Contemporary Muslims need to understand the material causes of their material decline, recognize the sacred essentials of the

Islamic faith, and acknowledge Islams historic diversity and pluralism. Islamist demands for an Islamic State, accompanied by calls to arms and terror, are likely to only push Muslims further down the road of weakness and humiliation.

HUSAIN HAQQANI ON THE ISLAMIC STATE AND THE STATE OF ISLAM

FOR FOURTEEN CENTURIES Islam has been the faith of hundreds of millions. Its followers have included emperors and mystics, traders and farmers, soldiers and philosophers. Like all religions, Islam aspires to provide ethical and spiritual guidance to its followers. This guidance applies to all spheres of life, but cannot be described as a political or economic ideology in the contemporary sense. Throughout history, Muslims have had the sense of belonging to a community of believers, but they have hardly ever been organized into a single state. Beginning with the 20th century, however, several interlinked movements seeking an Islamic revival have claimed that Islam lays the foundations for a specific political system, and that the principal objective of Islam is the creation of an Islamic State. The desire to revive something that historically did not exist has led to a partial erosion of Islams ethical and spiritual heritage, and its replacement with totalitarian and semi-totalitarian versions of a political ideology that seeks legitimacy in Islams name. The Islamic political theory known today as Political Islam has developed largely in response to the breakdown of traditional order under the pressures of modernity. Several political models prevailed in the pre-modern Muslim world. Prophet Muhammads immediate successor (the first of the Rightly Guided Caliphs) was elected when the notables of the time gathered in a mosque. The first caliph designated his own successor, while the third was chosen by an appointed committee and then endorsed by the community. The Shia split
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with the majority Sunnis over the concept of the caliphate, and asserted that religious authority rested with those known as imams, all directly descended from the Prophets daughter and son-in-law. Temporal power in Shiamajority Iran was exercised by kings (shahs), and the Fatimid offshoot of the Shia in Egypt preferred to call themselves caliphs, like their Sunni Umayyad and Abbasid predecessors. The larger Muslim states were ruled by sultans, hereditary autocrats who derived their legitimacy from the implementation of sharia laws. Early Muslims did not accept the divine right of kings and considered the sharia as a means of tempering their rulers authority. The Ottoman Empire in Europe and the Middle East, and the Moghul Empire in India, accommodated large non-Muslim populations within the sultanates. Sultans aided by the Ulema (religious scholars) also ruled parts of contemporary Malaysia and Indonesia. Smaller principalities, such as Yemen and the present-day Gulf States, were run by imams, emirs, or sheikhs, all of whom paid tribute to the major sultan in the region, especially the caliph in Constantinople after the 15th century. Having lived on its own terms, and with few setbacks (such as the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258), the Muslim worlds ascendancy turned into a gradual decline that coincided with the rise of Europe. The Muslim world faced modern transformation over a relatively short time and mainly under pressure from the European powers. Unlike Europe and North America, Muslim territories did not get the opportunity to evolve into modern states over time. The British and the French in the Arabic-speaking lands, the Russians in Central Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in India and Malaya penetrated and occupied Muslim lands. Once their authority was firmly established, the Europeans governed with an iron fist, with the help of elites trained by the colonial masters. The earliest Western idea borrowed by Muslim modernizers, especially in the 19th century, was enlightened absolutism. Administrative and military reform within the decaying Ottoman Empire, for example, depended largely on the model of the enlightened despot. Numerous partial modernizers emerged in other parts of the Islamic world: primarily rulers who wanted to introduce selected Western social and economic ideas and technology without altering the basis of political power. Some Sultans even followed Europes enlightened despots in introducing constitutions and assemblies of nobles, but these efforts did not go far enough for some and went too far for others within powerful elite groups.

Muslims responded to the challenge of the technologically and militarily superior West in one of two ways. One segment of the population accepted Western education and adopted the Western way of life, excluding religion from their discourse almost entirely. Others started defining politics in religious idiom, insisting that Islam offered a complete way of life distinct from that offered by the colonial powers and their modern ideas. The beginning of the modern era thus marked the beginning of ideological conflicts within the Muslim world about politics and governance. Until then, traditional Islamic scholarship had focused on the divine message through critical evaluation of the Quran and extrapolation from the hadith, as well as through philosophy, reasoningand some jurisprudence. With notable exceptions, Muslims paid little attention to political and economic theory. This absence of a consistent Islamic political theory has led scholars such as Bernard Lewis to argue that in Islam, In principle, at least, there is no state, but only a ruler; no court, but only a judge. The alternative explanation is that Muslim politics is plural and changing, which renders redundant any monolithic interpretations of fourteen centuries of history by historians or by religious ideologues. Muslims have a tremendous sense of history and of civilizational rise and fall. Having lost the status of world leaders to the West beginning in the 16th century, Muslims have developed a collective feeling of weakness and helplessness. Starting in the 19th century, Muslim scholars have spent a lot of time explaining the Muslim decline and proposing remedies for it. Of all the remedies proposed, the one with the most disastrous consequences has been the notion of Islam as political theory, resulting in what Tarek Fatah describes as the illusion of an Islamic State. The advocates of an Islamic State back their ideology with conspiracy theories about threats to Islam that have been popular among Muslims since the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. Non-Muslim conspiracies are used to explain the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the worlds economic, scientific, political, and military leader. The over- arching Islamic State that would unite all Muslims and topple the ascendant powers from their perch is offered as the remedy to the Muslims current weak situation. One can find evidence of fear of schemes by freemasons and Zionists being voiced since the late 18th century. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw wider discussion of how Muslims and Islam were being contrived against.
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The erosion of the leadership position of Muslims coincided with the Wests gradual technological ascendancy. Soon after the Ottomans took over Constantinople, Johannes Gutenberg printed a Bible using metal plates. Printing was introduced into the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Sultan Bayazid II (14811512), only to be virtually banned for use by Muslims in 1485. In Europe, a full-grown book industry evolved, facilitating wide dissemination of ideas and knowledge. By 1501, more than a thousand printing presses had produced approximately 35,000 titles with ten million copies. But in the Ottoman Empire, only Christians and Jews used printing technology. Muslim use of the printing press did not start until 1727, causing the Muslims to lose more than 270 years in the worlds greatest explosion of knowledge. The Persian, Moghul, and Ottoman empires controlled vast lands and resources, but many important scientific discoveries and inventions that had occurred since the 15th century came about in Europe and not in the Muslim lands. Ignorance is an attitude, and the worlds Muslims have to analyze, debate, and face it before they can deal with it. The predisposition to rumour and conspiracy theoriesand the presumption that an Islamic State is all that is needed to revive the Ummahs fortunesprevents that frank discussion. The fifty-seven member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) account for one-fifth of the worlds population, but their combined GDP is less than the GDP of France. The twenty-two Arab countries, including the oil-exporting Gulf States, account for a combined GDP less than that of Spain alone. Almost half of the worlds Muslim population is illiterate. Muslims are noticeably absent from the list of recent inventors and innovators in science and technology. The OIC countries have around five hundred universities; by comparison, there are more than five thousand universities in the United States and more than eight thousand in India. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an Academic Ranking of World Universities, and none of the universities from Muslim-majority states made it into the Top 500. There is only one university for every three million Muslims, and the Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The
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United States has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million. The Muslim world spends 0.2 percent of its GDP on research and development, while the Western nations spend around 5 percent of GDP on producing knowledge. Tarek Fatah rightly explains [Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State] that the decline of the worlds Muslims does not come from the absence of a puritanical Islamic state. It is the result of the state in which the Muslims currently find themselves. He also calls for making a distinction between pietistic Muslims and those pursuing power in Islams name. Some of his views, especially in relation to US policies and the war against terrorism, are bound to generate controversy, and not everyone agreeing with his diagnosis will necessarily agree with his prescription. But Fatah joins the expanding list of Muslim authors who are challenging Islamism and demanding that Muslims revert to seeing Islam as an essentially spiritual and ethical belief system instead of stretching history to present Islam as a political ideology. Contemporary Muslims need to understand the material causes of their material decline, recognize the sacred essentials of the Islamic faith, and acknowledge Islams historic diversity and pluralism. Islamist demands for an Islamic State, accompanied by calls to arms and terror, are likely to only push Muslims further down the road of weakness and humiliation. Husain Haqqani is director of Boston Universitys Center for International Relations, and co-chair of the Islam and Democracy Project at Hudson Institute, Washington, DC. [Afterword to Tarek Fatahs award-winning book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State (2008) republished in Pakistan by Vanguard as Pakistan: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State]