In the book review field, it is not normal to discuss the author and his possible motivation. This clearly leaves a gap and reviews remain, as it were, suspended in mid-air. It must, however, be admitted that this gap is not always easy to overcome since in many cases the reviewers do not know the writers. As it happens, I know Rafiq Zakaria intimately and am in a position to discuss the inspiration behind the book under review, The Struggle Within Islam. As it also happens, Zakaria has provided a brief autobiographical sketch in the introduction to the book and has thus made it ‘legitimate’ for me to refer to his background.
Zakaria, as the reader will know, is a Muslim and a nationalist. I use this formulation advisedly. I prefer to avoid the familiar ‘nationalist Muslim’ formulation for a variety of reasons. Zakaria is an unusual Muslim in that he is genuinely interested in Hinduism and can, without any difficulty, identify himself with the great achievements of the Hindus, specially in the field of philosophy. He has read the Gita several times and he keeps a magnificent Buddha statue (probably of Thai provenance) and a Nataraj in his house. But that does not make him a syncretist. He remains a proper Muslim inasmuch as he accepts the revelatory and therefore immutable character of the Quran and the inviolability of the Sunnah and Hadith (sayings and practices of Prophet Muhammad).
If I may coin a phrase, I would say Zakaria is a nationalist by temperament. He was drawn towards the freedom movement when he was a student, that is, before he could grasp intellectually the deeper implications of the concept of Indian nationalism as opposed to Jinnah’s two-nation theory. He was opposed to partition as a nationalist. But he was also opposed to partition as a Muslim, for, he was convinced that partition would be a disaster for Indian Muslims. Subsequent developments have only reinforced him in his conviction.
It is notable that Zakaria chose “Rise of Muslims in Indian Politics” as the subject of his PhD dissertation at the London School of Economics. This remarkably thorough work, which, in my opinion, has not been improved upon by any Indian scholar, Hindu or Muslim, could have left him in no doubt that Indian Muslims were determined to acquire a separate political identity and could have therefore inclined him to cast his lot with Jinnah. But it did not so incline him. He remained committed to Indian nationalism, that is to say, to the proposition that despite all that had happened, the Hindus and the Muslims could constitute one nation.
Zakaria continued to reject the two-nation theory and like other Muslims of his persuasion, to regard the Indian National Congress under the Gandhi-Nehru leadership as an adequate instrument for the creation of an Indian nation. He was still in London when India was finally partitioned in 1947. This, in a sense, settled the issue for him. He had to do his bit for the creation of an Indian nation with the help of the only instrument available in the shape of the Indian National Congress. The alternatives of either migrating to Pakistan or of confining himself to his legal practice were wholly unacceptable to him. Nehru’s leadership of the Congress facilitated Zakaria’s adherence to the Congress since a vast majority of Muslims accepted Nehru’s secularist credentials after partition and trusted him to ensure their security. But I believe that Zakaria would have pursued the same course if instead of Nehru, Sardar Patel had become India’s first Prime Minister. Zakaria is one of that small group of Muslims who would not dub the Sardar as a Hindu communalist.
As Zakaria saw things, there was, however, a gap between the Hindus and the Muslims that needed to be bridged. He did not see the gap wholly either in terms of the history of Muslim conquests and Hindu resistance, or in terms of old stereotypes, though both these were pertinent. He saw the gap in terms of modern education and the resulting social changes, that is, in the same terms in which Sir Sayyid Ahmed viewed it in the later part of the 19th century. In view of the work that Zakaria has done in the field of education in Aurangabad, it would not be much of an exaggeration to describe him as a latter-day Sir Sayyid. It is perhaps because Aurangabad is so far away from the Delhi-Agra-Lucknow belt and because modern education among the Muslims is not the novelty it was in Sir Sayyid’s time that Zakaria’s efforts have not received the attention they deserve, for no other Muslim leader has done half as much in independent India.
If Sir Sayyid advocated cooperation with the then British rulers for the sake of the advancement of the Muslims, Zakaria has been firm in his commitment to the ruling Congress partly for the same reason. The parallel does not end here. Sir Sayyid sought to interpret the Quran in a manner which could persuade the Muslims to accept the proposition that the scripture was not incompatible with modern science and the underlying Cartesian concept of the supremacy of reason as an instrument for unlocking the secrets of nature and utilising that knowledge for the benefit of man. Zakaria has not engaged in so ambitious a project perhaps partly because Sir Sayyid and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad have largely exhausted the possibilities in that respect and partly because the people no longer worry about such interpretations. But he has sought to interpret Islam in a way which can, on the one hand, make it less suspect in the eyes of the Hindus than partition made it and, on the other, persuade the Muslims to accept nationalism with its secular undertones and overtones as not being incompatible with Islam.
He made a major effort in the second direction when he wrote a series of articles in The Times of India in the early Eighties questioning the validity of the concept of Islamic state as distinct from Muslim state, the first being an ideological proposition which has never materialised in Muslim history because no Muslim state has ever been theocratic and the second being a fact of history in the past 1,400 years. It would be recalled that the possibility and desirability of an Islamic state, that is, a state based on the Quran and the Hadith, had become a major issue of world-wide debate in view of the triumph of the mullah-led revolution in Iran in 1979. The Struggle Within Islam is in a fundamental sense a continuation and expansion of those articles, of course, with a lot of additional information.
This brings me face to face with a major dilemma. On the basis of what little I know and understand of Islam (this is an honest confession of inadequacy and not an exercise in pretentiousness and false modesty), I cannot endorse Zakaria’s theses. At the same time I regard it wholly unfair to ignore his impressive scholarship, extremely rare in India even among the academics, and criticise him when, not to speak of the Hindus, who are in the lead in the so-called modernisation programme, a large number of educated Muslims too would go along with him. So I would have liked to keep quiet. But that would be escapism.
Zakaria has collected enormous historical evidence to establish the following points: that no Muslim state has ever been a theocracy in the proper sense of the term; that a power struggle began in Muslim society soon after the death of the Prophet; that of the four first “rightly guided” Caliphs, three died violent deaths; and that with the emergence of Muawiya as the Caliph after the death of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, the concept of hereditary kingship triumphed; that this reality was not superseded in Muslim history till recently, and that the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 represents the first serious attempt even in Shia Islam to establish what can be called a theocracy.
In terms of facts, all this is irrefutable. The power struggle in the Muslim world has been as violent and unprincipled as anywhere else in the world; Muslim rulers have as a rule been as pleasure-loving and self-seeking as their counterparts elsewhere. But these facts need to be placed in what I for one regard as the proper perspective. This cannot be done unless we grasp the central point that Islamic society, as Gai Eaton has put it in his Islam and the Destiny of Man (George Allen and Unwin, London), is theocentric and not theocratic. The distinction is important and it is truly extraordinary that it has been missed in most of the writings on Islam.
The centrality of the state in human affairs is a modern development. Traditional societies regarded the state as no more than a necessary evil since large societies could no longer be managed on the old tribal basis. In the case of the Hindus, this proposition is widely accepted despite the theories modern apologists have propagated in the past one century. It is generally accepted that as a self-regulating community, the Hindus have not been unduly dependent on the state and indeed that they have managed to preserve their identity under prolonged foreign rule on that strength.
In the case of the Muslims, this reality has somehow got obscured perhaps partly because Muslim commentators have been keen to contrast their community with the Hindus and establish some kind of parity with the West just as they have been anxious to do the same on the issue of the “people of the book” in disregard of other explicit statements in the Quran itself and the entire Sufi tradition which is without question rooted in the Quran. The source of the confusion, of course, lies in western scholarship which has sought to locate Islam in history and thus deny it its transcendental aspect which surely is the heart of Islam as it is of every religion. These questions are, however, too large to be discussed in the course of this review.
To return to the question of the distinction between theocentrism and theocracy, it should hardly be necessary to define theocentrism. But it has become necessary to do so in view of the confusion that prevails. So it needs to be emphasised that for the Muslims, all sovereignty vests in God and that, indeed, nothing whatever exists or can exist outside of Him. It follows that God is the sole legislator; to quote Gai Eaton again, the Quranic insistence that “there is no god but God” can be interpreted to mean that “there is no legislator but the Legislator.” That is precisely why for the Muslims their laws have to be derived from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. And they have been so derived in the past 14 centuries. And that is what has given the Ummah the unity it has possessed despite all the political turmoils it has passed through. That would also explain why jurisprudence and not theology has been the main preoccupation of Islamic scholarship.
In such a scheme, the role of the ruler, good, bad or indifferent, must be strictly limited. Unlike pre-Islamic Egyptian kings, for example, he cannot claim to be vice-regent of God on earth (incidentally in Islam all men are vice-regents of God on earth in that ‘man has been made in the image of God’); he cannot supersede the Shariat, though changes have been made in it by some Muslim rulers in recent years; he can manipulate the ulema and make them issue fatwas in his favour but that only establishes the point that he is not a priest-king. And how can there be a theocracy without a priest-king? Indeed, ‘secular’ communist rulers have been more like priest-kings than Muslim rulers.
Two other points need to be made in this regard. First, the Prophet, who spoke in great detail on a great number of issues, had little to say on government as such; he showed no interest in theorising on politics. And there is a tradition which speaks for itself. One of his companions is said to have requested him that he be appointed governor of one of the recently conquered territories. “No,” said the Prophet, “if you wish to rule, then you are unfit.” According to another tradition recorded by both Bukhari and Muslim, the Prophet said: “Do not ask for rulership, for if you are given power as a result of asking for it, you will be left to deal with it on your own, if you are given it without asking, then you will be helped in exercising it.” It should not be necessary to add that hardly has any Muslim ruler ever lived up to the Prophet’s prescription.
Second, it was years after the death of the Prophet that the theory of leadership (caliphate) was worked out by Muslim jurists, and under this theory, it has been clearly understood that the prophetic function had ended with the death of Muhammad and that his successors inherited only the political function and the duty of administering the laws set out in the Quran and the Prophet’s sayings and practices. The Caliph had three functions. He was the vice-regent of the Prophet as temporal head of the Ummah; he was the Imam of the community and upholder of the Law, and finally, he was commander of the faithful for the defence and expansion of Islam.
The central issue in Islam has not been whether the state can be separated from religion but whether society can be separated from religion. It is because the answer to the second has to be firmly in the negative that the answer to the first has also to be in the negative. In posing the first question – whether the state can be separated from religion – without simultaneously posing the second – whether society can be separated from religion – scholars have, to use the old cliché, sought to put the cart before the horse.
The modern mind just cannot comprehend Islam precisely because it is a totality. Islamic society is rooted in the religion of Islam; it is not the other way about. The point needs to be heavily underscored that Islamic society is wholly unlike Christian society in terms of which it is judged. Unlike Muhammad, Christ did not give his people the Law; Christians inherited the Roman Law; in plain terms, Christianity did not represent a break from the Graeco-Roman past except in the field of religion narrowly defined. Islamic Law is not rooted in pre-Islamic Arab traditions; it is rooted in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. As such Islamic society was a new “creation” even if old materials had gone into its making in the sense Christian society was not a new “creation.” Sanatan Dharma, which is now called Hinduism, is a similar totality. But that is another issue which I cannot even touch upon here.
Zakaria has dwelt at length on the wrong-doings of Muslim rulers. In this, as in much else, he has rendered a service to his fellow Muslims who, in their ignorance of history, try to glamourise the past. As Islam stepped out of the spartan Arab setting in its formative period, its rulers were bound to succumb to the ways of the Byzantinian and the Sassanid empires they inherited, and they so succumbed. The glorious Muslim civilisation that we admire and the Muslims take great pride in was, however, in no small measure the product of this development.
One aspect of this great civilisation has not attracted the attention which, in my view, it deserves. It created a divide between the Persianised sophisticated and pleasure-loving upper crust and the pious and the ordinary Muslim, a rift which has not healed despite Islam’s insistence on equality. This rift could have proved fatal for Islam, especially in the context of the introduction of the Aristotlean rationalist “poison” into Islamic philosophy, if the state had acquired the kind of power it now enjoys in society. Islamic society has survived because over much of its history the state has been so marginal to it.
The gulf between Islamic exoterism as represented by the ulema and Islamic esoterism as represented by the Sufis of different orders is too wide to be glossed over. The great Ghazzali sought to reconcile the two but his success could in the nature of things be only limited. But the fact stands out that the two together have ensured the survival of Islam. Without the ulema, Islam could not have protected its external defences and without the Sufis, Islam would have lacked the capacity for self-renewal and been reduced to a mausoleum. There is an inner dialectic in Islam, as in Hinduism, which the modern man, indoctrinated by the West, is unable to see.
As Islam expanded beginning with the time of the Prophet, it could not possibly be ruled from one centre. The surprise, if any, is that the institution of the caliphate survived till the second decade of this century even if in a shadowy form. Temporal authority had to fragment. Empires and kingdoms had to arise. These divisions had to be based partly on the fact of conquest and partly on ethnicity and geography. But Muslim states territorially defined as we know them today are the imperialist West’s handiwork. Having come into existence, though as a result of accidents of history, they are likely to stay on more or less in their present boundaries. But they cannot by virtue of their existence become nation-states, unless it is assumed that Islam will be reduced to the status of a small compartment in the totality of society as Christianity has been in the West.
The nation concept is the product of developments over centuries in Europe. It does not represent only the triumph of the province over the priest; it represents the triumph of an altogether new approach to life. Along with its twin brother, secularism, it represents the triumph of matter over spirit and of reason over intellect which the Hindus call Buddhi. The contrast between the traditional (religious) and the modern approach is best illustrated by the difference in their concept of the origin of man. The Manu of the Hindus and the Adam of the Christians and the Muslims was a semi-divine figure, Manu being the original law-giver and Adam in Islam the first Prophet and in Christianity the perfect man who allowed himself to be beguiled; the modern West traces our ancestry to the ape.
The nation is a new god (nothing short of it) which feels entitled to demand, and has succeeded in extracting, from the people the kind of sacrifices no religion has ever demanded; millions upon millions have been killed and maimed in the name of the nation god. This god could not have arisen without the help of its twin brother, secularism. Indeed, they are like Siamese twins who cannot be separated. A nation must by definition be secular because it can rise only on the corpse of religion; a secular state is a logical extension of a secular nation. To be secular is not to be necessarily intolerant of religion. Communism is an unnecessarily ugly face of secularism just as it is an unnecessarily crude face of the modern western civilisation as such, that is gross materialism unrelieved by the residue of Christianity in the shape of humanism. Again, philosophic materialism must not be confused with “this-worldliness.” This-worldliness without the philosophic underpinning is defensive; it seeks to cover itself behind some facade. Philosophic materialism (secularism) is self-confident and aggressive. Powerful battalions are ranged behind it in the form of modern scientists, technologists and what not.
This story began with the Renaissance, if not much earlier, with St Thomas Aquinas (who replaced Platonic categories with Aristotlean ones and thus exposed Christianity to split and erosion from within), proceeded via the Reformation when the so-called individual conscience came to be accorded primacy over the collectivity, and got consummated in the French Revolution preceded and followed by debunking of all tradition, glorification of the individual, of change, of material comfort, of speed and the whole rigmarole called modernism. Neither the nation concept nor the secularism concept stands by itself. Both are integral parts of a complex framework of which religion, any religion, can constitute only a marginal component.
Where do we go from here? Quite candidly, my mind is full of forebodings. As I see things, the western onslaught has gathered much greater momentum and force after formal decolonisation; all non-European societies are caught in the “revolution of westernisation”; independence has not meant any respite from the steady western encroachments even in ancient lands such as India and Egypt; there can be little doubt that the Iranian revolution will abort; it is only a matter of time; this so not because Ayatollah Khomeini has departed from the scene but because the Iranians cannot possibly produce an alternative design for living; and on top of it all, non-European societies cannot become western however hard they may try; from old dependencies they are in the danger of becoming slums of the West in every sense of the term – intellectual even more than economic.
Orthodox Islam is resisting. It cannot but resist. That is why there is such a ferocious campaign against “fundamentalism” in the West which most of us have unintelligently swallowed. Fundamentalism is a form of resistance. The trouble is that it is also an expression of desperation, almost of hopelessness. In that sense Islam is facing a crisis. But the rest of us should have the good sense to realise that the Muslims are also fighting our battle.
Finally, I would say Zakaria has raised issues which go to the very heart of the dilemma not just the Muslims but also the Hindus face, though, of course, in a different way. The book should help promote a debate in the country.
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The Struggle Within Islam: The conflict between religion and politics
By Rafiq Zakaria
Viking, Penguin Books (India) Ltd, New Delhi 1988; Rs 250
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The Telegraph, 23 June 1989