1
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between Islamism and Islam? The essential answer is that Islamism is about political order, not faith. Nonetheless, Islamism is not mere politics but religionized politics.1 In this book I look at Islamism as a powerful instance of the global phenomenon of religious fundamentalism.2
The notion of “religionized politics” is essential for grasping this book’s basic argument. In the case of Islamism, the religionization of politics means the promotion of a political order that is believed to emanate from the will of Allah and is not based on popular sovereignty. Islam itself does not do this. As a faith, cult, and ethical framework, it implies certain political values but does not presuppose a particular order of government. Islamism grows out of a specific interpretation of Islam, but it is not Islam: it is a political ideology that is distinct from the teaching of the religion of Islam.
It follows that Islamism is also not, as it is often described, a revival of Islam. It does not revive but rather constructs an understanding of Islam not consonant with its heritage. Islamism calls for a return of Islamic history and glory, but the state to which it seeks to “return” is, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, an invented tradition. The Islamist utopia, an imagined system of divine governance named hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule), has never existed in Islamic history.
Islamism and the Invention of Tradition
To understand why and how Islamism invents Islamic tradition, one should first familiarize oneself with the agenda of the Islamist movements. It represents much more than religious orthodoxy or a political intent to create havoc. The term “radical Islam,” which suggests this meaning, is therefore misleading. The same applies to the use of the term “moderate Islam” to identify those Islamists who forgo violence and pursue their goals peacefully. In fact, all Islamists have a common commitment to a remaking of the world. Within Islamism there is a distinction between institutional Islamists and jihadists, but the two differ only over the means to be employed, not over the goal itself. Even those Islamists identified as “radical” but belittled as “jihadi-takfiri pockets” share this political agenda. (The term “takfiri” refers to jihadist groups that engage in accusing other Muslims of kufr [unbelief] and branding them as infidels if they do not share Islamist views. These groups are not “pockets” but an integral part of the Islamist movement.
Islamism exists in a global age characterized by what Daniel Bell has called a return of the sacred.3 This recourse to religion takes place under the conditions of a dual crisis: one is normative and relates to secular modernity, and the other is structural and relates to failed development. But despite the superficial appearance of a religious revival, the return of the sacred is not a “religious renaissance.” Instead, religion assumes a political shape. In Islam the religionization of politics is carried out in the name of an imagined umma (community).4 The resulting political order is known as a shari’a state. Islamism can therefore be identified as an ideology that connects din (religion) with dawla (state) in a shari’a-based political order. This is a religionized political agenda, not a spiritual one. In addition, it is not local, restricted to countries of Islamic civilization, but also global, as Islamists propose a remaking of the world at large.
In their masterpiece Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectics of Enlightenment)5 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer present a case for comparison. Though they never argue (as some wrongly suggest) that fascism grew from liberal Enlightenment and do not identify the two with each other, they do see a context of crisis in which the two are related. I propose a similar relationship between Islamism and Islam. Islamism is a cultural-political response to a crisis of failed postcolonial development in Islamic societies under conditions of globalization. Yet even though Islamism is political, it remains religious. Unlike its totalitarian predecessors, communism and fascism, the new totalitarianism is not a secular but a religious ideology. How can we understand Islamism as different from Islam without denying the connection between them? How does one avoid confusing the two? In Europe, the dialectics of Enlightenment in a time of great crises led to communist and fascist rule. Just as these European ideologies contradicted the Enlightenment, Islamism contradicts the humanism of Islam. Continuity and break, tradition and innovation are involved. No prudent scholar would condemn the Enlightenment or all of Europe because of these totalitarian movements. I wish to bring the same insight to Islam and Islamism. This book represents an effort to apply the thinking of global historical sociology to the crisis of Islamic civilization from which Islamism emerges.
I thus take pains to dissociate Islam from Islamism without ignoring their commonalities. In both Islam and Islamism one encounters diversity within unity. Certain beliefs and principles are common to all Muslims, but they are expressed in multiple traditions.
A person is considered to be a Muslim if he or she adheres to the al-arkan al-khamsah, the five principles or pillars of Islam. These are to pronounce the shahadah (the unity of God and the acknowledgment of Mohammed as His messenger); to perform the salat (daily prayers); to fast during the holy month of Ramadan; to pay zakat (alms) to the poor; and finally, if financially possible, to travel to Mecca to fulfill the duty of hadj (pilgrimage) to become a hajji (male) or hajja (female). Does Islamism revive these pillars and the traditions related to them? The major creed of Islamism is din-wa-dawla (unity of state and religion) under a system of constitutionally mandated shari’a law. This is not faith but the imposition of a political system in the name of faith.
Nor is it based in any plausible reading of history. In this opening chapter I maintain that Islamism does not herald a revival but is rather an invention of tradition. I borrow this term from Eric Hobsbawm6 because it most accurately captures the relation of Islamism to the past. The Islamic shari’a state advocated by Islamists is not the caliphate—though some Islamist movements, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, use this notion—but a novelty whose roots are thoroughly modern. The shari’a on which this political order is to be based is likewise a modern invention.
Another invention of tradition is the Islamist definition of the umma as the supposed citizenry of the nizam Islami, or new Islamic order. The umma is the community of the faithful, based on shared observance of the five pillars of Islamic belief. The historian Josef van Ess7 mentions in his magnum opus on early Islamic history that umma in early Islam never had the meaning attributed to it by contemporary Islamism. After the death of the Prophet in the seventh century, van Ess writes, Muslims of Mecca and Medina refused to pray behind an Imam who was not a sheykh (leader) of their tribe. In his book Muhammed at Medina, the historian of early Islam W. M. Watt described the classical Islamic umma as a “super-tribe” uniting various tribes in a “federation of tribes” for purposes of prayer. This umma was not a political entity but the opposite: a means of transcending political boundaries for religious unity.
In contrast, the Islamist umma is explicitly political, what Benedict Anderson termed an “imagined community.” But it is an odd variety, sovereign but not inherently limited. In developing his idea of the imagined community, Anderson was attempting to fathom nationalism—to explain why, as he put it, “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”8 Islamism, however, has a relation to “nation-ness” that is at best ambiguous: not only is it skeptical of the nation-state as the fundamental political unit of the modern world, it rejects many of the concepts underlying modernity. As prerequisites for imagining their polity as a modern-style nation, Anderson writes, people must overcome three ideas: that a particular language has a unique relationship to reality; that the head of state mediates between the divine and the human; and that historical time is equivalent to cosmological time. Islamists fail on all three counts. They thus qualify as truly radical, not in the superficial sense of engaging in political violence but in the sense of opposing certain ideas at a very deep level. It is not clear that most Western scholars and policymakers understand Islamist radicalism in this sense.
The tensions between Islamists’ utopian ideals and basic modern notions about the political order inevitably lead to conflict. Islamism flourishes as an ideology of opposition, but when Islamists come to power they not only fail to deliver what has been promised, they also become totalitarian and suppress any dissent to their rule. Even in democratic-secular Turkey the ruling AKP, an Islamist party, undermines the freedom of the press and puts journalists in jail without trial. In November 2010 Turkey was criticized for its media restrictions by the European Union in its annual report on the country’s bid to join the EU.
The Basic Issues
It is a mistake for Muslims and Westerners to play down the ideology and practices of Islamism as the work of a few “militant” adherents of “radical Islam,” or to simply excommunicate these “radicals” as “un-Islamic.” There is no such thing as radical Islam: Muslims who practice their religion even in the most conservative possible manner are not radical any more than the Amish are radical. Instead, there is a totalitarian Islamism presented by a transnational movement that religionizes politics. But Islamists’ reference to Islam is not simply instrumental. They think of themselves as true believers and behave accordingly.
If those who belittle Islamists as a marginal minority of “radical Muslims” are mistaken, those who inflate the politics of Islamization into “the other modernity” are likewise mistaken. The growth of Islamism compels others to respond to it in a pragmatic manner. They believe they will be able to accommodate Islamism in dealing with it, and also that the mundane problems of governance will make the Islamists more tractable once they gain power. Islamism, in this view, either will burn out on its own, as extremist movements tend to do, or will eventually accommodate to practical realities. Both predictions are belied by facts on the ground. Post-Islamism is not yet in sight, and Islamism grows, taking full advantage of Islamic symbols for its own use.
An invented tradition cannot be well understood if it is not related to the tradition from which it has emerged. Little understanding of this relationship exists in the West. I shall identify six themes as basic to the relation of Islamism and Islamic tradition. These are:
• the interpretation of Islam as nizam Islami (state order);
• the perception of the Jews as the chief enemy conspiring against Islam, because they are believed to be pursuing a “Jewish world order” in conflict with the Islamist goal;
• democratization and the place of institutional Islamism in a democratic state;
• the evolution from classical jihad to terrorist jihadism;
• the reinvention of shari’a; and
• the question of purity and authenticity, which determines the Islamist view of secularization and desecularization.
These six themes, which help us understand the basic contrast between Islamism and Islam, are each given a chapter. Then, in Chapter 8, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to conceptualize the Islamist movement as the new totalitarianism. I do not impose her approach on my subject, but rather use the tools of analysis she developed.
Western readers may legitimately wonder why the list above does not include the issue of gender and Islamism. Women’s issues are certainly an important subject in the Muslim world today. But in three decades of reading Islamists’ literature, I have found that they have little to say on this topic: it does not seem to interest them much. Sayyid Qutb chastises Western civilization for its promiscuity. Based on his years in New York City, from 1948 to 1950, he saw the emancipation of women as symptomatic of a Western decline of values. Yusuf al-Qaradawi states clearly that men are the leaders of the Muslim umma and that the worst-case scenario would be for a woman to lead the umma. Islamists generally hold the view of traditional shari’a that men are superior to women and thus have an obligation to lead them. There are, of course, varying degrees of patriarchy within the world of Islam, the highest of which are in the Middle East. In Muslim West Africa and Southeast Asia, Muslim woman have more rights than in Arab countries. Female politicians have become heads of state in four non-Arab Muslim countries: Turkey before the AKP, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Nonetheless, the most powerful Muslim feminists are two Arab women: the Moroccan Fatma Mernissi and the Egyptian Nawal al-Sa’dawi. These women have courageously criticized both traditional Muslim and modern Islamist patriarchy and have fought for gender equality. But Islamists, while they have imposed the cruelest strictures on women, seem to have given little thought to the place of women in their envisioned umma.
There is a key distinction between the totalitarianisms analyzed by Arendt, fascism and communism, and contemporary Islamism. While the earlier phenomena were secular, Islamism is not. Therefore, while a political order is at the forefront of Islamist thinking, one should beware the pitfall of banning Islamists from the Islamic umma. We must not adopt the procedure of the takfiri Islamists themselves, who excommunicate from the Islamic community any Muslims who disagree with them.
The term “Islamism” reflects a common approach of adding the suffix “ism” to reflect the conversion of an original idea into an ideology. For instance, adding an “ism” to the name of Karl Marx reflects an effort to transform the thoughts of this European humanist into an ideology that is not always consonant with Marx’s original thought. Marxism was further developed by Leninism to totalitarian communism, which was never Marx’s intention. In a similar vein, the politicization of Islam is a process by which this religion is used for the articulation of political concerns that are not in line with Islamic faith. Political religion becomes a means for the pursuit of nonreligious ends. I keep repeating that Islamism is not Islam, yet add that Islamism is a political interpretation of this religion; in other words, it is based in Islam and does not lie outside of it. If these nuances are not properly understood, then one may make the mistake of conceiving Islamism merely as an instrumental abuse of Islam. In my three decades of research on Islamism, I have talked with a great number of Islamists throughout the world, and I know that they honestly perceive themselves as true believers. Their reference to Islam is not merely instrumental.
The politicization by which Islam is transformed into the political religion of Islamism is the core issue that emerges in a crisis-ridden social situation. Consider, for instance, its effect on Islam’s claim to universality. The politicization of this universalism results in a political ideology of activist internationalism resembling that of internationalist communism. Both ideologies seek a remaking of the world. No wonder that Islamists, while rejecting many Western ideas (and claiming to reject all of them), borrow from communism the idea of world revolution.
The War of Ideas
For a scholar, taking the distinction between Islamism and Islam seriously is a risky thing to do. It has become common practice to hurl the charge of “Orientalism” at those who fail to comply with established taboos. Orientalism is a term popularized by the late Edward Said, who accused the West of creating an imaginary cultural space called “the Orient” in order to establish hegemony over Asian civilizations. But the issue is not only intellectual: the risks may include more existential threats. Islamism is not a club for free debate. When the scholar is a Muslim accused by Islamists of kufr, he or she may be threatened with death.
The Islamist accusation of heresy or infidelity and the scholarly accusation of Orientalism both reflect a mindset aimed at limiting thought and speech. Some people who are involved in the so-called war of ideas9 perceive this war as a fight between democracy and Islamist jihadism. They seem unaware that they are echoing the Arabic term harb al-afkar, which also means “war of ideas” and was coined by the Islamists themselves. The source of this concept is Sayyid Qutb, who wrote in one of his major pamphlets that a war between iman (belief) and kufr (unbelief) takes the shape of a war of ideas. Kufr becomes a label for excluding anything that is seen not to be Islamic. In Qutb’s view, the fight against unbelief assumes the character of a cosmic war. He writes: “The battle between the believers and their enemies is in its substance a fight over the religious dogma and absolutely nothing else.… It is not a political or an economic conflict, but in substance a war of ideas: either true belief or infidelity is to prevail [imma iman imma kufr].”10 This fight defines the Islamist perspective of jihad in its new meaning of “an Islamic world revolution … for an Islamic world peace. It is not a peace that avoids violence at any price … for Islam is a permanent jihad … to achieve the just order based on Islamic tenets.”11
These statements inspire the war of ideas that Islamists now fight. They maintain that there is no such a thing as a distinction between Islam and Islamism, but only one essential Islam. Those who agree are “true believers,” while all those—including Muslims—who oppose this view stand against Islam. Muslims who do not buy into this argument are accused of shurk (heresy), or even kufr; critical non-Muslims are labeled Islamophobes. The reason for this dismissal is more than an expression of religious fanaticism. The distinction helps unravel Islamism and therefore is a fitting target in the war of ideas that Islamists wage.
There is an advantage to Islamists in presenting themselves as the voice of Islam. It helps to insulate them against criticism, as well as against persecution by Muslim rulers whom they identify as “enemies of Islam.”
If Islamists have a rational motive for denying the distinction between Islamism and Islam, what can we say of their Western allies? In the Islamic diaspora of Europe—and partly in the United States—it has become common to accept the Islamist deception. Sunni Islamists legitimate iham (deception), the willful misleading of “infidels,” as part of their war of ideas. In this they have found unwitting allies among those Europeans who view Islamism as a liberation theology and part of a progressive antiglobalization movement. (Some Islamists use these terms as well.) They are abetted by pragmatic American analysts who consider moderate Islamists suitable partners for U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. A highly disturbing example of this pragmatism is a policy article in Foreign Affairs in which the author advocates that the United States cultivate a relationship with the Muslim Brothers in Egypt.12 In addition to factual errors (for instance, misinterpretations of the ideology and politics of the movement), the arguments for cooperation with the Muslim Brothers, underpinned by a notion of “moderate Islam,” are based on ignorance of the movement itself. The Movement of the Muslim Brothers has long been one of the foremost pillars of political Islam in both its violent and nonviolent forms. The group’s ideology of a nizam Islami (Islamic system of government) reflects an utterly totalitarian political agenda. Of course, there is a liberal and civil Islam, but the notion of “democratic Islamism” is a contradiction in terms.
The Institutional Islamists and the Jihadists
The distinction between institutional and jihadist Islamists is often referred to in public debates as a distinction between “moderate” and “radical” Islamists, but as I have mentioned, this is a misleading distortion.13 Many “moderate” Islamists go to the ballot box and participate in politics within institutions, and some, but not all, forgo terror. Yet they do not abandon the Islamist agenda, which is a radical agenda for remaking the existing political order. What is “moderate” about this? It is more useful to speak of institutional Islamists and jihadists.
What makes jihadist Islamists “radical” in Western eyes is their commitment to violence in the form of irregular warfare. Thus the difference between “moderates” and “radicals” has to do only with means and ignores the two branches’ common worldview. Moreover, because Islamism is a transnational movement with global networks, Islamists cannot be described as a “crazed gang,” as Edward Said called them after 9/11. If they were really a “crazed gang,” then they could be chased by police and brought to justice. In fact, Islamists constitute a powerful movement and are truly engaged in a war, of both violence and ideas. Having said that, I add with dismay that the flawed politics and practices of the George W. Bush administration did great damage to efforts to present realistic arguments about jihadist Islamism. Thus the fact of a new irregular warfare is ignored. Many people think that anyone who acknowledges the existence of this war must be a neoconservative. It is deplorable that this notion has been used to dismiss the analysis of jihadism within Islamism. Under the Obama administration the ideological dimension of this war is dismissed altogether, with the result that jihadists are often viewed as individual criminals.
The institutional and jihadist branches of Islamism are two aspects of a single transnational movement. In many countries in the world of Islam this movement is poised to seize power, whether through the abuse of democracy or through terror redefined as legitimate Islamic jihad.
It is also nonsensical to view institutional Islamists as “reformers” and jihadists as “revolutionaries.”14 Though the distinction between jihadist and institutional Islamists is important to understand, violence is only peripheral to the overall phenomenon of Islamism. Two dominant Western obsessions are wrong: the association of Islamism with violence, and the focus on peaceful Islamists as “moderates” and therefore amenable to accommodation with the West.
Denial
It is now time to turn to those who will not find comfort in this book. Basically, there exist three groups of people who will oppose any effort to distinguish Islamism from Islam.
First are the Islamists themselves. They will argue that there exists only one immutable Islam, of which they claim to be the true representatives. This idea of a monolithic Islam is used to legitimize Islamist political activities. But such an Islam does not exist, either religiously or culturally, outside of the Islamist mindset.
In direct opposition to the Islamists, the second group consists of those who demonize Islam altogether and deny any meaningful diversity within it. Adherents of this view contend that there is no distinct Islamism but a general “Islamic threat.”
In response, some apologists reverse this argument: they accept the dismissal of a distinction between Islamism and Islam but allege that any threat posed by Islamists is a xenophobic myth. Between the extremes of the first and second groups, the third group tends to attract adherents of political correctness, who are simply against addressing the issues in clear and critical terms if doing so might invite a claim of disrespect to any religious or ethnic group. All of these groups have in common a tendency to overlook nuances and instead to look at Islam, either positively or negatively, as a monolithic entity.
The first group, the Islamists, understandably would not like to see themselves unveiled. Their invented tradition of just one valid Islam is a political construct, useful for discrediting any opposition to their views of the state order. To be sure, many—in fact most—Islamists honestly believe in the notion of one true Islam and place themselves among its true adherents. But these people, while honest, are also naïve. I know of Sunni Islamist leaders who, in a religious borrowing of the Shi’ite notion of taqiyya (dissimulation),15 embrace the mindset of iham. By presenting themselves as the spokesmen of “true Islam,” these leaders enable themselves to defame their critics with the equally invented and instrumental notion of Islamophobia.
Some Islamists cultivate a sense of victimization by imagining themselves as the “new Jews” and even speak of a “new Holocaust” against Muslims—a tragic irony when one considers how antisemitic most Islamists are. The accusation of Islamophobia serves as a weapon against all who do not embrace Islamist propaganda, including liberal Muslims. Most followers of Islamism are honest and do not play such games, but many of their leaders do. These leaders fight their war of ideas with all means available. It is worth noting that only some Islamists use the term al-Islamiyya (Islamism), which is established in modern Arabic. Most prefer to speak of sahwa Islamiyya (Islamic revival)16 as a way to blur the distinction between Islam and Islamism. This suggests that something old and traditional has returned, and that the political use of Islam is not a modern invention. I argue in this book that Islamism is not a revival of any tradition.
The second and third groups of deniers both consist of groups in the West who conflate Islam with Islamism. The third group does so largely out of political correctness, and this group ultimately ends up—willingly or otherwise—aiding the Islamists by depicting them in a flattering light. Islamism becomes, in the title of a book by Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear.17 The best example of this state of mind is the work of John Esposito, for whom the distinction between Islamism and Islam is totally absent. A close reading of Esposito’s books reveals that he is nearly always dealing with the ideology of Islamism, not the religion of Islam.18 His conclusion that Islam is compatible with democracy translates into approval of Islamism as a democratic movement. As I will show in Chapter 4, this view is utterly wrong. People of this mindset not only dismiss the distinction between Islam and Islamism but also misunderstand the differentiation within Islamism itself. Institutional Islamists and jihadists alike are committed to an Islamic order based on an invented shari’a. The fact that the jihadists employ violence does not make the institutional Islamists any less committed. The politically correct deniers close their eyes to this reality. Within this group are some people who not only prefer the distinction between “moderate Islam” and “radical Islam” but also refuse to hear any talk about an Islamist threat. Esposito makes his position clear in the title of his book The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? which accuses his critics of blurring those two things. Of course, since he speaks of an “Islamic,” not an “Islamist,” threat, much of the blurring is done by Esposito himself.
Another example is the French writer Gilles Kepel, who foresees the déclin d’islamisme (per the subtitle of his book, unfortunately published in 2000 and shortly belied by 9/11). The “decline of Islamism” is a wrong forecast. Still another popular French writer, Olivier Roy, keeps arguing that we are entering an age of “post-Islamism”—a term that evokes a deliberate parallel with postcommunism. This judgment is equally baseless. The notions of decline and post-Islamism reflect a misconception of the realities on the ground. Islamism is thriving. It results from a particular crisis and is underlain by normative and structural constraints. As long as this underpinning remains in place, Islamism will be a major factor throughout the Islamic world and also in its diaspora in the West, with no post-Islamism in sight.
While the first and third groups described above are apologetic about Islamism, the second not only rejects the distinction between Islamism and Islam but is generally hostile to everything (and everyone) Islamic. The depiction of Islam after 9/11 as “radical Islam” and as a threat to the Enlightenment has become a common Western narrative. If Islamists can be accused of coining the notion of Islamophobia to deter legitimate criticism as a religious defamation of Islam, this fact does not erase the existence of prejudice against Islam. Much popular discourse in Europe and America can be legitimately described as Islam-bashing.
One example of this way of thinking is the intelligent but facile book by Lee Harris, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the Enlightenment. Harris is one of those Westerners (like William McNeill)19 who speak of civilization in the singular and deny a civilizational history to everyone outside Europe and its colonial offshoots. He carries on the tradition of viewing non-Westerners as People without History.20
Harris speaks reverently of the Enlightenment but seems to be in the dark about the three hundred years of Islamic intellectual history, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, that contributed to it.21 During that era, a variety of Islamic rationalism thrived that I sometimes describe as an Islamic Enlightenment. Medieval Muslim rationalists from Farabi to Averroës advocated the primacy of reason, which is what the Enlightenment is all about.22 This tradition was passed over to Europe and, according to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, helped shape the European Renaissance.23 Yet Harris depicts Muslims as a people who have not only never achieved rationalism but are apparently incapable of it. He attributes to all Muslims a “radical Islam” characterized by fanaticism and intolerance. Not only did they commit the attacks of 9/11, but they are willfully bringing about “the suicide of reason.”
Though not an expert on Islam, Harris is sufficiently confident of his knowledge to discern that it is dominated by “a populist tradition of fanatical intolerance.”24 This tradition is sustained by the “simple fact that Muslim fanaticism works, and throughout the centuries it has worked with spectacular success.”25 Muslims are essentialized as “intolerant fanatics” (a tautology that is repeated throughout) whom no one can change. “Fanatical intolerance,” Harris tells us, “made Muslims … impervious to all outside efforts to change their fundamental way of life.” The conclusion seems clear: all Muslims are to be viewed as fundamentalists and a “threat to the Enlightenment.” One may conclude from these distortions and misconceptions that Harris is knowledgeable neither about the dialectics of Enlightenment and how it relates to fascism nor about the crisis of Islamic civilization that generates Islamism.
Another example of this mindset is the book Surrender, by Bruce Bawer.26 Surrender, which excoriates liberal American media and academic institutions for abetting (as the jacket copy describes it) “pressure and intimidation designed to crush the ability of non-Muslims to resist Islamic encroachments on Western freedom,” is an alert not about Islamism but about Islam in general. Bawer sees Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a death sentence against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses “as illuminating the eternal nature of Islam itself—and its attitudes toward freedom.” He not only makes no distinction between Islamism and Islam but states that there is no such thing as liberal Islam.27
The few knowledgeable scholars among this group who are generally hostile to Islam also deny the distinction between Islam and Islamism. One of them is Andrew Bostom, who has published two highly informative anthologies on jihad and on antisemitism.28 The flaw in Bostom’s work, unlike Harris’s, is not a lack of knowledge but rather an apparent inability to engage in clear-cut differentiations. This problem is demonstrated by Bostom’s confusion of traditional Islamic Judeophobia with modern Islamist antisemitism, and his confusion of classical jihad with contemporary jihadism. I shall not elaborate on these issues here because I discuss Islamist antisemitism and jihadism in later chapters.
The Political Order: The Islamic State and the Remaking of the World
The most important point is what all Islamists share: an ambition for a remaking of the world. Islamism is not about violence but above all about the order of the world. Therefore, the neo-Arabic term nizam (system) is central to Islamist ideology. The political order of Islamism is also a new world order. The established world order, based on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, is secular, while the envisioned one is sacral, based on the concept of a dawla Islamiyya, the Islamic shari’a-based state, and on hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule) to replace popular sovereignty. This order vehemently rejects the “Westphalian synthesis” and it is supposed to be enhanced, Islamists say, to an international Islamic system. There existed in the past a universal Islamic order, for which Marshall G. S. Hodgson coined the term “Islamicate.” That order united the world of Islam as a kind of a civilizational entity as well as in a political sense. Nonetheless, this should not be confused with the modern system. The notion of world order does not exist in the traditional Islamic doctrine. Its use by Islamists reflects an invention of Islamic tradition using ideas about world order that have been introduced through neo-Arabic terms not known to Islamic heritage.
The origins of political Islam can be traced back to the emergence of the Movement of the Muslim Brothers, founded in 1928 in Sunni-Arab Islam in Cairo. This fact runs counter to a common Western misconception. Islamism did not arise out of the 1979 Shi’ite Khomeinist revolution in Iran. Sunni Islamism is much older than Khomeinism. Therefore, in this book I focus on Sunni-Arab Islamism and explain its spillover to the rest of the Muslim world, while also attending to the Shi’ite impact in such important areas as the transfer of Shi’ite martyrdom in Sunni suicide bombing or the adoption of taqiyya in the new shape of iham.
In terms of the distinction between institutional Islamists and jihadists, the original Muslim Brothers without doubt belong in the jihadist category. They subscribed to terror and practiced it on all possible levels. The founder of the movement, Hasan al-Banna, made this view abundantly clear in his “Risalat al-Jihad,” where he writes: “There are some Muslims who are misguided by the view that fighting the enemy is the lesser jihad compared with the greater self-jihad … as jihad of the heart.… This is a clear distraction from the importance of physical fighting [qital] as substance of the jihad.… It ranks next to the great profession of allegiance to Islam [shahadah]. Jihad means to kill and to be killed on the path of Allah.… Oh, Brothers, Allah gratifies in this world and also at heaven the umma that masters the art of death, and knows how to die in dignity.… Be advised, death is inescapable, and it happens at once.”29
This passage does not reflect an “Islamic revival” but instead documents the shift from traditional jihad to jihadism. It gives religious legitimacy to suicidal terrorism that cultivates death on the path of Allah. In a way, al-Banna anticipated the adoption of martyrdom from Shi’ite Islam that took place after 1979. The glorification of death as political sacrifice is more reminiscent of Georges Sorel’s Réflections sur la violence, one of the sources of European fascism, than of the respectful Islamic ethics of life. In the past, when Muslims fought jihad as a regular war—not as terror—to disseminate Islam, they never glorified death as al-Banna did.
Today, the Muslim Brothers repress their terrorist past and claim to have become a moderate movement of institutional Islam that embraces democracy. Yet they do not dissociate themselves from the al-Banna tradition. This benign pose is taken at face value by some, even in Foreign Affairs.30 But the Muslim Brothers’ transformation, if genuine, points only to a difference in means. They have not abandoned their vision of a shari’a-based Islamic state as a political order, the most basic feature of Islamism.
In the West the notion of an “Islamic state” is often confused with the “restoration of the caliphate.” Only the Islamist movement hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) advocates such a restoration. The Muslim Brothers never talk about it. Their concern is the nizam Islami, by which they mean the modern shari’a-based Islamic state. Islamism invents the tradition of a shari’a state and gives it the new name nizam Islami.
Adherents of institutional Islamism agree to elections but shun the political philosophy of civic values or democratic pluralism. Their commitment to democracy is thus highly questionable. The most prominent example of institutional Islamism is the AKP, which has ruled Turkey since 2002.31 The leaders of AKP are intelligent politicians who know well that the Supreme Court would ban their party if they publicly pronounce their agenda, but they nonetheless practice a politics of “creeping Islamization.” One great step in this direction is the plan for a new constitution that allows the judiciary to be simultaneously weakened and reshaped. For the moment Turkey’s judiciary is still secular; this is, however, in flux, as will be shown in chapter 6. In the Arab Middle East, other Islamist movements are already involved in the business of government: Hamas32 is ruling Gaza and is ready to take over the West Bank. The war of 2008–9 weakened Hamas militarily but not politically, and it was foreseeable that the war could not eradicate it. The AKP-supported flotilla incident of May 2010 was a political triumph for Hamas. In Lebanon, Hezbollah33 is represented in the government and parliament. Most Shi’ite parties in Iraq34 after the U.S.-led liberation from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship follow Islamist precepts. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers are ready to take over; they are resurgent since the Arab Spring and continue to bill their Islamism as democracy. So where is Kepel’s “End of Islamism”?
Islamism’s “Jewish Conspiracy” against the Islamist World Order
A second feature of Islamism is a perception of competition over the world order. Sayyid Qutb’s book Our Battle against the Jews nurtures the Islamist obsession with a Jewish conspiracy against Islam. The Islamized antisemitism that grew from Qutb’s writings is different from the secular Judeophobia once embraced by pan-Arab nationalism. It is also different from traditional Islamic Judeophobia. A part of Islamist antisemitism is the adoption of the idea, taken from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that attributes to the Jews the aspiration to rule the world. Today this view is combined with anti-Americanism, as Islamists believe that the Jews rule the world from New York and Washington. Thus the Islamic world order envisioned by Islamism is seen as directly threatening, and threatened by, “world Jewry.”
The necessity of “countering the Jews” is thus central to the worldview of Islamism and not related to any specific conflict, not even the conflict with Israel. As we will see in Chapter 3, Islamists view the Jews as a “cosmic enemy.” Underlying this view is the belief in a deeply rooted rivalry between an Islamic and a Jewish world order. When the Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, there existed no state of Israel and obviously no related conflict. Nevertheless, the Muslim Brothers saw themselves as struggling with a “Jewish conspiracy” against besieged Islam. The view that Islamist Judeophobia results from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and will disappear once it is resolved, is thus utterly wrong. The history of the Muslim Brotherhood reveals that political Islam takes issue with the Jews regardless of the Middle East conflict. Nonetheless, in British Mandate Palestine there existed a conflation of Palestinean-nationalist and Islamist-universalist antisemitism.
In an Islamist reading of history, the alleged cosmic war between Islam and Judaism began with the creation of the Medina polity in 622. Qutb maintains that the Prophet established in Medina the very first “Islamic state” and that this was opposed by “the Jews.” Today, Islam is perceived to be under siege, and Islamists attribute this siege to the “conspiracy” growing out of a supposed war of nearly fourteen hundred years. Their primary concern is clearly not the Israelis and Palestinians. It is to annihilate what Qutb and his fellows view as an “evil.” This is the substance of their antisemitism. This is more than a phobia, and it is what makes Islamism a genocidal ideology. The German historians Mallmann and Cüppers disclosed in their book Nazi Palestine35 Islamist plans, designed with the German military, to implement this ideology in a Holocaust “planned for the Jews in Palestine.”
Not only my commitment to Muslim humanism prompts me to argue that this murderous ideology is alien to Islam. At issue is also the Islamist claim that the foremost goal of “world Jewry” is to create a world order. This falsehood makes Jews not only an enemy but an enemy with whom no peace is possible. If this idea represents an Islamic and not an Islamist antisemitism, how could one ever argue for peace between Jews and Muslims?
Modern antisemitism was introduced to the Middle East by Arab Christians under French influence beginning in 1905, but it later infected the secular Arab-Muslim nationalists. European antisemitism is an ideology that had no roots in the traditional culture and religion of Islam. Many Western writers and experts on this issue not only confuse traditional Judeophobia with modern antisemitism but also confuse pan-Arab nationalism (as embraced by such midcentury figures as Gamal Abdel Nasser) with Islamism. In so doing they fail to understand that two distinct antisemitisms are at work: one secular, the other religionized. The former is imported from Europe and remains at the surface, while the Islamized antisemitism claims authenticity and presents its prejudice as an appealing religious belief. These writers also ignore Hannah Arendt’s recommendation that we distinguish between traditional Judeophobia and modern antisemitism: the first is based on resentment, the latter is a genocidal ideology.
Democracy and Democratization
The third subject required for understanding the distinction between Islam and Islamism is the attitude of each toward democracy. The American missionary effort to democratize the world of Islam through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has put Islamism in a new, highly skeptical stance toward democracy. After toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime, the United States had no choice but to cooperate with Saddam’s most visible domestic enemies, the powerful Islamist opposition, in the name of promoting democracy. The distinction between institutional and jihadist Islamism thus became highly relevant to U.S. policy. The Obama administration has transformed this difference into a distinction between “moderate Muslims” and nameless “terrorists,” and has employed this approach to justify doing business with the former. These were placed in positions of authority. During the Bush years jihadists were declared enemies in a largely unsuccessful “war on terror.” The Obama administration has avoided any reference to Islamism and to jihadism to justify its indiscriminate conciliatory policy of engagement toward Muslims and distinguishing them from those “radicals.”
Despite their very different policies, both the Bush and Obama administrations have proceeded from unexamined assumptions. While institutional and jihadist Islamists differ in their preferred means of gaining power, they are in agreement about vision, worldview, and the issue of governance related to their ultimate goal of an Islamic shari’a state. How compatible is this envisioned order with democracy? I shall address that question fully in Chapters 2 and 4. Here, two points must suffice. The first relates to the distinction between Islam and Islamism, the second to the compatibility of Islam and democracy. There is no doubt that Islam, as a source of political ethics, in the course of religious reform, can exist in harmony with democracy. But Islamists constitute the foremost and best organized political opposition in the world of Islam. When an election takes place, as happened in Gaza and in Iraq, Islamists often win and take power. In Gaza, their victory in the 2006 elections did not prevent them from a violent, complete takeover in June 2007. Since then, all Hamas detractors have remained in jail without trial. Prospects are uncertain for the fairness of the next election—if indeed it takes place at all.
Institutional Islamists split democracy into two segments, much as they do with modernity itself. They adopt modern instruments and procedures, including electoral politics, while rejecting the values of cultural modernity. Islamists approve the ballot box as a mechanism of voting, thus reducing democracy to an instrumental procedure. But they do not espouse the more important aspect of democracy, democratic pluralism and power sharing. They reject the political philosophy and civic culture of democracy as Western and alien to Islam. Can democratization succeed on such a basis?
Beyond superficial procedures such as holding elections, there are deeper questions of Islamists’ adherence to the democratic process. This process requires that all involved parties not only forgo violence but consent to the core values and procedures of democracy. The distinction between institutional and jihadist Islamists makes sense only when the former really abandon all forms of violence and stick to the rules of a civil system. The distinction is blurred to the point of meaninglessness when so-called moderate Islamist movements engage in the ballot-box game while still maintaining violent militias. Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Supreme Iraqi Council (SIQ) and the Mahdi Movement in Iraq are all represented as political parties in their respective elected parliaments yet also maintain militias.36 They go to the ballot box, get senior figures elected to the parliament, but continue to practice violence through their militias, which they refuse to disband. How can the combination of the ballot box with the bullet be consonant with democracy?
The only Islamist party I know of that functions without a militia is Turkey’s AKP. But even the AKP has been accused—by the general prosecutor of Turkey in a July 2008 trial in the Turkish constitutional court—of pursuing a “creeping Islamization” of the country. The AKP was not fully acquitted of this accusation, although the judges, in their verdict, declined to ban the party in order to save the country from severe conflict. In 2010 the AKP responded by drafting a new constitution that not only changes the constitutional court but also restructures the entire judiciary to the AKP’s benefit.37 The politics of creeping Islamization of secular Turkey becomes more visible. The AKP’s Islamism38 is an exceptional case that, for a variety of reasons, cannot be generalized. But because it is the prime exhibit for those who argue that political participation will lead Islamist movements to adjust to democracy, it merits a brief discussion. Keep in mind that democracy is not merely about ballot boxes and voting booths, it is also, and more basically, about the core values of a civic political culture. There are many reasons to doubt the AKP’s commitment to democracy, among which are Turkey’s regular attacks on the freedom of the press and arrests of political opponents with no legal procedure. This is a pattern of institutional Islamism. What is happening is not an adjustment of an Islamist party to a secular republic but rather the reverse. Under the AKP we are seeing the desecularization and de-Westernization of a Kemalist republic that was once a model for a secular democracy in the world of Islam. Add to this the increasing closeness of AKP-led Turkey to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the picture clearly suggests a drift away from the West.39
Classical Jihad and Contemporary Jihadist Terrorism
No one can write about Islamism without touching on the subject of jihad. Islamism is not terrorism, and this book dissociates both Islam and Islamism from violence. Nonetheless, the jihadization of violence in a new warfare not only is much more than terror, it is an important feature of Islamism. The distinction between Islam and Islamism matters especially when we consider the question of the legitimization of violence. In Islam jihad means not only “self-exertion” but also, as the Qur’an prescribes, the implementation of qital: physical fighting against the unbelievers for the spread of Islam. When Islamic civilization was highly developed, between the seventh and seventeenth centuries, Muslims engaged in jihad wars for the expansion of the “Islamicate” as an international civilization. According to the foremost historian of Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Muslims of that time engaged in the “formation of an international political order.”40 This expansion was eventually tamed by the rising West and ended with the decline of Islamic civilization.
The related historical development is summarized in Chapter 2 as a process of a mapping of the entire globe into an international system determined by the “Westphalian synthesis.”41 Today Islamism is the foremost variety of a “revolt against the West,” in which the distinction between cultural modernity and Western hegemony is missing. What matters here are the Islamists’ responses to the decline of their civilization in the course of the evolution of the modern international system and expansion of international society.42 These responses are partly a continuation of the Islamic “Shari’a reasoning,”43 however, in an invention of tradition. In this context, cultural modernity and its reversals in a counterenlightenment44 also matter to Islamic civilization in its crisis resulting from a predicament with modernity.45 The contemporary efforts of some scholars with an Islamic background to discard these problems by dismissing the Westphalian international system as an expression of “Eurocentrism” can be qualified as a “defensive culture,” not as a contribution to a proper understanding of the issue.46 How did the Islamic worldview adjust to this change?
The most authoritative institution of Islamic learning in Sunni Islam is the millennium-old al-Azhar University in Cairo. The authoritative textbook Bayan li al-Nas (Declaration to humanity), a product of al-Azhar, recommends that followers abandon “armed jihad.”47 A fatwa issued by Sheykh al-Azhar ranks highest in the religious establishment of Sunni Islam. The recommendation against armed jihad is such a fatwa. In a personal meeting in September 1989, the late sheikh Jadu-ul Haq reconfirmed this fatwa to me in a strong condemnation of “armed jihad.” Leaders of political Islam, however, dismiss this fatwa and consider this recommendation a submission to the enemies of Islam.
The evolution of classical jihad into modern jihadism was launched by Hasan al-Banna. Sayyid Qutb’s concept of an “Islamic world revolution” was later added as “global jihad.” This revolution is meant to restore the siyadat al-Islam (dominance of Islam), not the caliphate. Al-Banna and Qutb laid the foundations not only for this legitimation of violence but also for transforming classical jihad, as a regular warfare conducted by the Islamic state, into terror waged by Islamist nonstate actors. This jihadism heralds much more than simple terrorism or insurgency. The new violence is no more than an instrument in the process of a remaking of the world according to the tenets of a reinvented shari’a. This context is largely absent from the mushrooming literature on jihad in the West, and also from U.S. policy, of both the Bush and the Obama administrations.
The Shari’atization of Islam
In this chapter and throughout this book I make frequent use of Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the invention of tradition. One of the key areas in which Islamism invents tradition is in its call for a “return” to shari’a law. Many scholars (including one of the academic reviewers of this book) will object that law has always been central to Islam, and thus Islamists’ demand for a state legal order based on shari’a cannot be an “invention of tradition.” Perhaps, they will argue, it may be described as an attempt to impose an old order that is at odds with modern realities, but surely I am wrong to call shari’a an invented tradition. I reply (and explain in detail in Chapter 6) that the Islamist understanding of shari’a is a fundamentally new one, which differs in crucial respects from the traditional or inherited shari’a. A shari’atized Islam is not traditional Islam but an invention of tradition.
Shari’a reflects a specific reasoning in Islam that has three different meanings. The first is scriptural: in the Qur’an (where the word appears but once, sure 45, verse 18), shari’a is a guide to moral conduct. The second meaning unfolded with the development of the Islamic legal tradition beginning in the eighth century. In this usage, shari’a was law for mu’amalat (roughly, civil law) and ibadat (cult rules), apart from the penal code of hudud. But as Joseph Schacht has argued in his authoritative Introduction to Islamic Law, in classical Islam there was always a clear line between shari’a and siyasa (politics).48 This should not be confused with the modern separation of church and state—the caliph was expected to uphold shari’a law—but shari’a was not identical to the political order. Shari’a law never took the form of a uniform legal code: it consisted largely of individual judgments by Islamic jurists, the faqihs (fuqaha’), who were different from the theologians (mutakalimun).
The third meaning of shari’a is a new one that unfolded in the course of the politicization of Islam to Islamism. In this context, shari’a becomes a claim for a state law, to be written into national constitutions. Shari’a is supposed to be written into national constitutions and to direct the legal code passed by legislatures. This is an entirely new phenomenon within Islam, and the claim that it restores some historical institution is precisely an invention of tradition: an effort to inculcate certain behavioral values and norms by asserting continuity with imagined past practices. But it is a necessary invention. The claim to derive its laws not from human deliberation but from the will of God is central to Islamist ideology. This is what the Islamist shari’atization of Islam is all about.
How Authentic Is the Islamist Worldview?
Between the early nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, a significant Westernization of the world of Islam took place under the name of modernization, but this model of development is now largely failed. These efforts nonetheless brought considerable modernization and secularization. Contemporary efforts at purification, which represent a backlash against this process, are undertaken in the name of authenticity. This is no retraditionalization, however, but another invention of tradition, as the claim to restore lost authenticity is imbued with modernity.
The West and Islam share a history not only of mutual conquest but of cultural borrowing. This positive legacy needs to be revived against those—Islamists and Westerners alike—obsessed with the rhetoric of a clash of civilizations. One is tempted to compare medieval Hellenization with modern Westernization. Medieval Islam’s encounter with Hellenism led to a flowering of Islamic civilization. But with Islamic supremacy came the conquest of Constantinople, which ended the Byzantine Empire. Modern European expansion turned the tables and ended Islam’s supremacy, but modern efforts at Westernization have been less successful than medieval Hellenization was. Islamism, which is clearly a reaction against the recent effects of Western globalization, confuses civilizational encounters and cultural borrowing with Western hegemony. The Islamist revolt against the West is partly a cultural uprising against Westernization. To the extent that it preserves and advances Islamic culture as a legitimate alternative to that of the West, this revolt would not be entirely a bad thing, if only it did not confuse cultural modernity with Western hegemony.
Why has the “revolt against the West” become a reflexive, antisemitic rejection of all things Western? Islamists like Anwar al-Jundi claim to see a Jewish conspiracy behind the taghrib, the “Western agenda of Westernization.” The fight for authenticity is thus identified with an agenda of purification that combines anti-Americanism with antisemitism. The Islamization of antisemitism is a central segment in the story of Islamism. The Islamist mindset rejects the Islamic tradition of cross-civilizational fertilization and cultural borrowing. This history is not well known to most postmodernists, who praise cultural authenticity without necessarily being familiar with its substance. They do not understand how sharply Islamism differs from the classical heritage of Islam, which always displayed an open-minded spirit vis-à-vis the non-Muslim cultural other.
Islamism as Totalitarianism
This book’s journey into the distinction between Islamism and Islam ends with an effort at defining Islamism as a new variety of totalitarianism. The political religion of Islamism does not, as some believe, provide a way forward for Islamic civilization in a time of crisis. Societies in crisis may go in many directions: they may democratize, or they may become susceptible to totalitarian ideologies. In Chapter 8 I argue that Islamism would move the world of Islam firmly in the latter direction.
Except for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the toppled Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Turkey under AKP rule, and the participation of Islamists in power in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine, Islamism is still part of the political opposition throughout the world of Islam—often the most significant part. In this book I focus on the Islamist movements seeking to establish a shari’a state. The study of their ideology does not support the view that Islamism is compatible with pluralist democracy and therefore I disagree with those commentators who would upgrade nonviolent Islamism to an engine of democratization. If we examine Islamism in light of Hannah Arendt’s theoretical framework, we can see that it is the most recent variety of totalitarianism, not a force for democracy. The seizure of power by Islamists in any Middle Eastern state is therefore a disastrous outcome for that state. The slogan of the Islamists is al-Islam huwa al-hall (Islam is the solution). I argue that Islam is not the solution, at least not a political solution for the existing crisis of development and of political rule of authoritarian regimes. Islamists rightly refer to an existing crisis (in development, in economy, in the legitimacy of power, and in cultural alienation), but the solution they present, when it takes concrete form as the shari’a state, points to totalitarian rule. If they were to seize power, whether through jihad or through the ballot box, they would not be in position to solve the problems of Islamic societies. They can do no better than deliver stability—as in Iran—in a totalitarian context. Even in Iran we find the regime resorting to escalating levels of repression in order to maintain its rule. Also in Iran, which conducts formal but meaningless elections, the new totalitarianism rules, not “Islamic democracy.”
True, the existing secular authoritarian regimes present an obstacle to development and to democratization. There is a need for an alternative, but Islamism is not the appropriate alternative. Replacing these regimes with a system based on religionized politics would amount to replacing one disease with another. Iraq is a case in point, and in no way a promising one. The second Bush administration once envisioned using Iraq as a model for democratization—not only throughout the Middle East but for the world of Islam at large. The lesson that experience should have taught them is this: do not bring Islamists to power in the name of democracy! The Bush “Middle East initiative,” which tried to do precisely that, was a disaster. The distinction between Islamism and Islam that I present here is thus pertinent to American foreign policy under Barack Obama. But despite frequent references to rival American administrations, I hope to go beyond these topicalities and to provide a lasting assessment of Islamism, a phenomenon that seems likely to endure as long as Islam’s predicament with modernity prevails.
Do the Media Help Us Think Usefully about Islamism?
I want to end this chapter with some comments about how the media portray this issue. I shall refer to a report about how a partly Muslim country, Bosnia, has been hijacked by Islamists. The fate of Islam in Bosnia is a case in point for the Western response to Islamism.
Bosnia was once among those places that practiced a beautiful form of Islam—like the civil Islam of Indonesia or the Afro-Islam of Senegal—but this European Islam was largely killed off in the 1992–95 war. The killers were not only Serbians engaged in ethnic cleansing. The European Islam of Bosnia also fell victim to Arab-Muslim Islamists who ostensibly came to rescue their brothers in faith against “crusaders.” Among these were jihadists known as Arab Afghans and Wahhabi Saudis who successfully replaced European Islam with their Salafist Wahhabism. Today the earlier open Islam survives in only a few places. Islamism and Wahhabism prevail in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Since 1995 Saudi Arabia has invested more than 500 million Euros to promote Wahhabi Islam in Bosnia. The greatest mosque in Sarajevo carries the name of the late Saudi king Fahd. Madrasa faith schools and kindergartens, all built after the war for indoctrination, are sprouting up throughout the country.
How do the Western media cover this process? Here is one example: an International Herald Tribune article in its weekend edition of December 27–28, 2008, carries the headline “Bosnia Experiencing an Islamic Revival.” In the eyes of the Herald Tribune, the invention of tradition in an Islamization agenda equals an “Islamic revival.” What does this revival look like? The article rightly gives this description: “Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are commonplace.” Why? The article describes the “Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity.” The reality is that it is the result of Islamization supported by Saudi Wahhabism. The Herald Tribune article trivializes this concern and quotes the Saudi-friendly Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceriç, who “has played down worries about Islamic fundamentalism.” The article goes a step further and cites “Muslim leaders and Western analysts” who dismiss concerns about an “Islamization of Bosnian culture and politics” as “an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.” The piece ends by quoting the defamatory slogan “Will You America Kill Muslims?”
This article—one of many I could have chosen—demonstrates how difficult it has become to speak plainly about Islamism and Islam in the current atmosphere of a “war of ideas.” The Islamists have succeeded in defaming their critics as “Islamophobic” and pushing forward their narrative that Islam is under siege and Muslims are victims. This touches on Christian guilt, with the result that some Western scholars and opinion leaders, out of a general sympathy for victims, join in the defamation. Thus if you worry about the eradication of European Islam in Bosnia in favor of Wahhabism and Islamism, you risk being called an ally of the Serbian genocide.
Yet it is worth taking this risk. Beyond its iham (willful deception), Islamism precludes any dialogue with those outside its own circle of belief. Western critics are defamed as “crusaders,” and Muslims who disagree are accused of committing kufr (unbelief). Undeniably, prejudice against Islam exists in the West and needs to be fought. Still, the notion of “Islamophobia” has become a weapon in the hands of Islamism and is no longer either useful in rational discourse or appropriate for fighting prejudice against Islam. I therefore propose to replace this charged notion with the term “Islam-bashing.” To criticize Islamism is not to defame Islam. After all, non-Islamist Muslims are in a better position to understand political Islam and are among its staunchest critics.49
This book is an effort to help readers think properly about Islamism so that they will be better equipped to deal with this new totalitarianism. My intent is to discourage any engagement of Islamism that is based on false assumptions, in particular the assumption that there is a distinction between “moderate Islamists” and “terrorists.” This mistaken idea must be replaced with a distinction between liberal-civil Islam and Islamism. Liberal and civil Islam is not “a small slice of Muslim societies,” as an article in Foreign Affairs has suggested. Western analysts should beware of the Islamist game of iham and be extremely cautious about taking Islamists’ words at face value. The West should engage in a dialogue with liberal Islam while emphasizing security in dealing with Islamists.
The Obama administration is to be congratulated for abandoning the rhetoric of the “war on terror,” which too often became derailed into a war on Islam. That was exactly what Islamists hoped for, to help foster a perception of “Islam under siege.” Yet while this administration appears to be more attentive to Muslim concerns, it seems to err in the opposite direction. The “sidelining of religious freedom”50 aimed at appeasing Islamism in the guise of “moderate Islam” is no less damaging than the “war on terror.” Thus it was reassuring to read in a New York Times op-ed piece by Patrick French the advice that President Obama should “recognize the real and immediate danger of the Islamist threat.” French, who clearly has experience in the world of Islam, writes: “Millenarian Islamists are now seeking to destroy Pakistan as a nation-state, and realize that they have won a strategic victory.… President Obama’s hope of weaning moderate elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan away from violence … is stymied by the fact that the Pakistani Taliban know they are winning. Making a real deal with them now is appeasement.”51 This statement could apply equally to all nation-states targeted by Islamism throughout the world of Islam.
The West’s stance toward the world of Islam can be promising only if policymakers can pursue an engagement that does not succumb to the Islamist terms of discourse. No effort at building bridges between Islam and the West can succeed without an awareness of the distinction between Islam and Islamism.
Scholars as well as policymakers have been intimidated by Islamists who cry Islamophobia. Scholars protect themselves by pretending uncertainty. Richard Martin and Abbas Barzegar, the editors of Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, write that their book does not “resolve the debate about Islamism” or take a stand in the controversy about “the usefulness of the term.” Nonetheless, they have recruited two lead essayists who discard the notion of Islamism: Donald Emmerson, who labels the distinction between Islamism and Islam “invidious,” and Daniel Varisco, who declares emphatically that “Islamism is a term we should abandon.” The book provides evidence for the misgiving expressed in a most critical book on Islamism by Paul Berman: “The Islamist movement … has succeeded in imposing its own categories of analysis over how everyone else tends to think.”52