More than eight decades after its birth in Egypt, Islamism is still a force to be reckoned with, in the Greater Middle East and well beyond. And it remains a phenomenon which sharply polarises opinion both in the West and within the Muslim world itself.
Islamism is, at root, a response to Western power and Western culture. Historically, Islam enjoyed a phenomenal early success. It was, as the writer Malise Ruthven puts it, ‘programmed for victory’. But from around 1700 on, the balance of power between Islam and the West began to shift decisively in the West’s favour. Many Muslims saw the ascent of the European colonial powers, who came to dominate their lands from Morocco to Indonesia, as the reversal of the natural order of things. It was a humiliation which has never been forgotten.
This collective historical memory has had an important impact on Islamist ideologues from Hasan al-Banna to Osama bin Laden. It is no accident that Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood – the archetypical Islamist movement –in Egypt at a time when the country was under British colonial rule. He believed Muslims were engaged in a battle on two fronts – an internal struggle to bring about a revival of Muslim belief and consciousness, and an external one to drive out the foreign colonialists from Muslim soil. In his mind, the two were linked. ‘Eject imperialism from your souls,’ he declared, ‘and it will leave your lands.’
For Al-Banna, Islamism was a social movement that had to build support from the bottom up. In contrast, Ayatollah Khomeini’s approach was top-down. To re-Islamise society you had to topple the secular tyrant and seize control of the state. Thus, even though the groundwork had been laid decades earlier, it was in 1979 that Islamism really took off. That crucial year saw the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – the two momentous events which served to radicalise and internationalise Islamism in both its Sunni and Shi’a forms.
Thereafter there were two possible trajectories: Islamism-in-one-country (sometimes called ‘Islamo-nationalism’) – epitomised by such groups as the FIS in Algeria or Hamas in the Palestinian territories – and the new global jihadism of groups of the Al-Qaeda type. Each has experienced both successes and failures. Groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have enjoyed significant grass-roots success. They have capitalised on resentment of ruling parties seen as corrupt and incompetent. But for the most part such groups have not won power. The result – in Algeria, in Egypt and elsewhere – is an unhappy deadlock, with the same old regimes clinging to power but under siege from Islamist movements with a tangible degree of popular support.
This deadlock at the national level is one of the factors that led Bin Laden and his colleagues to switch their attention from the ‘near enemy’ (the regimes) to the ‘far enemy’ (the United States and the West). Attack America in its heartland – so the argument ran – and you will drag it into unwinnable wars in the Muslim world. From this sprang the logic of 9/11.
In the next article, I look at the Western response to Islamism, in both its nationalist and internationalist forms, which I argue has all too often been short-sighted and self-defeating.
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