Secularism
And Islamism
In The Arab world
By Sukant Chandan
10 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Secularism in the political leadership in the Arab world has had a
very short life-span if put into historical context. It became a
dominant political current for a few decades in the latter half of
the twentieth century, and today is seeing a near complete collapse
in political movements struggling for independence and development in
the region. Different Islamic leaders have been the main political inspiration
for Arabs in their liberation movements. Salahuddin al-Ayoub, more popularly
known as Saladin, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the
twelfth century is probably the Islamic leader most widely known outside
of the region. Saladin’s legacy remains a profound source of inspiration
for Arabs, especially so for radical Islamists who not only see the
parallels with today’s military invasions and occupations, but
directly employ this history in their political agitation in their fight
against what they consider as the modern-day Crusaders. More recently,
Political Islam was at the forefront of the fight against colonialism
in the twentieth century. There are examples of movements and leaders
from every Arab country, but some of the more well-known include Sheikh
Izz al-Din Qassam, after who Hamas have named their armed wing. Sheikh
Al-Qassam was killed by the British colonialists in Palestine
in an armed confrontation; his death sparked what some call the First
Palestinian Intifada from 1936 to ‘39. In Iraq Shia Islamists
united with their Sunni counterparts against the British colonialists
in 1920, a popular uprising from which one of biggest present-day Iraqi
Islamist insurgent groups, the ‘Brigades of the 1920 Revolution,’
takes their name. Shia Islamism in Iraq can also be linked to the emergence
of the Lebanese Hezbollah. Shia Islamist scholars such as Fadlallah,
a prominent radical Shia scholar based in Lebanon who has close ties
to Hezbollah, were immigrants to Lebanon from the religious centres
of Iraq and Iran. On a theoretical level it has been the ideas of Muhammad
Abdu and Al-Afghani in the nineteenth century, and further back to Ibn-Tammiyah
from the fourteenth century who have been some of the most important
contributors to Islamist ideology.
While one can trace back
the influences on modern Islamism from the region’s own history,
making it an integral part of the political
identity of the people and their struggles, in contrast it was the
cultural and political influences from outside of the region, in
Europe, that influenced modern secular Arab nationalism. The founding
father of modern secular Arab nationalism was Syrian Sati al-Husri,
who was inspired by French republicanism and nineteenth century German
nationalism. Arab nationalism became the ascendant political force in
the post Second World War period.
Like the rest of the ‘Third
World’, the post Second World War period saw the increasing strength
of secular and left-wing nationalist currents in the region, inspired
by the example of the independence and social development of the Socialist
Bloc in the face of neocolonial hostility. The direct or indirect support
from the USSR, East European socialist countries and China, to radical
Third World movements also played a major role in their growth.
It was the preeminent secular
Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt whose nationalization of
the Suez Canal signalled the pinnacle of the modern Arab renaissance.
This in turn brought about an unprecedented atmosphere of Arab confidence
that invigorated various trends of Arab nationalism, a period in which
branches of the Arab nationalist and socialist Ba’ath Party came
to power in Syria and Iraq. The Arab National Movement, mainly based
in Beirut, developed into various left-wing forces such as the Marxist
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who put the largely
unknown tragedy that befell the Palestinian people onto the world agenda
by being the first Arab armed group to hijack passenger airplanes. And
of course Yasser Arafat’s secular and left nationalist Fatah led
the
Palestinian national revolution by the late 1960s.
In this same period Islamist
forces had also been gaining momentum and were often in the ranks of
the independence movements. Those inside and outside of the region with
vested interests in opposing the anti-imperialist leftist and nationalist
surge supported sections of political Islam that were in opposition
to the secularists. In the light of the complex interaction between
the two political movements, this relationship is all too often over-simplified.
In Algeria theFLN was an Islamist nationalist movement as much as one
inspired by the ideas of Fanon, Mao and Che Guevara, although the Islamist
current was purged shortly after independence. Many of the original
Fatah leadership (including Arafat by his own claims) belonged to the
movement to which Hamas is the ‘Palestinian branch’: the
Muslim Brotherhood or ‘Ikhwan Muslimeen’, a major force
of mass radical
anti-imperialism after World War Two with branches throughout the Arab
world. The Ikhwan was strongest in Egypt, the home of its founder Hassan
al-Banna. Another Egyptian leader of the Ikhwan after Hassan al-Banna’s
death, Sayyid Qutb, was possibly modern political Islam’s greatest
strategist and thinker. He was executed by Nasser’s regime in
1966 after being accused of plotting to overthrow the state. Initially
Nasser’s Free Officers and the Ikhwan were allies in the struggle
against the British, before Nasser’s regime conducted a massive
repression against the movement, jailing and cruelly torturing many
of their activists. A fact little known outside of the region is that
the Palestinian Ikhwan also played a major role in the resistance against
the establishment of Israel in Palestine in the late 1940s.
The 1967 defeat of Nasser
and the Arab armies by Israel can now clearly be seen as the beginning
of the decline in leadership of the secular forces. As soon as the left
nationalists in the Middle East gained power, their leadership in the
struggle against Zionism and neocolonialism began to wane. While much
of the 1970s saw struggles being conducted and led by left nationalist
forces, this decade also witnessed a qualitative shift in favour of
radical Islamism. The Arab people were incensed when the Arab Republic
of Egypt under President Sadat sued for peace with Israel, giving the
Ikhwan and other more radical Islamists a greater hearing from the masses.
The event which contributed to the growth of the Islamists more than
any other was the overthrow by Islamists of the West’s strongest
ally in the region after Israel — Iran under the Shah —
which was up to then ‘an island of stability’ according
to former US president, Jimmy Carter.
The two most important manifestations
of the growth of radical
Islamist movements in the 1980s were the Lebanese Hezbollah which was
directly assisted in military training and infrastructure by the Pasdaran,
an Iranian military force, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Both
movements saw Iran as their chief inspiration.
PIJ were the first openly
Islamist movement to conduct armed struggle against the Israeli occupation
in the early 1980s, and the first movement in the Sunni community to
use the controversial tactic of kamikaze attacks. At the same time the
Palestinian Ikhwan were involved in building up a network of charitable
and religious organizations that were invaluable social institutions
to the lives of many Palestinians, especially in Gaza. The Ikhwan established
the Islamic University in Gaza in the late 1970s, the construction of
such a centre of learning, debate and activity constituted a big step
forward for them and forged a new generation of Islamist educated youth.
Nevertheless, PIJ was a challenge to the Palestinian Ikhwan as it was
the only Islamist armed resistance to Israel at the time. This meant
that many young Ikhwan members either joined PIJ or put pressure on
their leadership to develop and implement a militant strategy for the
Palestinian revolution. The fact that one of the most charismatic and
astute ideologues of the Palestinian Ikhwan, Fathi Shiqaqi, had split
and formed PIJ, must have added to the Palestinian Ikhwan’s image
at the time as a movement unable and unwilling to address the challenges
of the Palestinian liberation struggle. This possibly speeded up preparations
of Sheikh Yassin and
other leaders of the Palestinian Ikhwan for armed struggle which came
to fruition with the establishment of the Harakat Moqawama
al-Islamiyya — the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ or
Hamas — on the second day of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987.
The initial document that Hamas issued in 1988, ‘The Charter’,
is problematic as it gives credence to the fabricated Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. It has to be borne in mind that this anti-Semitic document
has wide currency across much of the political spectrum in the region
due to the West’s support for Israeli settler-colonialism, and
the feeling of powerlessness amongst the masses in the face of Israeli
aggression. Hamas issued various subsequent communiqués which
give a more accurate exposition as to their ideology, strategy and tactics.
The PLO claim that the 1987
Intifada was led by them, and that they were the ‘sole legitimate
representatives of the Palestinian people’. Nevertheless, it has
been argued by Dr Azzam Tamimi’s in his new book on Hamas, Unwritten
Chapters, that the PLO’s jealous guarding of their claim to leadership
may have been partly due to Hamas playing a major role in the Intifada
and challenging the PLO’s claim to leadership.
In an ironic twist of history
it was the Western and Chinese-supported Afghan mujahideen who fought
against the Soviet
army and pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan that gave further
impetus to the development of modern militant Islamism which was soon
to become a powerful force against neocolonialism in the region. The
Afghan jihad allowed militants to overcome the rivalry between different
groups that existed along national and ethnic lines. Overcoming these
divisions and forging pan-Arab and pan-Islamist unity were some of the
main strategies of Bin Laden and Zawahiri in the construction of their
organization that was to become the violent ‘World Islamic Front
for Jihad against Crusaders and Jews,’ commonly known as Al-Qaeda,
meaning ‘The Base’, formed in 1998. Initially for Bin Laden,
Zawahiri and others, Afghanistan was the base for international jihad,
today it is mainly Iraq.
By the late 1980s the popularity
of Islamism and the Islamist
movement was such that the hitherto secular Arab nationalist Saddam
Hussein, like Muammar Qaddafi before him, started to formally synthesise
Islamism with Iraqi and Arab nationalist ideas into the social and political
fabric of Iraq. The most outwardly visible example of this was adding
‘Allah u Ahkbar’ – Allah is the greatest – to
the Iraqi flag during the war against Iraq in 1990. Saddam Hussein initiated
a massive mosque building program, and attempted to co-opt the Islamic
revival that was taking place into the Ba’athist strategy of positioning
Iraq as the vanguard Arab nation resisting neocolonialism. Saddam Hussein
may have chiefly been responsible in contributing to today’s synthesis
of radical Arabism and Islamism, a view advanced by Jerry Long in his
book, Saddam’s War of Words. The 1990 war against Iraq saw for
the first time a unity between left-wing, nationalist and Islamist forces
in the region and beyond against Western aggression.
The United States’
establishment of large military bases in Saudi
Arabia during the campaign against Iraq fundamentally shifted the
position of many Islamists who hitherto had been allied with the US
against nationalists in the region. These Islamists, Osama Bin Laden
being the most well-known amongst them, could not sit idly by and see
the Islamic lands of Iraq and Saudi Arabia occupied by the US. This
was compounded by a realisation amongst some Islamists that the US and
Britain were not going to allow them to use their own oil wealth for
the benefit of their own countries. Western oil exploitation was going
to mean that the only natural wealth of the Gulf - oil - was going to
run out in the next four decades or so, and that they had to fight to
wrest control of their own oil from the West before they were left with
nothing. These political shifts culminated in the establishment of Al-Qaeda
and many other organizations that share their military vanguardist outlook,
and many more yet that share their political aims of an Arab world free
from Western domination.
Today one sees the shift
from secular nationalism to Islamism nearing the final stages of completion.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writing for The Guardian on June 12, 2007, from Palestinian
refugee camps in Lebanon vividly described this transition, contrasting
the “ailing, ill-equipped and ill-fed fighters of the old secular
factions” and “muscular, bearded and well-equipped jihadis”
funded through the network of Islamist organisations that spans the
Middle East, and describing the migration of Palestinian radicals, both
young and middle-aged, from the former Marxist camp to the Islamist.
As one Marxist in his 50s told Abdul-Ahad, “I have never lost
my political compass. Wherever the Americans and the Israelis are, I
am on the other side. So if Hezbollah and the Iranians and the Islamists
are against the Americans now, so I am an Islamist.” Highlighting
the continuities between armed secular groups of times gone by with
that of armed Islamist groups of today, a PFLP leader explains to Abdul-Ahad
that “most of those jihadis were once fighters with us and other
Palestinian factions … if you come to me and give me $100,000,
I will split from the PFLP and form the PFLP: Believers’ Army.
It’s so easy.” Another secular leader explains of the hopelessness
and anger at their position which drives these wretched youth of the
Arab world to militancy: “we have young men who have nothing,
no hope of a
nation, no hope for the right of refugees to return, nothing but the
two streets of the camp. With this situation I wouldn’t be surprised
if half the camp becomes jihadis.”
Islamists have always been
at the forefront of the struggle against
colonialism and neocolonialism in the Middle East since the times of
the Crusades. Most academics, policymakers and those who support the
independence and development of the Arab world have some knowledge of
the post Second World War period when Islamist movements were supported
by those who saw them as a counterweight to the secular anti-imperialist
movements of various Arab nationalists and Marxist trends. Further study
and reflection on the contemporary history of
the Arab world may on the other hand lead to a more nuanced
understanding of this relationship, rather than labeling one side
‘reactionaries’ and the other ‘progressives’.
Perhaps it is time to
move away from this outdated and problematic terminology. Islamists
see themselves at least as equals to the radical secularists if not
the rightful owners to the leadership of the national and social liberation
struggle. The end of the strife between the Islamists and what remains
of the secularists in the anti-imperialist struggle, is not just attributable
to the weakness of the secularists but is a sign of the strength of
the independence movements in the Arab world. Furthermore, the Islamists’
leadership in this struggle — such as that of the Iraqi resistance
— lacking support that the secularists enjoyed from the Socialist
Bloc, is indicative of the strength of their ideology’s roots
in the history, culture and identity of the masses in the region.
*Sukant Chandan is a London-based freelance journalist, researcher and
political analyst. He has contributed to several publications including
Al-Ahram Weekly, Counterpunch and the Kuala Lumpur-based Third World
Network. He runs two websites:
http://ouraim.blogspot.com/
and http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.com/
and can be contacted at [email protected]
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