Jan-Peter Hartung - A System of Life: Mawdudi and the Ideologisation of Islam

A SYSTEM OF LIFE

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Jan-Peter Hartung, 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jan-Peter Hartung

Title: A System of Life: Mawdd and the Ideologisation of Islam

ISBN 9780199361779 (print)

ISBN 9780197524091 (epub)

ISBN 9780197524084 (epdf)

To the memory of Christoph Schumann (19692013)

In 1979 an apocalyptic mood spread throughout the Muslim World. After all, this year according to the Gregorian calendar coincided with the turn to the fifteenth Islamic century. As always at such times, pious Muslims were on the lookout for the signs of the hour when this world would come to an end. They were looking out for the return of the Messiah, who would, after prolonged battle, triumph over the Great Deceiver, the Antichrist, who had taken over to rule the world.

Although this apocalyptic mood rose and wore off almost cyclically, postponing the end of the world to the next turn of the century, this time it seems as if the expectations were extraordinarily high. After all, quite a number of Muslims felt that the world had indeed become ruled by the Great Deceiver, the signs of which were clearly outlined in a sound saying of the Prophet Muammad:

The Great Deceiver has a blank eye [mams al-ayn] and between his eyes it is written Unbeliever. Then he spelled it: k-f-r. Every Muslim will be able to read it.

Widespread unbelief, according to this ad th , was thus one of the main characteristics of the rule of the Great Deceiver, unbelief that would spread also among the Muslims. This has been made abundantly clear in the Qurn, in which such a Muslim would give nothing in charity, nor did he pray! But on the contrary, he rejected the truth and turned away! Then did he stalk to his family in full conceit! Indeed, various signs seemed to point to such a situation in 1979.

In the previous years the ruler of Iran, Muammad Ri Shh Pahlaw (d. 1980), had increasingly oriented his rule away from the Islamic religious tradition towards the Pre-Islamic Achaemenid Persian one. His so-called White Revolution (inqilb-i safd) aimed at the secularisation of law and economy, followed by a growing cultural Westernisation and the opening to Western political powers that went hand-in-hand with the brutal suppression of any opposition within Iran.

Meanwhile the Egyptian President Anwar al-Sdt, who began his reign as the Islamic consciousness in Nasserist Egypt, changed his foreign policy agenda owing to increasing economic and social problems inside the country. His self-portrayal as leading advocate of the Palestinians led, as it was seen by his opponents, to a betrayal of Muslim interests when al-Sdt began to hold peace negotiations with Israel in 1977 that culminated in the US-mediated Camp David Accords in 1978 and finally in the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 26 March 1979.

Even in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, based on a concordat between the ruling family Sad and the Wahhbiyya, an extremely rigid religious scholarly movement,

Finally, from the overthrow of the monarchy in Afghanistan in 1973 the political order became increasingly dominated by leftist forces, which were heavily supported by the Soviet Union.

There would be even more examples from around the Muslim world that suggested a gain of power by the Great Deceiver and pointed towards the final showdown. Various personalities appeared at this point in time, who either claimed to be, or were styled, the Saviour, the Expected One or the one who will defeat the Antichrist and pave the way to Judgement Day (yawm al-qiyma).

The victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, however, appeared to be the only success over the Great Deceiver at the turn of the fifteenth Islamic The ruling house had been striking back and, at least for the moment, regained its control over the kingdom.

On Christmas Eve 1979 the Red Army crossed the Oxus River into Afghanistan and ended what had begun as a series of coups dtat with the investiture of a pro-Soviet government in Kabul. The Egyptian state took control again and resumed its political course.

It looked as if the end of the world had again been postponed, although the spirit of the occurrences of 1979 did not simply evaporate. Rather they brought about new and more radicalised responses, which became increasingly intertwined and culminated in the most recent events around, and since, the attacks of 11 September 2001. All those responses built somewhat on a history of Muslim religious and political thought which increasingly gained momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century. They received an enormous stimulus by the ideas of a man whose fate is also tied to the year 1979. On 22 September Sayyid Ab l-Al Mawdd, aged seventy-six, died in a hospital in Rochester, New York, while undergoing medical treatment.

This Pakistani citizen must be considered the first systematic thinker of what became known as Islamism: an ideology rooted in a particular understanding of Islam. As such, some of his core concepts became most influential on the further development of Islamist thought, then mainly in the Arabophone world. That Mawdd passed away in the ominous year of 1979 appears almost symptomatic: the time of the theoreticians seemed once and for all over, now was the chance for increasingly armed action, be it against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, against those who were held responsible for selling Saudi Arabia to the infidels, against the autocratic regime of president usn Mubrak (b. 1928) and his National Democratic Party (izb al-waan al-dmuqr) in Egypt or against every otherWestern and non-Westernforce that obstructed the establishment of Islamic rule on earth.

However, for an understanding of the way todays Islamists think and argue it helps to gain a close understanding of the ideas of their immediate predecessors, over and above their most systematic mastermind Mawdd.

To understand the thinking of someone like Mawdd poses somewhat of a hermeneutical problem, often subsumed under the label insider-outsider and closely linked to the Orientalism debate that was triggered in 1978 by Edward Sads important book of the same name. Various ways out of this trap have been suggested and, at the same time, attempted to define the scope in which our statements about the culturally Other could claim validity. After all, it has to be analysed to what extent, if any, our categories are suitable for dealing with issues which are, at least at first sight, culturally clearly distinct. The problem, however, extends even further.