The case that a political term has outlived its usefulness
To watch
the Arab world’s political transformation over the past year has been,
in part, to track the inexorable rise of Islamism. Islamist groups—that
is, parties favoring a more religious society—are dominating elections.
Secular politicians and thinkers in the Arab world complain about the
“Islamicization” of public life; scholars study the sociology of
Islamist movements, while theologians pick apart the ideological
dimensions of Islamism. This March, the US Institute for Peace published
a collection of essays surveying the recent changes in the Arab world,
entitled “The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are.”
From all this, you might assume that “Islamism” is the most important
term to understand in world politics right now. In fact, the Islamist
ascendancy is making it increasingly meaningless.
In Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the most important factions are led
overwhelmingly by religious politicians—all of them “Islamist” in the
conventional sense, and many in sharp disagreement with one another over
the most basic practical questions of how to govern. Explicitly secular
groups are an exception, and where they have any traction at all they
represent a fragmented minority. As electoral democracy makes its impact
felt on the Arab world for the first time in history, it is becoming
clear that it is the Islamist parties that are charting the future
course of the Arab world.
As they do, “Islamist” is quickly becoming a term as broadly
applicable—and as useless—as “Judeo-Christian” in American and European
politics. If important distinctions are emerging within Islamism, that
suggests that the lifespan of “Islamist” as a useful term is almost at
an end—that we’ve reached the moment when it’s time to craft a new
language to talk about Arab politics, one that looks beyond “Islamist”
to the meaningful differences among groups that would once have been
lumped together under that banner.
Some thinkers already are looking for new terms that offer a more
sophisticated way to talk about the changes set in motion by the Arab
Spring. At stake is more than a label; it’s a better understanding of
the political order emerging not just in the Middle East, but around the
world.
***
The term “Islamist” came
into common use in the 1980s to describe all those forces pushing
societies in the Islamic world to be more religious. It was deployed by
outsiders (and often by political rivals) to describe the revival of
faith that flowered after the Arab world’s defeat in the 1967 war with
Israel and subsequent reflective inward turn. Islamist preachers called
for a renewal of piety and religious study; Islamist social service
groups filled the gaps left by inept governments, organizing health
care, education, and food rations for the poor. In the political realm,
“Islamist” applied to both Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which disavowed
violence in its pursuit of a wealthier and more powerful Islamic middle
class, and radical underground cells that were precursors to Al Qaeda.
What they had in common was that they saw a more religious
leadership, and more explicitly Islamic society, as the antidote to the
oppressive rule of secular strongmen such as Hafez al-Assad, Hosni
Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein.
Over the years, the term “Islamist” continued to be a useful catchall
to describe the range of groups that embraced religion as a source of
political authority. So long as the Islamist camp was out of power, the
one-size-fits-all nature of the term seemed of secondary importance.
But in today’s ferment, such a broad term is no longer so useful.
Elections have shown that broad electoral majorities support Islamism in
one flavor or another. The most critical matters in the Arab world—such
as the design of new constitutional orders in Egypt, Tunisia, and
Libya—are now being hashed out among groups with competing
interpretations of political Islam. In Egypt, the non-Islamic political
forces are so shy about their desire to separate mosque from government
that many eschew the term “secular,” requesting instead a “civil” state.
In Tunisia’s elections last fall, the Islamist Ennahda Party—an
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—swept to victory, but is having
trouble dealing with its more doctrinaire Islamist allies to the right.
In Libya, virtually every politician is a socially conservative Muslim.
The country’s recent elections were won by a party whose leaders believe
in Islamic law as a main reference point for legislation and support
polygamy as prescribed by Islamic sharia law, but who also believe in a
secular state—unlike their more Islamist rivals, who would like a direct
application of sharia in drafting a new constitutional framework.
In Egypt, the two best-organized political groups since the fall of
Mubarak have been the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi Noor Party—both
“Islamist,” but dramatically different in nearly all practical respects.
The Brotherhood has been around for 84 years, with a bourgeois
leadership that supports liberal economics and preaches a gospel of
success and education.
The rival Salafi Noor Party, on the other hand,
includes leaders who support a Saudi-style extremist view of Islam that
holds the religious should live as much as possible in a pre-modern
lifestyle, and that non-Muslims should live under a special Islamic
dispensation for minorities. A third Islamist wing in Egypt includes the
jihadists—the organization that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in
1981, which has officially renounced violence and has surfaced as a
political party. (Its main agenda item is to advocate the release of
“the blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, imprisoned in the United States
as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)
***
‘Islamist” might be an
accurate label for all these parties, but as a way to understand the
real distinctions among them it’s becoming more a hindrance than a help.
A useful new terminology will need to capture the fracture lines and
substantive differences among Islamic ideologies.
In Egypt, for example, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis
believe in the ultimate goal of a perfect society with full
implementation of Islamic sharia. Yet most Brothers say that’s an
abstract and unattainable aim, and in practice are willing to ignore
many provisions of Islamic law—like those that would limit modern
finance, or those that would outright ban alcohol—in the interest of
prosperity and societal peace. The Salafis, by contrast, would shut down
Egypt’s liquor industry and mixed-gender beaches, regardless of the
consequences for tourism or the country’s Christian minority.
There’s a cleavage between Islamists who still believe in a secular
definition of citizenship that doesn’t distinguish between Muslims and
non-Muslims, and those who believe that citizenship should be defined by
Islamic law, which in effect privileges Muslims. (Under Saudi Arabia’s
strict brand of Islamist government, the practice of Christianity and
Shiite Islam is actually illegal.) And there’s the matter of who would
interpret religious law: Is it a personal matter, with each Muslim free
to choose which cleric’s rulings to follow? Or should citizens be
legally required to defer to doctrinaire Salafi clerics?
Many thinkers are trying to craft a new language for the emerging
distinctions within Islamism. Issandr El Amrani, who edits the blog The
Arabist and has just started a new column for the news site Al-Monitor
about Islamists in power, suggests we use the names of the organizations
themselves to distinguish the competing trends: Ikhwani Islamists for
the establishment Muslim Brothers and organizations that share its
traditions and philosophy; Salafi Islamists for Salafis, whose name
means “the predecessors” and refers to following in the path of the
Prophet Mohammed’s original companions; and Wasati Islamists for the
pluralistic democrats that broke away from the Brotherhood to form
centrist parties in Egypt.
Gilles Kepel, the French political scientist who helped popularize
the term “Islamist” in his writings on the Islamic revival in the 1980s,
grew dissatisfied with its limits the more he learned about the
diversity within Islamism. By the 1990s, he shifted to the more academic
term “re-Islamification movements.” Today he suggests that it’s more
helpful to look at the Islamist spectrum as coalescing around competing
poles of “jihad,” those who seek to forcibly change the system and
condemn those who don’t share those views, and “legalism,” those who
would use instruments of sharia law to gradually shift it. But he’s
still frustrated with the terminology’s ability to capture politics as
they evolve. “I’ve tried to remain open-eyed,” he said.
It’s also helpful to look at what Islamists call themselves, but that
only offers a perfunctory guide, since many Islamists consider religion
so integral to their thinking that it doesn’t merit a name. Others
might seek for domestic political reasons to downplay their religious
aims. For example, Turkey’s ruling party, a coterie of veteran Islamists
who adapted and subordinated their religious principles to their
embrace of neoliberal economics, describes itself as a party of
“values,” rather than of Islam. In Libya, the new government will be led
by the personally conservative technocrat Mahmoud Jibril; though his
party could be considered “Islamist” in the traditional sense, it’s
often identified as secular in Western press reports, to distinguish it
from its more religious rivals. Jibril himself prefers “moderate
Islamic.”
The efforts to come up with a new language to talk about Islamic
politics are just beginning. They are sure to evolve as competing
movements sharpen their ideologies, and as the lofty rhetoric of
religion meets the hard road of governing. The importance of moving
beyond “Islamism” will only grow: After all, what we call the “Islamic
world” includes about a quarter of the world’s population, stretching
from Muslim-majority nations in the Arab world, along with Turkey,
Pakistan, and Indonesia, to sizable communities from China to the United
States. For Islam, the current political moment could be likened to the
aftermath of 1848 in Europe, when liberal democracy coalesced as an
alternative to absolute monarchy. Only after that, once virtually every
political movement was a “liberal” one, did it become important to
distinguish between socialists and capitalists, libertarians and
statists—the distinctions that have seemed essential ever since.
