Islam and politics

Religion and politics distinct and different in Islam, argues academic

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

* US Islamic scholar rejects opinion that Islamist groups are uncompromising
* Says democratisation antidote to appeal of Islamist rhetoric

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Despite what contemporary Islamists as well as their detractors may say, the religious and political spheres in Muslim lands have remained distinct and continue to do so; where they intersected more often than not it was the political actors that used religion for their purposes and not vice-versa, according to Mohammed Ayoob, an Islamic scholar at the University of Michigan.

In a paper presented at a recently held conference here organised by the Centre for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Ayoob, a Muslim of Indian origin, also rejected the assumption that political Islam is a monolithic phenomenon unrelated to context. This assertion is most emphatically contradicted, he argued, by a look at the two leading self-proclaimed Islamic states of Saudi Arabia and Iran. No two states could be more different from each other in the way political life is organised. The Saudi and Iranian systems are products of particular historical contexts in which they originated, but despite the claim by both that they epitomise the Islamic political system, their experience makes clear that there is no consensus over what constitutes such a system. Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood is as much a product of the Egyptian context as the Jamaat-e-Islami is a product of the Indian and after 1947 the Pakistani context. To argue, that there is a monolithic political Islam across the globe, therefore, makes no sense at all, he stressed.

Flexible: Ayoob also rejected the view that Islamist groupings are unwilling to make compromises or enter into coalitions and that they are unduly rigid over ideological matters. In fact, the opposite is true if the trajectories of Islamist parties in Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia are analysed. He also argued that Islamist parties are not anti-democratic, as is often assumed, because they are committed to the notion of God’s sovereignty, which is antithetical to popular sovereignty, which forms the bedrock of democratic systems. On the contrary, Islamist parties in Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Kuwait have internalised democratic values to a very significant extent.

Ayoob disagreed also with the common assumption that violence is inherent in Islamist political activity. A look at the record will make it clear that violence is the exception rather than the rule as far as Islamist activity is concerned. Violence is usually committed in the name of Islam by fringe groups that break away from mainstream Islamist formations because they consider the latter to be too compromising.

Ayoob argued that while political Islam has been a very effective oppositional ideology, but once Islamists achieve political power or a share in it, their rhetoric can no longer act as a substitute for concrete policies and the Islamist’s feet are also be held to the political fire.

Antidote: Democratisation, therefore, may be the ideal antidote to the appeal of Islamism and the rhetoric accompanying it. Acquiring and holding power necessitates compromises and induces pragmatism. Ayoob said the notion of ‘Political Islam’ comes in various shapes and sizes and these differences can be perceived not only among countries but within countries as well.

Democratisation of Muslim polities not only induces pragmatism and compromise in Islamist politics, it also has the potential to fracture the Islamist base as a consequence of electoral competition. This makes Islamists appear less of a threat to their secular counterparts and more normal players of the political game. The future of political Islam is, therefore, intimately tied in more than one way to the future of democracy in the Muslim world, according to Ayoob.