GRUPO CLARIN S.A
NOTA 9 – MARCO REGULATORIO DE LOS SERVICIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN AUDIOVISUAL – PROCESO DE ADECUACION QUE SE EJECUTA COMO CONSECUENCIA DEL MISMO
Alongside these fundamental differences in political organisation between medieval Europe and the Arabo-Islamic world, there existed another crucial difference pertaining to social order and political economy in the pre-modern era.
Essentially, the subversion of the Roman Republic and Europe’s conversion to Christianity between the first and fifth centuries involved the de-urbanisation of the Roman Empire. Naturally, the questions of civil society and urban social order ceased to dominate the intellectual political debate on state-society relations as they had done during Greek and Latin antiquity. It was not until the twelfth century that new social actors, urban classes and non- agrarian economies emerged posing a threat to a predominantly-agrarian social order and a feudal political system (Anderson, 1974; 1979).
Islamdom on the other hand inherited Near Eastern antiquity: the nomadic Arab conquerors of Arabia quickly became the lords and rulers of the settled – agrarian and urban – civilisations of the Fertile Crescent and Nile Valley. This, as Ibn Khaldun argues in Al-Muqaddima, led to the substitution of the social order of unruly nomadic Arabs with the socio-political order of their subjects. Consequently, questions of state, society and government which prevailed in pre- Islamic Egypt, Byzantium, Persia and India influenced social order and political thought in the Islamic Middle Ages. Urbanity, civility and civil society were not issues that could be marginalised or deferred for centuries as they had been in medieval Europe.
Moreover, it must be noted that literacy amongst the urban middle classes in Arabo-Islamic cities in the Mashreq as well as the Maghreb and Al-Andalus was significantly higher than amongst medieval European elites. The ratio of kuttabs, madrassahs and public libraries to the average population of an Arabo-Islamic city, for instance, indicates the extent to which education and science were not as exclusive as they were in medieval Europe and explains the abundance of philosophers and scientists of modest backgrounds in the Arabo-Islamic world (Hanna, 2003:50).
Essentially, the existence of a large urban population engaged in mercantile commerce, banking and artisan industries as well as the existence of a considerable and erudite urban middle class engaged in scholarship and the production of knowledge throughout the pre- modern era underpinned the sophisticated political superstructure which entailed the trifurcation of sovereignty, authority and government.
In short, late-medieval Islamdom exhibited two seemingly-contradictory characteristics. On the one hand, a complex network of contractual relations underpinned the sophisticated social order and political economy of pre-modern Islamic society. These relations however did not exist within the overarching context of the state. Although warranted by a rational-religious system of courts and institutions of far-reaching reputation, contractual relations in the pre- modern realm of Islam were essentially rational-cultural relations rather than legal-contractual relations – that is to say, relations that are binding by force of cultural and social obligations, not legal arrangements enforced by the agencies of a modern state (Fukuyama, 2005:45).
2.3.3 The Civilisational Functions of Religion and Sub/Transnational Identities
Modernism in the Arabo-Islamic world ran contrary to the rational-developmental foundations of European modernity which assumed that man alone is capable of subduing nature. For modernists and proponents of the Enlightenment, primordial identities and religion are inherently irrational, naturalist and primitive. The metatheories of modernisation, therefore, not only pejoratively dismissed and trivialised ‘traditional’ notions of familialism, tribalism and confessionalism, but also perceived them as obstacles to modernity (Khalaf, 2003). Instead, the ‘modernity’ project emphasises national groups in a politico-territorial; and adopts rational- secular understanding of authority. Religion, modernists would argue, subordinates reason to transcendental wisdom; imposes itself on the individual, the economy and politics; prevents the disentanglement of spheres; and confines the human mind within impenetrable barriers.Of course, much of this may be true in the European historical experience where the ‘learned mind’ witnessed a sweeping liberation from the influence of Christian theology since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Indeed, today, rational reasoning, experimentation and
80
empirical research methods are the only basis for contemporary Western knowledge. But, to what extent is this hostile view of religion universally accepted as ‘modern’? And why have rational-secularist epistemologies not replaced religion in the making of modernity in several non-Western societies? Why does the literature suggest that ‘reformists’ and ‘revivalists’ in the early-modern Arabo-Islamic societies not see a contradiction between ‘aql (rational) and naql (received/transcendental) knowledge?
It has often been argued that the fundamental difference between the philosophical foundations of European and Arabo-Islamic civilisation lies not in religion per se but in their prioritisation of man, nature and God: whereas the epistemology of European modernity emphasises the first two, priority is given to God and man in Islamic ontology (Dhaoudi, 2005; Al-Jabri, 2006). This is evidenced by Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena, Al-Muqaddimah, for instance. In his seminal fourteenth-century universal history, he makes what would seem to be a paradoxical assertion for the Eurocentric modernist mind: ‘non-rational’ authority deteriorates and ‘traditionalism’ does not make it any stronger or more stable, he argued; however, rationalism and legalism are insufficient to stabilise and justify authority. Ibn Khaldun’s study of trends and transformations in the paradigm of collective solidarities draws on a wealth of empirical evidence from the Maghreb and Egypt – the former characterised by morphological severity and, thus, agnatic forms of solidarity (‘asabiya); the latter, by urbanity and, thus, civility (‘umran).
Ibn Khaldun’s theory of ‘umran and ‘ijtimā‘a, therefore, demonstrates a unique awareness of the inevitable demise of ‘traditional’ society and the rise of post-traditionalism where the city becomes the scene of the battle between social orders. Indeed, parallels can be drawn between Ibn Khaldun’s sociology and that of Durkheim insofar as they criticise forms of solidarity suitable for ‘simple societies.’ Unlike Durkheim however, Ibn Khaldun does not view religion as a form of solidarity for ‘simple societies’, but a catalyst for the transformation of nomadic Arabs into civilisation-builders; a ‘post-traditional’ form of solidarity capable of subduing primordial identities of clan/tribe and internalises the legal-moral value system underpining the transition to ‘umran and civility (Spickard, 2001; Boukraa, 2008; Chabane, 2008).
The favourable position religion occupies in the socio-political thought of ninteenth-century reformers and revivalists of the Nahda, however, must not only be viewed in relation to the relationship between ‘religion’ and reason in the late-medieval period, but also in relation to the exogenous forces trigerring the transition to modernity.
For them, Islam was not simply ‘in harmony with reason’; it offered the only response to the weakness and destruction of the ummah which was made apparent by the encounter with the
modern other – Europe. The revival of the ‘pristine values’ of Islam, therefore, promised not only to thrust Muslim societies to civility and modernity, but also a guardian of ‘authenticity’ and the backbone for the struggle against colonialism and acculturation (Al-Azmeh, 1993). The anticolonial function of Islam in Muslim societies was not merely a ‘reaction’ to Western modernity, but also because it claims equally the universality of its own worldview as does Western modernity. The springboard of the confrontational claims of universality by Western and Islamic modernities, it must be noted, is their concept of knowledge and epistemology that is grounded in their ontology. Indeed, as Kassim (2005:20) notes, “it is not a confrontation between Islam and Christianity as it was in the past from the times of the Crusades”; instead, it is a confrontation rooted in their divergent worldviews and parallel claims of universality. Confronted by the modern other, however, early-modern Islamist revivalists and reformists exhibited seemingly-contradictory traits: they condemned established orthodoxy and blamed it for backwardness vis-à-vis Europe; and, yet, resorted to ‘the pristine qualities of Islam in its purest form’. This is most evident in the works of such modernist-revivalists as Sayyid Jamāl- al-dīn al-Afghānī, Muhammad Abdūh and their disciples (Al-Afghānī, 1968; Keddie, 1968; Tibi, 1988; Al-Azmeh, 1993; Al-Khisht, 1998; Al-Afghānī and Abdūh, 2002; Kohn, 2009). Al-Afghānī, for instance, argued that ‘Islam in its purest form’ is central not only to intellectual authenticity, but also to the transformation from barbarism and superstition to civilization and reason. On its socio-political potential, he condemned ties of ethnicity and, even, language to the advantage of ‘religious orthodoxy’ which, he argued, provided social cohesion, identity and mobilisation versus the ‘colonial other’ (Al-Afghānī, 1968:9-12). Moreover, he contended that Islam was, in fact, superior to secular authority because it internalised law:
religious orthodoxy, devoid of superstition and innovations, empowers nations with forces of cohesion and unity. It promotes a conciseness of honour over one of lust; encourages virtue; encourages scientific inquisition; and pushes societies to the apex of civility (Al-Afghānī and Abdūh, 2002:115)
In short, it is evident that, unlike Western modernity, Islam is attributed a crucial civilisational function by important social actors/movements which undertook to articulate the socio-cultural project of modernity in their respective societies. This can, in part, be attributed to a perceived harmony between Islam and reason; but, more importantly, can be understood in relation to the civilisational claim of universality rooted in the concept of knowledge, epistemology and ontology in Islam. In the context of the acculturation of world society and the ability and desire of ‘the modern other’ to ‘mold the entire world in its own modern ontology of the present’, the parallel claims of universality between Islam and ‘the West’ become all the more omnipresent in the mindset of the social actors/movements articulating Arabs’ ‘subaltern modernity’.
82