Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Conclusion: The costs of renewal

At the outset of this work was posed the question of the advances of thought in the Islamic Renaissance. Was there anything’new’ in the theses elaborated in the Shi’i colleges, in comparison with the Middle Eastern intellectual scene, and beyond, in the longue duree course of the history of ideas ?

We have discovered in the works of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr a system.

As in all systems, its strength comes from the avenues it opens, rather than from the specific answers it is able to provide. Sadr was confronted with several challenges, which he tried to address with the tools of the tradition available to him. In economics and banking, he was operating from difficult uncharted territory, and whilst he sometimes erred, the way he proceeded and the seriousness of his work remain unmatched in Islamic literature. As argued in this research, the detour through the shari’a allowed Sadr to elaborate on economic and banking issues with far more depth than his immediate contemporaries. Even in the works of the great reformists of the twentieth century, contributions in the field have been rare and unalluring.

In the longer perspective of the history of ideas, a distinguishing feature of the Najaf Renaissance has been the immediacy with which the proposed ideas have found a terrain of application. In the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as during the Enlightenment, the protagonists in the debate of ideas were relatively sheltered from the immediate impact of the application of their world view. In Najaf in contrast, Sadr and Khumaini’s ideas came suddenly as the guidance of a large and powerful Iran. This unique development has prevented the analysis from seeing behind the’Islamic phenomenon’ witnessed in the 1980s the deeper renewal that had been shaped in the Iraqi South from Muhammad Husain Kashif al-Ghita’ to Sadr and his companions. On the other hand, the research undertaken in Najaf in a difficult field such as economics and banking could not offer clear and decisive guidelines to action in government.

The hesitations in agrarian reform in Iran, as well as the difficulty of devising a sound Islamic financial and economic system, are testimony to the problems inherent to application.

Developments in the constitutional field were different. The Iranian institutions, which were fashioned in the shape of the legal blueprint, have taken root. A decade of constitutionalism in Iran has offered, in matters of separation of powers and in judicial review law sensu, a rich and lively terrain for analysis and debate. Some areas, of course, were not part of the picture, and the record on human rights is a dismal failure of revolutionary Iran. But as a peculiar and challenging answer to Juvenal’s question of’who watches the watchmen ?’, the old Platonic issue of the philosopher-king was being answered in effect by way of scholarship in the law. The Leader in Iran, the marja in Sadr’s constitutional project, Khumaini’s faqih, are all variations on the theme of leadership in the (Shi’i) community on the basis of legal knowledge. In this, these ideas and their application offer a unique contrast to the Western tradition.

The renewal of Islamic law lost in the person of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr its most brilliant thinker. With his execution on 8 April 1980 a page in the intellectual life of Iraq was turned. Soon the confrontation would take an international turn. The onset of the Iran-Iraq war in September of that year and the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990 started a new era in the Middle East, the deeper consequences of which are yet to be assessed. For Najaf, the wars and revolts have brought unmitigated disaster.

The protagonists of the Renaissance in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon were the first victims of the propagation of their reading of the Islamic tradition. A decade after the death of Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda, many of the’good companions’ of Najaf met with violence, if not with brutal death. As with Sadr and Bint al-Huda, Mahdi al-Hakim and Hasan ash-Shirazi were assassinated. Ragheb Harb was killed in South Lebanon in 1984.

Muhammad Mahdi Shamseddin and Muhammad Husain Fadlallah narrowly escaped assassination attempts and were caught in a network of terror in which they were soon depasses. In Iran, the long list of’martyrs’ of the Revolution includes many of the companions of Ruhullah al-Khumaini at Najaf. Amongst the Shi’i international of Najaf graduates, one can even find a leader of the Islamic movement in Pakistan,’ Aref Husaini, who was killed in 1988. As to the other militant Iraqis in Najaf, they live almost without exception scattered in European, Lebanese or Iranian exile, where they carry the torch of the Holy Cities’ rebellion. These include Muhammad Bahr al-’Ulum, Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim, Muhammad Mahdi al-Asifi, Mahmud al-Hashimi and Muhammad ash-Shirazi.

Some of these names were encountered in the course of this research as the respectable authors of Islamic law treatises. Others were road companions who firmly believed that their version of the shari’a would in Sadr’s words,’clothe the earth with the frame of heaven’. But as in Goya’s painting, Saturn has brutally claimed his children. Sadr had, in his very first publication of Fadak in History, warned that’words would be the soldiers of revolution’. Revolution, as in Karbala for Husain, had failed him. But it had been successful for Khumaini, whose taking over the state had started a new institutionalised episode for Islamic law.

Beyond the political tragedies which the legal renewal has triggered, a watershed has occurred in the intellectual realm of the shari’a. No longer is family law the last precinct of the jurists. Islamic law has regained the high ground in disciplines which had seemed only a few decades ago beyond its pale: constitution, economics and banking.