Pathways to religious reform
Syasaat Al-Adyan, Al-Sira'at wa Darourat Al-Islah (The Politics of Religion(s): Conflicts and the Necessity of Reform), Nabil Abdel-Fattah, Cairo: Merit, 2003. pp695
The tension between tradition and reform, islah or tajdeed, in the Muslim world has been one of the most pressing issues for well over a century. However, a number of events leading up to the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington lent the issue added urgency, and, as a result, an avalanche of writings has helped shape public debates about the necessity of reform in Muslim societies by Muslim as well as non- Muslim pundits in the wake of the attacks.
Some Muslim writers have long argued that the idea of Al- Islah wa Al-Tajdeed is not a foreign concept to Islamic thought, but that the new reformists can build on a legacy that dates back to at least the early years of the 20th century. This new book by Nabil Abdel-Fattah is one such attempt to build on this legacy, as the central theme of the book is concerned with the politics of reform (islah) in the Muslim world, placing special emphasis on the case of Egypt. However, the book is problematic in that Abdel-Fattah does not attempt to offer a definition of what he means by reform. What are the criteria for reform, and what is the yardstick with which the reform process can be measured? A further question concerns which institutions will monitor and assess any reform.
While the book does not offer any easy answers to such questions, it does, however, provoke debate, and it is likely to generate disagreement among scholars particularly regarding the author's arguments about the increasing role of religion in world politics, the "attraction" between religion and violence, and the influence that he believes the religious establishment exercises over public debate on religious reform.
The author's point of departure in dealing with his ambitious undertaking is a question he poses at the outset of the book: how did Arab intellectuals respond to the 11 September 2001 attacks, and in particular how did the political and religious establishments respond? Abdel-Fattah justifies his focus on the Muslim religious establishment because of the issues the attacks raised regarding radical Islamic fundamentalism. Many forces, in fact, have "capitalised on the 2001 events in order to establish connections between faith, doctrine, Arab and Muslim cultures, terrorism and the systems and politics of religious education," Abdel-Fattah writes.
The events, he continues, exposed the dearth of academic studies in Arabic in fields relating to South East Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, the Sudan, as well as the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet republics. It also exposed the lack of honest enquiry and critical thinking about the Islamist movements, with their wide range of factions, ideological groupings, and defections. What is required, Abdel-Fattah notes, are in-depth, scientific studies on the existing religious discourses, in order to allow readers to make decisions on the reasons behind the current predicament, and also to produce a reformist religious discourse that can pave the way for a reformist movement on all levels, be they political, religious or national, in Arab societies.
Abdel-Fattah identifies what he describes as a "radical and extremist religious discourse" and examines the reasons behind its rise. He argues that religion has come into the grip of literalists, fundamentalists and radicals of every stripe. Unlike some scholars who have argued that Islamist fundamentalism might prove to be a kind of "liberation theology" for the modern Islamic world, Abdel-Fattah believes that Islam as a religion should rid itself of such doctrines. One of the most dangerous implications of a discourse of this type is that it has sometimes been treated as if it were itself a form of divine revelation, or an emanation from the essence of Islam, he notes. "We can identify a trend dominating some official religious circles, as well as elements within the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which attempts to integrate the sacred text with a human-produced discourse," he writes. "Therefore, any critique of such a discourse will be interpreted as a critique of the sacred text itself. One of the impediments on the path of reform is this blurring of the boundaries between what is sacred and what is temporal."
Abdel-Fattah launches a scathing attack on the religious establishment, which he portrays as simultaneously reactionary, radical and conservative, serving temporal (worldly) interests in the name of religion. He accuses a class of religious leaders of putting hurdles in the path of reform in order to further their own agendas, placing the blame for this situation squarely on men who stand in the way of reform.
"The official religious establishment pursues a strategy that aims primarily to impose religious hegemony over society and to extend its political clout to areas that go beyond the religious and the spiritual and are related to the nature of the state and the political system. We are confronted by strategies cloaked in a religious attire, and employing religious symbols, that nevertheless aim to control the political and to reshape its values," he writes.
Such statements, however, fail to acknowledge the fact that the influence exercised by conservative religious elements has been waning in recent years, due to a number of factors the most important of which is that their association with the state has undermined their credibility in the view of mainstream Muslims. Just as importantly, however, has been the rise of a new class of TV preachers who address contemporary issues in a modern way. The assumption that religious leaders have an overwhelming influence on the way the Muslims construct their Islamic identities is also exaggerated: many would argue to the contrary -- that the authority of traditional religious leaders has in fact declined.
Abdel-Fattah also offers a survey of the different Islamist political groups in his book and the factors which have shaped their relationships with the state. He offers insights into the ways in which religion has been used by the Egyptian state to further political ends and to acquire political legitimacy during the Nasser and Sadat eras, as well as into the ways in which that same Islam has been used by political protest groups to challenge the existing systems. He deals at length with the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which has long participated in the political game, noting that the Brotherhood's handling of the multi-party system has taken a number of forms, including what Abdel-Fattah describes as "Islamisation from the centre".
In its heavy involvement in a number of Egyptian professional syndicates, and through the many political statements which it has issued addressing the questions of women's status, the multiparty system and contemporary citizenship, the Brotherhood has attempted to gain a leading role in Egyptian politics and civil society. Abdel-Fattah also touches on the ways in which the confrontation between the state and Islamist factions during the 1990s influenced the development of the Islamist groups, whether in terms of changing their tactics, as was the case of the Brotherhood, or through a radical transformation of their world view, as was the case of the leaders of Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, who announced that they would renounce violence.
Abdel-Fattah also makes interesting comparisons between the old religious reformists who launched the reform process at the turn of the 19th century and their contemporary counterparts. He concludes that a qualitative shift in the strategies of the Islamist groups has taken place as a result of their concerns with the "Islamisation" of political, cultural and educational institutions, a concern that was not a priority for older reformists such as Mohamed Abduh or Hassan El-Attar. Like most writers who have engaged in discussions of religious reform and renewal, Abdel-Fattah concludes that Al-Azhar, the bastion of Islamic thought in the Muslim world, should undergo a radical process of transformation. While the title of the book deals with religion(s), and most of it deals with Islam alone, Abdel-Fattah also sheds light on Coptic reactions to events over the past decade, particularly the Al- Kosheh incident in Assiut, one of the worst examples of sectarian strife in Upper Egypt during the past decade.
Finally, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the present book is that while it offers a critique of the status quo, it also provides proposals for change and reform. It offers the first extended examination of contemporary debates surrounding the issue of the politics of religious reform. However, one of the book's weak points is that there is a feeling of dejection about it, and much of the material has been recycled from previously published articles. Thus, the last part of the book consists of a disjointed collection of articles and lectures given at different international venues. While the book is written from a secular perspective, Abdel-Fattah describes a range of Islamist movements and thinkers, from those who support liberal democracy to those who want to establish a theocratic state. He also quotes at length from many sources, and perhaps another strong point of the book is its lengthy bibliography spanning a variety of literatures.
Abdel-Fattah's core message is that the religious establishment should work on updating Islam's message to meet contemporary requirements, basing this on a study of scholarly sources and media accounts as well as on his own observations. The book can be highly recommended because of its relevance to the current public debate in Muslim and Arab societies about religious reform. It is a survey that attempts to address the question of what has gone wrong and how things can be put right, and in this respect it could not be more timely.
Reviewed by
Omayma Abdel-Latif
