Interesting paragraph toward the end of that review of Kepel's <Jihad:
However, the same conditions that gave birth to Islamism thirty years ago persist: economic stagnation or even negative growth, the unemployment of the young. So do resentment and free-floating rage. If Islamism is bankrupt, where is the ideology to replace it? A nationalist-socialist doctrine could emerge, perhaps with the same ingredients as before but in a different admixture?a populism more Islamic but also in some ways more secular, overseen by regimes headed by leaders with military backgrounds. But it is difficult to see how such regimes would promote the civil society and lead to the new enlightenment that Kepel forecasts. And in the meantime, the temptation remains to regain dignity and power not through real change but through the shortcuts of terrorism.
I believe this is only partly correct:
However, the same conditions that gave birth to Islamism thirty years ago persist: economic stagnation or even negative growth, the unemployment of the young. So do resentment and free-floating rage.
Islamism of the sort he talks about has roots in the Wahhabist form of Islam which grew out of 19th centry Arabia. Extremely short on real acholarship and very long on literalist interpretation of sacred texts - millenniarist, nostalgic, obscurantist, atemporal, anti-modern religion of the ruling class of an obscure tribe.
It has since had constant currency in India/Pakistan (Deobandism) and parts of Arabia as a reaction to modernity and lately as a reaction to other equally milleniarist movement, marxism/socialism.
It was revived in Egypt in the writings of Qutb which came as a result of his reaction to modernity and socialism and has expanded far more than it might have as the mullahs and mosques belonging to the sect were financed by Wahhabist oil money from Saudi Arabia.
I expect the money is still flowing. Some of it is diverted or sent ditectly to the middle class nihilists who make up the core of of islamist terrorist movements.
If Islamism is bankrupt, where is the ideology to replace it?
Is there a need for a replacement ideology? Or any particular ideology? The US, for instance, gets by harbouring a number of ideologies, some conflicting. Modernism itself, this may be a controversial assertion, doesn't have an over-arching ideology unless we count science as one. (I suppose misapplication of certain scientific methodology could be construed as ideology but that's a stretch, isn't it?)
The defining tropes of modernism are free speech, democracy and private property rights. None of these are inimical to Islam but they are harmful to the interests of some muslim leadership.
A nationalist-socialist doctrine could emerge, perhaps with the same ingredients as before but in a different admixture?a populism more Islamic....it is difficult to see how such regimes would promote the civil society and lead to the new enlightenment....
Indeed. Joining Islamism at the hip to an equally millenniarist and backward ideology, which I believe has happened in parts of the movement, is not not healthy for Muslim populations or their neighbours. (There is in this an argument for attacking the Iraqi Baathist regime and foreclosing that option).
I don't have time right now to chase down an implication for this although it has been discussed on this thread sporadically and often ill-temperedly. And that is, what actually has closed down millenniarist movements in the past? Stretch the time line beyond the 20th century.
Gotta go. |
