The Idea of European Islam

Religion, Ethics, Politics and Perpetual Modernity

Mohammed Hashas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351604000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Suspicions about the integration of Islam into European cultures have been steadily on the rise, and dramatically so since 9/11. One reason lies in the visibility of anti-Western Islamic discourses of salafi origin, which have monopolized the debate on the "true" Islam, not only among Muslims but also in the eyes of the general population across Europe; these discourses combined with Islamophobic discourses reinforce the so-called incompatibility between the West and Islam.

This book breaks away from this clash between Islam and the West, by arguing that European Islam is possible. It analyzes the contribution that European Islam has made to the formation of an innovative Islamic theology that is deeply ethicist and modern, and it clarifies how this constructed European Islamic theology is able to contribute to the various debates that are related to secular-liberal democracies of Western Europe. Part I introduces four major projects that defend the idea of European Islam from different disciplines and perspectives: politics, political theology, jurisprudence and philosophy. Part II uses the frameworks from three major philosophers and scholars to approach the idea of European Islam in the context of secular-liberal societies: British scholar George Hourani, Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane and the American philosopher John Rawls. The book shows that the ongoing efforts of European Muslim thinkers to revisit the concept of citizenship and political community can be seen as a new kind of political theology, in opposition to radical forms of Islamic thinking in some Muslim-majority countries.

Opening a new path for examining Islamic thought "in and of" Europe, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Islamic Studies, Islam in the West and Political Theology.

Part I

Voices of European Islam

1 Bassam Tibi

Cultural modernity for religious reform and Euro-Islam

This chapter presents Bassam Tibi’s political justifications for what he calls “Euro-Islam” through “cultural modernity” reforms. The first section of the chapter introduces his description of Islam’s various predicaments with modernity, along with his distinction of Islam from fundamentalism and political Islam; here he proposes considering Islam a “cultural system” that adapts to context, instead of reading it essentially as an “ideology” or a political religion. The second section introduces his reform agenda so that Islamic-majority societies as well as Muslims of Europe genuinely endorse “cultural modernity” and consequently give birth to “Euro-Islam,” which is secular, liberal, pluralist, and morally universalist. This reform is composed of three major concepts: secularization, individual rights and pluralism, and rationalization of the conception of the world. Tibi ultimately defends the idea of Europeanizing Islam, to void that fundamentalists Islamize Europe, through what he refers to as “Euro-Islamic ‘asabiyya” (i.e. ésprit de corps).

1.1 Islam’s predicament with modernity

From Damascus to the world

In most of his writings, Tibi does not tire from stressing his background in Damascus, and how that contributed to shaping his later academic career. Tibi belongs to a noble Damascene family (ashrāf banū al-Tibi) that traces back its origins to the Prophet of Islam.¹ As a child he was introduced to Qur’anic studies. At school, he remembers very well asking his teacher about the causes behind the contemporary misery of the Arab and Islamic world. The reply he received would be stuck in his mind ever since, and would push him later in his career to seek answers. The answer the teacher gave him was that the Arab-Islamic world was in crisis (miḥna) as a test (imtiḥān) from God. The kid did not swallow the answer, and, in the West, to which he travelled for academic training, he would dig into this “miḥna” and try to “fix” it. His philosophical training takes its shape with the Frankfurt School,

Thanks to my Western academic education, and in particular to the philosophical reasoning studied in the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), I have acquired the detachment needed for pursuing a scholarly non-apologetic approach, as well as for related unbiased thoughts.²

“But beyond this the Frankfurt School gave no further guidance,” since it “was not helpful for a proper understanding of religion.”³ After an inspiring encounter with the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (d. 1977), who was knowledgeable of medieval Islamic philosophy, leads the young Damascene scholar to write his first book The Arab Left (1969), while still a 25-year-old PhD student. This book brings him in touch with Edward Said (d. 2003), who invites him to speak of the Arab Left in the US, as part of his book The Arabs of Today: Perspectives for Tomorrow (1973). Tibi keeps friendship with Said but soon departs from him academically afterwards, as he narrates, for the reason that neither Orientalism nor Orientalism “in reverse” (of Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, d. 2016) help in solving international tensions, which Tibi tries to overcome with his inter-civilizational dialogue approach that he outlines in one of his later works.⁴

Tibi bears in mind the idea of Ernest Bloch that the study of religion would be reductionist if tied solely to economic machinery and social conditions. Tibi, like Bloch, saw this as a “vulgar expression of Marxism.”⁵ Instead, Tibi strongly sees religion as a cultural system which a variety of factors influence. Besides acknowledging the influence of Emile Durkheim (1885–1917) who sees religion as a “fait social” (social fact), he does not settle as a Durkheimian for he is “wary of reducing religion to a social context.”⁶ It is with Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), the renowned American anthropologist, that he most sympathizes intellectually, “The reader will clearly find out how much I lean on Clifford Geertz’s cultural anthropology, but consistently with an attempt to go beyond his approach.”⁷ A few notes on Geertz explain Tibi’s point.

In his work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz defines culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”⁸ In his fieldwork in the Islamic world, Geertz finds out that the “elusiveness of the subject matter” of religion is the most challenging item while researching as an anthropologist in religious societies, and this challenge becomes worse as one moves from describing it to finding it, “Our problem, and it grows worse by the day, is not to define religion, but to find it.”⁹ This quest of “finding religion,” according to Geertz, starts with and ends in looking at it as a cultural system. This Geertzian perspective envisions a variety of “Islams” that are colored with different cultural systems. This aspect is what makes Tibi very relevant to the study of European Islam and the development of a European Islamic culture, as will be further illustrated by the end of this chapter. The emphasis on culture in the production of religious meaning is rooted in Tibi’s attempt to dig deep into the distinction between religion in substance as “a spiritual belief and an ethics” and religion “in its role as a political ideology.” The first requires “divinity studies” while the latter requires “cultural analysis.” He is concerned with the latter, without totally putting aside the former. His study revolves around Islam and its oscillation between culture and politics.¹⁰

When Tibi moved to Germany as a young man of 18 years old, this distinction was not clear in his mind yet, and he had to work it out. His academic training made him realize that the Middle East he belongs to by birth and early education has a particular reading of Islam, so much Arabocentrist, socio-culturally affected, and narrow in its perspective, according to him. In his research and professorship tours around the world, Tibi was affected by the way Islam was indigenized, adapted, and adopted socio-culturally especially in Africa and Asia, to produce Afro-Islam, and Indo-Islam.¹¹ This pushed him to read Islam in light of the cultural system in which it is practiced. This implies that it can bear interpretations according to space and time, and the miḥna (crisis) he experienced as a child and also as a Muslim scholar and citizen in Europe can be remedied through a reading, a reinterpretation and revisit of the past to overcome the current crisis, and consequently be able to speak of Euro-Islam.

1.1.1 Islam as a cultural system

Starting from his Geertzian perspective, Tibi does not tire from repeating that Islam is a cultural system. He also does not tire from repeating that he is a believer and liberal Muslim. He does not deprive this religion from its divinity. The divinity he questions revolves around the cultural aspects this same divine religion has been clothed with in various geographies and locations of the world. The divinity and universality of Islam is not questioned; what is questioned are the ways both divinity and universality have been used to the extent of freezing their utility for the human being to whom they are destined. In other words, the divinity and universality of Islam have not been studied in historical perspectives and in context; rather, they have been imprisoned in history and in the same way the religion was first revealed in the seventh century AC. Apart from its five pillars, Tibi is against any aspect of essentializing Islam; it is that which has caused a cultural stagnation, according to him, in the Muslim world and mind. In contradistinction to any essentialism, he tries to answer the question, “What is Islam?”

To answer this pivotal question, Tibi does not work on the metaphysical worldview of Islam. Instead, he contends that no religion stands in isolation from wo/man and society. That is, Islam, like any other religion, makes sense in society, “religions represent cultural systems, which are both influenced by processe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on transliterations and style
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: from Islam in Europe to European Islam
• PART I: Voices of European Islam
• PART II: European Islamic thought and the formation of perpetual modernity paradigm
• Conclusion: from European Islam to Arab Islam
• Index