Issue No. 613
Opinion
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21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | |||
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Blowback: Islamisation from below
US military and economic power is inviting a spate of inevitable, if unpredictable, reactions in the Arab and Muslim world, the revival of Islamism being the payback for America's war on terrorism, warns Reda Helal*
On 28 October 2001, Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations, argued in the Washington Post that if the West fails to convince Muslims that the war on terrorism is what it says it is, and not a war against Muslims, then Osama Bin Laden will have succeeded in defining the conflict in his own terms. Even were he to be killed as part of the struggle, Holbrooke wrote, Bin Laden could well spawn a new generation of dedicated fighters, ready to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of his programme. The battle of ideas was, therefore, as important as any other aspect of the war.
A year after the appearance of this article, it seems that Holbrooke's worries have been more than justified. Niveen Saleh, for example, a doctoral candidate at the American University in Washington, wrote an article in the September 2002 issue of the Middle East Policy Journal on the five months of research she had conducted in Cairo on Arab attitudes. The US war on terrorism, she discovered, may be doing Bin Laden more good than harm, since, at the same time that American troops were shelling Al-Qa'eda hideouts in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's star was rising in the Middle East.
Egyptian attitudes are a case in point. Traditionally critical of US Middle East policy and the tendency of Washington to side with Israel, Egyptian and Arab public opinion increasingly views President Bush as guilty of injustice and of indiscriminately targeting Arabs and Muslims. When asked for their opinions of Bush and American foreign policy, the respondents, generally members of the Cairo middle classes, answered that Bush was utterly biased.
In April 2002, the American Embassy in Cairo received a bogus bomb threat. Later, Hamdi Qandeel, presenter of a popular weekly political programme on Egyptian television, felt obliged to urge Egyptian viewers not to destroy American property as a way of expressing their outrage at US policy. Better to restrict themselves to boycotting US interests, he said.
What has the Bush Administration done to evoke such strong reactions from Arab opinion?
One thing that it has done is fail to understand Arab sensitivities. Daily exposure to the sufferings of the Palestinians in the occupied territories has meant that the Egyptian public has been left with the impression that President Bush supports the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, and by extension of Arabs, and has no wider strategy. Like many others in the Islamic world, the Egyptian public is sensitive to outbreaks of chauvinism and boorishness on the part of the world's sole remaining superpower.
Indeed, this hostility towards the United States now extends throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan. In the elections for Pakistan's national and provincial parliaments in October 2002, for example, the biggest shock was the success of the alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), at the polls. This alliance has a clear- cut electoral message: stop the American war in Afghanistan and end Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's support for the US war on terror.
Meanwhile, in Morocco the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) more than doubled its MPs as a result of the parliamentary elections in September 2002. This party, too, is against the US-led war on terror. Similarly, in Algeria's local elections, held in October 2002, the Islamic Movement of Society for Peace came third. Essam El-Erian, a former deputy representing the Muslim Brothers in Egypt's Parliament, wrote an article in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat on 19 October, in which he said that the election results in these three states represented a clear victory for the Islamic trend, Al-Tayar Al-Islami.
Two weeks later, Turkey's voters gave a resounding victory to the Islamic- learning justice and development party (AKP) with 34% of the vote.
Time and time again, in fact, what we are seeing in the Arab and Muslim world is an "American blowback" to use the expression used by US commentator Chalmers Johnson in his recent book, Blowback: the Consequences of American Empire. For Johnson, US military and economic power is increasingly inviting a spate of inevitable, if unpredictable, reactions, or "blowbacks".
The point here is that the revival of Islamism and Islamic parties in the Arab and Muslim worlds is the payback for America's war on terrorism.
Following the events of 11 September 2001, the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Pakistan followed US bidding by increasing the domestic fight against alleged terrorists, thereby leaving society vulnerable to Islamist takeover. As has been seen in Egypt in recent years, while the state has been busy fighting militant Islamist groups, such as Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, other Islamist groups have captured civil society. The result has been "islamisation from below".
America has exacted revenge for the September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon building in Washington. B52 bombers have blown the Taliban and Al-Qa'eda to bits, and a "hit list" of Muslim countries, including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya, has been prepared. The message is that war is the solution to every problem. However, there is no military solution to terrorism, and other means must be found.
There needs to be a better appreciation of Islamic history. In particular, it is some six centuries since Muslim orthodoxy, spearheaded by Imam Al-Ghazali, emerged to end the traditions of the Mautazilite (Al-Mu'tazila), the group of Muslim jurists who encouraged the development of science and philosophy during Islam's golden age between the nineth and the 13th centuries AD. As a result, by the turn of the 16th century while the Muslim world was held in the grip of religious orthodoxy, the Europeans' innovations in ocean navigation had enabled them to circumvent the Muslim heartland, opening up new trading routes and opportunities. At the end of the 18th century, Western colonialism, began by the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798, started to impact on the Arab and Muslim world. This marked the beginning of the Arabs' and Muslims' awareness of their relative backwardness with regards to Europe, beginning the clash between those asserting that the answer was a return to religious fundamentalism and those desiring greater modernity.
Despite widespread resistance from religious orthodoxy, the 19th century reformers in the Arab and Muslim world found adherents in thinkers like Rifa'a El-Tahtawi and Mohamed Abdu, who wished to adapt Islam to the times and interpret the Qur'an in ways consistent with modern science. Under British colonialism, which lasted in its strongest form from 1882 to 1923, Egypt was swept by European influence, and, due to the cultural, economic and military hegemony of the West, the kind of "Islamisation of modernity" represented in Abdu's thought was pushed aside in favour of wholesale Westernisation.
Egyptian nationalist liberals, such as Lutfi El-Sayed, Saad Zaghlul, Taha Hussein and Ali Abdel-Razeq, dominated political and intellectual life in the country, the nationalist and liberalising trend being clearly expressed in the 1919 Revolution and the 1923 Constitution. However, only five years after this constitution was promulgated, liberal Westernisation was challenged by the emergence of the fundamentalism of Hassan El-Banna, spiritual leader and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Banna rejected Western-style liberalism, opting instead for the "path of Islam". He demanded that all political parties be dissolved, and that all the country's political trends be united under one organisation, the "Party of God", or Hizbullah.
Ironically, it was the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser who turned against the liberal system, dissolving the political parties and replacing them with his own one-party system. Although the Nasser regime oppressed the Muslim Brothers, putting many of them in jail, the success of the coup d'etat that had brought Nasser to power encouraged many of them to turn to violence.
Nasser's brand of Arab nationalism, based on independence and statist modernisation, suffered a resounding defeat in the 1967 War with Israel, provoking the emergence of the Islamists and their concept of a jihad, or struggle, to demolish what they thought of as an illegitimate and corrupt system and a "return" to Islam. Consequently, Egyptian society today is once again polarised between Islamisation and Westernisation.
The Egyptians Ahmed Zewail and Ayman El- Zawahri are symptoms of this polarisation, the former having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the latter being Osama Bin Laden's right-hand man. In 1967, Zewail left Egypt for the US to study, overcoming every barrier and succeeding at the University of California, Berkeley. His special subject, a sub- division of chemistry, looked at fundamental physical processes, and his work has had applications in biology and medicine, where it has led to the development of techniques to detect tumours.
However, in the same year that Zewail left Egypt for America and for his scientific successes, El-Zawahri was arrested, at the age of 16, for being a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Later, he joined Al- Jihad group, a secretive militant Islamist organisation blamed for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat in 1981. Later still, El- Zawahri headed for Afghanistan, where he established a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, before becoming second in command after Bin Laden of the International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders in 1998, a group that aims to kill Americans and destroy US interests worldwide.
Obviously, Islam means very different things for Zewail and El- Zawahri.
Indeed, Imam Ali, the nephew of the Prophet Mohamed and fourth Caliph of Islam, said that the Qur'an was multi-faceted and could be understood in different ways. Today, Islam is not in question, but Muslim societies are. None have yet experienced a religious reform movement comparable to the European Reformation, none have a real democratic system, and none have a viable educational system.
Yet the United States, for its part, must also confront some bitter truths, the most important of which is that its policy in the region and its war on terrorism is "re-Islamising" Muslim societies, targeting the militant fundamentalists while not addressing the fundamental malaise of Muslim countries.
Thus far, the pursuit of democracy and enlightenment has not been a priority in the US-led war on terrorism, which has, on the contrary, been organised around oil interests and Israeli security. It is often said that democracies do not make war on one another, but it is less often remarked that they do not export terrorism either.
Terror obviously is not the answer to the widespread Muslim anger at American policies and at their own, sometimes corrupt, states. But it is part of a dark world of their jihad and counter-jihad, in which issues of religious reform, pluralism, and economic progress, will be defeated if we are not careful. Only greater democracy can offer a way out of this clash between modernity and militant fundamentalism.
* The writer is an assistant editor-in-chief at Al-Ahram
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