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Islam and International Relations
Exploring Community and The Limits of Universalism
By Faiz Sheikh Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Faiz Sheikh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-459-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
International Relations (IR) is a curious term which obscures a history which is less 'international', and more European. The European relations of the seventeenth century and afterwards is the genesis of what is now called international relations. But where is the African, Asian, Middle Eastern or South American heritage of 'international' relations? Indeed, what were European relations in the seventeenth century if not the relations of Christian nations? In this book I am responding to Amitav Acharya's call for Global IR, which he articulates as:
commitment to pluralistic universalism, grounding in world history, redefining existing IR theories and methods and building new ones from societies hitherto ignored as sources of IR knowledge, integrating the study of regions and regionalisms into the central concerns of IR, avoiding ethnocentrism and exceptionalism irrespective of source and form, and recognizing a broader conception of agency with material and ideational elements that includes resistance, normative action, and local constructions of global order.
Using Islam and the experience of Muslim statecraft as an 'ignored source of IR knowledge', I will reassess the relationship between IR and Islam, an undertaking all the more pressing given the increasingly manifold ways in which Islam is interacting with global politics. Such interactions can be seen with, for example, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an international organisation of Muslim majority and minority states; continuing international migration and refugee flows from Muslim to non-Muslim states; the rise of popularly elected Islamist parties in North African states after the widespread Arab uprisings of 2011; the looming spectre of acts of terrorism and violence carried out in the name of Islam. In just this small list we can identify a diverse set of claims and actions, some entirely at odds with each other, yet all causing anxiety because of the 'unknown unknown' of what Islam means to IR, and vice versa. Taking my examples further, the OIC is a state-based international organisation which is committed to upholding the principles of the UN charter. Compare the OIC's commitment to the UN charter, to the explicit rejection of the international system by a group like Islamic State. Both groups justify their claims through 'Islam', but in comparing these claims, a few possibilities open up. First, if one group is 'correct' in its interpretation of Islam and IR, then they render the other group 'incorrect'. Secondly, neither group could be correct and there remains an elusive but 'true' interpretation of Islam and IR. Or, finally, the marker of 'Islam' in IR could be so inherently diffuse in meaning that it becomes meaningless — it becomes unusable as an object of analysis. In a world of continuing polarisation between 'Islam' and 'the West', I will engage constructively with Islamic traditions, consider what it is IR does well, and what it might ignore or marginalise. Exploring themes that are considered universal in IR such as state-based politics and the necessity for secularism, I show how the study of political Islam might help bring the 'international' back into international relations.
I have already invoked the idea that the origins of the international system lie with Western Europe. In such an understanding of IR, the non-West is considered passive, acted upon by a dominant European centre. It is not just that the contemporary international system begins with the European state system, but additionally that this system resulted from immaculate European conception. Interactions between West and non-West before the advent of the modern state system are not acknowledged, and the non-West enters the story as geography and peoples to be tamed and civilised (brought into the state system) through colonialism. John Hobson, in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, has argued that the propensity to forward a world history in which the West pioneered a progressive and rational international system occurs because scholars 'begin by taking the present dominance of the modern West as a fact, but then extrapolate back in time to search for all the unique Western factors that made it so'. While I am invoking this trope of European ascendancy in IR, I do so to further trouble that narrative, not advocate it.
In this book I wish to engage Islam, specifically political ideas that derive from the faith, in a discussion with theories of IR. Through this dialogue I explore Islamic religious traditions, showing that Islam contributes keen insights into how we 'do' IR, and how we might change that practise to be more inclusive. At the same time I highlight the limits of political Islam regarding IR, especially around notions of sovereignty and communal, faith-based solidarity, and I propose some constructive measures needed to address these limitations. Such a dialogue will necessarily bring me into contact with the foundational terms and narratives of the international system, such as 'West', 'East' and Westphalian sovereignty, but I do not intend to dwell on these. Instead, I will focus on one very specific incidence of Eurocentrism in IR: secularism and its relationship to the state. I will engage with secularism by developing an embryonic theory of Islamic IR. Rather than attempt to fully articulate an Islamic concept of IR, a task that I will argue to be unachievable in the abstract, I will instead use the case of Islamic IR, loosely defined, to challenge certain central concepts in IR that are seen as immutable. In this way, I am using the case of Islam as an example of a tradition on the margins of IR, to critique the 'centre'. I will therefore pursue dual themes: (1) exploring what an Islamic construction of IR looks like and (2) analysing the impediments that an Islamic IR faces when interacting with other, more dominant paradigms and concepts in the discipline.
I will explore the above goals by using a two-stage analysis. This two-stage analysis is necessarily multidisciplinary, using concepts and theories drawn from both IR and theology.
In the first stage, I examine the dominant concepts in IR which prevent the articulation of religious politics generally and Islamic politics specifically, in the international sphere. I will argue that these otherwise immutable IR concepts, which I will identify as secularism in the discipline and the continuing centrality of the state, to be unfounded given the specific cultural and religious setting of their genesis. After the first stage of this analysis I will have created a space in which alternative theories, which do not sit well with secularism or the state, can develop; in the Islamic example this is represented by the concept of the umma (community of Muslims). In the second stage of analysis I will construct, as much as is possible, a notion of IR derived from an Islamic heritage.
The two stages of analysis outlined above reflect my two broad contributions. The first contribution is to the literature on IR, wherein I question the nature and influence of religion in IR. Rather than examine Islam's place in IR, the originality of my argument is in how I examine IR's place in Islam, revealing how IR's dominant interpretations fall short of the schema of Islam, as I construct it. Specifically, I argue that the centrality of the state and liberal individualism in IR derive from specific socio-cultural backgrounds, and so do not satisfy the needs of an Islamic IR. Such an analysis is only made possible by articulating what in fact constitutes Islamic IR for the purpose of this book. To be clear, I do not define what Islamic IR is, but point out that whatever form it might take, it would be derived from communal sources, not abstract and universal reason, as is the case with dominant IR paradigms. This distinction between the abstract and the communally derived is one of the locations of friction between IR and Islam, and more broadly, religion in general. As such, I argue for a greater reflexivity on the part of IR scholars to not take for granted value-neutral and universal claims within the discipline, universal claims that Acharya points out had a dark side: 'the suppression of diversity and justification of European imperialism'.
My second contribution is to the literature on political Islam. Here I argue that political Islam struggles to articulate a notion of IR because it aligns itself to theology in a prohibitive way. I suggest that theology and the Islamic source texts are too broad and abstract to provide guidance on the contemporary international sphere. This is not unexpected, however; as I argue that guidance on politics is distinct from guidance on how to develop a relationship with God. Moreover, I argue that Islamic source texts provide guidance, as opposed to canon, and always require interpretation with regards to temporal or mundane life. As such, I build on work that 'brings rationalism back in', supplementing theological guidance with other strands of Islamic thought, specifically philosophy. Pushing the inclusion of philosophy further, I attempt to balance a poststructural framework with that of a foundational faith such as Islam. This balance is distinct from a synthesis between the two positions; rather, I employ value pluralism to manage the incoherencies between the two positions (one foundational and the other anti-foundational), while these positions work together in a common critique of political modernity. Distinct from the commonly perceived threat that poststructuralism brings to Abrahamic (and other universal) faiths, undermining their belief in God, I attempt to demonstrate how these incommensurable positions affirm the nature of value pluralism, and need not (indeed cannot) be rationally resolved.
I will continue this introductory chapter by providing background and context to the broad themes presented above: Islam and politics; the state and the umma; and the relationship between liberalism, Islam and poststructuralism. Finally, I will outline the structure of the book and provide a summary of the remaining chapters of the book.
ISLAM AND POLITICS
Much of the literature on Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, and its relation to politics — loosely speaking, the literature on political Islam — has a very specific focus on the domestic rather than international sphere. Much of this dialogue is reactionary, with influential Islamist writers such as Sayyid Qutb and Abdul A'ala Maududi developing their ideas as a response to the situations in their own countries. For example, Qutb was writing in the shadow of an oppressive Nasserite regime and Maududi was clearly influenced by British rule in India and the subsequent partition into Pakistan.
The Qur'an itself defines its function to the believer: 'And We have sent down to thee the Book explaining all things'. However, there is debate over whether the explanation provided by the Qur'an pertains to every little detail of an individual's 'temporal life', or moral norms of behaviour which deal with an individual's relationship with the transcendental or 'divine life'. In Sunni orthodoxy the overarching understanding is that the Qur'an is not a legal document, but a source of moral norms. This is derived from chapter 2, verse 2 of the Qur'an: 'This is the Book in which there is no doubt, a guide for those who are God-conscious'. The Qur'an defines its role here as a guide, distinct from law or doctrine. Joseph van Ess argues that the closest the Qur'an gets to being canon is chapter 2, verse 177:
Righteousness does not consist in whether you face the East or West. The righteous man is he who believes in God and the Last Day, in the angels and the Book and the prophets; who, though he loves it dearly, gives away his wealth to kinsfolk, to orphans, to the destitute, to the traveller in need and to beggars, and for the redemption of captives; who attends to his prayers and renders the alms levy.
Again, the Qur'an is general about what it is that constitutes belief. Such general, normative advice lends itself to the argument that the Qur'an is a source of moral norms, rather than law. Another contributor to Islamic law is the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed, ahadith (singular: hadith). This catalogue of Prophetic actions and sayings help the jurisprudent extrapolate the sometimes abstract guidance in the Qur'an and 'fill the gaps' of Qur'anic content. Ahadith are considered the second most important source of Islamic knowledge, behind the Qur'an.
For all that they do cover, neither the Qur'an nor ahadith contain explicit guidance on the state or IR. Nazih Ayubi notes that the very notion of an 'Islamic' state is a 'novel' idea, conceived in the early twentieth century by Rashid Ridda and later the Muslim brothers. The concept of the Islamic state developed as a 'response to the dissolution of the Turkish caliphate and in reaction to the pressures put on Muslim societies by the Western powers and by the Zionist movement', not by Qur'anic imperative.
The lack of explicit guidance has not stopped Muslims in their quest for a government informed by religion rather than the secular nation-state model inherited from Europe after decolonisation. Such belief is articulated in the phrase din wa dawla, translated as 'religion and state'. However, the belief that Islamic guidance spans from the otherworldly concerns of worship to the temporal concerns of governance is hard to substantiate. As Qamaruddin Khan notes, 'if the first thirty years of Islam were excepted, the historical conduct of Muslim states could hardly be distinguished from that of other states in world history'. Rather than explicit guidance or a separate body of law, IR in Islam is an extension of law regarding Muslim and non-Muslim interaction at a personal level. So strictly, 'there is no Muslim law of nations in the sense of the distinction between modern municipal (national) law and international law based on different sources and maintained by different sanctions'.
Even if the din wa dawla slogan were true, one would still be hard pressed to find any information on how an Islamic state would participate in the international system. Indeed, political Islam is very much concerned with the domestic, defining what it is not and not how it would fit into or implement an international order. In classical Islamic thought the world is simply demarcated into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, the domain of peace (or Islam) and the domain of war, though a later addition by the Ottoman Empire saw the creation of dar al-ahd, the domain of treaty.
Majid Khadduri's exemplary work on war and peace in Islam posits the problem of a 'deficient' conceptualisation of IR in a different way. Khadduri states that '[s]imilar to the law of ancient Rome and the law of medieval Christendom, the Muslim law of nations was based on the theory of a universal state'. Bassam Tibi highlights the resemblance that such a universal position has with political modernity: 'Islam resembles Western civilization, in the sense that it is universal in both its claims and its outlook'. Failure to even recognise polities outside of its borders helps us to understand why discussion on the Islamic body politic is so embroiled in itself, its definition, capacities and functions toward its citizens, not the international system.
WARMING UP: THE STATE VERSUS THE UMMA
The leading political structure post World War II has undoubtedly been the liberal-democratic state that has dominated Western political philosophy. This state was prescribed upon the rest of the world following decolonisation, and as Acharya argues, '[a]s a discipline, IR has neither fully accounted for, nor come to terms with, colonialism and its legacy'. As Jeffrey Herbst notes of African states, '[i]t was immediately assumed that the new states would take on features that had previously characterized sovereignty [in Europe], most notably unquestioned physical control over a defined territory'. Unquestioned control of territory here reads as adopting the state system. In Herbst's African example, those communities were only accepted into the international system because they accepted what Turan Kayaoglu refers to as the 'Westphalian narrative', a narrative, which 'maintains that Westphalia created an international society, consolidating a normative divergence between European international relations and the rest of the international system'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Islam and International Relations by Faiz Sheikh. Copyright © 2016 Faiz Sheikh. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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