The Future of Political Islam?

Dec. 26, 2004 — -- In the early 1990s, the Muslim world witnessed a bloody struggle between militant Islamists and local authoritarian regimes.

The radicals launched an all-out frontal attack to dismantle the secular political order andreplace it with an Islamist one. The fight was so brutal and prolonged that Western governments feared for the survival of their Arab and Muslim ruling allies -- particularly in such pivotal countries as Algeria and Egypt -- and prepared for the worst. Pundits warned that the Islamist revolution was unstoppable, on the march and likely to sweep away failedsocialist and nationalist experiments.

Not so fast, cautioned Olivier Roy, a French sociologist and an authority on Islamist movements. Challenging the prevalent conventional wisdom, in 1994 Roy published a sensational book, "The Failure of Political Islam," that made headlines the world over. He convincingly argued that the Islamist revolution was already a spent force and, more important, an intellectually and historically bankrupt one.

According to Roy, Islamist movements neither possessed a concrete political-economic program nor offered a new model of society. An Islamist slogan holds that "Islam is the solution" to Muslims' developmental crisis; in fact, the radicals' rhetoric about the Islamic revolution, the Islamic state, the Islamic economy and the Islamic society proved to beempty talk serving as a cheap drug for some of the masses.

Iran's Shiite Ghetto

Nowhere was the Islamists' failure more blatant than in their inability togo beyond Islam's founding texts, be self-critical and overcometraditional divisions and narrow sectarian loyalties.

Roy noted that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary Iran, often celebrated as apioneering Islamist project, made two key mistakes. Rather than reachingout to the entire ummah, or Muslim community, it immediately locked itselfinto a Shiite "ghetto" by limiting its appeal to only fellow Shiites, andit quickly reverted to an ultraconservative social model that echoedSaudi Arabia's own brand of Sunni puritanism.

The only remnant of Khomeini's vision of a new pan-Islamism was the rhetoric. The radicals hoped to create a new regional order based on Islam, but the hard logic ofhistory, power, states, regimes and borders proved much more enduring thanIslamists acknowledge in their propaganda. Roy published these insightsat the peak of the Islamist revolutionary moment in 1994.

But although the attempt to foment widespread revolution was a failure,Islamism remained a force to be reckoned with in many Arab and Muslimsocieties. According to Roy, conservative "neofundamentalism" -- which aimsprimarily at Islamizing society from the bottom up -- has supersededrevolutionary Islamism, whose goal is to capture political power andIslamize society by autocratic fiat from the top down.

Uprooted Muslim Youths

All of this makes a new book by Roy something of an event. In "GlobalizedIslam," the sequel to his sociological analysis of political Islam's grandfailure, Roy addresses two main issues: "post-Islamism" and Islam's globaldispersion among modern nation-states.

When Roy writes of "global Muslims," he means either Muslims who havesettled permanently in Western countries or those who try to distance themselves from a given Muslim culture and stress their membership in a universal community of believers, or ummah. Fully a third of the world's Muslims, who number 1.2 billion people, now live in a sort of diaspora as minority members of secular countries.

This is a difficult situation rife with conflicts. But the dream ofbelonging to a wider ummah is now no longer grounded in a particularchunk of territory. It has become an abstract, purely imaginaryaspiration -- and, sometimes, an obsession. The dispersal of Muslims aspart of globalization can be seen to have given rise to newfundamentalist movements on all continents, fueled by disoriented youngpeople.

Roy documents how versions of this neofundamentalism have been spreadingamong uprooted Muslim youths, particularly the children and grandchildrenof Muslim migrants who settled in the West. This ideology fuelsradicalism and sometimes succeeds in generating some community support forviolent jihadist causes like those espoused by al Qaeda.

These new fundamentalists advocate multiculturalism singlemindedly, but only as ameans of rejecting efforts to integrate into Western society. Like theirco-religionists living in the West, Muslims in the Middle East and parts ofAsia may also feel like members of a besieged minority because of thesweeping changes brought on by Westernization and globalization.Sometimes, you really can't go home again.

Al Qaeda: Western-Style Radicalism?

But once again Roy turns received wisdom on its head. He argues thatdespite the backlash by radicals, the Muslim world is going through aprocess of transformation and secularization, albeit one overshadowed bythe re-Islamization of daily life in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

"Islam is experiencing secularization," writes Roy, "but in the name of[neo]fundamentalism."

For Roy, the root causes of the social upheaval roiling the Muslim worldand the jihadist revolt against the West lie in the spreading anddeepening Westernization of Muslim societies, particularly in the past 30years.

In "The Failure of Political Islam," Roy argued that the green banners ofIslamism were closely tied to the red banners of 1970s-era leftism. Here,he makes a convincing case that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's terrortactics are grounded not in the Islamic tradition of jihad but in far morerecent European, radical, ultra-leftist and Third-Worldist movements.

"The real genesis of Al Qaeda violence," contends Roy, "has more to do with aWestern tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusiveideal world than with the Koranic conception of martyrdom."

In this sense, bin Ladenism not only represents a rupture with mainstreamIslam but is a Western import. Roy sees Al Qaeda not as a strategic threatbut as a national security problem. (Neoconservatives are alreadysharpening their knives.)

Too Broad?

"Globalized Islam" is a highly original, methodologically rigorous butdifficult text. Its difficulty is compounded because Roy has, in effect,incorporated two books into one -- one about Muslim minorities who mainlylive in the West, and another about a new wave of Islamists who haveemerged as a significant force wherever Muslims live. He places both underthe rubric of neofundamentalism.

The problem is that neofundamentalismbecomes an all-encompassing term that explains everything from puritanicalSaudi Wahhabis to uprooted Muslim migrants in the West, from the radicalIslamism of the Taliban and al Qaeda to peaceful movements like SouthAsia's Tablighi Jamaat and even professional organizations like the MuslimBrotherhood.

It is also unclear whether Roy's notion of "deterritorialization" -- thesense of belonging to a landless minority -- applies to allneofundamentalists. Ask an Egyptian, Saudi or Pakistani jihadist about theboundaries and frontiers of the Muslim ummah, and he will promptly offer adefinite answer encompassing all Muslim states with an Arab core. Therewill be nothing abstract or imaginary about it.

Roy also seems to greatly exaggerate the role of uprooted Muslims livingin the West as the driving force behind militant Islamism, and he claimsthat radical Islamism is being exported from West to East. The evidencefor this is very thin.

International Jihad

To support his hypothesis, Roy cites the case of al Qaeda's jihadists,expatriates who choose to fight for an imaginary ummah rather than theirhomelands. He suggests that the Egyptians, Algerians, Yemenis and Saudiswho follow bin Laden's siren song made a conscious decision to wage jihadagainst the West, not their local rulers.

Recent history shows otherwise. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, jihadiststargeted the "near enemy" (such detested local regimes as Saudi Arabia andHosni Mubarak's Egypt) rather than the "far enemy" (the West in generaland the United States in particular).

But by the end of 1990, the radicalshad been militarily defeated in Egypt and Algeria. Instead of closing thejihadist shop, as many did, and calling it quits, terrorists like Aymanal-Zawahri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad rethought their business. They turnedtheir guns against the West in an effort to stop Islamism from sinking andsimply to stay in business. Frustrated in their attempts to topple Mubarakand the House of Saud, incapable of sustaining their costly confrontationwith the "near enemy," Zawahri and bin Laden internationalized jihad outof necessity and desperation.

Had Roy fleshed out this historical contextmore to consider critical nuances such as this one, he might have addeddepth to his superb and complex sociological study.

Fawaz A. Gerges is a consultant for ABC News. He holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in internationalaffairs and Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College and theauthor of the forthcoming "The Jihadists: Unholy Warriors."