The Islamic Movement: The Real Issues A response to Yola
By
Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
Strictly
speaking, Dalhatu Sani Yola’s comment “flaws in Sanusi Sanusi’s thesis” (Weekly Trust 13/11/98)
does not provide one with the basis for a response. First, Yola fails to
define what my “ thesis” is although he does suggest that it is on the
“ideals and realities of the Islamic crusade in Nigeria. I certainly did not
use those words and perhaps the choice of the word “crusade” is sufficient
as an indicator of the dividing line between different categories of Muslim
Activist. For me, the Islamic struggle is, on the political plane, a struggle
aimed at the revolutionary transformation of society such as to bring it closer
to the Islamic ideals of justice, honesty and fairplay and create a society that
respects the liberty and dignity of its citizens irrespective of creed. To some
others, it is a crusade whose
ultimate objective is to subdue other
Nigerians and “impose” upon them the Islamic law and religion and turn them
into willing or unwilling subjects of a government run by dictators in Islamic
garb. I do not say this is what Yola means, but the word “crusade” certainly
conjures in the mind a picture of Muslim forces waging a war against
non-Muslims. My thesis, on the other hand, was and remains that Islam requires
Muslims to join hands with other Nigerians in the struggle to create a better,
more religious and humane, more liberal, honest and fair political environment
in which all Nigerians can improve their lives-economically, culturally,
intellectually, spiritually and morally. The struggle
is for me, a revolution against
our collective – oppressors rather than a crusade against our
fellow-oppressed. This thesis was not addressed.
The
second reason Yola’s comment does not deserve a response is that it was
essentially a criticism of a paper which had opened by stating clearly that it
was a continuation of an earlier paper (The
Muslim Activist and Multi-Religious Opposition, Weekly Trust 5 & 12, June,
1998) and which Yola seemingly did not bother to read. In consequence, Yola
writes a rejoinder which seeks to “straighten the fundamental flaws” in a
thesis he did not read, or if he did, did not properly digest. This response
would have been more useful and the debate altogether richer, had the critic
allowed himself the opportunity of academic rigour, and pitched his intellectual
effort at a somewhat higher level than seems to have been the case. It is all
the more sad because from the tone of Yola’s article, he strikes one as a
person of more than modest intellectual endowments and who can thus hold out on
his own in the field of academic discourse.
The
result is that Yola spends his time quoting back at me verses of the Qur’an
which I had quoted in the first article. He accuses me of not acknowledging
“conceptual and institutional arrangements in-built in Islam that not only
guarantee democratic politics but inspire good governance and justice in the
polity.” This is indeed a baffling charge considering that I had gone out of
my way in the earlier paper to argue that only those who do not read the
Qur’an and Sunnah need to be taught these same principles by Americans or
Europeans and I had quoted much the same verses quoted by Yola.
Yola
next proceeds to defend the Islamic Movement against two allegations that I was
supposed to have levelled against it: The first is that Islam is being unduly
“politicized” literally in the process of its becoming responsive to
political forces or issues. Again, it is a shame that such a charge could be
leveled by one who read my paper. For, in the paper to which Yola was
responding, (Islamisation of Politics)
I had stated clearly what I meant by “politicisation” of Islam: that is, its
use or abuse for selfish political ends. I gave this definition precisely to
avoid confusion, as I am aware that some Orientalist and Middle-East scholars
like Nazih Ayubi have sometimes used the term to mean giving Islam a political
character which it does not intrinsically have.
The second allegation is
that the Islamic Movement has kept itself apart from the very processes that
need to be controlled if society is to be changed. I did make that allegation
and I stand by it. Yola makes
broad, unsubstantiated claims to show the great success of the Islamic Movement
in the field of education, publishing and public affairs. The facts give the lie
to this assertion and principal leaders of the Islamic Movement, including its
“moderate” arms, would be the first to admit that they have failed. I will
expatiate on this point but first I ask the reader to recall, incidentally, that
the thesis Yola is critical of was written in support of Dr. Uthman Bugaje, a
well-known activist. It was not primarily an attack on the Islamic Movement.
Be
that as it may the Islamic Movement, as a political movement, is to be judged
primarily on the basis of its success in formulating an ideology, articulating a
programme and implementing, (successfully), strategies that promote the interest
of the Muslim Ummah. By Ummah,
I do not mean Muslim Emirs and Chiefs, or Qadis and Imams, or petit-bourgeois
academics and middle-class elite, even though each of these rightfully belongs
to the Ummah. I mean rather the bulk of the Ummah,
those poor people called masses whose illiteracy, ill health, penury,
degradation and despair cry out for a liberator. What strategies have been
adopted to protect their interests? What publications have addressed their
plight? Where is their voice in public discourse? What education has been given
them that can help them change their
pathetic circumstances?
The
“moderate” wing of the Islamic
movement speaks like an elite, in the interest of the elite. It is interested in
having a “Muslim Brother” as an
Adviser, or a Minister, or a Vice-Chancellor and regards these as the signposts
of its success. Progress becomes a chance to share, to be part of the
system rather than to change it.
The
radical wings are more “revolutionary”. Their members are generally
uneducated, poor people who find outlets for expressing their anger in
confrontation with real and imagined opponents of Islam. A large number of them
have the death-wish, the love for martyrdom which may be equally a reflection of
complete faith in God or total despair in this world, leading to the search for
a quick way out. Yet the courage and revolutionary character notwithstanding,
these groups are hampered by limitations which are a necessary feature to their
composition, primarily a pedestrian
intellect and a simplistic, metaphysical approach to political reality. They
want an Islamic State (which they define largely the way Yola did in his paper)
but do not go beyond forms and externalities
to substances and realities. Somehow, if
they continued demonstrating and rioting, they believe the government of
Nigeria, the state machinery, will collapse. Somehow, they feel they can forget
the existence of tens of millions of non-Muslims and presume that these human
beings will willingly submit themselves to an Islamic government or a
dictatorship of Mullahs rather than the secular military dictatorship to which
they currently object. So we have groups who try to replicate the Iranian
Revolution in Nigeria without reference to differences not just in historical
experience but in the objective realities of the two nations such as demography,
cultural/religious homogeneity/diversity, distribution of economic and military
power etc.
The
net result of their activity is that a whole generation of Muslim Youth has been
rendered completely purposeless while Islamic struggle, being exclusive, has
raised fears and animosities on the part of non-Muslims who consider themselves
(their lives, properties and freedoms of worship) at risk. The poor are divided,
the weak kill each other, Muslims and Christians prepare the ground for
sectarian strife while the
oppression, corruption and injustices perpetrated by the status-quo continue. I
stand to be corrected on these points.
My thesis is that those
strategies are counter-productive and reactionary. My thesis is that there can
be no programme for change, for transformation of the life of the Muslim Ummah
(if we mean by Ummah the majority of the Ummah) unless
it is an integral part of a general programme of national transformation
which recognizes that the Muslims are a sub-set of the Nigerian Political
Economy who share the same traumas and deprivations as other sub-sets and that
progress lies in addressing this reality rather than chasing shadows.
Any
one who seeks to find a flaw in this thesis will need to go beyond Yola. Yola
merely presented a “model” of an Islamic polity, an ideal much the same as
Plato did in the
Laws or the Republic; much the same as the Utopia of Karl Marx. To quote
verses of the Qur’an and show that an Islamic ideal exists is to state an
obvious fact and participate in an exercise that is at best, glorified and
enlightened plagiarism. What we want to know is how the Qur’an can be applied
to Nigeria in 1998 and how we can liberate the Muslim masses and change their
objective, concrete and material conditions. This is where dialectics comes in.
Yola’s thesis was an exercise in metaphysics, a description of opposites
without searching for interconnections.
It
is ironical that Yola concludes his paper with a reference to Hegelian
dialectics. But is dialectics not what my thesis was all about? When I quoted
Russell on the necessity for a marriage between ideals and reality was I not
asking for a dialectical approach? Engels wrote, in explaining this approach in Ludwig
Feurbach: “the world is not to
be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of
processes.” Lenin wrote that
dialectics was concerned with “the concrete analysis of concrete
conditions”. Even Hegel sees dialectics as “the study of the connections of
opposites” leading to examination of things “ in their own being and
movement”. If Yola understands the meaning of dialectics he certainly does not
apply the dialectical method in his discourse. Practically everything I have
said here quoting Russell, Engels, Hegel and Lenin, I had said in “The
Muslim Activist” quoting purely Islamic sources.
Islamic
thought and civilization and the laws of motion governing Islamic Society, can
not be entirely separated from human thought and civilization and the laws of
motion governing human society in general. As Marx said in the 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “men make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
from the past.”
Those
who believe they can have a Political Economy for the Nigerian Muslim separate
from a general political economy of Nigeria are dreamers. This is why Yola is
unable to offer anything concrete. His conclusion says it all and I quote:
“Sanusi Sanusi’s antipathy over the seeming failure of the movement to
produce a political game plan could be rationalized within the context of
Hegelian philosophy on dialectics (sic). For whilst their complexities and
unlimited range might very well appear antithetical, I am confident their common
baseline (sic) not minding the discordant false starts, would one day facilitate
the arrival of that eventful day of reckoning. Soon enough, hopefully.”
The
stupefying banality of this conclusion should be obvious. The Movement has
failed to produce a “game-plan”. Its “false starts” are
“discordant”. However, the answer is not critical re-examination of these
“discordant” “false-starts”. Rather, it is a fatalistic anticipation of
that “eventual day of
reckoning” which will come out of
these, “soon enough, hopefully”. This
is the net result of the Metaphysical mode of thought which, as Engels wrote in
Anti-Duhring, consists in “
the habit of considering objects and processes in isolation, detached from the
whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion but in
their repose; not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants….”
Fundamentalists, far from representing a correct Islamic perspective, are guilty
of engaging in a quasi-science called metaphysical discourse. The seemingly
unassailable nature of their position lies in the fact that there is literally
no intellectual effort on their part, just quotes from the Qur’an arranged to
form a sterile utopia depriving the
Word of God of historical content and
its revolutionary social and
political character. Scholarship lies in defining the ideal, understanding
reality, and exerting the intellectual effort to study the dialectical
interconnections- between both. It is this that marks the difference between a
fundamentalist and a revolutionary.
Today,
political scientists would consider it amusing that the debate between
Metaphysics and Dialectics is still raging. Both natural science and philosophy
have moved on and the “study of things in their interconnection"
is the rule of the game even in bourgeois political and economic thought.
However, there are still those who operate from a metaphysical framework and the
majority of these tend to be religious fundamentalists.
I
say “religious fundamentalists”, not “Islamic fundamentalists”, because
fundamentalism and metaphysics are not peculiar to Islam. Just as Islamic
fundamentalists see society as either Islamic or Jahili, we have Christian fundamentalists who probably take their
inspiration from the words of Christ (Matt 5:37) “ Let
your communication be Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay, for whatever is more than these
cometh of evil.” Thus Muslim and Christian fundamentalists talk and act in
terms of political formulas, and have a set of ready-made labels to stick to
everything so as to judge it in accordance with its label, regardless of actual
changing circumstances.
The
fundamentalist Christian group, the Lord’s
Resistance Army (LRA) has for years been waging a civil war in Uganda aimed
at establishing a “Godly” government run on the basis of the Ten
Commandments. Unfortunately, since in war you have to kill, the LRA has
obviously had to suspend the commandment “thou shalt not kill”. Because in
war you need sustenance, the LRA when it raids a poor village will have to
suspend the commandment “thou
shalt not steal”. Since the Army is made up of young, virile men holed up for
months in the forests of Northern Uganda, it is also reasonable to presume that
when a village is raided and prisoners captured, especially young women, at
least some LRA members will temporarily suspend the commandment “thou
shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”. Thus we have these professed
Christians struggling to establish a Christian state through very unChristian
methods. Such is the fate of any revolution that does not have a popular
base, no matter what its ideals are. Such is the fate of those who think of
their ideals in isolation, without connecting them to objective reality.
The
dialectical approach, as Engels wrote in Dialectics of Nature is the “science of interconnections, in
contrast to metaphysics”. It is the basis for what Muslim Jurists refer to as Ijtihad or independent reasoning which only arises because of the
recognition that society is in constant motion and political issues in a state
of flux. What was good politics two centuries ago for Uthman b. Fodio in Hausaland may be bad politics in today’s
Nigeria. What is good for the Iranian Muslim as a political strategy does
not necessarily apply to the Nigerian Muslim. This is the essence of dialectics,
a term fundamentalists should learn to understand and apply rather than casually
use without comprehension.
Ijtihad,
of course, is not unassailable knowledge. That is the preserve of the Qur’an
and Sunnah. But it is also not to be easily dismissed as error. It is in that
realm which theorists of knowledge (epistemologists) call “probable
opinion”. It may be established or disproved. There will be flaws in it. But
those who wish to find flaws have to rise to its level of intellectual rigour
and beyond. It is for this reason that I have ignored references to my person by
Yola, a man whom I have never met, such as the claim that I have only recently
started participating in “ebullient public discourse in contrast to (my) past
attitude of idly watching events …” It is an old trick. If you can not
demolish a man’s argument or match his intellect, attack his character.
Meletus charged Socrates with corrupting the youth of Athens and believing in false Divinities.
Aristophanes presents Socrates in
his play, Clouds, as an expert
in sophistry and as a believer in physical (pre-Socratic) philosophy.
If it was a bait, I am not
biting. Those who cherish their work know better than to advertise it. Those who
respect their own intelligence know better than to allow themselves to be
distracted from issues by swipes taken at their personalities. They insist that
those who wish to engage them in debate rise
to their level.
In
sum, my thesis (to borrow from Hegel)
is that the Muslim Ummah’s logical path to success lies in its integration as
a Vanguard of a national democratic
revolution, in co-operation with
other Nigerians, but without losing sight of the great Islamic values
which our decadent political system requires. This is what will lead to what I
called the “Islamisation of Politics”,
as opposed to the “Politicization of Islam”.
Yola
sought a negation of that thesis not
by postulating an anti-thesis but by
seeking imaginary flaws and engaging
in pseudo – academic metaphysical
discourse.
The only reason I wrote
this essay is because Yola speaks not for himself alone, but for a vocal
minority of self-styled puritans who
pretend that their lack of intellectual rigour and their political naivete are
really reflective of a complete and superior loyalty to the sacred
texts. In this, they imply that those who formulate pragmatic, progressive
ideologies that take full cognisance
of the objective reality we seek to
impact on have somehow compromised Islam
and its ideals.
Those who break away from
traditional thought forms must learn to expect a back-lash. They must also have
the courage of their own convictions
and relentlessly pursue their objectives. This essay serves as a negation
of the negation.
The thesis stands.
You can read more about my article from my web page at http://www.gamji.com/sanusi.htm
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