Politicised political Islam and 'The New Spirit of Islamism'
In this book, I do not claim to have fully overcome the epistemological crisis of studying ideology or Islamism. However, I attempt to de-exceptionalise the lines of inquiry
Writing about political Islam is political, which brings us to my book’s broader crisis – the nature of knowledge production on Islamism. Karl Manheim, in a letter to Kurt H. Wolff in 1946, wrote that ‘in the marginal field of human knowledge we should not conceal inconsistencies’, covering up the wounds, as it were, ‘but our duty is to show the sore points in human thinking at its present stage.’[1] This is what I will try to do in the following paragraphs – not to dispel all errors but to present sore points that undergird the malaise in studying Islamism.
Firstly, the terminology around groups that seek to Islamise their societies – groups ‘who are committed to political action to implement what they regard as an Islamic agenda’[2] – is contested. In the book, I use ‘Islamism/Islamist’ and ‘political Islam’ interchangeably to refer to the AKP, Ennahda, and the MB in Egypt throughout. The main reason for this choice is that these actors and many contemporary Muslim intellectuals have adapted their rhetoric accordingly and have been using the Arabic term islamiyya or the Turkish term İslamcı when referring to political Islam or their political identities. ‘In its classical and modern standard sense, islamiyya refers to things pertaining to Islam or the status of being Muslim – in which case it is merely an adjective.’[3] The same delineation applies to the Turkish term İslamcı. The earliest use of the term islamiyya can be found in reformist Islamist thinker Fazlur Rahman’s 1970 essay[4], where he defined ‘Islamism as an ideology with political intent overriding theology.’[5]
A bit more than disagreeing
There are multiple schisms and heated polemics among the scholars of Islamism about its nature, agenda, and trajectory. Shibboleths on Islamists come in all shapes and sizes. Perusing the literature on Islamism will prove that the issue is not limited to a few disagreements on the theory, terminology or methodology. The tropes that the scholars used to disagree with one another can sometimes be inimical.[6]A French scholar who spent his life working and living in Maghreb countries, François Burgat, claims that he was ostracised by French academia, which has difficulty reaching a rational relationship with Islamic Otherness and as a result ‘refuse[s] to communicate directly with the Other incorporeal form.’[7] For many long years, Burgat claims, he was left out on his own in the same way ‘as those who set themselves the task of asserting the legitimacy of their Muslim speech.’[8] Burgat also believes that Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy – two prominent French scholars of Islamism – enjoyed more media attention because they knew how to explain the Islamist phenomenon in a way that was more palatable to French taste.[9]
According to Burgat, while his relations with Roy are not friendly, he recognises Roy’s talents. However, he accuses Kepel of ‘tirelessly hustling throughout his career in order to be granted the exercise of formal power over French research institutions on the Arab and Muslim worlds.’[10] Another example is Bassam Tibi, who stands on another platform far distant from Dabashi and Burgat. ‘It has become common practice to hurl the charge of Orientalism at those who fail to comply with established taboos,’ Tibi claims. He also implies that being called an Orientalist can, for him, ‘as a Muslim’, be a matter of life and death: ‘But the issue is not only intellectual: the risks may include more existential threats. Islamism is not a club for free debate. When the scholar is a Muslim accused by Islamists of kufr (denying of Islam’s commands), he or she may be threatened with death.’[11]
Knowledge. Power. The Other. The East. The West and the Rest. These concepts require an intellectual scaffolding to construct a meaning related to the scholarship on Islamism. That scaffolding can be the elaboration of what Orientalism is. I choose an amalgamation of Said’s definitions included in his seminal work, Orientalism. Orientalism represents an Orient that is different and inferior by nature to the West. It is a style of thought that manufactures a region’s reality, which helps the manufacturer gain power to dominate that region, namely the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and ‘accommodate Western history, knowledge, culture, and consciousness.’[12] In short, Orientalism is a Western-style designation for ‘dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.’[13] The Orientalist viewpoint sees the Orient as monolithic and static and the Occident as progressive and superior. Why is it important to discuss Orientalism? Because it is a debate or rather a concept that displays ‘a power struggle on the level of language and technical vocabulary which reveals conflicting wills and interests’[14] and lies at the heart of academic polarisation and the study of Islamism.
The Orientalists versus Saidian camp
Political upheavals of the region, such as the events of 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of ISIS (aka Daesh, Islamic State or ISIL) also had a critical impact on scholars who study the Middle East and brought the critique of Orientalism to the fore, generating a spirited debate. The Orientalist camp, headed by Bernard Lewis and Martin Kramer, reproached the Saidian camp for failing to predict these events, notably the eruption of violent Islamism, and for using government funding for their theoretical work, which is ‘of no use for policy-making.’ Times of crisis and war in the Middle East serve as excellent opportunities for the Orientalist mindset to gain authority in the eyes of the public and policymakers, with Middle Eastern studies finding it difficult to extract itself from securitisation and terrorism studies. We can agree on how terrorism studies and Middle Eastern studies have become reinscribed, utilising Orientalist narratives of the evil Arab and Arab terrorist and -similarly- how academics in Middle Eastern studies became drawn into government and military agendas.[15]
Despite a plethora of literature and a panoply of sources on Islamism, it remains an enigmatic socio-political phenomenon, and scholars struggle to explain the changing faces of Islamists.[16] The Orientalist or culturalist approach to studying Islamism, in which Islam and Muslim culture are treated as constant variables, results in a reductionist and rigid understanding of political Islam. The insufficient and prejudiced views on the politics of Islam also stem from the use of modernisation theory as the primary analytical paradigm. With its secular bias and sharp demarcation between traditional and modern, modernisation theorists are bound to regard political Islam as inherently backward, static, and totalitarian. It also overestimates the notion that Islam dictates every sphere of Islamist politics.
The emphasis on din wa dawla
Islamism is about a political agenda but the contents of that agenda - early Islamists’ ideas and projects- arose in response to Western encroachment. They began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century, during the colonial presence in the Middle East and North Africa. Islamism, like any other ideology, borrowed concepts and strategies from other contemporaneous, action-oriented movements, especially nationalism, with the goal of ‘creating cultural identities in which national and Islamic belongings become intertwined’.[17] True, Islam lies at the core of Islamist ideology and Islamists with varying degrees argue for the union of religion and politics – din wa dawla. In practice, however, Islamists are rational and motivated by interest-based calculations like all other political actors.[18] Therefore ‘the emphasis on din wa dawla inadvertently perpetuates Orientalist assumptions [about] Muslim politics.’[19]
In this book, I do not claim to have fully overcome the epistemological frailties of studying ideology or Islamism. However, by focusing on the transformation of the aspirations of key Islamist actors through their interaction with one another and using a variety of analytical tools, I attempt to de-exceptionalise the lines of inquiry regarding Islamist entities. This approach is one way of distancing the research from both Orientalism and a ‘postmodern/poststructuralist eulogisation of Islamism.’[20] De-exceptionalisation, in this sense, does not imply that the goals and ideological evolution of Islamist actors in the MENA are indistinguishable from their Western or Latin American counterparts. Rather, it allows me to refrain from the neo-Orientalist trap of scrutinising actors and polities of MENA ‘as largely homogeneous, closed, parochial, and resistant to change.’[21] In effect, I consider the group interests of the MB, the AKP, and Ennahda as internal forces of change and examine them as embedded in the global political upheavals.
A story with a theoretical compass
This book takes the form of telling a story with a theoretical compass so that it provides a plausible narrative that centres on three Islamist entities’ interaction. I treat Islamism as a modern ideology that transforms and adapts to provide answers and solutions to what it sees as the main problems of society. It has a grand worldview like any other ideology and evolved through interaction with other ideologies such as nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism.
Generalization is a trap of case studies. I may be criticized for focusing on an exceptional political confluence following consecutive revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Surely, this interplay cannot recapitulate and disclose all aspects of Islamist aspirations and objectives. Revolutions can indeed be supernovas[22] that create liminal spaces which cannot be replicated.[23] Also true is that one study cannot portray the ‘multifarious forms of Islamism that surged since the 90s.’[24] With all these in mind, I still am convinced that the interplay that this book focuses on is not as exceptional and would not stand as an outlier in the story of Islamism.
The two-decade-long rule of Turkey’s Islamist-based AKP, the rise and fall of Egyptian MB’s fledgling party FJP, and Tunisia’s Ennahda which was once seen as a beacon of reconciliation and consensus, make these three entities and their unprecedented interplay between 2011 and 2013 worthy examples to study change within political Islam. These three entities wielded – and continue to wield - significant intellectual and organisational clout in the world of Islamist movements. The MB in Egypt is considered the mother of Islamist politics, inspiring the establishment of other Islamist movements in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. Tunisian Ennahda’s founder and president, Rachid Ghannouchi, is widely regarded as one of the most prominent contemporary Islamist politicians and thinkers. Ennahda’s journey in government since 2011, demonstrated its ‘alliance-building, consensus-based and power-sharing approaches,’[25] which ‘can point to significant trends within political Islam and its party expressions.’[26] Finally, the AKP, since its foundation, has been promoted by the West as the best example of the fusion of Islamism, democracy, and market economy. Therefore, these three actors and their interactions allow us to examine contemporary Islamist aspirations and provide clues to gauge their transformation.
Collecting the garbage and Islamism
Typically, Islamist political behaviour and action are construed by comparing Islamist movements to one another or examining their position vis-à-vis the state in the national context. These are not my methods. In this sense, I agree with Talal Assad, when he claims that ‘understanding any dominant concept of modern life, is, I think, perhaps best approached indirectly. A straight line isn’t always the most useful way to explore things because it assumes not only that the endpoint is known but also that the shortest way to it from the starting point is always the best.’[27] Focusing on a political confluence to determine actors’ aspirations would be an indirect line similar to the one proposed by Assad.
S. Sayyid, in the second edition of Fundamental Fear (published in 2003) summarizes the conundrum of Islamists as if he had access to the interviews I had: ‘The major difficulty faced by Islamists, despite all their rhetoric of Islam as a total system, a complete way of life, is that when it comes down to it, far too many of them have a very limited idea of what ‘a way of life’ is. […Hence] it is not surprising that so many Islamists are considered unequal to the task of managing the complexities of contemporary governance. Their capacity to make the trains run on time or make sure the garbage is collected is often put into question.’[28] Remarkably, in the chapters of this book, you will witness how garbage collection has become a symbolic as well as a practical issue among these actors. ‘There is a great need for Islamists to demonstrate great skill in dealing with the banality of governing’[29] continues Sayyid. This book, in a way, features this endeavor of the Islamists.
[1] Karl Mannheim’s letter to Kurt H. Wolff dated 15 April 1946 quoted in Lyman Tower Sargent, "Ideology and utopia: Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricoeur," Journal of Political Ideologies 13, no. 3 (2008): 264.
[2] James Piscatori, Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral principle in the Middle East, ISIM (Leiden, Netherlands, 2000), 2.
[3] Richard C. Martin, Barzegar, Abbas, "Introduction: The debate about Islamism in the public sphere," in Islamism: contested perspectives on political Islam, ed. Richard C. and Barzegar Martin, Abbas (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2010), 10.
[4] Fazlur Rahman, "Islam and Social Justice," Pakistani Forum 1 1, no. 4-5 (1970): 9.
[5] Daniel Varisco, M., "Inventing Islamism: The violence of rhetoric," in Islamism: contested perspectives on political Islam, ed. Richard C. and Barzegar Martin, Abbas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 36.
[6] Hamid Dabashi calls ‘Niall Ferguson and his ilk’ Orientalists and Ferguson’s book Civilisation: The West and the Rest ‘a sophomoric and idiotic essay [which] would earn a well-deserved F’ in Hamid Dabashi, Being a Muslim in the world: rethinking Islam for a post-western history, Palgrave pivot, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1-2.
[7] François Burgat and Thomas Hill, Understanding political Islam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 160.
[8] Burgat and Hill, Understanding political Islam, 169.
[9] Burgat and Hill, Understanding political Islam, 197.
[10] Burgat and Hill, Understanding political Islam, 203.
[11] Tibi, Islamism and Islam, 8.
[12] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 203-04.
[13] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Penguin classics, (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 3.
[14] Hassan Hanafi, "Islamism: Whose debate is it?," in Islamism: contested perspectives on political Islam, ed. Richard C. and Barzegar Martin, Abbas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 64.
[15] Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology's politics: disciplining the Middle East, Ebook central, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016).
[16] Khalil Al-Anani, "Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood," The Middle East Journal 69, no. 4 (2015): 528.
[17] Jocelyne Cesari, "Political Islam: More than Islamism," Religions 12, no. 5 (2021): 2.
[18] Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim politics, 23,56.
[19] Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim politics, 56.
[20] Maidul Islam, Limits of Islamism : Jamaat-e-Islami in contemporary India and Bangladesh, Cambridge core, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 70.
[21] Asef and Herrera Bayat, Linda, Global Middle East into the twenty-first century, ed. Matthew and Lesser Gutmann, Jeffrey, Global Square, (California: University of California Press, 2021), 4.
[22] See Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (The New Press, 2015).
[23] Armbrust, Martyrs, and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution.
[24] Aurélie Campana and Cédric Jourde, Islamism and social movements in North Africa, the Sahel and beyond transregional and local perspectives, Routledge studies in Mediterranean politics; 7, (London; New York: Routledge, 2018).
[25] John L. Esposito, Lily Zubaidah Rahim, and Nāṣir Qubādzādah, The politics of Islamism: diverging visions and trajectories, Middle East today, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 15.
[26] Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone, "Moderation through exclusion? The journey of the Tunisian Ennahda from fundamentalist to conservative party," Democratization 20, no. 5 (2013): 859.
[27] Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason, Ruth Benedict Book Series, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019), 2.
[28] S. Sayyid, A fundamental fear : eurocentrism and the emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 2015), xxix.
[29] Sayyid, A fundamental fear: eurocentrism and the emergence of Islamism, xxx.