumpty' word. As the grounds for revolution or a midwife to empire, over the past two centuries it has shaped how we see ourselves and the world. This is sheer nonsense. The only 'grounds for revolution' are distributional. The only midwife of Empire is incentive compatible projection of military power.

While Europe’s empires may have worn liberalism like a badge of civilisation, liberal values were often taken up more vigorously in the lands they colonised, including in the Muslim world. Which European Empire 'wore liberalism like a badge of civilization'? The Portuguese Empire? The Russian Empire? The Spanish Empire? The Slave trading British Empire responsible for genocide in islands as distant as Ireland and Tasmania? Perhaps it King Leopold's Empire in the Congo which is meant. That was truly liberal. Debates about ‘liberal Islam’ are almost as old as the ideology of liberalism itself. Liberalism dates to the Seventeenth Century. 'Progressive', or 'Modernising' (jaddidi) or 'Reformist' Islamic ideologies date from the Nineteenth Century. 'Liberal Islam' does not exist. From the Aligarh movement in 19th-century British India to the al-Nahda, or renaissance, in the Arab world, Muslims have sought to synthesise Islam and liberalism to advance Islam’s civilisational progress. The al-Nahda predates the Aligarh movement and did bear the impress of 'bourgeois liberalism'. However, its 'Enlightenment' cashed out as a 'catch up' theory of Development which favoured top-down technocratic interventions supported by a Westernised army- not a Liberal Civil Society. Once it became apparent that a totalitarian 'catch up' model was more effective at building military power, the 'liberal' window-dressing was abandoned.

The ‘Christian’ West might have established liberal societies, but it has struggled to produce liberal citizens. So no 'liberal societies' as opposed to law-codes have ever been actually produced. The resurgent fascistic movements in Europe and North America today seeking to restrict the freedoms of others are distinctly Christian and Western identity movements. Europe and North America have always restricted the freedom of others so as to increase the life-chances of indigenous dominant groups. The US re-enslaved slaves previously freed by General Dunmore.  Mexicans were expelled en masse by both FDR and Eisenhower (Operation Wetback!). Britain ended free entry of Commonwealth citizens and is now seeking to restrict that of E.U citizens. It is foolish to speak of 'Fascism' in this context because no expanded role for the Army is envisaged by any recent political development the author disapproves of. On the other hand – and for largely historical rather than metaphysical reasons – Muslims have struggled to establish liberal states.  Muslims fought hard and made many sacrifices to achieve dominance and eject non-Muslim colonists, or economically successful minorities. Since the majority of Muslims, quite sensibly, don't want 'liberal states' where they won't enjoy the first fruits of their hard won dominance, it follows that they haven't established 'liberal states'. But then 'liberal states' stop being so if the dominant internal coalition feels that is no longer in its interest. 'Liberalism' is just window dressing. Yet, by and large, within the liberal societies of the West, Muslims have been exemplary citizens, claiming their rights and pursuing their interests rather than focusing on persecuting others. I'm afraid this is not true. British Muslims did want to persecute Salman Rushdie- but were prevented from doing so. Jews in France and Sweden face genuine persecution by Muslims. Why then can the projects of Muslim liberals – who see liberalism in Islam – seem so quixotic? There are two reasons for this

1) Like Don Quixote, these 'Muslim liberals' have read nothing but fairy tales. They lack contact with reality. They tilt at windmills because they are narcissists living in their own solipsistic world. Some may be well connected and serve as 'useful idiots' to add noise to signal in complex negotiations. Most are mere academo-journalistic hacks rehashing the same worthless article, or puerile sound-bite, on demand.

2) Sunni Islam, unlike Christianity, ab ovo invests every believer with an equal membership in all three Estates which share a common language and a common foundation. In England, the Crown had one language- Norman French- and type of Court- that of Equity. The Church had another language- Latin- and another type of Court- viz. Doctors Commons. The third Estate had its own immemorial Common Law with its own Courts whose language was English. In England, Liberalism meant identifying with English and the Common Law and the lower house of Parliament which alone could raise new taxes. English liberalism is not 'Quixotic'. Spanish liberalism generally was- as witness the wholly pointless Carlist wars. 
French liberalism was associated with anti-clericalism and faced challenges from both the far Right and the Left. It too had an atmosphere of unreality. Consider Macron. Is he a Liberal? If so, it is of a peculiar sort.
Islam could certainly have 'Liberal' mechanism design which would attract immigrants of other Faiths. This appears to already be happening in the Gulf and, perhaps, Saudi Arabia too is on this trajectory. But, there is no need to speak of this as 'Liberal Islam'. It simply is Islam. Prophet Muhammad was a Merchant. He was a law minded man. Islamic jurisprudence is inferior to none.

Liberal Muslim reformists see no contradiction between Islam and core liberal commitments to freedom, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law. So what? Marxist Muslim reformists saw no contradiction between Islam and core Stalinist commitments to 'class-war' based Gulags and genocide. No doubt, there are Wiccan Muslim reformists who see no contradiction between Islam and core Wiccan commitments to dancing naked around bonfires and riding around on broomsticks. It is true that many of them might not advocate a strictly secular state. Why not? Mohammad Ali Jinnah claimed to have created a 'secular state'. Turabi, in Sudan, claimed to have created a state where Jewish and Hindu and Confucian immigrants would be welcome to build their synagogues and temples while enjoying perfect equality under the law. Nobody believed Jinnah or Turabi. Why? Pakistanis and Sudanese had a deep commitment to the core values of ethnic cleansing and raping and robbing those of weaker sects or tribes. But there is nothing exceptional about this. The positions of many Hindu, Jewish or Christian liberals also allow various kinds of state recognition of and support for religious groups and values. 

Hindu Liberals- like Chief Justice Gajendragadkar, who was from a traditional Mimamsaka family- knew that, for Hinduism, local 'common law' takes precedence over 'Shastric' norms. However, these local customary laws could be changed to conform to 'the best practice of the best people' and Democratically elected leaders had the legitimacy to do so on a pan-Indian basis. However, they overplayed their hand. Absurd laws- like the draconian Anti Dowry Act- caused the Legislature to lose salience. Instead, the focus shifted to the Judiciary. Thus the brief decriminalisation of Homosexuality arose from a High Court decision which, sadly, the apex Court did not uphold. 

Christianity- especially in America- faced the problem of multiple competing sects. This permitted the separation of Church & State. 'In matters of Religion', as Jefferson said to Jewish leaders, 'divided we stand, united we fall.' This problem does not really exist in most Muslim countries where there is a dominant 'mazhab' unless, as has happened in Lebanon, that dominance is contested.

Muslim liberals are similarly a mixed bag, from the Qatari-based Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi to Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz, the founders of the Quilliam Foundation, a British counter-extremism think tank. This is not a 'mixed bag'. It is a heteroclite list of incompossibles . The first named is a crazed Muslim Brotherhood fanatic who wants everyone he thinks is an apostate to be killed. The other two are young 'de-radicalised', State funded, tokenist British Muslims who have zero credibility or influence anywhere.

Despite disagreements, they share fundamental challenges to the flourishing of their agendas. Rubbish! The 'fundamental challenge' Qaradawi faces has to do with not being captured and tortured by the Saudi or Egyptian secret police. By contrast the two young Muslim Britons mentioned face 'fundamental challenges' to do with getting their funding renewed. These challenges have often been characterised by detractors as a way of highlighting Islam’s supposedly inherent backwardness, anti-Westernism, and a desire in Muslim societies to revive a certain idealised vision of medieval glory. Yet it is decidedly an Islam of the nation-state, not an Islam of the caliphate, to which Muslim liberals aspire. So Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz want a 'Muslim Nation-state do they? Where? In Kilburn where Maajid stood as a Lib Dem candidate? Perhaps the author thinks the Qatari Royal family will let Qaradawi establish a 'Nation-State' in their Emirate.  I hope he is not holding his breath for that to happen. 

For the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and the Indian Abul Ala Maududi – perhaps the most influential Islamist thinkers of the mid-20th century – God’s sovereignty took precedence over that of the people. Neither were liberals- why mention them at all? In their theological views of the world, secular compromise with the popular will was impossible. Rather than the people, they built their politics around the will of God, coining neologisms such as jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance) and hakimiyya (God’s sovereignty) to flesh out their political visions. Equating jahiliyya with the West’s spiritually vacant secular culture, and contrasting hakimiyya with liberal democracy’s arrogation of divine authority, Qutb and Mawdudi’s thinking helped to shape Islamist movements throughout the world. Some of these movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have evolved towards the acceptance of key institutional practices of liberal democracies – popular elections and economic liberalism. Rubbish! What's next? Will the author claim that Erdogan is a Liberal? Why stop there? ISIS was very liberal wasn't it? While in the West, Muslims have largely accepted the parameters of liberal citizenship. Very kind of them to do, I'm sure.But the vexed issue of God’s sovereignty is far from settled in the politics of Islam. And navigating liberalism remains a preoccupation. Where? Is the Muslim Brotherhood, or are the Jamaati parties, sitting around holding seminars on Liberalism. Not at all. They have dispensed with any such eye-wash. They face more serious existential threats.

Non-political forms of Islam endure. So do non-political forms of Marxism or Monarchism or Voodoo. This includes non-violent ‘quietist’ Salafists who show their disapproval of what they deem to be un-Islamic regimes by simply staying away from politics. Curiously, their choice to disengage places them, along with some other non-Muslim citizens, in the familiar liberal ideal of separating religion and politics. This is not curious at all. A limited Sate means everyone has only a limited interaction with the political realm.By refusing to actively participate in the rites of liberal democracy, such as elections, they also share with some Western liberals the view that the procedural mechanisms of these states are hollow and lacking in legitimacy. For these Salafists, however, their objections are because the state is Godless, not because it isn’t liberal enough. D'uh!Anti-political currents also persist in protest movements in the Muslim world against both the centralising tendencies of Islamist parties and the encroachment of neoliberal ideologies. These forms of dissent were represented in the street protests at Taksim Gezi Park in Turkey in 2013, and also during the Arab Spring (2010-12). Resembling in some ways anarchist or Situationist modes of mobilisation, they have stood against Western liberalism – in the form of neoliberal globalisation – and against the authoritarianism of the state, Islamist or otherwise. The Arab Spring did succeed in Tunisia so the whole thing can't dismissed as being on an equal footing of imbecility as 'anarchist or Situationist' modes of mobilisation. In one sense, Western liberalism is inescapable.  Only in the sense that nonsense too is a sort of sense- at least for academics committed to failed Research Programs . Critiques of liberalism, including the ‘postcolonial’ and ‘critical theory’ projects which are wholly worthless  that appeal to notable Muslim intellectuals whom few Muslims have ever heard of, themselves come from within Western intellectual history which most Westerners ignore completely because it is written by idiots. This parasitic relationship has also coloured the way in which Muslim thinkers are sometimes categorised by idiots– from the political theorist Roxanne Euben’s reading of Qutb in her book Enemy in the Mirror (1999), which locates an understanding of his ‘fundamentalism’ against the limits of Western rationalist epistemologies, to the legal theorist Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State (2012), which relies, in part, on the correspondence between Western critical theorists and pre-colonial Islam to recover distinctive Islamic contributions to contemporary politics. Hallaq has zero influence on Islamic jurisprudence. He himself says his book is only engaging with Western Academia. Not the good bits of Western Academia but the shite bits which no one pays any attention to.

Underlying concerns for an authentic Islam appear in public debates over contending notions of ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ Islam. That may once have been the case. ISIS changed the equation. Now everything is Intelligence led and, in any case, 'profiling' is back on the agenda. 

While this distinction is really energised by the concerns of Western states about their domestic politics, it also contains at its heart a deeper question about liberalism – that is, how ‘free’ are Muslims to be Muslim? We know the answer to this. They aren't free at all if convicted of terrorism related offenses. 

In the current climate of alarm in the West, we are seeing conspiracy theories enter the political mainstream. They have fuelled xenophobia and revived Cold War fears of ‘subversion’.In the United Kingdom, the emerging notion of ‘non-violent extremism’ seems to threaten the criminalisation of thoughts or aspects of identity. ‘Non-violent extremism’, in the parlance of government policy, is behaviour that might not endorse terrorism, but that contravenes ‘British values’ of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the rule of law. It is an ill-defined term and includes things such as forced marriages and racism – whose link to terrorism is not clear. But which are illegal even for Hindus or Buddhists or whatever. 

The British notion of ‘non-violent extremism’ epitomises the binary way in which discussion of Islam is now so often framed – where Muslims are seen as either liberal or veering toward militancy.  Framed by whom? Nobody is listening any longer so 'framing' does not matter. The presumptions that accepting or supporting aspects of liberalism inoculates Muslims from ‘radicalisation’, and that the only ‘good’ Muslim is a liberal one, are both, at best, dubious propositions. They are also outdated propositions. 

I appreciate that Belfast isn't a great place from which to pontificate on Islam but surely it has access to the internet? Why is the Professor publishing this wholly contentless essay at the end of 2017? I suspect that this was written a decade ago and that it was emailed by accident to the editors of Aeon. Still, what is the point of a 3000 word essay on 'Islamic Liberalism' which ends on so anodyne a note?-

 Liberal Islam must first find a way of accommodating difference, dissent, heterodoxy and heresy. This will not happen while liberal Islam is dominated by the nexus between traditional, or classical, Islamic authority, and the power of the state.

Why not simply say Liberal Islam won't be Liberal till it becomes so? Kazmi is aware of the very different trajectories of the Khoja and Bohra communities. Both are 'liberal' in terms of education, female empowerment, type of employment etc. Neither has been shaped by the contingencies of 'the nexus between traditional, or classical, Islamic authority, and the power of the state. Yet, in the latter, community activists come to your home to see if you have a Western type toilet or a proper Eastern one. If you don't demolish your Western toilet and install an Eastern one, you are penalised through your digital identity and may face a ruinous economic boycott. Khoja Muslims, by contrast, can have any sort of crapper they like. The Aga Khan is not concerned about how they poo. The Bohras have displaced the Khojas- because the Aga Khan and Muhammad Ali Jinnah backed Pakistan and so many Khojas emigrated to Pakistan- as the economically more advanced and entrepreneurially more successful of the two- at least in India. Yet, Eastern toilets and female genital mutilation have become an obsession of the Bohras, not the Khojas. Why? The Aga Khan is of mainly European ancestry and lives in an European manner. He is liberal and encourages his followers to embrace liberalism. The last two heads of the Bohra community, however, chose to go in the other direction. Both Khojas and Bohras are legally free to abandon their community. Conversion to the dominant sect would be supported by the State. Still, there are advantages in adhering to a 'costly signal' based separating equilibrium because this increases 'liberal' freedom of a purely economic sort. This in turn means that every other type of freedom becomes more, not less, achievable.

It also needs to discover a more creative form of political theory that moves beyond reviving a ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic polities, or duplicating the Western liberal state.

In other words, it doesn't exist and won't exist till it discovers it does so. 

This might imply a more de-territorialised and decentralised vision of Muslim politics in a globalised age.

So, something purely gestural. 

And if it is to retain any transcendent power as a form of faith – to be a viable alternative to both secularism and militancy in an age of voluntarism – a re-enchantment that also makes room for forms of individual spirituality not jealously guarded by traditional authorities might prove more effective.

Not just gestural but also involving fairies at the bottom of the garden. 

Whether or not any of this will happen, or is even possible, is, of course, an open question.

Nope. It is a silly and therefore closed question. 

But unless we interrogate the intellectual premises of liberal Islam more vigorously, away from the fallacious arguments of Islamophobes, no amount of support for an ‘Islamic Reformation’ or ‘moderate’ Islam, however well-intentioned, will lead to meaningful change and empowerment, nor solve the current quagmire of militancy.

You can't 'interrogate' a premise. 

It is something assumed to be true for the purpose of an argument.

You can interrogate the neighbour's cat.

Unless it is sleeping.

The Prophet cut off a portion of his cloak so as not to disturb a sleeping cat.

That is 'Islamic Liberalism' in a nutshell.

Why?

Because it is also Islam in a nutshell.

As for the lucubrations of the pedants- recall the hadith 'the stupidity of the savants is the darkness of the age.'- let those sleeping dogs lie and go interrogate the neighbor's cat.