For almost two years, Benzene eschewed the traditional "blogroll", the habit of filling a sidebar with a list of links to other blogs -- a habit, by the way, which is explicitly encouraged by blogging software, presumably as a means of expanding the blogosphere and thus the software companies' potential clientele.

Recently, I've given in and added a couple. My "blog-parents" are two blog that were instrumental in the creation of Benzene. (For you latecomers, the story is told in Benzene's first post.) It wasn't too long after that when I happened upon Callimachus, in an earlier incarnation before he assumed the pseudonym and when his blog was called "The Sciolist". I call him my blog-brother because of an unlikely combination of habits and interests we share. (The brotherhood may be reciprocal, but it is not symmetrical; he writes far more regularly and prolifically than I do, and he has a mile-long blogroll. Benzene used to be on it, somewhere in the middle, but I think I was dropped during one of the periods where I disappeared for several months.)

Like me (and Orcinus, come to think of it), Callimachus tends to write very long posts. Also like me he enjoys engaging people with differing political views, and as a result he ends up with a blog that spans the partisan divide which segregates most of the political blogosphere into cliques. Among our common interests is etymology, which is what led me to discover the Sciolist in the first place. What kept me there was his interest in Islamic history and politics -- interest not just in pontificating about it (there's plenty of that around) but in reading and learning about it. I complain often about how ignorant just about everyone in the West is about Islam. Callimachus knows more than most (including me, probably) but he still doesn't feel like he knows enough, so he wants to find out more. I love that.

What we don't have in common -- and this is the kicker -- is our views. We have very different views about the war in Iraq, war generally, Iran, and Islamism generally. As is well known to regular readers (and anyone who understands the words of the Prophet quoted at the top of this blog), for me this is a plus. I love talking with people who disagree with me. It's less satisfying, however, when those who disagree do so from a position of ignorance, and with regard to Islam there is an awful lot of ignorance out there (including, alas, among most prominent journalists). To find someone who challenges my opinions and knows what the hell he's talking about, now that's a treat!

Two years later, Callimachus continues to impress me. In a recent post on Islamic fundamentalism [not so recent now; apparently I wrote this bit in October...] he casually mentions that he's reading Sayyid al-Qutb. Awesome. I wish more Americans would do that. Heck, I wish I would do that, but it's way way down on my list. I've read some bin Laden, and even a little bit of Mawdudi, but I could never muster the intellectual energy for al-Qutb.

For those unfamiliar with the big names of Islamist philosophy, a crude but useful formula: Mawdudi is Marx+Engels; al-Qutb is Antonio Gramsci. The one is the prolific pamphleteer, widely seen as the founder of the movement (though not without precursors, of course), who speaks engagingly to a larger public. His political ideas flow copiously, but they aren't very rigorous, and nobody who follows entirely agrees on what he really meant. The other is the movement's leading thinker. He is the intellectual's polemicist, sterner in his conclusions. His dense prose is harder to get through, but ultimately it's more coherent because he at least has a system to his philosophy which attempts to be internally consistent.

Where I'm going with this is an exploration of the much maligned political ideal of the Caliphate and resurrection of shari'a, but first I need to back up and say a few words on fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is paradoxical in any religion. It professes to want to get back to the true roots of a religion, but each fundamentalist gets to say for himself what those roots are. Fundamentalist movements typically aim for an ideal of the past, so in that sense they are traditionalist, but at the same time they are, almost by definition, fighting against the church as it exists today which makes them in that sense anti-traditionalist.

Today in America there is the additional confusion that "fundamentalism" has become a code word for radical violence. I remember an episode of "Politically Incorrect" in which one of the guests was Pakistani rock star Salman Ahmad. When the host mentioned "fundamentalist Islam", Salman tried to stop him. "Prayer, charity, fasting and pilgrimage," he said, "these are the fundamentals of Islam." Reading the transcript now, I see that he never got that far, but as I was watching the show, I could see where he was going with this. "These are the fundamentals of the faith. I believe in those fundamentals. Does that make me a 'fundamentalist'?" Bill Maher -- McLaughlin-like in his assertion of the host's privilege -- cut him off:

Salman was being disingenuous. Unless he's a fool, he's well aware that fundamentalism means a great deal more than just simple piety. But Maher is just as wrong when he says, essentially, "It's my word and it means whatever I say it means." It doesn't take much playing at that game before a word's definition becomes so diffuse that it becomes a barrier to communication rather than a vehicle of it. That's what has happened to "fundamentalism" in our culture today, I think.

I missed the convention speech which catapulted Barack Obama into the national consciousness in 2004, though I certainly heard about it afterward. I tend to be suspicious of overnight celebrity, so I was unimpressed by default. Since then, as I glean bits and pieces about Obama, I'm starting to see the appeal. I was especially impressed to find out that he has a close mentor relationship with Indiana's Sen Richard Lugar. Any sort of bipartisan collegiality pleases me, in this time of partisanship, and Lugar is -- in spite of having an internationalist attitude toward foreign policy that I almost entirely disagree with, not to mention his disturbingly Pat Robertson-like cadence of speech -- one of my favorite Republicans. (I suppose I'm due to express my opinion on the state of the Democratic primary race, but that'll have to wait for another post.)

Barack Obama's grandfather was a Muslim (from Kenya). Hence the senator's profoundly unpolitical name: Barack Hussein Obama Jr. In an interview some time around when this colloquy began -- it was prompted by response to that lecture by the Pope, remember -- Howard Fineman used this fact as a segue for asking Obama his views on Islam. Asked about that papal lecture and the hullaballoo that it raised, Obama gave a thoughtful but tastefully bland answer on the subject. What caught my attention were the follow-up questions Fineman chose to ask:

Forget about the "religion of violent conquest", we've been over that. What I find interesting here is Fineman's implication that the way to understand Islam is to read scripture. Obviously it's relevant, and I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from familiarizing himself with the Qur'an any more than I'd discourage someone from reading the Bible. But can you imagine if you got your impression of what Christianity is all about solely from reading the Bible? How much you would miss.

A few months later, in a post on his blog, Andrew Sullivan makes a similar mistake, defending the use of one of his favorite terms:

But clearly, the Bible isn't the sole source of Christianists' revelation. Surely, Sullivan must have noticed that Christianists oppose homosexuality far more than they oppose usury, yet the Bible condemns the latter even more strongly. If the Bible is the sole source of revelation, what tells the Christianists to make a political issue out of one but not the other? Clearly, whether or not it is explicitly acknowledged, there is some other source of moral authority.

One could point to numerous other examples. At the end of the same post, where Sullivan is concluding (correctly, I think) that objections to the word "Christianist" are little more than an objection by some Christians to the idea that Christianity and Islam should be considered alike in this sense, he observes in passing that Jesus, too, "was adamant on separating religion from politics." Was he? Maybe someone who knows the Bible better than I do can point me to evidence of this, but I really don't think Jesus was adamant about that.

The idea of keeping church and state distinct is an extremely important tradition in Christianity (and one which clearly distinguishes it from its younger brother, Islam), but where is the source for this tradition in scripture? As far as I can tell, every bit of it is pinned to one out-of-context phrase in a parable where Jesus says it's OK to pay your taxes. From this one passage we get the hoary tradition of separation of church and state? I don't think so. (It could be worse. Another extremely important tradition, that of the virgin birth, is pinned to a simple mistranslation.)

Neither Christianity nor Islam was born fully formed. Their respective scriptures were written early in the religion's history, but the religions' true formative years came a few centuries later. It is this later period, not the scriptural period, when the basic tenets of the religion became set. In part, this is reflected in what parts of the scripture came to be accepted as canonical and even more in how the canon is interpreted.

One point I never answered in Callimachus's post after the Pope's Regensburg address is his point that Islam's founder and its scripture are characterized by their historical context of military conquest. That's a fair observation as far as it goes, but to conclude that the religion is now "stuck with" the ideals of that context assumes that the conquest really was the formative period of the religion, and I don't believe it was. The conquest period is the historical context in the which the scripture was written, yes indeed, but the context in which the traditional interpretation of that scripture developed belongs to a later period.

In Bernard Lewis's The Political Language of Islam (incidentally, of the many of Lewis's books I've read, this is the one I most recommend to readers generally) he alludes to this period of global reassessment:

He goes on with several interesting examples, but it's no longer quotable without excessive ellipses.

The point I'm trying to illustrate here is that what shapes the Islamic concept of jihad is not the notion of universal conquest, but the task of maintaining a civilization in the face of the reality that the conquest which held such early promise will not be accomplished any time soon. That is why we have things like dar al-harb: Why define a relationship with the unbelievers if they're just going to be converted or exterminated tomorrow anyway? This is why jihad is such a slippery and ill-defined idea in Islam.

If scripture is not the sole authority of religious truth, what is? A charming characteristic of Islamic theology is the precise way in which the various levels of authority are so clearly defined. Like so many distinctions between Islam and Christianity, this one, I think, is also ultimately linked to the cultures' different approaches separation of church and state. In the Christian world we translate shari'a as "holy law". In the Islamic world that's redundant: it's not holy law, it's just law. For us the "holy" is necessary, because we have a cultural tradition in which there is such a thing as law that is not necessarily approved by God. In the Islamic world, there's no such thing. If any point of law could be characterized as contrary to the will of God, then it's just not good law.

This is not a measure of the narrowness of law in the Islamic world, as it is sometimes portrayed in intentional or unintentional caricature of Islamic fundamentalism -- that law can only be found in the words of scripture. Rather, it is a measure of the much broader and more casual way in which God's will is referenced in Islamic culture. Study of law and society is no less broad in the Islamic tradition than it is in the Christian tradition. (It's older, too: ibn Khaldûn's Muqaddimah is considered by many to be the first modern work of political science (and considered by Toynbee the greatest).)

Axiomatically, God wants what is just and good. An unjust law is contrary God's will and thus it is bad law. That is, it is not "holy law". This is the conceptual context in which law (like so many other things) is considered in the Islamic world. If some cleric points to a passage in scripture that says that an adulteress must be put to death by flogging (not stoning, that's the Jewish tradition...), the instinctive response in the West might be to say that that just goes to show how stupid the church is and we ought to replace "holy law" with better law. The Muslim reformer, responding from the same progressive impulse, would argue that surely that cannot be God's will because God is merciful and just. Since this interpretation of the law is clearly not merciful and just, it must therefore be bad law.

With many medieval Muslim jurists, indeed, one often gets the idea that God is merely a figure of speech, a sort of personification of the juridical ideals of wisdom and justice. Muslim theology, then, is pursued in a way we would recognize as scientific. "Holy law" is redundant in the same sense that we might consider "accurate physics". If your proposed equation fails to accurately describe how things actually behave, it's not "inaccurate physics". It's not physics at all; it's just wrong. God created the heavens and the earth and the rules by which they move. The goal of science is to understand those laws and write them down. So too with the study of law.

From the earliest days, the Muslim "scientists" who sought to discover through learning what indeed was the will of God for man and society recognized that scripture was not the only authority. The Qur'an, in spite of being God's word as expressed through the voice of His Prophet, did not address every question that one might ask. Nor was it always clear how broadly its pronouncements applied -- or even if they still applied at all, now that circumstances had changed. Fortunately, there are other means of gleaning God's will.

Islamic theologians, in their zeal, have given convenient labels to all these means of seeking the truth. The labels are fairly elementary, and I dare say they'd be familiar to any reasonably educated American were it not for our culture's bias against Islam. This post is already enormous, so I won't burden it further with a course in Islam 101, particularly when any of these terms can be looked up on Wikipedia (which is, again, remarkably excellent on these topics), but in summary there are four basic categories: Along with scripture there are hadith (traditions), ijma' (consensus), and qiyas (analogy).

The translations are approximate. "Analogy" is more or less what you'd think it is, taking specific precedents and extrapolating more general rules out of them. "Consensus" is based on a religious equivalent of the "ten million fans can't be wrong" logic. (In my second favorite saying, which both compares and contrasts with the one that tops this page, the Prophet once said, "My people will never agree in error.") God inspires those who believe in Him, so if the entire community (umma) of the faithful is in agreement on something, it must be right. Some scholars say this means that religious teaching, therefore, is completely reformable and ultimately democratic, while others vigorously insist that surely can't be right.

The most complicated by far are the hadith. The idea here is that, although the Prophet spoke God's actual words only when he was reciting the Qur'an, even when he was acting as his own agent he was still blessed and inspired by the Lord, and thus the ways of the Prophet (sunnah) are indications of God's way. Every hadith is something we know about the Prophet, and there is a tremendous science built around categorizing and analyzing them. Even the early scholars understood that the tradition by which stories are passed down is inherently lossy, so for each hadith they identify a sort of verbal genealogy (isnad) and by these each hadith can be assigned any of a number of categories of reliability based on its intellectual pedigree. These labels and definitions are handy because each school of thought can summarize its theology by identifying which ones it accepts and which it rejects.

This then is the science that is Islamic theology, or rather it was many centuries ago when the religion (and the society) was still intellectually lively, and many say it is again now. If you read much about Islamic philosophy, a metaphor you're likely to encounter is "the door to ijtihad", always in the context of discussing whether that door is open or closed. Ijtihad (from the same root word as jihad, struggle) is the process of study and research by which these theological/philosophical conclusions are reached. Both then and now there has been lively disagreement about who may practice ijtihad, just as we in the West today may debate who can advance a scientific theory (or even, for that matter, a political view): is it only for trained scholars, qualified to know what they are talking about? or may anyone put forth a reasoned argument so long as his logic is sound?

The famous pronouncement in Islamic history is that some time around the 11th century (the exact date is never clear), the door of ijtihad was closed. The long project was now complete: all the hadith had been properly researched, their sanad thoroughly documented. Everything had been figured out and there was no need to research it any more. (Since in Islamic culture, religion, law and science were never entirely separate, it has been argued -- correctly, I think -- that the closing of this door was also the beginning of the end of the Islamic world's superior science.)

Anyone who would reform Islam -- whether it's Mawdudi or Khomeini, abd al-Wahhab or Qasim Amin, a progressive who argues that Islam supports human rights or a talib who wants to stone homosexuals and shut women up in the house -- must push open the door of ijtihad. The scholarly tradition has created an edifice of religious law which is too modern for some and not modern enough for others. Diametrically opposed in political views, they unite in their rejection of the "debris" that clutters Islam. All of the hadith are wrong, they say, and we must go back to the basics to find fresh inspiration. Fundamentalism is a philosophical means, and not a philosophical ends. That is why it is so terribly confusing as a political term. How can the Osama bin Laden, Hizbullah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan all be "fundamentalists", when their views are clearly so different?

"Islamism" is a useful term which has been around since at least the early 1980s but has come into popular use only recently. Habib Boularès, who correctly sees Mawdudi and Sayyid al-Qutb as its intellectual founding fathers, defines the goal of Islamists as "that their concept of religion penetrates the state and society". The definition does not specify whether an Islamist pursues this goal by violent or non-violent means.

Andrew Sullivan has provoked objections by using the term in parallel with "Christianism", presumably referring to Christians in the West who also seek to have their concept of religion penetrate the state and society. The equation is complicated by the fact that Christianity has an organized church while Islam does not, but even so I think Sullivan is onto something in seeing a similarity. The same does not apply to "fundamentalist". Islamic fundamentalists, as I've described, reject religious orthodoxy. Like fundamentalist Christians of the 16th century, but unlike fundamentalist Christians today, Islamic fundamentalists are kindred spirits with those today who say, "I believe in God, but I reject organized religion". Today's Christian fundamentalists do not reject organized religion; they embrace it.

Fundamentalist and Islamist are not the same thing. A fundamentalist might be an Islamist, or might not; an Islamist might be a fundamentalist, or might not.

Language has forces of its own. The late Theodore Bernstein pronounced a law by which bad words will tend to drive out good. There is a tendency for any adjective or adverb which can magnify the word it defines to lose its specific meaning and join the large club of generic magnifiers (making commonplace such oxymorons as "massive sound" or "extremely close"). Any despised minority is obliged to invent a new name for itself every 10 years or so, as yesterday's correct term, in unending cycle, becomes tomorrow's derogatory slur. Likewise for any body part to which is attached a sense of shame: any word for it, no matter how affirming and positive in intention, once in common use is already on the road toward becoming a demeaning vulgarity.

Terms for our enemy have a similar short life. In our hunger for a label, we grab at terms like "terrorist" or "fundamentalist" with little regard for accuracy, and even as redefined the labels are tossed around so indiscriminately that they are soon devalued by overcirculation. Even those of us who respect accuracy in language and debate in good faith, like my friend Callimachus and his readers, can't resist the longing for a label. If al-Qaeda isn't truly "terrorist" in the PLO or IRA sense (because their goal is killing as an end in itself rather than as a means for political reform through intimidation); if "fundamentalist" must also include a rational, pragmatic politician like Prime Minister Erdogan; if even any sinner struggling against his baser nature is a "jihadist" -- then what do we call those guys who, like Bill Maher says, "fly planes into buildings"?

A new label I'm seeing, though it doesn't seem to have an "-ist" word yet, is the advocacy of the caliphate and shari'a. These people, it is said, want to sweep away all the existing political states and replace them with a single government under religious law. This new world order they call (with questionable historical accuracy) the "caliphate". There is a lot of truth to this, but the eagerness to have a new label for the bad guys is once again causing distortion. If one only wishes to converse with oneself for entertainment, it's all well and good to say, as Maher does, that this is my word and it can mean whatever I want it to mean. The problem comes when one wishes to engage the world outside one's immediate circle. Suppose one reads, for example, of a poll in which is revealed that 40% of Egyptians polled favor the establishment of a modern caliphate. (That's an invented example, but I think it's plausible enough to illustrate my point.) How should we react to that? You can say, "Holy cow, I had no idea they all hated us so much" and start preparing against yet another enemy -- a strategy that hasn't served us particularly well recently -- or you can try to understand what they're really saying. Most Muslims who long for the caliphate are longing for something other than the destruction of the United States.

I don't expect to illuminate the world at large, but it's seeing caricatures of the modern longing for the caliphate in places I respect, like the comments box on Callimachus's blog, that has inspired most of this long and roving post.

It's worth noting that this is not a uniquely Muslim idea. One of the clearest descriptions of the caliphate I've seen comes from the greatest writer the Christian world ever produced, Dostoyevsky. In his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, he puts the idea in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual brother, the modern thinker and self-proclaimed atheist (albeit one who sometimes falters in his (dis)belief).

There's quite a bit of discussion of this, with varying views expressed, but I can't quote the entire chapter this discussion fills -- the fifth out of ninety-five, in this vast sprawling novel. The most potent argument, as always with Dostoyevsky, is what this implies for personal morality and how it affects the criminal's relationship with society.

One of the guests at the monastery, Peter Miusov, another intellectual and modern thinker but very different from Ivan, is utterly horrified by the idea, and he expresses his objections in terms not unlike what Westerners think of the prospect of an Islamic caliphate today.

There's much more to it than that, and Miusov remains outraged and unconvinced, but this is the part that I think would resonate with today's Muslim -- the idea that in a state with no moral authority, there is no moral accountability: the criminal can justify to himself that his evil is only a crime against the irrelevant state, and not a crime against society, mankind, or God.

The modern idea of the caliphate comes overwhelmingly from the writings of Mawdudi. I'm not nearly expert enough to say whether Mawdudi originated the idea, nor to trace the many many streams that spring from that source and continue on their separate way, but Mawdudi is the one they all quote.

Mawdudi wrote a lot, and on a great many subjects. His philosophy was all over the place, and he was extremely controversial, attracting criticism from all directions. He is nevertheless probably the most influential Muslim writer of the 20th century.

With regard to the caliphate, what interests us is his book Khliafat wa Mulukiyyat (Caliphs and Kings). [I'd really like to provide a link. I'm sure that I found the text of the book online once, because that is where I myself was able to read some of it (none of my libraries carries it), but for the life of me I can't find it now.]

The title Mawdudi uses is significant. Malik is commonly translated as "king", but it carries with it a bundle of connotations. There are times and places in Islamic history where petty monarchs found it advantageous to claim the title of malik, and al-Malik is among the list of Allah's honorifics. In spite of that, it usually has something of a demeaning connotation. Malik is the term reserved for personal rulers who lack moral authority, whether they be Christian or pagan nation with which Islamic nations must deal diplomatically or pre-Islamic oppressor nations. (In the qur'anic story of Yusuf, the pharaoh is a malik.) Especially in the early centuries of Islam, mulukiyyat is posed as an opposite to khilafat, and that's the tradition that Mawdudi is mimicking. At the time he wrote, there were still several kings in the Middle East. Today there are not so many, but his readers understand that today's muluk are more likely to bear a title like "president" (like Mubarak or Musharraf) or, yes, even "ayatollah".

What struck me most (and indeed surprised me) in reading Mawdudi was his emphasis on the rule of law, in contrast to the rule of man. From Aristotle to John Adams, the rule of law is a fundamental idea throughout the history of Western political thought, central to that collection of rights we lump together under the name of "democracy". We understand the need for limited government, but the power of the state must be limited by law and by society. Throughout the Islamic world, this limitation is conspicuously absent.

The longing for the caliphate is a 20th century phenomenon because the 20th century Middle East was characterized by the expansion of the modern state. In his introduction to The Near East Since the First World War (a book which I sorely ought to have on my shelf, since I'm constantly borrowing it from the library to refer to, but I can never bring myself to read through from cover to cover), M.E. Yapp writes:

Take a look. As the nation of the Middle East made this transition, what sort of states did they get? With very few exceptions they got an authoritarian state, ruled by a monarch or by a dictator. On the spectrum ranging from rule of law to rule of man, the entire Middle East in the 20th century lurched heavily in the direction of rule of man. Whether he lives in an authoritarian dictatorship, a corrupt military pseudo-republic, a plutocratic monarchy, or a state of war-torn anarchy, today's Muslim suffers under the rule of man. He longs for the rule of law. He longs for a state where Ivan Karamazov's criminal cannot "compromise with his conscience". He longs for a state that is subject to society and not vice versa. He longs for the caliphate and the rule of shari'a.

My friend REG has criticized me for giving too much attention to what political movements profess to believe in and not enough to what they really are. I would expect him to suggest that while Mawdudi and his jihadist followers might say they want only justice and rule of law, what they really want is to take over the world and impose their will on everyone else.

I don't entirely disagree. The Taliban in Afghanistan are a recent demonstration that power corrupts absolutely in the Islamic world as well. Today's mullahocracy in Iran is no longer what Khomeini envisioned nor what he called for publicly (and it certainly isn't what the secular middle-class liberals of Teheran were looking for when they joined in the revolution).

History shows us numerous examples of political ideals run amok. Certainly the idea behind communism was not to impose a totalitarian dictatorship over half the world, and yet that's what it became under Lenin and Stalin. Much the same can be said of fascism, national socialism, and even American democracy. We haven't become a dictatorship like the others, but we do project an imperial hegemony over much of the world, which I don't think has much to do with our core political beliefs. Our ideals of human rights, free speech, justice, and so forth certainly isn't the "democracy" that we're bringing to Uzbekistan or Okinawa.

So are the haters of American imperialism, both abroad and here at home, right that "democracy" is just a fig leaf covering America's real goal of global hegemony? Clearly there's more to it than that. Enemies of America -- whether violent like Osama bin Laden or intellectual like Arundhati Roy -- will do well to study and understand what core America truly believes in, even if that isn't what they see out on the front.

We should fear the caliphate because of what it might become in spite of itself, but that doesn't mean we should label it evil and stop trying to understand the people who believe in it. The housewife in Pakistan who says she favors the caliphate isn't saying she wants to kill Americans and take over the world. She isn't our enemy unless we make her our enemy.

Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen has some unorthodox ideas about how to most effectively conduct the "war on terror". His no-nonsense realism and willingness to understand the mind of the enemy is a breath of fresh air in the miasma of stupidity that seems to surround the "war". (And incidentally I think his position is one where Callimachus and I, who disagree on so much, can come together)

Kilcullen sees our struggle not as a military conflict, but as a war of information. His prime bit of advice is that we need to narrow the definition of our enemy as much as we can. By lumping large groups of disgruntled Muslims in with those who are genuinely dangerous to us, we only help them to expand their movement. The article here now quoting an ally of Kilcullen's who serves as an adviser to the Pentagon:

Kilcullen suggests that America needs to understand what forces and yearnings drive individuals to become supporters of our enemy, and to respond by finding ways to satisfy those needs which are not unfriendly to us. That, in a nutshell, is why I think we need to stop caricaturing any favorable discussion of the caliphate as a movement to take over the world and impose backward theocracy on all, and instead recognize that many of those who are sympathetic to it are reaching out for political ideals not too different from the ones we espouse.

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