Muslim politician and scholar Jamal Al-Deen Al-Afghani (1838-1897). Wikimedia Commons.
April 23, 2015
Violent
Islamism is not an aberrational accident in Arab and Islamic history. It has
always followed the fall of the dominant order. It materialized in the periods
that followed the fall of the Ottoman-Mameluke state in Egypt and the eastern
Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century, after the crumbling of the Arab
liberal age in the 1940s, and in the 1970s when secular Arab nationalism proved
decisively unable to deliver on the grand ambitions it had given rise to. The
current forms of violent Islamism, which rage across the eastern Mediterranean,
North Africa, and increasingly in the Arabian Peninsula, attempt to fill the
vacuum created by the fall of the Arab state order that had appeared after
World War II and was rattled by the Arab uprisings. It also reflects deep
anxieties and dilemmas within the Arab and Islamic worlds.
The
Arab revolts of the last five years gave rise to an intense transition. It
entails a fight between the pillars of the old system which have lost moral
authority but retain many levers of power, and young forces which reject the
old system but have limited resources and cannot agree, yet, on what frame of
reference they want for their societies. The transition includes attempts by
immensely rich merchant (and often ruling) families to secure their future at a
time of dramatic economic changes, most notably as Middle Eastern oil is
increasingly losing its strategic (and monetary) value. The transition marks
the coming to the fore of the largest cohort in Arab history of Arab teens and twenty-and-thirty-somethings.
And
crucially, the transition revolves round conflicts between different
interpretations of Arab liberalism and nationalism; between Arabness and other
ethnicities in the region; and between Arabness and Islamism (seeing specific
old interpretations of Islamic theology and experiences as the primary, and
often the sole, frame of reference for political legitimacy, legislation,
social organization, economic undertaking, and identity). That such a
complicated transition takes place at a compressed timeframe makes it highly
disorienting for the societies undergoing it. The transition has also been
unfolding under the gaze of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, watching
it live on satellite channels and the Internet. They see for themselves the
cruelty, terror, horror, and banality that accompany such a mega
transformation.
This
transition is further inflamed by an acute moral problem across the Arab and
Islamic worlds. In less than five years, more than a quarter of a million Arabs
were killed and close to four million have been displaced. And yet, the Arab
and Islamic political and humanitarian responses have been dismal. This created
not only a glaring disconnect between the millions of refugees now in the
Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and the rest of Arab societies, but also
an emotional gulf within the Arab and Islamic worlds. On one side, there is
havoc and desolation, and on the other, indifference and feigning normalcy. For
many, this dichotomy is shocking and sickening.
The
fall of the order that had dominated the region for decades, the bankruptcy of
the old governing systems, disorientation, and repugnancy at the ubiquitous
lethargy, all fuel anger. It manifests itself through a rush to the sole value
system that, in the eyes of millions, has retained its integrity: religion.
Both Middle Eastern Islamism and Christianism have been imbued with immense
momentum over the past few years. And in both, the leading groups assumed the
roles of either the savior (promising harmony and redemption at a time of chaos
and falling certainties) or the martyr (evoking hatred and provoking vengeance,
both strong intellectual and emotional anchors). It helped that the fights
between Arab secularism and Islamism and between old and new powers have given the
largest Islamist groups across the Arab World successive opportunities to
assume the role of the victim. Here, Islam has become not only a refuge in a
world in which all ideologies and systems have been crumbling; it also became a
powerful cause to be defended.
The
fall of competing ideologies offered the Islamists a historic opportunity. Arab
liberalism, Arab nationalism, and Persian and Turkish top-down impositions of
secularism (throughout most of the twentieth century), all have cannibalized
the notion of the ummah (the Islamic
community as an overarching social identity and political entity). This has
always riled the Islamists; and for decades, the ambition of resuscitating the ummah has animated different Islamist
groups. The fall of these political systems not only offered an opportunity for
mainstream Islamist groups to attempt a peaceful Islamization of different
countries; it enthused, and emboldened, other Islamists to try to resurrect the
ummah by force.
Unlike
mainstream Islamist groups, violent Islamists did not present various ideas to
reconcile Islamism with modernity; and they did not try to assume the role of
ordinary political actors. They have, simply, rejected all of what has taken
hold in the Arab and Islamic worlds in the last two centuries as sinful and
deviation from true Islam. In this view, their form of Islamism need not adapt
to the experiences of their societies’ modern history, need not incorporate new
concepts, and need not demonstrate any kind of tolerance to others, or to
others’ beliefs, understandings, or ways of life. This absoluteness (purity,
even) made it, for some, a stronger emotional haven and social refuge, than the
qualified and guarded Islamism of the large Islamist groups.
Violent
Islamism also strongly connected with a yearning for a return of Islamic
ascendancy and dominion. For at least two centuries now, the Islamic World has
failed to catch up with its historical “other,” Christendom. And though the
notion of Christendom has been majorly diluted by the waves of modernity and
intellectual and scientific advancement, Islamism was never extinguished in the
Middle East. And so at a time of anxiety, fear, and vacuum, the call for
defending Islam and asserting Islamism by force blended with an acute awareness
of how weak and lethargic the Islamic World has been, as opposed to the West’s
strength and eminence.
For
tens of thousands of young Muslims, this assertive Islamism was also a form of
opposition and objection to the West’s repeated interventions in the Islamic
World. As the West came to directly control large parts of the Arab and Islamic
worlds, from Afghanistan to Iraq (including Baghdad, one of the most
illustrious capitals in the history of the Islamic civilization), Western
attitudes to Muslim societies came to be seen as, at best condescending, at
worst contemptuous.
The
danger here transcends the thousands of deaths and enormous chaos that violent
Islamism results in. The combination of the yearning for Islamic ascendancy and
agitation at the West redefines the Islamic World’s long interaction with the
West as one based on adversity and confrontation. This betrays a limited
understanding of Islamic history. It reduces the Islamic World’s experience
with modernity in the last two centuries to a struggle with colonialism,
various geostrategic confrontations, and, as Samuel P. Huntington put it, “a
clash of civilizations,” though in this case, it is reduced by the violent
Islamists to its most basic and crudest form: killing in the name of a faith. This
exacerbates the division within the Islamic World; it widens the polarization
between the Islamists and the secularists to become one between those who see
Islamic history through the growth and evolution of its civilization (which has
benefited from and added to Western civilization), and those who ignore its
rich path through long centuries and varied cultural interactions and restrict
it to its earliest societies in the Arabian Peninsula and the Eastern
Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries. Here, Huntington’s
“unceasing struggle between civilizations” becomes an unceasing struggle within
the Islamic World.
Violent
Islamism subjugates the myriad civilizational understandings of Islam to strict
embracement of its earliest societies, and literalist interpretations of its
theological sources. This repudiates all the intellectual innovations that
Islamic thinkers developed to ensure that Islam remains a social framework,
suitable for different ages and applicable in diverse societies. It renounces
the work of the medieval Islamic philosophers who graduated Islamic thinking
from its early desert origins and ushered it into the cosmopolitanism and
intellectual richness of Persia, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and later
southern Europe and the Indian subcontinent. It also rejects the work of modern
thinkers, such as Jamal Al-Deen Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abdou, who founded ways
of marrying traditional understandings of Islamic theology with ways of living
in modern societies. Without this contribution, it is highly likely that Arab
liberalism and nationalism would have become not only anti-Islamist, but also
anti-Islam, similar to Kamal Atatürk’s secularism in Turkey. And so by
disclaiming the Islamic civilization’s rich heritage and trying to impose early
interpretations of Islam on today’s societies, violent Islamism is foolishly
dragging the faith itself into a confrontation with modernity.
Abandoning
the Islamic civilization’s opulent heritage also condemns the Islamic World to
relive its past. It forces it to undergo the torturous experiences it had
endured in the tenth century, and many times since then, of how to evolve an
intrinsically flexible theological structure into a social and political frame
of reference applicable in societies with vastly different historical
experiences and cultural characteristics. Throughout these many experiences,
the Islamic World endured various episodes of mass violence.
Some
of that violence, though abhorrent, made sense. For example, in their
successful endeavour to unite large parts of the Arabian Peninsula under the
extremely conservative and highly literalist Wahhabi Islamic doctrine,
Abdelaziz Al-Saud’s religious warriors had used chilling violence. Here,
violence had a clear and viable objective: creating the Islamic Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia. The social and political system that has anchored that Kingdom
resonated with the historical experience and cultural characteristics of the
communities that lived in that part of the Islamic World in the early decades of
the twentieth century. There were similar examples in Islamic history when
violence, repugnant as it always is, was an effective approach to realize a
viable and sustainable objective. That was particularly true when the purpose
for which that violence was perpetrated had inspired large swaths of people.
Today, the violence adopted and promoted by various jihadist groups in North
Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, is senseless. Not only is their political
objective (creating a seventh-century style state at the heart of the Arab
World) unachievable; it is delusional. Resuscitating the earliest form of
Islamic state, stripped from all the religious, historical, cultural, and moral
features that made the original one a seed for a rich civilization, is not an
objective that will inspire or resonate with any large group of Arabs or
Muslims today.
The
thinking of today’s violent Islamism also denies the Islamic World the major
advancements in human and civil rights that large sections within most Islamic
societies have come to see as basic freedoms. And it restrains these societies
from seeking innovative ways for retaining their Islamic frame of reference
(under whatever definitions) and, at the same time, accepting new milestones of
human knowledge. Rigid thinking and circumscribed frameworks will render the
majority of believing Muslims utterly detached from understandings that biology
and physics are making increasingly irrefutable. This will not only entrench
the Islamic World’s lethargy, but will gradually dilute the connection between
millions of young Muslims (and coming generations) and Islam itself.
Over
time, this will become a threat to the religion. The simplicity of violent
thinking, the depravity it descends souls into, and the harshness and crudeness
it engenders within societies, will impoverish and corrupt contributions to
Islamic theology. The more this murderous thinking ingrains itself within the
Islamic World, the less sophisticated the Islamic World will be in dealing with
scripture and with its diverse set of sources. The result will be less
ingenious ways of interpreting the sacred, precisely at the time when it will
be under extreme scrutiny by new generations with vastly different social
perspectives and scientific certainties. Today’s violent Islamism is arguably
one of the most significant perils that the Islamic World, and Islam itself,
has ever confronted.
Tarek Osman is a political
economist focused on the Arab World and is the author of Egypt on the Brink. He was the writer and presenter of the
BBC’s 2013 radio series “The Making of the Modern Arab World” and the 2015
radio series “Saudi Arabia: Sands of Time.” He is the political counselor for
the Arab World at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. On
Twitter: @TarekmOsman.