History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.
The alternative resolution or the other Islamic state, the one that avoids the tyrant’s despair – or, put more politically-philosophically, allows for a liberal-Islamic assimilation that would also be integrative or unitary rather than irrecuperably conflictual – would appear to rely on modes of idealization of religion that would evolve simultaneously and bi-conditionally, or, as Fadel or Fadel’s Khaldun puts it, “organically.” Their current impermissibility is a reflection of the same problem.
A conflict so complex and all-encompassing that the two sides can be said to operate from “different interpretations of reality” may be somewhat simplified, at least as a matter of speech, if, setting aside for now any claims as to whose reality is more real or nearly real, we presume that both ideologies represent or emanate from distinct and comprehensive politico-religious worldviews, in other words are based on different creeds, and that both the problem and any solution must therefore be syncretic.
1. The conflict between liberalism and Islamism is a creedal as well as cultural, social, political, and economic conflict.
2. As an ideological articulation of an Islamic concept in relation to and within an expansionary global political-economic system dominated by liberal-democratic regime forms, Islamism will absorb and re-express contradictions internal to the liberal democratic concept.
3. The “Great Separation” of religion from politics is a paradoxical mythic-fictive foundation of liberal democracy whose necessary concealment cannot be continuously maintained in the encounter with unitary political alternatives as under typical forms of Islamism.
4. The generally occluded, intermittently exposed theological (Christian-soteriological) origin of the Great Separation and therefore of liberal democracy conforms to the instruction of the Qur’an on the political realization of revealed truth.
5. The radical coercive potential of the modern nation-state will be turned irresistibly against those who would accept and implement this instruction, except under adaptive integration of an effectively liberal-democratic concept.
In Egypt, what Hussein Ibish calls “accommodation” would for Islamists, as well as for the felool, equate with capitulation, under the longer term prospect of extinction. This prospect is deemed intolerable, just as the proposed or traditional “accommodations” of liberal or other minority aspirations under Islamist or nationalist-authoritarian regimes may be perceived as intolerable to those “accommodated.”
Comments on “Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke?”
History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.