Missed Opportunity for a Reform?

"Europe represents an opportunity for Islam" - is what many once believed, Why, then, have Muslim intellectuals in Europe failed to generate any impulses toward a general reform of Islam during the last few decades? An analysis by François Zabbal

photo: private
François Zabbal

​​The great French orientalist Jacques Berque (d. 1994) often said that Europe would be the wellspring for the renewal of Islam. He never provided reasons for this claim, but no doubt believed that the storehouse of knowledge that had accumulated in European universities and libraries, allied with a climate of intellectual freedom, offered the best foundation for an ultimately salutary and strengthening critique of those traditions that were preventing Islam from making a self-assured entry into the twentieth century.

If he were still alive today, Berque would probably be surprised to see that the once heralded streams of thought that seemed to offer so much promise for the future failed to develop, despite this favorable environment.

Instead, the basis for today's European Islam has been formed by Muslims who grew up in Europe and tend toward activism. They are the ones who respond to the questions of their fellow believers, Muslims who are faced with the search for their own, stable place in an overwhelmingly Christian society.

The end of a tradition

The reformers that Berque had hoped for are missing from this process: high-caliber minds who would approach the task of reform within the framework of a fruitful exchange with occidental thinking.

It is actually quite surprising that the last fifty years have yielded such disappointing results – despite occasional episodes of genuine reformist spirit. In earlier generations, by contrast, social visionaries appeared on the scene whose thinking had matured in contact with the culture of the Occident. One can justifiably claim that a true dynasty of European-influenced Muslim scholars were once involved in questioning religious traditions and exploring new ways of thinking.

It began with Sheik Tahtawi, who was dispatched to France by the governor of Egypt in 1836, and extends all the way to Sanhuri, who studied in France and in 1949 created the synthesis of European and Islamic law on which Egypt's present-day civil law is based. A further exponent worth mentioning is Taha Hussein, who in the 1920s dared to challenge the sacred status of Arab culture.

Their followers have simply lacked the same kind of courage, and, even more important, have been bereft of a decisive cultural and moral imperative. After all, religious reform cannot take place outside a specific social and cultural context; and the climate Muslim intellectuals have encountered in Europe since the 1960s has not exactly been conducive to this sort of undertaking.

Individual freedom and Muslim life in Europe

The main reasons for this lie on the one hand in the nature of religious questioning, and on the other hand in implicit or explicit interpellations by the society in the host countries.

Since the 1980s, the need to reshape religious life within Muslim immigrant communities in Europe has become increasingly urgent and tangible. The conditions for doing so appear favorable in several respects: for one thing, there is no consolidated traditional leadership by Imams, and for another, the process of individualization should theoretically by now have given each person a greater degree of freedom to decide how he would like to define himself as Muslim within the new, European context and how he wishes to live by his faith.

But instead, the opposite has occurred. Islam is fundamentally an orthopraxis – i.e., a religion calling for correct practice in all areas of life; and since this is the main interest of the less educated classes making up the majority of the migrants, discussions have focused on questions of the conformity of religious practices with the sanctified texts and tradition.

This focus has had the effect of primarily mobilizing activists of various stripes, along with the fundamentalist front that is now so strongly in evidence.

The illusion of the thinkers

At the same time, the "great thinkers" – and they do still exist, both in Europe and in the Islamic world – have failed to provide a viable alternative. While they have argued at length for a reform of Islam, they have simply ignored the everyday concerns of the immigrants; their primary aim has been first to establish and consolidate their own position vis-à-vis European culture.

This is due to the fact that many of the academics and intellectuals who emigrated to Europe came from the Near East and Middle East. They were thus molded initially in the most diverse ways by the debates raging in their respective home countries: on the failure of the nationalist idea, the situation of the Palestinians, or military rule. After spending some time in exile, however, they tend to converge on a more uniform view of the Arab world: seen from afar, at least, they seem much less torn and fragmented than they actually are.

In their host countries they in turn feel obligated to stand up for the world they have left behind, which - in a sublimation process that has become almost classic for the exile situation – they end up idealizing as a place where life and the practice of their faith is still largely intact. Thus, the avowed Arab nationalist from Damascus and the Kabyl intellectual find themselves united in the end in their homage for their Arab-Islamic heritage, which must be protected at all costs from foreign, adverse influences.

Intellectuals as advocates of Islam

The result has been the emergence of a militant attitude shared by Muslims born in Europe and those who emigrated here which turns the defense of Islam into a political mission. Under the pretence of fighting against racism, well-known intellectuals – who formerly had tended to distance themselves from questions of religion and faith – proclaim themselves as advocates of Islam.

This tendency can be traced, for example in France, in a whole range of new books brought out by thoroughly respectable (and agnostic) publishing houses which try to "explain" Islam either to "my daughter" or to humanity in general.

With ostensibly educational motives and the semblance of objectivity, Islam is therein boiled down to its most orthodox and unprogressive form, while some of its most important characteristics, namely the diverse streams of Islamic thought and the many different groupings within the religion, are not even hinted at.

Orientalism – a lost treasure

Paradoxically, this development is taking place in the great bastions of classic orientalism - France, England and Germany. This field of study has admittedly been the target of harsh criticism from Arab and Muslim intellectuals, leading to strange stirrings indicating a guilty conscience on the part of the Europeans.

Nevertheless, the loss of this once flourishing branch of European scholarship, from which America ultimately benefited as well, led to any and all academic analysis of Islam being limited solely to the terrain of the political sciences. Since the 1980s, research projects having to do with the Islamic world or Islam in Europe have primarily ended up in the hands of political scientists, who are then called upon to explain these things to us, to make recommendations and venture prognoses - during "prime time" on television, for example.

With the decline of other branches of Islamic scholarship - theology, jurisprudence, philosophy – a whole treasure trove of knowledge on the development and hypotheses of Islamic thought is disappearing, and with it the intellectual reservoir for a fruitful confrontation with Muslim thinkers.

The grand masters of Orientalism

This development has made an impact on the whole sociocultural environment – in particular in France, where the intellectuals still lay claim to their fair share of publicity. In today's debate on Islam, the voices of the grand masters of Orientalism, such as Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, are painfully absent; and it seems that the question of how to deal with Islam in general has undergone a profound transformation.

Up to 9/11 the leading newspapers and organs of the intelligentsia had gratefully delegated the problem of radical Islamism to the ranks of sociologists and political scientists, who were expected to offer explanations and if possible some sort of reassuring gesture. Only after the terrorist attacks of 2001 did the fact that Islam had now definitively gained a foothold in Europe call the great intellects into the arena – although the treatment of the theme was often reduced to what one might call technical aspects.

The so desperately needed dialogue with Muslim intellectuals, who for their part are caught up between defending an idealized Islam and acknowledging the aggressive pragmatism of the young Muslim militants - this dialogue has not yet begun.

François Zabbal

François Zabbal, writer and philosopher, used to teach at the University of Beirut, but was forced into exile in 1984. Since 1996 he has been editor-in-chief of the culture magazine "Qantara," published by the Paris Institut du Monde Arabe.

Translated from French: Angela Schader

Translated from German: Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

© Qantara.de 2005

This article was previously published by the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

See also on Qantara.de:
Arab Intellectuals and Globalisation, by François Zabbal