History and Anthropology

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Islam and politics: The terms of the debate

Mohamed‐Cherif Ferjani

To cite this article: Mohamed‐Cherif Ferjani (2005) Islam and politics: The terms of the debate,
History and Anthropology, 16:1, 75-83, DOI: 10.1080/02757200500103343

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History and Anthropology,
Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 75–83

Islam and Politics: The Terms of the

Debate
Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani
0Mohamed-CherifFerjani
UMR
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History
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GHAN110317.sgm
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Original
Taylor
12005
16 and
&and
Article
Francis Ltd Ltd LyonFrance
(print)/0000-0000
Francis
Anthropology
Group (online)

This paper traces the evolution of perspectives on Islam from the classical islamology of
French scholars to the more politically engaged views that have emerged in Anglo-Ameri-
can scholarship, by reference to developments in the Mediterranean. The image of a “fatal-
istic and reactionary religion” kept alive by ideologists of “civilising colonisation”, along
with that of a “spirituality which has proved able to hold out against an excessively mate-
rialistic modernity” championed by fascinated Orientalists, have given way to a vision of
an Islam that is both threatening and obscurantist, which results from that particular
essence that distinguishes it from other religions, and especially from Christianity and
Judaism. In contrast to these approaches that stigmatise Islam and Muslims, there have
been some who have leapt to the defence of political Islam, seeing it merely as a legitimate
form of resistance against the hegemony of Western powers and against the corrupt dicta-
torships maintained by these same powers. The paper then poses the question: How can we
deny the essentialism and absolute relativism common to both Islamist and islamophobic
discourse without also falling into the trap of the ethnocentricity and pseudo-universalism
that are its consequences? It suggests that some resolutions can be found in the works of
Olivier Carre. The paper then suggests that the separation of church and state, of politics
and religion, was not necessarily inherent in Christianity and that those who adopt an
essentialist view of Islam are equally liable to adopt an implicitly essentialist and ahistorical
view of Christianity, bypassing the long and painful process of secularization in the west. It
concludes by showing that from within political Islam there are many voices condemning
these over-simplified oppositions and demanding modernity, democracy, human rights,
and even secularism.

Keywords: Islam; Politics; Secularization; Essentialism

In the majority of Muslim countries, Islam is declared to be the official state religion
and the principal or exclusive source of all legislation. In certain countries, such as

Correspondence to: Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani, UMR 5195, CNRS-Université Lyon 2, Lyon, France.

ISSN 0275–7206 print/ISSN 1477–2612 online/05/010075–9 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/02757200500103343
76 Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani
Saudi Arabia, the Koran is considered to be like a constitution; the application of the
Islamic sharî’a provides an excuse for refusing to embrace institutions and legislation
considered to be foreign to the traditions of Islam. In countries where the state is
secular or does not defer to Islam, as is the case in Turkey and Indonesia, or where the
law is secular and does not depend on particular readings of the Muslim sharî’a, like in
Tunisia, where official interpretations of Islam are not sufficiently “orthodox”, and
morals and institutions, in spite of their reference to Islam, are considered to be too
“Westernised”, we are witnessing the development of movements seeking a “return to
Islam”. Since the 1970s, the Muslim world has been confronted with these movements,
which exist under a variety of names: “Islamism”, “radical Islam”, “Islamic fundamen-
talism” or “neo-fundamentalism”, not to mention the pejorative terms used by their
opponents to refer to them as “terrorists”, “extremists”, “obscurantists”, and so on, nor
the names they have created for themselves by defining themselves against these same
opponents (such as “The Party of God” as opposed to “The Party of Satan”, “The Party
for Reform”, “for Renaissance”, “for the Awakening”—always accompanied by the
qualifier “Islamic”—and so on). I prefer to describe political Islam in the same way as
political Christianity, political Judaism or any other religion associated with a political
agenda.
Having interested only a few specialists before the advent of the “Islamic Republic”
in Iran in 1979, political Islam has since remained firmly at the forefront of the
international agenda, arousing all kinds of fear, fantasy and fascination. The revolution
which led to the advent of the “Islamic Republic” in Iran fuelled political Islam to the
point where it has become, in every Muslim country, a political reality that cannot be
ignored, and a force to be reckoned with on the international agenda. In Sudan and
Afghanistan, movements which have called on political Islam have succeeded in taking
power in order to impose policies based on ideas which recall the darkest periods of the
Middle Ages. In Turkey, Jordan and Morocco, Islamic parties have won elections that
have made them into political units that are impossible to ignore. In Algeria, the rejec-
tion by the army, but also by some political movements and a proportion of society, of
the FIS’s electoral victory, led to a civil war that has been going on since the start of the
1990s. Elsewhere, repressive policies have unquestionably closed off the possibility of
electoral success for Islamic movements, and forestalled the civil war that could set
them against the powers or political and social forces are hostile to them. However,
everything points to the fact that, for the moment, this is merely a Pyrrhic victory. The
flame of Islamic anger is smouldering under the embers of repression. The corruption,
injustice and tyranny of the regimes in power, and the development of a culture of
hatred around the deterioration of living conditions and many other sources of
frustration, are features of this type of movement that facilitate its smooth passage from
the position of martyr to that of hero or torturer. If, in certain countries, the strategy of
suppressing the martyr’s quest has succeeded in prevailing over his or her relentless
pursuits, in other countries, in spite of the pressure of the international counter-
terrorism plan adopted in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, repression has not
prevented the most radical movements from committing increasingly murderous and
spectacular acts.
 History and Anthropology 77
Even in countries where Islam is in the minority, and has been until now peaceful
and apolitical, we are witnessing the development of demands and movements relat-
ing to Islam. In countries where Muslim minorities have been subjected to discrimi-
nation and violent persecution, as in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and some
Asian countries, these movements take the form of a resistance army that will stop at
nothing to defend itself and draw attention to the plight of its members. In Western
countries, where Islam is a recent arrival, numerous manifestations of political Islam
are developing: some campaign for the status and rights of Muslims to be equal to
those of other religious groups and the rest of the population; others concern them-
selves with claiming a particular status and specific rights that take into consideration
the traditions associated with the name of Islam. In keeping with current interna-
tional events and Islamic movements in a particular Muslim country, or indeed with-
out links to any specific country, certain organizations will perform acts of solidarity
with a particular group of Muslims who have been victims of aggression or the
oppression of a foreign power—indeed with movements who share with these orga-
nizations a political or ideological affinity. These acts can resort to extreme forms of
violence, as we have seen with the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States
of America, 11 March 2004 in Spain and other attacks on a smaller scale in France
and other countries.
This situation, which has been the state of affairs since the 1970s, has inspired new
ways of approaching Islam, challenging certain notions that have been passed down
from colonial times. The image of a “fatalistic and reactionary religion” kept alive by
ideologists of “civilizing colonization”, along with that of a “spirituality which has
proved able to hold out against an excessively materialistic modernity” championed by
fascinated Orientalists have given way to a vision of an Islam that is both threatening
and obscurantist, which results from that particular essence that distinguishes it from
other religions, especially from Christianity and Judaism. The classical Islamology of
great Orientalist scholars such as Louis Massignon, Henri Laoust, Louis Gardet,
Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson—to name only the most famous figures in French
Islamology—has given way to sociopolitical and anthropological perspectives
dominated by the essentialist ideas held in such regard by American specialists on the
Middle East. During the 1980s, Bernard Lewis became the intellectual leader of a large
number of specialists on Islam and the Muslim world, and indeed he continues to
be so.
Islam, according to the image of it found in the work of this specialist, is a uniquely
comprehensive, all-encompassing and indeed totalitarian religion that connects and
incorporates the spiritual and the worldly, the political and the religious, public and
private. It is at the same time Faith (‘aqîda) and Law (the common, and inappropriate,
translation of the term “sharî’a”), Religion (dîn) and State (dawla). It does not contain
principles like those in Christianity that allow the separation of the religious from the
political. In Islam, there is no equivalent of “my kingdom is not of this world”, as Lewis
tells us, adding, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to
God”. This is undoubtedly solid Christian doctrine and practice, but nothing could be
more alien to Islam.
78 Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani
The three main religions of the Near East exhibit revealing differences in their
relationship with the state, and in their attitude towards political power. Judaism,
originally linked to the state, has subsequently detached itself from it; its recent
encounters with the state in the have stirred up problems that have not yet been
resolved. Christianity, in the centuries during which initially it developed, remained
distinct from the state, indeed was set against it, and only came to be integrated into it
much later. As far as Islam is concerned, it was already the state during the lifetime of
its founder, and the identification of religion with power is engraved indelibly in the
memory and consciousness of the faithful, based on the testimony of their own sacred
texts, their history and their lived experience” (Lewis, 1985). Insisting on the specificity
of the relationship between Islam and the state, Lewis adds:
[I]n Islam, religion is not, as is the case in Christianity, a sector or division which governs
certain parts of life, while others escape its grip; the Islamic religion is concerned with life
as a whole, exerting its jurisdiction, not in limited, but in global terms. In a society like this,
the mere idea of a separation of the Church and the State is devoid of sense, in that the
Church and the State, religious power and political power, do not exist as two distinct units
able to be separated; they are one. Classical Arabic, just like the other classical Islamic
languages, does not contain semantic expressions for the Christian dichotomies of lay and
ecclesiastical, worldly and spiritual, secular and religious. The reason for this is that these
binary oppositions refer to a dichotomy that is particular to Christianity, and which has no
equivalent in the world of Islam. (Lewis, 1985)

Etienne (1985: 18–19) states, on the strength of this thesis, “strictly to separate reli-
gion and politics … is an idea that is totally foreign to Islam, which would not allow for
domestication (understood here to mean a reduction to the private realm)”, specifying
that Islam “involves a principal of totality” (Etienne, 1985: 206) irreconcilable with the
concept of laity because “the secular republic and the city of Umma are poles apart”
(Etienne, 1985: 309). Even Maxime Rodinson has fallen into the trap of this vision. In
his introduction to B. Lewis’ book The Assassins, he writes, in support of this theory,
that Islam is a religion that “exhibits the characteristic, distinctive among the large
family of monotheistic religions, of linking theological and political problems closely
and structurally” (Rodinson, 1982).
To summarise this approach, Islam is simultaneously:
● A religion (dîn or milla) with everything that is implied by religious facts in terms of
the beliefs that constitute faith (‘aqîda), cultural obligations (‘ibâdât) and the rules
concerning each human being’s “responsibilities” towards themselves, their peers
and the world in which they live (mu’âmalât);
● An ethico-politico-legal system (the caliphate, imama or Islamic state) based on the
sharî’a, a revealed, intangible, immutable law which determines once and for all
the status of all things, and the rules that should govern the individual and collective
relationships and behaviour of all who call on the authority of Islam;
● A community that is both spiritual and political (the ‘umma, presented as being
exclusively “the political and spiritual community of Muslims” or “the political
system … over which the sovereign (caliph or ‘imâm) reigns”, “the universal and
unique Islamic community, which embraces all countries in which there is Muslim
 History and Anthropology 79
domination and where Muslim law prevails”, according to the assertions of Lewis,
1988: 150, 155);
● A territory: dâr al-’islâm (land of Islam) within which war, as fitna (sedition,
fratricidal war or conflict) is prohibited, as opposed to dâr al-harb (land of war) in
which war is not only lawful, but is in fact an obligation as jihâd (understood solely
to be the holy war conducted to spread Islam, and which will only come to an end
with “widespread ‘umma”, to use Etienne’s (1985: 95) expression). The same
perception has led Camille Lacoste-Dujardin (1987: 568), who neglects the elemen-
tary notions of sociology she applies to Algeria, to say: “widespread across Africa,
Central and South East Asia, the Muslim religion has around 900 million followers.
This means that 450 million women belonging to the ‘umma, the Muslim commu-
nity [sic!], 450 million women are governed by the same laws in spite of the diversity
of the States in which they live. Muslims in effect acknowledge all, the sacred nature
of the language and content of the Koran, the most recent of Holy Books in which
we find contained that which was revealed to the prophet Mohammed”.

The influence of this view of Islam was such that the work of Lewis became a point
of reference for many researchers in Muslim countries who, suspicious of the domi-
nant discourse in their own country, rediscovered Islam under the pressure of the
growing Islamist debate and through the literature fashionable in Western countries. It
has taken time for them to realize that, in so doing, they have fuelled the very political
Islam they believed themselves to be challenging.
It is important to say that this view is not alien to the “war of cultures” forecast by
Samuel Huntington and revived as much by Islamists as by the apostles of an
Islamophobia that feeds on atrocities and crimes committed and defended in the name
of Islam. In effect, the author of Clash des civilisations stresses the primordial role of
religion, stating that “civilisations distinguish themselves from one another through
history, language, culture, tradition, and, most importantly, through religion”. This
role is presented as even more fundamental because different groups of people find in
their religion a decisive referent of identity; this in a world where all other boundaries
are disappearing one after another as a result of increasing levels of movement and
migration (Lacoste-Dujardin, 1993). If different civilizations, defined in this way,
cannot coexist peacefully, it is because the differences between them are deep-seated
ones and revolve around such fundamental issues as “the relationship between God
and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the State, parents and children,
husband and wife”, and equally around “the relative importance of rights and respon-
sibilities, freedom and authority, equality and hierarchy” (Lacoste-Dujardin, 1993).
The inevitable conflicts emerging from under the cloud of these fundamental
differences have been, and will continue to be, long-lasting and ever more violent,
according to Huntington, than those ones in which the stakes are purely economic,
political or ideological. This theory—“roughly hewn” as Todd (2002: 49) has judi-
ciously remarked—overlaps with those proposed by Lewis at the point when it places
Islam among the civilizations most antinomic to Western culture. In effect, Hunting-
ton establishes a hierarchy among the differences that separate the other civilizations
80 Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani
from the West, declaring that these differences are “of lesser importance for Latin
America and the orthodox countries of the former Soviet Union. They are of still
greater importance for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist societies” (Todd,
2002: 45). Lewis and the Islamic discourse to which he reduces Islam do not say
anything other than this on the subject of the relationship between the Muslim world
and the West.
In contrast to the approaches that stigmatise Islam and Muslims, there have been
some who have leapt to the defence of political Islam, seeing it merely as a legitimate
form of resistance against the hegemony of Western powers and the corrupt dictator-
ships maintained by these same powers. Some have seen in this the original forms of
access to modernity and democracy. Owing to the dramatic evolutions following the
development of Islamic movements and the blindly repressive policies adopted in
response to them, and bearing in mind what Olivier Roy (1992) calls “the failure of
political Islam”, many have cast it aside. Others, like François Burgat (1996), continue,
in spite of serious obstacles, to defend this argument, accusing those who dispute it of
Islamophobia and colluding with American imperialism, Western hegemony, and the
retrograde monarchies and dictatorships of the Muslim world. To give legitimacy to
political Islam, Burgat (1988) considers normal Arab modernists as “one form of out-
and-out cultural alienation … which compels the DOMINATED to seek to represent
themselves and express their aspirations only through the referents and concepts
produced and imposed by the dominant society”. In reaction to “this cultural
alienation”, Burgat (1988) notes: “Today, the dominated populations of yesterday are
experiencing a need to have recourse to new, less foreign, sources of representation, or
those which are perceived to be thus, and which are able to mount an effective
challenge on the field where the West has had its greatest victory: ideology.” For him,
these “new [forms of] representation” are provided by the discourse of political Islam,
“more language than doctrine, a method of representing a reality not bound by what
the dominant powers have imposed, an ideological alternative, much more than a sense
of mystical satisfaction”, it is “a political ideology capable of challenging the great
Western ideologies” (Burgat, 1988). This approach, which dates from the end of the
1980s, has hardly changed. In L’islamisme en face and more recent publications, Burgat
continues to see in political Islam—at the heart of which he identifies tendencies using
lines of demarcation and connections that the participants themselves do not
recognize2—the future of Arab and Muslim societies.
How can we deny the essentialism and absolute relativism common to both Islamist
and Islamophobic discourse without also falling into the trap of the ethnocentricity and
pseudo-universalism that are its consequences? It was the awareness of this double
requirement that allowed for the emergence and affirmation of approaches to Islam
and Islamic realities that broke away from the dominant scholarly perspectives of the
period from the late 1970s to the start of the 1990s. Olivier Carré (1993: 50) distin-
guishes himself firmly from the current approach involving drawing a contrast between
Christianity, “originally and fundamentally apolitical” carrying the seed of “the secular
and individualist evolution of contemporary Western societies”, and Islam, “inextrica-
bly and permanently linking religion and the State, the spiritual and the worldly; in
 History and Anthropology 81
short, theocratic”. Wary of essentialist perspectives, he notes the complex processes of
politicization and depoliticization of the two religions:
[T]he religion of Islam became politicised, and keenly so, after only thirteen years, then
became distinctly depoliticised less than three centuries later, only to become repoliticised
relatively recently. Christianity, by contrast, only became politicised after three centuries;
it only began to get somewhat depoliticised from the sixteenth century, in the West solely,
before repoliticising on the excellent legal basis of a “separation” of the Church from the
State. Basically, the two religions are equally political. (Carré, 1993: 54)

Continuing with his comparison, he highlights a “quietist political inclination, and

therefore a separation of powers” in Muslim and Christian thought alike (Carré,
1993: 56). It is to this quietist tendency that he connects what he calls “the great
[secular] tradition” that has marked the history of Shî’ism and Sunnism, and which
should not be eclipsed in order to benefit what he calls a “ deviant orthodoxy”
(Carré, 1993: 30–38) of the “official global Islam” that today is engaged with the most
radical Islamic movements in a contest to outdo one another.
Olivier Carré’s approach is poles apart from the dominant discourse, and it is no
stranger to the timid reorientations known to studies of Islam since the 1990s. Olivier
Roy’s (1993, 2002) argument of the failure of political Islam, like his work on the
globalization of Islam, and the theory of post-Islamism developed by Gilles Kepel
(2002), along with what the recent work of Bruno Etienne (2003) has once more called
into question, have contributed to this shift in the argument. This change in perspec-
tive, which dominated the 1980s under the influence of the fear and fascination
provoked by the development of political Islam, is not limited solely to specialists on
the Muslim world (to find out more about the dominant view on this subject in the
1980s, see Ferjani, 1991). The changing approach that the reality of Islam has experi-
enced through the work of Emmanuel Todd (1994, 2002)—whether through his anal-
ysis of the behaviour of Maghreb communities in France or in Après l’Empire—is in this
sense remarkable. Todd (2002: 49) is right to recall that Huntington’s “theory” is
“nothing but a reversal of the view of the ayatollah Khomeyni who believed, just
as much as did the fine American strategist, in the conflict of civilisations”. He is
equally correct to remark that “it is … unnecessary to essentialise Islam, to stigmatise
its alleged inclination towards war—represented by Mohammed’s military role—or to
condemn the subjection of women in the Arab world, in order to understand the rise
in the carnage and ideological fervour in this religious arena” (Todd, 2002; 49). In
recalling the transformations that the Muslim world has undergone, and in comparing
them to those experienced by Europe and America in the past, he specifies that a
“significant section of the Muslim world (which has achieved its transition) is already
in the process of conciliation”, and adds:
It is too easy to demonise Islam based on current crisis statistics. On a global level, Islam is
going through a crisis of modernization and clearly cannot be seen as a haven of peace.
Those countries that are developed and peaceful cannot in any way take pride in the situ-
ation they currently enjoy; some reflective thought about their own history should leave
them feeling considerably more modest. The English and French revolutions were violent
phenomena just like the communism of Russia and China, and the military and imperialist
82 Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani
upsurge of Japan. The explicit values associated with the American Civil War and the War
of Independence are immediately understandable to us for reasons of historical and
cultural proximity. All the same, the United States have not escaped a crisis of transition.
Certain ideological debates associated with the American crisis are at times difficult for us
to grasp, such as, primarily, the issue of skin colour. This American idiosyncrasy seems
neither more nor less peculiar to the French mind than the hysterical debate over the status
of women which has characterised Islamic revolutions. (Todd, 2002: 52–53)

In Muslim countries, and among Muslim minorities in countries the majority of

whose populations are non-Muslim, the impasses caused by the triumph of Islamic
ideology in Iran and Sudan, the extravagant nature of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,
the attacks of 11 September 2001 and their political consequences for Muslims as much
as for the rest of the international community, the continuing predicament of the crisis
in Algeria and tragic events like the attacks of 16 May 2003 in Casablanca, have encour-
aged the affirmation of a “new Muslim conscience”—to use the title of an issue of the
journal Prologues (No. 24, Winter 2002)—challenging oppositions such as Islam/the
West, Islam/modernity, Islam/democracy, Islam/secularity, and so on. From the very
heart of political Islam come more and more voices condemning these over-simplified
oppositions and demanding modernity, democracy, human rights and even secularity
as evidenced by the position defended publicly by Sayyid Muhammad Hassan al-‘Amîn,
the Qâdhî ja’farite of the town of Saïda, during the symposium organized by the IFEAD
in Alep in 2002,3 and also by associations and academics claiming to represent the
Islamist sphere of influence in France. Similarly, after the attacks in New York and
Casablanca, many movements, such as the Justice and Development Party in Morocco
and the Nahda in Tunisia, have condemned violence used as a weapon of political action
and gone as far as to refuse the Islamic label, instead calling themselves “movements
with Islamic orientation”4 following the example of parties which, in Europe, refer to
themselves as “Christian democrats”.
In this sense, can Burgat be said to have been correct when he wrote at the beginning
of the 1990s that the “totalitarian potential” of the “all-encompassing discourse” of the
“most traditionalist social margin of the [Islamic] movement” represents only “one
aspect, or we could perhaps say one moment of this of this ‘Islamist protest’, which is
inescapably condemned to evolve” (Burgat, 1992: 126–127)? The evolutions that have
been noted at the heart of Islamist movements since the end of the war between Iran
and Iraq would appear to prove him right, but they seem to emerge more from a
dynamic of failure and forced concessions than from the mere evolution of the balance
of power between different leanings within these movements. The adoption of a vocab-
ulary and points of view that were rejected as “downright cultural alienation” encour-
age this interpretation. This does not, of course, take away from the importance of
these evolutions, but it does show that political Islam today, like the political Christian-
ity of the past, can only evolve while, and insofar as, it is presented with an opponent
capable of inflicting defeat.
Unfortunately, the forces that have caused Islam to “bite the dust” are far from being
models of democracy or humanism, and this is where the real problem of the evolu-
tions in question lies. If they are only accomplished by reaching a new reconciliation
 History and Anthropology 83
with the victorious opponents, there is a strong possibility that they will come to a
sudden end. This is the reason why the criticism of political Islam as the product of an
anti-democratic objective should go hand-in-hand with the criticism of essentialist
perspectives inspired by, or an least inspiring, Islamophobia, imperialist globalization,
dictatorships and corrupt regimes in Muslim countries, and factors that fan the flames
of the “war of cultures”, which is no more than a “clash of ignorance” to use the felic-
itous expression coined by Edouard Saïd.

Notes
[1] This argument was initially developed in an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs (Lacoste-
1

Dujardin, 1993). The article gave rise to a book, which is available in French translation
(Lacoste-Dujardin, 1997).
[2] I am thinking in particular of H’mida Enneïfer and S. Jourchi’s use of examples to show the
2

evolutionary capability of the Al-Nahda movement, and Rachid Ghannouchi’s as the first two
broke with the last before the creation of Al-Nahda.
[3] See the transcript of his speech “Wijhât nazhar hawla al-‘ilmânyya al-mu’mina” (Opinions
3

about the secularity of believers) in the published conference proceedings: Le courant

réformiste musulman et sa réception dans les sociétés arabes, IFPO publications, Damas, 2003,
pp.56–70.
[4] See, e.g., the declaration from Abd al-‘Ilân Ben Kirane, a leading Moroccan Islamist, in the
4

weekly publication Al’Ayyâm (no. 89, 5–11 June 2003, p. 12), published in Casablanca,
where he writes: “To be involved in politics in the name of religion is unacceptable. As far
as we are concerned, we are a political party with Islamic tendencies, and that is our right; if
it were not our right, it would mean that such tendencies would be forbidden.”

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