A disputed term, widely used in the US and to a lesser extent in Britain
to denote any movement to favour strict observance of the teachings of the
Qur'an and the Shari'a (Islamic Law). On the continent, as well as in
Britain and amongst many scholars of Islam and the Middle East, there is a
preference for terms such as ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamicism’, ‘Islamists’, or
‘Islamicists’ in referring to the current activist political trend. Islamism
emerges out of the reform (islah) project of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that was launched by Jamal al Din al-Afghani (1837-97),
Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), and Rashid Rida (1865-1935). The reform
envisaged was broadly defined to incorporate a revitalization of culture,
society, and religion utilizing European science and techniques coupled with
the requirement of drawing on the moral and cultural tradition of early
Islam, of the pious forefathers (al-salaf,
ad 610-855). Thereafter, the
revitalization of Islam and Islamic society, and hence its defence, came to
dominate this trend as the fate of the Islamic world was increasingly seen
as being in the grip of European power to do with as it would.
Reform (islah) was comprehensive in addressing the causes of
backwardness. In their efforts against the conservative and traditionalist
religious forces hostile to reform, Abduh and Rida focused on the salaf
and condemned all innovations (bida) introduced into Islam after
their time, including the law schools (madhhabs). They called for a
return to the independent interpretation of the sacred sources (ijtihad),
of the Qur'an and Sunna of the Prophet and consensus of his Companions which
was said to have ended during the tenth to eleventh centuries. This would
allow those in authority to pursue what was in the best interests of the
Community in the secular sphere though it was never to be in conflict with
the Qur'an and Sunna. This type of argument contributed to the emergence of
a modern tendency to focus on the practices of the early years of Islam (salafiyya)
which remains influential until the present time. All innovations in Islam
that had occurred throughout its history after the salaf which were
regarded as having caused schisms and accepted local customs which led
Muslims away from the straight path were condemned. By returning to the pure
practice of the Prophet and his Companions, the traditional structures of
Muslim society including the secular domain could more easily be exposed to
new cultural and social dynamisms leading to reform.
In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) was founded in
opposition to these movements to renew the focus on the approach of the
salafiyya (sometimes referred to as neo-salafiyya to distinguish
it from the approach taken by Abduh and Rida), this time to bring its ideas
to the ‘man in the street’ and to exclude the colonial society by recovering
dominance of the public discourse, and to oppose Western imperialism and
secularization. They would look deep into the roots of Islam in order to
purify and renew it by focusing on the principles of the earliest
generations of Islam, the salaf. In effect, they rejected the
integrationist approach of the earlier reform movement as cooptation.
A further intensification of Islamic concern and activity can be discerned
from the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in which the Arab forces suffered
a crushing and humiliating defeat. This sounded the death knell of Arab
nationalism as a viable alternative strategy and ideology. Added to this was
the successful Iranian revolution toward the end of the 1970s, the
disorienting effects upon the region of the long-running Iraq-Iran War
(1980-8), the
Gulf War (1990-1) which led to Western militaries being invited into
Saudi Arabia, the proclaimed protector of the holy cities of Mecca and
Medina, and the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 which brought a
return of Western militaries this time to Afghanistan. Events on both these
last two occasions had transpired to bring almost all Arab governments to
join in alliance with the West, some, in the first instance, sending forces
to Saudi Arabia alongside those from the West to attack an Arab state. In
the case of Afghanistan, no Arab military participated. The Iraq-Kuwait war
is an indication of the degree of irrelevance to which Arab nationalism had
fallen; Afghanistan indicated the degree of Arab governments' sensitivity to
their populations' resistence to their governments' cooperation with US
Middle East policy.
The Muslim Brothers themselves reinvigorated the position of moderate reform
(though without abandoning the salafiyya approach) which at their
founding had been condemned. Other groups, regarding this as cooptation,
developed more militant and in some cases jihadist approaches, the most
extreme example being
al-Qaida.
Thus, Islamism expanded into the gaping vacuum of a dying nationalism and,
by focusing on domestic issues, for a time, continued to particularize
national identities, sometimes encouraged by governments. For example,
President Anwar al Sadat of Egypt on attaining leadership 1970 clothed his
rhetoric in Islamic symbolism, invited Islamist activists in exile to return
as a counterforce to an organized political left in Egypt, and reintroduced
aspects of Shari'a Law into the legal system. This Islamist response with
its neo-salafiyya tendency led to a proliferation of new-style voluntary
benevolent associations (jama'iyya) whose registered numbers in Egypt
alone in the early 1990s were over 12,800, all concerned with social
services, together with an unknown number of unregistered associations. In
this way, Islamist spokesmen emerged in many Arab and Muslim non-Arab
countries with political agendas designed to relate Islam to state power,
either openly, by stealth, or by violence.
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