More Barriers to Understanding

By Noureddine Jebnoun, "Identity of the al-Qaida generation" - Middle East Times - Cairo, Egypt
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

At the heart of the misunderstanding that is fueling tensions between the Muslim world and the United States and Europe, lies a common Western misconception that the intellectual and political trend known as Islamism is a necessary impediment to modernization

The condemnation of any form of Islamism, a significant political component throughout the Muslim world, often results from the simplistic and reactive perception that the majority in the West have toward Islamists.

The recent eruption of the al-Qaida generation has further entrenched this misconception and created more barriers to understanding and interacting with this phenomenon, which is much more diverse and widespread than many in the West believe.

The creation of identity concepts and lexicons is the greatest common denominator that can be effectively applied to all expressions of the Islamist phenomenon. Their very existence show the effectiveness, social mobilization and political diversity of Islamic political actors – qualities that have enabled Islamism to gain much more ground than previous ideologies, even Arab nationalism.

Islamists are using Western identity concepts to suit their own agenda. For example, they apply Western notions of modernization to their local contexts, such that "modernity" is not automatically associated with Westernization. The West, in turn, finds this localized treatment of their symbols irrational.

But the West's reaction is itself irrational, because it views those policies named "Islamist" as calling into question its monopoly on the definition of "modern," and does not realize the impact of creating the universal modernity.

Using the hypothesis of the identity criteria of "resurgent Islamism" authorizes a first important methodological conclusion: an identity movement by nature goes beyond the limits of social groups. Its analysis cannot be done effectively by using the instruments of classical sociology, which limit themselves to socio-economic parameters.

The Islamists are, in actuality, not poor or underemployed, nor rich, not young or old, not bourgeois intellectuals, civil or military, men or women. They are all of these categories at once, as were, historically, the players from other movements who employed a form of identity resistance, nationalist or anti-imperialist, against a dominant force.

Borrowing shortcuts from essentialism and brandishing these concepts only oversimplifies, a process appropriately described as producing "more rhetoric than insight." The analyst must be careful not to simply extrapolate the potential "common denominator" of identity as the sole basis of analysis. He or she must reestablish the diversity and complexity of the parameters of political sociology and economics, and not refer to the raison d'être of Islamism as primarily the behavior of social players.

Once the Islamic cultural label is established, the second level of analysis is to determine why one (and only one) segment of the last generation has opted for a radical Islamist reading and militant manifestation of this reference.

We know that this radicalization took place, on the one hand, against the ruling elites in the Muslim world and, on the other hand, against the West in general, and the United States and Israel in particular. We also know that this radicalization is both tactical and ideological.

On a tactical level, the al-Qaida generation advocates the use of armed struggle over all other modes of political action, which have been completely discredited in the eyes of its members.
On an ideological level, it relies on a stringent exclusivity.

This group has come to define "Muslim" so narrowly and selectively that "nonbelievers" include not only Christians and Jews, but also the so-called "secular" elite in power in the Muslim world.

Furthermore, the branding of nonbeliever also falls upon other Muslims opposing themselves to these elites (including the Muslim Brotherhood, who are called "political opportunists" by al-Qaida). They are accused of accepting democratic principles, a concession that gives primacy to a "human" law over the "divine" revelation.

Finally, both the tactics and ideology of al-Qaida have been "de-territorialized" as its struggle has become increasingly a globalized one.

The militants of al-Qaida cannot be considered as the only form of Islamist expression.

Furthermore, ideological and political differences are inherent to the diversity of Islamist movements. To remove the specificity of al-Qaida, it should be situated within the spectrum of other actors of the contemporary Islamist phenomenon, including other expressions of the current phenomenon of resurgent Islamism.

Whether in time or space, it goes without saying that the divisions between groups are shifting and porous because of ongoing developments and transformations which are complex and contradictory.

The founding movement of Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood, although denounced by al-Qaida, remains to this day a very large majority within the Islamist sphere.

The Salafis seem to want to avoid the political modernization assumed a long time ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. In recent years, it is important to note the major resurgence of Sufi modernist tendencies which have been more involved not only on the educational and social terrain, but also politically.

The Islamist phenomenon has long been perceived as radically antagonistic to the "mystic," "apolitical" or "moderate" qualities associated with Sufism in the eyes of all those, regimes or Western observers, who are looking within Islamic territories for a legitimate alternative to the Islamist challenge.

In many respects, the border should now be tempered; new bridges can be built between two forms of mobilization that have never been completely contradictory.

To be continued - This is the first of a three-part series - Part two will be published on Thursday, May 22, on the Middle East Times - Click the title of the article to go there.