Manifestations of modern Islam

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 20

Manifestations of modern Islam

The second of two articles by Dr W. SHEPARD, a senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Canterbury, who recently spent several months travelling in the Muslim world. The first article was printed yesterday.

In the first article I indicated that Islamic resurgence mainly has to do with the application, or reapplication, of Islamic law and practice in the social life of Muslim countries. Under the impact of the West there has been considerable secularisation of public life and the current resurgence is a conscious effort to reverse this trend. We can discern four general orientations toward resurgence: secularist, which tends to resist it; radical Islamism (or “fundamentalism”), which is its most extreme and consistent manifestation, moderate Islamism (or Islamic modernism), which may be seen as an intermediate position, and conservatism, which represents a “pre-modernist” position. Conservatives are likely to move toward one of the Islamist postions under the conditions of the current resurgence. I shall now consider some of the areas of social life in which resurgence manifests itself and some of its longer term implications both for Muslims and for the world at large. First, however, we must note one area in which Islamic resurgence is not a major issue. This is the area of technological modernisation. Except for a few extreme conservatives at most, Muslims like other peoples want modern communications, medicine, sanitation, and the various other forms of modern technology including, of course, modern weapons. Islamist Iran, secularist Turkey, and conservative Saudi Arabia hardly differ on this matter. One of the most obvious misunderstandings of Islamic “fundementalism” is to suppose that it is anti-technological. It may question some of the uses to which technology is put, but not the value of technology as such. The same, we may note in passing, is true of Christian fundamentalism.

An area where resurgence makes less difference than we might suppose is that of formal public institutions. All Muslim countries today have institutions such as schools, universities, and banks, and Islamist States are about as likely (or unlikely) as secularist ones to have elections, parliaments, and political parties. While the Islamist holds that political authority derives from God and not from the people, Islam has always taught that humanity is the vice-regent of God on earth, and radical Islamist ideologues commonly see parliaments and elections, with appropriate safeguards, as suitable ways to organise this vice-regency today. The content of eduction is an area where Islamic resurgence does, at least potentially, make a difference. Islamic religion is generally taught to Muslim students in State schools throughout the Muslim world. This was not true in Turkey in its most radically secularist phase in the 1930 s and 19405, but has been since then. The more Islamist a country is, however, the more attention is likely to be given to religion in the schools and the greater the effort to integrate it into the curriculum as a whole. An interesting recent development has been the establishment in several countries (Algeria, Malaysia, Pakistan) of Islamic universities where the effort will be made to develop and teach the humanities and social sciences, at least, in a specifically Islamic way. It is argued, with some plausibility, that current social science is very much based on Western assumptions and is thus inappropriate for Muslim societies. Iran is trying to reorganise its whole university system in this direction, and closed the universities down for more than a year at

the beginning of the process in a effort to make a clear break with the immediate past Even more prominent has been the development of Islamic banking in the last decade. The Islamic scripture prohibits something it calls “riba,’’which may be interpreted as usury, but is more commonly considered to. be any form of fixed interest. It is argued that such interest is unjust since the lender expects to receive his return whether the borrower makes money or not Profit sharing, on the other hand, is acceptable and to a considerable degree Islamic banking involves an effort to base banking on this rather than on fixed interest. Islamic banks have been founded in a number of Muslim countries, and even in Europe, while a considerable literature on the subject has developed. In countries such as Egypt and Malaysia Islamic banks compete with traditional banks, while Iran has undertaken to put its whole banking system on an Islamic basis. An obvious problem for Islamic banking is how it will relate to the non-Islamic international banking system. Also, the theoretical writing on Islamic banking and economics has yet to develop the sophistication of standard economic theory. Still, it would be very prematture to write off Islamic banking or Islamic economics as an impossible dream in the modern world. If successful it could have a significant effect on the world economic system as a whole. The issue of women’s rights has received considerable attention in the Western media, and the general impression is that Islamic resurgence means regression in this area. It is true that the women’s movement that has developed in past decades has taken considerable inspiration from the West and some of its accomplishments are under threat. For example, laws giving women more equal access to divorce have been reversed in Iran and attacked in Egypt. It is also true that while Islam

affirms the spiritual equality of men and women, Islamic teaching has generally assigned them different social roles. Radical Islamists, however, do not see themselves as “regresing” or as attacking women’s rights, but rather as developing a properly Islamic women’s movement For them the West has gone too far in trying to ignore the differences between men and women and in opening the doors to immodesty and sexual license. For them, women’s primary responsibilities are to home and family, still, they are prepared to permit and even encourge women’s participation in the workplace and politics as long as it does not detract from the primary role. It may also be worth noting the Islamic modest dress is not, in many countries, a simple return to the past. The actual forms of dress are often quite new. This is not so true in Iran, but the Islamist women there strike me as far more active and aggressive than the usual image of the secluded Muslim woman. The area of public law is one of the most important for Islamic resurgence. In the past century there has been a tendency to reform criminal and commercial law along Western lines. Family law, including laws relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption, has stayed closer to traditional Islamic norms, but has been subject to some reform. The primary thrust of resurgence is to “apply the shari’ah (Islamic law),” as the current slogan in Egypt goes, in all these areas. Just how much difference this would make in practice, however, is not completely clear. Moderate Islamists in Egypt, for example, argue that only 10 to 20 per cent of present laws would have to be changed. Punishments such as cutting off the hand of a thief or whipping fornicators tend to grab the headlines in the West, and attract considerable discussion among Muslims, but their import for the total legal system is less clear. In fact, traditional Islamic law

hedges such punishments with many conditions, and even radical Islamists often argue that they should not be introduced apart from a total Islamisation of society. Perhaps the most difficult issue has to do with the place of nonMuslim religious groups, who comprise significant minorites in many , Muslim countries, about 10 per cent in Egypt and Indonesia, for example, and half the population of Malaysia. Traditional Islamic law assures most of these groups tolerance and protection, but not full equality before the law in the modern Western sense. These groups, which are often relatively well educated and economically strong, tend to be very apprehensive of moves to apply the Shari’ah and very reluctant to give up Western-style equality to the extent that it has been achieved. Except in Turkey, they present one of the strongest supports for a secularist political ideology. The situation of Baha, is in Iran has been particularly difficult, but is the result of distinctive factors. Pluralism at the world-wide level is also a major challenge for Islamist ideology. Muslim societies live in a larger and increasingly unified world in which they are a minority. If Islam is a total way of life, how does it function in a world in which it is' not predominant? The issue is particularly obvious in areas such as economics and banking, as already noted, and also in eduction, where large numbers of Muslims go to Western countries (including New Zealand) for advanced education. The radical Islamist answer would be to seek, in the long term, to establish Islamic systems capable of holding their own with the West on a world-wide basis. This raises an interesting question which, to my knowledge, has been faced clearly by few Muslim thinkers. Conventional wisdom is that we are rapidly developing a world-wide civilisation based on modern technology. Such a civilisation may not be “Western” in the strictest sense, but it is Western in origin and is likely to be Western in predominant inspiration, bearing in mind that Marxism is no less of Western origin than “free” world ideologies. The radical Islamist option would call this into question, since its long term logic involves the development of a full fledged modem Islamic civilisation standing at least on a par with the contemporary “free” and Communist worlds. The implications of a more moderate Islamism would probably be to make Muslim nations more culturally equal partners in the civilisation of the “free” world: Either development would, of course, have major consequences for all of us. A final question: does a resurgent Islam seek to concert the world to its religion? Like Christianity and Marxism, Islam claims universal validity and certainly Muslims rejoice to see outsiders enter the fold. An interest in what Christians would call evangelisation is part of the current Islamic resurgence. It is not its focus, however. The predominant view seems to be that Muslims must first set their own house in order, and the hope seems to be that once this is done Islam would become more attractive to many who now reject it.