Islamists, civil rights, and civility: the contribution of the brotherhood siras

Contemporary Islam https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-023-00535-8 Islamists, civil rights, and civility: the contribution of the brotherhood siras Jakob Skovgaard‑Petersen1 Accepted: 22 June 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract From the 1980s, revisionist Sunni Islamist thinkers have engaged in a hermeneutical effort to argue for the full acceptance of non-Muslims as equal political participants and citizens in an Islamic polity. A key text in their argument is the so-called Constitution of Medina, regulating the interaction between the newly arrived followers of Muhammad and the existing tribes in Medina who were either polytheists or Jews. This paper investigates the sira literature of Muslim Brotherhood in order to gauge the degree to which the life of the Prophet has been reinterpreted to enable such novel readings. It analyzes three popular Muslim Brotherhood siras, by the Syrian Mustafa al-Sibai (1960s), the Egyptian Muhammad al-Ghazzali (1980s), and the Libyan Ali al-Sallabi (2000s). The paper detects important developments in these siras’ treatments of Muhammad’s engagement with non-Muslims—including their interpretations of the Constitution of Medina. These developments, however, do not reflect the radical rethinking of civil society and civility found in the abovementioned revisionist Islamist literature; rather, they evince a more classical Islamist interest in the Prophet as a propagator of Islam as a law and system. That said, this sira literature should be viewed as a genre aiming at the ideological education of brotherhood members, rather than the theoretical exploration of political theory. Keywords Islamism · Sira · Constitution of Medina · Civic state Apart from a few early studies, scholarship on Islamism took off in the 1980s, due to political developments. The Iranian revolution of 1979 made it clear that Islamism was a force to be reckoned with in political life. The Jihadist assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 further demonstrated that Islamism was to be found in both a Shia and a Sunni variety. On the Sunni side, some of the early books such as Gilles Kepel’s Le Prophéte et Pharaon (1985) and Emmanuel Sivan’s Radical Islam (1985) traced the violent strains in Sunni Islamism back to ideological splits within * Jakob Skovgaard‑Petersen 1 University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Contemporary Islam the Muslim Brotherhood (henceforth MB) movement. These authors rightly noted that jihadism was a product of political struggles and cultural wars in the recently independent Muslim countries. A massive literature on Islamism emerged, with particular interest in the performance of Islamist parties, and the classical figures of Islamism such as Sayyid Qutb. With continued jihadist eruptions over the next decades, it is perhaps inevitable that extremism and violence remained central in the scholarly treatment of Sunni Islamism. The fact that, from the 1980s, Islamist thinkers and organizations such as the MB had also moved in an opposite direction, towards more democratic positions, was only fully appreciated in scholarship after the turn of the millennium. Gudrun Krämer’s Gottesstaat als Republik (1999), Raymond Baker’s Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (2003), and Bruce Rutherford’s Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World (2008) set out to study this pro-democracy trend among Islamists in Egypt. These studies identified a group of interlinked revisionist authors who had opened a discussion about the features and institutions of a future Sunni Islamist states. These authors—the lawyer Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, the judge Tariq al-Bishri, the journalist Fahmy al-Huwaydi, the politician Kamal Abul-Magd, and the writer Muhammad Imara—were not members of the MB. But they had links to it and inspired the members who worked in politics and were elected to parliament. More importantly, they inspired the classical Muslim scholar (`alim) Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926-2022) who in the 1990s through his program Sharia and Life on the al-Jazeera television channel clearly became the most authoritative Sunni Islamist scholar in the Arab world. In books such as The Jurisprudence of the State in Islam, Qaradawi began to espouse similar ideas (al-Qaradawi, 1997). AlQaradawi had grown up as an active member of the MB but left it as he preferred to be an independent scholar. He remained, however, closely connected and influential within it. According to his memoirs, he was invited by the MB to become its leader (Qaradawi 2010:43). Ultimately, the revisionist authors were successful. In the 1990s, a splinter group from the MB sets up its own party, the Hizb al-Wasat (“Party of the Middle Way”) employing much of their vocabulary (Utvik 2005). A few years later, in 2007, the MB itself issued a “party program” for the party it was not allowed to set up. This program stated clearly that while sovereignty ultimately belongs to God, He has delegated man to govern his own affairs. The sovereignty of the people, parliamentarism, the division of the powers, and the day-to-day rule of man-made laws were thus recognized as the basis of politics, and the MB’s party, if it were to be allowed, would contest on this basis in a so-called “civic state.” However, the fact that an even more liberal version of the program had been leaked a month before the publication of the MB program pointed to a heavy contestation inside the MB. Critical observers raised the question of just how profound was the revision and how deep were the new ideas rooted inside the organization. Leading Egyptian critics of the MB, such as the head of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Abdel Moneim al-Said, considered the new emphasis of a “civic state” a ruse set up to catch attention and recognition while avoiding harder revisions of the Islamist ideological base (Said, 2007). 13 Contemporary Islam This is an easy claim to make, not least in a state which itself was only superficially democratic; despite a seemingly democratic set up with parliament, parties, press, and constitutional freedoms, underneath Egypt was ruled by its president as an autocracy. Even so, Said and other critics could well be right; the very authoritarian character of Mubarak’s rule made it easy for the MB to appear as democratic, and its leadership must have been fairly convinced that their democratic posture would not be tested in real life. As it happened, such a testing moment occurred only 4 years later when the revolution changed their fortunes. This paper will try to pursue a new way to gauge the depth of MB democratic revisionism by analyzing a genre of literature which is relevant in so far as it is being studied by new members of the MB in its basic cells, the usra (family) where an ideological indoctrination takes place. The study of the Prophet’s life, the sira, is a stable element in this training, and so far as I have been info (...truncated)