Political Islam, Justice and Governance

Mbaye Lo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319963273
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319963280
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that political Islam (represented by its moderate and militant forms) has failed to govern effectively or successfully due to its inability to reconcile its discursive understanding of Islam, centered on literal justice, with the dominant neo-liberal value of freedom. Consequently, Islamists' polities have largely been abject, often tragic failures in providing a viable collective life and sound governance. This argument is developed theoretically and supported through a set of case studies represented by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (under President Muhammad Morsi's tenure), Hassan Turabi's National Islamic Front in Sudan and The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It is ideal for audiences interested in Regional Politics, Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Mbaye LoPolitical Islam, Justice and GovernancePolitical Economy of Islamhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96328-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Justice Versus Freedom: The Dilemma of Political Islam

Mbaye Lo¹

(1)

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, International Comparative Studies and Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Mbaye Lo

End Abstract

Introduction

The US and its allies are engaged in two broad conflicts with groups associated with Islam: decades-long, often violent battle with militant Islamists, and a more passive fight against political Islam. If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State (IS) in Syria are the heart of the conflict with militant Islamists, its peripheral battlegrounds are in Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa. Militant Islam is a reactionary departure from the kind of political Islam that represents the peaceful application of Shari’a law to matters of governance. Militant Islam, to many scholars, is also another form of extremism within political Islam. Militant Islam is witnessed in the particularly extreme interpretations of jihad, Shari’a law, women’s status, and minority rights in Muslim-majority countries.

Political Islam, Justice and Governance offers a nuanced look at the nature of this conflict, arguing that there are two divergent visions of political culture: the Islamist justice project and the neo-liberal freedom agenda. Militant Islam draws on the “just-cause” principle to substantiate the implementation of its ideological philosophy, while the neo-liberal world, dominated by the US, brandishes the “defense of freedom” principle when marshaling its forces against militant Islam. A core task of this book is to explore how this difference exhibits itself loudly in the political thinking and ideological language of militant Islam, and how it manifests itself in the governance of Islamist parties when they ascend to power, as witnessed most recently in Egypt and the Sudan. In the case of Sudan’s Islamists and Morsi’s short-lived rule in Egypt, the consequences of this divergence are noticeable in the challenges these regimes faced in reconciling their rhetoric of justice with the implementation of government policy. Islamist regimes failed to govern effectively and successfully due to their inability to reconcile the global framework of neo-liberalism with their ideological beliefs in Islamic literal justice.

Islamist regimes found that their political agendas did not fit well in a global context dominated by neo-liberal ideologies. Neo-liberal ideologies and values magnify individuals and human rights and are largely indifferent to morality and religious values. This normative doctrine upholds individual freedom and its associated “pursuit of happiness,” leaving religious authorities with greatly diminished roles. Individual freedom is an end in itself.¹ In the words of Steven Weinberg, “Moral or aesthetic statements are simply not of the sort which it is appropriate to call true or false,” since we are “inventing values for ourselves as we go along.”² Political Islam seems to accept neo-liberal strategies of governance while rejecting its values of individual autonomy, civil liberty, and untamed freedom.

In this vein, political Islam’s supreme value of absolute justice is rendered vulnerable, and its advocates often run into unexpected crises of political relevance. However, it is worth noting that the adoption of Islam by various societies across the globe has produced a variety of ways of interpreting the faith. Despite these differences, there appears to be a constant in Muslim societies: the value of justice. It is also a defining value for modern militant groups claiming the mantle of Islam.

Terms and Definitions

Militant Islam is a reactionary departure from the kind of political Islam that calls for the peaceful application of Shari’a law to governance.³ However, the term militant Islam has its detractors, as do other terms that are used to identify groups that use violence in the name of Islam. Terms such as jihadists, Islamic extremists, Islamic terrorists, and Jihadi-Salafists are problematic in their assumptions of associational relationship: the acts and actions of these groups are categorized as belligerent terrorism, while the actors are doing so in the name of the Muslim faith. This complicates the urgent need to give names to these Muslim actors.⁴ Additionally, naming is also political: to name a thing is to control it. Humans often hide messages with names that do not bear a deep connection to what or whom they claim to represent. However, as academics, we must name things to make them measurable and comprehensible. In this book, I use “militant Islam” in the tradition of the great scholar John Hope Franklin’s appropriation of the idea of “militancy” to characterize the belligerency of Southerners in antebellum America. In choosing the name Militant South, Franklin was describing “the fighting spirit” ubiquitous in the South as a result of perceived threats—imagined and real—in the world around them.⁵ The term “militant Islam” can serve a similar purpose in our frame of analysis, neutrally describing a category of Muslims who display a combative character in the service of their “religious” cause.

Arguments and Questions

The main argument of this book is that political Islam (represented by its moderate and militant forms) has failed to govern effectively or successfully due to its inability to reconcile its discursive understanding of Islam, centered on literal justice, with the dominant neo-liberal value of freedom. Consequently, their polities have largely been abject, often tragic failures in providing a viable collective life and sound governance. This argument is developed theoretically and supported through a set of case studies.

The questions raised in the case studies of militant and moderate political Islam are simple: Is the prevailing neo-liberal democracy, with its orientation toward individual rights and liberties, compatible with the Islamists’ emphasis on the kind of justice that subsumes human freedom and choice? Does the literal obsession with justice, over and above political freedom and civil liberties, require a different kind of political order than that of a liberal democracy?

The parties involved in this conflict address these questions in different ways. The ethos of many militant Islamists includes an emphasis on an ongoing conflict with the US and its allies. Militant Islamists often promote the idea of “vigilante justice” in describing the nature of the conflict with the West and in assuming governance of their “conquered” territories. Unlike moderate political Islam, militant Islamists claim a “just war” with the West. Its attacks on the US are characterized as “ghazwah” (incursion into the enemy land), a classical term associated with traditional Islamic war practices. The wars fought by the Prophet Muhammad are historically known as Maghaazi, plural of ghazwah, another form of prophetic jihad.⁶ Contemporary militant Islamic scholarship on jihad is prolific, intense, and constantly evolving. It has moved beyond earlier, binary formulations in which the enemies were the US and “the Zionist-Crusader alliance” (to quote bin Laden’s 1998 al-Qaeda Manifesto),⁷ and past the identification of “near enemies” (Muslim allies of the US) and their addition to its category of enemies in 2005, to a current state of full-fledged war. According to Abu Abdullah Al-Muhajir, a leading theologian of militant Islam, Islam “does not distinguish between civilians and military-combatants, but between a Muslim and an infidel. A Muslim’s blood is infallible whatever work or place he occupies, and the infidel’s blood is permissible whatever work or place he occupies.”⁸ Muslim bystanders who refuse to join the call of jihad, he said, are also included in the infidel category.

The US and its allies, perhaps covertly, confess to the actualities of the conflict with militant Islam with “politically correct” language reflecting democracies’ distaste for violence. The US coined the term the “global war on terror” under President George Bush and the term “War on Radical Islamic Terrorism” under President Trump .

While the events of 9/11 generated a moral justification for the US to name the conflict a “war on terror,” there was no equally justified political motive for major European countries to do the same. Western Europe has the largest Muslim population on the continent, making up roughly 5% of the EU’s population of 425 million. The language of “war” isn’t used so much as language describing a conflict with immigrants, a conflict largely manifested as identity politics.⁹ In Europe, the terms “Muslim” and “immigrant” have become increasingly interchangeable.¹⁰

Xenophobic sentiments in Europe have disproportionately affected Muslim communities, where fear of religious diversity has motivated the social stigmatization of Muslims. For instance, in France, some describe a “crisis” of Muslim integration into French society. Muslims’ Islamic practices are described in terms of “threats to French culture” and “polygamy.” Other non-Christian religions are not exempt. In 2004, a law was enacted banning all “ostentatious religious signs” from public schools, including the wearing of the Jewish yarmulke and the Sikh turban, in addition to the Muslim headscarf. This was extended in 2010 to include face veils in public places,¹¹ and a burkini ban became the French political fashion in 2016 and 2017. In Germany, the “crisis” manifests itself in the growing anti-Islam protests led by the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA). In Great Britain, where Muslims are mostly of South Asian background, what is politically known as the 7/7 London bombing is widely considered by the British to be their 9/11. The 2005 Danish cartoon controversy and its worldwide Muslim reactions, as well as the subsequent prohibition of minaret construction in the Netherlands, similarly epitomize the identity politics of the conflict, even in this historically immigrant-friendly nation.¹²

The ramifications of 9/11 have extended beyond the more explicit military “war on terror” to a heightened sense of irreconcilable ideological difference between Western liberal values and the Islamist-inspired justice project. This perceived difference has continued to pervade US domestic politics and policies. It was echoed in the Ground Zero mosque debate, pastor Terry Jones’ labeling of the Quran as a book that promotes “terror,” popular belief in President Barack Obama’s hidden Islamic faith, and home-grown terrorism policies implemented in mosques around New York City,¹³ and then the rise of President Trump’s immigration policies against some Muslim-majority countries. However, nowhere in this US domestic debate is the fear of Islam’s onslaught on freedom more evident than in the issue of Shari’a. In a country where Muslims make up less than 1% of the population, between 2011 and 2012, about 78 “anti-Shari’a” bills or amendments were introduced in the legislatures of 29 states, designed to vilify Muslim religious practices.¹⁴ Thus, it was not unexpected when Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, declared, “I believe Shari’a is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”¹⁵ In all these cases, the continuation of the “Muslim problem” is supposedly rooted in Islam’s inability to appreciate and cherish “liberal” freedom. It is categorically true to note that this notion of “freedom” is evaluative and has been generally constructed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Justice Versus Freedom: The Dilemma of Political Islam
• 2. From Liberal Freedom to Neo-liberal Inequality: The History of the Freedom Agenda
• 3. Freedom in Islamic Political Thought and Justice and Its Islamist Agents
• 4. From Political Islam to Militant Islam: The Pursuit of Justice
• 5. The Collapse of the Egyptian Revolution: Liberal Freedom Versus Islamist Justice
• 6. The Islamic State: The Rise of Vigilante Justice
• 7. Turabi’s Islamic Project: From the Rhetoric of Freedom to the Politics of Tamkeen
• 8. Morsi’s Dilemma: The Shifting Sands Between Shar’iyyah and Shari’a
• 9. Conclusions: Beyond Justice and Freedom!
• Back Matter