Routledge Handbook of Political Islam [2 ed.] 2020034464, 2020034465, 9781138353893, 9780429425165

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Notes on contributors
1. Political Islam under the spotlight
2. Islamism beyond politics: Sayyid Qutb’s journey to radicalism
3. Theocracy: from Wahhabism to Vilayat-e Faqih
4. Political Islam and animal issues
5. The Muslim Brotherhood: ideological, political and organizational developments
6. Islamic movements and party politics: two competing visions in Morocco
7. Hamas according to Hamas: a reading of its Document of General Principles
8. Hezbollah: between nationalism and Islamism
9. Islamists, Muslim democrats and citizenship in contemporary Indonesia
10. Muslim autonomy, political pragmatism, and the challenge of Islamist extremism in the Philippines
11. Islam and politics in the Maldives: rethinking political Islam
12. Political Islam in Central Asia: from religious revival to securitization
13. Islamism in Turkey
14. Islamist populism, Islamist fatwas, state transnationalism and Turkey’s diasporas
15. Facebook and agency: Iranian women’s resistance and reaffirmation
16. Political Islamic movements in South Asia: the case of Jama‘at-e-Islami
17. An existential crisis: the diminishing influence of religion in the New Saudi Arabia
18. Political Islam in peace and war: the case of Yemen
19. The two sources of jihadism
20. Jihadi Salafism
21. The ideology of al-Qaeda
22. The Islamic State’s ideological and strategic worldview
23. Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the age of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
24. Militant goodness and totalized meanings: some interpretations of jihad among Tajiks
25. Women in jihad: a historical perspective on Western women in the Islamic State (IS)
26. Politics for jihadi women: Lashker-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud Dawah as a case study
27. Racialization and the construction of the problem of the Muslim presence in Western societies
28. UK counter-terrorism strategy, Muslim diaspora communities and the ‘securitisation of integration’
29. Revisiting S.P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ thesis
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL ISLAM

This updated, second edition of the Handbook of Political Islam covers a range of political actors that use Islam to advance their cause. While they share the ultimate vision of establishing a political system governed by Islam, their tactics and methods can be very different. Capturing this diversity, this volume also sheds light on some of the less-known experiences from South East Asia to North Africa. Drawing on expertise from some of the top scholars in the world, the chapters examine the main issues surrounding political Islam across the world, including: • • • • • • • • •

Theoretical foundations of political Islam Historical background Geographical spread of Islamist movements Political strategies adopted by Islamist groups Terrorism Attitudes towards democracy Relations between Muslims and the West in the international sphere Challenges of integration Gender relations

Capturing the geographical spread of Islamism and the many manifestations of this political phenomenon make this book a key resource for students and researchers interested in political Islam, Muslim affairs and the Middle East. Shahram Akbarzadeh is Convenor of the Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Australia. He held a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2012–16) on the role of Islam in Iran’s foreign policy making and recently completed a project on Proxy Wars in the Middle East and South Asia, sponsored by Carnegie Corporation New York.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL ISLAM Second edition

Edited by Shahram Akbarzadeh

Second edition published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Shahram Akbarzadeh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Shahram Akbarzadeh to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2011 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Akbarzadeh, Shahram, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of political Islam / Edited by Shahram Akbarzadeh. Other titles: Handbook of political Islam Description: Second edition. | New York : Routledge, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034464 (print) | LCCN 2020034465 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic countries–Politics and government–21st century. | Islamic countries–Politics and government–20th century. | Islam and politics. | Islam and world politics. Classification: LCC DS63.1 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC DS63.1 (ebook) | DDC 320.5/57–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034464 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034465 ISBN: 978-1-138-35389-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42516-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by River Editorial Ltd, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors

viii

1 Political Islam under the spotlight Shahram Akbarzadeh

1

2 Islamism beyond politics: Sayyid Qutb’s journey to radicalism John Calvert

11

3 Theocracy: from Wahhabism to Vilayat-e Faqih Abdullah F. Alrebh

26

4 Political Islam and animal issues Emmanuel Karagiannis

38

5 The Muslim Brotherhood: ideological, political and organizational developments Barbara Zollner

51

6 Islamic movements and party politics: two competing visions in Morocco Esen Kirdiş

67

7 Hamas according to Hamas: a reading of its Document of General Principles Jean-François Legrain

79

8 Hezbollah: between nationalism and Islamism James Paterson and Benjamin MacQueen

v

91

Contents

9 Islamists, Muslim democrats and citizenship in contemporary Indonesia Robert W. Hefner 10 Muslim autonomy, political pragmatism, and the challenge of Islamist extremism in the Philippines Thomas M. McKenna

102

115

11 Islam and politics in the Maldives: rethinking political Islam Azim Zahir

126

12 Political Islam in Central Asia: from religious revival to securitization Hélène Thibault

139

13 Islamism in Turkey Gareth Jenkins

155

14 Islamist populism, Islamist fatwas, state transnationalism and Turkey’s diasporas Ihsan Yilmaz 15 Facebook and agency: Iranian women’s resistance and reaffirmation Shahin Gerami

170

188

16 Political Islamic movements in South Asia: the case of Jama‘at-e-Islami Muqtedar Khan and Rifat Binte Lutful

205

17 An existential crisis: the diminishing influence of religion in the New Saudi Arabia Eman Alhussein

220

18 Political Islam in peace and war: the case of Yemen Silvana Toska

233

19 The two sources of jihadism Bernard Rougier

248

20 Jihadi Salafism Mohammed M. Hafez

260

21 The ideology of al-Qaeda Christina Hellmich

277

22 The Islamic State’s ideological and strategic worldview Anthony Celso

290

vi

Contents

23 Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the age of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Mohamed Nawab Bin Mohamed Osman

306

24 Militant goodness and totalized meanings: some interpretations of jihad among Tajiks Sophie Roche

318

25 Women in jihad: a historical perspective on Western women in the Islamic State (IS) Seran de Leede

337

26 Politics for jihadi women: Lashker-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud Dawah as a case study Samina Yasmeen

351

27 Racialization and the construction of the problem of the Muslim presence in Western societies Valérie Amiraux and Pierre-Luc Beauchesne

363

28 UK counter-terrorism strategy, Muslim diaspora communities and the ‘securitisation of integration’ Tahir Abbas

383

29 Revisiting S.P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ thesis Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed and Shafi Md. Mostofa

393

Bibliography Index

411 428

vii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Tahir Abbas FRSA is currently an Assistant Professor in Terrorism and Political Violence, Member of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs Board, and Chair of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion at Leiden University in The Hague. His recent books are Countering Violent Extremism (2021, forthcoming), Islamophobia and Radicalisation (2019), and Contemporary Turkey in Conflict (2017). His recent edited books are Political Muslims (co-ed., with S Hamid, 2019) and Muslim Diasporas in the West: Critical Readings in Sociology (4 vols., Routledge Major Works Series, 2016). Imran Ahmed received his PhD in History at the University of New England, Australia. His dissertation was awarded the Chancellor’s Doctoral Research Medal for cutting edge research at the forefront of the field. Imran’s research interests lie at the intersections of modernity, religion, law and politics in late-colonial India and contemporary Pakistan. His work on the constitutional politics of Islam in Pakistan appears in South Asia, The Round Table and the Journal of Contemporary Asia. He is currently co-editing an edited volume on Violent Religious Extremism in South Asia and is the executive officer of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia. Shahram Akbarzadeh is Convenor of the Middle East Studies Forum at Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Australia. He researches Middle East politics with an interest in the role of Islam in foreign policy making and Islamic radicalism. He was the founding President of the Australian Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (AAIMS) Inc. (2016-2019). His publications include The Politics and International Relations of the Middle East: Crisis Zone (2018). Eman Alhussein is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC. She was a visiting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Her research focuses on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region. Alhussein’s areas of interest include identity and nationalism, gender, cultural and societal change, and religious discourse and reforms. Abdullah F. Alrebh is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Religion and Sociological Theory at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He is an academic and viii

Notes on contributors

author with research interests in Middle East, Arabic literature and Islam. He has published a number of academic articles and book chapters focusing on religion, the Middle East, social movements and education. The major interest of Dr. Alrebh is Saudi Arabia and Islamic mobilization in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Valérie Amiraux is Full Professor of Sociology at the Université de Montréal. She held the Canada Research Chair for the Study of Religious Pluralism (2007–17, CRSH). Her research focuses on religious pluralism, relations between Muslim minorities and secular societies, Islamophobia, and discrimination (see valerieamiraux.com). She is working on her next monograph, which examines the unveiling practices among Muslim women in Belgium, France and Quebec. Her latest book is Les nouveaux vocabulaires de la laïcité (2020), cowritten with C. Mercier and D. Koussens. Pierre-Luc Beauchesne is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Université de Montréal and member of the PLURADICAL (Pluralism and Radicalization) and Tryspaces (Transformative Youth Spaces) research teams. His research focuses on youth activism and youth movements in Morocco. After conducting research with February 20th Movement activists in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings, since 2019 he has been following mobilizations of students, and of Islamist and leftist organizations on Moroccan university campuses. Howard Brasted is Professor of History and Islamic studies in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for research at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. A long-time Editor of the journal South Asia (1984–2001) and coordinator of the postgraduate program in Islamic studies at UNE, he has published widely on a range of themes including Indian nationalism, decolonisation in South Asia, labour standards in Asia, and Islam in South Asian politics. He is currently working with a collaborative team on a project on ‘Populism in Asia’. John Calvert is Professor of History at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, where he teaches courses related to Islam and the Middle East. His research focuses on Islamic social and political movements and the British Empire in the Middle East. He is the author of several books, including Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (2010). Anthony Celso is a Professor of Security Studies at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He is a specialist on terrorism with concentrations in jihadi movements, Mideast and European security. He is the author of The Islamic State; A Comparative History of Jihadist Warfare (2018) and Al Qaeda’s Post 9-11 Devolution: The Failed Jihadist War against the Near and Far Enemy (2014). Shahin Gerami is Coordinator of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Her research and activism has involved various aspects of gendered disparities from religious fundamentalism, to political exile, refugee status, and political profiling of Muslim men. She has published a book Women and Fundamentalism (1996) and numerous articles in professional journals. She collaborated with the United Nation’s High Commission for Refugees conducting a need assessment of Afghani refugee families in Iran. She is currently exploring how social media facilitate sexual agency among Iranian women. ix

Notes on contributors

Mohammed M. Hafez is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A specialist in Islamist movements and political violence, his books include Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (2003), Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (2006), and Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (2007). Professor Hafez is also the author of over thirty journal articles and book chapters on Islamist ideologies, radicalization and violence. Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Global Affairs and Anthropology at the Pardee School for Global Affairs at Boston University, USA. He has edited or authored twenty-one books and seven major policy reports for government and private policy centers. His research interests have to do with Muslims, citizenship and pluralism in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, as well as in the United States and France. He is currently producing six films on religious pluralism and democracy in Indonesia. Christina Hellmich is Associate Professor in International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of Al-Qaeda: From Global Network to Local Franchise (2011), and co-editor of The Epistemology of Terrorism: Knowing al-Qaeda (2012). Gareth Jenkins is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and based in Istanbul, Turkey, where he has been resident since 1989. Although he writes and speaks on diverse aspects of Turkish politics, economics and social change, his special fields of interest are civil-military relations, terrorism and security issues, and political Islam. His publications include: Between Fact and Fantasy (2012), and Occasional Allies, Enduring Rivals (2012). Emmanuel Karagiannis is an Associate Professor at King’s College London’s Department of Defence Studies. He obtained a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London, UK, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hull, UK. He has spent considerable time in the Middle East and Central Asia. His latest book is The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy and Justice. Muqtedar Khan is Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delawarein Newark. He is currently a Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Policy (2016–present). His most recent book is Islam and Good Governance: Political Philosophy of Ihsan (2019). He is also the author of Islamic Democratic Discourse (2006) and Debating Moderate Islam: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West (2007). Esen Kirdiş is Associate Professor in International Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of The Rise of Islamic Political Movements and Parties: Morocco, Turkey and Jordan (2019). Her articles have appeared in Democratization; Journal of Church and State; Religion, State, and Society; Politics, Religion & Ideology, and Turkish Studies. Kirdiş ’s primary scholarly interests include Islamic movements and political parties, the Middle East/ North Africa, and religion and politics. Seran de Leede works on the topic of women and political violence as an independent researcher and as an associate fellow for the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), The Hague, The Netherlands. In her most recent publications, she explored the x

Notes on contributors

motivations and roles of Western women supporting Daesh/the Islamic State and the roles and relevance of women in jihad from a historical perspective. Jean-François Legrain is a CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) researcher at the Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans (IREMAM) and a lecturer at Aix Marseille Université (AMU) and Institut d’Études Politiques in Aix-enProvence. His researches mainly relate to Palestinian political mobilizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As a contemporary historian and an Arabist, he is also concerned with the methodological questions raised by the inclusion of Internet documents in a research corpus. Rifat Binte Lutful is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware in Newark. Her research focuses on security studies. Her doctoral dissertation topic is on radicalization in Bangladesh and Pakistan. She earned her Master’s degree in Political Science (Security Studies Track) from the University of Akron in Ohio. Her areas of interest include security and religious extremism in South Asia. Benjamin MacQueen is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations and Education Director in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Thomas M. McKenna is an anthropologist and the author of numerous works on Philippine Muslims. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and a senior consultant at SRI Consulting in Menlo Park, California. He is currently an independent consultant. Shafi Md. Mostofa is an Assistant Professor of World Religions, Culture, and Politics (with special interests in Political Islam in Bangladesh) at Dhaka University’s Faculty of Arts. He undertook his PhD (on Islamist militancy in Bangladesh) at the University of New England, New South Wales, Australia. His publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) with Routledge, Springer, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan, and the journals Politics and Religion, Perspectives on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Terrorist Analyses, and Peace and Conflict Review. Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the editor of Pathways to Contemporary Islam: New Trends in Critical Engagement (2020) and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Political Islam: Identity, Ideology and Religio-Political Mobilisation (2018). James Paterson is a PhD candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on conflict and security dynamics, with a particular focus on non-state actors, and the adaptability of Islamist extremist actors. Sophie Roche is based at University of Heidelberg, Germany. She is a social anthropologist and works on conflicts and environmental disasters in Central Asia, Iran and Germany. She specializes in the social and political history and ethnography of Central Asia. Conflicts and disasters interest her because they bring to the forefront the fragility of societies and lay open society’s social structure as well as the practical solutions that people find to disruptive xi

Notes on contributors

experiences. She has authored two monographs, several edited volumes and more than forty articles and book chapters. Bernard Rougier is Professor of Arab Civilization and Society at Sorbonne Paris III University. He is the author of Every Day Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon (2007) and The Sunni Tragedy in the Middle East (2015). He also co-edited Egypt’s Revolutions with Stéphane Lacroix (2016). Hélène Thibault has been Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan since 2016. She specializes in political ethnography, Islam and gender in Central Asia. In particular, she studies the Islamic revival in Central Asia and the way it affects state policies regulating the practice of religion. She has written Transforming Tajikistan: State-Building and Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (2018), and her research has also featured in Central Asian Survey and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Silvana Toska is Assistant Professor of Political Science (Middle East) at Davidson College in Davidson, North Caroliina. Her research focuses on social movements, revolutions, the politics of identity, the role of violence (and its absence) in movements, and the role of emotions in each of the above. She has published on the Arab Uprisings, and is currently working on a book that looks at all revolutionary movements since the mid-eighteenth century. Samina Yasmeen is Director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies, and teaches Political Science & International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia in Perth. She focuses on political and strategic developments in South Asia (particularly Pakistan), the role of Islam in world politics, and citizenship among immigrant women. She is the author of Jihad and Dawah: Evolving Narratives of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud Dawah (2017) and Understanding Muslim Identities: From Perceived Relative Exclusion to Inclusion (2008). Ihsan Yilmaz is Research Chair of Islamic Studies and Intercultural Dialogue at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. His current research is focused on Islam-state-society relations in Turkey and among Turkey’s diasporas in the West, along with research into local, national and transnational socio-political engagement in Muslim minority communities. He has conducted research on several topics including: nation building, citizenship, ethnic-religious-political minority identities and their securitization, Islam-state-society relations, Islamic movements, political Islam, transnationalism, intergroup contact, and victimhood. Azim Zahir has a PhD in Political Science and International Relations. He is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Muslim States and Societies at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and also teaches there. His research focus is on political Islam and democratization, Islamophobia, violent extremism and radicalization, and South Asian politics. He is the author of Religious and Political Transformations in the Maldives: The Macro-Level Factors of Radicalization (2019). Barbara Zollner is a leading academic expert on Islamist politics, social movements and parties in the MENA region. She served as a Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London until 2019, and now works as an independent scholar. She has published extensively on the Muslim Brotherhood, including a monograph with the title The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (2009) and several articles. xii

1 POLITICAL ISLAM UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT Shahram Akbarzadeh

Political Islam is a modern phenomenon that seeks to use religion to shape the political system. Its origins lie in the perceived failure of the secular ideologies of nationalism and socialism to deliver on their promises of anti-imperialism and prosperity. The great thinkers of political Islam (Sayyid Qutb, Maulana Maududi, followed by Ayatollah Khomeini) were rebelling against the political system that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, one that sought to copy the Western-inspired system of nation-states. The political system was monopolised by a self-serving political elite with no respect for popular will or national interests – all under the pretext of modernity and progress. Political Islam provided a conceptual alternative that was purportedly based on the teachings of the faith. Sayyid Qutb’s concept of Islam as a revolutionary ideology inspired his followers to see Islam as a recipe for change.1 The cry ‘Islam is the solution’ captures this mood. Political Islam is focused on remoulding public life in accordance with a specific interpretation of Islamic text and traditions. Accordingly, all state affairs are subject to the yardstick of political Islam, used by its self-declared devotees, dubbed Islamists. Islamism is best understood as a modern-day ideology. Much like other -isms, Islamism imposes a normative framework on society in a blatant attempt to make society fit into its mould. This makes Islamists active agents of change, pursuing the goal of a perfect world, one that is run in accordance with divine will and in line with a specific reading of Islamic history. As Mohammed Ayoob has argued, Islamism is a reinvention of history and a reimagination of the future, borrowing selectively from Islamic history and reinterpreting meanings to justify the ultimate objective: an Islamic state.2 This capacity to reinterpret and reevaluate history makes Islamism an adaptive and flexible force, capable of responding to changed circumstances while retaining its relevance. Unlike the classical Islamic body of knowledge which tends to be rigid and fixed, Islamism has proven flexible, offering its adherents the opportunity to reinterpret history and religious text. This flexibility is an important asset that allows Islamism to regenerate and respond to new challenges with relative ease. A key point to bear in mind in the study of Islamism is that it has been a voice of dissent. Islamists have defined themselves in contrast to the status quo, whether responding to socialism, nationalism or the cultural and political hegemony of the United States. Islamism has defined itself as a reaction to a set of perceived failures. These range from the failure of the 1

Shahram Akbarzadeh

Muslim world to stand up for its own interests, to protect its religious and cultural values against the encroachment of Western culture, to defend Muslim land from non-Muslim occupation, and to provide the socioeconomic prosperity and justice that is believed to be integral to Islam. As Henry Munson points out, to understand the appeal of Islamism one must look at both nationalistic resentment of foreign domination and the ‘dire economic situation in much of the Islamic world’.3 In a nutshell, Islamism has been a reaction to everything that is ‘wrong’ in the Muslim world. Islamists have targeted two distinct bodies for their political agitation. At the local level, national governments have borne the brunt of the Islamist backlash. Khomeini, Qutb and Maududi were all responding to their governments of the day, in their respective countries. Mohammad Ayoob contends that political Islam gained increasing support as ‘governing elites failed to deliver on their promises of economic progress, political participation, and personal dignity to expectant populations emerging from colonial bondage’.4 The rise of political Islam was first and foremost a direct challenge to the national ruling elite. This challenge has manifested itself in similar forms. In Iran, Islamists managed to ride the tide of popular discontent in 1978 and 1979 to topple the monarchy. This led to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Egypt, the groundswell of Islamist agitation against the ruling regime facilitated the rapid growth of the Muslim Brotherhood. A violent offshoot of the Brotherhood took the message of challenging the political regime to an extreme and carried out the assassination of President Anwar Sadat (1981). This pattern of internal dissent against incumbent national regimes has been played out throughout the Muslim world, making Islamists the number one political and security challenge even before the rise of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – discussed below. The West has been the second target of Islamists. The close relationship between the United States and contested political regimes as well as its military alliance with Israel has made it the target of Islamist wrath. The spread of anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East is rooted in the belief that the United States acts as the international bastion of political power for unpopular regimes. For that reason, national grievances that are firmly grounded in the domestic setting have taken on an international dimension. The challenge posed by Islamism is not confined to national boundaries – it has clear international implications. It must be noted that these implications go beyond threatening US interests by undermining US-friendly states. The Islamist challenge has a potent conceptual component that has proven seductive to its followers, and that involves a fundamental critique of the state system. The system of nation-states that has become the foundation bloc of the international community was imposed on the Muslim world through the experience of colonisation and neocolonisation. National boundaries that demarcate the Middle East today were the result of negotiation and back-door dealings between the Great Powers of the twentieth century. Once drawn on the map, the boundaries were expected to represent real national communities, but the history of the Arab world does not support such a compartmentalised approach. Arab unity may be a myth as Arabs have lived under competing dynasties and have had their fair share of internal strife, but this division into manageable ‘national’ entities was a top-down experiment which continues to alienate segments of the population and provide the intellectual framework for the Islamist challenge. The fundamental message by Sayyid Qutb and other Islamist thinkers has been that the imposed system of nation-states was ‘man-made’ and contravened the divine mandate of Muslim unity. The bulldozing of a border checkpoint between Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in June 2014 was a clear act of removing ‘man-made’ barriers between the global Muslim umma (the transnational community of faith). 2

Political Islam under the spotlight

The Islamist challenge to the nation-state and its institutions is far reaching and encompasses not only the legitimacy of national borders – which are believed to divide the Muslim umma – but the legal and political framework that governs the state. The battle cry ‘Islam is the solution’ is believed to present a clear alternative to the failures of ruling regimes to provide justice, prosperity and welfare for their population. The incumbent regimes are believed to have failed because they deviated from the path of Islam – instead they allowed themselves to become tools of Western domination. The Islamist solution is presented as a return to Islam because only Islam is believed to provide dignity and justice to Muslims.5 Although the language of this return is designed to support the revival of a tradition that is supposed to have existed in the past, in reality the Islamist project is modern and centres around the capture of the state machinery. Islamism is focused on the capture and the remoulding of the state in accordance with what is believed to be Islamic law. This is a major point of contention, as Islamic law is seen to supersede man-made laws, challenging the legitimacy of the political and legal frameworks that have maintained incumbent regimes in the Muslim world. The critical point in this contestation for power is the question of sovereignty. Where does sovereignty reside? For the Islamist, the answer is straightforward: moral, political and legal authority emanate from God. According to Islamists, sovereignty resides with God, making illegitimate any other political system that removes Him from the centre of the equation. This approach is a direct challenge to popular sovereignty – one that is grounded in popular will, not divine wisdom. The Islamist approach is a break with the long-established history of reasoning and pursuit of knowledge through human faculties and advocates the view that human beings should not be allowed to tinker with God’s will. Any human being meddling in the divine order that is to govern the ideal Islamic state would inevitably corrupt and distort God’s design. The Islamist vision of a perfect society is diametrically opposed to democracy, as the latter rests on the sovereignty of the people as the source of legitimacy.6 This is a fundamental point and explains the extent of antipathy felt by Islamists towards the West. The anti-Western position, which has a familiar anti-colonial starting point, is reinforced by the belief that the West is imposing an alien and corrupting mode of government on Muslim lands. The obvious irony of the Islamist position is that in their attempt to build this ideal Islamic state, they engage in an unavoidable process of interpretation and intervention. Islam is open to interpretation, making it relevant to the modern state’s requirements and human reasoning. Consequently, Islamists are engaged in an elaborate process of reinterpretation of religious knowledge to cleanse it of what they see as misunderstandings and corruptions that have accumulated over time. Islamists claim to have found or uncovered the ultimate truth, a pure and unadulterated interpretation of Islam. Their understanding of Islam is presented as the only authentic version, dismissing alternative views as inauthentic and illegitimate. This is an exclusive claim to God and divine wisdom: only Islamists can know God’s mind. As a result, all criticism directed at them is dismissed as illegitimate and unworthy of attention. Criticism of Islamism is seen as criticism of God. This self-righteous perspective is intellectually debilitating and politically dangerous, especially when Islamism is transformed from a socio-political force of dissent into a position of authority. The second irony that chips at the foundation of political Islam is in its implementation. As noted earlier, Islamism dismisses existing nation-states as man-made products of Western hegemony. In principle, state boundaries are rejected as dividing the Muslim community – the umma. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to create (or recreate in their view) the glorious transnational entity of Islam to uphold the umma politically and militarily. In reality, however, 3

Shahram Akbarzadeh

Islamists have traditionally confined their activities to state boundaries. All major Islamist movements (for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and the Iranian Revolution) have operated as national projects. The rhetorical commitment to the transnational umma has not been forgotten, but the immediate challenge that has consumed Islamists has been the capture of political process within the existing boundaries of the state and building an ‘Islamic state’. Only ISIS broke with this practice and declared a short-lived transnational Islamic Caliphate. As noted above, the combination of the exclusive claim on divine truth and the capture of political power presents a dangerous mix. The establishment of an Islamic state based on this model leads to popular disenfranchisement because political authority and legitimacy are seen to flow from God. Sovereignty resides with God – and with those who have exclusive access to God. Consequently, opposition to this model of government, to policies pursued by the Islamic state, is not simply a matter of divergence of opinions, it is a matter of rejecting God. The exclusive claim to the truth empowers Islamists to reject all opposing views as blasphemy and take all measures to keep God’s system supreme. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the Islamist interpretation of Ayatollah Khomeini managed to gain the upper hand against alternative models, this exclusive claim to the divine knowledge opened the way for the brutal elimination of political opposition. The system of the velayate faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) paved the way for the suppression of dissent and alternative viewpoints. This system raised the stakes to an extent that any point of difference was interpreted as a challenge to God’s authority. Dissidents were condemned as warring against God and his messenger, and spreading corruption on earth.7 The obvious danger in this exclusive view is political intolerance, which can easily manifest as acts of violence. Although political Islam is not necessarily a violent movement, and many Islamists do not engage in acts of violence, the exclusive claim to the truth and the Manichean views of the world divided between the abode of Islam and the abode of disbelief lends itself to extremist tendencies. In the Islamist worldview, there is no middle ground. One is either committed to the implementation of the word of God, or is working against it. There are no innocent bystanders. There is no room for indifference. There is no distinction between civilians and soldiers. This blinkered view of Islam and society has allowed some Islamists to justify terror and brutality in the name of God. This reality is manifest in the Salafi-jihadist movement that emerged in the late twentieth century. Salafijihadists find inspiration in the Salafi movement that holds a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an. They advance the practices of Prophet Mohammad and the first three generations (as-salaf as-salih) of Muslims as the ultimate Islamic model to follow. Salafi-jihadists have merged this traditional Salafi perspective with an exaggerated emphasis on jihad (understood as holy war in this context). It is here that Qutb’s most radical thoughts play a seminal role in the development of Salafi-jihadist discourses. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Qutb’s work is his discussion on jahiliyya (ignorance), which in classical Islamic history denotes the period of ignorance in pre-Islamic Arabia. For Qutb, the Muslim world had once again descended into a state of jahiliyya because modern rulers emphasised secularism and materialism over God’s divine law.8 He declared that all true believers must wage armed jihad to bring down the jahili system and establish a true Islamic society. In Qutb’s worldview, the oppression of secular regimes in the Middle East and the neocolonialism of the West renders them targets of armed struggle in defence of Islam. Qutb’s interpretation of jihad reverberated across the Muslim world and ‘provided the ideological spark that ignited the Salafi-jihadist movement’.9 Jihadism presents an extreme end of the spectrum in Islamism. The most recognisable acts of Jihadi violence were the September 11 attacks on US soil by al-Qaeda. Those attacks became the defining feature of jihadism and captured the imagination 4

Political Islam under the spotlight

of international media. However, violence by Islamists in the name of Islam is more common against Muslims in the Muslim world. In October 1981, the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic Jihad, an off-shoot of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Daily violence is meted out to anti-Islamist Muslim citizens and intellectuals such as the Pakistani Governor Salman Taseer in Islamabad, who advocated the abolition of blasphemy laws.10 More recently, the history of ISIS was bursting with violence and bloodshed inflicted on other Muslims in Syria and Iraq. In ISIS’s exclusive ideology, only the Salafi-jihadis were considered true believers, reserving special disdain for members of the Shi’a community. Only their military defeat in 2020 has stopped the terror reign of ISIS. The extension of this ideology of intolerance and extremism to the West has led to new challenges. Population movements and the settlement of Muslim communities in the West have made redundant traditional divisions between the Muslim world and the world of Judaeo-Christianity. The West may be conceived as a geographical entity but it is no longer the exclusive land of Judaeo-Christianity. Muslims now account for just under one per cent of the total population of the United States, which equates to well over 2 million people.11 The process of enlightenment and the division of Church and State, followed by Muslim migration, the growth of second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe, Australia and the Americas, coupled with the legal, social and political frameworks that protect civil rights, have facilitated the indigenisation of Islam in the West. Despite challenges that persist due to racist hangovers, Islam is now part of the Western landscape. The binary divide between the abode of Islam and the abode of disbelief is incompatible with the reality of the Muslim experience in the West. The incompatibility of such divisions is made even more obvious in Western societies that actively protect the rights of Muslim communities to practice their faith and regenerate their religious and ethnic bonds. The policy of multiculturalism (when applied to Muslims) and provisions for the construction of mosques are two vivid examples of Western incorporation of Islam. Yet, the above experience of inclusion is dismissed by Islamists as an experience of subordination and cultural alienation whereby Muslims are corrupted in their belief and weakened in their bond with God. Represented by such groups as Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) and Muhajirun, Islamists in Western states reject multiculturalism, democracy and parliamentarianism as man-made systems and institutions that contravene God’s divine authority and give the Muslims an illusion of inclusion and respect in the West. Participation in such Western processes, they argue, does nothing for the supremacy of God’s will – instead it pushes God to the periphery and acknowledges the reign of secularism.12 This is simply not acceptable to Islamists. According to the constitution of Hizb ut-Tahrir: The Islamic ‘Aqeeda [doctrine] constitutes the foundation of the State. Therefore, nothing is permitted to exist in the State’s structure, system, accountability, or any other aspect connected with the State that does not take the Islamic ‘Aqeeda as its source. The Islamic ‘Aqeeda is also the source of the State’s constitution and laws. Consequently, nothing related to them is permitted to exist unless it emanates from the Islamic ‘Aqeeda.13 It is important to note that despite its uncompromising rhetoric, Hizb ut-Tahrir does not condone violence. The position of Hizb ut-Tahrir in relation to 11 September and Al-Qaeda may be ambiguous, but it has deliberately stayed away from promoting violent actions and terror. This may be partly due to the pragmatic consideration that crossing that threshold 5

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would make it subject to anti-terror laws. However, there is a larger issue at stake here. Despite the violent tendencies of some Islamists and acts of terror carried out by groups like Hamas, which justify their actions in terms of the ultimate battle between good and evil, terrorism is not a necessary outcome of Islamism. Forces aligned with the ideology of political Islam have demonstrated a long track record of working in the social, cultural and political arena without resorting to violence. This process has helped establish them as important players in the socio-political landscape. The majority of Islamic movements have established modern political groupings and social organisations, embracing modern means of technology and functioning ‘within civil society as social and political activists’.14 The Muslim Brotherhood is a prime example of such Islamist actors. Primarily an Egyptian organisation, as explored by Barbara Zollner, the Muslim Brotherhood was initially focused on raising awareness and education on Islam. Over the years, it expanded its activities to the welfare and political spheres, running hospitals and fielding candidates for parliamentary elections. The Muslim Brotherhood rejected terror as a political tool and distanced itself from its splinter group Islamic Jihad. The Muslim Brotherhood sought to participate in the very system it vowed to dismantle, which explains its unpreparedness for the Arab Spring. The Islamist participation in the established system and institutions of power presents a conceptual challenge. On the one hand, actors affiliated with political Islam seek to establish the sovereignty of God. On the other, they take part in the ‘man-made’ state apparatus they ultimately wish to depose. This contradictory behaviour is often justified in terms of the need to remain relevant to the needs of society and pushing the boundaries from within. Groups like the Brotherhood claim to harbour no illusions about the capacity of the existing regimes to reform and pave the way for God’s will to reign supreme, but by operating within the system they also hope to expand their reach, remain relevant and avoid state repression. In other words, such Islamist actors adopt a pragmatic response to the conceptual challenge. This response does not address the inherent contradiction of engaging with an illegitimate system and potentially lending it a degree of legitimacy. Instead, the pragmatic response sidetracks the principled rejection of the man-made system by insisting that a complete withdrawal would ultimately limit the scope of Islamism to advance its agenda. This attitude has led many observers to be suspicious of a ‘hidden agenda’ that governs the behaviour of Islamists. The claim by veteran US diplomat Edward Djerejian that Islamists will uphold the principle of ‘one-man, one-vote’ only for ‘one-time’ reflects this cynicism.15 The participation of Islamist forces in the established political system may be grounded in strong pragmatic justifications, but there is every reason to believe that the prolonged process of engagement could potentially make a qualitative impression on Islamists. This may fall way short of a complete reappraisal of the Islamist worldview and epistemology, but the process gives Islamists a stake in the system and builds a degree of dependence on how it works. This process is not guaranteed or universal, but once the ruling regimes demonstrate a degree of flexibility and refrain from pursuing the complete eradication of political Islam, political actors of Islamist hue tend to take advantage of the openings in the public domain and grow roots.16 In turn, this visibility, however restricted it may be, offers Islamists an incentive to refrain from extremism or a full-frontal confrontation with the system. Instead the political platform of Islamism can shift towards reform, not rebellion, a process that encourages Islamists to develop more in common with forces of the status quo than antisystem revolutionaries. This is a rather ironic twist as Islamism completes a 180-degree turn, starting from the complete rejection of the man-made state system ends with an accommodation of the nation-state. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood offers a pertinent example of this evolution. Although the Muslim Brotherhood has never denounced its ultimate goal of 6

Political Islam under the spotlight

establishing an Islamic state, its record under 30 years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule and its response to the popular uprising of 2011 demonstrated a remarkable degree of accommodation. A very different case, but one that shares critical characteristics with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is presented in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new Islamic regime that emerged out of the 1979 popular revolution claimed to put the ideal of divine sovereignty into practice. Yet the new Islamic Republic maintained the man-made institutions of power and the Iranian state, while adding a layer of religious authority over the top, known as the velayate faqih. The new system of government made outlandish claims about championing the interests of an idealised transnational umma, but the Islamic Republic of Iran behaved like a religious nationalist power.

Post-Islamism and the Arab uprisings In the context of post-revolutionary Iran, Asef Bayat coined the term ‘post-Islamism’ to capture the relationship between Islamists and modernity, as well the trappings of democracy. Bayat contended that there is a realisation amongst Islamists that Islam alone did not have all the answers to economic, social and political problems of society. Post-Islamism ‘is not antiIslamic, but rather reflects a tendency to re-secularise religion’ to adapt to the ever-changing socio-political landscape.17 A different conceptualisation of post-Islamism was led by Olivier Roy. Roy offered a critical perspective on Islamism, arguing that it had failed due to its inability to establish an Islamic state outside of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Roy pointed to the persistence of secular authoritarian regimes and continued US hegemony in the postGulf War period to assert that political Islam had not ‘passed the test of power’.18 Roy’s argument on the failure of Islamism holds true in the context of the Arab uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath. The widespread popular optimism that galvanised mass movements across North Africa and the Middle East appeared to leave Islamists behind. In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamists managed to reap the benefits of the popular revolt and ascend to political power. They represent very different experiences, yet they appear to have one thing in common: the demise of political Islam. The overthrow of the Mubarak regime in 2011 opened up Egypt’s political environment. The success of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom of Justice Party in the 2011/12 elections offered the group its first chance of governance in its 93-year history. President Mohammad Morsi inherited an extremely challenging political and economic environment, arguably magnified by the Brotherhood’s lack of governing experience. Morsi’s presidency was short lived. His critics pointed to his exclusion of non-Islamist actors to accuse him of seeking to establish theocratic fascism. They further pointed to his creation of a constitution that was not representative of Egyptian society in its establishment of Islam as the primary source of law and undermining the equality of minorities and women.19 In a move that solidified growing popular discontent, Morsi placed himself above the law through exempting his decrees from judicial review. These factors prompted a counter-revolution which saw Morsi overthrown by a military coup on 2 July 2013. In September 2013, the Egyptian government, led by former army chief of staff Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation and embarked upon an extensive campaign to dissolve its network of social services.20 The fate of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood prompts important questions regarding the future of political Islam in Egypt and the nature of Islamism more broadly. Chiefly, does the poor popular performance of the Muslim Brotherhood signal an aversion to Islamic politics in Egypt? In this regard, the Muslim Brotherhood does not hold a monopoly 7

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over Islamism in Egypt, evident in the rise of the Salafi el-Nour Islamist party in the post2011 period. The trajectory of the Tunisian Ennahda Islamist party in the post-Arab uprising period raises equally important questions about the nature and evolution of political Islam in the region. After the fall of President Ben Ali from power in 2011, Ennahda was formally legalised after decades of state repression. After its electoral success in the country’s first democratic election, the party mapped out a pragmatic course and demonstrated flexibility to operate by the rules of liberal democracy. Ennahda contributed to the stability of Tunisia’s democratic institutions by forming a national unity government with the country’s largest secular party. It also played a significant role in creating a constitution that did not pursue an Islamic state, nor make reference to Sharia law. Rather, the constitution established an expansive framework for freedom (i.e. freedom of conscience as well as freedom of religion). This is a unique innovation in the Muslim world as it provides for the freedom to believe or not to believe in religion. In 2016, Ennahda ceased to define itself as an Islamist organisation, with its co-founder Rached Ghannouchi declaring: ‘Tunisia is finally a democracy rather than a dictatorship; that means that Ennahda can finally be a political party focusing on its practical agenda and economic vision rather than a social movement fighting against repression and dictatorship.’21 Ennahda’s trajectory provides important insights into the evolution of Islamism. Just as Jihadism may represent one extreme end in the spectrum of political Islam, Ennahda may be seen as representing the other end. Accommodating this diversity in the definition of political Islam has proven a conceptual challenge and a source of contention in the literature, one with which contributors to this collection have grappled masterfully. Another pertinent point relates to the fluidity of Islamist ideas and strategies which allows actors to move along the spectrum towards either end, depending on the many social, political and ideological variables that relate to them. Seeing Islamism as fixed and unable to accommodate change, risks missing the diversity of actors and strategies under the broad umbrella of political Islam and their capacity to evolve. But at what point does this evolution turn into a rejection of fundamentals? Indeed, at what point would Ennahda cease to qualify as an Islamist organisation? The case of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) further illuminates the non-static ideological nature of political Islam. Since gaining a parliamentary majority in 2002, it has maintained its lead in Turkish politics, thwarting a coup attempt in 2016. Yet the evolution of AKP has been all but consistent. Arguably up until 2011, the AKP was heralded as a moderate Islamist political force that had successfully reconciled Islam with democracy. It was championed as a beacon of hope in the Middle East. Despite its roots in the Islamist Virtue Party, the AKP appeared comfortable with running a ‘man-made’ state machinery that safeguarded popular sovereignty and maintained a distinct separation between Islam and politics. The AKP was very careful to avoid any reference to Islam in politics, except as a national heritage and a moral compass. For example, the AKP oversaw a reform that allowed hijab in the public domain and universities, but repeatedly stated its commitment to maintaining the legal system as secular and sharia-free. AKP critics reject the Turkish government as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They view the AKP’s moves to reinstate Islam in the public domain as paving the way for an Islamist revolution by stealth. The credentials of Turkey’s secular Muslim democracy were thrown into doubt during the 2013 Gezi protests. The state’s use of arbitrary measures to quash the pro-democracy demonstrators revealed the authoritarian nature of the Turkish government. Since this time, the AKP has shown increasing disregard for democratic principles while appealing to nationalist and 8

Political Islam under the spotlight

Islamic values. The AKP has reconstructed Turkey as a ‘Muslim nation’ and revived its Islamist ideology.22 The ramifications of the Arab uprisings further contributed to the weakening of Middle East state structures, which had arguably begun to deteriorate with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Syrian conflict and regime changes in Libya and Yemen dramatically destabilised the region and provided fertile ground for the rise of Islamist militancy in the region. The emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as Daesh by its Arabic acronym) provides the most pertinent example. After consolidating control over large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, Daesh’s leadership declared the resurrection of the Islamic Caliphate in April 2014, and pronounced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as its Caliph. The group’s ideological underpinnings were clearly drawn from the Salafi-jihadist tradition. Its endeavour to rule based on Prophetic customs and its destruction of holy sites and tombs were part of the Salafi doctrine of the purification of the faith. However, Daesh represented a significant turning point in the history of Salafi-jihadism, evident in its overtly sectarian interpretation of Islamism. It is here that the specific socio-political context from which Daesh emerged from is vital to consider. Within the context of post-Saddam Iraq, Daesh successfully exploited sectarian tensions to attract thousands of Sunni Muslims to its selfproclaimed Caliphate. Yet Daesh’s interpretation of Islam, its disregard for human rights, particularly against minorities and women, and its brutal use of force, appalled the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world, who saw Daesh as completely removed from Islamic norms and values.

Conclusion Defining political Islam presents researchers with a challenge. While the kernel of the definition is about the commitment to establishing Islam as the governing principle of the state, there are some important deviations within the fold. First, the Islamist vision aspires to the transnational unity of Muslims, yet it is very common for forces of political Islam to resign themselves to the established boundaries of states and trim their political objectives to fit state demarcations. Second, Islamism rejects ‘man-made laws’ as emasculating Muslims and depriving them of their source of authority and pride. This is a rejection of existing political orders as illegitimate and unworthy of Muslim allegiance. Yet so many Islamists seek to take part in the system and influence it from within. Third, while the principle of divine sovereignty comes into direct conflict with popular sovereignty and most Islamists have rejected democracy as a means of subjugating Islam, a discernible trend in Islamism has looked to utilising democracy. This has been dismissed as a cynical abuse of democracy by forces that have no desire to uphold its principles once they gain power. Yet there are significant cases that give reason for pause. Fourth, the Manichean worldview and the exclusive claim to truth has allowed some Islamist actors to dismiss all opponents as warring against God. Yet crossing the threshold to violence and terror is not an inevitable process. Many Islamists present their ideological position in terms of an existential conflict between ‘good and evil’, but shy away from the physical elimination of what they term ‘evil’. Political Islam is best understood as a dynamic social phenomenon – not a static ideology. Its origins are uncontested among observers, but the evolution of political Islam over the last decades along divergent paths suggests that scholarship on Islamism needs to retain conceptual agility and intellectual rigour. This agility is necessary in making sense of the various manifestations of political Islam in the twenty-first century. The present volume aims to contribute to this objective. 9

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Notes 1 Adnan Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 2005). 2 Mohammad Ayoob, ‘The Future of Political Islam: The Importance of External Variables’, International Affairs 81, no. 5 (2005): 952. 3 Henry Munson, ‘Islam, Nationalism and Resentment of Foreign Domination’, Middle East Policy 10, no. 2 (2003): 51. 4 Mohammad Ayoob, ‘Political Islam: Image and Reality’, World Policy Journal 21, no. 3 (2004): 3. 5 Henry Munson, ‘Islam, Nationalism and Resentment of Foreign Domination’, Middle East Policy 10, no. 2 (2003): 44. 6 John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, ‘Islam and Democracy’, Humanities 22, no. 6 (2001): 22–23. 7 Elizabeth Anne Mayer, ‘Islamic Law as a Cure for Political Law: The Withering of an Islamist Illusion’, in Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation ed. Barbara Allen Roberson (London: Frank Cass, 2003): 124. 8 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Beirut: Holy Koran Publishing House, 1978): 55. 9 Robert Manne, The Mind of the Islamic State: Milestones Along the Road to Hell (Melbourne: Black Inc. Books, 2016). 10 Dawn, ‘Salman Taseer Laid to Rest’, 5 January 2011, available at www.dawn.com/news/596288/ salman-taseers-funeral-to-be-held-today (accessed 23 June 2011). 11 Central Intelligence Agency, ‘The World Fact Book’, 2020, available at www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/fields/401.html (accessed on 23 April 2020). 12 Houriya Ahmed and Hannah Stuart, Hizb ut-Tahrir: Ideology and Strategy (London: Centre for Social Cohesion, 2009); and Suha Taji-Farouki, A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate (London: Grey Seal, 1996). 13 Taq An-Nabhani, The Islamic State (London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 1998): 240. 14 John L. Esposito, ‘Claiming the Center: Political Islam in Transition’, Harvard International Review 19, no. 2 (1997): 10. 15 Edward Djerejian, ‘The U.S. and the Middle East in a Changing World’, The DISAM Journal 3 (1992): 37. 16 John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, ‘Islam and the West: Muslim Voices of Dialogue’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 613. 17 Asef Bayat, ‘The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society’, Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 5, no. 9 (1996): 46. 18 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), ix. 19 Muqtedar Khan, ‘Islam, Democracy and Islamism after the Counterrevolution in Egypt’, Middle East Policy 21, no. 1 (2014): 78. 20 Steven Brooke, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Social Outreach after the Egyptian Coup (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2015), 1. 21 Rached Ghannouchi, ‘From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy: The Ennahda Party and the Future of Tunisia’, Foreign Affairs 95 (2016): 60. 22 Menderas Cinar, ‘From Moderation to De-moderation: Democratic Backsliding of the AKP in Turkey’, in The Politics of Islamism: Diverging Visions and Trajectories eds. John L. Esposito, Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Naser Ghobadzadeh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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2 ISLAMISM BEYOND POLITICS Sayyid Qutb’s journey to radicalism John Calvert

Introduction One of the notable features of the past half-century is the prominence of Islamist movements and parties. Of these, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries have historically been the most prominent. Normally, Islamists work to establish in their home country what they term an “Islamic order” (nizam Islami), that is, a polity defined by the full implementation of the Sharia—the body of laws, regulations, and advice that govern a Muslim’s personal and communal responsibilities. To achieve this end, political Islamists engage in advocacy, propagation, and—when allowed to do so by the authorities against whom they stand—elections. Islamists justify this engagement by pointing to the inherent link between Islam “as a comprehensive scheme for ordering human life, and politics as an indispensable instrument to secure universal compliance with that scheme.”1 Yet to regard Islamism as propelled by an immutable, animating idea is to strip it of contingency and historical specificity. Rather, it is more fruitful to examine the phenomenon as a type of social movement whose manifestations spring from and respond to tensions in the social, economic, and political environments. Seen in this way, political Islam evolves in relation to circumstance and opportunity. Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar organizations have been guided by realism and are open to the possibility of change within the framework of the ideology. This flexibility is nowhere more evident than in the career and ideological formation of Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Muslim Brotherhood’s most important thinker. No other Islamist ideologue, excepting the South Asian Abu l-A’la Maududi (1903–79), exerted a comparable, worldwide influence on Islamic activism both in his day and in the generations that followed. In response to repression by the authoritarian state established, in the 1950s, by the Egyptian Free Officers, Qutb modified the discourse of political Islam in increasingly militant directions. By the time of his execution at the hands of Egypt’s Nasser regime, he had detached Islam from conventional forms of political persuasion and mobilization. The way to social transformation, he came to believe, rested simply on the act of obedience to God’s will. Although the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood disavowed Qutb’s confrontational attitude, his ideological revisions left a legacy, feeding the jihadi current that began in the late 1970s and culminated in Al-Qaeda and its offshoots. This chapter will trace Qutb’s 11

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journey to radical Islam through the fractious and contested political landscape of midtwentieth-century Egypt.

Between nationalism and Islamism Sayyid Qutb did not conceive his Islamism in full form. Rather, it evolved from interests that had little to do with religion. He was born, in 1906, into a family of déclassé landowners in the Upper Egyptian village of Musha, near Asyut.2 Born into a culturally conservative family, his childhood unfolded in a setting of creeping change as the colonial state tightened its grip on the countryside. As Qutb recounted in his 1946 memoir, A Child from the Village (Tifl min al-Qarya),3 this change awakened him to a world of possibilities beyond Musha, and to the need to accommodate tradition with modernity. Following the 1919 nationalist uprising, Qutb’s parents sent him to Cairo where he enrolled in the Teachers’ Training College (Dar al-‘Ulum). After graduating, in 1933, he worked for Egypt’s Ministry of Education, initially as an elementary school teacher and then as an administrator. During his school years and into the period of his employment, Qutb was active in the national life of Egypt, as a secular Egyptian nationalist. Many things in Qutb’s background made him receptive to the nationalist trend. His father’s support of the National Party (al-Hizb al-Watani), Egypt’s first significant nationalist organization, together with the involvement of his native village in the countrywide anti-British uprising of 1919, had encouraged him at a young age to look beyond the traditional solidarity networks of kinship and village to the larger conceptual community of the nation. Later, after arriving in Cairo, Qutb’s ability to imagine the Egyptian nation was enhanced by his experiences in the educational institutions of the capital, which afforded him opportunities to forge bonds with other literate and politically aware effendis from around the country also engaged in the processes of social and economic change.4 Like many others, he was frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of Egypt’s monarchical-parliamentary regime to resolve Egypt’s problematic relationship with Britain, diminish the gap between rich and poor, and support the Arabs in neighboring Palestine against Zionist aspirations. Initially a supporter of the Wafd, the mass-based nationalist party that dominated politics during the old regime, he switched his allegiance, in the early 1940s, to the rival Sa’dist Party, viewing its platform as more in line with effendi interests. Change, in Qutb’s view, could only come about through lobby efforts and elections. All the while, he contributed to Egypt’s vibrant intellectual life, writing social commentaries, literary criticism, and imaginative works that sought a glimpse of the truth that lurked beyond the dross of everyday existence—a quest that would remain constant throughout his life. Compared to the literary luminaries of the day—Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, and his mentor, Abbas al-‘Aqqad—the quality of his writing was erratic and uncertain. But he had a mystical passion for poetry through which he attempted to transcend the prosaic concerns of everyday life. His book Artistic Depiction in the Qur’an (Taswir al-Fanni fi al-Qur’an), published in 1944, was the first to put forward the thesis that the Qur’an’s stylistic genius resided in its method of artistic depiction. Qutb was a brooding, introspective man who suffered from the kind of melancholia common to intellectuals living in tumultuous times. Constantly writing, he drove himself relentlessly, taxing his feeble body to the limit. He had few close friends— his younger brother Muhammad was his only true confidant. Yet within literate Egyptian society many knew him. His name popped up frequently in Cairo’s lively press. While Qutb generally applauded modernizing changes in the economy and structure of the state, he displayed less enthusiasm for cultural Westernization, which some politicians 12

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and intellectuals regarded as the natural concomitant of the developmental impetus. Scattered references in Qutb’s published works suggest that beneath his Western-style jacket and tie was a traditional man whose cultural sensibilities were anchored in the universe of village Egypt. In a spate of articles written from the late 1930s into the middle 1940s, Qutb explained that Egypt’s cultural traditions had instilled in the Egyptian people a spiritual disposition that contrasted markedly with the ostensibly materialistic nature of the Western nations. To protect Egypt from the purported ills of Western civilization, Qutb enjoined his countrymen to modernize in ways true to the essence of Egypt’s indigenous culture, not in ways that mimicked the materialism of Egypt’s Western oppressors. As Qutb stated succinctly in 1946: “The question for me is my honor, my language, and my culture.”5 Keenly aware of the poverty, chronic illness, and illiteracy that beset many of his countrymen, he cultivated attitudes of compassion and social justice. In the late 1940s, Qutb began to express his concerns by drawing heavily upon the Qur’an. In his widely read books Social Justice in Islam (Al-Adala al-Ijtima’iyya fi al-Islam, 1949) and The Battle of Islam and Capitalism (Ma’rakat al-Islam wa’l-Ra’smaliyya, 1951) he attempted to undercut the claims of Western socialism by making the case that Islam alone possessed all that was necessary to build modern, socially just societies.6 Whereas the individual must put an end to any “evil” within his purview, the community is obliged to look after the poor and destitute through the Islamic mechanisms of zakat and sadaqa (alms), the former being obligatory and the latter voluntary. The Islamic umma, he explained, feels like one body. Whatever happens to one of its members, the others also are affected.7 The books’ style reflected Qutb’s status of a layman. Instead of engaging readers in carefully crafted discussions of fiqh as was the norm among Azhari scholars, Qutb cut to the point, providing insights and practical advice relevant to the position of Muslims as colonial subjects. Because Qutb was not a religious scholar (‘alim) bound by an established reading of the Qur’an, he could afford to be free-wheeling in terms of his ideas.8 There was no specific moment or event that marked Qutb’s turn to political religion. Rather, the transformation appears to have been gradual, spurred by the increasingly popular view of Islam as a viable, comprehensive ideological solution to Egypt’s faltering political and economic order. But it would be wrong to suppose that Qutb was motivated by political considerations only. Political Islam also seems to have addressed core aspects of his interior life, which, since childhood, he had expressed in his relentless search for spiritual truth, especially in his poetry. Nevertheless, Qutb’s adoption of the Islamist position tended initially to buttress rather than to supersede the practice of national politics that had dominated his activities since the 1930s. Despite his strong appeal to scriptural and prophetic authority, Qutb’s primary concern at this stage was to enhance the identity of the virtuous national self against the different and competing alter ego of the West. Qutb’s dismal view of the West was reinforced by a 21-month stay in the United States between 1948 and 1950 to study American school curricula and pedagogy on behalf of the Egyptian Ministry of Education. Spending time at teaching colleges in Washington, DC and Greeley, Colorado, he observed first hand the purported difference between Islam and the Occident that he was beginning to shape into an ideology.9 In letters and essays published in Egyptian periodicals, Qutb contrasted Islamic virtue with the abject and atheistic features of American society. Undoubtedly, Qutb exaggerated and even invented much of what he related, because his goal in these reports was not to provide a documentary portrait, but rather to dissuade the Egyptian public from traveling down the road of Westernization. Qutb wrote of his American experience: 13

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And during that long period of time and in that giant place I never saw the face of humanity. All I saw was the stormy, wandering herd whose only destinations were pleasure and money, the bodily desires that are gratified but flare up again the next morning, and the desire for wealth that consumes the life of a person as he chases the “dollar.”10 It was a strong indictment, but one fully consistent with Qutb’s growing proclivity to divide the world into the culturally distinct and ethically unequal categories of East and West. The political pressure that had been building over the years finally burst in late July 1952, when military men took over the government and overthrew King Faruq.11 Qutb greeted the Free Officers’ coup with guarded optimism. He had a natural sympathy for the soldiers. Like him, they sought a politically independent regime, free of hizbiyya (the debilitating partisan politics that had come to plague the country) and premised on the ideal of social justice. Because several of the military men, including the ring-leader, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, had been friendly with the Muslim Brothers in pre-coup days, Qutb believed that the officers would champion the implementation of Islamic values once they consolidated their position. He appears not to have been bothered by the officers’ slide to dictatorship, for by the early 1950s he came to believe “that there was an urgent need for strong state actors capable of cleansing the land of corrupt politicians and traitors and to protect Egyptian society from enemies.”12 In return for Qutb’s backing, the Free Officers dropped him hints that they might elevate him to the post of secretary-general of the proregime, mass-mobilization Liberation Rally that they had set up in 1953 or else make him minister of education or media. Qutb’s support of the officers, however, was short-lived. In March 1953, he abandoned the new regime and officially joined the Muslim Brothers,13 men who were relative strangers to him but with whom he was ideologically aligned. For the Brothers, this was a windfall. Since al-Banna’s assassination at the hands of the political police in 1949, they had been looking for someone to fill the ideological void. Although a passable administrator, alBanna’s successor as Supreme Guide, Hasan al-Hudaybi, was neither a top-notch thinker nor an effective publicist. Quickly, the Brotherhood appointed Qutb head of its propaganda department. The energy Qutb had previously devoted to the officers he now channeled to the Muslim Brotherhood.14 Why did Qutb jump ship? Most likely, it had become clear to him that the new regime, although honoring Islam as an important aspect of Egypt’s national personality, had no intention to create in Egypt a polity governed exclusively by Islamic principles. Moreover, it was evident to him, as it was to the Muslim Brothers, that the regime was intent on marginalizing the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamism’s only real champion in the country, by steering its massive public following into its controlling embrace. Qutb saw that if his dream of having a role in creating a religiously inflected state order was to be realized, he had no choice but to join the still-powerful Muslim Brotherhood. In his view, the Brotherhood was all that stood between Islam and the secularism of the soldiers. Through argument and street power, the movement would ensure that Nasser and his colleagues would not ignore Islam.15 But a feisty Muslim Brotherhood is exactly what the officers did not want. By 1954, all Egypt’s political actors had come to expect a showdown between the two forces. On the evening of October 26, 1954, a week after the Free Officers’ signed the long-awaited evacuation treaty with Britain, which the Brotherhood decried as an insufficient halfmeasure, a Muslim Brother belonging to the movement’s secret militant wing (al-Tanzim al-Khass), which al-Banna had founded in the early 1940s to protect the movement in 14

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case of political repression, fired eight shots at Nasser as he addressed a throng in Alexandria. The bullets, which missed their mark, gave Nasser the pretext he needed to outlaw the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb was one of hundreds of Brothers caught in the dragnet. Because of Qutb’s stature, his trial—bereft of due process and overseen by military and not civilian judges—was given prominence. In July 1955, the state authorities sentenced him to 15 years’ incarceration at the Tura prison—a nineteenth-century-era hell hole where he endured mistreatment and torture. Over the years that followed, Nasser took every opportunity to justify his power by disparaging the Muslim Brotherhood as parochial and backward-looking—a dark and outdated counterpoint to his vision of an Egypt built on “scientific” development and the sort of moderate, devotional Islam that he and most other Egyptians practiced. By the late 1950s, he could point to the hallmarks of his success: Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, the triumph over the “Tripartite Aggression” at Suez, the great dam at Aswan, Pan-Arabism, expanded education and health care, jobs creation, steel factories and the nationalization of big business. Never mind that he curtailed political freedom and that the people were watched by an intrusive General Intelligence Service. Nasser’s fatherly supervision of the Revolutionary Command Council would revive Egypt’s greatness in the modern period. Prison forced Qutb to narrow his vision. Cut off from the distractions of the world, with only the Qur’an and Muslim Brothers to keep him company, his faith deepened. Estranged from the national society that was taking form outside the prison walls, he felt like a stranger and with every act of reflection, his alienation grew. His jailors allowed him to write, and under their watchful eyes, he completed his multi-volume Qur’an commentary, In the Shade of the Qur’an (Fi Zilal al-Qur’an, 1951–65), in addition to many other tracts and books.16 In 1957, an event occurred in the prison that impressed upon Qutb the high stakes of the contest. In response to planned strike action on the part of Muslim Brother prisoners, guards shot dead 21 of them in their cells. Qutb, whose frail condition exempted him from forced labor, was in the infirmary when the wounded were brought in. The floors of the prison hospital were awash with blood.17 If during the last years of the monarchy, Qutb had shared with the Muslim Brotherhood a desire to mobilize the Egyptian people within the legal framework of the state, now he claimed that politics were ineffective against a regime set upon the wholesale eradication of its Islamist opponents. From his new-found position of heightened religiosity, he transferred the odium he had previously directed at the British, the Americans, and the politicians of Egypt’s Old Regime to the new revolutionary government. His emphasis now focused, not on Islam’s equation with social justice, still less on national identity, but the totalitarian imperative of the monotheistic creed, in other words, on the fundamental issue of legitimacy. Accordingly, Qutb’s demand for an “Islamic order” (al-nizam al-Islami) became emphatic with strong appeals to core doctrines and principles. If we seek a true turning point in Qutb’s life, the moment when his ideology crystallized, it was during this period of incarceration—a drawn-out, Pascal-like “Night of Fire” during which he and his comrades suffered deprivation and ill-treatment. Qutb’s stark dualism confirms a contention of historians that the totalistic quality of revolutionary thought owes much to the authoritarian nature of the regimes against which it is deployed. This had been the case, for instance, in nineteenth-century Russia where nihilist and anarchist groups converged against the tyranny of the tsarist system.18 And it was the case in Egypt where the rising power of a police state prompted Qutb to respond in kind. While it is tempting, as some have done, to dismiss Sayyid Qutb simply as a backward-looking nativist, in fact, his prison writings are animated by a steely logic. Steeped in a received history that extended to the time of the 15

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Prophet Muhammad, Qutb interpreted the Islamic heritage through the lens of discontent, focusing on understandings that justified but also shaped, his response to repression. Qutb’s adoption of ideological totality anticipated, and in part inspired, the “friend-enemy” distinctions made by subsequent Islamist radicals, including those of a Salafist bent, such as Egypt’s Islamic Group (al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya), in their violent confrontations with the powers-that-be.

Contemporary barbarism The starting point in Qutb’s refurbished view is the idea that God is supreme over the universe. The concept of divine rulership is as old as Islam itself and even older if one considers ancient Near Eastern antecedents, notably in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Dan. 4:30–37; 2 Ch. 20:6). Drawing on Hanbali notions, Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and later the Wahabiyya each emphasized divine exclusivity in opposition to those who would venerate God’s qualities or approach Him through intermediaries. In the 1940s, Hasan al-Banna emphasized the point in referring to God as standing above individual, party, and class interests. Qutb made the idea center stage in reaction to the secular nationalism that had taken root in much of the Muslim world over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Qutb deployed the term hakimiyya to refer to this divine “sovereignty” or “dominion,” which he adopted from the South Asian jurist Abuʾl-Aʿla Mawdudi (d. 1979), founder in 1941 of the Islamic revivalist organization Jama‘at-i Islami (Islamic Society), and his protégé Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (d. 1999), who was rector of the Nadwat al-Ulama in Lucknow. This borrowing is important because it signals an emergent transnational dimension to Islamism—a cross-fertilization that would prove important in the formulation of global Islamic radicalism in the decades to come.19 In Qutb’s view, as in Mawdudi’s, the modern-era principle of state sovereignty, which holds that nations are inherently autonomous and their citizens are juridical subjects beholden to laws crafted by state legislators, undermines God’s hakimiyya. Recognized in the normative statements of international law, the principle of state sovereignty legitimized the discrete political units that emerged first in Europe and later in Asia, the Americas, and Africa from the early modern period onwards. The independence movement that had taken root in Egypt in the period of the Old Regime, whose end-product was the Free Officers’ regime, was solidly based on this secular idea, as were the emergent nationalisms in India, China, and Korea.20 Yet for Qutb, states that were based on the law of man usurped God’s right to command and be obeyed. To submit to the control and supervision of secular authority was to surrender to the whims and selfish interests of imperfect human agents. The rule of man over man, according to Qutb, led invariably to oppression. Commenting on Qur’an 2:159–62, Qutb wrote: The One God is the only deity to be adored and worshipped, and He is also the sole source of man’s moral codes and norms, and the origin of all laws and regulations that govern and control man’s social, political and economic life and the life of the whole cosmos.21 For Qutb, “Belief and faith are the only worthy and legitimate ties that can bring men together. They override all other incidental ties of nationality, race or ancestry.”22 It was an argument that added weight to the Pan-Islamic trend that had emerged in the Ottoman 16

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Empire and British South Asia in the late nineteenth century, and that sputtered on after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate in 1924. In his absolute negation of the legitimacy of nation-states, Qutb heralded the appearance within Islamism of a biting trend that called into question the very practice of politics. Unlike Hasan al-Banna, who had embraced Egypt’s social and political order in his willingness to engage in political advocacy and elections (Muslim Brothers participated in the 1945 elections), Qutb stood in contempt of politics, favoring uncompromising obedience to divine law. For Qutb, servitude to God must precede any effort on the part of humans to determine the specifics of a truly Islamic society, including the precise forms of viceregency; submission must come before, and independently of, acquiring religious understanding (fiqh). In making this point, Qutb referenced the first generation of Muslims who understood “that ascribing sovereignty only to Allah meant that the authority would be taken away from the priests, the leaders of tribes, the wealthy, and the rulers, and would revert to Allah.”23 It was not difficult for any reader of Qutb’s work to discern his actual object of scorn: the regime of Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Qutb underscored the purported illegitimacy of the Egyptian Republic and all other ostensibly non-Islamic regimes and societies, including those in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, by equating their moral universe with the condition of jahiliyya (“ignorance”) of the divine mandate.24 The term is well placed in medieval Islamic thought. From early in the Islamic era, Muslim commentators took the word to refer to the moral failings of the peninsular Arabs before the advent of the Qur’an. Jahiliyya, in this sense, had a temporal designation that distinguished Islam from pre-Islamic heathendom. Taking cues, again, from Mawdudi, Qutb excised the term from its time-based meaning and applied it more widely to forces throughout history—including in his time—that reflected a human, rather than a divine, source of authority or guidance. According to Qutb, jahiliyya pervaded the modern world, not only in the West, where one might expect it, but also in majority Muslim countries where ruling elites had replaced the Sharia with man-made laws, ideologies, and lifeways. As a result, the strong oppressed the weak, selfish individualism prevailed, and people resorted to immoral and decadent behavior, especially of the sexual variety. Tragically and unnaturally, modern lives—Muslim no less than pagan—were insulated from the metaphysical realm. Although, Qutb wrote, Muslims may claim to believe in God and His Prophet, pray, fast, perform the Hajj and dispense charity, because their lives are not based on submission to God they cannot be reckoned as fully Islamic. It was a controversial supposition that went against the grain of Islamic theology. Historically, Muslim scholars advised against declaring co-religionists to be outside the faith and adopt instead positions of inclusion and tolerance to maintain Muslim cooperation and unity. Hasan al-Banna, for one, never condemned outright the Muslim masses, whose basic disposition he saw as virtuous. Nor did he anathematize political leaders who veered off the straight path. According to al-Banna, Islam had not disappeared; it had waned and needed to be invigorated. Neither did the pioneer-Islamist thinkers Mawdudi and Nadwi go as far as Qutb in their castigation of Islam’s contemporary condition; in their view, the Muslim world had been partly, though not wholly, corrupted by Western culture and systems of governance. Perhaps only the Wahhabis of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in their ready pronouncements of takfir (disbelief) on other Muslims approximated Qutb’s concept of jahiliyya.25 By introducing the dyad of hakimiyya and jahiliyya into the heart of his discourse, Qutb sharpened the division between the Self and Other that had long been a fundamental feature of his worldview. Whereas previously he had distinguished between spiritual Easterners and Western 17

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materialists, during the final years of his incarceration he expressed the division in terms of harsh theological categories. In Qutb’s view, so great was the level of cultural, political, and economic oppression in Egypt and elsewhere in the world, so deep the rot, and so tainted the Muslims, that only a circle of adroit believers, a vanguard (tali’a), could bring about the desired obedience to God. This vanguard, Qutb writes, should excise itself from the corrupting influences of the surrounding jahiliyya. The vanguard will imbue the people with Islamic consciousness and lead them to eventual victory against the corrupt political order. This was the strategic aspect of his new theorizing. In conceiving this approach, Qutb had in mind the model of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Muslims who from a position of weakness at Mecca gradually built up their power to confront head-on the oppressors of the age after they were established at Medina. Qutb’s vision of a small, highly organized and dedicated cadre of “professional revolutionaries” differs markedly from his earlier formulations about Muslims organizing politically against the ruling establishment. Like these first Muslims, the vanguard’s necessary instrument is jihad—not defensive jihad as advocated by modern apologists like the Indian Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) or fellow Egyptian Muhammad Abduh (d. 1903)—but offensive jihad such as that which propelled Muslim armies to victory during the period of Islam’s initial expansion.26 Qutb honored the classical jurisprudence on jihad, viewing it as a template for directing and sustaining the struggle against Islam’s enemies—both internal and external—in the modern period. He was particularly impressed by what the Hanbali jurist Ibn al-Qayyim had to say on the topic in his compendium of traditions, Zad al-Ma’ad (The Provisions of the Hereafter).27 According to Qutb, jihad was the instrument of people’s freedom. Not freedom in the Western sense of individual rights, but the freedom that comes with the realization of one’s God-given nature (fitra). Muslims, Qutb wrote, do not fight to gain military honor or on behalf of nations, territories, or kings. Rather, they fight to realize God’s universal truth and with it the realization of the “complete man” (insan kamil), who unites his thought and action in the light of divine guidance.28 Nothing should stand in the way of Islam’s manifest destiny. Following the classical jurists, Qutb wrote that faced with the imperative of Islamic conquest, non-Muslims have but three options. They may yield to the Muslims and enter into Islam (i.e. convert); if they are Jews or Christians, they may forego conversion and instead pay the jizya (poll tax), which gains them dhimmi (protected) status, or, if recalcitrant, they may fight the believers and pay the consequences in terms of lives lost and property confiscated.29 For Qutb, as for the jurists of old, Islam must be elevated to a position of power over the peoples of the earth. Unlike pagan, Christian, or imperialist empires, Islam’s rule will be wise and benevolent. Qutb was confident that given the choice, non-believers under Islam’s sway would accept the true creed sooner rather than later. Qutb’s message to the disheartened Muslim Brothers is clear: forge ahead and do not look back. Show unblinking commitment to the project of Islam’s manifest destiny. God “has chosen to make the divinely ordained path for human life to be realized through human existence, rather than enforcing it miraculously, through obscure, hidden means.”30 The believer may not know the outcome of his efforts, but by conforming to the divine path, he comes closer to God. If theory is not the judge and determinant of social action, there is no rift between God’s plan and its implementation. In confirmation of this point, Qutb drew attention to the example of the early Muslims at Medina. For them, the organization of community affairs was the natural concomitant of the faith that was planted in their hearts at Mecca: “Those of the first generation did not approach the Qur’an for the purpose of acquiring culture or information. Rather, 18

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they turned to the Qur’an to find out what the Almighty Creator has prescribed for them.”31 In other words, the horizons of Qutb’s revised Islamism do not extend beyond the stage of struggle to envision what an Islamic state should look like. Qutb’s mature Islamism thus makes the revolutionary process central to his concerns. In this sense, it is much like European fascism, which focused on change at the expense of a fully thoughtout “orthodox stage when the dynamics of society settle down to becoming ‘steady-state,’ namely when its internal and external enemies have been eliminated and new institutions created.”32 Any similarity between this synchronization of theory and practice and Qutb’s earlier expressive inclinations is not coincidental. Under the influence of the Diwan School, Qutb had composed poetry that stressed its emotive effect on individual consciousness. True art, according to this school, had the ability to transform sensibility. Now, writing in an environment that rendered argumentation useless, Qutb returned to Romanticism to spur Muslims to action through the power of the Qur’anic “conception” (tasawwur) from which all Islam’s primary characteristics (khasa’is) are derived. What mattered to Qutb was the transforming effect of a word, image, or idea on the community of believers.33 While Qutb was writing in prison, Muslim Brothers who had either escaped imprisonment or had been released early were organizing a tanzim al-sirri, or “secret organization” to continue the struggle against the state. Operating clandestinely, they searched for a leader to guide their activities and ideological formation. Because of the mass imprisonment, the pickings were slim. The men initially asked the prominent pro-Islamist ‘Abd al-ʿAziz ʿAli to help them. After he declined, the men approached the imprisoned Qutb through his sister Hamida and the resolute Islamist, Zeinab al-Ghazali. Qutb agreed to lead the men and they pledged to him their bay’a, or allegiance. Over the months that followed, the two women visited Qutb in prison during which he gave them pages of a work in progress called Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq (“Signposts”) culled from his Qur’an commentary that contained the kernel of his ideas.34 The men on the outside devoured the pages. Qutb regarded them as comprising the vanguard he had conceived in his writings. Without Qutb’s approval, individuals within the tanzim began to stockpile weapons in preparation for a surgical strike against the regime. In May 1964, the Nasser regime released Qutb from prison at the behest of the Iraqi president ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif. ‘Arif admired Qutb and sought by his request to gain favor among Iraq’s Islamist movement. Immediately, the tanzim accelerated its plans for a counter-coup. Qutb cautioned restraint, warning that hasty action would bring the wrath of the state down on their heads. In emulation of the Prophet Muhammad’s method at Mecca, the tanzim should instead devote itself to indoctrination. Only after a critical mass of true believers was formed would the “properly equipped forces of goodness”35 be in a position to “remove all obstacles in its path.”36 In other words, for the time being, the tanzim should employ violence for defensive purposes only. The men of the tanzim assented to Qutb’s counsel although not without drawing up elaborate plans for assassinating Nasser should the regime move against them. The reckoning came sooner than Qutb and his fellow activists had anticipated. In the summer of 1965, Nasser’s security services discovered the existence of the organization and arrested its members before they could react. When the judge rebuked Qutb for excommunicating other Muslims—an act associated with the most extreme branch of the Kharijites, the notorious seventh-century Azariqa37—Qutb countered that he did not condemn individuals as such but rather the prevalent global culture. His defense did not bend the opinion of the court. On August 29, after dawn prayers, he and two of his closest associates—Muhammad 19

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Yusuf Hawash and Abd al-Fatah Ismail—were hanged. Following the executions, Islamists around the world elevated Qutb to the status of martyr. In their perspective, the “ordeal” (mihna) of 1965–66 was a drama of good vs. evil in which Qutb played the central role. In sacrificing his life, Qutb sought to demonstrate publicly the vast gulf that separated truth from falsehood, and in that way to keep the flame of “true” Islam alive. And so, the tenor of Qutb’s Islamism had changed in response to events on the ground. Having first engaged in advocacy politics within the context of the parliamentary system, and then, briefly, taken on the function of propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood, he turned squarely to the task of replacing the national state with its converse: a totalistic system whose starting point was complete and unbending obeisance to the divine purpose. Qutb claimed to have found the template for revolutionary action in the Qur’an and prophetic hadith, especially references to Muhammad’s struggles against the pagan taghut (a Qur’anic term denoting idolatry in defiance of God’s lordship) of Mecca. But no doubt he was also inspired, if only unconsciously, by modern currents of rebellion and political change, including examples from the European revolutionary tradition that were rife in the Cold War period. Like other firebrands and ideologues, Qutb enumerated grievances and laid claim to truth, the better to realize the utopian dream of lives lived organically and in harmony with a higher purpose. In the 1950s, as the Cold War unfurled, Eric Hoffer famously referred to such people as “true believers”—individuals who “plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change”38—usually with disastrous results. Alone among Egyptian Islamists, Qutb fashioned a galvanizing myth of an absolute good threatened by its complete opposite. Through his use of traditional Islamic concepts like hakimiyya, jahiliyya, and jihad, Qutb sought to inspire a movement of purifying, cathartic rebirth. By demonizing the political and cultural moorings of the “other,” and by envisioning the principles of an as-yet-unrealized “community of virtue,” Qutb circumscribed the range of legitimate political discourse. Ultimately, his radical purpose was to explicate a distinctive Islamic method to transform the consciousness of the Muslim masses and inspire them to action.

Qutb, lost and found Yet, political repression does not need to spawn radicalism. Other variables may intervene to mollify or channel discontent with the status quo in different directions. One such factor is the inducement, on the part of political authorities, for dissidents to participate, if only to a limited degree, in the politics of the country—in other words, to unplug the political blockage that had alienated dissident groups in the first place. This is what happened in Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s. In return for the allowance to reconstitute the haggard remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement’s leadership repudiated Qutb’s theology of confrontation, claiming the martyr’s prison works to be dangerous incitements to insurgency and the inevitable government response.39 The elderly Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Hudaybi, made the initial move in this direction. As he waited out his prison sentence, al-Hudaybi cooperated with pro-regime Azhari ‘ulama to write a tractate called Du’at la Qudat (“Preachers, Not Judges”), written in 1969 and published in 1977, which excoriated Qutb’s revolutionary ideas.40 In contributing to this work, al-Hudaybi hoped to dampen the ardor of Qutbist extremism that was still alive among some of the Brothers. He wanted the movement to have an opportunity to rebuild within the purview of the state order. Against Qutb’s notion of the modern jahiliyya, al-Hudaybi followed his co-authors in adopting the time-honored definition of a Muslim as being a person who simply declares belief in God and His Prophet 20

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even though he might err in his deeds. As for Qutb’s concept of hakimiyya, the authors claimed that it imposed an essentialist view of the law that downplayed human reason and political agency in discerning God’s will. The tract’s overall message was to reassert the Muslim Brothers as callers to the faith, not judgmental deciders of who was in and who was out of the faith in the manner of the Islamist movement’s “wayward” son, Sayyid Qutb. Al-Hudaybi’s accommodation set the stage for the Muslim Brotherhood’s reappearance on Egypt’s political stage. Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor to the presidency, gradually released many Brothers from prison, and allowed the movement to reconstitute, with the expectation that it counter perceived threats to the new regime by diehard Nasserists and socialists. Sadat had decided to reverse the course of the Egyptian Revolution by pursuing an “Egypt first” policy that, among other things, opened the country’s economy to outside investments. During the heyday of the rebuilding period, in the mid-1970s, a young cadre of Muslim Brothers emerged, recruited from the university campuses, which aimed to take the Brotherhood in a direction that was at once reformist and politically assertive.41 This group, represented by men like ‘Isam al-‘Aryan and Abdel Moneim Abu al-Futuh, led the Muslim Brotherhood eventually to dominate the professional syndicates and engage in parliamentary elections by allying with legal parties such as the New Wafd and Labor, or else by encouraging Brothers to run as independents. Qutb’s extreme theocratic views were inconvenient to such a purpose, and so the Brotherhood’s leadership arranged that only a whitewashed or curated version of his writings was available to the movement’s rank and file. Quipped ‘Umar al-Tilmisani, al-Hudaybi’s successor as Supreme Guide and survivor of the 1954 crackdown, when pressed on the matter: “Sayyid Qutb represented himself alone and not the Muslim Brotherhood.”42 Yet the corpus of Qutb’s work was too well known for its innovative contributions to be obscured. The evolving nature of Islamist-state relations in Egypt guaranteed that all of it would remain relevant. Beginning in the early 1990s, the regime of Husni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, reacted to the Brothers’ electoral successes by imprisoning its leaders and shutting down its publications, and then to peg the Brotherhood as the source of all Islamic-oriented extremism in the world. The state’s persecutory stance prompted the Brotherhood’s old guard— men who had endured Nasser’s prisons and thus tended to be secretive and conservative—to put brakes on the reformers’ politicking. These men, including Muhammad Badie who, in 2008, was elected to the post of Supreme Guide, admired Qutb and over the long years following his demise had kept the flame of his memory alive. By 2000, these conservatives had succeeded in pulling the Muslim Brotherhood in an isolationist direction—retreating from politics and shoring up basic positions against the liberal élan of the reformers.43 For they understood that survival depended on maintaining a certain aloofness from the state. Without explicitly endorsing Qutb’s bold declarations on jahiliyya and jihad, they encouraged their fellow Islamists to follow his injunction to build a cadre of dedicated Muslims, unblemished by political compromise, which could pave the way for future success. On the other hand, Egypt’s Islamist hardliners explicitly endorsed Qutb’s radical thought. Unreconciled to the state authorities, and contemptuous of the Muslim Brotherhood’s disposition to engage with an irrelevant and scurrilous political system, they articulated their rage through Qutb’s moral categories. The renegade physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later co-founded al-Qaeda, was clear about this influence. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he wrote: “Qutb’s message was and still is to believe in the oneness of Good and the supremacy of the divine path. The message fanned the fire of Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad.”44 21

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Developments on the international scene added to the extremists’ enthusiasm. Not only did President Sadat lead Egypt to a US-mediated peace with Israel, a deal they regarded as traitorous. A year later, in 1979, Islamists under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran’s state apparatus while mujahidin in Afghanistan began their jihad against the Soviet Red Army—all inspirational events that buoyed the confidence of the Egyptian militants. Around the same time, Salafi influences began to spill out of Saudi Arabia into Egypt and surrounding countries, encouraging extremists to incorporate legalistic frameworks into their ideological statements, thus taking Islamism in ever more fundamentalist directions.45 These small jihad organizations, which in their in-group solidarities, unconventional views, and deference to charismatic leaders resembled cults, and captured headlines. Their names are well-known to observers of radical Islamism:46 Shabab Muhammad, led by the Jordanian-Palestinian transplant to Egypt, Salih Siriyya, which, adopting Qutb’s concept of jahiliyya, attempted a putsch at the Military Academy in Cairo; Jama‘at al-Muslimun (“The Society of Muslims”), organized by former prisoner Shukri Mustafa, which, extrapolating from Qutb’s theory, adopted an explicit takfiri point of view, plainly removing society and the ruling elite from the body of the faithful, to justify the assassination of an Egyptian government official; and Tanzim Jama‘at al-Jihad, whose ideologue, ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982), drew upon Qutb, as well as the thirteenth-century Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya, to sustain the imperative of jihad against the forces of disbelief (kufr), including so-called “infidels” who held authority over Muslim lands, although he broke with Qutb in advocating immediate action against the “iniquitous prince” rather than allowing for a period of preparation. Faraj’s pamphlet justified the tanzim’s assassination of President Sadat in 1981. ‘A more dangerous challenge to the Egyptian state came from the grassroots-oriented alJama‘a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group) that emerged from the numerous Islamic prayer and study groups that took root on Egyptian campuses in the mid-1970s.47 While some students gravitated to the re-born Muslim Brotherhood, others decamped to the southern Egyptian cities of Asyut and Minya, among other places, where they established the movement in question—one dedicated both to da’wa (missionary activity) and grinding, anti-regime activism, the latter turning increasingly violent in response to heavy-handed state reprisals. The “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, the group’s leading theorist, legitimized this violence adopting Qutb’s idea of offensive jihad, although he was far more effusive than Qutb in identifying targets. Following Qutb, ‘Abd al-Rahman also spoke of the modern jahiliyya and Islam as a self-contained system premised on God’s lordship. Led by idealists and animated by purity and paranoia, the pinpricks, assassinations, and insurrections perpetrated by these groups yielded occasional mayhem, not revolution. Could any society live up to the ideals they had set for themselves?48 By the late 1990s, their ideological narrowness and dismissal of practical needs had isolated them almost completely from the mainstream, prompting Islamic Jihad ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri to consider the alternative tactic of attacking what ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj had termed “The Far Enemy”: America and its allies. Had Qutb been around to witness the outcome of Egypt’s iteration of the Arab Spring, he would not have been surprised. When the demonstrations of January 25, 2011 erupted, the old guard of the Muslim Brotherhood was caught off guard. With tens of thousands protesting in the streets, the movement’s leadership vacillated. Would Egypt’s powerful military allow an assertive Islamist movement to present itself as a serious political contender? The caution of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership was overtaken by its youth leaders who, more comfortable in taking risks, pulled the whole movement into the fray. And once it entered the political contest under the name of the Freedom and Justice Party (Hizb al-Hurriyyah wa al-ʿAdala), 22

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the Brotherhood did well. In December 2011, it won most seats in Egypt’s lower house of Parliament and in elections held in May 2012 gained the presidency, both victories due to the Muslim Brotherhood’s deep social roots and mobilizing skills. Qutb would have braced for what he knew would come: a virulent response by the “Deep State” to the Brotherhood’s political inroads, although probably he would not have been prepared for the actual ferocity of the riposte, unmatched in modern Egyptian history, namely, the massacre, on August 14, 2013, by Egyptian state security forces of over 800 Muslim Brothers and their families at Cairo’s Rab’a al-‘Adawiyya Square followed by imprisonments and executions. Qutb, no doubt, would have counseled the Brothers to eschew the system of politics and nation-states for the realm of the metaphysical, insisting that a person’s primary obligation was obedience to God. All else, including deference to Qur’anic commands, advice, and stipulations were contingent on this determinant. In Qutb’s prison works, we leave the reformism of the Muslim Brotherhood and move closer to the nefarious thought-worlds of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS).

Notes 1 Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 1. 2 Biographical treatments of Qutb in English include John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sayed Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyyah (London: Routledge, 2006); Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (New York: Routledge, 2006); Adnan Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), and James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–94. 3 Sayyid Qutb, A Child from the Village trans. and ed. John Calvert and William Shepard (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 4 Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Defining the Egyptian Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11. 5 Sayyid Qutb, “Ha’ula’i al-Aristuqrat,” Al-Risala, no. 687, 962–3. 6 William Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996). Shepard compares and analyzes the various editions of the work. 7 Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism, 39. 8 Qutb’s intellectual influences during this period are examined in Giedre Sabaseviciute, “Sayyid Qutb and the Crisis of Culture in Late 1940s Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 1 (2018): 85–101. 9 John Calvert, “‘The World is an Undutiful Boy’: Sayyid Qutb’s American Experience,” Islam and Christian – Muslim Relations 11, no. 1 (2000): 87–103; and James L. Nolan Jr., What they Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 168–202. 10 John Calvert, “An Islamist’s View of America,” in Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 73. 11 Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Revolution: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Kirk Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). 12 Fawaz Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 6. 13 The best book on the Muslim Brotherhood during the Old Regime remains Richard Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; 2nd ed. 1993). The early history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well treated by Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement, 1928–1942 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1998). 14 On Qutb’s relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, see Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, 157–195; and Gerges, Making the Arab World, 31–32, 251–253.

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15 Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, 185–187; Gerges, The Making of the Arab World, 223–227. 16 Sayyid Qutb, Fi Zilal al-Qur’an, rev. ed. Vols. 1–18 (Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 1994); Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an vols. 1–15, trans. and ed. Adil Salahi and Ashur Shamis (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2008). 17 Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, 201–202. 18 An interesting study comparing the revolutionary groups of late tsarist Russia and the jihadi radicals partly inspired by Qutb is Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko, Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 On Mawdudi and his influence on Qutb see Jan-Peter Hartung, A System of Life: Mawdudi and the Ideologisation of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 193–224. 20 Erez Manela analyzes the effect of US President Wilson’s rhetoric of the “self-determination of nations” on Zaghlul and other national leaders in his The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63–75. 21 Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an, vol. 1, surahs 1–2, 162; and Fi Zilal al-Qur’an, parts 1–4, vol. 1, 148. 22 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, revised trans and forward by Ahmad aki Hammad (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publications, 1990), 20. 23 Qutb, Milestones, 20. 24 William Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s Doctrine of Jahiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35 (2003): 521–545. 25 Shiraz Maher, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 114–116. 26 See David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 94–97, and Rudolf Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wienner Publishers, 1996), 6–7. 27 As, for instance, in Qutb, Milestones, 43. 28 Olivier Carre, Mysticism and Politics: A Critical Reading of the Qur’an by Sayyid Qutb, Radial Muslim Brother trans. Carol Artigues and revised by W. Shepard (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 75. 29 Toth, Sayyid Qutb, 279–281. 30 Sayyid Qutb, This Religion of Islam (Delhi: Markazi Maktaba Islami, 1974), 5. 31 Qutb, Milestones, 20. 32 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 39. 33 This is the major theme in Qutb’s The Islamic Concept and its Characteristics, trans. Mohammed Moinuddin Siddiqui (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publications, 1991). 34 Zainab al-Ghazali, Return of the Pharaoh: Memoir in Nasir’s Prison trans. Mokrane Guezzou (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1994), 31ff. 35 Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an, vol. 3, surah 4, 282. 36 Qutb, Milestones, 61. 37 For an outline of Kharijite theology and history, see Jeffery T. Kenny, Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–53. 38 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 20. 39 John Calvert, “Wayward Son: The Muslim Brothers’ reception of Sayyid Qutb,” in The Muslim Brothers in Europe eds. Roel Meijer and Edwin Bakker (London: Hurst, 2012), 249–272. 40 Barbara Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2009), 64–145. 41 Abdullah al-Arian, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 42 Quoted in Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63. 43 Nathan Brown, “The Muslim Brotherhood’s (and Egypt’s) Qutb Conundrum,” Foreign Policy, 17 May 2010, available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/05/17/the-muslim-brotherhoods-andegypts-qutb-conundrum/, and John Calvert, “The Afterlife of Sayyid Qutb,” Foreign Policy, 15 December 2010, available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/15/the-afterlife-of-sayyid-qutb/ 44 Montasser Al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right-Hand Man, trans. Ahmed Fekry, ed. Sara Nimis (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 25. 45 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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46 Accounts of the Egyptian jihadi groups of the 1970s and 1980s include Saad Eddine Ibrahim, “Egypt’s Islamic Activism in the 1980s,” Third World Quarterly (1988): 632–657; Ellis Goldberg, “Smashing Idols and the State: The Protestant Ethic and Egyptian Sunni Radicalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 1 (1991): 3–35, and Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt. 47 On the Islamic Group, see Roel Meijer, “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong as a Principle of Social Action: The Case of the Egyptian al-Jama‘at al-Islamiyya,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement ed. Roel Meijer (London: Hurst, 2009), 189–220, and Mohammed M. Hafez and Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Violence as Contention in the Egyptian Islamic Movement,” in Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach ed. Quintan Wiktorowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 61–88. 48 This is the question asked by Nelly Lahoud in her The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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3 THEOCRACY From Wahhabism to Vilayat-e Faqih Abdullah F. Alrebh

Introduction Islam, as a religion, is the source of norms that govern not only the daily life of the Muslims but also the political and legal spheres of a society. This chapter links the contemporary sacred politics to the Islamic heritage based on the Sunni and Shi’a interpretations of the legitimate leadership. In this case, theocracy refers to Sharia law enforced by the state, which makes the state a form of Islamic theocracy which derives its state formation and judicial system from the Islamic text. The concept of an Islamic state is always citing Saudi Arabia and Iran as ideal types of Islamic theocracy, which are similarly run as religiously backed states under the rule of wali al-amr. It is thus an attempt to understand the political philosophy of modern Islamic statehood in a different way than typically found in the contemporary Western philosophy. The key difference between the two countries goes beyond the binary of Sunni and Shi’a to the specific version of each sect. That is to say, Wahhabism as a Sunni sub-sect serves as the key to legitimacy for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, while Vilayat-e Faqih as a Shi’a sub-sect serves as the key to legitimacy for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thus, readers need to be aware of the context of the concept of authority in the Muslim world in terms of its theology, jurisprudence and history. This context forms a considerable part of this chapter, as the whole debate of Islam and politics, in Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular, is built on this context. Thus, a reader needs to be aware of the Islamic understanding of sovereignty and authority. The term Hakimiah (the Arabic translation of governance) is the Islamic expression, which refers to the right of ruling and making laws. Allah is the source of Hakimiah, from which no one benefits except as emanating from Him and everyone must obey Him as a duty. The term wali al-amr—which means the “guardian” or Muslim religious ruler—refers to the person whose authority over a Muslim society is absolute. Where the relationship between the state and religion is concerned, Hakimiah supports the efforts of the Islamic reformers to revise constitutions and aims to link the “nation-state” to “Islamic thoughts.”1 That is to say, Hakimiah serves as a substitute to the term “sovereignty” as applied in the Western social sciences. Similarly, the terms wilayah and amr,2 which might be difficult to translate, refer to the position of governing the Ummah.3 Since the term wilayah means guardianship and amr means affairs, the term wali al-amr refers to the Muslim religious ruler. That is to say, wilayah al amr serves as a substitute to the term “authority” as applied in the Western social sciences. 26

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Therefore, these terms—Hakimiah and al-amr—do not just hold political significance. In fact, they have been accepted as part of the adherent’s daily religious beliefs. Thus, the applications of these terms differ according to various Muslim sects. Those political terms belong to the theocratic conception of what Islamists wish to have as an “Islamic state”. Thus, based on Islamic theocracy, it is Muslims’ duty to make the world better by bringing society closer to God and applying Sharia law. Ibn Khaldū n claims that “Islam is the only religion whose religious leaders involve politics and lead the nation . . . the person in charge of religious affairs in [other religious groups] is not concerned with power politics at all.”4 In The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldū n (1332–1406) compares Islam and the Qur’an with Christianity and the Bible. He then concludes that the Islamic text includes laws and rules, while the Christian text merely focuses on stories and general ethics. One of Ibn Khaldū n’s chapters is titled “Arabs can obtain royal authority only by making use of some religious coloring, such as prophecy, or sainthood, or some great religious event in general.”5 He argued that Arabs would not subordinate themselves to each other due to tribal pride and the intertribal struggles for leaderships. They would therefore respect religious authority as sacred authority. If we consider the historical context of The Muqaddimah—that is, the fourteenth century—I argue that Ibn Khaldū n meant statehood in general, not merely the monarchy. In that period, the terms “Arab” and “Muslim” contained a shared heritage and identity and were almost synonymous; there were virtually no conflicts between them.6 Therefore, religious rule is the primary source of legitimacy within Islamic history based on the Walayah, which is the Islamic leadership.

The Walayah The character of wali al-amr is based on the concept of Walayah, which means “guardianship.” So, the wali here means the guardian of the Ummah whom Muslims shall obey as their legitimate ruler. The term wali recalls the general concept of guardianship that authorizes the guardians to direct the affairs of the people under their protection. This includes Walayah over minors, women, and slaves. It is the obligation of people to obey their guardians as the Qur’an insists: “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. And if you disagree over anything, refer it to Allah and the Messenger.”7 So, the guardian is listed on the third row after the God and the Prophet, and technically guardians now are the only authority that believers can deal with in person, since no one can see God and the Prophet passed away in 632 AD. However, the verse includes a reference for solving any sort of disagreement between guardian and subject, i.e., “And if you disagree over anything, refer it to Allah and the Messenger.” That is to say, Allah/God and Prophet Muhammad represent the source of legitimacy beside their practice of authority, while the guardians practice authority on behalf of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad without being sources of authority themselves. In this vein, God refers to the Qur’an, while the Messenger refers to the Hadiths, which means the sacred text is the judicial reference in political Islam. The core of Islamic belief is to accept the divine authority. In fact, “for the Arabic word al-islam means ‘surrender’ as well as the peace that issues from our surrender to God . . . Islam states that a person must be the perfect servant (‘abd) of God in the sense of following His commands.”8 The Qur’anic verse cited above (4/59) includes a major command of whom Muslims should follow alongside Allah. That is what makes Islamic authority a matter of guardianship over the Ummah.9 27

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However, immediately following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his successors launched a series of wars seeking extension of their territories. Despite the long debates regarding the moral necessity of these wars (many Muslims consider these wars as nonreligious actions and merely a part of the expansionary policy), the reality is that Islam was a religion of strong states. This was the case, at least until 1922 when the Ottoman Empire in Turkey—the last proclaimed Caliphate—was abolished. Over this long history, a theocratic philosophy of politics grew in terms of the concepts of state and society, which of course affects contemporary Muslim socio-political thought. This chapter investigates the Islamic roots of Vilayat-e Faqih and Wahhabism and their effects upon the state structure and links the contemporary conservative politics to the Islamic heritage based on Sunni and Shi’a’s different interpretations of what constitutes legitimate leadership. Before delving into the two Islamic movements that apply Sharia laws as derived from the Islamic texts, readers need to be aware of the cultural and historical context of political authority in the contemporary Muslim world at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This context occupies a considerable part of this chapter, as the whole debate concerning Islamic rule in general, in Saudi Arabia and Iran, in particular, is built on this context.

Historical context The whole question of sectarianism in Islam is based on the right of authority after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. While Shi’a Muslims believe in the divinity of the succession of the Prophet Muhammad, Sunni Muslims do not believe that God has chosen particular successors (“caliphs”). These theological interpretations explain much of the variation of the clergy’s power over the masses within each Islamic school. From the Shi’a perspective, the successors of the Prophet are the twelve Imams he listed in his Hadiths. The last Imam—named al-Mahdi—was withdrawn by Allah “into a miraculous state of occultation (hiddenness) in 939 C.E.”10 He will remain in his occultation until Allah calls him again to return as the savior (“messiah”) of this world. According to Shi’a literature, al-Mahdi left a commandment to his followers referring them to the religious scholar with the greatest knowledge of the religion. Thus, Shi’as believe that the clergy are the successors of their Imams. On the other hand, Sunnis do not believe in such a divine assignment of rulers. They believe in the stability of Muslim nations under a single strong ruler, regardless of his level of religiosity. As long as he does not abrogate any principles of Islam, all Muslims— including the clergy—must obey him. Therefore, the clergy plays a secondary role in politics and governance in Saudi Arabia, as their role is limited to legitimizing the royal rule and interpreting Sharia law.11 During the early history of Islam—that is, immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, a number of Muslims supported Ali ibn Abi-Talib as the successor of the Prophet based on the Prophet’s testament.12 Another group of Muslims met before burying the Prophet to discuss the next step and selected Abū Bakra S ̣iddı̄ q from Mecca as the first Caliph. Since then, Sunnis believe in de facto rule, either through selection by the powerful circle of decision makers,13 or through appointment by the former ruler, an example being with the succession of the second Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattā b. De facto rule became a norm with the Umayyad Caliphate (661–744 AD), the first Muslim monarchy. Yet, the group that advocated for Ali ibn Abi-Talib continue to identify him as the legitimate successor of the Prophet and consider those who proclaimed themselves Caliphs as 28

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non-legitimate rulers. Even when Ali was selected to be the fourth Caliph (656–661 AD) based on the Sunni norm, his adherents did not view this method of selection as a source of legitimacy. They argued that he was finally enabled to practice “his right” of leading the Islamic state. However, some figures—who were well respected in the Sunni literature— fought Ali until they attained de facto rule and established their monarchy (i.e., the Umayyad Caliphate). Ali’s 11 descendants enjoy—according to Shi’as—the same status of Ali as the legitimate guardians of Muslims. Shi’as believe that early Muslims ignored the Prophet’s command and failed to support the legitimate leader Ali and his descendants. From the Shi’a point of view, rejecting the rightful Imams and Caliphs meant a denial of divine grace. For Shi’as, the ideal guardian of Muslims is a man of piety and religious knowledge, and if he could not rule politically, good Muslims should nevertheless follow him to learn the true way of Islam until he—or one of his successors—rules over the nation of Islam. Thus the bases of legitimacy in Sunni and Shi’a sects are different: the “de facto ruler” versus the “pious teacher.” In modern history, for Sunnis, the successors of the de facto ruler would be the political leaders—i.e., monarchs and presidents—regardless of their levels of religiosity. On the other hand, for Shi’as, the successor of the pious teacher would be the mullah “clergy.” regardless of their political history and knowledge. Therefore, the leading clergy enjoy the divine legitimacy as wali al-amr among Shi’as, while for the Sunnis, this legitimacy is reserved for the political ruler.14

Vilayat-e Faqih Literary, the term Vilayat-e Faqih means “the mandate of the jurist,” and recognizes the Faqih/jurist as the guardian of the Ummah.15 The term Faqih in Shi’a contexts refers to the Marja’ (the qualified jurist who is eligible to issue fatwas based on his ijtihad, the results of studying sacred texts based on Islamic jurisprudences lessons). In their religious affairs, Shi’as are expected to follow/obey a Marja’, as their religious authority.16 Since there are many Marjas (Ayatollahs), it would be impossible to have all of them involved in governing the Islamic state. For this reason, the theory of Vilayat-e Faqih serves as the disciplinary agency of rule by the religious institution. The first source of this theory is Awa’ed al-Ayam by Sheikh Ahmad al-Naraqi (1771–1829),17 who legitimates “the mandate of the jurist” based on the concept of the Walayah. As Shi’a Muslims pledge obedience to their 12 infallible Imams, they should obey the deputy of the Imam, which is the jurist. To make this practicable, only one jurist should rule at any time. Thus, al-Naraqi considers Vilayat-e Faqih as a rational choice for ensuring Islamic ruling involving worldly affairs. According to Arjomand, Ayatollah Khomeini “firmly rejected the separation of religion and politics, he argued that in absence of the divinely inspired Imam, sovereignty devolves upon qualified jurists.”18 Article 5 of the Iranian Constitution articulates the concept of the position of the jurist as the deputy of the sacred Imam: During the Occultation of the Walial-’Asr (may God hasten his reappearance), the wilayah and leadership of the Ummah devolve upon the just [‘adil] and pious [muttaqi] faqih, who is fully aware of the circumstances of his age; courageous, resourceful, and possessed of administrative ability, will assume the responsibilities of this office in accordance with Article 107.19 In this theocratic scheme, the Supreme Leader, or Vali-e Faqih, enjoys the full authority of the holy Imam until the Imam returns from his occultation, which means the leader has 29

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custodianship over the people and must be obeyed based on his sacred status.20 Such a development in Shi’a Muslim thinking does not reflect the history of Shi’a political history, as they do not believe in an Islamic state without the “Imam.”21 Today, a great number of Shi’a Muslims reject the Islamic-theocratic state. However, the dominant Iranian clergy have a different view of the system of Vilayat-e Faqih.22 The Islamic Republic of Iran is controlled directly by the clergy who are advocating for Islamic revivalism. Stewart M. Hoover places the 1979 Iranian Revolution in the same context of the rise of Christian evangelicalism as a political force in North America, as “events that seriously confronted prior assumptions about religious reticence, quietude and secularism.”23 However, Christian evangelicals did not establish a state under the clergy system, while this is what the Ayatollahs did in Iran. Since the revolution, the Islamic regime has built a strategy and developed policies to Islamize Iranian society, with a focus on successive attempts to police moral behavior of, especially, young people. This includes the imposition of many restrictive regulations: wearing hijab, and the prohibition of alcohol consumption and out-of-marriage sexual relationships. Bearing in mind that Iran used to be a Western-style state before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a portion of the population was very unsatisfied with such theocratic restrictions, resulting in an expanding Iranian diaspora post-revolution. In addition, the regime’s popularity depends on the lower economic class, as they tend to support it.24 In terms of the state’s structure, the Islamic republic aims to integrate Western-style democracy with Shi’a Islamic theocracy under the rule of the supreme leader, Vali-e Faqih. The clergy of the Assembly of Experts hold the highest position, which is a deliberative body of well-educated Islamic scholars mujtahids, who elect and can remove the Vali-e Faqih and supervise his activities. The Assembly comprises “a body of 86 senior clerics who are responsible for monitoring Iran’s Supreme Leader and choosing his successor.”25 Duration of assembly membership is for an eight-year term.26 On the other hand, the president—i.e., the head of government—is elected for a four-year term, with a two-term limit. Thus the roles of the “Supreme Leader,” and the “Assembly of Experts” are religious positions and candidates come only from the clergy, while the president and members of Parliament can come from any background, provided that their political attitude is in accordance with the precepts of an “Islamic” republic. It is possible to put this political system in the same context of a constitutional monarchical system. That is to say, the clergy serves as the royal family who have the right to act as the head of state and they are the only members who can proclaim the rule within their tied circle. The president serves in the position of prime minister; since this position functions under the position of the Supreme Leader and serves as the head of the executive authority. This assumption explains the 1989 Iranian constitutional amendments that eliminated the post of prime minister, since there is no need for two heads of one government under the Supreme Leader, Vali-e Faqih.

Wahhabism The term “Wahhabism” refers to the movement led by Sheikh Mohammed ibn AbdulWahhab (1703–1792). In terms of the four Sunni jurisprudential schools, Wahhabis present themselves as Hanbali, with a firm emphasis upon monotheism as their priority. They prefer to be called Salafis, or Ahl-sunnah wa al-Jama‘ah, as the term Wahhabis came to refer to intolerant fanatics in many contexts. The movement was used to Islamize Arabia by returning to what Wahhabis claimed to be the one true version of Islam, and it attempted 30

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to challenge, often using physical force, any “heretical” alternate versions.27 No one can discuss Wahhabism as a religious movement without involving the Saudi state, which has long been considered integral to the history of both the political and military aspects of Wahhabism.28 Historically, Wahhabism and the Saudi state have been allied since 1744, when Sheikh Mohamed Bin Abdul-Wahhab met Mohamed Bin Saud—the fifth great-grandfather of the current Saudi King Salman. Mohamed Bin Saud was the emir of Dariya, a small town in Najd, and the two men made a pact to spread Wahhabi doctrine by bringing the House of Saud to power. This power was divided into two realms: politics for the House of Saud, and religion for Abdul-Wahhab and his disciples, who later became the scholars, the Ulama, of the state. Since then, the House of Saud provides political cover for Wahhabism, which in turn provides religious legitimacy for the royal family. Despite the collapse of the first Saudi state in 1818 after defeat by the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt Mohammed Ali Pasha, the alliance returned six years later, as Turki ibn Abdullah Al Saud returned to power, accompanied by two of Abdul-Wahhab’s grandchildren (Abdul Rahman ibn Hasan and Abd al-Latif ibn Abd al-Rahman). Al al-Sheikh served as the religious leaders until the collapse of the second Saudi state in 1891. When King Ibn Saud started building the current State in 1902, another member of Al al-Sheikh (i.e., Abd Allah bin Abd al-Latif) accompanied him. As part of Sunni belief in de facto rule, Wahhabism insists that “it is forbidden in Islam to raise a hand against the ruler . . . [unless] if the ruler does not believe in the God or the Prophet, then action is required . . . obedience to rulers is part of Muslim practice.”29 Any challenge to the King is considered a sin and any attempt at dissent may lead to instability and fitna, public disorder that might result in civil war. That is to say, Wahhabism adheres to the Caliph-Dynasty model of the Sunni Islamic state within the history of Islamic civilization (e.g., Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans). The Caliph/King is the religious leader wali al-amr that everyone must pay homage to and obey. However, if someone does succeed in overthrowing the King, he automatically becomes the legitimate guardian of “Muslims” and inherits all the features of the position. This model was applied most recently to the Saudi state in 1932 when Ibn Saud unified the territories under his rule and named the resulting state after his surname—just as in the traditional Islamic monarchy. As a traditional theocracy, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia rejects any secular challenge to the state, including an elected Parliament or any other serious public participation in the public sphere. Generally, any title other than “true Islam” is also rejected. Such an attitude recalls the Saudi conflict with the former Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the charismatic leader who was admired by a considerable majority of the Arab masses in the 1960s.30 This mass support represented a threat to the other Arab regimes of that time, especially the monarchies that Nasser considered to be reactionary regimes. Thus, the Wahhabi discourse served as a puritanical interpretation of Islam to challenge Nasser’s secular discourse of PanArabism. Islam was prioritized over nationalism as the source of unity in Saudi Arabia under the Wahhabi doctrine that based its authority in the Islamic bond of the Ummah. The same Wahhabi discourse is used to face the Iranian Islamic discourse, as the Shi’a belief system is considered heretical by Wahhabis. The first Saudi Constitution was introduced in 1992, and became known as the “Basic Law of Saudi Arabia.” It establishes the Islamic identity of the state as based on the “Islamic Creed,” the term that has always been insisted upon in the Wahhabi literature. Article 5 of Chapter 2 of the Basic Law explains how the King and the Crown Prince are inaugurated through the Bay’ah (the Pledge of Allegiance). Article 6 states: 31

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the citizens pledge allegiance to the king based on the Book of Allah [i.e. the Qur’an], and the Sunnah of His Messenger [i.e., the Hadith] and giving the obedience in all conditions. Hence, Wahhabism does not invent a new political system for the Saudi regime; they just support the traditional Sunni Islamic rule that was practiced for a long part of the history.31 Such an attitude recalls their preferred title, Salafis, which means the followers of the “pious predecessors.” In Saudi Arabia, the King is not just a political position, it is also a religious one, but with a different title. The Wahhabi clerics “prefer to call the head of the House of Saud ‘Imam’ to convey the holy source of his power.”32 Furthermore, King Fahd changed his title from the royal “His Majesty” to “the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.” This religious title reflected a desire to Islamize the king’s position as the guardian of the nation. The following Saudi Kings, Abdullah (2005–15) and Salman (2015–) retained this religious title and have never been addressed as “His Majesty.” As the state hosting the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the Saudi kingdom insists on being an Islamic state that applies Islamic law and strengthens its image as a country leading the Islamic global struggle against any attacks on Muslim ethics.33 Therefore, the religious institutions—which are appointed by the King and controlled by the Wahhabi clergy— invest their efforts in convincing people to accept the sacredness of the monarchy through a specific religious doctrine known as Wahhabism. This includes presenting the royal family as the guardian of Sharia law, and the king as wali al-amr. Such a classic Islamic monarchy does not need a Parliament to supervise the government who holds the Islamic title of the guardian of the nation. Thus, the kingdom does not have an elected Parliament; instead, there is the “Consultative Council” (Majlis Al-Shura), which is fully appointed by the king to provide advice to the government, rather than a legislative body. Such an advisory method fits with the Wahhabi system that does not believe in public participation in politics (i.e., elections). On the other hand, and for the same reason of hosting the holy lands, Wahhabi clerics limit their regulations to the two holy cities to avoid embarrassing the wali alamr with other countries.34 Since the establishment of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance, the “Islamic law is primarily designed as an ethical tool and as a preventive agent,”35 which reflects an obsession with puritanism among Wahhabis under the mandate of the Saudi state. However, the new epoch of King Salman and his son Prince Muhammad that starts in January 2015, is the turning point of the transition of power from the old generation to the new generation of Al Saud. This transition brings some notable changes in the social views of the new ruling elite, including the understanding the need to decrease the conservative religious social domination by Wahhabi clergy, who still serve as the religious legitimacy of the king. Thus, the neo-Saudi state would include more social changes within the same political realm, and Wahhabism would limit its social authority and serve the new wali al-amr who is the absolute ruler of the state.

The mechanism of the Islamic states Both doctrines are effective movements within their sects, the Shi’a being Vilayat-e Faqih, and the Sunni being Wahhabism. Each of them adheres to the concept of Walayah that places the head of state as the successor/deputy of the Prophet Muhammad (i.e., wali alamr). Yet, each doctrine has its view and mechanism to legitimize the leadership to ensure 32

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its Islamic guardianship. Table 3.1 below explains the major differences of the theory and practice of Walayah in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Table 3.1 illustrates how the theological and jurisprudence differences between Sunni and Shi’a sects play an effective role in legitimating the state structure of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both movements reflect the role of history over contemporary politics. That is to say, the sectarian debates in the Muslim world move beyond theology and salvation matters to convey a sense of the conflict regarding the legitimacy of ruling. This is not merely between Sunni and Shi’a; conflicts also exist within each sect regarding who follows the ‘purest’ Sunnism or ‘purest’ Shi’ism. To support this argument, one can examine the conflict between Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and Vilayat-e Faqih and other Islamic Shi’a factions in Iraq on the other. So, sectarianism among Muslims today concerns the legitimacy of ruling in the current states based on sacred texts and historical account, not merely a theological debate over Islamic history. This explains the reasons behind the current active sectarianism in the Middle East, as politicians utilize religion to legitimize their policies. Theologically, Vilayat-e Faqih has included a notable metaphysical account of the “Advent: Waiting for the Messiah,” that is, the 12th Imam, al-Mahdi, who will return one day and unify and lead all Muslims. Obviously, the contemporary Iranian discourse emphasizes seeking blessing from the Prophet and his family (his daughter Fatimah and the 12 Imams) and attribute Muslims’ success to this blessing, plus their hard work. On the other hand, much like Calvinism, Wahhabism is a worldly theory that struggles against the idea of the miraculous and the sacred power of saints.36 Indeed, the history of Wahhabism is replete with calls for cutting irrational relations with the dead; moreover, Wahhabis have demolished the graves of Muslim saints in Arabia.37 Thus, the theological and jurisprudential difference between the two movements dictates how each country seeks to govern their populations, be it through an unelected absolute Table 3.1 The Political Mechanism based on Vilayat-e Faqih in Iran and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia Concepts

Vilayat-e Faqih in Iran

Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia

wali al-amr

A deputy of the hidden infallible Imam. He must give up power when Imam Mahdi returns. Resorting to a modification of the attitude toward ruling during the period of Imam’s Occultation. The majority of Shi’a reject legitimizing the rule and consider it as a hijacking of the holy position. Since there is no historical application, a modern Constitution is needed to explain the method of selecting the head of state and the mechanism of ruling. Assembly of Experts An elected Parliament

He—himself— is the authorized Imam and no one has the right to dispute his rule. The Caliph-dynasty model of Sunni Islamic state within the history of Islamic civilization (e.g., the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans). The Caliph/ King is the religious leader that everyone must give loyalty to and obey. The Sunni historical account provides enough illustration of the mechanism of ruling.

The historical notion of the sect

Application and historical account

Ahl al-hall wal-aqd (i.e., the political elite who mentor the ruling system)

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Allegiance Council An appointed Consultative Council

Abdullah F. Alrebh

monarchy or a Supreme Leader that is divinely ordained. Bear in mind, that democracy, per se, has no place in either sect’s religious heritage. There is nothing about public participation in the literature of these two movements. Indeed, Wahhabism recognized an Ahl alhall wal-aqd, the political elite who can affect the rule of law, which includes tribal chiefs (ruling armed tribal members), and clerics. Vilayat-e Faqih does not recognize the role of the public, the ruler is appointed by divinity and the mullah is no more than his deputy. So, democracy is a contemporary matter for Islamic jurisprudence. In both cases, the Islamic elite maintains the same manner of the theoretical level of democracy with extending somehow the margin of freedom based on the need of the state. Comparing Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is the latter that allows its citizens a greater democratic space, where presidential elections are conducted every four years. The favorable attitude towards democracy can be explained in two dimensions: (1) Iran’s revolutionary republic was established based on overthrowing a monarchy by mass protests. Those people who participated in this transition, need to participate in the new political realm as a reward to their efforts. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is a traditional monarchy which has existed since the eighteenth century; the country has maintained stability since King Ibn Saud took over Riyadh in 1902, and the rest of the Saudi territories surrendered to his authority. That is to say, the mass participation of the establishment of the Islamic Republic requires public inclusion in the political realm. Conversely, the limited participation of the establishment of the Arabian Kingdom left public inclusion as an option for the king. (2) Iranian history is rich in the debate regarding the Constitution, that includes some written literature by Shi’a clerics (e.g., the Mashrū tiyyat legalized by Ayatollah Muhammad Hossein Naini).38 The Iranian Parliament was founded in 1906 during the Qajar dynasty.39 Simply, Iran was a constitutional monarchy where parliamentary elections were the norm. Nevertheless, the Supreme Leader, after 1979, assumes his position by bypassing the democratic process, solely overseeing the political affairs of the country: While the constitution includes specific references to the people as the foundation of political power which allows for an electoral parliamentary system, it also places all authority with God, represented by the Supreme Leader occupying the office of the velayate faqih [sic]. This places God above people.40 On the other hand, democracy and legislative elections have never existed in any practical form in Saudi Arabia. So, even after the declaration of the current Kingdom in 1932, Saudi Arabia kept the same form of governance, i.e., absolute monarchical rule. While the Basic Law of Governance does not include any references to the people as the foundation of political power which justifies the absence of an electoral parliamentary system, it also places all authority with God, represented by the wali-almr who holds the positions of the monarch and the prime minister.

Conclusion Both movements are similar as they view the state to be ruled under wali-almr, yet they are rather different in their views of the practical type of authority, and democratic scale according to conditions of their societies. Historically, both movements were founded by charismatic figures who mobilized the masses to build the state of God. However, charismatic 34

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authority “cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both.”41 From Max Weber’s perspective of authority, the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the traditional authority of Shi’a Muslim heritage; however, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s charismatic authority played a significant role in establishing the Islamic Republic rising out of the ruins of the Pahlavi monarchy. Milton Viorst argues, “Iranians saw Khomeini then not as a thinker but as a head of the revolution. In winning, he got to choose the state that he wanted.”42 Such a description reflects the charismatic authority that legitimized Khomeini’s rule beyond the rational-legal authority based on being elected and supervised by Assembly of Experts. Likewise, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei enjoys a fair reputation in Iranian media today. However, the state holds public elections for the head of government (president), the legislative institution (Parliament), and the supervision institution of the Supreme Leader (Assembly of Experts). Applying Weber’s perspective of authority to the case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia requires considering the historical account of the Saudi–Wahhabi alliance. The militaryreligious power, which is based on the traditional authority of Sunni Muslim heritage, fits with Weber’s model of traditional authority. However, King Ibn Saud was an undoubtedly charismatic character that built the kingdom in a heroic style. The Saudi kings following him had different levels of popularity, especially Faisal and Fahd. Today, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman plays the role of charismatic leader who has promised his followers a progressive future for their nation. Such a promise serves as “the legitimizing reason for accepting this ruler.”43 The Iranian political scene operates with this mechanism: rationalizing traditional authority under the rule of a charismatic leader. On the other hand, the Saudi political scene operates under a charismatic leader presiding over a traditional authority. As mentioned earlier, the historical account of each country and philosophy (i.e., Vilayat-e Faqih and Wahhabism) play a significant role in the existence of a political scene based on the demand over the political elite. Since authority is the legitimate power, the political elites seek to legitimate their rule based on the demand they face to ensure avoiding any challenge or doubt on sovereignty over their people. Away from Iran and Saudi Arabia whose rule is based on Vilayat-e Faqih and Wahhabism respectively, it would be interesting to study these movements in other countries that have no single Islamist domination. For example, Lebanon for Vilayat-e Faqih and Kuwait for Wahhabism would be reasonable case studies, as both countries are fairly democratic. Hezbollah—the adherents of Vilayat-e Faqih in Lebanon—and the Islamic Salafi Alliance in Kuwait—the adherents of Wahhabism—have no chance to establish their own states and appoint a wali alamr based on their beliefs. So, what kind of national views would these groups hold and express, since the basic norm of Islamists’ belief is in the Ummah (Ummah, which should have a single head/wali al-amr)? Would they link their religious and/or political affairs to the dominant states (i.e., Iran and Saudi Arabia), or compromise their views to fit with their national agendas? Such questions might be applied to many Muslim countries.

Notes 1 Ali Oumlil, Al Eslahat al Arabiyah wa ad’dawllah al wataniah [The Arabic Reforms and the Nation State] (Casablanca: The Arabic Cultural Center, 1985), 167–169. 2 Approximate meanings to the Arabic word amr would include: order, ordinance, affair, decree, and instruction.

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Abdullah F. Alrebh 3 The Arabic word meaning is “nation” or “community.” For example, the term al-Ummah alIslamiah means all the Muslim nations or communities in the global perspective. Similarly, alUmmah al-arabyah means the entire Arab world. 4 Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun intro. by Darwish al-Jawadi (Beirut: Dar al-Kotub al’Assrya, 2005), 212–216; and Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History; In Three Volumes. 1 (no. 43) eds. F. Rosenthal and N.J. Dawood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 473. 5 Khaldun, Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, 140, and Khaldun, Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 305. 6 Muhammad Abed Al-Jabiri, Mas’alat al hawi’yah [The Matter of Identity] (Beirut: The Center of Arabic Union Studies, 1992), 33–35. 7 The Holy Qur’an, 4/59. 8 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 8. 9 Abdullah F. Alrebh, “Islamic Authority: A Matter of Guardianship,” Athens Journal of Social Sciences 5, no. 2 (2017): 170. 10 Vali Nasr, “The Shia Revival,” Military Review 87, no. 3 (2007): 67. 11 Muhammad Al-Atawneh, “Is Saudi Arabia a Theocracy? Religion and Governance in Contemporary Saudi Arabia,” Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 5 (2009): 721–737. 12 The testament was in Ghadir Khumm, where the Prophet Muhammad gave a speech that considered by Shi’as as the testament appointing Ali as his successor, while Sunnis see this as no more than a sign of high esteem and affection. Both sects recognize the verbal part of the Hadith; however, they interpret it in different ways. This story occurred 632 AD three months before the Prophet Muhammad passed away. 13 In Arabic, pronounce Ahl al-Hall wa al-Aqd, which means people who enjoy power within their society and can affect political decision making. 14 According to S.H. Nasr, The Heart of Islam, 67: “The understanding of the term imam therefore differs greatly in Sunnism and Shi’ism. In Sunni Islam the term has many uses, but it is never used in the mystical and esoteric sense given to it in Shi’ism. In Shi’ism, the Imam, like the prophets, is inerrant (ma’s um) and protected from sin by God. He possesses perfect knowledge of both the Law and the Way, both the outer and inner meaning of the Quran. He also possesses the power of initiation (walayah/wilayah) and is the spiritual guide par excellence, like the Sufi masters within their orders. In fact, the first eight Shi’ite Imams are also central spiritual authorities or poles of Sufism and appear in the initiatic chain of nearly every Sufi order.” 15 It is pronounced Wilayat al Faqih. In German, and in Persian-Iranian, “W” is pronounced like “V” in English. 16 Heinz Halm, Shi’a Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), 106. 17 The theory emerged during the Qajar rule, claiming that the authority of the jurist was to be at the same level of the holy Prophet and his successors, the 12 Imams. However, al-Naraqi supported the Iranian King Fath Ali Shah Qajar in the war against Russians. 18 Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99. 19 The Islamic Republic of Iran Constitution of 1979, with Amendments through 1989 (2019), 10, available at www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989.pdf?lang=en 20 In his book Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist (originally published in 1970, in Persian), Khomeini explains the necessity of having a jurist as the head of government: “Today and always, therefore, the existence of a holder of authority, a ruler who prevents cruelty, oppression, and violation of the rights of others; who is a trustworthy and vigilant guardian of God’s creatures; who guides me to the teachings, doctrines, laws, and institutions of Islam; and who prevents the undesirable changes that atheists and the enemies of religion wish to introduce in the laws and institutions of Islam” (2005: 34). 21 Nasr, The Heart of Islam, 2007: 125 22 The theory emerged during the Qajar rule by Ahmad Naraqi (1771–1829), who claimed the authority of the jurist to be in the same level of the holy Prophet and his successors, the 12 Imams. 23 Stewart M. Hoover, “Media and the Imagination of Religion in Contemporary Global Culture,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 6 (2011): 613. 24 Mohammad Sohrabi-Haghighat, “New Media and Social-Political Change in Iran,” Cyber Orient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East 5, no. 1 (2011).

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Theocracy 25 Babak Rahimi, “Iran: the 2006 Elections and the Making of Authoritarian Democracy,” Nebula 4, no. 1 (2007): 287. 26 Anoush Ehteshami and Mahjoob Zweiri, Understanding Iran’s Assembly of Experts (Durham, UK: Durham University, 2006). 27 Jacques Benoist-Mechin, Arabian Destiny trans. Denis Weaver (London: Elek Books, 1957). 28 Algar Hamid, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publication International, 2002). 29 Milton Viorst, In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 218. 30 Mai Yamani, “The Two Faces of Saudi Arabia,” Survival 50, no. 1 (2008): 143–156. 31 Basic Law of Governance, Umm al-Qura Gazette no. 3397 (1992) available at www.wipo.int/ edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/sa/sa016en.pdf 32 Viorst, In the Shadow of the Prophet, 217 33 Mamoun Fandy, “Cyber Resistance: Saudi Opposition between Globalization and Localization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 3–5. 34 Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, 44. 35 Sam S. Souryal, “The Religionization of a Society: The Continuing Application of Shariah Law in Saudi Arabia,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 4 (1987): 432. 36 Abdullah F. Alrebh, “A Wahhabi Ethic in Saudi Arabia: Power, Authority, and Religion in a Muslim Society,” Sociology of Islam 5, no. 4 (2017): 283. 37 Simon Ross Valentine, Force and Fanaticism: Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 251. 38 Mashrū tiyyat means “conditional”: rulers must govern under conditions that avoid dictatorship and ensure a respect to Sharia law. 39 At that time, Iran’s official name was the Persian Empire. 40 Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam. ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012): 7 41 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology vol. 1. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 246. 42 Viorst, In the Shadow of the Prophet, 191 43 Abdullah F. Alrebh, The Public Presentation of Authority in Saudi Arabia during the 20th Century: A Discursive Analysis of “The London Times” and “The New York Times” (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2014), 56.

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4 POLITICAL ISLAM AND ANIMAL ISSUES Emmanuel Karagiannis

Introduction The Muslim faith has been preoccupied with animal issues since the Prophet began to preach his messages to Arab communities in the mid-seventh century. Overall, Islam as a religion has favoured a balanced approach that permits harmonious co-existence between humans and nonhumans. From the Islamic point of view, animals are not soulless creatures that exist to serve mankind. Indeed, they form their own communities and worship God like humans do. This chapter first describes the Islamic approach to animals, covering doctrine, ethics and rights. Then, it will analyse the animal policy of three Islamist groups, each differing from one another. The Muslim Brotherhood is a former governing party in Egypt with a clandestine history; Hamas is an armed group that has become a political party in power in Gaza, while Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Islamist party supporting non-violent methods. It should be noted that the chapter uses the Muhammad Ali’s English translation of the Qur’an.1

Islam and animals Islam is probably the Abrahamic religion that has more to say about animals.2 Ibn Sina argues that animals possess two important abilities that differentiate them from plants: sensation (al-ihsas) and locomotion (al-harakah).3 With its fine senses, an animal can be aware of its environment, avoid dangers and find food to survive. Animals can also run or fly away, migrate to another place, or pursue prey. The Qur’an states that they worship God in their own way, one not understood by humans (38:19). Animals have their own life cycles and are independent of human beings. Three Qur’anic chapters are named after animals (cow, cattle, and elephant) and three after insects (ants, bees, and spiders), while more than 200 verses mention non-humans. Their central role in the organization of the text reflects the positive approach of Islam towards animals. More importantly, the Qur’an states that animals form communities as human beings do: “And there is no animal in the earth, nor a bird that flies on its two wings, but [they are] communities like yourselves. We have not neglected anything in the Book. Then to their Lord will they be gathered” (6:38). This verse essentially differentiates Islam from Judaism and Christianity, clearly asserting that animals and other non-humans have their own social life. 38

Political Islam and animal issues

According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad had strong bonds with animals and insects. When he left Mecca to go to Medina, a spider and two doves disguised his hiding place; the former used its web and the latter placed their nests at the entrance of the cave where he rested.4 On various occasions, the Qur’an and hadith have discussed animal rights. From the Islamic viewpoint, humans have obligations and responsibilities towards animals because we have been entrusted by God to protect every form of life. The Prophet Muhammad called repeatedly for the ethical treatment of other living creatures by mankind. Imam Bukhari narrated a famous hadith about the protection of animals: A man felt very thirsty while he was on the way, there he came across a well. He went down the well, quenched his thirst and came out. Meanwhile he saw a dog panting and licking mud because of excessive thirst . . . So, he went down the well again and filled his shoe with water and watered it . . . The people said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Is there a reward for us in serving the animals?” He replied: “Yes, there is a reward for serving any animate [living being].”5 This hadith is essentially an affirmation of the human responsibility to sustain life on the planet. Indeed, the protection of animal life could lead to salvation. This is clearer in a hadith relating the Prophet Muhammad’s proclamation, “If someone kills a sparrow for sport, the sparrow will cry out on the Day of Judgment, ‘O Lord! That person killed me in vain! He did not kill me for any useful purpose.’”6 The hadith implies that animals have the capacity for moral judgement and are conscious of their existence. Humans are not allowed to kill for pleasure; for instance, fox hunting and cock-fighting are banned as cruel sports. Interestingly, the Qur’an claims that living creatures have their own language. Solomon had the ability to communicate with ants and birds; one Qur’anic verse asserts, “And Solomon was David’s heir, and he said: ‘O men, we have been taught the speech of birds, and we have been granted of all things. Surely this is manifest grace’” (27:16). The Prophet also occasionally communicated with non-humans. Once a camel approached him to complain about its owner, and the Prophet asked the owner, “Don’t you fear God? This animal you own has complained to me that it is hungry and tired because you use it continuously in your work.”7 These stories, again, emphasize the autonomous existence of non-humans that form their own communities. Indeed, the Prophet’s mission was accepted by animals and birds that have their own spirituality and praise God in their own language.8 It is not a coincidence that the Qur’an mentions many animals, but each one of them enjoys different status. The camel is mentioned in 20 verses of the Qur’an, that dictate its humane treatment; for example, “So Allah’s messenger said to them: [Leave alone] Allah’s she-camel, and [give] her [to] drink” (91:13). Indeed, the camel had a special role in early history of Islam. In 628, the Prophet and some Muslims attempted to perform pilgrimage to Mecca, but as they were reaching the town, his she-camel al-Qaswa suddenly stopped. A hadith explains: The she-camel of the Prophet sat down. The people tried their best to cause the she-camel to get up but in vain, so they said, “Al-Qaswa has become stubborn! Al-Qaswa has become stubborn!” The Prophet said, “Al-Qaswa has not become stubborn, for stubbornness is not her habit, but she was stopped by Him Who stopped the elephant.”9 39

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The Muslims were stopped by the Quraysh tribe before entering Mecca and they signed the Treaty of Hudaybiya that established a ten-year peace. As a result, the Prophet was allowed to return to Mecca for a pilgrimage one year later; he rode his she-camel and led Muslim pilgrims back to the town. Additionally, horses are viewed as worthy of human respect. Asserts one hadith, “good will remain in the foreheads of horses till the Day of Resurrection.”10 This statement implies that horses are inherently good animals. The Prophet’s empathy for horses is confirmed by a hadith narrated by Anas bin Malik, which says, “There was nothing dearer to the Messenger of Allah after women than horses.”11 Finally, the Qur’an states, “And [He made] horses and mules and asses that you might ride upon them and as an ornament. And He creates what you know not” (16:8). Similarly, cats are animals of high status because the Prophet was fond of them. He was kind and tender with cats; his favorite was Muezza. There is a legend about Abu Hurairah (a companion and a major narrator of hadith) who had a cat that saved the Prophet’s life from an obnoxious snake.12 Abu Hurairah also reported one hadith about a woman who was sent to hell because she kept a cat caged until it died of hunger. For that reason, Allah’s Messenger said “You neither fed it nor watered when you locked it up, nor did you set it free to eat the insects of the earth.”13 However, the validity of this hadith was disputed by Aisha, the Prophet’s youngest wife, who implicitly accused Abu Harairah of being misogynist.14 The Islamic tradition does not allow the sale of cats for money or other material rewards, and considers them to be clean animals. In contrast, the place of dogs in the Muslim world is rather ambiguous. Several Qur’anic verses declared dogs as loyal and intelligent animals who can serve humans, for example: The good things are allowed to you, and what you have taught the beasts and birds of prey, training them to hunt – you teach them of what Allah has taught you; so eat of that which they catch for you and mention the name of Allah over it; and keep your duty to Allah. (5:4) Although the Qur’an tends to have a favourable view of dogs, there are hadith that consider them to be ritually impure (najis).15 According to one hadith, “He who kept a dog, but not meant for hunting or watching the herd, would lose one qirat of reward every day.”16 Such a hadith can explain why sometimes Muslims in Europe have been almost hostile to dogs. In Great Britain, for instance, Muslim bus drivers have not let guide dogs board, as have some Muslim taxi drivers.17 Having dogs as pets furthermore is socially unacceptable in many Muslim-majority countries. In June 2002, for instance, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini placed a ban on public dog-walking as being “offensive to the sensitivities of Muslims”.18 Also, the Prophet instructed Muslims not to kill ants or bees and specified that no animal may be burned alive.19 One chapter of the Qur’an is dedicated to bees (an-nahl). A verse describes how honey is made and its medical effect for humans. It states: Then eat of all the fruits and walk in the ways of thy Lord submissively. There comes forth from their bellies a beverage of many hues, in which there is healing for men. Therein is surely a sign for a people who reflect. (16:69) Moreover, the son-in-law of the Prophet and fourth Caliph (644−656), Ali was reported to advise fellow Muslims to “Be like a bee; anything he heats in clean, anything he drops is 40

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sweet and any branch he sits does not break.”20 Hence, bees are viewed as self-reliant insects from whom men could draw inspiration. The animal kingdom has been featured in the writings of several Islamic scholars. For example, the eighth-century Arab scholar Al-Jahiz wrote the Book of Animals (Kitab al-hayawan) describing 350 different animals. More importantly, he offered a proto-theory of natural selection that grasped the essence of evolution. He argues: animals engage in a struggle for existence, and for resources, to avoid being eaten, and to breed . . . Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming them into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring.21 The Brethren of Purity (ikhwan al-safa) was a Basra-based secret society of Islamic philosophers who lived during the tenth century.22 They became known for their Encyclopedia (rasa’il) which included, among others, a fable titled “The Island of Animals”. The story relays that 70 shipwrecked men settled on an island ruled by animals. Humans soon came into conflict with the indigenous living beings because they had no respect for the local environment. As a result, animals, birds and fish brought the dispute with humans to the attention of the King of Jinn, who arranged several debates between the two parties. The non-humans claimed that humans had behaved cruelly and had wasted viable resources. Although the animals almost won the debate, the King ruled in favour of the humans because God gave them certain privileges. Yet, he warned humans to fulfil their role and avoid mistreatment of animals. The Brethren allegorically used the debates between humans and non-humans to condemn the ills of tenth-century Muslim society; in the fable, humans may represent corrupted judges, politically ambitious ‘ulama and tyrannical leaders, while the animals symbolize the masses.23 Contemporary scholars have offered a description of animal rights in accordance with Islamic law and practice. Mohammad Yusuf Siddiq has argued that the animal world should be treated as a silent partner (haywan ghayr natiq) of humankind.24 Moreover, Shi’a jurist Hashem Najy Jazayery has offered the following imperatives stemming animal rights: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Do not brand an animal on the face, and do not hit an animal on the face, because animals pray and praise God Almighty. Do not force an animal to carry a load greater than it is able to bear. Do not force an animal to travel further than it is able to. Do not stand on the back, waist, or neck of an animal. Do not use your animals’ back as a pulpit. Before filling your own stomach, think about filling the stomach of your animal and give it food. Before slaking your own thirst, think of the thirst of your animal and take care of it. When taming an animal, do not hit it unnecessarily. When an animal is unruly, punish it only to the degree necessary.25

Although the Muslim faith has a very positive view of non-humans, the Islamic texts do not suggest a vegetarian lifestyle. Islamic sources call for the swift killing of animals whose meat humans would consume. One hadith commands, “When you kill, kill well; when you slaughter, slaughter well!”26 This command can be interpreted as one to avoid animals’ unnecessary suffering. Indeed, the Islamic method of slaughtering animals (halal) has religious 41

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connotations. The slaughter must be done by an adult Muslim man who must recite the name of God before killing the animal. In this way, he will acknowledge God’s authority over all living creatures. Muslims can eat meat from chickens, goats, cows and sheep; other animals, like pigs, cannot be slaughtered. Animals also cannot be slaughtered in front of other animals or during the night. They should face Mecca during the process. The method of slaughtering is supposed to be relatively painless, because the slaughter cuts the arteries in the neck of the animals. The underlying principle is to treat animals with respect in the most humane way possible. In conclusion, animals in Islam are not servants of humans. The Qur’an states that animals speak their own language and form communities. While humans are commanded to act as stewards, non-humans are autonomous beings whose rights must be protected. Yet, the Qur’an shows a preference for certain species, including camels, horses, bees and ants. This preference reflects practical wisdom and cultural heritage, rather than indicating hierarchical ordering of animals in relation to divine causality. The chapter now turns to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Hamas, all groups that have formulated policies towards animal life.

The Muslim Brotherhood The Muslim Brotherhood have maintained an ambiguous position towards animal rights. Sayyid Qutb understood the environment as part of human existence. His autobiography A Child from the Village, published in 1946, offers insights into his relationship with animals. As a young boy, he developed an affection for the family’s cow. When his father sold some of the family’s land, Sayyid Qutb recalled how he worried about what would happen to the cow. Apart from proving milk and cream, he valued the firm friendship that bound him to her as it also did his sisters and mother. She had been there almost the whole time he and his sisters were growing up and had become a “personality” dear to him and to all in the house.27 His words reflect not only a child’s innocent view of animals, but also a deeper appreciation of the villagers’ closeness with nature and its creatures. Life in the village was more balanced and harmonious. This nostalgia for the life he left behind has underpinned the soul of the organization, which does not wish to look like an urban-only movement.28 The Islam of Qutb’s rural childhood was authentic and holistic. Sayyid Qutb’s affection for his family’s cow indicated how the young Sayyid felt responsible for the fate of the animal. The cow was part of Qutb’s family, not a pet, but more like a loyal companion, a view derived from the Islamic notion of Khilafa (stewardship). Qutb romanticized animals in the context of rural Islam. The Qatar-based Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has maintained a close relationship with the Brotherhood, has offered a more explicit Islamic perspective on animal rights. In The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, published in 1960, he states: Thirteen hundred years before any societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals were established, Islam had made kindness to animals a part of its faith and cruelty to them a sufficient reason for a person to be thrown into the Fire . . . Never, prior to Islam, had the world witnessed such concern for animals, a concern which was beyond its imagination.29 42

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At first sight, his view can be easily described as animal-friendly. However, what Qaradawi really wants is to defend the moral superiority of Islam over other religions. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood has paid little attention to animal issues. In April 2009, a Muslim Brotherhood MP, Hamdy Hasan made a statement concerning the swine flu that had supposedly spread around Cairo. He posited, “the issue must be taken with full seriousness as it is a first-degree national security issue and can’t be delayed as was the case the past three years.”30 The securitization of swine flu enraged many Egyptian Copts because pork is part of their diet.31 The anti-pig prejudice of the Brotherhood seems to derive from the Islamic ban on pork and pork-related products. In addition, senior leaders of the organization have used animals to insult perceived enemies. In 2010, for example, Mohamed Morsi gave an interview to Lebanon’s Al-Quds TV where he declared that “either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war . . . This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these bloodsuckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”32 This anti-Semitic statement was based on a Qur’anic verse, Say: Shall I inform you of those worse than this in retribution from Allah? They are those whom Allah has cursed and upon whom He brought His wrath and of whom He made apes and swine, and who serve the devil. (5:60) Morsi later retracted his statement. The Constitution of 2012, which was drafted by the Ikhwan and Salafis, included a general provision about environmental protection. More specifically, Article 63 declared that every person has the right to a healthy, undamaged environment. The state commits itself to the inviolability of the environment and its protection against pollution. It also commits itself to using natural resources in a way that will not harm the environment and to preserving the rights of all generations to it.33 The Constitution does not mention animal rights; yet activists approached the Salafi alNour party during the drafting period and proposed a constitutional provision protecting animals that was largely based on Sharia.34 Surprisingly, the Salafis ignored pleas for protection of animal rights. In contrast, Article 45 of the 2014 Constitution, supported by the military, states that the State shall protect and develop the green space in the urban areas; preserve plant, animal and fish resources and protect those under the threat of extinction or danger; guarantee humane treatment of animals [al-rifq bi-l-hayawan], all according to the law.35 Thus, the Sisi regime took a progressive stance on the issue by infusing Islamic values into the new Constitution.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Hizb ut-Tahrir has stressed that “Muslims are accountable to Allah for the way they treat animals.”36 The group has declared that “Islam prohibits hunting animals for sport, treating 43

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them cruelly, overburdening them, making them fight each other for entertainment, maiming them while alive and neglecting pets.”37 For this purpose, it has used several hadith as evidence that Muslims are required to respect animal rights.38 In this way, the group adheres to mainstream Islamic principles regarding relations with non-humans. Moreover, Hizb ut-Tahrir has participated in a heated debate about the selling of halal meat in Europe. In March 2014, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain issued a detailed response to the President of the British Veterinary Association that called for an outright ban of halal slaughter in the United Kingdom. The group observed that “animals continue to be used to test products before they are consumed by humans in the West, not only by the pharmaceutical industry for drugs, but also for cosmetics.”39 According to Hizb ut-Tahrir, the problem lies in the profit-oriented treatment of animals as objects. Nevertheless, the debate over Islam and animal rights is not as simple as it may seem. From Hizb ut-Tahrir’s perspective, [Westerners] do not have a monopoly on animal welfare when in fact such topics were a normal part of Islamic teachings more than 1000 years ago and if development and education is required the framework exists as part of the Shariah and we do not need to look elsewhere regarding this . . . there is a trend to attack Muslims and try to convince them that their way of life is barbaric.40 Hizb ut-Tahrir has embraced the “conflict of civilizations” thesis to explain the tensions over halal meat.41 The West has supposedly conspired against Islam out of fear and aggressiveness. In India, the question of cow slaughter has proved particularly controversial. Hindu nationalists have long blamed Muslims and Christians for the slaughtering of cows, which are considered sacred by Hinduism. On the other hand, Hizb ut-Tahrir has insisted that Hindus themselves have consumed beef and have exported it.42 It has argued that “it would be hypocritical to prevent an animal from being slaughtered on compassionate grounds only to let it meander about the streets malnourished, feeding on plastic, paper, and even human waste thus developing a disease called Pica.”43 In this way, the group has been able to shift the debate from the slaughter of cows to the protection of stray cows. This tactic allows Hizb ut-Tahrir to appear compassionate but firm in its determination to defend the large Muslim community in the country. Animal rights have also become an issue of contention in eastern Africa where Hizb utTahrir has established a presence. The group has almost defended the government of Tanzania against British allegations of corruption regarding illegal wildlife trade. In February 2014, Masoud Msellem, the deputy media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in East Africa, remarked that while nobody disputes poaching and smuggling of wildlife is a chronic problem in Tanzania . . . major Capitalist states use the same issue for their own interests. America uses it to cement itself in Tanzania especially in military matters under the guise of fighting poaching and smuggling of wildlife. Britain on its part criticizes Tanzania on the issue because of jealousy and paranoia because Tanzania like other East African countries used to be a British fortress which has been captured by America.44 The group has not defended animal rights, but the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country. According to Hizb ut-Tahrir, Western powers have used animal 44

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rights violations and the endangerment of wildlife to promote and defend their national interests. It is a claim that fits the narrative of Western neo-colonialism in the region. Hizb ut-Tahrir perceives animal rights as important only because they serve the overarching goal of confronting its adversaries. While the group subscribes to the Islamic treatment of animals, its attitude is reactive − not proactive. It takes a position on animal rights only if Muslims are involved.

Hamas The official position of Hamas is that it “takes animals’ welfare and rights into consideration because Islam recommends us to do so”.45 Nonetheless, the isolation of Gaza from the outside world has created a siege mentality affecting, among other things, Hamas’s perception of animals. In August 2015, for instance, a Palestinian newspaper reported a bizarre story about the naval unit of Hamas’s military wing capturing a dolphin that was allegedly used by the Israeli as a spy; it was claimed that the mammal was equipped with spying cameras and a device capable of firing arrows.46 While dolphins and other marine mammals have been trained by Russia and the United States for military purposes, it is doubtful whether the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have such capability. Indeed, no photographs of the dolphin were released by Hamas.47 It should be noted that there have been similar claims about Israeli use of animals for espionage and other purposes throughout the region. In December 2010, the governor of South Sinai had speculated that a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea could have been the work of Mossad “to hit tourism in Egypt”.48 On the other hand, Hamas has used donkeys laden with explosives to carry out attacks against Israeli forces.49 According to the IDF, the first such attack involving a donkey took place in June 1995.50 During the second Palestinian Intifada (2000−05), Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups continued the weaponization of animals.51 In Sunni Islam, donkeys do not have a significant religious significance. In contrast, Shi’a traditions have described the close relationship between the Prophet and His donkey Ya’fur, which probably was either a gift from the Patriarch of Alexandria Cyrus or a spoil of war from Khaybar.52 Hence, the military use of donkeys implicitly reveals the Sunni character of Hamas, that perceives them only as expendable beasts of burden. Also, the Palestinian group has targeted dogs as being dangerous and impure. In May 2017, Hamas banned owners of dogs from walking them in public places such as open markets and beaches. The spokesman of the Hamas-controlled police, Ayman al-Batniji, explained that “it is neither of our culture nor of our traditions . . . we are not against dogs, we use dogs in our work – the ban is simply to protect our women and children.”53 While the group justified its decision on the basis of public safety, it is clear that the Islamic perception of dogs was deliberately mentioned to demonstrate the rightness of the ban. Another indication of Hamas’s anti-dog prejudice is the use of “dog” as a derogatory phrase against the Jews. For example, a pro-Hamas preacher once stated that [the Jews] used to be a dog that frightened the entire neighbourhood with its barking. This dog begot a pup which was more wicked than its father. The Jews are always the same . . . Both dogs and pups bark and bite, and both are impure. That is the truth about the Jews.54 Such words indicate that dogs are viewed as inherently untrustworthy and aggressive. Thus, they can be compared to the Jews who supposedly have the same characteristics. 45

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Likewise, Hamas has targeted pigs not only as unclean, but also as a tool of Jewish conspiracy against the Palestinians. The group has used, for instance, the outbreak of swine flu in 2009 as a metaphor to describe the “danger of Zionism”. In the words of Yunis al-Astal, Hamas MP and cleric, people who are afraid of the bestial swine flu should be even more afraid of the measures taken by the Zionist devils, which are more lethal to humanity than pigs . . . The fact that some countries slaughtered their pigs constitutes a modest measure in confronting this danger, as long as those countries maintain intimate, strong ties with the Zionists, whom Allah has decreed to be the brothers of apes and pigs.55 Not only has al-Astal condemned countries affected by the swine flu that have maintained relations with Israel (e.g., Egypt), but he has used a verse from the Qur’an to dehumanize the Jews: Say: should I inform you of those worse than this in retribution from Allah? They are those whom Allah has cursed and upon whom He brought His wrath and of whom He made apes and swine, and who serve the devil. (5:60) Once again, Hamas has used the Qur’an as a basis of legitimacy for its propaganda against the Jews. Finally, the group has used animals for propaganda purposes. Hamas’s TV channel Al-Aqsa has broadcasted the children’s show The Pioneers of Tomorrow which features animal characters. For example, Farfour the Mouse once proclaimed that “we, tomorrow’s pioneers, will restore to this nation to its glory and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers. We will liberate al-Aqsa with Allah’s will and we will liberate Iraq.”56 This character was later replaced by Nahoul the Bee, who was featured abusing animals in one episode; it flung cats by the tail and threw stones at lions in the Gaza Zoo.57 Following Nahoul’s “martyrdom”, Assud the Bunny became the main animal character in the show. Assud introduced itself as follows: “I come from the diaspora, carrying the Key of Return . . . Allah willing, we will use this key to liberate our al-Aqsa mosque . . . we are all martyrdomseekers.”58 The Pioneers of Tomorrow have portrayed animals and insects as aggressive and violent. These animal characters are fiercely committed to the liberation of Palestine and use hateful language against the Jews. The choice of animals and insects is not always coincidental. The 16th chapter of the Qur’an is named after the bee, mentioned in verses 68 and 69: And thy Lord revealed to the bee: Make hives in the mountains and in the trees and in what they build. Then eat of all fruits and walk in the ways of thy Lord submissively. There comes forth from their bellies a beverage of many hues, in which there is healing for men. Therein is surely a sign for a people who reflect. (16:68–69) Thus, the bee serves as an example of dedication, determination and eventual success. The Qur’an does not mention mice but there are some hadith that state that the killing of mice is permissible. For example, a hadith narrated by al-Bukhari maintains that 46

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“there are five animals for which there is no blame on the one who kills them: crows, kites, mice, scorpions and mad dogs.”59 Hence, the appearance of Farfour the Mouse seems unorthodox, because it is a rodent that has a negative image in Islam. Farfour clearly resembles the iconic American cartoon character Mickey Mouse that has already been attacked by conservative Muslims. In the words of Saudi cleric Muhammad alMunajid: according to Islamic law, the mouse is [a] repulsive, corrupting creature . . . [they] have become wonderful and are loved by children . . . Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.60 Hamas ignored a mainstream Muslim belief about mice probably because Farfour the Mouse proved very popular among young viewers. Of all the animals that appeared in the show, rabbits are the least theologically important. The Qur’an does not mention rabbit, which is halal meat for Sunnis.61 In contrast, most Shi’as consider rabbits to be unclean. For example, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has argued that “it is haram to eat the meat of rabbit, elephant, bear, monkey, jerboa, mouse, snake, hedgehog, and crawling animals and insects.”62 However, the selection of Assud the Bunny did not have any religious meaning for Hamas; it was chosen probably only because it looked more appealing to children. In other words, Hamas’s Pioneers of Tomorrow was less religion-driven and more politics-focused.

Conclusions Islam has understood animals as creatures of God that humans must respect and protect. Non-humans are co-habitats of the planet that have their own rights. Indeed, they form their own communities and worship God like humans do. It is not an exaggeration to say that Islam is one of the most animal-friendly religions in the world. Having said that, Islamist groups have followed different approaches towards animals. Despite a generic acknowledgement of mankind’s duty to protect animal life, the Brotherhood has not developed any concrete proposals. While in power, the Ikhwan did not promote animal rights as the Sisi regime later did. Yet, the influential Islamic scholar Qaradawi has written about the relationship between humans and non-humans. The question of halal meat has been at the forefront of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s approach to animal rights, since it has become a symbolic battleground for Muslim self-expression and identity-building in the West. Additionally, African branches of Hizb ut-Tahrir have perceived poaching and smuggling of wildlife as proof of capitalist exploitation and human greed that require an Islamic response. In contrast, Hamas has a problematic record in dealing with animals, both practically and symbolically. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, animal welfare is not a top priority for any Palestinian group. Overall, Islamist representations of animals have reflected traditions and beliefs, motivational strategies, and propaganda priorities. Most Islamists have perceived animals as passive objects of human agency. This approach deviates from the body of Islamic teachings and norms defining mankind’s relationship to the animal world as equal and respectful. Indeed, Islamists have attributed characteristics to animals, which echo cultural and religious beliefs and bias. Despite the theological acceptance of animals as co-inhabitants, Islamists have promoted the demonization of certain animals. 47

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Notes 1 Muhammad Ali, The Holy Quran (Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaʻat Islam,1951). 2 See Al-Hafiz Masri, “Animal Experimentation: The Muslim Viewpoint,” in Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science ed. Tom Regan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), 171–198; Al-Hafiz Masri, Islamic Concern for Animals (Petersfield, Hants: The Athene Trust, 1987); Mustafa Mahmud Helmy, Islam and Environment 2 – Animal Life (Kuwait: Environment Protection Council, 1989), and James L. Wescoat Jr., “The ‘Right of Thirst’ for Animals in Islamic Law: A Comparative Approach,” Society and Space 13, no. 6 (1995): 637–654. 3 Mulyadhi Kartanegara, Essentials of Islamic Epistemology (Bandar Seri Begawan: University of Brunei Darussalam, 2014), 48. 4 Coeli Fitzpatick and Adam Hani Walker, Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopaedia of the Prophet of the God (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 29. 5 Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 46, Hadith 27, available at https://sunnah.com/bukhari/46/27 6 Ali Mohamed Al-Damkhi, “Environmental Ethics in Islam: Principles, Violations, and Future Perspectives,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 65, no. 1 (2008): 16. 7 Richard Foltz, Animals in Islamic Traditions and Muslim Cultures (London: Oneworld, 2014), 55. 8 Foltz, Animals in Islamic Traditions, 55. 9 Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 3, Book 50, Hadith 891, available at http://sunnah.com/bukhari/54/19 10 Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 56, Hadith 65, available at https://sunnah.com/bukhari/56/65 11 Sunan an-Nasa’i, The Book of Horses, Races and Shooting, available at http://sunnah.com/search/ ?q=horse 12 Annemarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 32. 13 Sahih al-Bukhari 2365, Book 42, Hadith 13, available at http://sunnah.com/bukhari/42/13 14 Fatima Mernissi, “A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam”, in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 121. 15 Foltz, Animals in Islamic Tradition, 130. 16 Abu Huraira, Hadith 3827, available at www.sahihmuslim.com/sps/smm/sahihmuslim.cfm? scn=dspchaptersfull&BookID=10&ChapterID=624 17 Andy Dolan, “Muslim Bus Drivers Refuse to Let Guide Dogs on Board,” Daily Mail, 19 July 2010, available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295749/Muslim-bus-drivers-refuse-let-guide-dogsboard.html 18 Foltz, Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures, 131–132. 19 Fitzpatick and Walker, Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopaedia of the Prophet of the God, 25. 20 John Alexander Chapman, Maxims of Ali (Lahore: Sh. M. Ashraf, 1968). 21 Jim al-Khalili, “Science: Islam’s Forgotten Geniuses,” The Telegraph, 29 January 2008, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3323462/Science-Islams-forgotten-geniuses. html 22 Ikhwan al-Safa, The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn: A Tenth-Century Ecological Fable of the Pure Brethren of Basra (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978). 23 Robert Irwin, “Political Thought in Thousand and One Nights,” in Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective ed. Ulrich Marzolph (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 110. 24 Mohammad Yusuf Siddiq, “An Ecological Journey in Muslim Bengal,” in Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust eds. Richard C. Foltz, Frederick M. Denny and Azizan Baharuddin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 455. 25 Foltz, Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures, 34–35. 26 Gehan S.A. Ibrahim, Virtues in Muslim Culture: An Interpretation from Islamic Literature, Art and Architecture (London: New Generation Publishing, 2014), 150. 27 Sayyid Qutb, A Child from the Village (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 127. 28 Magdi Abdelhadi, “The Muslim Brotherhood Connects with Egypt’s Rural Majority,” The Guardian, 25 June 2012, available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/muslim-brotherhoodegypt 29 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, available at www.usislam.org/pdf/Lawful& Prohibited.pdf, 172.

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Political Islam and animal issues 30 The Muslim Brotherhood Official English Website, “MP: 400,000 Pigs in Cairo Threaten Spread of Human Epidemic,” 27 April 2009, available at www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=20015&ref= search.php 31 Securitization is the process of transforming an issue into a security threat. See Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). 32 The Haaretz, “Morsi Called Israelis ‘Descendants of Apes and Pigs’ in 2010 Video,” 4 January 2013, available at www.haaretz.com/israel-news/morsi-called-israelis-descendants-of-apes-and-pigs-in2010-video-1.491979 33 See Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt 2012, available at www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/ laws/en/eg/eg047en.pdf 34 Mara Alioto, “Animal Rights in the Egyptian Constitution,” Northwestern University School of Law, 15 May 2014, available at https://northwesternlawcomparativeconlaw.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/ animal-rights-in-the-egyptian-constitution/ 35 See Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt 2014, State Information Service, available at www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/Dustor-en001.pdf 36 Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, “Halal Meat on the Chopping Block Again!” 10 March 2014, available at www.hizb.org.uk/viewpoint/halal-meat-on-the-chopping-block-again/ 37 Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir, “Cow Slaughter Ban in India – Milking of Democracy Loophole,” 10 April 2015, available at http://hizb-ut-tahrir.info/en/index.php/site-sections/articles/ analysis/7533.html 38 For instance, a hadith narrated by Abu Hurairah states, A prostitute was forgiven by Allah, because, passing by a panting dog near a well and seeing that the dog was thirsty, she took off her shoe, and tying it with her head-cover she drew out some water for it. So Allah forgave her because of that. See Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, “Halal Meat on the Chopping Block Again!” 39 Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, “Halal Meat on the Chopping Block Again!” 40 Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, “Halal Meat on the Chopping Block Again!” 41 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1996). 42 Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir, “Cow Slaughter Ban in India – Milking of Democracy Loophole,” 10 April 2015, available at http://hizb-ut-tahrir.info/en/index.php/site-sections/ articles/analysis/7533.html 43 Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir, “Cow Slaughter Ban in India.” 44 Masoud Msellem, Deputy Media Representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in East Africa, “Crime by Britain and America is Greater than Poaching”, 13 February 2014, available at www.hizb-ut-tahrir. info/en/index.php/2017-01-28-14-59-33/news-comment/download/1635_765c33067ee80d8d1 fa1cce4205965f2.html [link is broken]. 45 Interview with Hussam Abdulhadi, Director of Foreign Media Unit, Hamas Information Office, 29 January 2018 (email correspondence). 46 Inna Lazareva, “Israeli ‘Spy Dolphin’ Caught off Gaza Coast,” The Telegraph, 19 August 2015, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11813322/Israeli-spy-dolphincaught-off-Gaza-coast.html 47 BBC News, “Hamas ‘Seizes Israeli Spy Dolphin’ Off Gaza,” 20 August 2015, www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-middle-east-34001790 48 Yolande Knell, “Shark Attacks Not Linked to Mossad Says Israel,” BBC News, 7 December 2010, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11937285 49 Robert Tait, “Donkey Suicide Bomb Stopped by Israeli Troops in Gaza,” The Telegraph, 19 July 2014, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10977818/Donkey-suicidebomb-stopped-by-Israeli-troops-in-Gaza.html 50 Israeli Defence Forces, “Hamas Attacks Israeli Soldiers with Explosive Donkey,” www.idfblog. com/blog/2014/07/19/hamas-using-animals-perpetrate-terror-attacks/ 51 Israeli Defence Forces, “Hamas Attacks Israeli Soldiers”. 52 In the latter scenario, Ya’fur was able to speak to the Prophet and explained that it belonged to a line of donkeys serving prophets, including Jesus. See Khalid Sindawi, “The Donkey of the

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Prophet in Shı̄ ’ite Tradition,” Al-Masā q: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 18, no. 1 (2006): 90–93. Greg Wilford, “Hamas Bans Dog Walking Through the Gaza Strip to ‘Protect Women and Children’,” The Independent, 20 May 2017, available at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/ hamas-gaza-strip-occupied-palestinian-territories-facebook-israel-dogs-dog-walking-a7746101.html Al Aqsa TV, “On Hamas TV Friday Sermon: Calls to Annihilate the Jews, Who Are Compared to Dogs,” 3 April 2009, available at www.memri.org/tv/hamas-tv-friday-sermon-calls-annihilatejews-who-are-compared-dogs/transcript Al Aqsa TV, “Hamas MP and Cleric Yunis Al-Astal on Swine Flu and ‘the Brothers of Apes and Pigs’,” 15 May 2009, available at www.memri.org/tv/hamas-mp-and-cleric-yunis-al-astal-swineflu-and-brothers-apes-and-pigs/transcript Palestinian Media Watch, “Hamas Mickey Mouse Speaks of Islamist Insurgency,” 16 April 2007, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZEGsnWZKh8 MEMRI TV, “Hamas Bee Abusing Animals,” 10 August 2007, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GXHSCgSN5zg MEMRI TV, “Hamas’ Children TV with a Terrorist Jew Eating Rabbit,” 2–9 February 2008, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YU__vFw_0E Muhammad Saed Abdul-Rahman, Islam: Questions and Answers – Manners, vol. 17 (London: MSA Publications Limited, 2007), 26. MEMRI TV, “Islam Wants to Kill Mickey Mouse,” 27 August 2008, available at www.youtube. com/watch?time_continue=82&v=6cTZ9-TCvMc See IslamWeb, “Is Eating of Rabbit Prohibited?”, Fatwa 84598, 29 July 2002, www.islamweb.net/ emainpage/index.php?page=showfatwa&Option=FatwaId&Id=84598 Al-Sayyid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, “Dialogue on Slaughtering and Hunting,” The Official Website of the Office of the Eminence, available at www.sistani.org/english/book/49/2413/

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5 THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Ideological, political and organizational developments Barbara Zollner

Introduction The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is one of the largest and most established Islamist organizations. Its rise to political prominence presents an ideological response to social, economic, and political challenges in Egypt of the past century.1 Founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, it remains an influential politico-religious player in Egypt. Internationally, the organization has a presence through a network of members in exile and like-minded Brothers as well as branches and sister organizations. The MB strives for the establishment of an Islamic State. While the movement pursues this goal through the gradual Islamization of society, it has a record of political opposition against Egyptian ruling regimes. Its history is marked by periods of violence and persecution, but also of accommodation and political participation.

History of the Muslim Brotherhood – an overview The Muslim Brotherhood (Jama‘a al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin; also, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun; MB) was founded in 1928 by a group surrounding the secondary-schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna.2 Starting in Ismailiya, the MB found its fellowship in the lower-middle and growing working class. By the 1930s and throughout the 1940s, it was a mass-movement that was able to mobilize support in major Egyptian cities. The MB’s headquarters moved to Cairo in 1932 and shortly afterward opened its first branches in capital cities of neighboring countries. From the onset, the MB defined itself as a group pursuing Islamic reform. While the group’s initial goal was concerned with education,3 the political turbulence during Egypt’s constitutional monarchy (1928–52) and the persistent influence of Britain over the country’s domestic affairs set the foundations for the Brotherhood’s evolution into a political mass-movement.4 In the preWWII period, the MB stood out for its anti-British/anti-Western agitation and its opposition to Egypt’s political system – themes that recurrently found resonance despite changing contexts.5 The MB presented itself as a nationalist force independent of party interests and guided purely by religious fervor. When failures of Egypt’s constitutional monarchy became evident in the post-war 51

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years, the MB used its outreach to mobilize extra-parliamentary protests, which contributed to destabilizing an already fragile democracy. During the period of increased political violence and anarchy, which marked the last years of Egypt’s constitutional monarchy, Islamists such as the MB, but also its political competitors – the nationalist Wafd and communist movements – developed paramilitary units.6 The MB’s military wing, the so-called al-Nizam al-Khass (Special Unit, also referred to as al-Tanzim al-Sirri, i.e., Secret Organization), was responsible for several high-profile acts of terror, amongst them the murder of Sa‘adi Prime Minister Muhammad al-Nuqrashi in December 1948. It operated through tightly organized military units that were commanded by a paramilitary leadership that was hand-picked by and directly answerable to al-Banna. Because of this, the paramilitary wing was – at least nominally – administratively autonomous. This organizational constellation created an obstacle after al-Banna’s death as his successor ran into difficulties to bring the paramilitary units under his control. Al-Banna was gunned down in January 1949 by members of Egypt’s Secret Service as an act of retaliation for al-Nuqrashi’s assassination. While a circle of al-Banna’s close associates kept the movement going, the circumstances furthered secrecy amongst the MB cadre and strengthened the influence of the paramilitary wing. When Hasan al-Hudaybi became Murshid (Supreme Guide) in 1951, the hope of repairing MB’s relations with the state and restoring internal unity guided his appointment.7 However, his nomination glossed over internal frictions and put off fundamental intra-organizational discussions on the MB’s future direction. Questions of intra-organizational democracy, the top-heavy hierarchical structure, an aura of secrecy, and radical tendencies remained unresolved and continued to haunt the organization at different phases in its history. Setting out under extremely difficult circumstances, al-Hudaybi led the MB for two politically stormy decades. In July 1952, a group of Free Officers instigated a coup d’état and toppled the constitutional monarchy. Forming a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), a circle of military officers took power, which included Mohammad Naguib, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and Anwar al-Sadat. MB’s dealings with the RCC were initially positive; many MB members, amongst them also Sayyid Qutb, strongly supported the revolution.8 Relations eventually turned sour over the issue of the MB’s stake in political affairs. Al-Hudaybi wanted to develop the MB into a nongovernmental organization akin to a political foundation that refrains from direct involvement in state governance. His position set him on a collision course with leading MB members and with Gamal Abd al-Nasser, whose influence grew steadily within RCC. Debilitated by discontent within the ranks over self-definition and political strategy, but also with regards to the continuation of the paramilitary units, the MB was unable to react to al-Nasser’s power games. When shots were fired at al-Nasser on 19 October 1954 during celebrations of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty in Alexandria, the MB was accused of orchestrating an assassination. October 1954 marks the beginning of a period of persecution that lasted almost twenty years: the organization was outlawed; its leaders received severe sentences, and thousands of MB members of all ranks were incarcerated. Abd al-Nasser used the incident to purge the ranks of the RCC, ascend to the presidency, and establish his autocratic populist regime, which he led until he died in 1971. The MB’s prison years were a crucial period for the movement’s ideological development.9 The person most associated with the prison years is Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in August 1966 after being charged for conspiring against the state. His most propagandistic work, Milestones (Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq), presents a simple dichotomy: ‘true Islam’ against its enemies.10 With Milestones, Qutb sets the ideological tenor for violent Islamist activism, thus providing the ideological base for extremist and militant groups.11 In response to the radicalization within the MB, and in an attempt to 52

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counter the rise of militant Islamist competitor groups, a circle of leaders surrounding the Murshid Hasan al-Hudaybi – amongst them his son Ma’mun – began to put together a document with the title ‘Preachers not Judges’ (Du‘at la Qudat), that outlines the theological and juridical principles of a politically and socially moderate activism.12 Towards the end of al-Nasser’s presidency and, furthermore, under the rule of Anwar alSadat as his successor, state policy towards Islamist movements and, most notably amongst them the MB, changed dramatically.13 Hoping for support to push for a shift in economic and foreign policy, the new president, Anwar al-Sadat, declared an amnesty. The MB publicly renounced clandestine activities and political violence, committing itself to work within the political and legal framework. Murshid al-Hudaybi, and, after his death in 1973, his successor Umar al-Tilmisani, began to rebuild the Brotherhood’s public and political power. The ideological and strategic development of the MB during this period is in stark contrast to the violent activities of Egyptian terrorist groups that emerged in the late 1960s and spread in the 1970s. Groups such as al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (TH), al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya (JI), or Jama‘at al-Jihad (JJ), which followed the path of Qutbists, opted to pursue Islamist militancy and became the nucleus of Salafi-Jihadist trends.14 While extremist Islamist groups carried out several high-profile attempts on the lives of politicians, notably assassinating President Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981, the MB spoke out against terrorist acts.15 This status quo between state and MB did not, at least initially, change when Hosni Mubarak came to power. However, the Brotherhood’s aim to gain influence and legitimacy, first through informal networks, then through its successes in social movement organizations (SMO), and finally through its participation in elections, led to increasing resentment and, since the mid-1990s, to outright persecution.16 The MB’s political triumph was not matched by internal cohesion and unity. The two successors of Umar al-Tilmisani, namely Muhammad Hamid Abu Nasr (1986–96) and Mustafa Mashhur (1996–2002), were rather weak. The locus of power thus gradually shifted to the Guidance Office (Maktab al-Irshad).17 Ma’mun al-Hudaybi – the son of a previous Murshid, a member of the Guidance Office and the Official Speaker of the MB – took a leading role within the Guidance Office, the highest executive council, and later took charge as of the organization as its Murshid in 2002. The dominance of a closed circle of members in the Guidance Office in making fundamental executive decisions raised issues about intra-organizational democracy and transparency. Literature characterizes internal disputes as a conflict between an ‘old generation’ and a group of younger, politically active members.18 Generational differences did initially play a role. However, there are more fundamental differences related to ideological vision, religious beliefs, and, most importantly, attitudes towards political participation and democracy.19 The ‘young generation’ consisted of members who had joined the MB in the 1970s as student leaders and then matured to become leaders of professional syndicates and, as such, represent the interests of Egypt’s educated professional classes.20 Driving the agenda of the MB first through informal platforms but later also by aiming for parliamentary representation, they were to become the political face of the organization. While the Guidance Office tolerated their political activities and, in fact, gained an advantage from the MB’s inroads into Egypt’s social middle and parts of the upper classes, this circle of hardliners – often called the ‘old guard’ – had a conservative perception of religion and society. As many Guidance Office members experienced al-Nasser’s proscription, distrust shaped their attitudes to the state, its institutions, and other political actors. For them, organizational unity and the long-term goal of establishing an Islamic state that is underpinned by their version of an Islamic ideal are central to strategic decisions. In this mindset, political work is part of religiously inspired 53

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activism as long as it serves the overall objectives. Hence, the Guidance Office prioritized missionary work (da‘wa) and social welfare engagement in the decades until the Arab Spring, yet reached for political power when the opportunity presented itself in 2011.21 The clash between the conservative leadership and the reform-oriented politically active group first openly broke loose when a group of reformists around Abou Elela Mady voiced their intention to establish the al-Wasat Party in 1996.22 The Guidance Office rejected these plans, and Mady was forced out of the MB. Under Mahdi Akif, who succeeded M. al-Hudaybi in 2004, calls for ideological reform, a new strategic direction, and more democratic inner-organizational participation did not quieten down. While the MB celebrated a landslide success in the 2005 parliamentary elections, questions about the organization’s political position, reappeared.23 Akif tried to find a solution to the internal disputes and allowed the drafting of a Party Platform Statement in 2007. As conservatives attempted to imprint their positions regarding the primacy of religion in legislative, the status of women and non-Muslims onto the draft, the document was leaked to the public, leading to open exchanges between the two factions. When Akif resigned a few months later in December 2009, tensions did not quiet down. In a highly controversial election process, which declared Muhammad Badi‘a as the new Murshid, the conservative majority in the Guidance Office rebuffed the attempts of reformists to install the frontrunner, Muhammad Habib. The selection of a Badi‘a as Murshid prompted the outrage of the reformist wing since he represents the political vision of the ‘old guard’. In the elections of the Guidance Office in January 2010, a majority of seats were allocated to Badi‘a’s supporters, thus alienating reformists within the organization.24 The Arab Spring of 2011 was a complete about-face in the fortunes of the MB.25 Although the leadership was reluctant to exert its power in support of the Tahrir protest, the MB benefited from the political changes once President Hosni Mubarak was ousted from office. Its political opposition during decades of authoritarian rule, its links to the Egyptian urban middle class, and its social engagement as a significant welfare provider, paved the way for the organization’s political triumph in 2011 and 2012.26 The Guidance Office now saw in politics the opportunity to imprint their vision of religion onto society through participating in the state-building process.27 The opportunities of the Arab Spring had a significant impact on intra-organizational constellations. Previously unresolved issues regarding internal reform reappeared and blended with new concerns about whether the MB should establish a political party and if so, how to define the relationship between party and movement, or whether the organization should refrain from political decision-making processes – either by acting as a lobby group, as a political foundation or, perhaps, by focusing only on social welfare provisions. The reformist wing received a blow when the Guidance Office took charge of the institutionalization of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in early summer 2011. Leading MB reformists, such as Abd al-Mun’im Abu al-Futuh, Islam Lotfi, Ibrahim Za’frani, and Muhammad Qassas, were forced to leave and started to set up other Islamist parties.28 The rising influence of the MB in Egypt’s debates about a future system of governance became apparent in the referendum of 19 March 2011.29 The extent of the success of the FJP and the Democratic Alliance in the parliamentary elections of November/ December 2011 was somewhat unexpected. Securing 48% of votes overall, the Democratic Alliance with the FJP as its spearhead became the largest parliamentary bloc. As the MB became a dominant force in Egypt’s Parliament, tensions between the MB on the one hand and its political contenders, outright opponents, and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) on the other hand started to dominate the fragile democratization process of 2012.30 54

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Although the MB candidate Muhammad Morsi won the presidential elections in late June 2012, the situation deteriorated as the Parliament was suspended by judicial decree earlier that month. Attempts by President Morsi to reinstate the Parliament using the powers of a controversial presidential decree backfired as his opponents regarded it as an effort to undermine the principle of the division of powers and as a hidden attempt to imprint the influence of the MB onto the state-building process.31 With the Parliament remaining dissolved, the MB’s increasing imprint on the newly forming democracy overshadowed the constitution-drafting process.32 When the Constitution was accepted through a public referendum that took place 15–22 December 2012, it initially seemed that the Morsi-led government had managed to withstand the pressure. Only a few months later, however, following mass demonstrations and civil unrest against the regime and the MB, the SCAF under the command of Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi intervened to remove Morsi from office. In the weeks following the coup d’état of June 2013, the MB and its supporters organized sit-ins and rallies, notably in Raba‘a al-‘Adawiya Square and al-Nahda Square. On 14 August 2013, the military raided both squares, killing and injuring hundreds of proMorsi protestors. Shortly after, in September 2013, the MB was declared a terrorist organization.33 Arrests of MB leaders followed, targeting members of its central Guidance Office and Shura Council particularly, before widening the persecution to the movement’s rank and file. To curb the MB’s influence on all levels of society and to break any further support for the ousted Morsi government, all areas of the public domain – civil services, military ranks, the judiciary, syndicates, and other non-governmental organizations, the media, and universities – were purged systematically. The MB’s commercial holdings and welfare outlets were closed, and its financial assets were confiscated. The measures brought the MB to the brink of collapse. Few leaders and members of the MB could flee into exile.34 Qatar, Istanbul, and London became new centers of activity. Despite being severely damaged by the events in Egypt and, as will be explained later, embroiled in intra-organizational debates, the MB has been able to survive, albeit on a much smaller scale.35 Nevertheless, there are signs that organizational networks are re-constituting, although it remains unclear what the lasting impact of an executive in exile will be on leading, administering, and perhaps changing hitherto existing organizational structures and ideological premises.

Ideology There is an ongoing dispute within the scholarly community about the MB’s ideological framework and, more particularly, whether the organization commits itself to democratic ideals and non-violence, or whether it endorses political extremism, violence, and militancy. Discussions about the ‘true’ intentions of the MB are often intrinsically linked to political developments in Egypt and the MENA region. As there remain uncertainties about the legacies of key figures, most importantly Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the MB’s theological basis and its ideological interpretation remain subject of continuous controversy.36 There is no doubt that al-Banna personifies the organization’s ideological core and identity.37 Despite many contradictions in the MB’s historical decisions and disputes over strategy, members see themselves unified by al-Banna’s ideals, which are characterized by active political engagement to bring about national confidence, social justice, and economic progress through an emphasis on religion. Because al-Banna emphasized activism over intellectual erudition, his legacy is scattered over several sources – mostly speeches and public 55

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addresses, a few statements and pamphlets, and, finally, his autobiography. These usually relate to specific historical events and situations. Al-Banna’s legacy and the ideological premises they portray are therefore somewhat fragmented and remain the subject of continuous debates amongst MB members and competing wings within the organization.38 A universalist concept of Islam that penetrates all aspects of life is at the heart of Hasan al-Banna’s reasoning. To him, Islamist activism encompasses the individual and the social, but also synthesizes the religious and the political.39 Inspired by Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, al-Banna believed in the idea of Islamic reform as the solution to the perceived decline of the Muslim world. In the context of political challenges, he equated Islamic revival and, ultimately, the establishment of an Islamic state with the restoration of national sovereignty and independence from imperialist influences. Comparable to other mass-movements of the early twentieth century, al-Banna pursued reform through populist activism. Fusing the personal, social, political, and religious, he had the vision to establish various social outlets – educational facilities, sports units, a paramilitary wing, companies, news and print units, but also places of worship. Beyond the social purpose, these facilities became center to MB recruitment, mobilization, training, selection, networking, and public protest.40 Al-Banna’s general political goals also find expression in an elusive strategic framework. His candidacy in the 1944 parliamentary elections has, for example, been called upon by the prodemocratic reformist faction, while certain critical remarks on party politics have been used to express reservations against a democratic system. Al-Banna’s position on political violence, gender equality, and the relationship to other religious communities and denominations are also subject to disputes. Any analysis of MB ideology needs to engage with a set of ideas that developed in the course of the Brotherhood’s most challenging time: the years of persecution between 1954 and 1971.41 It is often, albeit not quite correctly, equated to the evolution of Sayyid Qutb’s radical vision. It was during the prison years that Qutb gradually turned to extreme views of an Islamist revolution. In his best-known work, Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), he adapts the notions of hukm Allah (divine sovereignty), jahiliyyah (ignorance), and jihad (religious struggle) to equate religious belief with action, and Islamist activism with the establishment of an Islamic state.42 Qutb hypothesizes that it is not legitimate to support state systems that, in his view, are incongruent with Islam. Crucially, he charges majority-Muslim states, their officials, and the public, even individuals that support a regime inadvertently, with apostasy. As classical Islamic law regards apostasy as a crime punishable by death, Qutb implicitly justifies militancy and dismisses gradualism or leniency. His radical vision for Islamist activism influenced future discussions on the Brotherhood’s ideological profile and contributed to a significant extent to the formulation of the motivational frames of various Salafi-Jihadist groups that have evolved since the 1970s.43 Qutb was hanged in 1966. The MB holds on to the legacy of Qutb.44 There are distinct arguments that stand out in attempts to defend his legacy. The first position is to regard Qutb’s radical philosophy as the consequence of severe repression and torture during his prison experience. In this attempt to contextualize his views, the MB leadership distances itself from violent activism as pursued by terrorist groups. A second line of argument focuses on Qutb’s intellectual legacy beyond Milestones, pointing out that his works include a voluminous Qur’anic commentary, writings on social justice, and several literary works. This line of argument points to the multi-faceted nature of Qutb’s work and warns against reducing his legacy to a single text. Prompted by the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, some supporters of Qutb’s ideas – Qutbists – argued against the defense of the Egyptian state system, as they deemed its leaders 56

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illegitimate.45 In response to the growing ideological radicalization posed by Qutbists, the MB leadership surrounding Hasan al-Hudaybi issued the book Du‘at la Qudat (Preachers not Judges). This official document emphasized religious moderation and gradualism in activism. While alBanna provided the MB with an ideological identity and while Qutb is idealized as a martyr, al-Hudaybi detailed and standardized the movement’s ideological frame and set it within the theological and juridical repository of Sunni religious law. Based on this, the MB developed strategic stances during the leadership of Umar alTilmisani.46 With the return of the MB to public life in the 1970s, issues such as the organization’s position vis-à-vis democracy and the Egyptian state gained importance. Related to these are also questions regarding the Brotherhood’s participation in elections and its view on economic liberalization and privatization. With al-Tilmisani, the Muslim Brotherhood adopted an accommodationist strategy, which aims for democratic participation rather than fighting for revolutionary objectives. Still, internal debates about the practical application of its ideological premises weigh heavily on the organization’s recent strategic and political trajectory. At stake is the issue of whether the MB core mission lies in religious missionary work (da‘wa), commitment to social welfare and social justice or whether its main focus is on political action and political opposition. Members of the Guidance Office epitomize conservative attitudes towards religion and society. While they reject violence and instead favor gradual societal change, they pursue a path that aims to extend social and religious influence and control in all aspects of public and private life. In the 1970s and 1980s, a ‘young generation’ that had its roots in student organizations began to voice their view that a more explicitly political definition of the MB’s vision and activism is needed.47 As the influence of the new generation in informal and later also formal politics grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s, they demanded more transparency and more say in decision-making processes, thereby challenging the authority of the ‘old guard’ in the Guidance Office. The conflict between both factions was not only a strategic matter but was a symptom of a more fundamental ideological battle between opposing factions. Most members of the new generation had a more libertarian understanding of religion, which centered on social ethics, equality, and human rights as core religious values; most members of the old guard – most of whom were men of a generation that had endured years in prison – held deep suspicions towards the state and politics. Even though the designation along generational lines has dissolved in more recent years and becomes increasingly misleading, the terms ‘old guard’ and ‘young generation’ are still used today. In the post-Arab Spring and post-coup crisis, it refers to two competing factions that continue to battle over strategic decisions and administrative power.48

Political power Hasan al-Banna did not propose a clear political message, let alone a political program. He defines religion as the solution to social, economic, and political issues, on both the individual and public levels. Al-Banna aimed to bring religion to the masses and thus change society and politics. Not dissimilar to other mass-movements of the early twentieth century, grassroots community engagement that was administered through a top-down hierarchical network became the means for mobilizing political protest on a large scale and forming a strong extra-parliamentary political opposition.49 Mainly through informal networks and personal relationships, al-Banna managed to spin a web that connected the MB to the political elite and influential leaders, particularly the Wafd. Links also existed to the religious 57

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establishment led by al-Azhar as well as officers in the Egyptian military, amongst them officers which joined the circle of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) such as Gamal Abd al-Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat. Al-Banna’s strategy to use the power of the Muslim Brotherhood as a political protest movement rather than as a political party was particularly successful in the context of Egypt’s struggle to define itself as a state independent of British influence and as a nationstate adopting a modern parliamentary system. Al-Banna argued that political parties of Egypt’s constitutional monarchy merely followed their short-sighted self-interest rather than representing the will of the people.50 Speaking of hizbiyya (‘partyism’), he regarded parties as dishonest, corrupt, and incompatible with Islamic principles. While al-Banna rejected parties, he supported parliamentarism as a form of governance and as a forum for the representative participation in legislation. The MB under al-Banna actively rallied against the suspension of Parliament during and after the war period. Further evidence of al-Banna’s commitment to parliamentary politics is the fact that he put his name forward as an independent candidate for elections in 1944. The MB’s political activities during al-Banna’s years are overshadowed by political violence. Al-Banna initiated the establishment of a paramilitary wing in 1936.51 The Secret Unit gained field experience when supporting Palestinian fighters in the uprising against the British Mandate. In the 1940s, the MB military wing turned increasingly against the state. It was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of public figures as well as orchestrating several bomb attacks and shoot-outs with police as well as instigating an armed rebellion against the Sa‘adi government. The violence culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi on 28 December 1948, which the Secret Police retaliated with the murder of al-Banna on 12 February 1949. Al-Banna’s successor, Hasan al-Hudaybi, attempted to restrain the influence of the Secret Unit, but it remained active until October 1954.52 There is no evidence of attempts to revive the paramilitary unit later. Al-Hudaybi’s early years coincided with the July 1952 coup d’état during which a group of officers took control. The Muslim Brotherhood, which already had ties to some Free Officers in the pre-coup period, was invited to participate in reshaping the government. However, alHudaybi’s lack of full MB leadership support and his inability to bring the Secret Unit under control, made the MB vulnerable.53 Relations with the RCC gradually eroded in the course of 1953/54 but finally broke down completely in October 1954, when the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of instigating an assassination attempt on al-Nasser in Alexandria. The event marked the end to any hopes of political participation and the beginning of a period of persecution that lasted almost two decades. The MB was banned; six key figures were hanged, and thousands received lengthy prison sentences or disappeared. With the MB removed as political weight, al-Nasser was able to build his autocratic regime. Throughout almost two decades of Abd al-Nasser’s autocratic rule (1954–71), the MB’s political influence was severely curtailed. With the ascent of Anwar al-Sadat, relations with the regime relaxed. Aiming to bolster his rule as the new president, al-Sadat declared an amnesty and allowed Islamist groups greater freedom.54 Although the 1954 prohibition was officially not lifted and, in fact, remained in place until the Arab Spring of 2011, the MB managed to overcome restrictions and expand its influence in society and politics. It gained a stronghold amongst student organizations in the 1970s and subsequently gained considerable political sway in professional syndicates from the mid-1980s onwards, taking leading positions in the professional associations for medicine, law, journalism, engineering, agronomy, education, commerce, and pharmacy.55 Making inroads in these syndicates, the MB gradually gained sympathy and support amongst Egypt’s professional social circles and urban middle class. 58

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From 1984 onwards, the MB participated in elections and thus took steps towards becoming an opposition through formal political channels.56 As the MB did not run as a recognized party, it circumvented electoral law by running its members as candidates on the lists of established parties. In the parliamentary election of 1984, the alliance with the liberal Wafd Party won six (of 360) seats; in 1987, the MB extended this strategy to run a tripartite alliance between the MB, the liberal Wafd and the socialist Labour parties, and it won 36 seats. The MB’s success in forming a parliamentary opposition soon triggered hostile responses from the Mubarak regime, which, despite offering lip service to democratic reform, had no intentions to give up its authoritarian rule.57 In response to the political inroads made by the MB and its allies, the electoral law was changed in 1990, replacing a party-list system with individual candidacies that competed for seats allocated to constituencies. Several opposition parties reacted with a boycott. Although the MB ran candidates in the next 1995 parliamentary election, it was overshadowed by heavy-handed government harassment, the arrest of many MB members, and widespread election-rigging. The elections of 2000 were fought under similar pressures; however, the MB adapted its strategy to the electoral system. By running independent candidates, the MB managed to increase its influence in the Parliament in 2000, gaining 17 seats. Five years later, in 2005, the MB had a landslide victory, winning 88 seats.58 The MB’s successes at the ballots constituted a strategic dilemma for the MB.59 The extension of MB’s political power increased the risk of evoking drastic regime responses against the organization and its members; furthermore, the MB’s political participation and perhaps even further conciliation with the regime could have been perceived by the MB’s constituency as a sign of accomodation with Mubarak’s rule. In any case, the regime pushed back the MB in the November 2010 parliamentary elections, in which it managed to gain only a single seat. Through extensive electoral infringements, vote-rigging, and violence, the regime secured NDP dominance in Parliament, preparing for a setting that would support the handover of presidential powers to Mubarak’s son, Gamal.60 Only a year later, demonstrations broke out, which ended the rule of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and the eminence of the NDP. The Arab Spring had pivotal effects on the fortunes of the MB’s political presence. While the MB leadership was initially reluctant to put its weight behind the protest, it became a dominant force once Mubarak was removed. Shaking off a 56-year-long official ban, the organization established the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in February 2011 and directed its political ambitions through this political arm.61 In the course of the next thirty months, spanning the period of building a new democratic state-system, the behavior of the MB, and, by extension the FJP, raised concerns about the MB’s agenda.62 The MB’s political opponents and critics were alarmed by the organization’s position during the referendum in March 2011, when it threw its weight behind the view that elections should first be held before a constitution-drafting council is selected. Although the prospect of parliamentary elections won broad public support, political competitors of the MB criticized that the short time frame offered a competitive disadvantage that undermined efforts to build a fair democratic system. Early elections did not allow newly established parties to build up structures, constituencies, or alliances, and thus weakened their efforts to compete while running against a mighty MB that had an extended reach in both formal and informal political circles through decades of political opposition. The MB’s decision to take advantage of its organizational capacity, its well-established links, and its reputation thus irritated its political competitors.63

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In Egypt’s first free post-Arab Spring elections, the FJP – the MB’s political arm – became the most significant parliamentary representation. Although the MB leadership recurrently promised not to dominate the political scene, the outcome of the elections shifted power into its hands.64 The FJP won 37.5 % of votes and, combined with the results of other parties in the FJP-led Democratic Alliance, built a parliamentary bloc of 47.2%, which is 235 of a total 508 seats. The year 2012 was a period of critical political battles over the future of Egyptian democratic state-building. A controversial High Court suspended Parliament in mid-June. Following this, the SCAF sought to secure its future supremacy in the political order by issuing a declaration in late June that commanded the installation of a Constitutional Assembly while at the same time restricting presidential oversight over military affairs. Although the power of the military remained a fundamental concern for democratic state-building, the year 2012 represented the height of the MB’s ascent to political power.65 Defeating an advocate of the ancien régime, Ahmad Shafiq, in the second round of the presidential elections, MB/FJP candidate Muhammad Morsi was declared the winner of the presidential elections on 24 June and sworn in on 30 June 2012. In one of the first steps as president of Egypt, Morsi issued a presidential decree in the first week of July that attempted to reinstate the Parliament. Crucially, the act also delimited the power of the SCAF and designated that the Parliament has the right to select members of a Constitutional Assembly, thus dismissing the SCAF’s influence. Morsi’s determination to restore the Parliament backfired. Opposition parties regarded the decree as the imposition of MB’s dominance onto the political system, while old elites and the SCAF accused the new president of undermining the principle of the separation of powers in democratic systems.66 The president was forced to backtrack when the Supreme Constitutional Court decided to uphold the dissolution order against the Parliament. However, Morsi managed to push for changes in the SCAF’s personnel, negotiated a deal with the SCAF that allowed for the formation of a Constitutional Assembly, and secured full legislative powers until the election of a new Parliament. The antagonism between Morsi’s regime on the one hand and the political opposition, old elites, and the SCAF, on the other hand, ensued in the following weeks and months, leading to much chaotic political wrangling and court battles on fundamental constitutional questions. With the Constitutional Assembly at the brink of collapse, Morsi issued yet another presidential decree in November 2012 that granted him in his role as president immunity from judiciary challenges to his presidential orders. This move was met with outrage and resentment amongst the political class, the military, and the judiciary; after much pressure, Morsi finally had to rescind his decree that legislated on presidential immunity at the beginning of December 2012. Due to the chaos inherent in political debates during the last quarter of 2012 and the resulting lack of progress in building a state-system, but also in addressing pressing social and economic issues, public opinion gradually turned against the Morsi regime. In the hope that the Constitution would bring stability, the Morsi regime and the MB deemed the approval through a referendum held on 8–17 December 2012 as a political success.67 The victory was, however, short-lived as the battle for political power shifted to the streets. Demonstrations, protests in all kinds of public settings, and online fora as well as sit-ins, led to constant clashes and, as Parliament remained dissolved, debilitated Morsi’s regime from governing. After months of disarray during which the SCAF managed to align key political actors in their support while the MB was unable to articulate a coherent policy, calls for Morsi’s dismissal became louder.68 In the end, on July 3, the military under the leadership of Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi removed Morsi from office and suspended the Constitution. 60

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The coup d’état brought the ill-fated Morsi presidency and the MB’s political hopes to a sudden end.69 Although the MB leadership tried to galvanize its followers and sympathizers to remonstrate against the takeover of power, attempts were finally crushed with brutal force when the military dispersed pro-Morsi sit-ins on Raba‘a al-‘Adawiya Square and al-Nahda Square on 14 August 2013. The event, during which hundreds lost their lives, also marks the beginning of a new phase of persecution.

Social movements and social engagement Defining the MB’s profile at the fifth General Assembly in 1939, al-Banna declared that one of its main aspects was that of a social movement.70 Part of this endeavor was to develop social outreach programs and social services. Throughout its history, the MB struggled to find a clear answer to the question of whether it should define its religious calling in terms of a social welfare provider, a social movement with an element of political opposition, or as a political opposition with a social agenda. The MB gradually extended its social facilities as well as its reach within civil society starting in the early 1970s. The conservative MB leadership in the Guidance Office tended to prioritize the movement’s social profile.71 Using a tight administrative structure, the organization harnessed the resources and expertise of members, its businesses, and professional networks in fields such as education and medicine to offer a wide range of welfare services.72 Amongst these are surgeries and hospitals, kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, after-school care, libraries, and social and sports clubs. The MB-run services are offered to members and non-members regardless of their social strata or religious affiliation. The MB’s social engagement made it a provider of alternative social support provisions, which were, reportedly, better managed than state-run services. The social welfare engagement was also a means to spread its worldview, to gain public approval and sympathy, and to extend its structure and influence amongst the middle class. It also was a venue for recruiting new members and training those who were earmarked to rise within its ranks.73 Next to social welfare provisions, the MB built up its sway within institutions of civil society and as a social protest movement. In the 1970s, the MB began to extend its influence in student organizations.74 Using personal affiliations and harnessing the professional expertise, MB members took charge of several professional associations, amongst them notably medicine, law, journalism, engineering, and education.75 As the upcoming generation of MB leaders successfully represented the interests of an urban professional middle class, trust within this section of society grew steadily throughout the Mubarak years. The work within informal platforms also enabled the MB to develop ties to various nongovernmental organizations that demanded civic and human rights; it furthermore aided the organization to connect to Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) with axiomatically different political ideologies, amongst them also movements of the center and left.76 The MB occasionally was called to participate in rallies, particularly during election campaigns, when it coordinated prayers demonstratively in front of police lines. However, MB activism as a social movement tended to avoid mass-protests and violent confrontation with the Mubarak regime; it sought participatory means instead. This effort was supported by media outlets such as books, newspapers, and pamphlets.77 With the onset of the online media age, the MB made use of the full range of web-based technologies – websites, social media sites, online news, radio, and TV – to underpin its influence as a social movement.78

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The MB’s channels and networks for social and political activism were essential factors for the rise of the organization’s political dominance in the post-Arab Spring period.79 Because of shifts in the political context, the MB’s engagement as a social movement became, however, subservient to its activities as a political actor. The organization’s dominant position in politics in the period of February 2011–July 2013 had, as outlined above, significant implications for the deterioration of relations with other social movements and was, as discussed, also the cause of internal debates about the MB’s primary mission. In the aftermath of the July 2013 coup and the proscription of the MB in September 2013, the MB’s social movement and social welfare networks became a target of attempts to crush the organization.80 The new regime disbanded the MB’s extensive social service network; centers of known activity were closed, assets were confiscated, and syndicates and civil society organizations were purged. Targeting these crucial outlets of the organization’s activities undermined the MB’s ability to operate on a grassroots level and thus made it impossible for its incarcerated and exiled leadership to mobilize resistance to the regime. The strategy also had a long-term impact on the organization’s ability to reconstitute its influence in Egyptian society.

International aspects and diaspora The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence reaches beyond Egypt. From the movement’s inception, it emphasized that Islam and brotherly activism have a universalist ideological outlook that cannot be delimited by national borders.81 With the rise and success of the MB in Egypt, it thus started to expand its activities and began to establish branches in neighboring countries in the 1930s. Because the MB was more or less debilitated after Hasan al-Banna’s death and since the organization was at the brink of dissolution with the onset of persecution under al-Nasser in 1954, branches outside Egypt developed into more or less independent entities that were no longer under the direct control of the mother-organization. Known by different names, almost every country of the MENA region has a Brotherhood presence; noteworthy are, for example, the movements in Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, and Sudan.82 Corresponding to specific national contexts, ‘Ikhwan-inspired’ movements have been marked by national challenges and histories of conflict. While a strong Brotherhood bond continues to connect the various organizations in different countries, and although personal links on the leadership level exist, it is highly contested whether a global organization, one that has an administrative structure that operates as a unity, actually exists. Nevertheless, the Egyptian ‘mother organization’ and globally operating Brotherhood networks consult and liaise on common strategic issues. What unites national MB organizations is a common heritage of al-Banna’s ideological base and, connected to this aspect, the idea of a universal bond of brotherhood. Important to note is that, depending not only on political circumstances but also on the relative closeness of the leading cadres and informal networks, the sense of brotherly identity is either emphasized or downplayed. There are too many Ikhwani offshoots to mention them here. Well-known affiliations of the Egyptian MB are, for example, the Tunisian al-Nahda (Renaissance) or the Jordanian Brotherhood with its parliamentary wing, Jabhat al-‘Amal al-Islami (the Islamic Action Front). The Egyptian MB also has ties to organizations that are seen to be associated with terrorism, such as the Palestinian Hamas. More recently, there seems to be an affinity between the MB and the governments in Turkey and Qatar; it is here that some MB 62

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members found refuge in the post-coup era.83 With a headquarter in Istanbul and supporting networks in Qatar and London, the Egyptian MB survives the ongoing persecution by al-Sisi’s regime. The presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East needs to be, at least to some degree, distinguished from that in Western countries. MB members settled in European countries and the US in the past decades where, depending on immigration rules as well as legal, social, and political contexts, hubs of activity have emerged.84 Many of them fled the Middle East, while others migrated to study, work, and live. Various contributions trace MB activities in Muslim community associations in Europe and the US, such as the European Institute for Fatwa and Research, the Muslim Association, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim American Society, etc. However,it remains disputed whether these organizations posit any danger to host countries in Europe, and the US. It seems to be, however, the case that the various identifiable clusters which are operative in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, and – more recently in the post-coup era – in Turkey and Qatar, do not act independently from networks in the Middle East and, at least for now, constitute centers that allow the MB to survive persecution in Egypt.

Notes 1 Shahram Akbarzadeh, “Political Islam under the Spotlight,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2020). 2 Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–12, and Brynjar Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928–1942 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1998), 21–49. 3 Johannes J.G. Jansen, “Hasan al-Banna’s Earliest Pamphlet,” Die Welt des Islams 32, no. 2 (1992): 254–258. 4 Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 12–34. 5 Martyn Frampton, The Muslim Brotherhood and the West. A History of Enmity and Engagement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 6 Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 35–79; Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, 177–181, and Barbara H.E. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 12–16. 7 B. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 9–25; Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers: 80–84 8 Barbara H.E. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 25–36. 9 Barbara Zollner, “Prison Talk: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Internal Struggle During Gamal Abd alNasser’s Persecution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3 (2007): 411–433, and Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh (London: al-Saqi, 2003), 26–35. 10 Sayed Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyya (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), and Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty. The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 11 Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt, 36–69; Alison Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood. The Burden of Tradition (London: Saqi, 2010), 177–186. 12 Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 64–71; Khalil Al-Anani, The Myth of Excluding Moderate Islamists in the Arab World (Washington, DC: The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, 2010). 13 Abdullah al-Arian, Answering the Call. Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 46–48, 74–104. 14 Omar Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists. Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (New York: Routledge, 2009), 33–62. 15 Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists, 63–89. 16 Hesham Al-Awadi, In Pursuit of Legitimacy. The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak 1982–2000 (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2004).

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17 Khalil Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood. Religion, Identity, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 147–149. 18 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism and Political Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 115–118, 189–194; Abdullah al-Arian, Answering the Call, 146–174; Mohammed Zahid, The Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Succession Crisis. The Politics of Liberalisation and Reform in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 107–127. 19 Barbara Zollner, “The Brotherhood in Transition. An Analysis of the Organisation’s Mobilising Capacity,” in Religiöse Bewegungen als Politische Akteure im Nahen Osten eds. Peter Lintl, Christian Thuselt and Christian Wolff (Berlin: Nomos, 2016), 47–49. 20 Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, 116–118, 176–203; Al-Arian, Answering the Call, 49–74, 105–145, and Zahid, The Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Succession Crisis, 105–127. 21 Zollner, “The Brotherhood in Transition,” 43–69. 22 Stacher, “Post-Islamist Rumblings in Egypt: The Emergence of the Wasat Party,” The Middle East Journal 56, no. 3 (2002): 415–432. 23 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood. Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 117–124. 24 Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 127–148, and Khalil al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 154. 25 Khalil al-Anani, “Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” The Middle East Journal 69, no. 4 (2015): 527–543; Mohammed El-Nawawy and Mohammad Hamas Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt in the Eyes of the Muslim Brotherhood: A Framing Analysis of Ikhwanweb (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and Eric Trager, The Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016). 26 Steven Brooke, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and Islamist Political Advantage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 21–77. 27 Barbara Zollner, “The Metamorphosis of Social Movements into Political Parties. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Tunisian al-Nahda as Cases for a Reflection on Party Institutionalisation Theory,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 22 May (2019). 28 Barbara Zollner, “Does Participation Lead to Moderation? Understanding Changes in Egyptian Islamist Parties Post-Arab Spring,” in Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings: Governance, Pluralisation and Contention eds. Paola Rivetti and Hendrik Kraetzschmar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 149–165. 29 El-Nawawy and Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt, 33–46, and Trager, The Arab Fall, 57–76. 30 Tadros, “Participation not Domination: Morsi on an Impossible Mission,” in Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings: Governance, Pluralisation and Contention eds. Paola Rivetti and Hendrik Kraetzschmar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 17–35. 31 Eric Trager, The Arab Fall: 145–162, and Ashraf el-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures”, June 2014, available at https://carnegieendowment.org/files/muslim_brotherhood_fai lures.pdf 32 Tadros, “Participation not Domination,” 17–35; Trager, The Arab Fall, 175–188, and El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures.” 33 Nathan Brown and Michele Dunne, Unprecendented Pressures, Unchartered Course for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2015). 34 Eric Trager and Marina Shalabi, “The Brotherhood Breaks Down. Will the Group Survive the Latest Blow?” Foreign Affairs, 17 January 2016, available at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/egypt/ 2016-01-17/brotherhood-breaks-down. 35 Samuel Tadros, “The Brotherhood Divided,” Hudson Institute, 20 August 2015, available at www. hudson.org/research/11530-the-brotherhood-divided#; Barbara Zollner, “Surviving Repression: How Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has Carried on,” Carnegie Middle East Center, 11 March 2019, available at https://carnegie-mec.org/2019/03/11/surviving-repression-how-egypt-s-muslimbrotherhood-has-carried-on-pub-78552 36 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “What Would Hasan al-Banna Do?: Moderate (Re-)Interpretations of the Brotherhood’s founding Discourse,” in Transnationalizing Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe ed. Roel Meijer and Edwin Bakker (London: Hurst, 2012), 241–248, and Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood. 37 Gudrun Krämer, Hasan al-Banna (London: Oneworld Publications, 2009); and Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 50–66, 118–134.

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

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Wickham, “What Would Hasan al-Banna Do?” 241–248. Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 50–66, 118–134, and Krämer, Hasan al-Banna, 83–121. Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 99–117. Zollner, “Prison Talk,” 411–433; Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 50–63. Qutb, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb, and Qutb, The Power of Sovereignty. Omar Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists. Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (New York: Routledge, 2009), 45–56. John Calvert, “Wayward Son. The Muslim Brother’s Reception of Sayyid Qutb,” in Transnationalizing Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe eds. Roel Meijer and Edwin Bakker (London: Hurst, 2012). Zollner, “Prison Talk,” 411–433. Abdullah al-Arian, Answering the Call. Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 75–104. Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, 116–118. Tadros, “The Brotherhood Divided”, and Zollner, “Surviving Repression”. Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, 151–235. Krämer, Hasan al-Banna, 52–59, and Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, 199–207. Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, 177–181, and Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 35–79. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 16–19, 22–25. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood, 25–36. Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 29–42. Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, 116–118, 176–203, and Zahid, The Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Succession Crisis, 105–127. Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 46–75; Sana Abed-Kotob, “The Accommodationists Speak: Goals and Strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 3 (1995): 321–39, and Mona El-Ghobashy, “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 3 (2005): 373–95. Annette Ranko, The Muslim Brotherhood and its Quest for Hegemony in Egypt. State-Discourse and Islamist Counter-Discourse (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), 75–192. Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher, “The Brotherhood Goes to Parliament,” Middle East Report 240 (2006): 32–40. Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 96–119, and Nathan Brown, When Victory is not an Option. Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 91–94, 181–187. Zahid, The Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Succession Crisis, 129–152; Amr Hamzawy. “Egypt’s (Un) Dedemocratic Elections, Q&A,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1 June 2010, available at https://carnegieendowment.org/2010/06/01/egypt-s-un-democratic-elections-pub-40898 Zollner, “The Metamorphosis of Social Movements into Political Parties.” El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures”; Al-Anani, “Upended Path,” 527–543; Trager, The Arab Fall, 57–76, and El-Nawawy and Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt. El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures.” El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures,” and El-Nawawy and Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt. Trager, The Arab Fall, 109–174. Trager, The Arab Fall, 145–162. El-Nawawy and Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt, 47–90. El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures,” and Trager, The Arab Fall, 163–174. Brown and Dunne, Unprecendented Pressures. Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 50–66. Al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, 114–116, 145–149. Brooke, Winning Hearts and Votes, 78–101. Brooke, Winning Hearts and Votes, 78–101. See also Janine A. Clarke, Islam, Charity and Activism. Networks and Middle-Class Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Yemen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–81. Al-Arian, Answering the Call, 49–74, 105–145. Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, 176–203, and Zahid, The Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Succession Crisis, 105–127.

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Barbara Zollner 76 Maha Abdelrahman, “‘With the Islamists? – Sometimes. With the State? – Never!’ Co-Operation between the Left and Islamists in Egypt,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, no.1 (2009): 37–54. 77 Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 185–195, and Al-Arian, Answering the Call, 176–220. 78 El-Nawawy and Elmasry, Revolutionary Egypt, and Noha Mellor, Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood. Da‘wa, Discourse and Political Communication (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 79 Brooke, Winning Hearts and Votes, 121–134. 80 Steven Brooke, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Social Outreach after the Egyptian Coup. Working Paper (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2015), and Brown and Dunne, Unprecendented Pressures. 81 Lia, The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, 154–156. 82 Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 196–246; Beverly Milton-Edwards, The Muslim Brotherhood. The Arab Spring and its Future Face (New York: Routledge, 2016), and Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood, 61–176. 83 Tadros, “The Brotherhood Divided.” 84 Roel Meijer and Edwin Bakker, Transnationalizing Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe (London: Hurst, 2011), and Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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6 ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS AND PARTY POLITICS Two competing visions in Morocco Esen Kirdiş

Introduction Why do some Islamic movements form Islamic political parties, while others do not? In particular, why has the Justice and Spirituality Movement, the largest Islamic movement in Morocco, rejected any plan to form a political party and continued to work as an informal social movement thereby risking regime repression, while its counterpart, the Movement for Unity and Reform, formed by the splitters of the radical Islamic Youth Movement, decided to enter party politics under the banner of the Party for Justice and Development Party, the incumbent party of Morocco today? This is an important question to ask theoretically and methodologically. Islamists, as Akbarzadeh has convincingly demonstrated, have a political vision informed by a flexible reinterpretation and re-evaluation of religious texts and history. In this, political Islam presents a ‘dynamic social phenomenon – not a static ideology.’1 Hence, diverse Islamic political actors have taken divergent political paths to accomplish their political visions based on their unique reinterpretations and re-evaluations. In order to understand such dynamism of and diversity within political Islam, this chapter looks at the differentiation between Islamic movements eschewing party politics and Islamic political parties. It does so because Islamic movements and Islamic political parties diverge in their means and goals, and thus in their political impacts. While Islamic movements work outside institutional channels in their quest to challenge the regime’s status quo as the voice of the marginalized, Islamic political parties aim to win ‘votes, office and/or policy’2 to demand representation within the regime. Because Islamic movements and Islamic political parties diverge in their means (utilizing informal versus formal channels) and goals (voicing unrepresented demands outside of institutional politics versus demanding representation within institutional politics), they have different impacts on the regime and its socio-political hegemony. Specifically, Islamic movements eschewing party politics, on the one hand, pose a democratic challenge to the regime, but on the other hand, they do not work within democratic politics. Meanwhile, Islamic political parties, although accepting the need to function within democratic politics, are not necessarily democratic actors themselves in their acceptance of the rules of an authoritarian regime like that of Morocco.

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Methodologically, comparing the simultaneous yet diverging political paths of the Justice and Spirituality Movement and the Movement for Unity and Reform while they face the same Moroccan regime and socio-political context allows for the utilization of a within-case comparison. Different from single case studies and cross-country comparisons of political Islam, a within-case comparison holds the structural context constant, thereby allowing us to focus on the role internal motivations play in the strategic decision making of Islamic political actors. In light of such a within-case comparison informed by qualitative in-depth fieldwork in Morocco, this chapter argues that Islamic movements strategize about their political steps in light of their political visions which are informed by their ideological priorities and organizational needs. To elaborate this argument further, this chapter will first frame its hypotheses, and then examine how and why the Justice and Spirituality Movement and the Movement for Unity and Reform have made different strategic decisions about forming a political party in Morocco.

Theoretical framework The benefits of forming an Islamic political party are not straightforward. On paper, party politics brings an Islamic movement increased public presence, potential political influence, and connections to the state and its resources. Such political connections, as a result, are expected to expand an Islamic movement’s reach beyond its niche ideological base. In practice, however, party politics risks the alienation of an Islamic movement’s core supporters. After all, Islamic movements build their networks on family and personal ties, thus making exiting an Islamic movement more difficult given the peer pressure.3 In a political party, though, relations become bureaucratized and impersonal to accommodate the growing party network by differentiating between the party hierarchy and the constituents.4 Hence, Islamic movements considering a run in party politics face the dilemma of whether they seek to expand their constituency or to protect their ideological core. Another strategic trade-off that Islamic movements exploring participation in party politics need to consider is whether they seek to contest a regime’s legitimacy by staying out of its institutions or to reform it by working from within. In particular, party politics in authoritarian regimes like Morocco are not really about democratization but rather about consolidating the authoritarian regime by legitimizing it with elections.5 Consequently, entering party politics, in essence, means the acceptance of this game of regime legitimization. The benefit of such legitimization, nonetheless, is the relative freedom to legally exist in an authoritarian regime, and thus to minimize the potential cost of repression. On the opposite end, staying outside the party system and thus outside the corruptive forces of the regime allows an Islamic movement to genuinely challenge the regime’s hegemony as a popular opposition outside the regime’s control. Nevertheless, this also risks regime persecution. Such a strategic trade-off between regime legitimization and regime repression leads to a third strategic trade-off. While Islamic movements participating in party politics avoid regime repression, they also risk co-optation, namely the risk of abandoning their long-term ideals while making pragmatic choices in the short run. On the other hand, Islamic movements eschewing party politics, by risking regime persecution for their open challenge to the regime, also risk political stagnancy in their inability to move forward. In light of these three strategic trade-offs, what drives which political path Islamic movements will take? This chapter argues that the answer lies in a movement’s internal 68

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dynamics. Firstly, Islamic movements vary in their ideological priorities. They do so, foremost, because they differ in their interpretations of Islam.6 For instance, some Sufi Brotherhoods seek individual salvation and thus see no benefits in political participation, while some Salafi groups withdraw from contemporary politics and society to live like the early followers of the Prophet Muhammad and in the meantime believe in obedience to the ruler of the country. Furthermore, Islamic movements evolve through their own past experiences, which colors their ideological priorities. For instance, the largest Islamic movement in Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Revival of the Religious Scholars), forbade its members to participate in party politics after years of political activism.7 Secondly, Islamic movements vary in their organizational needs. For instance, the Jordanian or Egyptian Muslim Brotherhoods, as movements with a mass following, will have different strategic calculations over party politics than their Turkish counterpart, the anti-capitalist Muslims, which has a niche following. Given such differing and evolving ideological priorities and organizational needs, it should be no surprise that Islamic movements seek diverse objectives and thus adapt different mediums to achieve these objectives. One common strategic dilemma faced by Islamic movements is whether the formation of an Islamic state precedes or follows the formation of an Islamic society.8 Whereas some Islamic movements believe in Islamic revival at the societal level through grassroots activism (grassroots movements), others anticipate Islamic vanguards to jumpstart an Islamic social engineering project by controlling the state (vanguard movements). Ideologically, grassroots movements prioritize the formation of a Muslim community before the establishment of an Islamic state.9 For this end, they aim the Gramscian formation of an Islamic counter-hegemony wherein their goal is not simply taking over the state but rather they are interested in winning hearts and minds.10 Hence, for them ‘a true revolution . . . is not just winning state power but winning society by institutional, intellectual, and moral hegemony.’11 Because they cannot establish and consolidate such a counter-hegemonic stance within party politics where the regime sets the rules, they will stay out of party politics to be able to challenge the regime independently. In addition to such ideological priorities, grassroots movements will also be more likely to eschew party politics in light of their organizational needs. As movements seeking mass recruitment to build their counter-hegemony, grassroots movements will aim to protect their core base. As discussed earlier, while party formation is a danger to internal cohesion, staying out of the corruptive forces of party politics will help grassroots movements consolidate solidarity within the movement. Within this quest to build counter-hegemony, grassroots movements will not be intimidated by regime persecution either, because it is a daily encounter for them. Rather, cooptation and thus alienation of their supporters is a greater risk for grassroots movements and their long-term strategic objectives. Consequently, this chapter expects grassroots movements to be more likely to eschew party politics because they will see the prospect of shifting to party politics as too costly, given that the benefits of party politics (widening the movement’s mass appeal) have no additional incentive for a movement focused on creating a counter-hegemony with an already established mass base, and given that the cost of party politics (co-optation) threatens to erode the movement’s ideological and organizational integrity. Unlike grassroots movements which start with bottom-up societal transformation, however, vanguard movements believe that the state and its resources are crucial to the administration of reforms and policies to jumpstart an Islamic revival.12 In an almost Leninist understanding, therefore, vanguard movements believe in the training of a vanguard that will lead the revolution and social engineer the society through the state.13 For this reason, 69

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vanguard movements will be more likely to find party politics and access to the state a good ideological fit for their top-down aspirations. Organizationally, too, vanguard movements will be more likely to enter party politics in their need to expand their supporter base, given that they are elites without a mass base and thus needing to expand their constituency. And as discussed earlier, political participation by allowing Islamic movements to gain access to state resources is a strong medium to do so. Not only that but it does so while preserving the party itself for the Islamic elite, which trains and guides the masses.14 While examining the benefits of party politics, vanguard movements will be unlikely to be cowed by the costs of party politics, namely co-optation, in their belief that their dedicated vanguards are impenetrable and thus immune to co-optation. As a result, this chapter expects vanguard movements to be more likely than grassroots movements to form Islamic political parties because they will value the benefits of party politics, such as the chance to broaden their mass appeal through top-down political involvement, over the potential costs, such as co-optation. The next three sections will discuss these two hypotheses by analyzing empirical evidence from Morocco.

Morocco Morocco is an authoritarian regime in which the King bears religio-political legitimacy as the Commander of the Believers. Within this arrangement, the King’s ‘sacredness’ and ‘inviolability’ are constitutionally guaranteed.15 The King’s role as the Commander of the Believers is also consolidated legally through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which is responsible for the appointment of religious clergy at the national and local levels.16 The King also proactively intervenes in the religio-political field to protect his legitimacy. In particular, the King encourages the active participation of multiple religious organizations in order to avoid any one group becoming dominant and thus posing a challenge to his religio-political authority.17 The King also uses his authority as the Commander of the Believers to present himself as the protector of Moroccan Islam against radical trends.18 While controlling the religio-political field, however, the Moroccan regime is officially a constitutional monarchy with a lively party system, and it allows oppositional representation. Within this arrangement, opposition groups can participate in party politics as long as they refrain from criticizing the King, thereby becoming ‘loyal opposition.’ Consequently, this does not mean Morocco is en route to democratization. Rather, the regime, by allowing oppositional activism and parliamentary elections, aims to legitimize itself. In the end, the King and his advisors supervise all decisions taken by the Parliament. Furthermore, to divide and rule the opposition, the King proactively encourages the formation of new political parties. For instance, in the 1950s, King Mohamed V played the Mouvement Populaire’s (Popular Movement’s) rural base against the urban base of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, and his son King Hassan II in the 1970s created pro-monarchy political parties19 to divide and rule the opposition. Within this arrangement, the Moroccan regime is on the one hand repressive towards Islamic movements because they challenge the King’s religio-political legitimacy,20 but on the other hand, the regime also sees Islamic movements as a counterbalance to the Left, which the regime has considered to be its main opposition for decades.21 Thus, the King tries to keep the Islamic opposition weak enough not to challenge his authority, yet strong enough to outweigh his rivals.22

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Given such a conditionally tolerant authoritarian regime, party politics comes at a price. On the one hand, party politics allows an Islamic movement to become more publicly visible, politically influential, and thus attract more supporters in an authoritarian context like Morocco. After all, in Morocco, party politics may be one of the few ways Islamic movements may affect politics, given that the regime is the country’s most influential political actor, and controls all aspects of life as an authoritarian regime. On the other hand, however, party politics also risks fragmentation and the loss of organizational integrity in the face of the regime’s proactive divide-and-rule policies. Even more so, given how weak and ineffective the Moroccan Parliament is, it is unpopular with the masses. According to the Arab Barometer opinion survey, 60% of the Moroccan population does not trust/has very little trust in the prime minister and the Parliament, while trust in political parties remains at less than 20%.23 Hence, eschewing party politics rather than getting involved with futile institutions strengthens an Islamic movement’s societal reach. Moreover, eschewing party politics in such a context also allows an Islamic movement to mobilize around Moroccan society’s alienation from party politics by providing an alternative medium to voice their demands outside the control of the regime. After all, the only way to pose a genuine opposition to the Moroccan regime is by evading its institutional reach. Nonetheless, in a system where the King has far greater political influence over socio-economic issues vis-à-vis non-state political actors, participation also provides a powerful medium to influence and to supervise public policy. Such political influence is especially significant, considering the need to represent urban and educated Moroccans, who have no access to regime networks, and thus face serious socioeconomic problems. Hence, participation in party politics means connecting with and representing the demands of these new constituents. As a result, eschewing party politics is not cost-free, given the Moroccan regime’s treatment of ‘unrecognized’ opposition. With an iron fist, the late King Hassan II (1929–99) ruled Morocco as a surveillance state,24 while his son Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s current regime, despite its seeming moderation, remains authoritarian in essence as the regime continues to silence certain journalists and political activists at will. Hence, choosing not to become a member of the ‘loyal opposition’ not only risks political repression but also running out of political options, and thus political stagnancy. On the opposite end, party politics risks co-optation: the Moroccan regime offers the opposition material and political rewards but in turn expects it to scale back its antipathy to the regime. For instance, the two ‘loyal opposition’ parties today, the nationalist Istiqlal Party and the leftist Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (Socialist Union of Popular Forces – USFP), were once major oppositional contenders to the regime. While the King co-opted the Istiqlal Party in the 1960s/70s by drawing support from the rural and tribal power-holders,25 it co-opted the USFP in the 1990s by promising them fundamental democratic reforms if the party would join the ‘alternance’ government and ‘not contest the overarching powers of the monarch.’26 Yet, over time, both of these ‘loyal opposition’ parties have become ineffective, receiving only 10% and 6% of votes respectively in the 2016 general elections. Facing these same strategic trade-offs between participation and non-participation in party politics, the Justice and Spirituality Movement and the Movement for Unity and Reform in Morocco have chosen different political paths in light of their diverging political visions.

The Justice and Spirituality Movement A school inspector educated within the Boutchichiyya Sufi Brotherhood, Abdessalam Yassine came to fame when in 1974 he sent King Hassan II a 120-page public letter refuting the 71

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King’s role as the Commander of the Believers.27 For this letter, he spent three years (1974–77) in an insane asylum.28 Yassine continued his political activism after his release by publishing his first magazine, Al-Jamaa (The Society),29 and then another entitled Al-Subh ̣ (The Dawn).30 In the meantime, he also demanded legal recognition for his Islamic movement in 1982, which was rejected by the regime. He was once again sentenced to two years in prison in 1984 and was banned from preaching in mosques. Notwithstanding such setbacks, Yassine founded his movement, the Justice and Spirituality Movement (JSM) (Al Adl wal Ihsane),31 which resulted in his house arrest in 1989 and the outlawing of the Movement in 1990.32 What Yassine offered was a unique ideology that combined Sufi and Salafi elements.33 Calling this the ‘prophetic way,’34 Yassine believed that for the Muslim community to regain its confidence, the first step was the ‘spiritual education’ of the individual. The second step was the ‘organization’ of communities through grassroots activism. For Yassine, the community was a continuation of an individual’s spiritual education, wherein the community provided guidance and solidarity.35 The third step in Yassine’s vision was to ‘propagate.’36 In this stage, JSM followers engaged in mass education,37 as well as engaging in civil disobedience to ‘propagate’ social awareness. For instance, Yassine’s daughter, Nadia Yassine, in an act of civil disobedience punishable by law, criticized the hereditary monarchy and called for a republican form of government. Through such acts of propagation and thus rising societal awareness, would emerge a bottom-up mass ‘uprising,’ the last step in Yassine’s vision, wherein Moroccans would demand the non-violent reconstitution of the regime, would be inevitable.38 This bottom-up political vision was carried out by a grassroots organization directed by the JSM’s Executive Committee, which provided political and organizational direction for the Movement, and by the Guidance Committee, which provided spiritual guidance.39 According to a member of the JSM’s youth branch, under Yassine’s leadership, decisions within the group were taken by vote and through Shura (consultation).40 The leadership’s decisions were carried out through seventy provincial branches all over Morocco. At the grassroots level, the Movement engaged in welfare services, charity, and poverty relief.41 In this, according to a JSM leader, the Movement followed a strategy of mass recruitment through (1) direct action on the ground, (2) its affiliated branches at the local level, and through (3) its youth, women, and worker sub-branches.42 As a result, according to an expert on Moroccan Islamic movements, the JSM’s real strength lay in its organizational skills, such that Yassine’s ideology was efficiently executed through grassroots activities throughout the country.43 While Yassine and the JSM were busy expanding their grassroots network, the Moroccan regime was trying to secure a smooth royal succession from Hassan II to his son Mohammed VI. For this end, the Ministry of Religious Affairs in 1990 approached Yassine, who was in prison at the time.44 According to a JSM member involved in discussions with the regime, in return for political privileges, such as ministry positions, financial help, and legal status, the regime demanded the Movement recognize the King’s religio-political legitimacy as the Commander of the Believers.45 The JSM rejected such an offer because it was incompatible with its ideological priorities and organizational needs. Ideologically, Yassine believed that a political movement that does not start with the individual’s spiritual education would fail.46 Within this priority, the Movement feared that party formation would distract the Movement from its aim of individual transformation. In particular, the Movement believed that the reason for the corruption of Muslim societies was elitism and the consolidation of autocratic rule.47 Thus, formal political institutions, like the party system, that were controlled by the regime could not offer a way out. What the 72

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JSM instead was searching for was a fundamental change of the system wherein a new Constitution would put the King not above but under the law and make him accountable to the people.48 Within this vision, Yassine also believed that the ballot box on its own was insufficient to solve this contemporary crisis, that what Morocco needed was not exclusive parliamentary discussions behind closed doors but open public debates informing the people.49 As a result, Yassine advocated for a ‘long-distance vision and a plan for a society that meets permanent needs.’50 Within this formulation, party politics, according to Yassine, did not offer a genuine change/reform in Morocco but working outside the system through hard work and dedication did.51 Organizationally, the JSM also found party politics to be not compatible to its organizational needs as a grassroots movement with an already large mass base, by some accounts the largest Islamic movement in Morocco. This organizational strength was the reason why the Moroccan regime wanted to integrate the JSM into the system in the first place. In the JSM’s vision, the regime aimed to use party politics to subject the Movement’s mass base to the fragmenting political climate of the Moroccan party system and co-opt it. Hence, the JSM aimed to protect the trust between the Movement’s leadership and its followers by staying out of party politics. Consequently, party formation was not only unnecessary for the Movement’s dedication to promoting spirituality but also counterproductive to it. After all, it was the JSM’s ‘outsider’ stance that attracted old and new supporters, according to Nadia Yassine.52 In addition to such ideological and organizational objectives, the cost of eschewing party politics, namely political stagnancy as a result of political marginalization, was not a vital threat for the JSM because, according to a JSM youth leader, in the Movement’s vision they were keeping up the fight by all means through their grassroots activism.53 Instead, the real danger for the JSM was co-optation. Nadia Yassine explains:54 Co-opting is a classic in politics. As soon as a political force that has a popular base emerges, and I believe that [JSM] is the only real political entity in Morocco that has a genuine popular base, the power does everything to neutralize it. The Makhzen [political elites around the King] tries to involve its opponents by including them in a system that is locked, and where the rules are imposed by a system of laws but also by a Makhzenian [elitist] ritual. For me there are no parties and royal prerogative, both are sides of the same coin; just as there are no executive and legislative powers. Parties see us as rivals to the extent that we interfere with the role that is officially assigned to them. The recent elections showed how great their debacle is. We surely do not want to resume their roadmap, which was proven to be a deadlock. Such fears of co-optation were further justified by the experiences of the Moroccan Left, according to the JSM. Specifically, the Moroccan Left, before its participation in party politics, represented a vocal opposition, but by entering party politics, they transformed from ‘warrior knights into doormats,’ according to Nadia Yassine.55 Therefore, the JSM chose to remain outside the party system to engage in spiritual education, and to challenge the regime’s hegemony externally through grassroots activism.

The Movement for Unity and Reform While Abdessalam Yassine was building his grassroots movement, the Islamic Youth in Morocco, the predecessor to the Movement for Unity and Reform (MUR) and the 73

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incumbent Party for Justice and Development (PJD), was a violent Islamic movement terrorizing the Moroccan Left. Inspired by Sayyid Qutb and the National Liberation Front in Algeria,56 the Islamic Youth’s aim was a top-down revolution under its vanguards. This topdown political vision stood in contrast to the JSM’s vision of bottom-up change starting with the individual spiritual re-education. After its assassination of a known leftist student leader, the Islamic Youth was banned, its leaders imprisoned/escaped, and the Movement disintegrated. Some former Islamic Youth members who were not involved in its violent actions formed a new movement under the name ‘Islamic Society’ in 1981–8257 and denounced violence. To prove their transformation, they shed the word ‘Islamic’ from their title, and formed the ‘Movement for Reform and Renewal.’58 After uniting with other smaller Islamic movements, they renamed the movement once again, finally in 1996 acquiring the name Mouvement Unité et Réforme (Movement for Unity and Reform – MUR).59 What brought all these smaller Islamic movements under the MUR umbrella was not necessarily unity in ideology60 but rather a pragmatic quest to make the law, the economy, and society more Islamic.61 Unlike Yassine’s step-by-step political vision describing a path towards a bottom-up Islamic revival, PJD’s ideological objectives remained ambiguous. Their 1989 charter, for instance, reflected such ideological elusiveness: (1) To renew the understanding of religion, (2) to call for respect of individual rights and public freedoms, (3) to advocate the implementation of Sharia, (4) to improve Muslims’ material and living conditions, (5) to perform charitable work, (6) to achieve a comprehensive cultural resistance, (7) to work on accomplishing the unity of Muslims, (8) to confront ideologies and ideas that are subversive to Islam, and (9) to raise the Moroccan people’s educational and moral levels.62 With these ideological objectives, the Movement aimed to take the lead in reviving Islam from the top down, but did not necessarily provide a clear path like that of Yassine and the JSM. Such ideological ambiguity was also reflected in the Movement’s organization. Unlike the JSM with its tight organizational structure, the MUR was rather a movement of ‘prominent individuals and organizations, which came together in a hybrid organization over time.’63 As a result, MUR’s leadership was composed of roughly twenty individuals, whose positions within the organization fluctuated. For instance, the role of leader altered back and forth between Benkirane and Othmani, while Ramid, Raissouni, and Yatim had held vital positions since the Movement’s early inception.64 In short, the MUR was an initiation of a few Islamic elites rather than a mass movement like the JSM. In light of such ideological and organizational objectives, in 1992, the MUR first proposed to form the ‘National Revival Party,’ which was rejected.65 As luck would have it, in 1996, when the JSM rejected the regime’s proposal for political integration, the regime now approached the MUR to integrate the ‘Islamists’ into the Popular Democratic Constitutional Movement Party (Mouvement Populaire Démocratique et Constitutionnel). MUR accepted this proposal, and in 1998, MUR leaders renamed the Party the ‘Party for Justice and Development’ (PJD) (Parti de la Justice et du Développement) taking full control of it. The MUR embraced such an offer of integration, given its vanguard political vision. Ideologically, according to a minister from the PJD, party politics was in line with MUR’s pragmatic approach to politics wherein they believed that they, as the Islamist vanguards, would replace Morocco’s Western-trained elites, to hold them accountable to Islam and solve Morocco’s socio-political crises.66 In this political vision, they would not repeat the mistakes of other Islamic movements, which in Ahmed Raissouni’s words, who 74

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was one of the first leaders within the Islamic Youth to advocate legalization and nonviolence, ‘produced masses of supporters, fighters, and resisters but they produced little knowledge, experience, and efficiency for exercising politics and rule.’67 Instead, by entering party politics, according to a minister from the PJD, they would gain political experience in governing.68 Thus, party politics, according to another minister from the PJD, would allow the MUR to engage in top-down social engineering under their vanguards, who would sit in the Parliament, hold posts of power, and form Morocco’s new elites.69 Organizationally, party politics would help the MUR connect its vanguards to the masses by making the Movement a legal organization.70 This was especially important for the MUR with its former ties to the radical Islamic Youth. Furthermore, unlike the JSM’s mass base, this was a small movement. According to the MUR’s 1992 rejected party application for the National Revival Party, the Movement had 34 official founding members, most of whom were young, educated, and lived either in Rabat or Casablanca.71 More so, the Movement only had 16 branches throughout Morocco and thus not much of a reach in rural areas.72 Within this political vision, co-optation was not a significant risk for the MUR either. Unlike the JSM, which saw the experiences of the Moroccan Left as a lesson to be avoided, the MUR saw the Left’s experience as an example to be emulated. According to a minister from the PJD ranks, those segments of the Moroccan Left that chose party politics under the ‘Socialist Union of Popular Forces’ (Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires – USFP) banner had become a staple of the Moroccan Parliament, while those segments of the Moroccan Left that chose to remain outside of party politics were marginalized and became political stagnant as a result.73 A member of the Parliament from the PJD explains: To participate is the only way to improve things. If you choose not to participate, you cannot influence the regime. People who decide not to participate are the ones who are waiting for something to change. However, if you stand by, nothing will change.74 Within this understanding, the MUR, in the words of a high-ranking MUR leader, believed that it was time to become ‘more realistic’ and to ‘stop dreaming of how Morocco should be.’75 Hence, the MUR chose to enter party politics.

Conclusion This chapter asked what explains the variation in Islamic movements’ behavior. In particular, it analyzed why the Justice and Spirituality Movement, the largest Islamic movement in Morocco, rejected becoming a political party and continued to work as a grassroots movement, while its counterpart, the Movement for Unity and Reform, decided to enter party politics under the banner of the Party for Justice and Development Party. Through a within-case comparison that holds the structural context stable to focus on the internal dynamics in explaining Islamist differentiation, this chapter discussed how ideological priorities and organizational needs shape Islamic movements’ strategic decision making. What are the political implications of this differentiation in Islamic movements’ behavior in Morocco? On the one hand, after the Arab Spring and the precautionary changes the Moroccan King introduced, the PJD became one of Morocco’s incumbent parties and thus acquired connections and power within the political system. On the other hand, however, the PJD’s incumbency remained limited in that it was unable to administer any deep-seated reforms, not only because it lacked a clear ideological vision to do so, but also because the 75

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Moroccan regime kept them under a tight institutional hold. Hence, ‘the paradox of Political Islam’ became a reality for the PJD, which engaged in pragmatic choices in its quest to challenge the Moroccan regime from within yet ended up as a ‘status quo actor’ accommodating the regime.76 The PJD’s accommodation was a win for the JSM, which had been rejecting political participation for years for this very reason. Nonetheless, the JSM also failed to bring about change outside party politics when the Arab Spring-inspired February 20 Movement withered away without inspiring real change. Meanwhile, the Moroccan regime countered both Islamic movements by increasing the public visibility of the King’s role as the Commander of Believers, by extending the powers and regional scope of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs,77 and by promoting the King as the ‘King of the Poor’ to compete with the charities run by the Islamic movements.78 Hence, the real winner between the MUR/PJD path of participation and the JSM’s path of non-participation may have been the Moroccan regime, which retook its control of the religio-political sphere.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this chapter has been published as an article (Esen Kirdiş , 2015. ‘Between Movement and Party: Islamic Movements in Morocco and the Decision to Enter Party Politics,’ Politics, Religion & Ideology 16(1): 65–86) and an extended version as a book (Esen Kirdiş , 2019. The Rise of Islamic Political Movements and Parties: Morocco, Turkey and Jordan, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press).

Notes 1 Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (New York: Routledge, 2012). 2 Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, Policy, Office, or Votes?: How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3 Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4 Panebianco, Political Parties. 5 Malika Zeghal, “Participation without Power,” Journal of Democracy 19, no. 3 (2008): 31–36. 6 Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 7 Saragih Bagus, “NU Leaders Cannot Hold Political Posts,” Jakarta Post, 20 June 2011, available at web.archive.org/web/20110624120742/www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/06/20/nation%E2% 80%99s-largest-muslim-group-laments-%E2%80%98waning-influence%E2%80%99.html. 8 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 9 Michaelle Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 10 Asef Bayat, “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution: Comparing Islamic Activism in Iran and Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 1 (1998): 136–69. 11 Bayat, “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution.” 12 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “Mawdū dı̄ , Sayyid Abū al-A‘lā ,” Oxford Islamic Studies Online, available at www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/opr/t236/e0517 (accessed on 12 April 2012). 13 Kamran Bokhari, “Jamā ‘at-I Islā mı̄ ,” Oxford Islamic Studies Online, available at www.oxfordislamic studies.com/opr/t236/e0408 (accessed on 12 April 2012). 14 Roy, The Failure of Political Islam. 15 Driss Maghraoui, “The Strengths and Limits of Religious Reforms in Morocco,” Mediterranean Politics 14, no. 2 (2009): 195–211.

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Islamic movements and party politics 16 Julie E. Pruzan-Jørgensen, “Islamist Movement in Morocco: Main Actors and Regime Responses,” DIIS Report, April 2010, available at www.academia.edu/1892070/Islamist_Movement_in_Moroc co_Main_Actors_and_Regime_Responses_DIIS_Report_2010_April_2010. 17 Mohammed El-Katiri, “The Institutionalisation of Religious Affairs: Religious Reform in Morocco,” The Journal of North African Studies 18, no. 1 (2013): 53–69. 18 Maghraoui, “The Strengths and Limits of Religious Reforms.” 19 Farid Boussaid, “The Rise of the PAM in Morocco: Trampling the Political Scene or Stumbling into It?” Mediterranean Politics 14, no. 3 (2009): 413–19. 20 Stephen O Hughes, Morocco under King Hassan (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2006). 21 Marvine Howe, Morocco: The Islamist Awakening and Other Challenges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 22 Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishing, 2009). 23 Mark Tessler et al., “Arab-Barometer: Public Opinion Survey Conducted in Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen, 2006–2007,” Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) [distributor], 8 June 2010, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ ICPSR26581.v1. 24 Henry Munson, Religion and Power in Morocco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 25 James N. Sater, “Parliamentary Elections and Authoritarian Rule in Morocco,” The Middle East Journal 63, no. 3 (2009): 381–400. 26 Sater, “Parliamentary Elections and Authoritarian Rule in Morocco.” 27 Malika Zeghal and Henry Munson, “Morocco,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 28 Zeghal and Munson, “Morocco.” 29 Mohamed Tozy, “Qui Sont Les Islamistes Au Maroc [Who Are the Islamists in Morocco?],” Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1999, available at www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/TOZY/12315. 30 Zeghal and Munson, “Morocco.” 31 Ahmet Yükleyen and Aziz Abba, “Religious Authorization of the Justice and Spirituality Movement in Morocco,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 14, no. 1 (2013): 136–53. 32 Samir Amghar, “Political Islam in Morocco,” CEPS Working Document, 2007, available at http:// aei.pitt.edu/11725/1/1510.pdf. 33 Henri Lauziere, “Post-Islamism and the Religious Discourse of Abd Al-Salam Yasin,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 2 (2005): 241–61. 34 Lauziere, “Post-Islamism and the Religious Discourse.” 35 Youssef Belal, “Mystique et Politique Chez Abdessalam Yassine et Ses Adeptes,” Archives de Sciences Sociales Des Religions 135, no. juillet-septembre (2006): 165–84. 36 Kassem Bahaji, Islamism in Morocco: Appeal, Impact and Implications (1969–2003) (PhD Dissertation, Political Science, Northern Illinois University, 2007). 37 Abdelhakim Hajjouji, “Education and Values,” in Islamists versus Secularists: Confrontations and Dialogues in Morocco: Values, Democracy, Violence, Freedom, Education ed. Maâti Monjib (Rabat: IKV PAX, 2009). 38 Bahaji, Islamism in Morocco. 39 Marina Ottaway and Meredith Riley, “Morocco: From Top-Down Reform to Democratic Transition?,” Carnegie Papers, 2006, available at www.carnegieendowment.org/files/cp71_ottaway_final.pdf. 40 Anonymous interview with a member of JSM’s youth branch by the author, 10 May 2010, Casablanca, Morocco. 41 Marlise Simons, “Morocco Finds Fundamentalism Benign but Scary,” The New York Times, 9 April 1998, available at http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA150212737&v=2.1&u= tel_a_rhodes&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=145102eaefd295e95ab765797b517033. 42 Anonymous interview with a high-ranking leader from the JSM by the author, 14 May 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 43 Anonymous interview with an expert on political Islam in Morocco by the author, 10 May 2010, Casablanca, Morocco. 44 Abdelkébir Alaoui M’Daghri, “Interview-vérité, Abdelkébir Alaoui M’Daghri: J’ai gagné la confiance des islamistes [Interview-truth, Abdelkebir M’Daghri Alaoui: I Won the Confidence of Islamists], interview by Driss Ksikes,” Telquel 150, 2004, available at www.telquel-online.com/archives/150/ sujet4.shtml.

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45 Anonymous interview with a member of the JSM’s executive branch by the author, 13 May 2010, Casablanca, Morocco. 46 Lauziere, “Post-Islamism and the Religious Discourse.” 47 Mohammed Taha Wardi, Islamists and the Outside World: The Case of Abdessalam Yassin and Al Adl Wal Ihsan (Ifrane: Al Akhawayn University Press, 2003). 48 Abdallah Saaf and Abdelrahim Manar Al Slimi, “Morocco 1996–2007: A Decisive Decade of Reforms?,” Arab Reform Initiative, Center for Studies and Research in Social Sciences Country Report, 2008, available at www.arab-reform.net/spip.php?article1319. 49 Abdessalam Yassine, Winning the Modern World for Islam (Iowa City, IA: Justice and Spirituality Publishing, 2000). 50 Yassine, Winning the Modern World for Islam. 51 Yassine, Winning the Modern World for Islam. 52 Nadia Yassine, Féminisme Islamique [Islamic Feminism], interview by Emmanuel Martinez, Le Journal Des Alternatives, 28 September 2008, available at http://journal.alternatives.ca/spip.php? article4140. 53 Anonymous interview with a member of the JSM’s youth branch by the author, 10 May 2010, Casablanca, Morocco. 54 Nadia Yassine, “Only the Combined Efforts of All Forces of the Nation Can Get Morocco Out of the Crisis,” Nadiayassine.net, 2008, available at www.nadiayassine.net/en/page/12400.htm. 55 Yassine, “Only the Combined Efforts of All Forces.” 56 Anonymous interview with an ideologue and deputy from the PJD by the author, 28 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 57 Haoues Seniguer, “Genèse et Transformations de l’islamisme Marocain à Travers Les Noms. Le Cas Du Parti de La Justice et Du Développement,” Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 103, no. novembre (2013): 111–20. 58 Mohamed Tozy, Monarchie et Islam Politique Au Maroc [Monarchy and Political Islam in Morocco] (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1999). 59 Muhammad Darif, Monarchie Marocaine et Acteurs Religieux [Moroccan Monarchy and Religious Actors] (Casablanca: Afrique orient, 2010). 60 Khadija Mohsen-Finan and Malika Zeghal, “Opposition Islamiste Et Pouvoir Monarchique Au Maroc: Le Cas Du Parti de La Justice et Du Développement,” Revue Française de Science Politique 56 (2006): 79–119. 61 Pruzan-Jørgensen, “Islamist Movement in Morocco.” 62 Eva Wegner, Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 63 Pruzan-Jørgensen, “Islamist Movement in Morocco: Main Actors and Regime Responses.” 64 Mohammed Boudarham, “Leaders Islamistes. Les Dix Portraits,” Telquel, 14 November 2013, available at http://telquel.ma/2013/11/14/leaders-islamistes-les-dix-portraits_9487. 65 Darif, Monarchie Marocaine et Acteurs Religieux. 66 Anonymous interview with a PJD minister by the author, 19 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 67 Ahmed Raissouni, “Raissouni: Religious Scholars Should Participate in Governments, Parliaments,” interview by Al Hassan Al Sarat, 6 November 2006, available at www.ikhwanweb.com/ print.php?id=2999. 68 Anonymous interview with a PJD minister by the author, 15 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 69 Anonymous interview with a PJD minister by the author, 19 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 70 Darif, Monarchie Marocaine et Acteurs Religieux. 71 Tozy, Monarchie et Islam Politique Au Maroc. 72 Tozy, Monarchie et Islam Politique Au Maroc. 73 Anonymous interview with a PJD minister by the author, 19 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 74 Anonymous interview with a parliamentarian from the PJD by the author, 28 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 75 Anonymous interview with a high-ranking leader of the MUR by the author, 21 April 2010, Rabat, Morocco. 76 Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam.” 77 El-Katiri, “The Institutionalisation of Religious Affairs.” 78 Azzedine Layachi, “Islam and Politics in North Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics eds. John L. Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 352–78.

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7 HAMAS ACCORDING TO HAMAS A reading of its Document of General Principles Jean-François Legrain

Introduction The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means (Article 1). The promulgation on May 1, 2017 by the Islamic Resistance Movement-Hamas of its “Document of General Principles and Policies” (Wathîqat al-Mabâdi’ wa-l-Siyâsât al-‘Ammah – ‫” ﻭﺛﻴﻘﺔ ﺍﻟﻤﺒﺎﺩﺉ ﻭﺍﻟﺴﻴﺎﺳﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻣﺔ‬1 aims to mark a significant step in its historical trajectory as it was adopted by its representative bodies after years of debates, amendments, etc. This Document testifies to the internal balance of power as Khaled Meshaal leaves the leadership of the Political Bureau he has chaired since 1996 and where Yahya al-Sinuwar, head of the armed wing, has recently won the internal elections for the general direction of the movement in Gaza. It also and above all reflects, though without any reference, the experience gained through the thirty years of its existence as Hamas, plus the forty years previous to then, since the establishment of the Palestinian branch of the Association of Muslim Brothers in which the movement is inscribed.2 By designating its text as a “wathîqa” (document), Hamas refers somewhere to his 1988 “mîthâq” (Charter)3 even if linguistically the wathîqa is supposed to be less binding and fixed. For that matter, Khaled Meshaal emphasizes that this new text would be called to be amended, supplemented, or even replaced according to the realities and interests of the nation.4 As a result, many analysts have read the Document in the light of the Charter, at the risk of forgetting that, if it can be read together with the Charter, it can also be compared with other documents which, like it, could serve as an inspiration or a deterrent, emanating from Hamas itself, as from other structures such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Article 1 of the Document proposes Hamas’s definition of itself which, by what it states and what it omits, offers in short the continuities, evolutions, ruptures and ambiguities of which the whole Document testifies. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, will make crossreferences both within the Document itself and between it, on the one hand, and the Charter and other Hamas communiqués and statements, not to mention the 1968 PLO Charter,5 on 79

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the other hand, in order to understand what the movement wants to emphasize in its similarities to, as well as differences from, its own past history and/or its rivals.

What the Document states The resistance and liberation of Palestine Palestine holds the central place within this Document, its mention being associated with the principle of liberation. The “resistance” was the raison d’être of the movement from its origin and as such mentioned in its name, “Movement of the Islamic resistance” (Harakat alMuqâwamah al-Islâmiyyah – ‫)ﺣﺮﻛﺔ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺎﻭﻣﺔ ﺍﻹﺳﻼﻣﻴﺔ‬, Hamas (‫ )ﺣﻤﺎﺱ‬being the acronym. To resistance to the Zionist project, the Document henceforth adds “liberation” of the land, two inseparable objectives, to be developed in the frame of reference that is Islam. Hamas defines itself in Arabic as “an Islamic national Palestinian movement of liberation and resistance.” It thus displays its Islamic specificity while claiming a certain community of identity with the Palestinian nationalist formations. Its self-definition in English, however, is quite different since Hamas acts as a “Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement.” This ambiguity could lead to a misinterpretation, making Hamas a Palestinian version of the Islamic movements. Even if it was absent from the Charter, this self-qualification of Hamas as a “liberation movement” appears periodically as early as the 1990s. However, where nationalist organizations use the grammatical form tahrîr – ‫ﺗﺤﺮﻳﺮ‬, the action of liberation being done without more definition of its actor, Hamas uses the form taharrur – ‫ﺗﺤ ّﺮﺭ‬, the action being the work of Palestine itself. This liberation, according to Article 25, will be carried out through the “armed resistance” as “the strategic choice for the protection of the principles of the Palestinian people.” Expressed in these terms, this choice is recent, undoubtedly related to the intifadas and the succession of wars in Gaza. Asserting that “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws,” the same article maintains the validity of the strategy that the movement had adopted through the last two decades by organizing, for example, suicide operations. On the other hand, the term “jihad,” which appeared in one form or another on 36 occasions in the Charter, has not completely disappeared from the Document, even though it is used only once in Article 23 according to which “Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah.” According to Article 24, “The liberation of Palestine is the duty of the Palestinian people in particular and the duty of the Arab and Islamic Ummah in general. It is also a humanitarian obligation as necessitated by the dictates of truth and justice.” The Document, however, gives no justification for this duty, when Article 14 of the Charter made liberation “an individual religious obligation incumbent upon every Muslim wherever he may be.”

Palestine and Palestinians The definition that the Document gives of the “land” (the object of Articles 2 and 3) and the “people” (Articles 4 to 6) clearly seeks to escape history. If “Palestine is the land (ard – ‫ )ﺃﺭﺽ‬of the Arab Palestinian people” according to the Preamble, for Article 1 of the PLO Charter, however, “Palestine is the homeland (watan – ‫ )ﻭﻃﻦ‬of the Arab Palestinian people.” When the homeland reflects history, the land seems to escape history. The “borders” (it is specifically the term hudûd – ‫ ﺣﺪﻭﺩ‬which is used in the 80

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Arabic version of Article 2, where the English version uses a less precise verbal form: “extends from”) of Palestine surely refers to those that were established by the great Powers at the end of the First World War: “Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm AlRashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit.” Hamas, however, refrains from mentioning any historical condition that may have presided over this delimitation as “Palestine is the Holy Land, which Allah has blessed for humanity” and “within Palestine there exists Jerusalem, whose precincts are blessed by Allah”6 (Article 7). Referring to the same geographical contours on the ground, the PLO’s Charter, for its part, does not hesitate to refer to history, asserting that “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.”7 The only references to history made by the Document can be found in Article 18 which, however, makes clear distinctions. The only history qualified to be remembered and magnified is the ancient religious one as Palestine was the Muslims’ first Qiblah and the destination of the journey performed at night by Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. It is the location from where he ascended to the upper heavens. It is the birthplace of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him. Its soil contains the remains of thousands of Prophets, Companions and Mujahidin. All contemporary historical decisions concerning Palestine, for their part, are “considered null and void: the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution, and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them.” In general, the Document justifies Palestinian rights by shifting history to rely on “facts” described as “natural”, for example when it asserts that “The Palestinian cause in its essence is a cause of an occupied land and a displaced people” (Article 12). In fact, “The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes . . . is a natural right, both individual and collective” and this natural right “is confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law.”8 The concept of “natural right” however is not new to Hamas and is used to describe both “the right of our people to liberation (taharrur), return and establishment of the State”9 as well as the right of refugees and the resistance to the Occupation10. In the same vein, the Document claims the universality of the question of Palestine beyond its Arab status and its Islamic status and founds this on humanity since “Jerusalem . . . has a religious status, historical and cultural, Arab, Islamic and human (insânî – ‫( ”)ﺇﻧﺴﺎﻧﻲ‬according the Arabic version of Article 10) and that “The liberation of Palestine . . . is also a humanitarian (insâniyyah – ‫ )ﺇﻧﺴﺎﻧﻴﺔ‬obligation as necessitated by the dictates of truth and justice” (Article 24). The definition of “Palestinian people” refers both to the nation (“Arab”) and the territory (“Palestinian”). By asserting, however, that Palestine is “the land of the Arab Palestinian people,” the Document reverses the hierarchy that Article 1 of the 1968 PLO Charter established between its Arab status and Palestinian status by referring to “Palestinian Arab people.” The use of the expression “Arab Palestinian people” is new to Hamas. It seems, however, to be the case only in the Document itself. The territorial link makes the Palestinian and this one has only the qualifier of Arab in the absence of any confessional mention. The definition of the Palestinian people given in the Document, however, is religious in some respects, since it uses the expression “our [my emphasis] nation,” that is, an Arab and Islamic one.

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Concerning the “Palestinian people,” the relationship between the Document and the PLO Charter is almost systematic, both of which reflect an approach that could be described as essentialist. Referring to “Palestinity” (al-shakhsiyyah al-filastîniyyah – ‫)ﺍﻟﺸﺨﺼﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﻠﺴﻄﻴﻨﻴﺔ‬, both Charter and Document go far beyond the mere approach in terms of nationality and/ or legal status. The definition given to “Palestinians” in Article 4 of the Document reproduces in almost identical terms Article 5 of the PLO Charter by making them Arabs who lived in Palestine until 1947 and anyone born after this date whose father is Palestinian. In the same way, the inalienable character of Palestinity beyond occupation and banishment almost literally replicates the PLO Charter. Without explicit parallel in the latter but in full agreement on the substance with it, Article 6 of the Document gives a definition that one could describe with humor as “laic and democratic”: “The Palestinian people are one people, made up of all Palestinians, inside and outside of Palestine, irrespective of their religion, culture or political affiliation.” Some reading might suggest the possibility of recognizing the existence of Jewish Palestinians, as does Article 6 of the PLO Charter, which states that “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” There is nothing to suggest that this could be conceivable, and the Document, for that matter, refrains from mentioning any historical presence of Jews in Palestine. Nor are Christian Palestinians named as such, even if Christendom is mentioned on the occasion of citing the holy places. The document thus sets back from various statements such as that made Khaled Meshaal in 201211 who spoke about “the unity of the Palestinian people, both Muslims and Christians.” Article 8 simply emphasizes that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. It provides an umbrella for the followers of other creeds and religions who can practice their beliefs in security and safety.” With this affirmation, Islam thus retains its ultimate reference status and it is to Islam and not to democracy that “followers of other creeds and religions” (and not citizens, believers or not) owe “security and safety.” The fact that the two Articles devoted to defining Hamas’s approach of Islam are under the heading “Islam and Palestine” (Articles 8 and 9) might lead one to believe that it refuses to consider that Palestinians can legitimately develop others. According to the first paragraph of Article 8, “By virtue of its justly balanced middle way and moderate spirit, Islam – for Hamas – provides a comprehensive way of life and an order that is fit for purpose at all times and in all places.” This is manifest influence of Chaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.12 Coming from the Muslim Brotherhood’s school of thought, the chaykh, born in Egypt, has been living in Qatar since the 1960s from where he enjoys an international audience. The idea that Islam provides a way for the comprehensiveness (shumûl – ‫ )شمول‬of life is the first of the twelve principles of Islam developed by Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The wasatiyyah – ‫ﻭﺳﻄﻴﺔ‬, meanwhile, refers to the Qur’an, 2, 143, whose reading makes Muslims the “balanced nation.” Following the thought of Chaykh al-Qardawi, it evokes the idea of a certain “centrist” orientation in relation to dogma (neither moral laxness nor overzealous religious rigor) which politically refers to the idea of “moderation.” This notion is central to Hamas’s self-understanding when coming face-to-face with jihadist Salafism. Never named in the Document, the latter is nevertheless present, for example, when Article 9 states that “Islam is against all forms of religious, ethnic or sectarian extremism and bigotry.”

The conflict and its resolution For Hamas, the struggle concerns the “Zionist project,” beyond the State of Israel mentioned once in Article 18 and appears in quotation marks, where it is considered that 82

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“The Israeli entity is the plaything of the Zionist project and its base of aggression.” It is “a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others; it is hostile to the Palestinian people and to their aspiration for freedom, liberation, return and self-determination” (Article 14), and “The Zionist project also poses a danger to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability.” In vocabulary as well as in concept, these articles are very close to Article 22 of the PLO Charter and certain standards of the 1970s. Affirming that “its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion” (Article 16), the Document states that it “rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist (ethnic, qawmî – ‫)ﻗﻮﻣﻲ‬, religious or sectarian grounds” (Article 17). It recalls, on occasion, that “it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity” (Article 16), that “the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage,” and that it is “with the help of the Western Powers” that the Zionist movement “could occupy Palestine” (Article 17). This is the institutional response that has long been called for by many leaders of the movement to counter the accusations of anti-Semitism that it has been subjected to on the basis of the Charter. However, The Palestine Information Center, Hamas’s unofficial website, since at least August 2004,13 as well as Khaled Meshaal’s 2010 interview in al-Sabîl and another in 2012,14 and the presentation of Hamas offered by its official website in 2015,15 have all expressed the same ideas in almost identical terms. If the Document states that “The establishment of ‘Israel’ is entirely illegal” (Article 18), it is not exempt from the essentialist approach of the conflict with Israel that could be already noted at the end of Article 7, which speaks of the determination of the people of Palestine to defend the truth “until the Promise of Allah is fulfilled,” an inspired expression of the Qur’an 16,33. The secular approach, expressed in terms of illegality, in fact, is advanced only by the English version of the Document; where the Arabic version uses the adjective “bâtil,” also used in Article 19 and then rendered in English by the term “illegitimate” to qualify “occupation, settlement building, Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts.” There is no doubt that the authors of the Document, like many of its Arabic-speaking readers, have in mind here the habitual use of the term based on the Qur’an 21,18 and 31,30, which opposes the bâtil – ‫ﺍﻟﺒﺎﻃﻞ‬, the deceptive illusion, to the haqq – ‫ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬the truth, the reality (God is haqq: Koran 10,32; 22,6; 24,25). Some Qur’anic comments interpret this opposition as being that which differentiates the ephemeral and the permanent, the Evil and God.

The State along the 1967 Lines Article 20 develops this principle of the illegality of the creation of Israel and presents its consequences. The first part of the Article merely repeats the principles already stated: “no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded” and rejection of “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” The second part of Article 20 is the one that has elicited the most numerous comments and misinterpretations: Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian State, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the 83

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return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus. Unlike Palestine, which, according to Article 2, has “borders,” as we have seen, the State presented as a formula of consensus does not have any, only those drawn by the “lines” (khutût – ‫ )ﺧﻄﻮﻁ‬inherited from the ceasefire of 1949. Hamas is perfectly faithful to its traditional approach to the issue. However, Hamas refrains from explaining its basics as before made of some reading of the Koran and the Islamic tradition: the negotiation of the frontier would be a denial of the Islamity of Palestine, hence the refusal of the legitimacy of the 1947 partition; the acceptance of a State along the lines of the ceasefire, on the other hand, is only the expression, objective but reversible, of a simple balance of power, hence the legitimacy of a de facto armistice without a de jure recognition of Israel. It is, therefore, a false object of satisfaction or dissatisfaction for those who say that Hamas would have endorsed the two-state solution which, in fact, implies the definitive existence of “borders” that are safe and recognized to use the dedicated expression. By adopting the traditional vocabulary of international relations to express positions that are not unlike that of the PLO of the 1970s, the Document abandons the terms that Hamas used in the 1990s and early 2000s based on exemplarity of prophetic conduct and expressed in terms of hudnah – ‫( ﻫﺪﻧﺔ‬armistice) and sulh – ‫( ﺻﻠﺢ‬conciliation). In reference to the negotiation of the Hudaybiyya treaty between the Prophet and the Quraysh tribe, Chaykh A. Yasin thus proposed in November 1993 a ten-year hudnah.16 The proposal was reiterated in January 2004 by his short-lived successor Dr. Abdelaziz Rantisi and its content was in all respects similar to what the Document proposes as the State that is a formula of national consensus. The initiative was performed again in November 2006,17 the last use of the term in this context. In the field of military engagement from Gaza, Hamas took the initiative for a first 45-day hudnah in June 2003, but broke it after a succession of Israeli operations. The term was abandoned in 2005 in favor of tahdi’ah – ‫( ﺗﻬﺪﺋﺔ‬lull), whose doctrine is developed by Article 26: “Managing resistance, in terms of escalation or de-escalation, or in terms of diversifying the means and methods, is an integral part of the process of managing the conflict and should not be at the expense of the principle of resistance”; unilateral or negotiated sometimes with the help of Egypt, the “lulls” followed each other from 2005 to 2014.

The PLO and the PA Unlike the Arab resolutions that since 1974 have made the PLO “the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” Article 29 of the Document considers it as “A [my emphasis] national framework for the Palestinian people.” In spite of this reservation, the Document considers that “It should therefore be preserved, developed and rebuilt on democratic foundations so as to secure the participation of all the constituents and forces of the Palestinian people, in a manner that safeguards Palestinian rights.” Article 30 goes on to stress “the necessity of building Palestinian national institutions on sound democratic principles, foremost among them are free and fair elections.” However, the text refrains from specifying whether these institutions should be inside or outside the PLO. Asserting that “the Oslo Accords and their addenda contravene the governing rules of international law in that they generate commitments that violate the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” (Article 21), the Document offers a distant position of any invective, even if it qualifies the “security coordination” as “collaboration.” The Article is to be compared with Article 31, which claims that the PA “is to serve the 84

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Palestinian people and safeguard their security, their rights and their national project,” a somewhat contradictory requirement with the condemnation of its basic principles set forth herein.

The Palestinian State The PA’sposition is to be read in relation to Article 27 according to which “A real State of Palestine is a state that has been liberated. There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.” First, it aims to describe everything that is not the State of Palestine proclaimed by the PNC in Algiers in 1988. In relation with Article 20, it also means that the State defined to be a formula of national consensus does not meet the conditions of the “real” State. It can be read, finally, as defining the expected goal of liberation. The claim of a State is not new in Hamas’s speech even though it was not included in the Charter which only envisaged the solution of the Palestinian question from the point of view of a return to Islamic sovereignty. However, at no time does the Document advance a requirement of Islamity of that State. If Article 27 of the Charter regarded the PLO as Hamas’s “closest of the close,” it devoted its longest development to stressing its distance from its conception of the secular State: “The fruit of the intellectual invasion suffered by the Arab world since the defeat of the Crusaders and which have strengthened and continue to strengthen Orientalism, mission work and imperialism.” Hamas, however, has never shown itself to be uncomfortable with the place accorded to Islam by the Basic Law of the PA voted for by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), which sticks to making Islam the official religion and “a [and not the] main source of legislation.” Thus since 2007, in Gaza, none of the laws passed by the PLC really breaks with this practice of being almost consensual in matters of religion. Hamas, therefore, did not implement the political program of the Bloc of Change and Reform presented in the legislative elections of January 2006 aimed at “making Islamic sharia ‘the main source of legislation’ [original emphasis] in Palestine.”18 Considering these institutions, the influence of religion, in fact, can be read through the encouragement given to the development of conflict resolution mechanisms in the framework of Islah (conciliation) committees set up by the Palestinian Scholars’ League, a group which is close to Hamas, in response to the problems faced by the civil judicial system legally linked to the presidency.

What the Document omits Making the liberation of Palestine the focus of its Document, Hamas has opted to ignore any development regarding the modalities of its implementation that it would conduct itself if we make an exception of its mention of armed resistance as a strategic choice.19 The Document, for example, restricts itself with Articles 33 and 34 when mentioning in a general way the role that the various elements of civil society could play in the project of resistance, liberation and the construction of the political system.

The Document’s humanitarian, popular, political and religious commitments Surprisingly, the Document completely ignores aspects of its practices for which it has no reason to be ashamed. Nothing is said, for example, of its commitment to the prisoners while the Bloc of Change and Reform: 2006 mentioned in its Article 9 that “the question 85

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of prisoners and detainees is one of the priorities of Palestinian action and is part of national sovereignty.” The Document likewise ignores the very term “negotiation” (mufâwadah – ‫ )ﻣﻔﺎﻭﺿﺔ‬even though Hamas has been practicing this since its origins, provided that it excludes the domain of sovereignty, especially regarding the question of prisoners. Furthermore, according to PIC in 2004, Hamas is “a popular and national resistance movement that is working to create conditions conducive to the realization of the liberation of the Palestinian people.”20 This type of commitment does not appear in the Document, even though it has been reactivated since 2018 in support of the movement granted to the “Great March of Return,” a civil society initiative launched on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the nakba through a series of demonstrations and confrontations along the border between Gaza and Israel. Moreover, at no time does the Document explain Hamas’s political commitment to the institutions of self-government. Articles 21 and 23, quoted earlier, merely recall that the Oslo Accords contradict Palestinian rights without explaining how its participation in elections and its management of power could be linked to the quest for liberation. In the program of the Bloc of Change and Reform: 2006, however, it was made clear that Hamas believes that its participation in the legislative elections at that time and in the light of the reality experienced by the Palestinian question is part of its overall program for the liberation of Palestine and the return of the Palestinian people to their country and country. Nothing, finally, suggests that Hamas could be a “government party” as part of the expected State. Likewise, nothing is said from an organizational point of view on the relationship between its political and military wings, that is, Hamas and its al-Qassam Brigades. More surprising perhaps is the near-silence observed regarding its religious commitment. Dedicated to resistance and liberation, Hamas specifies as seen before that “Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.” One could therefore legitimately include preaching (da’wah – ‫ )ﺩﻋﻮﺓ‬among its means and Islamization among its objectives. Such a mission, however, is not specifically mentioned. Does the Document renounce the consideration that Islam is a (the?) favorable condition for liberation? No doubt this isn’t the case if one refers to the definition given in Article 8 of Hamas’s conception of Islam as providing “a comprehensive way of life.” Article 6 of the Charter, for its part, affirmed that Hamas is a movement that “works toward raising the banner of God on every inch of Palestine” and Article 12 made patriotism (wataniyyah – ‫“ )ﻭﻃﻨﻴﺔ‬an article of the religious profession of faith” [‘aqîdah – ‫]ﻋﻘﻴﺪﺓ‬. The resistance against the occupier was then active practice of the faith and preaching was its preparation. Still in 2005, Hamas presented itself as “a movement of resistance that works for the liberation of the earth and man.”21 Such an approach was only the result of the conception then explicitly developed by Hamas. The Charter, for example, gave the motivation for the creation of Hamas in Article 9: that “Islam had disappeared from the reality of life.” Its objectives, therefore, were: “to fight the lie (al-bâtil – ‫)ﺍﻟﺒﺎﻃﻞ‬, to defeat it and to destroy it so that the truth (al-haqq – ‫ )ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬can reign.” As a consequence, Article 15 of the Charter held that “in the minds of all Muslim generations the cause of Palestine must be a religious cause which requires appropriate treatment on that basis.” In 2013, former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyyeh still claimed that “Hamas presented a new model of national action” which he defined as “a combination of resistance, da’wah activities, relief work, popular work, political action, and intellectual action.”22 86

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Hamas’s affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood At no time does the Document remind us that Hamas’s commitment is part of the history of all those which preceded it, nor does it recall its achievements and its tutelary figures. The absence of the mention of the Association of Muslim Brotherhood is therefore just a part of this silence even if it has been underlined by many analysts. For the Charter, Hamas was “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine,” the “Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood [being] a world organization” (Article 2), when Hamas’s slogan in Article 8 was that of Muslim brothers. The question of the amendment of the Charter, including the break of the links with the Association of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been asked at the beginning of 1993, the object of shuttles between the leaders on the ground in Palestine and the banned ones in Marj al-Zuhûr in Lebanon.23 The debate was then linked to the establishment of an Islamic State in Palestine and the imperatives of clarifying and improving Hamas’s relations with its Palestinian partners, the PLO in particular, as well as its Arab and Western interlocutors. The question of the links between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is complex because of the plurality of the parties involved.24 There is no doubt that Hamas, through history and ideology, has links with the Egyptian Association. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Ismailia in Egypt and the establishment of the Association in Palestine from 1935 onward was due to Abderrahman al-Banna, the brother of Hasan, the Brotherhood’s founder. In addition, the body of Hamas’s ideological references is populated by the great names of the Egyptian Association. There is also no doubt that the Palestinian Association and Hamas have links with the Egyptian-controlled international leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. A member of “Tandhîm Bilâd al-Shâm” (Organization of the Levant) since its creation in 1977, Hamas obtained emancipation in 2008 (or 2011 or 2013, according to the sources) due to its own importance, and it was directly attached to the Guidance Office in Cairo. The real prerogatives of the latter, however, have always been subject to debate, and in 2017, we did not really know what the Association had become because of the Egyptian government’s repression. Without forgetting the undeniable immediate diplomatic interest in Hamas’s relations with Egypt, this silence seems rather to refer to the will to claim the independence of decision of the movement, as well as to endorse any interference in external affairs. In 2015, for example, Hamas’s self-styled presentation on its official website said: Hamas’s decision stems from its leadership, leadership institutions and from the top interest of its people and the requirements of the Palestinian cause. No one interferes in its decisions and it has no organizational overlap with any organization, party or state whatsoever.25 But it is only a silence and not a denial of history or a break. As Khaled Meshaal, in his 2017 interview emphasizes,26 Hamas is in the legacy of the Muslim Brothers’ ideology, a legacy of which the Document sometimes suggests, such as Articles 8 and 9 mentioned above and devoted to the vision that Hamas proposes to Islam.

Conclusion At the end of this reading of the Document, it is clear that, taken separately, none of the points raised is really new. The text merely reiterates (without copy and pasting) statements and positions already issued long ago, but omits to mention some that are still held. Its 87

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originality is due to the lack of explicit religious references and the multiplicity of nods to the positions held by the PLO in the 1970s. The only novelty lies in the mention of armed resistance as a strategic choice. A superficial reading could lead to the conclusion that Hamas’s thinking has been secularized. Given the “resistance” of some concepts to “purification”, this secularization would, however, still be in the process of being developed. But this is not the case. The Document is a complex and even subtle text beyond its formal imperfections and its silences are just as meaningful as its statements. Far from a secular approach, the Document’s authors appear to have simply chosen to silence the religious foundations of assertions expressed mostly in secular terms. The reading grid offered by Meshaal in his 2017 interview thus reveals its relevance by making the Document the combined fruit of fidelity to invariants (thawâbit – ‫ )ﺛﻮﺍﺑﺖ‬and openness (infitâh -‫ )ﺇﻧﻔﺘﺎﺡ‬in the consideration of realities (wâqi’ -‫)ﻭﺍﻗﻊ‬. The silence of the Document on the Charter and Khaled Meshaal,27 which avoids the question of its repeal can only refer to the fact that it is not repealed. Only its anti-Semitic aspects can be considered as such, since the Document explicitly expresses an entirely different position. All the other provisions upon which the Document remains silent, on the other hand, can be considered as still valid, as are the numerous communiqués and declarations of the last three decades. All these texts constitute the real body of references that are always relevant when each of the assertions of the Document finds its roots and its justifications in them. The treatment of the question of the links with the Association of the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore significant of the report in general maintained by the Document with the inheritance of the movement: silence does not mean denial. Therefore, the Document is not the result of a decision comparable to that adopted by the Tunisian al-Nahda Party at its May 2016 congress which had then chosen to abandon da’wah in favor of democratic politics, Islam being no longer considered “the solution” but one [my emphasis] reference. It was prohibited for party membersto engage in charitable and religious activities. Anxious to avoid what some would characterize as religious narrow-mindedness, the Document opted for a form of thought that could be described as a-historical. Renouncing all Qur’anic and prophetic citation but also any reference to both the Palestinian experience and its own in terms of resistance, it has, we would say, reified the question of Palestine. It is the land that is mentioned even before the people, a geographical entity with eternal limits, and the right attached to it, itself eternal, is “natural”, the divine Scriptures being only its confirmation (not the source). All this brings us back to the questions of the conditions of writing the Document and the identity of the intended target. Published on the occasion of the change of president of the political bureau, the Document does not seem deeply dependent on this event because its process of writing was initiated several years earlier. Deeply anchored in the Palestinian political landscape, Hamas is not fighting for its survival even though its banishment by a part of the international scene and the economic and political blockade of Gaza has undeniably weakened it. So why produce this text at this time? There is no doubt that the Document reflects the experience gained during the decade of their exercise of power but also and especially the military commitment, in the context of the wars recently waged by Israel. In this context, the target is probably not the basis of the movement already formed and informed, nor the leaders of the PLO and the PA, which have for years been impeding all attempts at reconciliation. Israel is no more targeted as the Document does not constitute “an initiative” as Meshaalpointed out.28 The expansion of the movement’s recruitment base in the absence of a truly charismatic leader therefore remains. To all those disappointed with nationalism as embodied for decades by the PLO and the PA, especially to young people, Hamas proposes that they join its ranks. 88

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Above all, it offers them a chance to contribute to the armed struggle, the only path chosen for liberation, by providing them an approach to the conflict, lightened by its religious references and rich in references to the PLO before Oslo. It was incumbent, moreover, on Hamas to give some pledges of good conduct to the Egypt of Marshal A.F. al-Sissi. Some considered that, with the Document, the theologian had given way to the politician. The evaluation seems true as soon as it is made clear that the politician acted in proximity with the soldier without ever denying his theological knowledge. In this context, the Document could express a sort of bet on the future, when the generation of PLO and PA president Mahmoud Abbas, and PNC speaker Salim Zaanoun, eventually fades away and as the annexation to Israel of new Palestinian lands is announced periodically. While the PLO and the PA are unable to offer a vision of the future, trapped by the only logic of survival in the preservation of acquired status, Hamas aims to restore depth to the policies it has enacted in Gaza.

Notes 1 Originals in Arabic and English on the official website of Hamas, available at http://files.hamas.ps/ doc/. The publication of the text was accompanied on May 1 by a press conference of Khaled Meshaal given in Doha and broadcast by the channel Al-Jazeera, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GvPQ_L1BKeI. A source mentioned below as Meshaal: 2017. 2 Among the many analyses that have been proposed of the Document, it seems relevant to me to distinguish: Issam M.A. Adwan, “Hamas Charter: Changes and Principles,” Politics and Religion Journal 13, no. 1 (2019): 15–37; Amira Hass, “Why Hamas’ new charter is aimed at Palestinians, not Israelis,” Haaretz, May 3, 2017, available at www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium1.786870; Khaled Hroub, “A Newer Hamas? The Revised Charter,” Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) XLVI, no. 4 (2017): 100–111; Menachem Klein, “Religion out, nationalism in: Will Hamas’ charter divide the movement?,” 972 Mag, May 14, 2017, available https://972mag.com/religionout-nationalism-in-will-hamas-charter-divide-the-movement/127298; Mohsen Mohammad Saleh, “On the Debate Regarding Hamas’s Political Document,” Political Analysis, Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations, June 15, 2017, available https://eng.alzaytouna.net/2017/06/15/politicalanalysis-debate-regarding-hamass-political-document-dr-mohsen-mohammad-saleh/ 3 Original in Arabic, available at www.aljazeera.net/specialfiles/pages/0b4f24e4-7c14-4f50-a831ea2b6e73217d, and English translation by Muhammad Maqdsi (Islamic Association for Palestine), in Journal of Palestine Studies XXII, no 4 (1993): 122–134. 4 Interview with Meshall in 2017 at 0’22”. See Note 1. 5 Original in Arabic, available at http://info.wafa.ps/ar_page.aspx?id=4921, and English translation by The Avalon Project, “The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1–17, 1968,” available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp. 6 The English version ignores the religious connotations suggested by the expression “Aknâf Bayt alMaqdis” (‫)ﺃﻛﻨﺎﻑ ﺑﻴﺖ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺪﺱ‬. Referring to “Islamic law,” Article 11 of the Charter made Palestine “an Islamic Waqf [trust] land for all generations of Muslims until the day of resurrection,” a concept ignored by the Document. 7 Hamas, however, limits Palestine with the Jordan River when the PLO at that time left open the interpretation as to the possible inclusion of Transjordan. Article 1 of the Basic Law of the Palestinian Authority (PA) refrains from specifying the boundaries of Palestine. 8 As the natural law is confirmed by “divine laws,” when the Zionist project denies these rights it goes against the revelation that the people it claims to represent have benefitted from. 9 Communiqué of April 29, 1999 marking the end of the interim period, available at https://hamas. ps/ar/post/1033/. 10 Communiqué of May 15, 2004 marking the commemoration of the nakba, available at https:// hamas.ps/ar/post/903/. 11 Contribution to the conference organized in Beirut on November 28 and 29, 2012, published under the title of “The Islamists in the Arab World and the Palestinian Issue, In Light of the Arab Uprisings,” a kind of preliminary draft of the text of 2017, available at https://eng.alzaytouna.net/

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12 13 14

15

16 17

18

19

20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28

2013/03/19/khalid-mishal-hamas-political-thought-and-stances-in-light-of-the-arab-uprisings/. 1/ 12, a source mentioned below as Meshaal: 2012. Sagi Polka, “Hamas as a Wasati (Literally: Centrist) Movement: Pragmatism within the Boundaries of the Sharia,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 42, no. 7 (2019): 683–713. The text was still online ten years later, available at web.archive.org/web/20040810034859/http:/ www.palestine-info.com/arabic/hamas/who/who.htm. A source mentioned below as PIC: 2004. In Al-Sabîl, Amman. Interview published in several episodes in July 2010 and gathered in one volume by the PIC, see in Arabic at www.palinfo.com/Uploads/Models/Media/old/oldimages/ sfiles/2010/augest/khaled_meshaal_interview_assabeel.net.pdf, and English translation by the AfroMiddle East Centre (AMEC), “Hamas’s Mesha’al lays out new policy direction,” August 30, 2012, available at http://amec.org.za/palestine/item/976-hamas-mesh-al-lays-out-new-policy-direction. html. A source mentioned below as Meshaal: 2010. The Arabic page was created by March 25, 2015, available at https://hamas.ps/ar/page/19/, and the English page “The Islamic Resistant Movement,” no later than June 28, 2015, available at https://hamas.ps/en/page/2/. Both were still online as of 2019. Al-Hayât (London), November 1, 1993, available at www.alhayat.com/article/1871405/. Al-Hayât al-Jadîda, December 24, 2006; English translation in Yigal Carmon and C. Jacob, “Alongside Its Islamist Ideology, Hamas Presents Pragmatic Positions,” MEMRI, Inquiry & Analysis Series, no. 322, February 6, 2007, available at www.memri.org/reports/alongside-its-islamist-ideologyhamas-presents-pragmatic-positions Original in Arabic, available at http://islah.ps/new2/?news=128, and English translation in Khaled Hroub, “A ‘New Hamas’ through Its New Documents,” Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 4 (2006): 6–27. A source mentioned below as Bloc of Change and Reform: 2006. However, unlike several earlier statements like Meshaal: 2010 which only corroborated its traditional field politics, Hamas refrains from recalling here that it is limiting its struggle to that against the occupier. See Note 13. “Hamas’ Political Vision,” available at https://intilaqa.hamas.ps/28/page/word/w3.html. Isma’il Haniyyah, “Hamas: An Analysis of the Vision and Experience in Power,” 2013. Interview published in its English version in Mohsen Mohammad Saleh, Islamic Resistance Movement-Hamas: Studies of Thought and Experience (Beirut: Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies & Consultations, 2014), 3. Al-Hayât, April 7, 1993. For example, Muhsin Sâlih, “The track from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas” (in Arabic), al-Jazeera, December 28, 2016, available at www.aljazeera.net/knowledgegate/opinions/ 2016/12/28 Mirroring this demand for independence, Article 37 states that the movement “opposes intervention in the internal affairs of any country,” a commitment already posted on the official website of the movement from 2015. The lesson was probably learned from the Jordanian experience: accused of having unduly taken control of the Jordanian Association of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas had been led to emancipate itself from the “Tandhîm Bilâd al-Shâm” as we have seen below. See Note 1: 2017 interview at 0’59. See Note 1: 2017 interview at 1’29”. See Note 1: 2017 interview at 1’28”.

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8 HEZBOLLAH Between nationalism and Islamism James Paterson and Benjamin MacQueen

Introduction Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s by an association of young Shi’a militants, activists and religious leaders in southern Lebanon. This nascent political movement consolidated primarily in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion. However, the birth of this organization must be understood in the broader context of the politicization of the Lebanese Shia community from the 1950s to the 1970s, and their links with emerging political trends within Lebanon and across the region. Herein, Hezbollah’s early political thought, and legitimizing narratives would be informed by and based in the marriage of two ideological streams: religious legitimacy and nationalist/territorial legitimacy. In relation to the former, the movement’s founders emerged from the Najafi Shi’a school of thought in the late 1960s/early 1970s, heavily influenced by Khomeini’s ideas of Islamic revolution and the governance of the jurist (vilayet-e-faqih). In this, the movement promised liberation for Lebanon’s “disinherited” Shi’a through the creation of an Islamic state in Lebanon. In relation to the latter, the movement also drew directly from Marxist and post-colonial thought in seeking to broaden their appeal beyond the Shi’a community to all disadvantaged Lebanese. In both regards, the early movement sought the overthrow of Lebanon’s confessional political structure – critiqued as both un-Islamic and a tool of Western-backed imperialism. Since the end of the civil war in 1990 and the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, the movement’s ideology has drifted away from these twin rationales for the removal of confessionalism toward open participation in the Lebanese political system. It is argued here that this represents an ideological shift in the movement not to something new, or a simple dilution of its goal for the creation of an Islamic state, but an emphasis on the nationalist/territorial elements that were core components of its ideology since the founding of the movement.

Socioeconomic factors and the deprivation of Lebanese Shi’a communities Whilst Lebanon is often presented as the archetype of communal accommodation, the crafting of the state institutions from the 1920s to the 1940s was effectively a bargain between the two 91

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dominant religious communities of the time: the Maronite Catholics and Sunni Muslims. Whilst a diversity of other groups existed within Lebanon upon independence, it was these two communities who dominated the early political trajectory of the state. The modern Lebanese state won its independence from France in 1943, with its defining compromise being the mithaq al-watani (National Pact), an unwritten bargain between the Maronites and Sunnis that provided the newly independent state with its terms of reference.1 The National Pact was the enshrinement of a trade-off between the Maronite and Sunni leadership whereby Sunni concerns over the allegiances of the Maronite leadership were to be assuaged by the proclamation of Lebanon as an “Arab” state whilst Maronite concerns of being subsumed within a broader Muslim community were mitigated by over-representation in the nascent Lebanese Parliament. It was the latter of these two bargains that proved to be more definitive for Lebanese politics as it established a system whereby religious identity became the basis for political representation (confessionalism). That is, parliamentary representation was the site of the sectarian trade-off. The range of confessional groups within Lebanon were organized under two over-arching groupings of Christian and Muslim. Based on the 1932 census, it was determined that the Christian community outnumbered the Muslim community 6–5. As a result, parliamentary representation would be split between the communities, and their relevant constituent groups according to this proportion, giving the Christian community and, by extension, the Maronite community, a permanent parliamentary majority. Further to this, senior political posts were allocated according to confession, with a permanent Maronite-held presidency and Sunni-held prime ministership. In a system weighted heavily toward the executive, these were by far the two most important political posts. Junior posts were given to other, less influential communities.2 Notably, the Speaker of the House was delegated to the historically marginalized, but numerically single largest group, Lebanon’s Shi’a. Historically, politically and economically disenfranchised, the Lebanese Shi’a communities’ “cultural heritage of oppression and suffering”3 provided the building blocks for their politicization. The symbolic post of Speaker, and the National Pact writ large, became one of the many sources of resentment for the Shi’a communities who felt excluded from the political system without a tangible means of redress.4 During that time, another chief determinant of Shi’a activism was the wider socioeconomic factors that spurred various movements to action.5 Lebanon’s rural peripheral regions, inhabited mostly by the Shi’a and commonly referred to as the “belt of misery,”, provided a breeding ground for Shi’a militancy in the 1980s.6 An IRFED7 report, conducted in 1960, revealed that 4 percent of the population possessed a third of the country’s wealth,8 and that 2 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the means of production.9 According to the report, the country’s peripheral regions had no running water, no electricity, no infrastructure, no hospitalization, and almost all development and infrastructure projects were concentrated within Beirut and Mount Lebanon, areas dominated by the Maronite and Sunni communities.10 Characterized by famine and illiteracy, these conditions engendered a sense of real and relative deprivation, as compared to Beirut’s apparent wealth and government attention. As such, the self-identification as the “proletariat of Lebanon” became an increasingly common theme amongst the emerging Shi’a leadership and their flagship party, Amal.11 Against this backdrop, Shi’a communities, the largest demographic group at the bottom of the socioeconomic and political ladder, started demanding a place in the distribution of power and spoils.12 However, according to Saad-Ghorayeb, the early Shi’a political awakening had a particularly secular character, experiencing a “communal reidentification, not a [Shi’a] Islamic retrospective.”13 Indeed, distinct Shi’a political 92

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organizations, Amal and later, Hezbollah, were relative latecomers to the Lebanese political scene, with the initial inception of Shi’a activism affiliating itself with secular opposition parties, such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), and the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP).14 As outlined by Norton, it is worth noting that “there was an inherent ideological attraction to parties that condemned the tribal, religious, or ethnic bases of discrimination. Indeed, it is notable that the leadership of these secular parties was predominantly Christian.”15

Hezbollah’s inception Nevertheless, other sectors began to look inward to empower and unite the Shi’a communities; this second group found its charismatic leader in the cleric Musa al-Sadr.16 Al-Sadr established the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumim) which, along with the movement’s armed wing (Harakat Amal) became one of the most significant, and explicitly Shi’a, political movements within Lebanon.17 However, following al-Sadr’s disappearance and presumed death in 1978, hitherto muted divisions within the organization emerged. Many Shi’as were disappointed with al-Sadr’s replacement, Nabih Berri, and his unwillingness to take a more confrontational stance, particularly against Isarel after the 1982 invasion. Although ideological fissures had been revealed earlier, it was this juncture – a fragile existing organization (Amal) representing a marginalized community (Lebanon’s Shi’a), an external intervention (Israel) drawing the community together, a pre-existing leadership group (indiviudals such as Hassan Nasrallah, Abbas al-Musawi, Subhi al-Tufayli, and Ragheb Harb), linked to a willing external partner (Iran) – that provides the constellation of factors that all fed into the emergence of the Party of God, Hezbollah, some time in early 1980s Lebanon. In this context, Iranian help, initially in the form of ideological justification and later material and logistic resources, was crucial to the development of the movement.18 The 1979 Iranian Islamic revolutionary model provided the ideological justification “about how a political transformation could be achieved through social mobilization and adherence to a politicized version of Shiite Islam.”19 Moreover, Ayatollah Khomeini’s uncompromising hostility to his opponents and his emphasis to export the Islamic revolution abroad meant that there was an willingness to provide direct assistance in the form of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. Most significantly, Iran’s despatch of up to 5,000, Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) played a direct role in the genesis of the organization.20 Consequently, Iranian support proved vital, with Alagha arguing that “without Iranian ideological and material backing there could not have been an efficient Lebanese [Hezbollah].”21 This, in turn, provided Hezbollah with its distinct religious character.

The open letter: Nascent political thought and the anathematizing of the Lebanese state The coalescence of all these resistance elements into a single institutional framework established Hezbollah’s dual forms of legitimacy: religious and nationalistic. This framework was published and cemented in the 1985 Open Letter. The Open Letter is grounded in Hezbollah’s religious belief system, shaped in turn by an undercurrent of Shi’ite religious, political revivalism, and the adoption of Khomeini’s revolutionary ideology.22 When it came to domestic politics, the Open Letter focused on the need to establish an Islamic state modeled after the Islamic Republic of Iran, and rooted in the concept of wilayat al-faqih,23 the religious doctrine that requires Hezbollah to refer to the Supreme Leader in Iran, and 93

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rejected the notion of political participation in the Lebanese political system, which the group described as inherently corrupt and illegitimate.24 The language used in the letter to refer to the confessional system is quite striking. Hezbollah described the existing system as “fundamentally unjust, neither reformable nor modifiable, and it must be extracted by the roots.”25 The letter goes on to state that any party or group that works within the “established constitution” is in opposition to the movement, and that to “to form any government, or . . . to participate in any ministry whatsoever” will not achieve what the movement aims to accomplish.26 As a response to the corrupt system, theological abstraction of an ideal Islamic state represented a core doctrinal element of early Hezbollah political thought, as Islam represents the only “right system for mankind.”27 Linking all political, military and social threads in Hezbollah’s worldview emerging from the Open Letter, what provides its intellectual foundations with its distinctly communal character is the notion of resistance as a comprehensive framework of action and the group’s self-identified role as a vanguard in the struggle between the conceptual dichotomy of the “oppressors”(mustakbirin) and “oppressed” (mustad’afin).28 Distinguished from the Sunni formulation between the Abode of Islam (Dar al-Islam) versus the Land of War (Dar alHarb) which sets Muslims against non-Muslims, Hezbollah’s conceptualization represents “those who are culturally repressed vis-à-vis those who practice this oppression, regardless of their religious identity.”29 This nationalistic claim was the means by which Israeli actions were deemed “oppressive” and in need of redress, and the belief that the Islamization of society should not be forcefully imposed and should be from “below” and not from “above.” Within the Open Letter, the emphasis that “there is no compulsion of religion”30 is indicative of the tenacity with which this notion is held.31 In the decades since its original publication, Hezbollah’s Open Letter has continued to serve as the group’s ideological framework, but with some interesting caveats. For example, through an emphasis on the principle of non-compulsion noted above, in subsequent years Hezbollah began rephrasing the call for an Islamic state as an aspirational, rather than programmatic, goal. Nevertheless, the Open Letter and Hezbollah’s original articulation of its political thought,32 demonstrates that interplay of two conceptualizing and legitimizing dynamics on its character, a wider Islamic and particular Shi’a interpretation on one hand, and a nationalistic/territorial narrative on the other.

The early years Following its inception, Hezbollah’s first decade of activity (1982–92) was its most violent. Here, Hezbollah emphasized its resistance ethos against the Israeli presence in Lebanon under the rubric of a defensive jihad.33 In the Open Letter, Hezbollah concluded that “we have seen that aggression can be repelled only with the sacrifice of blood, and that freedom is not given but regained with the sacrifice of both heart and soul.”34 At this time, Hezbollah identified itself as a jihadist movement, “a party of resistance,” whose resistance to Israel through armed opposition represents its “fixed and invariable dossier (al-malaf al-thabit).”3536 Identified as the fulcrum of belief within Islam, a communal defensive jihad is rationalised as God’s cause, as the cause of the people, the cause of the oppressed, the cause of pride, honour, and glory, the cause of the defense of the land, the cause of the defense of the sacred, of religion and of the values of humanity.37 Moreover, irrevocably tied to this concept of jihad, martyrdom becomes a necessity in this fight against Israel, valued not only as a means to an end, but as the end itself.38 94

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Justified from this narrative, and within the context of the Lebanese civil war which had led to the proliferation of confessional militias and proved the Lebanese Armed Forces’ (LAF) inability to end the conflict, Hezbollah became powerful enough to fight four simultaneous campaigns. According to Berti: the group’s goals were to fight the IDF [Israeli Defense Force]; to assert its military power over its Shia rival, Amal; to challenge directly the Lebanese government; and to expel any foreign presence from Shia areas of Lebanon and from the rest of the country.39 On one hand, sporadic clashes and ongoing tensions between Amal and Hezbollah boiled over into the 1988–89 war for control over southern Lebanon and Shi’a-dominated areas of Beirut. In addition, Hezbollah was openly challenging state authority and sovereignty through an ongoing campaign designed to force out state presence in Hezbollah-dominated areas.40 At the same time, through a mix of conventional and asymmetrical tactics, Hezbollah attempted to drive external forces from the country, principally the Israeli and the US, but also the French – most notably, the April 1983 martyrdom operation against the US embassy in Beirut and the infamous barracks bombing in October 1983 that killed 241 US Marines to force their departure. Here, as with its fight against Israel, Hezbollah’s strategy was to inflict high levels of casualties that made of the cost of sustained presence in Lebanon too high to bear. In describing Hezbollah’s development, early analysis stressed this armed resistance narrative as central to the organization. For example, Kramer adopted the perspective that the organization relied on sustained violence for legitimacy and strength.41 Indeed, despite involvement in the Lebanese political system since 1992, described below, since then Hezbollah has maintained an extended military network and continued its military campaign. Attacks against IDF position continued beyond the 2000 Israeli military withdrawal, and concentrated mostly on dispute areas, such as the Shebaa Farms.42 These tensions would escalate to a full-fledged war with Israel in the summer of 2006, which proponents point to as evidence that at its core Hezbollah remains predominately a military movement. This is further evidence through the group’s ongoing procurement strategy, based around increased stockpiles of missiles, rockets and anti-tank weapons43, and its most recent involvement in the Syrian civil war in support of the Assad regime.44

Hezbollah’s opening up Nonetheless, despite this continued resistance posture, others emphasize Hezbollah’s political accommodation with the post-civil war system – what has been deemed its “Lebanonization” – as underscoring pragmatism as the group’s center of gravity.45 Here, authors argue that Hezbollah’s history and institutional development can be divided into two phases; a “constitutive phase” (1982–92) wherein the group’s main asset was its military prowess. Following this, Hezbollah’s second “political accommodation” phase is marked by a gradual moderation and toleration of the Lebanese political system, and a progressive reliance on social services and political activism to maintain its power and legitimacy. A by-product of this process has been the group’s shift towards mainstream politics and integration into Lebanese society. This second phase, according to commentators, is signaled by Hezbollah’s decision to contest parliamentary elections in 1992, the first within the framework that ended the civil war, the Ta’if Agreement. As noted elsewhere, one of Hezbollah’s raisons d’être was its opposition to the underpinnings of 95

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the political system of pre-civil war Lebanon in toto. Hezbollah’s disparagement of the political system was rooted in its repudiation of its political sectarianism, and what it viewed as an unequitable appropriation of sectarian shares, representing it as a “fundamentally oppressive” system underscored by the Maronites’ monopoly over “sectarian privileges.”46 Nonetheless, with the formulation of a new constitution under the Ta’if Agreement, Hezbollah’s perception underwent a transformation; unlike its early stance that anathematized the entire Lebanese state as corrupt and unreformable, the changes institutionalized under the Ta’if Agreement posed an interesting, perhaps existential, question for Hezbollah. Deemed “neither completely evil nor completely good,”47 the constitutional changes brought in by the Agreement, which saw diminution of the political dominance held by the Maronites and expanded the scope of Shi’ite political participation,48 were considered substantially sufficient that Hezbollah revised its previous uncompromising pre-Ta’if stance.49 Building on this basis, the group shifted from its initial rejection of the Lebanese political system to a more narrowly defined objection to the role of sectarianism in shaping Lebanese politics.50 Against this backdrop, it became apparent that not only had Hezbollah failed to remove the confessional system, but there appeared little appetite amongst the Shi’a for any moves toward the establishment of an Islamic state.51 The movement appeared to recognize this soon after the end of the war, and saw greater currency in increasing formal participation within the confines of confessional politics. The movement installed a new leadership under Abbas Musawi (replaced by Nasrallah after Musawi was assassinated by Israel in 1992) and sought backing from senior Shi’a Iranian clerics for permission to participate in the legislative process. Whether this was abandonment or simply a delay, the theme of revolution receded to the background, Hezbollah’s emblematic expression “Islamic revolution in Lebanon” was replaced with “Islamic resistance in Lebanon,” and the movement appeared to remove the goal of achieving an Islamic state from its priority list.52 Implicitly, the movement’s leaders established a distinction between the ideal of an Islamic state, which became an aspiration rather than programmatic platform, and the circumstances of Lebanon’s reality: a fractured, multi-faith state. With this in mind, since the use of force was rejected as a mean of establishing an Islamic state, it became possible to temporarily integrate into the system.53 The movement in turn emphasized its resistance to Israeli occupation, a move that served a variety of purposes; it not only maintained a continuity with the movement’s founding principles but also allowed the movement to retain its armed wing, as a resistance group and not a militia, under the tacit cover of the Lebanese Constitution.

Political participation and social service provision In less than 50 days between the announcement of Hezbollah’s intention of participating in the election and the actual election day, Hezbollah presented a comprehensive political and social platform that managed to successfully mobilize public support, winning eight seats out of the total of 128 seats.54 Since then, Hezbollah has established a strong, and reformulated, political identity, sustaining its political participation over time. Indeed, since 1992, the group has consistently competed in Lebanese parliamentary (1996, 2000, 2005, 2009 and 2018) as well as municipal (1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016) elections, in the process becoming a fixture of the Lebanese political landscape.55 Through careful deal-making, Hezbollah has managed to establish a firmer control over the political reality of Lebanon., cementing its ability to shape the landscape, while at the same time embedding itself into it. For example, in the 2000 parliamentary elections, Hezbollah’s share of seats in the Lebanese Parliament rose from 9 to 12. At the same time. Hezbollah has instituted a coalition with the other dominate Shi’a group, Amal. Together, 96

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they won all 23 seats in southern Lebanon and all 9 seats in the Baalbek-Hermel region, located in the Bekaa Valley and heavily dominated by Shia. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, an alliance between Hezbollah and Amal won control of 35 seats, or 27 percent of the total seats and in the recent June 2009 elections, the Hezbollah bloc won 57 seats56 Most recently, Hezbollah, along with its partners, has been able to consolidate a small parliamentary majority in the 2018 parliamentary elections.57 While its own tally did not substantially change, 13 out of 128 seats, gains by its allies meant that Hezbollah has been able to play a more influential role in government.58 This parliamentary success has meant that “Hezbollah is able to exercise effective veto over any Lebanese government policy it opposes – while at the same time constructing an impenetrable wall against any public or parliamentary accountability over Hezbollah’s decisions.”59 Beyond this, pragmatism and political accommodation has also applied to the way which Hezbollah has dealt with, and rhetorically describes, Lebanon’s Christians. Within the Open Letter, Hezbollah maintained that the Maronites belonged to the category of dhimmis.60 On this basis, Lebanese Christians were accorded their human, social and religious freedoms, but not their political ones. No longer framed as ahl al-dimma, but now framed as partners, Hezbollah has recognized the need to work with other sectarian communities in order to claim a veneer of national, cross-sectarian political legitimacy among the majority of Lebanese.61 Most notably, this shift is evident in the memorandum of understanding signed by Hezbollah and Michael Aoun’s Maronite Free Patriotic Movement. This is not an isolated incident. The significant amount Hezbollah has invested into the establishment of an extensive network of social services underwritten by the movement forms a key part of its popularity and serves as a pillar in its claims to represent the marginalized and dispossessed. In brief, the movement has developed and oversees a statewide network of health, sanitation, educational, pastoral, judicial and other services.62 Building on this foundation, Hezbollah established a political identity based on service provision, particular to Shi’ite communities, but ostensibly to any marginalized communities within Lebanon.63 Alongside its well-financed media organization, it can appear to be a mirror or de facto state operating within the borders of the country. The party seeks to monopolize representation of this section of Lebanese society internally, through the provision of services bolstering its political and military agendas.

Shifts in Hezbollah’s political thought This process of integration into the system, and the reframing and reformulating of its political preferences, led to Hezbollah publishing, in November 2009, “The Political Document of Hezbollah,” commonly referred to as the “Manifesto.” The Manifesto was a revised political and ideological platform that was characterized by both significant continuity and discontinuity with the group’s 1985 military program.64 On one hand, the group maintained its bifurcated world of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” nor did it change it views on either the United States or Israel, maintaining the necessity of repelling the “corrupting influence of the West on the Islamic world.”65 On the other, and of perhaps more significance, through the Manifesto, Hezbollah established a revised political discourse in respect for its vision for Lebanon. For instance, Hezbollah omitted any references to either the concept of wilayat al-faqih, in a sense indicating it as an abstraction, and confirming Lebanon’s “consociational democracy” and its self-identification as part of the Lebanese political system.66 Now, Lebanon was a “homeland” par excellence.67 97

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With this context, Hezbollah’s co-option of, and perhaps by, the system is most noticeable in its reaction to the fragile protest that gripped Lebanon in late 2019. Amid calls to disperse and reported bouts of violence between protesters and counter-protesters linked to Hezbollah,68 Nasrallah’s bid and desire to maintain the current system is clear. In a highly anticipated speech on November 1, Nasrallah offered “bland criticisms” that in many ways backed the country’s establishment.69 “We call for dialogue between political parties, parliamentarians, and honest leaders of the protests,” Nasrallah said. “We must all get past the wounds that were created in the last two weeks.”70 Hezbollah’s reaction was telling, as even when confronted with an opportunity to undermine the existing and entrenched system, as one would expect from an anti-system movement that has branded itself as the vanguard of the revolution, its continued support for it is a significant indictor that it no longer prioritizes a substantial change. Moreover, this would not be the first time that the group has used violence domestically when its position was threatened. Following its resignation from the Siniora Cabinet in November 2006, and the subsequent protest and counter-protest, the Siniora government attempted to curb Hezbollah’s military wing by disabling Hezbollah’s telecommunications network and removing the head of Beirut’s airport on claims of collaboration with Hezbollah. This in turn prompted a swift and violent response from Hezbollah who framed the decision as a “declaration of war”, and saw the move as a pretext for an attempt to disarm the movement by force.71 In response, Hezbollah co-opted the existing protest movement and pushed for a general strike, sanctioning the use of violence domestically for the first time since 1990. Within days, Hezbollah had managed to overthrow pro-government militias and seized Sunni-dominated areas of West Beirut.72 These seizures led to a series of sectarian engagements between the two main parliamentary blocs and some of the worst instances of violence since the civil war.73 The resultant negotiation between the government and the opposition in the Qatari capital of Doha, implemented a number of functional changes to the balance of power within Parliament, to Hezbollah’s favor. Most significantly, even when not in majority, the changes provide the opposition movement, now dominated by Hezbollah, an effective veto over government decision making. Coupled with this, the Doha negotiations initiated a national reconciliation process, and amended electoral districts, once again in Hezbollah’s favor.74 However, the more substantive reforms that were originally part of the protest movement, such as claims related to wages and substantial electoral reforms, had now been discarded, in service of Hezbollah’s more limited goals. This episode, coupled with its response to the most recent round of protests, demonstrates not only Hezbollah’s ability, and willingness, to use violence on a domestic front against its claims to contrary, but also its prioritization of its position with Lebanon. Evidently, it has become increasingly apparent that Hezbollah is not seeking an overthrow of the Lebanese state and the confessional system. Instead, it has incrementally increased its control over existing institutions, showing a priority for continuity over radical change.

Conclusion Hezbollah’s trajectory represents one of domestic ideological compromise. Internationally, the party has maintained its steadfast confrontational stance vis-à-vis Israel, as well as solidarity with Iran in its ongoing confrontation with the US. However, even these aspects of Hezbollah’s ideology are framed in the context of territorial and national claims, particularly in relation to Israel’s occupation of the Shebaa Farms district and violations of Lebanese territorial, air and naval sovereignty. Domestically, this compromise is even more stark. Given its ascendant political position by the end of the 2010s, the party has actively 98

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worked to maintain the confessional system that under-represents their constituent community in Parliament. In short, it sees greater utility in the maintenance of the established political order than it does in the overturning of this order, an outcome it perceives as a threat to its current position.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

Augustus Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 11. Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, 12. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 7. Joseph Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program ed. Joseph Alagha (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 22–23. For an overview, see James Worrall, Simon Mabon and Gordon Clubb, Hezbollah: From Islamic Resistance to Government (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), Chapter 2. Worrall, Hezbollah: From Islamic Resistance to Government, 30–32. IRFED – Institut international de recherche et de formation éducation et développement. Quoted in: Dominique Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, eds. Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 11. Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 24. Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 24. Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 7; Faud Ajami, quoted in H. Khashan, Inside the Lebanese Confessional Mind (Washington, DC: University Press of America, Incorporated, 1992), 44, and Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 23–24. Joesph Olmert, “The Shi’is and the Lebanese State,” in Shi’ism, Resistance, and Revolution ed. Martin S. Kramer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 197. Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 9. Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, and Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion. Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, 15. See also Augustus R. Norton, Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon ed. Societies American Council of Learned (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 33–38. Benedetta Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration ed. Muse Project (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 31. For an overview of al-Sadr’s and Amal’s role see Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, 18–25. Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 31. Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 33. Marc R. DeVore and Armin B. Stähli, “Explaining Hezbollah’s Effectiveness: Internal and External Determinants of the Rise of Violent Non-State Actors,” Terrorism and Political Violence 27, no. 2 (2015). Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 14, and DeVore and Stähli, “Explaining Hezbollah’s Effectiveness.” Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 35. Adham Saouli, “Intellectuals and Political Power in Social Movements: The Parallel Paths of Fadlallah and Hizbullah,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41, no. 1 (2014). For an overview of wilayat al-faqih see Jason Wimberly, “Wilayat Al-Faqih in Hizballah’s Web of Concepts: A Perspective on Ideology,” Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 5 (2015), and Mariam Farida, Religion and Hezbollah: Political Ideology and Legitimacy (New York: Routledge, 2020), 10–14. Joseph Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto (Amsterdam: Pallas Publications, 2011), and Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History. Quoted in Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, 114. Quoted in Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, 115. Quoted in Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 35, and Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology. Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 16; Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, 36; Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 115–119, and Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto, 15–16. Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 17. Quoted in Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 119.

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31 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 36. 32 Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto; and Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration. 33 The Qur’anic concept of jihad, refers to the process by which an individual endeavors, struggles, or exerts in the Cause of God in either a personal or communal basis. 34 Quoted in Krista E. Wiegand, “Reformation of a Terrorist Group: Hezbollah as a Lebanese Political Party,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 8 (2009). 35 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 112. 36 For an overview of Hezbollah conceptualization of the concept, see Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 121–27, and Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 102–05. 37 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 122. 38 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 127–33, and Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 105–11. 39 Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 34. 40 Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 34. 41 Martin Kramer, “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 47, no. 8 (1994). See also Nicholas Blanford, Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (London: I.B Tauris, 2009). 42 Augustus Richard Norton, “The Role of Hezbollah in Lebanese Domestic Politics,” The International Spectator 42, no. 4 (2007). 43 Iver Gabrielsen, “The Evolution of Hezbollah’s Strategy and Military Performance, 1982–2006,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 25, no. 2 (2014). 44 Lina Khatib, The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication eds. Dina Matar and Atef Alshaer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Kota Suechika, “Strategies, Dynamics, and Outcomes of Hezbollah’s Military Intervention in the Syrian Conflict,” Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 12, no. 1 (2018). 45 Augustus Richard Norton, “Hizballah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?” Middle East Policy 5, no. 4 (1998), and Magnus Ranstorp, “The Strategy and Tactics of Hizballah’s Current ‘Lebanonization Process’,” Mediterranean Politics 3, no. 1 (1998). 46 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 26. 47 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 28. 48 For an overview of changes insitutionalized by the Ta’if Agreement, see Norton, “The Role of Hezbollah in Lebanese Domestic Politics”, and Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 42–43. 49 Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, 27–33. 50 Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 528. 51 Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, 41. 52 Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, 41; Mona Harb and Reinoud Leenders, “Know Thy Enemy: Hizbullah, ‘Terrorism’ and the Politics of Perception,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005), and Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: Politics and Religion. 53 Avon, Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God”, 45. 54 Norton, “The Role of Hezbollah in Lebanese Domestic Politics.” 55 For an overview of Hezbollah’s political program between 1992 and 2005, and changes therein, see Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, 42–67. 56 Wiegand, “Reformation of a Terrorist Group.”; and Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, “Declawing the ‘Party of God’: Toward Normalization in Lebanon,” World Policy Journal 18, no. 2 (2001). 57 Asma Ajroudi, “Hezbollah, Amal and Allies Biggest Winners in Lebanon Elections,” Al Jazeera, 8 May 2018, available at www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/hezbollah-amal-allies-claim-lebanonelection-sweep-180507160524402.html 58 Hanin Ghaddar, “What Does Hezbollah’s Election Victory Mean for Lebanon?” The Washington Insitute PolicyWatch 2966 (2018). 59 Jeffrey Feltman, “Hezbollah: Revolutionary Iran’s Most Successful Export,” Brookings Insitute (2019). See also, Shahram Akbarzadeh “Why does Iran need Hizbullah?” The Muslim World 106, no. 1: 127–140. 60 Dhimmis are non-Muslims that are excluded from certain rights enjoyed by Muslims. 61 Khatib, The Hizbullah Phenomenon, 25, and Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto.

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Hezbollah 62 Shawn Flanigan and Mounah Abdel-Samad, “Hezbollah’s Social Jihad: Nonprofits as Resistance Organizations,” Middle East Policy 16, no. 2 (2009). 63 Melani Claire Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014); Daniel Meier, “(B)Ordering South of Lebanon: Hizbullah’s Identity Building Strategy,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 30, no. 1 (2015), and Benedetta Berti, “Rebel Groups between Adaptation and Ideological Continuity: The Impact of Sustained Political Participation,” Government and Opposition 54, no. 3 (2019). 64 Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto. 65 Quoted in Wimberly, “Wilayat Al-Faqih in Hizballah’s Web of Concepts,” 43. See also Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto, 29–30; Berti, “Rebel Groups between Adaptation and Ideological Continuity,” 521. 66 Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto; Adham Saouli, “Hizbullah in the Civilising Process: Anarchy, Self-Restraint and Violence,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 5 (2011); Adham Saouli, Hezbollah: Socialisation and Its Tragic Ironies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Wimberly, “Wilayat Al-Faqih in Hizballah’s Web of Concepts.” 67 Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents from the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto, 32. 68 Al Jazeera, “Lebanon Protesters Defiant Despite Hezbollah Confrontation,” 26 November 2019, available at www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/lebanon-protesters-defiant-hezbollah-confrontation191125182301655.html 69 Michal Kranz, “Hezbollah’s Old Tricks Won’t Work in Lebanon,” Foreign Policy, 4 November 2019, available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/04/lebanon-shiite-hezbollah-resistance-establish ment-protest/ 70 Quoted in Kranz, “Hezbollah’s Old Tricks Won’t Work in Lebanon.” 71 Saouli, “Hizbullah in the Civilising Process,” 938–39, and Eitan Azani, “Hezbollah’s Strategy of ‘Walking on the Edge’: Between Political Game and Political Violence,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 35, no. 11 (2012). 72 Saouli, “Hizbullah in the Civilising Process.” 73 Berti, Armed Political Organizations from Conflict to Integration, 70. 74 Joseph Maïla, “Lebanon: Behind the Doha Compromise, a Fragile National Harmony,” Esprit 346 (2008): 8.

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9 ISLAMISTS, MUSLIM DEMOCRATS AND CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY INDONESIA Robert W. Hefner

Introduction After the fall of President Muhammad Suharto’s “New Order” regime in May 1998, Indonesia began an unsettled but hopeful transition from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy. During its first four years, the transition was buffeted by two contrary currents. On one hand, the country made steady progress toward the consolidation of democratic institutions, including free and fair elections; freedom of the press, assembly, and labor; the strengthening of a balance of powers between the executive and the legislature, and the withdrawal of the armed forces from Parliament. On the other hand, these same years witnessed a proliferation of Islamist paramilitaries, spectacular terrorist attacks, and outbreaks of ethno-religious violence in eight of the country’s 34 provinces. For some foreign analysts, these latter developments seemed to raise questions as to the democratic commitments of Indonesia’s Muslim citizens. Notwithstanding these reservations, the national elections held every five years from 1999 to 2019 have provided a reassuring confirmation of the electoral moderation of the great majority of Muslim voters. In all election cycles, voters have steered clear of both radical Islamism and conservative secular nationalism. Some 80 percent of the electorate has cast its vote for parties committed to the multiconfessional ideals of Indonesia’s state ideology, the Pancasila (Five Principles). Among the remaining parties of Islamist hue, those that have attracted the most support have done so largely by highlighting their commitment to clean government and social welfare provision, rather than the establishment of an Islamic state.1 Despite the achievements of the post-New Order transition, more assertive varieties of Islamism remain active. The more powerful of the radical Islamists have assembled large militias (laskar) with tens of thousands of followers organized into quasi-military hierarchies. The largest of these organizations, the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI), played a central role in the mass mobilizations of 2016–17 against the Chinese Christian governor of metropolitan Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (know as “Ahok”), who was 102

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voted out of power in April 2017 and several weeks later imprisoned on blasphemy charges. The militias have also been active in campaigns for the implementation of sharia-influenced bylaws in districts and towns beyond the capital, and have mounted sometimes fierce attacks on Muslim minorities (including the country’s tiny Shi’a and Ahmadi minorities), as well as Christians intent on building churches in Muslim-majority neighborhoods. In this chapter, I trace the genealogy and political impact of radical Islamism in post-New Order Indonesia. By “Islamism,” I refer to a variety of Muslim politics and social reform based on two paramount principles: first, that Islam is a “total” system (al-nizam al-Islami) and, as such, requires a comprehensive transformation of state and society; and, second, that the transformation must take place in accordance with Islamic sharia (divine law) which is understood, not in the classical sense of Muslim jurists, but as a body of positive law similar to that used in the modern West and to be enacted and enforced by the state.2 In the early years of Indonesia’s transition, many foreign policy analysts regarded radical Islamism as the most serious threat facing Indonesia’s fragile democracy. In retrospect, it seems these worries were exaggerated. Nonetheless, Indonesia’s Islamists have continued to influence politics and public culture. They have mounted serious challenges, less to the democratic system as a whole, than to Indonesia’s distinctive tradition of religiously inclusive citizenship.

Insurgent precedents Although sometimes described as more “moderate” than its Middle Eastern and South Asian counterparts,3 Muslim politics in this sprawling South East Asian country has in fact always been deeply contentious. On one hand, Indonesia is exceptional in that it has the largest Muslim social welfare and civil-religious associations in the world. The largest of these organizations are the Muhammadiyah (founded 1912, 25–30 million members today) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (estab. 1926, 35–40 million members). Both organizations have long been committed to the ideals of an independent and multiconfessional Indonesia. However, in the tumultuous decade of the1950s, Indonesia had the largest Communist Party outside the communist bloc, and the bitter polarization pitting Muslim parties against a communist Left led many in these Muslim associations to call for the establishment of an Islamic state. However, after the establishment of Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order (1966–98), these mainline organizations returned to their founding commitment to a multi-religious and inclusive, but not secular liberal, Indonesia. From the late 1980s onward, the two organizations were at the heart of what was to become the largest pro-democracy movement ever seen in the Muslim-majority world.4 If the democratic stream in Indonesia’s Muslim politics has deep roots, the country’s smaller radical stream has historical precedents as well. The roots of Islamist radicalism in Indonesia go back to the anti-colonial social movements of the late nineteenth century.5 Some of these early movements had a millenarian quality that had more to do with indigenous cultural imaginaries than they did with Islamist values as such. In the middle years of the twentieth century, however, several mass-based movements of radical Islamist inspiration arose, the largest and most influential of which was the so-called Darul Islam (“Abode of Islam”) movement. The Darul Islam was established in 1948, at the height of the independence war, when Dutch colonialists ousted during the Japanese occupation (1942–45) returned to Indonesia to re-impose colonial rule. After three years of armed struggle, the country’s nationalist leadership signed an agreement ceding control of much of West Java to the Dutch, and 103

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allowed an orderly retreat of Indonesian fighters to republican territories to the east. Angered by the agreement, a Muslim commander in West Java by the name of Kartosuwiryo launched a counter-insurgency, which he called the “Darul Islam” (DI). The new state, Kartosuwiryo declared, was based on divine law rather than human legislation. Just what Kartosuwiryo and his followers meant by sharia and the methodologies through which it was to be interpreted were neither consistent nor clear.6 At the height of the rebellion, DI commanders mutilated thieves’ hands, stoned adulterers, and executed Muslim peasants who had paid taxes to the republican government. The DI movement was denounced by the country’s major Muslim organizations and never seriously threatened the larger republic. Nonetheless, and as much as a result of ethnic and regional resentments as Islamist idealism, the movement attracted significant support in Aceh, South Sulawesi, parts of West and Central Java, and South Kalimantan. Armed resistance continued for more than a decade, ending only in 1962 with the capture and execution of Kartosuwiryo. Notwithstanding its defeat, the DI movement left an enduring ideological and organizational legacy. Under Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government (1966–98), a number of former DI leaders became outspoken supporters of the president and the ruling party, Golkar. However, after several terrorist incidents in the early 2000s, researchers revisited DI territories and discovered that a rejectionist underground had regrouped, and was intent on again launching a struggle for the implementation of their understanding of God’s law across Indonesia and neighboring areas of Muslim South East Asia.7 Led by two Central Javanese religious teachers of Arab-Indonesian descent and known as the Jemaah Islamiyah, this new organization was far more internationalist in orientation than the Darul Islam leadership had ever been. It was from the ranks of this, neo-Darul Islam group that a new generation of insurgent radicals was to emerge and launch attacks during the first 15 years of the post-Suharto, democratic period.

New Islamists The months following the ousting of President Suharto in May 1998 were marked by the appearance of dozens of radical Islamist groups of varying ideological persuasions. Some, like the internationalist Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (established in Jerusalem in 1953 by a Palestinian activist, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, and known in Indonesia as Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), or the Indonesian Party of Liberation), had been operating clandestinely since the mid-1980s.8 Compared with other Islamist organizations in Indonesia, the Hizbut Tahrir is distinctive in that its programs and leadership are subject to guidance from an international leadership based outside of Indonesia and making few concessions to the distinctive cultural legacies of Indonesian Islam. The organization rejects parliamentary politics and the legitimacy of the nation-state, advocating the establishment of a global government headed by a Caliph. The HTI also adopts a radical discourse on globalization and capitalism, portraying Muslims and non-Muslims as locked in a fight-to-the-finish both in civilizational and economic terms. In tactical matters, however, the HTI stops short of anything illegal or violent, and seeks to forge alliances with other Muslim groupings “committed to the struggle against liberalism and for the implementation of Islamic law.”9 Although it already had an underground presence on a few university campuses in the late 1980s, the HTI began its ascent to national prominence only after Indonesia’s return to democracy in 1998–99. The United States’ intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001 provided the organization with a platform for mobilizing beyond its university base, and over the next few years the HTI succeeded at establishing branch organizations in major 104

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cities and towns across Indonesia. In 2000–01, the organization gained national prominence through its well-organized campaign in support of a constitutional amendment to mandate state enforcement of Islamic law for Muslim citizens. After a year-long debate, the national assembly rejected the proposed amendment.10 In the months following this legislative setback, Hizbut Tahrir joined with other Islamist organizations to press for the implementation of sharia-oriented by-laws away from the capital in cities and districts across Indonesia. The campaign made its greatest headway in regions where the Darul Islam had achieved prominence a few decades earlier. Islam-inflected by-laws of this sort were made constitutionally possible by the fact that, in May 1999, the government had rushed through two laws (No. 22 and 25/1999) intended to devolve a broad array of powers from the nation’s capital to districts (kabupaten) and municipalities across the country.11 Over the next six years, activists in Hizbut Tahrir and the Islamic Defenders Front (see below) joined forces with mainstream political parties – including some long regarded as “secular nationalist” rather than Islamist – to introduce what Indonesians refer to as “sharia-oriented regional regulations” (peraturan daerah yang bernuansa syariah Islam). Although since 2007 the movement has slowed greatly, in its heyday, legislation of this sort was approved in 53 of Indonesia’s 470 districts and municipalities. Most of these regulations are neither explicitly sharia-based nor (least of all) product of established jurisprudential methodologies. They are instead moral regulations of broadly Islamic inspiration, concerned with controlling prostitution, gambling, alcohol consumption, and women’s unescorted movement at night.12 Other regulations deal with matters of a more explicitly devotional nature, mandating Qur’anic study, payment of religious alms (zakat), or the wearing of Islamic dress. In contrast to the Darul Islam’s earlier demand for a state based solely on Islamic law, all but the most radical proponents of Syariah by-laws today take care to work within the basic framework of Indonesia’s national constitution and court system.13 In most jurisdictions where sharia by-laws were enacted, the effort was coordinated both by Islamist movements and by representatives of the semi-governmental Council of Indonesian Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia – MUI). Founded in 1980, for most of the Suharto era, the MUI had been seen as a government-controlled body designed to burnish the regime’s Islamic credentials. In the post-Suharto era, however, the MUI sought to shed its pliant image by reaching out to Islamist radicals previously excluded from the council, including Hizbut Tahrir and the Indonesian Council of Jihad Fighters (Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia).14 MUI leaders were determined to reverse what they regarded as the Muslim community’s drift toward Islamic liberalism and the pro-pluralist “neo-modernist reformism” of intellectuals like Nurcholish Madjid and the former president, Abdurrahman Wahid.15 The MUI’s collaboration with Islamist organizations like Hizbut Tahrir and the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia was one of the most important trends in conservative Muslim politics in the first decade of the post-Suharto era. Although radical Islamists fared poorly in national elections, they were able to exercise an influence greater than their numbers in society as a result of this tactical alliance. These informal collaborations played an even greater role in the rise of groupings more radical than Hizbut Tahrir.

Elite disunity and radical outreach During the first five years of the post-Suharto era, Islamist militias were established in cities and towns across Indonesia, soon becoming a major force in local Indonesian politics. The groups attacked and closed cafés, brothels, and other alleged centers of vice; they harassed 105

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women who chose not to veil, and they attacked adherents of non-conformist Islamic sects, as well as Christians intent on proselytizing in Muslim neighborhoods. (Christians comprise some 10 percent of Indonesia’s population.) From 1999 to 2001, the largest of the paramilitaries openly defied the elected government of President Abdurrahman Wahid (r. 1999–2001) and sent fighters to support the Muslim side in communal violence between Christian and Muslims in eastern Indonesia. Their intervention dealt a blow to the heretofore ascendant Christian militias (who, it must be emphasized, were every bit as violent as their Muslim counterparts).16 Ultimately, the government’s inability to control the violence in eastern Indonesia contributed to the collapse of Wahid’s reformist government. Several of the paramilitaries received quiet support from members of the oldregime establishment opposed to Wahid’s reformist ambitions. Through collaborations with disaffected elites like these, the Islamist militias were able to exercise a political influence disproportionate to their numbers in society. The majority of these Islamist militias were freelance locals independent of any national directorship. However, the two largest groups, the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam – FPI) and the Laskar Jihad (the militia wing of the Salafist Communication Forum for Followers of the Prophetic Sunna [Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunna wa Jamaah]), were nationally oriented in their ambitions and alliances. Each of these organizations had thousands of members deployed in military-style battalions under a centrally coordinated command. Each also had bases of operation in cities and towns across the country, rather than just one locale.17 At least in their early years, these large militias also enjoyed the shadowy support of powerful members of the country’s fractured political elite.18 The early history of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) illustrates the complex and ideologically opportunistic nature of these collaborations. The FPI was founded in August 1998 by Habib Muhammad Rizieq ibn Hussein Shihab, popularly known as Habib Rizieq. Rizieq was a young (38 years old at the time) religious teacher of HadramiIndonesian descent, from a family with ties to Indonesia’s oldest Arab-Indonesian religious association, the al-Irshad. Established in the early years of the twentieth century, al-Irshad was a mainline reformist organization, whose educational and social-welfare programs resembled those of the moderate modernist organization, the Muhammadiyah.19 In the late 1980s and 1990s, a small wing in the al-Irshad leadership came under the influence of Islamist organizations based in Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. These also happened to be the years when President Suharto had reversed his policy on political Islam and was reaching out to conservative Islamists. As one part of his campaign, the president developed ties to several nationally prominent al-Irshad businessmen, using the bond to extend his outreach to the conservative wing of the Muslim community. During the final year of the Suharto regime, one well-known al-Irshad leader and Suharto crony approached Habib Rizieq and asked him to help coordinate demonstrations in support of the president and against the pro-democracy opposition. Although at this point he was not yet a familiar national figure, Rizieq led a network of several dozen conservative Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) in the Jakarta and West Java region, most of which were in turn linked to the Saudi-supported Indonesian Council of Islamic Predication (DDII). Rizieq drew on this network to mobilize pro-Suharto demonstrations in opposition to the prodemocracy movement. The early post-Suharto era saw a new contest, pitting supporters of Suharto’s designated successor, B.J. Habibie, against an unwieldy alliance of multiconfessional nationalists identified in the media as the “rainbow” (pelangi) coalition. It was in this context of the growing rivalry between Muslim supporters of President Habibie and his “nationalist” opponents that Rizieq and his colleagues established the Islamic Defenders Front. In addition to the al-Irshad business 106

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patron, Armed Forces Commander General Wiranto and the chief of police for the capital district, Nugroho Jayussman, both initially backed the formation of Rizieq’s militia, for strategic rather than ideological reasons. Years later (in 2016), Wiranto would become the top security chief in the cabinet of President Joko Widodo (r. 2014–24); Wiranto would take the lead in cracking down on radical Islamists in the aftermath of the anti-Ahok mobilizations (see below). However, the early post-Suharto period was marked by a shifting array of tactical alliances, many of which had more to do with personal patronage than ideological conviction. With establishment backing in these early years, Habib Rizieq became the most prominent of Islamists working with security officials to organize a semi-governmental paramilitary known as the “Voluntary Security Guards” or Pam Swakarsa (Pasukan Pengaman Swakarsa). The Security Guards were a militia force of 50,000 civilians designed to back up the 160,000 police and soldiers who were to be deployed to protect the November 1998 meeting of the Special Session of the People’s Representative Assembly (SI-MPR). The Special Session was convened to lay the ground rules for the elections of June 1999, the first to be held since Suharto’s resignation. At rallies held in the run-up to the November session, the charismatic Rizieq denounced Habibie’s opponents as anti-Islamic communists. He urged the Guard members to be ready to give their lives in defense of Islam and the nation.20 When the Security Guards poured into the capital on November 9, they directed their attacks against pro-democracy students, but unwittingly ran afoul of residents in several poor neighborhoods. More than a dozen people died in the resulting clashes. During the first decade of the 2000s, the FPI continued to play a supporting role in conflicts among segments of the now deeply fractionalized political elite. In June 2000, the FPI ransacked the headquarters of the National Commission on Human Rights when the latter issued statements implicating members of the Army Command in the 1999 violence in East Timor. In March and April 2001, the FPI joined with several Islamic political parties in a campaign against an allegedly resurgent communism.21 The FPI also kept a watchful eye on Christian evangelicals, forcing the closure of home-front churches operating without government permits. When Christian–Muslim violence flared in the provinces of Maluku and North Maluku in 2000 and 2001, the FPI recruited jihadi fighters for the troubled provinces. From 2005 to 2017, the FPI joined with other militants to mount a campaign against Indonesia’s 300,000 strong Ahmadiyah community, a sect regarded by Muslims in many countries as deviationist. On several occasions, the militia ransacked Ahmadiyah schools, burned members’ homes, and threatened those unwilling to renounce their faith.22 As this brief history shows, during the early post-Suharto period, disputes among rival claimants to power provided Islamist militias with new opportunities for mass mobilization. After the ouster of Abdurrahman Wahid from the presidency in July 2001, Wahid’s successor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, repaired the civilian government’s relations with the military command, and armed forces officials signaled their desire to steer clear of the FPI. In more recent years, and especially under the administration of President Jokowi Widodo (2014–), the government and security forces have taken bold measures to curb the FPI’s power, typically doing so in the name of Indonesia’s traditions of multi-religious citizenship.

Sectarian mobilization The rise of radical Islamist militias in the post-Suharto period was in turn affected by outbreaks of communal violence in several of Indonesia’s outlying provinces. In particular, five provinces where Christians and Muslim lived in close proximity – West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi, Maluku, and North Maluku – saw horrific outbreaks 107

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of ethno-religious violence. Although the Western media sometimes assumed that radical Islamists were the main cause of the violence, they actually played a minor role in its early phases. The more pervasive influence was the backdraft caused by the rapid devolution of powers from Jakarta to the regions after 2001. Although decentralization was premised on the idea of strengthening civil society by bringing government closer to the people, the policy’s more pervasive effect was a “decentralization of corruption, collusion, and political violence.”23 Faced with an intensified struggle over local resources, regional party bosses, business elites, and militia chiefs jockeyed to win control of the local state apparatus and the nebulous “shadow state” that ran alongside it.24 The highly unsettled context of political devolution and resource competition stimulated the formation of locally based militias in Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike. Even before Suharto’s ouster, West Kalimantan in early 1997 had witnessed brutal attacks by indigenous Dayaks (nominally Christian) on Muslim Madurese immigrants to the province. After Suharto’s fall, the violence exploded again, this time with even greater fury. In all of these incidents, the violence was one-sided, with Dayak fighters, coordinated by local political bosses, attacking hapless Madurese immigrants.25 The fact that Dayak violence was not directed at other Muslim groups, and did not typically target institutions like mosques or madrasas, insured that, although the violence shocked the national public, it was for the most part seen as an ethnic rather than religious conflict. By contrast, the conflicts in Central Sulawesi and the Moluccas quickly assumed a more explicitly sectarian form, pitting Christians against Muslims. In the Poso district of Central Sulawesi, a thousand people died in violence from 1999 to 2002.26 The worst violence of the early post-Suharto period, however, took place in the provinces of Maluku and North Maluku in north-eastern Indonesia. As in the Poso region, the southern portions of the Maluku archipelago were more-or-less evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. The northern portion of the province (which in September 1999 became the separate province of North Maluku) had a more secure Muslim majority, but still had a Christian minority almost twice that of the national average (18 percent, rather than the national average of around 10 percent).27 In the early independence period, Christians in Ambon and much of southern Maluku had controlled the commanding heights of politics and economic life. Communal tensions grew, however, in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of three developments: an influx of Muslim migrants, many of whom commanded entrepreneurial skills greater than local Christians; the movement of growing numbers of Muslims into higher education and the professions, and the Suharto regime’s courtship of conservative Muslims. Already in the mid-1990s, small clashes had occurred between Christians and Muslims in this fast-changing territory. In January 1999, however, an otherwise unexceptional skirmish between a Protestant bus driver and two Muslim youths escalated into full-scale communal battles between Christian and Muslim neighborhoods in Ambon city. Over the next weeks, the violence spread into other islands in the central Maluku chain. In late 1999, the violence spread to North Maluku, where it took on an even darker form, involving mass killings and the destruction of whole villages.28 In early 2000, the Maluku conflict entered a new and more dangerous phase, as outsiders channeled money, men, and arms to both parties in the conflict. Conservative Islamists in the nation’s capital met secretly and agreed to provide funding to the newly established Laskar Jihad (jihad paramilitary). The militia’s headquarters was in the south-central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, but in these early years the group also enjoyed the backing of several prominent elites with ties to the old regime.29 Despite appeals by President Wahid, the Governor of Maluku, and the Minister of Defense, in April 2000 a large contingent of Laskar Jihad fighters traveled across Java to Surabaya to 108

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sail for Maluku. Along much of the way the forces had military escorts. In Surabaya, the fighters boarded state-owned ferries for the passage to Maluku. Upon arrival in Maluku, they were greeted and given automatic weapons by out-of-uniform soldiers (although it was never determined under whose command the soldiers acted). Shortly after the arrival of the jihad fighters, the troubled province saw a new and more violent round of killings.30 By late 2002, the Maluku violence had consumed some 15,000 lives; 1.5 million more people had fled their communities.31 In February 2002, a peace accord was signed in which the Christian and Muslim sides both agreed to remove all “outsiders” from the conflict zone. Although, as in Poso in Central Sulawesi, there were to be scattered incidents of violence well into the early 2010s, the accord put an end to mass armed mobilizations in Maluku. Like the Islamic Defenders Front, the Laskar Jihad suspended operations in the days following the terrorist bombings in Bali in October 2002. In early 2003, sources close to the Laskar Jihad in Yogyakarta told me that the organization’s dissolution was a direct response to “advice” from elite backers who warned that the United States had formally identified the Laskar Jihad as a terrorist organization. Equally important, however, the group’s leader, Jafar Umar Thalib, had lost the support of most people in his own Salafiyyah Islamist community. From the beginning, Thalib’s attempts to recruit Salafiyyah for the Maluku jihad had been controversial in the eyes of the many Indonesian Salafis, many of whom are politically quietist. As one Yogyakarta-based Salafiyyah leader told me in Yogyakarta in 2001, “the Maluku campaign is being conducted to advance the interests of certain political players, not Islam.” Stung by the growing criticism, and pressed by his elite backers, Jafar not only suspended his militia’s activities after the October 2002 Bali bombing, but dissolved his organization outright. Although he and his network of hardline Salafis remained active in national affairs into the early 2010s, the movement today has been greatly eclipsed by more moderate neo-Salafis intent on achieving a new accommodation with the nation-state (see below). It is now well-known that that several prominent al-Qaeda militants also visited the conflict zones at the height of the Maluku violence, along with domestic militants sympathetic to Bin Laden’s movement, including the Jemaah Islamiyah (see below). Notwithstanding this meddling, the conflicts in eastern Indonesia were primarily the product of declining state capacity, heightened elite factionalism (at both the local and national level), and sectarian mobilization in provinces with long-simmering ethno-religious tensions. By 2003, state authorities had restored order to most of eastern Indonesian. Although today Christians and Muslims in areas like Ambon and North Maluku remain more territorially segregated than they had been prior to the conflict, no region has seen a return to violence, and the results of local elections have consistently favored party leaders committed to Indonesia’s mainstream tradition of multi-religious nationalism rather than radical Islamism.

Internationalist Jihadism Although in the early years of the post-Suharto period the Islamic Defenders Front and the Laskar Jihad were the most well-known radical Islamists, their notoriety was eventually eclipsed by a more violent and revolutionary organization known as the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). The JI first came to national attention in the aftermath of the first Bali bombings in October 2002. Several young activists with ties to the group were arrested and convicted for carrying out the attacks. The group’s stated ambition is to establish a pan-South East 109

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Asian polity ostensibly based on the Qur’an and Sunna. In the 1990s, the JI dispatched fighters for training and combat to Afghanistan; in the early 2000s, the southern Philippines and, after 2003, Iraq and Syria.32 Through the early 2010s (when state repression severely curbed the organization’s capacities), the JI maintained particularly extensive ties with armed Islamist insurgents based in the southern Philippines. Notwithstanding its internationalist aspirations, the JI’s primary field of operations has always been Indonesia. The DI from which some of the JI leadership was descended had been suppressed by the Indonesian armed forces in 1962, but remnants of the movement went underground, biding their time in West Java, Aceh, and southern Sulawesi. By 1976, some in the DI underground had concluded that it was time to launch a new campaign of armed struggle. Shortly thereafter, DI militants organized an underground cell called the “Komando Jihad” and carried out attacks on Christian and government targets. The violence spiraled on until 1981, when the group’s leader, Asep Warman, was tracked down and killed.33 After Warman’s execution, an underground faction remained active, recruiting followers, not from rural strongholds, but from the radical fringe of the Islamist student movement. It was in these years too that Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Baasyir, eventual leaders of the Jemaah Islamiyah (and, prior to their flight to Malaysia in 1985, the directors of the alMukmin Islamic boarding school in Ngruki, Central Java), initiated contacts with the militant wing of the DI. Sungkar and Baasyir were both from Indonesia’s Arab community and initially had ties to the mainline al-Irshad. Like most al-Irshad activists, the two men were strict reformists on matters of religion, and this appears to have become a point of tension with some of their DI counterparts, many of whom at the grassroots level had vaguely Sufi orientations. In 1992, disputes of this sort led Baasyir and Sungkar to break with the DI and, in January 1993, establish their own organization. Baasyir and Sungkar’s organization eventually came to be known as the Jemaah Islamiyah (“Islamic community”). The group recruited heavily from among the 600–900 Indonesians who had participated in mujahidin training in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s; half of the group had trained in camps linked to Osama bin Laden. From the early 2000s to 2018, JI militants underwent intensive military training in Iraq, Syria, and the southern Philippines as well. A trademark of JI activism has been its willingness to engage in spectacular acts of terrorist violence. Responding to the Christian–Muslim violence raging in eastern Indonesia, on Christmas Eve 2000, JI militants bombed 40 churches in towns across the Indonesian archipelago, killing 19 and wounding 100. In October 2002, in an action designed to celebrate the prior year’s attacks in the United States, JI bombers struck at two beach-front clubs in southern Bali, killing more than 200 people, most of them Western tourists.34 In August 2003, the JI carried out a suicide car bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta; ten people died. In September 2004, JI militants carried out a suicide attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta; nine died. In 2005, the JI carried out a second bombing in Bali, once again using suicide bombers. Shortly thereafter, and in the face of increasingly effective suppression by state authorities, the organization split into two factions, one gradualist in its aims and the other committed to more aggressive armed struggle. The violence-prone faction eventually came under the control of the Malaysian-born military strategist, Noordin Mohammad Top. After a four-year hiatus, on July 17, 2009, his group carried out a bold attack on the Mariott and Ritz-Carlton Hotels in Jakarta. In the face of this violence, the Indonesian police intensified their campaign against the Noordin faction. Over the next three years, they arrested more than 200 militants and broke up several bomb-making cells. In September 2009, the Indonesian police succeeded at cornering and killing the splinter-group’s master strategist, Noordin Top. 110

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This brief history reminds us that radical Islamist paramilitarism in Indonesia has roots that go back to well before the Suharto era and well before the rise of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, from a comparative perspective, the Jemaah Islamiyah and its parent group, the Darul Islam, are among the world’s most long-lived armed Islamist groupings, and have demonstrated a remarkable genius for reinventing themselves in the face of changed conditions. Even in the midst of sustained political crisis, however, neither has been able to extend its base beyond a small network of Islamist radicals.

Neo-Salafism and differentiated citizenship In response to the repeated failure of Islamist groupings to make significant headway in Muslim public opinion or national elections, the main wing of the Islamist community in Indonesia has in recent years undergone a striking ideological evolution. The most striking characteristic of the change has been a partial accommodation with the principles of Indonesian nationhood, and an effort to adopt more of the social and devotional styles of mainstream Indonesian Muslims. Earlier, in the first years of the post-Suharto era, more hardline groups like the Council of Indonesian Mujahidin (Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia – MMI) had refused any such accommodation. The MMI was founded in Yogyakarta in August 2000 by a core group of activists that included, as spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir of Jemaah Islamiyah fame, and Irfan Awwas as executive director. Awwas and his colleagues made clear that, in their view, the sharia is not something that should or could be adjusted in light of national culture or citizenship. Awwas spoke disparagingly of the idea popular in some national-minded legal circles that Indonesia might be able to develop its own national school of law (madhhab).35 He was equally critical of modernizing reformists who sought, not a literal application of an unreformed sharia, but a variety premised on the “higher aims of the law” (maqasid al-shariah).36 In much the same spirit, Awwas stipulated that Indonesia’s Pancasila citizenship would have to be replaced by dhimmihood institutions, and non-Muslims were to be tolerated only if they acknowledged Muslim rule and accepted limits on their citizen rights, including not being allowed to serve in the military or assume positions of leadership over Muslims. In the years between the MMI’s founding in 2000 and its steady decline after 2004–05, the movement’s “anti-national” understanding of Islamic law stirred growing unease among activists earlier aligned with the MMI coalition. By 2005–06, the majority of Islamists took exception to the MMI’s claim that the implementation of Islamic law required that Indonesia’s Constitution and nation-state framework be abolished. One of the more striking examples of this change was that of a neo-Salafi movement known as Wahdah Islamiyah (WI), which was founded in Makassar in southern Sulawesi in the early 2000s. Today it has 120 branches across Indonesia, and is the largest of the country’s five distinct new Salafi movements. What most distinguishes WI from its rivals is that, from 2010 onward, the movement promoted cooperation with state agencies, including the police force. More generally, the group “has become adept at combining religious and national terminology in order to ‘locate’ themselves within nationally oriented narratives of Islamic revival.”37 However, WI’s accommodation with the principles of Indonesian nationalism has always been only partial, especially with regards to citizenship. Whereas mainstream Muslim groupings like the Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama accept the religiously inclusive concept of citizenship associated with Indonesia’s Pancasila philosophy, WI activists seek “to alter the membership boundaries of Indonesian citizenship so as to preference Muslims at the expense of non-Muslims.”38 111

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The WI’s ideal of religiously differentiated citizenship was vividly illustrated in the campaign it conducted in alliance with the Islamic Defenders Front against the Chinese Christian governor of metropolitan Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”) in late 2016 and early 2017. In September 2016, as the Chinese governor was beginning his campaign for the 2017 gubernatorial elections, he made a somewhat light-hearted reference to the al-Ma’ida 51 verse in the Qur’an, which counsels Muslim believers not to take Jews and Christians as protectors, allies, or friends. Governor Ahok told the crowd that voters should not be fooled by any among his electoral opponents who invoke the al-Ma’ida verse to argue that Muslim voters should not choose a non-Muslim to serve as governor. When Ahok’s political opponents learned of his comments, they posted a redacted version of his remarks on the Internet. On October 11, 2016, the fatwa board of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia called for the state prosecutor to take legal action against Governor Ahok on grounds that the statement portrayed in the Internet video amounted to defamation of Islam. Shortly thereafter, the leadership of the Islamic Defenders Front and Hizbut Tahrir joined with other hardline groups to organize a “National Movement to Guard the Fatwa of the Council of Indonesian Muslim Scholars” (GNPF-MUI). On December 2, 2016, the anti-Ahok movement succeeded in mobilizing one of the biggest shows of force by hardline Islamists ever seen in the Indonesian capital – bringing in some 500,000 demonstrators. The rally was a challenge, not just to Governor Ahok, but to his longtime friend and ally, President Joko Widodo. In the aftermath of the demonstration, the campaign against the Chinese governor escalated, and in April 2017 he was defeated in the second round of the gubernatorial elections, despite the fact that weeks earlier polls had had him in the lead. Even more shocking, a week later he was convicted of religious blasphemy in a Jakarta court, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. In the aftermath of Ahok’s electoral defeat and blasphemy conviction, many foreign observers and even some Muslim democrats worried that a turning point in Indonesia’s new democracy had been reached, undermining the country’s long-established tradition of multireligious citizenship. Under the leadership of President Joko Widodo (popularly known as “Jokowi”), however, the state in late 2017 launched a series of counter-measures, banning Hizbut Tahrir (on the grounds that it was promoting ideologies contrary to those of the Indonesian Constitution) and taking legal action against the FPI’s Habib Rizieq, who fled into exile in Saudi Arabia. The government also launched a vigorous campaign of “Pancasila education” in schools and offices across Indonesia. Although in the national elections of April 2019, many observers felt that the opposition candidate, Prabowo Subianto (ex-son-in -law of the New Order strong man, President Suharto), had played the “Islamist card” against Widodo, the tactic proved less effective than intended, and Widodo won by a margin of 8 percent. The two-year mobilization campaign that preceded the 2019 elections showed that, however much they had reconciled with the ideals of nationalism and given up on any hope of establishing an Islamic state, Indonesia’s Islamists remained committed to a religiously differentiated and Muslim-supremacist variety of citizenship. Opposition to the Islamist campaign came most forcefully, not from the country’s small secular-nationalist community, but from the national leadership of Indonesia’s largest Muslim social welfare organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Although contention over religion and citizenship is likely to remain a key feature of Indonesia politics for some time, the main fault-line in that contention will continue to lie, not between Islamists and secular liberals, but between Islamists and the larger community 112

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of Muslim Indonesians committed to a Pancasila variety of religiously inclusive citizenship. From this perspective, Indonesia offers a striking example of a Muslim-majority country committed, not just to a system of democratic politics, but a practice of citizenship premised on religious inclusion rather than Islamist supremacism.

Notes 1 For a comprehensive overview of Muslim piety and electoral trends in Indonesia in that country’s new democratic era, see Thomas B. Pepinsky, R.W. Liddle, and Saiful Mujani, Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). On the recent rise of Islamist populism and its implications for citizenship, see Vedi R. Hadiz, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 2 See Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6–9. 3 Although Indonesia has a proud legacy of multi-religious citizenship and Muslim democracy, its religious and political history recommends against trying to collapse its tumultuous complexity into as simple a phrase as “Muslim moderation.” On the limits and vicissitudes of Indonesian Muslim traditions of tolerance, see Tim Lindsey and Helen Pausacker, eds., Religion, Law and Intolerance in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2016); in the same edited volume, see Greg Fealy, “The Politics of Religious Intolerance in Indonesia: Mainstream-ism Trump’s Extremism?”, 115–131. 4 For overviews of Indonesian Islam and the Suharto-era democracy movement, see Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Jeremy Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance Without Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 5 Sartono Kartodirdjo, Protest Movements in Rural Java: A Study of Agrarian Unrest in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1973), and Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784–1847 (London: Curzon, 1983). 6 See Cees van Dijk, Rebellion under the Banner of Islam: The Darul Islam in Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), and Chiara Formichi, Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in 20th Century Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012). 7 International Crisis Group, Recycling Militants in Indonesia: Darul Islam and the Australian Embassy Bombing (Jakarta and Brussels: Asia Report No. 92, February 2005). 8 Anthony Bubalo and Greg Fealy, Joining the Caravan? The Middle East, Islamism, and Indonesia (Alexandria, New South Wales: Lowy Institute, 2005); and Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Political Islam: Identity, Ideology and Religio-Political Mobilization (New York: Routledge, 2018). 9 Interview, Muhammad Ismail Yusanto (HTI national spokesperson), August 3, 2003. 10 Arskal Salim, Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Law in Modern Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 102, and Robert Elson, “Two Failed Attempts to Islamize the Indonesian Constitution,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28, no. 3 (2013): 379–437. 11 Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, “Introduction: Decentralisation, Democratisation, and the Rise of the Local,” in Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisations, eds. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), 3–4. 12 Salim, Challenging the Secular State, 126, and Robin Bush, “Regional Sharia Regulations in Indonesia: Anomaly or Symptom?” in Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia, eds. Greg Fealy and Sally White (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008), 176. 13 On the political alliances behind the proliferation of sharia-inflected by-laws, see Michael Buehler, The Politics of Shari’a Law: Islamist Activists and the State in Democratizing Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 14 Piers Gillespie, “Current Issues in Indonesian Islam: Analysing the 2005 Council of Indonesian Ulama Fatwa No. 7 Opposing Pluralism, Liberalism, and Secularism,” Journal of Islamic Studies 18, no. 2 (2007): 202–40, and Moch. Nur Ichwan, “‘Ulamâ, State and Politics’: Majelis Ulama Indonesia After Suharto,” Islamic Law and Society 12, no. 1 (2005): 45–72. 15 On Madjid and Wahid, see Greg Barton, “Neo-Modernism: A Vital Synthesis of Traditionalist and Modernist Islamic Thought in Indonesia,” Studia Islamika: Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 1–71.

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16 Gerry van Klinken, Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars (New York: Routledge, 2007), 88–123. 17 See Andrée Feillard and Rémy Madinier, La Fin de l’innocence? L’islam indonésien face à la tentation radical de 1967 à nos jours (Paris: IRASCE, 2006), 117–21, and Ian Douglas Wilson, “Continuity and Change: The Changing Contours of Organized Violence in Post-New Order Indonesia,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no.2 (2006): 265–97. 18 Jamhari and Jajang Jahroni, Gerakan Salafi Radikal di Indonesia [Radical Salafi Movements in Indonesia] (Jakarta: Rajawali Press, 2004). 19 Natali Mobini-Kesheh, The Hadrami Awakening: Community and Identity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1999), 89. 20 See Kees van Dijk, A Country in Despair: Indonesia between 1997 and 2000 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001), 340–44. 21 See Robert W. Hefner, “Muslim Democrats and Islamist Violence,” in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 284–286. 22 Human Rights Watch, In Religion’s Name: Abuses Against Religious Minorities in Indonesia (New York: HRW, 2013). 23 Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken, “Introduction,” in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, eds. Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 18. 24 Van Klinken, Communal Violence, 33, 51. 25 Jamie S. Davidson, From Rebellion to Riots: Collective Violence on Indonesian Borneo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 26 International Crisis Group, Communal Violence in Indonesia: Lessons from Kalimantan (Brussels: ICG Asia Report No. 19, 2001). 27 International Crisis Group, Indonesia: The Search for Peace in Maluku (Brussels: ICG Asia Report No. 31, 2002). 28 Christopher R. Duncan, Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014). 29 See Robert W. Hefner, “Civic Pluralism Denied? The New Media and Jihadi violence in Indonesia,” in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere eds. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 158–179, and Noorhaidi Hasan, “Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-New Order Indonesia” (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University, 2005). Information on developments internal to Laskar Jihad come also from my interviews with Jafar Umar Thalib and former Laskar Jihad activists in Yogyakarta, during July–August 2003, 2004, 2005, 2012, and 2015. 30 See Tamrin Amal Tomagola, “The Bleeding Halmahera of North Moluccas,” in Political Violence: Indonesia and India in Comparative Perspective, ed. O. Törnquist (Oslo: University of Oslo, Center for Development and the Environment, 2000), 17–35, and Van Klinken, Communal Violence, 88–123. 31 See International Crisis Group, Indonesia: The Search for Peace in Maluku. 32 Zachary Abuza, Political Islam and Violence in Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2007). See also the background reports by the International Crisis Group, Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia: The Case of the “Ngruki Network” in Indonesia (Brussels: ICG Asia Briefing, 2002), and International Crisis Group, Recycling Militants in Indonesia: Darul Islam and the Australian Embassy Bombing (Singapore: ICG Asia Report No. 92, 2005). 33 International Crisis Group, Recycling Militants in Indonesia, 3–5. 34 See International Crisis Group, Indonesia Backgrounder: How the Jemaah Islamiyah Terrorist Network Operates (Brussels: Asia Report No. 43, 2002), 3–14. 35 See R. Michael Feener, Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 36 On the “higher aims” of Islamic law, see Robert Hefner, “Shari’a Law and the Quest for a Modern Muslim Ethics,” in Shari’a Law and Modern Muslim Ethics, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016). 37 Chris Chaplin, “Salafi Islamic Piety as Civic Activism: Wahdah Islamiyah and Differentiated Citizenship in Indonesia,” Citizenship Studies 22, no. 2 (2018): 208–223. 38 Chaplin, “Salafi Islamic Piety as Civic Activism.”

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10 MUSLIM AUTONOMY, POLITICAL PRAGMATISM, AND THE CHALLENGE OF ISLAMIST EXTREMISM IN THE PHILIPPINES Thomas M. McKenna

Introduction In February 2019, voters in the southern Philippines ratified a historic peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) ending a 46-year-old separatist conflict and granting political autonomy to Philippine Muslims, or Moros, in their traditional homeland where they make up nearly 6 percent of the Philippine population. It was a hard-earned victory for the politically pragmatic MILF and a notable success story for the Moros, a Muslim national minority, at a time when political conditions in most of the world have worsened for Muslim minorities, and when some of them – including the Rohingya of Burma and the Uighurs of China – find themselves imperiled. The news of the long-awaited breakthrough agreement was overshadowed in the national and global press, however, by the bombing of an iconic cathedral in the South, which killed 23 Catholic churchgoers and injured more than a hundred. It was an act of sectarian terror clearly intended to undermine the peace agreement, and responsibility was claimed by the Philippine branch of ISIS. Islamist extremist groups in the Philippines are few in number with a few hundred adherents compared to the 15,000 armed fighters claimed by the MILF, but they have become more active and visible in recent years. They have engaged in terror bombings, hostage taking, and sectarian murders, all acts that have been officially shunned by the MILF during its long struggle against the Philippine government. It is that profound tension between the nation-building pragmatism of the MILF and the destructive extremism of the IS-aligned armed groups that forms the central dynamic of political Islam in the contemporary Philippines. This chapter examines the distinctive colonial history that created the Moros, their decades-long modern struggle for political selfdetermination, and the conflict now building in the Muslim South between those trying to build the new autonomous political entity and the Islamic extremists attempting to destroy it.

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Resistance and colonization With an estimated population in excess of 108 million, the Philippines is the fifth largest majority Christian nation in the world and the only predominantly Christian nation (other than tiny East Timor) in Asia east of the Caucasus. Philippine Muslims, who comprise more than 6 percent of the Philippine population, are geographically concentrated in the south of the country in Mindanao and Sulu and are distinguished from Christian Filipinos not only by their profession of Islam but also by their evasion of 300 years of Spanish colonial domination. At the same time, Philippine Muslims have always been separated from one another in this archipelagic nation by significant linguistic and geographic distances. They are divided into three major and ten minor ethno-linguistic groups and dispersed across the southern islands. In some parts of their traditional territory, Philippine Muslim populations retain their majority; about 98 percent of inhabitants of the Sulu archipelago, for example, are Muslims.1 In Mindanao-Sulu as a whole, however, Philippine Muslims now comprise less than 24 percent of the population, due primarily to large-scale Christian in-migration from the North over the previous fifty years.2 Philippine Muslims share their religious culture with the neighboring majority Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. They also retain certain elements of an indigenous precolonial Philippine culture – expressed in dress, music, political traditions, and a rich array of folk beliefs and practices – that are similar to those found elsewhere in island South East Asia, but are today mostly absent among Christian Filipinos. Thus, while Philippine Christians and Muslims inhabit the same nation-state and are linked together by various attachments, a profound cultural gulf created by historical circumstance separates them. That gulf is the outcome of two interlinked events: the conversion of some regions of the Philippines to Islam and the Spanish colonial occupation of other regions shortly afterward. Islamization was still under way in the archipelago when the Spaniards gained their foothold in the northern Philippines in 1571. After consolidating control of the northern tier of the Philippine islands, they failed, despite repeated attempts, to fully subdue the well-organized Muslim sultanates of the South. The Spaniards assigned to the unsubjugated Muslim peoples of the southern sultanates the label previously bestowed on their familiar Muslim enemies from Mauritania and Morocco, “Moros” (Moors). The term “Moro” was applied categorically and pejoratively, and the term eventually became an epithet among Christian Filipinos, denoting savages and pirates. In a bold semantic shift, Philippine Muslim separatists during the late 1960s appropriated the term “Moro” and transformed it into a positive symbol of collective identity – one that denominated the citizens of their newly imagined nation. While the Muslim peoples of the Philippines have often been referred to in the modern era as “Muslim Filipinos,” they tend today to identify themselves in English as Philippine Muslims (the closest English equivalent to “Moro”). I use the two terms – Moro and Philippine Muslim – interchangeably here. The Americans who replaced the Spaniards as colonizers at the turn of the twentieth century, finally conquered the Moros by use of overwhelming force in a brutal but forgotten war. That war included two large-scale massacres of Philippine Muslims that were so bloody and blatant that prominent US journalists decried them at home, with Mark Twain describing one of them as the work of “Christian butchers.”3 After more than a decade of armed resistance, the Moros succumbed to the invaders and became the only Muslim population ever formally colonized by the United States. The Americans created what was in essence a separate Muslim colony in Mindanao. From 1914 to 1935, when the Philippines was granted Commonwealth status, Moroland (as the new 116

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colonizers had designated it) was administered differently from the rest of America’s Philippine colony. Christian proselytization, though not officially banned, was strongly discouraged and no governmental assistance was provided to Christian missionaries. Traditional Moro leaders were allowed to adjudicate “religious” matters. But the principal American project in Moroland was to prepare the Moros for their eventual integration into a unitary and independent Philippine republic. Despite the objections of Moro leaders, and of a few colonialists who wanted to retain Mindanao-Sulu as a separate American possession when the rest of the Philippines achieved its independence, American policy was unwavering; when its experiment in overseas empire ended, it would leave behind a single Philippine nation. The American education of Philippine Muslims focused on preparing them to be a national minority. In their efforts to “civilize” Moros without Christianizing them, American educators worked to inculcate in them a set of compatible Western values (including monogamy, democracy, and private property in land), as well as to cleanse Philippine Muslim culture of polygamy and slavery – two practices that preoccupied American colonial agents. American education, incidentally, also provided educated Moros a neutral lingua franca – English – which facilitated the formation of the first formal, self-consciously pan-Moro organizations. When the Americans formally exited the Philippines in 1946, they left the Moros as a small Muslim minority in a self-consciously Christian nation. Whereas they had been somewhat protected under US rule, in the Philippine Republic there would now be no buffer from the demographic and cultural domination of Christian Filipinos. The leaders of the new republic moved quickly to develop Mindanao and Sulu for the benefit of the new nation as a whole, particularly by using the vast and underpopulated island of Mindanao as an outlet for impoverished tenant farmers from the overpopulated Christian North. Muslims had formed the majority population of almost every region of the southern Philippines, but by the late 1960s the Muslims of Mindanao found themselves a relatively impoverished minority in their own homeland. While the scale of Christian immigration to Mindanao itself caused inevitable dislocations, the manner of its occurrence also produced glaring disparities between Christian settlers and Muslim farmers. From 1946 onward, the government steadily provided more opportunities and assistance to settlers from the North. By contrast, government services available to Muslims were not only meager compared to those obtained by immigrant Christians but were also fewer than they had received under the colonial regime. The new Christian communities became linked to trade centers and to one another by networks of roads while Muslim communities remained relatively isolated. For the first twenty years of the new republic, Muslims and Christians coexisted peacefully on the Mindanao frontier. For one, indigenous Muslim communities had not been displaced so much as surrounded. Also, in exchange for delivering votes to national parties, Muslim politicians benefitted from government largesse, though they rarely passed those benefits on to their followers. By 1969, however, the political and demographic pressures building on the frontier led to armed sectarian clashes initiated by both sides. The full eruption came early in the next decade, triggered by an unusually aggressive president of the republic, Ferdinand Marcos, who realized that he could use the claim of disorder in the Muslim South to declare martial law in late 1972; he ruled as a dictator for the next 14 years. When, in early 1973, he sent the Philippine Army to occupy the Moro homeland, he ignited a Muslim separatist rebellion against the state that has continued, at various levels of intensity, to this day. From 1973 to 1977, an intense armed conflict raged across the Muslim South between the Philippine military and Muslim separatist rebels numbering as many as 30,000 fighters. The rebels fought the Philippine Armed Forces to a stalemate, obliging the Philippine 117

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government to negotiate a ceasefire and peace treaty in early 1977. The peace settlement, which called for the establishment of a “Muslim Autonomous Region” in the southern Philippines, was never genuinely implemented by the Marcos administration. As a consequence, fighting broke out once more before the end of 1977, but did not again approach the level of intensity experienced prior to the ceasefire. The Muslim separatist movement entered a period of disarray marked by factional infighting. By the early 1980s, it had refashioned itself into a mass-based and self-consciously Islamic movement guided by Islamic clerics.

Muslim identity, Islamic renewal, and the Moro separatist movement Almost no indigenous population of Muslims lives further from the Islamic heartland than do the Moros of the Philippines. That physical distance, as well as active interference by the Western colonizers of the Philippines, resulted in very limited contact with the Islamic centers of the Middle East until the mid-twentieth century. As state-sponsored Christian migration into the Muslim South surged in the 1950s and Moros began to lose their majority status in the most populous provinces of the South, one response was the development of a more self-conscious Muslim identity, which saw its materialization in new mosques and schools and the establishment of ties with Islamic centers. Beginning in 1950, the government of Egypt began sending missionaries educated at al-Azhar University to the Muslim Philippines. These missionaries established themselves in formal schools funded by local notables and began to teach, for virtually the first time, the understanding of Arabic and the interpretation of the Qur’an in addition to reading and recitation. In 1955, the Egyptian government began granting scholarships for study at al-Azhar to Philippine Muslims as part of the pan-Islamic programs of Gamel Abd al-Nasser. Between 1950 and 1978, more than 200 young men took advantage of these scholarships. Almost all of these students eventually returned to the Philippines to teach in Islamic schools, but the development of schools staffed by Philippine Muslim teachers educated in the Middle East was disrupted by the armed separatist conflict that broke out in 1973. Because of the intense fighting and the extreme military harassment of those Muslim civilians deemed to be Islamic activists, it was not until the late 1970s that the Middle East graduates were able to teach and speak openly in urban centers. By 1977, new religious funding began to flow into the Muslim Philippines, this time primarily from Saudi Arabia and Libya. This new funding allowed the Middle East graduates to open schools without relying on the patronage of traditional leaders.4 As a result of the new contacts, a gradual process of Islamic renewal began in the 1970s – a process that quickened after the first ceasefire agreement in 1977. Initiated by the new Middle East-educated clerics, it took the form of encouraging Moros to be more observant Muslims, to refrain from gambling and alcohol consumption, and to abandon some traditional rituals and practices considered by the clerics to be un-Islamic. For their part, ordinary Moros quietly resisted attempts at behavioral and ritual reform that they felt went too far too fast.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) In its first, desperate years, the Moro separatist rebellion was led by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a loosely knit organization headed by Nur Misuari, a Westerneducated political science lecturer at the University of the Philippines in Manila. Misuari 118

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was more familiar with the language of Marxist-inspired activism than he was with Islamic discourse. By 1977, Misuari had garnered strong opposition to his leadership, which led to a schism in the MNLF by 1980. In 1984, the anti-Misuari faction of the MNLF, led by Hashim Salamat, a Middle-East-educated cleric, changed its name to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). As the name change suggests, ideological differences played a role in the schism, but regional, ethnic, and personality differences were also key contributing factors. Eventually, the MILF eclipsed Misuari’s original organization. For the past twenty years, it has been widely regarded as the sole legitimate representative of the Moro separatist movement. The MILF is quite old among self-consciously Islamic armed movements. It pre-dates Hamas and al-Qaeda and is contemporaneous with Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Its political goals and rhetoric, however, have differed sharply from those organizations and movements. Its armed strategy and tactics have also differed greatly, not only from these Islamist insurgencies but also from older, nationalist, Muslim insurgencies such as those led by the PLO or the Algerian FLN. The MILF was organized with the official goal of creating an independent nation-state covering the traditional homeland of the Muslim peoples of the Philippines. For most of its existence, however, it has also declared its willingness to settle for something less than full independence. The MILF characterizes that independent state (or autonomous entity) as an Islamic state, but its descriptions of that imagined entity have always been intentionally vague. Throughout its long struggle, the MILF has exhibited a political pragmatism reminiscent of Ho Chi Minh. Nationalism has always trumped political ideology as long as the struggle for the nation continues. The MILF’s strategy for armed struggle has also been much closer to Ho Chi Minh than to either Osama bin Laden or Yasser Arafat. In its fight against the Philippine government, the MILF has relied overwhelmingly on the classic guerrilla tactics of raids, ambushes, and sabotage against an occupying army, while maintaining broad support from local populations. Bombings or kidnappings of civilian targets have never been an acknowledged tactic of the MILF. The assassinations and sectarian killings that figure so prominently in the recent Muslim separatist strife in southern Thailand (an insurgency with which it has often been compared) have never been a significant factor in the Philippine Muslim separatist struggle. And while fighting to the death in defense of the homeland is a central principal of MILF fighters, suicide attacks, and especially suicide bombings, have not occurred. In addition, in sharp contrast to the vicious ethnic cleansing associated with so many intrastate armed conflicts of the past twenty years, and the recent horrendous sectarian mass murders perpetrated by ISIS, the MILF has never had a policy of targeting non-Muslim civilians.5

Violent extremism, imagined and real Ferdinand Marcos’s war against the Moros from 1973 to 1977 was extremely costly to his government and did not bring victory. By 1975, three-fourths of the Philippine Army was deployed fighting the rebellion, which devoured the defense budget and decimated the junior officer corps. Subsequent administrations took away the lesson that there was no military solution to the Moro insurgency. Beginning in 1987, they renewed negotiations with Muslim separatist leaders that resulted in autonomy agreements – roughly one per decade for the next thirty-some years – that, until the most recent, failed or were undermined in their final stages. In virtually every instance, the last-minute collapses were caused by the Philippine government. 119

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One Philippine administration attempted a different approach. In May 2000, Philippines President Joseph Estrada, a former action movie star, launched a massive offensive against the MILF, vowing “an all-out war” against them.6 The offensive – the largest escalation of the armed conflict in more than 15 years – captured the main rebel camp and created hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, but it did not destroy its intended target. It did result in an unprecedented terror-bombing campaign in Manila and elsewhere in December 2000, likely carried out by individuals connected to the MILF, which never claimed responsibility for any of the incidents. By 2002, partly as a result of the year 2000 offensive and the MILF’s response, but also reflecting the new post 9–11 atmosphere and the Philippine military’s intensive efforts to link the MILF-led insurgency in the South to the global war on terrorism, the popular frame of reference when speaking of the MILF had changed from “Muslim rebels” to “Islamic terrorists.”7

Abu Sayyaf and the beginnings of violent extremism in the Muslim Philippines Another reason for that shift in popular thinking about the MILF was the rise of a tiny but vicious armed group – the Abu Sayyaf Group – whose bold and provocative attacks had, by 2002, drawn international media attention. The Philippine military rushed to link Abu Sayyaf with the MILF but objective observers agreed that Abu Sayyaf’s outrages were at least partly a repudiation of the peace efforts of the MNLF and MILF.8 Five years earlier, in 1995, about 200 raiders – most of them members of Abu Sayyaf – attacked the primarily Christian town of Ipil on Mindanao. They burned the town center to the ground, robbed banks and stores, killed more than fifty town residents and took another thirty civilians hostage. Moro bandits had raided towns and robbed banks before in the young republic, but never with such wanton destruction and murder.9 Abu Sayyaf (though not yet known by that name) announced itself with the 1995 raid on Ipil. The message it sent to the Philippine government, which was currently close to a new autonomy agreement with the MNLF, was that there were other armed Moros opposed to compromises of any kind. Soon their message would become even clearer. In 2000, the Abu Sayyaf group kidnapped 21 foreign tourists from a diving resort in Malaysia and reportedly collected millions of dollars in ransom money. In May 2001, they kidnapped twenty more foreigners in the Philippines, including three Americans, which prompted the US military to deploy 650 troops to the southern Philippines in January 2002 – the first expansion of the US’s post 9–11 “war on terror” beyond Afghanistan. In 2004, in the Philippines’ worst terror attack to date, Abu Sayyaf claimed responsibility for the bombing of a large ferry sailing south from Manila. The bomb sunk the ship, killing 117 passengers and crew. A massive government crackdown in response crushed the group for more than a decade until their recent reappearance and latest claimed terror bombing. Abu Sayyaf was founded in the early 1990s by Abdurajak Janjalani, the son of a Moro father and a Christian Filipina mother. He attended a Catholic high school but left before graduating in 1981 to study in Mecca on a scholarship from the Saudi Arabian government. His three years in Mecca apparently radicalized him because when he returned to Basilan, the southern island of his birth, he began preaching in local mosques, and the content of those lectures caught the attention of his elders. In the mid-1980s, the MNLF and MILF were on equal footing and mostly divided by region. Basilan was an MNLF stronghold. Janjalani was of the same ethnic group as Nur Misuari and like him was intelligent and 120

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charismatic. Many on Basilan considered him to represent the future of the MNLF. But Janjalani quickly became a strident critic of Nur Misuari. In his videotaped lectures from that period he notes that the command of Allah is to wage jihad, not revolution. . . The objective of a jihad is not. . .the attainment of autonomy. It is not just independence. The objective of jihad is the attainment of independence as a means of establishing the supremacy of the Koran and the Hadith. In jihad, if you win, it should be the laws of the Koran from the beginning, to the middle, to the end . . . There are no ideas of men to be followed here.10 A number of the earliest recruits to Abu Sayyaf were the sons of MNLF fighters. Janjalani quickly demonstrated his radical break from MNLF/MILF tactics by murdering an Italian priest and two foreign missionaries in the group’s first year of operation. Janjalani himself was killed in a shoot-out with national police on Basilan in 1998. His brother, Khaddafy, succeeded him as Abu Sayyaf’s leader.

The MILF’s response By 2002, the MILF was facing severe challenges on multiple fronts. The organization was still recovering from President Estrada’s unsuccessful but deeply damaging “all-out war” on the organization. The US military was on the ground in the southern Philippines and the Bush administration was threatening to declare the MILF a terrorist organization. In addition, the Abu Sayyaf group was both posing a violently extremist challenge to its leadership of Moros and tarnishing its international reputation by association. The MILF responded by becoming more politically pragmatic. Seventeen years earlier, in 1985, the founder of the MILF, Hashim Salamat, had written a guide for MILF fighters titled The Bangsamoro Mujahid: His Objectives and Responsibilities. It is an unambiguously Islamist document and one not far removed in substance from Abdurajak Janjalani’s later statements about the objective of a jihad. Salamat states that “First and foremost, our duty is to establish a just social order under the stewardship of leaders adhering to the Qur’an and Sunnah . . . by transferring authority from the hands of the wicked . . . to the hands of righteous and god-fearing colleagues.” The guide, published in English with 1,500 copies distributed, also makes clear where sovereignty resides and how governance will be established once victory is achieved: “the system of governance which shall be established is pre-determined by Qur’anic principles . . . Hence, the matter of selecting a system of government for the community is completely beyond the scope of the peoples’s will and prerogatives.”11 Now, in 2002, the MILF changed the name of its official website, its main communication organ with both its members and the outside world, from MoroJihad.com to Luwaran.com. The terminology shift was significant. It de-emphasized the term jihad, which had become closely associated with Abu Sayyaf, and, in the immediate post 9–11 environment, with terrorism in general. Just as significantly, it introduced the traditional Moro term, Luwaran, which means “Selection,” and refers to the traditional Moro written legal code, consisting of selections from the Shafi’i school of Islamic law combined with local customary (adat) law.12 The new emphasis on the traditional Moro legal code was a direct repudiation of Abdurajak Janjalani, who had stated that for Abu Sayyaf, “the only goal is the rule of the Koran, not autonomy . . . not independence.”13 It was also 121

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a substantial dilution of Hashim Salamat’s earlier call for a government “pre-determined by Qur’anic principles.” The website itself is in English, the language of Philippine politics. It is free of jihadist rhetoric and, in fact, contains hardly any Islamic rhetoric at all. With its local political news and discussions of national electoral politics, it is surprisingly similar to the websites maintained by any regional political party. In 2003, Hashim Salamat died of a heart attack. Within a few weeks, he was replaced as chairman by Ebrahim Murad, known popularly as Hadji Murad. Unlike Salamat, Murad is not a religious scholar. He studied engineering at a Catholic university in Mindanao. When the war broke out in 1972, he became a local rebel commander and has remained in place as a military commander ever since, never once escaping into exile overseas. Murad has shown himself to be both a pragmatist and a moderate. Just as significant, Murad has always been, and still remains, extraordinarily popular with ordinary Muslims in Mindanao. When Murad resumed negotiations with the Philippine government, he gave the role of chief negotiator to Mohagher Iqbal, who had been minister of information, rather than to the hardliner Abdulajiz Mimbantas, who was Hashim Salamat’s pick for the job. Beginning in 2012, the MILF’s pragmatism and patience began to pay off. That year the MILF signed a preliminary peace agreement with the Philippine government, followed in 2014 by a final peace agreement and, in 2018, the passage of the Bangsamoro Organic Law, which established a new autonomous region in Mindanao and Sulu to be led in its threeyear transition phase by the MILF.14 The new Moro autonomous region is designed to have impressive powers and resources. The establishing bill guarantees annual block grants from the central government for the autonomous entity to be spent at the discretion of the directly elected regional Parliament. The Bangsamoro government also has the power to tax and set fees and to share revenues with the central government from the development of the natural resources within its territory. It is hoped that these capabilities will allow the Bangsamoro government to rapidly develop the region, which has long been the poorest in the Philippines, for the benefit of its roughly 4 million residents. Those residents are predominantly Muslims, but almost 9 percent of them are non-Muslims, both Filipino Christians and indigenous followers of local religions.15 Among the capabilities of the new Bangsamoro government is the power to establish what have been termed Sharia Courts. These courts only have jurisdiction over Muslim residents of the region and are limited to hearing primarily civil cases. Criminal cases other than those involving minor offenses are reserved to the central government.16 The new Sharia Courts are, in fact, nearly identical to those that have been operating smoothly for decades in Muslim Mindanao. The establishment of these courts by an Act of Congress in 1977 was, it is widely agreed, the most durable and positive outcome of Ferdinand Marcos’s abortive peace agreement that ended the early Muslim separatist conflict. The most Islamic component of the new Moro autonomous entity is therefore not at all new. The residents of the new region are not likely to feel a sudden shift toward Islamic rule when the transition period ends and the Bangsamoro government comes to power.

Extremist challenges to Muslim autonomy Recent history suggests, however, that the new region will also face an internal threat from violent extremists who, though few in number, have had an outsized destructive impact. The Abu Sayyaf group re-emerged in 2014 to pledge their allegiance by video to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS. They resumed their kidnappings of 122

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international tourists the same year. While the Abu Sayyaf kidnappings are reminiscent of ISIS mass abductions, they are also examples of straightforward for-profit piracy that Moro bandits in the Sulu archipelago have practiced for centuries. The 2019 bombing of the Jolo Cathedral appears, by contrast, to be a work of political terror perpetrated against Christian Filipinos with the goal of undermining the newly established autonomous region. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack on its website.17 Subsequent police investigation has found that the attack was a suicide bombing carried out by an Indonesian couple pledged to ISIS and aligned with Abu Sayyaf. Confirmed suicide bombings had been virtually nonexistent in the Philippines, and attacks by foreign terrorists – especially those connected to ISIS – are nearly as rare. If the findings of the investigation hold, this is a worrying change of direction for Abu Sayyaf. By far the most destructive violence of recent years in the region, however, occurred on Mindanao and was instigated by another ISIS-related extremist group related to Abu Sayyaf. In May 2017, Philippine security forces attempted to arrest Isnilon Hapilon, an Abu Sayyaf leader, in Marawi City, a significant urban center on the island of Mindanao. Hapilon was under the protection of the Maute Group, a small extremist group based on Mindanao that had also pledged their allegiance to ISIS. In response to the failed arrest attempt, the Maute Group launched a full assault on Marawi City, one apparently previously planned. Maute and Abu Sayyaf fighters occupied the center of the city, prompting a Philippine military siege that lasted weeks and then months. After five months, Marawi City was retaken after having suffered severe damage from airstrikes and artillery. Most Maute fighters were killed in the siege but some escaped. The level and nature of the violence were unprecedented. Christian residents were killed in targeted executions by extremist fighters. The Philippine military bombed indiscriminately. In all, more than 1,100 people were killed and at least 600,000 Marawi residents became refugees. The city has yet to recover from the fighting there.18 The challenge to the MILF and to the legitimacy of the new Bangsamoro autonomous region from the aligned extremist groups is a significant one. It is clear that the extremists reject the very idea of an autonomous Muslim entity within the Philippines. As one Maute Group leader, Abu Dar, stated it in an interview, “The moment you sit down with [the Philippine government], that’s the end of the struggle.”19

Conclusion Given the dramatic levels of extremist violence in recent years, it is not surprising that media outlets have been quick to write stories such as a recent New York Times article describing “How ISIS is Rising in the Philippines as It Dwindles in the Middle East.”20 While it is certainly true that the symbols and rhetoric, and in some respects the ideology, of ISIS are “rising in the Philippines,” the underlying dynamics of that development likely have more to do with local conflicts than with the pan-Islamism of ISIS. To understand the recent actions of Islamist extremists in the Philippines, it is first necessary to understand the local context, particularly the goals and strategies of the MILF. Shahram Akbarzadeh notes that “The binary divide between the abode of Islam and the abode of disbelief is incompatible with the reality of the Muslim experience in the West.”21 That statement applies nearly as well to the Philippines as it does to Europe, Australia, or the Americas. As a religious minority in one of the most Westernized nations in Asia, Philippine Muslims may be said, without much exaggeration, to have been living in the West for more than sixty years. Nowhere is this more true than in the vast and fertile central basin of the island of Mindanao, still the major Muslim population center of the 123

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region and the stronghold of the MILF. There, Muslim communities live interspersed with long-established Christian communities, and Muslims and Christians interact every day in cities and towns. There, middle-aged MILF leaders and supporters, many of whom were engaged in armed struggle for a homeland of their own and still identify as Islamists, have become moderate pragmatists simply as a by-product of where they live. As a reward for their struggles, those MILF leaders and supporters have gained an autonomous Bangsamoro (Moro Homeland) carved out of the Philippine Republic, but still very much a part of it. In an acknowledgment of the reality of their situation – living both in a majority Christian state and among Christians – they have compromised in order to gain the resources they need to develop their communities. Their goal is not, and never has been, to live apart. Their goal, which they are close to accomplishing, is to be recognized and respected by the Philippine State and by their Christian neighbors, and to have a greater say over their own lives. With the goals and accomplishments of the MILF in mind, it may be more analytically productive to view Abu Sayyaf and the Maute Group not simply as generic Islamist extremists but also as Moro bitter-enders. It is no coincidence that the leaders and adherents of these two groups tend to hail from the peripheries of the Muslim South – islands and areas that are nearly 100 percent Muslim and that are also exceptionally poor and undeveloped. They come from territories that have always been the refuges of pirates, bandits, and primitive rebels. Their ancestors fought the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese, as well as the Philippine military. They have consistently resisted external rule because they have never benefitted in the least from that rule. The extremist ideologies that have overlaid the old regional grievances have arrived in the Philippines via new technologies. Inexpensive airfares have made travel to the distant Middle East far easier, but more important are mobile phones, which have made possible the rapid creation and dissemination of low-cost propaganda (most famously by ISIS) . Mobile phones also allow small groups such as Abu Sayyaf to promote themselves to the media and gain instant notoriety. To say that the violent extremists of the Muslim South are Moro bitter-enders who are continuing a tradition of absolute defiance of the central government is not to deny the disturbing new ideological component of their threat. It is, however, meant to inject some perspective and a measure of hope into the discussion. The symbolic rhetoric of ISIS is a tool to mobilize one’s local supporters and a weapon to frighten one’s local enemies. That rhetoric, as well as the horrific actions of ISIS adherents in the Philippines, has clearly frightened Christian Filipinos but did not ultimately damage the MILF’s peace efforts. Having gained its prize, the MILF now has the opportunity to focus its development efforts on the most troubled parts of its new territory and by doing so pull adherents away from the extremist groups as those individuals see, for the first time ever, Muslim leaders bringing positive economic change to their impoverished and long-neglected communities.

Notes 1 Michael A. Costello, “The Demography of Mindanao,” in Mindanao: Land of Unfulfilled Promise, eds. Mark Turner, R.J. May, and Lulu Respall Turner (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1992), 41. 2 Republic of the Philippines, “Factsheet on Islam in Mindanao, (Davao, 2017) 2017–008,” Republic of the Philippines, Philippine Statistics Authority, Region XI – Davao Region. 3 Samuel Clemens, “Comments on the Moro Massacre,” (March 12, 1906) in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 170–173.

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4 Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 5 The MILF has always been a loosely knit organization and it should be noted that at least one massacre of Christian civilians was committed by two “rogue” MILF commanders in 2008. See Amnesty International, Shattered Peace in Mindanao: the Human Cost of Conflict in the Philippines (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2008). 6 Carolyn O.Arguillas, “No One Remembers the Fall of Camp Abubakar,” CyberDyaryo.com, 10 July 2001, available at www.cyberdyaryo.com/features/f2001_0710_01.htm 7 Thomas M. McKenna and Esmael A. Abdula, “Islamic Education in the Philippines: Political Separatism and Religious Pragmatism,” in Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). 8 Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda M. Gloria, Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (Manila: Ateneo Center for Social Policy and Public Affairs, 2000), 193. 9 Vitug and Gloria, Under the Crescent Moon, 162. 10 Vitug and Gloria, Under the Crescent Moon, 212. It is thanks to the impressive reporting of Philippine journalists Vitug and Gloria on the ground in Mindanao-Sulu and at Philippine military headquarters in Manila that we have such rich and reliable information about Abdurajak Janjalani and the beginnings of Abu Sayyaf. As they report, Philippine military intelligence circulated a good deal of misinformation about Janjalani, including the widely reported false claims that he fought in Afghanistan and that he received millions of dollars from Osama bin Laden to start Abu Sayyaf. 11 Hashim Salamat, The Bangsamoro Mujahid: His Objectives and Responsibilities (Mindanao: Bangsamoro Press, 1985). 12 McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels, 62. 13 Vitug and Gloria, Under the Crescent Moon, 206. 14 The law establishing the new Bangsamoro (Moro People’s) autonomous region was pushed through the Philippine Congress by President Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte, whose political persona is more macho than Joseph Estrada’s and who has an authoritarian bent reminiscent of Ferdinand Marcos, has nevertheless been supportive of Moro aspirations for genuine political autonomy. This is likely because Duterte has lived most of his life in Mindanao and has some family ties to Moros. It also may be because Duterte, like many other residents of Mindanao – a region perennially neglected by the central government – favors a federal system for the Philippines and sees a Moro autonomous region as a model for such a system. 15 Republic of the Philippines, “Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, ARMM Population, 2017,” Republic of the Philippines, Philippine Statistics Authority, available at http:// rssoarmm.psa.gov.ph/statistics/population 16 Republic Act no. 11054, “An Act Providing for the Organic Law for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao,” Seventeenth Congress, Philippine Congress, Republic of the Philippines, July 23, 2018, available at http://bangsamoroonline.com/bol.pdf 17 Criselda Yabes, “Triumph, then Tragedy in the Philippines,” Asia Sentinel, January 29, 2019, available at www.asiasentinel.com/society/triumph-tragedy-philippines-bangsamoro-mindanao/ 18 International Crisis Group, The Philippines: Militancy and the New Bangsamoro (Brussels: International Crisis Group, Asia Report No. 301, 2019), 3–4. 19 International Crisis Group, The Philippines: Militancy and the New Bangsamoro, 6. 20 Hannah Beech and Jason Gutierrez, “How ISIS is Rising in the Philippines as It Dwindles in the Middle East,” New York Times, March 9, 2019, available at www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/world/asia/isis-philip pines-jolo.html 21 Shahram Akbarzadeh, “Introduction,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. idem (Routledge, 2012), 4.

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11 ISLAM AND POLITICS IN THE MALDIVES Rethinking political Islam Azim Zahir

Introduction Islam in its Sunni form has existed in the tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives for more than 800 years. It remains the Maldives’ sole officially recognised religion. Contrary to the assumptions of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis,1 this self-claimed 100 per cent Muslim nation with a population of about 550,000 people, experienced an impressive political liberalisation process since 2003, transitioning to an electoral democracy in 2009.2 During the same period, new religious actors and organisations – or Islamists – agitating for a comprehensive enforcement of sharia emerged for the first time in the political public sphere. The new democracy in fact institutionalised Islam in many ways. Most significantly, the new constitution, enacted in 2008, explicitly limits citizenship only to Muslims (Article 9 (d)), effectively rejecting religious freedom. Hence, religion is enforced for everyone, technically including for members of any minority religions – a key reason why Jonathan Fox has designated the Maldives as a ‘religious state’ in the same category as Saudi Arabia.3 This chapter examines the institutionalisation of Islam in the Maldives, as well as the rise of oppositional Islamism calling for a comprehensive enforcement of sharia. The chapter argues that, as counterintuitive as it is, the institutionalisation of Islam and the rise of oppositional Islamism significantly owe to the prior institutional and discursive politicisation of Islam through modern nation building since 1930s by state actors with Islamic modernist orientations. Hence, this chapter suggests that ‘political Islam’, broadly understood, is not the ‘other’ of the modern state, and it is not limited to Islamism as such, and it is not even an outcome of an aberrant understanding of Islam. Rather, political Islam is the outcome of making Islam a modern and usable religion for the nation-state, which has challenged the depth of democratisation. The chapter consists of three sections. The first section discusses the conceptual and contextual terrain to explore the rise of political Islam in the Maldives. The second section explores the role of modernist political actors in nation building and the multiple transformations of Islam through modern nation building. The third section discusses how exactly those prior transformations of Islam contributed to the rise of Islamism and institutionalisation of Islam in the new democracy. It ends by suggesting how various forms of political Islam limit the depth of democratisation. 126

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Conceptual and contextual terrain ‘Islamism’ usually refers to activities of individual actors, organisations, or movements through explicit deployment of symbols from Islamic tradition with an ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state.4 As such, Islamism is described as a modern, resurgent phenomenon. This ‘Islamic resurgence’ thesis suggests that the rise of Islamism since the 1970s was a response to the failure of Muslim secular states and secular ideologies such as nationalism.5 While there are different interpretations as to what the rise of Islamism means for liberal democratic politics, the dominant view assumed Islamism ‘would seem to reduce the likelihood of democratic development’.6 The velayet-e faqih (governance of the Islamic jurist) system that was established in Iran after the Iranian Revolution, in particular, cemented this view. However, based on the ideological diversity within Islamist movements and the ‘moderation’ that some groups underwent when included in the electoral political system, others argue Islamism can be compatible with electoral democracy.7 However, even the moderation thesis assumes that the kind of democracy the Islamists, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, advocate would have an Islamic hue. Other constituencies of non-violent Islamists may be even more conservative. Thus, according to Hefner, ‘the discourse of democracy in modern Muslim societies can take hold only if it responds to the criticisms of conservative Islamists.’8 Finally, some scholars have pointed to the emergence of ‘post-Islamism’, which emphasises Islamisation of the society, as a consequence of the ‘failure’ of Islamist political projects in establishing Islamic states.9 Yet, taking politics broadly, even the post-Islamist thesis assumes the continuing influence of Islamism on the state through the spread of its ideas in the larger society.10 Overall, therefore, the dominance of Islamism – or even post-Islamist politics – in a country could mean bad news for certain individual rights and certainly for liberal democracy. While not liberal democratic, the Maldivian Constitution that, according to the international democracy clearinghouse Freedom House, delivered an electoral democracy in 2009, was in many ways impressive. In a ranking of 46 Muslim states according to the number of rights provided in their Constitution, Ahmed and Gouda rank the Maldives in second place with 72 rights (Albania being the top with 75 rights).11 The democratic transition itself took place on the back of protests and activism, beginning in late 2003, led by actors such as the newly established opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), oriented in global human rights discourse. Even though far from overtly secular, they used these and other Western discourses such as ‘liberal democracy’ to indict the human rights abuses and authoritarian politics of the long-standing regime of Al-Azhar University-educated religious scholar, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who came to power in 1978. These actors scaled up their activism through help from ‘transnational advocacy networks’ working on international human rights, such as Amnesty International, and Western actors with relevant ‘linkages and leverage’, such as the European Union, to exert pressure on the regime.12 Paradoxically, though, the 2008 Constitution – the culmination of the liberalisation process – rejected political secularism and instead Islam was institutionalised in several ways. The Constitution places an overarching limitation on individual rights: they are guaranteed ‘in a manner that is not contrary to any tenet of Islam’ (Article 16 (a)). Like all other previous constitutions, the Constitution also excluded religious freedom and the cognate concept of freedom of conscience.13 This time, though, the legal space for religious freedom was also further curtailed. Most significantly, the Constitution for the first time explicitly limited citizenship only to Muslims (Article 9 (d)). Besides these limits on individual rights, Islam is enshrined in the Constitution as one of the main bases of all laws, and no laws shall be contrary to any ‘tenet of Islam’ (Article 10 (a) and (b)). When adjudicating justice, judges are 127

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also required to consider Islamic sharia in matters on which the Constitution and law are silent (Article 142). Beyond institutionalisation of Islam in the Constitution, liberalisation and democratisation processes also saw the spectacular rise of new religious actors agitating in the public sphere for comprehensive re-Islamisation of the state as well as the society. Their specific religious doctrines vary – some more Salafi while others more Islamist à la Maududi. Their religious and ideological roots go back to at least the 1970s and to their education and exposure in especially Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Largely suppressed under Gayoom’s regime, with political liberalisation, some of them pursued a top-down approach of insertion into political society and the state. Others wanted a more bottom-up civil society-based approach. In the end, some decided to form the first overtly Islamist political party, Adalat Party (AP, registered in 2006). Others decided to operate within civil society. While there were no more than two NGOs with religious objectives before 2004, by 2010, there were 12 registered NGOs and this number continued to increase rapidly. The most prominent example is the Salafi NGO, Jamiyyatul Salaf (JS), registered in 2006. Albeit electorally ineffective, the new religious actors seemed to have achieved some success within a short time span. Since liberalisation began, their outreach activities in society and in the mainstream media and Internet-based outlets by Islamist and Salafi actors have grown exponentially. The AP shared in political power as a member of the opposition coalition that defeated Gayoom in 2008 in the first ever multiparty presidential elections. Officials of the party headed the newly established Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Since around 2004, there has been a major re-Islamisation effort in terms of the usual indicators. Rarely occurring in the past, most Maldivian women started to don the veil. More and more people sported beards and dress codes became calf-length. Arabic and Islamic terminologies found their way in daily communications. Introduced under the first democratically elected government, the Islamic finance sector has gained popularity. A parallel retail sector catering for the religious changes also emerged, and Islamic education outlets also increased. From preschools to universities, a significant change has been visible. Even with regard to the law, besides the Constitution, changes were made, for example, to the Penal Code to incorporate sharia punishments such as hudud and qisas more substantively. How may we understand the multiple institutionalisations of Islam, leading to a more constrained space for religious freedom, and the rise of Islamism? As already suggested, a dominant understanding of political Islam limits it to Islamism of the variety that calls for an Islamic state, and posits political Islam as the ‘other’ of the modern state that emerged as a reaction to the failure of secularist politics. The resurgence of Islam in this sense is seen as an aberration.14 While this chapter agrees that Islamism is partly to do with the failure of secularist politics and modernisation, as counterintuitive as it is, I would like to suggest that to fully account for contemporary forms of political Islam in the Maldives, we need to look for explanations in the path-dependent legacies of modern nation building by political actors with Islamic modernist orientations.

Multiple politicisations of Islam through modern nation building Since the nineteenth century, Islamic modernism has been a religious, intellectual and political response to ‘modernity’. Its broader impulse was to show the compatibility of Islam with modernity.15 Moaddel and Talattof summarise that Islamic modernism in general i) accepted the view that the West had a more advanced civilisation, ii) accepted the differentiation in knowledge and respected the modern sciences, iii) favoured democracy and 128

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constitutionalism, iv) was favourable towards women’s status, and v) reformulated Islamic methodology to stress rationalism.16 The movement based on these general orientations had influence across Muslim lands reaching ‘the apogee of their power in the first two decades of the twentieth century’.17 This influence was spread through institutional bases of educational centres, journalism and international networks of Muslim intellectuals. South Asia and Egypt, among others, were the most important sites of Islamic modernism during the period. It should not therefore be surprising that Islamic modernism as well as nationalist currents of the period would have influenced the Maldives during this period. Maldivian elites often travelled to the Indian subcontinent and Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the major educational institutions, as well as journalism, literature and Islamic modernist intellectuals had direct and indirect influence on some key Maldivian elites, such as Ahmed Kamil, Mohamed Amin, and later Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who shaped political modernisation since the 1930s. A member of the first constituent assembly (1931) and the first education minister, Ahmed Kamil, was a student of Indian Islamic modernist figure Shibli Nu‘mani. Amin, another member of the first constituent assembly, who in 1953 adopted the first republic and became the first president, was also a student at the foremost modernist institution of Aligarh University. Amin had enormous influence on political modernisation in the country. Analyses of their writings suggest their modernist influences by figures such as Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Ameer Ali and Muhammad Iqbal. Their broader discourses supported ‘constitutional rule’ (dhusthooree hukoomath) and ‘rule of law’ (qanoonee hukoomath), ‘civilisation’ (thahzeebaai thamadhdhun), and ‘love of nation’ (hubbul watan). Even terminologically, some of these discourses (e.g., thahzeebai thamadhdhun) have roots in the Indian subcontinent.18 Within those broader discourses, they spoke of science, rationality, justice, equality, ‘shura’ (consultation) as a basis for constitutional government, and ‘republicanism’. The powerful political figure, Amin, in particular, spoke of the need for achieving ‘civilisation’ (which he believed existed in the West) and was also a staunch advocate for women’s equality.19 Later, since the late 1970s, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, trained as a religious scholar with a Master’s degree in sharia from Al-Azhar University, dominated politics for thirty years. Even though his regime was characterised by authoritarianism, Gayoom espoused a scholarly Islamic modernism which endorsed certain rights and a certain democracy both at an intellectual religious level and as a public rhetorical discourse. In greater scholarly terms compared to his predecessors, Gayoom spoke of ‘the flexibility of sharia’, the need for independent reasoning (ijtihad) to both revisit existing religious consensus (ijma) and find solutions for new problems, the compatibility of Islam with modernisation and progress, gender equality, and shura as a basis for democracy.20 Consistent with the general view that Islamic modernism is a positive force, those discourses even in the Maldives did act as positive resources for conceiving, legitimising and justifying political modernisation.21 The political elite introduced, used and promoted these discourses for the said purposes in their writings and speeches, and, in turn, also left institutional and discursive path-dependent legacies that positively shaped democratisation in the twenty-first century. Even though often trampled on, since the 1930s, the Maldives adopted modern constitutions incorporating certain liberal and electoral principles: popular sovereignty, rule of law, formal equality before law, certain civil and political rights, and (limited) electoral political mechanisms. The state also allowed societal modernisation and even Westernisation. Since especially the 1970s, when the Maldives opened up to the global capitalist system with the introduction of tourism, there was an increased availability and consumption 129

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of Indian and Western popular cultural products. Western novels and literature, Hollywood and especially Bollywood films, Hindi television soap operas, Bollywood and Western music, songs and fashion became part and parcel of Maldivian popular culture. Sports, Dhivehi cinema, music and song, use of drugs, and other commodities of gratification also increased. Even in the education system, British curricula-based education dominated. In those respects, the Maldives conformed to the secularisation that was seen in many other Muslim majority contexts as observed by, for example, Sami Zubaida.22 Consistent with findings elsewhere in several Muslim majority states,23 most Maldivians also desire democracy. Sixty-two per cent believe democracy is the best system and more than 75 per cent of the people believe that having a democratic political system is good.24 In this regard, we may suggest that the Islamic modernist discursive legacies had some influence on the ‘lived Islam’ of the ordinary people: for most of them Islam was compatible with democracy. Overall, therefore, it is not surprising to see popular agitation for greater democracy and adoption of a Constitution that was in many ways impressive. In other words, these political developments are consistent with the view that Islamic modernism is generally a positive force for modernity. However, these actors also saw that Islam could be made or remade as part and parcel of modern nation-building processes. In doing so, however, Islam was also transformed into what I call a modern institutional political religion and a discursive political religion, heretofore unknown in the past. Islam’s transformation through modern nation building at four specific institutional levels – constitutions, codified laws and rules; centralised state authority; a bureaucratised judicial system, and state identity – is particularly germane towards making Islam a modern institutional political religion. First, as political actors with Islamic modernist orientations favoured the liberal idea of rule of law to be realized through statute law and written constitutions, sharia law itself was increasingly liberalised, systematised and codified into statute law forms. Even though non-religious laws proliferated in the process, instead of jettisoning sharia from the state and polity, it was transformed onto the modality and framework of modern law forms. A culmination of this process was the codification of sharia into a Penal Code. Second, the judicial office, which was in the past headed by a religious scholar-judge who adjudicated justice based on sharia interpreted from religious texts, was bureaucratised and transformed into a modern institution that no longer assumed the religious authority of a religious scholar-judge. Modern-educated lawyers, with no command of Arabic or even Islamic jurisprudence, could head the judicial office and deliver sharia rulings based on codified laws and written rules. Again, instead of jettisoning Islam, the modern judiciary acquired a new self-understanding of religious authority. Third, the role differentiation regime that long existed between religious scholar-judge, who in the Maldives was the highest religious authority, and the sultan/president as the political authority, was dismantled in 1968. The highest religious authority was brought firmly under the political authority of a modern chief executive, who was constitutionally declared the supreme authority on religion. Religious authority thereby acquired a new self-understanding as it existed by virtue of the force of modern law, not necessarily by virtue of religious knowledge of the chief executive. This move also did not jettison religion as such. Rather religion was further transformed onto the modality of modern state power. Fourth, modern state building was accompanied by a distinctly modern Islamic identity building for the state. Symbolically, the establishment of Islam as the state religion in modern constitutions exemplified this institutional identity building. More concretely, the omission of religious freedom in all constitutions and the moves towards defining the modern 130

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apparatus of citizenship based on Islamic belonging – first implicitly in naturalization law in 1969, and explicitly in the 2008 Constitution – exemplified the distinctly modern Islamic identity building via law. These four institutional levels of re-organising the religion-state nexus through modern nation building completely transformed Islam into a modern institutional political religion heretofore unknown in the past. Finally, a fifth, extra-institutional discursive level constituted Islam’s complete transformation into a modern discursive political religion as unknown in the past. Islam as a discursive political religion most significantly emerged through discursive construction of nation and national identity based on Islamic belonging. Since the 1940s, Amin reconstructed a preexisting state ‘meta-narrative’ of collective identity derived from anti-colonial narratives around the sixteenth-century Portuguese maritime empire in the Indian Ocean. The official historiography narrated that Islam was existentially threatened when the Maldivian Sultan Hassan IX was proselytised into Christianity by the Portuguese in India and then later when they subsequently imposed their rule under the name of this Christian king. Amin reconstructed this meta-narrative through ‘invented traditions’ by establishing a National Hero (Muhammad Thakurufaanu, the man, who is believed to have defeated the Portuguese rule), a National Day (1st of Rabi’ al-awwal, marking the day the Maldives is believed to have gained independence from the Portuguese), a national anthem, and through nationalist songs. At a foundational level, from the beginning modern national identity building therefore was linked to Islam. Amin’s new nationalist discourse was juxtaposed against an ‘other’ that had existentially threatened Islam and it was based on the motif of ‘love of nation’ (hubbul wathan) – a motif taken from the saying ‘love of nation is part of faith’, attributed to the Prophet. Since the late 1970s, under the Islamic modernist scholar president, Gayoom, the new discourse of national identity connected to Islam acquired a deeply political ideological and public discursive role. Gayoom ‘functionalized’25 his scholarly modernist Islam to reconstruct the meta-narrative towards a more exclusionary public discourse of identity, enabled by modern media technologies and through political mobilisations over a period of 25 years. To this end, he re-constructed collective identity based on the powerful new discourse of ‘100% Muslim Nation’ (satthain sattha muslim qaum), a motif that had not existed as a political discourse in the past (see Table 11.1 for a selection of these motifs in Gayoom’s National Day speeches over a period of 25 years.) It is via such discursive reconstruction of national identity based on Islamic belonging through speeches, songs, writings and public celebrations, that ‘Islam’ acquired its most powerful public political discursive role. ‘Islam’ thereby became a major discursive frame of reference in the public domain as it had never existed in the past. In fact, prior to the 1970s, ‘Islam’ existed largely as a practice, rather than as a public political discursive frame of reference. It is through its emergence as an ideology of national identity, Islam was transformed into such a discursive religion. Arguably the multiple transformations of Islam were in many ways consistent with the assumptions of and shaped by the Islamic modernist orientations and discourses of the elite. A key orientation of Islamic modernism was seeking modernity (or ‘civilisation’ as Maldivian modernists called it) within an Islamic political framework and Islamic foundational identity. Classical Islamic modernism that influenced the modernising elite not only rejected secularism but also sought to show Islam properly understood was fully compatible with modernity and indeed a superior basis for ‘civilisation’. However, consistent with their liberal impulses, they also sought a circumscribed and modernised place for Islam through the modality of rule of law via written constitutions and statute laws, through a modernised 131

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Table 11.1 100% Muslim Nation meta-narrative in Gayoom’s National Day speeches Year Selected quotes 1980 As our nation is a 100% Muslim Nation, by that fact also today [National Day] is special. Our National Day symbolises the relationship between love of nation and Islam. An occasion that symbolises Islamicness and nationalism. 1981 Everyone knows the link between our national identity and Islam . . . It is in this month that Muhammad Thakurufaanu defended the Maldives through a jihad . . . We will be able to prevent foreign interference by strengthening the relationship between our nation and Islam. 1982 As we all are proud, the Maldives is a 100% Muslim Nation. Compared to all Muslims, we top the list in this respect. Since conversion . . . we have remained a 100% Muslim Nation . . . It is no historical coincidence that the Prophet was born in a day in a Rabi’ al-awwal and our National Day falls in the same month. It shows the link between Islam and our nation . . . Our national identity is based on two conditions: one is Maldivianess, and the other is Islam. 1984 As we celebrate National Day, it is a special day in several ways. First, we opened a centre [Islamic Centre] that represents our Islamic personality. It is named after National Day hero, Masjidhul Sulthan Muhammad Thakurufaanu al-Auzam . . . I do not need to tell the deep connection between our national identity and Islam . . . the link between Islam, Maldivianess, and national identity is made out of the blood sacrificed on this land. 1989 Unlike other nations, the Maldives does not have different ethnicities. There are no people with a different religion. 1990 . . . why are there signs of damage to the love that exists between the people of our 100% Muslim Nation? . . . Our National Day symbolises the sacrifices of our forefathers for Islam . . . It calls for the defence of our nation and our religion. 1993 Tonight [National Day night] our hearts are overjoyed not just with national feelings. Before that we are filled with the feelings of the light of Islam . . . it is a good omen that we got independence in this blessed month.26 1994 No Maldivian will deny that the biggest foundation of Maldivian national identity is Islam . . . We have been able to defend our independence and self-rule because of Islam. 1996 It is paramount to be proud of Islam and our Maldivianess . . . we must before everything be determined to protect our Islamic faith and Maldivian independence and our self-hood. 1997 As we celebrate National Day . . . we must value the sacrifices that Muhammad Thakurufaanu made for Islam and our independence. 1999 As today is the 1st of Rabi’ al-awwal, we must consider that day not just as our National Day. As Maldives is a 100% Muslim Nation, the connection between the month and the special occasion of Islam [the Prophet’s birthday] linked to our hearts and our soul . . . Islam is our biggest blessing. The link between our national identity and Islam is a historic link which can never be de-linked. 2001 As we celebrate National Day today, we must remember our biggest blessing is Islam 2002 As our National Day comes in Rabi’ al-awwal, which is the month of the Prophet . . . it shows the link between our national identity and our faith. The link between Islam and Maldivianess is a strong historical link, which will never change. We must remember our independence and our sovereignty is inextricably tied to the Maldives being a 100% Muslim Nation I pray to Allah that he keep the Maldives as a 100% Muslim Nation.

and bureaucratised judiciary, through transfer of religious authority under a centralised state, and as an overall identity for state. Hence, the political institutional Islam that emerged did not seek a comprehensive Islamic state or comprehensive sharia as Islamism wants. In other words, a significant aspect of Islam as a modern institutional political religion concerns its form and self-understanding, rather than its specific content as such. 132

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Similarly, the distinctly modern Islamic identity building as national identity was also consistent with at least the variety of reformist Islam in the Maldives. ‘Islam’ in the equation of the meta-narrative of collective identity mattered more at the level of belonging, as the metanarrative served to provide an Islamic identity, more than particular ways of behaving, believing, or enforcement of substantive injunctions of sharia law. While Islamic modernism upheld liberalised views on religious freedom at the level of beliefs, it was overall committed to incorporation of Islam as a key marker at the level of collective belonging. Hence, some prominent modernists such as Muhammad Iqbal espoused Islamic identity as a basis for national identity.27 Masud has argued that most South Asian Muslims held the latter position.28 Even though prominent Islamic modernists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Indian Muslim thinkers such as Iqbal and Abdul Kalam Azad also espoused pan-Islamism, even pan-Islamism with its anti-imperialism arguably contributed to the rise of nationalised identity.29 In their contemporary context of the Maldives, where Islam was the only religious tradition, the commitment by modernist actors to a collective identity based on Islamic belonging would not have struck anyone as a project against plural citizenship. Such a commitment to Islamic identity rather buttressed their attempts at validating and legitimising ‘modernity’ through Islam. As an Islamic modernist, Gayoom theoretically did believe in religious freedom, but as part of a political project for identity construction, he argued the Maldivian context was unique as it was a ‘100% Muslim state’, where religious freedom was not only irrelevant but would undermine other Islamic values such as unity and peace. A key reason why I suggest this identity construction is liberal in many ways is the fact that even under a ‘100% Muslim Nation’ identity, as modernists constructed it, a citizen can be a fully modern and even a westernised Maldivian without much repercussion. What the modernism à la Gayoom expects from a citizen is that his or her public identity to be based on belonging to Islam. The Islam in the equation thus concerns the level of belonging, not mainly behaviour or private belief. In this respect, the pursuit of a national identity defined through belonging to Islam was not a modernising state’s compromise in the face of an aberrant form of Islam. It was the very project of a modernist form of Islam that saw Islam and the belonging to the Islamic faith as superior bases for the pursuit of ‘civilisation’. In these processes of nation building, however, instead of de-establishing Islam, Islam acquired a new, modern political institutional framework, a new self-understanding, and a new political public identity, with implications for Islamism itself and the depth of future democratisation.

The rise of Islamism and institutionalisation of Islam: Mechanisms The suggestion here is not that oppositional Islamism was caused by the prior transformations of Islam. Rather Islamism was nourished by those discursive and institutional legacies. These resources intensified Islamism and made it ever more relevant in the public political domain. The logic of this intensification is similar to experiences of Islamisation elsewhere such as Egypt,30 Malaysia,31 and Pakistan.32 Gregory Starrett, for example, explains the rise of what he calls the ‘Islamic Trend’ in Egypt as an outcome of the prior ‘functionalisation’ of Islam as part of a state modernisation drive.33 Taking the example of the public education system, he explains the intention of public education was to inculcate rationalised Islam which can be useful for creating a modern society where there was political stability and a pacified citizenry. But in the functionalisation process, ‘Islam’ became deeply embedded in the public domain and a hegemonic force, which made the Islamic Trend’s oppositional tendencies possible and more intensified: 133

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[I]n becoming hegemonic, Islam (like political economy, or evolutionary theory, or Marxism, or any of a half-dozen other comprehensive ideological systems) is forced by necessity not only to provoke limited counter-languages, but to become itself the language in which cultural and political battles are fought by the vast majority of interested parties.34 Applying these insights to the Maldives, the new religious actors in the Maldives found exactly the right political language and the relevant institutional framework (based on Islam) already available in the public discursive field in which they could fight their own battles. Oppositional Islamism therefore does agree with Islamic modernist actors at the level of Islam as a marker for national belonging. However, it is deeply critical of Islam in this equation to remain a vacuous or ‘thin’ identity marker. Islamists therefore seek stricter enforcement of apostasy and blasphemy injunctions and stricter othering of non-Muslim identities, socialisation processes and cultural products. Thus, for example, they are deeply critical of Western forms of entertainment and music. They are also deeply critical of the circumscribed place for religion in the education system dominated by Western textbooks. In short, they are want to remake Muslims of the ‘100% Muslim Nation’ based on a ‘thick’ Islamic identity. Islamists are also happy with the idea that sharia can be changed into the modality of modern law forms and adjudication of justice through a modernised and bureaucratised judiciary, as already available in the legal system. But they are deeply critical of the liberalised, and circumscribed, manner in which sharia is codified, the half-baked manner in which it is enforced, and the limited and selective ways judges use it. In other words, they seek a more comprehensive codification, adjudication and enforcement of sharia, including its criminal laws. Similarly, they are happy with the overall religious identity framework given for the state by, for example, identifying the state with Islam through appellations such as ‘Islam is the state religion’ and ‘the state is based on Islamic principles.’ However, again, Islamists do not want these appellations to be vacuous identity markers. Thus, Islamists also deployed a more comprehensive and public critique of secularism as the ‘other’ of Islam (see Table 11.2 for a summary of key features). Overall, therefore, the suggestion is that prior institutional and discursive transformations of Islam provided the relevant language and framework for Islamists. As explained, the movement for democratisation since late 2003 was in many ways oriented towards Western human rights and liberalism, and was scaled up by transnational Table11.2 Modernist Islam vs. Islamism in the Maldives: key features Modernist Islam

Islamism

Committed to 100% Muslim Nation identity but resigned to de facto secularisation of society and individuals Behaving Relaxed towards religious piety and observance Believing More liberal: e.g., supports gender equality and democracy Enforcement Liberalised and circumscribed sharia and Islam as state identity

Belonging

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Committed to 100% Muslim Nation but deeply critical of de facto secularisation of society and individuals Stricter observance and public piety (worship, dress code, lifestyles) Critical of gender equality and to varying levels more critical towards democracy Comprehensive sharia, including all hudud and qisas punishments, and thus a substantial Islamic state

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advocacy networks. However, the prior transformations of Islam into a modern discursive religion and institutional religion provided the parameters within which the debates in the public sphere and the constituent assembly as well as institutional changes could take place. The 100% Muslim Nation meta-narrative of identity – the most potent way Islam existed as a discursive political religion – in particular, limited the debates and institutional changes. After Gayoom’s regime came under increasing external and domestic pressure for liberalisation, the state vigorously deployed the meta-narrative to discredit the emergent democratisation movement. The opposition leaders were frequently demonised as agents of Christian missionaries, or accused of having links with foreign agents to destabilise the country and destroy Islamic unity by introducing other religions. This construction of ‘ontological insecurity’35 and negative framing of the leaders of the emergent oppositional public sphere by the regime led to an outbidding of each other’s credentials in protecting Islamic identity. The opposition, just beginning to establish itself, saw Gayoom’s allegations damaging their work, and resorted to similar attacks against Gayoom and his regime. They therefore sometimes portrayed Gayoom as a religious fundamentalist, and other times accused the regime as the real threat to the 100% Muslim Nation identity. Oppositional figures also alleged it was Gayoom who wanted to introduce religious freedom and wipe out Islam, as was done in Turkey. At the constituent assembly level, three broad ideological camps existed: a few members who wanted a more liberal Constitution, still fewer who wanted to take it in a more Islamist direction, and finally, the majority of the members (from across major parties), who were influenced by the modernist positions and legacies. Thus, predictably, members frequently resorted to the meta-narrative of 100% Muslim Nation to justify incorporation of ‘Islam’ at various levels, and to discredit one another’s Islamic credentials. The functionalisation of religion to outbid each other’s credentials to protect ‘Islam’ in this manner is what I call the ‘functionalist vicious cycle’. It led to progressive discursive politicisation of Islam, further legitimising the meta-narrative of 100% Muslim Nation. As a consequence, it progressively constricted the discursive space of religious freedom or cognate principles. In fact, religious freedom was not even included in the draft Constitution for debates. When the cognate concept of ‘freedom of conscience’ was proposed, the members accused the chair (who espoused a more liberal position) of an agenda to introduce other religions and voted it down, resorting to the 100% Muslim Nation meta-narrative. The almost unanimous approval by the constituent assembly, without any substantial debate, to explicitly define citizenship by Islamic belonging, was the ultimate demonstration of the constrained space for plural citizenship and religious freedom. Some members directly invoked the meta-narrative to legitimise the unprecedented proposal. Beyond the constraining power of the meta-narrative, most members were influenced by the path-dependent institutional legacies of Islam. These legacies therefore also ensured a place for Islam at other institutional levels in the new democracy. The idea of basing the state on ‘principles of Islam’ and designating Islam as the state religion were legacies from the past and provided the broad identity for the new Constitution. Sharia was established as a main basis of law-making and adjudication of justice, further formalising an existing institutional pattern and practice. The Constitution also formalised in Article 149 (c) the existing institutional idea that the chief justice could be trained in non-Islamic law with no command of Arabic, as the underlying expectation is to have the skills to adjudicate justice based on codified laws or rules in the vernacular. On their part, the new Islamist actors were actively engaged in the public sphere to ensure the position of Islam in the institutional structure and national identity were 135

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protected and realised in more substantive ways in the new polity. Hence, they called for substantive incorporation of Islam in the new Constitution and decried any attempt to include religious freedom. There were also calls for establishing an independent body of religious scholars to provide religious injunctions on the decisions of other state bodies. At the end, however, by the time of democratic transition, actors influenced by the institutional and discursive legacies of modernist nation building constituted the most powerful constituency.36 The institutionalisation of Islam in the new Constitution therefore overall reflected their positions with regard to Islam.

Conclusions Political Islam is best seen constituting a continuum and as an outcome of modernisation, implicating actors from different religious backgrounds. Hence, modern nation building in the Maldives by state actors with Islamic modernist orientations not only left democracy-friendly legacies. It also transformed Islam into a modern institutional political and discursive political religion. These actors believed Islam, when properly interpreted, was compatible with modernity; that Islam constituted a superior foundation for the nation and state, and it could be changed into the modality of modern, liberal political forms. However, instead of weakening Islam in the polity, these attempts at incorporation or functionalisation of Islam in nation building deeply embedded Islam in the political domain, only in new forms. Islamism in the twenty-first century itself was unwittingly nourished by those forms of political Islam, for Islamism found the right language and frameworks already available in the public political domain. Similarly, even though Islamism aggravated challenges to deepening democracy and certain individual rights such as religious freedom, the pre-existing forms of political Islam bequeathed by modern nation building would continue to challenge democratisation in more liberal directions in this Muslim state. Similar institutionalisations of religion through modern nation building that exist in several Muslim majority states37 could therefore also explain Muslim desires for a ‘third-model’ democracy that may limit certain individual rights and rejects political secularism.38 If so, albeit particular religious discourses may exist as resources, the issue for deepening democracy is not Islam per se, but how religion was transformed into specific discursive and institutional political forms through modern nation building.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Professor Samina Yasmeen, the University of Western Australia, for her feedback, and Professor Ahmed Kuru, San Diego University, for his comments to an earlier draft.

Notes 1 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster 1996). 2 Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2010 – Maldives (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2010). 3 Jonathan Fox, Political Secularism, Religion, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4 I. Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-E-Islami (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Salwa Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), and Shahram Akbarzadeh, ‘The Paradox of Political Islam’, in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–8.

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Islam and politics in the Maldives 5 Akbarzadeh, ‘The Paradox of Political Islam’, and John L. Esposito, ‘Islam and Secularism in the Twenty-First Century’, in Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, eds. Azzam Tamimi and John L. Esposito (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2000), 1–12; Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization Negotiating Modernity in Iran, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Will More Countries Become Democratic?’ Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (1984): 264. 7 Esposito, ‘Islam and Secularism in the Twenty-First Century’; John L. Esposito and F. Burgat, Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in the Middle East and Europe (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2003); Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, ‘The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party’, Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 205–228, and Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. 8 Robert W. Hefner, ‘Public Islam and the Problem of Democratization’, Sociology of Religion 62, no. 4 (2001): 499. 9 Asef Bayat, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), and Olivier Roy and Amel Boubekeur, Whatever Happened to the Islamists?: Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims and the Lure of Consumerist Islam (New York: Columbia Universtiy Press, 2012). 10 Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism. 11 Dawood Ahmed and Moamen Gouda, ‘Measuring Constitutional Islamization: The Islamic Constitutions Index’, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 38, no. 1 (2014): 1–76. 12 Ahmed Shahid and Hilary Yerbury, ‘A Case Study of the Socialization of Human Rights Language and Norms in Maldives: Process, Impact and Challenges’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 6, no. 2 (2014): 281–305. On ‘transnational advocacy networks’, see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Transnational Advocacy Networks in International and Regional Politics’, International Social Science Journal 51, no. 159 (2002): 89–101. On external ‘linkages and leverage’, see Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, ‘Linkage Versus Leverage: Rethinking the International Dimension of Regime Change,’ Comparative Politics 38, no. 4 (2006): 379–400. 13 This meant, inter alia, conversion away from Islam is not legally protected. Even though minority religions have not historically existed in the Maldives, there are no reliable data on the actual religious affiliations of the people. The lack of religious freedom more significantly impacts on non-Muslim migrant workers in the Maldives, mainly from neighbouring India and Sri Lanka. They could practice their faith only in private. Public congregations and the building of places of worship are illegal. 14 H.A. Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 15 Muhammad Khalid Masud, ‘Islamic Modernism’, in Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates, eds. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 255; Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Source Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talattof, Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 16 Moaddel and Talattof, Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam: A Reader, 3–4. 17 Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Source Book, 9–10. 18 C.M. Naim, ‘Interrogating “the East,” “Culture,” and “Loss,” in Abdul Halim Shararʾs Guzashta Lakhna’u’, in Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition, eds. Alka Patel and Karen Leonard (Leiden: Brill, 2011), and Johannes Marinus S. Baljon, The Reforms and Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Leiden: Brill Archive, 1958). 19 Mohamed Amin, ‘Male’ Ge Muthaqbalaa Medhu Alhugan’duge Hiyaalu’ [My Dreams for the Future of Male’], in Dhivehi Adheebunge Dhuvasvee Liyunthah, ed. Ali Hussain (Male’: Novelty Printers and Publishers. Pvt Ltd., 2008); Mohamed Amin, Kuriyah Dhivehi Qaum [Onwards Maldives] (Male’: Novelty Printers and Publishers. Pvt Ltd., 2007); Dhivehi Jumhooriyya . . . Maruhabaa! [Maldivian Republic . . . Welcome!] (Male’: Novelty Printers & Publishers. Pvt Ltd., 1953), and Rasheh Kuriaraanee, ‘E Rashehge Anhenunge Eheeyaai Laigen Eve’ [Women’s Participation Is Needed for the Development of an Island], Al S’laah’ 1, no. 5 (1933). 20 Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, ‘Keynote Address at the Opening of the Islamic Seminar of the Flexibility of Islamic Law’, in The Flexibility of Islamic Law (Kuala Lumpur: The President’s Office,

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21

22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

1985); Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, ‘Speech at the Special Convocation at Aligarh University’ (Male’: The President’s Office, 1983); Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, ‘Inaugural Address at the Opening Ceremony of the Seminar on the Call for Islam in South and South East Asia,’ in Seminar on the Call for Islam in South and South East Asia (Male’: The President’s Office, 1983), and Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, ‘Lecture on ‘Islam: A Religion of Peace and Tolerance’ at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies,’ (Male’: The President’s Office, 2007). On discourses as ‘resources’ and ‘constraints’ for institutional changes, see John S. Dryzek and Leslie Templeman Holmes, Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses across Thirteen Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), and Sami Zubaida, ‘Islam and Secularization’. Asian Journal of Social Science 33, no. 3 (2005): 438–448. Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2013), and Rakesh Sharma and Azim Zahir, ‘A Troubled Future for Democracy: Results of the 2015 Maldives Democracy Survey’ (Transparency Maldives, 2015). Sharma and Zahir, ‘A Troubled Future for Democracy’. Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 9. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, ‘50 vana qawmee dhuvahuge munaasabathugai beyvvi rasmiyyaathugai dhekkevi vaahakafulhu’ [speech at the Function to Mark the 50th National Day]. (Male: The President’s Office, 1993). Masud, ‘Islamic Modernism’. Masud, ‘Islamic Modernism’, 248. See also M.T. Ansari, Islam and Nationalism in India: South Indian Contexts (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2015). Jocelyne Cesari, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Nikki R. Keddie, ‘Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism’, Journal of Modern History 41, no. 1 (1969): 17–28; Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (New York: Routledge, 2002), and James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Starrett, Putting Islam to Work. Lily Zubaidah Rahim, ‘Introduction: The Spirit of Wasatiyyah Democracy’, in Muslim Secular Democracy Voices from Within, ed. Lily Zubaidah Rahim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–27. Samina Yasmeen, ‘Islam, Identity and Discourses in Pakistan,’ in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012), 167–178. Starrett, Putting Islam to Work. Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, 219. Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security’, Political Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 741–767. In 2012, the first democratically elected President, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced to resign after sections of the security services joined opposition groups, including Islamists, calling for his resignation. Key accusations against him included his alleged anti-Islamic policies. Following a period of political turmoil, new elections in 2018 that saw Nasheed’s party come to power again, have paved the way for the consolidation of electoral democracy. Robert W. Hefner, ‘Introduction: Shari’a Politics – Law and Society in the Modern Muslim World’, in Shari’a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 14, and Cesari, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy. John L. Esposito and D. Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007).

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12 POLITICAL ISLAM IN CENTRAL ASIA From religious revival to securitization Hélène Thibault

Introduction In the 1970s and 1980s, authors like Rywkin1 and Carrère d’Encausse2 predicted that the USSR’s Muslim republics would be responsible for the fall of the Union because of their demographic weight and political pretensions. However, the strongest mobilization for independence took place in the “European” corners of the USSR: the Baltic states. The Central Asian republics, which consist of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, were actually the last to declare independence in the last quarter of 1991. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, many observers predicted that Central Asia would become a “hotbed of Islamic radicalization.” In The Problem of Soviet Muslims, perpetual alarmist Daniel Pipes, wrote in 1991: If past experience is anything to go by, the decolonization of Central Asian and Caucasian will create a host of new problems . . . Fundamentalist Muslims could benefit from the backlash against decades of intense Westernization, leading to alliance with the Iranian government.3 This is a discourse that was also present in academic literature in which scholars expected Islamic radicals to challenge the newly established governments.4 Nearly three decades later, it is clear that those predictions were misleading. If there was indeed an increase in religious activity and piety, very few radical factions emerged and radicalization has been fairly limited. If cooperation with Muslim countries was instated in the early 1990s, it did not result in strong links and Iran remains a minor actor in the region, even for Tajikistan, the only Persian-speaking country in Central Asia. However, recent attacks perpetrated by Central Asian nationals involved with ISIS in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have put the region into the spotlight again. If we understand political Islam as: “a modern phenomenon that seeks to use religion to shape the political system,” 5 then we can argue that political Islam in Central Asia is a relatively marginal phenomenon since very few parties and groups have actively engaged in formal politics. The sole Islamic political party that ever constituted a proper legal organization with a program and membership was the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT). The party, which was leading the United Tajik Opposition during the civil war (1992–97) and was a stakeholder in the peace agreement, was legally operating and participating in elections until it was banned 139

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and put on the list of extremist organizations in 2015. Other clandestine parties such as the Hizb ut-Tahrir were also influential but their scope of action remained limited because of the heavy repression to which they were submitted. However, if we think that political Islam is “best understood as a dynamic social phenomenon – not a static ideology,”6 it provides us with a lot of avenues to explore the manifestations of political Islam in Central Asia. This complex phenomenon is at the crossroads of identity, religion, politics and modernity. The current dynamics have to be understood, on the one hand, in light of the legacy of Soviet atheism and persistence of authoritarian rule, and on the other hand, to the globalization of jihad. Even if they share similarities, the political trajectories of Central Asian countries differ. In this chapter, I will address dynamics of the post-Soviet “Stans” but will pay attention especially to Tajikistan as one of the countries that experienced political Islam through the participation of a formal Islamic political party. This chapter will neglect Turkmenistan, the most authoritarian and insular country in the region where scholars can hardly conduct any research and there are simply not enough data to formulate solid conclusions. The chapter is divided in three sections. The first one will briefly recollect the history of political Islam in the region in Tsarist and Soviet times, before turning to the post-Soviet period religious mobilization. The final section will address the increasing securitization of Islam in the region. My main argument is that political Islam in Central Asia is best characterized as a moderate religious revival and political mobilization that has been increasingly securitized due to tightening authoritarianism and the globalization of jihad.

Political Islam in a historical perspective The Islamization of Central Asia started at the end of the seventh century with the Arab conquest. Despite the military character of the Arab expansion, conversions were not necessarily forced and on the contrary, came with some advantages that locals were interested in, such as tax exemption and access to circles of power. In the ninth century, the region experienced a real cultural boom with the development of science and literature. Scholars such as al-Khorezmi, who is credited for the invention of algebra, and Avicenna, known for writing an innovative treaty on medicine, contributed to expand the intellectual, religious and scientific influence of the cities of Bukhara, Khiva and Samarkand. The progressive Islamization of the Golden Horde beginning in the eleventh century gave an impulse to the implementation of Islam but it is only in the fourteenth century that Islam became the official religion of the khans’ court. Muslim clerics played an important role in the affairs of the successive political entities that ruled Central Asia. In that sense, Islam was an integral part of the political life and sharia was the source of law. Sharia courts continued to operate even under Russian colonization in the late eighteenth century.7 Islamic practice was characterized by the reminiscence of ancient rituals and traditions such as the worship of ancestors and saints as well as by the presence of Sufi orders.8 In Tsarist Russia, Sufism was often identified as the main anti-colonial force and a threat to the authorities.9 As an example of that, the 1916 revolt of the Basmachi occurred after an imperial decree that non-Russians were to serve in the Russian Army during the First World War.10 Despite its failure, the revolt revealed the possibility of resisting the colonizers by rallying around a religious identity. In the later years of the Russian Empire, a Muslim reformist movement emerged in Tatarstan and Central Asia. Jadidists, whose name derived from the Arabic word jadid (new), were driven by the idea that Muslims should emancipate themselves through education and participation in modern life, while reinforcing their Muslim identity. The Jadidist movement was critical in the transformation of Central Asian culture in the first decade of the 140

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twentieth century.11 Yet, their actions did not result in major political transformations, as they were later sidelined after the Soviet victory in Central Asia. Soviet domination dramatically changed the structure of the society with its attempt to eliminate religious influence altogether. Aggressive atheist policies were adopted from the very beginning of Soviet rule in Central Asia. However, because of local resistance, there had been a lot of back and forth between repression and accommodation before Stalin’s brutal rule persecuted and eliminated religious personnel.12 The influence of the clergy was greatly undermined in Soviet times, but religion was not forbidden and people continued to practice and study Islam, either clandestinely or in state-sanctioned premises, or both. Some underground groups were relatively influential. In particular, Tajik scholar Mawlawi Hindustani taught several generations of scholars in his clandestine school in Dushanbe.13 Whereas Central Asia had once been an influential center for culture and religion, it found itself relatively isolated during Soviet times but it did not stop the flourishing of a political Islamic thought. Dudoignon and Noack14 insist on the importance of the rural world in shaping Islamic political thought in the USSR’s Muslim regions. In particular, they show how an “underground” economy, located outside the planned economy, allowed some individuals to develop small businesses and a new class of rural entrepreneurs to emerge. In Tajikistan, this led to the formation of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan in the late 1970s. They also emphasize how forced migration from the mountains to the plains forced the meeting of different regional communities which reconfigured around a religious identity. Starting from 1943, religious life was also regulated by the Spiritual Muslim Board of Central Asia (SADUM),15 a sort of Soviet official clergy. Based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, SADUM had branches in all the Central Asian republics and were responsible for appointing imams, controlling religious literature and emit religious edicts (fatwas).16 Islam was mostly practiced privately but studies have also shown that there were plenty of connections between official and non-official Islam.17 The Soviet period was therefore not characterized by the absence of religious activity but by strict control of religious practices and discourses. The presence of an official clergy changed nothing regarding the fact that religion was strongly discouraged and secularization campaigns as well as propaganda efforts vilified faith, which according to Marxist rhetoric, led to greed and oppression. The most prominent Soviet-era scholars generally agreed on the idea that the Soviet state failed to transform Muslims into Homo Sovieticus and remained instead Homo Islamicus.18 For French historian Bennigsen and Soviet ethnographer Poliakov,19 Muslims of the USSR lacked allegiance to the state. Instead, they were loyal first to their tribe, then their republic, and then to the ummah or the community of Muslim believers. This failure also bore a threatening character. In 1983, Bennigsen published a book with the unequivocal title The Islamic Threat to the Soviet Union.20 In particular, he saw the Sufi brotherhoods as the most ardent opponents to Soviet rule and a threat to the authorities. On the contrary, Knysh argues that the association with Sufi brotherhoods was marginal in terms of the number of practitioners. Sufism mostly manifested itself in the faith and reliance in spiritual guides who gave advice and helped resolve disputes.21 The post-Soviet academic community later questioned the common conclusion that the Soviets had failed at transforming Muslim communities. Deweese even suggests that the “Soviets definitely succeeded all too well.”22 Indeed, Central Asian state and government institutions remain aggressively secular, whereas significant majorities believe in the separation of religion from state. Findings from research published by the Pew Research Center in 2013 reveal that Central Asian societies are not supportive of the interference of religion in politics (see Table 12.1). 141

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Table 12.1 How much political influence should religious leaders have?23

Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Uzbekistan

Major influence

Some influence

3% 10% 8% NA

21% 36% 20% NA

Overall, in Central Asia, only 28 per cent of people are in favor with the idea that religious leaders should have some political influence, which is a big contrast with South East Asia where 79 per cent of people agreed with that idea (see Table 12.2).24 During the first years of independence, Soviet-style atheism was delegitimized and the liberalization of the political field enabled new ideologies and religion to gain prominence and compete. Islam became the focus of discussions and did influence nation-building efforts but not to the extent predicted by some observers. If a few radical groups emerged, their actions were short-lived. Instead, nation-building efforts in Central Asia concentrated on the reinforcement of the secular character of the new republics.

Post-Soviet religious mobilization As mentioned in the introduction, observers’ predictions were often alarmist, and Islamic radicals did not gain excessive prominence after independence. Yet, political actors claiming an Islamic identity were definitely influential. Here, I use the word “Islamic” to designate an actor or organization that “consciously organizes his thought within the conceptual framework of Islam.”26 In the early 1990s, the strongest Islamic political mobilization took place in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The Uzbek portion of the Ferghana Valley, a region marked by great piety27 was the theater of a strong mobilization that would eventually turn deadly. The first years of independence were marked by chaos and a lawless situation and in the city of Namangan, self-defense groups formed to protect small business owners from racketeering gangs. One of these groups was Adolat, which means “justice” in Uzbek. Adolat’s mandate expanded to the promotion and implementation of sharia in the city and they established morality patrols to monitor people’s behavior.28 On December 19, 1991, militants occupied the mayor’s office during the visit of President Islam Karimov. On the stage, one of the leaders Tohir Yuldash, grabbed the microphone from Karimov’s hand and called for the dissolution of Parliament and the establishment of an Islamic state. But Yuldash neglected to address the economic proposals that some of the locals wanted to convey to the leadership. After that humiliating incident, the Uzbek authorities cracked down on the movement and they eventually left Uzbekistan. If the Table 12.2 Percentage of Muslims who favor making sharia the official law in their country25 Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Uzbekistan

10% 35% 27% NA

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IMU is usually seen as a militant group lacking profound ideological motives,29 Babajanov claims that ideological clashes led to the radicalization of the group in the early 1990s. For him, tensions with local conservative scholars and the general population who opposed Adolat’s radical ideas and modus operandi led to the group’s isolation, even before the state started cracking down on its members. Their forced exile (hijra) and designation of Uzbekistan as a territory of war became central to their “ideology of exiles’ isolation,” as Babajanov describes it.30 Neighboring Tajikistan, which was at the midst of a civil war, provided a “haven” for those radicals looking for a cause and they got involved alongside the United Tajik Opposition before migrating to Afghanistan where they enjoyed the support of the Taliban.31 During those years, Adolat morphed into the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Dedicated to the overthrow of President Karimov and the establishment of an Islamic state in Uzbekistan, the group is considered responsible for several armed incursions into the Ferghana Valley in the mid-1990s as well as orchestrating the 1999 and 2004 bombings in Tashkent.32 The Western intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 undermined the group which moved further east to Pakistan. They pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 201533 and continue to be active in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the further away they moved from Uzbekistan, the more they focused on international jihad and neglected Central Asia. A second significant Islamic political group in Central Asia is the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT). It is the only Islamic party in the whole of Central Asia that has been actively and legally participating in formal politics. The 2012 edition of this volume also mentioned the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan’s (IRPT) political participation, and did not foresee its subsequent demise in 2015. This movement emerged from the kolkhozes (collective farms) in the 1970s, and became an influential political party at independence. Dudoignon argues that at its creation, the Party could be compared to the Muslim Brotherhood model but that it moderated its approach after it started cooperating with different actors, including the leader of the official Muslim authority, the Qazi, Hoji Akhbar Turajonzoda, as well as other newly created political parties.34 Muhiddin Kabiri, the IRPT’s chairman (who has been in exile since 2015), argued that the IRPT once looked favorably upon the establishment of a theocratic society in Tajikistan, but that their real objective was to form “a human, judicial and democratic society,” since the party was operating within the limits of the Tajik Constitution and it respected the secular nature of the state.35 During the first presidential election in November 1991, the IRPT, led by its first Chairman Said Abdullah Nuri, formed a coalition with Rastokhez, a nationalist movement of intellectuals, and the Democratic Party of Tajikistan. The so-called “Islamo-democrat coalition” supported the candidate Davlat Khudonazarov, a Pamiri36 filmmaker who secured 30 percent of the vote in the country’s most competitive election. Rahmon Nabiyev, chairman of the Supreme Council, received 57 per cent of the vote.37 Nabiyev was, like most presidents of the Tajik SSR before him, from Leninabad (now called Khujand). The elections were followed by a wave of repression and financial scandals which prompted opposition forces to mobilize. Confrontations escalated into a civil war in May 1992. Even if most of the violence had ceased in 1993, a real peace agreement was not reached until 1997. This war claimed between 60,000 and 100,000 victims, displaced 600,000 people, and had a terrible human and economic cost. Because the IRPT was leading the opposition forces, the civil war is often perceived as a conflict between opposing secular and Islamist forces. Yet, the war was truly a regional one.38 The peace agreements entailed the integration of the opposition former combatants and leaders in the executive and security forces up to 30 per cent. However, this was never fully implemented and by 2003, of the 53 high-ranking functionaries drawn from the opposition, 143

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only 12 still held office.39 After the war, the IRPT restructured itself, as well as implementing the peace agreement and participating in elections. In 2011, the party had around 35,000 members, among whom 50 per cent were women. Between 2000 and 2015, the IRPT’s presence in the lower house of Parliament, the Majlisi Namoyandagon was limited to two seats. Their electoral popularity was modest but party representatives claimed that their support was much higher than the official results showed. The IPRT won 7.7 percent of the vote during the 2010 parliamentary elections but it claimed to have actually won at least 30 percent of the vote. In 2010, a local IRPT representative from the city of Kistakuz (in north Tajikistan) mentioned to me that: “Overall, they gave us 7 to 8 per cent but in reality, we obtained 30 to 40 per cent.” He also claimed, although he could not be certain, that in the Rasht Valley region, the IRPT may have received up to 90 per cent of the vote.40 The IPRT’s program was as moderate as ever. During my own fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan in 2010 and 2011, the issues raised publicly by the party were indeed popular: corruption, suicide rates among girls, the state of the economy, etc. At the same time, they had a clear mandate to promote Islam and organized Qur’anic and Arabic lessons for men and women, and provided women with a place of worship in their headquarters in Dushanbe and Khujand, since women in Tajikistan are not allowed to attend religious services in mosques.41 In the 2013 presidential elections, which marked President Emomali Rahmon’s re-election for a third term, the IRPT supported long-term female social activist Oinikhol Bobonazarova. However, she was prevented from participating because her organizing party failed to collect the necessary 210,000 signatures required to run for presidency, falling short by 8,000 signatories.42 But the party was careful not to provoke the government. In Kabiri’s own words: “If we happen to criticize the government, then we do only softly and on minor issues.”43 Despite this compromising attitude, the party was put under a lot of pressure over the years and was ultimately eliminated in 2015. During the 2015 parliamentary election, the party garnered a mere 1.5 percent of votes44 and after a wave of intimidation, national membership decreased dramatically and the party was deprived of its license due to alleged insufficient membership. Kabiri went into exile in June 2015. A month later on September 29, 2015, the Supreme Court declared the IRPT a terrorist organization in connection with the rebellion fomented by former United Tajik Opposition (UTO) commander and defense minister Nazarzoda. In total, 16 leading party members were given very long prison sentences on charges of extremism in 2016. As of June 2019, it was estimated that about two hundred members and affiliates of the IRPT were serving jail sentences.45 In May 22, 2016, an umpteenth constitutional referendum validated the prohibition of faith-based parties and marked the end of an era.46 Tajikistan used to be the only Central Asian country where a religious political party was able to operate legally. But despite its compromising stance, the IRPT could not withstand the strengthening of authoritarian rule in Tajikistan. Ironically, the party’s compromising attitude also contributed to the perception that it had been co-opted by the authorities and thus was criticized by other religious organizations as well. Indeed, Kabiri himself argued that because the IRPT was focusing on electoral politics, the ideological field was opened and this allowed other Islamic groups, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jama‘at Tablighi, to step in.47 For both ideological and opportunist reasons, the IRPT opposed the Jama‘at Tablighi, which it considered to be an alien movement promoting foreign Islamic values. However, not everyone in Tajikistan shared the same vision, and renowned Muslim scholar, Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda, who was once a member of the IRPT and of the United Tajik Opposition during the war, asked the party to defend Jama‘at Tablighi and lobby for its removal from the list of terrorist organizations, arguing that it is a peaceful and non-political movement.48 This 144

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episode exemplifies the diversity of religious orientations as well as the pervasiveness of the foreign vs. local distinction. Interestingly, the IRPT adopts a rhetoric similar to the authorities’ by making a distinction between foreign and local Islam. Hizb ut-Tahrir, to which an entire chapter is dedicated in this volume, has gained popularity in Central Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was the object of multiple discussions and publications.49 Created in East Jerusalem in 1953, Hizb ut-Tahrir is an ultra-conservative fundamentalist political party that aims at reuniting Muslims under a Caliphate. Even though they advocate non-violent methods, they are considered an extremist organization and banned in many countries since they don’t recognize the authority of states, promote anti-Semitism and don’t respect basic human rights such as the freedom to choose a religion.50 Their discourses also have a strong anti-Western, anti-capitalist rhetoric and put an emphasis on equality and justice. In Central Asia, they mostly focus on the economic and religious injustices suffered by Muslims under the secular (kafir) regimes of Central Asian dictators. Because the party was banned early in the 2000s, thousands of its alleged members have been jailed over the last twenty years in Central Asia. In the mid-2000s, Emmanuel Karagiannis estimated the number of Hizb utTahrir members in Tajikistan at 2,500–3,000, between 2,000 and 3,000 in Kyrgyzstan,51 and in Kazakhstan, up to 1,000 members and many more sympathizers,mostly in southern regions.52 Hizb ut-Tahrir has been able to expand and recruit new members in Central Asia’s poorest and weakest states, such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and in the poorest regions of Kazakhstan. Poverty is not necessarily the issue here, but poor economic indicators are signs of weak state capacities and the absence of good infrastructure and services, which can exacerbate grievances. Despite its success, Hizb ut-Tahrir’s message in Central Asia provoked backlashes since they are critical of local forms of Islam; for instance, they condemn the worshipping of local saints and mullahs who accept payments for Qur’an recitation and the performance of certain rites.53 Hizb ut-Tahrir’s presence in Central Asia was underlined in the 2012 edition of this book but its influence in Central Asia seems to have become less significant these days. It has not been the object of recent informed publications with the exception of occasional news reports which mention the arrest and prosecution of its members. However, in 2018, a representative of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB in Russian) claimed that Hizb ut-Tahrir was the region’s most dangerous terrorist organization.54 This was a rather surprising conclusion since there is little evidence that the party has gained more adepts recently. Also, the party itself advocates peaceful methods and it has not been found guilty of perpetrating terrorist attacks, as opposed to ISIS. Another foreign fundamentalist, yet peaceful, movement has also taken root in Central Asia in the 2000s. Jama‘at Tablighi is a religious conservative movement founded in India in the 1920s which primary purpose is dawa or proselytization. Believers have the obligation to travel and spread the message of Islam, a journey that they finance themselves.55 They are currently banned in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan but not in Kyrgyzstan. As of January 2019, 73 Kazakhstanis had been convicted and punished for alleged Jama‘at Tabligh membership since 2015.56 Their dawa is not political and focuses on Islamic education and lessons about good and evil.57 Jama‘at Tablighi does not necessarily reject the local religious culture and despite being a transnational movement, it adapts its concepts and views to the local context, though they also challenge local practices. In Kyrgyzstan for instance, women’s traditional religious roles were connected to the visit of mazars (tombs of saints) and healing practices, but such practices are condemned by Jama‘at Tablighi’s purist approach. In this sense, the group creates a new role for women as it encourages them to engage in religious education with other women.58 145

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Even though Jama‘at Tablighi and Hizb ut-Tahrir continue to be of concern for Central Asian governments, ISIS has replaced them as the main radical threat in the region. At the occasion of the 2018 Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, Sergei Smirnov, the director of the Russian Security Service, evaluated the number of ISIS fighters from Central Asia to 8,000,59 citing statistics from the Tajik special forces. If we compare these numbers with other majority Muslim and non-Muslim majority countries, the “contribution” of Central Asia to ISIS is negligible. The proportion of ISIS fighters coming from Jordan was of 315 per million inhabitants, 46 for Belgium as opposed to five for Kyrgyzstan and 24 for Tajikistan. So far, ISIS’s presence in the Central Asian republics has been limited, with few, though deadly, attacks, mostly in Tajikistan. In the summer of 2018, Tajik jihadists who claimed allegiance to ISIS killed four Western tourists on a cycling trip and in November 2019, an attack against a Tajik border post left at least ten people dead.60 While very few attacks have been conducted by ISIS within Central Asia, there is no doubt that many Central Asian nationals joined ISIS since its rise in the early 2010s. The defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is of extreme significance for the Central Asian region since the Islamic State has been able to export itself in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan since January 2015, when it announced the establishment of the Islamic State in Khorasan.61 In 2015, Colonel Gulmorod Halimov who was the head of the Tajik Special Forces disappeared in Tajikistan and reappeared few weeks later in a video, announcing that he had defected to ISIS. This was a serious blow for the Tajik government which also feared a severe security breach. According to UN and Russian estimates, 3,500–4,000 militants are fighting with the Islamic State in Khorasan, with approximately 750 of them coming from Central Asia.62 Central Asian authorities fear the return of militants who could influence and mobilize individuals vulnerable to radical ideas. However, it is likely that these will seek refuge somewhere else, since they fear being prosecuted upon return in their home country. Since the beginning of the operation called “Zhusan” in early 2019, a total of 524 Kazakhstani citizens, including 30 men, 137 women, 357 minors, including 27 orphans, were removed from Syria in three phases. Women and children are being rehabilitated through state programs which include psychological counselling, religious lessons and professional training.63 Militant groups such as ISIS challenge the local understandings of religion and political engagement. Even though these groups have attracted most attention from scholars, radical and militant groups have minimal social resonance in Central Asia, since a great majority of Central Asian Muslims see Islam as part of their national identity more than the foundation of political action.64 A number of scholarly works have demonstrated that a great majority of Central Asian Muslims seek guidance and justice, relying on local imams or self-education, reading books translated into local languages to deepen their religious knowledge.65 Islamic militancy has little appeal within Central Asia’s fairly secular societies and the increase of religious practice does not necessarily morph into the development of an Islamic political project, even if some of the practices are very conservative. Yet, the states’ and societies’ responses to the presence of militant and proselytizing groups has been an increasing securitization of religious practice.

Central Asian states as producers of religious norms The regulation of Islam66 has both a normative and security character. On the one hand, states impose diverse rules regarding the practice of Islam, forbidding certain customs and religious attributes considered destructive, while enabling others which are deemed to 146

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conform to national traditions. In that sense, state apparatuses are also producers of religious norms that support the regime and aim at producing secular subjects. The Soviet legacy of the regulation of religion certainly explains the Central Asian states’ preoccupation with the control of religious communities and practices. However, ISIS’s appearance in Central Asia, as well as the alignment of Central Asian security practices with international ones,67 make the Soviet model a bit less relevant to understand current securitization practices and discourses. Securitization is defined as a process by which discourses put in place practices identifying threats not in relation to their actual dangerous nature, but rather simply by identifying them as such.68 In the context of Central Asia, the Salafi has become the “other” – the foreign, the radical and the undesirable – who corrupts the traditionally moderate Central Asian societies and threatens their stability. The securitization of Islam is not limited to discursive practices. It is accompanied by policies and discourses that emphasize the correct way to practice Islam. Here, Foucault’s concept of biopower becomes relevant. In our study of counter-extremism in Tajikistan, Lemon and I have argued that countering extremism involves “repressing ‘bad’ forms of life, and promoting ‘good’, loyal forms of life that support the regime,”69 and in particular, to produce secular subjects. In Central Asia, elites insist on the traditional character of Islam whereas Salafism (also referred locally to as Wahhabism) is associated with violent radicalism.70 Institutions of regulation such as official Muftiates, the Directorates of religious affairs as well as laws on freedom of conscience in all the Central Asian republics were inherited from the USSR, though the Communist content has been removed. Religious communities have the obligation to register and the rules regarding registration have been tightened over time. The Muftiates oversee religious education and the importation of religious literature, as well as exerting control over the Friday sermons.71 The Central Asian Muslim clergies’ teachings and positions mostly reflect the state’s positions and are overall supportive of the legislation adopted, even when it infringes on the rights of believers. For instance, the Tajikistani and Kazakhstani Muftiates were supportive of the hijab ban in schools, arguing that the hijab is foreign to national culture and represents an Arab tradition.72 Muftiates still retain a degree of autonomy and Islamic authorities may criticize the government’s policies or actions on certain issues.73 Some of their positions are surprisingly conservative, and even contradict national laws. For instance, in 2014, the newly elected Mufti of Kyrgyzstan released a fatwa calling for the murders of gays, though later retracted;74 the Council of Ulemas75 in Tajikistan approves of female genital mutilation,76 and the Muftiate in Kazakhstan distributes free books in mosques that promote polygyny. These positions might as well be a reflection of the social conservatism that remains pervasive in the region. Religious education is relatively limited, except perhaps in Kyrgyzstan where there are currently 102 operating madrassas teaching 6,000 pupils. In contrast, Tajikistan, a country with a similar population, had 11 madrassas in 2003 but forced the closing of the last one ten years later in 2013.77 In Kazakhstan, religious education is not part of the school curriculum and is dispensed in 16 madrassas, and one Islamic university in Almaty. In Uzbekistan, a country of 30 million inhabitants, about a thousand students are studying in nine madrassas.78 In addition to the control they exert over the curriculum of these institutions, Central Asian authorities, with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, have restricted access to religious foreign education.79 Since 1999, the Turkish movement Hizmet, led by Fetullah Gülen, opened almost 80 boarding schools in all Central Asian republics.80 These schools are highly regarded in Central Asia and known to provide a very good quality education.81 While these schools are opened to students of all confessions and the 147

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curriculum is secular, outside the classroom, tutors and professors promote an Islamic lifestyle and encourage pious behavior. For that reason, some of the schools were shut down in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, even before Gülen fell into disgrace in Turkey for his alleged implication in a coup in 2016.82 The varied counter-extremism measures adopted by Central Asian states are accompanied by a redefinition of the nature of threat and the insistence on foreign influence. But defining what is non-traditional presents a number of challenges. Indeed, who possesses the authority to determine what is acceptable or not? In the past, Sufism and then Wahhabism were considered hostile to Russian imperial, and then Soviet, authorities. Today, Salafism embodies the new threat to the secular order. Because of the diffuse aspect of Salafism, which is more a way of life than a political project, it is difficult to detect it and even more problematic to prosecute people because of their beliefs. This nuance is sometimes acknowledged by politicians. In 2016, Nurlan Ermekbayev, the former minister of religious affairs of Kazakhstan said the following about Salafism: Salafism is not an organization, it is a religious movement, a belief system. In some countries based on Sharia, religious movements close to Salafism exist as traditional movements. For what concerns us, contemporary national theologians agree that Salafism has a destructive potential in Kazakhstan.83 Contrary to other Central Asian countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Salafism is not officially banned in Kazakhstan and the state discourses tend to refer to a mixture of Salafism and “non-traditional” or “destructive” religious movements to designate undesirable trends. Yet, the term “Salafism” definitely acquired a significant importance following the Aktobe and Almaty attacks. Recent research monitoring the content of popular online publications in both the Russian and Kazakh languages showed that there was a sharp increase in the number of articles addressing the issue of Salafism, emphasizing both its threatening and foreign character. In 2015, only ten publications dealt with the issue of Salafism, whereas this number jumped to 147 in 2016.84 The overall message is highly negative and identifies Salafism as a threat to national security as well as insisting that Salafis are morally bad people and that Salafism is foreign to Kazakh culture. Similarly, Heathershaw and Montgomery found that 24 percent of Kyrgyzstani articles about Islam in the Central Asian press discussed foreign influences over national Islam, a relation that they see as insignificant. The government’s insistence on promoting a national form of Islam concerns not only teachings and discourses, but extends to religious clothing and styles which are considered alien to national traditions, notably, the hijab for women and short trousers and beards for men. In January 2018, Nurlan Ermekbayev declared: “Among the external attributes of destructive religious movements, we could include elements that are characteristic of radical movements in Islam. For instance, to preach intolerance, wear clothes which cover the face, some types of beards and short trousers.”85 In Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the hijab has been banned in schools. The trend of minors wearing hijab was seen as an Islamic foreign influence which threatened national traditions. In particular, the decision to forbid girls to wear hijab in school in Kazakhstan has created a lot of resentment. Some parents and children even defied the Ministry of Education’s decision, but ended up being fined.86 In Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, political figures have not hesitated to openly criticize and ridicule the hijab. In 2007, the Tajikistani Minister of Education Abdudjabbor Rakhmonov compared women who wear the hijab to monkeys.87 If women are accused of propagating extremist ideas if they wear 148

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a hijab, they are also criticized for wearing in European “sexy” clothes that betray national values. In Tajikistan, a 2007 decree compelled young women to dress “in accordance with their status and national traditions,” and avoid clothes that are “provocative,” for instance, tight jeans and miniskirts.88 In 2018, the Tajik Ministry of Culture published an official dress code for women in order to provide guidelines to girls and women on how to dress according to national traditions. Though not compulsory, the dress code puts pressure on women to act in conformity with national values, and is supported by Tajikistan’s president’s remarks that “there is no greater sin than the betrayal of parents and of the Motherland.”89 Other Central Asian countries like Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan had similar incidents regarding the tension around women’s dress and renewed interest in national traditions. In 2016, there was a brief “war of billboards” in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. The first poster showed two groups of women, one dressed in traditional Kyrgyz dresses worn with a round hat and the other, a group of women wearing niqabs which covered the entire face but their eyes. The billboard declared: “My poor people. Where are we headed?!” Not long after, a similar poster appeared and included the same question, but compared women in traditional dress versus women in shorts and t-shirts, warning about the dangers of Western influence.90 In Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the pressure on men and women who wear religious styles have reached unprecedented levels. Local police have even forcibly shaved thousands of men whose beards were considered too long and a sign of Islamic radicalization.

Conclusion Many Muslim-majority countries have witnessed the development of contemporary Islamist parties such as the Party of Justice in Turkey, Ennahda in Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, etc. Their participation in the formal party politics of their respective countries has been irregular and difficult and was only made possible in periods of political openings. In Central Asia, no formal Islamist party has been able to emerge due to the robustness of local authoritarian regimes and the strength of the Soviet secular legacy. The Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan was the only party to formally engage in politics between 1997 and 2015. Yet, its large membership did not lead to electoral success. Eventually, tightening authoritarian rule led to its demise. With the exception of Kyrgyzstan, none of the Central Asian countries had a transition to a democratic leadership. Leadership change either occurred because the president died, as in Turkmenistan in 2006 and Uzbekistan in 2016, or a successor was determined, as in Kazakhstan in 2019. All opposition forces have been suppressed and/or exiled and the president’s party usually dominates all political institutions. Again with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, all Central Asian countries have some of the world’s lowest scores for freedom of the press.91 There is little space to express independent opinion or even to mobilize social forces for collective action.92 In that context, the expression of religious beliefs that diverge from the official norms becomes a threat to the regime’s stability. As demonstrated, religious repression is often accompanied by state efforts to promote national traditions and national Islam. Because of the proximity of state authorities and their respective religious institutions (the Muftiates), the former have gone beyond the model of assertive secularism, which implies an active promotion of secular values, and they have themselves become producers of religious norms. Yet, the control of religion in Central Asia should not be understood simply as an ideological atavism inherited from the Soviet past, but also as a manifestation of secular authoritarianism in general. When Colonel Gulmorod Halimov, Tajikistan’s former head of special police forces, defected to ISIS in 2015, he specifically mentioned in his video that his defection was a protest against Emomali Rahmon’s oppressive religious policies. Central 149

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Asia fits the argument made by Olivier Roy’s recent argument about the “Islamization of radicalism” instead of the “radicalization of Islam.”93 The appeal of foreign movements is connected to disenfranchisement and feelings of deprivation experienced domestically, but paradoxically, the fight is not carried out at home but through foreign groups waging conflicts that have little to do with local realities. There is evidence that ISIS has a growing presence in the region but it appears to be limited to Afghanistan where state weakness, poverty and rivalries within different insurgent factions favor the implementation of foreign groups,94 whereas its presence in Central Asia is minimal, nearly non-existent. Their mitigated success is due to the little appeal that their radical message has within the largely secular communities of Central Asia. Central Asian countries are also characterized by very high levels of corruption, both petty and grand,95 which is one of the main concerns of Central Asian societies96 and can lead to the formulation of grievances and feelings of injustice. It is difficult to find a simple factor that would explain religious revival and people’s attraction to purer forms of Islam in Central Asia but the quest for justice appears determinant. The countries that are experiencing the strongest influence of Islam in Central Asia are Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and they are also the poorest. If poverty does not necessarily foster radicalization, feelings of deprivation and injustice certainly can, especially for populations which enjoyed extended social services in the past. That might explain the popularity of parties such as Hizb ut-Tahrir whose message specifically denounces corrupt kafir governments and emphasizes justice for Muslims. Again it seems relevant here to refer to Roy’s book The Failure of Political Islam, in which he argues that we have witnessed the collapse of Islamism as a political ideology but not the political failure of Islamists, and that neofundamentalism, understood as the promotion of pure religious norms, has become more influential.97 Indeed, in the absence of a political level playing field, Islamism cannot emerge as a potent force. Yet, poverty, corruption, feelings of injustice, and the indiscriminate repression of believers explain people’s attraction to movements that provide clear guidelines and inspiration to enforce integrity and fairness in their own communities.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Michael Rywkin, Moscow’s Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1982). H.C. d’Encausse, L’empire Éclaté. La Révolte Des Nations En U.R.S.S (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). Daniel Pipes, “The Problem of Soviet Muslims,” Asian Outlook (1991). See, for example, International Crisis Group. 2011. “Tajikistan: The Changing Insurgent Threats,” ICG Asia Report, no. 205 (2011), available at http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/ media-releases/2011/asia/tajikistan-thechanging-insurgent-threats.aspx; Alexei Malashenko, “Islam and Politics in Central Asian States,” in Political Islam and Conflicts in Eurasia, eds. Lena Jonson and Murad Esenov (Stockholm: CACC Press, 1999); Petra Steinberger, “‘Fundamentalism’ in Central Asia: Reasons, Reality and Prospects,” in Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, ed. Tom Everett-Heath (London and New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 219–243; Laurent Vinatier, L’Islamisme en Asie centrale, Géopolitique et implantation des réseaux religieux radicaux dans les républiques d’Asie centrale (Paris: A. Colin, 2002), and Vitaly Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012), 2. Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam,” 7. S.Frederick Starr, Ferghana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia, ed. S.F. Starr (New York: Routledge, 2011). Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tÿkles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

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Political Islam in Central Asia 9 Alexander Knysh, “Sufism as an Explanatory Paradigm: The Issue of the Motivations of Sufi Resistance Movements in Western and Russian Scholarship,” Die Welt des Islams 42, no. 2 (2002): 139–173. 10 Until then, Central Asian subjects had been exempted from such duty, and the decree unleashed a wave of violent protests that were severely repressed by Russian authorities. Also central to the understanding of the revolt is the fact that the order implied fighting against Turkish Muslim “brothers” who were allied with the Germans: Marco Buttino, “Ethnicité Et Politique Dans La Guerre Civile: À Propos Du Basmacestvo Au Fergana,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, no. 1–2 (1997). 11 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (California: University of California Press, 1999). 12 Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (London: Praeger, 2001). 13 Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Sayyid Ahmad Qalandar. 14 Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack, Allah’s Kolkhozes: Migration, De-Stalinisation, Privatisation, and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s–2000s) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014). 15 The acronym comes from Russian: Srednoe Aziatskoe Dukhovnoe Upravlenie Musulman. 16 Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “Среднеазиатское Духовное Управлене Мусульман (Spiritual Muslim Board of Central Asia),” in Многомерне Границы Центральнойи Азии (The Multidimensional Frontiers of Central Asia), ed. Martha and Alexei Malashenko Brill Olcott (Gendalf, 2000). 17 Eren Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Yaacov Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2000). 18 d’Encausse. 19 Sergei P. Poliakov and Martha Brill Olcott, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). 20 Alexandre Bennigsen, The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State ed. Marie Broxup (New York: Routledge, 2011). 21 Alexander Knysh, “Contextualizing the Salafi – Sufi Conflict (from the Northern Caucasus to Hadramawt),” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2007): 509. 22 Devin Deweese, “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’i’s ‘Islam in the Soviet Union’,” Journal of Islamic Studies 13, no. 3 (2002): 302. 23 Research Center Pew, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (Washington: Pew Research Center, 2013), 64. 24 Research Center Pew, “The World’s Muslims,” 33. 25 Research Center Pew, “The World’s Muslims,” 15. 26 Guilain Denoeux, “The Forgotten Swamp: Navigating Political Islam,” in Political Islam. A Critical Reader, ed. Frederic Volpi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 55. 27 Muhiddin Kabiri, “Tadjikistan: Analyse Comparative Du Parti De La Renaissance Islamique Et Du Hiz Al-Tahrir Al-Islami,” in Les Islamistes D’asie Centrale: Un Défi Aux États Indépendants? (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007). 28 Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “Le Jihad Comme Idéologie De L’autre Et De L’exilé À Travers L’étude De Documents Du Mouvement Islamique D’ouzbékistan,” Cahiers d’Asie Central, 15–16: 140–166. 29 Martha Brill Olcott, Roots of Radical Islam in Central Asia (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007). 30 Babajanov, “Le Jihad Comme Idéologie,” 158–159. 31 Babajanov, “Le Jihad Comme Idéologie,” 152. 32 Hooman Peimani, “Uzbekistan’s Reaction to Tashkent Bombings Generate Doubts on Efficacy,” Central Asia -Caucasus Analyst, 21 April 2004, available at www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analyticalarticles/item/8936-analytical-articles-caci-analyst-2004-4-21-art-8936.html 33 Edward Lemon, “Imu Pledges Allegiance to Islamic State,” Eurasianet, 1 August 2015, available at https://eurasianet.org/imu-pledges-allegiance-to-islamic-state 34 Stéphane A. Dudoignon, “Une Segmentation Peut En Cacher Une Autre: Régionalismes Et Clivages Politico-Économiques Au Tadjikistan,” CEMOTI, Cahiers d’Études sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le monde Turco-Iranien 18, no. 1 (1994): 110. 35 Kabiri, “Tadjikistan: Analyse Comparative,” 110.

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36 Pamiris form a distinct ethnic and religious group who inhabit the Southern mountainous region of Gorno-Badakhshan. They speak a Persian language related to Tajik and are Ismaili Muslims, a branch of Shi’ism. 37 Roy, L’Asie Centrale Contemporaine, 131. 38 Dudoignon summarizes the dynamics the following way: “Khujand Communists and the southern Kulobis on one side versus the Pamiri party Lali-Badakhshon, the Democratic Party of Tajikistan, and the Gharmi-dominated IRP on the other side.” See Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Communal Solidarity and Social Conflicts in Late 20th Century Central Asia: The Case of the Tajik Civil War (Japan: Islamic Area Studies Project, 1998), 14; Jesse Driscoll, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 39 Helene Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan: State-Building and Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 65–66. 40 Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan, 87. 41 Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan, 84. 42 Plus Asia, “Бобоназарова Считает, Что Антиреклама Против Пивт Не Позволила Собрать’ Нужное Количество Подписей (Bobonazarova Believes That the Negative Publicity against the Irpt Prevented to Collect the Required Number of Signatures),” Asia Plus, 19 October 2013. 43 Muhiddin Kabiri, “The Role of Islamic Revival Party in the Politics of Islam in Tajikistan,” in Central Asian Intellectuals on Islam: Between Scholarship, Politics and Identity, ed. Sophie Roche, Dina Wilkowsky, Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2014), 247. 44 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “A Pyrrhic Victory in Tajik Parliamentary Elections,” 5 March 2015, available at www.rferl.org/a/tajikistan-islam-elections-parliament-history/26883637.html 45 Eurasianet, “Tajikistan: Opposition Figures Pass through Prison Revolving Doors,” 22 April 2019, https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-opposition-figures-pass-through-prison-revolving-doors 46 International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), “Elections in Tajikistan. 2016 Constitutional Referendum,” (2016), 3. 47 Kabiri, “Tadjikistan: Analyse Comparative,” 106. 48 BBC, “Renowned Tajik Cleric Urges Party to Back Outlawed Islamic Organization,” 24 December, 2009. 49 Emmanuel Karagiannis, Political Islam in Central Asia: The Challenge of Hizb Ut-Tahrir (New York: Routledge, 2009); Mariya Y. Omelicheva, “The Ethnic Dimension of Religious Extremism and Terrorism in Central Asia (La Dimension Ethnique De L’extrémisme Et Du Terrorisme Religieux En Asie Centrale) (La Dimensión Étnica Del Extremismo Religioso Y Del Terrorismo En Asia Central),” International Political Science Review/Revue internationale de science politique 31, no. 2 (2010); and Didier Chaudet, “Hizb Ut-Tahrir: An Islamist Threat to Central Asia?” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 26, no. 1 (2006): 113–129. 50 Geraldine and Igor Rotar Fagan, “Hizb Ut-Tahrir Wants Worldwide Sharia Law,” Forum 18, 29 October 2003, available at www.refworld.org/pdfid/46891851d.pdf 51 Emmanuel Karagiannis, “Political Islam and Social Movement Theory: The Case of Hizb Ut-Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan,” Religion, State and Society 33, no. 2 (2005): 138. 52 Emmanuel Karagiannis, “The Rise of Political Islam in Kazakhstan: Hizb Ut-Tahrir Al Islami,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13, no. 2 (2007): 302. 53 Vera Exnerova, “Radical Islam from Below: The Mujaddidya and Hizb Ut-Tahrir in Ferghana Valley,” in Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia, ed. Pauline Jones Luong (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 54 News Fergana, “Fsb Calls Hizb Ut-Tahrir the Most Dangerous Terrorist Organization,” 2018. 55 Bayram Balci, “Reviving Central Asia’s Religious Ties with the Indian Subcontinent? The Jamaat Al Tabligh,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 15 March 2015, available at https://carnegieen dowment.org/2015/03/19/reviving-central-asia-s-religious-ties-with-indian-subcontinent-jamaat-altabligh-pub-59481 56 Felix Corley, “Kazakhstan: Years of Intrusive Questioning,” Forum 18, 19 August 2019, available at www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2502 57 Mukaram Toktogulova, “Le Rôle De La Da’wa Dans La Réislamisation Du Kirghizstan,” in Les Islamistes D’asie Centrale: Un Défi Aux États Indépendants? ed. Fahti Habiba (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007). 58 Mukaram Toktogulova, “The Localisation of Transnational Tablighi Jama‘at Network in Kyrgyzstan,” in Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia, ed. Luong Jones Pauline (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 240.

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Political Islam in Central Asia 59 Fergana News. “Fsb Calls Hizb Ut-Tahrir”. 60 France24, “Is Claims Deadly Tajik Attack as Doubts Swirl,” France 24, 8 November 2019, available at www.france24.com/en/20191108-is-claims-deadly-tajik-attack-as-doubts-swirl 61 Khorasan is the ancient name of Central Asia, a region which today encompasses modern-day Afghanistan, western Pakistan, northeastern Iran and Central Asia. 62 Edward Lemon, Vera Mironova and William Tobey, “Jihadists from Ex-Soviet Central Asia: Where Are They? Why Did They Radicalize? What Next?,” Russia Matters, 7 December 2018, available at www.russiamatters.org/analysis/jihadists-ex-soviet-central-asia-where-are-they-whydid-they-radicalize-what-next 63 Kazinform, “Гуманитарная Операция «Жусан 3»,” Kazinform, 8 June 2019. 64 Alon and Yaacov Ro’i Wainer, “Uzbekness and Islam: A Survey-Based Analysis of Identity in Uzbekistan,” in Being Muslim in Central Asia: Practices, Politics, and Identities, ed. Marlène Laruelle (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 65 Maria Elisabeth Louw, Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2007); Johan Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Aurélie Biard, “Power, ‘Original’ Islam, and the Reactivation of a Religious Utopia in Kara-Suu, Kyrgyzstan,” in Being Muslim in Central Asia: Practices, Politics, and Identities, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Leiden: Brill, 2018); and David W. Montgomery, Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan (U.S.A.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). 66 Non-traditional Christian religions such as Baptism and Evangelism are also being closely monitored if not outright banned such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. 67 Johan Rasanayagam, “Counter-Extremism, Secularism, and the Category of Religion in the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan,” in Constructing the Uzbek State: Narratives of Post-Soviet Years, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 151–168. 68 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Pub., 1998), 24. 69 Edward Lemon and Hélène Thibault, “Counter-Extremism, Power and Authoritarian Governance in Tajikistan,” Central Asian Survey 37, no. 1 (2018): 140. 70 Mariya Y. Omelicheva, “Islam in Kazakhstan: A Survey of Contemporary Trends and Sources of Securitization,” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 2 (2011): 243–256; Adeeb Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan. 71 Bilal A. Malik, “Islam in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Experiencing Public Revival of Islam through Institutionalisation,” Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 13, no. 3 (2019): 360; and Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan, 116. 72 DUMK, “Фетва Думк В Отношении Мусульманского Платка,” 21 March 2013; and Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan, 127. 73 Noah Tucker, “Domestic Shapers of Eurasia’s Islamic Futures: Sheikh, Scholar, Society, and the State” (paper presented at the Islam in Eurasia Policy Conference, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2013); and Alima Bissenova, “Building a Muslim Nation. The Role of the Central Mosque of Astana,” in Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols, and Social Changes, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 223. 74 Lenta, “Муфтий Киргизии Объяснил Призыв Убивать Геев (Mufti of Kyrgyzstan Explains Call to Kill Gays),” 3 February 2014. 75 Shahnoza and Tim Epkenhans Nozimova, “The Transformation of Tajikistan’s Religious Field: From Religious Pluralism to Authoritarian Inertia,” Central Asian Affairs 6, no. 1–2 (2019): 133–165. 76 This is especially surprising since female genital mutilation is rare in Tajikistan. 77 Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan, 107. 78 Sputnik, “В Узбекистане Зарегистрировано Первое Медресе Со Статусом Вуза (the First Madrasah with University Status Registered in Uzbekistan),” 13 June 2017. 79 Zakon, “Верховный Муфтий Рк: Мы Против, Чтобы Казахстанцы Поступали В Сомнительные Зарубежные Вузы (Supreme Mufti of the Republic of Kazakhstan: We Are Opposed to Kazakhstani Citizens Entering Dubious Foreign Universities),” Zakin.kz, 20 February 2017. 80 Bayram Balci, “Fethullah Gülen’s Missionary Schools in Central Asia and Their Role in the Spreading of Turkism and Islam,” Religion, State and Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 156. 81 At Nazarbayev University, a Western-style institution in Kazakhstan where I work, 21 percent of the 4,209 students admitted in 2019 were graduates of the Turkish-Kazakh high schools: NU

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82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97

Institutional Research and Analytics. Office of the Provost, “Fall 2019 Student Enrollment Report,” (2019). After the coup attempt, Turkey started exerting more pressure on Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to close down the schools: Bruce Pannier, “The Gülen Schools in Central Asia,” RFE/RL (2016). Tengri, “В Думк Высказались О Ношении Хиджаба В Школах (Dumk Discussed the Hijab in Schools),” Tengri News, 24 October 2016. Sultan Sailaubekuly, Media and Power: Controlling Religion by Manipulating Public Opinion. The Case of Islam in Kazakhstan (Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2019), 32. Irina Sevostyanova, “Politsii Predlagayetsya Dat’ Polnomochiya Vyyavlyat’ Priznaki Posledovateley Destruktivnykh Religioznykh Techeniy (La Police Est Invitée À Autoriser L’identification Des Adeptes De Mouvements Religieux Destructeurs),” Atameken, 29 January 2018. Tengri. IWPR, “Таджикистан – Рахмонов: «Пусть Ваших Детей Учат Муллы» (Tajikistan – Rakhmonov: ‘Let the Mullahs Teach Your Children’),” IWPR, 2010. Sally Peck, “Tajikistan Bans Miniskirts and Head Scarves,” The Telegraph, 18 April 2007, avilable at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549005/Tajikistan-bans-miniskirts-and-head-scarves.html Emomali Rahmon, “Выступление По Случаю Дня Матери (Speech at the Occasion of Mother’s Day),” ed. President of the Republic of Tajikistan (2015). BBC, “Kyrgyzstan President: ‘Women in Mini Skirts Don’t Become Suicide Bombers’,” 13 August 2016, avilable at www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36846249 Refer to Reporters sans frontières’s ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking The level of repression reached high levels of absurdity during the presidential campaign in Kazakhstan, when a man holding a blank sign was briefly detained in the city of Uralsk: Daniel Victor, “A Man in Kazakhstan Held up a Blank Sign to See If He’d Be Detained. He Was,” New York Times, 9 May 2019. Olivier Roy, Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State trans. Cynthia Schoch (London: C. Hurst & Company Limited, 2017). Antonio Giustozzi, The Islamic State in Khorasan: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the New Central Asian Jihad (London: C. Hurst & Company Limited, 2018). Alexander A. Cooley and John Heathershaw, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Leonid Gurevich, “The Values of Kazakhstani Society in the Sociological Dimension,” (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2019), 118. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994).

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13 ISLAMISM IN TURKEY Gareth Jenkins

Introduction When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938) founded the modern Turkish Republic in 1923, he sought to expunge Islam from public life and make secularism the foundation of the new nation state he was trying to construct from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. For decades, Turkey was touted as the prime example of a predominantly Muslim country which was both secular and had a functioning parliamentary system. However, secularism in Turkey had always been imposed from the top down by the political elite, rather than arising naturally out of Turkish society. During the final decades of the twentieth century, a combination of socioeconomic factors and increasing democratization resulted in the official interpretation of secularism coming under increasing pressure as religion and religious identity once again emerged in the forefront of Turkish politics. As in many other countries, the Turkish Islamist movement includes a broad range of diverging, and sometimes conflicting, opinions and goals, ranging from relatively minor amendments to the official interpretation of secularism to a radical fringe who advocate the creation, by violence if necessary, of an explicitly Islamic state based on shari’a law. Ironically, one of the few issues on which the various elements of the Turkish Islamist movement tend to agree is in their rejection of the term “Islamist.” All view it as being in some way pejorative. Moderates, the vast majority of whom are genuinely appalled by the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of their religion, regard it as grouping them together with transnational militant groups such as alQaeda and the Islamic State, while radical elements on the margins of the political spectrum claim that it implies a differentiation between their goals and Islam itself. Nevertheless, in the absence of a suitable alternative, the term is used here in its broadest sense to cover all those who seek to reshape society and/or the political sphere in accordance with their perceptions of Islamic precepts and values. In addition to having a more extreme agenda, the radical elements on the fringes of the Turkish Islamist movement also tend to have a more internationalist outlook. They identify more strongly with Muslim causes in other parts of the world, see themselves as being part of a global struggle and are mainly influenced by the writings of foreign, rather than homegrown, writers and theorists. Although they advocate change within Turkey, the establishment of an Islamic state within the country’s borders tends to be regarded as merely the first 155

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stage in the creation of a transnational political structure which unites the entire ummah, or global community of believers. In contrast, the more moderate members of the Turkish Islamist movement tend to be Ottoman nostalgists. Rather than viewing the increased Islamicization of Turkey as a preliminary to the submersion of national identity within a global polity, they tend to regard it as a stepping stone towards Turkish leadership of the Muslim world in a reassertion of the preeminence enjoyed by the Ottoman Empire at its peak.

The Ottoman and Kemalist contexts The Ottoman Empire is often described as an Islamic state, governed by shari’a law, in which the sultan’s political power was based on his religious authority as the Caliph, or spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims. This is slightly misleading. Initially, the Ottomans appear to have been motivated as much by pragmatism as piety. It was only in the sixteenth century, when the conquest of the Muslim holy lands of the Hejaz produced an influx of Arab scholars and scribes, that the Ottoman state began to assume the shape prescribed in contemporary Islamic political theory.1 The shari’a formed the foundation of all legislation, although in practice it was supplemented by a form of statute law known as “orfi,” which consisted of commands and decrees issued by the sultan. The class of religious scholars known as the ulema not only issued rulings on all issues related to theological matters but also supplied the judges, known as “qadis,” for the courts.2 It was also during the sixteenth century that non-Muslims began to disappear from positions of authority and be relegated to the status of a protected underclass, who were both spiritually and legally inferior to Muslims; although non-Muslims continued to account for the majority of the sultan’s subjects until the late nineteenth century. However, it was not until the late eighteenth century, when Ottoman military capabilities were in manifest decline, that the sultans began to attempt to use their claim to the caliphate as a substitute for raw power. Previously, in as much as they used the title of Caliph at all, it was as an honorific. Ottoman military dominance of the Mediterranean and Middle East appears to have been regarded as proof in itself of divine approval of the empire’s preeminence. This instrumentalization of the caliphate accelerated through the nineteenth century as Ottoman military power continued to decrease, finally peaking under Sultan Abdulhamit II (reigned 1876–1909), who attempted to use religion not only to hold together the crumbling remnants of an empire won by the sword but, in a form of spiritual imperialism, assert his authority over all the Muslims in the world in what came to be known as “pan-Islamism.”3 But, by the time that Abdulhamit was forced to abdicate following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a series of Western-inspired reforms implemented under pressure from the European powers had already eroded the influence of both the ulema and the shari’a; and even introduced the concept of the legal equality of all Ottoman citizens regardless of belief. The process was accelerated under the Young Turks. In 1913, a decree was promulgated allowing judgments passed in the shari’a courts to be referred to a secular court of appeal. In 1915, overall control of the shari’a courts was transferred from the “sheikhulislam,” the most prominent member of the ulema, to the secular Ministry of Justice, and the religious schools or “madrassas” were placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Education. But it was not until the Ottoman Empire had been replaced by the Turkish Republic that the first attempt was made to completely separate religion from the apparatus of state. 156

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Official Turkish historiography has traditionally described the 1919–22 Turkish War of Independence as a nationalist uprising against an invading Greek army and the forces of the victorious Allies, who had occupied parts of Anatolia to try to enforce the 1920 Treaty of Sevres after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War One (1914–18). However, although Ataturk, the overall commander of the resistance, was undoubtedly a Turkish nationalist, most of the troops under his command appear to have had little awareness of the concept of nationalism and to have believed that they were fighting for Islam and the protection of the sultanate and the caliphate. Nevertheless, following the proclamation of the Turkish Republic on October 29, 1923, Ataturk, who enjoyed autocratic powers, oversaw the most radical secularizing reform program ever attempted in a predominantly Muslim country. Over the next sixth months, the sultanate, caliphate, shari’a courts and office of sheikhulislam were all abolished. During the years that followed, the shari’a was purged from the statute book and replaced by civil, criminal and commercial codes imported from Switzerland, Italy and Germany respectively.4 All madrassas were closed and state-run schools were established to train Muslim clergy; and the ulema ceased to exist as a distinct class. In addition to legal codes, Ataturk imported many of the other trappings of contemporary European nation states. For example, the Gregorian calendar was introduced as the sole official measurement of time, effectively rendering the Islamic lunar calendar obsolete. Perhaps most extraordinarily, in 1935, a law was passed making Sunday, rather than the Muslim holy day of Friday, the official day of rest. In 1937, the Turkish Constitution was amended to declare that the republic was a secular state. Although Ataturk appears to have introduced his reforms piecemeal, rather than as part of a preconceived program, they gradually coalesced into a doctrine known as “Kemalism”5 which became – and, in theory at least, remains – the official ideology of the Turkish state. However, in one of the many paradoxes that characterize the official interpretation of secularism, Islam remained the primary determinant of Turkishnesss, both popularly and at governmental level. For example, during the forced population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923–24, the sole criteria used for who should be expelled from each country was not ethnicity but religion.6 Even today, non-Muslim inhabitants of Turkey are invariably described not as “Turks” but as “Greek/Armenian/Jewish/Syriac Turkish citizens.” Kemalism was enthusiastically adopted by Turkey’s urban elite, many of whom had long believed that religious reactionaryism was the underlying cause of the Ottoman Empire’s long decline. But it proved less popular with the mass of the population, most of whom remained firmly wedded to their traditional religious beliefs. Ataturk’s reforms triggered a string of violent popular protests and, in a 1924, a full-scale rebellion in the deeply conservative south-east of the country in what has become known as the Sheikh Said Revolt, after the name of its leader. All of the disturbances were crushed by government forces and the ringleaders were hanged.7 During the Ottoman Empire, the official Islam of the courts, mosques and learned theological discussions was dominated by the ulema. However, outside the ulema, virtually the entire population was illiterate and lived predominantly in rural areas, where religious convictions tended to be shaped more by folk beliefs and oral traditions than by sacred texts. For many, their religious lives were shaped primarily by the Sufi networks known as tariqah. Significantly, it was not the remnants of the ulema who organized the protests against Ataturk’s reforms but prominent members of the different tariqah – particularly the Naqshbandi order, of which Sheikh Said was also a leading member. In 1925, Ataturk outlawed the tariqah, closing down all their lodges and forbidding the use of all titles, roles, activities and even clothing associated with them.8 157

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The return of Islam The proscriptions forced the tariqah underground but did not eradicate them. Some, such as the Mevlevi, or followers of the thirteenth-century mystic Mevlana Jalal al’Din Rumi (c. 1207–73), who famously practice a trance-like whirling dance, found it difficult to carry out their activities in secret. Others, such as the Naqshbandi order, whose central ritual is the silent contemplation of God, found it easier to shift to a clandestine existence; and largely preserved their extensive social networks. As late as 1940, over 80 percent of the Turkish population of 17.8 million was still illiterate.9 Although Kemalism was vigorously inculcated in the education system and took root amongst the urban elite, it does not appear to have penetrated very deeply into the countryside, where most of Turkey’s population still lived; certainly not deeply enough to shake centuries-old beliefs and traditions. It was the combination of these two factors – rural religiosity and the survival of the tariqah – which led to the reemergence of Islam as a political force following the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1946. In 1950, the conservative Democrat Party (DP), which drew most of its support from the rural population, won the first fully free general election in Turkish history. It replaced the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which had been established by Ataturk and had enjoyed a monopoly of power since 1923. The DP remained in office until 1960, when it was toppled by a military coup. During its decade in power, the DP introduced a number of concessions to religious sentiments, including reversing Ataturk’s edict that the call to prayer should be in Turkish rather than Arabic, launching a massive mosque-building program and opening 19 new “Imam Hatip” schools to train Muslim clergy. But the DP was motivated by a desire to court the conservative vote rather than to introduce Islamist policies. It made no attempt to revive the office of sheikhulislam and Muslim clergy were civil servants, whose wages were paid by the state. In fact, it was under the DP that laws were passed which made it a criminal offense, punishable by a prison sentence, to exploit religion for political purposes through propaganda or indoctrination and to insult the memory of Ataturk. The former was not repealed until 1991; the latter remained in force in 2020. The DP’s decade in power coincided with the beginning of a rapid massive migration from the countryside to the cities. Nearly 1 million peasants are estimated to have migrated to the cities of western Turkey in the period 1950–55 alone. They brought with them the values and beliefs of the “folk Islam” of rural Anatolia. Their priority was cultural and societal – being able to continue to live according to their convictions rather than to press for changes to the statute book. Indeed, from Ottoman times, life in the countryside had been largely self-regulated by what was perceived as Islamic custom and tradition rather than sacred text or the wording of shari’a law. There is also evidence to suggest that exposure to the teeming modernity of urban life reinforced rather than eroded conservative attitudes, particularly with regard to women. In the Turkish countryside, women have long performed a large proportion – arguably the majority – of agricultural labor by working family-owned plots of land, and thus been relatively visible within a relatively restricted and controlled public space predominantly inhabited by relatives and acquaintances. However, migration to the cities meant that most of these women left the labor force and, whenever they ventured out of their homes, they moved in incomparably larger public spaces which were predominantly inhabited by complete strangers. The result was increased societal and familial pressure on women to adopt perceptibly modest clothing and modes of behavior. As the number of migrants continued to grow, so too did the demand for mosques and Imam Hatip schools. By the late 1960s, the latter had ceased to be merely vocational schools but were being chosen by parents who wanted their children to receive a religious education 158

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instead of the secularism inculcated in the rest of the state system. In 1976, the Imam Hatip schools were opened to girl students, even though Sunni Islam traditionally forbids women from serving as clergy. By 1977, 135,000 students were enrolled in Imam Hatip schools. The concentration of large numbers of conservative Muslims in urban areas also led to the development of an Islamic popular culture and lifestyle, ranging from clothing stores to religiousthemed movies and, as literacy began to spread, a proliferation of magazines and books on Islam and Islamic values and modes of behavior. Initially, these changes occurred on the periphery of the Western-oriented lifestyles of the Kemalist elite, both culturally and physically, as most migrants from the countryside settled in the sprawling shantytowns which had sprung up around all of the major cities of western Turkey. However, gradually they began to move into the mainstream of Turkish life – physically, culturally and politically. During the 1970s, conservative Muslims also began to make the transition from being a constituency – to be appeased and placated in return for their votes – to becoming political actors in their own right. A handful of conservative political parties had been established in the late 1940s, following the introduction of multiparty democracy; but they had all been very small and faded from the political scene without being able to mount an effective challenge to the mainstream parties. In January 1970, Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011), established the National Order Party (MNP). Erbakan and most of the other leading members of the MNP were closely connected with the Naqshbandi order, particularly at its Iskenderpasa lodge in Istanbul. Erbakan consulted frequently with his sheikh, Mehmet Zahit Kotku (1897–1980), the head of Iskenderpasa lodge, and utilized the order’s network as he sought to organize the MNP on a national basis. Initially, the MNP also enjoyed the support of what was known as the Nurcu movement, the followers of the Kurdish Islamist activist Said Nursi (1876–1960). As a young man, Nursi had been deeply influenced by the tariqah, although he never became a formal member. Later, he began to attract followers in his own right. In his writings, which were later collected under the title “Risale-i Nur” or “Epistles of Light,” Nursi called first for the internal transformation of the individual, followed by the implementation of faith in everyday life and finally the establishment of an Islamic state based on the shari’a.10 The MNP adopted a hard-line Islamist agenda, although Erbakan stopped short of explicitly calling for the restoration of the shari’a. Nevertheless, in May 1971, the MNP was closed down by the Turkish Constitutional Court on the grounds that it was committed to undermining the secular nature of the Turkish state and the principles of Ataturk’s reforms. Erbakan responded by founding a new party, the National Salvation Party (MSP), in October 1972. The MSP survived for eight years until, together with all other political parties in Turkey, it was outlawed in the wake of the September 12, 1980 military coup. In its public rhetoric, the MSP actively cultivated a nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, even using archaic Ottoman vocabulary in its campaign literature. In his speeches, Erbakan relentlessly attacked the West, arguing that Turkey needed to return to Islam and Islamic civilization if it was ever to regain what he described as its rightful status as a great power. Although he avoided personally advocating the restoration of the shari’a, other members of the MSP were less circumspect. The magazine of the party’s youth organization was unequivocal about its long-term aims, which were to destroy the “unwanted, humanistic system of the Western-Secular Republic” and replace it with “an Islamic state based on divinely ordained laws.”11 In the general election of October 1973, the MSP won 11.8 percent of the vote and became a partner in a coalition government headed by the CHP. Throughout the 1970s, 159

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Turkey was wracked by factional fighting between leftist and ultranationalist extremist groups. When Erbakan backed a CHP proposal for an amnesty which included the release of imprisoned leftist activists, the Nurcus in the party resigned in protest. In the next general election in 1977, the MSP won just 8.6 percent of the vote, as Nurcus shifted their support to other right-wing parties. Despite Erbakan’s often inflammatory rhetoric, even when it was in power as a coalition partner, the MSP made little attempt to implement Islamist policies. Instead, it focused on deepening its social roots both inside the country and amongst the Turkish diaspora in Europe; this was particularly the case in what was then still West Germany, where the number of Turkish “guest workers” and their families had grown to over 2 million, most of them first-generation migrants from rural Anatolia. In 1976, Erbakan founded the European National View Organization (AMGT) in Berlin, although its headquarters were later moved to Cologne. The AMGT provided a sense of religious and ethnic solidarity in an alien, and often xenophobic, environment. It rapidly grew to over 2,000 branches and more than 250,000 active members and sympathizers, and its fundraising activities became one of the main sources of revenue for Islamist activism in Turkey. The coup of September 12, 1980, after another round of factional fighting between leftists and rightists had descended nearly into civil war, was followed by three years of military rule. Extraordinarily for an institution which regarded itself as the guardian of Ataturk’s legacy, the ruling junta actively promoted Islam as an ideological bulwark against the perceived threat from communism. Most controversially, it made the inculcation of Sunni Islam compulsory at every level of the school education system. The junta also appointed Turgut Ozal (1927–93), a member of the Naqshbandi order and an unsuccessful candidate for the MSP in the 1977 general election, to oversee the economy. During the return to civilian rule in 1983, Ozal took advantage of the military’s continuing ban on political leaders active before the coup to be elected prime minister. Although he was no longer close to Erbakan, Ozal oversaw the appointment of a large number of pious Muslims to key positions in the government bureaucracy, particularly in the Ministry of Education. The junta’s promotion of Islam as a social cohesive reinforced the shift towards more conservative values and identity and helped prime the electorate for the grassroots activism of Islamist networks. Even before the political bans were eventually lifted in 1987, Erbakan had already used proxies to establish the Welfare Party (RP). Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the RP continued to grow in strength. In March 1994, it won the local elections, taking control of the metropolises of Istanbul and Ankara. In the general election of December 1995, it became the largest party in Parliament, albeit with only 21.4 percent of the total vote. Nevertheless, it was able to form a coalition government with the True Path Party (DYP), a successor to the DP, under Erbakan as prime minister. In June 1997, a campaign of pressure and persuasion orchestrated by the Turkish military resulted in the coalition’s collapse. The military also belatedly attempted to reverse some of the concessions to religious sentiments introduced over the previous decades. By the mid-1990s, there were over 600 Imam Hatip schools catering for 495,000 pupils, approximately 13 percent of the total school enrollment in the country.12 The military succeeded in forcing the government to adopt measures which reduced the number of pupils to 104,000 by 1999. However, by this time, there were already over 2 million Imam Hatip school graduates in Turkish society. The RP had not attempted to introduce any explicitly Islamist policies during its term in power but had nevertheless done enough to convince hard-line secularists of what they believed were its long-term goals, most notably in January 1997 when Erbakan hosted 160

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leaders of the theoretically outlawed tariqah to a dinner at the prime ministry. In January 1998, the Constitutional Court outlawed the RP and banned Erbakan from active politics for five years. Although it had been the tariqah’s networks which had provided the social foundations for the re-emergence of Islam as a political force in the 1970s, Erbakan’s political parties gradually established their own social networks which first supplemented and then began to overshadow those of the tariqah. In addition, in time, Erbakan consulted less with the tariqah leaders and more with his own political advisors. Nevertheless, even if their relative importance declined, the tariqah continued to play a significant role in inculcating the values which made electors receptive to Islamist parties; and, on occasion, still utilized their social networks to provide them with political or financial support. However, by the late 1990s, the tariqah had also been overtaken in social influence by the networks of the followers of the preacher Fethullah Gulen (born 1938). Although the two never met, Gulen became a disciple of Said Nursi. During the 1960s, while he was serving as a state-appointed imam in the Aegean city of Izmir, Gulen began to organize religious courses at summer youth camps. His sermons, which were characterized more by their emotionalism than their theological sophistication, resulted in him attracting a growing following amongst both the youth of Izmir and local businessmen, who funded more summer courses and eventually the establishment of schools. What became known as the Gulen Movement grew rapidly. By the time that the RP was outlawed, Gulen’s followers had established a huge network of schools, NGOs, businesses and media outlets that extended across most of Turkey and even abroad – giving it a presence not only amongst the Turkish diaspora in Europe and the US but also the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. In his teachings, Gulen emphasized the importance of hizmet, or “service,” encouraging his followers to join the civil service, particularly the police, the judiciary and the state-run education system. Although the members of the movement publicly denied any desire to dismantle the Kemalist state, hardline secularists remained suspicious. These doubts were reinforced in June 1999, when a secular television channel broadcast footage of Gulen privately instructing his followers to infiltrate the apparatus of state and maintain a low profile until they were strong and numerous enough to begin to take control of it. Fearing prosecution, Gulen fled to the US, where he remained in late 2020, living in a sprawling compound owned by his followers in rural Pennsylvania.

The emergence of the AKP In late 1997, aware that the RP was likely to be outlawed, Erbakan oversaw the preparations for the formation of a new party. The Virtue Party (FP) was formally established in December 1997. After the RP was banned, those members of the party who were still allowed to participate in politics joined the FP. At the FP’s inaugural congress in May 1998, Recai Kutan (born 1930), a longtime confidante of Erbakan and a fellow member of the Naqshbandi Iskenderpasa lodge, was elected party leader. During the 1990s, the wearing of the Islamic headscarf had become one of the key battlegrounds in the struggle by hardline secularists to preserve their control of the public space. Urbanization and rising living standards had resulted in the emergence of a conservative middle class, many of whose daughters not only covered their heads but sought university education and a career. In theory, both state employees and university students were forbidden from wearing headscarves, although, in practice, many universities ignored the 161

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ban. That changed after the toppling of the RP-led government in 1997 and, under pressure from the military, the ban became more rigorously enforced. In the campaign for the April 1999 general election, the FP toned down the Ottoman and religious references adopted by its predecessors. However, it remained intransient on the issue of the headscarf, fielding eight female candidates who covered their heads. Only one, Merve Kavakci (born 1968), was successful as the FP won just 15.4 percent of the vote and took 111 of the 550 seats in Parliament. When Kavakci arrived in Parliament, the other deputies prevented her from taking part in the swearing-in process. In May 1999, the Public Prosecutor applied to the Constitutional Court for the FP’s closure on the grounds that Kavakci had attempted to undermine the principle of secularism enshrined in the Constitution. The FP was formally outlawed in June 2001. The closure of the FP split the Turkish Islamist movement. In July 2001, an older generation of Erbakan loyalists established the Felicity Party (SP) under Kutan’s leadership. In August 2001, a younger generation of Islamists broke away to form the AKP. They were led by Tayyip Erdogan (born 1954), a graduate of an Imam Hatip school and another member of the Naqshbandi Iskenderpasa lodge who had first come to prominence when he was elected RP mayor of Istanbul in March 1994. His deputy was Abdullah Gul (born 1950), a UK-educated economist who had served as government spokesperson in the RP-DYP coalition. In the run-up to the November 2002 general election, the SP pursued a policy similar to that adopted by the FP. Its rhetoric and campaign literature avoided explicit calls for Islamist policies while nevertheless containing a sufficient number of thinly veiled references to ensure that voters remained aware of its continuing commitment to Islamic values. In contrast, the AKP explicitly sought to portray itself as a center-right, rather than a religious, party. Although the decision-making core of the party was dominated by former RP members, the AKP also reached out to Nurcus, including the Gulen Movement, conservative Turkish nationalists and even a handful of disgruntled former leftists who shared the party’s antagonism towards the Turkish military. In private and in public, AKP members claimed that the party’s leaders had abandoned Islamism and were now committed to a pluralistic, secular democracy. Hardline secularists remained skeptical. But, in a country which had been ruled for the previous decade by a succession of corrupt and incompetent coalition governments and was mired in a deep economic recession, there was a widespread willingness to try something new – and none of the AKP’s leaders, not even Gul, had been actively involved in formulating the policies of Erbakan’s parties. In the election on November 3, 2002, the AKP won 34.3 percent of the vote, giving it 363 seats and a comfortable parliamentary majority. The SP took just 2.5 percent and faded to the margins of the political arena. Once in power, the AKP concentrated on consolidating its political powerbase, nurturing an economic recovery and accelerating the domestic reform process tentatively initiated by the previous administration to try to secure a date for the official opening of membership negotiations with the EU. It did not introduce any explicitly Islamist policies and rapidly backed down whenever any of its initiatives – such as a 2004 attempt to criminalize adultery – aroused secularist suspicions. The AKP’s cautioun paid off in October 2005 when it succeeded where a succession of previous governments had failed, as Turkey finally opened formal accession negotiations with the EU. However, the process soon began to founder, not least over the AKP’s refusal to recognize the Republic of Cyprus. As hopes of EU membership started to fade, the AKP sought to redress what it described as a previous imbalance in Turkey’s foreign policy by engaging more actively with other predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East. 162

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However, through late 2006 and early 2007, the political agenda became increasingly dominated by the forthcoming vote in Parliament to appoint a successor to President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, whose term was due to expire in May 2007. Although the presidency had only limited powers, Sezer had used them to veto legislation passed by Parliament and block the appointment of over 750 AKP nominees to high-level positions in the civil service. The AKP’s majority in Parliament meant that it could effectively appoint its own candidate to the presidency, which its critics argued would enable the AKP to finally seize control of the apparatus of state. In April 2007, the AKP named Gul as its candidate. The announcement was greeted with outrage by hardline secularists, not least because Gul’s wife wore a headscarf. On April 27, 2007, General Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of the Turkish General Staff (TGS), issued a statement implicitly threatening a coup if Gul became president. The AKP responded by calling an early general election for July 2007. Buyukanit’s intervention enabled the AKP to portray the general election as a choice between democracy and a continuation of the system of military tutelage. It was further boosted by its impressive economic record and the fact that none of the opposition parties appeared to offer a credible alternative. The result was a landslide victory, in which the AKP won 46.6 percent of the popular vote and another large parliamentary majority. In August 2007, Gul duly became president. Unable to risk challenging such an unequivocal demonstration of the popular will, Buyukanit did nothing. Confident that it no longer needed to fear the military, through late 2007, the AKP began to draft what it described as a liberal new Constitution, which was expected, among other things, to lift the headscarf ban in universities. However, in February 2008, these plans were abruptly shelved as the AKP opted instead to try to push through amendments to the existing Constitution. The move triggered a reaction from what, along with the military, had long been the other main bastion of the Kemalist establishment, namely the higher echelons of the judicial system. In March 2008, an application was filed with the Constitutional Court calling for the AKP’s closure on the grounds that it was trying to undermine secularism. In July 2008, the court upheld the charges against the AKP but opted to impose a fine of $20 million rather than outlawing the party. Over the months that followed, relief in the AKP at avoiding closure gradually gave way to growing confidence and the realization that, six years after it was first elected, the party was not only in office but in power. But, despite the fears of secularists, the AKP made little attempt to overhaul the Turkish statute book. Instead, Erdogan focused on trying to consolidate his grip on power and eliminating the rivals and opponents he shared with the Gulen Movement.

The Erdogan era Although Erdogan and the Gulen Movement were rivals within the broader Turkish Islamist movement, they had formed an alliance of convenience.13 The Gulen Movement used its networks in Turkey and abroad – particularly in Washington and Brussels – to lobby on the AKP’s behalf. In return, the AKP helped the Gulen Movement to increase its already growing presence in the civil service, particularly the police and the judiciary. Emboldened by the AKP’s success in seeing off challenges from Turkey’s secular establishment, Gulen sympathizers in the police and lower levels of the judiciary launched a barrage of court cases targeting hardline secularists, Turkish nationalists, military personnel, leftists and Islamic theologians, all of whom were alleged to be co-conspirators in plots to overthrow the AKP government. Through 2009 and 2010, hundreds of suspects were arrested, tried and imprisoned, including high-ranking members of the once-powerful military. Many of the 163

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allegations were manifestly absurd and much of the evidence adduced by prosecutors had clearly been fabricated.14 But this served only to intensify the intimidatory impact of the cases on thousands more of Erdogan’s critics and opponents, who were frightened into silence. Nowhere was the AKP’s growing confidence more noticeable than in Erdogan himself. Through 2009 and 2010, decision making within the government became increasingly concentrated in Erdogan’s own hands, as other leading members of the party were marginalized. The AKP’s campaign for the June 2011 general election was almost completely concentrated on Erdogan, in the first signs of what would eventually become a personality cult. Nevertheless, with the opposition parties still weak and divided, when the election was held on June 12, 2011, the result was another landslide victory for the AKP, which was re-elected for a third term with 49.8 percent of the vote and 327 seats in Parliament. When he gave his victory speech in Ankara on election night, Erdogan made it clear that his ambitions already stretched beyond the modern republic’s borders, reeling off a list of cities located outside the country in the former Ottoman Empire for which, he said, the election was as much a triumph as it was for Turkey. As early as 2009, Erdogan had begun to try to portray himself as the spokesperson for the world’s Muslims, particularly on Palestine, where he aligned Turkey with Hamas, against not just Israel but also the secular Fatah faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). In May 2009, Erdogan appointed his foreign policy advisor Ahmet Davutoglu (born 1959) as foreign minister. An outspoken Ottoman nostalgist,15 Davutoglu made no secret of his ambition to reassert Turkey as the preeminent regional power, initiating a series of joint Cabinet meetings, known as High Level Cooperation Councils, with the governments of other Muslim countries in the Middle East and lifting visa requirements for their citizens. When the Arab world was swept by popular uprisings from late 2010 through early 2011, Erdogan and Davutoglu initially hesitated, concerned about alienating the incumbent governments that they had so assiduously cultivated. However, in Egypt, where relations with President Hosni Mubarak had always been strained by the AKP’s sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, its support for the anti-government protests was immediate and enthusiastic. By mid-2011, this had extended to virtually all of the uprisings and AKP officials were confidently predicting that new regimes would soon take power across the region and would look to Turkey for leadership. The main exception was Bahrain, where Ankara endorsed the ruling Sunni elite’s suppression of protests by the kingdom’s Shi’a majority. This was in contrast to Syria, where Turkey vigorously supported the attempts by the predominantly Sunni Free Syrian Army (FSA) to overthrow the Alawite-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In September 2011, Erdogan paid a five-day visit to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where he was received by cheering crowds brandishing his photograph and waving Turkish flags. Erdogan delivered a series of speeches in the same hectoring tone that he had used in the domestic election campaign earlier in the year, repeatedly urging his listeners to look to Turkey for inspiration and leadership. But there was little indication of a desire in the region for a return to Turkish suzerainty. Even the AKP’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood during its short-lived rule in Egypt was strained by Erdogan’s tendency to see the organization more as a subordinate than an equal. After its leader, President Mohamed Morsi (1951–2019), was overthrown and imprisoned in July 2013, Erdogan tried to step into the vacuum, portraying the Brotherhood as being part of a dava, or sacred cause, of which he was the leader. After the massacre of pro-Brotherhood demonstrators in Rabaa alAdawiya Square in August 2013, Erdogan even adopted the Brotherhood’s four-fingered Rabaa sign as the symbol of his own AKP. 164

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The ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo came at a time when Erdogan was facing new challenges to his rule inside Turkey. Although he still made no attempt to incorporate the shari’a into the Turkish Civil or Criminal Code, after the AKP’s election victory in 2011, Erdogan did increase his attempts to reshape Turkish society according to his own conservative worldview, particularly to realize his stated goal of raising a “generation of pious youth.” In September 2012, he reformed the education system, lowering the age at which students could enter Imam Hatip schools from 14 to 10 and increasing compulsory lessons in Qur’anic studies and the life of the Prophet Muhammed throughout the school system. Erdogan also encouraged what became a wave of Ottoman nostalgia in popular culture – from cinema and television dramas to fashion and design, Ottomanthemed flower festivals and even the Turkish language, as AKP supporters started to display a penchant for Ottoman vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Meanwhile, taxes on alcohol were increased and more restrictions introduced on where it could be sold and served. The result was a steady rise in social tensions, which erupted in early summer 2013 in nationwide anti-government demonstrations as an estimated 3 million people, mostly members of the country’s secular middle class, took to the streets in what became known as the Gezi Park Protests after the park in central Istanbul where they started. By fall 2013, the protests had petered out. But they had triggered an intensification in Erdogan’s already growing authoritarianism as he shifted from trying to broaden to deepening his popular support, inculcating a siege mentality amongst his supporters by maintaining that the West – aided by his domestic critics and opponents – was constantly conspiring to undermine him and prevent Turkey’s otherwise inexorable rise to global preeminence under his leadership. In this narrative, neo-Ottoman expansionism, Islam and the personality cult in which Erdogan was increasingly engulfed were merged into an inseparable whole. In December 2013, long-running strains in Erdogan’s alliance with the Gulen Movement resulted in a public power struggle, as pro-Gulen prosecutors issued arrest warrants for nearly a hundred businesspeople and politicians close to Erdogan on corruption charges. Erdogan hit back by initiating a purge of suspected Gulenists from the police and judiciary. The movement responded by posting on the Internet a stream of clandestinely recorded telephone calls, which they claimed showed Erdogan and his close associates engaged in corruption and the manipulation of judicial processes. The attempt failed. Not only did the AKP win the nationwide local elections in March 2014 but, in the presidential election of August 2014 – now decided by popular vote rather than Parliament – Erdogan became president. He was succeeded as prime minister by Davutoglu. In September 2014, Erdogan’s aides informed journalists that he had decided to use a newly built 1,150 room complex in Bestepe on the outskirts of Ankara as his presidential palace. In December 2014, Erdogan announced that the Ottoman language, which was written in the Arabic script, should become a compulsory subject in all Turkish schools. Starting from January 2015, foreign dignitaries visiting Bestepe were greeted by an honor guard of actors dressed as soldiers from past Turkish empires. Even though Davutoglu was theoretically head of the executive, in practice Erdogan continued to make all major policy decisions. After the AKP’s vote fell to 40.7 percent in the June 2015 general election and it lost its parliamentary majority, Erdogan launched a massive military crackdown against the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the predominantly Kurdish south-east of the country and called another general election for November 2015. Buoyed by support from Turkish nationalists, the AKP took 49.5 percent of the vote and regained its parliamentary majority, winning 317 seats. However, its victory 165

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was overshadowed by widespread reports of electoral irregularities and statistical anomalies in the results, particularly in the south-east. The November 2015 election set the pattern for the next four years, which were characterized by security crises and an intensification of the war against the PKK and its affiliates – particularly the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria – inside and outside Turkey, flawed elections, arrests and prosecutions of Erdogan’s critics and opponents and almost total government control over the mainstream media. Erdogan’s autocratic authoritarianism also extended to the AKP. In April 2016, after Davutoglu had begun to try to hold negotiations with foreign leaders independently of Erdogan, he was forced to resign as prime minister and replaced by Binali Yildirim (born 1955), an acquiescent Erdogan loyalist. After a still largely unexplained failed coup attempt in July 2016 – which the government blamed on the Gulen Movement – Erdogan declared a State of Emergency, which allowed him to rule by decree. He used his new powers to initiate an unprecedented purge of the apparatus of state, dismissing 140,000 civil servants, ostensibly on allegations of Gulenist sympathies, although they included many leftists, Kemalists, atheists and members of Turkey’s heterodox Alevi religious community. A referendum in April 2017 narrowly approved changes to the Turkish Constitution and the replacement of Turkey’s parliamentary system with one in which virtually all political power was concentrated in the presidency. The system was officially introduced after simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections in June 2018 – again overshadowed by statistical anomalies and allegations of fraud – which resulted in Erdogan securing a second term as president; however, the AKP vote fell to 42.6 percent, with the result that it lost its parliamentary majority and had to form a coalition with the Turkish ultranationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). In July 2018, Erdogan finally lifted the State of Emergency. Yet, despite his now almost total control over political processes, the media, the security forces and the judiciary, Erdogan made no attempt to reshape the statute book in accordance with religious precepts. Although Turkey continued to support Muslim Brotherhood affiliates abroad – and sometimes, as in Libya, to arm and equip them – their primary importance to Ankara had become their potential as instruments for the expansion of Turkish influence. By 2020, Ankara had become not only the sole remaining foreign sponsor of the rebel militias fighting in the Syrian Civil War but, after the disintegration of the FSA, effectively controlled a disparate alliance of both Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers and considerably more radical groups, which it had collectively rebadged as the Syrian National Army (SNA). However, Erdogan’s priority in Syria was no longer overthrowing al-Assad but deploying the rebel militias it controlled against the PYD in northern Syria.

Militant groups Although MSP youth organizations established summer camps at which party supporters were provided with paramilitary training, they played little part in the factional fighting that wracked Turkey through the 1970s. In fact, there was almost no Islamist violence in Turkey between the 1930s and the 1980s, when individuals inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution – and initially occasionally trained and financed by elements in the Iranian intelligence apparatus – began to form groups dedicated to the use of violence to establish an Islamic state. Even though some had been inspired by the example of the revolution in Iran, they tended to try to model themselves on radicals in Sunni countries; and study the writings of Sunni Islamists such as the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb (1906–66). 166

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Unlike during the early years of the republic, recent Islamist violence has tended to be directed not against the Turkish state itself but against rival militant groups or what are regarded as ideologically alien presences in the country; such as Turkish secularist intellectuals, local non-Muslim communities, or the representatives of foreign countries and businesses. Similarly, although their networks played a prominent role in the violent protests against Ataturk’s reforms, modern militant Islamist groups have tended to be formed outside, and frequently in opposition to, the tariqah – even sometimes targeting leading members of the different orders. Most of the indigenous violent Islamist groups active in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s were small and short-lived. The exception was the Ilim Group, which is frequently referred to in the Turkish media as the “Turkish Hezbollah,” although it has no connection with the Lebanese organization of the same name. Ilim was formed in 1982 in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir by Huseyin Velioglu (1952–2000), a former member of the MSP youth organization. Velioglu foresaw a threestage process: propaganda and organization, the creation of the foundations for an Islamic society, and jihad to establish an Islamic state based on the shari’a. During the late 1980s, Ilim expanded rapidly, particularly in the predominantly Kurdish south-eastern region of Turkey. In 1992, despite protests from his colleagues who believed that it was premature, Velioglu decided that the time had come to launch a jihad. Through the early 1990s, Ilim was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of members of rival Islamist and Kurdish nationalist groups. Initially, the security forces were slow to react. It was only in the late 1990s that a concerted effort was made to eradicate the organization. In March 1999, a police raid on a safe house in south-eastern Turkey resulted in the seizure of Ilim’s archives, including the biographical details of 20,000 members, of whom 4,000 were members of the organization’s military wing. Velioglu responded by attempting to relocate Ilim’s headquarters to Istanbul, but he was tracked down and killed in a police raid in one of the city’s suburbs in January 2000. Velioglu’s death and the subsequent arrest of thousands of its members dealt a devastating blow to the organization. However, it gradually began to rebuild under Isa Altsoy (born 1961), who had avoided arrest by fleeing to Europe and going into hiding. Under Altsoy’s leadership, Ilim reverted to the second stage of Velioglu’s plan, strengthening its social support base by building up a network of NGOs, Islamic charities and media outlets. In December 2012, it even established its own political party, the Free Cause Party or Huda-Par. But it struggled to make a significant impact in national and local elections. In 2020, Hizbullah had reconstituted some its armed wing and possessed some stockpiles of weapons and explosives. But it was unclear whether it would return to violence at a future date – and, for those of its sympathizers impatient for jihad, the numerous extremist rebel groups fighting in the Syrian Civil War offered an alternative to launching a campaign inside Turkey. Until 2016, almost all of the violent attacks in Turkey by transnational organizations such as al-Qaeda targeted Western European, US, or Israeli interests based in Turkey, or members of the country’s non-Muslim minorities. During the early years of the Syrian Civil War, Ankara adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards the extremist Islamist groups – including Islamic State – which were fighting against the Assad regime, permitting them to organize openly in border areas and allowing foreign volunteers to transit Turkey unhindered. However, starting in early 2015, growing concerns that they posed a potential threat to Turkey’s own security led to increasing pressure on Islamic State in particular. From late 2015 and particularly through 2016, the Islamic State hit back with a series of suicide bombings in Turkey targeting the Kurdish nationalist movement and foreign tourists. For 167

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the former, it mostly used Turkish nationals, while for the latter, the perpetrators were mainly non-Turks.

Conclusion Ataturk’s secularizing reform program of the 1920s and 1930s has no parallel in any other predominantly Muslim country. It created a unique context for – and arguably a demand for a unique definition of – Islamism, particularly given the often paradoxical form that the official interpretation of secularism acquired in the years after Ataturk’s death. For any attempt to reshape politics and society in accordance with Islamic precepts would necessitate first dismantling the official interpretation of secularism. Yet some of the latter’s strictures – such as the headscarf ban – would have been regarded as unacceptable restrictions on personal liberty in many manifestly non-Islamic states. Nevertheless, AKP’s first two terms in power left little doubt that the party’s policies were at least informed by religious considerations. The situation was clearest in foreign relations where the AKP regarded Islam as both the primary determinant of Turkey’s international identity and as a means of reasserting a neo-Ottoman preeminence. In its domestic policies, the clues lay more in the selectivity of what it tried to do, rather than in what it actually did, perhaps most clearly in the disparity between the time and effort the AKP spent on the headscarf ban and on the discrimination faced by non-Sunni Muslims, particularly in its refusal even to contemplate ending the compulsory inculcation of Sunni Islam in the school system. However, as Erdogan increasingly concentrated power in his own hands from 2011 onwards, government policies became shaped less by the party and more by his own personality and ambition, to the point where he appeared to regard himself as being synonymous with the advancement and protection of Islam and the ummah. In 2019, he lambasted AKP members – including Davutoglu and Ali Babacan (born 1967), who had overseen the strong economic performance of the AKP’s first years in office – who were reportedly considering resigning to form their own political parties, accusing them of trying to “divide the ummah.” In fact, discontent in the AKP was nothing new. Many in the party, including members of both its liberal and more conservative wings had long been appalled by Erdogan’s autocratic authoritarianism, his vituperatively divisive rhetoric and what was seen as the rampant nepotism and corruption in his inner circle – with many privately describing them as incompatible with the religious values which Erdogan claimed to espouse. But they had been restrained by fear of Erdogan and his seemingly unshakeable grip on power. However, by late 2020, with the Turkish economy mired in a prolonged recession, the country’s foreign relations in disarray and opinion polls suggesting that support for both Erdogan and the AKP was in irreversible decline, there was a widespread sense both inside and outside the party that the Erdogan era was slowly coming to an end – although it was unclear how or when this end would occur. This was reinforced by the results of the March 2019 local elections, in which – not least as a result of the opposition parties deploying thousands of volunteers to monitor the voting and counting processes – the AKP suffered unprecedented losses, including losing in Istanbul and Ankara to the CHP. It was the first time since 1994 that the country’s two largest cities had not been won by the AKP or one of its predecessors. In late 2020, Erdogan also appeared to have failed to reshape Turkish society in accordance with his own conservative worldview. Opinion polls suggested that levels of religious 168

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observance had fallen when compared with a decade earlier, particularly amongst younger generations. But there were also signs that, after 18 years of AKP rule, some of the societal lines that once separated “secularists” and “religious conservatives” had become blurred. Although Turkey remained a patriarchal society, the AKP’s vigorous efforts to lift the headscarf ban had enabled women wearing the hijab to become more socially mobile and more visible in the public sphere and the workplace, which in turn had eroded much of the prejudice and fear with which some secularists had previously regarded them. Ironically, by late 2020, Erdogan’s increasing tendency to target any perceived critics or rivals amongst conservative Muslim critics with the same ferocity that he directed at those for whom religion played a less prominent role in their lives had also done much to erode what had been once been one of the major fault lines in Turkish society – even if it had become replaced with an arguably even more dangerous polarization between a hardcore of Erdogan loyalists who believed the conspiracy theories that peppered his public pronouncements and the rest of the population.

Notes 1 Gareth Jenkins, Political Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 35. 2 Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, History of The Ottoman State, Society and Civilization Vol. 1. (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, 2001), 443. 3 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 65. 4 Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 467. 5 Alp Tekin, Kemalizm (Istanbul: Cumhuriyet, 1936), 201–205. 6 Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger (London: Granta, 2006), 106. 7 Martin Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State (London: Zed Books, 1992), 303. 8 Andrew Mango, Ataturk (London: John Murray, 1999), 435. 9 Jenkins, Political Islam in Turkey, 111. 10 Mehmet Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 161. 11 Soner Yalcin, Hangi Erbakan (Ankara: Basak 1994), 151. 12 Gareth Jenkins, Context and Circumstance: The Turkish Military and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62. 13 Caroline Tee, The Gulen Movement in Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 164. 14 Gareth Jenkins, Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation (Washington, DA: CACI, 2009), 83. 15 Jenny White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 96.

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14 ISLAMIST POPULISM, ISLAMIST FATWAS, STATE TRANSNATIONALISM AND TURKEY’S DIASPORAS Ihsan Yilmaz

Introduction Analysts and scholars of the country agree that the secular Republic of Turkey, as it has been known, does not exist anymore, and is not returning anytime soon. All seem to agree that Turkey is in the process of radical change as a result of the growing composite ideology consisting of Islamism, populism, nationalism and authoritarianism. Different categorisations have been used to define the new regime in Turkey, such as Islamist authoritarianism, Islamist populism, electoral authoritarianism and Erdoğ anism. They underline a shift to majoritarianism at the expense of pluralism, to religious and nativist values at the expense of open society and democracy, to elective authoritarianism at the expense of free and fair elections, and to Islamist populism at the expense of democratic liberalism. What is more, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Government has actively pursued the regional strategy of promoting transnational populism while exporting its Islamism to Turkish diasporas across the world using state transnationalism. This shift has affected every part of Turkish society both domestically and abroad. Hate speech and intimidation have become a new normal in Turkey; from the streets and everyday discussions to the media, sports and entertainment. AKP-supporting leaders in the media, entertainment industry and bureaucracy openly intimidate their opponents and call for attacks upon them by the public. These calls are usually justified by the “national will” or the “national survival” discourse, which have the effect of rallying most Turkish conservatives and nationalists around the flag. However, recently we have seen an increasing use of self-made Islamic religious decrees (fatwas)1 by pro-AKP religious figures and political elites, to justify their authoritarian actions through religious means as their political purpose shifts. There are early signs that the AKP’s ideology and unofficial Islamist laws have found resonance among the Turkish diaspora communities in Western societies. This chapter explains the main component of AKP’s composite ideology – Islamism – and analyses how the AKP changed its rhetoric and policies after it consolidated its power. Then, this chapter will look at the Islamist turn in the schools, the mosques and foreign

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policy. The school and the mosque are the two main institutions that every government in Turkey, since the foundation of the republic, has used to socially engineer the people. The AKP, like others, is using these institutions to socially engineer their “acceptable citizen”. This is a citizen who votes for the AKP, believes its conspiracy theories, and accepts any justification for their corruption, violation of human rights and authoritarian behaviours. Unlike other governments, the AKP does not leave any opponent unpunished; longstanding traditional and secular schools have been closed or their system changed, private businesses have been taken over, and many journalists have been imprisoned. All these moves were completed in the name of “national will” and the Erdoğ anist-Islamist idea of “uniting the Ummah under Erdoğ an’s Turkey”.2 Unlike other administrations, the AKP government has justified this ideological, Islamist turn with the fatwas of government-sponsored religious preachers. The government has not only blurred the divide between religious institutions and state, but it has also vilified and securitised, as a “traitor” or a “heretic”, anyone who stands against any government policies or actions. As a well-funded ideology, Erdoğ an’s Islamist populism has found its way into various Muslim communities in the West. Erdoğ an’s AKP has used any means possible to influence Muslims living in the West, for example, by sponsoring mosques in Europe and the US, conferences and their keynote speakers, and trips to Turkey for Muslim diaspora members, among other things. These methods have had some success. The last section of this chapter will look at the preliminary signs of the AKP’s Islamist turn having an impact in Turkey on both a domestic grassroots-level and abroad. These fatwas and propaganda do not only affect the Turks living in Turkey, but also those abroad and other non-Turkish Muslims that live in the West. In this chapter, we will focus on Turkey, the Turkish diaspora, and how the fatwas issued by the pro-government preachers have affected them, beyond the school, the mosque and foreign policy.

State transnationalism and Islamist populism There are increasing indications that populist regimes actively seek to engage diaspora populations for political support in a new trend of “transnational populism”3 and that diasporas are becoming political instruments for populist leaders.4 In the case of the AKP, its transnational Islamist populism has been fortified by its state transnationalism, increasing its potential impact. State transnationalism refers to state structures that actively participate in and facilitate cross-border movements and connections of people, culture and ideas. These structures can be influential in social, cultural, political, economic and other aspects of immigrants’ lives. State transnationalism emerges “when the state initiates, promotes or sustains cross-border movements and connections of people, commodities, information, capital, institutions and culture in the pursuit of its priorities and the perceived good of its citizens, expatriates or immigrants”.5 Turkey has recently been very active in terms of state transnationalism and exporting its Islamist populist ideology.6 The Erdoğ anist diaspora mobilisation has been connected to Turkey’s authoritarian turn – in particular, the capture of state institutions by the AKP after 2011.7 Ironically, while the Kemalist state has tried to transform the Turkish Islamist movement within Turkey and move conservative segments of the Turkish diaspora in a secular nationalist direction,8 today, the Islamists are using the same tools to transform and dominate secular and non-compliant Islamic groups both in Turkey and in the diaspora.9 With the emergence of a new Islamist identity in Turkish foreign policy, Turkey’s diaspora policy has also evolved toward promoting conservative social values and a collective identity marked 171

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by Islamism amongst diaspora communities who are now considered an important pillar of Turkey’s public diplomacy strategy.10

The AKP’s Islamist populist turn “Islamism” and “Islamists” are terms commonly used by commentators on religion and the Middle East. Without a strict definition, these terms can be used to convey different things, depending on the context. Part of this flexibility stems from the fact that Islamism is not a monolithic ideology or movement, and it takes many forms. To put it simply, the most commonly used definition is that Islamism is the instrumentalisation of Islam for political objectives in the context of a modern nation-state.11 Islamists (that is, individuals who pursue Islamism) presuppose a pure and monolithic version of Islam and believe that their vision embodies the solutions to all social, political, personal and other problems. They long for a pan-Islamic political unity of the ummah and the elimination of non-Muslim, especially Western, socio-cultural and political influences in the Muslim world, as they think these influences are against Islam. Nevertheless, Islamists are also not uniform, and they are influenced by their surroundings, by the state and government under which they live and by the period in which they operate.12 What Islamists have in common, is that they are bound by an unquestioned adherence to their own imagined, glorious history, but at the same time, they face an external reality that derives from the West. The clash of these two ideologically incompatible worlds leads to a profound distortion of Islamists’ perceptions of the world, not only in how they see the West, but also in how they imagine themselves. While they believe in their imagined, glorious history, Islamist groups are also characterised by the exchange of theological ideals for political gains. They engage in cost-benefit calculations to advance their objectives and don’t shy away from saying and doing the opposite of what Islam teaches, or of what they, themselves have said and done before, because they always have the power to create a theological justification for their actions.13 Turkey’s AKP is a phenomenal case in point. When the party formed in the early 2000s, it was at pains to explain to voters how it had detached itself from the Islamist movement of Necmettin Erbakan of the National Outlook; it had “taken off the Islamist shirt” and would be focused on democracy and European Union accession. Based on the AKP’s pro-EU performance in its two terms between 2001 and 2011, several academics, including myself, prematurely concluded that these former Islamists had made use of democratic education and become “Muslim Democrats”,14 only to be proven wrong just a few years later. Starting with its third term in power, Islamism made a comeback in AKP leaders’ rhetoric and practice. The party manipulated electoral politics for Islamist purposes by using popular support to consolidate power and capture the state in 2011, establishing a new regime – what some authors call Erdoğ anism. This “has four main dimensions: electoral authoritarianism as the electoral system, neopatrimonialism as the economic system, populism as the political strategy and Islamism as the political ideology”.15 The Erdoğ anists hold within themselves a nostalgia for an imaginary, idealised Ottoman imperialist past and glorify the Turkish Ottoman history. The AKP is pushing the neo-Ottomanist/Islamist ideology through both its domestic and foreign policy. Domestically, the party has launched an ambitious project to Islamise Turkish society and politics. The Erdoğ anist-Islamist phase of AKP rule became characterised by the halt of the EU reform process.16 This led to an increase of anti-Western and nationalist rhetoric from the AKP, increasing intolerance towards public dialogue, hostility towards criticism of any AKP policies or plurality, the securitisation of ethnic-religiouspolitical minorities, crackdowns, torture and other violations of human rights, and general 172

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authoritarian behaviour from the government. Glorification of martyrdom, nationalist rhetoric propagated with imagery of blood and death, and constant populist calls for the government to mass sacrifice in defence of both Islam and Turkey against domestic and foreign “infidels;” is the new trend in the current period of AKP rule. In hindsight, the years 2010–11 seem to be a turning point in the history of the AKP. The AKP and Erdoğ an completely altered their agenda to establish their pet projects after 2011. Erdoğ an exploited all power and legitimacy among AKP supporters to arrive at the desired stage of a total absence of military tutelage blocking the spread of Islamism and no existing potential democratic opposition interfering with his consolidation of power. The 2010 Constitutional Referendum gave Erdoğ an a golden opportunity to consolidate his party’s legitimacy for further Islamist projects within the boundaries of Muslim nationalism. Erdoğ an also curbed all possible opposition in democratic politics; both in party politics and civil society. The behaviours of Erdoğ an and the AKP described above are examples of what occurs when the forces and constraints of domestic and external social, political and economic conditions disappear and the opportunities that once came from being Muslim Democrats are no longer soundly reinforced. In this situation, some former Islamist leaders return all too easily to their original ideology because the values of the Muslim Democrats, their respect for democracy and pluralism, have not truly been internalised.17 Since 2011, the entire AKP discourse has been based on hate speech, polarization, conspiracies, anti-Western sentiments, Islamist victimhood narratives and Islamist populism. In addition to the media, which has been almost monopolised by the regime, the main platforms for this new discourse have become the schools and mosques, both of which are seen by the AKP as essential for raising an Islamist generation.

Spreading Islamist populism at home and abroad An important part of the AKP’s Islamist project is the creation of the “ideal Turkish citizen” – a project that was started by the Kemalists in Turkey.18 Whereas the Kemalists tried to socially engineer the ideal secularist citizens, the AKP endeavours to create the ideal Islamist citizens. As part of this project, the regime has embarked on creating “a pious generation” to serve its ideological goals.19 In line with Muslim nationalist political ideology, and following the prime minister’s explicitly stated desire to raise a generation of religious youth, the AKP has primarily instrumentalised two state apparatuses: the mosque and the school. The Kemalists continued the Byzantinian-Ottoman practice of subduing religion to the state and for this purpose, instead of detaching religion from the state, establishing the Diyanet (Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs) to control Islam and create a Turkish version of Sunni Islam that excludes Alevis.20 This control continues even today. All mosques are under the rule of the state and all preachers are state employees. Even the Friday sermons are written by the state.21 Erdoğ an has tried to instrumentalize the Diyanet since the early AKP period. The Diyanet’s cadres were systematically replaced by Erdoğ anists and its budget significantly increased. It now controls funding equal to that of at least ten other ministries in Turkey combined and has nearly 115,000 employees – mostly imams on the state payroll.22 Erdoğ an has gone well beyond his predecessors’ usage of the Diyanet, synchronising it completely with his and the AKP’s policies and ideology. As a result, the Diyanet has become the “mouthpiece” of the government agenda to an unprecedented extent. The Diyanet serves as a tool of Erdoğ an’s 173

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Islamist social engineering project in all social, political and public discussions – from abortion to blood and organ donations, to economic discussions and terrorism, and everything in between. The Diyanet is also used to support, legitimize and justify local and national actions of the AKP government; through sermons, explanations and fatwas (religious decrees). In the June 2015 elections, for the first time in Turkish history, the Diyanet openly supported a political party, calling on voters to vote for “Muslims” because the “opposition is an enemy of our religion.”23 A series of new mega-mosques have been constructed by the AKP government at home and abroad,24 from Ghana to Kyrgyzstan to the US. There are at least 2,000 other mosques of various sizes that have been funded by the government, with still more planned or discussed for locations such as Venezuela and Cuba.25 These mosques remain controlled by the Diyanet “and – in areas with large Turkish diasporas – deliver the same state-mandated weekly sermon heard in every city, town, and village back in Turkey”.26 The Diyanet controls 900 of Germany’s 2,400 mosques and has been the subject of multiple controversies in the West which have received media attention.27 The AKP’s behaviour strongly suggests that it believes its envisioned generation of pious AKP voters can only be raised in Imam Hatip religious schools. Thus, the AKP has used state apparatus to increase the number of these schools. Since 2012, when Imam Hatip education was extended to middle schools for pupils aged 10–14, Imam Hatip student numbers have risen fivefold to 1.3 million in more than 4,000 schools. Government spending on Imam Hatip high schools for children aged 15–18 increased to $1.68 billion in 2018. This is nearly one-quarter of the budget for all high schools in Turkey. Imam Hatip students make up just 11 per cent of Turkey’s high school population, however, these schools receive 23 per cent of the funding –double the per-pupil spending at mainstream schools.28 In recent years, some private schools have been seized and turned into Imam Hatip schools and funding for high-quality, secular, public schools have been cut and instead channelled into new Imam Hatip schools. Many students, including non-Muslim students, have been forced to attend an Imam Hatip school as it is the only existing school in their district. Imam Hatip schools have even come under the direct influence of President Erdoğ an through the Foundation of Youth and Education in Turkey (TURGEV), which is run by the president’s son; Bilal Erdoğ an. TURGEV has become the umbrella organization for established Islamic NGOs whic already promote and teach Islam to students through schools and dormitories they own.29 TURGEV has also become a means through which illegal transfers can occur between Turkish businesspeople and Erdoğ an – businesspeople who fund Erdoğ an in exchange for government contracts. The AKP has also been opening Imam Hatip schools abroad, for Turkish expatriates. The government is also converting Turkish-owned buildings in France, Austria and the US to Imam Hatip schools.30 Pro-government media also reported that along with the opening of these schools, the ministry plans to increase the number of international Imam Hatip schools operating in Turkey. Currently, three schools operate in the cities of Istanbul, Kayseri and Konya where nearly 1,000 students from 72 countries attend.31 In addition to these state-run Imam Hatip schools abroad, Islamist foundations run by Erdogan’s family such as TURGEV have also opened branches, schools, dormitories and cultural centres to promote the Erdoğ anist ideology and Islamism abroad, including in Western Europe, the US, the Far East and Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and elsewhere. 174

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Under Erdoğ an’s leadership, the AKP has given the national curriculum an Islamist twist. Centrally administered entrance exams for high school and university students now include more questions on religion; a similar amount to those on science. The constantly changing high school curriculum has meant that classes which once revolved around secular philosophy and principles, and taught Darwinian concepts, have been replaced with religion and history classes glorifying jihad, martyrdom and Turkey’s state-constructed glorious history.32 Evolution theory has been removed from school textbooks – a decision supported by the education minister. Their justification was that the theory is “above students’ level and should be taught in universities”.33 On the other hand, textbooks explaining the idea of jihad as an armed struggle are now used in secondary schools in optional courses.34 An AKP member in the Parliament’s national education commission, Ahmet Hamdi Camli, summarises the Islamist rationale behind the inclusion of jihad in textbooks: Jihad is the primary component of Islam . . . Our ministry made a very on-point decision. If prayers are the pillars of the religion, jihad is the tent. Without the pillars the tent is useless . . . There’s no use in teaching mathematics to a child who doesn’t know jihad.35

Islamist populist foreign policy The AKP’s Islamism has revealed itself in the party’s foreign policy, especially during the Arab Spring and the Syrian War. Both of these developments triggered Erdoğ an’s fears of the potential rise of Kurdish nationalism and civilian disobedience. This caused him to advocate for Islamism to bolster Turkish nationalism and shore up his power.36 The AKP pursued a neo-imperialistic policy in the Middle East, aiming to be the dominant power and ideological leader of the region. The failure of the Arab Spring has not stopped the AKP’s ambitions. Even after the outburst of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, the ambitions of Ahmet Davutoglu and Erdoğ an have endured. Their aggressive and irredentist foreign policy actions and statements have consolidated the domestic support of the AKP’s authoritarianisation.37 This is reflected in Turkey’s foreign policy actions in Syria. All controversial incidents have been framed by the AKP as validation of the requirement to increase securitization, military campaigns and anti-terror campaigns. The AKP’s hawkish foreign policy actions have provided them with a shield of protection from domestic criticism. Erdoğ an has found a perfect justification, allowing him to legitimizse his actions in the name of fighting against terror, which could not be avoided under the current circumstances of the Syrian crisis. In brief, these global political developments have given the AKP and Erdoğ an carte blanche to legitimise the use of hard power and extraordinary measures without being questioned by democratic forces – neither domestic civil society, nor international organisations, nor, even, the EU. In 2013, the world learned of an unprecedented corruption scandal involving all of the AKP elite, including Erdoğ an and his entire family. Erdoğ an quickly dismissed the allegations of corruption and identified the ensuing investigations as part of a conspiracy intended to topple the AKP government. He then attempted to erase any information about the scandal, which had started to surface in the media during the Gezi protests earlier that year. He instead used these protests as opportunities to invoke anti-Western conspiracy theories. Erdoğ an repeatedly stated that “as we fight to make Turkey in the top 10 countries of the world . . . some are engaged in an effort to halt our fast growth. There are those abroad . . . and there are extensions of them within our country.”38 175

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Though these measures were largely successful, Erdoğ an also used the 2016 failed coup attempt as an opportunity to peddle further anti-Western discourse, going so far as to accuse the US and the EU of being behind the failed coup. Through his rhetoric, Erdoğ an reignited the religio-civilisational animosity against the West that had briefly died down. Today, Erdoğ an and the media he controls constantly propagate the existence of a holy war between the Islamic world and the Christian West, insisting the latter is bent on the destruction of the former.39 This has led to pro-government pundits insulting non-Muslim religious minorities when denouncing the coup in the media, tarring the plotters of the coup as “seeds of Byzantium”, “crusaders”, or a “flock of infidels”.40 Erdoğ an himself portrayed the coup and the aftermath as “a clash between the cross and the crescent”.41

Islamist populism reflected in the fatwas Many analysts of Turkey have compared the AKP regime to previous regimes that securitised minorities42, used the media to spread propaganda, and advanced their ideology through social engineering. They also compare the AKP regime with post-coup regimes in Turkey. Certainly, there are many similarities and differences among these groups, but one thing is unique to the AKP: it legitimizes its actions by religious decrees (fatwas). The AKP and Erdoğ an have extensively used the Diyanet institution and Islamic scholars to issue fatwas that support their actions and legitimize them in the eyes of the public. In Islamized societies, fatwas play a more powerful role than any legal justification of actions, because people value fatwas more than the rule of law. The AKP has produced a society of religious scholars that are loyal to the regime – the leading scholars being Hayrettin Karaman, a religious scholar, professor and columnist, and Mehmet Gormez; a former head of the Diyanet. Both Gormez and Karaman, as well as their students and protégés, have issued statements in support of the AKP government’s increasingly Islamist and radical rhetoric. This has included their attacks on abortion and women’s rights, New Year and non-Islamic celebrations, and their demonisation of AKP opponents, for example, by labelling them “heretics”. They have, most notably, influenced public opinion in their favour through the use of fatwas which they have issued on the AKP’s and Erdoğ an’s political actions. They often play a role in preparing the public for the government’s upcoming operations against the opposition and justify the government’s violation of human rights, crimes and tortures. For instance, in 2017, Karaman issued a fatwa saying that those who support Erdoğ an, even if they had done something wrong, could not be prosecuted because Muslims in Turkey are under attack by anti-Muslim foreign and domestic powers.43 We can categorize these Islamist fatwas into three types to explain their recent occurrences in Turkey: fatwas justifying corruption, fatwas encouraging vilification of government opposition, and fatwas promoting the Islamisation of social life.

Fatwas for corruption Corruption, especially the corruption scandal of December 2013, has been among the most controversial topics in Turkey during the AKP regime. Corruption has always been an “open secret” in Turkey, especially during the AKP regime. The December 2013 corruption allegations shocked the public, not because they did not know the corruption was occurring, but, because the police were pursuing “untouchable” elites. While some applauded the police’s actions, others criticised the police for being “too brave”. Ultimately, they were right, because the police and others who worked on those operations have been 176

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in jail now for over seven years. Erdoğ an masterfully turned the tables on his opponents when the allegations flew, berating them for working with foreign governments and attempting to overturn an elected government. He also accused some individuals of planting false evidence – specifically, planting the money found in the possession of the cabinet ministers’ children which incriminated the government. Fatwas have played an enormous role in rebutting corruption allegations. Erdoğ an-backed religious scholars have also provided fatwas of support to Erdoğ an on similar matters, including tax exemptions, operating public properties and opening them up for construction, public build-operate-transfer biddings given to pro-Erdoğ an oil transfers, energy, mining, shipping and real estate businesses, all of which are worth billions of dollars. As a consequence of the monopoly the Erdoğ an family has over the Turkish business and financial sectors, a sort of rentier state has been created, in which businesspeople pledge what resembles a monetary “oath of allegiance” (bay’ah) to the Erdoğ an family by “voluntarily” funding their foundations. In this arrangement, the “donator” must deliver whatever they have promised before the businesses are even opened.44 Islamist intellectuals, theologians and religious authorities, led by Professor Hayrettin Karaman, produce Islamic references and comments that legitimise Erdoğ an’s corruption to the public. Karaman’s religious fatwas and views are a highly important part of understanding the AKP and Erdoğ an’s manoeuvres in Turkish politics.45 Karaman is a political Islamist figure, Erdoğ an’s close friend and religious counsel, and the AKP’s main Islamist theologian. Prior to his unquestioned loyalty to Erdoğ an, he was a respected professor in pious sections of Turkish society – considered, consulted and appreciated by the vast majority of religious groups, both Islamist and non-Islamist. After the corruption scandal of December 2013, Karaman wrote a controversial column intended to excuse the AKP’s corruption.46 When this was criticised by the public, he went further, defending the (in)voluntary donations given to charities linked to the AKP government and the Erdoğ an family by the businesses that then received billion-dollar government contracts.47

Demonisation of the opposition through the fatwas Fatwas have played an invaluable role in clearing the way for the AKP’s crackdown on any opposition. This includes Kurds, Gülen Movement followers, Alevis, secularists and everyone in between. For instance, Hayrettin Karaman, like Erdoğ an, argues that there is a conspiracy against Turkey and Erdoğ an – a conspiracy of foreign governments, international institutions and domestic actors. In order to legitimise Erdoğ an’s efforts to eliminate his critics, Karaman has implied that the Turkish people must continue to support the AKP in order to be united against Turkey’s enemies. As a religious figure who can issue a fatwa, Karaman has the power to legitimise the Erdoğ an regime’s persecution of any critics who oppose Erdoğ an’s one-man rule. Karaman has also stated that political parties and opposition lead to division and that they are un-Islamic: “political parties are the institutions which is produced as a trouble for us by the Western democracy.”48 Since the December 2013 corruption scandal, the AKP government has run an asymmetrical defamation campaign on both a national and international level, primarily targeting the Gülen Movement (led by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen), along with anyone who questions Erdoğ an’s authority or policies. Formerly allies, Erdoğ an and the Gülen Movement parted ways after Erdoğ an requested that all the Islamic movements plead their allegiance to him and support his Islamization process. Shortly after this, the corruption scandal broke out 177

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and Erdoğ an accused the Gülen Movement of staging a coup against him. To compound this, he accused the movement of infiltrating the government and attempting to establish a parallel government. Unlike foreign powers, domestic Islamic movements who don’t adhere to the AKP’s ideology are labelled as heretics who have left Islam. They are accused of plotting to overthrow Erdoğ an and, in doing so, waging open war on Islam. The government claims that, by this logic, their punishment should be more severe than usual – justifying the imprisonment of pregnant women, children and the ill. The government has labelled not only the Gülen Movement this way, but also other, smaller Islamic groups, such as the Furkan Foundation. Their leader and supporters have been imprisoned, schools and institutions closed down, and businesses taken over. This also happened to the Gülen Movement on a much larger scale. Erdoğ an’s violent political discourse against Islamic dissidents has been supported by many religious men and preachers from the Diyanet and other supporting Islamic groups. They claim that those that have become non-Muslim may be wiped out without pity. Ömer Döngeloğ lu, a widely popular TV preacher and vocal religious supporter of AKP policies, has called Gülen supporters (and everyone labelled as Gülen supporters) “nonbelievers, offsprings of bad families, people who have no religious book, pig-headed”, among other insults. He argued that Fethullah Gülen was never a hodja (Islamic scholar), and that he is “a damn dog”. Döngeloğ lu went further, applauding the Diyanet for torturing many of Gülen’s alleged supporters in prisons and not burying them in Muslim rituals when they die. He called on the Diyanet to continue this practice so that alleged Gülen supporters could be buried like “dogs in the streets”.49 Abdulmetin Balkanlıoğ lu, another influential preacher and a leading member of Ismailaga Brotherhood (tariqah) (a group loyal to the AKP) implied that followers of the Gülen Movement should not have the property rights of citizens. When the government confiscated the assets of followers of the Gülen Movement, Balkanlıoğ lu supported these actions by calling them “fake believers” and “exploiters of religion”. He stated that the followers of Gülen Movement, like a leech, have soaked up the blood of the nation by collecting donations (himmet). What they soaked up have returned to the nation again. Enjoy 15 different universities, enjoy 1,000 schools, it’s all yours! Enjoy and good appetite! These are all booty! Enjoy your booty.50 Ahmet Mahmut Unlu, another popular regime-linked religious preacher and influential tariqah leader also known as “Cubbeli Ahmet Hodja”, accused Fethullah Gülen and his supporters of being apostates and cursed Gülen followers: “May Allah damn them. May Allah fill their graves with fire when they crap out. Because they have publicised some clandestine works of Muslims by blackmailing with video recordings.”51 Here, he refers to the wiretapped conversations in government that were leaked during the corruption scandal, which Erdoğ an accused the Gülen Movement of being behind. The Erdoğ anist theologian, Hayrettin Karaman, has also waged an attack against the Gülen Movement and implied that the movement has been working against state interests. He claimed that the movement was creating tribulation (fitnah) and thus, could legitimately be destroyed by the state.52 Before the referendum on the amendment of Turkey’s Constitution, in order to open the gates for an autocratic presidential system without checks and balances, Karaman, unsurprisingly, tried to divide voters based on their political preferences. He issued a fatwa-like religious opinion that voting “yes” (for a change to the Constitution, making Erdoğ an the first president in this Turkish-type presidential system) was an Islamic issue, an obligation, 178

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and that “no” voters would go to hell.53 Karaman’s logic is straightforward: it demands a strong Islamic state and considers Erdoğ an the leader to safely turn Turkey into that strong Islamist state. As Erdoğ an’s actions are painted as fulfilling Turkey’s religious destiny (to become a strong Islamic state), every action Erdoğ an orders that brings Turkey closer to this destiny becomes everyone’s religious obligation to support, including voting “yes” in the referendum.54 Any opposition to this “sacred destiny” is an action against Islam. There are many pro-AKP fatwa-givers in Turkey. Regime-supported preachers compete with each other in justifying the regime. Nurettin Yıldız; an Erdoğ anist religious preacher and leader of an Islamist movement in Turkey, publicly called for violence against Gülen followers. Yıldız is known for giving fatwas on controversial sexual topics, such as controlling sexual desires in elevators and using blankets to abstain from sexual desires. He also issued a controversial fatwa supporting child marriage. Yıldız demanded that the Diyanet issue an official fatwa commanding that instead of holding Gülen followers in prisons as punishment, either their hands and feet should be amputated or they be exiled. In a video published on July 25, Yıldız said: The Diyanet and The Religious Affairs High Commission must speak up about this [Gülen Movement] group. If it is not able speak against it, it must declare the basic criterion [to punish them]. For example, how the Qur’an punishes those involved in terror in Surah al-Ma’idah. It says “Kill them, execute them, order their opposing hands and feet be cut off or exile them.” There are no prison terms. The Religious Affairs Directorate and its high commission must direct the government [for punishing Gülen followers]. This Muslim nation will have to feed those people [Gülen followers] for more than 20 years in prison. Thousands of people will be more of a burden to the state than a town is.55 In a similar vein, an AKP deputy very close to Erdoğ an, Metin Külünk, who runs illegal Erdoğ anist transnational operations in Europe,56 said that Turkey’s top religious officials should declare supporters of the Gülen Movement to be apostates. This is a crime punishable by death under Islamist law. Külünk, who spoke to journalists in the Turkish Parliament, said he would write letters to a hundred religious scholars and ask them to declare followers of the Gülen Movement apostates.57

Fatwas for Islamist social life Alongside the political justification of the regime’s actions, fatwas have been used by Erdoğ an as a way to advance the Islamisation of social life in Turkey; challenging the secularist and Kemalist status quo. These fatwas have been very controversial, not only because they challenge the secularist fabric of the Turkish state but because some of them can be interpreted in the framework of increasing radicalisation. Misogynistic fatwas have occasionally targeted the public behaviour of practicing Muslim women. In a remarkable case, Karaman defined smoking as an obscene and indecent act for women, saying that smoking sends out the message that they have low morals and thus, conveys they are sexually available. He implied that a woman who smokes is trying to attract the attention of others: When I see a woman with a headscarf smoking in public, this is my impression: It is as if she is saying to those who are different: “Don’t mind my headscarf, don’t give up on me, I have a lot more to share with you.”58 179

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The Diyanet’s tolerant stance towards New Year celebrations has dramatically shifted and taken on an anti-Western, anti-Christian, Islamist character in recent years. In 2003, Diyanet statements about New Year’s Eve leniently described it as “part of a universal culture, like celebrations of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or birthdays”, different from religious celebrations such as Christmas. Recently, Diyanet statements have taken a less positive perspective, instead emphasizing how such celebrations alienate Muslims from their own culture. What is more, the Diyanet’s messages are becoming even more hard-line.59 It reversed the liberal 2003 fatwa on New Year celebrations, and in 2015, declared the tradition illicit. The president of Diyanet, Mehmet Görmez, claimed that the celebrations lead to a “corrupt culture..60 A popular speaker on religious issues, Cübbeli Ahmet wrote: Would you celebrate the holyday on the day in which your father’s murderer celebrates? Do not join the celebrations of the enemies of your religion and the murderers of your father! Do not celebrate Christmas! If you celebrate the holidays of non-believers, then God sends you non-believers as an enemy!61 The AKP has instrumentalised religious fatwas to challenge the established rule of law and Constitution in Turkey. Also, with these fatwas, the AKP regime has been able to both legitimise its actions and progress its Islamist social engineering process.

The impact of the Islamist populism and fatwas This increasing Islamist rhetoric, mixed with populism, victimhood politics and conspiracy theories, and backed up by fatwas, has had a tremendous impact on supporters of both the government and Erdoğ an. One notable effect is that they feel emboldened to say what they were most likely hiding before: they want to establish an Islamist system with Erdoğ an as the supreme leader. A system where the government’s acts are unquestionable to citizens and accepted as in the name of God. This impact can be seen in the radicalisation of youth who are being brainwashed by Islamist rhetoric propagated hand-in-hand with hate speech against the West, and where martyrdom and jihad are being exalted. The following story captures the powerful impact these politics are having in Turkish society. As political tension escalated ahead of the critical referendum on a switch to an executive presidency, which would make Erdoğ an a de jure dictator, Hayrettin Karaman wrote in his column on 13 April 2017 that casting a “yes” vote in the referendum is a fard: the Islamic term for a religious obligation.62 Karaman also said that the “no” voters were opponents of Islam. Vehbi Güler, a pro-AKP theologian, said on a live show on progovernment Beyaz TV, that those who vote against the amendment package are comparable to Satan, who said “no” to God’s order to bow down before the Prophet Adam. Imams of mosques also participated in the AKP’s referendum campaign. An imam in Istanbul’s Ümraniye district accused naysayers of treason and ignorance, while an imam leading a group of Turks during Umrah in Mecca labelled naysayers as infidels.63 Then, a worker in the AKP-run Istanbul municipality tweeted that if the constitutional amendments were approved, naysayers’ wives and daughters would become halal as plunder and sex slaves for “yes” voters.64 He wrote: Dear friends. The CHP [Republican People’s Party] clearly declared war and has been fighting at full force. They have spread the aggression they launched in Parliament on “yes” voters with their words and deeds. When we win the war on April 17, the wives and daughters of those who vote “no” will be halal to “yes” voters as 180

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plunder . . . In fact, it is necessary to check the laws of war in Islam. When I said “halal”, it means they can be your concubine. In any case, let us win the war first; then we can think about it . . . They declare war and we wage jihad, and we will have booty until Judgment Day.65 The day after the coup attempt, Veysel Taskin, an executive with the Trabzonspor soccer club, tweeted: “The properties and the wives of the infidel coup-plotting bastards are spoils of war.” Taskin “ended up resigning from his post following the uproar, but he wasn’t the only one to objectify women as booty.”66 In response to these ISIS-like fatwas, the University Women’s Collective, a popular feminist group, stated that the coup, the war, AKP’s backwardness or jihadist mobs . . . they all target women. They use sexual harassment against women’s [quest to] exist freely. They are enforcing their manhood by threatening to rape the wives or daughters of the declared enemy.67 Huseyin Adalan, a columnist for the pro-government Milat and Yenisoz newspapers, tweeted that the Turkish state has a religious obligation to kill people affiliated with Turkey’s Gülen Movement: “in truth, it is religiously permissible to kill those who even feel bitterness for FETO (the Gülen Movement). The honourable Turkish state should reveal its power. It is religiously permissible to slay the FETOists including their babies.”68 These are just a few examples from random people – in this case, a civil servant, a soccer club executive and a journalist, who were emboldened to speak their radicalised minds. However, they are not alone in having these views. Other individuals, groups and institutions have demonstrated a similar mentality. The Directorate of National Education in a province in Izmir issued a statement to its civil servants advising them not to practice Christian rituals for New Year celebrations. The official statement orders that Within the scope of all the activities related to the celebration of New Year in our schools and institutions, you shall not use any ritual belongs to Christianity such as Christmas, Santa Claus, decorating a Christmas Tree etc. You shall stay away from any social and cultural activity that are not associated with our national and religious values.69 When we consider that these statements were unthinkable a few years back, because those who uttered them would be stigmatised, and then compare that with the discourse since 2013, we can see how the present rhetoric propagated by the president, the government and the government-controlled media, has given the pro-AKP grassroots the courage to openly propagate more hate, polarisation and crime. Nevertheless, this is not limited to Turkey alone. Thanks to the AKP’s state transnationalism and transnational populism, its hate speech, Islamism and Islamist unofficial laws have transcended borders. We will now briefly look at this nascent phenomenon. The AKP’s political transformations paved the way for a new geopolitical imagination and assertive outreach in Turkish foreign policy. Thus, the AKP has emphasized the importance of Ottoman heritage, Turkish values and Muslim unity. It sought novel ways of reaching out to all citizens abroad, including co-ethnics, 181

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kin communities and communities with historical ties to Turkey as a result of a common Ottoman history.70 As a result, under the AKP, Turkey has expanded the transnational activities of the Diyanet and established new transnational institutions, such as Turkish cultural centres (including various branches of the Yunus Emre Foundation) in Western countries to promote Turkish culture and traditions, and to teach Islamic studies and Ottoman history. It has expanded its franchises to Turkish citizens living abroad and set up other institutions, such as the Presidency of Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB).71 The YTB has been aggressively targeting not only Sunni Turkish diasporas, but Muslims all over the world and other “related communities”, such as peoples of former Ottoman territories. For the Turkish diaspora, the YTB website states that “with its activities, our institution aims to protect the family structure, socio-cultural values of our diaspora and the transmission of them to future generations along with supporting civil society activities in these fields.”72 And for the related, sister communities, it says that the YTB “is in charge of establishment of the policies towards sister communities within the main lines of our country’s foreign policy priorities and coordinating the activities carried out by the other actors of the country operating abroad”.73 In parallel to the official government organs, the regime uses pseudo-NGOs such as UETD, TURKEN, TURGEV, Osmanen Germania and others, as unofficial, and sometimes illegal, means of its transnational mobilisation.74 The AKP government’s diaspora policy has been asymmetric in the sense that it does not follow an equal citizenship agenda, but instead focuses on Sunni Muslim Turkish identity, which is in line with its Turkish Islamist ideology. Therefore, Kurdish, Alevite, or Assyrian migrants originating from Turkey are not included in the Turkish state‒diaspora nexus.75 While selectively supporting the pro-AKP Sunni Turkish groups in the West, the AKP has deliberately excluded AKP’s opponents, such as the Kemalists, Alevis, Kurds, leftists and Gülenists. This selective diaspora strategy has further polarised the Turkish diaspora communities in the West and has worsened existing intergroup prejudices, anxieties and animosities between ethnic, religious and political groups from Turkey. The AKP’s transnational Islamist activities frequently fuel tension between themselves and Western governments. In a noteworthy case, on February 16, 2018, a sermon sent by the Diyanet to Turkey’s 90,000 mosques for Friday prayers, explained the meaning of “jihad” – a controversial topic that had previously been avoided by the Diyanet. The sermon argued that “Engaging in armed struggle for belief, existence, nation, survival and freedom is the highest level of jihad.” The sermon was issued just before the Afrin Military Operation in Syria. It begins with the explanation of the inner jihad, and finishes with the explanation of the external, armed jihad; which is underscored as the “true meaning of jihad”. The sermon also sees the Turkish Armed Forces’ Afrin Military Operation as a matter of life and death for Turkish Muslims, and infers that Muslim-majority Kurdish people living in Afrin are “enemies of Islam”.76 Similar sermons on jihad were sent to Diyanet-linked mosques abroad. The government of the Netherlands launched an investigation into this Friday sermon on jihad that was issued by the Diyanet. The Dutch Minister of Social Affairs and Employment told the press that they were taking the issue of Turkish preaching of jihad on Dutch soil very seriously and did not want the Turkish-Dutch youth to be inspired by a sermon praising holy war and martyrdom amid Turkey’s offensive on the isolated enclave of Afrin in Syria.77 There are also some early signs that the AKP’s unofficial Islamist law has been transnationalised to Turkish immigrants in different parts of the world. The following Twitter message 182

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written by Hasan Güray Özüyer, an AKP supporter living in Austria, is a remarkable case in point. Özüyer tweeted that the AKP’s male supporters were permitted to enter into polygamous marriages with the wives of imprisoned followers of Fethullah Gülen.78 Responding to a Twitter message that featured the Rabia sign, he proceed to tweet a four-finger hand gesture frequently used by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğ an, which refers to the Turkish lira hitting rock bottom (TL 4 = €1), and wrote: “That [sign] is not for the euro. It is for the wives of jailed FETÖ [Gülen Movement] supporters. It means you could marry as many as four of them.”79 Özüyer’s remarks were reminiscent of the practices of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants, who force women in the territories they occupy to be their second, third and fourth wives. Özüyer’s message clearly shows that in this Islamist legal reasoning, defeated political opponents’ wives become objectified as “war trophies”, because Islamists consider this to be a war between Muslims and all non-Muslims. Although Özüyer received a lot of criticism, which led him to close his Twitter account, other AKP loyalists argue openly for polygamy on television, in their columns, and in conferences.

Conclusion The AKP regime in Turkey has used the mosque to preach its Islamist ideology to the older generations. Through the Friday sermons, they have set the ideological agenda for Turkey’s practicing Muslims. State and religion have come to be seen as one by the preachers in mosques, and linked to the well-being and survival of both the AKP and Erdoğ an. But even more importantly, the AKP has used the school and the education system to increase the number of Islamic schools, to close schools in Turkey that don’t preach what they are told by the AKP government, and to raise an Islamist youth that believes in the AKP’s ideology, votes for the AKP, and acts as the government directs them. The “pious generation” the AKP government imagines is a generation that believes in the government’sIslamist populist narratives and anti-Western conspiracy theories, does not question the practices of the government, and defends the narratives that the government constructs. Educational organisations that operate domestically and internationally are used for the same purpose, due to being well-funded by the state and by the crony-capitalist, pro-government businesses who take the lion’s share of the public tenders in Turkey. However, the AKP has aimed to cement its Islamist populist ideology in social life beyond the mosque and the school. Government-sponsored community leaders and Muslim preachers have been issuing fatwas justifying any questionable acts in which the government and Erdoğ an’s family members are involved. This includes corruption, money laundering, demonising and torturing opponents, violating human rights (especially those of minorities), and challenging the Turkish Constitution. Using the fatwas to paint the AKP’s opponents as traitors, terrorists and heretics protects the government from criticism for its wrongdoings and legitimises its authoritarian practices in the eyes of its conservative constituencies. The impacts of this ideological shift are many. The polarisation of the population and the increase in probability of inter-group violence are only two of many consequences. Turkey and Turks have become more radical as the radical interpretation of traditional Islamic texts have made their way into the mosques and the schools. Martyrdom and jihad have been glorified; whereas critical thinking, questioning, research and academia have been demonised. Hate speech and intimidation have become an integral part of the society, and antiWestern conspiracy theories have now made their way into the mainstream public discourse. A state of war has been created to shield government officials from any responsibility in 183

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addressing these issues and to allow government officials to justify securitising anything they see fit. With the help of Turkish state transnationalism, domestic intergroup conflicts have been exported to the Turkish diaspora, which have been dragged into the transnational Islamist populism. This is preventing the pro-AKP Turkish immigrants from integrating into their host countries and sometimes leads them to clash with the host country’s values, policies, rules and laws. This chapter has analysed these developments in Turkey, but there is much more research to be done in analysing the impact of these politics on Turkish diaspora communities and other Muslim communities in the West, for example, through the state-issued Friday sermons, school curriculum and fatwas. Such analysis is beyond this chapter. However, what we can say here is that with the rise of Turkish state transnationalism and the increasing pace of investment in this field – government-funded trips for Muslims in the West to Turkey, conferences and lobbying activities – could increase, and this situation may evolve into a full-fledged transnational Islamist ideology. A vital challenge will be the spread of unofficial Erdoğ anist-Islamist laws in the West that could lead to Muslim communities in the West clashing with Western constitutional orders. This is already being seen among some Turkish diaspora groups, who have been participating in the illegal activities of profiling Erdoğ an’s opponents and making hate speech.

Notes 1 For the definition of fatwa and its place in Islamic law, see in detail, Ihsan Yilmaz (2020) “Muslims, Sacred Texts, and Laws in the Modern World,” in Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives, eds. M. Woodward and R. Lukens-Bull (Cham: Springer) 1–18, available at https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_5-1 2 Ilhan Tanir, “Erdoğ an’s ‘Uniting Ummah’ Event in New York Divides U.S. Muslim Leaders,” Ahval, July 26, 2019, available at https://ahvalnews.com/turkey-usa/erdogans-uniting-ummahevent-new-york-divides-us-muslim-leaders 3 Moffitt, Benjamin, “Transnational Populism? Representative Claims, Media and the Difficulty of Constructing a Transnational ‘People’,” Javnost – The Public 24, no. 4 (2017): 409–425. 4 Alan Gamlen, “The Emigration State and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination,” Political Geography 27, no. 8 (2008): 840–856; Christian Lamour and Renáta Varga, “The Border as a Resource in Right-wing Populist Discourse: Viktor Orbán and the Diasporas in a Multi-scalar Europe,” Journal of Borderlands Studies (2017): 335–350, and B. Fiona, “Sending States and the Making of IntraDiasporic Politics: Turkey and Its Diaspora(s),” International Migration Review 53, no. 1 (2019): 210–236. 5 Ku Sup Chin and David Smith, “A Reconceptualization of State Transnationalism: South Korea as an Illustrative Case,” Global Networks 15, no. 1 (2015): 78–98, 83; Rainer Bauböck, “Towards a political theory of migrant transnationalism,” International migration review 37, no. 3 (2003): 700–723, and Liza Mügge, “Ideologies of Nationhood in Sending-state Transnationalism: Comparing Surinam and Turkey,” Ethnicities 13, no. 3 (2013): 338–358. 6 Ihsan Yilmaz, “Potential Impact of the AKP’s Unofficial Political Islamic Law on the Radicalisation of the Turkish Muslim Youth in the West,” in Contesting the Theological Foundations of Islamism and Violent Extremism, eds. Fethi Mansouri and Zuleyha Keskin (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 48–62. 7 Zeynep Sahin Mencutek and Bahar Baser, “Mobilizing Diasporas: Insights from Turkey’s Attempts to Reach Turkish Citizens Abroad,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 20, no. 1 (2018): 86–105, and Zekiye Ayca Arkilic, Between the Homeland and Host States: Turkey’s Diaspora Policies and Immigrant Political Participation in France and Germany (PhD dissertation. University of Texas, 2016). 8 Banu Senay, Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), and Ihsan Yilmaz, “Homo LASTus and Lausannian Muslim: Two Paradoxical Social-Engineering Projects to Construct the Best and the Good Citizen in the Kemalist Panopticon,” Turkish Journal of Politics 4 no. 2 (2013): 107–126.

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Islamist populist fatwas and diasporas 9 Ihsan Yilmaz, “Islamic Populism and Creating Desirable Citizens in Erdogan’s New Turkey,” Mediterranean Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2018): 52–76. 10 Yasar Aydin, The New Turkish Diaspora Policy: Its Aims, Their Limits and the Challenges for Associations of People of Turkish Origin and Decision-makers in Germany (Berlin: SWP Research Paper, 2014), 28, and Bahar Baser, “Turkey’s Ever-Evolving Attitude-Shift Towards Engagement with Its Diaspora,” in Emigration and Diaspora Policies in the Age of Mobility, ed. Agnieszka Weinar (Cham: Springer, 2017), 221–238. 11 Mohammad Ayoob, The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 2, and Peter Mandaville, Islam and Politics (London: Routledge, 2014), 74. 12 Aaron W. Hughes, “Islam and Its History,” in Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives, ed. Gabriele Marranci (Cham: Springer, 2018), 1–16. 13 Quintan Wiktorowicz and Karl Kaltenthaler, “The Rationality of Radical Islam,” Political Science Quarterly 121, no. 2 (2006): 298. 14 Ihsan Yilmaz, “Muslim Democrats in Turkey and Egypt: Participatory Politics as a Catalyst,” Insight Turkey 11, no. 2 (2009): 93–112. 15 Ihsan Yilmaz and Galib Bashirov, “The AKP after 15 years: Emergence of Erdoganism in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 39, no. 9 (2018): 1812–1830. For AKP’s Islamist practices see in detail Yilmaz and Bashirov, “The AKP after 15 years”: 1822–1823. 16 Galib Bashirov and Ihsan Yilmaz, (2020) “The Rise of Transactionalism in International Relations: Evidence from Turkey’s Relations with the European Union,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 74, no. 2 (2020): 165–184, available at DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2019.1693495 17 Ihsan Yilmaz, Greg Barton and James Barry, “The Decline and Resurgence of Turkish Islamism: The Story of Tayyip Erdoğ an’s AKP,” Journal of Citizenship and Globalisation Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 49. 18 See in detail Yilmaz, “Homo LASTus and Lausannian Muslim.” 19 Lüküslü, Demet, “Creating a Pious Generation: Youth and Education Policies of the AKP in Turkey,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 637–649. 20 Ihsan Yilmaz and James Barry, “The AKP’s De-securitization and Re-securitization of a Minority Community: The Alevi Opening and Closing,” Turkish Studies 21, no. 2 (2020): 231–253. 21 See in detail Ihsan Yilmaz, “State, Law, Civil Society and Islam in Contemporary Turkey,” The Muslim World 95 (2005): 385–411. 22 Yavuz Baydar, “Diyanet, Turkey’s Powerful Tool for Social Engineering,” The Arab Weekly, February 4, 2018, available at https://thearabweekly.com/diyanet-turkeys-powerful-tool-socialengineering 23 Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, “Turkey’s Diyanet under AKP Rule: From Protector to Imposer of State Ideology?” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 627–628. 24 Ahmet Erdi Öztürk and Semiha Sözeri, “Diyanet as a Turkish Foreign Policy Tool: Evidence from the Netherlands and Bulgaria,” Politics and Religion 11, no. 3 (2018): 1–25. 25 John M. Beck, “Turkey’s Global Soft-Power Push Is Built on Mosques,” The Atlantic, June 1, 2001, available at www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/06/turkey-builds-mosquesabroad-global-soft-power/590449/ 26 Beck, “Turkey’s Global Soft-Power.” 27 Beck, “Turkey’s Global Soft-Power.” 28 Baydar, “Diyanet, Turkey’s Powerful Tool.” 29 See in detail Yusuf Sarfati, “How Turkey’s Slide to Authoritarianism Defies Modernization Theory,” Turkish Studies 18, no. 3 (2017): 395–415. 30 Safure Canturk, “Turkey to Open Imam-Hatip Schools Abroad,” Daily Sabah, December 15, 2014, available at www.dailysabah.com/turkey/2014/12/15/turkey-to-open-imamhatip-schools-abroad 31 Canturk, “Turkey to Open Imam-Hatip Schools Abroad.” 32 Dan Bilefsky, “In Turkey’s New Curriculum, Ataturk, Darwin and Jihad Get Face-Lifts,” New York Times, September 18, 2017, available at www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/ turkey-curriculum-darwin-jihad.html 33 Öykü Altuntaş , “Turkey’s New School Year: Jihad In, Evolution Out,” BBC News, September 18, 2017, available at www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41296714 34 Altuntaş , “Turkey’s New School Year.” 35 Samuel Osborne, “Turkish MP Says ‘No Use in Teaching Maths to a Child Who Doesn’t Know Jihad,” The Independent, July 15, 2017, available at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/

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turkish-mp-maths-teaching-jihad-child-muslim-islam-jihad-madrasa-secular-education-a7858451. html Yilmaz, Barton and Barry, “Erdogan’s AKP,” 57. Ihsan Yilmaz, Mehmet Efe Caman and Galib Bashirov, “How an Islamist Party Managed to Legitimate its Authoritarianization in the Eyes of the Secularist Opposition: The Case of Turkey,” Democratization 27, no. 2 (2020): 265–282, available at DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2019.1679772 Constanze Letsch, “Turkish PM: Corruption Probe Part of ‘Dirty Operation’ against Administration,” The Guardian, December 19, 2013, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/18/ turkish-pm-corruption-probe-dirty-operation Jason Le Miere, “Muslims and Christians at War in Europe, Turkey Warns, Lamenting ‘Clash between the Cross and the Crescent’,” Newsweek, March 17, 2017, available at www.newsweek. com/erdogan-islamchristianity-battle-europe-569792 Aykan Erdemir, “After the Coup: Backlash against Turkey’s Minorities,” The Globalist, August 22, 2016, available at www.theglobalist.com/coup-backlash-turkey-religious-minorities-conflicterdogan/ Hakkı Taş , “The 15 July Abortive Coup and Post-truth Politics in Turkey,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 8. For the securitisation of Turkey’s ethnic, religious and political minorities by the Kemalist-secularists as well as Erdoganist-Islamists, see in detail Yilmaz and Barry, “The AKP’s De-securitization and Re-securitization.” Yilmaz, “Potential Impact of the AKP’s Unofficial Political Islamic Law,” 129. Humeyra Pamuk, “Turkish Prime Minister Targeted in Second Audio Tape,” Reuters, February 27, 2014, available at www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-erdogan/turkish-prime-minister-targeted-insecond-audio-tape-idUSBREA1P0ZK20140226 Mustafa Akyol, “Erdogan Counts on Karaman’s Islamic Counsel,” Al-Monitor, January 29, 2014, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/fr/originals/2014/01/erdogan-karaman-counsel.html Yeni Safak, “Corruption is Another Theft,” December 21, 2014, available at www.yenisafak.com/ yazarlar/hayrettinkaraman/yolsuzluk-baka-hirsizlik-bakadir-2006694 Orhan Kemal Cengiz, “Fatwa Emerges in Turkish Corruption Allegations,” Al-Monitor, March 23, 2014, available at www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/03/turkey-corruption-erdogan-polit ical-islam-fatwa-elections.html Yeni Safak, “Birlik ve huzur düş manları,” September 13, 2015, available at www.yenisafak.com/ yazarlar/hayrettinkaraman/birlik-ve-huzur-dumanlari-2021751 YouTube, “Ömer Döngeloğ lu insulte Fethullah Gülen et ses sympatisants,” September 2, 2016, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8L-cF0g71Y YouTube, “Abdulmetin Balkanlıoğ lu Hoca: FETÖ’nün Ganimetlerini Tepe Tepe Kullanın,” July 25, 2016, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=732lfBQdBVI YouTube, “Allah Fetö’cülerin Kabirlerini Bile Ateş Doldursun! İ nsanların Avretlerini Açtılar!” April 13, 2017, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0JafVcXY6k Yeni Safak, “İ htiyat, tedbir, mağ duriyet,” February 5, 2017, available at www.yenisafak.com/yazar lar/hayrettinkaraman/ihtiyat-tedbir-magduriyet-2035983 Ahmet S Yayla, “Turkish Referendum: When Democracy Falls Short of a Majority,” Huffington Post, April 15, 2015, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/turkish-referendum-when-democ racy-falls-short-of-a_us_58f23649e4b048372700d8a9 Yeni Safak, “Neyi oyluyoruz?”, April 13, 2017, available at www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/hayrettin karaman/neyi-oyluyoruz-2037309 Turkish Minute, “[VIDEO] Controversial pro-Erdoğ an Cleric Demands Fatwa for State to Execute Gülen Followers,” December 27, 2016, available at www.turkishminute.com/2016/12/27/videocontroversial-pro-erdogan-cleric-demands-fatwa-state-execute-Gülen-followers/ Chase Winter, “Turkish AKP Politician Linked to Osmanen Germania Boxing Gang in Germany,” Deutsche Welle, December 14, 2017, available at www.dw.com/en/turkish-akp-politician-linked-toosmanen-germania-boxing-gang-in-germany/a-41789389; and Turkish Minute, “Wiretaps Reveal Erdoğ an Behind Protests in Berlin against Armenian Bill,” March 27, 2018, www.turkishminute. com/2018/03/27/wiretaps-reveal-erdogan-behind-protests-in-berlin-against-armenian-bill/ Stockholm Centre for Freedom, “AKP Deputy Calls on Turkey’s Religious Officials to Declare Gülen Followers Apostates,” August 1, 2017, available at https://stockholmcf.org/akp-deputy-callson-turkeys-religious-officials-to-declare-gulen-followers-apostates/

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Islamist populist fatwas and diasporas 58 Riada Asimovic Akyol, “Islamic Writer’s Comments on Smoking Leave Turkish Women Fuming,” Al-Monitor, August 8, 2017, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/08/islamic-scholar-questionsmorality-of-women-who-smoke.html 59 Riada Asimovic Akyol, “Turkey’s Religious Conservatives Bemoan ‘Dangers of Christmas’,” December 28, 2015, available at www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/12/turkey-new-yearcelebrations-perennial-problem.html 60 Ozgur Korkmaz, “Happy ‘Illicit’ New Year,” Daily News, January 1, 2015, available at, www. hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/ozgur-korkmaz/happy-illicit-new-year-76336 61 T24, “Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca’dan Reina’daki saldırı için mesaj,” January 1, 2017, available at, http://t24.com.tr/haber/cubbeli-ahmet-hocadan-reinadaki-saldiri-icin-mesaj,380536 62 Yeni Safak, “Neyi oyluyoruz?” 63 Turkish Minute, “Istanbul Municipality Worker: Naysayers’ Wives, Daughters Permitted as Sex Slaves,” 13 April 2017, available at www.turkishminute.com/2017/04/13/istanbul-municipality-workernaysayers-wives-daughters-permitted-as-sex-slaves/ 64 Turkish Minute, “Istanbul Municipality Worker.” 65 Turkish Minute, “Istanbul Municipality Worker,” emphasis added. 66 Pinar Ersoy, “Women Are Being Silenced in Turkey’s Crackdown,” GlobalPost, 20 July 2016, available at www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/07/20/women-being-silenced-turkeyscrackdown/87329486/ 67 Pinar Ersoy, “Women Are Being Silenced.” 68 Turkey Purge, “Pro-gov’t Columnist: Killing Gülenists, Even Their Babies, a Religious Obligation,” July 8, 2017, available at https://turkeypurge.com/pro-govt-columnist-killing-Gülenistseven-their-babies-a-religious-obligation 69 Diken, “Milli eğ itim müdüründen ‘yılbaş ı talimatı’: Hristiyanlık ritüellerinden kaçının,” December 20, 2017, available at www.diken.com.tr/milli-egitim-mudurunden-yilbasi-talimati-hristiyanlikrituellerinden-kacinin/ 70 Mencutek and Baser, “Mobilizing Diasporas,” 93. 71 Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, “Institution,” available at www.ytb.gov. tr/en/corporate/institution 72 Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, “General Information,” available at www. ytb.gov.tr/en/abroad-citizens/general-information-2 73 Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, “Programs,” available at www.ytb.gov.tr/ en/sister-communities/programs 74 Oliver Pieper, “Germany and the Long Arm of Turkey’s AKP,” Deutsche Welle, May 18, 2018, available at www.dw.com/en/germany-and-the-long-arm-of-turkeys-akp/a-43846127 75 Mencutek and Baser, “Mobilizing Diasporas,” 100. 76 Din Hizmetleri Genel Müdürlüğ ü, “Cuma Hutbeleri,” available at www2.diyanet.gov.tr/DinHiz metleriGenelMudurlugu/sayfalar/hutbelerlistesi.aspx 77 Stockholm Centre for Freedom, “Turkey’s Official Friday Sermon Glorifies ‘Armed Jihad’,” February 16, 2018, available at https://stockholmcf.org/turkeys-official-friday-sermon-glorifies-armed-jihad/ 78 Turkish Minute, “Erdogan Men Advised to Have Polygamous Marriages with Wives of Jailed Gülen Followers,” January 13, 2017, available at https://hizmetnews.com/21042/erdogan-menadvised-polygamous-marriages-wives-jailed-Gülen-followers/ 79 Turkish Minute, “Erdogan Men Advised to Have Polygamous Marriages.”

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15 FACEBOOK AND AGENCY Iranian women’s resistance and reaffirmation Shahin Gerami

Introduction Since its establishment in 1980, the Islamic Republic of Iran has pursued a systematic pattern of replacing secular social and cultural constructs with Islamic alternatives. This restructuring model is clearly and intentionally gendered. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and cultural field, one can observe patterns of gender segregation as the preferred code of conduct for the state to regulate its citizens’ lives. Women and urban youths’ opposition to this restructuring is well documented. Since its establishment as the Republic, young women have displayed their opposition to the regime’s policies through a number of cultural fields.1 The most common of these is manipulation of the state-mandated dress code for women. Young women who want to exercise their self-expression manipulate the Islamic Republic’s complex dress code of hijab Islami (Islamic veils) by playing with the veil’s size, color, texture, or accessorizing. An extension of this form of visual resistance to the Islamic state norms is the use of cyberspace, particularly Facebook, whereby these women engage in a cyberfeminism model. I have designed an interactive/interpretive research plan to measure Iranian women’s expression of agency, specifically on Facebook for female subjects in Iran.

Theoretical model The narrative of cyber feminism and construction of gendered subversive discourse provides tools to discern women’s expression of agency. When applying literature of cyber empowerment to women of the South, we need to consider the nuanced ways women subvert state and family patriarchy. Facebook as a virtual habitus allows some anonymity from outsiders while allowing intimacy for identity construction within groups.2 I have mapped young Iranian women’s use of Facebook to subvert gender codes of both the Islamic Republic and patriarchal family structures.

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) A growing body of scholarship and research on the use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and gender arrangements suggests that women in some national and political contexts find this a potent vehicle to express their resistance. Boyd and Ellison define 188

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social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) to articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) to view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.3 Facebook has remained one of the most dominant networks due to its worldwide reach, easy access, and multiple uses (group/individual). Studies conducted of Facebook users and their social contexts do offer enticing data, albeit with challenging privacy issues.4 Bourdieu’s notion of social capital has been used to measure gender distinction in the use of online connections to build or enhance social capital. Bourdieu and Wacquant define social capital as “the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”5 Putnam elaborates by distinguishing between “bridging” and “bonding” networks; where bridging refers to “weak ties” i.e., a loose utilitarian connection, such as creating or enhancing economic opportunities, and “bonding capital” is marked by emotional connections in a closely knit group.6 Many studies of social capital have sought to measure the effect of social categories of race, gender, etc. on the formation of these networks. Tufekci measured the connection between social capital and popular social media applications as it relates to gender7 and found that women gain bonding social capital from SNSs more than men.8 Similarly, Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe measured the effect of intensity of Facebook use on bonding social capital and life satisfaction.9 Of interest is their finding of “the interaction between bridging social capital and subjective well-being measures,”10 specifically that increased use was associated with increased self-esteem and increased college life satisfaction. Of particular interest to our research is Homero, Nakwon, and Sebastián’s exploration into the relationship between participation in social media and political participation.11 They suggest that by increasing members’ social capital “SNSs can foster norms of reciprocity and trust and, therefore, create opportunities for civic and political engagement.”12 This precept is based on Bourdieu’s cultural theorizing that cultural similarities contribute to social boundaries and their maintenance or manipulation.13 Additionally, understanding the extent and elasticity of social boundaries creates opportunities for agency for those participating in online interactions.

Habitus, embodiment, and agency Feminist articulation of Bourdieu has been contradictory, as one can find elements of his model antagonistic to feminist epistemology.14 Nevertheless, the analytical tools of embodiment and agency allow us to understand women’s lived lives, particularly in the Iranian context.

Habitus Bourdieu’s construction of habitus and social fields have been incorporated and problematized by a feminist approach.15 Bourdieu’s discourse of social agents and their role performance within habitus lends itself to women’s articulation of diverse agencies. Habitus is generally understood as containing a hierarchical social body of dispositions internalized through social interactions. These social dispositions are closely linked to the structural conditions that produced them. This process links bodily actions, with subjective interest such 189

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as taste, receptivity, values, and similar cultural behaviors. As Anthony King puts it “The habitus comprises perceptual structures and embodied dispositions which organize the way individuals see the world and act in it.”16 Feminist interrogation of Bourdieu has proven applicable to a diversity of habitus and fields. For Muslims of both sexes to down cast their eyes when talking to the opposite sex is an example of embodiment, confirming the cultural codes of conduct. These behaviors occur in a structural environment that is internalized by actors, but understood to be fluid in certain social conditions. Thus actors may subvert, challenge, or even change these codes of conduct or even the structure that requires them. An example of this subversion of social codes is happening in Iran and some other Muslim countries, where bodily contact between unmarried members of opposite sex is strictly forbidden.17 Islamic Republic laws require extreme gender segregation and prohibit any physical contact between the sexes, including displays of affection between mother and son in films. Because unmarried men and women holding hands in public is forbidden, young people flaunt these restrictions simply as a kind of bravado. I have observed, and some documentaries have recorded,18 the hugging and kissing of opposite sex friends among “Yuppies” (Young Urban Professionals) in Tehran and other major cities. In 2013, in an underground, invitation-only fashion show, I observed young and privileged Iranians of both sexes greeting each other with long hugs and kisses. Therefore it is this breaking or subverting the codes of conduct that represent a form of agency by actors in a certain social field. Facebook has become such a field of agency for these young Iranians.

Agency Understanding habitus leads us to the disposition of agents and their embodiment. King observes that “social agents are ‘virtuosos’ who are not dominated by some abstract social principles, but who know the script so well that they can elaborate and improvise upon the themes.”19 The codes of conduct for actors are based on social agreement. It is others as individuals or groups that make an action acceptable or inappropriate.20 I will demonstrate in the case of Golshifteh Farahani, an Iranian actor, and her nude pictures, how women’s and some men’s reactions changed the discourse about her right, turning the debate around back to the authorities’ absurd hijab codes. Social agents consistently test the rigidity of the structural constraints and evaluate the cost and rewards of their acts of agency.21 Bourdieu’s discussion of honor among the Kabyle is intrinsically useful for our understanding of Iranian women’s construction of agency. The collective group’s approval marks the individual’s action as compliance or resistance. King elaborates that group agreement about rules of conduct are negotiated and temporary, because “there is an openness to practice.”22

Embodiment Members embody social codes or cultural dispositions in a variety of expressions, from formal language to physical and emotional expressions. These cultural dispositions then are inscribed in bodily decorum, i.e., cultural embodiment of the habitus. Bodily conduct is the essential presentation of social life. In his “practical theory,” Bourdieu lays the foundation of how individuals embody the structure of the habitus. His repeated notion of the intersubjectivity of rules and his emphasis on negotiation among agents, provides an opening for locating individual embodiment of the habitus and negotiation of the embodiment decorum. 190

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Many religious doctrines prescribe and enforce gendered bodily codes. Those required of women involve more detailed and stringent bodily decorum.23 In a report of Facebook use by Saudi women, Al-Fawaz reports that many post images of parts of their body, like their hands or the back of their necks on anonymous Facebook pages.24 In a clear act of agency in 2013, a Facebook page “Saudi-Women-To-Drive” openly challenged the Kingdom’s rules of prohibiting women from driving cars. Another example of how agents challenge the cultural codes of embodiment is the Facebook page of “Stealthy Freedom,” where Iranian women post their unveiled pictures and post messages. Later, the “My Stealthy Homosexual Freedom” Facebook page was created by the queer community.25

Iranian women’s habitus and embodiment Extensive work has been done on the designated gender scripts in Iranian society, both in public and private domains. Gender codes are an important element of citizenship in the Islamic Republic (IR). Political factions use their support of a strict gender script in public and private domains as a testament to their loyalty to the revolutionary spirit and its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. The same gender and sexuality script is used by American politicians in debating issues of abortion, gay rights, or contraceptive use. The irony surrounding this discussion is similar to that of Iranian political humor widely spread through SNSs mocking the state’s code of wearing the hijab and its enforcement. The Islamic Republic maintains a large state bureaucracy charged with enforcing women’s compliance with the hijab, which includes codes of public decorum for men as well. Among the state’s tactics are the use of surveillance of public spaces to ensure citizens do not violate the rules of gender segregation. Cyberspace is another domain of cat-and-mouse skirmishes between citizens, especially young people, and the state. Facebook has become the second most valuable tool after SMS (texting) to express and show resistance to the state. Though there is tough online surveillance of social networks and random shutdown of all Internet connections, which can occur without any warning, Iranian youths have remained quite savvy in their use of SNSs. During fieldwork in Iran in the springs of 2012 and 2013, I tried many times to access my Facebook page but was redirected to http://peyvandha.ir/, a government search engine aspiring to replace Western search engines. My hosts successfully accessed their pages because their pages were connected to a proxy site. The Iranian government uses web-filter technology to block users accessing banned websites. Iranians use proxy servers to access the banned sites and the state then adds those proxy sites to its filter, leading users to find new proxies! These restrictions affect those in provinces and outside the major cities more than those in urban settings. Within the structural rigidity of gender habitus in Iranian society, I have investigated identity performance and its variation between offline and online habitus. In the following research, I have documented how Iranian women move between these fields.

Research design Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have created opportunities for interconnected fields of activism and opposition. They are utilized by young Iranian women to: • •

Challenge states’ structural and cultural fields of gender segregation Subvert patriarchal control of female body under codes of chastity and modesty enforced by the state apparatus and the family 191

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• •

Modify embodiment of habitus in both fields Connect and enhance the social capital of extended family from inside the boundaries of Iran to those in diaspora contexts.

Methodology Feminist epistemology has challenged positivistic research in social sciences. We have further learned that fixed research hypotheses and operationalization of variables, though suitable for some research questions, may not be suitable for interpretive techniques. Participants are collaborators who help the researcher understand and document their lived lives. Originally, I sought the perspective of a focus group of women in Iran and Canada. They remain advisers for the interpretive content analysis of Facebook by a larger group of participants. Research participants also assisted in recommending friends and acquaintances to join the research project, in order to expand it considerably. Originally, I created a Facebook page for the project and requested assistance from Iranian student organizations in local colleges in the northern California Bay Area to announce and post links on their Facebook pages. Although many befriended this new page, it failed to generate the kinds of responses that I had anticipated. Meanwhile, many joined my own personal Facebook page. Through the snowball technique, the number of “friends” who allowed me to analyse their page reached 183. As the research progressed, the reality of off- and online habitus in the Islamic Republic necessitated a design modification. Consequently, I modified the model to improve measurement and analysis.

Focus group During the fall of 2012, I had an opportunity to interview 17 Iranian women in Toronto and San Jose, California, who were either refugees or recent immigrants, who had been out of Iran for less than two years. They provided valuable assistance in honing the research design. For instance, they revealed that some girls from religious/ devout (mazhabi) families have more than one Facebook page, that serve different purposes.26 These women asked their acquaintances for permission and I was allowed to review 16 such multiple Facebook owners’ pages. The focus group became expert advisers in discerning subtle symbolic and hidden meanings of content. I have reviewed (befriended) over 183 women/girls from secular families and 34 women from religious families. Altogether, in 2012–14, a sample of 168 women remained active participants in the analysis. The content analysis of Facebook pages revealed two aspects of agency of subversive language and embodiment.

Coding and documenting The content of users’ pages is divided into two main categories of: 1. 2.

Agency of subversive language, which broadly includes all forms of expressions through words, symbols, signs, and characters, and Agency of embodiment, which is inclusive of pictures, visual images, logos, cartoons, and any other symbol that cannot be interpreted as written words. These are analytical categories for ease of coding because SNS content reveals a mixed mediums of images, symbols, and text. I used the main point of a posting as the basis of coding. For

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example, when Google changed the naming of the Persian Gulf to the Arab Gulf, it became a hot topic of Facebook postings. For our purpose if the image of the Gulf was prominent, it was coded as embodiment. To appreciate the virtual reality of Iranian women, one needs to consider the very global structure and precarious conditions in which Iranian people live. The economic and financial sanctions against Iran, enacted by UN Resolution 1696 since 2006, have imposed extreme economic hardship on families.27 Iran’s unique situation in current global hostilities affects daily routines of individual Iranians.28 Therefore the sanctions and the issue of nuclear agreement were routinely addressed on SNSs during the fieldwork.

Results A composite picture This is a composite profile of the participants who allowed me to access their Facebook page for this research and does not represent any one person in particular. Farah is a 24-year-old graduate of art and literature from the University of Tehran, employed in a state agency as technical writer. She has listed her movie interests, American films like “Twilight,” “Notebook,” and Iranian movies such as “A Separation,” “About Eli,” etc. Her interest in music includes mostly Iranian singers but a few international names like Bob Marley, Madonna, and Beyoncé are listed as well. She has a few pictures of her and her family in which she and her sisters are unveiled. She writes about herself “people say I am kind, uncomplicated, have a good sense of humor, but serious when I need to be. I get angry but I am playful, I can climb straight wall! (expression of tom-boyishness)”, (author’s translation). There are Google images and links to Persian websites. There are texts (slogans) and images that convey an implicit opposition to the regime, such as this one: “They have buried us in dust; let’s go play in mud to complete the indignity.” The “mud” refers to the stifling social environment in Iran. There are many affectionate messages exchanged between Farah and her friends, all female; such as “my beloved why are you sad? I cannot bear the thought of you hurting! Please don’t cry. He is just a boy!” This exchange had 18 “likes” punctuated with stars and hearts. She has about seventyfriends at home and abroad.

Agency of subversive language: Bonding, affirmation, and opposition Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the regime’s leaders have pursued a policy of Arabization of the Farsi language and the Islamization of the Iranian culture. During the Cultural Revolution (1980–87), the regime sought to purge all mediums of cultural discourse – from media to educational system – from Persian cultural heritage by infusing official language with Arabic grammar and vocabulary. Ancient Persian culture was defamed, ignored, or outright banned. The Persian New Year celebration of Norouz – the first day of spring – dating back to Zoroastrian heritage has been downplayed, while Islamic rituals, ceremonies, and holidays have received the support of the state. The Islamization of Iran’s socio-cultural structure affected woman more than other social groups. The effect of legal and economic Islamization is well documented.29 But it is not surprising that the children of the revolution, now in their thirties, have looked back in an attempt to revive and celebrate Persian culture over the state-imposed Islamic one. SNSs have become potent vehicles for this discourse of resistant, refusal, and authentication of “Iranianness.”

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Subversive expression – written texts As stated earlier, Facebook postings are fluid and text formats are diverse and need careful examination and interpretation. Iranians at home and in the diaspora write in phonetic Persian, often using a combination of the Farsi alphabet and English, thus popularly designated as “Finglish.” The language used by women is emotionally expressive and often uses an exaggerated vocabulary of affirmation and emotional bonding. For example, the word eshgh in Farsi, which refers to heterosexual love and often mystic love for the beloved, is now used in expressions of strong affection among women for their female friends. However, this should not be seen as expression of lesbian love. Due to the restriction of contact between the sexes, these exaggerated expressions are oriented toward other female friends. This is almost non-existent among men, either in Iran or the diaspora. The Iranian women in diaspora use the word eshgh sparingly.

Bonding (affection, affirmation) The comments on others’ postings are often very affirming and reveal great affection and enthusiasm. Women express affection for each other against all adversaries, and sadness is often expressed in melancholy romantic languages. Women also support one another in hints regarding relationship difficulties, as postings of personal/relationship problems are relatively rare. Love poems receive the most responses from younger women often through expressions such as “talk about my heart, I love you!” or “I miss you my love” with many hearts and sad face emojis ☹. Older women often have content related to marriage or self-affirmation about enjoying ‘lahze, hal (“the time is now”) and taking care of oneself. I have not come across any negative comments about friends, though negative evaluation of celebrities or issues abound. Many examples of bonding are expressed as gender jokes. This kind of commentary was circulating in many married or single women’s pages: “Hey sis, what is difference the between an accident and a catastrophe? What? Accident is when you push your mother-in-law into the pool! Catastrophe is when she can swim and comes out of the pool!!” Often it is hard to gauge if a girl has a boyfriend, but ideas expressed of lost love and despair might mean relationship difficulty. It is this enthusiastic though hesitant preoccupation of online habitus, combined with emotional support, that can express supportive agency of social capital. On the other hand, men use the language of affirmation sparingly. This is consistent with Tufekci’s findings that women gain bonding social capital from SNSs more than men.30 In 1936, the monarch Reza Shah banned the hijab from public space: soldiers and police would tear the hijab from women’s heads. After 1979, the IRI made hijab Islami mandatory for all females nine years and older. Women are persecuted and prosecuted for disobeying hijab codes. This posting on a young man’s page received a lot of commentary and mocking from his male friends, while women used the emotional language of support:

To the ladies; Reza Shah wanted to remove your veil, you refused; Now they want to veil you, you refuse. OMG! Women are the most stubborn creatures in the world!! To this post, women’s comments were: “LOL! If we like it we wear it! Get used to it!” 194

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The language of opposition and resistance There is a clear contrast between those in Iran and those in the diaspora regarding open expressions of opposition to the regime. There are numerous texts, stories, and jokes that hint at political humor in Iranians’ Facebook pages. In the following post, the writer expresses both affection and political subversion: “I am a woman, free; Still breathing; Don’t stifle my breath; and put a veil of ownership on my head. I am here, standing.” This message had 36 “likes” and 68 comments, all very supportive, except for a man who jokingly tried to get a rise from the community to support his view that “men are the victims.” Another male responded by writing “bro, I want to say something, that’s bull—t.” The following refers to the culture of martyr worship which was promoted after the Revolution and during the eight-year war with Iraq. Nowadays, “martyrdom” has become a punch line for jokes and insults. For the occasion of Father’s Day, one woman wrote:

“Guys whatever you thought; You are ripped off this year!! This year there is nothing for you, not even shorts and socks! This year, Father’s Day falls on the memorial of Imam Khomeini [leader of the revolution] Sooo, Father’s Day is martyred!” Mottahedeh in her book #Iranelection provides detailed coverage of how Iranians provided up-to-the-minute coverage of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran.31 Women were active in spreading oppositional voices from one outlet to another. Additionally, new apps have created the cultural field for the spreading of explicit erotic, sexual jokes, and images among groups. This is another example of subversive language against codes of modesty.32 There are feminist messages circulating in blogs, and on websites and Facebook pages. One of my favorite recent postings, that appeared on many Facebook pages, is an image circulated as “The Poster of the Century,” stating: “IF YOU ARE A MAN, COME TO IRAN AND BE A WOMAN!” Some of the postings have a known author, while others are anonymous. The prose of I am A Feminist by Shirin Ebadi, Iranian Noble Peace Prize winner was posted on many Facebook pages. Of this sample, 21 females and three males responded. Then there is this posting about violence against women – Invisible Wound: Violence is not a broken nose, nor a broken tooth, and neither a black eye; violence of a humiliation, harm of a look, gaze of a man on a woman’s chest when she is bending to offer him tea, stare of a brother at a sister when she laughs aloud in a gathering . . .. The following is a comment by a man: “The opposite is true too. It is not only a man who can harm by his gaze, a woman can harm a man by her behavior.” This is a clear example of subversive language agency. In the relative safety of the SNS habitus, young women and men can “improvise” or “manipulate” the restriction of expression. The Islamic Republic’s strict gender codes are internalized by both sexes. Facebook postings reflect how the sexes negotiate their embodiment of these gender codes and the extent to which they can push the limits while still enjoying the group’s support.

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Political humor While from outside, Iran seems to embody a stifling social system, the state has not been able to crush the ingenious ways that people express opposition to it. A vibrant culture of political humor in Iran has further flourished due to the accessibility of SNS mediums. Indeed, the post-Islamic Republic ban on many mass media outlets can be credited with creating a vibrant, underground satirical discourse in all levels of Iranian society. Babak Rahimi and others have presented the modern evolution of political humor in Iran.33 During the 1980s, with a few magazine and newspaper outlets being published, either openly or underground, an oral tradition emerged. It then rapidly spread during the Cultural Revolution in what became known as the “cabby jokes.” One was often treated to the latest political or ethnic humor while being transported in one of Tehran’s many taxis. The new SNS technology brought the two mediums of oral and written venues together and sped up the process of communicating with others. This posting pokes fun at the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy based on its negative attitudes toward the US and Israel: “In Friday prayer, this Imam dude yells: ‘The message of our revolution is peace and friendship with ALL!’ The followers chant: ‘Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to the opposition!!’” This had 24 likes and eight comments with similar jokes. Another wrote this in English: In Tehran’s metro stations a poster says “Our beloved Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] was so caring that when he would get up at the middle of night to pray, he walked slowly not to wake up his family. Bro! You would think when we get up to pee in the middle of the night, we play saxophone??LOL! The Revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, is still revered by many and is the symbol of the Revolution, but he is not safe from becoming the butt of many jokes on SNS. This posting about the idiotic surveillance and at times cruelty of the Morality Squads also received a lot of attention: “Gals who wear mini hijab tonic with tights will be headshot by Morality Snipers! Hey!! You going out; put a helmet on! GOD! What a mess!!” This is in reference to the fashion of the day, circa 2013, in which the hijab consisted of a short, abovethe-knee long-sleeve dress or a variation on a men’s Oxford shirt with Capri (mid-calf length) pants and a small head scarf, and completed with various accessories – sunglasses, jewelry, smart phone – and open-toed sandals in summer and stylish boots in winter. The whole ensemble goes against the state-mandated dress code, which calls for the regime’s squads of young men and women patrolling the street to enforce the morality codes, from simple advice and admonition to fines. This widespread joke, a play on words, was on many Facebook profiles:

Have you noticed what happens when you type ^^^ 3 times? Hee he (funny face)! So What? You ask my sister? Keep your hijab!! I get mad if you ask how’s this sh—t related? This widespread joke, a play on words, comparing two foods, dolmas and meat balls. The narrative goes:

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Do you know why dolmas are more delicious than meat balls? Because dolmas have hijab but meatballs are naked!!! Sister; obey hijab, love!! The SNS language that has emerged globally has allowed Iranian youth to develop their vocabulary of expression and identity construction. During the springs of 2012 and 2013, I collected a mere 213 of these composite expressions casually. By their account, and as many linguists may attest, it is almost impossible to document the fast-paced evolving languages of SNSs. In restrictive social systems, these mediums of expressions are created and transmitted and often work at the same speed of the new technology. They become obsolete with the same speed with which their carrier technology is outdated.

Personal and political expressions Cultural codes frown upon public displays of emotional expression between opposite sexes, except for married couples. These seemingly restrictive cultural codes lend a refreshing feature that opens a venue for other expressions on young Iranians’ Facebook pages. A cursory comparison with American women’s Facebook pages of the same age, where many relational difficulties are expressed in colorful language, reveals that Iranian women use their Facebook for other expressions. The following from a senior in high school refers to how changing of time and progress has left Iran behind. It starts with Zakaria Razi, Persian polymath and physician (c. 854 AD) to Steve Jobs, highlighting how patriarchy and superstition prevails:

Zakaria Razi came and is gone! Einstein came and is gone! Freud came and left! Steve Jobs, father of new technology came and now gone! But in my neighborhood; a mother burns incense; a father sacrifices a sheep; a girl seeks psychic advice for the right husband with the right birthday . . . A man calls his wife whore, because of her minimal veil . . . they kill children accused of blasphemy! Is backwardness in my blood?

Agency of embodiment Images can be classified into three broad categories: fun images, personal pictures, and political/agency images.

Fun images I classified “fun” as: cartoons, images of make-up, American restaurants, or fashion-related items. The favorite food/beverage vendor is Starbucks which, due to sanctions, has no branch in Iran! Favorite American symbols abound: vampires, Disney, Vans shoes, Apple products, American Idol, How I Met Your Mother, Harry Potter, and other television shows and movies. American celebrities have their place, from Bob Marley to Meryl Streep and Justin Bieber. In sports, football (soccer) images are plentiful. The same level of 197

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representation exists in the posting of Iranian images of food, historical sites, movies, television series, books, and celebrities. The actors of the Oscar-winning Best Foreign-language movie, A Separation (2012), take the top place of images of Iranian celebrities. Other popular images are Iranian designer products like Donya Design and Iranian singers such as Darya Dadvar and Pyam Shams, just to name a few.

Personal pictures A review of pictures provided some information regarding the freedom to post and the response to comments and the number of “likes” a posting receives. Overall, if the woman was employed or her family had a prominent state affiliation, the pictures were limited and women were veiled. In the focus-group interviews of professional women of Tehran and Toronto, there appeared to be a consensus regarding interpretation of photos. In two focus groups in Tehran consisting of 18 women, they agreed that they only post pictures of family when all the women were either veiled or unveiled. If there were women who were regularly veiled, no one posted group pictures of these women when they were unveiled. Women related mishaps of unveiled pictures posted on Facebook that caused family difficulties for them. This is my personal story, but I have recorded approximately forty such events related by others. In 2013, my older daughter was maid of honor in a wedding. She later posted on her Facebook page some pictures from her smartphone. The bride’s mother called me immediately, asking my daughter to remove the pictures. The in-laws of the bride and her sister in Iran were either devout or had a family culture that knew young women abroad were unveiled, but never acknowledged it. In other words, there is a code of “don’t ask, don’t tell” of hijab among Iranian families.

Personal political The media story of a young actress who posed nude for a French magazine can shed light on the discourse of embodiment for young Iranian women. Golshifteh Farahani’s story became a potent symbol of resistance, family honor, cultural body codes, and identity construction. The daughter of two prominent Iranian film-makers, Farahani had immigrated to France. The nude picture of her covering her breasts with her hands appeared in Madame le Figaro and then on her Facebook page. This caused quite a controversy both in Iran and in Iranian diasporic communities. Many of her supporters saw this act as a challenge to the Islamic Republic regime’s proscribed view of women as chaste, modest, and non-public. Those who opposed it perceived it as against the tenets of modesty in the Iranian cultural tradition. Farahani’s parents, who live in Iran and have faced the regime’s wrath, claim that the photo is a fake, and that their daughter actually lives in India. This disclaimer indicates the actress’s parents’ discomfort with their daughter’s nude picture, regardless of the regime’s reaction. This episode captured the public’s imagination and became a controversial and potent reminder of how Iranian social boundaries are in flux.34 This posting is a response to those who condemned Farahani for her action: They [religious leaders] didn’t let you gentlemen talk for a century; you don’t amount to nothing, losers!! I can’t even write what they did or didn’t do; cause of [self-censorship].

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You have this stupid thing and call it HONOR! Your HONOR was silent at the face of those indignities [author’s explanation]; but NOW just a bare upper body; NOW, their honor and dignity is shattered . . . [angry emoji]. This posting had 48 likes and various supportive comments. In 2014, Ms. Farahani posed naked once more. This time, the online comments have been overwhelmingly positive. In her reaction to comments, she is quoted to have said: “Someone got naked, Iran woke up, Iran robbed naked; no one woke up.” The implicit message is that when Iran was robbed naked, no one woke up to object, but the image of a nude woman woke up everyone. The mute opposition to this new picture and supporting comments from some Iranian celebrities confirm the Bourdieuian negotiation process. The story of Golshifteh Farahani and her nude picture on her Facebook is an excellent example of identity construction and the interconnectivity of habitus. A vast array of images falls under this category of political resistance. To begin with, pictures of artists, either dead or alive, who are under the regime’s surveying eye. Images displayed of writers like the celebrated but deceased poet, Forough Farkhozad; Zahra Rahnvard, a female activist and wife of the opposition leader, Moussavi; film-maker Jafar Panahi who has been imprisoned; film-makers Leila Hatami and Tahmineh Milani, etc. – all out of favor with the regime – reflect a sense of opposition. However, one needs to be cautious in reading signs of resistance in postings where the owner may not have intended an oppositional stance. The Islamic Republic is very vigilant in tracing and removing any sign of opposition, but it cannot control the culture of opposition circulating, reproducing, and regenerating various expressions of disapproval in all sites. For example, various symbols of ancient Persian culture and historical sites, such as Cyrus the Great’s Cylinder or Persepolis, are often posted on SNSs. These reflect a preference for, and pride, in ancient Persian culture which is disdained by many Islamic leaders. In May 2012, Google removed the name of the Persian Gulf on Google maps, changing it to the Arab Gulf.35 This has become a cause célèbre for Iranians seeking to remedy Iran’s diminishing global prestige. One sees many pictures of the Gulf with “Persian” scrawled across it on Facebook posts. This is part of a posting about the Arabization of Iranian identity:

I am not Iranian I long to be Iranian; I am not Iranian because my name is Arabic; I am not Iranian because when I was born they recited Azan [call to prayers recited in the newborn’s ears] in my ear; The first day of school my parent walked me under the Qur’an [a tradition for safe return]; I am not Iranian because at school they taught me Muhammad’s codes, not Noble thoughts, Noble speak, and Noble conducts [of Zoroastrianism – an ancient Persian faith]; I am not Iranian because when I married it was in Arabic tradition and in Arabic language . . . Many comments responding to this post included images of the Persian Gulf. Mottahedeh has recorded many slogans chanted during the Green Revolution such as “NeJate ma aryastdeen as sissast Jodas” (We are Aryan race, religion, and politics don’t mix), which is the denial of racial kinship with Arab world.36

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Comparing home and diaspora When comparing women in the context of Iran and the diaspora, one notices the elements of embodiment and habitus differently through subtle signs. Overall, the online habitus of homeland is hesitant and cautious; though it can be daring at times. The long prose messages expressing opposition or affirmation are more frequent on Facebook postings by women in Iran than by Iranian women in the diaspora. The sample of diaspora women’s Facebook pages often have more pictures, and more frequent status updates about travel, restaurants, and social gatherings. This can be due to both ease of access and more activities for those living abroad as well as the absence of a fear of surveillance by the state. Furthermore, the language of those in diaspora varied based on the intended audience. When users wrote to their friends abroad, they wrote in English, regardless of the nationality of the audience. When a text was intended for an audience in Iran, they would write in phonetic Persian or use the Persian alphabet. Additionally, the content of the messages of users abroad was more diverse with the postings related to work or other social issues, while I did not see any work-related text in Facebook users’ posts in Iran, though some listed their employment in their status.

Devout sample My focus group helped to identify mazhabi (devout/religious) women in Iran, but they did not mark any of the Facebook users in diaspora as religious. For those who had more than one Facebook page, I marked their open Facebook as “out” and the other as “secret”! In their “out” page, their profile picture was veiled, unlike the picture on their “secret” page. Their “out” page had some family pictures, often mixed gender, all women veiled. If men are blood relatives, women could have been unveiled in the party, but would wear their hijab for picture-taking, as it may be viewed by other men, na mahrams. Their female friends were all veiled. Overall, these pages had less textual information and images than those of secular women of the same age. Some women used their baby pictures for their status picture. Their updates were also less frequent and if they were married, their husbands were among their Facebook friends. Their list of friends had fewer members and they had a lower number of log-ins. Any new picture was removed more quickly than on secular women’s Facebook pages. Since they had a smaller number of friends and their postings were calculated, their agency of resistance and embodiment appeared tenuous. For example, they used female saints as symbols of opposition, or a tame form of feminism such as an image of Zainab, the Prophet’s granddaughter,37 who was referred to as a role model by twelve of the devout members. Interestingly, these images, posted on their “out” Facebook page, were absent from their “secret” Facebook page. They also had more “likes” on their “secret” pages. Though they allowed me to compare their friends on both pages, none had shared friends on their dual pages. According to the focus group, though friends may know about one’s secret page, to be safe they do not cross-list friends between the two pages. This was a very small group and throughout the years since the start of this project in 2012, I have met 13 of the members in Iran and abroad. Three members who now reside in Canada are the embodiment of secularism, not veiled and embracing Western feminine symbols of make-up and fashion. A symbol of showing religious devotion is the wearing of strict Islamic hijab, known as hijab Islami. In an interview in Toronto, in August 2014, these women joked about wearing their hijab Islami only when they are in Iran.

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Update This research was conducted in 2012–14. Since then, the spread of technological changes and events have changed some of the conditions of these observations. The following is a short summary. The majority of the members in this sample still have an open Facebook page though not as active as before. Two members informed me that they had to close their page because of occupational considerations. New apps such as Telegram, Viber, Instagram, and WhatsApp have replaced Facebook as a major field of interconnection. These are easier to update and can be more easily closed to outsiders. My observation of two apps users on Viber and Telegram confirm the agency of bonding and resistance. In a study of the Viber app user, I examined posting on groups of friends and families. Their use confirmed expression of opposition to the Republic’s policies. Additionally, there were daily examples of agency of affirmation and bonding.38

Conclusion Bourdieu describes social actors as having a “sense of the game,” using football and tennis players as examples of this virtuosic sense. These players do not apply a priori principles to their play – only beginners need to do that – but rather, having “an intimate understanding of the object of the game and the kinds of situations it can throw up, they have the practical flexibility to know when and how they should run to the net or into space”.39 In this research I have examined how Iranian women locate identity and agency within the virtual habitus of Facebook as a model for SNSs. Since these rules of bodily disposition are based on group agreement, in the safe and selected community of SNS, women subvert and by communal agreement, challenge the codes of conduct. The cultural field of SNS for Iranian women is a complex web of on- and offline fields both in Iran and in the diaspora. This multifaceted web of interconnectivity creates opportunities for innovative subversion of the codes. These social agents have internalized the rules of the game, which they play, but also modify and regularly improvise upon those rules. Young women use the medium of SNS to bond, resist, and carve a space for their rebellious identity. Though compared to their Western cohorts, these expressions appear more modest, they are nevertheless a deviation from the state and family’s decorum of conduct and embodiment. To this end I designed an interactive participant-coordinated research plan to explore women’s use of Facebook for agency to resist and subvert the structural constrains of gender segregation codes. The results support the previous findings that SNSs are used to construct identity and form social capital. Findings add to the existing information that SNS, in general, and Facebook in particular, allow users to build a large social community based on their knowledge of the rules of the game. Then they establish flexible patterns to challenge those rules. Those Iranian women who fully occupy the cultural field of Facebook often find new ways of resisting the rules and testing the limits of the offline patriarchal social codes. Women in this study used the mixed media of personal/political of text and images to reaffirm their commitment to their community; to enhance their social capital of bonding, which in turns allows them to reformulate social norms of conduct. When members have strong affinity, they have more opportunity to challenge their society’s social codes. In a like-minded community, members can push back against the social dispositions of the 201

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larger society. In real settings, members may criticize someone who seems to have gone too far, but in the virtual community this criticism is absent or very mute. At most, members refrain from posting supportive comments and expressing affirmation about a member’s transgressions. This bonding of the online community then allows members to learn new ways of challenging the offline social norms. The jokes, prose, and social topics posted on Facebook are discussed in real social gatherings and then women find creative ideas about manipulating real social codes of bodily decorum. Pictures and images convey messages to the members that the actor is extending and testing the community’s boundaries. For example, a sexually suggestive posting by a member of herself or from online images sends the message that the member is testing the boundaries of propriety. Members either support the new posting or perceive it to be too excessive. Since no aggressive scolding is acceptable, the responses can be supportive or humorously negative, or without a commentary. This gradual evolution of SNS behavior has now led to some women posting more daring personal pictures and/or more oppositional postings. To stay in the loop, you push the boundaries ever so lightly. Overall, the Iranian women’s social structure of the virtual world is forgiving of transgressions. Those experienced in the language of SNS use it to challenge authority, whether in terms of the family or the state. In addition to small group agency, identity politics has fueled a new collective consciousness in cyberspace. The first to experiment with SNS to mobilize and fuel a large-scale social movement were Iranian youth that generated and powered the Green Movement of 2009, after the contested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian regime used force and counter-resistance to suppress the movement, which was generated both with SMS and SNS. The Arab youth learned their lesson from 2009 and they had some initial success in challenging regimes in Egypt, Tunis, and Libya during the Arab Spring of 2011.

Acknowledgment San Jose State University provided time and space for me to conduct this transnational research. My students, especially two graduate assistants, Robin Rogers and Rachael Cole, were patient readers and editing assistants through the project. Iranian women at home and in the diaspora unwearyingly guided me through the labyrinth of oppression and agency. And, thank you Shahram, our supportive editor for remaining a thoroughly engaged colleague on the other side of the globe.

Notes 1 Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, “Transgression in narration: the lives of Iranian women in Cyberspace,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4 no. 3 (2008): 89–118; Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed, 1999), and Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2 Shanyang Zhao, Sherri Grasmuck, and Jason Martin, “Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships,” Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 5 (2008): 1816–1836. 3 Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no.1 (2007).

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Facebook and agency 4 Maritza Johnson, Serge Egelman, and Steven M. Bellovin, “Facebook and privacy: it’s complicated,” SOUPS 2012: Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security no. 9 (2012). 5 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An invitation to reflexive sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 14. 6 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 7 Zeynep Tufekci, “Gender, social capital and social network(ing) sites: Women bonding, men searching,” American Sociological Association (2008): 1. 8 Tufekci, “Gender, social capital and social network(ing) sites”: 15. 9 Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe, “The benefits of Facebook ‘friends:’ Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 4 (2007): 1143–1168. 10 Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, “The benefits of Facebook friends”: 1163. 11 Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Nakwon Jung, and Sebastián Valenzuela, “Social media use for news and individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17, Issue 3 (2012): 319–336. 12 De Zuniga, Jung and Valenzuala, “Social media use for news and individuals”: 321 13 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 14 Julie McLeod, “Feminists re-reading Bourdieu: Old debates and new questions about gender habitus and gender change,” Theory and Research in Education 3, no. 1 (2005). 15 Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs, Feminism after Bourdieu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), and Toril Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: feminist theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture,” New Literary History 22, no. 4 (1991): 1017–1049. 16 Anthony King, “Thinking with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: A ‘practical’ critique of the Habitus,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 3 (2000): 423. 17 The use of binary gender distinction – of opposite sexes –‘here is for ease of coding and documentation of gender references in Iranian culture. I acknowledge the feminist discourse of challenging the cultural construct of the gender binary. 18 Kourosh Ziabari, “Iran was not what we had thought,” The People’s Voice.org, 29 May 2010, available at www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/05/29/iran-was-not-what-we-hadthought, and Bahman Ghobadi, “No one knows about Persian cats,” IFC Entertainment, 2012, available at www.ifcfilms.com/films/no-one-knows-about-persian-cats 19 King,Thinking with Bourdieu, 419. 20 Naghmeh Samini, “Gendered taboos in Iran’s text message jokes,” in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic eds. Annabelle Serberny and Massoumeh Torfeh (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 21 Lawler, “Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities,” The Sociological Review 53, no. 3 (2005): 429–446. 22 King, Thinking with Bourdieu, 420. 23 Christel Manning, God gave us the right: conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish women grapple with feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); and Birgit Sauer, “Headscarf regimes in Europe: Diversity policies at the intersection of gender, culture and religion,” Comparative European Politics 7, no. 1 (2009). 24 Nadia Al-Fawaz, “Facebook profiles reveal young women’s obsession to post pictures of body parts,” McClatchy—Tribune Business News, 2012, available at http://libaccess.sjlibrary.org/login? url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/914569401?accountid=10361 25 Also see Shahin Gerami, “Sexual agency: Iranian women’s sexual communications via Apps,” Tirgan Magazine (2017): 44–45. 26 This is an expert commenting on emails and conversation from a focus group about how to identify a religious/mazhabi member: “a) If all of other picture of her are also with rosari (head scarf) and you cannot see a bit of her hair then 90% she is mazhabi (religious/devout); b) If there are some pictures that she does not have rosari but still you cannot see her hair (due to haziness) or she has rosari but you can see her hair, it’s probably because she works, and she is not mazhabi; c) finally if her family is mazhabi usually she can find ways to appear without hijab, for example: not to add her family member into her accounts.”

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Shahin Gerami 27 BBC, “Q&A: Iran sanctions,” February 6, 2012, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middleeast-15983302 28 Mohammed Ayoob, “Why Israel really advocates war on Iran,” CNN World, June 24, 2012, available at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/13/why-israel-really-advocates-war-oniran/, and Sameer Jafri, “Iran: Why war is not an option,” Pak Tribune, June 24, 2012, available at paktribune.com/articles/Iran-Why-war-is-not-an-option-242888.html 29 Homa Hoodfar, “The women’s movement in Iran: women at the crossroads of secularization and Islamization,” The Women’s Movement Series no.1 (1999); Roksana Bahramitash, “Islamic Fundamentalism and Women’s Employment in Indonesia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16, no. 2 (2002): 255–272, and Shahin Gerami, Women and fundamentalism: Islam and Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996). 30 Tufekci, “Gender, social capital and social network(ing) sites”. 31 Negar Mottahedeh, #Iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 32 Gerami, “Sexual agency.” 33 Babak Rahimi, “Satirical cultures of media publics in Iran,” International Communication Gazette 77, no. 3 (2015): 267–281, and Samini, “Gendered Taboos.” 34 Omid Memarian, “Nude photo of Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani roils Iran,” The Daily Beast, 20 January 2012, available at www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/20/nude-photo-of-iranianactress-golshifteh-farahani-roils-iran.html 35 Rosa Golijan, “Missing ‘Persian Gulf’ label on Google Maps angers Iran,” Technolog on Msnbc.com Tech, 17 May 2012, available at www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/missingpersian-gulf-label-google-maps-angers-iran-778039 36 Mottahedeh, #Iranelection, 86. 37 Zainab bint Ali was daughter of Fatimah and Ali, the first imam of Shi’a, and granddaughter of the prophet Mohammad. She is known as a lioness among the Shi’a for her bravery during the Battle of Karbala that led to defeat of her brother, Hossain and the death of most of her family. 38 Gerami, “Sexual agency.” 39 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An invitation to reflexive sociology, 19.

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16 POLITICAL ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA The case of Jama‘at-e-Islami Muqtedar Khan and Rifat Binte Lutful

What is political Islam? While the influence and popularity of political Islam varies across countries and across time, for the past few decades it has remained the most significant political and cultural force in Muslim societies.1 The goal of political Islam is the revival and the revitalization of Islam in Muslim public affairs. Islamists recognize that Muslims have lost their past glory and privilege in the contemporary world. They therefore seek to galvanize the Muslim Ummah (community), reform Muslim societies, and restore Muslim glory. Islamists believe that the core element of an Islamic state and society is the implementation of the Shariah, the divinely revealed Islamic law. They feel that Muslims have abandoned the path of the Shariah and this is the primary cause of the decline of Muslim societies. This assertion, which has no basis in empirical analysis or even on direct revelation, is the cornerstone of their ideology and the basis for their demand to return to the ways of Shariah. They simply assert that in order to restore Muslim glory, Muslims must implement Shariah and Islamize Muslim culture and societies.2 Islamists seek to shape the political system itself in the light of Islamic law. They reject the idea of secularism as antithetical to Islam, since they see the purpose of the state as enforcing Islamic values and producing Islamic society. Political Islamists argue that Islam is a complete way of life; it includes faith, the state, and the world; therefore, the concept of religion and the state cannot be separated.3 While the fundamental ideological goals remain the same – producing an Islamic state and society – Islamist groups nevertheless display some degree of diversity. They especially differ in the means that they employ in their pursuit of political and social change. For example, while one type of group, the Jihadis – Taliban, Daesh, and al-Qaeda – wants to establish Islamic polity through violence and terrorism, another type of group, like the Jama‘at-e-Islami (henceforth the Jama‘at), wants to establish Islamic polity through a democratic process.4 Additionally, there could be a group which seeks the Islamic polity by employing tactics of terrorism as well as participating in national elections, simultaneously. The Palestinian movement, Hamas, is an example of this type. The groups that do embrace democratic processes, like the Jama‘at and the Muslim Brotherhood, privilege Islamic law by stipulating Islam as the only source or the main source of law, and 205

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thus while embracing elections and parliamentary forms of government, they nevertheless subordinate the polity to Shariah. These groups are thus only procedurally democratic, and democracy is not a fundamental or core value.5 Two developments have undermined the historical momentum that Islamists were gaining in many parts of the world. One was the devastating turn that the Arab Spring took after 2013, especially after the collapse of the short-lived, Islamist-dominated, Egyptian experiment with democracy; there has since been a concerted backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood from the monarchies and dictatorships in the region that has devastated the ranks and leadership of political Islam. The second development is the rise of violent Islamists like al-Qaeda (AQ) and Daesh, and together these developments have dented the appeal of political Islam. Muslim societies fear the violence and extremism that Islamists bring, and Islamists are wary of the brutal suppression that secular and nationalist governments are willing to mete out against the Islamists. These fears can be seen in the transition of al-Nahda, the Tunisian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have shifted their focus from Islamizing Tunisia to secularizing al-Nahda itself. Rached Ghannouchi, their leader and spiritual guide, now claims that they are “Muslim Democrats” and not Islamists.6 But in spite of this retreat, the appeal of Islamists, though a bit diminished, remains and one can see these trends in the Islamist rhetoric of the playboy-turnedpolitician and prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan and Recep Erdogan, the president of Turkey. Given this backdrop, in this chapter, we propose to examine the history, the development, and the political impact of the Jama‘at-e-Islami movement in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Maulana Maududi and the origins of the Jama‘at-e-Islami in South Asia The Jama‘at was founded by Maulana Sayyid Abu’l A’la Maududi. Maududi is the foundational thinker of the modern movements of political Islam. He not only shaped how Islamists think in South Asia, but his influence on the Egyptian Syed Qutb ensured that his thought and ideas also influenced contemporary Islamism in the Arab world. Maududi was born on September 15, 1903 in Aurangabad, India. He claimed that his family lineage can be traced back to the Chisti Sufi order, whose members claim that they are descendants of Prophet Muhammad pbuh. This prophetic heritage is perceived as a symbol of nobility among Muslims.7 The decline of the Mughal dynasty greatly influenced Maududi’s thinking about political Islam. With the collapse of that dynasty and the enforcement of British colonial rule, the privilege of the noble patronage that he and his family enjoyed once had started to shrink. With the advent of British colonial rule, Muslims lost their positions of power, wealth, and noble privilege. Lands owned by Muslims were transferred to Hindus, the status of the Persian language as the official language was annulled and English became the primary language, and Shariah law was contested by English law and the new British court system that replaced the Mughal courts.8 In addition, the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923, an unprecedented development in Islamic history and the subsequent failure of the Khilafat movement to restore it in 1924 left an indelible mark on Maududi and shaped his worldview. He was engaged in the Khilafat movement, and from the movement, he learned how to mobilize the masses, run political propaganda campaigns, employ Islamic slogans, and utilize Islamic sentiments for political purposes. Most importantly, he became committed to the belief that the Caliphate is a vital institution necessary for the unity and revival of Islamic civilization.9 The collapse of the Khilafat 206

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movement and its failure to convince the Turks to restore the Caliphate, frustrated Maududi and convinced him that nationalism was antithetical to the idea of the Ummah and inimical to the goal of Muslim unity. He blamed Westernized Turkish nationalists and Arab nationalists for the demise of the Khilafat movement. Maududi recognized that the Muslim community could not trust the secular nature of nationalism.10 Therefore, he wanted to create a political party which would protect the Muslim Ummah as a whole and revive Islam. Maududi established the Jama‘at-e-Islami on August 26, 1941 in Lahore. At that time, the Congress party and the Muslim League party were the dominant parties in the Indian subcontinent. The central objective of the Congress party was to struggle for self-governance and independence and to end British rule. Although the ideology of the Congress party was secular, Maududi saw that the majority of the politicians in the Congress party were Hindus, and concluding that the Congress party would not serve the interests of Indian Muslims, he declined to join it. The Muslim League party was another option for Maududi. However, Maududi also rejected the Muslim League by arguing that the Muslim League was un-Islamic and influenced by Western laws. He criticized the Muslim League and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League in these words:11 No trace of Islam can be found in the ideas and politics of Muslim League . . . [Jinnah] reveals no knowledge of the views of the Quran, nor does he care to research them . . . yet whatever he does is seen as the way of the Quran . . . All his knowledge comes from Western laws and sources . . . His followers cannot be but Jama‘at-i-jahiliya [party of pagans]. In addition, the Muslim League wanted to establish a separate nation for Muslims, based on the Two Nation theory, which was proposed by Jinnah. The idea of the Two Nation theory was that India’s Muslims and Hindus essentially constitute two different nations, and therefore, each deserved a state of their own.12 The Muslim League wanted to create a Muslim nation where all Muslims of India would reside, leaving the rest to Hindus. Maududi recognized that this idea would hand over the control of a large chunk of India to the Hindus and abolish the preeminence of Islam in India. Unlike the Muslim League, Maududi’s aim was to turn the whole of India into a Muslim state, wherein Muslims would dominate the country.13 Given these profound philosophical differences with both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, Maududi decided to start his own movement. Through the Jama‘at, Maududi wanted to create a sacred community whose members would be educated, committed, and dedicated to Islam.14 Maududi separated the concept of a “Muslim identity” from the concept of “Islamic identity.” He believed that anyone could be a Muslim by simply being born into a Muslim family. Therefore, her Muslim identity may not be the proper reflection of Islamic identity unless she believes in Islam, “as a complete way of life,” and aims to establish, “the sovereignty of God on earth.”15 Maududi was influenced by the overlapping of the sacred and the secular in the life of Prophet Muhammad pbuh. Maududi believed that a true Muslim needed to be politicized and be, “an active, participating citizen of an Islamic state.”16 This idea shaped the profile of the future members of the Jama‘at. As an organization, the Jama‘at maintained a top-down structure, where an Amir would be the supreme leader and be obeyed by other members of the party.17 Maududi became the first Amir of the Jama‘at. The Jama‘at followed an elitist approach, modeled on the idea of “the vanguard” in 207

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Europe’s leftist movements. The purpose of the Jama‘at was to create a cadre of educated Muslims who understood the Qur’an and Islamic laws, and could thus guide the uneducated masses. In other words, in order to be a member of the Jama‘at-e-Islami, one had to be a Muslim who was educated generally and especially in Islamic sciences. Although the Jama‘at was interested in social work and education, many were skeptical of its agenda because to them it seemed that the Jama‘at only represented the middle- and upper-class Muslims of the country.18 Since its foundation, the Jama‘at-e-Islami also experienced several disputes regarding the party leadership . Many members perceived that Maududi did not sacrifice enough for the Jama‘at. In addition, the older members of the Ulama class were not interested in joining the Jama‘at, based on their belief that Maududi was not a pious Muslim. Many prominent scholars who were followers of the Deobandi scholar Muhammad Manzur Numani, Maududi’s principal critic, left the Jama‘at after political and intellectual disagreements with Maududi – to this day the Jama‘at remains elitist and limited in its appeal.19

The Jama‘at-e-Islami in India In 1948, the Jama‘at-e-Islami in India took the name of Jama‘at-e-Islami Hind (JIH) and emerged as an independent organization. Maulana Abul Laeth Islahi Nadvi was elected as the first amir of the JIH. The JIH took a different route than the Jama‘at-e-Islami in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Unlike the Jama‘at-e-Islami in Pakistan and Bangladesh, JIH decided not to participate in elections. The JIH Constitution states that if the party can generate enough public support required for winning the election, it will participate in the election.20 For many years, the Jama‘at members did not vote in any elections. The logic of their decision was that it was important to first educate Indian Muslims about Islam and prepare them to participate in the complex politics of post-Partition India. They recognized that unlike in Pakistan, calling for an Islamic state was not only futile but problematic since Pakistan had just been created and they had not migrated there. However, recently, the Jama‘at members decided to support and vote for political parties that have similar ideologies or agendas, like the JIH. Like most other Indian Muslims, the JIH too has seen the rise of Hindu nationalism and its anti-Muslim stance. The increase in the number of Hindu nationalists and their access to political power threatens minority security, property, and well-being in India; defeating them is a paramount goal of all minority organizations, and the JIH is no exception. Therefore, though the Jama‘at itself is anticommunist, it has recently supported Communist parties. For instance, in the 2006 Kerala Assembly election, the JIH supported the Left Democratic Party (LFD), which is one of the Communist parties in India; support was offered because of LFD’s stance against fascism and imperialism.21 The JIH have also supported other secular political parties who oppose the Hindutva movement.22 In 2011, the JIH formed and advanced a political party called the Welfare Party to directly engage in Indian electoral politics.23 The Welfare Party aims for promoting ethical values, advancing democracy, establishing a welfare state, restoring minority rights, and protecting cultural diversity.24 By forming the Welfare Party, the JIH deviated from Maududi’s original position, which suggested that Muslims would not participate in elections in a non-Islamic state.25 So why did the JIH launch this welfare party? One possible explanation suggests that the JIH fears that they could be banned by the government any time, and the Welfare Party can work as a protection against this kind of ban.26 The development of the JIH in India was not easy. Its leaders and members have been arrested on various occasions. In 1954, the government arrested multiple senior figures of the JIH, including Amir Maulana Abul Laeth Islahi Nadvi, Secretary General Maulana 208

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Yousuf Islahi, and Maulana Hamid Ali. The accusation was that members of the Jama‘at were supportive of Pakistan and collected funds for Kashmir. Later, in 1965 during the India–Pakistan War, in 1967 during the trip of Egyptian President Gamel Abd al-Nasser, and in 1971 during the liberation war of Bangladesh, many Jama‘at members were arrested. Besides the arrest of senior JIH figures, the party itself was banned by the Indian government during the emergencies in 1975 and 1992.27 These incidents suggest that the JIH has always been perceived through a lens of suspicion by the Indian government. In those years – the 1950s to 1990s – the JIH leadership, like many other Muslim leaders, displayed an affinity for pan-Islamic rhetoric that made them easy targets of the government as an anti-national movement. They were also scapegoats when the ruling party needed to appease the slowly emerging Hindu vote bank in India. As a result of this experience, the JIH now displays overt signs of nationalism, both in practice and rhetoric. It has also internalized acceptance of secularism, recognizing it as a shield from Hindu nationalism and the best way to protect minority faith communities.28 In contrast to Pakistan and Bangladesh, Muslims are in the minority in India, which makes the JIH focus more on protecting minority rights in that country. Frederic Grare argues that the main challenge for the JIH was to balance the idea of modernity and the preservation of Maududi’s ideological and cultural legacy.29 On the JIH’s official website, it states that the JIH wants to demonstrate the teachings of Islam. It asserts that true Muslims should follow the Qur’an first, then the Sunnah (Muslim traditional customs and practices), and then the “deductive elaborations” of Muslim scholars. In addition, it aims to contribute to societal betterment in the framework of Islamic teachings. Their societal works include teaching people about health care, and supporting the poor, orphans, widows, disabled people, etc. On security, the website says that the Jama‘at seeks to ensure the physical security and basic human rights of Muslims. In doing so, it encourages people to take proper measures to defend themselves from any injustice towards them within the boundaries of Shariah and Indian law. The Jama‘at also decided to translate the Qur’an and publish literature in the Hindi language in an attempt to dispel misconceptions about Islam and Muslims held by some Indians. The JIH has a student wing, the Students’ Islamic Organization (SIO), which promotes the true meaning of Islam among the youth.30 Thus, the JIH in India has combined Dawa work – sharing the message of Islam – with civil society initiatives designed to protect the rights and advance the well-being of Indian Muslims. The JIH also maintains a stance on economic issues. Their politics on these issues is very similar to that of parties on the left and mirrors those of the Communist parties in India. The JIH opposes economic liberalization, globalization, and privatization.31 It stands against the capitalist system and labels the free economy as “neo-colonialism.” The JIH’s members argue that neoliberal policies are the cause behind the wave of farmers’ suicides and the shut-down of small-scale industries.32 The JIH also believes in an interest-free system and advocates for a Zakat-based economy.33 The JIH argues that the neoliberal economy is not only harmful to the Indian economy, but also to Indian culture, since the capitalist economy promotes aspects detrimental to that culture, such as consumerism, and nudity in popular media.34 According to the JIH leader Illiyas, immoral aspects of Western culture are promoted by government policies and the media. Consequently, Indian people are being exposed to the “gay culture, live-in relationships, night-clubs and bars,” and this is having a detrimental effect on Indian culture.35 The JIH channels its cultural and social conservatism into its criticism of India’s rapid economic liberalization and increased participation in the global economy. 209

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On foreign affairs, the JIH opposes what it describes as Western imperialism, and are critical of US policies such as sanctions on Iran. It also condemns Israeli aggression in the Arab world and supports the popular resistance movements in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, countries which the JIH perceives are engaged in a struggle against US imperialism. The JIH also demands that Indian foreign policy should strengthen the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and establish peace and solidarity in South Asia.36 Even though the JIH has become more nationalistic in its domestic posture, on the international front it still clings to pan-Islamic geopolitics. It seems to show more concern for the well-being of Islamist organizations, is clearly anti-American, and is not in tune with India’s broader foreign policy goals. On terrorism, the JIH strongly condemns the terrorism that is targeted towards Muslims. For instance, the JIH manifesto shows its concern regarding the security issues of the Muslim victims of riots and communal violence.37 The JIH’s official website published a news report from 2012, which suggested that Muslims are the victims of “state terrorism.”38 It stated that Muslims in India are detained illegally by the state authority on a regular basis; many Muslims are tortured based on the stereotypical assumption that Muslims are terrorists. Furthermore, they argued that the media does not cover enough news concerning Muslim security issues. Another news report published on the website stated that religion is not the cause of terrorism – it only endorses righteous deeds; thus, any specific religion should not be blamed as the catalyst for terrorism, including Islam. The JIH leader Mohammad Saleem announced that the JIH will strive to reduce misconceptions regarding Muslims and initiate awareness programs in several states, which would reveal the injustices that are inflicted upon Muslims in India. On the subject of the Kashmir conflict, the JIH demands autonomy for Kashmir under the jurisdiction of the Indian Federal state.39 Considering that the JIH operates in a country where Muslims are in the minority, it is obvious that the JIH cannot take a stand similar to that of Jama‘at-e-Islami and Pakistan. In 2015, JIH’s President Syed Jalaluddin Umari stated that it was impossible for Pakistan to control Indian Kashmir through proxy insurgency or war; the international community also opposed Pakistani stand on Kashmir. He also stated that if Pakistan and India engage in nuclear confrontation, some parts of India would be destroyed, but Pakistan would be decimated completely. Therefore, Pakistan should abandon the idea of conflict in the Indian Kashmir region.40

The Jama‘at-e-Islami in Pakistan After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Jama‘at-e-Islami was split into two bodies: the Jama‘at-e-Islami Pakistan and the Jama‘at-e-Islami Hind. Maududi became the Amir of the Jama‘at-e-Islami Pakistan, which had a majority of the members of the former united Jama‘at.41 Soon after its creation, the Jama‘at-e-Islami Pakistan became entangled in two controversies. First, Maududi disagreed with the Pakistani state’s policy regarding the Kashmir issue, arguing that it is not Islamic for the Pakistani state to declare jihad in Kashmir. Instead, Pakistan should uphold the terms of the ceasefire agreement or declare war. Maududi’s critics labeled him an India sympathizer, resulting in the arrest of many Jama‘at leaders. Second, Maududi refused to pledge allegiance to the Pakistani state, arguing that Muslims should pledge allegiance only to Allah, and until Pakistan became a truly Islamic state, governed by Shariah law, it should be forbidden for Muslims to pledge allegiance to Pakistan. Consequently, Pakistan banned the Jama‘at-e-Islami’s publications and dismissed many members from the administration who were supporters of the Jama‘at.42 210

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The Jama‘at entered politics in the 1951 elections in Punjab by supporting some candidates whom they perceived were righteous ones. However, these candidates were unsuccessful.43 Regardless, the Jama‘at became more engaged in politics and changed its pitch, from claiming that the individual soul would change society, to claim that society would alter the individual. This was an interesting shift from a social theory perspective: they went from being agent-centered to advocate a structural basis for change. Maududi personally assisted in drafting Pakistan’s Constitution in 1956.44 In 1958, General Ayub Khan declared martial law and outlawed the Jama‘at-e-Islami, along with other political parties. Ayub Khan introduced a modernization program, with measures targeting economic growth. In 1969, following the resignation of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan came into power. In 1970, Yahya Khan called an election in which the Jama‘at contested and lost miserably, winning only four seats.45 The Jama‘at’s inability to translate intellectual influence into political influence was exposed, and this limitation has remained to this day in Pakistani politics. Political Islam has influence, but not enough to win at the ballot box. A deepseated secular instinct, which is an aspect of South Asian culture even in the region’s Muslim-majority nations, has never given electoral victories to political Islam, unlike the Arab world, where after the Arab Spring political Islam enjoyed spectacular electoral wins. In 1972, after the formation of Bangladesh, Maududi became politically more relevant in Pakistan by promising to support Bhutto in exchange for declaring the Ahmadia community as non-Muslim, and refraining from advancing socialist policies. However, in 1973, the pact between the Jama‘at and the government was canceled, and Bhutto proscribed the Jama‘at from participating in the by-elections. In 1977, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq declared martial law and became president of Pakistan. General Zia was the proponent of Pakistan’s Islamization process. In 1978, Bhutto was sentenced to death by the newly formed government and in the following year, 1979, Maududi died in New York, due to kidney and heart conditions. From the beginning of Zia’s regime, the Jama‘at had an ambiguous relationship with Zia’s government. Although initially, the Jama‘at supported Zia’s military regime, it started to criticize Zia’s regime in 1979.46 Especially in 1984, the relationship between the Jama‘at and Zia’s regime deteriorated when Zia’s government banned all the student unions including Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba (IJT), which was heavily influenced by Maududi’s ideology and had secured seats in university elections. Thus, the Jama‘at’s political relevance and influence was a function of its utility to the government of the time and directly in proportion to the extent it was willing to serve the political needs of that government. In 1985, Zia called for national elections, and the Jama‘at participated in that election with little success, further marginalizing the party. In 1988, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by Benazir Bhutto won the election, and the Jama‘at secured only nine National Assembly seats. In 1990, Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) led by Nawaj Sharif won the election, and the Jama‘at won only six seats out of 272, that are filled with direct elections in the National Assembly. After that, the Jama‘at contested various national elections, including those in 1993, 2002, 2013, and 2018, both independently and by forming alliances. So why has the Jama‘at failed to win elections? Some people, like Asif Lukman Qazi,47 argue that unlike other political parties, the Jama‘at’s objective is not focused on winning elections. Instead, the Jama‘at spends its resources on its ideological and social agenda. For instance, the Jama‘at works for multiple administrations to ensure good governance as a part of their social agenda. Members of the Jama‘at have also received accolades from the opposition party and the World Bank for their social work. Two Jama‘ati groups – Al-Khidmat and the Al-Khair Trust – are renowned for their humanitarian works in health care and relief care during natural disasters, amongst other 211

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efforts. However, these groups have also been accused of supplying resources for terrorist groups in Kashmir.48 This is a very sympathetic and simplistic explanation. We believe that Pakistan as a nation has a very small educated elite, and only a minor segment of that elite is Islamically inclined. While the masses are more conservative in their outlook, the Jama‘at’s agenda is too sophisticated for them, and they are thus easily swayed by more dogmatic, simplistic, and traditional Islamic and Islamist alternatives, such as the Tableeghi Jama‘at, the various Barelvi and Deobandi groups, and the old Sufi orders. The masses in Pakistan, who are religiously conservative, are not as engaged in the democratic process and hence the voter turnout for Islamist parties is less than their mass appeal. In spite of its limited political success at the polls, the Jama‘at does have the capacity, especially through their student wing, to mobilize masses during a political crisis. For instance, it played a key role in encouraging people to join the jihad against the USSR during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In addition, during the 1990s, the Jama‘at supported Iraq in the first Gulf War (1990–91). Consequently, three significant events followed. First, the Jama‘at achieved huge popularity among Pakistanis, who had supported Iraq in the Gulf War. Second, the Jama‘at received international recognition due to its stance and joined an international Islamic movement, Tahrik-i-Islam, and third, the Jama‘at offered a new meaning of “jihad”: the struggle against the West to defend Islam.49 Maududi’s and Jama‘at’s ideology have influenced many military leaders in Afghanistan, including Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. While the former led a mujahidin group in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets during the Soviet occupation, the latter was a former prime minister of Afghanistan and was listed as a terrorist by the US government.50 Although the Jama‘at always denied that it had any relationship with terrorist groups and stressed that it believes in the democratic process, it has been accused of having ties to the Pakistani Taliban and AQ.51 For instance, many AQ militants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, were affiliated with the Jama‘at leaders in Pakistan.52 The Jama‘at also exercises significant control over Jama‘at-e-Islami of Azad Kashmir. Although Jama‘at-e-Islami of Jammu Kashmir works as an independent organization, the Jama‘at-e-Islami Pakistan supports the Jama‘at of Jammu Kashmir.53 The Jama‘at assists in recruiting fighters for the Kashmir conflict and gives training to those fighters.54 On the Jama‘at-e-Islami Pakistan’s official website, it states that Kashmiri people have been fighting against Indian aggression for a long time, and to help these people, Muslims need to build unity and to distinguish between friends and enemies.55 It also suggests that the US and India are the enemies, considering that the former provides supports to Israel, and the latter does injustice to the Kashmiri people. The website also claims that there is a difference between terrorism and a freedom movement; Kashmiri fighters are not terrorists, but freedom fighters.56 Jama‘at-e-Islami of Pakistan is the de facto “mother ship” of this global movement, which has affiliates and branches in South Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe. Thus it is significant that the Jama‘at in Pakistan is both heavily engaged in politics and is also heavily politicized, because of its strong ideological overtones. Given the competition with newer and more radical Islamic movements in Pakistan, the Jama‘at cannot escape radicalization. It is therefore not surprising that it is in Pakistan that the movement has enjoyed more political success, but has also undergone more political radicalization.

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Jama‘at-e-Islami in Bangladesh Based on the Two Nation theory, which maintained that Muslims and Hindus were two distinct nations and hence each deserving of a nation-state, India during the independence process was divided into two nations: India and Pakistan.57 While India emerged as a secular state with a Hindu majority, Pakistan aspired to become a Muslim nationalist state, albeit divided into two territories: East and West Pakistan. The eastern territory was carved out of Bengal; while it had a Muslim majority, it was also essentially composed of Bengali ethnicity. The western part of Pakistan, also Muslim, was composed of a Punjabi ethnicity majority. Pakistan was a state founded on the principle of religious nationalism, laboring under the assumption that Pakistanis’ religious identity was strong, and thus the state could paper over its ethnic and linguistic cracks. This assumption was proven to be false, and discriminatory practices by the Pakistani state, particularly against the eastern Bengali minority, tore the fledgling nation apart. Pakistan’s founding fathers hoped to create a nation-state by imposing a policy of homogenization on a multi-ethnic society, but bad governance and prejudicial politics quickly politicized the ethnic and linguistic cleavages.58 The resultant dissatisfaction grew and culminated in the struggle for independence by East Pakistan. Maududi perceived that the then-East Pakistani “Awami League” (AL) political party wanted to divide Pakistan, ostensibly an Islamic state. He perceived that the unity of Pakistan is challenged by Hindu imperialism.59 Therefore, his party supported the Pakistani Army by arguing that it was the Jama‘at’s duty to fight against Muktui Bahini, a separatist militia formed by the Indian Army to facilitate the secession of East Pakistan.60 In continuation of that, Ghulam Azam, who was the Jama‘at’s leader in East Pakistan, rejected the demand for secular Bengali nationalism and socialism, while attending an Islamic conference in Dhaka in 1970.61 Consequently, the Jama‘at-e-Islami wing in Bangladesh fought against Bengali liberation fighters alongside the Pakistani Army.62 After nine months of bloody war between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now Pakistan), Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was born as an independent state in 1971. Consequently, the Jama‘at leaders were considered to be war criminals, and they fled to Pakistan to avoid prosecution. However, during the Zia and Ershad regime (post1978), the Jama‘at’s leaders got the green light and returned to Bangladesh, to begin to engage in politics.63 Although the Bangladesh Jama‘at-e-Islami supported the West Pakistani force during the war of liberation, what made it possible for the Jama‘at to emerge as a strong political force after the liberation of Bangladesh? Mujib’s secular nationalist approach, which aimed to eliminate poverty, failed to address the basic needs of the people.64 Mujib became increasingly unpopular and was killed along with his family on August 15, 1975 following a military coup d’état. After Mujib’s assassination, aspiring rulers of the country realized that they could reinforce their power by exploiting the Islamic sentiment of the people since Bangladesh’s majority population is Muslim, and they profess strong allegiance to Islam in public.65 Therefore, Major Zia ur-Rahman, who came to power following Mujib’s assassination, introduced many Islamist policies into Bangladesh’s Constitution, in order to strengthen his power. In addition, during Major Zia’s regime, Ghulam Azam, the leader of the Jama‘at received permission to return to Bangladesh. On May 30, 1981, Zia was killed in another military coup d’état and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad assumed power. Ershad knew that he lacked legitimacy, and thus, to ascertain his position, Ershad took several measures to support Bangladesh’s Islamization. For instance, in 1982, he included Islamic principles in the country’s Constitution.66 He also allowed the Jama‘at to register as 213

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a political party in 1984.67 Ershad intended to win the Jamat’s support by allowing them to become a recognizable political force in the country. Ershad’s Islamization process resembled the Islamization process of Pakistan’s Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Similar to Ershad, Zia utilized Islam as a “security blanket” to ensure his legitimacy; for example, he launched the Islamic penal code in 1979 in Pakistan.68 If we closely look at the measures taken by Major Zia, General Ershad, and General Zia-ul-Haq, it can be seen that all of these military despots utilized religion as a tactic to gain legitimacy and remain in power. Thus, even after the Jama‘at’s controversial role in the liberation war of Bangladesh, they were able to establish themselves as a prominent political force in Bangladesh due to the Islamization strategy adopted by Major Zia and General Ershad. During the 1980s, the Jama‘at grew stronger institutionally. The party built an organizational network all over the country by spreading Bengali translations of Maududi’s Islamic literature. Its student wing, Islamic Chatra Shibir (ICS), established several branches in educational institutions and won several student union elections.69 During Bangladesh’s 1991 national election, the Jama‘at became the country’s fourth largest political party by securing 18 seats. To form a government, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) which won 140 seats, needed 11 more seats.70 At that time, the Jama‘at backed the BNP to form the government, which ultimately promoted the Jama‘at’s status as a significant political force in the country.71 Recognizing the Jama‘at’s popularity, the secular political party AL built ties with the Jama‘at, and the Jama‘at supported the AL during the 1996 election.72 However, during that election, the Jama‘at won only three parliamentary seats, and the AL formed the government. After forming the government, the link between the Jama‘at and the AL broke down, and the Jama‘at again made an alliance with the BNP. These incidents show that both the AL and the BNP wanted to demonstrate to the public that they are pro-Islamist. In reality, both the AL and the BNP wanted to utilize the country’s Islamist leaning by periodically supporting the Jama‘at. In 2001, the Jama‘at became the third largest party in the country. In the October 2001 national election, the four-party alliance won the general election and came to power. The Jama‘at-e-Islami was part of this four-party alliance along with the BNP, the Islami Oikyo Jote (IOJ), and a faction of the Jatiya Party (JP).73 Karlekar argues that the Jama‘at’s agendas do not represent the regular goals of parliamentary democracy.74 Drawing from the party’s website, which was updated on September 24 and accessed on December 21, 2004, Karlekar argues that the Jama‘at’s objective is to replace Bangladesh’s parliamentary democracy with a theocratic Islamic state, since the website states that “the ultimate objective of the Jamaaat-e-Islami is the establishment of the Islamic system in all spheres of life.”75 According to Karlekar, the website presented a radical view which ensured that there would be no nationalism and secularism in Jama‘at’s Islamic state. As the website states:76 The demands of faith are not fulfilled merely by offering ibadat . . . prayers are not fulfilling their role in society. The sovereignty of Allah must be established in all fields of human existence. Mosque and parliament, taqwa and adl, dikr and shariah are inalienable dimensions of the same reality. The website also states that the motto of the Jama‘at needs to be achieved by jihad. The Jama‘at’s Constitution proclaims that it intends to establish an Islamic society in Bangladesh. To attain this goal, the Jama‘at has moderated over the years. For instance, its 2001 election manifesto denies enforcing Shariah law in the country.77 To increase its popularity, the 214

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Jama‘at also conducts many social welfare programs in the country. The members of the Jama‘at still oppose Western cultural practices, including pornography, free sex, indecency, homosexuality, and out-of-wedlock relationships.78 But, the party recognizes women’s rights and “spiritual equality” between men and women.79 The Jama‘at’s political leaders understand that to win the votes of poor women, the party needs to change its original position as propounded by Maududi, which suggested that women should stay at home and fulfill domestic duties. Thus, the Jama‘at now supports women’s work outside the home, including women’s participation in the political process and governance.80 The Jama‘at recognizes that they could not have come to power if there was no democracy, so over the years, it has supported many democratic movements in Bangladesh. The Jama‘at’s current website, accessed in 2019, stated that the Jama‘at is a true believer in democracy and wants to participate in elections.81 The Jama‘at has often indirectly encouraged violence against minorities. According to an Amnesty International 2001 report, Hindus – a religious minority of less than 10 percent of Bangladesh’s population – were massively attacked by BNP supporters due to the belief that Hindus supported AL, the main opposition party during the election.82 The report also says that many Hindus who supported the AL were displaced and forced to migrate; many Hindu women were raped, and their homes were burnt. Lintner argues that the Jama‘at may not direct all these attacks against the minority religious group, but its inclusion in the government stimulated radical groups to feel secure in terms of enjoying government protection, which made them believe that they can conduct such violent acts with impunity.83 During the 2008 election, the Jama‘at performed poorly and won only two seats, the AL forming the government with a landslide victory. After the AL came to power, it decided to abolish the Jama‘at. In July 1973, the AL government enacted the International Crimes (Tribunal) Act 1973. Under the Act, the tribunal has the power to punish any organizations, individuals, or members of any group irrespective of nationality, who are responsible for committing a crime in the territory of Bangladesh. In 2009, the Act was amended, and the International Crime Tribunal (ICT) was established.84 Under the ICT, the AL government charged people who helped Pakistan (then West Pakistan) during the liberation war of Bangladeshi in 1971. The tribunal prosecuted, convicted, and executed many leaders of the opposition political parties, mostly from the Jama‘at. The accusation against the Jama‘at leaders was that they had supported the West Pakistan Army and had carried out large-scale atrocities against Bengali people during the liberation war.85 Following the accusation against the Jama‘at’s leaders, the Jama‘at published a report on their website, where they labeled the whole tribunal as a “Character Assassination Campaign”:86 No one can have the license on such misinformation campaign of character assassination. Such foul practice is an utter violation of law and objectivity. An emotive issue like war crime is being used as a weapon for political offensive. The purpose is to tarnish the image of Bangladesh Jama‘at-e-Islami and give it a bad name. After 38 years of independence, all sorts of lies are being aired to unjustly implicate the Jama‘at in war crimes, without any shred of evidence. Despite severe protests led by the Jama‘at, the tribunal executed many top Jama‘at leaders. Mir Qashem Ali, Motiur Rahman Nijami, Quader Mollah, Muhammad Kamruzzam, and Golam Azam were five leading figures who were hanged by the tribunal. The verdicts leading to the execution of the Jama‘at leaders sparked Jama‘at activists to enact violent 215

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protests all over the country, including torching homes, vandalizing possessions, killing people, etc. After the verdict of the Jama‘at leader Delawar Hossain Sayeedi’s execution, eighty people lost their lives following violent protests carried out by the Jama‘at.87 The Jama‘at supporters across the country perceived this execution as politically motivated and a threat towards establishing Islam in Bangladesh. For instance, in response to Abdul Quader Mollah’s execution verdict, Jama‘at leader Makbul Ahmed stated that “people will take revenge on this killing by establishing Islam in Bangladesh, which is stained with the blood of Abdul Quader Mollah.”88 The followers of the Bangladesh Jama‘at-e-Islami can be divided into two sections: political Islamists, and Islamic extremists.89 Ramani contends that the aim of political Islamists is to transform Bangladesh into an Islamic state governed by Shariah law instead of a secular state; while the Islamic extremists seek to eliminate elements from the society that are not consistent with Islamic culture and maintain ties with international terrorist organizations. Many of these extremists also fought along with Afghan mujahidin during the Soviet invasion in 1979. It is not dificult to understand that these Jama‘at leaders and supporters perceive these trials as a threat to Islam, and therefore, there would be a backlash, especially from the Islamic extremist groups. AQ and Islamic State also utilized this sentiment and took advantage of the situation. Furthermore, in January 2014, the then AQ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri posted a video on social media titled “Bangladesh: Massacre Behind a Wall of Silence,” where he stated that the security forces in Bangladesh are consistently conducting atrocities against the pro-Islamic protesters and thus he called on supporters to protest vehemently any attack against Islam.90 In this way, the AQ influenced the Islamic extremists of Bangladesh, and Islamist terrorist organizations such as Ansarullah Bangla Team emerged, carrying out attacks against civilians, including non-Islamic, atheist, and gay people.

Conclusion The disparate evolutions of the Jama‘at-e-Islami in South Asia point to an interesting characteristic of political Islam. The movement has the capacity to adapt to its political environment in order to survive, and when it gains power and momentum, it becomes more radical. In India, where Muslims are in a minority, and Hindu nationalism is on the rise undermining India’s secular ethos, the Jama‘at not just abandons their goal to establish an Islamic state and implement Shariah; on the contrary, it becomes a force for democracy and advocates secularism. Undoubtedly, its positions are both inconsistent and hypocritical: it desires a secular India but also supports Shariah provisions for Muslims that are in contradiction to a uniform civil code for all people, regardless of religion. In Pakistan, the Jama‘at cannot win at the ballot, but nevertheless it has enough clout to play an important role in the state’s political culture. It has a loyal and significant constituency that allows it to run “Islamic campaigns,” mobilize people to wage jihad in both the east and west of Pakistan and is willing to work with authoritarian dictators like General Zia ul-Haq in exchange for token Islamization. Nevertheless, it remains an impediment to both secularization and democratization in Pakistan, and helps create a religiously charged environment that incubates other extremist groups in Pakistan. In Bangladesh, the Jama‘at has had the greatest electoral success and has often played the role of kingmaker. Its political popularity has often made it the decisive force that major parties seek in order to gain parliamentary majorities. But it is in Bangladesh that one sees more violence emanating directly from the Jama‘at and its followers, than one sees in Pakistan and India, debunking the idea that political inclusion and democratic participation 216

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have a moderating effect on radical movements. The case of Jama‘at-e-Islami establishes that there is a segment in Muslim societies everywhere that seeks a role for Islam in the public sphere, and this constituency is not going away, regardless of democratization or secularization. They have not proven to be a force for good or peace or stability, because with their ascendancy come other more radical and violent versions of political Islam. Political Islamic movements, even when they espouse democracy, do create an atmosphere through their discourse that is amenable to radicalism. For those who seek to fight this radicalism, they are confronted with a Catch-22 situation. Encourage political Islam and radicals thrive; repress political Islam, and it morphs into radical groups.

Notes 1 M.A. Muqtedar Khan, “Three Dimensions of the Emerging Political Philosophy of Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (New York: Routledge, 2012). 2 Muqtedar Khan, “What Is Political Islam?” E-International Relations 10 (2014) www.e-ir.info/2014/ 03/10/what-is-political-islam/. See also Shahram Akbarzadeh, Routledge Handbook of Political Islam (London: Routledge, 2012). 3 M.A. Muqtedar Khan, “The Political Philosophy of Islamic Resurgence,” Cultural Dynamics 13, no. 2 (2001): 211–229. 4 Khan, “What is Political Islam?” 5 Khan, “The Political Philosophy of Islamic Resurgence”; Muqtedar Khan, “The Politics, Theory, and Philosophy of Islamic Democracy,” in Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory, Debates, and Philosophical Perspectives ed. Muqtedar Khan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), and Khan, “What is Political Islam?” 6 Middle East Eye, “Ennahda Leader Ghannouchi: ‘We Are Muslim Democrats, Not Islamists’,” May 23, 2016, available at www.middleeasteye.net/news/ennahda-leader-ghannouchi-we-aremuslim-democrats-not-islamists (accessed on 15 January 2019.) 7 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9. 8 Roy Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam: Authority and the Islamic State (New York: Routledge, 2011), 12. 9 Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, 19. 10 Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, 20. 11 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 20. 12 Stephen Philip Cohen, “The Nation and the State of Pakistan,” Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2002): 109–122. 13 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 59. 14 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 62. 15 Maidul Islam, Limits of Islamism (India: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 192. 16 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 63. 17 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 62. 18 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 65. 19 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 68. 20 Mohd Zakirullah Firdausi, Jamat-E-Islami of India: A Politcal Perspective (Raleigh: LULU COM, 2014), 123. 21 Islam, Limits of Islamism. 22 Yusra Husain, “Jama‘at-E-Islami Hind Asks Muslims to Support ‘Secular Parties’ in UP ,” The Times of India, April 11, 2019, available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/elections/loksabha-elections-2019/uttar-pradesh/news/Jama‘at-e-islami-hind-asks-muslims-to-support-secularparties-in-up/articleshow/68819911.cms 23 Welfare Party of India, “History of Welfare Party of India,” available at http://welfarepartyofindia. org/welfarepatry-history (accessed on July 19, 2019). 24 Welfare Party of India, “Constitution of Welfare Party of India,” available at http://welfarepartyo findia.org/welfarepatry-info-all?event=vi&id=240 (accessed July 19, 2019).

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Muqtedar Khan and Rifat Binte Lutful 25 Tanveer Alam, “Jama‘at Must be Upfront on Its Ambitions,” India Today, May 11, 2011, available at www.indiatoday.in/opinion/tanweer-alam/story/Jama‘at-e-islami-has-to-be-upfront-on-ambi tions-133475-2011-05-11 (accessed on July 20, 2019). 26 Alam, “Jama‘at must be Upfront on its Ambitions.” 27 Firdausi, Jamat-E-Islami of India, 122. 28 Ayesha Khanyari, “Jama‘at-E-Islami Hind: Changed Political Outlook?” Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, May 20, 2014, available at www.ipcs.org/comm_select.php?articleNo=4453 (accessed July 21, 2019). 29 Frédéric Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent: The Jama‘at-i-Islami (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2005). 30 Firdausi, Jamat-E-Islami of India. 31 Islam, Limits of Islamism. 32 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 111. 33 Firdausi, Jamat-E-Islami of India. 34 Islam, Limits of Islamism. 35 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 148. 36 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 114. 37 Islam, Limits of Islamism. 38 Jama‘at-e Islami Hind, “Muslims Becoming Victim of ‘State Terrorism’,” September 10, 2012, available at http://Jama‘ateislamihind.org/eng/muslims-becoming-victim-of-state-terrorism/ (accessed on March 6, 2019). 39 Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 102. 40 Pakistan Defense, “From the Urdu Press: Jama‘at President Asks Pakistan to Forget Kashmir,” February 3, 2015, available at https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/from-the-urdu-press-Jama‘at-presidentasks-pakistan-to-forget-kashmir.357250/ (accessed on March 6, 2019). 41 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 70. 42 Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 30. 43 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 72. 44 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 73. 45 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 75. 46 Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 40. 47 Asif Lukman Qazi, “Islamist Experience in Pakistan,” in Rethinking Political Islam eds. Shadi Hamid and William McCants (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 48 Matthew Nelson, “Pakistan,” in Rethinking Political Islam eds. Shadi Hamid and William McCants (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 171. 49 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam, 169. 50 Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam. 51 Jama‘at-i-Islami, “Jama‘at-i-Islami,” available at www.dawn.com/news/1401376 (accessed on March 4, 2019). 52 Imtiaz Gul, “Transnational Islamic Networks,” International Review of the Red Cross 92, no. 880 (2010): 899–923. 53 Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. 54 Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 77. 55 Liaqat Baloch, “Always Resist the Evil,” Jama‘at-e-Islami, available at http://Jama‘at.org/en/article detail.php?id=1704 (accessed on March 3, 2019). 56 “Difference between a Freedom Movement and Terrorism,” Jama‘at-e-Islami, available at http:// Jama‘at.org/en/articledetail.php?id=1166 (accessed on March 3, 2019). 57 Shafique Ali Khan, Two Nation Theory: As a Concept, Strategy and Ideology (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1973). 58 Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 59 Zohair Husain, “Maulana Sayyid Abul A’La Maududi: An Appraisal of His Thought and Political Influence,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (1986): 61–81. 60 Asif Luqman Qazi, “How to Islamize an Islamic Republic: Jama‘at-E-Islami in Its Own Words,” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2017). 61 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 194. 62 Bertil Lintner, “Bangladesh: Extremist Islamist Consolidation,” Faultlines-New Delhi- 14 (2003): 1–28. 63 Lintner, Bertil. “Bangladesh: Extremist Islamist Consolidation,” 6.

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64 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 172. 65 Ahmed Shafiqul Huque and Muhammad Yeahia Akhter, “The Ubiquity of Islam: Religion and Society in Bangladesh,” Pacific Affairs 60, no. 2 (1987): 200–225. 66 Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, “Islam in Bangladesh Politics,” in Islam, Muslims and the Modern State eds. Hussain Mutalib and Taj ul-Islam Hashmi (New York: St. Martin’s’s Press, 1994), 113. 67 Bdnews24.com, “BNP Says Ershad, Not Zia, Brought Jama‘at-E-Islami Back into Politics,” November 6, 2017, available at https://bdnews24.com/politics/2017/11/06/bnp-says-ershad-notzia-brought-Jama‘at-e-islami-back-into-politics (accessed on July 23, 2019). 68 Mir Zohair Hussain, “Islam in Pakistan under Bhutto and Zia-Ul-Haq,” in Islam, Muslims and the Modern State eds. Hussain Mutalib and Taj ul-Islam Hashmi (New York: St. Martin’s Press’s, 1994), 47–79. 69 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 203. 70 Upendra Kumar, “Religion and Politics: A Study of Bangladesh Jama‘at-E-Islami,” Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities 7, no. 5 (2017): 146–165. 71 Islam, Limits of Islamism, 218. 72 Irfan Ahmad, “Islam and Politics in South Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics eds. John L. Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 324–339. 73 Lintner, “Bangladesh: Extremist Islamist Consolidation.” 74 Hiranmay Karlekar, Bangladesh: The Next Afghanistan? (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), 135. 75 Karlekar, Bangladesh, 137. 76 Karlekar, Bangladesh, 136. 77 Kumar, “Religion and Politics.” 78 Islam, Limits of Islamism. 79 Kumar, “Religion and Politics.” 80 Elora Shehabuddin, “Jama‘at-i-Islami in Bangladesh: Women, Democracy and the Transformation of Islamist Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 2/3 (2008): 577–603. 81 Bangladesh Jama‘at-e-Islami, “Jama‘at-e-Islami in the Democratic Movement,” March 16, 2015, available at https://Jama‘at-e-islami.org/article-details.php?category=44&article=75 82 Amnesty International, “Bangladesh: Attacks on Members of the Hindu Minority,” 2011, available at www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/124000/asa130062001en.pdf 83 Lintner, “Bangladesh: Extremist Islamist Consolidation.” 84 Ali Riaz, “A Crisis of Democracy in Bangladesh,” Current History 113, no. 762 (2014): 150. 85 Adrija Roychowdhury, “Why Bangladesh Is Executing Jama‘at-E-Islami Leaders. A Short History,” The Indian Express, 12 May 2016, available at https://indianexpress.com/article/research/why-ban gladesh-is-executing-Jama‘at-e-islami-leaders-a-short-history/ 86 Central Publication Department of Jama‘at, “Allegation of War Crimes against the Leader of Jama‘at,” available at https://Jama‘at-e-islami.org/en/publication/file/82_allegations_of_war_crime s_against_the_leaders_of_Jama‘at.pdf (accessed on December 5, 2017). 87 Riaz, “A Crisis of Democracy in Bangladesh.” 88 Julien Bouissou, “Bangladesh’s Radical Muslims Uniting behind Hefazat-E-Islam,” The Guardian, July 30, 2013, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/30/bangladesh-hefazat-e-islamshah-ahmad-shafi 89 Samuel Ramani, “Here’s How the Bangladesh Government is Making Religious Violence More Likely,” Washington Post, July 21, 2016, available at www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkeycage/wp/2016/07/21/heres-how-the-bangladesh-government-is-making-religious-violence-morelikely/?utm_term=.78e6161f2335 90 Animesh Roul, “How Bangladesh Became Fertile Ground for Al-Qaida and the Islamic State,” Combatting Terrorism Center Sentinel 9, no. 5 (2015) www.ctc.usma.edu/how-bangladesh-became-fer tile-ground-for-al-qaida-and-the-islamic-state/

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17 AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS The diminishing influence of religion in the New Saudi Arabia Eman Alhussein

Introduction Religious identity in Saudi Arabia is facing an existential crisis. The responsibilities and prestige religious scholars once enjoyed has substantially subsided in the past few years. The long marriage between the official religious establishment and the ruling family has never been conflict free; however, mutual interests sustained the bond and maintained it. Moreover, outdated fatwas as a result of inevitable modernization contributed to the loss of the religious establishment’s credibility, especially among the majority of the young population. On the other hand, religious figures from outside the official establishment provided an alternative religious discourse that was more appealing to the conservative population, but it also questioned the nature of the relationship between the state and its subjects. Therefore, the current leadership under King Salman decided to contain the challenges posed by various religious institutions and figures. It minimized the influence of the official religious establishment by not relying on it for political legitimization. It did this through fostering a growing sense of nationalism to replace religious legitimacy with a sense of national belonging. Moreover, the decision to imprison well-known religious figures in 2017 was due to the state’s growing concerns over their potential to grow into a mobilizing force, especially after the Arab uprisings. This chapter will look briefly at the history of the relationship between Saudi Arabia’s political and religious establishments. Then it will examine the challenges posed by the diverse views presented by religious scholars which initiated and encouraged discussions on political reforms and civil rights. It will then move on to focus on the new order established by King Salman and his son Mohammed which ultimately changed the relationship between the state and various religious bodies and figures. Finally, the chapter will examine how the current leadership is filling the religious vacuum with nationalism, which has not only weakened religious identity, but also contributed to its existential crisis.

The old order In 1744, an important alliance took place between Mohammed bin Saud (founder of the first Saudi state) and Mohammed bin Abdulwahab, which established a religio-political system. The former maintained power over the political sphere whereas the latter oversaw social and 220

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religious matters. This arrangement between the two remained more or less in place for centuries to come. However, after the unification of the third Saudi state by King Abdulaziz in 1932, the relationship between the religious establishment, headed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Ibrahim Al Al-Sheikh, and the political authority began to demonstrate a new changing dynamic. Mohammed bin Ibrahim, a descendant of Mohammed bin Abdulwahab, was the Grand Mufti from 1953 to 1969. The struggle over power between Saud and Faisal after the death of their father, King Abdulaziz, allowed the religious establishment to play a role in pushing Saud out of the picture. Faisal requested from the religious establishment to step into the political sphere by issuing a fatwa that requested from Saud the transfer of his powers to Faisal.1 This move illsutrates how religious legitimacy was always crucial as it sustained political authority and played a major role in strengthening its grip on power. However, the influence Mohammed bin Ibrahim enjoyed allowed him to play a bigger role than the state wished him to assume. He considered King Faisal’s plans to modernize judicial and administrative bodies an attempt to Westernize Saudi society.2 As a result, Faisal decided to dilute the influence of the Mufti by creating the Council of Senior Scholars, which included a number of figures who shared similar religious responsibilities and whose roles were defined by the political authority.3 This allowed the dissemination of religious influence from one person to an institution that would evolve to one always under the wing of the state. After the death of Mohammed bin Ibrahim, the Mufti’s position remained vacant until 1991. The cleric chosen for this role was none other than Abdulaziz bin Baz (1991–99), an influential scholar who held favorable and non-confrontational views of the political establishment. Nevertheless, maintaining the relationship between the religious and political establishments was an important survival mechanism for both sides, and explains the lack of social reforms that for years characterized Saudi Arabia. The religious establishment was at times almost on a par with the government, which allowed it to impose some checks and balances against implementing changes considered alien to Islamic traditions. Moreover, maintaining the relationship was considered important in the absence of political representation, since the establishment has asserted over the years through its religious discourse the importance of adhering to the ruler, which helped inhibit calls for unrest and civil demands. On the other hand, the geographic size of Saudi Arabia stood in the way of promoting an encompassing identity. Therefore, the religious identity provided a way to unite people by promoting an illfitting “one-size-fits-all” identity to a diverse population of religious and ethnic minorities. For years to come, the official religious establishment maintained its integrity as it continued to be influential and important, despite its obvious standing with the government. In the relationship between the official religious establishment and the political authority, the latter always had the upper hand. Therefore, it was always the credibility of the religious establishment that was affected with the inevitable changes and modernization pushed by the government, whether slow-paced as in King Abdallah’s era or fast-paced as witnessed during King Salman’s reign. Even though the religious establishment was committed to sustaining and promoting the political authority, it was the threat from other religious figures acting independently that began to challenge the state.

The roots of the challenge The dissemination and decentralization of the one-man role played by the Mufti kept things maintained and confined within the official religious establishment; however, the new order did not deter new challenges from emerging outside it. The state underestimated the power of religious mobilization that became the real threat for years to come. The first of these 221

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challenges was in 1979, when a group of men led by Juhayman Al-Otaibi placed the Holy Mosque in Mecca under siege. The second was by Sahwa (Awakening) movement that was allowed to flourish in the 1980s, as a result of the religious atmosphere that was fostered following the siege, only to backfire against the state. Sahwa religious figures began contesting the relationship with the ruler after the Gulf War started in 1990, when US troops were allowed to launch strikes against Iraq from Saudi Arabia. The official religious establishment’s acceptance of the US presence deepened the crack even further with Sahwa figures who considered the green light a sign of the establishment’s inability to uphold Islamic obligations and traditions. The Memorandum of Advice, a letter addressed to King Fahd and signed by dozens of Sahwa religious scholars, was a turning point, as it challenged the leadership and openly criticized its actions and lack of political reforms. The letter “represented the Islamists’ quest for power,” which ultimately led to the imprisonment of a number of signatories in 1994.4 These two challenges faced by the state demonstrated how religious movements cannot always be contained and can serve as a threat to the stability of the political authority. The deteriorating health of King Fahd (r. 1982–2005) in the last years of his reign allowed King Abdallah (r. 2005–15) to become the de facto ruler. Perhaps this explains how, between 2000 until 2014, a decent amount of freedom was allowed to flourish, which encouraged Saudi intellectuals and writers to contest religious and social views in traditional media and on the Internet. The September 11th attacks of 2001, along with the Iraq War in 2003, allowed Saudi liberals and conservatives to question the country’s religious discourse and call for its reform (a chapter in the first edition of this book discussed the emerging religious discourse at that time). Moreover, important Sahwa figures who were eventually released from prison enjoyed the relaxed intellectual space which helped them reconstruct their narrative and gain more supporters. As a result, debates on reforming the religious discourse moved from traditional to social media, opening the door for genuine and unrestricted discussion. Religious figures continued to attract much following and interest, and the state saw that its lenient stance and changed views had a benign effect on future mobilizations, undermining, yet again, the strength of such movements in unforeseeable regional events, such as the Arab uprising in 2011.

Transition: The quest for democracy Just like his half-brother before him, King Abdallah’s era witnessed the growing problem of maintaining a new challenge posed by religious figures. While King Fahd’s era witnessed religious hostility due to the state’s modernization and seeming Westernization, reformed Sahwa figures and other religious scholars began to challenge the traditional religious discourse itself. Just before the beginning of the Arab uprisings, religious and academic figures began campaigning for human rights and the need for a constitutional monarchy. The formation of Hasm (the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Organization) indicated the start of an era for political and civil mobilization, as the movement called for political reforms and the release of political prisoners, demonstrating a total shift and maturity of the religious discourse.5 Its founding members went beyond the “Islamist–liberal divide” that had characterized the Saudi intellectual scene for years, since Hasm’s founding members included both Islamists, such as Abdallah Al-Hamid and Sulieman Al-Rushoudie, and human rights activists such as Mohammed Al-Qahtani.6 Other thinkers and scholars such as Abdallah Al-Malki, Hasan Farhan Al-Malki and Salman Al-Odah continued contesting views through their writing, or on social media. Abdallah 222

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Al-Malki’s important interpretation of democracy and sovereignty perhaps poses one of the most challenging emerging religious narratives. Following the eruption of the Arab uprising, he wrote an article inspired by the revolutions, in which he argued that sovereignty is more important that implementing Sharia and that a constitution chosen through ballot boxes is the only means to implement democracy.7 Hasan Farhan Al-Malki also played a role in fostering debates that challenged conformist views on religion, especially relating to sectarianism. Salman Al-Odah along with Mustafa Al-Hasan established the Al-Nahda (Youth Rising Forum) Annual Meeting which was supposed to take place every year in different Arab capitals. The purpose of the meeting was to invite and encourage Arab youth to actively engage in social change and promote civil society awareness. The first meeting took place in Manama in 2010 and the second in Doha in 2011. However, the Kuwait meeting in 2012 was cancelled as the Gulf states were wary of such gatherings during the ongoing events of the Arab uprising. No more meetings were allowed to take place and both Al-Odah and Al-Hasan were included in the arrest of scholars in 2017. Even though King Abdallah’s time witnessed an era of ease and a better environment for freedom of expression, nevertheless, the calls for political reforms before and after the start of Arab uprisings challenged the government and led to the imprisonment of a number of political reformers in 2013 and 2014, most notably Hasm members. This is because the new emerging voices within the religious sphere constituted a “mutation that has consolidated against the dogma of the official Salafi tradition.”8 Even though these calls were modest and few in number, they were perceived as an additional threat to the government at a time of regional unrest. As a result, King Abdallah’s era witnessed the drafting of a counterterrorism law in 2014 which has been used against imprisoned activists. While King Abdallah’s rule had allowed the fostering of thoughts and ideas that helped develop the social and political scene, these minor reforms and limited prosecutions would evolve into dramatic social changes and wider clampdowns on religious and other important figures after King Salman ascended to the throne in 2015.

The new order King Salman seems to have learned the lessons from Abdallah’s challenging time with religious figures who were able to push back against the modest and limited reforms the latter had introduced. Just like his half-brother, King Salman maintained a conservative image among religious scholars before becoming king. Over the years, the religious discourse overstressed the significance of Saudi Arabia’s place as the land of the two Holy Mosques and the birthplace of Islam. Now that Saudi Arabia wanted to diversify its economy and open up the country to foreign investors, the Islamic identity stood as a hindrance to reform and change. Moreover, religious figures were hopeful that the new king would tighten the grip on the social scene that they considered was overly relaxed during King Abdallah’s era. During the first royal shake-up that took place days after he became king, Salman relieved Abdul-Latif Al Al-Sheikh from his role as the head of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Haia). That move generated much jubilation in public and private settings among conservative circles who were angered by the former head’s lenient stance during King Abdallah’s era.9 The strong approval of the new king, who maintained his conservative image for months into his reign, could be also seen when two prominent Sahwa figures openly praised and expressed their hopes for the new king and dismissal of his predecessor on national television. Salman Al-Odah said that when Salman was crown prince, he encouraged the scholar 223

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to write a list of recommendations to tackle domestic challenges and potential threats. According to Salman Al-Odah, the then crown prince praised his recommendation, saying that had he been in power, the list will be implemented as part of his policies as king.10 Mohsin Al-Awaji also praised King Salman and criticized the former king and the circle around him. The two scholars’ optimism in the new king did not deter them from being targeted. Al-Awaji was immediately summoned for an investigation following his criticism and Salman Al-Odah was included in the first clampdown on religious figures in 2017. From becoming king to the period of clampdowns in 2017, the new king and his son were first careful to minimize the influence of the religious establishment before going after the most challenging part: the independent and unofficial religious scholars.

Shelving the establishment The credibility of the official religious establishment has always been questionable, especially by Sahwa scholars who highlighted and criticized its conformity to the political authority. Moreover, “outdated” fatwas on contemporary issues, especially related to modernization and women, not only show a constant inconsistency, but also demonstrate the establishment’s inability to keep up with the pace of change that has been sweeping the kingdom over the past few decades. Therefore, the inevitability of modern living forced many Saudis to adapt to change, even if it was prohibited by the establishment. As a result, the establishment itself fell victim to modernization as the normalization of these changes not only weakened their credibility but illustrated their inconsistency even further when the scholars themselves adopted the lifestyles they had once prohibited. However, the religious discourse that emphasized adherence to the ruler also stressed the importance of not criticizing scholars, citing a quotation by Islamic historian and scholar ibn ‘Asakir who discouraged such criticism. The widely used phrase “the flesh of religious scholars is poisonous” deterred open criticism of the establishment, and maintained some remnant of public respect even if inconsistencies existed.11 Moreover, during King Abdallah’s time, the minor and slow-paced social reforms that were introduced did not completely throw the establishment’s credibility off balance. While King Abdallah’s social reforms were implemented gradually and slowly, King Salman was abrupt in introducing changes that stripped him of the conservative aura he had maintained as crown prince. Such fast-paced change was received with mixed feelings by the official religious establishment, which was unable to maintain a coherent stance regarding change in the kingdom. In early 2017, Sheikh Abdullah Al-Mutlaq, a member of the Coucnil of Senior Scholars, expressed concern about the establishment of an Entertainment Authority, urging its head at that time, Ahmed Al-Khatib, to reconsider his agenda. Other scholars such as Saleh Al-Fozan and Saleh Al-Luhaidan expressed similar views regarding change in the kingdom. However, the arrest of many scholars in 2017 showed the religious establishment that the leadership would not be deterred from taking an aggressive stance against them as well. It is no wonder that Al-Mutlaq fell more in line with change subsequently when, in early 2018, he announced that wearing a black abaya (the robe worn traditionally by women) is not compulsory for women, a drastic departure from decades of enforced abaya rule in the kingdom.12 Moreover, the royal decree that lifted the decades-long ban on women drivers included a statement by the Council of Senior Scholars that praised the decision, arguing that lifting the ban has more benefits for women than disadvantages.13 Subsequently, the official religious discourse began to change, focusing less on what is prohibited in Islam, and talking more about what is allowed. 224

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Another layer that the establishment had to shed which also foregrounds that drastic change in their discourse is their new stance on pre-Islamic artefacts and sites. For a long time, preIslamic history was associated with the jahiliya (ignorance), in order to create a rupture between the culture prevailing before the Prophet Muhammad, and the one associated with him and his message. As a result, pre-Islamic artefacts excavated from historical sites were kept away from the displays of national museums. However, the cornerstone strategy for post-oil Saudi Arabia – Vision 2030 – relies on economic diversification, and thus the need to break the taboo associated with pre-Islamic history was essential to revive tourism. As a result, the government encouraged scholars to speak in favor of opening the sites to the public. Statues and other figures were displayed for the first time in December 2017 in the Riyadh National Museum. The then Minister of Tourism Sultan bin Salman inaugurated the exhibition along with the members of the Council of Senior Scholars. During the exhibition, Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manea, a member of the council, spoke in favor of exhibiting the artefacts, arguing that Saudi citizens should be proud of their history and civilization which must be displayed in museums.14 Shelving the establishment was not the only means of minimizing the influence of religious scholars. The new leadership promoted new scholars at various posts to strengthen a sense of nationalism domestically as well as to polish the country’s image internationally. For example, Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, former minister of justice and the current secretary general of the Muslim World League, joined Mohammed bin Salman for his US and Europe tour in March 2018. In May last year, he was a guest at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he focused predominantly on condemning the Holocaust. Al-Issa wrote an article published in the Washington Post on Holocaust Remembrance Day to encourage Muslims around the world to remember the massacre.15 He has been active in promoting the new Islamic direction of the current Saudi leadership, arguing that Mohammed bin Salman is transforming the country economically, while promoting a more lenient understanding of religion. Although he remains mainly a figure to promote Saudi and its new religious stance outside the country, nevertheless, his role shows that the leadership is trying to promote its new position on religion to the Western world. Religion is no longer used to inhibit people domestically, but to appease the West by promoting a “moderate” version of Islam that is an essential part of the new public relations campaign to change the country’s image.

Al Al-Sheikh: From religious authority to business partners The alliance between Mohammed ibn Abdulawahab and Mohammed bin Saud has surely evolved over the decades. The descendants of ibn Abdulwahab (called Al Al-Sheikh as a direct reference to the religious leader) played diverse roles in government but their religious influence remained important. King Salman changed the distribution of the family and drastically altered their roles. He promoted the Al Al-Sheikh family even more, making them partners in the modernization project rather than only central for the project’s religious aspect. This constitutes a departure from King Abdallah’s era who, during the last month of his reign, dismissed the last member of the Al Al-Sheikh family from his cabinet, Saleh Al Al-Sheikh, who is an influential figure in the family and a current minister of state. King Salman has now allowed Al Al-Sheikh more positions, including the most controversial one: head of the Entertainment Authority. The two Muftis from Al Al-Sheikh, Mohammed bin Ibrahim and Abdulaziz bin Abdullah (1999–present), are a stark example of the religious establishment’s evolution and the changing 225

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dynamics of Al Al-Sheikh family. The first, Mohammed ibn Ibrahim, challenged the state and played a role in developing the religious discourse for decades to come, which influenced Sahwa figures and contributed to their mobilization. On the other hand, Abdulaziz ibn Abdallah has shown himself to be the total opposite of his cousin (see Table 17.1), as he continues to play a role in legitimizing not only the ruling family, but its various decisions both domestically and regionally. When the kingdom placed Qatar under a blockade in June 2017, Sheikh Abdulaziz ibn Abdallah backed the leadership’s decision, arguing that such drastic measure was, indeed, beneficial for the future of the Qatari people.16 Moreover, Abdulaziz Al Al-Sheikh, along with other members of his family, issued a letter clarifying that the Qatari ruling family is not a descendant of their founding grandfather, Mohammed bin Abdulwahab, as the Qatari ruling family claims. They also urged Qatar to change the name of the grand mosque in Doha named after Mohammed bin Abdulwahab since the mosque does not uphold their founding father’s teachings.17 To demonstrate the wide-ranging roles currently played by the Al Al-Sheikh family, in late 2018, Turki Al Al-Sheikh was appointed head of Entertainment Authority, which is a body responsible for overseeing the controversial entertainment sector in the country. Under his wing, entertainment ideas have expanded and are not only limited to concerts and events. He included in his entertainment agenda a Qur’an recitation competition as opposed to a Qur’an memorization contest, that had been the norm for decades before. Turki Al Al-Sheikh seems to want to accommodate society’s conservative faction by including competitions that were formerly under the wing of the religious establishment, yet diluting its purely religious nature by focusing on the contestant’s voice rather than their memorization skills. As the Table 17.1 illustrates, the relatively high number of Al Al-Sheikh members with government titles demonstrates that they are maintaining the alliance outside the religious

Table 17.1

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domain. Saleh Al Al-Sheikh, a grandson of the challenging Mufti Mohammed bin Ibrahim, is a senior family member with a high position in government. He also is on Mohammed bin Salman’s Committee of Political and Security Affairs, a government body that was formed after King Salman took power. A nephew of the current Mufti, Mohammed bin Abdulmalik, is also on the other committee that was formed to be in charge of economic and development affairs. Abdulatif bin Abdulaziz Al Al-Sheikh, the former head of Haia who Salman fired in early 2015, was given an even higher position than the one he occupied, as he was named the minister of Islamic affairs in 2018. Lastly, another branch of Al Al-Sheikh family, descendants of Hussein bin Mohammed bin Abdulwahab (not shown in Table 17.1), have also gained a number of influential positions with the current leadership, including minister of education. All this shows the soft power the Al Al-Sheikh family is deploying with their changing roles within the government, which has altered the nature of their relationship and expanded their areas of expertise.

Demonizing Sahwa and the subsequent clampdown When Saudi Arabia placed the Muslim Brotherhood on a terrorist list in 2014, hostility against Sahwa began escalating. The Sahwa was considered guilty by association and the movement was soon “witch-hunted” in both traditional and social media. Initially, Sahwa figures were seen as mere players in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, due to the latter’s infiltration of the education sector which, subsequently, allowed it to gained prominence in Sahwa circles. As a result, the official discourse argued that Sahwa leaders were mere followers, either actively or passively, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s wider agenda. However, the wide use of social media and the current leadership stance on clamping down on religious scholars encouraged a grassroots campaign against Sahwa figures. Moreover, the “Islamist mutation” that categorized the new emerging scholars in Saudi Arabia constituted a real concern for the current leadership.18 This mutation gave birth to a new category of thinkers who can be called tanwiris (enlightened), as they not only challenged traditional religious thoughts, but were capable of reproducing alternative religious views. Terms such as siyadah (sovereignty) and wilaya (rule) are used by these scholars to expand the religious domain and not limit these concepts to only the political authority. Madawi Al-Rasheed includes a number of scholars in this category, such as Salman Al-Odah, Abdallah Al-Hamid, and Abdallah Al-Malki among others.19 Demonizing Sahwa was a carefully thought-out strategy to eliminate the threat of religious figures who maintained millions of followers on social media. Scholars such as Salman Al-Odah, Muhsin Al-Awaji, Abdulaziz Al-Turaifi, Nasser Al-Omar, and Awad Al-Qarni were highly regarded among the conservative and religious factions of the population. However, when the new leadership opened up the country and relaxed social norms in 2016, these scholars began to be associated with years of constrained social life. This resentment against Sahwa allowed and encouraged a grassroots mobilization on social media that paved the way for mass arrests in 2017 and justified such drastic measures against religious scholars. The demonization of Sahwa not only allowed the state to eliminate religious figures and normalize their prosecution, but also helped to dissuade any sympathy for the imprisoned scholars and discouraged reviving their legacy. The wide clampdown of religious scholars in 2017 was a confirmation of the state’s quest for silencing the faction of religious scholars who do not identify with its views. As a result, Safar Al-Hawali, a well-known scholar who initially was not included in the arrests, published an book in mid-2018 that criticized the government and the official religious 227

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establishment. Al-Hawali says that the alliance between Mohammed bin Abdulwahab and Mohammed bin Saud gave birth to a foundation that is now collapsing with the current government’s changes. He suggests that this collapse will not only weaken religious influence but will also affect the state and might lead to its collapse.20 However, his book was used against him on traditional media as the widely circulated Arab News, a Saudi Englishlanguage newspaper, detailed how Al-Hawali had preached “anti-Western views,” as part of a series of articles that criticizes Sahwa scholars.21 Demonizing Sahwa took a great turn when Sheikh Aidh Al-Qarni apologized on the first day of Ramadan in 2019 to the Saudi population for the Sahwa’s responsibility for decades of constrained social life. Such a declaration on television, followed by Al-Qarni’s unlimited support to the leadership, demonstrates that the role of religious figures has not completely been abandoned. The leadership realizes that even if scholars have lost their appeal and credibility among the youth, however, their stance and views still remain important to a faction of Saudi society. Such a declaration also is an attempt to sabotage and eliminate the influence of the Sahwa movement among its figures, since Al-Qarni was a Sahwa member himself.

Towards a “moderate Islam” The current leadership has been attempting to push forward a “moderate” version of Islam not only to combat its fear of homegrown terrorism, but to relax social and conservative norms that dominated the Saudi lifestyle for decades before. During the Future Investment Initiative forum in Riyadh in October 2017, Mohammed bin Salman stated that Saudi Arabia is “going back to moderate Islam,” arguing that the kingdom will not waste more years “combatting extremist thoughts.”22 The phrase soon became a widely used but rarely defined expression among Saudi scholars. While a small number of scholars and writers have attempted to define the concept, these definitions fall short of providing a revolutionary understanding of religious texts nor do they provide an alternative understanding of contemporary issues. The few available definitions of moderate Islam rely on contrasting the new emerging version of religion to the Sahwa years, which were considered to be the conduit for extremist thoughts. As a result, “moderate Islam” seems to be a reactionary concept to the constraints of the state-sponsored Sahwa years. The phrase is an attempt to loosen religious restrictions through a religious lens. According to Saleh Al-Mghamsi, a religious scholar close to the leadership, the need to be in the middle is crucial in order to steer away from both radical views and complete Westernization. Al-Mghamsi argues that sometimes certain lifestyles do not necessarily appeal to everyone, but that does not mean it should be prohibited if the majority leans towards it. To be moderate is to be inclusive of the whole social spectrum. Al-Mghamsi confirms the conformity of the “moderate Islam” perspective by arguing that religious scholars are not equal to rulers nor are they opponents of them. He stresses that the leadership is capable of safeguarding society’s values.23 Some scholars went the extra mile by contributing to define “moderate Islam” through their own actions. For example, Sulieman Aba Al-Khail, former head of Imam University until late 2018, used his position to show allegiance to the leadership by departing from the usual role associated with his title. In regard to music, during the inauguration of a new department in the university, he was filmed dancing, which generated public debate. He also launched a campaign throughout the university against the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations on the kingdom’s terrorist list. This seems to be part of his efforts to 228

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actively foster the concept of Al-Amn Al-Fikri (intellectual security) as a means of combating extremism from the roots. Aba Al-Khail’s interest in intellectual security allowed him to deliver a lecture in the Holy Mosque in Makkah, seated at close proximity to the Kaaba to deliver his speech on the importance of intellectual security awareness.24 Adel Al-Kalbani is another controversial religious scholar, who has been playing on the “moderate Islam” trend for the past few years. After a number of controversial statements, especially on social media where Al-Kalbani has more than 6 million followes on Twitter, Al-Kalbani had to explain his controversial views on television. Photos of the sheikh dealing cards for the first national Baloot competition, a popular card game in the Gulf and a longdisputed activity among scholars who discouraged playing it, went viral on traditional and social media. He was also present during the announcement of the Entertainment Authority’s agenda for 2019, where he was seated next to Mohammed Abdo, a famous Saudi singer. His presence in both events demonstrate how the political authority is still using religious figures to add an element of legitimization regarding its numerous plans that might not be well received among the conservative population. Al-Kalbani, however, said during a television interview that dealing cards does not mean that he enjoys playing the game himself. He argued that announcing something as permissible in Islam does not necessarily mean that everyone must practice it, perhaps to explain why he never attends the numerous events arranged by the Entertainment Authority.25 Al-Kalbani seems to want to maintain his preacher’s hat while also appeasing to the current leadership, by arguing that he does not listen to music or play cards, yet encourages the population to take part in such events. Such a controversial stance demonstrates the difficulty of breaking long-established taboos and how attempting to do so does not necessarily help scholars gain more prominence but instead may weaken their overall credibility among the population.

How is nationalism replacing religion? Before the state began clamping down on religious figures to minimize their influence, it started to actively foster a strong sense of nationalism to fill the ensuing religious vacuum and to readjust loyalties. Banners of the new king and his deputies began covering building façades from early 2015. The state-sponsored nationalism was not only visible on the streets, but also present on traditional and social media, pushed by the state and enforced by Saudis who were enthusiastic about change. Genuine interests in the new leadership’s direction allowed nationalism to foster, and the subsequent clampdown on the religious police was well received among a sizeable faction of the population that was growing weary of the police’s constant interference in people’s lives. However, the subsequent opening-up of the country, especially by the numerous events of the Entertainment Authority, was received with mixed feelings, as the authority tested the boundaries of what is acceptable in the Saudi society. The attempt to open lounges similar to nightclubs and to invite controversial international artists was not well received. Therefore, the state realized that implementing its social reform plans was not as easy as it had anticipated, due to the constant pushback, making it realize that total abandonment of religious values is not a favorable direction for a substantial proportion of Saudi society. Moreover, the number of cases of Saudis taking advantage of the new relaxed atmosphere caused outrage on social media by those who considered such openness immoral and socially unacceptable. The state was faced with a difficult position; it did not want to tighten social norms after it has relaxed them, nor did it want to stand idle to a potential social backlash against it. As a result, it drafted a “Public Taste” law which is essentially a moral code of 229

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conduct, ostensibly not influenced by religious values, but instead intended to preserve social and cultural values. To distance the new law from claims of being inspired by religion, the new law includes a list of other violations related to waste, bullying, and other activities that might be considered disrespectful to the kingdom’s image, culture, and values.26 The Public Taste law encourages citizens to abide by their values and customs as “Saudis.” This is why nationalism is perceived as an important strategy to fill the religious vacuum and to promote an allegiance to the ruler without the need of religious figures for legitimization.27 The counterterrorism law that was drafted in 2014 was expanded in 2017, and also stresses the importance of not criticizing the king or the crown prince. Such new laws demonstrate the state’s attempt to find other means for legitimization outside of the religious domain. Now, nationalism is the new umbrella from under which the ruling family derives its legitimacy.

Conclusion: A new “moderate Islam” or an existential crisis? Since 2015, the government has aimed at curtailing the influence of the religious establishment on the population and to open up the country for social and economic reform. As a result, the current status quo of the religious establishment is undergoing the most challenging period of its history. The establishment has been sidelined and selectively invited to events and exhibitions to provide a religious “seal of approval,” as a way to absorb public disapproval of social and cultural change. Other scholars have either been detained or pressed to adopt views that weaken their credibility domestically and abroad. The government is replacing the identity that once was fueled by the religious institution with hypernationalism, as a means to replace the political legitimacy that the religious establishment once fulfilled. Unlike his brother before him, King Salman set new rules for dealing with the religious community that have always been difficult to maintain. He redefined his relationship with the religious establishment by not completely marginalizing them as Abdallah had done. For example, he keeps regular and close meetings with various members of the official religious establishment. However, he also ensured that they are aware of the new changing dynamics of their relationship with the state. The subsequent arrest of those who were not only challenging the political order but might pose a problem to the leadership provided the rest of the religious community with a warning sign. As a result, both the religious establishment as well as normal citizens have become aware now more than they did in 2015 of the country’s new direction. As a result, religious figures from the establishment have either accepted the new reality or decided to remain quiet. No longer are they able to provide their own perspective or challenge the state’s views, even if they subtly did so before. Friday sermons in the Holy Mosque in Makkah are tinted by the political and regional climate, and oaths of allegiance to the current leadership are expected now more than ever before. On the other hand, religious figures who have not been arrested are showing their allegiance to the ruler by actively promoting the government’s new decisions, even regarding highly debated issues such as entertainment and regional hostilities with neighbors. Religious figures have now realized that in order for them to maintain some public space and to save themselves from possible prosecution, they need to be fierce defenders of the state’s positions regarding social and economic reforms. Adel Al-Kalbani and other scholars like him are creating a third religious space that stands between the one established by former Sahwa figures and the one occupied by the official religious establishment. This third space allows them to normalize new social reform plans and to undo old traditional and religious views. However, just like the official establishment, their stance is decreasing their reliability and 230

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importance more and more every day. It also shows that for religious scholars to survive, they must promote views that are not derived from religion, contributing to their own existential crisis rather than providing an alternative understanding of religion that springs from a genuine interest in contesting social and political issues. The more the religious establishment and other religious figures try to appease to the leadership, the more their credibility, integrity, and overall sense of identity will become more dificult to maintain.

Notes 1 Nabil Mouline, “Enforcing and Reinforcing the State’s Islam: The Functioning of the Committee of Senior Scholars,” in Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, and Economic and Religious Change eds. Bernard Haykal, Thomas Hegghammer, and Stephane Lacroix (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 51. 2 Stephan Lacroix, Awakening Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 25. 3 Lacroix, Awakening Islam, 74. 4 Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 166. 5 Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists (London: Hurst, 2015), 55. 6 Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists, 56. 7 Abdullah Al-Malki, “Siyadat al-umma qabla tatbiq al-sharia [Sovereignty before implementing ̣ Sharia],” Almqaal, November 11, 2011, available at www.almqaal.com/?p=922 8 Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists, 8. 9 Issa Al-Shamani, “‘Awdat Al Al-Sheikh: Rasasah fi quloob al-ikhwanj wa al-muadlajeen [The return of Al Al-Sheikh: A bullet in the hearts of Ikwanis and ideologs],” Okaz Newspaper, 3 July 2018, available at www.okaz.com.sa/article/1646266 10 Rotana Khalijiah, “Sheikh Salman Al-Odah: Guest on Fe Alsamim,” Fe Alsamim, June 12, 2015, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5w5rnehiVY 11 Abdulsalam Al-Wabil, “luh ̣um al’ulama masmomah: qilat lel-rad ‘ala alsalafiyah [the flesh of ulama is poisonous: a response to Salafism],” Al-Sharq, August 25, 2012, available at www.alsharq.net.sa/ 2012/08/25 12 Abdullah Al-Dani, “Al-Mutlaq: ‘Aba’at al-mara laysat ilzamiya . . . almaqsud al-sitir [Al-Mutlaq: Abayas are not compulsory for women if decency is achieved],” Okaz newspaper, February 11, 2018, available at https://www.okaz.com.sa/local/na/1613955 13 Aseel Bashraheel, “The year the ban on women driving was lifted in KSA,” Arab News, December 26, 2017, available at http://www.arabnews.com/node/1214576/saudi-arabia 14 Ahmed Ghawi, “Sultan bin Salman yaltaqi al-ulema fi ma’radh rawai’ athar al-mamlakah [Sultan bin Salman meets Senior Scholars in exhibition for Kingdom’s archeological masterpieces,” AlRiyadh Newspaper, available at http://www.alriyadh.com/1643934 15 Mohammed Al-Issa, “Why Muslims from around the world should remember the Holocaust,” Washington Post, January 25, 2019, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/ 01/25/why-muslims-around-world-should-remember-holocaust/?utm_term=.6a8b1c2b49d3 16 CNN “Mufti Al-Su’udiya: Al-qararaat z ̣idda Al-Doha fiha manfa’a le al-muslimin [the decisions against Doha have benefits for Muslims],” 11 July 2017, available at https://arabic.cnn.com/ middle-east/2017/06/11/saudi-mufti-qatar-gcc-rift-muslim-brotherhood 17 Al-Arabiya, “Usrat Al Al-Sheikh: Nisbat amir Qatar li ‘ailatina kaḏ ib wa muḵ talaq [Al Al-Sheikh family: Qatar’s claim of family relation to Al Al-Sheikh is a made-up lie,” May 28, 2017, available at https://www.alarabiya.net/ar/saudi-today/2017/05/28/%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A9-% D8%A2%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%AE-%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A8-% D8%A3%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%AC%D9%8A-%D9%84% D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%A7-%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%B0% D8%A8-%D9%88%D9%85%D8%AE%D8%AA%D9%84%D9%82 18 Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists, 8. 19 Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists, 8. 20 Safar Al-Hawali, Almuslimoon wa Al-Hadara Al-Gharbiya [Muslims and Western Civilization], 1850.

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Eman Alhussein 21 Rawan Radwan, “Father of Hate: How detained Saudi cleric Safar Al-Hawali promoted antiWestern ideas,” Arab News, April 29, 2019, available at http://www.arabnews.com/node/ 1489456/saudi-arabia 22 BBC, “Crown Prince says Saudis want return to moderate Islam,” October 25, 2017, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41747476 23 Rotana Khalijiah, “Sheikh Saleh Al-Mghamsi: Guest on Fe Alsorah,” Fe Alsorah, December 10, 2018, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sREHv_2KHOg 24 General Presidency for the Holy Mosque and Prophet’ s Mosque, “Aba Al-Khail yaḵ tattim aldawrah al-‘ilmiyya fi al-amn al-fikri [Aba Al-Khail concludes a course in intellectual security],” December 10, 2018, available at https://www.gph.gov.sa/ar-sa/Pages/news-details.aspx? nID=46,682 25 CNN Arabic, “Adel Al-Kalbani yuwad ̣ih mawqifah mn al-ghina wa al ‘baloot’ wa madain Saleh [Adel Al-Kalbani clarifies his views regarding singing, ‘baloot’ and visiting Madain Saleh,” March 1, 2019, available at https://arabic.cnn.com/middle-east/article/2019/03/01/saudi-adel-alkal bani-fatwas 26 Um Al-Qura, “Lawa’ih ̣ wa anz ̣imat la’ih ̣at al-muh ̣afaz ̣ah ala alḏ awq al-‘aam [Regulations for the maintenance of Public Taste Law],” April 23, 2019, available at https://www.uqn.gov.sa/articles/ 1556145442037546600/ 27 Eman Alhussein, “How Hypernationalism is transforming Saudi Arabia,” The European Council on Foreign Relations, June 19, 2019, available at https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/ saudi_first_how_hyper_nationalism_is_transforming_saudi_arabia

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18 POLITICAL ISLAM IN PEACE AND WAR The case of Yemen Silvana Toska

Introduction Since its unification in 1990, and unlike anywhere else in the Middle East, Yemen’s main Islamist party – the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah) – has eclipsed all other forms of Islamic political activism in the country. The majority of Salafis, meanwhile, rejected both political parties and participation as a whole, instead favoring a focus on creed and piety. Partly in response to the relative political power of these two Sunni groups, as well as their Saudi Arabian support, the Zaydi Shi’a of northern Yemen established the Houthi movement, with both a political and a military wing. Following the revolutionary uprisings of 2011, the postSaleh period continued to be characterized by the political centrality of Islah. The Ansar Allah Party, the Houthis’ political wing, was sidelined in the post-revolutionary negotiations, which sparked its takeover of the capital in 2014. The Saudi Arabian-led war on the Houthis has further changed the political opportunities for the main Islamist groups. Whereas Islah has been eclipsed and fractured, with some of its old members joining with ideologically diverse groups, many apolitical Salafis have joined known jihadi groups – including al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Houthis remain bogged down in a multi-front war. In other words, most Yemeni Islamists have responded to the shrinking political landscape for participation through the one means that would ensure their political relevance: as militarized actors in a multi-sided conflict. Like most Arab countries, Islamist groups in Yemen have a long history of engaging with politics – both as insiders, namely status-quo actors who engage in formal political participation while pushing for a greater incorporation of Islamic principles in politics, and as outsiders, mostly revisionist Islamists who reject formal politics altogether in favor of versions of an Islamic state. Neither of these two groups, however, was ever internally monolithic. Status quo actors – such as Yemen’s Islamist Congregation for Reform (Islah), which is a Shafi’i (Sunni) political party – is composed of ideologically diverse factions that often conflict with one another.1 Many of the revisionist groups – including Ansar Allah (the Houthis), which is a Zaydi Shi’a group, terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and other Sunni militant groups – are also composed of factions that have adapted and adopted strategies and even ideologies in response to the political context in which they found themselves.2 Unlike most Arab countries, however, all these Islamist political actors have found themselves operating in war contexts at various moments in time 233

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which, currently, has left the Islamist landscape in Yemen strewn with different militarized organizations. In this chapter, I provide a broad overview of the changing nature of Yemen’s political Islam since the creation of the republic in 1962 to the present moment. I first describe Yemen’s diverse sectarian environment. Following that, I examine Yemen’s historically most important Islamist organization, Islah, and its oscillating fortunes from its days of formal participation in politics – as both a member of the governing coalition and in opposition to it – to its slow decline in the decade preceding the revolution of 2011. I will then examine the rise, and continuing rise, of the main revisionist groups in Yemen: the Houthis and al-Qaeda prior to the 2011 revolution. Finally, I discuss where each of these groups found themselves in the immediate aftermath of the revolution of 2011 – namely, the empowerment of Islah, neglect of the Houthis, and slow strengthening of al-Qaeda – and how that situation led to the overthrow of the government in 2014 on the part of the Houthis. A brief section discusses their fortunes during the war. Of these three broad groups with explicitly, but differing, Islamist agenda, the more moderate (Islah) is now significantly weakened, as the other two have gained strength. The Islamist field, overall, has become militarized. As this analysis will make clear, while religious and sectarian divisions in Yemen have been a source of some tension throughout Yemen’s history, the main drives of Yemeni Islamists of all stripes have been local (within Yemen), regional (externally fueled by neighboring powers), tribal, and global (al-Qaeda and ISIS). They are driven as much by ideology as they are by political and economic grievances. Similarly, popular support for each of these actors, where it exists, comes mostly from the same pragmatic calculations of the groups themselves, namely on their ability to provide food, services, and security in the absence of a functioning government. In other words, I argue that it is the word political, rather than “Islamist,” of Yemen’s political Islam that ought to be highlighted and underlined in any analysis of the phenomenon.

Sectarianism in Yemen Islamic identities in Yemen can be divided into three main sects: Shi’a Zaydism, Sunni Shafi’ism, and Isma’ilis which, due to their diminuitive membership, are not nearly as politically active. Despite domestic migration throughout the centuries, the Zaydis are mostly settled in Yemen’s highlands north of Sana’a, whereas the majority Sunni population lives in the southern part of the capital and the eastern regions (or South Yemen). The majority of the Sunnis adhere to the teachings of Mohammad Idris al-Shafi’i (d. 820), whereas the Zaydis trace their lineage back to their eponym, Zayd ibn Ali, the great-grandson of Ali ibn Abi Talib. Unlike juridical distinctions between Sunni and Shi’a sects elsewhere, the Zaydis and Shafi’i are much closer to one another: the main distinction between them is that the Zaydis insist on righteous rule through the sadah, i.e. descendants of the Prophet through his grandsons Husayn and Hasan.3 The first Zaydi imam in Yemen, Yahya ibn al-Husayn, established the Zaydi community in Yemen in 897 and laid the foundation for the Zaydi imamate, which ruled Yemen until the start of North Yemen Civil war in 1962. The loss of the imamate is a point of contention for some Zaydis – like the Houthi movement – but not all, since Zaydis also fought on the side of the republican army against the imamate. Because Zaydis and Shafi’is are not as theologically distinct as other Sunni and Shi’a sects, they sometimes describe themselves as the “fifth school” (al madhhab al khamis) of Sunni Islam, after the four orthodox Sunni schools of Islam.4 234

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In fact, Zaydi imams often promoted a convergence between Zaydi and Sunni jurisprudence, in order to legitimize their rule to their majority Sunni population.5 Various imams understood the pragmatic reasons to bring these two sects closer as a political tool, even if it meant revising religious doctrine – something that has remained a distinct feature of Yemen’s political Islam ever since. These imams, under the guidance of jurist Mohammad Al Shawkani (d. 1834), called their efforts a “Traditionist Project,” aimed at the development of a non-madhhab identity.6 This project was adopted by republican leaders after the abolition of the Zaydi dynasty in 1962: the adoption of a unified Yemeni national identity, they opined, required a unified Islamic identity.7 For decades, until the 1990s, this doctrinal convergence was relatively successful. However, the rise in Sunni evangelism and radicalism in the northern and traditionally Zaydi areas – often sponsored by Saudi Arabia – led to a Zaydi rival and a serious break in this convergence, made worse by the conflicts that followed the 2011 revolutions. Before examining in more detail how this divergence developed slowly over the last three decades, it is necessary to first focus on the most important Islamist political party in Yemen, Islah, which, together with President Saleh’s General People’s Congress party (GPC) dominated Yemeni politics since unification in 1990. I will then discuss how the repercussions of this dominance was at least partially responsible for the rise of revivalist movements in Yemen.

Status quo political Islam: Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood Established in 1990, Yemen’s Islah is often equated with Muslim Brotherhoods elsewhere in the Middle East but to do so, as is often done, is to simplify the matter greatly. While Islah has an explicitly religious ideology and platform, most of which is indeed influenced by Muslim Brotherhoods elsewhere in the Middle East, it also differs from them substantially. Internally, Islah is composed of four main groups, which have historically had very different agendas from one another. The party, as will be discussed below, is a combination of tribesmen, Muslim Brothers, Salafis, and notable businessmen.8 These four groups overlap – with tribesmen, for example, at times also being Salafis and businessmen – but it is nevertheless useful to distinguish between them, in order to better understand the different and conflicting tendencies that have influenced Islah’s behavior over the last three decades.9 A uniting factor among these groups is a commitment to participation in politics in the hope of accomplishing religious, constitutional, and socioeconomic reforms. Islah has worked within the system in achieving these goals, both as part of the ruling coalition, and as an opposition party with close ties to the ruling party. It is no surprise that tribalism is an important aspect of Islah. The pervasive tribalism in Yemen, and especially North Yemen, means that tribal personalities and patronage networks are as important as are ideological programs.10 Nevertheless, a discussion of Yemen’s tribes is challenging, because the concept of “tribe” is particularly ambiguous. On the one hand, the word “tribe” is an emic concept of social representation.11 Many individuals identify as tribal members and receive social services, protection, and guidance from their tribe. The concept is hard to define, however, because the practice of tribalism, membership, and borders of the tribe are fluid and context specific. This is particularly difficult in Yemen where, despite their important role, tribes are diverse and function through different mechanisms.12 Furthermore, large swaths of Yemen, such as urban areas, central and South Yemen, and even rural areas in the north, no longer consider themselves tribal. However, areas in the extreme north, north-east, and east are still dominated by strong tribal customs and traditions.13 In these areas, the tribe is the main point of reference and collectively represents the interests of its members. 235

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The strength of tribalism in northern Yemen coupled with weak state institutions, have had a large impact on Islah’s politics. Its political culture was shaped while a coalition ally of the ruling GPC party and, as a result, it is “imbued with a concept of politics expressed in terms of loyalty, patronage, and connections.”14 The push and pull that comes from maintaining those tribal social networks, meanwhile, means that the party never developed a coherent ideology about Yemeni state and society, nor a specifically Islamic political program. To be sure, references to Islam abound, but these are not programmatic and are often contradictory, depending on which of the four groups espouses them. The ideological core of Islah has traditionally been the Muslim Brotherhood. Starting in the 1940s, the influence of Egyptian founder of the brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, spread to Yemen via scholarly and political interactions. Importantly, in addition to its Islamist core, the ideology developed by al-Banna was decidedly nationalistic, republican, and anti-imperialist.15 A prominent Muslim Brother, Yassin Abd al-Aziz al-Qubati, moved to Sana’a from Egypt, in order to escape Egyptian President Nasser’s prosecution, and brought with him al-Banna’s teachings.16 For Yemenis who then supported al-Banna’s Islamism, this support led to an uneasy relationship with the Zaydi imamate, as well as British rule in southern Yemen. Rejection of the imamate was not a sectarian issue, however: both Zaydi Shi’ites and Shafi’i Sunnis supported a republican Yemen. As discussed above, both doctrinally and historically, these two groups were never strongly antagonistic, hence the pro- and antiimamate factions did not take overtly sectarian flavors. In fact, the ideology that most divided Yemen, and united Islamists of both sects, was Leftism which developed in southern Yemen starting in the 1950s. Following the establishment of the Northern Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) in 1962, the nascent and weak republican government promoted the Muslim Brotherhood and other, unaffiliated, Islamists to counter-balance both the Leftist groups in the South, and the opposition National Democratic Front in the North, which was backed by the southern government.17 At the time, the Brotherhood did not function as a party or broad-based social movement, however. But it nevertheless provided the northern government with ideological legitimacy during a time of extreme institutional weakness. In the 1980s, Islamists in North Yemen were more formally incorporated into the Yemen Arab Republic’s (YAR) developmental state. President Ali Abd Allah Saleh drew several important Islamists – who would be the eventual founders of Islah – directly into the government or GPC ranks. Most notable among them were al-Qubati, the senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood who became minister of education; Shaykh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, a prominent Salafi Islamist, and Shaykh Abd Allah bin Husayn al-Ahmar, the most important shaykh of the Hashid tribal federation, itself the most prominent tribal federation in Yemen.18 Shaykh al-Ahmar was of Zaydi origin, but he (informally) converted to Sunni Islam as a result of his own personal religiosity, as well as having close ties to Saudi Arabia. I write “informally,” because a formal embrace of Sunni Islam was not necessary in a context where the distinctions between the two sects were, for the most part, politically inconsequential.19 The appeal of Islamists overall, however, was significant. In 1988, Islamists won six out of seven constituencies within the GPC’s Consultative Council elections.20 The unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 and the resulting presence of multiple other parties from the south, provided the incentive for northern Islamists to unite under a formal political party. The conversation around party politics was a fraught one: as Muslim Brothers jumped at the opportunity, many senior Salafi figures rejected the idea of an Islamist party, and pushed instead for a more quietist dawa (piety).21 Some Salafis, most importantly al-Zindani, were more amenable to party politics and joined the Brotherhood. 236

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The Brotherhood, whose support came largely from urban centers and especially universities, understood that it needed groups with the necessary political connections if they were to survive in a patronage system, which explains the rapid alliance with tribal leaders, including Shaykh al-Ahmar, who co-founded Islah. Both Salafis and tribal leaders who joined Islah had closer connections to President Saleh, as well as larger followings on the ground than the Brotherhood did, but the Brotherhood remained the ideological core of the party. That does not mean that they could sway the party, however: decisions within the party were often fraught, and policies conflictual, reflecting this uneasy alliance of three very different groups. The eventual addition of important businessmen unaffiliated with either of the three groups only increased the ideological disputes within Islah. Throughout its first decade, Islah would be best described as a conservative Islamic party that promotes religious values. After the 1990s, Islah became more accepting of democracy, although its party program remained ambiguous. This is unsurprising given the ideological disputes between the four groups in the party, as well as a urban–rural divide on a national scale. Often, this urban–rural divide is referred to as the “moderates” and “extremist” division within Islah. For many Yemenis, how Islah behaves in the urban centers and how Islah followers in the countryside behave have always been two very different things, and it is the extremism of the rural areas that is considered the “true” nature of Islah, which only speaks the language of democracy to play the game of appeasing both urbanites and foreigners alike.22 But even within the urban center, significant divisions along the conservative – moderate scale abound. Within the party’s Shura Council, the top leadership remained ideologically split between Zindani and other Salafi leaders on the one hand, and Muslim Brothers on the other. From the interpretations of Islamic law, to conceptions of an Islamic state, to gender relations – deep disagreements made these topics taboo, left undiscussed and, hence, undecided.23 Nevertheless, Islah was very successful in both the 1993 and later elections. With the Brotherhood having deep connections in universities and urban centers, and the tribes and Salafis with connections in the rest of the country, they could use their mobilizational structures even if the party itself was ideologically incoherent and split. Their strong showing in elections, especially compared to the Leftist parties from the South, both empowered them and equally weakened and politically marginalized the South. Islah joined the GPC government in 1994 and remained as part of the coalition until 1997. Throughout the 1990s, these three main groups within the party undertook both their own diverse strategies and plans within the larger party umbrella, and activities as part of the same group. With the Salafis weakened by their split between those who supported party politics and those who chose a life of dawa, the Brotherhood faction was emboldened to take a greater leadership role within the party. While the two most prominent names in the party, with the greatest mobilizational power, remained al-Zindani and Shaykh al-Ahmar, “the Brotherhood designed and articulated party platforms, represented the party at interpartisan functions, and did the organizational heavy lifting involved in party-building, moving quickly to develop branch offices and youth movements in every governorate of the country.”24 The Salafis within the party, meanwhile, concentrated mostly on politicized mosque teachings, Islamic schooling, and university education as part of their constituency building. Perhaps the most important of these is al-Zindani’s renowned al-Iman Islamic University. In addition to these group-specific activities, Islah engaged in the delivery of social services, similar to other Brotherhood parties in the Middle East. For example, the Islah Social Welfare Society (ISWS) was involved in health awareness campaigns, religious education, illiteracy eradication, and relief donations.25 237

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Throughout the 1990s, Islah remained a close ally of President Saleh, including siding with his GPC during the war against Yemen’s Socialist Party (YSP), which ended with the latter defeated and its leaders exiled. The victory against the YSP, however, would cost Islah its coalition with the GPC. With the YSP no longer in the picture, the GPC slowly felt that it no longer needed Islah to govern. In fact, Islah’s electoral success in 1993 was precisely the type of sign that would have made their alliance necessary in the presence of a common enemy – such as the YSP – but worrying in its absence. The fissures between the two allies started in the lead-up to the 1997 parliamentary elections. They could agree neither on the main policies, nor on the list of candidates. Similarly, there were disagreements about how the power vacuum left by the weakening of the YSP in the South was to be filled. A final blow was the GPC’s closing of some religious educational institutions associated with Islah, in efforts to both modernize its educational system, but also to neutralize Islah in an area where it drew significant support.26 Nevertheless, the split was neither immediate nor inevitable: Islah engaged in an open campaign criticizing some of the electoral practices, but neither party admitted that they were heading toward a break-up. That is, until the GPC felt comfortable enough that it could win with a comfortable majority without Islah’s votes. This pushed Islah in a closer relationship with its traditional foes, the YSP and Nasserite parties from the South. Islah entered the 1997 elections as the GPC’s main competitor, and ended up as the second biggest party, with 53 out of the 301 parliamentary seats, of which 187 went to GPC.27 Despite this break-up, Islah was not united in its opposition to the GPC: senior Islah figures, including both al-Zindani and Shaykh al-Ahmar, supported President Saleh’s bid for the first direct presidential elections in 1999, whereas Brotherhood members vehemently opposed it.28 By this point, the Brotherhood’s mobilizational work in universities was bearing fruit, as many members were now university graduates and professionals with legitimate, and increasing, grievances against President Saleh’s regime, grievances which were shared by southern parties. Before the 2003 parliamentary elections, Islah joined the Supreme Coordination Council of the Opposition, which included parties traditionally hostile to Islah, but the latter felt that the political expediency of cooperation far outweighed the cost of doing so, especially in a context where Islah saw its position as a center party slowly but surely diminish.29 Islah and the opposition parties officially formed an umbrella party called the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), which was composed of the Yemeni Socialist Party, Nasserist Party, Baath Party, al-Haqq Party (a Houthi party), and the Union of Popular Forces. The JMP developed a collective electoral platform with the GPC as its common enemy, although this was implied rather than explicitly stated: neither the GPC nor President Saleh were mentioned by name and only “the state” was blamed for the corruption and authoritarianism in Yemen. But as with its behavior during the 1999 elections and despite joining the JMP, senior Islah leaders continued to support President Saleh and his GPC. In fact, during the 2006 presidential elections, Shaykh al-Ahmar supported Saleh against the JMP’s own presidential candidate, Faisal bin Shamlan.30 Regime officials kept some Islah members close, as they punished others, in order to drive a (greater) wedge within the party. Many prominent businessmen – fair-weather friends to any political party – left Islah and joined the GPC throughout this period. Some Salafis, meanwhile, defected from Islah – partly in response to the alliance with the YSP, al-Haqq and other Leftists parties – and became closer to the GPC, without officially becoming part of it. Brotherhood members within the party felt pressured to turn their attention toward the capital and the center again, to the detriment of outreach and mobilization in the periphery. As a result of this greater internal dissention and 238

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the loss of broad mobilization, Islah faced a deep loss during the 2006 local council elections.31 But these elections, together with Shaykh al-Ahmar’s death in 2007, caused a greater split between Islah and the GPC, and brought the former closer with the JMP. Nevertheless, Islah was not to find its former political weight – however briefly – until after the 2011 revolution and the fall of the Saleh regime. Its tight connection with the GPC continued to taint its legitimacy, however, and is at least partially responsible for its downfall.

Revisionist political Islam The groups that I discuss under the “revisionist Islam” section – namely the Houthis and al-Qaeda – are not normally grouped together. Both their goals and methods of achieving them differ substantially. However, both groups aim to revise the current Yemeni state in some fashion, justified by their own particular interpretations of Islam and political agendas. The Houthis consider themselves a revivalist movement that aims to restore Zaydism in Yemen, whereas al-Qaeda has both local and globalist goals beyond the Yemeni state. Nevertheless, as the following analysis will make clear, these groups, just like Islah, has shown incredible pragmatism in adapting their ideology and alliances to their political ends, even as this latter is influenced by their ideology. a. The Rise of Ansar Allah As discussed above, the mountainous area of northern Yemen is predominantly Zaydi, and this region was considered home to the Zaydi imamate until 1962. The republican revolution brought with it profound social, religious, as well as political restructuring in this region. Prior to the revolution, the main actors residing in this area of Yemen were: tribes and their shaykhs; the sadah, who are descendants of the Prophets and followers of Zaydism who immigrated to the Sa’dah region in the late ninth century; qadis, who were hereditary jurists and administrators of tribal descent; non-tribal people, and urban city dwellers. In order to fully understand the rise of the Houthis as a revivalist Islamist political movement, it is important to understand how the post-revolutionary fundamental change in the relationship between these groups led to the empowerment and disempowerment of some of them and, as a result, grievances on the part of the losing ones.32 Elite transformations triggered by the 1960s civil war and then cemented by the republican regime’s politics of patronage led to the systematic economic and political empowerment of shaykhs at the expense of other tribesmen and, perhaps more importantly, the disempowerment of the sadah. This action, helped “distort a functioning tribal order by elevating in importance positions of authority and economic favoritism,” which altered the character of tribal leadership, created alienation between shaykhs and their bases, and a detachment of both average tribesmen and sadah from the Yemeni state.33 The republic denounced the social stratification in the north by promising equality for all, but this promise remained unfulfilled. Furthermore, the collapse of the imamate and the ensuing civil war led to a “cold war” between Saudi Arabia, which was supporting the royalists, and Egypt, which provided material support and boots on the ground for the republican forces. Saudi support was motivated less by religious reasons, as supporters of the imamate in Yemen were mostly Zaydis, and more so by politics. Saudi Arabia wanted a sympathetic kingdom to its south, as supposed to the spread of the more widely popular republic in Nasser’s image. Additionally, 239

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Saudi Arabia considered parts of this region as its own, as evidenced by the disagreements on the exact border between the two countries, despite the fact that the Treaty of Taif with the new Saudi state had resolved the border war of 1934. This treaty allowed for border crossings of tribes on both sides of the border, but Saudi Arabia provided financial means for some of the Yemeni tribes, especially the Kawlan b. Amir, to provide security along that border. This Saudi patronage of border tribes only grew deeper during the 1960s and it continued until the Treaty of Jeddah in 2000, which gave a larger portion of the disputed territory to Saudi Arabia.34 This was a highly consequential move, because it broke the allegiance of tribes to the kingdom and, as we will see shortly, it provided what could have otherwise been a small Houthi movement, individuals with grievances against the Yemeni government who were also financially strapped as a result of Saudi Arabia’s actions. The Houthi movement had specific goals which were at least partially religious in nature, but the movement grew because it became a “catalyst with the potential to unite all those [including tribes], in Sa’dah and beyond, who felt economically neglected, politically ostracized and religiously marginalized.”35 The Houthis, in other words, have roots in both the establishment of the republic and the withdrawal of support from Saudi Arabia to northern tribes: two non-religious causes that were legitimized through a religious revival discourse. Since the revolution of 1962, the doctrinal distinctions between Zaydis and Shafi’is nationally narrowed even further, mostly as a result of deliberate state action in co-opting Zaydi leaders – raising the profile of those leaders who favored “Sunnification” – and establishing educational systems that razed those differences.36 This has been so effective for the majority of the Zaydi population that, for them, a Zaydi identity is not the primary one – as evidenced by senior Islah leaders, such as Shaykh al-Ahmar, being of Zaydi origin. Religious identities largely converged, and Zaydis often prayed in Sunni mosques and vice versa.37 Nevertheless, just as convergence was the experience of most Zaydis and Shafi’is, diverge was growing among a small, but significant, number of them. Most notably and as will be discussed below, Salafis, who emerged in the early 1990s with close ties to Saudi Arabia, continue to stigmatize the Zaydis, highlighting their alleged links to the dominant Shi’a sect in Iran and Iraq.38 In turn, Zaydi revivalists, including the Houthis, continue to support the rule by Hashemite leaders and reject Wahabi and Salafi predominance, especially in the northern highlands. These are not isolated events and not simply the result of recent developments, however: post-revolutionary history and the social restructuring that followed left deep scars in Yemeni social fabric. The republic is viewed as fundamentally anti-Hashemite (anti-sadah), and anti-Zaydi.39 Even though many elites in Sana’a are of Zaydi origin, they are critiqued by Zaydis in the north as having succumbed to a Saudi-backed Salafi/Wahhabi influence starting in the 1970s. The Hashemite sadah, especially, was always resentful of their loss of status and the loss of religious identity in northern parts of Yemen. In many ways, then, the Houthi family which belongs to the Hashemite family in Yemen, can also trace its origin to the Saudi-Sana’a alliance that led to a significant decline in both its political and religious status.40 The government in Sana’a also ignored the economic needs of both the extreme north and southern Yemen after the unification. Sa’dah went from being the heart of Yemen, to one of the most marginalized in the country. Its only means of survival was subsistence agriculture and trade with Saudi tribes across the border. It is unsurprising, then, that this climate was ripe for an opposition movement to the regime in Sana’a. It is equally unsurprising, though by no means necessary, that such a movement would take religious undertones, especially since many Zaydi imams found themselves without any legitimacy, given that a core tenet of Zaydism – notably that the leader of Yemen ought to be a Hashemite 240

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imam – was considered illegitimate by the republican government, and ignored by prominent Zaydi scholars co-opted by the regime. The Islamic rRevolution in Iran prompted a doctrinal revival in Yemen, as it provided a positive model for Shi’ites everywhere.41 Shortly after, and lending credence to criticism of an Iranian connection even though this seems more a result of diffusion of ideas than direct action on Iran’s part, Zaydi scholars became involved in opening teaching institutes in the north and started publishing Zaydi treatises. As with Islah, the unification of Yemen in 1990 further provided the political opening for new parties to enter the scene. Most notably, a Zaydi political party, al-Haqq (the Party of Truth), was established mostly in opposition to the establishment of the Islah party, which they feared would further empower Salafis and, as a result, weaken Zaydis in Yemen. This gave Zaydis a foot amidst the political elite. Nevertheless, al-Haqq had to also moderate its political message if it was to play the game at the national level. As part of this moderation, Zaydi scholars affiliated with al-Haqq issued a proclamation stating that the ruler of Yemen no longer needed to be a Hashemite. Badr al-Din al-Houthi, one of the most prominent members of al-Haqq, and other leading Saada-based scholars dissented and split.42 His son, Hussein al-Houthi, established “the Believing Youth” in 1992, seeking to revive Zaydi activism through education and proselytizing – mirroring and countering Salafi efforts in the region. Salafi evangelism had existed since the 1970s, but it was not until the establishment of Dar al-Hadith in the heart of Zaydi homeland in 1979 that led to fierce competition with Zaydis. Explaining why the Houthis established the Believing Youth, one of its leaders said that it was a result of “a cultural and intellectual war between Zaydism and Wahhabism since the revolution in the 1960s. The Yemeni government is looking for financial help from Saudi Arabia and so in exchange it has favored the spread of Wahhabism.”43 While this is a shared belief, it is important to note that President Saleh also financially supported the Houthis at this time: this was part of his larger game of balancing groups against one another. Once the Salafis were getting too powerful, he supported a Zaydi counter-force, but only to a point. And the Houthis, as is now clear, dangerously surpassed that point. The “Believing Youth” movement, which took Hussein al-Houthi’s name upon his assassination by Yemeni forces in 2004 but which prefers to call itself Ansar Allah (Party of God), was initially composed of Zaydis who wanted to defend their religion and identity. Over time, however, it became a “catalyst with the potential to unite all those [including tribes], in Sa’dah and beyond, who felt economically neglected, politically ostracized and religiously marginalized.”44 Hussein al-Houthi’s sermons referenced the success of the Iranian Revolution and Hezbollah, but they were also pan-Islamic and constantly highlighted the political and economic marginalization of the north. In many ways, the use of pro-Iran, anti-Israel, and anti-American slogans were in part instrumental, because they represented a language that was appealing to the marginalized, especially in light of Saudi (a US ally) efforts of “Sunnization” of the region. When, by the early 2000s, the Houthis appeared stronger than simply a balancing force in the north, President Saleh, with pressure from Saudi Arabia who sensed that the Houthis’ ire was directed toward the kingdom, started clamping down. The government labeled the Houthis a rebel group set on undermining the state and restoring the Zaydi imamate, and tried to rally international support for considering them a “terrorist” group. Given the timing – after 9/11 – this was a calculated move. The Houthis’ own slogan referenced “Death to Israel, Death to America,” which made President Saleh’s appeal appear reasonable. For the government, at least rhetorically, the Houthis were nothing but foreign (read: Iranian) puppets. When President Saleh requested a meeting with Hussein al-Houthi in 2004 and the 241

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latter rejected the meeting – fearing for his freedom – the president ordered an attack on Houthi supporters. The first bombing campaign, known as the first of six Houthi wars between 2004 and 2010, led to the death of Hussein al-Houthi and the takeover of the movement by his brother, Abd al-Malek al-Houthi, who in 2020 was still in charge. The bombing campaign led to indiscriminate violence against civilians in the north, which not only amplified grievances among the Hashemites and Zaydi revivalists but, more broadly, civilians in the northern highlands. Likewise, the Houthis committed similar indiscriminate crimes against those who did not support them and, toward the later parts of the conflict, the Houthis were engaged in clashes in multiple fronts: with the Saudi Army, with the Yemeni Army, and with local tribes who supported the government. Nevertheless, the longer the conflict lasted, the stronger the Houthis seemed to become. Despite support from Saudi Arabia and despite sending General Ali Mohsen, who commanded one of the two best-equipped sections of the Yemeni Army, the Houthis were not defeated by 2010, on the eve of the 2011 revolution. They had become, at this point, experienced in the battlefield, had hardened their dislike for the government in Sana’a, and were a formidable force demanding inclusion in postrevolutionary negotiations. It was precisely the absence of the latter – and the empowerment of Islah – that led to the Houthi eventual takeover of the government in Sana’a in 2014. While their grievances were both religious and political, it was often the political context and openings that propelled them in the national stage. Their political Islamist program, however, remains vague: a brief commitment to democracy, coalition building, and participation in multi-party politics is punctuated by rhetorical rejection of each point. Their actions since their takeover also belie any claim toward respect for democratic principles, but in this they are not alone: all parties in Yemen, religious or otherwise, are similarly militarized and, at present, unaccepting of other groups. As the previous history of peaceful sectarian coexistence makes clear, however, this is politics. b. Al Qaeda Any history of jihadi groups in Yemen must start with acknowledgment that much of foreign analysis of these groups conflates the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda with other branches. Unlike them, however, the Yemeni branch is just as much a product of Yemeni domestic politics as it is a global jihadi phenomenon. While this argument can be made of other branches – after all, al-Qaeda breeds in favorable domestic conditions – what sets the Yemeni example apart is the willful support and participation of the Yemeni government in its founding. It is not popular support in Yemen that made the Yemeni branch powerful. In fact, most Yemenis, despite espousing what would be considered a conservative Islam, are by no means supportive of violence en large.45 For them, the line between the state and al-Qaeda is not always clear, and many believe – with good reason – that competing factions in Yemeni politics stoke the al-Qaeda threat to their advantage. Fighting al-Qaeda, as a result, is nothing but a domestic power-struggle. Given the collapse of Yemen’s state and the establishment of the Houthi government in Sana’a, al-Qaeda’s fortunes have improved significantly. Its domestic support, however, itself remains tied to the fortunes of the Yemeni state. In the early 1990s, numerous Yemenis who had fought against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan were reintegrated into the system through patronage both at the local levels (among tribal shaykhs), and nationally (with Sana’a based elites coopting them).46 This was the first wave of global jihadi movements starting with the end of the Cold War. This occurred at a time when Yemen was in the process of reuniting and, as discussed above, when the Sana’a 242

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government still faced what it considered formidable opposition from the Yemeni Socialist Party and other southern groups. Just like it did with Islah, the Saleh government aligned himself with the returned jihadis. While some of them joined Islah, other more militant jihadis – such as Tariq al-Fadhli – founded the Islamic Jihad Movement (IJM).47 The first terror attacks with connection to al-Qaeda that originated from Yemen and against US subjects – specifically US Marines stationed in Yemen – originated from one of the IJM’s main leaders. Nevertheless, a decade prior to the “global war on terror” following the 9/11 attack in the US, there was not the same amount of attention given to the Yemeni theater, and the IJM was mostly left alone. In fact, Saleh and his military commanders used the Afghan Arabs and the IJM in particular as their own proxies. Many members of the southern opposition were assassinated by IJM members and, at the end of the war, IJM fighters were rewarded handsomely with positions in the GPC and security services. The second wave of global jihadi events in the mid-1990s also led to a shift for Yemeni jihadis to a more global focus on the “far enemy.”48 More radical IJM members who refused to be coopted by the Yemeni state gathered under Yemeni Afghan veteran Zain al-Abidin Abubakar al-Mihdar to create the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA), which was the first jihadi group with a global agenda and allegiance to al-Qaeda.49 On October 2000, the USS Cole, a US warship stationed off the port of Aden, was attacked with explosives, killing 17 Marines. the AAIA claimed responsibility, which propelled Yemen into the spotlight as a critical state for US security in the Gulf and elsewhere. The mastermind of this attack was considered to be Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen who led al-Qaeda’s operations in the Gulf – indicating the first close ties between the AAIA and al-Qaeda. With pressure from the United States, President Saleh ordered the arrest of senior figures within the AAIA, but not al-Nashiri. Saleh was only willing to go so far at the time: keeping the AAIA as a potential balancing force was more important than fighting them. It was not until after the 9/11 attacks that President Sahel actively fought and defeated al-Qaeda, both succumbing to US pressure, and due to the fact that domestic politics in Yemen was such that he did not face the strong opposition of the previous decade and hence could dispense with al-Qaeda for the moment. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought a third wave of jihadi attacks globally, and a revival of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch.50 A prison break in 2006 led to many prominent jihadis escaping and establishing AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) by joining the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al-Qaeda. Despite increased US aid to fight terrorism, the US was distracted by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the Sana’a regime was distracted by the Houthi conflict in the north. As a result, AQAP remained largely unchallenged and became al-Qaeda’s most lethal branch by 2011. For Yemenis, al-Qaeda was not considered a priority issue: most citizens viewed it as a government pawn and its threat was marginal compared to the Houthi conflict in the north, or the brewing separatist movement in the south. It was not until after the 2011 uprisings that al-Qaeda in Yemen reinvented itself to fit local needs, showing, again, the type of pragmatism most easily identified with Yemeni political and Islamist actors.

Post-2011 revolution and its aftermath During the Yemeni uprising, the Houthi movement was well-represented in the square as was, eventually, Islah. Both movements demanded the fall of President Saleh, but only the former was considered true to its word and legitimate in its demands. Islah joined the protests when the tide was already shifting against Saleh, and its legacy of cooperation with the 243

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regime was heavy. Nevertheless, when President Saleh was removed from power and the various Yemeni factions started cooperating under the so-called the “National Dialogue Conference” (NDC), Islah was in a uniquely powerful position even as its status as “opposition” was questioned in the streets. As the one major, formally opposition party, the GCC framework that sought to establish a new and inclusive Yemeni government guaranteed Islah a substantial role in the NDC. To be sure, Islah was not acting as a unified actor: given its internal structure, it could not. But Islah was active in two important committees during the dialogue and tried to push its agenda through them: the Sa’dah committee attempting to solve the problem in the Houthi heartlands, and the Rights and Freedoms committee, which dealt with more religious issues.51 In both, Islah both revealed its internal fissures, and caused others. In the second committee, members of Islah from the more conservative to the more moderate groups debated on ideological issues familiar with most Islamist parties, such as the status of sharia, the rights of women and non-Muslims relative to Muslim men, and issues of religious freedom.52 But it was the second working group that became conflictual not only rhetorically but also in the literal meaning of the word: as Islah and Houthi groups sparred in the conference halls, their rival militias were fighting one another in the north. Many Salafis unaffiliated with Islah also joined in the conflict and started stoking anti-Zaydi hatred. The politics of the NDC did not solve many of Yemen’s most pressing issues, but it did show to the Houthis that formal political engagement with current political actors was simply not feasible. The Houthis used the deep dissatisfaction with the new government in Sana’a – under President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi and staffed with many Islah members – to overtake the government altogether in September 2014. Prominent Islah members fled to Aden or Saudi Arabia together with President Hadi, and a coalition force under Saudi Arabian and Emirati leadership started a war to reestablish what they considered the “legitimate” government of Yemen. Despite the fact that a prominent Islahi, General Ali Muhsin who had led the six wars against the Houthis, was vice-president of Yemen and that Saudi Arabia claimed to want him back in power, Islah suffered great loss of support after the Houthi takeover. Due to its close ties to Qatar and the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Emirati government against Qatar, Islah was sidelined since the start of the coalition war in favor of various Salafi groups. These Salafi groups in most areas in Yemen, in turn, themselves continued to sideline Islahi militiamen and assassinated key Brotherhood members. Meanwhile, in the Houthi-controlled north, Islah-affiliated institutions and individuals were roundly arrested, tortured, and disappeared by the Houthis. The Muslim Brotherhood section within Islah, which continued to aim for non-violence, could no longer control its own Salafi factions, which were co-opted into various anti-Houthi factions. Today, much of Islah’s senior leadership remains in exile, and the Muslim Brotherhood is stubbornly committed to a support of President Hadi and the “legitimate” government of Yemen. Its lack of onthe-ground mobilization capacity and dismemberment as a result of Salafi splits, means that it must abide by international agreements as the only thing that it can actually do, especially in a militarized field. The Houthis, on the other hand, have managed to continue their control over the north, despite repeated attacks from the coalition, al-Qaeda, new ISIS franchises in South Yemen, various Salafi groups, and various tribes. They have been too busy fighting to develop a programmatic political ideology and it is difficult to ascertain with any certainty how Zaydi Islam, the cornerstone of their ideology, would look like in practice, but it suffices to say that so far their behavior is mostly driven by a desire for survival and the 244

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knowledge that losing ground may also mean death for its leaders and a destruction of their branch of Zaydism. Of these three groups, al-Qaeda is the easy winner of the war, up to the time of the writing of this chapter (2020). During the uprising, AQAP evolved from a primarily internationally focused jihadist organization to one with a significant local insurgency component, seeking to sink deeper roots into Yemeni society and establish territorial control.53 In 2011, it created a parallel group, Ansar al-Sharia (AAS, “Supporters of Islamic Law”), in order to widen its domestic appeal and separate its local and global components. Despite al-Qaeda’s rejection of ISIS-style rule in Syria and Iraq because they argued that holding territory and focusing on local politics distracted from the larger global agenda, AQAP did precisely that: they took a page from ISIS’s book in Syria, without the indiscriminate violence, in order to establish themselves within the local population. The ultimate rhetorical goal continued to be global, but the more immediate one became ingratiating themselves with the tribes. When the Houthi forces took over Sana’a, al-Qaeda renewed its earlier calls for war against the Houthis, but this time they acted on it. As of December 2014, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for 149 individual attacks against the Houthis.54 Concurrently, ISIS began to establish a base in Yemen in 2015, as well as carrying out its own attacks on the Houthis in Sana’a. With four years into the conflict and various groups splintering and rejoining with other factions, these three groups – al-Qaeda and the Houthis especially, and to a much lesser degree ISIS – remain crucial and internally united. Al-Qaeda has become increasingly more powerful comparatively, as it has increased its military arsenal significantly by stealing weapons from the Yemeni Army, as well as obtaining weapons from coalition forces. Coalition governments have supported Salafi groups that have, at times, expressed allegiance to al-Qaeda. There is great opportunity in chaos, and in al-Qaeda’s case they have managed to capitalize on the lack of a state to provide basic services in areas under their control and to achieve what no other al-Qaeda branch has achieved: control of territory and popular support. To be sure, this support is almost entirely instrumental, as al-Qaeda is simply a group capable of providing much-needed security in an otherwise war-torn area, but nevertheless, this situation has left it empowered relative to other Islamist actors. The Houthi takeover of Sana’a under the purported claim to fight a corrupt government but, most importantly to them, to establish a rightful role for Zaydis following what they perceived as decades of anti-Zaydi policies, has resulted in greater sectarian violence and anti-Zaydi sentiment than ever before. It has sparked various opportunistic alliances of Sunni “resistance fighters” against them. The Houthis themselves are equally to blame in stoking sectarian sentiments by conflating all of their opposition with al-Qaeda and ISIS.55

Conclusion The historically evolving and pragmatic nature of Yemeni Islamists is a reminder to examine them as networks of diverse actors operating in their specific political contexts, shaped both by ideology and their internal drives, as well as domestic and external pressures. It is the political context that led to the weakening of the only Islamist group able to act as a firewall against violent radicalization in Yemen – namely Islah, and especially its Muslim Brotherhood faction. The Houthis, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Salafi groups in Yemen continue to stoke sectarian sentiments, while expanding their military arsenal and embedding themselves further in the vacuum left behind by the absence of a government. Perhaps the saving grace of the Yemeni political field is precisely the pragmatism shown by all political actors, 245

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including the more radical Islamists, which may mean that given a safer domestic environment, the relatively easily won (non-ideological) supporters of al-Qaeda and ISIS may cast them aside as soon as there is no longer a need for them. Until then, the Islamist field in Yemen risks remaining dominated by groups that speak ambiguously of an Islamic government, but act as political actors most concerned with who gets what, when, and how.

Notes 1 Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 2 Sarah Phillips, “Al-Qaeda and the Struggle for Yemen,” Survival 53, no. 1 (2011): 95–120. 3 Marieke Brandt, “The Global and the Local: Al-Qaeda and Yemen’s Tribes,” in Tribes and Global Jihad eds. Virginie Collombier and Oliver Roy (New York: Oxford University Press 2017), 108. 4 Brandt, “The Global and the Local,” 108. 5 Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhhammad al- Shawkaanıi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 6 Brandt, “The Global and the Local,” 109. 7 Gabriele vom Bruck, Islam, Memory, and Morality inYemen: Ruling Families in Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 187. 8 April Alley, “The High Water Mark of Islamist Politics? The Case of Yemen,” The Middle East Journal 61, no. 2 (2007): 255. 9 Alley, “The High Water Mark of Islamist Politics?”: 255. 10 Amr Hamzawy, Between Government and Opposition: The Case of the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), 2. 11 Brandt, “The Global and the Local,” 106. 12 Marieke Brandt, “Inhabiting Tribal Structures: Leadership Hierarchies in Tribal Upper Yemen (Hamdaan & Khawlaan b. ʿAAmir),” in Southwest Arabia across History: Essays to the Memory of Walter Dostal eds. André Gingrich and Siegfried Haas (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014), 92. 13 Brandt, “The Global and the Local,” 106. 14 Amr Hamzawy, Between Government and Opposition, 2. 15 Sheila Carapico, Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Southern Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98. 16 Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 246, n58. 17 Stacey Philbrick Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood and the Perils of Powesharing,” in Rethinking Political Islam eds. Shadi Hamid and Will McCants (Washington, DC: Brookings Project on US Relations and the Islamic World, 2015), 2. 18 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 2. 19 President Saleh, too, is Zaydi, but this rarely mattered in his politics – a not unusual thing for many Yemenis. 20 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 3. 21 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 3. 22 Alley, “The High Water Mark of Islamist Politics?”: 255. 23 Alley, “The High Water Mark of Islamist Politics?”: 256. 24 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 3. 25 Hamzawy, “Between Government and Opposition,” 6. 26 Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 103. 27 Hamzawy, “Between Government and Opposition,” 8. 28 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 4. 29 Jillian Schwedler, “The Islah Party in Yemen: Political Opportunities and Coalition Building in a Transitional Polity,” in Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach ed. Quintan Wictorowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 220. 30 Hamzawy, “Between Government and Opposition,” 9. 31 Alley, “The High Water Mark of Islamist Politics?”: 240.

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32 Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict (London: Oxford University Press, 2017). 33 Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, 73. 34 Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, 36. 35 Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, 37. 36 International Crisis Group, “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb,” Report no. 86 (2009): 7. 37 Laurent Bonnefoy, “Les identités religieuses contempo- raines au Yémen: convergence, résistances et instrumenta lisations,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditer ranée no. 121 (2008): 199–213. 38 International Crisis Group, “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb”: 7. 39 International Crisis Group, “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb”: 9. 40 See Bruck, Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen. 41 Gabriele Vom Bruck, “Being a Zaydi in the Absence of an Imam”, in Le Yémen contemporain eds. Rémy Leveau, Franck Mermier and Udo Steinbach (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1999), 339–362. 42 International Crisis Group, “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb”: 8. 43 International Crisis Group, “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb”: 9. 44 Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, 37. 45 Sarah Phillips, “Al-Qaeda and the Struggle for Yemen,” Survival 53, no. 1 (2011): 95–120. 46 Laurent Bonnefoy, “Violence in Contemporary Yemen: State, Society, and Salafis,” The Muslim World 101, no. 2 (2011): 324. 47 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda: Expanding the Base (Brussels: ICG Middle East Report No. 174, 2017), 2. 48 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, 3. 49 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, 3. 50 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, 3. 51 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 8. 52 Yadav, “Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood,” 8. 53 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, 6. 54 Oren Adaki, “AQAP Claims 149 Attacks in Yemen since Late September,” The Long War Journal, December 19, 2014, available at www.longwarjournal.org. 55 International Crisis Group, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, 13.

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19 THE TWO SOURCES OF JIHADISM Bernard Rougier

Introduction Like other Islamist movements, the history of jihadism oscillates between the struggle against apostate regimes and the struggle against Western powers. This chapter shows that the strategic priority depends to a large extent on the history of contemporary jihadi dynamics. Indeed, a historical perspective allows us to distinguish two distinct sources of jihadism, which can account for the respective specificities of al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and the organisation Islamic State (IS), on the other. Founded by Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda organization appears as a radicalized version of the intellectual heritage of the Muslim Brotherhood. Bin Laden, himself stemming from the Brotherhood, conceived of al-Qaeda as the military expression of a form of Islamic nationalism in line with the primary inspiration of the Brotherhood’s founders. IS, on the other hand, dates back to a demand for religious purity, whose first violent expression in the twentieth century was the seizure of the Great Mosque of Mecca in November 1979. Relying on the Salafo-Wahhabi corpus, the representatives of this current consider that the Saudi state has betrayed the meaning of Mohammed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s message for the benefit of the Saudis. This paradigmatic opposition makes it possible to better understand the reasons why large numbers of volunteers from European countries traveled to the Syrian-Iraqi zone controlled by IS.

Priority to the distant enemy During his stay in Sudan (1992–96), bin Laden strategically selected to strike first at the “distant enemy” (al-‘adu al-ba‘îd), that is, the United States and the West. It was during this period that he convinced his former ally during the Afghan jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization, to abandon his fight against the “near enemy” (al-‘adu al-qarîb), then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. According to bin Laden, terrorist action – far from causing the fall of Arab regimes – only leads to the strengthening of the repressive arsenal of the states in the region. He claimed that this served only to aggravate the situation of jihadi fighters in the Arab and Muslim world. In his view, it is better to attack the United States “at the head of the snake” in order to weaken, by domino effect, the Arab regimes which 248

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owe their survival to the US superpower. His religious adviser recounts with precision what bin Laden said in a private conversation: He said to me: look at this tree. It is a solid oak. You cut down the branches, it’s useless, they will grow back. You have to attack the roots [judhur] of the tree, the root of evil. The United States is the mother of evil [umm al-charr].1 Yemen and Afghanistan provide two exceptions to bin Laden’s principle of fighting the distant enemy. During the May–June 1994 Yemen civil, bin Laden reportedly transmitted confidential information to his northern Yemeni allies concerning the movements of the southern army. These leaks were allegedly obtained through Saudi Defense ministry officials who were prepared to sabotage from within the regional policy of the Kingdom’s leaders, who were engaged alongside the southern army. The second exception took form in bin Laden’s military support of fighters in the Taliban. The men of al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad played a crucial role in the defense of Kabul during Tajik leader Commander Ahmad Shah Masoud’s offensive in the summer of 1997. Subsequently, bin Laden continued to fight the Tajik leader alongside the Taliban, privately accusing him of failing to enforce sharia law when he was in partial control of the capital, and of becoming an “apostate” through his ties with India and the West. Al-Zawahiri was initially reluctant to fight the distant enemy, preferring to make Mubarak pay for the horrors of torture in Egyptian jails. He belatedly rallied to the doctrine of the distant enemy after the divergence fueled tension between the two men during their Sudanese stay. Bin Laden had stopped financing the Islamic Jihad organization until al-Zawahiri rallied to his views. In his text Knights under the Prophet’s banner, written at the end of the 1990s and published in the Arab press in 2002, al-Zawahiri finally associated his name with the theory of fighting the “distant enemy” (the United States) at the expense of the “near enemy” (Muslim political regimes). Importantly, the anteriority as well as the intellectual and strategic paternity of this distinction and choice belong exclusively to bin Laden. There is another reason, less known and with more serious consequences in the long term, that may explain bin Laden’s strategic choice of the distant enemy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, bin Laden was threatened by a more radical jihadist current than his organization. His religious adviser, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, provides in his memoirs a unique view of the situation in Peshawar, the capital of the “Afghan Arabs,” at that time: The world of Peshawar was amazing. It was the Dis-United Arab Emirates! The atmosphere was fraught with conflicts of ideas and religious jurisprudence. In this poisoned intellectual milieu, a curious jurisprudence was born, as well as strange fatwas. Some considered it haram [forbidden] to use bank notes or documents proving a person’s identity, such as passports, because they saw this as an acknowledgment of the tyrannical powers [al-sulutât al-tâghûtiyya] that had issued them.2

Al-Qaeda against the ghulat Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, head of the religious institute which he founded on bin Laden’s recommendation a few months after his arrival at Camp al-Farûq in Khost, writes that he “placed great importance on the spiritual dimension and the need to address the issue of ghulû [exaggeration] in the pronouncement of excomunication [al-ghulû fi al-takfîr] that was spreading on the Peshawar stage and in some training camps.”3 In the chapters devoted to 249

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this period, Abu Hafs multiplies remarks and annotations on those whom he calls “the takfirists” with their “differences of degree in the ghulû, in the extremism [tachaddud] and in the propensity to pronounce the mistrust of Muslims by making their blood and property lawful”. For the ghulat, the religious purity of belief (‘aqida), overvalued in the Wahhabi tradition, must take precedence over all other considerations. The term “ghulat” (singular “ghali”) comes from the Arabic verb “ghala,” which the Kazimirski dictionary translates as “to go beyond the limits, to go beyond the ordinary term, the just.”4 It is used to designate a jihadist of the exclusive Wahhabi current of the al-Zarqawi type. In order to flourish, this religious purity requires a territorial base exclusively regulated by sharia law under the strict supervision of specialized judges and religious institutions, as in the time of the first Caliphs. Although it was largely unnoticed by specialists in Europe and the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, this jihadist current was present on the Afghan-Pakistani ideological scene from the end of the 1980s. Its ideologues relied on a direct reading of the texts of the Wahhabi tradition, hence their propensity to accuse the Saudi religious institution and family of infidelity to the legacy of the state’s religious instigator Abd al-Wahhab. A libel such as The Clear Evidence of the Ungodliness of the Saudi State, by Palestinian Sheikh Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, was widely read and commented on in jihadi circles in Peshawar where it was printed in 1980.5 In Kuwait, al-Maqdisi had been a relay of the millenarianist group of Juhaiman al-’Utaibi who had seized with his companions the Great Mosque of Mecca in November 1979 to announce there the arrival of the Mahdi.6 In 1992, in the Afghanistan province of Nuristan, Abu Abdullah al-Filastini proclaimed a Caliphate and considered himself legitimate to embody the title of Caliph, in the name of his belonging to the tribe of Quraysh, as tradition demands. Bin Laden’s religious adviser recalls being challenged by supporters of the so-called Caliph in the following terms: “You must make the ba’iyya [allegiance] to our Caliph. You must have land, scholars.” These theological considerations were relatively foreign to bin Laden. On the contrary, he sought to bring together all religious sensibilities in the fight against the West, while taking particular care not to raise in public the Shi’ite question or relations with Iran. As a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth, at a time when King Faisal made massive appeals to Egyptian and Syrian militants of the Brotherhood to modernize the Saudi kingdom, bin Laden did not suffer a strong Wahhabi impregnation in a personal capacity. According to his entourage, he mocked the Wahhabi ulemas, saying of them that “they saw miscreants everywhere and were ready to excommunicate anyone who prayed with a rosary.” During a trip to Istanbul in the early 1970s, bin Laden met the historic leader of the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood and head of the Milli Gorüs, Necmettin Erbakan. Bin Laden was a teenager at the time, illustrating how early he was involved in the Brotherhood. His intellectual preoccupations distanced him from the religious sectarianism of the “exaggerators” (ghulat) and from the Hanbalite school favoured by the Saudi religious institution. On the contrary, his intellectual tastes lead him to read the books of Mohammed Qutb, who was appointed professor at the University of Umm al-Qura in Mecca. Qutb had taken refuge in the Kingdom to escape the same fate of his brother Sayyid, who was hung by former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1966. Bin Laden also favored Malekite theologian Abu Ishâq al-Shâtibî (1320–88), whose major work – al-Muwâfaqât fi usûl al-charî’a (The Reconciliation of the Foundations of Religious Law) – proposed to overcome the differences between the four Islamic legal schools by studying the higher objectives of religious law. 250

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Reinvested in the Sudanese economy, bin Laden’s considerable financial resources were put at the service of this desire for Islamic union. Under the ideological leadership of Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan thought of itself as the international centre of Brotherhood activism. While in Sudan, bin Laden stopped giving financial support to the Algerian GIA after its leader Djamel Zeituni assumed responsibility for the massacres of Algerian civilians in 1994. Threatened a few months earlier by an emissary sent by the radical fringe of the GIA in Khartoum, bin Laden escaped an assassination attempt in the al-Riyad neighborhood in Sudan’s capital. During this period, he privately accused Sheikh Abu Qatada, an editor of the GIA’s al-Ansar bulletin, of going too far in religious exaggeration, especially the latter’s insistence on the exclusive principle of allegiance and disavowal (al-wala’ wa al-barra’) to demand that all Algerian Muslims follow the GIA. The decision was also taken to prohibit members of al-Qaeda from reading the magazine al-Ansar published in London by the GIA. On his return to Taliban Afghanistan in May 1996, bin Laden noted that jihadist currents had multiplied in his absence within the anarchy of the civil war between the mujahidin. According to the testimony of Moustafa Hamid, a former “Afghan Arab” close to bin Laden, “the North African camps in Jalalabad, and later in Khaldan, offered advanced military training to the GIA and thus contributed to a violent and destructive confrontation that changed the destiny of Algeria.”7 The car bomb attack committed in front of the National Guard building in Riyadh on November 13, 1995, was prepared by a jihadist who had passed through the Khaldan training camp in Khost, the main place of convergence of the ghulat [exaggerators] hostile to the bin Laden group, including many Algerians who arrived after the military coup d’état of January 1992. Bin Laden was also unaware of who were behind the attack on the Saudi Khobar Towers on June 25, 1996, which was later attributed to Iranian agents. Bin Laden did not want to bring the fight to Saudi soil. Despite his low opinion of the royal family that had stripped him of his Saudi nationality, he did not publicly pronounce any religious excommunication against the regime at that time. The “Declaration of War Against America” in August 1996 can thus be seen as an attempt to regain control of a jihadist field that was on the verge of being completely out of his hands. During the period 1996–97, he received many delegations of ulema and Pakistani students who were impressed by his resolve to fight the US and the West. On the wall of the room where he received guests, hung a huge map of Arabia covered with dots corresponding to the geographical location of all the US military bases in the peninsula. Bin Laden explained to his visitors that the holy places of Islam were “occupied territory” because of the short distance between them and the US bases.8

The Islamic nationalism of al-Qaeda In his role as self-proclaimed champion of religious nationalism on the scale of the Muslim world, bin Laden presented to his guests the figures of a memorandum establishing the United States and its allies as responsible for plundering oil resources in the region – an operation described as “the greatest theft in the history of humanity.”9 In front of interlocutors dumbfounded by the arithmetical agility of the demonstration, the former engineer compared the price of a barrel in 1998 ($9/barrel) to its price 25 years earlier ($36/barrel). He then multiplied this figure by four based on the prices’ increase of components used in the petroleum production ($144). These calculations inferred that the United States levied $135 per barrel. Multiplied by “the number of barrels the Islamic world produces in a single day” – or about 30,000,000 barrels – amounts to $4.05 billion per day. Multiplied by 365 days, the sum 251

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then rises to $1.478 trillion. This amount was in turn multiplied by the past 25 years. He then divided this astronomical figure by the number of Muslims in the world to conclude that each of them had been robbed by the United States of an amount equivalent to $37,000, and therefore had an equivalent claim on the world’s leading power. In addition to this controversial framing of a neo-colonial economic grievance, al-Qaeda leaders place their terrorist actions within the presumed consensual framework of defending the Muslim world. The military operation against the missile-launching destroyer USS Cole on October 12, 2000 was conceived as an act of resistance against US hegemony in the strategic strait of Bab al-Mandeb, near the port of Aden in Yemen, where US warships used to refuel. It gave substance to bin Laden’s August 1996 Declaration of War against America, as well as his 1998 Islamic Front against the Jews and the Crusaders. For bin Laden, the operation was more important because it coincided with “the launching of the al Aqsa Intifada in Palestine: many considered it to be the response to American support for the Jews.”10 From the spring of 1999, Bin Laden became obsessed with preparing a large-scale attack against the United States. The issue provoked tense debates within al-Qaeda’s Consultative Council (Majlis al-Choura) which met every week in Kandahar. A majority of Majlis members were opposed to this initiative. They reminded the al-Qaeda leader that he had sworn an oath of allegiance (bay‘at) to Mullah Omar as Amir of the Believers and that he could not withdraw from it. But bin Laden didn’t listen to their advice. To him, jihad against the United States was an absolute imperative, superior to any duty of obedience. According to his plan, terrorist action would force the United States to commit itself militarily in Afghanistan from where it would emerge defeated, like the Soviet Union ten years earlier. Between the struggle for the liberation of the Muslim world and the maintenance of the Taliban in power, there could be no hesitation.11 In such a climate of open defiance, a minority of al-Qaeda leaders – as well as people who were not yet members of al-Qaeda – prepared for the September 11 attacks.

Al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda In the 2000s, the ghulat had a new figure in the Jordanian Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. Released from prison by royal pardon at the enthronement of King Abdullah II in March 1999, the former student of Sheikh al-Maqdisi first wanted to fight in Chechnya, where he sought to travel from Pakistan. He was arrested for a few days in Pakistan and, for lack of anything better, took refuge in Afghanistan. From there he called on members of his clandestine network in the Levant, Jund al-Sham (The Army of the Levant), to join him.12 In the Afghan province of Kandahar, he met al-Qaeda’s Number 3, former Egyptian police officer Sayf al-Adl (Mohammed Makaoui), who was anxious to iron out as far as possible the differences between his organization and the competing jihadist personalities on the Afghan scene. Sayf al-Adl was aware of the existing ideological differences between al-Qaeda and al-Zarqawi.13 He explained that he had been “mandated by the two sheikhs [bin Laden and al Zawahiri]” to negotiate a modus operandi that could be acceptable to both sides. The objective was then to circumvent al-Zarqawi by offering him logistical assistance to set up a camp in Herat, western Afghanistan, where military training would be shared between al-Qaeda and Jund al-Sham. As defined by Sayf al-Adl, al-Qaeda’s interest was “to attract brothers from Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, given the importance of these areas for us [al-Qaeda] and given the assessment of the weakness of our presence in these countries.” In exchange for logistical assistance, al-Zarkawi was 252

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not required to swear an oath (bay’a) to bin Laden, but only to accept “coordination and cooperation in the service of our common goals.” Al-Qaeda also pledged to advocate al-Zarqawi’s cause with the Taliban, so that the Taliban would not obstruct the establishment of a new camp in Herat province. The choice of heart, close to the Iranian border, did not come about by chance: it was a matter of finding a safe passage to Iran from Turkey, while the access route through Pakistan was proving increasingly uncertain because of the “restrictive measures taken against us and our movement by the Pakistani authorities.” Sayf al-Adl foresaw networks of smugglers in Tehran and Mashhad “to facilitate entry and exit from and to Afghanistan.” But the instrumentalization of al-Zarqawi’s group was not totally successful. On the ideological level, it remained far removed from the ideological and strategic options of al-Qaeda’s leaders. The young Jordanian preferred the Egyptian Sheikh Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir (Abd al-Rahman al-Ali). Trained by Salafist ulema in Egypt, Sheikh al-Muhajir studied at the Sharia faculty of the University of Islamabad in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. He later traveled to Afghanistan to supervise the religious education of volunteers in the Khaldan camp near Khost, where he denounced “grave-worshipers.” In 1998, bin Laden’s religious adviser offered him an Arabic-language course at his institute in Peshawar “in the hope of easing ideological tensions and fighting religious exaggeration.” In 1999, al-Zarqawi asked the Egyptian Sheikh to take care of the religious training of his men at the Herat camp. The sheikh seemed to have exerted a strong intellectual hold on the Jordanian jihadist. His work Considerations on the Jurisprudence of Jihad (masa’il min fiqh al-jihad), also called The Jurisprudence of Blood (fiqh al-dima’), advocates, in the straight line of the absolute and primitive Wahhabism of the ghulat, the physical elimination of all Shi’ites. This work would later become an ideological reference for the cadres of IS.14 In the same way, in complete contradiction to the path traced by bin Laden, al-Muhajir favored the struggle against the “near enemy” embodied by the apostate Muslim regimes, which were to be fought as a priority. This explains his condemnation, together with al-Zarqawi, of the attacks of 9/11.

Al-Zarqawi, figure of the ghulat The imminence of the US intervention in Iraq in 2002 tipped the balance of power within the jihadist world in favor of al-Zarqawi. His militant investment in the Syrian-Iraqi space did not come about by chance. Since his adolescence, al-Zarqawi’s model was the Zingi dynasty of Turkish origin, a symbol of the Muslim Renaissance during the Second Crusade in the middle of the twelfth century.15 The founder Imad al-Zingi is known in the Latin chronicles of the time as “Sanguinus” (“the Bloodthirsty”) and “magnus infidelium orientalium princeps” (“great leader of the oriental infidels”).16 He managed to reconstitute against the Franks a homogenous territorial zone, the equivalent of a Syrio-Mesopotamian state, stretching from Mosul to Aleppo – that is, the zone established by the Islamic State in the year 2014. His son, Nur al-Din al-Zingi, for whom al-Zarqawi had a particular passion, conquered Damascus in 1154 and prepared the way to Jerusalem for his lieutenant Saladin. Al-Zarqawi’s passionate identification with the heroes of the Muslim counter-crusade was put to good use in the service of an intimate knowledge of the social fabric of the Syrian-Iraqi badiyya (steppe), from which al-Zarqawi drew connection as a member of the great tribal confederation of the Banu Hassan. This empirical knowledge enabled the jihadi leader to speak the language of an Iraqi society retribalized by a regime seeking survival in 253

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the face of the 1991–2003 embargo’s destructive effects. In the same way, al-Zarqawi was able to recover for his own benefit the effects of the “Campaign for Faith” launched in 1993 by Saddam Hussein through various initiatives: compulsory veiling for women civil servants, religious programs on state television, the proliferation of mosques in Mosul and Baghdad in 1998 (after the rule of one mosque per neighborhood was abandoned), evening classes at the Sharia faculty of the University of Baghdad and the launching of the Great Saddam Hussein Mosque.17 During the “Campaign for Faith”, Salafist preachers were released from the regime’s prisons and allowed to conduct their religious activities in public. In Falouja, the burning by Salafists of the city’s only cinema and two drinking establishments did not lead to collective reprisals against the family and friends of the perpetrators, as was customary. On the contrary, the regime erected a mosque in place of the cinema to display its newfound piety. In Ramadi, at the heart of “Western Sunni society,”, bearded men dressed in short tunics (dichdacha) appeared in the streets of the city.18 In the midst of social disintegration, the country experienced at the same period a massive de-schooling of Iraqi youth, both in secondary and higher education. The recycling of a part of them was done in paramilitary structures improvised by Saddam Hussein’s presidential cabinet, within which various Sunni and Shi’ite militias were recruited after 2003. After the US invasion of 2003 and the fall of Saddam Hussein, al-Zarkawi’s jihadist group gradually imposed itself on the various groups of the Sunni insurrection through exacerbated violence. This hegemony manifested itself in an exacerbation of the Sunni–Shi’ite divide and the installation of a regime of terror in the country’s Sunni triangle, inaugurated by the macabre staging of the execution of journalist Nicolas Berg in May 2004. By trapping the US Army in the locality of Falouja, the scene of two battles in 2004, al-Zarqawi was able to recruit within his organization – then called “al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad” – dozens of cadres of Saddam Hussein’s former regime, who had lost relatives following indiscriminate bombings by the US Army.19 When the bodies of the four Blackwater mercenaries who were ambushed on March 31, 2004, were burned, mutilated and, in the case of two of them, hung on the bridge linking the two banks of the Euphrates, the young mufti of al-Zarqawi, Abu Anas al-Shami, legitimized the use of such practices through the use of various hadiths. This silenced voices within the jihadi ranks that questioned the religious legitimacy of alZarqawi’s ultra-violent methods.20

The Islamic State versus al-Qaeda On October 7, 2004, the leader of al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad was recognized by bin Laden as the head of the organization “Al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers.” However, the Jordanian ignored the admonitions made by Ayman al-Zawahiri in a letter written in the summer of 2005, in which he asked him to stop attacks against Shi’ites and to stop the killing of hostages “so as not to cut off the jihadi vanguard of the Muslim mass, which has not understood the merits of such operations.”21 Unaffected by the admonitions of al-Qaeda’s leaders, al-Zarqawi remained faithful to the terms of his declaration of war against the Shi’ites, who “represent a greater and more damaging danger for the umma [Muslim community] than that represented by the Americans.”22 Al-Zarqawi and his successors were able to exploit all tensions – tribal, ideological, social, regional – in Iraqi society to strengthen their hold on whole swaths of territory. Bin Laden on the other hand, who was far from the region and unfamiliar with the human geography of the Middle East, became during this period, the disembodied figure of a nomadic 254

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terrorism, slowed down in its action after September 11, 2001. Stretching over various continents, al-Qaeda’s “historical canal” was deprived of the capacity to act on the historical hearths of the first two Muslim empires – Umayyad and Abbasid – where considerable changes would take place. Paradoxically, the organization that saw itself as the “vanguard” of the Muslim world was never able to find a territorial anchorage in it, while the most exclusive and intolerant current was able to build a territorial base from northern Iraq to the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria. In the years before and after the emergence of IS, al-Zarqawi’s conception of jihad triumphed over bin Laden’s. The man of the sham (Greater Syria) thus prevailed over the man of the jezeera (Arabian Peninsula), the Sunni confessionalist over the Muslim unionist, the sectarian Wahhabi over the “open-minded” jihadist, the petty criminal of Zarqa over the son from a good family of Jeddah, and finally, the sociologist of Arab violence over the international strategist of the war between the powers. Theological and strategic differences are the basis for two types of relationships to the territory. In a letter addressed to a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), bin Laden forcefully refutes the state option because it offers the enemy a point of fixation on which to strike. In view of the current balance of power, he wrote, such an option is inevitably doomed to failure.23 Faithful to the doctrine established during his stay in Sudan, bin Laden strongly condemned attacks against the local authorities, in the name of the imperative fight against the United States and its troops in the region. Al-Qaeda’s preferred mode of action remains that of a clandestine, underground action, benefitting at best from the support of the population, but deliberately devoid of any identifiable territorial – and therefore vulnerable – anchorage. Its success lies in its capacity for action, not demonstration, except through virtual communication, the function of which is to film the attacks in order to give them maximum visibility. However, the transformation of Zarqawi’s “Al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers” into the “Islamic State of Iraq” in 2006 went in the opposite direction: it was based on a noisy and assumed public expression, within a proto-state territorial framework idealized by images, destined to expand ever more as the territorial conquest progressed. Having become in April 2013 “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” by admitting its participation in the Syrian conflict under the name “The Relief Front” (Jubhat al-Nusra), it was unable to recover its Syrian franchise because of the refusal of the Syrian jihadists to merge with the mother organization. Acknowledging the strategic and ideological divergence between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda since the time of al-Zarqawi, the Syrian jihadists pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri to escape the grip of the Iraqi ghulat, a decision which led to fratricidal conflicts between fighters on both sides in Syria.

The Islamic State and the old regime Arab and Western scholars have rightly stressed the importance of the former cadres of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the birth of the Islamic State of Iraq. After the elimination of al-Zarqawi on June 7, 2006, the members of the military committee “nationalized” for the benefit of the Iraqis a jihadist organization hitherto dominated by Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs. According to the Iraqi sociologist Salah A. Jabbar: the idea of “the state here and now” is an Iraqi idea. It was born and nurtured in the Iraqi technocratic milieu – that of the military, intelligence men and civilians. It reflects the aspirations of Iraqi technocrats and bureaucrats engaged in armed action since 2003, whatever their ideological heritage.24 255

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The Salafist militants were thus converted to the State idea under the pressure of former elites of the fallen regime – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi owing his self-proclaimed title “Caliph” in 2010, to the effective and discreet support of former Colonel Hajji Bakr, an intelligence specialist, who had previously ensured the loyalty of the Consultative Council (Majlis al-Choura). However, this takeover does not explain why the former elites were so quickly converted to the Salafo-jihadist idea. In view of their alleged influence, they could have shifted al-Zarqawi’s ideological line towards more religious flexibility after his death or more Iraqi patriotism. However, the unquestionable contribution of these elites in military, bureaucratic, and religious matters did not fundamentally change the nature of the ideological discourse. If the human “Iraqization” of the organisation did not change the ideological content of a Salafo-jihadist formula developed outside the national framework, it is perhaps because the religious imagination specific to this variant of jihadism required, by its nature, centralized authority to be exercised effectively. Indeed, religious purity is futile if it is not accompanied by a moral control (hisba) sanctioned by religious courts. On this crucial issue, IS is part of a legal positivism worthy of Hans Kelsen: to be effective, the norm, both legal and religious, must be sanctioned by courts that are themselves guided by respect for the binding law (the Qur’an and hadith). Religious institutions derive their legitimacy from a project aimed at restoring the effectiveness of a divine legal order that has been neglected by men for too long. The cruelty of the death sentences, as well as the publicity given to them on the organization’s social media, were not only intended to terrorize the Caliphate’s enemies; these medieval procedures (beheading with the sword, slitting the throat, stoning to death) ensured the bulk of the work of legitimation, by accrediting the effectiveness of the divine norm as it had been formulated in history by the most literalist currents of Islam. The reactivation of the most conservative part of Sunni religious heritage necessarily needed a bureaucratic apparatus to impose itself (just as the Saud sword was a condition for the success of Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s “predication of the Nejd” in Arabia). The Salafist dimension is attested by the permanent use of hadiths in the proclamations of IS. The imagination of its neo-Caliphate, declared in June 2014, borrowed as much from the historical Caliphate of the Abbasid empire, its legal order, and its lawyer-theologians, as from the experience of the first Muslims and the utopian Caliphate of Abu Bakr (the latter having been largely reconstructed during the Abbasid period). IS’s Caliphate’s imagination drew onto this dual utopian and imperial basis an inexhaustible source of images and symbols. Thus, achieving the most operational synthesis between the nostalgia for political Sunnism of the former Iraqi state and the utopia for religious Sunnism of the Messianic state to come. The phenomenon goes beyond the school debate on whether or not the “organization Islamic State” was a State – it is more like a sui generis political form, mixing ultramodern State techniques with anachronistic medieval imaginary – all within a territorial framework in perpetual movement. The two main books in circulation among the IS leaders – The Management of Savagery (idarat al-tawahhuch) and the Considerations on the Jurisprudence of Jihad already mentioned – dealt precisely with territory (the former) and the religious norm (the latter). The Management of Savagery is a theoretical reflection on how best to transform a geographical space outside state control – which has been left to chaos (fawda) and savagery (tawahhuch) – into an organized jihadist hotbed. According to the author, the success of the enterprise depends on the ability of the mujahidin to provide the population with security and religious justice in order to gain its trust, 256

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while undermining, through violent actions relayed by effective propaganda, the authority of the apostate state, actions which are unfolded over the state’s vital interests (oil installations, official buildings, hotels and tourist sites). It is not known if between 2010 and 2014 the organization’s leaders had all read the book that was posted on the Internet in 2004. Nevertheless, providing security and justice played a crucial role in the way the IS jihadists tamed the tribal area of Sunni badiyya in western Iraq, recovered for their benefit the disappointment resulting from the Sahwa experience between 2006 and 2010, played out generational conflicts within clans and tribes, and resolved in particular the delicate issue of access to water points for herds. The book Considerations on the Jurisprudence of Jihad places respect for the religious norm at the heart of the legitimacy of the Islamic State. Violence thus becomes the purest expression of the sacred. Each chapter of the book gives a legal framework to the production of violence (definition of the “domain of war”, the scope of the obligation to eliminate disbelievers and apostates, the possibility of military action even when there are Muslims among the targets, authorization to destroy anything that can strengthen the enemy, etc.) by drawing on the jurisprudential sources of Salafo-Hanbalism to make the organization its most complete expression.

Conclusion It was also through territory and norm that IS was defeated, from the outside and inside. The organization’s war machine could not indefinitely extend its territorial conquest without encountering the hostility of regional and international powers – even if these, directly or indirectly, through their action or inaction, each in their own way, contributed to the initial success of the enterprise. Similarly, the desire to display Islamic impeccability was likely to provoke a mimetic outbidding on the interpretation of the supreme norm. As Muslim jurists of classical Islam understood, one does not manipulate with impunity the definitions of misbelief and apostasy, for risk of encountering someone purer than oneself on questions of identity and otherness. Thus, for the group formed around the teaching of Sheikh Ahmad al-Hazimi, he who invokes the excuse of ignorance (al-’udhru bi-al-jahl) becomes himself a misbeliever when it comes to great misbelief. In other words, no one is supposed to be ignorant of religious law or to escape punishment for a serious offense. Supporters of Sheikh al-Hazimi within the EI, mainly Tunisian fighters, have drawn the conclusion that all those who do not excommunicate (takfîr) members of the Syrian jihadist organization Jubhat al-Nusra should be eliminated, leading to opposition, arrests, and death sentences. The violence of the sacred has thus turned against the mechanisms of the legitimization of Islamic authority, in a way reminiscent of the great discord (fitna) of the early days of Islam.25 In the neighborhoods and suburbs of European societies, the call of the Islamic State has been heard among fringes of young people from post-colonial North African or sub-Saharan immigration, as well as among some Europeans of Salafist origin. The reason for this becomes obvious at the end of this historical and the theological perspective: this call had a strong power of suggestion because it naturally echoed conceptions, narratives, and deeply rooted affects, in more or less euphemistic forms, in the religious imagination of the younger generations, particularly in France and Belgium. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Salafist revolution had previously shown its capacity to “annihilate” the French political and institutional reality in relation to an “ideal state of affairs,” coming out of a mythical re-reading of the past to be exhumed in the present.26 257

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This ideal state of affairs was made current by the profusion of religious language regarding the heroic gesture of the Prophet and his companions, nourished and enriched by the study of the hadith, which is the main marker of Salafism. This imaginary has highlighted the body, through clothing, the wearing of beards, ostentatious practices, and the voice (war songs) in the search for a mimetic identity with the first Muslim generations, because “however unreal a fiction may be, we imagine it by stimulating our bodies from within.”27 Those who lead such a revolution do not reject French-style secularism for its alleged harshness, but they consider it intolerable because they have made a plan to change it. Proclaimed in Raqqa and Mosul, a religious model sought “to make reality identical to what the language had made us imagine.”28 This model heralded, with the help of digital propaganda, the final reactivation and the final shaping of the most conservative and literalist Sunni heritage, whose expression, at least about moral issues, is today hegemonic on both shores of the Mediterranean. For the most zealous or the most convinced, it was then difficult to resist.

Notes 1 Bernard Rougier, “De l’Orient à l’Europe: islamismes et jihadismes en France,” in Territoires conquis de l’islamisme, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2020), 37. 2 “Al-tarîq ila al-Qa’ida, [The Road to al-Qa’ida], Memoirs of Sheikh Mahfouz Uld al-Walid (Abu Hafs al-Mauritani),” unpublished typescript [accessed July 2019], Nouakchott, Mauritania, 162. 3 Al-tarîq ila al-Qa’ida, “[The Road to al-Qa’ida],” 158. 4 Kazimirski, Dictionnary Arabic-French [Dictionnaire arabe-français] (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1860), 496. 5 See Joas Wagemakers, A Quietist Jihadi. The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6 Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, The Meccan Rebellion. The Story of Juhayman al-‘Utaybi Revisited (Bristol: Amal Press, 2011). 7 Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2015), 167. 8 “Al-tarîq ila al-Qa’ida,” 54. 9 “Al-tarîq ila al-Qa’ida,” 56. 10 “Al-tarîq ila al-Qa’ida,” 114. 11 Interview with Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, Nouakchott, Mauritania, July 2020. 12 See Brian Fisherman, The Master Plan. ISISI, al-Qaeda and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2016). 13 Sayf al-Adl’s testimony about his links with al-Zarqawi illustrates the existence of such tensions: “I should point out here that I asked to see the official in charge of examining the situation of Abu Mus’ab and his companions in our house in order to get an idea of what was happening between the brothers and Abu Mus’ab. The result of this consultation was as follows: Abu Mus’ab has extremist views on certain issues, on which there was no agreement between him and the brothers.” For the full testimony of Sayf al-’Adl, see Fouad Hussein, Al-Zarqawi. Al-jîl al-thâni lilqâ’ida [Al-Zarqawi. The Second Generation of Al Qaeda] (Beirut: Dar al-Khiyâl, 2005), 115–142. 14 Hassan Abu Hanieh and Mohamed Abu Ramman, Tanzim al-dawlat al-islamiyya. Al-azmat al-sunniyat wa al-sira ‘ala al-jihadiyyat al-‘alamiyya [The Organization Islamic State. The Sunni Crisis and the Struggle for Global Jihadism] (Amman: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2015), 22–23. 15 Hussein, Al-Zarqawi. Al-jîl al-thâni lilqâ’ida, 18. 16 Abbès Zouache, “Zangî, stratège averti (522/1128 to 541/1146) Réexamen des sources latines et arabes,” Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales 56 (2004–2005): 63–94. 17 Loulouwa al-Rachid, L’Irak de l’embargo à l’occupation: dépérissement d’un ordre politique (1990–2003) (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2010). 18 Those two examples are quoted in Faleh Abdul-Jabar, Dawlat al-khilafat: al-taqaddum ila al-madi. Daesh wa al-mujtama‘ al-mahalli fi al-Iraq [The Califate State: Advancing Toward the Past – ISIL and the Local Community in Iraq], (Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2017), 121.

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The two sources of jihadism 19 The premeditated nature of the first battle of Falouja (April 4–May 1, 2004) is attested to by the testimony of al-Zarqawi’s religious adviser, Abu Anas al-Chami, who recounts that the city’s military council had met in March, “on the orders of Chief Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi,” at least ten days before the start of the events. Faced with the disastrous situation on the ground, the council decided to make Falouja a strategic fixation point: “a safe refuge and an impregnable shield for the people of Islam and a forbidden land, a desert full of mortal peril for the Americans.” See Dunia al-Watan, “The Battle of Falouja as told by Abu Anas al-Chami,” July 31, 2004, available at www. alwatanvoice.com/arabic/content/print7885.htlm 20 Abu Anas al-Shami relies on a hadith attributed to Abu Horeira: “If you find an altar and a so-andso, burn them both with fire. When we wanted to leave, the Messenger of Allah said: ‘I commanded you to burn altar and altar, but only Allah punishes with fire. So if you find them, kill them.’ He therefore acknowledges that the ‘pious ancestors’ (salaf) differed on the legitimacy of the immolation of enemies by fire (tahrîq), but considered that ‘the people of Madinah agreed on the use of fire to burn fortresses and inhabitants.’” See Dunia al-Watan, “The Battle of Falouja.” 21 Letter quoted by Gilles Kepel in Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 147. 22 Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, The ISIS Reader. Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 46. 23 William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse. The History, Atrategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 52–56. 24 Faleh Abdul Jabbar, Dawlat al-khilafat, 71. 25 As of 2013, the General Committee (lajnat ‘amma) of the Islamic State has made this question a religious taboo: “some seek to spread these questions to sow the seeds of division and quarrel between the soldiers of the Islamic State. The committee prohibits anyone from raising the issue of the ‘excuse of ignorance’ at any level of the Islamic state without the express permission of the committee. It is therefore forbidden to broadcast audio-visual, sound or written material relating to this issue. This ban will be rigorously monitored and offenders will be immediately subject to a dissuasive sanction.” “Circular No. 6,” Islamic State, year 1435 of the Hegira. 26 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant [Being and Nothingness] (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 489. 27 Nicolas Grimaldi, Sortilèges de l’imaginaire. La vie et ses égarements [Spells of the Imagination. Life and its Strays] (Paris: PUF, 2015), 31. 28 Grimaldi, Sortilèges de l’imaginaire, 25.

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20 JIHADI SALAFISM Mohammed M. Hafez

Introduction Jihadi Salafism is one of the deadliest ideologies of our times. Since its birth in the 1990s, adherents of this extremely puritanical Islamist movement have grown in size, strength, and geographical expanse.1 Three of the bloodiest militant organizations in the last two decades— the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram—embrace this ideology and use it to rationalize mass atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Their violence has far outstripped rival Islamist factions because of their innovative tactics and embrace of suicide bombings.2 Jihadi Salafist networks have also been responsible for mobilizing tens of thousands of foreign fighters to several conflict zones, imperiling international security with the prospect of their homecoming.3 This chapter traces the evolution of Jihadi Salafism since the 1990s, explains its core religious and ideological precepts, and highlights the recent trends of fragmentation and infighting within the Jihadi Salafist faction. Jihadi Salafism emerged from the broader Islamist movement that became ascendant after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. At its point of origin, Jihadi Salafism represented a clear alternative to prevailing forms of Islamism, principally the accommodationist Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, the non-violent activism of Salafist preachers, and the quietism of Salafist scholars. It rejected any form of political Islam that does not adhere to its Salafist paradigm and questioned the efficacy, and ultimately the legitimacy, of Salafists that did not embrace jihad in practice. As a result, Salafism was divided into three broad categories of quietists, activists, and jihadists. This typology made sense in the 1990s, but critical differences have emerged from within the Jihadi Salafist camp in recent years. Today, Jihadi Salafism is no longer a coherent signifier of the movement it presumes to describe. Islamists that embrace both jihad and Salafism exhibit important religious, ideological, strategic, and tactical differences. Specifically, Jihadi Salafists have diverged on critical issues such as collective takfir (excommunication of Muslims), sectarian targeting, and the importance of a territorial state. These disagreements produced distinct repertoires of violence among adherents of Jihadi Salafism. It also led to a violent rupture between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. These divisions require us to introduce a more nuanced typology of Salafism, one that accounts for its new strand of sectarian and fratricidal extremism. 260

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Defining Jihadi Salafism The moniker Jihadi Salafism (al-salafiyya al-jihadiyya in Arabic) combines two concepts from the Islamic tradition.4 Salafism is a form of Islamism that idealizes the first three generations of Muslims (or the first three hundred years of Islam). These formative generations lived through the prophetic mission of Muhammad, produced the Rightly Guided Successors (al-khulafa al-rashidun), witnessed the companions of the Prophet (sahaba) spread Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula, collected prophetic traditions (ashab al-hadith), and produced erudite scholars that closely followed the way of the Prophet and his companions (al-tabi‘un). Collectively, these categories of people are referred to as al-Salaf al-Salih (righteous predecessors or pious forbearers)—hence, the term “Salafism.” In their era, these righteous men rejected heterodoxy and insisted on purifying religious practices from heretical beliefs, speculative philosophy, cultural accretions, and ritualistic innovations. For them, as for contemporary Salafists, the Prophet’s life and that of his companions, both men and women, provided an abundance of examples of how they would have acted in different situations and ruled on various issues, so their model is instructive at all times and in all places. Therefore, following closely in the footsteps of the Prophet and the jurisprudence bequeathed by the pious ancestors is the best one can do to reach for perfection in the present and ensure salvation in the hereafter.5 Salafism today can be equated with traditionalists that developed in the eighth and ninth centuries, known as ahl al-sunnah wal jama‘a (adherents of right practice and communal solidarity).6 Some call them puritanical Muslims or ultra-orthodox Muslims, thus comparing them to religious traditionalists in the Christian and Jewish traditions. Others call them Wahhabis, a reference to the notoriously conservative strand of Islam in Saudi Arabia. This comparison is controversial, but it is not entirely unwarranted. Many of the contemporary Salafists hold in high regard the teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of the Wahhabist movement in the eighteenth century.7 Furthermore, whereas Wahhabism was mainly confined to Saudi Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century, it has spread its influence to other countries due in large measure to Saudi financial support of Wahhabist proselytizing institutions and media, as well as to foreign students and guest workers returning home from the oil-rich kingdom.8 As for the second term, the adjective “jihadi” refers to the tradition of jihad in Islam. This Arabic word means “to strive, exert oneself, or take extraordinary pains.”9 The Qur’an contains several references to jihad in conjugated form.10 However, their meanings range from peaceful persuasion (verse 25:52) to fighting (verse 9:41).11 Salafists, generally speaking, believe that jihad as combat is prescribed by God. They also agree that jihad is permissible when Muslim lands are attacked by external forces. However, as we shall see below, they disagree about the conditions, requirements, and targets of jihad in the modern era. And they especially disagree about the legitimacy of jihad against secular regimes in the Muslim world. Quietist Salafists reject jihad against Muslim rulers, preferring to confer advice privately on leaders who go astray. Political Salafists similarly reject jihad against their secular regimes, but they choose to challenge them publicly through their writings, speeches, or in elections (an option on rare occasions). Jihadi Salafists reject both of these choices and insist that Muslim regimes that do not rule by Islamic law must be removed from power forcefully; advice and political contestation are insufficient to expel tyrants and transform un-Islamic polities. To create genuinely Islamic states, jihad is necessary—hence, their label “Jihadi Salafists.” 261

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The Jihadi Salafist ideology The Jihadi Salafist worldview has two dimensions, one religious and the other ideological. Their religious paradigm (manhaj) is indistinguishable from other Salafist scholars, with whom they share many dogmas. All Salafists, by definition, are originalists who are suspicious of modern interpretations of scripture and Prophetic traditions. They especially shun any attempt to reconsider historically settled doctrines. They insist on adherence to the jurisprudential methods of tradition-minded scholars from past eras, such as Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyya, and his disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. These venerable scholars based their opinions on textual forms of authority, and their rulings referenced proofs from the original narrators and interpreters of the Qur’an.12 Salafists maintain that over the centuries, Muslim rituals and interpretations of scripture began harboring innovations (bid‘ah) that undermine the original intent of the Qur’an (the word of God) and the Prophetic model. Avoiding invented ideas and new rituals is of paramount concern for them. Methodologically, therefore, all religious opinions and rulings must be based on proof (dalil shar‘i) from the revealed scripture and the Prophetic traditions. This means that when considering an issue of concern to Muslims today, Salafists would first reference the Qur’an and determine what its verses have to say about the matter. They would also reference the authentic traditions of the Prophet and see what he said and did with regards to the issue at hand. When reading a religious opinion (fatwa) by a Salafist scholar, including Jihadi ones, they invariably begin by citing a plethora of verses from the Qur’an and Prophetic traditions. If these sources are clear and absolute in their commands, then the matter is virtually closed for discussion; that is to say, it is ineligible for reinterpretation in light of changing circumstances or evolving norms. This “hyper-textual approach”13 is augmented by retrieving examples from the sayings and conduct of the Prophet’s companions (sahaba) whose words and deeds (athar) are considered authoritative.14 They also resurrect the arguments of the early interpreters that were hostile to speculative theology, philosophical rationalism, and allegorical interpretations of scripture. As mentioned before, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab is an important source of knowledge, especially his treatise on monotheism (Kitab al-Tawhid), as well as a number of twentieth-century Salafist scholars like Sheikh Naser al-Din al-Albani, Sheikh Ibn al-‘Uthaimin, Sheikh Abdel Aziz bin Baz, and Sheikh Abdel Aziz ’Al al-Sheikh. The Jihadi Salafists augment these sources of knowledge with writings from radical ideologues like Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Nasr al-Fahd, and Abu Basir al-Tartusi, to name just a few.15 Salafists are also defined by whom they exclude from the universe of legitimate authorities or even the community of believers. They reject Shi’ism as heresy principally because of its belief in an awaited redeemer in occultation (al-mahdi al-muntazar). They also reject Sufism because its practice of venerating saints is considered polytheism and its mystical rituals are innovations on orthodox forms of worship. Lastly, they reject centrists (wasati) or reformist (islahi) Islamists, represented by the well-known figure of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, because they embrace ideas borrowed from Western modernity, such as democracy. In addition to the religious dimension, Jihadi Salafists promote seven ideological concepts that have become the foundations for rebellion against secular regimes in the Muslim world: tawhid (unity of God), hakimyat allah (God’s sovereignty), takfir (declaring Muslims to be infidels), wala wal bara (loyalty to Muslims and disassociation from unbelievers), jihad (striving in the path of God), istishhad (martyrdom), and al-ta’ifa almansoura (the Victorious Sect). Although these ideas are anchored in religious texts, they 262

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are ideological because their intent is to justify a militant form of Salafism against their regimes and their foreign allies.

Tawhid and hakimyat allah Salafists, including their Jihadist offshoot, place immense emphasis on the concept of tawhid (“oneness” of God or monotheism).16 This emphasis is warranted because the first pillar of faith in Islam is the confession “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His apostle.” However, Salafists argue that tawhid is more than a confession of faith; it is a way of life. It is more than an utterance to gain acceptance into the community of believers; it is also sincere devotion in the heart and proper behavior in practice. All three can strengthen one’s faith (iman) and the absence of one or more can diminish or even nullify it. The indivisibility of tawhid, therefore, can be thought of as a triangle of intersecting words, beliefs, and acts that are mutually reinforcing. Closely related to tawhid is the emphasis on God’s sovereignty (hakimiyyat allah). God alone can define right and wrong, good and evil, permissible and forbidden. Abiding by God’s commands as revealed in the scripture and as demonstrated by the Prophet’s example is the ultimate form of piety (taqwa) because it affirms God’s sovereignty as the Lawgiver. Conversely, altering, suspending, or replacing God’s revelation with some other law is violating tawhid by placing another authority on a par with God. It is tantamount to disbelief as per the Qur’anic verse 5:44, “And whomever does not judge by what Allah has revealed—then it is those who are the disbelievers [al-kafiroun].”17 Salafists, moreover, do not believe it is necessary to apply something other than God’s laws (shariah) to govern Muslim societies properly. Like other Islamists, they insist that the Qur’an and the Sunnah (Prophetic sayings and practice) are sufficient to guide Muslims in all aspects of life. They are comprehensive sources of law governing matters of creed (‘aqida), ritual worship (‘ibadat), and worldly conduct (mu‘amalat), including taxation and commerce, war and peace, marriage and divorce, and crime and punishment. Therefore, Muslims that turn to positive law, Western legal systems, or alien ideologies such as Marxism, liberalism, or nationalism are disbelievers, evildoers, and transgressors in the eyes of God. For the Jihadi Salafists, it is nothing less than committing apostasy.

Takfir Salafists believe that it is both permissible and necessary to engage in takfir (the act of declaring a Muslim to be outside of the community of believers, the equivalent to excommunication in Catholicism). Certain beliefs and practices nullify one’s status as a Muslim, leaving the pious no option but to label them infidels unless they repent and return to the right path. Otherwise, their lives and property are no longer sacrosanct and can be taken away without compunction. The practice of takfir, however, is a subject of a major debate among Salafists, especially the controversy over general takfir (declaring entire categories of people as infidels).18 Takfir is an important stepping stone to violence against secular Muslim regimes and non-Sunni communities, so understanding this complex concept in depth is necessary to comprehend the Jihadi Salafist ideology. Salafists position themselves between two paradigms that emerged in Islam’s formative period. The first is the Kharijite paradigm, which refers to a group of Muslim rebels that seceded from the authority of Ali Bin Abi Talib, the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs in the Sunni tradition. They eventually assassinated him in 661 CE. They have earned the 263

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reputation of being renegades beyond the pale.19 They claimed that anyone who violates God’s laws and judges by something other than what God commanded is no longer a Muslim; he is an apostate (murted). Salafists reject the Kharijites because they did not distinguish between minor and major impiety (kufr asghar and kufr akbar, respectively). Not every sinner is considered a kafir (infidel) on earth because there is a hierarchy of sins. Short of being an infidel, a sinning Muslim could be considered a fasiq (transgressor) or ‘aasi (disobedient). Although pious Muslims may dislike sinners, they cannot declare them apostates or infidels without proof that they committed one of the major sins (al-kaba’ir). Naturally, there are disagreements over what constitutes a comprehensive list of major sins, but some are undisputedly damning according to the consensus of scholars, such as practicing polytheism or killing a life without just cause.20 But even if individuals commit major sins, it may not be enough to cast them out of the community of believers unless they declare publicly that their illicit behavior is indeed Islamic (or is not in violation of Islamic law). The second paradigm is that of the Murji’ah, which means those who postpone judgment. The Murji’ah developed to counter the extremism of the Kharijites. They claimed that as long as a Muslim affirms his nominal status as a believer, no one can label him otherwise. It is up to God to judge the sincerity of his faith. Whereas some insist that good deeds are necessary to affirm one’s faith, the Murji’ah held that faith is independent of acts and, therefore, the two must not be conflated. The only thing required of a Muslim to be considered a believer in this world is his utterance of the confession of faith: “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His apostle.” The Salafists disagree with irja’ (postponement) and reject the idea that a mere declaration of faith is sufficient to keep a Muslim within the community of believers. It is the responsibility of Muslims to protect their faith from misguided beliefs and improper conduct by pointing out that certain utterances and acts constitute major impiety to the point of nullifying one’s Islamic faith. The nullifiers of Islam (nawaqid al-Islam) include practicing polytheism, refusing to declare nonbelievers infidels, supporting nonbelievers against Muslims, exempting oneself from implementing Islamic law (shariah), and turning away from God’s religion in practice. Failing to call these out may give the misimpression that they are an acceptable part of religion, thus leading Muslims astray. People of religious knowledge have an obligation to label those individuals infidels so that others do not emulate them.21 Jihadi Salafists argue that existing Muslim regimes today are targets of takfir because they rule with secular laws, not Islamic law. Thus, because they violate God’s unity and his sovereignty, they can no longer be considered Muslims. Consequently, it is permissible to reject them and rebel against them until they repent and apply Islamic law or are removed from power. Takfir is also invoked against any person working for the “apostate” regimes, including the police and security services, state-run media, and anyone supporting or giving legitimacy to these governments.

Al-wala’ wal-bara’ Showing complete loyalty to Muslims and disassociating from unbelievers (captured in the Arabic phrase al-wala’ wal-bara’) is an important behavioral requirement in the Jihadi Salafist worldview.22 When Muslims encounter kufr (unbelief), they must take the side of believers and disavow unbelievers. Neutrality is not an option. It is insufficient for Muslims to hate the unbelievers in their hearts, they must outwardly demonstrate their hostility toward 264

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them. Loyalty to Muslims means supporting those who uphold Muslim causes in wars by joining their ranks, giving them support, and praying for their success. Disassociation means turning away from those who fight against Islamists, refusing to aid them in anything either minor or significant, and refraining from making deals with them. Wala’ wal-bara’ can also mean disavowing one’s own family, friends, neighbors, tribes, or country. Jihadi Salafists cite the Qur’anic narrative of Abraham who disavowed his idolatrous father (verse 9:114). Jihadi Salafists also reference the Qur’anic verse 5:51: “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them.” This verse is used to justify attacks on Muslims who support foreign forces occupying Muslim lands. It is also used to recruit western Muslims as foreign fighters in support of their co-religionists in conflict zones.23

Jihad Jihadi Salafists believe that jihad fi sabil allah (fighting in the path of God) is an Islamic obligation against any regime that does not rule according to Islamic law. They reject the notion that jihad is merely an internal struggle to lead a pious life. They also reject that argument that jihad is merely defensive. Although the Qur’an does make references to jihad as peaceful disputation with the unbelievers (verse 25:52) and defensive fighting when attacked (verse 2:190), these verses are said to have been abrogated (nusikhat) by subsequent verses that remove restraints on aggressive fighting against all unbelievers (i.e. 2:191, 9:5, and 9:29). Jihad, therefore, is not just an imperative to counter foreign aggression; it is also required to recapture all the lands that were once in the abode of Islam, and to further expand Islamic authority through new conquests. Jihadi Salafists reject modern nationalism and its concomitant system of sovereign states. Instead, they believe that jihad is continuous until all of humanity embraces Islam or submits to an Islamic authority, signifying that “religion is all for Allah” (partial Qur’anic verse 8:39). Jihadi Salafists are plagued with several controversies that relate to their application of jihad. The first relates to the permissibility of fighting Muslim regimes. In the classical Islamic legal tradition, jihad is permissible when conducted by a Muslim leader (imam) to bring non-Muslim territories under Islamic authority. It is also legitimate when Muslims are defending their lands from non-Muslim aggressors. In both cases, jihad is strictly against non-Muslims. Jihadi Salafists are accused of two errors: (1) fighting without a recognized Islamic leader, and (2) fighting against their co-religionists. Their violent campaigns, therefore, do not qualify as jihad. Jihadi Salafist reject these arguments and insist that the requirement for an imam applies when Muslims are fighting an offensive war (jihad al-talab). Today, however, Muslims are merely protecting their lands and religion against a new Western crusade aided by their local lackeys. This is a defensive struggle (jihad al-daf‘i) that is obligatory (fard ‘ayn) on every capable Muslim until aggression ceases. Occasionally going on tactical offensives like the 9/11 attacks does not change the fact that jihadists are merely repelling Western encroachment with the few means at their disposal. As for fighting co-religionists, Jihadi Salafists insist that they are fighting regimes that have nullified their Islam by substituting God’s law with secular law. They are fighting apostates, not Muslims. Quietist Salafists argue that jihadists are sparking fitna (discord among Muslims) through their violence. Ruling regimes in the Muslim world, no matter how impious or tyrannical, must be obeyed as long as these rulers do not officially renounce Islam or justify positive 265

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law by declaring it to be superior to God’s law. The best that pious people can do is advise their rulers privately and focus their efforts on instilling in the public the proper Islamic way through socialization (tarbiyya) and purification (tasfiyya) of religious beliefs and practices. Jihadi Salafists counter that the greatest fitna is to govern by something other than what Allah has revealed.24 By criticizing the jihadists, quietist scholars have become apologists for the impious regimes that employ them and suppress the sincere believers. Jihadists refer to quietists as ulema al-sultan, a pejorative phrase that means “the sultan’s scholars.” Other Islamists, chiefly political Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood movement, argue that jihadist violence against secular regimes is counterproductive and harms Muslim societies. Absent a foreign invasion, Islamists should rely of civic activism or political means like democratic elections to advance their cause. The Jihadi Salafists counter that jihad is an indispensable component of comprehensive Islamic activism, which begins with preaching (dawa) and culminates with confronting obstinate unbelievers. This strategy is the only appropriate one because it is the method of the Prophet Muhammad. He did not spread Islam in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century by preaching and political means alone. Those who opposed the Prophet wanted to kill him and annihilate his inchoate Muslim community. Force was necessary to repel their attacks and ultimately prevail over them. Those who believe that secular rulers will give up power through elections are deceiving themselves (not to mention that elections are forbidden because they elevate people’s sovereignty above God’s). The failure of the Arab Spring movements in Egypt and Syria illustrates the futility of non-violent strategies. Another controversy relates to jihadist atrocities against civilians. The Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad clearly gave immunity to noncombatants during warfare.25 Jihadi Salafists counter that in their present context of defensive warfare, attacking the civilians of adversarial regimes is a legitimate act because the other side kills Muslim civilians. The Qur’anic and Prophetic restrictions on harming civilians apply in the context of offensive warfare, when Muslims are leading the charge. Today, Muslims are in a state of weakness and are merely defending their lands and religion with the comparatively meager resources available to them. Furthermore, to the extent that civilians support their regimes and give them material support in the form of votes and taxes, they are culpable in their country’s aggression against Muslims.26 The most challenging controversy for Jihadi Salafists is their use of indiscriminate tactics that harm ordinary Muslims. As with civilians, the Qur’an and Prophetic traditions contain several clear prohibitions against killing believers.27 Jihadi Salafists maintain that they do not intentionally harm Muslims, but in a context of a defensive warfare, Muslim collateral damage is inevitable. Those killed are considered martyrs on earth. Additionally, they retrieve a historic ruling regarding the permissibility of killing Muslim human shields if necessity requires it. Today, apostate regimes and foreign invaders place their institutions and forces in the heart of cities populated with Muslims. One cannot refrain from attacking these targets because of the harm that will come to innocent Muslims. When choosing between two evils, the suspension of jihad and victory for the enemies of Islam would clearly be the greater evil.28

Istishhad Jihadi Salafists have justified and expanded the use of suicide attacks despite clear Islamic prohibitions against suicide.29 To circumvent these prohibitions, they euphemistically label suicide as martyrdom (istishhad). Suicide is indeed rejected as religiously impermissible 266

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(haram), but martyrdom (i.e., dying while fighting in battle) is venerated in Islam in several verses (2:154, 2:207, 3:169, 4:69, 4:74, 4:95–96, 9:111, 9:20–22, and 61:10–12). Suicide attacks are a form of martyrdom. The key distinction between suicide and martyrdom is the intention behind the act. Suicide is designed to kill oneself, while the chief aim of a suicide attack is to kill the enemies of Muslims. Human intentionality is the key to legitimating this direct form of self-sacrifice. Interestingly, Jihadi Salafists in this instance elevate human intentionality above textual forms of authority, which violates their methodology of aligning conduct with clear proofs from the Qur’an and Sunnah. The latter clearly prohibits suicide, while all references to martyrdom point to dying in battle at the hands of others. To overcome this critique, Jihadi Salafists have unearthed examples of the companions of the Prophet eagerly charging the enemy (inghimas fil-saf) in order to hasten their own demise and earn the rewards of martyrdom. That is why suicide attacks are often called “inghimasi operations.”30 Jihadi Salafists have also mythologized martyrdom. During the anti-Soviet jihad, Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden, glorified martyrdom by making it the personal choice and the highest aspiration of a Muslim warrior. Azzam spoke of miracles on the battlefield, including Soviet bullets not penetrating fighters and angels literally fighting on the side of the jihadists. He also wrote about the dream visions (ru’yah) of martyrs before their operations, simultaneously predicting their death and confirming their status as martyrs. “Through his stories,” writes Edwards, “Afghanistan morphed from a place of death, dislocation, and suffering into an enchanted realm in which the original spirit of Islam had come back to life.”31 Jihadi Salafists have taken Azzam’s myth-creation template and expanded it from the written form into online videos distributed through social media. Weaving together emotional narratives of Western humiliation and local collaboration, jihadists were presented as heroic figures that redeemed their nation through intentional acts of martyrdom. Their biographies were plastered in online forums and poetry recited their praises. The mythology surrounding individual suicide bombers appealed to potential recruits to make similar heroic sacrifices.32

Al-ta’ifa al-mansoura Jihadi Salafists are often accused of being modern-day Kharijites, a reference to the historically detested sect known for its extremism and violence in Islam’s formative period. Jihadi Salafists reject this comparison and instead argue that they constitute the Victorious Sect (al-ta’ifa al-mansoura), the one about whom Muhammad prophesized: The Jews split into seventy-one sects, one of which will be in Paradise and seventy in Hell. The Christians split into seventy-two sects, seventy-one of which will be in Hell and one in Paradise. I swear by the One Whose Hand is the soul of Muhammad, my nation will split into seventy-three sects, one of which will be in Paradise and seventy-two in Hell.33 Claiming the label of the Victorious Sect has become the basis upon which some Jihadi Salafists differentiate their faction from other Muslims and rival Islamist factions. The concept neatly wraps in one package all the aforementioned religious and ideological narratives represented by tawhid (monotheism), hakmiyat allah (God’s sovereignty), takfir (excommunication), al-wala wal-bara (loyalty and disavowal), jihad (war in the path of God), 267

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and istishhad (martyrdom). The Victorious Sect is defined by its characteristics, which include adherence to Salafist orthodoxy; idealization of Islamic law as the perfect normative and legal system by which to govern Muslim and non-Muslim subjects; denunciation of creedal and ritualistic innovations; rejection of secularism as apostasy; elevation of jihad to one of the tenets of faith, and embracing martyrdom in the face of death. The Victorious Sect today is fighting to reestablish the Islamic Caliphate without any regard to the modern system of sovereign states and without any support from non-Islamic forces. The Victorious Sect is juxtaposed with all other Islamist movements that believe in establishing civil democratic states, or those that reject violence as necessary to establish Islamic states, or those that limit their fight for an Islamic order within the confines of the nation-state, or those that make alliances with secular factions or Western governments in the name of realpolitik. All these pseudo-Islamists are insufficiently righteous to stake a claim to the title of the Victorious Sect. In practice, the Victorious Sect narrative is used to rationalize and publicly justify factional conflicts with rival Islamists in civil wars. Since the 1990s, Jihadi Salafists in Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan insisted on unity of effort under their organizational banner because they were the Victorious Sect. They demanded that other Islamists give an oath of loyalty to their leadership, or step aside to allow the ideologically pure faction to take charge. In doing so, they have descended into fratricidal wars that fragmented their movements and undermined their cause.34

Political contexts that empower Jihadi Salafists Jihadi Salafism, despite its rapid growth and spread since 2001, remains a relatively small faction within the broader Islamist movement. Its significance stems not from the appeal of its ideology, but rather from the destructiveness of its adherents. However, some political opportunity structures enable Jihadi Salafists to gain a mass following in Muslim communities. State repression, state sponsorship, sectarian tensions, and failed states are important factors that contribute to the expansion of Jihadi Salafist networks in the Muslim world.

State repression State repression of political Islamist movements often radicalizes these dissidents and opens the door for more radical forms of contestation.35 Three examples from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria illustrate this dynamic. Political Salafism in Saudi Arabia (known as the sahwa or awakening) emerged in the early 1990s as a hybrid between Muslim Brotherhood activism and Wahhabi conservatism. It challenged the Saudi ruling family’s decision to allow US forces to be based inside the kingdom. After failing to co-opt the opposition, the authorities cracked down on political Salafists. As the leaders of the Sahwa were confined to prison, the movement splintered into many factions, including an extreme version of jihadism associated with a new generation of young and militant scholars that were previously overshadowed by the original Sahwa scholars. The experience with repression convinced these radicalized preachers that political means were insufficient to affect change inside the kingdom.36 In Algeria, state repression similarly empowered extremists within the Islamist movement. In 1989, Algeria had embarked on political liberalization in the aftermath of mass anti-state riots. Political Islamists took advantage of this opportunity by forming their own party, the 268

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Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which won 188 out of 430 National Assembly seats in the first round of voting in December 1991. The FIS was poised to win an overwhelming majority of seats in the second round, but Algeria’s military intervened to halt the electoral process. Thousands of FIS cadres were rounded up and detained, triggering a violent rebellion. Several Islamist rebel groups emerged to topple the military regime, including the extreme Armed Islamic Group (GIA). By 1994, the GIA became the leading fighting group in Algeria, completing the ascendancy of hardline Salafists who rejected the electoral path and insisted on total war to establish an Islamic state. In Syria, a wave of peaceful Arab Spring protests in 2011 was met with intense state repression that precipitated a civil war. The Free Syrian Army, a loose network of secular nationalists made up of defecting officers, became the face of the rebellion. However, as state repression intensified and the FSA failed to quickly topple the regime, new militant factions emerged, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusrah Front and the splinter faction, Islamic State. Both of these organizations espoused Jihadi Salafism and were able to catapult themselves ahead of other factions despite the fact that they were not part of the original protest movement.

State sponsorship Governments can empower extremists directly by sponsoring them as clients in their proxy warfare against a rival state. The US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, for example, supported jihadists in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaign during the 1980s. Pakistan has been supporting jihadists in Kashmir since the 1990s. Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have supported some of the Jihadi Salafist factions in the Syrian civil war, including Jaysh al-Islam and the Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement. Direct financial and military support for these factions intensified as their state rival, Iran, gave support to the Assad regime and mobilized sectarian militias to suppress the Syrian rebellion.

Sectarian faultline Growing conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites often feeds the ranks of Salafists because their ideology portrays Shi’ism as anathema to Sunni orthodoxy. The Sunni–Shi’ite split in Islam has its roots in a political dispute over claims to legitimate authority after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE. Although it has transformed into a theological schism in Islam, it rarely reemerges as a source of violent conflict absent political elites activating this sectarian difference. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave rise to growing tensions between the minority Sunni Arabs and majority Shi’ites. The toppling of Saddam Hussein allowed Shi’ite parties to claim their right to govern in Iraq, overturning centuries of Sunni dominance. Jihadi Salafists exploited this fact by stoking the embers of sectarianism through massive bombings that targeted symbols of Shi’ism, including their shrines and religious figures. As predicted, Shi’ites retaliated with their own version of sectarian targeting, nearly sparking a protracted civil war. In this context of growing sectarianism, Jihadi Salafists were able to increase their ranks, turning from a marginal current in Iraqi society prior to the war to the leading faction in the insurgency.37

Failed states Government breakdown and public lawlessness associated with failed states creates an opportunity for religious fundamentalists to position themselves as the forces of order, 269

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justice, and accountability. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan during the 1990s and the Islamic Courts Movement in Somalia in 2006 illustrate this dynamic. In both cases, Islamists stepped in to remove warlords who abused the general population and established fiefdoms in place of effective ruling institutions. Islamists imposed a harsh brand of justice in the name of shariah to punish criminals and deter malfeasance. Populations with few options initially welcomed these organizations because they were effective in reestablishing public order and relative safety in their beleaguered cities.

Divisions within Jihadi Salafism Jihadi Salafists do not constitute a single, unified faction. Instead, their ideologues and organizations often disagree about fundamental issues in the context of civil wars. Two disagreements in particular have become centrifugal, splintering Jihadi Salafists into opposing camps. The first pertains to the issue of collective takfir and sectarian killings. The second revolves around the importance of establishing Islamic states and the territorial limits of those states.

Collective takfir and sectarian killings Jihadi Salafists have been engaging in mass atrocities in which other Muslims are the primary targets. Sectarian killings in particular have increased substantially since 2003. It is no surprise, therefore, that these attacks have unleashed intense criticisms by other jihadists who are concerned about the permissibility of this violence and its political repercussions. The killing of co-religionists poses the greatest difficulty for jihadists from an Islamic jurisprudential perspective as well as a public relations standpoint. As noted earlier, the principle ideological mechanism that enables extremists to justify killing their coreligionists is takfir—the act of Muslims declaring other Muslims to be infidels. However, takfir comes in two forms, collective (kufr al-‘aam) and individual (kufr al-mu‘ayen). Collective takfir involves declaring entire categories of people as infidels. For example, according to Salafists, Shi’ites are infidels because of their doctrine of a hidden imam. Similarly, Sufis who seek intermediaries with God are infidels, too. These are statements of collective takfir. They identify a certain practice or belief and argue that those who engage in this practice or hold this belief have fallen from grace. These generalizations, however, are insufficient to justify attacks on the collective. Punishment stemming from the act of takfir can only apply against individuals, not entire collectives. Punishing individuals for major impiety that nullifies their Islam is permitted at the individual level as long as religious authorities follow a prescribed due process consisting of three steps. Step one involves investigating whether the person accused of committing a major impiety has met the requirements of takfir. There are circumstances that preclude the application of takfir in individual cases. These include inadequate religious socialization, mental immaturity due to young age, or coercion by unbelievers. The manifestation of major impiety does not automatically give religious authorities permission to engage in takfir because these extenuating circumstances diminish one’s culpability. Step two involves exposing the major impiety to the culpable person and explaining the textual proof from the Qur’an and Sunnah to remove any doubt that the individual understands the violation. Step three requires that the person be given an opportunity to repent and return to the proper path. Only when these three steps have been exhausted can the unrepentant infidel be eligible for punishment.38 270

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This important distinction between collective and individual takfir poses a problem for extremists who wish to engage in mass casualty attacks against security institutions and civilian constituencies of ruling regimes. They argue that these organs and their employees are supporters of apostate tyrants. Critics say that, as a general rule, anyone that supports an apostate is an infidel, but such a general pronouncement (kufr al-‘aam) does not give extremists license to declare that every individual that works for these governments to be an infidel. They are required by Islamic law to undertake a rigorous due process of issuing specific proof of major impiety to each individual involved (kufr al-mu‘ayen). The issue of collective takfir may appear esoteric, but its consequences are quite deadly. In Iraq, Islamic State has engaged in mass killings of thousands of Shi’ites on the basis of their identity. Other Islamist factions, including Jihadi Salafists, have condemned this violence as both Islamically illegitimate and politically damaging to the movement’s cause. Sectarian targeting, therefore, has become a major divide among Jihadi Salafists on the battlefield.39

Establishing Islamic states Jihadi Salafists also disagree about when and where to establish Islamic states. Although they all share the ambition of establishing an Islamic Caliphate that unites the ummah (Muslim nation) across borders, not all see this goal as immediately attenable. Therefore, they disagree about strategic priorities necessary to achieve this long-term objective. One can discern three separate views on the issue of a territorial state. The first view comes from al-Qaeda, which holds that establishing Islamic states is not a priority under present circumstances. The priority is to support rebellions against secular regimes, establish al-Qaeda’s organizational presence in those conflict zones to grow its transnational network, and attack Western states that shore up oppressive governments. This strategy involves making tactical alliances with local rebels, regardless of their ideological purity, and refraining from controversial policies that might alienate local factions, including sectarian killings, declaring an Islamic state, or governing with strict shariah codes. The second view comes from local Jihadi Salafists mired in civil wars. They are fighting to topple their secular regimes in order to establish Islamic states within the framework of the modern nation-state. Their territorial vision is confined to their existing borders; they are not interested in abrogating their states’ territorial integrity. Moreover, their ambition to rule over existing states that have multiple ethnic and religious communities drives them to exercise restraint in their targeting policy. They avoid overtly sectarian or ethnic killings, preferring instead to combine Salafism with local nationalism. Furthermore, local rebels invariably need external support—political, financial, and material—to topple their regimes. They pragmatically avoid rhetoric that can be viewed as threatening to neighboring states and other potential external allies. Thus, they refrain from talking about an Islamic Caliphate that promises to upend the Westphalian system of sovereign states. The third view comes from Islamic State. It harbors the irredentist ambition of restoring an Islamic Caliphate over territories that were divided by Western powers after the World War I (the so-called “Sykes-Picot system”). Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the spokesman of Islamic State before he was killed by a US airstrike in September 2016, explained to skeptical Islamists the importance of establishing an Islamic state that cuts across Iraq and Syria: 271

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These borders have torn the ummah apart, divided its nations, and led them to believe that these geographic maps are divine revelations to which they should adhere. Islam does not acknowledge mapped borders that impose limits on it and trap it . . . Abu-Bakr and Umar [the first two Rightly Guided Caliphs], may God be pleased with them, used to move their armies between Iraq and the Levant [Syria] without differentiating between the two. This is what we are doing now . . . Our religion taught us, and our scholars raised us, to disavow the borders imposed by the Sikes-Picot Agreement and to completely disregard them.40 Islamic State cares little about state sovereignty, the complex political considerations of local Islamist factions, or the interests of external powers. Whereas nationalist Salafists seek to work organically with their beleaguered populations in order to win their hearts and minds, Islamic State cares little about populism and, instead, advances a vanguardist vision that seeks to mold hearts and minds through compulsion. As a result, it seizes every opportunity to carve out a territorial state from within and across sovereign state boundaries and governs with a strict shariah code without regard to local conditions and habits. And it discards norms of human rights by expelling non-Sunni populations from its territories with genocidal violence. These ideological, strategic, and tactical divides have fragmented Jihadi Salafists into multiple rival organizations that are increasingly competing over territory, fighters, and affiliates. In fact, they are killing each other in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Al-Qaeda and other Jihadi Salafists have denounced Islamic State as modern-day Kharijites that kill Muslims simply for failing to give their oath of allegiance (bay‘ah) to its Caliph.41 Islamic State retorts that it is the Victorious Sect that waves the banner of the authentic creed and “banishes the pretentious and the hypocrites.”42

Conclusion The development of Jihadi Salafism since the 1990s highlights a common truism held by experts of Islam and Islamism: fragmentation is much more salient than unity. The fragmentation of Salafism into quietists, activists, and jihadists has been compounded by the intra-jihadi schisms over competing religious narratives. Despite their shared normative commitments and mutual state adversaries, Jihadi Salafists have become divided on core religious, ideological, and strategic issues. In fact, in the past three decades, Jihadi Salafists have descended into fratricidal violence against their brothers-in-arms. The stress of conflict and the urgency for survival did little to bind them into a singular unified faction. Instead of closing ranks, Jihadi Salafists have turned their attention away from near and far enemies and, instead, prioritized fighting with fellow Salafists, treating these rivals as the nearest enemy of all. This fragmentation should not be surprising, since the history of revolutionary movements is one of endless splintering. Islamists that embrace both jihad and Salafism exhibit fundamental feuds over ideology, strategy, and tactics in the same way that communism in the twentieth century became divided into Stalinism, Trotskyism, Titoism, and Maoism. All of these movements were vexed by debates over revolution in one state, territorial expansion of the revolutionary project, alliances with non-revolutionary forces, and the pace of the revolutionary process. In the case of Jihadi Salafists, their divisions take on the form of specific debates around collective takfir, sectarian targeting, and the priority of establishing an Islamic state within or across states. 272

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The Jihadi Salafist classification has become too constraining to capture the diversity of factions contained within it. Jihadi Salafists can be populists or they can be vanguardists. They can be irredentists that are raring to form an Islamic Caliphate on any piece of captured land or they can be nationalists that are unwilling to abrogate their state’s territorial integrity. They can be sectarian like Islamic State or they can downplay sectarianism as in the case of al-Qaeda’s original leadership. They can be selective in their targeting— preserving the norm of civilian immunity—or they can be indiscriminate and genocidal in their violent repertoires. Since 2003, a distinct form of Jihadi Salafism has emerged. It combines sectarianism, territorial separatism, and sadistic extremism. Although it might be too polemical, branding the new extremists as Neo-Kharijites is a befitting description. It is a phrase authentic to Muslims and is widely used today by mainstream Islamists to denounce Islamic State and its acolytes. It links contemporary extremists with their detested Kharijite predecessors and counters their claim to be the Victorious Sect. More generally, specialists need to consider carefully how the emergence of hyper extremism should modify the extant three-pronged division of Salafism into quietists, activists, and jihadists. The latter label should evolve because it is no longer a coherent signifier of the movement it presumes to describe. The diversity of tendencies within the militant Salafist camp requires additional nuanced categorization for students of political Islam.

Notes 1 In the mid-1990s, several jihadist groups in Algeria and Egypt began to identify themselves as Salafists. Additionally, radical ideologues like Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada al-Filistini also identified their tendency as both Salafist and Jihadist, although they did not merge the two words in a singular phrase. The term “Jihadi Salafist” garnered public notice in 2003 after a Moroccan group by that name carried out several suicide bombings in Casablanca, Morocco. It gained currency in Iraq as several groups identified their ideology as that of Jihadi Salafism. A recent study estimates that adherents of Jihadi Salafism increased by 270 percent between 2001 and 2018, numbering between 100,000 and 230,000. As of 2018, there are at least 67 Jihadi Salafist groups worldwide, a 180 percent increase from 2001. See Seth Jones et al, The Evolution of the Salafi-Jihadist Threat: Current and Future Challenges from the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and Other Groups (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2018), 7–9. 2 Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 3 Sean C. Reynolds and Mohammed M. Hafez, “Social Network Analysis of German Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 4 (2017): 1–26, and Thomas Hegghammer, “The Rise of the Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad,” International Security 35, no. 3 (2010): 53–94. 4 Many specialists refer to this movement as “Salafist-Jihadist.” However, this is a mistake in translation because Salafism is the noun and Jihadi is the adjective. The erroneous phraseology turns Salafist into an adjective that describes the singular noun Jihadist (alternatively, it contains two adjectives without a noun). The original phrase was intended to use jihadi as the modifier of the plural noun Salafists to distinguish this faction from other, less militant, Salafists. 5 For a good introduction on Salafism, see Joas Wagemakers, Salafism in Joran: Political Islam in a Quietist Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 6 On the early traditionalists, see Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Chapter 11. 7 Namira Nahouza, Wahhabism and the Rise of the New Salafists: Theology, Power and Sunni Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 8 Saudi Arabia had multiple realpolitik motivations to spread their brand of Islam abroad. In the 1960s, it wanted to counter the rise of pan-Arab nationalist republics that portrayed Gulf monarchies as reactionary agents of Western imperialism. In the 1980s, it wanted to shore up its Islamic

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credentials in the face of Iran’s revolutionary Islamic Republic. In subsequent decades, it promoted quietist Wahhabism abroad as a counter to activist Islamism as represented by Muslim Brotherhood movements. Presently, it promotes Wahhabism as a sectarian narrative against ascendant Shi’ite factions loyal to Iran. Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16. See, for example, verses 8:74 (jahadu); 9:24 (jihadin); 9:41, 9:86, and 22:78 (Jahidu), and 25:52 and 60:1 (jahidahum, jihadan). The Qur’an also refers to war (harb), combat (qital), and killing (qatl), all of which appear in defensive (verse 2:190) and offensive (verse 9:5) references. For an excellent exposition on the many meanings of jihad in Islam, see Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). It is often asserted that Salafists are opposed to taqlid (blind emulation) of religious precedents set by scholars of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib). In some sense, this is true because they insist that any precedent must be based on textual proofs from the Qur’an and Sunnah. However, in practice, Salafists often rely heavily on the scripturalism of the Hanbali school. Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement ed. Roel Meijer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45. This practice is supported by a Prophetic tradition cited by several of the authentic (sahih) collections of his sayings: “The best people are those living in my generation, then those coming after them, and then those coming after [the second generation].” Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 52, Hadith 15, available at https://sunnah.com/bukhari/52/15 Some of these scholars and ideologues have fallen into disrepute in Jihadi Salafist circles because of their critiques of extremism or specific practices on the battlefield. On the phenomenon of contemporary Jihadi clerics, see Richard A. Nielsen, Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tawhid consists of affirming the unity of God’s lordship in the universe (tawhid al-rububiyyah), which means that God is the only creator and provider. He has no partners, no intermediaries, and no offspring. Tawhid also consists of affirming worship of no one else but God (tawhid al-uluhiyyah). In other words, one cannot pray to anyone except God; those who pray to saints, idols, or gravesites are violating the unity of God. Finally, tawhid consists of affirming the uniqueness of God’s names and attributes described in the Qur’an (tawhid al-asma’ wal sifat). His nominal attributes are to be taken literally, not figuratively, although they are not equivalent to any human attributes. Verse (5:44) appears in two other forms that follow in quick succession, but the word “disbelievers” is replaced with “evildoers” (al-dhalimoun) in verse 5:45 and with “transgressors” (al-fasiquun) in verse 5:47. This variation has given rise to a debate between Salafists. One camp views the act of suspending God’s laws as disbelief, evil, and transgression all in one. However, another camp holds that not ruling by God’s laws could be a manifestation of acts of impiety, injustice, or disobedience—all of which are dreadful sins, but insufficiently damning to exclude a Muslim from the community of believers (kufr duna kufr). Mohammed M. Hafez, “Debating Takfir and Muslim-on-Muslim Violence,” in Fault Lines in Global Jihad: Organizational, Strategic and Ideological Fissures eds. Assaf Moghadam and Brian Fishman (New York: Routledge, 2011). Jeffrey T. Kenney, Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Seven major sins come from an authentic Prophetic saying, “Avoid the seven great destructive sins . . . To join partners in worship with Allah [i.e. polytheism]; to practice sorcery; to kill the life which Allah has forbidden except for a just cause (according to Islamic law); to eat up usury . . . to eat up the property of an orphan; to give one’s back to the enemy and fleeing from the battle-field at the time of fighting; and to accuse chaste women who never even think of anything touching chastity and are good believers.” Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 86, Hadith 80, available at https://sunnah. com/bukhari/86/80 For a more extensive discussion of the khawarij and murji’ah, see Joas Wagemakers, “‘Seceders’ and ‘Postponers’? An Analysis of the ‘Khawarij’ and ‘Murji’a’ Labels in Polemical Debates between Quietist and Jihadi-Salafis,” in Contextualising Jihadi Thought eds. Jeevan Deol and Zaheer Kazmi (London: Hurst & Co., 2012).

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22 For a comprehensive history of this concept, see Shiraz Maher, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 111–141. 23 Rukmini Callimachi, “Chapter 2: Recruitment,” New York Times podcast titled Caliphate, available at www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/podcasts/caliphate-transcript-chapter-two-recruitment.html 24 The word fitna carries multiple meanings. It could mean discord in the community; sedition; chaos and disorder; trials and tribulation; and temptation. It could also mean religious persecution intended to forcefully revert people from their embrace of Islam. Jihadists use the latter definition and argue, per verses 2:191, that “persecution [fitna] is worse than killing.” In other words, fighting secular regimes that turn people from Islam is the lesser of two evils. 25 The prohibition against killing non-combatants derives from Qur’anic verse 2:190: “Fight in the path of God those who fight you, but do not transgress limits, for God does not love transgressors.” It is also found in an authentic Prophetic tradition: “It is narrated on the authority of ‘Abdullah that a woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him). He disapproved of the killing of women and children.” 26 For a comprehensive discussion of the justifications for killing civilians, see Maher, Salafi-Jihadism, 46–59. 27 Qur’anic verse 4:93 is the basis for this prohibition: “If a man kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell, to abide therein (For ever): And the wrath and the curse of Allah are upon him, and a dreadful penalty is prepared for him.” In a commonly cited Prophetic tradition, Muhammad reminds his followers that “Everything belonging to a Muslim is inviolable for a Muslim; his honor, his blood, and property . . ..” Hadith in Jami’ al-Tirmidhi, Book 1, Hadith 234, available at https://sunnah.com/riyadussaliheen/1/234 28 For further elaboration on this argument, see Mohammed M. Hafez, “The Alchemy of Martyrdom: Jihadi Salafism and Debates over Suicide Bombings in the Muslim World,” Asian Journal of Social Science 38, no. 3 (2010): 364–378. 29 Qur’anic verse 2:195 cautions, “cast not yourselves by your own hands into destruction.” A Prophetic tradition cited in both sahih canons of Bukhari and Muslim offer the clearest expression against suicide: “And whoever commits suicide with a piece of iron will be punished with the same piece of iron in the Hell Fire.” 30 For an in-depth explanation of these complex narratives, see Mohammed M. Hafez, “Apologia for Suicide: Martyrdom in Contemporary Jihadist Discourse,” in Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and SelfImmolation: Religious Perspectives on Suicide ed. Margo Kitts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 126–139. 31 David B. Edwards, Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 104. 32 Mohammed M. Hafez, “Martyrdom Mythology in Iraq: How Jihadists Frame Suicide Terrorism in Videos and Biographies,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2007): 95–115. 33 Hadith in Sunan Ibn Majah 3992, Book 36, Hadith 67, available at https://sunnah.com/ibnmajah/ 36/67. A similar hadith is narrated by Abdullah bin ‘Amr in Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 2641, Book 40, Hadith 36, available at https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/40/36. Jihadists augment that tradition with another Prophetic report: “A group of people from my nation [umma] will always remain triumphant on the right path and continue to be triumphant [against their opponents]. He who deserts them shall not be able to do them any harm. They will remain in this position until Allah’s Command is executed.” Hadith in Sahih Muslim 1920, Book 33, Hadith 245, available at https:// sunnah.com/muslim/33/245. 34 Mohammed M. Hafez, “Fratricidal Jihadists: Why Islamist Keep Losing Their Civil Wars,” Middle East Policy 25, no. 2 (2018): 86–99, and Mohammed M. Hafez, “Fratricidal Rebels: Ideological Extremity and Warring Factionalism in Civil Wars,” Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 3 (2017): 1–26. 35 Mohammed M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). 36 Stéphane Lacroix and George Holoch, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 249–255. 37 Mohammed M. Hafez, “The Origins of Sectarian Terrorism in Iraq,” in The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death eds. Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 38 For a more extensive discussion of collective and individual takfir, see Hafez, “Debating Takfir.”

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21 THE IDEOLOGY OF AL-QAEDA Christina Hellmich

Introduction Since the attacks of 9/11, few issues have been more widely debated than the ideology of al-Qaeda – and numerous interpretations have surfaced. These include suggestions that the terrorists’ actions are simply irrational; that the religious rhetoric is merely a veil for political ambition, or that the explanation lies in different theories of Islamic extremism: ‘Al-Qaeda not driven by ideology’ was the initial conclusion reached by a Pentagon intelligence team, while according to Rohan Gunaratna, ‘aiming to galvanize the spirit of its supporters, al-Qaeda corrupts, misrepresents or misinterprets the Koranic text’.1 For Stephen Schwartz, ‘Osama bin Laden and his followers belong to a puritanical variant of Islam known as Wahhabism, an extreme and intolerant Islamo-Fascist sect that became the official cult of Saudi Arabia.’2 Following these initial suggestions, a consensus emerged that al-Qaeda is the vanguard of what Marc Sageman refers to as the ‘global Salafi jihad, a worldwide religious revivalist movement with the goal of re-establishing past Muslim glory in a great Islamist state’.3 Indeed, the notion of the global Salafi jihad has become a shorthand descriptor for al-Qaeda and its ideology in the media, government reports and a steadily growing body of academic writing. However, the notion of the Salafi jihad as a distinct school of thought has been widely criticised as a superficial label: Salafi-jihadism, and Wahhabism, from which it allegedly seeks its inspiration, are concepts that are subject to much controversy in Middle East and Islamic studies and are by no means straightforward, monolithic schools of thought drawing on an ancient tradition that would readily explain the rationale of a contemporary movement.4 The Salafi jihad is a concept founded on oversimplifications and misconceptions of the history of Islamic thought that lack an empirical basis, yet have nonetheless acquired political momentum and legitimacy in the contemporary discourse. But in contrast to popular perceptions of al-Qaeda as a group of radical Islamists on the fringes, if not entirely outside of the fold of Islam, much of bin Laden’s rationale, albeit not his violent means, had broad appeal and resonated widely with Muslims around the world.5 Indeed the designation of al-Qaeda as the outworking of the global Salafi jihad demonstrates many of the analytical shortcomings identified by Gunning and Jackson’s critique of the popular concept of religious terrorism.6 In line with their conclusion, this chapter argues that the ideology espoused by bin Laden and subsequent leaders of al-Qaeda needs to be understood first and foremost as the manifestation of ideas and practices springing from the 277

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Islamic faith of a contemporary community of Muslims rather than a set of traditional beliefs or doctrines readily identifiable in ancient religious texts.

Listening to Osama Bin Laden A meaningful inquiry into both the ideological basis for and the appeal of al-Qaeda’s global jihad therefore begins with an examination of the rationale presented by Osama bin Laden: We declared jihad against the US government because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Land of the Prophet’s Night Journey (Palestine). And we believe that the US is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. The mention of the US reminds us before everything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in recent explosions . . . This US government abandoned even humanitarian feelings by these hideous crimes. It transgressed all bounds and behaved in a way not witnessed before by any power or imperialist power in the world. They should have been sensitive to the fact that the qibla of the Muslims (Saudi Arabia) raises the emotion of the entire Muslim world. Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness of the US regime has reached such an extent that they occupied the qibla of the Muslims (Arabia) who are more than a billion in the world today.7 Although bin Laden’s reasoning evolved over time to take account of socio-political developments, the central theme evoked throughout his statements – from open letters and video messages to interviews and training manuals issued from the late 1980s until his death in 2011 – is the suffering and humiliation of the umma, the global community of all Muslims, at the hands of the unbelievers, i.e., the US and its allies. At the core of his messages is a pan-Islamic worldview, according to which God’s favoured community faces an existential threat from the modern arch-enemies of Islam: the United States and Israel, also referred to as the Zionist-Crusader alliance. The primary means of communicating this message is the enumeration of Muslim anguish by references to powerfully symbolic situations such as in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir and, above all, Saudi Arabia, where US military forces occupy and control the holy places of Islam. Thus the ultimate reason for the miserable and indeed intolerable state of the umma, evinced in both the physical suffering of Muslims and the widespread decline of moral and religious standards and modes of conduct within the Islamic community, is found in the dual reality of US military occupation and US cultural domination. In the words of bin Laden: The Arabian Peninsula has never – since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas – been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts. For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam, the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors. The world is on fire. Endless suffering, increasing corruption, horrendous abuse. Just look at Iraq. Look at Palestine. Look at Kashmir. Atrocities are committed against our brothers and sisters. Yet they are part of our community, and they deserve our sympathy and our support.8 278

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The only way to defend the umma against this perceived aggression is through military (in effect, paramilitary) confrontation with America, which bin Laden used to present in highly emotive terms as the rightful jihad of the present time against the principal enemy of God’s favoured community, and even of Islam itself. The ultimate goal of this jihad is to reclaim the umma from the United States’s painful hold. The by-now infamous Fatwa of 1998 made it unambiguously clear as to how this goal was to be achieved: To kill the Americans and their allies – civilian and military – is an individual duty incumbent upon every Muslim in all countries, in order to liberate al-Aqsa mosque and the Holy Mosque from their grip, so that their armies leave all the territory of Islam, defeated, broken and unable to threaten any Muslim.9 It is understandable in the light of these statements that many analysts focused on the call for violence, even if a glance at the history of Islam reveals many radical groups that separated from the established schools of thought and became famous for their use of violence against those who did not agree with their beliefs and practices. However, the same groups failed to survive for long, due to their inability to attract and retain adequate support.10 In contrast to such factions whose manifestos were either so radical or so exclusive that they naturally alienated the vast majority of those they claimed to represent, bin Laden’s vision for liberating the umma achieved something that the campaigns of previous radical groupings did not: it managed to strike a chord in the hearts of ordinary Muslim citizens. The appeal of bin Laden’s message did not lie in the fact that it was radical but persuasive, because it spoke to something that was already felt by his listeners. Furthermore, rather than perceiving bin Laden as too extreme to be taken seriously or too radical to be worth following, many Muslims around the world saw him as a sincere believer. In the words of a young Pakistani interviewed on Al Jazeera, ‘bin Laden is not a terrorist. That is American rhetoric. He is a good Muslim fighting for Islam. I named my son Osama – I want him to become a believer just like him.’ Does that mean that millions of ordinary Muslims condoned the use of violence against civilians as the righteous jihad of our age, or is there something else to bin Laden’s message that would explain its popularity? As can be seen from his statements, bin Laden stood by the acts of violence that were carried out in the name of the global jihad. Yet he was at pains to point out that his was a reactive kind of violence – an act of retaliation against what he perceived as the much greater form of aggression exercised by the West against the Muslim world over a far longer period of time. With the force of history on his side, it is difficult to deny, in principle, the legitimacy of his argument when bin Laden recounts the impact of colonialism, from the first French invasion of Egypt to the artificial creation of state boundaries that redrew the map of the Middle East, and decries the betrayal of the Arabs, the West’s unconditional support for Israel and American control of the entire region. This history of the unjust suffering of the umma, coupled with the ultimate goal of reclaiming the same from the unholy oppressors and curing Islam of its stagnation, amount to the core tenets of bin Laden’s rationale. Thus bin Laden was able to tap into a growing sense of Muslim solidarity that has become a prominent feature of the modern, globalised world.11 Indeed, what set bin Laden apart was his idealism, along with his truly transnational approach that was not bound to any particular nationalist project but united the entire spectrum of Muslim grievances as a single cause. And although not even the most legitimate grievances can justify the killing of civilians – if anything, the brutality of his conduct served only to undermine the morality of bin 279

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Laden’s call – it was the universality of his appeal to Muslims’ sense of injustice, further stoked by the indifference of the West to the atrocities it has committed, that helps explain why he was, and to some extent continues to be admired by ordinary Muslims, however much they also oppose the murder of innocents. He effectively utilised Muslims’ sense of being united in their suffering as a launching pad for violent action. The question which follows is whether support for bin Laden was based purely on agreement with his political rationale. In other words, does his position as the most radical antiimperialist of the twenty-first century explain his appeal? Clearly, this view is not without merit. According to sociologist Michael Mann: Despite the religious rhetoric and bloody means, bin Laden is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the US: American imperialism. As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy.12 Indeed, in an interview with the American network ABC, bin Laden effectively engaged with the idea of terrorism in a distinctly secular manner: Terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible. Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property. There is no doubt in this. Every state and every civilization and culture has to resort to terrorism under certain circumstances for the purpose of abolishing tyranny and corruption. Every country in the world has its own security system and its own security forces, its own police and its own army. They are all designed to terrorize whoever even contemplates to attack that country or its citizens. The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation. Terrorizing those and punishing them are necessary measures to straighten things and to make them right.13 Here bin Laden called into question the meaning of ‘terrorism’ in the broader context of the question of who has the right to use violence in the international system, an argument that is likely to appeal to many in its own right. To see bin Laden’s cause as a matter of political philosophy, however, separated from religious concerns, is to see only one side of the story. As Akbarzadeh has clearly argued, all Islamists see themselves as true believers.14 An approach to bin Laden’s messages that focuses exclusively on the political leaves no room for the inherently religious dimension. What this position of simple duality, itself a reflection of an inherently secular perspective, fails to acknowledge is the intricate relationship between religion and politics in the history of Islam, as well as the intensifying controversy surrounding questions of the interpretation of Islamic scripture and the fragmentation of religious authority to date.

The separation of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and the ideal of Muslim unity Most discussions of this issue – and this holds for both Western and, to a significant extent, Muslim scholarship – assume that Islam makes no distinction between religious and political 280

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matters. This is based on the assumption that all aspects of the lives of Muslims should be conducted according to the will of Allah, and thus there is no sense of matters of state lying without the purview of religion. Indeed, this widely held view of the inseparability of religious and political spheres finds support in over forty references in the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet, at once a spiritual leader and the head of a political community.15 Closer examination shows that this is an idealised version of Islam, denoting what should be rather than providing an accurate description of what it is or indeed ever was. In practice, as several authors have illustrated, the two spheres became separated soon after the death of the Prophet. The union of politics and religion only existed during the lifetime of the Prophet while he was able to provide direct guidance for the conduct of daily life. With his death, the community of Muslims descended into a crisis of both political and religious leadership, and the complete union of religious and political spheres would never exist again. Notwithstanding the historically complex relationship of the two spheres, the fundamental principle that all Muslims should live by the will of Allah and that, by way of necessity, the umma should be governed by Islamic principles as prescribed by the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet has always been seen as both legitimate and important. Thus the ideal stipulates that there is no contradiction between religion and politics, despite the fact that their union has never been fully realised in practice. In fact, the Muslim world has not been insulated from global socio-political trends and has therefore moved further away from the ideal of Islamic unity and become more and more fragmented over time. In the face of this trend towards increasing secularism and division, the goal of contemporary Islamists is the fulfilment of what is perceived to be the most authentic and desirable state of existence: a return to the golden age of Islam, expressed in political terms as the recreation of the caliphate, in which there will be the least possible divergence between the two spheres.16 While a detailed examination of the relationship between religion and politics in the history of Islam is beyond the constraints of this chapter, in order to appreciate both the rationale and the appeal of bin Laden’s message it is crucial to acknowledge that he advanced a concept of Islam that not only saw no contradiction between religious belief and political action, but actually considers political action as a necessary outworking of belief. For Islamists, and this holds for religious fundamentalists across the faiths, political participation in the broadest possible sense is seen as advancing the will of God on earth and thus considered an act of faith. While it may be easy to concede that bin Laden himself saw his mission as first and foremost Islamic, given that religious fundamentalists of any faith regard themselves as true believers, the question as to why others should regard it in the same way remains more problematic. By curtailing any meaningful discussion from the outset, the post-9/11 political climate that divided the world into the forces of good and evil – ‘If you are not with us, you are with them!’ – has allowed for only one legitimate answer to the question of whether bin Laden represented Islam: a definite ‘no’. Yet reality does not fit this starkly defined dichotomy. In fact, the only definite statement one can make about the term ‘Islam’ is that it means different things to different people. While it has been argued that Muslims agree to the profession, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet’ as an article of faith that is incapable of sustaining differing interpretations (and even this has to be taken with a degree of caution), the meaning of all other principles and beliefs is a different matter altogether. The obvious, and indeed frequently encountered response would be to ‘look at the Qur’an,’ but, like all documents, the meaning of the message is not immune to interpretation. And while scriptural interpretation is problematic in all religions, it is especially difficult in the case of Islam.17 281

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The first observation to be made in this regard is that the Qur’an itself (despite the fact that generations of Muslim jurists have argued that no further legislation is possible in the face of the definitive guidance the Qur’an provides) encourages some degree of questioning by planting doubts as to the immutability of the revelation. It specifically states that certain verses are obscure and that only God knows what they really mean (Qur’an 3:7). Moreover, the idea of the immutability of the revelation is challenged when it confirms that the message could change with divine whim: ‘If We willed, We could take away that which we have revealed to you’ (Qur’an 17:86) – and the challenge becomes even more apparent when it is considered that there were, in fact, systematic revisions to the Qur’an, as shown in verses 2:106, 13:37, 16:101 and 22:52. Furthermore, there is near-universal agreement among Muslims that, in interpreting the Qur’an, custom based on the example of the Prophet (sunna) both clarifies and supplements it. However, the very pragmatism that defines the sunna means that justifications of widely varying and even mutually exclusive positions occur in practice. Although this variability and inconsistency have attracted criticism, the great majority of Muslims accept the authority of the sunna as a whole and see nothing wrong with the Prophet having changed his positions and principles with the circumstances. Such precedents support the general idea in Islamic jurisprudence that whatever is daruri (necessary) and maslaha (in the public interest) can be deemed to be Islamic. At risk of oversimplification, the question of whether something is ‘Islamic’ may be said to depend on whether it is in the interest of the umma, and it is thus clear that this in turn may become subject to the interests and prejudices of the individual or group in charge of making political decisions. Notwithstanding the flexibility which is reflected in the practice of the Prophet and the interpretation of the Qur’an, the question remains as to how and by whom the issue of what is ‘necessary’ and ‘in the public interest’ is to be decided. Indeed, the problem of who decides is further complicated by the fact that ‘although the individual’s membership in the community of believers is emphasised, the sense of a definite spiritual authority over him is missing.’18 Islamic legal scholarship builds on this idea with the concept of ibaha, whereby the individual’s freedom of action outside the area of specific divine commands is acknowledged. Therefore, as long as the individual believes that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His Prophet and follows explicit scriptural injunctions, that individual ultimately becomes the arbiter of his own faith. Although the ‘ulama (Islamic legal scholars) may be prepared to exercise their independent judgment (ijtihad) to determine what the Word means – all the time following the same principle of there being no intermediaries between God and man – no ecclesiastical authority exists to settle disputes between them. It is thus hardly surprising that the quest for the true way of Islam, from the appropriate conduct of daily life to the establishment of formal modes of governance, was a task that led to turmoil after the death of the Prophet. Islamic history testifies to the many differences that have gone unresolved: not only has there been the division between Sunni and Shi’a ‘ulama, but there have been several divisions within each group. The controversy over who speaks authoritatively for Islam, far from ever being resolved, only intensified with the processes of modernisation and the advent of mass education. Of the many implications of these global trends, from the development of modern political societies to the creation of new identities, opportunities and inequalities, two interrelated issues are of particular importance for the assessment of bin Laden’s rationale. One is the ongoing fragmentation of religious authority. With authoritative sources once confined to the educated few now readily available to the literate masses, the meaning of sacred scripture no longer needs to be interpreted by the ‘ulama but is now available for interpretation by each individual.19 These new 282

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‘ulama make up for what they lack in terms of formal religious training with the eagerness that marks their restless attempts to voice their opinion – in print, on Arabic news channels, or on YouTube – speaking of general principles and modern concerns without making specific reference to the principles of the established Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’I, or Hanbali schools of Sunni law (madhhabs) and citing few of the classical works of jurisprudence. The consequence of this development is what Hallaq has described as the ‘demise of the shari’a’.20 As individual Muslims increasingly interpret Islam for themselves, a broad spectrum of interpretations emerges that provide alternative opinions to those of the traditional religious establishments, making it more and more difficult to say with reassuring finality what is Islamic and what is not. This would appear to constitute both the biggest dilemma and the greatest challenge for Islam in the modern, globalised world. Related to this combination of a gradual decline of traditional structures, the development of new identities as a consequence of globalisation and the increasing fragmentation of religious authority is a phenomenon that Eickelman and Piscatori have termed the ‘objectification of Muslim consciousness’, a process by which basic questions such as the actual meaning of Islam and how it should affect one’s conduct come to occupy the minds of believers,21 questions such as ‘What does it mean to be Muslim in a world that bears no resemblance at all to the days of the Prophet?’ The search for the true Islam in the modern world is destined to yield an abundance of different answers across the spectrum of existing interpretations that evade easy classification. Given that Islam has no equivalent of the papacy, final judgement lies with the conscience of individual believers. If the answering the question about the ‘proper’ meaning of Islam was difficult during the early 1990s, it has become even more problematic by 2019. Indeed, it is worth considering the consequences of new trends and developments that are transforming the nature of social reality such as the unprecedented access to online information and instantaneous, continuing participation in arguably trivial activities (i.e. ‘the Facebook generation’) that have led some observers to declare the era of ‘post-postmodernism’. Taking a rather unflattering view, Kirby describes the resulting intellectual consequences of the hyper-engagement in the virtual world as ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety with the potential of producing trance-like states.22 Without wanting to overstate the issue, these observations lead to a couple of important, if perhaps uncomfortable conclusions: First, in practice, if not in theology, there are as many Islams as there are Muslims. And secondly, many of these new interpretations are of increasingly limited intellectual quality.

The competition for sacred authority The increasing number of (un)scholarly opinions on what Islam has to say about the present state of world affairs offers those in search of spiritual guidance an unprecedented level of choice. This in turn means that those wishing to share and establish their views as the true meaning of Islam are in direct competition for sacred authority by which to win hearts and minds. Each attempts to persuade his audience of the righteousness of his agenda by means of religious symbolism, whereby all Muslims should be able to identify that his interpretation amounts to nothing less than the true will of Allah. Bin Laden might not have been a terribly original thinker nor a formally trained religious scholar, but he did have a gift of rhetorical brilliance that turned his messages into what Lewis described as ‘a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose’.23 This image of his piety was reinforced by, for example, his wearing the traditional clothing of a devout Muslim and the air of heroism and personal sacrifice conferred by stories of the rich businessman who has 283

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forsaken the pleasures of a privileged life for the sake of his faith. In today’s fast-paced environment where superficial impressions all too often replace nuanced, in-depth assessment, he had all the qualities of an inspirational religious leader: he looked like a true believer; he sounded like a true believer – he was a true believer. This is not just superficially effective, however. Bin Laden’s messages reached deeply into the collective consciousness of Muslims around the globe. For example, ‘Saudi Arabia’ and ‘Palestine’, central and repeating themes in his many statements, are charged with emotion and symbolism in the Muslim political imagination. Home to the holiest cities in Islam, they form the setting in which the Prophet lived his life and from which Islam originated. As Piscatori explains, ‘both Arabian and Palestinian lands are thus special preserves, and, because of this, they take on a wider importance, particularly in the competition for legitimacy that characterizes politics in the Middle East.’24 Thus, when bin Laden called for the liberation of Al-Aqsa mosque and the Holy Mosque, he was destined to strike sentimental chords with his Muslim audience. It would, however, be misleading to accuse him of exploiting these emotionally charged symbols for other purposes. Unlike Saddam Hussein, whose linkage of the Palestinian cause to his own withdrawal from Kuwait in 1991 was, above all, a strategically smart move to attract otherwise unlikely public support across the Arab world, bin Laden considered the liberation of the holy lands of Islam to be a significant milestone towards the ultimate goal of reclaiming the umma and restoring the glory of Islam.

Reclaiming the umma: The origins of pan-Islamic sentiment By addressing contemporary issues of grave concern to the Muslim world, formalising the return to the traditions of the golden age as a straightforward solution, and authoritatively addressing the entirety of the Muslim community, bin Laden managed to both powerfully indict the waywardness of Muslim societies and to set out a simple blueprint for action. Though the likelihood of his succeeding in achieving his ultimate goal of restoring the unity of Islam (tawhid al umma) by means of a personalised jihad remains questionable at best, bin Laden nonetheless succeeded in polemicising modern-day Islam. By calling so forcefully for a return to fundamental Islamic traditions and values, and seeking to interpret them in such a way that they can be applied effectively to the present-day situation, bin Laden set a benchmark by which the status quo can be measured and criticised, and in so doing, not only provides religious guidance for the faithful but also brings religious – and, by his standards, righteous – judgement upon a world that currently bears no resemblance to his vision of the golden days of the caliphate. By this light, a meaningful way to identify the ideological foundation of al-Qaeda would be to place it in the context of those issues that have contributed to the emergence of political pan-Islam and Muslim solidarity. Pan-Islam developed as a response to two key challenges in the late nineteenth century: imperialism and the decentralisation of the Ottoman Empire. While different proponents like Sultan Abdulhamid (1842–1918), polemicists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), and Western apologists such as Wilfred Blunt (1840–1922) all contributed to make a vague idea of Islamic unity a symbol of the modern Islamic condition, it was the Turkish Grand National Assembly that challenged believers and nonbelievers alike when it abolished the caliphate in 1924. Kemalists predicted the inevitable secularisation of Muslim societies; devout believers thought it would weaken Muslims in their interaction with the West, and colonial offices feared that it would stimulate a broad uprising of the worldwide Muslim community. Although none of these have actually occurred, the lingering appeal of the 284

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notion of Muslim solidarity began to manifest itself and eventually assumed its place both in the formation of modern Muslim states and in attempts of challenging and resisting state authority.25 Inevitably, a number of different perspectives emerged on the continued significance of the caliphate as a necessary condition or expression of Muslim unity, ranging from those wishing to re-establish a purified religious-political institution to those who thought the fusion of religious and political authority was counterproductive, and to accommodationists who saw the creation of an international organisation among sovereign ‘Muslim states’ as being the best way of adapting to post-war conditions. In the face of such diversity, and with no prominent political leadership to develop the pan-Islamic sentiment into a concrete reality, ‘Pan-Islam seemed at its nadir.’26 ‘Ironically’, as Landau observed, ‘among the few who thought that Pan-Islam represented a potent force were foreign officials and military officers whose duty it was to forestall a Pan-Islamic threat.’27 However, although little agreement was reached by the unionists as to how the umma was to be constructed, the perception of the spiritual unity of the umma remained and firmly established itself as an unquestioned given, readily accepted in line with Qur’anic references to umma wahida (one community; e.g. 5:48/53; 16:93/95). In spiritual terms, the idea (and the ideal) of ‘unity’ (ittihad-i Islam, al-wahda al-islamiyya) was cast as essential to Islam, now posited as integral and largely divorced from the canonical articulation of concepts such as khilafa (the caliphate), dar al-islam (the juridical realm of Muslims), and dhimma (non-Muslim subjects). Indeed, as Piscatori reminds us, scholarly discussions were remarkably thin on these topics.28 In the second half of the twentieth century, the caliphate’s political mission gradually disappeared; however, the idea of Islam’s political mission did not. In the eyes of many, the umma required some form of political expression. Yet whatever broad consensus was created, it had to compete with the emergence of single-state nationalism (wataniyya) in Muslim societies, or at least the consolidation of dynastic rules and regimes. In the context of these structural developments, the political goal of a unitary Islamic state resembling the caliphate was soon to be replaced by the goal of unity in Islamic state politics.29 And although Islam has always had a global dimension, it is here that the concept of Islamic, or maybe more appropriately, Muslim solidarity, emerged: even if Muslims were not to be united under a single ruler, concern and indeed some form of responsibility for the well-being of all members of the faith, regardless of citizenship, became an article of the modern Islamic condition. Thus, when bin Laden decried the global suffering of Muslims, he spoke to the core of Muslim consciousness. In the sphere of state politics, this new sense of Islamic solidarity was expressed in the development of state-based organisations such as the Muslim World Congress, the Muslim World League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Yet despite outwardly signalling their support for the ideal of Muslim solidarity, closer examination shows that national elites invoked pan-Islam for everything other than pan-Islamic purposes, keeping one eye on their domestic publics and the other on rival states as they sought to serve as the new patrons of Islam, in order to consolidate their individual claims to national power and global leadership. Notably, Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, despite vehemently criticising their respective national leaders for their ‘un-Islamic ways’, largely did the same, seeking not so much to restore the caliphate as to establish themselves in power within the by now firmly established political form of the nation-state.30 Yet, away from the visible theatre of state politics, yet as a consequence of the developments there, pan-Islamist sentiments continued to spread and developed a more distinct transnational character. In part, this was brought about by the repression and exile of some 285

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of the most vocal and dedicated pan-Islamists such as Muslim Brotherhood activists in Egypt, Iraq and Syria, and their subsequent migration to other countries: ‘With limited prospects for domestic political influence and an opportunity to work internationally, these activists devoted themselves to transnational activism and vigorous promotion of populist pan-Islamism.’31 Particularly noteworthy is the case of Abdullah Azzam, a disciple of Sayyid Qutb, who formulated much of the doctrine of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and also served as mentor to bin Laden. Yet, the novelty of his call to jihad was his conceptualisation of the rationale for what may be described as privatised warfare: To him, coming to the defence of a Muslim country against invasion by non-Muslim forces was a clear case of personal obligation (fard ‘ayn), which presented a remarkable shift from orthodox Islamic views on jihad. Mainstream Islamic scholars maintained that while it was possible for jihad to be declared in cases of aggression against Muslim countries by nonMuslim powers, they stressed that the responsibility for fighting (the individual duty) rested with the local population. For outsiders, fighting was a collective duty (fard kifaya) that had to be met by the community as a whole and did not present a personal obligation.32 Although Azzam was an aggressive advocate of jihad, demanding the return of formerly Muslim lands, it is important to note that he refrained from demanding the overthrow of secular Muslim governments on the grounds of apostasy, and strongly rejected internecine Muslim conflict. His arguably moderate views would later clash with the ambitions of Ayman al-Zawahiri and other members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who aimed to overthrow the Egyptian government and in whose minds condemnation of the apostasy of secular Muslim states was inseparable from true Islamic faith.33 However dramatic a departure Azzam’s rationale on jihad was from mainstream views, it was still at a distance from bin Laden’s call for global jihad: While Azzam advocated conventional military tactics in confined locations of war, bin Laden’s infamous 1998 Fatwa issued in the name of the World Islamic Front sanctioned all means in all places: To kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.34 Recognising these complex developments at both state and sub-state levels, Landau contemplated a renewed surge of Pan-Islamist expression. Writing in late 1989, he concluded, ‘as large parts of the world are moving towards more concrete forms of association, PanIslamists too may well turn a 120-year-old dream from what seemed to have become a utopia into a political reality.’35 Taking the analysis into the new millennium, Piscatori observed: As the pan-Islamic dimension appeared to recede, some ‘radicals’, if you will, have sought to fill the void. They seek, in their view, to reclaim the umma from the nation-state and dynastic regimes. Examples are obvious: Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (the Islamic Liberation Party), the Muhajirun (an offshoot of the Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain), Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri (leaders of al-Qa‘ida). In effect, pan-Islam went underground, re-emerged spectacularly, and, in one virulent form, attacks the status quo in the name of a ‘tradition’ that has only relatively recently appeared.36 286

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Al-Qaeda and the global jihad might not have been exactly what Landau envisioned when he contemplated the determination of pan-Islamists to fulfil their utopian dream. Yet the vision of resurrecting the caliphate, however vague it may be, that has manifested itself in a perpetual threat of terrorist violence seems to have become a permanent feature of life in the twenty-first century.

Towards pan-Islamic unity or fragmentation and banality? Despite bin Laden’s grand global ambitions to unite the umma, the practical reality of al-Qaeda, as Lahoud aptly illustrated, is characterized by local agendas, internal rivalry and power struggles, a trend that began to develop years before his death in May 2011.37 After 9/11 and the destruction of al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda began to fracture into a global cadre of more-or-less independent groups which enabled it to continue to both elude and fight its enemies. This arguably unintended globalisation of al-Qaeda brought with it also the fragmentation and indeed localisation of bin Laden’s mission. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for example, despite having professed loyalty to Osama bin Laden, seemed to be more concerned with the goal of overthrowing the Algerian government and the establishment of an Islamic state in its place than with the re-establishment of the caliphate and the unity of the global umma. A similar case is that of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Right from the start, AQI’s goals were distinctly local in character: to force a withdrawal of US-led forces from Iraq; to topple the Iraqi interim government; to assassinate collaborators with the occupation; to marginalise the Shi’a population and defeat its militias, and subsequently to establish a pure Islamic state.38 What stands out is the confrontation with the Iraqi Shi’a, which quickly turned what started out as a campaign to liberate Iraq and establish an Islamic state within its borders into a bloody sectarian conflict massacring large numbers of Muslim civilians which, in spite of strong condemnation by bin Laden and Zawahiri, significantly undermined bin Laden’s claim of a purely defensive jihad on behalf of all Muslims. This of course, as Anthony Celso’s chapter (Chapter 22) develops in greater detail, is the origin of ISIS. If al-Qaeda stood little chance of ever turning its global vision of the caliphate into reality, let alone maintaining a convincing commitment to the pan-Islamic ideal of the umma, its prospects are even slimmer without the ideological inspiration and guidance of Osama bin Laden. While the controversial killing of the sheikh temporarily re-energised the ranks of al-Qaeda, and through pledges of revenge ensured a heightened sense of alert amongst its Western audience, it was not to be enough to build up the sort of momentum and broadbased sympathy that they enjoyed, for example, at the height of the US-led occupation of Iraq. In terms of ideological continuity, Nasser al-Bahri, bin Laden’s former bodyguard, describes the new generation of al-Qaeda as the ‘Internet generation’, ‘young’ and ‘illeducated’, set on their very own missions of pursuing their individual agendas and oblivious to the guidance of the older generation. To the seasoned jihadi, ‘One of the main problems the al-Qaeda movement has today is that young people join, for example, the Yemen branch but don’t really follow the ideology of the central group . . . In fact, they are totally ignorant about it.’39 Al-Bahri has aslo stated, ‘This new generation, which claim to be members of al-Qaeda, have in fact absorbed nothing of his [bin Laden’s] deep thinking.’40 The ongoing crisis of meaning of Islam in the modern world, characterised by both the fragmentation and pluralisation of religious knowledge and authority that made the development of al-Qaeda possible in the first place, is the same force that is now undermining it. In a twist on Hannah Arendt’s words, the new generation of al-Qaeda might best be described as ‘the evil of banality’. 287

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Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al-Qaeda (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 14. Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam (New York: Random House Inc, 2002), 1. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1. Mona Azzam, “Al-Qaeda: the misunderstood Wahhabi connection and the ideology of violence,” The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Briefing Article No. 1 (2003); Christina Hellmich, “AlQaeda – Terrorists, Hypocrites and Fundamentalists? The View from Within,” Third World Quarterly 26, no 1 (2005): 39–54; Roel Meijer, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurst, 2009). The Pew Global Attitudes Survey 2005 revealed that a surprising number of Muslims had confidence in bin Laden’s conduct in world affairs, regardless of the overall decline in support of the use of suicide bombing and other forms of terrorism and growing concern over the consequences of the war against terror. While in Morocco and Indonesia, public support for bin Laden ranked at 26 per cent and 37 per cent respectively, marking an overall decline in support since 2003, this trend is not reflected in other countries. In Pakistan, for example, a narrow majority of 51 per cent placed some measure of confidence in bin Laden, a moderate increase from 45 per cent in 2003. In Jordan, support for the alQaeda leader rose from 55 to 60 per cent between 2003 and 2005, including 25 per cent who say they have a lot of confidence in him. Jerome Gunning and Richard Jackson, “What’s so ‘religious’ about ‘religious terrorism’?” Critical Studies in Terrorism, 4 no.3 (2011): 369–388. Bruce Lawrence, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005), 46–47. Christina Hellmich, Al-Qaeda: From Global Network to Local Franchise (London: Zed Books, 2011), 89. Lawrence, Messages to the World, 61. Nelly Lahoud, The Pitfalls of Jihad: Takfir and the Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (London: Routledge, 2003). Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 169. Osama bin Laden, “Interview: Osama Bin Laden,” ABC, May 1998, available at www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html#video. Shahram Akbarzadeh: “The Paradox of Political Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012): 1–10 Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics. James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States, 4. Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 37–45. Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 37–45. Alan Kirby, “The death of Postmodernism and beyond,” Philosophy Now no. 58, (2006): 34. Bernard Lewis, “License to Kill,” Foreign Affairs (1998). Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States, 5. James Piscatori, “Imagining Pan-Islam,” in Islam and Political Violence eds. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Fethi Mansouri (London: I.B. Tauris 2007) 27–28. Jakob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 217. Landau, The Politics of Pan Islam, 216. Piscatori, “Imagining Pan Islam,” 29. Piscatori, “Imagining Pan Islam,” 30. Piscatori, “Imagining Pan Islam,” 30. Thomas Hegghammer, “The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad,” International Security 35, no. 3 (2006): 57. For an excellent exposition of the theory of jihad, see Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Hellmich, 2011. Lawrence, Messages to the World, 61. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam, 311. Piscatori “Imagining Pan Islam,” 32–33. Lahoud, The Pitfalls of Jihad. Christina Hellmich, Al-Qaeda. Nasser al-Bahri, Guarding Bin Laden (London: Thin Man Press, 2013), 197. Al-Bahri, Guarding Bin Laden, 186.

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22 THE ISLAMIC STATE’S IDEOLOGICAL AND STRATEGIC WORLDVIEW Anthony Celso

Introduction This chapter analyses the Islamic State’s (IS) ideology and strategy. It argues that the Islamic State is paradoxically a standard bearer for and dissident within the global jihadist movement. Generating enthusiasm and revulsion among jihadi extremists, the Islamic State poses a significant challenge to al-Qaeda’s (AQ) direction of the global jihadist movement. The chapter begins with a history of the IS movement, proceeds to examine the foundations of its ideology and its development of a total war strategy. Despite the destruction of its physical caliphate, the movement remains a formidable global terrorist entity.

From al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to the Islamic State (IS) The Islamic State is a mercurial organization anchored in al-Qaeda’s unwieldy post 9/11 network of affiliates. Many of these regional branches have proved problematic for the central command.1 This was especially true of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) that now reconstituted as IS disputes AQ’s leadership over the global jihadist movement. The Islamic State’s chaotic development reflects ideological and tactical divisions between jihadi organizations. AQI’s evolution into the Islamic State mirrors the sectarian hatreds of its Jordanian founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His violent legacy is enshrined in the Islamic State’s ideology. Though killed in an American air strike in 2006, al-Zarqawi’s ideological and tactical impact within the jihadist movement endures. Indeed most analysts underestimate his significance.2 Part of this rejection may be due to al-Zarqawi’s lack of a formal education and his brutish tactics. Poorly educated as a youth al-Zarqawi grew up in the mean streets of Zarqa, Jordan where he drifted between menial jobs and street crime. After a sojourn in prison for assault, al-Zarqawi’s religious education by an radical imam spurred him toward a jihadist vocation. Later al-Zarqawi’s extremism was moulded by the al-Qaeda-linked cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.3 Al-Zarqawi and al-Maqdisi formed a terror group in the 1990s that was dismantled by Jordan’s powerful security services. Both men spent time in the country’s notorious prison system and after a royal amnesty decree, al-Zarqawi travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. 290

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Unlike al-Zarqawi, al-Maqdisi’s influence over jihadist thought is recognized.4 His greatest contribution deals with religious obligations to violently oppose apostate regimes including the Saudi Kingdom. Al-Maqdisi’s controversially criticized Saudi Arabian clergy whom he saw as apologists for the royal family’s deviant rule. His critique of the Saudi government may have influenced Osama bin Laden’s (OBL) repudiation of the Kingdom’s royal family, whose security relationship with the Americans OBL despised. Al-Maqdisi, however, rejected al-Zarqawi’s takfirist approach to taking Muslim life.5 Al-Zarqawi’s hatred of Shi’ites was furthered by his time in Afghanistan where he became exposed to a radicalized intellectual milieu critical of al -Qaeda and the Taliban. Analyst Torre Hamming argues that Abdullah Azzam’s 1989 death and Osama bin Laden’s departure to Saudi Arabia created a vacuum for an extremist faction within the mujahidin movement whose expansion of takfir and hatred for the Shi’a greatly influenced the intellectual development of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.6 Since the seventh century, sectarian tensions have convulsed the Muslim world. Theological conflicts between Sunni and Shi’ites have deepened since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the expansion of Shi’a power throughout the Mideast. Al-Zarqawi’s world view was shaped by his recruitment by al-Qaeda who were ambivalent about his radical views, but saw his potential as a terrorist leader. Under al-Qaeda’s patronage, al-Zarqawi formed a terrorist training camp in Herat, Afghanistan near the Iranian border. At heart, al-Zarqawi was exposed to the Taliban’s hatred of the Shi’ite Hazara minority. Based along the Iranian-Afghan border, al-Zarqawi established a criminal-terror network dominated by Iranian Kurds whose smuggling networks reached into Europe.7 Al-Zarqawi was able to capitalize on these connections by recruiting and sending European fighters into Iraq prior to the US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. His creation of a jihadi network, named al-Tawid wal Jihad in Iraqi Kurdistan, was the foundation for a brutal Sunni-dominated insurgency against the American occupation. AlZarqawi capitalized on mistakes made by the Americans after the collapse of Saddam’s state. The liquidation of the Sunni-dominated Baathist state by the US occupation authority escalated sectarian tensions. Democratic elections empowered the country’s Shi’ite majority, exacerbating sectarian animosity. Having been dominant for over a generation, the Sunnis felt vulnerable and isolated. The Sunni insurgent movement that arose after the fall of Saddam’s regime was initially seen by US intelligence analysts as being led by former regime members. Though some groups tied to Saddam Hussein’s state did rise up, the insurgency was dominated by jihadists. Support for al-Zarqawi’s network was especially pronounced in Anbar Province and the socalled “Sunni belts” outside of Baghdad.8 Comprised of foreign-born jihadists and Iraqi Islamic extremists, al-Zarqawi’s group unleashed a wave of religious violence that had already been building in the society. Sectarian passions in Iraq echoed the rise of Islamist extremism across the Muslim world, so much so that Saddam’s state late in his rule developed a pronounced religious caste.9 Many former members of Hussein’s state joined al-Zarqawi’s movement out of sincere religious commitment. Al-Zarqawi’s charisma and brutal attacks against Shi’a, Kurdish, and Christian populations inflamed ethnic and religious passions to the point of civil war. His network’s use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) killed hundreds of US soldiers and his suicide bombing operations targeting Shi’a clerics, mosques, and religious ceremonies vanquished thousands of civilians. 291

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Though al-Zarqawi’s savagery was upsetting to al-Qaeda’s leadership, they eagerly latched upon his movement. After a series of communications between al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Jordanian swore allegiance to al-Qaeda’s network.10 Al-Zarqawi’s bayah to OBL’s leadership resulted in the 2004 formation of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a loyalty oath that al-Qaeda’s leadership would unsuccessfully invoke to guide the behavior of Zarqawi’s successors. Al-Zarqawi’s stewardship of AQI created a new, more violent and propagandistic form of terrorism. He was a pioneer of the use of social media and terrorist propaganda. AQI’s filming of its martyrdom operations against security services and Shi’a religious and civil institutions was posted across the Internet to increase jihadist recruitment and terrify AQI’s opponents. Al-Zarqawi’s videos of beheading Western hostages were designed to capture the world’s attention. They certainly had a catalytic impact on the recruitment of foreign fighters. Fighters across North Africa and the Mideast flocked to Iraq to wage jihad against the Americans. Hundreds were recruited, with dozens coming from European Muslim diaspora communities. Jean Pierre Filiu argues that Paris’s 19th District became a major foreign fighter recruitment base for the Iraqi jihad.11 Despite to the risk to its own security, the Syrian government contributed to the development of a jihadist smuggling network in the county to send foreign and Syrian fighters into Iraq. From 2004 to 2006, AQI’s violent activities overshadowed al-Qaeda Central. During this period, al-Zarqawi prioritized attacking Shi’ite mosques, clerics, and community institutions, hoping to instigate a sectarian civil war and state implosion. Al-Zarqawi reckoned that faced with an untenable situation, US and Coalition forces would withdraw from Iraq. For a period of time, al-Zarqawi seem poised to realize al-Qaeda’s plan to build a jihadi state in the heart of the Arab Mideast. By spring 2006, Iraq appeared destined for a civil war and state collapse. Al-Zarqawi was on the verge of achieving his key objectives, but like many past jihadi groups AQI’s brutality backfired. In areas where AQI had gained control, its usurpation of black market smuggling networks and its imposition of harsh Sharia rule alienated Sunni tribal leaders.12 Increasingly, al-Qaeda’s barbarous tactics were undermining its popularity. In 2005, al-Zarqawi had been warned by al-Qaeda’s central command that he ran the risk of undermining popular support for the insurgency. In a 2005 letter, Ayman alZawahiri advised that AQI’s shedding of civilian life and targeting of the Shi’ite majority was dividing jihadist ranks and that al-Zarqawi should focus on attacking the Coalition forces. In a series of letters between AQI and the central command, the propriety of alZarqawi’s sectarian strategy was questioned, foreshadowing the organizational break of AQI’s successor from al-Qaeda’s network.13 Though al-Zarqawi heeded al-Qaeda’s advice by unifying with other salafi jihadist groups, forming the Mujahidin Shura Council (MSC), he never relented in his sectarian strategy. Many analysts emphasize that al-Zawahiri’s advice to al-Zarqawi to avoid sectarian bloodshed was prescient.14 Yet it was not his attacks against the Shi’a that were his undoing. More pertinent was the increasing Sunni tribal opposition to AQI’s overall Sharia governance project. Al-Zarqawi and his insurgents alienated Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar province. AQI’s practices of forcing tribal leaders to marry off their daughters to their fighters, moreover, engendered widespread resistance. Al-Zarqawi’s death in a June 2006 in a US airstrike fractured his network, weakening the overall insurgency. These factors, combined with the US’s arming of Sunni tribal confederations hostile to AQI, crippled the insurgency

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that by 2009 was declared defeated.15 Armed with better intelligence provided by Sunni tribes, US Special Forces’ attacks decimated AQI’s ranks. Will McCants argues that AQI’s leadership crisis in the post-Zarqawi period provided the impetus for its apocalyptic ideology. Rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), leaders Abu Hamza al-Mujahir and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi believed one of their members was the Mahdi who would redeem the Muslim world during humanity’s final stages.16 Though such fantasies may have been the leadership’s response to organizational duress, ISI’s emphasis on Islamic eschatology proved enduring. ISI’s overall decline concerned al-Qaeda’s central leadership. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri saw their fate tied to the success of the Iraqi insurgency. The faltering of their Iraqi affiliate proved troublesome. Analysis of OBL’s communications with al-Qaeda’s other leaders point to widespread dissatisfaction with ISI’s independence and brutal jihadist tactics.17 AQ’s American-born media adviser Adam Gadahn even advocated expelling the organization.18 Despite such worries, ISI would be revitalized under the leadership of Abu Bakr alBaghdadi. Unlike most jihadist leaders, al-Baghdadi had an advanced religious education, with a doctorate in Islamic Studies. He joined AQI shortly after the US invasion. Though imprisoned by the Americans at Camp Bucca, the contacts he made with other militants at the detention facility facilitated his emergence as ISI’s leader.19 After his release from prison, al-Baghdadi re-entered the ISI’s ranks as a mid-level manager, building consensus between its divergent factions. His ascent was also facilitated by the ‘Iraqification’ of the insurgent organization. After the American killings of Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Mujahir and Iraqi Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, al-Baghdadi was chosen as the movement’s leader. Al-Baghdadi capitalized on sectarian tensions that were exacerbated by the exodus of US troops from Iraq in 2011 and the Syrian civil war. The Americans falsely believed that ISI’s weakening had stabilized Iraq, permitting the US to disengage from an unpopular war that had cost the country over 4,000 combat deaths and trillions of dollars. The American withdrawal proved problematic. Dominated by Shi’a political parties, the Iraqi government led by Nuri al-Malaki repressed Sunni tribal and political groups, which raised sectarian animosities and allowed ISI to present itself to Sunnis as their defender.20 This development converged with a Sunni-based insurgency against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. Since the late 1960s when Bashar’s father seized power, Syria has been a sectarian tinderbox. Hafez al-Assad’s regime was dominated by the Alawite minority (whose beliefs are tied to Shi’a Islam) and his regime promoted heterodox Muslim minorities at the expense of the Sunni majority.21 The army’s leadership and security services were dominated by Alawites and Christians hostile to Sunni Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood’s insurrection against Hafez al-Assad’s regime in the early 1980s was met with a brutal campaign against the Brotherhood’s base of support in the city of Hama. Tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood militants and their civilian supporters were annihilated during the army’s conquest of the city.22 The liquidation of the Brotherhood’s Hama powerbase was a precursor to the Syrian civil war a generation later, when jihadi groups sought revenge for the Brotherhood’s annihilation at Hama. Capitalizing upon sectarian animosities across the Levant, Baghdadi’s ISI network was revitalized. Al-Baghdadi’s elevation of Syrian Abu Muhammad al-Adnani as ISI’s spokesman, helped him to rebuild his network. Al-Adnani’s influence within ISI was enhanced by his religious training and his knowledge of the Qur’an that mirrored al-Baghdadi’s own extremist worldview.23 Al-Adnani and al-Baghdadi combined organizational ability with extremist 293

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religious beliefs. Though ISI’s interest in Islamic eschatology had preceded al-Baghdadi emergence as a leader, its commitment to apocalyptic ideals deepened. Such fanaticism assisted the movement’s recruitment of fighters committed to ISI’s brutal millenarian ideology. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters across the world joined ISI’s network.24 Augmenting its operational capacity, the organization enriched itself through black market operations. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISI was not dependent upon external donor networks permitting it financial autonomy to mount terrorist attacks. ISI assaults against Iraq’s army, police, and tribal militias devastated their ranks. ISI’s “Soldiers of Harvest” campaign liquidated thousands of soldiers, policeman, and militia members, psychologically shattering Iraq’s poorly organized and financed security services.25 Al-Baghdadi increased ISI’s ranks through attacks on Iraq’s badly secured prisons, liberating thousands of former AQI members. ISI’s “Breaking the Walls” campaign secured the release of prisoners eager to re-join ISI’s resuscitated movement.26 The freeing of these militants allowed al-Baghdadi to create a very personal network, based upon allegiances originally formed at Camp Bucca.27 Faced with a sustained terror campaign from a replenished insurgent movement, Iraq’s army and police withered. By the summer of 2014, ISI had seized territory across north-west Iraq, including its second largest city Mosul, and was poised to strike a mortal blow against Iraq’s beleaguered regime. ISI made equally impressive territorial gains in Syria. Al-Baghdadi expanded his network into Syria by creating a front organization branded as Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). Expanding its operations across the Iraqi border into north-eastern Syria, Baghdad designated Mohammad al-Julani as JN’s ruler. Eager to capitalize upon the expansion of al-Baghdadi’s network into Syria, al-Qaeda central command also sent a number of veterans into the country to guide the insurgent movement. Though tied to ISI, al-Julani’s organization was independent. JN’s future evolution became the center of an al-Qaeda–ISI dispute.28 Fearing that JN would disengage from ISI’s larger network, al-Baghdadi merged the Syrian network into the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Baghdadi’s decree was contested by al-Qaeda’s emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, setting the stage for a larger power struggle. Neither al-Zawahiri nor al-Baghdadi could reconcile their differences. Al-Baghdadi’s assassination of jihadi veteran Abu Khalid al-Suri, appointed by al-Qaeda to resolve the dispute, forced al-Zawahiri in February 2014 to expel ISIS from his network. Across Syria, jihadists ranks subdivided, with al-Qaeda and ISIS militants fighting over contested territory. ISIS was able to establish a territorial base across the Euphrates River Valley with Raqqa as its Syrian administrative capital. Having seized territory across the Iraqi-Syrian border, ISIS in June 2014 announced the formation of a caliphate called simply the “Islamic State” (IS). Such a bold announcement was consistent with IS’s extremist ideological worldview.

The Islamic State’s ideological vision The emergence of IS as a global movement has vexed al-Qaeda’s central command and is a threat to authority. Such a development is not surprising, for IS’s predecessors rejected alZawahiri’s argument that Zarqawi’s bayah to bin Laden obligated his successors to follow his guidance. More fundamentally, the separation reflects ideological and strategic differences between the two jihadist contenders. The Islamic State’s worldview integrates medieval philosophical and millenarian tenets within a modern jihadist framework. IS’s ideas have been sent to the world across multi294

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lingual social media forums. The movement’s intellectual foundations are easily discernable. Three philosophical sources predominate: (1) twelfth-century Turkish cleric Ibn Taymiyyah, (2) medieval “prophetic” hadith, and (3) the eighteenth-century Saudi preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. These theological influences are given a powerful modern reformulation by IS’s ideologues. The role of Ibn Tamiyyah in contemporary jihadist discourse is well recognized.29 He is admired by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, for the Turkish cleric was a pioneer in legitimating jihadist revolutions against Muslim apostate leaders. He argued that the Mongol rulers of Iraq and Syria in the twelfth century were illegitimate because, though they were Muslim, their governance deviated from the Qur’an. Taymiyyah concluded that under such conditions, insurrection against them was a religious obligation. His theological discourse is especially relevant for IS’s movement. Taymiyyah’s broad definition of takfir, permitting the ex-communication of fellow Muslims for their deviation from genuine Islamic belief, legitimates their killing. Mongol apostasy, he argued, constitutes a violation of the religion and therefore lifts Islamic prohibitions against shedding Muslim blood. Taymiyyah was also harsh toward heterodox Muslim minorities like the Shi’ites, Alawites, and Druze for their reverence of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali and his familial line. He considered such practices as polytheistic, shattering the unity of the Muslim faith rightly based in his view upon the Qur’an, sunna, and hadith. Taymiyyah therefore advocated repressing their beliefs and killing their leaders.30 Al-Zarqawi evoked Taymiyyah’s work to justify his killing of Shi’ites. By referencing him, al-Zarqawi and his successors present themselves as defenders of the true faith. Even here, however, IS ideologues have expanded Taymiyyah’s rulings beyond his intent. Though he inveighed against the Shi’ites, the Druze, and Alawites for their deviance, it is unlikely that Taymiyyah would have embraced IS’s genocidal project against them.31 IS’s takfirist and sectarian vision is buttressed by its belief in Islamic eschatology. Though past jihadist movements like the Mahdists had an apocalyptic element, it lay mostly dormant until the 1979 storming of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a fanatical cult that believed that one of their members was the Mahdi, who according to prophetic hadith would redeem the Muslim world during humanity’s last days.32 The year 1979 significantly featured the Iranian Revolution and the beginning of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. David Rapoport argues that 1979 began an Islamist “fourth wave” of modern terror from which the world is still reeling.33 The organization’s millenarianism is expressed across its multi-lingual publications. The movement’s first English-language magazine, Dabiq, references a Syrian town that according to a prophetic hadith will feature a battle between Muslim and Christian armies.34 According to this hadith, the Prophet told his followers that the Muslim victory at Dabiq would usher Issa’s (Jesus’) return, the destruction of satanic forces, and Islamic conquest of the globe. The Islamic State views itself as part of an eschatological chain of events where its caliphate renews a Muslim world stricken by fitnah (discord), setting the stage for an apocalyptic event. This eschatological focus is continued on Dabiq’s successor magazine Rumiyyah (Rome) that envisions that the Islamic State’s conquest of the West. Will McCants argues that the Islamic State and its predecessors have consistently reformulated their eschatological beliefs.35 Though past leaders believed that one of their members was the Mahdi, McCants argues that the Islamic State now believes its movement will catalyse events leading to the Mahdi’s emergence. 295

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The rarity of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s physical appearances, moreover, served to create a mystical persona. Appearing only twice on film, al-Baghdadi has been theatrically framed by IS, as not only their leader but also a caliph and guerrilla fighter.36 Al-Baghdadi’s July 2014 Grand Mosque of Mosul sermon announcing the formation of a global jihadist state that demands the loyalty of the globe’s Muslims was filmed in a way that presented him as an almost divine figure. The Islamic State is also shaped by eighteenth-century Wahhabi principles and practices. The movement’s founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab sought to redeem the Muslim world from Ottoman heresy. Emphasizing that Islamic rule must comport to the Qur’an, sunna, and hadith, he rejected any other influences. The Wahhabi tradition’s historical ideal lay in the governance project pursued by the Prophet and his immediate successors. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab inveighed against modern religious innovations (bidah), he condemned Ottoman heresy, and argued for the destruction of Shi’ite shrines. He collaborated with ruler Muhammad bin Saud to form the Emirate of Diriyah, whose governance over the Arabian Peninsula featured the draconian implementation of Sharia law and repression of the Shi’ites. The eighteenth-century Wahhabi state was a model for IS’s later governance over parts of the Levant. Killed in an American airstrike in 2017, IS cleric Turki al-Binali hailed the first Saudi state for its destruction of Shi’ite religious iconography and its implementation of Sharia.37 Al-Binali was a student of Muhammad al-Maqdisi and like AQI’s founder came to repudiate his former mentor. The Bahraini-born cleric saw IS’s mission as restoring an authentic Islamic tradition, based upon Wahhabi principles. IS’s endorsement of the Emirate of Diriyah as a correct theological model serves multiple strategic purposes. First, its sectarian practices legitimate its anti-Shi’a position. Second, the early Wahhabi state can be contrasted with the deviance of the Saudi royal family, whose dependence upon American military power undermines its religious legitimacy. Third, it allows IS to present itself as authentically Islamic. The Islamic State’s synthesis of salafist thought and prophetic hadith is complemented by a comprehensive jihadist war strategy that builds upon the work of contemporary theorists. Its former spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani expresses IS’s “total war” concept in the following terms: The whole world has not come together to wage war against us except because we command the worship of Allah, alone without partner, and we incur others to do so. We make wala based upon it and we declare the disbelief of those who abandon it. We warn of shirk [polytheism] in the worship of Allah, and we are severe against it. We make enemies based upon it and we declare the disbelief of those engage in it. This is our call. This is our religion. For this alone, we fight the world and they fight us.38 Al-Adnani’s discourse ties jihadism’s three main adversaries into a nefarious conspiracy against the Sunni world. IS has declared war against Muslim apostate rulers (“the near enemy”), all non-Muslim civilizations (“the far enemy”), and heterodox Muslim minorities (“the sectarian enemy”). Though considered extreme by its al-Qaeda competitor, the Islamic State’s total war doctrine builds upon military strategy developed by AQ’s foremost theorists.

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IS’s warfare strategy Islamic warfare strategy has historically divided the world into two spheres – Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb – where co-existence is transitory and warfare natural.39 Truces made between Islamic states and their rivals are considered ephemeral. They are interregnums presaging later conflict. Mary Habeck argues contemporary jihadist terror-insurgent strategies are taken from Muhammad and his companions’ military exploits.40 Islamic extremists have mythologized this as Islam’s “golden age.” Historically, jihadists have selectively targeted three different enemies to facilitate their “total war” and conquest strategy. Habeck argues that three groups – the near enemy, the far enemy and the sectarian other – have been targeted by Sunni jihadist movements whose selection of adversaries varies. Islamic history is replete with examples. Nelly Lahoud’s study of the seventh-century Kharajites makes clear that militant groups challenged Muhammad’s immediate successors.41 Though the Islamic State chafes at its critics who compare its movement to the Kharijites, they share an uncompromising religious devotion to Muhammad’s Medina community and oppose that which deviates from Islam’s most early expressions. The Kharajites jihadist militancy paled when compared to the sectarian fissures generated by Ali’s unsuccessful effort to assert his rightful claim as Mohammad’s son-in-law to rule over the ummah. Ali’s failure to resist Mu’awiyah’s bid to lead the caliphate contributed to his assassination by supporters who felt betrayed by his capitulation, setting the stage for today’s sectarian antagonisms. The martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn at the battle of Karbala in 680 AD echoes prominently in the battle cries of Shi’a militias fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria. Invoking jihad, the eleventh-century Shi’ite Assassins engaged in a “total war” doctrine, attacking both European crusaders and Sunni rulers.42 The Ottoman conquests from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries continued this process of Islamic military dynamism. Throughout their rule, the Ottomans combatted extremist movements, some of whom evoked apocalyptic ideas similar to IS’s. Though considered innovative, al-Qaeda’s “far enemy” doctrine is embedded in the history of jihadi warfare. Bernard Lewis, Walid Phares, and Ephraim Karsh point to Islam’s “demonization” of the non-Muslim “outsider” that impels the faith to resist, confront, and conquer its adversaries.43 The religion’s separation between Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb justifies divinely sanctioned warfare to expand the Muslim faith. Though Islamic military behavior is rationalized as “defensive jihad,” it is often a pretext for imperial conquest. By the Middle Ages, Islam stretched from Spain to Indonesia. During the eighth century, Islamic armies penetrated into central France, where they were defeated by Charles Martel’s forces and forced back to Spain. The Umayyad caliphate in Spain remained for 700 years. Resenting this loss, al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants clamor for its re-conquest. It is within this historical context that the Islamic State’s “total war” strategy can be understood. Yet other factors abound. IS’s military doctrine is an outgrowth of past jihadist failures and the frustration that it has bred among its theoreticians.44 Jihadist failed revolutions against the “near enemy” in Syria, Algeria, Egypt, and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s were interpreted as a consequence of American support for apostate regimes, fortifying their capacity to resist jihadist rebellions. Arab military failures against Israel in the disastrous Six Day War were similarly blamed on US support for the Zionist project in Palestine.

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US military intervention in the Arabian Peninsula on behalf of the Saudi royal family during the 1991 Persian Gulf War furthered the refocus of jihadist hostility toward the “far enemy,” whose nefarious alliance with Sunni apostate regimes was seen as an effort to destroy Islam and plunder the Mideast’s riches. Bin Laden had hoped that al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks would force the US to militarily disengage from the Mideast. Faced with the loss of American economic and military support, OBL reckoned that “near enemies” would be more vulnerable to jihadist revolutions. Far from inducing an American withdrawal from the Mideast, the US counter-strike in Afghanistan fractured al-Qaeda’s network, resulting in affiliates who acted contrary to the central command’s wishes.45 The American-led war in Iraq furthermore was viewed as a plot to empower the Shi’a community and spread Iranian power in the region. This invariably led to expanded conspiracy theories that connected near, far, and sectarian enemies. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the first jihadi thinker to tie the American project in Iraq to the empowerment of the Shi’a, and by extension, to the expansion of Iranian power across the region. Though his ideas were condemned as thuggish, his contribution to jihadist theory is under-appreciated. Over the long term, al-Zarqawi’s anti-Shi’a strategy proved prescient. Today, jihadist forces operate in environments where sectarian passions dominate. The complex geopolitics of the post-9/11 world and the fracturing of al-Qaeda’s network led to dramatic innovations in jihadist war doctrine. Al-Qaeda theorists Abu Bakr Naji and Sayyid al-Adl developed a corpus of ideas that became the bedrock of the Islamic State’s “total war” doctrine. Ironically, al-Qaeda’s most innovative theorists contributed to the development of its most formidable jihadi competitor. Abu Bakr Naji The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Phase in Which the Ummah will Pass was endorsed by al-Qaeda over a decade ago.46 Will McCants and Michael W.S. Ryan argue that IS’s strategic direction is inspired by Naji’s book.47 Though falsely attributed to al-Zarqawi, Dabiq’s first issue outlines Naji’s stages of jihadist insurgency.48 Naji’s treatise was published by an al-Qaeda media outlet in 2004.49 His “exhaustion and vexation strategy” is consistent with al-Qaeda’s Madrid rail and London subway attacks in Europe and its guerrilla campaign against Coalition troops in Afghanistan.50 Naji advocates a strategy to weaken the West’s resolve and force its Mideast disengagement. His goal is to cripple jihadism’s far and near enemies. He writes: The primary goal for the stage of the power of “vexation” and “exhaustion” is: 1)

2)

– exhaust the forces of the enemy and the regimes collaborating with them, disperse their efforts, and work to make them unable to catch their breath by ways of operations of the choice states, primary or otherwise. Even if the operations are small in size and effect . . . – attract new youth to the jihadi work by undertaking qualitative operations . . . . . . like the operations in Bali . . . and the large operations in Iraq.51

Naji prioritizes attacking civilians, transport infrastructure, and economic institutions.52 His strategy sought to inflict immense damage upon the West and its regional allies. Mass 298

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casualty attacks are designed to sway public opinion and pressure Western policy makers to end combat operations in the Muslim world. The Management of Savagery argues that the USSR’s collapse resulted in US-Israeli hegemony over the Muslim world. The 1991 Gulf War is viewed as an American plot to appropriate Muslim resources.53 Continued US support for Israel and its policies in the Occupied Territories are offered as proof of a “Zionist-Crusader” conspiracy to destroy Islam and reinforce apostate rule. The Saudi monarchy is, accordingly, the handmaiden of American power in the region. Naji implores jihadists to “open fronts” across the Muslim world. Citing Paul Kennedy’s work on imperial overextension, Naji believes US military forces can be drawn into multiple battle zones where they, like the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, will suffer crippling losses.54 Naji believes that jihadist attacks in North America and Europe will fracture the international coalition’s will to fight and sway public opinion against military intervention.55 Naji’s “vexation and exhaustion” doctrine emphasizes the central direction of the mujahidin struggle against America, for only one jihadist organization can coordinate a systematic global terror campaign. Battlefield success, he maintains, should be accompanied by a bifurcated media campaign. First, glamorizing mujahidin victories against Western troops and highlighting strikes against the Western homeland will weaken enemies and arouse Muslim passions to join jihadist forces. Second, jihadist media propaganda should be directed toward swaying Western public opinion toward military disengagement from battlefields in the Muslim world. Operating from this premise, the IS’s attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015 were designed to pressure France to disengage from military operations against its caliphate.56 Naji’s strategy aspires to provoke regional disorder. Citing Taliban rule as a model, Naji expects that Islamic states will arise to “manage” anarchy.57 He advocates stern measures against those who oppose jihadist rule. Naji references Muhammad’s successors’ warfare strategies to further these emirates. Commenting on the Islamic State’s caged immolation of a captured Jordanian Air Force pilot, Fernando Reinares references Naji’s support for Abu Bakr’s use of fire against enemies.58 His war strategy aspires to resurrect a caliphate to rule over the Muslim world. Naji’s “near and far enemy merger” advocates alliances between jihadi groups. Its end goal is to merge these organizations into one terrorist-insurgent entity. The Islamic State’s absorption of terror networks in Nigeria, the Philippines, Egypt, Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia as “provinces” within its network moves in this direction. Abu Bakr Naji is not the only alQaeda theorist to have influenced the Islamic State’s war doctrine. Brian Fishman argues that al-Qaeda theorist Sayf al-Adl developed a seven-stage plan that began with the organization’s 9/11 attacks and ends with a future jihadi state engaged in wars against all non-Muslim civilizations.59 Al-Adl argues that the 9/11 attacks were designed to provoke US military intervention in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda would then proceed to “vex and exhaust” US forces in a protracted guerrilla war, forcing their eventual disengagement. Absent American military and financial support, al-Adl reckons that regional states would fall to jihadist insurrections. The ensuing power vacuum would, according to this theory, give jihadists territorial space to create an Islamic revolutionary state that would wage a war of annihilation against Israel. Al-Adl hoped that his forecasted twenty-first-century caliphate could unite the globe’s 1.5 billion Muslims against the “forces of atheism.”60 299

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Fishman maintains that al-Adl formulated his vision as a response to al-Zarqawi’s insurgency in Iraq. Alarmed by al-Zarqawi’s rapid advance and his organization’s brutality, al-Adl hoped to harmonize AQI’s operations within the central organization’s overall vision. It clearly failed. Though Fishman contends the jihadi struggle against the West is aimed at preserving the Mideast’s Islamic character, al-Adl’s plan appears more ambitious. His strategy’s final stages point to a “total war” doctrine that adheres to medieval Islamic military strategy. It envisions two camps locked into divinely willed conflict which is resolved when the “forces of faith” prevail over atheistic enemies. It is within this context that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration during his July 2014 sermon at Mosul’s Grand Mosque can be best understood: O Ummah of Islam, the world today has been divided into two camps and two trenches, with no third camp present: the camp of Islam and faith, and the camp of kufr [disbelief] and hypocrisy – the camp of Muslim and mujahidin everywhere, and the camp of the Jews, the crusaders and their allies, and with them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the Jews.61 Fishman describes al-Adl’s master plan as “prescient,” for it forecasts the Islamic State’s caliphate’s development.62 He reasons that al-Qaeda advanced its caliphate creation timetable to appease al-Zarqawi’s ambition. Faced with its diminished capacity to direct an effective “far enemy” strategy after 9/11, al-Qaeda hoped to capitalize upon the collapse of states during the Arab Spring by embedding into the local insurgencies.63 The sectarian foundation of some of these conflicts allowed the Islamic State an opening to expand its network and challenge al-Qaeda’s authority. Historically, Syria’s ethnoreligious configuration has made it an unstable country. Though Assad’s brutal repression of the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the 1980s inhibited any challenge to the regime for a generation, the Arab Spring’s turmoil and the radicalization of the jihadist movement conjoined to undermine Syrian security. Bashar al-Assad’s support for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in the chaotic aftermath of the 2003 US-led war ironically facilitated the development of a jihadist infrastructure that contributed to the 2011 Sunni rebellion against his rule. Motivated by sectarian passions, Sunni and Shi’a jihadists have blooded each other in the killing fields of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Given Iran’s growing presence across the Arab Mideast, it is unsurprising that sectarian animosity drives jihadist war doctrine. Today, Sunni jihadists like al-Zarqawi before them see Iran as partner in a wider “Zionist-Crusader” conspiracy to destroy the Muslim world. Emblematic of the sectarian foundations of the Islamic State’s “total war” doctrine is Abu Muhammad al-Adnani’s statement: O, our people the Sunnis! O, you, the tribes of good! You have tried all regimes, and you have witness the treachery of all these parties and those failing perverted groups . . . You are invited to join hands with your sons, the mujahidin. To form a solid front against the Crusader-Rafidi plots and the Magi Iranian expansion in Mesopotamia and all Muslim lands; so as to restore your Islamic caliphate.64 The Islamic State’s development of a total war doctrine targeting near, far and sectarian enemies reflects tendencies that have been building within the global jihadist movement for over a generation.65 Often credited for criticizing al-Zarqawi’s anti-Shi’ite strategy, Ayman al-Zawahiri repeatedly expressed animosity toward heterodox Muslim minorities. In an exchange of letters 300

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with al-Zarqawi, he writes the Shi’a are a “problem” and that they must be “dealt with,” but only after the success of the jihadist war against the US occupation of Iraq.66 Al-Qaeda’s emir, moreover, linked the Iranians to a larger Zionist-Crusader plot similar to the Islamic State’s conspiratorial theories.67 Al-Zawahiri’s once heir apparent, the late Hamza bin Laden, also exhibited anti-Shi’ite resentments that belie al-Qaeda’s supposed “moderation.”68 This suggests that al-Qaeda’s critique of the Islamic State’s anti-Shi’a policy was merely tactical. A tendency, moreover, exhibited in AQ’s central command’s critique of the Islamic State’s creation of the caliphate, that long has been advocated by key theorists associated with its movement. The Islamic State very much follows the model of behavior advocated by Naji and al-Adl. By August 2014, the Islamic State occupied Sunni areas in Iraq and Syria along river tributaries.69 This geopolitical development gave the jihadist proto-state a strategic advantage against its opponents. IS facilitated its state-building project by seizing dams, reservoirs, oil wells, grain bins, gas lines, and electricity generating plants. By controlling critical infrastructure, the Islamic State generated financial resources, recruited loyalists, and punished its enemies. Water, food, electricity were used as weapons of war. The Islamic State resorted to flooding its adversaries to facilitate the advance of jihadist forces. The configuration of IS along the Tigris and Euphrates river basin allowed the caliphate to wage “total war” against all who refused to swear fidelity to its network. Sunni tribes that rebelled against the IS were annihilated.70 Mostly, however, tribal engagement and reconciliation with Sunni tribes allowed the caliphate to secure its territorial control. Initially IS rule in Sunni areas was well received by most residents, who benefitted from increased security.71 The comprehensive brutal character of IS’s “total war” strategy, however, created countervailing forces that led to its demise. By pursuing a policy that targeted so many enemies, IS contributed to a global coalition united against it. At war with the Western powers, Iran, the Kurds, Shi’ite militias, and the Iraqi and Syrian governments, its jihadi state withered before sustained assaults. By 2018, its “physical caliphate” was destroyed and the Islamic State reverted to a terror-insurgent movement. Despite the loss of 40,000 of its soldiers, the 2020 death of its leader, and the liquidation of its state that at its height ruled over 6 million people, the movement remains. Some analysts had questioned whether IS’s network could withstand the loss of its proto-jihadist state. They argued that mounting internal pressures within the organization questioning the authority of its emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, could give al-Qaeda a strategic opening to reclaim its leadership over the global jihadist movement.72 Cole Bunzel, for example, has highlighted heated internal debates over the limits of takfir among IS clerics.73 Despite such formidable challenges, IS’s movement continues to show its trademark resilience.

The future of the IS movement There are reasons to believe that IS will rebuild. First, the political conditions conducive to its regeneration remain. The salience of sectarian conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen continue to spark tensions across the Mideast. This is especially true regarding the geopolitical competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose proxies are pitted against each other in multiple battlefields in the Islamic World. IS was able to effectively exploit Sunni grievances in Iraq and Syria after the Arab Spring, and there is every reason to expect that it will do so in the future. Second, states across the Mideast remain fragile and weak allowing IS’s

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network opportunity for growth in ungoverned areas. Third, al-Qaeda’s network remains weak. Al-Qaeda’s separation from its Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (now rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – HTS) has weakened the central command. This de-coupling demonstrates al-Zawahiri’s incapacity to control the behavior of affiliated organizations. There is correspondingly little hope that al-Qaeda will displace the Islamic State in the near future. Though weakened, the Islamic State’s “virtual caliphate” is still robust.74 The network’s propaganda machine posts newsletters and videos daily, celebrating its attacks and urging its supporters across the world to kill apostates and infidels. IS continues to have some 30–40,000 fighters under its command in Iraq and Syria.75 The Institute for the Study of War indicates that IS is rebuilding its insurgent networks across Sunni-dominated areas in Iraq and has expanded its global reach.76 There are, moreover, signs of its rebirth in eastern Syria. The movement, moreover, has expanded into Central Africa, decreeing new branches in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its “provinces” in Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the Philippines continue to mount terror attacks. The Islamic State has moved increasingly toward an anti-Christian sectarian strategy that is similar to its brutal war against heterodox Muslim minorities. The Islamic State’s anti-Christian message resonates strongly in Asia and Africa. One affiliated group in Sri Lanka killed over 250 people participating in Easter Services in late April 2019, while others in Nigeria and Burkina Faso have massacred hundreds of Christians.77 Since its formation in July 2014, IS has attacked churches and monasteries, and has massacred Christians across the world. Christians have been killed by the network’s fanatical supporters in Egypt, Nigeria, Germany, France, Libya, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Germany. Its coordinated assaults against Sri Lankan churches and luxury hotels during Easter 2019 was the most deadly terror attack since 9/11, and is evidence of the network’s resilience and continued appeal. The movement’s violent anti-Christian campaign is designed to provoke conflict and separation. As IS’s media campaign inveighs tirelessly against the “peoples of the cross,” it seeks to polarize and inflames religious tensions. The Islamic State hopes to convince radicalized supporters that a “conflict of civilizations” is imminent and that an end-times confrontation between the forces of faith and apostasy is underway. This message is particularly geared toward Europe’s Muslim diaspora populations, which IS hopes will heed its call for attacks against the “infidel” West. Past entreaties have had great success. Since 2014, IS supporters have mounted hundreds of attacks in Europe killing close to 400 people. IS French and Belgian fighters have been especially effective, with close to 300 people murdered in France alone.78 Having recruited over 5,000 Western Europeans to fight for its caliphate, IS hopes that its returning foreign fighters will continue their jihad across the old continent. IS as a global terror-insurgent movement endures and it is unlikely to be vanquished anytime soon. This does not mean, however, that its central goals are attainable. The barbaric and utopian sentiments that the IS movement inspires creates countervailing forces leading to its failure. Yet these same passions insure its resilience. As Mohammad Hafez argues, “fratricidal” jihadists movements like IS self-destruct because they fail to apprehend the counterproductive consequences their violence unleashes.79 Despite this outcome, the jihadist movement’s continuous regeneration after successive defeats suggests a dynamic of permanent insurgency that, while unsuccessful, is difficult to destroy.

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Notes 1 Anthony Celso, Al Qaeda Post 9–11 Devolution: The Failed Jihadist War against the Near and Far Enemy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 2 Brian Fishman, The Master Plan: ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Jihadi Plan for Final Victory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 3 Nibras Kazimi, “A Virulent Ideology in Mutation: Zarqawi Upstages Maqdisi,” International Institute of Jihadi Webstes Montoring Report, September 2009, available at http://zes.isn.ch/104.virulentideol ogy.pdf 4 Kazimi, “A Virulent Ideology in Mutation,” 59. 5 Kazimi, “A Virulent Ideology in Mutation,” 67. 6 Tore Hamming, “The Hardline Stream of Global Jihad: Revisiting the Ideological Origin of the Islamic State,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 12, no. 1 (2019): 1–7. 7 Jean-Charles Brisard, Al-Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda (New York: Other Press, 2005). 8 Aaron Zelin and Philip Smyth, The Vocabulary of Sectarianism (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 2014). 9 Amatizia Baram, Saddam Hussein and Islam, 1968–3003 Ba’athi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2014). 10 Brisard, Al-Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda, 143–155. 11 Jean Pierre Filiu, “The ‘French Iraqi’ Networks of the 2000s: Matrix of the 2015 Terrorist Attacks?” Perspectives on Terrorism 10, no. 6 (2018): 97–101. 12 John McCary, “The Anbar Awakening: An Alliance of Incentives,” Washington Quarterly 32 no. 1 (2009): 43–59. 13 Shmuel Barr and Yair Minzili, “The Zawahiri Letter and Strategy of Al Qaeda,” Hudson Institute, February 16, 2006, available at www.hudson.org/research/9901-the-zawahiri-letter-and-the-strat egy-of-al-qaeda 14 Sojjan M. Gohel, “Deciphering Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda’s Strategic and Ideological Imperatives,” Perspectives on Terrorism 11, no. 1 (2017): 54–66, and Barr and Minzilli, “The Zawahiri Letter and Strategy of Al Qaeda.” 15 Brian Fishman, “Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, March 2009, available at www.ctc.usma.edu 16 William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015). 17 Don Rassler, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Liam Collins, Muhammad al-Obaidi, and Nelly Lahoud, “Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden Sidelined?” Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, March 3, 2011, available at https://ctc.usma.edu/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-sidelined/ 18 Brian Dodwell, “The Abbottabad Letters: The Quiet Ascent of Adam Gadahn,” Combatting Terrorism Center Sentinel 5, no. 5 (2012): 19–21. 19 William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 73. 20 Kenneth Pollack, “The Fall and Rise and Fall of Iraq,” Brookings Institute no. 29 (2013). 21 Steven Hydemann, “The Syrian Uprising: Sectarianism, Regionalization and State Order in the Levant,” Fride and Havos Working Paper no. 119 (2013): 1–19. 22 Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, 2nd edition (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 76–105. 23 Anthony Celso, “More than the Voice of the Caliphate: The Destructive Legacy of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani,” International Journal of Political Science 2, no. 4 (2016): 86–94. 24 Richard Barrett, “Foreign Fighters: An Updated Assessment of the Flow of Foreign Fighters into Syria and Iraq,” The Soufan Group 4 (2015). 25 Alex Bilger, “ISIS Annual Reports Reveal a Metrics-Driven Military Command,” Institute for the Study of War (2014). 26 Anthony Cordesman, Iraq in Crisis Center for Strategic and International Studies (Lanham, MD: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014). 27 William McCants, The Believer: How an Introvert with a Passion for Religion and Soccer Became Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Leader of the Islamic State (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2015). 28 Charles Lister, Profiling the Islamic State (Washington, DC: Brookings Doha Center, 2014); Charles Lister, Jihadi Rivalry: The Islamic State Challenges Al Qaeda (Washington, DC: Brookings Doha Center, 2016), and Aaron Zelin, The War between ISIS and Al Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 2014).

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Anthony Celso 29 Quintan Wiktorowicz, “A Genealogy of Radical Islam,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28 (2005): 75–97, and Cole Bunzel, “From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State,” The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Muslim World Analysis Paper no. 19 (2015). 30 Nibras Kazimi, Syria through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect Enemy (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2010). 31 Kazimi, Syria through Jihadist Eyes, 9–14. 32 Jean Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam (Berkley: University of California, 2012). 33 David Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism” in Terrorism Studies: A Reader eds. John Horgan and Kurt Braddock (New York: Routledge, 2012), 121–141. 34 Michael W.S. Ryan, “Dabiq: What the Islamic State’s New Magazine Tells Us about Their Strategic Direction. Recruitment Patterns and Guerilla Doctrine,” The Jamestown Foundation, August 1, 2014, available at https://jamestown.org/program/hot-issue-dabiq-what-islamic-states-new-maga zine-tells-us-about-their-strategic-direction-recruitment-patterns-and-guerrilla-doctrine/ 35 McCants, ISIS Apocalypse, 31–46. 36 Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, “The Guerrilla Caliph: Speeches that Bookend the Islamic State’s Caliphate Era,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 12, no. 5 (2019): 41–46. 37 Cole Bunzel, “The Caliphate’s Scholar-in-Arms,” Jihadica, July 9, 2014, available at www.isn.ethz. ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?id=182205 38 Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, “That They Live by Proof,” al-Hayat Media Center, available at http:// pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpresss.com 39 Walid Phares, The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 40 Mary Habeck, “Jihadist Strategies in the War on Terrorism,” The Heritage Foundation, November 8, 2004, available at www.heritage.org/defense/report/jihadist-strategies-the-war-terrorism 41 Nelly Lahoud, The Jihadis’ Path to Self-destruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 42 Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 43 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and the Middle Eastern Response (London: Phoenix Books, 2004). 44 Anthony Celso, The Islamic State: A Comparative History of Jihadist Warfare (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). 45 Rassler, Koehler-Derrick, Collins, al-Obaidi, and Lahoud, “Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden Sidelined?” 46 Fernando Renaires, “De dónde le viene al Estado Islámico la idea de quemar vivo a un rehén?” Real Instituto Elcano, 2016, available at www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/portal/web/rielcano_es/ contenido/donde-viene-al-estado-islamic-la-idea-de-quemar-vivo-a-un-rehen 47 McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, and Michael W.S. Ryan, Decoding Al Qaeda: The Deep Battle against the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 48 The Islamic State, “Imamah is from the Millah [Path] of Ibrahim,” The Return of the Khalifa Dabiq, 2014, available at www.jihadology.net/2014/07/05/al%e%68%sayat-media-center-presents-a-newissue-of-the-islamic-state-magazine-dabiq1/ 49 Jarret Brachman and William F. McCants, “Stealing Al-Qaeda’s Playbook,” Counter Terrorism Center Report (2006): 1–25. 50 Abu Bakr Naji, Management of Savagery, 2004, available at www.vcfia.harvard.edu/olin/images/man agement%20of%savagery%20%2005-23-2006.pdf 51 Naji, Management of Savagery, 40. 52 Naji, Management of Savagery, 20, 45. 53 Naji, Management of Savagery, 23. 54 Naji, Management of Savagery, 18. 55 Naji, Management of Savagery, 51. 56 Jean-Charles Brisard, “The Paris Attacks and the Evolving Islamic Threat to France,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 8, no. 11 (2015): 5–8. 57 Naji, Management of Savagery, 27. 58 Renaires, “De dónde le viene al Estado Islámico.” 59 Brian Fishman, The Master Plan: ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Jihadi Plan for Final Victory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 60 Fishman, The Master Plan, 790.

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61 The Islamic State, The Return of the Khalifa. 62 Fishman, The Master Plan, prescience of the master plan Caliphate’s prediction. 63 Charles Lister, Jihadi Rivalry: The Islamic State Challenges Al Qaeda (Washington, DC: Brookings Doha Center, 2016), 7–14. 64 Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, “The State of Islam Will Remain Safe,” Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum, August 7, 2011, available at https://scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/bitstream/handle/ 10066/15267/ADN20110807.pdf?sequence=1 65 Anthony Celso, “Sectarianism, State Failure and the Radicalization of Sunni Jihadist Groups,” International Journal of Political Science 4, no. 3 (2017): 22–36. 66 Celso, “Sectarianism, State Failure.” 67 Reprinted in Brisard, Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda, Appendix VIII, 233–251. 68 Ali Soufan, “From Steadfast Son to Al Qaeda Leader in Waiting,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 10, no. 8 (2018): 1–8. 69 Celso, The Islamic State, 88–91. 70 Martin Chulov, “ISIS Kills Hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis from Albu Nimr Tribe in Anbar Province,” The Guardian, October 31, 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/massgraves-hundreds-iraqi-sunnis-killed-isis-albu-nimr 71 Munqith Dagher, Aaron Y. Zelin, and David Pollock, “The Islamic State: New Inside Views,” Washington Institute, December 17, 2015, available at www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-nalysis/ view/the-islamic-state-new-inside-views 72 Hasan Hasan, “Two Houses Divided: How the War in Syria Shaped the Future of Jihadism,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 11, no. 9 (2018): 1–8. 73 Cole Bunzel, “The Islamic State Mufti on Trial: The Saga of Silsila Ilmiyya,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 11, no. 9 (2019): 14–18. 74 Michael Munoz, “Selling the Long War: Islamic State Propaganda after the Caliphate,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 11, no. 10 (2018): 31–36. 75 Hasan Hasan, “The Hollow Victory over the Islamic State in Syria?: The High Risk of Jihadi Revival in Deir ez-Zor Euphrates River Valley,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 12, no. 2 (2019): 1–6. 76 Brandon Wallace and Jennifer Cafarella, “ISIS Reasserts Global Reach for Ramadan,” The Institute for the Study of War, May 1, 2019, available at http://iswresearch.blogspot.com/2019/05/isis-reas serts-global-reach-for-ramadan.html 77 Armanath Amarasingham, “Terrorism on the Teardrop Island: Understanding the Easter 2019 Attacks in Sri Lanka,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 12, no. 5 (2019): 1–10. 78 Jean-Charles Brisard and Kevin Jackson, “The Islamic State’s External Operations and the FrenchBelgian Networks,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 9, no. (2016): 8–15. 79 Mohammad Hafez, “The Curse of Cain: Why Fratricidal Jihadis Fail to Learn from Their Mistakes,” Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel 10, no. 10 (2018): 1–7.

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23 HIZB-UT-TAHRIR IN THE AGE OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA (ISIS) Mohamed Nawab Bin Mohamed Osman

Introduction In 2015, a meme was posted on a Twitter handle, The Dawlah, which reads: Hizb-ut-Ta’khir1 and its bold headline reads ‘Establishing the Khilafah since 1953’. “I know, we have got nowhere so far, but we have lots of conferences and heaps of flags and are really good at sitting in cafes and talking about the Khilafah and how one day we plan to establish it, except by jihad because we don’t roll that way.” The meme is a reflection of the long-held differences between the two groups. Beyond their ideological differences, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has had a major impact on Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT). Prior to the rise of ISIS, HT has been equated with the idea of the Caliphate. However, the rise of ISIS not only stole the Caliphate thunder from HT but also led to an internal implosion of the group, which could potentially lead to the demise of the movement. This chapter argues that, unlike the alarmist analysis of the movement as a major threat to international security, HT is a movement in decline and is likely to disintegrate into smaller factions. There are three parts to this chapter. First, it will provide some brief background on HT, its ideology, methodology and objectives. Second, it will examine four factors that have led to the weakening of HT after the rise of ISIS. Finally, the chapter will examine the trajectory of HT and illustrate how it is likely that HT’s survival is at stake, especially since the rise of HT’s current leader, Sheikh Ata Abu-Rashta.

Brief introduction to Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) The Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) is a transnational Islamist movement that seeks to re-establish the historical Caliphate. The movement is currently active in more than 57 countries internationally. The group’s chapters in Asia, particularly in Indonesia and Central Asia, are considered to be the largest and most important ones.2 Most observers of HT have concluded that the movement is hierarchical and tightly controlled by a central leadership based in the Middle East.3 Some have assumed that the leadership is based in the United Kingdom, Jordan and Palestine.4 While the 306

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headquarters of HT is unclear, the leadership of the movement has been largely Arab and Palestinian. The HT organization was begun by a Palestinian Islamic scholar, Sheikh Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, in 1953. Based in Jerusalam, the group was founded as an Arab nationalist movement that sought to establish an Arab Caliphate with the goal of emancipating Palestine.5 The stated objectives of HT included the revival of the Muslim world from its perceived decline, the liberation of Muslims from the thoughts, systems and laws of “unbelievers”, and the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate.6 Al-Nabhani advocated that the obligation to revive the Caliphate was incumbent on all Muslims and as such he opened HT’s membership to Muslims regardless of race, sects, mazhab (schools of jurisprudence), or gender. However, in actuality, the group has remained Arab-centric, with every single member of its leadership council being Arab (mostly Palestinian). In advocating for the establishment of a Caliphate, Al-Nabhani claimed that HT deferred to the Prophet Muhammad’s methodology of establishing the first “Islamic state” in Madinah. Al-Nabhani claims that Muhammad did this through a three-stage process which informs the methodology of HT. In the first stage, known as the stage of culturing (tatsqif), Al-Nabhani advocated for the formation of a nucleus group of individuals who believe in the ideals of the group. At the second stage, which is that of interaction (tafa’ul) with the Muslim community, HT sought to educate the larger Muslim community on the importance of re-establishing the Caliphate. At the third stage, of accepting power and ruling (istilamu al-hukmi), the party works towards establishing a government, implementing Islam comprehensively, and carrying it as a message to the world.7 To facilitate this third stage, the party sought nusrah (assistance to gain power) from important power brokers in the country, such as military leaders, judges and politicians.8 In his own writings, Al-Nabhani envisioned the founding of the first Caliphate state in the Arab world and never envisioned the movement will spread to other parts of the Muslim world. This could be seen in his earlier writings, for example, Risalat Al-Arab (The Message of Arabs), which was presented as a memo at the Cultural Conference of the Arab League held in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1950, Al-Nabhani reiterated his message that the Arab leadership should unite to form a Caliphate, with the aim of fighting against the state of Israel.9 Al-Nabhani saw it necessary that the ideas of the movement be spread to the neighboring countries including Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The movement also found roots in Egypt and the Gulf states when members of the movement sought job opportunities in these countries. It was not long before HT came under the spotlight of the intelligence services of the Middle Eastern states, and the movement was severely repressed. Many HT members sought political asylum in a number of European countries including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Denmark, as well as Australia, which led to the founding of HT chapters in those countries. London became an important recruiting ground for HT and the movement also started targeting tertiary students from Asia and Africa for recruitment, leading to the founding of chapters in Central, South and South East Asia.

HT and the Arab Spring The Arab Spring of 2013, which saw protests against authoritarian governments throughout the Middle East, subsequently led to the toppling of governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, but caught HT by surprise. HT welcomed the uprising, characterizing the protests as a desire for Muslims to revive the Islamic Caliphate.10 The group also claimed that the uprising was threatened by Western countries, as these countries would wish to thwart the 307

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protests in favor of the dictatorships in the region.11 Most importantly, HT tried to claim credit for the uprising by suggesting that protesters were seeking the revival of the Caliphate. HT’s London office posted a video on YouTube in January 2011, where protesters are heard calling for return of the Caliphate.12 In actuality, the demonstration was a small gathering, and not representative of the larger Arab Spring. HT’s initial endorsement of the protests quickly dissipated, with many of its leaders expressing disappointment that the Arab Spring had been hijacked by the West in support of an un-Islamic systems and leaders who are puppets of the West. Dr. Abdul Wahid, member of the HT Britain executive committee, stated that the Arab Spring reflected the sentiments of Islam which had been long suppressed in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria; while these were loud and clear, Wahid expressed his disappointment with the two governing parties in Tunisia and Egypt – the En-Nahda and the Muslim Brotherhood respectively – as there is an “absence” of Islam in their policies.13 He further stated that prominent members from the two parties seemed more intent on courting the support of Western politicians than the grassroots Islamic community.14 This view was further underscored by Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia (HTM), which noted that the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt were cosmetic, as they simply ushered in the system of democracy and secularism. HTM further elucidated that democracy, which is part of the European model of the secular nation-state, runs contrary to the values, beliefs and history of the Muslim world, and that the only viable Islamic model is the Caliphate.15 HT scaled down its activities in Central and South Asia, focusing its resources in the Middle East and North Africa instead.16 Regardless of its disagreement with the outcome of the Arab Spring, HT utilized the political opportunity to mobilize and intensify its recruitment efforts in the countries impacted by the uprising. Shortly after the fall of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, HT was one of the “main hardline Islamist groups to emerge”.17 HT initially gained some traction amongst Tunisian youth who had grown disenchanted with the Tunisian political system, especially the continued presence of old elites linked to the previous government. Hence, HT’s call for the political framework of the nation-state to be overhauled and be replaced with a Caliphate was attractive.18 In March 2012, HT organized a female-only conference in Tunisia with the aim of winning the support of women.19 HT also intensified its activities by delivering off-the-cuff speeches in mosques.20 In Egypt, the 1974 ban on HT was lifted and it became a legitimate organization after the collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011.21 Much like Tunisia, HT moved quickly to mobilize the few HT members in Egypt and began campaign to gain visibility, producing numerous leaflets calling for the revival of the Caliphate. In June 2011, HT issued a leaflet seeking nusrah (support) from the Egyptian Army to announce the establishment of the Caliphate.22 The group also became notorious for its attack on the official Al-Azhar religious leadership, when it issued a leaflet condemning Al-Azhar for endorsing all international agreements signed by previous Egypt governments. HT saw this as the Al-Azhar’s endorsement of the 1979 Egyptian peace agreement with Israel, which HT saw as contravening Islamic laws. HT rebuked Al-Azhar and urged them to retract the document, but Al-Azhar ignored them. Beyond issuing leaflets, HT began an initiative to set up a mobile information tent in front of the Salafi-oriented Al-Noor Mosque, to introduce and outline its ideas and to introduce its books to the Egyptian public.23 Sources within HT also suggested that its leadership had written officially to the Egyptian military to permit the group to assume power and declare the establishment of the Caliphate.24 Syria was the key country that HT invested in after the Arab Spring, believing that the country was ripe for the establishment of the Caliphate. HT also focused on Syria because 308

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the group’s doctrine suggested that the Islamic Caliphate cannot be conceived without “Greater Syria”, a territory which includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus and Sinai. Hisham al-Baba, spokesman for HT in Syria, stated at a HT conference in Tripoli, Lebanon that “The Islamic Caliphate state cannot be conceived of without [Greater] Syria. It has what no other spot on earth has in terms of honor, esteem, and status after Mecca and Medina.”25 When the Syrian conflict began, HT issued a public statement addressing the Syrian public, calling for a confrontation with Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, which it labeled “the enemy of Allah”. HT also called on the Syrian Army officers to assist in the revolt against the regime. HT had hoped that the fighters unite under its Islamic umbrella and agree upon an Islamic Caliphate.26 However, this did not happen, mainly because HT members had no prior military experience and the group also held an avowed commitment to achieving its goals through non-violent means.27 Much like Egypt and Tunisia, HT mobilized in Syria by opening offices, printing and distributing pamphlets, books and magazines published by the group.28 Interestingly, the Amir of HT, Ata Abu-Rashta had rejected attempts by HT factions to implement Islamic rule in their areas of control. He stressed that the establishment of these rules and their implementation can only be the jurisdiction of the Caliph, when the Caliphate is established and in the presence of the Caliph.29 The Syrian conflict also proved to be the Achilles Heel for HT. The Amir of HT had instructed HT’s leadership in Turkey and Syria to work with Turkish authorities to transfer weapons from Turkey to Syria. Members of HT Syria were also believed to be fighting alongside groups such as the Ansar-ul-Khilafah and Ansar-ulIslam which are deemed to be ideologically opposed to HT’s ideology.30 This issue will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.

HT and the emergence of ISIS On June 29, 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of a Caliphate.31 The rise of ISIS posed a particular challenge for HT. While HT had been advocating for the rise of a Caliphate for decades, ISIS actually established a Caliphate. Following the announcement, HT members worldwide were waiting with anticipation for the Amir of HT to declare his support for the Caliphate. To many members’ surprise, despite being one of the most vociferous advocates for the Caliphate, the Amir rejected ISIS’s Caliphate.32 The HT Amir described the new Caliphate as “mere rhetoric”, which was undeserving even of acknowledgment as to its reality.33 HT criticized al-Baghdadi’s declaration as an “empty speech without substance”, and that this self-proclaimed Caliphate from Baghdadi has no “authority” in implementing Islamic rule.34 In HT’s website, the group had stated that “The issue of the Khilafah is too great for its image to be distorted or for its reality to be changed merely by an announcement here or an announcement there.”35 Taji Mustafa, the media representative of HT Britain, stated that HT was one of the first organizations to reject ISIS’s caliphate.36 He further denounced the previous report in The Guardian regarding the quote from an unnamed “intelligence specialist” stating “Hizb want a Caliphate. They want to be a province or a state of ISIS.”37 The group also denounced ISIS’s declaration stating that the establishment of this socalled “Caliphate” did not follow the methodology of the Prophet in establishing an Islamic state and that the security situation in Syria was too precarious for a Caliphate to survive.38 The HT’s Central Media Office Director Osman Bakhash stated that ISIS’s Caliphate is 309

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illegitimate from an Islamic standpoint and does not have any legitimacy from the lens of Islamic law. In drawing a distinction between HT and ISIS, he described HT as a political movement with an Islamic ideology, but ISIS is a mere military organization which seeks to control territory. He added that the Caliphate sought by HT is based on the legitimate bay’ah (oath of allegiance) from the Muslim community and not through force and coercion as done by ISIS.39 It was further highlighted that ISIS focused its attention on killing Muslims, rather than waging war against the “enemies of Islam”. Ata Abu-Rashta, the Amir of HT, argued that the establishment of ISIS’s Caliphate would bring negative consequences to the very concept of the Caliphate, and perceived al-Baghdadi’s declaration as a Western conspiracy against Islam, which sought to eliminate the project of establishing any future Caliphate. HT’s abhorrence for ISIS is equally felt by ISIS leaders towards HT. Besides criticizing HT for its failure to establish the Caliphate, ISIS maintained a highly antagonistic position against HT. From early on, ISIS declared HT as a deviant sect; HT’s activity is forbidden in ISIS-controlled territories and ISIS has openly chastised HT for its failure to establish the Caliphate.40 In fact, ISIS has explicitly targeted members of HT. In November 2014, ISIS executed a senior HT member in Syria, Mustafa Khayal, for questioning the legitimacy of ISIS’s self-proclaimed Caliphate in Aleppo.41

The Caliphate dilemma The decision by the HT leadership to oppose ISIS’s declared Caliphate was not well received by all HT’s members. This disagreement stems not necessarily from the rejection of the ISIS Caliphate, but rather due to the reasons given for rejecting the Caliphate. AlNabhani and other ideologues of HT have maintained that the Caliphate can be declared by any Muslim who possesses the necessary characteristics of a Caliph.42 However, the Amir’s statement suggested that only HT can declare a Caliphate, which many members saw as a transgression of HT’s ideology. Dr. Tawfiq Mustafa, a former HT leader, criticized the group’s leadership for believing that HT alone can and must lead the Muslim community, without participation from anyone else. Indeed, he complained that HT would attack these movements and drive them away from HT, even though HT’s original position was for relations between Islamic movements to be amicable, and that it is not possible for just one Islamic movement to lead the Muslim community, let alone establish the Caliphate by itself without the participation of other Islamic groups.43 A small number of HT members also decided to join ISIS, believing that ISIS’s Caliphate is the promised version. One prominent example is a former member of HT Indonesia, Muhammad Bahrun Naim Anggih Tamtomo (Bahrum Naim),44 who became a key recruiter for ISIS in Indonesia and masterminded one of the worst ISIS-led attacks in Jakarta in 2016, which resulted in four deaths.45

Exodus of HT members Since the Arab Spring, there has been an exodus of key HT leaders, who either resigned or were dismissed. This includes the spokesmen or leaders of HT in Bangladesh, Syria, India, Palestine, Tunisia, Canada, Jordan, Australia, Scandinavia, Kuwait and Britain. The most prominent HT member who resigned was Sheikh Hassan al-Dahi, who acted as the interim Amir of Hizb ut-Tahrir after the resignation of Abdul Qadeem Zalloom in 2003. A large number of HT’s central committee members, including Sheikh Abu Iyas Mahmood AbdulLatif Uwaidah and Hafez Salleh also quit. In fact, Ahmad Abu Qadoum, prominent 310

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member from Jordan and the son-in-law of the Amir was sacked and made a public announcement about his sacking.46 A number of HT figures who featured prominently in the West, such as Fadi Abdul Latif, former leader of HT in Scandinavia; Dr. Imran Waheed, former spokesman for HT Britain, and Uthman Badar, former spokesman of HT Australia, have also left the group. It is believed that the HT chapters in a number of countries including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have folded. While HT had gone through divisions in the past, the number of prominent HT leaders who left the group in the 2019 turmoil is both astonishing and unprecedented. While numerous reasons were cited for these HT leaders’ desertion, for many, it had to do with the Amir’s policies in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Departing from HT’s ideology and methodology A key reason for much of the discontent in HT has to do with many leaders’ belief that the Amir had departed from HT’s clearly stated ideology and methodology. A key tenet of HT’s ideology is the rejection of violence in the form of an armed uprising. HT allows for “defensive jihad” to protect one’s life, family and property, but the defensive jihad is subjected to certain criteria. First, HT members must fight as individuals and not as part of an organized militant force. Second, HT as an organization will not partake in assisting to organize this jihad.47 As noted earlier in this chapter, the HT leadership facilitated the funneling of weapons from Turkey to Syria and also assisted in organizing the fighting in Syria by working with a number of jihadist organizations. Former HT leaders noted that HT was presented with many “opportunities” to carry out jihad in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq but instead chose the path of political action, not violence. In explaining the methodology of achieving its aims, HT stated: Though the Party committed itself to be open, clear and challenging in its da’wah, it restricted itself to political actions alone and did not exceed them by resorting to material actions against the rulers or against those who opposed its da’wah, following the example of the Messenger of Allah (saw) who restricted himself in Makkah solely to the da’wah and he (saw) did not carry out any material actions until he had migrated to Madinah. And when the people of the second pledge of ‘Aqabah proposed that he give them permission to fight the people of Mina with the sword, he answered them saying: “We have not been ordered to do that yet.” And Allah (swt) asked him (saw) to be patient about the persecution as the Messengers of Allah before him had been, when Allah (swt) said to them.48 Another major perceived transgression of the Amir is the fact that he had instructed members of HT to work with the Turkish intelligence and police. The party has long considered any Muslim government that does not implement Islam to be un-Islamic. Acknowledgment of the suzerainty of the state of any kind, including paying taxes and voting, are also considered un-Islamic.49 The fact that the Amir would allow the local HT chapters to work with the Turkish authorities is deemed as problematic. It is further argued that every single jihadist group in Syria is supported by foreign interests including that of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – all states that HT consider to be un-Islamic. Ironically, in his own analysis of the Syrian conflict, the Amir had cited these foreign interests.50 311

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An Arab-centric leadership One of the key complaints of HT members outside the Middle East is the perceived Arabcentric nature of the HT leadership. Every single member of HT Central Committee are of Arab (mostly Palestinian) origin. As noted earlier, al-Nabhani had not conceived of a Caliphate that would come from outside the Arab world. HT’s second leader, Abdul Qadeem Zalloum, was reluctant to support the movement’s expansion in Asia.51 The central leadership of HT was also reluctant to support its chapters outside the Middle East. While the current HT leaders have been more supportive of the group’s activities outwith the Middle East – namely in Pakistan and Bangladesh where the local groups have attempted coup attempts – AbuRashta has remained focused on the Arab world.52 Muhammad al-Khaththath, a former leader of HT Indonesia, cited several factors in explaining the Arab-centric attitude of the Amir of HT. First, he bemoans the absence of non-Arabs in HT’s central leadership. In fact, all of HR’s central leaders are Palestinians. Al-Khaththath added that the movement invested most of its resources in the Arab states, despite the fact that their campaigns in these countries have had little success.53 Following the Arab Spring in 2010, the HT leadership mobilized its chapters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, believing that the Caliphate would be established in one of these countries. However, none of these countries proved to be fertile ground for HT’s Caliphate. In fact, a conference organized in Tunisia shortly after the Arab Spring saw a dismal attendance, indicating the lack of interest in the idea of the Caliphate and in HT as an influential organization.54 The redeployment of the resources to the Arab World was made, despite the fact that HT’s chapters in these countries were virtually non-existent. The Arabcentric bias of the HT’s leadership also meant that there was a failure on the leadership’s part leadership to understand the local context. While the Amir of HT sends an envoy to most of its chapters worldwide every three to four months to review the development of these groups, the envoy does not speak the local language and is dependent on translators. Thus, many meetings and interactions with members are determined by local leaders, which might skew the envoy’s analysis of the local situation.

Failure in strategy The Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS also reflected clearly the failure in crafting proper strategies in dealing with developments within the Muslim world. Former HT leaders also questioned the current leadership’s lack of strategy, which the earlier leaders saw as leading to HT’s image being compromised. As noted earlier, shortly after the fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, HT officially sought nusrah from the Egyptian Army to allow HT to declare the Caliphate. One former HT leader noted: This is an act of naivety on the part of the HT leadership. It is also delirious on the part of the HT leaders to think that the Egyptian Army, which they themselves criticize as being agents of the United States and Israel, would give power to a group with no presence in the country. HT is not even banned by General Sisi as it poses no threat to the Egyptian government55 More recently, HT had again sought nusrah from the Sudanese military, following the deposition of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Again, this was deemed problematic by many former HT members, who pointed out the contradiction again in HT’s position. In an editorial shortly after al-Bashir stepped down, HT’s Central Media office argued that 312

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regardless of al-Bashir’s resignation, the old elites linked to the West remained entrenched within the political system as seen from the appointment of General Awad Mohamed Ahmed Ibn Auf, the defense minister and a confidant of al-Bashir as the interim leader of Sudan. The examples of Egypt and Sudan indicated to many HT members that the group’s central leadership, especially the Amir, lacked the finesse to lead to any significant movement and was contradictory in their stance on a number of issues. Former HT members have criticized the HT’s central leadership for a number of failed coup attempts, which many argued were stymied by the indecisiveness of the Amir. This is especially so in South Asia. Since the late 2000s, there has been an increase in the number of HT chapters in South Asia, which became an important region of focus for HT after Pakistan officially became a nuclear state. The Amir of HT had issued a circular to HT leaders and members to focus on Pakistan and the neighboring countries of Bangladesh and India. The argument that was proposed by the Amir was that Pakistan, being a nuclear-armed state, could declare the Caliphate, and Western powers would be cautious in dealing with a Caliphate state in possession of nuclear weapons. There was a need for HT to have a presence in Bangladesh, as the country couyd support the Caliphate in Pakistan when it is declared. HT members from Britain of South Asian origin traveled back to Pakistan and Bangladesh and by 2000 had established HT chapters in both countries.56 By the early 2000s, HT had established a strong enough network within the Pakistani military that the group was banned in 2003.57 According to Michael Kugelman, HT had been proselytizing among officials in inner circles who have the power to bring the government down from within; HT had not only been recruiting high-ranking military officers, but also affluent educated urbanites, and students at prestigious private universities.58 In 2012, a number of senior Pakistani military officers were arrested, after it was revealed that they were planning a coup and had also planned an uprising in Pakistan similar to the rallies and protests in Egypt.59 A source within HT noted that the Amir of HT was apparently in Pakistan during the 2012 coup attempt, and had instructed HT members to continue with the coup plan after he left Pakistan. This delay resulted in Pakistani intelligence discovering and successfully foiling the plan. Similarly in Bangladesh, the group was banned in 2009 for posing a threat to public interest.60 After this ban, HT continued to maintain close contacts with some high-ranking military Bangladeshi officials. In December 2011, the Bangladeshi government arrested some members of the Bangladesh military who claimed to have links with HT, and were plotting again the government. The plot was allegedly hatched by Major Syed Mohammad Ziaul Huq and that “up to 16 Islamist military officers – including at least two retired officers – were involved.”61 All the officers are believed to be HT members. In the cases of both Bangladesh and Pakistan, the coup attempts were poorly planned, without considering the viability of success. This was clearly reflected in an open letter to the Amir by the former HT leader Shaykh Abdul Latif Mahmood Uwaydah, who stressed the Amir’s recklessness in his ignorance that the East and West together will not allow the establishment of the Caliphate.62 Likewise, others have highlighted the failure of the HT leadership to garner enough support at the level of the masses – a requirement before any attempt to assume power is allowed within the group’s ideology in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh where coup attempts had failed, or in Egypt and Sudan where HT does not have enough support.63

The increasing authoritarian turn in the leadership While the issue of the lack of transparency has been much discussed by many former HT members, the rise of ISIS has exacerbated this problem.64 HT stipulates that any concerns 313

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about the decisions made by its leadership are to be raised through the “the party structure” – essentially, questions can be posed to the local leader from the member who parrots answers from the group’s literature. Further questions will be posed to the group’s upper echelon and can progress all the way to the Amir himself. The debacle over support for jihad in Syria and cooperation with the Turkish and Syrian authorities has led to the sacking of a number of key HT leaders, including a number of central committee leaders and the Amir’s son-in-law. When chastising those who questioned his leadership, the Amir had referred to these individuals as “infidels” who are working for the interest of the Jordanian and Western intelligence services. There has been no attempt by the Amir of HT to address claims over support for jihadist groups and links to the Turkish government.

Conclusion: The future of HT Commentaries on HT have suggested that the group poses a growing security threat that is bigger than ISIS. One report suggested that HT is more dangerous, as it quietly builds a global infrastructure of radicalized youth and deep-pocketed Arab support in preparation for the global Caliphate, and that its alleged 1 million strong membership is much larger than that of ISIS.65 Governments in the Muslim world view HT as a menace that must dealt with, using hard security measures. The group is banned in most of the Muslim world – Indonesia is the latest country to ban the group.66 However, such claims are often factually inaccurate and are not supported by actual data. In the late 2010s, the membership of HT in Indonesia, which is one of the largest chapters of the group, stood at 30,000.67 Given that its membership in the Middle East, Europe and Africa often number only several hundred members in most countries, it would be a stretch to imagine that its membership exceeds more than a hundred thousand worldwide. The reality is that HT is a movement that is in decline. As shown in this chapter, the group was badly affected by the Arab Spring and the emergence of ISIS, as it could not muster enough resources especially at the level of membership to respond effectively to these developments. In the process, the HT’s leadership devised several strategies that ran contrary to the principles that the group has long upheld, such as avoiding working or assisting jihadist groups, working with government authorities and facilitating armed uprising by its members. The large number of HT key leaders being either sacked and resigning, indicate an implosion that is unprecedented in the group’s history. Its focus on the Arab world and its failure to understand the local contexts of countries where they are operating, as well as the leadership’s naivety in attempting to assume power in Pakistan, Sudan, Bangladesh and Egypt, have created further frustrations. The lack of any recourse to challenge or correct the Amir of HT will likely result in even larger numbers of HT members leaving the group. Some may decide to completely renounce Islamist activism, or form splinter groups with different ideologies and methodologies to achieve the group’s objectives. This is especially so if the current Amir, who is now 77, would pass away.

Notes 1 Hizb-ut-Ta’khir translates as the “Party of Postponement” while the official party title Hizb-utTahrir translates as the “Party of Liberation”. 2 Emmanuel Karagiannis, Political Islam in Central Asia: The Challenge of Hizb-ut-Tahrir (London: Routledge, 2009), and Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Political Islam: Identity, Ideology and Religio-Political Mobilization (London: Routledge, 2018).

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Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the age of ISIS 3 Ken Ward, “Non-violent Extremists? Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 63, no.2 (2009): 149–164, and Burhanuddin Muhtadi, “The Quest for Hizbut Tahrir in Indonesia,” Asian Journal of Social Science 37, no. 4 (January 2009): 623–645. 4 Michael Whine, “Is Hizb ut-Tahrir Changing Strategy or Tactics?” Center for Eurasian Policy Occasional Research Paper Series I no. 1 (date unknown): 3. 5 For a discussion on the Arab-centric nature of HT, see Suha Taji-Farouki, A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate (London: Greg Seal, 1996). 6 Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia and Political Islam: Identity, Ideology and Religio-Political Mobilisation (London: Routledge, 2018), 136. 7 Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, The Method to Re-Establish the Khilafah and Resume the Islamic Way of Life (London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 2000), 88–110. 8 For a comprehensive explanation of the concept of nusrah see Asif Khan, “The Search for the Nusrah,” Khilafah Magazine 16, no. 1 (2003): 18–21. 9 Taji-Farouki, Fundamental Quest, 2. 10 Interview with former HT leader in India, New Delhi, August 2018. 11 James Brandon and Raffaello Pantucci, “UK Islamists and the Arab Uprisings,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideologies, November 22, 2012, available at www.hudson.org/research/9902-uk-islamistsand-the-arab-uprisings (accessed on October 20, 2019). 12 Brandon and Pantucci, “UK Islamists and the Arab Uprisings.” 13 5pillars, “Interview: Dr Abdul Wahid of Hizb ut Tahrir on the Arab Spring,” April 29, 2013, available at http://5pillarsuk.com/2013/04/29/interview-dr-abdul-wahid-of-hizb-ut-tahrir-on-thearab-spring/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 14 5pillars, “Interview: Dr Abdul Wahid of Hizb ut Tahrir.” 15 Hizb ut-Tahrir, “Arab Spring To Blossom Democracy Or Caliphate?” July 11, 2011, available at https://ht-malaysia.com/arab-spring-to-blossom-democracy-or-caliphate/ 16 The American Foreign Policy Council, “Hizb ut-Tahrir,” World Almanac of Islamism, January 13, 2017, available at http://almanac.afpc.org/hizb-ut-tahrir (accessed on October 30, 2019). 17 Lin Noueihed & Alex Warren, “The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New Era,” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 18 Interview with former HT leader in Britain, October 20, 2018, Kuala Lumpur. 19 American Foreign Policy Council, World Almanac of Islamism 2014 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 987. 20 Nahda Productions, “Tunisia Revolt 2011: Hizb ut Tahrir’s Leaflet Read Out in Mosques,” Youtube Video, January 15, 2011, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJlMDwaEsZ0&list= PUC3I-bZKqSwr3bDqr1chu5w&index=182 (accessed on October 30, 2019). 21 5pillars, “Interview: Dr Abdul Wahid of Hizb ut Tahrir.” 22 Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, “Islam Online Interviews Leader of Hizb-ut-Tahrir Egypt,” October 18, 2011, available at www.hizb.org.uk/dawah/central-dawah/islamonline-interviews-spokesman-ofhizb-ut-tahrir-in-egypt/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 23 Khilafah.com, “Hizb ut-Tahrir Wilayah Egypt: Khilafah Constitution Campaign at al-Noor Masjid in alAbbasiyya/Cairo,” October 12, 2012, available at webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: yTU3adS6e_QJ:www.khilafah.com/hizb-ut-tahrir-wilayah-egypt-khilafah-constitution-campaignat-al-noor-masjid-in-al-abbasiyya-cairo/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sg (accessed on October 30, 2019). 24 Interview with former HT leader, August 2019, New Delhi. 25 Firas Choufi, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Syria: The Regime Will Cede to the Islamic Caliphate,” Islam.ru, May 3, 2012, available at http://islam.ru/en/content/story/hizb-ut-tahrir-syria-regime-will-cedeislamic-caliphate (accessed on October 30, 2019). 26 Ata Bin Khalil Abu Al-Rashtah, “Q&A: Hizb ut Tahrir and the Syrian Revolution,” Khilafah.com, July 16, 2013, available at webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:y7dSPFHIsIIJ:www. khilafah.com/qaa-hizb-ut-tahrir-and-the-syrian-revolution/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sg (accessed on October 30, 2019). 27 Tariq Ahmed, “Hizb ut-Tahrir in the Syrian Revolution,” Suwar Magazine, December 7, 2016, available at http://suwar-magazine.org/details/Hizb-ut-Tahrir-in-the-Syrian-Revolution/895/en (accessed on October 30, 2019). 28 Ahmed, “Hizb ut-Tahrir in the Syrian Revolution.” 29 Ahmed, “Hizb ut-Tahrir in the Syrian Revolution.”

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30 Interview with Former Chairman of HT Indonesia Muhammad Al-Khaththath, March 8, 2019. Also, for narratives by former members of HT with regards to this issue on a website set up by former HT members calling for the removal of the Amir of HT, see Reform and Renewal, “Testimonials: Ata Abu Rashta’s weapons support to ‘jihadis’ in Syria & punishment of concerned members,” March 8, 2018, available at https://fikralislami.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/weapons/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 31 For more on ISIS, see Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2016), and Fawaz A. Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 32 Crescent International, “Islamic Scholars Reject Baghdadi’s US Sponsored Khilafah,” July 7, 2014, available at https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articles/islamic-scholars-reject-baghdadi-s-us-sponsoredkhilafah (accessed on October 30, 2019). 33 Ata Bin Khalil Abu Al-Rashtah, “Q & A: Regarding ISIS Declaration of Khilafah,” Khilafah.com, July 3, 2014, available at webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pO9oOwnL7TgJ:www. khilafah.com/qaa-regarding-isis-declaration-of-khilafah/+&cd=14&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sg (accessed on October 30, 2019). 34 Ata bin Khalil Abu Al-Rashtah, “Regarding the Declaration of Khilafah by ISIS,” Hizb.Australia. org, July 2, 2014, available at www.hizb-australia.org/2014/07/regarding-what-has-been-declaredby-isis-about-the-establishment-of-the-khilafah/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 35 Shafik Mandhai, “Muslim Leaders Reject Baghdadi’s Caliphate,” Al-Jazeera, July 7, 2014, available at www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/muslim-leaders-reject-baghdadi-caliphate20147744058773906.html (accessed on October 30, 2019). 36 Taji Mustafa, “Hizb ut-Tahrir is Totally Opposed to Isis,” The Guardian, October 7, 2015, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/07/hizb-ut-tahrir-is-totally-opposed-to-isis (accessed on October 30, 2019). 37 Simon Tisdall and Anna Ridout, “British Jihadis in Bangladesh Fanning Flames of Extremism, says Dhaka,” The Guardian, September 16, 2015, available at www.theguardian.com/world/ 2015/sep/16/british-jihadis-bangladesh-extremism-uk-isis-sheikh-hasina (accessed on October 30, 2019). 38 The American Foreign Policy Council, “Hizb ut-Tahrir,” World Almanac of Islamism, January 13, 2017, available at http://almanac.afpc.org/hizb-ut-tahrir (accessed on October 30, 2019). 39 Osman Bakhach, “The Vicious and Wrongful Attempts to link Hizb ut Tahrir to ISIS,” Khilafah. com, November 29, 2015, available at webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:biMHcJ4a coUJ:www.khilafah.com/the-vicious-and-wrongful-attempts-to-link-hizb-ut-tahrir-to-isis/ +&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sg (accessed on October 30, 2019). 40 Ahmed, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the Syrian Revolution.” 41 5Pillars, “ISIS Executes Senior Hizb ut-Tahrir Member in Syria,” November 21, 2014, available at http://5pillarsuk.com/2014/11/21/isis-executes-senior-hizb-ut-tahrir-member-in-syria-withouttrial/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 42 This is clearly stated in Article 31 of HT’s draft constitution for the Islamic State written by the group’s founder Al-Nabhani. Article 31. It states that for an individual to become the Khalifah, he must fulfill the following basic conditions: Male, Muslim, Free, Mature, Sane and Just. See Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, The Islamic State (London: Khilafah Publishers, 1998), 245. 43 Reform and Renewal, “The Causes of Failure of Hizb ut-Tahrir and How to Take Lessons (from it) – Dr Tawfeeq Mustafa,” June 22, 2019, available at https://fikralislami.wordpress.com/2019/ 06/22/the-causes-of-failure-of-hizb-ut-tahrir-and-how-to-take-lessons-from-it-dr-tawfeeq-mustafa/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 44 Muhammad Taufiqurrohman and Ardi Putra Prasetya, “A Rising Indonesian Jihadist Plotter: Bahrum Naim”, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 8, no. 11 (2016): 8. 45 ABC, “Jakarta Bombing: Attackers, Civilians Killed in Blasts Claimed by Islamic State, Police Say,” June 23, 2016, available at www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-14/jakarta-bombing-suspected-terroristscivilians-dead-after-attack/7089218?nw=0 46 Ahmad Abu Qadoum, “Exposing the Injustices of the Ameer of Hizb-ut-Tahrir,” Reform and Renewal, August 4, 2019, available at https://fikralislami.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/ht-ameersson-in-laws-letter-exposing-his-injustices/ (accessed on October 30, 2019). 47 For a discussion on HT’s position on jihad, see Hizb-ut-Tahrir, The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilizations (London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 2002), 57.

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Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the age of ISIS 48 Reform and Renewal, “‘Defensive Jihad’, Syria & Hizb ut-Tahrir: Q&A from the Hizb’s positions and Fiqh of Jihad,” March 13, 2018, https://fikralislami.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/jihadanswers/ (accessed on November 30, 2019). 49 For HT’s view on taxes, see Adnan Khan, “Islam and Taxation,” Khilafah.com, July 4, 2009, available at www.khilafah.com/islam-and-taxation/ (accessed on November 30, 2019). 50 Hizb-ut-Tahrir United Kingdom, “Amir of Hizb-ut-Tahrir Addressed Sincere Revolutionaries and People of Syria,” 31 January 2013, available at www.hizb.org.uk/real-change/amir-of-hizb-uttahrir-addresses-sincere-revolutionaries-and-people-of-syria/ (accessed on November 30, 2019). 51 Interview with Muhammad Al-Khaththath, Former Chairman of HT Indonesia, August 20, 2019, Jakarta. 52 For a discussion of the coup attempt in Bangladesh and Pakistan see Houriya Ahmed, “Hizb ut-Tahrir and its Failed Coup in Bangladesh,” Henry Jackson Society, January 20, 2012, available at https:// henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/01/20/hizb-ut-tahrir-and-its-failed-coup-in-bangladesh/ 53 Interview with Muhammad al-Khaththath. 54 Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren, The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2012), 80, and Anne Wolf, Political Islam in Tunisia: The History of Ennahda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 146. 55 Interview with Former HT Member, August 30, 2019, New Delhi 56 For more on HT Pakistan, see Farhan Zahid, “The Caliphate in South Asia: A Profile of Hizb-ut Tahrir in Pakistan,” Terrorism Monitor 12, no. 14 (2014), and Muhammad Amir Rana, Profile: Hizbut Tahrir in Pakistan and Impact (Pakistan: Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, 2010) 57 Zeyno Baran, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency,” The Nixon Center, December 2004, available at www.bits.de/public/documents/US_Terrorist_Attacks/Hizbut-ahrirIslam’sPoliticalInsur gency.pdf 58 Michael Kugelman, “Another Threat in Pakistan, in Sheep’s Clothing,” The New York Times, August 3, 2012, available at www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/opinion/hizb-ut-tahrir-threatenspakistan-from-within.html?mcubz=3 59 Irfan Ghauri and Zia Khan, “Intelligence Warning: Hizb ut-Tahrir Planned ‘Arab Spring’ in Pakistan,” The Express Tribune, July 25, 2011, available at https://tribune.com.pk/story/216828/intelligencewarning-hizb-ut-tahrir-planned-arab-spring-in-pakistan/ 60 BBC News, “Bangladesh Islamist Group Banned,” October 23, 2009, available at http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/8321329.stm (accessed on October 30, 2018). 61 Ahmed, “HT Bangladesh.” 62 Reform and Renewal, “The Stronger Message,” January 12, 2018, available at https://fikralislami. wordpress.com/2018/01/12/abuiyas-13-01-2018-e/(accessed on 30 October 2018). 63 Abu Khaled Al Hejazi (Former HT leader in Saudi Arabia), “Letter to Ameer of Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Reasons for Resignation,” June 14, 2018, available at https://fikralislami.wordpress.com/2019/06/ 02/letter-from-abukhaled-al-hejazi/ 64 For a discussion on the lack of accountability in HT, see Ed Husain, The Islamist (London: Penguin, 2007); Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism (Guilford: Globe Pequot Press, 2016), and Umm Mustafa, “Why I left Hizb ut-Tahrir,” The New Statesman, February 28, 2008, available at www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/02/party-hizb-tahrir-members (accessed on October 30, 2019). 65 Economic Times, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir May Become More Dangerous than ISIS: Report,” February 15, 2015, available at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/hizb-uttahrir-may-become-dangerous-than-isis-report/articleshow/46251520.cms?from=mdr (accessed on November 30, 2018). 66 For an example of an alarmist report on HT in Indonesia, see Moh. Iqbal Ahnaf, “How Harmful is HTI to Indonesian Pluralism?” The Jakarta Post, June 28, 2019, available at www.thejakartapost. com/academia/2019/06/28/how-harmful-is-hti-to-indonesian-pluralism.html 67 Osman, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, 130.

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24 MILITANT GOODNESS AND TOTALIZED MEANINGS Some interpretations of jihad among Tajiks Sophie Roche

Introduction When a Tajik man suddenly disappeared from his apartment in Russia, his father travelled to Russia hoping to find him. His son was a migrant worker who, like a million other Central Asians, had moved to Russia to find work. He had been working as a taxi driver in Moscow before he disappeared. The desperate father turned to other Tajiks in Moscow who were well connected; they found his son’s car outside Moscow, but no trace of the man himself. The father then learned that his son had left Russia for Syria. This news left the father deeply troubled, and initially in disbelief. However, he later remembered how his son would watch video clips featuring the desperate situation of Palestinians and would express anger and frustration to his father about what he described as the “hopeless situation of Muslims in the world.” He had behaved at times as though he was personally affected by the experiences of Muslims elsewhere in the world.1 When his father searched further for answers, the son’s co-workers (also taxi drivers) confirmed to him that his son had decided to go and fight, unable to “passively bear” the “situation of Muslims in the world” any longer. By 2015, taxi drivers in Moscow had established a network of recruitment to Syria via the Caucasus. Through this route, the young man had travelled to Syria, leaving back in Tajikistan his parents, a wife and children. The desire to save a vulnerable group from unfair domination, known as “Robin Hood activism”, is not limited to this story, but a principle that this chapter shall identify as “militant goodness”. While the activism of militant goodness adopts similar concepts and rhetoric across different cultures, the socio-political context, the stories, images and tools of activists differ. Hence, it is not enough to generalize about militant goodness without examining the forms it takes. In this chapter, the author will take a closer look at activism in Tajikistan, and also by Tajiks living elsewhere, from a social anthropological perspective. To date, most research on militant activism in Central Asia has been carried out by political scientists and hence differs to a certain degree from studies made from the social anthropological angle.2 The hypothesis raised in this chapter is that militant goodness is shaped by a value culture of resistance which is driven by the fundamental need of humans for recognition.3 By suggesting this approach, the author wishes to move away from assuming that political or religious ideologies predefine action. Equally, she would like to 318

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abstain from explaining militantism through psychological, functional, activist, or other approaches, which have been explored in relation to Islamic activism in Central Asia.4 Instead, this chapter first provides a patchwork of historical events in which jihad is said to have appeared as a reference and secondly, examines individuals’ use of the term over the past twenty years. Jihad, as a key term to describe militant goodness, is at the centre of this contribution. Works which place the concept of an Islamized value culture central to their analysis argue that individuals take up the term “jihad” in various socio-political contexts as an expression of moral, political, or cultural resistance. Militant goodness refers to interpretative modes of aggressive activism that obscures violence and other negative effects of activism. Much has been written on the concept of jihad and its theological base and historical development. Most of this literature focuses on Arabic-speaking countries, although thorough socio-historical studies also exist focusing on other parts of the world, such as in the Caucasus or Indonesia.5 Although believers may emphasize the unchangeable character of theology, jihad exemplifies the fact that theological concepts develop alongside their socio-political contexts and hence remain dynamic and mouldable. Shahram Akbarzadeh reminds us that since at least the mid-twentieth century, when decolonization processes began, jihad has become an integral part of Islamism and political national opposition.6 Rudolf Peters,7 among others, has argued that the classic doctrine of jihad in fiqh (Arab. fiqh, Islamic law) is not exhaustive8 but, if unspecified, means “fighting the unbelievers for religion’s sake”.9 However, the wider definition of jihad in literature has been to “exert oneself as much as one can.”10 Other interpretations include: fighting non-believers, the jihad of heart and tongue, the struggle against one’s sinful inclinations known as amri ma‛ruf * (or Arab. amr bi-l-maʿrū f, religious teaching), jihad of the hand and jihad of the sword. In no historical period has jihad been given the same definition by all fronts. At times, holy wars were fought in the Middle East and others in Spain or China in which the concept of jihad was employed by militants. This chapter looks at the use of jihad in Central Asia and provides a closer ethnographic study of its use in Tajikistan. The nation of Tajikistan today is a relatively recent creation of Soviet politics of the 1920s. Since independence in 1991, Tajikistan has struggled to be accepted as a state by the international community and to define its borders, a process that resulted in a civil war in 1992–97. Religious activism has been continuous in Tajikistan, but has changed in relation to the political regime in power at the time. It is hence part of what Akbarzadeh has discussed as Islamism,11 a way to voice dissent towards the current regime, most often in a climate of national political tensions. For the former Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the movement founded by Sayyid Abdullah Nuri in the 1970s plays a central role. The nature of religious activism shifted in the 1990s, significantly again during the civil war, and today it has developed a new dimension in reaction to recent politics. Militant activism is shaped by more than individual religious beliefs or convictions, it is created by the socio-political environment in which it develops. Militant activism does not necessarily involve the use of weapons, but engagement in militant activism does involve at least some level of acceptance of using physical violence against others. This definition also applies to the concept of jihad; however, jihad is not merely a tool of war. Jihad also includes non-violent engagements, as described above, such as “jihad of the pen”, “jihad of the tongue” or the inner struggle against nafs (ego), to name a few. What the various internal and external jihads have in common with militant activism is that they express activism in a religious moral vocabulary that suggests this activism is inherently good in a religious sense. “Militant goodness” captures the morality that activists accord to their 319

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violent political engagement. As such it focuses on the perception of the group or individuals rather than on sociological classifications of political militant activism. The example of Tajikistan is particularly interesting as religious activism began during the Soviet period and changed with the country’s independence: from the Soviet Union turning against an imagined imperial world power to the individual struggle for a utopian Islamic state in Syria. This development of religious activism over a relatively short period of time (thirty years) moves hand-in-hand with developments in access to information, religious teaching materials and global politics. While in all cases, the activists were convinced to follow an all-Muslim agenda, their socio-political goals varied considerably, as did the material bases and communication technologies through which information was accessible to them at the time.

A short overview of the history of jihad in Central Asia While the term “jihad” is assumed to have a fairly solid base in theological material, studies have shown that it has changed over time in different theological schools and depending on the socio-political context. Central Asia, on the periphery of the Muslim world, has been of little interest in this matter, as concepts tend to be defined in political and theological centres. Hence, historical records on jihad in Central Asia have been scarce. The study of Masami Hamada,12 for instance, provides insight into fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Central Asia and the struggle between the Turkic nomadic groups’ pressure from the north, and from the south, the Chinese Empire and Moghuls presiding as far north as Turfan in Xinjiang. Jihad was employed, Hamada argues, as part of an economically rather than religiously motivated struggle between Chinese and Turkic rival groups.13 Over time, jihad moved from being an expansionist term to one referring to the defending of an Islamic territory. The controversial use of jihad became even more visible under Tsarist rule. Widely discussed (and probably overvalued regarding its political impact) is the Andijā n uprising in 1898 in the Ferghana Valley, “when about 2000 followers of Madali (Dukchi) Ishan, a minor Sufi shaykh, attacked the Russian barracks in Andijā n”.14 While the nineteenth century was filled with similar rebellious episodes,15 this event was picked up by later religious leaders and still figures in resistance narratives today. One reason for this is that the leader of this revolt, Dukchi Ishan, considered the uprising to be a religious event. In contrast, Aftandil Erkinov16 has uncovered documents that illustrates how mullahs in Central Asia called on the population to pray for the Russian Tsar, so Islam was by no means an oppositional religion per se. Considerable reforms took place at the turn of the twentieth century in South Asia and Afghanistan, with the emergence of new religious-political figures. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and the Deoband School contributed to changing Islam from a traditional theology into a political ideology and military enterprise. Revolutionary activities here turned, on the one hand, against British rule, and on the other, scholars called Muslims to join hands with the Bolsheviks emerging on the political map in Russia: “Oh Muhammadans . . . listen to this divine cry. Respond to this call of liberty, equality and brotherhood which Comrade Lenin and the Soviet Government of Russia are offering to you”.17 One of the last efforts of the young socialist state to use Islamic militant activism was undertaken by Leo Trotsky and his idea of a “world revolution”. It was only during the Great Patriotic War (World War II) that Islam was institutionalized within the Soviet Union, in the country’s efforts to maintain control over its Muslim population. 320

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According to Jeff Eden,18 the main official religious figure in Central Asia, Ishan Babakhanov, who was to become the leader of the official Islamic institution, the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) in 1943, had called upon Muslims to engage in a jihad against Hitler in 1943. Later, Ziyauddin Babakhanov (1908–82) was appointed head of SADUM when it was experiencing internal conflicts over what theological direction Islam in Central Asia should take. Babakhanov called the “Muslims of Turkestan” to “join the ranks in this general and sacred jihad (umū mı̄ va muqaddas jihā d), this holy war (ghazā t)” and to fight the “traditional corrupt authorities”.19 The traditional authorities enjoyed great respect among the population, which included religious lineages (eshons) as well as imams and other administrative personnel and landowners of the Emirate of Bukhara (e.g., bay).20 The relationship between the official personnel and the Soviet regime was filled with tension, indeed “it should also be kept in mind that the relationship between the ‘ulamā ’ and the Soviet state broke down from the very beginning of sovietisation.”21 The inner-Soviet struggle among Muslims in the 1920s was the one between reformists (jadid) and traditionalists. The former had followed the revolutionary movements in Turkey (such as the Young Turks) and joined with the Bolsheviks from Russia, but then were abruptly eliminated in the 1936–38 purges. The fight against “traditional corrupt authorities” and “cultural innovations” remained a central issue also when SADUM was established. The criticisms were turned against various practices such as pilgrimage to holy sites (mazars), healing practices of various kinds that were widespread all over the region (many of them especially by women) and many more practices in relation to life cycle rituals or feasts.22 Sufi saints drew their authority from masculine symbols (e.g., horsemanship) as well as from the concepts of miracles and healing.23 The criticisms that reform scholars made against the role of religious authorities in local communities, as well as various religious practices, can be contextualized within theological debates as the “schism” in Central Asian Islam, as Babajanov and Kamilov24 tentatively refer to it. Stéphane Dudoignon25 suggests that this Kulturkampf was going on between the Fergana-born Uzbekspeaking higher echelons of the Spiritual Board and the Persian-speaking leaders of great Sufi lineages with roots in Bukhara and Samarkand – a debate between legal and gnostic positions in Islam. The lack of written sources has made it a challenge for historians to reconstruct these debates and identify the relevant subjects of dispute and vocabulary used. It seems, however, that the term “jihad” was not used during most of the Soviet period until the war in Afghanistan began. At least, ordinary Muslims could not remember having heard the term – whereas the term “shahid” was used among ordinary Muslims for people who died unexpectedly and through external circumstances. When mujahed groups in Afghanistan opposed the Soviet troops in the late 1970s, militant terms like “afghanski mujakhed” became associated with the enemy rather than with political opposition. The term “jihad” did not become popular along with the term “mujahed”, but featured as a concept in theological debates, as seen in an exchange of letters between the scholar Domullah Hindustani (born Muhammadjon Rustamov, 1892–1989) and an anonymous writer.26 Access to this exchange of letters made Domullah Hindustani into a key authority in academic writings. It is important to highlight that there have been also larger regional theological debates amongst various scholars which have attracted much less scholarly attention.27 The following passages are taken from the anonymous letter addressed to Domullah Hindustani. In this letter (taken from Rahnamo),28 a historical continuity of jihad is assumed and jihad is linked to militant resistance to the existing regime. 321

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Those who do jihā d in the way of God and reach the place of shahodat, which is the highest place; you have declared those who never spared an effort on this path as oppositionist, you made yourself innocent (whiten) before the enemies of God [communists] . . .29 Those who fight the holy jihā d in Afghanistan and face the enemy and occupiers on the way to fulfilling the religious obligation of jihā d, which is farzi ‘ain [religious obligation] until the Day of Judgement, do not allow fear and do not shake with fear while on the way to gaining a place among the shahı̄ ds, you accused them of being quarrelsome. And you make compromises with the communists, who distort the meaning of the sura of God for their own purposes, or does the sura which [speaks of] the enemy of God and the aggressors of Islamic territory, include the communists? Did you forget the first verse? Or the verse [verse in Arabic] that there are two groups of believers – the honoured holy war of jihā d by the Afghan Muslims is right – did you overlook this passage? There is war between Islam and kufr, between the tribe of believers, on the one hand, and tribes of unbelievers, on the other hand, not between two tribes of believers. God called the believers brothers (barodar), believers and unbelievers can never be brothers, even if they are brothers by descent and thus have an eternal relation. The Afghan communists are the brothers of Marx and Lenin, not Muslim brothers. You made fun of the great mujā hid Shahid Ishan, Dukchı̄ -Ishan (which is his lakab, his real name is Muhamadamin Ishan),30 you called it fitna, for this you will have to answer to God. Of all those I have read who were mujā hid, I have most sympathy for this mujā hid. A real Ishan has to teach the murids who follow in his path, just as Dukchı̄ -Ishan taught the jihā d and the good of martyrdom.31 This letter exchange came to be one of the main historical example discussed among religious and secular scholars. Beyond this, various religious groups, which have gathered throughout the Soviet Union from the 1970s onwards, have developed their own ideas regarding world events. Their material has been drawn from a world divided into two blocs – the Eastern-Socialist versus the Western bloc – with information and human exchange taking place within the blocs but little between them. Once the Soviet–Afghan war broke out fully, militant terminology such as mujahed would be associated with the Afghan resistance armies. Adeeb Khalid situates the beginning of “jihadism” in Central Asia to this Afghan struggle.32 However, this does not mean that these notions were appropriated by Tajik opposition activists. A decade prior to this struggle, a group of young scholars had come together with the goal to educate themselves and selected individuals in religious subjects. This youth group around Sayyid Abdullo Nuri was the origin of the later Nahzat group. The group joined into the hujra system which had spread across Central Asia, in which the children of religious authorities could receive a religious education by joining study groups conducted by a master. This system ensured that theological debates would remain alive throughout the Soviet period, but access was restricted to those with a religious genealogical line. What was new for the Nahzat group was the inclusion of young people with no religious family background. This phenomenon will be explored in the following section. According to discussions with Nahzat members, jihad slowly emerged as a path of resistance to Communism that some brave Afghan fighters exemplified. New literature became available through Tajik-Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and information about Iran’s Islamic Revolution was brought back by exchange students. Each little book was received 322

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with great appreciation and translated into Tajik or other languages. A student reported to have come into contact with a book called Haqiqati jihod dar Afghoniston (The Effort of Conducting Jihad in Afghanistan) during this period. Another student remembered how he was fascinated by the book Tafsiri surai fotiha alham (Commentary on the Sura Fotiha Alham) from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – something he would never read again today, as he explained that now he is able to contextualize the literature. Their lack of comparison and expertise left young people to find their own interpretations for their readings. This created an environment in which literature from outside, when it was received, was usually eagerly accepted. However, we cannot conclude that young people became indoctrinated by this literature. On the contrary, the absence of authorities to situate each little booklet within theological debates, meant that the literature often created interesting disputes, but did not necessarily provide an entrance into radical Islamism or a particular movement. The Soviet–Afghan war was not the blueprint for the Tajik conflict nor was the Afghan literature relevant for the opposition’s political demands. The civil war in Tajikistan grew out of disputes over political leadership within a post-colonial, deeply polarized society, fueled by militants’ easy access to weapons. The political development of the civil war has been described competently in wider literature and hence, shall not be repeated here.33 What matters for this analysis, is understanding the way in which religious notions were implemented by groups as the conflict developed. The majority of the population heard about ideas of religious militancy during the mass demonstrations in the capital Dushanbe in 1992. While pro-regime people demonstrated in Ozodi Square, the opposition had already gathered in Shahidon Square.34 According to Abdullohi Rahnamo, the demonstrators were first exposed to religious-militant language, when the protests’ victims were given a public funeral in Shahidon Square. As the civil war developed, the opposition gathered around the strongest party: the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan. Taking refuge in Afghanistan, different international and national organizations provided them with aid. While Western organizations provided aid to the Mazar-e Sharif refugee camp, Muslim-world countries supported the Kundus refugee camp. Children in the latter camp were offered the choices of studying in madrassas in Pakistan or getting a training in order to receive education in Saudi Arabia. The concept of jihad “normalized” as the civil war continued, came to be used for an ever-increasing number of activities. While during the early 1990s, jihad could be contextualized within a political culture that epitomized a clear “other” (the Communists), this ideological opposition dissolved as the civil war persisted. Jihad eventually received a “totalizing meaning”, as the scholar Rahnamo explained in an interview. This made the term applicable for describing struggles which ranged from combat, to local disputes, such as rivalry between two men seeking marriage with the same woman. While theological approaches assume that the term “jihad” remains linked to some original texts, the Tajik example demonstrates its strong link to practice. Jihad, for the large majority of Muslims, became a relevant notion in ongoing conflicts. This again is interesting, as this perspective reflects how understandings of jihad depend on the context, political period and references available. In the following sections, individual actors share their experiences with the author. The individual position is given particular attention along with the socio-political context within which this position is articulated. With this approach, the author wishes to deconstruct the linearity of militant activism that emerges when separate events are lined up in academic or analytical articles, which leads to the simplification of what can be complicated processes, as well as to inaccurate labelling of whole groups and regions. The “security problem” and “terrorist threat” which haunt the writings of think-tanks studying 323

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the region derives from this practice of lining up events as if they are logically linked to one another, even if the socio-political context differs radically as well as the actors involved. The inability of many analysts to focus on specific conflicts (regardless of how small they may be) has created a topography of terrorism in which certain places have become marked as dangerous and henceforth, every conflict that takes place there automatically confirms the danger with which it is associated.

Methods The material for this chapter was gathered through more than 15 years of social anthropological research and ethnographic fieldwork in the region and among Tajiks in Moscow and Istanbul. The chapter does not focus on religious scholars in Tajikistan, but on various young people, particularly young men, who choose to identify as Muslim, but do not derive their religious status from a sacred family line of descent. My primary interest lies with the popularization of jihad and its link to social and political events rather than the theological development of the term. “Popularization” refers to knowledge production outside professional discourse; it suggests the inclusion of many people beyond the specialized knowledge community, and overcomes the divide between the highly specialized knowledge of experts and the knowledge of ordinary people, between the elites and the masses. In her thesis,35 Bettina Gräf has demonstrated the popularizing of Islamic law in the fatwa production of al-Qaradawi and the influence this process has on all modes of social and cultural production beyond politics. In Central Asia, the popularization of expert knowledge began in the 1970s when religious learning was opened to non-lineage groups and Islamizdat literature became available to the masses. In order to study the social dimension of the term, I not only surveyed a wide range of social groups, including a variety of age groups and both genders in those groups, but also conducted interviews with Tajik scholars, such as Abdullohi Rahnamo, who has written about religious authorities in Tajikistan; Muhamadali Haitov, who was an interpreter during the Afghan–Soviet war and later joined the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT); representatives of the fatwa department from the Committee on Religious Affairs in Dushanbe, and local mullahs. Beyond the interviews with political and religious experts, the material used in this chapter draws primarily from ordinary young people who grew up in rural villages, received a basic education in Islam, and engaged with the social and political problems of their times.

Learning about jihad The introduction mentions the intervention of the Soviet–Afghan war and how the term “mujahed” became connected with Soviet oppositional activities. Recent research has demonstrated that the Soviet–Afghan war did not promote massive upheaval among the Muslim populations of the Soviet Union.36 And yet, at least for my Tajik interlocutor, these Afghan mujaheds appeared brave and inspiring in socio-political ways. In theological debates, we need to differentiate between the scholars with a sacral genealogical descent and religious education, and youth groups who would get hold of booklets from various places in the world. The debates among Domullo Hindustani and other scholars described above were not known to these youths, who were left to interpret the literature on their own. The system of hujra also helped young people gain access to literature and discussions. Whereas the hujra groups around religious authorities have received considerable academic 324

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attention, young people and particularly men also gathered independent of religious networks.37 The Nahzat group was eager to train youth of different social and political backgrounds. However, study groups also formed outside political religious networks such as at university among students: There were discussions about the Afghan jihad where we took our lessons. We believed that the Afghan mujahids fought the right jihad. To fight against the Soviet Union was righteous . . . we were sympathizing with the Afghan mujahids . . . For us students, the idea of jihad came from there . . . Now and again little books circulated from Hekmatyar,38 Sayyaaf,39 and Abdullah Azzam40 thanks to those Soviet soldiers who went to serve in Afghanistan, and brought them back secretly . . . I remember one [book] Tafsiri surai fotiha alham from Hekmatyar. If I think of that today, I wonder. At that time we really liked them, today I think Hekmatyar was one – he was nobody . . . But those years when we were students we liked them so much. (interview with former student of the state university of Dushanbe, 2011) The debates, a Nahzat member suggests, were characterized by enthusiasm rather than theological sophistication. The material was read against a Soviet reality: “The communists helped us with their repressive measures . . . otherwise, we did not have much knowledge, but we had great passion for Islam.” What was thus created over the years can be referred to as a value culture (Wertekultur), that would penetrate all domains of life and position itself against socialist values and Communist leadership, but within a Soviet political rhetoric. During this period, literature coming in from outside the Soviet Union was greeted with fascination by young people, though they did not attain a clear theological orientation with the literature. In fact, different authorities provided them with various interpretations of these booklets. The Islamizdat pamphlets that circulated within Central Asia covered various historical periods, from Muslim Andalusia to Communist politics, and various theological subjects were produced by Muslim writers from a large array of groups and institutions.41 This Islamizdat literature – that is, cheaply produced little pamphlets with an unclear production path and distributed through various channels – was a source of intellectual reflection and inspiration for sacralizing the banal of everyday. It was not an instruction for militant action. During the Tajik civil war of the 1990s, a booklet titled The Mujahid’s Handbook appeared, which contained a mixture of stories of saints, instructions on how to Islamize everyday practices (what to say when waking up, when eating, when entering a house, etc.), a list of weapons, a mujahid treaty “From the code of Abuibrohimi Misrı̄ : The code (treaty) of mujohidin,” as well as a fatwa that forbade Muslims to engage with Communists:42 It is not permitted for a Communist to marry a Muslim woman. If he did marry, his nikoh* [marriage] is invalid and their sexual relation is adultery and their children will be children of parents who committed adultery (valaduzzino). A Communist’s dead body is harom* [unclean]. It is not permitted to wash the dead and wrap him into a kafan [shroud]; it is not possible to read a janoza* [mourning ritual], and it is not allowed to bury him in a Muslim graveyard. Also, his Muslim children cannot inherit from him because members of two different religions – Islam and Communism – cannot inherit from one another. It is a sin to marry a Communist [woman], and even to get close to her. This is a fatwa of Shaikhs from the greatest Islamic Union “Azhar” (in Egypt). 325

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This pamphlet was apparently distributed among fighters of the United Tajik Opposition. However, it was not a handbook for fighters, as it has no advice on military tactics or any other practical use. The booklet is a patchwork of ideologically motivated quotes translated into Tajik, responding to the assumption that Soviet Muslims have “lost” their religious tradition. This idea – that Muslims of the former Soviet lands have “lost their Islamic identity” – became particularly popular during perestroika and in the 1990s. Even in contemporary literature, the argument continues to persist. The plurality of pamphlets and their wide variety of subjects created much disorientation around theological debates. The openness and flexibility that many people demonstrated on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse cannot be understood without this context. It should also be noted that the disorientation produced by the Islamizdat publications does not reflect the scholarly circles, which were less affected by this literature and produced their own writings. Islamizdat did, however, attract ordinary young people who read them – often secretly, without their parents’ knowledge. While it is difficult to map the inner Tajik discussions that were taking place between different generations of students and scholars, the following story provides us with insights into the kinds of discussions people were having regarding knowledge: When Shamsiddin, a young student of the Nahzat movement found a book with pictures and their corresponding Arabic terms, he decided to use it to teach himself Arabic. When he was in class, his teacher found the book and asked him to “put it away” because pictures were “not allowed in Islam”. Shamsiddin obeyed; however, after some time, his teacher revised his decision and permitted him to learn with the book. Shamsiddin explains how he sees this story as an example of how Islam was subject to constant change and that from each publication and idea arose questions and debates. Equally, he remembered reading translated books by popular scholars. This included Arabic scholars like Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brothers and Mawdudi, as well as Persian scholars, whom he found easier to understand than Arabic ones. Against this background, we must be careful not to assume that the concept of jihad was a clear idea brought about or produced by one Islamic movement. Instead, social processes, individual conditions and political activism provided the context against which religious literature was read and interpreted. Militant goodness developed amidst a clear ideological divide that reflected the broader global division between the Eastern and Western blocs; however, the value system that was developed within those groups did not necessarily reflect those of society at large. While practicing Muslims were found at both ends of the ideological spectrum, the development of the all-Union Islamic Renaissance Party that was founded in Astrakhan in June 1990 clearly positioned itself in opposition to the Communist party but within a Soviet political frame. When the Soviet Union collapsed in Tajikistan, political parties competed for power and individuals for positions within the government. Masses of the population mobilized across Tajikistan to further their political goals. Social polarization could be seen in the Dushanbe demonstrations, whereas opposition groups demonstrated in Shahidon Square, and counterdemonstrations took place in Ozodi Square.43 There have been debates about the role that Islam played in these demonstrations. While some argue that religious activism was reserved to the Nahzat group, others claim that mullahs were equally active among the pro-state activists. The scholar Allen Hetmanek, for instance, claims that jihad was a central concept of the IRPT from the very beginning.44 He argues that the IRPT had its fighters trained with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, from whence they brought back clear concepts of jihadist 326

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war. He even claims that Qozi Turajonzoda publicly proclaimed the struggle of jihad in 1992.45 These findings have not been confirmed, either by scholars, or among my interlocutors. Abdullohi Rahnamo, a scholar of the Centre for Strategic Research in Tajikistan, however, recalled learning a couple of religious notions on the square from the opposition: When the first people in the mahalla* [neighbourhood] Oli Sovjet were killed, these dead were declared shahids. Nobody knew really what this is, who that is, but suddenly killing received a new context. The janoza [mourning ritual] of these three killed people was conducted on the square in front of the palace. I still remember the speech of Qori Muhamadjon, which he gave before ten thousand young men: “Today they have martyred three brothers, they have been made shahid (vairo shohid kardand),” he declared at the demonstration. Among the listeners, interest grew in knowing what jihad was, what shahid was – it was fascinating to hear that the blood of a shahid was savob [blessed]. The dead were brought to the square. Young people asked themselves what it could mean to be shahid. Jihad started when they shot against us, when we were attacked. The war was religiously motivated. It was understood as an aggression against Islam. I was a student in the second year and was struggling with the same questions: what is a shahid? what is a mujahid? Then the opposition adopted these terms and explained to us what shahid and shuhado (martyrs) were, and that their struggle against the Communists who fought for the constitution was a jihad. The newspaper Paymoni Mujahid was launched by the party [Nahzat] and existed between 1993 and 1997. It was a very beautiful journal, much better than our newspapers today, probably financed by Iran. There they explained what all these terms meant. We heard from the commanders about jihad.46 Again, we can observe here how militant goodness emerges, as violence becomes part of a political protest. It is not a readily available theology that is taught in schools or mosques. Jihad, more than other religious terms, develops alongside political and religious activism and transforms with experiences and individual interests. The religious vocabulary becomes a way to attribute meaning to political violence and to feelings of frustration which occur as a result of grievances related with socio-political conditions. During the course of the civil war, jihad lost its close link to militant goodness as political opposition, and developed what Rahnamo has called a “totalized meaning”: Then the term received a totalized meaning (manoi totali). By this, I mean that the term was used for all fighters, also when the conflict was about individual interests, or when it was about politics. Everybody was a mujahid. Before the mujahid, people were clean, pure, and namoz: praying with a deep belief of God. Now everybody was mujahid. I remember a confrontation between two commanders in Afghanistan – they were fighting over a girl. At the end, they said that two from this and four from that side had been made shahid. The word changed completely. Now I try to teach the people that there is a difference between a greater and lesser jihad. People here don’t know the terms.47

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The phenomenon of a powerful term receiving a totalized meaning is not exceptional. In the context of post-Soviet Tajikistan, Islam became a reference for different groups of fighters. In this context, the term “jihad” was popularized and became synonymous with war. The civil war remained an internal war with little international interference (with the exception of Russia and Uzbekistan) and there was little recruitment of international fighters. Islamic militant concepts were not adopted or developed systematically, as had been the case ten years before in Afghanistan under the leadership of the Saudi scholars, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and Osama Bin Laden. The weakness of militant religious notions became obvious in the peace process, in that no group demanded the establishment of an Islamic state, but instead called for freedom of religious expression generally.

Individual jihad and popular theology Muhammed, as he calls himself on Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki, is a young boy in his mid-twenties who received a basic religious education in a remote mountainous village in Tajikistan and a school education until year eleven. After this, his family did not allow him to continue his education, and in 2010 they sent him to join his brother in Moscow, working in a bazaar. Muhammed spent most of his spare time engaging in religious discussions with various people via his mobile phone, through social groups on Odnoklassniki.48 He quickly learnt to speak Russian – motivated because he wanted to discuss the Bible with a Russian religious activist he had met online – and not so much in order to be a good trader, which he was less interested in. The name of the group was “Apostle Paul or Muhammad—who was the last prophet of God?” (followed from November 2013 until April 2014). Here, he took an Islamic position on Jesus and God, whereas his Russian counterparts (Yuriy Nikolaevich Ermak and at times also Marina Rerich) took a Christian stance. All three maintained a respectful tone and emphasized that they were interested in engaging in theological arguments with one another and not in passing around blame. Each aspired to impress the others. While none of them had studied theology, Muhammed was convinced that truth was to be found in holy books and that this could be proven through content analysis. In tandem with engaging in theological discussions online, Muhammed studied Arabic and the Qur’an – all with his mobile phone during the endless hours of waiting for customers. When I met him in winter 2014, he was not legally registered to live in Russia and thus, had no choice but to remain at home where he spent his whole day on the Internet. He shared his Internet conversations on religious questions with me and proudly explained that people he communicated with believed he had studied at a madrassa somewhere in the Arab world because his knowledge and theological arguments were “so good”. His religious expertise was a patchwork of copy-and-paste quotations and a basic knowledge of Arabic he had acquired himself. He felt himself as an authority in this virtual world and explained to me that he had read the Bible in order to understand Christianity. However, he was very amused by some of the virtual conversations he engaged in, admitting to inventing stories about the Prophet Muhammad when he felt they could be useful in demonstrating his points. He had his own ideas of what “proof” was. He developed modes of argumentation that were based on his freelance learning in the virtual world. His real, everyday life was monotonous and boring, moving between a flat that he shared with six to ten other people and then endless hours of waiting on customers at the bazaar. Once a month, he was required to deliver money for his “patent” (a type of tax system for migrants in Russia) to the city centre of Moscow. But during these trips he 328

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never visited any tourist sites – apart from the Cathedral Mosque, which he had visited only a few times. Travelling in Moscow can be risky for migrants with unclear documentation, as they may be picked up by the police. It is not unusual for migrants to spend their entire stay in Russia (often many years) inside a bazaar or a limited amount of locations.49 Muhammed took the online theological conversations between Christians and Muslims, or between Ahl Al-Sunna and Shi’a (called “ma’lumote dar borai rofiziyoni takfir” – information about the takfir path) as intellectual stimulation for himself, which compensated for living under his brother’s control and administrative difficulties. In the virtual world, he was eager to present himself as a scholar of Islam and maintained what he considered to be “scholarly conversations” (vy disskusiia khotite? Vybraĭte sami tema, ia gotov’ – “Would you like a discussion? Choose a subject; I am ready.”). Odnoklassniki was used as a platform for discussions or bahs in order to find “The Truth”. He participated in many groups run in parallel – constantly claiming to promote theological discussions and rejecting any insults to his character. The takfir conversations in which Muhammad participated discussed Tajik authorities like Turajonzoda or Hikmatullo, or the question of whether navruz is permissible or not – all classic questions that demonstrate the different theological positions among Tajik Muslims. When he was not arguing, he was searching the Internet for information. His virtual intellectual life contrasted completely with the reality of being a migrant and younger brother (who by custom must obey his elder brother)50 at a bazaar in Moscow. Out of these discussions emerged the idea to engage in conversations about jihad and the Islamic State in Syria held among Salafi-oriented Odnoklassniki members. The conversation he had registered for was conducted primarily among Tajiks; occasionally, Uzbeks joined in. The question of who and what is “Salafi” is crucial to many Tajik youth, who constantly are repositioning themselves within the many Islamic movements. The Salafi movement has some success in Tajikistan. It has experienced periods of close cooperation with the intelligence forces, which have been contrasted by periods of persecution to stop Salafis from becoming politically too visible. Their primary task is to aggressively argue against established and respected religious scholars who derive their popularity from participation in Central Asian hujra networks, as well as genealogical connections. Muhammad held arguments which he would promptly copy and paste in online forums to assert his position. Once, he told me about an ongoing conversation with people who wanted to take up jihad in Syria. In order to justify their decision, they would produce many quotes from the Qur’an in favour of jihad and post them onto Odnoklassniki. Mohammad then checked the quotes and found that each had been taken from a more complete paragraph. His response to these kinds of arguments was to say: “I will join you immediately, if you can prove that fighting in Syria is jihad.” Then, he would complete each quote with the missing part from the Qur’an, which devalued their argument – at least according to his perception. His self-declared mission was to find out whether the war in Syria was a permissible jihad. However, unlike many other youth, he would explore this question independently, searching for religious quotes and interpretations himself. This phenomenon of people collecting arguments from various (and sometimes opposing) religious authorities and interpreting religious quotes in favour of one’s own position has been little researched in the social sciences. It is usually assumed that ordinary people absorb the concepts proposed by authorities or groups, rather than modelling their own views through a patchwork of the ideas available to them. Islamists, Akbarzadeh reminds us, “engage in an unavoidable process of interpretation and intervention” in order to build their ideal Islamic state.51 In the absence of a solid religious education, Muhammad drew his knowledge from countless social media discussions, websites, Qur’anic 329

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interpretations, hence constructing his own interpretation of events in isolation of the religious debates in mosques and religious institutions, or the social world outside the bazaar. I would, however, claim that his approach is not an exception, but a continuation of the practice found since at least the 1980s among the above-mentioned youth groups. Namely, to read everything accessible to one but then to discuss and reason the content against existing socio-political and cultural realities. This does not exclude the fact that certain religious authorities are considered more reliable than others. For Muhammad and many other young men in Moscow, this authority was Eshon Nuriddinjon – a national hero for Muslim Tajik youth, rather than a global influencing scholar. During my stays in Moscow, discussions frequently revolved around Syria. Questions spun around the reasons youth may leave for Syria, the justification for their participation, the role of Tajik politics in spurring the youth to make this decision, and finally, whether it was a religiously permissible jihad. Between 2012 and 2015, the Syrian war dominated religious debates among Tajik migrants. Networks developed rapidly in response to the conflict and constantly adapted to the changing political situation, providing channels through which thousands of Muslims living in the Russian Federation, including migrants and native Muslims, could leave and participate in the war in Syria. Initially, recruitment was openly done in the Cathedral Mosque of Moscow in 2013, and one-way tickets to Turkey were easy to obtain. Soon, however, the practice moved underground and the route to Syria changed to be via Chechnya. In Turkey, volunteers (those who had to pay for the journey themselves, lured by the promise of good jobs in the Islamic State) received a six-month training before being sent inside Syria. This system seems to have produced whole battalions of foreign fighters that joined the Islamic opposition forces in Syria and Iraq. During the Syrian conflict, the term “jihodı̄ ” became popular in Tajik writing to describe the fighters, the flag, and more generally, the activities in Syria.52 Jihodiho (jihod + i for a person + ho as Tajik plural) are those who decide to join the Islamic State in order to fight, whereas mujahed remains a term connoted to the Tajik conflict. Our interest here is not how recruitment to Syria worked, but the way that jihad became a justifying argument in this process. The following example is taken from a discussion of the online news agency “Ozodi”. It provides insight into the framing of jihad as the purest of actions and an individual’s private decision that should never be publicly announced. Note that there is no theological base or authority named in the debate – solely individual interests and socio-political conditions. Ozodi.org picked up this comment on an article about Syria and used the young writer’s post as the basis for further discussions. The 25-year-old man, writing under the pseudonym “Khastadil” (Tajik for “tired heart”), explains why he wants to go to Syria to die for a cause (Ozodi.org, October 30, 2013):53 I also want to go. Maybe you think I am joking, or you think I have turned mad or stupid or Salafi or Wahhabi or become a member of some group? No, I swear to God I am not a Wahhabi, not a Salafi, or a member of any group or mad or stupid. I am alone and am tired of this life, of migration, of being without honour, of shame and being without rights. I am annoyed by the politics of today’s state [of Tajikistan]. How long shall I walk to the doors of people as a migrant? This man had been in Russia for seven years and had experienced no improvements in his life. He remained torn between his family and his wish for recognition. Humiliation is 330

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a daily order in Russia, with the legal restrictions imposed on migrants accompanied by violent, often lethal attacks against them.54 Migration to Russia had become increasingly difficult at all levels (political, economic, social) and in relation to this, the number of Tajiks in Russia opting to travel to Syria had increased. The first comment to this article reads: Never in your life will you go to Syria. Those who wish to leave for Syria do not boast on the Internet like you, they remain quiet and become silent until they leave. This is a true man. You say that you are neither a Wahhabi nor a Salafi. Are you a journalist that you boast with such sentences? Jihad, in relation to Syria, is discussed as something private and intimate. To a certain degree, the debates among Tajik migrants in Russia have escaped theological reasoning. These quotes resonate with the view of many people I met and spoke with about Islamic activism. The hope and wish that there was a moral world that was worth fighting for, was projected onto the IS in Syria. The morality which emerged here did not have one clear opponent, such as Communism in the 1980s, but a diffused enemy that threatened Muslims in a generalized way. Despite the era of mobile phones and global connection, the Syrian war remained surrounded by secrecy and myths that are well-presented in the writings of the former scholar in Russia, Gaidar Dzemal. Dzemal was a controversial person who had close ties to various religious activists in Tajikistan until his death. He was a religious activist without a clear attachment to any theological school, participating in various debates and actively posting Islamic arguments on his website. Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Michael Kemper55 argue that it is his inability to create his own movement and his opportunistic use of Islamic arguments that saved him from persecution. He is a product of the Soviet era and a self-styled authority that treats Islamic sources as a patchwork knowledge that can be used for opportunistic activism. Among many books and articles, he published a piece authored by a woman that circulated among Tajik networks in Moscow, “Pochemu my nichego ne znaem ob ISIS?” (Why don’t we know anything about ISIS?).56 In this article, the author mystifies the IS by mocking external actors who have little information about the internal functioning of the “so-called” Islamic State. The article claims that IS fighters are neither imposing their regime, nor attacking civilians. In short, they appear to be soldiers motivated by a moral cause. The socio-political context that is constructed in this article opposes the autocratic regimes of Russia and Central Asia – one of the main arguments my interlocutors expressed when we discussed the IS. Jihadists who had joined the IS burned their Tajik passport publicly, a strong symbolic act that rejects loyalty to the regime in Tajikistan. In their imagination, politics taken from Islamic principles would naturally bring justice and, most importantly, a meritocracy. In August 2014, the press communicated that a Tajik had been nominated amir* (Arab. amı̄ r, governor) of the largest province in Syria, al-Raqqa.57 Negative reporting or horrific pictures from within the IS territories were simply ignored. The privacy of jihad as presented on Odnoklassiniki gives the question of jihad an additional social dimension: The people who left for Syria were searching for a social recognition beyond political protest or theological conviction. The wish for a meaningful life that moral activism promotes is the militant goodness suggested above. Unlike the militant goodness of the 1980s and 1990s – where political positioning was crucial – in the discussions around Syria, details of politics of the Syrian conflicts were less decisive – at least in the discussions held with the author. Whereas criticisms of Central Asian regimes were 331

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raised at times, the privacy of jihad seemed to have much more weight. At the base of militant goodness among jihadists from Tajikistan were diffused ideas of justice derived from the belief that the Qur’an holds all the solutions for life’s problems and socio-political frustrations.

Conclusion After several years of work on militant Islamism, an interlocutor who received regular information about Tajiks leaving for Syria said, “all these young men leaving to fight for a foreign war would make a great army for Tajikistan, if only the state would take them.” In his perception, the enthusiasm with which these men left to fight jihad for a utopian state was, in itself, valuable. Only they were fighting in the wrong place. This idea captures the perceived value of militant goodness well: enthusiasm and moral claims for a military cause. Islamism blurs the distinction between civilians and soldiers; all Muslims become potential fighters for the cause.58 Unlike theological debates that discuss issues such as whether jihad is a religious obligation or a voluntary act, or which seek to distinguish between “smaller” and “greater” jihad, ethnographic enquiries have demonstrated that jihad was primarily used to give meaning to military engagement, which emerged out of individual frustrations and political anger. The history of jihad in Central Asia remains open and undetermined. From the few written documents, and even after many years of ethnographic research, we cannot conclude that jihad has been a solid theological reference for Muslims in the region at all times. The Mujahid’s Handbook does not link to a concrete conflict in Central Asia or to a Caucasian jihad, nor did it take concepts from one clearly identified source. Neither referenced the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in the Ferghana Valley. According to Babajanov,59 the group of Tahir Yuldash (the leader of what later became known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan), did not himself use concepts like jihad and shahid in its rhetoric until December 1991, after the visit of the Uzbek president to a crowd of demonstrators.60 Babajanov even claims that it is only after having been driven out of Uzbekistan into Tajikistan that they came into contact with jihad ideas. Once the IMU joined militant groups in Afghanistan, they adopted al-Qaeda’s concepts. Later however, trained men came back to teach inside Uzbekistan. The notebooks discussed by Martha Brill Olcott and Bakhtiyar Babajanov reveal an interest in militant activities, but equally poor knowledge of Islam.61 Jihad seemed to have been taught here as a conglomerate of aggressive ideologies, terrorist skills and religious patchwork. There is no genealogy of jihad – neither in Tajikistan, nor in Central Asia. More interesting is the use of jihad and, related to it, mujahed and shahid, to give meaning to militant goodness. Hereby, the socio-political context serves as the reference against which activism is developed, fuelled by individual frustration, grievances in Russia, or in the workplace environment. The socio-political context should not be confused with clear political ideas or specific theological schools. As the examples have shown, it is the absence of such theological and political orientations and concepts that drives the discussions and imagined ideas of jihad as militant goodness. Popularization of these terms happens today on social media, triggered by educated people who provide the raw, theological material which is then taken and moulded by ordinary people like Muhammad. The value culture emerges through these conversations, through social experiences and economic situations, as much as through the information filters (e.g., the orientation of different websites) and family influence. 332

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As it emerges, new material is read and absorbed, and it changes as opportunities change. Muhammad follows the website of Eshon Nuriddinjon, but does not consider him to be theologically dominant beyond Tajikistan’s borders. He would just as readily search the Internet for material to suit his ideas. This post-Soviet practice to acquire knowledge about Islam online as it becomes available seems to continue, unless a young person has the opportunity to study at a madrassa somewhere in the Muslim world and becomes theologically educated in this way. The primary concerns of young people, such as Muhammad, are how to live a decent life, how to gain access to resources, and how to, one day, live in a society which recognizes ordinary people’s engagements, whether social, religious, or political. If, during the demonstration in 1990, jihad arose with the struggle of ordinary people for political power, in recent times the term serves the individual demanding recognition in a context of authoritarian political regimes, economic struggles and clashes of religious, cultural world orders.

Notes 1 More details about this story in Sophie Roche, The Faceless Terrorist. A Study of Critical Events in Tajikistan (Cham: Springer, 2019), 314. 2 See among others Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The Political Shape of Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey 16, no. 4 (1997): 517–542; Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia. The Creation of Nations (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000); John Heathershaw, Post-Conflict Tajikistan: The Politics of Peacebuilding and the Emergence of Legitimate Order (London: Routledge, 2009); Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer, Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), and Hélène Thibault, Transforming Tajikistan: State-building and Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 3 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4 Vitaly Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 21–29. 5 See, for instance, Nourhaidi Hasan, Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in PostNew Order Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), and Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus: Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859) (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2007). 6 Akbarzadeh, “The Political Shape of Central Asia.” 7 Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), and Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1996). 8 Peters, Islam and Colonialism, 9. 9 Peters, Islam and Colonialism, 10. 10 Peters, Islam and Colonialism, 10. 11 Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The Paradox of Political Islam,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam ed. Shahram Akabrzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–8. 12 Masami Hamada, “Jihȃ d, hijra et ‘devoir du sel’ dans l’histoire du Turkestan oriental,” Turcica 33 (2001): 35−61. 13 Hamada, “Jihȃ d, hijra et ‘devoir du sel,” 38. 14 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 59. 15 Ravshan Abdullaev, Namoz Khotamov and Tashmanbet Kenensariev, “Colonial Rule and Indigenous Responses, 1860–1917,” in Ferghana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia ed. S.F. Starr (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011), 69–93. 16 Aftandil Erkinov, Praying for and against the Tsar: Prayers and Sermons in Russian-Dominated Khiva and Tsarist Turkestan (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2004). 17 Khizar Humayun Ansari, Emergence of Socialist Thought among North Indian Muslims (1917−1947) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24.

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Sophie Roche 18 Jeff Eden, “A Soviet Jihad against Hitler: Ishan Babakhan Calls Central Asian Muslims to War,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, no. 1−2 (2016): 256. 19 Bakhtiyar M. Babadjanov, “O fetvakh SADUM protiv ‘neislamskikh obychayev’ [About the fatwas of the SADUM against Non-Islamic Customs],” in Islam na postsovetskom prostranstve: vzglyad iznutri [Islam in Post-Soviet Space: A View from within] eds. Alexei Malashenko and Martha Brill Olcott (Moscow: Moscow Carnegie Center, 2001). 20 Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 21 Paolo Sartori, “The Tashkent ‘Ulamā ’ and the Soviet State (1920−38): A Preliminary Research Note Based on NKVD Documents,” in Patterns of Transformation in and around Uzbekistan eds. Paolo Sartori and Tommaso Trevisani (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2007), 166. 22 Annette Krämer, Geistliche Autorität und islamische Gesellschaft im Wandel (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2002); Habiba Fathi, Femmes d’autorité dans l’Asie central contemporaine (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose/IFEAC, 2004); Razia Sultanova, From Shamanism to Sufism: Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Sophie Hohmann, Pouvoir et santé en Ouzbékistan (Paris: Petra, 2014), and Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Iconic Places in Central Asia: The Moral Geography of Dams, Pastures and Holy Sites (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016). 23 Stéphane A. Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from De-Stalinization to Independence (1955–91),” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 1 (2011): 62. 24 Bakhtiyar M. Babajanov and Muzaffar Kamilov, “Muhammadjan Hindustani (1892–1989) and the Beginning of the ‘Great Schism’ among the Muslims of Uzbekistan,” in Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries) eds. Stephanie A. Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao (London: Kegan Paul, 2001), 195−219. 25 Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation,” 55. 26 According to Babajanov et al., the authors of the letters used several Turkic words and generally wrote in the simple style of spoken language. For more, see Bakhtiyor M Babajanov, Ashirbek K. Muminov and Anke von Kügelgen, “Introduction: Religious Texts of the Soviet Era,” in Disputes on Muslim Authority in Central Asia (20th Century): Critical Editions and Source Studies (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2007), eds. idem, 32–54. Disputy musul’manskikh religioznykh avtoritetov v Tsentral’noi Azii v XX veke, eds. Bakhtiyor M. Babajanov, Ashirbek K. Muminov and Anke von Kügelgen (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2007), 32–54. For a complete history of Domullah Hindustani consult Babjanov B.M. Babadjanov, “Islam et activisme politique. Le cas Ouzbek,” Annales. Histoire, Science Sociales 59, no. 5−6 (2004): 1139−1156. See also Babajanov and Kamilov, “Muhammadjan Hindustani,” 195–219; Saodat Olimova, “Islam and the Tajik Conflict,” in Islam and Central Asia eds. R. Sagdeev and S. Eisenhower (Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies, 2000), 59−71; Ashirbek K. Muminov, “Chami-damulla et son rôle dans la constitution d’un ‘Islam soviétiques’,” in Islam et politique en ex-URSS (Russie d’Europe et Asie centrale) eds. M. Laruelle and S. Peyrouse (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2005), 241−261; Martha B. Olcott, A Face of Islam: Muhammad—Sodiq Muhammad—Yusuf (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 18–20, and Tim Epkenhans, “Muslims without Learning, Clergy without Faith: Institutions of Islamic Learning in the Republic of Tajikistan,” in Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and its Successor States eds. M. Kemper, R. Motika and S. Reichmuth (London: Routledge, 2010), 313−348. 27 Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation.” 28 Abdullohi Rahnamo, Ulamoi Islamı̄ dar Tojikiston [The Ulama in Tajikistan] (Dushanbe: Irfon, 2009). 29 Rahnamo, Ulamoi Islamı̄ dar Tojikiston, 178, my translation from Tajik. 30 Rahnamo inserts a footnote to explain that Saikh Muhammadali ibni Muhammadsobir, nicknamed “Dukchı̄ -Ishan”, was a well-known resistance fighter in Andijan, in the Ferghana Valley (today within the territory of Uzbekistan) who led the struggle against the Russians in 1898. 31 Rahnamo, Ulamoi Islamı̄ dar Tojikiston, 182 my translation from Tajik. 32 Adeeb Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 16. 33 See among others Ahmed Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism (London: Zed Books, 1994); Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Vitaly Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Sophie Roche, “Categories of Analysis and Categories of

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Practice since the Tajik Civil War,” Antropologia 13, no. 16 (2013): 69–92; Jesse Driscoll, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Tim Epkenhans, The Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan: Nationalism, Islamism and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Space (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), and Bayram Balci, Renouveau de l’islam en Asie centrale et dans le Caucase (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2017). Epkenhans, The Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan, Chapters 6 and 8. Bettina Gräf, Medien-Fatwas @ Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Die Popularisierung des islamischen Rechts (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2010). Markus Göransson, “Kampf im fremden Land. Tadschikische Sowjettruppen und Afghanen 1979 −1989,” in Sovietnam: die UdSSR in Afghanistan 1979−1989 eds. T. Penter and E. Meier (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017), 161–185. Sophie Roche, Domesticating Youth (New York: Berghahn, 2014), Chapter 2. Gulbiddin Hekmatyar was a staunch fighter against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. His Islamist group “Hezb-e Islā mi” received massive support from Pakistan and the United States. He became prime minister of Afghanistan in 1993, and fled Kabul in 1996 after the Taliban conquest, but joined Osama bin Laden’s division in 2001. Ustod Sayyaaf was the leader of the joint council of mujahids. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was a Palestinian Islamic scholar who preached on jihad and supported the Afghan mujahids in their fight against the Soviets. During the 1980s, he was crucial in the development and reinterpretation of jihad. Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001); Allen J. Frank, Popular Islamic Literature in Kazakhstan (Hyattsville, MD: Dunwoody, 2007), and Sophie Roche, The Faceless Terrorist. A Study of Critical Events in Tajikistan (Cham: Springer, 2019). A detailed discussion of the pamphlets can be found in Roche, The Faceless Terrorist, Chapter 4. Nourzhanov and Bleuer, Tajikistan, 295–321 Allen Hetmanek writes: “One opposition orator addressing the demonstrators proclaimed, for example, that ‘We will wash the government with our martyrs’ blood’.” Allen Hetmanek, “Islamic Revolution and Jihad Come to the Former Soviet Central Asia: The Case of Tajikistan,” Central Asian Survey 12, no. 3 (1993): 372. Hetmanek, “Islamic Revolution,” 369. Notes from the interview taken with Rahnamo, printed in Roche, The Faceless Terrorist, 102. Notes from the interview taken with Rahnamo, printed in Roche, The Faceless Terrorist, 103. Odnoklassniki was found in 2007 and has become the most popular social media for Central Asians and many Russians. Some years later, Mohammed was allowed to visit a sports club which allowed him to leave the house in the evenings. He thus joined Chechen networks and a view that religious puritanism goes along with a healthy body. Politically, this step was interpreted as the only way to repel Russian aggression against migrants. Roche, “Domesticating Youth.” Akbarzadeh, “Introduction,” 3. ozodi.org, “Mirzoi Salimpur, Зайд, Саъд, Абӯ Оиша. . .Нашри ВИДЕО дар бораи ҳалокати 19 тоҷик дар Сурия ва Ироқ,” March 1, 2015, available at www.ozodi.org/content/tajik-militanstclaimed-19-tajiks-killed-in-syria-and-iraq/26875813.html The following example has been quoted in Roche, The Faceless Terrorist, 311. Sayyora Mukhamedova has provided an in-depth overview of the role of the media in Russia racializing, humiliating and indirectly promoting violence against migrants from Central Asia. Sayyora Mukhamedova, “Central Asian Migrant Workers in the Russian Federation. Do Migrant Workers Threaten the National Identity of a Local Population?” (MA Thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2001). Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Michael Kemper, “Between Salafism and Eurasianism: Geidar Dzhemal and the Global Islamic Revolution in Russia,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 28, no. 2 (2017): 219–236. Nadezhda Kevorkova, “Почему мы ничего не знаем об ISIS? [Why Don’t We Know Anything about ISIS?],” poistine.org, 21 October 2014, available at https://poistine.org/pochemu-mynichego-ne-znaem-ob-isis Nadin Bahrom, “Society and Authorities Are Outraged by the News that a Tajik Militant Just Became the Leader of the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ in al-Raqqa, a Syrian Province,”

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Centralasiaonline.com, August 29, 2014, available at http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/ caii/features/main/2014/08/29/feature-02?change_locale¼true Akbarzadeh, “Introduction,” 4. Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “Le Jihad Comme Idéologie De L’autre Et De L’exilé À Travers L’étude De Documents Du Mouvement Islamique D’ouzbékistan,” in Les Islamistes D’asie Centrale: Un Défi Aux États Indépendants? ed. Habiba Fathi (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007) http://asiecentrale. revues.org/84 Babajanov, “Le jihad Comme Idéologie De l’Autre,” 149–151. Martha Brill Olcott and Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “The Terrorist Notebooks,” Foreign Policy 35 (2003): 31–40.

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25 WOMEN IN JIHAD A historical perspective on Western women in the Islamic State (IS) Seran de Leede

Introduction Since the proclamation of the Caliphate by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on 29 June 2014, hundreds of women and teenaged girls from all over the world travelled or attempted to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the self-styled Islamic State (IS). From the Netherlands, over eighty women have travelled to IS-controlled territory since 2012.1 From the United Kingdom and France, these numbers are even higher, respectively around 145 and 200 women and teenaged girls.2 Studies of the roles of (predominantly) Western women in IS so far show that these women mostly played supportive or facilitative roles as mothers and wives, as propagandists, and as recruiters. Some women have been involved in educative, administrative, logistical, social, and medical positions. On a smaller scale, women in IS have been involved in operational positions, including those that are related to the planning or execution of attacks.3 The involvement of women in IS has generated increased attention for women’s roles in jihad, particularly as proselytisers and (potential) militant operatives. Yet, it often remains poorly understood how to interpret women’s supportive and facilitative capabilities in waging jihad and, as a consequence, how to assess women’s relevance for jihad. This chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of women’s roles in jihad and how they can be interpreted. It commences with a brief discussion of jihadist doctrine regarding women’s ‘permissible’ role in jihad with the purpose of pointing out the controversy within jihadist ideology concerning the militant position of women in jihad. Drawing from the author’s ICCT Policy Brief ‘Women in Jihad, a Historical Perspective’,4 it offers historical illustrations of women’s roles in different jihadist groups (or groups that claim to wage jihad) to explore the different roles women have played in jihadism in the past. Building on this historical context, it zooms in on women’s roles in IS as identified in existing research, before elaborating on how these roles can be interpreted and understood in the conclusion.

Controversy around the permissibility of female combatants in Jihad The classical Islamic literature does not provide for one particular reading of what are ‘permissible’ roles for women in jihad. Overall, as described by Farhani Qazi in her exploration of the early female warriors of Islam, women during the early Islamic battles of the seventh 337

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century predominantly took care of wounded fighters, brought food and water to the battlefield and encouraged their (male) family members to support and join the struggle.5 This suggests women’s permitted role within jihad is limited to that of supporting male fighters. However, as Qazi points out, the classical texts also refer to exceptional women who fought in Islam’s early years. Qazi mentions Umm Umarah, who defended the Prophet in the battle of Uhud and fought in at least six battles during her lifetime. Other women include Muhammad’s wife Ayesha, who led the battle of the Camel, his granddaughter Zaynab, who fought in the battle of Karbala, and Khawlah bint al-Azwar, who took part in the battle against the Byzantines.6 Part of the controversy around the permissibility of female fighters in jihad derives from the response of the Prophet Muhammad who, while never commanding the women to fight, was said to have praised them for their sacrifice and bravery.7 The equivocality around the permissibility of women fighters in jihad is reflected in the statements of modern-day, leading jihadist ideologues and clerics on the role of women in jihad. They honour the historic women who fought to defend Islam and consider them iconic heroines.8 Yet, as argued by Nelly Lahoud in her article, ‘The neglected sex: The jihadis’ exclusion of women from jihad’, they rarely encourage or call on women to take part in combatant positions themselves.9 Referring to statements of several influential ideologues of modern jihadism including Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, Sayyed Imam al Sharif, Yusuf al-Uyari and Osama bin Laden, Lahoud points out most of them either remained silent regarding the permissibility of women in militant operations in jihad or strongly opposed women’s militant contribution, emphasizing the valuable role of women in jihad as mothers, daughters and wives of male fighters.10 The following section explores women’s roles in jihad in more detail, elaborating on the issue of female combatants in jihad and demonstrating the relevance of women’s supportive roles.

A historical perspective Female combatants Employing women in combatant positions, including as suicide bombers, brings several advantages for jihadist movements. Different studies point out that, besides doubling the pool of potential recruits, these tactical and strategic advantages are related to gendered assumptions about women and violence. As women are mostly perceived as the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators, they are often seen as less of a (security) threat. They therefore attract less security attention than men and, as a consequence, can enter crowded areas more easily without raising suspicion and have a better chance to pass through checkpoints undetected.11 Also, because women are generally not seen as perpetrators of violence, their deployment in combat roles has proven to send a powerful message of intimidation and imply that nobody is safe if ‘even women’ carry out violent attacks.12 It provides jihadist movements with the advantage of increased media attention and it underscores the seriousness of the cause if ‘even women’ are prepared to engage in violence. In addition, including women in combatant positions can have a shaming effect on men, impelling them to participate in jihad.13 The online propaganda magazine of IS, Dabiq, for example, wrote that because men fail to take their responsibility in jihad, women carry out attacks in their place.14 Similarly, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the deceased former leader of al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI), remarked in a website posting: ‘are there no men, so that we have to recruit women?’15 Al-Zarqawi also declared in a speech that if men did not want to be knights, they should make room for the women to wage war and men can take the eyeliner.16 338

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However, despite these potential advantages of using women in combatant roles and suicide missions, few jihadist groups in the past have explicitly accepted women in such roles. Traditional gender norms are predominant in jihadist ideology and conservative societies,17 and the consequential risk of losing popular (and internal) support when putting women in harm’s way, might explain this reluctance to employ women in combatant missions. Groups that have employed women in suicide missions include Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, AQI, Chechen separatists and Boko Haram. Hamas claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks by women, one in 2004 and one in 2006.18 In her research on women in modern terrorism, Jessica Davis writes that up until 2015, Hamas conducted 78 suicide attacks.19 So, the percentage of women as suicide operatives for Hamas is relatively low. The number of women bombers in Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is a little higher. According to Davis, PIJ has deployed women in five of its suicide attacks (carried out between 2003 and 2006). She writes that since 1993, PIJ perpetrated a total of 47 suicide attacks,20 making the overall rate of female suicide bombers around 10 per cent. The percentages of female bombers deployed by Chechen separatists, Boko Haram, and AQI are significantly higher. Chechen separatists have made extensive use of female suicide bombers since 2000. The estimates of the number of Chechen women involved in violent attacks vary. In 2008, Speckhard and Akhmedova wrote that a total of 42 per cent of all Chechen suicide bombers were female.21 Davis puts that percentage between 28 and 31.22 AQI’s al-Zarqawi introduced female suicide bombers to the organization, having orchestrated four attacks involving women.23 It is estimated that in the three years after his death in 2006, between 25 to 44 women carried out suicide attacks in Iraq.24 However, whether these women were affiliated to AQI or aligned groups is not completely clear.25 Boko Haram has deployed women in suicide missions since 2014.26 Davis puts the participation rate of female suicide bombers in Nigeria at around 54 per cent,27 similar to Warner and Matfess, who put that percentage at around 56 per cent.28 These groups, though, form clear exceptions to the prevalent perspective regarding the acceptable, facilitative role for women in jihad.

Mothers and wives Generally, one of the most cited roles for women in jihad is that of mother and wife. Mothers bring forth the next generation of fighters. This role can hardly be overestimated and is emphasized by influential jihadist ideologues, including Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden remarked that the women’s role is just as valuable as men’s, as women brought forth the generation of men fighting in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the squadron of men who carried out the attacks in New York and Washington.29 His successor, al-Zawahiri, also stresses the importance of women’s non-military contributions, and praises them for their heroic job of watching over the homes and children of the mujahedeen.30 And in their charter, Hamas specifically states that one of the main duties of women is to raise the next generation of fighters.31 Women themselves have also emphasized their importance in jihad as mothers and wives. The mother of a Hamas suicide bomber said in a television interview that it is the responsibility of mothers to constantly remind their sons of their religious obligation to partake in jihad.32 The women of Hezbollah do the same and encourage their daughters to marry Hezbollah fighters.33 Women in the South East Asian Jemaah Islamiyyah have kept the different cells and networks together through strategic marriages.34 Asiya Andrabi, the leader of a conservative women’s group in a radical Islamist movement in Kashmir,35 pleads for a strict separation of gender roles in jihad and propagates that fighting jihad is 339

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a man’s job. Women’s task is to take care of the family. The reason for this, she argues, is simple. If women would also fight in jihad, who is going to raise the children? Andrabi stresses women should not participate in military operations, as this will cause social instability.36 Women should encourage their men to join jihad and they should offer them moral support, so men can carry out their tasks. However, she adds, if the time comes that women are needed to pick up arms, they will be more than ready to do so.37

Propagandists and recruiters The supportive role of women extends, however, beyond that of mother and wife. The rise of the Internet in particular has provided women the opportunity to propagate and disseminate jihadist ideology on an unprecedented scale, enabling them to reach out to both men and women.38 An iconic figure in the so-called Internet jihad is the Belgian-Moroccan Malika el-Aroud. In 2009, she was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for her involvement in the foundation, operation and financing of a terrorist online network. On this network, with over a thousand active, frequent visitors, she glorified the jihad in Afghanistan, propagated a jihadist worldview, and disseminated messages and images that underscored her conviction of the worldwide suppression of Muslims. It was her purpose, she herself claimed, to spread the ideas of her deceased husband39 and his jihadist brothers in arms.40 According to a New York Times article, she called herself a ‘female holy warrior for Al Qaeda’. The article states she claims she does not disseminate instructions on how to fabricate bombs, and that she has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, that she urges Muslim men to go and fight, and that she encourages women to join the cause. She is quoted saying: “It’s not my role to set off bombs – that’s ridiculous. I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”41 Like Malika el-Aroud, the women around the Dutch Hofstadgroup, an amorphous group of around forty young Dutch Muslims, who were active in the Netherlands from 2002 to 2005, also made use of the space the Internet provided them. They were highly active in the online dissemination of inflammatory material; they glorified the use of violence on online fora and translated and spread jihadist texts.42 Similarly, female supporters of al-Qaeda have been known to reach out to other women to remind them of their religious obligation to support jihad.43 In 2004, a group of Saudi, female sympathizers of al-Qaeda, who called themselves the ‘Female Information Bureau in the Arabian Peninsula’, set up an online magazine for women, called Al Khansaa. The magazine contained recipes, but also articles on how a proper Muslim woman should behave, how she could best support her husband in jihad, and how she could prepare her children for their future role in jihad. The magazine also contained articles on how to stay in shape and how to be prepared for a jihad that was fard ayn, meaning a religious duty for all, including women.44 The lead editorial of the first issue stated: We will stand up, veiled and in abayas, arms in hand, our children on our laps and the Book of Allah and Sunnah of the Prophet as our guide. The blood of our husbands and the bodies of our children are an offering to God.45

Facilitators and enablers Women have also raised funds, collected tactical information, smuggled weapons and explosives, and taken care of wounded fighters to support jihad. The women of Hezbollah and the female members of the Kashmiri Dukhtaran-e-Millat operated as couriers; transporting 340

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messages, money and weapons between different cells.46 In a documentary on the women of Hezbollah for Al Jazeera, several women linked to the movement, all politically engaged, share how they contribute to jihad. They explain how they raised money for the group and how, during the war with Israel in 2006, women set up a ‘sponsor program’ where women could donate money, clothes and food for fighters. During that same war, women took wounded fighters into their homes to help them recover. All women in the documentary emphasized that they consider themselves crucial players in the resistance. This viewpoint was underscored by Rima Fahri, the female representative in Hezbollah’s political council, who said that even though female supporters of Hezbollah do not take part in militant operations, they cannot be seen as separate from the military struggle of the group.47 Women supporting Hezbollah and female supporters of Hamas have been involved in the organization of social activities that benefit their communities.48 Such social activities can increase popular support for the movement, as it helps create a positive, sympathetic and social image of the group. Women of Hamas are also active as logisticians and facilitators,49 as are women in al-Qaeda, who have been known to have opened bank accounts, translated documents and carried out bookkeeping duties for the network.50 These roles have also been taken on by female supporters of jihadi groups in Indonesia.51 Women linked to al-Shabaab have similarly been known to raise funds for the movement (not only in Somalia where the group is based, but also in the United States and Europe);52 this role is also carried out by female supporters of al-Qaeda. In February 2010, a female al-Qaeda supporter from Saudi Arabia was arrested and accused of having raised over US$200,000 for the group and of having forged identity papers to help smuggle operatives to join the insurgency in Iraq.53

Planners, plotters and attackers Finaly, women have been involved in the plotting and execution of terrorist violence, albeit on a smaller scale than the aforementioned roles. Aafia Siddique, a MIT graduate and mother of three children was linked to an al-Qaeda plot to blow up gas- and fuel-storage tanks in the Baltimore/Washington, DC area in 2003. Her name and email address were used to purchase equipment, manuals for assembling bombs and body armour. As a result, she was placed on the FBI wanted list. In that same year, she, her husband and their three children disappeared. In 2008, she was arrested in Afghanistan with bomb-making materials, instructions and a list of New York landmarks in her possession. In February 2010, she was convicted of attempted murder.54 Ahlam al-Tamimi played a crucial role in the planning of a suicide attack coordinated by Hamas on the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001 that killed 15 and left 130 people wounded. Prior to the attack, she is believed to have inspected the area, in order to calculate where the bomb would be most effective. She then joined her male accomplice on the bus to Jerusalem, pretending to be a young couple on a holiday to provide him with a cover. Meanwhile, the bomb was in her luggage, as she knew she would most likely not be checked. This attack was not her first. A few months prior to the Jerusalem attack, she planted a bomb in a supermarket. However, before she could detonate the device, it was discovered by security personnel. For her part in the Sbarro pizza place, Tamimi was convicted to 16 life-sentences. She was released in 2011 in exchange for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Many Hamas supporters consider her a national heroine and the female face of Hamas.55 In 2009, the American Colleen LaRose was arrested for her involvement in an attempted attack on the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks (because of his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.) She pled guilty to conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill 341

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in a foreign country, lying to the FBI and attempting identity theft. She was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on 6 January 2014.56 Another example is Roshonara Choudry, a British citizen of Bangladeshi origin, who, on 4 May 2010, stabbed the British Member of Parliament Stephen Timms. She later told the police she stabbed him as a ‘punishment’ for his parliamentary vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq War.57 With her attack, Choudhry became the first would-be assassin linked to al-Qaeda in the United Kingdom and the first British woman convicted of a violent Islamist attack in the UK.58 She received a life sentence, with a minimum of 15 years for her assassination attempt.59 As a final observation, it is interesting to see that women have been notably excluded from leadership positions in jihad. A notorious exception is the British Samantha Lewthwaite, the widow of one of the suicide bombers of the 7/7 attack on the London subway in 2005. She has been reported to be involved in the leadership of al-Shabaab.60

Women supporters of IS Building on the historical context laid out above, the following section zooms in on the different roles of female supporters of IS, strengthening the assertion that women can be involved in jihad in a myriad of ways. This exploration helps deepen the understanding of women’s capabilities in waging jihad, and how women’s roles may be assessed.

Domestic roles The responsibilities of female adherents of IS has largely been domestic, as supportive wives and dedicated mothers. Unmarried women arriving in the territory were prepared for their tasks in a so-called Maqar, an all-female safe house where they had to stay until they were married.61 Women were expected to support their husbands in their duties in jihad and to make sure they stayed motivated and focused, to maintain the household, raise their children according to IS beliefs and prepare them for their future responsibilities in jihad.62 The value of this traditional role was highlighted in IS propaganda, where references to Qur’anic scriptures were cited to support the claim that women’s main purpose was the divine duty of motherhood and of providing for their families.63 Female supporters themselves also stressed the importance of their domestic role. One woman, who called herself Umm Ubaydah, wrote on Twitter that the role of the muhajirah (women who travelled to the Caliphate) is to support their husbands and jihad, and to increase the Ummah: ‘The best thing a man can do is jihad, and the best thing for a woman is to be a righteous wife and to raise righteous children.’64 Another woman, Umm Layth wrote on her Tumblr account that: We are created to be mothers and wives – as much as the Western society has warped your views on this with a hidden feminist mentality . . . you may gain more ajr [religious merit] by spending years of sleepless nights by being a mother and raising your children with the right intentions and for the sake of Allah than by doing a martyrdom operation.65

Professional roles As IS commenced a state-building effort, it required not only fighters but also skilled (female) professionals, including doctors, nurses and teachers.66 There have also been reports 342

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of women working in administrative positions and in welfare activities.67 These women were permitted to work outside the home. In the manifest for women drafted by female members of IS, women’s rights in relating to work are specified. It is outlined that a woman’s independent duties may not exceed three days a week, so that she is not too long away from home. A woman’s duties as a mother should not suffer from her employment, so in the case of illness of children or a husband’s absence, employers must grant her leave. The manifest also stated that women were entitled to a two-year maternity leave and employers must provide day-care for children until they go to school.68 Furthermore, women were active in law enforcement in the Caliphate. They worked, for example, in all-female brigades of which the Al Khansaa brigade is perhaps the most well-known. This brigade was set up in early 2014, at first to help uncover male activists and dissidents who dressed up as women to avoid detection. As of 2015, the brigade functioned as a ‘moral police’. Charged with regulating moral behaviour and general conduct, the female members patrolled the streets of Raqqa armed with AK-47s. The brigade consisted of around 25 to 30 women age 18 to 25. They checked whether women were following the strict moral conduct of IS, including clothing regulations and the ban on wearing make-up. They have been known to carry out harsh corporal punishment against women who failed to abide the strict rules. The brigade has also been known to report spies or other enemies of the caliphate.69

Recruiters and propagandists Women have been known to actively disseminate the jihadi ideology, making use of the possibilities the Internet has provided them with. On social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumlbr, Ask.fm and Kik, they glorified the jihadi struggle, rejected and denounced Western society and pointed to the (perceived) stigmatisation of Muslims worldwide. They propagated the view that the West is waging a war against Islam by referring to the Palestinian conflict and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and by posting images of suffering (Muslim) children. In their home countries, women organized meetings where they propagated the jihadi ideology. A Dutch woman, for example, hosted meetings in her living room.70 A documentary by Channel Four in the UK reveals how, on a larger scale, a group of British women came together in female-only study groups where they glorified jihad and expressed antiWestern and anti-democratic views. The number of women attending these meetings ranged from eight to around twenty and there were often (very small) children present. Many of these women were also known to be highly active online where they propagated the jihadist ideology.71 Women were also involved in the large-scale recruitment of both men and women. Those who made hijra (migration to the Caliphate) called upon others to do the same. The British woman Zahra Halane, for example, pointed to the religious duty of waging jihad, emphasizing there is no excuse not to participate in the jihadist struggle.72 Hoda Muthana, an American who left for Syria in November 2014, wrote: ‘There are sooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are all the Americans, wake up u cowards.’73 Women have also been known to advise other women on how to make the journey to the Caliphate. The Dutch woman Fatima, who left her hometown Tilburg to travel to Raqqa at the age of 17, told the 15-year-old Imane from The Hague not to confide in anyone about her plans and not to be nervous. ‘It’s like going on a holiday, super fun!’ she said.74 And the British Aqsa Mahmood uploaded onto her Tumblr page a detailed how-to manual for women and girls considering the trip. She advised them on what to 343

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bring, what to leave at home and how to avoid getting caught. Her list was shared at least 27 times.75 Women not only propagated the jihadi ideology and recruited others; they also glorified and encouraged the use of violence against the ‘enemies of Islam’. Zehra Duman, for example, called upon her followers on Twitter to ‘kill the kuffar’ (non-believers).76 Umm Layth also encouraged her followers to use violence and exhorted them to ‘Follow the example of the brothers from Woolwich, Texas and Boston. If you cannot make it to the battlefield, then bring the battlefield to yourself.’77 Women also retweeted violent imagery online and responded to beheadings with comments such as ‘I was happy to see the beheading of that kaafir [non-believer], I just rewinded to the cutting part.’78

Facilitators Women have been reported to facilitate the jihad in Syria and Iraq in different ways. Audrey Alexander writes how a group of women from the United States purchased military equipment and shipped it to international fighters in Syria/Iraq.79 The Belgian Fatima Aberkan, a 56-year-old mother of seven and a prominent member of the Zerkani network that brought forth several key-players in the jihad in Syria, has been considered a ‘mother figure’ in the network. She is believed to have been involved in logistical operations, including the transportation of goods and money between different members of the network. She was convicted in April 2016 for her involvement in jihadi activities.80 The European Union Institute for Security Studies reports that women have managed information flows and contacts between local fighters and operatives abroad.81 The Dutch Intelligence Service writes that Dutch women have been involved in fundraising activities for IS, and in facilitating the travel of others to IS territory.82 Similarly, Nava Nuraniyah describes how Indonesian female supporters of IS have been known to facilitate the hijrah of their male countrymen by connecting them to their contacts in Syria and, in some cases, even paying for their tickets. In particular, Indonesian female supporters working abroad in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have been known to contribute a significant part of their earned incomes to the jihadi cause.83

Operational roles As previously outlined, the permissibility of female militants in jihad is controversial. IS poses no exception. Several women expressed a desire to participate in the fighting. The British Khadijah Dare, for example, wrote on her Twitter account: ‘I wna b da 1st UK woman 2 kill a UK or US terrorist!’84 However, Aqsa Mahmood wrote on her blog in April 2014 in response to questions from her readers about whether women were permitted to fight in jihad, this role was not (yet) permitted for women: I will be straight up and blunt with you all, there is absolutely nothing for sisters to participate in Qitaal [fighting]. Sheikh Omar Shishani has been quite clear on his answer and has emphasized that there is nothing for sisters as of yet.85 Interestingly, women carrying out violent attacks do not appear to be judged in official IS media outlets. The English-language online propaganda magazine Dabiq cheered on the 344

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attack of Tasfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook, who killed 14 people and wounded 22 others on 22 December 2015 in San Bernadino, California. In its 13th issue, Dabiq stated: And the brother’s blessed wife accompanied him despite the fact that combat is not even obligatory upon her, but she did not want to lose the opportunity for shahā dah [martyrdom] at a time when many “men” of the Ummah have turned away from the obligation of jihā d. May Allah accept the sacrifices of our noble brother Syed Rizwan Farook and his blessed wife, accept them among the shahadā ’, and use their deeds as a means to awaken more Muslims in America, Europe, and Australia.86 As of early 2016, although there was no official announcement or call from IS towards the permissibility of female combatants, the number of women participating in violent attacks seemed to increase. On 26 February 2016, the then 15-year-old German/Moroccan Safia S. stabbed a police officer with a kitchen knife at Hanover train station.87 In that same month, the UK Times reported of female combatants with ties to IS in western Libya.88 In September of that year, four women were arrested for planning an attack in Paris.89 In July 2017, the BBC reported of several female suicide bombers in the battle for Mosul in Iraq.90 In May 2018, three families with ties to IS carried out suicide attacks in Indonesia.91 And one month later, an all-female terror cell that planned a knife attack outside Westminster Palace in London was uncovered in the UK.92

Propaganda value As previously mentioned, the involvement of women in violent attacks has additional propaganda/recruitment value when the willingness of women to engage in violence is used to shame men into participating in the jihad. IS has also been known to have adopted this tactic. Dabiq, for example, writes that because men fail to take their responsibility in jihad, women carry out attacks in their place.93 Moreover, Western women supporting IS provided the group with a powerful propaganda asset. Anita Perešin and Alberto Cervone point out that by committing themselves to IS, Western women explicitly denounced the Western way of living and declared their preference to live under Sharia law,94 feeding the rhetoric of Islamic superiority over Western values. In addition, the presence of women in the Caliphate supported the rhetoric that IS was a legitimate state where women and families could live according to the laws of Islam, which could help increase support for IS.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates that the roles women have fulfiled in jihad, both in the past and within IS, have generally been different from those taken up by men. Leadership positions, for instance, have almost exclusively been fulfiled by men. Generally speaking, the same holds true for front-line positions. The ambiguity in the classical texts on the issue of whether women are allowed to take part in combat roles offers jihadist groups the theological space to incorporate women in such positions if deemed necessary. However, despite the potential tactical advantages that could be gained by deploying women in operational roles – related to gendered assumptions about women and violence – few jihadist groups 345

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permit women to take on such roles. Those who do predominantly deploy women as suicide operatives. In the case of IS, women have been involved in the planning and execution of attacks, albeit on a (much) smaller scale compared to their male counterparts. Particularly towards the technical defeat of IS, when the group started to lose territory and the fighting intensified, women’s involvement in such capacities increased. Overall, women predominantly play supportive and facilitative roles within the context of jihad. These can be wide-ranging and diverse and include: raising their children according to the jihadist ideology and preparing them for their future obligations in jihad, supporting and motivating their husband so they can stay focused on their struggle, propagating the jihadist ideology and disseminating jihadist propaganda – both online and offline, recruiting others, propagating violence and encouraging others to engage in violent attacks, strengthening internal bonds through marriages, providing social covers and increasing popular support by organizing social activities, raising funds for jihadi activities and transporting messages, weapons and goods, and providing medical care to wounded fighters. As these roles are often less visible compared to operational and militant roles, they can become easily overlooked, downplayed, or considered of secondary importance by outside observers. However, as this chapter has argued, these supportive and facilitative roles are to be considered just as crucial for jihad as operational roles. Particularly in light of ensuring the continuity of the jihadi struggle – in terms of the influx of new fighters, popular and financial support, and maintaining and expanding networks – these facilitating and supporting roles should not be underestimated. Both women themselves as jihadist ideologues and clerics underscore the value and necessity of women’s supportive roles. Yusuf al-‘Uyayri even claimed that the success or failure of jihad depends on the commitment and support of women.95 So, rather than being considered of secondary importance or subordinated to men’s roles, women’s roles should be viewed as complementary to and interconnected with them. Women and women’s contributions form an integral part of jihad. Recognizing the relevance of women for jihad, and the myriad ways in which women can contribute to the jihadi cause, provides a more comprehensive understanding of (global) jihadism.

Notes 1 General Intelligence and Security Service, Jihadist Women, a threat not to be underestimated (The Hague: General Intelligence and Security Service, 2017), 3. 2 Seran de Leede, Renate Haubfleisch, Katja Korolkova and Monika Natter, Radicalisation and violent extremism – focus on women: How women become radicalized and how to empower them to prevent radicalization (Brussels: European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, 2017), 16. 3 See, for example: De Leede et al., Radicalisation and violent extremism; Edwin Bakker and Seran de Leede, European female Jihadists in Syria, Exploring an under-researched topic (The Hague: International Center for Counter-Terrorism, 2015); Erin Marie Saltman and Melanie Smith, Till martyrdom do us part. Gender and the ISIS phenomenon (London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2015); Anita Perešin, “Fatal attraction, Western Muslimas and ISIS,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9 no.13 (2015); Sofie Patel, The sultanate of women. Exploring female roles in perpetrating and preventing violent extremism (Canberra: ACT – Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2017); The Carter Center, The women in Daesh: Deconstructing complex gender dynamics in Daesh recruitment and propaganda (Atlanta, GA: The Carter Center, 2017); Elizabeth Pearson and Emily Winterbotham, “Women, gender and Daesh radicalization,” The RUSI Journal (2017); Ayesha Navest, Martijn de Koning and Annelies Moors, “Chatting about marriage with female migrants to Syria, agency beyond the victim versus activist paradigm,” Anthropology Today 32, no. 2 (2016); Amanda N. Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism: An analysis of the women in Islamic State,” Journal of Strategic Security 9 no. 3 (2016), and Ester J. Strommen, “Jihadi brides or female foreign fighters? Women in Daesh – from recruitment to sentencing,” PRIO Center on Peace and Security (2017).

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4 Seran de Leede, Women in Jihad: A historical perspective (The Hague: International Center for CounterTerrorism, 2018). 5 Farhana Qazi, “The Mujahidaat, Tracing the early female warriors of Islam,” in Women, gender and terrorism eds. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 35. 6 Qazi, “The Mujahidaat,” 33–35. See also on this, David Cook, “Women fighting in Jihad?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28, no. 5 (2005): 376. 7 As pointed out by Nelly Lahoud in her “The neglected sex: The Jihadis’ exclusion of women from Jihad,” Terrorism and Political Violence 26, no. 5 (2014): 792–794. 8 Katharina von Knop, “The female Jihad: Al Qaeda’s women,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30 (2007): 407, and Lahoud, “The neglected sex.” 9 Lahoud, “The neglected sex.” 10 Lahoud, “The neglected sex.” Also emphasized by Qazi, “The Mujahidaat,” 32–33. See also Cook, “Women fighting in Jihad?” 11 Jennie Stone and Katherine Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers in Iraq, a case study,” in Women, gender and terrorism eds. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (Athens: University of George Press, 2011), 163–165; Kathy Laster and Edna Erez, “Sister in terrorism? Exploding stereotypes,” Women and Criminal Justice 25, no.1–2 (2015): 88; Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe, Women and terrorist radicalization (Vienna: OSCE, 2013), 3; Karla J. Cunningham, “Countering female terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 2 (2007): 18. 12 Laster and Erez, “Sister in terrorism?” 88–89. See also Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 165. 13 Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 165. 14 The Islamic State, “Foreword,” Dabiq Issue 13 (2014): 3. 15 Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 161. 16 Charlie Winter and Devorah Margolin, “The Mujahidat dilemma: female combatants and the Islamic State,” CTC Sentinel 10, no. 7 (2017): 23, footnote c. 17 Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 170. See also Cook, “Women fighting in Jihad?” 382–383. 18 Jessica Davis, Women in modern terrorism, from liberation wars to global Jihad and the Islamic State (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017), 56, 165. See also, Karla J. Cunningham, “The evolving participation of Muslim women in Palestine, Chechnya, and the Global Jihadi Movement,” in Female terrorism and militancy: agency, utility and organization ed. Cindy D. Ness (New York: Routledge, 2008), 90, and Kim Cragin and Sara Daly, Women as terrorists, mothers, recruiters and martyrs (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 62. 19 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 56. 20 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 60. 21 Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova, “Black widows and beyond. Understanding the motivations and life trajectories of Chechen female terrorists,” in Female terrorism and militancy: agency, utility and organization ed. Cindy D. Ness (New York: Routledge, 2008), 100. 22 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 94. 23 Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 163. 24 Caron E. Gentry, “The neo-orientalist narratives of women’s involvement in Al Qaeda,” in Women, gender and terrorism eds. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (Athens: University of George Press, 2011), 186. 25 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 121. 26 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 107. 27 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 109. 28 Jason Warner and Hilary Matfess, “Exploding stereotypes: The unexpected operational and demographic characteristics of Boko Haram’s suicide bombers,” (New York: Combating Terrorism Center at Westpoint, United States Military Academy, 2017), 4. 29 Lahoud, “The neglected sex,” 783 footnote 15 referring to Bin Laden (and al-Qaeda), “Bayman min Usama b. Ladin wa-Tanzim al-Qa’ida ila al-Umma al-Islamiyya” [A statement from Usama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida organization], Minbar al-Tawhid wa-al-Jihad, 2012. 30 Lahoud, “The neglected sex,” 783 footnote 16 referring to Ayman al-Zawahiri, “al-Liqa’ al-Maftuh” (referred to in the press as the “Town Hall” meeting), Minbar al-Tawhid wa-al-Jihad, 2008.

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Seran de Leede 31 Article 18 in “Hamas Covenant 1988,” see Hamas, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ hamas.asp 32 MEMRI, “An Interview with the Mother of a Suicide Bomber,” 19 June 2002, available at www. memri.org/reports/interview-mother-suicide-bomber 33 Al Jazeera, “Every woman, women of Hezbollah,” 19 June 2007, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hpz7eAe-glg (part 1) and www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFCOFt24LLE (part 2). 34 Mia Bloom, Bombshell, women and terrorism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 173–196; Institute for policy analysis of conflict (IPAC), “Mothers to bombers: The evolution of Indonesian women extremists,” 31 January 2017, available at www.understanding conflict.org/en/conflict/read/58/Mothers-to-Bombers-The-Evolution-of-Indonesian-WomenExtremists 35 The conflict in Kashmir has developed from a nationalist movement into a radical Islamist movement in the last decade. See for further reading, Swati Parasahar, “Aatish-e-Chinar, in Kashmir, where women keep resistance alive,” in Women, gender and terrorism eds. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (Athens: University of George Press, 2011), 96–119. 36 Parashar, “Aatish-e-Chinar,” 105. 37 Parashar, “Aatish-e-Chinar,” 106. 38 Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Nick Kaderbhai, Research perspectives on online radicalisation, a literature review 2006–2016 (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King’s College, 2017), 51. 39 Abdessatar Dahame, one of the assassins of Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance and opponent of the Taliban. The couple went to Afghanistan where they stayed in one of Osama bin Laden’s camps. For further reading on the biography of Malika el-Aroud, see Beatrice De Graaf, Gevaarlijke Vrouwen, tien militante vrouwen in het vizier (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2012), 189–215, and Bloom, Bombshell, 197–206. 40 De Graaf, Gevaarlijke Vrouwen, 189–215, and Bloom, Bombshell, 197–206. 41 Elaine Sciolino and Souad Mekhennet, “Belgian woman wages war for Al Qaeda on the web,” The New York Times, 27 May 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/europe/ 27iht-terror.4.13257511.html 42 Janny Groen and Annieke Kranenberg, Women warriors for Allah, an Islamist network in the Netherlands trans. Robert Naborn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 43 “Al-Shamikha, “Al Qaeda women’s magazine, launches report,” Huffington Post, 25 May 2011, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/al-shamikha-al-qaeda-womens-magazine_n_835572. html?guccounter=1 44 Bloom, Bombshell, 208–209; Cunningham, “The evolving participation of Muslim women,” 93. 45 Bloom, Bombshell, 208. 46 Al Jazeera, “Every woman, women of Hezbollah”, and Parasahar, “Aatish-e-Chinar,” 104–105. 47 Al Jazeera, “Every woman, women of Hezbollah.” 48 Al Jazeera, “Every woman, women of Hezbollah”, and Adnan Abu Amer, “Women’s roles in Hamas slowly evolve,” Al Monitor, 2 March 2015, available at www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/ 2015/02/women–role-hamas-gaza-leadership-social-mobilization.html 49 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 57. 50 Stone and Pattillo, “Al Qaeda’s use of female suicide bombers,” 171. 51 IPAC, “Mothers to bombers.” 52 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 114. 53 Richard Spencer, “First Lady of Al Qaeda jailed for 15 years,” The Telegraph, 30 October 2011, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/8858301/First-Lady-ofal-Qaeda-jailed-for-15-years.html 54 Gentry, “The neo-orientalist narratives,” 181. 55 Bloom, Bombshell, 112–139. 56 Caronline Joan S. Picart, “‘Jihad Cool/Jihad Chic’: The toles of the Internet and imagined relations in the self-radicalization of Colleen LaRose (Jihad Jane),” Societies 5 (2015): 354–383. 57 Vikram Dodd, “Profile Roshonara Choudhry,” The Guardian, 2 November 2010, available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/02/profile-roshonara-choudhry-stephen-timms 58 Elizabeth Pearson, “The case of Roshonara Choudhry: Implications for theory on online radicalization, ISIS women, and the gendered Jihad,” Policy and Internet 8, no. 1 (2016).

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Women in jihad 59 Vikram Dodd and Alexandra Topping, “Roshonara Choudhry jailed for life over MP attack,” The Guardian, 3 November 2010, available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/03/roshonarachoudhry-jailed-life-attack 60 Davis, Women in modern terrorism, 114. 61 Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 79. 62 Bakker and de Leede, “European female Jihadists in Syria.” 63 Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 82. 64 Carolyn Hoyle, Alexandra Bradford and Ross Frenett, “Becoming Mulan? Female Western migrants to ISIS,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2015): 31–32. 65 Hoyle, Bradford and Frenett, “Becoming Mulan,” 32 and 46, footnote 116. 66 Patel, “The sultanate of women,” 15, and Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 86. 67 Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 86–87. 68 Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 87, and Charlie Winter, “Women of the Islamic State, A manifesto on women by the Al Khansaa Brigade, translation and analysis by Charlie Winter,” Quilliam Foundation (2015), 25. 69 Spencer, “The hidden face of terrorism,” 83–84. 70 Danielle Pinedo, “Mijn kinderen hebben mensen vermoord,” NRC, 21 May 2016, available at www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/05/21/mijn-kinderen-hebben-mensen-vermoord-1622780-a1285774 71 Channel Four, “ISIS, the British women supporters unveiled,” available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=V6e49yfPI7s 72 Saltman and Smith, Till martyrdom do us part, 22. 73 Audrey Alexander, “Cruel intentions, female jihadists in America,” Program on extremism, the George Washington University (Washington, DC, 2016), 18. 74 Jaco Alberts and Harry Lensink, “Seks en de Jihad, Nederlandse Moslima’s vallen voor strijders,” Vrij Nederland, 25 April 2015. 75 Lauren Crooks, Lauren, “Runaway British Jihadi bride writes shocking suitcase checklist for schoolgirls wanting to join ISIS,” Mirror, 2 August 2015, available at www.mirror.co.uk/news/uknews/runaway-british-jihadi-bride-writes-6179441 76 Saltman and Smith, Till martyrdom do us part, 35. 77 Homa Khaleeli, “The British women married to Jihad,” The Guardian, 6 September 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/06/british-women-married-to-jihad-isis-syria 78 Hoyle, Bradford and Frenett, “Becoming Mulan?” 29. 79 Alexander, “Cruel intentions,” 12. 80 Gianni Paelinck, “Ronselaar van terroristen Abbaoud en Laachraoui krijgt maximumstraf,” De Redactie. BE, 14 April 2016, available at http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/regio/brussel/1.2629018; De Tijd, “M/v van de week, Fatima Aberkan,” 12 August 2016, available at www.tijd.be/tablet/newspaper_ vooraan/M_V_van_de_week_Fatima_Aberkan.9797977-7311.art?ckc=1, and Jessica Heijmans, “Wie is Fatima Aberkan, de ‘moeder van de jihad’?” Metro Nieuws, 7 August 2016, available at www.metro nieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenland/2016/08/wie-is-fatima-aberkan-de-moeder-van-de-jihad 81 Florence Gaub and Julia Lisiecka, “Women in Daesh: Jihadist ‘cheerleaders’, active operatives?” European Union Institute for Security Studies (2016), 2, available at https://www.iss.europa.eu/content/ women-daesh-jihadist-%E2%80%98cheerleaders%E2%80%99-active-operatives 82 General Intelligence and Security Service, “Jihadist Women,” 4. 83 Nava Nuraniyah, “Not just brainwashed: Understanding the radicalisation of Indonesian female supporters of the Islamic State,” Terrorism and Political Violence 30, no. 6 (2018): 905. 84 Aryn Baker, “How ISIS is recruiting women from around the world,” Time, 6 September 2014, available at https://time.com/3276567/how-isis-is-recruiting-women-from-around-the-world/ #3276567/how-isis-is-recruiting-women-from-around-the-world/ 85 Hoyle, Bradford and Frenett, “Becoming Mulan?,” 33. 86 The Islamic State, “Foreword,” 3. 87 BBC News, “German girl jailed for IS attack in Hanover,” 26 January 2017, available at www. bbc.com/news/world-europe-38757039 88 Bel Trew, “ISIS sends women into battle in Syria,” The Times (UK), 29 February 2016, available at www.thetimes.co.uk/article/isis-sends-women-into-battle-in-libya-rjmhqc7k7 89 Angelique Chrisafis, “Cell of French women guided by ISIS behind failed Notre Dame attack,” The Guardian, 9 September 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/09/cell-offrench-women-radicalised-by-isis-behind-failed-notre-dame-attack

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Seran de Leede 90 BBC News, “Battle for Mosul: fierce clashes as IS uses suicide bombers,” 4 July 2017, available at www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40489816 91 Kate Lamb, “The bombers next door: How an Indonesian family turned into suicide attackers,” The Guardian, 19 May 2018, available at www.theguardian.com/world/201/may/19/indonesiablasts-surabaya-family-from-good-neighbours-suicide-bombers 92 Nadia Khomami, “Members of all-female terror cell jailed over London knife plot,” The Guardian, 15 June 2018, available at www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/15/all-female-terror-cellrizlaine-boular-mina-dich-jailed-over-london-knife-plot 93 The Islamic State, “Foreword,” 3. 94 Anita Perešin and Alberto Cervone, “The Western Muhajirat of ISIS,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 38, no. 7 (2015): 6. 95 Lahoud “The neglected sex,” 786–788, referring to Yusuf al-‘Uyayri, “Dawr al-Nisa’fi Jihad alA’da;” [The Role of Women in the Jihad against the Enemies [of Islam]], Minbar al-Tawhid wa-al Jihad, 2001/2002.

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26 POLITICS FOR JIHADI WOMEN Lashker-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud Dawah as a case study Samina Yasmeen

Introduction Literature on jihad has traditionally focused on the activities of Muslim militant groups with a clear gender bias: a jihadi is assumed to be a male with willingness to engage in conflict in the name of Islam. This ignores the significant contribution made by women in jihad both as supporters of jihad and active participants in implementing the jihad project. The focus on jihadi women who joined the so-called Islamic State has shifted this trend to some extent. But even then the analyses remain limited to the manner in which women have promoted and implemented the jihad project designed and developed by men. Such a conception of jihadi activism ignores the agency of women who support, or are actively involved in, jihad in the contemporary world. It fails to appreciate that their participation may also reflect certain views on what is meant by politics, the role of the state, rights of citizens and appropriate foreign policies of a state. Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to go beyond the male-specific conception of the jihadi project to explore how Muslim women affiliated with jihadi groups approach the idea of politics. This is done with reference to women affiliated with Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jamaat ud Dawah (JUD) in Pakistan. Based on analysis of books, pamphlets and magazines published by LeT and JuD, it argues that the notion of citizenship and politics among these women expanded from an original focus on the family and social as ‘political’ to a broader conception of what constitutes the political for women. They presented an integrated picture of politics that encompassed family, societal, economic and political spheres, and asserted their citizenship right to analyse and prescribe appropriate domestic and foreign policy for Pakistan. In doing so, they assumed the identity of ‘purposive beings’, committed to guiding others to the best – the ideal – for Pakistan. The argument is developed in three parts: the first part focuses on the concept of citizenship and the areas that require exploration if we are to understand views of women affiliated with jihadi organizations. The second part discusses the initial focus on the family and social ties as being political for women of LeT and JuD. The final part discusses how these women presented an integrated view of political, economic and social dynamics in 351

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Pakistan, and the solutions they offered to deal with emerging issues. The chapter concludes with reflections on the the relevance of these views in the post-JuD days.

Citizenship and Jihadi project(s) The ‘ideal of citizenship’,1 as we understand it today, can be traced back to the Athenian polis and Roman res publica. Though far from being ‘ideal’, ideas presented by Aristotle and Gaius five centuries apart have contributed to notions of citizenship. Far from being rigid and static, these ideas have both expanded and modified over centuries. In the Aristotelian conception, a citizen was both a ruler and the ruled in an association underpinned by the reality of humans as ‘purposive beings’, who pursued operational good. With impermeable boundaries between the public (polis) and household (oikos), membership of the association was restricted to male members of select groups, with women and slaves assigned the task of ‘satisfying needs of the men and leave them free to engage in political relations with their equals’. Five centuries later, the Roman Jurist Gaius presented an alternative view of a ‘citizen as a legal being, existing in a world of persons, actions, and things regulated by law’.2 As ‘someone free to act by law, free to ask and expect the law’s protection’, the concept of being a ‘citizen’ came to include rights and responsibilities. Centuries later, T.H. Marshall categorised these rights as civil, political and social in his seminal work on Citizenship and Social Class (1949). Despite being recognised as a significant contribution, T. H. Marshall’s ideas of rights have been criticised as being orthodox, presenting a unified conception of citizenship drawn from the British experience, and promoting the idea of ‘passive and private citizenship’.3 The literature published since the 1990s has come to acknowledge, and integrate gender, class and ethnicity in discussions of the concept of citizenship. It has also drawn attention to active as opposed to passive citizenship. Within this scheme, political participation emerges ‘as the means whereby individuals may become accustomed to perform the duties of citizenship’, and not merely assume the identity of subjects of a superior authority. For Oldfield, ‘political participation enlarges the minds of individuals, familiarizes them with interests which lie beyond the immediacy of personal circumstance and environment, and encourages them to acknowledge that public concerns are the proper ones to which they should pay attention.’4 Dalton also identifies public participation in politics as a defining element of democratic citizenship, along with three additional elements of citizenship. In his opinion, good citizens ‘should be sufficiently informed about government to exercise a participatory role’, be committed to social order with an acceptance of state authority, and be cognizant of their ‘relations to others in the polity’. These elements, in his opinion, can make positive contributions to a democratic political culture.5 The expanded scope of literature on citizenship, it may be argued, draws upon and is relevant mostly to Western liberal developed states. Even if relevant to developing states, it has little to state about jihadi groups and their concept of what constitutes a citizen. Even less so is the case for women affiliated with jihadi organisations. Nevertheless, the focus on active political participation in the literature enables us to explore the manner in which these women assert their identities and views as citizens in specific geographical regions and countries. The investigation involves a set of questions such as: What activities are grouped under the broad umbrella of ‘political’? How do these women approach the question of active political participation? What is their view on acceptance of state authority? To what extent have their views and notions of active political participation been modified over time? Answers to these questions with reference to women affiliated with LeT and JuD are 352

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closely connected to the jihad project launched in Pakistan towards the end of the 1980s, and the place accorded to women in this context.

Lashker-e-Taiba, Jamat ud Dawah and women Though formally launched in 1990, the initial steps to set up Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) were taken in the late 1980s as part of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. This formed part of a strategy adopted by General Zia ul Haq to build the capacity of Pakistanis who could learn the art of jihad while fighting in Afghanistan, and then later be deployed to secure the liberation of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Among others, he chose adherents of the ahle hadith school of thought in Pakistan who set up Markaz Dawah wal Irshad (MDI) in 1987, and participated in jihadi campaigns in Afghanistan. Following the Geneva Accord (1988), and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, MDI moved to set up Lashker-e-Taiba under the leadership of Hafiz Saeed. Supported by sections of the military, Lashker-e-Taiba made effective use of print media. Dar-ul-Andlus, the main publishing house for the MDI, produced literature in the form of books, magazines, short pamphlets and even pocket-size diaries and informational cards that rendered the call to jihad intelligible for their readers, who predominantly hailed from lower, and lower-middle income groups. Youth from Punjab, North West Frontier Province (renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Sindh were mobilised, recruited and then launched into the Indian part of Kashmir as jihadis.6 The gendered nature of Lashker-e-Taiba’s jihad project, which relied on male agency, initially provided little space for female agentic activism. This was apparent in the peripheral status accorded to the women in the obituaries of martyrs published in the monthly magazine, Mujallatud Dawa. Women as mothers, sisters, wives and daughters were exhorted in the premartyrdom testimonials and letters written by the martyrs to live as true and good Muslims, observe purdah and celebrate martyrdom of the male members of the family. Essentially, this schema relegated women to the role of quiet supporters and not of active participants in the jihad project. But the Kargil Crisis (1999) altered this situation: Lashker-e-Taiba sustained heavy human losses due to General Pervez Musharraf’s adventurism across the Line of Control and the subsequent withdrawal of Pakistan’s military forces by the Nawaz Sharif regime.7 Disillusioned by the turn of events, the MDI leadership opted to create an independent support base within Pakistan to sustain the jihad project while enjoying the patronage of the military. Women’s agency was recognised: networks linking women of Lashker-e-Taiba were established, with Hafiz Saeed’s wife taking a leading role. As in the male domain, women across the country were also engaged in the jihad project through face-to-face contacts and publications. In the post-9/11 era, and particularly as LeT metamorphosed into Jamat ud Dawah in early 2002, following the Indo–Pakistan tensions in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament (December 2001), women’s networks were further consolidated. The frequency of mobilisational material tailored to engage female audience increased under the rubric of dawah (proselytisation). Although the broad parameters of this activism was determined by the male leadership, the enhanced engagement of women resulted in emergence of localised and national JuD female leaders. These leaders played a significant role in articulating the scope of women’s active participation as religious citizens of Pakistan through pamphlets, books and magazines such as Tayibaat and Al Siffat. Family, as the foundational unit of society, was privileged as the site where women could participate and manifest their religiously determined citizenship of Pakistan. Employing the idea of the complementarity of gender-based roles, women were identified as the nurturers, 353

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while men were to operate in the public space. This was justified with reference to a particularistic interpretation of Islamic injunctions: Qur’anic verses and hadith were referred to in the process of establishing that within Muslim family structures, men occupied the dominant position. Women, complementing male participation in the public space, were to discharge their duties effectively by taking care of family members, and fulfilling the requirements of being good Muslim women.8 Such a delimitation of private and public, it could be argued, is not specific to JuD and is often promoted and justified by Muslim men and women in Muslim majority states as well as in minority communities. But what rendered the JuD concept of family space as the locale for active participation distinct was the purposive nature of female agency. Women were to prepare the groundwork for jihad in multiple ways: as the bearers of children, they were to bring more male jihadis into the world,9 and to prepare girls in the family to learn the art of supporting jihad once they grow up to be women. Women were also charged with the responsibility of divesting themselves of worldly goods (especially jewellery) to support the cause of jihad. The JuD literature provided detailed guidance on the requisite attributes for women to discharge their purposive responsibility as women citizens in the family sphere. The information in this respect was contained in articles regularly published in Tayibaat (and later in Al Siffat) on learning the Qur’an, elaboration of hadith, and articles by female leaders on religiously sanctioned behaviour.10 Together, these publications exhorted women to observe purdah vis-à-vis all those identified as non-mahram in Islam, including adopted children once they reached puberty. Equally importantly, women were to be kind and considerate towards family members, avoid backbiting or making fun of others, or finding faults in others and losing temper in face of provocations. An exegesis of Surah Al-Baqarah, for example, explained to women that the reference in verse 2:169 that ‘He [Satan] only orders you to evil and immorality’ encapsulated a spectrum of evil deeds such as mal-intention, deviation from aqidah (religious creed), doubting others, slander, finding faults in others, and pride and arrogance.11 Implied in this exegesis was the message that resisting these negative traits would facilitate their participatory role within the family sphere, or, to borrow from Dalton’s four broad principles of citizenship, endow them with ‘religiously sanctioned autonomy’. Women’s agency in the family sphere as the promoters of true Islamic jihadi identity was placed in a wider social context. Reflecting an inherent contradiction in the construction of an ideal Muslim jihadi family, women were to both create a fortress-like environment that shielded family from external un-Islamic trends, as well as shape the nature of the society in which the family unit operated. This, by extension, identified women as possessing agency in the societal environment as well. But this agency was not one of uncritically accepting the prevailing social order: women assumed the right and responsibility to rid the society of ills that had corrupted the morals and impacted on the true Islamic identity. Interestingly, this cleansing act was not to be performed by only reminding others (whether affiliated with JuD or not) of Islam’s Golden past. More recent memories of the social norms prevailing in the subcontinent also were used as reference points for other women to appreciate the necessity of re-ordering and revising prevailing social norms. But this re-creation of the subcontinental past excluded any importation of Hindu cultural practices. Instead, fulfilling their responsibility of dawah, women were to engage in ensuring a return to a cleansed and purified true Islamic subcontinental culture. The writings of Umm Abd Muneeb – the sub-editor of Tayibaat, and later of Al Siffat – provide insights into this societal role for women. The content of her publications presented her as a ‘focused narrator’, whose major concern is ‘to break away from inherited scripts or established patterns of socialization’.12 Keen to remind her audience of early local practices 354

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that embodied a restrictive interpretation of women’s role in Muslim societies, and the insidious impact of modernisation on lives, she called upon women to actively engage in cleansing both the family and society. One example is her discussion of how women share news of their pregnancies. She was critical of how women announce their pregnancies as part of an accepted social practice: they openly share the news with others and are showered with gifts for the unborn babies. This was contrasted to how women behaved only in the recent past: a woman would be shy and careful about sharing the news of her pregnancy, sometimes even excluding other mahrams in the family who would only come to know of it through others. Her attention would be focused not on acquiring a new wardrobe for the unborn, but re-using clothes worn by other children. Another example of her criticism combined with encouraging other women affiliated with JuD to assert their activism in the social sphere was related to the use of mobile phones. Labelling mobile phones as ‘bells of danger’, she pointed out their insidious impact on society: women can talk to non-mahrams and violate the purdah of voice which, by implication, contributes to sexually linked fitna in the society. Mobile phones, she argued, also enable people to share photographs of women in the family, an action that directly violates the norms of purdah and hijab.13 Interestingly, the criticism of mobile phones, and by extension social media, as the spreader of un-Islamic norms did not exclude the use of the media by women in JuD as an instrument of dawah (proselytisation). Female leaders in the group reportedly managed and used Facebook, for example, to share ideas with other women on how to be good Muslims in Pakistan. A need to re-calibrate societal norms, with women as active agents of change, was promoted with reference to the social welfare space. Such activities were identified as a subset of the belief in the oneness of God (tawhid) and a commitment to helping the needy as enjoined by Prophet Muhammad. It was argued that it was commonplace in the subcontinent’s recent past for people to share goods, to lessen the burden of others by offering food and lodging, and to willingly live frugally in order to support the needy. Specifically for women, precedent for such active participation was set by many ‘Muslim women who surpassed men in helping others through setting up madaris, health centers, canals, bridges, mosques, libraries and food outlets for helpless and disabled’.14 It is important to note that this conception of women’s participation in the social welfare space was sharply contrasted with the social welfare activities undertaken by the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Pakistan. Umm Abd Muneeb, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Islam aur Rafahi Kaam’ (Islam and social welfare activities), published by Mushraba Ilm wa Hikmat,15 for example, blamed the fast-proliferating NGOs in Pakistan for promoting a Western agenda, bringing women out in the public space, and enabling the associated promotion of immodest and lecherous practices in the country. Implicit in such a contrast was the recognition that Muslim women should use the social welfare space for promoting commitment to tawhid, while helping those in need. The floods of 2010 provide an insight into how women participated in social welfare activities while spreading the ahle hadith message to the victims of disasters. The floods covered nearly one-fifth of Pakistan’s total area and impacted on nearly 20 million people in all four provinces of Pakistan – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. Of these, KPK was the worst affected, registering approximately 90 per cent of the deaths caused by the flood. The linkages between sections of the Pakistan military and JuD resulted in the group taking the lead among the local organisations in providing disaster relief. Women affiliated with JuD also supported these activities under the male-led umbrella of Falahe-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF) – the social welfare arm of JuD that was ultimately banned by the Pakistan government in 2019. Umm Saad (previously using the name 355

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Umm Hammad) narrated the story of helping women affected by the floods in Nowshehra through the largest relief camp run in KPK. Run by FIF, this camp provided food, shelter and other support for the affected individuals and families. Umm Saad recounted that women in the areas were suffering from extreme weakness and lack of vitamins. In addition to addressing these health issues, Umm Saad reported distributing new clothes, bangles and cooked meals among the women. But this was combined with organising an Eid prayer for eight hundred women who previously had no concept of congregational prayers. Such story-telling suggests that the act of engaging large number of women in the area by women of JuD used the social welfare activities as means to promoting the ahle hadith creed and practices.16

Political participation: Beyond the family and the society Political and economic issues, though not emphasised, were not excluded from the purview of women’s concerns. Global and regional geopolitical developments in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US (September 2001) provided the backdrop for their engagement in the political sphere. Initially, female leaders including Umm Hammad and Umm Abdur Rabb were most vocal through their articles and commentaries in Tayibaat. But gradually other women also became active, sharing their ideas on political developments, their relevance for Pakistan and appropriate policy responses for the successive regimes in the new millennium. The frequency of these analyses increased after the Mumbai bombing (2008) and the listing of JuD as a terrorist organisation by the UN. A new magazine, Al Siffat, communicated the views of JuD women on politics with an invigorated state of assertion of agency. This could be linked to the fact that the JuD was being restrained by the Pakistan government from freely operating in the country after the international opprobrium.17 Hafiz Saeed had introduced ideas of sabr jameel (silent forbearance and patience) in his exegesis of Surah Yusuf and urged male members of the JuD to wait for the time when they could be vindicated for their commitment to jihad.18 Women affiliated with JuD were less constrained by these restrictions and, therefore, able to voice their ideas categorically and vociferously: they highlighted the integrated nature of the political, economic and cultural challenges faced by Pakistan. This was combined with theological and political justifications for restructuring and recalibrating Pakistan’s institutional structures and foreign policy. A critical analysis of the extent to which Pakistan had remained committed to its ideology provided the starting point for women’s active engagement in the political sphere. Through the articles published in Tayibaat and later Al Siffat, they argued that Pakistan owed its existence to nazriya-e-Pakistan, the ideology that underpinned the struggle waged by the Indian Muslim League. As the leader of the League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had clearly articulated the need to create a separate homeland for Muslims on grounds that they constitute a separate nation. His vision of Pakistan, to be carved out of British India, was of a state structured along Islamic lines.19 The Divine nature of the Pakistan project, the writings in women’s magazines of JuD argued, was evident in Pakistan coming into existence in 1947 on 27 Ramadan – Laila tul Qadr, the most blessed of all nights.20 Once created, Pakistan’s founding fathers had demonstrated their commitment to Islam as the basis of the new state. On 9 March 1949, Liaqat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, had presented the Objectives Resolution to the Constituent Assembly tasked with the responsibility of drafting a Constitution. The Objectives Resolution acknowledged that ‘sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone’, and that ‘the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limit prescribed by 356

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Him is a sacred trust’ was to form the basis of Pakistan’s Constitution.21 Citing published accounts of nazriya-e-Pakistan, the female authors also maintained that Pakistan’s founding fathers also proudly proclaimed Islam as the foundational principle for Pakistan at the global stage. In his address to the US Congress during his first visit to America in May 1950, for example, Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan introduced Pakistan with reference to its Islamic identity by stating: ‘The creation of Pakistan will be a laboratory test for Islam.’22 Despite the unequivocal identification of Islam as the basis of the state, JuD female writers argued, Pakistan’s leadership had subsequently deviated from this commitment. Although the military has both directly and indirectly ruled Pakistan for most of the country’s life, with a few exceptions,23 the criticism was restricted to civilian rulers and politicians, who were accused of being guided by their self-interest and of violating the foundational principles of Pakistan. They were accused of employing democracy as a tool for protecting their own interests, which were closely linked to the hierarchical structures of Pakistani society. In an elitist society divided between the rich and the poor, the rich used their declared preference for democracy to strengthen their own positions, while simultaneously treating the poor as slaves, and Pakistan as their estate. Umm Saad, for example, argued in an editorial in Al Siffat, that Pakistan had unfortunately not been ruled by any sincere ruler since the death of its founder. On a number of occasions, ‘[its rulers] tried democracy [to destroy] the administrative, legislative and economic structures of the country, and failed to deliver results. It has become impossible’, she maintained, to exclude from the political circles individuals who have been undermining Pakistan’s existence like termites, because their generations have controlled Pakistan’s politics and government. They treat this country [Pakistan] to be their personal fiefdom, and its citizens as their personal inherited slaves.24 In this whole scenario, the ulema and intellectuals had become party to deviation from the foundational principles of the country. Caught in their desire to protect their own interests, they had also ignored the harm being done to the country by ignoring the Islamic underpinning of the nazriya-e-Pakistan. The elaboration of how the preference for democracy had harmed Pakistan occurred with reference to the economic, social, cultural and political structures that had emerged in the country. Instead of compartmentalising these areas, an integrated and linked picture was presented of how misguided policies in one area had implications for impacting on other structures. Pakistan’s leadership, it was argued, had permitted the West to infiltrate the country’s economic system, which was not structured along Islamic lines. Pakistan’s economic system was based on riba (usury). In a harsh and pointed criticism of this deviation, an article in Tayibaat commented that Pakistan’s rulers had probably forgotten the hadith in which Allah’s Prophet had stated that the practice of usury is as if one is engaged in ‘zina [adultery] with his mother’.25 The government had also permitted Western companies to operate freely in Pakistan, which in addition to undermining local businesses were also responsible for serious health implications for its citizens. Pakistan, like other poor countries, often was delivered ‘food poison’ – food that could not be sold in Western countries. Additionally, the additives in food imported into Pakistan posed serious health risks, such as rendering Pakistani women barren and restricting population growth. But the risk also extended to altering the nature of Pakistan’s societal norms. Foreign companies, Umm Abd Muneeb argued in a detailed article: 357

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do not just provide relevant goods to people but also impose their cultural norms on a country accepting their presence. If you reflect, [you would realise that] a number of foreign products are reflections of foreign cultures. For example, the cold drink companies in Pakistan have also popularised the Western tradition of drinking directly from the bottle while standing.26 Any event where cold drinks are not served is not considered exciting. National drinks such as lassi, milk, home-made traditional sherbet, juice of sugarcane and fruit juices are now considered worthless . . . and only left for old-fashioned people [in the country].27 Influenced by such imports, she continued, the youth also adopts the foreigners’ mannerisms, which are often imbued with ‘immorality and immodesty’. Effectively, she argued, the induction of foreign companies and goods in Pakistan was rendering Pakistani society prisoners of Western social norms and customs. Deviation from the Islamic foundations of Pakistan, women affiliated with JuD argued, had also shaped the educational structures in the country. The curriculum in educational institutions, influenced by Western ideals,28 had narrowed the space for religious content which was increasingly being reduced. But the environment in which education was being imparted to the new generation was also antithetical to Islamic values. Western influence and the need to adapt modern practices had made it difficult for teachers who observed purdah. Their preference for wearing hijab in line with Islamic injunctions was often derided by those in charge of educational institutions; the teachers were put under pressure to conform to norms that did not distinguish between mahram and non-mahram. Female students were in an even more precarious position: power differentials made it difficult to observe Islamic dress code in schools.29 Extracurricular activities promoted at schools also ran counter to Islamic values: students were expected to participate in Meena Bazaars and perform dances in public in front of non-mahrams. These practices, it was argued, were not new and could be found in the ‘United Pakistan’ where Hindu culture was promoted, for example, in schools in East Pakistan, where girls were taught dances, and made to sing Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry instead of Pakistan’s national anthem. The ulema and intellectuals, who should have resisted these deviations, remained silent and focused on their own interests instead of those of the nation.30 Pakistan’s foreign policy was also presented as an evidence of its leadership’s disregard for the country’s Islamic foundations. Guided by their self-interest, these leaders had compromised on a number of issues: General Musharraf had adopted a soft approach on the Kashmir issue, despite the Indian use of water for strategic domination of Pakistan. The Musharraf regime, JuD’s activist women argued, had also violated the principles of standing by other Muslims: Pakistan had willingly joined the War on Terror launched by the US, provided logistical support for its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and toyed with the idea of recognising Israel. Pakistani rulers had also permitted the US private security company Blackwater to operate on its soil, a company which was actively sabotaging Pakistan’s territorial integrity. That this was done despite the knowledge that Blackwater was an instrument of the US and Israeli governments to promote their interests was evidence that Pakistan’s leaders, ‘keen to fill their pockets [with money] had dropped the living 200 million Pakistanis in the lap of the USA government’.31 The discussion of political issues within a broader and integrated framework resembled the approach adopted by male leadership of the JuD. The difference, however, was apparent in the relatively increased focus by women on the ‘political’ in the aftermath of the Mumbai bombings and the listing of JuD as a terrorist organisation by the UN in 2008. As the JuD’s 358

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male leadership was placed under house arrest, women affiliated with the group, who were not directly impacted by the sanctions, took the lead in drawing attention to how the deviation from the vision enshrined in nazriya-e-Pakistan had placed Pakistan in a precarious position. The narration of the problems inherent in the ‘existing situation’ was combined with JuD female leaders prescribing alternatives that would bring it in line with the foundational principles enunciated by Pakistan’s founding fathers. Changing the pattern of leadership provided the starting point for these prescriptions. Often communicated through messages in bold letters combined with vivid imagery on the cover of women’s magazines, the Pakistan leadership was exhorted to live their lives according to the pattern set by the Righteous Caliphs and the Companions.32 They were reminded of the urgency to restructure Pakistan’s institutions, particularly in the economic and educational sphere. A decoupling from the West and its economic interests, it was argued, would create the necessary conditions for a return to the true Islamic state that Pakistan was envisioned to be. The foreign policy arena occupied a significant place in this context: through articles dealing with the US invasion of Afghanistan post-9/11, and of Iraq in 2003, these female voices urged successive Pakistani regimes to appreciate the dangers lurking for Pakistan’s own security and integrity. They were urged to stop acting like America’s ‘watchman’ in the region, and by extension not to serve the interests of the US, India and Israel.33 Instead, echoing the calls for jihad made by the male leadership of JuD, particularly Hafiz Saeed, female leaders of the group also urged Pakistan’s leadership to actively promote and support jihad both as an individual obligation (fard ay’n) and a collective obligation (fard kifaya). A commitment to jihad, and willingness to live and die for Allah, they argued, would bring every superpower in the world to its knees.34 Failure to return to the traditions of the Righteous Caliphs, and to recalibrate Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policy, JuD female leaders cautioned, entailed serious threats to Pakistan’s integrity. Treating democracy as a panacea for the country, Umm Saad argued in an editorial, had enabled Sheikh Mujibur Rehman ‘to drop Bangladesh in India’s lap’ in 1971. But the threat to Pakistan’s territorial integrity had not subsided with secessionist movements for other ‘deshes’ continuing to exist.35 If anything, they argued, Pakistan was the real target behind the US machinations in the region: having subdued the Taliban in Afghanistan and secured a foothold in Iraq, the US was waiting for the time when it could control Pakistan. Such dire warnings linked to geostrategic assessments were combined with drawing attention to contemporary Muslim experiences. Interestingly, the Arab Spring of 2011 was used in this context as evidence of how authoritarianism combined with deviation from Islam had cost Arab leaders their regimes. Writing in the December 2011 issues of Al Siffat, Kubra Rasool discussed the rules introduced by the authoritarian leaders of Tunisia, Libya and Syria. If Tunisia had banned wearing hijab, Qaddafi of Libya had labelled it as a satanic practice and denigrated the traditions of the Righteous Caliphs in favour of his Green Book. That the Arab masses had awakened and risen against these despots was evidence that God does not permit continuation of oppression irrespective of where it occurs. Ultimately ‘the dictators – be they from Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, or Pakistan – are destroyed and relegated to dustbin [of history].’36 The article ended with calls for Pakistani leadership to learn from the sudden dismantling of Arab regimes: If our rulers wish, they could learn from the fast changing times that power, status and government is entrusted by Allah. He grants it to whosoever He wishes, but 359

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also takes it away if He so wishes. Those in power are divested of their power through change.37 A poem by Umm Saad in the same issue repeated this message; while eulogising jihad, she addressed leaders of Islam in the following words:38

O leaders of the Muslim world! Open your eyes How the time has furiously destroyed [what existed before] Recognise the faces of the corpses lying Thy are the ones who submitted to Pharaohs Remember the lessons being taught by history You will always regret if you forget these lessons The JuD female leaders also employed theological justifications for their call to realign Pakistan’s identity with its Islamic vision. Referring to Qur’anic verses, for example, an article recounted how God had bestowed its blessings on Qaum-e-Saba (the people of Sheba). Their territory was bordered by mountains on both sides and fields of orchards were spread across miles. They built dams and palaces with Allah’s blessings. But the nation proved itself unworthy of these blessings. So God withdrew the blessings and ‘sent upon them the flood of the dam’ (34:16). Qaum-e-Saba had to survive on ‘gardens of bitter fruit, tamarisks and something of sparse lote trees’ (34:16). And God reminded us: ‘[B]y that We repaid them because they disbelieved. And do We [thus] repay except the ungrateful?’ (34:17).39 Pakistani leaders were reminded that they needed to mend their ways or experience Divine dissatisfaction due to the path chosen by Pakistan’s elite.

Looking into the future: Beyond the JuD Assessed with reference to the four dimensions of citizenship listed by Dalton, it could be argued that the women of JuD have publicly engaged in politics as ‘purposive beings’. Their participation in the ‘political’ has encompassed both public and private spheres with ideas relevant to family, society, economy and politics. Drawing upon the information popularised by the JuD’s male leadership, they have presented an account of the existing situation the country finds itself in, as a state created in the name of Pakistan. Though openly critical of democratic norms, their views reflect both an acceptance of state authority and a commitment to shifting the norms underpinning state structures. As such, in contrast to women who joined the so-called Islamic State (IS), they have shunned open confrontation with state authority in favour of persuasion: their activism has remained limited to suggesting possible avenues for Pakistan to recalibrate its structures to be in line with what the JuD considers to be the vision of the founding fathers. But herein lies the possibility of their continued influence within the state boundaries of Pakistan. A fusion of female activism in familial, societal, economic and political spheres carry the possibilities of their long-term, even if understated, impact within Pakistan. Jamat ud Dawah was banned in 2019 by the Pakistan government to avoid being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and Hafiz Saeed and other male leaders are being tried by courts. But the women affiliated with JuD are unencumbered: as mothers, wives, daughters and sisters, they retain the ability and capacity to shape the society through the family unit. The significance of their intergenerational impact, and the possibility of the language and 360

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project of jihad being privileged within the family environment means that their views would remain relevant in the political sphere in the future.

Notes 1 John G.A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,” in Citizenship, eds. Richard Bellamy and Antonino Palumbo, The Library of Contemporary Essays in Political Theory and Public Policy (London: Routledge, 2016), 6–7. 2 Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,” 9. 3 Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” in Citizenship, eds. Bellamy and Palumbo, 43–72, and Michael Mann, “Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship,” in Citizenship, eds. Bellamy and Palumbo, 27–42. 4 Adrian Oldfield, cited in Kymlicka and Norman, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics 104, no. 2 (1994): 352–381. 5 Russell J. Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation,” Political Studies 56, no. 1 (2008): 78–79. 6 Samina Yasmeen, Jihad and Dawah: Evolving Narratives of Lashkar-E-Taiba and Jamat Ud Dawah, First ed. (London: Hurst Publishers, 2017). 7 Yasmeen, Jihad and Dawah: Evolving Narratives. 8 See, for example, Umm Abdullah Tamachi, “Ghar Aurat Ki Jannat Hai (Home Is a Woman’s Heaven),” Tayibaat, June 2005. 9 Umm Hammad, “Musalmaan Ma’oun Behno Ko Tumhari Appointing Authority Qabool Hai Na Uss Ka Nisab (Muslim Mothers and Sisters Neither Accept Your Appointing Authority nor Its Curriculum),” Tayibaat, May 2004. 10 See, for example, Ayesha Yusuf, “Mo’min Jhoot Nahin Bol Sakta (a True Muslim Does Not Tell Lies),” Al Siffat, September 2013. Some men also contributed articles in these magazines. For example, Mufti Mohammad Saeed, “Khwateen-E-Islam Kay Islam Say Mutal’bay (Islam’s Expectations from the Women of Islam),” Al Siffat. 11 Umm Abd Muneeb, “Hifz-E-Hayaa, Guftago Aur Tehrir,” (Lahore: Mushraba Ilm wa Hikmat, 2008), and Umm Abd ur Rabb, “Aayaiy Qur’an Seekhain: Tafsir Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayat Number 168, 169 (Let Us Learn Qur’an: Exegesis of Surah Al-Baqarah Verses: 168, 169),” Tayibaat, 2008. 12 Ivor F. Goodson, Developing Narrative Theory: Life Histories and Personal Representation (London: Routledge, 2013). 13 Umm Abd Muneeb, “Valentine Day,” (Pakistan: Mushrab Ilm wa Hikmat, 2004), and “Hifz-E-Hayaa, Guftago Aur Tehrir.” 14 Umm Abd Muneeb, Islam aur Rafahi Kaam (Islam and Social Welfare Activities) (Lahore: Mushraba Ilm wa Hikmat, no date), 1–64, at 47. 15 Muneeb, “Islam aur Rafahi Kaam.” 16 Umm Saad, “Ankhain Tau Khol Shehr Ko Sailab Ley Giya (Open Your Eyes and See That the City Has Been Destroyed by the Flood),” Al Siffat, October 2010. 17 UN Security Council, “Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee Adds Names of Four Individuals to Consolidated List, Amends Entries of Three Entities-Sc/9527,” news release, 10 December 2008, available at www.un.org/press/en/2008/sc9527.doc.htm. 18 Professor Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, Tafsir Surah Yusuf (Exegesis of Surah Yusuf), First ed. (Lahore: Darul Andlus, 2009), 119–22. 19 Anonymous, “Nazriya-E-Pakistan: Tehqiq Wa Tajziya (Ideology of Pakistan: Research and Analysis),” Al Siffat, 2009, 40–42. 20 Kubra Rasool, “Surkhar’oi Ki Manzil Ki Taraf Qadam Barha’ain (Take a Step Towards the Destiny of Success),” Al Siffat, October 2010, 25. 21 Anonymous, “Nazriya-E-Pakistan: Tehqiq Wa Tajziya,” 42. 22 Anonymous, “Nazriya-E-Pakistan: Tehqiq Wa Tajziya.” 23 See, for example, in response to a comment by Majid Nizami, that the military needs to appreciate nazriya-e-Pakistan, a one-line comment stated: ‘If the armed forces had this sense, Pakistan would not have faced such a situation’. Anonymous, “Tabsaray (Commentary),” Tayibaat, April 2003, 43. 24 Umm Saad, “Memo Scandal Ki Haqiqat Kiya Hey? Awam Ko Bataya Ja’aiy (What Is the Reality Behind the Memo Scandal? The Citizens Should Be Informed),” Al Siffat, December 2011, 2–3.

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Samina Yasmeen 25 Bint Ishaq, “Iqtidaar: Aik Asmani Amanat (Authority: A Heavenly Trust),” Tayibaat, April 2003, 46. 26 Implied in this criticism was a deviation from Prophetic advice of sitting while drinking water. 27 Umm Abd Muneeb, “Ghair Muslimoon Ki Companiyan Aur Unn Kay Deeni Wadunawi Nuqsanat (Non-Muslims Companies and Their Relgious and Worldly Harmful Effects),” Tayibaat, November– December 2002, 14–15. 28 Rasool, “Surkhar’oi Ki Manzil Ki Taraf Qadam Barha’ain (Take a Step Towards the Destiny of Success),” 26. 29 Ukht Hafiz Aziz, “Gilrs Taa’leemi Adaray Magrabi Saqafat Kay Sailab Mein (Girls Educational Institutions Flooded by Western Culture),” Tayibaat, September 2003, 9–12. 30 Bint Mohammad Ishaq, “Ayam-E-Bay’zaa (the Days of Purity),” Al Siffat, December 2011. 31 Umm Saad, “Pakistan Mein Blackwater Ka Qiyam Aur Uski Sargarmian (the Establishing of Blackwater in Pakistan and Its Activities),” Al Siffat, October 2009. 32 See, for example, Al Siffat, “Hukumran Apni Zindigian Khulfa-E-Rashedin Aur Hukumran Sahaba Ki Tarz Par Ikhtiar Karein (Rulers Should Adopt the Life Style of the Four Righteous Caliphs and the Companions Who Ruled),” July 2010. 33 See, for example, Umm Ayman, “Amriki Dehshat’gardi Aur Iraqi Jang (American Terrorism and the War in Iraq),” Tayibaat, April 2003, 9–13, 36. 34 See, for example, Umm Hammad, “Amriki Istai’mar Ka Suraj Gharoob Ho Chuka Hai Aur Amriki Ma’ishat Ka Janaza Nikal Chuka Hai (the Sun of American Colonialism Has Set and American Economy Is Dead),” Al Siffat, July 2011. 35 Saad, “Memo Scandal Ki Haqiqat Kiya Hey? Awam Ko Bataya Ja’aiy (What Is the Reality Behind the Memo Scandal? The Citizens Should Be Informed).” 36 Kubra Rasool, “Aalam-E-Arab Mein Baidari Ki Lehr (the Wave of Awakening in the Arab World),” Saad, 2011. 37 Rasool, “Aalam-E-Arab Mein Baidari Ki Lehr,” 21. 38 Umm Saad, “Suaiy Karzar Niklo Qadam Say Qadam Mila Kay (Leave for the Battle Field United),” 49. 39 Rasool, “Surkhar’oi Ki Manzil Ki Taraf Qadam Barha’ain (Take a Step Towards the Destiny of Success),” 25.

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27 RACIALIZATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE PROBLEM OF THE MUSLIM PRESENCE IN WESTERN SOCIETIES Valérie Amiraux and Pierre-Luc Beauchesne

Introduction Here’s what else we cannot do. We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want. ISIL does not speak for Islam. They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world – including millions of patriotic Muslim Americans who reject their hateful ideology. Moreover, the vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are Muslim. If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away through suspicion and hate. That does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse. Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote; to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity. US President Barack Obama’s address to the nation about the war on ISIS following the terror attack in San Bernardino, California, 6 December 2015

So, listen. Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on! . . . We have no choice. US presidential candidate Donald Trump, campaign rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 7 December 2015

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Madrid (March 2004); London (July 2005); Fort Hood (November 2009); Boston (April 2013); Ottawa (October 2014); Paris (November 2015); San Bernardino (December, 2015); Chattanooga (July 2015); Brussels (March 2016); Orlando (June 2016); Nice (July 2016); Berlin (December 2016); Québec (January 2017); Stockholm (April 2017); Manchester (May 2017); Barcelona (August 2017); Christchurch (March 2019); El Paso (August 2019); Bayonne (October 2019) . . . in the collective memory of citizens of Western societies, these cities are now associated with terrorist attacks claimed by jihadi groups. They are only some of the “Western loci” where terrorist attacks have been perpetrated against civilians post-9/11. These jihadi-claimed attacks have targeted both Muslims and Jews in their respective places of worship (attacks against Jews include those in Toulouse, March 2012; Brussels, May 2014, and Copenhagen, February 2015),1 as well as undifferentiated citizens (in public spaces, such as shopping malls, bridges and concert halls), and members of professional orders (newspaper writers and cartoonists in Paris, January 2015). In 2020, Islam and Muslims are core political issues in non-Muslim countries, while Muslims in Western societies are simultaneously becoming instrumental to Middle-Eastern politics. The surge of foreign fighters joining the ranks of ISIS in Iraq and Syria have, most recently, given new impetus to these political articulations.2 In 2001, alQaeda’s Saudi-affiliated fighters committed an act of terror on US territory. By 2012, many European Muslims were joining ISIS to fight on Middle Eastern soils. In this chapter, we examine political Islam as a transnational concern. We consider it as a shared political issue and a multilevel source of anxiety that has unleashed intense public debate, moral panic, and security concerns about Muslims in so-called “Western contexts” since 9/11. Transnational surveillance regimes have developed in response to a matrix of public policies in most European and North American countries. Over the last fifty years, Muslim immigration to and settlement in the EU and North America have been perceived by the public in the various countries of these regions as a social and political problem that manifests in various forms. This perception has often revealed the culturally circumscribed nature of citizenship models, the historical tradition of nation building, and national specificities in the definition of the relationship between church (religion) and state.3 Nonetheless, for many decades – from the 1960s until the early 2000s – the situation of Muslims in North America and the EU was more or less perceived as the result of successful traditions of immigrant integration specific to each nation.4 Perceptions and mainstream public opinion changed dramatically after the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 (9/11),5 and have continued to change drastically since 2015 with the upsurge of violent jihadism in Europe that has directly affected the “sense of threat” perceived by Western publics.6 Until the mid-2000s, most debates regarding the presence of Muslims in Europe and North America focused on the liberal governance of religious diversity (meaning the way in which nation states do or do not accommodate religious differences),7 and on claims made by European and North American Muslims relating to Islam.8 Since the 2010s, the “radicalization” and active participation of Muslims from Western countries in Middle Eastern conflicts have merged security policies with the fight against terrorism. This has added a layer of security-oriented policies to the discussion around integration and participation of Muslims in Western societies. In brief, following a series of violent attacks, a variety of identifiable public personas, both male and female, such as the foreign fighter, the returnee, the convert, and the homegrown terrorist, have emerged in Western societies where they are viewed with suspicion and perceived as a threat. These figures magnify the increasingly ingrained distrust 364

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with which Muslim populations in these societies are faced and must confront. Public opinion surveys in North America and in Europe rank Muslims as the “least accepted” group.9 The first section of this chapter briefly describes the context in which narratives about Muslims and Islam have developed in the 27 countries of the European Union,10 and in Canada and the United States.11 With regard to the general purpose of this volume, we will consider Islam and Muslims in predominantly non-Muslim contexts as loci for political problems and sources of polarized politicization. After 9/11, and in reaction to the ensuing chain of violent attacks, European and North American attitudes converged to frame Muslim citizens as potentially incapable of integrating into so-called “secularized Western” host societies. Contrasting frameworks and regimes of defining citizenship, as well as traditionally opposed “models of incorporation”, such as interculturalism, multiculturalism, Republicanism, and assimilationism, have all produced public discussions on the Islamic headscarf, and on questions of radicalization and counterterrorism throughout the West, albeit with some differences between publicly expressed attitudes in the US, Canada, and Europe. So, how can the widespread, global adhesion to restrictive policies (i.e., controlling publicly expressed religious preferences) and institutionalization of suspicion (i.e., racial profiling as a national security imperative) be understood? The thesis that integration fails whenever religious differences are made visible is prominently shared in Western contexts, again with subtle variations between North America and Europe.12 The answers to our inquiry are, of course, multifaceted and tentative. Any discussion of Islam-related subject matter involves broader social, political, ideological, and economic issues, and is connected to the recent rise of nationalist populism in Europe and in the US.13 These populist discourses include arguments focusing on, but not inclusive of: the “challenge” of multiculturalism, the capacity of secularism to organize a conflict-free religious pluralism in Western societies, the perception of non-Western cultural references as a threat, the increase in Islamophobia and in anti-Muslim racism and the tangible discrimination it begets, the perceived loyalty of Muslim citizens, and the impact of foreign policies on domestic spaces. The issues discussed also involve concepts of culture, justice, and welfare. In the second section of this chapter, we highlight how the transnationalization of feelings of insecurity is founded on the racialization of Muslims in non-Muslim contexts. The third section examines the “moral panic”14 surrounding the fear of radicalization. Here, our main challenge is to show how racialization became the central axis for the politicization of Islam and Muslims by non-Muslim majorities in many sectors of social and public life. The domestic pursuit of the “war on terror” based on counterterrorism policies designed to “combat religious radicalization” presupposes that Islamic religiosity is a threat to peaceful cohabitation in Europe, Canada, and the US.15 Such cultural boundary-making serves as a convenient marker to distinguish desirable from undesirable citizens.

The challenge of analysing “Muslims” in Western contexts In Europe and North America, Muslims have evolved as stable minorities within their respective societies, although their legal status varies between countries. In the US, Muslims account for 1 per cent of the population;16 in the European Union, they represent about 2 per cent of the population.17 Over time, the intense but wide-ranging public discussion of the legal, political, and theological nature of these Muslim minorities has shifted away from the diversity of this socio-demographic reality and become, at times, a narrowly focused, highly controversial, and antagonistic debate.18 365

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We begin by examining who these Muslims in Western contexts are in order to analyse the path dependency of controversies around secularism, accommodation, freedom of speech, public safety, and national identity that has become the central channel for policing the public presence and visibility of Islam and Muslims. The growing presence of Muslims (and Islam) in societies where they form minorities raises social and cultural issues at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels of the political decision-making process. It also finds expression at the individual and collective levels of experience. Over the last five decades, these issues have been well documented in academic research; they are increasingly being covered by non-academic writers, such as columnists, journalists, bloggers, essayists, novelists, and activists.19 The word “Muslim” has become a common, all-encompassing categorization in Western public discourse. Often, without referring to anything precisely, it is used as a proxy for all sorts of troubles and social problems considered in terms of identity and culture,20 as well as in ideological and political terms.21 Statistics are powerful political tools when discussing the realities of minority religions. When estimating the size and demographic rates of growth of Muslim populations, the idea that Muslims will come to outnumber non-Muslims is innate to the ideological diversity of populist discourse.22 While misrepresentations generally fuel hostility towards “otherness”, public perceptions of Muslims in Western contexts fit easily into the “us vs. them” mentality that underscores the “political style” of most populists. Populism uses “specific repertoires of performance to create political relations”.23 Focusing on populism as a political style (rather than as a strict discourse or ideology) helps in understanding the central role of representations (perceptions of threats or crises) in activating individuals and groups, and rendering them present.24 Numbers and the misrepresentations associated with them are central to this rhetoric and function as “technologies for imagining and representing a population composed of ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’, just as they contribute to the production and maintenance of particular feelings about and between the two categories”.25 The “Index of Ignorance,” produced by Ipsos Mori as part of the “Perils of Perception” survey, illustrates how numbers can nurture fantasies and be used to disconnect populist discourse from factual and empirical realities. The 2016 survey measured gaps in public perceptions on a range of population and social issues in forty countries. In the survey, most respondents systematically overestimated the number of Muslims as a per centage of the total population in their respective countries. In France, respondents thought 31 per cent of the population was Muslim when it is only 7.5 per cent; in Britain, respondents thought Muslims comprise 15 per cent of the population when, in fact, they only account for 4.8 per cent; in the US, the respective figures were 17 per cent and 1 % per cent; and in Canada, they were 17 per cent and 3.2 per cent. In most countries, respondents also thought the Muslim population was increasing at an “incredible rate”.26 One explanation for these two findings may relate to the fact that people tend to overestimate what they worry about and perceive as a threat. In their surveys, scholars and statisticians use three methods to estimate how many Muslims live in a given country. The first takes ethnicity as a proxy. It relies on ethnic criteria to determine who is Muslim based on the country of origin and place of birth of the first family member to emigrate. But equating ethnic and religious identity means that all the complex, plural, and often shifting identities of contemporary Muslim citizens and populations are lost in the shuffle. What about “those who tick the ‘no religion’ box” on a census or on surveys?27 The second method registers believers on the basis of what are perceived to be common religious practices, such as praying, fasting, and alms giving. The third method involves collecting quantitative census data based on the answers to questions 366

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pertaining to religious self-identification or religiosity. This method has been used in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom censuses (since 2001), but questions and data about religiosity are consistently absent from public surveys and statistics in continental Europe, including national censuses.28 The 2011 Canadian census asked, “What is this person’s religion?” The notes accompanying the question included both a specification that the answer should be given independent of the level of practice as well as a list of suggestions to prompt a response. In Canada, the 2001 census results documented that the country’s Muslim population had more than doubled since 1991. This fact, when combined with the public’s reaction to the events of 9/11, transformed the national discussion of Islam into a “problem”.29 While 9/11 made Muslims visible in the US,30 in Canada, their increased visibility was also a function of demographics and immigration. In the 2001 UK census, a question about religion was introduced after a protracted discussion between different groups, including members of Britain’s religious communities. The data initially collected revealed the internal heterogeneity of religious groups.31 In subsequent surveys, it also measured an increase in the number of respondents indicating they had “no religion”. The census data collected is particularly significant when cross-referencing occupational attainment and education: treating Muslims as a homogeneous group ignores important differences in terms of ethnicity, and of the characteristics of the neighbourhood in which respondents reside.32 The extent of ethnic penalties, for example, varies among Muslims of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi origin. Census data also identifies gender gaps between migrant communities and religious groups, and counterbalances both the “politicized status of Muslims in the global context” and the negative attention focused on them.33 In many countries, the lack of official data on religious affiliation constitutes an obstacle to conducting research and devising public policies, for instance, when assessing discrimination in accessing public goods and services.34 The lack of data creates discrepancies when attempting to assess quantifiable indicators, such as academic achievement,35 and the impact of “ethnic penalties” on the members of disadvantaged, easily identifiable groups.36 Statistical invisibility also impacts the attempt to provide potential legal solutions to redress inequalities. For example, the concept of direct and indirect discrimination, including discrimination due to religious belief, is central to the legal and political discourse and practices that promote equality and respect for diversity. Until recently in Europe, however, the concept remained relatively marginal in discussions about Muslims and Islam.37 But a lack of official and trustworthy numbers does not mean an absence of interest with regards to quantitative knowledge on Muslims who are continuously “tested” on various matters.38 A discussion of the issues relating to Muslim integration “in the West” can be advanced from a variety of perspectives. One of the most frequently used references is the separation of church and state, because of the historical stability of this institutional arrangement in both Europe and North America. When dealing with Islam as a religion, “European countries tend to follow the American example, and each has developed its own particular framework or model for governing the separation of church and state and for regulating the activities of its religious minorities.”39 France actively promotes a secular ideal in which religion is considered strictly private. The UK advocates for the accommodation of religious pluralism. Belgian public policy is based on the concept of “pillarization”, as per Casanova, who emphasizes both the role of the state and of regulatory policies in identifying the national conditions for the inclusion of Muslims and Islam in Western societies. Secularism, the governance of religious materialization in public, remains the dominant matrix in Western societies.40 367

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There are numerous national versions of the question: “Can Muslims fit into liberal and secular societies?” Beginning in the late 1980s, an extremely productive field of scholarship has used national case studies to analyse and edify the various relationships binding church and state in predominantly secular societies.41 In the US, the separation of church (religion) and state is embedded in the Constitution of 1791. In contrast with France where, as mentioned, the state is actively engaged in restricting religion to the private sphere in what Ahmet T. Kuru42 calls “assertive secularism”, the US is engaged in what Kuru labels “passive secularism”, whereby religion maintains a level of public visibility or dimension that is “expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling the American civil religion”.43 Compared with most European countries, religiosity in the US is conceived of and understood “as a constitutive moral grounding of citizenship and national identity . . . in constituting cultural membership in the American context”.44 From this perspective, when looking at the evolution of global anti-Muslim sentiment in the US and Europe,45 the perceptions of Muslims by non-Muslim majority societies mirror the gap that has also been identified in how the legitimacy of religious identity performed in the private as well as in the public life of citizens is respectively comprehended.46 When comparing the American and European contexts, Karen Isaksen Leonard47 also emphasizes the relationship between the history of Muslim ethnic communities and the nexus of ties connecting religion, freedom, and justice in US history. In Western Europe, Islam is often perceived as a foreign religion imported by immigrant ethnic groups, such as the Turks in Germany, the Moroccans and Turks in Belgium, and the Maghrebis or North Africans in France. In the US, Muslims represent a much smaller and more ethnically heterogeneous minority religion, of which almost a quarter is of African American descent. When examining Islam in America, race matters as much as the ties binding religion to politics. To understand the distinction between the American and European contexts, Zolberg and Woon48 analysed the “major foci of tension and contention” relating to discussions in Europe and the States of the boundary tracing enacted by regimes geared toward incorporation. They identified a sharp contrast in which religion in the EU and the minority language in the US represent risk factors: “Islam and Spanish are metonyms for the dangers that those most opposed to immigration perceive as looming ahead: loss of cultural identity, accompanied by disintegrative separatism or communal conflict.”49 In parts of Europe and in Canada, public discussions of “Islam and Muslims” continue to promote secularism as a principle evolving into a value,50 and manifesting itself in efforts to control the public visibility of a minority religion in order to protect and defend a traditional definition of national identity (such as in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Québec).

Controversial public visibility and the racialization of Muslim “others” In this section, we want to look at the interconnection of two processes that, together, have created a powerful matrix of racialization of Muslims in Western contexts: first, the construction of the presence of Islam and public religious claims by Muslims as a social problem and second, the transnationalization of threat and insecurity associated with it. In some EU member-states and parts of North America, public spaces have become increasingly intolerant towards the forms of religiosity practised by Muslims, regarding them as cultural, social, and political pathologies. The topic ranks high on the political agenda and is embodied in many items (the headscarf being the most prominent one). It has been consistently omnipresent in the media.51 Since 2001, from the States to the EU, Muslims have become a very frequent and common subject of discussion, becoming the 368

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quintessential outsiders.52 While the Western contexts we are dealing with are heterogeneous, as expressed in the first section, similarities in the public discourses can be observed in the way in which, for instance, cultural hierarchies are established and categorized through fantasies and iconographies of otherness and narratives of deviance embodied by Muslims and their religion.53 The binarism underwriting these hierarchies not only traces a line between “us and them” (Muslims and non-Muslims), but also serves often to distinguish between acceptable (good) Muslims and unacceptable (bad) Muslims, i.e., those not complying with expected behaviours and established ways of doing, or not endorsing or respecting national values.54 If this distinction always intensifies in the aftermath of terrorist acts and/or controversies related to Muslims, it also translates into uneasy daily interactions between citizens in more ordinary moments of their life. Suspicion and control have come to compose a topos of transnational defiance towards Muslim citizens in Western contexts that operates on multiple levels, from the local to the international. It is based on the circulation of a shared hostility towards the visible materiality of religious distinction (headscarf, minaret, mosque) and on the racialization of religion, and more generally of minority cultures,55 rather than on religion per se.56 Culture, as Elisabeth Claverie57 points out with regard to her work on appearances of the Virgin Mary, only becomes a “problem” when it is manifested by practices, by perceptible traces. The visual display of religiosity and religious affiliation in secular contexts has indeed become an issue at the centre of legal battles in Québec and EU countries over the last three decades, giving rise to recurring controversies. While the institutional avenues channelling these heated discussions differ (judiciary, i.e., courts, versus legislative, i.e., political arenas) in the various contexts at stake here, their intensity and ability to polarize have been quite similar. Specific national contexts each have their own cultural, political, and historical dimensions that frame public debates, but the construction of Islam and Muslims as public problems follows more or less a shared sequence of steps in North America and in Europe.58 First, it involves the publicization of narratives of incompatibility, mostly by emphasizing the impossibility of bridging opposite systems of values (freedom of speech vs. blasphemy; gender equality vs. control of women). This incompatibility is then staged in various arenas, through multiple voices (sometimes Muslim ones) from very local to more global ones. It is sometimes erected as a major national issue, often through a controversial and polarizing mode where opposite camps become the most vocal poles. We can think of the binary opposition between the multiculturalist voices and the nationalist or nativist ones regarding the integration of Muslim migrants in Western contexts. The incompatibility matrix, through its controversial publicization, is then encoded as a security and an identity problem, in which the visible religious distinction of Muslim minorities is perceived as a threat. The 2009 Swiss episode of the minaret ban and the controversy surrounding the opening of an Islamic centre in late September 2011 near the location of the “Ground Zero” memorial in lower Manhattan have provoked similar debates. For example, the Republican political figure Newt Gingrich declared on television that “to [build a mosque] a few blocks from the site in which Islamist extremists killed nearly 3,000 Americans, is a ‘political act’ of triumphalism.”59 The presence of Islamic religiosity in public space, and especially near a memorial that performs as part of a war narrative where American values are set up in opposition to “un-American” enemies, becomes a provocation, a profanation of an American “sacred site”.60 Visibility is key in this process of the construction of the public problem. The focus of majority society’s attention on visible signs of belonging to Islam (garments and beards for instance) supports a process of an essentialization of cultural and religious attributes that 369

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connects race with culture or religion by making them a “fixed property of groups rather than an entity constantly created through relationships”.61 The narratives of incompatibility are particularly powerful in the essentialization process:62 they emphasize the perception of ethnic differences as equating moral differences.63 The production of a race effect in this relates as much to the visible artefact of an other’s religion, as to the mere notion that majority societies are raceless, while minority groups remain entrapped in an intangible cultural, ethnic, and religious origin.64 Strong reactions amongst “white” national majorities to public references to Islamophobia or the systemic discrimination of Muslims are emblematic of a “white fragility” that is triggered when racial privileges are made visible to individuals who consider themselves “raceless” and “inclusive”.65 In that context, if the “Muslim problem” is now at the core of European and North American politics, the “Islamophobia problem” is still the subject of a strong denial.66 For example, in the aftermath of the armed attack on a mosque in Québec City in January 2017, all three major provincial political parties opposed the establishment of a day against Islamophobia proposed by Canadian Muslim organizations and the federal government. This opposition is driven by the idea that such a day will contribute to depicting Québecers as racist and Islamophobic – going against the narrative of an inclusive Québec, exemplified by the declaration that “there is no Islamophobia in Québec”, made by Québec premier François Legault when commenting on the possibility of such a commemoration in 2019. The convergence between this threat to identity and security constituted by a public display of religious indicators has been embodied in many examples. Non-heteronormative sexualities have, for instance, been serving as a litmus test of citizenship in some contexts, distinguishing between foreigners/immigrants capable of integrating into the West from those who, because they do not view homosexuality as possible, are not. Its role in the Baden-Württemberg German tests of citizenship has also been crucial. In the United States, the homonationalist component of nationalistic populism was visible in presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s reaction after the mass shooting in a gay bar in Orlando in 2016. His speech emphasized the immigrant, Afghani background of the shooter and called for “toughness” towards “radical Islam”. The racialization of Muslims was also pervasive in progressives’ reactions to the attack, as the native-born status of the shooter was broadly denied, entrapping him, rather, in his assigned religious identity.67 The clearest illustration of these polarizing narratives remains the headscarf controversies that multiplied in most EU contexts during the 1990s. Two main positions vis-à-vis the headscarf can be distinguished. First, the accommodating position of public authorities (dominant in the 1980s but decreasing since the 1990s), and second, the position adopted by those wishing to ban this behaviour/garment from certain sectors or all of the public sphere. The widespread debates and legal limitations imposed on the wearing of the headscarf made clear that it is viewed as an inadequate social object, a source of risk and iniquity. It is perceived simultaneously as an obstacle to integration (both of the membership group and the individual), to emancipation (of women), to dialogue (between Muslims and non-Muslims, veiled and non-veiled women, men and women), as well as to public authority.68 In the EU, France has certainly taken the lead in the overt hostility expressed towards Muslims in Europe with regard to the headscarf; the real distinction between France and other EU countries lies in the early introduction and longevity of the debate in the public arena (1989–2004).69 In almost all EU countries (including for example Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands), restricting or banning the headscarf and the full Islamic veil in specific sectors of social and public life became the subject of controversies after the mid-1990s. Outside of the EU, Britain and Québec offer two contrasting 370

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illustrations of this pattern of public discussions, going from invitation to a case-by-case assessment of individual situations to an extended ban in limited sectors of public life or by certain agents (for instance, by public servants).70 Reading the headscarf controversies as a “normative account of the relationships between citizenship and identity”71 reveals a shared conviction that the headscarf is a contaminating element, harmful to both national identities and the individuals who wear it. Such a consensus, however, contravenes principles such as equality and neutrality and religious freedom, as well as the right to carry private indicators of intimate convictions into the public sphere. The ubiquity of the debates has made headscarves (more recently niqabs), and by extension the Muslim women wearing them, signify everything that is thought to be wrong with Islam, generating moral panic and hysteria. What do race and racialization bring into the picture? Racialization is a complex of signification and action with structural consequences.72 It refers to a process through which many types of differences, including cultural traits or religious belonging, are given meanings so that they produce and reproduce racial discrimination, racial inequalities, and sometimes racism. Racialization is “a process of signification in the course of which the idea of ‘race’ is employed to interpret the presence and behaviours of others, a conceptual process which can guide subsequent action and reaction”.73 Its move on the political agenda relates to politicization and has historically fuelled the contradictory request addressed to migrants: on the one hand, public authorities and societies expect them to participate and be included; on the other hand, the same actors produce the conditions of their differentiated treatment. Racialization is also a reciprocal dynamic that becomes a way to define oneself. Robert Miles and others after him emphasize the fact that the meaning and production of categories place the racialized person (here, Muslims) into a power structure that includes many scales of interaction, turning “Islam into the ‘other’ who cannot be assimilated, confusing the self-determination of the autonomous subject with the subjectivity of the white, ‘Western male’”.74 Mahmood Mamdani speaks of “museumized peoples”, who are “petrified into a lifeless custom” in reference to Muslims, who in the end need to be saved by someone on the outside as they are incapable of working on their culture.75 The figure of the homophobic migrant threatening the secularized gay body is one of the examples of the racialization process tied to homonationalist configurations.76 “Intimate citizenship practices” have thus been elevated into discriminating variables that measure the capacity of certain individuals to become loyal Western citizens and clearly confirm the enmeshment of homonationalism with securitization, counterterrorism, nationalism, and citizenship abounds.77 Racialization operates both at the collective and individual levels. From the “rivers of blood” prophesied by Enoch Powell (1968) to the “Muslim ban” executive order of Donald J. Trump (2016), the racialization of politics has been a strong adjuvant of nationalist discourses. The external threat embodied in the figures of the black or Muslim immigrant are described as perniciously disrupting the way of life of a now-estranged majority, turning the table of privileges, and putting “white” majority citizens at risk. These prophecies of a chaotic future fuel the rhetoric of nationalist politicians proposing to regain control, to stop immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on!” as Trump puts it. Sherene Razack writes, “Racial distinctions become so routinized that a racial hierarchy is maintained without requiring the component of individual actors who are personally hostile towards Muslims.”78 The already discussed iconography of threat transpires in daily interactions. It is articulated through the erection of public transnational

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controversies and image, clichés that contribute to the production of a common stage on which similar dramas are being played and interpreted by standardized actors: Islam is staged in public by means of religious rituals and symbols, by gendered modes of address, by manifestations and collective prayers, and by new forms of jihadism and violence that challenge and threaten the consensual values and civilizational attributes of Europe.79 Today, the contemporary iconic construction of Muslims is rather ethnographic in its focus on the governance of bodies as the main sites for surveillance, using sophisticated legal technologies, as well as the modes of social reproduction and transmission of good practices and best virtues. Razack shows,80 for example, how the regulation of the marital age of consent and family reunification helped the Norwegian state create a category of citizen whose private life choices are controlled (as in Foucault’s “conducting the others” conduct). Comparing Canada and Norway, she explores the way in which three allegorical figures (the dangerous Muslim man, the imperilled Muslim woman, the civilized European) “animate a story about a family of white nations”.81 Examining the experience of Arab and South Asian American Muslims, Saher Selod considers the racialization of Muslims as a process of exclusion from “whiteness”,82 from the privileged position of an uncontentious identity. By this process, Islamic religiosity and visible signs of religious beliefs become a “problem”, a subject of suspicion and surveillance. For Arab Muslim women interviewed by Selod,83 wearing a hijab after 9/11 led to this process of “losing whiteness”, experiencing the scrutiny of co-citizens in daily life interactions and state surveillance (e.g., in airport security checks). The work by Sarah Mazouz84 has also described how gender equality and what she calls “sexual democracy” (démocratie sexuelle) work as yardsticks to assess the degree of integration and adhesion to the Republican values necessary for migrants becoming French. Race and gender interplay as key variables, and Muslim women wearing the headscarf are often perceived as not matching up with expectations.85 These examples point towards the importance of gender in the racialization process of Muslims. The polarization of political debates about the headscarf have exposed the bodies of Muslim women to the hostility of Islamophobic publics. As reported by the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France in 2019, 70 per cent of hate crimes targeting Muslims in France target women.86 Debates about the forms of religiosity of Muslim women are staged in different arenas, in the absence of the women themselves, making their experience of racialization also an experience of the denial of their agency.87

Suspicion and surveillance: is radicalization the new black? Since the end of the 1990s, Western secular public spaces have taken a radical turn when dealing with the growing visibility of Muslims. The counterterrorism and prevention of radicalization policies push further the surveillance and policing of private convictions and even personal taste that was already in action at the core of discourses and legislations about headscarves, burkas, minarets, and other supposed indicators of religious orthopraxis. If the public gaze centred on Muslims and Islam in non-Muslim contexts can be examined through a fashion metaphor, this chapter’s main statement is that radicalization is the new black. Indeed, from Ukraine to British Columbia, radicalization has popped up since the mid-2010s as the main label through which the presence of Muslims as minority is lensed 372

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and studied in social sciences. Clearly, 9/11 is the starting date of a perception shift towards Muslims and Islam, as “Islamic terrorism” became the most feared phenomenon throughout the European Union and North America.88 Research on radicalization and reference in research to radicalization has increased massively since 2006, with the concept becoming an academic and political buzzword.89 Terrorism and radicalization complement each other and have a series of effects at various scales, both collectively and individually. The radicalization discourse framed and informed the rationale of counterterrorist policies producing definitions of risk, dangerous vulnerabilities, or suspicious activities.90 Counterterrorist and counter-radicalization measures may restrict individual rights and fundamental freedoms challenged by the terrorist threat, as different countries promulgate regimes of intensive surveillance and exception. When it comes to radicalization in academic and non-academic literature, readers are aware of two dominant arguments to explain the upsurge in political violence motivated by jihadism.91 The first theory is labelled “culturalist” by Arun Kundnani: as a cult and a culture, Islam is the cause of all evils. Based on this, extremism and radicalisation are intrinsically linked to Islam for historical and theological reasons. This “language of culture” operates much like the “language of race” in times past. Culturalists (Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Christopher Caldwell) believe that the only acceptable political act for Muslims is to renounce their Muslim identity in order to exist politically.92 The second theory, which Kundnani calls “reformist”, perceives extremism and Islamism as perversions of the original religious message (he refers to Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, Robert Leiken, Marc Sageman).93 For reformists, as a condition of citizenship, Muslims must demonstrate unconditional allegiance to Western liberal values in order to distinguish themselves from the “bad guys”, disassociating themselves from political activity and engagement (cf., the vivification of the campaign centring on #notinmyname).94 For both arguments, Kundnani critiques the absence of political circumstance and context in their respective diagnosis and analysis. When considered alone, ideology may offer a credible explanation, but it ignores how political circumstances affect the ways in which individuals make sense of their surroundings and, ultimately, decide to take action to influence outcomes. To understand the root causes of jihadist terrorism, however, requires an examination of the forces underlying the violence committed by Western states in the Middle East and “at home”, and of the identity politics upon which these forces are founded. At times, culturalist and reformist theories converge. Such was the case when a new approach to radicalization was developed following the terrorist attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005), and the emergence of the “homegrown” terrorist. As events unfold – Kundnani cites the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 and the killing of a British soldier in Woolwich in May 2013; we could add the October 2014 murders of a Canadian Armed Forces member in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, and of another during the Parliament Hill shootings in Ottawa – they take their place in the narrative matrix of the “war on terror”. Threats are simply being reconfigured on several fronts that are not necessarily distant or foreign, but domestic, local, and difficult to identify or detect. Although their scale differs from the attacks that took place in New York (2001), Madrid (2004), and London (2005), these threats update the conditions necessary to maintain levels of fear and anxiety among members of the public when faced with the perceived dangers posed by individuals attracted to a “controversial” ideology like Islam (whether it is portrayed as a culture or as a misinterpretation). Kundnani explains how the impulse to disengage from politics – political avoidance – is ongoing and is manifest with the psychologization of jihadization.

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Various authors have presented Islamophobia – the structural racism against Muslims – as a by-product of the “war on terror” that cannot be sustained without the racialized dehumanization of the Muslim victims of this war.95 Focusing on Islamist radicalization (its stages, its actors, “lone wolves”, its “cells”, and its frameworks of opportunity, such as multiculturalist tolerance and generational factors) rather than on the political causes of terrorism, European and North American societies certainly continue to fuel Islamophobia in multiple ways, including through surveillance, infiltration, suspicion, and criminalization (of actors and actions). A flourishing literature surrounding the concept of “racialized surveillance” towards “suspected communities” of Muslims proposes to understand the experience of Muslims in non-Muslim contexts through the lens of racialization.96 For example, the Prevent strategy in the UK was based on a highly depoliticized representation of the radicalization process and a rather “epidemiological” view of the diffusion of the terrorist threat in the country.97 Political motives and determinants are not included in the “puzzle”98 of the radicalization trajectories of individuals, which draw the major part of the attention of scholars and public authorities.99 Explanations tend to encapsulate international and national political contexts in the description of an “individual theological and/or psychological journey”.100 The impact of these measures on the daily lives of Muslim populations in non-Muslim contexts has been well-documented, as many scholars in different countries have taken up the W.E.B. Du Bois classical research agenda and asked “How does it feel to be a problem?”101 The understanding of racialized security assemblages in which “suspected communities” are entrapped calls for a new topology of the border in order to move beyond the traditional notion of boundary as a territorial line, now becoming obsolete notably through mass surveillance of online activities.102 Indeed, not only are national dramas made public issues in other contexts and hence transnationalized, but they all relate to each other, reconstituting internal racial and religious borders in non-Muslim contexts. Policy transfers between security partners103 and cooperation initiatives104 at regional or transnational levels produce convergence in national counterterrorism and counterradicalization measures, as insecurity become transnationalized. The Prevent strategy, like other counterterrorism policies in Europe and North America, has been critiqued for its tactics: namely, that in attempting to pre-empt the risk of terrorism, it intervenes directly with institutions within the Muslim community, thereby directing an aura of suspicion towards the community and framing certain publics as threateningly vulnerable to radicalization.105 These policies are driven by the will to govern risk and uncertainty, and especially fetishized Muslim subjects that catalyse suspicion and fear of terrorism.106 Sharmin Sadequee,107 writing in the American context, insists on rooting surveillance and suspicion towards Muslim Americans in a long-standing will of the state, complex in its genealogy (partly colonial108) to delineate the boundaries of appropriate religion and to control religiosity of the others threatening secular public space and embodying the risk of multiculturalist tolerance.109 “Excessive Muslimness”110 or visible religiosity, the mark of a “bad Muslim” refusing to abide by the secular order, becomes suspicious and threatening. Identities of increasingly visible Muslims in non-Muslim contexts get politicized and entrapped in Muslimness.111 This entrapment is visible in the Muslims’ encounters with the racialized surveillance assemblage. For example, as Selod’s work has shown, in airport settings, Muslims are subjected to intense surveillance as Muslim names (similar to the ones on security lists), places of birth, wearing a hijab, or other behaviours that normally go unnoticed, become suspicious.112 The logic of profiling directs security agents and online programs of surveillance to not only rely on indications of potential 374

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criminal activities but also on a racialized representation of “who is engaged in these behaviours”.113 Racialization is also gendered. The hijab, perceived as a suspicious garment, draws hateful speech or actions, and also the hyper-vigilance of the security apparatus.114 The representation of Muslim women as disempowered tends to consider their engagement as the product of a manipulation. This tendency is visible in the different “deradicalization” programs and the policies facing the jihadist returnees.115 In an autobiographical essay entitled “The Beard” (La barbe), Omar Benlaala narrates his identity itinerary from his childhood in the Parisian suburbs to his spiritual endeavour in Islam, and explains how the decision to shave his beard at the beginning of 2000s made him invisible again while in public and allowed him to avoid the scrutiny and suspicion he had been facing before.116 The suspicion oriented towards Islam produces “day-to-day segregation of Arabs and Muslims”,117 and the counterterrorism and counter-radicalization policies are also leading to the diffusion of defiance within Muslim communities given how they call for scrutiny118 and rely on informants to spot potential terrorists and gather information on suspicious activities.119 Facing surveillance, Muslims in non-Muslim contexts may decide to avoid politics and “tone down” religiosity publicly in order to “not look the part” and present a “moderate” image of Islam,120 as well as avoid the stigmatization of Islam and Muslims. The politicization of Muslim identities, however, is also giving rise to different forms of resistance and stigma reversal. Making Islamic religiosity visible and asserting their Muslim identities can provide an avenue to political subjectivation for some Muslims when full citizenship is denied.121

Conclusion In 2020, the religious diversity embodied by Muslim citizens in non-Muslim contexts remains key in generating contemporary transnational anxieties and international social panics. As is clear from recent public debates over the legitimacy of religious signs or dress, religious legal systems within secular states, comic-strip controversies, or even family law issues, terrorism, and religious radicalization, Islam and Muslims are at the centre of debates about modern European democracies and their futures. Over the last years, the politics of difference in Western countries have constituted a mixture of hesitation, inconsistency, and faithfulness to historical ghosts and abstract principles. Mapping religious diversity is still frequently coupled with normative prescriptions about how modern citizens should engage with religious others. There is a need to invent a new type of tie to bind individual citizens to the political, since national belonging (citizenship) is increasingly disassociated from cultural belonging. Despite the substitution that can be identified between race and religion as elements of inclusion/exclusion from national contexts, they do not overlap entirely, either in their legal treatment or their political outcomes. Both are regulated through constitutional politics; however, the regulations differ. Whereas the constitutional politics of race imply political struggles over the meaning of equality and the legal tools to implement them (affirmative action, ethnic monitoring, etc.), the constitutional politics of religion, and especially Islam, imply a renegotiation, or a reinterpretation of an historical compromise on secularism and its implementation. Whereas the principle of equality characterizing liberal constitutional states cannot tolerate the rule of exception, when it comes to religion, there seems to be room for exceptional treatment or differential treatment at the very least. The current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic offers an unexpected and ironic illustration of this. Public health measures and social distancing rules prohibit the shaking of hands and encourage the wearing of masks when out in public. These two behaviours, 375

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among others, have however been strictly tracked for the last two decades in many Western anti-radicalization policies as indicators of risk, disloyalty, and a potential threat to national values and security.122 The shifting of discourse is quite fascinating and confirms the fetishization of Islamic religious signs and motives by the secular gaze,123 leaving the door open to never-ending polarizing discussions about the place of believers in liberal democracies.

Notes 1 To these names should be added the long list of cities outside Europe where Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, have been the victims of attacks by various groups. As mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, Islamist terror also targets Muslims. 2 ISIL is the abbreviation of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (or Syria); ISIS is the abbreviation of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. 3 Richard J. Moon, Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), and Nancy Foner and Patrick Simon, Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity: Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015). 4 Integration is an ill-defined notion that has transformed from a classical sociological concept into part of a political and ideological vocabulary, and is used interchangeably to convey socio-cultural programs and projects relating to assimilation, incorporation or participation. See Franck Düvell, “Migration, minorities, marginality: New directions in European research,” in The SAGE Handbook of European Studies, ed. Chris Rumford (London: Sage, 2009), 328–346, and Rinus Penninx, Maria Berger and Karen Kraal, The Dynamics of International Migration and Settlement in Europe. A State of the Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 5 Pippa Norris, Montague Kern, and Marion Just, Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Costas Panagopoulos, “Trends: Arab and Muslim Americans and Islam in the Aftermath of 9/11,” Public Opinion Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2006): 608–624. 6 Pavlos Vasilopoulos, “Terrorist Events, Emotional Reactions, and Political Participation: The 2015 Paris Attacks,” West European Politics 41, no. 1 (2018): 102–127. 7 Christian Joppke and John Torpey, Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 8 Salim Farrar and Ghena Krayem, Accommodating Muslims Under Common Law: a Comparative Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2017). 9 Penny Edgell, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis, “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States,” Social Forces 95, no. 2 (2016): 607–638, and Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Geoffrey C. Layman and Eric M. Uslaner, “‘Bands of Others’? Attitudes toward Muslims in Contemporary American Society,” The Journal of Politics 71, no. 3 (2009): 1–16. 10 Medhi Bozorgmehr and Philip Kasinitz, Growing up Muslim in Europe and the United States (Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, 2019), and Marcel Maussen, The Governance of Islam in Western Europe: A State of the Art Report (Amsterdam: IMISCOE Working Paper No. 16, 2007). 11 For the US, see John L. Esposito and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Muslims on the Americanization Path? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Karen Isaksen Leonard, Muslims in the United States: The State of Research (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), and Jonathan Laurence and Philippa Strum, Governments and Muslim Communities in the West: United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008). For Canada, see Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2005); Denise Helly, “Orientalisme populaire et modernisme: Une nouvelle rectitude politique au Canada,” The Tocqueville Review/La revue Toqueville 31, no. 2 (2010): 157–193; Anna C. Korteweg, “The Sharia Debate in Ontario: Gender, Islam, and Representations of Muslim Women’s Agency,” Gender and Society 22, no. 4 (2008): 434–454, and David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die, Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada Between Europe and America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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12 Secularism assumes that the influence of religion on society will inevitably decline as the authority of the Church in Western societies diminishes. The waning influence of religion on social behaviour is traditionally seen as an inherent part of modernization and, in particular, is linked to the increased individualization (the “do-it-yourself” perspective) of religious affiliations and practices, including the “privatization” of religion as the solution to cultural conflicts. In Europe, politics, culture, and social morality are conceived as being independent of religious influence. Morality has become a personal as opposed to a collective concern and citizens are expected to relate to and function in society as autonomous, responsible, and reflective individuals. 13 Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy, Saving the People. How Populists Hijack Religion (London: Hurst Publishers, 2016). 14 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: Routledge, 2011). 15 Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2014). 16 The US Census Bureau has not collected data on religious affiliation since the 1950s; Public Law 94–521 prohibits mandatory questions about religious affiliation. Nonetheless, the Census Bureau may collect data on a voluntary basis, and private organizations survey the US population to develop portraits of the American religious landscape. In Canada, Statistics Canada conducts a national census once every five years but, in the past, has only included a question on religious affiliation once every ten years. According to the 2011 Canada Census, Muslims represent about 3 per cent of the Canadian population. Modifications to questions about ethnicity and religion are being prepared for the 2021 census, including a proposal to survey religion in all future censuses. 17 The Special Eurobarometer 493: Discrimination in the European Union (2019). This survey, which included questions on the religious self-identification of Europeans living in the EU member states, identified Shi’a, Sunni, and other Muslims as representing about 2 per cent of the total EU population. 18 Nilüfer Göle, Islam and Public controversies in Europe (New York: Routledge, 2016), and Nadia Marzouki, Islam. An American Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 19 These non-academics have authored various types of publications, including texts on personal websites or newspapers (Daniel Pipes in the States) and monographs by journalists such as Oriana Fallaci in Italy or columnists like Éric Zemmour in France or Mathieu Bock-Côté in Québec; see Oriana Fallaci, La rabbia e l’orgoglio (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2001); Éric Zemmour, Le suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), and Mathieu Bock-Côté, Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (Paris: Cerf, 2019). 20 Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 21 B. Rougié, Les territoires conquis de la République (Paris: PUF, 2020). 22 The replacement theory (from the French for la théorie du grand remplacement) has been central to Western European nationalist and right-extremist ideologies since 2010. It has taken hold among North American white supremacists and alt-right movements since the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump. In 2019, it also appeared in the manifestos disseminated by the instigators of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. In these contexts, the word “replacement” has a dual meaning: on a cultural level, so-called “Western values” are being replaced by Islamic values; on a demographic level, existing national white populations are being subsumed by immigrants. The role of Muslims in this demographic outnumbering of European populations has been covered by the defendants of the “Eurabia” thesis. See Göran Larsson, “The Fear of Small Numbers: Eurabia Literature and Censuses on Religious Belonging,” Journal of Muslims in Europe 1, no. 2 (2012): 142–165. 23 Benjamin Moffitt and Simon Tormey, “Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style,” Political Studies 62, no. 2 (2014): 387. 24 Moffitt and Tormey, “Rethinking Populism,” 393. 25 Birgitte Schepelern Johanssen, and R. Spielhaus, “Quantitative Knowledge Production on Muslims in Europe as a Practice of ‘Secular Suspicion,’” in Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions. European Configurations, eds. Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 171–184, at 171. 26 All data can be found at www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/perceptions-are-not-reality-whatworld-gets-wrong.

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Valérie Amiraux and Pierre-Luc Beauchesne 27 Linda Woodhead, “The Rise of ‘No Religion’: Towards an Explanation,” Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 78, no. 3 (2017): 247. 28 In the European Union, the demographic weight of Muslims is increasing primarily because of immigration. See Lipka Michael, “Europe’s Muslim Population Will Continue to Grow – But How Much Depends on Migration,” Pew Research Center, 4 December 2017, available at www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/04/europes-muslim-population-will-continue-to-grow-buthow-much-depends-on-migration/ In 2010, there were 19.5 million estimated Muslims in total, representing 3.8 per cent of the population of the 27 EU member states. In 2016, it is estimated (by Pew Research Centre) that there were 25.8 million Muslims representing 4.9 per cent of the total EU population. 29 Denise Helly, “Are Muslims Discriminated against in Canada?” Canadian Ethnic Studies 36, no. 1 (2004): 24–47. 30 Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Saher Selod and David G. Embrick, “Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 8 (2013): 644–655, and Andrew Shyrock, “The Moral Analogies of Race, Arab American Identity, Color Politics, and the Limits of Racialized Citizenship,” in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, eds. Jamal and Naber, 81–113. 31 Ceri Peach, “Muslims in the 2001 Census of England and Wales: Gender and Economic Disadvantage,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 4 (2006): 629–55. 32 Ron Johnston, Ibrahim Sirkeci, Nabil Khattab, and Tariq Modood, “Ethno-religious Categories and Measuring Occupational Attainment in Relation to Education in England and Wales: A Multi-level Analysis,” Environment and Planning 42, no. 3 (2010): 586. 33 Jeffrey G. Reitz, Mai B. Phan, and Rupa Banerjee, “Gender Equity in Canada’s Newly Growing Religion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 5 (2014): 681–699. 34 Open Society Institute, Muslims in Europe: A Report on 11 EU Cities (London: OSI, 2010). 35 Meer Nasar, Valerie Sala Pala, Tariq Modood, and Patrick Simon, “Religion, Culture, Identity, and Education in Western Europe,” in The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education, ed. James A. Banks (New York: Routledge, 2009), 413–424. 36 Johnston, Sirkeci, Khattab, and Modood, “Ethno-religious Categories,” 578. 37 Claire L. Adida, David D. Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian Heritage Societies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2009). 38 Schepelern Johanssen and Spielhaus (2019) have compared polls and surveys with Muslim respondents in Western Europe. They show how numbers help to produce and manage public emotions. 39 José Casanova, “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism,” in Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, ed. Thomas Banchoff (Oxford University Press, 2007), 61. 40 Olivier Roy, Secularism confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Anna Triandafyllidou and Tariq Modood, The Problem of Religious Diversity: European challenges, Asian Approaches (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Aristide R. Zolberg and Long Litt Woon, “Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States,” Politics and Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 5–38. 41 Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper, Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and John Madeley, “Unequally Yoked: The Antinomies of Church–State Separation in Europe and the USA,” European Political Science 8, no. 3 (2008): 273–87. 42 Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 43 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005): 40–55. 44 Edgell, Hartmann, Stewart, and Gerteis, “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders,” 607. 45 Kalkan, Layman, and Uslaner, “‘Bands of Others’?” 46 Marzouki, Islam. An American Religion. 47 Leonard, Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. 48 Zolberg and Woon, “Why Islam is Like Spanish.” 49 Zolberg and Woon, “Why Islam is Like Spanish,” 5.

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50 Charles Mercier, David Koussens and Valerie Amirau, Les nouveaux vocabulaires de la laïcité (Paris: Garnier, 2020). 51 John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Edward Saïd, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Random House, 1997). 52 David Theo Goldberg, The Thread of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009): 163. 53 As Gurminder K. Bhambra writes, colonialism is intrinsic to the contemporary scenes of European integration, though the colonial is rendered unseen in most representations of Europe. This is mostly operated through silencing voices that may challenge the posited universality of European narratives. For more, see Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Sociology after Postcolonialism: Provincialized Cosmopolitanisms and Connected Sociologies,” in Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, Manuela Boatcă , and Sérgio Costa (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 33–48. 54 This dichotomy of bad and good Muslims works with many Islam-related topics such as women – Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) – and citizens – Hajjat, Abdellali, “Port du hijab et ‘défaut d’assimilation’. Étude d’un cas problématique pour l’acquisition de la nationalité française,” Sociologie 1, no. 4 (2010), 439–455, and Sarah Mazouz, “Politiques de la délégitimation : de la remise en cause de la double nationalité au projet d’extension de la déchéance de nationalité,” Mouvements 4, no. 88 (2016), 159–167. 55 Sarah Song, “The Subject of Multiculturalism: Culture, Religion, Language, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race?” in New Waves in Political Philosophy, eds. B. de Bruin and C.F. Zurn (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 177–197. 56 Defining religion is probably one of the most hazardous exercises now facing national courts in Europe, frequently through compensation cases for obstruction of freedom of conscience and religious practice (on the religious tests, see Ilenia Ruggiu, “The ‘Cultural Test’ as Cultural Expertise: Evolution of a Legal–Anthropological Tool for Judges,” Laws 8, no. 3: 1–15. Is it possible (and if so, how) to determine whether religious practices and convictions are authentic or not to a religion? What becomes of the “sincerity” argument proposed by believers? Hence, debates about belief and religious practices are inextricably linked to issues of sincerity, which often, at their emotional level, emerge as accusations by one group against another, deriding them for not being “true” believers; see Lori G. Beaman, “Defining Religion: The Promise and the Peril of Legal Interpretation,” in Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada, ed. Richard Moon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 192–216. 57 Elisabeth Claverie, Les guerres de la Vierge: Une anthropologie des apparitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). 58 Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), and Abdellali Hajjat and M. Mohammed, Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le ‘problème musulman’ (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). 59 Fawaz Gerges, Obama and the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 229. 60 Liyakat Takim, “The Ground Zero Mosque Controversy: Implications for American Islam,” Religions 2 (2011): 132–144. 61 Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 12, no. 89 (2000): 94. 62 For a glimpse into the way typical figures and archetypes circulate among Muslims, see Jennifer Selby, Amelie Barras and Lori G. Beaman, Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018), who look at the way three masculine archetypes (the Terrorist, the Enlightened Man, the Patriarch) inhabit and organize the daily lives of female participants in their study. 63 Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” 89. 64 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Classe (Paris: La Découverte, 1988). 65 Paul Eid, “Les majorités nationales ont-elles une couleur? Réflexions sur l’utilité de la catégorie de blanchité pour la sociologie du racism,” Sociologie et Sociétés 50, no. 2 (2020): 125–149. 66 Juliette Galonnier, “Discrimination religieuse ou discrimination raciale? L’islamophobie en France et aux États-Unis,” Hommes et migrations no. 1324 (2019): 29–37, and Hajjat and Mohammed, Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises.

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Valérie Amiraux and Pierre-Luc Beauchesne 67 Bernadette M. Calafell, “Brownness, Kissing, and US Imperialism: Contextualizing the Orlando Massacre,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2017): 198–202, and Doug Meyer, “Omar Mateen as US Citizen, Not Foreign Threat: Homonationalism and LGBTQ Online Representations of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting,” Sexualities 23, no 3 (2020): 249–268. 68 Valérie Amiraux, “Visibility, Transparency and Gossip: How Did the Religion of Some (Muslims) Become the Public Concern of Others?” Critical Research on Religion 4, no. 1 (2016): 37–56, and Birgit Sauer, “Headscarf Regimes in Europe: Diversity Policies at the Intersection of Gender, Culture and Religion,” Comparative European Politics 75, no. 1 (2009): 75–94. 69 There are other distinctions within the various countries: the actors affected by the ban are not the same (students in France, teachers in Germany), and the garment – the “type” of headscarf forbidden – also varies (the “extreme veil”, that is, the jilbab in the UK). 70 Nadia Fadil, “Not-/unveiling as an Ethical Practice,” Feminist Review 98, no. 1 (2011): 83–98; Sevgi Kilic, “The British Veil Wars,” Social Politics 15, no. 4 (2008): 433–454, and Anna C. Korteweg and Gökçe Yurdakul, The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 71 Cécile Laborde, “The Culture(s) of the Republic: Nationalism and Multiculturalism in French Republican Thought,” Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 718. 72 Robert Miles, “Beyond the ‘Race’ Concept: The Reproduction of Racism in England,” Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 4 (1988): 7–31. 73 Miles, “Beyond the ‘Race’ Concept,” 9. 74 Laborde, “The Culture(s) of the Republic,” 721. 75 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004). 76 Jin Haritaworn, “Wounded Subjects: Sexual Exceptionalism and the Moral Panic on ‘Migrant Homophobia’ in Germany,” in Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, Manuela Boatcă and Sérgio Costa (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), Chapter 8, and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 77 The explicit publicity of the homosexual sexual preference of leading EU political figures is deliberate in order to highlight Muslims’ attitudes towards homosexuality. Many examples come to mind, the best one undoubtedly being the gay, Dutch, anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders. 78 Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law & Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 9. 79 Nilüfer Göle, “European Self-presentations and Narratives Challenges by Islam: Secular Modernity in Question,” in Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, Manuela Boatcă , and Sérgio Costa (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 190. 80 Razack, Casting Out. 81 Razack, Casting Out, 5. 82 Saher Selod, Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 83 Selod, Forever Suspect, 45. 84 Sarah Mazouz, “Politiques de la délégitimation: de la remise en cause de la double nationalité au projet d’extension de la déchéance de nationalité,” Mouvements 4, no. 88 (2016): 159–167. 85 Mazouz, “Politiques de la délégitimation,” 128. 86 See also Barbara Perry, “Gendered Islamophobia: Hate Crime against Muslim Women,” Social Identities 20, no. 1 (2014): 74–89. 87 Sirma Bilge, “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 9–28, and Heidi Safia Mirza, “‘A Second Skin’: Embodied Intersectionality, Transnationalism and Narratives of Identity and Belonging among Muslim Women in Britain,” Women’s Studies International Forum 36 (2013): 5–15. 88 Jacob Poushter and Christine Huang, Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, But Cyberattacks a Rising Concern: Worries about ISIS and North Korea Persist, as Fears about American Power Grow (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2019). 89 Arun Kundnani, “Radicalisation: The Journey of a Concept,” Race and Class 54, no. 2 (2012): 3–25, and Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann, “How Rigorous is Radicalization Research?” Democracy and Security 9, no. 4 (2013): 360–382.

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Racialization of Muslims in the West 90 Charlotte Heath-Kelly, “Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15 (2012): 394–415. 91 Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! 92 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2004); Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), and Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 93 Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003); Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Robert S. Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of The Second Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 94 In the aftermath of the attack against Charlie Hebdo’s caricaturists, French Muslims faced a double injunction: first to renounce their expression of a religious identity at the risk of being accused of “communitarianism”, and at the same time, to “communitarianize” their condemnations of the attack. The hidden script of this second injunction is a postulated solidarity of Muslims citizens with terrorism; see François Burgat, Comprendre l’islam politique: une trajectoire de recherche sur l’altérité islamiste, 1973–2016 (Paris: La Découverte: 2016), 280). 95 Moustafa Bayoumi, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 96 Saher Selod, “Citizenship Denied: The Racialization of Muslim American Men and Women post-9/11,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 77–95; Selod, Forever Suspect; Selod and Embrick, “Racialization and Muslims”, and Galonnier, “Discrimination religieuse ou discrimination raciale?” 97 Charlotte Heath-Kelly, “The Geography of Pre-criminal Space: Epidemiological Imaginations of Radicalisation Risk in the UK Prevent Strategy, 2007–2017,” Critical Studies of Terrorism no. 2 (2017): 297–319. 98 Mohammed Hafez and Creighton Mullins, “The Radicalization Puzzle: A Theoretical Synthesis of Empirical Approaches to Homegrown Extremism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 38, no. 11 (2015): 958–975. 99 A similar trend is visible about the new figure of returnees. See Thomas Renard and Rik Coolsaet, Returnees – Who Are They, Why Are They (Not) Coming Back and How Should We Deal with Them? Assessing Policies on Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Belgium, Germany and Netherlands (Brussels: Egmont Institute, 2018). 100 Kundnani, “Radicalisation: The Journey of a Concept,” 6. 101 Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem. 102 Sanjay Sharma and Jasbinder Nijjar, “The Racialized Surveillant Assemblage: Islam and the Fear of Terrorism,” Popular Communication 16, no. 1 (2018): 72–85. 103 Jeffrey Monaghan, “Criminal Justice Policy Transfer and Prison Counter-Radicalization: Examining Canadian Participation in the Roma-Lyon Group,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société 30, no. 3 (2015): 381–400. 104 Oriola Sallavaci, “Strengthening Cross-border Law Enforcement Cooperation in the EU: the Prüm Network of Data Exchange,” European Journal of Criminal Policy 24, no.17 (2017): 1–22. 105 Imran Awan, “‘I Am a Muslim Not an Extremist’: How the Prevent Strategy Has Constructed a ‘Suspect’ Community,” Politics and Policy 40, no. 6 (2012): 1158–1185. For a comparative analysis, see Shahram Akbarzadeh, “Investing in Mentoring and Educational Initiatives: The Limits of De-Radicalisation Programmes in Australia”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 33, no. 3 (2013): 451–463. 106 Heath-Kelly, “Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual”; Thomas Martin, “Governing an Unknowable Future: The Politics of policy Britain’s Prevent,” Critical Studies of Terrorism 7, no. 1 (2014): 62–78, and Therese O’Toole, Nasar Meer, Daniel Nilsson DeHanas, Stephen H. Jones, and Tariq Modood, “Governing through Prevent? Regulation and Contested Practice in State– Muslim Engagement,” Sociology 50, no. 1 (2016): 160–177. 107 Sharmin Sadequee, “Surveillance, Secular Law, and the Reconstruction of Islam in the United States,” Surveillance and Society 16, no. 4 (2018): 473–487.

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Valérie Amiraux and Pierre-Luc Beauchesne 108 Yael Berda, “Managing dangerous populations: Colonial legacies of security and surveillance,” Sociological Forum 28, no. 3 (2013): 627–630. 109 Francesco Ragazzi, “Suspect Community or Suspect Category? The Impact of Counter-terrorism as ‘Policed Multiculturalism’,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 5 (2016): 724–741. 110 Sadequee, “Surveillance, Secular Law,” 474. 111 Caroline R. Nagel and Lynn A. Staeheli, “Muslim Political Activism or Political Activism by Muslims? Secular and Religious Identities Amongst Muslim Arab Activists in the United States and United Kingdom,” Identities 18, no. 5 (2011): 437–458. 112 Baljt Nagra and Paula Maurutto, “Crossing Borders and Managing Racialized Identities: Experiences of Security and Surveillance Among Young Canadian Muslims,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 41, no. 2 (2016): 165–194, and Selod, Forever Suspect. 113 Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, “When the FBI Knocks: Racialized State Surveillance of Muslims,” Critical Sociology 45, no. 6 (2019): 873. 114 Perry, “Gendered Islamophobia”, and Saher Selod, “Gendered Racialization: Muslim American Men and Women’s Encounters with Racialized Surveillance,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 4 (2019): 552–569. 115 Rachel Schmidt, Duped: Why Gender Stereotypes are Leading to Inadequate Deradicalization and Disengagement Strategies (Canada: Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society, 2018). 116 Omar Benlaala, La Barbe (Paris: Seuil, 2015). 117 William Hobbs and Nazita Lajevardi, “Effects of Divisive Political Campaigns on the Day-to-Day Segregation of Arab and Muslim Americans,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 1 (2019): 270–276. 118 Imran Awan and Surinder Guru, “Parents of Foreign ‘Terrorist’ Fighters in Syria – Will They Report Their Young?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 1 (2017): 24–42. 119 Ibrahim Bechrouri, “The Informant, Islam, and Muslims in New York City,” Surveillance and Society 16, no. 4 (2018): 459–472. 120 On the slippery slope associated with this category, see Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. 121 Su’ad Abdul-Khabeer, “Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the Making of American Muslim Citizenship,” Transforming Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2017): 103–119; Joëlle Bordet, “Les jeunes des quartiers populaires: affirmer ‘être musulman’ en réaction à la stigmatisation, dans un contexte de mondialisation,” Topique 4, no. 137 (2016): 69–82, and Tahseen Shams, “Visibility as Resistance by Muslim Americans in a Surveillance and Security Atmosphere,” Sociological Forum 33, no. 1 (2017): 73–94. 122 Shaking hands with teachers in public schools in Switzerland gave rise to a heated discussion in 2016, ending with a decision to force children to do so after two Muslim boys refused. 123 Amiraux, “Visibility, Transparency and Gossip.”

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28 UK COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGY, MUSLIM DIASPORA COMMUNITIES AND THE ‘SECURITISATION OF INTEGRATION’ Tahir Abbas

Introduction Terrorism and political violence require interdependent research and policy solutions in order to generate effective measures. The events of 9/11 and subsequent instances of terrorism and violent extremism linked to global Islamic radicalism, however, have created new challenges without obvious solutions. Since the 2015 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), numerous governments across the world have introduced the ‘countering violent extremism’ (CVE) paradigm as an attempt to prevent, disrupt and generate a response. This includes a counter-narrative to avert, intervene, or build community resilience against further instances of violent extremism. As the concept’s reach has grown exponentially, from Canberra to California, from Astana to Addis Ababa, London is the centre of the CVE world. But not all is well in the UK context. In the UK, the closest equivalent to CVE is the policy approach known as ‘Prevent’ – a counter-extremism instrument to protect against future ‘would-be terrorists’, based on various assumptions about the sociological, psychological, or behavioural characteristics of ‘the radicalised’.1 Consequently, ‘Prevent’ is not without its critics in academia or civil society2 – to the extent that many see it as potentially making matters worse for community relations, including in unwittingly providing support to far-right extremist movements. The UK government, led by the Home Office and its various internal units, however, is unwavering in rolling out ‘Prevent’. The UK government introduced a statutory Prevent Duty in 2015 to cover a whole host of public-sector organisations, especially in education and health. New procedures include a concern over returnee foreign fighters.3 It is now legally incumbent upon all public-sector bodies to tackle the threat of violent extremism. This includes reporting on visible differences in appearance among young people, regarded as one indication of radicalisation.4 In the UK, the Home Office takes the lead on counterterrorism and deradicalisation. As the main government department responsible for counterterrorism, it receives the bulk of funding 383

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in this area. Nevertheless, it encounters various levels of criticism from a variety of social and political actors arguing that the ‘Prevent’ agenda is counterproductive and divisive.5 Concerns here rest on how Muslim communities were, until very recently, the only groups targeted. The lack of trust in the institutions operating the policy is not addressed either. In effect, the lens through which Muslim communities are viewed is entirely based on terrorism and extremism, rather than the needs of communities beyond these matters. In 2011, the UK government reviewed ‘CONTEST’ (counterterrorism strategy), originally developed (officially) in 2006 after the events of 7/7 (July 2005), from which came the ‘Prevent’ agenda. The 2011 review considered countering ideology as central in the battle against terrorism. While it was also clear that the legal remits of ‘Prevent’ would not be altered in any way, it did emphasise the need to work alongside different agencies, including health, education and social services. A youth element would also become a particular feature of the policy content.6 The review accurately identified a significant conflation between social cohesion and counterterrorism. The areas where communities need support and investment have to be distinguished from judgements clouded by any assessments of the threats of radicalisation. The 2011 review raised three consequences for policy. First, the need to help build resilience and empower communities to challenge radical Islamist extremist narratives that might lead to violent extremism. Second, a specific policing, security and intelligence mandate to engage in overt and covert counterterrorism measures. Third, the need to establish counter-narrative schemes as part of the communication and information battle. The latter also includes the importance of building community trust with policing authorities charged with targeting areas of high Muslim residential concentration. Previously, measures associated with the risk of radicalisation were crudely connected with a funding model based on residential concentrations of British Muslims.7 The trouble with this ‘at risk’ versus ‘risky’ dichotomy, however, is the possibility of blurring the distinctions. Given the politicisation of radicalisation from above, placing too great an emphasis on ‘Muslimness’,8 rather than the underlying structural determinants of radicalisation,9 is a concern. Governmentality, a process of altering citizens’ behaviour to conform to certain government policy, as defined by Michel Foucault, applies in the context of ‘Prevent’, which many see as more a form of social engineering10 than an explicit policy of preventative deradicalisation. It results in widening existing polarisations that are subsequently instrumentalised by elites. In a paradoxical development, the removal of ethnic inequalities from the mainstream discourse of diversity and difference has seen ethnic and religious differences given full weight in the counterterrorism domain.11 In addition, despite attempts to clarify the separation between social cohesion and counterterrorism, due to various political developments within the coalition government from 2010 to 2015,12 the split vanished. Not only did confusion on the part of politicians and civil servants lead to political bickering, it created an atmosphere of alarmism around British Muslims. It fuelled the flames of far-right sentiment based on anti-immigration, anti-religion and anti-multiculturalism conceptualisations promulgated by media and political (il)liberal elites. A hostile discourse systematically fashioned the conditions for deepening Islamophobia, leading to levels of violence against Muslims that spike after incidents of terrorism across the world. It is a time, when, according to some, Islamophobia has become an accepted norm.13 These recent developments confirm trends from the mid-2000s onwards. In a charged and toxic atmosphere, relations between the state and British Muslim communities have become increasingly restricted. It has been reduced to a top-down system of design and delivery seen by numerous academics and commentators as a form of governmentality.14 384

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The use of social media and digital imagery tools by the so-called Islamic State advanced to sophisticated levels in recent periods. As a front-facing dynamic of a wider counterterrorism strategy, one of the main elements of ‘Prevent’ is to sustain a counter-narrative and counter-messaging platform. The aim is to restrict the interests of young people looking online for answers to questions that challenge them the most.15 The other main concern with ‘Prevent’ is the mentoring system known as ‘Channel’,16 which uses a one-to-one methodology with vulnerable young people in order to educate, motivate and inspire them away from the paths leading to violent extremism.17 The UK government argues that this system stopped a number of people joining Islamic State as ‘foreign fighters’.18 The Channel model is also of interest to other counterterrorism agencies, including in France and Germany, with Denmark promoting its own unique approach, known as the ‘Aarhus model’.19 The question remains, however. Is mentoring alone the dominating enabler? Due to data confidentiality, the UK government is unable to provide access to original case files or even anonymised data regarding particular communities. Thus, in a deflating volte-face, the UK government, however, has moved back the compass of its counterterrorism strategy. It targets not simply terrorism, as such, but also ideology in acts of preparedness of terrorist crimes. In addition, resistance to the state among Muslim minority groups is partly delegitimised. Many of these concerns are based on genuine grievances but receive scant attention anywhere in society,20 although a significant body of the left-leaning press has taken a critical stance towards ‘Prevent’ throughout the policy’s various phases of development. These community reactions and the associated media attention are combined with various political concerns across Parliament. It transforms the ‘Prevent’ agenda into a media, political and intellectual tussle of immense proportions.

The trouble with ‘Prevent’ While ongoing concerns relate to CVE impact and effectiveness, considerable disagreement over the efficacy of the ‘Prevent’ policy agenda also materialises inside the UK government. In these policy-making circles, a particular political predilection wishes to promote integration containing a pro-‘Prevent’ message. The dominant hegemonic discourse in UK government policy thinking is always to centre on specific interventions regarding British Muslim communities, however. This involves both a direct and indirect approach, potentially alienating a significant body of British Muslims unable to engage with the political process. It raises all sorts of connotations around ideas of policed multiculturalism.21 With a persistent gaze on terrorism and radicalism, British Muslims feel beleaguered. Consequently, they are hesitant about government attempts to engage with them through the singular lens of deradicalisation.22 Various other community and political forces compete in their resistance to the enlargement, impact and effects of counterterrorism legislation. With different groups signalling their interests, the ‘Prevent’ discourse is the centrifugal force that brings together the various elements in shaping its direction, but with the least privileged groups bearing the greatest consequences. British Muslims, various civil society actors, academics, sections of the media, and various aspects of the political classes are united in this. They share concerns about the effectiveness of the policy as well the negative impact it has on community relations. The UK government, charged with delivering ‘Prevent’, encounters opposition from many elements of society. It places strain on relations between different groups involved in shaping the discussion and the narrative surrounding ‘Prevent’. For advocates of ‘Prevent’, including many of the civil servants involved in designing, delivering and evaluating it, violent extremism relates to a small number of people (argued 385

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to be) carefully processed by a system with significant checks and balances. No blanket approach exists to ensure proportionality, however. For these respondents, their criticism is that ‘Prevent’ is too big in its reach and capacity, as it implicates a wide segment of the population. For example, individuals associated with radical Islamism because of a general tendency of conservatism based on historical-cultural faith traditions are swept up by the policy. Alternatively, ‘Prevent’ is too small because it is not focused enough on catching vulnerable people actively looking to become violent extremists. The rhetoric among senior parliamentarians, however, states that the ‘Prevent’ policy is working sufficiently. In addition, the levels of security and confidentiality associated with the work make it impossible to permit much of the data to enter into the public domain. However, this creates an information-dissemination vacuum ultimately filled by critical voices in the mainstream, as well as in social media. These interests are variously individually or collectively organised as part of efforts to debunk ‘Prevent’ as mass state surveillance. In the vast number of cases, professionals and practitioners working in this area are getting on with the business of improving and delivering ‘Prevent’ policy. In the absence of an alternative, ‘doing nothing at all is not an alternative’, argued the respondents. For proponents of ‘Prevent’, critics are said to be unable to demonstrate a substitute for what is evidently a pressing concern for national security. The irony is that by removing the opening formed by ‘Prevent’, greater securitisation of Muslim communities is more likely, not less, they argue.23 A harder-edged counterterrorism framework will take over the gaps left, argued many respondents, as it limits the opportunities to pursue community-engaged processes. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is no longer at the forefront of community engagement – nor is it a front-facing aspect of counterterrorism policy, as it was as a part of UK government thinking and policy a decade or so ago. The Home Office, traditionally the home of policing and security, has taken over the agenda. The space generated by ‘Prevent’ is to work with the harder end of counterterrorism at one end of the spectrum. At the other end, it is to reach deep into communities in order to work directly with vulnerable individuals. The aim is to safeguard and protect them and society from the threats and realities of violent extremism. Because of the limitations caused by austerity and the failure of such ideas as the ‘Big Society’, MHCLG no longer has such a role to play. In this opening, ‘Prevent’ is the only critical space for government and communities, respondents argued. There 22+ indicators used by ‘Prevent’ service providers are part of a system that wishes to categorise individuals as terrorists or would-be terrorists. It is argued that rather than some crude measure to identify individuals thought to be on the path to radicalisation, the approach assesses people on various spectrums of vulnerability. Education and mental health professionals consider each case independently. However, when individuals with severe mental health problems are classified as vulnerable, it does not make them any less capable, potentially shifting a health issue into a counterterrorism conundrum. Critical academics point to the dominant hegemonic order as culpable in the manufacture and delivery of an intolerant, oppressive and controlling state. With numerous critical voices in response to the government’s approach, the direction of policy in such a charged field is invariably skewed. Calls have appealed for the removal of the ‘Prevent’ agenda from government policy on tackling extremism altogether. But ‘Prevent’ has so profoundly permeated aspects of UK government policy, including in education and health, that its disappearance is unlikely – even though the ‘Prevent’ brand is seen as toxic among numerous actors in society. In this milieu, there is an absence of an alternative message. Moreover, there is a limited response on the government’s part to 386

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defend the apparent successes of ‘Prevent’, although it is clear that ‘Prevent’ is not a singular concept. Different modes of engagement do exist, but the dominant perspective is that referrals to the Channel programme occur most of the time. The UK government, therefore, needs to be sensitive about instrumentalising a strategy that wishes to counter violent extremism with every good intention. Without the resources needed to support communities, or in building the necessary trust and engagement in the process, success is likely to be limited. Neither is CVE simply a matter of countering the narratives of the likes of Islamic State. In the immediate stages of recruiting a soldier to its cause, Islamic State did not use the language of religion or ideology. It played on real and observable grievances experienced by Muslims in the West. Recent data on Islamic State recruits recovered by the German intelligence services provided details on over 20,000 foreign fighters joining Islamic State.24 The overall profile suggests that these predominantly young men have a low level of education, an history of offending and a record of violence. They experience racism, exclusion and marginalisation, but, crucially, have little or no knowledge of Islam before joining Islamic State. Ultimately, ideology is the tipping point at the end of the radicalisation process. It takes troubled young people and turns them to suicide, but it is through ideology that they need to be brought back from the brink of self-annihilation. However, this needs to be seen as separate from a focus on religiosity or the need to ‘reverse religiosity’ in some way.25 This is what has tainted the ‘Prevent’ brand the most.

The research and policy challenges ahead Due to various political developments concerning the CVE strategy, differences of opinion occur between state actors and the targeted communities, especially in Western Europe. It leads to politicisation and polarisation, not prevention nor protection. That policy makers have been struggling to profile the ‘potential violent extremist’ suggests that the direction of questions is perhaps wrong. The conveyor-belt theory promotes the view that vulnerable young people are at risk of radicalisation and then committing acts of violent extremism. It stigmatises entire groups. It also disregards genuine instances of political resistance. Opposition is transmuted into pre-violence pre-crime extremist thought, which is then policed or securitised, including through the silencing of legitimate dissent or criticism.26 The discussion on what causes violent extremism has led to the CVE strategy, branded as a concept with tentacles in numerous countries across the world. However, a significant gap materialises between perceptions and experiences among communities in general, and the positions taken by states concerning the policy framework in particular. For too long, policy makers have concentrated on religion and ideology as the main causes – hence, the CVE aspiration to solve what is regarded as problematic religiosity by replacing it with a moderate or a liberal Islam. It uses proxy actors, with connections to the communities at large, who now see the errors of their ways, often presented as liberated from the shackles once chaining them to regressive Islamism. As states do this, however, they ignore the grievances – the structural dynamics of racism, inequality, social division, with multiculturalism and diversity as an asset for citizenship. In effect, the tendency is to securitise differences in societies. The focus is on deradicalisation of individuals thought to be on the move from low-level to extremist radicalism and, eventually, to violence and extremism.27 Radicalisers mobilise young people attracted to a unifying, ostensibly empowering and holistically conceptualised vision. It is an attempt to address all their grievances that are without doubt real and have long histories to them. The more states ignore genuine structural 387

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grievances, the more organisations such as Islamic State can play on them. Extremism is a symptom. It is not the cause of instabilities, insecurities and patterns of anomie experienced by various groups. Religion is merely a convenient umbrella, an instrument of mobilisation, not the first point of departure in the causes of radicalisation or violent extremism. A counter-extremist strategy that debunks the narrative of the likes of Islamic State but does not deal with the structural is likely to fail. A policy attempt that focuses entirely on religion as the central mystery is likely to miss the mark, as is a policy that focuses on religion as the sole solution. The belief that radicalisation is always a security risk, or that it will always lead to violence or terrorism, also needs decoupling. The net result is a ‘disconnected citizenship’ that further alienates Muslim groups facing the deleterious consequences of a ceaselessly hostile gaze upon them.28 In reality, greater threats transpire from polarisation than from radicalisation. It pits indigenous minority and majority groups against each other, leading to ideological, cultural, as well as political conflict rather than violent extremism or terrorism.29 Social research on the impact of CVE and CVE-related policy interventions ought to explore individuals in their social contexts. The transformation of risks and challenges into strengths and opportunities is the key here. What is the position of the family (without promoting the ‘suspect community’ paradigm30), peers, schools, or work in providing support (ecological parameters)? How is confidence and trust built between near-radicalised individuals differentiated by ethnicity, gender, or sexuality in order to de-radicalise collectively (dialogue and inter-cultural exchange)? How can self-realisation and self-actualisation act as methods to empower young people at the margins of extremism (empowerment)? Radicalisation is the reality of global issues with local impacts. Radicalisers, as part of their strategies of recruitment, fill a vacuum, as local leaders in the diaspora are unable to address the concerns of disaffected youth. It is a space in which much of radicalisation reflects youth rebellion. One task, therefore, is to encourage angry youth to re-direct their energies to socially solidaristic causes, where communities and families are focal points. Broad measures have a negative effect, raising the need to concentrate on the narrower spaces.31 All-embracing interventions add to existing levels of distrust. This disproportionality has negative consequences because of its universally directed heavy-handed approach that casts the net wide. Teenagers recognised today as radicalised or vulnerable to extremism were born after the onset of the global ‘war on terror’. Effective intervention needs to be sensitive to the background of every individual in order to understand when best to introduce it. The politicisation of CVE is another important dimension. That younger people are increasingly entering into the fray of violent extremism suggests that the question is all about the local. It concentrates attention on the social pressures at specific points in the lives of young people – paths that lead to alienation, isolation and intergenerational disconnect. Heightened emotions create psychological problems that introduce vulnerabilities. Tensions between counterterrorism and CVE thinking have muddied the waters in the recent past, for example, in the UK context when activism is conflated with extremism.32 It is simplistic, however, to reduce the dilemma of ‘Prevent’ to a conflation between cohesion and counterterrorism, as cohesion is not without its own difficulties.33 Emerging as a policy approach and a political discourse after the Northern Disturbances in 2001, ‘community cohesion’ was flawed and unpopular. Its insistence on generating bridging social capital as a solution to what are profound patterns of social inequality and economic polarisation was a diversion, argued many.34 Sharing the same social, educational, occupational, or cultural spaces, or an outlook on accepting and valuing differences in society more generally, is not the central problem. The reality in 2001 reflected failed multicultural, integration and social mobility 388

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policy, resulting in a process of cultural withdrawal. A lack of cohesion is the result of wider societal processes, not the foundations of radicalism and later terrorism. The ‘Prevent’ antiterrorism agenda has come under considerable community and political criticism. A speech by then British Prime Minister David Cameron, on antiterrorism, security and multiculturalism delivered on 5 February 2011 in Munich, caused considerable outcry. At an event designed to discuss terrorism and security issues, his first public statement on the question of radical Islamism and its dangers for secular liberal nations argued that the problem is one of wide-ranging radical Islamism and that Britain can no longer tolerate the intolerable – that is, apparently divisive communitarian ethno-political interests. In categorising the range of Islamisms as varieties of Islam ignored everything in the making of contemporary Islamism, which is that it is a political and ideological project in response to historical colonialism and ongoing cultural exclusion and social disadvantage. The government position on ‘preventing extremism’ has in fact made matters worse, as it has sensationalised an entire community.35 These government voices also have close connections to the intelligence and security sector.36 In short, religion does not cause terrorism.37 The idea that Muslims are ‘suspect communities’ encumbers dialogue.38 The association between assimilationist goals and the aims of a security state is therefore an additional problem for unity within diversity, civil liberties and, arguably, human rights, for all. Counterterrorism and CVE extremism are relatively successful endeavours in the UK, compared with France, Belgium, or Germany; however, the lack of public engagement about ‘Prevent’ on the part of the UK government creates distrust and disengagement. Far right groups are committing more acts of terrorism than their radical violent Islamist counterparts, but this reality is less well known or understood.39 It adversely affects Muslim communities already shouldering acute challenges regarding their visibility and their negative representation in media and politics. The vacuum is filled by critical voices that have no opposition or direct engagement from government, academia, or mainstream media. In addition, accounts of 150 individuals stopped from going to the Islamic State are certainly deemed as successes by the government, but more than 800 UK men, women and children entered the Islamic State in the last few years, while variations on the ‘Prevent’ policy have been in operation since the mid-2000s. Radicalisation is a generational challenge that has arisen because of past inadequacies in policy as well as due to ongoing global concerns. A wider geopolitical climate has seen the rise of populism, protectionism, anti-immigration and anti-diversity sentiment. All the while, social divisions widen and foreign policy towards the ‘Muslim world’ continues to create consternation. The challenge, therefore, is to determine the effectiveness or otherwise of CVE,40 especially when it veers into matters of social cohesion,41 followed by a systematic evaluation of CVE policies across the world. This will help to obtain generalisable understandings that both improve knowledge and also increase the ability to deliver effective policy and practice.

Concluding thoughts Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing phenomenon of Islamophobia and radicalisation in the Global North. The first is a function of exclusion, ‘othering’ and misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims. The latter is a set of social challenges that have led people to paths of extremism and political violence, largely as a response to structural and political marginalisation. However, the dominant hegemonic discourse is to argue that Islamophobia is a reality of the responses to processes of selfmarginalisation of Muslims groups who have selected to live ‘parallel lives’. Similarly, 389

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radicalisation is regarded as a problem of the ‘Islamisation of politics’, where Islamic political radicalism is a manifestation of ideologically motivated religious violence. Both Islamophobia and radicalisation are manifestations of intersections of race, racism, racialism and the racialisation of Islam and Muslims. That is, the othering of Muslim groups leads to patterns of discrimination based on their construction as the objectified other. Issues of exclusion lead to patterns of disadvantage that compound existing social tensions. The constant negative attention paid to Muslim groups creates the normalisation of hate and disdain towards them that is sustained by media and politics. This enhances existing exclusionary practices leading to entrenchment and normalisation. As this chapter is written in mid-2019, various Western European governments continue to maintain their legal, social and cultural engagement with Muslims on issues of ‘extremism’, with attempts to strengthen antiterrorism legislation at home while fighting Muslim ‘insurgents’ abroad. Meanwhile, with ongoing harmful media and political discourses that vilify, stigmatise and homogenise Muslims and Islam, some young Muslims remain vulnerable to radicalisation. Without greater efforts to tackle the structural issues and politico-ideological constructions to ‘being Muslim’, the potential threat of violent Islamic political radicalism lingers, where national and international issues compound local area efforts, leaving many Muslims feeling further alienated and disempowered. The status quo cannot continue if society wishes for a stable and prosperous multicultural future, confident of intercultural and interfaith relations as globalisation bites harder and individual freedoms erode in the face of rampant capitalism and insidious post-9/11 invasions into basic freedoms. This observation, however, does not cohere with existing dominant UK government thinking or the persuasions of centre-right think tanks, commentators and political actors in general. Populist voices suggest a problem with the Muslim integration process is due to cultural divisions. The idea of multiculturalism, ‘a philosopher’s tool’ in imagining the ‘good society’, therefore receives extensive criticism from both the left and the right. In reality, a lack of integration is a reality of economics and questions of social and political empowerment rather than identity, culture, or religion alone.42 The debates on migration, integration, multiculturalism and radicalism are at the centre of much public concern. While radicalisation feeds off Islamophobia and vice versa, Islamophobia thrives from the negative visibilities of Muslim communities. Similarly, radicalisation is generated by reactions to the infectiveness of attempts to integrate, which are a reflection of the inadequacies of equality policies at home and foreign policy abroad. But locally there are also the actions of farright groups who now take on a counter-jihad guise, reacting to issues of immigration, perceptions of Muslim cultural relativism and geopolitical concerns relating to terrorism. There is a symbiotic relationship between Islamophobia and radicalisation which emerges in the discussion of Islamism and multiculturalism. To eliminate the deleterious consequences of both Islamophobia and radicalisation, the question of what it means to be a Muslim in a multicultural Britain today is the most pertinent. Muslim integration is raising Islamophobia and far-right extremism because the state is unable to accommodate differences in a neoliberal political economy. The observations presented here provide a much-needed perspective on British South Asian Muslim communities who are under sharp focus but little able to speak for themselves. These are many historical challenges facing British Muslims in the current period. Considerable attention is on questions of race, ethnicity, loyalty, belonging, and local and global identities. Importantly, the impact of policy and practice on questions of Islamophobia and radicalisation in particular, is also missing from this debate. 390

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Acknowledgements Aspects of the content of this chapter have been taken from my publications ‘Implementing “Prevent” in Countering Violent Extremism in the UK: A Left-Realist Critique’, Critical Social Policy, 2019, 39(3): 396–412 and Islamophobia and Radicalisation: A Vicious Cycle, 2019, London and New York: Hurst and Oxford University Press.

Notes 1 Vicki Coppock and Mark McGovern, “‘Dangerous Minds’? Deconstructing Counter-Terrorism Discourse, Radicalisation and the ‘Psychological Vulnerability’ of Muslim Children and Young People in Britain,” Children & Society 28, no. 3 (2014), 242–256. 2 Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso, 2014); Lauren Powell, “Counter-Productive Counter-Terrorism. How is the dysfunctional discourse of ‘Prevent’ failing to restrain radicalisation?” Journal for Deradicalisation 8, (2016): 46–99, and Caitlin Mastroe, “Evaluating CVE: Understanding the Recent Changes to the United Kingdom’s Implementation of ‘Prevent’,” Perspectives of Terrorism 10, no. 2 (2016): 50–60. 3 Jessie Blackbourn and Clive Walker, “Interdiction and Indoctrination: The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015,” Modern Law Review 79, no. 5 (2016): 840–870. 4 Government of United Kingdom, Revised ‘Prevent’ Duty Guidance: for England and Wales (London: Crown Copyright, 2015). 5 Toby Archer, “Welcome to the Umma: The British State and its Muslim Citizens since 9/11,” Cooperation and Conflict 44 no. 3 (2009): 329–347. 6 Government of United Kingdom, Prevent Strategy (London: Home Office, 2011). 7 Alex Murray, Katrin Mueller-Johnson and Lawrence W Sherman, “Evidence-Based Policing of U.K. Muslim Communities: Linking Confidence in the Police with Area Vulnerability to Violent Extremism,” International Criminal Justice Review 25, no. 1 (2015): 64–79. 8 Charlotte Heath-Kelly, “Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK ‘PREVENT’ Strategy,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15 no. 3 (2012): 394–415. 9 Suraj Lakhani, “‘Prevent’ing Violent Extremism: Perceptions of Policy from Grassroots and Communities,” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 51, no. 2 (2011): 190–206, and Thomas Martin, “Governing an Unknowable Future: The Politics of Britain’s ‘Prevent’ Policy,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 7, no. 1 (2014): 62–78. 10 Mohammed Elshimi, “De-radicalisation Interventions as Technologies of the Self: A Foucauldian Analysis,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 1 (2015): 110–129. 11 Hanna Lewis and Gary Craig, “‘Multiculturalism is never talked about’: Community Cohesion and Local Policy Contradictions in England,” Policy and Politics 42, no. 1 (2014): 21–38. 12 Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre: A Warning (New York: Verso, 2014). 13 Chris Allen, “Passing the Dinner Table Test Retrospective and Prospective Approaches to Tackling Islamophobia in Britain,” SAGE Open (2013): 1–10. 14 Therese O’Toole, Nasar Meer, Daniel Nilsson DeHanas, Stephen H. Jones, and Tariq Modood. “Governing through ‘Prevent’? Regulation and Contested Practice in State–Muslim Engagement,” Sociology 50, no. 1 (2016): 160–177, and Paul Thomas, Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism: Failing to ‘Prevent’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 15 Alex P. Schmid, Challenging the Narrative of the “Islamic State” (The Hague: The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2015). 16 Asim Qureshi, “‘PREVENT’: Creating “rRadicals” to Strengthen Anti-Muslim Narratives”, Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 1 (2015): 181–191. 17 Samuel Tyler Powers, “Expanding the Paradigm: Countering Violent Extremism in Britain and the Need for a Youth Centric Community Based Approach,” Journal of Terrorism Research 6, no. 1 (2015), available at: http://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.1074 (accessed 28 September 2020). 18 Edwin Bakker and Roel de Bont, “Belgian and Dutch Jihadist Foreign Fighters (2012–2015): Characteristics, Motivations, and Roles in the War in Syria and Iraq,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 27 no. 5 (2016): 837–857.

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Tahir Abbas 19 Preben Bertelsen, “Danish ‘Prevent’ive Measures and De-radicalization Strategies: The Aarhus Model,” Panorama: Insights into Asian and European Affairs 1 (2015): 241–253. 20 Anthony Richards, “From Terrorism to ‘Radicalization’ to ‘Extremism’: Counterterrorism Imperative or Loss of Focus?” International Affairs 91 no. 2 (2015): 371–380. 21 Francesco Ragazzi, “Suspect Community or Suspect Category? The Impact of Counter-Terrorism as ‘Policed Multiculturalism’,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 5 (2016): 724–741. 22 Gabe Mythen, Sandra Walklate and Fatima Khan, “Why Should We Have to Prove We’re Alright?’: Counter-terrorism, Risk and Partial Securities,” Sociology 47, no. 2 (2012): 383–398. 23 James Fitzgerald, “Frontline Perspectives on ‘Prevent’ing Violent Extremism: An Interview with Alyas Karmani (STREET UK),” Critical Studies on Terrorism 9, no. 1 (2016): 139–149. 24 The Guardian, “Isis Document Leak Reportedly Reveals Identities of 22,000 Recruits,” 9 March 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/isis-documentleak-report edly-reveals-identities-syria-22000-fighters (accessed on 10 February 2019). 25 Lorne L. Dawson and Amarnath Amarasingam, “Talking to Foreign Fighters: Insights into the Motivations for Hijrah to Syria and Iraq,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 3 (2016): 191–210. 26 Aislinn O’Donnell “Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent: The Educational Implications of ‘Prevent’,” British Journal of Educational Studies 64, no. 1 (2016): 53–76. 27 Gabe Mythen, Sandra Walklate and Elizabeth-Jane Peatfield, “Assembling and Deconstructing Radicalisation in ‘Prevent’: A Case of Policy-based Evidence Making?,” Critical Social Policy 37, no. 2 (2016): 180–201. 28 Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister, “Disconnected Citizenship? The Impacts of Anti-terrorism Policy on Citizenship in the UK,” Political Studies 61 no. 3 (2012): 656–675. 29 Vasco Lub, “Polarisation, Radicalisation and Social Policy: Evaluating the Theories of Change,” Evidence and Policy 9 no. 2 (2013): 165–183. 30 Basia Spalek, “Radicalisation, De-radicalisation and Counter-radicalisation in Relation to Families: Key Challenges for Research, Policy and Practice,” Security Journal 29, no. 1 (2016): 39–52. 31 Shandon Harris-Hogan, Kate Barrelle and Andrew Zammit, “What is Countering Violent Extremism? Exploring CVE Policy and Practice in Australia,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 8 no. 1 (2016): 6–24. See also Shahram Akbarzadeh, “Investing in Mentoring and Educational Initiatives: The Limits of De-Radicalisation Programmes in Australia”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2013), pp. 451–463. 32 David Lowe, “‘Prevent’ Strategies: The Problems Associated in Defining Extremism – The Case of the UK,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no.11 (2016), 917–933. 33 Paul Thomas, “‘Prevent’ and Community Cohesion in Britain – The Worst of All Possible Worlds?” in Counter Radicalisation – Critical Perspectives eds. Christopher Baker-Beall, Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Lee Jarvis (Abingdon: Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies, 2014). 34 Tahir Abbas, “Muslim Minorities in Britain: Integration, Multiculturalism and Radicalism in the Post-7/7 Period,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 28, no. 3, (2011): 287–300. 35 Nicholas Appleby, “Labelling the Innocent: How Government Counterterrorism Advice Creates Labels that Contribute to the Problem,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 3, no. 3 (2010): 421–436. 36 David Miller and Tom Mills, “The Terror Experts and the Mainstream Media: The Expert Nexus and its Dominance in the News Media,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 2, no. 3 (2009): 414–437. 37 Jeroen Gunning and Richard Jackson, “What’s So ‘Religious’ About ‘Religious Terrorism’?” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 4, no. 3 (2011): 369–388. 38 Mary J. Hickman, Lyn Thomas, Henri C. Nickels and Sara Silvestri, “Social Cohesion and the Notion of ‘Suspect Communities’: A Study of the Experiences and Impacts of Being ‘Suspect’ for Irish Communities and Muslim Communities in Britain,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 5, no. 1 (2012): 89–106. 39 Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index 2018: Measuring and Understanding the Impact of Terrorism (Sydney: IEP, 2018), and Daniel Peddell, Marie Eyre, Michelle McManus and Jim Bonworth “Influences and Vulnerabilities in Radicalised Lone-actor Terrorists: UK Practitioner Perspectives,” International Journal of Police Science & Management 18, no. 12 (2016): 63–76. 40 Hedieh Mirahmadi, “Building Resilience against Violent Extremism: A Community-Based Approach,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 668, no. 1 (2016): 129–144. 41 Sahar F. Aziz, “Policing Terrorists in the Community,” Harvard National Security Journal 5 (2014): 147–224. 42 Hiranthi Jayaweera and Tufyal Choudhury, Immigration, Faith and Cohesion: Evidence from Local Areas With Significant Muslim Populations (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2008).

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29 REVISITING S.P. HUNTINGTON’S ‘THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS’ THESIS Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed and Shafi Md. Mostofa

Introduction In the 2012 edition of the Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, Chapter 22, on S.P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, left the door open for further consideration of his 1993 thesis on the future thrust and direction of international relations.1 Although this chapter had canvassed the initial critique of Huntington’s thesis in Western scholarship as being completely fanciful,2 it ended with Niall Ferguson’s 2006 opposing testimony that, ‘as works of prophecy go’, it had been ‘a real winner’.3 What most scholars had taken issue with was Huntington’s prediction that future war would likely occur between entire civilizations, and particularly between those of Islam and the West. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Huntington had prophesied a violent and hostile world in which war and conflict were driven by civilizational differences, rather than by the ‘ideological’ and ‘economic’ causes of the past. ‘The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict’, he wrote, ‘will be cultural.’ ‘Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of civilizations.’ In short, ‘the fault lines between civilizations’ would become ‘the battle lines of the future’.4 Ferguson could hardly have commended the Huntington thesis in the way he did before 9/ 11 – insufficient time had passed to make such a judgement – and just five years after 9/11 it was still a provocative thing to do. Scholarly disdain of the thesis had not suddenly been overturned by the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers or the chain of events that followed. With few exceptions, the thesis is still considered within the disciplines of history, political science and international relations to be deeply flawed. Even so, not only does Huntington’s thesis crop up again and again in ‘hundreds if not thousands’ of studies on international relations,5 but also its signature ‘Clash of Civilizations’ title has become almost as enduring a metaphor as that of the ‘Cold War’ which preceded it. What university course in international relations does not reference Huntington’s prognostication about the cultural basis of future war and its likely ‘civilizational’ protagonists – though principally Islam and the West? Symposia on the ‘clash of civilizations’ continue to discuss Huntington’s thesis on various anniversaries of its 1993 publication. Journalists almost routinely hark back to Huntington in their reporting of terrorist incidents involving Muslims. 393

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How can the remarkable longevity of the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis be explained, given that it continues to receive little if any empirically based scholarly support6 and the terminology it propagates is invariably contested?7 Nor is Huntington, who died in 2008, here to defend it anymore, as he did in response to early criticism in a follow-up article in Foreign Affairs in 1993, ‘If Not Civilizations, What?’, or to promote it further and more fully in a best-selling 1996 book without the question mark of the original article.8 Have the ‘fault lines of contact’ between Islam and the West, which Huntington first identified in 1993, become more apparent in recent years perhaps? That there is a cultural dimension, for example, to the tensions currently dividing Western and Muslim societies, does not appear all that controversial an idea 25 years or so after Huntington first advanced it. From a Western perspective, dress codes, lifestyle differences, the role and rights of women, Sharia punishments, and customary practices have increasingly filtered into journalistic portrayals and popular perceptions of Islam as a religious culture that essentially fails the tests of civilized society. The Afghan burqa, especially, with its prison-like facial grill, is routinely projected as symbolizing in general the subjugation of women in Islam, and the models of governance followed by the post-1979 Iranian Republic or the Taliban regime of Mullah Omar are ones deemed to have come straight from the ‘Dark Ages’.9 Equally, many Muslims, and not just Islamists, find fault with aspects of modern Western life: its secular orientation, the relegation of religion to the private sphere, the central place of interest or riba in the banking system, the way business seems to be conducted without regard for ethical conduct, the pornographic and sexual exploitation of women, and so on. As a system of belief based on Qur’anic practice, Islam finds twenty-first-century Western social mores bordering on the offensive and seeks to imbue Muslims with the strength to resist them. Whether or not cultural differences such as these will ultimately engulf Islam and the West in total war, as Huntington projected, the cultural dimension of Islamist attacks against the West is difficult to ignore. Such attacks are often coordinated against culturally based Western targets – restaurants, places of worship, tourist centres, newspaper offices, footpaths, bridges, railway stations – as well as symbols of Western cultural and political significance, though none was more iconic than the World Trade Center in New York. As the spate of later, more conventional ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attacks suggests against, for example, competitors in the Boston Marathon (2013), the staff of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris (2015), pedestrians on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice (2016) and London Bridge (2017, 2019), and concert-goers leaving the Manchester Arena (2017), the spread of Muslim communities in the West has opened up new, culturally based fronts for jihadist activity – in Europe especially where there are sizeable immigrant populations of Muslims. Since 2014, France alone has experienced over twenty terrorist attacks involving Muslims. Asymmetrical war, or war of an irregular, insurgent kind, is arguably well under way. Ostensibly exacerbating these tensions are two other factors that Huntington predicted would influence the outcome: the ever-present dangers of Muslim majority countries gradually succumbing to Islamist radicalization over time, and the intensification of Islamophobia – broadly defined in this chapter as anti-Muslim prejudice and discrimination against Muslims generally and particularly those living in the West – fanning the fires of populism and xenophobia.10 Recent evidence suggests that both scenarios are currently being played out within the context of globalization, a phenomenon Huntington believed would heighten parochial attitudes and serve to split the world into dichotomies of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.11

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Islamist parties vowing all-out retaliatory war against the West have been moving with impunity from the periphery to the centre of political life in their respective countries, with a simple belligerent message. The infidel West must not only be ejected from the Muslim lands it has plundered for centuries, but unbelief must also be stamped out for good, by means of global jihad. While ‘fundamentalist’ narratives of the kind propagated by al-Qaeda12 clearly have the power to radicalize small minorities of already-alienated Muslims, it is not so clear that they can win over the vast majority of Muslims, or in what circumstances.13 A great deal more sharpening of the ‘enmities’ between Islam and the West would need to occur if, as has been suggested, this were a real possibility.14 Islamophobia, which is gaining momentum with the emergence of far-right political parties, is clearly on the rise in Europe and routinely flares up whenever a suicide bombing or terrorist incident is reported. In his 1996 analysis, Huntington rather presciently pointed to a growing right-wing ‘phobia’ – that Europe was being ‘invaded’ by Muslim migrants threatening ‘its way of life’ – feeding into and fertilizing the growth of white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim populism.15 The danger, as he saw it then, was that pressure would be applied to established parties to adopt some of the rhetoric of the far right to endorse some of the anti-immigration measures they proposed. It is certainly the case that since the influx of refugees from the war-zone of Syria and the establishment of Islamic State in Syria’s north, Europe has been experiencing an upsurge in far-right sentiment, both on the ground and at the political level. The concept of multiculturalism is attracting far less support and tolerance than it once did. All this begs a number of key questions, which inform this chapter: if Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis totally misrepresents the situation the world currently faces, why has it endured in public and academic usage for over a quarter of a century? Could the fact that the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has simply not gone away be indicative of developments taking place that give it some degree of reinforcement? Is its durability simply a case that no alternative theory of international relations has yet come closer to explaining Muslim disenchantment with the West, and the manifestation of Islamist terrorism? These questions remain open, despite the extensive attention the ‘clash of civilizations’ has received, and continues to receive, over the years. The world has sufficiently moved on to warrant the revisiting of Huntington’s thesis in the light of Ferguson’s 2006 challenging tribute to it.

An adverse scholarship, then and now The position Huntington had hoped his thesis would attain in political theory is clearly and candidly laid bare in ‘If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War’, the second of his 1993 articles on the subject. In answer to his immediate critics, he proposed the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a new paradigm to replace the old ‘Cold War paradigm’ in explaining the causality and direction of ‘central developments in world politics’. Laying out the ‘elements’ of a ‘post-Cold War’ paradigm, Huntington insisted that it did not have to ‘account for everything’ or be able to explain or predict every single event that ever happened. It had not mattered that the Cold War paradigm had not been able to do this and had ‘many anomalies’. What mattered in its case was that as a ‘simple model of global politics’, it explained ‘more important phenomena than any of its rivals’. For forty years, the ‘Cold War’ had provided a ‘highly simplified but very useful picture of world affairs’, and was an ‘indispensable starting point for thinking about international affairs’.

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Huntington commended his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis along similar lines. As with any paradigm, Huntington’s did not fit every situation, nor did anomalies necessarily falsify it. The important thing was that it could only be ‘disproved’ by the creation of an alternative paradigm able to account for ‘more crucial facts in equally simple or simpler terms’. A more ‘complex theory’ could always account for ‘more things’, but nothing like this had yet materialized. In short, the ‘clash of civilizations’ model represented the ‘best simple map of the post-cold war world’ there was. Listing a wide range of recent international events, Huntington proclaimed that all of them fitted his clash of civilizational paradigm and ‘might have been predicted from it’, barring Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.16 Despite what amounted to an extraordinary promotion of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis as the next paradigm of international relations, Huntington failed to defuse the fervour of the criticism that followed. In the period before 9/11, a generation of largely Westernbased scholars practically spoke with one voice in opposition to the thesis and Huntington himself came in for some fairly rough treatment.17 While one contribution to a 1994 symposium in the ASAA Review18 went so far as to categorize Huntington’s whole argument as complete ‘balderdash’19 – a categorization that continues to hover over it20 – no one was quite as harshly dismissive as Edward Said, who derided the thesis as a dangerous ‘gimmick’ on a par with Orson Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast of 1938.21 What had provoked Said to take aim at Huntington in this way was the suggestion that 9/11 was proof that Huntington had been right all along. Nearly all of Huntington’s critics pick out the same issues in their rebuttals of his thesis. Prime among them is Huntington’s key concept that civilizations are intrinsically discrete, cohesive and monolithic entities. The contention against this is that Islam is too pluralistic, too dispersed and too territorialized to ever coalesce in global form22 against the particular markers of Western civilization that Huntington had laid down, such as individualism, equality, democracy and secularism.23 Equally problematic is considered Huntington’s related assumption that Islam could become totally radicalized. This possibility is not ruled completely out,24 but the rivalries existing within the spectrum of ‘political Islam’ and the existence of separate Muslim nation-states are viewed as giant impediments to the formation of a coherent multinational, radicalized Islam.25 The fact that ‘violent conflicts’ are occurring ‘within’ civilizations rather than breaking out ‘globally’ between different civilizations forms a major rejoinder in the counterargument that scholars pose. While true in 1993, intra-civilizational conflict has if anything increased in the second decade of the twenty-first century. With civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, widespread anti-government unrest throughout the Middle East, and bitter and bloody sectarian violence, the Arab heartland of Islam constitutes a region ostensibly still very much divided against itself.26 The biggest question mark, however, is reserved for Huntington’s key argument that religious culture will become the prime driver in not only radicalizing Islam, but also turning it into a global political force. Militant rhetoric, it is countered, is much less directed at promoting the ‘superiority’ of Islamic culture than in declaring jihad against the US and Europe. The primary aim of jihadist Muslims is to eject the West from the Middle East altogether and put an end to its long history of economic exploitation and political interference.27 Even after 9/11, which overturned a lot of traditional thinking about the causes of Muslim terrorism and how best to deal with this challenge, Huntington’s good idea, as he implied his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis was in a rejoinder to invited critics in Foreign Affairs a month or two after advancing it,28 has continued to be seen as a thoroughly ‘bad’ idea.29

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Nonetheless, the second wave of criticism, which covers much of the same ground, seems to have lost some of the biting edge that accompanied the first wave of critiques. In a 2013 e-publication to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, the editor of Foreign Affairs has no reservations in claiming that Huntington had ‘clearly’ got some things ‘right’. How the variable of culture might impact the modern world, and identifying ‘the dynamics underlying a “war on terror” that had caught everyone by surprise’, were among these. Part of the trouble, Gideon Rose goes on to explain, is that many people have simply ‘misread’ and ‘misinterpreted’ the thrust of Huntington’s article.30 Fouad Ajami, one of the earliest critics to cast doubt on Huntington’s prediction of a ‘struggle between Islam and the West’, is cited as subsequently conceding that he may have been mistaken.31 What Ajami had particularly objected to was Huntington’s prediction that India would abandon its ‘secular inheritance’ and become a ‘Hindu state’.32 A little less forgiving, however, is a 2019 special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs: ‘A Quarter Century of the “Clash of Civilization”’.33 Applying Huntington’s thesis to a number of country case studies across Europe, some articles query the suitability of ‘civilizational conflict’ as an analytical concept in understanding the sources of deep political division, social tensions and marginalization they were investigating. Other articles conclude that there are models of explanation more useful than Huntington’s. The one area where Huntington’s thesis is still considered ‘helpful’ is in ‘explaining and accounting for the electoral gains of right-wing politicians in various Western countries’.34 While the initial debate was primarily conducted as a Western discourse, with little or no reference to Muslim views, it would appear that some Muslim scholars have been more receptive to some of Huntington’s theorizing, as indeed he claimed they were in his 1993 article.35 Certainly, there seems to have been no reciprocal clamour of outrage from Muslim scholars when Huntington’s two articles in Foreign Affairs first appeared. Perhaps Huntington had Akbar S. Ahmed in mind when declaring that Muslims very definitely perceived the historical interaction between Islam and the West in ‘clash of civilizations’ terms. Just two years before Huntington had projected his vision of the future direction of international relations, Akbar S. Ahmed had also raised the spectre of a bitter, violent ‘encounter’ between the West and Islam, though without any apparent outcry. In his 1991 ‘Islam: The Roots of Misperception’, Ahmed had outlined what he called three historical encounters dating back to the birth of Islam. Having faced a ‘cultural onslaught’ of ‘blitzkrieg’ proportions from the West during the age of European imperialism, the Muslim world, he predicted, would launch a concerted fight-back in the third of these encounters, beginning in the 1970s.36 That the Muslim fight-back is in full swing against the globalization of Western culture was confirmed by Ahmed immediately following 9/11.37 A leading Muslim scholar who is not persuaded that Huntington has got it all wrong, Bassam Tibi refuses to add his voice to the ‘demonization’ to which Huntington had been exposed. Although conceding that his thesis is riddled with ‘shortcomings’, some of them ‘deplorable’, he acknowledges that Huntington has got it right in drawing attention to the ‘pivotal’ issues of culture and civilization, hitherto missing or underplayed in the study of international relations.38 Where he parts company with the thesis, however, is over Huntington’s understanding of civilization and the way ‘culture’ informs it. For Tibi, Huntington goes too far in conceptualizing both ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ as monolithic, rather than ‘ever changing’ entities, and insufficiently distinguishes between them.39 While he is persuaded that the whole world stands at the threshold of a ‘war of civilizations’, this will essentially be a war not in any military sense but one between competing politicized ‘worldviews’.40 As testament to how embedded Huntington’s ‘rhetoric’ has become, Tibi 397

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devotes almost an entire book – Islam and Global Politics (2012) – to showing how it crucially misrepresents the inter-civilizational tensions between Islam and the West.41 Few scholars, if any, seem prepared to predict a world war between militarized civilizational blocs. In so far as he considers a ‘civilizational clash’ to be ‘theoretically possible’, Tariq Ramadan envisages that it will more likely be engaged in the cities of Europe – in the heart of the West itself rather than at the ‘geopolitical frontlines’ – between Muslims minorities seeking European citizenship on the basis of Islamic identity and non-Muslim majorities fiercely opposing any Islamization of European culture.42 While it is difficult to envisage this kind of intermittent, if ongoing, urban conflict expanding into an all-out war on a global scale, such an escalation was integral to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s strategy for global jihad against the ‘crusader’ West. Provoking the US to retaliate militarily, as happened after 9/11 when it launched drawnout, economically draining and increasingly unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was, they believed, a sure way of fanning the flames of Muslim anger and bringing global jihad a step closer.43 IS’s strategy of ‘purposeful violence’ on Europe’s city streets, as a step to creating ‘an international jihadi archipelago’, follows much the same logic.44

Assessment Looking back on the almost universal chorus of scholarly criticism that greeted Huntington’s article in 1993 and right up to the turn of the century, it is difficult now to fully apprehend and account for the extremely hostile reception it received then. Huntington was not the first to predict a ‘clash of civilizations’ – Raymond Aron (1962) and Bernard Lewis (1990)45 had done this before him – and Huntington did so clearly speculatively with a highly visible question mark at the end of his eye-catching title. This question mark is seldom commented upon. Moreover, a number of Huntington’s more contentious points came with significant qualifications. He did not assert, for example, that civilizational conflict would immediately replace or rule out nation-states going to war for ideological, economic and territorial reasons, the pattern that had hitherto characterized the post-Westphalian international system. Huntington even conceded the possibility that ‘conflicts’ within civilizations would continue for some time, though they were likely to be less ‘intense’ and less extensive than conflicts between civilizations.46 Another of Huntington’s claims, that the ‘conflict of civilizations’ was ‘deeply rooted in Asia’ and particularly in the sub-continent,47 could draw on actual events taking place at the time he articulated his thesis in Foreign Affairs. In India, the BJP’s rise to prominence on the basis of Hindutva – Hinduizing the political and social culture of India – was capturing the world’s attention. It certainly did when communal intolerance reached a flashpoint in December 1992 and the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed by a ‘saffron mob’ claiming it as the birthplace of Ram.48 Mumbai was subsequently rocked by a bombing blitz of hotels and business landmarks in March 1993, killing over 250 people. In a regional context, Huntington’s positioning of Islam and Hinduism at a fault line of cultural alienation in the sub-continent might conceivably have appeared a plausible fit for his prescription of civilizational conflict. Huntington was not alone in thinking that India would sooner or later declare itself to be a Hindu state and marginalize Muslims as secondclass citizens.49 In this event, not only would Hindus and Muslims in India be put on a collision course, but an additional wedge might be driven between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan. That the Pakistan-based terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, for 398

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instance, has been implicated in attacks on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the centre of Mumbai again in 2003, 2006 and 2008, has kept subcontinental tensions at boiling point. Little if any of this, however, has been analysed in terms of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. Perhaps it was Huntington’s most boldly stated and controversial prediction that the next world war, should there be one, would be between the civilizations of Islam and the West,50 that inspired the almost unanimously hostile response from scholars; though not, however, from the press. In 1993, this prediction would have looked particularly improbable. With the Soviet Union breaking up and communism as a system of government collapsing, the United States as the one remaining superpower appeared poised, as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed, to establish the next world order alone and without challenge. As a political system, he wrote, Islam had nothing to offer the world and would only ever appeal to ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims. Beginning in 1989, his writings about ‘the end of history’, proclaiming that liberal democracy had won the long battle over time to become the ultimate universal political system,51 must have appeared much closer to the mark than Huntington’s more distant ‘mother of all’ conflicts. 9/11, which caused the West to reassess its reading of twenty-first-century reality, served not only to deflate the certainty of Fukuyama’s century of peace, but also to place Huntington’s theory of civilizational conflict ahead of it. By 2004, Fukuyama had declared that America’s world order was not for everyone. Muslim nations especially could not be forced to embrace it. In the forensic examination that followed 9/11, Huntington’s thesis, particularly where it suggested that the ‘battle-lines of the future’ would form over differences of culture, was no longer rejected out of hand quite so automatically.52 Certainly, the 9/11 Commission on Terrorism did not shy away from using Huntington’s language in referring to a ‘clash’ within Muslim ‘civilization’, nor did it hesitate to suggest that Muslims would have to ‘reflect upon such basic issues’ as the position of women in Islam, if they were to distance themselves from the terrorist minority.53 In the aftermath of 9/11, the status of women was clearly moving more noticeably to the very centre of the widening rift between Western and Islamic worldviews. The Muslim veil in particular was being singled out and seized upon as the symbol for everything the West deemed to be wrong with Islam. Both France and Belgium went so far as to ban the burqa in 2010, or any form of women’s dress that covers the face. And they did so officially, in the causes of national security, women’s rights and secular identity. As far as the then French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, was concerned, there was no question that the burqa was essentially a symbol of ‘subjugation and humiliation’.54 More recently Sri Lanka, while not specifically outlawing the hijab or headscarf, temporarily banned the wearing of the niqab in public as a response to the Easter Sunday bombings of Christians by an Islamic State-affiliated group.55 There seems little doubt that the veil of any kind has become a highly visible and easy target for anti-Muslim sentiment. Intriguingly, the Islamophobia that radical right parties in Europe have been embracing, has included some Western feminist arguments about the lack of autonomy and subordination of Muslim women.56 Having been poles apart on most issues, the radical right and feminists find themselves in broad agreement on this. From the other side of the fault line, Islamists are no less critical of the way the West treats women, predominantly as sexual objects as far as Islamic State is concerned. For Islamic State, the objectification of women is a prime example of the complete ‘deviance’ of Western society and constitutes one of the main reasons it proffers for the antagonism Islamists feel towards Western civilization. So ‘mixed up’ have become the roles of men and 399

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women, it declares, that ‘the true woman in the West has become an endangered species.’57 By imitating men, Western women have abandoned their ‘inborn human nature’. Despite the passage of time, the scholarly verdict remains virtually unchanged overall. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ continues to be found wanting as a model that fully encapsulates the interaction between Islam and the West and sufficiently accounts for the tensions unfolding between them. The notion of a single Islam in radicalized form coming to confront a single West in liberal secular form, and vice versa, is still considered to exist at best at ‘a very high level of abstraction’.58 The model may be simple as Huntington intended it to be,59 but its simplicity is thought to distort rather than capture the reality of the complex world it purports to explain.60

The phenomenon of rising Islamophobia An area that Huntington arguably did not distort or necessarily get wrong related to his prediction about the rise of xenophobia in the West. In a controversial article, Bernard Lewis had warned against the West being ‘provoked’ into ‘irrational reaction’ against Islam, though he did not elaborate.61 As Huntington saw it, the upsurge in Muslim immigration to Europe in the early 1990s represented just such a provocation, accompanied as it was by a rise of extremely hostile anti-Muslim sentiment across Europe. Expressed by ‘far-right, nationalist parties’, this sentiment was, he warned, increasingly translating not only into ‘acts of terrorism and violence’, but also increased electoral support. While Huntington did not spell out the exact danger ahead, the inference was clear that he anticipated Muslim ‘fundamentalist’ hostility to everything Western being met by Western ‘fundamentalist’ hostility to everything Islamic. ‘In large part’, these European parties were, he wrote, ‘the mirror image of Islamist parties in Muslim countries’, in that they shared an antipathy to establishment ‘corruption’ and ‘foreign influences’. The far-right’s dislike of Muslims came from ‘genuine cultural clashes and worries about national identity’.62 What Huntington had drawn attention to in his 1996 book was that ‘Islamophobia’ was unmistakenly beginning to take hold of the public perspective on Islam during the 1990s. And in the wake of 9/11, it grew substantially stronger.63 European populist politicians, such as Jorg Haider, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party of Austria, and Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, did not hesitate to interpret the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre as proof that Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ had begun.64 While government or leading opposition political figures might readily distance themselves from observations of this kind, it has been noted that the Islamophobic views of the populist radical right have begun to gain traction even with ‘mainstream audiences’.65 This has been in spite of concerted politically correct attempts to head off any notion that Islam per se is the potential enemy. Following 9/11, the ‘West’, as represented by its various governments, has periodically attempted to hose down the possibility of popular backlash. President George W. Bush famously did this on 20 September 2001, when he differentiated between the small ‘fringe’ group of Muslim ‘extremists’ who had declared war on the US, and the ‘peaceful teachings of Islam’.66 But his message of defeating terrorism wherever it grows was tantamount to putting Muslim countries on notice, and his diplomacy did nothing to impress Islamist opinion.67 A more convincing attempt to embrace Muslims as fellow citizens of the world has come from New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, following the killing by an Australian gunman of 51 Muslims attending Friday prayers in Christchurch on 15 March 2019. Her commitment to the cause of multicultural integration inspired 400

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world-wide admiration. However, it may seriously be doubted that reassurances of this kind do anything to spare Muslims from growing discrimination in the West. Not only has the ‘war on terror’ that Bush had declared on terrorists make this increasingly difficult, but so also does the rising total of terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam. Irrespective of a public reluctance by political leaders in the West to treat Islam as any kind of imminent or monolithic threat, the tabloid press continues to do this routinely. Islam is invariably depicted through a number of stock stereotypes, which have barely changed over the last twenty years, as civilizational enemies.68 In this context, the concept of ‘moderate’ Islam may have derived its existence as primarily a Western stereotypical category, since, as Osama bin Laden has argued, it is built upon a ‘Western conception’ of Islamic beliefs and practice.69 Irrespective of whether or not it has metaphorically emerged as the binary opposite of ‘radical’ Islam, the concept is deemed by al-Qaeda to have no basis in Muslim theology. ‘There is no such thing as moderate Islam,’ Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently insisted echoing this point, ‘there is only Islam.’ His bellicose take on the mosque killings in New Zealand, that they were part of the West’s ‘conspiracy against Islam’, which it was the duty of Muslims to confront,70 is certainly in line with Osama bin Laden’s call-to-arms treatise: ‘Moderation is a prostration to the West.’71 On an ongoing basis, the often-graphic coverage by the visual media of daily incidents of Muslim terrorist attacks around the world, serves to demonize Islam in general. Over time, the clear distinction between marginal and mainstream Muslims tends to become blurred. Whether, for instance, against non-Muslim civilians in European cities or Christian communities in Eygpt, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, violence and Islam are repeatedly portrayed going hand-in-hand. Compounding the bad press have been the bloody civil wars that have resulted from the Arab Spring of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East, and the subsequent rise of Islamic State. The Caliphate it proclaimed has done nothing to demonstrate the peaceful nature of Islam. Harrowing pictures of hostages being beheaded, Muslim families fleeing from battle-torn countries, and queues of refugees desperately trying to get into Europe have led to all kinds of anti-Muslim barricades going up. As Huntington had foreseen, the issue of Muslim immigration would prove to be fertile ground for the growth of a ‘populist’,72 radical-right ‘nativist’,73 neo-nationalist movement in the West, particularly in Europe. Although by no means a new phenomenon, the populist radical right has acquired momentum and prominence in the post-9/11 era with an anti-Muslim agenda that seeks not only to stop Muslims migrating to Europe, but also to return them to the countries they left. What appears to inform the new-found Islamophobia of many radical-right parties is not necessarily an antipathy to Islam as a religion, as a fear that the cultural integrity of Europe is imperilled. Indeed, the radical-right anti-Muslim rhetoric is redolent of Huntington-like terminology, such as that of protecting Judeo-Christian values against the Islamic threat to democracy, the separation of church and state, gender equality, the freedom of the individual, and popular sovereignty.74 Restricting the wearing of the veil features strongly in all their election manifestos. In short, the basic stance of the populist radical right is that Islam fundamentally ‘clashes with western civilization’ and constitutes a transnational global enemy that must be confronted.75 The impulses that would seem to have motivated the white Australian terrorist to kill dozens of Muslim worshippers attending two mosques in Christchurch, for example, related not to any hatred for the religious ideology of Islam per se, but to essentially anti-race, antiimmigrant beliefs that it is thought he picked up in Europe. Describing himself as an ‘ethno-nationalist’, he attributes the Islamophobia he actually professes to the high birth 401

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rates of Muslim immigrants wherever they settle. Muslim immigration thus constituted a form and level of ‘invasion never seen before in history’.76 Far-right terrorism of this type was a phenomenon that Waleed Ali, a prominent Australian academic and TV commentator, suggests the West should have seen coming.77 That it did not, at least in New Zealand, ignores the warning signs of the significant electoral gains made by far-right parties in Europe in recent years and the early alerts that scholars like Huntington, Lewis, Tibi and others had given about the prospect of rising Islamophobia. That said, none of this as yet is of a scale that looks set to pave the way for World War 3 or anything like it. Neither radical Islamists nor Western radical-right groups can be said to represent more than a relatively small, if currently growing, percentage of the communities they purport to represent.78 Despite some scholars catching glimpses of the possibility, situations that would permit either of these groups to capture majority support in their respective countries and put all Westerners and all Muslims on a war footing are difficult to see.79 This cannot, however, be said of the situation in South Asia, a melting pot of religious and cultural fault-lines, that Huntington incorporated into his thesis. Arguably, Islamophobia has been at its most prevalent and intense in the subcontinent, especially in India. Stirred up at the very top through the BJP’s promotion of Hindu nationalism and its agenda of Hindutva, which intrinsically renders Muslims as non-Indians or foreigners, the pot of communal and religious tensions seems closer to boiling over than ever before. Following its landslide victory in the May 2019 general elections, Narendra Modi’s BJP government has provocatively moved to revoke Article 370 of India’s Constitution which guarantees the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, and to strip the citizenship of those among Assam’s 4 million Muslims unable to prove that they were not illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Detention centres are reported to have bee set up for those who cannot produce documentary evidence of their nationality.80 On top of this is an amendment to the Citizenship Act of 1955, which allows for all but Muslim refugees facing persecution in neighbouring Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, to become Indian citizens. The fear that India is slowly but surely edging its way towards becoming a Hindu state is resulting in some of the biggest Muslim-led protests India has experienced in decades.81 It is tempting to suggest that it was the Indian subcontinent that provided Huntington with concrete evidence of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in the making, if on a non-global scale. For Huntington, the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodyha in December 1992 raised the likelihood of India becoming a Hindu state; a ‘Hindu rage towards India’s Muslim minority’ was building up, he noted, and ‘religious strife’ was ‘intensifying’.82 Despite centuries of coexistence, Islam and Hinduism as complete ways of life appear to have become the irreconcilable social and cultural systems that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had declared them to be in his Lahore Declaration of 1940. Giving added poignancy to this confrontation is the fact that as nuclear-armed nations, India and Pakistan have the capacity not only to annihilate each other, but also to threaten the existence of the rest of the world at the same time. This possibility prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which maintains the mock-up Doomsday clock in its office at the University of Chicago, to conjure up a scenario that might set off such a chain of events. In 2019, the trigger the atomic scientists envisaged, for the world to reach the Doomsday clock hour of 12 midnight, would be another Pakistani-sponsored attack on the Indian Parliament.83 That there is a pronounced cultural dimension to Islamophobic narratives is in line with Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ model and may help explain, as has been suggested,84 the growing electoral popularity of the radical right in Europe, and likewise the BJP in India. What is also in line with the Huntington model is the emergence of recent jihadist 402

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narratives that predict end-time conflict on a global scale. These narratives may not project the same kind of civilizational war that Huntington advances, or closely follow the same metaphorical reference points he maps. But they do show that Islam has its own versions of Doomsday theory to draw on, in attempting to make sense of the post-9/11 world.

Islamist narratives At a metaphysical level, Islamist narratives, which predict a final war between Islam and the West, can be said to run parallel with Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. Bassam Tibi has attested that in the post-9/11 era, both ‘conservative’ and what he called ‘fundamentalist’ Islamist Muslims began prominently espousing the cultural aspect of civilizational conflict. Their hostility to the West, he points out, is directed not against Western political power alone, but also against the onslaught of Western cultural values that accompany globalization. What ‘fundamentalists’ envisage, he argues, is an alternative universalism based on the civilization of Islam as a world order of a different kind. This is a universalism, which they have been ‘drawing up’ with its own set of ‘fault lines’ and conflict points.85 While the notion of cultural clashes may be held in common, Islamist narratives follow a different path to Huntington’s, and have been constructed independently of his. Generally speaking, the general Muslim public has neither heard of Huntington nor know anything about his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis.86 Osama bin Ladin conceded that he was aware of the ‘saying’, but that the ‘clash of civilizations’ he subscribed to was grounded in Islamic theology, not the imaginary theory or ‘fairy tale’ being put about by the ‘Jews and America’.87 The offensive jihad he exhorted Muslims to employ against Western civilization was for him an overdue response to a long and continuing history of military incursion and was designed not only to kick the West out of the Middle East for good, but also ultimately to destroy its whole system of unbelief.88 Until at least the advent of Islamic State, the dominant anti-Western discourse was constructed and propagated by al-Qaeda. This conjures up a simple, historically based narrative of Muslim resistance to foreign invasions starting with the Crusades, continuing with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, and culminating with the imperialist phase of European expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the period constituting Akbar S. Ahmed’s ‘second encounter’. In bin Laden’s scripting, the US, which replaced Britain in the Middle East in 1945 as the world’s leading superpower, continues to pursue a similar military interventionist policy that confirms the West’s hostile status.89 The West, in short, remains the ‘worst civilization’ in the ‘history of mankind’.90 In view of the US invasions of Iraq in 1990 and 2003, and of Afghanistan in 2001, this narrative has the reinforcement of lived or observed experience. It strikes an empirical chord and is constantly augmented. According to an editorial in Inspire, the online voice of al-Qaeda, ‘9/11 was neither the beginning of the war between the Muslims and the West nor was it the end. It was merely an episode in a long, protracted war’ that started with Muhammad the Messenger of Allah and ‘will end with al-Malhama’ (the great battle at the end of time).91 Tracing the 1,300-year history of conflict between ‘the Western and Islamic civilizations’, Huntington covers much of the same chronological ground.92 It leads him to speculate that one of the causes propelling the Muslim world to engage the West in renewed conflict is the quest to restore the ‘superiority’ that Islamic ‘culture’ and ‘power’ had once enjoyed.93 What the Huntington thesis does not foresee or factor in, however, is the emphasis al-Qaeda places on offensive jihad, not simply as a defensive response to

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the military presence of the US, but primarily as a religious duty involving all-out actual war against the West to occupy its lands and destroy its systems of government.94 When Daesh or Islamic State, as it has become more widely known, emerges on the scene in the first decade of the twenty-first century and begins to capture the headlines after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi assumed its leadership in 2010, it comes with a story line more theologically based than al-Qaeda’s. This is an apocalyptic storyline which, according to JeanPierre Filiu, Muslims generally regarded with suspicion before the US invaded Iraq in 2003.95 With Iraq subsequently in flames and the Arab Spring bringing widespread political turmoil across the Middle East, IS espouses a Doomsday philosophy that not only begins to resonate with the Muslim public whose world is being destroyed, but also appeals to the foreign fighters it recruits to defend the Caliphate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had proclaimed.96 End-of-the-world messages are propagated in most issues of Dabiq, a journal launched by IS in July 2014, and named after the small town of Dabiq in northern Syria, believed to be the site of a prophesied battle in which Islamic forces conquer the infidel crusaders once and for all.97 Based on Hadith literature and Muhammad’s prophecies, the proverbial ‘day of judgement’ is deemed to be at hand, with the Antichrist (Masih ad Dajjal) suddenly appearing and the prophet Isa (Jesus) returning to earth to lead the Muslims – alongside the Mahdi in some versions – to victory in a final battle against this false messiah and his Jewish-led forces of unbelief. The outcome is the establishment of a world order based totally on Islam.98 Recent analysis of some 70 ‘significant’ narrative themes contained within 14 issues of Inspire and 13 issues of Dabiq, the respective high-profile English-language mouthpieces of al-Qaeda and IS propaganda, has identified the ‘clash of civilizations’ as one of them. Grouped under the larger organizing categories of first ‘The West’ and ultimately ‘Islam at War’, the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a distinct phrase is seldom mentioned as such in these journals. But it is deemed to apply to those passages that directly refer to the ongoing conflict of Islam and the West over their ‘separate’ and ‘irreconcilable’ civilizations.99 There is never any hint in his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis that Huntington believed that the world was heading towards ultimate catastrophe, let alone that its end was just around the corner. It has also been questioned whether the leaders of al-Qaeda and IS have seriously believed this either.100 For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the apocalyptic narrative proved an effective recruiting tool to attract foreign fighters to the IS cause, and Dabiq’s pitch to them – that sitting idly at home and doing nothing in the world’s final years – seemed to work.101 Joining IS is prescribed not only as preparation for the day of judgement, but also as holding out the divinely accredited prospect of martyrdom and entry to Paradise.102 On the other hand, a number of prominent Islamic scholars such as, for example, Mufti Kazi Ibrahim103 and Sheikh Imran Hosein,104 are espousing end-time narratives that emphasize the point that the countdown to al-Malhama, or the great war, has already started. Just how much reinforcement the apocalyptic messages of IS and to a lesser extent alQaeda have indirectly afforded Huntington’s thesis is difficult to measure. Certainly, there are plenty of references in them to ‘World War 3’ being on the horizon, as the Huntington thesis had predicted.105 In this context, India also features large in IS thinking, as a prophetically designated site for civilizational conflict. Quoting from a number of hadiths, IS urges South Asian Muslims to prepare themselves for end-time war in Hindustan (Gajwatul Hind).106 Suffice to suggest that if these messages had been dismissed by Muslims everywhere as pure bunkum, as Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis had been by most scholars in the West, Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ might have gone the way of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History: as a futurological model unsupported by anyone or, 404

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importantly, by the turn of events. Without the advent of Islamist terrorism – put on display with devastating effect on 9/11 and followed up by smaller if deadly attacks around the world – and without some kind of thematic similarity given it in Islamist narratives, Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis might well have reached its use-by date by the end of the twentieth century. That similarity, however, was prominently declared in the very first issue of Dabiq when IS outlined its vision of two warring camps – the ‘camp of Islam and faith’ and the ‘camp of Kufr [unbelief] and hypocrisy’ led by the US and Russia – meeting in a final showdown. This had clearly more to do with religious prophecy about the end of time and the establishment of Islamic rule, than the civilizational clash Huntington had in mind. But what al-Qaeda’s narrative of retaliatory war, IS’s narrative of ‘end of world’ battle, and Huntington’s thesis about civilizational ‘clash’ have in common is the prospect of cataclysmic struggle on a mega scale. Their respective endings may differ, but the front-line protagonists of Islam and the West are broadly the same.

Conclusion On balance it could be argued that Huntington’s thesis stands up in a few places, as much as it falls down overall. As both Akbar Ahmed and Tibi have shown in their own writings, it does capture the cultural dimension to the tensions that are evident in the engagement between Islam and the West. No other theory of international relations seems to do this, and certainly not the ‘war on terror’.107 As Ferguson stated in 2006, it does provide a plausible context for making some sense of everyday developments such as Islamist terrorism on the one hand and Western moves to ban the veil, restrict the height of minarets, and stop Muslim immigration, for example, on the other hand. Any apprehension that Huntington’s thesis might become ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’108 by conceding ground to it seems to have moderated. Muslim scholars especially show no hesitation in confirming that the signs of ‘rupture’ between the Islamic and Western civilizations are ‘visible’,109 or that Islam and the West are in fact ‘competing for a new world order’.110 As it has transpired, Huntington’s good idea has not come to be successfully challenged by a ‘better’ idea, but nor has it evolved into a comprehensively constructed model of international relations that can explain everything in world politics either. Unlike the ‘Cold War’, the many shortcomings scholars have identified continue to deny it paradigmatic status. Tellingly, even Ferguson has come to admit that the ‘one major defect’ in Huntington’s model is that as ‘prophecy’ it has ‘failed – thus far – to come true’. It is still much more ‘accurate’ to say that civilizations were ‘crashing’ rather than ‘clashing’.111 Nonetheless, like the ‘Cold War’ paradigm, the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has acquired poignancy and prominence as an ‘indispensable starting point’ for thinking about international affairs.112 In part, this can be attributed not only to the notoriety its argument continues to attract, but also to the notoriety adverse scholarly reviews continue to invest it with. While its endurance may not be put down to a ‘hung jury’, as Gideon Rose proposes,113 its place in intellectual history is assured not only as a controversial model of present and future conflict between Islam and the West, but also perhaps as a reference point for Doomsday scenarios. In either form, it has probably some way still to go before it runs its full course.

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Notes 1 Howard Brasted and Adeel Khan, “Islam and the ‘Clash of Civilizations?’ An Historical Perspective,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Routledge, 2012), 273–289. 2 Brasted and Khan, “An Historical Perspective,” 286. 3 Niall Ferguson, “The Crash of Civilizations,” Los Angeles Times, 27 February 2006, available at www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-27-oe-ferguson27-story.html 4 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49. 5 Jonathon Fox, “Civilizational Clash or Balderdash? The Causes of Religious Discrimination in Western and European Christian Majority Democracies,” The Review of Faith and International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2019): 45. Fox calculates that Huntington’s thesis has been cited over 35,000 times in Google Scholar since September 2018. 6 Fox, “Civilizational Clash or Balderdash?” 45. 7 Foreign Affairs, The Clash at 20 (2013), is a retrospective e-book in honour of S.P. Huntington. While his original articles and those of a number of critics are reprinted, his thesis is only occasionally mentioned in a 2013 video featuring, among others, Francis Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria, available at http://home.sogang.ac.kr/sites/jaechun/courses/Lists/b6/Attachments/9/clash %20of%20civilization.pdf 8 Samuel P. Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 5 (1993): 186–194, and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was translated into 39 languages and reputedly sold millions of copies. 9 Howard Brasted, “The Politics of Stereotyping. Western Images of Islam,” Manushi 98 (1997): 6–16, and Howard Brasted, “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950–2000,” in Muslim Communities in Australia, ed. Abdullah Saeed and Shahram Akbarzadeh (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001), 218–221. 10 Huntington, Remaking of World Order, 201. 11 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 29. 12 Brasted and Khan, “An Historical Perspective,” 278. 13 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Mind. Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 246, 285–287. 14 Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe. Democratic Peace and Euro-Islam versus Global jihad (London: Routledge, 2008), 37–40, 78–81, and Shahram Akbarzadeh and Samina Yasmeen, Islam and the West: Reflections from Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005). 15 Huntington, Remaking of World Order, 198–204. 16 Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?” 186–190. 17 Brasted and Khan, “An Historical Perspective,” 277–280. 18 Asian Studies of Australia Association, “Symposium on Huntington Thesis,” Asian Studies of Australia Review 18, no. 1 (1994): 1–30. 19 Pal Ahluwalia and Peter Mayer, “Clash of Civilizations – Balderdash of Scholars,” ASAA Review 18, no. 1 (1994): 21–30. See also Fox, “Civilizational Clash or Balderdash?” 34–48. 20 Fox, “Civilizational Clash or Balderdash?” 34. 21 Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation, 22 October 2001, available at www.thena tion.com/article/archive/clash-ignorance/, and Edward Said, “The Myth of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’,” YouTube, 1998, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPS-pONiEG8 22 John L. Esposito, The Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10–12, and Peter Mandaville, Global Political Islam: International Relations of the Muslim World (London: Routledge, 2007), 3, 15–16. 23 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations ?” 40. 24 Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom. The Future of the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 258–259, and Tariq Ramadan, Islam, the West and Challenges of Modernity (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 200 edition), 290. 25 Olivier Roy, Globalising Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2004), 74–75. 26 See Dieter Senghass, The Clash Within Civilizations. Coming to Terms with Cultural Conflicts (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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Revisiting ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ 27 See Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Thomas Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism after the Iraq War,” The Middle East Journal 60, no. 1 (2006), 11–32, and Amin Saikal, Islam and the West: Conflict and Co-operation (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 28 Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?” 191. 29 David Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Chiara Bottici and Beniot Challard, The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 30 Gideon Rose, “Introduction,” Foreign Affairs, The Clash at 20 (2013): 1–3. 31 Richard K. Betts, “Conflict or Cooperation? Three Visions Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, The Clash at 20 (2013): 73–75. 32 Fouad Ajami, “The Summoning: ‘But They Said, We Will Not Hearken’,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 4 (1993): 2–9. 33 See Special Issue: “A Quarter Century of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2019). 34 Jeffrey Haynes, “Introduction: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and Relations between the West and the Muslim World,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2019): 6. 35 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 32. 36 Akbar S. Ahmed, “Islam: The Roots of Misperception,” History Today 41 (1991): 29, 31. See also Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam. Making Sense of Muslim History and Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 117, and Akbar S. Ahmed, “A Third Encounter of the Close Kind,” History Today 39 (1989): 7. 37 Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam Under Siege. Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003). 38 Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 edition), 20, 213. 39 Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 20–21, 190, 218; Bassam Tibi, Islam and Global Politics. Conflict and Cross-civilizational Bridging (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 43, and Roy, Globalising Islam, 139–141. 40 Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism. Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 16, 88–93; Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 213, and Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe, 81, 214. 41 Tibi, Islam in Global Politics, 78, 136, 161, 162. 42 Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 224–225; original emphasis. 43 Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 60, 23. 44 Scott Atran & Nafees Hamid, “Paris: The War ISIS Wants,” New York Review of Books, 15 November 2015, available at www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/11/16/paris-attacks-isis-strategychaos/ 45 Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entres les nations (Paris, 1962), cited in Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, 217, and Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslimrage/304643/ 46 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 38. 47 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations ?” 33. 48 In a final judgment on 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled that a Hindu temple could be built on the site. 49 South Asian Studies Association of Australia, “After Ayodhya: The BJP and the Indian Political System,” South Asia 17, Special Issue (1994), 1–229. 50 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 39. 51 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, August 1989, 15–25, available at www.embl.de/aboutus/science_society/discussion/discussion_2006/ref1-22june06.pdf; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), and Francis Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” The National Interest, Summer 1999, 16–33, available at www.embl.de/aboutus/science_society/discussion/discussion_2006/ref222june06.pdf 52 Rose, “Introduction,” 2.

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53 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC, 2004), 363, 375, available at www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf 54 Aristotle Kallis, “The Radical Right and Islamophobia,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. Rydgren Jens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 87. 55 Veiling was banned in Sri Lanka after the Easter jihadist bombing. See Sasha Ingber, “Sri Lanka Bans Face Coverings After Easter Sunday Attacks,” National Public Radio, 29 April 2019, available at www.npr.org/2019/04/29/718184435/sri-lanka-bans-face-coverings-after-easter-sunday-attacks 56 See Rozie Campbell and Silvia Erzeel, “Exploring Gender Differences in Support for Rightest Parties: The Role of Party and Gender Ideology,” Politics and Gender 14, no. 1 (2018): 80–105; Tjitske Akkerman, “Gender and the Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Policy Agendas,” Patterns of Prejudice 49, no. 1–2 (2015): 37–60, and Niels Spierings, Andej Zaslove, Lisa. M. Mugge and Sarah L. de Lange, “Gender and Populist Radical-right Politics: An Introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice 49, no. 1–2 (2015): 3–15. 57 The Islamic State, “The Fitrah of Mankind and the Near-Extinction of the Western Woman,” Dabiq 15 (2014): 20–25. For a ‘reference guide’ to IS’s English-language magazines, see Haroro J. Ingram, “Islamic State’s English-language Magazines, 2014–2017: Trends & Implications for CT-CVE Strategic Communications,” ICCT Research Paper (2018). 58 Mandaville, Global Political Islam, 15–16. This view remains almost commonplace. 59 Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?” 187. 60 Brasted and Khan, “An Historical Perspective,” 275, 280. 61 Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” 62 Huntington, Remaking of World Order, 198–204. 63 Gideon Rose, “Introduction,” in Foreign Affairs, The Clash at 20, 2. 64 Kallis, “The Radical Right and Islamophobia,” 81. 65 Kallis, “The Radical Right and Islamophobia,” 78. 66 George W Bush, “Following is the Full Text of President Bush’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the Nation,” Washington Post, 20 September 2001, available at www.washington post.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html 67 See, for example, Azan, “The 3rd World War and Dajjal,” (2013), 39–40. Azan is a Taliban online magazine. 68 Brasted, “The Politics of Stereotyping. Western Images of Islam,” 6–16; Brasted, “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective”, and Howard Brasted, “Postscript,” in Muslim and Media Images. News versus Views, ed. Ather Farouqui (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58–84, 85–90. 69 Osama bin Laden, in Raymond Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 19, 26–28. 70 “Turkey and New Zealand row over the Christchurch massacre,” The Economist, 21 March 2019, available at https://www.economist.com/international/2019/03/21/turkey-and-new-zealandrow-over-the-christchurch-massacre 71 Osama bin Laden, “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West,” in The Al Qaeda Reader, 17–62. 72 See Cass Mudde’s definition of ‘populism’ as a set of ideas that is connected to an essential struggle in society between ‘the pure’ or good people and the corrupt elite. Cass Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, eds. Cristobel R. Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 48, 63. 73 See Mudde’s definition of ‘nativism’ as an ideology that holds that the nation-state should only be formed by members of the native group. C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19. 74 Michael Minkenberg, “Religion and the Radical Right,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydgren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 524, 525, and Rosie Campbell and Silvia Erzeel, “Exploring Gender Differences in Support for Rightest Parties: the Role of Party and Gender Equality,” Politics and Gender 14, no. 1 (2018): 85–86, 93. 75 Kallis, “The Radical Right and Islamophobia,” 77; and Akkerman, “Gender and the Radical Right in Western Europe,” 39–40, 53. 76 Brenton Tarrant, “The Great Replacement Manifesto,” Kantana17.wordpress.com, 15 May 2019, available at http://republicbroadcasting.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/the-greatreplacement-e28094-manifesto-e28094-new-zealand-mosque-shooter-ver-3.pdf

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Revisiting ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ 77 See Waleed Ali, “Waleed on the Christchurch Terrorist Attacks,” Network Ten Video, available at https://10play.com.au/theproject/recap/2019/waleed-on-the-christchurch-terrorist-attacks/ tpv190915fiyet 78 Tibi warns that despite being a minority, Islamism is an extremely ‘powerful’ minority ‘empowered by global networks supported by immense financial funds’, see Tibi, Islam in Global Politics, 159. 79 Ramadan, Islam, the West and Challenges of Modernity, 290. Ramadan concedes that ‘people’ are ‘justified in fearing the worst: the clash between civilizations’. 80 Jeffrey Gettleman, “Millions of Muslims Risk Being Stripped of Citizenship in India and Declared ‘Foreign Migrants’,” Independent, 18 August 2019, available at www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/asia/india-muslim-residents-citizenship-assam-modi-hindu-nationalism-a9064096.html. See also The Economist, “Modi’s dangerous moment,” 2–8 March 2019, available at www.economist. com/leaders/2019/02/28/india-and-pakistan-should-stop-playing-with-fire, and Timesnow, “India’s Divider in Chief,” 20 May 2019, available at www.timesnownews.com/india/article/ indias-divider-in-chief-pm-modi-makes-cover-of-time-magazine/416069 81 Hannah Ellis-Petersen, Shaikh Azizur Rahman and Ahmer Khan, “Indian Students Join Protests against ‘Anti-Muslim’ Citizenship Laws,” The Guardian, 17 December 2019, available at www.the guardian.com/world/2019/dec/16/india-protests-six-dead-as-demonstrators-vow-to-continue-tofight-citizenship-changes 82 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 35, and Huntington, Remaking of World Order, 195. 83 Alan Robock, Owen B. Toon, Charles G. Bardeen, Lili Xia, Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, R. J. Peterson, Cheryl S. Harrison, Nicole S. Lovenduski and Richard P. Turco, “How an India-Pakistan Nuclear War Could Start and Have Global Consequences,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75, no. 6 (2019): 273. 84 Haynes, “Introduction: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’,” 6. 85 Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe, 81. 86 Based on fieldwork carried out by Shafi Mostofa between 2016 and 2019. 87 Osama bin Laden, Messages to the World. The Statements of Osama bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence and trans. James Howarth (London: Verso, 2005), 124–5. 88 Osama bin Laden, “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West,” 19, 28, 32, 42, 51, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, “Loyalty and Enmity,” both in The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 93–94. 89 Inspire 4 (2011), 7. 90 Osama bin Laden, “Why We Are Fighting You,” in The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 197–208. 91 Inspire 4 (2011), 7; Inspire 7 (2011), 3. 92 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 31–32. 93 Huntington, Remaking of World Order, 212. On this point also see Tibi, Islam in Global Politics, 10. 94 Brasted and Khan, “An Historical Perspective,” 284. 95 Jean Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, trans. M.D. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 121, 140. 96 William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse. The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 48, 164, 238. 97 See, for example, Azan 1 (2013), 39–40; Azan 5 (2014), 33; Dabiq 3 (2014), 9–11; Rumiyah 1 (2016), 39, and Rumiyah 3 (2016), 24–26. Rumiyah replaced Dabiq as IS’s online propaganda magazine in September 2016. 98 See McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 175ff; Azan 1 (2013), 40; Dabiq 14 (2015), 64–65, and The Islamic State, “Break the Cross,” Dabiq 15 (2015): 46–63. 99 Julian Droogan and Shane Peattie, “Mapping the Thematic Landscape of Dabiq Magazine,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 6 (2017): 591–620; Julian Droogan and Shane Peattie, “Reading Jihad: Mapping the Shifting Themes of Inspire Magazine,” Terrorism and Political Violence 30, no. 4 (2018): 684–717, and Julian Droogan and Shane Peattie, “Islamophobia in Al Qa’ida’s and IS’ English Language Magazines,” in Islamophobia and Radicalization. Breeding Intolerance and Violence, eds. John L. Esposito and Derya Iner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 139–158. 100 McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 49, 239, 242, 253. 101 McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, 166, 241. 102 See, for instance, Dabiq 15 (2015), 72, 82.

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103 See Islamic Online Center, 4 August 2017, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJVdogXATY0. 104 He has over twenty published books on the subject and is a recognized Islamic scholar. His works are available at www.youtube.com/user/SheikhImranHosein http://imranhosein.org/n/ 105 See, for example, Azan 5 (2014), 31ff; Azan 6 (2014), 20ff, and Dabiq 2 (2014): 43. 106 Mawlana Farid Uddin Masoud, Mawlana Husynul Banna, D. Ahmed Abul Kalam and Mufti Waliur Rahman Khan, Misinterpretation of The Quran and Hadith by Militants and their Correct Interpretation (Dhaka: RAB Forces, Bangladesh Police, 2017), 52–57. 107 Howard Brasted, “Reflections on the ‘War on Terror’,” audio of paper given at NCEIS conference, 20 November 2008, available at www.nceis.unimelb.edu.au/event/conference-08-howard-brastedreflects-war-terror. 108 Rose, “Introduction,” 2. 109 Ramadan, Islam, the West and Challenges of Modernity, 290. 110 Tibi, Islam in Global Politics, 78. 111 Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011), 313. 112 Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?” 187–188. 113 Rose, “Introduction,” 2.

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427

INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to tables.

Abbasid 31, 255, 256 Abd al-Nasser, Gamal 14, 15, 17, 19, 31, 52, 53, 58, 209 Abd al-Rahman, Umar (Blind Shaykh) 22 Abd al-Salam, Arif 19 Abd al-´Aziz, Ali 19 Abdallah, King (Saudi Arabia) 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230 Abdo, Mohammed 229 Abduh, Muhammad 18, 56 Abdulaziz, King (Saudi Arabia) 221 Abdulhamid I, Sultan (Ottoman Empire) 284 Abdulhamid II, Sultan (Ottoman Empire) 156 Abdullah, King (Saudi Arabia) 32 Aberkan, Fatima 344 ‘Abode of Islam’ movement see Darul Islam (DI) abode of Islam/abode of disbelief 4, 5, 94, 123, 285, 297 Abraham 265 Abu al-Futuh, Abdel Moneim 21 Abu Bakr (Caliph) 28, 272 Abu Hurairah 40 Abu l-A’la Maududi see Maududi, Maulana Abu Nasr, Muhammad Hamid 53 Abu Qatada, Sheikh 251 Abu Sayyaf Group 120–121, 122, 123, 124 Abu-Rashta, Ata 309, 310, 312 acceptable citizen 171 acceptable/unacceptable Muslims 369 accommodation phase (Hezbollah) 95, 97 accommodationist strategy (Muslim Brotherhood) 6–7, 57 Aceh 104, 110 active citizenship 352

activism: al-Hudaybi’s document outlining principles of moderate 53, 57; jihadism as indispensable to 266; Lebanon 92, 93; militant see jihad/jihadism; militant goodness 318, 319–320; Morocco 70, 72; Muslim Brotherhood 55–56, 57, 61, 62; Philippines 119; political work as part of religiously-inspired 53–54; Qutb’s influence on 11, 52; religious 320; transnational 286; Turkey 160 Adalan, Huseyin 181 Adalat Party (AP) 128 Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA) 243 Adolat 142, 143 Advent: Waiting for the Messiah 33 advocacy 11, 20 affirmation: among Iranian women 194 Afghanistan 22; as an exception to the principle of fighting the distant enemy 249; IMU in 143, 332; influence of Jama´at e-Islami ideology 212; IS movement in 299, 302; ISIS in 146, 150; jihadi-Salafists in 268; military training 110, 251, 252, 326; Pakistan’s support for US invasion of 358; US counterstrike, and fracturing of al-Qaeda network 298 afghanski mujakhed 321 Africa 16, 17, 44, 47, 212, 302, 307, 314; see also Central Africa; North Africa; sub-Saharan Africa Afrin Military Operation 182 agency 190; of embodiment 191, 197–200; female political 351, 353, 354, 356; Islamist 1; of subversive language 193 Ahl al-hall wal-aqd 33, 34 ahl al-sunnah wal jama’a (adherents of right practice and communal solidarity) 261

428

Index

ahle hadith school 353 Ahmadi minorities 103, 107 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 202 Ahmed, Akbar S. 397, 403, 405 Ahmed, Dawood 127 Ahmed, Makbul 216 Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement 269 Ajami, Fouad 397 Akbarzadeh, Shahram 67, 123, 147, 280, 319 Akhmedova, Khapta 339 Akif, Mahdi 54 AKP see Justice and Development Party Aktobe attack 148 Al Al Sheikh family 31, 225–227; Abdel Aziz 262; Abdul-Latif 31, 223; Abdulatif bin Abdulaziz 227; Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah 225, 226; Mohammed bin Abdulmalik 227; Mohammed bin Ibrahim 221, 225, 226; Saleh 225, 227; Turki 226 Al Khansaa brigade 343 Al Khansaa (online magazine) 340 Al Siffat 353, 354, 356, 357, 359 al-Adl, Sayf 252, 253, 299–300, 301 al-Adl, Sayyid 298 al-Adnani, Abu Muhammad 271, 293–294, 296 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 133, 284, 320 al-Ahmar, Shaykh Abd Allah bin Husayn 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 al-Albani, Sheikh Naser al-Din 262 Al-Amn Al-Fikri (intellectual security) 229 al-amr 27 al-ansar bulletin 251 Al-Aqsa Intifada 45, 252 Al-Aqsa mosque 284 Al-Aqsa (TV channel) 46 al-Assad, Bashar 95, 164, 293, 300, 309 al-Assad, Hafez 293 al-Astal, Yunis 46 Al-Awaji, Mohsin 224, 227 Al-Azhar 58, 308 al-Baba, Hisham 309 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 9, 122, 256, 296, 300, 309, 310, 337, 404 al-Baghdadi, Abu Omar 293–294 al-Bahri, Nasser 287 al-Banna, Abderrahman 87 al-Banna, Hasan 14, 16, 17, 51, 52, 55–56, 57, 58, 82, 236 al-Bashir, Omar Hassan 312 al-Batniji, Ayman 45 al-Binali, Turki 296 al-Bukhari 46–47 al-Dahi, Sheikh Hassan 310 al-Fadhli, Tariq 243 al-Fahd, Nasr 262 Al-Fawaz, Nadia 191 al-Filastani, Abu Abdullah 250

Al-Fozan, Saleh 224 al-Futuh, Abu 54 al-Ghazali, Zeinab 19 Al-Hamid, Abdallah 222, 227 al-Haqq Party 238, 241 Al-Hasan, Mustafa 223 Al-Hawali, Safar 227–228 al-Hazimi, Sheikh Ahmad 257 al-Houthi, Abd al-Malek 242 al-Houthi, Badr al-Din 241 al-Houthi, Hussein 241–242 al-Hudaybi, Hasan 14, 20–21, 52, 53, 57, 58 al-Hudaybi, Ma’mun 53 al-Irshad 106, 110 al-Islam 27 Al-Issa, Mohammed bin Abdul Karim 225 Al-Jahiz 41 Al-Jamaa (magazine) 72 al-Jama´a al-Islamiyya see Jamaah Islamiya (JI) al-Julani, Mohammad 294 Al-Kalbani, Adel 229, 230 Al-Khail, Sulieman Aba 228–229 Al-Khair Trust 211 al-Khaththath, Muhammad 312 Al-Khatib, Ahmed 224 Al-Khidmat 211 al-Khorezmi 140 Al-Luhaidan, Saleh 224 al-Mahdi (Imam) 28, 33 al-Ma’ida verse (Qur’an) 112 al-Malaki, Nuri 293 al-Malhama 404 Al-Malki, Abdallah 222–223, 227 Al-Malki, Hasan Farhan 222, 223 Al-Manea, Sheikh Abdullah 225 al-Maqdisi, Sheikh Abu Mohammed 250, 262, 290, 291, 296 al-Mauritani, Abu Hafs 249–250 Al-Mghamsi, Saleh 228 al-Mihdar, Zain al-Abidin Abubakar 243 al-Muhajir, Sheikh Abu Abdullah 253 al-Mujahir, Abu Hamza 293 al-Munajid, Muhammad 47 al-Musawi, Abbas 93, 96 Al-Mutlaq, Sheikh Abdullah 224 al-Muwâfaqât fi usûl al-charî’a (The Reconciliation of the Foundations of Religious Law) 250 al-Nabhani, Sheikh Taqi al-Din 104, 307, 312 al-Nahda (Renaissance) 62 al-Nahda Square 55, 61 Al-Nahda (Youth Rising Forum) Annual Meeting 223 al-Naraqi, Sheikh Ahmad 29 al-Nashiri, Abd al-Rahim 243 al-Nizam al-Khass see al-Tanzim al-Khass/al-Nizam al-Khass (Secret Organization) al-Nuqrashi, Muhammad 52, 58

429

Index

Al-Odah, Salman 222, 223–224, 227 Al-Omar, Nasser 227 Al-Otaibi, Juhayman 222 al-Qaeda 2, 11, 21, 23, 205, 248; -ISI dispute 294; against the ghulat 249–251; al-Zarqawi and 252–253; attacks, Turkey 167; Consultative Councils 252; critique of anti-Shi’a policy 301; on establishing Islamic states 271; globalisation and fragmentation of 287; ideology see ideology of al-Qaeda; Islamic nationalism 251–252; militants, Indonesia 109; on moderate Islam 401; new ‘internet generation’ 287; offensive jihad 403–404; as ‘the evil of banality’ 287; and the undermining of historical momentum of Islamists 206; US counterstrike in Afghanistan and fracturing of 298; versus the Islamic State 254–255; women in jihad 340, 341, 342; Yemen 242–243, 245; see also al-Zawahiri, Ayman; bin Laden,Osama al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) 243, 245, 255 al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) 287, 290, 292, 293, 300, 339 al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers 254, 255 al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) 287 Al-Qahtani, Mohammed 222 Al-Qami, Awad 227 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 42–43, 47, 82, 262, 324 Al-Qarni, Sheikh Aidh 228 al-Qassam Brigades 86 Al-Qaswa (she-camel) 39, 40 al-Qubati, Abd al-Aziz Yassin 236 Al-Rasheed, Madawi 227 Al-Rushoudie, Sulieman 222 al-Sadat, Anwar 2, 5, 21, 22, 52, 53, 58 al-Sadr, Musa 93 al-Salaf al-Salih (righteous predecessors or pious forbearers) 261 al-Shabaab 341, 342 al-Shami, Abu Anas 254 al-Sharif, Sayyed Imam 338 al-Shâtibî, Abu Ishâq 250 Al-Shawkani, Mohammad 235 al-Sinuwar, Yahya 79 al-Sisi, Abd al-Fattah 7, 43, 47, 55, 60, 89 al-Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Ali 47 Al-Subh (The Dawn) 72 al-Suri, Abu Khalid 294 al-ta’ifa al-mansoura see Victorious Sect al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (TH) 53 al-Tamimi, Ahlam 341 al-Tanzim al-Khass/al-Nizam al-Khass (Secret Organization) 14, 22, 52, 58 al-Tartusi, Abu Basir 262 ‘al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad’ 254, 291 al-Tilmisani, Umar 21, 53, 57 al-Tufayli, Subhi 93

al-Turabi, Hassan 251 Al-Turaifi, Abdulaziz 227 al-Uthaimin, Sheikh Ibn 262 al-Uyari, Yusuf 338 al-Wasat Party 54 Al-Zarqawi, Abu Mus’ab 290; and al-Qaeda 252–253, 292; anti-Shi’ism 291, 295, 298; on female combatants 338; figure of the ghulat 253–254 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 252, 254, 286, 287, 294, 398; animosity towards heterodox Muslim minorities 300–301; on atrocities in Bangladesh 216; fate tied to success of Iraq insurgency 293; inability to control behavior of affiliated organizations 302; on priority to the ‘far enemy’ 22, 248, 249; Qutb’s influence 21; stewardship of the AQI 292; Syrian jihadists pledge of allegiance to 255; on women in jihad 339 al-Zindani, Shaykh Abd al-Majid 236, 237, 238 al-Zingi, Imad (the Bloodthirsty) 253 al-Zingi, Nur al-Din 253 Al-‘Aqqad, Abbas 12 al-‘Aryan, ‘Isam 21 al-‘Uyayri, Yusuf 346 Alawite minority 164, 293, 295 al’Din Rumi, Mevlana Jalal 158 Alevis 166, 173, 177, 182 Alexander, Audrey 344 Algeria 74, 251, 268–269, 297 Ali, Ameer 129 Ali, Ben 8 Ali, Maulana Hamid 209 Ali, Mir Qashem 215 Ali, Waleed 402 all-Union Islamic Revival Party 326 Almaty 147, 148 Altsoy, Isa 167 Amal party 92, 93, 95, 96 Ambon 108, 109 America see United States Amin, Mohamed 129, 131 Amnesty International 127, 215 amr (affairs) 26 Anatolia 157, 158, 160 Anbar Province 291 Andijan uprising (1898) 320 Andrabi, Asiya 339 animal issues 38–42; anti-dog prejudice 45; antipig prejudice 43 animal rights 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 Ankara 160, 164, 165, 168 anomie 388 Ansar al Sharia 245 Ansar Allah Party 233, 239–242 Ansar-ul-Islam 309 Ansar-ul-Khalifah 309 anti-Americanism 2, 210, 241

430

Index

anti-capitalism 69, 104, 145 anti-Christian campaign 302 anti-colonialism 3, 103, 131, 140 anti-democracy 343 anti-diversity 389 anti-immigration 384, 389, 395 anti-Israel 241 anti-Muslim agenda 401; anti-Muslim racism 365; anti-Muslim sentiment 368, 399 anti-radicalization policies 376 anti-Semitism 43, 46, 83, 88, 145 anti-Shi’ism 291, 295, 298, 301 anti-Soviet jihad 22, 212, 267, 286, 295, 353 anti-Western: conspiracy theories 175, 183; position, reinforcement of 3; rhetoric 145, 172, 176, 403; sentiment 173; views 228, 343 ants 40 Aoun, Michael 97 apocalyptic narratives 404 apostates/apostasy 56, 134, 178, 179, 248, 249, 253, 257, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 271, 286, 291, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 302 AQAP see al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Aqeeda see Islamic doctrine Arab Spring 164; Egypt 22, 54, 58, 59; as evidence of how deviance from Islam has cost leaders their regimes 359; Hibz-ut-Tahrir and 307–309, 314; Morocco 75; post-Islamism and 7–9; as proof of futility of non-violence 266; undermining of Islamist momentum 206 Arab unity 2 Arabization 193, 199 Ardern, Jacinda 400–401 Arendt, Hannah 287 Aristotle 352 Arjomand, Said Amir 29 Armed Islamic Group (GIA) 251, 269 armed resistance: Hamas 80 Aron, Raymond 398 Artistic Depiction in the Qur’an (Taswir al-Fanni fi alQur’an) 12 ASAA Review 396 Asia: ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis 398; Hizb-utTahrir 306, 307; see also Central Asia; South Asia assassinations 2, 5, 14, 22, 58, 96, 213 Assembly of Experts 30, 35 assertive secularism 149, 368 assimilationism 365, 376n4, 389 Association of Muslim Brothers 79 Assud the Bunny 46, 47 Asyut 12, 22 ‘at risk’ versus ‘risky’ dichotomy 384 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal 17, 155, 157, 158, 168 athar 262 atheism: Soviet-style 141, 142 attackers (female) 341–342

Australia 5 Austria 174, 400 authoritarianism: deviancy from Islam and loss of regimes 359; HT leadership 313–314; Morocco 70; party politics in 68; secular 149; Tajikistan 144; Turkey 8, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172; Turkmenistan 140; Yemen 238 authority: charismatic 34–35; concept of, in the Muslim world 26; foundation of, Iran 35; foundation of, Saudi Arabia 35; wali al-amr as a substitute 26; see also divine authority; political authority; religious authority autocracy 52, 58, 72, 157, 166, 168, 178, 331 autonomy 115, 119, 121, 147, 210, 294, 354, 399; see also Moro autonomous region Avicenna 140 Awa’ed al-Ayam 29 Awami League (AL) 213, 214, 215 Awwas, Irfan 111 Ayatollahs 29, 30; see also al-Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Ali; Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah Ayesha (wife of Mohammad) 338 Ayodhya mosque: destruction (1992) 398, 402 Ayoob, Mohammed 1, 2 Azad, Abdul Kalam 133 Azam, Ghulam 213, 215 Azariqa 19 Azzam, Abdullah 267, 286, 291, 325, 338 Baasyir, Abu Bakar 110, 111 Baath Party 238 Babacan, Ali 168 Babajanov, Bakhtiyar 143, 321, 332 Babakhanov, Ishan 321 Babakhanov, Ziyauddin 321 Badar, Uthman 311 Badi´a, Muhammad 21, 54 Bahrain 164 Bakhash, Osman 309–310 Bakr, Colonel Hajji 256 Bali bombings 109, 110 Balkanloğ lu, Abdulmetin 178 Bangladesh: Massacre Behind a Wall of Silence 216 Bangladesh: Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 313; Islamization 213–214; Jama´at e-Islami 213–216; national elections 214; women 215 Bangladesh National Party (BNP) 214 Bangsamoro Organic Law (2018) 122 The Bangsamoro Mujahid: His Objectives and Responsibilities 121 Banu Hassan 253 Barelvi group 212 Basic Law of the Palestinian Authority (PA) 85 Basic Law of Saudi Arabia 31–32, 34 Basilan 120, 121 Basmachi revolt (1916) 140

431

Index

bâtil 83 The Battle of Islam and Capitalism (Ma’rakat al-Islam wa’l-Ra’smaliyya) (1951) 13 Bay’ah (the Pledge of Allegiance) 31–32 Bayat, Asef 7 The Beard 375 bees 40–41, 46 Beirut 92, 95, 98 Belgium 146, 257, 367, 368, 370, 389, 399 believers 18, 19, 145; see also non-believers; true believers ‘Believing Youth’ movement 241 belonging: dissociation of citizenship from cultural 375; Islamic 131, 133, 134, 135, 369 ‘belt of misery’ (Lebanon) 92 Benlaala, Omar 375 Bennigsen, Alexandre 141 Berg, Nicholas 254 Berri, Nabih 93 Berti, Benedetta 95 Bestepe 165 Bhutto, Benazir 211 Bible (Hebrew) 16, 27 bid´ah 262 bin Abdul-Wahhab, Sheikh Mohammed 30, 31, 220, 221, 225, 226, 228, 248, 262, 295, 296 bin Abdulwahab, Hussein bin Mohammed 227 bin Baz, Abdulaziz 221, 262 bin Laden, Hamza 301 bin Laden, Osama 109, 255, 293, 338, 398; call for liberation of Al-Aqsa mosque 284; on clash of civilizations 403; image of piety 283–284; on moderate Islam 401; priority of fighting the distant enemy 248–249; resolve/obsession with jihad against the US 252; rhetorical brilliance 283; support for the Taliban 249; theology 250; on women in jihad 339; see also al-Qaeda bin Malik, Anas 40 bin Salman, Sultan 225 bin Saud, Mohamed 31, 220, 228, 296 bin Shamlan, Faisal 238 bint Al-Azwar, Khawlah 338 biopower 147 Bishkek 149 BJP party (India) 402 Blackwater mercenaries 254 blasphemy injunctions 134 Bloc of Change and Reform (2006) 85, 86 Blunt, Wilfred 284 boarding schools (Islamist) 106, 110, 147 Bobonazarova, Oinikhol 144 bodily conduct/codes 190, 191 Boko Haram 260, 339 bombing(s): campaign, Yemen 242; Indonesia 109, 110; of the Jolo Cathedral (2019) 115, 123; Manila 120; Mumbai (2008) 356, 358; and new approach to radicalization 373; Tashkent (1999

and 2004) 143; see also car bombings; hotel bombings; suicide bombings bonding: and resistance, Iranian women 194, 202 ‘bonding’ capital 189 Book of Animals 41 Boston Marathon terrorist attack (2013) 373, 394 Bourdieu, Pierre 188, 189, 190, 201 Boyd, Danah M. 188 ‘Breaking the Walls’ campaign 294 Brethren of Purity (ikhwan al-safa) 41, 43, 47, 62 ‘bridging’ capital 189, 388 Brill Olcott, Martha 332 Britain see HT Britain; United Kingdom British Muslims 384, 385, 390 brutality: justification of 4 Bukhara 140 Bukhari, Imam 39 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 402 Bunzel, Cole 301 Burkina Faso 302 burqa 394, 399; see also hijab Bush, George W. 400 Bush, G.W. 121 businessmen: Islah 235, 237, 238 Buyukanit, General Yasar 163 cabby jokes 196 Caliph-Dynasty model 31 caliphates: Abbasid 256; Arab 307; Ottoman 28, 156, 157, 206; Umayyad 28, 29, 297; see also Islamic Caliphate caliphs 28–29, 156 camels 39–40 Cameron, David 389 Camp Bucca 293, 294 Campaign for Faith 254 Canada: estimation of Muslim numbers based on religious practices 367; iconic construction of Muslims 372; public overestimation of Muslims in 366; wearing of hijab 200; see also Québec car bombings: Jakarta (2003) 110; Riyadh (1995) 251 Casanova, José 367 cats 40 census data: estimation of Muslim numbers based on 366–367 Central Africa 302 Central Asia 139–150; corruption 150; Hizb-utTahrir 306; Islamization 140; jihad in 320–324, 332; political Islam in a historical perspective 140–142; post-Soviet religious mobilization 142–146; poverty 150; predicted as a hotbed of Islamic radicalization 139; producers of religious norms 146–149; promotion of Erdogan ideology 174 Central Java 104, 110 Central Kalimantan 107

432

Index

Central Sulawesi 107, 108, 109 Cervone, Alberto 345 ‘Channel’ mentoring system 385, 387 Character Assassination Campaign 215 charismatic authority 34–35 charismatic leadership 22, 31, 35, 88, 93 charity 72 Charlie Hebdo attack 394 Charter (1988) 79, 80 Chechen separatists 339 child marriage 179 A Child from the Village (Tifl min al-Qarya) 12, 42 China 16, 319 Chisti Sufi order 206 Choudry, Roshonara 342 Christian Filipinos 116, 122, 123, 124 Christian Palestinians 82 Christian-Muslim violence 107–109, 110 Christianity 27, 38, 131 Christians 18; evangelicals/evangelicalism 30, 107; immigration, Philippines 117; IS massacres 302; militia attacks on, Indonesia 103; statesponsored migration, Philippines 118; see also anti-Christian campaign; Maronite Catholics citizenship: differentiated 111–113; disconnected 388; discriminating variables 371; dissociation from cultural belonging 375; gender codes, Iran 191; headscarf, identity and 371; India 402; jihadi women and 352–353; limited to Muslims, Maldives 126, 127, 135; tests of 370; unconditional allegiance to liberal values 373 Citizenship and Social Class 352 civil society: Muslim Brotherhood position in 61 civil society initiatives: JIH 209 civil war involvement: and divisions among jihadiSalafists 271 civil-religious associations: Indonesia 103 ‘civilisation’ 129, 131, 133 ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis 393–405; an adverse scholarship, then and now 395–398; assessment 398–400; halal meat 44; IS hopes of convincing supporters of imminence of 302; Islamist narratives 403–405; phenomenon of rising Islamophobia 400–403 Claverie, Elisabeth 369 The Clear Evidence of the Ungodliness of the Saudi State 250 clergy 28, 29, 30, 147, 157, 291 clerics 34, 140 co-optation 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 98, 240 co-religionists: Salafi-jihadism 265, 270 codes of conduct 188, 190, 229–230 Cold War paradigm 395, 405 Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France (2019) 372 collective identity 116, 131, 133, 171–172 collective obligation: jihad as 359 collective takfir 260, 270–271

colonialism 379n53 colonisation 2 Commander of the Believers 70, 72, 76 Commission on Terrorism 399 Committee of Political and Security Affairs (Saudi Arabia) 227 communal reidentification: Lebanese Shi’a 92 communal violence: Indonesia 106, 107–109; JIH concern 210 Communism: jihad as a path of resistance to 322 communist movements 52 Communist parties: India 208, 209 Communist Party (Indonesia) 103 Communists: Muslims forbidden to engage with 325 community cohesion 388 community leaders: government-sponsored, Turkey 183 ‘complete man’ (insan kamil) 18 ‘conducting the others’ conduct 372 confessionalism 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106 conflict: and liberation of Palestine 82–83, 85 Congress Party (India) 207 conservativism 53, 57, 147, 158, 161, 171, 209 Considerations on the Jurisprudence of Jihad (masa’il minfiqh al-jihad) 253, 256, 257 consociational democracy 97 Constitution: Egypt 55; Iran 34; Maldives 127, 131, 135, 136; Pakistan 211, 357; Saudi Arabia 32, 34; Turkey 157 Constitutional Assembly (Egypt) 60 Constitutional referendums (Turkey) 166, 173, 178–179 constitutional rule 129 constitutive phase: development of Hezbollah 95 Consultative Councils 32, 252, 256 CONTEST 384 conveyor-belt theory 387 corruption: Central Asian countries 150; fatwas justifying 176–177; fight against, USSR 321; of Muslim societies 72; Turkey 165, 168, 175; Yemen 238 Council of Indonesian Mujahidin (MMI) 111 Council of Indonesian Ulama (MUI) 105, 112 Council of Senior Scholars (Saudi Arabia) 221, 224, 225 Council of Ulemas (Tajikistan) 147 counter-extremism 147, 148, 264 counter-narrative schemes 384, 385 counter-radicalization 373, 375 countering violent extremism (CVE) paradigm 383, 385, 387, 388 counterterrorism 371; and defiance among Muslim communities 375; ethnic and religious differences given full weight in 384; law, Saudi Arabia 223, 230; policies, radicalization and 373; post 9/11 and public discussions of 365;

433

Index

surveillance and policing 372; UK see United Kingdom Covid-19 pandemic 375–376 cows 42, 44 cruel sports 39 ‘Cubbeli Ahmet Hodja’ 178, 180 cultural alienation 5 cultural codes 190, 191, 197 cultural dimension: civilizational conflict 394, 397, 399, 402, 405 cultural dispositions 190 cultural fields: resistance displayed through, Iran 188, 201 cultural hierarchies 369 cultural identity 368 cultural integrity 401 Cultural Revolution (Iran, 1980-87) 193, 196 cultural similarities 189 cultural values 2, 182, 230, 403 cultural Westernisation 12 culture 365; Central Asian 140–141; defamation of Persian 193; Hindu 358; Philippine Muslims 116; as a problem 369; see also popular culture; religious culture; value culture; Western culture culturing (tatsqif) 307 culturists: explanation of upsurge in political violence 373 cyberfeminism model 188 cyberspace: resistance and use of, Iran 188, 191; see also social media Dabiq 295, 298, 338, 344–345, 404, 405 Daesh see ISIS dalil shar’i 262 Dalton, Russell J. 352, 354, 360 Dar, Abu 123 dar al Harb 94, 297 dar al-Islam see abode of Islam Dar-ul-Andlus 353 Dare, Khadijah 344 Dariya 31 Darul Islam (DI) 103–104, 110, 111 dava 164 Davis, Jessica 339 Davutoglu, Ahmet 164, 165, 166, 168, 175 da’wa 22, 54, 57, 86, 145, 209, 236, 237, 353 Dayaks 108 de facto rule 28, 29, 31 decentralization: Indonesia 108 Declaration of War Against America 251, 252 defamation: of Persian culture 193 defamation campaign: of AKP government 177–178 defensive jihad 18, 94, 265, 266, 287, 297, 311 democracy 396; compatibility of Islamism with 127; consociational 97; as contrary to Islamic values and beliefs 308; Egypt 54; Indonesia 102,

103; Iran 30, 34; Islah acceptance of, Yemen 237; Islamist cynical abuse of 9; Islamist rejection of 5; Islamist vision of perfect society as diametrically opposed to 3; Maldives 127, 130, 134–135; Pakistan 357; quest for, Saudi Arabia 222–223; Tunisia 8; Turkey 8–9, 158, 159 Democratic Alliance (Egypt) 54, 60 democratic citizenship 352 Democratic Party of Tajikistan 143, 158 Democratic Union Party (PYD) 166 demonization: of animals 47; of Islam, tabloid press and 401; of non-Muslim ‘outsider’ 297; of the opposition, through fatwas, Turkey 177–179; of the Sahwa 227–228 Denmark 307, 385 Deobandi group 212, 320 deprivation: and radicalization 150 deradicalization 375, 383, 384, 388 devout sample: Iranian women study 200 Deweese, Devin 141 dhimma (non-Muslim subjects) 97, 285 dhimmi (protected) status 18 dhimmihood institutions 111 DI see Darul Islam difference(s): ethnic, equated with moral 370; politics of 375; securitization of 387; see also lifestyle differences; religious differences differential treatment: religion and 375 direct discrimination 367 disconnected citizenship 388 discrimination 168, 367, 370, 371, 390 discursive political religion: Islam as a 131, 135 disenfranchisement 4, 92, 150 dissidents 4, 20, 178, 268, 290, 343 divide and rule 70, 71 divine authority 5, 27, 34, 42, 283–284; knowledge 4; law(s) 4, 17, 80, 81, 89n8, 103, 104; legitimacy 4, 29; sovereignty 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 56, 214, 262, 263, 267, 356; truth 3, 4, 18; will 1, 21; wisdom 3 Diwan School 19 Diyanet 173–174, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182 Djerejian, Edward 6 Document of General Principles and Policies (Hamas) 79–89; a-historical aspect 88; conflict and its resolution 82–83; Hamas definition of self 79; omissions in 85–87; Palestine and the Palestinians 80–82; Palestinian state 85; PLO and PA 84–85; resistance and liberation of Palestine 80; the state along the 1967 lines 83–84; target of 88 dogs 40, 45 Doha negotiations 98 dolphins 45 domestic roles: female IS supporters 342 Döngeloğ lu, Ömer 178 donkeys 45

434

Index

Doomsday clock 402 dream visions: of martyrs 267 dress codes 128, 149, 188, 196, 358, 394 Druze 295 Du Bois, W.E.B. 374 Du’at la Qudat (Preachers, Not Judges) 20, 53, 57 Dudoignon, Stéphane A. 141, 143, 321 Dukhtaran-e-Millat 340–341 Duman, Zehra 344 Dushanbe 141, 144, 323, 324, 326 Dutch women 344 East Pakistan 213, 358 East Timor 107 economic issues: JIH stance on 209 Eden, Jeff 321 education: de-schooling of youth, Iraq 254; Maldives 130, 133; of Moros, under the Americans 117; Pakistan 358; religious see religious education; spiritual education; see also schools Edwards, David B. 267 effendis 12 Egypt: Arab Spring 7, 308; Constitution 55; Constitutional Assembly 60; coup de’etat (1952) 58; coup de’etat (2013) 61, 62; democracy 54; electoral law 59; Erdogan’s visit to (2011) 164; future of political Islam 7–8; Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 307, 308; IS movement in 299, 302; Islamic modernism 129; Islamisation 133; Islamism as challenge to political elite 2; Islamist influence, Indonesia 106; jihadist failed revolutions against the ‘near enemy’ in 297; Muslim Brotherhood see Muslim Brotherhood (MB); parliamentary elections 54, 56, 58, 59, 60; presidential elections 55, 60; referendums 55, 59, 60; scholarship grants awarded to Philippine Muslims 118; state policy towards Islamist movements 53; terrorist groups 53 ‘Egypt first’ policy 21 Egyptian Copts 43 Egyptian Islamic Jihad 286 Eickelman, Dale 283 el-Aroud, Malika 340 elections: Islamist engagement in 11; see also individual countries and individual organizations electoral authoritarianism 172 electoral law: Egypt 59 elite see national elites; political elite; urban elite elitism: Pakistan 357 Ellison, Nicole B. 188, 189 embodiment 190–191; agency of 197–200 Emirate of Diriyah 296 emotionally expressive language: Iranian women’s use of 194 enablers (female) 340–341 Encausse, Carrère d’ 139 The End of History 404

enlightenment 5 Ennahda/En-Nahda/al-Nahda party 8, 88, 206, 308 Entertainment Authority (Saudi Arabia) 224, 226, 229 equality 57, 129, 145, 375, 396; see also gender, equality; inequality(ies) Erbakan, Necmettin 159, 160–161, 172, 250 Erdogan, Bilal 174 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 162, 163–166, 168–169, 206, 401; see also Justice and Development Party (AKP) Erdoganism 172 Erkinov, Aftandil 320 Ermekbayev, Nurlan 148 Ershad, General Hussein Muhammad 213–214 eschatology: Islamist 295 essentialism/essentialization 21, 82, 83, 369–370 Estrada, Joseph 120 ethnic differences: in counterterrorism domain 384; equated with moral differences 370 ethnic penalties 367 ethnic-religious minorities: securitization of 172 ethnicity: estimation of Muslim numbers in a given country 366 ethno-religious violence: Indonesia 102, 107–109, 110 Europe: female fundraisers 341; Gulen movement 161; Islamophobia 395; Jama´at e-Islami branches/affiliates 212; MB presence in 63; Muslim immigration 400; Muslims in 5, 364, 365, 378n28; perception of Islam in Western 368; promotion of Erdogan ideology 174; separation of religion and politics 367; visual display of religiosity and legal battles 369; see also individual countries European Institute for Fatwa and Research 63 European National View Organization (AMGT) 160 European Union 127 European Union Institute for Security Studies 344 exclusion 7, 131, 338, 372, 375, 387, 389, 390 Executive Committee (JSM) 72 ‘exhaustion and vexation’ strategy 298–299 extremist challenges: Moro autonomous region 122–123 extremists/extremism 297; Bangladesh 215; Egypt 53; exclusive claim to truth and tendency towards 4; Islah, Yemen 237; Philippines 115, 120–121; Turkey 160, 167; see also counterextremism Facebook 189; and agency see Iranian women, resistance and reaffirmation (study); bonding social capital and life satisfaction 189

435

Index

facilitators (female) 340–341, 344, 346 Fahd, King (Saudi Arabia) 32, 35, 222 Fahri, Rima 341 failed states: and empowerment of jihadi-Salafism 269–270 The Failure of Political Islam 150 Faisal, King (Saudi Arabia) 35, 221, 250 faith 264, 282 fake believers 178 Falahe-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF) 355, 356 Falouja 254 Faqih 29 far (distant) enemy 22, 248–249, 296, 297, 298 far right 383, 384, 390, 395, 400 Farahani, Golshifteh 190, 198–199 Faraj, Abd al-Salam 22 fard ayn 340 Farfour the Mouse 46, 47 Farook, Syed 345 Faruq, King (Egypt) 14 fascism 19 fasiq (transgressor) 264 Fatima (Dutch woman) 343 Fatimah (daughter of Muhammad) 33 fatwa(s) 29, 262; of bin Laden, on reclaiming the ummah (1998) 279, 286; calling for murder of gays, Kyrgyzstan 147; impact of, Turkey 180–183; increasing use of, Turkey 170, 171; Islamist populism reflected in Turkish 176–180; popularization of Islamic law 324 Federal Security Service (Russian) 145 Felicity Party (SP) 162 female combatants 338–339; ambiguity of classical texts on 345; controversy around permissibility of 337–338 female genital mutilation 147 Female Information Bureau in the Arabian Peninsula 340 Ferghana Valley 142, 143, 320, 332 Ferguson, Niall 393, 395, 405 fetishization 374, 376 ‘fifth school’ of Sunni Islam 234 Filiu, Jean Pierre 292, 404 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 360 Finglish 194 fiqh 13, 17, 319; see also Islamic law Fishman, Brian 299, 300 fitna 31, 178, 257, 265, 266, 275n24, 295, 322, 355 fitra 18 ‘folk Islam’ 158 food poison 357 for-profit piracy 123 Foreign Affairs 393, 394, 396, 397, 398 foreign affairs: JIH stance on 210 foreign fighters 146, 260, 265, 292, 294, 302, 330, 364, 383, 385, 404

foreign policy: JIH stance on 210; online posts poking fun at, Iran 196; Pakistan 358, 359; Turkey 162, 172, 175–176, 181–182 Foucault, Michel 147, 372, 384 Foundation of Youth and Education in Turkey (TURGEV) 174, 182 Fox, Jonathan 126 France 92, 257, 389; burqa ban 399; cultural dimension to Charlie Hebdo attack 394; hate crimes targeted at women 372; Imam Hatip schools 174; interest in Channel mentoring model 385; IS massacre of Christians 302; overt hostility to wearing of headscarves 370; political asylum of HT members 307; public overestimation of Muslim numbers 366; secularism 258, 367, 368; women involved in jihad 337; see also Paris fratricidal violence 255, 268, 272, 302 Free Cause Party (Huda-Par) 167 Free officers 11, 14, 16, 52, 58 Free Syrian Army (FSA) 164, 166, 269 freedom: of action (ibaha) 282; of the individual 401; jihad as the instrument of people’s 18; of the press 102, 149; Saudi Arabia 222; Tunisia 8; see also religious freedom Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) 7, 22, 54, 59, 60 Fukuyama, Francis 399, 404 fun images: Iran women’s resistance 197–198 ‘functionalization’ of Islam 131, 133, 135 fundamentalism 22; fundamentalists 281, 403; movements 145; narratives 395; neofundamentalism 150 fundraisers (female) 340, 341, 344, 346 Furkan Foundation 178 Gadahn, Adam 293 Gaius 352 Gayoom, Maumoon Abdul 127, 128, 129, 133 Gaza 79, 80, 84, 85, 86 gender: codes 191, 195; equality 56, 129, 134, 369, 372, 401; norms 339; in racialization 372, 375; roles 145, 339–340, 353–354; scripts, Iranian society 191; segregation 188, 190, 191, 201; see also women General People’s Congress party (GPC) 235, 236, 237, 238, 239 genital mutilation, approval of female, Tajikistan 147 Germany 63, 157, 160, 302, 368, 370, 385, 389 Gezi Park protests (2013) 8, 165, 175 ghala 250 Ghannouchi, Rached 8, 206 ghulat: al-Qaeda, against the 249–251; Al-Zarqawi 253–254 Gingrich, Newt 369 global capitalism 129 global jihad 242, 243–244, 277, 286, 287, 290, 296, 346, 398

436

Index

global politics 175, 320, 393, 395, 396 globalization 104, 209, 394, 397, 403 God: criticism of Islamism as a criticism of 3; oneness of see tawhid; servitude/submission to 17; terror and brutality justified in name of 4 ‘golden age’ of Islam 281, 284, 297 Golkar 104 good vs. evil 9, 20 Gormez, Mehmet 176, 180 Gouda, Moamen 127 government party: omission of Document to mention Hamas as a 86 governmentality 384 Gräf, Bettina 324 Grand Mosque of Mosul sermon (2014) 296, 300 Grare, Frederic 209 grassroots movements 22, 57, 62, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 110, 160, 171, 181, 227, 308 Great March of Return 86 Great Mosque of Mecca: seizure of 248, 250, 295 Greater Syria 309 Greece 157 Green Revolution, Iran (2009) 195, 202 Gregorian calendar 157 grievances 2, 20, 145, 150, 234, 238, 239, 240, 242, 252, 279, 301, 327, 332, 385, 387–388 guest workers: (Turkish) 160 Guidance Committee (JSM) 72 Guidance Office (MB) 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 87 Gul, Abdullah 162, 163 Gülen, Fetullah 147, 161, 178, 183 Gulen Movement 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 177–178, 179 Gülenists 182 Güler, Vehbi 180 Gulf War (1990) 7, 212, 222, 298, 299 Gunning, Jerome 277 Habeck, Mary 297 Habib, Muhammad 54 Habibie, B.J. 106, 107 habitus 188, 189–190, 199 Hadi, Abdrabuh Mansour 244 hadith 28; on animals 39, 40, 41, 44, 46–47; and Islamic State 295, 296; legitimization of ultra-violence 254; Qutb’s claim to have found references for revolutionary action 20; Salafi use of 256 Hafez, Mohammad 302 Haider, Jorg 400 Haitov, Muhamadali 324 Hakimiah 26, 27 hakimiyya 16, 17, 20, 21 hakimyat allah see divine sovereignty halal meat 44, 47 Halane, Zahra 343

Halimov, Colonel Gulmorod 146, 149 Hallaq, Wael 283 Hamada, Masami 320 Hamas 4; and animals 45–47; criticism of national leaders for un-Islamic ways 285; goal 79; justification of terror 6; self-definition 79, 80; Turkish alignment with 164; women in jihad 339, 341; see also Document of General Principles and Policies Hamid, Moustafa 251 Hamming, Torre 291 Hanbali school of thought 16, 18, 30, 250, 257 Haniyyeh, Ismail 86 Hapilon, Isnilon 123 Haqiqati jihod dar Afghoniston (The Effort of Conducting Jihad in Afghanistan) 323 haram 47 Harb, Ragheb 93 Hasan, Hamdy 43 Hashemites 240, 242 Hashid federation 236 Hasm 222, 223 Hassan II, King (Morocco) 70, 71, 72 Hassan IX, Sultan (Maldives) 131 hate crimes 372 hate speech 170, 173, 180, 181, 183, 184, 375 Hawash, Muhammad Yusuf 19–20 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) 302 Hazara minority 291 headscarves: public discussions/controversies 365, 370–371; wearing of 161–162, 163, 169 Heathershaw, John 148 Hefner, Robert W. 127 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin 212, 323, 325, 326 Herat camp 252, 253, 291 heretics 176, 178 Hetmanek, Allan 326 Hezbollah 35, 91–99; distinct religious character 93; early years 94–95; founding of 91, 93; ideology 91, 94, 98; institutional development 95; military wing 98; nascent political thought and the anathematizing of the Lebanese state 93–94; opening up 95–96; ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ bifurcation 97; political participation and social service provision 95, 96–97; procurement strategy 95; raisons d’être 95–96; shift in political thought 97–98; women in jihad 339, 340–341 High Level Cooperation Councils 164 hijab: ban, Central Asia 147, 148; ban, Iran 194; ban in schools, Kazakhstan 148; as compulsory, Iran 194; derision/denigration of, Pakistan 358, 359; hate speech and hyper-vigilance of security 375; Iranian women, Canada 200; Iranian women’s manipulation of 188; and ‘losing whiteness’ 372; mobile phones and violation of 355; Turkey 8 hijra 343

437

Index

Hindu(s) 207; culture 358; displacement and forced migration, Bangladesh 215; imperialism 213; nationalism 208, 209, 402; sacredness of cows 44 Hinduism 398, 402 Hindustani, Domullah 321, 324 Hindustani, Mawlawi 141 Hindutva 398, 402 Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami 286; see also Hizb utTahrir (HT) Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) 5, 306–313; and animals 43–45, 47; and the Arab Spring 307–309; Arabcentric nature 307, 312; authoritarianism 313–314; belief in Amir’s departure from HT’s ideology and methodology 311; Britain 308, 309, 311, 313; caliphate dilemma 310; Central Asia 140, 144, 145, 146, 150; and the emergence of ISIS 309–310; exodus of members 310–311; failure in strategy 312–313; founding of 307; future of 314; Indonesia 104–105, 112, 306, 314; leadership 306, 308, 310–311, 312, 313–314; Malaysia 308; pragmatism 5–6; as a security threat 314 hizbiyya 14, 58 Hizmet 147 hizmet (service) 161 Hoffer, Eric 20 Hofstadgroup 340 holy war 4, 176, 182, 319, 321, 322 Home Office 383–384, 386 homegrown terrorism 228, 364, 373 Homero, Gil de Zúñiga 189 homonationalism 370, 371 Hoover, Stewart M. 30 horses 40 Hosein, Sheikh Imran 404 hotel bombings 110, 398 Houthi Movement 233, 240, 244–245; see also Ansar Allah Party HT see Hizb ut-Tahrir hudnah 84 hudud 128, 134 hujra system 322, 324 human intentionality 267 human rights 9, 57, 81, 127, 134, 145, 209, 222, 272; violations 171, 172, 176, 183 humanitarian obligation: liberation of Palestine as 81 humanitarianism 211–212 humans: obligations towards animals 39 ‘100% Muslim nation’ identity 131, 133, 134, 135 hunting animals 39, 43 Huntington’s thesis see ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis Huq, Major Syed Mohammad Ziaul 313 Husayn, Taha 12 Hussein, Sadam 254, 284

ibn Abd al-Rahman, Abd al-Latif 31 ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Mohammed see bin AbdulWahhab, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdullah Al Saud, Turki 31 ibn Abi-Talib, Ali 28, 29, 234 ibn al-Husayn, Yahya 234 ibn Al-Khattā b, Umar 28 Ibn al-Qayyim 18 ibn Ali, Zayd 234 Ibn Auf, General Awad Mohamed Ahmed 313 Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad 262 ibn Hasan, Abdul Rahman 31 Ibn Khaldū n 27 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 262 Ibn Saud, King (Saudi Arabia) 31, 34, 35 Ibn Sina 38 Ibn Taymiyya 16, 22, 262, 295 ibn ´Asikir 224 Ibrahim, Mufti Kazi 404 iconography of threat 371–372 ‘ideal of citizenship’ 352 ‘ideal state of affairs’ 257–258 ‘ideal Turkish citizen’ 173 identity: citizenship and 371; Facebook images and 199; see also collective identity; Islamic identity; Muslim identity; political identity; religious identity ideology: Hezbollah 91, 94, 98; Hizb-ut-Tahrir 311; Islah 236; Jama´at e-Islami 212; Muslim Brotherhood 55–57; nazriya-e-Pakistan 356, 357, 359; and radicalization 387 ideology of al-Qaeda 277–287; competition for sacred authority 283–284; jihadi-Salafism 262–268; practical reality of pan-Islamic unity 287; rationale presented by bin Laden 277–280; reclaiming the umma 284–287; separation of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and the ideal of Muslim unity 280–283 ‘ideology of exiles’ 143 If Not Civilisations, What? 394, 395 ignorance: see also jahiliyya Ikhwan see Brethren of Purity (ikhwan al-safa) Ilim Group (Turkish Hezbollah) 167 illegal wildlife trade 44 illegality of Israel 83 illiteracy 13, 92, 157, 158, 237 images: agency of embodiment 197–199 ‘Imam Hatip’ schools 158–159, 160, 165, 174 Imams 28, 29, 33; Zaydi 234, 235, 236, 239, 240 immigration 400 imperialism 56, 175, 210, 213, 280, 397 impiety 264, 270, 271 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) 291 In the Shade of the Qur’an (Fi Zilal al-Qur’an, 1951–65) 15 incompatibility narrative 369, 370 independent judgement (ijtihad) 282

438

Index

independent reasoning 129 Index of Ignorance 366 India 16; British colonial rule 206; ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis 398, 404; Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 313; Islamophobia 402; Jama´at e-Islami 207, 208–210, 216; slaughter of cows 44; Two Nation theory 207, 213; see also Hinduism; Hindu(s) Indian Muslim League 356 indirect discrimination 367 individual jihad: and popular theology 328–332 individual obligation: jihad as 286, 359 individual rights 74, 127, 136, 373 individual takfir 270, 271 individualism 17, 396 individualization 377n12 indoctrination 19, 158, 323 Indonesia 102–113; decentralization 108; democracy 102, 103; elite disunity and radical outreach 105–107; female facilitators 344; HT in 104–105, 112, 306, 314; insurgent precedents 103–104; internationalist jihadism 109–111; Islamic movements 69; neo-Salafism and differentiated citizenship 111–113; new Islamists 104–105; radical Islamists 102–103, 104–105, 108; sectarian mobilization 107–109 Indonesian Council of Islamic Predication (DDII) 106 Indonesian Council of Jihad Fighters 105 inequality(ies) 282, 367, 371, 384, 387, 388 infidels (kafir) 22, 264, 270, 271, 314, 395 inghimasi operations 267 injustice(s) 145, 150, 209, 210, 212, 280; see also justice Instagram 201 Institute for the Study of War 302 institutionalization of Islam: Maldives 126–136; Soviet Union 320 insults: use of animals as 43, 45 integration 365, 367, 369, 370, 376n4, 390, 400–401 intellectual security 229 interaction (tafa’ul) 307 interconnectivity: and subversion 201 International Crime Tribunal (ICT) 215 International Crimes (Tribunal) Act (1973) 215 internationalist jihadism: Indonesia 109–111 Internet jihad 340 interpretation(s): Islam and Islamic texts 1, 3, 9, 31, 41, 67, 69, 183, 262, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284, 354; of Islamic law and shar’ia 28, 104, 237; of the Qur’an 4, 118, 282; of religious literature 326, 329; of secularism 155, 157, 168; see also misinterpretation intersubjectivity of rules 190 intervention: Islamist engagement in 3 intimidation 69, 144, 164, 170, 183, 338

intolerance: political 4, 5, 172 Ipil 120 Iqbal, Mohagher 122 Iqbal, Muhammad 129, 133 Iran 7; cited as ideal type of Islamic theocracy 26; Constitution 34; controlled by the clergy 30; democracy 30, 34; economic and financial sanctions against 193; elimination of political opposition 4; foundation of authority 35; gender scripts 191; help to the Movement of the Dispossessed 93; Islamism as challenge to political elite 2; Islamization 30, 188, 193; linked to Zionist-Crusader plot 301; Parliament 34; presidential elections 34; state structure 30; Supreme Leader 30, 34, 93; theocratic restrictions and diaspora 30; Vilayat-e Faqih 26, 33 Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps 93 #Iranelection 195 Iranian Islamic revolutionary model 93 Iranian revolution (1979) 4, 30, 127, 166, 260 Iranian women, resistance and reaffirmation (study) 188; agency 190; coding and documenting 192–193; comparison of home and diaspora 200; conclusion 201–202; focus group 192; methodology 192; research design 191–192; results 193–200; theoretical model 188–189; update 201 Iraq: Al-Qaeda’s interest in attracting brothers from 252; bulldozing of border checkpoint between Syria and 2; de-schooling of youth 254; defeat of ISIS in 146; female facilitators in 344; HT in 307; ISIS in post-Saddam 9; jihadi training in 110; jihadi-Salafists in 268 Iraq war (2003) 9, 222, 243 IRFED report (1960) 92 irja (postponement) 264 irredentism: and divisions among jihadi-Salafists 271–272 Ishan, Madali (Duckchi) 320 ISIS 2, 4, 205; claim of responsibility for Jolo Cathedral bombing 115, 123; Colonel Halimov’s defection to 146, 149; defeat in Syria and Iraq 146; emergence of 9; foreign fighters 364; Hizb-ut-Tahrir and emergence of 309–310, 314; ideology see jihadi-Salafism; as main radical threat in Central Asia 146; polygamous marriages 183; presence, Afghanistan 150; presence, Yemen 245; removal of man-made barriers between the global Muslim umma 2; symbolic rhetoric 124; violence against other Muslims 5 Iskenderpasa lodge 159, 161, 162 Islah (conciliation) committees 85 Islah Social Welfare Society (ISWF) 237 Islah (Yemeni Congregation for Reform) 233, 235–239, 243–244, 245 Islahi, Maulana Yousuf 208–209 Islam: The Roots of Misperception 397

439

Index

Islam: animal issues 38–42; in Basic Law of the PA 85; construction of, as a problem 369–370; early female warriors 337–338; golden age of 281, 284, 297; Hamas approach to 82; indigenisation in the West 5; institutionalization of, Maldives 126–136; institutionalization of, Soviet Union 320; interpretations, and differing ideological priorities 69; perception of, in Western societies 368; question of proper meaning of 283; securitization of 147; spread, during eighth century 297; in tabloid press 401; Turkey 158–161; see also political Islam; Qur’an; radical Islam; Sunni Islam Islam aur Rafahi Kaam 355 ‘Islam is the Solution’ 1, 3 Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) 211 Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba (IJT) 211 Islami Oikyo Jote (IOJ) 214 Islamic Caliphate 104, 256, 268, 271, 300; Arab uprisings characterised as a desire for revival of 307, 308; destruction of physical 301; HT focus on Syria 308–309; HT leadership opposition to ISIS’s declared 310; HTI advocacy of 104; ISIS declaration of resurrected 9; as necessary condition for Muslim unity 285; robustness of virtual 302; sought by HT as based on bay’ah (oath of allegiance) as opposed to force and violence 310 Islamic centre (Manhattan) 369 Islamic Chatra Shibir (ICS) 214 Islamic counter-hegemony 69 Islamic Courts Movement (Somalia) 270 Islamic Creed 31 Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) 102, 105, 106–107, 112 Islamic doctrine 5, 15; see also Vilayat-e Faqih Islamic identity: Maududi’s separation of Muslim identity from 207; Muslims of former Soviet lands loss of 326; Saudi Arabia 31; state building and, Maldives 130–132, 133; women as promoters of true 354; Yemen 234, 235 Islamic Jihad Movement (IJM) 243 Islamic jurisprudence 282 Islamic law: jihad in 319; the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni 57; openness to interpretation 3; popularization in fatwa production 324; Saudi Arabia 32; as superseding man-made laws 3; see also sharia Islamic modernism 128–129, 131, 133, 134 Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) 143, 332 Islamic order (al-nizam al-Islami) 11, 15 Islamic reform 56 Islamic renewal: Philippines 118 Islamic Republic of Iran see Iran Islamic resistance in Lebanon 96 ‘Islamic resurgence’ thesis 127 Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) 139–140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149, 323, 326

Islamic revivalism 30, 56, 69 ‘Islamic revolution in Lebanon’ 96 Islamic Salafi Alliance 35 Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) 269 Islamic schools 141, 161, 171, 173; see also boarding schools; ‘Imam Hatip’ schools; madrassas Islamic society: dilemma of Islamic state formation preceding or following 69; see also Jama´at e-Islami Islamic Society movement 74 Islamic state(s): al-Banna on establishment of 56; call for, Indonesia 103; concept of 26; dilemma of preceding or following an Islamic society 69; establishment of and divisions among jihadiSalafists 271–272; Hezbollah’s promise and focus on need to establish 91, 93, 94; HT and deference to the Prophet’s methodology of establishing 307; Ilim Group process for, Turkey 167; IMU dedication to establishing, Uzbekistan 143; mechanism of 32–34; objective of Jama´at e-Islami to establish, Bangladesh 214; theocratic conceptions of 27 Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) 255–257, 293–294 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria see ISIS Islamic State (IS) 290–302; apocalyptic narrative 404; call of 257; female supporters 342–345; future of 301–302; history of 290–294; ideological vision 294–296; intellectual foundations 295; numbers of UK citizens who have entered 389; and the old regime 255–257; propaganda machine 302; recruitment 387; use of social media 385; versus al-Qaeda 254–255; warfare strategy 297–301 Islamic State Khorasan 146 The Islamic Threat to the Soviet Union 141 ‘Islamic Trend’ (Egypt) 133 Islamic unity: move away from the ideal of 281 Islamic Youth Movement 67, 73, 74, 75 Islamism(s) 127; appeal of 2; argument on failure of 7; criticism of 3; flexibility 1; focus of 3; as a modern day ideology 1; as a reinvention and reinterpretation of history 1; transnational dimension 16; Turkey 8, 155–169; as a voice of dissent 1–2; see also political Islam; postIslamism; radicalism Islamist movements: common strategic dilemma 69; Indonesia 69; as national projects 4; political see political movements; prominence in the past half-century 11; variation in ideological priorities 69 Islamist mutation 227 Islamist narratives: clash of civilizations 403–405 Islamist populism, and the AKP: foreign policy 175–176; impact of 180–183; reflected in fatwas 176–180; spreading of, at home and abroad 173–174; state transnationalism 170, 171–172; turn to 172–173

440

Index

Islamists: as agents of change 1; appeal of 206; commonly used definition 172; cost-benefit calculations 172; divergent political paths 67; fluidity of ideas and strategies 8; lack of middle ground in worldview of 4; and modernity 7; national governments as targets of 2; nonuniformity of 172; participation in established political systems 6; political vision 67; pragmatism 6; radical see Indonesia; self-righteous perspective 3; ultimate goal 3–4; vision of a perfect society 3; the West as a target of 2, 3; work to establish Islamic order 11 Islamity of Palestine 84, 85 Islamization: Bangladesh 213–214; Central Asia 140; as a consequence of failed Islamic political projects 127; of everyday practices 325; as a Hamas objective 86; Hezbollah on 94; of Iranian society and culture 30, 193; of king’s position, Saudi Arabia 32; Maldives 128, 133; MB goal of 51; Pakistan 211; Philippines 116; of politics, radicalization regarded as 390; of radicalism 150; of social life, Turkey 179–180 Islamizdat literature 324, 325–326 Islamo-democrat coalition: Tajikistan 143 Islamophobia 365, 370, 372, 374, 384, 389, 390, 394, 395, 399, 400–403 The Island of Animals 41 Ismail, Abd al-fatah 20 Ismailaga Brotherhood 178 Isma’ilis 234 Ismailiya 51 Israel 2, 86; Hezbollah’s resistance to and fight against 94, 95, 98; illegality of 83; JIH condemnation of 210; Turkish alignment against 164; US support blamed for Arab military failures against 297; see also Zionism Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) 45, 95 Istanbul 55, 160, 165, 168 Istiqlal (Independence) Party 70, 71 istishhad see martyrdom Italy 157, 370 Izmir 161 Jabbar, Salah A. 255 Jabhat al-’Amal al-Islami (Islamic Action Front) 62 Jackson, Richard 277 Jadidists 140–141 jahiliyya (ignorance) 4, 17, 20, 21, 22, 56, 225, 257 Jakarta 102, 106, 108, 110, 112, 310 Jalalabad 251 Jamaah Islamiya (JI) 16, 22, 53 Jamaat ud Dawah (JUD) 351, 353–356, 358–359, 360 Jama´at al-Jihad (JJ) 53 Jama´at al-Muslimun 22 Jama´at e-Islami 205; Bangladesh 213–216; disparate evolutions 216; elitist approach 207–208;

leadership disputes 208; Maulana Maududi and the origins of 16, 206–208; Pakistan 210–212, 216; purpose 208 Jama´at e-Islami Hind (JIH) 208–210, 216 Jama´at Tablighi 144, 145, 146 Jammu 210, 212, 402 Janjalini, Abdurajak 120–121 Janjani, Khaddafy 121 Jatiya Party (JP) 214 Java 108 Jaysh al-Islam 269 Jayussman, Nugroho 107 Jazayery, Hashem Najy 41 Jemaah Islamiyah 104, 109–111, 339 Jerusalem 81, 83, 307, 341 Jewish Palestinians 82 Jews 18, 45, 46, 82, 83; see also anti-Semitism jihad/jihadism 248–258; 9/11 attack as defining feature of 4–5; against infidels 22; as an integral part of Islam 319; anti-West 300; appearance in Hamas Charter 80; in Central Asia 320–324, 332; fratricidal 255, 268, 272, 302; gender norms 339; Hezbollah 94; internationalist, Indonesia 109–111; in Islamic law 319; Kharijite 297; military training 110, 251, 252, 326; nonviolent 319; as obligation 265, 286, 359; priority to the distant enemy 248–249; propaganda 299; Qutb’s justification of 56; recruitment of fighters 107, 109, 110, 212, 265, 291, 292, 294, 302, 307, 328, 330, 346, 387, 404; smuggling network 292; Tajikistan see Tajiks, jihad among; totalized meaning of 327, 328; Turkey 167, 175, 180, 182, 183; understanding the root causes of 373; US military intervention in the Arabian Peninsula and 298; Western cities associated with attacks by 364; see also anti-Soviet jihad; defensive jihad; global jihad; mujahidin; offensive jihad; women in jihad jihadi 261 jihadi women, politics for 351–361; citizenship 352–353; future of 360–361; Jamaat ud Dawah (JUD) 351, 353–356; Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) 351, 353–356; political participation 356–360; purposive beings 351, 360 jihadi-Salafism 4, 5, 9, 53, 56, 82, 256, 260–273; classification 273; defining 261; divisions with 270–272; emergence 260; (fighting in the path of God) 265–266, 267; global 277; ideology 262–268; ‘neo-Kharijite’ description 273; political contexts empowering 268–270; use of hadiths 256; violence 260 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali 207, 356, 402 jizya (tax poll) 18 Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) 238 Jolo Cathedral bombing (2019) 115, 123 Jordan 62, 69, 146, 252, 290, 307 Jordan, River 81

441

Index

Jubhat al-Nusra (JN) 255, 257, 294, 302 Judaism 38, 83 judicial office: Maldives 130 Juhaiman al’Utaibi 250 Jund al-Sham 252 The Jurisprudence of Blood (fiqh al-dima’) see Considerations on the Jurisprudence of Jihad jurists see qadis; Vilayat-e Faqih justice 129, 145, 365; see also injustice(s); social justice Justice and Development Party (AKP) 170–184; composite ideology 170; diaspora policy see Turkish diaspora; discontent with 168; disregard for democratic principles 8; emergence 161–163; engagement with predominantly Muslim countries 162; Erdogan era 163–166, 168–169; intolerance of criticism towards 172; Islamist populism see Islamist populism; revival of Islamic ideology 8; see also Erdogan, Recep Tayyip Justice and Spirituality Movement (JSM) 67, 68, 71–73, 74, 76 Kabiri, Muhiddin 143, 144 Kabul 249 Kabyle 190 Kamil, Ahmed 129 Kamilov, Muzaffar 321 Kamruzzam, Muhammad 215 Karagiannis, Emmanuel 145 Karaman, Hayrettin 176, 177, 178–179, 180 Kargil Crisis (1999) 353 Karimov, Islam 142, 143 Karlekar, Hiranmay 214 Karsh, Ephraim 297 Kartosuwiryo 104 Kashmir 210, 212, 269, 339, 358, 402 Kavakci, Merve 162 Kawlan b. Amir 240 Kazakhstan 139; belief that religious leaders should have political influence 142; destructive potential of Salafism 148; hijab ban in schools 148; Hizb ut-Tahrir membership 145; Muftiates 147; percentage in favour of Sharia law 142; punishment for Jama’at Tablighi membership 145; religious education 147; removal of citizens from Syria 146 Kemalism 157, 158 Kemalists 166, 173, 182, 284 Kennedy, Paul 299 Khaldan camp 251, 253 Khalid, Adeeb 322 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 35, 40 Khan, Ahmed 129 Khan, General Ayub 211 Khan, Imran 206 Khan, Liaqat Ali 356, 357

Khan, Sir Sayyid Ahmad 18 Khan, Yahya 211 Kharijites 19, 263–264, 267, 297 khasa’is 19 Khayal, Mustafa 310 Khilafa (stewardship) 42, 309 Khilafat movement 206–207 Khiva 140 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 1, 2, 4, 22, 29, 35, 91, 93, 191, 196 Khost 249, 251, 253 Khudonazarov, Davlat 143 Khujand 144 kidnappings 58, 119, 120, 122–123 King, Anthony 190 King’s role: Morocco 70, 72, 76 Kirby, Alan 283 Knights under the Prophet’s banner 249 Knysh, Alexander 141 kolkhozes (collective farms) 143 Komando Jihad 110 Korea 16 Kotku, Mehmet Zahit 159 Kramer, Martin 95 Kugelman, Michael 313 Külünk, Metin 179 Kundnani, Arun 373 Kundus refugee camp 323 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) 165, 166 Kurds 175, 177, 182, 291, 301 Kuru, Ahmet T. 368 Kutan, Recai 161, 162 Kuwait 35, 223, 250, 284, 310, 311, 396 Kyrgyzstan 139; belief that religious leaders should have political influence 142; Hizb ut-Tahrir membership 145; Jama’at Tablighi 145; megamosques 174; percentage in favour of Sharia law 142; percentage of ISIS fighters coming from 146; religious education 147; strong influence of Islam 150; tensions around women’s dress 149 Labor 21 Lahoud, Nelly 287, 297, 338 Lampe, Cliff 189 Land of War (dar al-harb) 94 Landau, Jakob M. 285, 286, 287 language: agency of subversive 193; of animals 39; of opposition and resistance, Iran 195 LaRose, Colleen 341–342 Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) 351, 353–356, 398–399 Laskar Jihad 106, 108–109 Latif, Fadi Abdul 311 The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam 42 Le Pen, Jean Marie 400 leadership: of the MUR 74

442

Index

Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) 95 Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) 93 Lebanon 87; Al-Qaeda’s interest in attracting brothers from 252; HT in 307; independence from France 92; Islamist movement see Hezbollah; mithaq al-watani (National Pact) 92; peripheral regions 92; state institutions 91–92; Vilayat-e Faqih 35 Lebanonization 95 Left Democratic Party (India) 208 Leftism: Yemen 236 legal code (MILF) 121 legal positivism 256 Legault, François 370 legitimacy: of 1947 partition, Hamas refusal of 84; religious rule as primary source of 27; of rule, sectarianism and 33; see also divine legitimacy; regime legitimacy; religious legitimacy Lemon, Edward 147 Leonard, Karen Isaksen 368 Lewis, Bernard 297, 398, 400, 402 Lewthwaite, Samantha 342 liberal democracy 8, 127, 376, 399 liberal values: allegiance to 373 liberalisation: Maldives 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135 liberalism 104, 105, 134, 170, 263 Liberation Rally 14 Libya 62, 118, 164, 166, 268, 297, 299, 302, 345, 359 lifestyle differences 394 Lintner, Berti 215 London: as HT recruiting ground 307; MB presence in 55, 63; terror attacks 373, 394 ‘lone wolf’ terrorism 394 Lotfi, Islam 54 love of nation 129, 131 loyal opposition: Morocco 70, 71 Luwaran 121 Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Signposts) 19 McCants, Will 293, 295, 298 Madjid, Nurcholish 105 madrassas 147, 156, 157, 323 Madrid terrorist attack (2004) 373 Mady, Abou Elela 54 Mahdi 295, 404 Mahfouz, Naguib 12 Mahmood, Aqsa 343–344 Majlis Al-Shura 32, 252, 256 Malaysia 116, 120, 133 Maldives 126–136; conceptual and contextual terrain 127–128; constituent assembly 129, 135; Constitution 127, 131, 135, 136; democracy 127, 130, 134–135; institutionalization of Islam 126, 127, 130–131; ‘invented traditions’ 131; judicial office 130; liberalisation 126, 128, 130,

133, 135; modernist Islam vs. Islamism 134; multiple politicizations of Islam through modern nation-building 128–133; new religious actors 128, 134; Penal Code 128, 130; political movements 126, 128; popular culture 130; Sunni Islam 126 Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) 127 Malik, Tasfeen 345 Maluku 107, 108, 109 man-made: laws 3, 9, 17; states 3, 6, 8; systems 5, 6 The Management of Savagery (idarat al-tawahhuch) 256–257, 298–299 Mandani, Mahmood 371 Manichean worldview 4, 9 Manifesto see Political Document of Hezbollah Manila 120 Mann, Michael 280 Maqar 342 Marawi City 123 Marcos, Ferdinand 117, 118, 119 marine animals 45 Marj al-Zuhûr 87 Marjas see Ayatollahs Markaz Dawah wal Irshad (MDI) 353 Maronite Catholics 92, 96, 97 Maronite Free Patriotic Movement 97 Marshall, T.H. 352 Martel, Charles 297 martyrdom (istishhad) 20, 94, 95, 173, 180, 183, 195, 262, 266–267, 292, 353 Marxism 91, 119, 141 Mashhur, Mustafa 53 Mashrū tiyyat 34 Masoud, Ahmed Shah 249 mass education 72, 282 Massoud, Ahmad Shah 212 Masud, Hammad Khalid 133 Matfess, Hilary 339 Maududi, Maulana 1, 2, 11, 16, 17, 206–208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 326 Maute Group 123, 124 Mazar-e Sharif refugee camp 323 Mazouz, Sarah 372 MB see Muslim Brotherhood Mecca 18, 19, 20, 32, 42, 120 media propaganda (jihdist) 299 Medina 18, 32 Meena Bazaars 358 mega-mosques 174 Memorandum of Advice 222 mentoring system (Channel) 385, 387 Meshaal, Khaled 79, 82, 83, 87, 88 Messenger see Muhammad (Prophet) meta-narrative: Maldives national identity 131, 132, 133, 135 Mevlevi 158

443

Index

mice 46–47 Mickey Mouse 47 Middle East: AKP neo-imperialistic policy 175; Arab uprisings and weakening of state structures 9; national boundaries 2; Ottoman military dominance 156; presence of MB in 63; spread of anti-Americanism 2 migration 5, 158, 390; of Christian, Philippines 116, 117, 118; forced, Bangladesh 215; forced, Tajikistan 141; of MB members 63, 286; of Tajiks, to Russia 331; Yemen 234, 239 Miles, Robert 371 Milestones (Ma’alim fi al-Tariq) 52, 56 militant activism see jihad/jihadism militant goodness: activism 318, 319–320; emergence, Tajikistan 326, 327; as shaped by a value culture of resistance 318–319 militant groups: Turkey 166–168 military wing: Hezbollah 98; Houthi movement 233; of Movement of the Dispossessed 93; Muslim Brotherhood 14, 22, 52, 58 militias (Islamist): Indonesia 102–103, 105–107 Milli Gorüs 250 Mimbantas, Abdulajiz 122 minaret ban, Swiss 369 Mindanao 116, 117, 120, 122, 123 Ministry of Culture (Tajikistan) 149 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) 386 Ministry of Islamic Affairs (Maldives) 128 Ministry of Islamic Affairs (Morocco) 70 Ministry of Religious Affairs (Morocco) 72 Minya 22 misinterpretation 80, 83, 277, 373 Misuari, Nur 118–119, 120 mithaq see Charter (1988) Moaddel, Mansoor 128 moderate Islam 228–229, 401 moderates 8, 155, 237 moderation 57, 82, 127 modernity: Islamist response to 128; Qutb and need to accommodate 12; reinforcement of conservative attitudes, Turkey 158; see also postIslamism modernization 13, 129, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 377n12 Modi, Narendra 402 Mohamed V, King (Morocco) 70 Mohammad bin Salman, Crown Prince (Saudi Arabia) 32, 35, 225, 228 Mohammad, Khalid Sheikh 212 Mohammed VI, King (Morocco) 71, 72 Mohsen, General Ali 242, 244 Mollah, Abdul Quader 215, 216 Moluccas 108 Mongol apostasy 295 Montgomery, David W. 148

moral code of conduct 229–230 moral judgement 39 moral panic 364, 365, 371 moral police 343 moral regulations 104 morality 377n12 Morality Squads: online posts of fun poked at 196 Moro autonomous region 122, 124; extremist challenges to 122–123 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) 115, 118–119, 120; offensive against (2000) 120; official website 121, 122; response to challenges 121–122 Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) 118, 120, 121 Morocco 70–71; King’s role 70, 72, 76; Parliament 71; parliamentary elections 70; regime authoritarianism 70 Morocco, party politics 67–71; Justice and Spirituality Movement 67, 68, 71–73, 74, 76; Movement for Unity and Reform 68, 73–75; theoretical framework 68–70 Moroland 116–117 Moros: colonization and resistance 116–118; forprofit piracy 123; identity, Islamic renewal and separatist movement 118; Marcos’s war against (1973-77) 119; political autonomy 115; term 116 Morsi, Mohamed 7, 43, 55, 60 mosques: construction 5, 158, 174; and social engineering 171; terror attack, New Zealand 400, 401; under state rule, Turkey 173 mothers: in jihad 339–340 Mottahedeh, Negar 195 Mouvement Populaire 70 Movement of the Dispossessed 93 Movement of the Islamic resistance see Hamas Movement for Reform and Renewal 74 Movement for Unity and Reform (MUR) 68, 73–75 Msellem, Masoud 44 Mu’awiyah 297 Mubarak, Gamal 59 Mubarak, Hosni 7, 21, 53, 54, 59, 164 Muezza (cat) 40 Muftiates 147, 149, 221 Muhajirun 5, 286 Muhammad: individual jihad and popular theology 328–332, 333 Muhammad (Prophet) 4, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28, 33, 131, 266; and animals 39, 40, 45; praise of women for their sacrifice and bravery 338 Muhammadiyah 103, 106, 111 mujahidin 22, 110, 212, 216, 321, 322, 324 Mujahidin Shura Council (MSC) 292 The Mujahid’s Handbook 325–326, 332 Mujallatud Dawa 353 Mujib 213

444

Index

mujtahids 30 Muktui Bahini 213 Mullah Omar 252, 394 multiconfessionalism 102, 103, 106 multiculturalism 5, 365, 369, 374, 385, 390, 395, 400–401 Mumbai bombings 356, 358, 398 Munson, Henry 2 The Muqaddimah 27 Murad, Ebrahim (Hadji Murad) 122 Murji’ah 264 ‘museumized people’ 371 Musha 12 Musharraf, General Pervez 353, 358 Mushraba Ilm wa Hikmat 355 Muslim: as a proxy for troubles and social problems 366 Muslim American Society 63 Muslim Association 63 Muslim Autonomous Region 118 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) 4, 6, 7–8, 51–63; accommodationist strategy 6–7, 57; after Arab uprising 22–23; and animals 42–43, 47; the Arab Spring and HT disappointment with 308; argument against jihadi-Salafism 266; campaign against, Saudi Arabia 228–229; criticism of national leaders for un-Islamic ways 285; declared a terrorist organisation by al-Sisi 7; democracy 127; generational differences 53–54, 57; Hamas affiliation with 87; historical overview 51–55; ideology 55–57; imprisonment and executions 23; international aspects and diaspora 62–63; Islamist agitation and growth of 2; isolationist direction 21; liquidation of Hana power base 293; massacre of members and their families 23; military wing see al-Tanzim al-Khass/ al-Nizam al-Khass; outlawed by Nasser 15; party politics 69; political power 53, 54, 57–61; prominence 11, 51; realism 11; reformist and politically assertive direction 21; rejection of terror and violence 6; repudiation of Qutb’s theology 20–21; social movements and social engagement 6, 61–62; Turkish relations with 62, 164, 166; Yemen see Islah; see also Freedom and Justice Party; Qutb, Sayyid Muslim Council of Britain 63 Muslim Democrats 112, 172, 173, 206 Muslim diaspora: ‘conflict of civilizations’ message geared towards 302 Muslim identity: halal meat and 47; Moros 118; politicization of, and resistance 375; separation of Islamic identity from 207 Muslim League (India) 207 Muslim minorities 366; animosity towards heterodox 300; India 209; militia attacks on, Indonesia 103; see also Moros Muslim reformist movement: Tatarstan 140

Muslim saints: Wahhabist demolition of graves 33 Muslim societies: corruption in 72; discourse of democracy in 127; see also Jama´at al-Muslimun Muslim unity: caliphate as a necessary condition for 285; the ideal of 281; nation-state system as contravention of 2 Muslim World Congress 285 Muslim World League 285 Muslims: AKP influence of, in the West 171; as the ‘balanced nation’ 82; democratic commitment, Indonesia 102; prophetic heritage as a symbol of nobility 206; puritanical/ultraorthodox 261; of the USSR 141; violence against 5; in Western societies see Western societies; see also British Muslims; Moros; nonMuslims; Shi’a Muslims; Sunni Muslims Mustafa, Dr. Tawfiq 310 Mustafa, Shukri 22 Mustafa, Taji 309 Muthana, Hoda 343 Nabiyev, Rahmon 143 Nadvi, Maulana Abul Laeth Islahi 208 Nadwi, Abul Hasan Ali 16, 17 Naguib, Mohammad 52 Nahdlatul Ulama 69, 103, 111, 112 Nahoul the Bee 46 Nahzat group 322, 325, 326 Najafi Shi’a school of thought 91 Naji, Abu Bakr 298–299, 301 Nakwon, Jung 189 Namangan 142 Naqshbandi order 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Nasrallah, Hasan 93, 96, 98 Nasser see Abd al-Nasser, Gamal Nasserite parties 238 nation-building: institutionalization of Islam 128–133, 136 nation-state system: imposition on Muslim world 2; Islamist challenge to 2, 3; political Islam as the ‘other’ of 128 national boundaries: Middle East 2 National Commission on Human Rights 107 national curriculum: Islamist, Turkey 175 National Day (Maldives) 131; speeches 132 National Democratic Front (North Yemen) 236 National Dialogue Conference (NDC) 244 national elites: and pan-Islam 285 national governments: Islamist backlash 2 National Liberation Front (Algeria) 74 National Movement to Guard the Fatwa of the Council of Indonesian Muslim Scholars (GNPF-MUUI) 112 National Order Party (MNP) 159 National Pact (mithaq al-watani): Lebanon 92 National Party (al-Hizb al-Watani) 12 National Revival Party 74, 75

445

Index

National Salvation Party (MSP) 159, 160, 166, 167 ‘national will’/’national survival’ discourse: Turkey 170, 171 nationalism 371; as antithetical to the Ummah 207; binary between multiculturalism and 369; Hindu 208, 209, 402; Islamic, of Al-Qaeda 251–252; Jihadi Salafist rejection of 265; Pakistan 213; political Islam as response to perceived failure of 1, 127; Saudi Arabia 220, 225, 229–230; single-state 285 Nationalist Action Party (MHP) 166 nationalist rhetoric 172, 173 nationalist Salafists 271–272 ‘natural right’: concept of 81, 88 natural selection 41 nazriya-e-Pakistan 356, 357, 359 near enemy 248, 249, 253, 296, 297, 298 ‘near and far enemy’ merger 299 necessity (daruri): and Islamic jurisprudence 282 The neglected sex: The jihadis’ exclusion of women from Jihad 338 negotiation: among agents 190; ignored in Hamas Document 86 neo-colonialism 2, 4, 45, 209, 252 neo-imperialism 175 neo-modernist reformism 105 neo-Ottomanism 165, 168, 172 neo-Salafism 111–113 neoliberalism 209 neopatrimonialism 172 nepotism 168 Netherlands 63, 182, 307, 337, 340, 370 ‘New Order’ regime 102, 103, 104 New Year celebrations 176, 180, 181, 193 Nice attack 394 Nigeria 299, 302, 339 Nijami, Motiur Rahman 215 niqab 399 Noack, Christian 141 non-believers 18, 344; dissociation from 264–265 non-heteronormative sexualities 370 non-Islamic celebrations: attack, on Turkey 176 non-madhhab identity 235 non-mahrams 354, 355, 358 non-Muslims: Islamist longing for political elimination of 172; othering and demonization 134, 297; Ottoman Empire 156; Turkey 157, 167, 168, 174, 176 non-violence 38, 55, 72, 75, 127, 145, 244, 260, 266, 309, 319 North Africa 7, 251, 257, 292, 308, 368, 401 North Maluku 107, 108, 109 North Yemen 235, 236, 239 Norton, Augustus 93 Norway 372 nullifiers of Islam 264, 270 Numani, Muhammad Manzur 208

Nuraniyah, Nava 344 Nurcu movement 159, 160, 162 Nuri, Said Abdullah 143, 319, 322 Nuriddinjon, Eshon 333 Nursi, Said 159, 161 nusrah (assistance to gain power) 307, 308, 312 Nu´mani, Shibli 129 oath of allegiance (bay’ah) 177, 252, 272, 310 Obama, Barack 363 obedience: to God 11, 17, 18, 26; to guardians 27; to the jurists 29; to the ruler 69 ‘objectification of Muslim consciousness’ 283 Objectives Resolution 356–357 obligation: jihad as 265, 286, 359; to liberate Palestine 81; towards animals 39; of women to support jihad 340 occultation 28, 29 Odnoklassniki 328–332 offensive jihad 18, 22, 56, 265, 266, 403–404 old guard: Muslim Brotherhood 53–54, 57 Oldfield, Adrian 352 oneness of God see tawhid online media: MB use of 61 Open Letter (Hezbollah) 93–94, 97 operational roles (female) 344–345 opposition: brutal elimination of 4; demonisation of, through fatwas 177–179; jihad as central to 319; see also resistance opposition parties: Morocco 70, 71 oppositional Islamism: Maldives 126, 133–134, 135 ordeal (mihna) (1965–66) 20 orfi 156 Organization of the Islamic Conference 285 Oslo Accords 84, 86 Osmanen Germania 182 other(s)/othering 17; demonization of 20; and discrimination 390; Islamic demonization of nonMuslims 297; Islamophobia and 389, 390; jihad and 323; misrepresentations and hostility towards 366; of the nation state, political Islam as 128; of non-Muslim identities 134; public visibility and racialization of 368–372; Salafi as, Central Asia 147; secularism as 134 Ottoman Empire 156, 157, 297; caliphate 28, 156, 157, 206; decentralization and origin of panIslamism 284; heresy, Wahhabism and condemnation of 296; language 165; nostalgia for 159, 164, 165, 172; pragmatism 156 Ozal, Turgut 160 Ozodi Square demonstrations 323 Özuyer, Hasan Güray 183 Pahlavi monarchy 35 Pakistan: commitment to Islam 356–357; Constitution (1956) 211, 357; democracy 357;

446

Index

deviation of leadership from Islamic foundations 357, 358; economic system 357; floods 355, 356; foreign policy 358, 359; founded on principle of religious nationalism 213; HT in 313; IMU move to 143; ISIS in 146; Islamization 133, 211, 214; Jama´at e-Islami 210–212, 216; national elections (1985) 211; NGOs blamed for promoting Western agenda 355; Penal Code 214; political participation of jihadi women 356; politics for jihadi women 351–361; state sponsorship and empowerment of jihadiSalafism 269 Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) 211 Pakistani Taliban 212 Palestine 12, 46; Al-Aqsa Intifada 45, 252; AlQaeda’s interest in attracting brothers from 252; Document of General Principles and Policies on 80–82, 83–84, 85; MB presence in 87 Palestine Information Center 83 Palestine liberation: Document of General Principles and Policies on 80; Hamas goal 79; HT goal 307 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 79; Charter (1968) 79, 80, 81, 82; in Document of General Principles and Policies 84–85; Turkish alignment against Fatah faction of 164 Palestinian Arab people 81, 82 Palestinian Authority (PA) 85 Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) 339 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) 85 Palestinian rights 81, 84, 86 Palestinian Scholars’ League 85 pan-Arabism 15, 31 pan-Islamism 16–17, 133, 156, 172, 241; as core of Bin Laden’s ideology 278; JIH affinity for 209, 210; origin of sentiment 284–287; practical reality of 287 pan-South East Asia policy: JI ambition to establish 109–110 Pancasila (Five Principles) 102, 111, 112 paramilitary units: Egypt 52, 56, 58; Indonesia 102, 106, 107, 108, 111 Paris: attack (2015) 299; attack (2017) 345, 394; recruitment of fighters 292 parliamentarianism: rejection of 5 Party for Justice and Development (PJD) 74, 75–76 Party of Liberation see Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) Party Platform Statement (2007) 54 party politics: Morocco 67–71 party-ism (hizbiyya) 14, 58 Pasha, Mohammed Ali 31 passive citizenship 352 passive secularism 368 patriarchy 169, 188, 197, 201 patriotism 86 patronage 239, 240, 242

Penal Code: Maldives 128, 130; Pakistan 214 Perešin, Anita 345 ‘Perils of Perception’ survey 366 persecution: Hamas rejection of 83 Persian culture 193, 199 personal expressions: of resistance, Iran 197–198 personal political images: of resistance, Iran 198–199 Peshawar 249, 250, 253 Peters, Rudolf 319 Pew Research Center 141 Phares, Walid 297 Philippines 115–124; Abu Sayyaf and beginnings of violent extremism in 120–121; IS massacre of Christians 302; ISIS ideology in 123; IS’s absorption of terror networks in 299; Moros see Moros physical Caliphate: destruction of 301 Pica 44 pigs 43, 46 pillarization 367 The Pioneers of Tomorrow 46, 47 pious generation: creation of, Turkey 173, 183 pious teacher 29 Pipes, Daniel 139 Piscatori, James 283, 284, 285, 286 planners (female) 341–342 PLO see Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) plotters (female) 341–342 poetry 12, 19 polarization 103, 169, 173, 182, 183, 326, 370, 376, 384, 388 Poliakov, Sergei, P. 141 policed multiculturalism 385 political authority: cultural and historical context of 28–30; Hezbollah challenge to 95; Maldives 130; perceived as coming from God 4; Saudi Arabia 221, 222, 224, 227, 229 political avoidance 373 political culture: democratic 352 Political Document of Hezbollah 97 political elite: corruption 72, 175; disunity, Indonesia 105–117; Maldives 129; political Islam as a challenge to 1, 2; see also Ahl al-hall wal-aqd political expressions: of resistance, Iran 197, 198–199 political humor: Iran 196–197 political identity: Hezbollah 96, 97 political influence 68; belief that religious leaders should have, Central Asia 142; monarchical, Morocco 71 political intolerance 4, 5, 172 political Islam 1–9; as an alternative to established political system 1; challenge of defining 9; diversity in definition of 8; goal 205; implementation 3–4; international implications 2; nonstatic ideological nature of 8; origins 1; as the

447

Index ‘other’ of the nation state 128; as a reaction to perceived failures of secularist ideologies 1; as a social phenomenon 9, 11, 67, 140; as a transnational concern 364; see also Islamism(s); jihad/jihadism; political movements (Islamist) political movements (Islamist) 6; developments undermining historical momentum 206; divergence in goals 67; diversity 205; party politics 67, 68, 69, 71, 149; trade-offs in forming 68; vanguards and the likelihood of forming 70; variation in organizational needs 69; see also individual countries political participation 2, 6, 149; citizenship and 352; Hezbollah 94, 96–97; Indonesia 69; Islah, Yemen 235; jihadi women 356–360; social media participation and 189 political power: Arab uprisings and 7; claim to divine truth and capture of 4; Muslim Brotherhood 53, 54, 57–61; Ottoman 156; Turkey 166 political reform: calls for, Saudi Arabia 223 political Salafists 261, 266; see also Sahwa (Awakening) movement political vision 67, 68; of Hezbollah 97; of Islamic Youth Movement 74; of the JSM 72, 74; of the MB old guard 54; of the MUR 74–75; of the PJD 74 politicization: of (CVE) paradigm 388; of Muslim identities and resistance 375; of radicalization 384 politics: of difference 375; Indonesia 103; Islamization of 390; for jihadi women see jihadi women; of race 375; racialization of 371; of religion 375; theocratic philosophy of 28; see also separation of religion and politics polygyny 117, 147, 183 polytheism 262, 264, 295, 296 popular culture 130, 159, 165 Popular Democratic Constitutional Movement Party 74 popular sovereignty 3, 8, 9, 129, 401 popular theology 328–332 popular will 1, 3, 163 popularization 324, 332 populism 366, 370, 389, 390, 400 populist activism 56 populist radical right 400, 401 Poso district (Central Sulawesi) 108, 109 post 9/11 world 120, 298, 403 post-colonial thought 91 post-Islamism 7–9, 127 post-postmodernism 283 post-soviet religious mobilization: Central Asia 142–146 poverty 13, 150, 213 poverty relief 72 Powell, Enoch 371 power and ruling: accepting (istilamu al-hukmi) 307; see also political power

pragmatism 6; of Hezbollah 97; of HT 5–6; of the MILF 114, 119, 122, 124; of the MUR 74; of the Ottoman Empire 156; of the PJD 76; of the Sunna 282; of Yemeni political actors 245–246 prayer and study groups (Islamic) 22 pre-Islamic history 225 Preachers not Judges (Du’at la Qudat) 20, 53, 57 pregnancies: announcement of 355 Prevent: 22+ indicators 386; ‘Channel’ mentoring system 385, 387; trouble with 385–387 Prevent Duty (2015) 383 Prevent strategy (UK) 383; basis of 374; as a counter-narrative and counter-messaging platform 385; criticism of tactics 374; governmentality in context of 384 prisoners: lack of mention in Hamas Document 85–86 private schools: seizure of, Turkey 174 pro-Iran 241 The Problem of Soviet Muslims 139 procurement strategy: of Hezbollah 95 professional roles: female IS supporters 342–343 profiling 374–375, 387 profit-oriented treatment of animals 44 propaganda 14, 20, 46, 158, 167, 176, 258, 292, 299, 302, 342, 404; magazine see Dabiq propaganda value: of women in jihad 345 propagandists (female) 340, 343–344 propagation 11, 72, 340 prophetic traditions 261, 262, 266 ‘prophetic way’ 72 proselytization: Christian 106, 117, 131; Islamic see da’wa protectionism 389 public interest (maslaha): and Islamic jurisprudence 282 public opinion: 9/11 attacks and change in 364, 365, 373 public problems: construction of Islam and Muslims as 369–370 ‘Public Taste’ law 229–230 purdah 354, 355 purification (tasfiyya) 9, 88, 266 puritanical Islam see Wahhabism Purnama, Basuki Tjahaja (Ahok) 102–103, 112 purposive beings 351, 352, 354, 360 Putnam, Robert D. 189 Qaddafi of Libya 359 qadis 156, 239 Qadoum, Ahmad Abu 310–311 Qajar dynasty 34 Qassas, Muhammad 54 Qatar 55, 62, 63, 226, 244, 269, 311 Qaum-e-Saba 360 Qazi, Asif Lukman 211 Qazi, Farhani 337–338

448

Index

qisas 128, 134 A Quarter Century of the ‘Clash of Civilization’ 397 Québec 369, 370–371, 373 quietist Salafists 261, 265–266 Qur’an: al-Ma’ida verse 112; on animals 38–42, 46, 47; cited to support claim of purpose of women 342; comparison with Christianity and the Bible 27; early Muslim’s approach to 18–19; encouragement of questioning 282; illegality of Israel 83; inseparability of religion and politics 281; interpretation of 4, 118, 282; Jama´at e-Islami Hind translation of 209; JI ambition to establish, pan-South East Asia policy based on 109–110; Qutb’s claim to have found template for revolutionary action 20; reference to the jihad 261; and Salafi-jihadist ideology 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 270, 274n12 Qutb, Hamida 19 Qutb, Muhammad 12, 250 Qutb, Sayyid 1, 2, 11–23, 166, 326; accommodation of modernity 12, 13; between nationalism and Islamism 12–16; career and ideological formation 11; concept of Islam as a revolutionary ideology 1; contemporary barbarism 16–20; cultivation of compassion and social justice 13; early life 12; elevation to martyrdom 20; endorsement of radicalism 21–22; imprisonment 15, 18, 19, 56; joins Muslim Brotherhood 14; lack of enthusiasm for cultural Westernisation 12–13; nation-state system as contravention of divine mandate Muslim unity 2; poetry 12, 19; propaganda work 14, 20, 52; relationship with animals 42; religiosity 15, 17; repudiation of theology of 20–21; Salafi-jihadist discourses 4; vision of a dedicated cadre of professional revolutionaries 18; visit to the US 13–14; writings 12–13, 15, 19 Qutbists 56–57 Rabaa sign 164, 183 Raba´a al-´Adawiya Square 55, 61, 164 rabbits 47 racial discrimination 371 racial hierarchy 371 racialization 368–372 racialized security assemblages 374 racism 365, 371, 374, 387, 390 radicalisers 388 radicalism 390, 401; association of Salafism with violent 147; Cameron on dangers of 389; concept of divine sovereignty 16; in Indonesia see Indonesia; Islamization of 150; king’s role in protection against, Morocco 70; Sayyid Qutb’s journey to 11–23; Trump’s call for ‘toughness’ against 370; UK counter-terrorism 384; vulnerability to, Central Asia 146; Yemen 235

radicalization 396; Central Asia predicted as a hotbed for 139; growing phenomenon 389; injustice and 150; Jama´at e-Islami 212; and the merging of security policies in fight against terrorism 364; politicization of 384; post 9/11 and public discussions of 365; regarded as ‘Islamization of politics’ 390; suspicion and surveillance 372–375; UK measures associated with 384; Uzbekistan 143; of youth, Turkey 180; youth vulnerability 387; see also deradicalization Rahkmonov, Abdudjabbor 148 Rahmon, Emomali 144, 149 Rahnamo, Abdullohi 321, 323, 324, 327 rainbow coalition 106 Raissouni, Ahmed 74–75 Ramadan, Tariq 398 Ramadi 254 Ramani, Samuel 216 Rantisi, Dr. Abdelaziz 84 Rapoport, David 295 Ras Al-Naqurah 81 Rasool, Kubra 359 Rastokhez 143 Razack, Sherene 371, 372 re-Islamization 128 realism 11 recruiters (female) 340, 343–344 recruitment of fighters 107, 109, 110, 212, 265, 291, 292, 294, 302, 307, 328, 330, 346, 387, 404 reformist: explanation of upsurge in political violence 373 reformist wing (MB) 54 regime legitimacy 68, 70 regime persecution 68, 69 regime repression 67, 68 Rehman, Sheikh Mujibur 359 Reinares, Fernando 299 religion: conservative attitudes towards 57; defining 379n56; diminishing influence of, new Saudi Arabia 220–231; libertarian understanding of 57; politics of 375; under Soviet rule 141; waning influence on social behaviour 377n12; see also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism; separation of religion and politics religiosity: census data and the estimation of Muslim numbers based on 367; perceived as a threat 365; of Qutb 15, 17; reverse 387; rural, Turkey 158; in the US 368; visual display 369, 372, 374, 375 religious activism: Tajikistan 320, 326 religious authority: Ayatollahs 29; fragmentation of 282–283; Maldives 130, 132; and political power, Ottoman Empire 156; as primary source of legitimacy 27; see also Vilayat-e Faqih religious commitment: Hamas document silence on 86

449

Index

religious consensus 129 religious culture 396 religious decrees see fatwas religious differences: in counterterrorism domain 384; and failure of integration 365 religious dimension: of Salafi-jihadism 262 religious discourse 136; Saudi Arabia 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 religious discrimination 367 religious diversity 364, 375 religious education: Central Asia 144, 147–148, 322; Maldives 128; as MB initial focus 6; Pakistan 358; Turkey 158–159, 160, 161, 165, 175; under Soviet rule 140; of volunteers, Afghanistan 253; Yemen 237, 238, 240; see also Islamic schools religious freedom: Hizb ut-Tahrir’s lack of respect for 145; Maldives 127, 130–131, 133, 135, 136 religious identity 368; equated with ethnic identity in surveys 366; Lebanon 92; Saudi Arabia 220, 221; under Soviet rule 141; Yemen 240 religious knowledge 3, 29, 130, 146, 264, 287 religious law see divine authority, law(s); Islamic law; shari’a religious leaders: and political influence 142 religious legitimacy 31, 32, 91, 220, 221, 254, 296 religious mobilization: post-soviet, Central Asia 142–146; Saudi Arabia 221 religious networks 325 religious norms: Central Asian states as producers of 146–149 religious pluralism 365, 367 religious practices: estimation of Muslim numbers based on 366 religious preachers: regime-supported, Turkey 179, 183; Salafist 254 religious purity 248, 250, 256 religious repression 149, 150 religious scholars: loyal to the AKP 176, 177; Saudi Arabia 220, 222–223, 225, 227–228, 229, 231; tradition-minded 262; see also Council of Senior Scholars; mujtahids; ulama/ulema religious states 126 rentier state: Turkey 177 replacement theory 377n22 Republican People’s Party (CHP) 158, 159, 160, 168, 180 republicanism 129, 365 resistance: as a comprehensive framework of action, Hezbollah 94; of Hamas to Zionist project 79, 80, 81, 82–83; of the Moros, Philippines 116–118; politicization of Muslim identities and 375; and shaping of militant goodness 318–319; to atheist policies, Soviet rule 141; see also Iranian women, resistance and reaffirmation (study)

returnees 383 reverse religiosity 387 The Review of Faith & International Affairs 397 revisionist Islam 239–243 Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) 15, 52, 58 Reza Shah 194 riba 357 Rida, Rashid 56 right-wing phobia 395 Righteous Caliphs and Companions 359 Rightly Guided Successors (al-khulafa al-rashidun) 261 Rights and Freedom committee (Yemen) 244 Risalat Al-Arab (The Message of Arabs) 307 Risale-i-Nur (Epistles of Light) 159 ‘rivers of blood’ prophecy 371 Rizieq, Habib 106, 107, 112 ‘Robin Hood’ activism 318 Rose, Gideon 397, 405 Roy, Olivier 7, 150 rule of law 34, 129, 130, 131, 176, 180 Rumiyyah 295 rural religiosity: Turkey 158 Russia 15, 45, 140, 145, 320, 321 Ryan, Michael W.S. 298 Rywkin, Michael 139 Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal 92 sabre jameel 356 sacred authority see divine authority sadah 234, 239, 240 sadaqa 13 Sadequee, Sharmin 374 Sa’dist Party 12 Saeed, Hafiz 353, 356, 359, 360 Safia S. 345 Sageman, Marc 277 sahaba 262 Sahwa (Awakening) movement 222, 223, 224, 227–228, 268 Said, Edward 396 Salafi al-Nour party 8, 43 Salafis/Salafism 30; association with violent radicalism 147; conversion to the idea of an Islamic State 256; evangelism 241; Falouja 254; fragmentation and fratricidal violence 272; ‘ideal state of affairs’ 257–258; idealization of first three generations of Muslims 261; ideology 69; Indonesia 109; influence in Egypt 22; Maldives 128; as the ‘other’ in Central Asia 147; threat to secular order 148; typology 260; Yemen 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245; see also jihadi-Salafism; neo-Salafism Salamat, Hashim 119, 121, 122 Saleem, Mohammad 210 Saleh, Ali Abd Allah 236, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244

450

Index

Salih Siriyya 22 Salleh, Hafez 310 Salman, King (Saudi Arabia) 32, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227, 230 Samarkand 140 Sana 234, 236, 240 Sarkozy, Nicholas 399 Sartre, Jean-Paul 257 Saud, House of 31 Saudi Arabia 22, 220–231; authority 35; cited as ideal type of Islamic theocracy 26; Constitution (1992) 32, 34; Consultative Council 32; female supporters of al-Qaeda 340; Islamist influence in Indonesia 106; kings 32, 34, 35; nationalism 220, 225, 229–230; the new order 223–231; the old order 220–223; quest for democracy 222–223; religious funding of Philippine Muslims 118; religious identity 220, 221; religious institutions 32; secondary role of clergy in politics and governance 28; state repression and empowerment of jihadi-Salafism 268; state sponsorship and empowerment of jihadiSalafism 269; support, Yemen 239–240; Wahhabism 26, 30, 31, 33 Sayeedi, Delewar Hossain 216 Sayyaaf, Ustod 325 Sa´adi government 58 schools: hijab ban 147, 148; Islamic see Islamic schools; Ottoman language compulsory in 165; seizure of private, Turkey 174; see also education Schwartz, Stephen 277 Sebastián, Valenzuela 189 second encounter 403 sectarian enemy 296, 297 sectarianism: among Muslims 33; clashes, Philippines 117; engagements, Lebanon 98; Hezbollah’s reputation of political 96; killings and divisions among jihadi-Salafists 270; mobilization, Indonesia 107–109; question of, in Islam 28; Sunni-Shi’a divide and empowerment of jihadi-Salafism 269; tensions 9, 268, 291, 293; Yemen 234–235 secular authoritarianism 149 secularism 5, 16, 377n12, 396; assertive 149, 369; capacity to organize conflict-free religious pluralism 365; classical Islamic modernism and rejection of 131; ignorance in Muslim world due to emphasis on 4; interpretation 155, 157, 168; as the ‘other’ of Islam 134; restructuring with Islamic alternatives, Iran 188; threat of Salafism to 148; Turkey 8, 155, 162; in Western societies 258, 367, 368 secularist citizen 173 secularization: of Hamas’s thinking 88; of Muslim societies, Kemalist prediction 284; Turkey 157, 168

securitization 147, 172, 371, 386 security assemblages (racialized) 374 segregation: of Arabs and Muslims 375; of Christians and Muslims, Indonesia 109; suspicion and 375; see also gender, segregation self-defense groups: Namangan 142 self-governance: Hamas document omission of commitment to 86 Selod, Saher 372, 374 separation of religion and politics 5; al-Qaeda and 280–283; rejection of 29; Turkey 8; Western societies 367, 368 September 11 attack 287, 299, 356, 393, 399; change in public opinion after 364, 365, 373; as defining feature of jihadism 4–5; momentum of populist radical right after 401; question of religious discourse, Saudi Arabia 222; status of women in the aftermath of 399; see also post 9/ 11 world sermons: of Hussein al-Houthi, Yemen 241; statemandated, Turkey 173, 174, 182, 183; see also Grand Mosque of Mosul sermon (2014) sexual democracy 372 Shabab Muhammad 22 Shafi’i Sunni 233, 234, 236, 240 Shafiq, Ahmad 60 shahid 321 Shahidon Square demonstration 323, 326 Shalit, Gilad 341 Shamsiddin 326 Shanghai Corporation Organization Summit (2018) 146 shari’a 8, 11; -oriented regional regulations 105; Bangladesh 214; contested by English law, India 206; as core element of Islamic state and society 205; courts 122, 140, 156, 157; demise of 283; flexibility 129; Indonesia 103, 105, 111; interpretation 28, 104; Maldives 128, 130, 134, 135; in the Ottoman Empire 156; percentage in favour of, Central Asia 142; protection of animals 43; punishments 128, 394; Saudi royal family as guardians of 32; Western women and preference for 345; see also theocracy Sharif, Nawaj 211 Shebaa Farms 95, 98 Sheikh Said Revolt 157 sheikhulislam 156, 157 Shi’a Muslims 26, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 47, 91; considered as infidels 270; deprivation of Lebanese 91–93; militia attacks on, Indonesia 103; US involvement in Iraq viewed as plot to empower 298; see also Sunni-Shi’a divide; Zaydi Shi’a Shi’ism: Najafi school of 91; Salafi rejection of 262; see also anti-Shi’ism shura (consultation) 72, 129 Siddiq, Mohammad Yusuf 41 Siddiquie, Aafia 341

451

Index

sincerity 379n56 Siniora government 98 siyadah 227 slaughter of animals 39, 41–42, 44 Smirnov, Sergei 146 smoking 179 smuggling networks 291, 292 social actors 201 social agents 189, 190 social capital 189, 388 social codes: subversion of 190 social dispositions 189–190 social engagement: of Muslim Brotherhood 61–62 social engineering 69, 75, 171, 173, 174, 176, 180, 384 social ethics 57 social justice 13, 14, 15, 55, 56, 57 Social Justice in Islam (Al-Adala al-Ijtima’iyya fi alIslam, 1949) 13 social life: fatwas for Islamist, Turkey 179–180 social media: religious discourse, Saudi Arabia 222; and terrorist propaganda 292, 385; see also social networking sites social movement: Muslim Brotherhood as 61–62 social movement organizations (MB) 53, 61 social networking sites (SNSs): individual jihad and popular theology 328–332; as a vehicle for resistance 188–189; women in jihad and use of 340, 342, 343–344; see also Iranian women, resistance and reaffirmation (study) social norms 201, 202, 227, 229, 354, 355, 357, 358 social reforms: Saudi Arabia 224 social welfare 365; Indonesia 103, 106; of Jama´at e-Islami, Bangladesh 214; of the JSM 72; Muslim Brotherhood 6, 54; women in jihad and organisation of 341; women’s engagement in, Pakistan 355–356; Yemen 237 socialism: political Islam as response to perceived failure of 1 socialization (tarbiyya) 266 societal environment: female agency in 354 socio-political context: of Islamism 9, 11, 318, 319, 332 soft power 227 ‘Soldiers of Harvest’ campaign 294 solidarity 22, 69, 72, 98, 160, 210, 261, 279, 284, 285 Solomon 39 Somalia 270, 299, 302, 341 South Asia: Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 313; Islamic modernism 129; political Islamic movement see Jama ´at e-Islami; see also Afghanistan; Bangladesh; India; Maldives; Pakistan; Sri Lanka South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) 210 South Kalimantan 104

South Yemen 235, 236 Southern Sulawesi 104, 110, 111 sovereignty 227; according to Islamists 3; AlMalki’s interpretation of 223; Hakimiah as a substitute for 26; see also divine authority, sovereignty; popular sovereignty; state sovereignty Soviet Union (USSR) 141; atheist policies 141; importance of rural world in shaping Islamic political thought 141; institutionalization of Islam in 320; legacy of religious regulation 147; mobilisation for independence 139; Muslims of 141; struggle between Muslim reformists and traditionalists 321; see also anti-Soviet jihad Soviet-Afghan war 322, 323, 324 Spanish colonial occupation, Philippines 116 Speaker of the House (Lebanon) 92 Special Session of the People’s Representative Assembly (SI-MPR) 107 Speckhard, Anne 339 spiritual authority 282 spiritual education 72, 73, 74 spiritual guidance 72, 283 Spiritual Muslim Board of Central Asia (SADUM) 141, 321 Sri Lanka 302, 399 Starrett, Gregory 133 state building: and Islamic identity building 130–131, 136 State of Emergency: Turkey 166 state politics: and Islamic solidarity 285 state repression: and empowerment of jihadiSalafism 268–269 state sovereignty 16, 95, 98, 272 state sponsorship: and empowerment of jihadiSalafism 269 state transnationalism: Turkey 170, 171–172, 184 Steinfield, Charles 189 stigmatisation 181, 240, 343, 375, 387, 390 structural environment: and social and embodied dispositions 189–190 structural grievances: and extremism 387–388 Students’ Islamic Organization (SIO) 209 sub-Saharan Africa 161, 257 Subianto, Prabowo 112 subjective well-being: bridging social capital and 189 subordination: Muslim inclusion perceived as 5 subversive language 193, 194 subversive (written) expression 194 Sudan 62, 248, 249, 251, 312, 313, 314 Sufi networks (tariqah) 110, 157, 158, 159, 161, 167, 178 Sufism 69, 71, 140, 141, 148, 206, 262, 270 Suharto, Muhammad 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112 suicide 266–267

452

Index

suicide bombings 291; Indonesia 110; mythology 267; Philippines 123; Turkey 167 suicide missions: women in 339, 341, 345 Sukarnoputri, Megawati 107 sulh 84 sultans: Ottoman Empire 156, 157 Sulu 116, 117, 122, 123 Sungkar, Abdullah 110 Sunnah 32, 106, 110, 121, 209, 261, 263, 267, 270, 274n12, 281, 282, 295, 296, 340 Sunni Islam 31, 32, 45, 126, 159, 160, 166, 168, 173, 234; see also Salafis/Salafism Sunni Muslims 26, 28, 29, 31, 35, 47, 92; see also Shafi’i Sunni Sunni-Shi’a divide 254, 269, 282, 291 Sunnification 240 Supreme Coordination Council of the Opposition (Yemen) 238 Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) 54, 55, 60 Supreme Leader: Iran 30, 34, 93 Surabaya 108, 109 Surah Al-Baqarah 354 Surah Yusuf 356 surveillance 372–375, 386 suspected communities 374, 389 suspicion: and segregation 375 swine flu 43, 46 Switzerland 157, 369 Syria: Al-Qaeda’s interest in attracting brothers from 252; bulldozing of border checkpoint between Iraq and 2; defeat of ISIS in 146; female facilitators in 344; Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 307, 308–309, 311; ISI territorial gains in 294; jihadi training in 110; jihadi-Salafists in 268; jihadist failed revolutions against the ‘near enemy’ in 297; MB presence 62; state repression and empowerment of jihadi-Salafism 269; Tajiks fighting in 332; Turkish relations with 166, 175; see also Free Syrian Army (FSA) Syrian civil war 95, 166, 167, 175, 293 Syrian National Army (SNA) 166 Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) 93 Syrian-Iraqi badiyya (steppe) 253, 257 Tableeghi Jama´t 212 tabloid press: treatment of Islam 401 tafkir (disbelief) 17, 22 Tafsiri surai fotiha alham (Commentary on the Sura Fotiha Alham) 323, 325 taghut 20 Tagore, Rabindranath 358 taharrur 80, 81 tahdi’ah 84 Tahir Yuldash 332 Tahrik-i-Islam 212 Ta’if Agreement 95, 96

Tajikistan 139, 319; approval of female genital mutilation 147; belief that religious leaders should have political influence 142; civil war 143–144, 323, 325, 328; counter-extremism study 147; dress code for women 149; hijab ban in schools 148; Hizb ut-Tahrir membership 145; Islamic political mobilization 142, 143, 144; Jama’at Tablighi banned in 145; Muftiates 147; parliamentary elections (2010 and 2015) 144; percentage in favour of Sharia law 142; percentage of ISIS fighters coming from 146; presidential elections (1991 and 2013) 143, 144; religious activism 320; religious education 147; school closures 148; strong influence of Islam 150; see also Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT); United Tajik Opposition (UTO) Tajiks, jihad among (study) 318–333; civil war and normalization of jihad 323; individual jihad and popular theology 328–332; learning about jihad 322–323, 324–328, 332; methods 324 takfir 262, 263–264, 267, 270–271, 291, 295 takfirists 250, 257 Talatoff, Kamran 128 Talib, Ali bin Abi 263 Taliban 205, 212, 249, 253, 270, 291, 394 Tamtomo, Muhammad Bahrun Naim Anggih 310 Tandhîm Bilâd al-Shâm (Organization of the Levant) 87 tanwiris 227 Tanzania 44 Tanzim Jama’at al-Jihad 22 tariqah see Sufi networks tasawwur 19 Taseer, Salman 5 Tashkent 141, 143 Taskin, Veysel 181 Tatarstan 140 tawhid 262, 263, 267, 355 Tayibaat 353, 354, 356, 357 Telegram 201 terror/terrorism: bin Laden on 280; Egypt 53; fourth wave of modern 295; Indonesia 102, 104; JIH stance on 210; justification of 4; Morocco 74; Muslim Brotherhood’s use of 52; propaganda 292; and radicalization 373; see also bombing(s); counterterrorism; jihad/jihadism; kidnapping(s) Thailand 119 Thakurufaanu, Muhammad 131 Thalib, Jafar Umar 109 theocracy 26–35; historical context 28–29; mechanism of Islamic states 32–34; Vilayat-e Faqih 29–30; Wahhabism 30–32; Walayah 27–28; see also shari’a theological conflicts: Sunni-Shi’a 291 threat: iconography of 371–372 Tibi, Bassam 397–398, 402, 403, 405

453

Index

Timms, Stephen 342 Top, Mohammad Noordin 110 torture 15, 56, 172, 176, 178, 183, 210, 244, 249 ‘total war’ doctrine 296, 297, 300, 301 ‘totalized meaning’ of jihad 327, 328 tourism 129, 225 Traditionist Project 235 transnational advocacy networks 127, 134–135 transnational Islamist populism 170, 171–172, 182 transnational surveillance regimes 364 Treaty of Hudaybiya 40, 84 Treaty of Jeddah (2000) 240 Treaty of Sevres (1920) 157 Treaty of Taif (1934) 240 tribalism: Yemen 235–236 Trotksy, Leo 320 true believers 4, 5, 19, 20, 280, 281, 284, 379n56 True Path Party (DYP) 160 true revolution 69 Trump, Donald J. 363, 370, 371 truth: divine 3, 4, 18 Tsarist Russia 140, 320 Tufekci, Zeynep 189 Tunisia 7, 8, 62, 164, 308, 359 Turajonzoda, Hoji Akhbar 143, 144, 327 TURKEN 182 Turkey 8, 155–169; Al-Qaeda’s interest in attracting brothers from 252; Constitution (1937) 157; democracy 8–9, 158, 159; factional fighting 160; failed coup (2016) 176; forced population exchange between Greece and (1923-24) 157; foreign policy 162, 172, 175–176, 181–182; general elections 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166; Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 309, 311; impact of Islamist populism and fatwas on 180–183; Islamist movement 155–156, 162; local elections 165, 168; militant groups 166–168; neoOttomanism 165, 168, 172; Ottoman and Kemalist contexts 156–157; political Islam 8; presidential elections 165, 166; in process of radical change 170; radical islamists 155–156; referendums 166, 173, 178–179, 180; relations with the MB 62, 164, 166; return of Islam 158–161; secularism 8, 155; secularization 157, 168; State of Emergency 166; state sponsorship and empowerment of jihadi-Salafism 269; see also Justice and Development Party (AKP) Turkish Armed Forces 182 Turkish diaspora: AKP policy 171–172, 182; expansion of transnational activities of the Diyanet 182; export of domestic inter-group conflict 184; Islamic schools 161; the MSP and 160; state-run mosques and sermons 174; transnational Islamist populism 170, 171–172; YTB targeting of 182 Turkish Grand National Assembly 284 Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) 157

Turkish women: attack on rights of 176; conservative attitudes towards 158; forced into polygamous marriages 183; misogynistic fatwas against 179; response to fatwas 181 Turkishness 157 Turkmenistan 139, 140, 148, 149 Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) 182 Two Nation theory 207, 213 UETD 182 ulama/ulema: al-Hudaybi’s cooperation with the Azhari 20; bin Laden’s mockery of the Wahhabi 250; division between Sunni and Shi’a 282; education and the new 282–283; exercise of independent judgement 282; India 208; Ottoman 156, 157; Pakistan 357, 358; Saudi Arabia 31 ulema al-sultan 266 Umari, Syed Jalaluddin 210 Umayyad 28, 29, 31, 255, 297 Umm Abd Muneeb 354–355, 357–358 Umm Abdur Rabb 356 Umm Al-Rashrah 81 Umm Layth 342, 344 Umm Saad (Umm Hammad) 355–356, 357, 359, 360 Umm Ubaydah 342 Umm Umarah 338 umma 35; Bin Laden and al-Qaeda ideology, and liberation of 278, 279; governance of 26; guardianship over 27, 29; ISIS removal of man-made barriers between global 2; Islamist goal to uphold 3–4; Islamist longing for political unity of 172; liberation of Palestine as duty of 80; nationalism as antithetical to 207; Qutb on 13; reclaiming 284–287; rejection of state boundaries dividing 3; rhetorical commitment to 4; Soviet Muslims’ allegiance to 141; women’s role in supporting 342 ‘underground’ economy: in the USSR 141 underground satirical discourse, Iran 196 Union of Popular Forces (Yemen) 238 Union Socialiste des Force Populaires (USFP) 71, 75 United Kingdom (UK): accommodation of religious pluralism 367; estimation of Muslim numbers based on religious practices 367; headscarf contoversies 370–371; MB presence in 63; political asylum of HT members 307; public overestimation of Muslim numbers 366; women involved in jihad 337, 343; see also London United Kingdom (UK), counter-terrorism: concluding thoughts 389–391; CONTEST 384; Home Office 383–384, 386; Prevent Duty (2015) 383; Prevent strategy 374, 383, 385–387; research and policy challenges 387–389 United National General Assembly (UNGA) 383

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United States (US): attacks against see Boston Marathon terrorist attack; September 11 attack; USS Cole; bin Laden’s accusation of plundering of oil resources 251–252; bin Ladens obsession with jihad against 252; colonization of the Philippines 116–117; estimation of Muslim numbers based on religious practices 367; Gulen movement 161; Hezbollah’s attempt to drive from Lebanon 95; homonationalism 370; Imam Hatip schools 174; involvement in Iraq viewed as plot to empower Shi’a 298; Islam in 368; Israeli support 299; Jama´at e-Islami branches/ affiliates 212; jihadist failed revolutions blamed on 297; MB presence in 63; Muslims in 5, 364, 365; as priority of jihadism 248–249; public overestimation of Muslim numbers 366; Qutb’s stay in 13–14; religiosity 368; secularism 368; separation of church (religion) and state 368; state sponsorship and empowerment of jihadiSalafism 269; surveillance and suspicion towards Muslims 373; as a target of Islamic wrath 2; use of marine animals 45; women in jihad 341, 343; see also anti-Americanism United Tajik Opposition (UTO) 139, 143, 144, 326 ‘uniting the Ummah under Erdogan’s Turkey’ 171 universalism 62, 403 universities: MB mobilisation, Yemen 238 University Women’s Collective 181 Unlu, Ahmet Mahmut (Cubbeli Ahmet Hodja) 178, 180 unrecognized opposition: Morocco 71 urban conflict 398 urban elite: Turkey 157, 158 urban youth: opposition to restructuring, Iran 188 urban-rural divide: Islah 237 USS Cole 243, 252 USSR see Soviet Union (USSR) usury 357 Uwaidah, Sheikh Abu Iyas Mahmood Abdul Latif 310, 313 Uzbekistan 139; belief that religious leaders should have political influence 142; hijab ban in schools 148; Islamic political mobilization 142, 143; Jama’at Tablighi banned in 145; percentage in favour of Sharia law 142; religious education 147; SADUM 141; school closures 148; tensions around clothing 149 value culture: of resistance 318, 319, 325, 332 vanguards 18, 69–70, 75, 94, 98, 272 Velioglu, Huseyin 167 Viber 201 Victorious Sect (al-ta’ifa al-mansoura) 262, 267–268, 272 Vilayat-e Faqih 4, 7, 26, 29–30, 33, 34, 35, 91, 97, 127

Vilks, Lars 341 violence: against civilians, Yemen 242; against minorities, Jama´at encouragement of, Bangladesh 215; against Muslims 5; al-Banna’s position on 56; arguments explaining upsurge in 373; during al-Banna years 58; ethno-religious, Indonesia 102, 107–109, 110; exclusive claim to truth and tendency to 4; as expression of the sacred 257; extremist, Philippines 120–121; female encouragement of 344; Hezbollah 95, 98; HT rejection of 5–6, 311; Turkey 167, 179; see also terrorism Viorst, Milton 35 virtual caliphate 302 virtual world: hyper-engagement in 283 Virtue Party (FP) 8, 161, 162 visibility: and racialization of Muslim ‘others’ 368–372 visual resistance: to state-mandated dress code, Iran 188 Voluntary Security Guards 107 Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 189 Wafd Party 12, 21, 52, 57, 59 Wahdah Islamiyah (WI) 111–112 Waheed, Dr Imran 311 Wahhabism 16, 17, 26, 30–32, 33, 34, 147, 148, 241, 250, 253, 261, 277, 296 Wahid, Abdurrahman 105, 106, 107, 108 Wahid, Dr. Abdul 308 wala wal bara (loyalty to Muslims and disassociation from unbelievers) 262, 264–265, 267 Walayah 27–28, 29, 32 wali al-amr (guardian) 26, 29, 32, 33 war of billboards 149 war on terror 120, 243, 358, 365, 373, 374, 388, 397 Warman, Asep 110 Warner, Jason 339 wasatiyyah 82 wathîqa (document) 79 weaponization of animals 45 web-based technologies: MB use of 61 Weber, Max 35 welfare see social welfare Welfare Party (India) 208 Welfare Party (RP) 160, 161 West: AKP influence on Muslims living in 171; cities associated with jihadi-claimed attacks 364; cultural dimension to attacks against 394; Erdogan and reignition of religio-civilisational animosity against 176; extremism and intolerance towards 5; Hezbollah, and the need to repel corrupting influence of 97; indigenisation of Islam in 5; infiltration of Pakistan’s economic system 357; influence on education, Pakistan 358; Islamist criticism of entertainment and

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music 134; Islamist criticism on treatment of women 399–400; as a priority of jihadism 248–249; as a target of Islamic wrath 2, 3; use of animal rights violations to promote national interests 44–45; see also anti-Western West Java 103, 104, 106, 110 West Kalimantan 107, 108 West Pakistan 213, 215 Western culture 2, 209, 215, 397, 403 Western hostages: videos of beheadings of 292 Western imperialism 210 Western societies, Muslims in 5, 363–376; the challenge of analysing ‘Muslims’ 365–368; controversial public visibility and racialization 368–372; perceived as a threat 364–365; suspicion and surveillance 372–375 Western women: in the Islamic State (IS) see women in jihad Westernization 12, 13, 129, 221, 222, 228 WhatsApp 201 white fragility 370 whiteness: racialization and exclusion from 372 Widodo, Joko (Jokowi) 107, 112 wilaya (rule) 227 wilayah (guardianship) 26 Wiranto, General 107 wives: in jihad 339–340 women: Bangladeshi 215; criticism for wearing ‘sexy’ clothes 149; dress code for, Tajikistan 149; HT attempt to gain support from 308; Islamist criticism of West on treatment of 399–400; Jama´at Tablighi and new role for, Kyrgyzstan 145; lift of driving ban, Saudi Arabia 224; representation of disempowerment 375; SNSs and bonding social capital 189; as targets of hate crime, France 372; wearing hijab compared to monkeys 148–149; widening rift between Western and Islamic worldviews 399; see also gender; Iranian women; Turkish women women in jihad 337–346; controversy around permissibility of female combatants 337–338; facilitators and enablers 340–341; female combatants 338–339; IS supporters 342–345; martyrdom testimonials 353; mothers and wives 339–340; planners, plotters and attackers 341–342; politics see jihadi women, politics for; propagandists and recruiters 340, 343–344 Women in Jihad: a Historical Perspective 337

women’s rights 176, 215, 244, 343, 394, 399 Woon, Long Litt 368 World War 3 404 Ya’fur (donkey) 45 Yasin, Chaykh A. 84 Yassine, Abdessalam 71–73 Yassine, Nadia 72, 73 Yemen 233–246; as an exception to the principle of fighting the distant enemy 249; Islah 233, 235–239, 243–244, 245; Islamist influence, Indonesia 106; jihadi-Salafists in 268; parliamentary elections 238; post-2011 revolution and its aftermath 243–245; presidential elections 238; revisionist political Islam 239–243; sectarianism 234–235; unification (1990) 241 Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) 236 Yemeni Congregation for Reform see Islah Yemen’s Socialist Party (YSP) 238 Yildirim, Binali 166 Yildiz, Nurettin 179 Yogyakarta 108, 109, 111 young generation: of Muslim Brotherhood 53, 57 Young Turk Revolution (1908) 156 youth: de-schooling of Iraqi 254; IS recruitment 387; opposition to restrictions, Iran 188, 190, 191, 197, 202; radicalization 180, 182, 387 youth element: CONTEST 384 Yuldash, Tohir 142 Zad al-Ma’ad (The Provisions of the Hereafter) 18 Za’frani, Ibrahim 54 zakat 13, 209 Zalloom, Abdul Qadeem 310, 312 Zaydi Shi’a 233, 234, 235, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 245 Zaynab (granddaughter of Mohammad) 338 Zeituni, Djamel 251 Zezer, Ahmet Necdet 163 ‘Zhusan’ operation 146 Zia ur-Rahman, Major 213 Zia-ul-Haq, General Muhammad 211, 214, 353 Zingi dynasty 253 Zionism 12, 46; resistance to 79, 80, 82–83; see also Israel Zionist-Crusader conspiracy 299, 300, 301 Zollberg, Aristide R. 368 Zollner, Barbara 6

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