The secularism debate

I was quite looking forward to a recent public event about secularism in the Islamic world. No, not the "Secular Islam" conference, where American conservatives and a few like-minded Muslims gathered to declare their own importance (a post on their blog right now compares the participants to Martin Luther).  I learned about it when some journalists called me up to ask me about it, and it seems to have been quite the collection.  I'm sure that many of them are nice people, but they are pretty irrelevant to the actual Middle East (featuring the founder of "Arabs for Israel" was a nice touch, as was having the "secular Islam" summit be chaired by a self-declared "ex-Muslim").  It's good that in an odd fit of common sense, the US government doesn't seem to have wasted its time with them or wanted to be associated in any way with it.

The debate that interested me was on al-Jazeera, a place where really important debates about these issues actually happen quite frequently and people in the actual Arab world actually watch them.  In this week's show Faisal al-Qassem, host of what is still probably the Arab world's most popular and widely viewed political talk show The Opposite Direction, posed the question of the future of secularism in the Islamic world.    Rather than draw on the "Secular Islam" crowd, he chose the iconoclastic and well-known author Sayid al-Qemni (*) and pitted him against the Egyptian philosopher (and newly appointed coordinator of the Kefaya movement) Abd al-Wahab al-Messiri.  Messiri was an odd choice to represent the anti-secularization side, despite having written an interesting book on the subject from an Islamist perspective - he's very thoughtful, calm, and open to cross-ideological cooperation.   Usually Qassem prefers pyrotechnics.    This isn't his first go at the topic by any means, either.  In fact, Qassem's al-Jazeera show hosted what is probably the single most important debate about secularism and Islam in memory. No, no, not that Wafa Sultan show a couple of years back - that made more of an impact in the West, thanks to MEMRI, than it did in the Arab world.  I'm talking about the debate between Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al-Azm back in 1997 - a showdown that people are still talking about today.  He's also had Qemni on the show before too (you can see a clip here if you like).

Qemni on an old episode of The Opposite Direction

Qemni was an interesting choice.   He's a well-known, provocative figure (who even has a blog or two).  He's a real dissident, deeply engaged in the polemics and public debates in today's Arab world.  Like many, many Egyptian writers his books have been banned by al-Azhar and he's been the subject of vicious campaigns by the pro-government tabloid Roz al-Youssef.   I've never met him, won't pretend to have read all of his many books, and obviously don't agree with many of his positions and arguments. But I respect him as an engaged and passionate public intellectual and have always found him fascinating (even though I know plenty of people in the region - and not Islamists - who consider him an annoying publicity hound).  The cover of his 1998 book "The Other Question" might give a sense of his approach:

   

Yes, that's a long-bearded Islamist with a gun, a sack of money, and blood-drenched backdrop.   Among his many books are 2004's "Thank You Bin Laden", which argued that bin Laden's barbarism had finally forced Muslims to confront the realities of the Islamic movement, and begin to reform after a long stagnation and confront Islamist backwardness - with or without American support.  This, as you might imagine, sparked some controversy.  But he doesn't quite fit the American Enterprise Institute's vision of what a secular Islamist should look like.  Consider 2005's "The people of religion... and democracy," with this striking cover:

Ahl al-Din wa al-Dimoqratiya called on Muslims to reject everyone who tried to monopolize either religion or worldly power, and to embrace pluralism and dissent in all things.  He also criticized the use of Islam to confront Israel, not because Zionism shouldn't be confronted but because Islamic discourse was a bad way to do it.   In other words, a scathing critic of Islamists of all stripes, but not a big fan of American foreign policy either.  I've always thought of him as the closest thing to an inheritor of the mantle of Farag Fuda, the Egyptian secularist who mercilessly lampooned Islamists... until he was murdered by one in 1992.  In July 2005, Qemni stopped writing after receiving serious death threats from the Egyptian radical Islamist group Islamic Jihad, and publicly recanted his views ("I denounce everything I have written hitherto, which at the time I never thought of as infidelity").  This sparked a major debate, leading some to mourn that "we are all Sayid al-Qemni", some to denounce it as a publicity stunt, and others (many of whom lived in America, not Egypt, and weren't facing the murder of themselves and their families) to lambaste him for cowardice.   I hadn't heard much from or about him lately, so I was looking forward to his re-emergence on al-Jazeera.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't seem to have lived up to its billing. I missed the original airing (but I'm hoping to catch a repeat), and the transcript isn't available online yet.  But Asad AbuKhalil writes that Qemni actually fell asleep on the air, snoring loudly, which is either a brilliant tactic to throw one's sparring partner off balance or something else. [see below] But it's nevertheless pointing out once again the role which al-Jazeera actually plays in pushing debates over these kinds of issues - with lots of people actually watching.  People interested in the secularism debates in the Middle East would do far better to pay attention to this sort of thing than to the conference in Florida.

UPDATE:  here's the transcript.
AND: Asad AbuKhalil issues a correction, which I will reproduce in full:

I have posted an item about Sayyid Qimni's appearance on Aljazeera's Ittijah Mu`akis. I had written that Qimni dozed off and snored loudly. The program's host, Faysal Al-Qasim, corrected me. He said: "In actual fact Kimani was not snoring. He had a bad case of nasal congestion which made him breath heavily."

My apologies to Sayid al-Qemni for repeating Asad's description without having yet seen the show to judge for myself;  my thanks to Faisal for making the correction and Asad for posting it graciously. 

While I'm back on this post, let me add one other point:  had Faisal al-Qassem in fact picked Wafa Sultan or Irhad Manji or any of the "secular Islam" crowd as the champion of secularism, he would have been pilloried for having stacked the deck - identifying "secularism" with a whole package of other unpopular views, such as support for the Bush administration and for Israel.  Reiterating what I wrote above, I think it's worthwhile recognizing when Faisal does not do this -  Qemni is a strong and forceful an advocate of secularism inside the Arab discourse as you're likely to find, giving that side at least a fighting chance.

 

(*) please don't harrass me about how I spell his name, okay?  I use Qemni because that's how I've heard his name pronounced and that's how al-Ahram spells it.  AbuKhalil uses Qimni. On his own blog, he uses the spelling Quemny.  On one website devoted to his works, it is spelled Kemni.   This is just the way things go with Arabic transliteration. 

Comments

[Nur al-Cubicle]

please don't harrass me about how I spell his name, okay?

Oh, geez, everyone remembers how Qaddafi's name was mangled. US press agencies used to love to use Qadaffy. Then there was Khadaffhi, Kadaffi, Qudaffy and about fifty other variants.

[issandr]

Thankfully, Qemni announced his retirement from retirement a month or two ago -- after two years of silence. So he's back on the media roadshow, which I suppose can only be A Good Thing.

The debate over whether Article 2 of the Egyptian constitution, which refers to Sharia law, should be changed has rekindled the debate about secularism. It's clear that the most vocal debate has called any attempt at removing Sharia, or minimizing its role, from the constitution, as a form of attack on Islam itself. I wrote myself a little about this MP who has launched a "Popular Movement Against Secularism." Unfortunately the intellectual and political climate in Egypt at least does not seem to be right for a debate about secularism, despite the fact that many Muslim legal thinkers say, sotto voce, that they don't see why Sharia should be in the constitution in a country whose political culture in the 20th century was largely based on Wafdist ideas of sectarian co-existence (of course that point is debatable).

More difficult to deal with are the Danish cartoon mentality and the globalization of hesba -- it seems to me that there is an emerging global Muslim referential that is essentially Salafist (I mean by this something midway between the original Egyptian Salafists and the current post-Qutb Salafism of Islamist groups). And that is a worrying development if this region is going to have a serious debate about the relationship between state and religion.

[The Lounsbury]

And "Qadaffy" is worthy of note why?

[Batir]

Abu Aardvark you know that I deeply respect you and in this case I think the conclusion that you may benefit from is never believing what Asad Abu Khalil has to say.