Amidst the ravages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then, political Islam is on the rise, and its supporters portray it as the ideology of the poor and the dispossessed. They promise 'a better life' for the 'disinherited', 'less inequality', and the 'end of corruption' through the rule of 'sharia'a' (the religious state). Yet in Iran, almost twenty-six years after coming to power with similar promises, Islamic government has become synonymous with greed and corruption. Super-rich clerics and their immediate families have replaced the 'corrupt Royal court' and its entourage. The poor get poorer while the rich get richer. (Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the Islamic regime's previous president and likely to be its next president, is ranked the forty-third richest man in the world by Forbes Magazine.)
What, then, is the basis of the political economy of Islamic fundamentalism? How does it gain its supporters amongst the poor and the 'dispossessed'? What is the relation between the promises of equality in the rule of sharia'a and the real politics of Islamic governance within the world capitalist order?
>From the 1970s onwards, as Islamic societies of the periphery were
incorporated ever-deeper into the world market, the centre-periphery
crisis in these societies entered a new and qualitatively different
phase. The fluctuating, but, overall, downward trend in the price of
raw materials, including - for most of the period - oil, on which
these societies depend, speeded up the widening of inequality in
social, economic and cultural development; the accumulation of foreign
debt; and the increasing inability of such states to control and
restrain the spiralling crises they have to confront.
A modern phenomenon
The 'revolutionary Islamic movement' is a contemporary phenomenon. Whatever may be the indirect or minor influences of past Islamic movements on it, it is attached by an umbilical cord to the form of world capitalism that has developed in the last three decades. The social roots of the 'political Islamic movements' are, essentially, the uprooted – those who, for a variety of reasons, have been waylaid on the path of socio-economic development; and, to whom the new structures have brought nothing but bankruptcies and ruin. Despite variations in its social fabric in different circumstances, the pan-Islamist movement in all the more-or-less developed countries of the periphery (with a few exceptions) has recruited among four main layers.
First are the urban uprooted and deprived. They belong to the explosion of people with no stable relation to the expanding peripheral-capitalist system of production and distribution. These apparently 'cursed' people have in common a peasant ancestry, taking 'refuge' in the dirt and mud surrounding such cities as Cairo, Algiers, and Teheran. They are futureless, hopeless, degraded, and without identity or rights. In Islamic societies, the urban destitute form the social layer most ready to take up the Islamists' banner. They make up the main social base for the 'political Islamic movement.' They also generate its explosive power.
Second are middle layers belonging to pre-capitalist structures. Such people have been bankrupted or marginalised by the spread of capitalist structures and their fate is to struggle harder only to sink into greater poverty. They are important in helping to organise the Islamic movements, and in welding together their socially disparate supporters.
The third layer comprises sections of the merchant and industrial bourgeoisie left outside the circle of power. They find themselves in unequal competition with a bourgeoisie privileged by being close to (and reliant on) a state, the rationale of which has been to orchestrate development from above. In peripheral societies where the bourgeois state (rather than being the product of capitalist development) imposes the growth of capitalism from above - and where the relation between power and capital is turned upside down to the extent that it is easier to rely on power to make money than on wealth as a gateway to power - those layers of the bourgeoisie excluded from power can count on being permanent losers. This fate places manufacturers and merchants in the same camp as the 'wretched of the earth.' Such people not only fill the coffers of the Islamic movement, but can also, for a period, help to increase the attraction of pan-Islamism to the justice-seeking poor by setting up charities, interest-free loan accounts and other such schemes.
Fourth are intellectuals whose social standing has declined, who have lost out, altogether or at least to some degree, during the formation of the new political and civil structures. These intellectuals find their influence and privileges vanishing. They are increasingly isolated. Whether or not in priestly clothes, whether young or old, whether or not - objectively - their re-emergence would answer a structural need, they will use the religious movement to re-establish their place in society. They provide the leadership cadres of the movement, those who pack the ideological baggage and map the political strategy for the 'Islamic movement.'
Anti-enlightenment
The pan-Islamist movement, in its rebellion against the hopelessness capitalism has engendered, rests on the rejection of enlightenment. The ideologists of this rebellion have to close their eyes to the future, turn their backs on reality and take refuge in myths. This obscurantism, ironically, brings today's uprooted poor together, under one umbrella, with yesterday's rich. It is an Islam based on resurrecting, from a vast store of stories and myths, ideas that promise the end of misery for all those on the scrapheap. It insists there is no alternative to a movement that is foreign to common sense and free thought in all its forms. It treats as enemies all who favour scientific thought and who question the so-called 'certainties' (tashkik). In this view any attempt at enlightenment, whether of yesterday or today, is a devilish plot to be fought at all costs.
Against class-based line-ups
The pan-Islamist movement is a furnace in which class line-ups must melt. The non-homogeneous (multi-class) mix in the Islamists' camp dictates a policy of denying class war, or at least marginalising it and removing it from the immediate agenda. Such a non-class-based social bloc, based on religious cultural unity, has no other way of surmounting the class antagonisms within it between the hungry and those with full bellies. Here and there, 'the war between poverty and wealth' becomes a weapon for the movement to browbeat its merchant fellow-travellers when they become restless, or to loosen their purse strings. But in general, sharia'a remains firmly on the side of 'unity' and those who 'split' (monafegh) are worse than those who do not 'believe' (moshrek). It has an uncompromising enmity towards communism or any other political creed which defines society by its class boundaries and perceives class confrontations as inevitable. <SNIP> But at the opposite pole, the working class is powerless not only because of its relative youth and political immaturity but also because it lacks an effective ideological base. The 'Marxism-Leninism' packaged in the 'Academies of Science' of the 'socialist bloc', in conjunction with various theories of the 'non-capitalist road to socialism', in no way served to unite the working class. Quite the opposite. These theories rationalized the splitting of the political and trade-union movement into small groupings, and the collapse of other sections of workers into passivity or open surrender. In some countries the communist and worker parties went as far as liquidating themselves and amalgamating with the ruling party (e.g. in Egypt). In others, there was an inexorable process distancing the mass of workers from worker-based political organisations.
To complete the picture, there was systematic police repression. Taken together, all this explains why, at a time when conditions for the growth of the class pole opposing the bourgeoisie were at their best, the working class remained weaker and more helpless than ever. This catastrophic balance between the two main class poles in society promoted not so much political paralysis as a vacuum – both of political representation and of legitimacy. In such situations the voice from the minarets gains an ear. A multicoloured amalgam of social layers is attracted by the invitation to a jihad, apparently taking its ideology from ancient tales and sayings, but actually resurrected on the ruins, chaos and wretchedness of today. <SNIP> Second, we must consider the ruling political administrations' attitude to religion. In most Islamic countries, despite the gradual separation between the state and the religious structures - and all the ups and downs in the relations between them - some form of working alliance has always been maintained. The prime purpose of this has been to oppose the left and the workers' movement. At every juncture where the workers and democratic movement have made advances, threatening the despotic and authoritarian systems, the religious apparatus has joined the army and police as an arm of repression. In return, from time to time, the state has acted to spread the network of religious schools and mosques; to facilitate the establishment of workplace and neighbourhood Islamic societies; and to promote the religious establishment's political influence by means of cultural, devotional, and charitable organisations. Finally - in conditions of a single-party state - there has been toleration of the quasi-party activity of religious fractions inside the ruling party and government. Without a serious analysis of the role of the state in Islamic countries, and without considering the relations between religion and state, it is impossible to understand how Islamic societies became so defenceless in the face of growing religious obscurantism and backward-looking political movements.
The third factor is the effect of imperialist policy during the Cold War. Throughout it, one of the major weapons of imperialist powers against liberation movements (and movements for freedom and socialism) in Islamic countries was religion. In using religion to stupefy the masses and to denounce opposition, imperialism was both resourceful and relentless. It used the religious weapon (through groups, parties and men of influence) to provoke splits in the working-class movement, sabotage progressive and nationalist movements, and even to destabilise anti-imperialist governments or those allied with Soviet Union. <SNIP> Cultural fatigue
In a society giving birth to a radical Islamic movement, the cultural make-up is the first victim. The cultural sphere disintegrates into numerous ever-smaller, conflicting formations, united only by belief in the absolute. This calamitous process effectively closes the route to cultural advance. Scientific thought, experimental sciences, philosophy, as well as values emanating from these, are walled off by absolutist cultural structures. The quest for the absolute - the struggle to annex knowledge to an integrated and dominant ideological monopoly - becomes the governing, social ethic.
In addition there is a return to the most extreme paternalism, superstition and machismo, deepening the roots of the ideas that will ultimately create, and secure, the ultra-conservative, absolutist, and despotic structures of the Islamic state. In this process, not only is the value-system of society overturned, but cultural, educational and ethical structures are overhauled. Muslim schools, Islamic social gatherings, and so on, reappear. The intellectual potential of society is gradually eroded. Thought, in all its manifestations is enslaved to belief and Islamic ethics. Sceptical questioning - essential to scientific and philosophical thought - is rejected as a tool of the devil. Combine these pressures on independent thought with daily attacks on modernism and everything new, and the elements of a sterile and rigid intellectual life are all in place. Instead we have a situation in which intellectual servitude, demagoguery and obscurantism can breed; and in which religious despotism can grow.
Social psychology
More insidiously still, the psychological potential of society becomes poisoned, and with disastrous effects. A corrosive mixture of absolutism and power-worship, juxtaposed with the placing of a monopoly belief at the centre of the social value-system of a polarized society leads to a cult of violence. The ideological process numbs the senses, creating an acceptance of a militaristic, police mentality. This can be expressed as the exhortation to the violence of the jihad (holy war); as the amre be ma'aruf (or duty to punish those who do not observe Islamic laws); as the cult of martyrdom and the 'blood' (witness the fountain spewing blood in the 'Martyrs' Cemetery' in Teheran); and as the self-mutilation associated with the mourning of saints and martyrs. All these, and other things, create an atmosphere where acts of violence and the shedding of blood become a social norm.
There are other negative outcomes. The situation increases the power of the male, the khan, and the mullah; leads to unquestioning acceptance of received wisdom; encourages crude populism; promotes the reduction of difficult concepts to simple absurdity; and creates fertile ground for the rise in religiosity and belief in the supernatural. Ultimately this leaves social mistrust and creates the basis for future ideological and police-military repressive institutions.