Islamism

“Islamism” is a neologism used to describe a political ideology that developed into its current form in the twentieth century.  Its meaning is distinct from “Islam,” the term used for centuries to describe the theology, faith, jurisprudence, mysticism, culture, and society of Muslims.

Islamism is the ideological proposition that the legitimacy of the political order ought to be derived from Islam. In its mildest forms, it seeks to reconcile “Islamic principles” and a particular political system, whether it was socialism in the past or democracy more recently. This kind of reconciliation often takes the form of remedial derivations, such as positing that democracy is an expression of the concept of shura (consultation) referenced in the Qur’an. More rigid expressions of Islamism accept political orders not derived from Islam only as temporary expedients, or alternatively reject such political orders entirely and actively or passively resist them. The common denominator among all expressions of Islamism is the postulate, that the validity of a political system is ultimately determined by its conformity with or adherence to an idealized notion of Islam—an often-ahistorical model with considerable departures from Islam as lived and experienced by Muslim societies.

Islamism formed and emerged in response to twentieth-century circumstances. Precedents to Islamism have existed in Islamic history, however, both in Islamic scholasticism and as an ideological framework for various revolutionary movements within the Muslim world. It is notable that, in its focus on orthodoxy, twentieth-century Islamism roots itself, albeit selectively, in the scholastic tradition while generally ignoring the often-heterodox, proto-Islamist revolutionary episodes of Islamic history.

The broad outlines of Islamic history consist of the rise and fall of successive imperial states with dynasticism as the actual basis for those states’ political legitimacy. While particular dynasties were often challenged, the premise of dynastic rule was not. Revolutionary movements adopted a proto-Islamist discourse—in their successive calls for a return to the postulated purity of original Islam—but invariably yielded new dynastic orders. In practice and theory, no comprehensive formula was presented for an Islamic political model. The challenge for twentieth-century Islamism was to elaborate such a model while anchoring it in the Islamic past.

Islamic history is thus largely reconfigured in modern Islamist discourses. It is made to oscillate between a minimalist version that restricts Islamic legitimacy to the dawn of Islam (the Prophet and the first four Caliphs in the Sunni variant; the Prophet and the twelve Imams in the Shi‘i variant) and a maximalist version that considers that Islamic legitimacy persisted virtually uninterrupted for thirteen centuries and was terminated only in 1924 with the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate.

While rooting itself in the reconfigured Islamic history, Islamism can still be viewed as an attempt at a grand narrative to provide Muslim societies with the framework to support the transition from the imperial state model to a world defined by nation-states born out of colonialism. The models that preceded Islamism—all of which, in their successive heydays, dismissed Islamism as an underdeveloped and atavistic archaic alternative—were: 1) elitist liberalism, with the promise of Western-style progress that ended up exacerbating the socioeconomic divide; 2) a populist nationalism that declared unity and the restoration of a fictionalized national golden age as its goal but that actually yielded more divisions and territorial losses; and 3) a revolutionary leftism that placed the national struggle in the presumed context of a world overhaul but actually delivered terrorism and clientelism for one side in the Cold War. In many places, the successive failures of these narratives left a vacuum in politics and identity, a void that Islamism was able to fill.

The ideological underpinnings of Islamism can be traced to the Arab “renaissance” (nahdah) of the nineteenth century and even to the intransigent “reformation” initiated by Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah in the fifteenth century and applied in Arabia by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century. Credit for the actualization of Islamist ideas from the intellectual and scholastic domain, however, can be attributed to Hassan al-Banna, who, in his call for the re-Islamization of the individual, family, and society in late-1920s Egypt, proposed a sociocultural program with distinct political implications.

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood (and its South Asian counterpart, Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi’s al-Jama‘ah al-Islamiyyah) ushered a gradual shift in Islamic scholasticism from legalism to activism. The dichotomy in Muslim culture in previous centuries had been between the prescribed scholastic legalism and the lived social pietism. Yet the transformation engineered by Banna replaced pietism with activism, with the evident implication of the politicization of Islam. This politicization emerged in full force with the recession of the grand narratives that had once dominated Muslim societies. As the ideas conceptualized by Banna and Mawdudi matured throughout the Islamic world, the cross-fertilization between the Egyptian-born focus on activism and the Arabian-rooted, intransigent literalism yielded a potent formulation of irredentist claims on the Muslim Ummah and a rejectionist stance toward non-Islamic ideas and institutions. Best elaborated by Sayyid Qutub of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, this formulation was put into operation by the Palestinian ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Islamic revolution in Iran and the jihad in Afghanistan were both expressions of the transformations in the character and place of Islam in Muslim society. They also served to amplify the effects of these transitions, enabling an incremental dominance by Islamist discourse over Arab and Muslim political cultures. The graduation of the Afghan jihad into a global endeavor and the multipronged engagement of enemies both within and outside of the Muslim world have further advanced the decades-long transformation.

In the mid-twentieth century, the religion of Islam was largely perceived as a source of values for Muslim societies in their quest to achieve peace and prosperity. By the early twenty-first century, Islamists—ranging in their propositions from a conciliatory merging of Islam and democracy to a radical rejection of the West—have achieved primacy in the political discourse and made severe inroads into the interpretive framework of the religion itself. Islamists’ collective effort aims at recasting the political question toward implementing “Islam as the solution.” Islamism today exists in a number of variants. Al Qaeda exemplifies the uncompromising top-down approach seeking the immediate implementation of the notional “Shari‘ah State.” The constellation of organizations that stem from the Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast, is engaged in a generational program incrementally working toward the preparation of the “Shari‘ah State.” Other Islamist formations have substantially different strategies. Hizb al-Tahrir, for example, accepts a peaceful, albeit segregationist, coexistence with non-Islamists while awaiting the opportunity to take over state institutions. Other Islamist-inclined groups in hostile environments restrict themselves to leading by example.

A proactive reclamation of Islam as a religious, cultural, and intellectual tradition from the Islamist grip has not yet materialized. The Islamist program itself has not yet moved beyond rejectionism and symbolism. The “Shari‘ah State” is invariably little more than a slogan. Islamist “successes” in Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Gaza have not lasted. Islamism might yet prove to be just another grand narrative with which Muslim intellectuals and societies have experimented, but its deconstruction and/or metamorphosis will require both the emergence of a credible alternative that offers Muslim societies the peace and prosperity that has eluded them, as well as the recovery of the plural heritage of lived Islam from the failed reductionist political systems that have ravaged it.