Modern Islamist Movements

History, Religion, and Politics

Jon Armajani

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781405117425
  9781405117418
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444344370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Modern Islamist Movements provides a clear and accessible examination of the history, beliefs and rationale of Islamist Groups and their grievances with the West and governments within the majority-Muslim world, while examining some of these groups' visions for a global Islamic empire.

• A clear and accessible text that examines the history, beliefs and rationale for violence emerging from Islamist movements, while examining some of these groups' visions for a global Islamic empire
• Examines Islamist grievances against the West and modern governments in the majority Muslim world, while providing an overview of Islam's relations with the West from the period of the Crusades to the modern age
• Discusses the historic development of Islamism in Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
• Explains classic Islamic understandings of jihad and Bin Laden's, al-Qaida's, and other Islamists interpretations of this concept
• Offers an historical account of the formative relationship between al-Qaida, other Islamists, and Islamic intellectual trends beginning in the eighteenth century
• Appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as interested general readers

1

Introduction

What we are seeing now is a radical international jihad that will be a potent force for many years to come.

The New York Times, June 16, 2002 ¹

Islamism is nothing new. It is rooted in long-standing currents within modern Islamic history. Alongside democracy, socialism, communism, monarchy, and autocratic authoritarianism, Islamism is one of modernity’s most influential political and religious ideologies. Islamists, also known as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Islamic revivalists” (among other designations) – assert that the literal truth of the Quran, Islam’s most sacred text, together with its legal and ritual injunctions based on Islamic law (Sharia), must be applied to all Muslims and to religious minorities living in majority-Muslim countries. ² Islamists also believe that: (1) Islamic principles must dictate every aspect of life, both personal and societal; (2) Islam contains the truth and that other religions are either false or of limited validity; (3) traditional rules must govern sexual relations (i.e., sex may only take place within heterosexual marriage and licit concubinage); and (4) Western and secular cultures promote a range of consumerist and permissive lifestyles which are antithetical to Islam. Thus, Islamism – the complex current which is this book’s focus – is the reinflection and reaffirmation, in substantially changed political and socio-cultural settings, of time-honored forms of understanding and behavior. Yet, Islamists are not utterly opposed to every kind of change; rather, they maintain that change must be regulated by traditional beliefs and practices. ³

Islamist groups comprise one part of a modern trend, known as fundamentalism, which is also present within religions other than Islam. Broadly speaking, fundamentalism is the activist affirmation of specific beliefs and practices that define a religion in an absolutist and literalist manner. Among other characteristics, fundamentalism involves an effort to reform and implement the historical and textual interpretations, doctrines, and behaviors of religious persons in accordance with what the fundamentalists believe to be the essentials of their religion. Typically, fundamentalists attempt to formulate these ideas and then apply these ideals to themselves, to others within their religion, and to society at large. ⁴

Within this context, Islamists including Usama bin Laden (1957–2011), members of his movement, al-Qaida, and other Islamists have reinterpreted the main ideals of Islam while mobilizing themselves – in the context of a well thought-out religious and political worldview – to subvert what they perceive to be the West’s imperialism and hegemony in the majority-Muslim world and elsewhere, and to create a global Islamic state under Islamic law. Islamism is not only a significant feature of the modern international religious and political landscape, it is one of the most influential forces within modern Islam.

The religio-political justifications for the September 11 attacks and the Islamic organizational structures which catalyzed them will dominate international affairs for the foreseeable future. In the aftermath of September 11, the United States government made dramatic long-term changes in its domestic budgets and legislation, law enforcement and intelligence services, foreign policy and military doctrines which – together with the opposing strength of Islamism – will drastically change the global political map for many years to come. ⁵ This book examines the histories, worldviews, structures, and religiously-based rationales for violence within Islamist groups; it will explore various Islamist groups and their historic grievances against the West with a long time-horizon in view. Particular attention is devoted to the formative relationship between Islamist and Islamic intellectual trends from the eighteenth century until the present.

An Islamic Lexicon

There are approximately 1.57 billion Muslims in the world and 96 percent of them live in developing countries. ⁶ Muslims form a majority in almost 50 nations, most of which stretch within a wide band from Morocco to Indonesia. The four countries with the world’s largest Muslim populations are Indonesia with approximately 203 million Muslims, Pakistan with 174 million, India with 161 million, and Bangladesh with 145 million. ⁷ At the same time, more than 38.1 million Muslims live in Europe and roughly 2.5 million live in the United States. ⁸ Within this vast ethnic, linguistic, national, and regional diversity, there are aspects of Islamic history, practice, and belief which Sunni Muslims, who constitute roughly 90 percent of all Muslims worldwide, affirm as the basis of the religious tradition. Shiite Muslims, who comprise roughly 10 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, adhere to many of these principles as well. Muslims believe that one sovereign and merciful God of the entire universe (who revealed himself to all the prophets from Adam to Jesus) gave his final, supreme, and perfect revelation to the Prophet Muhammad from 610 to 632 in what is modern-day Saudi Arabia. This revelation is recorded in the Quran, Islam’s most important sacred text. The Hadith, which also holds considerable authority, contains, among other things, what Muslims believe to be the sayings and actions of Muhammad, and these are models for Muslims collectively and individually.

Muslims believe in the oneness of God, the power of angels, the importance of the Jewish and Christian prophets and holy books, God’s final judgment, and his complete sovereignty over the universe, all of which comprise the Five Pillars of Belief in Sunni Islam. Muslims also hold a number of practices in common. These Five Pillars of Islam (distinct from but related to the Five Pillars of Belief) consist of a public confession of faith which initiates a person into Islam (shahada), five prayers per day (salat), an annual offering of 2.5 percent of one’s assets to be paid to a mosque or Muslim charity (zakat), fasting (sawm) during the daylight hours of Ramadan, and making the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia once in a person’s lifetime if she or he is able (hajj). The months of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca fall during different times from year to year because the Islamic calendar is lunar, not solar like the Western Gregorian one.

The term Islam comes from the Arabic words for submission and peace (salaam). Muslims frequently say they have an individual and corporate obligation to submit to God and God’s commands as found in the Quran, Hadith, and the example of the Prophet, find peace with God and within themselves, and create peace with each other and the world through submitting themselves completely to God and his commands. Indeed, for Muslims life is a gift that God has given earthly creatures. Thus, humans are to live in a spirit of submission to God, peace, and respect for life. As evidence of Islam’s teachings on peace and mercy, Muslims often cite the Quran chapter 6 verse 54 (Quran 6:54) which states, “Peace be upon you. Your Lord has decreed mercy. If anyone among you commits evil through ignorance and then repents and mends his ways, he will find God forgiving and merciful.” Yet, in spite of the unity which Muslims share, they vociferously debate issues such as Quranic interpretation, the role of Islam in political systems, and Islamic responses to modernity. Ideological groupings in the majority-Muslim world can be divided into the following categories: Islamists, Muslim liberals, secularists, and “the floating middlers.” ⁹ These viewpoints function as ideal types, based on complex and ambiguous realities in which the moral stances and dispositions of any single person may contain a combination of all, tending to gravitate toward one or the other viewpoint according to the issue involved. ¹⁰

Al-Qaida’s form of Islam is one of the newest extensions of Islamism. One of several sources of al-Qaida’s origins was as an outgrowth of forms of Islamism present in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, soon after the Soviets retreated from there and as Bin Laden established al-Qaida during that time using Afghanistan as his headquarters. Al-Qaida has its intellectual roots in the thought of: (1) the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Egyptian Muslim scholars Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muhammad Atef; (2) the Saudi Muslim scholars Sheikhs al-Bahrani, Ulwan, and al-Rayan; and (3) a number of Islamic schools (madrasahs) in Pakistan. ¹¹ While members of al-Qaida agree with other Islamists in almost every area, the members of al-Qaida emphasize a significant point to their ideological manifesto. They, like some other Islamists, have constructed arguments founded on their interpretation of the Quran, Hadith, and early Islamic history which justify violent attacks against the West and Western institutions.

Two of several interrelated Islamist organizations are al-Qaida and the Taliban. Although the Taliban and al-Qaida are separate organizations, the Taliban became the Islamist government in Afghanistan during the 1990s and al-Qaida is Bin Laden’s international guerrilla organization. These groups often cooperated with each other before and even after September 11; the Taliban provided al-Qaida a base of operations in Afghanistan, while Bin Laden and al-Qaida gave the Taliban financial and military support. The Taliban attempted to defeat the anti-Taliban Afghan rebels during that country’s civil war in the 1990s in part in order to create an Islamist state there, while al-Qaida’s main objective was to operate as an international Islamic guerilla organization which wanted to expand Islam in Afghanistan, Pakistan and throughout the rest of the world while launching violent attacks against Western interests with the hope of eventually establishing a global Islamic state. ¹²

Liberal Islam constitutes an alternative interpretive stance to Islamism and, much like other Muslims, including the Islamists, liberal Muslims take seriously the most important foundations of Islam: the Quran, Muhammad’s life, the example of the first Muslims, and the Sharia. ¹³ However, liberal Muslims reaffirm and reevaluate the significance of all these principles for modern life, viewing the Quran as God’s supreme revelation and believing it calls for human progress. They point to the Quran’s restrictions on slavery, its enhancement of women’s status, its limitations on the right of private vengeance, and its commands for beneficence, justice, equality, liberty, and social solidarity. For liberals, these ideals have propelled Muslims to make great leaps forward, beginning from Islam’s origins in the seventh century until today. They do not want literal interpretations of the Quran to block Muslims from perceiving its most relevant meanings as God’s perfect revelation. They believe Muslims must seek the underlying moral purposes of the Quran and Hadith, and that of the lives of Muhammad and early Muslims – grounding contemporary daily belief and conduct on that ethical thrust. ¹⁴

In contrast, secularists maintain that individuals’ religious or non-religious affiliations should have no political ramifications; any person should be able to hold any political office in the state and the legal status of all citizens must be equal. ¹⁵ Secularists contend that the right to legislate rests with the people and its authorized representatives, while believing that contemporary utility is an overriding factor which can help determine the content of laws. Secular governments may draw on the Sharia for specific guidance where popular mores and consent demand, but ultimately for the secularists the Sharia is shaped by human beings, and both Sharia and human beings are subject to changing religious, social, political, and eco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Egypt
• 3 The West Bank, Gaza, and Israel
• 4 Saudi Arabia
• 5 Pakistan
• 6 Afghanistan
• 7 Conclusion
• Index