The limits of tolerance: Islam as counter-hegemony

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The limits of tolerance: Islam as counter-hegemony?
TONY EVANS
 



Abstract.  
Following recent acts of terrorism in many parts of the world, Islam has become
an object of fear. While the threat of violence is undoubtedly an element that inspires this  fear, Islam’s counter-hegemonic threat is not limited to violence alone. Given its 1.2 billion   following, Islam also offers a challenge to the central values that describe the dominant   neo-liberal world order, particularly those values that legitimate the global political   economy. Although tolerance is an important value in liberal thought, tolerance cannot be   exercised where counter-hegemonic threats include challenges to the central tenets of
liberalism. This article argues that the current fear of Islam is motivated by just such a
challenge. By looking at four central concepts where liberal and Islamic thought diverge –
reason and revelation, private property, rights and duties, and government and state – this
article seeks to gain a more nuanced insight into current attitudes towards Islam and the
fear of counter-hegemony.
Tony Evans is Professor of Global Politics at the University of Southampton. He has
published widely in the field of human rights, global governance and law. His current
research looks at opposition to human rights discourses. This research will be published by
Lynne Rienner at the end of 2010.
Introduction
Following the terrorist attacks in New York, Bali, London and several other
locations, the advanced capitalist economies have come to regard militant Islam as
the single most important threat to achieving a ‘civilized’ global order that
promises democracy, human rights, and ever greater levels of economic prosperity.1
Movement towards achieving these ‘civilizing’ goals is built upon an economic
logic that valorises competition within a single global market. In contrast to views
associated with Orientialism, which stress backwardness, an inclination to laziness,
a lack of ‘reason’, and a level of immaturity that demands constant paternal care,
the dominant neo-liberal order emphasises the virtues of liberty, individualism,
tolerance, science, and progress. While ‘people like us’ are educated, creative, and
* This article was written during the author’s tenure of a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. The author
would like to thank the Trust for its generosity. The author would also like to thank Annie Taylor,
Katherine Brown, John Glenn, Siba Grovogui, and two anonymous reviews for their comments on
an earlier draft. An earlier version was presented at the ISA Annual Conference, Chicago, 2007.
1 For an example of American attitudes towards Islam published before 9/11 see, Fawaz A. Gerges,
Journal of Palestine Studies, 26:2 (1997), pp. 68–80. See also, Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam:
Partners, Resources, and Strategies, Report by the RAND Corporation 2003.
Review of International Studies (2011), 37, 1751–1773 2010 British International Studies Association
doi:10.1017/S0260210510000185 First published online 21 May 2010
1751
forward looking, ‘people over there’ are hidebound by cultural and religious
traditions that breed intolerance, ignorance, and suppression.2 In contrast to
Enlightenment values that helped create some notion of Western superiority,
Muslims are cast as the ‘other’:3 that category of people possessing no sense of
reason and therefore in need of constant guidance and correction. Seen from this
view, the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is a reaction to ‘alien’ ways of thinking,
knowing, and acting that are understood as impeding social forces associated with
economic globalisation. Although rhetoric and policy retain a focus on action
against militant Islam, the argument presented here is that Islam’s potential for
counter-hegemony provides the political context for that action.
Given this contextualisation, Islam can be seen as an ‘offspring of modernity’:
as a move to a place newly created rather than a retreat to a tradition.4 Adopting
this approach acknowledges the dialectic materialist character of globalisation,
which Marxists have long argued provides the engine for change.5 The recent
politicisation of Islam, from both within and outside Muslim society, is thus a
consequence of an emergent global political economy that is intolerant of divergent
socio-political alternatives created by its own movement.6 What emerges from this
is a new politics of identity, difference, and exclusion, which finds expression in the
re-articulation of core traditions, providing discontented groups with a place to
register their grievances.7 As Butko has noted, Islamic counter-hegemonic movements
focus upon uniting the people behind an alternative world view that
challenges modernisation and its social consequences.8
It does not follow from these preliminary remarks that groups closest to the
centre of economic globalisation will unfailingly react to all and any resistance to
the ambitions of global capital. Many instances of resistance have little appeal
beyond their immediate locale, and those that achieve a wider audience are often
inspired by disparate motivations, as the ‘Battle in Seattle’ demonstrated.9 What
makes Islam exceptional in the eyes of the neo-liberal order is its vast membership,
its potential as a global mass movement, and its distinctive and complex tradition
2 Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
3 For a critique of the assumed superiority of the West see Sophie Bessis, Western Supremacy: triumph
of an idea?, trans. Patrick Camille (London: Zed Books, 2003). Also, Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing
Western Civilization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).
4 Aziz Al-Azmeh, ‘Postmodern Obscurantism and ‘The Muslim Question’, Journal for the Study of
Religions and Ideologies, 5 (2003), pp. 20–47.
5 Malcolm D. Brown, ‘An Ethnographic Reflection on Muslim-Christian Dialogue in the North of
France: The Context of Laicite’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 13 (2002), pp. 5–23.
6 Peter Mandaville, Transitional Muslim Politics (London: Routledge, 2001). To sustain this view,
intellectual and political authority engaged in the politics of globalisation posits a monolithic Islam,
opposed in every respect to the values that describe some equally monolithic version of the ‘West’.
7 Nancy Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Age’,
New Left Review, 212 (1995b), pp. 68–93; Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review
(May–June 2000), pp. 107–20.
8 T. Butko, ‘Revelation and Revolution: A Gramscian Approach to the Rise of Political Islam’, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 31:1 (2004), pp. 41–62.
9 For an analysis of the ‘Battle in Seattle’ see, for example, J. A. L. Alves, ‘The Declaration of Human
Rights in Postmodernity’, Human Rights Quarterly, 22:2 (2000), pp. 478–500. M. Chossudovsky,
‘World Trade Organisation (WTO): An illegal organisation that violates the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights’ [Electronic Version] (1999); E. Paine, The Road to the Global Compact, Global
Policy Forum Report (2000).
1752 Tony Evans
of religious belief, political ideology, social norms, world outlook, and philosophical
method. Taken together, these characteristics appear to challenge all the central
values upon which the project for the global expansion of neo-liberalism is built.
Describing Islam as a unique global movement, dedicated to defending its followers
from further cultural and spiritual encroachment, and by any means at its disposal,
gives it the appearance of a counter-hegemonic force capable of mounting a
successful challenge to the global neo-liberal order.10
The assertion that Islam is dedicated to changing Western values has become
a common-place theme in European and North American society. In this regard,
Islam is presented as a monolithic, proselytising creed dedicated to undermining,
overturning, and eventually replacing the values that have sustained capital growth
on a global scale. This was recognised by Edward Said, who asserted that the fear
of Islam had increased since the publication of his seminal book, Orientalism,
arguing that ‘it is still considered a threat, something that must be walled out’, a
place for ‘terrorists and fanatics.’11 A more recent expression of this fear was seen
when talk-show host Dennis Prager asserted that the first Muslim member of
Congress (Keith Ellison: D-Minn) threatens to ‘imperil’ America simply because he
intended to be sworn in on the Qur’an, not the Bible.12
This fear does not, of course, acknowledge the wide theological and cultural
differences between Islamic communities. Apart from the most obvious split
between Sunnis and Shiites, cultural filters have seen the emergence of Islam in
may forms: Persian, Arab, South-East Asian, African and Middle-Eastern, each
with its own agenda, attitudes to radicalism, and social practices. Just as there are
many forms of Christianity, so too there are many forms of Islam. No matter the
reality, the image of Islam in European and North American population’s looms
large as a single movement, dedicated to spreading its religious and cultural order
throughout the world.
It is not the purpose of this article to examine the claims and counter-claims
of Islam and its opponents in an effort to explicate the ‘true’ interpretation of the
scriptures and religious texts. Nor is it concerned with drawing out the differences
and similarities between different cultural instances of Islam. Rather, the article is
concerned to examine the underlying causes of the ‘fear’ of Islam currently found
in Western society. As Andrew O’Hagan has observed ‘Islamophobia is one of the
big questions of our day’, presenting a problem that is most often answered ‘with
ignorance or with common hysteria, and almost never with fresh thinking.’
Accordingly, he argues that the damage this brings to bear on our own society is
‘making a monster where it shouldn’t exist, a monster made from the mania of our
own fear?’13 It is the underlying cause for creating this ‘monster’ that this article
seeks to address.14
10 The history of Islam indicates that the globalisation of the faith has long been a goal for Muslims.
This is a theme regularly explored by Islamic scholars. For a good introduction to this theme see
W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1968).
11 International Herald Tribune (11 March 1996). See also Edward Said, Orientalism (London,
Routledge, 1976) and Kegan Paul.
12 See, among other reports of this instance, {http://mediamatters.org/items/200612060001}.
13 Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Fear is Ruining Our Chance of Peace, The Daily Telegraph (8 April 2008).
14 Recent research conducted at Cardiff University has show that a fear of Islam is prevalent in the
UK, citing both the fear of terrorism and the challenge to social values as the main reasons. See the
The limits of tolerance 1753
The article begins with a brief discussion of tolerance, which is often presented
as a core principle of the neo-liberal global order. It argues that tolerance is
practiced only to the extent that counter-hegemonic challenges do not threaten to
move from expressions of discontent to actively promoting alternative futures. In
the case of Islam, this point is reached when Islam appears to mount a challenge
to core values that sustain the neo-liberal order. It then moves to discuss four core
values over which neo-liberal and Islamic thought diverges: reason and revelation,
property, rights and duties, and government and the state. Through these
discussions the article demonstrates that the fear of Islam is deeply rooted in the
challenge it appears to represent to the dominant neo-liberal global order.
Counter-hegemony and the limits of tolerance
Recent literature has emphasised the disciplinary mode of social organisation,
which functions largely without need of coercion and on a global scale. Its purpose
is to imbue the individual with particular ways of thinking, thus instilling modes
of social consciousness that make social action both predictable and in the service
of particular interests. Discipline is learned in the day-to-day complex of social life,
for example, through institutional training received in the family, the school, the
university, the church, and the workplace, where notions of correct and incorrect
behaviour and thought are clearly delimited. The epithet ‘common sense’ is
achieved when a particular mode of thought or conduct is unquestioningly
accepted as normal and natural.15 ‘Common sense’ represents a category of rules
that are rarely articulated explicitly in legal statue or constitutional form but
nonetheless provide the foundation for generating and maintaining norms, and
processes of ‘normalization’, that legitimate law and constitutional limits. In this
sense, discipline operates without ‘compulsion, but nevertheless, [exerts] a collective
pressure and [obtains] results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of
thinking and acting.’16
From the perspective of ‘common sense’ as disciplinary social order, power is
not located within governments or particular factions, classes, institutions, or
cadres, but is instead exercised in the actions of everyday life. In contrast to past
eras, where the exercise of power was associated with readily identifiable agents,
who operated irregularly and intermittently, discipline in the age of globalisation
operates continuously, without conscious agency, and with a global reach. The
distinctive characteristic of disciplinary ‘common sense’ is that it replaces violence
and the threat of violence with more temperate modes of action associated with
Guardian (4 July 2008). The outrage expressed following the speech of the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s in February 2008, in which he expressed the view that it was ‘inevitable’ that some
shari’a law would be accepted in the UK, and the subsequent speech by the most senior Judge in
the UK, Lord Phillips, expressing similar views, gives some indication that the fear of value change
is central to the populations thought on Islam. See, the Guardian (7 July 2008).
15 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Selections from the Prison Notebooks’ edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey
Smith (London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1996).
16 Ibid.
1754 Tony Evans
visibility through surveillance.17 This is not to argue that the use of violence will
play an ever diminishing role within the contemporary world order. There will still
be times when discipline breaks down, where the excluded and potentially
disruptive threaten peace and civility. Should the institutions of global governance
fail to pacify such groups, by providing ‘poor relief’, the military and police are
used as ‘riot control’. In this way, threats to the emerging structures of the global
order are minimised by mollifying or oppressing ‘chaos in the bottom layer.’18
Critics of neo-liberal notions of power have argued that the institutionalisation
and valorisation of a particular set of values, for instance those concerning
property rights and concepts of freedom, obscures and conceals the processes of
domination that lie beneath normal social practice.19 Gill, for example, has referred
to the most prominent discipline within the current global order as ‘market
discipline’, which stresses economic growth and development, deregulation, the free
market, the privatisation of public services, individual freedoms, and minimum
government.20 Market discipline describes a set of normative relationships with a
global reach, supported by discourses of truth, and widely accepted as ‘common
sense’. These relationships are manifest at both the domestic and global level, for
example, in national and international economic planning, market-based solutions
for environmental degradation, the move to privatise social welfare provision, and
the move to privatise life itself, seen in the scramble to patent the genes of both
human and non-human life forms. Surveillance is undertaken by international and
regional agencies, for example, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World
Bank, the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). Each of these is understood as the authentic voice of market discipline
and each exercises systems of surveillance and data collection on a global and
regional scale, designed to detect any deviations from ‘normal’ socio-economic
practice.
It is common to find proponents of market discipline arguing that the new
‘politics of recognition demands new expressions of sensitivity to difference and new
possibilities for expanding the range of permissible disagreements.’21 This is the
virtue of tolerance, which is a fundamental principle of social pluralism. However,
market discipline does not extend tolerance to all groups, ideas and values. Instead,
tolerance is extended only to those who accept the general purposes of market
discipline by adopting its values and following the ‘correct’ procedures for realising
the ‘good life’. Those who attempt to challenge the general principles of the
dominant economic, social and political order are tolerated only in so far as they
‘do not seek to make the transition from word to deed, from speech to action’.22
This is the condition of ‘repressive tolerance’, which Marcuse argues is little more
17 Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions’, in Barry
Smart (ed.), Michel Foucault (2): Critical Assessment (London: Routledge, 1995a), pp. 133–48.
18 Robert Cox, ‘Democracy in hard times: economic globalization and the limits to liberal democracy’,
in Anthony McGrew (ed.), The Transformation of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997),
pp. 49–75.
19 Duncan Ivison, ‘The Disciplinary Moment: Foucault, Law and the Reincription of Rights’, Jeremy
Moss (ed.), The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 129–48.
20 Stephen Gill, ‘Globalization, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, in Millennium:
Journal of International Studies, 24 (1995), pp. 399–423.
21 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
22 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in R. P. Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse
(eds), A Critique of Tolerance (Boseon: Beacon Press, 1969).
The limits of tolerance 1755
than a ‘market-place of ideas’ in which notions of the ‘good life’ compete for
attention within the confines of a particular version of social order, currently that
described by market discipline.23
Within this social order, the role of civil society is to defend the social and
economic norms associated with the global marketplace. Normalisation demands
that the ‘individual who enters these civil spaces is expected to adopt a certain
stance towards his or her own person and towards others.’24 Those who cannot or
will not embrace the values embodied in civil society are treated as ignorant,
ill-informed beings, lacking the moral capacity to engage fully in decisions about
their own interests.25 Tolerance and civility are therefore concerned with the
preservation and management of a particular form of civil society, a narrowing of
the political agenda and the exclusion of actors whose voices appear as a threat.
In neo-liberal societies, tolerance is practised by legitimating a set of civil liberties
and freedoms that are granted to all citizens, regardless of ‘race, colour, sex,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property,
birth or other status’.26 Against this expression of formal equality and tolerance,
however, is the actual practice of tolerance, which cannot be divorced from power
relations, relations that determine what will or will not be tolerated. For Marcuse,
in the face of repressive tolerance and inequality ‘the idea of available alternatives
evaporates into an utterly utopian dimension’ because the dominant world order
is characterised by ‘indoctrination’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘extraneous authority.’27
Summed up succinctly by Marcuse, progress towards tolerance is ‘perhaps more
than before asserted by violence and suppression on a global scale’, when tolerance
is extended to ‘policies, conditions, and modes of behaviour which should not be
tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an
existence without fear and misery’.28 Tolerance may therefore perform the task of
‘closure’ by excluding alternatives that threaten the existing order, for example, by
defining legitimate rights claims as a legal problem rather than one best understood
within the context of the global political economy or by treating resistance to
market discipline as perpetrated by ‘evil doers’ rather than as a consequences of the
prevailing socio-economic global order.29 From this perspective, Islam offers an
example of the perceived failure to embrace market discipline as ‘common sense’,
and therefore a counter-hegemonic threat to the global capitalist project. Following
Antonio Gramsci, to the extent that consensus and ‘common sense’ prevails so too
does hegemony.30
Thus, hegemony provides a form of latent coercion sufficient to ensure
conformity of action in most people most of the time. The material success of
23 Ibid.
24 Mustapha Kamel Pasha and David L. Blaney, ‘Elusive Paradise: The Promise and Perils of Global
Civil Society’, Alternatives, 23 (1998), pp. 417–540.
25 Barry Hindess, ‘Power and Rationality: The Western Conception of Political Community’,
Alternatives, 17 (1992), pp. 149–63.
26 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2.
27 Herbert Marcuse ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in R. P Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse
(eds), A Critique of Tolerance (Boseon: Beacon Press, 1969).
28 Ibid., p. 82.
29 President George W. Bush was fond of using the phrase ‘evil-doers’ in speeches following the events
of 9/11.
30 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Selections from the Prison Notebooks’, edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey
Smith (London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1996).
1756 Tony Evans
hegemony built across Europe, North America and some parts of Asia has
encouraged neo-liberals to press less developed states to adopt certain elements of
the hegemonic model as a means for creating a single, integrated world economy.31
To achieve this goal demands a passive revolution within less developed states that
legitimises new ways of thinking and acting, ways that are appropriate for engaging
with the hegemonic order. However, lacking the economic and social evolution
experienced in the advanced global economy, the effort to achieve rapid integration
through inserting certain elements of the hegemonic order into existing social and
cultural practices is often perceived as a threat to traditional notions of identity.
Both Cox and Mittelman, for example, argue that the new socio-economic context
of globalisation demands that a proportion of production in less developed states
is shifted to export goods as the means to gaining a foothold in global markets.
While this may produce greater opportunities for some groups to enter the
wage-earning economy (for example, women), it also disadvantages others who
must bear the cost of higher levels of unemployment and social deprivation.
Furthermore, the shift in production also bring changes in social relations,
challenging existing values and social norms that often clash with the values
inherent in Islam.32
Consequently, many Islamic leaders and intellectuals have sought to project
Islam as a revolutionary vehicle, a vehicle that unifies and disciplines the masses
whose lives are touched by the attempt to insert the norms and values of global
hegemony. As Youssef Choueiri has observed, thinkers like Qutb, al-Mawdudi,
and Khomeini all sought to articulate a new political theory based upon religious
foundations that secured a contemporary Islamic discourse for government. For
them, ‘change had to be total, comprehensive, and revolutionary’ because they saw
‘no possibility of coexistence between Islam and other political and social
systems.’33 It is important to note here that the attempt to construct a viable
counter-hegemonic movement capable of driving back the values associated with
neo-liberalism was most often directed at national governments engaged in
programmes of modernisation rather than at those at the centre of the global
hegemonic project. More will be said on this later.
Tolerance, fear and Islamic political economy
Of the many alternatives to the tenets of the neo-liberal global order offered by
Islam, four will be discussed here: the consequences that flow from the distinction
between reason and revelation; the role of property within the political economy;
31 Robert W. Cox, ‘Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: An essay on method’, in Stephen
Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993). Cox argues that the tradition of International Relations, which seeks to
express world order as the relations between states, has masked the exercise of power in its
historically social class form.
32 R. W. Cox, ‘Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: An essay in method’ in S. Gill (ed.),
Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 49–66; J. H. Mittelman and C. B. N. Chin, The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation
and Resistance (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2000).
33 Quoted in T. Butko, ‘Revelations or Revolution: A Gramscian Approach to the Rise of Political
Islam’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 31:1 (2004), pp. 41–62.
The limits of tolerance 1757
universal human rights as individual claims; and the role of the legitimate
government and state. It is worth reiterating here that the purpose of this analysis
is to gain an insight into the West’s fear of Islam and not to offer a detailed critical
view of the subtly, complexity, and alternatives that Islamic thought offers in its
counter-hegemonic movement.
Reason and revelation
The distinction between reason and revelation as philosophical method is key to
understanding Islamic political economy.34 This is so because, as Gramsci argues,
modes of thinking and knowing are integral to creating and maintaining
hegemony. While the Enlightenment tradition seeks philosophical ‘truth’ through
the application of reason, Islam seeks ‘truth’ through revelation.35 Following from
the Islamic premise that the earthly realm is God’s creation, all human capacities
and capabilities are God given, constituting a ‘divine sovereignty’ which demands
religious devotion. The revealed word of God, which the Prophet recorded in the
Qur’an fourteen centuries ago, sets down moral truths as a guide for building a just
social order within which all Muslims can find both material and spiritual security.
These truths include the duty of the individual, the family, and the wider Muslim
community (ummah) to participate in creating and sustaining social relations for
realising God’s design.36 In this sense, revelation serves to bridge the divide
between the earthly and the heavenly realms, where the former is characterised as
the day-to-day struggle for survival and the satisfaction of physiological and
material needs, and the latter as a transcendent realm beyond earthly desires, which
satisfies psychological and spiritual needs.
From the perspective of revelation, it follows that any attempt to separate the
physiological and material from the psychological and spiritual aspects of human
existence, which is central to Enlightenment thought, must be rejected. Qutb, for
example, explains this rejection through his critique of Thomas Hobbes, who he
claims emphasises reason and the acquisition of knowledge at the expense of
revelation. In Qutb’s reading of Hobbes, knowledge of the natural world opens the
possibility of imagining a future where the failure to satisfy natural appetites is less
likely. Reason therefore offers the potential to satisfy physiological needs through
the exploitation of nature to generate surpluses.37 However, the state of nature
determines that others may attempt to satisfy their own physiological needs
34 Antony Black, ‘Classical Islam and Medieval Europe: A comparison of Political Philosophies and
Culture’, Political Studies, 41(1993), pp. 58–69.
35 The term ‘reason’ is not used here in the Orientalist sense, which contrasts Western rationality and
its application to science, philosophy and social organisation with non-Western irrationality and
ignorance. Instead, ‘reason’ and revelation are understood here as equally valid modes of rationality,
each dedicated to discovering truths about the natural world and humankinds place within it. The
will of God revealed through Islamic theology is as rational for Muslims as the empirical world
revealed through scientific method is for western thought.
36 Ali Mohammadi, ‘The culture and politics of human rights in the context of Islam’, in Al Mohammadi
(ed.), Islam and Encountering Globalization (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), pp. 111–30.
37 Of course, neo-liberal political economy does not satisfy the material needs of all. Rather, it meets
the needs of those who possess the purchasing power. It cannot therefore be claimed that
neo-liberalism provides security in the broad sense of the term, which includes economic security.
1758 Tony Evans
through appropriation. Hobbes therefore proposes a social contract where citizens
surrender some liberty to a ‘leviathan’ in exchange for security defined by rights
over property. Accordingly, Qubt argues that the role of the secular state is limited
to the physiological needs of citizens.38 Socio-psychological needs remain a private
matter of faith and religious devotion, a sphere of social life in which the state has
little interest and, therefore, no legitimate claim to interfere.39 Thus, Qutb claims
that Hobbes explicitly rejects the need for the state to engage with issues of
religious belief and instead focuses upon the material world.40
For these reasons, the secularist turn found in most advanced capitalist
economies, which separates the state’s duty from duties associated with religious
observance, and which assigns religion to the private world, is rejected by Islamic
scholars. For Islam, the social world must be investigated as a ‘unity between
worship and work, ideology or creed and behaviour, spirituality and materiality,
economic symbolic value, the world and immortality, heaven and earth.’41 In
Islamic thought, the development of distinctive disciplines in economics, international
relations, politics, philosophy, sociology, law, and theology – each with its
own language, methodology, and normative context, brings only confusion, partial
truths and conflict. While Enlightenment thought encouraged a methodology that
seeks ‘truth’ through an examination of every facet of society in isolation, Islam
adopts a holistic approach; an ‘Islamic spirit’ that is realised only when the
individual’s consciousness is awakened by submission to the will of God.42 In
short, many Islamic scholars argue that the Enlightenment project to abandon
holistic thought, its preference for a methodology that focuses upon the parts
rather than the whole, and its rejection of God as the source of ‘truth’, creates a
social order that fails to satisfy either the physiological or psychological needs of
humankind.43 For many proponents of Islam, the schism between physiological
and psychological needs is the major cause of decadence found in developed
neo-liberal states, where the instances of family breakdown, drugs, violent crime,
and social dislocation threaten the collapse of social order.
Although from the perspective of Enlightenment thought, Hobbes’ rationale
and ambitious programme offers an optimistic view of human progress, viewed
38 Ronald. A. T. Judy, ‘Sayyid Qutb’s Fiqh al-waqi’i, or New Realist Science’, Boundary 2, 31 (2004),
pp. 113–49.
39 J. Plamentaz (ed.), Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (London: Fontana, William Collins, 1969).
40 Secularism does not imply that a society lacks religious conviction, as is seen in the US, with its
millions of ‘born-again’ Christians. Instead, secularism implies the separation of religious beliefs
from the political, social, and economic decision-making. For example, Article 1 of the US Bill of
rights states categorically that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances.’ Article IV of the US constitution states that ‘no religious Test shall ever be required as
a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States’, explicitly forbids the adoption
of a state religion and the practice of religion in schools.
41 Qutb quoted in Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘Sayyid Qutb’s Fiqh al-waqi’i, or New Realist Science’, boundary
2, 31 (2004), pp. 113–49.
42 Mohmood Monshipouri, ‘Islamic Thinking and the Internationalization of Human Rights’, The
Muslim World LXXXIV (1994), pp. 217–39.
43 This is not to argue that a clear division can be made between the freedoms claimed by the
individual and those claimed by the community. Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers were concerned
with investigating questions of how the individual can be free within community. However, the
liberal focus on the individual is widely accepted. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract,
trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983).
The limits of tolerance 1759
from Islam it offers the prospect of a socio-economic order that fails to deliver
spiritual and moral guidance. By contrast, the Islamic version of the social contract
is said to actively assert a normative foundation that seeks to go beyond the mere
satisfaction of physiological need by extending that satisfaction to the psychological,
spiritual and moral needs of the whole community. As Judy explains, it is a
contract that seeks to awaken the individual’s consciousness to Allah’s guidance on
the nature of the universe and humankinds place within it. Any claim to knowledge
that fails to accept the ‘truth’ of Allah’s guidance, or otherwise pre-empts the
possibility of engaging that ‘truth’, is seen by Islamic scholarship as the very
definition of ignorance (Jahiliya).44 Consequently, the struggle to gain a greater
knowledge of the material world alone must fail if it produces a disconnected and
temporal form of knowledge that cannot provide the foundations for creating
forms of community based upon social justice and a stable moral order.
The opposition between knowledge as reason and knowledge as revelation
provides the foundation for many disagreements between a neo-liberal and Islamic
political economy. As Hoogvelt has noted, it is an ontological difference theorised
in a self-serving contrast of identity and progress, where capital is cast in the role
of economic dynamo ‘because it [is] universal, rational, pluralist and secular’, while
the ‘Orient [is] economically stagnant because it [is] particularistic, traditional,
despotic, wallowing in religious obscurantism, and therefore stagnant.’45 While
neo-liberals focus on the satisfaction of material needs, personal security, and
secular forms of government and society, Islam emphasises both material and
spiritual needs, security for the community, and forms of earthly government that
fulfil Allah’s moral vision for humankind. For Islam, a philosophy that rejects
revelation can lead only to social formations full of decadence, moral decay,
illegitimate laws, and corrupt government. Marshalling the values that spring from
revelation in order to mount a counter-hegemonic movement is therefore a central
concern for Islam.
The distinction between knowledge and truth derived from the application of
reason and that derived from revelation brings consequences for values associated
with the political economy. Most centrally, Islam’s notion of property differs from
that held by neo-liberal societies in ways that challenge the foundations upon
which the global capitalist project is built. It is to this that we now turn.
Property
Islam’s understanding of property begins by recognising that ‘God gave dominion
over all the assets of the world, including the sun and moon, the sea, animals, the
firmament.’46 However, from the earliest days of Islam these principles were not
unconditional. In the decade following the death of the Prophet, for example, Abu
Dharr argued that any wealth created beyond the needs of subsistence, including
44 Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘Sayyid Qutb’s Fiqh al-waqi’i, or New Realist Science’, boundary 2, 31 (2004),
pp. 113–49.
45 Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), emphasis in original.
46 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
1760 Tony Evans
wealth created through the exploitation of labour and nature, should be used to
fulfil the command of God, which was to further the spiritual and material
wellbeing of the ummah. In fulfilment of this duty, it was prerequisite for those
engaged in any form of wealth creation to acknowledge a duty to provide for those
unable to secure the basic necessities of subsistence through the application of their
own skills and talents.47 To reinforce this limitation on wealth, the starving and
destitute were permitted to take whatever was needed to sustain life, without fear
of punishment. Zakat, the duty to give charity, is one aspect of this restriction on
wealth and property.48
A more recent manifestation of Islamic principles relating to property was
articulated by Habubullah Peyman, following the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Peyman argued that there is no prohibition on the ownership of private property.
Nor does the Qur’an denounce the inequalities that derive from an unequal
distribution of wealth, the ownership of the means of production or the pursuit of
profit and the use of wage labour. However, since all material assets are a gift from
God to the Muslim world, resources must be made available to any Muslim who
wants to apply his or her creative labour to those resources.49 This is the Islamic
doctrine of ‘peoples ownership’, which in line with John Locke, begins by asserting
that one has legitimate ownership only over the goods produced by ones own
labour. Unlike Locke, however, property rights under Islam are limited by a
‘sufficiency principle’, which ordains that property rights are restricted to satisfying
ones own needs, and those of one’s family. Muslims therefore have a duty to freely
redistribute excess wealth beyond their own needs to those who are unable to
provide for themselves through their own endeavours. Crucially, since labour is the
only legitimate means for creating wealth, receiving wages and a share of profits,
there is no legitimacy in a share-holding corporation, where the exploitation of
labour is separated from rights to take profits.50
Against a background of growing resentment over conspicuous wealth,
accumulation, the increasing gap between rich and poor, an awareness of structural
exclusion on a global scale, and the erosion of time-honoured approaches to social
welfare as the market demands cuts or the abolition of transfer payments, Muslim
societies often reject neo-liberal principles of property and turn instead to those
offered by Islam. In some cases, this has opened the space for Muslim socialists to
promote the economic principles expressed in the Qur’an. In the 1970s, for
example, Ali Shariati wrote extensively on an Islamicised version of historical
materialism, which sought to offer a radical reading of Shi’ism. According to
Shariati, the central teachings of Islam offer the oppressed, the poor, and the
excluded the means to achieve emancipation from further class conflict. Most
significantly, and of particular concern for the capitalist global economy, Shariati
argued that the abolition of all institutions associated with property would lead to
47 Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism (London: Alan Lane, 1974).
48 Zakat is usually calculated at a minimum of 2.5 per cent of wealth, not income. While this may be
achievable during times of growth and prosperity, in times of depression it may strain any economy.
A general fall in profits makes zakat less sustainable at a time when there is growing unemployment.
49 Suhrub Behdad, ‘Islamization of Economics in Iranian Universities’, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, 27 (1995), pp. 193–217.
50 Nikhil Aziz, ‘Human Rights Debate in an Era of Globalization: Hegemony of Discourse’, in Peter
Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia (London:
Routledge, 1999), pp. 32–55.
The limits of tolerance 1761
a more just and classless society.51 These arguments found a sympathetic ear in the
People’s Mujahedine and other Muslim organisations dedicated to promoting a
political economy that generated further movement towards achieving a particular
kind of social order, which they claimed was revealed in the sacred texts.52
For many interpretations of Islam, therefore, wealth creation is not concerned
solely with investment, profit maximisation and personal aggrandisement. Indeed,
under Islamic economics, the duty to use surplus wealth for the good of the ummah
demands that investment and production activity include social utility calculations
before proceeding. This could, for example, include the goal of full employment,
environmental protection, health provision, poverty alleviation, social welfare, and
social housing.53 The aim of profit maximisation is not, therefore, concerned solely
with increasing personal wealth, although this is not prohibited, but must also be
concerned with increasing the wellbeing of the ummah. In short, and by definition,
legitimate economic activity is concerned with both wealth creation and social
justice. Accordingly, ‘before entering the market place and being exposed to the
price filter, consumers are expected to pass their claims through the moral filter’.54
This reflective process is intended to sift out socially harmful investment and
production activities and to act as a guide for consumer choice. Thus, according
to the Islamic view of property, the moral and price filters satisfy both spiritual and
material needs within a socio-economic order that seeks to satisfy the physiological
and psychological needs of the community.
An attempt to express these principles is seen in the Constitution of the Islamic
Republic of Iran. The preamble states that the purpose of the economy is to make
provision for the material needs of the population, which is not an end in itself but
a means for attaining the ‘ultimate goal’ of living by Islamic principles and norms.
This is contrasted to the prevailing global orthodoxy, and ‘materialist schools of
thought’, where the economy is seen as an end in itself, ‘so that it comes to be a
subversive and corrupting factor in the course of man’s development.’
From this viewpoint, the economic programme of Islam consists of providing the means
needed for the emergence of the various creative capacities of the human being.
Accordingly, it is the duty of the Islamic government to furnish all citizens with equal and
appropriate opportunities, to provide them with work, and to satisfy their essential needs,
so that the course of their progress may be assured.55
From the perspective of Islamic economics, the efficient allocation of resources
does not exclude the possibility of private property or self-serving activity to create
wealth. However, the well-being of all members of the ummah is the central
purpose of economic activity, and this cannot be achieved in an environment that
fails to promote socio-economic justice. While the market does contribute to the
efficient allocation of resources, competition within markets alone does not meet
the moral standards expected to achieve Islamic socio-economic justice. In contrast
51 For a brief outline of Ali Shariati’s work see Suhrub Behdad, ‘Islamization of Economics in Iranian
Universities’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (1995), pp. 193–217.
52 Of course, the sacred texts of all religions have always been open to particular interpretations. The
case of the Mujahedine is no different in this respect.
53 Karen Pfeifer, ‘Political Islam: Essays from the Middle East Report’, Report by the Middle East
Research and Information Project (1997).
54 M. Umer Chapra, ‘Islamic Economics: What Is It and How It Developed’, in Economic History Net,
edited by Economic History Association: Economic History Association (2006).
55 The Constitution of the Republic of Iran can be found at {http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/ir00000_.html}.
1762 Tony Evans
to the ‘culturally approved behaviour model for a neo-liberal market society based
on private property and competition’, which remains the dominant order in the
global economy, Islamic economics rejects the rational economic actor model in
favour of one that gives central place to social welfare and justice.56
Consequently, although the individual does have a duty to strive to create
wealth, when this choice is made it cannot be realised other than within the context
of the ummah. Without the stability and predictability provided by the rules and
norms that describe the ummah, the avaricious individual must lead an isolated,
atomised, egotistic existence separated from the community. To engage in
economic activity merely to generate wealth dedicated to ones own enjoyment,
personal aggrandisement or the craven satisfaction of a lust for power as
sanctioned by the global neo-liberal order, is to exploit the ummah in ways that are
morally repugnant. It is this that motivates Islam’s claims for ethical superiority
over neo-liberal hegemony, as practiced under conditions of globalisation. Furthermore,
the spiritual dimension in Islam’s economic thought, and the existence
of a moral community whose boundaries do not coincide with the state and the
modern state system, provides an alternative image of globalisation that is
unacceptable to neo-liberalism and its proponents.
The rights of the individual
Following from the contrasting tradition of property rights in Islam, as opposed
to that under neo-liberalism, is the role of universal human rights as the rights of
the individual. The success of human rights associated with market discipline can
be seen in claims that in ‘virtually all regions of the world [. . .] there is broad
acceptance of the triad of human rights, free markets and democracy as desirable,
attainable policy objectives.’57 Of course, the rights referred to here assume a
particular conception of rights, defined as the freedom of the individual to invest
time, capital, and resources in processes of production and exchange.58 They are
the rights that are said to release the creative potential of humankind in the pursuit
of wealth, benefiting all sections of society through the ‘trickle-down’ mechanism.
However, while it may be possible to claim that all peoples throughout the
world do now, as a matter of fact, embrace the concept of human rights, there can
be no certainty that the particular conception of human rights associated with
market discipline has achieved universal acceptance. Indeed, as Pasha and Blaney
argue, the effort to promote particular notions of civility, by proclaiming the ‘truth’
and ‘universality’ of a particular conception of human rights or democracy, may
add to the ‘sense of grievance that motivates a politics that transgresses civility.’59
This sense of grievance is at the root of Islam’s objections to the current dominant
56 Karen Pfeifer, ‘Political Islam: Essays from the Middle East Report’, Report by the Middle East
Research and Information Project (1997).
57 M. Conley and D. Livermore, ‘Human Rights, Development and Democracy’, Canadian Journal of
Development Studies XIXI (1996), pp. 19–26.
58 Mary A. Tetrault, ‘Regimes and Liberal World Order’, Alternatives, 13 (1988), pp. 5–26.
59 Mustapha Kamel Pasha and David L. Blaney, ‘Elusive Paradise: The Promise and Perils of Global
Civil Society’, Alternatives, 23 (1998), pp. 417–540.
The limits of tolerance 1763
discourse of human rights. As many Islamic scholars argue, while the dominant
human rights discourse emphasises rights and the individual, Islam favours duties
and community.
Islam claims to have no difficulty in entering a discourse of universal human
rights.60 As noted above, Islamic thought looks to revelation as the foundation on
which to build its moral framework, including notions of universal human rights.
Accordingly, since God created humankind, and rights are an attribute of
humankind, rights are God given and therefore attract the utmost respect. This
revelation inspired Islamic scholars to create a discourse of rights in the early days
of the ummah. Although these scholarly works spring from different branches of
Islam and from different cultural traditions, Mayer argues that it is still possible
to identify dominant human rights themes throughout Islamic thought.61 In
particular, she cites the work of al-Farabi in the tenth century and Ibn Rushd
(Averroës) in the twelfth century, who Mayer’s claims come closest to acknowledging
the application of reason in pursuit of rights, truth, and justice.62 However,
these earlier discourses on justice and rights served only to reinforce the prevailing
view that justice should be garnered from divine revelation found in the Qur’an
and Shari’a law, which embody God’s wisdom and will.
Following the conclusion reached in these historic debates has encouraged
many religious leaders to argue that the Islamic system of ethics and rights is not
in need of further revision.63 Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, asserted that rights
established through reason (natural rights) were a fiction, and that believers should
therefore submit to the word of God, where the limits of justice and rights were
securely rooted.64 More recently, in a Friday sermon delivered in the Holy
Mosque, Mecca, Sheik Salih Bin Abdullah Bin Humied argued that the debates on
rights and justice conducted many centuries ago represented the first instance of a
rights regime in world history. Muslims should therefore be confident in entering
the contemporary global human rights discourse because ‘it was Muslims who
exported the principles of Human Rights to other nations, then these rights [were]
re-exported to us, as if they were a new human revealing that we have never know
before, just like rainwater that falls from the sky, stays in the ground, to reappear
afterwards, as a strong spring or a running well.’65 However, while Islamic scholars
often acknowledge the concept of human rights as a significant global issue, such
60 Norani Othman, ‘Grounding Human Rights Arguments in Non-Western Culture: Shari’a and the
Citizenship Rights of Women in a Modern Islamic State’, in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell
(eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
pp. 169–92.
61 Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (London: Pinter, 1995).
62 Ernst cites the Niche for Lamp of al-Khatib alTabrizi (d. 1337) as another useful and widely drawn
upon source that functions as a source of ethical behaviour. See Carl W. Ernst, Following
Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (London: University of Carolina Press,
2003).
63 The 10th Century Ijtihad saw an agreement that all important interpretations of the Qur’an and the
hadith were settled and that no further argumentation would be countenanced. See, Monshipouri,
1998).
64 For a recent commentary on Khomeini’s conception of freedom see, Susan Siavoshi, ‘Ayatollah
Khomeini and the Contemporary Debate on Freedom’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 18:1 (2007),
pp. 14–42.
65 Sheik Salih Bin Abdullah Bin Humied, ‘Friday Sermon in the Holy Mosque – Human Rights
(Mecca, 2000).
1764 Tony Evans
that it is now ‘ugly and abominable to stand against human rights’,66 the
conception, construal, and elucidation of human rights is very different from that
found in the dominant neo-liberal global discourse.67
The priority given to the needs of the ummah over those of the individual, in
contrast the priority given to the individual in neo-liberal thought, has already been
mentioned above. Contrary to the claims of the human rights associated with
market discipline, Islam claims to unleash the creative potential of humankind, not
as isolated individuals freely exploiting labour and the natural world, but within
the social context of the ummah. Community and exploitation are incompatible.68
Since the full expression of human capability and capacity requires the prior
satisfaction of both material and spiritual needs, which can be achieved only when
social order is maintained, claims of individual rights and freedoms make no
sense.69
Given the social context of the ummah for economic activity, the interests of the
individual are inextricably fused with those of the community. It is therefore
thought legitimate to curtail individual freedoms when the security of the ummah
and the collective interests of its members are threatened. These interests, which
include the maintenance of minimum levels of welfare, housing, education, and
medical care, take priority over the rights of the individual to secure self-serving
accumulation.70 Any state based upon the precepts of Islam may therefore limit the
rights of the individual, including the exercise of property rights, when sustaining
such a claim might harm the community. The duty of the Islamic state is to
establish and maintain the principles, norms and values of Islamic society, not to
ensure the rights of individuals in pursuit of personal wealth. States that claim a
constitutional affinity with Islam, but fail in their duty to fully implement policies
directed at protecting and promoting Islamic values, and populations that fail to
hold such states to task, are apostate.71 In short, while market discipline is
expressed in the language of individual rights, the language of Islam is duties to
and within the ummah.
The long tradition of emphasising duties over rights in Islam asserts a
hierarchical social order ordained by God, which remains stable only when each
accepts his or her social role. Soroush expresses this neatly when he asserts that a
‘knowledge of duties is as marginal to modern law as that of rights is to traditional
religious law.’72 Indeed, many Islamic scholars cite the ‘cult if individualism’ as a
primary cause of social instability, which is said to generate arrogant, haughty, and
inflated attitudes about self-worth and personal capabilities, attitudes that are
66 Ibid.
67 Azzam Tamimi, ‘Islam and Human Rights’, Institute of Islamic Political Thought (2001).
68 Kees van der Pijl, ‘Transnational Class Formation and State Forms’, in Stephen Gill and James
Mittelman (eds), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), pp. 105–33.
69 Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘Sayyid Qutb’s Fiqh al-waqi’i, or New Realist Science’, boundary 2, 31 (2004),
pp. 113–49.
70 Suhrub Behdad, ‘Islamization of Economics in Iranian Universities’, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, 27(1995), pp. 193–217.
71 Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘Sayyid Qutb’s Fiqh al-waqi’i, or New Realist Science’, boundary 2, 31 (2004),
pp. 113–49.
72 A. Soroush, Reason, Freedom, & Democracy in Islam, trans. M. Sadri and A. Sadri (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 62.
The limits of tolerance 1765
presented as deserving greater rewards than the rest of the community.73 This was
perceived many centuries ago when Ibn Khaldun argued that the ‘cult of individualism’
creates a miserable, unhappy, destabilised, and unfulfilling life that must be
rejected in favour of duties to Allah and the ummah. There is no place for the
individual in the sense suggested by the state of nature and natural rights, which
provides the foundations for the dominant conception of human rights. Rather,
individualism is seen as a disturber of the collective harmony and is therefore
abhorrent.74 For Islam, by accepting one’s social lot, and not behaving as though
one is above the fray, all members of the community achieve contented and
rewarding lives. Freedom is therefore realised by accepting Allah’s order and by
each member of the community fulfilling his or her duty to God and the ummah.75
The contrast here between Islam’s approach to right and that now widely
accepted as universal is clear. For Islam, a neo-liberal claim that there is only one
legitimate conception of rights demonstrates to many Islamic scholars a level of
ignorance that makes any global discourse on rights impossible. Why, some
scholars ask, should Islam accept the truth of a Declaration of human rights when
Islam has had no voice in its construction?76 Islamic scholars and commentators
therefore argue that in view of Islam’s historic validation of human rights, there is
an urgent need for the world to acknowledge deficiencies in the current human
rights regime and to work towards finding a closer fit with Islam, rather than
persist in claiming that Islam must be modernised to fit with human rights.77 Given
the context of economic globalisation, the failure to accept the need for processes
that enable a constant reassessment of dominant values and norms adds to feelings
of discontent. As Pasha and Blaney put it,
[w]e need only gesture to the contested status of human rights within world politics, to
debates about the nature of democracy, or to disputes about who can speak for nature
[. . .] in order to suggest that consensus is mostly lacking. Or we might point to the contested
status of the very idea of a cosmopolitan view of justice. Or we might simply ask:
how does one know, short of [. . .] global democracy [. . .] that a consensus exists? In other
words, advocates of [global civil society] are quite premature in declaring the existence of
a global common good where the deliberative process that could establish such a result are
not in place.78
73 For a recent exposition on individualism, see Tibor R. Machan, Classical individualism: the supreme
importance of each human being (London: Routledge, 1998).
74 Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam
(New York: Basic books, 1991).
75 Khaldun notes that slavery is a permitted commercial transaction, a tradition which according to
Lewis was accepted until very recently. See I. Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rozenthal, vol.
2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967); B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy
Terror (London: Phoenix, 2004).
76 A. Mohammadi, ‘The culture and politics of human rights in the context of Islam’, in A.
Mohammadi (ed.), Islam and Encountering Globalization (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002),
pp. 111–30. This is not entirely true. The Universal Declaration was drafted at a time when Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia were members of the UN. However, the Saudi representative on the Commission
for Human Rights was a Lebanese Christian, and the overwhelming majority of member states were
Christian. See also, Mohamed Berween, ‘International Bills of Human Rights: An Islamic Critique’,
International Journal of Human Rights, 7 (2003), pp. 129–42; Tony Evans, US Hegemony and the
Project of Universal Human Rights (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
77 Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East
(London: Tauris, 2003).
78 Mustaph Kamel Pasha and David L. Blaney, ‘Elusive Paradise: The Promise and Perils of Global
Civil Society’, Alternatives, 23 (1998), pp. 417–540.
1766 Tony Evans
In other words, the more vigorously global civil society promotes market
discipline and its associated human rights values, the greater the resistance,
creating a ‘periodic and irresolvable problem of policing the non-civil in civil
society.’79 Those who adhere to the norms of ‘civility’ and aspire to the ends
promoted by market discipline are included, while those who offend against the
‘normal’, either through critique, reflective alternatives, direct action or a stubborn
refusal to participate, are excluded, including the poor found in many Muslim
societies. Disapproval may be registered by the agencies of global civil society in
a number of ways, for example, by including aid conditions that emasculate
government decision-making powers, by threatening intervention, by simply
labelling alternative voices as ‘mad’80 or by asserting that the excluded do not
possess the moral capacity to engage fully in decision-making processes about
their own best interests.81
Many Islamic scholars therefore reject the current human rights regime because
it describes only one kind of person, valorises the individual over the community,
does not pay sufficient attention to the religious and spiritual nature of human
existence, and relies too exclusively on legal rather than social processes for
promoting and protecting human rights. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration,
for example, on freedom of thought, conscience and religion, is often seen by
Muslims as a form of rampant individualism that threatens to legitimate
polytheism and a return to pre-Islamic society.82 For these reasons, Soroush argues
that while Islam must engage with the secularising pressures that accompany the
move to modernisation, it is necessary to ‘confront’ a Universal Declaration that
is ‘oblivious to religion and the rights of the creator.’ Moreover, the demand that
all states must now accept liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of
government creates tension and conflict between secularist modernisers and
religious traditionalists who remain suspicious that the ‘invitation to democratization
of the religious government will ineluctably eviscerate any religious content.’83
Again, Humied’s Friday sermon on human rights is instructive here. In this
Humied asserts that the market discipline conception of human rights is little more
than a shabby arm of imperialism, a political tool in the campaign to convert the
world to a soulless, utilitarian belief system that has no room for God and
spirituality. Accordingly, ‘human existence will never enjoy rectitude’ if people are
deprived of the rights proclaimed by the Prophet and the reformers, who fought
for establishing and fixing these rights.
Don’t you see that hundreds of millions of human beings are forced to blaspheme God,
receive an education that disdains religion, and causes damage to sacred things. All over
the world, there is a gloomy imperialistic and fanatic colonization that steals food and
creeds, poisons the thought, and seeks to divert the attention of nations from their beliefs.
The world is looking forward to a Declaration of Human Rights, in which the sound mind
79 Ibid.
80 James Keeley, James, ‘Towards a Foucauldian Analysis of International Regimes’, International
Organization, 44 (1990), pp. 83–105.
81 Barry Hindess, ‘Power and Rationality: The Western Conception of Political Community’,
Alternatives, 17 (1992), pp. 149–63.
82 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Persius Publishing, 1992).
83 Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, & Democracy in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
The limits of tolerance 1767
agrees with the Divine Revelation. When such a Declaration is formulated, it can be
supported and respected.84
While the concept of human rights many have gained greater credence within
global politics during the last six decades, the neo-liberal conception of rights is far
from universally endorsed. Islam’s alternative notion of human rights, which
emphasises duty and community, therefore represents a potential counterhegemonic
threat to cherished beliefs associated with the globalising neo-liberal
world order.
Government and the state
A further distinction between neo-liberalism and Islam, and one that is central to
achieving agreement on the form of institutions necessary for maintaining current
forms of economic globalisation, is Islam’s approach to government and state.
According to Islamic principles, the role of government is to ‘construe the
phenomena of God’s sovereignty because God’s will is embodied in His legislation’,
which takes priority over the will and orders of all social or political
institutions, including the democratic will of the people.85
The clearest expression of this is seen in the application of shari’a law, which
must be obeyed not because it is the command of the state, but because of its
authority as the voice of God. While at first take this seems alien to mature liberal
democracies built upon the rule of law, Vaezi insists that in all ideologies and belief
systems, including liberalism and socialism, one finds a constitution that proscribes
the actions of governments who violate the fundamental beliefs and abiding
principles that describe the social and cultural context in which political institutions
are embedded.86 Democratically elected governments, for example, cannot legitimately
undertake actions or make decisions that breach fundamental democratic
values, even though the majority may support such actions or decisions. In this
respect, many scholars argue that the Islamic state is no different from the
democratic state, for no majority can overthrow any of the principles and values
of Islam.
Accordingly, the starting point for looking at all social, political and economic
issues, including human rights, democracy, legitimate trade, and foreign policy, is
to recognise God’s sovereignty. In contrast to the modern secular state, where
material and physiological needs provide the focus for government, and where the
moral and ethical authority of religion is not formally enshrined within a
constitution, the purpose of the Islamic state is to act as the guardian of religious
values. In contrast to contemporary global politics, which emphasise rights and
democracy, Islam emphasises the duties of the ruler and the ruled as ordained by
God. The state may enact laws and create institutions for regulating the actions of
citizens in social, economic and political affairs, but these remain subject to the
84 Sheik Salih Bin Abdullah Bin Humied, ‘Friday Sermon in the Holy Mosque – Human Rights’
(Mecca, 2000).
85 Ahmad Vaezi, Shia Political Thought (London: Islamic Centre of England, 2004).
86 Ibid.
1768 Tony Evans
guiding norms and laws found in the Qur’an and Shari’a law. As noted previously,
the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran is presented as an attempt to
operationalise this principle.87
Consequently, it is common to find Islamic scholars arguing that the preferred
model of democracy that supports market discipline, particularly the notion of
majority rule, is ‘absolutely incompatible with Islam.’88 According to Ahmed
Vaezi, when the liberal democratic state abandons the authority of God, relocates
moral questions in the private sphere beyond the limits of government, and seeks
legitimation through democracy, society has experienced social and moral decay,
typified by ‘welfare induced sloth’.89 In place of procedural democracy, which seeks
legitimation through periodic elections, it is the duty of all Muslims to remain
permanently and fully vigilant to ensure that government does not transgress the
core principles of Islam. In the current world order, this includes guarding against
the importation of values that may be antithetical to Islam.
The duty of the states leader is to see that God’s justice is done, not to create
a version of justice constructed through reason and rights. The Prophet’s message
was religious, concerning spiritual guidance, not a message from God on the
correct form of government a society should adopt. This message describes a
community of the faithful, not a state, its duties and responsibilities. The spiritual
and moral health of the ummah is central, rather than the rights of the individual.
For these reasons many scholars argue that in contrast to values found in secular
societies, where the legitimate actions of government are limited by outlawing any
interference in the spiritual, private, moral and social world of the individual and
the family, under Islam these are the very issues that are in need of guidance.90
Given the impetus for change brought by the forces of economic globalisation,
changes that touch the lives of all people, governments in states where Islam is the
dominant belief system are caught between competing demands. Those who make
these demands are often categorised as ‘modernizers’, ‘reformers’, and ‘neofundamentalists’.
While ‘modernizers’ pursue the goal of full integration within the
global political economy, ‘reformers’ and ‘neofundamentalists’ present a challenge
to the neo-liberal order.
‘Modernizers’ seek to reform and rationalise Islam in an attempt to bring it in
line with neo-liberal thought and the needs of economic globalisation. This is a call
for engaging fully in the processes of globalisation by accepting the norms, values,
and conditionalities of neo-liberalism, as promoted by the WTO, the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, and the regional economic fora. It is also a call
to develop a modern secular state capable of developing an efficient administrative
role for promoting global capital.91 For this group, modernisation is the ‘process
of progressive complexity and differentiation of institutions and spheres of life’,
which is characteristic of globalisation, the expansion of the neo-liberal global
economy, and the further incursion of market discipline. Secularisation is
87 See the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran at: {http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/ir00000_.html}.
88 Ahmad Vaezi, Shia Political Thought.
89 Diane K. Mauzy, ‘The Human Rights and ‘Asian Values’ Debate in Southeast Asia: Trying to
Clarify the Key Issues’, Pacific Review, 10 (1997), pp. 201–36.
90 Ahamd Vaezi, Shia Political Thought.
91 Robert Cox, ‘Democracy in hard times: economic globalization and the limits to liberal democracy’,
in Anthony McGrew (ed.), The Transformation of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997),
pp. 49–75.
The limits of tolerance 1769
recognised as an instance of modernisation, which differentiates religion from
economic and political institutions and the church from culture and conscience.92
It connotes much more than a simple shift of social and political responsibilities
from church to state, but also includes psycho-cultural aspects that see traditional
cultural practices and mores penetrated by the new values of modernity. The shift
from a theocratic society to a secularised society is seen by some modernisers as
an inevitable consequence of economic globalisation, where religious values lose
authority as a guide for social action. Consequently, modernisers argue that neither
the material nor the spiritual needs of the ummah can be satisfied by looking to an
Islam developed many centuries ago. Instead, modernisers argue that the tensions
between the values that describe the new global political economy and those of
Islam can be resolved only by constructing a new theology for the twenty-first
century and beyond. For ‘modernizers’, such a theology must come to terms with
the reality of economic globalisation and its social consequences, including the
secular state and form of government.
The ‘reformers’ also look to develop a state and form of government that
engages with economic globalisation. However, while ‘modernizers’ call for the
separation of church and state ‘reformers’ seek a synthesis of Islam and the
dominant global political economy, in an attempt to ‘Islamize’ some aspects of
modernity. In this way ‘reformers’ recognise the duty of all cultures to contextualise
cherished traditions and values within the emerging, globalised social,
economic, and political order. Soroush, who was an important intellectual
influence during the early years of the new Islamic Republic of Iran, argues that
the only realistic way to overcome existing social and economic deprivations is to
engage with economic globalisation. However, for Soroush such an engagement
does not imply an inevitable corruption of Islam. Indeed, he argues that
globalisation offers an opportunity to provide the space for greater levels of
reflection upon the moral and spiritual world, a process, he notes, that has already
begun in the developed world, as signified by feminism, postmodernism, and
environmentalism. The Islamic state’s engagement with economic globalisation
therefore offers an opportunity to overcome social deprivations while also
contributing to reflections on the vices characteristic of the global political
economy from an Islamic perspective.93 In this way, the state fulfils two roles, first,
by improving the social conditions of the people and, second, by playing a
facilitating role in new ethical and moral discourses with Islam.
Both the ‘modernizers’ and ‘reformers’ are opposed by what Hoogvelt refers to
as ‘neofundamentalists’, religious leaders who see globalisation as an irredeemably
corrupting process that should be rejected by all and any available means.94
‘Neofundamentalists’ therefore reject all attempts to engage with the contemporary
world of market discipline.95 For ‘neofundamentalists’, the move to embrace
modernisation may permit some groups to gain access to technological, scientific
and industrial goods and services that increase material wellbeing, but this cannot
92 Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, & Democracy in Islam. Introduction by the editors and
translators, Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, xvi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
93 Ibid.
94 Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), ch. 9.
95 Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, & Democracy in Islam.
1770 Tony Evans
be achieved without also embracing the social values hostile to Islam. Instead, in
the face of calls by some groups to accelerate the state’s drive towards
modernisation, ‘neofundamentalists’ call for a ‘return to the past’, and the
re-establishment of shari’a law and Islamic social traditions. While it is often
assumed that the advanced economies offer the most obvious target for ‘neofundamentalist’
opposition, this group see the main culprit as ‘quasi-Islamic’.
Governments who collude with interests associated with economic globalisation,
and thus promote market disciplinary values and ‘infidel ways’.96 For example,
Arkoun argues that ‘Islam has given humanity an ideal code for living a fulfilled
and moral life, which confers honour and dignity on humanity and eliminate(s)
exploitation, oppression, and injustice.’ Since God is the author of laws designed
to protect the moral identity of the ummah, ‘no leader, no government, no
assembly or any other authority’ can legitimately violate the social and moral
foundations of Islam.97
Seen in this light, ‘neofundamentalists’ argue that economic globalisation has
encouraged Islam to take a wrong turn. Governments in Islamic states may display
all the ritual that is expected of Islam, but their association with developed states
suggests that they are apostates who have abrogated the Holy Law by embracing
foreign values, customs, and laws.98 The removal of such leaders is therefore a
legitimate and essential precursor to re-capturing an ‘authentic’ Muslim society. As
Mernissi points out, historically, leaders who fail to fulfil the duty to govern
through God’s law have been assassinated.99 While ‘neofundamentalists’ often
express anti-Western rhetoric, pointing to the corrosive effect that Western values
have on Islam, the elimination of existing leaders remains central. Noting this,
Bernard Lewis points to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, and the
assassination of President Sadat of Egypt in 1981, acts that are seen by
‘neofundamentalists’ as a necessary process of ‘inner cleansing’, before establishing
a true Islamic state under shari’a law.100 Crucially for neo-liberal perceptions,
responsibility for achieving a return to the past, and a spirit of Islamic unity within
the Muslim world, is not solely the responsibility of the citizens of any particular
Muslim state, but that of the global ummah as a whole. For ‘neofundamentalists’,
the state and the modern state system takes second place to the ummah.
Caught between reason and revelation, modernisation and tradition, governments
have often sought a solution by claiming a correspondence between God’s
word and their own actions and policies in an attempt to appease both religious
and material demands. However, the outcome of this approach is no less divisive.
Moves to modernise by adopting the norms and values of market discipline often
lead to a small minority of citizens achieving higher levels of income while the
majority continue to suffer further economic and social deprivations.101 The failure
to achieve a measure of economic development that includes the majority has often
96 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Phoenix, 2004).
97 Quoted in Ali Mohammadi, ‘The culture and politics of human rights in the context of Islam’, in
Al Mohammadi (ed.), Islam and Encountering Globalization (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002),
pp. 111–30.
98 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Phoenix, 2004).
99 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Persius Publishing, 1992).
100 Ibid.
101 For example, see UNDP, Human Development Report–2000.
The limits of tolerance 1771
left an educated, ambitious, expectant, and younger generation with a heightened
awareness of the material advantages brought by economic globalisation, unable to
find jobs.102 Fearing that they may have been ‘forgotten by their own people, who
have found another identity and are involved in other networks, especially those
very strong ones that create profit on an international scale’, the majority seek
comfort and consolation elsewhere.103 For these people, the failure of many
governments to make socio-economic progress that brings improvements to
ordinary people’s lives leaves Islam as one of the few sites of solace and
empowerment.104
In short, any policy aimed at state led modernisation risks confrontation with
religious leaders of an intensity that threatens social unrest, revolution, and the
demise of any attempt to engage with the neo-liberal global political economy.
However, the dilemma for government is that by appeasing the demands of
religious leaders and devout followers, and refusing to engage fully in the global
neo-liberal economic agenda, the prospect for fulfilling the material needs and
aspirations of the people vanishes, raising the spectre of further antagonisms, social
unrest, and political instability.105 In either case the uncertainties and instabilities
that are generated frustrates the neo-liberal project for ever greater integration
within the global political economy.
Conclusion
This article set out to show that the fear of Islam currently experienced in
neo-liberal society is not caused solely by the fear of violence. Instead, it was
suggested that fear is caused by the potential for Islam to offer a counterhegemonic
threat to neo-liberalism. With reference to Marcuse’s concept of
‘repressive tolerance’, and Gramsci’s idea of counter-hegemony, it was argued that
neo-liberal tolerance could not be extended to values perceived as a threat to the
dominant global order. To explicate this conclusion, four core sets of values were
examined over which clear differences exist between neo-liberal and Islamic
approaches to the political economy: reason and revelation, property, human
rights, and state and government. The conclusions drawn from these discussions
suggests that while the fear of violence perpetrated by radical Islamic fundamentalist
groups remains the most visible cause of current fears, the threat of
counter-hegemony offers a more nuanced understanding.
The distinction between adopting reason or revelation as the foundation for
thinking and knowing engenders divergent ways for conceptualising social values,
political organisation, and an ethical economic system. While private property
within the neo-liberal order focuses on the freedom of the individual to create and
accumulate wealth for personal use, Islam offers an alternative ethical path through
102 Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development.
103 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Persius Publishing, 1992).
104 Malcolm D. Brown, ‘An Ethnographic Reflection on Muslim-Christian Dialogue in the North of
France: The Context of Laicite’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 13 (2002), pp. 5–23.
105 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World.
1772 Tony Evans
a ‘sufficiency principle’ that limits accumulation to satisfying the needs of oneself
and one’s family. Any surplus beyond this principle should be used to further the
wellbeing of the community. Moreover, since production takes place within a social
setting, it is a requirement that producers go beyond calculations of profit and
efficiency and to satisfy ethical and moral questions about the contribution a
particular production makes to the community.
A further distinction that suggests Islam offers a counter-hegemonic force is
seen in the field of human rights. The formulation of human rights within the
current global order places the individual at its centre, contrasting with Islam’s
claims to place duty and the rights of the community above the rights of the
individual. Approaches to the state and government also highlight the distinctive
claims of Islam to offer an alternative way of thinking and knowing, and therefore
a potential counter-hegemonic movement. For neo-liberal society, mass participation
in periodic elections has become the legitimising factor for political power,
power that rests with the duly elected government. Islam’s alternative to this argues
that the role of government is to enact laws and develop policies that further the
spiritual aims of the community. It is therefore the duty for all Muslim citizens to
remain fully engaged with social and political decision-making processes at all
times, and to ensure that government’s act in accordance with the values and
principles expressed in the Qur’an and other religious texts.
Taken together, these distinctions between alternative value systems do appear
to represent a Gramscian counter-hegemonic threat to the dominant neo-liberal
global order. The discussion here has been concerned with the construction of that
threat and the fear that it might inspire. It has not been concerned to examine the
real potential for 1.2 billion Muslims, representing a myriad of cultural manifestations
of Islam, to act collectively as a counter-hegemonic bloc. Such an approach
would require a further article.
The limits of tolerance 1773


Review of International Studies / Volume 37 / Issue 04 / October 2011, pp 1751 - 1773
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510000185, Published online: 21 May 2010
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210510000185
How to cite this article:
TONY EVANS (2011). The limits of tolerance: Islam as counter-hegemony?. Review of
International Studies, 37, pp 1751-1773 doi:10.1017/S0260210510000185
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The limits of tolerance: Islam as
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