Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition (Joseph E Lumbard)

Hailed by Hamzah Yusuf (Zaytuna Institute) as an important “step in the right direction", the book is a collection of essays penned by contemporary Islam’s brightest scholars. The range of topics covered is broad, but all address a common theme: that the rise of extremist interpretations of Islam is directly attributable to the dismantling of the traditional framework of religion.

We often hear the term traditional without properly understanding what it entails. Traditional Islam, at its most superficial, is taken to be the complete opposite of Salafi Islam- that means, Sufi-loving, "grave-worshipper" and itinerant fan of a fossilized style of Islam. Of course, that is how some Salafi Muslims like to think their counterparts are.

By and large, though, it’s not easy to properly pin down the definition of traditional Islam since it is the normative religion of the majority and allows for quite varied expressions of faith. Any definition must necessarily take into account Islam’s multifaceted reality and attempt to be as broadly inclusive as possible. The latter proviso, as Sir Hamilton Gibb (Mohammedanism- An Historical Survey) acknowledges, has always been a hallmark of Sunni Islam.

It would not be to go too far beyond the bounds of strict truth to say…that no body of religious sectarians has ever been excluded from the orthodox community but those who desired such an exclusion and as it were excluded themselves.

Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition ably delineates this spirit by establishing that traditional Islam is nothing less than,

Divine revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a “vertical” connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

The writers, all of whom manage to combine the best of a Western outlook and classical Islamic knowledge, succeed in drawing a compelling distinction between the radicalism of modern Muslim groups and the normative Islam that was and continues to be practiced by the majority of Muslims.

It is a sad but inevitable fact that one of the devices used by modern-day extremists involves reducing Islam to its supposed “essentialities”, thereby severing the religion from its place and role in history. What remains is a conceptualization that Islam was only at its purest at a specific time period, notably, the first three generations of al-salaf al-salihin (the Pious Predecessors). The statement is hardly dogmatic in itself, but the belief that only a small number of groups today mold themselves after the template of the salaf certainly is.

That period of al-salaf al-salihin is distant and blurred enough a canvas for self-proclaimed “reformists” to paint a persuasive utopian model. The lifespan of that model is taken as the cutting-off point for any branch of knowledge- even those arising to meet the challenge of providing depth to the Koranic revelation- to be deemed legitimate. Thus, religious sciences like kalaam (philosophical theology) and tassawwuf (spirituality) are dismissed as heresies simply because they did not exist within the utopian time-frame.

Joseph Lumbard argues, in the chapter entitled “The Decline of Knowledge and the Rise of Ideology in the Modern Islamic World", that there are notable exceptions, but for most of the liberal and doctrinal reform movements in the Islamic world,

Sufism became the scapegoat through which Islam “backwardness” could be explained. In this view Sufism is the religion of the common people and embodies superstition and un-Islamic elements adopted from local cultures; in order for Islam to retain its birthright, which includes modern science and technology, Sufism must be eradicated.”

Tim Winter points out in the last chapter of the book that,

It is vital to understand that mainstream Sufism is not, and never has been, a doctrinal system, or a school of thought – a madhhab. It is, instead, a set of insights and practices which operate within the various Islamic madhhabs; in other words, it is not a madhhab, it is an ilm. And like most of the other Islamic ulum, it was not known by name, or in its later developed form, in the age of the Prophet (upon him be blessings and peace) or his Companions. This does not make it less legitimate. There are many Islamic sciences which only took shape many years after the Prophetic age: usul al-fiqh, for instance, or the innumerable technical disciplines of hadith.

A cursory study of history will reveal that there is also an undeniably political dimension to the reformists’ rejection of Sufism. Most reformists arose at a time when Sufi tariqas (way) were actively engaged in a life-or-death struggle against European colonialists, from French-controlled Algeria to British-administered India to the Russian-infested Caucasus. The piety, tenacity and numbers that Sufi leaders were able to muster remains unparalleled till this day, and is testimony to the extraordinary nature of these awliya (Friends of God) and on how ordinary Muslims had regarded them. The tariqas were potent challengers to the reformists’ ideology for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community.

But the encroachment of the West was a fact that many Muslim societies had to face from the seventeenth century onward. This triggered several responses in the Muslim community. One of the most influential being the rise of elites who insisted that there was no contradiction between scientific and Koranic pronouncements. These modernists sought to reconcile western scientific theories with verses from the Koran, making the fundamental mistake of thinking that science, like divine revelation, was a systemized body of law that changed little with time.

This trend gained a unique momentum in the Indian Subcontinent and was best served by the popular writings of the intellectual, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan:

"the work of God", that is, God’s work as visible in nature, cannot contradict the "Word of God", as revealed in the Koran.

In the essay “A Traditional Islamic Response to the Rise of Modernism“, Fuad Naeem deftly summarizes the responses of one man, Maulana (lit. our master) Ashraf Ali Thanvi, to the core premises of modernism. In his treatise, Intibahat, the Deobandi scholar intelligently refutes,

the prevalent errors of modernism in the wake of Western domination of India, and thereby removes the barriers for the Muslim, especially those with a Western education, that prevent him or her from penetrating into the truth of his or her own tradition.

The power of the Maulana’s words is in the combination of lucidity and deep spirituality that informs his insights. Fuad Naeem concludes that Maulana Thanvi,

follows the way of his great forbearers like al-Ghazali…and Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, who demonstrated synthetically that the ways of the intellect and the ways of revelation are harmonious and not contradictory. One of the Names of God in Islam is al-Haqq, the Truth. In light of this, the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition has always emphaisized the primacy of truth, wherever it may be found, for all divergent truths are unified in and testify ultimately to the One Truth, God. This is why Islam does not need to be reformed…; it already contains within itself the principles necessary for renewal from within.

Herein lies the true definition of mujaddid, which neither takes on the rather disingenuous rendition of “reformer” nor “innovator”. Rather, it means renewer. The renewer fans a flame that has merely dimmed. Fuad Naeem asserts that it is presumptious to think that Islam needs to be re-formed when the religion already contains within itself the principles necessary for renewal. Renewal conforms with the Koranic invitation to reflect, so that it emerges from within, rather than needing any special institution to enforce it. Truth is clear from error, the Koran reveals. It must be said that Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, a man many consider to be a reformer par excellence, had been an ardent advocate of the enforcement-by-the-sword rule.

The last chapter of the book is also my favorite for being the most daring. In “The Poverty of Fanaticism“, Tim Winter directly identifies the ideology that is the backbone of most radical groups of our time. He eloquently relates his own experience with one manifestation of the Salafi movement.

I used to know, quite well, a leader of the radical ‘Islamic’ group, the Jama’at Islamiya, at the Egyptian university of Assiut. His name was Hamdi. He grew a luxuriant beard, was constantly scrubbing his teeth with his miswak, and spent his time preaching hatred of the Coptic Christians, a number of whom were actually attacked and beaten up as a result of his khutbas. He had hundreds of followers; in fact, Assiut today remains a citadel of hardline, Wahhabi-style activism.

The moral of the story is that some five years after this acquaintance, providence again brought me face to face with Shaikh Hamdi. This time, chancing to see him on a Cairo street, I almost failed to recognise him. The beard was gone. He was in trousers and a sweater. More astonishing still was that he was walking with a young Western girl who turned out to be an Australian, whom, as he sheepishly explained to me, he was intending to marry. I talked to him, and it became clear that he was no longer even a minimally observant Muslim, no longer prayed, and that his ambition in life was to leave Egypt, live in Australia, and make money. What was extraordinary was that his experiences in Islamic activism had made no impression on him – he was once again the same distracted, ordinary Egyptian youth he had been before his conversion to ‘radical Islam’.

This phenomenon, which we might label ’salafi burnout’, is a recognised feature of many modern Muslim cultures. An initial enthusiasm, gained usually in one’s early twenties, loses steam some seven to ten years later.

The term “salafi burnout” seems especially apt when almost a century before, Maulana Muhammad Husayn Batalwi, a leader of those who rejected following one of the four Maddhabs (School of Thought), had conceded in his book Isha’at al-Sunna that,

After twenty-five years of experience, we have become aware of the fact that those who, out of ignorance, totally relinquish following a school altogether (taqlid) eventually relinquish Islam altogether [1].

The notion is hardly earth-shattering when one considers that almost all modern-day extremists reject both taqlid and the traditional framework of Madhhabs in favor for the alleged path “upon what the Messenger and his Companions were upon“. The superficiality of the credo is evident from the many variations of Salafi thought spread across the global arena; each one claiming to be the only correct constituency.

Joseph Lumbard, whose name is also behind the seminal Jordan Initiative taken in 2005, assembled an impressive list of thinkers from all over the world for this project. The eight essays represent an exciting development in the Islamic world, the first inklings of a revolt against religious extremism that has so characterized the Islamic facade in recent decades.

It is not without justification that John L Esposito (Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam) calls these scholars “provocative Muslim voices“.

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References:
[1] The Differences of the Imams, Shaykh al-Hadith, Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi.

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