The Future of Political Islam
In January 2015, after jihadists attacked the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, European leaders linked arms to lead a procession of millions through the French capital, chanting “Je suis Charlie”
(I am Charlie) in an expression of solidarity with the victims and
contempt for their killers. Muslims all over the world also condemned
the attacks, as did a number of Islamist organizations, including
perhaps the most influential one—the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, which posted a statement on its English-language website denouncing the “criminal attack” and stating that “true Islam does not encourage violence.”
Not all of the group’s adherents approved of that message, however. A
month after the killings, a Muslim Brotherhood activist in Turkey told Shadi Hamid,
an expert on political Islam, that she disagreed with the
organization’s decision to issue the statement. Like many other
mainstream Islamists, she opposed the Paris attack but felt that
Islamists should refrain from loudly condemning it because few in the
West had spoken out after Egyptian security forces massacred
800 Brotherhood members who were peacefully protesting in Cairo in
August 2013. “Our blood is shed day and night and no one pays any
attention,” she said. “Our blood is licit, but theirs isn’t. . . . The
world’s balance is off.”
That sense of imbalance pervades Islamist organizations of all
stripes. Perceived as aggressors, they see themselves as victims;
condemned as intolerant, they complain about intolerance of their views.
What is indisputable is that even after 15 years during which the
intersection of politics and Islam has been a major theme in world
affairs, Islamism remains poorly understood, especially in the West. Two
recent books tackle the subject, primarily by considering the crises
roiling the Middle East and examining Islam’s role in the turmoil. Both
books succeed in explaining the dilemmas, paradoxes, and confusion
facing political actors in the world’s most volatile region, although
each author emphasizes different factors.
Hamid, an Egyptian American who is a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution and who served for a number of years as the director of
research at the think tank’s center in Qatar, structures Islamic Exceptionalism
around a specific question: In order for the region’s Muslim-majority
states to become liberal democracies, must Islam undergo the kind of
reformation through which, in the West, Christianity was ultimately
subordinated to the principles of the Enlightenment, such as freedom of
speech, religious choice, and the idea that legal governance should
issue from the popular will? Or can the Islamic world arrive at some
form of Muslim democracy by following a different path whereby Islam
would maintain its centrality as a private faith and public discourse
even though it would remain at odds in many ways with Enlightenment
ideals? Hamid argues that the second outcome is more likely. In his
view, politics is far more integral to Islam than to Christianity—which
has traditionally relied on the God/Caesar distinction to separate the
holy from the worldly—and thus the Muslim world is unlikely to witness a
replay of the West’s journey toward liberalism, which depended on
separating church and state.
In his book, Tarek Osman, an Egyptian writer and broadcaster known to British radio audiences for his 2013 BBC series The Making of the Modern Arab World,
considers many of the same issues as Hamid. But in contrast to Hamid,
who takes a comparative historical approach, Osman views Islamism
through a more sociological lens, identifying it as the site of a
“social battle—over identities, frames of reference, the role of
religion, the nature of governance, and the meaning of being Arab,
Turkish, or Persian.”
Although Osman’s account is more nuanced, Hamid’s approach offers
greater clarity. By exploring the provenance of Enlightenment ideals and
questioning their claims to universality, Hamid argues that Islam is
fundamentally different from Christianity and that this difference has
“profound implications for the future.” He adds:
This admittedly is a controversial, even troubling claim, especially in the context of rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Europe. “Islamic exceptionalism,” however, is neither good nor bad. It just is, and we need to understand it and respect it, even if it runs counter to our own hopes and preferences.
WATCHING CAIRO FROM TUNIS
Although both books delve into Islamic history, they are primarily
concerned with recent developments—especially the failure of the Arab
revolts of 2010–11 to generate what Hamid terms “a legitimate, stable
political order.” That failure has resulted in the restoration of
authoritarian structures and at the same time has opened up space for
more radical forms of resistance, such the jihadist violence of the
self-proclaimed Islamic State
(also known as ISIS). Hamid is particularly interested in the contests
that pitted Islamists against secularists after the revolts in Egypt and
Tunisia that led to the fall of the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes,
respectively. After toppling their tyrannical leaders through popular
movements, both countries elected governments dominated by Islamists.
But at that point, their paths diverged—although not quite as
dramatically as it might appear.
In the summer of 2013, Egypt’s military ousted the
elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi
assumed the presidency and ushered in the return of authoritarian rule.
The military coup was preceded by massive demonstrations—perhaps the
largest in Egyptian history—organized by Tamarod (Rebellion), a movement
spearheaded by liberals and secularists alarmed by what they saw as
Morsi’s plan to Islamize Egyptian society. Egyptian media outlets fanned
these anxieties, as Osman relates:
Dozens of articles by leading journalists decried “the path towards becoming Afghanistan.” Artists and prominent women activists accused the Islamists of a condescending view of women: “seeing us as mere sexual objects,” “they think with their lower halves.” Some swore to fight for the right of Egyptians not to be led by “imams,” even if those imams had come to power through the ballot box. Irrespective of the change in the Brotherhood’s thinking and rhetoric since the [mid-twentieth century], its dramatic move from being an illegal group to the party ruling Egypt left many Egyptians, especially in the upper-middle classes, disoriented and fearful.
Alaa Al Aswany, perhaps the best-known contemporary novelist in Egypt
and the Arab world, warned in a series of articles that the Islamists
were using religious slogans to convince the lower-middle classes and
the rural poor—traditional Brotherhood supporters—that being a “good
Muslim” meant supporting a conservative agenda that ran counter to
Egypt’s “long, beautiful, resplendent, and plural identity.” Osman sees
this polarization, fanned by “media organizations with close links to
Mubarak-era power groups,” as crucial to the public delegitimization of
Morsi’s government, which was already reeling from the collapse of
foreign investment and tourism. The stage was set for the coup after
Morsi responded to such challenges by issuing a constitutional
declaration granting himself unlimited authority to enact legislation
and investing his presidential decrees with retroactive immunity from
executive or judicial review
In Tunisia, a similar contest between Islamists and secular forces emerged after the dictatorial president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
was toppled in January 2011. Educated elites and the upper-middle
classes had long benefited from Ben Ali’s rule and were adamantly
opposed to the long-outlawed but suddenly resurgent Islamist party
Ennahda, which won the largest number of seats in the elections held in
October 2011 and formed a coalition government with two left-leaning
parties. Although Tunisia remained calmer than Egypt during the period
of Islamist-led government, it experienced the same level of
polarization. Confrontations—sometimes violent—erupted between Islamists
and various secular-minded groups, ranging from the youth activists who
had started the original protests to remnants of the Ben Ali regime.
The Ennahda
government faced a series of general strikes launched by the country’s
influential, secular-oriented labor unions—the first time such strikes
had happened in more than three decades. In 2013, mass protests erupted
after the daylight assassinations of two opposition leaders, Chokri
Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, which were widely blamed on hard-line
Islamists. The ensuing political crisis, fueled by opposition parties
that blamed Ennahda for being “soft” on Islamist violence, was resolved
only when the Ennahda-led coalition stepped down and was replaced by a
caretaker government in October 2013.
The main catalyst for Ennahda’s decision to give up power may have
been watching the coup unfold in Egypt, which concentrated Islamist
minds greatly in Tunisia. As an Ennahda deputy told Hamid:
We’re sorry for what happened in Egypt, but it led to a result which was in a kind of way positive for our base. They saw how the Brotherhood’s insistence on unilateral acts might benefit you in the short term, but you lose in the long run. Your existence in the political scene is tied to the guarantee of democracy.
In addition to dissolving its ruling coalition, Ennahda also took an
accommodating approach to the process of drafting a new constitution,
which had begun in 2011 and continued under the caretaker government.
The Islamists compromised on a number of critical areas, dropping their
demands that the new constitution criminalize blasphemy, cite Islamic
law as the source of legislation, give men the right to marry more than
one woman, and refer to women as “complementary,” rather than equal, to
men. These were major concessions that sacrificed core elements of the
Islamist agenda. What is more, there was a good deal of public support
in Tunisia for making religion more central to governance, even after
the Islamists had stumbled while in power. In 2014, a Pew Research
Center poll found that more than half of Tunisians believed that the
country’s laws should “follow the values and principles of Islam”; 30
percent of respondents took an even more conservative position, agreeing
with the statement that laws should “strictly follow the teachings of
the Koran.”
Ennahda, however, seems determined to survive Tunisia’s transition
to democracy even if doing so requires adopting a de facto separation
between religion and government. At a party congress in May, its members
overwhelmingly supported a motion to separate the group’s political
affairs from its religious and cultural activities, while retaining
Islam as its primary ideological source.
Among modern Middle Eastern states, Tunisia may be unique in several
respects. It experienced a long period of secular government and
institutional state building, first under its founder, Habib Bourguiba,
who negotiated the country’s independence from France during the 1950s,
and then under his successor, Ben Ali. Tunisia also has the advantage of
having an Islamist leader of rare intellectual stature in Rached
Ghannouchi, co-founder of Ennahda and the group’s guiding force. After
returning to Tunisia in 2011 following more than 20 years of exile in
the United Kingdom, Ghannouchi has apparently come to see that his
movement’s survival—and perhaps that of Islam itself—depends on some
level of separation of mosque and state. As Hamid argues, the basic
project of Islamist movements such as Ennahda is to “reconcile premodern
Islamic law with the modern nation-state”—a negotiation in which the
state usually gets “the better end of the deal,” Hamid writes, because
the very process of state building, buttressed by the international
system of state recognition, is inherently secularizing and forces
Islamists to limit their ambitions.
That, of course, did not happen in Egypt. The difference in the two
countries’ outcomes may be attributed, in part, to differences in the
qualities of their Islamist leaders. In Egypt, the increasingly paranoid
Morsi tried to use the presidency and the state apparatus to face down
his liberal opponents. In Tunisia, by contrast, Ghannouchi saw that his
movement could survive only through compromise.
IMMODERATE TIMES
Ennahda’s pragmatism and gradualist approach run counter to the
religious fervor of the many Islamists who have joined the jihadist
droves flooding Iraq and Syria; indeed, it might be no coincidence that
Tunisia is one of the largest suppliers of foreign jihadists to those
countries. Ennahda’s accomodationism is out of sync with the messianic
and utopian currents that are coursing through Islamic thought today,
anchored in the belief that the word of God, as revealed to the Prophet
Muhammad in the Koran, is destined to supplant the flawed or distorted
versions of divine locutions preserved in the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures. The theological problem such extreme views pose can be
addressed, if not resolved, through sophisticated discussion between
religious specialists. But the social forces unleashed by religious
passions are proving much harder to contain.
The Sunni Muslim tradition suffers from an especially acute problem
that stems from what I have referred to elsewhere as “the argument from
manifest success”—the notion that the absolute truth of the Koran and
the rectitude of Muhammad’s mission were proved by the success of the
Arab conquests in the Middle East that followed the Prophet’s death in
632. That view, which took hold during centuries of hegemonic Islamic
rule in the Middle East and North Africa, has been difficult to square
with the unpalatable reality that during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, virtually every part of the Islamic world came under the rule
of Christians—and, in one particularly contentious case, of Jews—whose
beliefs were supposed to have been superseded by the finality of Islam.
The Sunni Muslim tradition
suffers from an especially acute problem that stems from what I have
referred to elsewhere as “the argument from manifest success.”
Osman admirably captures how the gap between the vision of Islamic
supremacy and the reality of Muslim subjugation has fueled in Islamist
circles a mixture of anger, nostalgia, and disenchantment with
pragmatists such as Ghannouchi. Although a majority of Islamists may
have come to accept the reality of the modern nation-state, Osman notes
that most have not yet abandoned
the notion of seyadat al-Islam: Islam’s sovereignty and its superiority over any other religious and man-made framework. This . . . means that beneath the acceptance of equal citizenry and secular nationality as the basis for an individual’s belonging to any society lurks the idea that any non-Islamic social or political framework is threatened by its status as inferior, if not flawed.
Ennahda’s “official rhetoric intelligently adheres to the vernacular
of any party functioning in a secular democracy,” he writes, but it is
not clear how long it will succeed in sustaining this posture in the
face of “the reality that Salafist jihadist ideas have captured
significantly large areas of the Islamic world.” He maintains, however,
that considering the persecution that party members had suffered prior
to 2011, Ennahda had done “the best that could have been achieved in a
short space of time.”
Still, the group’s quotidian language and modest accomplishments pale
in comparison to the soaring rhetoric and lofty aspirations of more
hard-line Islamists, such as the influential Qatar-based Egyptian
scholar Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In their analyses of the problems
facing Muslims, Qaradawi and other hard-liners tend to reduce a century
and a half of complex interactions between Islamists and the state to a
simple confrontation between Islam and secularism. Dismissing social
polarization, conflicting identities, and opposing views of national
security or economic challenges as mere secondary issues, Qaradawi and
others favor a narrative that sets “the Islamists’ rise and fall in a
much longer historical context,” in which the abolition of the Ottoman
caliphate by Kemal Ataturk after World War I becomes “an affront to
God’s rule,” Osman explains.
The emphasis on victimhood and loss—which can be remedied only by
vindication and restoration—also defines the vision of violent
jihadists, such as the self-styled caliph of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In a recorded sermon released on the Internet last year, Baghdadi urged
Muslims to leave the “abode of war” (comprising all the “infidel”
lands, including those governed by nominally Muslim leaders) and join
ISIS in the only true “abode of Islam.” “We call upon you so you leave
the life of humiliation, disgrace, degradation, subordination, loss,
emptiness, and poverty [for] a life of honor, respect, leadership,
[and] richness,” Baghdadi declared, promising new recruits “victory from
Allah and an imminent conquest.”
THE IRAN PROBLEM
How can the Muslim world escape the dual curse of secular
authoritarianism and religious extremism? Hamid persuasively challenges
the idea—advanced by the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among
others—that Islam must undergo a reformation akin to the Christian one.
As he writes, “lessons learned in Europe” are not necessarily applicable
in the Middle East. There is a curious absence in his book, however:
Iran, which for nearly 40 years has served as the clearest testing
ground for political Islam. Hamid claims that Iran falls outside the
scope of his study because the ideas that guided the Iranian Revolution
are relatively recent Shiite innovations, whereas he is concerned with
only the Sunni world. But he overplays the importance of that
distinction, and it is far from certain that his thesis about Islamic
exceptionalism could survive an analysis of Iran without severe
modification.
In Iran, which arguably boasts the world’s only Islamist government,
clerical governance has led to a steep decline in religious observance;
in 2011, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance lamented
that after more than 30 years of theocratic rule, only three percent of
Iranians attended Friday prayers. (Prior to the revolution, the figure
was almost 50 percent.) And yet Iranian society and governance have not
liberalized in any meaningful ways: the theocracy represses dissent at
home and supports militants abroad, such as the Lebanese group
Hezbollah. This poses a problem for Hamid’s view: put simply, the
argument that political Islam can evolve into Muslim democracy would be
more persuasive if the world’s most prominent Islamist country offered
more impressive evidence of that possibility.
Perhaps a better way to rebut the idea that the Islamic world can
follow only the European path toward modernity, by way of reformation,
would be to note that even Europe didn’t really follow that path—at
least as it is often portrayed. The Enlightenment was the outcome not
only of the Reformation but also of centuries of violent religious
conflict, after which sensible people concluded that they were not
improving their lots by killing one another in the name of God. That is
the grim lesson that Muslims in the contemporary Middle East may yet
find themselves learning from European history.
CORRECTION APPENDED (August 16, 2016): An
earlier version of this article misidentified the location of an
interview conducted by Shadi Hamid and misstated Hamid’s title at the
Brookings Doha Center. It has been corrected and updated.