Islamic movements: tradition and modernity

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The third Nordic conference on Middle Eastern Studies:
Ethnic encounter and culture change
Joensuu, Finland, 19-22 June 1995

Islamic militant movements
between tradition and modernity

Abdel-Qader Yassine
Gothenburg University

The Arab world is in turmoil. In most parts of the
transcontinental land that extends from Casablanca to Baghdad,
internal conflict has become the norm and uneasy stability is
the exception. The growing cult of Islamic militancy in the
Arab world owes much more to socio-political than to religious
factors. The major causes of Islam being articulated as answer
to the prevailing ills of the Arab polities are basically two:

1) The failure of the Arab political elites to evolve
responsive political systems to take the place of traditional
ones which no longer exist; and

2) The humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli
Six-Day War of June 1967 causing reverberations not only in the
Middle East but the wider Muslim world.

Islamic theory

In traditional Islamic political theory the state rested on
three pillars: the Ummah (the community of Muslim believers),
the Caliphate, and the Shari'ah (Islamic Law). Except perhaps
in the early decades of Islam, this theory, however, did not
always conform to what happened in real life.

The Ummah embodied an ideal which could not be realised in
full even in the early period of Islam. As long as Islam was
confined to the Arabian Peninsula, the Ummah was a homogeneous
community held together by the bonds of Islam. But once Islam
spread into the non-Arab territories to the north, the
dichotomy between the Arab and non-Arab Muslims arose. The
Arabs found it difficult to accept the non-Arabs as full
members of the Ummah and gave them the unflattering title of
mawla (client). The Persians accepted Islam but refused to be
reconciled to Arab supremacy and led the revolt against the
first Arab-Islamic dynasty headed by the Umayyads. The
Abbasids, who succeeded the Umayyads, were accommodative to
non-Arab Muslims.

From the tenth century onward, regional pressures reinforced
by ethnic self-assertion splintered the Islamic empire and it
was progressively displaced by feuding kingdoms across the
massive arc stretching from the plains of central Asia to the
Atlantic coast of Africa.

In the 16th century, the Ottomans did succeed in bringing
large chunks of the Arab world under the umbrella of the
Turkish empire but remained at loggerheads with the Shiite
rulers of Iran, called the Safavids. Towards the end of the
19th century, the Arabs were stirred by sentiments of modern
nationalism and took full advantage of the opportunities
offered by the First World War to break loose from the Ottoman
hegemony.

The 20th century has witnessed Iran and Turkey emerge as
independent states, and a fragmented Arab world into 20 odd
nation-states. The Ummah had thus ceased to be a fact of
political life long before the advent of the present day
nation-states.

The institution of Caliphate emerged out of a practical
necessity in the aftermath of Prophet Muhammad's death. His
closest companion Abu Bakr al-Siddiq was chosen to head the
Ummah, and he assumed the modest title of Khalifah ("caliph"
being its Western corruption) or deputy. But within the span of
a few decades the caliphate degenerated into an absolute
hereditary monarchy.

Islamic political theorists supplied the necessary religious
underpinnings for the institution to suit its changing
requirements. It was generally held that the caliph must be
from Quraish (the Prophet's clan); he was the defender of the
faith and the political leader of the Ummah. All Muslims were
obliged to proclaim allegiance to him.

The principle of hereditary succession also found general
acceptance. In later centuries, power slipped from the hands of
the caliph but the caliphate lingered on as a notional
institution. Kings and sultans of the Muslim world found it
expedient to seek the caliph's formal recognition in return for
offerings of salutations and gifts. The Shi'ah, of course, did
not recognise the caliphs and looked to their own imams for
political leadership and spiritual guidance. The late Ottomans
staked their claim to caliphate, if only to beef up their
bargaining power vis-ŕ-vis the European states. But when the
empire disintegrated after the First World War, the new Turkish
leaders, aspiring to build a modern republican state, abolished
the caliphate in 1924.

Since then, there has been no serious proposal from any
quarter to revive this supra-national politico-religious
institution. Even the Islamic Conference Organisation (ICO),
which pays lip-service to Islamic solidarity, takes ground
realities into consideration to exclude political unification
of the Muslim world from its proclaimed agenda.

In the field of Shari'ah, too, the Arab societies have
traversed a long way from the early beginnings when the divine
law, derived mainly from the Qur'an and the Sunnah (sayings of
the Prophet), governed all aspects of life. In classical
argument, the institution of caliphate itself was justified in
terms of the need for a central authority to enforce the
Shari'ah. Ironically enough, it was under the late Ottoman
caliphate that the application of Shari'ah was progressively
circumscribed.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Ottoman sultans
launched legal reforms, supplanting the Shari'ah from the penal
and commercial fields, under the grand project of "tanzimat",
or "putting things in order." The project also stipulated
creation of "nizamiyah" (secular) courts to adjudicate the
man-made penal and commercial laws.

The 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights made inroads into the
hitherto forbidden territory of Muslim personal law by
introducing administrative regulations governing divorce and
relief to deserted wives. Violation of these regulations was
punishable under the secular criminal law. Most of the Arab
countries, stretching from Iraq to Morocco, effected further
reforms in the Muslim personal law besides endorsing the
general principle of sovereignty of legislatures to enact laws
for all aspects of life. It can thus be said that in most of
the Arab countries today the Shari'ah applies only to limited
segments of life involving marriage, divorce and inheritance.
There are, however, two sets of exceptions to this rule. At one
end of the spectrum stand Saudi Arabia and the smaller states
of the Arabian Peninsula which enforce, with varying intensity,
the Islamic penal codes. Iran, too, falls into this category.

At the other extreme is Turkey which, in the wake of the
Kemalist revolution of the early 1920s, adopted a militant
secularist stance. It proclaimed modern secular laws for all
areas of life including marriage and divorce. It is seldom
realised that outside the "communist" fold Turkey is the only
Asian nation to opt for full-scale secularisation of social and
political life in a strictly modern sense of the term. And it
has stayed that way since the days of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk,
notwithstanding recurrent clamour by the Islamists for a return
to the good old days of the Shari'ah.

It follows from the above that the concept of ummah and the
institution of caliphate had either become dysfunctional or
changed beyond recognition long before the advent of western
influence in the region. It was only in the field of Shari'ah
that increasing contacts with Europe and modernisation of
social and economic life contributed to its shrinking
influence.

Alternative order

While Arab modernising political elites can justly claim credit
for managing the transition to certain areas with reasonable
efficacy, they cannot escape blame for their failure to provide
a credible alternative to the traditional system of government.
This does not mean that no effort was made in this direction.
On the intellectual level, a whole generation of thinkers from
Abdel-Rahman al-Kawakibi to Ahmad Lutfi as-Sayyid, Ali
Abdel-Raziq and Taha Hussein, joined the quest, in the late
19th and the early part of this century, for an alternative
order based on reason and rule of law.

The Syrian-born Abdel-Rahman al-Kawakibi argued that despotism
had been the bane of Muslim polities through the ages; that the
just state, in which men could find fulfilment, was one in
which the individual was free and freely served the community;
and that the government should be controlled by the people and
act as a watchdog to ensure that freedom. Ahmad Lutfi
as-Sayyid, for his part, made the case that good government is
one that springs from the will of the people. All other forms
end up in tyranny.

The case for an out and out secular order was, however, made
by Sheikh Ali Abdel-Raziq in his book al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm
(Islam and the Basis of Political Authority, 1925). A product
of al-Azhar and Oxford, Abdel-Raziq used his theological
scholarship and analytical skill to advance the thesis that the
entire theory of caliphate (the kingpin of Islamic political
thought) had no basis in the Qur'an and the Sunnah and that the
practice of the caliphate was often at variance with its
theory.

Abdel-Raziq's book aroused a storm of protest. But the works
of Dr Taha Hussein (also an alumnus of al-Azhar) were greeted
with much less hostility. For Taha Hussein approached his
subject from a pragmatic rather than theological angle. In his
Future of Culture in Egypt, he argued that the dichotomy
between religious dogma and everyday secular practice is an
inescapable part of life.

Early Arabs, he reasoned, had no inhibitions about borrowing
extensively from Greek and Persian civilisations and they
gained a great deal in the bargain. Hence, contemporary Arabs
need not be averse to borrowing from the Western civilisation.

On a practical footing, the quest for alternative basis of
polity found expression in eclectic approach. It favoured
liberal borrowings from Western constitutional forms and
adapting them to local needs and circumstances. In quick
succession, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt adopted
constitutions patterned after the British, French or Belgian
models. This stupendous experiment in constitutionalism,
however, did not carry much credibility as it was generally
devoid of democratic content.

In the 1950s, most of these edifices collapsed like houses of
cards. A succession of coups d'etat and civil disorders made
the whole region reverberate with the sound of crashing
thrones. Egypt and Iraq turned into republics and the soaring
spirit of republicanism rattled the remaining monarchies in the
region.

Then came the era of charismatic leaders espousing heady
ideologies of pan-Arabism, socialism and redressal of the
unequal relationship with the West. Even the Shah of Iran
donned the mantle of a modernising monarch heralding his "white
revolution".

In most cases, where some form of constitutional structures
existed, the single party system of political mobilisation was
introduced. But this was mostly used as a facade behind which
dictatorial rule thrived. The press and other media were firmly
controlled.

The system allowed no possibility of free debate on public
priorities or policies. Even the Shah of Iran felt tempted to
emulate the undemocratic devices designed by the radical
republics in the region which he otherwise abhorred.

As for the paternalistic kingdoms and emirates of the Arabian
Peninsula, the rate of their social and economic transformation
in the wake of the oil boom of the 1970s has been
mind-boggling. Literacy advanced in rapid strides and the
benefits of housing, health and general economic welfare were
extended to all sections of these sparsely populated
oil-exporting countries. But there was no corresponding change
in the political arena. Political power still vests in kings
and sheikhs amidst growing popular clamour for accountability
and rule of law.

Divisions and disjunctions

If the absence of credible political systems responsive to
popular expectations has driven the people to protest under the
banner of Islam, the failure of the ruling elites to hold their
own against an expansionist Israel or to contain super-power
pressures on the region gave a militant edge to the call of
Jihad against the internal and external foes of Islam.

The Islamic militants, commonly called "fundamentalists"
because of their strident call for a return to the fundamental
tenets of Islam, view the defeat of Arab armies at the hands of
the Zionist state in a series of wars, beginning in 1947, and
the loss of entire Palestine to Israel in the process, as a
catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic peoples. The
fundamentalists no doubt blame the Zionist and their Western
backers, in particular the United States, for this calamity;
but they blame their own rulers even more.

They ascribe the Arab-Islamic defeat to the alienation of the
ruling classes from Islam, their worship of the false idols of
nationalism (local as well as pan-Arab) and their addiction to
foreign ideologies such as socialism, communism or capitalism.
The same malaise, they argue, accounts for the apathy and
inaction of the present rulers in face of the ongoing tragedy
in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Exacerbating the grievous injury to the Arab sense of dignity
and honour caused by defeat is the relentless pressures on and
manipulations of the region by the industrialised West which
not only accounts for close to two-thirds of the world's proven
oil reserves but also serves as a lucrative market, thanks to
the oil boom of the 1970s, for their consumer products and
weapons. The Islamists see in this a replay of the medieval
crusades.

It is, however, necessary to point out that the
fundamentalists in the Arab world are not a monolithic entity
nor is their upsurge irreversible. The fundamentalist camp,
although clamouring for Islamic solidarity, suffers from inner
divisions and disjunctions. Saudi Arabia, for example, has long
been the home of what might be called controlled
fundamentalism.

The Saudi royalty took shelter behind Islam to deny its own
people a constitution. And to gain respectability for their
archaic domestic set-up, the Saudi rulers created the Rabitat
al-Alam al-Islami (World Islamic League) to mobilise goodwill
of Muslim `ulama' from all over the world through an elaborate
system of patronage.

With a substantial spurt in oil royalties in the 1970s, Saudi
Arabia sponsored the Islamic Conference Organisation as a handy
platform to demonstrate its Islamic credentials. It is hardly
surprising that the United States found Saudi Arabia's
championship of Islam as a convenient weapon to beat the Arab
radicals with, and look benignly on it.

In the wake of the Suez War, which spelled disaster for Britain
as a custodian of Western interests in the Middle East, US
president Dwight Eisenhower seriously toyed with the idea of
promoting king Saud as the "pope" of Islam. But the project
failed to take off.

For some time now, Saudi Arabia is having second thoughts
about the efficacy of its own brand of Islam as an instrument
of its foreign policy. It all started with the Iranian clergy
mounting a rebellion against the Shah and eventually seizing
political power. In 1979, the Pahlavi monarchy of Iran was
replaced by an Islamic republic with Ayatollah Khomeini as its
"Supreme Guide".

The cause of Saudi Arabia's discomfiture lay in the fact that
whereas Riyadh had always invoked Islam to uphold political
status quo, Iran's new rulers presented Islam in a
revolutionary attire seeking to topple despotic kings, ushering
in an egalitarian social and economic order, and fighting
foreign dominance in the region.

The Saudis were indeed scared when, in 1979, a bunch of
home-grown fundamentalists occupied the Holy Mosque of Mecca in
an undisguised attempt to overthrow the monarchy, ironically,
in the name of Islam.

In Iran, too, in the past 16 years since Ayatollah Khomeini
returned to Iran from his long exile, public zeal for the
Islamic revolution has steadily diminished. Khomeini strongly
believed in the unquestioned power and efficacy of Islam to
establish and sustain a just social and political order. He
encouraged export of the Iranian revolution to other parts of
the Islamic world and envisaged eventual triumph of Islam the
world over. He came to be identified with what may be called
messianic fundamentalism.

Khomeini, however, glossed over one basic fact about the
Islamic revolution: it was made possible by the active support
and sacrifices of a good section of the educated youth and the
merchant class who would loathe to see Iran converted into an
obscurantist theocracy. As it happened, the clergy squeezed
their non-clerical partners out of the newly created governing
institutions and eventually suppressed them.

The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which was patently
senseless for both sides, scotched all hopes of a just and
humane order taking shape in Iran. In the end, Khomeini was
compelled by his closest advisers to swallow his pride and call
for a cease-fire. The post-Khomeini Iran is surely, though
haltingly, moving towards a rational and pragmatic approach to
the moulding of Iran's domestic and foreign policies. Dr Qassem
Ihsanzadeh, an outspoken member of the Iranian parliament
recently observed: "We must decide whether we want a
parliamentary system or an Islamic government - the two are
incompatible." Predictably, he was shouted down by the
Islamists but not before he made it quite clear that there were
many more who shared his views but would not utter them
publicly.

President Ali Hashimi Rafsanjani, for his part, knows that he
cannot bring the fruits of revolution to the restive people of
Iran without the inputs of science and technology and modern
managerial skills. He is, therefore, keen to loosen the
stranglehold of clergy on the system so that Iranian
technocrats who fled the country in the wake of the revolution
can return and a new generation of technocrats could be trained
at home.

Rafsanjani admittedly sees no contradiction between modernity
and Islam and he speaks of the need for close co-operation
between Iran, India and China so that they can have a say in
post- cold war world politics. All this is a far cry from the
heady days of February 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini had
unfurled the flag of Islamic revolution.

Hence the real breeding grounds of militant Islam and Islamic
fundamentalism today are not in Iran or Saudi Arabia or the
mini-states of the Gulf. On the contrary, these states are
either apprehensive of Islamic militancy or, as in the case of
Iran, having second thoughts about its efficacy as an
instrument of public policy. Islamic militancy is, however,
rampant in the more populous Arab countries of Egypt, Algeria
and the Sudan. All three have certain features in common:
population explosion, soaring unemployment and varying degrees
of repression of political dissent. And this has given rise to
Islamic protest movements which can be generally designated as
retributive fundamentalism.

The political stalemate in Egypt during the 1940s, resulting
from the triangular conflict between the British, the king and
the mass-based Wafd Party, and public disenchantment with the
politicians in the wake of Egyptian defeat in the first
Arab-Israeli War of 1947-48, swelled the ranks of al-Ikhwan
al-Muslimun (Muslim Brothers), founded by Hassan al-Banna in
1929. The Ikhwan preached that the redemption of Egypt (and of
the Islamic world) lay neither in reform nor in
reinterpretation of the Islamic doctrine but in its full-scale
resurrection.

They declared that the real issue was not Islam's inadequacy
to meet the challenges of modern times but that Islam was never
given a chance to prove its efficacy, and that the Qur'an and
the Sunnah provide essentials of a just political order and a
universal brotherhood of men. Above all, the Ikhwan claimed
that the fault lay not in Islam but in its internal and
external enemies: the West strangled it politically and
economically from the outside and the westernised Muslims
undermined it from within.

On the eve of the revolution of July 1952, which toppled the
monarchy and put General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Jamal
Abdel-Nasser into power, the Ikhwan claimed a million followers
in Egypt alone. Two years later the Ikhwan faced a showdown
with the military regime and lost. For a while, Nasser's Egypt
offered a future of hope to its teeming millions. Pursuit of
the ideals of socialism, unification of the Arab world into a
single polity, and an independent role in world affairs
enthused the whole Arab world. But the defeat of Egypt in the
June 1967 war turned that dream into a nightmare. Nasser's
image as saviour of the Arabs was shattered and he died soon
after.

That was the time when the Islamists regrouped and mounted a
frontal assault taking advantage of Egypt's mounting economic
problems, the occupation of Sinai by Israel and the
vacillations and waywardness of Anwar al-Sadat who succeeded
Nasser. Al-Sadat's compromise agreement with Israel over Sinai
was seen by the Islamists as a betrayal of Egypt and Islam and
as a justification to take up arms against the regime.

The turmoil gave birth to several militant groups,
collectively know as al-Jama'at al-Islamiyyah (Islamic Groups).
Currently the intensity of their violence and the virulence of
their propaganda make the old Ikhwan look like a moderate
outfit. One such group, called al-Jihad al-Islami, plotted the
assassination of president Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981.
Amongst their principal targets are top members of the Coptic
Christians, who make up over 15 per cent of Egypt's population,
and foreign tourists.

The most visible protagonist of the movement is a 55-year-old
sightless Dr Omar Abdel-Rahman, now under detention in the
United States for his alleged involvement in the car-bomb
attack on the World Trade Centre at New York, in February 1993,
that killed six people and injured many more.

In Algeria, the monopoly on power enjoyed by the National
Liberation Front (FLN) and its failure to find credible
solutions to the nation's economic problems, notwithstanding
its substantial oil and gas reserves, have thrown up an Islamic
backlash. Opponents of the FLN rallied under the banner of
Islam not because Islam had ready-made answers to Algeria's
political and economic woes but because the ruling group
permitted no secular platform to exist outside its own
regimented ranks.

In the early 1980s, the Algerian government launched an
austerity programme to grapple with rising unemployment. But
the crisis aggravated and in October 1988 widespread
anti-government riots occurred. The government then belatedly
revised the constitution to permit a multi-party system.
Restrictions on the press were relaxed. Among the various
political parties that emerged, the most articulate was the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), headed by Abbas Madani. It
benefited greatly from Madani's previous record of opposing the
FLN and gained further popularity through impressive relief
operations organised in the wake of the 1989 earthquake.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Islamic Salvation Front won 67
per cent of the provinces and 55 per cent of the municipalities
in the regional and local elections held in June 1990. And in
the postponed parliamentary elections, eventually held in
December 1991, when the FIS won 188 of the 231 seats in the
first round of elections, president al-Shazli Ben-Jedid stepped
down to make way for Muhammad Bou-Diaf. The new president
cancelled the elections. In March 1992, the FIS was outlawed.
Bou-Diaf was assassinated on June 29th, 1992. Algeria's
cautious advance towards democracy came to a grinding halt.

In the Sudan General Ga'afar Muhammad al-Numeiri seized power
in a bloodless coup d'état in 1969, and followed in the
footsteps of Egypt's Nasser, adopting a set of socialist
policies and mobilising mass support under the banner of the
Sudanese Socialist Union, within the framework of a
single-party system.

In the southern Sudan, assertively Christian and African in
contrast to the more populous Arab-Islamic north, Numeiri
followed a policy of accommodation by conceding autonomy and
allocating resources for development. Numeiri's 16-year-long
stint in power, however, left the economy tottering under the
weight of rampant corruption at home and the influx of refugees
from Ethiopia, Uganda and Chad; the south suspicious and
resentful of Khartoum's manipulations; and the disgruntled
conservative groups in the north breathing down the regime's
neck.

A few years before his fall in April 1985 Numeiri enlisted the
support of the Ikhwan and Dr Hassan al-Turabi's National
Islamic Front by promising to turn Sudan into a full-blooded
Islamic state. This desperate act alienated the Christian south
to the point of insurrection. Numeiri's exit has not made much
difference to Sudan's political and economic woes.

It is noteworthy that a few months before his ouster,
Numeiri's crusade for Islamisation of Sudan had resulted in the
hanging of Muhammad Mahmoud Taha, the 76-year-old protagonist
of a secular approach to politics.

Taha's "crime" was that he and his associates belonging to the
Republican Brothers had distributed a leaflet saying that the
Islamic laws promulgated by Numeiri ran counter to Sudan's
constitution and were indeed detrimental to integration of the
Muslim north and the Christian south into one nation on the
basis of equal rights for all citizens.

Taha thus became the first martyr to the cause of secularism in
the Arab world. The intrepid secularist refused to defend
himself in the court declaring that his persecution was
unconstitutional and the judges were unqualified and
technically incompetent.

Secularism has been further discredited by the semi-fascist
Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. The Gulf War accelerated
the trend in favour of fundamentalist Islamic movements and
sharpened divisions among them.

Dose of democracy

Let me conclude by emphasising a few important points about the
Islamic protest movements in the Arab world. Arguably, what we
are witnessing is the intersecting of two phenomena:


The struggle of the South for political and economic
liberation from the power of the West is being continued by
powerful movements for cultural liberation, challenging the
West's monopoly of having discovered universally valid truths
about how the world and society best should be understood and
organised.


This attempt at cultural liberation is focused on the right to
seek a basis in one's own culture and history. Nevertheless, in
striving to liberate themselves from Western models, Islamists
cannot avoid calling into question what is arguably the core of
cultural hegemony which the expanding, modernising Europe
spread over the world: the ideas of the Enlightenment. And this
questioning comes at a time when these ideas, as represented by
the miscellaneous heirs to the Enlightenment, are in deep
crisis in their homelands.As already noted, the challenge posed
by Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran has dampened the enthusiasm of
Saudi and other Gulf rulers for politicisation of Islam. In
Iran itself, time and internal pressure for political openness
and economic progress do not favour the clergy and their
grandiose notions of Islamic resurgence.

As for the predicament of Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan, a
major cause of the people turning to Islam and the Islamists
for resolving their economic and political problems is the
denial of opportunities to bring about political change through
the democratic process. Arguably, a victory of the Islamic
Salvation Front in the Algerian elections of 1991-92, which at
any rate appeared certain, might well have defused rather than
aggravated the political crisis in Algeria. In Egypt and the
Sudan, too, a liberal dose of democracy could bring a semblance
of purpose and poise to the institutions of governance.

The answer to the crisis of Arab polities lies in genuine
power-sharing and accountability in government. The Declaration
of Principles signed in Oslo in September 1993 between the
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel on the
framework of a political settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, if carried to its logical conclusion, can blunt the
edge of Islamic militancy in the Middle East in a significant
way. For, after all, the hurt and humiliation caused to the
Arab psyche by the loss of Palestine, has been a vital
contributing factor to Islamic extremism.

Modernism is not the monopoly of the corrupt ruling elite of
the American club of friends in the Arab world. If social peace
and harmony is to accompany the path of modernisation and
progress in the Middle East, the Islamists should not be driven
into a corner. The Western mind and policy makers have to
accept the right of other peoples to cultural autonomy,
especially those who have behind them a long history and a
great civilisation. Diversity and variety in our world, within
a framework of mutual recognition and co-operation, is in a
sense a guarantee for the future. After all, man's heritage of
rationality evolved on all sides of the Mediterranean, not only
on the northern side.

(c) The author and Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies

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