Draft version. Final version in Strategic Analysis, vol. 41, no. 6, 2017.

Link to the article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09700161.2017.1377899

Muslim Traditionalism and Violence in the Middle East

By: Dr. Mohammed Nuruzzaman
Associate Professor of International Relations
Gulf University for Science and Technology

In recent years, especially after the 9/11 attacks on America, Western academics and policy-
makers have increasingly viewed Islam as inherently a violent religion and Muslims as terrorists.
Several academic studies1, though without much empirical evidence, have found that Islamic
religion is more fundamentalist and more conflict and violence-prone, both domestically and
internationally. But the reality is that most Muslim countries are not fundamentalist and most of
them are also relatively free of violence. A large percentage of Muslims, approximately 600
million, live in Southeast Asia and China but evidence of violence, driven by fundamentalism, is
either rare, or not of much concern2. Similarly, hard data on religious conflicts, during 1 - 2008,
reveals that it is not Islamic but Christian civilization that witnessed the bloodiest conflicts in
history. Some 177 million people were killed in religious conflicts and political violence in
Christian countries (excluding the erstwhile antitheist communist bloc), while for Islamic
civilization the death toll was 31 million for the same period3. Contrary to this reality, many
Western leaders also see Islam as equivalent to violence and terrorism. Incumbent US President
Donald Trump, for example, vilified Muslims as “terrorists” during the 2016 presidential
election campaigns and capitalized on Islamophobia4 as a winning strategy. Former President
George W. Bush, in the run up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, branded the Muslim Iraqis
“Gog” and “Magog”5, a Biblical reference to the enemies of God, to partially justify the invasion
on religious ground.

Behind such malign views and perceptions of Islam and the Muslims in the West lie the recent
spikes in violence in the Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The outbreak of civil wars and
sectarian fighting in Iraq, Syria and Yemen are characterized by a complex set of forces and
interests –strategic stakes of external actors (read US and Russia) in the region, tough
competition for power and influence between regional rivals (Iran and Saudi Arabia), and the
resurgence of Islamic fundamentalist forces to capture power, redraw the political map, revive
the caliphate and beat the West out of the region6. A recent study by Gleditsch and Rudolfsen7 on
violence in the Muslim countries presents a number of important findings: firstly, Muslim
countries are experiencing a disproportionate percentage of the post-cold war civil wars;
secondly, in terms of other internal forms of violence (such as repressive human rights policies),
their overall record is much higher than the non-Muslim countries; and thirdly, their participation
in interstate wars is also higher than the global average. What is striking is that the Islamic
fundamentalists, a small group of violent Islamists, are involved in most of the civil wars in the
Muslim world, contributing to horrendous atrocities and unimaginably high battle casualties.
Between 2010 and 2014, of the world’s total battle deaths 94 per cent (209,000 out of a total of
223,500) took place in the Muslim Middle East8. The proclamation of the Islamic State in the
summer of 2014 has further abetted violence in Iraq and Syria. In Syria alone, according to a
recent report by Reuters9, 465,000 people have either been killed or gone missing, while five
million Syrians have become refugees in foreign countries and another 6.3 million are internally
displaced.

What exactly accounts for the rise in civil wars, violence, deaths and destructions in the Muslim
Middle East? Gleditsch and Rudolfsen10 identify the impacts of Western colonialism in the
region, and interest-driven external interventions as possible causes; Sørli et al11 have attributed
conflicts and violence in the region to variables like regime type and level of development; while
Karakaya12 refers to repressive regimes, oil dependency, low economic development and the
growing but dissatisfied youth bulge as the reasons for violence. All such reasons have some
merits to explain political conflicts like the Arab movements for democracy, better dubbed as the
Arab Spring, but they fall short of unpacking the unending cycle of hostility and violence
between the radical Islamic fundamentalists (grouped under al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) and
their governments and other groups, and between the radical Islamic fundamentalists and the
West (more specifically the US), especially after the 9/11 attacks. A better explanation to
understand conflicts and violence in the Muslim Middle East is offered by the fundamentalist
nature, basic thrust and theological outlook of Muslim traditionalism – the dominant Sunni
branch of theology and ideology. This commentary makes an attempt to develop this important
explanation.

Muslim Traditionalism

Muslim traditionalism sticks to the textual sources, looks at Islam as it was established by
Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century and disallows any scope or freedom to reason
out and interpret reality objectively. In that sense, Muslim traditionalism has been an anti-science
and anti-rational theological branch that by the twelfth century forcibly took away from the
Muslims their right to philosophical reasoning and scientific inquiry. Much of the reasons for
present-day scientific and material decline of Muslim societies boil down to the rigidities of this
traditional branch of Islamic theology. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State today truly inherit and
propagate this traditional branch of Islamic theology.

Enter al-Qaeda and the Islamic State

Both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State leaders, in their attempts to square off against the West,
have often underscored the need for a return to the original Islamic rule to revive Muslim glory
that Islam had achieved under the leadership of the four “Rightly Guided Caliphs” (Abu Bakr,
Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abu Talib) in the early period of Islam.
They are, in fact, seeking a return to Muslim traditionalism. Like other Muslim traditionalists,
they see the Qur’an and the Hadiths (sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad) as universally
applicable, regardless of time and space. Any effort to reinterpret the divine texts to suit the
prevailing conditions, what is better called ijtihad (defined as the use of reason to reinterpret
developments and solve problems accordingly), they opine, are heretical and outside the remit of
Islamic ‘Faith’. The emancipation of the Muslims, they argue, lies in their commitment to hold
onto the original texts and lead a life free from worldly and material impulses13.

Clearly, the traditionalists’ interpretation of Islam prefers ‘deen’ (religion) to ‘duniya’ (the
material world), in a sharp contrast to the West’s philosophical materialism that encourages
human enquiries into the material world and to demystify nature. Whereas the West, beginning
with the eighteenth century, adopted scientific and empiricist methods to understand the world
and the universe unleashing huge material progress and prosperity in the process, the Muslim
traditionalists have suffered from an irrational and absurd fear that philosophical reasoning and
scientific investigations of the nature would eventually reason God out of existence for the mass
people. Were it really the case, European rationalism and scientific pursuits would have banished
Jesus and God from the Western societies long ago.

Over time, the traditionalists did irreparable damage to Muslim societies in two distinct but
lamentable ways: their anti-science posture (the foreclosing of the door to material progress) and
their anti-democratic stand (the denial of mass participation in the governance system).

The Traditionalists’ Anti-science Posture

Science, in fact, had its glorious days under Muslim rule, though for a short-lived period. What is
known as the “Islamic Golden Age” is the Baghdad-based Abbasid period (750–1258), which
successfully produced a bevy of Muslim polymaths, including al-Khwarizmi (died 850), al-Razi
(also known as Rhazes, died 925), al-Farabi (died ca. 950), Avicenna (also known as Ibn Sina,
died 1037), al-Biruni (died 1048), and al-Hazen (died 1040), among others, who made
tremendous contributions to almost all branches of science and philosophy, including algebra,
medicine, optics, physics, psychology, alchemy, cosmology, mathematics, and much else. The
Abbasid Caliphs, especially Harun al-Rashid, al-Mansur, and al-Ma’mun lit the torch of science
by allowing reasoning and the freedom to inquiry. Crossing over the conventional Muslim
religious lines, they also directly aided and encouraged the Muslim intellectuals, clerics, scholars
and philosophers to borrow from Greek, Hindu and Byzantine houses of knowledge. What later
came to be known as the ‘translation movement’14 in Baghdad, lasting from the eighth to the
tenth century, the Muslims got almost all Greek scientific works in medicine, mathematics and
other branches of science and philosophy translated into Arabic, which they successfully utilized
to advance their own scientific research and development.

The Muslim polymaths were members of a group commonly known as the “Mu’tazilites”. Their
ideology, called “Mu’tazilism”, adopted rationalist methods to explain how the world and the
universe worked – the necessary first scientific step to uncover the laws of “cause and effect”.
Influenced by Greek rationalism, particularly by the works of Plato and Aristotle, the
Mu’tazilites developed their own rationalist philosophy15 that favored reason over revelations,
what was a clear deviation from the conventional Muslim belief that God is the “cause” of all
occurrences, and everything in the world and in the universe is willed by God. They viewed the
Qur’an as a divinely-inspired book rather than the direct word of God, rejected the belief in
human predestination (fate) and upheld that human fate depended on human actions.
Furthermore, in line with Greek rational thinking and methods16 that urge humans to question all
occurrences around them, not simply attribute the occurrences to God, and that behind every
claim of knowledge there must have a reason to prove it, the Mu’tazilites unleashed their
scientific minds to understand the physical and human world around them. Their scientific
pursuits thrived for some four hundred years spanning most of the Abbasid period but they were
gradually marginalized or eliminated from the society by the twelfth century by a counter Sunni
movement called “Ash’arism”. The absence of powerful political patrons like Caliphs al-Mansur
or al-Ma’mun simply expedited the downfall of the Mu’tazilites. That was the beginning of
Muslim scientific irrationalism, social backwardness and historical decline – the precursor to
contemporary Muslim fundamentalist violence.
The impact of Ash’arism

Ash’arism17, as an anti-rational and anti-philosophical Sunni school of thought, not only rejected
the Greek forms of logic and rationalism but roundly condemned philosophical reasoning and
free thinking championed by the Mu’tazilites. It called on Muslims of the day to refocus on the
Islamic holy texts and discard scientific inquiry that would question the basis of Islamic religion
(and all religions for the matter). The Ash’arites developed the doctrine of occasionalism, a
doctrine that preached the idea that all natural occurrences took place as per God’s will and that
the concept of natural causality simply did not exist. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (died 1111), the
leading figure of the Ash’arism school, identified reasoning as the enemy of religious belief and
vigorously propagated the irrational and unscientific idea that nature did not exist outside God’s
will. Most Sunnis of the time sided with al-Ghazali and banished science from society, though
scientific research only to aid the study of Islamic religion was allowed. There was a clear return
to the metaphysics by the early twelfth century. Well, this much resonates with the trial of
Galileo by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in the early seventeenth century for his scientific
contributions to the heliocentric theory of Nicolas Copernicus that all planets in our solar system
revolved around the sun. Galileo was declared a heretic and put under house arrest till his death
in 1642. The eighteenth century Enlightenment swept away much of European ignorance but
Muslim anti-science tradition still survives today. Many universities in the Middle East and
across the Muslim world focus on the study of metaphysical subjects, while paying inadequate
attention to scientific and technological research.

The grave consequences of the abandonment of science for the Muslims are manifold: not only
did they lose intellectual and scientific leadership in the world, a series of socio-economic
malaises started gripping their whole community. Europe, that initially copied and thrived on
Muslim scientific works of the Mu’tazilites during and after the Enlightenment, became the new
master of the globe putting the rest of humanity under its dominance, including the Arab Middle
East and North Africa. To paraphrase Bernard Lewis18, European scientific endeavors reversed
the relationship between Islam and Christendom from battlefields to marketplace and public life:
disciples became masters, and masters opted to become pupils.

A group of nineteenth century Muslim modernists, chiefly Syed Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–
1897) and his Egyptian disciple Mohammad Abduh (1849–1905), waged a war on Muslim
traditionalism, unsuccessfully though. They sought to arrest Muslim decline by arguing that
Islam did not prohibit scientific pursuit of knowledge, which was absolutely necessary to
improve Muslim living standard and resist European penetrations into the Muslim world.
Furthermore, they favored rationalist and empiricist methods of inquiry, what the Mu’tazilites
promoted a few centuries earlier, to turn around the tide of Muslim predicament but the
traditionalists were hardly swayed.

In the contemporary context, Muslims have little visible presence in the world of science and
technology. According to one estimate19, Muslim contribution to the world’s scientific literature
is just around one percent, whereas Spain and India each contributes more scientific literature
than the combined contributions of forty-six Muslim states. Any statistical publications by the
World Bank or the United Nations Development Program usually bracket most Muslim countries
within the low income or low human development group of states who are struggling hard to
provide their citizens with the basic needs support to contain domestic social and political
violence, but not always successfully. There is no denying that the curse of unemployment and
creeping frustrations motivated the Arab youths to bring down their governments through the
Arab Spring movements for a better living standard and for improved social and political
security. Many jobless Sunni young Iraqis and Syrians were lured to join the Islamic State
fighting force on the promise of better monthly salaries and benefits.20 Muslim youths, living in
conditions of prosperity, would hardly sympathize with or espouse such violence perpetuated in
the name of religion. There is, after all, a causal link21 between unemployment, poverty and
violence.

The Anti-democratic Position

Ash’arism’s victory against the Mu’tazilites meant an end to the freedom to inquiry, an end to
the tradition of ijtihad. Muslim autocratic rulers of the time and thereafter have seen independent
ideas and reasoning or ijtihad as a major source of challenges to their rules. They used the
Ash’arites’ opposition to independent thinking and reasoning as a pretext to close down the
political system for the common Muslims. The modern-day Muslim autocrats and dictators also
view the Western democratic system of governance as chaotic and unsuitable for Muslim
societies – only to justify the denial of democratic rights for their peoples. Traditional Islamists
like Sayyid Qutb saw, and his followers still view, Western democratic concept of popular
sovereignty as transgressive of God’s sovereignty (meaning that God is the lone sovereign and
God’s rule, as revealed in the Qur’an, must be implemented in the world), while contemporary
Muslim modernist thinker Yusuf Qaradawi views democracy as an “antidote to despotism”, as a
way to get out of despotic systems of governments that impose their wills and choices on the
Muslim populace.22
Whatever may be the differences in opinion on democracy, the despotic system of rule is a clear
example of deviance from the original Islamic practices of choosing the rulers. Prophet
Muhammad used to consult his close associates to make critical decisions pertaining to war,
peace and organisation of the nascent Islamic state he founded in Medina. After his death in 632
A.D., the Medina-based small community of Muslims chose Abu Bakr as their first caliph
through spirited democratic debates, dissensions and approvals. The three other “Rightly Guided
Caliphs” were also democratically chosen or approved to look after the interests and benefits of
the Muslims. This great democratic tradition was first sacrificed by the Damascus-based
Umayyad rulers (661-750) who established dynastic rule sowing the seeds of despotism in Islam
which the Ash’arites subsequently helped to legitimize.

The deviation from the original democratic tradition has sapped the political vitality of the
Muslim community in at least two insidious ways: first off, it made the Muslims feel not like
worthy citizens of their societies since they were hardly involved in the governance systems;
and, secondly, it denied them alternative political channels to express demands, grievances or
even vent anger. Whatever protest movements the Muslim dissidents in the Middle East
organized in the past or even organize today were/are brutally suppressed, and protest organizers
are either branded disloyal to the state (not to the despotic leaders!) or perpetrators of violence to
harm public life. As the phenomenon of ‘Arab Spring’ indicated, apart from economic
grievances, the Arab youths were politically so marginalized that they viewed their governments
as insular, arbitrary and repressive that treated them as merely subjects, not as citizens.23 So they
vented their anger first peacefully and thereafter violently, though success did not come as
expected.

Unfortunately, the failures of the Arab Spring to change the despotic Arab political systems
(other than Tunisia) has opened other extremely violent channels for the Arab youths – the
Islamic State, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and many other jihadist organizations active in Iraq and
Syria. Exploiting the economic hopelessness and political frustrations of the Arab youths, the
jihadist organizations have successfully recruited and directed many of them towards more
violence against each other24, against the Iraqi and Syrian governments and against the West. An
endless cycle of violence seems to sweep the region and consequently affect the world.

In conclusion, Muslim traditionalism, through its anti-science and anti-democratic postures, has
no doubt attributed a violent image to Islam, a religion of peace, and facilitated the long
historical decline of the Muslim civilization. At the same time, the largescale violence in the
Middle East today is also attributable to the short-term tactics being used by the West to secure
its geopolitical and strategic interests in the region and deepening rivalry between two regional
behemoths – Iran and Saudi Arabia. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq on false grounds that former
dictator Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction set the country on a dark
road to sectarian violence that lasted from 2006 to 2008. The Islamic State’s origin also draws to
the mayhem created by post-invasion developments. Additionally, the West’s policy to meet
violence with violence in Iraq and Syria, which is termed ‘counterterrorism’, is also unleashing
even more violence, which should stop. Most importantly, a return to science and philosophical
reasoning to improve Muslim economic and social status can immensely help reverse the cycle
of violence and destruction.

Notes:

1. See, for example, Jonathan Fox, ‘Do Muslims engage in more domestic conflicts than
other religious groups?’, Civil Wars, vol. 6, no. 1, 2003, pp. 27 – 46; Jonathan Fox, ‘The
religious wave: Religion and domestic conflict from 1960 to 2009’, Civil Wars, vol. 14,
no. 2, 2012, pp. 141 – 158; Gabriel Ben-Dor and Ami Pedahzur, ‘The uniqueness of
Islamic fundamentalism and the fourth wave of international terrorism’, Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003, pp. 71 – 90.

2. Andrew Mack, ‘The Truth About Islam’, Slate, January 21, 2016, at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/01/islam_isn_t_inherently
_violent_or_peaceful.html (accessed: May 11, 2017).

3. Naveed S. Sheikh, Body Count: A Quantitative Review of Political Violence Across

World Civilizations, The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Jordan, 2009,
p.20.

4. Khaled A Beydoun, ‘Donald Trump: The Islamophobia President’, Al Jazeera, November

9, 2016, at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/11/donald-trump-
islamophobia-president-161109065355945.html (accessed: May 10, 2017).

5. Juan Cole, ‘Is Lt.-Gen. Right that Islam is not a Religion?’, Informed Comment,
November 20, 2016, at: https://www.juancole.com/2016/11/flynn-right-religion.html
(accessed: May 15, 2017).

6. On the resurgence and goals of the fundamentalist Islamic State, see Mohammed
Nuruzzaman, ‘The Challenge of the Islamic State’, Global Affairs, vol. 1, no. 3, 2015, pp.
297 – 304.

7. Nils Petter Gleditsch and Ida Rudolfsen, ‘Are Muslim countries more prone to
violence?’, Research and Politics, April – June 2016, pp. 1 – 9.

8. Gleditsch and Rudolfsen, ref. no. 6, pp. 4 – 5.

9. Reuters, ‘Syrian war monitor says 465,000 killed in six years of fighting’, March 13,
2017, at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-casualties-
idUSKBN16K1Q1 (accessed: August 8, 2017).

10. Gleditsch and Rudolfsen, ref. no. 6, pp. 5 – 6.

11. Mirjam E. Sørli, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Håvard Strand, ‘Why is there so much conflict in
the Middle East?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 49, no. 1, 2005, pp. 141 – 165.

12. Suveyda Karakaya, ‘Religion and conflict: Explaining the puzzling case of “Islamic
violence”’, International Interactions, vol. 41, no.3, 2015, pp. 509 – 538.

13. Saud Saleh AlSarhan, Early Muslim Traditionalism: A Critical Study of the Works and
Political Theology of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, doctoral thesis submitted to the University of
Exeter, September 2011, at:
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/3374/AlSarhanS.pdf?sequence
=2 (accessed: May 7, 2017).

14. Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Routledge, Oxon and New York, 1998,
pp. 1-10.

15. Usman Butt, ‘The Muslim Predicament’, July 10, 2013, at:
http://www.catch21.co.uk/2013/07/the-muslim-predicament (accessed: May 7, 2017).

16. George Boas, Rationalism in Greek Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore, MD, 1961.

17. Hillel Ofek, ‘Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science’, The New Atlantis,
November 30, Winter 2011, pp. 14-16.

18. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Orion
Books Ltd, London, 2002.

19. Hillel Ofek, note 10, p. 4.

20. Kellan Howell, ‘Islamic State cuts its fighters pay by half: report’, The Washington
Times, January 20, 2016, at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/20/islamic-
state-cuts-its-fighters-pay-half-report/ (accessed: May 7, 2017).

21. Christopher Cramer, ‘Unemployment and Participation in Violence’, World Development

Report 2011, at:
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/9247/WDR2011_0022.pdf
(accessed: May 10, 2017).
22. Roxanne L. Euben and Mohammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton Readings in Islamist
Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 2009, pp. 30-31.

23. Mohammed Nuruzzaman, ‘Human Security and the Arab Spring’, Strategic Analysis, 37
(1), 2013, pp. 57-58.

24. Reuters, ‘Syrian rebels weakened in Aleppo battle by their own divisions’, December 4,
2016, at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-rebels-analysis-
idUSKBN13T0IC (accessed: May 21, 2017).