A New Islamic Politics: Faith and Human Rights in the Middle East

If the constraints of daily reporting on what is considered newsworthy require a focus on Islamic militants and their suicide bombs, a 500-page book should provide an opportunity to present a broader picture of Islam as a world religion and civilization. If one refuses to see Islam’s very real spiritual value, liberating force, and moderating influence on individuals and the community, one might reasonably conclude that for Muslim countries to catch up with the rest of the world, the faith must be marginalized.

If the history Miller recounts here demonstrates anything, it is that Islam remains central to identity, political mobilization and organization, ethics, and legal systems throughout the region -- to Muslims’ very worldview. Each of the book’s chapters brings that home anew. In Sudan Islam runs so deep that ‘even the Communists were Islamists.’ Born and raised under the strongly secular regime in Syria, the daughter of a thoroughly Westernized businesswoman seeks an ‘Islamic life.’ Beginning with Egypt in the 1970s, governments in the region have adopted Islamic symbols. While Islamic authenticity by itself is a dubious and oft-manipulated goal, the religion has intense spiritual and political appeal among Muslims who look to it for the organizing principles of their lives. It is difficult to imagine predominantly Muslim societies abandoning their belief in an Islamic order as an ideal to be pursued, regardless of how elusive and problematic such an order may prove in real life.

Miller notes, as have many secular Muslims, that corrupt and discredited regimes have at times sought to prop themselves up with claims of Islamic legitimacy. Such cynical maneuvers have usually ended up strengthening militants and encouraging them to demand more power, as in Egypt and Algeria; Sudan’s Islamic militants finally took over the state. But surely this does not mean that Islamic legitimacy is inherently bad.

For believers, however, challenging objectionable formulations of Islam should be a matter of principle. Islamic militants stand for the view that Islam is synonymous with discrimination against women and non-Muslims, that random violence aimed at political change is a legitimate form of jihad, that the death penalty is appropriate for apostasy, and other aspects of traditional conceptions of sharia. All Muslims opposed to this view must challenge it, regardless of the political success or failure of the proponents of sharia.

Miller dismisses attempts to marry a commitment to human rights with Islam. She observes that in Islamist movements, as in ideological movements in general, ‘the more ruthless tend to prevail.’ But Islamic militants are able to define the parameters of Islamic politics because of the abdication of Muslim intellectuals. When Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, the Sudanese Muslim reformer whose execution Miller describes in the opening pages of her book, was told by Sudanese intellectuals, ‘Your ideas are enlightened and positive, but when will people accept them?’ he would respond, ‘You are the people. When will you accept these ideas and behave accordingly?’

THE MIRAGE OF SECULARISM

Many of those who concede to the Islamists the right to define the Islamic agenda for their countries and the Middle East as a whole do so in the expectation of someday substituting a secular discourse in which Islamists could not effectively compete for power. But a secular politics is unlikely to prevail in predominantly Muslim societies. By continuing to pursue the mirage of secularism, Muslim liberals and leftists alike may lose the possibility of a humane Islamic alternative, which is being defeated more by the indifference of its natural constituencies than by its opponents’ ability to criticize it in Islamic terms.

In the Middle East today, the ‘Islamic left’ of Tariq al-Bishri and Hassan Hanafi of Egypt, Muhammad Abid al-Jabri of Morocco, Abdalla al-Nafisi of Kuwait, Muhammad al-Talbi and Abdel Majid al-Sharfi of Tunisia, and many others is widely known and appreciated, if not yet a focus of mass movements. Working from an explicitly Islamic perspective in their respective fields of law, philosophy, history, politics, and sociology, these intellectuals are attempting to modernize interpretations of Islam both in the academy and in areas of practical concern like development, constitutionalism, and the protection of human rights. Scholar-activists like

al-Nafisi, a founding member of the Arab Human Rights Organization, are engaged in political struggles for democratization in their countries as well as contributing to regionwide initiatives. More broadly, beyond the traditional practices of Sufi orders and popular Islam in the societies of the region is an ethos of tolerance and peaceful coexistence that millions of Muslims share.

Islamists and Muslim human rights advocates doubt the relevance to their project of each other’s guiding concern. While Islamists who believe in the unity of religion and state tend to reject international human rights standards as a tool of Western cultural imperialism, rights advocates see any link between religion and the state as a threat. By refusing to seriously consider the other side’s perspective, each camp helps widen this divide.

That is not to say their fears are groundless. History records drastic losses of personal liberty under religious regimes as well as high social and moral costs under secularism. In Nasser’s Egypt, Algeria under the National Liberation Front, and Baathist Iraq and Syria, secular ideology has proved as oppressive as doctrinaire religion. Iran and Sudan today demonstrate that religious doctrine can have serious social and moral costs aside from the loss of personal freedom.

The dichotomy between the Islamic and the secular is artificial; believers do not think and behave in such a compartmentalized fashion.