Abdel-Qader Yassine
Gothenburg University
How can the militant protest movements fighting for an Islamic state in which Shari'ah (Islamic Law) rules supreme best be understood: as part of a world-wide reaction against modernist thought or as a broad and diverse attempt to understand and tackle the problems of modernity through reconnecting with an indigenous system of references for producing meaning? This is the main question discussed in this paper.
The Arab world is in turmoil. In most parts of the transcontinental land that extends from Casablanca to Baghdad, internal conflict has become the norm and uneasy stability is the exception. The growing cult of Islamic militancy in the Arab world owes much more to socio-political than to religious factors. The major causes of Islam being articulated as answer to the prevailing ills of the Arab polities are basically two:
1) The failure of the Arab political elites to evolve responsive political systems to take the place of traditional ones which no longer exist; and
2) The humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of June 1967 causing reverberations not only in the Middle East but the wider Muslim world.
The Ummah embodied an ideal which could not be realised in full even in the early period of Islam. As long as Islam was confined to the Arabian Peninsula, the Ummah was a homogeneous community held together by the bonds of Islam. But once Islam spread into the non-Arab territories to the north, the dichotomy between the Arab and non-Arab Muslims arose. The Arabs found it difficult to accept the non-Arabs as full members of the Ummah and gave them the unflattering title of mawla (client). The Persians accepted Islam but refused to be reconciled to Arab supremacy and led the revolt against the first Arab-Islamic dynasty headed by the Umayyads. The Abbasids, who succeeded the Umayyads, were accommodative to non-Arab Muslims.
From the tenth century onward, regional pressures reinforced by ethnic self-assertion splintered the Islamic empire and it was progressively displaced by feuding kingdoms across the massive arc stretching from the plains of central Asia to the Atlantic coast of Africa.
In the 16th century, the Ottomans did succeed in bringing large chunks of the Arab world under the umbrella of the Turkish empire but remained at loggerheads with the Shiite rulers of Iran, called the Safavids. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Arabs were stirred by sentiments of modern nationalism and took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the First World War to break loose from the Ottoman hegemony.
The 20th century has witnessed Iran and Turkey emerge as independent states, and a fragmented Arab world into 20 odd nation-states. The Ummah had thus ceased to be a fact of political life long before the advent of the present day nation-states.
The institution of Caliphate emerged out of a practical necessity in the aftermath of Prophet Muhammad's death. His closest companion Abu Bakr al-Siddiq was chosen to head the Ummah, and he assumed the modest title of Khalifah ("caliph" being its Western corruption) or deputy. But within the span of a few decades the caliphate degenerated into an absolute hereditary monarchy.
Islamic political theorists supplied the necessary religious underpinnings for the institution to suit its changing requirements. It was generally held that the caliph must be from Quraish (the Prophet's clan); he was the defender of the faith and the political leader of the Ummah. All Muslims were obliged to proclaim allegiance to him.
The principle of hereditary succession also found general acceptance. In later centuries, power slipped from the hands of the caliph but the caliphate lingered on as a notional institution. Kings and sultans of the Muslim world found it expedient to seek the caliph's formal recognition in return for offerings of salutations and gifts. The Shi'ah, of course, did not recognise the caliphs and looked to their own imams for political leadership and spiritual guidance. The late Ottomans staked their claim to caliphate, if only to beef up their bargaining power vis-à-vis the European states. But when the empire disintegrated after the First World War, the new Turkish leaders, aspiring to build a modern republican state, abolished the caliphate in 1924.
Since then, there has been no serious proposal from any quarter to revive this supra-national politico-religious institution. Even the Islamic Conference Organisation (ICO), which pays lip-service to Islamic solidarity, takes ground realities into consideration to exclude political unification of the Muslim world from its proclaimed agenda.
In the field of Shari'ah, too, the Arab societies have traversed a long way from the early beginnings when the divine law, derived mainly from the Qur'an and the Sunnah (sayings of the Prophet), governed all aspects of life. In classical argument, the institution of caliphate itself was justified in terms of the need for a central authority to enforce the Shari'ah. Ironically enough, it was under the late Ottoman caliphate that the application of Shari'ah was progressively circumscribed.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Ottoman sultans launched legal reforms, supplanting the Shari'ah from the penal and commercial fields, under the grand project of "tanzimat", or "putting things in order." The project also stipulated creation of "nizamiyah" (secular) courts to adjudicate the man-made penal and commercial laws.
The 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights made inroads into the hitherto forbidden territory of Muslim personal law by introducing administrative regulations governing divorce and relief to deserted wives. Violation of these regulations was punishable under the secular criminal law. Most of the Arab countries, stretching from Iraq to Morocco, effected further reforms in the Muslim personal law besides endorsing the general principle of sovereignty of legislatures to enact laws for all aspects of life. It can thus be said that in most of the Arab countries today the Shari'ah applies only to limited segments of life involving marriage, divorce and inheritance. There are, however, two sets of exceptions to this rule. At one end of the spectrum stand Saudi Arabia and the smaller states of the Arabian Peninsula which enforce, with varying intensity, the Islamic penal codes. Iran, too, falls into this category.
At the other extreme is Turkey which, in the wake of the Kemalist revolution of the early 1920s, adopted a militant secularist stance. It proclaimed modern secular laws for all areas of life including marriage and divorce. It is seldom realised that outside the "communist" fold Turkey is the only Asian nation to opt for full-scale secularisation of social and political life in a strictly modern sense of the term. And it has stayed that way since the days of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, notwithstanding recurrent clamour by the Islamists for a return to the good old days of the Shari'ah.
It follows from the above that the concept of ummah and the institution of caliphate had either become dysfunctional or changed beyond recognition long before the advent of western influence in the region. It was only in the field of Shari'ah that increasing contacts with Europe and modernisation of social and economic life contributed to its shrinking influence.
The Syrian-born Abdel-Rahman al-Kawakibi argued that despotism had been the bane of Muslim polities through the ages; that the just state, in which men could find fulfilment, was one in which the individual was free and freely served the community; and that the government should be controlled by the people and act as a watchdog to ensure that freedom. Ahmad Lutfi as-Sayyid, for his part, made the case that good government is one that springs from the will of the people. All other forms end up in tyranny.
The case for an out and out secular order was, however, made by Sheikh Ali Abdel-Raziq in his book al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Basis of Political Authority, 1925). A product of al-Azhar and Oxford, Abdel-Raziq used his theological scholarship and analytical skill to advance the thesis that the entire theory of caliphate (the kingpin of Islamic political thought) had no basis in the Qur'an and the Sunnah and that the practice of the caliphate was often at variance with its theory.
Abdel-Raziq's book aroused a storm of protest. But the works of Dr Taha Hussein (also an alumnus of al-Azhar) were greeted with much less hostility. For Taha Hussein approached his subject from a pragmatic rather than theological angle. In his Future of Culture in Egypt, he argued that the dichotomy between religious dogma and everyday secular practice is an inescapable part of life.
Early Arabs, he reasoned, had no inhibitions about borrowing extensively from Greek and Persian civilisations and they gained a great deal in the bargain. Hence, contemporary Arabs need not be averse to borrowing from the Western civilisation.
On a practical footing, the quest for alternative basis of polity found expression in eclectic approach. It favoured liberal borrowings from Western constitutional forms and adapting them to local needs and circumstances. In quick succession, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt adopted constitutions patterned after the British, French or Belgian models. This stupendous experiment in constitutionalism, however, did not carry much credibility as it was generally devoid of democratic content.
In the 1950s, most of these edifices collapsed like houses of cards. A succession of coups d'etat and civil disorders made the whole region reverberate with the sound of crashing thrones. Egypt and Iraq turned into republics and the soaring spirit of republicanism rattled the remaining monarchies in the region.
Then came the era of charismatic leaders espousing heady ideologies of pan-Arabism, socialism and redressal of the unequal relationship with the West. Even the Shah of Iran donned the mantle of a modernising monarch heralding his "white revolution".
In most cases, where some form of constitutional structures existed, the single party system of political mobilisation was introduced. But this was mostly used as a facade behind which dictatorial rule thrived. The press and other media were firmly controlled.
The system allowed no possibility of free debate on public priorities or policies. Even the Shah of Iran felt tempted to emulate the undemocratic devices designed by the radical republics in the region which he otherwise abhorred.
As for the paternalistic kingdoms and emirates of the Arabian Peninsula, the rate of their social and economic transformation in the wake of the oil boom of the 1970s has been mind-boggling. Literacy advanced in rapid strides and the benefits of housing, health and general economic welfare were extended to all sections of these sparsely populated oil-exporting countries. But there was no corresponding change in the political arena. Political power still vests in kings and sheikhs amidst growing popular clamour for accountability and rule of law.
The Islamic militants, commonly called "fundamentalists" because of their strident call for a return to the fundamental tenets of Islam, view the defeat of Arab armies at the hands of the Zionist state in a series of wars, beginning in 1947, and the loss of entire Palestine to Israel in the process, as a catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic peoples. The fundamentalists no doubt blame the Zionist and their Western backers, in particular the United States, for this calamity; but they blame their own rulers even more.
They ascribe the Arab-Islamic defeat to the alienation of the ruling classes from Islam, their worship of the false idols of nationalism (local as well as pan-Arab) and their addiction to foreign ideologies such as socialism, communism or capitalism. The same malaise, they argue, accounts for the apathy and inaction of the present rulers in face of the ongoing tragedy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Exacerbating the grievous injury to the Arab sense of dignity and honour caused by defeat is the relentless pressures on and manipulations of the region by the industrialised West which not only accounts for close to two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves but also serves as a lucrative market, thanks to the oil boom of the 1970s, for their consumer products and weapons. The Islamists see in this a replay of the medieval crusades.
It is, however, necessary to point out that the fundamentalists in the Arab world are not a monolithic entity nor is their upsurge irreversible. The fundamentalist camp, although clamouring for Islamic solidarity, suffers from inner divisions and disjunctions. Saudi Arabia, for example, has long been the home of what might be called controlled fundamentalism.
The Saudi royalty took shelter behind Islam to deny its own people a constitution. And to gain respectability for their archaic domestic set-up, the Saudi rulers created the Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami (World Islamic League) to mobilise goodwill of Muslim `ulama' from all over the world through an elaborate system of patronage.
With a substantial spurt in oil royalties in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia sponsored the Islamic Conference Organisation as a handy platform to demonstrate its Islamic credentials. It is hardly surprising that the United States found Saudi Arabia's championship of Islam as a convenient weapon to beat the Arab radicals with, and look benignly on it.
In the wake of the Suez War, which spelled disaster for Britain as a custodian of Western interests in the Middle East, US president Dwight Eisenhower seriously toyed with the idea of promoting king Saud as the "pope" of Islam. But the project failed to take off.
For some time now, Saudi Arabia is having second thoughts about the efficacy of its own brand of Islam as an instrument of its foreign policy. It all started with the Iranian clergy mounting a rebellion against the Shah and eventually seizing political power. In 1979, the Pahlavi monarchy of Iran was replaced by an Islamic republic with Ayatollah Khomeini as its "Supreme Guide".
The cause of Saudi Arabia's discomfiture lay in the fact that whereas Riyadh had always invoked Islam to uphold political status quo, Iran's new rulers presented Islam in a revolutionary attire seeking to topple despotic kings, ushering in an egalitarian social and economic order, and fighting foreign dominance in the region.
The Saudis were indeed scared when, in 1979, a bunch of home-grown fundamentalists occupied the Holy Mosque of Mecca in an undisguised attempt to overthrow the monarchy, ironically, in the name of Islam.
In Iran, too, in the past 16 years since Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from his long exile, public zeal for the Islamic revolution has steadily diminished. Khomeini strongly believed in the unquestioned power and efficacy of Islam to establish and sustain a just social and political order. He encouraged export of the Iranian revolution to other parts of the Islamic world and envisaged eventual triumph of Islam the world over. He came to be identified with what may be called messianic fundamentalism.
Khomeini, however, glossed over one basic fact about the Islamic revolution: it was made possible by the active support and sacrifices of a good section of the educated youth and the merchant class who would loathe to see Iran converted into an obscurantist theocracy. As it happened, the clergy squeezed their non-clerical partners out of the newly created governing institutions and eventually suppressed them.
The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which was patently senseless for both sides, scotched all hopes of a just and humane order taking shape in Iran. In the end, Khomeini was compelled by his closest advisers to swallow his pride and call for a cease-fire. The post-Khomeini Iran is surely, though haltingly, moving towards a rational and pragmatic approach to the moulding of Iran's domestic and foreign policies. Dr Qassem Ihsanzadeh, an outspoken member of the Iranian parliament recently observed: "We must decide whether we want a parliamentary system or an Islamic government - the two are incompatible." Predictably, he was shouted down by the Islamists but not before he made it quite clear that there were many more who shared his views but would not utter them publicly.
President Ali Hashimi Rafsanjani, for his part, knows that he cannot bring the fruits of revolution to the restive people of Iran without the inputs of science and technology and modern managerial skills. He is, therefore, keen to loosen the stranglehold of clergy on the system so that Iranian technocrats who fled the country in the wake of the revolution can return and a new generation of technocrats could be trained at home.
Rafsanjani admittedly sees no contradiction between modernity and Islam and he speaks of the need for close co-operation between Iran, India and China so that they can have a say in post- cold war world politics. All this is a far cry from the heady days of February 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini had unfurled the flag of Islamic revolution.
Hence the real breeding grounds of militant Islam and Islamic fundamentalism today are not in Iran or Saudi Arabia or the mini-states of the Gulf. On the contrary, these states are either apprehensive of Islamic militancy or, as in the case of Iran, having second thoughts about its efficacy as an instrument of public policy. Islamic militancy is, however, rampant in the more populous Arab countries of Egypt, Algeria and the Sudan. All three have certain features in common: population explosion, soaring unemployment and varying degrees of repression of political dissent. And this has given rise to Islamic protest movements which can be generally designated as retributive fundamentalism.
The political stalemate in Egypt during the 1940s, resulting from the triangular conflict between the British, the king and the mass-based Wafd Party, and public disenchantment with the politicians in the wake of Egyptian defeat in the first Arab-Israeli War of 1947-48, swelled the ranks of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brothers), founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1929. The Ikhwan preached that the redemption of Egypt (and of the Islamic world) lay neither in reform nor in reinterpretation of the Islamic doctrine but in its full-scale resurrection.
They declared that the real issue was not Islam's inadequacy to meet the challenges of modern times but that Islam was never given a chance to prove its efficacy, and that the Qur'an and the Sunnah provide essentials of a just political order and a universal brotherhood of men. Above all, the Ikhwan claimed that the fault lay not in Islam but in its internal and external enemies: the West strangled it politically and economically from the outside and the westernised Muslims undermined it from within.
On the eve of the revolution of July 1952, which toppled the monarchy and put General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Jamal Abdel-Nasser into power, the Ikhwan claimed a million followers in Egypt alone. Two years later the Ikhwan faced a showdown with the military regime and lost. For a while, Nasser's Egypt offered a future of hope to its teeming millions. Pursuit of the ideals of socialism, unification of the Arab world into a single polity, and an independent role in world affairs enthused the whole Arab world. But the defeat of Egypt in the June 1967 war turned that dream into a nightmare. Nasser's image as saviour of the Arabs was shattered and he died soon after.
That was the time when the Islamists regrouped and mounted a frontal assault taking advantage of Egypt's mounting economic problems, the occupation of Sinai by Israel and the vacillations and waywardness of Anwar al-Sadat who succeeded Nasser. Al-Sadat's compromise agreement with Israel over Sinai was seen by the Islamists as a betrayal of Egypt and Islam and as a justification to take up arms against the regime.
The turmoil gave birth to several militant groups, collectively know as al-Jama'at al-Islamiyyah (Islamic Groups). Currently the intensity of their violence and the virulence of their propaganda make the old Ikhwan look like a moderate outfit. One such group, called al-Jihad al-Islami, plotted the assassination of president Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981. Amongst their principal targets are top members of the Coptic Christians, who make up over 15 per cent of Egypt's population, and foreign tourists.
The most visible protagonist of the movement is a 55-year-old sightless Dr Omar Abdel-Rahman, now under detention in the United States for his alleged involvement in the car-bomb attack on the World Trade Centre at New York, in February 1993, that killed six people and injured many more.
In Algeria, the monopoly on power enjoyed by the National Liberation Front (FLN) and its failure to find credible solutions to the nation's economic problems, notwithstanding its substantial oil and gas reserves, have thrown up an Islamic backlash. Opponents of the FLN rallied under the banner of Islam not because Islam had ready-made answers to Algeria's political and economic woes but because the ruling group permitted no secular platform to exist outside its own regimented ranks.
In the early 1980s, the Algerian government launched an austerity programme to grapple with rising unemployment. But the crisis aggravated and in October 1988 widespread anti-government riots occurred. The government then belatedly revised the constitution to permit a multi-party system. Restrictions on the press were relaxed. Among the various political parties that emerged, the most articulate was the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), headed by Abbas Madani. It benefited greatly from Madani's previous record of opposing the FLN and gained further popularity through impressive relief operations organised in the wake of the 1989 earthquake.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the Islamic Salvation Front won 67 per cent of the provinces and 55 per cent of the municipalities in the regional and local elections held in June 1990. And in the postponed parliamentary elections, eventually held in December 1991, when the FIS won 188 of the 231 seats in the first round of elections, president al-Shazli Ben-Jedid stepped down to make way for Muhammad Bou-Diaf. The new president cancelled the elections. In March 1992, the FIS was outlawed. Bou-Diaf was assassinated on June 29th, 1992. Algeria's cautious advance towards democracy came to a grinding halt.
In the Sudan General Ga'afar Muhammad al-Numeiri seized power in a bloodless coup d'état in 1969, and followed in the footsteps of Egypt's Nasser, adopting a set of socialist policies and mobilising mass support under the banner of the Sudanese Socialist Union, within the framework of a single-party system.
In the southern Sudan, assertively Christian and African in contrast to the more populous Arab-Islamic north, Numeiri followed a policy of accommodation by conceding autonomy and allocating resources for development. Numeiri's 16-year-long stint in power, however, left the economy tottering under the weight of rampant corruption at home and the influx of refugees from Ethiopia, Uganda and Chad; the south suspicious and resentful of Khartoum's manipulations; and the disgruntled conservative groups in the north breathing down the regime's neck.
A few years before his fall in April 1985 Numeiri enlisted the support of the Ikhwan and Dr Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front by promising to turn Sudan into a full-blooded Islamic state. This desperate act alienated the Christian south to the point of insurrection. Numeiri's exit has not made much difference to Sudan's political and economic woes.
It is noteworthy that a few months before his ouster, Numeiri's crusade for Islamisation of Sudan had resulted in the hanging of Muhammad Mahmoud Taha, the 76-year-old protagonist of a secular approach to politics.
Taha's "crime" was that he and his associates belonging to the Republican Brothers had distributed a leaflet saying that the Islamic laws promulgated by Numeiri ran counter to Sudan's constitution and were indeed detrimental to integration of the Muslim north and the Christian south into one nation on the basis of equal rights for all citizens.
Taha thus became the first martyr to the cause of secularism in the Arab world. The intrepid secularist refused to defend himself in the court declaring that his persecution was unconstitutional and the judges were unqualified and technically incompetent.
Secularism has been further discredited by the semi-fascist Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. The Gulf War accelerated the trend in favour of fundamentalist Islamic movements and sharpened divisions among them.
As for the predicament of Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan, a major cause of the people turning to Islam and the Islamists for resolving their economic and political problems is the denial of opportunities to bring about political change through the democratic process. Arguably, a victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in the Algerian elections of 1991-92, which at any rate appeared certain, might well have defused rather than aggravated the political crisis in Algeria. In Egypt and the Sudan, too, a liberal dose of democracy could bring a semblance of purpose and poise to the institutions of governance.
The answer to the crisis of Arab polities lies in genuine power-sharing and accountability in government. The Declaration of Principles signed in Oslo in September 1993 between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel on the framework of a political settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, if carried to its logical conclusion, can blunt the edge of Islamic militancy in the Middle East in a significant way. For, after all, the hurt and humiliation caused to the Arab psyche by the loss of Palestine, has been a vital contributing factor to Islamic extremism.
Modernism is not the monopoly of the corrupt ruling elite of the American club of friends in the Arab world. If social peace and harmony is to accompany the path of modernisation and progress in the Middle East, the Islamists should not be driven into a corner. The Western mind and policy makers have to accept the right of other peoples to cultural autonomy, especially those who have behind them a long history and a great civilisation. Diversity and variety in our world, within a framework of mutual recognition and co-operation, is in a sense a guarantee for the future. After all, man's heritage of rationality evolved on all sides of the Mediterranean, not only on the northern side.
© The author and Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Archived 10.8.95