Geydar Dzhemal — Political Islam

Political Islam

Speech at the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of Azerbaijan during the round table on the topic “Different faces of political Islam” in Baku. 23.09.2009

BismiLlahir-Rahmani-r-Rahim! (In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful!)

Today, political Islam attracts the attention not only of Muslims, but also of analysts, political thinkers, and politicians outside Islamic areas, because today humanity is facing the long-awaited, but nevertheless unexpected phenomenon of a severe shortage of meanings. In other words, in the modern global space, riddled with media structures that rely on recognized universal givens, on cliches, on mental standards, there is a rapid collapse, a rapid collapse of what was recently considered meaning. The meaning motivating collective social existence, collective social contract.

Today, we are witnessing a crisis of Laicism (Laicism is a movement for secularization, the main requirement of which is to eliminate the influence of religion in various spheres of public life. From Latin. Laikos — people’s.), the crisis of the secular model of society, which was initiated more than 200 years ago by the French Revolution, which was also ambiguous in itself, but nevertheless launched the mechanism of separation of the state and the church. The crisis of Laicism occurs due to the fact that the resources of social motivation have been exhausted, which are built on liberal values, on hedonism, on the doctrine of rationalistic political thinkers (Hobbes, Locke), socialists, French thinkers, etc. This is a mental crisis, this is a crisis of global civilization. Ultimately, this is a crisis of liberalism as a project.

Liberalism as a project existed, of course, before the French Revolution, but it finally triumphed after 1945, becoming a generally accepted system of intellectual standards, and it was from this moment that its gradual collapse, gradual inflation, and gradual subsidence began. Therefore, today, in conditions of a shortage of meanings, in conditions of a crisis of liberalism, political Islam seems to be one of the acute challenges to the global establishment, it provokes some, fascinates others, attracts, in any case, it is a source of increased interest.

Islam has been political since its inception. It appeared as a manifestation of a completely new mentality, a new consciousness that claimed to win over traditional conservative forms of consciousness, come to power, reprogram and redefine the global destiny of mankind. From the very beginning, Prophet Muhammad (SAS) challenged the then two superpowers, Byzantium and Iran, which formed the global political establishment of the then world.

Now it should be noted a very interesting thing: at all times there was a political society, which is commonly identified with the state. But it was only during the period of liberalism that a truly separate state arose, which began to oppose not political, but civil society. A society of the political, i.e. structured as a system of rigid classes based on class ideology, on class consciousness, even, one might say, caste consciousness, has turned into a rather amorphous structure determined by media space, opinions, large vertical and horizontal dynamics, i.e., in simple terms, there has been a certain lumpenization of this society, despite the fact that in it there is also a cultural pole, and a pole close to the grassroots, connected with the common people.

This civil society, having lost its independent political component, has become one of the powerful arguments in the complex conflict game that forms the facade of modern Western democracy, i.e. it is a conflict between the state and civil society; on the one hand, corporate bureaucracy, on the other hand, political parties that are fighting for recognition of their programs by as large a segment of the electorate as possible. But this is a recent phenomenon. The main part of the human history known to us has always been the existence of a political society that included the state as a withdrawn fact, as a kind of undivided independent instrument, if we understand the state simply as a management apparatus.

From the very beginning, Islam was a challenge to this political society as a universal fact of history. In this, Islam was a continuation of the tradition of the prophets, just as Musa (AS) challenged the political society of ancient Egypt, and Isa (AS) challenged the political society of the Roman Empire, so Muhammad (SAS) challenged the political society, which was actually much more global and internationally integrated in his time than in the time of the more ancient prophets mentioned above. Political society is structured on the basis of a class hierarchy, while it is challenged by the community. Society and the community are fundamentally, dramatically opposing poles. A community, which is known in the political terminology of Islam as a jamaat, is a structure in which its members are interconnected in fundamentally different ways than in a structure that assumes a global political organization of large masses from top to bottom, a pyramidal organization of society. Jamaat is the main characteristic of political Islam. And that is why we cannot talk about political Islam, starting from the phenomenology of the party structuring that exists in modern nation-states of the spread of Islam. That is why the Jamaat and the party are completely different structures. The Jamaat does not participate in the electoral struggle, the Jamaat does not seek to come to parliament, the Jamaat seeks to bring its influence by various methods — from armed struggle to lobbying, formal and informal (including sometimes through the representation of political parties in parliament). But in principle, the Jamaat is an opposition to a political society. And here’s what’s interesting today: simultaneously with the crisis of liberalism, i.e. with the crisis of those intellectual standards that finally won in 1945, there is a crisis of the nation-state (everyone knows that today national sovereignty is being questioned from the point of view of global interests), there is also a crisis of civil society, because the philosophy of the «common cause», supported by the media structure, political thinkers and propagandists, collapsed. Today it has become clear that the common cause in which the upper and lower classes are engaged — namely, the project to live well for everyone, and tomorrow is even better than today — this project has failed, which is recognized by various establishment thinkers (even such as Fukuyama). It is clear that, in simple terms, there is not enough for everyone. Fukuyama, in one of his recent works, frankly writes that huge masses of the population should either be raised to the top with the help of genetic engineering, but this is a utopia, or we must somehow think how to solve their problem. Other political professors are more outspoken on the subject. One of the American professors, who teaches at an American university, frankly says that 90% of the population are superfluous mouths, and the question is how to get rid of them, because the remaining 10% may well fulfill the mission of humanity in space, to realize what humanity exists for.

A backfilling question, a frontal question: what does humanity exist for? Such questions are beginning to be raised for the first time. And since the experience of answering such questions has long been lost, they cause either acute discomfort, displeasure, or politically incorrect answers. Political Islam is re-structuring itself and calling itself political, unlike non-political Sufi, confessional, clerical Islam, only because there is a sharp shift and restructuring of the liberal establishment. If it were not for this, it would still be in some apolitical forms. I fundamentally disagree with the fact that an example of political Islam is various official political organizations that, within the framework of a nation-state, are fighting for the electorate in order to enter parliament, etc. Yes, this is the technique and tactics of the Ikhwan al-Muslim, which they consider quite adequate. However, as history has well shown, in particular, in Egypt, it did not justify itself. This tactic does not contribute to the growth of Islamic influence in a society built according to the blueprints, by the standards of electoral democracy. For the simple reason that electoral democracy is not really the final mechanism in decision-making, including and primarily in Western countries. Electoral democracy is simply a kind of apparatus that allows the old power structures, the old traditional elites to take responsibility for the course of affairs in society. In some way, to shift it onto the shoulders of deputies elected from the people, parties that offer their programs, etc. although behind the facade of electoral democracy there are all the same elites, whose immediate predecessors were there a hundred or more years ago.

Political Islam, I emphasize once again, is primarily a Jamaat, and the Jamaat at the beginning of its history coincided with the Ummah. But the Prophet (SAS) had thirty sahabas at the beginning of his journey, and today the Ummah has one and a half billion people. It is clear that in this case there is a difference between the Ummah and the Jamaat. Because the Ummah is an association of all Muslims, it is a kind of sea, and, naturally, it is diversified in its structure, in its quality, because even the world ocean, which seems to us a homogeneous mass, actually has warm layers, cold layers, saltier and less salty, more gasified and cleaner. Similarly, the human sea, which cannot but be diverse and variegated.

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But what unites this huge one and a half billion Ummah? Like other civilizations, the Ummah is united by a commitment to common values: the declaration of Shahada — Monotheism, faith in Islamic justice, faith in Sharia law and the infallibility of its Divine source. Even if the vast majority of Muslims who make up the Ummah are not professional theologians, they will never speak out, with a few rare exceptions, against those fundamental values that are embedded in the Quran and the Sunnah. And this, with all the diversification of languages, backgrounds, cultural roots, and so on, is what makes the Ummah as a whole a common, unidirectional historical vector.

But what is jamaat? The Jamaat consists of Muslims with increased activity, with increased passionarity, with an increased level of acuteness of perception of the Islamic call at the level of their own personal existence. These are the ones who form the brotherhood. The Jamaat is, of course, a brotherhood. The brotherhood is theological, but because it is theological, it is not abstractly intellectual, it is not a partnership of a non-binding nature. This is a brotherhood of people who consciously share a sacred spiritual destiny. There can’t be very many of them, because these people must know each other personally. Therefore, inevitably, we cannot talk about one Jamaat, we can talk about a lot of jamaats that are interconnected by a network structure. Naturally, this is inevitably a horizontal form of self-coordination.

Today’s political Islam, based on the Jamaat movement, is ahead of its own political philosophy. As you know, most representatives of the Jamaats have some ideas about the need to restore the global caliphate as an ideological vector. This is a certain atavism of thinking, perhaps inspired by those early political thinkers who defined the general initial background of political Islam. In particular, this is the famous Indian politician Maududi, who, without a doubt, was a caliphatist, to a certain extent and with some restrictions, Sayyid Qutb can be counted among them. Maududi played a much more significant role here, of course. Let me remind you that caliphatism as a movement has existed since the liquidation of the Ottoman Caliphate in India. It was a political movement demanding the restoration of the Caliphate. From the point of view of political philosophy, from the point of view of analyzing the requirements of Islam, Caliphatism, of course, is a weak and vulnerable doctrine that is easy to criticize. First of all, because there are no loose ends about the sacredness and human aspect of the highest spiritual and political authority, because, after all, none of the Muslims disputes the fact that only the first four were righteous caliphs, and for Shiites in general only the fourth caliph. Nevertheless, the caliphatists hope to somehow avoid repeating the sad experience of the Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates, although it is obvious that it is impossible to restore a caliphate satisfying the principles of Islam on a human level.

So, the logic of the political process is such that the practice of Jamaats is far ahead of the level of their political philosophy. I.e., thinking backward and yesterday’s categories, they are nevertheless in a process that makes them an instrument of radical innovation in relation to the current global situation. I want to emphasize here that political Islam, from the point of view of the interests of modern humanity, is an innovative factor. When we take as a model of political Islam the parties built on the Western principle, on the Western blueprints, on the models of electoral Western democracy, we cannot talk about political Islam in full. Because this is a kind of holdouts of those standards that are losing their power and authority in the area of their origin, i.e. in the West itself.

Political Islam as an innovative force is still a newborn child who is far from realizing its capabilities and its potential.

What can be singled out primarily as a characteristic of this movement — of the political Islam, which I would call a global transnational movement of political communities, political jamaats.

The first is, without a doubt, the opposition to the Sufi trend in the Islamic consciousness, i.e. the Tariqas. I do not want to say that this is a denial of Tariqas in favor of what is commonly called the general term “Wahhabism” or “Salafia”, the issue is much deeper. In fact, we are talking about the fact that Islam initially opposed the Hellenistic mentality, which became a universal mentality by the II century of the New Era. The Hellenistic mentality, based on the great Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, turned into a generally accepted intellectual language, a generally accepted system of concepts. With its help, it is possible to universally decipher both the metaphysics of the Aztecs and the metaphysics of Advaitevedante, because traditional humanity is in a common intellectual field. This field can generally be called pantheism. As you know, pantheism can be with a realistic accent, and sometimes with an idealistic one, but this is pantheism, this is cosmism. In Hellenistic discourse, high intellectual cosmism was spread, primarily due to the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

So, first Judaism, and then Islam, are a spiritual and political opposition to this Hellenistic space. But historically, Islamic thinkers and scholars have adopted as their tool and methodology exactly what the Quranic Revelation, the Revelation of Monotheism, was a denial of. Ultimately, this internal conflict led to the collapse of discourse in Islam, to the rejection of kalam, to the impoverishment of theology.

The process has been started again today. This is the process of discovering Ijtihad, i.e. the right to legal judgment, which was discontinued after the formation of the four Sunni madhhabs. Today, this is open not only among Shiites, but also among Sunnis. Today, an active theological thought is starting to work anew, which goes beyond direct comments on a very narrowly understood Sharia.

And most importantly, today the prerequisites are being created for the creation of a worldview that, being an Islamic political worldview, will be quite understandable and clear, confessionally appealing to a wide space and beyond, technically limiting Islam. It will be a political philosophy intelligible to the European public, intelligible to Latin America, intelligible to South Asia, etc. Because political Islam solves universal problems that are not limited to the technique of salvation, but speaks about the fate of humanity as a whole, about the meaning of humanity as a protege of the Almighty, as a caliph set by the Almighty in the center of the earth in order to carry out a certain providentialist task.

Hence the inevitable clash with Tariqas, with Sufism, because Sufism is a continuation of Neoplatonic thought within Islam in the garb of Islamic terminology. Sufism is, first of all, the theme of chamber individual salvation, determined by personal attachment to the sheikh, i.e. the patronage network within the Tariqa. This point is discarded not because of Wahhabism or Salafism, it is discarded because Islam purifies itself from the Hellenistic worldview, which was latent in both the post-Mongol and post-colonial periods.

The second point is that for political Islam, an organized clergy in the form of a clerical corporation is unacceptable. Clericalism for political Islam is a fact that represents a bid’ah, i.e. an innovation that must go away. Of course, the mentality of people is an inertial thing, so many representatives of political Islam call themselves mullahs and come from the corporate clergy, but nevertheless, this process is underway. It is happening in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different parts of the world. There are more traditional places — Afghanistan or Somalia, there are places that were detraditionalized, for example, by the Soviet government, such as the Caucasus. The declericalization process is much faster there.

Further, a feature of political Islam is the emergence of non-State subjects of international law or subjects of history. These are organizations that assume municipal and social responsibility over a certain territory entrusted to them, without becoming a state, but representing a certain subject of power, a subject of political creativity. An example could be Hizbullah, Hamas, the same Taliban, the Union of Islamic Courts of Somalia and, finally, the C.E., which openly says that it is not going to imitate pseudo-statehood and is transnational and international by definition. These are five examples of large organizations that are well-known, which are non-state actors who take responsibility for the well-being of the territories entrusted to them, but at the same time fundamentally do not represent the state. They do not have an apparatus, which is a stumbling block in the way of connections between the top and the bottom. After all, what is the state apparatus? Lenin once said that this was an apparatus of violence and oppression on the side of the ruling classes. This is a very romantic but inaccurate answer. The state is just a bypass valve that allows the upper classes to influence the lower classes, and doesn’t allow the lower classes to influence or lobby their interests at the top. This is a kind of cutoff, a kind of face control at the level of political flows. And here, of course, electoral democracy is very necessary for the state, as a kind of complementary component, in order to create the illusion of this reverse influence of the bottom on the top. But any illusion lasts very short. In light of the above, it can be added that Islamic political parties, such as Jamaatu-l-Islami, Ikhvanu-l-Muslimin (some parties use the word “Jamaat” in their names, but at the same time they are parties), are a simulacrum of political Islam. They survive at the level of collusion between their leaders and postcolonial elites, who, of course, are not going to allow Muslims to have a serious share in decision-making.

So, the Jamaat stands against the tariqas, the Jamaat stands against the corporate clergy, the Jamaat stands against the state apparatus.

And finally, the Jamaat needs a new worldview, an integral political philosophy that would allow it to become a subjective force of struggle in our history, help it gain the trust of the entire Ummah, become its leading stratum, and then become attractive to wide non-Islamic circles. Such a political philosophy is still in its infancy. The paths of Kalam’s reformation do not lie on the roads of returning to Aristotle and Plato, or even on the roads of returning to the German philosophy of the XIX — XX century. They lie on the ways to restore the theological spirit, the theological atmosphere, in fact, the great theology as such, which, unlike philosophy, thinks based on the priority of the subject, not the object. (There have been such intellectual breakthroughs in Western Europe. For example, Descartes or Kant surprisingly come very close to the spirit of Islamic theology, they fall out of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition of the West. Literally one more step, and Descartes or Kant could have become the forerunners of a new Islamic theology, but they did not take this step due to the fact that a person is complex and conservative and cannot fly like a bullet. One wing flies forward, and the body and the other wing remain behind.)

Jamaat, which eliminates the influence of patronage Islam in the Ummah, the so-called Islamic mysticism or Sufism, eliminates the influence of corporate clergy, whose existence no one can justify, because there are no mysteries that an ordinary believer could not carry out without them; jamaat, which eliminates the factor of self-sufficient bureaucracy that prevents access from the bottom to the top; jamaat who is the bearer of a new approach to understanding global human problems — all this is in the formative period, but the foci and contours are already visible.

What is the common factor linking all these aspects of political Islam into one? This is, of course, the doctrine of finalism. Not eschatology in the classical mystical sense, which is accepted, among other things, in European mysticism, namely finalism. Finalism can be understood in two ways. It can be understood, as understood in a clerical, Tariqa, confessional way, as an akhirat. This is a legitimate understanding. Akhirat is exactly the criterion by which every ethical action of a Muslim is measured. I.e. the correlation of what you do in your near life with the results you get in your far life. But finalism is at the same time something broader and more horizontal, not so pretentious. Finalism is the understanding that the historical human process is finite, that there is a certain exhaustibility of human problems, human plot. You can’t play Hamlet on stage continuously, you can’t run it for 24 hours seven days a week. Hamlet begins with the first act and ends with the last. Human history has a beginning and an end. The end is the most important thing. Because in the light of the end, everything we do becomes significant, not only from the point of view of personal salvation, but also from the point of view of gaining the meaning of the entire human history we have passed. It is known that a biography can be ruined with one unsuccessful gesture, and then all the sacrifices, all the achievements made on the path of life become meaningless, go to zero, because everything loses its meaning.

Political Islam sets the task of restoring meaning to humanity, returning the broad masses to historical significance, returning them to participate in history, making sure that the broad masses of people would not be dust in the wind, passing without a trace. This is precisely the reason why political Islam is of interest to a huge number of people in Islam and beyond.