Islamism

• 1. Introduction

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  Islamism made its first appearance in the English language as Islamismus in 1696, and as Islamism in 1712. Back then it meant nothing more than the religion of Islam itself, with no hint of politics or movement attached. The word even surfaced in a United States Supreme Court decision, In Re Ross, in 1891. Then it nearly vanished. By 1938, when scholars finished The Encyclopaedia of Islam, the term seemed to have disappeared from English usage entirely.

  It came roaring back for an unexpected reason. The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 brought Ayatollah Khomeini's idea of Islamic government to Iran, and suddenly the old word had a new and charged meaning. Today it names a range of religious and political movements united by one belief: that Islam should shape political systems, and that Islam as a political order outperforms communism, liberal democracy, and capitalism in building a just society. The people who hold this view are sometimes called al-Islamiyyun. How did a near-forgotten English noun become shorthand for the most powerful ideological force in the Muslim world? Who shaped it, why did it spread, and why do its own followers reject the very label others pin on them? Those are the threads to follow.

• 2. A Word At War With Itself

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  Al-Ash'ari's famous theological encyclopaedia carries the title Maqalat al-Islamiyyin, which translates as The Opinions of The Islamists. In that traditional Arabic scholarship, an Islamist was simply any person who attributed himself to Islam, without the author affirming or denying that attribution. The term carried no political weight at all. It signalled impartiality, or sometimes a quiet hint that the writer was unsure whether to count someone as truly within the faith.

  Western usage collided head-on with that older meaning. When the new political sense arrived after the Iranian revolution, it ignored how Islami and its plural Islamiyyun already worked in theology. To dodge the confusion, Arab journalists invented a fresh word, Islamawi, sometimes rendered as Islamian, to mark the political movement and keep it separate from the older Islami. Critics complained that the coinage was grammatically incorrect.

  Islamists themselves dislike the whole vocabulary. They prefer terms like Islamic movement or Islamic activism, objecting to any suggestion that what they pursue is something other than Islam renewed and revived. The Council on American-Islamic Relations went further in a complaint about one news agency's definition, saying the term had become shorthand for Muslims we do not like. As the writer David Belt put it, Western popular discourse tends to reserve Islamism for the negative in Muslim communities, while keeping the plain word Islam for the positive or neutral.

• 3. The Architects

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  Muhammad Rashid Rida, a Syrian-born Salafi theologian based in Egypt, is widely regarded as one of the ideological forefathers of the modern movement. A fervent opponent of Westernization, Zionism, and nationalism, he championed Sunni internationalism and the revolutionary restoration of a pan-Islamic Caliphate. During 1922-23 he published a series of articles in the Al-Manar magazine titled The Caliphate or the Supreme Imamate, advocating a Caliphate guided by Islamic jurists, reached through gradual education, reformation, and purification.

  Hasan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher and one of Rida's disciples, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailiyah in 1928 under the motto the Qur'an is our constitution. He, like Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, called for a reformist strategy of re-Islamizing society gradually, through grassroots social and political activism and persuasion rather than force. Maududi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and led it until 1972. He had written al-Jihad fil-Islam back in 1925, and his writings would later have a profound impact on Sayyid Qutb.

  Not every architect favored patience. Hassan Al-Turabi argued for a revolutionary strategy, Islamizing society through the exercise of state power. Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed for combining grassroots Islamization with armed revolution. The figures who anchor twentieth-century Islamism also include Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose path would diverge sharply from these Sunni thinkers.

• 4. Lost Caliphate, New Ideology

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  On the 1st of November 1922, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey abolished the Ottoman Sultanate, ending an empire that had lasted since 1299. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, left the Ottoman capital of Constantinople on the 17th of November 1922. In March 1924 the Turkish National Assembly abolished the Caliphate itself, legally severing centuries of Ottoman influence.

  The loss shocked the Sunni clerical world. Many clerics felt they could no longer present Islam as a traditional religion alone. They began recasting it as an innovative socio-political ideology fit for a modern nation-state. That reaction gave rise to ideologues like Rashid Rida and Maududi, and to organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Majlis-e-Ahrar-ul-Islam in India.

  The longing for a Caliphate ran deep across South Asia. Rida himself had visited India in 1912 and came away impressed by the Deoband and Nadwatul Ulama seminaries, which carried the legacy of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and his pre-modern Islamic emirate. In British India, the Khilafat movement of 1919-24, led by figures including Shaukat Ali, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, Hakim Ajmal Khan, and Maulana Azad, gave voice to South Asian Muslims' aspirations for a Caliphate.

• 5. Petro-Islam

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  Starting in the mid-1970s, an abundance of money from Saudi Arabian oil exports funded the Islamic resurgence. By one description, the tens of billions of dollars in petro-Islam largesse paid for roughly 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith. By some estimates, between the 1960s and 2016 the Saudis funnelled over 100 billion US dollars to spread Wahhabi Islam.

  That money built an enormous infrastructure. More than 1500 mosques were built and paid for with Saudi public funds over fifty years, alongside madrassas, scholarships, fellowships, and satellite campuses around Egypt for Al-Azhar University, the world's oldest and most influential Islamic university. The interpretation it promoted was strict, conservative Wahhabism or Salafism. The political scientist Alex Alexiev called it the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted, and David A. Kaplan said it dwarfed the Soviets' efforts at the height of the Cold War.

  The roots reached back to superpower rivalry. In a 2018 interview, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, said the propagation was rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked the kingdom to use its resources to block Soviet inroads into Muslim countries. Qatar played a smaller version of the same role. It backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt even after the 2013 overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, and in Libya it supported Islamists with tens of millions of dollars and more than 20,000 tons of weapons. In 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism.

• 6. When Socialism Failed

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  By the late 1960s, many Muslim-majority states had aligned with Moscow, among them Nasser's Egypt, Baathist Syria and Iraq, Qaddafi's Libya, Algeria under Ben Bella and Boumedienne, Southern Yemen, and Sukarno's Indonesia. School books of that decade went out of their way to teach children that socialism was simply Islam properly understood. The marriage of the two ideas did not hold.

  The turning point came with defeat on the battlefield. Arab nationalist armies fighting Israel under the slogan Land, Sea and Air suffered a disastrous loss in the 1967 Six-Day War. Six years later, in the Yom Kippur War, the military's slogan had changed to God is Great, and the result felt to many like a near-victory. Alongside it came the Arab oil embargo, when Persian Gulf producers cut output and quadrupled the price of oil, making the words oil, Arabs, and Islam synonymous with power.

  Economics did the rest of the work. When a collapse in oil prices triggered violent rioting by the urban poor in Algeria in 1988, what looked like an opening for the left instead launched major victories for the Islamic Salvation Front. The corruption and economic failure of the ruling socialist party, the FNL, had discredited the vocabulary of socialism. Olivier Roy summed up the wider pattern, writing that the failure of the Arab socialist model left room for new protest ideologies to emerge in deconstructed societies.

• 7. Many Faces

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  Islamism is not a united movement, and it spans a wide range of strategies toward power: destruction, opposition, collaboration, indifference. Moderate and reformist Islamists who work within the democratic process include the Tunisian Ennahda Movement. Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan operates as a vanguard party within democratic politics, yet has also gained influence through past military coups. Groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine claim to take part in democratic politics while maintaining powerful paramilitary wings.

  Graham E. Fuller drew a major dividing line between two camps. On one side sit the conservative guardians of the tradition, the Salafis, such as those in the Wahhabi movement. On the other stands the revolutionary vanguard of change centered around the Muslim Brotherhood. Olivier Roy observed that Sunni pan-Islamism shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, as the Brotherhood's focus on Islamic institutions was eclipsed by the Salafi emphasis on sharia.

  The sharpest break comes with the jihadists. Qutbism, the ideology formulated by Sayyid Qutb, held that since sharia was not enforced, Islam had been extinct for centuries and the Muslim world had fallen back into Jahiliyya, the state of pre-Islamic ignorance. Qutb urged a two-pronged attack of preaching and offensive jihad, declaring that truth and falsehood cannot coexist on this earth. He was executed in 1966. His ideas passed to Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who studied under Qutb's brother Muhammad and later mentored Osama bin Laden. Salafi jihadism took shape in the 1980s, when bin Laden and thousands of militants gathered to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The term near enemy, meaning Muslim-majority governments, was coined by Mohammed Abdul-Salam Farag, who led the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981.

• 8. The Shia Path

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  Twelver Shia Islam makes up roughly 10 percent of all Muslims, and its political strand is tied above all to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His revolution overthrew the secular, oil-rich, well-armed, pro-American monarchy of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Before that revolution, Khomeini's acolytes, including Iran's later Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, translated and championed the works of Sayyid Qutb and other Sunni revivalists into Persian.

  Yet Khomeinism stood apart from its Sunni influences, described as more leftist and more clerical. It was more leftist in the propaganda before the revolution, which stressed exploitation of the poor by the rich and of Muslims by imperialism. It was more clerical afterward, with clerics holding the levers of power under the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. In this design the leading jurist would enforce sharia, would not be elected, and would need no legislature, since divine law already covered every topic in human life.

  The Iranian path had its own historical figures. Sheikh Fazlullah Nouri declared the new constitution contrary to sharia during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11. Navvab Safavi founded the Fada'iyan-e Islam to kill off figures he saw as corrupting. Ali Shariati, a non-cleric socialist Shi'i, absorbed Marxist ideas in France and taught that Imam Hussein was the original oppressed one. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr led Shi'i opposition to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime before being executed. The Islamic Republic itself executed more than 3,400 political dissidents between June 1981 and March 1982 while consolidating power. As one anonymous expert put it, rather than strengthening religion, the regime has ruined the Iranian people's belief in religion.