Political Quietism in Islam

Sunni and Shi’i Practice and Thought

Saud al-Sarhan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780755645046
• eBook ISBN: 9781838607661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In recent years, Islam – whether via the derivatives of 'Political Islam' or 'Islamism' – has come to be seen as an 'activist' force in social and political spheres worldwide. What such representations have neglected is the strong countervailing tradition of political quietism. Political quietism in Islam holds that it is not for Muslims to question or oppose their leaders. Rather, the faithful should concentrate on their piety, prayer, religious rituals and personal quest for virtue.

This book is the first to analyze the history and meaning of political quietism in Islamic societies. It takes an innovative cross-sectarian approach, investigating the phenomenon and practice across both Sunni and Shi'i communities. Contributors deconstruct and introduce the various forms of political quietisms from the time of the prophetic revelations through to the contemporary era. Chapters cover issues ranging from the politics of public piety among the women preachers in Saudi Arabia, through to the legal discourses in the Caucasus, the different Shi'i communities in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and Pakistan, and the Gülen movement in Azerbaijan. The authors describe a wide range of political quietisms and assess the continuing significance of the tradition, both to the study of Islam and to the modern world today.

Part One

The Concept of Political Quietism: Its Problematics and the Islamic Context

1

Making Sense of “Political Quietism”: An Analytical Intervention

Jan-Peter Hartung

These days, many conceptual terms flutter around the academic landscape that are, in fact, heavily presuppositional, including even the study of Islam and its manifold auxiliaries. Unfortunately, more often than not, theoretically, these concepts do not appear to be sufficiently grounded; this fact creates the impression that these terms correspond with actual empirical entities. All-time favorites in this regard include “discourse” and “network,” and not least, also “quietism.” With Katrin Jomaa’s entry “Quietism and Activism” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, the concept has become almost canonized and thus suggests that there is an overall consensus that allows for the meaning of a term to be enshrined in such a reference work.¹ However, I think that this conceptual pair merits further reflection, as do the other overblown concepts listed above.

Most of these concepts, it seems, have sprung from the various social sciences; yet, we must be careful not to adopt them simply because they sound sophisticated and make an academic argument appear even more academic. In fact, we may want to consider the careful and well-considered use of language as one, if not the, core criterion of any kind of academic pursuit. Therefore, it is reasonable to thoroughly investigate the conceptual term “quietism”—be it alone or in combination with various attributes, such as “political”—and see to what extent we can employ the term sustainably. In this context, we must also consider whether “quietism” is indeed an antonym of “activism”; a cursory glance shows that this may not be the case, as the antonym of “active” is usually “passive,” not “quiet.” Therefore, if “quietism” and “activism” are to form a conceptual pair, then we should be able to make an argument for such a pair. This chapter is meant to stimulate a deeper terminological reflection.

First, we need to remember that almost all conceptual terms were derived from objective ones, that is, they are words that have emerged not from a scientific context but rather life-world experiences. To raise objective terms from their empirical embeddedness to abstract analytical terms requires a lot of substantiation; otherwise, one is tempted to read abstract notions against one’s own empirically grounded experience—many of Max Weber’s ideal types have thus been equally misread as Hegel’s earlier imaginaries in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History.²

Therefore, my first step is to introduce the historical origins of “quietism,” then I illustrate how the term was embraced by scholars in the study of Islam in the 1980s and then perpetuated, and further expanded upon, from the early 2000s. Third, I relate the historical term and its semantic implications to the term that is used in the study of Islam and indicate the odd semantic pitfall that makes the application of this term in our context problematic, at least without serious efforts to conceptualize it as logically consistent in itself.

I conclude that, in our context, the usefulness of “quietism” indeed depends on what we understand as “political”—in fact, “political” is the attribute upon which the term “quietism” reacts.

The starting point: The historical semantics of “quietism”

In 1675, the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos (d. 1696), initially educated by the Jesuits, released his Guida spirituale che disinuolge l’anima e la conduce per l’interior camino all’ acquisito della perfetta contemplazione e del ricco tesoro della pace interiore, “The spiritual guide which releases the soul and conducts it through the interior path to acquire the perfect contemplation and rich treasure of interior peace.” In this work, de Molinos pleads for the supremacy of the “prayer of quiet” (orazione di quiete), which—by annihilating one’s own will in favor of God’s—he believed would lead inevitably to the highest level of mystical contemplation and nearness to God.³

The idea of obliterating one’s own will through contemplative prayer provoked almost instant rebuke by the representatives of established spirituality. Thus, three years after the publication of de Molinos’s work, the Jesuit Gottardo Bell’uomo (d. 1690) responded with his own Pregio e l’ordine dell’ orazioni ordinarie e mistiche [The merit and order of ordinary and mystical prayers]. In this work, the term “quietism” appears for the first time⁴ and obviously with polemical intent.

Despite the fact that Bell’uomo nowhere mentioned his name explicitly, de Molinos responded with a defense of his own views, this time in Spanish, although he ultimately refrained from having it published. A reason for this may be that while he praised the Spiritual Exercises of Ignacius of Loyola (d. 1556), founder of the Jesuit order, as “most holy, most useful, and worthy of infinite praise,” he nonetheless claims that “they are not an immediate means to raise the soul to union and perfection,”⁵ that is, he implicitly criticized the founder of the order.

Indeed, the following and often quite polemical critiques of de Molinos’s Spiritual Guide came from within the Jesuit order.⁶ It may be useful to briefly examine its self-image, indicated already by the fact that the order was founded by the Roman Catholic Church in an effort to counteract the popular pull of the Reformation movements throughout Europe that began in the early 1500s. The figureheads of those movements, in turn, emphasized what culminated in, approximately 300 years later, the Pietistic movements; they also inspired Max Weber’s theory of the interdependence of the Calvinist work ethic and the rise of capitalism in what is now called the “Global North”—just to employ yet another en vogue conceptual term.⁷ Indeed, the Jesuit reaction was an inner-worldly one, emphasizing the work in and for the community, caritas and humanitas: this turned out to be a rather successful strategy to bring stray sheep back into the flock of the Catholic Church and win over all of humanity. They worked on a global scale, setting up missions, translating works, and blending in with local populations.

Thus, when Jesuits polemicized against other Jesuits who advocated quietism from among their own, then we are confronted with a matter that touches on the very identity of the order and the post-Reformation Catholic Church as a whole. This conflict within the Jesuit order was ultimately decided in 1704 by the papal decision to list the works of de Molinos and those who followed him in the index of prohibited books,⁸ very much in line with the view of Ignacius of Loyola that “to be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it.”⁹ That is, the matter was closed, at least as far as the Catholic Church was concerned.

Decontextualized application: The current use of the term in the study of Islam and conceptual problems

How is it possible, we must ask, that a term with a rather clear-cut and culturally specific historical meaning became entrenched in the study of Islam and, moreover, was coupled with the attribute “political”? Taking into consideration its dissociation from its historically concrete meaning and its eventual lexicographical determination in English—“what is called by the poets apathy or dispassion, by the scepticks [sic] indisturbance, by the Moulinists Quietism, by common men peace of conscience seems all to mean but great tranquility of mind”¹⁰—the question becomes even more compelling when we look for a direct correspondent of the term in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or other written Muslim languages. Almost all the dictionaries I consulted refer to core elements of Sufi practice (taṣawwuf): tranquility, calmness, silence, and deference (Ar. ṭumaʾnīna; sukūt; Tk. digincilik/taslīm; P. and Urdu riżā; tavakkul; be-khabarī)¹¹; none of these terms seems suitable to refer, in a straightforward way, to something “political.”

Alternatively, the term muwādaʿa has been used to capture the idea of “quietism,” not least in the Arabic title of the conference from which this volume emerged. While muwādaʿa seems to be much more closely related to the wider field of politics, we must ask ourselves whether “(political) quietism” is the best possible English rendering of a term that—at least in its classical usage—refers more to conducting a truce between two or more conflicting parties or to the cessation of hostilities.¹²

The at times controversial Orientalist Bernard Lewis seems to be responsible for bringing together these terms with reference to Islamic contexts. In an article in the New York Review of Books from 1988, he stated the following:

There are in particular two political traditions, one of which might be called quietist, the other activist. The arguments in favor of both are based, as are most early Islamic arguments, on the Holy Book and on the actions and sayings of the Prophet. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Concept of Political Quietism: Its Problematics and the Islamic Context
• Part II Political Quietism in Classical Islam
• Part III Political Quietism in Modern and Contemporary Islamic Thought
• Index
• Imprint