kepel

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Gilles Kepel. JIHAD: THE TRAIL OF POLITICAL ISLAM. Translated by Anthony F. Roberts. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

BIN LADEN MAY BE LIVING,

BUT HIS CAUSE MAY BE DYING

This book was doubtless in the making well before 11 September 2001, but Kepel before publication managed to incorporate references to the attack on America and the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. These world-changing events did not divert Kepel from his main argument at the last minute; indeed, they confirmed it.

Kepel's book is a relief for anyone feeling down about the Islamist onslaught so awesomely dramatized by 9-11.

I myself felt down as I tried to understand the ensuing "engagement" between Islam and the West. I was trying since 9-11 to develop a vision of a slow but steady discovery of common ground in a global setting that would demand accommodation for mutual survival. As my reading went onward, that vision faded. In its place emerged a depressing picture of a long twilight clash of incompatible cultures, punctuated by spectacular episodes of violence here in America and around the world.

Islamist extremism seemed to me inextricably rooted in the main tenets of traditional Islamic belief. I came to suspect that, no matter how successfully America might wage its war on terrorists, Islam never will root out extreme hostility toward the West. My reading of both Bernard Lewis and V. S. Naipaul reinforced this suspicion. The Islam-West "engagement" from this pessimistic perspective came to look grim.

The tactical actions being taken by the Bush administration as it copes with threats from the Middle East have only reinforced this dismal expectation. It has shown little evidence that it has a vision of America operating productively in the interconnected age of globalization. Bush's obsessive repetition of war whoops toward Iraq has seemed to fill the screen and to block out wider thought.

Kepel's study of the Islamist jihad movements persuaded me to stop and reconsider these seemingly dismal prospects.

ISLAMISM EXPANDED TO REPLACE NATIONALISM

Kepel first tracks the expansion of Islamism from its rise in the early 1970s, following the independence movements in Muslim countries. Islam in the late 1960s, says Kepel, found various ways of relating to the nationalist regimes that took power after colonial withdrawal. (48) Nationalist leaders generally were wary of allowing the religious influences of Islam to penetrate directly into politics. (John Esposito and others have similarly traced this development.)

Meanwhile, however, Saudi Arabia was fostering and exporting conservative Wahhabist Islamic practice through the Muslim world. Fueled by its growing wealth from oil, this program sought to preserve social order and political stability. But Egyptian Muslim Brothers, driven out by Nasser and taken in by Saudi Arabia, linked Saudi Wahhabism with radical Islamist thought derived particularly from the Egyptian Sayyud Qutb. (51)

As the 1960s ended, Kepel says, Islamic leaders in all Muslim countries except Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (which was peculiarly defined as an Islamic polity) lacked "control of the public debate over the central values of society." (52)

But the political failure of nationalist regimes set the stage for the "sudden emergence of militant Islamist movements in most of the world's Muslim nations." (61) These movements politicized Islam while raising a new vision of a "virtuous Islamic civilization." (62) The intellectual foundations of the Islamist movements lay in the ideas of Sayyud Qutb of Egypt, Mawlana Mawdudi of Pakistan, and Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. (23) They installed the traditional concept of jihad against the unbelieving as the cornerstone of the Islamist political agenda.

Kepel delineates the vision shared by these three Islamist ideologues: "They all called for the establishment of an Islamic state," (23), thus thoroughly focusing the Islamist movements on an out-and-out political objective for the first time. The Islamic state would take the place of the failed secular nationalist states of the post-colonial period. This Islamist view rejected the separation between Islamic culture and secular politics that traditionally had prevailed through the colonial and early nationalist periods. (23) And it called for direct action to achieve the Islamic state.

What brought on this Islamist emergence? Kepel offers a complex social and political answer. Reduced to simple outline, Islamism began to rise as secular nationalism failed to satisfy the needs of the growing urban poor and the devout middle classes. The Arab defeat in the 1973 war against Israel symbolized nationalism's failure. As Islamism gained its legs through the 1970s in the region, the Iranian situation reached the crisis stage. Khomeini triumphed in 1979 and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This was an Islamist political victory of profound importance, for it demonstrated the power of jihad as a political instrument. Kepel quotes a spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: "As far as [Fathi] Shqaqi was concerned, the victory of the Islamic Revolution 'demonstrated that even against an enemy as powerful as the Shah, a jihad of determined militants could overcome all obstacles." (123)

Kepel goes on to explain the political tensions within the Islamic world that resulted from the Iranian revolution. Anyone fearing the rise of a united Islamic hegemony might take heart from this tangled tale of religious and political motives. Again simplifying Kepel's account, we see Saudi Arabia striving to contain the revolutionary zeal uncorked by the Iranian coup under Khomeini. The Saudis worried that the extremism of Islamic jihad would jeopardize even strongly entrenched Islamic regimes such as theirs. The devastating war mounted against Iran by Saddam Hussein of Iraq had the backing of Saudi Arabia (and the US). Saddam was a useful tool for preventing the revolution in Iran from spilling into other Muslim countries. (120)

The trail of political Islam followed by Kepel leads most significantly to the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Islamist campaign against the Soviet Union solidified jihadist motives. It brought from elsewhere in the Middle East recruits to the jihad movement, including Osama bin Laden. Since the US invasion of Afghanistan in pursuit of Al Qaeda, we have become acquainted with the picture drawn by Kepel--a mix of arms, money, terrorist training, and extremist interpretations of Islam created throughout the decade-long resistance to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.

For us, the most important outcome of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was what came afterward.

First, the Arab adventurers who came to wage jihad against the secular forces of evil scattered "to every remote corner of the earth." (150) This dispersion of extremists was compounded by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It "demolished the Islamic consensus that the Saudis had laboriously built up and kept intact throughout the maelstrom of the Iranian revolution." (10) With the Gulf War, Islamic radical jihadists (most notably bin Laden) demonized the US and condemned Saudi Arabia for allowing our "satanic" military presence on the Holy Land of Islam.

Second, by 1996 the fundamentalist Taliban regime took over in Afghanistan. Its attempt to re-create a society based on strict reading of the sacred texts led to the extremes of punishment, the neglect of human needs, and the political impasse with which we became familiar after 9-11.

ISLAMISM LOST ITS CHANCE AND IS IN DECLINE

Indeed, all these events marking the rise of Islamism over secular nationalism are becoming familiar enough to Americans seeking to understand why we were attacked on 9-11. But what distinguishes Kepel's analysis is that he discerns in them the FAILURE and DECLINE of Islamism following its rise in the 1990s.

Revolutionary jihadists, in his view, gained their opportunity to realize the vision of a "virtuous Islamic civilization" with their political successes in Iran in 1979 and later in Afghanistan. They failed to export the Iranian revolutionary experience elsewhere in the Muslim world--except for the creation of terrorist groups, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon. Their commitment to violence failed to win the mass of Muslims to the cause. The urban poor and the devout middle classes, not to mention pious intellectuals, received no benefits from the violence and bloodshed unleashed by the jihadists throughout the Muslim world. Islamists proved that while they could disrupt they could not govern for the benefit of the Muslim masses.

Kepel documents Islamism's dead-end political ideology by surveying the damages around the Muslim world:

uncontrollable violence in Algeria and Egypt, ineffectual violence in Palestine,...collapse in the Sudan and Afghanistan, religious civil war in Pakistan, co-option by a dictator and exhaustion of moral credit in Mahathir's Malaysia and Suharto's Indonesia, inability to live under the constraints of a government coalition in Turkey and Jordan....the bankruptcy of the Iranian regime....(368)

Khomeini's famous 1989 fatwah authorizing the death of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for his "impious" novel, The Satanic Verses, represents, in Kepel's view, a desperate climax of the failed Iranian revolutionary experiment. It was just a "sop...to the radicals, " designed to cover up the failure of the revolution "to export itself in the face of Saudi containment" and to meet the social expectations of its supporters. (364)

Desperate acts, Kepel suggests, are the remaining stock in trade of the Islamist jihadists after their failures to implement a new Islamist political order. That's how he sees 9-11--"a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation, and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength and irrepressible might." (375)

As violent Islamist jihadism declines in its power to mobilize Muslims, says Kepel, another political view is rising to replace it, just as Islamism decades earlier pushed out secular nationalism. This more moderate form of Islamist thinking is turning against the Qutb-Mawdudi-Khomeini doctrines, which saw the sovereignty of Allah "as the central criterion of an Islamic state." (372) Kepel hears Islamist thinkers now seeking "the 'democratic essence' of Islam." (368) This means some separation between religion and civil society. It seems to suggest a recapturing under globalized conditions of the non-political position of Islam in the colonial and national periods.

Among the references Kepel advances to support this view is an editorial by a respected Arab writer, Abdel Wahab al-Effendi, "The Sudanese Experiment and the Crisis of the Contemporary Islamist Movement: Lessons and Significance." It appeared in December 1999 in a London-based Arabic daily newspaper. (361) Effendi cited the ouster of the Islamist head of Sudan earlier that month as an instance of the wider failure of Islamist governments. Effendi saw a multiple failure: Islamists allowed the acquisition of power to deflate the utopian dream of an Islamic state; they failed to resolve internal conflicts in the Islamist movement; and they failed to implement democratic procedures. (362).

Kepel interprets Effendi to mean that he and like-minded Islamist intellectuals and middle class allies were yearning for "an alliance with mainstream secular society whereby they can escape the trap of their own political logic." (363)

These and other evidences of Islamist revision and regret lead Kepel to conclude that "Muslims no longer view Islamism as the source of utopia, and this more pragmatic vision augurs well for the future." (366) He sees Muslims emerging from the failed "Islamist era", wishing to construct a future "through openness to the world and to democracy." (373) This impulse, he says, liberates Muslims from the "straitjacket of dogma" imposed by the Islamists; it connects them with "the great tradition of Muslim civilization throughout history, whose strength has always been an extreme sensitivity and receptiveness to change." (373) Mohammed thus meets 21st century globalization and decides that he can deal with it.

Whew! Kepel's optimistic view will uplift anyone feeling down about Islam-West relations, punctuated by 9-11. He hastens to warn us, however, that the turn toward a better Muslim future now hinges on the decisions of the sovereign states and their ruling elites. They must turn toward more democratic modes:

They must assist at the birth of a Muslim form of democracy that would embrace culture, religion, and political and economic modernity as never before. (374)

Kepel--and all of us--may hope that younger elites now coming to power, such as the articulate King Abdullah of Jordan, will see a tide turning and reform their political structures. We may hope to see them give legitimate voice not only to the middle class and intellectuals but also to the still-impoverished mass of Muslims, to whom Islamism has brought nothing but excitement and bloodshed. If they fail to reform, Kepel believes that militant jihad could gain new life. This would be a missed opportunity of historic dimensions.

I am not sure that Kepel advances enough evidence to support his thesis that Islamists are in critical decline. They surely still have fire in their bellies sufficient to raise plenty of hell around the world. Osama bin Laden lives, apparently, capable of inspiring another spectacular attack on us. Just as surely, however, Islamists have amply shown us that they are as incapable of governing as they are capable of destroying. In that insight, Kepel is right. Hannah Arendt's classic analysis of violence remains applicable: violence cannot be power--it can create nothing.

HOW SHOULD AMERICA ADDRESS ISLAM?

If Kepel even partly is pointing us in the right direction, America must ask itself whether our current approach to the Islamic world is in step. Are our policies likely to give wind to the small sails of democracy that Kepel sees on the horizon? Are they likely to encourage the anti-Islamist sentiments that Kepel sees rising in the middle class and among intellectuals? Or are they more likely to keep fueling the hatred of Muslims and keeping the Islamist flame alive?

One way or another, America has to do more than fight the immediate and necessary war on Islamist terrorists. We need to show massive support for the forward-looking Muslims that Kepel has found. We need to find the wave of post-Islamist moderation and ride it for all it is worth.

This need points up a danger in the style of George W. Bush's vigorous conduct of the war on terror, at this writing focused obsessively on Iraq. Unmediated, it may perpetuate the Muslim perception of "Great Satan." It may fail to show that America's greatest care is the welfare of moderate Muslims who, if Kepel is right, could take control out of the ashes of Islamist extremism. America should be their allies in every way, economic, intellectual, religious, political. This should be our priority; and it should drive our relations all across the Muslim world, from Morocco through Israel to the Philippines.

Our military strategy against terrorists needs to be a subset of our diplomatic and cultural strategy for a Muslim civilization that can exist with us in the conditions of globalization.

Continuing violence in Israel and bin Laden's recent renewal of threats combine with the winds of war stirring over Iraq to retard my personal conversion to optimism. Still, Kepel seems to have identified a promising pattern to events. One hopes that in some inner circle of the administration, far-seeing people are looking at the same pattern and preparing to brief Bush on it.

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25 November 2002; last modified 28 November 2002 Copyright © 2002 Richard P. Richter