For liberals committed to the priority of the individual and the inviolability of individual rights, religion and revolution are both suspect. Such defenders of individual choice could easily agree with Khomeini’s dictum (referring to the United States and the Soviet Union) that “each is worse than the other,” for both religion and revolution relativize the value of the individual by placing him or her in the context of a much vaster canvas: the will of an almighty God who demands absolute obedience or the logic of a historical process that will culminate in the good society. In Exodus and Revolution the political philosopher Michael Walzer has made the parallels between monotheistic religion and revolutionary vision into a historical connection. He believes that the logic of “Exodus politics”—the sequence of consciousness of oppression, liberation, social contract, political struggle, and new society—has decisively shaped secular revolutions as well. “The Exodus, or the later reading of the Exodus, fixes the pattern.”1
The idea of an Islamic revolution must be, from this point of view, doubly dangerous. It fuses the demands for absolute submission to God’s will—we recall that Islam has the literal meaning of submission—with the conviction that God’s purpose for humanity will find fulfillment in history. It thus links individual commitment, politics, and divine injunction. Jihad, religious struggle in the service of the faith, is the human embodiment of God’s will in history. For such reasons, some observers contend that contemporary Islamic movements that want the faith embodied in all aspects of social life are totalitarian, insensitive to the priority of a set of inalienable individual rights over and above any social and political vision.2
Contemporary international events throughout the Islamic world offer lamentably strong support for the liberal indictment of radical Islamic movements. Whether we turn to the murder of innocent tourists in Egypt, to the slaughter of tens of thousands of people of every description in Algeria, to the enforcement of restrictions of women in public life in countless places, or to the recent order by the Afghan Taliban for people to destroy their television sets, the conclusion seems inescapable: The combination of Islam and revolution is one of the major threats to human rights in our time, as dangerous in its own way as was communism.
However, as tempting as it may be to emphasize the compatibility between Islam and revolution, and thus to use the term Islamic revolution as a unified concept, in fact the relationship between Islam, revolution, and human rights is more complex than might appear. Islam may indeed animate a revolutionary assault against human rights, but it may also, even in Khomeini’s Iran, provide protections for the individual against the claims of revolutionary movements. As compared with Jacobin or communist movements unalloyed with religion, there appear to be certain checks to totalitarian politics in Islamic revolutions. These checks stem in large part from the fact that an Islamic vision of the world cannot avoid certain conservative—conservative from a characteristically revolutionary point of view—Islamic principles, including an emphasis on the sanctity of private property, the private sphere, and revealed legal norms. These cannot simply be obliterated by revolutionary ideology. Of course, Muslim revolutionaries have in practice violated religiously defined human rights in sometimes horrifying ways, but it is not enough merely to point to the joint dangers of religion and revolutionary vision as an explanation. Instead, to understand the complex links among Islam, revolution, and human rights, we must analyze the key terms in pairs: Islam and human rights; revolution and human rights; Islam and revolution. Only in this way can we begin to understand the special features of Islamic revolutions both within the history of Islam and within the history of revolutions.
Contemporary advocates of moral universalism have sought to develop a universal ethic on the basis of shared human values. One important result has been the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has had truly worldwide impact. But the search for and espousal of universal moral standards is not simply the product of modern liberal thinking rooted in Enlightenment values, for moral universalism in different forms makes up an important part of all the world religions. In Buddhism this universalism extends beyond humanity into the world of animals as well.
It is a tragic paradox, however, that no matter how international in scope the roots of a universal morality may in fact be, in the contemporary world the very idea of a shared and binding set of human rights calls forth cries of ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism. For example, in the Middle East the Universal Declaration has been attacked on the grounds that it violates the cultural integrity of the Muslim community. Muslims have also countered with a potent counterargument: Not only are such “universal” documents seen to be not at all universal, but Muslim culture is said to be far more universal and respectful of human rights than that of the West, past or present. Here are the words of a member of Morocco’s Council of Religious Scholars: “Human rights may be something new for the West, but we in Islam have had it [sic] since the beginning. We have no differences between whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims—everyone is free. We never persecuted the Jews here the way they did in France and England. In England and in the U.S. you fight against the blacks—why just the other day there were news items about fighting between the police and blacks in London.”3 Typically, this statement immediately places current issues in the context of cultural heritages. Thus, the problem of human rights cannot be addressed merely through abstract philosophical or legal reasoning but must be placed in the context of “the beginning”—fundamental cultural principles.
Ironically, then, the very concept of “human rights” provokes battles over the relative worth of different civilizations despite its universalizing intent. Perhaps there is no more poignant evidence for a central paradox of twentieth-century history: Although greater contact among cultures and a certain degree of convergence of aspirations and values among peoples are undeniable, these cosmopolitan and universalizing elements have often served to exacerbate xenophobic and exclusionary tendencies. Just as too much openness to the international market can give rise to economic protectionism, especially in the weaker economies, so can emphatic moral universalism create moral protectionism, especially among societies preoccupied with their cultural authenticity.
If we are to understand the claim that the Islamic world has recognized and protected human rights from the beginning, we must clarify some essential conceptual issues, for we have already been warned that our concept of human rights may not be as universal as we think. First, if we look behind any of the fundamental statements on human rights, we find the assumptions that rights are inherent in the individual and are shared by all individuals, at least by all adults. In certain essential senses, then, any concept of human rights implies that human beings are seen to be both capable and in some essential respect equal. In this lies the universalistic element in the principle of human rights—if there were no universalism, the adjective human would not be suitable.
The opposite of a universalistic concept of human rights is absolute exclusion: the denial that the individual as such has any rights whatsoever. It is only the individual as believer or as a member of a race or class who is worthy of respect. People become defined in terms of categories inherently opposed to each other. It is unfortunately true that religions have proved to be as potent as ideologies in creating such absolute dualisms. In a fundamental sense, the very idea of rights is thus obliterated, for even the rights of the accepted categories are only contingent. Further, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt emphasized, such exclusion of whole categories destroys the very idea of personhood, for the rightless person loses his or her place in the world and in essential respects ceases to be an individual. For Arendt the stateless person and the concentration camp inmate both suffer from the denial of their status as individuals imbued with rights; and any practice that utterly denies rights to individuals is totalitarian.
There is a third possibility, an alternative to universalism or exclusion, that is often inadequately recognized in debates on human rights: Rights can be—not denied—but defined hierarchically. According to such hierarchical ascription of rights, the individual is not an isolated atom but a social being defined through participation in webs of social relations. He or she does not cease being an individual, but individuality is inseparable from social relations, which thereby become the matrix for defining an individual’s relative rights, for hierarchical rights are always relative to one’s place in social relationships.
These, then, are the three alternatives: universalism, which always departs from the individual; exclusion, which denies to the individual a place in society on the basis of group membership; and hierarchy, which, while not denying the individual, regards him or her also in terms of social roles and relationships.
These simple but important distinctions will help elucidate the paradoxical fact that the very concept of universal human rights gives rise to conflicts over civilizational values between Islam and the West. For although it is true that both Christian and Islamic religio-cultural traditions include elements of universalism, exclusion, and hierarchy, Islamic culture has for much of its history embodied a more strongly hierarchical view of rights based on a rich appreciation of the individual in his or her socially defined roles. Unlike early Christianity, Islam became a society and a state very early: thus the much greater attention to social roles and relations. Christianity, by contrast, has been more universalistic, less socially oriented, in its claims; ironically, this very universalism has posed a greater danger of exclusion, for there was no subordinate place for the outsider. However, despite the centrality of a hierarchical view of rights throughout Islamic history, in the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, Islamic movements with a much more dualistic stance based on exclusion have emerged, a product of wrenching social changes that have called into question the Islamic heritage. A revolutionary form of Islam has challenged what militants label as a hollow religious tradition that in their view has violated the authentic values of Islam for centuries.
To say that Islam has devoted great attention to the definition of hierarchical relations among people is not to downplay the strong exclusionary elements that have plagued it, as they have the other monotheistic religions. The bitter experience of crusades and jihads, of inquisitions and religious massacres, throughout the centuries bears ample witness to the dualistic, exclusionary elements in both Christianity and Islam, these most explicitly universal of the world’s creeds. The very affirmation that there is a single transcendent God ruling over all peoples has been the source of division among those who accept this universal affirmation in different ways. Tragically, it is in some measure the universal claim on people’s consciences that has created such hostility to those who have not accepted the revealed faith. Given that God has spoken to all people through his prophets and messengers, people are all the more culpable for refusing to believe.
In what, then, is the shared universalism of the monotheistic, prophetic religions? First and foremost, they begin with a rejection of all purely local gods identified with a particular group of people. Since the one creator God is the Lord of all, all are subject to his will and his demands and are in this sense alike in his sight. For the creator God is a moral God who makes demands on the individual as responsible actor, and the individual has the capacity and duty to obey. Moral conduct according to God’s will is incumbent on all, whether high or low. Unlike the Confucian tradition, in which there is no sense of the people’s responsibilities, there is no essential distinction in moral capacities made among individuals.4 Further, all individuals should be both subject and object of moral action; this enlarged moralism therefore embodies an imperative for social justice. Thus, not the promise of individual self-awareness (as in many forms of Eastern religion) but the imperative of individual moral conduct as the basis for collective morality lies at the center of the prophetic religions.
Accordingly, these religions all embody a powerful individualistic and contractual element. The covenant is not between a faceless collectivity led by a wise leader with a monopoly on a uniquely close relationship to God, but between a community of individual moral agents and a God who requires just actions and dealings from all of them. In Christianity the teachings of natural law imported from classical philosophy buttressed this individualistic and universalistic element. In Islam the tradition of natural law and philosophy did not acquire the same salience as in Western Europe, but there were other sources of individualistic universalism that were more conspicuous than in the West—particularly the highly developed contrac-tualism rooted, according to Marshall Hodgson, in the centrality of merchants and trade in Islam.5
The Islamic monotheistic emphasis on the individual, his rights and choices, finds a powerful echo in modern radical Islamic thought, from Banna and Mawdudi to the more militant Qutb. For such leaders, Islam guarantees a wide variety of what contemporary political sociologists would classify as civil, social, and even political rights. There is much emphasis on the political contract between ruler and ruled based on religious norms and the Islamic imperative of consultation. For Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam since its inception has emphasized individual rights, which were designed “to raise the standards of individuals, permit their participation in activities which would serve the welfare of society, safeguard human dignity, nurture individual talents, and aid in the exploitation of their physical and intellectual resources.”6 The universal rejection of Marxism-Leninism by Islamic radicals is grounded in this doctrine’s submersion of the individual and his rights in the collective.
Before turning to the hierarchical elements in Islam, I should stress that the universalism of the monotheistic religions affirms a human right of the greatest significance to believers, even if not taken seriously by nonbelievers or ratified in liberal declarations: the universal possibility of salvation. So significant was this “human right” in the mind of Paul and other early Christians convinced of the immanence of the kingdom of God that they devoted little attention to the question of the nature of a Christian society and Christian ideas of social justice.
The situation was of course otherwise in Islam. In the Quran it is asserted that “to each of you We have given a law and a way and a pattern of life” (5:48). Indeed, whereas the New Testament hallows love and freedom, but is relatively inattentive to social relations, the Quran speaks of justice perhaps even more than of love. Justice is anchored in the responsibility of believers as defined by their social roles and relationships. These social relationships, in turn, are not egalitarian, although the universal element is never entirely lacking. Men are stronger and more powerful than women; free individuals are above slaves; and members of the Muslim community have rights not accorded to the nonbeliever. Accepting the hierarchy of relationships seen to be ordained by God in society, Islam seeks to define and regulate inequalities in accord with a revealed vision of justice. As the influential Iranian religious leader Nuri bluntly declared during the debates on a constitution at the turn of the twentieth century, “In Islam there is no equality between the mature and the immature, the sane and the insane, the healthy and the ill, the slave and the free, wife and husband, the learned and the ignorant, the Muslim and the non-Muslim and so on.”7 Does such a statement contradict Banna’s insistence on the centrality of equality in Islam? Not at all, say Muslim spokesmen. For example, with respect to gender relations: “What discrimination exists (in inheritance, legal hearings, prayer) is a function of the greater responsibility devolving on men and of the difference in the mental and emotional attributes of the sexes.”8
We now see why the Western concept of human rights as attaching solely to the individual is seen to be both partial and ethnocentric. It is partial because it fails to take account of individuals in their social roles as members of a religiously defined community, and it is ethnocentric because, without recognizing its own assumptions, it elevates one concept of rights above another. We also see a certain justice in the assertion that Islam endorsed and supported “human rights” before the West; by recognizing hierarchy and developing religious norms about the responsibilities of superiors to inferiors (dowries, alms, protection of orphans, acceptable treatment of nonbelievers) Islam extended a measure of justice to groups who in Christendom were largely ignored by religious norms.
A further observation is in order about the partial nature of the liberal concept of human rights from an Islamic perspective. Precisely because it sought to define a pattern of life, Islam did not restrict itself to individual civil and political rights, but affirmed a broad range of responsibilities that the privileged and powerful have with respect to the weak. The giving of alms is, of course, one of the five pillars of Islam; and throughout the Quran there are injunctions to protect orphans and widows. It is not without reason, then, that advocates of Islamic values in the modern world express their sympathy for the broad range of economic and social rights affirmed, at least in principle, in communism. In their view such a broadened conception of human rights provides the foundation for both equality and a richness of community unknown in the capitalist West.
The fact that hierarchy can indeed define rights can be seen in the differential treatment of Jews in medieval Christianity and Islam. According to the historian Mark Cohen, Jews in thirteenth-century Europe came to be “assaulted as aliens, persecuted collectively for alleged crimes against Christians and Christianity, increasingly isolated in their Jewish quarters, soon to be confined to legal ghettos, and all too often expelled.”9 No such extreme exclusion occurred in the Islamic world of that time, where the rights of Jews were encompassed within Islamic law. Certainly not the bearers of equal rights—they were subject to such forms of discrimination as dress codes, special taxes, and formal prohibitions on holding public office—they were yet embraced within that “law” and “pattern of life” of which the Quran spoke. In Islam, the dualistic element within confessional religions was more tempered by the hierarchical emphasis of an encompassing religious law.
The emergence of apocalyptic religious movements throughout the history of monotheistic religions demonstrates that these religions have the potential to promote dualistic visions that separate the true believer and the corrupt world of unbelief. And yet there can be no easy identification between religion and dualism; the relationship between them must be treated as a historical and sociological problem of great complexity. By contrast, dualism is of the essence of revolution, whether religious or secular in inspiration. Thus, revolutions always threaten human rights because they do not envision people as individuals but only as members of ideologically defined categories.
If the ultimate truth of the Western monotheistic religions is the reality of a transcendent God in intimate relation with individual human beings, the truth of modern revolution is an ideal social and political vision that demands realization in this world. Certain uniform consequences of such ideological commitment in modern revolutions can be identified across a broad spectrum of cases. For example, as different from each other as are revolutionary Marxism and radical Islam, they nonetheless share a certain number of common emphases stemming from a uniform revolutionary logic. In the same vein, the core similarities between the two major secular twentieth-century revolutionary ideologies, communism and fascism, have received exhaustive attention in classic works of modern social thought. The following generalizations about revolutions and human rights thus apply to all the major cases.
Modern revolutionary visions are integral, embracing all aspects of social life. If, despite their dramatic claims on the conscience, religions have tended to allow some distinction between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar, revolutionary ideologies are totalistic. The economy, politics, all key social institutions, indeed, even the individual conscience: All must be remade in accord with the ideology. The totalistic emphasis of Marxism-Leninism is well-known, at least in principle, although it is by no means clear from Marx’s own work what even a Marxist economy, let alone a Marxist culture, would look like.
It is perhaps somewhat surprising that Islamic revolutionary visions intend to be equally comprehensive. Their concepts and theories about the Islamic economy or the Islamic state bear the marks of modern integral ideologies rather than the stamp of tradition.10 Islam in the eyes of Islamic radicals is both all-embracing and a coherent system. For them it has an answer for everything, even for questions that could not have been posed in the seventh century. Thus, while the idea of an Islamic state in the medieval period merely meant a state that embraced Islam and protected it from its enemies, for Islamic radicals the authentic Islamic state must be based on a set of comprehensive Islamic principles with practical consequences.
If Islam can thus be systematized, then it also becomes clear, as it was not in “traditional” Islam, which practices and institutions are not Islamic. (Note that it would be impossible to systematize a religion in such a thorough way; indeed, throughout Islamic history even the specific sphere of Islamic religious law could not be clearly systematized, for there were always a plurality of traditions and interpretations that largely cohabited with each other despite fundamental tensions.) Radical Islamic thinkers thus conceive of themselves as an alternative to the other twentieth-century “systems,” communism and capitalism (often failing to observe that Western capitalism has rarely been as thoroughly systematized as its more transcendental rival). Their system, they claim, offers a superior pattern of social life in all spheres than does the model of its rivals.
Certain consequences all too familiar from the history of twentieth-century communism follow from this commitment to an ideal integral system. A dualistic ethical stance emerges, with its corresponding mythology and demonology. Since the truth has been revealed, everyone has access to it; those who do not accept it are thus guilty. Revolutionary morality separates the pure from the impure, and since the pure must be active in the struggle for the ideal society, passivity is not neutrality. Those who do not engage in jihad—not merely for the protection of the faith, but for the pursuit of the ideal—display their unworthiness. Active engagement is incumbent on all. The parallels between this activist vision of jihad and the campaigns for socialist construction in communist societies are rooted in their systematic character and in their shared embrace of a dualistic vision.
Dualism is also expressed in the ideal of the revolutionary vanguard destined to lead and transform the masses. It may come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the literature of Islamic radicalism that the apotheosis of the enlightened elite is as central to the vision of Islamic revolution as it is to Marxism-Leninism. And the demands on this elite are almost equally high. For Lenin, as expressed in What Is to Be Done, the revolutionary elite was separated from the masses in part by the former’s possession of ideological knowledge, which was necessary to guide the movement in all its tactical and strategic decisions. But Lenin was also convinced that only a small minority would possess the necessary moral qualities of revolutionary commitment and dedication. Since both correct ideological understanding and moral purity were rare, the party should constitute a select elite.
For the Islamic vanguard the challenges are somewhat different, though the overarching logic is the same. For Islamic revolutionaries ideological knowledge was not so rarefied, since God had chosen to reveal his message clearly to all those willing to hear it. The significance of superior knowledge is not entirely denigrated, for it is necessary for the elite to understand how Islamic tradition has distorted the truths of Islam, which must be discovered anew as for the first generation.
Yet the key requirement for the Islamic vanguard is not superior knowledge but moral purity as exemplified by the Prophet and his companions. The revolutionary elite should emulate the model of what Qutb, the Egyptian Islamic radical executed by the Nasser regime, called “the sole Quranic generation,” so that they in turn can serve as models for the masses. Extravagant claims are made for the potential of this enlightened elite, particularly with respect to the man who is to be the authoritative leader of the Islamic community, the amir—in accord, it would seem, with Islam’s lack of emphasis on original sin. There is even talk of the “Perfect Man” to whom unquestioning obedience is due, a clear echo of Sufi traditions now transposed to a quasi-modern mass movement. Characteristically, in Egypt the Muslim Brothers’ oath includes the following words, entered into by “contract with God”: “to have complete confidence in its [the organization’s] leadership and to obey absolutely, under all circumstances.”11
There is thus no single and shared concept of the vanguard in all revolutionary tradition. It can base itself on ideological knowledge or moral authority, and its leadership can be primarily defined as an organizational elite, or its basis can be almost entirely personal qualities. Further, the vanguard may be called upon to do many different things, to direct the revolution strategically, to organize a mass party, or to inspire the inner self-transformation of the masses. Whatever the differences, however, the question of the role of the vanguard is always posed in a distinctively revolutionary way: The key actors envisioned are a vanguard and a broad public, so that the arena of activity is modern mass politics; and the vanguard is utterly separated from the masses through its possession of rare qualities that validate its revolutionary leadership regardless of the views of the masses themselves.
Islamic revolutionaries have thus largely transformed what might otherwise be an amorphous religious tradition into an ideology. And although ideologies can be based upon religious values and religions can have ideological elements, there are nonetheless critical distinctions between religion and ideology. Ideologies in their modern sense (and ironically, this would even include radical Islam, so obviously shaped by other ideological traditions) are products of the Enlightenment. No matter how unrealistic they may seem, they embody the rationalist idea that human beings can understand and control history and society. They therefore provide a vision of a desired end state as well as concrete mechanisms for reaching it. Ideologies are future oriented, teleological, and inherently dualistic. Although the monotheistic religions emphasize God’s justice and the community of moral individuals acting in history, the religious mainstream in all of them has been more modest in offering promises to transform human life from top to bottom. Nor can anything like a program for an ideal society or an explicit model of a vanguard party be found in any of the monotheistic scriptures. Although Walzer is certainly right that foreshadowings of such ideas can be found in the Exodus model, the monotheistic religions’ emphasis on humanity’s weakness and God’s omnipotence undermines such expressions of human self-confidence.
All of the preceding themes are exceedingly familiar from the history of twentieth-century secular revolutions, which, in accord with their exclusionary dualism, grant little respect to the concept of human rights inherent in the individual. Islamic revolutionary movements recapitulate this same pattern of thought and model of political leadership. In thus departing from more traditional Islamic ideas, in which a hierarchical conception of rights played a more central role, the experience of radical Islam gives added weight to the hypothesis that revolution embodies a common ideological and political logic despite immense differences in content. In large part, then, radical Islam threatens human rights because of its revolutionary nature rather than its religious content.
But what, then, is the content of the Islamic revolutionary ideology, and why did Islam become transformed into a dualistic vision of radical transformation? To address these questions is also to illuminate the peculiar features of Islamic revolutionary movements.
Contemporary radical Islamic movements are defined above all by the conjunction of two exclusions: the dualism of Islamic belief versus the threatening outside world and the dualism of Islamic ideology versus all who do not live according to its ideal model. Consequently, the enemy within the Islamic world is identified with the external enemy, and against both of them any form of struggle is legitimate and necessary.
A crucial concept for revolutionary Islam is jahiliyya. In traditional Islam the term denotes the state of ignorance in pagan Arabia before the Quranic revelations. In radical Islam it becomes an ideological term of rejection for everything that does not correspond to the totalistic vision of the Islamic good society. If the watchword of traditional Islam is justice in accord with law, radical Islamic activists seek a society suffused with goodness. Thus, for the Iranian Islamic radical Ali Shariati, the Shariah is not just the body of Islamic law but a “complete scheme of life and all-embracing social order,” which will guarantee that nothing—whether “legal, class, social, political, racial, ethnic, territorial, cognatic, genetic, intrinsic and even economic”—will hamper “the development of Man.”12 Given such an exalted standard, everything is condemned: for Qutb, “everything around is jahiliyya; perceptions and beliefs, manners and morals, culture, art and literature, laws and regulations, including a good part of what we consider Islamic culture.”13 The extraordinary implication of this doctrine is that the so-called Muslim world is no more Islamic than those obvious enemies of the faith, the West and communism. From this standpoint, almost all spheres of existing Middle Eastern societies have already been infected by these hostile forces.
But almost all of Islamic history has also been the realm of jahiliyya. Here we touch another of the central points of revolutionary Islamic ideology: the choice of principle over tradition. Radical Islamic activists reject any form of society that is not thoroughly penetrated with religious ideals, as no historical Islamic society ever was. It was never enough only to structure social relations through religious law without changing the overall context within which law operates. This kind of “fundamentalist” Islam, basing itself only on the Quranic revelation and the lives of the Prophet and his companions, is necessarily at odds with an Islam that accepts the validity of the historical development of the community. No wonder that a favorite assassination target of Islamic radicals has been conservative clerics who affirm the fundamentally Islamic nature of both Islamic history and the status quo in the Middle East!
The root causes of the appeal of such a dualistic vision in the contemporary Middle East are varied and profound. The view of the world as jahiliyya makes sense in a civilization victimized by Western imperialism and by oppressive states seeking to modernize under Western or communist sponsorship (for example, Iran under the last shah, Egypt under Nasser). Thus, it would be a mistake to think that Islamic revolutionaries are alone in the Middle East in embracing a dualistic view of the world, for a rejection of the status quo has been an extremely common response to the weight of historical experience in the period of Islamic decline. Even pro-Western secularists can feel a sense of polar opposition between their world and the world of the threatening dominant powers. Thus, the cultural building blocks of Islamic radicalism pervade the contemporary Middle East, giving a penumbra of legitimacy to radical movements even when radical goals are not shared.
Further, the threat to the Islamic world, everywhere palpable, gives to radical Islam a large part of its appeal among the masses. As Richard Mitchell’s account of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt shows, the experience of humiliation by the Western powers was not just an abstract experience felt at a distance. Many ordinary people recruited to the Muslim Brotherhood had directly experienced the sting of haughty attitudes and discrimination. And what was it like for a devout Egyptian Muslim to watch President Nasser ingratiate himself with the Soviet leadership, knowing that the Soviet government did not allow Islam to develop freely within its own borders? Another kind of experience was even less abstract and tragically widespread: time spent in torture chambers and concentration camps, an ordeal guaranteed to generate a dualistic view of the world. As a major scholar of radical Egyptian Islam remarked, “Islamicist thought was reconstructed after 1954 primarily in the concentration camps.”14
Recent Islamic radical thought has given increasing weight to the dangers of Western cultural penetration. Behind bravura statements about the inevitable victory of their ideals—inherent in any highly ideological mind-set—there is a pervasive sense of the immense threat of Western culture, with its promise of liberation of the individual from traditional values and social institutions. Qutb’s view that “everything around is jahiliyya” exemplifies a crucial difference between the Christian exclusion of Jews at the time of the Crusades and the shift toward revolutionary dualism in the recent history of the Islamic world. In medieval Europe the Jew became less necessary economically and more repellant culturally as the Christian world entered a period of increased power and expansion. By contrast, in the contemporary Muslim world the situation is the reverse: The transformation toward dualism is especially full of pathos because of the devastating decline of the Muslim world, which made the external world not just repellant but menacing.
In this context of a perceived struggle to the death, for people who feel that pernicious outside forces threaten their authenticity as individuals as well as the survival of a meaningful world, there can be no politically neutral idea of human rights based on the individual. The liberal freedoms, so facilely propounded in international documents by foreign lawyers and politicians, are seen to play into the hands of the opponents of the only true way. Thus, why should the militants of Islam respect that hypocritical weapon of their opponents, the appeal for tolerance and human rights? After all, these too are part of the world of jahiliyya, for under their banner every kind of subversive cultural message can pollute people’s minds. The same goes for other forms of cultural interchange, such as tourism. According to one Muslim militant (“disappeared” subsequent to this late-1993 interview), “tourism in its present form is an abomination: it is a means by which prostitution and AIDS are spread by Jewish women tourists, and it is a source of all manner of depravities, not to mention being a means of collecting information on the Islamic movement. For these reasons we believe tourism is an abomination that must be destroyed.”15 As a pernicious example of a radically Manichaen worldview, this statement is worthy to stand beside any Stalinist diatribe of the 1930s.
When radical Islamic militants brand capitalism, communism, and all existing Muslim societies as jahiliyya, they conform to the logic of revolution, which always makes an absolute distinction between the sphere of revolutionary purity, represented by the revolutionary movement, and the outside world of corruption. At the very least, then, radical Islam is revolutionary in “form”—in its emphasis on ideology, on the vanguard, on a dualistic worldview. But, to return to a famous Stalinist distinction, what is the relationship between revolutionary form and revolutionary content? What, concretely, is the essence of this revolutionary vision that “is destined to liberate all humanity from man’s domination upon man”?16 In Marxism-Leninism there was a certain correspondence between revolutionary form and revolutionary content; the revolutionary party acting on the basis of a dualistic ideological stance promises to abolish private property and social classes, eliminate the division of labor, and create a harmonious society based on a non-antagonistic mode of production. The content of the revolutionary vision is obviously utopian, an utter break with all previously existing societies.
In revolutionary Islam there is certainly utopian rhetoric about the final goals of the revolution: The abolition of all domination and exploitation according to the model of the golden age of Islam, which can still be discerned across the centuries despite the distorting lens of tradition. But in fact was this primordial Islamic society anything like a utopia? Clearly not: orphans, the poor, and abandoned women continued to exist. Islam urged that they be treated with justice; it did not promise that the conditions responsible for their plight could be eliminated. Rivers flowing with wine would only be encountered in paradise, not in this imperfect world of wayward human beings. Although it was certainly incumbent on the believer to promote justice, in the world of Muhammad and the companions just actions could not bring about the revolutionary millennium.
And so we come to a strange irony. In their abstract statements about the perfection of the Islamic model of society, Muslim revolutionaries strike a utopian note familiar from the literature of Marxism. However, when writers such as Qutb, Shariati, or Mawdudi actually describe the nature of economic or political institutions in an authentically Islamic society their goals seem rather prosaic. Ideologists of radical Islam certainly go further than traditional legal scholars, who often wished for nothing more than a ruler who acted according to Islamic norms and promoted the expansion of Islam. For radicals, Islamic society should be headed by a wise ruler who acts in consultation with a council of sages (shura). The precise qualities necessary for this exalted ruler have been discussed endlessly in their theoretical writings and polemics, but the key requirement is always superior moral character based on religious commitment. The composition and nature of the shura have also aroused much interest: how it should be chosen; its sphere of competence; and the like. In Islamic Iran the general model of the Islamic state has been embodied in the special constitutional position of the faqih, the guardian of Islamic law (until his death, Khomeini), whose authority was seen by many to be virtually infallible. Sunni Islamic militants are more likely to use the term amir for this exalted leader, to whom qualities of perfection are also ascribed. It also follows from this theory that the people owe the faqih or amir absolute obedience.
Although the ideal of leadership is certainly more elevated than in historical Islamic regimes, such a political framework hardly promises the end of domination so favored by Islamic radicals. The faqih, if he has the requisite personal qualities, may be able to render just (though hardly perfect) decisions, but he cannot transform the nature of modern political life, where a multiplicity of interests, factions, and parties compete for power quite apart from any rhetoric of unity based on transcendent wisdom. The exclusively moralistic vision of leadership, based on the example of the Prophet and his companions, virtually ignores real institutions and processes of power. The contrast with communist regimes, where revolutionary form and revolutionary content coincided to a much greater degree, could not be starker. Thus, despite considerable personalism of their own, the communist leadership knew that a revolution required revolutionary organization and they understood how to make use of revolutionary organizations for radical social change.
In a certain sense, there is nothing really surprising in this disjunction between the ideology of Islam and actual proposals for the nature of political rule in a thoroughly Islamic society, for in fact the ideology of Islamic radicals has little to do with the realities of Islamic history even during the pristine rule of the Prophet. Thus, their return to basic Islamic principles, if the slightest bit authentic, cannot be truly revolutionary. If one is to extract a political lesson from the earliest Muslim political community, it cannot be about the possibility of ending domination and creating perfect harmony. In his famous treatise on Islamic government Khomeini was clearly much closer to the mark than more consistent Muslim revolutionaries, who are caught in a web of contradictions. For Khomeini, Islamic government based on the Prophet’s model meant leadership by religious authorities according to divine law—and not the coming of the Millennium to earth.
A utopian tone also pervades the radicals’ discourse about the Islamic economy. Both Western capitalism and communism are attacked as extreme systems incapable of property balancing the interests of the individual and society. Both are therefore unjust and immoral. And, as in the political sphere, revolutionary Islam is resolutely moralistic in its approach to the economy. As the influential Iranian religious leader Tateghani declared, Islamic economics is “inseparable from an intellectual and moral orientation and training and from religious and social ordinances.”17 Following the Prophet’s example, the individual should curb his appetite for consumption, exercising self-control and moderation. Further, the community has the moral responsibility to guarantee that the exercise of private property rights does not infringe upon the moral development of other individuals, for freedom from pressing material needs is a prerequisite for moral freedom. Thus, according to the same authority, Islamic government “has priority in disposing property and exists, moreover, to establish equity.”18
With such a moral foundation, it is claimed that the Islamic economy can provide a “third way” in the contemporary world, one which, like all such chimerical theories of the third way, is designed to provide an alternative to rapacious capitalism and totalitarian communism. Apart from such high-blown claims, however, the actual content of the ideal of the Islamic economy seems rather trite. At their most radical the proposals do not go much beyond a rather typical social democratic vision of capitalism, with much Islamic window dressing on issues such as Islamic taxation (zakat), luxury taxes, and the Islamic government’s right to redistribute. Occasionally there are more disturbing pronouncements: For Taleghani, Islamic government “is empowered to limit individual ownership to a greater degree than the law may authorize,”19 for the wisdom of the religious leader is ultimately superior to law.
However, when one gets to actual policies the pronounced emphasis on property rights and considerable freedom of contract in Islamic law generally takes precedence. For example, the Iranian Council of Experts has played a distinctly conservative role, opposing land reform legislation that would infringe upon the clergy’s property rights and in general upholding Islamic rights of private property. There have been a plethora of conflicts between such conservative voices and radical groups who advocate more social democratic policies—but even the most far-reaching proposals are not especially radical! Such endemic conflicts are inherent in such “third ways,” which eclectically combine different principles. Thus, moralistic in “form,” the ideal and also the embodiments of the Islamic economy are distinctly lacking in coherent content. A few radical exceptions aside, they are certainly not revolutionary in any classical sense of the term. They will thus disappoint any deeply held revolutionary convictions.
It has become apparent that the fit between Islam and revolution is far from perfect. Islamic revolutionary movements and regimes are neither consistently revolutionary nor consistently Islamic. With respect to the first, they embrace many elements from the traditional Islam that they deride, such as a respect for private property, a hierarchical view of many social relations (especially gender), and limitations on the role of the vanguard party. Thus, no thoroughgoing revolutionary assault on society will be conducted by Islamic revolutionary regimes; despite the charges of many Western scholars, Islamic revolutions cannot be totalitarian. It is symptomatic that nothing like collectivization or the great purges of the Soviet 1930s has occurred in Iran, in many ways the bellwether Islamic revolutionary regime.
Revolutionary Islam is also in certain fundamental ways not really Islamic. Islamic radicals mythologize the golden age of the Prophet and his companions and reject the rest of Muslim history, including the whole development of the Islamic legal tradition, as a distortion of basic principles. But ultimately radicals like Shariati and Qutb cannot win their battle for an ideologized, and thus ahistorical, religion. It is no doubt true that aspects of Islam are compatible with a totalizing ideology, as are aspects of Judaism and Christianity. For example, they all claim a special relationship to God that will be brought to fulfillment in the future, and so the promise of individual and collective moral purity always exists, even if in abeyance. For such reasons it is warranted to find an intimate connection between religion and revolution.
Despite such connections, both the theory of radical Islam and the historical experience of the Iranian revolution show the ultimate contradictions between monotheistic religion and total revolution, for Islam has strong conservative and also democratic elements connected, respectively, to its hierarchical and universalistic features. These cannot easily be swept aside in favor of a doctrine of “revolutionary ethics”—that is, the conviction that whatever is good for the revolution is right. Nor, in the context of Islamic law, is it so simple to justify a radical vanguard’s efforts to purify the society and create absolute harmony. Radicals in Iran argued that the thoroughgoing application of Islamic law would only be appropriate if the individual and society already lived according to the authentic principles of Islam. Until that time, they said, revolutionary logic, including the use of state terror and infringements on private property rights, supersede religious legalism. There certainly was a radical moment in the Iranian revolution. But basic Islamic values could only be disregarded so far in the name of revolutionary purity, and ultimately even Khomeini himself, after a period of flirtation with social radicalism, came down firmly on the side of such values as private property and the respect for privacy, including the inviolability of the home. For, unlike communism, at the heart of Islam is a pronounced individualism—the individual as moral agent, as responsible actor in contractual relations with other people and with God. If Hannah Arendt is right that the fundamental idea of totalitarianism is the conviction that anything is possible, we can hope that the inhuman and potentially totalitarian elements in contemporary radical Islam can be tempered by the limits inherent in Islam, not as a set of abstract principles, but as historical experience based on revelation.
The political system that emerged out of the Iranian revolution shows as clearly as do the economic principles that Islam cannot provide a firm basis for an autonomous revolutionary vanguard. As noted earlier, in accord with the elitist spirit of Shiite Islam, the constitution of Islamic Iran gave pride of place to a religious elite, in the form of an esteemed religious guide (the faqih) and a Council of Experts not subject to the popular will. Yet, at the same time it endorsed the principle of popular sovereignty, created an elected legislature, and gave broad guarantees of civil and political rights, including the legal equality of men and women. These latter constitutional principles could be grounded in traditional Islamic principles such as consultation and consensus. Although the resulting political system certainly had dictatorial elements, it also provided for an array of institutions expressing the interests of diverse social groups and allowed for a degree of political pluralism and conflict inconceivable in a polity run purely by an ideological vanguard model. After Khomeini’s death a revised constitution gave more power to both state officials and the popularly elected president at the expense of strictly religious authorities, thus further undermining the vanguard model. Still a system based on mixed principles, in part on the commitment to Islam and in part on the ideals of popular sovereignty and representation, there is no prospect in sight of a permanent revolution that will sweep away all elements of moderation. (Nor of course can the complete triumph of the moderates be expected.)
How, then, to characterize revolutionary Islam, and what are its implications for human rights? I have already hinted at a formula that expresses the eclectic nature of both theory and practice. Revolutionary Islam is revolutionary in form, moralistic in content. It is revolutionary in form because there is a theoretical commitment to the end of injustice and domination in human societies, and this commitment finds expression in vanguard politics and a dualistic mentality. It is moralistic in content because Islamic principles, even as reinterpreted, do not permit a truly revolutionary transformation of society. Thus, the emphasis in theory and practice comes to be the moral qualities of individuals and leaders in the economic and political spheres (the amir, the shura, the obedient subject, the moral consumer, the generous donor). Without a model of new instiutions, the realm of revolutionary transformation becomes restricted to the sphere of individual conduct.
Despite these limitations, both form and content have important implications for human rights. Even if the primal revolutionary vision will never be fully realized, revolutionary dualism as expressed in the vanguard mentality will continue to shape the relations between Islamic revolutionary movements and the outside world. Those who do not adhere to the radical vision of Islam, whether Muslim or foreigners, will be seen as corrupted by the world of jahiliyya. As outcasts of the authentic Islamic community, Islamic law does not apply to them. And without the protection of law, there is, in practice, no respect for rights.
As de facto substitute for revolutionary transformation, Islamic moralism will also continue to shape social behavior and relationships on the daily level, as seen in matters of dress and personal conduct, even though the moralism of contemporary Islamic movements is not really revolutionary. Indeed, such moralism can substitute for revolutionary radicalism or even attempt to compensate for the failures of the revolutionary vision. Not nearly as esoteric as revolutionary Islam, and requiring no absolute withdrawal from the world of jahiliyya, moralism has great appeal both in terms of its resonance with Islamic tradition and as a response to the cultural threats of the outside world. As well as operating at the societal level as a substitute for real institutional change in economics and politics, it is flourishing at the local level throughout the Muslim world—grassroots party organizations, neighborhood groups, religious associations. At this popular level, the strict enforcement of Islamic moral codes of personal behavior is a major threat to human rights as defined by liberal individualism. But in contrast to the revolutionary party state, which reshapes all institutions and imposes itself everywhere, human beings have a relatively effective weapon against moralism: hypocrisy, the contradiction between public and private behavior. Hypocrisy clearly has a bright future in the Islamic world, for it will grow apace with the attempts of militant—if not consistently revolutionary—Muslims to purify their worlds in the face of failure and corruption.
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 134.
Charles J. Adams, “Mawdudi and the Islamic State,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 119-120.
Quoted in Kevin Dwyer, Arab Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 38.
See William Theodore de Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 12-13.
Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 128-30.
Quoted in Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 249.
Quoted in Homa Omid, Islam and the Post-Revolutionary State in Iran (London: St. Martins Press, 1994), 16.
Quoted in Mitchell, Muslim Brothers, 255.
Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 194.
See Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 132-33.
Mitchell, Muslim Brothers, 165.
Quoted in Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 156.
Quoted in Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam. Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 25.
Gilles Kepet, Muslim Extremism in Egypt. The Prophet and Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 27.
“What Does the Gama’a Islamiyya Want?” in Political Islam, ed. Joel Beinin and Joe Stork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 320.
Book of the Muslim Students’ Association published in Cairo, quoted in Sivan, Radical Islam, 48.
Ayatuilah Sayyid Mahmud Taleghani, Society and Economics in Islam (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1982), 26.
Taleghani, Society and Economics, 28.
Taleghani, Society and Economics, 28.