On 6 December 2009, MPACUK published an article entitled "Muslim Brotherhood vs Saudi Salafis – The Political War for the Muslim Mind". Below is the letter to the Editor I sent in response to that article.
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful and the Source of All Mercy
Assalamu aleykum,
Dear Editor,
I am writing further to your article posted on 6 December 2009 titled “Muslim Brotherhood vs Saudi Salafis – The Political War for the Muslim Mind”.
In my opinion your article somewhat misrepresents the situation vis-a-vis the so-called “salafi” movement and the Middle Eastern governments, which are, as you correctly point out, dictatorial. You suggest that this movement is in fact favoured by such governments at the expense of movements such as Muslim Brotherhood due to alleged advocacy of political passivity. I would venture to say that your assertion is not entirely correct.
There two issues that need to be understood in this context.
First of all, most Middle Eastern governments in countries such as Morocco and Egypt, countries I have personal experience of, would ideally prefer to be rid of both types of movements – the conservative “salafi” movements and the “political Islam” movements, such as Muslim Brotherhood – since both movements seek to challenge the status quo on which the power of those governments rests. Both in Egypt and Morocco, members of both types of movements face arbitrary arrests, restriction on activities and other forms of political persecution. The recent moves against hijab in Egypt as well as closing of “salafi” Quranic schools in Morocco are among the examples of such persecution aimed at the “salafi” groups, while regular arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt and similar group in Morocco continue to illustrate those governments’ hostility towards “political” Islamic movements.
Secondly, to speak of the “salafi” movement as a single movement is factually incorrect. Various stripes of “salafis” exist today and these range from jihadis and takfiris to those who advocate abstinence from politics to advocates of Islamic State based on the 7th century model.
The main point of your article, I believe, addresses a far more important, difficult and deep rooted problem of the ummah – the question of political participation, or rather the clearly apparent lack thereof. The causes of this problem are manifold but I would like to mention just two aspects of it, for the sake of brevity.
First and foremost, the cause of an apolitical attitude among many Muslims lies in the fact that the scholars of today have not managed to work out a unified fiqh understanding of the place of modern politics in Islam. No unified modern political theory exists in Islamic law today – save for a couple of general works on the subject, there is no authoritative and agreed upon fiqhi position regarding political participation of Muslims in modern Muslim and non-Muslim societies. As an example of this, you will quite easily find scholars advocating political “abstinence” and active political participation in one Google search. This lack of an authoritative Islamic position leads many Muslims to simply forgo the question altogether. In the modern times there has been no successful attempt to build a political system entirely and exclusively based on Islamic principles and therefore there has been no impetus to develop the fiqh of political participation.
The second related aspect is that there appears to be a lot of contradictory statements coming out from scholarly circles. Respected scholars, often seen as representatives of the “Muslim establishment”, have made statements encouraging political participation while visiting non-Muslim countries with Muslim minorities, while at the same time their colleagues have come out strongly against political activism in their own countries. One of the examples of this would be Sheikh Sudais’ advocacy for political participation on his recent visit to London, while the Saudi religious establishment came out strongly against demonstrations in support of Palestine during the Gaza Massacre, declaring the whole concept of demonstration to be unIslamic. This, almost two-faced, nature of the debate, sows a lot of confusion in the minds of ordinary Muslims who tend to afford a lot of respect to the opinions of such scholars.
Islam cannot be divorced from its scholars and therefore until the above issues are sorted out, it is natural that active/not active dichotomy will remain.
Wasalam,
Yours faithfully,
Abdulhafid ar-Russi
www.abdulhafeed.com
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