Islam in International Relations

Politics and Paradigms

Nassef Manabilang Adiong, Raffaele Mauriello, Deina Abdelkader, Nassef Manabilang Adiong, Raffaele Mauriello, Deina Abdelkader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138200937
• eBook ISBN: 9781315513553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Islam in International Relations: Politics and Paradigms analyses the interaction between Islam and IR. It shows how Islam is a conceptualization of ideas that affect people's thinking and behaviour in their capacity to relate with IR as both discipline and practice.

This approach challenges Western-based and defined epistemological and ontological foundations of the discipline, and by doing so contributes to worlding IR as a field of study and practice by presenting and discussing a broad range of standpoints from within Islamic civilization. The volume opens with the presentation and discussion of the international thought of a major Muslim leader, followed by a chapter that addresses the ethical practice of IR, from traditional pacifism to modern Arab political philosophy. It then switches to applying constructivism as a tool to understand Islam in world affairs and proceeds to address the issue of how the ethnocentric approach of Western academia has hindered our understanding of world affairs. The volume moves on to address the ISIS phenomenon, a current urgent issue in world affairs, and closes with a look at Islamic geopolitics.

This comprehensive collection will be of great interest to students, scholars and policy-makers with a focus on the Muslim world.

1
Analysing and theorizing Islam and IR

Non-Western international relations and geocultural epistemologies

Nassef Manabilang Adiong, Raffaele Mauriello and Deina Abdelkader

The chapters in this volume address the issue of Islam and International Relations. They provide a detailed picture of the different ways in which it is possible to study the interaction between the Islam – broadly defined as a history, a people, a religion, an intellectual tradition, and the like – and International Relations (IR) as a discipline.

It is well known that the sources of IR conspicuously fail to correspond to the global distribution of its subjects and that there is a necessity to diversify the discipline – in particular as regards theoretical questions and debates – by using the experience and intellectual history of non-Western regions and intellectual traditions (in our case the Islamic civilization) to both build and locate gaps within existing IR literature, in particular its theories and paradigms (Acharya and Buzan 2010; Abdelkader, Adiong and Mauriello 2016). The essays presented here identify patterns and experiences that differ from those of Europe and North America and can enrich the field of IR and help explain – or at least better understand – events and phenomena at the local, regional/civilizational levels. They can be placed within the scope of post-colonial IR in that they do not aim to replace current Western-centric IR with non-Western IR but to offer an expanded and enriched IR that accounts for the diversity of worldviews and perspectives on world affairs (Biswas 2016). In this respect, our efforts as researchers help in providing the South, in general, and Muslims, in particular, with a voice as actors and agents on the international platform.

In 2013, Hamid Dabashi asked the question, Can non-Europeans think? He was appalled by the universality and “global claims” of continental (European) philosophy while those from Asia, Africa or Latin America are called “ethno-philosophies.” Dabashi (2013) poignantly writes:

The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America […]

(https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html)

In retrospect, we may also ask how do we theorize the “international”? Is there a matrix that affects one’s theorizing skills, particularly the individual’s view of the world? Is theory always for someone and for some purpose? (Cox 1981). We always speculate things and observe phenomena. We postulate the supposition of ideas to explain something we are curious about or account for situations we desire to provide justifications for. A theory may have four properties: it describes, explains, interprets and predicts phenomena. These properties are manifested in both American and European IR theory traditions. In most American IR traditions, positivistic theorizing efforts are conditioned by setting out their operational terms, presenting their causality and generating testable hypotheses. In European IR, a theory is, on the other hand, generally understood in a reflective manner where general structuring or specific questions are organized and systematically produce a coherent set of interrelated concepts and categories.¹

From the perspective of application-level theorizing, the chapters prove the worthiness of using the local Muslim contexts as a ground for testing existing theoretical approaches and, in some respects, go beyond this by implying the possibility to elaborate Islamic paradigms of IR. In this respect, Acharya and Buzan (2010: 10) indicate that “it is possible for non-Western societies to build understandings of IR based on their own histories and social theories, and even to project these in the form of universalist claims.” They further contend that theory basically reflects a simplified reality where unique identification of events can be congregated altogether to share essential homogeneity (Acharya and Buzan 2007: 287–312). They provide conditions on which non-Western theorizing can be considered as IR theory, and these are

extensive acknowledgment as a theory by IR scholars, identification as IR theory by its creator regardless of non-recognition by mainstream academic IR community, or a systematic attempt to theorize IR which provides possible starting points.

(Acharya and Buzan 2007: 292)

Current IR gravitates around a number of theories and paradigms made in the US and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe. The domination of Western IR theory is still prevalent because of five dimensions: (1) the systemic understanding of issues and affairs worldwide; (2) the successful linkage of (Western) historical past to (Western) present continuity; (3) (Western) hegemonic experience of colonizing the global South through incomparable military strength; (4) (Western) vast resources in finances, research institutes, universities, think tanks and scholarships, among others; and (5) the poor conditions of non-Western academic IR communities including cultural and linguistic hindrances. This condition persists despite the fact that Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (2009) noticed how

the study of various “third world” contexts has led to claims that key IR concepts, including the state, self-help, power, and security, do not “fit” third world realities and may not be as relevant as others for thinking about the specific problems of such parts of the world.… IR knowledge is shaped by the privileging of the core over the periphery and the formation of key concepts based solely on core perspective.

The statement by Wæver and Tickner is based on the findings of an academic effort centred on “geo-cultural epistemologies in (or end of) IR.” The work they carried out is very relevant to this volume, as it is the question of whether or not IR is the local product of a particular geo-epistemological perspective. If this is the case, there ensues the need to address the role of geo-cultural factors in representing certain epistemological perspectives. A relevant difference between this volume and Tickner and Wæver’s research lies in that here we are not interested in the sociological dimension of Muslim scholars working within the clearly unbalanced core–periphery structure of IR as a social world – that is in terms of sociology of science – but, rather, in the intellectual dimension of Islam as a viable source for tools of analysis and of the Islamic civilization as a valuable object of enquiry for the IR discipline – that is in terms of epistemology/theory of science and philosophy of science.²

Before surveying the corpus of Islamic historiography in International Relations, it is worth tackling one aspect of Islam that has befuddled IR scholars for several decades, that is the role or correlation of “religion” with modern and contemporary IR.

Religion and international relations

In the past few decades there has been a tremendous increase of IR scholars that study religion, and a dedicated section called REL (Religion and International Relations) was established at the International Studies Association in 2013. Prior to this, there were similar sections, committees and caucuses that focused on religion and politics in major international associations: the International Political Science Association, the American Political Science Association and the European Consortium for Political Research.

It is without a doubt that the literature on IR and religion rapidly proliferated after the tragic 9/11 terrorist attack in the US. Several scholars are talking about the “global resurgence of religion” or the need to “bring religion back into IR from its exile.” Was religion really in exile? How come IR scholars are recently paying attention to it? How do IR scholars see religion in their analyses? Is there a possibility of integrating religion into IR?

There is no common understanding of the meaning of religion in the social sciences, theology or philosophy.³ Haynes (2013: 33–34), quoting Martyr, identified five features of religion: it “(1) focuses our ultimate concern, (2) builds community, (3) appeals to myth and symbol, (4) enforced through rites and ceremonies, and (5) demands certain behaviour from its adherents.”

Religion can also be thought of as a belief system that is mutually supported by practices and oftentimes related to adherence to supernatural beings or “being” held as sacred to a society or number of persons. It is surprising that almost all major religions share a symmetrical view of transcendental reality. For example, sociologists of religion instigated that the practice or thought of creating or constructing a sanctified being, sometimes characterized with supernatural abilities, is universal to all human civilizations that date back to antiquity, particularly in West Asia or the (modern) Middle East region. In Kubálková’s (2000: 684) words,

theologians, of course, deny that God (or the gods) are human constructions. They might accept that the human being is homo sapiens but they would contend that he or she is also homo religiosus, a species in need of finding a system of beliefs essential to the self-definition of the believer, what we now call “identity.” All religions are organised on the basis of beliefs that are fundamental not only to reality, but even more important to human identity.

While theologians contend the homo religiosus nature of human beings, at the other spectrum social scientists raise the aspect of the homo politicus. Religion and politics are intertwined since humans became aware of the transcendental and supernatural. Oftentimes religious explanations are the result of political situations and of political life. Hurd (2015) argued that

religion cannot be disembedded and isolated from the broader social and political fields… There are no untouched religions waiting to be recovered from political irrelevance or reformed into peaceable governing partners.

According to the Scholars of the Critical Religion Association⁴ religions are actually modern inventions that are made to appear ubiquitous – they are present everywhere – and have been marginalized and privatized because they were construed only to serving the mystification of the (supposed) natural rationality of the secular (e.g. the modern nation-state and the capitalist system). This reified religion represents the so-called “resurgence,”⁵ “return from exile,” or “bringing back” religion in the world of social sciences we find in IR literature. There, religion is treated as if it had distinct properties and characteristics that cannot be the subject of empirical investigation and analysis or as a variable to be observed.

Religious roots of IR

It is argued that modern IR is rooted in the European experience of the Reformation era, which consequently led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Those actors or agents who acted upon the Reformation are the same actors who created the West-phalian system. There are two components to this argument: first, that the Reformation accounted for the origin of Westphalia because of the similar authoritative structure of the system of sovereign states. In Philpott’s (2000: 207) words, “International Relations scholars have long granted that a state system exists and have sought to theorize its laws and patterns of war, peace, and commerce.” Second, the Reformation warrants the “recognition as a kind of historical cause that merits more attention in the international relations literature” (Philpott 2000: 208). Going back to historical accounts, during the Reformation, in 1517 the monarchies of Britain, France and Sweden dominated political domains over the church, and Italy even had a system of sovereign states. In addition, the 1555 Peace of Augsburg had provisions authorizing German princes the free will to establish their own faith in territories they owned. This accounts for the famous saying cuius regio, euis religio (whose realm, his religion; Philpott 2000: 211).

Philpott (2000: 214) strongly argued that a system of sovereign states would not have developed had the Reformation not occurred. It was truly through the Reformation that these transnational actors, including the church, developed an interest and curiosity in the idea of sovereign nation-states. The church was losing its political power, its territories and its properties were confiscated and the temporal authority of the pope and of the emperor was truncated and transferred to the modern state. All in all, religious powers and influences succumbed to the dominance of the secular state. In other words, the theology of Christianity’s Reformation and the conceptual notion of territorial sovereignty are intrinsically and historically connected. Those polities who were interested in the sovereign state system were also those who adopted Protestantism as their official religion or faith.

Religion is seen by IR scholars as either important or tangential, but most of the time the latter prevails, particularly after 9/11. Internationally, religion is treated as an opposing form of epistemic communities, that is non-governmental or trans-national organizations/entities. However, religion can be a distinctive subject matter in IR because “it brings into IR issues of norms, values and beliefs that go beyond the traditional secular concerns of international relations” (Haynes 2013: 23). One way of looking at IR scholars’ neglect of the importance of religion in the analysis of the “international” is from the perspective of the staunch influence of Enlightenment thinkers onto IR scholars and the Western (Anglo-American and European) experiences of secularization, the nation-state system and modernity, which have relegated religion into a state of oblivion and self-privatization. More so, even IR theoreticians⁶ have excluded religion from their theoretical analyses and methodologies (Fox and Sandler 2004: 163).

The rejection (or negligence) of IR scholars with regards to the importance of religion stems from the following points: First, most secular social sciences, particularly IR, have a history of rejecting⁷ religion on the basis that analyses of state relations and behaviours can only be accounted for through basic rational and logical explanations and not (irrational) religious analyses. Second, the dominance of positivist and behaviouralist traditions, that IR adapted, made religion difficult to operationalize. For example, IR scholars who utilize quantitative analysis usually ignore religion as a type of variable because it is very hard to measure. Last, IR scholars do not know how to deal with, address or treat religion whether they aim to integrate it into IR theories or build new theories to accommodate religion. There is somehow a hope that with the proliferation of IR scholars interested in religion, there might be a possibility in the near future that IR may develop an adequate theoretical understanding of religion concomitant with its resurgence in world affairs. Finally, although most contemporary IR scholarship looks at religion as a variable operated and perceived to have a preponderating link with conflicts, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Analysing and theorizing Islam and IR: non-Western international relations and geocultural epistemologies
• 2 The Khamenei Doctrine: Iran’s leader on diplomacy, foreign policy and international relations
• 3 The Arab right to difference: Taha Abderrahmane’s concept of the awakened youth and the formation of modern Arab Nationhood
• 4 Reconciling Islam and pacifism: a traditionalist approach
• 5 Constructivism in the Islamic approach to International Relations: Davutoğlu and Qutb as case studies
• 6 Beyond terrorism and disorder: assessing Islamist constructions of world order
• 7 Struggling for post-secular hegemony: causal explanations for religious discrimination in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 8 Belying the human web: Islam, international affairs and the danger of a single story
• 9 Foreign policies of political Islam movements: of the use and reconstruction of an ideological reference
• 10 The geopolitics of the Wahhabi movement: from the “neglected duty” to Daesh
• 11 The Islamic State’s notion of “mobile” sovereignty/territoriality in a post-secular perspective
• 12 Towards an Islamic geopolitics: reconciling the Ummah and territoriality in contemporary International Relations
• Index