Chasing your own axioms….
Readers who are somewhat familiar with Islam should check out this comment over at Jason Soon’s blog by a Muslim named Amir Butler. It is, in essence, a long apologia for “Salafism.” After reading Western Muslims and the Future of Islam much of what he is saying is intelligible to me (and I know a little bit about Islam aside from that too!). Amir Butler is not a dissembler in the most direct fashion, but, he fails to remember that his audience does not share his axioms of belief. This makes a lot of what he says totally irrelevant and incomprehensible. For instance, the Muslim fixation with tawhid, is not something that can really be understandable outside of the religion. It is as interesting to non-Muslims as the details of the Monophysite controversies are to non-Christians (or more realistically, non-Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Christians). After reading Ramadan elucidate tawhid page after page, I felt like I was trying to read Heidegger ramble about Being or Wittgenstein whistle at elementary propositions (round and round we go, but the essence of God we never know!). Since the book was aimed at Muslims it made sense that he went on about tawhid, if Muslims can see that tawhid and Western democracy are compatible, all for the good. But many times when interviewed by non-Muslims the more pious of the believers tend to ramble on about Islamic concepts as if the interviewer really cares beyond trying to figure out a) why some Muslims blow themselves up around non-Muslims b) how non-Muslims can convince them not to do this anymore. As far as Amir Butler goes, I think his typological dodges simply seem like bizarre obfuscations, sociologically it is a plain fact that the most prominent Islamic nutsos have been self-proclaimed Salafis.1 This is the point that one needs to start from, the relationship of “Salafism” to the rest of Sunnism, or its difference from Shiism is really irrelevant, no one would care about Salafism if self-proclaimed Salafis hadn’t rammed jets into skyscrapers, most non-Muslims aren’t interested in what Islam is, they are interested in what Islam does.
Note: Also, let me add that I’m not one to consider pedantry a sin. But it seems to me that the response by Mr. Butler was totally off-base in the context of the question Jason was posing, how did the Salafi-Sufi split play out in Australia’s Muslim community. Instead of a sincere, prosaic and plain response Jason was on the receiving end of theo-babble.
1 – Butler either mistakes, or shades, the details a bit as well. He attempts for example to assert that the Muslim Brotherhood is non-Salafi, after dodging back and forth with quotes to obscure the term Salafi in such a fashion as to make it hard to know if he thinks it’s valid. The Brotherhood’s ideology is hard to characterize because it is an enormous group (Banna and Qutb were certainly influenced by Salafi thinkers if you don’t define them as Salafi), and the two primary groups which carried out the most radical Muslim terrorist acts in Egypt were breakaway factions of the Brotherhood which did explicitly espouse Salafi principles (Egyptian Islamic Jihad and The Islamic Group, Ayman Al-Zawahri is the leader of the first group).
Razib, it will be a great accomplishment if I ever become as well read as you are. I tried to read Heidegger once, and after finding it totally incomprehensible, gave up. Heck, I find almost all philosophy to be nearly incomprehensible, just about useless, and, as a result, read very little anymore. I’m doing horribly in my philosophy class, mainly because I couldn’t care less about the classical theory of knowledge. My teacher, a brilliant TA from Romania with a Shakespearean-like command of the English language, has great difficulty understanding why I have difficulty with the subject. I think in this respect the commenter is sort of similar to my philosophy teacher, rambling on in very good English about concepts that one’s listeners find incomprehensible.
But I do think that a differentiation between the major Islamic sects, primarily Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Sufis is important and not done regularly enough. I generally feel much better about Shi’a than I do about Sunnis, and the Shi’a that I have spoken with seem to have a much better grasp on reality and tend to be more moderate in their political positions. This is not to say that they are without their terrorists, like the Pasdaran and Hizbollah, but a quick comparison between Iranian society and the various Sunni state societies does tend to confirm my observations about Shi’ites being more “progressive.” This may be due to the fact that the country was so heavily Westernized when the nuts took over that it was impossible to completely purge it, or that an attempt to purge it might lead to a backlash that would theaten the regime.
Some Sunni societies are fairly progressive, too… just look at the Kurds and the various Turkic states in Central Asia. But on the whole I think Shi’ites are more progressive thinkers.
Which is, btw, why I think our Iran policy is fundamentally misguided, along with a few other factors.
re: definitions, yes, we need better ones, more precise ones. one problem though is in my opinion islam within the ummah is a bit more fluid and continuous than christianity is. i think this might be because christianity emphasizes creedal formulae to a greater extent than islam, which is distinguished a great deal by practice, and practice can shade a great deal.
re: shia, i think part of it is that shiism is more intellectually diverse. the “gates of itjihad” never closed for them, so they are more open to using rational criteria in judging what is permissible or not. you might know that that this was one of the main reasons that khomenei could justify his clerical regime, as the ulema do not normally take such a role in temporal affairs, but the innate flexibility within shiism allowed this to play out. the reason that shiism is more flexible is that for most of history it has been a persecuted “underground” faith. without powerful mainstream forces buffeting the religious consensus shiism has preserved a lot of diversity that sunnis excised (the rational mode of analysis is one of those, it was dominant via the mu’tazilites among the sunni for a short period in the 9th century). the variance i think allows greater sampling, just like variation allows selection response to be stronger.
just a hypothesis.
and after finding it totally incomprehensible
it is totally incomprehensible. much of philosophy is important to know because incomprehension is the mother of much evil, and you must know the incomprehensions of your enemies….
Razib,
I just read Amir’s response and I agree with you that for people uninitiated with Salafism and Nasir al-Albani it does come out as you called it ‘theo-babble’
I would however caution the readers on treating the Salafists as a monolith.
Salafism is as big a school of thought as any in traditional Sunni Islam.
Salafis have different views on almost everything just like members of any other sect.
There is a very interesting dynamic to Salafism though.
For example, Amir alludes to the fatwas by Ibn Baz on Bin Laden (which I am sure were completely political and not based on some Salafi exclusionary aversion to terror)
What Amir did not say was that a lot of Salafis do not support for example the Palestinian suicide bombings because for them fighting for land is a form of shirk, because you are putting land/nationalism ahead of your life given to you by God.
Maybe this aversion to nationalist struggles has led to a section of the Salafis looking for global conflicts which transcend national boundaries.
Amr is also right about most Salafis not indentifying themselves as ‘Salafis’ at the same level as other Muslims describe themselves as Sunnis/Shias or which madhabs they follow in the Sunni school of thought.
I would agree with you that the global jihad movement is controlled by people heavily influenced by Salafi ideals.
But the big question is whether global jihad is itself rooted/result of Salafist ideology or whether the global jihadis just happen to be Salafists, because Global Jihadists have a mindset which makes Salafism the most appealing school of thought in Islam to these people.
Some have made a very persuasive case that this Salafist ideology of extreme monotheism and absolutism makes it difficult for Salafists to co-exist with Christians or Shias in the modern world which is getting extremely interconnected and globalized. Hence they lash out against modernity, globalization and pluralism.
I am of the opinion that Salafism without global conflicts in Palestine, Chechnya or Iraq will be restricted to scholarly work by modern Qutbs of this world. Violent Salafism is sustained by local conflicts and most of the foot soldiers are to a large part motivated by these local conflicts and a have a ‘Islam under siege’ mentality.
‘Islam under siege mentality’ of course is more appealing to Salafists because they are globalists to begin with.
Within the Levant, the Hizballah is easily scarier than any Sunni terrorist outfit.
How this reflects on the ‘progressiveness’ of individual Sunnis and Shi’ites in the region is open to interpretation ( ie, to the extent that a Lebanese Shia is more open-minded than a Jordanian Sunni, it might be because he is Lebanese rather than Shia..etc, etc ).
In any case, perhaps Arcane’s opinion is best applied to Persians specifically…
Even Hizbullah is more progressive in the sense that they are willing to challenge/innovate religious customs and duties.
For example in Lebanon, Hizbullah now has a blood drive for young men, where young men donate blood instead of the usual practice of self flagellation.
The test of being progressive is not who has more per capita suicide bombings and random attacks on Westerners.
The test would be on the ability of the adherents and especially the establishment figures of the respective sects to challenge conventional wisdom, interpretation and application of religious text and customs.
The Shias are way ahead by the above definition while orthodoxy/aversion to change/back to the 7th century is a gift which Sunnism never fails to deliver be it Deobandism or Salafism.
I would however caution the readers on treating the Salafists as a monolith.
yes, they aren’t. no group is a monolith, the thing though is we need to make first order approximations. as westerners our interest in islam is derived primarily from the fact that a subset of muslims are hostile and violent toward the west. and this subset tends to have salafist assocations. hizbollah is very violent, but its aims are localized, and clearly understandable in the context of local power politics. the al aqsa martyrs brigade is a front for fatah organizations, so the individuals are probably muslim, but nationalist preoccupations are rather important. the level of detail amir engaged in is probably appropriate if he thought jason was a prospective convert to islam, but he isn’t.
AM,
For example in Lebanon, Hizbullah now has a blood drive for young men, where young men donate blood instead of the usual practice of self flagellation.
Yes, this is true, but please remember that this isn’t being done because they are being “progressive.” You have to remember two things:
1. Hizbollah controls a lot of territory, and as a result must act something like a government.
2. Hizbollah, like Hamas, has three wings… a military, political, and charitable wing. The charitable wing is sort of like the soup kitchens set up by the American mafia… designed to make them look better than they really are.
Melnorme,
Within the Levant, the Hizballah is easily scarier than any Sunni terrorist outfit.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with removing Hizbollah from the face of the planet.
Salafism is sustained by local conflicts and most of the foot soldiers are to a large part motivated by these local conflicts and a have a ‘Islam under siege’ mentality.
This may have some validity in Chechnya, but London? Bali?
In Indonesia, the IJ operated in a largely Muslim context where the local officials were all to willing to look the other way. Since the elections last year this is not as true as it once was, but with an ‘Islam under siege’ theory we would predict an increase in IJ attacks when instead they have been falling.