The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 5

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

The spiritual challenge of modernity, even when unencumbered by Western dress, leaves the modernists in Islam vulnerable to criticism both from traditional religious leaders and later from jihadist and sala­fist revolutionaries on the grounds that their modernism was both inef­fective and "un-Islamic." Thus a modernist such as Al-Afghani (1837-1897) or Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) whose views might be con­sidered unexceptionable and even mainstream in the salons of Mayfair or the cafés of Paris look in retrospect as if they were in a kind of lim­bo or halfway house on the way to radical, fundamentalist, or jihadist Islamism.⁷⁰

Political institutions created after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire opened a number of political possibilities. In Turkey, the aboli­tion of the caliphate in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the defeat of the Allies at Gallipoli, laid the foundation for what is arguably the most successful state whose citizens are chiefly Muslim.⁷¹ In contrast, in Egypt the foundations were laid at about the same time for a renewal of salafist and jihadist Islam by Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brethren, the Jamiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, in direct emulation of the Ikhwan of Arabia.

The Egyptian Ikhwan may have adopted the name of the Arabian agriculturalists, but they were "a new type of Islamic community," namely, "the first mass-supported and organized, essentially urban-oriented effort to cope with the plight of Islam in the modern world."⁷² Al-Banna was distressed at the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and angered at the declaration two years later by the ulamas at al-Azhar University in Cairo that, absent a true caliphate, Muslims could not live properly as Muslims. He also rejected the position of the Westernizers and argued in favor of what would later be called an Islamic state, as distinct from an Islamic society within a secular state, as provided by the example of Turkey. At the end of the day, this "magical and mil­lenarian attitude" would require "the intervention of a supernatural power, an apocalyptic upheaval" to come into being.⁷³

Al-Banna's position was similar to that of another intellectual and revolutionary, his older contemporary, Rashid Rita. Rita argued in sup­port of a familiar theme, that only a salifist Islam, purged of Western influences, could end Western colonialism and that it could be recov­ered by ijtihad, by exercising individual judgment in opposition to the traditions of the ulama. Rita also reintroduced the symbol jahiliyya. The Prophet used the term to refer to pre-Islamic Arabia; Ibn Taymiyya used it to refer to the Mongols. Rita was the first to apply the term to the Muslim lands of his own time. Soon enough, as Haddad observed, jahiliyya came to mean "any system, order, world view or ideology that is considered un-Islamic" by the salafist interpreter.⁷⁴ The chief differ­ence between Rita and al-Banna, apart from doctrinal issues, about which revolutionaries typically quarrel, was that Rita remained isolated and ineffective despite his ambitions and al-Banna led a social and polit­ical movement.

Like their predecessor, the Egyptian Ikhwan exalted their leader, though al-Banna and his organization did not come to the attention of the British authorities in Egypt until 1936, "the year that witnessed the beginning of large-scale revolt in Palestine against British occupa­tion, Zionist policies, and Jewish immigration."⁷⁵ Opposition to British authorities about the same time in India took a similar and, it turned out, highly portable form.

Mawlana Mawdudi, a vigorous participant in the prewar debates in India regarding the future of the subcontinent, made a number of dog­matic assertions based on the arguments of Rita and on the traditions of Indian Wahhabism. He asserted once again the unity of religious and political life and wrote a lengthy comparison of Islam with capitalism, fascism, socialism, and communism — and notably not a comparison with Judaism or Christianity. Like the other revolutionaries, he endorsed itjihad against the ulama and asserted a literalist reading of an un­changing Sharia. His organization, the Jamaat-I Islami or Islamic Asso­ciation, was the "counterpart" of the Ikhwan in the Arab world.⁷⁶ Like the Ikhwan, he sought an Islamic state. Following partition, this stance placed him in opposition to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who like Ataturk had established, at least in principle, a secu­lar state that might shelter an Islamic society, but also non-Muslims.

In Egypt, political events followed a more or less similar path. In 1948, one of al-Banna's followers murdered the Egyptian prime minister, Mahamud al-Nuqrashi. As a consequence, the Ikhwan was dissolved and al-Banna was himself murdered within the year. The loss of their leader was a genuine decapitation, and his followers were unable to cre­ate any coherent political strategy.⁷⁷ The 1952 coup by the Free Officers Association led by Gamal Nasser introduced something like a secular state, which has remained intact ever since. The Ikhwan did not share the Arab nationalism of the new regime, and eventually they made a highly incompetent attempt on Nasser's life. The government then sup­pressed the Ikhwan by arresting its members, many of whom were sub­sequently tortured and executed.

The most intellectually important member of the Ikhwan, the "god­father to Muslim extremist movements around the globe," was Sayyid Qutb.⁷⁸ We will analyze his views in the following chapter. Let us con­clude this chapter by summarizing the argument. We noted at the out­set that the experiential dynamics of living in accord with the message of God are precarious and existentially demanding. The analysis of the Israelite experience indicated this clearly. Moreover, the same pattern emerged in the history of Christianity.

Historically, Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement torn between the expectation of the Parousia that would usher in the King­dom of God as a historical event in the world and an awareness that the faith of the community of believers constituted the continuing revela­tion of Christ in history. That is, from its origin Christianity contained both an eschatological notion of community and the understanding that the Messiah has already appeared and that his presence is contin­ued in the community of the faithful. This new community, described in Paul's Letter to the Hebrews, is centered on faith, is unified by the Holy Spirit, and is guided by the Decalogue and the law of the heart.⁷⁹

The transformation of an eschatological community into a Christian com­munity, the beginnings of which are recorded in Acts,⁸⁰ had the effect of toning down the expectation that the existing order of the world would soon be transfigured into the Kingdom of God. Even so, during times of crisis—such as the persecutions of the Christians by Roman author­ities—expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God could easily be restored, as, for example, in the contemporary Revelation of Saint John. The structure of the existential issue is notably similar to that of the Israelite prophetic communities and the issue of metastatic faith touched upon above. In Voegelin's words:

If Christianity consisted in the burning desire for deliverance from the world, if Christians lived in expectation of the end of unredeemed his­tory, if their destiny could be fulfilled only by the realm in the sense of chapter 20 of Revelation, the church was reduced to an ephemeral community of men waiting for the great event and hoping that it would occur in their lifetime. On the theoretical level the problem could be solved only by the tour de force of interpretation that Saint Augustine performed in the Civitas Dei. There he roundly dismissed the literal belief in the millennium as "ridiculous fables" and then bold­ly declared the realm of the thousand years to be the reign of Christ in his church in the present saeculum that would continue until the Last Judgment and the advent of the eternal realm in the beyond.⁸¹

The Augustinian understanding of the Church, which remained intact until the end of medieval times in the West, simply declared the revo­lutionary expectations of a second coming to be ridiculous.

And yet, human beings are perfectly at liberty to believe in ridicu­lous fables. Moreover, the temptation to do so is likely to be particu­larly strong, as we have indicated, during periods of crisis and change, when historical institutions are challenged and individuals long for relief from suffering, from evil, from the effects of the famous apoca­lyptic horsemen.⁸² Voegelin has called the experiential phenomenon the "fall from faith." In the Christian world, the probability of such a fall increased with the spread of Christianity to ever-larger numbers of individuals who, at the same time, lacked the existential stamina to en­dure the uncertainties and precariousness of faith.

When such a fall is experienced on a socially widespread scale, the consequences will depend on the surrounding historical and, broadly speaking, religious culture into which the individuals are falling. "The fall could be caught," Voe­gelin wrote, "only by experiential alternatives, sufficiently close to the experience of faith that only a discerning eye would see the difference, but receding far enough from it to remedy the uncertainty of faith in the strict sense."⁸³ The history of Islam, from the Kharijites to the Ikhwan, recapitulates a structurally similar fall from faith in response to a series of historical crises.

The original crisis in the Prophet's "duty to succeed" was the exodus, the hijra from Mecca to Medina in 622. His triumphal return and the evocation of the umma was understood by his followers as the prelude to further triumphs — and especially the transformation of the umma from the potential of humanity living in submission to God to the actual establishment of an ecumenic Islamic world. The expansion of Islam was, of course, remarkable, but so too were the crises, most notably the Mongol depredations of the mid-thirteenth century.

The response of Ibn Taymiyya began a pattern that has not yet come to an end: if Mus­lims were unable to fulfill their duty to succeed, the reason lay in their having neglected the message of the Prophet. Only by recalling the pris­tine Islam of the pious forefathers, the salafa, could their triumphs be repeated. On the one hand, success required a new interpretation of the Koran, ijtihad, and thus a struggle with the existing interpretive author­ity of the ulama. On the other, it meant enacting the rule of God, the Sharia, by combining power, wealth, and jihad to command the good and forbid the evil.

Likewise the crisis of the "decline" of the Ottoman Empire motivated the restorative work of al-Wahhab. And again it was a salafist program of recovery that focused even more intently on puritanism, on political jihad, on dogmatic ijtihad in service to the Sharia. The setback of 1813, which ended with Abdullah's head on a pike in Istanbul, was followed by redoubled efforts and the consolidation of Saudi-Wahhabist power. The help provided by the British introduced yet another layer of com­plexity: the modern experience of imperialism and Western domina­tion.

This time there was no mystic reappropriation of the Prophet's message, such as may be found in the Sufism of Rumi. Nor, with the Saudi suppression of the Ikhwan (again with British help), was a gen­uine salafist response, namely, the formation of hijra communities in the desert, a serious possibility. Instead, with the increasing simplification of Islamic discourse with Mawdudi and al-Banna, and particularly with the reintroduction of jahiliyya as a means to stigmatize fellow Mus­lims who were political opponents, the response of Islamic thinkers was as modern as the Western intruders they found so objectionable.

By the mid-twentieth century, something like the following doctri­nal complex informed the salafist enterprise. First, Islam is a complete and all-encompassing way of life both for the individual and for the community; its chief antagonists are communism, capitalism, and fas­cism. Second, the Koran, rightly interpreted according to the salafist ijtihad, is a complete guide to individual and communal action. Third, the Sharia, the law of God, is a detailed guide to the right order of human life. Fourth, abandonment of the pristine ways of the ancestors and reliance on the West has caused the decline of Islamic power, wealth, culture, and righteousness; only a return to the old ways can change this. Fifth, science and technology are available from the West but must be appropriated without Westernization. And, last, jihad is central to the revival of Islam and the final conquest of the world for God and against Satan.⁸⁴ In the following chapter we examine the further trans­formation of salafism into an ideology fueled less by love of one's own than by hatred of the other.    

[This is the last of five parts.  Part 1 may be read HERE.]

NOTES