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However, things in this respect began to change from early 1970s onwards. The
right-wing expressions of Political Islam experienced a surge, especially after
the death of popular Egyptian leader and Arab Socialist, Gamal Abdul Nasser
in 1970.
Later, the bankrolling of the anti-Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan by the US, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan in the 1980s, also became a catalyst that triggered the
shifting of political and social influence in many Muslim countries from leftleaning Political Islam to its rightist expressions.
The Afghan Jihad also added a more militant dimension to right-wing Political
Islam. It reached a peak in the late 1980s after the Afghan conflict resulted in a
stalemate and the Soviet forces in Afghanistan had to pull out.
In the early 1990s, encouraged by their successes in Afghanistan, the militant
expressions of right-wing Political Islam began to pull away from the orbit of its
former backers (US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), and tried to trigger Islamic
revolutions in various Muslim countries.
Their methods of creating chaos through bombings (to unleash an uprising)
antagonised the regimes that had formerly backed them, but now found
themselves under attack.
The revolutions failed to materialise, but the bombings continued. Frustrated,
the militants found themselves bordering on taking nihilistic action that has
caused the deaths of thousands of civilians and members of the security forces
in countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia,
Syria and Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the more classical expressions of right-wing Political Islam have
tried to repair the damage inflicted to their cause by their more militant
cousins, by getting involved in the democratic process in countries like
Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey.
12th century Islamic thinker, Imam Ghazali, who advocated an end to 'ijtihad'
(independent reasoning) with the view that Islamic thought had reached
completion.
The 'fundamentalists' usually emerged in the shape of scholars (ulema) and
clergymen (maulvis and imams), who worked as advisers to Muslim kings, or
in mosques and madrassahs.
Truth is, during the disintegration of Muslim empires from the 19th century
onwards, the many reformist Islamic movements that emerged in reaction to
the collapse criticised the performance of Islamic Fundamentalists, blaming
them for getting too close to decadent kings due to whose negligence of
Islam, Muslim political power had crumbled.
This movement has historically been more interested in rectifying cultural and
social aberrations in a Muslim society, and for this it used the mosque and
evangelism.
But Islamic Fundamentalism continues to be frozen in an understanding of the
faith and its texts developed centuries ago by ancient Islamic scholars and
jurists.
Though it is vocal in its rhetorical demands for the imposition of Islamic laws
(Shariah), it has little or no political agenda. It never did.
It remains largely associated with apolitical conservative ulema, the clergy and
Islamic evangelists even though at times many such individuals have been
accused of endorsing militant action to enforce the fundamentals of Islam in a
society.
Members of the Tableeghi Jamat in Pakistan. The Jamat is one of the largest
Islamic evangelical movements in the world. Observers have described it as a
genuine Islamic fundamentalist movement but with no political agenda.
Muslim Nationalism was perhaps Political Islams first major modern
manifestation (along with Pan-Islamism). Both emerged in the 19th century as
critiques of classical Islamic Fundamentalism which they accused of being
apolitical, frozen in time and anti-progress.
Both were also the reactive products of the rise of European colonialism. PanIslamism viewed the Muslims across the world as a single entity (ummah) that
should be united under single Islamic state (a global caliphate).
Pioneering Pan-Islamic thinkers such as Jalaluddin Afghani (1839-97) were
perhaps the first to allude to the creation of an Islamic State (albeit a universal
one). It was a concept culled from the Western idea of the state and then
furnished with the theory that the governmental set-ups in Makkah in the 7th
century during the initial rise and triumph of Islam were organic Islamic
States.
Though Pan-Islamism eschewed and abhorred the idea of nationalism defined
by political borders, it still managed to inspire Muslim Nationalism. Muslim
Nationalism emerged in India soon after the complete collapse of the Mughal
Empire and the victory of the British Colonialists in the 1857 Mutiny (triggered
by sections of rebellious Muslim and Hindu soldiers and the remaining scions
of the Mughal Empire).
Pan-Islamism was in fact critical of Muslim Nationalism that was being shaped
by men like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Syed Ameer Ali. For example, Afghani
accused Muslim Nationalists (in India) of attempting to confine the Muslims of
India as a group defined by their geographical location (and thus limitations).
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was one of the early architects of Muslim Nationalism
(along with Syed Ameer Ali). Pan-Islamists and orthodox clergy criticised him
for adopting the Western concept of nationalism for the Muslims of South
Asia.
But Muslim Nationalism largely remained an urban and reformist
phenomenon associated with the Muslim bourgeoisie of India. It was further
elaborated and bolstered by the scholarly works of philosopher and poet
Muhammad Iqbal. By the 1930s, it had become the central plank of the All
India Muslim League.
Muslim Nationalism thus became the main driver behind the movement that
created Pakistan (in 1947), because it advocated the formation of a separate
country for the Muslim nation of India.
Ibn Saud.
Head of the Saud family, Ibn Saud, was an ardent follower of Abd Al-Wahhab
an 18th century puritanical Islamic reformist. The Saud family soon enacted
the worlds first Islamic State, but one that was under the control of a
monarchy.
The Saud familys adherence to the more puritanical strain of the faith and the
imposition of laws (culled from the ideas of literalist 8th century Islamic jurist,
Ibn Hanbal, and 14th century Islamic theologian, Ibn Taymmiya), went down
well with the people of the region; but the familys growing ties with the British
and its monarchical tendencies made a lot of them uncomfortable as well. It
was a puritanical monarchy.
Prolific author and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi was one of the first
major ideologues of what became to be known (in the West) as Islamism.
Qutb, on the other hand, implied that 20th century Muslim societies were in a
state of jahiliyya a term used by classical Muslim scholars to define the state of
ignorance the people of Arabia were in before the arrival of Islam in the 7th
century.
Qutb suggested that a jihad was required in Muslim countries to grab state
power and rid the Muslims from the modern forces of jahiliyya (that to him
were secularism, Marxism, nationalism and Western materialism).
The exception in this regard was the Islamism associated with the Shia
Islamists in Iran. Though the main groundwork for the 1979 revolution in Iran
was done by leftists and constitutionalists, the Iranian forces of Islamism
successfully steered the revolution towards becoming an Islamic one. Iran also
remains to be Islamisms only tangible ruling enactment though it has greatly
suffered from constant economic, political and social strife.
The arrangement between Islamism and its Western and Saudi backers reached
a peak in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the drying up of the patronage and funds
Islamisms leading organs were receiving (from the West), movements
attached to Islamism started to weaken and fragment. Consequently,
Islamisms less intellectually inclined (and more brutal) cousin, NeoFundamentalism, soon began usurping its agenda and political space.
Forces attached to Islamism tried to rebound after the Cold War through the
democratic process but were (on the one end) accused of being apologists of
violent Neo-Fundamentalists and of being lukewarm towards 'islamising' the
society on the other.
Wherever they have managed to come to power (through democracy), they
have struggled to initiate effective political and economic reforms mainly due
to the fact that they end up creating polarisation and administrational chaos by
trying to address solutions to non-religious issues with certain ill-defined
religion-orientated alternatives and manoeuvres.
Some observers have defined the violence associated with NeoFundamentalism as an anarchic and desperate symptom foretelling the
collapse of Political Islam.
If this indeed is the case, one is not quite sure exactly what (in Muslim
countries) will replace it. And whatever happened to the leftist tendencies of
Political Islam? Are they still relevant?
The left flank
One of the strongest among the left-leaning tendencies of Political Islam was
dubbed Islamic Socialism. As a term it was first used by the Muslim Socialist
community in Kazan (Russia) just before the 1917 Communist revolution there.
Staunchly anti-clerical, the community supported communist forces but
retained its Muslim identity.
The term then became popular among some left-leaning Muslim Nationalists of
the All Indian Muslim League.
Gamal Abdul Nasser (right) with famous Marxist revolutionary, Che Guvara, in
Cairo (1960).
After the political successes of Arab Socialism and Baath Socialism (in the
1950s and 1960s), the idea of Islamic Socialism also gained currency in
Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The National
Liberation Front that led Algerias independence from France (1962) described
itself as a follower of Islamic Socialism, and so did the populist Pakistan
Peoples Party in Pakistan.
Libya too began calling itself an Islamic Socialist state after Muammar alGadhafi toppled the Libyan monarchy in a coup in 1969. Yasser Arafats
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) also described itself as being Islamic
Socialists, and during the same period (late 1960s/early 1970s) Islamic
Socialists also came to power in Pakistan, Sudan and Somalia.
Poet, painter and author, Hanif Ramay, is considered one of the main
Syria and Iraq, and with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
In Iran, radical anti-Shah militant organisations that fused Islamic symbolism
with Marxist/socialist ideas also appeared. They took an active part in the 1979
Iranian Revolution, but were then eliminated or banished by the new Islamic
regime.
Iranian thinker and activist Ali Shariati expressed revolutionary Islam through
Marxist symbolism. He was assassinated in 1975 by the agents of the Shah of
Iran.
Islamic Socialism was vehemently attacked and criticised by conservative
Muslim monarchies, as well as by those forces associated with Islamism.
(despite the fact that there is historical accuracy in the claim that major Muslim
empires of yore were already largely pluralistic and non-theocratic).
Again, in the political context, Liberal Islam can find its roots in some 19th
century reformist movements and in the way Muslim countries such as Iran,
Afghanistan and Turkey adopted western economic and social models in the
early 20th century.
The emergence of the nationalist movements in the Muslim world too gave
impetus to the thought attached to Liberal Islam, and so did the coming to
prominence of effusive ideologies such as Islamic Socialism.
The founder of modern Turkish nationalism, Kamal Ataturk, was one of the
staunchest expressions of Liberal Islam (in the political context).
Liberal Islam has been a flexible entity. Sections in both the anti-West as well as
pro-West segments in the Muslim world profess it, with the anti-clergy factor
being the common link between the two.
Many democratic political parties of the left and of the right and also
authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world can be termed as having liberal
views about Islams political role.
These parties and regimes are highly suspicious of the clergy and repulsed by
the political ambitions of Islamism and Neo-Fundamentalism.
They encourage ijtihad in matters such as the understanding of the Quran and
Shariah, and emphasise that Islam is best served through religious institutions
instead of through the state and the government. They also believe faith to be a
strictly private matter that should not be soiled by the amorality of politics.
An emphasis on multiculturalism, nationalism and democratic pluralism too is
made, even though, as mentioned earlier, some Liberal Muslim organs have
been authoritarian as well.
The founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, tried to bridge the political
gap between Muslim Nationalism and Liberal Islam in South Asia.
Most mainstream political parties in the Muslim world today can be said to be
following various degrees of Liberal Islam. Not all of them are secular in the
western sense of the word, but they are flexible in their outlook towards
matters such as the Shariah, and concepts and practices that are deemed as unIslamic by their more conservative opponents.
References:
Oliver Roy, The failure of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, 1998) p.2
Muhammad Ayoob, The Many Faces of Political Islam (University of Michigan,
2007)
Roger Hardy, The Muslim Revolt, (Harsh Publishers 1999) p.18
Ziauddin Sardar, Islam, Post-Modernism & Other Futures (Pluto Press 2001)
p.100
Martin Kramer, Fundamentalists or Islamists? (Middle East Qutarly, 2003)
pp.65-70
Abdullah Saeed, Freedom of Religion & Islam (Ashgate Publishing, 2004) p.90
James Toth, Syed Qutb (Oxford University Press, 2013) p.324
Nadeem F. Paracha, Islamic Socialism: A history from left to right
(DAWN.COM, February 21, 2013)