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There are two big events of this century which obviously deserve our
attention. One is the failure of Marxism; the other is the success of
Islam. I am an outsider to both these faiths. The terms I use are
analytical or sociological. They do not imply endorsement or condemnation
from an absolute viewpoint; they express the judgments of an observer of
society concerned sympathetically with the fate of the people involved in
these systems.
Let me begin with the failure of Marxism and my attempt to understand it.
Marxism has often been compared, I think correctly, to a religion. It has
many of the features of the advanced kind of religion which Professor
Keane mentioned, although I think he was slightly narrow in highlighting
religions which are centred on belief and doctrine and in rather
underplaying the different kind of religion which is primarily ritualistic
and traditional and non-doctrinal. Marxism had many of the features of a
religion. It offered a total vision of the universe and of society and a
combined vision of the two, so that social order and social righteousness
were seen as corollaries of the total vision. In brief, it offered a path
of salvation to mankind. It was unusual amongst religions in that it
claimed to be entirely secular and this-worldly. It had no recognition of
the transcendent, in fact it denied the transcendent, and I think what was
fatal to it was that it had no division of the sacred and the profane.
Paradoxically, it was a secular religion.
Now let me consider the other major interesting phenomenon of our age, the
victory and success of Islam. In the social sciences, one of the commonest
theses is the secularisation thesis, which runs as follows. Under
conditions prevailing in industrial- scientific society, the hold of
religion over society and its people diminishes. By and large this is
true, but it is not completely true, for there is one major exception,
Islam. In the last hundred years the hold of Islam over Muslims has not
diminished but has rather increased. It is one striking counter-example to
the secularisation thesis. Like the failure of Marxism, it is a
fascinating intellectual problem that serves as a background to the more
practical, moral and political problems which are the concerns of this
symposium.
The alternative is to say, "Not only are those Westerners bastards, but
virtue is on our side." If you cannot idealise the government, which is
usually difficult to do because they are caught between traditionalism and
compromise with the past, you idealise some kind of local folk culture.
What then is the distinctive feature of Islam amongst the high religions?
I think all high religions, by a high religion I mean a religion equipped
with a scripture, a doctrine, and a professional core of interpreters,
tend to suffer from a tension between the high variant and the folk
variant. This takes a very specific form in Islam. The high variant is the
faith of the scholars, unitarian, pure and puritan, spiritualist,
anti-mediationist and anti-hierarchical. Their's is an egalitarian
religion stressing the unity of God, the symmetry in the relationship
between believer and God, with an ethic of rule observance rather than an
ethic of loyalty to particular individuals. There is such a strong
distrust of mediation, that there is a special name for the sin of
associationship and of the use of mediators. By contrast, folk religion is
more oriented towards mystical practices, hierarchy and a kind of
surrogate priesthood in the form of cultish living saints.
Islam revives in the name of its own high tradition, not in the name of
either the West or in the name of a populist idealisation of the folk
culture. Muslims leave the latter to Western romantics; they do not
themselves practise this and what they idealise is the old high tradition,
in which case it appears as fundamentalism.
The first is a Western one which says that religion does not really mean
what it says, and is in fact just a kind of symbolic expression. Talking
to uneducated people like peasants and fishermen in Galilee, the founder
of the dominant Western faith had to use simple language because if he
talked modern philosophy they would not have understood him. But he really
meant the latest philosophic fashion. So you get Christianity which in
this sense tends to be vulgarised. In each generation it gets restated,
and the basic message is: the doctrine does not mean what it says, it
really means what the latest prophet has been saying, in simple language
so that a simple fisherman can understand it.
Khomeyni does not deny the authority of the hidden Imams, but politically
speaking he pensions them off. They are really politically irrelevant.
What matters about religion is the implementation of the law. When the
Imam comes back, of course, the authority will be his and he will take on
government, but until he comes back the law must be implemented by those
most competent to do so. Who else can do this but the lawyers? They will
implement the law neither more nor less severely before or after his
coming. His coming is almost a political accident. Khomeyni has rude
things to say about such things as the cult of saints. So without actually
abolishing the cult of personality there has been a kind of transfer or
movement to a cult of the law away from the cult of personality, which I
took to be the crucial distinguishing line between Sunnism and Shi'ism.
Let me now come back to the contrast with Marxism. Once again I have an
interesting little disagreement, it is a matter of stress really, with
Professor Keane. Professor Keane rightly pointed out that Islam is not
just faith; it is an ordering of social life. Yes indeed, but it is an
ordering of social life that does not fully sacralise it. In the
regulation of economic life, for instance, Islam provides a set of hand
rails so that people know where they are but it does not actually say that
economic life in itself is sacred.
In other words, Muslims have a sphere of the profane to which they can
retreat at times of less and maximum religious zeal. When it had the
opportunity to play at the world of religion, Marxism deprived humanity of
that zone precisely by sacralising the economic. If it had ritual and
symbolic objects, they were the tractors, the images of muscular workers,
huge socialist dams and so on. Economic life provided the sacraments for
that religion. But when economic life in the end turned out to be both
squalid and markedly less efficient, then Marxism collapsed. I think one
of the most important factors in the final self-destruction of the Soviet
Union was the discovery that Western capitalism could indeed be overtaken,
but not by them; the people who were doing it were the Confucianists of
East Asia and not the Marxists of the Euro-Asian centre. That discovery
was crucial in causing the loss of faith which led to the self-dismantling
of a system which had not provided a zone in which people could retreat
when they wanted to work out their way.
Islam does provide for such a zone, which is one of the things which makes
it a workable modern religion. It combines firm guidance in an idiom
compatible with modern backgrounds, with a respect for the type of social
division which is essential for a viable society.
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Ernest Gellner was born in 1925 and joined the staff of the London School
of Economics in 1949. He was Professor of Philosophy from 1962 until 1984,
when he became William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge
and Professorial Fellow at King's College. During the last few years of
his life he was Research Professor at the Central European University,
Prague, which he was intrumental in establishing and where he was Director
of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism. His many books include Words
and Things (1959), Thought and Change (1964), Spectacles and Predicaments
(1979), Nations and Nationalism (1983), The Psychoanalytic Movement
(1985), Culture, Identity and Politics (1987), State and Society in Soviet
Thought (1988), Plough, Sword and Book (1988), Reason and Culture (1992)
and Encounters with Nationalism (1994).
Ref.: http://www.penguin.co.uk/wop_author_new/1377.htm