h.a. hellyer response to wood in salon

2/23/15, 8:59 PMThis stupidity needs to end: Why the Atlantic & NY Post are clueless about Islam - Salon.com

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This stupidity needs to end: Why the Atlantic & NY Postare clueless about Islam

This week, President Obama hosted a summit on countering “violent extremism,” wherehe received criticism from some on the rightwing over his refusal to call such violence“Islamic.” American media outlets, particularly the Atlantic and the New York Post, havestruck a similar chord of late. All of this happens against a rather poignant backdrop:Only a few days ago, ISIS released a video showing the killing of 21 Coptic Egyptians inLibya. The group expressed what it considered to be Islamic justification for its actions.Long after the summit, specialists in the field of counter-extremism will continue to askthe question: Is ISIS actually representative in some way of Islam? And what, really, isthe relationship between the group that calls itself the “Islamic State” and the world’ssecond largest religion?

There will be those that will insist that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam or religion in

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/18/politics/obama-speech-extremism-terror-summit/

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/02/19/the-new-york-post-pulls-no-punches-on-president-obama-like-none/

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/15/middleeast/isis-video-beheadings-christians/



general — that ISIS is primarily a social and political phenomenon, bereft of ideologyentirely, or simply using Islam as a superficial justification. Counterterrorism studiesindicate that for very many people in the broader radical Islamist universe, non-ideological factors certainly play magnificently important roles. At the same time, it isalso the case that for radical Islamists, an ideological component not only exists, but iscrucial in understanding their world views. In some shape or form, for ISIS supporters,religion certainly plays a role. But what religion, precisely?

The easy answer is to say “Islam” – but it is also a rather lazy answer. There are around1.5 billion Muslims around the world. The vast, overwhelming majority of them,needless to say, are not members of ISIS — and, in fact, Muslims actually make up themajority of ISIS’s victims, its most active enemies on the battlefield, and its mostprominent detractors.

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Surely ISIS would have far more recruits than a tiny minority of Muslims worldwide if“Islam” were the crucial factor. Moreover, if the Islamic credentials of ISIS were sowidely considered as valid, even if most chose not to actually follow them, surely therewould be a large numbers of Muslim jurists and theologians that would vouch for asmuch. In reality, the vast majority declares in no uncertain terms that, indeed, thosecredentials are void and invalid — a long, condemnatory open letter last year to the headof ISIS included more than a hundred well known religious authorities.

When assessing the role of religion in ISIS, there is also another option, which someposit: Islam lacks an ecclesiastical, hierarchical authority structure. There is noequivalent to a papal authority, such as in Catholicism, to define religious authority —so, essentially, everyone is entitled to define religion as they see fit within the Islamicfaith. Essentializing “Islam” as “good” or “bad” thus misses the point; there is no way toessentialize Islam. ISIS is as “Islamic” as its detractors — the only difference is

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-islamic-state_n_5878038.html



popularity (which heavily favors the latter).

While this is a more nuanced argument – certainly more than the one that claims ISISrepresents mainstream Islam – it is rather problematic when put up against thebackground of Muslim history. On the one hand, it is very correct that for SunniMuslims there is no hierarchical ecclesiastical structure. But a community with morethan 1,400 years of history does not survive as a recognizable community without someedifice of religious authority — even if it is one that we as Westerners are unfamiliarwith.

At the same time, there has indeed been a breakdown of religious authority, andunderstanding that brings us that much closer to understanding how ISIS exists.

A broken chain

Throughout my academic career, I’ve engaged with contemporary participants of SunniIslam’s system of intellectual inheritance of religious authority. Among scholars at theAzhar University in Cairo, graduates of the Qarawiyyeen in Morocco, and students ofseminaries in the Malay Archipelago – indeed, among fledging seminary institutions inthe West itself, I was struck by the broad variety of viewpoints they had on a plethora oftopics within the domain of religion. Their positions are not ones that we as modernWesterners might always find palatable — but they are not chaotically come to, either.There are sophisticated systems of interpretations at play.

Islam clearly admits a great diversity in spirituality, jurisprudence and theology. Butreligious authorities – jurists, theologians, spiritualists – have also traditionally beencareful about uniting that pluralism within a harmonious prism. That prism has systemsof interpretation — systems that ISIS and its cohorts reject — and therein lies animportant part of the puzzle.

At the root of such systems is the sanad, or the “chain.” Contemporary exemplars of thistradition take great pride in being able to say that any text they teach in the religious



sciences is a text that they have read with someone, who read it with someone, who readit with the author of the text, who would have read previous texts with someone whoread… and so on and so forth, back to the Prophet himself in the 7th century. That basicability to show a certain historical pedigree was vital in networks of Muslim religiousauthority, at least until quite recently. For adherents to those systems, even a degree in auniversity — let alone self-study — would by itself be insufficient to establish thequalification to interpret even secondary texts, let alone the primary one, the Qur’an.

These are rather complex systems of establishing religious authority via processes akinto academic peer review. Indeed, parts of these systems of transmission, especially withrelation to jurisprudence, have become crystalized in various curricula and schools oflaw (madhahib) – even inspiring the modern Western university, according to historianssuch as George Makdisi. These systems do not simply establish the transmission of textsbetween successive generations, but also the understanding of those texts, and amethodology — or minhaj — for understanding the primary and secondary texts.

Modern radical tendencies within the Muslim community do away with such systems.For them, the Muslim community has gone awfully wrong – and they’re going to put itright. In short, they create a do-it-yourself kit of interpretation.

A history of reformations

In the past few years, many have talked of the need for Muslims to engage in a“reformation” in order to address burgeoning extremism. In fact, however, Muslimcommunities often engage in “renewal” (tajdid), although it is typically done through theexisting structures. As for a more fundamental reformation, it wouldn’t be the first timethere had been one — but such changes haven’t worked out especially well in the past.

Over the past couple of centuries, Muslims have seen two types of reformation processestake place: One version, in what would later become Saudi Arabia, gave rise topurist Salafism, which many now call “Wahhabism.” The other version, in Egypt,became “revivalist modernism,” which later was politicized in the emergence of the

https://archive.org/details/TheRiseOfCollegesInstituionsOfLearningInIslamAndTheWest



Muslim Brotherhood. In both cases, from the outset, the more established religiousauthorities of the day chastised the proponents of reforms as either disavowing majorparts of the traditional methodology in their understandings and interpretations of thewide and vast corpuses of religious texts – or they accuse such “reformers” of cuttingcorners, intellectually.

As we’ve already seen, however, religious authority is defined through established, peer-reviewed approaches to the texts — not in spite of those approaches. Thus, for reformmovements, to jettison that methodology isn’t just a matter of corner-cutting, but acalculated objection to such authority. In these historical movements laid the seedsradical Islamism; thus, there will be those critics who move on from the simplistic “ISISis Islam” theory to an “ISIS is Islamism” one.

It is pertinent to note that “Islamism” is not “Islam.” Rather, Islamism comes about, inits various forms, as a reaction to, or even as an attack, in some cases, on normativereligious thought as taught by mainstream authorities. One might make the argumentthat without Islamism, one cannot trace the full genealogy of ISIS. But that isn’t quitethe point.

There have been, long before Islamism, other extreme movements that rose amongMuslims, such as the “Assassins,” the Qarmatians, and, at their outset, the followers ofMuhammad ibn Abdul Wahab. These movements were, like Islamism, defined asheterodox — precisely because on the root methodological level, they rejected allprevailing sets of textual approaches to religious materials.

When scores of religious authorities in the Sunni and Shi’a Muslim worlds disparageISIS as being “un-Islamic,” they’re not being facetious. They can see, plainly, that ISIS isciting religious texts – the Qur’an itself, the sayings of the Prophet, and pre-modernreligious authorities. These citations, however, don’t establish authenticity. Rather, theability to interpret the primary texts as the Prophet did, and secondary texts as theirauthors did, is what establishes authenticity. As far as religious authorities areconcerned, such discernment can only come via these systems of training through chains



of transmission. After all, there is a vast and massive corpus that has been added uponfor more than a millennium. Context thus could be seen as imperative.

Years ago, as I researched classical Islamic law in Cairo, I discussed the work of amodern Muslim academic with a traditional scholastic authority in Egypt. The latter hadpainstakingly studied for more than a decade, according to a curriculum that had itselfbeen the result of successive generations of traditional authorities essentially “duking itout” in a long peer-review process. The academic, by contrast, who was brilliant in manyways by my estimation, had spent about a year in private study of some traditional texts,based on a curriculum he’d constructed himself. The religious scholar was reluctant tooffer criticism, but said of the academic: “He dipped his toe in the ocean. He doesn’tknow how to swim.” For the scholar, interpretative credibility came about throughconnecting yourself to that system of authority.

No Kung-Fu master becomes as such without a master, or sifu of his own, it seems. Forthe likes of ISIS, the very system of producing a sifu is null and void. That’s part of thepoint.

The extinction of ISIS

Some argue that Muslim religious authorities ought to excommunicate ISIS, and thatwould solve the problem. Though rather rare, excommunication has taken place inMuslim history — but not on the grounds of sinful actions, grotesque though they mightbe. Criminals can be punished or fought against, even killed; but traditional religiousauthorities insist such criminals must still be recognized as Muslim, unless theyrepudiate core Islamic theological beliefs, like the unity of God, for example. Ironically,it is heterodox movements that regularly resort to excommunication for non-theologicalreasons – indeed, ISIS appears to do that regularly. In any case, this wouldn’t solve theproblem: ISIS would ignore such declarations, and continue to exist.

But there is something unique about ISIS, historically speaking, beyond its obviousbrutality – and that is the time in which it managed to emerge. In pre-modern Muslim

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26338341



communities, heterodox movements might get somewhere — but not for very long, andnot with very many. But the last 200 years has created a conflation of some veryawkward realities.

The first is the breaking down of religious authority through different types of Salafism,as mentioned above. Purist Salafism manages to survive and thrive through a politicalalliance in Saudi Arabia, eventually with the help of massive financial resources. Theeffect of that on Muslims writ large is significant – it not only breaks down normativenotions of religious authority, but replaces them with something deeply antithetical tothose notions.

Additionally, the systematic degradation of educational standards in traditional Musliminstitutions of religious authority, which begins prior to colonialism, is intensifiedthrough that experience, and then is worsened by post-colonialist and nationalisteducational paradigms. As a typical example: Most Arab countries’ educational systemsoperate on an upside-down pyramid structure, where the higher your high-school-diploma grade, the more subjects you are able to study at university level. Loweracademic achievers get subjects knocked off their options. Religion finds itself at thevery bottom of that inverted pyramid — and thus is the first subject to go. After severalgenerations, this shows not only in the students of religious establishments, but in manyof the faculty, who are often drawn from graduates. Those are the same graduates thatwill minister to Muslims at large, as well as be invested with the responsibility to educatethem and inoculate them against radical Islamism.

Finally, such institutions of religious authority often suffer from a credibility deficit withthe grassroots in their own countries and beyond. A lack of independence from the state,and an unwillingness to criticize abuses carried out by those in power, is more the rulethan the exception today. Against that backdrop, the credibility of critiques against ISISand others is less than it might otherwise be.

But beyond addressing institutions of religious authorities, there is also the issue of thelay Muslim. The human race at large becomes basically more literate via the advent of



modernity — and religious establishments have typically been unprepared for that. Forcenturies, all religious establishments have expected that the lay among their flockwould rely on specialists to interpret religious texts — because most of the laity neverhad the option to even read those texts. With widespread literacy, and the massproliferation of religious texts, hitherto only accessible to seminarians, that has changeddramatically.

When ISIS claims book “A” written by author “B” says “C,” any Muslim can find thatbook, and see if it does. If this new interpretation appears credible, then readers areoften stumped — because they, like ISIS, have generally not been through a seminaryeducation that would put such books into context, according to the systems oftransmission mentioned above. While it is welcome for all sorts of reasons that religiousauthorities stand up and say “ISIS is not Islamic and these actions are forbidden” andthe like, that doesn’t address the basic issue. The question is: Why is ISIS not Islamic?And that comes back to credibility and pedigree in interpretation.

It’s entirely likely that just as pre-modern heterodox movements disappeared, so too willISIS – but only after a lot of damage has been done in the meantime. Moreover, due tothese structural issues above, it’s also possible other such movements will arise again,and again. Breaking that cycle is not the prerogative of Western governments. If Muslimcommunities and societies themselves wish to tackle the issue, there are several things tobe addressed in the short and long term.

In researching the philosophical interplay between Islam and modernity, I found thatMuslim scholars were often quick to note that traditional systems of religious authoritydo have the ability to “revive” themselves, and update from within. That requires,nonetheless, for religious authorities to be of a decent academic caliber, and havecredibility with the Muslim laity at large. That in turn demands a massive improvementwithin seminary institutions, giving them more independence to critique not only abusesby the likes of ISIS, but authoritarianism in Muslim heartlands.

Secondly, in the short term, religious authorities need to do far more than simply say



“this is un-Islamic” when faced with a crime ISIS or others carry out. Fullycomprehensive refutations of why these things are un-Islamic need to be forthcoming –and put into terms that are comprehensible to the layman. At the same time, in themedium to long term, religious authorities, and elite religious institutions may need toget to grips with the new realities that modernity has in recent generations placed uponthem. In pre-modernity, only specialists would have the religious literacy needed tounderstand the methodology for interpreting primary and secondary texts. Maintainingthat sort of educational elitism is partly responsible for the production of vulnerableMuslims to recruitment of radical groups. The answer isn’t to try to turn lay Muslimsinto religious authorities en masse. But more widely diffusing a basic literacy innormative methodologies that are traditionally used to interpret religious texts mayindeed be in order. Adjusting their relationship with the laity, and making the systems ofauthoritative interpretation more widely understood, are contemporary tasks forreligious authorities — but important ones.

As noted before, many heterodox movements among Muslims have erupted in the past –and then become extinct. They’re essentially footnotes in history books. There’s noreason to think ISIS won’t face precisely the same fate – but it would certainly bepreferable to help along the wheels of history so that it happens faster — and nothingelse takes its place.

Dr. H.A. Hellyer is a non-resident fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy at theBrookings Institution, and at the Royal United Services Institute in London. A researchassociate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, he tweets at @hahellyer.

http://www.twitter.com/hahellyer

h.a. hellyer response to wood in salon

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