Islamism in the Modern World

A Historical Approach

W. J. Berridge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781474272827
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474272841
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Islamism in the Modern World is an accessible, student-oriented introduction to the debates surrounding the historic origins of contemporary Islamism. It explores controversies surrounding contemporary Islamists' indebtedness to various European and Islamic thinkers, as well situating debates concerning the relationship between political Islam, violence and democracy in an historic context.

W. J. Berridge explores the continuities, discontinuities, and the impacts of long term social, economic and political change on the nature of Islamism as an ideology. Readers are encouraged to subject the claims of current commentators to the scrutiny of historical analysis, exploring the complexities of the relationship between Islamist and European thinkers – whether classical, Renaissance or modern liberal, fascist or Marxist. The book understands political Islam in the longue durèe, comparing medieval, early modern and modern Islamist thinkers, as well as discussing the compatibility of Islamism – and, indeed, Islam itself – with supposedly 'Western' values such as democracy, feminism, and human rights.

Each chapter contains a short bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources, as well as excerpts from key sources and a glossary of Arabic terms, making this the ideal introduction to the subject for history students.

1

Introduction: Debates and terminology

It is often commented, with a fair degree of accuracy, that Islamist ideology presents an ahistoric view of society, offering those who adhere to it the choice between living in a pristine utopia modelled on seventh-century Mecca and Medina or miring themselves in the godless present, and ignoring everything in between. Yet, its Western critics are often equally ahistoric in their analysis of it, seeing Islamism as the timeless ‘other’ of a world divided between secularism and religion, authoritarianism and democracy, liberalism and totalitarianism – between the West and Islam. Nevertheless, since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, Islamism has had its own history. Why should we study this history? It is because we need to understand the social and political contexts in which Islamist ideology has evolved and the forces that have shaped it. We need to learn how to read the most prominent Islamist texts – such as Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, a key reading for contemporary militants – as we read other historical sources, as products of the sociopolitical environment in which they were written. We need to learn that Islamist ideology is not an undifferentiated whole. The methods and rhetoric of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s are very different from those of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1930s or the Jama’at-i-Islami in Pakistan in the 1950s.

In emphasizing the historicity of Islamism, I am not seeking to impose (or indeed to reject) the argument that each movement has been defined more by the particular historic and geographical context that it emerged in than by a set of ‘common denominators’ that constitute the essence of Islamist ideology as a whole. From one viewpoint, Islamist ideology, while capable of adapting to a degree in each new era, is nevertheless underpinned by a set of core traits that include a monolithic and exclusivist view of society, as well as the desire for world domination.¹ Other accounts propose that such traits have never been core elements of Islamist ideology but are specific to historical eras in which totalitarian worldviews flourished and Islamism was radicalized by colonial and postcolonial authoritarianism. This brings us right to the core of contemporary debates about whether there can be a ‘moderate’ Islamism. As this volume is intended primarily as an introduction to the subject for students at the undergraduate and master’s level, I have striven as far as possible to avoid didacticism – that is, I am not using this textbook to convey a particular intellectual perspective or advance a particular thesis. Rather, my aim here is to survey the many competing positions regarding the history of this controversial subject matter and thus to empower students to advance their own perspectives.

Terminological chaos

In recent times, scholars have been particularly inclined to write on Islamism as pundits and their language has become rather loose. Terms such as ‘Islamic Revivalism’, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’, ‘Salafism’, ‘Political Islam’ and ‘Islamism’ are often used interchangeably. Here, expanding on an earlier effort by Guilian Denouex to ‘navigat[e] the forgotten swamp’,² I shall argue the case for preferring certain descriptors over others, attempt to define some of these terms, and indicate the context in which they will be used in this text.

‘Islamic Fundamentalism’

Youssef Choueiri entitled his own survey text Islamic Fundamentalism ‘for want of a better word’, acknowledging that the second component of the term had its origins in the Protestant Reformation and, in consequence, made its use in an Islamic context problematic.³ Islamists themselves tend to avoid the term, while many of Islamism’s critics avoid it on the grounds that it takes Islamism’s pretence of religious orthodoxy at face value.⁴ The term ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is most unsatisfactory when used to describe extremist groups such as al-Qa’eda and ISIS because the majority of religious Muslims think their disregard for human life violates the ‘fundamentals’ of their faith. It even fails to distinguish adequately between ‘moderate’ Islamists and those Muslims who remain attached to the ‘fundamentals’ of their faith and yet do not identify with an Islamist political programme.⁵ Indeed referring to Islamists as ‘fundamentalists’ amounts to an implicit acceptance of the conceit of many such individuals that one cannot be a Muslim without being an Islamist.

On account of the difficulties identified above, especially those associated with the assumption that Islamism represents the one ‘real’ or ‘fundamental’ Islam, this text will avoid usage of the term ‘Islamic fundamentalist’. In doing so, it does not seek to be so didactic as to impose the view that Islamism has no real basis in Islam at all. It will leave that question to the reader’s judgement. However, one term that will appear later on in the text is ‘neo-fundamentalism’. This is the expression coined by Olivier Roy for an ideology that evolved out of Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s and criticized the earlier Islamist movements for focusing too much on political at the expense of religious and moral transformation.⁶ Although use of this term might lead us into a number of the same analytical pitfalls as have been identified above, it at least helps to mark out the separate ideological schools within the broader ‘Islamist’ trend.

‘Political Islam’

A number of texts on Islamism employ the phrase ‘Political Islam’, both as part of their title and as their principal analytical category.⁷ My own preference is to use this term only sparingly. It is not problematic in the same sense as ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, in that it can be accused of mispresenting the phenomenon that it is describes. So long as ‘Islam’ is understood as a wider cultural and civilizational phenomenon and not a monolithic religious phenomenon in this context we do not risk implicitly endorsing the ideological narrative of movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS by using this term. Its principal analytical weakness comes from its lack of specificity. It is not necessary to accept the claim that ‘Political Islam’ is a pleonasm (i.e. that the adjective is redundant because Islam is inherently political) to maintain that there were many different political manifestations of Islam before the rise of Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in the twentieth century – the Almoravid movement in medieval Morocco and the Wahhabiyya in eighteenth-century Arabia, to name just two. Yet, a number of the texts on ‘Political Islam’ dwell on the mass ideological movements of the twentieth century and, as a result, tend to overlook the characteristics that distinguish Islamism from movements like the Almoravids or the Wahhabis; for example, the exploitation of modern forms of propaganda and mobilization in modern, secular educational institutions.

‘Islamism’

This term is now usually employed to refer to individuals, and movements seek to ‘ideologize’ Islam in a manner that transforms it into a tool of mass politics.⁸ It is this specific theme of ideologization that distinguishes ‘Islamism’ from ‘Political Islam’ in the broader sense. Most commentators limit their use of the expression to the period following the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood – the first ‘Islamist’ movement – by Hasan al-Banna in 1928. This textbook will itself rely heavily on this term, as the majority of the movements on which it focuses emerged after 1928. However, a word of warning: the addition of the ‘ism’ potentially implies an assumption about the character of the movements under discussion – just as ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ risks accepting the claims of Islamists at face value, perhaps ‘Islamism’ concedes too much ground to those who maintain that Islamism is an ideology defined by the twentieth-century conditions that gave rise to it and has little organic connection to the Islamic past. Here is one definition of Islamism that offers such a perspective, from Guilian Denouex:

Islamists usually aspire to reshape people’s daily lives according to a more or less clearly defined political and cultural vision that harks back to a mostly mythical, invented Islamic past. While that vision draws on Islamic terms, symbols and events, it infuses them with new meanings that are typically alien to the actual historical and current experiences of Muslims. Islamists are engaged in a process of intellectual, political and social engineering which, through the familiar language of Islam, aims to legitimize a thorough restructuring of society and polity along lines that have no precedent in history.⁹

As will be seen below, there is a debate between those who maintain that Islamism represents a resurgence of the values and institutions of the precolonial Islamist past, and those w ho follow a line of analysis similar to Denouex or go even further and argue that it represents a mere rehashing of Western ideologies such as Marxism–Leninism and fascism. As mentioned above, I seek strenuously to avoid didacticism in this text, yet the barest definition of ‘Islamism’ need only imply (in Ruthven’s words) ‘the relationship between the pre-existing reality (in this case, a religion) and its translation into a political ideology’.¹⁰ It is also a term (rendered in Arabic as Islamiyyun) that is accepted by a great number of Islamists themselves. A cautious working definition of Islamism might therefore understand it as ‘an ideology that fuses political ideals from both Islamic history and the twentieth-century world in order to establish a revolutionary order’. As we will see throughout this text, debates as to the respective significance of the twentieth century and historic Islamic ideals are very much ongoing.

Islamic Revivalism

‘Islamic Revivalism’, like ‘Political Islam’, has been used to categorize a broad range of religio-political movements, from the medieval period till the present day, seeking to ‘revive’ Islam. For the purposes of this text I draw chiefly on the relatively narrow definition of ‘Islamic Revivalism’ offered by Youssef Choueiri: a cluster of eighteenth and nineteenth-century movements that sought to return to the original Islamic sources – the Quran, the Sunna and the Hadith – and which used them to challenge the existing religious and political establishment. For Choueiri, this was a movement of internal rejuvenation that made little reference to Western concepts.¹¹ Confusingly, some scholars refer to twentieth-century movements that Choueiri would categorize as ‘radical’ as ‘revivalist’ – for instance, Nasr in his text Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism. To ensure clarity, this text will avoid such use of the term. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Revivalist movements, which include, for instance, the Wahhabiyya in Arabia and the Mahdiyya in Sudan, will be the principal subjects of Chapter 3, although the extent to which the ‘Revivalist’ phenomenon fed into twentieth-century Islamism will be the subject of much debate throughout the text.

Islamic Reformism/Islamic modernism

Choueiri defines ‘Islamic Reformism’ as principally a nineteenth and early-twentieth-century movement that sought to adapt Islam to the conditions imposed by Western colonialism. Thinkers such as Muhammad Abduh and Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who attempted to reconcile Islam with modern Western ideas such as nationalism and democracy, are identified as prominent reformists by Choueiri.¹² Other writers have termed these thinkers ‘Islamic modernists’ for the same reasons, seeing figures like Abduh as the intellectual forefathers of later ‘modernists’ such as Shaltut whom they differentiate from ‘Islamists’ and ‘fundamentalists’.¹³ In other regards, the ‘reformists’ might be regarded as the forerunners of the more ‘moderate’ Islamists in that they have a tendency to blend modern political ideals such as nationalism and democracy with seventh-century terminology. I shall mostly follow Choueiri’s definition, although some of the problems associated with this term, such as challenges involved in differentiating it from ‘Revivalism’, will be discussed in Chapter 4.

Islamic Radicalism, Radical Islamism, Radical Islam

Each of these terms has been used to signify a more uncompromising form of Islamist ideology: one that has emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century that is more revolutionary, more totalitarian – and therefore less restrained in its advocacy of political violence. ‘Radical Islam’ is probably more prevalent than the first of these terms in the media and especially in political debate, where there is sometimes less concern about distinguishing between faith and ideology. For Choueiri, ‘Islamic Radicalism’ marks a qualitative break from ‘Islamic Reformism’, rejecting any potential for synthesis between Western and Islamic values and championing a pristine, undiluted form of Islam as the only saviour from secularism and imperialism.¹⁴ Denouex proposes ‘radical’ Islamism as the possible ‘other’ of ‘moderate’ Islamism, suggesting that ‘moderates’ may be more willing to embrace democracy and compromise on the principle of ‘divine sovereignty’, while acknowledging that the distinction is a blurry and often unsatisfactory one and that there are both ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’ within particular movements.¹⁵ The controversies over the delineation of ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ will be discussed throughout this text – for instance, arguments concerning the extent to which the ideology of the earlier, ‘mainstream’ Muslim Brotherhood can be differentiated from that of its later and more ‘radical’ offshoots will be a principal theme in Chapter 6.

Militant Islamism, Islamic Militancy, Militant Islam

As with ‘radical Islam’ and for similar reasons, the third of these terms is more prevalent in media and political circles. Collectively, they are in many regards interchangeable with ‘Radical Islamism’, although in themselves they convey the decision of a number of radical Islamist movements to take up arms against established Muslim regimes such as Egypt, Algeria and Syria in the last decades of the twentieth century. Militant Islamism converged to some extent with Jihadist Salafism (see below) at the turn of the century, when it became far more willing to consider attacks against Western governments – the ‘Far Enemy’.¹⁶ Militant Islamism and its Jihadist-Salafi variant will be the focus of Chapters 12 and 13.

Salafism

This is potentially the most misleading term in the whole academic literature on Is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of key Arabic, Farsi and Urdu words
• 1 Introduction: Debates and terminology
• 2 Sufis, scholars and rebels: Classical precedents for contemporary Islamism
• 3 The assault on tradition: Islamic Revivalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 4 Between Muslim rationalism and European colonialism: The Islamic reformists
• 5 The first Islamists: Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood, 1928–54
• 6 Islamism’s chief theoretician: Mawdudi, South Asia and the Jama’at-i-Islami
• 7 Marxist borrowings: Islamism and the left
• 8 Hate-filled extremist or brutalized intellectual? Sayyid Qutb
• 9 The rule of the jurist: Khomeini and the 1979 Iranian Revolution
• 10 Reformer, radical or maverick? Hasan al-Turabi and Islamism in Sudan
• 11 Between sharia, custom and patriarchy: Islamist views of women, women as Islamists
• 12 From Hizbullah to the Taliban: The militant wave
• 13 The extremist fringe? Al-Qa’eda, ISIS and the dawn of global jihadism
• 14 Twenty-first-century Abduhs? Post-Islamism, democracy and the Arab Spring
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright