Islamism and the West

From "Cultural Attack" to "Missionary Migrant"

Uriya Shavit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134704088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Offering a unique analysis of Islamist ideology, Islamism and the West attempts to explain how- and why-mainstream Islamist leaders have, for the past century, developed and canonized theories which depict theWest as engaged in a sophisticated conspiracy to undermine Muslim identity by cultural means, while morallycollapsing and yearning for the spiritual salvation brought by Muslim migrants.

This book demonstrates how seemingly triumphalist Islamist writings served, in fact, to legitimize pragmatic concessions undertaken by Islamists – from cooperating with regimes allied with the West, to encouraging Muslim migration to Christian lands. Following the Arab Spring, and with Islamism becoming a dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, Islamism and the West is an essential reading for the understanding of a region in transition

Providing new insights on familiar concepts including 'cultural imperialism,' 'liberal democracy,' and 'civilisational decline,' this book will be of use to students of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Political Science, Migration Studies and Cultural Studies.

1	Second-generation Islamism in the path of pragmatic idealism

Just as the visitor to a museum can identify paintings belonging to the same school, so can the reader of second-generation mainstream Islamists identify common ideological brushstrokes, i.e. similar approaches to the same principal issues. While not obscuring the writers’ individual fingerprints, these common approaches create unity of style and purpose, to the point that on certain issues the publications of some authors can easily be confused with those of others. This unity results from the existence of a shared, confirmed canon with which all mainstream second-generation Islamists engaged, directly or indirectly, as well as from similar sets of historical conditions.

The biographies of the more prolific and influential among second-generation Arab Islamist intellectuals generate an “ideal type”: this person – a man – was born into a devout family in a small village; as a schoolboy or during his university years, he embraced notions articulated by first-generation Islamists, first and foremost by Hasan al-Banna: that the problem of Muslim societies is neglect of Islam’s comprehensiveness, that the solution is re-embracing it as a system regulating all aspects of life, and that the way to encourage this is to galvanize a bottom-up socio-political revolution through peaceful means. Faced with his movement’s failures to capture power, the mainstream second-generation Islamist did not begin doubting the validity of his creed, and rejected the temptation to pursue his agenda using violence against his homeland’s regime. He discovered that to remain free, he had to refrain from subversive activity in the politics of his country of origin or his receiving country in exile. His writings and activities transitioned from the local to the pan-Islamic, and from the concrete to the more abstract. To use Roy’s definition, the second-generation Islamist shifted from political revolutionary activism to puritanical, populist, and conservative advocacy¹ and became, to use Dekmejian’s definition, a “gradualist.”² His continuation of Hasan al-Banna’s legacy was compromised and transformed by his inability to do what al-Banna did: actively mobilize the people of his country against their regime. Expanding on the Islamist creed as already developed in the first half of the twentieth century, he formulated specific interpretations of Muslim–Western relations in a way that legitimized both his basic beliefs and the practical concessions he had made.

Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), the schoolteacher who established the Muslim Brothers (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) in 1928, embodied the experience of a generation of young Egyptians born to traditional, religious families, who migrated from villages to cities at a time when the “golden age” of Egyptian liberalism was as its peak, and developed a distaste for the new reality they encountered. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire marked the termination of the last entity that spoke in the name of a religious-political Muslim nation, or umma. More than in other Muslim countries, in Egypt, still largely administered in accordance with British imperial interests, Islam was losing ground as the main instrument organizing the social, cultural, and legal dimensions of life. Although Egypt gained formal independence in 1922, British political and cultural influence remained strong. The main political forces in the country were the Wafd and the Liberal Constitutionalist parties, both advocating a national-territorial Egyptian identity. In 1925, an al-Azhar scholar, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, caused a storm when he suggested that Muhammad was not a political leader and that Islam has no specific doctrine of government.³ In 1928, Salama Musa, a Copt and founder of Egypt’s Socialist Party, declared that the civilization of the future is based on science and that religion should be a personal matter.⁴ The author and literary critic Taha Hussein proposed in 1926 that jahili literature is in fact Islamic;⁵ in 1938, he suggested that Egypt is historically part of European civilization.⁶ These ideas did not win the hearts of a majority of Egyptians, and some were met with fierce opposition. To al-Banna, who moved to Cairo in 1924, such notions suggested that the enemy needed to be exposed from within. At the heart of his evolution as a political-religious thinker was his impression that the elites of his generation had been taken captive by the West, not only militarily but also culturally, and in the process had damaged the Islamic essence of his country.

Al-Banna’s agenda, formulated in a number of articles as well as other writings and speeches he gave from the early 1930s until his assassination in 1949, had three main objectives: to reinstate Islam as a system comprising and regulating all aspects of life, including the political, legal, cultural, and financial; to reconstitute the Muslim nation, or umma, as a viable unified political entity with a universal mission; and to put an end to Western occupation of Muslim soil.⁷

The ideas presented by al-Banna were utopian and revolutionary. In his mind, there had once existed a perfected time in history. For Muslim societies of his era to be healed from their backwardness, dependence, and injustices, they must reject false and frozen interpretations of Islam as well as secular, Western-imported ideologies and habits, whether in the form of legislations against the commands of Allah or unacceptable social behavior, and re-embrace the ways of the early Muslims by taking the Quran and the Prophetic examples as their guide. Restoration of that kind necessitated, according to al-Banna, complete socio-political upheaval. It could not be compromised, because it represented God’s idea of how society should be governed; for the same reason, it could not be defeated.

Al-Banna’s ideas found favor among some Egyptians, and others elsewhere in the Arab world, in part because they presented a clear, simple manual for creating a new social order that corresponded well with religious sentiments as well as with resentment of foreign domination. Yet the reason for the massive appeal and durability of his agenda was not its simplicity, but the sophistication with which he integrated modern notions in his call for the reinstating of a utopian myth. A generation torn between modernity and tradition, between the temptations of newly encountered Westernizing cities and village life left behind, was told by al-Banna – the product of a similar experience – that one must not have to come at the expense of the other.

The integration of modern concepts into Islamic thought featured three main dimensions. First, drawing on the modernist-apologetic tradition of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida,⁸ al-Banna’s paramount mentor on Islamic-Western relations, the Brothers’ founder did not seek an Islamic withdrawal from all that is Western; instead, he Islamized Western concepts, institutions, and innovations which he deemed useful for the needs of the Muslim nation by giving them an Islamic theological or historical context. Al-Banna accepted the early modernists’ complex spectrum, in which Muslim societies represent, in some respects, those who are least faithful to true Islam, Western societies represent a partial loyalty to some aspects of true Islam, and Muslim societies to-be-revolutionized represent a perfected ideal. Like the early modernists, he argued that the origins of modern sciences, technology, administration, and government lie in Islam, both historically (the European Enlightenment resulted from interactions with Islam)⁹ and theologically (the Quran, if interpreted correctly, testifies to, or at least is compatible with, all modern discoveries and innovations).¹⁰ Thus, Western achievements are nothing but a twisted, godless variation of true Islam; in studying them and carefully adjusting them to the teachings of Islam, Muslims do not imitate their rival civilization but take back what is theirs. In this sense, while it is not incorrect to label al-Banna’s creed “fundamentalist,”¹¹ it is analytically misleading. Unlike American fundamentalism, from which the term originates, the Brothers’ fundamentalism was not intended to denounce modern science when incompatible with literal interpretations of revelations, but exactly the opposite: to justify the integration of modern concepts by submitting them to a fresh and corrected reading of the sacred texts.¹²

Second, while al-Banna considered a united religious-political Muslim nation, led by a Khalifa, to be his ultimate goal, he did not ignore a reality of territorial nation-states and pan-Egyptian and pan-Arab patriotic sentiments, but legitimized them as long as the leaders of these nations and movements were governed by religious teachings and aimed for the resurrection of the Muslim nation as an ultimate goal. His plan was a gradualist rather than a totalistic one: first Egypt would be revolutionized, then the rest of the Muslim world.¹³

Third, while al-Banna formed his vision on his interpretations of sacred texts, he rejected the position of patiently waiting for a divine intervention that would set things right. Instead, he advocated a gradual, bottom-up, educational mission that would prepare Muslim hearts for revolutionizing society; established disciplined, vertical political and social organizations; and demanded that the devout actively promote an Islamic revolution by taking the message from the mosques to the public sphere.¹⁴

This emphasis on the power of the masses reflected an understanding that for his agenda to be truly implemented, it must be the result of a grassroots social transformation, rather than a top-down takeover. Al-Banna was not a pacifist. While the movement he established focused on non-violent mobilization of the masses, by the time of his death, the Brothers already operated an armed wing, the secret apparatus (al-jihaz al-sirri).¹⁵ Yet in theorizing on the issue of armed revolution, he cautioned against a careless attempt at overthrowing the government, and legitimized a violent takeover only as a last resort and only when the Brothers would be firmly united and strong in faith.¹⁶

By the time of his assassination, al-Banna had managed to mobilize masses into his organization, in particular young, urbanized, educated Egyptians who shared his conservative background and resented, as he did, the Western impact on their country. Branches of his movement surfaced in a number of Arab states. However, his political legacy is mixed. Though he transformed the Brothers into a large oppositionist group, he did not recruit sufficient support to capture power. In 1952, the Brothers’ hope to Islamize the Free Officers’ revolution was shattered, and in 1954 Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasser led a campaign to crush them; many of the movement’s leaders were jailed and several were killed. In Syria during the 1950s, the Brothers were given a fair chance in several election campaigns, but they did not come close to winning a majority of the popular vote. Elsewhere in the Arab world, branches of the movement did not develop into strong alternatives to conservative regimes. Thus, within less than a decade of al-Banna’s death, it became clear that his methods had failed to bring about the desired revolution. Some leaders of the movement were imprisoned; some were forced to maintain a lower profile; and some cooperated with anti-Islamist political orders.

One result of the Brothers’ failure to capture power was a split within the movement and the evolution of a jihadi-Qutbist offshoot. During the 1940s and the early 1950s, Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an educator and literary critic, published numerous works that became, and remained, part of the mainstream Islamist canon. Yet it was his final published work, Milestones, written after he had spent a decade in brutal imprisonment under Nasser’s orders, which offered a different brand of Islamism. In Milestones Qutb championed the dichotomy (originated by Abu A‘la al-Mawdudi and introduced to Arab readers by his student Abu Hasan al-Nadwi) that all societies that do not apply Islamic law to the letter are jahili (ignorant, pre-Islamic), and called for a pioneering vanguard to retreat from the corruption of contemporary Muslim societies and lay the foundations for a struggle, armed if necessary, that would enforce Allah’s word upon the earth.¹⁷ In invoking takfir, or excommunication, against secular Muslim regimes, he blurred any distinction between Muslim states and Western occupiers, and coupled this idea with the notion that physical obstacles on the part of anti-revolutionaries must be answered by physical force on the part of the Islamic vanguard. Qutb paved the way for sidelining the long-held taboo of fitna, or civil war among Muslims, and legitimizing and prioritizing armed struggle against Arab regimes. His emphasis on the merit of a vanguard signified a shift toward elitism and away from al-Banna’s devotion to mass mobilization. Following Nasser’s crackdown on the Brothers in 1965 and the failure of Islamist movements elsewhere to advance their goals via electoral processes, some Islamists drew on Qutb’s Milestones to castigate Arab governments as un-Islamic and to advocate for a revolution via violent means. Different interpretations of Qutb were applied. One Islamist Egyptian group that rose in the 1970s, al-Takfir wal-Hijra (excommunication and migration), emphasized Qutb’s idea of the retreating vanguard; it was crushed by the late 1970s, after committing a series of attacks against Cairo nightclubs and murdering a kidnapped former government minister, Hussein al-Dhabi.¹⁸ Another Egyptian group, The Jihad Organization, sought to infiltrate the regime and revolutionize it from within; it was suppressed after a member assassinated President al-Sadat in 1981. From the mid-1970s, the Syrian Brothers adopted a model of massive armed struggle; they were crushed in 1982, when several thousand of their affiliates were massacred by al-Assad’s regime in Hama.

While Qutbism appealed to some frustrated activists, it remained on the fringes of Islamism, with the exceptions of Syria in the 1970s and 1980s and Algeria in the 1990s. A signifier of mainstream second-generation Islamist thinkers was their rejection of the Qutbist impulse to attempt to violently overthrow governments that do not apply Islam to the letter, and their continuous adherence to al-Banna’s concept of grassroots, peaceful revolution. In rejecting the Qutbist zeal for takfir and taking up arms, mainstream Islamist intellectuals silently legitimized a reality of political marginalization and favored long-term social, educational, and political activities over immediate revolutionary efforts. This decision did not constitute, in principle, a rejection of violence as a political instrument; rather, as al-Banna did, second-generation mainstream Islamists accepted the use of force as a last resort while arguing for the importance of strategic realism and agreed-upon action. Their conviction was endorsed by the tragic ending of most Qutbist-oriented challenges. They argued that patience must be exercised, hasty measures must be avoided, and the merit of any action must be evaluated against the harm it may inflict.¹⁹

Mainstream second-generation Islamist intellectuals shared concerns and objectives similar to al-Banna’s: a belief in reinstating Islam as an all-encompassing system, in resurrecting the umma and in opposing Western physical and cultural domination of Muslim lands, as well as a conviction that massive educational and social operations are the means to bring about the desired revolution. Yet one crucial aspect separated al-Banna from the most vocal and most prolific among the intellectuals who followed in his footsteps. The founder of the Muslim Brothers was, until his last day, the ideological as well as political leader of the movement in a specific, national-level political field. He established a universal creed for Islamic revival while actively orchestrating the social, educational, and political-organizational operations of the Brothers in Egypt. The leading intellectuals who continued his legacy in the Islamist mainstream, almost all without exception, neglected at one point or another to directly involve themselves in efforts to revolutionize the non-Islamist political orders of their homelands or receiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Second-generation Islamism in the path of pragmatic idealism
• 2. Disco is the new crusader: roots and systemization of the “cultural attack”
• 3. Do cultures possess guns? Contextualizing and debating the “cultural attack”
• 4. The decline of the West: predicting the collapse of a godless civilization
• 5. From nadir to triumph: constructing the Muslim migrant as a missionary
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index