War and Religious Interpretation

Published: 20/4/2003

For the last several weeks, a number of Indonesian televisions have been working in partnership with Al-Jazeera television to present the progress of US and its ally’s invasion of Iraq. The theme Alharb Alal Iraq (Iraq under attack), became the most important information source on the war, and also became the most favourite program of the moment. Following on the Gulf War I in 1991, the public could observe again, through the medium of television, the horror experienced in Baghdad and other Iraq cities.

For the Arabic and Muslim world in particular, the invasion of Iraq is naturally a subject of great concern. In fact, the solidarity of the Muslim religious community has been disturbed. This does not mean to reduce the importance of Muslim solidarity with the Iraqi people’s misery but to raise the question as to what is the relation between this invasion and the religious interpretation of the invasion?

For the Arab nations, the horrors of the first Gulf War is still a recent memory. For example, Fatimah Mernissi, a feminist from Morocco, recorded her own memory of it as a trauma in her book Islam and Democracy: Fear of Modern World. There she illustrates how the war provided additional evidence for those who do not believe in the fairness of the modern world dominated by one powerful state despite modernity’s attractive cultural values. In fact, she writes that the first Gulf War reversed our perception of the uncertainty in the enchanting values of Western democracy as a lie. At the very least it provided strong evidence against the certainty of democratic values. The suspicions of the Arab and Muslim world have been confirmed.

This fear of the modern world is both appreciated and criticized by Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, the “doomed” thinker from Egypt who sees this fear as a circle, dawaairul khauf. Both Mernissi and Abu Zaid raise limited questions about the influence of the war upon religious interpretation. For example, in Al-Khitab wa Atta’wil, Abu Zaid has described the war, the defeat and the triumph from a religious point of view. In his view, the destructive effect of war has greatly influenced religious thought. Besides spreading trauma, it has also affirmed multiple dimensions of crisis for the defeated. Herein, for Zaid, the crisis of existence for Arab nations is most clearly symbolized in the Israeli defeat of the Arabs in the 1967.

In this very great condition of crisis, a return to religion (alluju’ iladdin) with particular forms of interpretation has served as a psychological fortress. The problematic effect is that even the defeat has been interpreted through a religious justification. Ironically, according to Abu Zaid’s interpretation, the Jewish triumph occurred due to their insistence of performing the injunctions of the Old Testament. While on the contrary, the Muslim community has abandoned their religious values and become trapped in the blind pursuit (Taqlid a’ma) of Western secularism which has influenced their political system and thought. Abu Zaid terms this a metaphysical interpretation of crisis and defeat (at-tafsir al-ghaibiy lil haziimah).

Several Arab thinkers have been talking about a dark and backward history evidenced in the repeated outbreak of wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1980-1990, 1991, 2003) in the region. Jabir Al-Ushfur, an Egyptian intellectual, has described this as an anxiety about moving backwards in history (Al-Ahram, 31/3/03). The Iraqi people are the first victims of this backward moving history, though not only Iraq, for Jabir warns that the whole Muslim world is becoming trapped in a backward moving circle. Rather, future oriented thinking (al-tafkiir al-mustaqbaliy), and avoiding being trapped in a crisis mode, are absolutely necessary. For Jabir, the evidence clearly shows that any progress achieved in the Arab world is repeatedly afflicted by crisis. History is going in reverse in all aspects of life including in the domain of religious thought.

In the Indonesian context, many relevant issues apply. Currently, our energy has been sapped by the horror of the US invasion of Iraq. In the religious field, an increase in radicalism seems to have become justified. Concerning the war, there has been almost no discourse of tolerance or for the urgency of upholding a religious vision which prioritizes moderation.

Using Arkoun’s terminology, the resistance logic (al-aqlun nidlaaliy) arising from this circumstance will dominate religious discourse and escalate. Yet, according to Arkoun, one of the failures of the Islamic reformation is caused by the domination of the idea of an outward notion of resistance rather than a complementary notion of an inward resistance. This outward view has according to Abu Zaid taken over since the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948 and become the dominant factor in the religious interpretation of conflict.

Those sorts of reflections seem to have some significance for our contemporary context. Of course, the purpose is not to reduce humanitarian solidarity with the suffering of the Iraqi people. Nevertheless, it is necessary, at least for me, to anticipate the mistake of becoming entrapped in the idea of history as a backward moving cycle born in the psychological crisis caused by defeat.

Novriantoni Kahar, alumnus of Al-Azhar Universitas Egypt, activist of Liberal Islam network.