Dr. Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University.*
The question “Who Speaks for Islam?” has become of fundamental importance to the West in light of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as well as the subsequent violence in parts of the Muslim world, most notably in Iraq, ostensibly undertaken in the name of Islam. This sequence of events has left the distinct impression in many quarters that such attacks presage a clash of civilizations between “Islam “ and the “West.” The clash of civilizations thesis in its latest incarnation, inspired by Princeton historian Bernard Lewis1 and most vividly presented by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington,2 in fact predates the events of 9/11. However, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and subsequent events have given the thesis much greater credibility among the Western public than had been the case earlier. Predicated upon an essentialist interpretation of Islam, the thesis has created a monolithic impression of Islam and Muslims that conceals the enormous diversity not only among Muslim opinion, in general, but even among those groups characterized as fundamentalists or Islamists.3 In fact, as Michael Doran has argued, the United States has in part become the target of ire on the part of certain Islamists because it has interposed itself in what is in substantial measure an intra-Islamic battle over political ideas and strategies for political action.4
The major impact of this essentialist and monolithic interpretation of Islam on Western perceptions is not merely to paint all Muslims with the same black brush but also to accord the most extremist and violent elements in the Muslim world the position of authentic spokespersons for Islam. The latter assessment is based on the mere fact that these elements are able to quote selectively from the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, and stretch the meanings of such quotes through very creative interpretations, to justify killing civilians.5 Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just as there is no Islamic monolith, currently there is no single individual, group or institution that can rightfully claim to speak for Muslims, let alone on behalf of Islam. As Robert Hefner has pointed out, today “most Muslim societies are marked by deep disagreements over just who is qualified to speak as a religious authority and over just how seriously ordinary Muslims should take the pronouncements of individual scholars.”6
However, this is not a new quandary for most Muslims. The question “Who Speaks for Islam?” has historically been difficult to answer. Islam has neither a pope nor a clearly delineated religious hierarchy. While a loose hierarchical tradition does exist among the Shia clergy, even in Shia Islam, which is the minority branch, there is currently no single individual or organization that can authoritatively decide theological issues. An attempt was made in the middle of the nineteenth century in Iran to establish a single source of religious authority in Shia Islam with the title marja-i-taqlid, meaning the source of imitation.7 However, this system broke previously down after the death of Ayatollah Burujerdi in 1961. Since then several leading religious figures have enjoyed the prerogative to issue edicts or rulings that become binding but only on their respective followers, that is on those who have chosen these particular figures as sources of emulation.8
These rulings are not considered binding on the followers of other religious figures of equal status. It was, therefore, no surprise that Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrogation of the right to speak on behalf of all of Iranian Shia Islam was greatly resented by many leading ayatollahs, several of whom outranked him in the religious hierarchy before the Iranian Revolution. These divisions of opinion have been very important in the political realm dividing those endorsing politically quietist interpretations of Islamic injunctions from those advocating politically activist interpretations of religious doctrines and the various shades of opinion in between. While Ayatollah Burujerdi advocated a quietist line, Ayatollah Khomeini expounded an activist position. Ayatollah Sistani, currently the de facto marja of the Iraqi Shias, falls somewhere in between.9
The problem of locating religious authority becomes much more acute in the majority Sunni tradition where multiple religious voices have historically been the rule rather than the exception. Traditionally, numerous senior ulama, the learned in the law, have exercised the right to issue religious rulings based on meticulous research of the sources of Islamic law, including the context in which particular revelations occurred, and of accumulated precedents. It is not uncommon to find edicts issued by different fuquha (jurists, from the singular faqih) to be at variance with each other, depending upon the different weight they have accorded to sources from which they have sought guidance and on the different contexts within which they have issued rulings.
The tradition legitimizing multiple sources of religious authority was institutionalized in the ninth century CE with the consolidation of five major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, four among the predominant Sunnis and one among the Shia. Followers of the major schools were expected to accord equal status and respect to each one of them and consider the decisions of their representative ulama as binding upon the followers of each respective school. This policy of live and let live produced several benefits over the centuries. It helped preclude the establishment of a single orthodoxy that in alliance with the state could suppress all dissenting tendencies and oppress their followers as happened in Christian Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. Wars of religion and persecution of “heretical” sects were, therefore, infrequent in the classical age of Islam again in contrast with Christendom.
The dispersal of religious authority in Islam also prevented a direct clash between temporal and religious authority, as happened in medieval Christendom, while simultaneously preventing the total control of the religious establishment by temporal rulers. A combination of these factors promoted the creation of distinct religious and political spheres that respected each other’s autonomy. As long as the rulers did not unduly interfere in matters of religious belief, the ulama adopted a largely politically quietist stand. Furthermore, they normally exhorted their followers to accept established authority lest dissension lead to fitna (anarchy) and the fragmentation of the umma, the community of believers. “Rather than a divine right of rule, Islam came to recognize a divinely sanctioned need for rule.”10
However, despite this decentralization of religious authority, there was a general consensus during the pre-modern era on the answer to the question, “Who Speaks for Islam?” It was commonly recognized that those learned in the religious sciences and Islamic jurisprudence, and recognized as such by their peers, had the right to speak for and about Islamic doctrines regarding both moral and societal issues. This consensus was ruptured in the nineteenth century by the intrusion of modernity through its various agents — European colonialism, the print revolution, and mass literacy the chief among them. The cacophony we hear in the Muslim world today is the culmination of the process that started with the breakdown of this Islamic consensus in the nineteenth century regarding the role of the ulama as the sole legitimate interpreters of religion.
European colonial domination reopened the whole question of the nature of authority in Islam by decimating the then existing political structures and by undercutting the legitimacy of the religious authorities. Both parties to the original contract between the temporal and the religious – the Muslim potentates who presided over a minimalist state and the largely politically quietist ulama – were discredited. Many lay thinkers in the Muslim world held the religious establishment as responsible as the temporal rulers for Muslim political decline because of their perceived collaboration with, or at least tolerance of, decadent regimes. They also considered the ulama as practicing a fossilized form of Islam that had neither answers to contemporary problems nor a vision of the future. This last conclusion is not completely true since many ulama demonstrated considerable intellectual agility and doctrinal flexibility in an effort to respond to new issues and problems as they arose during the past two centuries. Some creatively reinterpreted earlier rulings made by jurists to fit modern circumstances, while others attempted to think through contemporary problems de novo.11 Nonetheless, the image has persisted because the majority of the ulama, not trained in the modern sciences, have continued to speak a language that appears largely pre-modern especially to the more advanced sections of Muslim societies. It is no coincidence that it is these modern strata that have been responsible for producing many lay Islamist thinkers.
The undermining of the ulama’s status as interpreters of true religion was accelerated by the print revolution and the increase in literacy in Muslim countries beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Consequently, the Muslim world found itself in a situation analogous to that of Western Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the printed word became accessible to lay individuals and paved the way for the Reformation in Europe. Two ingredients that were integral to the Reformation — scriptural literalism and the ‘priesthood of the individual’ — also appeared in the Muslim world and with pretty much the same consequences. Just as Christian fundamentalism, which rejected the accumulated wisdom of religious tradition, was a product of the Reformation, its Islamic counterpart was born out of the proto-Reformation that swept the Muslim world once lay Muslims gained direct access to the fundamental texts of Islam.12 Religiously inclined individuals, often educated in non-religious schools and engaged in secular professions, began exercising their right of individual interpretation of the Muslim scriptures in near total disregard of precedents and interpretations accumulated over centuries by those trained in religion and jurisprudence.
Today’s Islamists are direct descendants of the nineteenth and early twentieth salafi thinkers (the term salaf is a shortened form of salaf al-salih, which means the “righteous ancestors,” and salafis are those who make the first generation of Muslims their primary source of emulation). They advocated a return to the golden age of Islam that they imagined on the basis of their reading of the fundamental texts. To be fair to the original salafis, leading figures among them, such as Muhammad Abduh of Egypt, advocated the return to a pristine faith because they believed it to be in total accord with scientific positivism and rationality that underpinned modernity.13
However, this modernist interpretation was overshadowed by those among the salafis who interpreted the return to the golden age in literal terms and advocated the creation of an authentic Islamic polity based on their imagined model of the Islamic society at the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors in seventh century Arabia. Contemporary Islamists are heirs to this revivalist tendency although many of them have made significant concessions to the contemporary contexts in which they find themselves. As Daniel Brown points out, “While they staunchly defend the theoretical authority of the sunna, the revivalists’ commitment to the reintroduction of Islamic law in relevant forms makes them pragmatists in practice.”14 These salafi/Islamist thinkers, many of whom were not trained in the traditional seminaries that impart religious and legal knowledge, became the primary challengers in the scholarly realm to the ulama’s authority to speak for Islam. Consequently, they contributed significantly to the crisis of religious authority in the Muslim world that was set off by the twin processes of literacy and the print revolution.
The ulama’s authority was further undermined by the emergence of nation-states in the Muslim world during the twentieth century. The establishment of sovereign states within boundaries defined by the European imperial powers effectively put paid to the notion of the universal umma, the worldwide community of believers, as a politically relevant category. While the Muslim world had been de facto divided among several empires, kingdoms, and principalities beginning with the breakaway of Umayyad Spain from the Abbasid Caliphate in the second half of the eighth century CE, the ideal of the political unity of the umma had been maintained at least amongst the Sunnis, among other things by the continuation of the institution of the Caliphate. This institution was brought to an end with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the subsequent proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
Nation-states that became the rule in the Muslim world in the twentieth century were conceptually very different from the pre-modern kingdoms andprincipalities into which the Muslim world had been divided. The ideal of nationalism posed a fundamental doctrinal as well as practical challenge to the concept of the umma. It did so by demanding that the nation-state, created in the image of European states and recognizing no superior, become the exclusive repository of its citizens’ allegiance. A return to the ideal of a united umma, even as a hypothetical scenario, was no longer a feasible proposition.
The victory of the nationalist doctrine is demonstrated by the fact that the restoration of the Caliphate, even as a symbolic institution, is supported only by a very tiny minority among Muslims and by fringe organizations, such as the London-based Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Most Muslims, including most Islamists, have internalized the values of the sovereign state system and are perfectly at ease working within the parameters of the nation-state. The division of the umma into multiple sovereignties is now taken as given.
The partition of the Muslim world into sovereign nation-states led to two major outcomes. First, despite the spread of communication in the twentieth century, the ulama’s reach and authority became restricted within specific national boundaries. For example, edicts issued by the Egyptian ulama were considered binding only within Egypt just as the edicts issued by the Pakistani ulama could be applied only in Pakistan. For all practical purposes, the religious authority of the learned in the law was nationalized. Moreover, as the modern state began to penetrate society in a way that the pre-modern Muslim empires had never done, it expanded its control of the religious establishment. This was accomplished above all by nationalizing the control of the religious endowments, the awqaf (plural of waqf), on which religious seminaries, mosques, and large numbers of the ulama subsisted. This drastically reduced the financial, and therefore the intellectual and political, autonomy of the religious classes many of whom became salaried functionaries of the state often ruled by unrepresentative and authoritarian regimes. This was particularly true of the Sunni countries, although the shah attempted a similar strategy in Iran as a part of his “White Revolution”. Unfortunately for him, the strategy boomeranged and was responsible in substantial part for the growing hostility of the Shia clergy towards the Pahlavi dynasty.
Second, since Islam continued to be part of the regimes’ legitimacy formula in most Muslim countries, leaders of Muslim states often portrayed their national and regime goals as Islamic ones. They used the subservient ulama to bolster their image as Islam’s spokespersons, thus adding to the cacophony of ostensibly religious
voices in the Muslim world. This was and is particularly true of self-proclaimed Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, as well as Egypt, the seat of the most prestigious Islamic institution, Al-Azhar. However, it is clear to discerning observers that much of their “Islamic” rhetoric was little more than subterfuge that they utilized to enhance their regime or national interests. This has been as much the case with “revolutionary” Islamic regimes, such as Iran, as with “conservative” ones, such as Saudi Arabia. In the process, however, the rhetoric of these regimes further confused Western audiences as to who really speaks for Islam.
The derogation in the authority of the ulama consequent upon their subservience to unrepresentative regimes, as well as the division of the Muslim world into fifty-odd nation-states, provided the opportunity and the space for Islamist groups of various hues to become important players in the political game. These groups, such as the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan and the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, while they emerged out of the earlier salafi movements, were much more modern in their organization and much more in tune with their political environments. Although committed in theory to transforming their polities into Islamic states through the Islamization of society and the eventual enforcement of sharia law, they were adept at making compromises and working within the national frameworks and the constitutional constraints imposed upon them.15 While paying rhetorical obeisance to the concept of the universal umma, these political formations did not challenge the existence of the nation-states within which they operated. In essence, they became exponents of what Olivier Roy has called “Islamo-nationalism.”16 Their basic objectives were and are to improve the quality of governance in existing states by making it conform to Islamic law and to change the moral condition of their societies by making them correspond to Islamic norms. These are national, not universal, goals.
These Islamist political formations have succeeded in carving out substantial constituencies within important Muslim states, allowing them to stake a claim to speak for Islam and Muslims within their national boundaries. They have been able to do so primarily because of the nature of many Muslim regimes, especially in the Middle East. Authoritarian and repressive in character, these regimes have been successful in stifling political debate and ruthlessly suppressing political dissent.
Their effective decimation of nearly all secular opposition has created a vast political vacuum in their countries that Islamist formations have moved in to fill. The Islamists have been successful in doing so because of the vocabulary they use and the institutions they employ to advance their political objectives. It is very difficult for even the most repressive regimes to outlaw or successfully counter the use of religious idiom for the expression of political dissent. Similarly, it is almost impossible for regimes fully to control religious institutions and charitable networks linked to such institutions. These institutions provide the Islamist groups with the organizational base through which they are able to mobilize support.
Consequently, Islamist formations have in many cases been able to present themselves as the primary, and in some cases the sole, avenue of opposition to unrepresentative regimes. By suffering for their defiance of dictatorial regimes, they are also able to portray themselves as champions of human rights within their societies. This strategy has bought them a great deal of goodwill from those whom one cannot consider to be Islamists either in religious or political terms. This is why, even while Islamist groups have in many cases become targets of state suppression, they have simultaneously emerged in several instances as the only credible alternative to repressive regimes. As a result, many analysts have concluded that, if and when authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Muslim countries, especially in the Middle East, collapse, they are likely to be replaced by Islamist groups and parties through democratic elections. The recent electoral endorsement of the religiously based Shia parties in Iraq testifies to the validity of this assertion. This has led some commentators, such as Reuel Gerecht, to deduce that Shiite clerics and Sunni Islamists are the most likely vehicles for the spread of democracy in the Arab world.17
The Sunni Islamist formations are largely distinct from, and often antagonistic toward, the traditional ulama. Several of their leading figures have in the past condemned the ulama for practicing and preaching an ossified form of Islam incapable of responding to contemporary challenges. For example, Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, denounced “the very idea of ‘men of religion, who take from religion a profession,’ corrupting the Qur’anic message to suit their needs and attributing to God what He did not reveal.”18 There are, however, exceptions to this rule, such as the nexus between the radical ulama and the lay Islamists that has produced a form a neo-Wahhabism both in Saudi Arabia and in parts of Pakistan.19
The situation in Shia Iran is somewhat different. The fact that a group of ulama led by Ayatollah Khomeini became the primary vehicle for Islamism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a function of the difference between the ways the Shia ulama are organized as compared to their Sunni counterparts. Their financial independence from the Iranian state in contrast to the Sunni ulama’s dependence on state patronage provides a part of the explanation. This independence was achieved to a large extent through the payment of khums, one-fifth of a person’s income, by the religious laity to their chosen marja, or source of emulation, among the senior clerics. Also, the robust Shia tradition of ijtihad (innovative interpretation to suit changing times and circumstances) allowed a politically activist faction of the Iranian clergy inspired by Khomeini to adapt its strategy to the circumstances in which it found itself in the 1960s and 1970s.
Iranian Shia Islam’s doctrinal flexibility helped the ulama to project themselves as the leading force of opposition to the shah’s oppressive regime. The same predilection for innovation provided Khomeini the space to advocate his theory of Islamic government as one to be guided by the supreme jurist, with the Shia ulama the ultimate repositories of both moral and political rectitude.20 This did not mean that lay Islamist radicals were totally absent from the Iranian scene. The writings and speeches of lay activists, such as Ali Shariati, contributed substantially to the delegitimization of the shah’s regime. Non-clerical forces, both secular and avowedly Muslim, contributed substantially to the success of the revolution. However, in the final analysis they could not compete with the ulama for the control of post-revolution Iran because of the latter’s superior organization, much greater financial resources, and divisions among the non-clerical forces.21
The Shia ulama have demonstrated, above all, a much greater capacity to remain relevant to contemporary issues than have their Sunni counterparts. This does not mean that the Sunni ulama have remained completely fossilized in terms of their interpretation of Islamic doctrines. Indeed, as Muhammad Qasim Zaman has demonstrated, the Sunni ulama have played a significant role as agents of change in Muslim countries.22 However, the pace of change among them has been considerably slower than among the Shia clerics. This has led to their political and social role being overshadowed by that of the college educated “new religious intellectuals,” the lay Islamists, drawn from the secular professions.23
It is worth reiterating that while in theory Islamist groups, both Sunni and Shia, advocate a return to pristine Islam, in practice they have become prisoners of their own context provided by the nation-state and thediscrete problems facing diverse Muslim societies. They are as much products of modernity as they are reactions to it. In fact, it can be argued quite convincingly, “they represent a vision of renewed Islam which is not only authentic to the ideal Islamic past but also adapted to the modern situation of Muslims.”24 Their greatest strength lies in their ability to combine their image of the ideal past with a vision that is considered by a substantial number of Muslims as being relevant to the contemporary situation.
Their rhetoric, which promises to bring Islam back to life and thereby provide solutions to the ills of their societies, resonates with large segments of Muslim populations. This is because Islam as a solution has not been tried and because other models imported from the West, including secular nationalism, capitalism and socialism, have largely failed to deliver either wealth or power or dignity to Muslim peoples. Moreover, Islamist groups appear to be paragons of probity when compared to the corrupt regimes that they seek to displace. However, if they come to power, Islamist parties will have to demonstrate the validity of their slogan “Islam is the solution” by addressing the concrete economic and social problems of their societies. It is then that their prescription that Islam possesses the solution to all social, economic, and political problems will be tested.
What cannot be disputed is the fact that the overwhelming majority of Islamist formations are primarily engaged in promoting their domestic agendas through largely peaceful means. They have participated in many cases in political processes under severe constitutional restraints and with the political cards visibly stacked against them. There are, however, extremist offshoots of some of the Islamist movements, such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, that have taken to violence against their own regimes. Some have made the United States their primary target because, among other things, they have come to the conclusion that the road to Cairo or Riyadh lies through Washington. This change in strategy is partly a function of their failure to overthrow local regimes supported by the United States and partly of their belief that the United States is bent upon dominating the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, for reasons relating to oil and Israel.
However, despite their dramatic exploits of the past few years, 9/11 above all, these groups, lacking national bases and loosely connected in an international “network of networks,” are fringe elements among the Islamists themselves. Their resort to indiscriminate violence, first domestically as in Egypt in the 1990s and then globally, signifies that they have given up on attaining political power within Muslim societies and shifted to dramatic acts of international terror in order to capture the imagination of the disgruntled Muslim youth. Since sensational acts speak louder than words, they have captured Western imaginations as well and thus have been able to portray themselves as Islam’s spokespersons especially to the Western world. Consequently, political Islam and terror have become synonymous in much of the discourse in the Western media and even in parts of academia.
In fact, these radical networks that espouse terror constitute a very small fringe of the Islamist tendencies. Their actions have been repudiated not only by the vast majority of the ulama and the governments in the Muslim world, but by mainstream Islamist movements as well. They add to the cacophony in the Muslim world and make it appear threatening to Western eyes, but they are not its true representatives. Moreover, as Wiktorowicz has argued, their “increasingly expansive violence…may erode popular support for Al Qaeda, as increased violence did to the GIA in Algeria, but in the meantime more groups of people will likely find themselves on the jihadi list of legitimate targets… attacks may become increasingly deadly as well”25 The deadliness of their attacks, however, does not make them Islam’s foremost spokespersons. In fact, it discredits them within the Muslim world itself, as does the absence of a realistic political agenda that informs their activities.
This article has attempted to do several things. First, it has tried to give a historical account of why religious authority has traditionally been dispersed and decentralized in the Muslim world. Second, it has attempted to analyze why the traditional religious authority of the ulama, the religious scholars, even if decentralized, has been gravely challenged during the past 200 years by the onset of colonialism, the print revolution, and mass literacy. Third, it has argued that the adoption of the nation-state model has fundamentally altered the nature of the debate in the Muslim world about religious authority by nationalizing religious establishments and putting them directly under the control of the state.
Fourth, it has tried to analyze movements and groups, especially those which we call Islamist that emerged in the twentieth century as a result of what can be termed the proto-Reformation in Islam. These groups have projected themselves as spokespersons for Islam and Muslims often in opposition to the ulama, but sometimes in concert with sections of the ulama themselves. The article has argued that their current popularity is largely a function of the nature of regimes in the Muslim world and the failure of imported models of governance and development because of their gross distortion by unrepresentative ruling elites.
Fifth, the article has contended that the transnational networks of violence and terrorism, such as al-Qaeda, although ideologically offshoots of Islamist groups, are extreme fringe elements without societal base. Their popularity has been exaggerated because of the electronic revolution that has given them high visibility through audio and video-cassettes and websites on the Internet. They may have the capacity to undertake dramatic acts of violence but are for the most part irrelevant to the political struggles, including those for democracy and social justice that are taking place on the ground in Muslim countries.
What is worth noting in this context is that the precursors of groups like al-Qaeda that were recruited from across the Muslim world and operated in Afghanistan in the 1980s were financed and armed in large measure by the United States to fight the Soviet presence in that country. Without the American-supported proxy war in Afghanistan, the various components of the al-Qaeda leadership and rank and file would not have come into contact with each other and been able to construct the global network that sustains them today.
Nor would they have learned the tools of their trade, which they have turned against the United States with such lethal effect. Above all, without the experience of the American-supported Afghan war, the idea of a global jihad undertaken by a motley group of transnational fighters would have never captured the imagination of even the miniscule minority now engaged in this venture.26
Finally, and fundamentally, this article has tried to argue that there is no individual or group or tendency that can speak authoritatively for Islam and Muslims. The Muslim world is too diverse and too divided, along national, jurisprudential, and ideological lines, for a single set of spokespersons to be acceptable to all major components of the worldwide umma, the community of believers. Despite the attempt by the most extreme elements to usurp the right to speak for Islam, what we have today is a cacophony of different, often competing, views and opinions in the Muslim world rather than the deliberate orchestration of a single dominant voice.
The Islamist voices among these are divided primarily along national lines with Islamist political formations principally preoccupied with issues that matter within the territorial confines of the states in which they operate.
It is important for Western strategic analysts and policy makers to be aware of the fact that there are multiple and competing groups aspiring to speak for Islam, and that the vast majority of them are confined within discrete national boundaries. Responding to them successfully will require three major adjustments in Western thinking. One, Western policy makers and analysts must discard the notion of political Islam as a monolith and must begin to appreciate the multiple manifestations of political Islam. Two, at the same time, they must shed their obsession with the most extreme and violent transnational groups.
These may be a nuisance and may even pose serious physical threats in the short term, but they do not have a serious constituency in the Muslim world and do not play a major part in formulating Muslim political perceptions, including those of the West. Crafting policy toward the Muslim world primarily in light of the terrorist challenge posed by these groups would be playing into their hands and alienating the vast majority of Muslims who would normally prefer to have no truck with terrorist groups. It could very well end up by turning the “clash of civilizations” thesis into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Three, Western policy makers and analysts must develop empathy for the concrete grievances of Muslim populations. Graham Fuller has put this very succinctly: “The real issue is not what Islam is, but what Muslims want.”27 Festering, unaddressed grievances generate support for Islamist groupings that are increasingly perceived in the Muslim world as the foremost articulators of their people’s political aspirations. These grievances range from issues of national self-determination, as in the case of Palestine, to freedom from oppressive regimes, as in the case of Egypt. Addressing such grievances sympathetically and spending political capital to redress them will significantly reduce hostility in the Muslim world toward the West, in general, and the United States, in particular. It will also help remove much of the anti-Western edge from Islamist political rhetoric itself. Deciphering Islam’s multiple voices and discriminating among them is no longer an intellectual luxury for policy makers and analysts in the West. It has become a strategic necessity.
* This article was inspired by my participation in a workshop in Amman in December 2004 on “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” It was jointly organized by Dialogues: Islamic World-US-the West, a program earlier based at New School University and currently housed at New York University, and Majlis El Hassan, the non-governmental organization run by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal. I would like to thank Mustapha Tlili, Director of Dialogues, for stimulating my interest in this very important subject.
1 See, for example, his “Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, pp. 47-60.
2 Most famously, his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996).
3 For a succinct analysis of different types of Islamists, see International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, Middle East/North Africa Report No. 37, March 2, 2005, available on the Internet at http:// www.crisisgroup.org/library/documents/middle_east north_africa/egypt_north_africa/ 37_understanding_islamism.pdf.
4 Michael Scott Doran, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 1, January/February 2002, pp. 22-42.
5 For an insightful discussion of their arguments justifying the killing of civilians, see Quintan Wiktorowicz, “A Genealogy of Radical Islam,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 28, No. 2, March-April 2005, especially pp. 86-92.
6 Robert W. Hefner, “Introduction: Modernity and the Remaking of Muslim Politics,” in Robert W. Hefner, ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005), p. 6.
7 Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 1982) p. 162.
8 Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003) p. 146.
9 According to one report, “While Sistani’s thought is far from the radical Shiite leaders who led the Iranian revolution, it isn’t accurate to say it’s apolitical. While he himself leaves politics to politicians, Sistani’s understanding of religious law leaves very little of the world beyond the scrutiny of religious leaders.” Philip Kennicott, “The Religious Face of Iraq,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2005.
10 L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (Columbia University Press, New York, 2000), p. 54.
11 For a convincing argument that this has been the case, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Pluralism, Democracy, and the ‘Ulama,’” in Robert W. Hefner, ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000, 2005) pp. 60-86.
12 For details of this argument, see Carl W. Ernst, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2003) pp. 66-67, and Richard W. Bulliet, “The Crisis Within Islam,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 11-19.
13 L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (Columbia University Press, New York, 2000), pp. 93-98.
14 Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999), p. 112. Italics in the original.
15 See, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt (Columbia University Press, New York, 2002) on Egypt, and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-I-Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994), on Pakistan.
16 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996), p. 26.
17 Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (AEI Press, Washington, DC, 2004).
18 Charles Tripp, “Sayyid Qutb: The Political Vision,” in Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival (Zed Books, London, 1994), p. 178.
19 For Saudi Arabia, see Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, (Belknap, Cambridge, MA, 2004), ch. 5; for Pakistan, see Vali Nasr, “Military Rule, Islamism, and Democracy in Pakistan” Middle East Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2, Spring 2004, p. 205.
20 See Daniel Brumberg, Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001), for Khomeini’s innovative ideas about the structure of Islamic government.
21 Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2003), chs. 9 and 10.
22 See, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002).
23 The term “new religious intellectuals” is borrowed from Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996), p. 44.
24 Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999), p. 141.
25 Quintan Wiktorowicz, “A Genealogy of Radical Islam,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 28 No. 2, March-April 2005, especially p. 94.
26 For further details, see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (Pantheon New York, 2004).
27 Graham Fuller, “The Future of Political Islam,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81 No. 2, March/April 2002, p. 50.
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