Islam

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ISLAM.

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH EUROPE
THE DEFEAT OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ITS AFTERMATH
JIHAD TURNED INWARD
WESTOXICATION AND ITS CURE
ISLAM IN EUROPE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

In 1913 the spiritual leader of Reformist Islam, Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), a Syrian living in Egypt, wrote a rave review of an Arabic translation of a book by a French pamphleteer entitled The Roots of Anglo-Saxon Superiority. One should learn from the pace-setting civilization of our era, he wrote, and borrow as many of its ideas as possible, to the extent that they are compatible with Muslim identity. The fight against the British occupation of Egypt, to which he was committed, should by no means extend to its culture. Egyptians, said Rida, had a great deal to learn from the British, even though they had to flatly reject British political rule and claims about the "white man's burden."

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH EUROPE

This review nicely captures the mood on the eve of World War I, the high point of Islamic modernism's love affair with Europe. In a way, it marked the culmination of a process begun in the 1820s, when Muslim thinkers and decision makers in the Middle East drew the lessons of Napoleon's invasion, which had laid bare how far Muslims lagged behind Europeans. Travelers and students who flocked to Paris and London (some students were sent by modernizing rulers) confirmed the finding. Europe had developed a civilization that was not only dominant militarily but was also superior in science, organization, social etiquette, and government. A vast translation effort was undertaken, both by rulers, who issued fiats to that effect and by curious intellectuals eager to quench the thirst to discover and unlock the secrets of European superiority and to get to know its major exponents.

The impact on mainstream Islamists, not to speak of secularized intellectuals (many of them Christian) was enormous, despite the efforts of religious, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives to block any borrowing from the so-called Crusader West. The major outcome was the birth of the Salafi movement. It was headed by Sheikh al-Azhar, Muhammad Abduh of Egypt (1849–1905). In its glorious early age, Islam was able to progress and develop by rationally adapting to circumstances while preserving its essence. It had lost this ability, wrote Abduh, somewhere late in the third century of its existence. The aim of the Salafis was to regain this capacity.

Because Islam is an orthopraxis (a system in which behavior has precedence over belief) rather than an orthodoxy, the way to regain Islam's original flexibility, according to the Salafis, was to revitalize law and education rather than theology. The major tool was to be the ijtihad, the authority jurists possessed to amend, even change, the sharia (law) by applying personal legal reasoning in evaluating the urgent needs of the Muslim community. Innovation in such matters should not be considered evil, as most traditionalists held, but helpful. The innovative ideas to be absorbed could be indigenous or European. Had not Islam taken on the great ideas of Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages? As far as possible, said Abduh and Rida, such borrowing ought to be done under the norms of al-Salaf al-Salih, as expressed in the rich and pluralistic hadith (oral tradition) and legal literature.

The Salafi movement had a deep influence on the young high school-educated generation, especially in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia. It had its Shiite analogues in Iran and Iraq.

THE DEFEAT OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ITS AFTERMATH

World War I and its immediate aftermath abruptly changed all that. Rida and many of his disciples felt duty-bound to revise their ideas. The Ottoman Empire, a bulwark of Muslim identity, suffered a crushing defeat, lost most of its territory, and was soon abrogated by the secularist modernizer Kemal Ataturk. Large chunks of the Abode of Islam, including the Fertile Crescent (Rida's native region) fell under European domination. Egypt was no more the exception in the Middle East but the rule. Europe showed what Rida and his young, radical followers came to see as its real face—arrogant, domineering, and expansionist. For the radical wing of the Salafi movement, known as Al-Manar, which had grown apart from the older and more liberal wing, it was no longer possible to preserve the distinction between Europe's cultural and political facets, especially since the world war seemed to unveil underlying irrational and destructive strains in European culture. Could it be that Europe itself was in decline and did not have much to offer anymore? This doubt was sustained by the translated writings of Oswald Spengler and the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Alexis Carrel. These prophets of doom, along with their British counterpart, Arnold Toynbee, headed the nonfiction best-seller list in Arab countries in the interwar years.

Yet the major preoccupation of the Al-Manar trend, named after the weekly newspaper edited by Rida, was not Europe but internal reexamination. The question the radicals asked was: Are we still Muslims? Could it be that, enfeebled by centuries of decline, Muslims had already surrendered to the temptations of European civilization? Unlike the liberal Salafis, who preserved the hope that Islam and modernity were reconcilable, Rida answered this last question in the affirmative. Most Muslims, especially those who were modernized, were no more than geographical, or nominal, Muslims, observing only the external rules of behavior, lacking belief and any understanding of the significance of those rules. They cut corners in ritual and, above all, did not apply the sharia either under foreign rule or even in regions that remained independent or autonomous. In such a state of affairs, ijtihad was still needed, but it should be more uniform, more controlled throughout the Muslim world. Because Islam's identity was weak during that period, it was incapable of assimilating a large number of innovations or any pluralistic practices. The radicals thus tried to build mental and behavioral walls to defend against the siege on a beleaguered faith.

The upshot was a split in the Salafi movement, which was completed by the 1930s. While the radicals grew in strength, thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928), the liberals, who claimed loyalty to Abduh's legacy, moved to the left. They embraced world culture and progress. Some of them, like the Egyptian thinker Taha Hussein, put early Islam under scrutiny, following research methods learned from Western Orientalists. Rida as well as Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, saw such Westerners as enemies of the faith who were burrowing into and sabotaging Islam from within. But there was no doubt about who was winning this debate—the radicals with their broadening social base attracted great numbers of the young, the urban disenfranchised, and even the peasants, well beyond Egypt's borders.

JIHAD TURNED INWARD

If Islam in the first half of the twentieth century transformed ijtihad, in the second half it transformed jihad, or holy war. This was a much more politicized phase than the first. As Muslim countries achieved their independence, the attitudes that had given precedence to external enemies—the colonial powers—began to fade away, as did the tendency to externalize guilt, to blame others for all the problems of indigenous societies, to view them as the result of imperialist dominance. In other words, the jihad turned inward.

At that moment, the historical force that came to the fore was the populist state, which was able to mobilize the masses and was often controlled by military elites drawn from the lower middle class. This state, whether embodied in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt (1952–1970), in Baath-led Syria (1970 on) or Iraq (1968–2003), or in Algeria under the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN (1962–1988), was characterized by a sincere and combative anti-imperialism. The Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk could therefore not impugn the state as collaborationist or as besotted with the West, as they had the old upper-class rulers and their liberal Salafi allies. Besides, the elites in the new states were commoners and proponents of a new and galvanizing nativist ideology, namely, Pan-Arabism. These elites could thus reasonably aspire to gain cultural dominance and develop a modernizing civil religion with its own symbols and rituals, often using Islamic themes. And because the new elites were soldiers by profession, they possessed the advantages of the military: relative efficiency, order, ruthlessness, and disrespect for the legal process. They had at their service techniques to control the populace that they had learned from like-minded European regimes on both the Right and the Left, as their use of secret police, detention camps, and listening devices demonstrate.

Finally, the technological revolution in audiovisual communications (notably the transistor radio and television), which coincided with the advent of the nationalist state, favored the interventionist ambitions of the new masters. Initially these rulers exercised a virtual monopoly on the press and on book publishing. They saw the potential of the new audiovisual media, when buttressed by an ever-vigilant censorship. These media penetrated every corner of people's lives and reached the largely illiterate population of women, small children, and rural men. Social groups that had been beyond the reach of modernity, Europe's crowning achievement, were now drawn into the fold.

The social sphere was rapidly shrinking as the state's role increased. The fares the new media were selling were attractive in their substance and in their packaging: the nationalist gospel was a kind of ersatz religion. It focused on solidarity, deftly couched in Muslim terms, on the one hand, and on the promise of economic modernization as the avenue for the good life on the other. In this brand-new situation, the radical Salafis (notably the Muslim Brotherhood, first the allies of the military in power, then their victims) had to reassess their worldview.

WESTOXICATION AND ITS CURE

A number of thinkers in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s (Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, Said Hawwa in Syria, Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr in Iraq, and, in a different setting, Ala Al Ahmad and Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran) pioneered the new thinking. This fell under three headings.

The diagnosis: Twentieth-century Islam faced a mortal danger, worse than anything it had ever known. The danger came this time from within, from leaders and movements that were technically Muslim, that were responsible both for enforcing the law and for persuading. In their manner, these rulers were sincerely devoted to the welfare of their people. And yet they were inadvertently bringing a calamity of spiritual extinction down upon these very masses. Indeed, the new masters, much more than the liberal Salafis, were deeply committed to "westoxication," a term coined both in Persian and in Arabic. They were intoxicated by Western, European ideas totally alien to Islam, such as nationalism, economic growth as an overriding goal, socialism, and the primacy of human-made over God-made laws. By manipulating the media and using the enticements and punishments at their disposal, they inculcated these ideas into the subconscious of the masses. They thus fostered an addiction to modernity and to the "good life" it promised, here on earth and not in the hereafter. As a result, the Abode of Islam was in a state of virtual apostasy. It had abandoned its faith for faithlessness. This state of affairs was all the more deleterious for being subconscious. In Muslim terms, Islam was in a state of jahiliyya—a barbarity worse than that existing in Arabia before the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad.
The cure: True believers had to come back to the political arena, from which they had been absent for too long. For the archenemy was now the state, which was the agent of European thought, beliefs, and behavior. It behooved Believers to subject modernity to a rigorous and systematic critique in accordance with the norms of Islamic authenticity. Through such a critique they had to enhance religious awareness, especially among the brainwashed, westoxicated youth. High school- and university-educated youngsters were indeed the major target group and had to be immediately reclaimed and detoxified, liberated from their infatuation with pleasure-seeking, pseudoscientific modernity. It is likely that such a critique did not stand a real chance of bringing about a change from within, given the state monopoly on the means of compulsion and on education and the media. The Muslim radicals could not dodge the inescapable conclusion: the regimes in power had to be delegitimated.
Administering the cure: Delegitimation would inevitably lead to jihad, "by word [propaganda] or by sword [violence]," as the hadith had it, in a jihad against internal, not external enemies. Through the reeducation of society or through armed revolt, believers could eventually set up a state where religious law was applied. These ideas were developed in the heyday of the nationalist state but were given the chance to spread throughout society as a result of a series of defeats the nation-state had experienced from the late 1960s and to the 1990s. These included the 1967 defeat in the Arab-Israeli War, the failure of the Soviet-inspired command economy to truly take off, oil price slumps in 1979 and in 1985, and the decline of Pan-Arabism between Nasser's death in 1970 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The new Islamic radicals succeeded in taking power only in Iran, and for a short time in Sudan and Afghanistan, but they became the major opposition force everywhere else. Their nongovernment organizations (NGOs) were active in civil society, which they managed to revive, and—despite harassment and persecution by the powers that be—they wielded enormous influence on mores, particularly among urbanized youth. It was indeed among such youth that suspicion of everything that Europe is supposed to stand for—enlightenment, progress, tolerance, and universal values—was evident.

ISLAM IN EUROPE

Another twist in this complex history came toward the end of the century. This was the fate of Islam in Europe. By the 1980s Europe had many more Muslims than ever before: 4.5 million in France, 3 million in Germany, 2 million in the U.K., 1 million in the Netherlands, and 1.5 million in the other countries of Europe, not including illegal aliens, who continued to arrive in waves. The most vulnerable group among them consisted of young males aged fifteen to twenty-four. They could be found at the bottom of the socio-occupational ladder, with an unemployment rate triple that of the same age group in the general population. They lived in overcrowded ghettos on the outskirts of large towns and were overrepresented among drug addicts, school dropouts, and prison inmates. This was the result in part of an inadequate investment by the states in housing, infrastructure, and medical services in these ghettos, either because of racial prejudice or because of the recent shrinking of the welfare state, which hit hardest the social strata lacking political clout. And the uneducated Muslims voted in lower proportions than the rest of the electorate. It was thus a vicious circle: lack of education brought about political underrepresentation and that in turn created further cuts in educational and other services.

Young Muslim men (women invested more in education to guarantee their freedom from dependence on the family) were victims of globalization. In the 1960s and 1970s the European economy needed the muscle power of the immigrants of their parents' generation, largely illiterate, to rebuild from the ruins of World War II and expand industry. By the 1980s it had started to transfer labor-intensive activities (cars, metalwork, mining, textile, footwear) to central and eastern Europe and to Southeast Asia. Even the construction industry, which had employed so many of the parents, became mechanized. Young men with few technical skills and little education now had difficulty finding work in the new services and information economy. They were hence driven to the gray area of petty crime, drug peddling, and protection services. No wonder so many had brushes with the law, whose agencies were often permeated with racism. Alienation from mainstream society was growing. Besides, young Muslims rebelled against the compliant attitude of their fathers. Born in Europe, they sensed they had rights and insisted on respect.

That is why Muslim youth, restless and hopeless, were attracted by a new radical message coming from the fringe of the Islamic world—the message of Dr. Abdallah Azzam, leader of the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets (he was assassinated in 1988) and of his successor, Osama bin Laden. According to Azzam and bin Laden, the source of all Muslim miseries was the United States and its lackey, Europe. These new crusaders, they argued, should become the target of a holy war directed at their economies. Collateral damage would also be inflicted upon apostate regimes in Islamic countries, which relied on the United States and Europe to ensure their survival. They would eventually totter as well. The new theory insisted on the essential hypocrisy of Christian civilization. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what was supposedly a religion of peace produced the Crusades to subdue the Abode of Islam. Now its modern counterpart sought to maintain control of that Abode in order to ensure itself of oil supplies. These were vital to Western plenty, and without them the pleasure-seeking civilization could not survive. The West also found it vital to this end to exploit immigrants. Yet to cover up its immorality, it spoke of universal human rights, which gave it a justification for intervening everywhere in the Muslim world. And were these rights respected in the West itself ? Ask unemployed Muslims harassed by racist police, said bin Laden, urging the young to stand up and fight.

Such a message provided young Muslim men with an outlet for frustration, a glimmer of hope, avenues for action and adventure. And as the differences between countries of origin blurred in the European diaspora, the emergent identity of the members of the second and third generations of Muslim immigrants was "Muslim"—in their own eyes and in the eyes of mainstream society. The stigma became a badge of honor and helped them accept an ideal and a form of organization (inspired by Al Qaeda but not necessarily beholden to it) predicated on the notion of an Islamic community, or umma. The clandestine or semiclandestine groups (jamaat) that the young joined provided them with a sense of belonging, of solidarity, and of empowerment, a warm home in a cold, individualistic, and often hostile European society. The young could make sense of their personal failures in finding employment, getting promotions, passing exams, and steering clear of the police. All these were the fault of an evil, immoral outside force, namely, Western civilization, as inimical to Islam in the twenty-first century as it had been in the Middle Ages.

If the youth were the victims of globalization, as new militants they also benefited from it. The message arrived in their ears though audiocassettes produced by preachers in Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Morocco. These cassettes were easy to smuggle and copy and also served as entertainment. Fledgling activists could get instructions from far away via cell phones, could get funds through telephonic bank transfers, and could receive instructions and educational material by means of the Internet. A new jihad was on.