Lahore University of Management Sciences

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1 POL 2112 Trajectories of (Political) Islam: 20th Century Islamist Social Movements Fall 2017 Instructor Umair Rasheed Room No. 235-A Office TBA Hours Course Basics Credit Hours 4 Lecture(s) 28 Duration 14 Weeks Recitation/Lab Nbr of Lec(s) Duration (per week) Tutorial (per week) Course Distribution Core Elective Open for Student Category Close for Student Category Per Week Nbr of Lec(s) Per Week Yes Duration Course Description This course will undertake a comparative examination of 20th century social movements in Muslim societies that advocated for Islamic Shari a to be the guiding principle for the regulation of affairs in their respective polities. These movements emerged alongside anticolonial nationalist struggles as well as in response to post-colonial state nationalism and its accompanying socio-economic policies. The simultaneous processes of secularization of religious authority (public schooling, mass media, state-led projects of secularism, etc) and sacralization of the secular (nation, founding fathers, army, etc) that characterized late 19th and early 20th century colonial modernity were crucial to the emergence of these movements and their eventual transformation as they either got incorporated into the dominant power blocs or fragmented following state repression into moderate, conservative, radical and post-islamist strands. These movements have been variously associated, in academic scholarship as well as popular discourse in the United States and Western Europe, with militant, political or radical Islam or simply Islamism, to distinguish them from a supposedly nonviolent, moderate or liberal Islam. An important objective of the course, therefore, is to problematize this (Orientalist) tendency towards essentialization or reductionism of what are a diverse range of (religious) thoughts and practices comprising multiple life-worlds and their re-presentation as a 1

2 monolithic entity like political Islam. Besides unsettling these essentialist (mis-) representations, the other major objective is to historicize the emergence and transformations of these social movements in their specific spatial and temporal contexts. Like the anti-colonial nationalist movements that preceded, and on occasion overlapped, them, the Islamist social movements were a response to colonial modernity and secularism. Like the nationalist elites, the Islamists, too, were opposed to Western domination but presented themselves as best possible representatives of Islam and Muslims to the rest of the world. With such a genealogy, Islamism and the social movements it has inspired in the 20th century come across as much of an ideology of domination as secular nationalisms. The course is divided into following themes: I) methodology and object of study (week 1), II) context of study (week 2), III) Islamist thought (week 3), IV) Islamism in practice (weeks 4 and 5), V) Gender question (week 6), and VI) Global jihad and other militant Islamist trajectories (week 7). Course Objectives Grading Break-up and Policy TBA COURSE OVERVIEW Week 1&2: Methodology and object of study We will begin the week with a reading of Edward Said s seminal work Orientalism to highlight issues a scholar of Muslim societies in general and contemporary Islamist social movements in particular has to grapple with. Subsequent sessions will feature discussions on works that have tried to chalk out a post-orientalist approach to scholarship, particularly that on Islam and Islamist social movements. The week will end with discussion on texts that define Islamism, explain its movements in terms of social actors who pioneered them and their own discourses. The objective is to enable an understanding of the phenomenon - variously termed as Islamism, political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism - as a struggle for power in Muslim societies, informed by particular readings of Islamic scriptures. Session I: The Scholarly Tradition of Orientalism Introduction, Ch 1 The Scope of Orientalism & Ch3 Orientalism Now, Edward Said, Orientalism (Penguin Books, 1977) Session II: Post-Orientalist Approach to the Study of Islam The Idea of An Anthropology of Islam, Talal Asad, Paper presentation at Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (1986) 2

3 Ch1 Islam and Democracy: The Perverse Charm of an Irrelevant Question, Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Standford University Press, 2007) *Ch 8 Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography, Gyan Prakash, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (Ed: Vinayak Chaturvedi) (Verso 2012) Session III: Islam and modernity Ch2 Islamic Roots of Modernity, Modern Roots of Islam, Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi, Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, Religious Politics and Democratic Reform (I.BTaurus 2008) Ch1 Culture Talk, or, How Not to Talk About Islam and Politics, Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, (Pantheon Books 2004) Session IV: Understanding Islamism Islamic Revival and Modernity: The Contemporary Movements and the Historical Paradigms, Ira M. Lapidus, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1997), pp Week 3&4: Context of study: empire, secularism and nationalism 20th century Islamist movements emerged in a historical context defined by European colonialism and the rise of secular modes of rationality and new ways of imagining a political community in the form of a nation. Ostensibly, these movements had adopted an antagonistic posture towards these processes and the underlying ideas. But to understand such discursive techniques from Islamist thought, we must first define these others (empire, secularism and nationalism) of Islamism. The texts we study this week will enable us to i) take up the question of anti-imperialism and assess Islamism s claim of being anti-imperialist; and ii) draw a genealogy of secularism (not just as a political ideology but also a project of modern power) and nationalism (as a new way of political imagination). Session I: Islamism and the empire Ch 2, Islamism and Empire: The Incongruous Nature of Islamist Anti-Imperialism, Asef Bayat, Socialist Register 2008 Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism (eds. Leo Panitch & Colin Leys) (The Merlin Press 2007) Saba Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation Session II: Two examples from 20th century history 3

4 Chapter/s on formation of state of Saudi Arabia from Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil Chapter/s on Afghan jihad from Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror Session III Conceptualizing secularism Nikki Keddie, Secularism and Its Discontents, Daedalus, Summer Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism: Its Content And Context, SSRC Working Paper Series, October Chapters from Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity, (Stanford University Press 2003) Session IV: Islamism and nationalism Introductory chapters from Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee s works On Muslim nationalism from Francis Robinson s Separatism among Indian Muslims On (secular) Arab nationalism from Origins of Arab Nationalism (eds) (Columbia University Press 1993) Week 5&6: Issues in Islamist thought This week we will study about the lives and works of Syed Abu l Ala Al-Maududi who formed the Jamaat-i-Islami in British India, Syed Qutb, an Islamist intellectual affiliated with Muslim Brothers in post-colonial nation-state of Egypt; Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini credited with steering Iran s revolutionary moment of 1979 towards first of its kind Islamic (Shi ite) state of the 20th century, and, Zainab Al-Ghazzali, a leading woman Islamist activist of her time in Egypt. We will end the week with a discussion on the concept of Shari a and its transformation from a law making process in pre-modern Muslim societies to a doctrine for statecraft in modern time. This week s objective is to understand the ways in which ideas pertaining to statecraft, politics, government and law are dealt with in Islamist thought. Session I: Maududi and Hassan Al-Banna Vali Nasr, Maududi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford University Press 1996) Session II: Syed Qutb and Zeinab Al-Ghazzali 4

5 Ch2 Qutb s Core Ideas, Ch3 Milestones & Ch4 Prologue, from In The Shade of the Qur an, Albert J. Bergesen, The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion and Society Ch11, Zainab Al-Ghazzali, Qasim Zaman and Roxxane Euben, Princeton Readings on Islamist Though: Text and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden Session III Ruhullah Khoimeini Ch4, Program for the Establishment of an Islamic Government, Imam Khoeimini, Governance of the Jurist Session IV Shari a s mutation Chapters from Wael Hallaq s books Shari ia and The Impossible State Week 7&8: Islamism in practice: Egypt and Turkey In Egypt, the trajectory of Islamist movement that started with the establishment of Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 can be understood with reference to three distinct phases i) pre Free Officers coup missionary and lobbying phase, ii) confrontation with the secular state post-coup and before infitah (economic opening to western capitalism), and iii) a postinfitah phase of accommodation with an Islamic state and a society marked with passive piety. Islamism succeeded in pushing the state to selectively co-opt Islamic rhetoric in its jurisprudential and bureaucratic structures but in the process its own outlook changed from one that focused on enforcing Shari ia through the state to working in the civil society. In Turkey, Islamic activism emerged in the wake of a two-decade long state formation effort guided by Kemalist secularism. The first multiparty election in late 1940s provided a political opening to hitherto banned religious (sufi) brotherhoods. By 1980s, the Islamic civil society transformed into a social movement whose political manifestation was the Refah (Welfare) Party. The 1997 military coup led to a crackdown on hardline Islamists and fragmented the movement into a radical and a gradualist faction. The latter, led by Recep Tayyib Erdogan and supported by the Islamic bourgeoisie, was inducted into the dominant power bloc. Session I Muslim Brothers of Egypt The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Richard P. Mitchell (Oxford University Press 1969) Session II From Islamism to Islamic state Egypt s Passive Revolution : The State and the Fragmentation of Islamism, , Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (Stanford University Press 2007) * Ch 3 Violence as Contention in the Egyptian Islamic Movement, Muhammad Hafeez and Quitan Wiktorowicz; and Ch9 Interests, Ideas and Islamist Outreach in Egypt, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Indiana University Press 2004) 5

6 Session III Islam and state in Turkey Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, Jenny White, (Princeton University Press 2013) Session IV Turkey s passive revolution Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, Cihan Tugal, (Stanford University Press 2009) Week 9&10: Iran and Indian sub-continent Islamist movement emerged in colonial India as a response not only to colonial rule (as in Egypt) or state nationalism (Turkey and Iran), but also to the nationalism of the Indian Muslim elites. The partition of India divided this movement as well and led to different trajectories in the two sovereign states. Unlike Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, there was no pervasive Islamist movement in Iran till the 1979 revolution. The Islamist state was a distinct outcome of the post-revolutionary power struggle. The consolidation of power and establishment of an exclusivist social order, however, fragmented the revolutionaries into Islamist (dominant bloc comprising high clergy, civil and military bureaucracy, national bourgeoisie and intelligentsia) and post- Islamist (subordinate segment of the bloc) factions. By 2000s, the latter put together a post- Islamist social movement of urban middle class youth, women, and professionals and under the leadership of a reformist cleric, Muhammad Khatami, pushed for democratization of the state and extension of civil and political rights. Session I Islamism, Islamic state and Muslim conservatism The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaat Islami of Pakistan, Syed Vali Reza Nasr, (University of California Press 1994) Introduction, Ch1, 2, 3 and 4 from Secularizing Islamists: Jamaat Islami and Jamaatud Dawa in Urban Pakistan, Humaira Iqtidar, (University of Chicago Press 2011) Session II Islamism and a secular state Islamism and Democracy in India: Jamaat Islami and its Transformation, Irfan Ahmed (Princeton University Press) Session III Political contestations in post-revolutionary Iran Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, Religious Politics and Democratic Reform, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (I.B. Taurus 2008) Session IV From Islamic state and post-islamist movement Ch3 The Making of a Post-Islamist Movement: Social Movements and Sociopolitical Change in Iran, and Ch4 Post-Islamism in Power Dilemmas of a Reformist Project, , Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (Stanford University Press 2007) Week 11&12: Gender and the movement, gendering the movement 6

7 To understand Islamism s position on gender, this week we will study texts on transformations brought about by education and employment reforms of colonial and postcolonial states. These reforms were at once disciplinary (serving the modernizing state s ends) and emancipatory (enacted following women s activism and leading to socioeconomic empowerment and political enfranchisement of large segments of women population in Muslim majority countries). This widespread presence of women in the public sphere and its association with westernization had contributed to the emergence of Islamist social movements as singularly male-dominated affairs. Yet, by the end of the 20th century, these movements had to reckon with the changed times and women occupied a large and organized presence in them. In addition, there emerged autonomous women organizations, occasionally led by former Islamist women, for missionary work (dawa). Session I and II Socio-economic and political empowerment of women Chs 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 from Women, Islam and the State (edited by Deniz Kandiyoti) (Temple University Press 1997) Ch7 The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey, Yesim Arat, from Rethinking National Identity and Modernity in Turkey (University of Washington Press 1997) Session III, IV Islamist activism of women Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (Princeton University Press 2011) Ch5 from Secularizing Islamists: Jamaat Islami and Jamaatud Dawa in Urban Pakistan, Humaira Iqtidar, (University of Chicago Press 2011), and, Ch9 from Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, Humaira Iqtidar (ed Asef Bayat) Week 13&14: Global jihad and other militant trajectories of Islamism We will end the semester with a discussion on a key public policy issue of contemporary times. The global wave of terrorist violence associated with organizations like Al-Qaeda and, more recently, the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant is a product of a post-afghan war world that is no longer characterized by the Cold War rivalries between the US and Soviet Union. The week will begin with study of texts that explore the various meanings of jihad in Islamic jurisprudential and philosophical discourses. This will enable us to understand the modernity of Al-Qaeda s jihadist discourse. We will also compare and contrast the project of Al-Qaeda and that of the ISIL. The week will end with a discussion of local manifestation of this global problem in Pakistan. Session I Jihad in perspective Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, Ayesha Jalal (Harvard University Press 2008) *Selected chapters from Ibn Tahmiyya and his Times, Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (Oxford University Press 2010) 7

8 Session II Al-Qaeda s jihad Landscapes of Jihad: Militancy, Morality and Modernity, Faisal Devji (Cornell University Press 2005) Session III An impossible state TBD Session IV Pakistan s war on terrorism Chapters on TTP in Waziristan and Swat insurgency from Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier, Magnus Marsden and Benjamin Hopkins (Oxford University Press 2012) Selected articles from mainstream print publications on Pakistani state s policy towards militant Islamist outfits 8