Political Islam, World Politics and Europe

From Jihadist to Institutional Islamism

Bassam Tibi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415730471
• eBook ISBN: 9781317816348
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The new and updated edition of Political Islam, World Politics and Europe focusses on the shift within political Islam, in light of 9/11 and the events of the Arab Spring, from a jihadist struggle, to institutional Islamism.

Refuting what has often been referred to by commentators as the 'moderation,' of Islamism, the second edition of this book introduces the concept of 'institutional,' Islamism, a process which Tibi argues was accelerated in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Both jihadist and institutional Islamism pursue the same goal of an Islamist state, but disagree fundamentally on the strategy for achieving it. Whilst jihadism is committed to the idea of a (violent) Islamic world revolution, institutional Islamism embraces political institutions as a means to an end.

Turning to the events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt this book attempts to determine whether an abandonment of violence is enough to underpin a shift to genuine democracy. Analysing the fall of Morsi in particular, Tibi questions what lessons can be learnt from his presidency, and argues that this event will not change the overall trend of development from jihadism to institutional Islamism

A timely addition to existing literature, this book will be of interest to students and scholars studying Middle Eastern and European Politics, Political Islam and International Relations.

Part I

The conflict within Islamic civilization between jihadism and democracy

Its pertinence to world politics and to the Islam diaspora in Europe: obstacles and solutions

Introductory remarks

The bottom line for living in peace and with mutual respect in the twenty-first century is the acceptance of people of all cultures and civilizations of the values as well as the institutional safeguards of religious and cultural pluralism. This pluralism that combines diversity with a consensus over core values should be the house order for the entire world, but this goal cannot be achieved without the participation of the people of Islamic civilization who count as one quarter of humanity.

To set the record straight: Cultural and religious pluralism – as an essential part of democratic peace – is an adoption from the political theory of multiparty parliamentarian democracy. Political pluralism acknowledges diversity, but requires the acceptance of shared rules and common values. This idea is applied to religion, but this undertaking is hampered by the obstacles related to religious absolutism shared by all religions. The foremost Islamic revivalist of the nineteenth century, al-Afghani, called for anticolonial jihad not only to reject a foreign rule, but also in contesting the fact that world political realities are not in line with Islam’s self-image of being superior to others in its claim for ruling the world. In al-Afghani’s view the “ghalab/superiority” is among Islam’s central features. As a young boy born in Damascus to the centuries-old Damascene “ashraf/notables family” – according to the history of Damascus by Taqiul-Din al-Husaini – of Banu al-Tibi, I learned at school along with the respective Qur’anic verse that we Muslims are the khair umma/best community God created on earth (sura al-Imran 3:110). This is the inherited image that Muslims have of themselves. It follows that not only are Pax Americana and hegemonic US unilateralism obstacles in the way of global pluralism, but there are also Islamic barriers. Muslims lack power, but nevertheless adhere to a powerful Islamic worldview which teaches “al-Islam ya’lu wa la yu’la alayhi/Islam is superior and no one can stand above it.” Muslim preachers teach this formula, which runs counter to the need for cultural and religious pluralism.

When I was taught this Muslim self-image as a young schoolboy in Damascus, I contradicted our teacher, who was preaching Islamic superiority to us. To support my objection I referred to the facts perceived by the media. Our teacher responded, however, in a self-righteous manner and had no other argument to present than the scriptural one he gave to us in quoting the Qur’an. The tension between reality and the Muslim self-image was explained by the reference to a mihna/crisis that we are undergoing. In Arabic, mihna also means a test: in this case a kind of civilizational exam. The message is: Muslims are expected to prove that they are really better than the realities, and of course better than the others, i.e. the non-Muslims classified either as dhimmi (Christians and Jews living as protected minorities under the banner of Islam) or as kafirun/infidels. Again, this inherited worldview stands in contradiction to any religious or cultural pluralism. The reported Damascene story is the personal background for my dealing with Islam. Therefore, my first book on Islam in 1980 bore the title The Crisis of Modern Islam. To be sure, any objective scholarly findings always have a personal background. I have addressed this issue at length in the preface to the first edition and refrain from repeating it. It is self-deception to think that scholars can keep their “selves” out of their work in terms of objectivity.

The question I asked my Damascene teacher never left my mind. In 1962, I moved from Damascus to Frankfurt to study philosophy, history and social sciences with, among others, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Iring Fetscher and Jürgen Habermas. For a young Muslim that meant a window of opportunity, the opening of an avenue. The conservative education I received as a Muslim in Damascus was not much help in finding convincing answers to questions that stemmed from thinking about Islam. The education of the Islamic tradition internalized in Damascus, combined with the cultural modernity of the Frankfurt School which I perceived in Europe, built up my background when I switched from philosophy to international studies. In following the philosophical approach of “thinking is research“ introduced by Hedley Bull, I came to the conclusion that contemporary Muslims in their exposure to cultural modernity and the related globalization are torn between the tradition of jihad – including its present reinvention as jihadism – and the need to incorporate their civilization into international society based on shared values and a culture of democratic peace. This is the theme of Part I of this book.

The study of Islam as a civilization in a scholarly but not in an Islamic apologetic or an Orientalist manner (and, to be sure, also not in the Saidian way of Orientalism in reverse) helped me to understand the history of Islamic civilization and its current dilemmas. Islam succeeded in ruling most parts of the world in its imperial history after the Islamic conquests. The latter were conducted as jihad in the form of qital/physical fighting and contributed to an Islamization of vast parts of Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. Between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries Muslims formed the leading civilization.

As a student of history in Europe and the USA, I learned in my academic studies that the decline of the Islamic civilization was related to both an emerging inner weakness and the rise of the technologically superior West within the framework of “the military revolution,” as Geoffrey Parker puts it. In contrast to what I had learned in Damascus, I was exposed to the telling story of the consequences of new industrial power translating its capabilities into warfare, characterized by the “industrialization of war,” as Anthony Giddens argues. This new power underpinned the European expansion. Through its technological advantage, the West was in a position first to contain the jihad expansion, then to overtake the place of the earlier superior Islamic civilization, and later even to conquer the abode of Islam itself while subjecting it to European colonial rule. This development caused deep wounds, to the extent that Muslims in their collective memory relate colonization and crusades to one process of humiliation of Islam by the Christians of Europe. When colonial rule ended, decolonization never meant more than an inclusion into the system of sovereign states. Europeans had successfully managed “to impose [this system; B.T.] on the entire world,” to put the story in the phrasing of Charles Tilly.

The twenty-first century is characterized by a Muslim revolt. A distinction between early decolonization based on European ideas and the contemporary civilizational “revolt against the West” (H. Bull) continuing in the twenty-first century is needed in order to understand the issues involved. There is a contestation of the European pattern of the nation-state that prevails throughout the world, i.e. also in the world of Islam. Given the fact that the imposed European nation-state in a civilizationally alien environment lacks the needed substance and basically exists therein as a nominal nation-state, a crisis is the outcome. Unlike early anti-colonial nationalists who were seeking inclusion, the jihadist Islamism is a challenge to the secular nation-state as such. Most of the nation-states in the world of Islam are undergoing both a structural – i.e. development-related – and a legitimacy crisis. In this crisis of modernization Islamists speak of a sahwa Islamiyya/Islamic awakening, which is nothing other than an effort to reverse the development that has been taking place in the past few centuries since the universalization of the principles of Westphalian peace. As Daniel Philpott rightly argues, this return of a vision of an Islamic political order is targeting the structure of the “Westphalian synthesis” (World Politics, 2002). The envisioned shift from Europeanization to de-Westernization is not only directed against Western dominance, but is also a neo-jihad against the present world order and its expanded Westphalian system mapping the entire globe. This jihadism is no longer the classical jihad, as shown in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, I ask: Could Muslims instead embrace democracy and democratic peace?

At issue is an “invention of tradition” and not the tradition itself. The neo-jihad – or jihadism – is an irregular war, which means a war with no rules, and can therefore be addressed as a variety of modern terrorism. However, it would be wrong to use the terms Islamism and terrorism interchangeably, as is done in the media for describing acting jihadists. The concern is the mihna/crisis of Islamic civilization, not terror itself. Jihadism is a bid for the remaking of the world.

The chapters of Part I refer to Islamic civilization at a crossroads seeking its future. I normatively envision these future prospects: a choice between global jihad as an invented tradition, and joining democratic peace to become a part of the entire human community on an equal footing within the framework of pluralism outlined in the outset of these introductory remarks. It is argued that these choices pertain equally to world politics and to Europe affected through massive Islamic migration. The existing Islamic enclaves in Europe, called “parallel societies,” indicate that Muslim immigrants are not integrated and are not yet a part of Europe. Some of them read the works of the intellectual father of political Islam, Sayyid Qutb, who teaches all Muslims that their civilization is in crisis and needs “ma’alim fi al-tariq/signposts along the road.” Are the solutions he offers, including an “Islamic world revolution” to map the entire globe into this divine order, envisioned to replace the Westphalian one also valid for Europe?

As a European Muslim I contest, but acknowledge, the tensions between the envisioned Islamization of Europe by the Islamists and the Europeani-zation of Islam as an alternative to it proposed by the concept of EuroIslam to be introduced in Part III. At the level of Part I, the focus is on contrasting jihadism and democratic peace as competing options. In subscribing to the view of Hedley Bull that “thinking is research,” I look first at the development of jihad to jihadism and then question the Islamization of democracy. In my view, there can be no Islamic epistemology, because knowledge is human and universal. Along these lines, I argue that there is no specific Islamic democracy. In contrast, there can be with nuances a democracy in the world of Islam, as in any other civilization.

1 From classical jihad to global jihadism in an invention of tradition for mapping the world into Dar al-Islam

As much as Khomeini made the Islamic term fetwa popular, so did bin Laden with jihad. Today, one barely finds a Westerner who has not heard these Islamic terms. However, fetwa is not a death sentence, just as jihad is not terrorism. These are the wrong meanings spread in the West along with many misconceptions of Islam itself. The present chapter will elucidate, explain and claim to change the described situation. The development of the classical jihad to jihadism lies at the center of the analysis. It is asked: Is the jihadist path a promising option for the future of the Islamic civilization? In Chapter 2, I present democracy as a competing option.

The different meanings of jihad and jihadism

It is true that at present Islamists think of violence and fighting when they speak of whatever practice of jihad. However, in the Qur’an jihad does not mean terrorism, but it is also not simply a peaceful “self-exertion,” as some suggest. In most Western contemporary popular writings on jihadist actions – particularly since 9/11 – the readers are exposed to an equation of Islamic jihad with terrorism. In this distorted context, jihad¹ and jihadism are consistently confused. In contrast, this book subscribes to the clear distinction between classical jihad and modern jihadism. Jihad combines qital/fighting with proselytization in wars for Islamic futuhat/expansion. This fight is subject to binding rules that also limit the targets. In contrast, contemporary jihadism is a pattern of the new irregular war waged as global jihad by those Islamists who subscribe to violence for fighting against the West and its believed Islamic allies. It is a war without rules. The distinction between jihad and jihadism pertains to the other basic distinction between Islam and Islamism. This is most crucial. To be sure, not all Islamists are jihadists. There are peaceful Islamists who believe in pursuing their goal within institutions. These are the institutional Islamists who reject jihadist terrorism. After these distinctions I hasten to add that it is not enlightening when – as is sometimes done, with misleading intent – some translate jihad as pure peaceful “self-exertion.” In fact, jihad² is also related to qital, which means physical fighting that includes the use of weapons. However, long before Clausewitz, the Qur’an made it obligatory on those Muslims fighting jihad-wars to honor prescribed rules during the qital, as will be shown in this chapter. It follows that classical jihad, unlike jihadism, is a regular war subjected to clear rules and limited targets; it does not allow ambush fighting and prohibits the killing of civilians in general and fellow-Muslims in particular. In short, a war without rules is strictly forbidden in the Qur’an. In the history of Islam, jihad stood always in the service of da’wa/proselytization and therefore it was and continues to be in conflict with pluralism and democratic peace. On these grounds the plea is presented to Islamic civilization to move forward from global jihad to democratic peace as a positive perspective for the twenty-first century.³ Professedly, this is the normative commitment of this book, which nevertheless is at pains not to confuse analysis with wishful thinking. I acknowledge the spread of the present understanding of jihad as jihadism and qualify this as a deadly virus which is also detrimental to the people of Islam.

In turning to the analysis of the Islamic concept of jihad, it is clear that it is equally based on both normative and real grounds, by which the scripture as well as historically practiced Islam are to be considered. On normative grounds, the concept of jihad is scriptural as it is derived from Islamic revelation. To orthodox scripturally minded Muslims, the Qur’anic revelation is the divine source of knowledge which includes the obligation to jihad. This is viewed as the ultimate source of an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction: The impact of the politicization of Islam on world politics as a context for Europe and Islam in the 21st century
• Part I The conflict within Islamic civilization between jihadism and democracy. Its pertinence to world politics and to the Islam diaspora in Europe: obstacles and solutions
• Part II Political Islam enters world politics: Global jihadism as an Islamist internationalism in its Sunni and Shi'ite varieties as a challenge to safe democracy and international security
• Part III Europe as a battlefield for the competing options: Islamization versus Europeanization resulting in Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam?
• Part IV Political Islam in a process of change: The shift from jihadist terror to Islamist governance: a moderation?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index