More of the Debate within Islam and its spillages

Political Islamic thinkers may be divided into three categories: progressives, Islamists open to dialogue and ahistorical Islamists closed to dialogue and debate. The last category may also be subdivided into violent and non-violent. Waleed ‘Ali’s People like Us provides insight into the questions that appear to divide the West from Islam. There are more useful ways to consider political Islam over the last 50 years, say, besides considering it unchanging and uniform. For instance, we can see political Islam as a variety of highly evolved movements and specifically designed for each situation in which people in the Islamic world find themselves, politically. As I have also noted in earlier posts, even within a given movement there are always a variety of tactical and even strategic ideological views.

One kind of political Islam we may consider is a political movement violently opposed to its national government as the FIS was for many years in Algeria. The degree of violence employed is not constant over time especially as governments demonstrate their willingness to change their stripe but also as elements of the movement becomes weary of violence (especially when their own violence is directed against an ostensibly Islamic government).

There are also movements which are essentially nationalist but use Islamic terminology such as those in the southern Philippines, Aceh and Kashmir. These movements are persistent for reasons other than Islam and may prove highly volatile as nationalist ideology rarely concedes the autonomy of national territory to an alleged other nation.

The Brothers (Ikhwan) groups are an example of social or cultural movements that developed politically especially under the repressive influence of brutal government regimes. I’ve mentioned that in Jordan they now have an established party, the Islamic Action Front, and a degree of government tolerance exists. Their electoral support for the time being has maximised there at about 30% partly due to failure to fully articulate coherent policies and partly due to government action. In Egypt, the Party of the Centre (Hizb al-Wasit) is a moderate splinter group from the Brethren which also suffers from political wishy washiness.

Both the Jamati Islami in Pakistan and Turabi’s National Islamic Front in Sudan began in similar fashion to the Brethren but experienced a period in power by virtue of allying themselves with military dictators (Zia in the late 80s and Numeiri, also in the 1980s, respectively). They, in turn, gave their Islamic imprimatur to the dictators. In both cases, the US played a role in both initially supporting the dictators and later supporting their ultimate overthrow. Particularly in Pakistan, women’s rights were significantly curtailed under Zia but the Jamati Islami was far from the worst enemy of women in Pakistan. These movements model oppositionist Islam giving relatively disenfranchised people private social services and the opportunity for a protest vote against illiberal governments but generally without providing a serious political programme that might inspire the confidence they would need to in order to actually form government for the long haul.

The next class we might consider is resistance movements that have developed a political programme and been elected to represent an occupied people, the classic case being Hamas. Formed in 1987 during the first intifada from the remnants of weak and relatively secularist Brotherhood and other resistance movements in Israeli-occupied Palestine, hard times eventually led to a turning to religious inspiration. While it is an Islamic group, Hamas is also supported by many Palestinian Christians because of its anti-occupation agenda and relative absence of corruption when compared with the PLO. Its less violent agenda than Islamic Jihad (mainly based in Gaza) is politically appreciated in Palestine.

I’ve discussed the potential for political and paramilitary splinter groups to be formed by the action of repression in earlier posts and Hamas falls somewhat into this category (if it is on the mild side, ideologically and politically, when compared with other groups such as Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, etc.)

There are significant radicalised splinter groups formed usually from younger cadres of less radical groups in at least Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and various countries of South East Asia. Members are typically withdrawn from the societies into small close-knit subgroups in which they live in preparation for violent jihad. The names of the groups are generally innocuous-sounding such as Islamic Group but may occasionally be threatening with terms such as Jihad. The group in Syria with the name Tawhid, for example, whose name is uncontroversial in Islam, simply meaning unity referring to God’s Oneness, is certainly a radical splinter group. The Lebanese group called Victory of Islam (Fatah al-Islam), perhaps a slightly threatening name, is apparently an al-Qaeda affiliate which certainly qualifies it as violent and radical. The Sunni Brotherhood has been rather weak in majority Shi’a Iraq but the Jaish al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army or Army of the Wise One or Army of the Anointed One) qualifies as a radical Shi’a group there, radicalised by civil war and occupation. The Badr Organisation (Munathamat Badr) formerly known as the Badr Brigades is another example of radical Shi’a Islam in Iraq. Badr refers to a major battle in very early Islam and also means full moon. The Shi’a Islamic Da’wa (Call) Party’s name refers simply to the call to religion from God but the party, which is now a conservative party in Iraq’s new democracy, was earlier a banned and radicalised splinter party (by suppression during Ba’ath Party rule from its formation in the late 1960s or perhaps earlier). Today the party still appears to be splintered into the Islamic Da’wa Party and the Islamic Da’wa Party/Iraq Organisation. The Indonesian/South East Asian Jama’a Islamiyya was of course responsible for the major Bali bombing and other atrocities.

On the other hand the reforming king of Morocco (who chooses to wear the fez popularised by the Ottomans who never ruled Morocco) has recently set up a school for female imams.

Of all the male ideologists I have considered in various posts, there is a wide variety of attitudes to the wearing of beards and western styles of dress. There are also a wide variety of attitudes to sacrifice for the cause. Muhammad Akef of the relatively peaceful Egyptian Muslim Brothers leadership has spent more time behind bars than Nelson Mandela. Ghannoushi of Tunisia breaks the mould of political Islam by having a political preference for definite, achievable programmes.

Lest we forget how different the various ideologists were in their proposals and fall for the idea that political Islam is one united force against the West, I would now like to briefly note how some of the most widely respected thinkers differed.

Maududi saw Islam as the best religion and all-encompassing so that it provided all necessary legal and constitutional measures. The prime duty of any good state for him was to protect Islam, command what Islam commands and prohibit what Islam prohibits.

Qutb on the other hand saw Islam as a great, just, all-encompassing way of life for Muslims from which good government would flow in Muslim nations but saw that Europe was entitled to follow the secular path.

Afghani was a Muslim nationalist but he was also a fan of science up to a point. He was not a huge fan of the established clergy of Islam, however, but he saw Islam as the potential heart of the only just philosophy.

Taha Hussein, however, was a different kind of nationalist. He was an Egyptian nationalist who also saw Egypt as properly a part of Western and Mediterranean Civilisation rather than Eastern Civilisation. He was a member of the ulema not especially liked by Afghani but was ironically less Islam-focused than Afghani himself was.

As with Qutb and Maududi, both Afghani and Hussein were interested in discussion of the West and its ideas.

Khomeini was pro-theocracy and anti-Jew and saw Islam as a perfect constitutional form in itself.

Al-Banna, on the other hand, didn’t envisage an especially constitutional/theocratic role for Islam. He was rather more interested in creating social and cultural progress and would have been relatively happy with a fair degree of secularisation as long as Western materialism was guarded against and Islam was duly considered as a political model.

On the other side of the ledger in Islam is a writer, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, who opposed any return to a caliphate (having witnessed the end of a weak and corrupt alleged one at the end of the Ottoman period) thus falling foul of the Egyptian king, who at that time was considering appropriating the title for his own purposes, and consequently losing his job as a Sharia judge and al-Azhar academic. He also suggested that generally Islam permitted Muslims some flexibility in their choice of political system and even leaned towards a democratic one perhaps similar to some of the democracies in the West. He stressed that the monarchy of Muhammad was a special case as he was a prophet and that the Qur’an was a moral guide rather than a book of legal and constitutional rules.

Nazira Zein ed-Din is another Islamic writer (also writing in the 1920s) who represented a particular Islam; the Islam that includes women's rights. She was a Lebanese writer who proposed that women unveil in line with the mood of those times in much of the former Ottoman Empire. Fatima Mernissi has continued her work in a time when that mood has reversed in many areas. These authors have also dealt with other women’s issues in similarly progressive ways, considering the times in which they operated (and continue to operate in the case of Mernissi) though much of the ‘progress’ has been opposed or met with arguments for traditional practices that resonate with many Muslims including the authors themselves. The arguments concerning veiling rightly continue in many places in the Middle East but legally enforced dress codes only apply in the Gulf States, Iran (where veiling is generally compulsory in public places) and Turkey (where veiling continues to be prohibited in certain places). Unfortunately, however, social pressure continues to limit freedom of choice in this area in many places.