2

Islamism and the Political Order

THE FIRST STEP IN THE ISLAMIST invention of Islamic tradition is to establish a new understanding of Islam as din-wa-dawla: religion united with a state order.1 When Islamists speak of al-hall al-Islami (Islamic solution), they mean not democracy but rather a remaking of the existing political order in pursuit of the Islamic shari’a state. It is this idea, not violence, that is the hallmark and conditio sine qua non of Islamism. It is no exaggeration to contend that Islamism puts the unity of religion and state2 almost on an equal footing with shahadah (allegiance to Islam) as a test of how truly Islamic one is. Thus if you want to know whether a Muslim is an Islamist, ask him, “Is Islam for you a faith, or is it an order of the state?” Any Muslim who replies that “Islam is a state order” can be safely considered an Islamist. In my reading of American and European studies on political Islam, I have found that most analysts do not understand this dimension. Instead they reduce Islamism to the notion of “radical Islam” and overlook its quest for an Islamic order.3 Not until the idea of the Islamic state is abandoned can one talk about “post-Islamism.”

Our analysis of six basic features of Islamist ideology thus begins with the most important feature, the political order.

Islamism Is a Political Ideology of the Islamic State

Among the best sources for the study of Islamism is what former Islamists write. The British-Pakistani activist Maajid Nawaz not only was in the leadership of the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir (UT) but also spent four years in Egyptian prison after the disclosure of his Islamist underground activities. Later Nawaz cofounded the Quilliam Foundation for the purpose of opposing Islamism. In his writings he contends that Islamism is about not theology but a political ideology. Islamists politicize Islam in “their desire for an Islamic state.”4

The establishment of a nizam Islami (Islamic system) is meant to be the first step in an incremental process. What makes Islamism a global issue is the second part of this vision: the extension of the Islamic state to create a world order. The proclaimed Islamist world revolution not only aims to remake the political order of the territorial state, it is also directed toward a remaking of the world. Like Christianity, Islam is a religion with a universalist mission: it explicitly seeks to extend its doctrine throughout the world. Islamism transforms Islamic universalism into a political internationalism that seeks to replace the existing secular order of sovereign nation-states with an Islamist one. In this way Islamism resembles the communist doctrine. In place of the Marxist proletariat, which is expected to carry world revolution, Islamist internationalism offers an invented umma. This Islamist umma, unlike the traditional Islamic umma, is not a community of faith but a political movement whose members support the imposition of strict shari’a law by the state.

The terms used to describe this agenda do not occur in either the Qur’an or established classical sources. While the agenda is allegedly based on the Islamic shari’a,5 closer scrutiny reveals that the envisioned remaking of state and world order is an invented tradition6 with no precedent in the traditional shari’a of classical Islam.

Just as the secular sovereign state is the nucleus of the Westphalian order, the shari’a state is supposed to be the cornerstone of the Islamic order. These two world orders are mutually incompatible. It is a fallacy to believe that the Islamist vision of a new world order can be accommodated within a pluralist order, since Islamism explicitly rejects both other conceptions of the state and even the very idea of pluralism. It follows that Islamism, with its goal of replacing the current conception of the nation-state with a wholly different conception, constitutes an explicit threat to the existing world order. This threat is not a myth. True, Islamists lack the power to accomplish this goal, but they can destabilize many nations and thus generate disorder.7

The New Revolt

To understand the Islamist revolt one needs a correct grasp of the Westphalian order. According to the historian Charles Tilly, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 changed the world and gave it a new shape. This treaty accomplished two things: it established the sovereign state as the fundamental unit of international relations, and it decoupled the religious establishments from the individual states. Sovereign states, as secular entities, were henceforth forbidden to go to war over religious differences. “Over the next three hundred years,” Tilly writes in his 1975 book The Formation of the National States in Western Europe, “the Europeans and their descendents managed to impose that state system on the entire world.” He goes on to say that “the recent wave of de-colonization has almost completed the mapping of the globe into that system.”8 In other words, almost the entire world is now the dominion of secular nation-states on the Westphalian model that originated in Europe. This is a political reality, not, as some Muslim scholars contend, a Eurocentric idea of international relations theory.

Islamists aim to overturn this world-historical reality.9 The Islamist revolt against the secular nation-state, which began as a war within Islam, thus becomes a geo-civil war.10 In a reversal of the “end of history”11 prematurely pronounced by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the cold war, Islamists promote the return of history as a history of civilizations. This recourse to “civilizations” is an Islamist theme that has nothing to do with the late Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations shows no familiarity with Islamist ideology. The clash of civilizations envisioned by Islamism, which predates Huntington’s book, is not about the West and the rest but about Islam against the rest of the world, primarily the West. One can find this framework in Sayyid Qutb’s writings, paraphrased most recently by his heir Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The late Oxford scholar Hedley Bull described the rejection of the secular order of nation-states as a “revolt against the West.” Unlike the earlier struggle against colonialism, the current revolt is not merely an upheaval against Western hegemony but also—and above all—“a revolt against Western values as such.” Bull believed that this process was best “exemplified in Islamic fundamentalism,”12 that is, the Islamist politicization of religion. The Islamist challenge to secularization and promotion of a return of the sacred, equally as a return of history, is a challenge to the basic foundations of the existing secular world order13 based on the Westphalian synthesis.

If the return of religion in political form were limited to political ethics, there would be nothing wrong with it. But Islamism envisions a divine order for the state and for the world at large. This basic feature of Islamism is a major phenomenon in contemporary history, whose understanding calls for tremendous research. This collective task has been taken up by two separate research teams. One of them, assembled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under the title the Fundamentalism Project, consisted of an interdisciplinary group of scholars from all over the world and from diverse religious communities, engaged in thinking about the role of religion in politics and society. Their work resulted in an exceptional five-volume, jointly authored series, also entitled The Fundamentalism Project.14 Unfortunately, despite the very strong scholarly credentials of the group and the high caliber of analysis provided by these volumes, their work has been largely ignored in the field of Islamic studies. The other research team, the Culture Matters Research Project (CMRP),15 which brings “culture” into the study of development and politics, will be described later in this book.

Neither project has had the impact on scholarly debate that it deserves, in part because of confusion over the nature of the phenomenon. Some scholars argue that the term “fundamentalism” cannot be applied to Islam or to any other non-Western religion. To refute this, one can cite Hasan al-Hanafi, one of the international stars of the moderate branch of political Islam, who gave the title al-usuliyya al-Islamiyya—Islamic fundamentalism—to his influential book on the Islamist challenge. Hanafi, who embodies and promotes this challenge, does not hesitate to apply the Arabic term usuliyya (fundamentalism) to the Islamist movement when he writes in Arabic. Yet he polemicizes against this notion when he writes in English.16

Not only students of Islam but also others in the West need to understand the unusual nature of Islamism as a political religion. Unlike such secular ideologies as fascism and communism, which have often been viewed as political religions, Islamism is based on a real religious faith and a genuine conception of the divine. Thus the religious pronouncements of Islamists, unlike those of, say, fascists, do not reflect a purely instrumental use of religion. My research for the Fundamentalism Project,17 which involved hundreds of informal interviews with Islamists, supports the conclusion that for them, religion is not instrumental. Islamists view themselves as true believers—and thus, in the most important sense, they are.

The study of political Islam is a study of conflict and tension.18 For this reason I have taken in the past years an approach I call “Islamology,” to distinguish it from standard Islamic studies. Islamology emulates the earlier model of Sovietology in dealing with Islamism as a source of global conflict. The underlying argument is that political, economic, and social concerns are articulated in terms of religious claims, thus heralding what I have termed the religionization of politics. The Islamists can legitimately be said to be engaged in a new cold war. Like the Soviets, they claim no more or less than a “remaking of the world.” This “Islamic World Revolution” (as Sayyid Qutb calls it) has many different labels: the French call it intégrisme, others fundamentalism. All refer to the basic issue in the ideology of Islamism: the politicization of Islam in the pursuit of the shari’a state. This ideology is embraced by a transnational movement composed of nonstate actors. If one ignores these facts and restricts the issue to “radical Islam” and “moderate Islam,” then “nonviolent Islamism” is not properly understood and one cannot grasp the general phenomenon of Islamism. It is more useful to distinguish between the institutional and jihadist Islamists. The former disavow the use of violence, play the game of democracy, and appear willing to work peacefully within existing institutions. The latter are explicitly committed to waging global jihad, which they understand as something akin to terrorism. But jihadism is more than simple terrorism. It is a new kind of warfare of irregular nonstate actors. Such jihadist movements as Hamas and Hezbollah also act as political parties and participate in elections even while they maintain their jihadist militias, which act parallel to their deputies in the elected parliament. This simultaneity creates great confusion unless one understands that these are simply two modes of operating in support of the same underlying ideology.

Islamism as the Pursuit of a Divine Political Order

To restate the issue: Islamism is not about violence but about political order. Violence is a marginal aspect even of the jihadist branch. Islamism speaks the language of religion, but its thinking revolves around questions of political rule and governance. The framework of a divine order is a basic feature of Islamism on all levels.

We should be skeptical, however, of the depiction of political Islam as a revival. Even though Islam has historically been a device for determining and asserting political legitimacy, Islamism is a novelty in this domain.

If Islamism is a political quest for a remaking of the world, it is wrong to look at it also as a religious awakening. The global phenomenon known as the “return of the sacred”—a notion coined by the sociologist Daniel Bell to contest Max Weber’s assumption of a general secularization—takes a largely political shape. The politicization of religion does not come from nowhere; its roots are to be sought in a crisis generated by the encounter with modernity.19

One may draw a precarious parallel between European and Islamist totalitarianisms in that each emerged from a particular crisis. In the case of Islamism, the crisis arose from a failure of development in relation to the much more powerful West, a failure of both modernism and liberalism to strike roots in the Islamic world, and, as a more immediate precipitating event, a failure of secular leaders’ legitimacy following the humiliating defeat by Israel in the 1967 war. In addition, Islamism shares with Nazism and communism the quality of being modern in the technological sense while vehemently rejecting the values and norms of cultural modernity. The historian Jeffrey Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” to denote the Nazis’ simultaneous embrace of modern technology and rejection of cultural modernity. I think the comparison is legitimate, but it should not be overstretched. Germany under Hitler was one of the most industrially advanced countries in the world, while the present world of Islam consists of countries described (by, for instance, the Culture Matters Research Project) as societies based on “developing cultures.”

The return of Islam in the shape of Islamism is not a return of faith but rather a return of the sacred with political claims. Islam never receded as a faith, but it no longer served as a vehicle of political legitimacy after the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and the subsequent ascent of the secular nation-state throughout the Muslim world. Coming after a succession of failed religious and secular experiments, political Islam offers the formula al-hall huwa al-Islam (Islam is the solution). Like all of its predecessors, political Islam represents not an embrace of modernity but rather a defense against its values. Nonetheless, Islamists are not traditionalists, since they adopt modern instruments of science and technology, even though they combine this approach with a decisive rejection of modernity’s values and rationalist worldview. This ambiguity is a major feature of all fundamentalisms.20

The notion of “the return of the sacred” rests on three contentions. Applied to Islam, these are:

First, the religion of Islam is for ordinary Muslims not a political formula for a state order but a cult and cultural system that determines their worldview and way of life. It has been made abundantly clear that the Islamist formula din-wa-dawla (unity of religion and state) is not a feature of Islam itself but a marker of the key boundary between Islam and Islamism. It is this invented tradition, created in response to globalizing modernity, that is generated by the “crisis of modern Islam” prevalent throughout Islamic civilization. Without the crisis of the Weimar Republic in Germany there would have been no national socialism, and without the crisis in the world of Islam there probably would have been no Islamism.

Second, as a variety of religious fundamentalism, Islamism is not simply another form of modernity, as some scholars who speak of “multiple modernities” contend. It is a totalitarian ideology, as is the movement it represents (a subject I will address in Chapter 8). The instrumental use of the forms of democratic civil society does not transform a totalitarian movement into a democratic one.

Third, the Islamization of democracy supposedly achieved in the context of shari’a only camouflages the agenda of a totalitarian order. The Islamist concept of divine order rejects not only popular sovereignty but any democratic pluralism that concedes a place to the political other. Islamists think in the binary code of true believers and unbelievers. Later in this book I will argue that Islamism is intrinsically incompatible with a liberal form of “open Islam.” It lacks all of the ethical foundations for an embrace of democratic pluralism.21

Despite the controversy over the term “religious fundamentalism” in the study of political Islam, in this book I continue to employ the concept of fundamentalism as an analytical tool. The accusation that the term expresses Islamophobia is simply misguided: the Fundamentalism Project was based on an indiscriminate inquiry into the emergence of this phenomenon in all religions.

The Fundamentalism Project took the methodological approach of viewing religion as a social reality, not primarily as a set of beliefs. This understanding of religion as a fait social derives from Émile Durkheim’s sociology of religion. The politicization of religion in this sense of social fact is what creates an ideology of religious fundamentalism. When defined in this way, and not simply used as a vague synonym for fervent, orthodox, or extremist belief, the term “fundamentalism” is not only useful but broadly applicable. One has to reiterate that the phenomenon is not restricted to Christianity but is found in all religions with a holy scripture, including Islam and Judaism. In all of these monotheisms there exists a clear distinction between religious orthodoxy and religious fundamentalism. The former is genuinely traditionalist, while the latter is a modern phenomenon that emerges in the context of exposure to a globalizing and universalizing modernity that consists of structures and instruments but is also based on cultural values. Islamists, like all fundamentalists, both contest modernity and are steeped in it: their claim of al-sahwa al-Islamiyya (Islamic awakening) is a dream of an Islamic modernity.

This “Islamic awakening” also relies on an invention of tradition. From the nineteenth century into the twentieth there existed in the Muslim world a cultural revivalism inspired by the pan-Islamic activist al-Afghani. The revivalist al-Afghani was by no means an Islamist. He had no ambition for a divinely based political order but simply sought the renewal of Islam in “response to imperialism” in the context of an anticolonial movement. Today, when Hasan al-Banna’s grandson Tariq Ramadan asserts a continuity between al-Afghani and his grandfather,22 he confuses the political religion of Islamism with Islamic revivalism. The Islamist al-Banna, on the other hand, was by no means a revivalist. Ramadan’s effort to link the two not only is wrong but also has highly misleading implications.

Islamism is not religious revivalism. Its quest for a political order based on religion, which draws on the formula of din wa dawla, has no parallel in authoritative Islamic scripture. The term “dawla” (state) appears in neither the Qur’an nor the hadith, the canonical accounts of what the Prophet said and did. The same applies to the Islamist terms “nizam al-Islami” (Islamic system) and “hukuma Islamiyya” (Islamic government). They are not among the common terms employed in the Islamic tradition and its established scripture. Their coinage by adherents of Islamism is hard to square with the idea of revival of an older tradition. Here lies a key boundary between the revivalist al-Afghani and the Islamist al-Banna.

The Islamist claim for an “Islamic state” is given substance by the notion of tatbiq al-shari’a (implementation of shari’a). But it relies on a radically new interpretation of shari’a. In Islam, shari’a has a variety of meanings.23 The term occurs only once in the text of the Qu’ran. In sure 45, verse 18, the Qu’ran prescribes shari’a in its literal meaning of a path leading to water, which implicitly means the right path. This “right path” means both correct ritual and moral conduct. In contrast, the Islamist shari’atization of Islam24 results in political claims. The Islamists invent a shari’a tradition, specifically designed for a totalizing concept of law, that cannot be found in the text of the Qur’an. This represents neither a religious renaissance nor a revival of classical shari’a.

The Ideology of Islamism in a Global Context

It would be a mistake to look at any large movement only in terms of globalization while forgetting that it has local manifestations that are embedded in the global but that maintain their own dynamics. Islamic tradition is in fact many local traditions with a common theme. Islamism is an expression of a defensive culture that then becomes a mobilizing force in the shape of an activist revolutionary internationalism. There is an interplay between the local currents of tradition and the global Islamist movement. In addition, religion has meaning in its own right and is not just a reflection of a social reality, even though embedded in it. It is inappropriate to discard the ideology of Islamism as “un-Islamic,” as is often done by those who would fully dissociate Islam from Islamism with the intention of contesting the use of the term “political Islam.” It is a fact that Islamism is an ideology of Islamic fundamentalism.

The political agenda of Islamism envisions the mobilization of 1.7 billion Muslim people who live as a majority in fifty-seven states and as a minority all over the world. Most Muslims are not Islamists. For the non-Islamist Muslims, belonging to the umma of Islam means nothing more than being part of a “community of believers.” In Chapter 1 I drew on the idea of an “imagined community” to conceptualize the Islamist perception of an umma. The worldview of Islamism politicizes this umma to promote the perception of a collective “we” against the rest of humanity. This identity politics shapes Islamism and contributes to conflicts on all levels, locally, regionally, and globally. The use of religion as identity marker by Islamism is associated with the contention that there is one monolithic Islam. This contention matters to the rest of the world. This Islamist identity politics serves polarization, not bridging.

One part of the Islamist invention of tradition is reflected in the effort to unite the entire umma into one polity that will lead humanity in an Islamic world order. The source of this vision is the work of Sayyid Qutb. Qutb, who was executed in 1966, did not live to see his vision become a mobilizing ideology. Now there is a dispute within Islamism over the means to be employed in the pursuit of this vision. Still, when the religious establishment and Salafists criticize the jihadists, they restrict their objections to the practices and exclude the worldview. As John Kelsay tells us in a recent book, “In broad outlines, the militant vision articulated by al-Zawahiri is also the vision of his critics.… They certainly argue that … the means … are wrong … but they do not dissent from the judgment that … the cure … involves the establishment of Islamic governance.… The problem of militancy is not simply a matter of tactics. The problem is the very notion of Islamic governance.”25

As in Islam, so in Islamism there exist commonalities and disagreements. It is therefore safe to speak of a “unity in diversity” when studying the politicization of Islam and the ideology of Islamism. The basic commonality is the notion of Islamic governance, and the disagreement, which is quite recent, relates to the use of violence. The founder of Islamism, Hasan al-Banna, never questioned the legitimacy of any resort to violence. He transformed classical jihad into jihadism,26 but it is Sayyid Qutb, the rector spiritus of political Islam, who first interpreted jihad as an “Islamic world revolution” in the pursuit of an Islamic world order. The “Islamic state,” which is only one step in this direction, is not restricted to the existing territories of the dar al-Islam but is ultimately applicable to the entire world in a challenge to secularism.27

In Islamist thinking, Europe is considered dar al-shahadah, an Islamic territoriality. Shahadah, the pronouncement of submission to Allah and allegiance to his Prophet Mohammed as a confession to Islam, is in Islamic faith not a political issue; it is the first of the five pillars of Islam. The revision of dar al-Islam to dar al-shahadah is a coinage by Tariq Ramadan. The term indicates an Islamic expansionism, and it envisions a mapping of Europe into the Islamist project.28 By applying the phrase dar al-shahadah to Europe,29 Ramadan proposes to establish an Islamic “counterculture” for the twenty-three million Muslim immigrants. This is not a project for the integration of Muslim immigrants to European citizenship, but rather an ethnicization of the Islamic diaspora.

The Islamist ideology essentializes Islam and is in conflict with the ideas of global pluralism and democratic peace. Its vision for the world includes the following characteristics:

•  Politically: The concept of din wa dawla calls for interpreting Islam as a political religion that prescribes a divinely inspired order for the state.

•  Legally: The concept of shari’a, as reinvented by Islamism, projects a new meaning into Islamic law. The Islamist shari’a goes beyond both the Qur’anic meaning of morality and the traditional concept of Islamic law (divorce, inheritance, and so on). The shari’atization of Islamic politics (to be described in Chapter 6) happens in the pursuit of a divine state order. The new shari’a, unlike the decentralized classical one, is a totalizing state law.

•  Culturally: The assumption that all Muslims constitute one monolithic umma reflects what Benedict Anderson has referred to (in the context of nationalism) as an “imagined community” that is supposed to share one culture. This invented culture underpins the ideology of Islamic internationalism.

•  Militarily: The traditional Islamic concept of jihad, like the shari’a, is reinterpreted—again in an invention of tradition—beyond its original Qur’anic and traditional meaning. The new jihad is rather a jihadiyya (jihadism) that legitimates a war without rules. Violence in this ideology is not mere terror but rather a new kind of irregular warfare.

Again, the return of religion to the public sphere in a shape of religionized politics is not restricted to Islam but is a global phenomenon. Nonetheless, the ideology of political Islam matters to world politics more than does any other religious fundamentalism, because Islamism has been more aggressive than any other fundamentalism in translating traditional universalism into a new internationalism articulated on religious grounds. Islamists cannot be reduced to a “crazed gang,” as the late Edward Said called them after 9/11. Islamism is not a rebellion against flawed Western policies in Palestine but a quest for a new world order. The phenomenon lies much deeper and is embedded in a structural and normative crisis in many Arab and other Islamic societies. An analysis of the Islamist ideology and its historical background helps us understand how the normative functions of religion as doctrine and meaning combine with its social aspects (religion as a fait social) to create a particular response to the crisis. Reductionist approaches do not help us understand this ideology. It is simply incorrect to argue that the Islamist is a “homo politicus” and thus a secular activist; or that Islamism is un-Islamic and uses religion only as a pretext for gaining power—as the British minister of the interior, Jacqui Smith, did in 2008 when, in a spasm of political correctness, she maintained that jihadists are “anti-Islamic.” Nor can one derive Islamism merely from its social context. While it is surely important to pay attention to the social environment, this is not the sole cause of religionized politics. An analysis of political Islam based exclusively on sociological variables is misleading. Culture and religion and the ideologies and worldviews to which they give rise cannot be reduced to social and economic variables. It is no essentialization to argue that culture and religion matter on their own terms. The religious and ideological background of Islamism must lie therefore at the core of this analysis. It is to be repeated that “culture matters.” When political and social grievances are expressed in religious and cultural terms, then these expressions matter too, on their own terms.

From its founding in 1928 to the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966 on charges of plotting to assassinate Egyptian officials, political Islam unfolded more or less as a fringe movement. (There is an exception, Islamism in Palestine, which I discuss in Chapter 3.) The watershed moment came in 1967, with the defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War against Israel.30 That defeat created a crisis of legitimacy in the Arab world and marked the beginning of the decline of secularism and the concomitant rise of the religionized politics of Islamism. Secular nationalists like Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’thist leaders of Syria and Iraq found themselves in retreat. They lost the admiration of their own people and came to be viewed simply as tyrants.

Islamism first moved to the fore as a mobilizing power in its initial base in Egypt.31 From there its ideas disseminated throughout the Sunni world, offering the al-hall al-Islami (Islamic solution) as the alternative to the anzimat al-hazima (regimes of defeat, as the secular nationalists were branded). This “solution” is meant not only for the Arab world but for the entire world of Islam, and ultimately for the world at large. The new voice of antisecularist Islamism32 was again an Egyptian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual heir of Qutb. Today, in his role as a global television mufti, he enjoys greater impact than he ever did. Westerners who classify Qaradawi as a “moderate” are deceiving themselves. His trilogy Hatmiyyat al-hall al-Islami, published in Cairo and Beirut, can be safely compared—in terms of impact—with Qutb’s Signposts Along the Road.

Some Western commentators (Olivier Roy comes to mind) argue that the rejection of Western values by Islamists has nothing to do with Islam but is merely a reflection of political and social problems related to globalization. This reflects a misunderstanding of the secular regimes’ decline: it was an integral part of a larger “revolt against the West”33 and against Western values. In the ideology of Islamism, toppling local secular regimes is only the first step in a quest for a new world order. The larger goal for Islamic fundamentalists is challenging the secular world order, and thus the West itself. The pronouncements and deeds of al-Qaeda reveal a cosmic worldview. Among Bin Laden’s basic religious sources are Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It was not the West that set “democracy” against “jihadism,” as some contend. Political Islam launched its harb al-afkar (war of ideas) on its own34—a global war, as Qutb puts it, of iman (belief) against kufr (unbelief). This war of ideas is a global jihad not dependent on terrorist tactics.

Qutb makes this clear in Ma’alim fi al-Tariq. He first calls for a divine order of hakimiyyat Allah throughout the dar al-Islam. This divine order will then create an Islamic revolution designed to lead to world peace under conditions of siyadat al-Islam (supremacy of Islam) over the entire globe. It is a religious farida (obligation) to pursue jihad as a “world revolution of Islam” in order to overcome the jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance, identical with kufr, or unbelief) into which the world has fallen since the decline of Islam and the rise of the West. This supremacist ideology underlies not only Islamist internationalism but also its views on political order.35

Western readers may wonder how seriously such ideas are taken in the Islamic world. This is not even a question for Muslims, because they know how powerful Qutbism is. Roxanne Euben, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, states: “Qutb’s prominence seems an accepted fact.… [His] influence is undisputed.”36 This influence is not restricted to jihadist groups like al-Qaeda but extends also to institutional Islamist organizations such as Turkey’s AKP.37 I have traveled throughout the world of Islam, far beyond the Middle East (for example, West Africa, Central and Southeast Asia), and live in Europe. In all of these places, one need only walk into any Islamic bookstore to find Qutb’s books on display—often one or two dozen titles. If one can believe that the owners of these stores stock what they are most likely to sell, Qutb is far from being marginal.

In short, the binary worldview of Islamist fundamentalist ideology (Muslims versus infidels) entails not only a struggle against perceived Western oppression but above all a remaking of the world in pursuit of a divinely ordained political order. This binary is characterized by an obsession with the West, which is clearly apparent in Islamist writing. We encounter this binary in the works of Qutb and al-Banna as well as Qaradawi. It is because it explicitly advocates a war of ideas between secular and religious concepts of order that the binary of political Islam is a concern for international security.38 Given that this variety of religious fundamentalism claims universality for its political ideas, it puts the people of Islamic civilization in conflict with the rest of humanity. Non-Islamist Muslims are therefore challenged to join efforts at preventing the clash of civilizations39 (as a famous book title has it) through bridging of the intercivilizational divides in a cross-cultural search for shared values.

The Westphalian Order versus the Internationalism of Political Islam

As a professor emeritus of international relations who spent his academic life teaching about the existing international system based on the Westphalian synthesis, I profess my preference for this secular system of sovereign nation-states but allow myself to question whether it is Eurocentric, even an expression of Orientalism, to do so. Why should the Westphalian synthesis be preferable to the world order envisioned by Islamism?

Why should one defend the secular world order against religionization? To answer these questions it seems prudent first to put the issue in a historical context. The competition between religious and secular worldviews is a contemporary issue, but its undercurrents are deeply rooted in history.

Islamic civilization dominated major parts of the world as a result of the successful jihad conquests from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries,40 before its dominance was ended by the rise of the West. The West’s “military revolution”41 brought to a halt the Islamic project of expansion and replaced it with Europe’s own. Modern science and technology, developed largely in the West, have meant that the current world order is shaped by Western standards. Most parts of Asia and Africa were colonized by European powers and then reemerged after World War II as sovereign states. But this sovereignty was often merely nominal. Former colonies ostensibly evolved into nation-states and were legally mapped into the modern international system. They then underwent “development,” in which they were expected to modernize and nurture national (ideally democratic) institutions. This did not always work as planned. With a few successful exceptions such as India, the result has been a paired crisis: on the one hand a crisis of development and on the other a crisis of legitimacy for the secular nation-state.

Islamic civilization did not escape this process. In the course of its decolonization, the world of Islam made an effort to accommodate to the new international environment by joining the international system of nation-states. But the Western model of modernization did not work. The dar al-Islam, today no more than an imagined umma of 1.7 billion peoples, represents a historical memory of the old Islamic Empire now subdivided into nation-states. The crisis that evolved from this failed development has led to the return of the sacred in a political form. In presenting their agenda as the hall (solution) to these paired crises, Islamists construct collective memories about Islamic glory, claim that the return of history will be a return to that glory, and read modern history into the Islamic past with the argument that the new world order they envision will represent a restoration of the past. They talk about nizam (system), not, as some believe, about the caliphate. Now, why is it wrong for Islamists to want to reverse a historical development that has been detrimental to their civilization?

The anticolonial movements of Asia and Africa rightly defied Europe and European rule, but they also drew constructively on European political ideas of liberty and human dignity, based on what Habermas has called “cultural modernity,”42 to justify their anticolonialism. The states that emerged from these former colonies have by and large accepted—if fitfully and often unsuccessfully—the fundamental tenets of the Westphalian order: the sovereignty of nations and the desirability of popular rule and market economies. In contrast, the Islamist revolt against the West rejects not only Western dominance but Western values. The Islamists deny that cultural modernity has any claim to universality that can be separated from Western hegemony—that it allows (at least in principle) for a global civil society that places all civilizations on an equal footing.43

The secular and rational principles of cultural modernity are potentially acceptable to all of humanity. Western hegemony, which ought to be criticized, should not be confused with the principles underlying the current world order. By contrast, the traditional universalism that political Islam translates into internationalism is not even shared by all Muslims. This internationalism simply aims to replace one type of hegemony with another. For non-Muslims, who are looked upon as intrinsically inferior dhimmi,44 Islamic supremacy is by no means acceptable. The difference between modernity and hegemony can be demonstrated by a simple example: one can rationally criticize the use of human rights claims (even if they are to some extent justified) in hegemonic U.S. foreign policy without simultaneously rejecting the value of human rights as such. The abuse of rights by a particular U.S. policy is one thing, and the universality of rights quite another. But one cannot find a similar distinction between values and practices in Islamist ideology. The principle of siyadat al-Islam is unequivocal about the dominance of Islam. For Islamists this is the fundamental value.

Though many have disagreed with Samuel Huntington and his book Clash of Civilizations, he was right when he stated that “modern democracy … is democracy of the nation-state and its emergence is associated with the development of the nation-state.”45 When we promote this pattern of the democratic state, it is an endorsement of the universality of democracy and not—as some have suggested—an expression of “Orientalism.” And it is this world order—an order that goes back to the Peace of Westphalia—that the Islamists reject. Earlier I quoted a 1975 book by the social historian Charles Tilly on the importance of this mapping of the world into the Westphalian system. In a book published two decades later, Tilly wrote, “Something has changed in the extension of the European state system to the rest of the earth.”46

In the course of expansion, Europe created an international state system that has been able to dominate the entire globe—the system in which we live today. Yet the world outside Europe does not resemble Europe. It is extremely relevant to understanding the Islamist challenge to the democratic secular nation-state to grasp that this modern state pattern is not structurally and institutionally well established in most non-Western countries. Most nation-states in the world of Islam are nominal states with quasi-sovereignty, and most are only superficially democratic at best. It is a problem that the current world order rests upon a pattern of the nation-state that lacks substance outside the West. The call for an Islamic state is aimed at toppling an order of nominal nation-states that rest on weak foundations.47

The Arab state system was troubled from the beginning.48 The Arab nation-states designed along the Western model were first challenged by pan-Arabism, the ideology of the secular Arab nationalists that led to the creation of short-lived entities like the United Arab Republic, a three-year merger of Egypt and Syria. These states have been plagued by two problems: firstly, the conflict between existing territorial states and the nationalist vision of a pan-Arab state, and second, the tensions related to universal Islamism as well as pan-Islam (two phenomena that are often wrongly equated).49 Many of these nominal states lack most of the basic requirements for true nationhood: polity, civil society, citizenship, and a national identity. It is this weakness that makes these states susceptible to the Islamist drive to remake the world.50

To return to the question asked at the outset—why should we endorse the Western idea of universality against the internationalism of political Islam?—let us revisit the legitimacy of the Western-style nation-state. Yusuf al-Qaradawi51 addresses its shortcomings in al-hall al-Islami (The Islamic solution). In line with the general ideology of Islamism, Qaradawi dismisses everything coming from the West, including democracy, as hulul mustawrada (imported solutions) and argues for purity. His phrase “Islamist solutions versus imported solutions” serves as a convenient formula for blaming the West for the ills of the Islamic world. (Edward Said does the same thing with his accusation of “Orientalism.”) Qaradawi argues that a wholesale de-Westernization would purify Islam as a precondition for the Islamization of the entire world. (It is surprising to find this TV mufti, who has a popular program for incitement on Al Jazeera, listed under “Liberal Islam” and among “moderate Muslims” in a reader on contemporary Islam.)52

Qaradawi’s example serves as a reminder that arguments about the suitability of Western models are not carried out in a vacuum: one must also consider, should “Western solutions” be dispensed with, what would take their place. In a later chapter I will discuss the actual performance of Islamist groups in the few instances when they have taken power. Still, the ideological statements by themselves should make it clear that a democratic peace would be more promising for the future of Islamic civilization than any Islamist internationalism aimed at changing the international nation-state system. The Islamist agenda is intrinsically antithetical to pluralism, which is a better option for Muslims, as well as for the rest of humanity, than any form of religious absolutism. The internationalism promoted by Islamism creates a new cold war against the secular nation-state, with all the attendant tensions and conflicts. A preference for the Westphalian order—despite its shortcomings—is thus not an expression of Eurocentrism but is justified on universal humanist grounds.

The War of Collective Memories

John Kelsay is one of the few Western scholars who is deeply familiar with the tensions between Islamic and Western values. Kelsay describes the Islamists’ “war of ideas” as a war of collective memories translated into world politics. Collective memories, he points out, are a source of contemporary Islamic nostalgia: they recall past Islamic glory, nurture outrage over the present order of the world, and underlie the Islamist claim of a “return of history.” While specific memories are “constructed,” history itself is not. Islamism has been able to revive memories of real history and use them to serve the illusion of establishing a new world order based on religion.

The collective memories constructed by Islamism concern Islam’s imperial history, which begins long before the rise of the modern West. The expansion of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages involved a kind of globalization, in the sense of an imposing of one’s own political order, the “Islamicate,” on the rest of the world. Islamic fundamentalism revives these memories of Islamic jihad wars.53 This universal Islamicate came into being when Arab Muslims first engaged in wars of jihad54 from the seventh century onward, with the proclaimed goal of expanding Islamic civilization everywhere. The result was that Islam became an “international civilization” with an “international order.”55 Though successful in medieval times, Arabs never fully succeeded in mapping the entire world into the globalization of the Islamicate. The Islamic caliphate did not become the dominant order of the world. After the Arabs went into decline, the ascending Turks continued the Islamic expansion until the seventeenth century, when the Industrial Revolution gave the West not only political and economic power but also “industrialized warfare.”56 This is the history now being revived by Islamism. Islamists blame not only Christianity and the West but also a “Jewish conspiracy” for the decline of the Islamic jihad. Sayyid Qutb called for a world revolution to create peace and prosperity under Islamic rule, a venture that is to include ma’rakatuna ma’a al-yahud57 (our fight against the Jews). Qutb believed that the Jews, too, wanted to rule the world and were therefore in competition with Islam.58

To sum up, Islamism is not merely terrorist jihadism and it is not the religion of Islam, even though it emanates from Islam much as European totalitarianism emanates from the Enlightenment. The Islamist dream of a return of the history of civilizations represents a backlash against the ideologically driven repression of the history and the culture of the “other.” In this regard Islam presents a greater challenge to the West than to India or China. Islamists construct collective memories in order to respond with contempt to Westerners who once looked at others as “people without history.”59 But in their revolt against such arrogance, Islamists also revolt against the West’s positive contributions, such as the ideas of individual human rights and democracy. The pitfalls of anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism, and antisemitism are tremendous. Political religion and civilizational collective memories, when used as markers in identity politics, create barriers between the civilizations and serve as an Islamist instrument in the otherization of non-Muslims.

The Incorrect Notion of “the Decline of Islamism”

If you reduce Islamism to terror and associate it with violence, you may then—under certain circumstances—speak of “the decline of Islamism.” To do so, however, is to overlook the fundamental nature of Islamism as an ideology for the creation of a shari’a state and an Islamic world order. The peaceful and violent branches of political Islam differ over the means by which this “Islamic world revolution”—as advocated by Qutb—is to be brought about, but not over the goals. The rise of this ideology shows that Islamic civilization is at a crossroads: the choices are either to join the democratic peace under conditions of modernity and pluralism, or to endorse the call for the hall Islami (Islamic solution). The compassionate response of the West to the plight of Muslims after the tsunami of December 2004 compelled some Muslims to rethink their perception of Islam under siege. Many Muslims in Southeast Asia encountered the West as a helping partner, not as an enemy. At that time I was based in Singapore and observed these positive sentiments at first hand. Yet others, such as the Islamists of Aceh, took advantage of the tsunami to impose a local shari’a order. By and large the deplorable binary advanced by Islamism—a black-and-white choice of either Islam or the West—continues to prevail. The Islamist ambition of a “postsecular society,” as part of a pattern of anti-Western development that gives religion a new role in world politics, is not abating in most of the Islamic world.

While the West (Europe in particular) has largely moved from universalist Christianity to post-Christianity and from secular modernity to the cultural relativism of postmodernity, the universalism of Islam is not only gathering force but changing in disturbing ways. The politicization of Islam transforms the relatively peaceful universalism of Islam into a call for world revolution. Fashionable forecasts of increasing moderation, such as Gilles Kepel’s fin de l’Islamisme or Olivier Roy’s “post-Islamism,” have been repeatedly belied by events on the ground. While Islamist activists are a minority among Muslims, this vocal minority constitutes a powerful and highly appealing transnational movement. Islamist fundamentalists are active in the European diaspora, creating difficult choices there as well. Fukuyama, who recognized the power of diaspora Islamists and their identity politics, rightly speaks of Europe as “a battlefront of Islamism.”60 In this triangle comprising the world of Islam, the West at large, and the Islam diaspora in Europe, Islamism surely matters.

The study of Islamism faces a variety of obstacles. Islamists have been successful in stigmatizing their critics as xenophobes and Islamophobes, and in using the tools of propaganda to impose their own terms of analysis. In fact, neither Islamophobia nor “Orientalism” is at issue here. Few Western scholars are receptive to understanding Islamism as a variety of religious fundamentalism properly or are willing to criticize Islamist thinking as an expression of a totalitarian ideology. The late Ernest Gellner, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who understood fundamentalism, had the vision and courage to criticize Islamist fundamentalism in clear words. In Amsterdam in May 1994, I witnessed a head-on clash between Gellner and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Gellner called for reviving the ideals of the Enlightenment against the challenge of neo-absolutisms, among which he ranked Islamist fundamentalism at the top. He had written in his book Religion and Postmodernism that “religious fundamentalism … gives psychic satisfaction to many.… It is at present quite specifically persuasive and influential within one particular tradition, namely Islam.”61 In Amsterdam, he and Geertz engaged in a heated dispute between the universalism of Enlightenment (defamed most stupidly as “enlightenment fundamentalism”) and the cultural relativism that Geertz favored.62 In response to Geertz’s argument that one needs to respect the “cultural peculiarity of the other,” Gellner angrily stated “then one has to respect Hitlerism as ‘the peculiarity of the Germans.’ ” Geertz disparaged this remark as unfair.63

The Gellner-Geertz controversy compels us to understand “the limits of pluralism” and Gellner’s critique of cultural relativism. Islamism is absolutist. It will never accept a place as one among multiple modernities. Islamism has no commitment to democracy, it stands in opposition to civil Islam, and if it were to prevail, it would mark the beginning of a long era of darkness for the world of Islam, and for its diaspora in Europe. Gellner understood—as his opponents did not—that cultural relativism is an inadequate response to Islamist neo-absolutism.

The shari’a state envisioned by Islamism is not a political order that can be incorporated into the Westphalian system of sovereign states. To support this system against Islamist neo-absolutism is not necessarily an expression of Eurocentrism.64 Legal scholars like Noah Feldman65 view the shari’a state positively for its apparent acceptance of constitutionalism, but this is deceptive. Every expert who reads Arabic and is familiar with the literature Islamists produce knows that Islamists approve neither popular sovereignty nor the Westphalian synthesis that underlies the modern international system of sovereign states. The Islamist ideology of an Islamic shari’a state rests on the principle of hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule). Furthermore, this state is supposed to be the nucleus of an Islamic world order that will replace the existing Westphalian one. Given these facts, how can Islamism be accommodated? Some say that Islamists will change. If they ever did abandon the Islamist concept of order, this would be a positive sign—but they would no longer be Islamists.