This is a pretty decent breakdown for those interested in information as opposed to polemics.
Islam's main political arms differ greatly in both tactics and aims.
But that should not reassure America
EVER since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, George Bush has
been telling Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network they
will fail in one of their main aims: to trigger a broad global conflict
between America and its allies, and Islam. The president has called
Islam a peaceful religion, bringing "hope and comfort" to over a
billion people.
To judge by opinion polls, many Muslims around the world are
unimpressed. To them, America's actions in the Middle East tell a
different story about Mr Bush's attitude to their faith. And the
president may not be right when he says that a broad clash of
civilisations can be avoided. To anyone skimming the headlines in
recent weeks, it seems as though believers in an imminent clash between
Islam and the West have plenty of new evidence to support their case.
Iran--the country whose 1979 revolution put political Islam on the
modern map--is cocking a snook at its western critics. Its president
vows to destroy Israel and its nuclear researchers have defied the
world by going back to work. In its present mood, Iran shows little
interest in seeking "rehabilitation" by addressing the long list of
western complaints, which include sponsoring terror.
Meanwhile, the leaders of al-Qaeda appear on videotapes to tell their
supporters that the war against "crusaders" and Jews is very much
alive. Mr bin Laden warns that deadly attacks on America are still
being planned. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appeared on the screen
this week to declare that he has survived an American attempt on his
life and that Allah, not Uncle Sam, would set the hour of his death.
At the same time, an Islamist movement that many western governments
regard as terrorist and untouchable is savouring its stunning victory
in the Palestinian elections. The Hamas triumph has brought delight to
all its fellow members of the international fraternity known as the
Muslim Brotherhood--from the refugee camps of Amman in Jordan, where
sweets were eagerly handed out by local Brotherhood leaders, to their
well-organised counterparts in the Islamic diaspora in Europe. Whatever
Hamas now does, its success may be remembered as the biggest victory
for political Islam since Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini brought to the
modern world the idea that Islam might be a formula for governance, law
and spreading revolution.
For all these reasons, outside observers might be forgiven for
thinking that political Islam, in various violent forms, was on the
march against the West. In fact, the Islamist movement, though it may
look monolithic from afar, is highly quarrelsome and diverse, and in
many ways its internal divisions are deepening.
By no means everybody in the Muslim world rejoiced at the Hamas
victory. It was disturbing in at least two different quarters. One was
the corridors of power in Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt, where
the Brotherhood is already a powerful grass-roots movement and is
steadily gaining confidence. In Egypt's partially-free elections last
November, the Brotherhood did far better than expected; and in Jordan,
where the Brothers have long been treated as an innocuous vent for
letting off anti-Israel and anti-western steam, the movement is
demanding a higher profile.
Even more dismayed by the Hamas victory, it seems, are the al-Qaeda
terrorist network and its sympathisers. They were already furious with
Hamas for compromising with secular liberal ideas by taking part in
multi-party elections, and the fact that Hamas has played the
democratic game rather successfully will only increase their dismay.
Here lies a paradox. The two best known forms of political Islam
(broadly speaking, al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood) have common
ideological origins. Both have their roots in the anti-secular
opposition in Egypt, a conservative reading of Sunni Islam and the
wealth and religious zeal of the Saudis. But they differ hugely over
politics and tactics.
TACTICAL ALLIES, DOCTRINAL ENEMIES
The ideologists of al-Qaeda reject the division of the world into
modern states. To them, the only boundaries that matter are between
Islam (of which they believe they are the only authentic
representatives) and infidels. By contrast, Hamas and Brotherhood
thinking is pragmatic, accepting the reality of national boundaries.
Then compare political Islam among the Sunnis to the Shia variety, of
which Iran is the vanguard. Vast religious differences, stemming from a
split that occurred in the seventh century, separate these groups. They
still give a sharp edge to the conflicts of the present day, most
obviously in Iraq, where thousands of lives have been lost in
Sunni-Shia violence.
In its doctrine and ethos, the simple, back-to-basics Sunni Islam from
which the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda sprang is about as different as any
Muslim practice could be from the sophisticated, scholarly world of the
Iranian Shias, with their elaborate clerical hierarchy and long
tradition of studying and adding to a corpus of texts. But when it
comes to operational matters, especially against Israel, terrorist
groups sponsored by Iran have no qualms about tactical co-operation
with their Sunni counterparts. Hamas, for example, has good working
relations with the al-Quds Force, an external arm of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard. And suicide bombings against Israeli civilians,
now regarded as a Hamas trademark, were probably inspired at first by
Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed, Shia movement based in Lebanon.
Yet doctrinal differences matter. In recent weeks, there has been an
escalation of the war of words between al-Qaeda supporters on one hand
and Hamas and the Brotherhood on the other. In January, a London-based
website that reflects jihadist views--the belief in a broad, inexorable
conflict between Islam and the West--cited 102 clerics, living and
dead, to support the view that good Muslims should not take part in
elections. For this ideological camp, any electoral exercise merely
reinforces the blasphemous way of thinking that places human choices
and regimes above the law of God. In the words of Stephen Ulph, an
analyst of Islam at the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank, al-Qaeda's
message to Hamas is something like this: "You're still playing the
western game--we can put away the chess board."
Now that Hamas faces the reality of power and day-to-day challenges of
administration, it must decide how much more of a "western game" it is
prepared to play. It has already watered down its Islamist fervour by
entering policy debates with its secularist, Palestinian-nationalist
rivals in the Fatah movement, and may soon be deliberating the pros and
cons of a tactical compromise with Israel.
And part of that dilemma will be ideological. Hamas leaders will need a
theological licence from the Brotherhood's spiritual guides for the
political choices they make. At the same time, the world Brotherhood
has a huge stake in the success of a Hamas government which could be a
model of political Islam. For exactly that reason, predicts Ziad Abu
Amr, a Palestinian legislator close to Hamas, the Brotherhood is likely
in the end to provide "doctrinal cover and political support" for
whatever decisions Hamas takes. But if those decisions include
compromise with Israel, the doctrinal bit will not be easy. Despite its
rejection of violence in most circumstances, the Brotherhood's bottom
lines have included deep ideological opposition to Israel's existence
and a demand for Muslim control over Jerusalem.
Given that theology will play a role, at least, in these deliberations,
it is worth studying the ways in which different Islamist movements
converge and differ. Al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood, for example, are
both loosely articulated international movements which claim to
operate, often through proxies and ideological soul-mates, in scores of
countries. Both have emerged out of the conservative wing of Sunni
Islam, which believes in sticking to the letter of the earliest texts
as the main form of spiritual guidance.
In other ways, al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood are entirely different
phenomena. Al-Qaeda is first and foremost a movement which sponsors and
co-ordinates acts of violence, not just in the Islamic heartland but
anywhere it can hit back at the western enemy. In the ideology of the
Brotherhood, including Hamas, resort to violence is justified only in
the exceptional circumstances of "self-defence" and
"occupation"--conditions which are deemed to exist in Israel, the West
Bank and American-occupied Iraq.
ROOTED IN SHOCK
The ideological process which gave birth to al-Qaeda and the Muslim
Brotherhood is worth retracing. Both grew out of Muslim shock at the
advance of European colonialism in the 19th century and, in 1923, the
fall of the last Ottoman caliph. To make matters worse, Britain and
France then planted their flags in the Muslim heartlands as occupiers
of the Levant.
Out of those shocks came, first, a movement called Salafism, which
insisted that only the Prophet himself and the two generations that
followed him should be relied on for spiritual guidance. Salafism is
not necessarily violent, but became so when allied with the stark,
puritan, uncompromising variety of Sunni Islam, known as Wahhabism,
practised by the Saudi clergy. To that potent Egyptian-Saudi mixture
was added the galvanising experience, for many young Muslims, of
joining the American-backed war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in
the 1980s.
Al-Qaeda's two main leaders personify that story: Mr bin Laden, the
pampered son of a wealthy Saudi clan who found a new persona in
Afghanistan, and Mr Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor whose ideological
roots lay in the Brotherhood and in resistance to his own country's
secular regime. Mr Zawahiri is an example of one part of the
Brotherhood's transition from peaceful struggle to violence--at first
against the Egyptian government and other secular Arab regimes, and
then by extension against the West.
This teaching was sharpened by Sayed Qutb, an Egyptian thinker who was
hanged 40 years ago but still inspires Muslims with his stinging
denunciations both of western hedonism--he wrote a famous outburst
against American youngsters and their dance parties--and the decadence
of supposedly Muslim regimes. Whether among Hamas voters in the Gaza
slums or among Brotherhood thinkers, the ideas of Qutb enjoy huge
influence.
The Brotherhood claims to have millions of adherents all over the
world. Since it cannot operate openly in many places, the figures are
vague. To borrow an expression from Marxism, the political strategy of
the Brotherhood is "entryist"--it believes in participating in any
democratic process that is available, and in taking advantage of the
freedom the western world allows. "There are members of the Brotherhood
in many western countries, but they don't operate under that name--they
work within different groups to spread their ideas," says Kamal
Helbawy, a London-based Egyptian who for years was among the few people
in the West who spoke openly in Brotherhood's name.
Mr Helbawy's own career is a good example of the movement's advance.
The movements he has overseen were bankrolled by Saudi largesse. After
working in Nigeria to promote Muslim education, he was invited to Saudi
Arabia in 1972 to set up the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, one of
several bodies that spread the faith in a stark, simple form. As head
of WAMY, he spent a couple of decades in Saudi Arabia. There he
mentored young Muslims from all over the world who later became
influential in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey.
SHADOWY, BUT NOT SECRET
At least in the western world, the Brotherhood seems to form a kind of
parallel structure that would be familiar to historians of Northern
Ireland's Orange Order or the South Africa's Broederbond, both
fraternities in which evangelical Protestantism played a secret,
binding role. On joining the Brotherhood, followers are required to
take an oath which pledges them to "work for God's message" and
"believe and trust in" the movement's leaders. A Brotherhood member is
expected, with his comrades' help, to cultivate ten virtues, including
bodily health, a sound mind and punctuality.
In the diaspora at least, the practice of working through other
movements and fronts has had some spectacular success, and has brought
the Brotherhood and its proxies a degree of influence that far
outweighs the number of its members. The Muslim Association of Britain
was one of two main organisers of the "Stop the War" demonstrations
that brought millions of Britons on to the streets to oppose the
invasion of Iraq.
Mr Helbawy co-founded the MAB in 1997 as a movement close to, but not
part of, the Brotherhood. On the French scene, easily the biggest
single force in Muslim politics is the Union of Islamic Organisations
of France, which denies formal ties with the Brotherhood but clearly
has ideological links and is seen warily by French Muslims of other
stripes. Both the method and the aims of the Brotherhood's work will
vary with local circumstances.
The movement's belief in working through democracy and freedom of
speech, says Mr Helbawy, is not just a short-term choice. Its founder,
Hassan al-Banna, considered the parliamentary system the next best
thing to an Islamic one. That does not mean that he thought democracy
ideal. But even this belief in the legitimacy of multi-party politics
enrages the likes of Mr bin Laden.
The stated aim of the Brotherhood is to re-Islamise society, and only
thereafter the state. In this vision, the ultimate desirability of
introducing SHARIA law, as laid down by the Koran, cannot be
questioned. But the Brotherhood line is that this process should not be
rushed: SHARIA can come into being only when the people have freely
convinced themselves of its virtues.
The Brotherhood is certainly shadowy, but it is not a secret
organisation. Its leader is an elderly Egyptian, Mehdi Akef, who
presides over a series of councils dealing respectively with Egypt, the
wider world and various categories of followers, including women, youth
and professional groups. Its de facto spiritual guide, Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, is much better known, thanks to broadcasts and
pronouncements on the internet which are followed by Muslims round the
world. In perfect consistency with Brotherhood teaching, he has
condemned terrorist attacks in western countries but excused them in
Israel, Palestine and Iraq.
AMERICA AS ARBITER
Observing the ideological fights between al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood,
and the physical fights between Sunnis and Shias, some American
strategists might ask themselves: since they all oppose us and our
allies, shouldn't we take comfort from the fact that they hate each
other too?
In reality, things don't work that way. However little the arcana of
Sunni or Shia theology are understood in Peoria or even in Washington,
DC, the hard fact is that the American occupation of Iraq has made it
appear, to many people in the Middle East, that America is now the main
arbiter in the balance of power between the different components of the
Islamic world. To put it another way, people who were already inclined
to see almost every development in the Islamic world as America's work
will be harder to dissuade.
Despite the darkening clouds in America's relationship with Iran, many
Sunni Muslims are convinced that the Bush administration is subverting
their faith by favouring the Shia cause in Iraq and hence promoting
Iranian influence. In the slums of eastern Amman, for example, people
hardly knew what Shia Islam was until recently. Now the word has spread
that neighbouring Iraq is about to get a Shia-dominated
government--and, moreover, that it is all America's fault.
Nor can America escape this opprobrium by tilting its Iraqi policy a
few degrees in a more pro-Sunni direction. Anything that seems to
favour the Sunnis can also be interpreted as giving heart to the Saudi
establishment, royal or clerical. And that in turn will be seen as a
boost to Saudi efforts to spread various forms of Sunni fundamentalism
all over the world.
The contrasts between different varieties of Islam, and Islamism, are
not trivial--either in their teachings or the behaviour they inspire.
The western world needs to know about them, if only to know which
outcomes and shifts of policy are conceivable, and which are not. But
woe betide any western strategist who thinks the problems of the Muslim
world can be addressed by a policy of "divide and rule". The most
likely result of that is that western countries will be blamed for
divisions that have already existed, in one form or another, since the
founding of Islam.
See this article with graphics and related items at
http://www.economist.com/displaystor...ory_id=5467043
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