THE ROOTS OF 'POLITICAL ISLAM'
Andrew McKillop
(adapted from the forthcoming book by Andrew Mckillop 'The Next Oil War')
Perhaps ironically, the philosophical bases on which sunnite-chi'ite schism are founded, and the cause of fundamentalism - according to extreme orthodox literalists themselves - are traceable to the foundations of ancient Greek philosophy, about 600 BC. That is 2600 years ago. The whole corpus or body of ancient Greek philosophy is implied - sometimes openly incorporated - in both sunnite and chi'ite theology and religious philosophy, even more so than in Judaism and Christianism. Equally surely, this 'plagiarism' is denied by all orthodoxies, in all 3 religions of the Book. In the case if Islam, this denial was early and ferocious, and another founding basis of fundamentalism. Rooting out 'foreign and pagan' ideas was an early sport for sunnite literalists, starting with ibn Hanbal in about 840 AD. Yet one central teaching of Greek philosophy is that a multitude of meanings and logic can be advanced and denegated, contradicted and opposed, disputed and defended in almost any case of ideological difference. The cut and thrust of debate will decide, as human social tradition has set from the dawn of organised human groups - debate and discussion being the real meaning of philosophy.
Socrates, in particular, was well aware of this: his response was to never, under any circumstance set down his thoughts in writing - while permitting students of his, notably Plato, to do so. Only by live debate and spontaneous thought do ideas progress, was the central argument of Socrates. This rule is a tradition of western philosophy, if we take Socrates as the real founder of what we call western philosophy. In any case, this rule was also adopted and applied by many founding figures of Islamic thought, doctrine and philosophy. One notable case is Hibat Allah ibn Malk abul-Barakat al-Baghdadi (died about 1193), a convertee from Judaism at the late age of about 60 years. This philosopher, based in Baghdad as his name indicates, is sometimes called an islamic Thomas Aquinas. He is however mainly known as the 'father of political Islam'. This was due to his philosophical stance, closer to Confucianism or to the schools of chi'ite sufi mysticism initiated by Abu Yazid Bastami (9thC), than to anything we call 'political' today. Nonetheless he surely knew how to criticise Baghdadi politicians of the day, well supported by the already strong schools of sunnite fundamentalism, whose orators were skilled in winning round big audiences using sophistry, rhetoric, dogmatism and other speaking tricks. Hibat Allah's criticism of their demagogy earned him many admirers – and bitter foes.
Hibat Allah's main teaching was political, even in his day. It was a direct attack on the very bases of fundamentalism. He argued that successive layers of phases of written learning, and transmission of this written learning, can only destroy or degenerate the bases of traditional wisdom. In turn, divorced from our innate and intrinsic capacities to learn, reflect, discuss and discover, no book of any kind – holy or not – will be of utility to us. How will we know if these books tell us the truth? What criteria and bases can we use to find out, if we have forgotten our origins ? To the islamic fundamentalists, already working their obscurantist poison in the 12thC, and powerful in Baghdad's political circles, this was a very dangerous message. Like chairman Mao's little red book or Mein Kampf, doctrinal books are to read and obey. Or else. We can note here that Confucius, a contemporary of Socrates (5thC BC) and another fervent defender of tradition, was considered as essentially a political philosopher.
Political islam today is very surely an essential component in the triple-layer Iraq war. This pits sunnites and chi'ites against each other, separates the Kurds into a 'remake' of their short-lived nation of 1917-1923 with all that implies with regard to Turkey and its threat to crush the Kurd nation, and finally generates ongoing civil, sectarian, and above all political struggle against the US and British presence. Political islam enters into the multiple conflicts under way in Afghanistan, in Lebanon and Syria, and between Israel and the Palestinians. In every case 'political islam' is a go-anywhere, mean-anything term or rallying call. Both modern, and traditional meanings of the term 'political' are mixed, often violently, in what are religious, sectarian, ethnic, national and community-based conflicts.
For external players, the political economic element occupies the high ground. This usually relegates the other components far behind. In Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and in the standoff between Iran and the west, the understandable obsession with present and future oil and gas supplies is underlain by depletion fear, pushing deciders to take quick and wrong decisions as the Peak Oil clock counts down. This is surely one major reason for pessimism regarding the outcome of the Next Oil War. When we turn to political islam as it exists in 2006 and on the ground, however, it is vastly unrelated to oil depletion worries, even to who owns and controls what oil reserve or which gasfield. These vital interests to external players – the whole world - are almost irrelevant to what is basically a philosophical crisis running like a fault line between the tectonic plates of sunnism, and chi'ism. One of the reasons is that both Confucian philosophy, or the philosophy attributed to Hibat Allah (meaning 'gift of Allah', god-given), teach that what we call 'political' today is only a method. Vastly more important is the content. The meaning of 'political' in the 12thC, as in Aristotle's time 1400 years before, was totally unlike today's meaning of the word. It was traditionally linked with the Greek word polis. This includes a concept of city organization and even of ideal city construction, in which, very surely, there is a place for 'political' structures and procedures, but above all there must be 'the whole man'.
Hibat Allah continued with this Asian-influenced, and ancient Greek-influenced doctrine, by claiming that only by destruction of the ego can the individual accede to any higher sphere, of the type that so-called Holy Books speak. Without this essentially pan-Asian wisdom, incorporated in Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and other Asian religions and philosophy, and very certainly a part of much ancient Greek philosophy, no society can remain stable, nor adjust to changing circumstances, claimed Hibat Allah. His followers, to be sure, were castigated by the fundamentalist hanbalites and the salafists, and later by the 18thC Saudi wahabites because of his argument that no written body of teachings, including the Qoran, could guide persons who had lost all contact with their roots. Without these roots, there can be no knowledge of what 'tradition' might mean. Losing contact with tradition, the followers of Hibat Allah and many chi'ite mystic philosophers claimed, the devil of the human ego would take control.
Political islam of today, organised in political parties described by western media and observers as 'islamist parties', are usually influenced or dominated by fundamentalist islam. The only utility of the external world's oil and gas need to these parties is to call it oil greed. This of course is pure egoism. Islam is then presented as the antidote to, and bulwark against this egoism – through tradition.
As we know, Sunna means Tradition, orthodox means traditional, and fundamentalism is a "return to tradition". The problem, as Hibat Allah said, starts here: "tradition" has to have a meaning, its origins must be accepted by all parties and respected by all parties. Only a moment's reflexion is needed to prove that what is 'tradition' today was surely 'innovation' at some stage in the past: no tradition emerges with an instant-but-ancient pedigree, however fiercely it is defended ! Here we have another real base of schism between sunnites and chi'ites, with sure and certain, real world impacts on the action and policies proposed by 'political islam' today. Islamic fundamentalism, for sunnites more than chi'ites, is in particular the defence of literary tradition, but as Hibat Allah, and many other islamic philosophers have claimed down the centuries, acceptance of all that is written in the Qoran cannot exclude the personal meditation, introspection, reflexion and philosophical enquiry which is the duty of each individual believer. At its worst, literary fundamentalism is tashbih or anthropomorphism. This was the counter-charge made by followers of more humanist traditions in islamic philosophy, such as Hibat Allah, to the key accusation made by hard-line traditionalists. These fundamentalists claimed and claim today that philosophising leads to tanzil or agnosticism. From the very start of the literalist reaction to emerging chi'ism, mysticism, and humanist tendencies in Islam, launched by ibn Hanbal around 840, the intrinsic anthropomorphism of what became orthodox sunnism was denied by the followers of ibn Hanbal. This continues today.
In the Middle East of today, sunnite minority regimes controlling the Petromonarchies of the Gulf can – and do – halt or slow the democratizing trend by the pretext they are defending tradition through barring the route to power of 'agnostic' chi'ite parties. Their argument and rationale traces directly back to the origins of the sunnite-chi'ite theological divide. This in particular concerns Saudi Arabia and its latter-day form of hanbalist 'fundamentalism', the very narrow and strict doctrine, tending to Arab racism and set out by ibn Wahab. Almost a state religious philosophy in Saudi Arabia, the wahabist or wahabite doctrine is even more obscure than its ancient forbears, hanbalism and salafism. Wahabism emerged in the 18thC, long after the Monghol invaders had been converted to islam, and become the Turkish nation and Ottoman caliphate, dominating today's Saudi Arabia and far beyond. Not far enough back, however, to prevent Arab-Turk struggle from triggering the defensive wahabite doctrine. Wahabism never advanced to the stage of 'politics' because of these born-in-war origins. We can compare it to the narrow sunnite orthodoxy defended by Saladin, and motivating his decision to execute the liberal and humanist islamic philosopher Shihaboddin Yaya Sohrawahdi (in 1191), almost contemporary with the death of Hibat Allah. Like Saladin of the 12thC, engaged in a long struggle against Europe's crusaders, ibn Wahab was sending out a call for unity amongst Arabs against all and any foreign influences.
Chi'ite-sunnite schism, fanning ethnic and community conflicts, and feeding back to intensified schism and dispute is surely 'political' in its impacts, today, in Iraq and elsewhere in the wider Mid East region. We can estimate that the increasingly religious oriented, sunnite-chi'ite armed conflict in Iraq has, through 2006, killed about 50 000 persons, perhaps more. What is important is that there is no upward limit or ceiling.
The upward limit for civilian casualties, and certain massive damage to economic infrastructures in a widespread chi'ite-sunnite war throughout the wider Mid East region is almost open-ended, and impossible to estimate. The reason for this pessmistic, but unfortunately rational conclsuion is that schismatic conflict, once it has spilled out of the philosophical 'debating circle', and become part and parcel of armed political conflict, can continue for many years, even decades. Runaway intensification of the current schism-based, or schism-intensified conflict in Iraq, with the Iraq war playing the role of a regional flashpoint, could almost surely result in millions of dead. The current estimates of total deaths in Iraq since "liberation" in 2003, of about 600 000, would be puny by comparison. For external players and the world economy, however, the certainty that oil production infrastructures would be collateral damage is the greatest danger. For this reason we should never forget that during civil wars of the religious type, fighting can continue for decades rather than years. Very surely each side, in each theater of armed conflict will attempt to destroy the basic economic supports of the enemy, to extirpate the enemy from the region or country.
In the case of sunnite-chi'ite schism, because it came long after the first schisms of Judaism and Christianity, and is better documented, we must note that Islam, far more than Judaism or Christianity, was obliged or forced to take account of, sometimes parry and sometimes integrate, scientific, technical, astronomical, biological and mechanical science knowledge, as well as to find ways to negate and oppose the ideas of other religions and other philosophies. Islam was under intellectual attack from the time of its birth, explaining two tendencies in Islam: ideological hermetism and dogmatism on one hand. On the other, we find the opposing tendency of mysticism, sometimes vaporous and idealist, sometimes bizarre and baroque to western thinkers, and sometimes disguising what today would be called humanism. Simply because these strands are so different, but so well developed, political islam will continue to mean all things to all persons in the wider MECA region, and beyond.
The need for Islam to defend its 'core doctrines' from rationalist attack - from the sciences - was perhaps ironically one major reason Islamicised countries, in the Middle Ages, were for many centuries so far ahead of the Europeans in the scientific and technical domains. This technical and scientific richness, as we shall see, was yet another double edge sword of Islam, and for Islam. One immediate and local effect of improving military and weapons technology and strategy, domains in which the Arab and Muslim countries had a major advantage over the European in the earlier periods of the Middle Ages, was to make internal and local conflicts, including sunnite-chi'ite conflict bloodier. The scale and risks had been raised, through technical progress. This is turn very likely exercised a tendency for further, more intense and more definitive schism, separating and opposing the most politicised branches islam. These can be simplified as being sunnite and literalist Islam, on one hand, and the 3 main branches or types of chi'ism, on the other. Nonethless, and apart from the narrowest literalists or obscurantists, all of these diverse types or schools of islam include rationalist and humanist, as well as mystical or non-literary traditions.
We should not forget that in Islam, at the time of the crusades and the Monghol invasion, religious philosophy was at first part and parcel, and a motor of the modernising, science based, technology-oriented change of society. Numerous sunnite scholars of the narrower, more literalist schools, such as some reformed Motazilites (11the C), did not hesitate to engage in attempts at transforming lead to gold, or 'persuading' pear trees to yield oranges. In Europe, such attempts at 'transforming' matter did not become part of an intellectual and philosophical tradition until much later. Backed by religious fervour, early Islamic scholars believed it was more than possible to 'transform the physical world'. In Europe, this approach, or ideological propensity and goal did not become important until the 14th or 15th C in Europe, associated with philosophers such as Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon – but this technology tradition has been part of Islamic philosophy and thought almost from the start of sunnite-chi'ite schism, and certainly by the 11thC. The scale of ideological coverage and doctrinal inter-penetration of the physical and biological worlds was already strong is Islam, and this quest enormously raised the intensity and scope of ideological and philosophical dispute. Both sunnite and chi'ite thinkers, and political advisers to rulers, princes and kings exploited this totalitarian or close-to unlimited scope or purview of man's powers, conferred by a single god, in the very wide sweep of what were emerging sunnite and chi'ite ideologies. Here again we have a powerful motor for long term conflict, simply because of the huge sweep of religious doctrine, covering all parts of man's interaction with other men, society, and the wider world.
Thus 'political islam', like Marxism, was and is a 'total doctrine', much more so than Christianity, and vastly more so than Judaism. It is therefore able to extend right across the MECA region under conditions of social, political or international conflict. Over the centuries, and with little doubt on the almost unlimited scope of what is ideological conflict, what can be called 'political islam' is able to bestride the religious and political fence, telescoping the one in the other. This force of political islam has surely helped to set the ethnic and religious background, the political and economic geography, and the geopolitical fault lines of the present, as we move towards The Next Oil War.
