SOAS Middle East Issues S.

Context Versus Ideology

Khalad Hroub

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780863568831
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of the contemporary debates within political Islam, providing an in-depth analysis of the specific movements, countries and regions in the Arab world and Israel. The contributors contend that the evolution of Islamic movements is contextual rather than ideological. Therefore, Islamic movements are best understood individually within their own historical, socio-political and cultural setting. Political Islam is an essential reference for academi, researchers and the media, as well as general readers with an interest in Islamic political debates. Contributors include Abdullah Baabood, Youcef Bouandel, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Kamal Helbawy, Roel Meijer, Ibrahim Moussawi, Tariq Ramadan, Tilde Rosmer, Murad Batal al-Shishani, Sara Silvestri and Camille Tawil. '[Hroub's] work on Hamas is exceptional … a lucid, informative and extremely valuable introduction to this complex organisation.' -- Sara Roy, Harvard University

ONE

Introduction

Khaled Hroub

In understanding and explaining Islamist movements, are we better served by relying on an understanding of their context or an analysis of their ideology? The easy answer, of course is ‘both’, because these two undertakings should not be mutually exclusive. This is true, yet it leaves much to be answered. Few would deny that historical and contextual socio-political and economic conditions have been heavily detrimental to the shaping and evolution of political Islam. But the religious and ideological fundamentals of these movements have also been greatly significant in the development and expanding appeal of these groups. The persistent question here remains whether, in dealing with the world around them, Islamist movements are led by their context or their ideology. If the easy and immediate answer is opted for – that is, ‘by both’ – then a number of questions follow. The first question would be: What parts do both the context or ideology occupy in the body politic and practical conduct of a certain movement? Secondly: Which conditions would make the driving force of one – context or ideology – override the other? A third question relates to the status of a given movement, and whether it is a mainstream movement or a small fringe group. Here, size does matter. The unavoidable influence of context and the luxury of adhering to uncompromising ideology are very much functions of the size of each movement. A pragmatic concluding question would perhaps enquire as to what favourable circumstances might lead these movements to become more consistently shaped by context than by rigid ideology.

Facing endless specific and pragmatic situations, a process of immediate and ongoing negotiation continues to take place between the contextual pressures and the underpinning ideology, producing particular responses. My argument here is that what appear to be similar movements often show different responses to the immediate, and sometimes similar, practical pressures surrounding them. These responses are shaped mostly, if not completely, by the nature of these pressures, not by a supposedly common ideology. The ideology of these movements remains significant, but mainly at a rhetorical level, thinly concealing politics and responses that are formed by the contextual reality. The responses that a certain movement would show towards such pressures are particular to the given set of conditions (responses to elections, to poverty, to oppression and so on). It is thanks to this multiplicity of contexts and responses that the spectrum of Islamism has become truly broad, comprised of a wide range of movements and groups that would make any single definition lumping them together unattainable. In his in-depth survey of Global Political Islam, Peter Mandaville engages closely with numerous Islamist experiences, analysing them against the local context of each movement and its understanding and internalisation of ‘Islamic politics’. In concluding his volume, he notes that it is unrealistic to draw final observations that could connect diverse and sometimes divergent experiences: ‘Islam and politics commingle in almost infinite variety across a vast range of settings, issues, actors, and levels of analysis’.¹

Obituaries have often been written announcing the death of political Islam. These have, perhaps ironically, become an integral part of the seemingly never-ending debate on the subject of Islamism. In 1992 Olivier Roy published his challenging book The Failure of Political Islam (which appeared first in French).² As bluntly as was suggested in the title of the book, Roy argued that political Islam had failed to realise the goals it had set for itself: reviving the Muslim umma; establishing Islamic states; and remoulding Muslim societies to fit a new, Islamised vision. Since then, many scholars and experts, in various ways and to different degrees, have subscribed to this ‘failure’ thesis.

But political Islam has proved more resilient that previously thought. Reproducing itself in novel, expansive forms, and reaching out to new geographical areas, political Islam has confounded the expectations of many, and disappointed the hopes of many more. Developments have seemed to point in the opposite direction from the thesis of failure: Islamism has kept expanding and occupying new spheres, running boldly against the ‘failure’ argument. The contention between the arguments in favour of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is highly charged in the field of social movement activism, not least because of the problematic definition of these two terms. First of all, there is the difficulty of judging ‘success’ or ‘failure’, for each depends on a set of criteria that are largely subjective, giving rise to different conclusions from different observers and actors. But what should be underlined here is that an assessment of the success or failure of Islamist movements from the perspective of power alone would certainly overlook changing realities. Aspects of sociality, patterns of daily life and effects on local politics and value systems evolve in directions that point to the heavy influence of these Islamist movements. In short, if the success of political Islam is in doubt, its failure is, if anything, in even more doubt.

In fact, the ‘project’ of Islamism is still unfolding at various levels, in various forms, and in diverse countries and societies. Hasty attempts to apply any success/failure label are premature, to say the least. But the mere expansion of political Islam is no indicator of its eventual success. In this regard, Roy’s suggested criteria against which any claimed achievements of political Islam might be measured – namely, the acquisition of power and the bringing about of ‘new’ societies – continue to retain strong merits. But the picture as far as Islamism’s achievements are concerned is mixed, with a success/failure balance sheet that continues to fluctuate. One could make the claim that Islamism has manifested aspects of success and failure simultaneously, and when combined they make the ground under either side of the argument – in favour of success or failure – very unstable indeed.³

But the failure or success of political Islam is not the question that this collection of essays attempts to address. Rather, their focus is on what lies in the background of any assessment of success or failure: context. Not only does context influence the outcome of any given experience of an Islamist movement; it also makes it difficult to settle on a definition of either success or failure. In fact, contextual considerations always provide the broad and case-specific criteria through which any movement can be considered a success or a failure. For example, if the Islamist movement in Tunisia had allowed the hijab in state institutions, against the will of a secular government, this would be considered a great success for them. This would be less true in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco where women already wear the hijab freely in governmental institutions. Whereas a criterion of success in Tunisia could be based on state and public recognition of the Islamists, criteria of success in the other three countries would go beyond that to include the degree of power-sharing or power-controlling of government.

In April 2009 several voices within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) strongly criticised Hizbullah for threatening ‘Egyptian national security’. This criticism came about in the midst of a political and media debacle that broke out between Egypt and Hizbullah because Egyptian security had arrested a military cell that Hizbullah had dispatched to Egypt to smuggle weapons and channel support to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Kamal Nour al-Din, a leading MB member in the Egyptian parliament, had been the most vocal in attacking Hizbullah – on ‘nationalist Egyptian’ grounds that have little, if anything, to do with the notions of a ‘pan-Islamic umma’. Other leading MB members, including the prominent Isam al-Aryan, expressed the same sentiment, stating that ‘the national security of Egypt is a red line’.⁴ Mahdi Akif, the head of the MB, attempted to formulate a middle-ground position, issued a statement supportive of Hizbullah as a resistance movement, but at the same time expressed reservations against its use of Egypt for its operations. Taken together, these statements are indicative of the nature of an internal transformation that has been taking place within the MB. The statements reveal how the mother organisation of all MB branches has in fact been moulded, more than anything else, within its particular territorial context.

Why would leaders of an Islamist party as old and powerful as the MB in Egypt exhibit what seem to be contradictory positions on ideological principles in supporting jihad in Palestine? According to the literature and public pronouncements of the MB, sending weapons to Hamas in Gaza, as Hizbullah was trying to do, should not only be welcomed – constituting as it does support for the resistance of ‘our brothers’ in Palestine – but encouraged. But the MB position reflected great ambivalence between its deeply rooted ‘Egyptianism’ and its determination to adhere to its ‘Islamism’ and its ideology. In fact, the politics of the Egyptian MB can be seen as substantively more nationalist than ‘Islamic’. The tension between Islamist and nationalist tendencies, and between ideological and pragmatic components, is a deep-seated dilemma facing groups throughout political Islam. But this tension is essentially a response to context, to which Islamist movements seem to respond and correspond more clearly than to their underpinning ideologies.

It is helpful to clear up from the outset any potential misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the arguments in this volume tend to juxtapose sharply the socio-political context and ideological foundations of the emerging movements of political Islam. These two approaches to understanding Islamism are certainly not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. Although most of the literature on Islamism since at least the late 1970s has been attentive to historical and societal settings, renewed and expanded interest in political Islam since 9/11 has tilted the debate in the direction of ideology as the main shaper of Islamist currents.⁵ Islamist groups have been depicted in the latter corpus of literature as mostly if not exclusively driven by rigid and ‘out of context’ ideological ideals. The ideology of these movements, as the argument runs, is characteristically orthodox, allowing little room for negotiation with the surrounding and changing contextual conditions. The assumed inflexibility of these movements, combined with ideological detachment of reality, produces, in this vein of analysis, unattainable agendas that end up in mutual destruction. This understanding leads to policy propositions advocating stricter security measures and the use of force to defeat these movements or at least weaken them – the ‘securitisation paradigm’.

The dominant influence of context is perhaps most visible in the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is rightly considered to be the mother of most, if not all, movements of political Islam. At the time of its emergence in the late 1920s, there were many other Islamic organisations striving to promote an understanding of Islam that was not dissimilar to what the MB would later advocate. But the rise of the MB resulted from its peculiar connection with its societal setting rather than from its ideology alone, which was shared by other groups. Examining the formative years of the MB in Egypt, Brynjar Lia argues: ‘While not denying the importance of ideology, it seems appropriate to look for characteristics and qualities other than just ideological particularities when searching for the reasons behind the Society’s remarkable expansion in the 1930s.’⁶ Over the decades that followed its emergence, as outlined in Kamal Helbawy’s chapter in this volume, the MB continued to evolve in ways that were very much reflective of its changing context.

Any broader perspective that would include the rise of different waves of Islamist radicalism should take into account the ‘radicalising’ reality of the Middle East, largely influenced by foreign hegemonic interventions. Such a reality is captured well by David Gardner’s book Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, in which Gardner gives a thorough explanation of the adverse impact of intrusive Western policies in the region: ‘There is no other part of the world – not even China – where the West operates with such lethal condescension and so little regard for the human and political rights of local citizens.’⁷ Gardner identifies five areas of political despair that have created the frustrating atmosphere that has allowed, and in fact forced, Islamism to emerge and become dominant. These areas are: how Islam lost to the West; Europe’s colonial legacy, with its fragmentation of the Arabs and the creation of Israel; the failure of pan-Arab nationalism; US and Western support for tyrannical Arab rulers; and the double standard of Washington’s seemingly indiscriminate, and invariably unconditional, support for Israel.⁸

Many scholars have laboured to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• 1. Introduction by Khaled Hroub
• 2. Umma, State and Movement: Events that Shaped the Modern Debate by Abdelwahab El-Affendi
• 3. Salafism: Doctrine, Diversity and Practice by Roel Meijer
• 4. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Historical Evolution and Future Prospects by Kamal Helbawy
• 5. Political Islam in North Africa by Youcef Bouandel
• 6. The Islamists of Iraq and the Sectarian Factor: The Case of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia by Murad Batal al-Shishani
• 7. Islamism in the Gulf Region by Abdullah Baabood
• 8. Hamas: Conflating National Liberation and Socio-Political Change by Khaled Hroub
• 9. The Islamic Movement in the Jewish State by Tilde Rosmer
• 10. The Making of Lebanon’s Hizbullah by Ibrahim Moussawi
• 11. Al-Qaeda in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia: Jihadists and Franchises by Camille Tawil
• 12. Islam and Muslims in Europe: Changes and Challenges by Tariq Ramadan
• 13. Moderate Islamist Groups in Europe: the Muslim Brothers by Sara Silvestri
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright