We shall not linger, in this lecture, over the principal characteristics of the globalization that we have all been experiencing for about twenty year. Let it suffice to recall that this is a universal phenomenon possessing at once unarguably positive dimensions, as well as negative, not to say dangerous dimensions for the future of humanity. While the economy is the primary object of globalization, its unintended consequences for the religious domain are not negligible. And it is from this perspective that we are interested in that which, in this phenomenon, affects Islam in particular, the religion of one fifth of the world’ population. Its followers are mostly to be found in the geographical area stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, but large Muslim minorities live in different regions of the globe, North as well as South.
Let us begin by observing that historically, geographically and sociologically, Islam has never been monolithic. It is both one and many: one, by the creed which unites Muslims, that God is one and that Mohammed is his prophet; and many, by the multiple ways of understanding the Islamic faith, of formal practice of its recommendations concerning prayer, fasting, tithing and pilgrimage, as well as those concerning ethical behavior, right down to the deepest mystical experiences, and with the most varied intellectual expressions and all sorts of instrumentalizations along the way.
Let us add that Islam recognizes no intermediaries between God and man. The relation to divinity famously passes through the Koran as revealed to the Prophet, and accessorily, for the Shiites, through the Imam and his qualified representatives. This is the reason why the “Ulemas”, or doctors of Islam, refuse to be called “holy men”. Their task is limited, in theory, to the interpretation of the sacred texts for everyday believers, and to defining the duties incumbent upon them. And yet, this did not prevent the establishment of a religious “institution” to regulate the sacred, which considers itself qualified – to the exclusion of simple believers and of women altogether – to define dogmas and to distribute certificates of conformity or non-conformity with the demands of the religion.
The representatives of this institution receive, as a general rule, the same training, and are traditionally destined for the roles of cadis, or judges, of muftis, of prayer imams, of ‘udûls, or notaries, and other more or less official functions according to country and historical period. Although, in certain circumstances, they played a counter-balancing role in relation to the political powers, acting in favor of what might today be called the rule of law, by defending their prerogatives against the abuses of political power in the jurisdictional arena, they were basically in step with governments. These latter guaranteed them moral and material privileges, and relied on them for the administration of the population. In exchange, the Ulemas provided the political authorities with the legitimacy that they needed and that they lacked, being most often acquired by inheritance or by brute force, and conserved independently of the will of their subjects.
It is in these terms that the relations between religion and politics manifested themselves in Muslim societies, with the exception of the relatively rare cases where there was connivance between the two functions, when the political authorities intervened directly in religious affairs, or when the “clerics” imposed an orientation of some sort on politicians, as was the case, for example, in the age of the Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mûn, of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hâkim, or during the reign of Almoravides. This situation was seriously disrupted by the emergence of modern Nation-States in the Muslim world. The monopoly previously enjoyed by the Ulemas in the legal domain was demolished by the introduction of positive law during the colonial period, and then since the political independence occurring between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1960s. Moreover, the modern State tends to be an intrusive one, reaching into areas that never used to interest it, such as the economy, education or health. As a consequence, it tries to subordinate the religious authorities and to control them closely in order to be sure that they always provide it with an appearance, a surplus, or a decisive contribution of legitimacy.
What new does globalization bring to this picture? It is tempting to answer that what has occurred is not a radical break with the previously reigning situation, that there has merely been an acceleration of processes already at work at the economic, social, political, cultural, and therefore also religious, levels. At any rate, these levels are interwoven and connected among one another in a dialectical relation, to such a degree that it is sometimes difficult to affirm, despite appearances and notwithstanding the declarations of the actors involved, that such or such question has to do with one level rather than with another.
At the economic level, every country has seen a modernization of the means of production, at different speeds, but pursued everywhere with unequal success. Thus, the tractor, the automobile and the machine in general are supplanting the animal and human physical effort; services are occupying an ever growing place of importance in economies; and the same, or almost the same, industrial products are invading the markets of every country.
At the social level, nomadism loses ground each day, and the countryside is increasingly depopulated, in favor of a breakneck urbanization. The diminution or the disappearance of traditional social constraint exercised by the tribal group follows from this. The patriarchal family is giving way to the nuclear family, with all the consequences that come with it concerning the means of socializing young people. In sum, it is a mechanical solidarity, in the Durkheimian sense, that is replacing organic solidarity little by little – which is a source of conflicts and dramas due to this difficult transition.
At the political level, what is remarkably novel is that political personnel of every ideological slant constantly invokes the previously unknown values of democracy, progress, freedom and justice, even if in practice they distance themselves from them to a greater or lesser degree.
And finally at the cultural level, the tidal wave of secularization affects contemporary Muslim societies the same as it does other modernized or modernizing human societies, whatever their culture or their religion might be. What some observers consider to be a resurgence of the religious is unsurprising since the transition from the Middle Ages to 20th century modernity happened brutally. This resurgence of the religious – sometimes in an aberrant form – or rather its persistence, is in fact nothing but a reaction of defensiveness or of fear in the face of the rapid and disorienting mutations for which minds had not at all been prepared by traditional dominant structures. It is therefore unsurprising that, following the ceaseless movement that characterizes our era, more or less disoriented people look to religion for the fixed reference points which they have lost in other spheres of life, all the more since the novelties modernity has introduced, fascinating as they may be, are perceived as having been imposed by the West. The fact that modernity – and now globalization – is not an endogenous process obviously feeds into this attitude, with its apparent preference for a return to the past and for the preservation of cultural identity.
In such conditions, Islam plays the role of bulwark against Western hegemony in general and American hegemony in particular. It is obviously not a matter of passing judgment on the effectiveness of this bulwark, or of determining whether it constitutes the best defense. Islam is equally instrumentalized by anachronistic and/or despotic regimes in search of legitimacy, just as it is solicited by opposition movements to justify their struggle against the established order, which is perceived as being impious and contrary to Islamic norms. Here too, it is not a matter of passing judgment on the validity of this upmanship emanating from two antagonistic clans. It is preferable, in our judgment, to analyze the challenges with which Islam is confronted today, similar in this to all the religious systems that bear the weight of a long history from which they do not manage to liberate themselves.
In our book Islam Between Message and History, we analyzed the institutionalization of the prophetic message that occurred shortly after the death of Mohammed. This process, in its complementary form of confessionalization, ritualization and dogmatization, has resisted the accidents of history and the different conjunctures Muslims have experienced. The question to be asked in our time concerning this fact is the following: is it still relevant in the current context of globalization? Again, not because the latter is a novel and positive phenomenon in every aspect, but because it is the end result of a multiform movement begun with the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, pursued by the Enlightenment, and crowned by the scientific and technical advances of the last two centuries whose repercussions on the functioning of societies, on the ways of believing and the content of these beliefs, and on the new world-views these have generated, are undeniable.
Confessionalization was inevitable insofar as it allowed Muslims to recognize one another and distinguish themselves from non-Muslims, through clothing, food and general behavior. Let us not forget that in the early days of Islam, they were a minority in the countries they conquered, and that although the ancient societies were far from uniform, everyone and each social and religious category had to stay in its specific place, which was perceived as natural in the clearly hierarchical general structure of society as a whole. This rule, accepted and interiorized by practically everyone, explained not only the privileged status of Muslims but also the inferior status of women and non-Muslims, to say nothing of slaves. The different statuses brought both exclusive duties that were not binding for other groups and equally exclusive rights hardly enjoyed by others, all of this being justified by concerns of a religious nature. Today, the bases on which social relations are founded no longer permit discrimination between members of different social groups, be it because of differences of religion, color, or sex.
Regarding ritualization, which consisted in a uniformization of the ways of performing rites, especially prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, it seemed natural given the fact that the institutionalized religions did not tolerate the flexibility and the freedom to which the Muslims contemporary to Mohammed were accustomed. It matters little, from this point of view, that the Koran does not go into detail about devotional acts and is content to incite believers to carry them out; the nascent dogma of the normativity of the Prophet’s actions, as they were transmitted by certain Companions – usually second-order ones like Abu Hurayra, known only by his sobriquet – and then entrusted to the first collections of the Hadîth, is sufficient to come to its aid as a supplement. What was happening was in fact a gradual downward egalitarianization that took account of the dispositions of the greatest number, but left the strongest personalities, those who would find refuge from the 3rd century of the Hijra in mysticism, dissatisfied. Now that the believer is no longer perceived as a member of a group with no autonomy, the loosening of the vise of ritualization has become quite imaginable.
Dogmatization, the third form that institutionalization took, does not have the same importance in Islam as it has in Christianity, which has seen, especially in the Eastern Churches, incessant and virulent quarrels over the definitions of the faith, especially concerning the trinity and the incarnation. The absolute transcendence of God in Islam shielded him from parallel dogmatic disputes. The Koran remains nevertheless a theological book, and theology, insofar as it is the attempted rationalization of faith, could not but institute intangible dogmas. The first Muslim theologians, the mutakallimûn, defended as a general rule the principle of free will in human actions, but the combined opposition of the politicians and the specialists of the Hadîth wound up imposing the dogma of the divine determination of man’s acts in their minutest detail. Other dogmas were similarly imposed, among which we might especially cite, in the case of Sunnism, the normativity of the Tradition just mentioned, the honorability of all the Companions without exception, the preeminence of the first four “rightly guided” Caliphs in the order of their accession to the head of the Caliphate, etc. Without a doubt, the contemporary Muslim is no longer comfortable with this dogma; he seeks an understanding of the faith that is free of dogmas bearing the mark of their bygone era.
The institutionalization of Islam in question had to wed itself to the reigning forms of social organization, and yield to the norms accepted in every pre-modern civilization. It therefore permitted the religious justification and legitimization of the era’s values and institutions, and could not in any case extract itself from the categories imposed by the mental horizon that has been fashioned by the common estate, shared by all peoples, of the available science and knowledge.
It is at this level that it seems necessary to us to locate the problem of the difficult relationship between modernity and globalization, on the one hand, and historical Islam, i.e. the concrete applications of the prophetic message, on the other. We do no more here than point out a few of the difficulties that seem most significant in this regard, always keeping in mind that the problems that arise for an Islamic thinking confronted with globalization, when expressed in purely religious terms, obscure the other, strictly profane and historical, dimensions of these difficulties.
Let us take as an example the question of power. The latter had systematic recourse to religious legitimacy to ground the monopoly on violence it enjoyed. And this legitimacy was almost never questioned by the believers of any branch whatsoever. And yet, the amazing advances of the human and social sciences caused the mask to fall from the face of power, which was shown in truth to be that of a regulating institution of society, neither more nor less. From then on it could no longer receive its legitimacy from any source but the consent of the populations in question and the popular will. The interiorization of this new conception of power made headway in the West in a context that favored the transition from absolute power to democracy, i.e., the rise of the bourgeoisie, industrialization, scientific and technical progress, the birth of Nation-States, etc.
No such things took place in the Muslim world. One is, since the acquisition of political independence, therefore in the presence of autocratic regimes that perpetuate the notorious postponing of democracy. This situation is not confined to Islamic countries; it has existed and continues still in Latin America, in Africa and elsewhere. What is deserving of attention regarding this is that religious thought is torn between the attraction of freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and nostalgia for the regime of the Caliphate, on the other. The socio-economic conditions do not help it to free itself from the tar pit of this nostalgia; conceptual confusion and an ideological hodge-podge win the day.
And yet, a new factor, which is of a nature such as to turn completely on its head the classical schema of the evolution of political power, is the emergence, thanks to the more or less advanced generalization of teaching and to the lightening progress of information and communication technologies, the possibility of divulging in real time any event whatsoever in any part of the world. Ordinary citizens now have the ability to know the unspeakable and formerly well-kept secrets of the regimes in place, which strips these regimes of a formidable weapon in the manipulation and indoctrination of the masses. Of course, states today possess means of control and coercion of which yesterday’s dictatorships could not even dream. Nevertheless, they must take ever greater account of a public opinion that is not eternally duped by their lies, and which aspires to take part in strategic choices, in decision making, and in the control of public agents, from bottom to top. Thus, the religiously colored justifications of submission to despotism (the famous Ta’at ûlî-amr) tend to lose the incontestable authority that they used to enjoy. And it is extremely rare now to find declared enemies of democracy, whether it is called by the term shûra or taken for what it really is: a mode of government that was born in the West and that has become a universal value and an integral part of the rights of man, and as an aspiration to the concrete realization of the corresponding ethics and institutions.
The question of condition of women supplies us with another example of the difficulties of the adaptation of religious thought to the new conditions imposed by globalization. Indeed, it is well known that in every civilization’s past, and with the exception, more or less widespread in space and time, of the upper classes, women were considered ontologically and sociologically inferior to men. Concerning dress codes, which revealed social distinctions and discriminations, it was the case that in each town, even each village, and each region women would dress according to the tradition of their milieu and to climatic considerations. And, as on might expect, this situation was justified by religious considerations. Those whose job it was to manage the sacred began, moreover, with a consideration of their own interests and excluded women from the high sacerdotal offices and forbade them access to certain functions, which varied from one context to another.
Women did not obtain a theoretical equality with men, still put only partially into practice, even in many advanced societies, until after a difficult struggle and all sorts of sacrifices. It is nevertheless necessary to insist on the fact that this equality, obtained and consented to at such a high cost, would not have been able to establish itself, despite women’s struggle on behalf of their basic rights, and in face of the ferocious opposition of clerics and conservatives of every stripe, without industrialization and the need it created to resort to the female labor pool, and without as a result the financial autonomy that this allowed women to acquire, thus throwing off the yoke of the inferior status which had previously been theirs.
In the history of Islamic societies, in the very absence of the notion of original sin and of its correlate, the stigmatization of sex, women enjoyed, just like everywhere else, only inferior rights to those enjoyed by men. The reformist movements in the Muslim world, since the end of the 19th century, have made the improvement of the status and the education of Muslim women one of their principal battle cries, but almost entirely in vain. The modes of production and socio-economic structures did not change accordingly. And mentalities could not change without radical changes in these structures. In other words, the opposition to women’s liberation and to their juridical equality with men, although expressed in religious terms, in fact reflect a reality and a balance of power that religion does nothing but justify. The proof of this is that wherever modernization has attained a certain level of advancement, the situation of women has evolved despite every opposition. Tunisia, Turkey, and recently Morocco are a good illustration of this rule.
As in the case of democracy, gender equality has today become, thanks to globalization, development of the means of information and communication, and the generalization of education, a general aspiration of the younger generation, whom traditionally trained clerics and Islamist no longer dare confront directly. They are therefore leading a rear-guard fight by remaining attached, under false pretexts, to polygamy and to inequality of inheritance rights, and by passing judgment on unveiled women and those who bravely refuse prohibitions on interaction between the sexes and on participation in public life, all the while affirming the fundamental equality of men and women in Islam, without realizing the blatant contradiction in which they find themselves.
The two examples that we have mentioned – the conception of power and the condition of women – perfectly show that the spokesmen for Islam, whether an official, traditional Islam or an activist, revolutionary one, are up against this globalization over which they have no control. The conspicuous ritualistic religiosity dissimulates poorly a profound secularization of Islamic societies, along the lines of what all contemporary societies have known. What appears as a return to religiosity is nothing more, in most cases, than the expression of a return to communitarian identities. On the one hand, as we have said, it is more a matter of the search for certainty in a world that is losing its familiar orientation. On the other hand, it is a question of reaction to historical backwardness and to humiliation, to underdevelopment, to the despotism of local governments, and to the warlike and arrogant policies the United States of America in particular, and to the West in general, which supports the Israeli occupation of Palestine without reserve and is deaf to the legitimate complaints and suffering of the Palestinians, and which participates actively or through its silent complicity in the occupation of the Muslim lands of Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a consequence, holding Islam as such to be responsible for the evils that are eating away at Muslim societies betrays an essentialist vision of religion that the history of religions and religious anthropology have completely dispensed with. Islam, like any other belief system, can, paradoxically and varying with each case, be either a cause of alienation or of its opposite. Our hypothesis is that globalization, because a certain number of its manifestations is notoriously alienating, is of a nature such as to push Islam to play an de-alienating role concerning money, the rule of the law of the market, merciless competition, egotism, and everything dehumanizing in relations between groups and individuals. From another angle, through the means that it puts at the disposal of a greater number of people, globalization offers to humanity as a whole an opportunity to leave the material and symbolic ghettos into which it had been shut, and thus to enlarge its intellectual horizons, which were dramatically limited for preceding generations.
In this sense, we are all at a crossroads, and thanks to the digital revolution we are going through a privileged moment, one that incites us to redouble our efforts to keep religious thought from lagging behind cognitive progress, and to allow it to help us to assume responsibility for the fullness of our condition. To this end, the revision of our relation with the interpretative tradition of the prophetic message is a necessary, although insufficient, condition. It is obviously impossible to embrace every domain in which this tradition exercises incontestable authority. We shall as a result limit ourselves to the essential traditional conceptions that determine all the others in a certain way, and that seem destined by the force of things to evolve.
The first conception, and by far the most sensitive, concerns the status of the Koran. Is it, as the tradition proclaims, an exclusively divine text in both content and form, supernaturally dictated to the prophet Mohammed, whose role was purely that of passive transmitter? Or is the Koran, written in human language, for the believer divine in its origin and its inspiration but equally eminently human, to the extent that the personality of the Prophet, his culture and the conditions of his individual and communal life could not help but intervene in the elaboration of this sacred text? Can the believer allow that the Prophet had a privileged relation with divinity, an uncommon experience of the divine which the Koranic discourse, which was originally oral before being set down in the Mushaf, would perfectly account for?
Once it became canonical, the Koran served as a reference for the religious justification and for the legitimation of customary social relations and institutions of the Muslim empire. In other words, the interpretations of the Koran that come down to us in the first exegeses and date back to the 3rd century after the Hijla reflect the preoccupations of Muslims after the movement of the conquests and the constitution, in the vast fields of the empire, of Muslim communities of Arab or convert origin, much more than the preoccupations and ways of understanding that were proper to the first audience of the prophetic message. The attachment to the literalness of the text, in particular, was not universal until the point at which the Koran became practically a binding juridical code, which it in fact was more in theory than in reality.
One of the priorities of a critique internal to Islam consists in becoming and in making others aware of this historical process. This is a difficult operation which requires all sorts of competences, whose objective is to traverse the thick and successive layers of interpretations and manipulations that have been imposed on the Text in order to get back to the original message and apprehend it in all its richness and depth. On the way, one can cast aside philosophical concepts inherited for the most part from the dominant mythical consciousness and from efforts to rationalize the givenness of revelation. In sum, it can be hoped to seize what was given in revelation in its universality and in its intentions, and not in its circumstantial injunctions.
This way of proceeding would first of all question, and even contradict, the very widespread idea that the first generations of Muslims, the “pious ancients” (as-salaf as sâlih), had better knowledge of the precepts of Islam and applied them perfectly, and that the following generations are destined to drift ever further away. This idea is no longer acceptable to the degree that at its birth Islam needed time in order to be interiorized, that it did not go about this though brain-washing, and that the minds of the first Muslims were still soaked in the beliefs and perceptions of the world and society that were impossible to erase all at once and to replace them with new ones. Furthermore, it does not take account of the accumulation, which is larger with every passing day, of human knowledge and of elements of universal culture, especially today. In fact, the first Muslims whose task it was to apply what they understood of Islam could only do so in the framework of the cognitive and social systems at their disposition. Their solutions were dictated by imperatives which are no longer ours. To conform to them would amount to cutting religion off definitively from life, while the maintenance of this connection is paradoxically the declared objective of those who are attached to the veneration of the past and of the ancients, closer in their eyes (although they would never admit this) to angels than to humans, who are burdened by a multitude of constraints and subject, among other things, to desires, ambitions, loves and hates.
In the same order of ideas, we have witnessed a veritable transfiguration of the person of the Prophet, who has become super human over the years, a being to whom each attributes all the ideals and all the aspirations of the men of his time, and even their fantasies, including sexual, despite the Koran’s affirmation that he is certainly an example to follow, but that he is just a simple mortal charged with transmitting the divine message.
The living message was therefore not sufficient to feed this archetype in all the Islamic lands. It is therefore the textual tradition that took its place. The Hadith was born of this need, as well as the normativity of the acts and words of the Prophet, i.e., the necessity of conformity to the smallest of deeds and gestures of Mohammed recorded in the 3rd/9th century in the collections of prophetic traditions said to be authentic.
To revise the historical interpretations is also, as a result, to unmask the illusory character of these traditions which claim to reflect faithfully the will of the Prophet, while they are in fact and can be nothing but representations influenced, in good or in bad faith, by historical factors that it is possible to analyze and clarify, at least in large outline and in their general texture, by the methods of modern human and social sciences.
It is the same not only when it comes to other foundations of Muslim law, in particular concerning consensus (igmâ’) and analogy ( qiyas), but above all concerning the postulates which form the basis of the entire edifice of the jurisprudential rules inaccurately referred to as the Sharî’a. To take an example, to affirm, with Shâfi’î (204/820), who is only translating a common conception of his contemporaries, that all human acts without exception must all necessarily obey one of the five legal qualifications or statutes (ahkâm) which are, in descending order, the obligatory, the recommended, the permissible, the reprehensible and the illicit, is nothing more than the expression of a situation in which every aspect of life is sacralized, in other words characterized by an alienation that it is urgent to leave behind.
In the same vein, to consider that it is necessary to take Koranic verses literally, not taking into consideration the particular circumstances at their origin, or that the effort of personal reflection, (ijtihâd) only applies in the absence of an explicit text, or that the “tawâtur”, i.e. the presence of several transmitters of the same tradition, leads to certain knowledge, or that it is forbidden to revise a consensus elaborated by a previous generation, and so many other similar presuppositions, to consider that they are still valid today is to ignore that they are the pieces of a human, juridical, social and political edifice which fully played its role in the past, but which has now fallen into complete ruin under the effects of modernity.
To think Islam according to the imperatives of globalization is therefore also to admit that this type of organization in no longer valid, and that it is vain to pursue the chimera of restoration, such as was attempted by the Afghan Taliban, and as Islamist movements of every persuasion dream, whether they be Wahhabis, Khomeynists, Muslim Brothers or something else.
It is not appropriate, regarding this, to put into doubt the authentic aspiration of these groups, in the face of ever-present despotic regimes set up after the fall of the Caliphate and the end of colonization, to limit the powers of the State in favor of the application of their conception of the Law of God. And yet, this aspiration, legitimate as it may be, does not take account of two essential factors, without which it collapses without any chance of success:
The first is that the modern Nation State is an organization that has imposed itself everywhere in the world, and that even if one tries to escape it this will only be by means of assimilation into a larger political entity, such as the European Union, or by means of supra-national international conventions, but never through a return to the system of Empire whose frontiers expand and contract as a function of the balance of power, and which allows for the coexistence of different legislations, particularly on a sectarian basis, within it.
The second factor is the fiction of a Divine Law of which only the experts, the Ulemas, are the faithful interpreters. Modern historical knowledge, which is more refined every day, has taken it upon itself to destroy this fiction, by showing the all too human character of the Fiqh whose prescriptions are determined by the cultural, social and economic contexts of a bygone era.
Following these considerations, it appears that what is called globalization (if one is looking for brevity), but more fundamentally, that the structural changes at every level, the progress of human knowledge in the area of the human and social sciences, and the universal aspiration towards a spectrum of values falling under the description of inalienable “human rights”, effectively put Islam and the other great historic religions to the test. Will it be up to the task with which it is confronted? No one, in our opinion, has managed to give a convincing response one way or another. What is certain, however, is that religious thought is never disembodied, and that it is in the final analysis the historical conditions which shape and condition its adequation with reality in all its dimensions.
Translated by John Rogove
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The final/definitive version of Abdelmajid Charfi’s essay was published in Philosophy&Social Criticism, vol 36 nos 3-4 March and May 2010, SAGE Publications Ltd, (LA, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC), all rights reserved, p. 295-307, Special Issue: “Postsecularism and multicultural Jusirdictions”, Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations Istanbul Seminars 2008-2009, Edited by: Alessandro Ferrara, Volker Kaul and David Rasmussen. Link to the issue http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/3-4.toc
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*Abdelmajid Charfi is a leading Tunisian scholar on Islam, he teaches at the Faculty of Arts, University of Manouba, Tunis.