A Better Haqq

The Science Fiction and Fantasy genres treat Muslims extremely poorly. When we show up we’re terrorists or racist stereotypes. Decadent harems, brutal terrorists, backwards weirdos, and worse. Orcs are thinly disguised as us to represent how the author is scared of brown people, aliens are associated with us to represent how the author doesn’t think we’re human, and always, always, terrorism and religious extremism are at the fore and put entirely at the feet of religion. Politics, economics, culture, and other factors that define the Muslim world are ignored. I haven’t even started on the news.

As a result, the SFF genres often don’t function for Muslim audiences. Stories that are meant to be about escape, about visions of the future, about warnings and social commentary, all-too-often end up being banal reinforcements of everyday bigotry we face on a regular basis. 

For the most part, Infinity manages to avoid that. HaqqIslam is one of the better representations of an Islamic faction in Science Fiction by a non-Muslim writing team. It clearly tries, it presents a Muslim society that is genuinely pretty great without being perfect, it provides a variety of Muslim characters with their own stuff going on and has a bunch of extant conflicts to work with. It iterates to deal with problematic content in a way that indicates that the writing team cares about getting this right.

But.

There are significant issues. You can see some of them here, where a cursory glance at Haqq lore by Muslims results in people immediately pointing out problems. While the faction as a whole is significantly better than those snippets the mistakes it makes are important to a Muslim audience.

The nature of those issues trends less clearly problematic than those of many of Infinity’s competitors. You don’t have Cthulhutech’s overt bigotry, nor Shadowrun’s decision to mark all of Africa under the control of cannibal ghouls. Instead, you have elements that are clearly issues for Muslims, and those knowledgeable about the history of those elements outside of Infinity, but seem like non-issues to non-Muslims who haven’t studied the Middle East or Orientalism. 

The Big One

Let’s just jump right in with the biggest problem that, coincidentally, is also Haqq’s founding narrative.

The basic story is this: A reformer named Khadivar founds the HaqqIslam movement, a religious reform drawing on Mu’tazilite teachings as well as Sufi Mysticism, that discards the Hadith, Sunnah, and ‘Ijma in order to stop authoritarianism. He gets murdered but the movement catches on, colonizes a planet, and forms HaqqIslam.

I have politely highlighted the problems in red. Each is rooted in Orientalist myths that have sunken their claws into the public consciousness and have proliferated through the modern-day. They’re harmful things but well-ingrained, so I’m going to try and go into detail to talk about each of them, what’s wrong with them, and how they cause harm.

For Muslims, these ideas bring to mind attacks on who we are and who we are allowed to be that are pervasive in our lives. This results in distrust and hostility, some of which you can see in that Reddit post. For non-Muslims, this reinforces harmful and false beliefs about Muslims which, inevitably, are going to end up repeated elsewhere.

A Primer on Orientalism

Orientalism is a long and storied topic, and going into it in detail, even just as it relates to Science Fiction, is more than I can really do here. Instead, I’m going to provide a primer.

Orientalism has its roots in the colonial study of everywhere east of Europe as a single, agglomerated mass known as ‘The Orient’. It had its roots in two principles: First, everywhere outside of Europe was basically alike in important ways, they were mystic, backwards, fundamentally irrational and psychologically weak. Second, only Occidental (Western, used to mean European) thinkers could comment on and solve the issues plaguing the Orient, the people they were talking about were to be ignored at best, actively dismissed and excluded at worst. This was notably criticized in Edward Said’s Orientalism and has been a topic of significant debate since. While the nature and specific ideas espoused by Orientalism have changed over time, they’ve never gone away and they’ve never stopped hurting people.

So let’s start with the Reformation.

Protestantism, Islam, and the Middle East

There’s a common idea in political discourse that what Islam really needs is to be reformed and revitalized, with all the old stuff thrown out. Islam isn’t really compatible with whatever the speaker has arbitrarily decided it isn’t compatible with, so someone’s got to step up and change things. Become a Martin Luther for the Islamic Faith and introduce Islamic Protestantism.

If you’re an Orientalist, or simply draw your information from sources tainted by Orientalist thought, it’s a natural tact to take. Your sources and the worldview of those sources tell you that the problems with the Middle East have to be due to its inherent nature, and those same sources assume that the Middle East, as an Oriental region, must be mystical and irrational in contrast with the West’s rationality and empiricism. You aren’t told of the locals’ views on the matter, or the analysis of the region and its problems by the people who live there, so you are forced to make your own conclusions, and with your information, that conclusion seems obvious. Islam has to become more like Christianity for the Middle East to function. It needs to become more rational, empirical, and capable of change and, as you hold this to be true, it cannot already have those traits.

I don’t know when the transformation of this into a specific, Protestantism-tinged call for a Luther style Reform happened, but it’s become more prominent over time. Noted figures like Sam Harris and Hirsi Ali have all called for it, and variations of it are thrown out by thinkers across the West desperate for an easy solution to the Middle East’s problems.

The problem is that the entire concept is poison. It’s a series of misconceptions applied to ill-understood situations that have the net result of justifying treating Muslims like crap. People smarter than me have talked about why. 

The fundamental issues are twofold: First, the people advocating it fundamentally misunderstand the Reformation, and Second, the people advocating it fundamentally misunderstand the problems facing the Middle East.

The simplest of the two is that the argument misunderstands the reformation. There’s an easy narrative that is brought into here, the reformation brought about social reform, created a more peaceable, modern religion, and is, therefore, something necessary for religions to go through to become ‘modern’. 

This is inaccurate. 

The reformation was a movement based around elements of Catholicism without real Islamic analogs. It was a movement against Papal authority and monopoly on Christian practice in Europe, against corruption in the Church, and against a rigid priestly hierarchy that claimed divine backing for its actions. It didn’t actually have much to do with modernizing the faith, the resulting political instability is the opposite of desirable in the current middle east, and literally none of those institutions exist in Islam. The closest you get is that the Bible became more accessible during the Reformation but that isolation of religious scripture from the masses did not exist in the same manner 

There is no central church, no class of cloistered monks, no divinely appointed central authority. Access to the Qur’an maps to literacy rates and Arabic fluency rather than being part of specialized organizations studying a dead language. Influencing theology is better compared to Academia than the Papal seat.

But while historical accuracy reveals a background of ignorance it does not explain why the concept is misguided and damaging. The historical Reformation is, at best, tangentially involved because people actually want their idea of the Reformation to be enacted rather than the actual event. So we’re going to need to discuss the conflation of political problems with religious ones.

This is a rather more complex topic as there are obvious political problems that need to be addressed. The various dictatorships in the Arab World, from Muhammad Bonesaw to Sisi and Assad, are monstrous, instability is rife, terrorist groups keep popping up, etc. The problem is in Orientalism’s proposed solutions and their fundamental misunderstanding of the issues at play.

The Islamic Reformation idea, repeated by Infinity, holds that a necessary part of solving these problems is a fundamental change in the religion. That some nebulous aspect must be fueling the instability and horrors in the area and must be changed to make anything good happen. A necessary part of this argument is that any other reform is insufficient or useless because if it wasn’t then the Reformation would be unnecessary. As a result, it’s used to condemn any current movement as insufficient, to justify distrust and profiling of Muslim populaces in the West, and to justify collateral damage and torture as necessary to deal with the monstrous threat being faced. For examples look at Sam Harris’ support of torture, collateral damage, and nuclear first strikes against Muslims, or condemnation of Morsi after the Arab Spring.

The fundamental issue is that most of the problems plaguing the region are political, rather than religious, in nature. Dictators crippling their countries and oppressing their people to cling onto power. Coups resulting in counter-coups and radicalization. The lingering after-effects of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. The botched American reconstruction in Iraq. The power of the Saudi dynasty. The still-burning scars of the post-WW1 partition of the Middle East. While religious strife exists it has been less severe and basically civil in the past with no particular change in the involved religions. This is an enormous topic so I’m going to give an overview and hope that you trust me on the matter.

Iran is where it is due to a British-and-American sponsored coup, followed by an uprising against a Monarch with a thing for acid torture. Afghanistan went from democracy to Taliban courtesy of the Soviet Union. Iraq had rebuilding comprehensively screwed by a botched American reconstruction. 

In Egypt, after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political party, were brought into power. They were bad, and instability was rife, but they were democratically elected and showed the possibility of progress through further elections. Then the secular Sisi kicked over the democratically elected government and re-instituted authoritarian dictatorship. Killings, political repression, and more resumed, not due to any Islamist motivation, but due to pure politics. Rivals were arrested or intimidated out of running for office. The economy went downhill. Instability continued to be rife. And despite this, many in the west celebrated Sisi taking over under the mistaken assumption that a secular dictator would be better than a religious president.

On the other end, in Tunisia, the Arab Spring brought the Islamist party Ennahda into power. They participated in democratic power, handed over power peacefully at the next election, and are in general not particularly worse than the American Republicans.

There are political solutions to these problems that don’t require a grand reformation and the desire for that reformation hides good work being done as you read. Feminist issues are a problem that needs to be addressed, and there are Muslim feminist organizations trying to do so. LGBT+ rights need to be improved and protected across the Muslim world and there are Muslim groups trying to do so. Democracy and human rights need to be promoted and protected and there are Muslims fighting and dying for that without a grand, Protestant reformation. The history of the Muslim world, from Africa, through the Middle East and India, and into South East Asia and China, is far more vibrant and varied than this annoyingly pernicious myth would have you believe.

Obviating all of that in favor of a Grand Secular Reformation is not merely ignorant, it is actively counterproductive. It excuses atrocities by secular governments in the Middle East, elides the causes of problems in the region, and drives support for ‘solutions’ that make these problems worse. It turns people against religious figures making political reforms and blinds them to the ills of people like Sisi until it is too late. It becomes used to justify and outline policies that openly discriminate against Muslims. And then people die.

And when you repeat that myth you reinforce it in the minds of your audience. You spread a thing with toxic roots and toxic effects, even if you have the best of intentions. 

Mu’tazila and the Hadith

Another Orientalist standby is great broadsides at the Hadith, Islamic history, and Islamic theology. Often, but not always, this involves the lionization of the Mu’tazila and the condemnation of Al Ghazali and the Sira. At the most egregious, you get Patricia Crone trying to claim that Muhammad never existed and that Mecca actually refers to a different city farther north based entirely on a stubborn refusal to consult any Middle Eastern source on the matter.

The Hadith issue is a clusterfuck because any discussion of Hadith with people unfamiliar with the field is an enormous disaster. There are actual discussions to be had about the validity and motivations behind individual Hadith, and an entire science has arisen over the years about verifying chains of narration, determining unreliable narrators, and figure out what’s going on. There are chains of narration and investigations into famous transmitters and common jokes about uncles insisting on some Hadith where the Sahabah eat Biryani on the Arabian Peninsula. The issue in the Orientalist response, and in Infinity’s reflex of purging the entire thing, is that it sees a forest with maps in untranslated Arabic academic debates and decides that the correct solution is to set the forest on fire.

People live in that forest, man.

More specifically, an enormous amount of the day to day process of being Muslim is based on Hadith. Look at this guide on how to pray, note what’s in the Qur’an, and then note that everything else is in the Hadith and Sunnah. When you say ‘All Hadith and Sunnah needs to be thrown out, it supports dictatorship’ you are declaring a lot of incredibly basic functions of faith not merely null and void, but the cause of current issues in the Middle East. 

While there is a huge amount of academic debate, even among Islamic scholars, as to the validity of various hadith that debate is about specifics. Even the Mu’tazila, generally held as rejecting Hadith and Sunnah, in actuality used them as a secondary source. Specifics on prayer and practice were still drawn from it. The entire field is not just cast away as if it were optional.

So just cutting it entirely in Infinity is a mistake that alienates Muslims who stumble across that piece of the lore.

The Mu’tazila issue is easier to explain. A surface level reading of who the Mu’tazila were basically just says ‘hey there were these muslim rationalists who faded after something called the Mihna, which surely wasn’t particularly important’. It’s a neat reading that lends to ‘aha, here is the fix for Islam’, gives you a clear good guy, and is also wrong in important ways.

The Mu’tazila’s rationalism wasn’t about science and empirical study. It was about morality and theology. They claimed, in essence, that rational thought took ultimate priority in determining what was moral and what was not, and that their thought was the only one that was correct. This included some stuff about theological and moral states of Sin and how to determine what that sin is but notably did not include anything about science or oppression. And you can see that because, in the early 9th century, the Mu’tazila get the ear of a Caliph.

And once they do, they begin the Mihna. The Mu’tazila spent over a decade oppressing, torturing, and murdering their intellectual rivals with the help of the throne. The general populace soured on them and they faded away due to the atrocities committed in their name.

But it wasn’t actually the death of rationalism or scientific thought in Islam. The Mu’tazila, contrary to popular misconception, never had a stranglehold on such things. They were never the sole driver of scientific thought and development in the Muslim world and it very much did not die with them. The likes of Ibn Sina (Haqq’s own Avicenna! Except, you know, an academic instead of a mercenary transwoman combat surgeon) Ibn Rushd, Al Khawarizmi, and Ibn Khaldun were all very much not Mu’tazila.  

This is complicated by the recent adoption of the Mu’tazila label both by well-meaning Muslims, by ex-Muslims, and by Orientalists. This has its roots in a largely discredited historical take claiming that Al Ghazali had singlehandedly ended rational thought in the entire Muslim world by pointing out that Greek philosophers could be stupid sometimes. But the end result is more complicated than that.

By and large the people who are attempting to revive Mu’tazila thought don’t have much interest in the actual Mu’tazila, as I described them above, or in the arguments that they made. They want a better Islamic society, and better Islamic governments. They want more moral decisionmaking. They want more rights for women and minorities. They want many great things and have picked a kind of unfortunate name to hitch those too. A lot of the people who react against these neo-Mu’tazila are actually just total assholes who’d do fine in Roy Moore’s next senate run.

Also some of the Mu’tazila fans are Islamophobes with an axe to grind who want a convenient baton to hit Muslims over the head with. I even had one inexplicably take a shit on my profile page, once.

The end result is complex. I don’t think including the Mu’tazila, or at least many of the new Mu’tazila, is a bad thing. If they don’t fuck it up they could well be a solid political reform movement or develop into a neat school of thought. But it’s important to be careful in prescribing the Mu’tazila as a cure-all, or over-emphasizing them as part of the solution. Their historical baggage is way worse than you think it is, and while Haqq’s approach to Revanchism can mitigate that it is something to be careful around.

.Speaking of which.

Revanchism and Haqq

HaqqIslam’s approach to Islamofuturism trends towards Revanchism. It takes old concepts, movements, and social positions, puts a Haqq-styled twist on them, and then reuses them. Normally this works pretty well, the Bashi Bazouk, Jannissaries, Hassassins, and even the humble Ghulams all succeed at turning older concepts into functional new ones while shedding cultural baggage. Two of Haqq’s sectorials, Qapu Khalqi and the Hassassin Bahram, follow the model. Qapu Khalqi is a scifi take on the Ottoman navy and army, while the Hassassin Bahram does the same for, well, the Hashashin. It’s a solid approach whose issues are more aesthetic than any particular handling of the material. 

But it doesn’t always work, and it’s not always a good idea. So let’s talk about the Khawarij and the Odalisques.

For the record I think the Khawarij, against all odds, work. It was a terrible idea to name your heroic supersoldiers after the schismatic terrorists who murdered the last Rashidun Caliph. It was a terrible idea to name your educated upholders of justice after the dudes whose defining move, to this day, is to declare anyone who disagrees with them no-longer Muslim and then try to kill them and who have a dogmatic opposition to arbitration. It was a terrible idea to pick a name with ties to ISIS and basically no positive associations in cultural memory.

But it works despite this. CB dropped most of the associations of the name, made Religious Captain America a unit type, and pulled it off. They are the most iconic of Haqq’s genetically modified supersoldiers, universally heroic, well educated, and generally rad. A living symbol of making something great from an unfortunate beginning. 

However their name has, and will continue to, fundamentally taint the first reactions of Muslims getting into the faction. It’s like being that guy who bet that Germany was gonna beat Brazil 7:1, sure, you made a buttload off of it but you should not try to do that again and you probably shouldn’t be held up as an example to other gamblers.

For example, this process did not work for the Odalisques. 

At the core of the issue is that while other units resurrect and repurpose concepts from the Islamic world, the Odalisque resurrects an Orientalist myth. The actual Odalisques were household cleaning staff and servants in unisex clothing, generally tasked with serving the women of a household. The conception of them as alluring sexpots is a fabrication by horny Orientalists. 

Infinity plays directly into that fabrication by having the Odalisques be all-female sexpot bodyguards. The writers seem to have realized this, the RPG introduced male Odalisques and moved it away from the stereotype to the degree that it could, but the wargame hasn’t yet come up. And in doing so the normal ‘horny weab’ tendencies of Corvus Belli play into more sinister cultural background regarding Imperialism and lecherous stereotypes about Muslim men.

The Odalisque is the only glaring example of this, though the Druze artwork in Uprising and emphasis on the concubinage of the Nazarova Twins in their unit fluff edges in that direction. Stuff that would be fine edges into being distinctly not because the subject matter chosen evokes old ills. It’s minor but glaring where it pops up.

The Hunzakut, the Haqq HVT, or the new Ghulam Doctor aren’t issues from this perspective. While I generally agree with Impetuous Order on this front and am glad that the line has been improving, it’s also not what this essay is about and I already have so many side essays this thing has inspired. Generally, everyone’s better off if the models and art pieces picked for fanservice aren’t also the ones with terrible, terrible histories.

Race and Islam

Anywhere you are in the West, Islam is viewed in racial terms. In England, it’s about Indian and Pakistani immigrants. In France, Black african immigrants. In the US, it’s a goddamned disaster zone it’s about a mix of immigrants, Black people, and a general terror at the concept of a swarthy dude who may have a turban on. 

Infinity handles this pretty well. HaqqIslam has clear Turkish, Persian, Arab, and Central Asian roots. The game acknowledges a diversity to Islam that many actual people are afraid to, and largely dodges the arab-centrism that plagues many sources. So, for once, we get to dodge heavy topics and talk about minor issues that bother no-one but me.

Namely last names and PanOceania. Islam’s status as a global religion means two things: First, people from across the world grab Muslim given names when they convert. Second, that the founding population of PanO was either majority Muslim or majority Hindu and you wouldn’t begin to know that from PanO dossiers and character names. It’s a minor thing, but giving more HaqqIslam bit characters last names from across the world, and more PanOceanian bit characters Indonesian, Malay and Indian names, would go a long way to reinforcing the diversity already in the factions. 

Making Changes

N4 is coming out next year and it’s a prime opportunity to adjust the fluff. CB has done this before, I’ve heard tales of the old Ghazi and changes made in Human Sphere, and have seen the slow updating of Janissary fluff to ditch poor historical associations. By and large the changes that need to be made are pretty small. Be more mindful of the art you’re using, make sure the horny-on-main models aren’t also the revanchist models with orientalist associations, steer away from harmful bullshit.

I get that people are opposed to bringing politics into their wargames but the things I’m pointing out are already political. They’re just political in how they perpetuate harmful stereotypes, lies, and myths rather than political in how they avoid those things. 

Thankfully the solution set here is pretty simple.

A) Make Khadivar a political reformer, an MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela. Remove references to discarding the Hadith, Sunnah, and ‘Ijma. 

This deals with the most egregious problem and most harmful myths that HaqqIslam currently reinforces. It makes the lore more consistent, stops reinforcing Some Bullshit for people who don’t have degrees in middle eastern studies, and is friendlier to Muslim players. It’s also, like, two paragraphs in a fluff blurb to fix and a Datasphere edit.

The Hadith/Sunnah/Ijma part is by far the most important. The continued existence of various sects in HaqqIslam is enough to cover your butt if the writers are really keen on keeping the Reformation thing or religious motivation for the colonization of Bourak..

B) Move the Odalisques to be in line with the RPG Odalisques, maybe release a new model.

This isn’t going to deal with the unfortunate associations of the title but in a wargame that’s not something you can reverse in a reasonable manner.

C) Be Really Careful about historical associations of resurrected concepts.

This one’s hard.

…yeah, that’s it. Sorry. History is a tangled, brutal mess and there’s always going to be risk in Revanchistic writing and drawing from it. The most you can do is be careful and fix mistakes when they’re pointed out. CB’s already proved willing to do this so, hey, halfway there.

D) Name variety?

This isn’t actually a necessity I just think it would be neat. Marketing more than anything. 

I Still Love Haqq

I want to end this on a positive note because the nature of this conversation means that I’m largely talking about things I have issues with.

I got into Infinity because Haqq was done Pretty Well and is the best shot anyone in wargaming has given the Muslim community. I own a solid Haqq collection and am pretty much buying everything for Ramah as it comes out. I’ll probably even buy the Zhayedan SWC box eventually because of how much I like that shotgun, and I will probably die before I get around to fielding a Zhayedan HMG or Missile Launcher.

Ramah Task Force is probably my favorite. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted out of a Muslim faction in a Science Fiction and Fantasy setting. They’re heroic, unique, and move beyond the revanchist angle. They’re the shining, ethically sourced supersoldiers of the future and their mechanics back it up. Also, you know, 40% crit rate core link and some incredibly cool models.

I’m not trying to cancel Corvus Belli, or slander the writers, or say that Haqq players are bad people. I play the game, I love the faction, I just want it to be better because I know it can be.

(And I wouldn’t turn down an Indonesian Haqq/PanO NA2. Just, putting that out there)

If I haven’t completely alienated you, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon! It’s the only way for me to make a profit on the hours of work that went into this, and my two Patreon donors were the only reason I persevered when I realized how big this essay was going to be.

On a lighter note, this is probably going to be the heaviest content on the site for a while, expect diversions into tools for new Infinity players, more media reviews, or RPG updates as I prepare for BigBadCon.