The Hindu : Is Islam really jehadi?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 30, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Is Islam really jehadi?

By Imtiaz Ahmad

The rise of militant trends in every Muslim society has its own context... This needs to be understood and evaluated.

EVERY WORD of the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee's public speech at Panaji at the conclusion of his party's National Executive Committee meeting can be re-read aloud substituting the word Islam for Hinduism and it would hold equally good. He was not wrong in pointing out that the possibility of fundamentalism as an ideological response exists within Islam. Where he went wrong was in characterising Hinduism as a tolerant religion and failing to recognise that the possibilities of fundamentalism as an ideological response exist as much in other traditions including Hinduism. The point to ponder therefore is what it is that really makes all religious traditions respond in specific circumstances in militant or violent ways.

As far as the characterisation of Islam as jehadi is concerned, the Prime Minister was obviously guided by the belief common among those who have only a superficial understanding that Islam is an extremely closed religion, characterised, to a greater degree than is true of other religious traditions and ideologies, by a unity and commonality of attitudes and sentiments which renders militant mobilisation relatively easy in the case of Muslims.

Islam throughout most of its past as well as in the contemporary period has been characterised by an obvious paradox. This is its simultaneous unity as a world religion and its bewildering diversity as the living faith of local, regional and national communities. On the one hand, Islam projects itself and thrives on the celebration of the projection that it is the same everywhere. On the other hand, the patterns of beliefs and behaviour to which Muslims adhere in the course of their daily lives are diverse and varied. Indeed, the prolonged historical resistance by religions that have been able to withstand social change shows their flexibility. This capacity to outlive the historical circumstances of their birth makes it impossible to speak of Islam in the singular as Muslims do. As a social phenomenon there are Islams that have been a living reality to Muslims of various times and places. Divergences of observances, sects and schisms and de facto differences of attitudes to the role of the fundamental value system in social life all attest to this.

The implication of this religious pluralism, which exists widely despite popular perceptions to the contrary, is two-fold. For one, it goes to show that the unity and integrity of Islam as a world religion is not derived from scriptural sources. It is achieved through a complex interaction between codes derived from Islamic scriptures and those derived from the exigencies of living in differing ecological, social and cultural and political environments. Second, as a practical faith Islam is far more pluralist than the extreme degree of reification and unity commonly attributed to it. While Muslims no doubt commonly subscribe to the fundamental Islamic precepts, there is no unified definition of what is truly Islamic. Each Muslim society or community carries its own self-definition about what is fundamental and adheres to it.

Of course, the reason this becomes possible arises from an inherent or inbuilt ambiguity as to what is strictly within the limits of Islam. Controversy and debate over whether particular actions of individual Muslims or particular social beliefs and practices are common to all Muslims of a given community are recurrent features of Muslim societiesThe image of Islam as an aggressive, hostile and intolerant religion is an academic artefact of the historical process of colonial expansion. For the one third of humanity, self-styled as Muslim, collective violence assumed a new dimension in the 18th century. It can be described in distinct stages, all of which derive from and relate to the economic ascendancy of European, pre-dominantly Christian, nation-states. Twentieth century Islam, like the nation-states system, was created de novo in response to colonialism.

As for contemporary times, the situation is too varied and complex to allow sweeping generalisations. For one, two-thirds of the Muslim world currently lives under secular dispensations. It is true that even in some of these countries the so-called militant groups are active and have tried to capture political power. However, whenever they have seemed to be gaining political ascendancy, they have been put down with a heavy hand, though the predominant tendency has been to characterise Muslim militancy in terms as if its rhetorical message was about to become an imminent reality.

Among the countries of the Muslim world one contemporaneously finds a series of political responses ranging from the presence of an Islamic discourse to militant Islamic reassertion and open rebellion. When one looks at the varied cases comparatively, it appears that the nature of the dominant group, that is whether it is religious, national or cultural, has no bearing on the nature of Islamic response, though emphasis on Islam as a basis of identity or political reassertion almost always occurs where another religious group is present.

On the other hand, colonialism and the nature of the political regime always seem to generate Islamic self-consciousness. For example, situations of colonial domination, conquest and authoritarian rule almost always generate Islamic self-assertion and the use of Islam for identity. Where Islamic self-identity is assured, Muslims tend to become extremely divided and often end up fighting among themselves.

This has direct relevance for the understanding of the widespread phenomenon of Islamic militancy. The dominant approach to the understanding of Islamic militancy, which Mr. Vajpayee demonstrated, has been to see the growth of militant trends in each individual Muslim society as the unfolding of a common pattern imposed by the unity and dogmatism that Islam as a world religion is supposed to signify and represent.

In this view, Islam is credited with an autonomous role in that the presumption always is that the developments taking place in different Muslim societies ultimately flow from the potentialities of their faith.

What is suggested by this analysis is that the rise of militant trends in every Muslim society has its own context, and often a sub-text shaped and ordered by its own temporal conditions. This needs to be understood and evaluated.

Even if two or more Islamic societies show similar developments or socio-economic manifestations, we need to look discriminatingly at those distinctively existential conditions that can be discerned to have prompted those manifestations, rather than presume them to have been stimulated by their common adherence to a unified faith. For example, the Godhra incident is not a mere unfolding of a design laid down by the unity of Muslim faith. It is a pattern of response (if it can be attributed to Muslims at all in the present questionable state of our knowledge)to a specific situation where the majority community goes out to demonstrate that it is assuming the role of a dominant community and needs to be understood as such.

(The writer teaches Political Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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