The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism

A Study in Islamic Political Thought

Andrea Mura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317014492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism initiates a dialogue between the discourse of three of the most discussed figures in the history of the Sunni Islamic movement—Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Osama bin Laden—and contemporary debates across religion and political theory, providing a crucial foundation upon which to situate current developments in world politics. Redressing the inefficiency of the terms in which the debate on Islam and Islamism is generally conducted, the book examines the role played by tradition, modernity, and transmodernity as major "symbolic scenarios" of Islamist discourses, highlighting the internal complexity and dynamism of Islamism. By uncovering forms of knowledge that have hitherto gone unnoticed or have been marginalised by traditional and dominant approaches to politics, accounting for central political ideas in non-Western sources and in the Global South, the book provides a unique contribution towards rethinking the nature of citizenship, antagonism, space, and frontiers required today. While offering valuable reading for scholars of Islamic studies, religious studies and politics, it provides a critical perspective for academics with an interest in discourse theory, post-colonial theory, political philosophy, and comparative political thought.

PART I

Chapter 1
Approaching Islamism

In the incipit of this book ‘Islamism’ has been described as a complex ‘discursive universe’. Before assuming a discourse theory perspective and expounding the theoretical implications of such a definition, it is useful to provide the reader with a suitable context for this conceptualisation.

In general terms, Islamism can be taken to denote the religious and political project of self-professing al-Islamiyyun, a term translated in English as ‘Islamists’. This term shares with ‘Muslims’, al-Muslimun, the common root ‘Islam’ (s-l-m). ‘Muslims’, however, are those who profess the fundamental declaration of Islamic creed (i.e., shahada): ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God’. Islamists would rather refer to those Muslims who strive to restore the primacy of Islam in the social and political order. From this perspective, Islamism stands as a ‘revivalist’ trend aimed at ‘reviving’ Islam not only in the personal life of believers but also in the social and political dimensions of the community in general. The term ‘revival’ suggests the idea of religion currently being practised as a nominative rather than as a substantial intimate experience.¹ It implies that ‘Islam’ is perceived as absent or ‘dormant’ within a context in which it is claimed to have played a previous major and active role for individuals as well as for societies. Unlike other revivalist trends (e.g. as so-called ‘fundamentalism’) however, Islamism does not only endeavour to ‘re-vive’ religious feelings by ascribing to them a substantial role in providing believers’ life with meaning and a sense of horizon. The peculiarity of this revivalist trend is that ‘Islam’ itself becomes the foundation stone of the political and social order.

But how to approach this complex universe made up of ideas, pamphlets, organisational and legislative provisions, as well as single adherents, social movements, institutions, parties, etc.? A number of tensions have characterised the literature on Islamism in this regard. For instance, scholars have put different analytical emphasis on Islamism according to their privileging a conception of it mainly as an ideology or a social movement. The first tendency has been particularly popular since the early decades of Islamism – the first Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928 – up until the late 1980s. At that time, the Islamist ideology was for the most part considered through the lens of modernist theories and interpreted as an anti-modern, obscurantist and anti-imperialist ideology.² In the last three decades, increasing attention has been put on Islamism as a ‘modern’ mass social movement. A re-interpretation of Islamist ‘movements’ has highlighted the innovative character of their organisation and propaganda tools, focusing on those socio-economic parameters that explained their ability to mobilise entire sections of society.³ Naturally, contemporary analyses of Islamism reflect this variety of approaches, with some scholars emphasising the set of ideas and ideals which inform the political action of Islamism, and others tackling organisational and socio-economic factors.⁴ As we shall see briefly, these diverse approaches supply a tension between ideas and organisation as well as between modernist and anti-modernist interpretations that a discourse theory approach might be able to overcome.

Before pointing to this fundamental theoretical knot, however, it is useful to stress a second level of tension informing approaches on Islamism. A reference has to be established to the canonical debate arising from the crucial critique posed by Edward Said in Orientalism.⁵ In his ground-breaking work, Orientalism is conceived as the systematic depiction of Oriental societies and cultures from a Western perspective, fostered by a long-standing production of political, literary and anthropological literature on the Orient. Such a mode of orientalist interpretation methodically merged forms of power and knowledge based on binary divisions and essentialist reductions into a practice functional to Western colonial expansion. Orientalism did not reflect an intentional rationalisation of colonialism aimed at justifying the colonial enterprise of the West, but rather epitomised the forma mentis through which Western powers had exerted their control over colonial territories.

Said conceived of such a mindset as being ruled mostly by a binary logic, which was functional not only to the colonial enterprise per se but also to the very definition of European identity (and modern subjectivity in general). Since the ‘other’ was to be conceived as uncivilised, emotional, cruel and despotic, European identity was constructed in terms of its opposite; that is, as civilised, rational, democratic and free. At the same time, this reductionist approach – legitimised by the principle that Western knowledge knows the nature of the other better than the other knows itself – was used as a powerful tool of political and cultural exclusion.

In this context, Islam seemed to play a major role being that it epitomised the Orient itself. By deploying a dualistic perspective, Islam was represented in the West as a monolithic ontological entity whose essential features were furthermore grasped as atemporal in the way that they were supposed to be substantially ‘immune to change by historical influences’.⁶ This representation masked the very plurality of manifestations constituting Islam in accordance with its cultural and temporal context of reference. Resulting from this, Islam stood as a discourse whose ultimate reference had to be found in literary texts and never in an ontological ‘other’.

The pivotal critique posed by Edward Said in ‘Orientalism’ led to a major impasse in the understanding of the status of Islam and the epistemological approach that could better provide an adequate description of it. As Bobby Sayyid put it:

If Islam is constituted by orientalism, what happens when orientalism dissolves? What, if any, kind of Islam will remain? Said’s main concerns are with the struggle against intellectual and cultural imperialism. He illustrated the hostility of imperialism against Islam, his ‘counter-writing’ is directed towards neglecting orientalism, but ‘the negation of Orientalism is not the affirmation of Islam’. This has the effect of turning Said’s negation of orientalism into a negation of Islam itself.⁷

On the one hand, defenders of a possible ‘orientalist’ approach tried to re-affirm the substantial truth of Islam as a ‘cluster of essential attributes’ which may be singled out and posed as its ultimate ontological foundation.⁸ To this end, as mentioned in the Introduction, even philosophical reflections on Islamist subjectivity by contemporary thinkers might suffer from a certain degree of essentialism. Ian Almond, for one, has recently pointed to a sort of neo-orientalist pattern informing the thought of ‘postmodern’ philosophers, from Foucault to Žižek.⁹ Besides the risk of essentialist representation, Almond warns here also against the tendency of what he calls ‘post-modernism’ to deconstruct ‘modernity’ by instrumentally drawing upon the case of Islam, so reproducing once again a distorted depiction of the ‘other’. On the other hand, however, anti-orientalist criticism has mostly chosen to disregard debates about the ontological foundation of Islam in favour of a study of its articulation into the plurality of contexts within which it is invoked. We can read here the quasi-slogan: no Islam but Islams.¹⁰ Islam is thus disseminated into its constitutive parts, articulated in local events that allow the dismantling of a unitary substance. Naturally, the same applies to Islamism, which assumes ‘Islam’ as the corner stone of its political project. From this perspective there would not be such a thing as a single Islamism, for every Islamist ‘experience’ in a given social, historical or political setting would be irreducible to others.

A Discourse Theory Approach

We mentioned that a widespread tendency in the literature of Islamism had drawn quite a stringent divide between ideas and organisation, and that a discourse theory perspective can help to overcome such a tension. The theoretical foundations of such an approach are not new. Indeed, the notion of discourse developed by Michel Foucault has but increased in influence over the last 40 years, providing ‘compelling alternatives to the Marxist paradigm of ideology critique as well as to psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivation’.¹¹ A major reason for the increasing adoption of a discursive perspective has been the speculative attempt to reject the modern distinction between a plane of truth and a plane of representation, or between a level of immateriality and another of pure materiality, upon which the notion of ideology had rested for long time after its appearance.

In the wage of a long-standing elaboration, Ernesto Laclau defines a discourse as a ‘structured totality articulating both linguistic and non-linguistic elements’, i.e., ideas as well as organisations, documents, etc., therein offering a useful analytical tool able to account for the inherent complexity of Islamism.¹² According to Laclau, ‘the basic hypothesis of a discursive approach is that the very possibility of perception, thought and action depends on the structuration of a certain meaningful field which pre-exists any factual immediacy.’¹³ This requires pointing to the inscription of a transcendental plane determining the very condition of possibility of experience. Unlike Kantian philosophy, where the ‘a priori’ constitutes the basic structure of reasoning which transcends historical change, contemporary theories of discourse, however, acknowledge that the transcendental dimension of discursive fields is subjected to historical variations, contingency and change, so that ‘the line separating the “empirical” and the “transcendental” becomes an impure one, submitted to continuous displacements’.¹⁴

It should be emphasised that the discursive constitution of objects has nothing to do with the admission that there is a material world external to thought. As Laclau and Mouffe put it in their 1985 seminal work on hegemony: ‘An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of “natural phenomena” or “expressions of the wrath of God”, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field’.¹⁵ From this standpoint, a ‘discourse’ cuts across the divisions between structure and superstructure, mental and material, thought and action, linguistic and behavioural practices, all constituting the very condition of emergence of social phenomena, including institutions, rituals, techniques, and so on. In order to fully grasp the philosophical and linguistic premises informing the theory of discourse a central reference needs to be established, for the purposes of this book, to a post-structuralist reading of language and, particularly, to the idea of an endless circulation and movement of meanings.

In classic structuralism a linguistic system is thought of as the ensemble of its linguistic signs which are related through a network of differential relations. In Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational conceptualisation of structuralism, the idea of a linguistic ‘structure’ or ‘system’ is that of a closed structured totality composed of identifiable units and dominated by a logic of self-regulation. More specifically, the wholeness of language as a self-contained structure means that it is not only structured but also structuring. The laws of transformation of the system are internal to the system itself as that which perpetuates its self-referentiality and inner logic.¹⁶ The analysis of language elaborated by Saussure was employed and extended to a variety of fields under the new name of semiotics.

However, this analysis was increasingly performed in the name of a critique posed against some of the basic assumptions of the Saussurean model. For instance, Saussure had maintained a strict isomorphism between the signifier (the acoustic image of a linguistic sign: i.e., the sound of a word) and the signified (the meaning referring to the acoustic image). This entailed preserving the linguistic and logical unity of the sign (which integrates both the signifier and the signified). Moreover, Saussure theorised the ‘closure’ of the system, considering changes merely to be internal to it, rather than external and contingent. Such a closure allowed the possibility of stable representations of the system itself. A so-called post-structuralist approach began instead to challenge the basic assumptions of classic structuralism. Given the particular rel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Bibliography
• Index