ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM FAISAL DEVJI ZAHEER KAZMI (Editors) Islam After Liberalism A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Faisal Devji, Zaheer Kazmi and the Contributors 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi. Islam After Liberalism. ISBN: 9780190851279 Printed in India on acid-free paper CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Contributors ix List of Figures xi Introduction Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi 1 ORIGINS 1. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Cage Hussein Omar 17 2. Corrupting Politics Nadia Bou Ali 47 3. I lliberal Islam Faisal Devji 65 DEBATES 4. Postcolonial Prophets: Islam in the Liberal Academy Neguin Yavari 91 5. A New Deal Between Mankind and its Gods Abdennour Bidar 105 6. The Dissonant Politics of Religion, Circulation, and Civility in the Sociology of Islam Armando Salvatore 125 7. Islamic Democracy by Numbers Zaheer Kazmi 149 THE STATE 8. Bourgeois Islam and Muslims without Mosques Carool Kersten 167 9. Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom Arshin Adib-Moghaddam 189 10. Militancy, Monarchy and the Struggle to Desacralise Kingship in Arabia Ahmed Dailami 203 v CONTENTS 11. Islamotopia: Revival, Reform, and American Exceptionalism Michael Muhammad Knight 219 RESISTANCE 12. Preliminary Thoughts on Art and Society Sadia Abbas 243 13. The Political Meanings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam Edward E. Curtis IV 263 14. Post-Islamism as Neoliberalisation Peter Mandaville 281 Notes 299 Index 345 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has its origins in the ‘Beyond Muslim Liberalism’ workshop held at St Antony’s College, Oxford in March 2014. In addition to our chapter writ- ers, we would like to thank the following workshop participants who gave papers not included in this volume, or acted as discussants and session chairs: Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mohammed Bamyeh, Alastair Crooke, Michael Freeden, Kevin Fogg, and Nilufer Gole. The workshop was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J003115/1) and hosted by the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi vii CONTRIBUTORS Sadia Abbas is Associate Professor, Department of English, Rutgers University. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. Nadia Bou Ali is Assistant Professor, Civilization Studies Program, American University of Beirut. Abdennour Bidar is a writer, philosopher and associated researcher at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris. Edward E. Curtis IV is Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Ahmed Dailami works on the intellectual history and contemporary politics of the Middle East with a particular focus on the Arabian Peninsula. He holds a D. Phil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. Faisal Devji is Reader in Modern South Asian History and Fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Zaheer Kazmi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast. Carool Kersten is Reader in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London. Michael Muhammad Knight is a writer, novelist and Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida. ix CONTRIBUTORS Peter Mandaville is Professor of International Affairs in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Hussein Omar is AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History and Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Armando Salvatore is Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies, School of Religious Studies, McGill University. Neguin Yavari is a Senior Research Fellow at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe “Multiple Secularities,” Universität Leipzig. x CONTRIBUTORS LIST OF FIGURES Figure 12.1: The Two Souzas 251 Figure 12.2: The Proposal 253 Figure 12.3: Desi Wedding 253 Figure 12.4: Anecdote of the Cat 254 Figure 12.5 The First Majlis 256 Figure 12.6 Flagellation 256 Figure 12.7 State of Affairs 258 xi INTRODUCTION ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi The relationship between Islam and liberalism has been a subject of scholarly as much as popular debate for at least a century and a half. Its progress some- times hailed and at other times found wanting, this relationship has been marked by the unchanging and even stereotypical terms in which it has been debated, including issues such as the separation of church and state, the status of women and the rights of non-Muslims. Each of these issues serves as a lit- mus test to measure the liberalism of Muslim individuals as well as societies, and each is also drawn from the real or imagined history of liberalism in Europe. However, as a historical and variable phenomenon, liberalism does not in fact possess a normative definition but constitutes a family of shifting and overlapping ideas having to do with the freedoms of property and con- tract, speech and movement, or of rights and representation. The freedoms that have come to define liberalism differ in time and place, so that among its Muslim supporters as much as enemies, for instance, private property and contract law have rarely been controversial (though they might be for those Muslims who identify as socialists). Moreover, the categories ‘Islam’ and ‘liberalism’ are not in fact so distinct from one another, and it is even possible to argue that proponents of the latter have always relied upon 1 ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM the former’s recalcitrance, against which its own progress is to be defined.1 After all, religion, understood as a sociological (rather than theological) cat- egory common to all peoples, emerged during the nineteenth century together with liberalism, which could then function if separated from other entities such as ‘politics’.2 Islam, therefore, came to be redefined as a noun or proper name instead of a verbal form describing a certain set of practices.3 As the property of its adherents, it could now be seen as an identity that, whether it had to be opposed or protected, might only be conceptualised in liberal terms as an interest. In its earliest form, the relationship between Islam and liberalism was defined by imperial politics. Already in the 1930s, the influential Indian phi- losopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal noted how the questions that were of interest to his colonised Muslim compatriots, as well as to their British rulers, had to do with the former’s loyalty to Islamic authorities outside India, their views on jihad or messianism, and the interpretation of certain verses from scripture. Such questions, therefore, which have again become familiar in our own day, first came to define the relationship between Islam and liberalism in the nineteenth century: Does the idea of Caliphate in Islam embody a religious institution? How are the Indian Muslims and for the matter of that all Muslims outside the Turkish Empire related to the Turkish Caliphate? Is India Dar-ul-Islam? What is the real meaning of the doctrine of Jihad in Islam? What is the meaning of the expression ‘from amongst you’ in the Qur’anic verse: ‘Obey God, obey the Prophet and the masters of the affair (i.e., rulers) from amongst you’? What is the character of the tradition of the Prophet foretelling the advent of Imam Mehdi? These questions and some others which arose subsequently were, for obvious reasons, questions for Indian Muslims only. European imperialism, however, which was then rapidly penetrating the world of Islam was also intimately interested in them. The controversies which these questions created form a most interesting chapter in the history of Islam in India.4 But however important they might otherwise be, European and later American views on the relationship between liberalism and Islam do not always define the ways in which Muslims themselves have thought about this relationship.5 Indeed, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-European thinkers often did more to universalise liberal freedoms than those who came to stand as the patron saints of these virtues. Men like John Stuart Mill, for example, rejected the idea that such freedoms could exist out- side very specific and invariably Western social contexts, and in this sense their ideas of liberty were highly particularistic, often being defined by the privilege of race, religion or civilisation, in addition to the seemingly more acceptable 2 INTRODUCTION one of history, conceived as a number of stages that all peoples had to traverse, but in whose path some were more advanced than others.6 And so it took Asian or African intellectuals to criticise the racist and civilisational distinc- tions of Western liberalism and insist upon the universality of its freedoms.