Islamist Politics in the Middle East

Movements and Change

Samer Shehata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136455360
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over three decades, Islamist politics, or political Islam, has been one of the most dynamic and contentious political forces in the Middle East. Although there is broad consensus on the importance of political Islam, there is far less agreement on its character, the reasons for Islamist's success, the role of Islamist movements in domestic and international affairs, or what these movements portend for the future.

This volume addresses a number of central questions in the study of Islamist politics in the Middle East through detailed case studies of some of the region's most important Islamist movements. Chapters by leading scholars in the field examine the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Morocco's Justice and Benevolence, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq and Islamist politics in Turkey and Iran. The topics addressed within this volume include social networks and social welfare provision, Islamist groups as opposition actors, Islamist electoral participation, the intersection of Islam and national liberation struggles, the role of religion in Islamist politics, and Islam and state politics in Iran, among other topics.

All of the contributing authors are specialists with deep knowledge of the subject matter who are committed to empirically based research. These scholars take Islamists seriously as modern, sophisticated, and strategic political players. Together, their work captures much of the diversity of Islamist politics in the region and will contribute to the scholarship on a topic that continues to be important for the Middle East and the world.

Part I
Islamist politics: theory and critique

1

ISLAM AND ISLAMIST POLITICS IN THE ARAB WORLD

Old theories and new facts?

François Burgat

The question of Islam as a political force is an essential question for our time and will be for many years to come. The first condition for treating it with a minimum of intelligence is that one not begin with hatred.

(Michel Foucault)¹

Who [then] will want to claim solidarity with throat-slitters, thieves and murderers, especially when we are dealing with people we identify – based on no other historical expectation – as “Islamic madmen,” enveloped and masked under the dishonored name of Islamism, an atavistic symbol of all Eastern fanaticisms, fully able to endow racist hatred with an indisputable alibi of ethical and lay legitimacy?

(Pierre Bourdieu)²

Each time a political system is impeded from letting true political dynamics circulate freely through its veins, each time its channels narrow to the point of no longer being able to absorb everything flowing through them, it prepares a bed for secret organizations and other clandestine groups. … Whenever it gives birth to all sorts of legal entities having no relation with the political, social or cultural reality of a country, when it gives legal existence to what does not exist in reality whereas what exists in reality is not recognized by law, when a political system tolerates such a dichotomy between the legal and the real, … we get a true schizophrenia that risks affecting all of society.

(Tareq Al-Bishri)³

In L’Islamisme au Maghreb, published in the mid-1980s, I proposed an explanatory matrix for Islamist mobilization movements in the Maghreb, insisting on the fact that they were grounded more in identity and politics than strictly in religion.⁴ This analysis was then used to look at and explain other Arab regions, from Cairo to Sana

a.⁵ Since then the international context has evolved profoundly,⁶ and a new generation of activists has begun to emerge. But the template proposed in L’Islamisme au Maghreb⁷ of an Islamist matrix – based first on identity and then giving way to a multiplicity of political means of expression that should be correlated with its context rather than with the religious dimension of its vocabulary – can, it would seem, be profitably brought to bear on the subject of Islamism today.

Thus, there remains a methodological necessity of dissociating two levels of study. The first has to do with the trans-social matrix of identity that in our perspective explains the mobilization achievements of the Islamic lexicon. The second is, against any culturalist temptation of the monist type, that of the return to the complexity of the political and the social. Thus, the observer of Islamism must patiently follow the multiple paths taken by an Islamist generation whose participants may use the same vocabulary, but whose means of expression are multiple and changing according to national contexts and political events. This patient examination should focus on three areas: national boundaries, the Arab–Israeli conflict (where two nationalisms confront each other), and, more widely, the international North–South arena.

Insisting on the diversity of national configurations, however, does have its limits. Just as trans-social interpretations give evidence of collective behaviors going beyond the limits of social groups, transnational interpretations are not necessarily out of place. From Morocco to Egypt, despite the diversity of national historical and political configurations, the pattern of Islamist growth as well as the radicalization of a fraction of this generation have crystallized through the effect of readily comparable factors. The elites, having used up their initial capital of nationalist or revolutionary resources, have gradually joined together in the mold of a quasi-institutional Arab norm where, with the sometimes passive and often active support of the West, repression tends to replace the effectiveness of electoral representation.

Once the interpretation of the Islamists’ real strategies has been constructed and documented, an approach to the phenomenon of Islamism cannot substitute for the study of the conditions that led to the production of this knowledge. Distortions are introduced into the Islamist field fairly systematically by the dominant media, by the European and American people who produce and transmit neo-conservative discourse, and by certain Arab figures of state as well as segments of the academic establishment.

History has placed the generation of Islamists at the center of challenging questions regarding dysfunctional aspects in the political system, particularly those that lead to the denial of electoral representation of those who find themselves on the wrong side of various relationships of domination. Islamists may confront promoters of the militarization of American oil diplomacy, artisans of Israeli expansionist strategy, or leaders of authoritarian Arab regimes who support the international order that protects them.

The difficulties encountered in imposing a rational interpretation in the West of this political “Other” can be explained by the fact that knowledge about Islamists is embedded in resistance movements against the world political order. The restrictive image that continues to prevail is thus the result of a complex process in which the emergence of a rival vocabulary – Islamic – seems first of all to give the West, whose personal vocabulary had for a long time been hegemonic, the feeling of losing the monopoly on expressing the universal. Western perception in general, and French perception in particular, of the internal dynamics of the Arab and Muslim world is therefore marked by a difficulty to conceive of cultural difference – or at least when this difference goes beyond the area of folklore, food, or aesthetics (think couscous, mint tea, and “Andalusian” art) – and deal with politics and, even more so, protest.

The critical rereading of my hypotheses articulated in the mid-1980s can logically be organized around two poles: continuity and change. The continuity, even the exacerbations, of tendencies noted in the 1980s and 1990s far outweighs the volume and strength of changes that have evolved.

The continuity of an “Islamic” assertiveness that relates more to identity than religion

The core of the thesis we would like to revisit in 2012 can be presented in a few statements. The repositioning by societies on the African and Eastern colonial periphery of Europe, after being expressed through political independence movements, was extended to the economic realm through nationalizations and then to the cultural and symbolic realm via the “re-Islamization” of the political discourse that is at the heart of the Islamist drive. Coming out of a long colonial period in politics as well as social structure, the mobilizing virtues of Islamism are due less to its sacred than to its endogenous dimension.

My central hypothesis is that the identity matrix found in the vocabulary of Islam explains its inclination to spill over the boundaries of social groups. By this token, Islamists can no more be merely those “left behind by development” than explanatory variables can be merely socioeconomic. From this point of view, that the endogenous Islamic lexicon is a religious one only partially determines the political behavior of a population; the use of an Islamic vocabulary therefore represents more an affirmation of identity than the promotion of a theocratic vision of the world.

The affirmation of “Muslimhood” that has contributed to an in-depth reorganization of the Arab political domain cannot be reduced to the emergence of one monolithic and static political ideology, adopted only by the supporters of a social machismo or revolutionary and sectarian violence. Re-Islamization in fact nourishes a complex process of reconnection with local areas that produce almost all the political ideologies in the symbolic, rather than normative, universe of Muslim culture.

The Islamists, far from being reduced to revolutionary guerrilla warfare, use a spectrum of modes of action in their politics. A large segment clearly aspires only to take its place within the parliamentary sphere, to the extent this possibility exists, thereby consecrating a space within political autonomy and stepping far outside the boundaries of the political mechanisms of theocracy.

An attentive examination of the social practices of people stigmatized as Islamists reveals that the reintroduction into the political vocabulary of markers of Muslim culture does not, a priori, compromise either the dynamics of social reform or the process of political liberalization. In fact, the social or political answers formulated using the Muslim vocabulary turn out to be dependent, in a very banal way, on the questions being asked – and the nature of those questions is conditional on the educational, social, and political environment of the questioners.

Islamic assertiveness may therefore condone conservative, patriarchal, and sectarian positions or bellicose strategies. But it can just as well participate in discrediting them and legitimizing reformist positions, such as the modernizing tendency to move beyond attachment to basic groups, the struggle against authoritarianism, and the assertion of individual and collective freedoms, including those for women. Just as it was possible in Europe to legitimize the principles of social justice and respect for minorities or women’s causes by reference to socialist, Christian, or simply humanist values, Islamist social and political leaders do so by using references borrowed from the broad spectrum of Muslim culture, including its religious references.

The “depoliticization” at the root of a radicalization that is more political than religious

The perpetration of political violence after the structural crisis of Palestine and the electoral thrust of Hamas now occurs in Iraq and other countries. Indeed, since the mid-2000s, the activities of armed transnational Al-Qaeda groups have spread to the Maghreb. After the murderous attacks in Morocco and Algeria in 2003 and the assassination of French tourists in southern Mauritania in April and December 2007, a single explanatory variable was brought to the fore: Islamic radicalization. To what extent has this interpretation been illuminating? From what point did it become, in the social sciences as well as in diplomacy, a decoy covering the exacting solutions needed to calm this region in a durable way?

In the Arab world, the political life of the last two decades has in fact been marked by a great number of parliamentary and presidential elections or referendums in which the common characteristic has not been the success or failure of opposition parties, whether Islamist or not, but rather the failure of elections to have the slightest effect on the distribution of power between the regimes and those that oppose them. Across all of North Africa, behind institutional façades ranging from the belief in monarchy by divine right in Morocco to the Libyan “state of the Masses,” to the secular states of Tunisia and Algeria, the men holding power – who have been in place for over 40 years in Libya (until 2011), almost 46 in Algeria, 29 in Egypt (until 2011), and 24 in Tunisia (until 2011) – have remained sheltered from the electoral moods of their opponents. “He who has managed to seize all the responsibilities has likewise succeeded in becoming perfectly irresponsible,”⁸ writes noted Egyptian intellectual Tareq Al-Bishri.

This striking formulation describes the political system of his country under the Mubarak regime and can in fact be extended to almost the entirety of the region. For the vox populi, the revolutionary slogans of the nationalist past (“by the people and for … the people”) have taken on an absurd tone; the elections organized “by” the head of state are done “for him” and serve less to designate those who have an opportunity to govern than those for whom power demands that a merely cosmetic pluralism be acted out. With the timid exception of Mauritania for a brief period, where presidential elections took place in a less artificial atmosphere and where military power gave way temporarily, what shows is not so much the failure of the opposition but rather the flagrant limits of these political systems. Until the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011, only the deposing of Habib Bourguiba in 1987, the death of Hassan II in 1999, or the quarrels among those at the top of the government in Algeria have managed to create a semblance of political alternation in the midst of an impressive amount of stability.

When exceptions occurred, such as in Algeria in 1991 and in Palestine in 2006, and the polling stations might have set in motion a real balance of political forces, their results were disavowed by the incumbents with the active support of the international community.⁹ Everywhere else the only impact made on electoral regulations has been of the cosmetic type, whether observers thought they were seeing an Islamist or oppositional triumph, as in Egypt in 2005, or a new defeat, as in Al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Islamist politics: theory and critique
• PART II Case studies: Islamist movements and politics in the Middle East
• Index