The Renewal of Islam: An Oxford academic's antidote to bigoted narratives

Last weekend the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson led a rally in central London to claim that white Britons are under threat.

Robinson has long maintained that Muslims are invading Europe, that Islam is incompatible with the west and that any attempt to challenge talk of a Muslim takeover is an attack on freedom of speech.

Many agree with him. Nigel Farage's Reform UK, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives and sections of the British media pump out anti-Muslim narratives. 

Their analysis is informed by ignorance and sustained by lies and conspiracy theories. Neither Farage nor Badenoch is renowned for their religious literacy. They would struggle, if challenged, to articulate a coherent definition of Islamism.

But mainstream British discourse on Islam is on their side. Enter the Oxford academic Fitzroy Morrissey. 

His new book, The Renewal of Islam: Thinkers and Believers of the Modern Era, is an accessible history of modern Islamic thought, and antidote to the ignorance and bigotry that dominates public debate.

The Renewal of Islam refers to the Arabic word “tajdid”, meaning attempts at renewing the faith. 

The Prophet Muhammad told his companions that at the start of each century God would send a “mujaddid”, a renewer.

And so we are introduced to Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, a scholar in Ottoman Damascus in the late 16th century. 

He attacked the puritans of the day and defended the controversial practice of drinking coffee, as well as smoking, listening to music and visiting the graves of saints. 

There was a popular twist to Nabulusi’s argument: he believed all Muslims, not just initiated Sufi elites, could listen to music. 

He criticised “those who conceal God’s commandments from the masses on the basis of the esoteric principle that the divine law contains ‘hidden knowledge’” - a common idea among pre-modern Muslim philosophers and Sufis.

Nabulusi was thus an early proponent of what would become defining themes of modern Islamic reform movements: A move towards egalitarianism and a breakdown in hierarchy - as well as an emphasis on returning to the original scriptural sources and a refusal to blindly accept the opinions of past scholars.

At the same time, one of Morrissey’s crucial interventions into the scholarly discourse is his argument that modern reformers drew much more heavily from classical Islam than has often been presumed. 

Particularly influential was the thought of the great medieval Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi. His intricate metaphysical doctrine of “the unity of existence” holds that there is nothing "real" but God: everything is a reflection of God’s existence, since God’s is the only true existence. 

This led Ibn Arabi to the controversial conclusion that “everything that is venerated” is ultimately divine.

Centuries later, Ibn Arabi would influence many of the most important Muslim thinkers. 

Literalists and traditionalists

Morrissey brings refreshing nuance to his analysis of reformers whom historians have often crudely lumped together as fundamentalists. 

One crucial thinker is the 18th-century Indian scholar Shah Wali Allah, who railed against what he saw as the decadence of the ruling Mughal elite.

Often stereotyped as a puritan and a literalist, Wali Allah was in reality an admirer of Ibn Arabi. Morrissey presents him as a “great harmoniser, seeking and finding unity between scripturalism and mysticism”. 

By contrast his near contemporary Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab founded the al-Muwahhidun, the “true monotheists” - dismissed by opponents as Wahhabis. 

Through an alliance with the House of Saud, Abd al-Wahhab’s movement would become enormously powerful - especially after Saudi Arabia’s wealth exploded and the country exported its religious ideas across the Islamic world. 

Abd al-Wahhab vociferously opposed many popular Muslim practices, including the veneration of saints. He declared large numbers of Muslims to be heretics and urged his followers to "hate them, to hate those who love them, to revile them, and to show them enmity". This included followers of Ibn Arabi - such as Shah Wali Ullah.

To this day the House of Saud remains a valued ally of Britain and the United States.

Morrissey explains the Deobandi movement, centred around a seminary in north India after the Mughal empire’s collapse in the wake of India’s First War of Independence of 1857-58. 

Nearly half of British mosques are Deobandi, and there are dozens of Deobandi seminaries scattered across England. 

Often depicted in the media as fundamentalists, Morrissey paints a more complex picture. The Deobandis have always been adherents of the medieval Hanafi school of law - while Abd al-Wahhab’s followers oppose allegiance to schools of law. 

In that sense the Deobandis are traditionalists, but early Deobandi scholars distinguished themselves from the Indian norm by emphasising the study of Hadith (documented sayings of the prophet) over theology and logic. 

Rashid Ahmed Gangohi, one of Deoband’s founders, called philosophy “a useless thing” and “wicked”.

The Deobandis departed from the distinction older generations of jurists made between “reprehensible” and “praiseworthy” innovations in faith, instead opposing all devotional practices except those of the earliest generations of Islam.

This meant, for instance, opposing the celebration of the prophet’s birthday - a cause of rancour among many South Asian Muslims to this day. 

The Deobandis embraced a sober form of Sufism - arguing for the unity of “the sacred law and the mystical path”. The Taliban emerged out of the Deobandi movement - although not all Deobandis support them.

The rise of Islamic modernism

The book’s greatest achievement is its analysis of global Islamism’s emergence out of Islamic modernist thought.

Morrissey expertly draws trans-national connections between apparently disparate thinkers and ideas. He outlines intellectual genealogies between Sunni and Shia thinkers, and between parties and movements in different countries. 

The two most important early modernists were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his student Muhammad Abduh.

Afghani, born in western Iran, was designated by the British empire as a dangerous subversive and “pan-Islamist” activist.

A rationalist philosopher, he drew from medieval thinkers such sa Ibn Sina and Suhrawardy as well as the Iranian Shia philosophical tradition, particularly the mystic scholar Mulla Sadra. 

The cosmopolitan al-Afghani travelled around Russia, India, Afghanistan, Istanbul and Egypt, and spent time in Paris and London. He advocated for Muslim unity to fight European imperialism, thus launching Islam as a liberation movement.

His Egyptian student Abduh became the “leading proponent of Islamic modernism” of his age. Conservative scholars found his arguments for gender equality especially hard to stomach.  

They nevertheless survive today, and Morrissey’s book pays attention to feminist Islamic scholars who argue that many patriarchal teachings associated with Islam were the creation of later scholars and not to be found in the Quran. (Christian theologians have made the identical point about patriarchy and the gospels.) 

Abduh was exiled from Egypt after supporting the failed 1882 uprising against British rule. His teacher Afghani had been expelled three years earlier and was living in the wealthy Indian princely state of Hyderabad. 

From there he denounced the Indian thinker Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who preached loyalty to the British Raj, and founded a Muslim university in Aligarh modelled on Cambridge. 

While agreeing with some of his ideas, Afghani attacked Khan as a British stooge. But Aligarh educated a new Indian Muslim elite that would spearhead the Khilafat (Caliphate) Movement in the early 1920s, which opposed the Allied occupation of the defeated Ottoman empire.

'[Islam] recognises one sovereignty alone, the sovereignty of God, which is supreme and unconditional, indivisible and inalienable'

 - Maulana Mohamed Ali

Aligarh also shaped the All-India Muslim League, the political party that led Pakistan to independence. 

Luminaries of the League included the Ali brothers, leaders of the Khilafat Movement and close friends of Mahatma Gandhi. Mohamed Ali - educated at Aligarh and Oxford - argued that Islam “recognises one sovereignty alone, the sovereignty of God, which is supreme and unconditional, indivisible and inalienable”. 

He was a friend and admirer of one of the most formidable Muslim thinkers of the modern age - the poet-philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal. 

Iqbal, a member of the Muslim League, admired Afghani’s pan-Islamic ideals and condemned nationalism as atheistic. Instead he proposed a “community of Islam”, which “is not bounded by space or time; its founding principle is the covenant which man made with God at the beginning of creation”. The exquisitely liberal English novelist EM Forster, author of A Passage to India, praised Iqbal as a "genius".

Morrissey writes that this insistence on the sovereignty of God in opposition to modern nationalism “was to become the core concept of Islamism”, which he defines as “the movement to renew Islam through political means”.

Islamism and radicalisation

Let’s pause and turn to the British government’s crude social cohesion strategy, unveiled earlier this year, which identifies “Islamist extremism” as a “predominant threat” and seeks to define the movement.

It says: “Islamism is a political ideology; its proponents seek to impose their interpretation of religion and ‘sharia’ as law by state power, and, in various manifestations, justify acts of terror to achieve their goal of a global Islamist state - their version of a ‘caliphate’ or ‘Islamic state’. Islamists do not represent the Muslim communities of the UK.”

This is a clumsy and questionable definition, as The Renewal of Islam shows.

To return to the book, one of the most important Islamists was the man who claimed to be Iqbal’s intellectual heir, Abu l-’Ala’ Mawdudi, who hailed from Hyderabad and as a young man entered politics through the Khilafat Movement. 

Though a student of Iqbal, Mawdudi developed a political vision that went far beyond his and founded the Jama’at-i Islami, a political party still operative in Pakistan today, and whose Bangladeshi offshoot won considerable support in the country’s national election earlier this year.

Morrissey lays out how Mawdudi’s thought influenced Islamism in the Arab world as well - in particular, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed by many autocratic governments in the Middle East, and which Nigel Farage wants to ban in Britain.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Egyptian scholar and schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna - a Sufi who was inspired (like Iqbal) by Afghani and Abduh. Banna’s Brotherhood emphasised peaceful societal reform through education and missionary work.

As Morrissey shows, sections of the Brotherhood were radicalised in the 1950s when the organisation was suppressed by the Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Among the hundreds of Brothers imprisoned by Nasser was Sayyid Qutb, who combined his reading of Mawdudi and another Indian thinker, Abu l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi, with the experience of 12 arduous years in prison to produce a more radical Islamist vision. 

Qutb argued that Muslim states that failed to recognise God’s sovereignty had to be fought against. He believed a revolutionary vanguard - a notion heavily influenced by Marxism - must wage armed struggle to bring about an Islamic state.

From the Brotherhood’s Qutbist wing “the global jihadist movement would later emerge in the 1980s and 1990s”, Morrissey writes.

Crucially, the characterisation by the UAE and the American and British right of the Muslim Brotherhood as a uniform threat emerges from Morrissey’s book as incoherent.

Only a minority followed Qutb’s path. In fact, perhaps most influential to the Brotherhood in the late 20th century was the scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who left Egypt as a young man for Qatar, where he would live for the rest of his life. 

Qaradawi, who promulgated his ideas across the Middle East from the 1990s onwards on Qatar’s Al Jazeera television channel, “stressed the lenient and balanced nature of the divine law and its adaptability to new circumstances”. He argued that democracy was compatible with Islam. 

So did Rached Ghannouchi, the Tunisian leader of the Brotherhood-affiliated Ennahda party which was elected into government after the Arab Spring.

Ghannouchi was (and is) committed to political freedom. He argued against religious coercion, even announcing in 2016 that his party was transitioning from Islamism to “Muslim democracy”. But he is now a political prisoner of the authoritarian Tunisian President Kais Saied.

Khomeini as Plato's philosopher-king

Morrissey’s analysis of Ayatollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, brings valuable perspective. Morrissey shows that Khomeini - a Shia - had many ideas in common with Sunni Islamists.

Like them Khomeini stressed the sovereignty of God, the principle entrenched in the post-revolutionary Iranian constitution. While he had been trained in Shia jurisprudence, Khomeini also studied the metaphysics of prominent Sunni scholars.

In a 1988 letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, Khomeini urged the Soviet leader to study Ibn Arabi, Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra. 

The Iranian state is built on Khomeini’s novel doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, “the authority of the jurist” who is to rule like Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king, described by Khomeini in terms of Ibn Arabi’s ideal of the “perfect human”.

Morrissey writes: “It is possible, then, that Khomeini saw himself as the Platonic philosopher-king or the Sufi perfect human of his age… tasked by God with delivering the world from corruption and establishing a reign of righteousness on earth.” 

This reigning guardian jurist, Khomeini decreed, could even suspend the Sharia and Islamic law, in service of the public interest. 

He believed that “in the Islamic system, women do have the same rights as men”, and argued women must have the right to vote and run in parliamentary elections, as well as the right to study, work and own property. 

At the same time Khomeini decreed that women should wear the headscarf, and saw those who refused as “corrupt manifestations of the monarchical regime and the West”.

“Khomeini’s revolutionary reading of Islam has also been influential among Islamists in the Sunni world,” Morrissey tells us. 

Ghannouchi in Tunisia, for example, believed that Khomeini’s ideology gave the Iranian Revolution the “tools” to express the conflict between “the oppressed and the mighty”. He followed Khomeini in seeing this conflict “in terms of a perennial struggle” between the Prophet Moses and the tyrannical Pharaoh. 

Meanwhile, Khomeini’s ideology has been the focus of intense criticism from some Shia thinkers. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a leading Iraqi scholar, argues that jurists cannot take on the expansive authority claimed by Khomeini. 

And a prominent supporter of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, later became Khomeini’s most notable critic and argued that “Islam is for the separation of powers and does not recognise the concentration of power in the hand of a fallible human being”.

This very readable account of modern Islamic thought is straightforward intellectual history. At times the reader yearns for more robust and engaged judgments of the kind delivered by scholars such as Jonathan Brown and John Esposito.

At some stage Dr Morrissey may face a choice between staying in an academic ivory tower or tackling head on the ugly and twisted distortions of Islam that go unchallenged in British politics and mainstream media. 

Even as it stands the book is an essential corrective to much of the pernicious nonsense that is propagated across mass media in Britain and the West. But the far right, and the advocates of the great replacement theory, are gaining ground. Their voices are growing louder, and more dangerous.