Arab Spring:  Developing Unity through a Common Language of Normative and Compassionate Justice

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Abstract

  The universal principles of normative jurisprudence, known in Islam as the maqasid al shari’ah, may provide a common language for the moderate middle in the spectrum of forces that produced the Arab Spring and will determine its future.  The two major questions are: 1) is there a common essence of justice that all can understand, and 2) can they agree on how to turn principle into practice?

Part I:  The Challenge of Disunity

A.  Paradigm Spring

During the last half century as a professional long-range global forecaster for government and industry, one of my earliest conclusions as was that policy follows agendas and agendas follow paradigms. 

Leverage over policy does not come from arguing over surges in military commitment to victory whether in Vietnam or Afghanistan.  It comes from addressing prior agendas, such as how to unite the Vietnamese nationalists in both North and South against all foreign threats to national unity.  Leverage over policy might come today by considering how to help the Taliban marginalize or eliminate the remnants of Al Qa’ida’s leaders, which the Taliban nativists generally have considered a foreign threat, even though they once were exploited as a tactical ally.

Even agendas, however, come from prior paradigms, such as the role of military power in America’s global leadership as a moral model for the future.  The classic example was Henry Kissinger’s rationale in his August 12, 2002, op ed article in the Washington Post urging an immediate invasion of Iraq.  He said such an invasion was not needed to eliminate nuclear weapons, nor to secure control of global oil supplies, nor even to bring freedom and democracy to the poor Iraqi people.  The urgent need in a world collapsing into chaos, he argued, was to develop a new international law to legitimize unilateral preemption by the only power capable of restoring order, namely, the United States of America.  The arguments over bombs, oil, and people were tactical feints to hide the real paradigmatic rationale for what turned out to be in some ways an unmitigated disaster that boomeranged against the paradigmatic justification for the war.

    Paradigms are premises of thought that frame one’s outlook on life and one’s interpretation or even one’s recognition of facts.  A paradigm may narrow one’s vision and blind one to changes that have accumulated over time.  Or paradigms may widen one’s global vision so that one can identify facts relevant to a possibly transforming world and thereby more effectively set an agenda for intelligence gathering and policy planning.

Today we are witnessing a paradigmatic revolution in the Arab world and potentially in Persia, China, Russia, and even in America.  The revolution is the simple awareness that change is possible and that it does not have to be led by outside forces, especially from America and the former colonial powers.

    According to chaos theory and Thomas Kuhn’s half-century old theory of paradigm shifts, which apply in all fields of physical science, all truly major change occurs only after the old theory is bankrupt in explaining facts to the point that suddenly new states of nature and of understanding replace the old.

    The most unchanging fact about any kind of forecasting or planning is that most people are unaware that they have unspoken premises, which is why the parties to a disputed issue speak past each other and never come to grips with their real differences.  Perhaps more often than not, this failure to communicate is based on a deliberate decision to keep their unspoken premises secret for political or other purposes.  Sometimes there is nothing more sensitive than the public revelation of one’s own ultimate reasons for advocating anything.

    One result of such covert paradigm management is to brand anyone who advocates anything out of higher principle as “a loose cannon on a rolling deck”.  Such people cannot be bribed, which makes them inherently dangerous for people who consider principles of any kind as a dangerous form of baggage.  Even the very concept of a paradigm seems threatening.

    My study of civilizational collapse and renewal began as an eleven-year-old in 1940, when I wrote the first 125 pages of an intended 1,000 page novel, entitled From Savagery to Civilization.  My father’s losing efforts to help Jews escape from Germany to America came at a time when civilization was reverting to savagery and the future looked dim.  Unfortunately, against my wishes, the characters in my novel gradually reverted to savagery, and that ended the book.

As the Director of the Qatar Foundation’s new Center for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, my antennas are up to discern whether we are entering a Paradigm Spring, where institutional constraints on the free market of thought are replaced by new perspectives in an era of global vision.  We may even be entering the age of an epistemological revolution, a revolution not merely in what one knows but of knowledge itself. 

This meta-paradigmatic perspective is brilliantly explained by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Chapter 12, “Islamic Education, Philosophy, and Science: A Survey in Light of Present-Day Challenges”, in his new book, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition, which I incorporated verbatim in my two-volume, 800-page textbook, Islam and Muslims, prepared over the past three years with Dr. Muhammad Ali Chaudry, the President of the Center for Understanding Islam.

    Part of such a new ideative revolution is the increasingly sophisticated use of mimetic warfare, which is the use of memes (words and symbols) to subliminally control human thought.  The followers of old paradigms in foreign policy castigate those who disagree with them as conspiracy mongers.  In turn, increasingly these so-called conspiracy mongers cast their critics as the true conspirators.  They both use a boomerang strategy that can reflect back on oneself by using memetic warfare to degrade the very concepts of truth and justice.  Whoever can manipulate an opponent’s mind by either subliminal or merely psychological warfare has won half the battle.
   
    Recent trends point to the bankruptcy of old paradigms and of their accompanying euphemisms, such as “the clash of civilizations”, since the clashes are primarily among paradigms within civilizations not among them.  Another well-known bankruptcy is the NeoCon oxymoron known as “democratic capitalism”.  This concentrates capital ownership rather than broadening access to such ownership and thereby produces an escalating wealth gap that inevitably concentrates political power and in the future can be a major cause of terrorism.

    New memes or symbols in the growing free market of thought accompany the designation of new paradigms, such as “promiscuous interventionism”, once known as unilateralism.  Sometimes a really new paradigm arises based on an ancient paradigm common within all the major world religions, such as “peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice”. 

    The results of the Arab Spring and the task of both forecasting and planning the future could result in a new academic discipline entitled Paradigm Management, because facts have meaning only in the context of the paradigms used to understand them.  The Washington Post during just a few days in late June, 2011, revealed several examples of paradigm shifts, for either better or worse, as discussed in my article at the time, “Paradigm Spring and the Clash of Civilizational Paradigms”, in my de facto blog, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org. 

    Perhaps the most significant and no doubt the least noticed was the expansion of the term “Islamist” to include all radical and violent movements led by self-declared Muslims.  Previously, the accepted meaning of the term “Islamist” was the specific organization known for half a century as the Ikhwan al Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood, which originally followed a pacifist strategy of education under Hasan al Banna but metasticized to violent extremism under Syed Qutb. During the past twenty years, however, the Qutbian radicals have left to form new radical groups and movements, like the Jamaat al Islamiyah and its offspring in Al Qa’ida.  To lump such groups into a new generic term, “Islamist”, makes it difficult to comprehend the reality of the Arab Spring and leads inevitably to the condemnation of Islam as a religion and as an emerging force.

    Even Fareed Zakaria, who is one of the best informed pundits in the world on Muslim affairs, in his Washington Post article of June 23, 2011, entitled “Pakistan’s Military Crisis”, falls into this error.  Even though there still are some “radical activists” among the Islamists throughout the world in opposition to the leadership of so-called “pacifists” like Shaykh Rachid al Ghannouchi in Tunisia, it is misleading for Zakaria to state that “Radical Islamist ideas - with America as the Great Satan - are now reflexive for many in Pakistan’s military”.  Zakaria may be right that radicals, who almost by definition are not Islamists, appear to be growing rapidly in Pakistan, especially among the military in response to what George F. Will in his article on June 23rd, 2011, termed America’s promiscuous interventionism.  He was referring to McCain’s doctrine that the United States must intervene wherever America’s values are affronted.  This required the non-sequitur or logical disconnect in McCain’s mind that, “If Qaddafi survives, he will try to harm America”.  This catastrophist, hyper-security paradigm requires the accompanying paradigm of promiscuous interventionism.  According to George Will, this means quite simply that, “We must continue fighting because we started fighting”, and therefore never stop, even if continuation of the intervention carries blowback worse than the danger we originally foresaw.

    An excellent example of such memetic disinformation, whether deliberate or merely misguided, and of its impact on global affairs is the demonization of the Talibanic religious nationalists in Central Asia as a threat to America’s vital interests.  Misreading of what motivates most of the Taliban, and in fact of what motivates most of the world, has led to the deteriorating prestige of America as a model society, as shown by Griff Witte in his Washington Post article of June 23, entitled “Pakistan Courts China as U.S. Ties Sour”.  In the section entitled “Geostrategic Importance” he cites the Pew Research Center survey, according to which, “Pakistanis love China just about as much as they dislike the United states: 87% of Pakistanis say they have a favorable view of China, compared with 12% who say the same thing about the United States”. 

    Fortunately, even the inveterate supporter of the 1960s paradigm, “Peace through power”, Henry Kissinger, has joined the paradigmatic revolution.  In his article on June 8th, 2011, entitled “How to exit Afghanistan”, he gave credence to the relatively recent paradigm of “Smart Power” by concluding: “After America’s withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and the constraint to our strategic reach produced by the revolution in Egypt, a new definition of American leadership and America’s national interest is inescapable”. 

    The process of paradigm genesis and transformation, so remarkably shown in June, 2011, requires its institutionalization in think-tanks, which shape the agendas that control policy.  This institutional shift is introduced by a remarkable full-page article, in the Sunday Washington Post of June 19th, 2011, entitled “Continental Drift”, by Richard N. Haass, who has been President of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) for almost a decade, prior to which from 2001 to 2003 he was director of Policy and Planning in the U.S. Department of State.  He has long been influential in the efforts of the “Eastern Establishment” to reign in the suicidal ideology known as Neo-Conservatism.

    Dick Haass advises against trying to mend broken and outdated alliances, with specific reference to NATO.  He notes that, “Intimate ties across the Atlantic were forged at a time when American political and economic power was largely in the hands of Northeastern elites”.  This was an era when America could justify its overweaning influence in Europe, to the extent even of trying to control DeGaulle, by pointing to the “evil other” as a mortal threat to everyone.  America in recent decades has changed as the West and the South have gained power in Washington and New York.

    Most importantly, Haass writes, “The very nature of international relations has also undergone a transformation.  Alliances, whether NATO during the Cold War or the U.S.-South Korean partnership now, do best in settings that are highly inflexible and predictable, where foes and friends are easily identified, potential battlegrounds are obvious, and contingencies can be anticipated”.  He concludes, “Almost none of this is true in our current historical moment.  Threats are many and diffuse.  Relationships seem situational, increasingly dependent on evolving and unpredictable circumstances.  Countries can be friends, foes, or both, depending on the day of the week - just look at the United States and Pakistan.  Alliances tend to require shared assessments and explicit obligations; they are much more difficult to operate when worldviews [known as paradigms] diverge and commitments are discretionary.  But as the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya all demonstrate, this is precisely the world we inhabit”. 

    Haass is saying that countries will follow their own interests, based on their own history and values, and that we are past the era when a superpower can force other countries to submit to its own perceived interests.  This means that the era of unilateralism pioneered by the “realist” Henry Kissinger and by the ideologues of NeoCon infamy is over.

At stake is the future of civilization, which, in turn, depends on the governing paradigms both within and among nations.  The future of the Arab Spring is much in doubt, but the abandonment of old assumptions and old paradigms of thought is essential to promote the birth of new hope in what we might call a twentieth-first-century “Paradigm Spring”.

B.  The Mimetic Spectrum

The first approach taken by many scholars in assessing the meaning of the Arab Spring was to divide the parties up into a spectrum to determine who would win out in a clash of existing or would-be power holders.

Anthropologists developed new ideas of human behavior or applied old ones, such as the concept of the “sound scape” in Cairo during the revolution, when half a dozen different movements claimed a single martyr as their own symbol.

  The standard spectrum ranges from the “right-wing” Salafis, who want to impose their version of Islam on the world through a global “Islamic caliphate”, to the so-called secularists, who want to exclude all religion from public life.  These secularists sometimes are divided into post-modernists and liberals, many of whom are just as committed to a transcendent power as are the Salafis, with the difference being that the liberals do not conceive of Allah as a harsh judge sitting on a golden throne.

In the middle of the spectrum is the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al Muslimun, who, in turn, must be divided into a spectrum ranging from those who want so-called Islamic law to control the lives of everyone, even non-Muslims, to those who regard the shari’ah as a set of universal norms found in every religion and therefore beneficial as a commonly agreed set of guidelines for a freely elected parliament in a balance of powers.

  Somewhere we have the Sufis, who are found throughout the full spectrum of participants in the Arab Spring, but also include those who simply refuse to participate because Allah is the best planner.

In a three dimensional projection, we also have the mimetic warfare of words that mean one thing to one person and the opposite to others, so that never the twain shall meet in a common language to unify the latent powers in the paradigmatic maelstrom.

Four of the terms that cause the most confusion among both Muslims and non-Muslims alike in evaluating the Arab Spring and any other “springs” throughout the world are asabiya, khilafah, dawla, and democratia.

1.  Asabiya

The most powerful force in the various springs that emerged in the Year 2011 all over the world is the demand for dignity and respect.  At its root the search is for what the Roman Pontiff and Western Patriarch John Paul II called “personalism,” which involves both respect for the individual person as the purpose of human governance and reliance on the individual to perfect the group.

Equally important is respect for the group or community all the way from the nuclear family to the nation.  We may define the nation as a group with a common heritage, common concerns in the present, and common hopes for the future, usually with a common language and sometimes with a common majority religion. 

This is what Ibn Khaldun called the good asabiya or community loyalty.  The opposite is the bad asabiya, which is defined as tribalism, especially religious tribalism, which is often overlooked in assessing the dynamics of the Arab Spring in individual countries.  Tribalism consists of pride in oneself and one’s own tribe at the expense of other tribes and even in denial of all human rights except one’s own.  The good asabiya consists of pride in the best of one’s own tribe with openness to share whatever wisdom one has with other tribes in order to cooperate for the common good. 

The good asabiya goes beyond mere tolerance, which means essentially, “I won’t kill you yet”, to diversity, which means, “You are here and I can’t do much about it”.  Finally, it extends to pluralism, which means, “We welcome you, because we each have so much to offer each other”.

    God created humans with diversity of language, cultures, communities, and even religions so that we as persons and as members of unique communities can get to know each other and thereby cooperate for everyone’s mutual benefit.  Critics of “nationalism” contend that the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.  This is correct, but equally valid is the principle that solidarity in recognizing and respecting universal human responsibilities and human rights makes construction of a polity without nations Islamically unthinkable. 

    The Qur’anic principle of tawhid provides for diversity in the created order so that the coherence of diversity will point to the Oneness of the Creator. The attempt to standardize humans and humanity therefore is the worst of all polytheisms. 

    Every person, in fact, may have several mutually reinforcing identities.  I am a Muslim, an American, a Cherokee Native American, and a resident of Doha, Qatar, situated between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as a life-long mountaineer and world-class distance runner (or at least used to be) in the international world of sports.  None of these are contradictory.  Each reinforces the value of the others.  Each makes it possible for me to fulfill my purpose in life, in the knowledge that one’s true identity is the person God created one to be. As the Christian monk, Thomas Merton, put it, “So, become what you already are”.

2.  Khilafah

Another term that requires understanding if it is to provide productive guidance for communication is the “Islamic Caliphate”.  Ideally this is based on the principle of khilafah, whereby every person, including both the rulers and the ruled, are responsible first of all to God as stewards of Creation.  This means that the institution of the caliphate is not military or political in nature but instead consists of the ijma or universal consensus of the wise persons and scholars on the nature and application of justice, which one might call the academic discipline of ‘Ilm al ‘Adl.  This is based on the Qur’anic verse, wa tama’at kalimatu rabika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is completed and perfected in truth and justice”.

The most articulate and assiduous of the scholars on the meaning of the Islamic caliphate was Ibn Taymiya, who lived at the time of the Mongol invasion.  Some Muslims, notably the Hanbalis, claim to honor Ibn Taymiya as their mentor, but they distort his most essential teachings.  For example, many Muslims condemn Sufism as inherently un-Islamic, but they seem to be unaware that Ibn Taymiya was a Sufi who condemned the Sufi extremism that was spreading as a populist movement in his day.  He also was an ardent supporter of the khilafah but not as an institution of military or even political governance.

Salafi extremists, among whom Osama bin Laden was the most famous, claim that Ibn Taymiya supports their call for a one-world government under a single Caliph.  In fact, Ibn Taymiya developed a sophisticated understanding about the Islamic doctrine of the khilafah that demolishes the extremists of his day and of ours.  Ibn Taymiya was a political theorist who was imprisoned by the reigning Caliph and died in prison ten years later for opposing the extremism both of tyrants and of their opponents.  He was in fact a model of those who both understand the sources of extremism and the means to counter it.  His mission was to deconstruct extremist teachings doctrinally in order to marginalize their adherents.

One of his modern students, Naveed Shaykh, in his The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States, London: Routledge Curzon, 2002, writes rather poetically that extremism comes when pan-Islamists “operationalize a unity of belief in a human community of monist monolithism rather than in a boundless love for all of God’s creation in a transcendent Islamic cosmopolis.”  Extremism comes when people substitute a political institution for themselves as the highest instrument and agent of God in the world, when they call for a return of the Caliphate in its imperial form embodied in any number of sultanates, kings, and empires throughout the history of Islamdom.

Extremism comes when extremists call for what Shah Wali Allah of India in the 18th century called the khilafat zahira or external and exoteric caliphate in place of the khilafat batina or esoteric caliphate formed by the spiritual heirs of the prophets, who are the sages, saints, and righteous scholars.

In the late Abbasid period of classical Islam, according to Naveed Sheikh, “The political scientists of the day delegitimized both institutional exclusivism and, critically, centralization of political power by disallowing the theophanic descent of celestial sovereignty into any human institution.”  In other words, they denied the ultimate sovereignty claimed by modern states since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which elevated states to the ultimate level of sovereignty, in place of the divine, thereby relegating religion to the periphery of public life or excluding it and with it morality altogether.

The late Abbasid scholars, faced with a gradual process of creeping despotism, denied the divine right not only of kings but of every human institution, and they condemned the worship of power and privilege that had brought corruption upon the earth.  For insisting on this foundation principle of Islam, the greatest scholars throughout Muslim history were imprisoned, some for years and decades.  This was detailed in Chapter 59 of Khalid Abou el-Fadl, “The Scholar’s Road,” in his book, Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 2001.  This is precisely why Muslims traditionally have considered such martyrs in speaking truth to power great.

Ibn Taymiya completed the process of deconstructing the ontological fatalism of caliphatic thought by restricting the role of the caliphate to what perhaps the greatest Islamic thinker of all time, Abu Hamid al Ghazali, had called an ummatic umbrella functioning only to protect the functional integrity of Islamic thought rather than to govern politically.  Ibn Taymiya asserted that the unity of the Muslim community depended not on any symbolism represented by the Caliph, much less on any caliphal political authority, but on “confessional solidarity of each autonomous entity within an Islamic whole.”  In other words, the Muslim umma or global community is a body of purpose based on worship of God.  By contending that the monopoly of coercion that resides in political governance is not philosophically constituted, Ibn Taymiya rendered political unification and the caliphate redundant.

The principal proponents of the esoteric caliphate, the khilafat batina, and the principal opponents of a political caliphate, with occasional possible exceptions, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, have been the Shi’a scholars, because they were the most oppressed of the oppressed under the most un-Islamic of the Muslim emperors.  This may explain why they have always emphasized that purpose takes priority over practice, meaning that the legitimacy of practice must be determined by higher purpose.

3. Dawla and Democratia

Muslims often refer to “the Islamic state” as a goal of the Arab Spring.  Such a concept is un-Islamic because an Islamic state is an oxymoron.  Others refer to the state in the Western sense as dawla.  Better might be the te