Islamism

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sun Nov 10 11:58:30 PST 2002


Olivier Roy has written a lot of detailed and impressive material on political Islam, but he seems caught in a need to trash the left and link it to militant Islamic fundamentalism.

<<SNIP>>

As this piece does as well.

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From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at p...> Date: Thu Sep 26, 2002 7:35 am Subject: Re: [DemocraticLeft] Re: Debate about what exactly

Fascinating. Evola is a major influence on the European far right. See, for overviews on Evola see, "Black Sun," by Nicolas Goodrick-Clarke, " New York Univ. Press, 2002 and, "The Beast Reawakens, " by Martin A. Lee. http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/Boroumand.pdf
>... After this he read out long
passages from Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola (1898– 1974), an Italian author often cited by European extreme rightists. This strange ideological brew suggests the importance of exploring the intel-lectual roots of Islamist terrorism.4 The Genealogy of Islamism The idea of a “pan-Islamic”5 movement appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concomitantly with the rapid transforma-tion of traditional Muslim polities into nation-states. The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906–49). Banna was not a theologian by training. Deeply influenced by Egyptian nation-alism, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal of counteracting Western influences.6 By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revo- lutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had begun by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also had a youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a para-military organization whose slogan “action, obedience, silence” echoed the “believe, obey, fight” motto of the Italian Fascists. Banna’s ideas were at odds with those of the traditional ulema (theologians), and he warned his followers as early as 1943 to expect “the severest opposition” from the traditional religious establishment.7
>From the Fascists—and behind them, from the European tradition of
putatively “transformative” or “purifying” revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins—Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death Journal of Democracy 8 as a political art form. Although few in the West may remember it to-day, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the aestheticization of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom, and faith in “the propaganda of the deed” shaped the antiliberal ethos of both the far right and elements of the far left earlier in the twentieth century. Following Banna, today’s Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shi’ite Islam.8 After the Allied victory in World War II, Banna’s assassination in early 1949, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952–54, the Muslim Brothers found themselves facing the hostility of a secularizing military govern-ment and sharp ideological competition from Egyptian communists. Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Brothers’ chief spokesman and also their liaison with the communists, framed an ideological response that would lay the groundwork for the Islamism of today. Qutb was a follower not only of Banna but of the Pakistani writer and activist Sayyid Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi (1903–79), who in 1941 founded the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Islamic Assembly), which remains an important political force in Pakistan, though it cannot claim notable electoral support.9 Mawdudi’s rejection of nationalism, which he had earlier embraced, led to his interest in the political role of Islam. He de-nounced all nationalism, labeling it as kufr (unbelief). Using Marxist terminology, he advocated a struggle by an Islamic “revolutionary van-guard” against both the West and traditional Islam, attaching the adjectives “Islamic” to such distinctively Western terms as “revolution,” “state,” and “ideology.” Though strongly opposed by the Muslim religious authori- ties, his ideas influenced a whole generation of “modern” Islamists. Like both of his preceptors, Qutb lacked traditional theological train-ing. A graduate of the state teacher’s college, in 1948 he went to study education in the United States. Once an Egyptian nationalist, he joined the Muslim Brothers soon after returning home in 1950. Qutb’s brand of Islamism was informed by his knowledge of both the Marxist and fas-cist critiques of modern capitalism and representative democracy.10 He called for a monolithic state ruled by a single party of Islamic rebirth. Like Mawdudi and various Western totalitarians, he identified his own society (in his case, contemporary Muslim polities) as among the enemies that a virtuous, ideologically self-conscious, vanguard minority would have to fight by any means necessary, including violent revolution, so that a new and perfectly just society might arise. His ideal society was a classless one where the “selfish individual” of liberal democracies would be banished and the “exploitation of man by man” would be abolished. God alone would govern it through the implementation of Islamic law (shari’a). This was Leninism in Islamist dress. When the authoritarian regime of President Gamel Abdel Nasser sup- pressed the Muslim Brothers in 1954 (it would eventually get around to Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand 9 hanging Qutb in 1966), many went into exile in Algeria, Saudi Arabia,11 Iraq, Syria, and Morocco. From there, they spread their revolutionary Islamist ideas—including the organizational and ideological tools bor-rowed from European totalitarianism—by means of a network that reached into numerous religious schools and universities. Most young Islamist cadres today are the direct intellectual and spiritual heirs of the Qutbist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. <snip> Michael Pugliese



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