Patrick French :
(From previous issue)
All sorts of assumptions about the centrality of America in the international liberal order no longer hold true. It may be that Trump’s successor as US president reverts to the norm, but the change in external conceptions of American soft and hard power will not be reversed. Almost every aspirational country is now seeking bilateral diplomatic arrangements that leave them less dependent on the old concert of powers.
As societies become more varied, and economic and political power shifts away from the West, many people are taking an increasing pride in a real or imagined past. In the 21st century, we are seeing the reappearance of what appeared to be the outmoded or even forgotten rhetoric of self-assertion and exploded theories of historical self-justification. The dead hand of the past has become a live hand. History-or at least revolutionary perceptions of the past-has become an ideological force. Movements built on identity have taken the place of an earlier, largely postcolonial or nationalist impetus. Allegiances optimistically assumed to have been laid to rest by post-World War II modernity, and later by globalisation, have returned with a violence and success that has shaken the political establishment.
Immediate post-independence leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah and Atatürk believed in social progress, self-reliance and reform of laws and civil codes. ‘The spectacle of what is called religion,’ Nehru wrote in his Autobiography, ‘seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.’ The practice of keeping women secluded, said Hansa Mehta in the Constituent Assembly when debating how India would become a republic, was “an inhuman custom” which should be abolished. “As far as the Hindu religion is concerned,” she said, “it does not enjoin purdah. Islam does. But, I feel that Islam will be better rid of this evil.” Even Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic scourge of imperialists, could say in a public speech that he had tried to reach a deal with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. “The first thing he asked for,” Nasser told the audience, “was to make wearing a hijab mandatory in Egypt, and demand that every woman walking in the street wear a headscarf.” The audience laughed, and the president played the laughter. “Let him wear a headscarf,” shouts a voice, referring to the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. The audience claps. That was half a century ago, and today, no leader would make that speech.
Islamist extremism offers the most threatening version of a revival of an antiquated past, as it seeks to animate the pristine practices of the first three generations of Islam, known as the ‘as-salaf as-saliheen’ or ‘pious ancestors’. Groups like ISIS depend on a recoverable ideal of collective purity before colonialism: with its apocalyptic military ideology, it seeks to eradicate nation states in the name of religious transnationalism. After a military success in 2014, it released a video called ‘The End of Sykes- Picot’, showing a bulldozer mashing up the border between Syria and Iraq. Its magazine Dabiq said it intended to ‘eliminate any remaining traces of the kufri, nationalistic borders from the hearts of the Muslims’.
Abul A’la Maududi, who was born in Aurangabad in 1903, helped to initiate this thinking. Despite knowing little Qur’anic Arabic, and being happiest reading in Urdu, he reinterpreted Islam to fit his notion of a total, revolutionary ideology that could give birth to a new polity. Maududi was reacting to thinkers ranging from Marx to Adam Smith, and was even guided by books like the Guide to Modern Wickedness, written by the English shock jock CEM Joad. Although he was more tolerant of Sufis and Shias than his successors in Al Qaeda and ISIS, he associated popular customs like visiting the graves of Muslim saints with shirk or polytheism, and claimed that nearly everything that had happened since the collapse of Uthman’s caliphate, 25 years after the death of the Prophet, was a disaster. When the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan shot the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in 2012, they quoted Maududi’s thinking in justification, and wrote her a letter: ‘Muslim India was rich in farming, silk, and jute and from textile industry to ship building. No poverty, no crises and no clashes of civilization or religion.’ The writer told her [channelling Macaulay] that the United Nations wanted to ‘produce more and more Asians in blood but English in taste’.
ISLAMISM’S WISH TO recover the values of distant ancestors is not unique; but it is much more violent. In China-assumed by many progressives in the 1970s to have been denuded permanently of all religion-there is a revival of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Qigong and Falun Gong, and the recovery and rebuilding of ancestral and village temples and temple networks. In Turkey, President Erdogan has revived symbols of the Ottoman Empire, and members of his Justice and Development Party like to appear in Ottoman outfits on posters. The reclaiming of the Ottoman past can be seen as a reaction against the modernising legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The Turkish TV host Pelin Batu said in 2009 that the glorification of the Ottomans was a response to secularism: “Ottomania is a form of Islamic empowerment for a new Muslim religious bourgeoisie who are reacting against Atatürk’s attempt to relegate religion and Islam to the sidelines.”
In India, members of organisations that congregate around the BJP have expressed a need to learn from neglected ancestral traditions, including alternative science like the supposed use of nuclear devices by the philosopher-sage Kanada in the 2nd century BCE. Computer technology and textual analysis has been used to apparently date events in the Mahabharata, in the style of the Archbishop of Armagh, who deduced that Creation began on October 23rd, 4004 BCE. The national manifesto of the BJP for the General Election of 2009 noted that in ancient times, rice yields in India stood at 20 tonnes per hectare, twice what farmers can produce today using intensive agriculture in the lushest conditions. For some, the desire to recover the past extends to the ‘reconversion’ of those Indians who are not Hindu. In the words of Dr Manmohan Vaidya of the RSS: “Ghar waapsi is a natural urge to connect to our roots.”
In Russia, the former KGB agent President Putin has since the 1990s worn an Orthodox baptismal cross, and been filmed kissing icons, lighting candles and interacting with Russian Orthodox priests. His adviser Alexander Dugin describes “all modernism-the idea of progress, development, the so-called scientific view of the world, democracy and liberalism” as “a Satanic idea that spells a death sentence for humanity.” In a speech last year, Putin stated: “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.” This doctrine shows close parallels with Trump’s speeches on the decline of the West, and the thinking of his senior adviser Steve Bannon.
Political philosophies have always evolved according to circumstance. It would be a mistake for those on the left or the right to dismiss the legacy of liberalism as irrelevant, and hark back to forms of conduct that have little to offer new generations. Any society can gain from understanding its ancient traditions of knowledge, religion, custom and culture, and in India these have a connection to everyday life that is probably stronger than anywhere else on earth. In the early days of the freedom movement, political opponents actively connected, communicated and debated. The public conversation did not take place in binaries. Whoever makes a new ideology that takes the best elements of liberalism may find it has deep roots in Indian soil.
(Patrick French is a historian and biographer. He is presently writing the authorised biography of the novelist Doris Lessing. Courtesy: The Open magazine)
