The Political Meanings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam

Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black Christianity and the liberal dream of racial integration, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) was a prime target of US governmental surveillance and repression. Its very presence was perceived as a threat to the ideological foundations of 1960s US liberalism, which rested on anti-communism and the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, on the rhetoric of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and on federal welfare programs. At the same time, the Nation of Islam’s leadership appropriated and furthered what were at the time several other modes of liberalism: it policed its members’ middle-class, straight sexuality; it embraced the dream of black capitalism and encouraged entrepreneurship; it used the US courts to argue for freedom of religion and framed its activities as such; and it forbade its members from engaging in violent revolution or even nonviolent political resistance against many of the very liberal institutions that it identified as a religious evil.

A New Deal Between Mankind and its Gods

This chapter discusses Muhammad Iqbal’s response to the argument of Friedrich Nietzsche about the exit from religion. Instead of considering this event as the death of god, Iqbal considers it as the birth of a new man, and the starting point of a new era in the spiritual history of humanity. Following Iqbal’s line of thought, the chapter points to a de-Westernization of the theory of an exit from religion and, in so doing, offers a critique of Western liberalism. In Iqbal’s view, liberation from the guardianship of God does not mean there is no longer any relationship between God and humanity. Thus, when Iqbal talks about a metaphysical liberalism, he is referring to the intuition of the future, characterized by the next step in our spiritual evolution where the human species is liberated from the vision of a divine form as something different from itself, and has instead liberated itself in this divine form. In this sense, the exit from religion signals the beginning of a dialectical process of integrating God into humanity. Accordingly, Iqbal’s ideas can serve as a tool for understanding liberalism and secularization not only as a political process but as a spiritual re-birth for humankind.

Postcolonial Prophets

More often than not, the course of history in the Islamic world has caught scholars, pundits and governments in the West by surprise. This chapter investigates that dissonance.

Illiberal Islam

The Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal developed one of the earliest Muslim criticisms of liberalism in the early twentieth century. Given the caste, communal and other differences that he thought made a European form of nationalism and so democracy impossible in India, Iqbal asked how social relations there might be envisioned in its absence. He went on to question the three liberal categories, interest, representation and contract, that underlay the liberal form of nationalism and democracy, and describe and try to re-imagine the non-liberal ways in which Indians related to one another in moral, philosophical and aesthetic terms.

Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom

The meaning of freedom in Iran cannot be exclusively unraveled from an “Islamic” perspective. At the same time, liberal concepts and the idea of freedom itself have repeatedly figured prominently in the writings of leading Islamic theoreticians and philosophers in the country. In order to give a brief overview of these ideas and the debates they have provoked, this article will follow three steps. Firstly, it will demonstrate that the idea of freedom has been at the heart of political events in modern Iran. I will start by sketching some of the major political upheavals in the country, with a particular emphasis on the events surrounding the Iranian revolution of 1979. In a second step, I will look at the nexus between Islam and liberal ideas in the political philosophy of major contemporary Iranian thinkers. And thirdly, I will sketch some of their flaws with a short philosophical critique.

Islamic Democracy by Numbers

This chapter focuses on the ideological uses of the concept of al wasatiyya, as a means of propagating moderation, by prominent contemporary Muslim scholars engaged in countering extremism. It focuses on the ways in which, through the idea of the “middle way”, a particular theology combines with a majoritarian narrative of Islamic history, politics and civilization to produce a potent synthetic ideology which often serves to exclude, anathematize or marginalize. While it has become a commonplace among liberals to debate the fluid interpretations of Islamic concepts which legitimize violence, less attention, if any, has been given to the equally unstable categories associated with antidotes to religious violence. By deploying the majoritarian dimensions of a concept like “the middle way”, leading scholars today expose the multivalent and volatile nature of theological categories associated with countering extremism. Perhaps, most significantly, it points to some of the limits encountered in searching for correspondence between Islam and the West by way of such categories.

Corrupting Politics

The chapter explores the relationship between culturalism and liberalism in modern Arabic. It argues that internal contradictions from within Arabic thought haunt the attempt to define the Arabs as an organicist community. These contradictions within particular identity are expressed in the pervasive anxiety about habits and language. Anxiety emerges when there is a crisis in imaginary identification, it is generated as a remainder of acknowledging the self in a specular image: the mirror of language, the Arab’s moustache. It emerges from a process of misrecognition, when uncanny elements within identity itself become overwhelming. Rather than read the discourse on habits as a desire for Western modernity the chapter argues against a non-dialectical pitting of culture (Arab, non-West) against liberalism (West), which forecloses the real loss that is generated from this modern antinomy: the retreat and scarcity of politics in both liberalism and culturalism.

Introduction

The relationship between Islam and liberalism has been a subject of scholarly as much as popular debate for at least a century and a half. Its progress sometimes hailed and at other times found wanting, this relationship has been marked by the unchanging and even stereotypical terms in which it has been debated, including issues such as the separation of church and state, the status of women and the rights of non-Muslims. Each of these issues serves as a litmus test to measure the liberalism of Muslim individuals as well as societies, and each is also drawn from the real or imagined history of liberalism in Europe. However, as a historical and variable phenomenon, liberalism does not in fact possess a normative definition but constitutes a family of shifting and overlapping ideas having to do with the freedoms of property and contract, speech and movement, or of rights and representation....

Post-Islamism as Neoliberalisation

The debate on post-Islamism generally focuses on ideological compromise by political ideologues seeking support from the mass electorate. This chapter argues that what we call post-Islamism is actually better understood as a product of the advent of neoliberal religious subjectivity defined in terms of individualization, consumption practices, and lifestyle ethics. New social movement theory is employed to provide an analysis of new forms of television preaching and religious popular culture in the Middle East.

Islamotopia

This chapter explores the idea of American Islam, a unique expression of Islam articulated by a range of American Muslim thinkers. Special attention is given to the ways in which constructions of American Islam intersect with notions of U.S. exceptionalism to imagine the U.S. as a setting in which Muslims can recover and revive the “true” and “original” Islam. The claim that American Islam would thus be the most authentic and universal Islam, informed by the racial history of the U.S. and white privilege, has been employed to diverse ends by a variety of actors that includes conservative neo-traditionalists, progressive and feminist Muslims, and Muslim supporters of George W. Bush. This chapter investigates the development of these discourses to argue that notions of American Islam ultimately privilege white convert men as the ideal embodiments of universal Islam.