Is Religion the opium of the Masses

Originating in late 18th century in Western Europe the Industrial Revolution dismantled traditional and pre-modern modes of production, consumption and exchange. The Industrial Revolution and its attendant socio-political developments also substantially challenged traditional way of living and ‘being’ and it also displaced traditional attempts at making sense of the world and nature. This whole scale transformation and change took place in a relatively short period of time. It all happened because of a diverse range of factors but predominantly because of a scientific and ‘objective’ attitude towards subjugating nature, and locating the human-being as the measure of all things in its true senses of the word. Man was now able to cast philosophical doubt on all kinds of orthodoxies and received notions, perceptions and taken for granted assumptions. This sceptical attitude towards the past and a hopefully progressive future set the stage for the emergence of new ways of looking at things. It was an intellectual and epistemological leap of world-historical proportions that created such a conducive environment for creative thought. Now, interestingly religion had held a key role in the socio-political organization of pre-modern societies providing them with essential values that effectively contributed in the production of what the French sociologist Emile Durkhime has termed as ‘organic solidarity’, a sense of community which is adhesive, cohesive and durable over a period of time. Religion also offered a way of understanding nature; it was seen as the ‘intellectual response of the individual to natural phenomenon, the finitude of human life or the meaning of subjective reality.

Religious was a cognitive phenomenon, a system of propositions, which aimed to provide explanations of reality by reference to supernatural entities.[1] This was done usually in a static fashion, such as before the discovery of Galileo it was a widely held belief, based on Scripture, that earth is the centre of the universe which is stationary and everything including the sun revolved around it. But the idea was challenged and Galileo advanced a scientific explanation of cosmology which was based on observable facts. His theory concluded the opposite thus questioning a religious conviction. There was dismay, hatred, rejection and surprise at Galileo’s discovery among those who held religion and its ideas as the ultimate truth. Because religion was massive phenomenon so it exercised power over its followers. And managers of the sacred, those who spoke for religion held power consequently. They sentenced Galileo for life. All this happened, while science was still an essentially intellectually elitists activity available to those who were privileged enough to do so. But science progressively penetrated to the core of the society. In short, the emergence of Western modernity, capitalist economy based on consumerist ethos, rational and scientific world view and bureaucratic control of society radically divorced the conception of religion as key factor in the formation of people’s self, identity and community.

In addition, the early modern Europe was deeply embroiled in internecine wars of religion resulting in the death of thousands of people and in some instances wiping out the whole generations in the wars fought in the name of religion. One such example is that of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) whose ultimate cessation established the foundations of the modern nation-state. This was an essentially religious war fought between Protestants and Catholics each group claiming supposedly the ‘truth’, but ironically from a modernist perspective none having the truth. Both the groups were claiming more virtue and more religion, both were more eager than the other to claim the moral high ground. But, in reality, both were more of the same as both groups killed, raped, and destroyed. Such historical examples of religion’s distinct role in fuelling hatred and violence set the stage for subsequent debunking the exclusive hegemony of religion in society, politics and culture.

Within this backdrop and historical-intellectual milieu, however it fell on the shoulders of Karl Marx (1818-88) who did a partial but a trenchant critique of the role religion plays in society and the way it exhibits itself in the consciousness of the people, and the way it contributes in the formation of attitudes and values in society that are so essential in tempering the behaviour of masses, and forward march of history. Much of Marxist critique of religion stems form a materialist conception of history. This conception is based on a dialectical process, the role of private property relations, the critical role of the base expressed in terms of ‘relations of production’ and a linearly progressive development of history. Without taking into account these fundamental ‘scientific’ categories of human social existence, the partial analysis and attempts at understanding different social phenomenon, including religion, becomes a hopeless affair of fictions imagination.

In Marx’s conception of the role of religion in society, religion was nothing but a false consciousness which gave people a use less sense of meaning and direction in life. It divorced people from the active participation in the affairs of this world, which are essentially mediated by different powers, social, political and economic. Marx, however stressed the pre-dominant role played by a mode of production in the formation of such super-structural ‘residues’ as social and cultural institutions, religion being one of the best manifestations of social-cultural superstructure. Once in the public domain religion continues to offer opportunities of redemption, grand avenues of hope for those who have already systematically been disposed of hope, stripped of opportunities of realizing their potential. Here religion enters with a very attractive alternative to seek refuge and express one’s possible realization as well as put hope in it, but ironically it is futile and the consciousness it engenders is fundamentally flawed and essentially useless.

Religion drugs people, replaces prayer for action and protects the status quo against revolution. So Marxism has mocked the religious promise of future reassurance while present ills are ubiquitous. Those who believe in a scientific and rational understanding of religion and society seek to jettison religious delusions which have so far retarded the promise of progress, thus holding back the modern man form the freedom he deserves. Religion and its attendant super-structure of morality and the culture it forms, is for the weak to seek refuge in it so as to shy away form actual ‘material reality’, but for those who can bear it they need to liberate themselves from the ‘slave morality’ of the weak and the powerless and instead erect a new morality of power and progress which doesn’t rely on religious ideas for its inspiration and justification. Religion creates an environment divorced from reality and offers a trans-historical and metaphysical solution to the problems of the man. Instead of troubleshooting or seeking to understand the problems and the causes of the problems, religion attempts to create a false meaning in it. For example the great debate about theodicy, of the presence of evil in the world greatly obscures an effort towards objective understanding of the world. This attitude results in the ‘passive faith’ instead of active and creative engagement, with the cruel nature out there. It is largely because of human liberation form the chains of the passive faith that modernity has progressively conquered nature for its advantage.

In most of the organized religion the essential relationship between the transcendent and the immanent and between the sacred and the secular, are fundamentally in mutual exclusion of each other. For example, in Christianity there are historic tendencies which set the secular and sacred in opposition to each other. In such theologies it becomes increasingly inevitable that the oppositional characters of the relationship will lead to an other-worldly and purely individualistic outlook. This process begets the danger of the disenchantment and retirement of individuals from a genuine creative engagement with social, material and cultural conditions of real history. Enter Marx here and his inspiration for criticism of religion which was undoubtedly inspired from the famous Young Hegelian Feurbach. He had severely attacked in a philosophical and theological fashion the Christianity and its essence and the way Christian religion seeks to alienate human power and capabilities by imaginatively projecting these very properties and powers onto an objective, distant, unachievable transcendent God. This theological conception and process involved the transformation of an ‘active-creative’ subject into a residue of an omnipotent, all-knowing being in the from of God. In Fuerbach’s scheme of things and praxis it was incumbent on the liberated individual and the modern subject to take control of his own existence and settle this-worldly scores with the logic of this world, and based on an ethic which appeals to this world. It was a forceful and powerful assault on the edifice of Christianity, and for that matter any organized religion and spiritual system, but Marx found that Fuerbach’s critique of religion as inadequate as it speaks the language of theology as opposed to doing a sociological critique, by identifying the social sources of the legitimacy of religion and other quasi-religious ideologies and systems of belief. Partially agreeing with Feurbach but advancing his own critique of religion, however, Marx puts premium on trying to understand and interpret the social consequences of religion as critical, necessary and important than debating on the philosophical truth or falsity of religious practices. In a sense Marx attempted to dissect the functional role of religion. And in order to do that, an analyst needs to go beyond what a believer or a faithful has to say. When Marx uses the metaphor of the opium he clearly wants to suggest a tendency of individuals and men of faith who are misled and religion becomes an illusion in the sense that religion engulfs its believers in its world-view and totality. It inhibits its followers in thinking rationality and clearly. As Marx points out in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that people are born into a society not of their own choice or of their own making but a society with its prevailing set of values, assumptions and rules. In such a milieu, it is the nature of the location of individuals in the established social relations which determines the nature of their consciousness and not their subjective consciousness which determines their social existence.

Religion exhibits and operates in society as an ideology to be exploited by the ruling establishment. Given this tendency of religion it becomes a tool in the hands of those who have power. Religion becomes as an instrument of exploitation. As it serves to perpetuate existing power-relations, religion is the bastion and source of a falsely authoritative moral justification for the system of exploitation. Why so much emphasis on the religions complicity with power? It is so because religion, in the ultimate analysis, is based on beliefs and transcendent ideas, in shot religion is system of idealism. And Marx argued in The German Ideology in such forceful terms about the way ideas operate in society, ‘ The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. Now, given the predominance of capitalism in 18th century as the key ruling material force, it is clear that capitalism will also be providing the necessary intellectual tools for its rule. In Marx’s time the bastion of power was capitalist bourgeoisie who had far surpassed the feats of ‘Roman Aqueducts and Gothic Architecture’ so Christian religion has necessarily become complicit in justifying the existing or established power-system and that is the ‘capitalist’ system. Religion being an ideological and intellectual system would be subservient to the exigencies of capitalism. Ironically, though religion expresses the real problems and ‘real suffering’. Therefore, in the final analysis it becomes imperative to treat religion as an ideological system, so it is incumbent upon an analyst who uses ‘scientific’ tools to understand society should study religion, not from the perspective of the faith, but he should study religion by taking into account socio-economic circumstances that have shaped religious ideas, structures and discourse. When scrutinized dispassionately, objectively and scientifically the religion emerges as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[2]

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[1] Bryan Turner, ‘Religion and Society’ London p-45

[2] Karl Marx ‘On the Jewish Question’

Islam and Civil Society:Confrontation or Confluence

Arguably the idea of civil society is a Western concept, even a ‘Western dream[1]’ as Serif Mardin, a celebrated Turkish historian of ideas would have us believe. If we take Mardin as a prototypical modern Muslim intellectual then we can safely assert that, there is a concern among Muslims, about the philosophical origins of the idea of civil society, along with similar liberal notions of human rights, democracy, the state and dispensation of justice. It can be further argued that, for any idea to be authentic and vibrant, for example in a particular community or in a particular civilisation, it must be grounded in its history and collective memory, for otherwise it may ‘remain abstract, cut off from their existential, cultural, historical and intellectual contexts of [their] emergence[2]’.

Well, let us now discuss the idea of civil society. The idea of civil society rose to prominence followed by the political experience of modernity in the eighteenth century Europe. It developed out of philosophical reflection of such enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers as Hobbes, Adam Ferguson and Hegel among others, whose main concern was contrasting the state of nature with that of a peaceful society. These thinkers envisaged a society where people lived their lives according to certain rule of conduct, defined and agreed by all the members of any society in question. These rules were to be embodied in a social contract that constituted the basis of civilisation. So the idea of ‘civility’ or understood in terms of moral behaviour was certainly part of a ‘civil society’, to be contrasted with an anarchic state of affairs or a barbarian mode of living. In its origins, the idea of civil society was not really distinguishable form the idea of the ‘state’. However it was with Hegel who clearly contrasted civil society as separate arena both form the ‘state’ and other primordial social units as the family. In a Hegelian sense all the political space between the state and the family was the realm of the civil society. Hegel conceived the state as the ultimate expression of human reason, thus blessing it a universal character. While state embodied and symbolised the universal conscience of people, yet there was a need for particular forms of consciences to be expressed. Civil society provided precisely that arena for the expression of particularism at the cost of universalism. Hence in this socio-political space, autonomous people negotiated and re-negotiated the social contract that has already bound them with the state and hence it provides an opportunity for individuals to exercise the power of their liberty. So the modern conception of civil society is essentially about liberty, and by extension about the rule of law, about democracy, and about rights and all the trappings of a liberal bourgeoisie society.

Islam is the youngest of the Abrahamic faiths which originated in Mecca in the 610 AD when Prophet Muhammad’s claims to divine revelation were widely accepted across the Arabian Peninsula. This new religion was not less than a moral revolution in the tribal society of seventh century of Arabia embodying many of the Judeo-Christian concepts of ethical behaviour, purpose and meaning of life. As a religion Islam contrasted itself from the earlier periods of Arabian life which was termed as the period of ‘jahilliya’, an age of ignorance, moral decadence and social fragmentation. Islam presented itself as a new ethical order, whose central concerns were, like its Abrahamic predecessors not only spiritual redemption and other-worldly goals of its adherents but also, unlike Christianity, Islam concerned itself with this-worldly and even practical concerns of the believers. With subsequent expansion of Islam throughout the Middle-east by conquest, conversion and moral appeal, Islam truly emerged as a world civilisation with its own distinct system of values whose bedrock was the Quran and the Prophet guidance or the Sunna. One of the defining features of Islamic civilisation, during its formative stages, was a clear division of the whole world into two mutually exclusive categories: Dar al-Harb wa Darb al-Islam [Abode of War and Abode of Peace]. The abode of peace was the area where such values as the rule of law and Islamic brotherhood were practised, in addition to peace and social order being the normal political conditions. It was in opposition to the Abode of War where Islam was not practised and hence a barbarian state of affairs existed. It follows that within the realm of Islamic civilisation there was no place for violence as an option or as a policy instrument: it was sinful to fell a tree un-necessarily. This idea comes closer to the enlightenment[3] notion of a just and rule-governed society. Over the course of the last 1400 years of its existence Muslims have ceaselessly, on many historical occasions, sought to revert to the ideals and goals that were first set by the Prophet himself and actualised during the ‘‘Golden Age of Islam.’’[4] In this light, it becomes inevitably necessary to highlight the historic experience and the guidance contained in Quran, on any topic that concerns Islam and Muslims. It follows that, the discussion of the existence of an Islamic civil society we should turn to the origins of Islamic thought that can explain things in the light of the Quran. As a matter of fact the Quran has demonstrated a sustained concern about justice and there are many quotations, some categorically stated and others suggested in a characteristically metaphorical language. For example, Quran says something like this on private property, ‘and eat up not one another’s property unjustly (in any illegal way e.g. stealing, robbing, deceiving, etc), nor give bribery to the rulers (judges before presenting your cases) that you may knowingly eat up a part of the property of others sinfully. Sura al-Baqra.:188(2). Such statements were subsequently embodied in Islamic legal thought that takes into account the importance of private property, but with a concern for justice. The interpreters were normally the ulemma or the learned people who were a fairly independent community, whose primary obligation was to interpret and deduce meaning form the divine text. The ulema were supplemented by yet another group of species; the qadis [jurists and judges] who were also, like the ulema were independent from the clutches of the state authority and executive government. The decisions and judgements of qadis were binding both on the caliph and the common man, and in turn their judgments were subject to the opinions (or fatwas) of the ulemma. Both the ulemma and qaids acted as bulwarks against the extremes of the caliphate and thus kept important checks on caliphal power. They also acted as ‘watchdogs’ against each other as well. This creative tension sustained a vibrant civil society, quite independent from the state and we can confidently assert, as Hasan Hanafi a leading Cario based contemporary Muslim philosopher observes that

Islamic theory and practice sustain a number of legitimate human groupings existing between the state and the individual. These groupings are endowed with their own sphere of autonomy free from government intrusion, which made Islamic societies historically far less monolithic and undifferentiated than some Western stereotypes of a theocratic society allow.(Hanafi: 2002)

These institutional mechanisms were accompanied by active participation and public debate on issues not only of theological interest but also issues concerning contemporary politics, social and economic problems, war and issues of justice. However the defining framework was Islamic and settings were often centres of power or metropolitan cities. These debates were called munizara, where people came and debated any topic with active interest and keen engagement. This whole affair is not less than Habermasina public sphere which is a ‘realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body[5].’

In the Mid-east there are many coffee houses, tea houses and places where people hangout and discuss issues of the day, quite independently and with enough liberty[6]. This has been a feature of many Mid-eastern societies for a long period of its history, as there were some six hundred coffee house in Istanbul in the reign of Selim II (1566-1574)[7]’’. These places have always served as opportunities for exchange of information, poetry, and political commentary and of course socialisation. While these discussions don’t quite often translate into real political struggles or a sustained socio-political engagement, is an entirely different question. However, it follows that, there may be trappings of civil society existing in many Muslim societies today, if we understand civil society in its very simple definition as a place for discourse independent of family and the sate. Given this situation it may be pertinent to ask as to the possibility of a distinct civil society with an Islamic flavour. Since civil society has a lot to do with modernity it can be argued that the presence of an ‘Islamic civil society’ is a step towards what Eisetndeat has called ‘multiple modernities’ where modernity should be seen ‘as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’.[8 This is a certainly helpful way of investigating about the success of the idea of civil society in Islam, but in order gain a fuller understanding of this phenomenon we will have to distinguish between two basic but useful categories: Islamic society and Muslim society. An Islamic society is a society where the law is Sharia and its strict sense of the word and all members of the society are subjected to this law. This society can be contrasted with that of a Muslim society where the majority of the people are Muslims and their lived realities may be according to Islam but Sharia is not the law. Our concern should be with the later category given the plurality of Muslim societies and diverse interpretations of the fundamental sources of Islam. So in this context one of the abiding concerns of Muslim societies has been acceptance of the government of a ‘just’ ruler [often a just prince], at the cost of individual agency and liberty. This values its legitimation in a Prophetic guidance when Muhammad advised his followers to obey ‘even a slave if he leads you according to the precepts of Islam’. The abiding concern of Muslim societies was to avoid disorder or fitna, an idea which is quite similar to the Hobbesian state of nature. So for much of its history Muslim societies have preferred a dynastic system of caliphate, a system that remained in tact until the early part of the 20^th century when the Ottoman [caliphate] empire was finally dismantled. Although the Ottoman Sultan or the caliph was Turkish and his actual political sovereignty extended to a rather limited geo-graphical area but his legitimacy as a caliph extended far beyond the boundaries of the empire as far as to, for example, India[9].

But much of political discourse and concepts about civil society in Islam revolve around the impact of the West and its consequent results in the modern period. The first direct experience of the Muslim world with Western hegemony started off from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, who brought scientists, physicians and also intellectuals and scholars. This encounter was followed by colonisation of many Muslim countries and subsequent emergence of independent nation-states. These new states resisted colonial and imperial oppression by uniting different elements of the society on nationalist grounds along the secular lines. While these new governments pursued modernization polices along secular lines the ulema and the religious establishment pursued to resist these change and pushed for their own programme of Islamisation as opposed to copying Western modernity, as Ira Lapidus observes that, ‘Muslim religious life, in general, became separated from state institutions and flourishes as a differentiated element of ‘civil society[10].’ Given continued weakness of secular states, and in some cases state-failure in the Muslim world the religious establishment has come to the foreground. The claims of these religious groups is often a reversion to a nostalgic past or re-enacting, or re-grafting a old institutions. These groups are usually found around mosques, madrassas, awqaf groups (endowments for social welfare). Ironically these groups are also fundamentalist ones whose interpretation of Islam is rather exclusivist and literalist, and view the West values as culturall hegemony, nevertheless they form par of the civil society in the post-colonial Muslim World. For example these civil society groups along with the collaboration of Bazaris (usually petty bourgeoisie) during the reign of Reza Shah Pehlavi (1952-1979) in Iran effectively challenged the state and were even ultimately successful in overthrowing the regime in 1979 through a popular revolution. However, disillusionment with the ideal of the revolution has resulted in a process of questioning the legitimacy of an Islamic government, excesses of the revolutionary state and concerns about human liberty and freedom of expression. This whole reformist political movement, originating in 1997 following the election of President Muhammed Khatami, is led by active citizen groups including the media, such independent intellectuals as Abdolkarim Soroush and liberal theologians like Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahiri. The idea idea of civil society or ‘jame’h mandani stood in opposition to Islamic Society or jame’eh eslami as promoted by the segment of the state that adhered to a totalitarian mode of governance[11’.

Given the active participation of many Muslims in the public life of Muslim societies, historically as well as in some instances in modern Muslim states, it can be asserted that there is much room for an Islamic civil society. The presence of various intellectual traditions in the Islamic thought that seeks to check the excesses of the Islamic government established in a caliphate system, and a sustained emphasis on redistributive justice in the Quran and the prophetic traditions gives credence to the idea of a diverse Islamic society that accommodates equally diverse opinions and interpretations of the message of Islam.