Abstract
In Lifeworlds of Islam, Mohammad A Bamyeh has written a book that is intended to be ‘useful for general educated readers’. Posing the question as to why Islam has persisted in being a ‘powerful reference point’ in the lives of many Muslims, he presents a sociologically informed study of Islam in the contemporary world. In sharp contrast to the essentialist assumption of Islam as an encompassing system, Bamyeh argues that Islam has remained a strong guidance for many Muslims due to its rather pluralistic and non-systematic nature. In his understanding, Islam does not determine anyone’s behaviour in a specific way, but Islamic traditions do provide a reservoir for languages of social action and societal participation in countries in which authoritarian regimes exclude the population from formal political engagement. Islam has acquired its persuasive capacity and remains meaningful for so many without coercive power. According to Bamyeh, religion is most powerful as a social practice animated by the daily experiences of ordinary people. In analytically differentiating Islam from political power structures, the Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh narrates a history of Islam as an antagonist to formal politics and its historical institutionalization in the modern national state. The book substantiates this argumentation in three chapters.
In the first chapter, ‘Islam as social movement’, Bamyeh argues that Islamic social movements represent a way of organizing society parallel to the state. According to his analysis, Islamic movements have gained public support not by providing elaborate religious programmes, but due to their capacity for organizing civil society within a commonly available cultural frame detached from the state. The language of Islam, thus, has served purposes such as being a template for ‘good governance’, a mobilizing force for social welfare services, a common vernacular for the interests of a rising middle class, and a discourse for participatory ethics transcending the local level. From this perspective, Bamyeh understands Islamic activism as a popular claim to entitlement and participation by those people who have traditionally been excluded from formal politics. Historically, Islamic social movements emerged out of newly politicized social strata and demographics. While these movements differ in many respects, they share the common goal of ‘improving the spiritual quality of society’. Bamyeh illustrates this argument with a number of examples from Islamic movements in the twentieth century, prime among them the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. After it was founded by Hasan al-Banna (1906–1948) in 1928, according to Bamyeh, the Brotherhood developed into a globally applied model of Islamic activism. To be sure, Islamic movements have also aimed to take part in formal power structures, either through democratic processes or by force. However, in most examples this ‘contamination of the sacred with the profane’ compromised the nature of Islamic activism. Bamyeh concludes that in becoming similar to all other parties, these politicized Islamic movements largely failed.
The second chapter of the book explores ‘Islam as a public philosophy’. In this chapter, Bamyeh’s focus is on ‘the most influential intellectual systems that defined modern roles for Islam in the public sphere’. He identifies two competing varieties of Islam as public philosophies, one that is instrumental in approach and one that is hermeneutic. While both approaches indicate modern departures from traditional Islam, they strongly differ in the ways in which they give meaning to the world. Bamyeh traces instrumental Islam as an early basis for Islamic social movements back to the modernist nineteenth century Islamic reform movement, represented by figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935). Islamic modernists, in his analysis, ‘sought to infuse the twin projects of social modernization and anti-colonial nationalism with a religious character’. According to this way of thinking, ‘god’s mandate’ is comprehensible and therefore applicable by human actors. The author considers this instrumental religious reasoning as a response to secular consciousness in kind. In declaring Islam the solution, instrumentalist Islam is animated by a strong sense of external authority guiding the search for answers to contemporary social and political problems. For hermeneutic Islam, in contrast, the meaning of any divine message is only comprehensible through interpretation. Consequently, hermeneuticists are not concerned with the rigid application of Islamic rules, norms and ethics, but ask the question of how to get to know Islam in light of the dichotomy between general divine principles and the understanding of these principles in concrete historical situations. In empirical terms, the chapter identifies hermeneutic Islam with contemporary Muslim thinkers such as Fetullah Gülen (b. 1941), Abdulkarim Soroush (b. 1945) and Muhammad Shahrur (1938–2019).
Finally, the book deals with ‘Islam as a global order’. In this third chapter, Mohammed Bamyeh discusses Islam as a historical world system based on the three principles of partial control, free movement and cultural heteroglossia. In contradistinction to European national states, the pre-modern ‘Islamic state’ was characterized by a kind of power sharing of rulers with religious scholars, local elites, tribal networks, Sufi orders, guilds and extended family networks. In this sense, political authority and societal control were only of a partial nature. The dar al-islam, as this Islamic world system is called in Arabic, was furthermore a realm of relatively free movement. Scholars, pilgrims, merchants and adventurers travelled throughout the dar al-Islam, which, with its social networks, trade routes, different urban centres and a variety of communication channels, facilitated the construction of a distinct Islamic global society. In this global system, Islam ‘operated in the spiritual, legal, moral and political realms as a highly hybrid and varied practice’. This diversity of social practices Bamyeh defines by the concept of ‘heteroglossia’, which he derives from the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). It was not that an essential Islamic system of thought characterized this global order, but that this global order was inhabited by a multiplicity of voices that formed a common but diverse narrative space. In short, Islam was a body of thought and social practices ‘lacking a strong or effective central authority that could enforce dogmas across great distances’. In its confrontation with the modern national state, however, these properties of the Islamic global order have been remarkably compromised, giving way to more rigid, purist and dogmatic understandings of Islamic traditions in the modern world.
I agree with Armando Salvatore’s praise for the book. Indeed, Mohammad Bamyeh has written a book that has all the potential to ‘dispel myths of Islamic exceptionalism’. Moreover, the author has succeeded in writing a book that presents an intellectual history of Islam and its modern turn into a source for public philosophies and social movements that is very accessible for the general reader. Mohammed Bamyeh convincingly presents a variety of arguments that explain the persistence of Islam as a powerful reference point for believers over time. Lifeworlds of Islam is therefore suggested reading for all those non-experts who are interested in Islam beyond our current, highly charged media debates. The scholar in the field, however, benefits less from the book, as it is largely based on familiar secondary sources from the contemporary state of the art in Islamic studies. While the book is excellent reading for the general reader and students of the humanities and social sciences, I nevertheless would like to mention two critical points.
First of all, the author could have avoided a number of redundancies. In the acknowledgements, Bamyeh points out that the book draws from a number of previously published articles and unpublished materials. On some pages, however, I gained the impression that the author shifted between rewriting these articles and applying a cut-and-paste approach. A number of reoccurring paragraphs on the Muslim Brotherhood or on the relationship between sharia and siyasa sounded very familiar to me. This feeling of déjà vu throughout the text found its ‘formal confirmation’ on page 145 in the phrase ‘to be discussed later in this article [sic]’. In this sense, the book deserved a more dedicated copyediting process that could also have eradicated a number of errors in the text.
Finally, I personally think that the title of the book is a misnomer. In the section ‘What is a lifeworld?’ Bamyeh briefly explains his use of the concept in this book. Basically, he makes the analytical distinction between lifeworld and political power structures. However, this is a clear departure from the conceptual tradition that Alfred Schütz once established in transforming Edmund Husserl’s philosophical concept into a sociological one based on methodological individualism. To be sure, I do not criticize Bamyeh’s interpretation and usage of the concept but the essential role of this term in the title of the book. With respect to the conceptual tradition of lifeworld, the title raises the expectation of a book about the multiple ways in which ordinary people live Islam in their daily social practices. This expectation is further supported by the cover image in which a girl is playing with a skipping rope. Yet, the social practices of ordinary Muslims hardly play a role in this book. I liked the interpretation of the thought of al-Shafi’i (767–820), al-Ash’ari (874–936), and al-Ghazali (1058–1111) as subsequent gravity centres of heteroglossic Islamic thinking. But in what ways do these gravity centres relate to the ‘daily issues of ordinary people’? The author later dedicates only a single page of very general thoughts to heteroglossia taking roots at the popular level. Therefore, I have the suspicion that the choice of the title of the book was governed by marketing purposes rather than scholarly considerations. Frankly speaking, this does not befit a publisher with an international reputation like Oxford University Press.