Ortelius Lecture 5:Ortelius Lecture 5 - Netherlands Institute for ...

Ortelius Lecture 5:Ortelius Lecture 5

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The Dialectics of Enlightenment, Barbarism and Islam Mona Abaza


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NIAS Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar Telephone: (0)70-512 27 00 Telefax: (0)70-511 71 62 E–mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.nias.knaw.nl The Ortelius Lecture, a joint initiative of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and The University of Antwerp (UA), is a series of lectures set up to further Dutch-Flemish cooperation in the humanities and social sciences. The series is named after the famous sixteenth-century Antwerp cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598). The Fifth Ortelius Lecture was held at Antwerp 9 May 2007 NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/4 ISBN 978-90-71093-57-9 ISSN 1570-7483; 5 (c) NIAS 2007. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher.

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The Dialectics of Enlightenment, Barbarism and Islam

Le cheykh el-Islam lui-meme, qui a lu mon voyage, en a été très satisfait, et m’a promis d’écrire à son Altesse pour l’engager à le faire imprimer, regardant cette publication comme le moyen le plus efficace d’engager les musulmans à aller chercher les lumières à l’étranger, et venir ensuite les propager et les naturaliser dans leur pays. An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826-1831) by Rifa’a Rafi’alTahtawi, Daniel L. Newman, Saqi, London, 2004 Extract from a letter to Jomard written shortly after Al-Tahtawi arrived home from Paris in 1831

Multiculturalism amounts to legal apartheid

Pascal Bruckner

Islam is like communism

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The clash is between “Enlightenment fundamentalists” and “cultural relativists”

Adam Krzeminski

Multiculturalism is not cultural relativism

Jesco Delorme

Enlightenment Fundamentalism or (the) racism of the anti-racists?

Pascal Brueckner

The problem isn’t Islam, or Enlightenment, or multiculturalism, or postmodernism, or relativism: it’s dogmatism

Stuart Sim

These quotations portray the recent debates in Europe on the topic of Islam and Enlightenment. While my talk focuses on the understanding of Enlightenment in the Middle East, I believe these debates will have serious repercussions in the Arab World.


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This kind of terminology emerged out of the dispute amongst European intellectuals after Hirsi Ali’s book Infidel appeared.1 Other catchphrases on the dialectics of Enlightenment, barbarism, and Islam have been circulating since the early 1990s, paving the path of right-wing religiosity long before 9/11. Consider a phrase like Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”,2 sardonically reworded by Edward Said as the “clash of ignorance”.3 Tariq Ali altered the phrase again to the “clash of fundamentalisms”,4 to condemn an increasing global parochialism that is celebrating a “cult of stupidity” in a world in which “disappointment breeds apathy”. He describes the response to tyranny and oppression as an escalating vicious circle of more tyrannical means. Buzzwords have swamped the media as well as the academic field. As some social scientists have claimed,5 the public discourse has enforced a dichotomous and simplistic divide: a liberal and democratic West that is either Christian or secular, opposed to a unified entity of aggressive Muslims who advocate religious totalitarianism. Others have argued that Islam is represented in the West as an “Otherness” so radically different that it is defined as a “historical enemy” equivalent to the communist threat decades earlier.6 Some claim that the divide now centres on “culturalist differentialism” with racist undertones.7 If we follow the logic of Huntington’s clash of civilizations, the fight between the North and South will no longer be about economic disparities and inequalities, or ideologies, but rather about cultures and civilizations, as if these were essential, unchanging entities. This dichotomizing ignores ethnic, national, and class differences among Muslims. As some Middle Eastern specialists predicted, the consequence of such a classification has been the Islamization of immigration.8 Sami Zubaida argues

1 The debate included Ian Buruma, Pascal Bruckner, Timothy Garton Ash, Necla Kelek, Paul Clitteur, Stuart Sim and others. For the debates see the link www.http//signandsight.com. See also Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture, The Right to Offend , delivered in Berlin on 9 February 2006. 2 As a reminder Samuel Huntington published his article in 1992. Huntington’s ideas influenced the hegemonic policies of the neo-conservatives. 3 Edward W. Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, in The Nation, 22 October 2001. 4 The phrase became the title of his recent book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, Verso, London, 2002. 5 Sami Zubaida, ‘Islam in Europe’, http://www.isnethz.ch/5isf?papers?Zubaida_5 20 paper-111.2.pdf 6 Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, Verso, 1993, p.4. 7 Aziz al-Azmeh (1993) p.6. 8 Rudolph Peters, ’A Dangerous Book Dutch Public Intellectuals and the Koran’, in The European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Mediterranean Programme Series, RSCAS No 2006/ 39.

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that there is no such a thing as a pure Islamic culture, but multiple local settings and contexts. Nevertheless, with some 20 million Muslims living in Europe today there appear to be only two options presented: the Islamization of Europe or the Europeanization of Islam, with the inclusion of Muslims through the notion of citizenship.9 My talk will focus on the impact of clichés that portray the “West” as secular, successful and democratic, facing a blurred entity of “Muslims” who are seen as having failed to enter modernity. I will discuss how the discourse on Enlightenment has become significant in contemporary politics, but how it is differently perceived in Europe and in the Middle East. Is it still possible to speak confidently of a “secular” West? In the aftermath of 9/11 the former Italian prime minister, Berlusconi, redefined a new Europe “on the basis of common Christian roots” with the “opponents of global capitalism as the targets of a Western crusade”.10 What is mostly dismissed is that his attack on Islam, which compared it to “Western superiority”, lumped together anti-globalization protesters and Muslim terrorists. And in Germany, Udo Ulfkotte recently advocated the urgency of creating a “Christian Ecological party” to oppose the Islamization of Germany. Ulfkotte, a former editor of the German FAZ (Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung) newspaper, founded the new Pax Europa association. It is interesting that Europeans are suddenly emphasizing the “Christian-Jewish tradition”11 to define their identity in contradistinction to the enemy number one: Islam. Misunderstandings have escalated in response to the Pope’s recent speeches about Islam, the cartoon events, and the issue of the face veil. It is as if cross-cultural communication has descended into a Babylonian confusion of tongues. At the same time, American hegemony is growing hand in hand with the rise of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. The religious fundamentalists are magnified as the evil “Other”. In the culture of fear generated since 9/11, Bush, the double of Bin Laden, has launched a war against terror based on a Manichean view. “God bless America” seems to be turning into a crusaders’ battle of the “West versus the rest”.

9 Bassam Tibi, ‘Der Euro-Islam als Bruecke zwischen Islam und Europa’, see http://print.perlen taucher.de./artikel/3764.html 10 Stefan Steinberg ‘Racist Vomit from Italy’s PM Berlusconi’, World Socialist Website, 29 September 2001. (add) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/sep2001/ital-s29.shtml 11 See Jan-Philpp Hein, ‘Neokonservatives Projekt, Autor Ulfkotte plant anti-islamische Partei’, in Spiegel on Line,16 March 2007.


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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has experienced almost unlimited power, along with emerging forms of rule whereby ‘extra-territoriality’ and ‘extra-legality’ are becoming the norm. At the same time, some argue that an increasingly fluid global financial system sanctions large illegal forms of transactions.12 Zygmunt Bauman predicts that “fluidity” and fluid capitalism, characterized by an ungraspable shape, will be the future concern of social scientists.13 Richard Sennet’s concern in his book The Culture of the New Capitalism,14 is how humankind can survive in unstable, fragmentary conditions where short-term jobs, short-term relationships and constant mobility must be managed, along with our flexibility be competitive in the market.15 This new culture based on unpredictability, velocity and constant adaptation suggests that humanity will be permanently deprived of long-term vision. I am afraid that this fluidity is a global predicament that will impinge on the poor and marginalized of the South as well as their counterparts in the North. Alongside these political, economic and social trends, there is a serious assault on the values of Enlightenment in the West. The public visibility of jihadist groups is growing in parallel with anxiety over the integration or assimilation of migrants in Europe. In this climate, Berlusconi can casually declare that Muslims have failed to enter modernity because they do not have a Mozart or a Michelangelo.16 Berlusconi’s reasoning here advocates a ‘‘missing stage’’ of development, an issue hotly debated by Middle Eastern intellectuals. But the suggestion that the ‘‘primitive’’ still needs to be civilized to reach maturity and autonomy is as old as John Stuart Mill’s argument about the self-rule of the natives in his essay On Liberty17. On the other hand, the rise of a rigid, re-invented form of communalism among some Muslims in Europe is the mirror image, similar to an “Orientalism in

12 Aziz al-Azmeh, Postmodernism, Obscurantism, and the ‘Muslim Question’, http: // jsr.ro old/ html 20 version /index/no-5/ azialazmeh-articol.htm, p.13. 13 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Moderntity, Polity Press, 2000. 14 Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2006 15 See Sennett (2006), pp.3-4. 16 Edward W. Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, p.2. 17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, 2000, p.8.

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Reverse”.18 The Islamists provide the ideal raison d’etre for the right wing ascendance of the Berlusconis and the Le Pens. They share a common denominator, both fuelling hatred towards “Otherness”.

Enlightenment and Immigrants in Holland The murder of film director Theo van Gogh in 2004 polarized a divide between members of the immigrant Muslim community and Dutch nationals around the idea that Enlightenment values were endangered by a new barbarism. In the Dutch public debate, Muslims living in Holland were portrayed as perpetrating “medieval” worldviews that threatened Dutch ideals.19 As Ian Buruma argued in Murder in Amsterdam,20 this threatened ‘erosion’ of Enlightenment values dominated Dutch political discourse after the murder of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn and the death of Andre Hazes: the three “saints”, as Martin Van Bruinessen described them. Their funerals awoke populist and religious sentiments that revealed a malaise in Dutch society. The immense public interest in the burials provided coherence for “a civil religion or civil cult” that could “(fill) the gap left by the decline of the ‘pillar’ system”.21 At the same time, Islam became the scapegoat upon which all deviances in society were blamed. The funerals released popular feelings that crossed classes and political loyalties. Not only did the funerals generate “mass hysteria” as Buruma observed in Fortyun’s case;22 most importantly, they allowed the expression of anti-immigrant sentiments that were not classified as xenophobic.23 Once again, the controversy created a simplistic Manichean divide of Enlightenment versus counter-Enlightenment.24 For example the writer Leon de

18 A term coined by Sadeq Jalal al-’Azm. 19 Léon Buskens, ‘A Medieval Islamic Law? Some Thoughts on the Periodization of the History of Islamic Law’, unpublished paper, 18 December 2006. 20 Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Penguin Books, 2006. 21 Martin Van Bruinessen, ‘After Van Gogh: Roots of Anti-Muslim Rage (or :Islam Defining a New Dutch Civil Religion?)’, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)/Utrecht, 2006. 22 See Buruma (2006), p.65. 23 See Van Bruinessen (2006). 24 Buruma (2006), p.169.


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Winter remarked after van Gogh’s murder that “the nation of Spinoza and Erasmus was dead”.25 Former Dutch MP Hirsi Ali was depicted as the “Voltaire of Islam”, who dared to “ecraser l’infame” 26 by publicly stating that Islam was the cardinal problem. Hirsi’s cry is legitimate. Her critique of barbaric female circumcision practices, mutilations, and the oppression of women can only be saluted, but her condemnation of Islam with a capital “I” again falls into a culturalist trap. Right wing conservatives have appropriated her discourse. They are delighted to reduce the problem of immigrants to a war of religions in order to reclaim Dutchness (a Dutchness which perhaps has to be re-invented to inhabit the ungraspable liquid modernity mentioned earlier). Such a stand has antecedents in colonialism with its imposition of the civilizing mission and the white man’s burden that encouraged a type of ‘colonial feminism’ for Muslim women, while ignoring feminism in the metropolis. This move was not so much intended to support Muslim women as to show the backwardness of Islam.27 I am deeply concerned with the conservative or neo-conservative appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse. Ian Buruma, Martin van Bruinessen and Rudolph Peters, among others, have argued that conservative Enlightenment turned out to be a ready-made anti-immigrant slogan; an identity marker of cultural superiority in a discourse loaded with allusions to taming the barbarians. Buruma argues that the neo-conservative agenda is in fact an attack on secularism, which is perceived as having exceeded its limits and undermined the power of the church.28 The Enlightenment discourse suits the cliché of “We” the liberals versus the tyrant “Other”. A cliché so much perpetrated to obfuscate inner class contradictions. It seems that “elite Enlightenment”29 works hand in hand with the culturalist view to revive the public discourse on the perils of immigration; as if class has disappeared from the dictionary of sociology, and culture has replaced race and ethnicity as markers of the immutable essence of the outsider.30

25 Buruma (2006), p.192. 26 Buruma (2006), p.170. 27 Rudolph Peters ‘‘A Dangerous Book‘, Dutch Public Intellectuals and the Koran’ European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Mediterranean Programme Series. RSCAS No 2006/39. 28 Buruma (2006), p.34. 29 I borrow the term from Martin van Bruinessen. 30 See Martin van Bruinessen, ‘After Van Gogh: Roots of Anti-Muslim Rage (or: Islam Defining a New Dutch Civil Religion?)’, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)/Utrecht, 2006.

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But has the assimilation of immigrants really failed? In a recent study, Dominique Cobet interviewed 10 artists of Moroccan origin who are prominent in Dutch culture.31 When I see the abundant literary publications of second generation Moroccans and Turks in Holland, and the encouragement of alternative writing and its positive reception, I can only say that it is surprising that the jihadist minority succeeded in getting what they wanted: media attention. To celebrate multiculturalism does not imply a lack of vigilance vis-à-vis radical Islamism. It does not mean ignoring the violation of human rights or the intimidation of dissident and alternative voices.

Enlightenment and Controversy in the Middle East From the Dutch debate, l shift now to the Middle East, where the concept of Enlightenment carries different meanings and practices as a result of crosscultural colonial encounters. The values of Enlightenment were transported during the nineteenth century by white colonizers, but as postcolonial critics contend, there is a paradox. Enlightenment’s other facet is the imperialist civilizing mission. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, if humanism was preached by the colonizer, it was “at the same time denied its practice” to the locals.32 Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe deconstructs the myth of Europe by decentring modernity. While refuting a “nativist” position, Chakrabarty attempts to globalize history and include alternative narratives. Kant’s question, “What is Enlightenment?” would also have been answered differently in the Chinese context. Here it meant the dismantling of feudalism, the birth of the nationalist movement, the abolishment of religious superstition and patriarchal culture as well as the challenging of the ideology of subordination in Confucianism.33 For nineteenth century Chinese reformists the formula was

31 Dominique Cobet, Shouf, Shouf Hollanda, des artistes maroco-hollandais sur la scène culturelle néerlandiase, Tarik editions, 2005. 32 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, 2000, p.4 33 Vera Schawrz articulates this as a difference to European enlightenment rather than a similarity. However, one could draw parallels here with the reformation’s attack on the feudal power of the Catholic Church as similar to Confucianism.


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“Chinese learning as the goal, Western learning as the means”.34 This brings me to the debate about the periodization of Enlightenment in nonWestern cultures. For the Arab world, enlightenment (tanwir) is interchangeably used with the word renaissance (nahda),35 and it implicitly includes reform (Islah). This interchangeability in itself reveals how blurred the concept of Enlightenment is in the Middle East. For some, the awakening of Egypt begins with the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798 and the culture shock which followed. The scientific and military potency of the “civilizing mission” has been perceived as positive in liberal circles, among modernist historiographers, and in Egyptian school manuals; especially for its impressive classifications of knowledge epitomized in the Description de l’Egypte. However Marxist intellectuals like the Syrian philosopher Sadeq Jalal al-‘Azm and ‘Aziz al-‘Azmeh, argue that renaissance (nahda) and enlightenment (tanwir) came about with the movement and reforms of tanzimat in the Ottoman period, without which there would have been no enlightenment.36 They argue that with the tanzimat movement, a material transformation had already occurred as an overture to the intellectual movement. From the 1830s, the tanzimat’s universal reforms replaced religious affiliations with the notion of citizenship, liberating the Muslim world from a “religious matrix” by transforming the relationship between the temporal and the spiritual. The emergence of constitutional movements in Turkey and Egypt led to the creation of secular institutions of education and new judicial systems. A new class of secular intellectuals emerged, which ultimately led to the marginalization of the traditional religious intellectuals (ulama). This also coincided with the birth of the voluntarist state and later nationalism.37

34 Vera Schwarz, The Chinese Enlightenment, Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1986, p.5. 35 Schwarz (1986), p.5. 36 The tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire took place between 1839 and 1876. These reforms, which led to the modernization of Turkey and encouraged Ottomanism among secessionist groups, introduced European ideas and practices. Decrees led to the creation of new institutions that guaranteed new rights and liberties. The finance system and the civil and criminal codes were remodelled on the French system, and in 1876 an Ottoman constitution was created to limit the powers of the Sultan. See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzimat. 37 See Aziz al-Azmeh, in Abdou Filali Ansari, Réformer líslam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003, pp.149-150.

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Re-evaluations of the French Expedition to Egypt The association of Napoleon’s imperial project with the coming of modernity and thus “Enlightenment” is much debated by contemporary Egyptian historians. Many express a strong distaste for this association. In 1998, the idea of a joint EgyptianFrench commemoration of the French expedition to Egypt was challenged by antagonistic Egyptian public opinion. Reactions to the event demonstrated that Egyptian and French citizens have different and conflicting memories.38 Should the event have been commemorated anyway, as an opportunity to question the myth of Napoleon as the liberator? In the same year Leila ’Enan, Professor of French Literature at Cairo University, published her highly controversial book on Napoleon, titled Enlightenment or Falsification, the French Expedition, a Historical Trial. ’Enan asked why Napoleon’s crimes against his own troops have been ignored in a “cri du coeur” against Napoleon’s glorification.39 ’Enan’s alternative reading of French sources argues that the French expedition was in fact a military failure, burdened with heavy deaths, illnesses and numerous revolts and she asks, “Why do Egyptians have a stake in using the sequence of events between 1798 and 1805 as their point of departure for the modern world?”40 How, then, do we think history differently? How do we rethink periods alternatively? And how do we contextualize Islamic history within a universal framework? On these perspectives the work of Marshall Hodgson is essential. Hodgson critiques Eurocentrism and historicism, questioning whether the representation of a universal history has been a rigorous enterprise. For example Eurocentrism is clearly manifested in cartography which represents Europe as the centre; and by historians and philosophers who focus on Europe and relegate other civilizations to the periphery. In order to situate Islam within modernity, Hodgson believes we must also contextualize the specificity of historical Islam.41

38 See Ghilaine Alleaume, ‘Des incertitutes de La Mémoire Aux Exigences de l´Histoire, Le bicentenaire de léxpedition d’Egypte’. L‘Expédition de Bonarparte Vue D‘Egypte, in Egypte Monde Arabe, CEDEJ, ni.1999/1. 39 Peter Gran, Temple University, book review of Leila ‘Enan al-Hamla al-faransiyya. Tanwir aw tazwir (part one): al Hamla al-faransiyya fi mahkamat al-tarikh (part two), Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1998.’ Abd alRahman al-gabarti, Mazhar al-taqfidd bi-dhahab dawlat al-faransis, edited by Abd al-Raziq Isa and Imad Ahmad Hilal, Cairo: al-‘Arabi, 1998, 2 volumes. L‘Expédition de Bonarparte Vue D‘ Egypte, Egypte Monde Arabe, CEDEJ, ni.1999/1, pp.221-223. 40 See Gran Book review of Laila ‘Enan (1999), p.222. 41 See the chapter on Marshall Hodgson in Abdou Filali Ansari, Réformer líslam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003, p.75.


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He seeks alternatives to partial histories and philosophical theories. Arabists Peter Gran and Reinhard Schulze similarly challenge mainstream historiography in their search for indigenous forms of Muslim intellectual revival in the 18th century. Why the 18th century? Because of the long tradition of viewing this century as decadent compared to the19th century, which witnessed the advent of modernity. Pre-modern Muslim societies were seen as stagnating, devoid of their own self-regenerating transformation. However both Gran and Schulze argue that one can trace elements of intellectual enlightenment already in place by the 18th century. In Islamic Roots of Capitalism,42 Gran analyzes 18th century Egypt as an integrated part of the European industrial revolution, comparing Egypt’s sociocultural formation to Italy. Gran contends that the cultural and material life of Egypt was already closely connected to the Mediterranean world. He speculates that non-Western cultures could also have engendered capitalist economies.43 Schulze too raises the question of the possibility of Islamic modernity.44 Schulze challenges the simplistic analysis of contemporary Muslim cultures in terms of tradition or modernity, where non-Western societies are identified as traditional, then contrasted with modern European societies. Tradition here is often interpreted as the absence of modernity. However, there is also a prevailing view of the Muslim world as having witnessed only “one half of modernity”, relegating it to a “half modern-half traditional, schizoid life”.45 Schulze examines the intellectual and cultural production of the 18th century found in Sufi and mystical thinking, in music and poetry as it pertains to the formation of intellectuals and elites. He also investigates an “Islamic public sphere” manifested in the creation of public spaces: coffee houses, private salons and clubs, gardens (as the loci of poetry reading) and graveyards, where Sufi orders would gather and where literary exchange took place. These public spaces engendered gatherings, ritual performances, discussion, and the exchange of information and politics.46

42 Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840, University of Texas Press, 1978. 43 Gran was influenced by the pioneering work of the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson, author of Islam et Capitalisme, Seuil, Paris, 1966. 44 See Reinhard Schulze ‘Is There An Islamic Modernity’, in The Islamic World and the West: an Introduction to Political Cultures and International Relations, edited by Kai Hafez, Brill, Leiden, Boston & Köln, 2000, pp 21-32, p.31. 45 See Schulze (2000), pp.21-22. 46 Reinhard Schulze, ‘Graeber, Kaffehauser und Salons: Raume und Orte Islamischer Kultur im 18 Jahrhundert’, in Asiatischen Studien 50, 1996, pp.761-778.

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Arab modernists may argue that researching the 18th century is beside the point, yet another form of the ‘authenticity’ discourse. It is fait accompli, they say: the Middle East has been irreversibly transformed and incorporated into modernity. Any reactive expressions, including Islamism, are merely derivatives of Western thought.

The Muslim Luther As mentioned earlier, changes in Muslim societies after the tanzimat reforms raised the question of an Islamic modernization. Certainly, reform would not have occurred had the agents for change not encountered the readings and ideas of Western Enlightenment thinkers. One of the most significant agents was Jamal uddin al Afghani (1838-1897) who encouraged the idea of pan-Islamism, with strong anti-colonial undertones. Both Jamal uddin al Afghani and his disciple Mohammed ‘Abduh (1849-1905) have been compared to Martin Luther. These intellectuals were interested in adapting religion to the modern world. The compatibility of reason with faith was the core of their argument. Like Luther, Afghani and Abduh attacked religious corruption and decaying religious institutions. Both reformers aspired to return to the true origins of religion. Yet these early reformers were viewed as having their gaze directed towards dialogue with the West.47 They were mainly trying to find answers to issues of societal change. We know today that ‘Abduh was mainly inspired by Comtean positivism.48 Francophonie was essential to education amongst some elites by the late nineteenth century. Montesquieu and Voltaire had been translated by then and positivism was popular among the educated classes. ‘Abduh’s main concern was the corruption of Islam by its rulers throughout history. Because a gap had already opened up between the traditional religious education and modern education under European influence, there were new possibilities for religious reform. ‘Abduh questioned “whether someone who lived in the modern world could still be a devout Muslim”.49 Influenced by Comte, ‘Abduh argued that Islam was

47 See Abdel Majid Charfi, ‘Le temps de la reforme est-t-il venu?’, in Abdou Filali Ansari, in Reformer l’islam, une Introduction aux débats Contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003, p.238. 48 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.138. 49 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.139.


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potentially a rational religion, and encouraged the creation of a new type of ulama who would teach “real Islam”.50 ‘Abduh’s Quran commentary was the first modern commentary made available to, and readable by the general public, and influenced Egyptian nationalism and feminism.51 Why is it that the dialogue has hardly progressed since Afghani’s heated debate with the French philologist Ernst Renan, on the incompatibility of Islam with science? In 1883 when Renan declared that the Semitic mind was inherently incompatible with science and philosophy, Afghani replied that clearly religion did hinder sciences and Islam was not unique in this matter. His argument was that “all religions are intolerant and inimical to reason, and the progress that the West had manifestly achieved was accomplished despite Christianity”.52 Yet recent statements by Pope Benedict XVI repeat the same premise, already discussed and refuted a century and a half earlier. The struggles amongst Muslims that led to the renewal of thought in the Muslim world are ignored. For example in 1925, Sheikh Ali Abdel Raziq published a book arguing for the abolition of the Caliphate. Citing the Quran and other sources, he argued for the separation of state and religion and posed a simple question: “Was the Prophet a King?”53 This triggered a scandal, and his expulsion from his position. In 1926, Taha Hussein published his Pre-Islamic Poetry whereby he questioned the historicity of pre-Islamic poetry and cast doubt on whether it was written before Islam. He was put on trial for insulting Islam. These two events have been understood as decisive in the battle for the secularization of thought in the Middle East.54 But the intellectuals themselves were vilified when the masses reverted to the Islamic matrix, opting to stand against them.55 Again, in 1947, Mohammed Ahmed Khalafallah presented his doctoral thesis at alAzhar University on the art of literary narration in the Quran. His approach led to

50 Hourani (1983), p.140. 51 Perhaps ‘Abduh can be compared to the English theologian and reformist John Wycliffe (1320-1384), the first translator of the Bible into English. 52 Aziz al-Azmeh ‘Laicité et Culturalisme dans le Monde Arabe’, in Abdou Filali Ansary, Réformer l’islam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003. 53 Abdou Filali Ansari (2003), p.5. 54 See Aziz al-Azmeh, in Abdou Filali Ansari, Réformer l’islam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003, p.153. 55 See Aziz al-Azmeh, in Abdou Filali Ansari (2003), p.154.

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the refusal of his thesis, his transfer to a non-teaching job, and his professor being banned from teaching Islamic studies. Even an academic like the Pakistani scholar Islam Fazlur Rahman, who strongly defended the faith with rigorous scientific inquiry and well-founded historical research, was never really accepted in his home country. His proposals to reform Islam drew violent opposition from traditional Muslim groups, resulting in him leaving Pakistan for Chicago in 1968.56 In the last three decades the Middle East has witnessed an escalating religious witch-hunt, which has spread an atmosphere of terror among writers, novelists, film directors, artists and intellectuals who criticize the use and abuse of religion. They have been accused of blasphemy, “threatening public morality”, spreading pornography in the universities and apostasy or unbelief (invoking a license to kill). Censoring books, suing for libel, and jail sentences have become routine and are no longer news in our part of world. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture has been paralyzed since the 1980s, when the al-Azhar Committee for Research and Publication was given the power to charge authors with apostasy and to censor cultural products. In 1985, the Sudanese Mohammed Mahmud Taha, who wrote The Second Message of Islam was hanged by the Numeiri government for apostasy. He had protested when Islamic shari’a law was applied. Nobel Prize recipient Naguib Mahfouz was not spared from censorship either. University of Leiden Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was declared an apostate in the 1990s and his mentor Professor Hassan Hanafi was charged with unbelief (takfir) by the al-Azhar ’Ulama Front. Egyptian historian Sayyed Al-Quimni had his writings banned and was threatened with death by Islamists, which led to his silence. A Kuwaiti professor, Ahmed Baghdadi, who specializes in early Islamic history, was also charged with disbelief. In 1999, religious opponents attacked Palestinian singer Marcel Khalifa in Lebanon, for singing Mahmud Darwish’s poem, I am Youssef, Father. In 2000, two female writers were jailed in Kuwait for publishing work that is allegedly blasphemous and morally decadent. In the same year, students of the religious University of alAzhar organized mass riots when the Egyptian Ministry of Culture reprinted Syrian writer Haydar Haydar’s novel, first published some 17 years earlier. The same Ministry banned three other novels a few years later, having succumbed to the

56 See Abdou Filali Ansari’s chapter on Fazlur Rahman in Réformer l’islam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003.


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pressure of the Islamists. Even the American University in Cairo has not been spared. Its professors have been accused of teaching ‘pornographic’ novels and texts that offend religion. Plays have been banned, censorship has been strengthened and the importing of books undergoes state control.

Current Debates amongst Arab Intellectuals Despite this censure, the problématique of reform, Enlightenment and renaissance has continued to prompt fascinating discussion within the Middle East. An abundant flow of publications,57 debates and newspaper articles demonstrates the growing significance of alternative, contesting voices that apply rigorous historical critiques to Islamic heritage and history. These voices examine modernity, alterity, and the Other. Several express the frustration that it is as if no new questions have been raised since Abduh’s reformism. Some Arab intellectuals associate the ‘failure’ to create an Arab renaissance and subsequently an Islamic alternative, with the model of the state of Israel. The West is still remaining persistently as the cardinal “Other”, Equally, today Israel being still celebrated as a “modern oasis of democracy” in the middle of patriarchal authoritarian regimes has widened the gap. Michael Ben Yair has argued that “(t)he enlightened world’s recognition of the solution’s moral justification was an important, principal factor in Israel’s creation. In other words, Israel was established on a clear, recognized moral base”.58 But this argument is contradicted by the very act of Israel’s foundation with the violent eviction of some 900,000 thousand Arabs. This is a view acknowledged even by some revisionist Israeli historians. One can draw an affinity between these left wing Israeli intellectuals and the Moroccan philosopher M. Abid al-Jaberi.59 Both argue that Zionism was part and parcel of European modernity, and that Israel as the socialist Zionist utopia was realized at the expense of the existing inhabitants of the land. Perceived in this way

57 To cite a few recent edited volumes: qadaya al-tanwir wal nahda fil fikr al-‘arabi al-mu’asir, marquaz dirasat al-wahda al-‘arabiyya, Beirut, 1999; Hasilat al-‘aqlaniyya wal-tanwir fil fikr al-‘arabi al-mu ‘asir, marquaz dirasat al-wahda al-‘arabiyya, Beirut, 2004. 58 Michael Ben Yair, ‘The Six-Day War’s Seventh Day’, in The Other Israel, Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, The New Press, 2002, p.13. 59 Mohammed Abid al-Jabiri, Al-mashru’ al-nahdawi al-‘arabi, Marqaz dirassat al-wahda al-‘arabiyya, Beirut, 1996.

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as a colonial implant, Israel poses the contradiction that what constitutes “democracy for some (means) dispossession for others”.60 Ilan Pappe agrees that “Israel’s creation was thus enabled by military power, ethnic cleansing and the dearabization of the country”.61 The very idea of the “success” of the state of Israel, a state based on religious-ethnic particularisms, established a role model for the Islamists. Their project is to create a mirror image: a “modern” Islamic state. Leaving Israel aside, others have analyzed the impasse for Arab Enlightenment in relation to the pragmatism of the modern nation state, faced with the contradictions of tradition and religious ideology. It is possible to observe a great diversity of positions on this issue. At one end we have a clearly secular position, insisting on the fact that there is no such a thing as an immutable Arab-Islamic identity. At the other end, we have the glorification of “sheer otherness” as a consequence of a Middle-Eastern domestication of postcolonial discourse.62 Aziz al-Azmeh rejects the idea that Islam can be the source of anything, staunchly defending a secular alternative reading of history. Secularism for him is not a formula or a discourse, but a historical attitude. He adopts it to examine Middle Eastern reality for the possibility of a democratic future.63 Significantly, a number of Arab intellectuals (Abdallah Laroui, Al-Azmeh and S. Jalal al-Azm) have strongly rejected the return to “authenticity” and “indigenism”, because they claim authenticity offers culture only two prospects: to imitate an imported Western version; or to accept that culture is authentic, rooted, and thus immutable. When Marxist philosopher Sadeq al-‘Azm argued that tanzimat was the prelude to Arab Enlightenment, these ideas were neither an issue of discussion, nor were they contested. But then, Enlightenment has undergone harsh attacks in recent years due to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Al-‘Azm explains how the Muslim Brothers organization came to power in the late 1920s, and compares the growth of Islamism to the European counter-reformation movement. As reformism resulted from tanzimat, it seemed to be too narrowly linked with nationalism.

60 See Amira Hass, Drinking The Sea at Gaza, Days and Nights in a Land under Siege, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1996, p.7. 61 Ilan Pappe, ‘Break The Mirror Now’, in The Other Israel, Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, The New Press, 2002, pp.111-112. 62 Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, Verso, 1993, p.19. 63 Aziz al-Azmeh, in Abdou Filali Ansary, Réformer l’islam, une introduction aux débats contemporains, Editions de la découverte, Paris, 2003, p.157.


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Because the project of Arab liberation failed, Enlightenment values were targeted by the religious right, which now also glorifies the Ottoman period, even the Mamluks and Selguks, which were not that wonderful. Under such conditions, Al‘Azm argues that it is vital to defend the values of Enlightenment.64 Burhan Ghaliun, who is a Paris-based Syrian intellectual, has attempted to trace two major transformations: the religious revolution and the political. These two maintain a dialectical relationship of exchange, conflict and convergence. The Arab World seems to be a hotbed of the struggle between these two spheres. Ghaliun emphasizes the peculiar role of the state in the Arab World. The modern state in the West, born after long centuries of maturity, has certainly not been replicated in the newly created Arab states, where politics has become a direct competitor with religion, and the only legitimate constitution. Instead of promoting national policies that guarantee the values of freedom, the state has become a means of collective alienation and the symbol of repression. Ghaliun points at the abortive the national state, to emphasize its pragmatic role. The authoritarian state imposed change that generated a lag between the modernization of infrastructure and yet encountering the stagnation in tradition and religious worldviews.65 Nasr Abu Zayd, on the other hand, insists that as the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, the project of renaissance or nahda was in fact accommodative, an eclectic attempt to blend Islamic heritage with Western European heritage and scientific discoveries.66 However in the 19th century Arab mind, Europe was perceived as homogeneous, and 18th century Enlightenment Europe became confused with 19th century colonial, imperializing Europe. This accommodative position led to a dualist understanding of Western heritage. Philosophical and scientific tendencies were suppressed. Averroes, al-Razi (Rhazes, 865 AD-925), a physician and philosopher, Ibn al-Haytham (965 AD1040), who was a mathematician, astronomer and physicist, and the physician Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288), were marginalized at the expense of Hanbalism (considered

64 Sadeq Jalal al-‘Azm, Hiwar ma’a Sadeq al-’Athm (interviewed by Saqr Abu Fakhr), al-mu’assasah al‘arabiyya lil-dirassat wal nashr, Beirut, second edition, 2000, p.56. 65 See Abdou Filali-Ansari’s chapter on Burhan Ghalioun. 66 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, ‘mashru‘ al-nahda bayna talfiqiyyat al-tabaqa wal-turath al-talfiqi’, in al-Muhit al- thaqafi, 1 March 2002.

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the most rigorous school of law), the Ash’aris and the Sufis. Ultimately, those associated with a rationalist Islamic heritage (capable of complementing European Enlightenment values) remained on the periphery. The accommodative position thus produced uncertainty, which undermined the project of Enlightenment. As a consequence, the Arabs ‘imported’ technologies for two centuries, but failed to understand the philosophical and cultural background to modernization. This resulted in the ‘failure’ to develop a scientific environment. An often-repeated argument is that the Arabs were limited to a one-dimensional perspective on Enlightenment and thus misunderstood European modernity.67

The Rise of Intolerance and Authoritarianism Critiquing European and American neo-conservatives is not dangerous, but we should also look to the other side of the Mediterranean, where mounting intolerance in Middle Eastern authoritarian states has created the neoconservatives’ violent double, the Islamists. Secularism has come under strong attack because most of the corrupt Arab regimes fought their Islamic opponents under a secularist banner.68 This claim of ‘secularism’ to oppose the ‘dark’ Islamists is just a semblance, however, since doses of religiosity have been injected into all cultural and political spheres in recent years. Religion has been incorporated in the modern Arab state with most Muslim countries adopting shari’a law within their legal systems. This is part of what Sami Zubaida calls the “etatization” of religion and law, where religion is submitted to political authority rather than separated from it.69

67 A good example is Mohammed ‘Abid al-Jabiri who follows this argument to propose an alternative modernity. Al-Jaberi insists on blending reason with scientific and historical investigation to question established premises and to clarify the impact of faith on the reading of Islamic history (a position similar to Fazlur Rahman). However, al-Jaberi is clearly against secularism, which he argues is an alien imposition for Islamic societies. He understands Islamic societies as having developed different identities, and advocates a form of authenticity. Mohammed ‘Abid al-Jabiri Al-mashru’ al-nahdawi al‘arabi, Marqaz dirassat al-wahda al-‘arabiyya, Beirut, 1996. 68 Egypt scores as one of the most corrupt regimes in the MENA region, according to the corruption perception index. In 2002, 48 high-ranking officials were convicted of corruption (see Gamal Essam El-Din, ‘Catching up with High Profile Corruption’, in al-Ahram Weekly, 4-10 March 2004. According to the report of the administrative control authority, in the last five years there have been 80 000 cases of corruption in Egypt (see http//www.ikwanweb.com/home 8 March 2007). 69 Sami Zubaida, Law and Order in the Islamic World, I.B. Tauris, 2003, p.159.


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Islamization in Egypt started from the top. In the 1970s the late president Sadat encouraged Islamists onto university campuses and distributed free Islamic attire to counteract communists and secular trends. Islamization proceeded alongside the liberalizing of the economy, a major component of Sadat’s shifting allegiance from the Soviet Union and a socialist economy, to the United States. Furthermore, Sadat encouraged the banned Muslim Brothers organization to return to Egypt and allowed them to publish journals. Sadat, champion of a liberal laissez faire economy, introduced the Islamic shari’a law into the constitution.70 Islamists were given much more freedom under Sadat, who called himself the “president believer”. Religious television programs multiplied, and the construction of mosques was allowed as a tax exemption. Under Mubarak, the politics of becoming more royalist than the king continued. State violence was perpetrated not only against Islamists but also against poor citizens. Quotidian violence against the poor was one strategy to remind people that opposition would be ruthlessly crushed, as it was during the bread riots in 1977, or the mutiny by security force conscripts in 1986. Repression still goes on, as demonstrated in the December 2006 response to strikes by 20,000 textile workers in Mahalla. Terrorist attacks against government officials and clashes between the police and Islamic jihadists significantly multiplied in the 1980s. This violence reached a peak in the early 1990s with the murder of the sardonic secular intellectual, Farag Foda, and a terrible record of human rights violations.71 Yet this happened in parallel with an official government endeavour to promote a campaign of enlightenment via the Ministry of Culture. This schizophrenic behaviour, Islamizing state apparatuses on the one hand and claiming a “secular” façade on the other, was designed to maintain international credibility and attract foreign aid. The state managed to co-opt the secular and former leftist intellectuals into media apparatuses and Ministries of Culture, a process that has been brilliantly described by Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.72 These intellectuals used Enlightenment discourse as an instrument against both those representing the

70 During Sadat’s rule there were two amendments of the constitution (1971 and 1980). The first included the following sentence: “Islam is the religion of the state, Arabic is the official language; and the principles (mabadi’) of Shari’a are a principal source of legislation”. See Sami Zubaida (2003), p.166. 71 According to the Muslim Brothers organization, some 20 000 Muslim Bothers were arrested in around the past fifteen years. 72 Abu Zayd uses the Arabic word tagnid, meaning to mobilize or recruit intellectuals to the service of the state.

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religious institution of al-Azhar, which was implementing state Islamization, and the Islamists. This led to an unconditional elitist support of the government characterized by statements like “ … The hell of military despotic regimes is more merciful than the heaven of the preachers”.73 Islamization became obvious in the spread of Islamic attire, the imposition of sex segregation on university campuses, and increasing displays of ritual and religiosity in public spaces. The ‘culture of fear’ then, is not just a product of American politics that flourished after 9 /11. It has been used too by Egyptian governments to tighten or loosen their grip on the Islamists, their main opponents. Nevertheless, the culture of fear portraying the Middle East as a volatile, violent and dangerous region has a long tradition.74 Equally, the Islamists taxed the government endeavour to spread official Enlightenment propaganda.75 They attacked moves by Egypt’s first lady to empower women, the Ministry of Culture’s project to reprint works by Arab pioneers of Enlightenment, the fostering of the arts by the artist-Minister of Culture, and the creation of a television “Channel of Enlightenment”. Even more aggressively, the Islamists have defined secular intellectuals as “secular Westernizers” and as traitors. In the Islamists’ jargon, secularism connotes atheism or unbelief and thus the license to takfir.76 The secular camp believes that the license to incite the killing of unbelieving opponents is inherently embedded within the state discourse.

Conclusion Egypt’s experience of a war between two camps has been described as “secular fundamentalism versus religious fundamentalism”.77

73 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, ‘wizarat al-thaqafa: i‘laan fashal al-tanwir al-bragmaati, hal hunaka tariq aakhar? al-tathweeir la al-tanwir’ (‘The Ministry of Culture, Declaring the Failure of Pragmatic Enlightenment, Is There another Path?’), in Akhbar al-Adab, 18 February 2001. 74 On the long tradition of the Orient being depicted as a locus of dangerous eruptions of violence, and where Islam is seen as the key factor perpetuating disruption, see Thomas Scheffler, ‘West-Eastern Cultures of Fear Violence and Terrorism in Islam’, in The Islamic World and the West: An Introduction to Political Cultures and International Relations, edited by Kai Hafez, Brill, Leiden, Boston & Köln, 2000, pp.70-85. 75 See Gaber Asfur, didd al-ta’ assub, (Against Fanaticism), mahragaan al-quira’ lil gamii‘ maktabat al-usra, Cairo, 2000, p.303. 76 Gaber Asfur (2000), p.303. 77 Fauzi M. Najjar, ‘The Debate on Islam and Secularism in Egypt’, in Arab Studies Quarterly, vol 18, 1996.


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This leads me to my conclusion. On both sides of the Mediterranean we are witnessing similar trends. Certainly there are divergences, but a common denominator in both the current European discourse and in the Middle East is that the association of Islam with Enlightenment leads to “failure” and crisis. Clearly Islamophobia in the West will have serious repercussions in the Middle East. Middle Eastern regimes are more than happy to refer to Western Islamophobia to reinforce their discourse on the “Westoxification” of “indigenous” values; to blame the “Other” when they are unable to put their own house in order. There is much talk about the importance of dialogue, and encouraging a public sphere through the potency of the media. But the dialogue is still trapped in skirmishes between celebrities that reinforce simplistic divides: secular fundamentalists versus religious fundamentalists, or enlightened fundamentalists versus cultural relativists. And the public sphere in the media is dominated by sensationalist cult figures. In Europe, conservative Enlightenment discourse is accompanied by rising Islamophobia, due to the poorly managed problem of immigrant integration. In the Middle East, a ‘distorted’ form of Enlightenment has been used and abused by governments in manoeuvres against the Islamists. While faithfully acknowledging the critiques of the Frankfurt school that suggest Enlightenment is reverting to mythology, and that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”,78 I am afraid that there is not much alternative left but to adhere to the universal values of Enlightenment. Precisely when Bush moves to dictate democracy in the Middle East, the Arab regimes that are considered US allies score a record of human rights violations, as the freedoms of intellectuals, academics and artists are curtailed. Intolerance characterizes both the authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, and their double the Islamists. Both harbour a great potential for violence. It is Manichaeism on a global scale, and I am afraid that populism, abetted by a blinding and manipulative media, has never done so well as it is doing today. The end result is autism.

78 See Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Verso, London, 1972, p.3.

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About The Author Mona Abaza was born in Egypt. Currently she is an associate Professor at the American University in Cairo. She was a visiting scholar in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Berlin and Leiden. Her research interests are religious and cultural networks between the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Hadhrami diaspora in Southeast Asia and Consumer culture in Egypt. Her publications include: Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, Shifting Worlds, Routledge Curzon Press, UK, 2002. Islamic Education, Perceptions and Exchanges: Indonesian Students in Cairo, Cahier d'Archipel 23, EHESS, Paris, 1994. The Changing Image of Women in Rural Egypt, Cairo Papers in Social Science, The American University in Cairo, 1987. Her forthcoming book is entitled: The Changing Consumer Culture of Modern Egypt, Cairo’s Urban Reshaping, Brill/AUC Press, 2006.


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Ortelius lectures The Ortelius Lecture is an annual event. It is delivered by a specially selected NIAS Fellow and is intended for academics from both the Netherlands and Flanders. Previous Ortelius Lectures are: 1.

2002: Nancy Rose Hunt Rewriting the Soul in Colonial Congo: Flemish Missionaries and Infertility Published by NIAS, 2002

2.

2003: Klaus J. Bade

Legal and Illegal Immigration into Europe: Experiences and Challenges Published by NIAS, 2003

3.

2004: Piotr Sztompka

From East Europeans to Europeans: Shifting Identities and Boundaries in the New Europe Published by NIAS, 2004

4

2005: Peter Spufford

From Antwerp to London. The decline of financial Centres in Europe Published by NIAS, 2005

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NIAS is an institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Each year, the Institute invites around 40 carefully selected scholars, both from within and outside the Netherlands, to its centre in Wassenaar, where they are given an opportunity to do research for a ten-month period. Fellows carry out their work either as individuals or as part of one of the research theme groups, which NIAS initiates every year. In addition, through its conference facilities, the Institute also functions as a meeting place for scientific programmes of a shorter duration and more specific character, such as workshops, seminars, summer schools, and study centres. NIAS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The University of Antwerp was founded in 2003 after the merger of the three universities that were previously known as Universitair Centrum Antwerpen (RUCA), Universitaire Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (UFSIA) and Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen (UIA). Its roots go back to 1852.

It is the third-largest

university in Flanders. The university has seven faculties: Applied Economics, Arts, Law, Political and Social Sciences, Sciences, Pharmaceutical-Veterinary-Biomedical Sciences and Medicine. The four campuses are situated in the historic city centre and in the green belt to the south of the city.


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