Third Lecture delivered at Hillsdale Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West.” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

The eminent scholar Bernard Lewis tells the story of an official of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century who marveled at an English gunboat in Istanbul harbor. The ship symbolized Europe’s new military technology and commercial reach. That official could not foresee the implications of the modern political-philosophic project that the ship represented. By the end of the First World War—itself the debacle of the aristocratic and monarchic regimes of Europe–foreign, modern empires dominated Islamic civilization.

In some respects the Wahhabi movement in 18th-century Saudi Arabia was the first modern Islamist movement, thus one of the earliest responses of ‘fundamentalist’ Islam to modernity. The life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab spanned most of that century, the century in which the modern project began to take hold noticeably, beyond Europe. He called his followers muwahhadun, meaning unitarians—believers in the oneness of God, as distinguished from polytheists (including those Trinitarians, the Christians). God, he taught, is not only unitary; God is also exclusive, meaning he must be addressed directly, with no physical, human, or even ideational intermediaries. A physical intermediary might be an amulet, a gravestone, or any sort of ornamentation on a mosque (minarets should be torn down, he taught). A human intermediary might be a saint or a holy man. An ideational intermediary would be a philosophy, or any other mental structure not seen in the Koran. In practice, Abd al-Wahab asserted that any dependency other than dependency upon God is punishable by the forfeit of property and life, on the grounds that any such dependency implies polytheism, blasphemy; your amulet, your holy man, your philosophy has become, in effect, another god to you.

Abd al-Wahab was a Koranic fundamentalist or literalist. Whereas much of traditional Islamic jurisprudence had been founded upon the consensus of believers, held to be the foundation of the Shar’a, Wahhabists regard the Koran itself as the only foundation of the Shar’ia. He based many of his teachings on the writings of the medieval jurist and warrior Ibn Tamiyya, who had excoriated idolatry, devotion to saints, and philosophy some three centuries earlier. Appropriately enough, Ibn Tamiyya’s writings were republished in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Abd al-Wahab particularly loathed the Sufi branch of Islam, which inclines toward peaceable mysticism, and might lead to innovation; his Islam insists on strict legalism. Wahhabism also requires asceticism—again, grounded on the ban on polytheism. Above all, Wahhabism requires jihad or armed struggle against the polytheists and infidels. Wahhabists tend to regard true Islam as preeminently Arabic, and this happens to comport well with one aspect of the modern world, the nationalism that democratization and statism both foster.

As these teachings suggest, Abd al-Wahab, like the Prophet himself, and like Ibn Tamiyya, had the soul of the warrior. His movement has been compared to the more militant forms of 17th-century Protestantism. Although anti-modern in his doctrines, Abd al-Wahab had no compunction about the use of modern technology on the battlefield; he used firearms, not lances, in his many wars. In 1744 he allied with Muhammad ibn-Saud, the emir of a village near what is now the city of Riyadh. Ibn-Saud came from a distinguished family, as Abd al-Wahab did not, and family, then as now, counted for a lot in Arabia. For his part, Ibn-Saud needed Abd al-Wahab needed Abd al-Wahab for the warriors he brought with him, and of course benefited from the authority conferred by the Wahhabist religious method. To this day the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance forms the regime of Saudi Arabia, with the Koran as its constitution.

Declaring jihad against neighboring Arab tribes, the two men expanded their territory. Their successors captured Mecca in 1803—just as the United States and the Barbary monarchs went to war. This conquest attracted the unfavorable attention of the Ottoman Empire, home of the caliphate. The Ottomans sent Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to quell the movement. Ali expelled the Wahhabis from Mecca in 1812 and stayed in the region until 1819, conquering Riyadh itself. Defeated, the Wahhabi House of Saud nonetheless remained intact.

As the Ottoman Empire declined in the early 20th century, the Saudis saw their chance. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance recaptured Riyadh in 1902, and they consolidated their power over local Bedouin tribes during the First World War. With the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula after the war, the Saudis recaptured Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s. True to their iconoclastic doctrines, Wahhabis smashed tombs of Muslim saints and imams throughout the peninsula. Europeans recognized the monarchic regime of Ibn Saud in the mid-twenties, but other Muslims did so more reluctantly—the last holdouts being the Egyptians, who waited until 1936. The other Muslims had reason for concern about Wahhabist control over the two most holy cities of Islamic civilization. The British backed the House of Saud, over the objections of Colonel T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” who advocated support of the Hashemite royal family, which today rules Jordan. More radical elements among the Wahhabis opposed the British/infidel presence, but were crushed in 1929 by the Saudis and the British. One might think of the radicals as Osama bin Laden’s precursors.

Ibn Saud formally proclaimed the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in 1932. One of the most unusual features of this monarchy is the line of succession he established. The throne passes not from father to son but from brother to brother. To this day, the Saudi king is a brother of Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia was a modern, unitary state in its structure, but one dedicated in theory to the strictest Islam. While the figure of the armed prophet—Muhammad himself, as well as Abd al-Wahab—and the valorization of war do indeed square with Machiavellianism, the rest of Islam does not. Could Islam support a modern state?

The modern state needs substantial revenues. In 1933, Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with the new monarchy, and did discover oil there, a few years later. Just as Abd al-Wahab had availed himself of modern military technology as an instrument subordinate to the expansion of Islam, so the House of Saud would employ oil technology for the same purpose. The monarchs of 19th-century Germany and Austria had failed to meet the political challenges of modernity, but they had modernized their economies quite successfully. Among their main institutional innovations was the state-owned enterprise, typified by railways. Monarchs love state-owned revenue sources. Such enterprises radically decrease the need for tax revenues, thus decreasing the need for recognizing political demands for government by consent and representation—republicanism. The kinds of enterprises the German and Austrian regimes owned rather unfortunately required complex manufacturing and legislation. This meant that those monarchies became too complicated to remain truly monarchic. They became cumbersomely bureaucratic states; under the pressure of protracted war, they finally spun out of the control of their rulers.

Oil differs from many other sources of revenue. The technology needed to extract and refine it can be left to limited numbers of foreign infidels who can be isolated from the rest of society. Oil has been indispensable to the operations of the modern world, but its exploitation did not require the importation of any monarch-threatening infrastructures. State-owned oil revenues precluded the need for taxation and with it any economically-based call for popular political representation. The American republican slogan, “No taxation without representation,” can have little attraction to those who pay no taxes.

At the end of the Second World War, Saudi oil fields produced 21.3 million barrels annually. By 1975, they produced 2,852 million barrels annually. In that time, the enormous wealth generated by that production transformed Saudi society. Aristotle remarks that a regime may change if one part of the political partnership drastically increases in relative size and wealth to the other parts. How would the Saudi monarchy fare as the royal family enlarged and enriched themselves?

As early as the 1920s some Wahhabis grumbled that Ibn Saud had become too lax, taxing tobacco instead of banning it, allowing the use of telegraphs and other suspect devices. But Ibn Saud faced them down, by force and by law. He made the Koran the constitution of his kingdom, and his successors, if anything, toughened the laws they inherited from him—restricting the activities of women outside the household, for example, and persecuting Christians. But none of this fazed the new American president, Franklin Roosevelt, who made his move to Wareplace the British as Saudi Arabia’s top ally during the Second World War. Americans feared the return of the Great Depression after the war, and had rather disliked the British Empire since it had last proved useful—around the 1760 and the end of the French and Indian War. Just as the British had undermined the Ottomans in Arabia, so the Americans started to undermine the British, as chronicled by FDR’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, in his postwar memoir, As He Saw It. But we don’t need Elliot; we have, for example, the President’s toast to the king in September 1943. “In the future we should seek to know each other better,” he suggested, turning on his celebrated charm. “We have much in common. We both love liberty—both Nations” he continued, in a resounding slap at British imperialism. “I think we all know that the King is a very wonderful person. I was reading this afternoon a little magazine, and it was all about the King; and there was one little paragraph at the end that I liked a lot—all of it goes along with my own philosophy. ‘Ibn Saud’s most engaging quality is a kingly belief in eventual rightness. It did not surprise him greatly when Allah, who sent Arabia its ancient rains, provided also its new oil. Nor will it surprise him greatly if God presently provides also not merely victory [in the war] but the bright and honest world that should go along with it.'” The end of imperialism, the advent of the United Nations: yes, surely, FDR and Ibn Saud were very nearly soul-mates, although they might have differed somewhat on the principles under which nations ought to united. A detail left to another day.

The Wahhabist clerics surely had their own ideas on that matter. In 1964, King Faisal came to power, hoping to modernize the country. But in that same decade, his country saw an influx of Islamist activists and militants who had been exiled from the secularized despotisms of Nasser’s Egypt, Assad’s Syria, and Hussein’s Iraq—regimes then allied with Moscow. These were true Islamists, often affiliated with the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The interaction of these activists with the Wahhabists led to the radicalization of many of the latter, especially the younger generation. Faisal was himself assassinated by one of his young cousins. As a result of this ferment, the Saud dynasty needed to strengthen its ‘Islamic legitimacy,’ and for this it could turn to no other group than the clerics, which Faisal’s successor, King Khalid, quickly did.

The dynasty’s need only intensified a decade later, when neighboring Iran came under the rule of fundamentalist Shi’a clerics, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. Acceding to clerical demands, they gave the clerics thoroughgoing control over education and (perhaps in response to the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism in the West, tightened control over women. In this they were responding not only to the wishes of the clerics but to the demands of Islamist youths, their numbers swelling as the Kingdom experienced the consequences of its own postwar ‘baby boom.’ Many of these young men were ‘exported’ to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, an experience which hardly caused a tempering of the Islamist ambitions among those who survived and returned. It was a ‘pressure valve’ likely to work only so long as they militants stayed safely abroad.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, King Fahd, Khalid’s successor, requested that troops of the American-led “Coalition of the Willing” be stationed on Saudi soil in order to protect the oil fields from any possible Iraqi attack. Once again, a Saudi king needed Wahhabite backing, and once again, the clerics were only too eager to cooperate, again at the price of further Islamicization of Saudi society. The Saudi defense minister entered into negotiations with the young jihadi Osama bin Laden, who offered to defend the border with his troops. This was a step too far even for a desperate regime, and the dynasty’s refusal alienated bin Laden, turning him against the regime of his homeland, with results we considered in the previous lecture.

Perhaps the most important consequences of the regime’s increased intertwinement with the Wahhabis has been the use of Saudi oil revenues for Wahhabi proselytizing and for funding Wahhabi terrorist groups. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance extends to such allied countries as Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and, in recent years, Syria. Although Kurds, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and most European Muslims remain outside the Wahhabi camp, substantial inroads have been made in Kosovo, Algeria, and Tajikistan, where they have met defeat, and in Chechnya, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and, of course, the United States, where many mainstream Muslim organizations such as CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are Wahhabi-dominated. The notion of Pan-Islamism, invented by the Ottomans in the 1770s, has been taken over by the once-obscure Arabian sect founded by Abd al-Wahab. These remarkable inroads have been paved by the adroit use of modernity—oil technology—in some respects against modernity, and especially against democracy and secularism.

The Saudi monarchy has thus achieved many of the benefits of modernity without admitting into its realm any substantial number of the characteristic social class of modernity, the middle class. Saudi Arabia lacks a substantial middle class—the class inclined to demand political representation and to moderate the republicanism they build—not only demographically (there simply are not many middle-class people in the country—but also with respect to the country’s character, its ethos. Oil revenues fund a vast welfare state. The ‘commercial’ side of commercial republicanism is just as lacking as the ‘republican’ side. There is no ‘work ethic,’ as commercial republicans practice it. For the young, there is more incentive to study Koran than calculus. The Saudi economy lacks commercial diversity and the opportunities such diversity brings. Indeed, the economies of the twenty-two countries of the Middle East, with a combined population of some 300 million people, produce less than Spain. Ambitious men look to careers in religion and politics, but political careers are blocked by the monarchy. No wonder, then, that their ambitions turn toward the ruse o religion for revolutionary political purposes and not, for example, toward commercial entrepreneurship. In the West, the political philosopher Montesquieu proposed that the energies generated by religious passions be re-channeled into peaceful, commercial pursuits. The Saudi regime carefully blocs any such re-channeling—politically, doctrinally, and economically.

The Saudi ethos thus always stands ready to injure the Saudi ruling body and then to overturn or take over Saudi political institutions if that ruling body strays too far and too conspicuously from the doctrinal content of the ethos. The wealth generated by the oil economy has tempted the Saudi ruling body (the extended royal family) to stray–quite far, in some instances. Add to this a crisis in the oil industry itself. Revenues to support the Saudi state declined as oil prices have fallen in recent decades—that is, throughout the lives of the current generation of youth, the most numerous of any Saudi generation hitherto, resulting from years of having the highest population growth of any country in the world.

This population growth has hit the royal family itself. The king receives his title through the consensus of the royal family; family members, the Shar’ia, and the clerics limit his authority. The Saudi royal family consists of  15,000 members and, like the rest of the population, it is growing rapidly.  Under current economic trends, such a large family cannot sustain itself at the levels of affluence it has grown accustomed to enjoying. Further, affluence has led to a degree of luxury, of personal and social corruption, that the stricter Wahhabis find offensively impious. Hence Osama bin Laden.

How do things stand in Saudi Arabia today?

Saudi Arabia looks like a throwback to the Europe of the early modern period, the sort of traditionalist monarchy that declined in the West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the Saudis have proven resilient, surviving such crises as a revolt by religious militia in the late 1920s, the deposing of King Saud in 1964 by his half-brother, King Faisal’s assassination in 1975 at the hands of a nephew, the takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by jihadists in 1979, and the rise of al-Qaeda. So far, the size, wealth, and political experience of the Saudi royal family have kept the regime in place. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz faced a threat from the al-Quaedists which peaked in 2003-04, but that threat declined after an effective campaign of internal repression, helped by the U. S. troop surge in Iraq, coupled with the turning of Iraqi Sunnis against the Qaedist forces in that country. A recent conference of Islamic clerics hosted by the Saudis was condemned by an al-Quaeda spokesman: “He who is called the defender of monotheism by the sycophantic clerics is raising the flag of brotherhood between religions… and thinks he has found the wisdom to stop wars and prevent the causes of enmity between religions and peoples. By God, if you do not resist heroically against this wanton tyrant, the day will come when church bells will ring in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.” But such hand-wringing is just about all al-Qaeda recently has been able to muster against bin Laden’s old arch-enemy regime in Riyadh.  Most conservatives, both in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq, care first of all about their local communities; they do not appreciate the military attention al-Qaeda brings to their towns. And all the oil money has purchased friends in those towns.

The main external threat to the Saudi regime now is Iran, which seeks to extend its influence throughout the Gulf through Shi’a proxies in Iraq and elsewhere. Here too theological-political disputes push the Saudis and Americans into cooperation. At the same time, Saudis do not want the United States to attack Iran and rid the Sunnis of their Shi’ite problem more or less altogether; such a war would disrupt the oil trade, and the Saudis, having watched the Americans in Iraq, rather doubt that the American military would do a more effective job in Iran. But the Saudis do need the Americans for defensive purposes, being militarily unimpressive themselves.

And so for the time being the Saudis have wanted peace, except when challenged by the sort of threats in Yemen, where the Shi’a Houthis were threatening a revolution against the ruling Sunnis, and now seen in Syria and Qatar. All of these are ‘proxy’ conflicts with the Iranians. Elsewhere, Saudis are backing peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They also want peace in Iraq, if such a peace would reduce if not necessarily eliminate U. S. ground forces, allow the Sunni minority there the capacity to defend themselves, and insure that Iraqi Shi’a do not become pawns of Iran. And they don’t want to be ‘flanked’ by the Iranians in Syria or Qatar, either. They want to do what their onetime rulers, the British, excelled at; they want to muddle through, live to see another day, and meanwhile use their considerable economic leverage, worldwide, to promote their own interests, including Wahhabism, through the construction of mosques and other means of religious ‘networking.’ They have become good at that, for the past century or so.

The Saudis are tending to their substantial economic interests in a variety of ways. They are investing some of their rising oil revenues in refining capacity and in the petrochemical industry. At the moment, the top five refiners are the U. S., China, Russia, Japan, and Germany The Saudis want to join the club, and state-owned Saudi Aramco hopes to bring the Kingdom from #12 in the world (where it is now) into the top five, in five years. That is optimistic, but there is no reason to think that this goal is unachievable, eventually. It is a matter of money, and the Saudis have a lot of it.

They don’t have as much as in the past. The oil price decline of the past few years hasn’t caused the American natural gas industry to collapse, as the Saudis had hoped. They have needed to liquidate some of their foreign investments and to cut social spending. This puts pressure on the regime. Although they still control about 20% of the world’s proven oil reserves, from which the government derives 75% of its income, their grip on the international oil cartel has weakened. They’ve been forced to liquidate $70 billion in foreign investments and even to cut the social spending that has kept most of its population quiet for so many years.

This also imperils their strategy for meeting the pending worldwide shortage of food. Here, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, inasmuch as Saudi Arabia, once identified on maps as ‘Arabia Deserta,’ is as food-poor as it is oil-rich. Desalinization is not sufficiently advance technologically to make cereal grains viable on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis have given up on their program to grow wheat. They have attempted to solve this problem by purchasing overseas agribusinesses. Declining revenues won’t help. And this is also where the Saudis lack of military capacity could hurt them. In a worldwide food crisis, food producers will feed their own populations first, and the Saudis will need to cut deals for any surplus that remains—if there is one. This will hold true whether or not the Saudis own the farmlands in foreign countries.

Today, the reigning king is Salman, who ascended to the throne in January 2015. Given the fact that the brother-to-brother succession line established by Ibn Saud can no longer be sustained, Salman made an important and controversial decision in designating not a second-generation family member but a third-generation nephew, Muhammad bin Nayef, as crown prince. He has appointed his son, Mohammad bin Salman, as Deputy Crown Prince; in this post, his son has overseen the military intervention against the Houthis in Yemen and has also worked for the diversification of the economy, and he has helped this year in orchestrating the diplomatic isolation of Qatar from other members of the Gulf Coordination Council. As you might imagine, these ‘personnel’ moves have proven controversial within the royal family, especially among the second-generation royals, who have been passed over in the royal succession.

To put matters more generally, Saudi Arabia’s regime has used modernity to resist modernity. In doing so, it has deliberately insulated itself from its weak middle class, the usual backbone of social democratization, but without making itself immune from social democratization itself. If the extended royal family may be said to constitute a sort of aristocracy or oligarchy, it is threatened today not by a moderate middle class but by a fanaticized, Wahhabi-educated, Wahhabi-propagandized populace, angry at corrupt royal rule and susceptible to the arguments made by the radical Islamists.

 

 

 

 

Second Lecture delivered at “Islam and the West,” Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

 

Muhammad founded a monarchic regime and an imperial state upon a prophetic religious doctrine. Authority remained personal, as in all of the ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’ regimes, with the subject’s allegiance owed first to God, then to the Prophet/Monarch. Had the ‘modern’ or scientific-administrative state existed in the seventh century, Muhammad would have condemned it as a sort of idol. Although a person, Allah differs from the God of the Bible in that he is first and foremost not a spirit but a will. This inclines Islam away from viewing reason as authoritative, as in the Christian emphasis on God as Logos or Word.

With time and schisms, traditional Muslims often contented themselves with less-than-strict caliphs who ruled over societies in which clerics had influence but did not necessarily exercise direct political rule. For the men scholars now call Islamists, political activity to enforce the Sha’ria comes back to the center, as it had been under Muhammad himself. But Islamists face a problem Muhammad never saw: rather than the tribes of ancient Arabia, or the surrounding loosely-confederated empires, Islamists operate in societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in ancient and medieval empires. To push against such rule in the hands of infidels and heretics, Islamist engage civil-social organizing, electoral politics, and/or guerilla warfare and terrorism. This is why scholars often call Islamism “political Islam,” even if Islamists themselves, thinking of their enterprise as a return to Muhammad’s practice, regard such a phrase as redundant. Given the Islamic emphasis on God as a supreme Will rather than as a supreme Word, or a reasoning God with whom one may speak, and even argue (as the prophets of Israel did), political Islam tends not to be really political in Aristotle’s strict sense. For it, rule doesn’t involve give-and-take or consent but is more a matter of command and obedience.

The more radical Islamists, the ones who use war as a means of gaining power, are not simply throwbacks to Muhammad, no matter what they may claim. In the modern world, terror or fear was designed first as an instrument of modern state building, as seen most clearly in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who invokes the terrors of civil war to justify the counter-terror exercised over factions by the modern state, the “mighty Leviathan.” Marxism-Leninism (which, as we’ve seen, influenced some of the Islamists) deployed statist terror as an instrument of remaking human nature. (The so-to-speak classical argument for this may be found in Leon Trotsky’s book, Marxism and Revolution, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were the most notable practitioners of it among Marxists, and Lenin and Stalin were imitated by the tyrants of the right, particularly Hitler).

Terrorism developed as a revolutionary tactic under conditions of modern statism, as a way of fighting the fear-inspiring mighty Leviathan. This is the most dramatic of the distinctively modern dimensions of Islamism. You will not find homicide-suicides in the Koran, although you will find militants and martyrs. Islamism thus entwines Islamic ideas with modern ones, Muhammad with Machiavelli. In the case of homicide-suicide terrorism, the synthesis has produced an action that neither of its forebears commended.

In the first lecture I mentioned that Islamism also reflects the egalitarianism of modernity. The social equality that Tocqueville describes yields republican regimes or despotic ones. Under Islam, with its less-than-firm commitment to reason, despotism has been the more frequent outcome. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Mustafa Kemal. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, statist empires—Britain, France—in the Middle East. Both indigenous and foreign rulers in the Middle East thus deliberately depoliticized their societies—again, in Aristotle’s sense of ‘the political’; this left such civil-social organizing as was permitted to the Islamists, who have had the Koran-inspired courage to organize themselves against tyrannical rule and to deliver the social services the corrupt and incompetent statists have failed to provide. That is, the secular nationalists who wrested rule from Western imperialists after World War II squandered the political capital they had built up in that struggle by their very despotism and also by copying the Soviet model of economic development, a model that failed to compete effectively in the world market anywhere it was tried.

The decline of local aristocracies in the face of the onslaught of modern statism brought a vast democratization of Islam. This is a circumstance likely to produce ‘self-made’ religions or variations of religions, designed to appeal to popular passions. Under the Islamic regime-ethos, voluntary martyrdom results in no pain at death and promises great rewards in Paradise. Further, because one’s birth, life, and death are all predetermined by Allah, civilians (including children) killed in terrorist attacks were destined to die, anyway, so there is no moral harm in doing God’s will. So, for example, in one jihadist publication, women are instructed to understand that “The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are our sacrificial offering.” When the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the use of children as human mine-sweepers during the war with Iraq, he described this as a “divine blessing” to them. It is easy to see how such an approach might destabilize modern states that are new, despotic, corrupt, and incompetent. And so it has. Given the fact that Islam is a form of universalism or inter-nationalism, a democratized and hyper-fanatical form of Islam will appeal to many—especially many young men—who resent their local nation-state and thirst for glory.

Another feature of modernity is the valorization of commerce and industry as indispensable elements of the human conquest of nature. As modern commerce and industry developed, the use of oil to fuel large and powerful machines was discovered, famously empowering those peoples on lands with oil reserves underneath them. We recall the sharp increase in oil prices resulting from the embargo imposed by the Arab oil cartel in the mid-1970s. Revenues often went to support Muslim clerics, who were regarded by the monarchies as social counterweights to the communists—who, during the Cold War, enjoyed more formidable international support than local clerics could expect. Further, urbanization brought peasants into the cities, where they kept their allegiance to the clerics but also came physically closer to the centers of state authority. The same held true for the influx of students into the universities; even then-fashionable Marxism could not appeal to students recently removed from the countryside to the degree that radical Islamism could do, especially since Islamism incorporated Marxist motifs into a larger theological framework familiar to the students. Re-Islamization of Middle Eastern societies proceeded ‘from below,’ forming strong networks of persons in but not of the modern state.

To put it in ‘regime’ terms, then, Islamists amount to a new would-be ruling body or set of rulers on the geopolitical scene, one that represents its members as being of the ‘old regime’ of Muhammad. For the past few decades, the most notorious Islamist radical group has been al-Qaeda, founded by Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden’s story is now familiar. Born in 1957, he was a member of the generation of Arabs who would question nationalist secularism. His Wahhabist upbringing would have led him to question it, anyway. But he would eventually diagnose and reject the Saudi version of Wahhabism on ‘Qutbian’ grounds. As a member of a prominent, but not royal, Saudi family, he was near enough to see, but distant enough to reject, royal family decadence.

He formulated a regime-centered policy to combat that decadence. As early as 1996 he called upon his fellow Saudis to “change the regime” of Saudi Arabia, which he regarded as a mere agent of the United States. The Saudi regime has “imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer”—a life insufficiently Islamic. Indeed, after World War I, the Saudis had allied themselves with the British in bringing down the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. The United States replaced Great Britain as the Saudi regime’s principal Western ally after the Second World War, and Bin Laden characterized America as “unjust, criminal, and tyrannical” on four grounds: it “stole our oil”; it “executed” 600,000 Iraqi children with its embargo following the first Gulf War; it supports Israel; it subordinates itself to Jews, the arch-tyrants of the modern world. Jews, and therefore the Americans they control, are servants of Satan. Americans did not cause the Soviet Union to fall; God did, and to claim otherwise is blasphemy. Bin Laden denied that the United States assisted the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In addition to being evil, the United States is contemptible; it is “weaker than the picture it wants to draw in people’s minds.” Not only the American government but the American people themselves are contemptible, “a lowly people ho do not understand the meaning of principles,” a “debauched” people—”the cowards of this age.” Economic relations might be permissible with such a rabble, insofar as those relations serve Islam. But in occupying the Arabian peninsula Americans have declared war “against God, his prophet, and the Muslims.” The only valid Islamic answer is jihad. “May God show them his wrath and give them what they deserve.”

Despite its many vices and weaknesses, America remains the most powerful country of the age. How to fight it? For this, bin Laden had no state of his own, and even if he had, what state could stand against the United States? he needed an organization that could torment the godless superpower without presenting a target America could destroy. In his war on Israel, Palestinian leader Yasr Arafat had developed the policy of intifada, a low-level form of combat employing guerilla fighting and terrorism, needing no established state organization. Arafat himself had seen the success of guerilla warfare against the United States in Vietnam. Bin Laden in effect decided to take an Islamified intifada worldwide, and aim it at America.

The first experiment was in Afganistan, against the Soviets, who were then the more immediate threat. “Al-Qaeda” means “The Base,” and Afghanistan proved such a necessary territorial launching pad for jihad. There, bin Laden developed an international cadre of jihadis, young men who had severed their social ties at home and replaced them with the strong bonds that form among warriors. After the war, the bin Laden segment of the mujahedin did two things. In Afghanistan, they allied with the Taliban, Islamists backed by Pakistan. The Pak prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, had allied herself with one of the Pakistani Islamist parties in the hope of splitting the movement and co-opting it; she sent aid to the Taliban, hoping to secure Pakistan’s western flank, and so to be able to concentrate her attentions on Pakistan’s perennially tense relations with India. With both Pakistani and Arab-Islamist backing, the Taliban founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996.

The Taliban solution to the problem of modern statism turned out to be very simple; they had no modern state at all, no impersonal, centralized bureaucracy. They simply enforced moral codes, collected tolls, and fought the remnants of their local enemies. They had no universalist ambitions. Meanwhile, bin Laden and his organization (along with several other jihadi groups) enjoyed a safe haven for their worldwide operations, aiming most immediately at the expulsion of the United States from Arabia, and at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, with the ultimate aim of effecting the triumph of Islam throughout the world—God willing.

The core of al-Qaeda was small, consisting of fewer than 200 operatives, tightly controlled by bin Laden. But its network was and remains vast; al-Qaeda-trained jihadis have fanned out into about 80 countries around the world in what capitalists might call a franchise operation. Among other things, this meant that even if bin Laden and his core group were destroyed, the franchise or cells would live on, having been trained to act independently to subvert their local regimes by terror. In other words, al-Qaeda operates in the opposite manner from the centralized, modern state.

The expulsion of Israeli troops from Lebanon by Hezbollah in the 1990s provided a small but important test case for this strategy. The leader of Islamic Jihad, an al-Qaeda affiliate, drew the lesson: “Our jihad has exposed the enemy’s weakness, confusion, and hysteria. It has become clear that the enemy can be defeated, for if a small faithful group was able to instill all this horror and panic in the enemy through confronting it in Palestine and southern Lebanon, what will happen when the nation confronts it with all its potential? Martyrdom actions will escalate in the face of all pressures [and is] a realistic option for confronting the unequal balance of power. If we are unable to effect a balance of power now, we can achieve a balance of horror.” Insofar as such “martyrdoms” destroy innocents, the Islamist strategy seems in-Islamic. However, the regime of democracy solves this problem for al-Qaeda partisans, at least in their war against the Western republics. If the people are sovereign, then no one is innocent.

In a limited way, bin Laden’s achievement was impressive, if vile. This is a brilliant and ruthless way to attempt to destroy modern statism, much more formidable than the tactics of the various ‘anti-globalization’ groups on the Left who have been reduced to breaking shop windows and chanting at G-8 summits before getting swept away with tear gas and propelled water. Radical Islamists have focused precisely on the institutional structure of the modern world. The modern state justifies its existence primarily by providing security and, in the commercial republics, an orderly framework for liberty. The Marxist project—overthrowing the ‘bourgeois state’ and replacing it with “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” leading to the elimination of all states worldwide and the advent of Communism—has failed, and he anarchist or radical libertarian projects obviously partake of utopianism as well A network of terrorists, however, effectively amounts to a non-governmental organization, an NGO, with guns, or an international drug cartel with ideas—indeed, with religious ideas and religious laws.

Such an organization can ‘network’ on the civil-social level, under the state’s law-enforcement radar screen. From there, it can do in a systematic way what anarchist bomb-throwers did, well, anarchically, and therefore impotently: delegitimize statism. Hence bin Laden’s appeal to American mothers in his 1997 CNN interview: “To the mothers of soldiers of American troops… I say if they are concerned for their sons, then let them object to the American government’s policy and to the American president.” To replace the modern state, bin Laden intended to found a stateless ummah under the regime of the prophet Muhammad, ruling through clerics who invoke the prophet’s name. It is as if the Christian ecclesia or assembly had moved to substitute canon law for civil law wherever Christianity went. To put it again in regime terms, a clerical aristocracy will arise out of modern social egalitarianism in order to rule the world, out of a worldwide network, already in place.

It is worth noting that the egalitarianism of the modern project—the systematic attack on aristocratic classes, very often at the service of statist centralization—is no more consistently maintained in radical Islamism than it was in fascism or communism. Fascism quite explicitly proposed a new aristocracy to replace the by-then-decadent ‘old regime’ aristocracies of Europe. For its part, Communism proposed a supposedly temporary neo-aristocracy that the Communists called the ‘revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.’ Intellectually armed with Karl Marx’s self-described ‘scientific socialism,’ the revolutionary vanguard would lead the proletariat first to victory over the capitalist bourgeoisie, and then on to a classless and stateless society.

On this topic in Islamist thought, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahiri proves particularly instructive. Zawahiri is a former surgeon in the Eghyptian army and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood since the age of fourteen; he took over the leadership of al-Qaeda after the death of bin Laden. His book is entitled Knights Under the Prophetic Banner, published in 2001. In Zawahiri’s model, radical Islamism replaces the racial/national warfare of fascism and the class war of Communism with religious warfare or jihad. Sounding very much like an Islamicized Marxist, Zawahiri calls for a reconstitution of the relations between the “elites” and the “masses.” The elites must lead the masses in jihad, in a “scientific, confrontational, rational” manner, as he puts it. Elites must take care first to mobilize broad support among the masses before undertaking violent jihad; otherwise, they will be overmatched by the states. “The jihadist movement must move toward the masses, defend their honor, prevent injustice, and guide them along the path leading to victory.” It is up to the elites to guide the masses, to set strategy for them. Perhaps even more than Lenin, Mao appears to have been a sort of model for Islamists—Mao, with his emphasis on guerilla warfare and his famous contention that America was nothing more than “a paper tiger.” This makes sense, inasmuch as Mao appealed much more to ‘Third World’ sensibilities than any Russian Marxist could do.

With this correct relationship between elites and masses, leaders and followers, solidly in place, jihad can proceed with a series of terrorist and guerilla operations, operations that can turn modernity against itself. Known in contemporary military circles a ‘asymmetrical warfare,’ terrorism and guerilla war apply violent force to the key, weak pressure points of the modern state. Thus disrupted, the state will collapse, despite its vast logistical superiority. As mentioned earlier, the result will be the rule of the ummah, the body of Islamic believers, the final worldwide politeuma or ruling body established by Allah. This body might be loosely organized under a worldwide empire or caliphate, but it would not be modern-statist. Thus will Islam accomplish, with the energy of religious fervor, what communists could only dream of, and failed to do. But, then, the historical progress toward communism was seen as a merely human process, whereas the worldwide jihad has Allah on its side. Jihad has the highest of moral and religious purposes, according to the late Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-Arab theologian and founding member of al-Qaeda: Jihad “can purify souls and elevate them above reality.” Not that this will be easy. “Islamic society needs to be born, but birth takes place in pain and suffering.”

The American war in Iraq saw another instance of this strategy. In this case, the existing state having been removed not by jihadists but by the hated Americans, the jihadists have sought to prevent the founding of a new state, particularly a new state on socially democratic, commercial-republican regime lines. A democratic-republican state would be especially dangerous to their cause, inasmuch as such a regime might make Islamist vanguardism a matter of the ballot instead of the bullet and the bomb. Apart from the recent experience of Turkey, actual rule by Islamists has proven unpalatable wherever it has been tried; no less an authority than Zawahiri himself has decried the establishment of commercial republicanism in Iraq and vows to prevent it. In Zawahiri’s view, ‘democracy’ is a religion—an alternative, false religion in which human judgment and sovereignty and law override Allah’s judgment, sovereignty, and law. Democracy gives authority to “man’s desires, whatever they may be,” “replac[ing] God absolutely.” The worldwide struggle of Islam therefore must aim finally at Satan’s tool, the worldwide movement toward democracy. Which regime will prevail on the earth?

The strengths of the al-Qaeda strategy are noteworthy, but its limitations are considerable. In the days following the September 11 attack, I wondered aloud, “Where’s the follow-up?” Although this made some people around me a bit nervous, and I suppose I could have been more sensitive and considerate, it was clear then, and has become even clearer since then, that while a worldwide terrorist organization can disrupt its enemies, it cannot quickly seize and hold political power on a wide scale. It will remain a physical threat to states for a long time, but it is unlikely to destroy any but the weakest of them. Indeed, bin Laden tended to talk very much like a child of the television and Internet age, extolling the 9/11 attack for its symbolic meaning more than for any material effect it inflicted.

And then there was the problem of the counterattack. The U. S. war against the Taliban proved far more effective than bin Laden likely expected it to be. He probably thought of the United States as another Soviet Union, soon to be bogged down and cut to pieces by his mujahedin. The problem with that analysis—shared, you will recall, by the many exceedingly foolish commentators who popped up on television chat shows and op-ed pages—is very simple. Notwithstanding bin Laden’s silly lie about American victory in the Cold War, the mujahedin who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan could use supplies from America, principally Stinger missiles. Against the United States, however, the mujahedin had no reliable suppliers of first-rate weaponry. What is more, the United States of 2002 could not be compared to the Soviet Union of the 1980s—politically, militarily, or technologically. The Taliban and bin Laden had no idea what they were in for. As a result, both were driven back, and most of the key al-Qaeda senior and mid-level members were arrested or killed.

Second, the CIA Counterterrorism Center developed a plan called the Worldwide Attack Matrix. Using intelligence seized in the Afghan war, they tracked down the rosters of terrorist trainees, and tracked those trainees back to their host countries. Sharing intelligence with other states—few of which had any reason to want their own regimes destabilized by fanatics—the CIA helped to stop a planned series of attacks on U. S. military sites, businesses, and diplomatic offices in Singapore and elsewhere. All told, the modern state continues to deploy impressive resources of its own. Indeed, one of the main assets al-Qaeda continues to enjoy is willing or unwilling shelter lent to them by certain modern states themselves, where terrorists can be confident they will not be attacked, lest the host state’s sovereignty be violated. This fact has not gone unnoticed in Washington: hence the Bush Administration’s strategy of “regime change.” Although that strategy itself soon fell into disfavor, it intimidated a number of otherwise anti-American regimes into cooperation with the United States, long enough to tighten security in many countries around the world.

What, then, has the internationalist Islamist movement been thinking since the 2011 death of bin Laden and the degradation of the original core of al-Qaeda? Under the not-very-dynamic leadership of Zawahiri, al-Qaeda has often been reduced to urging its local franchises and even lone-wolf sympathizers to mount their own terrorist attacks. None of the franchises has been able to expand its power beyond their own regions, most of which are remote from world capitals. Low-intensity warfare, especially in Islamic countries, is about the most al-Qaeda can do. Meanwhile, within the jihadi movement itself, al-Qaeda has been challenged by a breakaway organization, the ‘Islamic State,’ which has proved more violent and radical in its methods than the parent organization itself. I shall save discussion of ISIS for the final lecture in this series, on Syria.

The main danger that jihadi organizations pose to the United States and the other commercial republics today continues to be their power to distract those regimes from much more powerful rivals, China and Russia. They, too, are prepared for a long conflict with the West, and they are much better equipped to wage it.

 

Primary source readings

Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetam: Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network. Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2001. Contains an appendix of documents by and about bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds.: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words. Pascale Ghazaleh translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Lecture delivered at Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West,” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

This week I will give five talks on Islam and modern politics. Today, I’ll talk about the origins of the ideology called ‘Islamism’ or ‘political Islam.’ Tomorrow I will discuss radical Islamism (specifically the ideology of the al Qaeda organization) as understood by its founder, Osama bin Laden and its other principal spokesmen. Following that, I will lecture on the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria, respectively. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the two most insistently ‘Islamic’ of the well-established regimes ruled by Muslims, and Syria’s civil war illustrates the clash of several would-be regimes, each backed by foreign regimes—some Islamic, some not.

My co-speakers are giving you an idea of what Islam is, but if I am to speak on Islam and modern politics, I still owe you an account of what I mean by ‘politics’ and what I mean by ‘modern.’ By spending the first half of this first lecture on those themes I intend to make my subsequent thoughts on Islamic politics much clearer. An added benefit to this approach is that I will be presenting a way of thinking clearly, as a citizen, about politics generally. What I’ll be saying next will be useful when you think about Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also when you think about China, Russia, Brazil, and the United States of America. One of my colleagues earlier asked good question: How to learn about Islam? I want to begin with the question of how political scientists learn about anything. Optimistically, I assume that political scientists are educable.

In trying to understand human communities, political science resembles anthropology, economics, and sociology in one way: It starts with individuals and families, looking specifically at the types of ruling that goes on in them. Political science differs from anthropology, economics, and sociology in one principal respect: It looks to the regime as the key feature that defines our lives together.

It so happens that the term ‘regime’ has been much in the news for the last several decades. The Clinton and Bush administrations have pushed for in such countries regime change as Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What, exactly, is a regime. Why should anyone want to change one. Thus the basic term of political science happens to have become central to the American political debate, a debate that we know, at least since the terrorist attacks by radical Islamists on 9/11/2001, to involve our very lives and our way of life.

In political science, a regime roughly parallels a species, or perhaps a genus, in biological science. It’s a term of classification or identification. As in biological species, we identify regimes by the behavior of the organism, the purposes it pursues, and its form or structure.

Regimes consist of two elements:

1. Rulers. How many people rule the community—one, a few, or many?—and what is their character. It makes a difference if only one person rules a community, or if only a few or many do; it also makes a difference if they are for the most part good or for the most part bad, whether (for example) the one who rules is Queen Anne of seventeenth-century England or Mao Zedong of twentieth-century China. This matters, not only because one set of rulers will act differently than another, but also because we tend to ‘look up’ to rulers, model our lives on them. A collection of Soviet-era educational materials had the piquant title, “I Want to Be Like Stalin.”

2. The Way of Life, the moral atmosphere of the society—its “habits of the mind and the heart,” as Tocqueville puts it—will foster the characteristic human type who lives in a given society. Business person or warrior, saint or sybarite, cowboy or computer geek? Or maybe all of those things, in which case you know you’re in America.

3. The purposes of a regime should be consistent with the rulers and the way of life. In America, the Declaration of Independence asserts that just governments aim at securing the unalienable, natural rights of the governed. In the Soviet Union, the purpose of the regime was to advance the ‘dialectic of history,’ first towards socialism and eventually towards worldwide communism. Neither the ancient Athenian democrats nor the contemporary Iranian mullahs would endorse the purposes of either of those regimes.

4. The form or structure of the regime refers to the authoritative structures by which the rulers rule. How are the most ambitious people in the society channeled into the positions of authority and prestige that they crave? And on what channels do those positions run? One might compare a regime’s form to an power grid, both directing and concentrating, but also limiting, the enunciation and enforcement of the ruler or rulers’ commands, including laws.

Obviously, these four elements of the regime—rulers, way of life, purposes, and institutions—are interrelated, mutually influential. If the rulers change, the way of life and institutions may change, in order to accommodate the intentions of the new rulers. For example, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 soon led to a new way of life for Germans, under a new set of ruling institutions, institutions that did not include a genuinely authoritative legislature, as the previous regime had done.

If the institutions change, the way of life and rulers will change. The way of life of Japan after the installation of General Douglas MacArthur’s constitution in the 1940s, and the kind of rulers Japan has had since that time, have both changed radically from what they were in the 1930s until August 1945.

If a community’s way of life changes, then rulers and institutions will change—usually somewhat gradually but no less profoundly. Consider the changes in the Roman Empire after Christianity pervaded its society ‘from below,’ so to speak. Finally, if the purposes of the regime change, this may well have profound consequences regarding the community’s rulers, way of life, and form. Many political communities have changed radically in these respects with the introduction of Islam, which sets down a far different set of purposes for human life than those pursued by, for example, Zoroastrianism.

All of these regime elements form an ethos or character specific to the regime. A person born to the same set of parents might be biologically identical if born in 1920s Hamburg on 1920s Pittsburgh, but his or her view of the world, life expectations would be very different; in important ways, the person himself would be entirely different.

A regime change is therefore nothing less than a revolution—whether violent, as in the United States and in France in the 1780s and 1790s, or peaceful, as Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and 1990s. The regime which prevails in our society effects all of our lives physically and morally, spelling ‘liberty or death,’ sometimes to millions.

Since Aristotle’s time, four massive facts have intervened to modify, if not to alter fundamentally, Aristotle’s system of political classification.

1. The first of these are religions that are both prophetic and international—specifically, Christianity and Islam. These are prophetic rather than civil religions in the sense that they require their adherents to ‘speak truth to power’ and not simply to reinforce existing regimes. They are international, indeed universal in that the God of the Bible and the God of the Koran rule over all human beings, not only particular communities or peoples. Notice that both of these religions have regimes: God is the King of kings; He is also the founding lawgiver, prescribing institutions and also requiring a particular way of life. This sets up a circumstance in which the City of God ‘cross-cuts’ the City of Man, sometimes commending a given regime and sometimes calling it to account or even undermining it. Prophetic and universal religions change both internal politics and international politics, permanently.
2. The modern state appeared, invented by the Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli and put into practice widely in Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. Aristotle saw two basic kinds of political communities, in terms of size and centralization. The polis was small and centralized, tightly-knit, a place where even a regime of ‘the many’—either a mixed regime or a democracy—could assemble all of its rulers in one place for deliberation in common. In such highly centralized and highly ‘politicized’ communities, the regime mattered intensely to everyone because the rulers really could rule everyone, really ‘reach into’ the life of every family. The empire, in contrast to the polis, was big but decentralized, typically a loose confederation of political communities whose subordinate members paid tribute in money, honor, soldiers, and slaves to the central government—which might have any of the six regime types—but otherwise left most major ruling decisions to the local rulers. The modern state combines the centralized rule of the polis with a size closer to that of some of the ancient empires. Machiavelli and subsequent political philosophers and statesmen invented ways of making this possible, of making the central ruling authority capable of reaching down into the families, into what now would be called ‘civil society,’ in contrast to ‘the state.’ These included the technologies generated by modern science, animated by the ambition enunciated by Machiavelli’s philosophic disciple, Francis Bacon: “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” Other modern political methods included an impersonal and professional bureaucracy—avowedly ‘scientific’ in its methods of rule—and modern, standardized military practices, seen most notably in a writer like Carl von Clausewitz.
3. A third feature of modern society, again urged by Machiavelli and his innumerable followers, consisted of an acquisitive, commercial/capitalist society—not mere trade routes or port cities, which had existed for centuries, but whole societies devoted to acquisition, with systems of finance to match. Such a political economy of acquisition could generate the vast revenues needed to support the modern bureaucratic and military apparatuses of the modern state. The modern political economy typically led to the ’embourgoisement’ of society, the rise of the middle classes and the partial displacement of the titled aristocracies.
4. Social embourgoisement, but also professionalization of military and civilian bureaucracies also enhance the democratization of society, societies in which, increasingly, who you were mattered less than what you were, and particularly what you could do to enhance the power of acquisition—politically, militarily, and economically.

These four massive facts, the last three at the service of the modern scientific project, have come together to form what we have come to call the distinctively modern life. That life raises the perennial question of regimes in the most serious ways. From the disposition of your soul for all eternity to the disposition of soul and body here and now, it matters more than ever who rules, by what institutions they rule, the way of life and the purposes rulers and ruling institutions enforce. Given the massive and transformative powers of modern states, as ruling entities and as frameworks for civil-social activities, regimes matter to us, to ordinary citizens or subjects, in some ways more than ever.

The history of the past two centuries accordingly has seen vast, sometimes worldwide struggles over exactly this regime question. The American regime of commercial republicanism is one answer to the question. But we’ve also seen the military republicanism of revolutionary France, the military tyranny of Napoleonic France, the constitutional monarchic imperialism of Metternich’s Austria, the military-capitalist monarchy of Wilhelmine Germany, the military and ideological tyrannies of Communist Russia and China, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Today, Islamism addresses this same question of who will rule us and how we shall be ruled in the modern world.

Consider these basic terms of political science with respect to Islam, and especially to contemporary Islamism. Muhammad was a political ruler and, more than that, a lawgiver and founder of a new regime. The regime he founded was a monarchy, and he began the conquest of territories that became a vast empire soon after his death. The empire he founded was an ‘ancient’ empire, not a modern state. Authority in that empire derived from persons—ultimately, from Allah—and not from impersonal functions in a centralized bureaucracy. For Islamists, too, politics is central. But unlike Muhammad they operate in societies where the modern state reaches down into the lives of every individual and family, societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in the empires of antiquity or the middle ages. Pushing back against the modern state, and against the modern project generally, Islamists put politics in the foreground of their enterprise. This is why Islamism is often called “political Islam.”

Islamism also reflects the social-democratizing tendency of modernity. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Kemal Ataturk. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, nation-state empires—Britain, France—in the Middle East. The elimination of the caliphate has brought a vast democratization to Islam. Under the caliphate, only a trained Islamic scholar could issue a fatwa; today, an adolescent can do so, and some have. Now, that’s democratization for you.

To put the matter in theoretical terms: modernity involves egalitarianism and the sharp break with tradition implied by the conquest of nature. Both egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism undermine the authority of the family, of fathers and mothers, of parental rule. To undermine the family is to generate individualism, the sense of ‘I’m on my own.’ But undermining the family in no way stops human beings from being human, that is, from being social and political animals who desire a sense of ‘belonging,’ of community; therefore, to undermine the family is only to initiate a quest for a substitute for the family. In modernity, we see several such substitutes. One is nationality; significantly, one’s country is called ‘the fatherland’ or ‘the motherland.’ Another was communism—the life of the communist cell, in which members experienced fraternity without parenthood. Yet another substitute for the family has been religious revival. This comes as a surprise to secularists, who had supposed, since the Enlightenment, that they alone would control the moral terrain of modernity. Socially, Islamism—for all its ‘traditional’ trappings and claims to orthodoxy—resembles the revivalisms or fundamentalisms that have characterized much of modern religious life. Islamists break with their families, adopting a self-made version of a particular religion in a new, ‘adopted’ family—experiencing, as they do, the intense emotions associated with family life. In the phrase of the French scholar Olivier Roy, Islamists are agitated by the “side effects of their own Westernization” or more precisely their own modernization. Politically—and here they differ from, for example, the fundamentalist revivalisms in Christianity—recent Islamists tapped into the political leftism of college and university campuses in the West, especially in Europe, which is where they experienced the emotional consequences of their removal from their real families, and where they began to think through their encounter with modernity.

An earlier generation of Islamists also tapped into fascism and communism after World War I. The elimination of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by modern empires also meant a crisis for Arab and Iranian nationhood. In subsequent decades, Arab rulers allied themselves with Soviet Russia, and later with Nazi Germany, in their quest for national independence—a dangerous strategy from which they were saved by the commercial republics, which defeated those alternate empires. In the 1950s, Arabs won their independence not through Islam but through nationalism—Nasser in Egypt, the Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq. Even the Palestinian Arabs, living in and out of Israel, appropriated a nationalist identity and program, and will now tell you, in the fanciful way that nationalists tend to adopt, that they are the descendants of the ancient Philistines, and therefore predate the Jews in their residence on the land.

As long as the nationalists had credit among predominantly Muslim peoples, the thinkers now called Islamists remained on the fringes, their followers persecuted by nation-statist rulers. These men included Ruhollah Khomein in Iran, Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, and Mawlanda Mawdudi in Pakistan. In fact, Qutb was hanged by Nasser in 1966.

But Arab nationalism became discredited in the eyes of many within a single generation. The nationalists failed to conquer Israel, losing spectacularly in the Six-Day War of 1967 and falling short in 1973. Nationalist rulers also came down firmly on the despotic side of the social-democratization issue, blocking the next generation from political participation. The post-independence generation of Muslims thus never fully sympathized with nationalism; many listened to the transnational notions of Islamism, spread by modern technology to a worldwide audience. Islamism also benefited from the  religio-political policy of the nationalist despots, who co-opted many of the more traditionalist clergy, rather in the way the Soviets co-opted many Russian Orthodox clergy. Thus compromised, the traditionalist lost prestige in the eyes of the young, and their loss was Islamism’s gain. Urbanized and educated, Islamists exemplified Tocquevillian democratization, but did so without the middle-class background of the liberal democrats or commercial republicans of nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, in the last twenty-five years Islamists have notched some important successes: overthrowing the Shah of Iran, defending the new Iranian clerical regime against Iraq and Iraq’s Saudi backers in the 1980s; launching successful terrorist attacks against America and other targets around the world; and of course defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Who are these people” What is ‘Islamism’?

Khomeini, Qutb, and Mawdudi all rejected nationalism as a form of idolatry, a neo-paganism to be resisted as violently as Muhammad had resisted the paganism of his time. To Islamists, the sovereignty of anyone but God is idolatry; nation and state are idols. The core of modernity, ultimately the self-deification of man, is false and evil. I shall discuss Khomeini in my lecture on Iran; today, I’ll outline the ideas of Qutb, Mawdudi, and Qutb’s predecessor, Hassan al-Banna.

In Egypt, Qutb joined the existing radical group, the Muslim Brothers, which had been founded in the 1920s by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Faced with the overwhelming power of the modern state, the Muslim Brothers sought to Islamify it, advocating what they called “Islamic modernity.” As the French scholar Gilles Kepel so pointedly notes, “The exact meaning of Islamic modernity has never really been settled.” Understandably so, inasmuch as it is fundamentally a contradiction. Islamic modernity, for the Brothers, involved a sort of totalitarianism—an amalgamation of society, state, culture, and religion, all under the guidance of Islam, and therefore of Islamists. The American founders had warned that any attempt to eliminate all factionalism, to constitute any thoroughgoing unity, would lead to tyranny. Peoples in the Middle East have seen this in those places—Khomeini’s Iran, the Taliban’s Afghanistan—where Islamism has established a regime, and in both of those places the people have been restive under the ‘totalizing’ yoke. Islamists have found that a shared religion does not constitute a sufficiently strong bond to hold a society together, and so have resorted to the frequent use of violence as a supplement.

Islamism agrees with Wahhabism (and indeed with Islam simply) on the need to Islamify all society, everywhere. It disagrees with Wahhabism on the issue of social equality. Islamism would end landed aristocracy. It is more urban and democratic—more modern—than Wahhabism. Wahhabism can tolerate the Saudi royal family, so long as they seem pious. Islamists do not tolerate them at all.

As the leader of the Muslim Brothers, Banna copied his organizational practices from the Nazis, who were active in Egypt, against the regnant British Empire, in the 1930s. He established a youth wing; he endorsed the Füherprinzip (the leadership principle); he had his people engage in paramilitary training, and cultivated a cult of the heroic death—all Hitlerian motifs. He was assassinated in 1949, but the Muslim Brothers persist to this day, briefly ruling Egypt a few years ago, and thus far winning and consolidating political power in Turkey.

Qutb joined the Brothers in the early 1950s, but favored a radicalism of the Left, not the now-defeated radicalism of the Right. The Islamist theorist he admired was Mawdudi of Pakistan, a contemporary of Banna who had advocated an Islamic state in all of India. Mawdudi wanted to take the modern state and use its apparatus to Islamify Indian society ‘from above,’ eradicating what he regarded as the local paganism, namely, Hinduism. Mawdudi founded his part, the Jamaat-e-Islami, on Lenin’s successful Bolshevik model. As you will recall, Lenin was a Marxist, believing that ‘History,’ understood as the course of human events, was proceeding dialectically, as Marxism and Engels had taught, toward its ‘end’ or culmination in a class-free, communalist worldwide society. That is, for Marxists ‘History’ proceeds by the conflict of socioeconomic classes. The urban working class, or proletariat, eventually triumph over the bourgeois class, seize and transform the bourgeois state, and use its power to eliminate all classes. Once classes are gone, the state will “wither away,” as it will no longer have any purpose. To hurry ‘History’ along towards this wondrous consummation, Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party as the working class’s vanguard party, the political party on the cutting edge of the historical dialectic, leading the working class to victory. The vanguard of the vanguard was, of course, Lenin himself, leader of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That regime would come to fulfill Tocqueville’s prediction of a Russian empire facing off against the great commercial republic of America.

To Mawdudi, Marxian dialectical struggle seemed very reminiscent of jihad. Under the Islamic rubric of jihad, whose “central theme” is “the propagation of the Faith through combat,” he would imitate Leninist political organization.

Mawdudi departed from Lenin in preferring a more strictly political course of action. His party engaged in parliamentary politics with a patience Lenin seldom exhibited. Here is where Qutb sided more with Lenin than with Mawdudi. Endorsing the ideas of the revolutionary vanguard and of the one-part state leading to a class-free society, Qutb preferred extra-parliamentary methods; indeed, in Nasser’s Egypt, such methods would have been irrelevant. The Muslim vanguard will work for the “abolition of man-made laws,” and their substitution with the perfect law, the Shar’ia, obedience to which he deemed true liberation. Thus, I what would eventually be seen as typical Islamist fashion, Qutb attempted to use modern political techniques as instruments of Islam.

As for the deeper substance of the modern project, Qutb authored a multi-volume critique of modernity. Modernity, he argued, had caused humanity to lose contact with its own nature. The original error went back much farther than modern philosophy, however. The original error went back to Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism had been God’s revelation. But Judaism fell prey to legalism because Jews had become slavish during their years of captivity in Egypt. Slavery had actually changed their nature, and so, when they received the laws of God from Moses, they inclined to worship the laws themselves instead of God. This led to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, who rightly broke with Jewish legalism. However, the early Christians fell victim to harsh persecution, causing the Christian message to become garbled; this adulterated message went too far against legalism. Having abandoned the Jewish law entirely, Christians reached out not to Judaism but to paganism (specifically, Greek political philosophy) as the needed, worldly supplement to their faith. Thus Christianity left itself vulnerable, in Roman times, to what Qutb regarded as Constantine’s pseudo-conversion, which drove the genuine Christians into the monasteries, as ascetic ‘desert saints.’ Asceticism is only another form of Christian extremism, a rejection of the bodily which bifurcates what should be coordinated, namely, spirit and nature. This leads to the characteristic Christian dualisms—sacred versus secular, God versus Caesar—dual standards.

To remedy this “hideous schizophrenia,” the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century brought a new legal code. This new code reintegrates spirit with physical nature. The unified, genuinely monotheistic religion of Islam thus reestablishes both the original revelation to the Jews and the original message of Jesus. Almost as boldly, Qutb claims that the return of the proper human relation to physical nature opened Islamic minds to the experimental scientific method, which Muslim scientists discovered in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the full use of this method for the benefit of all mankind was blocked by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols, both of whom disrupted Islamic life shortly after the discovery was made. The scientific method was taken by Christians to Europe in the sixteenth century, and exploited by them. Under Christian auspices, this method was used to reinforce the sacred-secular bifurcation favored in that civilization. Conflict arose between religion and science, the one informed by faith, the other by atheism. Atheist modernity has triumphed over Christendom in this struggle, leading to the crisis of nihilism in the West.

Thus, in Qutb’s account, Jews, Christians, and Muslim infidels have caused the current plight of Arab Muslims. America, with its separation of church and state, embodies both the Christian and the modern legacy. America’s presence in the Middle East betokens a war against Islam. As a result of the advance of the modern project, the whole world has reverted to the condition of paganism seen by Muhammad. Qutb and his followers are the only true Muslims remaining. They must do what Muhammad did: reconquer the world for God.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, became a university professor in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden came to understand that he must undertake a struggle over regimes: Who will rule? How will they rule? What way of life will prevail? What purposes will the rulers, ruling institutions, and prevailing way of life serve?

 

Primary Source Readings in Translation

Roxann L. Euben and Mhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.: Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Hassan al-Banna: Five Tracts of Hassan al-Banna. Available on-line.

Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi: Islamic Civilization: Its Foundational Beliefs and Principles. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2013.

Sayyid Qutb: Milestones. Available on-line.

____. In the Shade of the Koran.

____. Social Justice in Islam.

 

Secondary Readings

Bostom, Andrew G.: The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2005.

Bonner, Michael: Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Olivier Roy: The Failure of Political Islam. Carol Volk translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Kepel, Gilles: The War for Muslim Minds. Pascale Ghazaleh translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Cook, David: Understanding Jihad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.