[Marxism] Political Islam

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Whither Political Islam?
By Mahmood Mamdani

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. Olivier Roy. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004, 320 pp.$29.50

The debate over why the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred has been
dominated by different versions of "culture talk," the notion that culture
is the most reliable clue to people's politics. Their differences
notwithstanding, public intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard
Lewis agree that religion drives both Islamic culture and politics and that
the motivation for Islamist violence is religious fundamentalism. Ascribing
the violence of one's adversaries to their culture is self-serving: it goes
a long way toward absolving oneself of any responsibility.

The singular merit of two new books by Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy is that
they take the debate about the rise of political Islam beyond culture talk.
Kepel seeks to understand the intellectual history of political Islam, Roy
the social conditions under which Muslims think and act. Of the two, Roy
makes the most forceful break from culture talk. He dismisses "the
culturalist approach" that treats Islam as "the issue" and that assumes it
bears a relation to every preoccupation of the moment, from suicide
bombings and jihad to democracy and secularism. Not only does culturalism
treat Islam "as a discrete entity" and "a coherent and closed set of
beliefs," Roy explains, but it turns Islam into "an explanatory concept for
almost everything involving Muslims."

Roy argues that the Koran's most important feature is not what it actually
says, but what Muslims say about it. "Not surprisingly," Roy observes,
"they disagree, while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and
clear-cut." Like culturalists, Roy and Kepel examine very carefully the
Islamist discourse about both the Koran and the rest of the world. But they
understand it as the product of many forces, rather than as the necessary
development of its religious origin. In doing so, they provide a more
nuanced understanding of doctrinal and political Islam than do the
culturalists.

GOING GLOBAL

In a historical account that is both careful and user-friendly, Kepel
tracks two radically different strands of Islamic thought: the
ultra-strict, quietist Salafist, or Wahhabi, school and the more political
thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood. These two schools later merged,
producing the more hybrid ideology now identified with Osama bin Laden.

Kepel traces the origins of Salafism to Saudi Arabia and the ideas of the
radical theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In the opening decade of the
nineteenth century, the Wahhabis and the House of Saud formed an alliance,
commencing a state-building project that was completed a century later.
Wahhab agreed to glorify the Saudi tribal raids on neighboring oases by
treating them as jihads, in return for King Muhammad bin Saud's promise to
elevate Wahhabism to a state ideology. The project did not survive the
Ottoman invasion in 1818, however, and had to be renewed with a series of
Wahhabi-anointed jihads in the 1910s and 1920s. By that time, the jihad was
no longer a stand-alone affair: Wahhabi blessings for the Ikhwan, the
religious militia of King Saud, were doled out along with bombs dropped by
the British, who by then were occupying the Arabian Peninsula. After World
War II, the Americans replaced the British as the kingdom's main patrons.
And under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was eager to use the Saudis
as foils for the Soviet Union, "Wahhabism was elevated to the status of a
liberation theology--one that would free the region of communism."

According to Kepel, a second, more autonomous and activist strand of
political Islam originated in Egypt in the 1920s when the Muslim
Brotherhood resolved to go beyond observing sharia (Islamic law) to
establish a full-fledged Islamic state. Their slogan was "The Quran is our
constitution." The Brothers joined Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Free Officers'
Revolution that toppled King Farouk in 1952, but the alliance soon
dissolved. Repression, at first in Egypt and then in Baathist Iraq and
Syria, forced them to decamp to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, where they
joined forces with religious Palestinians who were uncomfortable with the
Palestine Liberation Organization's secular nationalism. Gradually, the
brotherhood took control of Saudi intellectual life, positioning itself to
shape the country's religious and political awakening after the Iranian
revolution of 1979. Its power grew with the attack on the Great Mosque in
Mecca on November 20 of that year, which brought the Wahhabists under
official suspicion. The religious "awakening" of "a plethora of young
radicals" followed; like the Iranian revolutionaries who combined
traditional Shiite rhetoric with Third World anti-imperialism (portraying
Saudi officials as American lackeys, for example), they mixed the activism
of the brotherhood with quietist Salafism, creating "an explosive blend
that would detonate throughout the region and the whole world."

The effect was to be momentous. As Kepel points out, after Afghanistan in
the 1980s, the jihad went global. The move was not just an expansion in
scale; it was also a critical shift in strategy and tactics. Consider, for
example, the seminal work by the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's
right-hand man: Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, the most politically
grounded and comprehensive manifesto on global jihad. Its text is not yet
available in English, but Kepel has translated important sections of it.
Zawahiri begins with a call to shift the jihad's target from the "nearby
enemy" to the "faraway enemy." To succeed, he says, the jihad needs a new
leadership that is sufficiently "scientific, confrontational, [and]
rational" to rethink relations between "the elite" and "the masses" and to
wield inspirational slogans. (He finds that there is no cause more
mobilizing than Palestine, which is "a rallying point for all Arabs,
whether or not they are believers.") To those who are ambivalent about the
use of political terrorism, Zawahiri explains that it is legitimate to
strike Western populations, not just their governments and institutions,
because they "only know the language of self-interest, backed by brute
military force." "In consequence," he adds, "if we want to hold a dialogue
with them and cause them to become aware of our rights, we must speak to
them in the language they understand." Zawahiri defends suicide attacks as
"the most efficient means of inflicting losses on adversaries and the least
costly, in human terms, for the mujahedeen."

The global jihad's radically different goals could warrant only radically
different methods and spawn radically different organizations. So instead
of seeking out recruits through patient face-to-face encounters as the
Afghan jihadists did in the 1980s, the leadership of the global jihad
reversed the approach: tapping the potential of the Internet and the global
media, it arranged for recruits to come find it. Predictably, the strategy
has produced an organization that defies conventional understandings. Al
Qaeda, a "terrorist NGO," or nongovernmental organization, is not, Kepel
explains, "a nation with real estate to be occupied, military hardware to
be destroyed, and a regime to be overthrown." As a result, Washington has
ended up reifying the group--to little effect. According to Kepel, with its
"Internet websites, satellite television links, clandestine financial
transfers, international air travel, and a proliferation of activists
ranging from the suburbs of Jersey City to the rice paddies of Indonesia,"
al Qaeda is resolutely modern and innovative. Unlike culturalists who
portray bin Laden and his associates as linear descendants of an esoteric
Saudi Wahhabism--or as premoderns with access to contemporary
technology--Kepel understands them as hybrid products of multiple
intellectual traditions. That insight is the great virtue of his book.

full:
<http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050101fareviewessay84113b/mahmood-mamdani/whither-political-islam.html>


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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