Ardeshir Mehrdad and Yassamine Mather
The last three decades have
witnessed a relentless growth of Islamic movements, so that, today political
Islam is an undeniable reality on the world scene. The events of September 11,
2001 and since have given it further prominence. From the Middle East to North
Africa and South Asia, it has, in its various manifestations, become a major
player that needs to be analysed both politically and theoretically. The contradictory
nature of political Islam means that such analyses must deal with it not only
in relation to the interests of capital, but also in relation to the challenge
it poses to socialist ideas.
In many countries, the movements of
political Islam raise their flag as that of ‘seekers of justice’ and aim their
propaganda at the poorest and most deprived sections of society. They, thereby,
present themselves as a rival to the forces of socialism and the left. The
formulation of a strategy to respond to this challenge requires a deeper
understanding of the background to, and reasons for, these developments. This
article presents some preliminary theses, based on a necessarily limited and
general outline of the characteristics and peculiarities of the Islamic movements.
Amidst the ravages of the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, then, political Islam is on the rise, and its supporters portray it as the ideology of the poor and the
dispossessed. They promise ‘a better life’ for the ‘disinherited’, ‘less
inequality’, and the ‘end of corruption’ through the rule of ‘sharia’a’ (the
religious state). Yet in Iran, almost twenty-six years after coming to power
with similar promises, Islamic government has become synonymous with greed and
corruption. Super-rich clerics and their immediate families have replaced the
‘corrupt Royal court’ and its entourage. The poor get poorer while the rich get
richer. (Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the Islamic regime’s previous president and
likely to be its next president, is ranked the forty-third richest man in the
world by Forbes Magazine.)
What, then, is the basis of the
political economy of Islamic fundamentalism? How does it gain its supporters
amongst the poor and the ‘dispossessed’? What is the relation between the
promises of equality in the rule of sharia’a and the real politics of Islamic
governance within the world capitalist order?
From the 1970s onwards, as Islamic societies of the periphery were
incorporated ever-deeper into the world market, the centre-periphery crisis in
these societies entered a new and qualitatively different phase. The
fluctuating, but, overall, downward trend in the price of raw materials,
including - for most of the period - oil, on which these societies depend, speeded up the widening of inequality in social,
economic and cultural development; the accumulation of foreign debt; and the increasing inability of such states to control and restrain the
spiralling crises they have to confront.
A modern phenomenon
The ‘revolutionary Islamic movement’
is a contemporary phenomenon. Whatever may be the indirect or minor influences
of past Islamic movements on it, it is attached by an umbilical cord to the form of world capitalism that has
developed in the last three decades. The social roots of the ‘political Islamic
movements’ are, essentially, the uprooted – those who, for a variety of reasons, have been waylaid on the path of
socio-economic development; and, to whom the new structures have brought
nothing but bankruptcies and ruin. Despite variations in its social fabric in different
circumstances, the pan-Islamist movement in all the more-or-less developed
countries of the periphery (with a few exceptions) has recruited among four
main layers.
First are the urban uprooted and
deprived. They belong to the explosion of people with no stable
relation to the expanding peripheral-capitalist system of production and
distribution. These apparently ‘cursed’ people have in common a peasant
ancestry, taking ‘refuge’ in the dirt and mud surrounding such cities as Cairo,
Algiers, and Teheran. They are futureless, hopeless, degraded, and without
identity or rights. In Islamic societies, the urban destitute form the social
layer most ready to take up the Islamists’ banner. They make up the main social
base for the ‘political Islamic movement.’ They also generate its explosive
power.
Second are middle layers belonging
to pre-capitalist structures. Such people have been bankrupted or marginalised by the spread of capitalist structures and
their fate is to struggle harder only to sink into greater poverty. They are important in helping to
organise the Islamic
movements, and in welding together their socially disparate supporters.
The third layer comprises sections
of the merchant and industrial bourgeoisie left outside the circle of power. They find themselves in unequal competition with a bourgeoisie
privileged by being close to (and reliant on) a state, the rationale of which
has been to orchestrate development from above. In peripheral societies where
the bourgeois state (rather than being the product of capitalist development)
imposes the growth of capitalism from above - and where the relation between
power and capital is turned upside down to the extent that it is easier to rely
on power to make money than on wealth as a gateway to power - those layers of the bourgeoisie
excluded from power can count on being permanent losers. This fate places
manufacturers and merchants in the same camp as the ‘wretched of the earth.’
Such people not only fill the coffers of the Islamic movement, but can also,
for a period, help to increase the attraction of pan-Islamism to the justice-seeking poor by
setting up charities, interest-free loan accounts and other such schemes.
Fourth are intellectuals whose social standing has
declined, who have lost out, altogether or at least to some
degree, during the formation of the new
political and civil structures. These intellectuals find their influence and privileges vanishing. They are increasingly isolated. Whether or not in priestly clothes, whether
young or old, whether or not - objectively - their re-emergence would answer a structural need, they will use the religious movement to re-establish their place in
society. They provide the leadership cadres of the movement, those who pack the
ideological baggage and map the political strategy for the ‘Islamic movement.’
Anti-enlightenment
The pan-Islamist movement, in its
rebellion against the hopelessness capitalism has engendered, rests on the
rejection of enlightenment. The ideologists of this rebellion have to close
their eyes to the future, turn their backs on reality and take refuge in myths.
This obscurantism, ironically, brings today’s uprooted poor together, under one
umbrella, with yesterday’s rich. It is an Islam based on resurrecting, from a
vast store of stories and myths, ideas that promise the end of misery for all
those on the scrapheap. It insists there is no alternative to a movement that
is foreign to common sense and free thought in all its forms. It treats as
enemies all who favour scientific thought and who question the so-called
‘certainties’ (tashkik). In this view any attempt at
enlightenment, whether of yesterday or today, is a devilish plot to be fought
at all costs.
Against class-based line-ups
The pan-Islamist movement is a
furnace in which class line-ups must melt. The non-homogeneous (multi-class)
mix in the Islamists’ camp dictates a policy of denying class war, or at least marginalising it and removing it from the immediate agenda.
Such a non-class-based social bloc, based on religious cultural unity, has no
other way of surmounting the class antagonisms within it between the hungry and
those with full bellies. Here and there, ‘the war between poverty and wealth’
becomes a weapon for the movement to browbeat its merchant fellow-travellers when
they become restless, or to loosen their purse strings. But in general,
sharia’a remains firmly on the side of ‘unity’ and those who ‘split’ (monafegh)
are worse than those who do not ‘believe’ (moshrek). It has an uncompromising
enmity towards communism or any other political creed which defines society by
its class boundaries and perceives class confrontations as inevitable.
No national boundaries
At every level the new ‘Islamic
movement’ is the rising of those who not only see themselves as alienated within
their own national boundaries, but also of those who have (they think)
discovered the source of their destitution and bankruptcy outside these
boundaries. From their beginnings, therefore, these movements face outwards.
The foreign enemy is seen as the root cause of all evil; in creating the
mechanisms of depravity and misery, it ensures that all Muslims suffer injustice equally.
‘Political Islam’, accordingly,
cannot confine itself within national boundaries. To aspire to set up anything
less than a world Islamic power, based on a world Islamic will, would be to acknowledge ultimate defeat. This is the logic behind the
rejection of the legitimacy of all the civil and secular systems that sustain nation states, and of all international treaties
and agreements between nation states. It is the context that explains the
inherent contradiction involved in simultaneously opposing both imperialism and
world ‘arrogance’, and also nationalism. The Islamic movement may here and
there support tendencies aiming at independence and even isolationism. Yet it
is emphatic in its rejection of nationalisms that counterpose the nation
against the umma (Islamic community).
Anti-democratic
The pan-Islamist movement - however its elements interpret
‘political Islam’ - opposes
democracy in all its forms. The movement’s beliefs, class make-up and historic
direction come together to reject popular sovereignty and the right of the
people to determine their own destiny by majority vote. It is forced to locate
the right of sovereignty above the heads of ordinary people, to make it the
overarching authority that must resolve the movement’s internal and external
contradictions. Divine rule, where all rights belong to god, is the only realm
where there are no tensions and dissent. And it is only the divine that can
give away this or that right on earth to the chosen people - whether the Islamists in question
wear clerical or civilian apparel.
Who is invested with this divine gift? This is a matter the ‘chosen’ must settle amongst themselves.
The right of people to vote on a one-person-one-vote basis can, at best, only be accepted once. This is in regard to the initial decision – for or against the Islamic Republic. Thereafter, the only political
function of the people is to express their allegiance
(beia’a) to the chosen (nokhbegan).
Democracy is an institutional
mechanism to establish a legal basis for government. Islam, however, recognises
only particular personages - a governor, vali or caliph: it does not
recognize institutions of government. Yet, in practice, it must
institutionalise the right to make decisions by a small coterie of nokhbegan
and religious authorities (mujtahed) - i.e. those who have the ability and
‘knowledge’ to interpret divine law for any given circumstance. Recognition of
those who have this ability is also in the hands of those who have proven their
‘knowledge’ beforehand. Thus the question -“who decides?” - comes full circle.
Citizen
rights
Even outside the question of
political power and of government, the pan-Islamist movement cannot accept any rights for its citizens. And, even if we put aside the fact
that Islamic sharia’a considers women as half a man (a destiny considered
entirely compatible with ‘justice’), women will do little better in the utopia
that the Islamic movement is advocating. The sanctity of the family is
basic to the reconstruction of this ‘paradise
lost’, and the values cementing it together require an unambiguous definition
of a woman – one that begins with her as a wife and ends
with her as a mother.
Outside the Islamic framework lies
the world of corruption. No matter how much political Islam shouts about human
rights and the miracle of womanhood, it cannot acknowledge values which cross
the boundary into this world. Sometimes this or that religion may be favoured
for political purposes, so that its adherents may be afforded a status
equivalent to Muslims. But for the most part non-muslims are second-class citizens or worse. Those who belong to proscribed religions, such
as the Baha'i, are directed to repent or die. If today religious apartheid is
put on the shelf, tomorrow the conscience of a powerful and dominant Islam will
not rest until the non-Muslims find their ‘rightful’ position. If non-Muslims
are today exempt from paying the religious tax
(jezzieh), they will only have this added to future debts.
In sum, the sovereignty of the
people is a concept alien to the pan-Islamism movement, which, most ominously,
will actively seek to destroy it altogether.
Jihad and terrorism
The pan-Islamism movement is a
‘Jihad.’ The uprooted who decide that a ‘wheel that does not turn for their
needs should never turn’, and who do not see any reason to decry the ruination
of today if it leads to the utopia of tomorrow, can have no
other recourse but to the sword. No open and free environment, no democratic
system, no legal testament can guarantee their goal. Even if pan-Islamism can,
in some circumstances, gain power through legal means; whether or not it is suppressed or allowed to grow; whatever
its place in a particular balance of power: it has in
general entered an arena of war where pulling the trigger is a daily duty.
Recourse to terrorism in all its forms; the semi-military organisation of that
part of the social base that can be mobilised; the creation of professional
military institutions; attempts to infiltrate and recruit in the armies of
Islamic countries: these are all acts which cannot be stopped or even delayed.
Jihad is a road which will take pan-Islamism to the promised land.
The growing crisis and the steady
weakening of governments increased the intervention of global capital in the
internal affairs of Islamic countries. This process reached a point at which
the finance and economic ministries of many Islamic countries turned into impotent
operatives for the decision-making centres
of global capital. They
bowed to major and crisis-provoking restructuring of the socio-political life
of their countries. They presided over policies that caused massive
unemployment and attendant despair; chronic inflation ravaging meagre savings;
acute housing shortages leading to running battles between the guardians of the
city and the never-ending waves of migrants; and non-existent healthcare facilities that transform
hospitals effectively into morgues.
The savage
demands of the International Monetary Fund and the credit limitations imposed
by the World Bank, forced peripheral governments to turn on their own people. What little remained
of state largesse, in
the form of subsidies,
dried up. Millions were made destitute, unprotected against misery, famine and
disease. These were the people who carried Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan
and Algerian pan-Islamism on
their shoulders. The
scholars of Islam would do better - and would save their institutions (official and
unofficial) much money - if, instead of looking for the
footprints of political Islam in history, they would wend their way to the
archives of the IMF and its financial networks.
There they would find
the directives that cast light on the cause of the plight of their people.
Reprinted
with permission from Critique
This is an updated version of a series of four articles which first appeared in iran-bulletin in 1993. Parts 2-4 will appear in subsequent issues.