Over the course of the Egyptian uprising, religious scholars in and beyond Egypt have taken positions against or in favour of the revolution. The dividing line between their views depends on the relationship of the ulama with state authorities in the region, which echoes a classical contention in the tradition of Sunni Islam.
The ulama of Sunni Islam have had an ambiguous partnership with the men governing them. The ideal religious scholar is portrayed as a courageous man of learning and piety who denounces injustice and dares to speak truth to tyrants. Nonetheless, pragmatism has also been at the core of the Sunni ulama’s relationship with political powers, along with a deep pessimism about the grim realities of politics, which they often hoped to escape. In the Middle East, modern politics has redefined the ulama’s place in society, causing them to submit to the state and nationalising their institutions into state bureaucracies.
For example, al-Azhar was nationalised in 1961 by Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Al-Azhar is officially represented by its Grand Imam, who has the rank of minister, is appointed by the president of the Republic and reports directly to him. Given this status, the official ulama usually follow the directives of the regime and have narrow margins of manoeuver. Critiques of the regime by Grand Imams are rare and often expressed with enough subtlety so as not to generate controversy. However the domestication of al-Azhar by the state has not prevented less official ulama from playing a significant public role nationally and beyond.
Azharites, recognizable by their white and red tarbushes, white collars, and long gray robes, gathered in Tahrir Square in small groups during the protests, reminding us of the sociological and political diversity of al-Azhar as an academic and religious institution. One day before the resignation of Mubarak, Shaykh Muhammad Jebril, who studied at al-Azhar, led the Friday prayer in Tahrir Square. The Azharite presence, as well as the images of Muslims and Copts protecting each other during prayers, calls to mind the narrative of the 1919 revolution. That revolution was one of the last great public protests in which Azharites participated as a significant body alongside more secular groups, representing al-Azhar as a popular and national institution.
Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyib, Grand Imam of al-Azhar since 2010, has been cautious in his statements regarding the protests, calling for restraint on the parts of the demonstrators and the regime. He asked demonstrators to go home after Mubarak’s departure, adding that protest is “illegitimate in Islam.” His line of reasoning echoed a classic position in Sunni Islam: namely, that obedience to the state, even to a tyrant, is better than fitna, or dissension.
On the other hand, Muhammad Rafi al-Tahtawi, the official spokesperson for al-Azhar, resigned in order to join the demonstrators in Tahrir Square. When a Saudi Mufti issued a fatwa condemning the Egyptian demonstrators, some Azharites denounced it. They argued that it was irrelevant because it was ordered by the Saudi government and was therefore “tainted by politics” (musayyasa). For their part, the Egyptian “Ulama’s Front” (jabhat al-ulama), a small group of Azharites whose history goes back to the 1940s, launched verbal attacks during the protests against the head of al-Azhar and the Mufti of Egypt, because they appeared to be too close to Mubarak’s regime. This mix of positions shows that al-Azhar is not a homogenous institution, but rather reflects the range of Egyptian politics.
The anti-regime voices are those of “peripheral ulama,” those Azharite graduates who do not necessarily work in the religious institution but for whom their own identity as Azharites is crucial. One of the most famous of these figures is Dr Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, a graduate of al-Azhar who resides in Qatar. He has gained an international reputation and audience through his television show on al-Jazeera 'Sharia and Life.'
Al-Qaradhawi appeared on al-Jazeera early on in the Tunisian crisis. Showing sensitivity to the plight of Muhammad Bouazizi, he declared that self-immolation and suicide in general are contrary to Islam, but that given the circumstances, those who had committed this type of suicide should not be condemned. He encouraged the Tunisian protesters to continue their fight. Later, he made the same appeal to the Egyptian demonstrators, urging them to oust Mubarak. After the fall of Mubarak, Shaykh Ahmed al-Tayyeb declared that he wanted the Grand Imam to be elected by a committee of ulama, and that the independence of al-Azhar should be a constitutional principle.
Religious state and non-state authorities have entered into a discussion about the legitimacy of political resistance. Al-Azhar, through the presence of some of its members in Tahrir Square, as well as through its more peripheral voices and the Grand Imam’s call for al-Azhar’s independence, has shown its relevance to the recent political mobilisation and has asserted its role in shaping a narrative of hope, empowerment, and resistance against tyranny.
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© Malika Zeghal is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life at Harvard University.
With grateful acknowledgements to Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Illinois, USASecular Revolutions, Religious Landscape
While the Middle East uprisings have not revolved around religion, faith has not been absent from Arab scenes of protest in the last two months. God and scripture are invoked by revolutionaries and those who oppose them for the simple reason that Arab dialects and ways of life are infused with religion.
To an outside observer, the revolts of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain might appear to be entirely secular, but Arabic Twitter and Facebook feeds are brimming with prayers, some formulaic and some informal, asking God to aid protesters and remove oppressors. Qur’anic verses and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are shared on Facebook walls. One blogger titled his post: “A saying of the prophet about President Qaddafi.” In the quoted hadith, the Prophet Muhammed warns of a time when trivial men will speak for the people.
After Libyan president Moammar Al-Qaddafi ordered brutal attacks on demonstrators, leaving thousands dead and even more wounded, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi urged the Libyan army to kill Qaddafi. “I say to my brothers and sons who are soldiers and officers in the Libyan Army to disobey when (the government) gives orders to kill the people using warplanes,” the prominent Sunni scholar said, according to UPI. Soldiers have already defected in large numbers, and the pro-democracy army has taken hold of many Libyan cities.
In every part of the Arab world, religious spaces such as mosques and churches have been stages for demonstrators as well as opposition. In the United Arab Emirates an activist was arrested after giving a speech at a mosque in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution. In his speech he invited worshippers to join him in performing a prayer for the Egyptian protesters.
In Egypt, marches began at mosques after Friday prayers, and inside them imams gave speeches in favour of, or opposition to, the uprising. Egyptians are donating blood at mosques near the Libyan border. In Bahrain pro-democracy and pro-government protesters demonstrated outside Manama’s Al-Fateh Mosque as well as at Pearl Roundabout.
Even though religion is not the driving force behind the revolutions, religious leaders continue to defend protest in speeches that are disseminated via YouTube. Dr Tareq Al-Suwaidan, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, gave a speech in which he urged Arabs to continue demanding freedom, human rights and an end to corruption. He challenged the governments’ claim that revolutions will lead to instability and insecurity, and that new freedoms would lead to chaos. “The west is living with these rights in stability and security, and they are making progress,” he said. “Our religion calls for these rights. Our religion guaranteed them to us.”
Al-Suwaidan’s tone is one of disbelief at dictators’ illogical statements and the contradictions in their claims. But his ridicule of government leaders is tame in comparison to the jokes made by Arabs all over the world following Al-Qaddafi’s speech. The jokes, too, involve religion. “Al-Qaddafi’s demands are simple — only that the people should say: There is no God but Al-Qaddafi,” Nael Shahwan tweeted in Arabic. Mohammad Awaad wrote, “Qaddafi ‘the god’ is a natural result of a media that has become accustomed to not saying no to a president, as if he is never wrong.” He continued, “I believe we have 22 gods” — one for each Arab country.
The opposition, too, is armed with religious rhetoric, but mosque, Qur’an, and hadith have been central in the Arab world’s struggle for freedom and democracy. Religious leaders as well as lay people have found that the language of religion is also the language of revolution. After all religion is very often the spirit of Arab life, and the inspiration for most of its endeavours — jokes and revolutions included.
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© Shatha Almutawa is the editor of Sightings and a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
With grateful acknowledgements to Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Illinois, USA.
ALSOThe pernicious 'good Muslim, bad Muslim' game
One of the lower points in the Park51 Center controversy was the comment by New York Governor David Paterson: “This group who has put this mosque together, they are known as the Sufi Muslims. This is not like the Shiites…They’re almost like a hybrid, almost westernised. They are not really what I would classify in the sort of mainland Muslim practice.”
In a few short sentences, the governor managed to offend Sufis, Shi’i Muslims, as well as westernised Muslims, non-westernised Muslims, and “mainland Muslims” (whoever they are). Paterson overlooked the fact that some Shi’i Muslims are mystically inclined, and that six million American citizens are Muslims, thus there is no question of “westernising” or “almost westernising” for them. There is a more disturbing implication hiding in his assertion: the ongoing way in which the general demonisation of Muslims, of the kind now routine on Fox News, is accompanied by an equally pernicious game of Good Muslim, Bad Muslims.
There are many versions of this game, but the basic contour stays the same: The assertion that the general masses of Muslims are evil, terrorist-supporters, anti-western, patriarchal, misogynist, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic; and that these masses are set off and defined against either the solitary, lone Muslim good woman or man. The 'Good Muslim' is often an individual, or a small circle, because to admit that the larger group of Muslims could be on the right side of the human-rights divide is to have the house of cards of the Muslim demonisation game collapse on itself.
There are endless scenarios of this fictitious bifurcation: Reading Lolita In Tehran is 'Good Muslim', unspoken, nameless, faceless masses of Muslims are patriarchal, bad Muslims. Irshad Manji is an Israel-loving 'good Muslim' who suggests that Muslims could be blamed for the holocaust, while the majority of Muslims are bad Muslims. Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk are 'good' secular or ex-Muslims, defined against the masses of Muslims. It is worth noting how easily and how frequently the 'good Muslim' solitary figure ends up being prominently featured on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.
Sarah Palin famously addressed “Peace-seeking Muslims” on Twitter: “pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing.” In her inarticulate bifurcation, supporters of Park51 were defined as being outside the “peace-seeking” Muslim category.
The latest version of this bifurcation game of Good Muslim, Bad Muslims is that of pitting Muslim mystics (Sufis) as the “good Muslims” against the majority of Muslims cast as villains. Sufi tradition offers incredible reservoirs for mercy, love, and pluralism. Yet it is inaccurate, and politically appropriative, to present Sufism as disconnected from politics or wider social concerns at best, and as agents of the Empire at worst.
This type of a presentation was prominent in the discussion about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the visionary American Muslim leader behind Park51. Time and again in the presentation of Imam Feisal and his wife Daisy Khan, we were reminded by the New York Times that they represented Sufi Islam, a gentle kind of Islam, nothing like the scary monster of political Islam: “He [Abdul Rauf] was asked to lead a Sufi mosque.” Daisy Khan is described as “looking for a gentler Islam than the politicised version she rejected after Iran's revolution.” Another New York Times article was even more explicit in marking the couple as worthy “good Muslims”: “They founded a Sufi organisation advocating melding Islamic observance with women's rights and modernity.”
The suggestion that Sufi teachings are somehow immune to politics, that Sufis have been unconcerned with social issues and questions of justice and politics are problematic. Historically speaking, Sufis have been fully engaged in both challenging political powers and alternately legitimising political power throughout their history. The legacy of prominent Sufis like Abu Sa’id Abi ‘l-Khayr has been used in legitimising political powers, and Sufis such as ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani and Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri have spoken truth to power. In both cases, Sufis have not remained aloof from politics.
The Park51 controversy exposes many underlying assumptions about religion in the public space and politics, particularly in the case of Muslims, who are given two options in this superficial bifurcation game: to be politically destructive in the manner of terrorists or 'Islamists', or to be politically quietist, acquiescing in the face of power. In this 'Good Sufi/Bad Muslims' dichotomy, Sufis are asked to line up in the politically quietist camp, so that they can be validated.
This dichotomy ignores a third group of Muslims: Those who, whether mystically inclined or not, want to neither destroy the world nor acquiesce to the wishes of the Empire, but rather seek to redeem the world by speaking truth to power. This group speaks out of the love of God and cries out for the suffering of humanity, defiantly and prophetically standing up for justice and liberation.
And here is where the canard of 'Moderate Muslims' comes to play: Ever since 9/11, we have been asked time and again where the 'moderate Muslims' are, and why they are silent. No matter how often, and how loudly, Muslim organisations and individuals condemn terrorism, the likes of Thomas Friedman can still famously, and inaccurately, state: “The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks… To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.” No presentation of factual data seems to persuade these critics that Muslims did, do, and will continue to speak out loudly and officially against terrorism. The reason their critics do not hear the moderate Muslims is because they are not listening.
Moving beyond the question of Muslims condemning terrorism, there is the larger question of what exactly makes someone a 'moderate' Muslim? In its current usage, the term 'moderate Muslim' is as meaningful as a purple polka dot unicorn. If the term moderate implies a balancing point between two extremes, it is a hopelessly vague term in the post-9/11 landscape. If one of the two extremes away from the 'moderate Muslims' is easy to imagine (terrorism, Bin Laden, etc.), the other extreme is ill-defined. What are moderate Muslims moderating? If one extreme is terrorism, then what is the other extreme?
'Moderate Muslims' are often defined, and confined, to be supporters of US foreign policy, vis-à-vis some important issues, such as supporting US global military presence, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Palestinian-Israeli issue. To dare suggest that the United States is today the world’s only military Empire with hundreds of military bases in other countries, or that we have in fact become the Military-Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about, or heaven forbid, that the Palestinians suffer from decades-long, unbearable occupation and violations of human rights, is to define one outside the safe (and lucrative) safe-zone of 'moderate Muslim'. Sadly, even the safe-zone is not so safe. Imam Feisal has been sent on political missions abroad by the State Department, yet even he was not safe from being branded by Fox News as a terrorist sympathiser.
If our public discourse about religion and politics is to evolve to a more subtle and accurate space, it must get to the point where religious voices that speak from the depths and heights of all spiritual traditions can do more than simply acquiesce in the face of the Empire. They can, and should, speak for the weak, and give voice to the voiceless.
REFERENCES
Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005).
Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
CBS New York, “Paterson: ‘Mosque Developers Hybrid, Almost Westernized’ Muslims,” 26 August 2010.
Sarah Palin, “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing,” Twitter, 18 July 2010.
Michael M. Grynbaum, “Daisy Khan, An Eloquent Face of Islam,” The New York Times, 12 November 2010.
Thomas L. Freedman, “If It’s a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution,” The New York Times, 8 July 2005.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex,” 1961 speech.
Dozens of Islamic Statements Against Terrorism, compiled by Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina. http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/terror.htm
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(c) Omid Safi is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, USA. He served as the Chair of the Study of Islam Section at the American Academy of Religion from 2002-2009. He is the author of Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters (HarperOne, 2009).
With grateful acknowledgements to Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Illinois, USA.
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