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"Although the histories of individual Muslim anarchists or anarchistic Muslims, from early twentieth century figures such as Gustave-Henri Jossot, Isabelle Eberhardt, Shibili Shumayyil, and Leda Bruna Rafanelli to more contemporary thinkers such as Peter Lamborn Wilson, Michael Muhammad Knight, Abdennur Prado, and Yakub Islam, are well known, little has been written or imagined about how the Holy Qurʾān and the Sunnah through the aḥādīth – the Prophetic practice and oral tradition – could be used to flesh out the theology, politics, and philosophy of an Islamic anarchism. Starting from the position that Islām is not a monolithic, unified belief system, but a heterogeneous and pluralistic series of traditions, perspectives, and practices, Islam and Anarchism constructs an anarchistic interpretation of Islām and an Islamic interpretation of anarchism, which I call Anarcha-Islām. It offers a decolonial, social justice framework that elides the prevalent Orientalist and Fundamentalist tropes of Muslims and Islām and seeks to interweave Indigenous, Black, and People of Colors’ lives and narratives together.
As a participant in the Orientalized “Arab Spring/Islamist Winter” uprisings and as an anarchist and a Muslim settler in Turtle Island, I have witnessed troubled times as a result of extreme divisions that exist between these two identities and communities. In response, I offer an Anarcha-Islām that disrupts two commonly held beliefs: one, that Islām is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; two, that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Anarcha-Islām is a basis for exploring a new transnational politics and an ethics of friendship and disagreement between these traditions in the context of both the Tahrir uprisings in Egypt and what Richard J.F. Day has called the “newest” social movements in settler-colonial societies of the U.S./Canada.
The book operates from the premise that colonialism never ended in settler-colonial societies such as the U.S./Canada or in franchise “post-colonial” societies such as Egypt that inherited the capitalist-State model. Since modernity, Muslims have been globally struggling with an exponentially growing identity crisis, which has led to two reactionary responses. The first response is that we seek to become neo-Fundamentalist terrorists re-enacting our colonially internalized traumas by adopting wanton-impotent violence as a sole holistic strategy. This is exhibited in non-statist movements such as al-Qaeda and proto-statist movements such as ISIS that have embraced warped notions of non-Qurʾānic concepts as the Caliphate as well as Qurʾānic concepts as Umma (i.e., a global community of Muslims that historically and traditionally included non-Muslims). The second response is one in which we, as Muslims, re-enact projects of self-Orientalization. An example of this is how diasporic Arabs, Muslims, South West Asians, and North Africans in the U.S./Canada strive to become good law-abiding citizens, who reify and mimic anti-Blackness and participate in the U.S./Canadian states’ settler-colonization of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, self-Orientialization does not only occur in the context of assimilation: it was visible in the initial 18 days of the 2011 Tahrir Uprisings. During Tahrir, Egyptians were united under the false banner of patriotic nationalism and abstract chants of “freedom, bread, social justice” that camouflaged ethical-political, ethnic, gendered, and spiritual factional differences between them.
Anarcha-Islām can help diasporic Muslims under Euro-American assimilation as well as Muslims in predominantly conservative societies such as Egypt to begin again the transnational radical recreation and re-imagination of their subjectivities and social justice orientations in a way that is conducive to Islām’s post- 9/11’s confrontations with a Euro-American “Age of Terror.” Anarcha-Islām is vital in light of the Euro-American perception that Muslims are incapable of assimilation as well as the global perception of Muslims as unable to incept suitable social justice alternatives to Euro-American capitalist nation-state paradigms. The absence of Anarcha-Islām from social movement horizons leads Muslims, Arabs, South West Asians, and North Africans in non-Euro-American and Euro-American societies to engage in false (neo)liberal-reactionary choices in the form of Orientalism and Fundamentalism. This is stated while noting that an underlying premise of this book is that the so-called “East” and “West” are not in a binary relationship, but rather represent a discursive formation that in fact obscures dialectics that cross-cut identities, migrating bodies, and movements. No one is completely oppressed or an oppressor, a victim or victimizer, and in the absence of decolonization all we learn from our internalized violence, trauma, and victimization is its reproductive radiation upon others. That does not deny the subjects of violence agency. It merely affirms that fascism is a mass psychology that has already won, given how we all embody micro-fascistic tendencies in light of our positionalities and the distinct penalties and privileges structurally and symbolically afforded us across race, gender, sexual practices, abilities, age, class, and so forth. Revolutionary social change is not a narcissistic affair embodied in individualistic notions of “self-care” but rather one that represents a collective responsibility that is also conditioned by land as the existential-spiritual-environment that animates, if not creates, us as subjects.
Anarcha-Islām offers infinite possibilities and opportunities for Muslim resistance to the horrors and neuroses of our daily lives while contending with Empire. Muslims supported by Anarcha-Islām’s vernaculars can be bodies that are not frozen in their current catatonic socio-political state of coma and naiveté. Anarchism and anarchists, in the newest social movements also stand to learn from interacting with Muslims and from Anarcha-Islām. For instance, anarchists could benefit by learning how to better offer hospitality to each other as well as disagree ethically as a community as opposed to tearing each other apart over ideological and personal differences. Albeit not followed by contemporary Muslims, Islamic interpretations developed these types of ethics early on, in what is referred to as Uṣūl al-Ḍiyāfa (an ethics of hospitality) and Uṣūl al-Ikhtilāf (an ethics of disagreements), as a compassionate and forgiving form of etiquette for Muslims to address disagreements.
More widely, this book aims to engage academic and activist literatures on radical and revolutionary social action. Drawing on radical Indigenous, Black, Islamic anarchistic, transnational queer-feminist of color, and new social movement discourses, Anarcha-Islām seeks to transcend not only statist pan-Arab and pan-Islamist trajectories and conservative Islamist movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, but also strives to transcend Euro-American liberal-leftist social movements like that of Bernie Sanders and the Women’s March. After all, the latter movements rely on a strategy that is anchored in a patriotic-national assimilationist politics of rights and an insistence on an unapologetic congruency of “hyphenated-American” citizen-identity. Both further the ongoing settler-colonialism on stolen Indigenous lands, as well as global imperialism, neoliberalism, and Orientalism elsewhere. Decolonization operates from the premise that these liberal-leftist movements are ultimately anchored in capitalist nation-state structures that represent a neocolonial product of modernity. As radical Indigenous movements and scholarships have argued, decolonization is not only concerned with constructing anti-statist and anti-capitalist rhetorical stances relative to land and (non) human life, but also non-statist and non-capitalist spiritual alternatives as well."
-Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism, London, Pluto Press, 2022.
