Counter-reformation II
Some Criticism on my Islamic reform series « Ali Eteraz
Ali Eteraz posted a reply to an article I posted last weekend, in reply to his three articles on Islamic reform and the alleged “counter-reformation” which has gained pace since 9/11. Here is my reply to parts of his reply:
About Ibn Taymiyya and the Mu’tazilites: Eteraz reiterates that the “20th Century Mu’tazilites” such as Khalid Abou El Fadl and earlier reformers like Muhammad Iqbal, Rashid Rida, Muhammad Abduh and Jamal-ud-Din al-Afghani, were inspired by Ibn Taymiyya rather than by the Mu’tazilites. I don’t deny that they may have taken some inspiration from him, but there is certainly a tendency to look fondly back on the days of the Abbasids where there were Muslim scholars who were open to Greek philosophy. A book I read when I was interested in Islam prior to converting was Introducing Islam by Ziauddin Sardar, who is definitely of that persuasion. Muslims who looked back on these times may have been more influenced by these general trends rather than by the specific doctrines which defined Mu’tazilism, such as believing the Qur’an to have been created rather than a pre-eternal attribute of Allah ta’ala.
About the so-called Muslim Canadian Congress: Ali Eteraz suggests that I use that phrases by way of “sneering veiled takfir”. I didn’t mean it this way; I used the entire phrase, rather than “so-called Muslims”, to imply that they aren’t the representative body that the title implies. Nobody was trying to introduce a millet system (of separate laws for Muslims and for other religious groups) in Canada anyway; they were trying to utilise an existing law to allow Muslims to settle disputes among themselves – and presumably only among themselves, given the low likelihood of a non-Muslim agreeing to it – according to our own religious laws, as Catholics and other religious people were allowed to do in Ontario under its Arbitration Act. There was no question of Muslims being allowed polygamy or the introduction of Shari’ah criminal law, for example. Their press releases suggest that they have contempt for Muslims’ rights, as evidenced in their attitude towards hijab (and not just niqab). They are certainly not a mainstream Islamic body.
About the counter-reformist response to violence: He says this:
>In fact, in the third post I say: “It certainly didn’t hurt that traditionalist tomes from long ago completely forbade rebellion, which made them the only mainstream group to have anything close to a pre-fabcricated counter to Bin Laden available.” Pre-fabricated means that they didn’t need to come up with it. I said a similar thing in the first post as well.
However, the traditionalists did not, for the most part, use their “pre-fabricated” response that Bin Laden et al were at fault simply for rebelling against the rulers. The only people I have seen to stress that argument are the pro-Saudi wing of the “salafi” movement. For the most part, the traditionalists have argued against terrorism on the grounds that killing innocent people on purpose is wrong. This is certainly the case with the traditionalist revivalists of the west, in any case.
About the prominence of the “counter-reformation”, Eteraz uses as evidence the fact that Shaikh Hamza Yusuf has appeared on Egyptian TV during Ramadan, and that “Indian and Pakistani traditionalists like Taqi Usmani and Wahiududdin Khan hobnob regularly with Western traditionalists and get a lot of backing from them”. There are two answers to this. My contention was that the traditionalist revival is a western phenomenon which goes back to the early to mid-1990s and originated as a response to the challenge of Wahhabism and other anti-traditionalist agitation. Shaikh Hamza, for example, has spent the last fifteen or more years building up his Zaytuna Institute, and others have worked for a similar period to build up the movement. Only now, it seems, has Shaikh Hamza become enough of a household name to get on Egyptian TV. The most likely reason is that his name has spread through contacts between Egyptians and their contacts in the USA, or through the Internet, or through press reports about his work. Of course, in the Arab world there has been a revival in interest in Islam over the same period, which I don’t believe is a “counter-reformation”, i.e. a reaction to Islamic reform, as such, but a religious revival in response to anti-religious trends such as secularisation and, in some places, (like South Yemen, the home of the Hadrami scholars who are enjoying popularity among the revivalists) communism.
The second is that all of these western revivalist scholars studied under traditional scholars in the Muslim world, albeit mostly under Arab scholars, so it should follow naturally that they should be well-acquainted. Deobandism, the school to which Mufti Taqi belongs, has always had a strong element of opposing the “Ahl-e-Hadeeth” reformists whose arguments (“following hadeeth” rather than madhhabs) are similar to the Wahhabis’ anyway. Perhaps he is aware of a growing revival of traditional Islam in Pakistan at the expense of Ahle-Hadeeth or other reformists, but the major scholars are mostly in the Muslim world rather than the west, and if anybody is hobnobbing, it is likely to be our scholars hobnobbing with those in Pakistan and the Arab world.
Lastly, I didn’t actually call Ali Eteraz a moron. I called something he wrote moronic, which is quite different in my opinion.
