THE DOUBLE DEATH OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM by Philip Cunliffe
In 1994, Olivier Roy, Research Director at the Paris Centre for National Scientific Research, published a controversial book entitled The Failure of Political Islam (1994, I.B. Tauris). The book detailed the decline of that movement popularly known as 'Islamic fundamentalism' in the English-language press and as 'Islamism' in the French media. Events since September 11 2001 would seem to spectacularly invalidate Roy's claim. So on what basis did he reach this conclusion?
Modern Islamic fundamentalism emerged as a significant force in Middle Eastern politics as early as 1970. The defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War called into question the prospects of Arab nationalism destroying the Zionist enemy. This opened up the ideological terrain of the Middle East to religious revivalism. Politically, Islamism rapidly gained ground post-1970 at the expanse of secular leftist, liberal, nationalist and pan-Arabist movements.
But, despite the popular images of the revival of primordial religious impulses, the ideology that followed the demise of Arab nationalism was distinct from a mere restoration of religious orthodoxy (that is the usual understanding of religious fundamentalism). The difference lies in the fact that Islamism defines Islam explicitly as a political system of thought, as a political basis with which to restructure modern state and society (rather than merely as a cultural practice). Its advocates have consciously posed themselves as competing with secular ideologies such as nationalism or socialism; hence their own designation - 'Islamism'.
Islamist organisations have taken one of several forms: that of revolutionary party or militia (e.g., Hizbollah); a Western-style political party (e.g., Turkey's most recent Islamist incarnation, the Justice and Prosperity Party, the AKP), an elite network of religious militants (the traditional Arab Muslim Brotherhood, or 'Ikhwan); or a mixture of the latter two (e.g., the Jordanian 'Ikhwan').
Following the demise of Third World nationalism, Islamism in the 1970s and early 1980s fused reactionary themes of religious revivalism with traditional Third World themes of anti-imperialism and North-South opposition. Consequently, there seem to be many points of similarity between Islamism and traditional Third World liberation movements. Militant groups such as Hizbollah often adopted and 'Islamicised' the political vocabulary and organisation of Third World revolt. The 'hizb', 'shura' and 'amir' of scripture substituted for the vanguard party, central committee and secretary general of Leninist organisation, respectively. The Islamist regimes of Sudan and Iran have overseen naitonalist economic planning in the garb of 'Islamic socialism'. Some Islamist militias, such as Hizbollah, AMAL (Lebanon) and Hamas (Palestine), style themselves as national liberation movements, who claiming political support beyond a narrow religious following. In Arab Africa, the acronym of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, FIS ('Front Islamique de Salut'), recalling 'fils' - 'son' in French - was deliberately chosen to indicate that FIS styled itself after the heroic tradition of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that liberated Algeria from French colonialism.
In his book, Roy argued in a novel manner that Islamism was imploding from its own internal ideological contradictions, as much as any external pressure of state repression. Due to these internal ideological contradictions, Islamism cannot hope to hold the fort of Third World liberation. Roy attributes the failure of Islamism to four factors: (1) 'paradigm failure' (the failure of the Sudanese and Iranian regimes to export their revolution); (2) revolutionary failure (the successful response of Middle Eastern state repression to terror); (3) ideological impasse; and the (4) 'petro-Islam' of Saudi Arabia. It is on the last two in particular that Roy focuses.
Roy identifies several major internal contradictions of Islamism. Firstly, there is the fact the individual's relationship to God always intellectually and ideologically outweighs any other consideration. Membership of the 'hizb', or incept of an Islamic society, is defined by faith, or an individual mystical experience. To fill their ranks, Islamists are dependent on enough people enjoying mystical conversions. For Islamists therefore, political change does not come about through argumentation or persuasion; it literally falls from the sky, spontaneously inhering in a vanguard of 'true believers'. There is nothing inherent in Islamism that logically necessitates political participation in the public sphere.
Islamists attempt to transform society in order to establish one where the individual believer can achieve total virtue. Islamic society is a necessary condition for the believer to achieve total virtue. But alternatively such a society functions only by virtue of its own members. This is what Roy dubs the 'self-consuming loop' of Islamist ideology, that vitiates any point of departure for Islamist activity.
Thirdly, Roy points out that the relentless Islamist emphasis on personal qualities such as virtue, or broadly behaviour that is pleasing to God, undermines any notion of specifically Islamic political institutions. Islamist political institutions will spontaneously function, incumbent on the virtue of those who participate in them. Hence, in Roy's words 'The Islamist political model being attainable only in a man, and not in institutions, [this] alone makes the creation of a polis, an Islamist "polity", impossible.'(Roy, op. cit., p.62) For the only thing that can be guaranteed about a virtuous Islamist leader is that he will eventually be followed by someone less virtuous, undermining the basis of any Islamist 'polity'.
Then there is jihad. For all the terror jihad evokes in the Western press, jihad is not even primarily directed at the non-believing enemy. First and foremost, jihad is oriented around the relationship between the believer and God. It is aimed at demonstrating the strength of the individual's faith. This makes exhibitionism inherent in jihad. Assuming that the 'aim' of the September 11 hijackers was to provoke a global mass uprising of Muslims, the fact that this never materialised is irrelevant to the fate of the hijackers' eternal souls. So although Islamist jihad may make for spectacular orgies of violence and narcissistic self-immolation, it is ultimately politically hollow. The goal of martyrdom erodes the necessity of long-term strategic planning, until it eventually logically eclipses the necessity of victory itself. So the relentless individuation implicit in Islamism through themes of faith, virtue, and jihad, when carried to their logical conclusion, necessarily negate modern mass politics. Politics presumes and requires speaker and listener; Islamism presumes individual and God.
Moreover, Roy maintains that any Islamist seizure of state power necessarily undermines itself. By assimilating Islam to the state, Islam finds itself reduced to the level of the profane. Rather than being a transcendent sanctuary away from worldly troubles, Islam becomes beholden to the mundane economic success or failure of a Third World state in a global economic system riven with structural inequalities. This dynamic can be clearly observed in the decay of the Islamic Republic in Iran.
The rise of Islamism parallels the rise of Western 'new social movements' (NSMs), such as environmentalism and feminism. While the influence of Western NSMs grew from the decline of the organised labour movement post-1970, Islamism expanded over the ruins of Third World nationalism. Organisationally NSMs and Islamist movements exhibit many similarities. Political organisation among Islamists has increasingly given way to Da'wa ('Call') organisations, with structures characterised by informal membership roles, networks, voluntary helpers, donations, charitable trusts and Islamic NGOs. Often Da'wa organisations seek to transform society incrementally by modifying inter-personal, cultural relations or social mores (by funding Islamic dress, religious libraries, sexually segregated transport for students, etc.). The obsessive focus on cultural authenticity and sexual / gender relations parallels many of the emphases of Western NSMs.
Many of these organisations work by infiltrating the ranks of the metropolitan elites, rather than by building mass membership. Many Islamist groups maintain close links with centres of power: the Jordanian 'Ikhwan' has close ties to the Jordanian monarchy, as does the Islamic Constitutional Movement in Kuwait to the Kuwaiti monarchy. So the logical ideological conclusion of the Islamist hizb is elitist mysticism, on a drip feed of state power. As has been frequently pointed out, most of the September 11 hijackers and Bin Laden himself come from the ranks of the Saudi elite. The operatives of Al Qaida wander like crazed, belligerent hermits from jihad to jihad, mostly at the fringes of the Middle East (Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Indonesia), more or less indifferent to the concrete political processes within these countries. Conscience-driven individuals and mystical experiences, it seems, are much more common to both the alienated metropolitan elites and the Arab middle classes than they are to the majority of the population in either the West or the Middle East.
Being closer to a traditional conception of religious fundamentalism, Roy terms this emergent more apolitical movement 'neofundamentalism' to precisely differentiate it from the Islamism incarnated by Khomeini. The distinction is not a rigid historical dividing line, and with the decline of Khomeinist Islamism, the two terms are more or less inter-changeable in their contemporary reference. The utility of the category 'neofundamentalism' is to conceptually eke out the inherent conservatism of Islamism, and illustrate the ideological development of the conservative, elite-based networks of neofundamentalism out of the nominally revolutionist Islamism.
Although ideologically speaking, Islamism is a walking corpse, its inner ideological life cannot be divorced from the various political, social and economic threads of world politics. In the absence of progressive secular politics, the corruption and authoritarianism of Middle Eastern elites has allowed Islamists to retain political capital as oppositional movements. But this is only a short-term respite from the unbearable pressure of the political vacuum at their core. While Islamists can react to their opponents, they cannot successfully implement their own vision of universal progress that is independent of the secular modern state.
Moreover (as everyone is now aware) the US has also breathed life into modern Islamism. The US allied itself with Islamic fundamentalism as early as 1945, following an historic meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. Predicated on a cold war alliance between the West and conservative Islamic fundamentalism, the Saudi regime served as a model for wider US relations with the Muslim world: in particular, the military fundamentalist regimes of General Numeiri in Sudan (1969-1985) and General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan (1977-1988).
The continued survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the 1991 Gulf War gave renewed life to the US-Saudi axis despite the end of the Cold War. The Saudis were one of few cold war allies to survive the clearing out of the old guard, while other erstwhile clients were overthrown or edged out of power with tacit or open US support (e.g., General Ershad in Bangladesh, (December 1990), Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan (November 1993), and, of course, the Gulf War against Saddam (1990-1991), amongst many others).
The US-Saudi relationship was deepened by two events: the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989) and the Iranian revolution (1979). After 1979, following pro-Iranian turmoil within the Arabian Gulf, the Saudi monarchy was more than willing to fortify its Islamic credentials and expand its regional role. Vast sums were poured into funding various organisations with the aim of promoting an Islamism that emphasised a rigid, orthodox implementation of Islamic 'Sharia' law, avoiding any of the political or social content of Khomeinism (such as populism, republicanism or any notion of 'revolution' - a theme distinctly absent from Bin Laden's communiqués, for example). The CIA, Pakistani intelligence and the original Al Qaida trained, managed and equipped the thousands of Arab Muslim men who flocked to the jihad in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation. The neofundamentalism of Al Qaida is the offspring of the ideological decay of Islamism, mediated by Saudi petrodollars and the dynamics of cold war politics.
But the US-Saudi 'special relationship' was already fraying by the mid-1990s. The US was increasingly perturbed as the 'Arab Afghans' now returned to swell the ranks of Islamist movements opposed to US client regimes, particularly Egypt. Now after the slaughter of September 11, it is even less tenable for the US to rely on so unwieldy a political weapon as Islamism. Since Islamism snapped so viciously at the hand that feeds, their old ring master the US has decided a renegotiation of US strategy toward the Muslim world is in order. It is clear that the 'Saudi model' of cold war alliance with a reactionary Muslim state is unravelling. The success of the Islamist opposition in the sham recent Pakistani elections, for example, only confirms the fact that they are now exiled from the corridors of power (whereas during the cold war they filled the ranks of cabinet advisors).
Unlike Pakistan, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is more complex, given the critical Saudi position as the dominant producer in world oil markets, on whom Washington is relying to make good any shortfall in oil output in event of war with Iraq. Also, it is clear that if there is any political content to the nihilistic tantrum that is Bin Ladenism, it aims at the removal of Western troops from Saudi soil and the overthrow of the House of Saud. Given US reliance on Saudi oil, Washington has avoided openly destabilising Saudi Arabia (as it has done, for example with Pakistan through the demands it has imposed on General Musharraf for support in the 'war on terror').
The Bush administration is scrambling to ideologically distance itself from the Saudi regime, by ceding the stage to hawkish conservatives within its own ranks (e.g., the notorious briefing paper presented to the Pentagon's civilian Defence Policy Board in July 2002, that recommended seizing Saudi oil fields unless Saudi Arabia stopped supporting terrorism - see Washington Post, August 7 2002). Although the Bush administration quickly pointed out that they did not endorse the report, Donald Rumsfeld's public criticism of the report did not include the normal expressions of support for Washington's old ally. The Saudis too, it seems, are soon to be swept onto the same ash heap of history as other cold war allies.
Although the chances of a US invasion of Saudi Arabia are slim, the possibility of ready access to Iraqi oil under a post-Hussein regime serve to raise US hopes of knocking Saudi off its pedestal as dominant oil producer. If the US occupies Iraq, it will no doubt feel freer to actively destabilise the Saudi regime with less fear of long-term repercussions on world oil markets, or any political threat of 'Islamist gangrene'. What is for certain is that any assault on Iraq would represent the end of US political and economic dependence on Saudi Arabia, and the final abandonment of Muslim fundamentalism as political weapon of choice in the region. -- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'