The other element one could foreground is probably the spirit of Islamic civilization and its materiality as it was able to realize itself through its artifacts and minor art objects as well as through its monumental art. Art is always supported by the state of science and technology. There is always a relation between, for example, architecture, engineering and the knowledge of geometry, i.e. between a speculative science and its inscription into matter. One can say that if one refers simultaneously to science, the state of technology and the state of the arts, Islamic civilization was contemporaneous with what was happening in Europe until the baroque and classical eras. There is indeed contemporaneity, even if what happened in Islam in the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth centuries is equivalent to the spirit of the European seventeenth century; at that time Islam is very close, I would say, pre-Cartesian, pre-Keplerian, pre-Copernican. And then, from the seventeenth century and those three great revolutions on will arise the spectacular movement of the eighteenth century, that Enlightenment that will detach Europe from the other great civilizations, from the Islamic as well as from the Chinese and from the Indian civilizations. It is the eighteenth century that will cause the separation of the Occident.

And in this eighteenth century founded essentially on the emergence of the concept of freedom, on the profound strengthening of the idea of the individual and the rights of men, the other extremely important idea is the explosion of the consubstantiality of the political and the religious. One could argue that the problematic that will bloom, crystallize and propose the solutions which the European eighteenth will know and on which the ensuing era will be built, that the process of this problematic will be located by the historians as originating in an Arabo-Occidental text, Averroes' famous text on the relationship between religion and philosophy, between theology and technique -- philosophy being perceived as a technique (the very term that determined it was what in Arabic is called ela, i.e. the instrument, the organon, the instrument of thought as inherited via Aristotle). That's where the beginning of the problematic lies, and its evolution will go through the Averroists, the European ones, notably. In Islam we truly have the same perspective as the Occidental perspective, but it is an arrested perspective.

What follows on this is the boom of fundamentalism and the global, planetary dimension it has taken. At any rate, the event we just witnessed is caused by the mutation of the Occidental model as it passes from the European to the American model. The European model in which I grew up, the one which arose from the French Enlightenment and was formative for me in both the Arab and the European traditions, this model no longer holds any attraction. I felt the shock of that when the question of the veil, so highly symbolic in Europe, came up. During my childhood in the fifties in Tunisia, that stronghold of Islam, I witnessed the unveiling of women in the name of Westernization and modernity. But I felt an ever greater shock when the re-veiling of women came back to haunt me in one of the strongholds of freedom and Occidental culture, i.e. in Paris, France. I had thought that we were engaged in an irreversible process of Westernization of the world, including the territories of Islam. Later, after spending more time in the Arab Orient (because Tunisia is very Westernized and I, myself, though belonging to a traditional family of Islamic theologians and scholars, received a Westernized education), I discovered to my great astonishment and in one fell sweep the cohabitation of American-style consumerism and of a simplified, schematic, traditionalist thought -- and that the fact of participating in consumerism does not necessarily imply a reformation of the soul.

The best example of this paradox which seems to me truly insane is incarnated in a spectacular manner by Saudi Arabia, a country profoundly Occidental in its alliances, profoundly pro-American in its urban landscape and which simultaneously extols a kind of Islam that is not even a traditional Islam but an Islam so puritanical, so schematic and simplistic that it is an Islam that founds its belief on the annihilation of Islamic civilization. All that's great in Islamic culture, all that's beautiful, came about not by the application of the Islamic letter of the law but rather through the transgression or at least the skirting of that letter, in a will to forget and ignore it. And if one wants to go back to the Islamic letter, one will have to burn the Sufis and the theosophists who dared to think freely, like Ibn Arabi, or to put them on the index and forbid them; one would have to destroy that famous poet I mentioned earlier, the great libertine of ninth century Baghdad, Abu Nuwas; one would also have to burn the Thousand and One Nights, and so on. One has to realize that the emergence of this purified Islam was always already directed against Islam itself as a civilization and culture. What is very surprising is this cohabitation in fundamentalism of archaic regression and of entry into the era of technique and technology. If I have cited the case of Saudi Arabia it is because those people are now at the core of an immense aporia: while being part of the Western alliance, while wanting to be part of the pax americana, they have fuelled the real or virtual civil war that is threatening the whole of the Muslim world. It is they who have financed, who have backed, who have restored this idea of a return to the pure letter, to the application of the letter of Islamic law, and who are trying to put the Qur'anic letter at the very foundation of the law down to the use of corporeal punishments corresponding to the scriptural imperatives.

Earlier on we mentioned the eighteenth century. I also brought up the ninth century and Ibn Hanbal, one of the protagonists of what happened in Baghdad at that time.  One must not forget that Saudi Arabia and its ideology possess great historical depth. Remember that it was this Ibn Hanbal who created one of the four schools of jurisprudence of Sunni Islam and who insists most vehemently on both a return to the purity of the letter and on a return to what is called the "Ancients of Medina", which boils down to trying to apply in and to each century the idealized model of Medina. What is forgotten (and it's weirdly comical) is that the model of Medina, that is the one that in the seventh century saw the birth of the Prophet's politics, was that of a bloody civil war. The whole history of Islam took place in the violence of the civil war and in the violence of the contestation of the legitimacy of power, similar to the work between the literalists and those who want to free themselves from the empire (of the violence) of the letter or at least try to keep the letter at arm's length.

Between that man, Ibn Hanbal, who preached the return to the letter, and what happened in the eighteenth century, we can make out an intermediary link, at the very foundation of Saudi ideology, Wahhabism. Before Wahhabism another very important link would be the theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) a Syrian whose life spans the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, a difficult and perilous moment for Islam -- because this type of radicalism emerges only when the entity to which one belongs is under a major threat. One must not forget that we are then in the context of the Mongol invasions, of the sacking of Baghdad and the end of the Caliphate, with the questions posed by the Crusades barely closed: an extremely dangerous, even apocalyptic context for Islam. This theologian, gifted with exceptional intelligence and work power, spent his life lying in wait for anything he perceived as an intrusion into Islam in terms of the purity of the letter. He set himself the task of restoring this purity by freeing Islam from the contamination caused by Greek philosophy via Sufism, which he perceived as a Christic, incarnationist element circulating inside Islam itself and thus in fact much more dangerous than Christianity as such.

Then, in the eighteenth century comes Mohamed Ibn Abdel Wahhab (1703-1792) at the origin of what will be called Wahhabism and who will try to preach a cross between the theory of Ibn Hanbal and that of Ibn Taymiyya in the very interior of the Arabian Peninsula, where he establishes ties with the tribe of the Saud, tries to take over power and fails. But at the very heart of the eighteenth century, contemporaneous with the Enlightenment, lies this puritanical movement that will be at the origins of Saudi Arabia.

I would like to introduce here a quotation by Sade, from his Cahiers personnels, his personal diaries, and you will see how this man reacts to the Wahhabite movement which was contemporaneous with him:
 

And once again wars of religions are ready to devastate Europe. Boheman, leader and agent of a new sect of "purified" Christianity, has just been arrested in Sweden, and the most disastrous plans were found among his papers. The sect to which he belonged is said to want nothing less than to render itself master of all the potentates of Europe and their subjects. [This Boheman is somewhat the equivalent of our Bin Laden]. In Arabia new sectarians are emerging and want to purify the religion of Mahomet. In China even worse troubles, still and always motivated by religion, are tearing apart the inside of that vast empire. As always it is gods that are the cause of all ills.

Thus the divine Marquis, who had understood the danger of that movement at the very moment of its inception -- and note with how much discernment Sade does not associate this problem only with Islam: he made it into a universal problem posing a threat as soon as one tries to create a revolutionary and insurrectional movement in the name of the letter, whatever the religion.

To return to the case of Saudi Arabia, the political take-over failed but the ideology had been sown. The project of the tribe of Ibn Saud to take over power, articulated on this purist ideology, was reactivated toward the end of the nineteenth century and thirty years later managed to take over power in the Peninsula, to pacify all the tribes and to create the Saudi state in the name of Wahhabite ideology.

The power of the petrodollar combined with this ideology preaching a schematic Islam, has allowed the Saudis -- I don't know if today they regret it or not -- to cause much ill to Islam itself by spreading a purist ideology that negates Islamic civilization in all its creative dimensions, in its anthropological, ethnological and popular space as well as in its aspects of a sophisticated and scholarly civilization, that dared the adventure of Being and of paradoxical thought not afraid to advance in the shadow of the forest swarming with aporias. 

On a few common places --

How did that ressentiment develop through the years after the Ottoman empire? There existed an Arab nationalism following the European model; there were attempts at secularization, for example in Kemal Attat'rk's Turkey. Does the failure of these attempts at secularization and of the idea of an Arab nationalism play an important role?

Concerning Saudi Arabia, if the combination of petrodollars and Puritanism isn't easily imaginable, isn't that because the structure of Kuwait or of Saudi society is nearly completely integrated into the circulation of the capitalist world?

We went from Europeanization to Americanization, from traditional European colonialism to the phenomenon of the modern protectorate where one shares a large part of the riches with those whom one protects. In Saudi Arabia or in the United Arab Emirates one is impressed by the material richness of cities that are the pure product of the Americanization of urban space, while the modernization that had happened until then in the tradition of the Islamic countries had been a modernization based on the European model, like that of Kemal Attat'rk in Turkey or Habib Bourguiba's in Tunisia a generation later, which was specifically animated by the profoundly French and "Third Republic" drive to found a secular state and a secular society. Even if all those experiences were closer to Hobbes than to the French Third Republic. Even in the most advanced constitutions, like the Tunisian one, Islam is given as the religion of the state; so that in fact the subject is not free to espouse the faith he wants, but has to conform to the faith of his Prince. Furthermore, something of the order of the theologico-political -- I'm using Carl Schmitt's concept here -- had haunted these experiences through a more pregnant incarnation of the State in its leader.

Whatever the state that was created, whatever the principles on which it was based -- I'm including even Attat'rk here -- the modern states and the emergence of the nation-state, have unconsciously done nothing else than modernize and reshape the tradition of the emirate as theorized by Mawardi (d. 1058), who granted legitimacy to the usurpation of power by force (imÇrat al-IstilÇ') if this avoids rebellion or secession. That is why one is still in the cult of the leader, in the incarnation of a state much more powerful from a theologico-political point of view than the tradition of a truly republican and democratic state would demand. Concerning the nearly systematic power take-over by the military, the model for this is not that of the Latin American caudillo. Its genesis has to be located in the figure of the emir. Here too we are dealing with a traditional concept of Islamic history; especially after the end of Caliphate or in its weakening phases, the military militias suddenly become conscious of their strength and power, of their ability to take over the state apparatus, and decide to do so and rule themselves. Thus did the emirates arise on the ruins of the Caliphate.

The facts of the material history of Islam help disprove something usually perceived as dogma, namely the concept repeated everywhere again and again according to which Islam is in its essence articulated on the structure of authority based on the consubstantiality of the religious and the political. Many European Islamologists share this belief with the fundamentalists; it is an idea that haunts the press and the media. But it is false! Historical fact does not verify it. Political power has very often been exercised by the military man who becomes emir. And who then had to negotiate the kind of relationship he will have with the man who represents religion, the one called the 'Alim, the scholar in theology, who represented the juridical-theological instances.

When one has an essentialist vision of things, one invokes the Prophet of Islam who was a warrior-prophet, founder of a political society; one says that in the very genesis of Islam, at its very foundations, one detects the consubstantiality which, indeed, existed and which continued with the creation of the figure of the Caliph, the successor, the delegate of the Prophet. This Caliphate is characteristically Islamic: one succeeds the Prophet in the fullness of His functions, as leader of the community. That is the ideal figure of the Caliph, as it existed for a brief period of time. Very early on, starting with the first Arab empire centered in Damascus, with the Umayyads (640-750), the Caliphate could have been tempted to resolve this problem of the legitimacy of power by a separation between the temporal function (assumed by the Meccans of Koraish) and the spiritual function (assumed by the imam, the descendant of the Prophets). I locate these premises in a poem by the official poet Farazdak (d. 728), which separates these two figures, attributing temporal prestige to the one and spiritual charisma to the other. Add to this that the very concept of the Caliphate had been emptied of its substance by the end of the tenth century, the era of that institution's decline which saw the extension of the caliphal function to three figures: besides the Caliph of Baghdad, two others declared themselves Caliphs, namely the Umayyad prince of Cordoba and the Fatimid Mahdi of Cairo. This function, after having become an empty shell invested with various utopias, will be restored by the Ottomans, but in a totally symbolic manner, precisely to signify that the religious function comes to add itself as a supplement to the figure of the sultan, whose first function is imperial.

We can find a useful indication in the monograph Ernst Kantorowicz devoted to Frederic II, Germano-Roman emperor (1212-1250) who had major conflicts with the Papacy and especially with Innocent III. Towards 1220 one of the great questions was to know who, the emperor or the pope, was the vero imperator. This conflict led to a civil war that lasted the whole of the thirteenth century, with various ups and downs. Dante himself both witnessed and was part of it: Florence was divided between the whites and the blacks, partisans of the pope and partisans of the emperor, Guelfs and Ghibellins, and Dante, backing the emperor, was expelled from Florence and had to live in exile. These elements pervade his work and he composed a major theoretical essay, De monarchia, which tries to think through that will to create two courts, separated but linked by a network of causalities -- the court of the emperor and the court of the pope.

The problem of the separation of the spiritual and the temporal is thus a problem common to Christianity and Islam. The same Frederic II, as leader of the 6th crusade (1229), negotiated with the Ayubides, the descendants of Saladin, in Jerusalem, Palestine, and he was given royal authority over Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. He then negotiated with Fakhreddine, the local governor of the Ayubid sultan Al-KÇmil who was in Cairo, and came a peaceful understanding. At that time the Caliph in Baghdad was a totally symbolic personage and was considered by Frederic II as the equivalent of the pope because he no longer had any political or military power. This Caliph protested loudly and vituperatively against the treatise but he had no means of coercion. And Frederic II is reported to have exclaimed: "It's extraordinary, their pope protests in vain!" For indeed his protest had no effect whatsoever; the emperor treats military and political questions with the military and political powers and "their pope" is completely powerless. Frederic II was dreaming of nearly the same thing for the Occident. You can see that if we take historic facts into account, it is at least necessary to complexify the so-called dogma of the consubstantiality of the political and religious.

But fundamentalism and Wahhabism restore the idea of the consubstantiality of the political and religious by recalling the mythic model of Medina, a model that factual history contradicts and dismantles. And of course when every political action is determined by religion, the effect is devastating. For politics, which is a human endeavor, by becoming a divine endeavor turns more dogmatic and intolerant. God is never wrong.
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