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by Martin Kramer |
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A short history of Islamism's pursuit of power. |
Fundamentalist Islam:
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In many respects, Afghani was the prototype of the modern fundamentalist.
He had been deeply influenced by Western rationalism and the ideological mode
of Western thought. Afghani welded a traditional religious hostility toward
unbelievers to a modern critique of Western imperialism and an appeal for the
unity of Islam, and while he inveighed against the West, he urged the
adoption of those Western sciences and institutions that might strengthen
Islam. Afghani spread his unsettling message in constant travels that took
him to Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul. He visited Paris, London, and St.
Petersburg as well, where he published and lobbied on behalf of revolutionary
change. A contemporary English admirer described Afghani as the leader of Islam’s
“Liberal religious reform movement.”[3] But Afghani—not an Afghan at all, but
a Persian who concealed his true identity even from English admirers—was
never what he appeared to be. While he called for the removal of some
authoritarian Muslim rulers, he ingratiated himself with others. While he had
great persuasive power, he did not shrink from conspiracy and violence. A
disciple once found him pacing back and forth, shouting: “There is no
deliverance except in killing, there is no safety except in killing.”[4]
These were not idle words. On one occasion, Afghani proposed to a follower that
the ruler of Egypt be assassinated, and he did inspire a supple disciple to
assassinate a ruling shah of Iran in 1896. Afghani was tempted by power, and
believed that “power is never manifested and concrete unless it weakens and
subjugates others.” Quoting this and other evidence, one Arab critic has
argued that there is a striking correspondence between Afghani’s thought and
European fascism.[5] Was Afghani a liberal or a proto-fascist? A reformist or a revolutionary?
Was he the forerunner of those fundamentalists who plead their case in
political ways? Or those who open fire on the motorcades of government
ministers? Afghani was athese things, and one can only wonder how today’s
taxonomists (and with them, the Prince of Wales) would have classified him.
Some fundamentalists still pose this same intractable dilemma of
classification, although most of them have far weaker “liberal” and
“reformist” credentials than had Afghani. Banna Between Afghani and the emergence of full-blown fundamentalism, liberal and
secular nationalism would enjoy a long run in the lands of Islam. Europe had
irradiated these lands with the idea that language, not religion, defined
nations. In the generation that followed Afghani, Muslims with an eye toward
Europe preferred to be called Arabs, Turks, and Persians. “If you looked in
the right places,” wrote the British historian Arnold Toynbee in 1929, “you
could doubtless find some old fashioned Islamic Fundamentalists still
lingering on. You would also find that their influence was negligible.”[6]
Yet that same year, an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna (1906-49)
founded a movement he called the Society of the Muslim Brethren. It would
grow into the first modern fundamentalist movement in Islam. |
The Muslim Brethren emerged against the background of growing resentment against
foreign domination. The Brethren had a double identity. On one level, they
operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political
awakening. Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in
good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a “secret
apparatus” that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use. Some of its
guns were deployed against the Zionists in Palestine in 1948, but the Muslim
Brethren also resorted to violence in Egypt. They began to enforce their own
moral teachings by intimidation, and they initiated attacks against Egypt’s
Jews. They assassinated judges and struck down a prime minister in 1949.
Banna himself was assassinated two months later, probably in revenge. The
Muslim Brethren then hovered on the fringes of legality, until Gamal Abdel
Nasser, who had survived one of their assassination attempts in 1954, put
them down ruthlessly. Yet the Muslim Brethren continued to plan underground
and in prison, and they flourished in other Arab countries to which they were
dispersed. Safavi |
At the same time, a smaller and more secretive movement, known as the
Devotees of Islam, appeared in Iran, under the leadership of a charismatic
theology student, Navvab Safavi (1923-56). Like the Muslim Brethren, the
Devotees emerged at a time of growing nationalist mobilization against
foreign domination. The group was soon implicated in the assassinations of a
prime minister and leading secular intellectuals. The Devotees, who never
became a mass party, overplayed their hand and were eventually suppressed.
Navvab himself was executed, after inspiring a failed assassination attempt
against another prime minister. But the seed was planted. One of those who
protested Navvab’s execution was an obscure, middle-aged cleric named
Ruhollah Khomeini, who would continue the work of forging Islam and
resentment into an ideology of power. In the checkered history of Afghani, the Muslim Brethren, and the Devotees
of Islam, clear patterns emerge. They saw foreign domination as a symptom of
Muslim weakness, and its elimination as the key to Muslim power. Such
domination could be attacked directly by jihad against foreigners, or
indirectly by promoting an Islamic awakening. Those who gave priority to
direct confrontation sometimes favored alliances with other nationalists who
opposed foreign rule. In Afghani’s anti-imperialist campaign, especially
against the British in Egypt, he took all manner of nationalists as allies,
including non-Muslims who became some of his most ardent disciples. The
Muslim Brethren, who joined the attacks against the British presence in the
Suez Canal zone, had many ties to the Egyptian Free Officers who overthrew
the monarchy in 1952, but their vision of an Islamic state eventually made
them bitter enemies of the new regime. The Devotees of Islam, while
thoroughly antiforeign, never collaborated with secular nationalists, whom
they deeply distrusted. Whatever their strategies, however, they all worked
to redress the gross imbalance of power between Islam and the West. They also sought to replace weak rulers and states with strong rulers and
states. Such a state would have to be based on Islam, and while its precise
form remained uncertain, the early fundamentalists knew it should not be a
constitutional government or multiparty democracy. Preoccupied with the
defense of Islam and the acquisition of power, they preferred the strong rule
of a just and virtuous Muslim. Afghani, the “Liberal,” did not advocate
constitutional government. His biographer, reviewing the famous Arabic newspaper
published by Afghani in Paris, has noted that “there is no word in the
paper’s theoretical articles favoring political democracy or
parliamentarianism.” Afghani simply envisioned “the overthrow of individual
rulers who were lax or subservient to foreigners, and their replacement by
strong and patriotic men.”[7] The Muslim Brethren in Egypt also rejected
party politics. Banna demanded the abolition of all political parties in
Egypt and the creation of a single Islamic party. Within this party there
could be elections, but electoral campaigning would be limited, voting would
be compulsory, and elections would be done by list, which Banna said would
“liberate the representative from the pressure of those who elected him.”
Banna pointed to Stalin’s Soviet Union as a model of a successful one-party
system.[8] Navvab also allowed elections, but all representatives had to be
“devout Muslims,” who would be kept “under the supervision of an assembly of
pious religious leaders in order to keep [their] activities in line with the
Islamic provisions.”[9] This preference for a strong, authoritarian Islamic
state, often rationalized by the claim that Islam and democracy are
incompatible, would become a trademark of fundamentalist thought and
practice. The pursuit of this strong utopian state often overflowed into violence
against weak existing states. These “reformers” were quick to disclaim any
link to the violence of their followers, denying that their adepts could read
their teachings as instructions or justifications for killing. Afghani set
the tone, following the assassination of Iran’s shah by his disciple. “Surely
it was a good deed to kill this bloodthirsty tyrant,” he opined. “As far as I
am personally concerned, however, I have no part in this deed.”[10] Banna,
commenting on the assassinations and bombings done by the Muslim Brethren,
claimed that “the only ones responsible for these acts are those who commit
them.”[11] Navvab, who failed in his one attempt at assassination, sent young
disciples in his stead. For years he enjoyed the protection of leading
religious figures while actually putting weapons in the hands of
assassins.[12] (Only when abroad did he actually boast. “I killed Razmara,”
he announced on a visit to Egypt in 1954, referring to the prime minister
assassinated by a disciple three years earlier.)[13] But despite the denials,
violence became the inescapable shadow of fundamentalist Islam from the
outset—and the attempt to separate figure from shadow, a problematic
enterprise at best. The fundamentalist forerunners also determined that fundamentalist Islam
would have a pan-Islamic bent. The peripatetic Afghani took advantage of
steamship and train, crossing political borders and sectarian divides to
spread his message of Islamic solidarity. His Paris newspaper circulated far
and wide in Islam, through the modern post. Egypt’s Muslim Brethren also
looked beyond the horizon. In 1948, they sent their own volunteers to fight
the Jews in Palestine. Over the next decade, branches of the Muslim Brethren
appeared across the Middle East and North Africa, linked by publications and
conferences. Egyptian Brethren fleeing arrest set up more branches in Europe,
where they mastered the technique of the bank transfer. The fundamentalist foreruneven laid bridges over the historic moat of
Sunni prejudice that surrounded Shi`i Iran. Iran’s Devotees of Islam mounted
massive demonstrations for Palestine, and recruited 5,000 volunteers to fight
Israel. They were not allowed to leave for the front, but Navvab himself flew
to Egypt and Jordan in 1953, to solidify his ties with the Muslim Brethren.
Visiting the Jordanian-Israeli armistice line, he had to be physically
restrained from throwing himself upon the Zionist enemy.[14] Navvab presaged
those Iranian volunteers who arrived in Lebanon thirty years later to wage
Islamic jihad against Israel. From the outset, then, fundamentalists scorned the arbitrary boundaries of
states, and demonstrated their resolve to think and act across the frontiers
that divide Islam. The jet, the cassette, the fax, and the computer network
would later help fundamentalists create a global village of ideas and
action—not a hierarchical “Islamintern” but a flat “Islaminform”—countering
the effects of geographic distance and sectarian loyalty. Not only has the
supposed line between “revivalist” and “extremist” been difficult to draw.
National and sectarian lines have been erased or smudged, and fundamentalists
draw increasingly on a common reservoir for ideas, strategies, and support. A resolute anti-Westernism, a vision of an authoritarian Islamic state, a
propensity to violence, and a pan-Islamic urge: these were the biases of the
forerunners of fundamentalist Islam. No subsequent fundamentalist movement
could quite shake them. Indeed, several thinkers subsequently turned these
biases into a full-fledged ideology. An
Ideology of Revolution In the middle of this century of ideologies, the fundamentalists set out
to transform Islam into the most complete and seamless ideology of them all.
All-encompassing Islamic law, based upon the Qur’an and the traditions of the
Prophet Muhammad, constituted their ideological manifesto and program. Many
of the provisions of that law had been remote ideals, enforced unevenly over
the centuries by weak states. Now fundamentalists, recognizing the enhanced
coercive power of the modern state, began to imagine that this law could be
implemented in its entirety, and that this total order would confer hitherto
unimaginable strength on the Islamic state. Fundamentalist ideology therefore
insisted not only on power, but on absolute power—an insistence, admits one
advocate of an Islamic state, that “has tended to make modern Islamists into
proto-fascists, obsessed with dragging their compatriots kicking and
screaming into paradise.”[15] Mawdudi |
Much of the ideological spadework was done by Mawlana Abu’l-A`la Mawdudi (1903-79),
the founder of the fundamentalist Jama`at-i Islami in India and Pakistan. His
many writings, translated into every major language spoken by Muslims,
provide a panoramic view of the ideal fundamentalist state. In this state,
sovereignty would belong to God alone, and would be exercised on his behalf
by a just ruler, himself guided by a reading of God’s law in its entirety. As
an ideological state, it would be administered for God solely by Muslims who
adhered to its ideology, and “whose whole life is devoted to the observance
and enforcement” of Islamic law. Non-Muslims, who could not share its
ideology, and women, who by nature could not devote their entire lives to it,
would have no place in high politics. Everything would come under the purview
of this Islamic state. “In such a state,” announced Mawdudi, “no one can
regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this
aspect the Islamic state bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and
Communist states,” although Mawdudi rejected individual dictatorship, instead
advocating a variety of one-party rule. Mawdudi was certain about what the
Islamic state would not resemble: it would be “the very antithesis of secular
Western democracy.”[16] Mawdudi himself never had a sufficient following to
make a concerted bid for power in Pakistan, but his writings exerted a wide
influence over fundamentalists better positioned to act upon his vision. Qutb Mawdudi’s ideas were carried to their ultimate conclusion by an Egyptian
Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). Qutb borrowed heavily from Mawdudi’s
vision of an Islamic state, but he broke new ground in his analysis of how to
realize it. Mawdudi had written about the need for a “revolution” to create
an Islamic state, but he believed this revolution had to be prepared by a
long campaign of persuasion. Qutb, confined to one of Abdel Nasser’s prison
camps when he wrote his major work, was far more impatient. Islam was under
assault, and redemption could not wait for a bloodless revolution. Qutb urged
that a believing vanguard organize itself, retreat from impious society,
denounce lax Muslims as unbelievers, and battle to overturn the political
order. As Qutb put it, “those who have usurped the power of God on earth and
made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word
alone.”[17] Qutb thus transformed what had been a tendency toward violence
into an explicit logic of revolution. He hardly had the chance to act on his
theory, for he spent almost a decade in prison before his final arrest and
execution. But later fundamentalists would return to his writings, to justify
their own resort to force. |
Qutb also placed the anti-imperialism of the early fundamentalists on an
ideological footing. He attributed his own Islamic awakening to a period of
more than two years spent in America from 1948. America repelled him on every
level. It was, he claimed, a disastrous combination of avid materialism and
egoistic individualism that commercialized women and practiced a ferocious
racism. Qutb went still further, claiming that there existed something called
“Crusaderism”—a systematic plan to eradicate Islam linking medieval
Christianity, modern imperialism, and Western consumer culture. “Western
blood carries the spirit of the Crusades within itself,” wrote Qutb. “It
fills the subconscious of the West.”[18] Qutb’s work would later prove crucial
to the fundamentalist rationale that formal independence from the West had to
be accompanied by a purging of Islam’s own bloodstream of all Western
cultural influence. Khomeini It was Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89) who finally wrote the ideological formula
for the first successful fundamentalist revolution in Islam. Khomeini added
nothing to fundamentalist ideology by his insistence on the need for an
Islamic state, created if necessary by an Islamic revolution, but he made a
breakthrough with his claim that only the persons most learned in Islamic law
could rule: “Since Islamic government is a government of law, knowledge of
the law is necessary for the ruler, as has been laid down in tradition.” The
ruler “must surpass all others in knowledge,” and be “more learned than
everyone else.”[19] Since no existing state had such a ruler, Khomeini’s
doctrine constituted an appeal for region-wide revolution, to overturn every
extant form of authority and replace it with rule by Islamic jurists. In
Iran, where such jurists had maintained their independence from the state all
along, this doctrine transformed them into a revolutionary class, bent on the
seizure and exercise of power. Much to the astonishment of the
world—fundamentalists included—the formula worked, carrying Khomeini and his
followers to power on a tidal wave of revolution in 1979. |
Khomeini also revalidated the anti-Western and anti-American credentials
of fundamentalism. Qutb’s idea of “Crusaderism” had worked particularly well
in Egypt and the Levant, where the legacy of the Crusades could be
resurrected from the depths of collective Muslim memory, but it did not speak
to the people of Iran, a land untouched by the Crusades. Khomeini thus drew a
striking metaphor to make the same point: America, historical heir to
unbelief, was the “Great Satan.” This posited an absolute conflict between
Islam and the West, not just in history but in eschatology.[20] It was
dramatized by the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the 444-day
detentionof its staff. In fundamentalist ideology, political conflict with
the West was transformed into a timeless cultural and religious conflict with
the “enemies of Islam,” led by America and represented on the ground by its
proxy, Israel. Not all of Khomeini’s ideas had a full impact on wider Islam. His legitimation
of rule by Islamic jurists proved difficult for other fundamentalist
movements to assimilate, because it assumed such jurists were inclined to
take an oppositional stand. In Sunni lands, Islamic jurists usually served
the state, and Sunni movements therefore tended to coalesce under lay
leaders. Likewise, while Khomeini’s anti-Americanism struck a deep chord, the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 diffused its impact. Sunni movements
mobilized to wage an international Islamic jihad against the Soviets,
and were even ready to cooperate temporarily with America to do so. Khomeini’s delegitimation of rule by nominal Muslims kings and presidents,
though, found a powerful echo, and he demonstrated how a revolution might
succeed in practice. Khomeini also showed how cultural alienation could be
translated into a fervid antiforeign sentiment, an essential cement for a
broad revolutionary coalition. Later it would be assumed that only
“extremists” beyond Iran were thrilled by Iran’s revolution. In fact, the
enthusiasm among fundamentalists was almost unanimous. As a close reading of
the press of the Egyptian Muslim Brethren has demonstrated, even this
supposedly sober movement approached the Iranian revolution with “unqualified
enthusiasm and unconditional euphoria,” coupled with an “uncritical
acceptance of both its means and goals.”[21] Sunni doubts would arise about
implementation of the Islamic state in Iran, but for the next decade, much of
the effort of fundamentalists would be invested in attempts to replicate
Khomeini’s success and bring about a second Islamic revolution. The attempts to make a second revolution demonstrated that fundamentalists
of all kinds would employ revolutionary violence if they thought it would
bring them to power. Frustrated by the drudgery of winning mass support, full
of the heady ideas of Mawdudi and Qutb, and inspired by Khomeini’s success,
they lunged forward. From the wild-eyed to the wily, Sunni fundamentalists of
all stripes began to conspire. A messianic sect seized the Great Mosque in
Mecca in 1979. A group moved by Qutb’s teachings assassinated Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The Muslim Brethren declared a rebellion
against the Syrian regime in 1982. Another path of violence paralleled this
one—the work of the half-dozen Shi`i movements in Arab lands that had emerged
around the hub of Islamic revolution in Iran. They targeted their rage
against the existing order in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and the
smaller Gulf states. In Iraq, they answered Khomeini’s appeal by seeking to
raise the country’s Shi`is in revolt in 1979. In Lebanon, they welcomed
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982, first to help drive out the Israelis,
then to send suicide bombers to blow up the barracks of U.S. and French peacekeepers
there in 1983. Another Shi`i bomber nearly killed the ruler of Kuwait in
1985. Some of Khomeini’s adepts went to Mecca as demonstrators, to preach
revolution to the assembled pilgrims. Others hijacked airliners and abducted
foreigners. Khomeini put a final touch on the decade when he incited his
worldwide following to an act of assassination, issuing a religious edict
demanding the death of the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989. This violence was not an aberration. It was a culmination. From the time
of Afghani, fundamentalists had contemplated the possibility of denying power
through assassination, and taking power through revolution. Because resort to
political violence carried many risks, it had been employed judiciously and
almost always surreptitiously, but it remained a legitimate option rooted
firmly in the tradition, and it became the preferred option after Iran’s
revolution emboldened fundamentalists everywhere. For the first time, the
ideology of Islam had been empowered, and it had happened through revolution.
Power for Islam seemed within reach, if only the fundamentalists were bold
enough to run the risk. Many of them were. They included not just the avowed
revolutionaries of the Jihad Organization in Egypt, but the cautious and
calculating leaderships of the Muslim Brethren in Syria and the Shi`i Da`wa
Party in Iraq. It was a seesaw battle throughout the 1980s. Nowhere was Iran’s experience
repeated. The masses did not ignite in revolution, the rulers did not board
jumbo jets for exile. Regimes often employed ruthless force to isolate and
stamp out the nests of fundamentalist “sedition.” Fundamentalists faced the
gaol and the gallows in Egypt. Their blood flowed in the gutters of Hama in
Syria, Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and Najaf in Iraq. Yet fundamentalists also
struck blows in return, against government officials, intellectuals,
minorities, and foreigners. While they did not take power anywhere, they
created many semi-autonomous pockets of resistance. Some of these pockets
were distant from political centers, such as the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and
several governates of Upper Egypt, but fundamentalists also took root in
urban quarters and on university campuses, where Islamic dress for women
became compulsory and short-cropped beards for men became customary. From
time to time, impatient pundits would proclaim that the tide of
fundamentalist Islam had gone out, but its appeal obviously ran much deeper.
Its straightforward solution to the complex crisis of state and society spoke
directly to the poor and the young, the overqualified and the underemployed,
whose numbers were always increasing faster than their opportunities. After Iran’s revolution and the subsequent revolts, it was impossible to
dismiss the ideological coherence fundamentalist Islam had achieved. It had
succeeded in resurrecting in many minds an absolute division between Islam
and unbelief. Its adherents, filled with visions of power, had struck at the
existing order, turned against foreign culture, and rejected not only apologetics
but politics—the pursuit of the possible through compromise. Fundamentalism
mobilized its adherents for conflict, for it assumed that the power sought
for Islam existed only in a finite quantity. It could only be taken at the
expense of others: rulers, foreigners, minorities. Fundamentalists did not
admit the sharing of this power, anymore than they admitted the sharing of
religious truth, and although fundamentalists differed on the means of taking
power, they were unanimous on what should be done with it. One observer has
written that even in Egypt, where the fundamentalist scene seemed highly
fragmented, the political and social program of the violent fringe groups
“did not seem to differ much from that of the mainstream Muslim Brethren,”
and was shared by “almost the whole spectrum of political Islam.”[22] This
was true, by and large, for fundamentalist Islam as a whole. Repackaging
the Islamic State Yet at the same time, a younger generation of thinkers added crucial
refinements to the ideology, adapting it to the times. Even fundamentalists
could not reject the West in its entirety. The West, despite fundamentalist
faith in its ultimate decline, continued to produce technologies and
institutions that gave it immense power. Muslims, to acquire that power, had
to import these tools or risk being overwhelmed completely. This next
generation of thinkers imagined the Islamic state not so much as a bulwark
against the West, but as a filter screening the flow of Western innovations
and influences. This ideological filter would admit whatever might enhance
the power of the Islamic state and reject whatever might diminish the unity
and resolve of Islamic society. It took a different kind of fundamentalist
leader to play this role—Muslims who knew the West’s strengths and weaknesses
first-hand, who had themselves come through the searing fire of its
skepticism with their belief intact. Turabi |
Sudan’s Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932) is the most notable representative of
this successor generation. Coming from a strong religious background, Turabi
took a doctorate in law at the Sorbonne from 1959 to 1964. Unlike Qutb, he
was not altogether repelled by his sojourn in the lands of unbelief: “I was
excited by the richness and precision of the French language, the culture,
the history of the revolution, the relations between church and state, and
the study of the different constitutions. I was not focused exclusively on my
law studies. I went to the national library, I visited museums.”[23] This
unique formation has helped to transform Turabi into the maître of
contemporary “Islamism,” for he is presumed to know the West intimately
enough to decide what should be borrowed and what should be spurned. His
partnership with the military regime in Sudan, since 1989, has put him in the
best position of any contemporary fundamentalist to implement an Islamic
state. Another member of this generation is Rashid al-Ghannushi (b. 1941), leader
of the Tunisian fundamentalist movement.[24] Ghannushi took to the ideas of
the Muslim Brethren while studying philosophy in Damascus, where he also
witnessed the Arab debacle in June 1967. Ghannushi briefly continued his
preparation in philosophy at the Sorbonne in the crucial year of the 1968 student
uprising. By his own account, he read not only the works of Islamic
philosophers, but Descartes, Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
Althusser.[25] But on his return to Tunisia, he preferred to teach the ideas
of Mawdudi, Banna, and Qutb to an emerging fundamentalist movement. Ghannushi
repeatedly ran afoul of the Tunisian authorities, and in 1989 chose voluntary
exile. He is now a political refugee in Britain, where he plays the role of
the foremost defender of Islamism in the West. His region-wide stature
derives from the fact that he speaks knowingly from the belly of the beast. Fadlallah |
A third figure of comparable stature, certainly among Shi`is, is Sayyid
Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (b. 1936) of Lebanon. Fadlallah, born in Iraq of
Lebanese Shi`i descent, is a product of the Shi`i academies of Najaf in Iraq.
But even there, he was drawn to study the forbidden knowledge of philosophers
and unbelievers, as he himself later hinted: “My studies, which were supposed
to be traditional, rebelled against tradition and all familiar things.”[26]
Fadlallah arrived in Beirut in 1966, at a time when the city often mistook
itself for an arrondissement of Paris. In this marketplace of
ideologies, Fadlallah learned to package Islam in a highly competitive way.
He, too, produced a nuanced argument for borrowing from the West while
battling it. In the course of the 1980s Fadlallah became the oracle and
mentor of Hizbullah, preaching dialogue and resistance in the same breath. Turabi, Ghannushi, and Fadlallah did not rewrite the idea of the Islamic
state developed by Mawdudi, Qutb, and Khomeini. They repackaged it. They
understood that the young doubted whether the secular West really intended a
crusade against Islam, and so they played down the themes of “Crusaderism”
and the “Great Satan,” substituting the more fashionable rhetoric of Third
World anti-imperialism. This came naturally, for they had overheard the West
incriminate itself during their own sojourns in and near its privileged
academe. Their arguments for the inevitable triumph of Islam drew upon the
dark prophecies of the West’s decline that have emanated from European and
American philosophers for a century. At the same time, they understood that
many of the young had been influenced by notions of class struggle. This they
incorporated by developing a terminology that referred to Muslims as the “dispossessed”
of “the South.”[27] Not surprisingly, fundamentalists even managed to find
apologists among the West’s own Third Worldists, who thought they heard an
echo in the words pumped from Islamist pulpits. (“Because they hate us, they
must be right,” wrote a French writer in irony. “What a wonderful coincidence
that the revelation of truth coincided with anti-imperialist struggle!”)[28] The genius of the new thinkers, though, was to create a climate that could
sustain an altogether different analogy. They understood that many of the
young had a sneaking or grudging admiration for the science and democracy of
the liberal West. Thus, they claimed that elements of both could be
selectively borrowed if this served to strengthen Islam. Without sacrificing
any element of ideological principle, they worked to present Islamic
fundamentalist movements as the functional equivalent of the “reform”
movements of the former communist bloc. This latest repackaging not only has brought new adherents to
fundamentalist movements, but has persuaded a surprising number of the West’s
most hopeful observers of the Middle East that “Islam is the solution.” They
now argue that beneath a monolithic façade, Islamism has grown diverse, and
carries the seed of the long-awaited reform of Islam. “Islam is now at a
pivotal and profound moment of evolution,” announces a journalist, “a
juncture increasingly equated with the Protestant Reformation.”[29] “This is,
indeed, the most exciting period in Islamic religious history since the twelfth
century,” gushes a professor.[30] But who are the “reformers” who supposedly are making the first
breakthrough in seven centuries? Where are the pathfinding texts without
which a “Reformation” is impossible? As one Western critic of Islamist
thought observes, since the writings of the founders, compiled well before
Iran’s revolution, “there are nothing but brochures, prayers, feeble glosses
and citations of canonical authors.”[31] In works written a generation ago or
more, Fundamentalist Islam became a coherent ideology, resting on a fixed
canon. The road to redemption leads through the Islamic state of the kind
envisioned by Mawdudi, Qutb, and Khomeini. Turabi speaks for nearly all
fundamentalists when he dismisses the need for any further thought: “Those
Muslims who venture to reform Islam because they are impressed by the Western
Reformation. . . did write a few books, but they did not go very far. They
did not impress any Muslim.”[32] For Turabi’s generation, the intellectual
work of thinking through an Islamic state has already been done. It is now a
matter of repackaging the vision and mobilizing Muslims for its
implementation. Turabi himself puts it best: Islamist movements are today
“without elitism or obsession with quality.” They represent “quantity and the
people.”[33] So far, there has been no “reform,” and certainly no “Reformation.” While
fundamentalist ideology has been refashioned at its edges, its core remains
consistent and stable. A decade ago, Hasan Hanafi, another Sorbonne-schooled
Islamist, described this irreducible and unalterable core: In the past, Islam found its way
between two falling empires, the Persian and the Roman. Both were exhausted
by wars. Both suffered moral and spiritual crises. Islam, as a new world
order, was able to expand as a substitute to the old regime. Nowadays, Islam
finds itself again as a new power, marking its way between the two
superpowers in crisis. Islam is regenerating, the two superpowers are
degenerating. Islam is the power of the future, inheriting the two
superpowers in the present.[34] A decade later, the Soviet Union is gone and the
fundamentalists of Islam claim they pose the last ideological challenge to
the last superpower. Ahmad Khomeini, son of the man who detonated the first
explosion, summarized the fundamentalist point of view: “After the fall of
Marxism, Islam replaced it, and as long as Islam exists, U.S. hostility
exists, and as long as U.S. hostility exists, the struggle exists.”[35] This
Islam, forged by a century of thought, claims the status of a world ideology.
For fundame, the proof of its validity will not be found in the number of
souls it wins but in its empowerment of Islam. Purge
Before Power To achieve that, of course, Islamism must first come to state power. Given
the strength of existing regimes, its leaders must build coalitions with
other groups if they are to stand any chance of breaking out of encirclement.
And it is here that Islamism seems to be failing. The Islamic revival was
perhaps most flexible at its outset, in the preaching of Afghani. He altered
his message to accommodate a wide range of political alliances, and his
biographer has rightly described his interpretation of Islam as “more In contrast, today’s Islamists, certainly in the Arab world, are unwilling
to suspend enough of their belief to find a common ground with potential
partners. Their words and deeds frighten many Muslims, even those who long
for change. The reason is violence—not against the West, but against other
Muslims. Even in opposition, Islamist movements cannot resist the temptation
to intimidate opponents, rivals, and even lukewarm supporters. The kind of
purge Khomeini carried out once in power is being attempted by Islamist
movements today, when it only serves to isolate them. Sayyid Qutb’s idea of
an unbelieving society, the basis of Islamism as ideology, is the congenital
defect of Islamism as politics. Its deleterious effects can be seen in the
continuing bloodshed between Islamic movements in Afghanistan, in the murder
of intellectuals in Egypt, in the indiscriminate bombings against civilians
in Algeria. Islamists claim they have been forced to follow the methods of
the regimes they oppose, but if this is so, why should anyone prefer them?
Regimes invoke the threat of Islamist “terror” precisely because there is a
genuine dread of it in society at large. As a result, the Islamists have no
allies, and without allies their chances of assuming power are slim. Dissimulation There are some Islamists who know this, and who are trying (late in the
day) to borrow a page from Khomeini’s techniques of dissimulation. But for
dissimulation to succeed, it must be consistent and seamless. As it is now
practiced by many Islamists, dissimulation is no more than telling each
audience whatever it prefers to hear. It is not too difficult to assemble
these utterances and demonstrate their incompatibility. This is why Turabi,
Fadlallah, and Ghannushi, despite protestations of pluralism, create deep
unease among liberals, leftists, nationalists, and feminists, who might have
been allies. They overhear the full discourse on the Islamic state—a
discourse in which one can hear democracy, free expression, and equal rights
denounced as Western cultural imperialism. Turabi is the only leading Islamist whose alliance-building has given him
some access to power in Sudan, but his friends are generals and colonels. In
the absence of other allies, the temptation of befriending the military may
also prove irresistible to other fundamentalist movements. If so, Islamism
will then have filled not only the same political space as Arabism. It will
have made the same fatal choice. At some point, it dawned on the military
partners of the Arab nationalist ideologues that they could do without the
guidance of a Sati` al-Husri or a Michel Aflaq. They could formulate ideology
for themselves, whenever needed. Likewise, generals and colonels who take
leading Islamists as guides are likely to discard them, even as they
appropriate their ideas and language. Perhaps this will be the next phase of
Islamism, as men of theory are thrust aside by new military potentates,
hungry for Islamic legitimacy. Libya’s Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi is perhaps the
transitional man in this gradual shift from Arab to Islamist military rule. But this is only speculation, and it is impossible to predict the future
fortunes of Islamism. Of its many outcomes, only one seems absolutely
certain. Like Arabism, Islamism may fail; and like Arabism, Islamism may fail
at great cost, its adherents gradually becoming its victims. But by then, it
will have launched a hundred careers and a thousand books. Of Marxism, it has
been said that it failed materially everywhere but in Western academe, where
its professors turned it into tenure and grants. Islamism seems destined to
do the same. Notes
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