Post-Capitalist Plastic Ummatics

The surrender of the “surrenderer[s] (muslim[s])”¹ to God is exclusive and voluntary. When surrenderers gather together under the “divinely-gifted way of God” (din)² behind an exemplary surrenderer (prophet-messengers, messengers), they become a surrendering community (Muslim ummah). The thought which is concerned with the “collective affairs of the Muslim Umma” is called by Dr. Ovamir Anjum ‘ummatics’.³

To start with some reflection on the idea of an ummah: Dr. Faisal Devji, in a post discussing the idea of Muslim unity, mentions the sacrifice of Abraham (may God’s mercy be upon him and his family) as the “sacrifice [of] one son” while abandoning the other.⁴ Hence, Devji concludes that “this is not a simple and happy family,” referring to what I believe are both the immediate and the “metaphorical” Abrahamic family.⁴ Such a reading of Abraham’s sacrifice and the conclusion that Devji draws from it, namely that the story partially signifies abandonment and conflict, is an unconvincing exegesis of the Qur’an.

Al-Raysuni, in a book on the concept of shura, also comments on this story.⁵ For him, one of the things notable about this is how Abraham (May God be pleased with him) consulted with his son before he went through with God’s command. Abraham’s son (may God be pleased with him) consented to the divine command for sacrifice.⁵ It is difficult to infer from the consultation and subsequent consent that Abraham (may God be pleased with him) in any way abandoned his son (may God be pleased with him), or that there was a conflict between him and his son. Rather, through it, the Muslims receive a lesson in how to handle the difficulty of sacrifice. This also takes me to Devji’s argument that at least some Muslim calls for unity are in reality another tool for “anathematising or demonising opponents.”⁴ Such anathematizations can only be born if we exclude those we disagree with from the realm of consultation. Abraham’s (may God be pleased with him) reaction to a difficult situation was one of surrender and consultation. There’s no reason why Muslim calls for unity, ummatics, cannot follow Abraham’s (may God be pleased with him) example. If the ummah is not yet a widespread symbol of Muslim liberation,⁶ then that doesn’t mean its impossibility. 

Plasticity, Islamicity, Oppresivity

Plastic ummatics moves between and into the state and society, all the while being confined by neither of the two. Plastic ummatics involves a profound process of unchaining. This unchaining is specifically a horizontal unchaining, an unchaining of human beings from the unjust domination of other human beings so that we can be free to devote ourselves to God. Constructing these horizontal chains and being devoted to God are two states that cannot exist together. One cannot unjustly dominate others yet still consider themselves as being true to the journey “from God to God”⁷ just as one cannot give offerings to idols and to God at the same time—something which the Arab idolators failed to understand.⁸ A concrete economic manifestation of horizontal chains would be “aporophobia” and its manifestations.⁹ My concern with ummatic plasticity is inspired by Milad Dokhanchi’s¹⁰ dissertation. The history of ummatics is long. It formed a core of at least a certain strand of Islamic reformism represented by ‘Abdurra’uf Fitrat. Fitrat serves as a good example of a figure in whom Pan-Islamic unity (read: ummatics), Islamic Reformism, and frustration with the religious establishment of his time¹¹ all combine to make the sort of a Sunnite ummatician akin to the Shiite Islamist which Dokhanchi¹² identifies. 

A preliminary note to be taken when dealing with the “boundary question”¹³ (i.e. what exactly is the boundary between the state and society) for plastic ummatics is that what counts as the state and what counts as society “is not the perimeter of an intrinsic entity,  which can be thought of as a free-standing object or actor. It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained.”¹⁴ In Mitchell’s methodology we try to see how the boundary between the state and society is formed, what are the “metaphysics” of the state, and what contributes to maintaining this “ghost-like effect” of the state.¹⁵ This methodology looks at how the state is created through “mundane social processes”. Modern politics becomes the “producing and reproducing of this line of difference” between the state and society.¹⁶ 

The elimination of the Ottoman Caliphate gave way to the post-Caliphate space, where the Islamic state began to be theorized in a new mode by a community of ummaticians.¹⁷ The idea of the Islamic state was the ummatician’s strategy to center Islam in society.¹⁷ In this, it becomes a symbol for the Islamicity of any theory of ummatics. This legitimizing function of the idea of the Islamic state can be kept intact whilst also recognizing that the state is not the only tool for Islamization¹⁸ but is rather part of a larger set of Islamization strategies. Plastic ummatics is fundamentally ideological.¹⁸ It realizes the importance of the Islamic state in its ability to produce a different political order as a resistance political theology that exists within the very “organizational terrain of the state”¹⁹ it aims to transform. In it, the idea of the Islamic state itself becomes not just the utopian musings of a few disenchanted pious Muslims, but rather as real a social reality as the state itself is, insofar as the Islamic state begins to transform the lives of those who believe in it. If the “binary” world is the construction of the state, then the resistance that Muslim revivalists ought to do is to reject the divisions drawn between the “conceptual and material, between abstract and real”.¹⁶

Plastic ummatics more generally centers around notions of “Islamicity”²⁰ and oppresivity as the two lenses that politics and economics can be seen through.²¹ It looks at what makes people, communities, systems, and acts Islamic and what sustains their status as those things which are Islamic, as well as seeing what makes people, communities, systems, and acts oppressive and what makes them continue to be so.²¹ The Islamic is plastic. It can take the shape of the political, the economic, etc.

This study is surrounded by a wider context of “post-movement” (read: non-partisan) theorizing among a new generation of Muslim thinkers.²² Following this perspective, I draw upon a wide array of Muslim experiences of and thoughts about ummatics, not necessarily aligning myself with one group or the other but trying to glean something of importance and move it forward. My work is one of trying to add to Muslim thought. I follow Dokhanchi’s¹² and Anjum’s²³ lead in taking an insider’s look at ummatics, seeing myself as a participant of it, and imagining what it would look like without the help or support of the state.

Plastic Theology

Plastic ummatics, just like “redemptive politics”,²⁴ is characterized by an urgency for achieving justice. This urgency arises out of a visceral reaction to the “tears, cries, hunger, and the danger of death” that poverty ³³ and other forms of suffering created by injustice. In this, an ethos of individual Muslim political responsibility is put front and center. This coincides with the modern political notion of da’wa which as a result of historical contingencies developed to mean an individual’s personal responsibility towards justice.²⁵ Plastic ummatics’ view of justice can very accurately be summed up in Huetos’s statement that, “Instead of waiting for better times to come, they [emancipatory thought and its subject] would actively work towards building them.” If redemptive politics requires identifying concepts that go beyond being mere concepts, then the political concept which holds this place in plastic ummatics is that of justice.²⁶ The radical recontestability of politics by political theology is constitutive of plastic ummatics.²⁷ The urgency of plastic ummatics might suggest it to be a “practicalist” theory of justice, but I believe that it is more closer to “utopian practicalism”. Utopian practicalism means that feasibility counts whenever we are trying to decide between different theories of justice.²⁸

The purpose of plastic ummatics can be analyzed under an Islamic notion of this life, or in short, the Islamic Saeculum. My reflections on the Islamic Saeculum are greatly influenced by Wigg-Stevenson’s dissertation entitled, “Saecular: The Ancient Word that Became the Modern World”.²⁹ The Islamic Saeculum is the terrain upon which plastic ummatics acts. An inquiry into ummatics must begin the same way as any distinctively Muslim inquiry has to: by recognising the order of things in their relationship to God.³⁰ God chooses which point in the total Saeculum our Saeculum will take place.³¹ The Islamic Saeculum starts from reflections on the concept of the “world”. In Arabic, the ʿālam exists as something pointing towards God. Meaning is to be found within the Saeculum/ʿālam, in both the senses of time as the entire span of this existence and an existence.³² An Islamic Saeculum is a cluster of ideas about our lives in this world and how they relate to the afterlife. The Saeculum can be good or bad depending upon how we act within it, similar to an early Christian perspective.³³ More specifically, the Saeculum is “…the temporal span of both the human creature and creation itself, which bear a micro-/macrocosmic relation to one another, especially in being delimited by divine judgment… the saeculum is also “life” itself in both its subjective and objective sense: a person’s life, and the world/time as a theater of life.”³⁴ The Islamic Saeculum thus contains the lives of individuals as well as the life of the world. The lives of and in the Islamic Saeculum are constantly in contact with lives without which the Islamic Saeculum cannot be understood: the lives of the prophets (peace be upon them all). This point is specifically made clear to me by Stewart’s observation that the Qur’an directs its readers to make a connection between the destruction of previous nations and “the history of prophecy”.³⁵ The signs of God, whether they be “celestial” and/or “earthly” as al-Razi explicates,³⁶ exist all within the Islamic Saeculum and obligate the Muslim to inhabit their Saeculum in a purposive manner in order to “arrive at knowledge of God”.³⁶

Post-Capitalist Economics 

Economic injustice seems to tail and/or lead other injustices. According to Rieger and Silva, the Blackamerican leaders of the sixties knew of this very well.³⁷ It is important that this insight also informs plastic ummatics. Additionally, Rieger and Silva mention an important distinction between power and privilege:³⁸ people who may have privilege still may not have power, such as workers in America who are in a better condition than many in Africa and Asia but still don’t have as much power as the American economic power-holders.³⁹ Capitalism has reduced the space for “all critical and transformative thinking”.⁴⁰ Therefore, we need to resist. We need to “organize” by building “solidarities”.³⁹ In an effort to recalibrate Rieger’s distinction between mere and “deep solidarities,”³⁹ I’d like to propose dividing solidarities in a different way: shallow solidarity, which is based on “sameness” of national and/or ethnic identities;³⁹ surface solidarity, which is based on shared economic goals but not much more than that;³⁹ and ummatic solidarity, which although including people besides Muslims, is also focused on not simply achieving economic justice but an empowerment of the ummah in order to place the ummah at the forefront of any struggle for justice. It is the ummah which knits hearts in a tapestry of monotheistic justice.⁴¹ Concern for ummatic solidarity is a prerequisite for ummatics and a realization of ummatic solidarity is its product.⁴² A life lived in the world, just like the world itself, is “a vast sacred space of monotheistic learning and prayer”⁴³ where the “surrenderer”⁴⁴ is meant to remember God. 

Economics has a bearing on our theologies. Human life today is valued in its capacity for economic value.⁴⁵ Thus, as Mo Sung makes clear, the poor homeless are seen as not human. Homelessness is not a problem because the homeless don’t matter. The homeless poor will re-materialize as an object of continued and detailed reflection in a theology which takes the Saeculum(s) of the poor seriously. This is what post-capitalist plastic ummatics is. 

So, what can we as ummaticians do to take the Saeculum(s) of the poor seriously? To start with, we can take the insight of the Mu’tazilite Imam Yahya ibn al-Husayn az-Zaydi and say that to make injustice theologically acceptable is to distort theology.⁴⁶ Moreover, “tolerating injustice not only wrongs oneself but also the members of the community”.⁴⁶ Thus, for any sort of ummatics to exist at all in the first place, there has to be an elimination of the practice of justifying and normalizing injustice by those who are most responsible to fight against it: the Muslim theologians. It doesn’t matter whether the oppressed are Muslims or not, we resist oppression all the same.⁴⁷ What matters is that we are Muslims, and it is us who have pledged to follow God’s commandments.

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References:

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