Why people fail to see Islamism

A founding principle of this website is that Islam is different from Islamism. Islam is a religious faith which first emerged in the 7th century CE. By Islamism I do not mean an extremist Islam – as many people see it – but rather a political ideology which emerged in the 20^th century. Those who support Islamism as a form of politics exist within the broader Muslim population.

The conceptual distinction between the faith and the ideology is simple in principle yet few grasp it. That is why it is necessary to ask why it seems so difficult to understand.

I have dealt with the distinction between the two in previous articles but just to recap on some of the main points.

Islamic principles, as with any ancient religion, are subject to contemporary interpretation. They appear to date from far back in time but the way they are viewed is heavily coloured by current concerns.

In the case of Islam its most important texts are the Koran, believed by strict Muslims to be the literal word of God, and the Hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. There are also secondary texts but they need not detain us here. 

The point is that someone reading them today will have a fundamentally different world view from someone in the 7th century. Indeed popular preoccupations have changed substantially since as recently as the late 20^th century.

The existence of several anti-Jewish passages in the Koran (although there are some pro-Jewish ones too) provides a good example. Many people make the rudimentary error of citing these passages to explain Muslim anti-Semitism in the present. But such a procedure is fundamentally flawed.

For one thing anti-Semitism as a racial ideology only emerged in the 19^th century. As I have written before – building on the work of Kenan Malik – the idea of race could only emerge once the notion of equality was established. Before that it was believed that societies were naturally hierarchical. The notion of races emerged as an attempt to explain why societies often failed to live up to the promise of equality. 

France provides a clear example of how this works. With the French revolution of 1789 the idea of equality officially became one of France’s organising principles. Yet it remained a highly unequal society. It was generally the most ardent conservatives who promoted the idea of race because they believed equality was unnatural.

In the case of Jews the idea that they constitute a race emerged in the second half of the 19^th century.  At that time Jews were officially enjoying emancipation. They were allowed to live outside their former ghettos and enjoy full rights as citizens. The anti-Semites were the ones who reacted against this emancipation. They saw the granting of equal rights to Jews and broader social modernisation as part of the same evil process. It is no coincidence that the term “anti-Semitism”, denoting that Jews should be seen as a race apart, was coined at this time. 

The point in relation to this debate is that there is no concept of race in the Koran nor was there any idea of society being modernised. There could not be because it was written many centuries before the ideas were conceived. There certainly were instances of religious instances of animosity towards Jews but that was a different phenomenon. 

Of course a present-day Muslim anti-Semite might well cite anti-Jewish passages from the Koran or the Hadith to give his views legitimacy. But to argue contemporary preoccupations are the same, or even similar to, those of the past is absurd.

Looking at Christianity and Judaism and not doubt other religions too helps illustrate the point. In the case of Judaism its key holy texts include the Torah and the Talmud. But the range of interpretation ostensibly based on these same texts is enormous. On one extreme are ultra-orthodox haredim who interpret Judaism as a socially conservative religion which prescribes every aspect of the life of its adherents. On the other extreme are woke types who interpret Judaism as a form of social justice ideology. Both claiming to be Jewish, both sharing the same foundational texts, but completely different interpretations depending on their respective contemporary preoccupations.

Islamism, in contrast, is a political movement which first emerged in the Middle East and South Asia. The Muslim Brotherhood, the first Islamist movement, was founded in Egypt in 1928. Jamaat-e-Islami was an Islamist party established in British India in 1941.

In broad terms Islamism can be seen as a rival to nationalism*. Nationalists in what was then the colonial world generally wanted to follow the West to become modern industrial nations. In contrast the Islamists, although against the colonial powers, were profoundly anti-modern. They wanted to expel the colonial powers but to replace them with an international Islamic order.

Bassam Tibi, a German-Syria academic, has set out their world view comprehensively. Islamists, among other things, tend to want to purge the world of jahiliyyah, which they see as a state of pre-Islamic barbarism. They believe that political sovereignty flows directly from God (hakkimiyya), rather than man. That means they are profoundly anti-democratic as they see the whole system of Islamic state order (Sharia) as divinely ordained. It is not a matter for human input. It also sees Jews in racial terms – as a distinct Satanic force which must be purged from the world.

Tibi points out that much Islamist thinking involves inventing traditions. For example, the term Sharia (path) is only mentioned once in the Koran to mean a divine path of faith. However, over time its meaning broadened until for the Islamists it became a whole theory of state order.

This brings us back to the question of why if the distinction is so simply, at least in principle, why do so many find it so hard to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. There are several factors at play:

 *We live in a world with little sense of history. The contemporary world is dominated by what some have called presentism. That is people struggle to see fundamental differences between the past and the present. The past is all too often seen as a less developed form of the present. At the same time people find it hard to imagine that the world will be substantially different in the future.

Under such circumstances people struggle to see how different terms can have fundamentally different meanings over time. For example, as discussed above, animosity to Jews is fundamentally different in the contemporary world than at different times of the past. Often it is just seen as “the oldest hatred” which rises and falls in prominence over time. Others will concede that it changes its form, for instance from religious to racial antipathy, but fail to appreciate these are fundamentally different world views.

*In much of the West politics and religion are seen as more-or-less separate. In one mental category are political movements such as conservatism, religion and socialism. In another box are religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The two types of thinking, political and religious, are seen as broadly separate.

But Islamism is something different. It is a political movement which exists within a broader religious community. Not all Muslims are Islamists, on the contrary many are not, but all Islamists are Muslims. This is contrary to the way politics normally works in the West. So westerners often struggle to imagine a politics which takes this form.

*Islamists operate in a covert way to obscure the difference with Islam. Part of the reason Islamists are hard to spot is that they deliberately hide themselves. They often operate through front organisations such as Muslim community, charitable, religious and student organisations. They also operate within broader organisations such as campaigns for Palestine solidarity. These are all on top of networks related to Islamist groups from different regions including the Arab world, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey

Islamists also consider themselves the authentic Muslims. Those Muslims who do not go along with the Islamists are often subject to contempt and sometimes physical intimidation.

*Finally, as noted in last week’s article, there was a protracted taboo against criticising Islam in wider societies. Anyone who engaged in such criticisms was likely to be accused of Islamophobia. They would be charged with punching down at those on the bottom of society.

But now that the taboo has been severely weakened it has become easier to discuss matters related to Islam. Hopefully that will include the distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as a political movement. It is a difference of the utmost important in contemporary politics.

It is a good time to seize the opportunity to develop an understanding of Islamism as a political movement.

*For a study of how the clash between Arab nationalism and Islamism has shaped the Arab world see Fawaz Gerges Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018).

PHOTO: "Qaradawi" by Ebong abd is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.