Hellfire in Shediac

My critics draw special attention to my ethnic origin. How bizarre and disturbing that they expect the content of a review to be determined by the birthplace of the reviewer’s parents.

Rather than discuss an individual country, such as Iran, I provided a structural critique of the central theme of Fatah’s book, namely religion-state relations in Muslim societies, to illustrate the author’s superficial knowledge of Muslim politics. Moreover, I’ve provided extensive media commentary on Iran over the past seven years. Charges that I am reluctant to discuss clerical despotism are spurious.

Saeed Rahnema seeks to undermine my argument that Indonesian Muslim groups have made important contributions to democracy. He claims that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) deserves credit for moderating these organizations, an entirely false claim as the PKI was brutally crushed in 1965, long before the events that I refer to with respect to an Islamic transformation. Since then the PKI has had a negligible role in influencing Indonesian politics, especially among Islamic currents.

Rahnema digs a deeper hole for himself when he writes that I “confuse public sphere with state, for no one has denied the ‘participation of religious groups in the public sphere’.” Has he not heard of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front or Tunisia’s Al Nahda, all of which have been banned by their governments? Moreover, in Turkey, religious-based political parties have been repeatedly banned. These facts suggest that the confusion is on his part, not mine.

I never claimed that “everyone is religious” in the Muslim world. However, it is clear to anyone who has visited a Muslim majority society that religion is a key marker of identity for the vast majority (especially in rural areas). While this may change over time, do I really need to footnote this truism?

Saeed Rahnema and I have deep philosophical differences on religion and politics. Like Fatah, Rahnema subscribes to the erroneous view that there is a global consensus on secularism, especially in the non-western world, and that the normative role of religion in government was arrived at through democratic negotiation and bargaining with strong input from civil society.

My position is categorically different. In the Muslim world, there has been no democratic consensus on the normative role of religion in government. These debates are in their infancy and, as I argue in my forthcoming book, one cannot de-link debates on democracy today from debates on the normative role of religion in government. They are occurring simultaneously, which partly explains why Muslim politics are so vertiginous. In short, political secularism needs to be socially constructed not ideologically affirmed. Rahnema is guilty of projecting his secularity onto the Muslim world, resulting in a distorted view, especially where religion and politics intersect.

Farzana Hassan attributes to me a position I do not uphold. I never claimed that “Islamic history is largely free of internecine tensions.” I say something quite different. Because she is unfamiliar with the origins of political secularism in the Anglo-American tradition—especially the relationship between religious toleration and political order—she cannot see how different the experience of religion-state relations has been between the West and the Islamic world.

Finally, I would like the LRC readers to know that Tarek Fatah has commented on my review. On his extensive Muslim Chronicle e-list, he distributed my essay while referring to me as a “termite” (email him or me for the full text). This was a Freudian slip on his part. Termites are insects that are to be exterminated. This confirms my suspicion that in terms of tolerance and political pluralism, Mr. Fatah is the mirror image of the Islamists whom he critiques.

In his critical review of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State by Tarek Fatah (“Political Islam versus Secularism,” September 2008), Nader Hashemi has demonstrated a warped and one-sided view of Muslim history, something he is quick to accuse Fatah of repeatedly. His claim that Islamic history is largely free of internecine tensions over minute differences in dogma is not supported by documented evidence. Hashemi, in comparing western and Islamic history, fails to acknowledge obvious parallels that point to a continued presence of religious and sectarian strife within both cultures. The Fatimids were wiped out by Saladin, the Abbasid rulers promoted the Asharites over the Mutazila or vice versa according to personal preference, resulting in the frequent persecution of ordinary citizens. Furthermore, contemporary Muslim society is riven by bloody conflicts. Hashemi appears to be turning a blind eye to the daily bloodbaths in parts of the Muslim world where fundamentalism is gaining ground. Wouldn’t this be enough reason to advocate the separation of religion and state?

Another glaring flaw in Hashemi’s review is his deliberate omission in not addressing human rights abuses in Iran. Chasing a Mirage devotes a considerable section to the political culture of contemporary Iran under the Ayatollahs, however Hashemi, being an Iranian himself, has conveniently dodged this subject in order to avoid being challenged over what is undeniable reality.

Farzana Hassan
Mississauga, Ontario

I do not recall ever having read a book review with such selective commentary until I read the review of Tarek Fatah’s Chasing a Mirage written by Nader Hashemi.

Fatah did not spend as much time writing about Turkey as he did discussing the situation in Iran. Yet Hashemi, of Iranian background, seems to have declined to challenge Fatah’s narrative on fundamentalism in Iran, and concentrated on Turkey and other countries. In my judgement, that borders on intellectual dishonesty.

In my long academic life, I have observed Islamic fundamentalism creeping in the system in Pakistan, first with Abul Ala Maudoodi, and later shoved down the throats of Pakistanis by a fundamentalist and vile military dictator, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. I have also studied and written extensively about fundamentalist mullahs in Pakistan and in the Middle East, including the Wahabi regime in Saudi Arabia as well as the fundamentalists ayatollahs in Iran. Hashemi seems to have avoided all this.

Yes, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey would have been a secular democracy if the Turkish constitution had not allowed the military takeovers in Turkey. Iran allows its citizens, both men and women, to vote, but it cannot be classified as a Muslim democracy because the top ayatollah has final authority. Even in Indonesia, Muslim fundamentalists are known to interfere with the state’s affairs. For example, they want Ahmadis to be declared as non-Muslims, as is the case in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among other places. A similar situation is emerging in Iran in regard to the Iranians of Bahá’í faith.

A genuine system of democracy does not allow these things; only a fundamentalist regime does.

Hashemi has mentioned some of the right-wingers such as Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn and Bernard Lewis. I think these people are Islamophobic to the extent of hating Muslims. However, like Fatah, I have defended their right to express things as they see them.

Although I do not deny Hashemi’s right to review this book, his review of Chasing a Mirage is not balanced.

It was disappointing to read Nader Hashemi’s review of Tarek Fatah’s Chasing a Mirage. While I may not agree with everything in the book, I found the review hostile and inaccurate. Unlike serious academic reviews that specifically critique content, the reviewer makes a few denigrating remarks about the author and the book, and provides a lengthy discussion of his own views on secularism. Impressed with Freedom House’s ranking of civil liberties, he picks Turkey and Indonesia as cases that supposedly refute Fatah’s claims about the dangers of Islamism, and conveniently avoids reference to the countries discussed in the book except for Palestine. Praising religion-based parties in these two countries, he declares: “left-wing parties and secularist intellectuals cannot claim credit here.” A minimal familiarity with politics and history suggests that without the existence of strong secular movements in these two countries, Islamists would not be much different from their peers elsewhere in demanding the rule of sharia: Indonesia had one of the largest communist movements in the world, and the strength of Turkey’s secularism is well known.

The review is full of assertions that are substantiated by assertions of other like-minded authors. We don’t see, for example, any reference to authoritative works of Abdullahi-an-Na’im, who has demonstrated that an “Islamic state” has never existed, or works by Abdelwahab Meddeb and others.

What prompted this response is Hashemi’s claims about secularism in Muslim-majority countries. We are told that since Muslim societies did not have religious wars like Christendom, “no inner political dynamic” in favour of secularism emerged, they “never had the need to think about secularism,” and their experience of secularism has been “largely negative” because it was an “alien ideology” imposed “top-down” by colonial and post-colonial states. He also implicitly assumes that in these societies everyone is religious. On the basis of these unsubstantiated claims, it seems Muslim-majority countries are essentially different from the West. Evidently, new anti-modernists share some of the views of the old Orientalists!

Attributing the push for secularism only to states ignores the rich history of the struggles of thousands of secular intellectuals, writers, poets, artists, professionals and politicians. The sketchy familiarity with modernist history in these societies inevitably obscures the reality of political suppression, always in full support of the clerical establishment, as the reason why secularists could not “earn” secularism.

The reviewer also seems to confuse public sphere with state, for no one has denied the “participation of religious groups in the public sphere.” The issue is keeping them out of the state, without which no democracy is possible. The example of a powerful Islamic state, the reviewer’s and my native country Iran, which he consciously avoids discussing, is a case in point. After 30 years in power, the mullahs are faced with strong secularist movements, women and youth, among others, which the regime has to keep at bay through sheer force and suppression, garnering a low rank in the Freedom House rankings.

It was very disappointing indeed to read Nader Hashemi’s unkind review article of Tarek Fatah’s seminal book, Chasing a Mirage. Sadly, having agreed with most analyses and reappraisals of history, religion, culture and politics by Nader Hashemi, I wonder why he has written all these in undermining Fatah’s well-argued book on the ahistorical, dangerous and degenerating concept of Islamic State and Muslim apologia and perpetual finger pointing—mainly the West—for all the problems afflicting the global Muslim community.

I am not aware of any book, not by celebrities or established authors other than Fatah, getting so much publicity and reviews—positive to extremely positive—within weeks of its publication. We know Tarek Fatah was never known as an Islamic scholar, political scientist or historian until the publication of this path-breaking work. By now we also know that he has surpassed many established authorities on political Islam and those who have worked on problems of retarded growth and development—economic, political and cultural—in the Muslim World, in general, and the state of ignorance and ambivalence of the mullahs and their followers, in particular.

This book is not all about Islamic history, politics and culture, or about a critical comparative appraisal of Islamic and western civilizations, as one would assume from Hashemi’s review. It seems the reviewer is only critiquing only two chapters out of a total 14—”Islam’s Arab Empire” and “Islam’s European Venture.” Although Hashemi has tried to point out why the West, unlike the Muslim world, has attained economic prosperity, political stability, cultural refinement, tolerance, rule of law, respect for human rights, by imputing these developments to the Reformation and grassroots-based secularism he has totally ignored some other important factors in this regard. He has totally ignored important factors behind the Crusades, geographical discoveries and the Renaissance, and how western Europeans’ quest for knowledge, access to sources of raw materials and markets in the heyday of Muslim civilizations in the East and West eventually transformed them into the most advanced and developed nations by the early 18th century.

Hashemi’s comparing Fatah with Islamophobes such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes is really unfortunate. His citing Vali Nasr’s lopsided argument that “conservative-based Muslim parties and politicians will likely lead the way toward a democratic transition in the Muslim world” is appalling—as if one day al Qaeda, Hamas and the like will espouse democracy and secularism! Hashemi’s sweeping assertion that only European Christians (Catholics, Protestants and others) fought each other on the eve of the Reformation and Renaissance, turning bulk of them into admirers of secularism, amounts to travesty of historical facts. His denial of similar bitter conflicts in the Muslim world is grossly ahistoric, as one can go on and on throughout Islamic history cataloguing hundreds of bitter sectarian conflicts—Shiah–Sunni, orthodox–Sufi, free thinkers–mullah, Wahhabi–non-Wahhabi, Assassin Ismaili–Sunni. Consequently Hashemi’s argument that European secularism was a by-product of internecine religious conflicts, and thus grassroots-based and indigenous, and that the absence of similar conflicts among the Muslims explains the absence of secular values among Muslims is not convincing at all.

An objective review of Chasing a Mirage demands a balanced appraisal of some of the core chapters of the work. Hashemi should have critiqued Fatah’s most important contribution, his demarcating the differences between the concepts of Islamic State and the state of Islam, for the sake of objectivity. One wonders as to why Hashemi did not shed any light on Fatah’s important chapters, “Politics and Theology of Islamic States,” “Pakistan—Failure of an Islamic State,” “Saudi Arabia—Sponsor of Islamic States,” “Iran—The Islamic State” and “Palestine—Future Islamic State?” The way Hashemi has only blamed the West for whatever has gone wrong with the Muslim world is very unfortunate. His ignoring the fact how Muslim clerics, intellectuals and leaders kowtowed to the West working against the best interests of Muslim countries (for example, Ayatollah Kashani’s opposition to the nationalization of the British oil companies in Iran, mentioned by Fatah) is astounding. One expected a much more nuanced and objective review from Hashemi, who is a quite well-known and promising scholar of Islamic history, politics and culture.