The Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

Qatar and the CILE — The Absurdity of Islamic Reform

Qatar has escaped a great deal of scrutiny owing to its small size and relatively shrewd diplomacy on the international stage effectively creating a soft image for itself as one of the more acceptable manifestations of Gulf monarchical rule. It has done so effectively through numerous strategies — whether through commerce or hosting cultural expositions. What has received little attention comparatively is Qatar’s finesse in using religious soft power in an effective manner to the extent it has now become a hot destination for a new generation of would-be reformers.

We live in such an age, that an oil-rich Gulf monarchy can establish an Islamic think tank and host ‘Islamic feminists’ lecturing about ‘Quranic hermeneutics’ whilst perhaps down the street, a Qatari or ex-pat family could be grossly exploiting a disenfranchised economic migrant from the subcontinent — be that a maid or a driver; such is the ‘absurdity of Islamic reform’ — it has delusions of grandeur about ‘reforming the Muslim mind’ and creates castles in the sky whilst ignoring the very pressing social concerns in its immediate context that do not require intellectual sophistry to unravel but simply the courage of political will, integrity, and character. Things that cannot be taught in academic graduate seminars where career progression and aiming for tenure are far more pressing priorities.

I want to focus more on the Qatari sponsored think tank — the CILE and how it is starting to lure Anglophone Muslim activist-academics into its corridors allowing quite an expansive platform to talk about a variety of high powered intellectual issues whilst effectively neutering them politically and socially to the extent that their words have absolutely no impact locally on a whole host of very pressing and concerning ethical transgressions. This is the genius of co-opting the ‘Islamic reform’ discourse.

Said was right

To start off with, a personal reflection about the formidable Edward Said. He delivered a particularly prescient set of passages that I have always held dear because of the simplicity and power of its undeniable truth:

“Nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy’’[i]

Such words ring so true about self-professed ‘reformist’ academics who have tenure to look after, book deals to pursue, think tank engagements to gather whilst putting on the dramatic spectacle of ‘intellectual bravery’ and ‘speaking from within the tradition’ and other such self-congratulatory euphemisms.

The second gets more to the heart of the matter:

“There is something fundamentally unsettling about intellectuals who have neither offices to protect, nor territory to consolidate and guard; self-irony is therefore more frequent than pomposity directness more than heming and hawing. But there is no dodging the inescapable reality that such representations by intellectuals will neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honors. It is a lonely condition, yet, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are.”[ii]

What Said eloquently states is the very real danger of establishment power co-opting seemingly high minded intellectual pursuits under its own hegemonic canopy. Allowing, intellectuals, academics, and artists wide scope and range but provided that the absolute authority and legitimacy of its rule remains unquestioned. It is perhaps why we live in an age that a ruler as vicious as MBS is perfectly comfortable with the prospect of Nikki Minaj twerking in downtown Riyadh but at the same time petrified by an organisation that wishes to establish some form of Islamic democratic constitutional rule, or even more mildly an Islamic polity that works away from absolute monarchy to a constitutional one. Freedom is not some uniform absolute, there are types and degrees of it — some of which can sit quite comfortably within an autocratic system. [iii]

Islamic Reform As A Security Policy

It is now an open secret that ‘Islamic Reform’ has been subsumed under the more sinister tent of Western foreign policy discussion about controlling opposition to its strategic aims both abroad in terms of planting regimes amenable to its interest but also more recently as a way of subjugating the Muslim presence within the Anglosphere. The hermeneutical projects of Islamic Reform often aim towards an apologetic reconciliation with the prevailing liberal norms of contemporary Euro-American societies. The infamous RAND report that needs no citation here explicitly identifies those who are boisterous in their aims of reforming the ‘Muslim mind’ as allies of Western power and interest. The manipulation of religious soft power is not only the preserve of Muslim despots but a weapon of choice for the powers that be in Washington and Europe. Saba Mahmood explicitly highlights this problematic relationship in her seminal paper:

“In analysing the programs and strategies of State Department planners, I have suggested that they have located a powerful partner in secular liberal Muslim reformers who agree with them in their diagnosis that the central problem haunting Muslim societies lies in their inability to achieve critical distance between the divine text and the world, and a concomitant overvaluation of received authority. Their hermeneutical project is aimed at creating the conditions for the emergence of a normative religious subject who understands religion — its scriptures and its ritual forms — as a congeries of symbols to be flexibly interpreted in a manner consonant with the imperatives of secular liberal political rule.”[iv]

What is fascinating in such a scheme is that very rigorous commitment to particular secular and liberal understandings of God, approach to scripture and religious ethics are prioritised above and beyond democratisation. Democratised MENA societies would pose inevitably a threat to American foreign policy interest and invariably democratised MENA societies would put forward sophisticated indigenously grounded paradigms of ethical reasoning and enquiry that would perhaps be in tension with Anglo or Francophone liberalism[v]. However, secular and liberal commitment in terms of being open to the monoculture of American Hollywood, hosting prestigious cultural and sporting events can live comfortably with autocratic rule that otherwise perpetuates tremendous violence in suppressing challenges to its legitimacy.

A more detailed examination of the themes highlighted in Mahmood’s paper and how the proposed secularisation of the Muslim mind by hijacking and refashioning religious sentiment to achieve specific security and foreign policy aims can be found in this fantastic three-piece installment[vi]. For now, let us pay specific attention to Qatar.

Qatari Soft Power

Al Jazeera is a true Qatari export, a success story for its elites in managing to create a true beacon of soft power that has no real equal in the region. Since 1996, it has offered MENA audiences a fairly unique platform to advance “critique” and hold a relatively open discussion. Al Jazeera operated like a world-class outfit particularly so in its English language offerings, attracting considerable talent. The Qatari policy is a simple yet effective one — ‘’criticise whoever you like except us’’. Indeed, no topic apart from the conduct and record of the Qatari elite is left untouched. The CILE enterprise in many ways is a way of emulating the Al Jazeera model but more specifically in the realm of Islamic discourse.

In effect, Qatar has adapted the “Dubai model” — instead of aiming to be solely a commercial hub that will determine the economic future of the region, the Qataris under the cloak of seeming benevolence wish to be the ‘intellectual hub’ of the region. A hub where it can directly control and dictate the types of ideas, debates, and discussions that will invariably shape the future of the region. Having a platoon of artists, scholars, and intellectuals working in your court is a sure way of ensuring the longevity of your rule and in an age where media, culture, and entertainment are becoming the ultimate markers of a liberal sensibility, foreign observers perhaps may be more forgiving about your abysmal human rights record if you can hold a debate about feminist hermeneutics.

What it is key, however, is that the Qatari elites have insulated the impact of these intellectual endeavours from the gritty day to day business of ruling. There seems to be no impact outside of garnering international press of holding such fora locally. This also very handily ties in with American designs for the region. If pesky Muslims can ‘learn’ to completely historicise and dis-enchant their religious experience, reducing all its metaphysical commitments to mere historical accident and even perhaps approaching the Qu’ran as merely another book rather than as God’s Word through insidious theorising then perhaps Islamic sentiment can be on the side of Uncle Sam rather than forever being recruited against it. At the same time, any such accusations can be offset by also giving the same platform to more traditionally minded authorities — such is the pragmatic calculation by Qatar’s elites in avoiding any potential blowback.

Qatar’s security policy is shrewd. It focuses on branding, soft power, image and optics of liberal democracy but without sacrificing any of its more draconian measures. It is more tasteful, to say the least, to construct a museum of Islamic art than to invite a second-rate American pop star to dance half-naked in your capital. It also plays very well with Muslim audiences, especially in the Anglosphere who look at the Emiratis and now the Saudis with horror as all manner of vice and vulgarity are incorporated into their societies. In comparison, the Qataris are seen as more sober, perhaps even enlightened in trying to cultivate a more refined sensibility. The end result, however, is the same — the vestiges of power no matter what type of circus you choose to host remain untouched.

The CILE

The CILE[vii] is the brainchild and the culmination of Tariq Ramadan’s own ambitious agenda for radical reform[viii]. It is beyond the scope of this piece to examine Professor Ramadan’s work, but March has a particularly brilliant paper on the topic[ix]. The organisation does not have any apparent financial independence or even bureaucratic autonomy being solely accountable for both to the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies. It is perhaps no accident that Ramadan’s methodology found an audience amongst the Qatari elite who having patronised Sh. Yusuf al Qaradawi for many years now needed a replacement for the aging scholar. Ramadan’s methodology consciously positions itself as a development and going beyond Sh. Qaradawi’s legal methodology particularly in the context of the ‘Maqasid Al-Sharia’ debate which does have political implications[x]. It would have made perfect sense at the time for the Qataris to court someone with the pedigree of Tariq Ramadan and to shape him as a successor for carrying forward Qatar’s mission of religious soft power supremacy.[xi] Ramadan in the past has not been averse to working with state-sanctioned outfits, as seen in his stint with Press TV[xii] which seldom if ever touched upon the brutal crackdown of dissidence — for example, the jailing of Islamic scholars, intellectuals and journalists in the Khomeinist dystopia[xiii].

One will be struck by the quite broad and impressive range of topics discussed at the CILE but at the same time stunned at how a forum that can attract international scholars of high standing and repute devotes such little if any space or time to discussing thorny domestic issues.

Activist-Academics At Qatar’s Service

To illustrate the absurdity of the Islamic Reform discourse we can look at the example of Dr. Ziba Mir Hosseini, an influential academic working within the Islamic feminist hermeneutic project. There is a video[xiv] of her preaching about the dangers of patriarchy but sadly the irony is lost on her that she is doing so on the CILE’s platform. She also spends little if any time in the midst of her profound observations about the means to ‘properly’ interpret the Qur’an on the quite evident and clear abuses of vulnerable expatriate women from across the world working in Qatar as maids who often have very little recourse to secure their rights[xv].

Al Azaami is all too keen to lecture about Islamic ethics[xvi] using the CILE’s platform but has never had any words of wisdom on the situation of political dissidents who are imprisoned under Qatari rule[xvii]. Perhaps they are not worthy enough in his political calculus. There is no mention during his lofty exposition on being ethical in a neo-liberal age about Qatar’s own shocking economic inequalities[xviii].

To be sure there is a range of academics and intellectuals who have opted to use the platform of the CILE to share their work. There cannot be a blanket rule or interpretation of what the participation of all these scholars means in terms of their ethical priorities but in the case of the ‘activist-academics’ who have ambitions for Islamic reform, wishing to challenge ‘orthodoxy’ and to be paragons of justice they have set themselves up against very lofty standards indeed. The ones with a reform agenda see themselves as speaking from a place of enlightenment, of sober reason, cautioning against atavistic attitudes. It only seems right then that those like Hosseini and Al Azaami who have uncritically used the CILE platform be held to account.

Qatari Motivation

The CILE, however, is a clever operation — it seeks to portray itself as a broad church encompassing a broad selection of viewpoints and projects — some are lay Muslims with academic expertise in other fields others are more traditionally trained. At times it does indeed allow isolated discussion about migrants’ rights but always in a controlled environment with little political impact or follow through. Thus debate, discussion, and discourse are merely a spectacle without any real bite or power to make it into policy and an agenda for reform.

The Qataris beyond fostering domestic fora are also keen on spreading influence in Islamic studies departments in the Anglosphere in the creation of positions and generous grants with little or no transparency that should give pause for concern[xix]. In this regard, this is a problem that extends beyond Qatar but also includes the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The co-option of academia for political ends is now part of the rulebook for aspiring Gulf elite looking to garner international legitimacy and kudos. The Qataris have simply played the game better than its competitors by fashioning itself as a centre for high-Islamic culture and also ‘reform’ whilst sweeping its own ugly transgressions under the carpet.

It also harkens back to Said’s initial point about the dangers of being recruited by forces larger than any intellectual or academic if one is not vigilant about maintaining their independence. Qatar’s evident sympathies for a revival of Islamic intellectual culture and funding it so lavishly are not based in a genuine worldview or vision of how the world should be ordered but rather should be seen as an exercise in “convenience, pragmatism, and sheer opportunism”[xx]

Conclusion

The ‘Islamic Reform’ gambit has always been a curious one — it seeks to speak in great detail about very technical almost dormant issues in medieval Islamic legal philosophy or Quranic interpretation that most Muslims are unaware of whilst ignoring very real concrete problems that many Muslims across the world whether that be in the MENA region, the subcontinent or the Anglosphere face. They will speak about “patriarchal hermeneutics” of the ulema till they are blue in the face but ignore far more pressing practicalities and their discourse never moves beyond the abstract into real concrete policy.

A corollary to this which has been not been explored but worthy of future consideration is how American universities open campuses across the Gulf and yet apart from taking snide pseudo-intellectual aim at traditional Muslim sensibilities, there is little work being done on local problems. This is merely a continuation of the establishment of American universities in Cairo or Beirut — the secularisation of the Muslim mind within Dar-al-Islam.

At the same time, blissful innocence is never a viable option. Monarchical and praetorian regimes exist, especially in Muslim lands — they cannot be wished away. The question and this is a very difficult one is how the integrity and relative independence of Sunnism be preserved in an age where nation-states are anxious to control religious discourse. This is an incredibly difficult dilemma and there are no easy answers.

[i] Edward W Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (Vintage 1996).

[ii] Ibid. xviii

[iii] https://twitter.com/IbnMaghrebi/status/1114484754487939079?s=20

[iv] Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation” (2006) 18 Public Culture 323 <https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-006>.

[v] See the work of Taha Abdurrahman, recently explored in: WAEL B HALLAQ, Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (Columbia University Press 2019) <www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/hall19388>.

[vi] “The Secularization of the Muslim Mind — Traversing Tradition” <https://traversingtradition.com/2019/04/08/the-secularization-of-the-muslim-mind/> accessed February 9, 2020.

[vii] “Home | CILE — Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics” <https://www.cilecenter.org/> accessed February 9, 2020.

[viii] Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation (Oxford University Press 2009).

[ix] Andrew F March, “Law as a Vanishing Mediator in the Theological Ethics of Tariq Ramadan” (2011) 10 European Journal of Political Theory 177 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885111395475>.

[x] Halim Rane, “THE RELEVANCE OF A MAQASID APPROACH FOR POLITICAL ISLAM POST ARAB REVOLUTIONS” (2012) 28 Journal of Law and Religion 489 <www.jstor.org/stable/23645196>.

[xi] For more detailed discussion about how Ramadan’s legal methodology has been harnessed by the Qataris in their bid to fashion themselves as a centre for Islamic reform see this brilliant piece: David Warren, “Doha — The Center of Reformist Islam? Considering Radical Reform in the Qatar Context: Tariq Ramadan and the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE)” in Adis Duderija (ed), Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa and Contemporary Reformist Muslim Thought: An Examination (Palgrave Macmillan US 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319418_4>.

[xii] “Search Results for ‘Press Tv’ Press Tv | Search Results |” <https://tariqramadan.com/english/?s=press+tv> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xiii] See the valiant opposition to Khomeini’s nightmarish Vilayat-e-Faqih: Abdolkarim Soroush and others, “Manifesto for Iran’s Green Movement” (2010) 27 New Perspectives Quarterly 32.

[xiv] “(4) Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini: What Is Islamic Feminism — YouTube” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzf2D43wcTc> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xv] “Foreign Domestic Workers in Qatar: Shocking Cases of Deception, Forced Labour, Violence | Amnesty International” <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/04/foreign-domestic-workers-qatar-shocking-cases-deception-forced-labour-violence/> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xvi] “(4) 7/19 Dr. Usama Al-Azami: Global Islamic Ethics in an Age of Neo- Liberal Inequality — YouTube” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZJKxDbnQW8> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xvii] “Policy Brief: Qatar’s Human Rights Record | Human Rights Watch” <https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/10/01/policy-brief-qatars-human-rights-record> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xviii] “The Qatar Poverty Rate: A Byproduct of Inequality and Oppression” <https://www.borgenmagazine.com/the-qatar-poverty-rate/> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xix] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/us/politics/universities-foreign-donations.html, accessed February 9, 2020. “Universities Challenged: Scrutiny over Gulf Money | Financial Times” <https://www.ft.com/content/fa6d15a4-f6ed-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c> accessed February 9, 2020.

[xx] “Reflecting on Qatar’s ‘Islamist’ Soft Power” <https://www.brookings.edu/research/reflecting-on-qatars-islamist-soft-power/> accessed February 9, 2020.