veiled4allah

understanding Islamism

Following up on recent posts about engagement with Islamist groups and the fact that the Middle East is not a monolith, we have Understanding Islamism. The executive summary states:

Reacting to the spectacular and violent events of 11 September 2001, many Western observers and policy-makers have tended to lump all forms of Islamism together, brand them as radical and treat them as hostile. That approach is fundamentally misconceived. Islamism -- or Islamic activism (we treat these terms as synonymous) -- has a number of very different streams, only a few of them violent and only a small minority justifying a confrontational response. The West needs a discriminating strategy that takes account of the diversity of outlooks within political Islamism; that accepts that even the most modernist of Islamists are deeply opposed to current U.S. policies and committed to renegotiating their relations with the West; and that understands that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war occupation of Iraq, and the way in which the "war against terrorism" is being waged all significantly strengthen the appeal of the most virulent and dangerous jihadi tendencies.

Later, it argues that there are three different types of Sunni Islamist groups (Shi'a groups are treated separately):

Political: the Islamic political movements (al-harakat al-islamiyya al-siyassiyya), exemplified by the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and its offshoots elsewhere (including Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Sudan and Syria) and by locally rooted movements such as the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey, and the Party for Justice and Development (Parti pour la Justice et le Développement, PJD) in Morocco, whose purpose is to attain political power at the national level. These now generally accept the nation-state, operate within its constitutional framework, eschew violence (except under conditions of foreign occupation), articulate a reformist rather than revolutionary vision and invoke universal democratic norms. The characteristic actor is the party-political militant. Missionary: the Islamic missions of conversion (al-da'wa), which exists in two main variants exemplified by the highly structured Tablighi movement on the one hand and the highly diffuse Salafiyya on the other. In both cases political power is not an objective; the overriding purpose is the preservation of the Muslim identity and the Islamic faith and moral order against the forces of unbelief, and the characteristic actors are missionaries (du'ah), and the 'ulama. Jihadi: the Islamic armed struggle (al-jihad), which exists in three main variants: internal (combating nominally Muslim regimes considered impious); irredentist (fighting to redeem land ruled by non-Muslims or under occupation); and global (combating the West). The characteristic actor is, of course, the fighter (al-mujahid).

There are substantial differences among these groups:

Political Islamists make an issue of Muslim misgovernment and social injustice and give priority to political reform to be achieved by political action (advocating new policies, contesting elections, etc.). Missionary Islamists make an issue of the corruption of Islamic values (al-qiyam al-islamiyya) and the weakening of faith (al-iman) and give priority to a form of moral and spiritual rearmament that champions individual virtue as the condition of good government as well as of collective salvation. Jihadi Islamists make an issue of the oppressive weight of non-Muslim political and military power in the Islamic world and give priority to armed resistance.

Finally, the report cautions:

Which of these three main outlooks will prevail in the medium and longer term is of great importance to the Muslim world and to the West. While the West in general and the U.S. in particular ought to be modest about their ability to shape the debate among Islamists, they also should be aware of how their policies affect it. By adopting a sledge-hammer approach which refuses to differentiate between modernist and fundamentalist varieties of Islamism, American and European policy-makers risk provoking one of two equally undesirable outcomes: either inducing the different strands of Islamic activism to band together in reaction, attenuating differences that might otherwise be fruitfully developed, or causing the non-violent and modernist tendencies to be eclipsed by the jihadis.

The full text of the report is also available (PDF). Afterthought: I just want to really, really recommend this to everybody to read. Don't just read the executive summary, read the whole report. I've been saying things like this for awhile (originally here), but this report really pulls everything together and makes some essential points that everybody should know.

news flash: fundamentalism and traditionalism aren't the same thing

An article in the Independent discusses the popularity among ordinary Afghans of shrines dedicated to the "Arab Afghans" and other fighters who made up the core of al-Qa'ida. The first thing that occurs to anybody reading this who is at all familiar with the various movements in Islam is that the Wahhabi form of Islam practiced by many of the Arab fighters and the Taliban's version of Islam are fervently opposed to the "folk Islam" that includes making pilgrimages to shrines and praying at them. In fact, the article itself mentions this, twice:

Ironically, the mainly Arab and Pakistani al-Qa'ida fighters who are so venerated in death by the people of Khowst were widely hated when they were alive and living in the town. They were Osama bin Laden's men, jihadis who had arrived from all over the Islamic world to prepare for a holy war in Khowst's terrorist training camps. The camps were handy for Pakistan, an hour's journey away with its connections to the outside world, but the foreign fighters never had much support in the area, which was always ambivalent about the Taliban, unlike some other Pushtun towns. Some of the fighters may have escaped death in the cruise missile strikes ordered by Bill Clinton in 1998 after the US embassy bombings in east Africa; many must have personally known Bin Laden, who had a base in the town. But local people remembered them mainly as strutting and arrogant, a superior clique who didn't disguise their contempt for Afghan culture, which they saw as a decayed form of Islam riddled with superstition... ...Ironically the strict Wahabi Arabs buried at Khowst and the other shrines were opposed to Afghan burial customs they considered idolatrous. One of the reasons they were so hated in Afghanistan was their habit of tearing down flags and decorations on Afghan graves in fits of iconoclasm. They would surely have hated to think that, in death, with an obsession for jihadis, they would be invested with magical powers and be prayed to by the superstitious tribesmen they looked down on in life.

When they talk about fearing a "resurgence of fundamentalism", they're referring to the kind of Islam practiced by Wahhabis and the Taliban, right? So how exactly does the popularity of a practice (veneration of shrines) that is absolutely abhorred by the fundamentalist groups indicate a "resurgence of fundamentalism"? It may indicate that there's a resurgence in traditionalist Islam in Afghanistan, or that there's a rapprochement between traditionalist and fundamentalist groups. But I'm not not quite seeing how it indicates a "resurgence in fundamentalism". Added: More of my thoughts about movements within Islam here.

Wahhabis and Qutubis

About a month ago, I wrote about an ideology called Qutubism, which is named for its founding thinker, the Egyptian radical Syed Qutb. Qutubism is the primary ideology of Ayman Zawahiri, Bin Laden's "number two", and was a major influence on Abdullah Azzam, who served as Bin Laden's teacher and mentor (Zawahiri is Egyptian and Azzam was Palestinian). I argued that Qutubism is an ideology that is distinct from Wahhabism and has goals that are different from, and in fact often directly opposed to, those of the Wahhabi establishment in Saudi Arabia. This is set out in more detail in the other blog entry. As a follow-up to this, you may wish to take a look at The Wahhabi Myth - Salafism, Wahhabism, Qutbism. This is the website for a recently-published book which is sponsored by organizations that are closely linked to the Wahhabi establishment. If you're interested in this question, I encourage you to check out the site, read the materials excerpted there, and make your own judgment on the matter. As I wrote in the comments of the other blog entry:

My purpose in posting this entry was not to promote either Wahhabism or Qutubism. My purpose was simply this: very often the two groups are treated as the same. They are not. They are two different groups with different, and sometimes opposing, aims. A policy based on the assumption that they are the same or that they share the same aims is a policy based on an error. In order to determine the best course of action and the best policy we need to have an accurate understanding of the situation.