Post-Islamism
Much has been written about this concept lately, given the Arab unrest and the expectation that democratization will lead to moderation of Islamists. However, post-Islamism is something that has been addressed by some of us for many years. Here is an article in which I predicted this trend almost 7 years ago.
http://www.stratfor.com/islamism_post_islamism
From Islamism to Post-Islamism
April 18, 2005 | 1924 GMT
By Kamran Bokhari
Amid continuing efforts to resolve its post-Sept. 11 security crisis, the United States and European countries increasingly are dealing with what once would have been an unlikely array of political partners in the Muslim and Arab worlds: Islamist groups.
Because they advocate the imposition of Islamic law in national politics, Islamists — or what Westerners formerly have referred to as Islamic fundamentalists — might at first glance seem to have little, if any, role in the Bush administration’s second-term push for democratization throughout the world. But they are, in fact, among the United States’ most potent potential partners as Washington and others seek to conclude the jihadist war and lay a foundation for relations with the Muslim world.
These efforts, which mark a significant shift in Washington’s own approach — particularly in the Middle East — will impact what has been a long-running competition within political Islam: the struggle of moderate Islamists of many varieties, who make up the bulk of the Muslim world, to attain power without sacrificing their religious ideals or credentials.
As a political ideology, Islamism achieved its first major victory with the Iranian revolution in 1979. At that time, in the context of the Cold War, it was not perceived as the next great challenge for the United States or the West. That perception emerged only with the Sept. 11 attacks and ensuing war. For the past three and a half years, media attention to the issue has created a perception — correctly or otherwise — that Islamism is proliferating and poses a growing security threat.
Islamists make up a significant portion of the Muslim political landscape — supported by believers who are concerned about the fate of Islamic values and culture in the modern age, when Western and particularly American ideals and culture seem to permeate the globe. Nevertheless, Islamist groups have had little success in translating their popularity into votes and actual political power.
But that is slowly beginning to change.
Mechanics of Moderation
Though logic dictates that some forms of radical and militant beliefs will persist, Islamism on the whole increasingly is moving toward moderation. This is evident in many areas — including Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, where groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are bidding to play a part in mainstream politics.
This shift has little to do with any external factors. Instead, it is part of a natural evolution for groups that thus far have been unable to capture the imagination of the masses sufficiently to take political power. Turkey is the only Muslim state in which an Islamist group of sorts — the Justice and Development Party (AK) — controls the government, but even the AK can be considered an “Islamist-lite” party, since it is a more pragmatic and increasingly moderate version of its predecessors, the Virtue, Welfare, National Salvation, and National Order parties going as far back as 1970.
As democracies around the world have shown before, ideology is important to voters, but not more important than the material interests of the people. Politically, ideology is a medium that allows a people to secure their interests; if it does not succeed in doing that, it will remain a peripheral concern.
For example, in the Middle East, Fatah has become an acceptable partner for the United States and Israel at the peace talks table, but support among the Palestinians is splintered because the government has not been able to build sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, Hamas commands a great deal of local support because of the social services it provides; but in order to achieve power within the mainstream, the militant group ultimately will have to compromise its ideological stance on the existence of a Jewish state.
Defining Islamist Movements
Though its intellectual roots stretch back to the social, economic and political upheavals of the late 19th century, Islamism emerged as a political movement in 1928, when the Ikhwan al Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) was founded in Egypt, and spread from there to British India, where Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Group/Association) was launched in 1941. By the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the Muslim countries had gained independence from their European colonial rulers, these organizations and their counterparts in other states became serious political entities.
Islamist groups distinguished themselves from others — which included secular, nationalist and Marxist Muslim groups, to name a few — by seeking to establish or re-establish what they argued was an Islamic state in their home countries. In other words, they wanted the state to implement Islamic law. Beyond that, however, there is no agreement even today on exactly what an Islamic state is or should be.
Not only are the reasons for this disagreement too vast to be explored here, they also are less important than the means by which the various brands of Islamists seek to achieve their goals. Though it is their attitudes toward their religion and modernity that makes Islamists “moderate,” “radical” or “militant,” it is their approach toward establishing their political goals that defines their relationships with other Muslim and non-Muslim entities.
A vast majority of Islamists in almost all Muslim states are moderates: They pursue the establishment of an Islamic polity through democratic means. At the other end of the Islamist spectrum are the militant groups who want to fight the incumbent regimes to attain power. During the 1990s, the militants went transnational and began fighting the United States — the main support behind the existing Muslim regimes — as a tactic toward this end goal. Al Qaeda and its allies around the world represent the transnational jihadists.
In the middle are several groups that can be viewed as nonviolent but that espouse a radical agenda. For example, Hizb al-Tahrir — founded in 1952 by Palestinians living in Jordan and now present in many parts of the world — rejects the use of armed struggle but seeks to overturn the political nation-state structure in order to re-establish the caliphate.
Intra-Islamist Contention
While the moderate, radical and militant labels refer to political attitudes, the behavior of various Islamist groups can be classified as either “integrationist,” “isolationist” or “interactionist.”
Moderate Islamists are integrationists, in the sense that they embrace the existing structure and function of the state — they are willing to work within constitutional bounds to establish their Islamic government. Moreover, they engage society by organizing themselves into various civil society groups and reaching out to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood, Jamiat-i-Islami and its counterparts in South Asia are key examples.
Radical Islamists are interactionists — they interact with society to foment popular revolution that would destroy the state power structure they reject as illegitimate. They also seek out sympathetic elements within existing state structures to support their efforts to oust those regimes. But most radical groups reject both democratic and the existing autocratic forms of government as un-Islamic, because they are secular systems. They seek instead to restore the old caliphal/emiratic forms of governance — though with some modifications to fit current realities. However, they also reject the use of violence to further their political interests.
Militant Islamists — most of whom are jihadists — are isolationists. Not only do they want to fight the state, but their operational needs for secrecy preclude them from engaging the masses. Moreover, militant Islamists subscribe to a top-down approach: The idea is to capture power and then Islamize the state and society, Taliban-style.
Now, there are some exceptions to these rules. For example, both the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah maintain large militias and engage in violence, but they do not direct their strikes at the Muslim state. Nor do they fit neatly into the “jihadist” mold cast by al Qaeda, for various ideological, religious and political reasons.
Their militant wings notwithstanding, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah seek to establish an Islamic authority through armed struggle. They have routinely acted as spoilers in the context of political developments from which they were marginalized or excluded — and as is now evident in the Middle East, they seek to advance their position through electoral means.
Moderation Leading to Interface
Now, with the United States actively searching for political as well as military solutions to its post-Sept.-11 security problems, the odds of success for Islamists are greater than ever before. By adopting a more democratic approach, it becomes possible for the Islamists not only to begin working with other domestic groups, but to open up a channel of communication with the United States as well. This already is occurring in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
The Bush administration’s declarations that its war on terrorism does not constitute a war against Islam or Muslims are much more than rhetoric. Military action has been focused against transnational and local or regional jihadists that have directly targeted the United States or its interests. There is nothing in Bush doctrine per se that precludes Washington from working with moderate Islamists — but there are fears and uncertainty about how to deal with nonviolent radical groups, which have evaded the spotlight amid the manhunts for militants and political negotiations with others. The fact that these radicals eschew violence but espouse revolutions that might run counter to U.S. interests will complicate policymaking in this area for some time.
Meanwhile, it is the moderate Islamists who present Washington’s best option for the future. As history has shown, non-Islamist moderates with whom the United States initially thought to partner — for example, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Saudi monarchy — do not necessarily enjoy the support of the masses. Now, the strategy is to engage certain types of Islamists in political dialogue, as Washington looks to use the weight of the majority to counter the radical and militant fringes.
Toward a Post-Islamist Era?
Islamists always represented a small fraction of the more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, and militants are an even smaller subset. This situation has been impacted, however, by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent events.
Now, militant Islamists are on the run, and the search for viable alternatives — as well as democracy movements — is lending itself to dialogue between moderate Islamist actors and Washington.
At the intellectual and ideological level, integrationists, interactionists and isolationists are all locked in a struggle for supremacy. The integrationists have the upper hand, since the militants are busy trying to save their skins and the radicals — though heavy on diagnosis and dogma — offer no tangible solutions to existing political problems.
However, the outcome of the struggle will depend, to a great extent, on Washington, which is fast moving away from an emphasis on military operations to one on calibrated negotiations. The U.S. contact with the moderates does risk delegitimizing them, but concrete political results and social improvements in the Arab/Muslim world would be the antidote.
The marginalization of the isolationists and the interactionists will allow the integrationists to gain the upper hand within the Islamist camp. But that does not necessarily mean that in the end the Islamist agenda will win the day. Once they have made the transition from opposition to dominance, these groups — as we are seeing in Iraq — likely will not be able to push their religious agendas too far.
As a practical matter, Islamists now are undergoing an ideological transformation. The heretofore heavy and rigid emphasis on doctrine is giving way under concerns about how best to turn doctrine into action.
When the dust settles, the Islamists likely will come to terms with the fact that the Quran and the Sunnah merely provide broad normative principles, which are applicable only through broad-based discussions, debates and negotiations — a process facilitated by a democratic framework.
As belief in a specific and timeless Islamic polity crumbles, an age of post-Islamism likely will emerge. In other words, the Muslim world is on the verge of embracing a version of modernity that is in keeping with its Islamic ethos. This would differ markedly from the periods of secularism and Islamism that followed the death of the caliphal age.
In this post-Islamist age, Islamist and non-Islamist Muslim powerbrokers will mingle. And in this environment, pragmatism will temper ideology.
Much has been written about this concept lately, given the Arab unrest and the expectation that democratization will lead to moderation of Islamists. However, post-Islamism is something that has been addressed by some of us for many years. Here is an article in which I predicted this trend almost 7 years ago.
http://www.stratfor.com/islamism_post_islamism
From Islamism to Post-Islamism
April 18, 2005 | 1924 GMT
By Kamran Bokhari
Amid continuing efforts to resolve its post-Sept. 11 security crisis, the United States and European countries increasingly are dealing with what once would have been an unlikely array of political partners in the Muslim and Arab worlds: Islamist groups.
Because they advocate the imposition of Islamic law in national politics, Islamists — or what Westerners formerly have referred to as Islamic fundamentalists — might at first glance seem to have little, if any, role in the Bush administration’s second-term push for democratization throughout the world. But they are, in fact, among the United States’ most potent potential partners as Washington and others seek to conclude the jihadist war and lay a foundation for relations with the Muslim world.
These efforts, which mark a significant shift in Washington’s own approach — particularly in the Middle East — will impact what has been a long-running competition within political Islam: the struggle of moderate Islamists of many varieties, who make up the bulk of the Muslim world, to attain power without sacrificing their religious ideals or credentials.
As a political ideology, Islamism achieved its first major victory with the Iranian revolution in 1979. At that time, in the context of the Cold War, it was not perceived as the next great challenge for the United States or the West. That perception emerged only with the Sept. 11 attacks and ensuing war. For the past three and a half years, media attention to the issue has created a perception — correctly or otherwise — that Islamism is proliferating and poses a growing security threat.
Islamists make up a significant portion of the Muslim political landscape — supported by believers who are concerned about the fate of Islamic values and culture in the modern age, when Western and particularly American ideals and culture seem to permeate the globe. Nevertheless, Islamist groups have had little success in translating their popularity into votes and actual political power.
But that is slowly beginning to change.
Mechanics of Moderation
Though logic dictates that some forms of radical and militant beliefs will persist, Islamism on the whole increasingly is moving toward moderation. This is evident in many areas — including Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, where groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are bidding to play a part in mainstream politics.
This shift has little to do with any external factors. Instead, it is part of a natural evolution for groups that thus far have been unable to capture the imagination of the masses sufficiently to take political power. Turkey is the only Muslim state in which an Islamist group of sorts — the Justice and Development Party (AK) — controls the government, but even the AK can be considered an “Islamist-lite” party, since it is a more pragmatic and increasingly moderate version of its predecessors, the Virtue, Welfare, National Salvation, and National Order parties going as far back as 1970.
As democracies around the world have shown before, ideology is important to voters, but not more important than the material interests of the people. Politically, ideology is a medium that allows a people to secure their interests; if it does not succeed in doing that, it will remain a peripheral concern.
For example, in the Middle East, Fatah has become an acceptable partner for the United States and Israel at the peace talks table, but support among the Palestinians is splintered because the government has not been able to build sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, Hamas commands a great deal of local support because of the social services it provides; but in order to achieve power within the mainstream, the militant group ultimately will have to compromise its ideological stance on the existence of a Jewish state.
Defining Islamist Movements
Though its intellectual roots stretch back to the social, economic and political upheavals of the late 19th century, Islamism emerged as a political movement in 1928, when the Ikhwan al Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) was founded in Egypt, and spread from there to British India, where Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Group/Association) was launched in 1941. By the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the Muslim countries had gained independence from their European colonial rulers, these organizations and their counterparts in other states became serious political entities.
Islamist groups distinguished themselves from others — which included secular, nationalist and Marxist Muslim groups, to name a few — by seeking to establish or re-establish what they argued was an Islamic state in their home countries. In other words, they wanted the state to implement Islamic law. Beyond that, however, there is no agreement even today on exactly what an Islamic state is or should be.
Not only are the reasons for this disagreement too vast to be explored here, they also are less important than the means by which the various brands of Islamists seek to achieve their goals. Though it is their attitudes toward their religion and modernity that makes Islamists “moderate,” “radical” or “militant,” it is their approach toward establishing their political goals that defines their relationships with other Muslim and non-Muslim entities.
A vast majority of Islamists in almost all Muslim states are moderates: They pursue the establishment of an Islamic polity through democratic means. At the other end of the Islamist spectrum are the militant groups who want to fight the incumbent regimes to attain power. During the 1990s, the militants went transnational and began fighting the United States — the main support behind the existing Muslim regimes — as a tactic toward this end goal. Al Qaeda and its allies around the world represent the transnational jihadists.
In the middle are several groups that can be viewed as nonviolent but that espouse a radical agenda. For example, Hizb al-Tahrir — founded in 1952 by Palestinians living in Jordan and now present in many parts of the world — rejects the use of armed struggle but seeks to overturn the political nation-state structure in order to re-establish the caliphate.
Intra-Islamist Contention
While the moderate, radical and militant labels refer to political attitudes, the behavior of various Islamist groups can be classified as either “integrationist,” “isolationist” or “interactionist.”
Moderate Islamists are integrationists, in the sense that they embrace the existing structure and function of the state — they are willing to work within constitutional bounds to establish their Islamic government. Moreover, they engage society by organizing themselves into various civil society groups and reaching out to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood, Jamiat-i-Islami and its counterparts in South Asia are key examples.
Radical Islamists are interactionists — they interact with society to foment popular revolution that would destroy the state power structure they reject as illegitimate. They also seek out sympathetic elements within existing state structures to support their efforts to oust those regimes. But most radical groups reject both democratic and the existing autocratic forms of government as un-Islamic, because they are secular systems. They seek instead to restore the old caliphal/emiratic forms of governance — though with some modifications to fit current realities. However, they also reject the use of violence to further their political interests.
Militant Islamists — most of whom are jihadists — are isolationists. Not only do they want to fight the state, but their operational needs for secrecy preclude them from engaging the masses. Moreover, militant Islamists subscribe to a top-down approach: The idea is to capture power and then Islamize the state and society, Taliban-style.
Now, there are some exceptions to these rules. For example, both the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah maintain large militias and engage in violence, but they do not direct their strikes at the Muslim state. Nor do they fit neatly into the “jihadist” mold cast by al Qaeda, for various ideological, religious and political reasons.
Their militant wings notwithstanding, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah seek to establish an Islamic authority through armed struggle. They have routinely acted as spoilers in the context of political developments from which they were marginalized or excluded — and as is now evident in the Middle East, they seek to advance their position through electoral means.
Moderation Leading to Interface
Now, with the United States actively searching for political as well as military solutions to its post-Sept.-11 security problems, the odds of success for Islamists are greater than ever before. By adopting a more democratic approach, it becomes possible for the Islamists not only to begin working with other domestic groups, but to open up a channel of communication with the United States as well. This already is occurring in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
The Bush administration’s declarations that its war on terrorism does not constitute a war against Islam or Muslims are much more than rhetoric. Military action has been focused against transnational and local or regional jihadists that have directly targeted the United States or its interests. There is nothing in Bush doctrine per se that precludes Washington from working with moderate Islamists — but there are fears and uncertainty about how to deal with nonviolent radical groups, which have evaded the spotlight amid the manhunts for militants and political negotiations with others. The fact that these radicals eschew violence but espouse revolutions that might run counter to U.S. interests will complicate policymaking in this area for some time.
Meanwhile, it is the moderate Islamists who present Washington’s best option for the future. As history has shown, non-Islamist moderates with whom the United States initially thought to partner — for example, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Saudi monarchy — do not necessarily enjoy the support of the masses. Now, the strategy is to engage certain types of Islamists in political dialogue, as Washington looks to use the weight of the majority to counter the radical and militant fringes.
Toward a Post-Islamist Era?
Islamists always represented a small fraction of the more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, and militants are an even smaller subset. This situation has been impacted, however, by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent events.
Now, militant Islamists are on the run, and the search for viable alternatives — as well as democracy movements — is lending itself to dialogue between moderate Islamist actors and Washington.
At the intellectual and ideological level, integrationists, interactionists and isolationists are all locked in a struggle for supremacy. The integrationists have the upper hand, since the militants are busy trying to save their skins and the radicals — though heavy on diagnosis and dogma — offer no tangible solutions to existing political problems.
However, the outcome of the struggle will depend, to a great extent, on Washington, which is fast moving away from an emphasis on military operations to one on calibrated negotiations. The U.S. contact with the moderates does risk delegitimizing them, but concrete political results and social improvements in the Arab/Muslim world would be the antidote.
The marginalization of the isolationists and the interactionists will allow the integrationists to gain the upper hand within the Islamist camp. But that does not necessarily mean that in the end the Islamist agenda will win the day. Once they have made the transition from opposition to dominance, these groups — as we are seeing in Iraq — likely will not be able to push their religious agendas too far.
As a practical matter, Islamists now are undergoing an ideological transformation. The heretofore heavy and rigid emphasis on doctrine is giving way under concerns about how best to turn doctrine into action.
When the dust settles, the Islamists likely will come to terms with the fact that the Quran and the Sunnah merely provide broad normative principles, which are applicable only through broad-based discussions, debates and negotiations — a process facilitated by a democratic framework.
As belief in a specific and timeless Islamic polity crumbles, an age of post-Islamism likely will emerge. In other words, the Muslim world is on the verge of embracing a version of modernity that is in keeping with its Islamic ethos. This would differ markedly from the periods of secularism and Islamism that followed the death of the caliphal age.
In this post-Islamist age, Islamist and non-Islamist Muslim powerbrokers will mingle. And in this environment, pragmatism will temper ideology.
