very interesting piece on the limits of “moderate” islam.
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Zaheer Kazmi: While Tibi and Ramadan continue to court Western liberal opinion, radical and creative thinking in Islamic thought that is concerned more discretely and earnestly with freethinking and toleration is to be found in places quite detached from the dominant narratives of liberal Islam. Some examples: the theosophic approach to Islam of French philosopher Abdennour Bidar, which draws on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Muhammad Iqbal; the counter-cultural anarchistic critiques of Peter Lamborn Wilson (pseud. Hakim Bey) and Michael Muhammad Knight, inspired by discourses of heresy and paganism (a syncretism not alien to Islamic history in India and Africa); the anti-statism of free-market libertarians, such as Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, who, in an ironic genealogical twist given their associations with American conservatism, draw on Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to call for a radical Islamic neoliberalism. All trace alternative genealogies of Islamic liberty that, in their own ways, question the premise that the future of Islam lies in its assimilation to the liberal state. One may not agree with any of their positions, but terrain such as this is where a truly radical Islamic hermeneutics takes place today. Unlike jihadists, who are often considered exegetical heretics, but who work to subvert a broadly recognizable and accepted Islamic canon, these are cultural interlopers deploying dissident traditions.
Liberal Islam, steeped in orthodoxy, rationalism, and arrogated notions of representation, has lost its vitality and ability to engage constructively with such radical departures. Its modalities are much the same as those of traditional forms of religious authority, engaged as they are in perpetuating threats of “deviance.” Like traditional scholarship, liberal Islam is still struggling to respond cogently to the increasingly voluntarist impulse in the Muslim world and the challenge laid down by the jihadi manipulation of it. The gatekeepers of knowledge have simply shifted from an ulema class to one of professional religious entrepreneurs, who then define the boundaries of Islam for public consumption. Their predilection for invoking classical jurisprudence and the “Golden Age” of Islamic history also suppresses, implicitly, voices of dissent. Under a veneer of intellectual freedom, substantive debate on contentious issues — such as blasphemy, apostasy, gender, sexuality, the penal code, and the right to criticize or exit — is often postponed or elided. Ramadan’s call for a moratorium on stoning is often invoked to signal his supposed duplicity in this regard, but it is more a reflection of the narrow parameters within which his reformist project is located. The intellectual space liberal Islam opens up is, in fact, quite slim: there are still only a small number of influential Muslim reformists, and they compete to say similar things, most often in the service of the state. More here.