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Literary Review
Articulating a constructive Islam
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Islam Under Siege is Ahmed's response, as a person who is at home in both the worlds, to the apparent conflict between the West and Islam, says RAJMOHAN GANDHI.
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AKBAR AHMED, the former civil servant and diplomat from Pakistan who made the Jinnah film, was for some years a well-known face of moderate Islam in the United Kingdom. Now, as chair of Islamic Studies at American University, Washington D.C., he plays a similar role in the United States. He is not, of course, alone in striving to rescue Islam from fanatical versions presented by some Muslims and seized upon by non-Muslims in need of a global enemy. In the subcontinent, in the Arab world, in other Muslim lands, and in the West, a growing number of Muslim scholars articulate a constructive Islam.
Islam Under Siege was written before the Iraq war but after the American reaction in Afghanistan and elsewhere to the attacks of September 11, 2001. It is not always clear who the book is written for. Is Ahmed asking the West to understand what Islam is not, or asking Muslims to understand, and act on, what it is? He switches without notice from one to the other. He is entitled, of course, to address both audiences, and equally entitled to offer, as he puts it, his map of the "global landscape" and his perception of "the routes and dangers that lie ahead".
If the book lacks a clear design, it offers a fair degree of passion and some food for thought. As aids to understanding the world of 2003, Ahmed proposes two concepts: honour and asabiyya, the social cohesion emphasised by Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-Century Muslim philosopher with ties to Arabia, North Africa and Spain and a founder, some argue, of the discipline of sociology.
Ahmed's argument is that the asabiyya or solidarity that Ibn Khaldun saw as a mark of civilisation has turned in our times into hyper-asabiyya, a devotion to one's group that degenerates into hostility to another group, and that honour, once implying a willingness to defend the weak, is now synonymous with cruelty to the innocent other. As Ahmed sees it, September 11 was a consequence of hyper-asabiyya and an inverted sense of honour among some Arabs.
Ahmed suggests that globalisation and modern dislocations have contributed to these distortions in understanding what loyalty and honour mean, and he points out that false honour and revenge are popular impulses in the Western world as well. The problem is not confined to Islam. But Ahmed is frank about his fellow-Muslims, and unsparing in his condemnation of bin Laden. Using honest words for the 11th-Century depredations of Mahmud of Ghazni, he also acknowledges the reconciliation attempted in the 16th Century by the emperor Akbar. Presenting both exclusionary and inclusive models from modern practices of Islam, Ahmed suggests that the old example of Ibn Khaldun and, from more recent times, that of Jinnah are what young Muslims should dwell on.
Part of Ahmed's book is autobiographical and given to his battles over the Jinnah film and to what Ahmed sees as a mean campaign against him, mounted by some Pakistanis, in connection with that film. In such pages the book's subject is personal rather than the siege of Islam. But of course Ahmed's feelings are understandable, as is his desire to place on record the truth as he sees it.
Arundhati Roy is the Indian that Ahmed quotes the most, and with unreserved approbation. But Ahmed is not offering a study of India-Pakistan or Hindu-Muslim relations. Nor is the book an inquiry into Islam's relations with the West.
What is it then? Like many others today, Ahmed is equally at home in and loyal to two cultures, the native (in his case the Muslim/Pakistani) and the Western. The apparent conflict between the two shakes the world of such persons and demands a response, which is what Ahmed offers in this book, often stimulatingly and spiritedly.
Islam Under Siege, Akbar Ahmed, Polity, Cambridge, UK, 2003, paperback, price not stated.
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