Issue No. 604
Opinion
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19 - 25 September 2002 Issue No. 604 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Outlining a future
Non-violent political Islam: What next, asks Amr Elchoubaki
Although the Islamist movements in general cannot be held responsible for the events of last September, certainly the jihadist wing, which espouses "holy war", stands accused, whether through direct involvement or through ideological propagation.
It is important to distinguish between two major trends in the Islamist movement. The first is the jihadist trend, "defeated" in its image, locally, in the Arab world, and globally, as the result of events in Afghanistan. The second is the non-violent trend, destined to grow and develop, and embodied by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, Hamas in Palestine, the Islamic government in Iran and the democratic Islamic movement in Turkey.
Such a distinction puts paid to the opinion, that political Islam is moribund. Rather, it presents us with the reality that the defeat of the jihadist trend does not imply the defeat of non-violent political Islam. The political and social marginalisation of the latter is contingent upon change in Arab society and in the prevailing US political mentality.
Reality, however, raises a crucial issue, which has been lost to the US. Initially, opposition to Western colonialism and cultural invasion manifested itself in a religious reform movement, spearheaded by Refa'a El-Tahtawi and Mohamed Abdou in the 19th century and developed by Rashid Rida and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 20th. What, then, in the evolution of protest Islam gave rise to terrorist violence?
The socio-political climate is clearly instrumental in the rise of religiously inspired violent protest, and will be equally instrumental in its decline. Perhaps the most important cause for the rise of religious violence and its escalation from a domestic to a "globalised" phenomenon resides in the new pressures the US-led world order has generated upon national and cultural entities.
That the US has worked to suppress forms of peaceful protest in many parts of the Arab and Islamic world has served to escalate the move towards violence. Iran, for example, has striven to secure democratic institutions and to follow a rational foreign policy. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of globalisation continue to ensure its exclusion and the US still deals with it as a terrorist state.
The same logic applies to the Palestinian cause. Here, too, the US has worked to close off all avenues for peaceful opposition to a racist occupation and to stifle the Palestinian and Arab peoples' hopes in this central struggle for liberation and national independence. Indeed, the US administration has branded this legitimate struggle as terrorist.
If Washington's policies have functioned to augment religious extremism and terrorist violence, one of the repercussions of 11 September was to further polarise the world via Bush's invention -- "the axis of evil" -- and other such devices to divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys".
The defeat of the Taliban and Al-Qa'eda represented the defeat of a doctrine divorced from any social or temporal contexts. However, as it flexed its military, economic and political might in Afghanistan, Washington forgot, or deliberately overlooked, the fact that its foreign policies, globally and towards the Arab world, were a crucial factor in generating the forms of violent protest it was combatting. But then, to come to terms with this would inevitably lead to a process of profound introspection, which is the last thing the US wants at the moment.
All indications prior to 11 September pointed to the decline of the jihadist trend of political Islam. This applies particularly to Egypt, where Islamist violence recoiled before the power, and sometimes the brutality, of the state. Equally important, though, was the growing perception that the ideology and rhetoric of jihadist organisations -- their condemnation of the central authorities as heretic, their declaration of war against intellectuals and their sectarianism -- was a path to nowhere.
This extremist narrative, alien to the contemporary age, received a new and fatal blow on 11 September. Yet this is not the case with non- violent trends of the Islamist movement, for the simple reason that these trends emanate from and interact with their social context. They have not isolated themselves behind an alien doctrine.
Perhaps for this reason the success the US administration has had in rallying opinion against these trends comes as a surprise. Washington equates Hamas to Al-Qa'eda, in spite of the fact that the former is engaged in a struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. The same applies to the new US outlook on one of the largest non- violent organisations of political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, towards which Washington had been neutral and, occasionally, on friendly terms.
Reports and intelligence available to the US on the Muslim Brotherhood confirms that this entity severed its organisational and ideological ties with groups that espouse violence in the 1970s. Yet it appears that the current administration in Washington has, since 11 September, discarded this information in favour of biased and deficient accounts. The danger of such an attitude, which essentially fails to distinguish between opponents to US policy whatever their political and ideological hue, is that it threatens to eliminate all real opportunities for these non-violent trends to progress further in the democratic transformation of their discourse.
The American tendency to reduce all the problems of the world to the "fight against terrorism" makes more dynamic discourse vital. Such an interchange does not mean that we must accept all the precepts of non-violent Islamist rhetoric. Rather, it means that an opportunity has presented itself to resolve the problematic of the relationship between this trend and the ruling authorities by assimilating its rhetoric into the global rhetoric and the values of the new world.
In this process, non-violent political Islam will not only be called upon to resolve its historic dialectic with the issues of democracy and political plurality in the Arab world. It will also be called upon to confront the biases of US policy with a new approach, a humanitarian message and a value system that advocates justice, not just for Muslims, and liberty. As it works towards a new system of universal values, peaceful political Islam is in a position to be in tune with the plights of the third world, which will render its promotion of equality, liberty, justice and cultural diversity much more credible than the current US administration.
Above all, Washington's tendency to ignore the principles of democracy, justice and human rights should not drive Arabs and Muslims -- the weaker party -- to discard these values as mere western imports. On the contrary it should compel us to adhere to them more tenaciously and to condemn the US whenever it betrays the values and ethics for which, ostensibly, it stands. The potential for a new and vibrant non-violent Islamist movement is enormous, even if the fundamentalist mindset in Washington remains determined to classify all opponents, Islamist or secularist, as violent terrorists.
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