Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (6 page)

Modern Oasis: Islamists’ Visions of the Ideal State

Bin Laden did not formulate his interpretations in a vacuum. He is the heir of an intellectual legacy which has its roots in the ideas of Muslim thinkers dat- ing to the eighteenth century and stretching over majority-Muslim countries from Egypt to Pakistan. Influential progenitors of the modern Islamic intel- lectual tradition include Muhammad ibn (Abd al-Wahhab (1703–87), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), Muhammad (Abduh (1849–1905), Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), Sayyid Abu)l-A(la Mawdudi (1903–79), and Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951). While some of these figures predate the beginnings of contemporary Islamism, they defined several key themes and, in some cases, the organizational structures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islamism. They also articulated the grievances which Islamists level against the West: its historic colonialist, political, military, and cultural assaults against Muslims.99 Concomitantly, Islamist groups (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas) while making small variations to their messages, depending on the specific contexts where they operate, espouse visions of an ideal Islamic state that are similar to each other.

The Islamists’ most vocal objections are directed against: (1) secular governments (such as those in Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan) and/or (2) govern- ments which perceive themselves as based on Islam but which the Islamists believe are not (such as Saudi Arabia). Islamists oppose these governments because they perceive Islam as a total and complete system which God desires to institute as the exclusive basis for every aspect of life including the political, economic, cultural, public, and private.100

The Islamists’ beliefs regarding their religion’s all-encompassing nature are based on their interpretations of the Quran, Hadith, and Islam’s early history. For Islamists, God’s wisdom, power, beneficence, and sacred injunctions should not be relegated to only some aspects of human affairs. In this regard, they quote passages such as Quran 2:2, “This is the book, in it is guidance sure, without doubt to those who fear God,” and Quran 2:85:

Then it is only a part of the book that you believe in, and do you reject the rest? But what is the reward for those among you who behave like this but disgrace in this life? And on the Day of Judgment they shall be consigned to the most grievous penalty. For God is not unmindful of what you do.101

In addition to these Quranic proclamations, Islamists look upon Muhammad’s life as a supreme model for every aspect of daily existence. For example, according to the Hadith, “Verily, there was a good example for you in the ways of the Prophet.”102 According to the Islamists’ understandings of

Muhammad’s life, during the time he led the early Islamic community, he made no distinctions between the secular, religious, and political realms; hence, for these activists there should be no distinction between these realms today. In their view, the Quran, Hadith, and Sunna (the Prophet Muhammad’s example) establish the foundations of Sharia which, accord- ing to God’s decree, must be the basis for every law governing majority- Muslim countries.103

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Islamists have actively worked to change their societies, espousing the following principles:

These ideals comprise one vision of an ideal Islamic state and of an eventual global Islamic state for many Islamists, including al-Qaida, and catalyze their religio-political movements.

Fundamentalisms and Interpretations of History

Typically, fundamentalists, such as the Islamists, attempt to formulate their ideals and then apply them to themselves and to others within their religion and society at large. As fundamentalists interpret texts, they do so with a desire to avoid compromise or thoroughgoing critical scrutiny of those texts and the other foundations of their ideas. In a number of cases, one salient component of religious fundamentalism involves fundamentalists taking active political roles in their efforts to shape society in accordance with their visions. Fundamentalism usually entails a number of features, including great religious passion, a defiance against secular and/or colonialist cultures, and a return to traditional sources of religious authority. Forms of fundamentalism are present in a number of religions, including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism to name a few.105

By way of caveat, these and other ideas are meant to create an impres- sionistic picture of some similarities within and between what could be termed fundamentalists within various religions; the characteristics articulated here are to function as ideal types and may vary to the extent they characterize fundamentalists within or between various religions. The intention is to provide a general outline of what may be termed fundamen- talism, while recognizing the enormous diversity in such movements within a given religion and between religions.

In any case, fundamentalists typically interpret their sacred histories in ways that mobilize their movements. For fundamentalists (and other religious people), the past is both exemplary and monitory; it is there to teach what must and must not be done.106 The Islamist groups, which this book examines, share at least some of those characteristics with Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, for example. The Islamists are responding to a variety of what they perceive to be political, religious, social, and economic problems for which they believe their understanding of Islam holds the solution. Like other Muslims, Islamists interpret Islamic sacred texts and history in such a way that mobilizes their actions in modern and contempo- rary times. For all Muslims, including Islamists, some of the most important entities that form the basis of their contemporary worldviews are the Quran, Hadith, the Sunna, and, in some cases, early Islamic history.107 Muslims use these and other elements to construct their meanings of the past, present, and future and to guide their actions.

In describing the ways that religious and other types of communities appropriate and understand their histories, among both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the sociologist Anthony Giddens utilizes the term “reflexivity” and states that it is the characteristic of “all human action.”108 Reflexivity takes place when individuals and/or communities utilize their perceptions of their histories as a way of guiding their present and future actions.109 For Giddens, tradition is a means of “handling time and space, which asserts any particular activity or experience with the community of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social prac- tices.”110 In light of this, tradition is a set of entities which religious communities and cultures continually reconstruct within certain parameters. Religions are not completely static in that almost every new generation reinvents the religious and cultural inheritance from the generations that preceded it.111

While members of virtually all religious communities engage in the process of reflexivity, there are multiple examples of Islamists reflexively drawing on the sacred texts and history of Islam as they construct meanings related to their historic contexts. For example, when Islamists state their visions for an ideal Islamic state, they are reflexively drawing on the Quran, Hadith, Sunna, and aspects of Islamic history as they reconstruct their vision of that imagined past and then apply it to the present, while believing all along that the visions that they proclaim closely or exactly match aspects of the Islamic past. When Islamists identify their current enemies with the past enemies of Muhammad and with other groups whom they believe were the enemies of true Islam, and justify their violent acts against their current enemies based on those reconstructions, the Islamists are reflexively reconstructing Islamic history as a way of justifying their current actions. These and other reflexive reconstructions of history are not necessarily conscious or willful; this pro- cess can naturally flow from being religious and attempting to relate one’s

religious beliefs and actions to the specific historic context within which one finds oneself. Indeed, all Muslims, including Islamists, feel a deep connection with their religion’s history, while, at the same time, interpreting Islam’s history and sacred texts in different ways. As a part of this process that seems endemic to Islam, the Islamists are also reflexively reconstructing their interpretations of Islam’s sacred texts and history in such way that mobilizes their religio-political movements as they attempt to achieve their goals. Like all Muslims, the Islamists feel their connectedness to Islam’s sacred texts and history, in ways that the Islamists believe are genuinely Islamic.

Intentions

Among other things, this book argues that the worldviews of the members of al-Qaida follow specific patterns which are rooted in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islamist ideas and institutions as well as some intellec- tual currents that date to the early modern period. It explores the connections between Islamist ideologies and movements in Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and those of al-Qaida, on the other. It also analyzes the United States’ Middle East policies from the beginning of the post-World War II period, and the ways in which Islamist groups have structured their ideologies and organizations to address Western political, cultural, and military influence in the region.

This study:

This book intends to examine some of the most significant Sunni Islamist groups and movements in the modern era, particularly in the time period