Fundamentalism

Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism. Roxanne L. Euben. Princeton University Press. $49.50.

Jihad. Expansion et déclin de l'islamisme. Gilles Kepel. Gallimard. $20.00.

Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam. Anthony Shadid. Westview Press. $26.00.

Hundreds of books and articles have been published over the last two decades upbraiding the West for profoundly misunderstanding the revival of political Islam and of fundamentalism, to use the common but not very precise term. They all accuse it of failing to appreciate the intrinsic value of Islamic ideas, its deeply democratic and peaceful essence, and of describing it as an irrational reaction to modernity and a major threat to Western civilization.

The intensity and the number of these apologias are a little surprising, for there have been relatively few critiques of political Islam and these have been, on the whole, in measured terms as befitting the rules of academic discourse in the West. For truly fierce attacks one has to turn to India or Nigeria, where cruder customs prevail and where the habit of calling a spade an agricultural implement is not yet widespread. But the Western apologists prefer not to deal with Bal Thackeray of Mumbai, the fire breathing Hindu extremist, they prefer to focus on students of Islam in Europe and America. Let us put aside for a moment the question of whether their basic assumption is correct, namely whether there is a true misunderstanding—or whether perhaps (as in the Israeli-Arab confrontation) the problem arises from the fact that the two sides understand each other only too well. Be that as it may, this industry flourishes more in the United States and Germany than in Britain and France, and, after all these huge volumes published about fundamentalism (Islamic as well as Christian and Jewish) all over the globe, the question then arises whether much new remains to be said. Professor Euben, a student of political philosophy who reads Arabic, devotes most of her book to one specific Islamic thinker, Sayyid Qutb. An Egyptian secular writer, he became a leading guru of Islamic radicalism following a long visit to the United States in the 1940s; the confrontation with American decadence and moral decay he witnessed there had a lasting impact on him and generated a series of influential books which became the inspiration of radical Muslims practicing violence from the Philippines to Africa. The novelty in Qutb was not so much his anti-Westernism, antimodernism, or reinterpretation of Islam, which can be found in other Islamic thinkers, but his argument that most if not all existing Muslim regimes were also corrupt and sinful (the term used is yahiliya which can be translated as pagan, or, perhaps more correctly barbaric—the state of affairs prevailing before Mohammed appeared) and had to be combated and overthrown. This innovation brought him into conflict with the leadership of his own country; he was kept in prison for years under Nasser and was eventually hanged in 1966.

In view of the influence his writings had posthumously—among his disciples were the murderers of Anwar Sadat—the preoccupation with Qutb is of course perfectly legitimate. But Professor Euben combines it with a critique of the legacy of the Enlightenment and modern rationalism; she considers Marx a fellow critic in this campaign, which may come as a surprise to most Marxists. This is a learned book, the envoi is from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and there are frequent references to Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, Adorno, Bourdieu, and even Hans-Georg Gadamer. But are these thinkers really of much help to explain Sayyid Qutb who belongs to another tradition? About as much, I suspect, as to explain the Lubavicher Rebbe or Pat Robertson.

Viewed in retrospect, attacks against the heritage of the Enlightenment and rationalism, assaults on Western civilization and humanism were quite fashionable during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This is a study in comparative political theory and Professor Euben could have done worse than pointing to some of the predecessors. She would have found The War Against the West, a book by Aurel Kolnai, an Austro-Hungarian psychoanalyst published in 1938 (unfortunately out of print for a long time) very useful. It's a compilation and critique of anti-Enlightenment writings of the twenties and thirties which in many ways anticipates the arguments of the fundamentalists on martyrdom and moral purity, on social justice, and about any other subject close to the heart of contemporary fundamentalists.

But there is an even more striking parallel, not with German National Socialism, suspicious of and averse to religion, but the Romanian fascists of the Archangel Michael variety, combining deep religiosity with the unity of the nation, submission to God, hate of the foreigners (infidels), anti-liberalism, anti-rationalism, and a firm belief in political violence. Professor Euben, to be sure, is not uncritical of the "progressive" claims of Muslim fundamentalism. She does know that while the Islamists, or at least the more educated among them, use the Western terminology of democracy and human rights but that they also believe that the holy Quran is not open to discussion on the part of the faithful. And if the Quran says, for instance, that sovereignty lays not with the people but with God, or that women are inferior to men, this cannot be explained away or reinterpreted. The only way out of the dilemma is to claim that the Quran does not really mean what it says, and this argument is hardly acceptable to a pious Muslim.

Sayyid Qutb also figures prominently in two other recent works on Muslim fundamentalism. A page from Qutb's Signposts, his last and most influential book, appears on the cover of Gilles Kepel's Jihad. Kepel works at the Paris CRNS; he has followed radical Islam for many years and has written about Qutb and Muslim extremism in Egypt earlier on. Together with his colleague Olivier Roy he belongs to the leading students of this phenomenon. But Kepel (like Roy) is less impressed than Euben by Qutb's political ideas—there are references to the poverty of the Islamic radicals' ideas. As he sees it the expansion of Islamism occurred because of the breakdown of traditional Islamic regimes on one hand, and the weakness of radical ideologies such as revolutionary socialism on the other. As a result many Muslim intellectuals rediscovered Islam hence the calls for Holy War (Jihad) or at least the establishment of true Islamic states.

But as Kepel sees it, this movement has not been a great success either, and this seems to be true both for the conservative and the radical wing of the Islamic fundamentalists. The conservatives, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim religious establishments in Egypt and elsewhere are discredited, whereas the record of radical regimes such as Iran, Sudan, and the Taliban in Afghanistan have been dismal and prospects are less than brilliant. Extreme nationalist regimes such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya have kept their distance from Islamism or even combated it. The Islamists have made some progress among the Palestinians but the terrorists in Algeria are on the defensive and a phenomenon such as Osama bin Ladin, the Saudi planner and paymaster of the terrorists, while providing headlines for the Western media, will forever remain marginal.

Kepel may well be right in the long run. Having underrated the importance of political Islam for many years, some Western observers have belatedly accepted its important role and are again lagging behind events; they now attribute to Islamism an exaggerated importance even while it is in decline. The important differences between conditions in various countries are overlooked, and so are the rifts within the Muslim Brotherhood and kindred groups. Qutb's teachings have by no means been embraced by the mainstream groups inside the Brotherhood, and his authority as a religious exegetist is low. But there are social trends pointing in the opposite direction. Islamism is, broadly speaking, a movement of the urban and rural poor and of the lower middle class. These segments of the population in the Islamic world are suffering not only spiritually but materially as a result of economic stagnation; and there is a considerable amount of social dynamite. The fact that Islamism in power in countries such as Iran or Sudan had disastrous consequences will not necessarily influence the masses in a country such as Egypt preoccupied with the situation at home rather than in other countries. The recent elections in Egypt have pointed to the undiminished influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the rulers in Tehran and Khartoum, even if unable to improve conditions, at least preach equality and curb ostentatious spending. In brief, the decline of Islamism correctly analyzed by Kepel and others, while inevitable in the longer run, will probably take longer than they think to unfold.

Anthony Shadid, a U.S. citizen of Lebanese origin was for years Cairo correspondent of AP. He is no political philosopher, but knows Arabic, has visited many Muslim countries and interviewed their leaders over the years. He loves Cairo, but as a Christian does not entirely feel at home there. He is critical of U.S. policy in Egypt, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and of course, Israel. He believes that the West must encourage democracy in countries such as Egypt with the realization that it is in fact encouraging Islamism and that governments will be elected that have no love for America. This perspective would be more plausible if Shadid could point to forces of reform in the Middle East to whom the future seems to belong. He does mention the Khatami phenomenon in Iran, the more moderate religious leader who became prime minister replacing the fanatics of the early years of the Khomeini revolution. He also mentions the Egyptian Center party, Hezbollah in Lebanon which engages both in guerrilla war and political and social activities, and leaders such as Kamal El-Said Habib, an erstwhile leader of the Jihad terrorist group (which assassinated Sadat) but later opted for political action.

But these are not very strong hopes. The weakness of Khatami vis à vis the conservatives in Iran has been shown time and again and it is more than doubtful that the Center party would benefit from a political earthquake in Egypt. In any case, all these reform candidates believe that their societies should be run according to the Sharia, the religious law, which is incompatible with democracy. The problem with these forces is not that they have no love for America and the West; America, in all probability, could live with this. The real difficulty is that their love for freedom and democracy is also dubious. As the author puts it: "Few in the West would agree with their goals. Some seem intolerant, others overly traditional, even regressive." If so, why support them in the first place? Because in Mr. Shadid's view the alternative, meaning the status quo, is even worse.

It is difficult to muster enthusiasm for the present regime in Egypt (let alone Saudi Arabia). But can Mr. Shadid, can anyone, claim with any degree of conviction that the political alternatives in these countries will be less repressive, less corrupt? It may or may not be more effective but it will certainly not be more democratic in any meaningful sense. This is a depressing outlook but it may well be the only realistic one, all the promises to the contrary as merely what is known in colloquial Arabic as kalam fadi—empty talk. There must be forces of democratic reform in the Middle East, and for all one knows they will prevail one day. But this day seems not to be near.

Walter Laqueur