01.12.2013

Islam imagined by western academia
The relationship between the Islamic world and the West (Christian world) is not defined entirely through crusades
By Tahir Kamran

Professor Francis Robinson needs no introduction particularly for those engaged in the history of South Asian Islam. He is an internationally acclaimed historian from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Graduate students of South Asian History were indeed thrilled when he came to Cambridge recently to give a weekly seminar on ‘Global History from an Islamic Angle’. He spoke for an hour and tried to encompass the whole history of Islam, which obviously was far too ambitious an undertaking for even a seasoned campaigner as Robinson.

He referred to contesting civilisations as a category of analysis for Muslims throughout his presentation – but with a pinch of salt. Perhaps, ‘civilisation’ as a tool for any social analysis has been trivialised quite considerably in the wake of Samuel Huntington’s book, ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Subsequently, ‘civilisation’ has come to reek of antagonism thus reinforcing mutual exclusion between different social units. Robinson primarily underscored the interaction between Islamic civilisation and the western world – by tracing the commonality articulated through folk tales, Dastaan goi, as the usual mode of sharing knowledge.

Folk tales cut across the social and cultural fence, creating a public sphere which brings together people of different hues. Similarly, various branches of scientific knowledge, such as astrology and astronomy, and patterns of consumption enhanced the mutuality between the two peoples. He emphasised the importance of trade routes Muslim merchants and traders used for travelling, along with their merchandise like tobacco or opium.

Thus, he brought into play a different trajectory to make sense of Islamic expansion rather than attributing it to the military prowess of ambitious Muslim rulers.

Crusades have been immensely important but we must not be obsessive about them. The relationship between the Islamic world and the West (Christian world) is not defined entirely through crusades.

Having said this, Islam’s interaction with modernity is the most tenuous of all intellectual formulations that western academics flirt with. Francis Robinson is of course no exception. Islam’s quest to expand globally was contingent on its imbibing influences from the West after it turned Protestant in the 17th century. Hence, the interaction of the Islamic world with the ‘rational’ West brought to them ‘this worldliness’, a terminology Robinson borrows from Max Weber, a German anthropologist of undisputed stature. Thereafter, Muslims became conscious of their present, located in the physical world.

Prior to its interface with the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ West, Islam and its adherents specifically in South Asia were incarcerated by ‘other worldliness’, by which Robinson implied Islam mediated through various Sufi Orders.

By advancing this argument, he seems to have seen the strong influence of Sufism on the socio-cultural ethos of the whole subcontinent in a negative light. What he calls this ‘worldliness’ has brought religious Puritanism which set forth fissiparous tendencies like sectarianism that we are experiencing in Pakistan.

Imagining the whole world after the West and the way it evolved is considered far too pervasive in western academia.

Faisal Devji, a historian from the Oxford University, is also victim of the same fallacy. In his article ‘Apologetic Modernity’, he says the phrase ‘Islam’ emerged in South Asia as a compact religion only in the 19th century. This is an utterly bizarre assertion.

Although Francis Robinson and Faisal Devji represent different traditions of history-writing, they assume modern day Islam is a western construct – Robinson regards ‘this worldliness’ as the bequest of the western protestant ethics whereas Devji categorically imagines it as the doing of the West.

Despite the epistemic conundrum conjured up by the western academics, like the two mentioned above, one must not lose sight of the fact that the cataclysmic changes that rocked Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries had permeable influences on Muslims, irrespective of their territorial specificities. ‘Young Ottomans’ was an organisation established in the first half of the 19th century in Constantinople by a group of young people like Sadik Rifat Pasha, Ziya Pasha and Namik Kemal. They became prominent during the 1860s. They were well-conversant with the literature of Europe and its ideas and admirers were of its strength and progress, but still they were not wholehearted westernisers.

The idea of reform had swept across the Muslim world including the subcontinent in the 1860s which primarily aimed at addressing some convoluted questions: what is a good society; the norm which should direct the work of reform; can this norm be derived from the principles of Islamic law or is it necessary to go to the teachings and practices of modern Europe; is there any contradiction between the two…

These questions cast indelible impression on almost all the Muslim reformers like Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801-73) from Egypt, Khayr al-Din Pasha (1820-1889) from Tunis, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1997) from Afghanistan, Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) India, and others such as Muhammad Abduh, Allama Iqbal, Rashid Rida and Abu Ala Maududi. All of them were profoundly influenced by the western thinkers. They, in fact, tried to re-orientate Islam in the light of western epistemology. French enlightenment permeated deep into the contemporary political discourse of the Middle East and Turkey.

Albert Habib Hourani in his masterpiece, ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age – 1798-1939′ claims with unequivocal certainty that the political concepts like Khilafat and Umma got currency in the last quarter of the 19th century when the Empire system had been wrecked beyond repair. Ethnic and religious insurgency aided by the western powers had sealed the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Mughals had already been made the saga of the past. It was then that the Turkish Sultans propounded such concepts with a pan-Islamic ring to them.

All said and done, Muslim world was ushered in an era of modernity because of historical exigencies. Much of what is being believed is the outcome of the modernity’s redefinition of our system of faith. Print, loud speaker, communication network, railway, modern weaponry and the emergence of public sphere have transformed us and our belief system beyond measure. What, however, makes us different from the West is that our religious tradition has re-invented itself through the instruments of modernity.

Quite conversely in the West, modernity embedded in scientific rationality has rendered religion socially redundant and confined it to the private sphere.

The course of history had been different for both ‘civilisations’. Therefore, to draw inferences from the history of Europe, to make sense of the Muslim world, is a colossal fallacy to say the least.