Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (44 page)
Read Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics Online
Authors: Jon Armajani
- Tom Lansford, A Bitter Harvest: U.S. Foreign Policy and Afghanistan
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 21–3.
- Ibid.
- Rashid, Taliban, 67–71.
- Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i Sharif, vol. 10, no.
7 (C) (November 1998),
www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/afghan/
(accessed September 14, 2009).
- Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi and Shahnaz Shaheen, “Challenges from Media and the Muslims,” in Challenges to Religions and Islam: A Study of Muslim Movements, Personalities, Issues and Trends, ed. Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2007), 1202–3.
- Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i Sharif.
- Jehl, “Iran Holds Taliban Responsible for 9 Diplomats’ Deaths.”
- Douglas Jehl,“Iran President Will Not Bar Use of Force on Afghans,” New York Times, September 10, 1998.
- Nicholas Goldberg, “U.S. Attack’s Value Questioned; Anger Toward Americans Has Intensified; Target Still Alive,” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), August 29, 1998.
- Ibid.
- Rashid, Taliban, 75.
- Ibid. 78 Ibid., 76.
- “Buddhas Destroyed in Afghanistan Amid World Protest,” Foreign Policy Association Newsletter,
www.fpa.org/newsletter_info2456/newsletter_info_
sub_list.htm?section=Afghanistan (accessed September 14, 2009). - Rashid, Taliban, 78–80.
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1214, December 8, 1998,
www.
un.org/Docs/scres/1998/scres98.htm (accessed September 14, 2009). - Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 79–83.
- Rashid, Taliban, 79–80.
- J. Alexander Thier, “Afghanistan,” in Twenty-First-Century Peace Operations, ed. William J. Durch (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace and the Henry L. Stimson Center, 2006), 476.
- See Neamatollah Nojumi, “The Rise and Fall of the Taliban,” in The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, ed. Robert O. Crews and Amin Tarzi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 90–117.
- Filkins, “Right at the Edge (Talibanistan).”
- Quoted in “Challenges within the Muslim World,” testimony by Dr Rachel Bronson, Director of Middle East Studies, at the Council on Foreign Relations Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (The 9-11 Commission), July 9, 2003,
www.cfr.org/publication/6112/
challenges_within_the_muslim_world.html (accessed September 14, 2009). - Quoted in Kurt Nimmo, “Abu Hamza al-Masri: Made in the USA,” Counterpunch, May 29/31, 2004,
www.counterpunch.org/nimmo05292004.
html (accessed September 14, 2009).
- Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, and Andrew W. Lehren,“Pakistan Spy Unit Aiding Insurgents, Report Suggests,” New York Times, July 26, 2010.
- Hooman Paimani, Falling Terrorism and Rising Conflicts: The Afghan “Contribution” to Polarization and Confrontation in West and South Asia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 118–22.
- Elisabeth Bumiller, “The War: A Trillion Can Be Cheap,” New York Times, July 24, 2010.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais, Recovering the Frontier State: War, Ethnicity, and State in Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 192–5.
- Filkins, “Right at the Edge (Talibanistan).”
- Arie Marcelo Kacowicz, Peaceful Territorial Change (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 105.
- Robert Grenier, “Ominous Signs for U.S.-Pakistan Ties,” AlJazeera.net, May 12, 2010,
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201051271757128641.html
(accessed August 11, 2010).
7
Conclusion
History is a battlefield. It’s constantly being fought over because the past controls the present. History is the present. That’s why every gen- eration writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E.L. Doctorow1
Members of some religio-political groups which are involved in resistance to the status quo and want to effect change – such as certain fundamentalists including the Islamists in this study – have some common characteristics in their organizations and ideologies. For example, such groups often draw on existing organizational networks, such as mosques, churches, temples, and other existing religious associations that can enable them to train leaders and adherents for their specific movements. In the case of the Islamists, groups such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Hamas, Pakistan’s Jama(at-i Islami, and the Taliban routinely use mosques to train their organizations’ leaders while educating and mobilizing their rank-and-file members. Such resistance groups which engage in violent acts assert that their actions are based on religious justifications for militant acts and that these and their other behaviors are morally justified based on these groups’ interpretations of their own religions’ sacred texts and histories. Members of such religio-political groups that engage in militant acts believe that they are engaged in a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil, where the members of the resistance groups maintain that they and their ideals represent good while those whom they oppose manifest evil. As many Islamists, for example, recognize their own sins and shortcomings, they
Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics, First Edition. Jon Armajani.
© 2012 Jon Armajani. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Conclusion 219
maintain an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause and the utterly wrongheaded nature of that of their enemies, and that they as true Muslims are engaged in a God-ordained global war which they as God’s soldiers will finally win, as they will eventually create a global Islamic state where everyone will be Muslim and governed by Islamic law. In this vein, similar to the Islamists, members of other militant religio-political groups, while also believing that they are engaged in a cosmic war, view the members of their group who are engaged in militant acts as religious soldiers who are engaged in an ultimately triumphant struggle against that group’s enemies. At the same time, members of certain religio-political groups, in a manner that is similar to some other religious persons, have an all-encompassing worldview, which involves the belief that the sacred figures, texts, and history of their own religion provide the ultimate guide to every aspect of their lives and should provide the ultimate guide to the lives of everyone in the world. For the Islamists, this is comprised of the belief that the Quran, the Hadith, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and certain aspects of Islamic history provide a single monolithic set of standards which they and everyone else should follow. Many members of religio-political groups who are involved in these struggles believe that the timeline of their sacred struggle is vast, extending for thousands of years or even eternally.2 The Islamists adhere to such a worldview; they believe that if God does not grant them victory in the near future, he will grant it to future Muslims at some
point, maybe even in the very distant future.3
Yet, all Muslims, including the Islamists, believe that their actions are guided by a set of discourses that preceded them. According to the anthropologist Talal Asad,
A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). An Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present.4
Thus, Islamists, like other Muslims and other religious persons, maintain a set of interpretations that are based on their understandings of the past which they believe should guide their actions in the present and the future. Indeed, the Islamists believe Islam’s sacred texts sanctify their actions. In view of the relative strength of Islamist groups and the various factors that
220 Modern Islamist Movements
catalyze them, they, like other fundamentalist groups in other religions, may have an effect on the foreign and domestic policies of Western and other countries for many years to come.
Notes
- Interview with E.L. Doctorow in George Plimpton, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 8th series (New York: Penguin, 1988), 308.
- Many of these ideas are adapted from Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 252–7.
- Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 229.
- Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Occasional Paper Series, 1986), 14.
Index
Abd al-Hadi Pasha, Ibrahim 53
Abd al-Rahman, Sheikh (Umar 65–6 and Zawahiri 66
(Abduh, Muhammad 20, 27, 37, 41–4 on autocracy and democracy 43–4 on critical thinking 42–3, 43–4
on education 42–3
on law 42
legacy of 44, 48
on Quran and contemporary challenges 42
and Western ideas 43, 44 Abdul Hamid II, Sultan: opposes
Zionism 88
Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk: airline attack by 77
Abu Hafs: in Somalia 144
Aden: attack on USS Cole at 149
al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 20, 27, 37–41
critiques caliphate 39–40 influenced by Guizot 39 legacy of 48
on nationalism and Islam 40
on Quran and political activism 41 and Tobacco Protest 38
Afghanistan
Bin Laden in 4, 17, 18, 27, 29,
141–2, 145
chaos/civil war in, following Soviet withdrawal 68, 194–5, 198, 211
Islamic insurgents (mujahideen) in
see mujahideen
as Islamist militants’ stronghold 210–11, 212–13
madrasahs in 192, 195
Operation Enduring Freedom 210, 211
al-Qaida in 27, 29, 212 Pakistan’s involvement in 188,
197–8
Saudi support for madrasahs in 195 Soviet occupation of 67, 140, 188,
191, 194
Taliban in 4, 29, 147–8, 164 tribal makeup of 147
United States’ involvement in 27, 29,
74, 210, 211, 212–13
Ahmad, Eqbal 111
Aideed, Mohamed Farrah 144 alcohol: Islamic ban on 22 Alexander III (Russia): pogroms
under 86
Alexius I Comnenus, Emperor 6 Ali, Caliph: tomb of 204–5 Annan, Kofi: on illegality of Israel’s
West Bank occupation 8
Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics, First Edition. Jon Armajani.
© 2012 Jon Armajani. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
anti-Semitism European 87
and Islamist groups 52 in Russia 86
al-(Aqqad, (Abbas Mahmud: and Qutb 55
Arab Higher Committee 92 Arafat, Yasir 9, 94, 98, 99, 105,
106
(Arif, (Abd al-Salam 61
Asad, Talal: on Islamic history 219 Atatürk, Kemal 46
Atef, Muhammad 4, 25–6
Atta, Muhammad: letter by 150 al-Awlaki, Anwar 77
Ayub Khan, General Muhammad and Islamic modernism 176 and Jama(at-i Islami 175–6, 177
al-Azhar (Cairo) 41–2, 49
Azzam, Abdallah 137, 140–1
Balfour, Arthur James 90 Balfour Declaration 7, 90 Balkh: significance of 205 Bamiyan 195, 206
Buddhist statues of 208 Taliban siege of 206–7 taken by Taliban 208
Bangladesh: secession of 177 al-Banna, (Abd al-Rahman 102 al-Banna, Hasan 20, 27, 48–53
assassination of 53, 56
influences upon 48
and Muslim Brotherhood 48, 49–50,
52–3, 181
and socio-economic justice 51 shocked by Western cultural
influences 49 Begin, Menachem
policies of, concerning Palestinians 100
promotes Jewish settlements in West Bank and Gaza 101
Ben Gurion, David 93 Benjamin, Walter 110, 111
Bhutto, Benazir: secularist government of 197
Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali: and Jama(at-i Islami 177–8
bid)a: concept of 124 Bin Laden, Usama 2
in Afghanistan 67, 69, 141, 145, 147 and attack on USS Cole 149
Dawn interview 151
death of, and al-Qaida 153 early life of 139–40
as heir to Qutb 61 and history 145–6
intellectual influences upon 20, 152
Islamist teachers of 137, 140
and jihad 14
lifestyle of 143, 149
and mujahideen 67, 140
as Muslim popular hero 16–17, 141,
147
opinion of United States 149 and al-Qaida 4, 140, 145 and religious poetics 16
and Saudi Arabia 25, 67–8, 138–9,
141, 145, 148–9
on September 11 attacks 151–2
and Somalia 144–5
statements by 148, 149
in Sudan 68, 142–3, 145
and Taliban 147–8, 208–9 United States’ attacks on 147–8 on waging war against United
States 151–2
and Wahhabism 122, 152 Britain see Great Britain Brzezinski, Zbigniew: on the
Taliban 210
calendar, Islamic 3 caliphate
al-Afghani’s view of 39 Rida’s view of 46–7 Zawahiri’s vision of 74
Camp David negotiations 9, 108 Carter, Jimmy: refuses Zia ul-Haq’s
requests 190
Central Intelligence Agency see CIA Christianity
doctrines of, and tawhid 123