(dramatic music)
- I am delighted to welcome Shadi Hamid back to this podium.
Today he will be discussing his latest book,
entitled Islamic Exceptionalism:
How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World.
Shadi's reputation as one of the leading scholars
on political Islam precedes him.
- Let me just start off by saying that
this is in some ways a very personal book.
I lived six of the last 12 years of my life
in the Middle East.
The Middle East has a way of changing you,
and in my case not necessarily for the best all the time.
I mean, some friends tell me that I have become
more pessimistic as a result of living in the region,
and I have to say that this book is sort of
colored by that pessimism,
and I think that I have also come to have
a bit of a darker view of human nature
and I'll get to that a little bit later.
But not only have I become more pessimistic,
I've also come to appreciate more and more
the role of religion in public life
and the role of religion in the hearts
and minds of believers
and what that actually means for them.
So part of what I've been doing
for the last 10 years of my work is really
trying to immerse myself in the world of political Islam.
So I've spent hundreds of hours of interviews
with Islamist activists and leaders throughout the region.
And I think for those of us
who come from a secular background
sometimes it's hard to really relate
to the power of religion
in the more conservative countries of the Middle East.
And it's not just the power of religion
or the role that it plays in everyday life,
it's something even a little bit beyond that.
And I think the best way to describe it is that
there's almost, in a metaphysical sense,
a supernatural sense, the kind of the magic of religion
in the lives of believers on an everyday basis
and how they interact with the world.
So, and I think that, I'm born and raised here in the U.S.,
and I'm a product of secularism,
I'm a product of American small L liberalism.
And I think that even though I have spent
quite a bit of time in the Middle East,
I myself realized through this book
that I have to make almost an extra effort
to understand things which to me seem
foreign in some ways.
Part of what I want to get at here
is the question of how much does religion really matter?
When we're trying to understand the demise
of the Arab Spring or the rise of ISIS
or the civil wars in the region,
how much of it is about Islam
and how much of it is about politics?
I put politics in quotation marks
because even the presumption that religion
and politics are separate categories
and we can say one is one and one is the other,
I think is itself problematic
because when you talk to many people in the region,
and not just Islamists,
you'll find that the two are endlessly intertwined,
and it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
So the argument that I'm making is that Islam is in fact
exceptional, but just not, not just in any way,
because it almost goes without saying
that all religions are different from other religions,
all religions are unique in their own way, right?
But the argument here is that Islam is exceptional
in a particular set of ways
that have a profound impact
14 centuries after its founding.
And today in our own world,
and we can actually see
how that exceptionalism plays out in modern day politics.
So it's about Islam's relationships,
specifically to law, politics, and governance.
So in both theory and practice,
I argue that Islam has been resistant
to secularization and that it will be
and will continue to be
resistant to secularization for a long time to come,
I would argue for the foreseeable future.
Now, I can't really speak to what's going to happen
in 300 or 400 years,
and you know, anything is possible then.
We'll all be dead by then,
so I'm not sure how relevant it is.
So I wanted to really focus on realistically
what we have to deal with
really for the rest of our lives as observers, as analysts,
as people who care about the Middle East.
And of course the Middle East does affect
the rest of the world, whether we like it or not.
So why is Islam resistant to secularization?
Why will it continue to be that way?
I'll mention two factors just to
kind of get the conversation going
and also provoke a little bit.
So these two factors really go back
to the founding moment of Islam 14 centuries ago.
And it might be banal to say so,
but history matters in my view
and the founding moments of religions matter,
so we have to look back and see what happened
in that founding moment.
Two years ago, yes, so November 2014, Thanksgiving,
me and my family and some family friends in Pennsylvania,
we were getting together,
having turkey and all that.
But everyone, I guess, you had Muslims
of various religious backgrounds,
some more practicing, some less,
and we were talking about ISIS
because that was just a couple of months
after ISIS came to dominate our headlines.
And we were trying to make sense of
how is this possible that this savage,
brutal organization could come to be
and to speak in our name and so on.
So we started talking about the modern day.
But, before we knew it, we started talking about events
that had literally happened 14 centuries ago.
So we couldn't make sense of ISIS
without going very much back in history.
And we were talking about the Prophet
and the Prophet's closest companions,
the four righteously guided caliphs of the early period.
And it really hit me at that moment that,
as an American Muslim and as someone
who grew up in this community,
that history feels alive in a way
that's somehow hard to describe.
It feels very intimate.
Even the way we talk about the first four caliphs:
so Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali,
we're even on a first-name basis with them.
I remember going to Sunday school.
We would talk about Umar
and he seemed almost like a friend of ours:
Umar this, Umar that.
And you know when I talk to American audiences,
I try to come up with what's the closest analog to that
in say, American history.
I guess the closest thing is the Founding Fathers, right,
but do any of us really go around talking about,
"Well, hey, George or Thomas or James?"
There isn't that same level I think of intimacy in a way.
But that's a little digression,
but I just, I think that's one way to sort of,
to understand the point that history,
even if it happened a very long time ago,
can feel very real.
So in the founding moment,
and this is, I think, a very key point of departure
between Christianity and Islam,
Prophet Muhammad wasn't just a prophet,
a theologian, or a cleric,
he was also a politician.
But not just a politician, he was a head of state,
and not just a head of state, but a state builder.
Unlike Muhammad, Jesus, in contrast,
was a dissident against a reigning state.
So in this respect,
Jesus was never put in a position to govern.
So it's no surprise then that the New Testament
doesn't have much to say about public law or governance
because that's not what Jesus was dealing with
at that particular time in the evolution
of what would become Christianity.
On the other hand, Muhammad was capturing
and holding territory.
And what happens when you hold territory?
You have to figure out how to govern it.
So presumably, if Muhammad is receiving a revelation,
that revelation has to have something to say
about Muhammad's particular time and place.
And one of his primary challenges with the early Muslims
was how to govern.
And this is why the Quran talks about
things like family law, contracts,
religiously derived criminal punishment,
so on and so forth.
If you're coming at it from the perspective of a believer,
you might say, "Well, it couldn't have been otherwise.
"History had to evolve this way because it was God's plan."
If we're coming at it from the perspective
of outside observers or analysts,
we would say that history was contingent.
So it's possible to imagine alternative, parallel histories.
What if Muhammad and the early Muslims
had lost some of those early critical battles
and they weren't able to build greater support,
they weren't able to actually
have an incipient state of their own?
Then, presumably, the Quran wouldn't say the same things
because they wouldn't be in a position to govern,
so what would be the point of the Quran
talking about governance
if Muhammad wasn't in the position to do those things?
So that's another way to look at it,
that once history happens,
there's a kind of path dependence.
So once it turned it turned out that way,
then that has implications going forward,
and you can't really undo that history.
But why would that matter 14 centuries later?
And I don't want to give the impression
that Muslims are bound to their founding moment,
no one's bound to anything.
But I think at the same time Muslims
can't fully escape their founding moment.
And why would they want to?
I mean, if you are a believing Muslim,
however practicing you are or aren't,
you're still going to look at the founding moment
with some degree of admiration and interest,
and Muslims emulate and admire Prophet Muhammad.
So naturally the founding moment
will have some effect on the way that you see the world
if you are a believer.
There are Muslim secular reformers today,
but because of this founding moment,
because of this history,
I would argue they face an uphill battle
in the sense that if they're arguing
for the separation of religion from politics,
they're pretty much in a way arguing against
some aspects of the prophetic model.
It can be done, and I talk in the book
about a number of very creative
and original Muslim secular reformers,
some of whom live in the West and Europe
and are quite prominent, at least here,
but they haven't been able to gain mass traction
in the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia
because the arguments they're making are very complex.
To kind of, how do you get around
the prophetic model of intertwining religious
and political functions?
You can do it, but it requires a lot of
complex reinterpretation and hermeneutical techniques,
and things which are mostly sort of in the realm
of intellectual elite discussion about Islam.
The ordinary Muslim who is trying to get by every day
would prefer Islam probably
to be more straightforward or simple
and doesn't want to get into
complex issues of Islamic philosophy.
I'm not even sure, you know,
if I hadn't written this book,
I probably wouldn't have gotten too much into
the theology and the philosophy of it,
and it's a very rich and complex history.
So the second factor I'll just mention
is the question of scriptural inerrancy.
So oftentimes we hear far-right, or not even far-right,
just Christian evangelicals, in general,
talking about how they believe the Bible is the word of God.
We hear that all the time.
And Muslims, we think, also say that the Quran
is the word of God.
So wouldn't it be similar?
But actually, the more that I dive into it
and I sort had to do a lot of
diving into Christian theology
and talking to pastors and Christian theologians
to really get a better handle on this.
So where Christians, at least evangelicals
in say, the U.S. would say, "The Bible is the word of God,"
Muslims take it one step further and say,
"Not only is the Quran the word of God,
"but it is God's actual speech."
And this is not a semantic difference.
So when you say that "The Bible is the word of God,"
there still is an acknowledgment of a human role,
of human authorship.
no one would deny that Paul wrote certain parts
of the Bible, right?
But Muslims, and it's not just conservative Muslims,
but as a creedal requirement,
Muslims believe that the Quran is directly from God.
In that sense, it's his actual speech
and every letter and word is directly from him.
Prophet Muhammad himself played no role
in the actual content of the scripture.
This has major implications
because really, this is the foundation
upon which Islam rests.
If you take that out, a lot of other things
which are very important theologically sort of crumble.
And if you look historically,
there has never been a major sect or denomination in Islam
that has argued otherwise,
that there is any kind of human authorship in the Quran.
On the other hand, there is no major sect
or denomination in Christianity
that has ever argued that the Bible,
every letter and word of it,
is directly from God.
This obviously has major implications
because if something is in scripture
and it's directly from God,
you can reinterpret it
and you can find five Muslims who all say
that the Quran is God's actual speech
but they disagree profoundly on what that means
in the modern context.
So you can disagree even if you all think it's God's word,
but still you can't ignore or dismiss the text altogether
and say, "Well, hey, that was just something that someone
"wrote 1400 years ago or 2,000 years ago."
You have to at least engage with it
because it is God's speech.
So moving on to sort of the modern period,
so if you accept my premise
that Islam is exceptional in some way,
then let's kind of dive a little bit more
into what that actually means.
When we're trying to understand the rise of ISIS
and all the things that are going on in the Middle East
over the past few years,
I think we tend to focus on a couple dates
that are quite recent:
2011, the start of the Arab Spring,
or we talk about 2003, the Iraq invasion,
9/11, so on and so forth.
But there's one date which I think is very important
which we don't talk about as much,
and that is 1924.
1924 marks the date of the formal abolition
of the last caliphate, the Ottoman caliphate.
And really ever since then,
there's been a struggle to establish
a legitimate political order in the Middle East.
So there's been kind of a religious
and political vacuum since then.
And that's not to say that the caliphate
was not controversial
and people weren't fighting over
the meaning of the caliphate.
But the point here is that
for the better part of 14 centuries
no one doubted that Islam provided the overarching legal,
moral, and religious architecture.
That was the natural order of things.
But with the end of the caliphate,
and, more generally, even before that
with the rise of Western ideologies
and Western influence and imperialism in the Middle East,
secularism and other ideas,
such as nationalism, socialism,
come to the fore.
And this challenges for the first time
the kind of overarching religious and legal architecture.
So really ever since the fall of the caliphate,
there is this struggle.
And at the center of that struggle
are a set of unresolved questions,
and they remain unresolved to this very day,
about Islam's relationship to the modern nation-state,
again, a very modern, you know,
that's a new thing,
the role of religion in everyday life,
the question of whether the state
should be ideologically or religiously neutral,
or should the state promote a particular conception
of the virtuous life or the good life?
And the fact that people haven't resolved those problems
explains at least part of the conflict
that we're seeing today.
So, and part of the challenge here is that
premodern Islamic law,
which was revealed in seventh century Arabia,
wasn't designed for the modern era,
and of course how could it be?
Of course it wasn't.
So the question is how do you square this circle?
And in some ways you can't.
It's an impossible thing.
You can't take something that was revealed
for the premodern era and find a perfect,
easy way that everyone will agree with
to apply it in an era of modern nation-states.
And this is where I turned to how we think about
the word Islamism and Islamist movements.
And Islamism is a very modern thing.
Islamism doesn't hearken back necessarily
to the seventh century
'cause Islamism couldn't have existed
four or five centuries ago,
because when Islam was the natural order of things
no one had to sort of go out of their way
to assert their Islamic identity.
But that's exactly what Islamism is.
It's a way to say,
"We have to make a political project out of Islam
"because it's being removed from the public sphere."
So in that sense, Islamism only makes sense
in opposition to its opposite, namely, secularism.
I think this is very important to sort of grasp
because in the premodern era
it went without saying, so it wasn't said.
But in the modern era it doesn't go without saying
that Islam should play a central role in public life,
and this is why you have movements
that define their political project
around this particular concern:
how to make an Islamic law prominent
or central in public life and in legislation.
In this respect, Islamism is inherently polarizing
precisely because it depends on its opposite.
And this brings me to, I think,
a lot of the divides that we we've seen
over the past few years,
that there are a number of other cleavages
that are perhaps economic in nature,
class-based, and so on,
and I don't want to pretend that those things don't matter.
But the primary divide in the Middle East,
or at least in most Middle Eastern countries,
is that between what we call Islamists and non-Islamists.
And the divide there is about, again,
these unresolved questions about
Islam's relationship to the state.
So in that sense, when people are debating politics
in the Middle East today,
and I'm sure all of you have seen this,
they're not really debating policy.
People aren't talking about tax policy
or how to fight unemployment and a lot of specifics.
That's not what's really at stake.
People are debating the meaning
and nature of the nation-state.
They're talking about the very basic foundations
of what it means to be an Egyptian or a Tunisian or a Turk.
The point here, though,
is when you move away from policy
and you talk about the things
that are raw and existential,
and you can split the middle on economic issues
because it's tangible, it's measurable.
You're dealing in a sense with numbers,
even if people disagree on kind of economic models,
but how do you split the middle on religion,
ideology, or identity?
You can try to understand the other,
you can have national dialogues, and you should,
and that's what people do,
but in the end we shouldn't be under any illusion
that in the Middle East people will agree
on these fundamentals
because it is very existential
and people have fundamentally different visions
about how they want their countries to proceed.
So as I close up here then,
what does that kind of mean going forward?
One option is to kind of have an authoritarian approach
and say, "Well, if people can't agree
"on Islam's role in everyday life,
"the best thing to do is to have an authoritarian government
"that represses it and doesn't allow people
"to really debate these issues
"and you just have one way of approaching it."
That's obviously problematic
because repression is not good generally.
But I think another thing that I really want to highlight
is this idea of a reformation.
So oftentimes people will say,
"Well, the Middle East or the Islamic world
"has to go through its own reformation
"and then after reformation, enlightenment, then secularism
"towards the end of history of liberal democracy."
And sometimes I get in conversations
where people will say to me,
"Hey, Shadi, you know, we went through this ourselves,
"you know, we had the Thirty Years' War,
"the Hundred Years' War,
"we had a lot of religious conflict,
"but don't worry, we figured it out.
"It took a lot of time.
"You guys'll get there.
"You're just struggling a little bit, you know."
But I think that this is sort of
a problematic way of approaching it
because it assumes that the trajectory that Christianity,
and specifically Christian Europe followed
can be superimposed onto the current
and future trajectory of Islam.
And I think we have to be careful not to sort of
fall into that liberal determinism,
that all, this idea that all people's cultures
and societies will follow a particular historical path,
especially when, as I mentioned, as I've discussed,
Christianity and Islam are different in very important ways.
What that means in practice is that,
even if we might wish there could be a reformation,
even if that might be our personal preference,
that we have to be realistic
and in some way come to terms
not with, not necessarily with Islamism writ large
or doesn't mean we have to like Islamist movements.
And as Americans there are many things
we obviously will not like about these movements
and disagree profoundly on.
But I think it's broader than that.
There is going to be a role for Islam in public life,
and it's not just Islamists who say that.
You'll find that there are many secular parties
or liberal parties in the Middle East or Asia
which say that they want Islam
to play a prominent role in public life.
They just disagree on to what extent and how far that goes.
So the question then is,
is that something we can really come to terms with,
and what does it mean to come to terms with that?
And I'll just close here.
I want to mention sort of, I think,
a debate that I think captures this quite well
which is some of you might remember
the Ben Affleck Bill Maher debate
in October 2014 with Sam Harris,
the New Atheist philosopher,
where they're talking about Islam.
And then Bill Maher says something like,
"Islam is the lode star of, the mother lode of bad ideas."
And Ben Affleck gets really emotional
and he goes on this kind of,
I don't want to say rant,
but it was nice for me as an American Muslim
to see a famous actor defending Muslims
on national television.
That doesn't happen very often.
So man, that's kind of cool.
But then when I thought about what Ben Affleck was saying,
I'm like, "That doesn't, I'm not sure
"if it really makes sense."
He was essentially saying Muslims are just like us.
You know, they raise children,
they care about their jobs,
and then he literally said this,
this is a direct quote.
He said, "Muslims like eating sandwiches too."
And I'm like, "Yeah, I can vouch for that.
"Muslims really like sandwiches, yeah, definitely."
But you can like eating sandwiches
but still believe in the implementation of Islamic law.
And I think what we saw in Ben Affleck's remarks
was this very strong desire to find,
to say that we were essentially all the same,
we all ultimately want the same things.
But I think that that's not
the most effective way of thinking about these issues.
And what I would suggest is, you know,
perhaps we should learn to recognize difference
but not see that as necessarily negative or bad,
but to appreciate and respect
and to see how we can live with people
that we disagree with or that we do not like.
And that's the challenge in terms of power sharing
and living in countries
where there are strong ideological divides.
But I think it raises a more profound question
that we can get into, which is:
Do we really want other people to be like us?
And I think we aren't all the same,
and I would pose the question to you:
Why should we all be the same?
So I'll just end there, and thanks for having me.
(audience applauds)
(relaxing music)
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