Is "the left" soft on Islamism?

Michael Walzer, a well-known theorist of just war, writes in the Winter 2015 Dissent, where Walzer is emeritus editor, on Islamism and the Left. The Dissent website features additional material, including endnotes to the article and this exchange, Andrew March and Michael Walzer, Islamism and the Left: An Exchange (Online Only) Winter 2015.

Walzer is a thoughtful guy and his article is a serious one. But processing it involves navigating the difference between the longer-term questions involved in evaluating Islamist governments and movements from a left-democratic perspective, and the short-term reality of this moment in which warmongers of both the neocon and liberal-interventionist variety are using the threat of Islamic fanaticism in groups like ISIS to promote reckless foreign and military policies.

When I read the print article, my first reaction was that his argument is too general to throw much light on the first question and therefore reads like it's encouraging the purveyors of reckless Middle Eastern foreign policy. Because the article is carefully but clearly scolding "the left" in the US and Europe for not being critical enough of Islamist fundamentalism in the world and especially not of the political variety.

Walzer argues that "the left" tends to naively view Islamist radicalism in the Middle East as opponents to Western imperialism. This produces a "reluctance to condemn Islamist crimes, and that is the great eagerness to condemn the crimes of the West"

He also argues that "the left" is somehow dogmatically unwilling to look at the significance of religion in jihadist ideology because "the left" just doesn't want to think about religion. "The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion." In the view of "the left," he argues, "Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base."

What struck me on the first reading of Walzer's piece is that what he described as that of "the left" didn't sound familiar to me from the considerable amount of reading, listening, researching and talking about such issues with people I consider progressives, mostly but not exclusively Americans.

To take one example, some of the best-informed and serious analysis of American foreign policy toward militant Islam in the last 12 years has come from Juan Cole, an expert on Shi'a Islam, the form dominant in Iran and Iraq. He opposed the Iraq War and has cautioned about new interventions in Iraq ans Syria over ISIS. He supported the US-NATO role in Libya, whose results also seem to have been largely disastrous.

I don't known whether Walzer would consider him a "leftist" of the kind he talks about in his article. Certainly, Cole has been very critical of the actions and effects of Western imperialism in the Muslim world. And he has also been a careful analyst and critic of the various forms of political Islam in the world today.

We see both of those factors in this recent post of his, 5 Surprising Ways Iran is better than Israel Informed Comment 02/27/2015. On Iran's government, he writes:

Iran's government is not one I agree with on almost anything, and it is dictatorial and puritanical. I wish Iranians would get past it and join the world’s democracies. Israel is better than Iran in most regards – for Israeli citizens it has more of a rule of law and more personal liberties. But just to be fair, there are some ways Iran's policies are better than Israel’s.

And in this paragraph, he explains how Iran's historical experience with European imperial powers shaped the Islamist movement there, including political Islam, ending with some comments about the evolution of the political movement of Zionism in Israel:

Iran and European Jewry were both treated horribly in the 19th and 20th centuries by the major European imperial countries. Obviously, proportionally Jews suffered much more than Iranians did; about a third of Jews were murdered in the Nazi genocide. But Iran also suffered significant loss of human life and property. Tsarist Russia fought two wars with it in the early nineteenth century, and annexed from it substantial territory. Britain and Russia forbade Iran from constructing a railroad in the late 19th century, robbing it of a key tool of economic advance; that probably killed a lot of Iranians if you think about its implications. The British and the Russians opposed the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 and helped make sure Iranians did not get liberty and a rule of law. Britain backed the rise of the Pahlevi dictatorship in the 1920s, if it did not in fact simply impose it. The US overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 because it had nationalized the oil industry and imposed the megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on that country. Ultimately Iranians, outraged at constant interference in their domestic affairs, overthrew the shah and instituted a revolutionary regime based on indigenous Iranian culture, especially religious culture. Although the Jewish response to the European genocide against Jews was not immediately religious (most Zionists were secular), over time religion has come to play a bigger and bigger part in Israeli life. In a sense, Israel and Iran are both reactions against European nationalism and imperialism, though Israel has now allied with the West, whereas Iran continues to oppose many Western policies.

Juan Cole has never struck me as afflicted by any problem of not being able to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to political Islam.

And that tends to be true of the writers, analysts and activists with which I have some experience. Of course, people who consider themselves in some way "left" can and do criticize aspects of Islamist politics and of Islamic religious practices. And most of those people seem to also be able to look at international conflicts and conflicts within countries involving religious-political parties and make some kind of realistic, practical distinction among them. I can't remember when if ever I've seen someone I identified as part of "the left" may the argument: "Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base."

Walzer's article struck me as trying to say that anyone on "the left" who is critical of militarist foreign policy on the Middle East or terrorism more generally should spend a lot of their time and energy echoing the anti-Islam rhetoric of those who advocate such policies.

Andrew March frames his discussion of Walzer's essay this way:

We can hear in Walzer himself the voice of the anguished and disappointed critic. He is not speaking to the demagogues of Fox News or to the even more belligerent purveyors of anti-Muslim racism. He is speaking to the tribe he still claims as his own—the global left. But his alienation from that tribe is much more palpable than his connection. Walzer is addressing the left, but neither sharing in its anxieties nor moving with its moral and emotional rhythms.

He also argues that Walzer's approach itself criticizes Islamism in an essentially ideological, non-empirical manner. "Is it really helpful to speak about 'the left's' attitude toward Islamism in such general terms, without looking at specific left debates about Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, or Iran?"

March also thinks, as I did, that Walzer sounds like he's making a demand of "the left" that can never actually be satisfied:

Worse, the charge that one does not denounce enough is notoriously slippery. Like demands for Muslims to—finally!—speak out and condemn terrorism, for American Jews to condemn Israeli settlements, or for black leaders to condemn inner city rage, Walzer’s essay suffers from both confirmation and selection bias. ... The problem is that no amount of contradictory evidence is ever good enough. The one who has moved first can always reply, “Well, yes, there are these exceptions, of course, but I still don’t have enough comrades declaring Islamist zealots our primary enemies.” This response is as slippery as it is disappointingly parochial.

Walzer's rejoinder to March's criticism is not without a touch of bitterness.

Interestingly enough, it's Walzer rather than March who relates this controversy to the endless Cold War game of non-Communist left activists and writers demanding that anyone protesting against misdeeds of their own government in the United States that they fall all over themselves also screeching about every real and imagined misdeed of the Soviet Union. It was kind of hard for anyone then to point out how official anti-Communist ideology was used to inflate threats foreign and domestic, if they themselves were simultaneously howling, "The Commies are everywhere and they're out to get us!! Aieee-eeee!!!"

Here's a tip. Anyone who goes on, say, a news program to caution about getting involved in an unnecessary war based on bad assumptions and unrealistic optimism about outcomes is not going to make their point very credible if in the same appearance if they do a Lindsay Graham imitation and hyperventilate about how the ISIS super-terrorists will be killing us all in our beds any moment now. Lindsay Graham on ISIS: "This President needs to rise to the occasion before we all git killed back here at home."

Sam Seder reported on Sen. Chicken Little's careful analysis in this 09/15/2014 YouTube video:

Anyone who claims to be a liberal or progressive or part of the "the left" is not going to make any successful antiwar argument if they couple it by echoing Graham's pants-wetting hysteria. All they will do is make themselves part of the prowar argument in the form of "Even the liberal so-and-so says that ISIS could murder us all tomorrow."

Walzer near the end of rejoinder makes it clear that he basically favors the necon/liberal-interventionist argument of the moment. He isn't just interested in the larger critique. He likes Lindsay Graham's position, though he doesn't quite reach the Senator's level of squawking fear in these pieces. Walzer writes:

For the America he excoriates is right now the only force effectively opposing or, at least, containing, the power of ISIS and therefore the beheadings and the mass executions and the enslavement of Yazidi girls. ... They require more than disgust; they require a political response. And the left should be actively engaged in advocating such a response and in talking about its agents, its methods, and its limits.

But there also was no ISIS before 2003, when the Cheney-Bush Administration invaded Iraq justifying their invasion with both fear-mongering hysteria and high-sounding moral and political justifications.

After all, since the Second World War, America only goes to war against Hitler, again and again. Our motives are always the best. And our enemies are always the worst. And anyone who opposes those wars is always accused by some of the war's supporters, not all of them as literate as Michael Walzer, and being "apologists" for the Evil Ones.

Christiane Amanpour reports from 2007 on Islamic and Christian fundamentalism

Christiane Amanpour on CNN International has been running a series of reports on Islamic, Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, originally broadcast in 2007. (Neil Genzlinger, Radical Fundamentalism in Three Flavors 08/21/2007) This piece discusses one of the chief intellectual influences on Islamic jihadism, God's Muslim Warriors: Sayyid Qutb 08/21/2012:

These following segments focus on the Christian Right. This one looks at the late Jerry Falwell, "the Baptist preacher who became the godfather of the Christian Right", God's Christian Warriors: Evangelicals 08/23/2012:

This is a report on a conservative Christian minister, Greg Boyd, a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary, author of The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church (2006) who opposes the kind of political activism that characterizes the Christian Right, God's Christian Warriors: Greg Boyd 08/23/2012:

This third segment discusses the Christian Zionism of the Rev. John Hagee, God's Christian & Jewish Warriors: Protecting Israel 08/24/2012:

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, islamic fundamentalism, jewish fundamentalism

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan)

Zaid Hassan argues in The Strategic Caution of the Muslim Brotherhood Religion Dispatches 02/10/2011 that "to dismiss the Brotherhood as incompetent or irrelevant ignore both the historical and current reality of the Brotherhood as virtuoso political actors and survivors." To treat the Brothers - the Ikhwan, in the Anglicized version of its Arabic name - as the equivalent of "Al Qa'ida" is foolish. Even though Sayyid Qutb, an Ikhwan leader during his lifetime, is considered the main spiritual godfather of the kind of violent, extreme Salafi thinking which Osama bin Laden adopted, the Ikhwan has gone a very different way. (I guess "godfather" is kind of an awkward term to use in an Islamic context.)

Hassan quotes Abdelwahab El-Affendi describing the Ikhwan's approach as "tactical carefulness and strategic modesty." Any supporter of secular democracy will have concerns about Ikhwan's longer-term goals in terms of imposing their conservative religious views on others through state power. But it's important to try to be genuinely realistic in assessing what the Ikhwan actually is without swallowing propaganda fear-mongering from Christianists like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

Robert Dreyfuss provides more background on Ikhwan in What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt? Mother Jones 02/11/2011. His book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005) deals extensively with the Ikhwan. Dreyfuss' book puts the development of political Islam as we know it today into the anti-Communist context of the Cold War, when the United States and Israel viewed Islamist groups and movements as useful and desirable competition to left-leaning, pro-Soviet parties and governments.

Recent superficial discussions of Egyptian politics on American TV might lead one to believe that the Egyptian regime was a bitter opponent of Ikhwan and Islamism. Which is a half-truth. Mubarak hated and feared the Muslim Brotherhood. But his predecessor Anwar Sadat promoted an Islamicizing trend as part of his approach to governance, as Dreyfuss describes in Mother Jones:

Guided by Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, Anwar Sadat — who'd been a member of the Brotherhood in the 1940s — reintroduced the Ikhwan to Egypt. At the time, Sadat had no political base, and he wanted to undermine the influence of the Nasserites and the communists. To that end, he calculatedly unleashed the power of right-wing political Islam. The Brotherhood's youth wing, often using physical force to intimidate its opponents, helped Sadat recapture ideological control of Egypt's universities. The Brotherhood also took the reins of Egypt's professional societies—doctors', engineers', and lawyers' groups. But because Sadat did not formally allow the Ikhwan to set up a political party, it fragmented into various components, some of which—inspired by Sayyid Qutb, a violent Salafi theoretician who was hanged by Nasser—turned to nihilist violence. One of these offshoots murdered Sadat in 1981, and then Vice President Mubarak took over. [my emphasis]

Karen Armstrong describes the Islamicizing trend under Sadat in her book, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1991).

This trend continued under Mubarak, as Paul Amar explains in Why Egypt's Progressives Win Jadaliyya - h/t Russ Wellen, Egypt Has Already Experienced Islamic Rule -- and Found It Wanting FPIP Blog 02/14/2011:

In the past ten years this political force of this particular wing of the Brothers has been partially coopted by Mubarak’s government from two angles. First, Brothers were allowed to enter parliament as independent candidates and have been allowed to participate in the recent economic boom. The senior Brothers now own major cell phone companies and real estate developments, and have been absorbed into the NDP machine and upper-middle class establishment for years. Second, the government wholly appropriated the Brothers’ moral discourse. For the last ten or fifteen years Mubarak’s police-state has stirred moral panics and waved the banner of Islam, attacking single working women, homosexuals, devil-worshipping internet users, trash-recycling pig farmers, rent-control squatters, as well as Baha’i, Christian and Shi’i minorities. In its morality crusades, the Mubarak government burned books, harassed women, and excommunicated college professors. Thus, we can say that Egypt has already experienced rule by an extremely narrow Islamist state – Mubarak’s! Egyptians tried out that kind of regime. And they hated it. [my emphasis]

Dreyfuss offers this cautious observation about the state of Ikhwan today:

In 2007, the Brotherhood released a draft political program that included several very troubling proposals, including the idea that Egypt's government be overseen by an unelected council of Islamic scholars who would measure the country's laws against the Koran and sharia to make sure governance would "conform to Islamic law." Since then, various Muslim Brotherhood officials have also made conflicting statements about anything from the role of women to the treatment of non-Muslim minorities.

In the end, there's no getting around the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is, if not an anachronism, a profoundly reactionary force. Its views on marriage, the family, homosexuality, and the like are distasteful to most Western minds and many Egyptian ones. And it harbors a strong current of overt anti-Semitism, along with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Despite Egypt's drift toward a more conservative Islamic outlook since the 1970s—which paralleled similar trends across the Muslim world—the Egyptian people, especially the middle class, may in the end not be receptive to the Brotherhood's message.

Juan Cole also provides an update on the Ikhwan in Fear Not the Muslim Brotherhood Boogeyman Truthdig 02/15/2011. He reminds us that some American demagogues are perfectly happy to flat-out lie about the group:

Someone named Andy McCarthy, identified as a "former federal prosecutor," has been everywhere in the media making the most grossly inaccurate claims about the Muslim Brotherhood and demonstrating a profundity of ignorance about Egypt unmatched since Pope Innocent III launched the disastrous Fifth Crusade in 1213. McCarthy alleged that the Brotherhood assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, that Ayman al-Zawahri of al-Qaida is in this group, and that the fundamentalist party Hamas in the Gaza Strip is under the control of the Egyptian Brotherhood. Everything he said to millions of Americans was a laughable falsehood.

He also reinforces the role that Islamist politics played in the ruling style of Anwar Sadat:

In the 1970s, Sadat rehabilitated the Brotherhood and stipulated that if it would eschew violence and become a civil society association, the government would let its members out of jail and allow them relative freedom. It was this bargain, to which the Brotherhood has faithfully adhered, that drove radicals such as al-Zawahri, now al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader, to break with the Brotherhood and to denounce it virulently. Sadat was not assassinated by the Brotherhood, contrary to what was alleged to the great Mideast expert Sean Hannity by the great Mideast expert McCarthy. The president was felled by militants who rejected both him and his ally, the Muslim Brotherhood.

He also reminds us that while it's ridiculous to imagine the Ikhwan as some super-menace, foreign policy makers need to be realistic in thinking about what it is:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist organization. It is relatively hostile to women's rights, and its vision of moving Egypt even further from civil, secular law to a conservative and literalist interpretation of medieval Muslim traditions is reactionary. Its literature is tainted with the worst sort of anti-Semitism. But decades of repression have not destroyed the movement, and there is no reason to believe that more repression would be more effective now.

There is another, proven, way to deal with this problem. The political success stories of the past decade in the Muslim world with regard to democratization are Turkey and Indonesia. In both countries the fundamentalist religious tendency has been liberalized and domesticated by its participation in the parliamentary process. Mubarak’s regime did not work. Democracy in Turkey and Indonesia has. Let us go with a winner for once. [my emphasis]

Tags: egypt, second subject, ikhwan, islamic fundamentalism, muslim brotherhood

Egyptian officialdom and Coptic Christians: a mixed record

The anti-Muslim hate-mongering that rightwingers in America and Europe are currently promoting is largely fact-free. But that shouldn't stop the rest of us from looking realistically at the variety of relationships between Christians and Muslims in Muslim-majority countries.

In the face of a bomb attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria on January 1, the Egyptian government has prominently defended the Christian and condemned the attack, as Juan Cole explains in Mubarak: We will Cut off the Head of the Snake; Al-Azhar: This was an Attack on all Egyptian Informed Comment 01/02/2010:

The foremost seat of Islamic learning in Egypt, Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, issued a plea for Egyptians to maintain their national unity the face of this bombing. In a statement, al-Azhar urged all Egyptians to rise above their anguish and perceive that the criminal hand that attacked the church in Alexandria is not an Egyptian hand. It added that "The brotherhood that has united them across centuries cannot be affected by a cowardly, criminal act perpetrated by enemies of the nation and of the [Muslim] community."

The invocation of both watan (the secular nation-state) and umma (the Muslim community or nation) refers to the two major political identities of Egypt. It is the secular nation-state or watan to which the Coptic Christians belong, and which was sinned against by the bombing of the church, but the al-Azhar is going further, and saying that the Muslim community was also harmed by this attack.

His Excellency the Rector of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyib, expressed his utmost regret and pain at the criminal incident and sent his condolences to the families of the victims. Al-Tayyib said in his official statement that the criminal action is prohibited in Islamic law, since Islam obliges Muslims to protect churches the same way they protect mosques. He said, "The targets of this attack are not the Christians alone, but rather all Egyptians." He said that the bombers were seeking to destabilize Egypt by dividing it.

The Rector of al-Azhar is among the most respected Sunni Muslim leaders in the world, and many Egyptian believers take his rulings or fatwas very seriously.

This is a 24-minute video on the attack and the aftermath from Al Jazeera English 01/02/2011. Note that the Al Jazerra interviewer makes it a point to report on instances of official discrimination against Christians by the Egyptian government. He also does something that may seem exotic to American TV news viewers: he actually corrects a mention of an event by one guest to make sure viewers understand that it's an unsubstantiaed rumor.



As this Al Jazeera report makes clear, Egypt is scarcely an ecumenical paradise for Christians. But it's important to note the real nature of incidents like this.

Al-Ahram, which Cole describes as a "semi-official Egyptian newspaper", has numerous articles and features on the attack at its English-language site:

Ekram Ibrahim, Citizen initiatives against anti-Coptic attacks 01/03/2011: "One of the main initiatives is a call for Muslims to attend the Orthodox Christmas Eve mass on January 6 as a sign of solidarity."

Ekram Ibrahim, More Egypt pro-Coptic protests today 01/03/2011: "Yesterday, thousands of outraged Copts conducted at least five protests throughout Cairo. Fifty seven were reported injured and Cairo traffic was jammed as a result of the protests."

Gamal Essam El-Din, Egypt MPs urge Coptic restraint after church attack 01/03/2011: "Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People's Assembly, said 'the attack against the Alexandria church of Al-Qiddisin is a cowardly act, and is by no means aimed to strike at Copts only, but all Egyptians, Copts and Muslims, in order to spark a civil war.'"

Ekram Ibrahim, Cairo boils as Copts protest 01/02/2011: "Friday night's explosion outside Saints Church in Alexandria during New Year's midnight mass killed 21 and left more than 96 injured and stirred Copts out of their docile 'pigeon attitude.'"

Hani Shukralla, J’accuse 01/01/2011. He argues that general social intolerance against Christians in Egypt has been increasing. This is an important point: "I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government."

Abdel Moneim Said, Our national unity 01/02/2011: "What appears obvious is that a malicious campaign is afoot to stir sectarian strife in the country using terrorism, hate-mongering and other expressions of fanaticism, and generally trying to reproduce conditions that prevail in certain other nearby countries."

Sadly, this diversity of response reflected in the above reports finds little echo in this Los Angeles Times story on the event: Amro Hassan and Borzou Daragahi, Egypt calls for calm as church bombing toll rises to 25 01/03/2011. The second-to-last paragraph mentions, for the readers who get that far into the story: "The bombing drew widespread condemnation across the Middle East, including from Islamist political groups such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon." But then the story concludes with a clash-of-civilizations spin: "It was the latest in a series of violent attacks in the Muslim world targeting Christian communities, already shrinking because of emigration."

Tags: egypt, islam, islamic fundamentalism, terrorism

The global war against Islam (or a fantasized version of it)

Department of Defense analyst Thomas McCabe's The Strategic Failures of al Qaeda Parameters (Spring 2010) seems at first like a pragmatic assessment of Al Qa'ida's effective demise as a significant force in world politics.

But the article is mainly an ideological justification for permanent war against the Muslim Menace. There's American triumphalism:

Immediately following 9/11, America showed an unprecedented ability to move quickly and with overwhelming force. Since then, the United States continues to display an impressive capacity to rapidly adapt strategically and tactically, while demonstrating impressive staying power in Iraq and Afghanistan, although many might say in Iraq it was a close call. While al Qaeda is undoubtedly hoping that the current turmoil in the world economy presages the collapse of the United States, a far likelier outcome is that once the initial panic passes the world will look pretty much like it did before, with America in fundamentally the same position — at the center.

As a statement of the obvious, that the United States will be the world's predominant military power for the foreseeable future, the deeply flawed response of the Cheney-Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks, followed now by Obama administration spectacularly ill-advised escalation of the Afghanistan War, have drastically weakened the credibility of the US as a world leader.

We also see in this paragraph the basic trick that underlies the entire article. It's the discussion of "Al Qaeda" as a massive, deadly, long term menace on a level with a hostile major power. Al Qa'ida, and here I'm referring to the remains of the group headed by Osama bin Laden, probably is "hoping that the current turmoil in the world economy presages the collapse of the United States". But so what? Lots of tiny sects, some of them with violent intent and capabilities, have all sorts of malign hopes for the fate of the United States. But McCabe uses the grandiose framework of evaluating the flaws of "Al Qaeda's" strategic assumptions to advocate for the need for the US to indefinitely fight a vaguely-defined Islamic threat.

His framework also shows in this claim: "After attacking the United States (and before), al Qaeda repeatedly expanded its theater of operations to embrace a greater portion of the world." But the biggest expansion of actual war has been the completely unnecessary American invasion of Iraq and the other decisions that leave us fighting militarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan nearly nine years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, with lower-level sporadic acts of war in Yemen and Somalia, and some unknown number of covert operations in places like Iran.

The active foreign terrorist threats currently confronting the United States may draw some inspiration from Al Qa'ida's actions and doctrines. But it's unlikely that Bin Laden's organization, to the extent that it exists at all, has much direct role in instigating them, much less exerting meaningful command-and-control authority over them. Groups like "Al Qa'ida in Iraq" were Salafi extremists groups, but their actual connection to Bin Laden was very tenuous. McCabe's underlying assumption of Al Qaeda as some kind of world power challenging American vital interests all over the world is a bad joke.

This is a good example of the problem with his argument:

Believing in a very narrow Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam—an especially rigid, austere, and intolerant fundamentalist interpretation—al Qaeda and other jihadis have repeatedly tried to encourage, or force, local Muslims to follow their practices and beliefs whether this was acceptable to the local populace or not. In Algeria, the jihadi insurgents were often extreme even by al Qaeda standards and routinely murdered those whom they defined as un-Islamic for such petty crimes as speaking French or not wearing proper Islamic dress. Over time, most of the population came to support the government, however reluctantly. Al Qaeda’s recent attempt to revive the Algerian civil war has not met with much popular support.

The argument that the Wahhabi variety of Islam, the one sponsored by Saudi Arabia, is the basis of Bin Laden-style jihadism is a favorite of the neoconservatives. But, as actual scholars of Islam like Juan Cole have explained, Bin Laden's jihadist ideas derived from the Egyptian extremist Sayyim Qutb are a violent extremist brand of Salafism, which is not Wahhabism. After all, Bin Laden's most important target has been the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy which is the chief international sponsor of Wahhabi Islam.

And the notion that the Algerian fundamentalists and the conflicts involving them are somehow "Al Qaeda" or like it, as well as the idea that what still exists of the actual Al Qa'ida could reignite the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, strike me as really pretty silly.

McCabe does make some interesting and probably valid points about how jihadist type groups (not just Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida) has alienated other Muslims. But that whole line of argument about the strategic failures of his mythic version of "Al Qaeda" leads up his own strategic proposal for a protracted US campaign against Islam. He suggest that a PR effort be part of it, though it's not at all clear how what he pictures would be different from the lame versions we've been using for years now. But in proposing this, he gives a key of his image of Islam:

Those in charge of this communication campaign should emphasize that the jihadis have sought to redefine Islam as a religion of intolerance at best and aggression and genocide at worst. Jihadists want to militarize the faith, so that Islam would literally become a terrorist religion rather than the religion of some terrorists, a redefinition that ideally will be widely opposed throughout the Muslim and Arab worlds. Unfortunately, in terms of Islamic theology and law, the jihadis may have a good case, as has been argued by a number of critics, or they may have a position that is at least as strong as their opponents’ arguments. Even if the jihadis do not dominate the debate, we have to be ready to deal with the fact that large segments of Muslim society choose to accept the jihadi arguments and ally with them. It is immaterial as to why they may follow these extremists, whether it is because they do not disagree or do not dare to disagree, out of religious solidarity, or because of hostility directed at the United States and the non-Muslim world. If large segments of Muslim society believe that extremist Islam truly reflects the basic tenets of Islam, the campaign will at least have removed any ambiguity. If the response is an embarrassed silence, we should make clear that, under the circumstances, such silence will be considered a “yes” in support of the extremists. [my emphasis]

It doesn't give a great deal of confidence in McCabe's general knowledge of Islam or his overall ability to assess sources that his one footnote reference to those "number of critics" who take that position is to a 2003 book (Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers) from the highly far-right Regnery Press, which specializes in, well, cranking out rightwing books. In Balancing the Prophet Financial Times 04/27/2010, Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar who actually knows a lot about the religion, describes Robert Spencer's perspective:

People often seem eager to believe the worst about Muhammad, are reluctant to put his life in its historical perspective and assume the Jewish and Christian traditions lack the flaws they attribute to Islam. This entrenched hostility informs Robert Spencer’s misnamed biography The Truth about Muhammad, subtitled Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.

Spencer has studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it is an evil, inherently violent religion. He is a hero of the American right and author of the US bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.

In the spirit of Spencer and his fellow Islamophobes, McCabe goes on to basically argue that "Al Qaeda" actually represents a huge number of the Muslims of the world, ending in a favorite Islamophobe argument:

First we need to understand that al Qaeda is not really an isolated phenomenon. In many ways, it is the tip of a large iceberg. It is not the lunatic fringe of Sunni Islam; it is the fanatic core of Sunni Islam, which is a profoundly
different phenomenon. Al Qaeda is an integral part of a broad and rather diverse spectrum of politicized Sunni Islam, and for that matter, of Sunni Islam as a whole. Unfortunately, the theological and ideological roots from which it grew still exist. Even if we are capable of destroying al Qaeda, we can expect it will have successors as long as those roots remain intact, especially those roots found in the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, the Deobandi school in South Asia, and the Qutbist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only Muslims can destroy those roots, and so far they have failed to demonstrate a willingness to do so. [my emphasis]

He then repeats the factually-challenged neocon/Islamophobe contention that huge numbers of Muslims supported the 9/11 attacks:

The second thing we need to understand is that when al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11, it had significant and fairly widespread support throughout the Arab world. Much of this support is the result of a belief that al Qaeda was standing up to the United States and punishing it for policies that harmed or demeaned Muslims. To the degree that al Qaeda has lost that popular support, it was a direct result of the strategic and tactical errors highlighted earlier in this article. Unfortunately, that potential base of support still exists and may be tapped by more sophisticated or more selectively bloodthirsty extremists.

Actually, there was a remarkable degree of condemnation from Muslim countries, including those in the Arab world, of the attacks. McCabe is conjuring bogeymen here. If there was any distinct region of the world from which the expressions of sympathy for the US seemed to be comparatively muted, it was Latin America.

And McCabe invokes another neocon standard, the argument based heavily of Bernard Lewis' faulty generalizations, that Arabs are generally kind of screwed up and hostile and envious and resentful:

Unfortunately, the problem goes far beyond these negative perceptions
and is rooted not just in America’s foreign policy but also in the political culture, psychology, and pathologies of the region. Much of the support al Qaeda received was rooted in the frustration, rage, and malignance with which much of the Muslim Middle East views the world and its position in it. These attitudes long predated either the existence of Israel or the US invasion of Iraq, and, in fact, preceded the United States having a major presence in the region. Middle East Muslims look at the world, especially the United States, with a primordial sense of grievance and a profound sense of resentment, which al Qaeda has been able to turn into a global threat. Once a leading civilization, the Muslim Middle East has been surpassed and is now dominated by peoples it historically regarded as inferior. The Muslim Middle East has been increasingly marginalized due to the globalization of the world economy by the capitalist economic powers and is constantly threatened by a wide range of attractions related to western popular culture. Governments in Muslim territories are often regarded as corrupt, incompetent, and in the view of Islamic radicals, defeatist in the face of Islam’s enemies, and often depicted as servants of the opponents of Islam who have been put in power and kept in power by its enemies. [my emphasis]

The few constructive observations in McCabe's article don't detract from the fact that he is essentially enunciating an already-too-familiar framework for permanent war against Muslims in general and Arab Muslims in particular.

On Islamaophia, see also this recent piece by Bruce Lawrence, The Polite Islamophobia of the Intellectual Religion Dispatches 06/01/2010.

Tags: islam,
islamic fundamentalism, us foreign policy

Sayyid Qutb

This post is about Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist who is considered a major influence on today's Islamic extremism. Since most of the sources I've used are not online, I've listed them at the end and refer to them by number in the text.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologist and leader, who is considered a key intellectual figure for present-day Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda. But his influence extends to Islamists who do not share the terrorist approach of Al Qaeda, as well. Rohan Gunaratna calls Qutb "the leading ideologue of Egyptian fundamentalists" and a "pioneer" of "the Islamist revival in the Middle East." (2) Karen Armstrong has written:

Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili [barbaric] ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. (4)

Qutb provided a religious justification for fighting against Muslim rulers and for considering Muslims who didn't share the radical goals of the Islamists as not being true Muslims. He took the idea of "jahiliyya" and gave it a new meaning. For most Muslims, jahiliyya refers to the society in Arabia before the Prophet's revelation, a time of ignorance of God's true religion. Gilles Kepel suggests that "barbarism" may be the closest translation. (6)

Qutb was a journalist who also wrote essays and novels. Up until 1945, his interests were mainly literary. When he first started writing political pieces, he wound up having to leave Egypt in 1948 to avoid arrest by the royalist government, though his political friends arranged for him to do so on the government's dime. He came to live in the United States, an experience which he found quite unpleasant. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1951, he was ready to join up with the fundamentalist ("Islamist") Muslim Brotherhood.

It's interesting to speculate in what ways his encounter with America as such shaped his views, as opposed to the experience of effectively being exiled and taken away from his regular community and his country under those circumstances. John Voll suggests that Qutb's hostility to the West had been influenced by British behavior in Egypt during the Second World War and by what he saw as Anglo-American encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. Voll sees Qutb's stay in America as having reinforced those ideas:

He found Americans to be materialistic and lacking in spiritual values and was disturbed by the popular and media support in the United States for the nascent state of Israel. After his return to Egypt, he wrote that in the United States, "any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed and any human element other than ego is not recognized. Where the whole life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production. The result is class struggle which becomes inevitable and visibly evident." (1)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir) seized power in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Nasser favored a much more secular approach to government than the Muslim Brotherhood sought. Qutb wound up going to prison for a three months in 1954. After Qutb's release, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Nasser in October of 1954. Qutb was rearrested, and was incarcerated in the Tura concentration camp until 1964. The experience of persecution by the Nasser regime and the conditions of the concentration camp were the context in which he prepared his most influential works, Milestones and Under the Aegis of the Koran (also in English translation as In the Shade of the Qu'ran), a long commentary on the Qu'ran.

Arrested again in 1965 in a government move against another alleged Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy, Qutb was hanged in August 1966, making him a martyr to the Islamists.

A Muslim Brother who was Qutb's cellmate in the Tura camp, Muhammad Hawwash, said that Joseph had appeared to him in a dream and gave him a message: "Tell Sayyid Qutb that in my sura he will find what he seeks." (6)

Joseph's sura (# 12) in the Qu'ran relates the story of Joseph being imprisoned in Egypt after his master's wife had attempted to seduce him. There, two of his fellow prisoners related dreams to him. (In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the story is in Genesis 40.) Before interpreting their dreams, he tells them:

This knowledge my Lord has given me, for I have left the faith of those that disbelieve in Allah and deny the life to come. I follow the faith of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We must never serve idols besides Allah. Such is the fight which Allah has bestowed upon us and all mankind. Yet most men do not give thanks.

Fellow-prisoners! Are numerous gods better than Allah, the One, the Almighty? Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has reveal no sanction. Judgement rests with Allah only. He has commanded you to worship none but Him. That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it. (5)

This concept of idolatry was key to Qutb's interpretation of jahiliyya. Qutb applied the term to present-day Muslim societies, including his own Epypt under the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb's most important book is Milestones (also known in English as Signposts and Signs Along the Path or Signposts Along the Road), which he wrote in the Tura camp and was published in 1964. In it, he wrote: "Nowadays, the entire world lives in a state of jahiliyya as far as the source from which it draws the rules of its mode of existence is concerned." (6) This allowed Qutb and his followers to view Muslim societies and Muslim leaders as enemies of Islam and enemies of God.

Qutb also emphasized that in struggling against the jahiliyya, no doubt having in mind in particular the repressive Nasser regime, true Muslims must not restrict themselves to jihad in only the sense of internal struggle or of defensive war. Instead, they must be prepared to propagate true Islam by "the sword" as well as by "the Book." The "jahiliyya regime" of Nasser, writes Kepel interpreting Qutb, "had to be fought in the way pagans were fought."

Qutb stressed that true Islamic faith must be expressed in action against the jahiliyya rulers.

The notion of idolatry was at the core of Qutb's new definition of jahiliyya. Those thought of themselves as Muslims had actually made gods of other things besides God himself. One of those idols is the concept of national sovereignty:

The principle on which [jahiliyya] is based is opposition to God's rule over the earth and to the major characteristic of the Divinity, namely sovereignty (al-hakimiyya): instead it invests men with this, and makes some of them gods for the others. This transference of sovereignty does not occur in the primitive manner of the pre-hegira jahiliyya [of Mohammad's time], but by allowing man to unduly arrogate to himself the right to establish values, to legislate, to elaborate systems, and to take positions, all without regard to divine ethics (minhaj allah lil-hayah), but rather in accordance with what He has expressly forbidden! Now, to oppose the rule of God in this way is to be the enemy of His faithful.

The degradation of man in general in the collectivists regimes [including Nasser's], the injustice suffered by the individuals and people dominated by capital and colonialism, are only the effects of this opposition to the rule of God, the negation of the dignity that God bestowed upon man! (6)

Earlier Islamists had considered Communist, democratic-capitalist and other non-Muslim societies to be jahiliyya, but Qutb's innovation was to place Muslim societies in that category as well.

Qutb argued that a vanguard of the ummah (Muslim society) must lead the drive for a truly Muslim form of rule. The vanguard must purge itself of idolatrous influences by returning to the true faith of the first Muslims, Muhammad and the first four caliphs who succeeded him as leader of the ummah, also known as the rightly guided caliphs.

Once a vanguard has been established with a truly Islamic consciousness and truly Islamic practice, "In the meantime the battle begins between this nascent society that has declared its secession ... from jahiliyya society" and the jahiliyya society itself. and the latter..." (6)

One chapter of Milestones, that was replaced in many editions published after 1981 according to Kepel, Qutb defines jihad in his theology, insisting that jihad against the jahiliyya cannot be restricted to nonviolent measures alone:

To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to power out of the hands of those of His worshippers who have usurped it and to return it to God alone, to confer authority upon divine law (shari'at allah) alone and to eliminate the laws created by man ...all this will not be done through sermons and discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word alone, otherwise the task of His messengers would be far more easily done. (6)

John Voll summarizes the significance of Qutb's view for the Egyptian Islamist movement:

The major conceptual contribution of Qutb was to provide an intellectual and theoretical foundation for the concrete rejection of Nasserism and the other Western-based radical ideologies of his day. One could no longer simply attack the state as being a foreign puppet. Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler of the country for millennia. Egyptians had gotten what they wanted: a successful nationalist committed to social transformation. Qutb explained why true Muslims could not accept this. (1)

The "establishment" Muslim view of Sayyid Qutb, as enunciated by the authorities of Egypt's al-Azhar university, was simply that Qutb was a heretic and an agitator. But in fact, Qutb's ideas had a huge impact on the Egyptian Islamist movement, an impact which was taken in different ways by those who used his ideas.

Among the more militant strain, one of the most prominent in Egypt was the Society of Muslims, led by the agronomist Shukri Mustafa, who believed that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society in order to prepare to attack it. A more "moderate" interpretation within the Muslim Brotherhood and among other Islamists praised Qutb's ideas but had to refute parts of Qutb's Milestones.

If the concept of "moderate" Islamists seems strange, since Islamists as a group represent a "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islam, it's worth remembering that in 1997 even Al Qaeda disassociated itself, both in its pronouncements and in practice, from the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) after its repeated massacres of ordinary Muslims not associated with theAlgerian regime. GIA had also proclaimed the right to hold women captured in military actions as slaves. Al Qaeda, however, did manage to bring key operatives from GIA's European network into a new group, the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) which became part of the Al Qaeda network. (2)

One of Sayyid Qutb's most important interpreters was his own brother. Muhammed Qutb taught Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. At the university in Jeddah, he made a deep impression on one of his young students, Osama bin Laden.

In 1975, Muhammad Qutb published a piece in a journal of the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood defending Sayyid Qutb's views. He quoted the latter as having said repeatedly, "We are preachers and not judges. Our objective is not to legislate against people, but to teach them this truth: that there is no god but God. The problem is that people do not understand what this formula requires of them." (6)

Muhammad Qutb insisted that his brother's work should not be interpreted as the cult-like Society of Muslims did, to mean that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society. But he also opposed interpretations which sought to blunt the political-revolutionary implications of his brother's ideas. It's a measure of Sayyid Qutb's influence that the less militant tendencies in Egyptian Islamism, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s, still tried to interpret his ideas in ways favorable to their approach.

1. "Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" by John O. Voll in Fundamentalisms Observed (1991) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.

2. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna (2002)

3. Is This the Man Who Inspired Bin Laden? by Robert Irwin Guardian (UK) 11/01/01

4. Islam by Karen Armstrong (2000)

5. The Koran, N.J. Dawood, translator; 1974 Penguin edition

6. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh by Gilles Kepel; trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild (1985). Kepel's book uses the translation Signposts as the name for Milestones.

7. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terrorism" by Paul Berman New York Times Magazine 03/23/03

8. Sayyid Qutb's America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality NPR 05/06/03. This has more details about Qutb's stay in the US, which was mostly in the conservative town of Greeley, Colorado.

9. Truly, Madly, Deeply Devout by Jonathan Raban Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

Additional Web sites:

Young Muslims, a Canadian Islamic site with links to an English-language text of Qutb's Milestones. The NPR site above links to the Milestones text. It's perhaps a general indication of the perspective of this site that one of the two articles on Qutb currently featured on this page says that describing Muslim extremist violence as "terrorist" is the practice of the "mouthpiece of the zionist establishment in America."

The 9/11 Commission Report mentions Qutb briefly in Chapter 2. The brief analysis there is not too impressive.


Tags: islam, islamic fundamentalism, islamic law, jihadism, muslim fundamentalism, sayyid qutb, sharia