- MB in International pressOther OpinionsPolitical Islam Studies
- July 12, 2008
- 114 minutes read
The rise of political Islam
’The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be… the conflict between ’the West and the Rest’ and the responses of non-Western civilisations to Western power and values’. So wrote prominent American intellectual Samuel P Huntington, in a much-hyped article in 1993, later a book, entitled The Clash of Civilisations. Influential though the theory was, as the
Indeed, the signs of the revolt they fear are there.
Western governments have been obsessed with ’Islamic fundamentalism’, especially since the end of the Cold War, scared the authoritarian regimes they support in the Middle East could fall to ’Islam’, and then terrified as on September 11 ’fundamentalism’ struck right in the heart of America. But the western left has tended to take the mirror image view, regarding Islamism as a legitimate expression of anti-imperialism, consequently to be supported. Because the Islamists cry ’death to
Neither framework, ’clash of civilisations’ nor ’anti-imperialism’, grasps the complexity and nature of modern Islamism. Terms like ’Islamism’ or ’political Islam’ can be misleading, encouraging the hasty reader to overlook the radical difference between Islamist politics and general Islamic religious sentiment. There are political tendencies which are broadly ’Islamic’ but not ’fundamentalist’. Yet the term ’fundamentalism’ can also be misleading. Christian fundamentalists believe in the literal truth of the Bible. The literal truth of the Qur’an is accepted by all religious Muslims. But modern ’Islamic fundamentalism’ is essentially a political, not a religious current. It denotes not especial devoutness, or devotion to the Qur’an, but political movements whose programme is to reshape societies into a template of an ’Islamic state’ which allegedly existed some 1,200 years ago. Revivalist movements, attempts to purge the life of Muslim communities of non-Islamic accretions and restore it to a more authentically Islamic form, have recurred many times over the centuries. But modern Islamism is distinctive in attempting to master the contradictions of already partly-secularised, partly-industrialised, partly-cosmopolitan societies by reverting to an imagined past and seeking to use the power of more-or-less modern military and state machines to do so.
Modern Islamism originates in the cities, not in the more tradition-bound countryside. Its core activists are drawn from the educated middle class (often young men, frustrated university graduates), not from the sections of the population most remote from scientific and ’western’ culture. But it is not an offshoot or outgrowth of national liberation struggle against imperialism. In the era when mainly-Muslim countries were struggling for freedom from colonial or semi-colonial domination, more secular politics dominated. They appealed to ’the nation’; Islamists do not. Where national liberation struggle is still most sharp, among the Palestinians, Islamism was notably slower in gaining a grip.
Although some Islamist currents have been aided in their early stages by the
In the countries where Islamism has risen, capitalist development has ravaged old social relationships, but not created stable new ones. Pre-capitalist society has largely been eliminated. Huge fortunes have been made out of the oil industry, in particular. Universities, televisions, radios, cassette players, cars, bureaucracies, airports, skyscrapers have mushroomed; simultaneously, huge numbers of people have been thrown onto the margins of society, and a huge class of ’new petty bourgeois’ is tantalised, then frustrated, by the chaotic, lopsided development. Old exploiting classes – bazaar merchants, the religious establishment, sometimes landlords – remain, and are jostled and embittered by the process of change. While in advanced capitalist countries, most of the population is working class in the broad sense, in these societies the working class is still a minority, and there are huge numbers of marginalised sub- or semi-proletarian poor, and of distressed petty bourgeois. These are the social conditions in which Islamism emerges as a distinctive movement, combining some of the features of the ’reactionary anti-capitalism’ which Marx describes in the Communist Manifesto – a first reflex reaction by displaced elements of the relatively well-off to the disruptions of early industrial-capitalist development – with some of the features of fascism.
1. The historical background
Muhammad, the author of the Qur’an and founder of Islam, died nearly 1,400 years ago. Within a very short time, his followers, from their base in what is now
For much of that time, the Muslim world was advanced and sophisticated in comparison with Christian Europe. When Europe was suffering the Dark Ages, Muslim Arab scientists invented algebra (which is an Arabic word) and brought the use of the zero and of decimal number systems from their Hindu inventors in
But European feudalism proved to be a more dynamic system than the state-centred tribute-paying system of the Islamic empires.
After World War One the whole structure came crashing down. Nearly 1,300 years of Islamic empire came to a shocking, sudden end.
More-or-less secular nationalism would dominate the politics of the Islamic world for the next 50 or 60 years. This secular nationalism was intertwined with ’Islamic modernist’ tendencies, schools of thought that wanted to revive Islam but also attune it to the modern world. Saad Zaghlul, the founder of the Egyptian Wafd Party after World War One, a modernising bourgeois nationalist movement which led a popular uprising in 1919 and dominated the inter-war period, had been a student of the most important early Islamic-revivalist thinkers, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammed Abduh. Other intellectuals, notably the writer Taha Hussein, came from the Islamic-revivalist tradition but were forthrightly secular.
The Middle Eastern oil industry began in
After World War Two, a wave of popular movements across the Middle East which brought radical, secular nationalist governments to power. ’Arab socialism’ was declared in Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, whose military government introduced land reform, nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal, resisted a disastrous Anglo-French-Israeli invasion, and then progressively introduced more and more widespread nationalisations, and aligned with the USSR. Nasser was a popular hero across the region, copied in various states (
In
In Iran (a mainly non-Arab country; the majority nationality is Persian), a Nasser-type regime under Mossadeq, which nationalised the British-owned oil company, was overthrown, with CIA and British assistance, and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was extravagantly pro-Western, but carried through, for instance in land reform, many policies similar to the radical nationalists. He was overthrown in 1979 by an enormous revolutionary movement, in which Islamists under Khomeini ultimately dominated.
In the first part of the 20th century, foreign capital had dominated everywhere: but by 1960, the bulk of economic activity in the region, with the important exception of oil, had passed into the hands of the governments or the native bourgeoisies. The next two decades saw a powerful wave of statisation. Outside agriculture and housing, the national private sector was reduced to insignificance in
Islam played a role in the ideologies of all these movements, to varying degrees: Qaddafi in
Secular nationalism scored impressive victories, particularly in achieving independence, though it failed to bring about Arab unity. But by the 1970s it was reaching the end of its rope. It had achieved about all it could achieve, and brought little but frustration and dislocation to vast masses of the population. It was running up against the limits of the capitalist world market, limits that no amount of nationalist militancy could budge. Its success now seemed a wretched and pale thing compared to the glorious Islamic past.
The Arab states were humiliated by
Elsewhere in the Arab world, a different process was taking place. In the oil-rich Arab states feudalistic/tribal monarchies, with colonial aid, transformed themselves into capitalist classes. In 1973, hiking the price of oil fourfold, the shaykhdoms became immensely wealthy. These ruling classes have enforced strict Islamic codes at the same time as gross inequalities have emerged as a result of oil wealth. In the biggest and most powerful state,
All the regimes, pro-western or more vocally nationalist and (until 1989-91) USSR-aligned, were authoritarian, often military in origin, sometimes brutally repressive. By the end of the 1970s they had generated vast sectors in their population for whom they represented nothing but broken promises, disappointment, disruption of traditional certainties, corruption, and shiftlessness. Partly because of the relative social weakness of the working class proper, but more decisively because the left, mostly Stalinist, had tailed the secular nationalists, the left had little appeal to those disillusioned masses. The Islamist movements were growing, entering the mainstream of politics as well as the radical fringes.
2. The Islamist movements
Modern Islamist groups aim for an Islamic state, that is a government which bases itself on Islamic law, the shari’a, a system established about two centuries after the death of Muhammad and then maintained, with fluctuating degrees of erosion, into the 20th century. In the violence of its punishments (amputations, lashes, stonings, death) the shari’a naturally reflects the norms, values, and level of development of its time, 1,200 years ago. Parts of it draw on the social norms of the constantly-warring, clannish society of Arabia at the time of Muhammad; parts (notably the veiling, segregation, and subordination of women) on traditions of the extreme subordination of women in the territories the Muslim armies conquered; and parts on the need to rationalise the fact that as the Islamic empires consolidated, the Muslims came to constitute large class-divided societies, instead of being the cohesive military elite that they were at the time of the first conquest. For the Islamists, though, it has the sheen of a bygone age of harmony and order.
Islam, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, has generally been a religion expressed in public law rather than more abstract theology, private ethics or mysticism. Traditionally the interpretation of that law was the job of the ulema, the Muslim scholars, the rough equivalent in Islam of the Christian clergy. Khomeini in
The Islamists appeal – ostensibly at least – to the Umma, the broad Islamic community, rather than to ’the nation’ (whether the Arab nation or a more narrowly defined one). For most modern, militant Islamists, their aim is both to revive, purge, and radicalise the Umma, and to extend it.
i.
It was in
Gradually al-Banna’s organisation moved in a more overtly political direction. In the 1936-39 Arab revolt against Jewish settlers and British rulers in
They had an uneasy relationship with the nationalist parties, but by the late 1940s, when al-Banna was assassinated, had developed a considerable base.
In 1952 the Free Officers overthrew the king and kicked out the British. Some of them had links with the Brothers. For a short while the Brothers supported, and even took part in, the new government. But they were hostile to the land reform which broke the power of the landlords, and quite soon the Brothers found themselves under arrest and facing persecution. As the regime became more radical, and began to introduce ’Arab socialism’ [state ownership], the Brothers opposed such atheistic heresy. They faced intense repression, along with other oppositional forces like the Communist Party. In the mid-60s, accused of an attempt on
One of those arrested, and executed along with other leaders of the movement in 1966, was Sayyid Qutb, who was probably the real intellectual founder of modern militant Islamism, at least in those lands where the Sunni (more Protestant-like) version of Islam dominates rather than the minority Shi’a (more Catholic-like) version centred in Iran.
Qutb developed his distinctive ideas after the Egyptian Ministry of Education, for which he worked as an official, sent him to the
After his arrest, Qutb wrote his famous work, Signposts, which is the first clear statement of the aims and worldview of the sects we now think of as Islamist, and is required reading for the cadre of these groups. Qutb defined the regime itself as part of the ’infidel’ problem. Society was divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan. The Islamist movement was surrounded by a swamp of ignorance and unbelief (jahiliyya, the term used to describe the society of
As Sadat moved away from Nasserist state-capitalism in the 1970s, the Muslim Brothers re-emerged from their eclipse by repression. Sadat was initially warm towards them. He had broken with the
The Brothers were still technically illegal, but they grew in the 1970s. And more radical schisms began to emerge. A group called the Islamic Liberation Organisation attempted a coup in 1974, seizing the
’Liberation is a means, not an end… When we fight for the liberation of
A better known group, Takfir wa Hijra (roughly, Atonement and Exile – hijra refers to Mohammed’s leaving
There followed a period of intense upheaval. Islamists in the town of
Chukri Mustapha, an agricultural engineer considered the ’emir’, or leader, of Takfir wa Hijra, expressed his ideology thus:
’God be praised. He will prepare the land for the group of the just by provoking a war between the two great powers,
As the gama’at islamiyya, the militant groups, began to grow, the Muslim Brothers moved more into the mainstream. By the end of the 70s, they had formally declared their abandonment of terrorist activity. By the late 80s, although unable to stand in elections, they formed electoral pacts, first with the Wafd, then with the so-called Socialist Labour Party (getting 17% of the vote in 1987). More importantly, they established a network of schools, clinics, and even banks – a pattern typical of Islamist movements – and made huge inroads into Egypt’s professional associations, mainly among engineers, doctors, and by the late 90s, lawyers, winning a majority in the bar association. The Brothers, in other words, sank deep social roots, with cadres in the urban middle class and support from the unorganised poor. In student bodies, too, both moderate and militant Islamists have grown. Now the Brothers are the best-organised and chief opposition to the Mubarak government. In an attempt to curtail their influence, in addition to repression, the state tried to extend its control over mosques; but there are simply too many of these for such control to be effective.
Moderate and legalistic as they now are, it should not be thought that the Brothers are a benign force in Egyptian political life. When the Muslim academic Nasr Abu Zaid put forward a theory that the Qur’an was read and interpreted differently according to historical context, the Brothers declared him an apostate, drove him from the university, and tried, through the courts, to force his wife to divorce him. The couple fled to
The weight of the moderate, ’reformist’ Brothers provides the ideological context for the radical variants. Those have grown increasingly violent. In the 1990s, the militant groups made a turn to assassinating tourists, beginning with the murder of some Israelis in Sinai, and tourists near the pyramids. Then in 1997, an attack was launched at the ancient
Tala’at Fu’ad Qassim, of the Egyptian Islamist group Gama’a Islamiyya, justifies the murder of tourists like this:
’[Tourism]… is a means by which prostitution and AIDS are spread by Jewish women tourists, and it is a source of all manner of depravities, not to mention being a means of collecting information on the Islamic movement. For these reasons we believe tourism is an abomination which must be destroyed. And it is one of our strategies for destroying the government.’
Indeed, these attacks have crippled
A truce was declared between the Islamists and the Mubarak government in 1997. Several thousand detainees were released, although 12,000 or so Islamists remained in prison. After 11 September 2001, though, a new clampdown began.
Secular, or secular-ish, and democratic forces remain alive in
ii.
The first great victory of the Islamist movements was the Iranian revolution. There is no space here to go into detail. But
The movement which, by late 1978, was challenging the regime, was composed of different social actors with incompatible aims. On the one hand there were the urban poor and the industrial working class, especially but not only in the vital oil industry. A general strike was one of the forces which succeeded in toppling the Shah. There was also a large organised left, although principally in the form of guerrilla organisations – the two most important were the Fedayyin, which was avowedly Marxist (influenced, for instance, by Guevarism), and the radical Muslim People’s Mujaheddin Organisation. The pro-Moscow Tudeh Party also played a role, although it soon proved to be one of the most right-wing, pusillanimous ’communist’ parties on earth.
On the other hand there were the wealthy bazaari merchants, sections of traditional classes rolled back by the White Revolution, and the mosque. These distinct social forces, with distinct aims and interests, temporarily came together for the single aim of removing the hated Shah; but almost immediately the movement fractured into virtual civil war. They came together on a huge scale. Along with the general strike, the mass demonstrations reached a scale rarely seen even in revolutionary movements: millions of people took to the streets, crippling the army’s ability to repress them, and indeed splitting the army. The guerrilla organisations fought the army with some success.
For a short period, the working class was centre stage, creating independent workplace organisations, shoras, which could have been further developed in a ’soviet’direction, purging managers, taking ever more radical steps in the factories. The chances for working class revolution were very real. The left was strong and confident. Yet the shoras were quickly co-opted by the Khomeini movement; the regime almost immediately turned on the left – and on women, and national minorities – and unleashed a violent, urban mass movement against them. Left-wing organisations had their offices sacked; then the left’s stronghold,
How did Khomeini and the clergy come to dominate this revolution, and crush its alternative potential? The mosque had been an independent space during the Shah’s rule, outside the regime’s capacity for repression, enabling the mullahs to emerge as a leadership for a section of the masses. Religious symbols became powerful means of mobilisation (for instance in the timing of mass demonstrations). Khomeini himself, from abroad, was known as a firebrand opponent of the Shah; by the beginning of 1979 he was seen to ’personify’ the revolution.
Other currents of Islamist thought had also become widely known in the decade or so before the revolution, most importantly that of Ali Shariati. Shariati was a lay intellectual who interpreted the struggle against the Shah in terms of reclaiming an indigenous cultural heritage. His ideas were far from Khomeini’s, a sort of populist Islamism which even talked about socialism, and was heavily influenced by the thinking of Franz Fanon. In turn the People’s Mujaheddin were influenced by Shariati. Other more moderate clerics were associated with Khomeini (some would form successive governments, subordinated to Khomeini himself and his council of experts; they were purged or resigned). Shariati cannot be held responsible for the Islamic Republic, but for sure the general currency of moderate, or even enlightened and secular-oriented, Islamism created a climate in which the profoundly reactionary variant could win leadership.
Khomeini’s Islamism was able to appeal to a number of social groups and classes – to the bazaar, which had historic links to the mosque; to the dispossessed poor; to sections of the intelligentsia; and to sections of the middle class to whom he offered ’order’. ’[T]he basis of the clergy’s opposition to the state was a reactionary resistance to the smallest social reforms. Even its struggle against [the Shah was based] only on intransigent opposition to any change that would diminish or undermine its own traditional prerogatives and power.’ Unlike Qutb and other Sunni ideologues, Khomeini proposed not merely an Islamic state but government by a hierarchy of Muslim clerics. In the end, the Islamic Republic was a hybrid of this proposed theocracy and a truncated parliament, but with the clergy firmly in control. It was never quite a totalitarian state, and opposition, especially from a working class whose economic militancy continued throughout the next two decades, and more recently among students, survived. But the organised left was crushed or driven into exile.
This left, famously, never knew what they were dealing with. From the outset, in the main, they supported Khomeini, accepting his ’anti-imperialism’ as good coin. Some, like the Tudeh, and what came to be known as the Fedayyin Majority, continued to support him as he suppressed the left, until he turned on them. The Mujaheddin took up arms against Khomeini eventually; but by then it was far too late – and, like the secular left, the Mujaheddin were divorced from the industrial working class. Indeed, the left as a whole had little implantation among industrial workers, and was unable to affect the struggle over the shoras, for example.
But the left’s error was not simply that they supported governments or had a tragic misestimation of what governments were about. They fatally misread the nature of the mass movement itself – failed to understand that a section of the mass movement was the regime’s brutal battering ram against them. The Iranian revolution, certainly from the viewpoint of the organised left, was lost not in text books or speeches, but on the street.
There was a distinctive Shi’a component to Khomeini-ite Islamism in
’[T]he Iranian revolution [was] a direct consequence of the position occupied by the religious leadership… since the 18th century… In addition to acting as tax collectors… the mujtahids and the mullahs… were entitled to a 10 % commission on the waqf properties administered by them. Some of these… constitute very substantial properties.’
The Iranian government has particularly supported Shi’a groups abroad, for example in
Over 20 years on, the situation in
iii.
In many ways the Taliban and other Afghan Islamists are different from elsewhere – the product of a more backward society, of Russian occupation, of US, Pakistani, and Saudi financial and military-training support. All these factors have created the most virulently reactionary Islamists of all – both among the Afghans themselves, and the non-Afghan forces who have used the country as a base, the so-called ’Afghan Arabs’’ like Osama bin Laden.
Eighteen years of war between 1978 and 1996 made
iv.
In Gillo Pontecorvo’s marvellous film Battle of Algiers, a Muslim woman dons Western clothes and make-up for the first time in order to go into the French quarter of the city and plant a bomb in a trendy cafe. Later we see the awful consequences of the explosion. The film dramatises a real event, which at the time, in 1956, seemed to be an epoch-marking terrorist atrocity, leaving three dead and dozens maimed. The Algerian war of independence was a bitterly-fought, bloody business in which perhaps a million people died before the French colonial authorities finally withdrew, in 1962. The war had lasted eight years; colonial rule well over a century.
The new government was formed by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the most important of the nationalist forces. Like others elsewhere, it moved quickly in a state-capitalist direction, first radically under Ben Bella, who was overthrown by Houari Boumedienne in 1965. He was succeeded by Chadli Benjedid, who held power until the coup of 1992. The Algerian revolution was far more thoroughgoing and radical than similar movements elsewhere in the Arab world, but it was more hesitant in its secularism, partly because the mosque played a role in the struggle against the French. The National Charter declared ’The Algerian people is a Muslim people… Islam is the state religion.’
The FLN formed a one-party state. It was a Muslim state, but far from an Islamic state in the modern Islamist sense. It nationalised religious schools and institutions. Although promises of women’s emancipation made in the nationalist struggle were not fulfilled, they were not flatly disavowed either, not for the elite anyway. Of the women who had planted those bombs in 1956, one became the director of
An Islamist movement began to emerge in the 60s and 70s, although relatively moderate and reformist; it was influenced by the Muslim Brothers. As popular discontent grew, the Benjedid government began to make concessions, promising liberalisation and democracy. In 1989, emulating the ex-Stalinists in
The Islamists had won their first core activists among young, educated, urban middle-class men, and, as elsewhere, built their support through welfare work in the communities, among the poor and the middle class, and through the mosques. They had taken over ’minor’ mosques in peripheral areas. People discontented with the FLN regime, though not necessarily positively committed to Islamist ideas, rallied to the FIS as the most effective opposition.
There were tensions in the FIS between Madani – a Francophone moderate – and Ali Belhadj, an Arab-Islamic militant, originally from
Unlike other regimes which have permitted political liberalisation, the Algerian government allowed the Islamists to compete in elections. The FIS’s programme was relatively moderate; in economics it was positively liberal. But the tensions under the surface would explode over the next few years.
In 1990, in municipal and regional elections, the FIS swept the board. With 65% of the electorate voting, they took 55% of municipal councils and two thirds of the regional assemblies. The FLN did badly – much to their own shock and horror. In all the major cities, the FIS won huge majorities of the vote.
Governmental elections came – to be fought in two rounds. The first were held in December 1991, the first multiparty parliamentary elections since independence. The FLN had gerrymandered as much as possible, but the results were a crushing defeat for the party which had driven out the French. The FLN came third, with just 16 out of 231 seats. The FIS won 188 seats, with almost half the total vote. Second was the Socialist Forces Front, which took 26 seats. Before the second round of elections due, which the FIS was sure to win, the military intervened. There was a coup at the beginning of 1992; the army declared a state of siege, cancelled all elections, banned the FIS and arrested its leaders. More than 10,000 Islamists were held in a concentration camp; their mosques and welfare services were closed. And the country descended rapidly into civil war.
The civil war was to leave as many as 70,000 dead. It was a war, primarily, between the Islamists and the army, with both sides committing terrible atrocities. But many civilians, leftists, secular radicals and intellectuals, trade unionists and others got caught in the crossfire and were identified by the Islamists as their enemies. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) was responsible for the worst atrocities; but the unofficial armed wing of the FIS itself, the Islamic Salvation Army, AIS, carried out similar attacks.
The Socialist Forces Front condemned both the repression and the Islamists. Many of its supporters fell victim to Islamist attack. At the
Not until the late 90s, did the killings subside. In further elections, though the FIS was banned, other Islamist parties, making a bid for a more moderate image, polled well.
As elsewhere, state repression in
iv.
It was only after the 1967 war that distinct Palestinian nationalist movements emerged. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was taken over by these nationalist movements, the biggest of which was Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, and embarked upon armed struggle against
From its emergence as a distinct force, Palestinian nationalism was perhaps more strongly secular than any other Arab nationalism outside
Until the intifada of late 1987, the secular nationalists had never considered the Islamists much of a problem or threat. There was an Islamist movement in
Today all that has changed. Islamists are a growing influence even in the
The biggest Islamist group is Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas emerged from the
With the second intifada in 2000, Hamas did not engage in fighting with the Israeli troops; they left that to the nationalist militias, principally of Fatah. Hamas’ contribution was to launch suicide attacks inside
The Palestinian leadership created this space for them. Arafat’s Authority has more members in the security forces than it has teachers; and a major aspect to the negotiated deal in 1993 was that Arafat take over policing Arab territories from
Hamas’ evolution, in sum, has been from a deeply conservative social movement into an aggressively chauvinist one which increasingly does nothing but destroy any possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That Israeli public opinion is today heavily behind Ariel Sharon, the most hawkish leader in its history, is largely a result of Hamas’ suicide attacks (and the inability of many Israelis to understand the sources of Palestinian frustration). Clearly, Hamas’ actions have quite wide support among Palestinians, who are poor, and desperate, and losing. But that does not change the reactionary character of these actions.
There is, of course, a strong element of straightforward, non-Islamist nationalism in Hamas’ growth. But they have redefined the national question in religious terms. If the PLO once wanted a secular state, Hamas wants an Islamic one, in which there is no place for Jews or even Christian Arabs. ’The Jews’ are intruding on Muslim, not Palestinian, or even Arab, land. Hamas have received financial support from the Saudi regime, which also sees the issue in these terms. It seems likely that images of Palestinian demonstrations holding up Hamas placards and flags exaggerate the real strength of Hamas. Yet they are, unquestionably, a growing force, beginning to eclipse Fatah.
vi. Others
There is no space here to go into detail about other countries where Islamists have been powerful. In
In
In
3. Why Islamism?
The nature of capitalist development in the region itself in part accounts for the emergence of Islamism. A huge educated or semi-educated middle class has been created which was promised the fruits of development but has not seen them. The working class is relatively small. A large class of pauperised peasants (not quite peasants, but small farmers certainly) remains. Population growth, and migration from the countryside, has produced overcrowded cities in which there are large numbers of marginalised poor. Pre-capitalist forms of social organisation have survived – the family; the mosque. And as economic crisis has deepened, as the welfare systems put in place by state-capitalist regimes such as Egypt’s have disintegrated, these old social structures have proved their worth to millions of people.
The nationalist regimes were experienced as bureaucratic, authoritarian, and repressive. The ’socialist’ vocabulary of many of them means that in some countries, at least, the population has experienced something of a mild form of Stalinism: socialism is identified with a discredited, failed past. There is now a huge crisis of bourgeois culture: the authoritarian, now mainly pro-Western states, which once, like
The left largely identified itself with the state-capitalist project. This is true both of the nationalist left, and the mainstream communist parties:
Culturally, the Islamists appeal to a sense of past glory; it is relevant that the Islamic, and Arab, pasts are imperial ones. The power of the West is viewed as a source of ’humiliation’. This is an ideology which appeals in particular to the young educated men who tend to form the activist base of the Islamist groups.
Three or four decades ago, on the whole, these men would have been more likely to have turned to the nationalist movements, with their secular agendas. But those older bourgeois nationalisms, whether in earlier forms, or in the shape of the ’Arab revolution’ of the 1950s and 60s, remained the preserve, to a large extent, of westernised, urban classes. There was a considerable rift between the cultures of these classes and the mass of the population. As the nationalist revolutions ran out of steam, and disillusionment set in, a section of the disappointed petty bourgeoisie began to look to more ’indigenous’ cultural and political references; to some extent the desire to link up with the dispossessed masses through Islam was an expression of a sort of masochistic guilt on the part of young Western-oriented men who felt detached from ’their own people’. And those cultural, religious reference points had remained intact, and indeed resilient, throughout the secular nationalist period. Conversely, the secularity of Nasserist and other nationalisms had more feeble roots in popular culture than it sometimes seemed.
One effect of the Arab revolution was what could be called the ’de-cosmopolitanisation’ of Arab society: the Jewish, Armenian, and Greek bourgeoisie in Egypt were the first targets of the state-capitalist drive in the 1950s; Alexandria, for instance, which had been a ’multicultural’ city in which up to a dozen languages were commonly spoken, was ’Arabised’ by the 1960s, diminishing the social weight of non-Islamic communities; large sections of the bourgeoisie had not been Muslim. The effect of this was a narrowing of political life, a loss of pluralist diversity. Even though there is a large Coptic Christian minority in
Elsewhere, nationalists from Christian backgrounds have been important, even central – yet their relationship to the Islamic heritage of the societies in which they live has been deeply problematic for them. Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party (factions of which rule in
It should not be thought that the growth of Islamism was or is automatic or inevitable. The Islamist movements are disunited and fragmented, and by their very nature are likely to remain so: one person’s ideal Islamic state is another’s infidel heresy. Energy consumed on issues of dress and suppressing impermissible entertainments has limited power to build mass support. The Islamists not only fail to have solutions to the social and economic problems of the population, they fail even to pretend to offer solutions other than the general and abstract one of a return to an imaginary, harmonious past. Probably most Muslims remain suspicious of or hostile to the Islamists. Outside
Alternatives do exist. There have been powerful moments of working class action in the history of the region.
Workers’ strikes were a feature of Egyptian life prior to the 1952 coup. Indeed, one of the regime’s first actions was to execute the leaders of militant strikes. Later, too, workers played a role: in 1977, it was a combination of rioting and a near general strike which forced Sadat to reinstate subsidies on basic foods. Striking workers and the urban poor united to chant ’O hero of the crossing, where is our breakfast?’
In
It remains true that the Middle East, or the Arab world at least, has never seen working class action on the scale, or of the type, that we have witnessed elsewhere, for instance in
4. Socialists and Islamism
The distinction sometimes made is between those Islamists which are ’anti-imperialist’ and those which accommodate to imperialism and local regimes, with the strong implication that the ’anti-imperialist’ type is preferable. This raises the question as to what is meant by ’anti-imperialism’, and whether it is a meaningful guide for a socialist response. In the case of Islamist groups, the more ’anti-imperialist’ they are, the worse – the more anti-democratic, the more violent towards secular, feminist and progressive opponents, the more chauvinistic towards foreigners, the more repressive they would be in power. ’Anti-imperialism’ without a positive, democratic and anti-capitalist programme is a reactionary, demagogic force.
The Islamists appeal to a range of social classes, though their membership and cadre tend to come from the urban, educated middle class. They are the product of modern social and political developments, and are therefore in an important sense modern movements. Though Islamism sometimes appeals to old social classes, and certainly gets support from them (from the bazaar, from some sections of the mosque hierarchy, from the Saudi royal family, from landlords and tribal chiefs in the case of Afghanistan), it is wrong to see it as simply the festering sore of pre-capitalist society. It is the product, on the whole at least, of capitalism.
Ideologically, although sometimes Islamists address themselves to ’modern’ political questions, their answers are backward looking – idealising the early Caliphate, glorifying the Islamic past, resenting economic development which can not be reversed. Many militant Islamists identify with the salifiyya tradition. That school of thought was founded by Muhammed Abduh, one of the early modernising Islamic revivalists. He advocated, for instance, rights for women. But its stress on the salafi – the early followers of the Prophet – has translated, within the modern Islamist movements, into a profoundly reactionary viewpoint.
Politics and ideology have their own weight. There is on the left a type of sociological reductionism which reads the Islamists as ’petty bourgeois’, and therefore simply a variant of standard petty bourgeois nationalism. This is quite false. There are other movements which seek through extreme violence to recapture some idealised past – the Khmer Rouge springs to mind. But the Islamists’ ’discourse’ is quite different from most nationalist movements, certainly from any which have had progressive, liberatory potential.
In so far as they are violent and reactionary, and especially in so far as they can mobilise a mass movement which, as in
Other Islamists are more moderate, and concerned with ’social reform’ rather than violent politics. The Muslim Brotherhood in
Even when moderate and reformist, the Islamist groups are best understood as conservative, right-wing movements, concerned with enforcing social conformity, especially on women and ’apostates’, and a threat to religious and other minorities. The reformist Islamists are less fiercely reactionary than their militant counterparts, but not in any sense progressive.
Military-bureaucratic repression of the Islamists – as in
They have to be defeated ’from below’. The problem for the left is that where the Islamists, reformist or militant, have built a solid base in communities, the left has not. Even – or, indeed, especially – in student and professional associations where secular nationalists thought themselves impregnable, they have been outflanked. There are energetic organisations across the region attempting to do grass-roots work – civil rights groups, women’s organisations, trade unions, of course, and so on. But many of these are wilfully unideological bodies, which simply can’t compete with the integrated worldview of the Islamists. The poor, the working class and the middle classes want political answers – the growth of Islamism shows this. So if the left is to compete it needs to be politically clear.
In
Trade-unionist and community activism alone cannot defeat the Islamists.
Politics, and socialist ideas firmly based on democratic and egalitarian principles, are not an optional extra in the building of a genuinely progressive movement; as long as no alternative framework for discussing politics develops – alternative to Islamism and old-fashioned nationalism – the Islamists are likely to keep the upper hand. But this is not to say that trade unionism and community activism are not important. One of the sources of the Islamists’ strength is their claim to offer an integrated moral system – their critique of the West is a moral one (for example, that Western women are degraded, Muslim women have more dignity, and so on). Trade unionism offers an alternative moral system – a concept of solidarity different to the Islamists’; an alternative, class-based sense of community. It also offers models of genuine, and working class, democracy. The organic process of organisational growth will take time and effort. But it is the essential task now for socialists; insurrectionary fantasies are a hindrance. One measure of the bankruptcy of the ’anti-imperialist’ conception is that in focusing on the ’revolutionary’ aspect of Islamism, and presumably imagining the region to be poised on some sort of revolutionary transformation, it ignores the real questions, for socialists, of how a powerful workers’ movement can be built.
The state and bourgeois liberal parties are no allies in the struggle to build that movement. But secular and liberal individuals, intellectuals and so on, certainly are, or can be. The strategic task for socialists in Muslim countries is to open the space for working class organisation to flourish and democratic issues come to the fore without losing political independence or subordinating workers’ struggle to a schema such as ’first bourgeois democracy, then the struggle for socialism’.
A central aspect of political rebirth in the Muslim world will be to question hoary notions of ’imperialism’ and ’Zionism’, challenging the idea that all social evils are the fault of Western ’neo-colonialism’, or identifying Israel as the oppressor of all Muslims, or all Arabs, rather than the Palestinians. One element in popular fury against
Creating a genuine, democratic anti-imperialism, and working-class movements, is an urgent task. Without such an alternative, the immediate future in the Muslim world looks bleak: either the continuation of the existing authoritarian, corrupt and repressive regimes (perhaps slightly modified with US prodding), or Islamic reaction, potentially in a violent and fascistic form, in many countries. The toppling of Hosni Mubarak, for instance, by an ’Islamic revolution’ led by al-Jihad would not be a blow against imperialism, but a blow against democracy and progress, however awful the regime it replaces. The fall of the Pakistani dictatorship at the hands of friends of the Taliban – giving them access to nuclear weapons – would be an appalling tragedy.
There is hope. The working class of
Our task is to build solidarity with those workers’ movements, and with the forces now preparing the way for them.