Islam and Modern Politics

Lecture delivered at Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West,” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

This week I will give five talks on Islam and modern politics. Today, I’ll talk about the origins of the ideology called ‘Islamism’ or ‘political Islam.’ Tomorrow I will discuss radical Islamism (specifically the ideology of the al Qaeda organization) as understood by its founder, Osama bin Laden and its other principal spokesmen. Following that, I will lecture on the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria, respectively. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the two most insistently ‘Islamic’ of the well-established regimes ruled by Muslims, and Syria’s civil war illustrates the clash of several would-be regimes, each backed by foreign regimes—some Islamic, some not.

My co-speakers are giving you an idea of what Islam is, but if I am to speak on Islam and modern politics, I still owe you an account of what I mean by ‘politics’ and what I mean by ‘modern.’ By spending the first half of this first lecture on those themes I intend to make my subsequent thoughts on Islamic politics much clearer. An added benefit to this approach is that I will be presenting a way of thinking clearly, as a citizen, about politics generally. What I’ll be saying next will be useful when you think about Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also when you think about China, Russia, Brazil, and the United States of America. One of my colleagues earlier asked good question: How to learn about Islam? I want to begin with the question of how political scientists learn about anything. Optimistically, I assume that political scientists are educable.

In trying to understand human communities, political science resembles anthropology, economics, and sociology in one way: It starts with individuals and families, looking specifically at the types of ruling that goes on in them. Political science differs from anthropology, economics, and sociology in one principal respect: It looks to the regime as the key feature that defines our lives together.

It so happens that the term ‘regime’ has been much in the news for the last several decades. The Clinton and Bush administrations have pushed for in such countries regime change as Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What, exactly, is a regime. Why should anyone want to change one. Thus the basic term of political science happens to have become central to the American political debate, a debate that we know, at least since the terrorist attacks by radical Islamists on 9/11/2001, to involve our very lives and our way of life.

In political science, a regime roughly parallels a species, or perhaps a genus, in biological science. It’s a term of classification or identification. As in biological species, we identify regimes by the behavior of the organism, the purposes it pursues, and its form or structure.

Regimes consist of two elements:

1. Rulers. How many people rule the community—one, a few, or many?—and what is their character. It makes a difference if only one person rules a community, or if only a few or many do; it also makes a difference if they are for the most part good or for the most part bad, whether (for example) the one who rules is Queen Anne of seventeenth-century England or Mao Zedong of twentieth-century China. This matters, not only because one set of rulers will act differently than another, but also because we tend to ‘look up’ to rulers, model our lives on them. A collection of Soviet-era educational materials had the piquant title, “I Want to Be Like Stalin.”

2. The Way of Life, the moral atmosphere of the society—its “habits of the mind and the heart,” as Tocqueville puts it—will foster the characteristic human type who lives in a given society. Business person or warrior, saint or sybarite, cowboy or computer geek? Or maybe all of those things, in which case you know you’re in America.

3. The purposes of a regime should be consistent with the rulers and the way of life. In America, the Declaration of Independence asserts that just governments aim at securing the unalienable, natural rights of the governed. In the Soviet Union, the purpose of the regime was to advance the ‘dialectic of history,’ first towards socialism and eventually towards worldwide communism. Neither the ancient Athenian democrats nor the contemporary Iranian mullahs would endorse the purposes of either of those regimes.

4. The form or structure of the regime refers to the authoritative structures by which the rulers rule. How are the most ambitious people in the society channeled into the positions of authority and prestige that they crave? And on what channels do those positions run? One might compare a regime’s form to an power grid, both directing and concentrating, but also limiting, the enunciation and enforcement of the ruler or rulers’ commands, including laws.

Obviously, these four elements of the regime—rulers, way of life, purposes, and institutions—are interrelated, mutually influential. If the rulers change, the way of life and institutions may change, in order to accommodate the intentions of the new rulers. For example, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 soon led to a new way of life for Germans, under a new set of ruling institutions, institutions that did not include a genuinely authoritative legislature, as the previous regime had done.

If the institutions change, the way of life and rulers will change. The way of life of Japan after the installation of General Douglas MacArthur’s constitution in the 1940s, and the kind of rulers Japan has had since that time, have both changed radically from what they were in the 1930s until August 1945.

If a community’s way of life changes, then rulers and institutions will change—usually somewhat gradually but no less profoundly. Consider the changes in the Roman Empire after Christianity pervaded its society ‘from below,’ so to speak. Finally, if the purposes of the regime change, this may well have profound consequences regarding the community’s rulers, way of life, and form. Many political communities have changed radically in these respects with the introduction of Islam, which sets down a far different set of purposes for human life than those pursued by, for example, Zoroastrianism.

All of these regime elements form an ethos or character specific to the regime. A person born to the same set of parents might be biologically identical if born in 1920s Hamburg on 1920s Pittsburgh, but his or her view of the world, life expectations would be very different; in important ways, the person himself would be entirely different.

A regime change is therefore nothing less than a revolution—whether violent, as in the United States and in France in the 1780s and 1790s, or peaceful, as Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and 1990s. The regime which prevails in our society effects all of our lives physically and morally, spelling ‘liberty or death,’ sometimes to millions.

Since Aristotle’s time, four massive facts have intervened to modify, if not to alter fundamentally, Aristotle’s system of political classification.

1. The first of these are religions that are both prophetic and international—specifically, Christianity and Islam. These are prophetic rather than civil religions in the sense that they require their adherents to ‘speak truth to power’ and not simply to reinforce existing regimes. They are international, indeed universal in that the God of the Bible and the God of the Koran rule over all human beings, not only particular communities or peoples. Notice that both of these religions have regimes: God is the King of kings; He is also the founding lawgiver, prescribing institutions and also requiring a particular way of life. This sets up a circumstance in which the City of God ‘cross-cuts’ the City of Man, sometimes commending a given regime and sometimes calling it to account or even undermining it. Prophetic and universal religions change both internal politics and international politics, permanently.
2. The modern state appeared, invented by the Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli and put into practice widely in Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. Aristotle saw two basic kinds of political communities, in terms of size and centralization. The polis was small and centralized, tightly-knit, a place where even a regime of ‘the many’—either a mixed regime or a democracy—could assemble all of its rulers in one place for deliberation in common. In such highly centralized and highly ‘politicized’ communities, the regime mattered intensely to everyone because the rulers really could rule everyone, really ‘reach into’ the life of every family. The empire, in contrast to the polis, was big but decentralized, typically a loose confederation of political communities whose subordinate members paid tribute in money, honor, soldiers, and slaves to the central government—which might have any of the six regime types—but otherwise left most major ruling decisions to the local rulers. The modern state combines the centralized rule of the polis with a size closer to that of some of the ancient empires. Machiavelli and subsequent political philosophers and statesmen invented ways of making this possible, of making the central ruling authority capable of reaching down into the families, into what now would be called ‘civil society,’ in contrast to ‘the state.’ These included the technologies generated by modern science, animated by the ambition enunciated by Machiavelli’s philosophic disciple, Francis Bacon: “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” Other modern political methods included an impersonal and professional bureaucracy—avowedly ‘scientific’ in its methods of rule—and modern, standardized military practices, seen most notably in a writer like Carl von Clausewitz.
3. A third feature of modern society, again urged by Machiavelli and his innumerable followers, consisted of an acquisitive, commercial/capitalist society—not mere trade routes or port cities, which had existed for centuries, but whole societies devoted to acquisition, with systems of finance to match. Such a political economy of acquisition could generate the vast revenues needed to support the modern bureaucratic and military apparatuses of the modern state. The modern political economy typically led to the ’embourgoisement’ of society, the rise of the middle classes and the partial displacement of the titled aristocracies.
4. Social embourgoisement, but also professionalization of military and civilian bureaucracies also enhance the democratization of society, societies in which, increasingly, who you were mattered less than what you were, and particularly what you could do to enhance the power of acquisition—politically, militarily, and economically.

These four massive facts, the last three at the service of the modern scientific project, have come together to form what we have come to call the distinctively modern life. That life raises the perennial question of regimes in the most serious ways. From the disposition of your soul for all eternity to the disposition of soul and body here and now, it matters more than ever who rules, by what institutions they rule, the way of life and the purposes rulers and ruling institutions enforce. Given the massive and transformative powers of modern states, as ruling entities and as frameworks for civil-social activities, regimes matter to us, to ordinary citizens or subjects, in some ways more than ever.

The history of the past two centuries accordingly has seen vast, sometimes worldwide struggles over exactly this regime question. The American regime of commercial republicanism is one answer to the question. But we’ve also seen the military republicanism of revolutionary France, the military tyranny of Napoleonic France, the constitutional monarchic imperialism of Metternich’s Austria, the military-capitalist monarchy of Wilhelmine Germany, the military and ideological tyrannies of Communist Russia and China, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Today, Islamism addresses this same question of who will rule us and how we shall be ruled in the modern world.

Consider these basic terms of political science with respect to Islam, and especially to contemporary Islamism. Muhammad was a political ruler and, more than that, a lawgiver and founder of a new regime. The regime he founded was a monarchy, and he began the conquest of territories that became a vast empire soon after his death. The empire he founded was an ‘ancient’ empire, not a modern state. Authority in that empire derived from persons—ultimately, from Allah—and not from impersonal functions in a centralized bureaucracy. For Islamists, too, politics is central. But unlike Muhammad they operate in societies where the modern state reaches down into the lives of every individual and family, societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in the empires of antiquity or the middle ages. Pushing back against the modern state, and against the modern project generally, Islamists put politics in the foreground of their enterprise. This is why Islamism is often called “political Islam.”

Islamism also reflects the social-democratizing tendency of modernity. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Kemal Ataturk. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, nation-state empires—Britain, France—in the Middle East. The elimination of the caliphate has brought a vast democratization to Islam. Under the caliphate, only a trained Islamic scholar could issue a fatwa; today, an adolescent can do so, and some have. Now, that’s democratization for you.

To put the matter in theoretical terms: modernity involves egalitarianism and the sharp break with tradition implied by the conquest of nature. Both egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism undermine the authority of the family, of fathers and mothers, of parental rule. To undermine the family is to generate individualism, the sense of ‘I’m on my own.’ But undermining the family in no way stops human beings from being human, that is, from being social and political animals who desire a sense of ‘belonging,’ of community; therefore, to undermine the family is only to initiate a quest for a substitute for the family. In modernity, we see several such substitutes. One is nationality; significantly, one’s country is called ‘the fatherland’ or ‘the motherland.’ Another was communism—the life of the communist cell, in which members experienced fraternity without parenthood. Yet another substitute for the family has been religious revival. This comes as a surprise to secularists, who had supposed, since the Enlightenment, that they alone would control the moral terrain of modernity. Socially, Islamism—for all its ‘traditional’ trappings and claims to orthodoxy—resembles the revivalisms or fundamentalisms that have characterized much of modern religious life. Islamists break with their families, adopting a self-made version of a particular religion in a new, ‘adopted’ family—experiencing, as they do, the intense emotions associated with family life. In the phrase of the French scholar Olivier Roy, Islamists are agitated by the “side effects of their own Westernization” or more precisely their own modernization. Politically—and here they differ from, for example, the fundamentalist revivalisms in Christianity—recent Islamists tapped into the political leftism of college and university campuses in the West, especially in Europe, which is where they experienced the emotional consequences of their removal from their real families, and where they began to think through their encounter with modernity.

An earlier generation of Islamists also tapped into fascism and communism after World War I. The elimination of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by modern empires also meant a crisis for Arab and Iranian nationhood. In subsequent decades, Arab rulers allied themselves with Soviet Russia, and later with Nazi Germany, in their quest for national independence—a dangerous strategy from which they were saved by the commercial republics, which defeated those alternate empires. In the 1950s, Arabs won their independence not through Islam but through nationalism—Nasser in Egypt, the Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq. Even the Palestinian Arabs, living in and out of Israel, appropriated a nationalist identity and program, and will now tell you, in the fanciful way that nationalists tend to adopt, that they are the descendants of the ancient Philistines, and therefore predate the Jews in their residence on the land.

As long as the nationalists had credit among predominantly Muslim peoples, the thinkers now called Islamists remained on the fringes, their followers persecuted by nation-statist rulers. These men included Ruhollah Khomein in Iran, Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, and Mawlanda Mawdudi in Pakistan. In fact, Qutb was hanged by Nasser in 1966.

But Arab nationalism became discredited in the eyes of many within a single generation. The nationalists failed to conquer Israel, losing spectacularly in the Six-Day War of 1967 and falling short in 1973. Nationalist rulers also came down firmly on the despotic side of the social-democratization issue, blocking the next generation from political participation. The post-independence generation of Muslims thus never fully sympathized with nationalism; many listened to the transnational notions of Islamism, spread by modern technology to a worldwide audience. Islamism also benefited from the  religio-political policy of the nationalist despots, who co-opted many of the more traditionalist clergy, rather in the way the Soviets co-opted many Russian Orthodox clergy. Thus compromised, the traditionalist lost prestige in the eyes of the young, and their loss was Islamism’s gain. Urbanized and educated, Islamists exemplified Tocquevillian democratization, but did so without the middle-class background of the liberal democrats or commercial republicans of nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, in the last twenty-five years Islamists have notched some important successes: overthrowing the Shah of Iran, defending the new Iranian clerical regime against Iraq and Iraq’s Saudi backers in the 1980s; launching successful terrorist attacks against America and other targets around the world; and of course defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Who are these people” What is ‘Islamism’?

Khomeini, Qutb, and Mawdudi all rejected nationalism as a form of idolatry, a neo-paganism to be resisted as violently as Muhammad had resisted the paganism of his time. To Islamists, the sovereignty of anyone but God is idolatry; nation and state are idols. The core of modernity, ultimately the self-deification of man, is false and evil. I shall discuss Khomeini in my lecture on Iran; today, I’ll outline the ideas of Qutb, Mawdudi, and Qutb’s predecessor, Hassan al-Banna.

In Egypt, Qutb joined the existing radical group, the Muslim Brothers, which had been founded in the 1920s by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Faced with the overwhelming power of the modern state, the Muslim Brothers sought to Islamify it, advocating what they called “Islamic modernity.” As the French scholar Gilles Kepel so pointedly notes, “The exact meaning of Islamic modernity has never really been settled.” Understandably so, inasmuch as it is fundamentally a contradiction. Islamic modernity, for the Brothers, involved a sort of totalitarianism—an amalgamation of society, state, culture, and religion, all under the guidance of Islam, and therefore of Islamists. The American founders had warned that any attempt to eliminate all factionalism, to constitute any thoroughgoing unity, would lead to tyranny. Peoples in the Middle East have seen this in those places—Khomeini’s Iran, the Taliban’s Afghanistan—where Islamism has established a regime, and in both of those places the people have been restive under the ‘totalizing’ yoke. Islamists have found that a shared religion does not constitute a sufficiently strong bond to hold a society together, and so have resorted to the frequent use of violence as a supplement.

Islamism agrees with Wahhabism (and indeed with Islam simply) on the need to Islamify all society, everywhere. It disagrees with Wahhabism on the issue of social equality. Islamism would end landed aristocracy. It is more urban and democratic—more modern—than Wahhabism. Wahhabism can tolerate the Saudi royal family, so long as they seem pious. Islamists do not tolerate them at all.

As the leader of the Muslim Brothers, Banna copied his organizational practices from the Nazis, who were active in Egypt, against the regnant British Empire, in the 1930s. He established a youth wing; he endorsed the Füherprinzip (the leadership principle); he had his people engage in paramilitary training, and cultivated a cult of the heroic death—all Hitlerian motifs. He was assassinated in 1949, but the Muslim Brothers persist to this day, briefly ruling Egypt a few years ago, and thus far winning and consolidating political power in Turkey.

Qutb joined the Brothers in the early 1950s, but favored a radicalism of the Left, not the now-defeated radicalism of the Right. The Islamist theorist he admired was Mawdudi of Pakistan, a contemporary of Banna who had advocated an Islamic state in all of India. Mawdudi wanted to take the modern state and use its apparatus to Islamify Indian society ‘from above,’ eradicating what he regarded as the local paganism, namely, Hinduism. Mawdudi founded his part, the Jamaat-e-Islami, on Lenin’s successful Bolshevik model. As you will recall, Lenin was a Marxist, believing that ‘History,’ understood as the course of human events, was proceeding dialectically, as Marxism and Engels had taught, toward its ‘end’ or culmination in a class-free, communalist worldwide society. That is, for Marxists ‘History’ proceeds by the conflict of socioeconomic classes. The urban working class, or proletariat, eventually triumph over the bourgeois class, seize and transform the bourgeois state, and use its power to eliminate all classes. Once classes are gone, the state will “wither away,” as it will no longer have any purpose. To hurry ‘History’ along towards this wondrous consummation, Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party as the working class’s vanguard party, the political party on the cutting edge of the historical dialectic, leading the working class to victory. The vanguard of the vanguard was, of course, Lenin himself, leader of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That regime would come to fulfill Tocqueville’s prediction of a Russian empire facing off against the great commercial republic of America.

To Mawdudi, Marxian dialectical struggle seemed very reminiscent of jihad. Under the Islamic rubric of jihad, whose “central theme” is “the propagation of the Faith through combat,” he would imitate Leninist political organization.

Mawdudi departed from Lenin in preferring a more strictly political course of action. His party engaged in parliamentary politics with a patience Lenin seldom exhibited. Here is where Qutb sided more with Lenin than with Mawdudi. Endorsing the ideas of the revolutionary vanguard and of the one-part state leading to a class-free society, Qutb preferred extra-parliamentary methods; indeed, in Nasser’s Egypt, such methods would have been irrelevant. The Muslim vanguard will work for the “abolition of man-made laws,” and their substitution with the perfect law, the Shar’ia, obedience to which he deemed true liberation. Thus, I what would eventually be seen as typical Islamist fashion, Qutb attempted to use modern political techniques as instruments of Islam.

As for the deeper substance of the modern project, Qutb authored a multi-volume critique of modernity. Modernity, he argued, had caused humanity to lose contact with its own nature. The original error went back much farther than modern philosophy, however. The original error went back to Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism had been God’s revelation. But Judaism fell prey to legalism because Jews had become slavish during their years of captivity in Egypt. Slavery had actually changed their nature, and so, when they received the laws of God from Moses, they inclined to worship the laws themselves instead of God. This led to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, who rightly broke with Jewish legalism. However, the early Christians fell victim to harsh persecution, causing the Christian message to become garbled; this adulterated message went too far against legalism. Having abandoned the Jewish law entirely, Christians reached out not to Judaism but to paganism (specifically, Greek political philosophy) as the needed, worldly supplement to their faith. Thus Christianity left itself vulnerable, in Roman times, to what Qutb regarded as Constantine’s pseudo-conversion, which drove the genuine Christians into the monasteries, as ascetic ‘desert saints.’ Asceticism is only another form of Christian extremism, a rejection of the bodily which bifurcates what should be coordinated, namely, spirit and nature. This leads to the characteristic Christian dualisms—sacred versus secular, God versus Caesar—dual standards.

To remedy this “hideous schizophrenia,” the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century brought a new legal code. This new code reintegrates spirit with physical nature. The unified, genuinely monotheistic religion of Islam thus reestablishes both the original revelation to the Jews and the original message of Jesus. Almost as boldly, Qutb claims that the return of the proper human relation to physical nature opened Islamic minds to the experimental scientific method, which Muslim scientists discovered in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the full use of this method for the benefit of all mankind was blocked by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols, both of whom disrupted Islamic life shortly after the discovery was made. The scientific method was taken by Christians to Europe in the sixteenth century, and exploited by them. Under Christian auspices, this method was used to reinforce the sacred-secular bifurcation favored in that civilization. Conflict arose between religion and science, the one informed by faith, the other by atheism. Atheist modernity has triumphed over Christendom in this struggle, leading to the crisis of nihilism in the West.

Thus, in Qutb’s account, Jews, Christians, and Muslim infidels have caused the current plight of Arab Muslims. America, with its separation of church and state, embodies both the Christian and the modern legacy. America’s presence in the Middle East betokens a war against Islam. As a result of the advance of the modern project, the whole world has reverted to the condition of paganism seen by Muhammad. Qutb and his followers are the only true Muslims remaining. They must do what Muhammad did: reconquer the world for God.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, became a university professor in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden came to understand that he must undertake a struggle over regimes: Who will rule? How will they rule? What way of life will prevail? What purposes will the rulers, ruling institutions, and prevailing way of life serve?

 

Primary Source Readings in Translation

Roxann L. Euben and Mhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.: Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Hassan al-Banna: Five Tracts of Hassan al-Banna. Available on-line.

Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi: Islamic Civilization: Its Foundational Beliefs and Principles. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2013.

Sayyid Qutb: Milestones. Available on-line.

____. In the Shade of the Koran.

____. Social Justice in Islam.

 

Secondary Readings

Bostom, Andrew G.: The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2005.

Bonner, Michael: Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Olivier Roy: The Failure of Political Islam. Carol Volk translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Kepel, Gilles: The War for Muslim Minds. Pascale Ghazaleh translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Cook, David: Understanding Jihad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.