Lifeworlds of Islam
The Pragmatics of a Religion
MOHAMMED A. BAMYEH
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bamyeh, Mohammed A., author.
Title: Lifeworlds of Islam : the pragmatics of a religion / Mohammed A. Bamyeh.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045603 (print) | LCCN 2018049495 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190280574 (updf) | ISBN 9780190942243 (epub) | ISBN 9780190280567 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Islamic sociology.
Classification: LCC BP173.25 (ebook) | LCC BP173.25 .B297 2019 (print) | DDC 306.6/97—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045603
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Islam as Lifeworlds 1
What is a lifeworld? 4
1. Islam as Social Movement: Pragmatics of Participation 11
From emergency to normal crisis 11
Social renewal: The long march into normal crisis 15
Three organizational models 23
Mutual aid 34
Society organizing outside the state 42
The politicization of new demographics 54
Partial politics 63
How reaching state power transforms the movement 69
2. Islam as Public Philosophy: Pragmatics of Knowledge 85
The secular question 91
Roots of the secular question: The modern state 93
The national question and religion 98
From religion to nationalism and back 101
Instrumental reason versus hermeneutics 104
Hermeneutic Islam 111
3. Islam as Global Order: Pragmatics of Historical Structures 137
Partial control 139
Free movement 174
Heteroglossia 179
Heteroglossia versus inquisition 191
Modern inquisitions 195
Global order beyond Islam 198
Conclusion: Islam as Reserve Discourse 205
Living religion 205
How social logic emerges out of metaphysics 208
Consensus and compromise 215
Elements of reserve discourse 217
Works Cited
Illustrations
Tables
1.1. Five hypotheses on the origins of modern jihadism 31
1.2. Comparison of three general models of modern Islamic activism 31
1.3. Perception of government responsibility toward society in selected Muslim societies 39
1.4. Confidence in governments 40
1.5. Municipal elections in Shi’a-majority districts, 1998, 2004 56
1.6. Levels of jihad according to Khomeini, Sheikh Qasem 69
1.7. Experiential Learning of Islamic Social Movements: Two Influencing Factors 74
2.1. Main features of an instrumental versus a hermeneutic approach 91
3.1. Historical genres of autonomy and control 152
3.2. Inquisition versus heteroglossia as strategies of faith management 192
Figures
1.1. Islam and politics 32
1.2. Two models of mutual aid and loyalty 35
1.3. Symbols of global struggle 48
1.4. Levels of struggle according to Banna, Maududi 66
2.1. Intellectual genealogies of hermeneutics and instrumentalism 88
Acknowledgments
This book came to life gradually, over many years of public and academic engagement with the sociology of Islam, and while I was pursuing parallel research projects. In the process, parts of it appeared in less polished forms, or were delivered as research notes in public lectures. In its current shape, the book distills what I have learned over the years from countless engagements with colleagues and publics across many countries. Earlier versions of chapter 2 appeared previously in The Macalester International (vol. 14, 2005) as “Between Activism and Hermeneutics: One Hundred Years of Intellectual Islam in the Public Sphere,” and in Third World Quarterly (vol. 29, no. 3 (Spring 2008)) as “Hermeneutics Against Instrumental Reason: National and Post-national Islam in the Twentieth Century.” That version was republished in Radhika Desai, ed., Developmental and Cultural Nationalism (Routledge, 2009). A condensed summary of chapter 3 originally appeared as “Global Order and the Historical Structures of Dar alIslam,” in Manfred Steger, ed., Rethinking Globalism (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004). With minor modifications, that summary was reprinted as “What Would a Global Civic Order Look Like? A Perspective From Islamic History,” in Scott Nelson and Nevzat Soguk, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics (Ashgate, 2016). These pieces, along with previously unpublished materials, have been expanded, revamped, updated, and integrated in this book into a cohesive narrative.
The list of friends and colleagues who helped develop my thought on the sociology of Islam is just too long to list here. What proved most crucial, however, was the sheer diversity of the publics I encountered over the years, ranging from elite university gatherings to working-class community colleges, and stretching in geography among North America, the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia. Those audiences showed patience
with some of my ideas in their less polished form. Through their engagement, they helped those ideas grow into fuller maturity, and taught me how to communicate across different agendas and explore connections that otherwise would not have been apparent. Particularly helpful were participants at the Chicago Humanities Festival (Chicago, 2017); UNESCO World Humanities Conference (Liége, Belgium, 2017); Oxford University (2014); George Mason University (2013); the American University of Beirut (2013); University of North Carolina, Charlotte (2012); Cornell University (2012); Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio (2012); University of California, Santa Barbara (2012); the Egyptian Philosophical Society (Cairo, 2011); the American Research Center in Egypt (Cairo, 2011); Seton Hill University (2009); Duquesne University (2008); University of Pittsburgh (2008); Takween Institute (Amman, Jordan, 2008); Minnesota International Relations Colloquium (2007); Century College (Minnesota, 2006); Saint Thomas University (2006); Georgetown University (2005); University of Victoria (2004 & 2003); University of Minnesota (2004); Macalester College (2004); European University Institute (Florence, Italy, 2003); University of Hawai’i-Manoa (Honolulu, 2002); State University of New York-Buffalo (2002); Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 2001); and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala, Sweden, 2001).
Everyone cited in this book played some role in giving direction to its arguments. But for special inspiration I would like to thank such friends and colleagues as Asef Bayat, Armando Salvatore, Ahmad Dallal, Charles Kurzman, Sami Zubaida, Said Arjomand, Göran Therborn, Richard Bulliet, Jeanette Jouili, as well as the late Janet Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood, and my teacher Fazlur Rahman. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff at Oxford University Press, and especially James Cook. And as usual, I owe much to the perceptive eye and care of Randall Halle. His role, as so happens to be conveyed by the cover image graciously supplied by my friend Hisham Bizri, gave more meaning to what I had wanted to explore in this volume: less the finished structures of things than the dynamism of life, and the worlds that make it possible.
Introduction
Islam as Lifeworlds
Why does Islam appear to persist as a powerful reference point for so many believers? This is the question of this book. Like any other question, an answer makes sense only to the extent that we clearly understand what is being asked. I wish to explore how an Islamic perspective on common affairs, among other perspectives, takes shape and becomes established in public life. In charting out this process, I will focus only on the sociological aspects of Islam, being aware that this focus leaves out vast areas of religious life—including the nature of belief, theological reason, and juridical debates. I will, however, address these areas whenever they have some bearing on the sociology of the faith.
The processes described in this book are probably not unique to Islam. Still, the focus on Islam allows us to explore contexts that, while specific enough, are also part of contemporary structures of global life. Recent history gives us ample reasons for this focus, but the question concerns how to discuss it and what might be the most appropriate questions to ask. For example, 1979, 2001, and 2011 provide three cataclysms that punctuate our approach to Islam in the contemporary period: the Iranian Revolution, the September 11 attacks, and the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Each of these events has provided sufficient reasons for a sharp reorientation of focus in its aftermath, but all have played an undoubted role, until now, in enhancing our attention to the role that Islam as a discourse, and Muslims as peoples, play in shaping political, cultural, and economic realities around the world.
Each of these events caught most observers by enough surprise to suggest that the available knowledge up to that point about the sociology of
Islam was lacking in some profound way. The Iranian Revolution, for example, reawakened interest in Islam as a potent revolutionary force. That revolution was all the more remarkable given that at that time, Islam was widely ignored as a factor in any mass politics, when it was assumed that the main influence and the most movement was likely to be in the domain of already mobilized secular forces. Political life in most Muslim countries was then still overshadowed by Cold War perspectives. The apparently viable and already mobilized political forces then were largely secular: Before 1979, various strands of nationalist, anti-colonial, liberal, socialist, and communist movements and ideas appeared to describe the range of existing political realities or perceived political futures in the vast majority of the Muslim world. The Iranian Revolution completely altered that perception.
The two decades of intense interest in Islam that followed 1979 gave rise to some of the best studies of Islamic sociology, before another inexplicable event led the world, and much scholarship, to an undeserved low point after 2001. Unlike the Iranian Revolution that took nearly two years of constant mass mobilization, September 11, 2001, was a single-day event. Also unlike the Iranian Revolution, which mobilized millions in Iran and inspired many more millions around the world, the 2001 attacks were carried out by 19 individuals, and the network surrounding them was a small, easily isolated group hiding away at the margins of the world, not a mass movement in a central Muslim country. But it triggered the two lengthiest wars that the United States fought, generated far more world turmoil than the Iranian Revolution (even if we factor in the eight-year Iran–Iraq war), cost several trillion dollars in military expenses and postwar “reconstruction,” and an increase in the security prerogatives of the state in both the United States and much of the Muslim world. The catastrophic failure of such a response, guided as it was by a fatal combination of feeble intellects and boundless arrogance, became very clear a little more than a decade later, when the erstwhile small band of scattered fanatics mushroomed into tens of thousands of Da’esh (aka ISIS) fighters operating as an effective force in multiple countries.
That sequence showed how poorly informed politics or publics may deliver far more expensive disasters than any act of terror and any revolution. For there was in fact no coherent strategic reason, nor enough social transformations among Muslims, for the September 11 attacks to galvanize the response they did. Under more enlightened conditions, we would not have treated them very differently from Breivik’s terror assaults in Norway
that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011. Appropriately, the violence meted out by Breivik and right wing groups in the West was typically explained as the outcome of personal pathology or small group recluse paranoia. In such cases, no world wars against terror were declared, nor a broad demand to sacrifice civil liberties in the process.
That event proves the point above about the high cost of ignorance: Acts of personal pathology may become national crises only when we do not know the community out of which the actor has emerged. Norwegian society, for example, recognized Breivik as one of its own, which meant that it could easily see him as not representing its own norms. A lone white European or U.S. terrorist may always be regarded as an anomaly by his society, since it is assumed that such a society is different from him. This is not the case with migrants or outsiders whenever they are not integrated enough into a host society and thus remain unknown to it. In such a case, it is much easier for such a community to be stigmatized by the action of even a single individual among them. Informed differentiation between personal pathology and common tendencies, therefore, can only happen when we all know each other, and at the personal rather than theoretical level. Part of the spirit of this book derives from the fact that we are far from that reality.
While in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, questions of terrorism and security became far more present than ever before in the study of Muslims, a decade later we were awakened to another surprise that somewhat alleviated this gloomy perspective, namely a wave of revolutionary events that collectively came to be known as the Arab Spring. These were the first real popular revolutions in the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution some three decades earlier (apart from the Palestinians’ uprisings in 1987 and 2000, and the popular uprising in Sudan against Numeiri in 1985, all of which remained local events). This surprise was even deeper than any other, even though all area experts were well aware that grave and widely shared popular grievances had been simmering for many years. After three decades of intense attention to Islam as the only discourse presumed to be capable of mobilizing large numbers of people in Muslim-majority societies, and after Muslims have become identified with their religion rather than with any other loyalty or identity, it was difficult to explain how out of such reality there should emerge a series of spectacular mass movements with no religious character. All of the 2011 movements called for a civic state; none wanted an Islamic republic. That
standpoint of the 2011 uprisings was accepted even by the religious movements that have joined them.1
This book is motivated by our inability to anticipate these events and, more specifically, understand the actual role of “Islam” in them. This inability should serve as an invitation to knowledge. In this book, I would like to pursue the thesis that Islam has served as a guide for a wide range of ideas and movements not because it has any essential meaning, nor because it determines anyone’s behavior in specific ways. Rather, Islam was useful precisely because it lacked such qualities: It could be made to say whatever anyone who lacked an alternative language of participation had wanted to say. This conception of Islam is clarified in the following three chapters, which respectively address the role of Islam in social movements; how it is elaborated as public philosophy; and the historical structures that gave it resilience as a common discourse of global citizenship. Collectively, these spheres of practice (social movement, public philosophy, and global orientation) may be considered as the lifeworlds of any ideology: they are the everyday methods, the pragmatics if you will, that sustain its life across vastly different times and spaces.
What is a lifeworld?
When an old idea appears vigorous again today, when just yesterday it appeared to be on the verge of extinction, suggests that something has given it a license for a new life. For about three decades after World War II, the secularization thesis predicted that as societies become modern, they also become secular. Much has since been written about the apparent failure of that thesis, and its detractors were all too happy to see it so thoroughly discredited in recent years, almost everywhere in the world (Berger 1999). Yet the thesis may actually be more true than it appears to be, especially if what is meant by it is the replacement of one form of religiosity by another, which is precisely how the defenders of the secularization thesis continue to argue its relevance (e.g., Bruce 2011). That would be the case, for example, whenever we observe that old-fashioned, traditional, ritualistic,
1. As mentioned a little earlier, the fundamental sociological dynamics of the Da’esh Caliphate, established after the Arab Spring, should really be considered a result of the reaction to September 11, rather than as part of the original 2011 dynamics, in which Da’esh played no part. This point will be addressed at more length in Chapter 1.
taken-for-granted religion has disappeared and been replaced by a new variety: action-oriented, nervous, instrumental, reified religion.
If this is true, we may first propose two likely sources that feed the ability of religion to overcome prophecies of its doom: first, its capacity to reinvent itself, the means for which are the subject of this book; and second the failure of alternative ideologies to solve problems around which there is sufficient social consensus. The proof of the last point is Western Europe, where the secularization thesis seems true even in its traditional form, likely due to the historical success (up to this point) of social democracy in establishing a new social consensus centered around liberal values that require no religious justification.
Barring that accomplishment, religion reinvents itself in order to tackle new, never ancient, problems. It does that in its lifeworlds, the true social laboratories of invention. The first two chapters explore the grand contours of two such lifeworlds, one oriented to action and the other to thought: social movements and public philosophy, respectively. The third chapter explores lifeworlds as historical structures that had allowed religion to reinvent itself as needed for many centuries and across the entire world.
Lifeworlds are what anything that is expected to live forever and everywhere must have. That is to say, lifeworlds are ways for doing two fundamental tasks of life: avoiding death, and going around irrelevance. Lifeworlds do their work, this avoidance of death and circumnavigation of irrelevance, at moments and in places where that which is supposed to be omnipresent and eternal, that is to say a universal religion, hits its limits, meaning that it sees both dangers. Without lifeworlds adequate for exploring or navigating the new environment, the old will expire at the gates of the new.
Since its foundations in phenomenology, the concept of “lifeworld” highlighted the world as an experience rather than a set of doctrines and structures external to consciousness, and in such a way that individuality itself gained meaning out of its immersion in the world of perceptions and practices, that is to say, the world shared with others. Jürgen Habermas (1987) in particular shows the analytical virtues of “lifeworld” as a concept by opposing it to “systems,” which are the economic and political techniques of standardization that seek to arrest the free flow of lifeworlds and deliver them in static formats that reflect bureaucratic and managerial preference for predictability, constancy, and impersonality. This opposition between “system” and “lifeworld” may at first glance appear evident in the history of any religion, where we see two basic approaches to religious
life: one governed by systematic doctrine and another by situational experience. Sometimes the two are contrasted as the “rational” versus “mystical” variety of religious life: one oriented to following divine rules, the other to experiencing divine substance. However, it would be inaccurate to say that the former approach provides the system of religion and the latter its lifeworld, since as we will see in subsequent chapters, both can be present in the same mind. The concept of lifeworld, therefore, is not limited to mystical experiences but refers to the entire range of acts and practices through which an old idea continues to generate voluntarily accepted meaning (rather than enforced rules).
I found it important to focus on lifeworlds of Islam since much has been written about the “systems” of Islam: the legal structures, political parties, educational institutions, economic enterprises, and so on. All these will of course be discussed insofar as they have bearing on our understanding of the lifeworlds of Islam. But lifeworlds are more fundamental to our understanding of religiosity, since without lifeworlds to speak to, systems can only be maintained as authoritarian structures, whose authoritarianism reflects the fact that they have no persuasive power. This lack of persuasiveness was evident, for example, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate from the old mosque of Mosul. He made it clear then what Islam meant to him: Islam could only be an authoritarian system. It required an effective authority to enforce it, he stated, since otherwise it will not be followed.
The new “caliph” was hardly original here, since the same principle has already been enunciated by other modern dictators who simply imposed themselves like a dead weight on their societies, from Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to the Saudi royal family. The principle of “necessary enforcement” is likewise perfectly acceptable to many modern Islamic movements that are far less extreme in their practices than the caliphate and far less cynical than the Saudis. Such movements reflect, again, another variety of the same authoritarian conviction that religion is now unpersuasive without sheer force. Among modern religious people, therefore, the real divide is not so much between those who want doctrinal sobriety and the others who prefer the mystical experience. It is rather between those who do not believe that faith has enough of a persuasive power on its own, thus needing enforcement, and those for whom faith is a pragmatic compass of meaning in ordinary, transactional life. The former perspective always leads to conflict, since it insists on living atop a world in which it knows that it does not fit. Only the latter may be adequate for life. Not because it is “true,” nor
because it necessarily solves any problem, but because its own life derives from one lifeworld or another.
Lifeworlds are not beautiful utopias, however. I do not think that we can properly understand modern religiosity by separating religions into good and evil varieties, nor by fixating on trying to make religiosity “safe” for liberalism or democracy, for example, when a vast history of political modernity shows how thus far world wars, the worst genocides, and most dictatorships have been thoroughly secular in nature. Danger comes from all sides. It may be true that modern Islamic movements are dangerous— some explicitly so, others only when they have enough power perhaps. But a broader historical perspective shows us that everyone else is dangerous just as well, including secular imperialism, both in its classical colonial form as well as in the newer form experimented with during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and probably again at a later point. Thus it is important not to lose perspective and fixate on one thing: Religion is the problem; no, it is modernity; perhaps colonialism? Maybe, but now it is globalization, and so on. There is no shortage of simplistic answers that pin modern danger on a single idea and thus appear to offer us a clear solution. But in a world in which there are systems that have large enough power, such as modern states, danger is equally distributed across all ideologies, secular and religious. That is because, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Bamyeh 2009), large power structures tend to encourage either a total struggle to take them over, or a tendency to use them to control more of the world. In the final analysis, our fundamental problem is power structures, not religion.
A lifeworld must be differentiated analytically from such power structures, since otherwise it is impossible to understand how any idea acquires a persuasive capacity on its own terms—that is, without coercive power. In an earlier book (Bamyeh 1999) I tried to understand how Islam, as a new idea in the seventh century, had itself acquired a persuasive capacity across multiple societies within a relatively short period. The transition from polytheism into monotheism paralleled a transition from a tribal to transtribal society that had already been underway, in part due to the rise of urban settlements, the increasing economic importance of long-distance trade, the rise of poetic transtribal culture, and the need for new methods of conflict resolution in light of new patterns of tribal warfare. Monotheism in its Islamic version knitted those elements together, and thus acquired a persuasive capacity. Islam acquired its social life not because it produced a harmonious society, but precisely for the opposite reason: It allowed all
social conflict to go on, just as before, but under the mantle of a single regulatory discourse. A discourse that acquires persuasive capacity is one that speaks to all social groups and classes, and in a way that allows each social segment to imagine the discourse (a specific faith in this case) to be intimately its own.
Understood this way, we begin to approach religion on its own terms, that is, not by starting out from a problem defined by non-religious people, i.e., how can Islam be made “democratic,” compatible with liberal values, or modernized in one way or another. Islam cannot be made to be anything that it is not. And what it is, is a plenum. That means that since it covers, or claims to cover, the entire spectrum of sociability, it will always house pathological demagogues, liberation theology, dictatorial tendencies, democratic sentiments, instrumental rationality, contemplative mysticism, feminism, and patriarchy—all at the same time and just like all other religions. Religion may be said to be “pure” in essence and “harmonious” in intent only from a religious perspective. But from any other perspective, religion must be seen to be a mix of tendencies that are not naturally reconcilable—but are able to communicate because they share the same reference points.
That mix is due to the social vastness and historical depth of religion. Anything that is large in space and deep in time must become exposed to “impure” matter: ideas and practices that were not part of its origins—an accurate observation of all puritans, who therefore tend to be a recurrent feature of religious life. Islam, therefore, cannot be made other than what it is, other than what Muslims would allow it to be. And that is true of any other faith. But what is important to note is that we do not speak of Islam the same way we speak of Christianity, or Judaism, even though we know that both teem with demagogues, authoritarian tendencies, anti-democratic sentiments, patriarchy, and calls for violence. And that is because they, too, are distributed across a large space and extend into deep time.
With that in mind, the book is written with the aim of being useful for general educated readers. I have attempted to navigate a path between two pitfalls that always surround this kind of work and invite descent into them: on the one hand the lure of essentializing Islam, that is, presenting it as a system of belief whose meaning appears independent of the human activity that generates questions about meanings; and on the other, the lure of getting lost in Islamic apologia (e.g., “Islam is compatible with human rights,” “women’s rights,” and so on). Throughout, I thought it
would be more enlightening to highlight distinct larger meanings that Muslims themselves appeared to imply in some way or another, whenever they identified in Islam a longing for an intimate dimension of their common life, and in ways they may have found wanting in alternative discourses.
These meanings are covered in three chapters, each of which offers a large compass around a key dimension of the sociology of Islam. The last chapter offers the broadest perspective, approaching Islam as the namesake of a globally networked, historical social reality. As such, it offers an opportunity to revisit contemporary globalization debates from an unusual angle, by asking the same question but in reverse: not whether Islam lives well or poorly with global processes, or whether Muslims are suffering or benefiting from globalization. My concern, rather, is whether Islamic global history teaches us something about the basic structures of globalization processes, including those of our times: How do people anywhere cultivate a sense of living in a global society—one that feels close, intimate, and controllable by relatively humane, less faceless forces and uncoerced dynamics? Readers familiar enough with Islamic history may want to start with that chapter.
The second chapter explores the ground structure of Islamic public philosophy for the past century—in particular, the era witnessing the most intense exposure of the Muslim world to European colonialism, as well as the decline of traditional Islam in the public sphere in favor of modernizing ethos, both religious and secular. The focus is mainly on the most influential intellectual systems that defined modern roles for Islam in the public sphere of several central Muslim countries. The two general varieties of contemporary Islamic public philosophy, namely “instrumental” and “hermeneutic” Islam, define the work of globally known Muslim intellectuals, some of whom are identified with Islamic social movements. That chapter explores the globality of Islamic thought in how various public intellectuals, working independently of each other and in different contexts, converged on two strands of thought in each region, even as they used different methods.
This public philosophy often takes organizational forms that are evident in modern Islamic social movements, whose common features are explored in the first chapter. Islamic social movements must generally be regarded as unfinished experiments rather than as prepackaged ideological bodies. They must be so since they express not so much standard religiosity, but a myriad of ways by which participatory claims are laid down
by erstwhile apolitical social segments. The desire of such social segments for some form of participation is in one sense a response to crisis, and in another, a response with minimal means. A “response with minimal means” is what one does when one pulls a familiar discourse out of its hibernation, so as to ask through it new questions: “How do I become a citizen of this environment that is changing everyday around me?”; “what is my real community today?”; “is it enough to help my neighbor as needed, or do I need to systematically help my neighborhood?”; “should I be patient with tyranny because it is god’s verdict, or should I bring it down because god’s mandate is justice here and now?” “how do I combat an evil that refuses to go away?”; and so on.
But since the whole exercise is an ongoing experiment with no termination date, and since the experiment is done in a social laboratory that is constantly changing its arrangement, the answers remain provisional. And it is the provisional character of an answer that sometimes suggests that the original question may have been improperly articulated. In that sense these social movements, like the science that seeks to study them, are unfinished experiments in assigning meaning to a world that, in crisisladen times, threatens at every moment to disavow all meaning.
Islam as Social Movement
Pragmatics of Participation
From emergency to normal crisis
Islamic social movements are movements that mobilize Islam as a language of social activism. Two general environments, with distinct characteristics, appear conducive to mobilizing an old religion for new purposes: One is an environment of emergency conditions; another is an environment dominated by calls for profound social renewal. Movements responding to the former may be called “emergency movements,” whereas those operating under and shaping the latter may be called “normal crisis movements.” Emergency movements see themselves as reacting to an immediate danger. By contrast, normal crisis movements, which sometimes do have their roots in earlier emergency movements, see their goal as responding to a long-term cultural and social crisis that they identify to be the ultimate root of whatever emergency conditions they may also find themselves responding to.
Both types of movements are generally conservative, but in different ways: Whereas emergency movements do not aim to transform society as much as preserve it, as in the face of a common and immediate danger, normal movements aim to transform society by reminding it of its deep but forgotten cultural roots. In reality this means the opposite: modernize society, but with the aid of its own indigenous cultural resources (as interpreted, of course, by such movements).
1) Emergency movements: The movement is conceived as an urgent response to extreme, immediate, and collective danger. Such danger
amplifies the need for greatest social unity in its face. The sense of such danger tends to amplify the role of the most common (though not necessarily the most deeply felt) expression of collective identity, which then serves as a common language of struggle. In modern history, such sense of danger occasions early phases of Western colonial invasions of lands where Islam is a common faith. The earliest phases of Algerian struggle against French colonialism, especially between 1832 and 1847, but also intermittently afterward throughout the nineteenth century, relied on transforming Sufi orders and other social groups into militant fighting machines, and Islam served as a unifying discourse of otherwise fragmented society against a completely foreign, technologically advanced and brutal enemy. The early phase of Libyan struggle against Italian colonialism, between 1911 and 1931, was led by a recognized religious pedagogue and mobilized especially the Sanusiyya, the dominant Sufi order in Libya. Some similarities to these legendary struggles, pitting relatively resourceless people against a mighty Western empire, could also be seen in later times, such as the mobilization of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In all these episodes, the greatest novelty insofar as “Islam” was concerned was that Islam was made to serve—at least temporarily—the role of collective anti-colonial nationalism. Indeed, in Islamic societies, emergency movements tended to use Islam as the language of their identity, usually wherever a common national identity was not yet solidly established. “Islam” meant in such cases not any particular practice, but rather a handy and quick reference to an urgent need for collective mobilization in the face of an extreme, sudden, and collective threat.
2) Normal crisis movements: These movements operate in environments where alternative movements exist, and where Islam enjoys less of a monopoly as a reference for translocal identity. The very pluralism of the cultural and political landscape compels some adherents to consider that Islam requires being revivified, even “updated,” so as to retain a central role in social and political life, and in ways appropriate to modern needs. Unlike emergency conditions noted in point 1), these environments tend to be perceived as possessing an enduring feature, even though they may be experienced by their inhabitants to be crisisladen. But the “crisis” here tends to be seen as deep-seated and to result from long-term processes of decay, rather than as an emergency condition that could be quickly corrected with a general mobilization.
Thus these movements tend to see themselves as responding to a profound crisis, but through a long-term project at social transformation. Normal crisis movements tend to be the most typical, most enduring, and most transformative Islamic social movements. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, both Muhammadiyyah and Nahdatul Ulama in Indonesia, and Jamaat-e-Islami in the Indian subcontinent are some prominent examples of these types of normal Islamic movements.
Some movements may be considered a synthesis of both types. They tend, as would be expected, to be entrenched in areas where colonial struggles or foreign invasions remain endemic, but where strong non-religious national movements also exist and a sense of immediate collective threat is accompanied by dynamics calling forth long-term transformation in the role of religion in society. Hamas in occupied Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon are probably the clearest examples of this kind of synthesis: Both originated as militant anti-colonial or national liberation organizations, while at the same time regarding themselves as permanent movements for social renewal. While both are quite young movements relatively, dating only from the 1980s, they do possess roots in earlier forms of Islamic mobilization and, in the long run, tend to be more similar to the “normal crisis” type of Islamic social movements.
Normal crisis movements do not lack for militancy when they operate in environments that generate enough reasons for militancy, as evident in the Muslim Brothers’ sporadic attacks on the British during their occupation of the Suez Canal. However, the long-term orientation of these movements is toward rejuvenating and reinterpreting the role of Islam in modern society, and not toward simply solving an immediate, large problem. Indeed, in the Arab World, the main difference in the anticolonial perspective between secular and religious forces has always been that whereas the secular forces saw colonialism to be the main cause of underdevelopment of colonized societies, the religious forces tended rather to see colonialism as a symptom of a deeper problem—namely of the accumulated weakness and degeneration of the umma. Both secular nationalist and religious movements opposed colonialism, but the religious forces in particular saw their task to consist of curing a deeper malaise, of which colonialism was no more than a symptom.
Normal Islamic movements are part of the cultural fabric of global modernity. By this I mean that while they may be seen and analyzed in terms of their local contexts, they may also be seen and analyzed in the larger
