Islamic Fundamentalism Research Paper

1. General Features

Islamic fundamentalism is too much a product of modern history to admit to being regarded, as is often the case, as sui generis. It is much too severed from Muslim learned and popular traditions over centuries to admit to being considered, as is habitually presumed, an authentic, albeit condensed, resultant of these traditions. In so far as it represents the political expression of a particular attitude towards scriptural material, it is a phenomenon generically belonging to the history of religions, with distinctive affinities to the other monotheistic fundamentalisms, Judaism and Christianity, as well as to other fundamentalisms that are recasting themselves along monotheistic patterns, namely Buddhism, especially in Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent Hinduism. In so far as this attitude towards scripturalist religious origins is made to converge with the modern political ideologies that power modern political movements, Muslim fundamentalism subtends conceptions of history, society, state, and of political action that quite naturally freely draw on the universal modules of populism, vitalism, and the entire repertoire of standard anti-Enlightenment motifs in the history of European and non-European peoples.

Finally, in so far as Muslim fundamentalism, in its wide variety of national settings, ideological and sectarian inflections, and political orientations, was an ideology of increasingly wide appeal in the closing decades of the twentieth century, it shares the common socio-economic characteristics of contemporary subalternist populist movements everywhere, both as diffuse sentiment and as centrally-organized, partypolitical movements of contestation and of revolution, mobilizing crowds as well as building up organizational structures and, in some extreme cases in Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan, and some Western countries, re-socializing their members completely and constructing counter-societies.

2. Intellectual Origins

2.1 Muslim Reformism

The ultimate intellectual, as distinct from social, origins of Muslim fundamentalism go back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much like rightwing European nationalist and royalist ideologies on the ascendant at the time, and in line with the long tradition of sentiment and polemic against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution associated with, among others, Herder, Burke, and de Maistre, these were premised upon a vitalist conception of society and history. At the heart of this conception lay the contention that societies and histories constituted organic wholes sundered and rendered into a condition of morbid distemper by the historical processes of modernity. While these processes in Europe were identified as French Republicanism, socialism, and anticlericalism, in Muslim domains, and particularly in Ottoman lands, which were at the forefront of rapid change among Muslim peoples, they were identified with the state-led reforms in the domains of law reform, educational and cultural advancement, and modernist social engineering—all of which were galvanized by a positivist notion of historical evolution correlative with the assumption by the Ottoman state of direct control on the Bonapartist pattern, which saw cultural and legal hegemony as a primary task and prerogative.

Just as Herder and other conservative Germans derided the court of Frederick the Great as effeminate and ‘inauthentic,’ so the subalten rungs of the emergent Ottoman bureaucracy and modern, non-clerical intelligentsia saw the reformist Ottoman state and the upper rungs of the state administration as being captive to European domination. These groups likewise saw this domination personified in westernized life-styles and progressive ideas. Expressed initially by the Young Ottomans, these sentiments were vigorously expressed and most consequentially by the Persian Jamal al-Din al-Asadabadi, alias al-Afghani (1839–1897) and his then disciple, the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), through the medium of the short-lived, but highly suggestive and influential review, al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, The Sure Bond (a Koranic expression), published in Paris in 1882–1883.

It was suggested in this review that nations are corporate entities which cohere around moral drives, a notion which bears close comparison with Herder’s notion of Krafte. Once adulturated by foreign influences, these drives tend to atrophy, and to weaken the body-national which, in this social-Darwinist world of nations, is perforce made subject to stronger parties. Thus history is a cyclical process, an alternance of purity and adulteration, corresponding to phases of power and powerlessness: in the history of Islam, alUrwa al-Wuthqa traced the causes of adulturation of the early Muslim empire to non-Arab newcomers to the faith, and to heterodox sects, and the adulteration of the Ottoman polity to the infiltration of modernist ideas and institutes of European provenance. Afghani and Abduh discounted race and ethnicity from their definition of a nation, and viewed religion as ‘the sure bond’ of Muslim nations. It was the Muslim religion, very broadly defined in culturalist and utilitarian rather than in devotional or dogmatic terms, which caused the organic unity of the nation to cohere, to acquire direction, and to gather force. Political action was thus conceived as an educational enterprise for the broad mass of people captive to superstition, and a conspiratorial political task directed at winning over prominent statesmen who might provide the authoritarian armature of this historical project.

Over subsequent decades, and until the late 1920s, the two prongs of this enterprise bifurcated, with Afghani, a charismatic and highly complex archconspirator but a superficial thinker, failing to build a Muslim internationalist coalition. Abduh, who became Grand Mufti of Egypt, independently charted the intellectual and cultural highlights of a lasting religious reform, explicitly inspired by the example of Luther, whose main thrust was to combat what he regarded as superstitious and irrational accretions that overcame what he took for the original Koranic foundations of the Muslim religion: folk religiosity, traditionalism, clericalism, and virtually all interpetations of religion that were contrary to modern science (including Darwinism) and modernist forms of political, legal, and social organization. At Abduh’s hands, Islam became highly latitudinarian and episodically regarded almost as a natural religion corresponding to the social evolution of humanity.

2.2 From Reformism To Fundamentalism

It was with Abduh’s star pupil, the Syrian Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1937), initially as liberal as his teacher, that what might be termed political Afghanism became ascendant. In his monthly review al-Manar (1898–1934), published from Cairo and prodigiously influential all the way fom Morocco to Java, he laid the foundations of an alliance between social conservatism and a cultural-political activism in the name of a religious reform shorn of its previous latitudinarianism, retained as a slogan voided of practical consequence, and with a pronounced antimodernist polemical tone that sought to expand the definition of religion to encompass the entire surface of social life, rendering politics, in the words of a prominent follower, ‘social devotions.’ The emphasis on the strict observance of ritual, the emblematic use of politico-cultural spectacle such as extreme forms of punishment, the vituperative strictures against equally emblematic manifestations of modernity, particularly secularism and the social liberation of women, vigorous opposition to nearly all but literalist interpretations of the Koran and to miraculous and salvational views of Islamic history, and the hostility to modern legal reforms in the name of fidelity to Koranic and classical norms, propounding the ‘restoration of the Shari’ a’ as a fundamental political slogan, and the revival of the notion of apostasy. These became leitmotifs of all subsequent Muslim fundamentalism in the Arab World and beyond.

This expansive definition of religion was influenced by the example of the literalist medievalism of the Wahhabi movement which led to the foundation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1925. This movement, born in a deprived and isolated territory during the era of the French Revolution, represented a ritualistic puritanism which referred directly to the Muslim scriptures and certain fundamentalist figures in Muslim traditions, at the same time impoverishing these considerably, and reducing them to formulism.

3. Culture Into Politics

To this expansive definition of the religious sphere was added an organized political moment in the 1920s and 1930s with the emergence of the Society of Muslim Brothers, first in Egypt, later spawning similar movements elsewhere.

3.1 Incipient Organization

Like subsequent moments in the history of Muslim fundamentalism, this political emergence followed the rhythms and patterns of international history which, in the interwar period, was characterized by the antiEnlightenment and anti-Communist vitalist motifs that provided ideological sustenance to racism, hypernationalism, xenophobia, and cognate trends, both organized and socially diffuse. Thus, the Society of Muslim Brothers and its Muslim and Hindu homologs in India, the Jamaat-i Islami and the RSS, for instance, conceived themselves as sporting and paramilitary youth organizations, ostensibly beyond party and class politics in the name of the unity and homogeneity of the nation, conceiving of the state as a natural and organic emergence from a homogenous society, fully corresponding to its essence, momentarily in diremption and in the course of restoration to an arcadian past prior to its violation and corruption by inauthentic modernity.

This rhetoric of history underlying a political project of hegemonism and of the seizure of state power by means both gradual (emphasizing re-education and re-socialisation) and insurrectional, was given added ideological and systematic force and relevance in the period of the Cold War, with large-scale borrowing from state-led nationalism in Muslim countries and from populist conceptions of popular will, interpreted as fundamentally and abidingly religious, whereby Muslim peoples were thought to be, by natural instinct, Islamist in political orientation. This explains to a large degree the extraordinary degree of social, symbolic, and physical violence needed for nurturing these movements in their quest for power. Correlatively, these movements derived concrete logistical, institutional and organizational sustenance from the US and from Saudi Arabia, and may be said to have constituted the cultural plank of the Truman Doctrine, to which military and political aid was added, most dramatically in the Malay Peninsula in the 1950s, in Indonesia in 1965, and in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

3.2 Radical Islamism And Society

The main ideological innovation in this third phase of Islamic fundamentalism resides in the notion of takfir, the notion that Muslim societies are not only aberrant and unfaithful to their natural history, but that they are territories of degeneration and godlessness in need of a total recasting along models derived from the prophetic period in Islamic history, now transformed into a Utopia. First propounded by Abul-A’la Mawdudi (1903–79), the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami in India and later its leading light in Pakistan, it was taken over by the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1903–66), crossed with the notion of degeneration current in right-wing European political thought during the fin-de-siecle and the inter-war periods (prominent here was the influence of Alexis Carrel), and provided the cornerstone of the extremist fundamentalism of the 1990s: among certain groups in Egypt, Algeria, and Afghanistan, and more episodically elsewhere. Most specifically, the civil war in Afghanistan spawned a class of itinerant professional Islamist revolutionaries of various nationalities who took up arms in Algeria, Egypt, the US, Bosnia, Kashmir, and elsewhere.

At the close of the twentieth century, further elements were added to the ideological and activist repetoire of these movements, some of which had taken over state power (as in Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan) or became potent players on the national scene (as in Pakistan), where they have been directing operations of social engineering aimed at recasting laws and public mores. The most important of these elements, again reflecting international flavors of the time, is the hyper-nationalist use of the vitalist notions of ‘identity,’ of cultural difference, and their cognates in a situation marked by the waning of projects of development and their cultural and social correlates, the weakening of states in the developing world under conditions of global deregulation, including cultural and social deregulation. These derive sustenance from armies of the slum-dwellers, the structurally unemployed, small businessmen belonging to a previous age, and subaltern intellectuals including members of the clerisy, most potently and successfully in Iran, where the break-up of the modenist state was most spectacularly displayed in the revolution of 1979 which has highly specific ideological and organizational characteristics.

An expansion of religious thought, in the name of culturally specific protocols of knowledge, led to an auxiliary and most important element that sustains fundamentalist bids for intellectual hegemony, namely the institutional and conceptual development of the ‘Islamization of knowledge’: Islamic social science, Islamic economics, Islamic democracy, the renewed hostility to Darwinism, and Islamic feminism. These currents of thought exercised collateral influence on sectors of political thought in many Muslim countries, some of them irreligious and hostile to political Islamism, and certain of these vocabularies seeped into the mainstream of political discourse, quite apart from state sponsored religion which had hitherto been marked by a latitudinarian reformism, now feeling the need to protect its flanks and pushed into a more conservative direction.

Bibliography:

1. Al-Azmeh A 1996 Islams and Modernities, 2nd edn. Verso, London
2. Appleby R S, Marty M E (eds.) 1991 The Fundamentalism Project, 5 Vols. Chicago University Press, Chicago
3. Ayubi N 1991 Political Islam. Routledge, London and New York
4. Choueiri Y 1990 Islamic Fundamentalism. Frances Pinter, London
5. Dabashi H 1993 Theology of Discontent. The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. New York University Press, New York
6. Enayat H 1982 Modern Islamic Political Thought. Macmillan, London
7. Kerr M 1966 Islamic Reform. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles
8. Roy O 1994 The Failure of Political Islam. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA