The Fundamental Things

The last nine months have been a time of questions in the West: Who carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, what were their motives, ideologies and expectations, and what may the future bring? “Terrorism,” a convenient term for identifying some of the issues involved, is one answer. But something else--history, social and political analysis, an understanding of the uses and misuses of texts, symbols, traditions--is also needed that moves the discussion beyond Manhattan and into the countries where anger and violence have been maturing for several decades.

To that task Gilles Kepel, Tariq Ali and John L. Esposito make their informative contributions. Each writes in a particular register: Kepel as a French specialist on fundamentalism in many countries; Ali as a Pakistani critic of fundamentalism and the United States; and Esposito as an American committed to the better understanding of faiths. What their books provide is an analysis of a religion and culture that is diverse and in conflict with itself.

Kepel has followed the development of political Islam for 20 years, beginning with a study of the Egyptian militants who assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and on through the spread of Islamic radicalism in the 1980s and 1990s to Algeria, Afghanistan and Turkey. The terror attacks of last year, he believes, are not the result of a rising Islamic force but are the desperate act of a radical Islam that is in decline.

Kepel has a fine eye for the ways in which appeals to a radical Islam identity and to the solidarity of a broad community, or Umma, embracing all Muslims are offset by more mundane forces. Thus it was the rivalry of two states, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that dominated politicized Islam, or “Islamism,” in the 1980s. In the 1990s, for all the rhetoric and fighting, it was the existing regimes that prevailed over religious protest: The radical movements failed to achieve their goals.

Similarly in Egypt and Algeria, militant groups were contained; in Turkey, where Islamism took an electoral form, the government of Necmettin Erbakan was dismissed by the military; in Iran, 20 years of the mullahs in power has led to widespread disillusionment with the appeals of political Islam; in Sudan, the Islamist regime became another military dictatorship; in its main European venture, Bosnia, fundamentalism failed to capture the embattled new republic.

And then came last year’s tragic events. In Afghanistan the population, far from embracing the jihadi internationalists who had provoked a confrontation with America, turned on them, denouncing Arabs and Pakistanis for ruining their country. In the Muslim world at large, Islamic internationalism and appeals to the Umma to rise up yielded little despite considerable sympathy for the attacks on America, as there was in the non-Muslim Third World, and little substantial or organized support for Al Qaeda.

Far from being a wave of the future, Kepel concludes political Islam is on the retreat; the resort to violence by extremist groups is a sign of desperation and frustration, not of some victorious, mobilizing advance. “In spite of what many hasty commentators contended in its immediate aftermath,” Kepel writes, “the attack on the United States was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation, and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength and irrepressible might.”

Kepel, Ali and Esposito describe the diversity of Muslim traditions and interpretations; it is a far cry from the perception of Islam as monolithic, something that fundamentalists also claim. Ali, for example, through his reading of early Islamic history and philosophy, locates the flexible, skeptical, hedonistic traditions within Islamic thinking, ones picked up by liberals such as Muhammad Iqbal in India and Arab liberal thinkers, whom the fundamentalists wish to silence.

Ali too puts considerable emphasis on the fact that, in contemporary Islamic culture, the great power is not religious solidarity, as the West might believe, but nationalism, most evident in the massacre of East Pakistani Bengalis by West Pakistani Punjabis and Sindhis in 1971.

Esposito traces the origins of fundamentalism to medieval Islamic thinkers such as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy, Ibn Taimiya (1268-1328). He also shows how text and tradition allow for different, more liberal, interpretations in contemporary times: The Malayan Anwar Ibrahim, Mohammad Khatami in Iran and the former president of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid are three examples of voices calling for reform and recognizing, as Esposito says, “the strengths and weaknesses of Western-style modernity.”

But the face of Islam that many of us have become accustomed to is that of Osama bin Laden, whose ideology can be traced from key radical modern thinkers who turned against liberal Islam as they turned against secular forces in their own society. Hassan al-Banna (died in 1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, provided a model of a new militant political organization. Mawlana Maududi (died in 1979) founded the Jamaat-i-Islami (the Islamic Society), the core of what was to be Pakistani fundamentalism, in 1941. He proposed the reestablishment of the unity of all Muslims and a jihad against secularism and Western ideology.

But, as these three books suggest, the Islamic thinker of most proximate importance for Bin Laden and many of his associates is Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. He denounced all in the West as jahiliya, a Koranic term for “ignorance,” and proposed in his programmatic book “Milestones” the creation of a hard, militant organization refusing all negotiation that would confront this enemy.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Communism had tried to use radical Muslim sentiment against Western colonialism. From the 1950s it was the other way: Saudi Arabia and later other regimes such as Pakistan and Iran sought to mobilize popular sentiment against communism and nationalism by promoting Islam. In this they were encouraged by the U.S., which went on to wage its largest covert operation in support of the Afghan jihad. Those who were encouraged by the West to fight communism in the 1980s turned, after the war with Iraq in 1990-91, to oppose the U.S. Within the Arab states most closely allied with the West, in particular Saudi Arabia, a movement of social unrest, directed at corruption and at collusion with Western policy, also increased.

By the mid-1990s three issues had fused into one angry cause: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan. Attacks on Western targets began in 1993 and, in February 1998, the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders was established, with Al Qaeda as one of its components, laying down in its rhetoric the claim to a militant opposition across west Asia. For all the resort to tradition, there was much that was new here: When Bin Laden invoked Muslim resistance to the Crusades, he made an allusion that until recently had meant little to most Muslims.

Since Sept. 11, signs of an enduring crisis, one that will engulf many Muslim countries, are more visible. Afghanistan has been freed from the Taliban, and the transitional process occurring there has some chance of success. Elsewhere, however, the crises endure: Kashmir remains unresolved, with India and Pakistan no nearer accommodation; there will, in all likelihood, be a major confrontation between the U.S. and Iraq; Israelis and Palestinians are at war, with popular anger on both sides such that, even were some cease-fire or agreement negotiated, it is improbable it would last.

Meanwhile, after an interlude of reflection and some good sense, wild generalizations about Islam and the West are gaining ground in the West and East. On all sides there is less understanding, less willingness to listen.

In all of this, and despite Kepel’s argument as to the limited appeal of radical Islam, it would appear naive to believe that a fundamental clarification of issues or of historical causes has taken place. We can explore, in the past and the present of the Muslim world, many ways in which more open, liberal, democratic interpretations are possible: But amid what is a pervasive sense of nationalist anger, and where the outcome of rival interpretation will be decided by those who have power, more open, tolerant variants will be on the defensive.

Among the many problems underlying this story, there are three that are particularly discomforting. One concerns the sources of political violence: These are deep and persistent, and even if Kepel is right about the limited mass appeal of Al Qaeda, others with equally limited appeal may try to replicate, if not outbid, Sept. 11. The second problem is that of responsibility for what happened: Post-Sept. 11 indignation and commitment to fighting terrorism cannot obliterate the degree to which Western countries played, during the Cold War, a role in fostering violent groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In this regard, patriotic denial and a careless use of the term “terrorism” are no escape.

Finally, there is the question of how far it makes sense, in any context, to try to combine religion with political life; whether, in other words, there is an alternative to secularism in the modern world. At the moment, those who oppose radical Islam often do so with other religious idioms, be it that of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or liberal variants of Islam itself. Given the uses to which religion and culture are put, one can only wonder if this will not compound the problem.

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From ‘The Clash of Fundamentalisms’

I never really believed in God. Not even for a week, not even between the ages of six and ten, when I was an agnostic. This unbelief was instinctive. I was sure there was nothing else out there except space. It could have been my lack of imagination. During the sweet, jasmine-scented summer nights, long before mosques were allowed to use loud-speakers, it was enough to savor the silence, look upwards at the exquisitely lit sky, count the shooting stars and fall asleep. The early morning call of the muezzin was like a pleasant-

sounding alarm clock.

There were many advantages in being an unbeliever.

-- TARIQ ALI