‘Fault Lines in the Faith’ by Iqbal S Hasnain maps nationalism’s drift towards Islamism

M Rajivlochan

Iqbal S Hasnain’s work is an important addition to the large number of books that have come out in recent times on the rise of Islamism and the strategies that can be used to wean Islamic society away from its violent ways.

Hasnain, in a straight-forward language, explains that Islamism emerged in the late 20th century and thrived in the 21st. He says that when nationalism ceased to be a powerful enough force in countries with a Muslim majority, they began to drift towards Islamism. The success of the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979 provided the first step in the capture of the modern state by Islamists. With the tools of the modern state in their hands, they became so much more capable of spreading havoc. Hasnain says that the al-Qaeda and Taliban, with the active connivance of rogue states like Pakistan, managed to create a large army of Islamic terrorists.

By the beginning of the 21st century, more than 30,000 Islamic fighters were roaming around the world and self-radicalised youth from Europe had begun to voluntarily join their ranks. The growth of Wahhabi Salafism provided the ideological backbone for global Islamic terror.

This terror was further fanned, Hasnain argues, by the geopolitical compulsions that pitched Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria against each other and everyone else. Jihadi mobilisation through the Internet only sharpened the abilities of Islamists to reach ever further.

Hasnain says that the slide of the Muslim world towards Islamism was almost inevitable once Muslims began to search for meanings of nationalism in Islam. Many years ago, sociologist Louis Dumont too had argued in a similar vein in his articles in the journal ‘Contributions to Indian Sociology’, when he was trying to understand what held Indian society together and where lay its fault lines. Hasnain takes Dumont’s argument further to explain how modern means of communication nurture and provide added strength to Islamism.

He concludes his book by arguing for the revival of Sufism, which, he claims, was marginalised by the rise of Salafism in the 18th century. “Sufism is the branch of Islam,” he says, “which accommodates local practices and makes it culturally relevant to the believers, without compromising on its core.”

Please take note that Sufis themselves were some of the worst Islamists in their early days. But they abandoned those vicious ways and became the softer, more accommodating, cultural stream, which is familiar to us in the 21st century. In ‘Lost Islamic History’, historian Firas Alkhateeb argued that this change happened because of the influence of Hindus on Muslims.

As everyone knows, all religions of present times have been vicious and violent at some time in the past. Yet, most of them managed to marginalise their streak of violence and nurtured the more caring and sensible strands. One can only hope that more and more people from the Islamic world join the discussion about all that is wrong with contemporary Islam and why its followers end up picking lessons of only violence and destruction from the large corpus of ideas that Islam represents. After all, as Maxime Rodinson, one of the earliest biographers of Prophet Muhammad, pointed out, the origins of Islam and its early popularity lay in its reformative lessons rather than in violence.

Islam spurred a golden age in West Asia that lasted almost four centuries. Societies in West Asia prospered. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious society of West Asia of those times created many of the systems on which modern scientific enquiry are based. Then Islamists took over. They insisted that the only truths worthy of being known were those in the Koran and in the life of the Prophet and that anyone who disagreed was liable to be killed. The downslide of knowledge and society that followed is ongoing. It is heartening that more and more people are making an effort to stop it, turn the tide of history and make Islam a great religion once again.