Starting in the mid-1970s, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the popular appeal of secular, nationalist ideologies declined precipitously among the urban classes. These urban classes were going through other experiences as well. The oil boom of the 1970s was fostering unprecedented economic and industrial growth and consequently dizzying social change. Rural-urban migration, uncontrolled urbanization, new industries and modes of employment, increasing diffusion and contact with other cultures—all of these developments had consequences for Middle Eastern societies’ perceptions of themselves and their state leaders. In the face of hostile and incompetent states, and a pervasive sense of social and cultural alienation among segments of the urban population, shelter was sought in the familiar and the comfortable, in Islam. Once Islam had proved itself to be a viable and powerful force for political mobilization in Iran in 1978–79, its popularity among politically minded Middle Easterners grew rapidly throughout the region. For state actors everywhere, this was a serious threat. Islam had been used as a vehicle for political expression for centuries, and in the twentieth century its politicization went as far back as 1928, when a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood group in Egypt. But now, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Islam was establishing itself as a political force to be reckoned with. Fouad Ajami captures it best: “In the simplified interpretation we have of that civilization, the young had taken to theocratic politics; they had broken with the secular politics of their elders.”108
Throughout the Middle East, Islamist opposition to the state is likely to come from four groups, although the boundaries between them are not clearly defined: the conservative clerical class (ulama), lay intellectuals, populist organizations, and fundamentalist groups and organizations. These groups are far from monolithic, and all of them feature significant intragroup diversity. They also often have a symbiotic and reinforcing relationship with one another: a conservative cleric issues a fatwa (religious opinion) sanctioning a specific act, which is in turn carried out by a group of fundamentalists, or a secular intellectual becomes one of the main ideological inspirations of a populist organization. Despite these overlapping relationships, it is possible to place many individuals or organizations in a specific category.
As a social group, the ulama have been an integral feature of Middle Eastern societies ever since the spread of Islam beyond Mecca and Medina, even though Islam does not formally recognize a distinct class of religious specialists. Over time, many of these interpreters of religion became powerful possessors of religious knowledge, educators, guardians of the hadith (the Prophet’s tradition), trustees of religious endowments (owqaf), and arbiters of social conflict. The inevitable clash between the ulama’s desire to maintain their vast privileges and responsibilities and the modern state’s attempts to mold society on the basis of its own agendas was, to varying degrees, settled in favor of the state. Some state leaders (e.g., Atatürk) tried to destroy the ulama as a social force, while others (Reza Shah, Mohammed V, Nasser, King Hassan) sought a partial accommodation with them. Still others, such as the Saudi royal family, tried to neutralize the clergy by incorporating them into the state apparatus and making them a part of the power equation. Nevertheless, in one form or another, by the late twentieth century most Middle Eastern states were able to force their political and institutional hegemony on the ulama and to ensure the clerical establishment’s political marginalization, if not total subordination.
The period from the 1950s through the 1970s did not go well for the ulama. Modern state institutions were created and took over many of the functions that had long been the preserve of the clergy. State-run schools and universities supplanted the many seminaries that had monopolized education for the bulk of the masses. “Family protection” laws were introduced, and women in most places were given the right to sue for divorce. Waqf land was taken over by the state, and in every country a Ministry of Religious Affairs or something similar to it was established to “supervise” the clergy. In 1961, the Al-Azhar, Egypt’s cradle of Islamic learning and one of the oldest universities in the world, was nationalized, and its ulama became employees of the Nasserist state. This same pattern was repeated in practically every other country of the Middle East. The ulamas’ position as judges and arbitrators was steadily eroded, their economic power was weakened, they lost students, and their political and institutional autonomy was curtailed.
It was no accident that most clergy around this time became politically “quietist.” Faced with increased repression and other acts of manipulation by the state, many retreated to their seminaries and mosques, immersing themselves in their religious studies and teachings. Some cooperated with the state and became mouthpieces of the “official Islam” (al-Islam al-rasmi) to which even the most secular leaders paid lip service. But by and large the mainstream ulama resented (and still resent) the state and most of what it stands for. They quietly decry the state’s moral corruption, its political mismanagement, its seemingly total submission to the Western powers, and its ceaseless efforts to “Westernize” society.
By themselves, the ulama have not been a powerful social force for spearheading political opposition or change. Even in Iran, as we saw in chapter 5, they succeeded only when they entered into strategic alliances with secular parties and intellectuals. They have, nevertheless, been highly influential sources of inspiration and general religious guides for various secular intellectuals who see in religion remedies for many social and political maladies of their societies. A generation earlier intellectuals had been rabidly secularist. They had included the Lebanese poet and educator Khalil Hawi (1920–82), the Iraqi-born poet Buland Heidari (1926–96), the Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51), the Syrian poet and literary critic Adonis, the pen name for Ali Ahmad Said (b. 1930), and the legendary Egyptian writer and novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), to name only a few.109 But the new crop of Middle Eastern intellectuals, almost all younger, invariably saw the political world through the lenses of Islam. Whether “progressive” or “reactionary” in the conventional sense, they identified themselves as Muslim thinkers who happened also to be Middle Easterners, not Middle Eastern thinkers who happened to be Muslim.
There was, in fact, an inverse relationship between the decline of the ulama as a social force and the rise of a new breed of Muslim intellectuals. “The ineffectiveness of the traditional ulama meant that the way was open for the emergence of a new style of Muslim intellectual who would work to create a modern but not secularist alternative to both the conservative ulama and the secular intellectuals. To a remarkable degree, the new intellectual perspectives peripherized the old secular intellectuals and converted the traditional ulama into more activist Islamic advocates and reformers.”110 This Islamist generation includes figures such as the Egyptian thinker Hasan Hanafi (b. 1935), the Tunisian activist Rachid al-Ghannouchi (b. 1941), Sudan’s Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932), Iranian ideologues Ali Shariati (1933–77) and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (b. 1947), and Indonesia’s Abdurrahman Wahid (1941–2009). Operating within the socioeconomic contexts and the intellectual traditions of their own countries, all these thinkers in their own ways have sought to reconcile Islam and modernity through contemporary interpretations of Islam and to propose viable Islamic solutions to problems of contemporary society.
Given their intellectual concerns and larger political environment, many of these Muslim thinkers have become politically active within their own countries.111 Hasan Hanafi was active in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a young man, although he has gone on to become a highly respected professor at Cairo University and has held visiting appointments in numerous other institutions around the world. In the 1990s, his unorthodox views earned him the ire of Egypt’s conservative religious establishment, and some figures at Al-Azhar even went so far as to brand him an apostate. Iran’s Abdolkarim Soroush and many other Iranian thinkers like him found themselves in a similarly precarious positio
n, although most of the opposition to them came from the conservative ulama within the state—or within the state’s orbit—rather than from nonstate clergy. Rachid al-Ghannouchi was the head of the Tunisian party called the Islamic Tendency Movement until he was forced into exile in the early 1990s. A former law professor at Khartoum University and a central figure in Sudanese politics since 1964, al-Turabi was believed to be the major ideologue of the regime that came to power in Sudan in 1989 and, ever after, had sought to establish an “authentic Islamic state.” By 1999, however, he had apparently fallen out of favor with the state’s leading figure, President Umar Hasan al-Bashir, and was dismissed.
Similar developments also occurred in two non–Middle Eastern countries that are among the largest Muslim countries in the world, Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim had long been active in the country’s legal opposition, but as part of the general Islamization of Malaysian politics in recent decades he had gradually risen within the state apparatus and by the early 1990s had held several different cabinet positions. Eventually, in 1993, he was named deputy prime minister and was assumed to be the successor to Prime Minister Mohathir Mohammad. By 1998, however, he, like al-Turabi in Sudan, was out of office. In a sensational trial in 1999, he was convicted of corruption and sexual misconduct and was sentenced to prison. In Indonesia, meanwhile, Abdurrahman Wahid, who had been one of the country’s most prominent Islamic figures, rose to even greater heights in Indonesian politics, becoming the country’s first democratically elected president in October 1999. However, he was unable to effectively deal with the country’s mounting economic crises, and after sustained mass demonstrations he was forced to resign in 2001.
Despite their occasional forays into politics and the innately political nature of their undertaking, the primary concerns of most Muslim intellectuals remain theoretical and epistemological. Most are academics, men and women of letters whose main vocations are writing, lecturing, and, on occasion, political activism. While many of these intellectuals at times have been involved with various political parties both directly and indirectly, they form a category of their own insofar as the Islamist opposition is concerned.
Another category is composed primarily of Islamist political parties. Found in every Middle Eastern country, these parties vary greatly in the degree to which Islam informs the ideologies of their overall platforms and in the precise role that they ascribe to Islam in relation to political and socioeconomic questions. For example, Turkey has had a series of ostensibly “Islamic” political parties, almost all of which have a common leadership genealogy: the National Salvation Party, the Refah, the Fazilet, the Saadet, and, most recently, beginning in 2001, the AKP. But although each party before the AKP was successively banned by the highly secularist political establishment, each, in order to operate, sought to downplay its Islamist character and instead played up its adherence to Atatürk’s (secular) legacy. At the opposite end of the scale have been parties such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, which have been unabashedly Islamist in every aspect, from their ideological platform to their base of support in mosques and among seminary students. The Tunisian Al-Nahda (Awakening) was another Islamist party. Although it was comparatively moderate, it too was banned by the Ben Ali regime.
Despite the differences in their specific ideological platforms and their tactics, these Islamist parties share certain characteristics. To begin with, their relationship with the state has been tense and inconsistent. The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and especially in Egypt has often been banned by the state, only to be allowed to operate later. In Turkey, the state frequently banned the existing Islamist party, but the same party leaders established a new one shortly thereafter. In Tunisia, Al-Nahda was banned altogether and not allowed to resurrect, since the government was highly sensitive to the events unfolding in neighboring Algeria.
More importantly, the Islamist parties share largely populist ideologies that appeal especially to the middle and lower-middle classes, such as attention to the economic plight of the lower classes, emphasis on economic nationalism, greater respect for the tenets of Islam in public life, and an end to government corruption. Although generally critical of the state and its leadership, these Islamist parties tend to endorse the overall legitimacy of the existing political order by agreeing to participate in it. They may boycott specific elections in protest over the government’s unfair advantage (or their own electoral weakness), but they generally endorse the existing institutional framework of the state and do not call for its overthrow. At most, they advocate changes through legislation and state directives.
This is in stark contrast with the extremist ideologies and strategies of Islamist parties and/or individuals that are commonly called “fundamentalist” or, more recently, Salafist. Islamic fundamentalists differ from other Islamists—conservative clerics, intellectuals, and relatively moderate parties—in degree. A product of the zero-sum political cultures that often pervade Middle Eastern polities, Islamic fundamentalists generally reject the legitimacy of the existing political order on the grounds of its essentially un-Islamic character. All state laws and regulations, they argue, must be based on Islamic law, the sharia. Some, such as the Islamic Liberation Party in Jordan, also advocate the resurrection of the caliphate system of rule.112 Others, such as Egypt’s Gamaʿa, have argued that sovereignty belongs only to God and that believers are called upon to engage in jihad (in this sense, battle) against leaders who are unbelievers (kafir).113 Other examples of fundamentalist parties are Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, the former Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, the Justice and Welfare Party (Adl wal-Ihsan) in Morocco, and Al-Qaeda.
Again, the various Islamic fundamentalist groups have important differences. The Lebanese Hezbollah, for example, is in some respects more concerned about the plight of the Lebanese Shiʿites than it is about the immorality of the Lebanese state. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have emerged in specific national and historical contexts that are unique to Palestine. Nevertheless, the shared features of these and other fundamentalist organizations tend to outnumber their differences. Practically all these organizations and the individuals who belong to them have a literalist interpretation of Islam and its precepts. Their world is one of simple divisions: good versus evil; the oppressed versus the oppressors; the abode of Islam (dar al-Islam) versus the abode of war (dar al-harb). For them, the best way to achieve their goals is through jihad, which they take to mean “holy war” rather than, as more sophisticated interpretations of Islam would have it, “striving” for betterment. Since they reject the legitimacy of the political order, they view jihad against the state as one of their fundamental obligations.114
All of this has often translated into violent attacks on state leaders and institutions, and, on occasion, on the state’s perceived foreign patrons. The FIS, for example, tried, largely without success, to take its struggle against the Algerian state to France, which it saw as the main supporter of the Algiers government. Osama bin Laden’s attacks on American targets were similarly inspired by a belief that the United States was the biggest patron of the Saudi royal family. Also, throughout the 1990s, the Gamaʿa attacked tourists visiting Egypt’s historic monuments, hoping both to embarrass the Egyptian state internationally and to deprive it of tourist revenues. Such terrorist activities have elicited equally violent and brutal reactions from many Middle Eastern states, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle of political violence that has become all too familiar.
The events of September 11, 2001, put the global spotlight on Islamic fundamentalism. Although its most archaic (and brutal) manifestation was practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan, fundamentalist Islam has pervasive roots in every country of the Middle East, from the highly “Europeanized” Turkey to the ultraconservative Saudi Arabia. Fundamentalism breeds in a vacuum of intellectual political discourse, when the authoritarianism of the stat
e makes it impossible to discuss and examine complex social and political problems in a reasoned manner. State terror elicits terror of a different kind, the terror of the young and the restless who want answers and solutions but find most avenues of expression blocked by an intransigent elite.
The precarious lives of the middle classes make them all the more receptive to extremist alternatives. As we will see in chapter 10, almost all Middle Eastern states launched ambitious economic liberalization programs in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Invariably, this meant inviting foreign investors, encouraging joint-venture enterprises, and giving tax and other investment incentives to domestic entrepreneurs. A few small and medium-sized state-owned enterprises were also privatized and sold off. Apart from multinational corporations, the prime beneficiaries of these privatization efforts were the domestic upper classes, who were well positioned to take advantage of the state’s slow retreat from the economy. They were the ones who had the necessary contacts to secure state contracts, acquire foreign partners, and invest in the newly privatized areas. Many opened up hotels and restaurants, bought and managed buildings, founded factories for food processing and other lucrative businesses, or imported the many foreign consumer items that the middle and upper classes craved—everything from cereals to auto parts, appliances, candy, and the like. Those who could afford it, the rich, were getting richer.
When the recession of the 1980s and 1990s came, the middle and lower classes who by now worked for these businesses were hit hard. Even the multinational corporations scaled back, frightened by the ever-present threat of terrorist attacks (especially in Algeria and Egypt) or disenchanted by the continued inefficiency and corruption of the government. Recession meant unemployment; privatization meant fewer secure government jobs. Even the civil servants who enjoyed job security found it difficult to make ends meet on their government salaries as the price of basic commodities continued to rise and inflation spiraled. Many in the upper classes could ride the wave, but the less wealthy were not as lucky. Today, throughout the Middle East, the middle classes are barely hanging on, many having to work two or three jobs to maintain their middle-class status. Extremism offers the middle and lower classes—disillusioned and frustrated, living in fear of losing even more economic ground, and powerless to protest the state’s policies—a way to strike hard at the state. And given the steady demise of other ideological alternatives, that extremism has taken on an Islamic character.
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