More than twenty years after the success of the Islamic revolution in
Iran, the wave of Islamic radicalism that has engulfed the Middle East
since the late 1970s is taking a different course. The mainstream
Islamist movements have shifted from the struggle for a supranational
Muslim community into a kind of Islamo-nationalism: they want to be
fully recognized as legitimate actors on the domestic political scene,
and have largely given up the supranational agenda that was part of
their ideology. On the other hand, the policy of conservative
re-Islamization implemented by many states, even secular ones, in order
to undercut the Islamist opposition and to regain some religious
legitimacy has backfired. It has produced a new brand of Islamic
fundamentalism, ideologically conservative but at times politically
radical. This neo-fundamentalism is largely de-linked from states”
policy and strategy. At first glance it is less politically minded than
the Islamist movements—less concerned with defining what a true
Islamic State should be than with the implementation of shariat (Islamic
law). Though the movement is basically a sociocultural phenomenon, it
has also produced an extremist expression which is embodied in loose
peripheral networks, such as the organization Al Qaida, headed by Osama
bin Laden, responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center on
11 September 2001. Consequently, international Islamic terrorism has
shifted from state-sponsored actions or actions against domestic targets
toward a de-territorialized, supranational and largely uprooted
activism. Nevertheless the strategic impact of these new movements is
limited by the very fact that they have such scarce roots in the states”
domestic politics. However, this is not the case in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, which are now the hotbed of contemporary Islamic
fundamentalism.
“Islamism” is the brand of modern political Islamic fundamentalism
which claims to recreate a true Islamic society, not simply by imposing
the shariat, but by establishing first an Islamic state through
political action. Islamists see Islam not as a mere religion, but as a
political ideology which should be integrated into all aspects of
society (politics, law, economy, social justice, foreign policy, etc.).
The traditional idea of Islam as an all-encompassing religion is
extended to the complexity of a modern society. In fact they acknowledge
the modernity of the society in terms of education, technology, changes
in family structure, and so forth. The movement”s founding fathers are
Hassan Al Banna (1906-1949), Abul Ala Maududi, and, among the Shi”as,
Baqer al Sadr, Ali Shariati and Ruhollah Khomeyni. They had a great
impact among educated youth with a secular background, including women.
They had less success among traditional ulamas. To Islamists, the
Islamic State should unite the ummah as much as possible, not being
restricted to a specific nation. Such a state attempts to recreate the
golden age of the first decades of Islam and supersede tribal, ethnic
and national divides, whose resilience is attributed to the believers”
abandonment of the true tenets of Islam or to colonial policy. These
movements are not necessarily violent, even if, by definition, they are
not democratic: the Pakistani Jama”at Islami and the Turkish Refah Party
as well as most of the Muslim Brothers groups have remained inside a
legal framework, except where they were prevented from taking political
action, as was the case in Syria, for instance.
The state the Islamist parties are challenging is not an abstract
state, but rather one that is more or less rooted in history and is part
of a strategic landscape. The Islamist parties themselves are the
product of a given political culture and society. Despite their claim of
being supranational, most of the Islamist movements have been shaped by
national particularities. Soon or later they tend to express national
interests, even under the pretext of Islamist ideology. A survey of the
mainstream Islamist movements in the 1990s showed that they have failed
in producing anything resembling an “Islamist International,” even if
their ideological references remain similar.
This “nationalization” of Islamism is apparent in most countries of
the Middle East. Hamas challenges Arafat”s PLO not on points relating to
Islam, but for “betraying” the national interests of the Palestinian
people. Turabi uses Islam as a tool for unifying Sudan, by Islamizing
the Southern Christians and pagans. The Yemenite “Islah” movement has
been active in the re-unification of Yemen, against the wishes of its
Saudi Godfather. The Lebanese Hezbullah is now stressing the defense of
the “Lebanese nation” and has established a working relationship with
many Christian circles. It has, incidentally, given up the idea of an
Islamic State in Lebanon, due to consideration of the role of the
Christians in defining the nation. The Turkish Refah Party, by stressing
its Ottoman heritage, is trying to affirm a kind of neo-Ottoman Turkish
model in the Middle East. By the same token, the Shi”i radical parties
of Iraq, such as Dawa”, are stressing the need for national unity and
are closely working with non-Islamic national parties. The Algerian FIS
claims to be the heir of the NLF of the anti-French war, and did not
find roots in Morocco or Tunisia. During the Gulf War of 1991, each
branch of the Muslim Brothers” organization took a stand in accordance
with the perceived national interests of its own country (e.g., the
Kuwait branch approved U.S. military intervention, while the Jordanian
branch vehemently opposed it).
On the domestic scene, these parties brought previously excluded
social strata into the political process: the mostazafin in Iran (the
marginalized segments of the urban population); the Shi”as in Lebanon;
recent city-dwellers and Kurds for the Refah; urban youth in Algeria,
shocked by the bloody repression of October 1988; Northern tribes in
Yemen, etc. In doing so they have helped to root nation-states and to
create a domestic political scene, which is the only real basis for a
future process of democratization. In this sense, the Islamist parties,
while they are not democratic, foster the necessary conditions for an
endogenous democracy, as is clearly the case in Iran. Khatami”s election
expressed a call for democracy which is possible only because the whole
population has been brought into a common political scene by a popular
and deep-rooted revolution.
Once this process is achieved, however, the mainstream Islamist
movements, while consolidating a stable constituency inside their own
country, are losing their appeal beyond their borders. The Refah (now
Fazilet) has no influence abroad except in the Turkish migrant community
in Western Europe, nor has the Islamic regime of Iran. This move let
the road open for more radical movements which discard modern
Nation-States and want to recreate the ummah, or the community of all
Muslims in the world. Parallel to the growing Islamist political contest
of the seventies and eighties, a process of conservative Islamization
has been pervasive among the Muslim societies, which means, among other
things, more veiled women in the streets and more shariat in state law.
This Islamization is a consequence of deliberate state policy as well as
a social phenomenon. Confronted with the Islamist opposition during the
eighties, many Muslim states, even when officially secular, endeavored
to promote a brand of conservative Islam and to organize an “official
Islam.” The first part of the program was quite a success, but state
control has never been effective. In all these countries the impact of
the development of a network of religious schools was the same:
graduates holding a degree in religious sciences are now entering the
labor market and tend, of course, to advocate the Islamization of
education and law in order to get better job opportunities.
Three elements characterize these groups (well embodied by the
Taliban/Osama bin Laden coalition). First, they combine political and
militant jihad against the West with a very conservative definition of
Islam, closer to the tenets of Saudi Wahhabism than to the official
ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nowhere is their conservatism
more obvious than in their attitude toward women. While the Islamists
strongly advocated women”s education and political participation (with
the condition of wearing a veil and attending single-sex schools), the
neofundamentalists want to ban any female presence in public life. They
are also strongly opposed to music, the arts, and entertainment.
Contrary to the Islamists, they do not have an economic or social
agenda. They are the heirs to the conservative Sunni tradition of
fundamentalism, obsessed by the danger of a loss of purity within Islam
through the influence of other religions. They stress the implementation
of shariat as the sole criterion for an Islamic State and society. This
strict Sunnism also turned very anti-Shi”a. This anti-Shi”a bias was
revived at the end of the eighties as a consequence of the growing
influence of the Saudi Wahhabism and gave way to a low-intensity civil
war between Shi”as and Sunnis in Pakistan, reflected in Afghanistan by
the mass killing of Shi”as after the take-over of Mazar-i Sharif by the
Taliban in August 1998. But they also are becoming strongly
anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. In fact, they believe that Israel, the
U.S. and Iran are united to destroy “true Islam.”
While anti-imperialist slogans were common among Islamist movements
from the fifties on, and political anti-Zionism turned into
anti-Semitism some time ago among many Muslim intellectual circles (and
not necessarily religious), the anti-Christian propaganda among the new
Sunni movements is rather new. The Islamists were not anti-Christians as
such; in Iran during the revolution there has never been any attack on
churches. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers never crack down on the Copts.
The idea was that there is some common ground between true believers.
Now, however, the term “religious war” really makes sense.
The second point is that these movements are supranational. A quick
look at the bulk of bin Laden”s militants killed or arrested between
1993 and 2001 show that they are mainly uprooted, western educated,
having broken with their family as well as country of origin. They live
in a global world. Of course the supranational links are sometimes made
possible by infranational ones, like the common ethnic Pashtun
background of the Taliban, the leader of the Pakistani Jama”at Islami
(Qazi Husseyn), the head of one branch of the Jami”at Ulama (Senator
Sami ul Haqq, from Akora Khattak), and many officers of the ISI (colonel
Imad, adviser to the Taliban).
While Islamists do adapt to the nation-state, neo-fundamentalists
embody the crisis of the nation-state, squeezed between infrastate
solidarities and globalization. The state level is bypassed and ignored.
The Taliban do not care about the state—they even downgraded
Afghanistan by changing the official denomination from an “Islamic
State” to an “Emirate.” Mollah Omar does not care to attend the council
of ministers, nor to go to the Capital.
In fact, this new brand of supranational neo-fundamentalism is more a
product of contemporary globalization than of the Islamic past. Using
two international languages (English and Arabic), traveling easily by
air, studying, training and working in many different countries,
communicating through the Internet and cellular phones, they think of
themselves as “Muslims” and not as citizens of a specific country. They
are often uprooted, more or less voluntarily (many are Palestinian
refugees from 1948, and not from Gaza or the West Bank; bin Laden was
stripped of his Saudi citizenship; many others belong to migrant
families who move from one country to the next to find jobs or
education). It is probably a paradox of globalization to gear together
modern supranational networks and traditional, even archaic, infrastate
forms of relationships (tribalism, for instance, or religious schools”
networks). Even the very sectarian form of their religious beliefs and
attitudes make the neo-fundamentalists look like other sects spreading
all over the planet.
http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/neo-fundamentalism/
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