– Nazry Bahrawi and Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib
The Malaysian Insider

September 11, 2013

When the World Trade Center twin towers came crashing down 12 years ago, it was not just non-Muslims who were shocked – many Muslims were equally horrified. Consequently, it led to deeper introspection. For many Muslims, it was a turning point.

Just over three decades ago, prominent Arab intellectual Sadik Al Azm wrote a devastating critique of the Arab world’s political stagnation after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1967 war. The loss gave impetus to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism worldwide. The solution to Muslims’ social, economic and political humiliation, it was believed, lay in returning to “Islam” as a complete ideology. Islam-ism would rival all other isms, from secularism to capitalism to communism.

At the heart of Islamism is an orientation that upholds the supremacy of “Islam” versus everything else deemed “unIslamic”. Syed Qutb, in his famous treatise Ma’lim fi al-tariq (Milestones), pretty much sums up the tension between what he deemed an “Islamic society” versus the “jahili (paganistic) society”.

Over nearly three decades, certain frustrated Muslim youths became attracted to this orientation known as Islamic fundamentalism. It was also a period of struggle for many Islamic movements to establish “daulah islamiyah” or the notion of an “Islamic state”.

This project failed, and its proponents continue to be frustrated by authoritarian secular regimes and their own intellectual deficiency in defining and operationalising the notion of an “Islamic state”. French sociologist Olivier Roy, in his insightful 1996 book, termed it “the failure of political Islam”.

Since the 1990s, the world has seen an increase in violent acts committed by Islamist movements which draw upon such frustrations. This culminated in the attack on New York’s twin towers.

If the 1967 defeat of the Arabs had propelled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, 9/11 has paved the way for rethinking and critical reflection.

Could Islam accommodate the separation of religion and state, thus admitting that secularism is not anathema to Muslim political thought? Could Muslims be at home with modern values without positing these as an antithetical to the Islamic notion of what is “traditional” and “authentic”?

Was the dichotomy between “Islam” and “the West” tenable or even intelligible? These were some of the issues that posed a new challenge to Islamic fundamentalism. Critical Muslim scholars such as Mohammed Arkoun (Algerian), Nasr Abu Zayd (Egyptian), Abdullahi An-Na’im (Sudanese), Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesian) and Abdolkarim Soroush (Iranian) continue to push the boundary of Muslim sociopolitical thought — and ultimately challenge the dominance of fundamentalist conceptions of Islam. Read the rest of this entry »