When I was a doctoral student in international relations, there were those among us who were enthusiastic about introducing Islamic concepts into this branch of political science, and I was the least enthusiastic of them, except within the framework of epistemology and methodology. This came back to me the moment I heard the news of the Houthis launching their missiles toward the holy sites in Mecca and Medina, and of the Islamic world's inability to persuade a group that calls itself Ansar Allah to stop this recklessness. I asked myself: were we joking when we grew enthusiastic about adding an Islamic attribute to questions of war and peace? And where does our moral frame of reference go when its test is confronting a group that raises the banner of religion?
I recall the climate of the 1980s and early 1990s, when we were preoccupied with the project of the "Islamization of knowledge" and the possibility of building the social sciences and humanities from an Islamic perspective. The ambition was to revisit the sources of knowledge, the image of the human being, and the relationship between values and scientific inquiry. But the distance between our theoretical ambition and our political impotence today deserves a reckoning that goes beyond nostalgia for university debates.
I had colleagues who earned their doctorates and worked at American universities, then left them to take part in what they regarded as the institutional embodiment of the project at the International Islamic University Malaysia. The university was founded in 1983, and its Faculty of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences in 1990. The wager was that combining religious knowledge with the modern sciences would produce a different awareness of the world.
My question today is: was that enough? Politics can be taught alongside doctrine without changing the tools for interpreting politics, just as a scholar can master both frames of reference and still be unable to determine his position when they conflict. Establishing an institution is a beginning. Its test is what it adds to our capacity to understand, and what opportunity it provides to review our ideas and conduct.
That is why I was interested in epistemology and methodology: how do we know, and with what tools do we test? Ontology asks what the political world consists of: sovereign states, or an umma that transcends borders? I did not exclude the question, but I was not convinced that sharing a creed produces a single political actor. A shared identity does not automatically produce a shared will, or an authority to carry it out.
I was dismayed by the universalizing of theories born within the Western historical experience, and then I realized that a theory's origin does not settle its validity. A Western origin does not invalidate an idea, and an Islamic origin does not grant it epistemic priority. We need to broaden knowledge with our own experiences and test its concepts, not replace one monopoly with another. A theory's value lies in its capacity to explain, not in the identity of its authors. And when we say that relations among Muslims rest on brotherhood, are we describing a reality or declaring a duty? Fighting does not invalidate the value of brotherhood, but it does invalidate using brotherhood as a sufficient explanation of behavior. Nor may a moral aspiration be turned into a theory explaining the trajectory of missiles, or the realism of politics be used to absolve those who launch them of responsibility.
I deplore this Houthi contempt for the region's security, and I deplore the Islamic world's inability to turn its weight into pressure that would stop it. Arab and Islamic condemnations have been issued, but the problem goes beyond issuing statements: how does condemnation become a political cost to the group and to whoever supports its arming or gives it cover? And what is solidarity worth if it does not protect people from repeated aggression?
The consequences of this recklessness go beyond Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It threatens to turn the sphere known as the Islamic world into an arena in which weapons violate everything held in common, the holy sites included. And when states and religious institutions are unable to impose limits, the armed group steps forward to define in practice the meaning of political Islam, reducing its causes to a missile whose target and timing it alone chooses.
Where is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and before it the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in turning concepts into commitments? Its charter provides for an International Islamic Court of Justice, but the institutional text is not enough on its own. The question is how far states are ready to accept shared constraints, bear the cost of enforcing them, and exert organized pressure on armed groups and on the states with influence over them, rather than settling for registering objections. And if the sanctity of the holy sites does not unite these states in effective action, what does? Failure squanders the credibility of institutions and encourages armed groups to believe that every red line can be tested and crossed without a price.
If our project cannot explain the divergence of Muslims' interests, or distinguish between the legitimacy of a cause and the crimes of those who raise its banner, what has it added?
What is required is a collective position that ties mediation to accountability, demands a halt to the attacks, and confronts the backers with their responsibilities. Persuading the Houthis is not a passing religious sermon but political work that uses the instruments of influence available. Leaving Saudi Arabia alone to pay the cost of protecting the holy sites exposes the emptiness of the oft-repeated talk of a shared Islamic destiny.
If I went back to the doctoral seminar room, I would tell my colleagues: we need knowledge open to criticism, ethics that constrain power, and institutions that connect the two. The test is not the number of universities and slogans, but the capacity to hold those who speak in the name of Islam to the limits of what they claim to represent. Adding a religious slogan to a missile does not make its destination any more just.
