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Islam Today
From: Cambridge University Press
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Sarah Ansari |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The very mention of Islam conjures up visions of the Middle East. Yet, only about a quarter of the world's 1,000 million Muslims actually live in that area. Islam is a diverse and growing phenomenon, which has recently sought to re-establish its non-western identity. Historian Sarah Ansari here traces some of the trends and influences which have characterized the face of Islam in the course of the twentieth century. |
 he extent to which the Muslim world has accommodated itself to western secular visions of progress has often been overshadowed during the late twentieth century by growing support among Muslims for so-called fundamentalist responses to the challenges arising from their encounter with the West. Militant Islam everywhere has raised its political profile. In many of the newly independent and overwhelmingly Muslim sub-Saharan states, for instance, Islam has become an important unifying force. In others such as Nigeria, a multi-religious state, it has been a source of division. Here, in the 1980s, heightened Muslim consciousness and social dislocation prompted by an oil boom encouraged a 'fundamentalist' streak of Muslim revivalism in the powerful northern provinces, which called for the introduction of the sharia. |
The label 'fundamentalism', however, is not applied only to Islam, nor is it a particularly new one. It has also been attached to both radical and conservative schools of thought and often applied inaccurately to anything Muslim which challenges what the West assumes to be progress. A better term, more accurately embodying what is distinctive about Muslim fundamentalism, would be 'Islamism'. Central to it is the notion of activism--creating a new religio-political order while preserving orthodox religious observances. It therefore appeals for reinterpretation of the sources of doctrine rather than the reassertion of traditional values. Islamism is definitely a twentieth-century phenomenon; it has not developed in a political vacuum. The pressing need to confront western ideas, and the dramatic changes which have taken place in many Muslim societies have encouraged some Muslims to demand the establishment of an Islamic system, a nizam as against the materially based systems of western capitalism and socialism. Islamism therefore does not represent a return to the past. Then the traditional Islamic view of government was limited to creating and maintaining the right conditions for Islam to flourish. Islamists, in contrast, usually consider, like the West, that government, with the enhanced power of the modernized state at its command, should exercise much greater responsibility for the people. This difference gives a distinctly modern look to the relationship between Islam and the state. |
The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood
The Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood), the leading Islamist force in the Middle East, was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (1906-49) as "a new soul in the heart of the nation". It disagreed with traditional orthodoxy about modernization, which it neither accepted nor rejected but reinterpreted to fit an Islamic model. Leaders of "official Islam" were "parrots of the pulpits", out of touch with reality. Revivalist Islam was a means of overcoming social and economic injustice imposed by the "secular" controllers of the state. Banna himself was, like many leaders of Islamist movements, not one of the ulama but a poorly paid schoolteacher in the provincial city of Ismailia; his supporters belonged to similar lower middle class backgrounds and were very often the recent urban migrants who were fuelling the rapid growth of Middle Eastern cities such as Cairo. At the end of 1948 the Egyptian government dissolved the Brotherhood for its involvement in the murder of the prime minister, Nuqrashi Pasha, and shortly afterwards Banna himself was assassinated. The dissolution led to the emigration of many Brothers, who spread their message to neighbouring Arab states. Equivalent parties grew in strength in Syria and Yemen with active support in Palestine and Transjordan. Despite activity in anti-British disturbances in the early 1950s, the Brotherhood was again suppressed in 1954 by the new Free Officers regime, disappearing from politics for at least a decade. Another purge in 1965 followed a second alleged plot to overthrow Nasser: its leader, Sayyid Qutb, was among the members executed by the authorities. |
The Brotherhood gradually re-emerged in the more favourable circumstances of the 1970s when Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat (1918-81), sought to present a more Islamic image for his regime, exploiting Islamic symbols to build support against Communism and Nasser's followers. This change was closely related to Egypt's 1967 defeat by Israel which had sharpened dissatisfaction with secular nationalism and acted as a catalyst in the resurgence of Islam. Although Sadat encouraged the moderate leadership of the Brotherhood, its more extreme affiliates kept up the pressure for armed insurrection. By the early 1980s these two wings had come together to oppose the government's peace negotiations with Israel. In September 1981 Sadat rounded on the opposition, concentrating on Islamic militants and sympathetic army officers. One month later, he was assassinated by military supporters of a Brotherhood offshoot, the Takfir wal Hijra (Repentance and Flight from Sin). Under Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood has continued to press for the Islamization of Egyptian society. Elections in 1984 and 1987 demonstrated its political influence: Islam had become the chief source of opposition to the regime as militants accelerated attacks directly on the government and more indirectly against the symbols--often tourists--of the West. |
In Syria, where Hafiz al-Asad's faction in the Baath Party had seized power at the end of 1970, the Muslim Brotherhood trod a similar path, joining forces in the 1980s with other Muslim parties to form an Islamic front against Asad's regime which was brutally suppressed in a military action which left much of the city of Hama destroyed. In North Yemen in 1988 a quarter of the elected seats on the state's consultative council were won by Muslim Brothers. Another major centre of Brotherhood activity was the Sudan where it campaigned after independence in 1956 for a permanent constitution based on the Quran and Sunna. This war of attrition contributed to President Numeiri's action in September 1983. Faced with
an economic crisis and serious erosion of his political base, he announced the introduction of Islamic law in its entirety. In Algeria, the late 1980s witnessed a determined challenge by Islamists who succeeded in unsettling the political equilibrium by winning in 1991, albeit temporarily, an electoral showdown with the country's secular rulers. Libya produced another variation on the theme when, following an army coup in 1969 which overthrew King ldris, the policies of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi--a modern technocrat--combined correct Islamic practice with Arab socialism to produce a "Third Way" of "Islamic socialism" that was highly revolutionary. Qaddafi's insistence on the Quran as the sole source of legitimacy denied the authority of the hadiths and earned the enmity of more traditional Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia. |
Growing Islamization
The Indian subcontinent saw its own versions of Islamism emerge. In Pakistan, the Jamaat-e Islami (Islamic Society), founded in 1941 and led by Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), reversed its earlier opposition to the creation of a separate nation-state for India's Muslims and called for the construction of a truly Islamic society with Islamic government, banking, and economic institutions. Like Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, Mawdudi's totalitarian vision condemned western notions of political sovereignty as denying God's authority on earth and, like the Brotherhood, the Jamaat drew support from the fast-expanding cities whose inhabitants, often former migrants from India, were disillusioned with the new Pakistani state. The prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1926-79), leader of the populist Pakistan Peoples' Party, declared Pakistan an "Islamic Socialist Republic" in 1973 as a way of keeping Islamism at arms length but dissatisfaction with his policies encouraged a drift to religio-political alternatives. This opposition mainly gave its support to General Zia ul-Haq (1924-88) after he seized power in 1977. |
Strongly influenced by the Jamaat, Zia embarked on Islamization which confirmed the sharia as the supreme law of the land. His own strongly held religious views, however, did not disguise the political motives at the root of these policies on Islam: he firmly believed that Pakistan's political system had to be Islamized in order to forge an ostensible national unity. This task was eased by events in Afghanistan where his support for mujahidin resistance to the Soviet-backed Kabul government after 1979 helped to bring him substantial western backing. Despite attempts at Islamization during this period, electoral success for religio-political parties such as the Jamaat remained limited. However, the strength of general religious sentiment persuaded subsequent governments, including that led by the world's first Muslim woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, of the pitfalls in seeking to amend the Islamic status quo. |
All Muslim societies, majority or minority, came by the late 1970s to contain an Islamist wing. Everywhere there were Muslims striving to purify their communities of the taint of westernization and to restructure them along more consciously Islamic lines. Even in Saudi Arabia, renowned for the conservatism of its rulers, the Islamist opposition movement had emerged by the 1990s as the main challenge to the existing order. But it was in Iran that the secular western mould was broken most spectacularly. Its revolution of 1978-79 appeared to sum up Muslim rejection of western-style modernization. The identification between the state and Islamism in post-revolution Iran also meant that Iran came to be regarded as the prime mover in the Islamist network that forms an element of the politics of Muslims everywhere, and this in spite of Shia-Sunni sectarian differences. |
The Iranian revolution was a hybrid incorporating secular left-wing opposition to the Shah's regime as well as the Shiite clerics whose religious teachings determined the nature of the new Iranian state. One persistent critic of the Shah's secularizing policies was Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89) who had long rejected the quietist stand of many of his fellow ulama by condemning the Pahlawi regime in colourful terms: "all the idiotic words that have proceeded from the brain of that illiterate soldier [Riza Shah] are rotten... Only the law of God... will remain and resist the ravages of time". His call for Iranians to rise up in 1963 led to his exile in Iraq but did not stop his voice of opposition, which with the help of tape recorder and telephone was still heard back in Iran. |
Dissatisfaction with the Shah's policies grew as modernization gathered speed. "Mushrooming" cities, as economic circumstances in spite of oil revenues deteriorated, spawned increasing numbers of Iranians whose disillusionment with the regime was intense. The opposition now included Iranians with western educations, who were influenced by the writings of Dr Ali Shariati (1933-77) which used central Islamic symbols and principles to express radical themes of social justice flagrantly violated by the regime of the Shah. By 1979, the Shah had fled and Khomeini had returned triumphant. In the aftermath, the ulama gained complete control as their secular allies fell by the political wayside. Khomeini's view that the purpose of government was to apply the law of God meant that the sharia became the law of the land with the provision that "the religious expert and no one else... should occupy himself with the affairs of government". Public adherence to the stated norms of Muslim behaviour meant the compulsory veiling of women and other symbols of propriety. The bloody Gulf war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988 unified the country politically but made the task of governing more difficult because of its colossal human and material cost. |
Khomeini's death enabled the Iranian authorities to become more flexible with the outside world but the Teheran government remained a potent inspiration for movements and Muslims with similar aims elsewhere in the world. Its decision to uphold Khomeini's fatwa condemning to death the author of The Satanic Verses provided leadership for those Muslims who objected in principle to Salman Rushdie's novel. More specifically, it assisted Islamist groups to achieve high public profiles, particularly in the troubled political arena of the Middle East. Militant organizations such as Hizballah (Party of God) dominated the headlines in the Lebanon, while Iran was able to exploit hostility between secularists and Muslim activists among Palestinians. Islamic Jihad and Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) were obvious targets for Iranian backing, and the extent of their support was revealed in the remarkable intifadah (uprising) of Palestinian youth after 1987. Here the Iranian revolution offered practical and moral support, just as it has done for Islamists in places as far apart as North America, Britain, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, India, and the Philippines. |
Islam as a contemporary world presence
The two centuries since 1800 have marked an important break with earlier times for the Muslim world. The vast empires so characteristic of it before this period disappeared from the map. Muslims, who formerly had ruled so many non-Muslims, more often than not instead found themselves being ruled by non-believers. With the decline of western imperialism, Muslims reacquired much of their political independence, but the result has been a patchwork of separate states, each one trying, with varying success, to balance its religious and national identities. For some, Islam and political life were inexorably intertwined. For others, their citizens, or perhaps only some of them, just happened to be Muslims and the state tried to maintain a neutrality on the question of religion. Hereditary monarchs, democracy, theocracy, dictatorship, military rule, radical revolution--the Islamic world has experienced it all since 1800. |
The most striking thing about the contemporary Muslim world therefore has to be its diversity. Statistics confirm this: only about one in four of todays 1,000 million Muslims live in the Middle East. Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population; more Muslims live in South Asia than in the whole Middle East; even the former Soviet Union had a larger number of Muslim citizens than any Middle Eastern country save Turkey. Indeed, Muslims now very often represent one element in a rich mosaic of different peoples living side by side. Thanks to decolonization and migration patterns since the Second World War, Europe now possesses a much bigger Muslim population, communities forming permanent strands in the fabric of western society. Organizations such as the Muslim Parliament in Britain and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) reflect the growing claims of sections of these Muslims who, as they have put down roots in their new homes, have become much more assertive over issues such as Islamic education where state and community interact. |
Not surprisingly, the Middle East continues to dominate popular perceptions about Islam and Muslim society. Apart from the fact that the religion emerged and developed here, Arabic, the language of Islam and the Quran, retains its emotional hold as a sacred liturgical language, despite the widespread availability of religious guidance in the vernacular. In addition, from a western perspective, the Middle East was where Europe first encountered Islam. The Middle East's oil wealth has reinforced its disproportionate importance by seeming to anchor the Muslim centre of gravity ever more firmly here. But the late twentieth century reassertion of Muslim identity and confidence in Islam has been matched by the rekindling of the pan-Islamic spirit and the emergence of international organizations which reflect the changed relationship between the Middle East and Muslims elsewhere in the world. |
Both the Rabetat al-alam al-Islami (World Muslim League), a religious organization set up in 1962, and the Islamic Conference, established in 1969 as a permanent political organization by King Faysal of Saudi Arabia (r. 1964-75), maintain their headquarters in the heart of the Middle East. But their memberships stretch right around the Muslim world: the Islamic Conference possesses more than forty member states with leading officials who have come from countries as far apart as Malaysia and Senegal. Even OPEC has played a part in this regenerated sense of pan-lslamic cooperation with 11 out of its 13 members in the mid-1970s effectively Muslim states, including non-Arab Nigeria, Gabon, and Indonesia. Similarly the Teheran authorities have been able, with the help of Iran's oil resources, to establish international Islamic organizations which have been in direct competition with their Saudi-sponsored counterparts. |
Yet, while it has proved relatively easy to express pan-Islamic sentiment, to maintain a consistent common front has been much more difficult. Even in relation to Israel, political forces in the Middle East, following the lead of Egypt, have in recent years been willing to consider a compromise solution, and a purely religious solidarity has been hard to maintain. The 1990-91 Gulf war, which pitched Iraq against the West, further fractured the Muslim world as different states lined up on opposing sides of the divide. The Gulf crisis revealed, as other recent periods of tension had demonstrated, the divisions which still exist within the Muslim world despite the very obvious solidarity that holds it together. This diversity and unity was highlighted in the early 1990s amid much anguish by the plight of Bosnian Muslims who had little choice, thanks to the civil war tearing their country apart, but to accept being evacuated half way round the world to new homes in Muslim states such as Malaysia. Culturally, these two societies are worlds apart. They are linked, however, by their Muslim heritage. |
This is an extract from pages 111-21 of "The Islamic world in the era of Western domination: 1800 to the present," by Sarah Ansari, in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, edited by Francis Robinson, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 1996. |
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