Part 9: Some More Recent Islamic Political (and other) Thought

Muhammad Arkoun is one Islamic writer today who suggests a pragmatic, empirical attitude to Islamic government which nevertheless does not go as far as Turkey on the road to secularisation. Others also develop the idea that Islam is at least potentially structurally similar to any other religion in its relation to secular life.

It may be asked: does Islam per se encourage innovation or is it atavistic and inherently conservative and inimical to democracy and peace, for example? The first answer to that question is that as Islam is an historical thing that can’t be said to have an unchanging essence there is no per se to talk about. In history, it has certainly appeared to encourage various innovations at various times and in various areas from its very formulation by Muhammad under alleged divine guidance (even innovations that the West may not be comfortable with such as the innovations that allowed Shi’a Ayatollahs to rule Iran). But in other times and areas and places it has certainly given every appearance of discouraging any innovations at all. If the ‘Taliban philosophy’ is Islamic as it would presumably claim to be, it provides one clear example of one extreme end of this range of Islams only. Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal and other modern Islamic thinkers (including, in fact, the Ayatollah Khomeini) prove that Islam inspires innovative thinking whether that thinking leads to a secular or clerical form of the illusive thing that is Islam as practiced by Muslims. Jihad often seems to be misunderstood by ‘jihadists’ and the West alike to mean only violent struggle whereas in reality the jihad most recommended by Muhammad was the struggle for justice for which a mere attitude of atavism is clearly not sufficient. Ultimately Islam’s commitment to revelation undoes the attempts of liberal Muslims to make Islam truly innovative, however, just as liberal Christians and Jews face ‘innovation/revelation crises’ of their own.