It Could Happen Here - Anarchism and Islam with Andrew

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Andrew tells James about some notable Islamic anarchists and anti-authoritarians throughout history. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. And I'm joined today by... It's me. It's just James today. Just James. Sounds like a cringe fan from the 90s. Really? I was not aware. Just out of curiosity, James, do you play any Paradox games?

I don't. I don't know what that is. Is that like a type okay like a type of computer game yeah yeah this was well it's like a uh game development company and also they also distribute games as well okay um you've hit an area about which i have very little knowledge yeah and by the way this isn't sponsored uh it's just, it's how I ended up stumbling upon this topic, right? Okay. So just, you know, humor me for a second here. So one of the Paradox games is Crusader Kings 3, right?

Right, yeah. It's, it's... Okay, no, I'm really interested to see where this goes. So yes, it's a medieval grand strategy game it's sort of like it's it's a combination of like those classic

sort of well grand strategy games and also a bit of Sims flair you're playing as a character and you're also playing as that character's dynasty so you play as a character and you're also playing as that character's dynasty so you'd play as the grandfather and then the father and then the son

and then the grandson and so on and so forth and so I actually if you can't tell I play the game sometimes a little bit too much but I appreciate the roleplay in the setting it's a set between either 867 or 1066 and 1453, which is considered the end of the medieval era

due to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. Yeah. So, you know, at a certain point in playing the game, after playing in pretty much every corner of the map, I was looking for a new religious movement to spread across the map for fun of course this is something i do with my free time and i started reading about all these different strands of islam that they have in the game like the karmicians and the ibadis and the sufris yeah And that led me to stumble across the Mu Tazilism and the Najadat.

And please bear with me with the pronunciations of everything I'm about to pronounce in this episode. But Mu Tazilism and the Najadat, I started digging into this stuff and that led me to make the decision to talk about what I've been learning. Before I begin I know even the idea of religious anarchisms is somewhat controversial particularly the discrepancy between the anarchist slogan of no gods no masters and of course the history of various faith-based class struggles. My stance on it is complicated, but whatever my stance is, I don't think we could deny the reality

that religious anarchisms have existed in the past and still exist today. No, I'm really interested in this. I'm working on a book at the minute about anarchists at war, or I guess how anarchism beats war and uh like people variously sort of defining our anarchism narrowly and widely i i grew grew up in the early 2000s i guess with the kind of new anarchists as graber called it um and they were always amongst that broader movement

opposed to like neoliberal globalization there were always religious people and i'm not a religious person and i went to a school where there was a priest and the priest had been a member of the anti-apartheid movement in south africa and um was wanted there and had left for doing violence again which like it's pretty based and i i so like i have a lot of time for a lot of religious people and it's always been kind of an area of i guess interest to me um this like religious anarchisms yeah it it certainly that it has a very uh eventful history yeah um so i wanted to talk a bit about the rather interesting history of just one eventful history. Yeah. So I wanted to talk a bit about the rather interesting history of just one

tradition. Although the whole thing about the anarchism that I'm going to be discussing is that I wouldn't really call it anarchism. At least not by our standards. Yeah. It's more of a distinct and notable resistance to centralized authority

or a minimization and decentralization of that authority i think it's more akin to like a minarchism than an actual anarchism sure right but it's still interesting to see uh i guess the seeds of anti-authoritarianism through history, right? Yeah, very much so. So these particular movements, they have a sort of an anti-Khalif, Khalif being the religious leader in Islam. They have a kind of an anti-Khalif action that expanded into a broader philosophical and political conclusion. So we can start in the city of Basra in Iraq in the 800s, where a discussion was taking place regarding how the Ummah, or Islamic community, should respond to a leader of the Abbasid Caliphate who had become corrupt and tyrannical. Extreme opinions were that of the activists who believed in staging a violent revolution to instill a new legitimate leader,

and the quietists who believed in patiently persevering under tyranny or passively resisting. It's funny how we see these kind of ideas about change rearing their heads again and again and again throughout history, despite various different contexts. The other people were like, yeah, let's go get it. And the other people were like, let's rock back a little bit and take things a bit more passively. So that's interesting, right? Now, Abu Bakr, the guy who was the the first caliph he made it clear in his inauguration that obedience is not incumbent upon his followers if he contradicts the will of allah and for those who don't know allah is god in the islamic religion um and yet the dominant position

uh in islam has been the quietest position even to this day the activist position in Islam has been the quietest position, even to this day. The activist position is less popular, some would say. Some people have this idea that the only manifestation of Islam can be the one seen in the autocracies of Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. But even back in Islam's heyday, there were Muslims willing to resist the tyrannical control of even religiously ordained rulers. So back to Basra in the 800s, there was also a third category of solutions proposed, which we can call anarchist in the general sense, but not really in the actual sense. Most of the Muslim anarchists believed that society could function without the caliph. They proposed a kind of evolutionary anarchism where private property was not abolished per se,

but because the ruler was considered illegitimate, the titles of property the ruler granted would also be considered illegitimate. They also argued that the caliph must be agreed upon by the entire community, They also argued that the caliph must be agreed upon by the entire community, which is no easy task considering how Islam divided between Sunnis and Shias almost immediately after the Prophet Muhammad died. However, without this consensus, no legitimate caliph could exist. And it was widely accepted that Allah did not impose obligations that were impossible to fulfill.

So then it was reasoned that then there was really no obligation to establish a legitimate caliph if no consensus could be found there's a little loophole basically we need full consensus we're never going to get full consensus oh well shrug you know yeah and then at the time in the context remember this is medieval times, you're seeing a lot more you're seeing several different political configurations and formations and ways of organising society

so some of them at the time were seeing their neighbours, the Bedouins and the Bedouins were living without rulers like normal, so they were like well why can't we living without rulers like normal. So they were like, well, why can't we live without rulers like normal? And so they used that as a justification as well. And so they also had many proposed solutions, ranging from a radical decentralization of public authority

to a complete dissolution of public authority. One particular genre of proposals involved replacing the caliph with elected officials, either completely independent of each other or joined together in a federation. And these elected officials would be temporary and only remain in office when legal disputes arose or when an enemy invaded. When the problem was resolved, they would lose their position and society would return to quote-unquote anarchy there was even a minority sect which called for the complete abolition of the state called it and they argued that if there wasn't sufficient agreement established to make a belief there can never be enough to establish law at all they wanted not just political independence

but intellectual independence because according to them individuals should be able to reason for themselves and have no one above them but Allah basically the religious anarchist slogan one god no masters yeah right but don't get it twisted of course all this radical stuff applied to them within their group alone so if you weren't part of their group you could still be enslaved or killed this is kind of a selective yeah

yeah it's a bit selective in their freedom mindedness yeah freedom mindedness. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Then in 817, so a couple years later, the center of religious power in the muslim world collapsed with the fall of baghdad the chaos of civil war ensued but in the absence of public authority there would naturally emerge an order out of the chaos without central planning as we've seen it again and again and again throughout history, people self-organize to protect themselves and their positions collectively. In times of natural disaster, in times of crisis,

people come together without a state having to organize them and tell them what to do and how to do it. Such has been the case for centuries. And speaking of centuries, we're going to jump ahead a little bit to the 12th century, where we could see a sort of a pseudo-nihilist anarchist movement called the Calandaria, a movement of wandering ascetic Sufi dervishes

from Andalusia and Spain to Iran, Central Asia, India, and Pakistan. Many of the Calandaria had body piercings and tattoos, an explicit defiance of Islamic traditions that regarded such practices as haram. Here's a bit of an interesting story. One of the earlier divishes of the Malatimiyya was once being followed by a crowd of admirers. And in reaction to their praise he paused pulled out his pee pee and urinated

on the ground so it's a sort of a radical it's almost like what's the name of that Greek guy oh the one who like it begins with a D Diogenes right so he kind of a D. Diogenes. Right.

So kind of like a Muslim diogenes. A sort of a rejection of society and rejection of its values. As a lot of people, a lot of these dovishes, they chose voluntary poverty and nomadism as a lifestyle. They would reject civilization. They would have this sort of an active nihilism directed at society. One of them has been quoted in saying in effect that money is, well,

I don't know if I could say that. Probably cross that out. I think we, I think we get, we get the, get the idea. Of course, again, not really anarchism in the classical sense or in an actual sense, but a manifestation of one trend within or one streak within the anarchist movement.

So we jump ahead again to the 19th century now, with perhaps the first anarchist to convert to Islam, Ivan Aguili, born in Sweden in 1869. Aguili was interested in philosophy, spirituality, ideology, and literature, and he explored new ideas ravenously. He joined the Theosophical Society in France, and he met anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in London in 1891. He also began reading the Quran around 1892 and converted to Islam in 1897. 1892 and converted to Islam in 1897

and Agueli wrote about Islam and anarchism fairly frequently but he didn't really connect them together however there was another one another anarchist who converted to Islam Isabel Eberhardt she grew up in

Geneva and converted to Islam around 1896 or 97 and she challenged both eastern and western norms through her writings and praxis, pursuing a nomadic lifestyle in Nigeria joining a Sufi order and expressing her unconventional spirit

by dressing as a male when she felt like it, taking on a male name and pursuing a lifestyle of purported promiscuity journalism smoking keef and journeying across the north african desert by horse um i think she would also be considered a figure of queer anarchist history um i wasn't able to find anything about how she identified personally, but apparently, I don't know if she was a cross-dresser or if she was trans or something else entirely.

Right. Like you get, especially in that period, like, like misogyny is, is so rampant that like, it could be necessary to like, I guess to present as male even if you

weren't like trans in your gender identity just to have access to things that were constrained or like delimited as male right yeah exactly makes sense yeah it's it's i think it's why it's to just be like we don't know rather than to necessarily like lay claim to someone's identity stuff when all we know is their presentation stuff agreed also during this time in the ottoman empire there was a not insignificant population of european anarchists mostly italians in alexandria alone there were approximately 12 000 italians living and working, often in the building sector. By 1876, anarchists there had organized a branch of the Syndicalist International Workers Association. And in the early 1800s, Enrico Malatesta and other Italian anarchists joined the Urabi uprising against the British. And this was perhaps the first time that Muslims and anarchists fought a military campaign side by side.

Although the uprising was squashed, anarchists were less harassed in the Ottoman Empire than in many other parts of Europe. Later on, in 1901, anarchists co-founded a free popular university, the Université Populaire Libre, or UPL, in Alexandria. It provided free courses on subjects like Tolstoy's and Bakunin's ideas, the arts, pragmatic topics like work and negotiation strategies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However common, if you were indigenous to the region, tough luck. Indigenous Muslims and Arabic speakers weren't really part of the UPL. to the region tough luck indigenous muslims and arabic speakers weren't really part of the

UPL's program weren't really included pretty much marginalized from the education entirely and the UPL gradually became more and more aimed toward and controlled by upper class interests so that sucks yeah that's

lame very lame a lot of disappointments in this episode people who are like nearly there and then kind of fail of course yeah but that's part of history, right?

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Yeah, that's generous. Yeah, to put it as generously as possible. I mean, we even saw later on a sort of an Islamic liberation theology developing that dismissed bin Laden as senseless and lifted up the examples of the revolutionary babi movement of the 1800s malcolm x and ali shariati's quest for a just and classless society then there was also a neo-sufi group known as the murabutin the murabitun and the inclusive mosque initiative in london as other examples of you know of how Islam could be used to resist some Islamic traditions. And there were also

several individuals today who have explicitly and publicly self-identified as Muslim anarchists. Not Muslim anarchists, but specifically Muslim anarchists. Including Abdinur Prado and Mohamed Jean Veneus.

That's cool. So that's a sort of basic rundown. But I think inevitably with these sort of topics, these sort of fraught ideas, something like an Islamic anarchism,

there are going to be some challenges and criticisms, right? Yeah. Like, for one, you know, it's a fairly new concept, the idea of Islamic anarchism. Like I went over, there were certain trends that can be described as anarchic, if you're being generous. But the idea of Islamic anarchismism as in something born out of the after development of anarchism and through anarchism as a political philosophy it's fairly new and it challenges a lot of the traditional Islamic teachings on

authority and governance so some scholars and practitioners have pointed out that with the emphasis of social order, the emphasis of authority of the state and the rule of law, this idea of rejecting hierarchy and authority as advocated by Islamic anarchists is heretical, practically. practically. There's also some criticism that with Islamic anarchism's rejection of all forms of authority and hierarchy, it undermines the concept of taweed, which is the belief in the oneness of God. And by, you know, rejecting that, by undermining that concept and promoting individualism and self-rule, it sort of goes against that teaching of course like i mentioned earlier there's also this challenge to the idea that islamic anarchism or islamic anarchism could be compatible because of the slogan no cause no masters right um of course islamic anarchists and other islamic socialists would argue that

islam should be seen as a liberating force that can help individuals achieve freedom from oppression and exploitation. The same argument is made with a lot of other strands of religious anarchisms as well. And so to bring things to a sort of a close, I'd say that, you know, like every religious anarchism, like every political philosophy, like every religion, like everything, honestly, people pick and choose. You know, in Islam, you can find elements of quietism as well as activism, detached mysticism as well as pragmatic daily concerns, traditions of violence and traditions of nonviolence, moderation and extremism. In anarchism, tensions exist between pacifism and insurrectionism, syndicalism and individualism, nationalism and anti-nationalism, collectivism and individualism, again. And I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a religious anarchist of any variety but i think that there is room for even if i may not agree with it in all cases the conclusions some people draw i think there's room for these

sorts of dialogues to be had um i think there's room for exploration to the history of all sorts of uh historical movements and ideologies and religions and ideas um because i mean there's a whole legacy of billions of people who have lived and died long before us and I find it interesting at least as a thought exercise to see how they came to their conclusions as well

so I hope this episode was thought provoking, enlightening and interesting to those who tuned in yeah it's always interesting to see these yeah like we don't have to agree with all of it but i think it's interesting to see where people come at these things from and it was i was wondering if you were going to get to or not but like one of the things that you saw in um the spanish like don't really the civil war as much but in the second republic was the

socialists and and like left liberals explicitly selling out uh like moroccan muslim people and north african people more generally whatever their faith and anarchists being like no we should express solidarity with these people like even if we if they are aren't and some of them were part of like they were anarchists in spanish north africa of course but like even if they weren't being like we should oppose colonialism and uh like when every other kind of left stripe didn't um it's kind of one of the failing sort of public not to so yeah there's been these conversations i guess for a long time it was interesting to hear about those sufis in spain uh and think about how long those conversations have been going back and forth you know exactly exactly i think the whole iberian peninsula is really interested in region in terms of the confluence of cultures i did miss that particular um historical instance in my research

without also pointing it out yeah don't worry i'm big nerd for that stuff is there anything you'd like to plug before we go andrew sure sure uh so you could find me on youtube at andrew rizam uh on patreon.com slash saint drew St. Drew. And I've logged off of Twitter. But if you want to get the updates, when I do decide to log in to post updates here and there, you could follow me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew. Thank you, Andrew. Take care, everyone. Peace.

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