-
Chapter 4: Between Ideology and Pragmatism
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter 4 Between Ideology and Pragmatism Egypt and Pakistan provide examples par excellence of the quest for ideological purity on the part of Islamist thinkers as well as of the Islamist movements’ ability to adapt to changing political circumstances. The two cases also highlight the importance of regime policies in determining Islamist trajectories. Cumulatively , these factors clearly demonstrate the validity of the proposition that expressions of political Islam in discrete countries are grounded in social and political realities speci‹c to their contexts and that Islamist movements undergo metamorphosis in response to changing situations and regime policies. This chapter compares the leading Islamist movements in Egypt and Pakistan —the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), respectively —to analyze, among other things, how far their strategies have been shaped in response to regime policies and restraints imposed on them. However , given the fact that the JI’s and MB’s strategies cannot be fully comprehended in the absence of an understanding of the seminal ideas propounded by their founders/ideologues, a comparison of their three major ‹gures—Hassan al-Banna, Abul Ala Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb—is deemed essential for the purpose of this chapter. Pakistan and Egypt: The Background The division of British India on the basis of Muslim and Hindu majority areas created Pakistan. Islam is therefore the primary cementing bond among its diverse ethnic groups, a fact that was clearly understood by its irreligious founders, who perceived religion principally in instrumental terms. The potency of political Islam therefore presented a major challenge for the modernist Pakistani elites, because they could not deny outright the political and 64 legal role of Islam in a country created in its name. The Islamist parties in Pakistan , especially the JI, were able to exploit this situation to promote what they characterized as an Islam-based agenda. This consisted principally of the infusion of selected provisions of sharia law into the legal code and the vetting of legislation to determine that it was compatible with Islamic law.1 The Islamists’ political agenda has been a constant cause of tension between Pakistan’s modernist regimes and the Islamists, who have considered Pakistan’s rulers as promoters of Anglo-Saxon law and thus as against the sharia. Egypt, by comparison, took its Islamic character for granted, with a Muslim majority of around 90 percent going back centuries. However, during the ‹rst half of the twentieth century, its quasi-liberal, modernizing elite and its royal court failed to end the de facto British occupation of the country that had begun in the 1880s, making them easy targets of popular anger. The venality of Egypt’s semifeudal ruling elite added to popular discontent. The situation became more acute at the end of World War II, with Egypt “facing critical internal and external problems and ruled by men without a semblance of popular support.”2 It was in this context that Islamist political ideology took root in Egypt, with the MB, the principal Islamist movement, projecting itself as the defender both of Egyptian national interests and of Muslim dignity against the foreign occupiers and their domestic collaborators. A comparison of these two movements, the JI and the MB, which have led the charge for Islamization of their respective societies and polities, demonstrates how different the Islamist movements have been in the two countries, despite the similarities in their idioms and concepts that continue to be couched in Islamic terms. Admittedly, there has been a certain degree of crossfertilization of ideas; the in›uence of JI founder Abul Ala Mawdudi’s writings on the ideas put forward by Sayyid Qutb, the MB’s chief ideologue during the1950s and 1960s, is clear. However, it is also evident that the two scholarscum -activists were reacting to distinct challenges that required unique responses. Similarity in the concepts and idioms used by Mawdudi and Qutb and in their respective movements often concealed the different stimuli that led the two Islamist thinkers to expound their fundamental ideas and develop their theories in the ‹rst place. Mawdudi, the chief theoretician of the JI, which he founded in 1941, was initially reacting to the challenge of preserving an Islamic identity under British rule in religiously plural India, where Muslims formed less than one-third of the total population. Then, in the run up to the partition of India in the 1940s and after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he was responding to the challenge of Between Ideology and Pragmatism / 65 [3.230...