Fred Halliday | ukwatch.net

Islam, Law and Finance: the Elusive Divine

Ellie Keen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:15:46 +0000

A controversy over the relationship of what is termed sharia or "Islamic law" to wider legal systems was ignited on 7 February 2008 from an unlikely source: an academic lecture by the spiritual head of England's established church. The Archbishop of Canterbury's address explored the landscape of "plural jurisdiction" in Britain and considered with sympathy "what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moralcodes".

The message conveyed from a text replete with caveats and circumlocutions was (in the words of Rowan Williams's preceding BBC radio interview) that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised" in society and law, and that their application is "unavoidable".

The media furore that has ensued is aspredictable as it is founded on widespread ignorance of the ostensible substance of the argument (see Tina Beattie, "Rowan Williams and sharia law", 12 February 2008). In this it is part of a wider pattern whereby news stories about aspects of "Islamic" activity and social practice – "Islamic law" or "Islamic banking" or "Islamic dress", for example – come to prominence and are circulated without a proper examination of the provenance and meaning of these terms.

In many European countries in particular (the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Germany, as well as Britain) "Islam"-related issues connected to the veil, medical hygiene, or religious imagery become the trigger for entrenching opinion, drawing battle-lines and fomenting indignation. If the pattern is to be broken and a more constructive form of public discourse conducted, it can only be done by informed reason, including historical and linguistic clarification.

The mirage of fixity

A vital step is to note what lies beneath the surface of controversy and what is seldom taken into account. In this case, to pose the question as being in favour of or opposed to something called "Islamic law" is to start from the wrong place. The assumption of both sides of the argument is that sharia – for it or against it – is a given text, a code available in set form to which jurists and believers may or may not relate.

This assumption of fixity is, on closer examination, on three accounts quite false. First, "Islamic" law – or more properly, legal practice in the fifty-seven Muslim countries – is, like any other system, plural and multivocal: the result of centuries of inherited practice and precedent, allowing of many different interpretations. There is no fixed legal code, and never has been.

Second, the interpretation of law, and the selection of which precedents or past cases to invoke – including which bits of a supposedly sacred text to use – are a function of contemporary power relations (whether of class, state or religious establishment).

Third, and most important of all, the very term so often fought over – sharia -is a misnomer; for it is not a legal or sacred code at all, but a political slogan and modern invention of 19th-century neo-Wahhabi reformers. In fact, sharia is no more specific than the terms "British way of life" or "the Italian way" or "American values". The scholarly authority Aziz al-Azmeh has noted that sharia is more akin to generic terms like nomos or dharma: it cannot serve as the basis for any decisions on legal codes or practices.

The paper trail

What do the texts say? The Qur'an, the only part of the Muslim tradition that is divinely sanctioned, contains around 6,000 verses, of which less than a hundred are concerned with matters of a legal nature; nearly all relate to personal and family matters. In no way can this legacy, supposedly immutable and definitive, form the basis for a modern legal code. The word sharia occurs only four times in the Qur'an; it denominates, in a general way, "the right path" (indeed each community, be it Muslim, Jewish or Christian is to have its own such "path").

A common confusion is made between sharia and fiqh (Islamic juridsprudence) – the corpus of law which has arisen over centuries and which forms the basis for law in many Muslim countries, andis obliged like any modern legal system to pronounce on all matters, from the personal to the commercial. This is not divinely sanctioned. Indeed the only parts of Islam that have such sanction are classified as deen (religion).

Fiqh, therefore, is a system of conventional law,without divine sanction, and allowing of many interpretations. Beyond the fact that the Sunni world has four main schools of fiqh – Maleki, Shafei, Hanbali, Hanafi – each reflecting developments in medieval Islamic society and politics, the Shi'a have their own, distinct, system. Where the confusion has arisen – and where both Islamic fundamentalists and well-meaning but ill-informed western observers like the Canterbury archbishop have contributed to the problem – is in pretending that there is one single legal text (sharia) and that this supposedly univocal code carries divine authority. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The interest at stake

A similar ideological slippage, and abandonment of a comparative common sense, arise in regard to the issue of Islamic "economic principles" and in particular of "Islamic banking". A dose of economic realism, and firsthand knowledge of the region, may also help to dispel some of the effusions thathave been circulated in recent years about a supposedly different basis for conducting economic life in the Muslim world (from the "Islamic economics" of the Iranian revolution, to the current vogue for "Islamic banking"). These fashions reveal – as much as do the straight exercise of political power or the subjugation of women – the way that supposedly religious or cultural values are used to rebrand or disguise what are on closer examination universal forms of resource- and power-manipulation.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 proclaimed a new set of "Islamic economic principles", based on some vague extrapolation of the principle of zakat (charity), one of the five duties of the Muslim. It succeeded, however, only in creating a perfectly recognisable ramshackle rentier economy, laced with corruption and inefficiency; in short, a conventional product of "development" in what was known as the "third world", and little different from its oil-producing counterparts Nigeria, Venezuela and Indonesia.

The resurgence of "Islamic banking" – a practice and idea that has spread from Malaysia to Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf – is now expected to account for assets reaching $1 trillion bythe year 2010. Such western institutions as HSBC, Dow Jones, Citibank, BNP Paris and others have all signed up to this parade of corporate piety. The financial press of the middle east is full of articles concerned about the shortage of "experts" and "appropriately qualified scholars" in Islamic finance. But all this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, good secular salt at that. Anyone who has studied the economic history of the Muslim world – from the trading activities of the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca and Medina in the 7th century to the banks and finance houses of the Arab Gulf today – will know that business is conducted as it is everywhere on sound capitalist principles.

There is no basis for the supposed textual or canonical theory of "Islamic banking". The late Maxime Rodinson – the greatest authority on this matter- showed in his great work Islam and Capitalism that there is, in fact, no Qur'anic or authoritative prohibition on the taking of interest; there is only (as in most religions) a condemnation of riba' (excess, or profiteering). Muslim writers have long differed on what riba' means; some confine it to profiteering in essentials like foodstuffs.

Nor, in the end, do the supposedly "Islamic" banks of today provide a fundamentally different service. They do two things: first, offer a degree of local affiliation or allegiance to investors (much as does in principle the Bradford & Bingley building society, or the Chase Manhattan bank); second, serve as a more friendly recipient for investors with cash (especially in the sense of asking fewer questions about the origin of the funds than do – in this era of client identification and post-9/11 controls – many other financial institutions in the west). Islamic banking is capitalist banking with a different cover: a way in the end to ensure that more money -whether it comes from the exports of the oil producers, drugs production in Afghanistan, or the hard-earned toil of minimum-wage service-workers in Europe's cities – is put into circulation. It is, as the British ambassador to one Gulf state put it to me, "a means of getting the money out from underneath the bed".Its relation to tradition, sanctity, the Qur'an and all that is purely presentational.

Moreover, the supposedly compulsory ban on profiteering does not apply when interests of state are involved: if Islamic authority and what is often misleadingly called "sharia" prohibit excess profits, then where are the voices of criticism when it comes to exorbitant and (in terms of production costs) wholly unjustified increases in the price of oil? If ever there was a case of riba', one to which all Islamic oil producers subscribe, it is the rent that Opec (and its free-riders like Russia) extract from the sale of oil. Here, as in so many other matters, it is religious text and tradition that serve capital (when not greed) and not the other way around.

The fist of "tradition"

Much of the controversy about Islamic law, as in the current British uproar over the remarks of the Archbishop of Canterbury, leads those proposing a compromise with sharia to allow "some" elements of it,but to condemn its "inhuman" or "barbarous" (to cite two familiar adjectives of choice) side such as stoning, or denial of the legal equality of women. But this is not the fundamental issue, which is respect for tradition itself (and, a closely related factor, the official obsequiousness towards bearded patriarchs of all religions who today claim to own and be able to interpret it).

The supposed authority of Islamic text and tradition is the greatest of all fallacies underlying this moving theatre of Islamic banking and finance, as of the misconceived debate on sharia. Similar sleights of authoritarian hand occur in Judaism and Christianity, in regard to such issues as the status of women, the rights of gays, and the celibacy of the clergy. A lot of forgetting is necessary to uphold reverence for such traditions, which are based often on medieval practice (e.g. the principle of a celibate clergy must suppress the fact that St Peter and many of his successors were married).

In any event, the reverence for tradition is only the other side of power-interests seeking expression and consolidation. The word "tradition" should alert a person to the very modern forces it connotes, and often conceals.

The London Bombs and Spain

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:04:53 +0000

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 stirred painful memories and bitter political disputes in Spain. The similarities with the explosions in Madrid of 11 March 2004 which killed 193 people are too evident: target (urban public transport), timing (the rush hour) and victim (innocent people from a range of countries). The affinities between 7-J (as the event is known in Spain) and 11-M made the Spanish reaction particularly intimate.

The outrage has created widespread sympathy for Londoners and Britain from Spanish politicians and public. In Barcelona, the night of 14 July witnessed a moving concert of the greatest contemporary Catalan singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, the first since a serious illness. Serrat, on behalf of all the staff of the concert venue, presented his performance as a demonstration of liberty and democracy.

The Spanish press has published reports on the London investigations alongside portraits of Londoners reactions: the tears and the stoicism (and the occasional joke), the pubs and the flowers, the poem on the triumph of love over death by Elisabeth Barrett Browning left at a bombsite, but also the inexpressible rage of people at these sudden killings in their midst.

There is a vast reserve of Anglophilia in Spain, much of it based on somewhat archaic stereotypes about Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. This extends to a voracious interest in current events and commentaries. So Spanish readers very soon had access to leading writers’ responses to the bomb attacks Ian McEwan, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor. Such connections reinforced Spaniards’ immediate instinct of solidarity with London.

Terror and politics

But the contrasts between the Madrid and London attacks may be more significant in the longer term. 11-M was a total surprise, 7-J was not; the London dead (presently 52) are far fewer; and the bombed London trains were all (as Ian McEwan noted in an article reprinted in El Pais) underground and invisible.

There are more complex, and irresolvable, differences. If the London bombings provoked instant domestic political unity, Madrids had the opposite effect: within days, the election of the socialist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was the prelude to months of dispute between the PSOE and the ousted Popular Party over responsibility for the bombings, and esepcially over the attempt by the PP and its leader José María Aznar in particular to put the initial blame on the Basque separatists ETA.

The ensuing months have not allayed this division. Indeed, Spanish politics is now more divided than at any time since the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s, and on a range of issues: gay marriage, the relationship between the state and the Catholic church, policy on Iraq, the renegotiation of Catalan autonomy (the dominant media story in Barcelona), the removal of remaining statues of Francisco Franco from public places and most pointedly whether to engage in talks with ETA.

A parliamentary commission on the bombings, which dragged on amidst acrimony for a year, recently submitted its report. It blamed the PP both for failing adequately to monitor the rise of Islamist groups and for its immediate reaction to the bombings itself. Needless to say, the PP has refused to endorse the report.

In some ways both the PSOE and the PP remain prisoners of their, inevitably partisan, responses in March 2004: the PP deny that the bombings had anything to do with the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, the PSOE deny their electoral victory three days later had anything to do with the bombings. The messages of Tony Blair, and of Churchill (we will never surrender), are differently used: by the left to rally support against terrorism, by the right to oppose any negotiation with ETA.

Other contrasts touch exposed nerves. The slowness with which the London police have identified the victims and published their names has surprised many Spaniards: in Madrid, lists of names were issued within hours (though the explosions were above ground, and all Spaniards must carry an identity card). By Sunday the owner of my local newspaper shop in the sedate and leafy Caller Madrazo, was indignant: If I was in London and I thought my son was in there I would be demanding to look for him! she proclaimed: no quiero ser Inglesa (I do not want to be English!).

She was equally clear about the need to publish photographs showing the violence in graphic terms: Spanish papers, while not going as far as those in the Arab world, do show photographs, as they did after 9/11 and 11-M, which the British press and TV would not show. For example, Spanish TV repeatedly showed film of people jumping from the twin towers in Manhattan, and of bodies on the railway tracks at Atocha.

Both sides of the Spanish argument link this to the question of the proper political response to terrorism. Some argue that publishing such pictures is playing the terrorists game of promoting fear among the public, and even accuse the press of being accomplices of the terrorists; others say that you can mobilise support against terrorism only by showing people what terrorism does to bodies and cities.

It is a matter of balancing three factors: the right to dignity and privacy of the victims, the public right to know, and the need to register horror and grief at these atrocities. The virtually complete censorship in the United States for the victims of 9/11 as for the military casualties of Iraq would command little support in Spain.

IRA, ETA, and jihadis

Two even larger differences between Madrid and London go closer to the heart of the modern politics and history of their two countries.

The first is the public response. Much is made, with reason, of the calm dignity and resilience of British people after 7 July. The remarkable contrast is by no means with a confused or excessively emotional Spain after 11 March, but with the political response of its people, its parties, and its civil society.

After the Madrid bombings, 12 million people demonstrated in the streets of Spains cities and towns, denouncing violence and upholding the values of democracy. The same thing has happened, on numerous occasions, after ETA assassinations of politicians and writers. That neither ETA nor the jihadis care about these popular mobilisations is not the point: they express a deep, popular commitment to democracy that has its roots in the Franco era or even before, and they testify to a depth of civil society that Britain (and certainly the United States) signally lacks. The contrast with London where the Trafalgar Square gathering of 14 July is so far the only sizeable collective response is notable.

The second contrast, deeply engrained in Spanish popular thinking and the reflexes of the state alike, concerns the relationship between the earlier, indigenous terrorist projects of ETA and the IRA respectively and the more recent Islamist campaigns.

In Britain, no overt link is made: no politician has, to my knowledge, tried to link Gerry Adams to the jihadis. Indeed, the whole issue of violence in Ireland remains extraordinarily separate from, almost outside of, political and intellectual debate in Britain. Although the numbers (4,000) killed in the Northern Ireland conflict since 1969 are far more than those (800) killed in ETAs Basque campaigns since the first incidents of 1959, Ireland has almost always been at the margins of British political debate and elections.

Even more striking in Britain is the paucity of response by intellectuals and writers to the troubles in political theory, discussion of the ethics of violence, nationalism and community, or in art and literature. In Spain, intellectuals and writers (and politicians) are acutely aware of the whole experience of the Basque country. Many novels (Bernardo Atxagas The Lone Man, for example) explore the violence of the Basque experience. In a discussion on Radio SER on the night of 7 July, I could not but feel from my Spanish interlocutors the visceral, democratic loathing of what ETA had done and attempted over a long period.

Thinking with the heart

Each country, like each individual, responds to terror in terms of a distinct past, with its accumulated sense of identity, honour and fear. There is no correct way.

My own personal response to 7 July 2005 is shaped by proximity to the equally devastating, if accidental, fire in Kings Cross – the London bombings epicentre – on 18 November 1987 which killed thirty-one people . That evening, I changed underground trains on returning home from a BBC television discussion with Michael Ignatieff and Malise Ruthven on, of all topics, the politics of Islam. At the moment the ticket-hall exploded, I felt sure this was an IRA bomb.

The many thousands of people intimately affected by the Madrid and London bombs will carry their own memories and associations for a long time. The British peoples instant reactions draw on the strengths of their past and deserve respect. Yet without seeking to impose a Spanish prejudice onto British public life, there is from the outside something disturbing, cold almost obscene about the public and official calm that has followed this event.

The sight of senior members of Britains royal family at a London celebration of second world war victory on 10 July smirking and strutting on their palace balcony, dressed in ridiculous quasi-imperial garb seemed particularly unseemly from afar. The French say that les états son des êtres froids (states are cold beings). So too, of course, are terrorists. Among such coldness, people in London, Madrid and many other cities seek within themselves the resources to understand, survive, and meet the challenge of modern terrorism.