An Admonishment to the Muslim Activist[1] is both penetrative and thought-provoking. As such, it elicits a response with the sole objective of generating a fruitful dialogue about Islamic activism in the modern world. In what follows, I will suggest an alternative reading and probe some of the articles contentions. From the onset, I cannot but agree with the articles primary diagnosis: the devolution of Islamic activism is largely the product of a disconnect between activism as praxis and Islam as theoria. To reclaim Islamic activism’s emancipatory potential, it must be resituated within the Islamic tradition.
Firstly, Islamic activism is not lacking in religious knowledge. The pioneers of contemporary Islamic activism have emerged from traditional spaces such as Abul ‘Ala al-Mawdudi, Ahmad Sirhindi (, Shah Waliullah, Abul Hassan Ali an-Nadawi, Safar al-Hawali, Taqi ad-Din an-Nabahani, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Muhammad al-Ghazali and others. For these scholarly figures, a move towards activism represented not a ‘break’ with religious knowledge but its continuity by other means. In short, we should not see ‘religious knowledge’ and ‘activism’ as being two-mutually exclusive spaces but rather two spaces which have become inadvertently and to our detriment separate.
I would suggest that perhaps the lack of religious knowledge among the rank-and-file activists is in reality is part-and-parcel of a long-standing chasm that has grown between the spaces which produced Islamic sciences and the tumultuous political space[2]. It is not so much that activists have willingly or unwillingly failed to engage with traditional Islamic knowledge. A critical reading of Islamic intellectual history demonstrates how a confluence of factors lead to the transformation of the Islamic worldview from a praxis and lived movement to one beset by static sciences that at times became spaces for divisiveness and polemical fissures within the Muslim community.
Secondly, for these activists, including the likes of Sayyid Qutb, Islamic activism was not only bound by Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) but activism – as a project and praxis – emanated from the tawhidic worldview. That is to say, activism was the emancipatory praxis manifest of la ilaha ila Allah. To resist, was to manifest the tawhidic negation (la ilaha) of all temporal hierarchies which subverted man to the worship of “Second Creators” and the pursuit of an Islamic State was a manifest of the tawhidic affirmation (ila Allah) through which the Sovereignty of the Creator was established. If the religious knowledges sought to establish the epistemic primacy of revelation, activism served as the medium through which that epistemic primacy became a totalizing sovereignty; epistemic and political primacy Thus, Islamic activism revived the very praxis of our worldview. It came to revive the single most important dimension of the Sunnah.
Thirdly, anger, was not merely a reaction to colonial aggression but a rage against the hubris of a new modern god who rebelled against a cosmic order and in doing so disrupted that which is all so essential to humankind; meaning. Just as importantly, anger was not a reaction to temporal events, but a disposition rooted in a consciousness that understood the dictums of tawhid. It was only when Muslim subject understood the implications of the tawhidic worldview, did the Muslim subject become angry towards the modern world, and became an activist.
Fourth, the article seems to suggest a series of generalizations which while applicable to modern variants of activism cannot be extended to all activists. If generalization is to serve as a starting point, one can extend the very same critique lodged by the author onto ‘modern’ religious knowledge space. No doubt, many activists have fallen prey to the mythos of the modern age. Religious spaces, similarly, have not been immune to the encroachments of the modern age. In even the most perceptibly authentic and traditional institutes, Islamic theology (‘ilm al-kalam, aqa’id), jurisprudence (fiqh) and legal theory (usul al-fiqh) are adopting revisionist discourses under the veneer of maqasid ash-Shari’ah and the principle of maslaha.
If we are to suggest that activism can learn much from the traditional religious sciences, we must also come to terms with the ways in which the gatekeepers of religious knowledge can learn from activism.
Wa Allaahu ‘Alaam
[1] https://traversingtradition.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/an-admonishment-to-the-muslim-activist/
[2] See Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
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