Interacción pública

In his already cited work on modern Islamic movements, Voll adopts an analytic typology of what he calls Islamic styles of action. He distin- guishes adaptationist, conservative, fundamentalist and personal-piety styles (Voll 1982: 29–31). These he presents as informing all periods of Muslim history, not just the modern era; but they are useful for discussing Islamic responses to the context characterized by European hegemony because they help one to appreciate both historical continuities and discontinuities in how modern Islamic movements have structured their responses and thereby contributed to the restructuring of Islam as a reli- gion in the global religious system. Briefly, adaptationist styles allow for Islam to change, to incorporate new ideas and forms that present them- selves in the environment. The Mutazilite incorporation of Greek philosophy or Akbar’s eclecticism in Mughal India can serve as examples. Conservatism wishes to preserve and rely on what has been received; it is a kind of ‘default’ style that reacts against movements of more radical change. Those who defend the status quo at any given time or place would be its representatives. The fundamentalist style insists on a reduc- tion or return to what is seen as the authentic core of Islam; it is past-oriented but often radical in its proposals for change and can include important innovation in areas that are not deemed as part of the core. The position of Ibn Taymiyyah or the Wahhabis already mentioned would be pre-modern examples. Finally, the personal-piety style focuses on the individual or restricted group practice of Islam, much of devotional and mystic Sufism of times past being one example. The utility of this typology in the present context is that it identifies four strategies that have been typical of Islamic responses to the modern and global circum- stances: reforming or modernizing Islam, simply continuing as before while allowing the gradual incorporation of changes once well estab- lished, redefining Islam in opposition to what are perceived as the dominant modern and global forces but thereby also introducing radical change of the Islamic status quo, and the privatization of Islam with varying specific emphases. The adaptationist and fundamentalist responses have received the most attention in the literature on modern Islam (see e.g. Donohue and Esposito 1982; Esposito 1983; Kurzman 2002), probably because they have in fact been the most visible and effec- tive. The possibility of conservative and personal-piety varieties should, however, be kept in mind. They may offer better prospects of longer-term stability in the global and modern contexts. All four styles can inform the kind of dissolution of received elements out of old structures and their recombination with new elements in new forms that is typical of the reconstruction of religions in contemporary global society.

Voll’s styles of Islamic action are useful as heuristic devices for classi- fying the different basic orientations that Muslims might use to respond to whatever historical situation they happen to find themselves in. How these styles manifest themselves in a particular circumstance, however, will depend, among other factors, on which sorts of social system they inform in any given historical period, and that again will depend on which kinds of system are dominant or available. In the past the segmentary system of the tribe, the clan, the family, the quasi-organizational brotherhood or core/peripheral and status group societal systems occupied this place. Islam and Islamic styles therefore incarnated themselves in and through these sorts of system. The increasingly preponderant place of functional societal systems, organizations and social movements in the globalizing society of the last two hundred years would, however, lead one to expect that the modern reconstruction of Islam as one of the major religions of the global religious subsystem will take place by way of these types of system. Interaction systems, of course, are universally present, whether in past or today’s societies. Above, I argued that the organization has been particu- larly critical in this regard as concerns the modern reconstruction of Christianity, but that social movements and other function systems have also played important roles in concretizing and controlling the recursive- ness of this religious subsystem. In the case of Islam, the same sorts of system have been involved, but the order of priority has been somewhat different. For the reconstruction of Islam as one of the religions, the social movement and other function systems, especially the political and the legal, have been more important, the organizational strategy having thus far played more of a supportive role. In consequence, for instance, the literature on modern Islam is currently dominated with analysis of various modern Islamic social movements, especially with the ideology and mobi- lization strategies of these movements (because that is what largely constitutes such systems); with the incorporation of Islamic meanings in the political and legal systems of various states; and relatively less, or primarily in that context, with express organizations such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Indonesian Muhammadiya or the South Asian Tablighi Jama’at, and even here as social movement organizations. Less movement-specific organizations, for instance various now more formally organized Sufi tariqats, Muslim student organizations or local mosque organizations, are beginning to receive more attention, however, indicating either a rise in the importance of the organizational form or simply greater attention to organizational responses that have been there for quite some time but ignored for various reasons.

The explanations for this different emphasis in comparison with Christianity are somewhat speculative. Part of an answer, however, undoubtedly lies in the already discussed Islamic precedents of the past, both the beginning ones and those of the more recent past, namely the

eighteenth-century reform movements. Above all, the critical position of tawhid and the very unorganizational stress of ummah make it more likely that reform will seek to engage society as a whole as its primary system of reference, and not one or more social subsystems of whatever type. The fluidity and restlessness of the social movement and the collectively binding quality of political and legal forms of power are better suited to such an emphasis than is strong reliance on the organization with its ability to carve out well-defined, even institutionally complete, but thereby also somewhat ‘sectarian’ social spaces. In combination, the resort to the broader and more nebulous forms easily confirms the impression that Islamic reform has sought anything but the differentiation of a specifically Islamic societal subsystem beside others. Meaningful intent, however, as modern revolutionary movements from the French and American to the Bolshevik, Maoist and Iranian show, does not usually translate directly into corresponding socio-structural consequences. Social systems have an independent logic of their own. Thus, the characteristic challenge for Islamic reconstruction has been, not the realization of utopia, but the translation of social movement impulses into available and more stable systemic structures which will perpetuate Islamic religious authority and operative recursiveness of Islamic communication. As with modern Christianity with its more clearly organizational emphasis, the alternative to such translation is a gradual dissipation of religious communication into the cultural ecological landscape, into individual bricolage, communitarian patterns and radical privatization.

In what seems like the majority of scholarly presentations of Islamic reform since the beginning of the nineteenth century, certain movements and certain historical figures appear again and again, even though, glob- ally, the field of such movements and figures is, as one might expect, exceedingly complex (Donohue and Esposito 1982; Kurzman 2002; Lapidus 1988; Voll 1982, 1999). The most frequently discussed nineteenth- century responses have been the adaptationist ones associated with names such as Sayyed Ahmad Khan in South Asia and Mohammad Abduh in Egypt, and fundamentalist movements represented especially by the more latter-day Arabian Wahhabis and the more personal-piety oriented Deobandis in South Asia. While far from presenting a complete picture, these movements can serve as representative examples of the sort of recon- struction efforts that dominated at that time. In looking at them more closely, however, it must be kept in mind that these were not express efforts to reconstruct Islam as one of the religions in a global religious system. As noted, in a real sense they sought to avoid that outcome. Yet in the context of the parallel construction of other systems, especially other function systems like the state or capitalist economy and other religions like Christianity, Sikhism and Hinduism, that is what they have contributed to accomplishing. More specifically, given the holistic

emphasis of most of these movements, they have to be understood in rela- tion to the parallel arising of more non-religious movements of response, especially nationalist ones. Whether in adaptationist or fundamentalist form, holistic Islamic movements, through their universalistic or pan- Islamic stress, have inevitably had to contend with nationalist movements, a critical factor in the parallel institutionalization of the modern political state system in Muslim majority areas as elsewhere. Although not unique to Islam, the ambiguous relationship between religion and state has been especially evident in this case, a symptom of two function systems constructing themselves with parallel meanings (e.g. ummah vs nation, tawhid vs the common good or nationalism) but with incompatible strate- gies of delimitation (Muslim bodies, wherever they are, vs sovereign territory). Thus the perpetual question has been whether Islam is for the nation or the nation is for Islam. Concretely, the only systemic ways of avoiding this outcome would have been to rely on other system types more heavily, above all, as in the Christian case, the organization.12

The South Asian reform direction represented by Sayyed Ahmed Khan (1817–98) in the latter half of the nineteenth century took very much Voll’s adaptationist direction. In the wake of repeated failed efforts to defeat British power and influence in India, ranging from the Barelwi revolt of the 1820s to the 1857 general Indian uprising, this member of the Muslim elite advocated acceptance of British political rule while at the same time promoting Muslim religious and cultural distinction. The rela- tion of his vision to the emergent functional prioritization represented by the British is instructive in the current context. Sayyed Ahmed Khan advanced a kind of scriptural ‘fundamentalism’ which, in typical fashion, rejected historic accretions to claim the Qur’an and the ‘indisputable’ Hadith as the only true sources of Islam. Those sources, however, had to be understood as being in consonance with human nature, meaning that true Islam could not be in contradiction with modern empirical science. It was not thus reduced to science, but rather re-imagined as a functionally resonant domain, as precisely not orthogonal. In tune with this refash- ioning of Islam, a main concrete institutional expression of this movement was the founding in 1874 of the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, today Aligarh Muslim University (see http://www.amu.ac.in). This institution aimed to train the modernizing elite that could restore Muslims to positions of power, a kind of Indian Muslim Eton and very unlike the traditional Islamic madrassa (Voll 1982: 112–13). The possible implica- tions of this direction for the understanding of Muslim religion appear with particular clarity in the orientation of Khan’s associate, Chiragh Ali (1844–95), who made a clear distinction between Islam as religion and the social system in which this religion was embedded, defending Islam as reli- gion especially against Christian criticism and rejecting the idea that Shari’a was anything like a codified, positive law or legal system (Donohue

and Esposito 1982: 38–47). If one adds the fact that neither Khan nor Ali advocated for a Muslim state and even eschewed a Muslim nationalist direction, then we have a revisioning of Islam very much in tune with a social context in which function systems dominate the societal structures. Religion remains important, even vital, but it is a domain beside others with which it is interdependent.

While Khan’s orientation demonstrates one possibility of Islamic recon- struction, and the movement that he represented was not without influence, other directions were just as consequential. Among these was that associated with the foundation of another school, the reform college at Deoband in 1867. Like the Muslim college at Aligarh, this school was structured along modern lines with a defined curriculum, institutional accreditation and a fixed professional faculty. Unlike Ahmed Khan’s insti- tution, however, it took a neo-Sufi direction, stressing the traditional Islamic sciences of Qur’an, Hadith and law without nearly as much atten- tion to non-traditional subjects like empirical science. The school was in fact the central institution in a much more communal, and even sectarian, response that sought to recreate as much as possible a Muslim society, but without the mechanism of a Muslim state. Beside establishing and running a growing system of schools, Deoband ulama encouraged their movement followers to consult them on all aspects of life, and were well known for the volume of legal rulings that they issued (Metcalf 1982). To re-form the Islamic community, they had to reform the practice of Islam, which meant, in Voll’s terms, a fundamentalist return to the sources and then the selective rebuilding of an authentic Islamic practice. In systemic terms, they sought to re-establish and strengthen the operative recursive- ness of Islamic communication through their reform programme. This purified Islam, in conjunction with the schools as the central modern institution and, be it noted, organization, was to be at the centre of a Muslim community, a kind of status group like an Ottoman millet or even a Christian sect, that sought precisely to avoid the dominance of function- based institutional systems and thus the differentiation of Islam as one of them and as one of the religions. What is particularly instructive about what one might thus call the Deoband option, however, is that it actually accords quite well with the re-ordering of social structure towards a dominance of function systems because it does not effectively seek to interfere with their development: it works towards the solidification of the Islamic religious system, leaving the political, economic and other systems to do likewise. The one system where it does ‘interfere’ is in education, but even here the segmentary differentiation of this system, as elsewhere in the world, allows parallel development of schools, in their own way as functionally coherent as any other, without requiring control of all schools. The efficacy of developing the Islamic religious system in this ‘pillarized’ fashion should not be underestimated, yet it immediately

points to a further possibility, and that is to do what Deoband tried to do, but expand the effort to, as it were, ‘colonize’ other developing function systems in addition to the educational, namely and especially the political and legal, and thereby also as much as possible the others within the borders of a particular state. This option is in fact the one that became most visible in the latter half of the twentieth century in the form of various ‘Islamist’ movements in numerous states. Its history in the modern period reaches back further than that.

Three movements will serve to illustrate this option and some of its variations: the movement associated with Abu al-Ala Mawdudi (1903–79) and the Jamaat-i Islami in South Asia/Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and twentieth-century Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. In each case, the relationship with their respective states has been different and, in the present context, instructive of how the differentiated construction of other function systems pushes religion in the direction of a parallel systemic development, even when religious ideology and state practice adopt a de- differentiating orientation. In all cases, this outcome is substantially the result of the fact that, even when Islam wants to be religion as such and not one of the religions, the parallel and global construction of other reli- gions makes that aim impossible to attain. Likewise, a state can become ‘Islamic’ to a significant degree, to the point even that it uses religious communication as the basis for many of its political decisions, much of its legislation, and to structure its legal system. Yet because that state is in fact a differentiated segment of a global function system that is the system of sovereign political states, it is also under substantial pressure in other respects to operate like any other state that is not Islamic, and thereby contribute to the reproduction of that differentiated system as well.

Like the Deobandis and others taking a more, in Voll’s terms, funda- mentalist direction, the twentieth-century Islamic revival movement associated with Mawdudi insisted on a recovery of Islam based on the original sources, but was also more or less open to modern techniques like empirical science and academic education, so long as Islam established their limits. Unlike the Deobandis, however, Mawdudi and the modern type of movement organization that he founded in 1941, the Jamaat-i Islami, took up the principles of tawhid and ummah in a broader and less sectarian fashion. This different orientation manifested itself above all in opposition to the Muslim nationalism represented by the Muslim League and its leaders like Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal. The League, some- what ironically, represented the main direction that Ahmed Khan’s more adaptationist direction had taken by the end of the nineteenth century. For Mawdudi, their idea of a modern Muslim state contradicted the societal holism reflected in tawhid since it in effect set up the nation with its state as the primary institutional domain, not religion. Correspondingly, by including only some Muslims within this state-centred understanding of

society, it also contradicted the notion of ummah as the community of all Muslims. Translated into the terms used here, Mawdudi opposed the League because its functional priorities were for him wrong: it set up the political system as a structural domain with an independent (Western) logic at least on a par with the (Islamic) religious system, if not frankly superior. In the historical context of the early to mid-twentieth century, however, Mawdudi’s direction did not have at its disposal the structural means that could put his vision into practical effect. An Islamic conquering army, for instance, such as the Barelwis had tried in the early nineteenth century, was not an option. The closest that he could come was to found a kind of ‘vanguard of Islam’ party in the form of the Jamaat-i Islami, a political organization that, like the communist parties of that time, could operate nationally but with international, here pan-Islamic, aspirations (Adams 1983). Again somewhat ironically, however, by the mid-twentieth century the viability of that option in the South Asian region already depended on the prior existence of just the sort of nation-state that