8/8/2019 Taj Hashmi

1/3

Taj Hashmi

Towards understanding Islam inpostcolonial world order Part I

November 25, 2010

Overview

As the discord between modern and traditional Muslims is ideological by nature, sois the conflict between Islam and the West. And ideology is more about power,influence and identity than a mere reflection of culture and belief system. Whilemodern Muslim elites are unwilling to concede power and privileges to the mullahs,most mullahs and their followers mostly rural and small town lower elites withtraditional Islamic or vernacular education are also unwavering about notconceding any ground to non-traditional Westernised Muslims.

The Iranian Revolution and the Taliban/al-Qaeda experiment in Afghanistan haveinspired mullahs and their followers to go the Khomeini or Taliban way. Meanwhile,Western duplicities and open support for Islamists during the Cold War had furtheremboldened Islamists within and beyond the Muslim World. State-sponsorship ofIslamism by Saudi Arabia, Gulf States and Pakistan, among other states, has alsobeen a contributing factor to the rise of political Islam. Arab autocrats promoteSunni orthodoxy to contain Shiite Iranian influence; and Pakistani rulers sometimepromote Islamists to bleed archrival India and to neutralise secular democraticopposition at home.

For distancing ourselves from any pseudo-history of Islamism, we need tounderstand that postcolonial Islamist re-assertion is a legacy of defeats andhumiliation for the Ummah. The death of Nasserism in the Six-Day War of1967, one analyst observes, brought Islamism as the alternative ideology in theMuslim World. We also need an understanding of the Muslim psyche vis--vis theMuslim experience in Palestine, Kashmir, Iran, Algeria, Egypt, and among otherplaces, Iraq and Afghanistan. How the Cold War allies Muslims and the West turned into adversaries or competitors in an uneven elite conflict in theGlobalised World for conflicting hegemonies and ideologies demands our attention.

We also need to discern the Cold War Islamism from the post-Cold War one. Whileduring the Cold War, Muslims considered the West a suspect-cum-ally.Nevertheless, Muslims regarded the West as a friend against their common enemy,communism. Although, the end of the Cold War following the Russian withdrawalfrom Afghanistan had heightened Muslim optimism, they were soon crestfallen bythe not-so-benign role of the West. Instead of ushering a new dawn of hope andempowerment for Muslims, the New World Order did not bring anything new to theMuslim World. By 1991, almost all the Muslim-majority countries barring Turkey,Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia had became autocratic; and by 2003 three ofthem Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan had been invaded by Western troops. In

short, the cumulative unpleasant post-Cold War Muslim experience has led to thebeginning of another Cold War. Islam vs. the West has become the newcatchword. Meanwhile, pre-modern ultra-orthodox obscurantist forces had gainedupper hand in many Muslim-majority countries. Interestingly, enamoured by theconcept of transnational Muslim solidarity, Muslims in postcolonial societies are

8/8/2019 Taj Hashmi

2/3

grabbing the elusive Ummah as their security blanket as weak and marginalisedpeople find security in number. We may impute the prevalent obscurantism amongsections of Muslims to their backwardness, lack of education and opportunities forvarious historical factors, but we cannot turn a blind eye to Western duplicities andhegemonic designs in the Muslim World. One can at best consider the Western lip-service to democracy and freedom in the Muslim World as condescending,insincere and deceitful; its insistence on bringing peace without justice fromAlgeria to Iraq and Palestine to Kashmir is simply shocking and terrifying.

Islamism, a postcolonial syndrome

Since most Muslim countries with a handful of exceptions were European colonies,the Muslim-West conflict is at least as old as colonialism. One may trace the rootsof the conflict to early medieval era, even predating the Crusades. The inter-stateconflicts between Muslim neighbours are by-products of colonialism. Europeancolonial powers arbitrarily drawing lines across the desert, which createdartificial states like Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Indonesia andMalaysia and truncated entities like Syria and Iraq; have further accentuated the

conflict. The postcolonial ascendancy of the Pax Americana, which coincided withthe beginning of the Cold War, divided the Muslim World between pro-Americanand pro-Russian camps. However, the end of the Cold War signalled the beginningof another between the Muslim World and the West. In the wake of the Cold War,the overwhelming Muslim majorities globally turned anti-Western in general andanti-American in particular. They were disillusioned with the West for its continuedsupport for Israel and regimes hostile to their interests in the Muslim World. Assubstantial part of the global disempowered people, they also believe the West-sponsored Globalisation process has not been beneficial to their interests at all. Wemust contextualise Islamic reforms, resurgence and Islamist militancy andterrorism to the dilemma of postcolonial Muslim community. They can neither

forget their pre-colonial and colonial pasts, nor can they fully integrate themselvesinto the modern world due to various cultural and economic constraints.

The Ummah represents a racially, culturally, politically and economically diverseglobal Muslim community. As Muslims have economic, political and sectariandifferences, they also have different ways of resolving problems, organising dissentand protest, violently or peacefully, in the name of Islam or with secular agenda.Algerian Muslims, for example, fought a protracted bloody war of liberation againstFrance. Algerian Muslims having the tradition of fighting a peoples war againstoppressive regimes are more likely to take up arms against their enemies than

Muslims in some other countries. They are not that different from Afghans. As theFrench colonial rulers did not allow representative self-governing institutions andrelatively free press, unlike what the British experimented in its colonies; Algerianslack the tradition of organising protests and demonstrations against their rulers ina peaceful constitutional way. The French allowed no Gandhis in their colonieseither. Consequently, as Fanon has argued, the colonised, underdeveloped manin Algeria metamorphosed himself into a political creature in the most globalsense. Unlike the colonised intellectual, the relatively free peasants posed thebiggest threat to the French in Algeria. [1] The postcolonial Algerian governmentsmaintaining the colonial hierarchical systems, especially in the realm of educationby continuing with the French and Arabic medium schools to create the

employable and under-employable, French and Vernacular elites respectively.According to Roy, Algerian Islamist lumpen-intellectuals, mostly with science orengineering background, had been striving for lumpen-Islamism. He has

http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2010/11/25/towards-understanding-islam-in-postcolonial-world-order-%E2%80%94-part-i/#_ftn1http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2010/11/25/towards-understanding-islam-in-postcolonial-world-order-%E2%80%94-part-i/#_ftn1

8/8/2019 Taj Hashmi

3/3