The Imperial Reification of the Qur‘an

Abstract

The Qur‘an, the holy text of Islam, is not simply a text liable to interpretation. It is a social relation mediated by a number of agencies that reify its messages in a number of ways. Over the millennia, the West managed to assert its intellectual hegemony over the forms and the types of the reification of the Qur‘an. The West is today the key mediating agency that has transformed the message of the Qur‘an, removing its original cultural tenets from their context and alienating Muslim societies from social and political practices that could lead to an understanding between Christianity, Islam and left-wing forces in Eurasia and the globe.

Notes

Nicos Poulantzas, L'Etat, le Pouvoir, le Socialisme (Paris: PUF, 1978), p.24.

This definition derives partly from Georgy Lukacs' early work, History and Class Consciousness, originally published in 1922; reference is to the English translation by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp.83–222. The reader should also, however, consult the first part of the first volume of Das Kapital, where Marx examines the same issue in a rather post-Hegelian manner, rather than the young Lukac's Hegelianism.

Althusser, drawing from the work of Gaston Bachelar, uses the term in a rather formalistic manner, by defining it as ‘a context with problems, absent as well as present, that can be reached via a symptomatic reading’: see Louis Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp.252–3.

The Qur‘an is divided into 114 sections, or suras, and each sura consists of a number of verses, the so-called aya. I will not enter here into other problems, such as that of the distinction between Meccan and Medinan suras. In the Medinan suras the messages are constructed after the migration to Medina, by which time the Muslims were no longer a persecuted minority but an established religious community with the Prophet as its leader. I have used here a combination of translations of the Qur‘an that can be found on the internet, as well as the English translations by Muhammad Asad in 1980 (an Austrian who converted to Islam) and M.A.S. Abdel Haleem's translation: The Qur‘an (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p.263.

Citations below will be in the form ‘2, 191’.

Abdel Haleem, Understanding the Qur‘an: Themes and Style (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001).

Contemporary scholars who still follow Rodinson's work make the same mistake: see, for example, Mustafa Akyol, ‘Is Capitalism Compatible with Islam?’, Turkish Daily News, 19 Feb. 2007.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000), p.394.

Ibid., see also, among others, Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (London: Vintage, 2003); Fernard Braudel, A History of Civilizations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp.48–9 and passim.

Abdel Haleem, ‘Introduction’, in The Qur‘an, pp.xxv–xxvi. Another interpretation without context regarding women is given to the phrase in sura 2, aya 228, which says that ‘husbands have a degree [of right] over them [their wives]’. Again, the context here is the question of divorce between husbands and wives, and therefore the reference is to spouses and not to men and women in general. True, the Qur‘an in this respect overlooks the equal status wives (and women) must have in society and in law, but which legal family scheme in the West inserted formal equality in its provisions before the Second World War?

See, in particular, Giovanni XXIII, Mater et magistra (The Vatican, 15 May 1961); Giovanni Paolo II, Centessimo anno; La dottrina sociale della chiesa oggi (The Vatican, 1 May 1991). On the politics of the Italian Communist Party regarding the Catholics, see Documentazione (Document of the School of the Italian Communist Party), Comunisti e cattolici, stato e chiesa, 1920–1974 (Rome: PCI, 1974). For an analysis of Italian politics and the Left, see Donad Sassoon, Togliatti e la via italiana al socialismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1980); Vassilis K. Fouskas, Italy, Europe, the Left: The Transformation of Italian Communism and the European Imperative (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

For the case of Iraq, in particular, see the incomparable work of Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Arguably, modern Western theories, such as the sociologies of Karl Marx and Max Weber, cannot be wholly absolved of responsibility for that. Unaware of the processes of modernization and economic development that took place well before European industrialism, they had considered Islam and other Eastern religions as anti-modern and against capitalist development. This misunderstanding has been powerfully addressed in more recent literature: see, for instance, the seminal work by Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

Apart from the work of Gunder Frank and others, see Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary by Lionel Casson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). I am grateful to Maritsa Poros of the City University of New York for drawing my attention to this source.

Edward W. Said, Uncovering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage, 1981), p.56.

Said, Orientalism, p.xxvii–xxviii. Ijtihad refers to the Shi‘a practice of making a legal decision through the independent interpretation of legal sources, thereby allowing evolution in legal thinking; it fell out of use by the tenth century of the Common Era.

On the distinction and differences between imperialism – as exemplified by France and Britain – and neo-imperialism – as constructed by the USA after the Second World War – see Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay, The New American Imperialism: Bush's War on Terror and Blood for Oil (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).

Notably in his The Clash of Civilizations.

Jean Baudrillard has argued that simulated realities – such as those created by imperial reification, I would add – have no referent, no ground, no source. They operate outside the logic of representation, and the method the masses have found in order to subvert them is apathy. I do not subscribe to Baudrillard's assertion of ‘mass apathy’, but I do recognize the force of his argument about the difficulty for the people to locate reified messages (signs) stemming from imperial centres; this obviously makes the deciphering and decodifying of the messages of the mass media even more difficult: see Jean Baudrillard, ‘What are You Doing After the Orgy?’, Artforum (Oct. 1983), pp.42–6.

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Vassilis K. Fouskas

Vassilis K. Fouskas, formerly a Reader and a Senior Lecturer in international relations at the Universities of Kingston and Stirling respectively, is now Professor-elect of international relations and US foreign policy at the University of Piraeus and Director of Research at the Centre for International and European Studies, Greece. He is also the founding editor of the refereed periodical Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans (quarterly as of January 2009 and renamed Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies). He is currently working on Vulnerable Empire: Understanding America's Wars in the 21st Century.