The Rise of Islamism

38.2.2: The Rise of Islamism

The rise of radical Islamism is a result of many complex factors, including Western colonialism in Muslim-dominated regions, state-sponsored aggressive popularization of ultra-orthodox interpretations of Islam, Western and pro-Western Muslim support for Islamist groups during the Cold War, and victories of Islamist groups over pro-Western politicians and factions in the Middle East.

Learning Objective

Connect the rise of Islamism with outside intervention in the Middle East

Key Points

  • The concept of Islamism has been debated in both public and academic contexts. The term can refer to diverse forms of social and political activism advocating that public and political life should be guided by Islamic principles, or more specifically to movements that call for full implementation of sharia. In Western media, the term tends to refer to groups that aim to establish a sharia-based Islamic state, often with connotations of political extremism and implications of violent tactics and human rights violations.
  • Islamism is not a united movement. Rather, it takes different forms and spans a wide range of strategies and tactics. Moderate and reformist Islamists accept and work within the democratic process. Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas participate in the democratic and political process and carry out armed attacks. Radical Islamist groups entirely reject democracy and call for violent/offensive jihad or urge and conduct attacks on a religious basis.
  • Western colonialism of the Muslim world, beginning in the 19th century, greatly contributed to equating the secular West with the enemy of Islam, thus fueling the development of increasingly radical Islamism. Beginning in the 1970s, Western and pro-Western governments often supported fledgling Islamists and Islamist groups that later came to be seen as dangerous enemies. For Islamists, the primary threat of the West is cultural rather than political or economic.
  • In the late 20th century, an Islamic revival developed in the Muslim world. It was manifested in greater religious piety and a growing adoption of Islamic culture. Two of the most important events that fueled the resurgence were the Arab oil embargo and subsequent quadrupling of the price of oil in the mid-1970s and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which established an Islamic republic in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. Although religious extremism and attacks on civilians and military targets represent only a small part of the movement, the revival has seen a proliferation of Islamic extremist groups.
  • The number of militant Islamic movements calling for “an Islamic state and the end of Western influence” is relatively small. According to polls taken in 2008 and 2010 by Pew and Gallop, pluralities of the population in Muslim-majority countries are undecided as to what extent religion should influence public life, politics, and the legal system.
  • Saudi Arabia and Qatar have devotec considerable energies to spreading Salafism and to gaining influence in the countries that benefited from their financial support. Such developments as the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet-Afghan War convinced many that the Westernization of the Muslim world was avoidable and fueled radical Islamism. As a result, groups like al-Quaeda, Taliban, and Islamic State gained popularity and tangible military and political power across the Middle East and other regions of the world.

Key Terms

Muslim Brotherhood
A transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. The organization has combined political activism with charity work as its model of functioning, gaining supporters throughout the Arab world and influencing other Islamist groups. As of 2015, it is considered a terrorist organization by the governments of five Arab countries and Russia, but claims to be a peaceful, democratic organization that condemns violence.
Islamism
A term that can refer to diverse forms of social and political activism advocating that public and political life should be guided by Islamic principles, or more specifically to movements that call for full implementation of sharia. It is commonly used interchangeably with the terms political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism. Its meaning has been debated in both public and academic contexts.
jihad
An Arabic word that literally means striving or struggling, especially with a praiseworthy aim. It can have many shades of meaning in an Islamic context, such as struggle against one’s evil inclinations or efforts toward the moral betterment of society. In classical Islamic law, the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers, while modernist Islamic scholars generally equate it with defensive warfare. The term has gained additional attention in recent decades through its use by terrorist groups.
sharia
The religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the Hadith. In Arabic, the term refers to God’s divine law and is contrasted with fiqh, which refers to its scholarly interpretations. The manner of its application in modern times has been a subject of dispute between Muslim traditionalists and reformists.
Hamas
A Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist that has been the governing authority of the Gaza Strip since 2007. It is a point of debate in political and academic circles over whether or not to classify it as a terrorist group.
Hezbollah
A Shia Islamist militant group and political party based in Lebanon. Its status as a legitimate political party, terrorist group, resistance movement, or some combination thereof is a contentious issue.
Islamic State
A Salafi jihadist extremist militant group led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Syria and Iraq. In 2014, the group proclaimed itself a caliphate, with religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims worldwide. As of March 2015, it had control over territory occupied by ten million people in Syria and Iraq, and has nominal control over small areas of Libya, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. It also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including North Africa and South Asia.
Taliban
A Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan currently waging war (an insurgency, or jihad) within that country. The group has used terrorism as a specific tactic to further their ideological and political goals.
Salafism
An ultra-conservative reform branch or movement within Sunni Islam that developed in Arabia in the first half of the 18th century against a background of European colonialism. It advocated a return to the traditions of the “devout ancestors” (the salaf).
al-Qaeda
A militant Sunni Islamist multi-national organization founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and several other Arab volunteers who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. It has been widely designated as a terrorist group.

 

What Is Islamism?

Islamism is a concept whose meaning has been debated in both public and academic contexts. The term can refer to diverse forms of social and political activism advocating that public and political life should be guided by Islamic principles, or more specifically to movements that call for full implementation of sharia. Sharia is the religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition, derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the hadith (various reports describing the words, actions, or habits of the Islamic prophet Muhammad). Islamism is commonly used interchangeably with the terms political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism. In Western media, the term tends to refer to groups who aim to establish a sharia-based Islamic state, often with connotations of political extremism and implications of violent tactics and human rights violations.

Different currents of Islamist thought have advocated a revolutionary strategy of Islamizing society through exercise of state power or a reformist strategy of re-Islamizing society through grassroots social and political activism. Islamists may emphasize the implementation of sharia (Islamic law), pan-Islamic political unity and an Islamic state, or selective removal of non-Muslim influences, particularly Western military, economic, political, social, or cultural influences, from the Muslim world.

Islamism is not a united movement, but takes different forms and spans a wide range of strategies and tactics. Moderate and reformist Islamists who accept and work within the democratic process include parties like the Tunisian Ennahda Movement. Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan is basically a sociopolitical and democratic vanguard party, but has also gained political influence through military coup d’états. Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas participate in the democratic and political process as well as in armed attacks. Hezbollah is a Shia Islamist militant group and political party based in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s status as a legitimate political party, terrorist group, resistance movement, or some combination thereof is a contentious issue. Similarly, Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist that has been the governing authority of the Gaza Strip since 2007. It is a point of debate in political and academic circles over whether or not to classify Hamas as a terrorist group. Radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda or the Taliban entirely reject democracy and call for violent/offensive jihad or urge and conduct attacks on a religious basis.

 

Islamism and the West

In the 19th century, European encroachment on the Muslim world came with the retreat of the Ottoman Empire, the French conquest of Algeria (1830), the disappearance of the Moghul Empire in India (1857), and the Russian incursions into the Caucasus and Central Asia. The first Muslim reaction to European encroachment was of rural and working class and not urban origin. Charismatic leaders launched the call for jihad and formed tribal coalitions. Sharia in defiance of local common law was imposed to unify tribes. All these movements eventually failed, despite some successes over the colonizing armies.

Under later Western colonialism, nostalgia for the days of successful Islamic empire simmered. This played a major role in the Islamist political ideal of Islamic state, a state in which Islamic law is preeminent. The Islamist political program is generally accomplished by reshaping the governments of existing Muslim nation-states. Today, however, the means of doing this varies greatly across movements and circumstances. Many Islamist movements, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood, have used the democratic process and focus on votes and coalition-building with other political parties. Radical movements such as Taliban and al-Qaeda embrace militant Islamic ideology.

Beginning in the 1970s, Western and pro-Western governments often supported fledgling Islamists and Islamist groups that later came to be seen as dangerous enemies. Islamists were considered by Western governments bulwarks against what were thought ore dangerous leftist/communist/nationalist insurgents, which Islamists were correctly seen as opposing. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to aid theMuslim Afghan enemies of the Soviet Union during the Soviet-Afghan War. Similarly, although Hamas is a strong opponent of Israel’s existence, it traces its origins to institutions and clerics supported by Israel in the 1970s and 1980s. Israel tolerated and supported Islamist movements in Gaza as it perceived them preferable to the secular and then more powerful al-Fatah. Egyptian pro-Western, anti-Soviet, and pro-Israeli President Anwar Sadat released Islamists from prison and welcomed home exiles in tacit exchange for political support in his struggle against leftists. Sadat was later assassinated and a formidable insurgency was formed in Egypt in the 1990s.

For Islamists, the primary threat of the West is cultural rather than political or economic. Islamists assume that cultural dependency robs one of faith and identity and thus destroys Islam and the Islamic community far more effectively than political rule. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan has eliminated the common atheist Communist enemy uniting some religious Muslims and the capitalist west.

 

Islamic Revivalism

In the late 20th century an Islamic revival or Islamic awakening developed in the Muslim world,  manifested in greater religious piety and growing adoption of Islamic culture. Two of the most important events that fueled or inspired the resurgence were the Arab oil embargo and subsequent quadrupling of the price of oil in the mid-1970s and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which established an Islamic republic in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. The first created a flow of many billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to fund Islamic books, scholarships, fellowships, and mosques around the world. The second undermined the assumption that Westernization strengthened Muslim countries and was the irreversible trend of the future.

The revival is a reversal of the Westernization approach common among Arab and Asian governments earlier in the 20th century. Although  religious extremism and attacks on civilians and military targets represent only a small part of the movement, the revival has seen a proliferation of Islamic extremist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. They have voiced their anger at perceived exploitation as well as materialism, Westernization, democracy, and modernity, which are most commonly associated with accepting Western secular beliefs and values.

Rise of Radical Islamism

The number of militant Islamic movements calling for “an Islamic state and the end of Western influence” is relatively small. According to polls taken in 2008 and 2010 by Pew and Gallop, pluralities of the population in Muslim-majority countries are undecided as to what extent religion (and certain interpretations of) should influence public life, politics, and the legal system.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the Islamic resurgence was funded by an abundance of money from Saudi Arabian oil exports. The tens of billions of dollars obtained from the recently heightened price of oil funded most of the expenses associated with the resurgence. Throughout the Muslim world, religious institutions for people both young and old received Saudi funding along with training for the preachers and teachers who went on to teach and work at the emerging universities, schools, and mosques. The funding was also used to reward journalists and academics who followed the Saudis’ strict interpretation of Islam known as Salafism (sometimes referred to as Wahhabism, but Salafists consider the term derogatory). In its harshest form, it preaches that Muslims should not only “always oppose” infidels “in every way,” but “hate them for their religion … for Allah’s sake,” that democracy “is responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century,” and that Muslims not ascribing to this strict interpretation were infidels. While this effort has by no means converted all or even most, it has done much to undermine more moderate local interpretations.

The strength of the Islamist movement was manifest in an event that might have seemed sure to turn Muslim public opinion against fundamentalism, but did just the opposite. In 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was seized by an armed fundamentalist group and held for over a week. Scores were killed, including many pilgrim bystanders in a gross violation of one of the most holy sites in Islam, where arms and violence are strictly forbidden. Instead of prompting a backlash, Saudi Arabia, already very conservative, responded by shoring up its fundamentalist credentials with even more Islamic restrictions. Crackdowns followed on everything, including shopkeepers who did not close for prayer and newspapers that published pictures of women. In other Muslim countries, blame for and wrath against the seizure was directed not against fundamentalists, but against Islamic fundamentalism’s foremost geopolitical enemy – the United States.

Saudi soldiers fighting their way into the Qaboo Underground beneath the Grand Mosque of Mecca, 1979

Saudi soldiers fighting their way into the Qaboo Underground beneath the Grand Mosque of Mecca, 1979. The seizure of Islam’s holiest site, the taking of hostages from among the worshipers, and the deaths of hundreds of militants, security forces, and hostages caught in crossfire in the ensuing battles for control of the site, all shocked the Islamic world. Following the attack, the Saudi state implemented a stricter enforcement of Islamic code.

Just like Saudi Arabia, Qatar has devolved considerable energies to spreading Salafism and gaining influence in the countries that benefited from its support. Over the past two decades, the country has exerted a semi-formal patronage for the international movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar is known to have backed Islamist factions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Hamas has also been among the primary beneficiaries of Qatar’s financial support.

The first modern Islamist state was established among the Shia of Iran. In a major shock to the rest of the world, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in order to overthrow the oil-rich, well-armed, Westernized, and pro-American secular monarchy ruled by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Khomeini believed that complete imitation of the Prophet Mohammad and his successors was essential to Islam, that many secular, Westernizing Muslims were actually agents of the West, and that acts such as the plundering of Muslim lands were part of a long-term conspiracy against Islam by Western governments. The Islamic Republic has also maintained its hold on power in Iran in spite of U.S. economic sanctions and has created or assisted like-minded Shia terrorist groups in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon (Hezbollah).

In 1979, the Soviet Union deployed its army into Afghanistan, attempting to suppress an Islamic rebellion against an allied Marxist regime in the Afghan Civil War. The conflict, pitting indigenous impoverished Muslims against an anti-religious superpower, galvanized thousands of Muslims around the world to send aid and sometimes to go themselves to fight for their faith. When the Soviet Union abandoned the Marxist Najibullah regime and withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 (the regime finally fell in 1992), many Muslims saw the victory as the triumph of Islamic faith over superior military power and technology that could be duplicated elsewhere. The veterans of the war returning home to Algeria, Egypt, and other countries were often eager to continue armed jihad.

Another factor in the early 1990s that worked to radicalize the Islamist movement was the Gulf War, which brought several hundred thousand U.S. and allied non-Muslim military personnel to Saudi Arabian soil to put an end to Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Prior to 1990, Saudi Arabia played an important role in restraining the many Islamist groups that received its aid. But when Saddam, secularist and Ba’athist dictator of neighboring Iraq, attacked Saudi Arabia (his enemy in the war), western troops came to protect the Saudi monarchy. Islamists accused the Saudi regime of being a puppet of the west.

These attacks resonated with conservative Muslims and the problem did not go away with Saddam’s defeat, since American troops remained stationed in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia attempted to compensate for its loss of prestige among the conservative groups by repressing those domestic Islamists who attacked it (bin Laden being a prime example) and increasing aid to Islamic groups that did not (including some violent groups), but its pre-war influence on behalf of moderation was greatly reduced. One result of this was a campaign of attacks on government officials and tourists in Egypt, a bloody civil war in Algeria, and Osama bin Laden’s terror campaign climaxing in the 9/11 attack.

In 1992, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan ruled by communist forces collapsed and democratic Islamist elements founded the Islamic State of Afghanistan. In 1996, a more conservative and anti-democratic Islamist movement known as the Taliban rose to power, defeated most of the warlords, and took over roughly 80% of Afghanistan. The Taliban differed from other Islamist movements to the point where they might be more properly described as Islamic fundamentalist or neofundamentalist, interested in spreading “an idealized and systematized version of conservative tribal village customs” under the label of Sharia to an entire country. Their ideology was also described as influenced by Wahhabism and the extremist jihadism of their guest Osama bin Laden. The Taliban considered politics to be against sharia and thus did not hold elections. The Taliban’s hosting of Osama bin Laden led to an American-organized attack that drove them from power following the 9/11 attacks. Taliban are still very much alive and fighting a vigorous insurgency with suicide bombings and armed attacks launched against NATO and Afghan government targets.

The Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is a Salafi jihadist extremist militant group led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Syria and Iraq. In 2014, the group proclaimed itself a caliphate, with religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims worldwide. As of March 2015, it had control over territory occupied by ten million people in Syria and Iraq, and has nominal control over small areas of Libya, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. ISIL (commonly referred to ISIS) also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including North Africa and South Asia.

Originating in 1999, ISIL pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, participated in the Iraqi insurgency that followed the invasion of Iraq by Western coalition forces in 2003, joined the fight in the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011, and was expelled from al-Qaeda in early 2014. It gained prominence after it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in western Iraq in June 2014. The group is adept at social media, posting Internet videos of beheadings of soldiers, civilians, journalists, and aid workers and is known for its destruction of cultural heritage sites. The United Nations (UN) has held ISIL responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes and Amnesty International has reported ethnic cleansing on a “historic scale” by the group. The group has been designated a terrorist organization by the UN, the European Union (EU) and member states, the United States, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries.

Attributions