Locating ‘Praxis’ in Islamic Liberation Theology: God, Scripture, and the Problem of Suffering in Egyptian Prisons

Abstract

The paper examines the tenability of a project for Islamic liberation theology by exploring the religious lives of Egyptian prisoners—with an emphasis on their encounters with the Qur’an, devotional and contentious contemplation, and theodicy. It employs an ethnographic approach to the study of Islam in Egyptian prisons by interviewing former political prisoners incarcerated after the 2013 military coup. By examining the work of key liberation theologians Farid Esack (b. 1959), Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951), and Asghar Ali Engineer (b. 1939), I ask: can a justice-oriented hermeneutics, concerned with pluralism and breaking down binaries, be a meaningful starting point to those struggling under oppression? I posit that the concern with developing hermeneutics can potentially limit the praxis whereby the faithful struggle with the text in the very moment of suffering. It shows how Egyptian prisoners’ devotional (and contentious) contemplation (taddabur) of the Qur’an—rather than reading liberation into the Qur’an—allowed for emancipatory embodiments of scripture. Furthermore, I show how prisoners stripped of their agentic power come to understand human action and divine action in history and how the metaphysical responses to human suffering inevitably shaped how they view both structures of inequality and domination as well as their potential liberation from it.

1. Introduction

In the first four days of his enforced disappearance, Mustafa could not pray (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner n.d.).1 It was not that he did not want to pray; he just could not. An anti-riot squad had knocked down his door and dragged him out of his house. They moved him to a clandestine cell. He was blindfolded and alone. However, he was keenly aware that in the adjacent cells were others who were also alone and potentially as scared as he was.

I was always the type of person on top of my prayers, but in the first four days, I was in a state of shock that I didn’t move at all. I couldn’t pray. I didn’t know where I was.

In the first forty days of his disappearance, he was being tortured daily and without stop. He was blindfolded for the first two months. What was most eerie, however, was the sound of the Qur’anic recitations emanating from the corridors and surrounding the solitary cells. The screams of prisoners being tortured would pierce through the melodious albeit somewhat grainy Qur’an recordings. Mustafa explained that the officers tried to drown out the sounds of torture with the loud Qur’an recitations. It was not exactly an overcorrection due to guilt, Mustafa noted these were truly religious people. They would take breaks from torturing him to pray their obligatory prayers. As for Mustafa, who was a graduate of Al Azhar and had memorized the Qur’an as a child, the salient presence of the Qur’an did not provide him solace nor did it alienate him. He was keenly aware that this was not for him. The sound of the recitation merely served a pragmatic purpose for the officers. Paradoxically, it amplified the faint screams it tried to mute. It was only later, when he held a physical copy of the Qur’an and read it for himself that he would seek answers to his suffering from the text.

This paper attempts to assess projects of Islamic liberation theology with an emphasis on praxis (Gutierrez 1988; Ziad et al. 2013). As such, I conducted an ethnographic study of the religious lives of Egyptian political prisoners. I interviewed twenty former political prisoners—twelve male and eight female former prisoners who had been incarcerated after the 2013 military coup in Egypt. I first show that despite the tentative nature of formulating an Islamic liberation theology, the project appears to have certain features and contours and employs some hermeneutical methods (Diàleg Global—Diálogo Global—Global Dialogue 2014). However, as an encompassing justice-oriented project formulated primarily within the academy—despite having strong roots in anti-racist struggles—it remains distanced from the lived practices of many of those seeking physical and metaphorical routes to emancipation (Esack 1997).

In this paper, I examine the tenability of a project for Islamic liberation theology by exploring the religious lives of Egyptian prisoners—with an emphasis on their encounters with the Qur’an, devotional (and contentious) contemplation, and theodicy—as a form of praxis. I argue against the efficacy of solidarity as a basis for liberation theology. I suggest that to truly be committed to praxis, scholars ought to start not from the question of what is at stake—in terms of negotiating hermeneutical practices and critiquing sources—but rather who is at stake? Meaning that an emphasis on a justice-oriented hermeneutics, particularly with an emphasis on pluralism such as that of Farid Esack or a liberation theodicy concerned with breaking down binaries of self and other such as that of Hamid Dabashi, could potentially lack the nuance to the particularities and commitments central to praxis (Esack 1997; Dabashi 2008). This could potentially render the marginalized a mere theoretical present not a focal starting point for liberation theology. This paper examines how devotional and contentious contemplation (taddabur) of the Qur’an was conducted by Egyptian prisoners—rather than reading liberation into the Qur’an—allowed for emancipatory embodiments of scripture. Furthermore, how prisoners stripped of their agentic power come to understand human action and divine action in history and how the metaphysical responses to human suffering inevitably shaped how they view both structures of inequality and domination as well as their potential liberation from it.

This paper will first provide a short history of liberation theology beginning from its Latin American roots with the emergence of Christian Base Communities—committed to a praxis of liberation and the subsequent 1968 Medellin Conference in Colombia (Abalos 1969). It will show the key components of Catholic liberation theology as outlined by key liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez in 1971 (Brown 2013). It will then assess the key thinkers of Islamic liberation theology with an emphasis on their articulations of the problem impeding liberation and hermeneutics. Namely, this paper will examine South African scholar Farid Esack (b. 1959), Iranian American scholar Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951), and Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer (b. 1939). This very emphasis on Qur’anic hermeneutics and in Dabashi’s case on theodicy will be the focal point in my assessment. My concern here is the fundamental question: what do we miss when our reading of Muslim popular theologies emphasizes only triumphant narratives of ideological figureheads or indeed even justice-oriented scholarship? In doing so, I ask in the very moments of struggle, how do the marginalized (in this context prisoners) relate to the Qur’an and derive meanings from it? Furthermore, how do they understand their own suffering in both metaphysical and social constructions of reality? By contending that the Qur’an is a generative and living text, the prisoners deduce subjective and universal meanings that both liberate but also constrain.

2. Toward a Liberation Theology

Liberation theology first emerged as a response to the radical organizing mission of ‘Christian Base Communities’ in Latin America in the 1960s. During this period, Latin American countries saw immense class disparity and struggle, the proliferation of corrosive capitalist authoritarianism, coupled with imperial domination. Moreover, different elements within the Catholic Church—particularly ones embedded within working-class and rural communities—saw a greater need to think beyond institutional Church structures and develop a more thorough commitment to grassroot evangelizing missions. As a result of these evangelizing missions, semi-autonomous and grassroot movements—often led by lay people—committed to a radical Christian praxis dubbed Christian Base Communities emerged in towns and in rural areas (Boff 1986). This was the initial makings of an embodied liberation theology in which the pious married a revolutionary struggle for social justice with Christian doctrine.

In acknowledgment of the need to articulate a comprehensive theology of liberation, Latin American Bishops met in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. They characterized liberation theology as a ‘preferential option for the poor’ (Burke and Lassalle-Klein 2006). Although this theology of liberation preceded the conference and existed in the praxis of Christian Base Communities, the goal was to enshrine it into a Catholic mainstream (Surlis 1988). It also reflected and formalized a longstanding trend within modern Catholicism that began with Rerum Novarum—an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 ‘On the Conditions of Labor’—and resumed with breakthrough papal encyclicals in the 1960s (Ziad et al. 2013). It was forged as a moderate critique of the excesses of capitalism. It criticized the treatment of workers and affirmed their right to fair treatment and fair wage as well as their right to organize as unions and strike if need be all the while maintaining the right to own property (Nepstad 2019).

Three years after the conference was held, Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez published a manifesto for the movement titled A Theology of Liberation. This not only provided a systematic view of Catholic liberation theology but also represented a call for action. Combining a Marxist critique of ‘sinful structures’ that reproduced suffering with Christian doctrine, Gutierrez’s call for action as praxis resonated with Churches and Catholic communities all over Latin America (Robson 2010). For Gutierrez, the praxis these communities embodied was more significant than theorizing liberation theology itself (McGovern 2009). He insisted that the very embodiment of liberation theology owes in great part to the presence and theologizing of the ‘absent’ from society, church, and history (Gutierrez 1988). Gutierrez explained, ‘By “absent” I mean: of little or no importance, and without the opportunity to give expression themselves to their sufferings, their comraderies, their plans, their hopes’ (Gutierrez 1988, p. xx). Liberation theology thereby is characterized by ‘the right of the poor to think out their own faith’ (Gutierrez 1988, p. xxi). Indeed, the term ‘poor’ here is also all-encompassing. It relates to economic deprivation but extends to ‘Dominated peoples’, ‘exploited social classes’, ‘despised races’, and ‘marginalized cultures’ (Gutierrez 1988, p. xxi).

By the 1980s and the 1990s, Catholic liberation theology experienced fundamental challenges. There were internal disputes—namely the opposition of more conservative elements of the Church. A part of the Vatican’s office, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued instructions questioning the movement’s radical politics and emphasis on class struggle (Singer n.d.). Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who later became Pope Benedict XVI—wrote, ‘the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith…brought about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought’ (Ireland 2022, p. 123). While Catholic liberation theology faced significant internal challenges in the 1990s, theologies of liberation emanating from other religious traditions and contexts continued to provide substantive theoretical and practical interventions to how the oppressed conceive of their lived realities, God, and justice.

3. Islamic Liberation Theology

By the 1990s, Muslim scholars and intellectuals began articulating and advocating for an Islamic liberation theology. This paper considers the scholarly reflections of three leading liberation theologians—namely Asghar Ali Engineer, Farid Esack, and more recently Hamid Dabashi. However, it should be noted that although we could deduce certain commonalities in their projects, they are indeed separate attempts at formulating an Islamic liberation theology and do not claim to be under the rubric of a single ideological project. In this paper, I consider two themes central to these articulations—namely hermeneutics and theodicy. I assess the main conjectures with reference to the praxis of prisoners in Egypt. As such, I will first begin contextualizing these projects and introducing the scholars who articulated them.

Ashraf Kunnummal aptly noted that these scholars share two common positionalities. Engineer, Esack, and Dabashi all grew up in the 1970s and were notably from countries where Muslims were a minority (Kunnummal 2017). Kunnummal further notes that their respective contexts impacted their articulation of Islamic liberation theology in many ways. Most significant is their preoccupation with questions of pluralism and breaking the boundaries between self and other. This informs their approach to hermeneutics in the case of Engineer and Esack and theodicy in the case of Dabashi. In doing so, some a priori truth claims regarding the nature of the texts could be deduced in their approach of the Qur’an and Sunnah.

Engineer’s conception of an Islamic liberation theology was influenced significantly by the Third Worldist and anti-colonial movements burgeoning in India at the time. Engineer was born in 1939 to a Dawudi Bohra family. His father was an Islamic scholar and taught him Qur’anic exegesis and jurisprudence (Rahemtulla 2018). Impacted by the communal violence in India between Muslims and Hindus, Engineer dedicated his later years to writing on the topics of social justice, gender justice, and pluralism. He believed that although religion was important to a peacebuilding project in India, ultimately only secularism could provide a lasting solution to communal violence (Rahemtulla 2018). Engineer contended that ‘Muhammad’s movement stressed liberation from ignorance, superstition, and injustice through the power of reason and the pursuit of knowledge’ (Ziad et al. 2013, p. 316). Thus central to the Qur’anic message was the emphasis on compassion which he argued could be deduced in Sufi practices.

Similarly, South African scholar Farid Esack’s conception of liberation theology originated in the struggle against apartheid. He was thus impacted by the developing Black Christian Liberation Theology in South Africa as well as its Latin American predecessors (Kunnummal 2017). In his magnum opus Qur’an, liberation & pluralism: an Islamic perspective of interreligious solidarity against oppression, Esack identifies his positionality in a chapter he aptly calls ‘What baggage does this interpreter carry?’ (Esack 1997). In the chapter, Esack lays out his personal history. Being raised by a single mother in a country with many faiths under apartheid, Esack began his religious journey at nine when he joined the Tablighi Jammat. He went to Pakistan on a scholarship, and as someone who belonged to a Muslim minority in South Africa, he was troubled by the treatment of Christian and Hindu minorities in Pakistan (Esack 1997). Back in South Africa in the 1980s, Esack noted, ‘the conflict between two expressions of religion, accommodationist and liberatory was increasingly evident. In a context of oppression, it seems that theology, across religious divisions, fulfils one of two tasks: it either underpins and supports the structures and institutions of oppression or it performs this function in relation to the struggle for liberation’(Esack 1997, p. 1) Moreover, the cornerstone of this liberation theology required interfaith solidarity—as spiritual praxis and hermeneutical approach to text. This was true particularly in the context of apartheid since believing Christians and Muslims were fighting an unjust system that accommodationist (believing) Muslims and Christians were upholding.

Esack classified this Qur’anic hermeneutics of pluralism as,

‘This work primarily focuses on rethinking approaches to the Qur’an and to the theological categories of exclusion and inclusion rooted in a struggle for freedom from economic exploitation and racial discrimination; its application is intended to be broader than these two forms of injustice. I believe that the ideas I put forward can have a wider application to all categories of social and political injustice, ranging from the obvious oppression of women in Muslim society to discrimination against left-handed people.’ (Esack 1997, p. 8)

For Esack, despite the importance of contextual meanings that underpin revelation, the Qur’an is not speaking principally to a particular time or space. As divine speech, it moves across temporalities to directly converse with the faithful. This is the root cause behind the universality of the text. This particular hermeneutical approach is situated in a wider argument against scholarly authorities acting as gatekeepers of the Qur’an. Instead, he reads the Qur’an through the eyes of the marginalized (al-aradhil) and the downtrodden (al-mustad‘afun) (Rahemtulla 2018; Esack 2003). In this sense, Esack seeks a comprehensive reading of the Qur’an that speaks to a potential liberation that is essentially pluralistic in nature. Thus, as Rahemtulla shows, ‘‘Prophetic’—or a principled—solidarity, therefore, is a fundamental component of liberation and lies at the heart of a meaningful commitment to social justice’ (Rahemtulla 2018, pp. 10–11).

In recognition of the fluidity of oppressor–oppressed categories, Esack insists the principled and Prophetic solidarity as central to forging liberation theology. He contended that the Afrikaners once victims of the British became the colonizers of indigenous Black land in South Africa; similarly, in the case of European Jewry that experienced the brunt of the Holocaust but also became supportive of settler-colonial projects in Palestine. On an even more micro-level, Esack explained, ‘While I can, for example, be in solidarity with a male black worker in respect of the exploitation that he experiences at work, I ought to be in solidarity with his abused wife in the home context’ (Rahemtulla 2018, p. 33; Esack 2006, p. 125). The notion of solidarity thus plays an interesting role as it pertains to plurality and the Qur’an.

Engineer’s work too shows a preoccupation with the question of pluralism. As Rahemtulla shows, Engineer’s starting point is that for Qur’an to be a liberating text, it must be a liberated text (Rahemtulla 2018; Engineer 1990). This could be deduced from his readings on gender and pluralism in the Qur’an. He does this by emphasizing parts of the Qur’an that from the outset seem to portray a liberationist and pluralistic message. Thus, he contends, for example, that the Qur’an upholds complete equality between men and women (Rahemtulla 2018; Engineer 2001). He also points out that Islam ‘does not even indirectly hint at coercion, let alone violence, when it comes to any religious or spiritual matter’ (Rahemtulla 2018, p. 62; Engineer 2005, p. 95). He laments the projects of Islamic revival for emphasizing ritual practices and outwardly shows of piety over liberationist approach, such as ones that prioritize social and economic justice, thus further entrenching the power of the scholarly elite (Rahemtulla 2018). Both Esack and Engineer emphasize a deity active in human history and on the side of the oppressed. The question of human suffering thus appears to have a salience—albeit implicit—in articulations of liberation theology.

In Hamid Dabashi’s 2008 book Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, he clearly struggles with the question of theodicy so much so that he advocates a move from liberation theology to liberation theodicy (Dabashi 2008). Dabashi ‘relied on post-structuralist thought with a postcolonial critical lens to develop a global Islamic Liberation Theology by connecting radical trends in black and subaltern studies’ (Kunnummal 2017, p. 14). Dabashi’s forged project of liberation theodicy takes the notion of theodicy outside its classical definition of accounting for suffering or evil in the world. Rather, he uses it to resolve the question of multiplicity and diversity, as Carool Kersten notes, to convey both diversity and alterity of truths (Kersten 2022). For Dabashi, this effectively means developing mechanisms and shared language that transcends the binary of Islam and the West. Kersten further notes, ‘As a rhetorical device, Dabashi envisions hermeneutics of alterity as defying schematization and categorization, presenting itself as appositional, contrapuntal, centrifugal, anthropocentric and open to cultural heteroglossia’ (Kersten 2022, p. 166) In Dabashi’s view, this so-called new reality necessitates a ‘worldly cosmopolitanism’ that decenters geography and is characteristically post-Islamist.

In fact, Dabashi is speaking from a particular historical moment—which he believes warrants post-Islamism as a new reality—that is, the post-9/11 context but with a keen reflective eye on the failure of the Iranian revolution which rendered Iran a theocracy. The dual violence of militant Islamism and imperial violence—both premised on the dichotomy of self and other—ought to thus be transcended. As such, Dabashi notes, ‘Today all liberation theories will have to be formulated above and beyond all binary oppositions, first and foremost one between the religious and the secular. Immediately contingent on that collapse is the recognition that no singular liberation theology can be speculated in a hermetic seal from the rest of the world—and only in a fictive and combatant conversation with a “West” that simply no longer exists’ (Dabashi 2008). He contends that a retrieval of this theodicy is possibly through reflections in the works of the great Persian poets (Ibn Haldun University 2020).

Dabashi conjures Malcolm X as the embodiment of what he envisions this project of liberation theodicy to be. Malcolm X emerges in Dabashi’s project as an almost post-Islamist figure, having liberated himself from the binary of self and other to embody a form of Islamic universalism and cosmopolitanism. He thus juxtaposes Malcolm X’s supposed ‘universality’ with Sayyid Qutb’s enclosed and dichotomous view of the world. For Dabashi, the figure of Malcolm X ‘discovered an emancipatory vision of Islam’ in his departure from the Nation of Islam through breaking down the racial distinction to embody a larger ummah (Demichelis 2014). Thus, Malcolm X ‘rejected the Islam of [Sayyid] Quṭb and that of generations of other Muslim revolutionaries trapped inside a binary opposition between two false consciousnesses: Islam versus the West, and no longer limited, defined or confined his free thought’ (Demichelis 2014, p. 146). In this sense, Dabashi renders Malcolm X as an almost early post-Islamist figure. Dabashi’s conciliatory reading of Malcolm X, whereby he transcends the specificity of Black radical politics after his hajj, is a common revisionist reading of his life that assumes a sharper ideological shift than in reality (Grewal 2015; Marable 2011). What is fascinating here is that Dabashi points out that both Sayyid Qutb and Malcolm X came to consciousness in prison; however, he does not necessarily sufficiently examine the relationship between confinement and liberation. Rather than examining subjective and intra-subjective dynamics of oppression and liberatory praxis, where ideology really comes to fruition, Dabashi’s concern with macro-theorization reflects a set of anxieties about a polarity in the world order but not one that people in their moments of oppression necessarily share.

In many ways, Asef Bayat’s qualms about the liberatory potential of ‘Islamism’ mirror the problem of Dabashi’s cosmopolitan turn. Both characterize what is said to be Islamism—and indeed its proponents—as belonging to a predominantly identarian movement based on the boundaries between self and other with a foremost commitment to a nation state-building project (Gresh and Bayat 2018). Unlike Catholic liberation theology, Bayat contends, which did not aim to proselytize their worldview or indeed Christianity, Islamism is predominantly concerned with Islamizing society. Both Dabashi and Bayat, therefore, contend that a post-Islamist condition is required for an Islamic liberation theology to flourish. For Bayat, the underlying view relies upon a depiction of liberation theology as an open and comprehensive revolutionary call for social justice while not wholly concerned with Christianizing society, in contrast to a so-called Islamist worldview, which is a closed system based on binaries, modes of exclusion, dogmatic state-building projects, and proselytization. Bayat inadvertently misconstrues both complex phenomena and, thereby, the relationship between both.

In fact, much of the early triumph of liberation theology in Latin America was due to the evangelizing efforts of Christian Base Communities in rural and urban working-class areas. This included meetings that emphasized Christian worship, Bible study, and political action (Nordstokke 2014). Moreover, for key liberation theologians like Gutierrez, the structures of capitalism are to be considered ‘sinful structures’, and thus, overturning them is a matter of Christian commitment and praxis. Therefore, it could not be said that liberation theologians were ambivalent about state-building projects. Furthermore, there is a strong historical and hermeneutical link between Islamic modes of liberation theology and movements dubbed as Islamist that Bayat neglects. As Matthew Palombo shows, Islamic liberation theology emerging from the South African context is historically linked to early Islamist anti-apartheid movements from the 1950s onward—such as the Qibla Mass Movement, the Call of Islam, the Muslim Youth Movement, and significantly from the teachings of Imam Abdullah Haroon (d. 1969) who died in prison as a result of his anti-apartheid activism. He goes on to show that contrary to the prevailing academic view of so-called Islamist movements, these were not primarily concerned with state-building projects but with praxis—whether in Qur’an study circles (halaqat) or direct political action. Palombo therefore contends that the development of Islamic liberation theology in South Africa was a confluence of African humanism and Islamism (Matthew Palombo 2014). Additionally, leading proponents of Islamic liberation theology in South Africa—such as Farid Esack—came from these Islamist backgrounds and continue to share a common view of hermeneutics with early thinkers associated with Islamist movements. Rahemtulla notes,

It is worthwhile noting that Esack’s emphasis on the present bears a striking resemblance to Islamist readings…In other words, scripture does not speak through the mediation of a primary audience (classical Arabia) to a secondary audience (the present). Rather, a direct hermeneutical link is forged between God and the faithful, transcending time and space. Another common characteristic between Esack’s readings and those of Islamists, then, is their markedly lay character. South African Muslims engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle routinely came together in religious circles (halaqat) to reflect collectively on a translation of the Qur’an, asking one another what they felt the various verses meant and how these verses spoke to their experiences.

(Rahemtulla 2018, pp. 17–18)

Asef Bayat provides a diametrically different view as he characterizes Islamism as,

an ideological package filled with seemingly consistent components, clear responses, and simple remedies, such that it automatically ejects philosophical doubts, intellectual ambiguities, or skeptical probing. And finally, Islamism continues to project a utopian image of itself in a world in which the grand ideals and dreamlands (such as communism, democracy, freedom) have collapsed or being questioned; it continues to project itself as a unique combatant, revolutionary and emancipatory ideology.

(Gresh and Bayat 2018)

Bayat is not entirely wrong. However, some complexity seems to be missing. The internal ideological, theological difference—still notwithstanding the diverse subjective formations—of those said to belong to an allusive ‘Islamist’ orientation has led many scholars to the conclusion that the very notion of Islamism is not useful (Qureshi 2022). Even Islamist movements—such as in the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood which Bayat studies—tend to embody an ideological complexity that allows for diametrically opposing views to (uncomfortably) exist under one organizational rubric or even represent it (Ayyash et al. 2023). While organizational dogmas exist, the diversity existing within the ranks allows personal meanings to be remade and reshaped constantly. Furthermore, Islamism—even as an intellectual classification—inherently carries the baggage of securitization and criminalization of Muslim political identity, on the one hand, or typecasting, on the other, which Bayat inadvertently does. For instance, Alain Gresh goes on to ask Bayat ‘And what does it mean to challenge the imperialist order when you support neoliberalism?’ (Gresh and Bayat 2018). Bayat responded that while left-leaning politics characterized Islamism of the previous decades, neo-liberal populism is now the mainstream. He cites leading Islamist figures to illustrate his point such as Erdogan or Khairat al Shater. Bayat goes on to add,

What is there in the Islamist “anti-imperialism” for the Muslim subaltern—the poor, the marginalized, the excluded? … I suggest that Islamist “anti-imperialism” has been non-liberatory, to say the least, even oppressive—it’s violence has triggered “war on terror” victimizing the mostly ordinary Muslims; it has emboldened autocratic regimes to quell dissent in the name of anti-terror campaign; and when Islamists have had a chance to rule, they have established authoritarian religious rule, exclusivist social order and moral discipline (theirs has been somewhat similar to Robert Mugabe’s “anti-imperialism”)”.

(Gresh and Bayat 2018)

My primary disagreement with Bayat here is who constitutes the ‘Muslim subaltern’ and what are they saying? And are those facing the brunt of the War on Terror empty vessels for state violence and Islamist counter-response or do they act on some agentic capacity? Furthermore, is it appropriate to assume that just because Khairat al Shater or Erdogan are committed to the free market that the so-called ‘Islamists’ in working-class neighborhoods or in rural areas facing the brunt of the War on Terror share the same class commitments? I would argue what is sorely missing from these scopes of analysis are the actual voices of the oppressed in narrating and ultimately theologizing their own oppression. By emphasizing praxis and subject formations, I highlight the cleavages within the academic discourse on those whose political identities are criminalized, on the one hand, but also do not embody lofty aspirations of Islamic liberation theology of transcending boundaries.

This paper does not merely conjure prison and the carceral as an example or case study, but it is my contention that the carceral is central to the consciousness of the Muslim subaltern. Indeed, prisons exist not just in the lives of prisoners, but the continuous looming threat of incarceration shapes the political choices and realities of many Muslim populations. Thus, by examining the way Muslim prisoners theologize their own suffering, I argue that liberatory praxis is not concerned with overcoming binaries and achieving pluralism. That is for the simple reason that boundaries and binaries are imposed on them and they are not equal participants to it. Thus often, it is within the confines of particularity from which praxis emerges. Conversely, praxis does not reproduce ideal types or harmony. It is characterized by struggle and contention—both with the material realities of suffering and with scripture and scriptural understandings. I see the problem with the emphasis on liberationist hermeneutics—whereby the text ought to be ‘liberating’ before becoming liberated, as Engineer contends—as two-fold. It discounts the experiential struggle with scripture that allows for it to be a generative and ultimately liberatory text. Moreover, a ‘liberated’ text, particularly one that envisions and strives for a resolution—either through the appeal to achieving pluralism or breaking down binaries—might not be a text that necessarily speaks to the oppressed. Since, for many, they may have to come to terms that there may never indeed be a resolution to their suffering but liberatory praxis is necessary for their survival, nonetheless.

This reality thus poses certain questions to Muslim liberation theology (and indeed theologians)—in their preoccupation with pluralism and formulating an encompassing and coherent justice-oriented hermeneutics. In the case of Esack’s conception of comprehensive (Prophetic) solidarity, which underpins his understanding of Islamic liberation theology, to be achieved, he needs not to only be in solidarity with the male Black worker but also with his abused wife at home. Solidarity is thus by definition principled albeit conditional. Meaning, the point of theologizing needs to stand outside both parties with an objective set of justice claims that speaks of the oppressed and not necessarily from the oppressed. While Esack’s positions were arrived at through a history of lived struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the appeal to comprehensiveness has its limitation. For example, how does this abused wife of a Black worker narrate her suffering? Or how does this Black worker understand his conditions and suffering but also see the suffering he inflicts? What do we lose when our liberation theology stems neither from the Black worker nor his abused wife but rather from a committed ‘other’ in conditional solidarity to both? While appeals to comprehensiveness may be warranted, especially as part of liberatory movements’ self-critique, it does not account for how either oppressed party narrates their own suffering, or how the appeal to comprehensiveness can be mobilized against the oppressed in the liberal order—which has been the case after the War on Terror. That is, despite Islamic liberation theology’s internal critiques of liberalism, it is still situated within liberalism and thus has to contend with the question of co-option and indeed has to articulate a thorough response against it (Esack 2003; Diàleg Global—Diálogo Global—Global Dialogue 2014), hence my question: who is at stake—in terms of the oppressed—rather than what is at stake—in terms of coherent and comprehensive hermeneutics?

4. Toward Praxis in Egyptian Prisons

In this section, I take the cue from Gutierrez whereby the theologizing is done by the absent. These are derived from interviews I conducted with former Egyptian detainees arrested after the 2013 coup led by General Abdel Fatah El Sisi against President Mohammad Morsi.2 I asked the detainees about the religious lives and practices in prison, their relationship with the Qur’an and with God, and how they reconcile their conditions with the notion of divine justice.

When Abdullah El Shamy was first detained from the site of the Rabaa massacre, he was subsumed not with fear but with an overwhelming feeling of anger. Bodies of dead men, women, and children littered the streets. It had been twenty-four hours of nonstop killing. The mosques were turned into morgues, and blood flooded the streets. Ordinary people, however, were looking at them from their balconies and on to the streets. As he was being hauled away to the stadium, where all the prisoners were to be detained, he saw an eerie sense of normalcy in the streets.

For a moment, I started thinking. Why is everyone just watching us? Is that it? A few hours ago almost one thousand people were just killed—just like that. People are just going about their life like nothing happened … And then the moment you leave the square, people are fine. Cafes are open. You would think as someone who has just witnessed what you’ve witnessed that people might be angry that people are being killed just a few kilometres away but that just didn’t happen.

Like Abdullah, Mona was bewildered and devastated by the sharp boundaries she did not draw between herself and society. The violence she endured was not just state violence, but there was a palpable sense of vengeance on the streets of Cairo. After her detention, she was being transported in a roofless van. A mob of ordinary people surrounded the van; once they discovered she was a political prisoner, they began to throw stones at her aiming for her face. She could not relate to or understand their anger or their vindictiveness.

For Abdullah and Mona, it was not necessarily the question of divine justice that preoccupied them, it was the very question of human nature. How can humans do that to one another? Later in prison, Abdullah would encounter guards and officers who would insist that they did not mean him harm but that they were only doing their job. At the time, he was in one of the very few prisons that had a communal place of worship. The congregation would be led by an imam from the Ministry of Religious Endowments, and beside each prisoner standing in congregation would be two officers. The officers were so close that they could hear the prisoners’ supplications, but in turn, the prisoners could also hear the officers’ supplications. Abdullah recalled,

During prayer, the officer that had escorted me out of my cell stood praying next to me. Like every Muslim he began reciting du’a for himself and his family. So I began to say ‘Allahuma ikhreb baytuh [O Allah demolish his home]. We were both in prayer. He could hear my supplications and I could hear his. Every du’a he would make, I would make the opposite.

Abdullah went on to add,

When I was released, the head officer at my block came to take me. He held my hand. As we were walking to the gate, he said, ‘Abdullah, please don’t make du’a against me’. I smiled because that came out of nowhere. He said, ‘Abdullah, please don’t. I never wanted this for you’. Even the officers who would treat us badly have this lingering feeling that something is wrong.

Prisoners were often unphased by shows of sympathy from officers who claimed that they were just doing their job. As Mohamad Soltan noted whenever benevolent officers would try to illicit sympathy or even cordiality, he would recall the verses of the Qur’an: [Those who followed will say, “If only we had another turn [at worldly life] so we could disassociate ourselves from them as they have disassociated themselves from us.” Thus will Allah show them their deeds as regrets upon them. And they are never to emerge from the Fire”] (Qur’an 2:167)3.

Omar4 spent a few years in the infamous Scorpion Prison in Cairo. The prison authorities attempted to exert control over the prison population through starvation tactics, stripping detainees of clothes, possessions, and blankets. The medical neglect led to the death of many inmates (Human Rights Watch 2016). The close modes of physical control were also accompanied by modes of spiritual control. The prison authorities banned prisoners from receiving copies of the Qur’an. Omar explained that this made memorization of the Qur’an especially important for prisoners because the prison authorities could not take away what the prisoners knew in their heart. From mundane acts of consistent brutality to active moments of coercion, the prison population was keenly aware that the prison authorities and the system in large attempted to usurp God’s power from the outset by deciding who gets to die and who gets to live, by controlling the movements, space, minds, and bodily functions of prisoners.

Deliberate acts conducted by the prison authorities—from continuous traumatization through torture to mundane acts like banning paper, pens, books, or having access to a watch and knowing the time—all aim to cement their control over the prisoners’ minds. In turn, the prisoners’ insistence on maintaining a connection with God became a way of cultivating spaces where they can connect with a deity that is both true and not confined in prison or even space. Thus, they too could transcend the prison and connect with atemporal truths. Further, the act of memorization allows the prisoners to cultivate an inner reality—where the mind cannot be controlled or managed by the modes of prison control.

The overt attempt of prison authorities to usurp God’s power over prisoners could be illustrated in an encounter Mohamad Soltan had with the prison vice warden. Soltan recalled,

[The vice warden] hauled me in my wheelchair to his office. They started beating me so I can pass out. Then they started taking my vitals. He looked at me and said, ‘…Here in this country, we are like God. We say kun fa yakūn (Be And There Was; a phrase used eight times in the Quran to describe God’s power). Whatever we want we will get’. I never heard that before; someone compares themselves to god and uses a weak prisoner to show it. It reminded me of the story of Ibrahim.

As Esack argued, the Qur’an is not just generative but also crosses temporality and space to provide meaning and speak to the faithful at that time (Esack 1997). Soltan was reflecting on the verse (Qur’an 2:258):

[Prophet], have you not thought about the man who disputed with Abraham about his Lord, because God had given him power to rule? When Abraham said, ‘It is my Lord who gives life and death,’ he said, ‘I too give life and death’. So Abraham said, ‘God brings the sun from the east; so bring it from the west’. The disbeliever was dumbfounded: God does not guide those who do evil.

Soltan was at his most vulnerable. This very vulnerability and helplessness render the relationship the prisoner forges with God and scripture more dynamic. It also provides a stronger emphasis on orthopraxis. In one instance, for example, prisoners were placed in concurrent solitary cells—like the one Mustafa was in. This very space impeded their ability to perform communal worship. The sensory deprivation limited their ability to gauge the direction of the qibla, and the limited access to toilet facilities made ablution difficult. Still, prisoners concocted a way to maintain congregation. The person at the very first cell would lead prayer, and the prisoners would stand near the utmost end of the cell as if standing in a straight line behind. Another example is the story of a female prisoner who was at the end of her menstrual cycle in her first days in detention—while she was enforcedly disappeared in an all-male detention facility. She was not allowed to shower or be ritually pure. She was also afraid of showing signs of overt religiosity in front of the prison authorities. She performed all of the prayers in her head, and when she finally moved to a cell where she could shower, she made a regiment where she made up all of the prayers that she missed.

The question here is why? Why would the community of prisoners be concerned with maintaining religious practices (and doing it right) in prison—a place of effective social death? The easy answer would be that the prisoners were pious before prison and continue to be inside prison. My research found the correlation to be far more tenuous. From the outset, not everyone starts off as pious or even believing. Secondly, pious prisoners go through many crises of faith that render the religious–secular categorizations very fluid. Acts of ‘correct’ worship, forged connections and generative meanings of the Qur’an, and devotional practices are predicated on the experiential dimensions of theodicy that interrogate divine justice and restitution, suffering, and free will. This is intrinsically related to the nature of prison as an institution that seeks to eliminate the free will of the prisoner but also usurp God’s power to punish and dictate the prison population’s destiny. Thus, the recognition—and indeed acts of worship—denote that the prison is thus a false god which in turn transforms the believer into an agentic being with free will. It is not as Engineer had suggested a dichotomy of liberation and exoteric practices.

Mustafa, the prisoner who heard the recitations of the Qur’an that distracted from the torture, related the instances when he struggled with this very question. He said,

I don’t know whether to categorize imprisonment as tribulation or evil that generally just exists in the world. I used to think, if this was a form of tribulation then why is it so intense and so difficult? Why do I have to suffer this much?... They say the Prophet was tried and suffered for years. Okay, but I am not a prophet or a messenger. I am a believer in God and He gives me strength but there were, at points, I would reach this place of extreme anger and resentment. I would be like why is He doing this to us? Why is He treating us this way? Like He does not need to show us He exists. We worship Him already; what is He trying to prove? Why am I being put through this? Why are my family being put through this? He is punishing my whole family not just me. Sometimes, I’d think maybe God has just lost his power. He is just not able to protect human kind. We grew up hearing, God will punish the oppressors but that doesn’t make sense human history is history of human oppression. It was really difficult, so I just didn’t want to talk to anyone. I used to pray regularly. I got much closer to Allah during that period of enforced disappearance. I would make du’a (supplications) all the time and pray all the time. When they got me a Qur’an I would just sit and read it all the time.

Mustafa recalled a hadith that would placate him in the period of enforced disappearance,

And remember that if all the people gather to benefit you, they will not be able to benefit you except that which Allah had foreordained (for you); and if all of them gather to do harm to you, they will not be able to afflict you with anything other than that which Allah had pre-destined against you. The pens had been lifted and the ink had dried up.

(Riyad as-Salihin 62)

As Jamall Calloway noted, the question of suffering—for the oppressed—is rarely resolved merely by intellectual deliberation (Calloway 2020). The meanings of suffering are generative and experiential. Theodicy, thus, as Peter Berger noted, ‘directly affects the individual in his concrete life in society. A plausible theodicy (which, of course, requires an appropriate plausibility structure) permits the individual to integrate the anomic experiences of his biography into the socially established nomos and its subjective correlate in his own consciousness’ (Berger 1967, p. 71). He goes on to explain that even meaning that does not promise relief to the suffering is valuable, and it is therefore ‘misleading to consider theodicies only in terms of their “redemptive” potential’ (Berger 1967, p. 72).

The question of divine justice and theodicy were recurring in my interviews. The first realization most of the prisoners have come to is that God will not give victory to the oppressed as a group simply because they are oppressed. In turn, the oppressors will not be defeated just because they are oppressors. God is active in history, but His action is not always easily discernable or has the outcome the oppressed may desire. Similarly, you can be oppressed but not righteous. What distinguishes this realization, however, from Esack’s proposal for Prophetic solidarity, as a basis for liberation theology, is that it is not relational. Hence, it is not necessarily an attempt at forging pluralism but locating the individual self in a larger social and metaphysical story of a suffering that needs to be overcome.

This is how former detainee Bilal described it:

My whole problem was Qada wa Qadar (fate and predestination)—whether we are predestined or if there was free will. Every time, I spoke with someone they would recite cliches or ask me if I believed in God. I am a believer but I had an issue—do we have free will or are we predestined to have things happen to us? If we are predestined then God did not create me to be free; why would he choose something so horrible as prison for me? Is God not just? Well, if I actually do have free will then how come I am in a place where I can’t practice this free will? Why can’t I just leave? If God is able—then why hasn’t He used His power to free me? I started to think...well maybe God can’t. That took me down a whole rollercoaster. The one thing that enlightened my path was Surah Maryam. The verse said:

{And, when the pains of childbirth drove her to [cling to] the trunk of a palm tree, she exclaimed, ‘I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this!’}

(Qur’an 19:23)

This verse was about her giving birth to Jesus. She was scared they would call her a whore for giving birth out of wedlock. How did God respond to her? She said something that if I had said in prison people might say I lost faith in God but God responded to her,

{And shake to you the trunk of the palm-tree (and) it will let fall ripe dates down on you, readily reaped. So eat and drink and comfort your eye}

(Qur’an 19:25–26)

It was like He was comforting her. It was like He was telling her, I know it’s tough but here just eat something; have a chocolate; have a date and try to forget. It was like God was telling her this had to happen but I am sorry.

Bilal’s devotional albeit contentious contemplation on the Qur’an spoke directly to his situation. Abas Asyafah explains tadabbur as ‘an integral reflection that can lead to an implied meaning of the words of Allah with their deep and profound messages’ (Asyafah 2014, p. 99). This explains the practice of prisoners as they approach the Qur’an. Sometimes, they consult books of exegesis or ask a more learned prisoner, but more commonly, the meanings arrive to them as they contemplate the text—a pedagogical practice of embodied understanding (Mouftah 2019).

5. From Theory to Praxis

Engineer’s starting point for Islamic liberation theology is a profound claim: ‘for Qur’an to be a liberating text, it must be a liberated text’ (Rahemtulla 2018, p. 67). This is a significant hermeneutical project for a liberation theology. However, it is not one that the oppressed would necessarily recognize or employ. In the case of Egyptian prisoners, there is not a single hermeneutic but rather a continuous engagement with scripture in the context of their oppression. Often, they struggle with the text; they approach it seeking meaning but make no grand claims of liberating the text. Furthermore, the questions of pluralism and boundaries are not typically questions raised by the oppressed but by those in distant solidarity attempting to manage different claims of victimhood under the rubric of a single hermeneutical study. The question becomes: what is at stake in terms of hermeneutics and progressive scriptural reasoning rather than a question of who is at stake—in terms of people theologizing and struggling with scripture from the midst of their oppression?

To conclude, this paper engaged the question of Islamic liberation theology moving from theory to praxis. Namely, I ask how in the context of oppression—such as that of Egyptian prisons—would the faithful read liberation in faith? And to what degree do the projects of Islamic liberation theology make sense? I first identified the features of liberation theology since its inception in the Latin American Catholic context—and especially the work of one of its key thinkers Gustavo Gutierrez. I then examined the hermeneutics and the epistemic assumptions of three key Islamic liberation theologians, namely South African scholar Farid Esack, Iranian American scholar Hamid Dabashi, and Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer. I argue that the project of Islamic liberation theology is untenable as a work of systematic theology and especially if the foremost positionality of the theologian is one acting in solidarity. Lastly, by showcasing prison religious narratives, I posit that devotional contemplation rather than hermeneutics is a more tenable form of theology in praxis—especially, as the oppressed struggle to give meaning to their suffering.