The Modern Middle East (49 page)

There was, in fact, an inverse relationship between the decline of the
ulama
as a social force and the rise of a new breed of Muslim intellectuals. “The ineffectiveness of the traditional ulama meant that the way was open for the emergence of a new style of Muslim intellectual who would work to create a modern but not secularist alternative to both the conservative ulama and the secular intellectuals. To a remarkable degree, the new intellectual perspectives peripherized the old secular intellectuals and converted the traditional ulama into more activist Islamic advocates and reformers.”
¹¹⁰
This Islamist generation includes figures such as the Egyptian thinker Hasan Hanafi (b. 1935), the Tunisian activist Rachid al-Ghannouchi (b. 1941), Sudan’s Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932), Iranian ideologues Ali Shariati (1933–77) and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (b. 1947), and Indonesia’s Abdurrahman Wahid (1941–2009). Operating within the socioeconomic contexts and the intellectual traditions of their own countries, all these thinkers in their own ways have sought to reconcile Islam and modernity through contemporary interpretations of Islam and to propose viable Islamic solutions to problems of contemporary society.

Given their intellectual concerns and larger political environment, many of these Muslim thinkers have become politically active within their own countries.
¹¹¹
Hasan Hanafi was active in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a young man, although he has gone on to become a highly respected professor at Cairo University and has held visiting appointments in numerous other institutions around the world. In the 1990s, his unorthodox views
earned him the ire of Egypt’s conservative religious establishment, and some figures at Al-Azhar even went so far as to brand him an apostate. Iran’s Abdolkarim Soroush and many other Iranian thinkers like him found themselves in a similarly precarious position, although most of the opposition to them came from the conservative
ulama
within the state—or within the state’s orbit—rather than from nonstate clergy. Rachid al-Ghannouchi was the head of the Tunisian party called the Islamic Tendency Movement until he was forced into exile in the early 1990s. A former law professor at Khartoum University and a central figure in Sudanese politics since 1964, al-Turabi was believed to be the major ideologue of the regime that came to power in Sudan in 1989 and, ever after, had sought to establish an “authentic Islamic state.” By 1999, however, he had apparently fallen out of favor with the state’s leading figure, President Umar Hasan al-Bashir, and was dismissed.

Similar developments also occurred in two non–Middle Eastern countries that are among the largest Muslim countries in the world, Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim had long been active in the country’s legal opposition, but as part of the general Islamization of Malaysian politics in recent decades he had gradually risen within the state apparatus and by the early 1990s had held several different cabinet positions. Eventually, in 1993, he was named deputy prime minister and was assumed to be the successor to Prime Minister Mohathir Mohammad. By 1998, however, he, like al-Turabi in Sudan, was out of office. In a sensational trial in 1999, he was convicted of corruption and sexual misconduct and was sentenced to prison. In Indonesia, meanwhile, Abdurrahman Wahid, who had been one of the country’s most prominent Islamic figures, rose to even greater heights in Indonesian politics, becoming the country’s first democratically elected president in October 1999. However, he was unable to effectively deal with the country’s mounting economic crises, and after sustained mass demonstrations he was forced to resign in 2001.

Despite their occasional forays into politics and the innately political nature of their undertaking, the primary concerns of most Muslim intellectuals remain theoretical and epistemological. Most are academics, men and women of letters whose main vocations are writing, lecturing, and, on occasion, political activism. While many of these intellectuals at times have been involved with various political parties both directly and indirectly, they form a category of their own insofar as the Islamist opposition is concerned.

Another category is composed primarily of Islamist political parties. Found in every Middle Eastern country, these parties vary greatly in the
degree to which Islam informs the ideologies of their overall platforms and in the precise role that they ascribe to Islam in relation to political and socioeconomic questions. For example, Turkey has had a series of ostensibly “Islamic” political parties, almost all of which have a common leadership genealogy: the National Salvation Party, the Refah, the Fazilet, the Saadet, and, most recently, beginning in 2001, the AKP. But although each party before the AKP was successively banned by the highly secularist political establishment, each, in order to operate, sought to downplay its Islamist character and instead played up its adherence to Atatürk’s (secular) legacy. At the opposite end of the scale have been parties such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, which have been unabashedly Islamist in every aspect, from their ideological platform to their base of support in mosques and among seminary students. The Tunisian Al-Nahda (Awakening) was another Islamist party. Although it was comparatively moderate, it too was banned by the Ben Ali regime.

Despite the differences in their specific ideological platforms and their tactics, these Islamist parties share certain characteristics. To begin with, their relationship with the state has been tense and inconsistent. The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and especially in Egypt has often been banned by the state, only to be allowed to operate later. In Turkey, the state frequently banned the existing Islamist party, but the same party leaders established a new one shortly thereafter. In Tunisia, Al-Nahda was banned altogether and not allowed to resurrect, since the government was highly sensitive to the events unfolding in neighboring Algeria.

More importantly, the Islamist parties share largely populist ideologies that appeal especially to the middle and lower-middle classes, such as attention to the economic plight of the lower classes, emphasis on economic nationalism, greater respect for the tenets of Islam in public life, and an end to government corruption. Although generally critical of the state and its leadership, these Islamist parties tend to endorse the overall legitimacy of the existing political order by agreeing to participate in it. They may boycott specific elections in protest over the government’s unfair advantage (or their own electoral weakness), but they generally endorse the existing institutional framework of the state and do not call for its overthrow. At most, they advocate changes through legislation and state directives.

This is in stark contrast with the extremist ideologies and strategies of Islamist parties and/or individuals that are commonly called “fundamentalist” or, more recently, Salafist. Islamic fundamentalists differ from other
Islamists—conservative clerics, intellectuals, and relatively moderate parties—in degree. A product of the zero-sum political cultures that often pervade Middle Eastern polities, Islamic fundamentalists generally reject the legitimacy of the existing political order on the grounds of its essentially un-Islamic character. All state laws and regulations, they argue, must be based on Islamic law, the
sharia.
Some, such as the Islamic Liberation Party in Jordan, also advocate the resurrection of the caliphate system of rule.
¹¹²
Others, such as Egypt’s Gamaʿa, have argued that sovereignty belongs only to God and that believers are called upon to engage in
jihad
(in this sense, battle) against leaders who are unbelievers (
kafir
).
¹¹³
Other examples of fundamentalist parties are Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, the former Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, the Justice and Welfare Party (Adl wal-Ihsan) in Morocco, and Al-Qaeda.

Again, the various Islamic fundamentalist groups have important differences. The Lebanese Hezbollah, for example, is in some respects more concerned about the plight of the Lebanese Shiʿites than it is about the immorality of the Lebanese state. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have emerged in specific national and historical contexts that are unique to Palestine. Nevertheless, the shared features of these and other fundamentalist organizations tend to outnumber their differences. Practically all these organizations and the individuals who belong to them have a literalist interpretation of Islam and its precepts. Their world is one of simple divisions: good versus evil; the oppressed versus the oppressors; the abode of Islam (
dar al-Islam
) versus the abode of war (
dar al-harb
). For them, the best way to achieve their goals is through
jihad,
which they take to mean “holy war” rather than, as more sophisticated interpretations of Islam would have it, “striving” for betterment. Since they reject the legitimacy of the political order, they view
jihad
against the state as one of their fundamental obligations.
¹¹⁴

All of this has often translated into violent attacks on state leaders and institutions, and, on occasion, on the state’s perceived foreign patrons. The FIS, for example, tried, largely without success, to take its struggle against the Algerian state to France, which it saw as the main supporter of the Algiers government. Osama bin Laden’s attacks on American targets were similarly inspired by a belief that the United States was the biggest patron of the Saudi royal family. Also, throughout the 1990s, the Gamaʿa attacked tourists visiting Egypt’s historic monuments, hoping both to embarrass the Egyptian state internationally and to deprive it of tourist revenues. Such terrorist activities have elicited equally violent and brutal reactions from
many Middle Eastern states, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle of political violence that has become all too familiar.

The events of September 11, 2001, put the global spotlight on Islamic fundamentalism. Although its most archaic (and brutal) manifestation was practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan, fundamentalist Islam has pervasive roots in every country of the Middle East, from the highly “Europeanized” Turkey to the ultraconservative Saudi Arabia. Fundamentalism breeds in a vacuum of intellectual political discourse, when the authoritarianism of the state makes it impossible to discuss and examine complex social and political problems in a reasoned manner. State terror elicits terror of a different kind, the terror of the young and the restless who want answers and solutions but find most avenues of expression blocked by an intransigent elite.

The precarious lives of the middle classes make them all the more receptive to extremist alternatives. As we will see in chapter 10, almost all Middle Eastern states launched ambitious economic liberalization programs in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Invariably, this meant inviting foreign investors, encouraging joint-venture enterprises, and giving tax and other investment incentives to domestic entrepreneurs. A few small and medium-sized state-owned enterprises were also privatized and sold off. Apart from multinational corporations, the prime beneficiaries of these privatization efforts were the domestic upper classes, who were well positioned to take advantage of the state’s slow retreat from the economy. They were the ones who had the necessary contacts to secure state contracts, acquire foreign partners, and invest in the newly privatized areas. Many opened up hotels and restaurants, bought and managed buildings, founded factories for food processing and other lucrative businesses, or imported the many foreign consumer items that the middle and upper classes craved—everything from cereals to auto parts, appliances, candy, and the like. Those who could afford it, the rich, were getting richer.

When the recession of the 1980s and 1990s came, the middle and lower classes who by now worked for these businesses were hit hard. Even the multinational corporations scaled back, frightened by the ever-present threat of terrorist attacks (especially in Algeria and Egypt) or disenchanted by the continued inefficiency and corruption of the government. Recession meant unemployment; privatization meant fewer secure government jobs. Even the civil servants who enjoyed job security found it difficult to make ends meet on their government salaries as the price of basic commodities continued to rise and inflation spiraled. Many in the upper classes could ride the wave, but the less wealthy were not as lucky. Today, throughout the
Middle East, the middle classes are barely hanging on, many having to work two or three jobs to maintain their middle-class status. Extremism offers the middle and lower classes—disillusioned and frustrated, living in fear of losing even more economic ground, and powerless to protest the state’s policies—a way to strike hard at the state. And given the steady demise of other ideological alternatives, that extremism has taken on an Islamic character.

Some important conclusions can be drawn here. It should be obvious that Islam is not inherently prone to extremism or violence. In fact, as we have seen, there is a rich array of interpretations and differences between and within the conservative, intellectual, and fundamentalist varieties of Islam. Over the past few decades, there has been a steady politicization of Islam as secular ideologies either have been repressed by state elites (as in the case of socialist ideologies) or have lost popular credibility among the masses on their own (as in the case of Pan-Arabism and secular na--tionalism). Islam was first politicized and then steadily radicalized. Hence Islamic fundamentalism was born. Of the varieties of political Islam, Islamic fundamentalism has attracted by far the most attention because of its violence and its transnational character. The primary fuel for this Islamic fundamentalism has been poverty, both economic poverty and a poverty of political discourse imposed by the state. As long as poverty and political repression remain basic facts of life in the Middle East, there is little reason to believe that Islamic fundamentalism will subside. The ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, in the form of the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, is bound to have consequences for political Islam in the Middle East. Precisely what these consequences will be only time can tell.