Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning

Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse

William Roff, William R. Roff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138820180
• eBook ISBN: 9781317593690
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

To be a Muslim is to be a part of a culture with distinct beliefs, ideas, institutional forms and prescriptive roles. Yet there is a complex inter-relationship between a system of knowledge and belief, such as Islam, and the immediate political, economic and social context of its adherents. This book aims to improve understanding of Muslim social and political action by examining a broad spectrum of Muslim discourse, both written and spoken, to see how meaning is formed by context. It is a broad comparative study and examines discourses produced in opposition to government as well as those produced, in Iran or Pakistan for example, under an authoritarian Islamic state. Through cogent analyses of socio-historical contexts and textual materials from East Java, Nigeria, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maghreb and Egypt, this book shows how to 'read' a familiar Islamic movement, period of change or textual source in a newer and better light.

First published in 1987.

Part One

The Political Economy of Religious Culture

1

Changing Interpretations of Islamic Movements

Dale F. Eickelman

The Iranian revolution signalled a major turning point in understanding Islam among both scholars and believers. Until 1979, many scholars dismissed Islamic intellectuals and leaders as elderly men without replacements in younger generations, and regarded popular Islamic movements as incapable of generating sustained support for specific political goals. This view was shared by some of the elite of Muslim countries, who considered Islam as a political force to be a receding phenomenon. Turkey, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, India, and even Iran were variously cited as indicators of the trend toward the relegation of religion to a compartmentalized, private sphere. Only exceptionally did studies break with the prevailing assumption of Islam’s declining political significance (e.g., Kessler, 1978) or admit the possibility of new forms of Islamic leadership emerging, as had often occurred in earlier eras (e.g., Hammoudi, 1981)

In particular, the notion of religion receding as a political force was accepted both by many members of the Western-educated technocratic elite throughout the Muslim world and by scholars accepting the common assumptions of modernization theory prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. Local setbacks notwithstanding, religion was seen as a force to be invoked in the preamble to constitutions or on formal occasions, rather than as a politically significant element of ideology, practice, and organization.

Political trends in Egypt have often been regarded as a bell-wether for the Arab Muslim world. Thus, Egypt’s experience was thought to exemplify the prevailing assumption of the political decline of religious movements. The massive reaction among Egyptian Muslims and Copts to reports of the apparition of the Virgin Mary over a Coptic church in a Cairo suburb in April 1968, certified as authentic by the Coptic Patriarch of Egypt and All Africa (Nelson, 1974: 253–66), suggests the continuing depth of religious sentiment, with political implications ranging well beyond the limits of state control. None the less, the disappearance in 1954 of the Muslim Brotherhood as a formal political force in Egypt was until recent years cited as an example of religion’s declining significance. The Brotherhood, possibly Egypt’s one genuine twentieth-century mass political movement, never fully recovered from the crippling wave of mass arrests and imprisonment instigated by Nasser.

Whenever religious interpretations, organizations, or practices are officially repressed or held in disfavor, official estimates of susceptibility to their message or goals must be regarded with extreme caution. For this reason, it is often easier to know the religious attitudes of earlier eras than those of the present. As Kepel (1985) observes, the arrest of suspected Muslim Brothers in the 1950s created an oppressive environment, which was ideal for instigating more radical religious interpretations and for recruiting a younger generation of radicalized militants unwilling to compromise with the existing state authorities. The prisons and prison camps became vivid metaphors for the moral bankruptcy of existing government. Jahil is a Qur’anic term evoking the state of ignorance, violence, and self-interest which existed prior to the revelation of the Qur’an and which continues to hamper realization of a full Islamic community. Islamic ‘militants’ and many other Muslims consider existing state organizations ‘barbaric’ (jahili) because they do not govern in accordance with Islamic principles.

The tactics of Sadat’s assassins, who justified themselves by asserting the jahili nature of Sadat’s rule, may have had limited popular support. But the existence of six mosques in Egypt independent of government control for every authorized one as of 1981 (Ansari, 1984: 129) suggests the extent to which Islam is considered to be both a vehicle for expression and a potential organizing force for significant elements of the population. The formal separation of religion and politics has not fared well outside of elite circles.

In many parts of the Muslim world, Islamic political activism is in part encouraged by what is perceived as the practical realization of Islamic rule in Iran. As a consequence, both voices of opposition and established authorities now seek to co-opt the popular slogans of Islamic militancy. In an effort to co-opt the left in the 1970s, the Moroccan monarch’s ‘Revolution of the King and the People’ emulated the former Shah’s ‘Revolution of the Shah and the People’. In Morocco it is now the language of militant Muslims that is co-opted in an effort to enhance monarchic authority (Tozy, 1984: 413; Eickelman, in press).

At the near antipodes of the Muslim world, early interpretations of Indonesia’s post-1966 ‘New Order’ suggested that the political elite sought to depoliticize Islam and promote instead the Pančasila, the official, pan-religious national ideology (McVey, 1983; 199). More recent analysis (Hefner, 1985a; cf. Geertz 1972: 81–84) suggests a more complex political process in which the ‘New Order’ seeks to encompass a multitude of shifting local-level coalitions and ideological orientations. The government party, GOLKAR, has managed to embrace Islamic symbols in such a manner as to sustain a guided dialogue between a variety of ‘local’ cultures and the nation state. The government seeks to communicate the message that religion is an important component of national development, and that local understandings of the process of development are important considerations. Hence there have been quiet but pervasive programs for upgrading the quality and training of village preachers, with parallel developments in Javanese Hindu communities (Hefner 1985b; 239–65). By allowing for such local participation and the fusion of religious symbols, especially Islamic ones, with national goals, the Indonesian government may be changing the local political balance by creating a more uniform Islamic community. For the moment, Indonesia appears to provide an example of the successful fusion of state development progams with a variety of local religious understandings.

The Indonesian case notwithstanding, many analyses of ‘resurgent’ Islamic movements suggest a deep Western bias against any valid role for religion in contemporary politics. As Piscatori (1983: 1) writes, Muslims are thought to become ‘politically active out of an excess of zeal rather than with clearly defined goals’. Islam is associated with fanatical opposition, aimless revolution, anti-Westernism and anti-modernism, so that the widespread evidence of interpretations of Islam and Islamic movements facilitating major social transformations is downplayed or ignored. Many Muslims none the less consider that Islam should play a central and pervasive role in politics and economics. For this reason alone, Islamic ideas and practices assume a major significance.

TOWARD A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISLAM

Islamic doctrine, tradition, and practice have been elaborated, understood, and transmitted to successive generations and new communities in different historical, political, and economic contexts throughout the world. Recognition of these transformations has become, at least in principle, a familiar part of the intellectual landscape. In practice, however, most studies assume, rather than explore, the complex, multi-dimensional relationships between political economy, on the one hand, and belief systems, on the other (Kessler, 1978: 20; cf. Eickelman, 1982: 6–8). A ‘political economy of meaning’ (Eickelman, 1979) contrives to achieve a balance between concern with the communication and development of complex belief systems and how these systems shape and in turn are shaped by configurations of political domination and economic relations among groups and classes in societies of different levels of complexity. In itself, this goal is not unique. Indeed, it is one of the central concerns of classical social thought. None the less, advocates of the political economy approach have often remained primarily at the level of theoretical exposition or implicit assumption. The elaboration of such concepts in the context of specific comparative studies has become common only in the last few years.

Of course, studies of Islam form part of broader intellectual currents and consequently reflect wider debates. In recent years there has been a shift away from emphasis upon an almost exclusive concern with symbolic forms, often devoid of a clear representation of economic and political activities, toward discerning how systems of meaning are transmitted and reproduced. Ortner (1984; see also Cohn, 1981) argues that the reintroduction into anthropology of a political economy approach in the 1960s contributed to the discipline’s belated ‘rediscovery’ of history after a long interval of prior neglect. Anthropologists interested in political economy have for the most part concerned themselves with larger regional processes, instead of the highly localized studies of an earlier era in which broad economic and political trends were evoked only peripherally. Since the 1960s there has been a growing effort to link these trends with their consequences for particular social groups and classes, effects which are also traced over time (e.g., Hopkins, 1983). On the negative side, self-identified studies of political economy by anthropologists have tended to emphasize economic factors above all others, in part perhaps to compensate for their earlier neglect. They have also tended to present a highly capitalism-centered view of the world. But these shortcomings are not inherent in the approach. ‘Meanings’ not founded in Western notions of politics and economics motivate people and have major consequences for social and political action. A renewed attention to the political economy of meaning seeks to alter the prior disregard of how understandings of Islam shape political and economic perceptions and activity.

PREDECESSORS

The development of a political economy of meaning in the study of religious tradition and discourse has distinguished antecedents in some respects, although in others it constitutes a significantly new point of departure. Ernest Troeltsch (1976 [orig. 1911]), for example, characterized the history of Christianity as one of progressive shifts between compromise and non-compromise with the social world: the delineation of ‘intrinsic’ sociological ideas of Christianity, the influence of Christian doctrine upon the social world, what he termed the ‘reflex’ influence of these conditions upon the ideas of Christianity themselves, and the ‘inner’ reality of religion (Troeltsch, 1976: 34). Despite his insistence upon the ‘briefest possible presentation’ (1976: 25), the fact that his study is over a thousand pages in length suggests the challenge of elaborating sociological hypotheses richly informed by attention to social history. Troeltsch’s magisterial study admittedly left vague many key concepts (e.g., Christianity’s ‘inner’ reality), but it none the less constituted, together with the earlier work of W. Robertson Smith (1956 [orig. 1889]), a pioneering effort to link the development of religious concepts with social and economic conditions.

In the last two decades, studies with a more sharply delineated historical compass have begun to offer a more precise understanding of how religious identities and concepts are differently elaborated within varied social classes and categories, and often change their significance when taken up by novel contexts or new groups. Merad (1967) shows the intimate and necessary interrelationship between the reformist ideology and its carriers in Algeria during the 1920s and 1930s, the resistance to the reformist movement from rural notables and the heads of religious orders, and the importance of understanding the prevailing assumptions of Islamic belief and practice to which the reformists were opposed. An indirect consequence of Algerian reformism was to disseminate a rationalist conception of Islam which inadvertently set religious doctrines and practice apart from other aspects of social life. More recent studies have dealt with such diverse topics as changing interpretations of Islam in local contexts (Eickelman, 1976), support for reformist thought (Metcalf, 1982), and the changing implications of conversion to Islam according to period, social category, and context (Bulliet, 1979).

The study of a world religion as it has been realized in various times and places implies what from some perspectives is obvious: the ideologies and practices associated with it are elaborated, understood, and subsequently reproduced in particular places and at particular moments. Even eternal truths are necessarily revealed in a specific language and setting. Revelation ‘in Arabic, that ye may be understood’ (Qur’an, 12: 2) has significantly different implications for a seventh-century Arabian merchant, a nineteenth-century Bengali peasant, a Turkish Gastarbeiter in Bonn, and a twentieth-century Malaysian university student.

The main challenge for the study of Islam is to describe how its universalistic or abstract principles have been realized in various social and historical contexts without representing Islam as a seamless essence on the one hand or as a plastic congeries of beliefs and practices on the other. To this end, the prevalent earlier conceptual dichotomy of ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions can retrospectively be viewed as a significant first step. As initially employed in the late 1940s, this conceptualization contained an historical component and was used to explore the possible relationships between religious traditions, as known through the texts and exegeses of a cultural elite on the one hand, and the religious expressions and interpretations prevalent in village of ‘folk’ contexts, on the other. Unlike the earlier doctrine of ‘survivals’, which presumed that folk traditions were vestiges of earlier civilizations and less permeable to change than ‘high culture’, the notion of great/little tradition made no gratuitous assumptions concerning the historical precedence of some civilizational elements over others. Yet as ordinarily reported, great and little traditions were more often juxtaposed than used as the basis for analysing their complex inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part One: The Political Economy of Religious Culture
• Part Two: Muslim Social Thought and the State
• Part Three: Change and the Individual Voice
• Glossary
• Index