This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 2, 2018 - April 8, 2018

Part of the struggle against Muslim extremism in the realm of education involves the critical study of extremist ideologies that have emerged among the Muslims, particularly those associated with the advocates of violence in Al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah and other so-called Salafi and Jihadi groups.

It is in this area that there is a danger of false understandings affecting our view of Islam and the ideologies and movements that are associated with it. Specifically, the problem has to do with the way in which we read and uncritically accept the research that is being generated on Islam these days.

We are often overrun by a variety of labels and terms that are either vague or too many for our minds to manage. There are many orientations or ideologies that characterise Muslim revival movements. The more conventional labels used to describe them are modernism, traditionalism, radicalism, fundamentalism, extremism and secularism. We have also read of other terms such as jihadism and Islamism. When such terms are adopted by Muslim researchers, it is usually because they are in a state of mental captivity vis-a-vis works of their mentors in the West.

Mental captivity, a problem discussed and elaborated on by the late Syed Hussein Alatas, refers to a way of thinking that is dominated by Western thought in an imitative and uncritical manner. Uncritical imitation takes place at levels of scientific intellectual activity, affecting problem selection, analysis, conceptualisation, description, explanation and interpretation.

Among the characteristics of the captive mind are the inability to be creative and raise original problems, and being cut off from the main issues of society. The captive mind is trained almost entirely in the Western sciences, reads the works of Western authors, and is taught predominantly by Western teachers, whether in the West itself or through their works available in local centres of education. Mental captivity is also found in the suggestion of solutions and policies.

As far as the study of Islam is concerned, there are several problems associated with the imitative and uncritical adoption of certain Western ideas and concepts. I say “certain Western ideas” because there is much in the Western social sciences that is useful and necessary to advance the study of Islam and Muslim societies. But there are also problems that need to be identified.

First of all, using a term such as jihadism is offensive to Muslims because it turns a lofty idea in Islam, that is, jihad, into something negative. Jihad is an important concept in Islamic theology and is certainly not associated with aggression and violence towards non-Muslims. In fact, the idea of the “greater jihad” in Islam has to do with moral and intellectual struggle and exertion, while the “lesser jihad” is about physical defence against unprovoked aggression.

By using the term “jihadism” to refer to the acts of murders and terrorists, researchers are, perhaps inadvertently, associating the lofty ideal of jihad with sinful acts and are in fact soiling a sacred idea that has nothing to do with what jihadism is being used to refer to.

Secondly, the uncritical borrowing of ideas exacerbates an already existing problem, that is, the relative neglect of terms and concepts from within the Islamic tradition that refer to extremism. The Eurocentrism is such that there is a conspicuous absence from the social scientific literature as well as media discourse of the way in which Muslims themselves understand extremism and terrorism.

In this way, Muslims are reduced to objects of study rather than a source of concepts and ideas for the study of Muslim revival movements and ideologies. This is particularly glaring in view of the fact that Muslims had conceptualised what I am referring to here as extremism from the very first centuries of Islam.

Muslim revival or resurgence or reform as it is variously known is not peculiar to the modern period. The idea of reform in Muslim societies dates back to pre-modern times. In a broad sense, we may define Muslim revival as a social and intellectual movement that seeks to correct what is perceived as wrong or lacking in the social, economic, political and cultural life of Muslims. Sometimes, these movements and the ideologies behind them have been regarded as extremist by Muslims themselves.

They were regarded as outliers, or what the early Muslims referred to as the ghulat, the adjectival form of ghuluww, often translated as zealotry. The term refers in classical Muslim sources to minority Muslim groups that exaggerate in matters of belief or doctrine. Another possible term is hashwiyyah, a reference to “vulgar anthropomorphism” because of the way in which basic beliefs were deformed in the tendency to compare and reduce God to created things.

Therefore, there is yet another reason to reject the terms such as Islamism or jihadism. If we were to use a more social scientific term such as modernist extremism and inquire about what this extremism is, we would not be able to get a satisfactory answer without referring to the way in which Muslims themselves have conceptualised extremism. Examples are the concepts of ghuluww and hashwiyyah referred to above. Related to the study of the wider phenomenon of Muslim revival is, of course terms like islah (reform) and tajdid (renewal).

The danger of mental captivity can be illustrated from the following example. Because many observers of Muslim movements tend to draw parallels between these and the Protestant Reformation some centuries ago, there is a tendency to see similarities between Muslim extremism and Christian fundamentalism. In fact, the term “Islamic fundamentalism” is also sometimes used.

This creates a false understanding of what Muslim extremism is all about. It is imagined that like Christian fundamentalism, Muslim “fundamentalism” is founded on a literalist reading of scriptures. In fact, the far greater problem that characterises Muslim extremism is not literalism but legalism, or the reduction of the shariah to rules and regulation, the understanding of Islam as law and not much else. This makes up a vital ingredient of extremism as it downplays or eliminates the spiritual dimension and, along with that, the attributes of love and compassion that are so important in Islamic tradition.

The study of Islam has always been affected by stereotypical and distorting ideas. Up until the early part of the 20th century, Europeans referred to the religion of Islam as Mohammedanism, as if to say that Muhammad is to Islam as Jesus is to Christianity. To their credit, Muslim scholars never took to using the term and gradually it fell out of usage among Western scholars. Muslim scholars should also stop using terms like jihadism and even Islamism and be more critical and creative in their approach to the terms and concepts that they borrow from the social sciences.

As the American political scientist, Don Emerson said, it is a matter of how to choose words when writing about the relationship between Islam and violence that are “at once accurate and considerate” of the feelings of Muslims. The question of escaping mental captivity is one of conceptual relevance as well as intellectual integrity and should be a prime goal of education.

Syed Farid Alatas is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.