Is "polticial Islam" Really So Scary?

Preface

Thinking and talking about Islam and politics is not at all that easy.  It is further complicated and confused by the way things are simplified, distorted and reduced to slogans in everyday political conversation. 
Political Islam, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Salafism, Wahabbism ... terms used almost interchangeably.  Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihadis, Taliban ... all somehow “Islamic” and they all seem to be against us.
Europeans, especially Germans, French and British, worry about the presence of Muslim communities and often see them as a threat to their identity.  The long discussions about Turkey joining the European Union have often had a tacit sub text of  “Is a Muslim country compatible with ‘European’ values?”
And for those impatient with details and academic niceties, there’s the late Samuel Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations, focusing heavily on the presumptive fault lines between Islam and Christianity over the past 1200 years. 
One way to understand how all this works from the perspective of political psychology might be to go find some of the more alarmist and paranoid literature from the height of the Cold War and substitute “Islam” for “Communism” and “Muslims” for “Reds.” 
The final complication in trying to discuss this is that it is going to be dry and boring compared to the lurid image of “Fanatical Jihadists with Medieval ideology who reject everything about the West and modern life and who hate our freedom waging war around the world .” 

Religion and Politics

One way to start Thinking about Islam and politics is to consider the consequences of European expansion on the Middle East.  In 1500 the Islamic world (the Middle East and North Africa, Persian Empire, much of the Indian subcontinent, large parts of South and Southeast Asia) was in general superior to Europeans in military prowess, intellectual sophistication, science and technology, and consumer goods.  The French and British conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th Century was a dramatic demonstration that was no longer true.  As Europeans came to control more and more of the world and especially after World War I when the Middle East was divided into colonial holdings by the British and French, there was a search for answers to the question of how Islamic societies had come to be weak militarily and comparatively impoverished economially and intellectually. 
Broad brush, three answers emerged among Muslim intellectuals and politicians.  One, reflecting the secularism of The Enlightenment, was to see Islam as the problem and the relegation of religion to the realm of individual piety and Friday practice.  A second response was to maintain the importance and centrality of Islam in society but to call for sweeping reforms to make it compatible with “modernity.”  The third response was to argue that the real problem was that much of Islam itself had become corrupt and degenerate and the solution was to return to an earlier, purer, more righteous way of life.
Human beings are delightfully more subtle and complex than this near caricature of broad schools of thought.  Individual thinkers, political leaders, or everyday folks don’t think so simplistically.  These discussions have always had a very practical orientation, an emphasis on what is to be done here and now.  They have reflected the dictum that all politics is local and have had as much to do with regime politics or the issues of the day as they have with abstractions and theological or philosophical fine points. But most of the time one can see someone putting more emphasis on one response over the other two and some people clearly flatly reject one or more of the positions.
Real people in the real world do not sit around making careful distinctions between different dimensions of their lives, or reasoning from ideological first principles to what is to be done .  You and I do not say, “Ah yes, this attitude of mine is derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, with a soupcon of the Kantian imperative thrown in for seasoning, along with lingering echoes of the American interpretation of Christianity.”  Scholaris and Constitutional lawyers may debate the concept of separation of church and state but you and I are busy living our lives and do not worry about the sacred or profane provenance of a given custom or social norm. Nonetheless, it is as if people in Muslim countries (like people in other countries around the world including the U.S.) have experimented with these three broad approaches to the relationship of religion to politics.
In those countries where resistance to colonialism took the form of a nationalist movement, there was a strong tendency for post colonial governments to reflect a secular, rationalist set of values. The leaders of most of these movements were from families who were not tradition al wealthy land owners.  They were from the middle strata of their societies, heavily exposed to Western education and values.  Traditional elites and religious leaders were often distrustful of the movements and at times even openly opposed.  Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was the first, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria are among many subsequent examples.  It is not surprising that these regimes treated religion as part of the background to be tolerated or as a potential source of opposition.  Over time secular nationalists and major religious leaders either came to an accommodation, as in Western Africa or Southeast Asia, or religious institutions became centers of anti-regime sentiment. 
The traditional monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, either did not experience direct colonial rule or achieved independence by mutual consent between traditional elites and the colonial power without a mass based independence movement.  The legitimacy of the monarchy rests on traditional values which often equate to an apolitical  mainstream Islam, social conservatism, and preservation of the old class structure.  But most of the monarchies reflect some willingness to accommodate economic and social reforms and adaptation of religious traditions to modernity.
Saudi Arabia is an extreme case.  The country owes its origin to an alliance between one set of tribal leaders (the al-Sauds) and a powerful Islamic reformist movement (the Wahabbis.) The royal family and religious establishment remain mutually interdependent.  Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia is much more rigid and austere than Islam almost anywhere else and exemplifies the third response: the times are corrupt and decadent because believers have become lax and sinful. Osama bin Laden was initially driven by the conviction that the Saudi royal family was the primary target because it had become corrupt and had to be replaced by a more faithfully Wahabbi elite. 

Talking Politics

OK, so Islam is intellectually diverse, there are a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between one’s religious commitments and the rest of one’s life, and most people are busy doing rather than drawing fine intellectual distinctions or articulating coherent ideologies.  If that is not enough to suggest that “political Islam” is a many splendored thing with enough diversity to fit almost any taste, there’s an additional complication for outsiders.  That’s the fact that Islam provides the vocabulary of politics. 
In the U.S., liberals and conservatives (with the exception of the vocal evangelical Christians) share a common set of terms and labels, even as they disagree about what they mean and which are the good ones.  Everyday people use the same terms to argue with each other. One of the good things about a shared vocabulary is that you can do a fair amount of “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” and your listener does. Our political vocabulary comes from some 2500 years of the Western tradition. 
Islam predominates in quite different societies that are quite different from the advanced capitalist milieu of North America and Western Europe, whether we think of the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia.  Islam and the cultures of its members provides the vocabulary for much of politics in these countries.  For someone to couch a political or social argument in terms of what is and is not properly Islamic can be, at best, odd and at worst off putting to you and me because most of us don’t routinely frame issues in terms of what is or isn’t “American.”  Debates about what is and what is not “Islamic” are typically ignited by ideas or behaviors that are coming into Islamic societies from outside.  Some people use “Islam” to argue against innovation and change or the foreign (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who condemned Pokemon as “un-Islamic”) while others use the argument to justify change.  A good recent example is the argument made by the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the preeminent university in Islam for the past several centuries) in support of the changes and reforms in Egypt.  The document states that democracy is “the modern formula for the Islamic precept of shura (consultation),” and the author supports “the people’s representatives endowed with the power of legislation in accordance with the precepts of true Islam—a religion which has never throughout its history experienced a religious or a theocratic state.” 
It is hard for us outsiders to follow the intellectual currents in the long running debate about Islam and politics, and the very language of the discussion further clouds the issues.  It gets very hard to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not identical to the Brotherhood in Syria or Jordan.  The distinctions between the Sunni political tradition in most of the Muslim world and Shi’i tradition in Iran and its neighbors is hugely important to insiders but largely opaque to most outsiders. The debate over religion and politics is sometimes an intellectual exercise and more often the context for rough and tumble practical politics.  Positions held by individuals and groups evolve and mutate depending on their political fortunes.  Individual human beings always have multiple motives behind what they do but you and I are prone to thinking other people have one “true” motive for their behavior and prone to accept a simplistic account.  Consider a suicide bomber who exclaims “God is Great” as he detonates the dynamite vest. It is all too easy to cast him as an Islamic extremist whose religious convictions led him to murder innocent people. 
Another unfortunate casualty of language is Islam itself.  It is not just that Arabic is the language of Islam, albeit not the language of the majority of Muslims.  Even in English, the terms of the discussion are unfamiliar.  The result is that Islam is seen as exotic and almost disturbingly alien to many in the West.  The critical fact that Islam’s vision of the good person and people’s relationship to God is very similar to Christianity’s gets lost.
No wonder people who are trying to make some sense of America’s relationship to the Middle East and Islam in general fall back on some simplistic version of “radical Islam” or “fundamentalism” and urge us to struggle against, if not go to war with, this pernicious ideology.

The Point Is

First (and maybe foremost) a caution.  Political Islam has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and some people are greatly concerned about its potential impact on the Arab Spring.  But the rallying cries and slogans during the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were couched in liberal democratic language.  Although the regimes in both Syria and Bahrain have tried to paint their opponents as Iranian-inspired Islamists, and even Muammar Qhadafi has tried to portray himself as the last bastion against “extremism”, the opposition is motivated by a wide range of political ideas and interests.  “Political Islam” is not a simple, unified world view nor is it the only major context for the next stage of political development for the 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslims.

There are some conclusions that can be drawn from this very sketchy overview:

“Political Islam” covers a wide range of positions, from support for liberal democratic institutions to attempts to rethink “democracy” to calls for a theocracy;
Some versions of political Islam are associated with violence directed against both internal enemies and the West, most are not;
The way we in the West think and talk about Islam and politics may be as consequential as the ways people in Islamic communities think and talk about it.

By that I mean that if we frame the question as a struggle or “war” with an ideology, it has two detrimental consequences.  One, the “enemy” becomes a ghostly abstraction, a frightening chimera, instead of specific individuals or groups with concrete capabilities and intentions to harm people.  Second, the metaphor of “war” has profound ramifications. It is “war” then it is a military struggle and violent coercion takes priority over persuasion and subtlety.  The “war on terror” launched after 9/11 has accelerated and deepened the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.