Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

It is less the ongoing intellectual debates among orientalists and "experts" concerning the nature of Islam and more the very open and contentious contemporary debates among Muslims concerning their own tradition that raises the question as to what constitutes, if not the essential core of Islam as a civilization, certainly its authoritative interpretation and its authentic representation today. What constitutes authentic Islamic norms, values and practices? Who has the authority to define and represent the Islamic tradition? Are Islamic norms, values, and practices compatible with modern democratic political structures and with an open pluralist civil society? Obviously, given my lack of expertise I am not in a position nor is this the proper place to attempt to address these questions systematically. In any case it is up to Muslim practitioners to answer these questions in their own multivocal ways.

But essentialist interpretations of Islam tend to preclude the possibility that contemporary Muslims may find their own models of Muslim aggiornamentos (they are likely to be plural), which like the Catholic one would offer viable responses attuned both to their religious tradition and to modern requirements. These essentialist interpretations in principle deprive contemporary Muslims of any agency or history, since they force Muslims to repeat the past compulsively in order to remain faithful to their identity. The comparison with Catholicism may be instructive because, like Islam today, it was viewed for a long time as the paradigmatic antimodern fundamentalist religion. (4) Catholicism served as the central focus of the Enlightenment critique of religion. It offered for centuries the most spirited, principled, and seemingly futile resistance to modern processes of secularization and modernization. It resisted capitalism, liberalism, the modern secular state, the democratic revolutions, socialism, and continues to resist the sexual revolution and feminism. Even after its official accommodation with secular modernity and after relinquishing its identity as a monopolistic state church, the Catholic Church refuses to become just a private religion, just an individual private belief. It wants to be both modern and public. Indeed, since Vatican II, it has kept a highly public profile throughout the world.

Even a superficial acquaintance with the complex history of premodern Muslim societies across three continents and over a millennium makes abundantly clear that the patterns of relations and differentiation between religious and political institutions and structures are as diverse as anything one finds in Latin Christendom or indeed in any other world religion (Lambton, 1981; Lapidus, 1975). As Talal Asad (1997: 191) has pointed out, it is "the idea that Islam was originally--and therefore essentially--a theocratic state" that has led to the "irresponsible" notion that Islamist modern politics are the natural "outgrowth of tendencies essential to an original politico-religious Islam" to which Islamic revival movements are condemned to return. Asad traces the genealogy of such an idea to nineteenth-century European historiography that, when analyzing the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, used anachronistically the modern categories of "religion" and "state." Paradoxically, modern Islamists have adopted from Western orientalists the vision of a "symbiosis" (Dabashi, 1987) of religion and politics in the prophetic charismatic age and so their calls for religious revival are often accompanied today by calls for the establishment of an Islamic state. Consequently, both Islamists and orientalists also share the view that later Muslim history with its differentiation of religious and political institutions signals a falling away from the original sacrosanct model. According to Asad (1997:190-1), "for the former (Islamists) this history constituted the betrayal of a sacred ideal that Muslims are required as believers to restore; for the latter (orientalists) it defines a schizophrenic compromise that has always prevented a progressive reform of Islam."