Toward a Third Type of fundamentalism?
Paper at the upcoming 10th General Assembly of CODESTRIA to be held in Kampala (Uganda), 8-12 December 2002
Prof. Hamadi Redissi
Faculty of Law and Political Science Tunis.
hredissi@meloo.com
The events of the fall, 2001, suggest the emergence of a third fundamentalism. A century ago the Salafiyya movement, a multinational collection of clerics, intellectuals, and statesmen, started from an assumption of Islamic decline. Reformists rather than revolutionaries, they called for a return to an initial, pure, rational Islam through ijtihad, which would liberate Islam from the weight of its interpretative history.
A second, more radical version of Islamism, epitomized initially by the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt) and the thought of Sayyid Qutb, seeks the re-Islamization of society. It forms political parties, seeks power in the nation state, calls for jihad against “tyrants” rather than ijtihad. Its protagonists are laymen, technocrats, modern youth in revolt against the inequities and indignities of modernity.
Al-Qaida seems to represent a third variant of Islamism, echoing the multinationalism of the Salafiyya and the ideology of radical Islam but shifting the focus from the nation-state to the international arena. It is neither an intellectual movement nor a political party but an international network. It recruits among a variety of countries, accepts alliance with both conservatives and radicals, and invokes global terror as its method.
The new Islamism has its roots in both the Salafiyya movement and the radical Islamist organizations currently competing for political power all across the Middle East. By that token it has its roots in the nation-states of the Middle East and North Africa. Principal responsibility lies with Muslims and, more specifically, with the Arabs. How can they confront these responsibilities? Should the response be national or international, theological or philosophical, intellectual or political, repressive or accommodating, Muslim or Arab?
The paper will explore the intellectual and political roots of the new phenomenon by examining its links to earlier forms of Islamism. It will ask how it should be understood in the context of the contemporary history of the Arab and Islamic worlds. And it will seek to articulate possible modes of response to this new challenge.
After the 9/11 tragedy, it is obvious that we are facing a fundamentalism of a third type. The first type characterized the Nahdha (Awakening) period or Islah (reformism) in the XIX century. It shifts from jihad (holy war) to Ijtihad (reasoning or interpreting Koran) to counter the challenge launched by the West to Islam, suddenly discovered superior in all files, except religion. The second type, for some of its supporters is the Islamic Sahwa (revival), for others it is radical Islam. It opts, in the thirties, for the Jihad against tyrants (Taghut); whereas the third type, the last type, displaces the domestic struggle on the international arena. In a certain manner, the three types, as historical periods and theoretical stages, intermix into a game of similitude and differences in a perfect way that the first type carries the third, the second makes a radical out of the first, while the third inheriting the other two, degenerates into terrorism.
Fundamentalism of the first type: between Ijtihad and Jihad
Ben Laden and the Talibans are the product of the alliance between the Wahabism and the religious school of Deoband. Sources and origins, in fact, vary. The founder of the Wahabism doctrine Muhammed Ibn Abd al-Wahab (1703-1792). Educated at Mecca and Medina, according to a classical curriculum of the Hanbalism, with reference to Ahmed ibn Hanbal (d. 855), rigid founder of one of the four schools of the Islamic classic law. The Hanbalism is not only one of the four schools but also a reaction against three dominating postures in the IXth century: philosophy, theology (adopted as State religion in 872, but rejected by the Caliph Mutawakil in 874) and sects. Ibn Hanbal has used against them religious credo that adopts sharia and avoids the rationalization of religion. This tradition will be definitely closed in the XIIIth century with Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), himself a Hanbalist, but also well known as having legitimized Jihad against the Moguls.
But when Abd al-Wahab started preaching only eight months after a journey in Iraq, his enemies were not sects, nor rational theology nor philosophy, but warlords in Arabia. Ibn Abd Al-Wahab adopts uniqueness: God is unique. He condemns the image of all saints, innovation in cult, all deviations from the oneness. He opposes the building, restoration, visiting and embellishment of tombs. Banned from his hometown al-Uyayna (in Najd), he meets Muhammad Ibn Saud (d. 1765) in his hometown of Dar’iya (near Riyadh, in Najd too). A treaty between the sword and the Book links the two men, a starting point for inter-tribal wars, that led them to Mecca and Medina (in Hijaz). They were finally defeated in (1818) by Egyptian reformist Muhammad Ali (1769-1849), acting on behalf Turks. The two were afraid that the Holy places fall into the hands of uneducated Bedouins.
In fact, the Puritanism of Abd al-Wahab is not original, nor his revolt in classic Islam, as reported by Ibn Khaldun and Gellner, where regularly Islam of the beneath, depicted as charismatic, tribal and popular, overthrows the upper Islam, tyrannical, urban and educated. The sealed alliance becomes in some words a "social pact" between knowledge and power, the Wahabits and the Sauds. This pact will be mutually reconducted until the foundation of the Saudi kingdom in 1932. Saudi Arabia, never colonized, steps into modern times, with a local medieval ideology.
Elsewhere, things turned out differently. In 1791, Abd al-Wahab dies, few years before Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt (1798). A year later, South India is under the British control (1799). Henceforth, fundamentalism has to define itself, in the same time, by opposition to the colonial hegemony first, and, second, to official Islam, literal, fatalist and autocratic. In India, the medrasa (Koranic school) of Deoband, in the Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, was created after the Islamic uprising in 1857. When Islamic schools were banned and closed, Muhammad Qacim Nanautawi went North India, to Deoband where he established in 1867 the so famous Darul Uloom (science school). Later on, one of his followers, Abdul Haq traveled to independant Pakistan (1947), founded a Koranic school near Peshawar (Akora Khattar), from where depart Talibans to conquer a bleeding Afghanistan. Islam was taught as in medieval ages, according a curriculum named "Nizami curriculum", issued by Nizam al-Din (d. 1747), including, now, Euclid’s geometry and Avicenna’s Medicine ! On the other hand, little is reported about modernist school Aligarh; founded by the modernist Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817-1899), or the Nadwat al-Ulama (Congress of the Ulamas), founded by Mawlana Shibli (1857-1914). In Iran, in the early years of the XVIIth century, a conflict between the Akhbaris (traditionalists) and Usulis (fundamentalists) ended by the victory of the last movement which gives to great Ulamas, namely the Ayatollahs, the right to interpret Sharia (Islamic law). They defend the civil society against the State: the Qadjar dynasty by Ijtihad and then, by Jihad, the Pahlavis until the khomeiny’s revolution.
The colonial break is deeper in the Arab-Turkish world. The fundamentalism of first type then was an intellectual and political movement calling for the return to the roots of an idealistic Islam ridden of an anaesthetic tradition that prevented it from a challenging west, suddenly discovered superior. That was the so-called Nahdha (revival) period, where two streams were sharing its paternity, the Syro-Lebanese secular Protestants and the Moslems religious fundamentalists.
The question is asked on behalf of the two by the Syro-Lebanese Emir Shakib Arslan (1870-1945) in 1930: " why Arabs are legging behind while others have progressed?" The answer rejected two opposite attitudes: a blind fidelity to the Ancients (Salafs) and the servile imitation (taqlid) of the West. The representatives of this ethos were clerics, scribers and statesmen. Their methods oscillate between Ijtihad and Jihad, which have the same lexical root (J.H.D.) that means, "making an effort". In fact, they were agnostic, even according to some sources secretly heretics, engaged into relations with senior officers of the colonial powers. Caught between Ijtihad and Jihad, this type survived. The second fundamentalism chooses the Jihad, a founding precedent for Al-Qaida’s world terror.
Fundamentalism of the second type: Vindicate contra tyrannous est!
The fundamentalism of the second type is commonly called radical Islam. The wave called sahwa islamiya (Islamic awakening) is rather recent. In fact, its origins go back to the thirties with the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (1927) and the Jamaat-i-islami in Pakistan (1941), common matrix to all radicalism.
Radical Islam was born in the thirties in an Egypt, politically liberal, parliamentary monarchy with a constitution (people often forget that), dominated by Saad Zaghlul’s Wafd party, and intellectually modernist. Then an obscure instructor, Hassen al-Banna (1906-1949), founded, a year after Saad Zaghlul death (1926), the populist movement Muslim Brotherhood, no body thought at the moment would be a "school case": the brotherhood is at the same time a religious gathering, a political party, an underground armed branch and Islamic international. Its program remains the same: "God is our goal, his message our model, the holy Qoran, our constitution, Jihad, our way, and martyrdom our hope". At he same time, in India, and before the creation of Pakistan, the Indo-Pakistani Mawdudi (1903-1973), founded Jamaat-i-islami (1941), copying the Brotherhood movement, with a peculiar fact which consequences are still visible in Pakistan: infiltration of Islamic groups by intelligence services. Mawdudi’s writings were translated from Urdu into Arabic by his follower Ali Nadawi, himself author of a best seller. He opposes Arslan’s question "what the West has lost with the decline of the Islamic world?" He traveled to the Middle East in 1951 and met with Qutb (1906-1965), the second spiritual guide of the Brotherhood after the assassination of its first leader al-Banna (1949). Now, the link between marginal Asian and radical Islam with the Middle Eastern, where initial fundamentalism has failed, is sealed for long.
The social forces in favor of this revolutionary Islam, for the majority, are what is commonly accepted as "Ph.D. + beard", young men, living in the periphery of towns, covering large areas to be considered as alternative leaders to authoritarian and corrupted regimes.
The question asked by the radical Islam is different from the one asked by shakib Arslan, on behalf of the Awakening: why Islam is a stranger on its own territory? The answer has a cutting edge: because of tyrant, a colonial agent, who keeps his population living in what Muhammad Qutb, brother of Sayyid Qutb, killed by Nasser in 1965, jahiliat al-qarn al-ishrin (XXth century paganism). "Re-Islamizing" society fallen into paganism and "killing the tyrant" become the program that federates all radicals. Tyrant must be killed: Vindiciae contra tyrannos est!
Fundamentalism of the third type: the global terror
Indeed, being repressed by authoritarian governments each and every one found refuge in Europe and the United states; countries that were not ready to give up a long liberal tradition under the provision that some enlightened people, so to speak, have threatened to bring Jihad to their doors. The "international Islamist", a notion long dreamt by al-Banna, is now a tangible reality that extends from Kabul to London. However, the 11th of September brings about a sudden break down of the whole system. Through the deadly attack that struck the United States, The "Head Quarters of the Crusaders", Al- Qaida breaks the pact whereby terror should be maintained for off shore purposes; outside the "American sanctuary" for safety sake, and away form Saudi Arabia, "in the neighborhood of God", for the sake of Allah. Let's compare and contrasts the three types of fundamentalism, using a number of indices, to highlight the network of similarities and the underpinning differences.
1 - Fundamentalism type one was just a tendency prompted by some intellectuals, fundamentalism type two was a political party. Fundamentalism type three is a network. Indeed, Al-Qaida is a web site connected to a web that may include any of the following: the board of directors of a wandering merchant bank, the armed hand of universal Jihad, a training camp for all the desperados of Islam -- An Islamic internationalism with no komintern, made up of different autonomous cores scattered all over the world but brought together to indulge in an ad hoc venture. More than that, Fundamentalism type three is the off spring of worldwide politics where official Islam mingles with the Islam of the CIA, the radical Islam of the Jihad groups, and that of the bankers and emirs that would get rid of high interests rates, forbidden in Islam, by providing the defender of the Islamic faith with the sadaqa (legal charity) just to spare themselves their reprisals.
2 - By bridging the gap between the war-mongering attitude of the radical Islamists and conservative Islam, Islam has come to saturation. This unprecedented phenomenon, based on classical Jihad, a legacy to which subscribes both official and popular Islam, was exaggerated by radical Islam. These are the very conditions that set forth a re-reading of the tradition - the very tradition of which Al-Qaida members avail themselves -, in which Jihad has become the duty of every individual; some sort of obligation virtually present, but expressly absent from the restricted economy of faith. Above and beyond the duties of every Muslim (the five pillars), tradition would require a collective duty to be taken care of by the Muslim community as a whole. The thing is that no single individual is required to be accountable to God for carrying out such collective duty as jihad, or asking for science to become ‘alim (scientist). Radical Islam has diverted Jihad from its traditional functions - be it that of fighting for freedom (when it was compulsory to drive colonizers away), or that of seeking power (when radicals felt the nee of usurping power from the tyrant) - to bring Jihad to worldwide level. When it was first broadcasted in Al-jazira, October the 13th 2001, the videotape made the following announcement on the bottom of the screen: "Jihad has become the duty of each and every individual".
3 - The genealogy of this radicalism is to be found in their very biographies. Ben Laden's first assistant, the mastermind of Al-Qaida, Dr. Ayman al-zawahiri, and Mohamed Atef are leaders of the Egyptian jihad group. They were responsible for the murder of Sadate in 1981. Ben Laden's second assistant, Suleiman Abu al-Ghaith, member of the Kuwaiti Brothers, the Kuwaiti branch of Muslim Brotherhood, a civil servant and the imam of a mosque financed by the State. The Jihad group is a division of the Egyptian brotherhood. The founder of the party, Hassen al-Banna, is a disciple of Rashid Ridha (1865-1935) - the editor of the magazine Al-Manar from 1897 to 1935, year when he died and when Hassen Al-Banna took up the position up until 1941 - Rashid Ridha was the biographer and friend of "his" imam and master Mohamed Abduh (1849-1905). The latter was, in the same time, a master thinker of reformism, the mufti of Egypt and the disciple of Afghani (1839-1897), the founder of fundamentalism, and non-subdued friend of the potentate of the era.
4 - Unlike the radical Islam of yesteryear, the new fundamentalism has a very good relation to official Islam. It is very close to the society and does not fear the information services. Unlike the old fundamentalism, the new one does not depend on the generosity of fallen princes for a living. Nor does it rely on some sort of militant collection to the profit of a delivered radicalism, but rather, on misappropriation: a godsend under the form of subsidies generously granted by Gulf monarchies to organization of charity, which the radicals embezzle to their own profit.
Ben Laden can be considered as the stitch of the system in so far as he establishes a link between different kinds of Islam: The bourgeois, the official, the diplomatic, that of the information services and the radical Islam. Ben Laden brings to the Islamic network the nobility of good ascent together with a diplomatic immunity, some war experience, some information secrets and the so long awaited financial support that shun radical Muslims from the classical image of damned disinherited flock of mustazifun, waiting for some glory.
5 - The social forces underlying radicalism are no longer homonyms: The 11th of September terrorists, recruited from all over the world, have different nationalities and different social conditions. They are anonymous individuals living in a state of constant and permanent rage felt intensely from within and who would pay regular but discreet visits to mosques and Islamic centers. They, on occasions, would allow themselves a licentious life going as far as drinking alcohol. The terrorists are the new stateless pariah, devoid of their nationalities (Ben Laden and Abu al-Gaith); the underground militants newly arrived from the Middle East to find in Al-Qaidas of the refugees in Europe and opportunity to sojourn on a stand by. They abandoned the beard and the jellaba and exchanged the Ph.D. for more practical studies (aviation, biotechnology) of which they mastered only basics so much that they hurried to join paradise. What's the point of learning from the cradle to the grave, as recommended by Islamic ethics, when one can reach eternity? Compared to the renowned and distinguished members of fundamentalism of first type, and compared to the radicals who appear on television, it is difficult to track the new fundamentalists; they travel, on occasions, with false documents, they get training in Kabul, and are spread over fighting territories -- Islam is always on a battleground anyway.
6 - Fundamentalism type three would like to reconsider the division made between three worlds: the intra-muros world of Islam (where the Islamic Law is put into practice and where minorities pays taxes to get beheaded), the extra-muror non Islamic world (world of war), and the world of reconciliation made up of those countries with which Islam cohabits in peace. Radical Islam has already done it. But, while fundamentalism type one was grateful to Europe, the second was rather sectarian, the third is ungrateful: from now on a binary cut separates the core of the Mujahidins (fighters living in the outskirts of an Ummanity without frontiers) from the rest of the world, even from the modem "reconciliation house" where Muslims persecuted in their own countries find a peaceful resort to pursue their faith freely.
7 - Short on intellectual resources, fundamentalism type three gets fuelled from the pamphlets of radical Islam. Compared to the exegetic master pieces of the XIXth century such as the Principle of exegesis by the Indo-Pakistani Sir Ahmed Khan or The Reconstitution of Religious Thought in Islam by his homologue Mohamed Iqbal (1875-1938), or Tafsir al-Manar (Exegesis of The Lighthouse) by the Egyptian Mohamed Abduh (1849-1905), and even Fi zilât al-Quran (in the Shadow of the Koran) by the radical Sayyid Qutb, compared to all these the Fetwa issued by Ben Laden in 1998 would have been so ridiculous if it had not been endorsed by action. Ben Laden's "license to kill" can be summarized in a single call, already made, to kill all Americans whether they be civilians or members of the military and where ever they are, because they have spoiled the sacred land of Islam, Arabia, to which the following countries have been adjoined: Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and Palestine. Judging by classical sources, and they are far more serious, only the Mecca, Medina, and a part of Hijâz are sacred. Otherwise large territories of Islam would pertain to the secular world or what in the past used to be called the sawâd, the fertile land of Persia, Iraq and others. One of the five interdictions, the one which have a direct bearing on the sacred status of Mecca and Medina, states that non-Muslims are neither allowed to enter, nor to sojourn, nor to be buried in the sacred land. In Hijâz, however, a piece of land stretching from Medina to Tabûk, non-Muslims have the right to enter and sojourn for a period not exceeding three days, but they don't have the right to settle. Those who infringe the law are either expelled or condemned to a discretionary punishment. But, their "execution is not licensed". And in all cases, Dhahran, American military base, is not in Hijâz.
8 - The question, after all, becomes: Whom do we have to kill out of duty? Certainly not the domestic Taghuts (tyrants) in Islamic lands, but the Americans and their allies, new tyrants. No matter how hateful violence is, one should always find a rationale behind it: The rationale behind September the 11th is irrational in the sense that it is not supported by a social project, nor does it have any social depth to it. Moreover, it is not limited to a particular territory nor does it have a clear enemy but some people to whom we should assign deadly strikes by surprise. This type of violence is all the more terrifying because it does not obey the canonical rules of a just and fair war, not even those allowed by classical Islam. Indeed, the latter considers "holly war" legitimate and authorizes the killing of fighters, it, nevertheless, disapproves of terrorism, or fat, murder by treachery and premeditation: "God does not like the incredulous traitors" (Koran, 32 : 38). True, Jihad, death in the battlefield, is advocated. Suicide, however, considered as an infringement to our duty to respect life, is not (Koran, 4: 29-30). The prophet, Muhammad, in three occasions, notably in what tradition calls Qozmin’case (holy warrior who killed himself to shorten his suffering), has disapproved suicide in holy war saying that "who commits suicide goes in Hell". On this ground Muftis of Islamic countries have condemned those who committed suicide of September 11. This is all the more so if we abide by what the Koran says "Wee shall be accountable for every thing: for what we saw, what we heard and what we felt in our hearts" (Koran, 17: 36). The tradition is well established: the Jihad spares the civilians, non-fighters. Although the issue is still subject to debate, Jihad does not allow the poisoning of wells, nor that of arrows (the two forms of biological terror of that epoch). With the triumph of Islam in Arabia, terrorism had been excluded from classical war theory. Bernard Lewis - who by the way bears no sympathy for the faith - when he said, voiced this idea: "At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoy terrorism and murder" .
Conclusion
What's the future of this fundamentalism? Henceforth it would be crushed and choked, it would run out of support and even the indulgent attitude towards it would be suspected of complicity. It will be very difficult to explain to the world, which already hardly distinguishes between conservative and modern Islam, the difference between Islam and Islamism, let alone the subtle but so well informed differences between Islamism: the moderate Islamism (Erbakan and Erdogan) and the radical one, the go between Islamism that hovers between elections and violence (Algerian Islamic Front and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), the Islamism that advocates the death of the Tyrant (Egyptian Takfir) and that which expands the semantic field of Tyrant to include the tourist and the Christians co-opts (Egyptian Gamaat), the nationalist Islamism geared towards the liberation of the nation (the Palestinian Jihad and Hamas, and the Lebanese Hizbolla), and a Jihad oriented Islam waging a war against the world (Qaida, Talibans, Jihad groups). Yet again, the difference between an Islam favoring suburban propaganda (Tabligh and Da’wa), and one made up of guided at distance moles and licensed Kamikaze recruiters. Last but not least, is the difficulty to explain the difference between the "clean" money of Zakat (legal charity) used to finance non-profit organization and the "dirty" money, under the form financial investments, used to the profit of terrorists?
The "irresistible" decline of Islam, prognosticated first by Olivier Roy (1994) and later by Gilles Kepel (2000) is not necessarily irreversible most likely because of the absence of a clear demarcation line between the salafism (traditionalism) of the militants and modern Islam. It is nationalism that served as an intermediary leading to radicalism! This very nationalism, considered in general as a second Awakening (Nahdha), was headed by some little bourgeoisie, largely secular, and of an average modernism. The question first raised by the nationalists was: why were we colonized? The Algerian Melek Ben Nabi answered the question for everybody: because we were prone to colonization. Unfortunately, the bourgeois leadership has exalted the notion of Jihad by shunning it from its fundamentalist component. The thing is that this elite thought it would be better to relegate a national movement to the community rather than to base it on universal citizenship. Or, better lead simple people to martyrdom than offer them an explanation of war as Clausewitz’one. Arrogant, this elite takes the post-colonial State for a hostage, a State already squeezed between two tyrannies: a secular tyranny that departs from political freedom and a religious tyranny that claims the monopoly over the free will to pursue ones faith. As Fouad Ajami, professor in the School of Advanced Study (John Hopkins) put it: Arabs have no one but themselves to blame; the terrorist ogres are but the will off springs of the Nahdha fundamentalism begotten in an out of sterility, dictatorship and misery. Shall we blacken the picture even mores through this verdict uttered by Brecht: is always fertile the womb that begets the unspeakable beast!