The Genesis of Islamic Economics

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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A long article, but very informative. You may agree or disagree with what the author says.

Timur Kuran, "The Genesis of Islamic Economics: A Chapter in the Politics of Muslim Identity, Social Research, Vol. 64, no. 2 (Summer 1997)

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The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an economic doctrine that calls itself “Islamic economics.” Of all economists of the Muslim faith, only a small minority, known as “Islamic economists,” identify with some variant of this new doctrine. Yet the doctrine is socially significant, if only because it advances the sprawling and headline-grabbing movement known as “political Islam,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” or simply “Islamism.”

The declared purpose of Islamic economics is to identify and establish an economic order that conforms to Islamic scripture and traditions.(1) Its core positions took shape in the 1940s, and three decades later efforts to implement them were under way in dozens of countries.(2) In Pakistan, Malaysia, and elsewhere, governments are now running centralized Islamic redistribution systems known as zakat. More than sixty countries have Islamic banks that claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking. Invoking religious principles, several countries, among them Pakistan and Iran, have gone so far as to outlaw every form of interest; they are forcing all banks, including foreign subsidiaries, to adopt, at least formally, ostensibly Islamic methods of deposit taking and loan making. Attempts are also under way to disseminate religious norms of price setting, bargaining, and wage determination. And for every such initiative, others are on the drawing board.

From these developments one might infer that Islamic economics arose to advance an economic agenda. In fact, the doctrine emerged in late-colonial India as an instrument of identity creation and protection; at least initially, the economics of Islamic economics was merely incidental to its Islamic character. The purpose of the present paper is to substantiate this claim.

Almost no research exists on the origins of Islamic economics. Part of the reason, no doubt, lies in the rhetoric of the doctrine: Islamic economics claims to reflect the fixed, transparent, and eternal teachings of Islam, thus making questions about its origins seem equivalent to investigating the origins of Islam itself. By this account, Islamic economics has existed since the dawn of Islam, and the role of the modern Islamic economist has simply been to rediscover forgotten teachings. Whatever the exact connection between the substance of Islamic economics and the precepts of Islam, this view is fallacious. Some of the economic ideas and practices that are now characterized as inherently Islamic are new creations; and others, while not new, acquired religious significance only recently. Moreover, even the concept of Islamic economics is a product of the twentieth century. So it is hardly obvious why the doctrine exists, to say nothing of why it has generated Islamic norms, banks, and redistribution systems.

Compounding the puzzle about the existence of Islamic economics is the Islamic world’s generally low level of economic development, at least relative to Europe and North America. Given the prevailing pattern, it is not self-evident why Muslims, however devout, would look to Islam for solutions to their economic problems. True, the heritage of Islam offers principles, policies, and practices of relevance to modern economic problems; and in the religion’s early centuries Muslim-ruled lands made remarkable economic progress. But if these scarcely disputed facts justify and explain Islamic economics, why did the doctrine not emerge earlier? If the answer is that it is the Islamic world’s persistent underdevelopment that has led to a search for alternative economic programs, there is the point that the Islamic world passed its economic prime almost a millennium ago. The need for economic reforms has bean present for many centuries, yet Islamic economics is barely a few decades old.

2

Justifying Cultural Separatism

Islamic economics emerged toward the end of India's colonial period as part of a broad campaign to preserve the religious identity and traditional culture of the country's sizable Muslim minority, more than a fifth of the total population. In the 1930s, against a background of mounting agitation for Indian independence, increasing numbers of Muslims came to believe that a Hindu-dominated India would subject them to hostility and discrimination.(3) Their worries were compounded by the ongoing build-up in the indebtedness of Muslim farmers, mostly to Hindu moneylenders who were prepared to expropriate the lands of defaulters (Darling, 1947, Chs. 1, 10). Although the British had erected obstacles to expropriation, it was uncertain that a Hindu-led government would uphold the protections (Ansari, 1991, pp. 184-85; Talbot, 1993, pp. 23940). Responding to such anxieties, certain Muslim leaders began arguing that the Muslims of India formed a distinct nation entitled to a state of their own. Before long, the idea of Pakistan was born, and within a decade and a half the new state became a reality.

Yet there were Muslim notables who resisted the idea of a separate state. They argued that Muslims needed not political independence but cultural autonomy and, further, that the two goals were incompatible. Foremost among these leaders was Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi (1903-79), the founder of Jama'at-i Islami (Party of Islam), first in India and then in Pakistan. Mawdudi objected to a national homeland for India's Muslims on the grounds that they were a "brotherhood" entrusted with "a comprehensive system of life to offer the world." Were they to practice Islam faithfully, the matter of a national homeland would become "absolutely immaterial" (Mawdudi, [1944] 1981, p. 36). He did not deny the existence of threats to Indian Islam, but his favored solution was cultural reassertion rather than political separation. Specifically, he wanted his community to turn inward and revive the traditions that once brought it power, glory, and prosperity. As part of the required rediscovery, he promoted the idea of Islamic economics. We do not know who introduced the concept into Indo-Islamic discourse, but this much is clear: it gained currency through Mawdudi's sermons, speeches, and publications. In addition to "Islamic economics," Mawdudi coined or popularized many other terms that quickly became key elements of Islamist discourse, including "Islamic ideology," "Islamic politics," "Islamic constitution," and "Islamic way of life" (Mumtaz Ahmad, 1991, p. 464).

In his voluminous writings,(4) Mawdudi argued that if India's Muslims were to survive as a community, they would have to treat Islam as their "way of life," not merely as a system of faith and worship. "True Muslims," he wrote, "merge their personalities and existences into Islam." They subordinate all their roles "to the one role of being Muslims." As "fathers, sons, husbands or wives, businessmen, landlords, laborers, and employers," they live as Muslims (Mawdudi [1940] 1990, p. 115). A minority of Muslims were "completely immersed in Islam." Religion fully controlled "their heads and hearts, their bellies and private parts." But the majority were barely practicing their religion. "They believe in Allah," he observed, "offer their prayers to Him, solemnly tell their beads in praise of Him, [and] partially abstain from what is forbidden." Beyond certain limited realms, however, they lead lives that have "no smack of religion whatsoever." Their "likes and dislikes, daily transactions, business activities, [and] social relations" have nothing to do with Islam, being based solely on "personal considerations and self-interest" (Mawdudi, [1945] 1981, pp. 38-40; see also [1940] 1990, Chs. 2-4, 7-9). The latter group, the "partial Muslims," had never accomplished anything of value, claimed Mawdudi. On the contrary, by relegating Islam mostly to the private domains of daily life, they had weakened their community and fueled the ascent of the "infidels" (Mawdudi, [1945] 1981, p. 40). And their limited adherence to Islamic norms, he felt, posed a greater danger to Indian Islam than the looming transfer of political power to the Hindus. In any case, he went on, a Muslim community could lose its religious identity even within a polity calling itself Islamic. The creation of Pakistan, he feared, would instill in its citizens the illusion of communal safety, thus accelerating the diminution of Islam's relevance to daily life.

Such reasoning convinced Mawdudi and his companions that the Muslim nationalists were proposing the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Whereas the nationalists wanted territorial partition to achieve political independence, what was needed was cultural reassertion to ensure religious survival. And to reinvigorate their culture, Muslims needed to make a point of keeping their religiosity continuously in public view (Mawdudi, [1948] 1981, pp. 65-68). In every domain of activity, they had to be conscious of how their behaviors differed from those of non-Muslims, making themselves easily distinguishable as Muslims. Economic activity is carried out partly, if not mostly, outside the home. In principle, therefore, it could serve the cause of heightening Islam's visibility. For example, if Muslim traders were to follow Islamic contracting procedures, and if Muslim consumers were to make choices in ways distinctly Islamic, Islam would gain salience, enabling new generations to grow up in an environment where Islam appeared highly relevant to everyday decisions. A factor making it especially important for Muslims to keep their economic behaviors "Islamic" was, Mawdudi felt, the growing significance of economics. "New complications have been introduced in the production, distribution, and acquisition of the necessities of life," he observed. "As a result of this, there is such a plethora of discussion and scientific research about economic problems that ... the other problems of mankind seem to have paled into insignificance."(5)

Bringing economics within the purview of religion was central, then, to Mawdudi's broader goal of defining a self-contained Islamic order. Whatever one thinks of his agenda, he was onto something real: with technological progress, economics was indeed becoming increasingly important to daily life everywhere. In a technologically primitive and static world, where family background determines one's career, where one plants and sells crops in the ways of one's grandparents, where one has little to spend on nonsubsistence goods, and where markets offer little variety, economics may be vital to physical survival but economic decision making does not absorb much attention. By contrast, in a technologically advanced world, where job choices have to be made, where women pursue and interrupt careers outside the home, where investment choices require monitoring, and where markets offer abundant choice, economic decision making absorbs considerable time. It follows that if economic choice is considered a secular activity, economic advances will make Muslim existence look increasingly secular. But if it is considered a religious activity, then economic development need not reduce Islam's perceived role in the lives of Muslims.

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Westernization and Muslim Disunity

Why did the Muslim nationalists not see the dangers that Mawdudi identified? His own explanation was that many had attended colleges, like Aligarh University, founded expressly to equip Muslims with Western knowledge. Brainwashed to think like Westerners, the nationalists were trying to refashion Islam in the image of irreligious Western materialism. In relation to the matter of a homeland, for example, they were making a fetish out of issues not even raised in the Koran, such as federalism, parliamentary democracy, and limitations on the franchise (related by Brohi, 1979, p. 291). Yet, the ideology of "Muslim nationalism" was a contradiction in terms. How, asked Mawdudi, could nationalism be compatible with a universal religion that transcends local identities? He went so far as to indicate that the envisioned state would not be worth serving. Pakistan would be "pagan" and its leaders "Pharaohs and Nimrods," he once claimed (quoted by Aziz Ahmad, 1967, pp. 373-374). But once Pakistan came into being, he simply accepted the new reality and expanded his mission to include making the state itself Islamic (Mawdudi, [1950] 1981, [1952] 1960). Distinguishing between a "Muslim state," whose citizenry happens to be largely Muslim, and an "Islamic state," which follows Islamic principles, he began fighting against what he considered Western influences on Pakistan's social, economic, and political systems.

Over time, Mawdudi's anti-Western rhetoric would become less strident and his positions more nuanced. Around the time of India's partition, however, his central concern was the impact of the West--the civilization, once called Western Christendom, that comprises Western Europe and North America, plus their cultural offshoots elsewhere. In addition to altering the way Muslims think, the West was changing their relationships with each other. Growing numbers of Muslims, he observed, were admiring Western literature, adopting Western customs, playing Western sports, and dressing like Westerners. Becoming socialized to consider Western culture superior to their own, they were judging Islam by Western criteria, when they should be judging the West by Islamic criteria. They were looking down on their brethren, making it seem that the Muslim community has two segments, one modern and progressive, the other traditional and backward. And, accentuating the communal division, they enjoyed an advantage in obtaining civil service jobs for which English literacy had become a prerequisite.

But if the Muslim community was splitting, the culprits, as Mawdudi saw it, were not only his fellow Muslims who saw Westernization as an instrument of personal advancement. The West itself was using its recent material advances to make Muslim achievements seem unimpressive. "Your honor, which no one dared to touch," he told a congregation, "is now being trampled upon" (Mawdudi [1940] 1990, p. 56). There existed, in fact, Western statesmen and intellectuals who were open about their low opinion of non-Western cultures; and some of them had singled out Islam as particularly uncivilized and irrational. For example, the Islamicist Duncan Black Macdonald ([1909] 1965, pp. 6-10) had said: "The essential difference in the oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things ... The Oriental feels no need to explain everything; he simply ignores the incompatible; and he does so conscientiously, for he sees only one thing at a time." True to this view, Macdonald ([1911] 1971, pp. 254-55) believed that to make peace with the twentieth century, Muslims would have to abandon Islam. And he approved of efforts to limit Islam's social role. The Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire were on the right track, he felt, as they were "prepared to assimilate the civilization of Christendom, prepared to make the attempt, at least, to bring the Muslim peoples within the circle of modern life." They were ready, he perceived, to modernize Islam. And where Islam stood in the way of their program, they knew that it was Islam that had to yield.

Today, such statements are generally considered crude and simpleminded. In the days before India's partition, however, they were commonplace, as Edward Said has shown in his polemic against Orientalism (1978). For Mawdudi and his followers, they constituted evidence that Westernizing Muslims had put themselves in the service of a new crusade against Islam. Khurshid Ahmad (1957, p. 8), a member of Mawdudi's inner circle and later a prominent contributor to Islamic economics, cites Lord Macaulay, the British statesman, as saying:** "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern--a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect."** The clear implication, it seemed, was that Islam had to be defended.

4

The Logic of Cultural Separatism

Mawdudi had been raised in a family suspicious of modern knowledge, and he had not received a formal Western education (Nasr, 1996, Ch. 1). These factors probably contributed to his apprehensions about the West, making him overlook the West's diversity and equate Western cultural expansionism with the West itself. But whatever his motivations and perceptions, he was right that contacts with the West were making increasing numbers of India's Muslims reject their own heritage. At the time he arrived on the political stage, his fellow Muslims were overwhelmingly illiterate; according to the 1931 census of India, only 6.4 percent of those aged five or above could read, and the educated minority usually attended traditional schools that emphasized religion and avoided modern science.(6) The community was mostly destitute, and it boasted disproportionately few of India's major entrepreneurs.(7) Dissatisfied with these conditions, ambitious Muslims, like growing numbers of India's non-Muslims, and like millions of poor people in other parts of the world, were discovering that the key to prosperity lay in adopting new technologies and developing new habits of mind.

Mawdudi was right, too, that India's Muslims were behind other major groups in making the requisite adaptations. Whereas 1.2 percent of all Indians aged five or above were literate in English in 1931, only 0.9 percent of the Muslims were. And, as of two decades earlier, 1.5 percent of all Indians were in professions requiring more than an elementary education, but just 1.3 percent of the Muslims. The latter comparison is especially striking, because the advanced professions were predominantly urban, giving entry advantages to Muslims, who were more urbanized than the population as a whole.(8) Two historical factors contributed to these patterns. Indian Islam drew its adherents primarily from the lower end of the caste system. And the Muslims were statistically overrepresented among the artisans whose skills became essentially worthless with industrialization.

Finally, Mawdudi was also justified in believing that Westernization was weakening the control that religion exerted on personal worldviews and interpersonal relationships. His writings anticipated Thomas Luckmann's (1967) "religious privatization" thesis--that as Western religion got pushed from public to private domains it became less of a restraint on individual religiosity and lifestyles (see also Casanova, 1994, Chs.1-2). Indeed, in Europe and North America the adherents of the typical religious denomination were exercising ever greater discretion over how they would practice their religion. If being an Episcopalian once meant that one attended Episcopal services every Sunday, it was now possible to attend occasionally, or not at all. Moreover, such diversity within denominations was becoming as acceptable as diversity across denominations had become in earlier centuries. And, as a consequence, religion was losing its importance as a determinant of marriage, residential choice, and employment (Johnson, 1980). Based on the West's ongoing evolution, then, it was reasonable for Mawdudi to predict that the Westernization of India's Muslim community would weaken official Islam's control over the minds and behaviors of individual Muslims. It was reasonable, too, for him to expect the practice of Indian Islam to become increasingly diversified, although his rhetoric exaggerated the likely effects.

His favored response--to reverse Islamic privatization by making Muslims display religiosity in a wider array of public settings--rested on a universal principle of group solidarity. In every society, movements eager to preserve or rebuild group solidarity put emphasis on visible markers of group identity. Such markers limit contacts across group boundaries and encourage those within (Hardin, 1995, Ch. 4; Hechter, 1987). An extreme form of their use involves the stigmatizing behavioral codes of religious sects popularly known as cults. Many sects require their members to behave in ways that nonmembers find strange and repulsive. The requirement binds the members to each other, as no one else accepts them (Iannaccone, 1992).

In late-colonial India, Mawdudi was not the first to promote Islamic norms to cult*ate Muslim solidarity. The Muslim nationalists had encouraged Muslims to distinguish themselves by wearing the fur hat that came to be known as the "Jinnah cap"--partly in response to Hindu identification with the "homespun" headgear known as the "Gandhi cap" (Aziz, 1967, p. 148). Nor was a campaign to enforce Islamic behaviors a break with Islamic history. Traditionally, Islam had insisted more on orthopraxy (behavioral correctness) than on orthodoxy (doctrinal correctness). As a case in point, the regular recitation of sacred texts was generally considered more important than comprehension of their meaning (Denny, 1989, p. 90); even in non-Arab lands, the call to prayer and the prayers themselves were almost always in Arabic, a language few understood.(9) It is significant that no major Islamic language has a word meaning orthodox, and also that the designation for Islam's largest major branch is "sunni," which means orthoprax. A good Muslim is usually not someone whose beliefs conform to an accepted doctrine, as Protestant Christianity defines a good Christian. It is someone whose commitment to Islam is evident through observable behaviors. The Islamic counterpart to the Christian concept of heresy is bid'a, which means "deviation" and has traditionally been interpreted to mean "behavioral nonconformism" (Smith, 1957, p. 20).

The originality of Mawdudi's program lay, then, not in his insistence on Islamic orthopraxy, but rather in his efforts to update the content of this orthopraxy to meet a new challenge. He did not try simply to restore or reinvigorate decaying customs. Nor did he limit the scope of his agenda to domains of activity that Islam was regulating already. Sensing that Europe's Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution were having irreversible and universal effects, he sought to redefine Islamic orthopraxy in a way that would allow, even encourage, certain adaptations without a loss of communal identity. Economic change was central to modernization. So, unless Muslims were taught how to make their economic adjustments in ways recognizably Islamic, identity loss would be inescapable. One of the pressing challenges facing the Islamic world, Mawdudi thus reasoned, was to specify, by developing Islamic economics, the economic components of a new Islamic orthopraxy. Although Mawdudi presented the agenda as a return to Islam, it was, in an important sense, a manifestation of Westernization. The idea of a distinct discipline of economics originated in Europe; no such category of knowledge existed in the intellectual heritage of Islam. Commentaries now classified as Muslim economic thought were not, except recently under Western influence, considered a separate branch of intellectual discourse.

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Previous Campaigns of Renewal

The novelty of the concept of Islamic economics is evident in the intellectual evolution of Mohammad Iqbal (1876-1938), the Indian poet-philosopher who, a generation before Mawdudi, became a dominant voice for Islamic reassertion. In 1902, before becoming an Islamist, Iqbal published a book called Ilmul Iqtesad (Science of Economics). Given the subsequent evolution of his thought, the most striking aspect of this work is its irreligious character. A few years later, by the time Iqbal had embraced Islamism, he no longer considered economics a key instrument of change. Not that he had lost sight of the Islamic world's economic backwardness. In 1909, he observed that India's Muslims had "undergone dreadful deterioration. If one sees the pale, faded faces on Muhammadan boys in schools and colleges, one will find the painful verification of my statement." Yet, his proposed solution to this crisis of underdevelopment lacked an economic dimension. He wanted his fellow Muslims to stop "out-Hinduing the Hindu" and to reinvigorate the traditions that had brought their ancestors glory and prosperity (Iqbal, [1909] 1964, pp. 43, 54).

One might infer from Iqbal's prescription that on economic matters, too, the solution lay in the rediscovery of old Islamic principles. However, the concept of a specifically Islamic form of economics is absent from Iqbal's work. Significantly, the major bibliographies of Islamic economics (Siddiqi, 1981; Islamic Research and Training Institute, 1993) list none of his writings. Iqbal's disinterest in developing an Islamic form of economics is shared by other figures who, in one way or another, made significant contributions to Islamic thought in the decades before Mawdudi came on stage. The speeches and writings of such activists as Muhammad Abduh, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan reveal no interest in the Islamization of economics.(10)

Nor did the development of Islamic economics ever become an objective of pan-Islamism--the diffuse international movement that, starting in the late-nineteenth century, sought to unite the world's Muslims under one flag. The pan-Islamists were alarmed by the military advances of Europeans, and especially by threats to Muslim holy places. They thus promoted the ideal of supra-national Muslim solidarity to resist the Europeans more effectively.(11) A few showed some interest in economic matters. For example, certain pan-Islamists worried about the economic exploitation that accompanied loss of political independence, and a few favored an economic war against non-Muslim rulers, including the withholding of taxes (Landau, 1990, pp. 119-20). But the notion of identifying or rediscovering economic practices that were distinctly Islamic was absent from their campaigns--to say nothing of cultivating an economic doctrine grounded in Islamic teachings.

While the Muslim activists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may not have included the development of Islamic economics in their agendas, collectively they paved the way for Mawdudi's initiatives. By calling for a return to Islam, however much they differed in what they meant by this, they prepared the masses for Mawdudi's broad Islamization campaign. Mawdudi's argument that Islam is a comprehensive way of life was hardly new. What makes him stand out is that he took this view seriously and sought to identify its concrete implications. At the time that Mawdudi set to work, vast numbers of Muslims, in India and elsewhere, were acutely aware of the Islamic world's political powerlessness and economic backwardness in relation to the West. They had developed various responses, including ones diametrically opposed to Islamization. One response, secularist modernism, was to accept the advantages of Western civilization, privatize Islam in the image of unobtrusive Protestant Christianity, and attempt to join the West. This response became the official policy of modern Turkey under its first two presidents, Ataturk and Inonu: the post-Ottoman regime sought to import Western civilization in toto, and part of its strategy was to drive Islam to the periphery of social life, shifting the primary loyalty of Turks from religion to nation. A second response, less radical in appearance, was Muslim modernism, exemplified by the movement for Pakistan. It pursued Westernization without recognizing any conflict between this objective and that of promoting an Islamic identity. One of its hallmarks was to identify Islamic precedents for reforms formulated to meet secular goals. Unlike secularist modernism, which essentially rejects the sacredness of Islamic scripture, Muslim modernism pays lip service to the comprehensiveness of Islamic wisdom, pretending that Islam is its ultimate source of authority. The difference is one of stylistic and tactical choice, however, not a matter of substance. For reasons unrelated to religion, either type of movement may decide to promote, say, restrictions on imports. The first will justify its policy through secular theories of economic development. The second will do the same, but offer also a more or less vague religious rationale.

Secularist and Muslim modernism both entailed Westernization, differing only in how openly they rejected Islamic authority. By contrast, two other responses were resolutely against Westernization, and each treated Islam as the primary source of wisdom. Its extreme variant, conservative Islamism, simply rejected Western civilization and embraced familiar cultural forms without pursuing change. By Mawdudi's time, it was more popular among the masses, including low-level religious functionaries, than among religious leaders of his own stature. Mawdudi's response, which may be called reformist Islamism, was to seek a religious revival that promotes modernization without Westernization. He differed from the conservative Islamists in perceiving an urgency to meet the Western challenge creatively. And he differed from all modernists in insisting that the reforms have an Islamic character. He refused to pursue reforms with an eye toward satisfying world opinion.(12)

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Sources of Variation

Mawdudi claimed to speak for all Muslims, except the Western-educated minority he considered “partial Muslims.” In truth, he never enjoyed the support of a majority of India’s Muslims, to say nothing of widespread support from Muslims outside India. As we have seen, Muslims responded to the Western challenge in various ways. One reason, already noted, lies in differences in upbringing, education, and crosscultural exposure. A Westernizing society would put people with traditional backgrounds at a disadvantage. Although they might make certain adaptations, they would find it difficult to achieve the privileges available to people with Western educations and contacts. A related factor is that certain individuals had a vested interest in preserving traditional patterns of authority; preachers, for example, had reason to believe that in a Westernized India or Pakistan some of their powers would shift to modern professionals. Just as local producers of textiles might fear competition from foreign-made textiles, local religious functionaries felt threatened by competition from foreign sources of cultural authority.

Still another source of variation lay in the capacity to cope with cultural clashes. People differ in their ability to synthesize elements from different cultures, as they do in the ability to prevent conflicts through compartmentalization. Consider the Muslim requirement to fast from dawn to dusk during Ramadan. Especially when Ramadan falls in summer, fasting workers may experience a fall in productivity. Those with high professional standards may feel morally torn, therefore, between fulfilling a sacred obligation and the duty to be productive. Such individuals will be more receptive, holding all else constant, to responses that entail choosing one culture over the other (Kuran, in press).

Mawdudi was aware of the inner conflicts that Muslims commonly experienced; he understood that many Muslims felt torn between East and West, old and new, tradition and adaptation. If the West’s influence were controlled, he reasoned, such tensions would subside. The task would require providing distinctly Islamic alternatives to behaviors Muslims had come to define as Western. If work enjoyed religious meaning, and work and worship were perceived as parts of a continuum, the modern Muslim would have a unified personality, rather than a bifurcated one. Mawdudi’s agenda shared a key characteristic with the agenda of secularist modernism: the aim of discarding certain cultural influences to prevent cognitive and moral dualism. Moreover, its instrument for fostering Islamization, an updated Islamic orthopraxy, was equivalent to the secularist campaign to weaken Islamic culture by encouraging the adoption of Western appearances and lifestyles.

Turkey’s headgear law of 1925, which forced Muslim-Turkish men to discard the fez in favor of Western headgear, aimed at cultural reconstruction. The law may seem comic or trivial, and it tramples on what is arguably a basic liberty. Nonetheless, it was of great significance at the time. “Dress, and especially headgear,” it has been observed, “was the visible and outward token by which a Muslim indicated his allegiance to the community of Islam and his rejection of others … The fez proclaimed at once his refusal to conform to the West and his readiness to abase his unimpeded brow before God” (Lewis, 1968, p. 267). The Turk adopting a Western appearance would be identifying publicly with the West; and he would be removing from view a major symbol of his Islamic heritage. Other Turkish reforms of the 1920s, including the abandonment of the Arabic script for the Latin, were also intended to solidify Turkey’s visible identification with the West. In neighboring Iran, likewise, the lifestyle reforms that Reza Shah Pahlavi undertook in the 1920s and 1930s were aimed at giving immediate visibility to Iran’s Westernization (Chehabi, 1993; Banani, 1961, Chs. 2-3). Mawdudi’s agenda, like these Westernization campaigns, was based on the insight that the coexistence of Western and Islamic cultural influences fueled personal tensions and social instability. It differed, of course, in its choice of which cultural influence was to be eliminated.

Both secularists and reform-minded Islamists were conscious of past reforms that generated mental dualism, like the educational reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Rulers of the era, including those of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, sought to equip Muslims with the advantages of Western knowledge without altering the traditional educational system. Specifically, they set up Western secondary schools without reforming the primary curriculum. The result was a bifurcation of the knowledge and values of educated Muslims. One side of them considered Islam as central to every question; the other ignored Islam altogether. One side accepted the traditional Islamic values, with an emphasis on community, authority, and stability; the other glorified values of the European Enlightenment, including freedom, innovation, and progress. Mental dualism could be avoided through a unified system of education, itself situated within a unified culture.(13) But there was more than one possible form of unification. Ataturk’s Turkey and Reza Shah’s Iran had chosen one strategy; two decades later, Mawdudi was pursuing an alternative.

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