Islam as a political movement
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Islam as a political movement has a diverse character that has at different times incorporated elements of many other political movements, while simultaneously adapting the religious views of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly the view of Islam as a political religion.
A common theme in the 20th century was resistance to racism, colonialism, and imperialism, in the form of the Ottoman Empire and British Empire (though the Ottoman Empire itself was an Islamic political movement). This continues today as oil imperialism continues to challenge Islamic nationalism, especially through Western support for Israel and its settlement of the Palestinian West Bank. The end of socialism as a viable alternative with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War has increased the appeal of Islamic revolutionary movements, especially in the context of undemocratic and corrupt regimes all across the Muslim world. Islamism grew as a reaction to these trends, and as a desire to create a government based on the tenets of Islam.
Groups advocating Islam as a political movement are invariably responding to complex political and historical situations, usually with deep roots in the local environment. For example, the rise of the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh would not have been possible without widespread public reaction against the corruption of the secular Awami League government in that country. But this complex local political history is completely lost in the simplistic religious reductionism of terms like "Muslim fundamentalism".
In fact, the scope of Islamic politics is so broad that it encompasses any kind of revolutionary movement or party in any Islamic country. Invariably, this means that it lumps together such a variety of nationalist, Marxist and ethnic movements that it has no longer has any real ideological content. The only defining characteristic it has is that it is militarism in a Muslim context; but this ultimately explains very little.
Liberal movements within Islam generally define themselves in opposition to Islamic political movements, but often embrace many of its anti-imperialist elements.
Modern Islamic philosophy, Islamism, Militant Islam and Islamic terrorism deal with related topics.
Contents |
The term 'Islamist'
Islamic parties exist in every democracy with a Muslim majority. These are sometimes called Islamist parties, meaning an advocate of Islam itself as a political movement. This term has many different meanings which this article will explore, along with links to other political trends.
The pejorative term Islamofacism is used mostly by non-Muslims to describe the political and religious philosophies of some militant Islamic groups, as well as those of the Islamic parties and political movements that they seek to categorize as moral equivalents to those groups. These terms lump together very different movements that have in common perhaps a resistance to specific demands of the West, but not much else. The articles on militant Islamic groups, Islamic parties and modern Islamic philosophy explain their actual views in detail, and avoid one over-arching term to describe them all. Many debates and conflicts have led to the perception of a singular Islamic movement and these are dealt with here.
Inherently political elements of Islam
In the earliest times of Islam there was no separation of mosque and state in both religious ideology and in practice. The origins of Islam as a political movement are to be found in the life and times of Islam's prophet Muhammad. In 622 CE, as a direct of result of his claims to prophethood, Muhammad was invited to the city of Medina to act as a governor of the city's people. At the time, two Arab tribes (Aus and Kazraj) dominated the city in numbers but were constantly at war with each other, and saw in the leadership of Muhammad a hope for peace in the city. Muhammad and his followers thus agreed to move to Medina (known as the Hijra migration), where Muhammad drafted the Medina Charter which made Muhammad the governor of the Medina and in which he is referred to as the Prophet of Allah. Muhammad proceeded to found a theocracy based on the laws of the Qur'an, which is considered by Muslims to be the verbatim word of the one God, Allah. Muhammad thus founded a state based on a distinctly Islamic political ideology. With the aid of the Islamic ideology, Muhammad gained a widespread following, and with loyalty of an army, this state rapidly spread through the Arabian peninsula; The state would reign for nearly six centuries, before eventually falling to Mongol invasions. Muslims see Muhammad as the perfect exemplar and seek to imitate Muhammad, to varying degrees. The Qur'an itself contains rules for Muslims to live their lives by.
After Muhammad's death, his status as the ruler of the Islamic state had to be succeeded by a Muslim (a status that gained the title of Caliph, meaning "successor [of the prophet]"). The Caliph naturally had to implement all the laws and practices that Muhammad established as part of the religion of Islam. As time passed, a coherent and systematic political ideology and legal tradition was recorded by the early Arab Muslim religious scholars, legal jurists, and historians. These scholars forged a complete political system, based on a profound belief in theocracy, known as the Caliphate. The scholars also forged a complete legal system, known as shar'iah (Islamic law) which is based on the madhabs of fiqh (schools of Islamic jurispudence). As their sources, the classical scholars used recorded oral traditions about Muhammad (collected in the form of hadith), the Qur'an, tafsirs (exegesis) of the Qur'an, and historical information about the life of Muhammad (recorded in the sira). The classical scholars of fiqh made rulings about the structure of the Islamic state, and on the Islamic military doctrine of the state as well as the military duties (i.e., the obligations of Jihad) of all able-bodied Muslims.
Image:United states of islam.jpg
The Islamic state, during the times of the classical scholars, was in fact an expanding Islamic empire that stretched from Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) to Persia, under the reign of the Ummayad dynasty (which descended from Muhamamd's tribe, the Quraysh). The Islamic state was expanded by the early Muslims themselves to encompass all of the Najd and Hijaz regions, as well as Yemen and Oman, and his closest companions, the four "rightly guided" Caliphs who succeeded him, continued to expand the state to encompass Jerusalem, Ctesiphon, and Damascus, and sending armies as far as the Sindh [1]. Thus the classical scholars and jurists gave religious sanction to the imperialist ambitions of the Islamic state, based on the rule of Muhammad and the early Caliphs. The origins of this imperial expansionism along the borders of the Islamic state has its origins in the pre-Islamic, nomadic bedouin practice known in Arabic as razzia (raiding), meaning an armed incursion for the purposes of conquest, plunder, or the capture of slaves. According to Montgomery Watt, "Thus, whether Muhammad incited his followers to action and then used their wrongs [wrongs committed against them] to justify it, or whether he yielded to pressure from them to allow such action, the normal Arab practice of the razzia was taken over by the Islamic community. In being taken over, however, it was transformed. It became an activity of believers against unbelievers, and therefore took place within a religious context. The Emigrants were described as "striving with goods and person in the way of God [Qur'an 4:95, 9:20, 9:41, 9:44]." They were promoting one of the purposes of the Islamic community in trying to establish a region in which God was truly worshipped." (Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, London, Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 108). In essence, the classical Islamic jurists had given legal, religious sanction to political, religious and cultural imperialism, known as offensive Jihad (contrast with defensive Jihad). This coincided with the practical existence of such an expansionist Islamic empire, and played a major role in the propagation of Islam as a political movement. The Qur'an also commands Muslims to resist oppression, and to come to the aid of fellow Muslims suffering oppression or infidel invasion.
Thus, essential elements such as the definition of ummah, ijma, zakat, jizya, khalifa (caliph), shar'iah, dhimmi, and Islamic economics, are basic to political Islam. Islam urges that human societies should be run according to Islamic law. The legal and political details of Islamic law depend on a number of theological factors, such as one's fiqh (school of jurispudence), varying degrees of adaptation to custom and usage (called al-urf) in the societies it is adapted to, and the process of ijtihad. Fundamentalist Islamic political movements tend to be called Islamist; such political movements adopt traditional views of Islamic law by ascribing to one of the four madhabs of fiqh that originated in Arabia, during the late medieval era. In the view of the fundamentalists, the complete practice of Islam as a faith requires the establishment of a theocracy based on Islamic law and headed by a Caliph (successor to the Prophet). The absence of a single Muslim head of state is considered by some Muslims to be a violation of the Islamic legal code, the shariah. The politics of all Muslim countries invariably involve the question of how much of a role Islamic law is to tale in the governing of the country.
The Islamic State
When the term Islamist is used by Muslims, it refers almost exclusively to their own specific and positive program to establish an Islamic state (most often by re-shaping the governments of existing Muslim nation-states). There are many more movements to establish such states than are recognized as Islamist by the West, thus the use is not very uniform. The association of one term to lump terrorism in with these autonomy, secession, self-sufficiency or independence movements would seem to be designed to discredit them.
What is actually meant by Muslims who refer to themselves as Islamist is the establishment of Islamic Law with formal status. Ziauddin Sardar wrote in 1994 that "In recent times, a number of Muslim countries declared themselves to be Islamic states and ostensibly established the shariah. But what is actually put into practice is a small number of classical juristic rulings concerning punishments, status of women and other spectacular aspects of classical jurisprudence. Thus, great show is made of 'Islamic punishments' or hudud laws, and floggings and amputations are advertised. These are in fact 'outer limit' laws to be carried out only under extreme conditions and after certain basic requirements of social justice, distribution of wealth, responsibilities of the state towards its citizens, mercy and compassion are fulfilled. What we thus get is an austere state operating on the basis of obscurantist and extremist law, behaving totally contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an and spirit of Islam, yet justifying its oppressions in the name of Islam! The self-declared Islamic states are thus nothing more than cynical instruments to justify the rule of a particular class, family, or the military."
As an example, he notes that "traditional Muslim thought has been very unkind and oppressive to women. While religious scholars constantly recite the list of women's rights in Islam, they have been systematically undermining these very rights for centuries... For example, the Qur'anic advice about modesty in behaviour.. has been interpreted exclusively in terms of the behaviour of women. 'Modest' and 'decent' behaviour for women in public has been interpreted as a rigid dress code despite the...deliberate vagueness which [is] meant to allow all the time-bound changes that are necessary for social and moral growth of a society. In a total perversion of the Qur'anic advice, dressing modestly has thus been interpreted to mean dressing like a nun, covered from head to foot, showing only a woman's face (in some circles only the eyes), wrists and feet. An injunction meant to liberate from the oppressions of 'beauty' and 'fashion' ends as an instrument of oppression."
The grounds for more liberal interpretation of Islam are not in dispute. As of its origins, Islam granted women the right to own property, choose their own partners, divorce, to abortion when necessary, education and sexual satisfaction in marriage. For these very reasons, Christians denounced Islam as sensuous, licentious and perverted through the 19th century and associated it with sexual looseness.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, when hold on the Muslim hinterlands from Moscow was drastically reduced, some local movements declared constitutions based on Islamic Law. A common pronouncement in them was that women were equal to men and would have the same democratic rights. These were crushed by the Soviet Union which subordinated Muslim countries into itself. What Islamic politics that existed, was local and quite suppressed.
Islam is sometimes militant
Today Islamic political movements are usually at least somewhat more conservative than their secular counterparts in the Islamic World.
Furthermore, some movements within Islam hold that a much more interventionist militant Islam is required to eject and prevent corrupt influences on children, women, and the young in particular. The term radical Islamist has come into use in propaganda to deliberately confuse the difference between radical and fundamentalist views, and militant actions.
Radical, as an adjective, implies a return to fundamentals. So does the term fundamentalist. Neither implies militant stances or violent actions. The Mennonite sect in Christianity, for instance, is both radical and fundamentalist, but is neither militant nor violent.
It is always problematic to assign any one ideology to a religion, whether in advocating or opposing it. In part what makes a religion durable is its ability to bend with the political times. In the United States in the 1960s for instance there was deep convergence between liberal white Christian churches, more conservative black churches, and civil rights movement activism - all saw racism as a common enemy. By the 1980s however more conservative religious forces had rallied (or been rallied by the Moral Majority, Christian Voice, and the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan) and had chosen abortion as their common opponent. However, on other issues, like the death penalty, these proponents were often strongly split, with Roman Catholics opposed, and most Protestant abortion opponents favouring state killing of "guilty" adults, as opposed to "innocent" unborn children.
Such shifts are just as prominent in the history of Islamic militancy. Examining militancy alone says little or nothing about the character of Islamic principles carried into political life.
History of Islam as a political movement
Historically, there were many competing strains of interpretation of Islam in politics:
Local cults, cliques and revival movements have always been a part of Islam and have characterized its spread as a faith, and its resistance to outside colonization. In G. H. Jansen's Militant Islam (book), published in 1980, he explored among other things the many different strains of that movement, and the role of tarika, or secret societies, in both spreading and defending Islam. The roots of these movements go back to medieval times, and it is thus simply not correct to argue that there is a separate movement called Islamism that emerged only by reaction to the West in the 20th century. The article on tarika establishes the roots of these societies and their relation to the modern groups that are in some ways based on them.
Some scholars hold that the tarika developed into the more modern militant Islamic movements in reaction to several forces:
Before World War I Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and his ally the Ottoman Empire, sought to enlist Islamic and Turkish imperialist movements in general support of resistance to the British Empire - Germany, he claimed in propaganda, had historically been the European defender of Islam as a faith, and had never participated in suppressing it. This was technically true as the country was only formed in 1870 and had few colonial possessions. "The German Kaiser was even prayed for in the mosques of Syria as Mohammed William or Hajji (Holy) Gilliom. Clearly it was only a matter of weeks before Turkey fell completely into the trap and joined with Germany in the so-called jihad (holy war) for which Berlin was calling." (Anthony Nutting, Lawrence of Arabia, p. 184).
Alarmed, Lord Kitchener in September 1914 struck an alliance with the Grand Sherif of Mecca, and on 31 October pledged that "If the Arabs assist England in this war, England will guarantee that no intervention takes place in Arabia and will give the Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression." This agreement served as the basis of the Arab Revolt which generally aligned Arabs with the British Empire. Islam as a political force in that war was not unified, as the Ottoman Turks were resented oppressors of Arab populations. There were scattered objections to the idea of uniting with non-Muslims to defeat nominal Muslim Turks but these were relatively muted. At least, until the British recanted on all their important promises:
Following World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent dissolution of the Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (founder of Turkey), At the same time, France had managed to gain control of Lebanon and Syria, contrary to explicit agreements (with the British) that Arabs would have self-rule. This was a direct swap to gain British control of Mosul, Iraq, and its oil reserves. These losses and betrayals were very disheartening, and many Muslims perceived their religion as in retreat, and felt that Western ideas were spreading throughout Muslim society, along with the influence of Western nations.
There was some minor resentment of Jewish immigration and influence on the European empires, although this was not due to the Balfour Declaration as such. Feisal Hussein, the Grand Sherif's son, in 1919 "asserted the claim to independence of all Asian Arabia - the Hejaz, Nejd, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia - on the grounds that geographically and racially these areas were inseparable. He raised no difficulties about the Balfour_Declaration and affirmed he was all for Jewish immigration into Palestine, although opposed to the concept of a Jewish state on the same grounds of the inseparability of Palestine from the rest of the Arab world." (Nutting, ibid). When French and colonial interests prevailed, resentment of all forces that had conspired to deny Arabs control of their own lands increased, and was exacerbated when Hitler indirectly gained control of Syria via Vichy France in 1940. The Baath Party was created in Syria and in Iraq as a movement to resist and harry the British, using some elements of Nazi, Islamic, socialist doctrines, and anti-Semitic propaganda. After the war, this party shifted to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Stalin had by then become an opponent of Zionism, having like the Arabs initially found it compatible, and then rejected it as bourgeois, racist, and colonial.
Any Arab tendency to anti-semitism was drastically magnified after World War II when Israel was created, at literally the crossroads of all traditional Arab lands. The fact that the Jews had not fought for the land, but the Arabs had, and that the promise made to Arabs had been broken, while that to Jews had been kept, was often ascribed to racism. A religious focus for rhetoric became more common, and more mullahs became involved in politics. The Palestinian Diaspora stressed social structures in Arab states, which expelled many Jews. Zionism was identified as the opponent, and some argued a coherent Islamism was required as a response.
However, Islam was still not the dominant trend in resisting colonialism or even Zionism. During the 1960s, the predominant ideology within the Arab world was pan-Arabism which deemphasized religion and emphasized the creation of socialist, secular states based on Arab nationalism rather than Islam. However, governments based on Arab nationalism have found themselves facing economic stagnation and disorder. Increasingly, the borders of these states were seen as artificial colonial creations - which they were, having literally been drawn on a map over tea by people who lived in London.
Also during the 1960s, the rise of convert movements such as Nation of Islam and the identification of racism as a common scourge of Muslims (who have had historically more racial variety than any other major religion) refocused Islamic political movements. As Malcolm X put it, on haj to Mecca, "I realized that if all the different races snore in the same language, they must be equal before God."
Modern debates
Once the common opposition to colonialism, corruption and racism was established as a focus, debates on political Islam became generally focused on three core questions through the 1970s:
- status of women and integration of priorities of feminism into a renewed fiqh
- Islamic economics and the role of debt in oppression and stagnation of Muslim states
- Zionism and the capacity of Muslims for self-governance, control of oil revenues, etc.
United Nations cooperation was pivotal in this view - as was cooperation with secular forces and allies. The agenda of secular and Islamist movements during this period was all but indistinguishable. However, some rural movements were finding progress made here to be symbolic and unsatisfactory. In 1979 the political situation drastically changed, with Egypt making peace with Israel, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - all three events had wide-ranging effects on how Islam was perceived as a political phenomenon.
To understand this, consider the variety of attitudes Muslims with a fervent belief in Islam as a universal solution to political problems, took to the events of the 1980s and the 1990s:
Perception of persecution
Some Muslims place the blame for all flaws in Muslim societies on the influx of "foreign" ideas including debt-based capitalism, communism, and even feminism; a return to the principles of Islam is seen as the natural cure. This is however interpreted in very many ways: socialism and Marxism as a guide to adapting Islam to the modern world was in decline by the 1980s as the USSR invaded Afghanistan and polarized attitudes against Communism and other secular variants of socialism. Capitalism was often discredited by plain corruption.
One persistent theme that both proponents and opponents of Islam as a political movement note is that Muslims are actively persecuted by the West and other foreigners. This view is of course not distinguishable from a critique of imperialism including oil imperialism, since many Muslim nations are sitting on relatively vast oil reserves. Colonialism is often identified as the force which is 'against Islam', and seems to neatly encompass British Empire experiences as well as those of modern times - the long Ottoman domination being more or less forgotten.
Reactive Islam
It was largely through reactive measures that the movement that is labelled Islamist came to be visible to the West, where it was labelled as being a distinct movement from Islam, pan-Arabism and resistance to colonization. The legitimacy of this kind of distinction is very much in doubt. Olivier Roy, a top advisor to French President Jacques Chirac, holds that the primary motive of all of this activity is resistance to colonialism and control of the Islamic World by outsiders. In this view, the movement called Islamist is wholly reactive and incidental, just a convenient rationale used to justify what is in fact resistance of a cultural and economic sort.
However, there are many overt similarities. Those militants who follow a version of shariah based on the classical fiqh ("jurisprudence") as interpreted by local ulema ("jurists"), were the most prominent of several competing trends in modern Islamic philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s. It was at this time that they became visible - and a concern - to the West, as they challenged the modernist dictators that the West had generally put trust in.
See militant Islam for a detailed review of some modern movements that are often labelled Islamist by their opponents. This article is only about the reactive definition of the West, leading to the label. Trends which led to this are summarized by Ziauddin Sardar as follows:
"1. The excesses of modernist leaders who have maintained their power in Muslim societies largely by coercive means and have ruthlessly persecuted the traditional leadership, including imprisonment, torture and execution of religious leaders and thinkers." Many of whom sought to refine and spread a more modern Islamic philosophy and an associated modern polity including most norms respected in democracy.
"2. The spectacular failure of the economic and development policies of the modernist leaders which have led to the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands." Usually in direct defiance of traditional Islamic economics and obligations such as zakat and khalifa.
"3. The continuous abuse and ridicule since the 1950s of traditional thought, lifestyle and everything associated with it." This is often symbolized by the modern dress of secular folk which is viewed as scandalous by traditionals.
"4. The policies of Western powers to deliberately undermine Islamic oppositions in Muslim countries, demonize Islamic leaders, prop up oppressive, westernised regimes, and reduce Muslim states to economic paupers and debt-ridden societies." Which is very similar to accusations made against globalization in general by anti-globalization movement and advocates of creditary economics (which includes Islamic economics).
The many strains of 'Islamism'
While the trends leading to the response can be summarized, the response to these trends is far less uniform, and has included a wide range of different ideologies fully as diverse as those observed in non-Muslim nations.
Despite the assertion that somehow all so-called Islamism is related, more moderate trends were well-funded, especially from nominally Wahabist Saudi Arabia which funded many departments of Muslim World Studies in the US. This funding was instrumental in making many of the more moderate trends in modern Islamic philosophy visible to the West - and further developing them. As Allan H. Weiner relates in his 1997 book Access to the Airwaves, his college experience in Maine was largely shaped by this kind of contribution to the American scholarly culture: "Dr. Shakir was an amazing man. He could speak four or five languages. He was incredibly intelligent and was versed in just about everything. You could go to him day or night for either an academic problem or a personal one. He taught me a lot, influenced my life a lot, and generally raised my awareness and my consciousness. He was not only the Director of Muslim World Studies, but the Director of the Political Science department as well - which was a pretty big department at Ricker College. He taught me more about the political process and the essence of the human being than anyone else. I remember one day I was lamenting to him about how we just seem to be destroying ourselves - human beings just can't get along, the political systems are so corrupt, and everything is such a mess. He said that change happens very, very slowly because the level of awareness of a human being takes a long time to raise. The only time that you get an extremely significant change in any type of a social structure, he said, is when the level of awareness of human beings raises up a step." Nor was this kind of interaction restricted to the classroom or counselling, but continued into elements of administration: "The corruption at the school was just disgusting. Dr. Shakir, myself, and a group of other faculty members knew this, and we tried to what we could to change things..."
Cold War exploitation
But such cross-cultural exchanges, polite activism and moderate views were very often suppressed by the funders of more militant strains who sought to exploit them against the Soviet Union. The United States, for instance, in the 1980s supplied university-authored textbooks to the mujahedeen of Afghanistan that encouraged militant attitudes and even taught arithmetic using examples involving hand grenades and "dead infidels".
There was also pressure against secular socialism in the Islamic World, and especially in Iraq, Syria and Iran, until the Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved it could well be counter-productive and lead to a backlash that put regimes in place that would be hostile to the Western, secular, world.
Role in terrorism
Some militant Islamist forces have been implicated in terrorism and have become targets in a series of military initiatives justified by the US rhetoric of "War on Terrorism", which has been adopted by Russia, Israel and other countries. This has led Muslims and the opponents of these initiatives (in the peace movement) to characterize it sometimes as actually a War on Islam.
As part of this war, they claim, literally every political interpretation of Islam, from classical fiqh to Marxist to such moderate views as those of Dr. Shakir, are all being classified as part of one "enemy" movement.
Movements described as 'Islamist'
- See main article at Islamism.
The following are considered by most Western governments to be Islamist movements. Some of them have formal ties, some have suspected ties, and some deny ties:
- International -- Al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden
- Afghanistan -- Taliban
- Algeria -- GIA
- Egypt -- Gama'at Islamiya
- Lebanon -- Hizballah
- South Asia -- Jamaat-e-Islami (there are Jamaat's in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Jammu and Kashmir(India), and Pakistan-administered Kashmir)
- West Bank and Gaza Strip - Hamas
What these groups have in common tends to be opposition to the United States and Israel. They vary widely in terms of the form of Islamic Law they prefer: Hamas for instance is close to secular in tone, the Taliban nearly medieval. Some include Saudi Arabia's dominant ideology, Wahhabism, on this list, but, interestingly, not the nominally Islamic governments of Pakistan or Turkey. This appears to be largely motivated by geopolitics, and a purely Western idea of "who we can work with, and who not."
Another profound bias of such classifications is that it is quite rare to include nominally Christian or Jewish or Buddhist guerillas in any analysis of those faiths' views of politics, but quite common if it is Islam under discussion—and likely being criticized.
Globalization
Along with many other cultural phenomena, Islamic political thought has undergone its own globalization as adherents of many different strains have come together. Even in such strictly controlled, secretive groups as Al-Qaida, there were believing Muslims of drastically varying backgrounds coming together, some of whom accepted the tactics and priorities of the group, and some not. While violent fanatics deployed by cynical leaders (who often act more like gangsters than political leaders) make highly visible attacks on Western interests and even on 'homelands', this is thought by many to be no more than backlash for an entire 20th century full of cynical attempts by German, British, and American Empires to deploy Islamic idealists as a mere tactic.
When Russia joined the Council of the Islamic Conference in 2003, it emphasized that it had a long history of successful co-existence with Muslims, and a large integrated population of Muslims (few of which are in any sense Islamist). President Vladimir Putin, despite a long and bloody confrontation with rebels in Chechnya, offered to act as a bridge or neutral broker in dealings between Muslims and NATO, the EU and USA. This was a quite different rhetoric, a more pragmatic one likely reflecting the reality that the ex-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan had substantial Islamic political movements - similar to those in Turkey and Pakistan, relatively modern in tone and willing to participate in the US War on Terrorism to some degree, although not as direct combatants.
Some analysts believe that the old Cold War battlelines have been redrawn, with Russia choosing new allies - those with a record of success in forcing US withdrawals from strategic territories (Beirut, Somalia and - depending on interpretation - Afghanistan and Iraq) with Muslim populations. In this view, the old Marxist alliance against colonialism is the dominant rhetoric.
Others accept the Russian pledge as sincere, and believe that Islamist movements of all stripes will eventually come to accommodation with domestic secular forces, and Islam as a global anti-corruption, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism movement, less focused on Zionism and Palestine. George W. Bush for instance has noted the real need as economic development in Muslim countries, to break the cycle of poverty that tends to feed into extremist movements. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq, the Bush administration has worked closely with nominally Islamic forces and ruling political parties in government. It denies intensely that it is involved in a War on Islam. However, polls of Muslim nations indicate these denials are not trusted. Any accommodation will not be quick in coming.
The Internet is also playing a role in the globalization of Islam as a political movement - in Iran in particular, Shia clerics respond to many thousands of requests for fatwa, or rulings on religious matters, by email. A younger generation of Shia clerics in Iran and Iraq are actively involved in politics, and seeking to restate the principles of the Islamic revolution of 1979, perhaps more in line with the modern debates that took place in the 1970s, prior to the interjection of the prolonged West Bank occupation, American provocateurs and funding for extremists (including Osama bin Laden) in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Collapse of the Soviet Union, and other distractions that have tended to reinforce only the more extreme movements.
Some analysts also note some luddite or anti-globalization movement convergence within some Islamist groups, especially those who very strongly reject biotechnology or persuasion technology or the use of modern technological weapons against people whose only weapons tend to be small arms, explosives and their own bodies, often scarified simply to strike.
See also
Sources
The following sources generally prescribe to the theory that there is a distinct 20th century movement called Islamism that exists independently of Jewish/Christian observers and motivations:
- "Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews" Khalid Duran with Abdelwahab Hechiche, The American Jewish Committee and Ktav, 2001
- "The Islamism Debate" Martin Kramer, 1997, which includes the chapter The Mismeasure of Political Islam
- "Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook" Charles Kurzman, Oxford University Press, 1998
- "The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder" Bassam Tibi, Univ. of California Press, 1998
However, the following sources very strongly challenge that assertion:
- Edward Said, Orientalism
- Merryl Wyn Davies, Beyond Frontiers: Islam and Contemporary Needs
- G. H. Jansen, Militant Islam, 1980
- Hamid Enyat, Modern Islamic Political Thought
These authors in general locate the issues of Islamic political intolerance and fanaticism not in Islam, but in the generally low level of awareness of Islam's own mechanisms for dealing with these, among modern believers, in part a result of Islam being suppressed prior to modern times.
The next articles focus on the timely issue of democracy in the Middle East, the role of Islamist political parties, and the war on terrorism.
- Marina Ottoway, et al., "Democratic Mirage in the Middle East," Carnegie Endowment for Ethics and International Peace, Policy Brief 20, (October 20 2002). Internet, available online at: http://www.ceip.org/files/publications/HTMLBriefs-WP/20_October_2002_Policy_Brief/20009536v01.html
- Marina Ottoway and Thomas Carothers, "Think Again: Middle East Democracy,"Foreign Policy (Nov./Dec. 2004). Internet, available online at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2705&print=1
- Chris Zambelis, "The Strategic Implications of Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Middle East," Parameters, (Autumn 2005). Internet, available online at: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/05autumn/zambelis.htm
- Adnan M. Hayajneh, "The U.S. Strategy: Democracy and Internal Stability in the Arab World,"Alternatives (Volume 3, No. 2 & 3, Summer/Fall 2004). Internet, available online at: http://www.alternativesjournal.net/volume3/number2/adnan.htm
- Gary Gambill, "Jumpstarting Arab Reform: The Bush Administration's Greater Middle East Initiative," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin (Vol. 6, No. 6-7, June/July 2004). Internet, available online at: http://www.meib.org/articles/0407_me2.htm
- Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C., "President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East," (6 November 2003). Internet, available online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html
- Robert Blecher, "Free People Will Set the Course of History: Intellectuals, Democracy and American Empire," Middle East Report (March 2003). Internet, available online at: http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/blecher_interv.html
- Robert Fisk, "What Does Democracy Really Mean In The Middle East? Whatever The West Decides," The London Independent (8 August 2005). Internet, available online at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9888.htm
- Fawaz Gergez, "Is Democracy in the Middle East a Pipedream?,"Yale Global Online (April 25 2005). Internet, available online at: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5622
External links
- Evaluating the Islamist movement - written by Greg Noakes, an American Muslim who works at the Washington Report
- Muslim scholars face down fanaticism - written by Aicha Lemsine, an Algerian journalist and author.
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