This is the second of a series of lectures for the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”

 

Muhammad founded a monarchic regime and an imperial state upon a prophetic religious doctrine. Authority remained personal, as in all the ancient regimes—not scientific-bureaucratic, as in the modern state. The subject owed allegiance first to God, then to the Prophet/Monarch. Allah differs from the God of the Bible, however, in that he is first and foremost not a spirit but a will. This inclines Islam against 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 Islamists, rule to enforce the Sharia 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-organized empires, Islamists operate in societies in which centralized political rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did anywhere in ancient and medieval empires. This is why scholars often call Islamism “political” Islam, although 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 isn’t really political in Aristotle’s strict sense. Rule doesn’t involve give-and-take or consent but command and obedience.

But the more radical Islamists are not simply throwbacks to the seventh century, no matter what they may claim. For one thing, they deploy terror as an instrument of policy. Although conquest and rapine date back a long way in the long story of human misconduct, with empires being built on the threat of ‘subordination or death,’ terror or fear was exercised as an instrument of modern state-building, seen most clearly in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who invokes the terrors of civil war to enforce the counter-terror exercised over violent factions by the modern state, the “mighty Leviathan.” Marxism-Leninism (which, as we’ve seen, influenced some of the Islamists) took this much further, deploying statist terror as an instrument of remaking human nature. The most comprehensive argument for this policy may be found in Leon Trotsky’s 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 tyrants on the Right, particularly Adolf 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 modern dimensions of Islamism. You will not find homicide-suicides in the Koran, although you will find militants and martyrs in the service of extending Islamic empire. 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. Machiavelli and Hobbes hardly recommended that the prince or monarch sacrifice himself in the establishment of the state; as for Muhammad, martyrdom was to be at the hands of the infidel, not at one’s own hand.

I mentioned yesterday that Islamism also reflects the egalitarianism of modernity. The social equality that Tocqueville describes yields republican regimes or despotism. 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—Great Britain, France—into the Middle East. Both indigenous and foreign rulers in the Middle East thus deliberately depoliticized their societies (in Aristotle’s sense of “political”); this left such civil-social organizing as was permitted to the Islamists, who have the Koran-inspired courage to organize themselves despite tyrannical rule and to deliver the social services corrupt and incompetent statists have failed to provide. That is, the secular nationalists who wrested rule from the 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 didn’t 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 to 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 of course promises great rewards in Paradise. Further, because one’s birth, life, and death are all predetermined by Allah, civilians (including children) killed n terrorist attacks were destined to die, anyway, so there is no moral harm in doing God’s will. For example, in one jihadist publication, women are instructed to understand that “The blood o 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” for the children. It is easy to see how such practices, backed by such ideas, 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 internationalism, a democratized and hyper-fanatical form of Islam will appeal to many—especially many young men—who resent their local nation-state.

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 became prevalent, empowering those peoples on lands overlaying oil reserves. 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 command. 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 fashionable Marxism could not appeal to students recently removed from the pious atmosphere of the countryside to the degree that radical Islamism could do, especially since Islamism incorporated Marxist motifs into a larger theological framework. Re-Islamization of Middle Eastern societies proceeded ‘from below,’ forming strong networks of person in but not of the modern state.

To put it in terms of the regime, 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.

Although Osama bin Laden died at the command of President Barack Obama and although bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, has seen more prosperous days, his ideas live on. His story is now familiar. Born in 1957, he belonged to the generation of Arabs who would question nationalist secularism. 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 had “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, helping to bring down the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire.

Bin Laden characterized the United States 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 mind”—image-drawing being a marker of idolatry. Not only the American government but also the American people are contemptible, “a lowly people who 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 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 onw, 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 American could destroy. In his war on Israel, Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasr Arafat had developed the policy of intifada, a low-level form of combat employing terrorism. This needed no state organization. Bin Laden in effect decided to take an Islamified intifada worldwide, and aim it at America.

“Al Quaeda” means “The Base.” The rugged terrain of Afghanistan, which for centuries has provided havens for outlaws, served as a useful launching pad for bin Laden’s jihad. Al Qaeda participated in the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. 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 victory in that war, the bin Laden segment of the mujahidin 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 therefore 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 state at all, no modern bureaucracy. They spread throughout the country, enforcing moral codes, collecting tolls, and fighting the remnants of their local enemies. Meanwhile, bin Laden and his organization had a safe haven for their worldwide operations, aiming most immediately at the expulsion of the United States from Arabia, and then at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy—preliminary steps toward the triumph of Islam throughout the world, God willing.

The core of al-Qaeda was always small, consisting of fewer than 200 operatives, tightly controlled by bin Laden. But its network is 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 means that even if bin Laden and his core group were destroyed, the franchises or cells would live on, having been trained to act independently to subvert local regimes by terror. ISIL began as one of these cells, and eventually superseded the much-damaged al-Qaeda core as the world’s foremost Islamist terrorist-militant organization.

The expulsion of Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1990s provided a small but important test case for this strategy. The leader of Islamic Jihad 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 confront 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, this Islamist strategy is unquestionably un-Islamic. However, the regime of democracy, prevalent in the West,  solves this problem for al-Qaeda partisans; if the people are sovereign, then no one is innocent.

In a limited way, bin Laden’s achievement was impressive, if vile. This was a smart way to attempt to destroy modern statism, much more formidable than 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 the anarchist or radical libertarian projects obviously partake of utopianism as well. A network of terrorists, however, effectively amounts to a non-governmental organization with guns, or an international drug cartel with ideas—indeed, with religious ideas and laws its members will die and kill for.

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 invoked 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, but with guns and bombs as backup.

To put it again in terms of regimes, a clerical aristocracy will arise out of modern social egalitarianism—an aristocracy trained, tested, and legitimized by its God-given successes as it has participated in a worldwide network organized by the founder, Osama bin Laden, in order to rule the world. 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 in communism. Fascism quite explicitly proposed a new aristocracy to replace the by-the-decadent ‘old regime’ aristocracies of Europe. Communism, for its part, 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, ‘communism.’ For both fascism and communism the principal enemy was the existing aristocracy or oligarchy, the ‘plutocracy,’ which (they charged) pulled the strings of the pseudo-leaders of the democratic republics.

On this topic in Islamist thought, Ayman al-Zawahiri proves particularly instructive. Zawahiri began his professional career as a surgeon in the Egyptian army, but had joined the Muslim Brotherhood by the age of fourteen. He eventually led the still more radical group, Islamic Jihad. His book is titled Knights Under the Prophetic Banner, published in 2001. In effect, radical Islamism replaces the racial/national warfare of fascism and the class warfare of communism with religious warfare or jihad. Sounding very much like an Islamicized Marxist, Zawahiri calls forth the reconstitution of the relations between the “elites” and the “masses.” The elites must lead the masses in jihad, in a “scientific, confrontational, rational” manner. 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 enunciate aims and set strategy.

With this correct relationship between elites and masses, leaders and followers, solidly in place, jihad can proceed with a series of terrorist and guerrilla operations, operations that turn modernity against itself. Known in modern military circles as ‘asymmetrical warfare,’ terrorism and guerrilla war apply violent forc to the key, weak pressure points of the modern state. Thus disrupted, the state will collapse, despite its apparently vast logistical superiority. As mentioned earlier, the result will be the rule of the ummah, the body of the Islamic believers, the final worldwide ruling body. This body might be loosely organized under a worldwide empire or caliphate, but this would not be modern-statist. Thus will Islam accomplish, under the rubric 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; in the words of the late Palestinian al-Qaedist, Abdullah Azzam, jihad “can purify souls and elevate them above reality…. 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 at work. In this case, the existing state having been removed not by jihadists but by the hated Americans, jihadists have sought to prevent the founding of a new state, particularly a new state founded as a democratic and commercial-republican regime. Such a regime would be especially dangerous to their cause, inasmuch as it might make Islamist vanguardism a matter of the ballot instead of the bullet and the bomb. Because rule by Islamists so often proves unpalatable where it is tried, no less an authority than Zawahiri himself has decried the possible establishment of republicanism in Iraq and vows to prevent it. In his view, democratic republicanism is a religion, an alternative, false religion in which human judgment and sovereignty, and law override God’s judgment, sovereignty, and law. Such republicanism 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 democratic republicanism. Which regime will prevail on the earth?

No further proof is needed to show that the al-Qaedist strategy can prove formidable. It poses a much greater hazard than it might because the United States has other geopolitical fish to fry: the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia. These countries have revived a regime enemy of a century ago, the capitalist, military-oligarchic and monarchist regime of Wilhelmine Germany. But China and Russia are a lot bigger than Germany.

Nonetheless, Islamists face their own limitations. In the days following the September 11 attacks, 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, a it has become even clearer since then, that while a worldwide terrorist organization can disrupt its enemies, it cannot quickly seize and hold political power in stable political communities. Indeed, bin Laden himself sometimes talked very much like a child of the television and Internet age, extolling attacks like those on September 11 for their symbolic meaning more than for any material effect. Whatever imagined effect such attacks may have in his imagined spiritual universe, Islamism is likely to will remain a physical threat to states for a long time, but (absent the possession of weapons of mass destruction) it is unlikely destroy any but the weakest of them. Islamism reminds one of the sort of chronic disease that persists in latent form within its host, deadly only if the immune system weakens. As STRATFOR analyst Scott Stewart wrote a couple of years ago, “following 25 years of armed struggle, the al Qaeda core is no closer to achieving its objectives than when it began. He adds that its strategy has always been a “long war strategy,” however.

This strategy was enunciated as early as 2008 by one of al-Qaeda’s most important surviving strategists, Abu-Bakar Naji, in his book Governance in the Wilderness, also translated as The Management of the Barbarians. Rather than attempting to control any specific territory, Islamists must mimic the globalization of its capitalist rivals, fighting wherever they can, as often as they can, all over the world. Terrorism must become entrepreneurial. The spectacular 9/11-style attacks may no longer be possible, but they may not be necessary if individuals and small groups within Muslim populations throughout the world can be motivated to plan and act. In this Naji rejects the ISIL strategy of founding a caliphate prematurely; this only gives the infidels a target to destroy with their overwhelming firepower. In addition to countries where such “wilderness” areas already exist—Algeria, Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, other Muslim countries that might become susceptible to this strategy include Pakistan, the north African states, Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia. Precisely because Allah is on their side, Islamists can outlast all the infidels and triumph in the end.

 

This is the first of a series of lectures at the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”

 

My co-speakers are giving us a good idea of what Islam is, but if I am to speak on Islam and modern politics I owe you an account of what I mean by ‘politics’ and what I mean by ‘modern.’ By spending the first half of this lecture on those themes I intend to make my subsequent thoughts on Islamic politics much clearer. An added payoff to this approach is that I will be presenting a way in which we can think clearly, as citizens, about politics generally. What I’ll be saying in the next twenty minutes or so 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.

A previous speaker asked a good question: How can we learn about Islam? I want to begin with the question of how political scientists learn about anything.

In trying to understand human communities, political science resembles anthropology, economics, and sociology in one way: it starts with individuals and families and the types of rule seen in the souls of individuals and in families. Political science differs from anthropology, economics, and sociology in one principal respect: political science look to the regime as the key feature that defines our lives together.

It so happens that the term ‘regime’ is much in the news, lately. In the couple of decades, first the Clinton and then the Bush administrations have effected regime change in such countries 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 of September 11, 2001, involves our very lives and our way of life.

A regime in political science roughly parallels a species, or perhaps a genus in biological science. It’s a term of classification or identification; the most impressive early regime typologies appear in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As in biological species, we identify regimes by both the behavior of the organism—its ways and purposes—and its form or structure.

In terms of behavior, regimes consist of three elements:

1. Rulers. How many people rule—one, a few, or many? And what is their character? It makes a difference if only one person rules a community, or if many do; it also makes a difference if those who rule are for the most part good or for the most part bad, whether the one who rules is Queen Anne of seventeenth-century England or Mao Zedong of twentieth-century China, for example. 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.
2. The way of life, the moral atmosphere of the society—its “habits of mind and heart,” as Tocqueville puts it. Is the characteristic human type who lives in a given society a business person or a warrior, a saint or a sybarite, a cowboy or a computer geek? Or all of these things, in which case you know you’re in America, which might best be defined as a commercial republic, a political community in which a variety of human types defend each other and trade one another.
3. The purpose of the society. When Americans declared their independence, after asserting the unalienable rights of human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they observed that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. The regime of the Soviet Union took as its purpose the formation of ‘Soviet man’ and the globalization of socialism, to be followed by worldwide communism; some Muslim regimes take as their purpose the establishment of a worldwide caliphate to be ruled by Islamic law.

In terms of form or structure, political scientists want to know the authoritative institutions by which the rulers rule. How are the most ambitious people in the society channeled into the positions of authority and prestige they crave? On what channels do these people run?

Obviously, these behavioral and formal elements of the regime—rulers, way of life, purpose, 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, among other things.

If the institutions change, the way of life and rulers will change. For example, the way of life of Japan after the adoption 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.

Finally, if a community’s way of life and/or its purpose changes, then rulers and institutions will change—usually somewhat gradually but no less profoundly, For example, consider the changes in the Roman Empire after Christianity pervaded its society, ‘from below,’ so to speak (or ‘from above,’ to speak another way). In the United States, the profound changes to the kind of people who enter government and our governmental institutions brought on by Progressivism began in the universities and the ideas taught in those universities.

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 in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and 1990s.The regime that prevails in our society affects all of our lives in the physical and moral sense, spelling ‘liberty or death,’ sometimes to millions. When we speak of the character or the ethos of a political community, political scientists point to the regime as its cause.

Since the time of the Greek philosophers, four massive facts have intervened to modify, if not alter fundamentally, this system of regime 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 each of these religions has a regime. 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 human regime and sometimes calling it to account or even undermining it. Prophetic and universal religions have changed both internal politics and international politics, permanently.
2. The modern state appeared, invented in theory by the Florentine philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli and put widely into practice 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 regime that mixed oligarchic and democratic elements 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, ‘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 money and honor 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 polish with, potentially and sometimes actually, the size of an ancient empire. Machiavelli and subsequent political philosopher and statesmen invented ways of making this possible, of making the central ruling authority capable of reaching down  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 Machiaelli’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 the German military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz.
3. A third feature of modern society, again proposed by Machiavelli and his innumerable followers, consisted of an acquisitive, commercial/capitalist society—not mere trade routes or port cities, which had existed for millenia, 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 ’embourgeoisement’ of society, the augmentation of the middle classes and the partial displacement of the titled aristocracies.
4. Social embourgeoisement, but also the professionalization of military and civilian bureaucracies also enhanced the democratization of society, whereby, increasingly, who you were mattered less than what you were, especially with respect to what you could do to enhance the power of acquisition—politically, militarily, and economically.

These four massive facts—prophetic religion, statism, commercial capitalism, and social egalitarianism or social democratization (the last three at the servide 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 rulers and ruling institutions reinforce, and the purposes of that way, those rulers, those institutions. 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 questions of who will rule us and how we shall be ruled in the modern world.

Now let’s apply these basic ‘political-science’ terms to Islam, and particularly 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 live 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 projected generally, Islamists put politics in the foreground of their enterprise. This is why the French scholar Olivier Roy and many others call Islamism ‘political Islam.’ Islam itself is ‘political’ in the sense of being a system of rule. However, even Islam in its original form is not political in Aristotle’s sense of reciprocal rule, ‘ruling and being ruled’; it is rather what Aristotle would call a form of ‘masterly’ rule. This sharply differentiates both Islam and its modern derivative, ‘Islamism’ from the conception of civil life that has informed the West.

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-ruled empires—Great 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, and adolescent can do so, and some have. Now, that’s democratization for you. But again, it democratization without the civil or ruling-and-being ruled practices of the West, with our habits of ‘taking turns’ in ruling, or in shared rule.

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 what they are by nature: social and political animals who desire a sense of ‘belonging,’ a sense of community. Therefore, to undermine the family is 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 substitute for the family has been the life of the communist cell, a sort of fraternity without parenthood. Still another substitute for the family has been ‘the family of God’—seen in the religious revivals that have swept modern societies periodically in the past three centuries. 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—resembles the revivalism or fundamentalism that have characterized much of modern religious life. Islamists break with their families, adopting a version of a particular religion along with a new, ‘adopted’ family—experiencing, as they do so, 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, they differ from, for example, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians because in recent decades they’ve tapped into the political leftism of 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. The earlier generation of Islamists similarly took some of their ideas—particularly their organizational plans—from fascism and communism in the decades following 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 then 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 Baathists in Syria and Iraq. Even the Palestinian Arabs, living in and out of Israel, appropriated a nationalist identity an program, and will now tell you, in the fanciful way nationalists tend to adopt, that they are the descendants of the ancient Philistines, and therefore predate the Jews in their residency on the land.

As long as the nationalists had credit with Arab and other peoples of the Middle East, the thinkers now called Islamists remained on the fringes, persecuted by nationalists. These men included Ruhollah Khomeini 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 the Yom Kippur War (or, as they prefer, the October War) of 1973. Nationalist rulers also came down firmly on the despotic side of social democratization, blocking the vast majority of their peoples from political participation. The post-independence generation of Muslims thus never fully sympathized with nationalism; many listened more eagerly to the transnational notions of Islamism, spread by modern technology to a worldwide audience. Islamism also benefited from the policy of the nationalist despots, who co-opted many of the more traditionalist clergy, rather in the way the Soviets had co-opted many Russian Orthodox clergy. Traditionalists often turned to an apolitical or quietist form of Islam—very arguably a deviation from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Thus compromised, the traditionalists lost prestige in the eyes of the young, and their loss was Islamism’s gain. Islamists did not shrink from a sort of politics. 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 regime against Iraq and Iraq’s Saudi backers in the 1980s, launching successful terrorist attacks against American and other targets around the world, and defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Who are these people? What is Islamism?

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

In Egypt, Qutb joined the existing radical group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in the 1920s by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Faced with the overwhelming power of the modern state, the Brotherhood 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 Brotherhood, involved a sort of totalitarianism—an amalgamation of society, state, culture, and religion, all under the guidance of Islam, and therefore of Islamists. We recall that the founders of the United States had warned that such an 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, and most recently in the territories ruled by ISIL—where Islamists have established a regime. In each of these places, one might add, 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 coercion as a conspicuous supplement. Government by consent of the governed does not, and in principle need not apply when the law of Allah (as interpreted by Islamists) prevails.

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 and subsidize the clerics. Islamists do not tolerate the royals at all.

As leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Banna copied his organizational practices from the Nazis, who were active in Egypt, against the regnant British Empire, in the 1930s. He established a young wing; he endorsed the Führerprinzip (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 Brotherhood persists to this day, although often in a less rabid form.

Qutb joined the Brotherhood 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 al-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 party, 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 inevitably toward an end, the class-free or communist society. As Marx had taught, Lenin proceeds dialectically, claiming that history proceeds by the conflict of socioeconomic classes. The urban working class, or proletariat, eventually will triumph over the bourgeois class, seize and transform the bourgeois state, and use its power to eliminate all classes. Once all classes are gone, the state will “wither away,” as it will no longer have any purpose. To hurry ‘History’ along to 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, and embodiment of Tocqueville’ 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, the “central theme” of which is “the propagation of the Faith through combat,” he could 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 Leninists seldom exhibited; in this he resembled the Marxists of the Social-Democratic parties, not the Marxists of the Bolshevik Party. Here is where Qutb sided more with Lenin than with Mawdudi. Endorsing the ideas of the revolutionary vanguard and of the one-party state leading to class-free society, Qutb preferred extra-parliamentary methods; indeed, in Nasser’s Egypt, such methods would have been quite 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, in what would eventually be seen as typical Islamist fashion, Qutb attempted to use modern political technique as instrument 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 under their years of captivity in Egypt. Slavery had actually changed their natures, 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 tooo far against legalism. Having abandoned the Jewish law entirely, Christians reached out not to Judaism but to paganism (specifically, to 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, however, is another form of Christian extremism, a rejection of the bodily, bifurcating 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 reintegrated 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. However, 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. Having spent time in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Qutb charged that 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. 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 Allah.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, became a professor in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was a young Saudi named Ussamah bin Laden.

 

Review of Jack Eisner: The Survivor. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1981.

Published May 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.

 

“Learn to be silent”–so Elie Wiesel advises those who would speak of the Holocaust. Especially those who were not there: “In intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual circles, in New York and elsewhere too, no cocktail party can really be called a success unless Auschwitz sooner or later figures in the discussion. Excellent remedy for boredom….” (Legends of Our Time: New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
The Jews, he observes, died because they had no friends, and even friends should not judge one another until shared circumstance teaches them understanding. Savants’ chatter camouflages their secret indifference along with their ignorance.

Wiesel knows that “the only ones who were, who still are, full conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved.” Here, responsibility means guilt–not the unreasoning guilt of one tormented by his own survival, but the all-too-reasonable guilt of one who remembers the terms of survival. The Nazis death quota, that engine of arbitrary selection, seems a triumph of collectivism, a perfect expression of indifference to the individuality of the victims. But the quota forced another excruciating individuality upon the survivors: “the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else went in my place.” Some of those who admitted this tried to forget the dead. Others joined them in death. Still others initiated a silent monologue, continued to this day, “which only the dead deserve to hear.”

What is this monologue? Those of us who ask risk becoming cocktail party cognoscenti, pretenders to understanding. Yet we should ask, I think; we may not deserve to hear the monologue, but if we do not hear of it, if we do not face the memories of the Holocaust, our silence will begin with tact and end with the cowardice tact may conceal.

Jack Eisner calls his memoir The Survivor. He knows the silent monologue of which Wiesel speaks. After the war he spent much time with other survivors. “We understood one another’s silences.” Did they? Surely they understood each other’s need for silence, but I doubt that all these monologues with the dead were alike. Both Wiesel and Eisner call themselves gravestones, markers commemorating the dead. But they are different men with different things to say to us–whatever they say to the dead.

Guilt enters Eisner’s monologue to us, like Wiesel’s. Not as Wiesel’s: “I am one in a thousand who survived. Why me? Was I better than the half million Jews in Warsaw who did not?” Eisner tells us how he survived. Although in this passage he means to deny his superiority to the dead, his memoir shows us in what ways he was `better’ than those who died, why he was a better survivor. Acts concern him more than thoughts. Wiesel, who cares much for thoughts and less for action, tortures himself with the question, “Why did you not resist?” Eisner did resist, did act, at times with a prudence that Wiesel might find profoundly disconcerting. These two men could not say the same things to the dead any more than they can say the same things to us. Guilt touches them differently.

To Eisner, thought undirected toward acts weakens the thinker. “My father was a dreamer a philosopher, a gentle man.” “He believed in the goodness of humanity” and “had faith in a civilized Germany.” “I loved and respected him, but sometimes I wished he were a more forceful man.” The means by which the 13-year-old Jack Eisner might have begun a life of the mind disintegrated by the grace of the Nazis: in 1939 they destroyed the Warsaw Music Conservatory, which had awarded him a scholarship. After that, his thoughts served action and his acts served survival. Action, in this circumstance, required courage first of all. “I knew that my Christian friends didn’t believe in Jewish valor…. But I also knew, in my heart, that they were wrong.” Indeed they were. When the Nazis tried to destroy the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Eisner was there. They “entered the ghetto in their usual way, firing guns in the air and screaming for all Jews to come out of their buildings.” Eisner adds proudly, “But we weren’t the usual Jews.” After repeated invasions failed, the Nazis finally could `conquer’ the ghetto only by leveling it with artillery fire.

Eisner himself is no “usual” man. His courage did not depend on comrades. At Budzyn, the second of four concentration camps he endured, he escaped alone, then faced punishment alone after his recapture. The commandant beat him with a whip: “he wanted me on the ground at his feet.” Eisner refused to fall. Eventually, the commandant exhausted himself, but Eisner “straightened back to attention.” “I felt the world was crushing me. The sky was falling like a shattered mirror on my face. But I stood.” Survival, both as a Jews among Jews and as an individual, obsessed Eisner, but survival finally served not only the will to live, the desire for revenge, and the need to bear witness to the struggle of those who died; it was a matter of dignity, of affirming the humanity the Nazis–and all the Jews-haters of the day, whether malevolent persecutors or icy bystanders–tried to deny.

Yet survival, as Wiesel insists, can also cost dignity, expend what it tries to save. Eisner knows this. Courage needs thought to complement it, and thought that serves survival often recommends indignity. Eisner watched an SS officer whip Eisner’s mother: “I wanted to leap at the sadist’s throat. But I didn’t budge. Survival was what counted.” He watched a Nazi commandant herd Jews into a synagogue, put a gasoline can on the porch, then explode the can with machine gun bullets. “Sick to my stomach, I watched the inferno from a distance. All my fears, anguish, and self-pity vanished. I wanted to jump on [the commandant’s] neck. To squeeze it. To wrench the last breath from his body. But my mind told me I was helpless. All I could do was turn my eyes to the forest.” In Flossenburg, his last concentration camp, Eisner became `friendly’ with a German criminal who worked at the disinfection chambers. “I soon became part of the elite, an inmate with connections”–so much so that he achieved re-designation as “an Aryan Christian.” Wiesel would devote many pages to such incidents, weighing the moral problems they pose (in fact he did watch his father beaten and writes extensively about it). Eisner, the survivor who acts, moves on.

Eisner has no immunity to guilt. Early in the war, after escaping the ghetto to live in “Aryan Warsaw,” he returned; “my conscience was bothering me.” When a young friend was killed during a smuggling expedition, Eisner felt responsibility. Forced to carry starving inmates to the crematorium in Flossenburg, madness nearly claimed him: “That night, I couldn’t sleep at all. Those big brown eyes. those big blue eyes. Those big wide-open green eyes. Millions of eyes stared at me all night long. I hated those eyes…. I hated the world.” Guilt, yes: disabling guilt, never. In his monologue with the dead–with these dead, the ones he carried–Eisner may accuse himself, but he can accuse the world with more vehemence, and more justification. In his book he restrains himself, except when he writes of the Nazis.

This world, not quite rid of Nazis, reads memoirs of the Holocaust, watches new holocausts in Mao’s China and in Cambodia. Perhaps the world’s continued ignorance, indifference and criminality goads Eisner not only to present Hell but also to explain it. (For example, he tells of a sign on Flossenburg’s gate that said, “Work liberates,” adding “The message was totally ironic.” He does this sort of thing more than once.) At times he tells us more than we should know, as when he describes a couple of his early sexual adventures in prose worthy of Penthouse. There are pages that read all too much `like a novel’–or worse, a cheap and trivial screenplay. He embarrasses his reader when he dips into what can only be described as Holocaust kitsch. What he has lived needs no such (melo)dramatization. Eisner, who writes with terse forcefulness at his best, should not be blamed for literary misjudgment; he runs an import-export business (the world of acts, as always), not a literary journal. Blame his editors.

Wiesel’s more refined and powerful intellect takes us places Eisner cannot. Eisner’s activeness also takes us places, giving us five memories for each Wiesel presents. Here is one that only Wiesel could elaborate upon properly: at one camp, a Nazi general on a white horse stopped in front of the inmates. At his side, on a white pony, road a 10-year-old Jewish boy dressed in a white uniform, black boots, and carrying a small whip. The boy ordered his fellow Jews into the showers, Days later, he saved Eisner from execution, ordered him to be whipped, smiled, complimented Eisner’s courage and handed him a chocolate bar. Shining like ebony, this brilliant evil mesmerizes as it repels. If he had survived, what would be this child’s monologue with the dead? If memoirs of the Holocaust teach us to learn the right silence, they also teach us to try to find the right speech and the right acts by showing us what happens if we fail.

2016 NOTE: Jack Eisner died in 2003, having dedicated much of his life’s considerable earnings to educating people about the Holocaust, especially through memorials he caused to be built in several countries. His memoir does indeed read at times like a screenplay for a melodrama and was produced as both a stage play and a film. The jarring disjunction between his experiences and some of his descriptions of them show a tough, blunt sensibility somewhat warped by the vulgar forms of entertainment he escaped to live in the midst of,  for the rest of his life. His book’s many fine and striking passages in this way represent his triumph not only over the death camps but over the trivializing coarseness of what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.”