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The Ideology of Islamic Fundamentalism
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Fouad Ajami |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The fall of the communist bloc left western ideologists temporarily without a sparring partner. Islamic radicals have to some extent been employed by the west to fill the vacancy. In this extract from his book The Arab Predicament, Fouad Ajami follows the work of Muhammad Jalal Kishk in an attempt to understand one approach to the intellectual workings behind Islamic fundamentalism. |
 n both liberal and radical analyses, religion is denounced as the dead hand of the past. Because both systems of thought seek to liberate humanity and harness its energy for the reconstruction of the social order, the hold of religious sentiments is seen as a reactionary force. Modernization puts religion in an unfavorable light; religion becomes an obstacle to social change. The bias of secular ideologies is that people must discard their religious faith if they are to make progress. This is not an analytical judgment on the part of secular ideologists, but, paradoxically, an article of faith that is adhered to with the same intensity with which religious beliefs are said to be held. In the imagery and folklore of secular ideology, religious individuals are caricatures: men obsessed with other-worldly concerns, surrendering to divine will, immune to science, exploited by a religious hierarchy, willing to forgo struggle for this world in order to gain the other. The details of the caricature may vary from one religion to another, but the composite is the same: Instead of attending cell meetings, participating in electoral politics, or giving body and soul to the nation in arms, a religious man would pray, fast, spend his money on a pilgrimage, trust in the will of Allah. |
After the June 1967 Six Day War
For many secular Arab ideologists, the defeat was another dramatic illustration of the crisis of Islam: lethargic, backward Muslims defeated by a modern enemy. The debate about the relation between Islam and the modern world is of course an old one; it preoccupied the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. During the age of Islamic decline and European ascendancy, the twin issues of internal reform and external defense engaged Arab intellectuals and men of public affairs and divided their ranks. By its very nature, this debate did not lend itself to a resolution. Different people went different ways, and some, as usual, juggled many systems of belief. Thus it was only natural for the debate about Islam to reemerge in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat. |
The defeat provided radical secularists with an opportunity to express their frustration with the persistence of Islamic sentiments. In the era that preceded the defeat, secular nationalism, seemingly radical politics, and the tempo of social change had somehow created a set of expectations that Islam would wither away and lose its hold on the believers. That view was never sturdily based but rested on the alienation of the intelligentsia from religious belief, on the easy assumption that religion and nationalism were incompatible and, finally, on the fashionable global assertion of the time that people were killing their deities and that religion as a social force was living on borrowed time. The secularists had read their own alienation from religion into the society at large. To be sure, a certain segment of the population had rebelled against religion but the overwhelming majority of people had not. Nor did the presumed incompatibility between nationalism and Islam hold for the Arab world. The more popular nationalism became, the more it identified with Islam. The separation that the secular Arab intellectual made between Arabism and Islam was not made by the less educated citizen; for the latter, the two were overlapping, almost identical forces. The power of Islam was attested to by the fact that the regimes that professed their adherence to socialism had dressed their socialism in an Islamic garb and justified their version of socialism by saying that it emanated from Islamic sources. If Islam could survive nationalism and be grafted onto socialism, the secular intellectuals were no longer sure of the withering away of Islam. |
In the aftermath of defeat, the turning of the masses to religion for solace and consolation and the continual appeal, couched in religious terms, for faith and patience on the part of no less a figure than [Egyptian] President Nasser, served as a reminder that God may be dead elsewhere--particularly in existential European literature and in Marxist tracts read by Arab youth--but was alive and well in the Arab world. The attempt of the radicals to link Islam with the defeat did not go uncontested. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism made an eloquent and moving case of its own and turned defeat into advantage. Fundamentalists argued that the Arabs had lost the war not because they were busy worshipping--as the radical caricature would have it--but because they had lost their faith and bearings: Disconnected from a deeply held system of beliefs, the Arabs proved an easy prey to Israeli power. |
The argument made by thoughtful fundamentalists was similar to the one made by the radical critics: The latter, too, had argued that a society needs a system of beliefs, an ideology, to guide it. The fundamentalists' contention was that Islam offered that system of belief, that it could do what no imported doctrine could hope to do--mobilize the believers, instill discipline, and inspire people to make sacrifices and, if necessary, to die. |
The Islamic perspective
Muhammad Jalal Kishk's Al Naksa Wa al Ghazw al Fikri (The Setback and Cultural Invasion) is the work of a prolific writer with Muslim Brotherhood affinities. The notion of cultural invasion seems to be the cornerstone of Kishk's outlook; the term appears in the titles of four of his books--one on general cultural penetration, two volumes on Marxism and nationalism as variants of cultural penetration, and one on the connection between cultural penetration and the Six Day War. Kishk's writings belie the notion that Muslim fundamentalists are reactionaries fixated on the image of a theocratic past that has to be restored. In Kishk's world view, cultures clash for preeminence: Some rise and conquer, and others surrender and are subjugated. An old-fashioned thinker, Kishk has no appreciation for what he sees as a fraudulent kind of cosmopolitanism propagated by the West and subscribed to by fifth-column Muslim Arabs. For Kishk there is no such thing as a world civilization; cosmopolitanism is the pretension of the ascendant culture "that asks others to abandon their identity and sovereignty, to dismantle their culture," and gives them a choice between adherence to its postulates or extinction. According to Kishk, what we are witnessing now is the third crusade against the Arab people. The first crusade, using the sword and the cross, realized some victories but was eventually overwhelmed. The second crusade--the age of imperialism--began with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and succeeded in destroying the self-confidence of the Muslim world. The third crusade picks up where the second left off: It accommodates itself to political independence; instead of using armies, it seeks to penetrate the mind of the Muslim and to rearrange it. Once the Muslim accepted the "supremacy of the West--not just material supremacy but cultural and spiritual supremacy as well--the Muslim's resistance would collapse; he would become like an open, defenseless city, vulnerable to every plunderer and invader" (Muhammad Jalal Kishk, Al Marksiyah Wa al Ghazw al Fikri [Marxism and Cultural Invasion], 1965, p. 41). |
That civilizations clash in a Darwinian manner for preeminence and survival is fully realized by Westerners. Why, asks Kishk, do Muslim Arabs fail to refuse to accept that overwhelming historical fact? In part, they have been lulled into complacency by the West, which spreads the myth of cosmopolitanism. Then there is the role played by an imported ideological doctrine, such as Marxism, which postulates a fake universalism of its own. Afraid of looking old-fashioned before their liberal and Marxist mentors, Muslim Arabs succumb to the process of cultural invasion and come to accept the myths propagated by the West about the decline of religious fervor and the unity of cultures. Meanwhile, the West brings to its encounter with the Arabs a ruh salibbiyya (crusading spirit); it is as hostile to the Muslim world as ever. |
Sincere people cling tenaciously to their beliefs. Mimics go whichever way the wind blows. They translate others' works, accept the latest fads, live through others' experiences, try to shed their biases, apologize for their particularism, adopt the ways of others. In Kishk's analysis, Muslim Arabs are neutralized, paralyzed by false doctrines of universalism--both liberal and Marxist--pitted against one another by sham ideological divisions concocted by the West. Meanwhile, underneath the sound and fury of ideology, behind the hair-splitting arguments, the eternal clash of civilizations goes on, the dominant civilization parading as globalism and subjugating other civilizations. Kishk holds up for his readers the Sino-Soviet split as an example of the transparency of ideology. No amount of ideology can bridge the gap between an Oriental country and an Occidental one, the old rivalry between China and Russia. |
Kishk argues that cultural and ideological penetration are to the twentieth century what gunboats were to the nineteenth. Marxism, which has succeeded in seducing Arab intellectuals, is but another weapon in the West's ideological assault. For Kishk, it is the westernism of Marx that matters, not his opposition to capitalism. In the duel of civilizations, Marx is clearly on the other side:
Marx did not call for a new civilization: he is a faithful son of Western civilization who formed his theory out of German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy . . . Marx believed in the values and the history of Western civilization; he was proud of that history which he considered as a triumph for humanity on its way to its final victory. He considered the crimes of Western civilization a historical necessity and did not trace those crimes to the philosophy of that civilization but, rather, to economic necessities. (Kishk, Al Marksiyah, p. 88.)
Marxism was not the only European affliction forced upon the Arab-Muslim world: Another, earlier one was secular nationalism. Kishk is even more contemptuous of secular nationalism than he is of Marxism, more certain of its disruptive consequences. Arabs were so convinced of the power of secular nationalism, so taken by its mystique, he says, that they were willing to set aside their religious beliefs in pursuit of the nationalist dream. But the history of secular Arab nationalism was a chronicle of defeat and setbacks. It does not strike Kishk as a paradox that the force that generated power for Europe brought weakness to the Arab world. Europe needed secular nationalism, which provided an effective way of organizing a community. But things were different in the Muslim world. Under the banner of Islam, disparate populations and ethnic groups had long been organized into a community. A unique kind of socialist ethos had been part of this community's creed and practice. At the height of its glory, it had laid siege to Vienna and outstripped Europe in the realms of science, philosophy, and culture, as well as war. Then the Muslims caught the germ of nationalism. The Ottoman Turks were the first victims of nationalism; the Arabs were next. The house of Islam was now divided, and Europeans could easily subdue the Muslim world. Minorities were now warring against one another. The concept of nationality, held in check by Islamic universalism, had shattered the basis of the community. |
All this, it could be said, is the remote background of the June defeat. Had the Arab states waged the war along the only true lines--religious lines--victory would have been theirs, Kishk argues. Certainly the Israelis had seen their conflict with the Arabs along these lines. Kishk's image of Israel allows of no ambiguity: It is a religious state through and through. In Kishk's account there is grudging admiration for the clarity with which the Israelis saw the war, for the fact that young Israeli soldiers prayed behind their rabbis at the Wailing Wall after their capture of Jerusalem. Why
did Muslims fail to exhibit the same religious zeal? Kishk believes that they were too embarrassed to do so: False doctrines about the class struggle and progressive nationalism had blurred their vision. He blames the regimes in Syria and Egypt for leading their people astray, for making cowards and inept soldiers out of a community that had a history of glorious victories. |
The military
A war society should organize itself in a roughly egalitarian manner: Bread and hardships should be divided in such a way that men are convinced of the justice of the social order. Such was not the case in the Arab military regimes, in which class arrogance and social stratification precluded a fighting society. The military class, placed at the apex of a social order of inequality, appropriated the public wealth for its own privilege and edification. The Arab armies were too busy living off the public treasury to stand up to the enemy. Furthermore, the military was riddled with factionalism; officers spent far more time watching and plotting against one another than they did thinking about the enemy. The Arab officer, according to Kishk, costs his society far more than does his American counterpart, but he hardly gets a chance to put to practice what he has learned. Sooner or later he finds his way to prison, or he becomes a corporate director, or an official responsible for fouling up industrial production in some factory, or someone who sabotages politics in some embassy. |
Unimpressed with the ideological claims of the military and their advocacy of socialism and revolution, Kishk finds in medieval dynastic history an apt explanation of the military in power. These men, he says, are "socialist Mamluks." The new men, like the Mamluks before them, consider the land and those on it the property of the sultan (Muhammad Jalal Kishk, Al Qawmiyah Wa al Ghazw al Fikri [Nationalism and Cultural Invasion], 1970, p. 67). For the military establishment, socialism means the military's dominance of the wealth of the country. None of this is new or modernizing. Kishk was exposed to Western writings that, in the early 1960s, saw the military as an instrument of modernization, as a vanguard of social change. In alluding to the Mamluks, he places the ascendancy of the Arab military in proper historical perspective. It is not a new, modernizing phenomenon but a retrogression, a resurrection of the politics of dynasties and intrigue. In the age of Islamic decline, "military gangs" assassinated, usurped power, and established dynasties that were subsequently overthrown by other soldiers of fortune. A keen student of Islamic history, Kishk can see through the claims of the military who proclaimed themselves--and were accepted by many analysts--as a repository of the national will. He can find the thread that connects the new military with its predecessors. |
The new Mamluks have misunderstood and distorted the meaning of revolution. For them revolution is mere seizure of power; they see no difference between a coup d'état--inqilab---and a revolution--thawra. Had they appreciated the difference, they would have realized that revolution does not occur with a mere attack on a radio station. In a practice of the military, the sole determinant of revolutionary politics was control of the radio station. Whoever controlled it was a revolutionary socialist, and whoever lost it was denounced as a reactionary agent of imperialism. None of this of course had anything to do with war and preparation for war. The military cliques were disinterested in it and unprepared for it. And when they lost in 1967 their main concern was to rush back from the front to hatch new conspiracies and prepare for the coming purge. |
Kishk does not consider the military officers the only culprits. He also blames the radical intellectuals who hammered at the foundations of belief, imported false doctrines, and unleashed the moral confusion that paved the way for the defeat. The radical intellectuals put their faith in concepts such as world peace, brotherhood among nations, and humane socialism, but such beliefs put nations that take them seriously at the mercy of aggressive ones. In this world, the eagle and the sparrow cannot coexist; there can be no brotherhood between the killer and the victim. Human history is built on strife. Islam recognized this truth. The Muslim battle cry "Jihad" was the only thing that frightened the Europeans; it drew the boundaries between belief and unbelief, setting Muslims apart from other men. But Islam has long been on the defensive, and in its own house men preach its obsolescence and inadequacy and call for its destruction. |
Conclusion
Each society must analyze its own predicament; each people must proceed from its own reality. For Kishk, the overwhelming reality is the existence of Muslim people who want to be true to themselves and to withstand the assaults of outsiders. Thus, Islamic movements that proceed from the objective social conditions of the Muslim world are the only ones that can claim to be authentic. Movements that attempt to read into the Islamic world the predicament and the solutions of other societies can lead only to estrangement and mimicry. Kishk's opposition to the radical intellectuals is based more on utilitarian concerns than on concerns about heresy. Our soil, he says, is Islamic; a nonnative plant is destined to die. Nor will attempts at cross-fertilization work: The plant will not survive (Kishk, Al Qawmiyah, p. 167). Revolutions, Kishk insists, must be authentic. For all its polemical output, he points out, Arab radicalism has yet to produce a single volume, like Mao's, that analyzes local realities independent of the thoughts of foreign masters. No translators have ever transformed societies. |
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