Islamic Movements of Europe

Public Religion and Islamophobia in the Modern World

Frank Peter, Rafael Ortega

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848858442
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857736734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

'Islam in Europe' and 'Islamophobia' are subjects of vital global importance which currently preoccupy policy-makers and academics alike. Through the examination of various European Muslim groups and institutions that have branched off from Islamic movements - including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jama'at-i Islami - this book outlines the configuration of social, political and religious processes that have given rise to new kinds of European Muslim organisations. The authors offer a new perspective on these Muslim groups and seek to reclaim them from the often highly-charged public debates by placing them within the context of their origins as politicised religious movements on the one hand and their ongoing incorporation into European societal structures on the other. They also consider the relationship of these organisations to their 'parent' movements and examine the presence of Islam in European education and higher education institutions.
Taking into account the connection between Islamic movements and the perceived surge of 'Islamophobia' in Europe, this book does not debate the question of whether these groups fit into normative or cultural structures of European nation-states, but rather examines how these structures have changed through their interaction with these groups and the growing Muslim population within Europe. It does not consider political Islam as the antithesis to a refined notion of secularism, but as a form of public religion which contributes to the ever-changing structure of Europe's secular regimes. Featuring the work of more than 40 scholars from around the world, this is the comprehensive guide to Islamic movements in Europe, offering original, definitive perspectives on Muslims and Islam in Europe today. It will be essential reading for policy-makers, political commentators and scholars alike.

PART 1

ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Frank Peter

This section offers case studies of major Islamic movements which have originated in Africa and Asia at different moments of history. The founder of the Wahhabiya, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, was born in 1702 or 1703 in what is known today as Saudi Arabia; Tablighi Jama‘at and Jama‘at-i Islami originated in 1926 and 1941 respectively on the Indian subcontinent; and the originally Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers was created in 1928. All the other movements discussed here – in Palestine, Turkey and North Africa – were created in the decades following the end of World War II. As the following chapters will demonstrate, these groups are highly diverse with respect to their histories, their aims and the contexts in which they are embedded. Nevertheless, these groups do have in common that they are perceived in the West as being religious in ways which are both not normal and not acceptable. This perception is indeed the common element in the broad variety of names given to these groups: Islamists, Fundamentalists, political Islam, Islamic movements, radical or extremist Muslims, and so forth. What these names seek to capture and rationalise is the deviant nature of conjoining politics and religion.

The first question these chapters ask is how these movements seek to link Islam to the political order – and what counts for them as political. With the exception of the Tablighi Jama‘at, which is usually considered apolitical, the most common characteristic ascribed to the groups studied here is their comprehensive articulation of Islam, which supposedly sees politics and religion as inseparable. While these groups certainly are inspired by the belief that politics and religion are intimately intertwined, a closer look at them quickly reveals that these two domains do not coincide in their objectives, strategies and activities. In the case of the Saudi Arabian Wahhabiya, the conjunction of religion and politics is founded on the alliance between the royal family, al-Sa‘ud, on the one hand, and the religious establishment headed by the scholarly family Al-Shaikh on the other. Far from being a relationship between equals, the religious establishment has been largely constrained in recent decades to serve the royal family’s interests both in Saudi Arabia and abroad. Some of the decisions taken by the scholars, such as legitimising the presence of US troops in the kingdom, have seriously damaged Saudi Arabia’s reputation as an Islamic state and contributed to the emergence, since the 1960s, of new Islamic – sometimes violent – movements which are, to various degrees, oppositional to the Saudi state.

Four of the other movements studied here – Jama‘at-i Islami, Milli Görüş the Tunisian Harakat al-Nahda and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party – have constituted themselves as political parties. While banned as a political party between 1948 and 2011, the Society of the Muslim Brothers repeatedly ran in elections through alliances with other Egyptian parties. In 2011, it created the Freedom and Justice Party and won the parliamentary elections. The Movement of Society for Peace in Algeria has participated in all elections since 1990 and in several governments. Refusing to see the relationship between God’s sovereignty and that of the people as one of simple opposition, these groups endeavoured to participate in the democratic process, accepting all the restrictions accompanying it. In the course of the last decades, this option has often been denied them by authoritarian regimes. In the case of the Tunisian al-Nahda, this led to the radicalisation of part of the movement. In Algeria, the creation of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and its success led the military and secular political forces to arrest its leadership and dissolve the group, which then took up armed struggle.

The engagement of these movements in the democratic process is regularly suspected to be merely a tactic in order to ultimately subvert the system. The intense debates inside these movements – sometimes leading to internal division – about whether and how to be politically active make it difficult to give credence to the thesis of an instrumentalist approach to democratic elections. Rather, the debates inside these groups demonstrate their awareness of what is objectively at stake when they enter the field of party politics, namely a commitment to participate in a process which exerts considerable constraints on their programme, activities and legitimacy. Some of the cases presented here point to the effects these constraints have generated over time.

A somewhat different case is presented by Hizb ut-Tahrir. Refraining from any social, educational or profession-based activism – so central to the activism of the Muslim Brotherhood – this group sees itself strictly as a political party. However, the conditions it places upon its entry into the political process are such that it has, by and large, abstained from participating in a democratic system which it ultimately rejects as un-Islamic. From a different perspective, the last movement studied here, Tablighi Jama‘at, also rejects political activism within the existing frameworks. While the movement’s founder was deeply concerned about the loss of political power by Muslims, direct involvement in politics was shunned in favour of reforming and strengthening the religious practice and identity of individual Muslims. In the view of Tablighi Jama‘at (as well as other Islamic movements), personal piety and politics are thus fundamentally inseparable – there can be no Islamic state unless Muslims truly live as Muslims. Nevertheless, the separation between these two elements is a constituent feature of the movement’s activities.

Secondly, these movements can be seen as social movements; that is, as movements – with an institutional basis in various voluntary associations, enterprises, or parties – which aim for social change, justice and political rights. Adopting a social movement perspective on these groups raises the question of how to explain their success. While this question has been addressed in many debates, one notes that little attention is paid to seeing their success in terms of the aspirations and needs of citizens and civil society. Numerous studies have attempted to explain the emergence and appeal of Islamist movements as the result of various social or cultural failures in the Islamic world. There has, however, been less research into how these groups meet social needs and expectations in civil society and how they succeed in mobilising citizens. Pursuing this line of analysis further, the question arises as to whether, and to what extent, characterising these movements as ‘Islamic’ is adequate or even helpful. Finally, in a broader perspective, the emergence of many of these groups is closely related to the creation of nation states. The anti-colonial struggle of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1920s onwards, the crucial contribution of the Wahhabi movement to the creation of Saudi Arabia in the early twentieth century, and the emergence of the ‘missionary’ Tablighi Jama‘at in the context of colonial India’s communal politics are some examples of this. More generally, the nation is a crucially important space of action for these national-transnational groups. However, not all movements accept the national framework as final. Indeed one of them, Hizb ut-Tahrir, pursues the recreation of a supranational caliphate as one of its primary aims. However, while the acceptance by these movements of the nation state framework is often linked to simultaneous attempts to reshape and also transcend it, their embeddedness in specific national contexts, and their concern for national interests and the welfare of the population, nevertheless strongly condition their understanding of Islam and often render it highly specific to time and place.

The studies underscore how useful and necessary it is to speak of specific Islamic groups rather than of political or radical Islam in general. They demonstrate the very limited benefits of analysing the perceived ‘threat of Islam’ with reference to general observations on Islamic doctrine and practice. To an important degree these practices and interpretations are changing, and this is indeed something which some of these movements openly acknowledge. Arguably, the perspectives outlined so far will not put to rest all anxieties relating to these movements. Indeed, these worries do not merely result from the difficulty of seeking to rationalise these groups, nor can they be fully explained by geopolitical interests which might incite the opposition of Western countries. It is certainly possible, in many cases, to rationalise the emergence and the functioning of Islamist groups in their social contexts, and it is also possible to show that many of them fundamentally accept the rules of democracy. If these groups nevertheless provoke anxieties and fears in many quarters in the West, this has to do with the fact that they contest the paradigmatic value of the Western model. The idea that for a society to be modern its organisation needs to conform to the specific way in which Western societies have developed is one which these groups reject in often uncompromising terms. In contrast to the notion that central institutions of modernity, such as democracy or human rights, have been conclusively defined in Western contexts, these groups have engaged in formulating competing understandings of these institutions. It is this kind of challenge, aimed at the very vocabulary of Western self-understanding, which triggers many of the hostile reactions to these groups.

Having said this, another question needs to be raised when thinking about Islamic movements, and it relates to our understanding of what we mean by politics. In fact, much of the discussion in the following case studies centres on whether a specific movement can be qualified as political, and how precisely politics and religion relate to each other. This is indeed the major question being asked today in public debates about these groups, and the following studies seek to answer it in an informed and considered manner. However, while this is an important question to ask, it is also in part misleading and in itself insufficient for properly assessing these groups. When asking whether a specific group is political, we are presupposing, of course, that politics (as much as religion) constitutes an evident category. We are presupposing that specific practices have a definite meaning and are either political or not. On closer scrutiny, this assumption is difficult to maintain. In fact, one effect of the ongoing debates on Islam in Europe has been a growing awareness by European nations of their highly specific understanding of how they define religion, politics and the legal arrangement which separates them – namely, secularism. The ongoing debates in Europe about the Islamic headscarf, and its religious or political signification, are but one example of the fact that identifying what counts as a religious practice is highly contested. As an act of identification, it is inescapably already part of politics. The headscarf issue also demonstrates that the state-centred definition of politics is intuitively rejected by many citizens who are deeply convinced that very personal practices, such as dress code, do have a bearing on broader society and are, ultimately, politically relevant. It seems that this intuition needs to be made explicit if we want to make progress in the current debate on political Islam.

It is thus far from obvious that we can employ a ready-to-use concept of politics and religion which is universally valid and allows for an objective study of religions. Indeed, many have pointed out that the dominant understanding of the concept of religion today is in some ways inappropriate for a study of Islam. The last chapter in this part will take this as its point of departure. It will ask how we can study these movements differently if we abandon the assumption that the dominant notions of politics and religion are universally valid. It will offer a starting point for thinking about how politics and religion can be differentiated in ways other than those prevailing in Europe today, and it will ask how such a rethinking of Islamic movements affects the widespread belief that their joining of politics and religion is inherently dangerous to Europe.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD: CREATION, EVOLUTION, AND GOALS FOR THE FUTURE

Rafael Ortega Rodrigo

From its creation in 1928, by Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), as the first global Islamic and reformist organisation that aspired to implement comprehensive social change (religious, political, educational, social) and sought to represent the ideal society and a strategy for effecting that transformation, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB, Jama‘at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) has become one of the fundamental political–social actors in many Arab and Muslim countries. Legalised or not, with or without representation in the state institutions, and with an undisputed social implantation, both the founding organisation – the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt – and the organisations deriving from it in many other countries now represent a key political and social force. Various expansion strategies have converged in this process: social and educational strategies characteristic of an association or pressure group, and political strategies – such as alliances with various parties and in different contexts – characteristic of a traditional political party.

I. Rise and spread

The MB arose in reaction to the deep social, political, economic and cultural changes that have been taking place since the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Egypt. These include substantial changes in Egyptian administration that affected justice (partial secularisation of legislation), education (religious education reforms), and other spheres, such as the economy, politics and morality, in a context characterised by contact with a Europe at once illustrious and colonialist, and by a duality in thought between a ‘lay-liberal’ tendency and a ‘reformist-Salafi’ tendency inherited from nineteenth-century Muslim reformers. The latter developed a reflection on the causes of the decline of Arab and Muslim societies, which they causally related to contact with Europe, and promoted a religious reform capable of adapting Islam to the needs of the era and a modernisation of government institutions. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and his disciple Muhammad Abduh (1849–1906), the former with a revolutionary approach and the latter opting for a more gradual and ‘rationalist’ model of re-reading sources, were the most prominent protagonists of this trend. Their discourse was taken up by a disciple of Abduh, Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who had witnessed how, in the name of state secularism, the caliphate had been abolished and the Ottoman Empire divided, and how British colonial presence in Egypt had caused profound changes in society. Like Afghani and Abduh, Rida had defended the return to the ‘times of the pious forefathers’ (al-salaf al-salih) as a mechanism for renewing the interpretation of religion and as a strategy to stir Arab and Islamic societies from what he considered was lethargy and regression. The MB embraced the ideas of Rida, and this had important consequences: while the reformism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was basically intellectual and individual, Hasan al-Banna aspired to create a movement and strove to form a type of pressure group that would ‘advise’ government authorities on how to govern in an ‘Islamic’ way (shura, shari‘a, Islamic economics) and not (as many might think) to hold power and establish an ‘Islamic State’.

The MB organisation was founded in the Egyptian city of Isma‘iliyya to fulfil the duties of a good Muslim: ‘command that which is established and prohibit that which is reprehensible’ (al-amr bi-l-ma‘ruf wa-l-nahi ‘an al-munkar), invite to Islam (da‘wa), and erect mosques and schools that would broaden the possibilities for individuals, families and communities to live in conformity with the message of Islam. This was a reaction to what they considered a degradation of morals and social practices and the removal of Islam from the public sphere due to the influence of European presence. Al-Banna viewed European culture as degraded, even if it included certain elements that could be acceptably embraced by Islamic societies (e.g., labour management and science, mass media techniques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Part 1: ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS
• Part 2: ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE
• Part 3: ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE: ISLAMISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
• Notes on Contributors