Anarchism and Islam with Andrew

Andrew tells James about some notable Islamic anarchists and anti-authoritarians throughout history. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, and welcome to another episode of It Cora Happen
here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrews and
I'm joined today by It's me.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
It's just James today, Just James. That's like a cringe
from the nineties.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Really, I was not aware, just sort of curiosity. James,
do you play any Paradox Games?

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I don't. I don't know what that is. I don't
think it's a type of computer game.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, yeah, this was well, it's like a game development company,
and also they also distribute games as well.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
You've hit an area about which I have very little
knowledge in.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah. And by the way, this isn't sponsored, it's just uh,
it's how I ended up stumbling upon this topic. Right, Okay,
so just you know, hearing me for a second. Yeah,
so why the Paradox Games is Crusader Kings three? Right? Right, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Okay, you know, I'm already interested to see where this goes.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
So, yes, it's a medieval grand strategy game. It's sort
of like it's it's a combination of like those classic
sort of well grand strategy games, I know, also a
bit of sims flair. You're playing as a character and
you're also playing as that character's dynasty, so you fit.

(01:35):
You play as the grandfather, and then the father, and
then the son, and then the grandson, and so on
and so forth, and so I actually, if you can't tell,
I play the game sometimes a little bit too much,
but I appreciate the role playing. The Saturn's it set
between either eight sixty seven or ten sixty six and

(01:57):
fourteen fifty three, which is considered the end of the
medieval era due to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. Yeah.
So you know, at a certain point in playing the game,
after I've played in pretty much every corner of the map,
I was looking for a new religious movement to spread
across the map for fun. Of course, this is something

(02:19):
I do with my free time. And I started reading
about all these different strands of Islam that they have
in the game, like the Commissians and the Ebadis and
the Sufreez. Yeah, and that led me to stumble across
the move Tasialism and the Naja Dad. And please bailed
me with the pronunciations of everything about to pronounce in

(02:41):
this episode, but move Tassilism and the Naja Dad. I
started digging into this stuff, and that led me to
make the decision to talk about what I've been learning
before I begin. I know, even the idea of religious
anarchisms is somewhat controversial, particularly the discrepancy between the anarchist

(03:04):
slugan of no gods, no masters, and of course the
history of various faith based class struggles. MY stance on
it is complicated, But whatever my stances, I don't think
we could deny the reality that religious anarchisms have existed
in the past and still exists today.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now I'm really interested in this, I'm I'm just I'm
working on a book at the minute about anarchists at
war or I guess how anarchism meets war, and people
variously sort of defining out anarchism narrowly and widely. I
grew up in the early two thousands, I guess, with

(03:44):
the kind of new anarchists, as Greater called it, and
they were always amongst that broader movement opposed to like
neoliberal globalization. There were always religious people, and I'm not
a religious person, And I went to a school where
there was a priest, and the priest had been a

(04:05):
member of the anti apartheid movement, in South Africa and
was wanted them and had left for doing violence to
get which, like it's pretty based and so like I
have a lot of time for a lot of religious people,
it's always been kind of an area of I guess
interest to me this like religious anarchisms.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, it certainly it has a very eventful history. Yeah,
so I wanted to talk a bit about the rather
interesting history of just one tradition. Although the whole thing
about the anarchism and I'm going to be discussing is
that I wouldn't really call it anarchism, not at least

(04:47):
not by our standards. Yeah, it's more of a distinct
and notable resistance to centralized authority or a minimization and
decentralization of that authority. I think it's more into like
a minarchism than an actual anarchism. Sure, right, but it's
still interesting to see I guess, the seeds of anti

(05:11):
authoritarianism through history.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
So these particular movements, they have a sort of an
anti Khalif, Khalif being the religious leader in Islam, they
have a kind of an anti Khalif action that expanded
into a broader philosophical and political conclusions. So We can
start in the city of Basra in Iraq in the
eight hundreds, where a discussion was taking place recording how

(05:38):
the Uma or Islamic community should respond to a leader
of the Abbasid Caliphate would become corrupt and tyrannical. Now,
the two me and stream opinions were that of the
activists who believed in stage in a violent revolution to
install a new legitimate leader, and the quietists who believed impatiently,

(05:58):
perseverant under attorney or passively resistant. It's funny how we
see these kind of ideas about change rearing their heads
again and again and again throughout history, despite various different contexts.
The other people were like, yeah, let's go get it,

(06:21):
and the other people who are like, yeah, let's rock
back a little bit and take things with more passively.
So that's interesting right now. Abubaka, the guy who was
the first caliph, he made it clear in his inauguration
that obedience is not incumbent upon his followers if he
contradicts the will of Allah. And for those who don't know,

(06:43):
Allah is God in the Islamic religion. And yet the
dominant position in Islam has been the quietest position even
to this day, the activist position is less popular. Some
would say some people have this side that the only
manifestation of Islam can be the one seed in the
autocracies of Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. But even

(07:07):
back in Islam's heyde there were Muslims willing to resist
the tyrannical control of even religiously or ordained rulers. So
back to Bastra in the eight hundreds, there was also
a third category of solutions proposed, which we can call
anarchists in the general sense, but not really in the

(07:27):
actual sense. Most of the Muslim anarchists believe that society
could function without the caliph. They proposed a kind of
evolutionary anarchism where private property was not abolished per se,
but because the ruler was considered illegitimate, the titles of
property the ruler granted would also be considered illegitimate. They

(07:49):
also argue that the caliph must be agreed upon by
the entire community, which is no easy task considering how
Islam divided between Sunnis and Shia's almost immediately after the
prophet Muhammad died. However, without this consensus, no logismate clief
could exist, and it was widely accepted that a law

(08:10):
did not impose obligations that were impossible to fulfill. So
then it was reason that then there was really no
obligation to establish legitimate clief if no consensus could be found.
So there's a little loopool. Basically, we need full consensus.
We're never going to get full consensus. Oh well shrug,
you know, yeah. And then in the time, in the

(08:32):
context rebe this is, you know, medieval times, you're seeing
a lot more. You're seeing several different political configurations and
formations and ways of organizing society. So some of them
at the time, we were seeing their neighbors, the Bedwinds,
and the bed Winds were living without rulers like normal.

(08:52):
So they were like, well, why can't we live without
rulers like normal? And so they use that as a
justification as well. And so they also had many proposed solutions,
ranging from a radical decentralization of public authority to a
complete dissolution of public authority. One particular genre proposals involved

(09:13):
replacing the calief with elected officials, either completely independent of
each other or joined together in a federation, and these
elected officials would be temporary and only remain in office
when legal disputes arose or when an enemy invaded. When
the problem was resolved, they would lose their position and
society would return to quote unquote anarchy. There was even

(09:37):
a minority sect which calls for the complete abolition of
the state, called it Nashda, and they argued that if
there wasn't sufficient agreement established this in aclief, there can
never be enough to establish law at all. They wanted
not just political independence, but intellectual independence, because according to them,
individuals should be able to reason for themselves and have

(09:59):
no one above them but Allah. Basically the religious anarchist
slogan one God, no masters. Yeah, right, but it'll get
a twisted of course, all this radical stuff applied to
them within their group alone, So if you weren't part
of their group, you could still be enslaved or killed.

(10:21):
So it's kind of a selective, Yeah, it's a bit
selective in their freedom mindedness. Then in eight seventeen, so

(10:43):
a couple of years later, the center of religious power
and the Muslim world collapsed with the fall of Baghdad.
The chaos of civil war ensued, but in the absence
of public authority, they would naturally emerge an order out
of the chaos without central planning. As we've seen it
again and again and again throughout history, people self organized

(11:06):
to protect themselves and their positions collectively in times of
natural disaster, in times of crisis, people come together without
having a state, having without a state having to organize
them and tell them what to do and how to
do it. Such has been the case for centuries. And
speaking of centuries, we're going to jump ahead a little
bit to the twelfth century where we could see a

(11:27):
sort of a pseudo nihilist anarchist movement called the Kalandaria,
a movement of wandering ascetic Sufi dervishes from Andalusia and
Spain to Iran, Central Asia, India and Pakistan. Many of
the Khalandaria had body persins and tattoos in explicit defiance

(11:48):
of Islamic traditions. They regarded such practices as haram. Here's
a bit of an interesting story. One of the earlier
divisions of the Manatimir was once being followed by a
crowd of admirers, and then reactions to their praise, he paused,
pulled out his pep i urinated on the ground. So

(12:12):
as a sort of a radical it's almost like what
seems that Greek guy.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Oh, the one who like dies because of the d diogenies, right,
so he kind of like a Muslim dirogenies.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
A sort of a rejection of society and rejection of
its values. As a lot of people, a lot of
these devices, they chose voluntary poverty and nudism as a lifestyle.
They were reject civilization. They would have a sort of
an active nihilism and director of society. One of them

(12:51):
has been quoted in saying an effect that money is well,
I don't know if I could say that before he
crossed that out. Yeah, I think we I think we
get we get the get the idea of course, again
not really anarchism in the classical sense or in an

(13:12):
actual sense, but manifestation of one trend within or one
streak within an anarchist movement. Steak jump ahead against the
nineteenth century. Now with perhaps the first anarchist to convert

(13:33):
to Islam. Ivan Agrelli born in Sweden in eighteen sixty nine.
Aguilli was interested in philosophy, spirituality, ideology and literature, and
he explored new ideas ravenously. He joined the Theosophical Society
in France, and he met anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in

(13:55):
London in eighteen ninety one. He also began reading the
Quran around eighteen nine too, and converted to Islam in
eighteen ninety seven. And GWELLI wrote about Islam and anarchism
fairly frequently, but he didn't really connect them together. However,
there was another one, another anarchist to convinced Islam, Isabelle Everhart.

(14:21):
She Grubb in Geneva and converted to Islam around eighteen
ninety six or ninety seven, and she challenged both Eastern
and Western norms through her writings and practice practice, pursuing
a nomadic lifestyle in Nigeria, joining a Sufi order and
expressing her unconventional spirit by dressing as a male when
she felt like, taking on a male name, and pursuing

(14:42):
a lifestyle of purported promiscuity journalism, smoking Kief and Junian
across the North African desert by horse. I think she
would also be considered a figure of queer anarchist history.
I wasn't able to find anything about how she identified personally,

(15:03):
but apparently so. I don't know if she was a
cross dresser or if she was trans or something else entirely.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Right, Like you get especially in that period, like like
misogyny is is so rampant that like it could be
necessary to like, I guess, to present as male even
if if you weren't like trans in you and gender identity,
just to have access to things that were constrained I
don't know, or like delimited as male.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Right, Yeah, exactly makes sense.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, it's I think it's why it's to just be like,
we don't know, rather than to necessarily like like claim
to someone's identity stuff when what we know is their
presentation stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Agreed. Also during this time in the Ottoman Empire, there
was a not insignificant population of European anarchists, mostly Italians.
In Alexandria alone, there were approximately twelve thousand Italians living
and working offer in the building sector. By in eighteen
seventy six anarchists they had organized a branch of the

(16:09):
Syndicalist International Workers Association, and the early eighteen hundreds at
the Comana Testa and other Italian anarchists joined the Urabia
Prize in against the British, and this was perhaps the
first time that Muslims anarchists fought a military campaign side
by side other uprising was squashed. Anarchists were less harassed
in the Octoband Empire than in many other parts of Europe.

(16:34):
Later on, in nineteen oh one, anarchists co founded a
free popular university, the University Popularity Libre or UPL, in Alexandria.
It provided free courses on subjects like tool stories and
Cunan's ideas, the arts, pragmatic topics like working negotiation strategies,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, common if you

(16:58):
were indigenous to the region, tough luck. Indigenous muslim and
indigenous Muslims and Arabic speakers went really part of the
UPI's program went really included pretty much marginalized from the
education entirely, and the UPL crash became more and more
aimed toward and controlled by upper class interests. So that sucks.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, that's a fair yeah, lame, very lame.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, a lot of disappointments in this episode, people who
are like nearly there and then kind of fair of course. Yeah,
but that's that's that's part of history, right, jumping head

(17:54):
even more in the twentieth century, we got to see
the fall of the caliphate in nineteen twenty four and
two new influential currents of Salafiism or Slafism, the Muslim
Brotherhood which is known for their social democratic lenans, and
the Saudis, who are known for their monarchic venus.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
To put it likely, yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
Yeah, as possible, Yeah, I mean even so late on
a sort of an Islamic liberation theology developing that dismissed
bin Ladin and senseless and lifted up the examples of
the revolutionary Barbi movement of the eighteen hundreds, Malcolm X
and Ali Shariati's quest for a just and classless society.

(18:44):
Then there's also a neo Sufi group known as the
Mura Bhutin, the Mura Bhutun and the Inclusive Mosque Initiative
in London as other examples of you know, how Islam
could be used to resist some Islamic traditions. And there
were also several individuals today who have explicitly and publicly

(19:04):
self identified as Muslim anarchists, not Muslim and anarchists, but
specifically Muslim anarchists, including ab Dinner Pradu and Mohammad jan Venus.
That's cool. So that's a sort of a basic rundown.

(19:25):
But I think inevitably with these sort of topics you
sort of fraught ideas, something like an Islamic anarchism, they're
going to be some challenges and criticisms, right, Yeah, I
would like for one, you know, it's a fairly new concept,
the idea of Islamic anarchism. Like I went over, there

(19:47):
were certain trends that can be described as anarchic, amphibian, generous,
but the idea of Islamic anarchism as in something born
out of the after development of anim schism and through
anarchism as a political philosophy, it's fairly new and it
challenges a lot of the traditional Islamic teachings on authority

(20:09):
and governance. So some scholars practitioners have pointed out that
with the emphasis of social order, the emphasis of authority
of the state and the role of law, this idea
of rejecting hierarchy and authority as advocated by Islamic anarchists
is you know, heretical practically. There's also some criticism that

(20:34):
with Islamic anarchisms rejection of all forms of authority in hierarchy,
it undermines the concept of tweed, which is the belief
in the oneness of God, and by you know, rejecting
that by undermining that concept and promoting individualism and self rule,
it sort of goes against that teaching. Of course, like

(20:56):
I mentioned earlier, there's also this challenge to the idea
that is anarchism or Islamic anarchism could be compatible because
of the slogan and no cause, no masters right. Of course,
Islamic anarchists and other Islamic socialists would argue that Islam
should be seen as a liberating force that can help

(21:17):
individuals achieve freedom from a Prussian exploitation. The same argument
is made with a lot of other strands of religious
anarchisms as well, and so to bring things to a
sort of a close, I'd say that, you know, like
every religious anarchism, like every political philosophy, like every religion,

(21:38):
like everything. Honestly, people pick and shooes. You know, in
Islam you can find elements of quietism as well as
activism detached to mysticism, as well as pragmatic daily concerns,
traditions of violence and traditions of non violence, moderation and
extremism in anarchism, tensions exist between pacifism and insurrectionism, cyndicalism

(22:06):
and individualism, nationalism and anti nationalism, collectivism and individualism again.
And I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a religious anarchist
of any variety. But I think that there is room
for even if I may not agree with it in

(22:32):
all cases the conclusions some people draw. I think there's
room for these sorts of dialogues to be had. I
think there's a room for exploration to the history of
all sorts of historical movements and ideologies and religions and ideas,
because I mean, there's a whole legacy of billions of

(22:55):
people who have lived and died long before us, and
I think I find it interested, at least as a
thought exercise, to see how they came to their conclusions
as well. So I hope this episode was start provoking,
enlightening and interesting to those who tuned in.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, it was good. It's always interesting to see these Yeah, like,
we don't have to agree with all of it, but
it's interesting to see where people come at these things from.
It was I was wondering if you were going to
get to or not. But like one of the things
that you saw in the Spanish like not really the
Civil War as much, but in the Second Republic was

(23:36):
the socialists and and like left liberals explicitly selling out
like Moroccan Muslim people and North African people more generally
whatever their faith, and anarchists being like, no, we should
express solidarity with these people, like even if we if
they are aren't and some of them were part of
like they were anarchists in Spanish North Africa of course,

(24:00):
but like even if they weren't, being like, we should
have post colonialism, and when every other kind of left
stripe didn't, it's kind of one of the failing sort
of public not to So, yeah, they've been these conversations,
I guess for a long time. It was interesting to
hear about those Sufi's in Spain and think about how
long those conversations have been going back and forth, you.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Know, exactly exactly. I think the whole Iberian Peninsula's really
interesting reagion in terms of the confluence of cultures. I
did miss that particular historical instance in my research A
thousand points and it's out.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, no worries big nerd for that stuff. Is there
anything you'd like to plug before we get Andrew.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Sure sure, so you can find me on YouTube at
andrewism On, patuon dot com slash Saint Drew, and I've
logged off of Twitter, but if you want to get
updates what I do, decided to log in to foost
updates he and there. You can follow me on Twitter

(25:04):
at underscore same true. Thank you, Andrew, Take care everyone peace.
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
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Speaker 1 (25:31):
Thanks for listening.