This is the second part of Professor Clive Kessler's article. -- Kassim
Kassim Ahmad and the ulama – Clive Kessler
Published: 6 August 2014
Part 2: Milestones
I have been following the
tribulations of Kassim Ahmad for some time now.
Ever since I came as a Visiting
Professor to UKM: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in late 1985 and was told of
some remarkable but disquieting recent developments there.
The university, upon the
recommendation of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology (some of whose
members had long been sympathetic to the man and his ideas), had been persuaded
to award Kassim an honorary doctorate. (It is on that basis that he is often
referred to as Dr. Kassim Ahmad.}
But it had been a fraught event.
His academic sponsors at UKM had
also wanted to hold a public seminar to discuss Kassim’s ideas about and
proposals for a “revaluation of the hadith”: the often casual sayings that in
the Sunnah are attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and which have subsequently
been routinely invoked in developing Islamic law, to clarify and amplify the
meaning of the Quran.
But, after much action and
counteraction, intervention and counter-intervention, the seminar had to be
cancelled — though Kassim was allowed to speak at the ceremony at which his
doctorate was conferred.
He elaborated briefly upon the Latin
Poet Horace’s and then Kant’s idea, or slogan,Sapere aude! Dare to know. Use
your mind! Think!
I first wrote about the confrontation at UKM over Kassim’s proposed hadith
revaluation seminar in a paper for a Conference on Malay Civilization held in
Kuala Lumpur in the late 1980s.
In it, and long before the idea of
“culture wars” has been made popular as a conservative catch-cry in the USA, I
drew upon Bismarck’s struggles for political domination in late nineteenth
century Germany to characterise what had gone on at UKM, and was beginning to occur
throughout Malaysia, as a Kulturkampf: as a war of and about and within
culture, as a deep conflict about national cultural form and identity and
direction under the impact of the new, post-1970s neo-traditionalist (and
clericalist) Islamisation.
Later I returned to the subject, in
an essay (ironically!) entitled “Milestones”. The remainder of this series
about Kassim Ahmad and his fate consists largely of the text of that essay, in
its revised form of about 2007.
“Milestones”? The name is an ironic
reference to the work of the emblematic Islamist thinker and martyr-figure Syed
Qutb, Ma’alim fi’l-Tariq [= Signposts or Milestones along the Road].
Towards desecularisation: a notable
milestone along the way
There are milestones along the road,
but we do not always heed them adequately in the course of our journey. We are
speeding along, to where we don’t at time much care, so long as we are, or seem
to be, making “good progress” …
I have written elsewhere about
Malaysia’s “long march to desecularisation”, about the half-century-long
struggle, ever since merdeka in 1957, to negate the expectations and reverse
the achievement of those who designed the so-called Merdeka Constitution of
1957.
That constitution rested upon the
assumption that the country was launched on an evolutionary trajectory towards
becoming a largely secular, modern and democratic society, since this was the
destination to which those engaging with modernity (and what other basis for
national politics might there possibly be?) were headed.
The conviction informing the
political negotiations and constitution-making that were the basis for the
country’s independence was that its interests, and those of its culturally
diverse and religiously pluralistic people, would be best served — and indeed
might only be safeguarded — by such a course of national evolution.
This was the underlying basis of the
not unreasonable hopes then held that the new nation would make “good progress”
and thereby make good the promise of “progress” itself. Yet things were not to
prove so simple.
The undoing of those “progressivist”
assumptions and, more deeply, of popular confidence in their apparent
obviousness, “naturalness” and seeming inevitability, has been the work of several
political generations: those of the 1957-1969 “liberal era”, especially the
leaders of PAS with their then “trinitarian” emphasis on the safeguarding of
“religion, people and homeland” and, with them, the distinctive identity and
political future of the nation’s core Malay people; of the early NEP champions
of the 1970s who sought to undercut and co-opt PAS support by adopting the
presuppositions of PAS’s critique of the pre-1970s Umno as the basis for a new
Umno and national politics; of the new, and often decidedly
“shari’ah-minded” Islamists emerging from ABIM in the 1970s and asserting
themselves within and through PAS from the 1980s; of those involved, on both
sides of the barricades, of Tun Dr. Mahathir’s ambitious but in many ways
ungrounded modernist or anticlericalist “counter-Islamisation” of the 1990s;
and of the new generation Malay Islamists, essentially children of the NEP,
many of whom came to political maturity in the context of the post-1997
Reformasi upheavals and who have since become the pioneers of a “new
generation” of distinctively middle-class and professional Islamic activists.
This shift, not simply of political
direction but in the basic underlying assumptions about national politics and
its possibilities, has been the outcome of what has been a central, perhaps
even dominant, dynamic of post-independence politics: the fifty-year
“Islamisation policy auction”, in which (until it joined the Pakatan Rakyat
anti-Umno/BN opposition coalition) PAS always, and with great tactical acuity,
sought to target Umno ambivalences and weaknesses in its policy towards Islam
and so to portray, even highlight, them as evidence of Umno “insincerity” and
“hypocrisy” in matters Islamic.
In response, the Umno always
scrambled to cover up and catch up, to ensure that it was not “left behind”
floundering in PAS’s wake, so that it might appear not less but only
differently committed to a politics (what it held was, unlike PAS’s, a feasible
politics) of Malaysian Islamisation.
But whenever the Umno seemed to have
closed the gap, and often as the electoral cycle was about to enter a new round
or was ready to move to new ground, PAS would simply “raise the stakes”, so to
speak, by suddenly (and usually quite decisively) making explicit what, to that
stage, had been only a tacit component or implicit basis of its Islamist
political agenda.
With that, the Umno would again be
left grasping politically at thin air as Islamic parity with PAS again escaped
its hands. It would find itself holding to, trusting in, and committed to
“marketing” a “religious product” that was not only less substantial than PAS’s
but also less compelling, since its appeared to have been fashioned out of
cornered expediency and desperate opportunism rather than genuine conviction.
The Umno always claimed — as it
sought to minimise the political and ideological gap, to neutralise its
religious disadvantage — that it wanted basically the same things that PAS was
seeking and, to great and enthusiastic popular acclaim, trumpeting, but that it
believed in proceeding (and believed it more effective to proceed) gradually
and by indirect measures rather than openly, explicitly, and by the most direct
route and confronting means.
Its stance often resembled that of
St. Augustine who, as he began to reconsider his ways, famously pleaded for
chastity “but not quite yet” — gradualist, patiently incremental, and often
given to reluctance and foot-dragging. Umno, like PAS, wanted an Islamised
state and Islamised law — but not just yet, not quite so fast!
It was a politics in which the Umno could never catch up, because even when it
matched the measures PAS had been urging, it could never promote them, and
therefore itself on that basis, with the same conviction, plausibility and
apparent Islamic authenticity.
Not merely a reluctant and
unenthusiastic Islamiser, Umno was often left looking hypocritical and, much
worse, seemingly lacking in any understanding of the difference between
commitment and hypocrisy — a major, even disabling, disadvantage within an Islamic
framework of moral and political discourse that so prizes sincerity and roundly
deplores expedient “lip-service” lacking in support from heart and hands.
He who is suspected, and widely regarded as guilty, of hypocrisy can never
successfully plead his own sincerity.
This has been the fate, in all its
various successive incarnations, of the Umno’s Islamic politics. It is the
problem that the Umno, with a conspicuous lack of success, has been wrestling
with as long as anyone can remember.
The UKM confrontation
Along the long journey towards the
desecularisation, or undoing and reversing the assumption of the seeming
“naturalness” of the secularisation, of Malaysian society there were, I
imagine, quite a number of significant milestones. One of them occurred in late
1985 when the noted Malay writer, controversialist and critic Kassim Ahmad, at
the time when he was to be awarded an honorary doctorate by UKM (Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia), proposed to offer a seminar or series of lectures on the
question of “Revaluing the Hadith”.
I arrived as an academic visitor at
UKM a little later and heard much at the time about what had happened. Kassim
proposed to look historically at the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet
Muhammad, as part of the sunnah or record of his sayings and doings that can be
employed as sources for interpreting, clarifying or elaborating Islamic law),
at the wider hadith literature, and at their status as a source of law — and in
that way to encourage a historically informed critical understanding of the
nature and growth of Islamic law, culture and society.
His plan, as it was explained to me,
had been not only to look at the hadith themselves as products of time and
circumstance; after all, the traditional hadith scholarship which he intended
to review and contest did just that. This was the method and methodology of
hadith studies in Islamic historical jurisprudence as practised by Muslim
scholars, the ulama.
Kassim intended further to consider,
in a modern historically and sociologically informed way that went beyond and
even challenged the approach of the ulama to these questions, how the hadith
became a source of law, a basis of shari’ah and fiqh; and, beyond that, to
examine how a form of legal reasoning, scholarship and culture had emerged from
the study of hadith and their evaluation as the exclusive expertise —— one
might even say as an intellectual monopoly — of in effect a clerical “class” or
specialised “estate” in Islamic society and civilization, the ulama, with their
own special concerns, approach and interests (interests based within, but which
might routinely differ from, those of the ummah as a whole).
There is, of course, nothing
terribly radical per se in any such “historicising” intention or project; it is
the approach of modern historical scholarship itself including research into
Islamic civilization by noted Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike. But there
was a concern, even fear, among some at UKM and beyond of Kassim’s individual
nature and reputation as a “fiery radical”; more, there was a concern among
those who consider themselves the modern-day successors and inheritors of the
classical ulama (and, ultimately, of the Prophet Muhammad himself, since they
asserted that the ulama are the pewaris Nabi) that others outside their circles
— people lacking their own special and custom-hallowed expertise, and also
invoking new kinds of expert knowledge of possibly dubious standing and
appropriateness — might intrude into this field.
They feared, it seems, being personally
exposed and challenged; they feared, no less genuinely, that new forms of
scholarship of dubious propriety might be deployed to impugn and undermine
their own standing and thereby that of traditional Islamic scholarship itself;
and, as always happens when the ulama and their clericalist allies are
challenged, they feared — both self-interestedly and on grounds of protecting
the “general good” as they understand it — the “confusion” that might be
created among the believing multitudes if their own authority were to be
questioned.
The consequence that they sincerely
fear, from such questioning and from any opening the debate to new participants
commanding new forms of knowledge, is that orthodox and conventional religious
scholarship — which has hitherto been able to set its own terms for all the
debates and controversies in which its exponents agree to engage — will be
contextualised, even “relativised” and marginalised, should its custodians, the
ulama, choose or consent to become involved in these new kinds of disputation;
and that, in their eyes at least, the status of Islam itself will consequently
be endangered.
So, while, in modern economic
theory, the idea of the “invisible hand” enables people to argue that they can
serve, and may best and indeed can only serve, others by serving their own
self-interest, the ulama work by a different or opposite logic: one that impels
them to want to defend Islam with unimpeachable sincerity and the purest of
altruism but which, while they are doing so, enables them, with that same
compelling sincerity and the authority that it bestows, to protect, as part of
that general and overwhelmingly desirable objective, their own special position
within Islam and their privileges of religious status, including the rights of authoritative
intellectual monopoly grounded in it.
To make a long story short, members
of the Faculty of Islamic Studies at UKM, with some powerful outside backing,
protested against the holding of Kassim Ahmad’s seminar and lectures and
demanded their cancellation. The ensuing dispute rose up through and from the
university to the Ministry and ultimately to Cabinet, where the then Minister
for Education (and later prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) defended, and
persuaded the government to uphold, the right of the university and its Faculty
of Arts and Social Sciences to hold such scholarly discussions, seminars and
lectures, even if the subject or the occurrence was distasteful to the
leadership of the Faculty of Islamic Studies.
But victory was not so easily
assured. Those who wished to block the event had a final card to play. That of
state, not federal, authority, and of royal prerogative. The mosque at UKM, its
management committee and its surrounding parish do not fall, it was suggested,
within the normal “grid” of local religious administration under the Umno-led
state government but under the personal authority, as royal head of the Islamic
religion in his state, of the Sultan of Selangor. An appeal was made to the
palace bureaucracy of the Sultan who upheld the complaints of those opposed to
Kassim Ahmad, his seminar and lectures and his wider intellectual agenda. The
event was cancelled, the seminar and lectures were never held.
The upshot was that Kassim Ahmad
then wrote a book on the revaluation of thehadith, quite a well-written,
serious and plausible effort in many ways: a book of some novelty and with a
hint of “scandal” in the Malaysian context, and certainly a more impressive
scholarly exercise that much of what is published by the majority of Malaysian
academics in the various fields of “humane studies” and by the nation’s most
prominent religious scholars, but hardly of any great originality or
unorthodoxy in the wider world of Islamic legal scholarship or the modern
historical study of Islamic civilization.
At that point the debate fell silent
for a while. Kassim was awarded his honorary doctorate anyway and he went on to
publish his book, his first book as things turned out, on the hadith issue.
Always one to take a strong position, especially when under attack, he then
made what proved a damaging move.
In his eagerness to assert that the Quran makes sense by itself, and can do so
to everyday believers so long as they use their reason and good sense (and so,
by implication, don’t need the added resource of the hadith as a guide or basis
for interpretation, or the intermediary assistance and authority of the ulama
to “know and show” how to use the hadith to make sense of the divine message of
the Quran), Kassim became an enthusiastic follower of one Rashad Khalifa: an
Egyptian computer engineer who had taken up residence in Tucson, Arizona in the
USA where he also served as imam in a local mosque.
Rashad Khalifa claimed to have used
computers to show that the Quran is constructed around an invariable but
hitherto unrecognised structure based on the number 19. If this were so it was
a discovery with amazing implications.
It would have shown that “the
miracle of the Quran” [mu’jizat al-Qur’an] was an even greater miracle than
anybody had previously suspected or ever been able to imagine. It would have
provided proof of an unprecedented and perhaps irrefutable kind of the
foundational Muslim claim that the Quran as it had come down to today’s
believers and now exists is not only perfect in its origins but also perfect,
perfectly uncorrupted and preserved, in its human transmission over the
centuries since Allah launched it, via the Archangel Gabriel and through the
Prophet Muhammad, into human history.
And it would have shown that, with
foresight of truly staggering implications, Allah had placed or encoded in the
Quran itself a hidden, embedded, arcane key that could only be detected, after
they had in due course been humanly discovered and invented, by modern
computers; and which, yet further, by becoming detectable in this way, was now
accessible to all Muslims of good conscience and reason and modern intellect
but which was not accessible to the ulama, locked away as they long were and
still are in their traditional world of classical Quranic and hadith
scholarship and its familiar techniques and narrow intellectual horizons.
So much for the ulama, then.
Rashad Khalifa’s work showed, or so
its devotees such as Kassim Ahmad maintained, that the ulama had not only been
“overtaken by history” and modern scholarship but were now — and had been
demonstrably made by Rashad Khalifa’s work — “objectively irrelevant”. Who
needed them anymore? They had no legitimate role, and if they ever had then
certainly no longer; the claims on which such a role were conventionally based
had been exploded …
The problems that soon followed were
twofold. First, some telling criticisms of Rashad Khalifa’s work, approach and
conclusions were made by computer-literate scholars who wanted to affirm more
orthodox opinion and to back those whose position within the ummah of the
Muslim faithful whom orthodox opinion sustained and upheld. Second, awestruck
by the far-reaching implications of his own ideas and apparent discoveries,
Rashad Khalifa began to believe some things about himself and his role and
status in Islamic history that verged upon, even succumbed to, the heretical.
Angered by these implications, a
devout Muslim of orthodox commitments and loyalty approached Rashad Khalifa in
his mosque and stabbed him. With his death his astounding ideas lost not only
their great proponent and publicist but also much of their remaining
credibility. With that the debate in Malaysia too fell silent, for a while. – New Mandala, August 6, 2014.
* Clive Kessler is Emeritus
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales,
Sydney. This article is the second of a three-part series titled "Kassim
Ahmad: the long agony of Malaysia’s Al-Hallaj".
* This is the personal opinion of
the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The
Malaysian Insider.
