The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World

Chapter 6: Islamist National Resistance

chapter 6 Islamist National Resistance There are a few important cases where Islamist political groupings with territorially circumscribed objectives—including those of liberation from foreign occupation, secession, or irredentism—clearly straddle the violent and nonviolent worlds. In many such cases, Islamism blends with nationalism, particularly in the context of resistance against non-Muslim foreign domination and/or occupation. Islam thus becomes an instrument for the mobilization of Muslim populations against control or domination by predominantly nonMuslim political authorities or foreign occupiers, thus giving the resistance its religious color. Such instances arise mainly in those cases where ethnicity and Islam coincide to a substantial extent; therefore, the latter can be used as a marker to de‹ne ethnic identity in opposition to the ethnoreligious identity of the dominating or occupying non-Muslim ethnic groups. This phenomenon is evident in such diverse locales as Russian-controlled Chechnya, Indian-administered Kashmir, and Israeli-occupied Palestine. Movements of national and/or ethnic resistance that aim at liberation, secession , or irredentism usually turn to Islam as their principal instrument for mobilization when secular parties and groups fail to achieve their nationalist goals, be they ending foreign occupation or gaining autonomy/independence from existing parent states. This is clearly demonstrated in the Palestinian and Kashmiri cases, where popular support shifted to Islamist movements and organizations following the failure of more secular groups to achieve nationalist objectives. In the process, ethnonational movements also become ethnoreligious ones. When such movements take up arms under the banner of a hybridized ideology that combines nationalism and religion, major powers apprehensive of Islamist radicalism brand them “terrorist” organizations. Both Hamas in Israeli-occupied Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon have suffered this fate. 112 However, the label “terrorist” lumps such movements together with those engaged in transnational violence, such as al-Qaeda. This blurs a very important distinction between the two sets of groups—namely, that the formers’ objectives as well as their base of operations are territorially circumscribed, while the latter choose their targets around the globe and carry out activities transnational in character. The ‹rst group works within the parameters of the state system, aiming at liberation or secession, while the second operates in de‹ance of such parameters, in near total disregard of national boundaries. Hizbullah and Hamas The foremost examples of Islamist national resistance movements are Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Israeli-occupied Palestine. This is the reason they have been chosen for detailed study in this chapter. The violence in which they engage in pursuit of their nationalist objectives has often been lumped together, in Western analyses and policy proclamations, with the transnational violence perpetrated by al-Qaeda under the blanket term terrorism. In 2002, Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, went to the extent of describing Hizbullah as the “A-team of terrorists,” suggesting that al-Qaeda may well be the “B-team.”1 However, on closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that there is an enormous difference between Hizbullah and Hamas, on the one hand, and al-Qaeda, on the other—in terms of both objectives and strategies. Unlike al-Qaeda, the violence that Hizbullah and Hamas have engaged in has been the product of struggles that are context speci‹c, nationally and territorially bounded, and principally determined by the fact of foreign occupation.2 The use by Hizbullah and Hamas of Islamic rhetoric and imagery to resist foreign occupation is reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements in Muslim countries resisting the imposition of colonial rule or attempting to overthrow it. Hizbullah and Hamas are in the tradition of these earlier movements that used the concept of jihad to justify resistance against foreign domination, thereby popularizing the modern interpretation of jihad as primarily defensive war against foreign occupation, aimed at driving out the occupier.3 While both organizations have been careful to control and direct the exercise of violence by their members, the obligation of jihad to resist foreign occupation has been couched by them in terms of the individual duty of every Muslim under such occupation.4 This interpretation has been used as a mobilizing tool to recruit members to engage in resistance activity against very heavy odds. At the same time, it has Islamist National Resistance / 113 been responsible for attacks on civilian targets carried out by individual members of these organizations, including suicide bombings. One must note, however , that Hizbullah and Hamas are not the...