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Chapter 1: Defining Concepts, Demolishing Myths
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chapter 1 De‹ning Concepts, Demolishing Myths Over the last decade and a half, but especially since 9/11, three major assumptions have inspired much of the popular discussion about political Islam. These are, ‹rst, that the intermingling of religion and politics is unique to Islam; second , that political Islam, like Islam itself, is monolithic; and third, that political Islam is inherently violent. This book will argue that none of these assertions captures the reality of the multifaceted phenomenon fashionably called “political Islam.” It will do so by demonstrating that the Islamic religious tradition is no different from many others in terms of wrestling with the issue of religion in politics and politics in religion. It will also do so by exploring the multiple voices that claim to speak for Islam and the discrete national contexts that give different manifestations of political Islam their distinctive local color. It will do so further by arguing both that mainstream Islamist parties—which form the overwhelming majority of Islamist political formations in terms of numbers, membership, and support bases—by and large abjure violence and that factions that engage in violent activity often do so in response to state repression or foreign occupation. It will also argue that transnational extremist organizations , such as al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, are fringe phenomena that are marginal to the primary political struggles going on within predominantly Muslim societies. Finally, it will demonstrate that political Islam does not operate in a vacuum and that variables external to Islamism, principally the nature of domestic regimes and the substance of major powers’ foreign policies, have substantial impact on the emergence, popularity, and durability of Islamist movements and parties. What Is Political Islam? Before beginning a discussion of issues related to political Islam, one must provide an adequate de‹nition of the terms political Islam or Islamism—that is, Islam as political ideology rather than religion or theology. At the most general level, adherents of political Islam believe that “Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim world and implemented in some fashion.”1 While correct as a broad, sweeping generalization, this is too nebulous a formulation for it to act as an analytical guide capable of explaining political activity undertaken in the name of Islam. Greg Barton points out: “Islamism covers a broad spectrum of convictions. At one extreme are those who would merely like to see Islam accorded proper recognition in national life in terms of national symbols. At the other extreme are those who want to see the radical transformation of society and politics, by whatever means, into an absolute theocracy.”2 A more precise and analytically more useful de‹nition of Islamism describes it as “a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups and organizations that pursue political objectives.” According to this de‹nition , Islamism “provides political responses to today’s societal challenges by imagining a future, the foundations for which rest on reappropriated, reinvented concepts borrowed from the Islamic tradition.”3 While Islamists do not necessarily agree on the strategies or tactics needed to re-create a future based on their conceptions of the golden age of early Islam, they share the yearning to “go back to the future” by reimagining the past based on their readings of the fundamental scriptural texts. The reappropriation of the past, the “invention of tradition”4 in terms of a romanticized notion of a largely mythical golden age, lies at the heart of this instrumentalization of Islam. The invention of tradition provides many Islamists the theoretical tools for dehistoricizing Islam and separating it from the various contexts—in terms of time and space—in which Islam has ›ourished over the past fourteen hundred years. In theory, this decontextualizing of Islam allows Islamists to ignore the social, economic, and political milieus within which Muslim societies operate. It therefore provides Islamists a powerful ideological tool that they can wield in order to “purge” Muslim societies of “impurities” and “accretions,” natural accompaniments of the historical process, which they see as the reason for Muslim decline. However, context has 2 / the many faces of political islam [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:06 GMT) a way of taking its own revenge on abstract theory when attempts are made to put such theory into practice. This is exactly what has happened to Islamism, a topic I will return to later in this book. The...