Dr Ahmed Moussalli (*)

We live today in a globalised world, and no state, religious group or civilisation can live in it in isolation from the other. We have made unprecedented technical progress in all aspects of life, a spread of multi-national organisations and increasing intervention by the state in directing social activities by means of repression. Equally, we find increasing popular demands for popular legitimacy and the activation of the role of politicised popular groups. All of these issues remain part of the challenges of the 21st century.

There is no one event in any one place which does not affect many places. What happens in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Egypt or the United States is not a localised event; rather it has divergent and multi-faceted repercussions. Modern Islamic movements which constitute contemporary and future political and social movements are not constricted by such and such a state or by this part of the world or that.

Islamic movements are on the rise all over the world, and it is expected that in the new world order which is appearing, religion will play a central role in state and regional politics, whether as a part of popular Islamic movements, or as one of the dynamic roots of worldwide civilisations. Now, today we see blends of civilization, secularism and rationalism faltering in the face of globalisation and what lies behind modernity and spirituality. The dawn of the 21st century is witnessing an ascendancy of centralised capitalism and technology which transcends borders, and both of these things represent a growing threat to the understanding of the nationalist state and its nationalist ideology. Thus the spirit of developed capitalism and advanced technology contradicts the spirit of the nationalist states and its truths. Nonetheless, popular demands, whether they be localised or worldwide, still centre around political, social and economic empowerment, and around issues of legality and legitimacy and reviewing the role of the state and its essence.

In this way, we can see the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism as a model for those popular movements which have religious or civilizational aspirations, are dubious about the ethics of technology and capitalism and call for popular empowerment and a law system differing from that of the nationalist state.

Therefore, Islamic fundamentalism and its discourse worldwide, be it hard-line or moderate, must be studied and analysed, within the context of the development of the nationalist state and new globalisation.

Islamic movements and their discourses form a series of ideological developments which influence what goes on within nationalist states and within the world order. Equally, their aspirations and objectives transcend local frameworks to include the regional and the global.

Most literature which treats issues of Islamic fundamentalism is not able to study the activities and alleged dangers of fundamentalist movements from its remote vantage point. Consequently there remains curiosity about the truth of fundamentalism and a fearfulness of it. This is an important aspect which must be dealt with carefully by Islamic fundamentalists. The future of Islamic discourse rests to a large extent on its ability to divorce itself from the attribute of terrorism, and to develop pluralist democratic discourse which does not strive to achieve power by means of force. However, there are two sides to this equation, and there is the state trying to pounce on all segments of society, including the Islamic and the secular.… Therefore its ability to assimilate multiple formations into society represents a safety valve and a controlling device for the Islamic movement, its discourse and its dogma or its moderation.

The future of Islamic discourse is intimately connected to its political discourse on pluralist democracy, and there are in fact two trends of thought within the Islamic movements. The first is the hardliner trend, opposed to civil liberties and to free political action and against democracy. As for the second, it is moderate in its political conduct and amenable to civil liberties, pluralism and democracy. The first trend is cut off from the thought of the second, which has its origins in Hassan al-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and which was dispossessed of legitimacy by successive Egyptian governments. This split led to the emergence of hardliner Islamic discourse, the distinguishing features of which were forged by Sayyid Qutb and afterwards by his followers and pupils. It created hardliner Islamic groups with Muslims and others. The birth of this hardliner movement was a reaction against the political, economic and state conditions in Egypt and against the policies of successive governments that repressed civil liberties and ruled despotically over the country. Thus hardliner fundamentalism employed the Islamic concepts of Opposition to combat the concepts of the ruling secularism, and turned ‘Shura’ [consultation] into ‘the will of the people’. From there, it was transformed into Divine Will. The individual must submit to that will, for his freedom springs from it, and similarly this popular will can establish a political covenant with a ruling individual, but it cannot permit political or societal pluralism or fundamental differences in the ideology, thought and religion. For the hardliners the establishment of the Islamic State became an execution of the Divine Will. Similarly, the hardliners create for the state, through its institution of Shura and Ijma’a [consensus], a fundamental role in dictating the choices of the Umma [the Islamic community]. According to hardliner Islamists the state achieves a formal legitimacy whereby it is only accountable before God and for applying the Islamic Sharia. On applying the Sharia its legitimacy becomes complete, and thus it is not possible to touch the state’s legitimacy except if it is disobedient to God or it fails to apply the Sharia. In this sense, the state is transformed into the overseer of public morals, and piety becomes a public action instead of a private adoration, subjected to the power of the state.

From this starting point, the hardliner fundamentalists reject the presence of parties, institutions and organisations in civil society and do not recognise any legitimacy in them. Views such as this and this trend of hardliner thought have no future, and the discourse of hardliners increases their isolation even from the Islamists. Their activities have become an aspect of the state’s justifications for its terrorism and violence against their own citizens.

As for the second trend, comprised of moderate Islamists, it holds that the absence of civil society and its institutions and democratic bodies is the first factor of violence and terrorism. However, this trend is absent from the political scene in many Islamic countries, even when they call for pluralism and liberalization of political action. This is the case in Egypt, where this trend has tried through peaceful political action to get into constitutional bodies, but it has still been rejected by the state.

This moderate trend looks at the legitimacy of the state through the lens of popular resolve and calls for a specification of the state’s three powers: legislative, judicial and executive, and their separation one from another. Similarly, they confirm the importance of the political covenant between the governor and the governed as a legitimate means of achieving power. Islamic rule is consultative, constitutional and plural rule. The political discourse of this trend is founded on the governorship of God whose discourse cannot be understood except through consultation and consensus. The moderate Islamists try to draw consultation and democracy closer together and to assimilate democratic thought into Islamic thought. This trend tries to reconcile democracy and constitutional rule on the one hand, and Shura and Sharia on the other.

Islamists universally employ the principle of monotheism, although from the practical perspective that is the principle of empowering the Umma or deputizing them on earth; in other words, the principle of rule by the Umma, but whilst hardliner Islamists employ this principle in order to control others in the name of God’s unity [monotheism] the moderates use this principle in order to forbid control over the Umma by unjust authorities and in order to defer the understanding of independence and sovereignty to the Umma. Quranic discourse is for them a discourse establishing the Umma’s rule over themselves and their government over their own affairs. This type of mandate is only legitimate through the Umma’s choice and election of their governors. The Umma is the sole body sanctioned to authorise legitimate authority.

In this way the principle of monotheism for Islamists is political discourse arranging authorities amongst the Umma and their rulers to combat individual governorship for the purpose of controlling the capabilities of the Umma and their people.  The search for monotheism, in its Islamic representation, is a quest for the Umma’s rule through religious discourse, particularly because of the profound collapse of nationalist, communist, socialist and liberal discourse in most parts of the Islamic world.

From here, we arrive at the importance of the Islamists’ rejection of the authority which Islamic organisations have entrusted to the concept of history, and their rejection of history itself. Islamists consider that this history has a role in the traditional religious structure which is subject to the historical justifications for submission and acquiescence to the despotic ruler’s authority on the basis that necessity knows no law - not only in jurisprudence but also in politics and elsewhere. Today these traditional religious and political organisations are not able to represent the different segments of society. The quest for Islamic revival by separating Islam from its history and by modernising its discourse is a quest for liberation from the authorities which for several decades or even centuries have been preventing real and substantive modernisation in people’s lives. The people, and Muslims today should, according to the Islamists, unshackle their human instincts from the past and begin religious, spiritual, ideological, political and social revival. The search for liberation and revival is not only connected to religious matters, but extends to political and social affairs, and to defining mankind from the past, and enabling him to act to act in the present and to plan for the future.

This appears clearly from reading most of the Islamic theoreticians of Quranic verses and prophetic texts. They consider that the understanding of these texts is not only linked to the history of their passage through time and their causes, but that it is necessary to discover their new meanings in the light of the present situation and to link them to the issue of legitimacy and modernity and the Islamic state on new and modern bases. For Islamists this process of rediscovering the meaning is not in itself an end or an absolute; it is also restricted by its context and by the actions of mankind. This process of rediscovery is therefore a search for modern legitimacy by means of trying to review the precepts of legitimacy and their component parts, which consequently preordains a fresh quest into the precepts of knowledge and its theories in new readings. Thus whilst the Islamists try to be sceptical about modern western theories of knowledge, at the same time they are taking fundaments of knowledge from those theories in order to dismantle the structure of historical Islamic thought, before reassembling it in a modern context. On the level of knowledge, the relationship of Islamic fundamentalism with historic Islamic thought and its traditional structure and influence on that thought in the long run parallels the relationship between Protestantism and the Catholic Church. Fundamentalism, as with Protestantism, makes the individual the source of religious interpretation. Just as they [Protestants] reject giving any organisation particular religious authority, so the Islamists reject completely, theoretically at least, giving any advantages or exclusive rights to religious organisations, since authority and even interpretative authority belongs to Muslims universally and as individuals.

From another perspective, the Islamists undertake the quest for modernity under the mantle of the quest for fundamentalism, so that fundamentalism is used to invoke modern western theories and to replace the traditions of Islamic knowledge with them. Therefore, the quest for modernity and fundamentalism is also a tool for empowerment -without yielding to western modernity, which in Islamists’ thought is linked with colonialism and imperialism - and in order to root modern concepts into the Islamic framework without surrendering to traditional Islamic explanations. ‘Islamized modernity’ allows the Islamists to adopt those western technologies, sciences and institutions which strengthen the power of Muslims. As for ‘modernized’ fundamentalism, this permits the Islamists to distance themselves from what they consider to be oppressive, illegitimate or overpowering local or worldwide powers. Thus the Islamic Fundamentalist identity is derived from an unalterable text (the Quran) which is employed for moral and ethical ascendancy, from Islamised modernity which supplies them with means to perfect the gathering of material power, and from Modernised Fundamentalism which distinguishes between the Islamic Umma and the rest of the peoples. However, this type of identity in fact stems from the process of connecting Islamic religious readings or discourses to their historical contexts, and secondly the complete rejection of their meanings by all generations of Muslims. Fundamentalism tries to put Quranic discourse in the place of historical discourse, and furthermore to recover its political legitimacy from the Quranic text, from which the power of action or objection is derived.

On the one hand, the historical theory for traditional and non-historic thinking on Quranic texts is the basis for establishing a liberating ideology which frees the individual and society from the historical accumulations that make up the intellectual links of the doctrinal hierarchy and its institutions. On the other hand, the true reading, if not the faith of the Islamists in the text and its truth, is to evolve their thinking into a part of a trend which lies behind modernity. For they do not believe that man is capable of reaching a definitive meaning of any truth, with the result that the text bears interpretation and reinterpretation indefinitely. Therefore, the Islamists believe that traditional Quranic readings and their schools of thought, and equally western schools of thought do not have any outward value in themselves.

The persistence of the Islamists in Islamizing every political and social principle is a search for identity and for political and social legitimacy. Thus the Fundamentalist rejection of rhetoric, philosophy, Suffism, and philology can be considered as a part of their rejection of intellectual dominance which contributes towards restoring legitimacy to the Umma in all spheres of life. The moderate Islamists therefore believe that the quest for democracy by re-interpreting the meaning of Shura and Ijma’a is a quest to create political authorities which have a degree of popular representation. Although the time is not yet ripe for evaluation of the impact of Fundamentalist thought on traditional thought or for divorcing the two, it is clear that many Islamic thinkers are working to review political models and their traditions and institutions and to attempt to achieve a broad and renewed Islamic thought. From this starting point it can be said that the search for the Islamic State is a type of escape from the domineering state or the search for a state representative of the people. While moderate Islamists generally see the Islamic State as a democratic state, and some see it as liberal democratic, state legitimacy must not contravene Quranic texts.

According to moderates, the authority of religious texts maintains an equilibrium between the ruler’s government, and the freedom of the movement of society and its component parts. It arbitrates between them in the case of disagreement. In this way the moderates transform elections, for example, into affairs comparable to Shura or Ijma’a, and furthermore into religious duties. Equally it [the authority of religious texts] maintains the representation of the Umma’s interests and the removal of oppression, despotism and exploitation. 

Hence, the Islamists are able to balance correct public morals springing from society’s control over the political field and from social and political justice, with uncorrupted political behaviour and the True Faith. Equally the moderates draw a parallel between errant political behaviour and Kufr [unbelief]. Because of this, the ongoing debate between Islamists and others over Faith and Kufr, Islamization and secularization, and similarly establishing roots and marginalisation, is in fact a political debate over justice and oppression and equally over self-fulfilment or self-exclusion in the political sphere. The Islamists hold that their thought is an alternative to communism, socialism, liberal capitalism and other ideologies. What distinguishes Islamic ideology from others is that it pivots around positive individual, social, economic and moral ethics. They look on the ruling institutions in the world and the players in their countries as corrupt, inhumane and exploitative of the world’s people. As for the morals of Islam, they are an empowering global authority which preserve Muslims’ role in the world and indicate their role in global politics.

Islamists believe that whilst the West provides mankind with material progress via technological progress, Islam provides it with the humanitarian/moral dimension, which contributes in propagating material progress in an ethical way throughout the world.

And so, if material progress were combined with the morality established by the Islamists, there would be a possibility to set up a global regime, materially and morally advanced, instead of the control by the worldwide capitalist regime which is neither moral nor humane. The moral dimension will play a part in the just redistribution of wealth amongst all nations, including poor ones. Thus, whilst the moderate Islamists adhere to the capitalist system of production, they oppose the capitalist system of distribution, or its political economy, because it is exploitative and oppressive. According to Islamists, the globalisation of the capitalist system of distribution through technical globalisation creates a divided world which is dominated by struggles to ostracise the poor and to leave them out of world history. Islamists believe that both globalised technology and capitalism are in need of global ethics - which the global religion of Islam provides. But, they see that religion is rejected by technical and capitalist globalisation, and hence it will turn into one of the components of instability in the world.

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* Professor of Political Sciences and Public Administration, American University / Lebanon.