Postmodernism and Islam

Predicament and Promise

Akbar S. Ahmed, Akbar S. Ahmed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136005824
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Can West and East ever understand each other? In this extraordinary book one of the world's leading Muslim scholars explores an area which has which has been almost entirely neglected by scholars in the field - the area of postmodernism and Islam. This landmark work is startling, constantly perceptive and certain to be debated for years to come.

Chapter 1

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Postmodernism and Islam

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When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990 he abolished more than Kuwaiti independence. He also shattered the complacency of those who were dreaming of a stable and harmonious post-cold war New World Order for the 1990s which would set the stanchions in place for the political architecture of the twenty-first century. Within days George Bush and Mrs Thatcher were calling him Hitler; many Arabs, on the other hand, saw him as a champion and compared him to Nasser, even Saladin; Iraqis, hedging their bets, added the name of the pre-Islamic King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar.

Young soldiers, deep in America at one end of the world, and in rural Pakistan at the other, began to pack for duty on the Arabian peninsula; the Americans, who provide aid to Pakistan, had made an offer which the Pakistanis could not refuse and, therefore, they agreed to supply troops to fight alongside the Americans. Young Stuart Lockwood, one of the hostages in Baghdad, had his head patted by Saddam on television and instantly became part of history. Muslims everywhere protested at the presence of non-Muslim troops in the land of Makkah and Medinah. Arabs accused the Americans of being like Rambo. Palestinians, taking heart from Saddam's support, renewed the intifada, and their deaths in Jerusalem provoked talk oijihad, holy war, among Arabs; Israel, threatened by Saddam, once again evoked the spirit of Masada, the ancient garrison besieged by the Romans. The war that followed had about it the inevitability of Greek tragedy.

In the future, major international crises are likely to follow the same pattern, which was characterized by several features: first, the involvement of the media. The media were everywhere. Every gesture and every word of the main players like Saddam was news, to be discussed and analysed. Second, the interconnection of the world was made apparent, whether of people — our example of American and Pakistani soldiers — or of economies: not only oil supplies to the West but also the remittances of the South Asian workers were affected. Third, a feeling, a mood grew, fed by the media, that henceforth a crisis of this nature could escalate uncontrollably to bring about a world disaster. A global perception therefore formed which was not unanimous on cause and effect, but it reflected concern for the interdependence of life on earth and forced us to participate vicariously in the terrible decision-making processes.

Most of this was new and frightening, but there was an eerie element of déjà vu in the drama, as if, half-awake, we had seen some of it before. Over the previous two years another crisis had been simmering. In it we had heard the principles of freedom of expression being defended — Voltaire was often cited — against those Muslims who felt their religious beliefs were outraged by The Satanic Verses (see pages 169–77, for a discussion of the book). Muslims believed that the Prophet and his family were insulted and the authenticity of the Quran challenged. Ayatollah Khomeini elevated the Muslim response into an international affair by issuing a fatwa, a declaration, condemning the author, Salman Rushdie, to death; then, by dying, the Ayatollah left the issue suspended in mid-air to eternity; no Iranian could revoke or cancel it.

Shortly after the Gulf war it appeared to Muslims that yet another strand was woven into the rope being used to bind Islam: the story of the Pakistani and Arab bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), broke. Here was massive fraud, corruption, cooking of books, drugs, big names; these businessmen could bring a blush of shame to the cheeks of J.R. Ewing. The media went wild with glee at what was one of the biggest banking scandals in history; the fact that most of the key players were Muslim added to the pleasure of the chase. The entire globe seemed to have been drawn into the BCCI story. Links were established with Abu Nidal on the one hand and Pakistan's nuclear programme on the other. It became the Bank of Cocaine and Crooks in the Western media. In 1991 the Western media were freely placing Muslims in the context of what they labelled a ‘criminal’ culture.

Ordinary, everyday, average Muslims may not agree with the fatwa, they may despise the military dictator in Iraq, they may loathe the fraud and corruption at the Bank, but they also resent the cavalier way in which they are treated by association in the media. They are still anxious to point out that the reality in each case is more complex than meets the eye; they will not have liked Rushdie's book, they will be vicariously thrilled that Saddam stood up to the West and spoke up for the Palestinians, even that the BCCI may be the target of Western wrath because it was the first major international Muslim bank.

There is no way an ordinary Muslim can make his views known in the media, which floods hostile words and images over and around him. He is portrayed as a fanatic over the book, politically unstable through the dictator and corrupt by the actions of the Bank. In the end, unable to convey his arguments, helpless and impotent, he is as cynical of Western motives as those of the military dictator and the corrupt bankers — they are all the same, he will say. But he is also as disgusted as he is confused with his own sense of impotence in shaping reality around him; he can no longer challenge what is real or unreal, no longer separate reality from the illusion of the media.

We note that Islam is the common factor intertwining most of the people mentioned above and ask: is Islam henceforth to be isolated and characterized as a force for anarchy and disorder? Islam, from the time of the Crusades, has been seen as barbarous, licentious, the enemy of Christianity; in our age, in addition, it is seen as anarchic and monolithic. The Islamic peril is now seen by many as the greatest threat to the West, beside which the Red and Yellow perils pale into insignificance.

But then we may consider other matters that have aroused controversy, for example, the antics of the popular singer, Madonna (and more of her later). Her songs, videos and stage performances have incurred the wrath of the Pope himself. So it is not only Islam which is the problem; something seems to have changed fundamentally in the way people are responding to the world.

QUESTIONS FOR OUR AGE

These contemporary crises were different yet in some ways similar: they forced us to ask questions; to challenge common assumptions; to look at the familiar in a different light. The kinetic energy which was created in turn sparked ideas and prejudices, controversy and argument. The crossing of cultural boundaries created the misinterpretation of foreign idiom causing great offence and agitation, great misunderstanding, on all sides. The crises brought together a bewildering collage of historical and popular images that, through Communications technology, bonded the entire globe. The audio-visual media allowed, as never before in history, an instant access to news, an unsettling, dazzling juxtaposition of diverse pictures, a variety of discourses. High philosophy and comic-book ideas, historical facts and pop sociology jostled and mingled. All this was made possible by other recent developments, such as mass transport, the electronic and printing media and the development of the global economy.

It was the media that juxtaposed for us images of people like Hitler and Saddam, Bush and Lockwood, Rambo and the Pakistani soldier, Saladin and Nebuchadnezzar, Khomeini and Rushdie, Voltaire and the Iranians, the Pope and Madonna, and places like Masada and Makkah, Babylon and Jerusalem. The Rushdie affair, the Madonna controversy, the manner of the Gulf confrontation were harbingers of things to come — not subsidiary but central to our understanding. The exploration of this theme will be my concern. It is characteristic of the times we live in.

We are living in a period of dramatic change; structures that have held for generations are being pulled down. Changing, too, are notions of the self and of the other, of class, of ethnicity and of nation, although the nature and depth of these are still debatable. A perception is forming that we may be entering a distinct phase of human history, one following modernism and, therefore, tentatively called ‘postmodernist’. However, the rupture with the previous period is not complete. For, if recent events in the disintegrating Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and South Africa represent postmodernist impulses, those in Tiananmen Square, those around events connected with the coup which almost ousted Gorbachev in August 1991, and those surrounding the Salman Rushdie affair suggest the strength of tradition and authority.

A host of questions, many of them of urgency for the immediate future, are thus thrown up for our consideration: Is there truth in the widely held assumption in the West that after the collapse of communism the next enemy is Islam? What does the New World Order we hear so much about mean for Muslims? Is the postmodernist age intrinsically hostile to Islam? Why do the media commentators, whether academics or journalists, so consistently and unanimously disparage Islam? And is the Muslim response, rejecting the Western media as biased, an effective one? If so, how long can they isolate themselves from the global civilization? Will the lampooning and vilification divert Muslims from the values of a religion that advocates compassion and balance? And where are these virtues, so much emphasized in the Quran, to be located in the present Islamic turbulence? Are the so-called moderates ‘out’ and the so-called extremists ‘in’ as a consequence of this turbulence?

What intellectual and cultural changes are taking place among Muslims? Why, for instance, do Muslims prefer baggy trousers to jeans? Is the mosque in danger of being replaced by the mall as the focus of Muslim social and community activity? What does the sermon in the mosque tell us? What does Islam have to say about the ‘green’ movement and ecology? How can Muslims retain their central Islamic features — family life, care for children, respect for elders, concepts of modesty and so on — in the face of the contrary philosophy of the postmodernist age? And how can they successfully convey the relevance of their beliefe and customs, their ‘message’, to the world community of which they are part?

We also go back to the past by asking: How does a religious civilization like Islam, which relies on a defined code of behaviour and traditions based on a holy book, cope in an age which self-consciously puts aside the past and exults in diversity? (The question is relevant to other religious cultures of Semitic origin.) How does it relate to the other major Semitic religions? What does it make of the influential civilization of Europe formed by the Greeks? How does European imperialism continue to affect Muslim culture and thinking?

These are important questions and need to be asked of our age. There are many theories in circulation, many processes afoot and many explanations at work. I will try to point to some. I cannot promise neat and tidy answers — nor are they always desirable. I will simply point to the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is our world.

Faith versus scepticism, tradition versus iconoclasm, purity versus eclecticism — it is difficult to relate Islamic postmodernism to Western postmodernism in any coherent or direct manner, or even to establish a causal relationship between the two. Although Muslims may employ some of the conceptual tools of François Lyotard or Jean Baudrillard for analysis, there must be a parting of company on certain crucial points. While Muslims appreciate the spirit of tolerance, optimism and the drive for self-knowledge in postmodernism, they also recognize the threat it poses them with its cynicism and irony. This is a challenge to the faith and piety which lies at the core of their world-view.

In the end, Islamic and Western postmodernism may have little more in common than that they are coetaneous, running concurrently. What we can state is that they may be entering this particular phase of their respective histories through different gates, propelled by different causes, still unsure of certain features, like the nature of the media and formulation of their responses to it, and even with a different understanding of the very nature of the age.

GRAPPLING WITH POSTMODERNISM

As we intend to borrow the concept of postmodernism from one culture to apply to another, its definition becomes even more important. However, at its clearest it lacks clarity and its provenance is uncertain. Is it a historical period (postmodernity) or an up-to-date style (postmodernism)? Is it a literary conceit, a philosophic concept or an architectural notion? Is it an aesthetic variation, a response to the globalizing tendency, an arts style or social phenomenon? Is it an exclusively European phenomenon or can it be applied plausibly elsewhere? The tone of the questions is appropriate, for the term represents an age of ambiguity and irony; they warn us to remain circumspect in using it. But before attempting to define postmodernism we must consider modernism, that which precedes and which allows us to measure postmodernism.

Books containing ideas on modernism occupy a large space in any well-stocked library, but it is in the general sense of the Oxford English Dictionary definition that the term is used: ‘modern view(s) or method(s), especially tendency in matters of religious belief to subordinate tradition to harmony with modern thought’. Modernism has come to mean the most recent phase of world history marked by belief in science, planning, secularism and progress. The desire for symmetry and order, balance and authority has also characterized it. The period is noted for its confidence in the future, a conviction that Utopia is attainable, that there is a natural world order which is possible. The machine, gigantic industrial projects, steel, iron and electricity — all were thought to be at the disposal of humanity to achieve this objective. The drive towards industrialization and reliance on the physical created an ideology which emphasized materialism as a way of life.

Nonetheless, doubts about modernism are expressed early by modernist writers like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. The critique of notions such as total ‘progress’ and those which generated them, like the Enlightenment, was already under way before the advent of postmodernist thinking (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). Indeed, Chaplin's Modern Times is an indictment of the age of industrialization and the belittling of humanity, whether in Roosevelt's America or Stalin's Russia. ‘Progressive’, ‘scientific’, ‘rational’ — in all this there was no room for religion. At best it was relegated to Christmas and christening, at worst it was mumbo-jumbo to be stamped out with energy.

Anthony Giddens poses a central, though little raised, question in relation to modernism: ‘Is modernity a Western project?’ (1990: 174). His blunt answer is ‘Yes’ (ibid.: 175). It is the perception of modernity as Western which will help explain non-Western responses to it; for example, as we will see in Chapter 3, the rejection of the concept of the nation-state, one of the central features of modernity (ibid.). The fact that until the middle of the twentieth century Western imperialism was a vehicle for the project of modernism further underlines the point. It is in this context that we may see Charles Jencks's useful distinction between modern culture as elitist and inaccessible and postmodernism as popular and accessible (1984; 1990); non-Western people can more readily identify with the latter.

The contemporary formulation of postmodernism as a distinct phase succeeding modernism is rooted in and explained by the recent history of the West which is at the core of the dominant global civilization of our times (see pages 98–110). Our definition of this civilization is cultural/political and not geographical. At the core are the United States and Western Europe, but included are other nations, like Australia. There is a general consensus on how to order the world in economic and, increasingly, political terms, one which presupposes a cultural way of looking at the world. For this civilization much of the last half-century has been a period of prosperity and tranquillity unmatched in history. It includes large parts of the population and is characterized by a strong and widening economic base, unassailable democracy and an increasing sense of possibilities. Plague, starvation and large-scale war at home seem features of a distant, almost medieval, past. The present period has coincided with — indeed, is made possible by — the most sophisticated technological advances such...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Postmodernism and Islam
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Postmodernism and Islam
• 2 Greek gods and Semitic prophets
• 3 Confrontation and clash
• 4 Studying Islam
• 5 Culture and change
• 6 The evil demon: the media as master
• References
• Name index
• Subject index