Farhan Wahab
A new tragedy has unfolded in the case of Muslims in Sri Lanka. The cultural junkies who consider themselves as the experts in terrorism-related topics are now looking out for traditional Muslims. On the other hand, Sufi orthodoxy proclaims itself as the traditional bearers of Islam. In the first place, this classifying project was introduced by Sinhala chauvinism a few years back when it was in search of an enemy.
Whoever disagrees with Sufi interpretations or the political positions are now labelled as Wahhabists. Post-Easter Sunday political atmosphere has helped them to outcast their ideological rivals.
This particular kind of classification is a pathological assertion that ruthlessly tries to destroy the heterogeneous nature of Muslim society and its ideological variants.
Modern-day Sufis are on the front raw to endorse such lunacies where the modern Islamic school of thought is deliberately criminalised. Some Muslim pseudo-intellectuals are insisting upon this discourse. This is nothing but an attempt to bring back the esoteric monopolised religiousism where a group of people would self appoint themselves as the sole authority of religious discourse.
What they mean by traditional Muslims is the traditional elites of the Muslim community (urban merchant capitalists and rentier class) who collaborated with Sinhala chauvinist government from the beginning. Culturally or socially they don’t have any relevance with mainstream Muslim society.
The urban elites or the so-called traditional Muslims are the members of the Sufi club which backs the Sufi orthodoxy. They preach modesty and discipline to society through religious institutions while they still live in the Victorian hangover. Their women have access to posh salons and elite institutions while underclass women are forced to wear Niqab and remain inside the harem to serve men. ACJU (All Ceylon Jammiyathul Ulema) and Sufi orthodoxy were the first sectarian groups to impose Niqab. In traditional Sufi families, women are prohibited to continue their education after attending age.
It is comforting to forget this side of Sufism and blame Wahhabists for Muslim backwardness.
In a way, Wahhabists culturally liberated women from such practices and they are the first sect that opened up the mosque for women.
When Wahhabists spoke against the Niqab, Sufi orthodoxy insisted that women must wear Niqab ( I’m not saying Wahhabists are the great feminists of our time it was part of their ideological war that had been in place between them and the orthodoxy)
FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) is widely practised among Sufis. It was advocated by Sufis whereas Wahhabists completely disagreed with them and preached against FGM.
The men who don’t wrap their heads with long towels were considered as spiritually weak. The same rule was applied in the case of skull cap as well. But the Wahhabists actually broke such superstitions and radically denounced those as un-Islamic.
It was the Sufi orthodoxy that founded madrasas in Sri Lanka for underage children. These traditional madarasas function in the same way how the Buddhist monasteries function. Normally children between 10-12 years of age are taken in to study and memorise the Quran. They spend 6-7 years in these institutions, in a highly culturally backward environment. Thousands of children are being forced to live a quasi -secluded lifestyle and it should be noted that in most of these madrasas, no formal education is provided.
Now Sufism tends to pose a liberal face in the post-Easter Sunday world. Which is again the hypocrisy of urban elites who try to preserve their political and social hierarchy. In order to accomplish this task, now they have begun to claim they are the traditional Muslims of Sri Lanka. This is to outcast their ideological rivals and other reformist groups who pose as a threat to the conservative orthodoxy.
It has given them legitimacy to accuse anyone who disagrees with their positions. Institutions like ACJU personally threaten people that they could get any individual arrested under PTA since the government considers them as the legitimate representatives of the Muslim community.
This is what called political pornography where one forgets oneself and the role he/she plays and sees only the acts of the others.
One can see the hypocrisy of Sufism when the Sri Lankan government passed the law to ban Niqab out of racism. Sufis were the first group that unconditionally agreed to strip women out of burqa overnight.
The irony is in the pre-easter Sunday Sri Lanka, where the Muslim organisations were fighting for the reform of MMDA (Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act) law, Wahhabists and Sufis were on the same side and suppressed the moderate voices that came from reformist movements and women organisations.
Again the crucial point is, the cultural talk cannot be a theory to trace down the root of political terror. If we tend to apply cultural logic, eventually one would find Wahhabists as more liberal than Sufi orthodoxy-which is inherently misogynistic and sexualises women’s existence.
Sufi demagoguery claims that except Sufi tradition all the other Islamic modern school of thoughts are susceptible to violence and terror. This false assumption that is made on the basis of cultural logic is historically flawed and logically false.
The stakeholders of American Jihad in Afghanistan had Sufi counterparts as well. Like any ideological rivals, they were also used and manipulated by extreme political forces to participate in armed struggle.
As it is the case of any ideology based movement it embraced the terror when the political conflict was translated to them in theological terms. Tabligh movement became a mass recruiter which had gone to every part of the world to recruit cadres.
Again the crucial point here is when you tend to interpret a political conflict in theological terms, it finds refuge in any ideology that is available at its disposal. Remember when Burmese ethnonationalism was violently interpreted, it embraced pacifist Buddhism as its ideological and moral force for the slaughtering of Rohingya Muslims.
In Dubai, Sufism is the state doctrine. Sufi intelligentsia plays the role of the midwife in order to back the pseudo-modern market based heavily consumerist -nihilist orgy called Dubai. Petrosheikdom adapted Sufism while funding famous intellectuals of Sufism since Wahhabism had generated a bad reputation in the west. Dubai needed something different, a kind of doctrine that would get along with liberalism- An alternative which would attract tourism. Sufism appeared to be the ideal choice in that regard. Theologians like Hamza Yousuf, Bin Bayyah became popular figures in Dubai. While collaborating with Saudi imposing blockade to their GCC counterparts and waging war in Yemen by deploying mercenaries, Dubai is busy preaching Sufism to the world. Sufi intellectuals are serving as a moral cover-up by holding the slogan of depoliticised Sufism as the ‘theology of obedience’
The Sufi claim of pacifism is as absurd as the claim of Buddhism’s claims of pacifism. Throughout history, both ideologies have a record of violence. As in the case of other ideologies, history hasn’t been so kind to Sufism either.
There has been a great myth that is communists and which we are made to embrace, that is that the Taliban movement is the extension of Wahhabism. In reality, the Taliban is the bastard child of the Regan doctrine of the Cold War period that militarised traditional Devbandi – Sufi based madrasas in Pakistan. Taliban demonstrated the backwardness of Sufism.
Burhanuddin Rabbani is a politician coming from Naqshbandi Tariqah where his Jamath-e-Islami was the recruiting institution for American Jihad in Afghanistan. The other traditionalist Sufi militant presence on the ground was the movement of the Islamic Revolution led by respected Sufi alim Mullah Nasim Akhundaza (Qadariyya or Naqshbandi) who ran a militarised madrasa as well as controlling huge landholdings. Its commanders were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.
In Sri Lanka, the first Islamic sectarianism group that used the language of violence was Sufi orthodoxy. When modern Islamic school of thought arrived in Sri Lanka, it possessed a great threat to Sufi orthodoxy that maintained a hierarchical order in society. Like the medieval Europe Christian churchdom which reigned as the sole authority of religious beliefs, Sufi orthodoxy too had sheikhs and their dynastic authority over the religion.
The emergence of various Islamic factions had managed to shatter this particular kind of hierarchical order and communised Islam. This became a huge blow to the Sufi Ahlussunnah establishment. So they mobilised the masses and manipulated them to adopt the language of violence to confront moderate forces. It was not Wahhabist who divided the Society.
Sufi orthodoxy that insisted upon preserving the unilateral order and tried to monopolise the religious discourse. This eventually led Wahhabists to create divisions, therefore, Saudi funded mosques were built.
Heterogeneous nature of Islam was completely dismantled by Sufis and the Wahhabists. The problem is Sufis are trying to whitewash their past by laying the guilt at Wahhabists’ doorsteps. But in reality, both groups are equally responsible for this chaos.
From the beginning, Wahhabi -Salafism has been an ideological deviation that backed the narrow -Arab ethnonationalism. The middle eastern petrol-monarchies nurtured Salafism in order to gain the religious legitimacy in their own revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
That goes back to the Ottoman Empire and the Palestinian discourse. Salafi -militancy had never been so-called political terrorism in existence which functions from a grass root level. The arrival of Wahhabism in Asia and other parts of the world were completely a cultural-religious phenomenon that had got nothing to do with politics. They self -identified themselves as the Puritans of Islam who devoted themselves to purify religion from various other sects whom they considered as potential polluters of Islam.
Except for Saudi Arabia, this particular group operated as a depoliticised ultra-conservative orthodoxy.
We must distinguish these differences in order to get a clear idea of their historical role. From the beginning, they considered the Palestinian struggle as non -Islamic. The discourse of politics had always been non-Islamic to them.
Evangelical Christian factions exist in America who are highly regressive. But at the same time, they actively interfere in secular politics such as in the anti-abortion lobby. They are the people who insist on censoring school textbooks that teach Darwin ‘s evolutionary theory and so on and so forth.
Every secular dispensation or any society that has its own ultra-conservative factions and are allowed to function within the democratic rights.
Evangelic claims are no lesser than the Wahhabist claim of purifying the religion. But in the case of Wahhabism, it is the militant identity that was imposed on it after the Cold War, has completely criminalised its public existence. Not every Wahhabist necessarily believe in political terrorism. It has various groups which speak the language of religion.
Just because one adopts the language of religion, doesn’t necessarily make him a terrorist. What we have to see is their agenda. Most of the Wahhabi factions are centred around culture talk. The very reaction to modernisation which one can find in any post-colonial societies in the world. This particular cultural logic cannot be used to label someone a terrorist.
First of all Islamic political terrorism is the product of the Cold War period and the groups are mongrel offspring of western intelligent agencies.
American empire made a shift from low intense wars to proxy open aggression in order to topple nationalist governments that came to existence after the world war-11, From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the governments were harshly confronted by the American empire. After the defeat of the Vietnam war, the US got itself into the Cold War where it fought wars through proxies. In Nicaragua, it was contras against the Sandinista nationalist government, Renamo in Mozambique and various other groups. The crucial point is those terrorist groups were secularists who carried out nihilist violence in the same pattern of contemporary self -styled Islamic state Isis.
The moment it decided to involve in Afghanistan conflict, Regan administration immediately appointed afghani opposition as its allies and announced to the world the Mujahideen of Afghan are moral equivalents of American’s founding fathers. Because the USA needed an ideological justification in order to communicate the American cause behind it.
Regan‘s words “War Against the Evil Empire“. He was the first one to adopt the language of religion to address a political conflict. Islam became the first choice to oppose godless communists. The militarization of madarasas supported it. The University of Nebraska received funds from USAID around 50 Million US dollars. Mamdani writes about the syllabus that was provided by an American institution to Afghani madrasas. A third-grade mathematics book asks; If one group of Mujahideen attacks 50 Russian soldiers, and if 20 Russians are killed, how many Russians fled?
US-sponsored textbooks radicalised afghani children. This is the kind of jihad that America waged on Afghani people. Remember afghani madarasas once used to produce the calibre of people like Jamal-Al-Din-Al Afghani. These institutions were handed over to local warlords and to people who ran the opium industry. CIA generated money from opium industry to fund its Jihad against the Soviet Union.
Let’s come to the point, Salafi -doctrine was used to convince the recruits which took place all over the Arab world. CIA funded people like Abdullah Azam to travel all over the world. Depoliticised Puritanical Islam was abused and used as a way to tap into Islamic Networks. Americans ideologised the war as Islamic. The Salafi doctrine was used as a slogan to mobilise people to fight the American Jihad.
Non-afghani fighters who were known as Afghan-Arabs were later called as hyphenated-identities. In the Indian subcontinent Devbandi school of thought which is the institutional authority of Sufi-Ahlussunnah tradition ( Sri Lankan racists use the term traditional Muslims – they belong to this sect ) highly depoliticised- quasi -seclusion group that uphold spirituality of religion as the way of life, were hugely manipulated and used as a proxy to mobilise foreign fighters .
Jamath-e-Islami has also played a huge role in recruiting cadres. CIA had 7 different Islamic groups on the ground, as a future arrangement that they prospected a sectarian war after the war. Thus Americans can get away with their crime and it will be the problem of Jihadists to clean up post-war Afghanistan. Each group reflected of fissures internal and external, to which the Afghan resistance was subject. On the other hand, the extremely sectarian characteristic of Islamist ideology enabled them to make it possible.
Easter Sunday attacker Zahraan (now he is the poster kid of Wahhabism) claims to be the adherent of Wahhabi Islam. But even before his outrageous political appearance in public, the Wahhabi doctrine had been an active ideological force among Muslims.
During the time of Jaffna expulsion, Wahhabist were there, busy at preaching their Puritanism. Why didn’t they send their cadres to blow themselves up on LTTE or any other political force that subjugated Muslims?
And in many other instances where Sinhala chauvinism Carried out pogroms on Sri Lankan Muslim minority, at any point there was never a militant confrontation came out from Muslims.
These crucial questions have to be asked in order to track down the real problem of this upshot that we witnessed on Easter Sunday.
Particularly this militant tendency begun to penetrate in this circle after the emergence of ISIS and the internet propaganda that went mainstream during 2012.
Many youngsters who had been the fans of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber turned out to be Islamic radicals, like any other part of the world. This particular type of lunacy created Jihadi hipsters. Some migrated to the Middle East, some remained covertly and sucked the blood of 259 people.
Long-standing ultra-conservative Wahhabi faction still has its various groups under its ideological umbrella. They all speak the language of religion. Still, they consider themselves as socially-oriented conservatives who are the ideological opponent of modern Islamic thought.
I don’t think one can deny the existence of the other on the basis of cultural or ideological differences, as long as they remain within the parameters of democratic space.
The battle against the ultra-conservative factions is the struggle of every community because each got its own.
the criminalisation of ideological identity is inherently undemocratic, those factions have to be confronted internally rather than external intervention.
The Muslim community has its own moderate forces that have been ideologically combatting ultra-conservative factions.
Understanding terror as a cultural phenomenon is highly misleading. This upheaval of militant tendency is the product of socio-political conditioning. As Mamdani writes it is none other than ‘rootless, bewildered and embittered hostages to a social condition that made them more or less prone to political nihilism.’
They were the strike force against the empire they had come to understand in a language they shared with Regan, as ‘evil’ the source of privatised Jihad and globalised terrorism in today ‘s world. The international Jihadis are the true ideological children of Regan‘s crusade against the evil empire.
The historical lesson is; A Political conflict should not be translated as a cultural or religious conflict. Because any ideology is susceptible to violence and when you tend to generalise, one ends up discarding all kind of political aspirations and ideologies. That is the lesson we learned from European modernity, where the revolutionary violence was idealised and mankind begun to believe that for noble reasons one can kill the fellow man.
Modern history serves as proof of that. Us vs Them, Pre-modern vs Modern, Islam vs West arguments are completely based on culture talk and the homogeneous wasteland.
The internal religious polemics have been the symbol of diversity. Like in any religion or society, the sects represent the multilateral discourse of those religion or society.
Criminalising such differences on the false notion can backfire and at the same time homogenisation of such arena, ruthlessly destroys the possibility of multilateral discourse and co-existence.
In the post-Easter, Sunday Sri Lanka unlike in any time in the history Muslim identity is not what it used to be.
To bear an identifiable Muslim name has become dangerous. Islam has become a political identity. Collective punishment was already enforced on Muslims. Every single aspect of Muslim life is being questioned. Media pundits, the covert racist intelligentsia are busy at demonising Muslims. Native informers are trying to track down the root of political terrorism with their culture talk.
In this crucial point of time, the aftermath of these attacks, beyond all the cultural talks and conspiracy theories, Muslim society in Sri Lanka, has to confront two particular types of terror.
- The radicalism that is seeping through blind corners of the Muslim society
- The systemic segregative racism that intensely trying to isolate and demonise Muslims.
In this hell which is made of binary logic, as people who bear unyielding love for humanity, we have to establish that grey area to confront both onslaughts, in order to create a condition for everyone to act upon their democratic aspirations and be treated equally regardless of their differences.
