Islamism

Contested Perspectives on Political Islam

Richard C. Martin, Abbas Barzegar, Richard C. Martin, Abbas Barzegar

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804773355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

As America struggles to understand Islam and Muslims on the world stage, one concept in particular dominates public discourse: Islamism. References to Islamism and Islamists abound in the media, in think tanks, and in the general study of Islam, but opinions vary on the differences of degree and kind among those labeled Islamists. This book debates what exactly is said when we use this contentious term in discussing Muslim religion, tradition, and social conflict.

Two lead essays offer differing viewpoints: Donald K. Emmerson argues that Islamism is a useful term for a range of Muslim reform movements—very few of which advocate violence—while Daniel M. Varisco counters that the public specter of violence and terrorism by Islamists too often infects the public perceptions of Islam more generally. Twelve commentaries, written by Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals, enrich the debate with differing insights and perspectives.

Part 1

OPENING POSITIONS

INCLUSIVE ISLAMISM: THE UTILITY OF DIVERSITY

Donald K. Emmerson

The most beautiful names belong to Allah: invoke Him by them. Qur’an 7:180

—Seen on a poster at the Jamil Mosque, California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA, November 20, 2004¹

Islam is the most hated word in the country at this point.

—Edwin Bakker, a terrorism expert at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, quoted a week after the 2 November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, apparently by a Muslim extremist²

I acted purely in the name of Islam.

—Mohammed Bouyeri, speaking to the Dutch court that sentenced him in July 2005 to life in prison for killing van Gogh³

Islamists are Muslims who are committed to public action to implement what they regard as an Islamic agenda. Islamism is a commitment to, and the content of, that agenda.

—James Piscatori, a scholar of Islam, as slightly amended and extended for use in this essay (below)

IN THESE POST-9/11 TIMES, how should we—English-speaking students, scholars, journalists, policy makers, and interested citizens—talk about Islam, about Muslims, and about violence in relation to Islam and Muslims? What words should we use? Why? Why not?

SPEAKING OF ELEPHANTS

Language tells us and others what we are talking about. But as they travel around the world through usage, words acquire baggage—connotations, implications, valuations. When we choose to use a word or phrase, its luggage comes along.

Such accompaniments are mostly unheard or unseen. Consider the phrase the global war on terror.⁴ It is about what it does not name. Its five words include neither Muslims nor Islam. Yet the global war on terror would not have existed, in discourse or in practice, had certain self-described Muslims not engaged in violence justified (by them) with reference to Islam. To the extent that the phrase calls to mind what it omits, the effect is like hearing someone say, “Don’t think of an elephant!” One can hardly think of anything else.

In Don’t Think of an Elephant! George Lakoff tells his readers that they can oppose “right-wing ideologues” more effectively by choosing words and phrases that favor a “progressive” agenda. Lakoff ’s words are also luggage-laden, but to him that is not only unavoidable; it is also desirable. He wants to replace conservative language with words that carry liberal baggage—to defeat one builtin bias by popularizing another. The book ends by advising those who would take up his cause to do four things: to “show respect” toward opponents; to “respond by reframing” subjects in “progressive” terms; to “think and talk at the level of values”; and to “say what you believe.”⁵

Transposed into a discussion of Islam, Muslims, and violence, Lakoff’s recipe could be perverse. Just how, in such a conversation, would a secular or Christian speaker show respect for his or her Muslim listeners by reframing the topic in secular or Christian terms, talking about secular or Christian values, and saying exactly what she or he really thinks? Depending on what the speaker’s Muslim audience believes, Lakoff’s fourth counsel, far from winning hearts and minds, could harden them instead—as President George W. Bush did when he called the war on terrorism a “crusade.”⁶ Conversely, obeying Lakoff’s first rule—showing respect—could tempt the speaker to violate the other three: by framing the subject along “Muslim” lines; by thinking and talking about “Islamist” values; and by shunning candor for the sake of rapport.

What price respect? What price not giving offense? What about respect for the facts, however elusive and open to interpretation these may be? A heart or a mind won over on false pretenses may be a false victory—based on deception, unlikely to last.

This book is not a prescription for replacing one set of partisan word-baggage with an opposing set that is no less partisan than the first. It is a discussion in search of language whose semantic weight—denotations and connotations— can balance two potentially contrary objectives: veracity and regard. Central to the search, in my view, is how poorly or well two increasingly common words, Islamism and Islamist, facilitate a discourse on Islam, Muslims, and violence that is both critical and constructive.

In this chapter I define and recommend Islamism and Islamist as helpful terms in such discourse. But words alone cannot protect their users from making errors or giving offense. In contrast to Lakoff ’s purpose, mine is less to endorse a particular vocabulary than to illuminate the larger contexts in which word choices take place. Awareness of these wider implications and repercussions can, I hope, serve the goal of free but fair discussion beyond the choice of any single word. I save the terms Islamism and Islamist for last so that, in reviewing them, I can refer back to these larger themes.

ISLAM, MUSLIMS, AND VIOLENCE

I do not know whether, in 2004, Islam really was the most hated word in the Netherlands, as Edwin Bakker claims in this essay’s second epigraph. But we would probably have to ransack history back to the Crusades to find a time when Muslims, and therefore Islam, were in Western eyes more closely identified with violence than they are now.

As the Crusades remind us, juxtapositions of Islam and violence long predate Al Qaeda’s attacks on America in 2001. But even an incomplete map of the phenomenon, dating only from the Twin Towers’ fall, yields dozens of sites of carnage in a swath running from North America to Western Europe, down through North, West, and East Africa, up through the Middle East, and on through South and Southeast Asia.

For an analyst who empathizes with the plight of many Muslims, this is painful cartography. It comes uncomfortably close to illustrating Samuel Huntington’s (in)famous remark that “Islam has bloody borders.”⁷ It risks suggesting that all this violence is the fault of Islam, or at any rate of Muslims—a monolithic accusation belied by the great diversity of causes and reasons underlying all these incidents.

Apples and oranges are being lumped together: terrorist suicides blowing themselves up to kill non-Muslims but often killing Muslims as well; Muslims attacking non-Muslims who may or may not have attacked them “first” (a term that means less and less the longer the chain of reprisals goes on); violence between Muslims, as in the Iran-Iraq war, the massacres in Darfur (Sudan), or the Sunni-Shii bloodshed in Pakistan and Iraq; and the burning of cars by Muslims or people of Muslim origin in the riots that swept the gritty, ghetto-like outskirts of French cities in November 2005. It makes no sense to impute a religious motivation to any act of violence that anyone who happens to be a Muslim might commit. Disconcerting in Islam-focused views of violence committed by Muslims is the typical omission of arguably secular concerns—oppression, injustice, invasion, occupation, displacement, alienation, and Israeli-American complicity in or indifference toward these conditions, whether real or alleged.

Unfairly or not, Islam has been and continues to be linked to violence in Western media. On November 6, 2004, for example, the New York Times ran an item entitled “Dutch Charge 7 Muslim Men in Killing of Critic of Islam.” Reading it led me to wonder how many other stories about violence in that same issue involved Muslims. Of the twenty-two news items under the pageheading “International,” fourteen mentioned violence or the threat of violence. In eleven of these fourteen reports—78.6 percent—the violence involved Muslims. Muslims were the sole (actual or feared) perpetrators in two of these eleven items; in the other nine they were both perpetrators and victims.⁸

In a poll conducted a month earlier, Americans were asked what came to their minds when they heard the word Muslim. Most—67 percent—responded neutrally. But 32 percent made negative remarks, and a mere 2 percent responded favorably. More than a fourth of the respondents agreed with statements such as “the Muslim religion teaches violence and hatred,” “Muslims teach their children to hate,” and “Muslims value life less than other people.”⁹ Further research would probably yield comparable or even more disturbing evidence from at least some other Western societies. And if a perceived “clash of civilizations” really is under way and has a long way to go, these figures could in future seem small.

How might a more careful use of language slow the growth of false stereotypes and attendant prejudice?

CONTEXTUALIZATION

Routinely in life people sacrifice accuracy for consideration. In a delicate conversation between two parties, one may choose to be tactful rather than factual to avoid triggering the other’s anger and thus possibly ending the conversation. Other things being equal, however, the higher the ratio of tact to fact, the greater the risk that the parties engaged in such a conversation will debase even its diplomatic value by ignoring real differences between them. Conversely, in such an exchange, if one side insists from the outset on comprehensive accuracy—no euphemisms, no omissions—the conversation may be broken off soon after it begins.

Such dilemmas are routine in diplomacy. Negotiation lies at the heart of that occupation. But that is hardly true of scholarship. Professionally inclined to notice the negotiability of truth in the discourses of others, academics rarely admit to practicing such selectivity in what they themselves write and say. From the viewpoint of a scholar who prizes accuracy, diplomacy resembles self-censorship.

That said, most diplomats and scholars could probably agree that language meant to slow—ideally to reverse—the growth of false stereotypes and attendant prejudice should both rest on facts and not give offense.¹⁰ In Diagram 1, this combination is called contextualization.

A persisting caricature of Muslims occurs when they are depicted as violent, that is, when a propensity toward violence is imputed, in effect, to all of them. Opposing that stereotype means placing the small number of Muslims who do engage in violence in the context of the overwhelming majority who do not. A further distortion occurs when violence by Muslims is said to be motivated solely by their religion. Countering that assertion, too, calls for contextualization: accurately explaining violence by Muslims with reference to non-religious as well as religious conditions, concerns, and motivations. The point in both instances is factually to refute the fallacy of composition whereby only one part or one aspect of something is made to represent or explain the whole.

Diagram 1. Four ways of juxtaposing Islam, Muslims, and violence—contextualization, denial, candor, and stigmatization

This strategy will not persuade everyone. Distinctions can appear invidious. The case for differentiating Muslims who are violent from those who are not may be seen as an effort to split and weaken the ranks of the faithful. Some Muslims may wish to defend the unity of their religious community (umma in Arabic) against any separation of “good” from “bad” believers, even if the distinction is drawn only to show how few the latter are. Some Muslims may justify violence by co-believers against the “enemies of Islam” as self-defense, not just in religious terms, but historically, socioeconomically, and ethically as well. Arguably, in their eyes, the statements in the upper-left box in Diagram 1, by omitting the reasons for violence, do not contextualize it enough. Some of these critics may even feel insulted by the idea that the violent vanguard is so small a minority of all Muslims, as if their laudable struggle were being dismissed.

Yet no analysis is possible without distinctions of some sort. Divide-andrule imperialists may invent, broadcast, and manipulate a dichotomy to nefarious ends, but that does not prove the dichotomy itself to be intrinsically deadly. As for suppressing a distinction—ruling it out of acceptable discourse—that may indeed increase the chance of its being misused.

The presumption that nonviolent Muslims are “good” and...