The roots of political Islam and its future

The phenomena of political Islam still attract researchers, despite what appears on the surface to be a severe decline in the Islamic political movements that expressed some features of this phenomenon, but - in my estimation - a decline in geographical areas and not others, and a shift in the forms that the phenomenon is now taking.

The decline is evident in our Arab region, where the era of the Arab Spring (2010-2011) cast a shadow over the Islamic movements that got involved in politics and left it. Appreciation is confused and does not have a formula to get out of this situation in order to pick up the pieces of its members who have been fragmented and their ties have been torn apart.

The phenomenon of returning to religion after its decline in the aftermath of the first wave of the Arab Spring is accompanied by a shift in the forms of religiosity, as it is predominantly not based on specific organizational affiliations, and in it forensic science and emotional Sufism occupy a privileged position, even if it is not centered around specific preachers.

While we are witnessing in the Arab region a decline in political Islam movements, however, Asian Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan still embraces many of these movements, even if their applications differ, which deserves great attention.

Despite this decline of Islamic political movements in the region, religion - according to many opinion polls - is still a major determinant of identity among Arab youth, and the Arab Barometer confirms in its latest survey an increase in the religiosity of Arab peoples, especially young groups.

The phenomenon of returning to religion after its decline following the first wave of the Arab Spring (2010-2011) is accompanied by a shift in the forms of religiosity.

As it tends to be not based on specific organizational affiliations, and forensic science and emotional mysticism occupy a privileged position in it.

And if it is not centered around specific advocates, rather the religious person moves among them according to his needs, aspirations, circumstances, and years of life.

In the end, it is a non-organizational, non-ideological religiosity that cares about minor questions rather than major ones.

Here it is better to present our definition of political Islam, as it is Islam that was formed from the folds of the modern nation-state and interacted with it. A modern discourse of Islam developed through the establishment and changes of the modern nation-state.

Moreover, the study of Islamism as a discourse linked to the discourse of the modern state does not eliminate the role of ideology in shaping it.

Ideology is a formation expressed on the surface of discourse and produced in interaction with the state and the market/economy.

What we like to emphasize is that the interaction of Islam with the emergence of the modern nation-state in its civilized world in which the state had a different definition is what established political Islam.

The modern nation-state extended through the tools of legislation, courts, schools, the army, the unified market, etc. to many spaces that filled and occupied the public space, while the Muslims’ state that they established over centuries was characterized by leaving many spaces for the community/nation to fill, and not interfering with a job or task that could be performed. by the community.

The moment of interaction - then - between Islam and the modern state is what created the phenomenon of "political Islam", and with this definition, which is supported by new studies, we reformulate questions and issues from a different perspective.

For example, the question that ruled our thinking for decades is no longer and still is the relationship between religion and the state, but as Talal Asad raises in his book "Secularism, the Nation-State, Religion" by asking how to show the spaces of the modern state, whether it is schools, courts or Laws or otherwise, their power to form and redefine the religious and secular in their relationship to each other.

The modern state, according to Asad, is not a cause, but an expression of secularization. It has generated specific social spaces in which secularists have grown, and at the same time, in those same social spaces, Islam must also grow.

Not only do religious and secular people meet and interact, they are also redefined, and most importantly Asad in his previous book makes it clear that Islamists must be statist and engage in politics, because all places are now political and state-ruled.

The question, then, is no longer about the relationship between religion and state, or religion and politics, but about how the religious and secular are shaped by the state?

And how do they interact?

Here we are talking about political expansion, incursion, and encroachment, and how we can restore it to its size through the distribution of power / power (Power Sharing) in society, which is one of the most prominent issues globally now.

The article by Muhammad Massad, professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, argues that political Islam should be traced back to the French campaign against Egypt (1798-1801) and the subsequent establishment of the modern state of Muhammad Ali Pasha.

Islamic movements between the French campaign and the fall of the caliphate

Al-Siddiq Muhammad Massad - Professor of Sociology at Northern Arizona University in the United States - presents us with a different vision of the roots of political Islam when he traces it back to the French campaign in 1798 and not the announcement of the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. The issue for him and for us is not a dispute and disagreement over dates, but rather a new approach that arranges a lot. One of the repercussions is the realization and understanding of the phenomenon of political Islam among its followers and those outside its organizations.

It also, in my view, will draw many ways of thinking in the future.

Many studies have established that the emergence of political Islam in Egypt - mainly represented by the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 - dates back to the moment of the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and its supposed emotional and intellectual effects on Egyptian Muslims.

Other studies interpreted this appearance as a reaction to the liberal and secular stance taken by the Egyptian state at the time.

Hence, the questions raised by this view are the relationship between religion and the state and the issues of succession, considering political Islam as the political entity that unites Muslims.

Intellectually, previous studies placed the founder's discourse in communication with two successive scholars: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897 AD) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905 AD).

Without diminishing the importance of these events or those intellectual works, Massad's article argues that political Islam should be traced back to the French campaign against Egypt (1798-1801) and the subsequent establishment of the modern state of Muhammad Ali Pasha there (1805-1842 AD).

The article explains the national and international political and economic contexts that surrounded and participated in the formations of political Islam in all its forms, in a manner that contradicts the common academic conviction that the thought of Hassan al-Banna was rooted in the works of Muhammad Abduh, and that Abduh was rooted in the movement of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.

The article depicts three historical phases:

• The first period from 1805 to 1849.

• The second phase: from 1849 to 1879.

• And the third: from 1879 to the mid-1920s.

Each of these stages revolves around a common theme that distinguishes discourses, knowledge, structures of politics, economics, and "Islam", which is, in order: technology, civilization, and ideology.

The work of Hasan al-Attar will be explored as an example of the first stage, and the work of Rifa'a al-Tahtawi as a model for the second stage, in which Islam becomes the basis of the state's nationalism.

The third phase would begin with a transitional period of undifferentiated discourses, but would quickly disperse after the British occupation in 1882 into three forms of political Islam;

A liberal represented by Muhammad Abdo and the Umma Party, close to the Khedive represented by Ali Youssef and the Constitutional Reform Party, and Islam from outside the state represented by Abdel Aziz Gawish and the National Party.

• First: He realizes the emergence of political Islam and the foundations of the modern nation-state in Egypt, and the emergence of capitalism as interrelated parts of a single social and historical phenomenon.

• Second: He sees political Islam - and the nation-state and the economy - as a good site for studying the continuity of what previous studies theoretically separate as traditional and modern. This required the article to explain the national and international political and economic contexts that surrounded and participated in the formations of political Islam of all kinds.

As a result of the cultural friction between the state of Muhammad Ali and the West, the question of civilization arose, which was answered by Al-Tahtawi, who realized early on that we are facing two different cultural structures that can bring about communication between them by disentangling the foundations on which the Western cultural structure is based and its products. Freedom is for the Europeans, for example. It is justice for Muslims

Implications and effects

First: Collusion in isolating the Islamic phenomenon as a prelude to stigmatizing it as exceptional

Previous studies that attempted to analyze Islamism fell into three traps:

Second: Political Islam is the legitimate son of the Egyptian state

If political Islam is the legitimate son of the Egyptian state and not a bastard, then it has interacted with it from within and without it.

Therefore, it was closely linked in its official and unofficial character - which grew from within its apparatus - to the developments of this state and the major questions it faced at every historical stage and left its mark on it.

This is what the aforementioned article followed in detail.

In the first stage - the stage of Muhammad Ali - the question was related to technology, i.e. bringing in technology to build the state, and its intellectual symbol was Hassan Al-Attar, the Al-Azhar scholar who did not see a contradiction between legal science and technical sciences, as both emanate from one root.

As a result of more cultural friction between the state of Muhammad Ali and the West through scientific missions, the question of civilization arose, which was answered by Al-Tahtawi, who realized early on that we are facing two different cultural structures that can bring about communication between them by disentangling the foundations on which the Western cultural structure is based. and between its products;

Freedom for Europeans - for example - is justice for Muslims.

The question at this stage is related to civilization, as we have been able to see the beginnings of a discourse that formulated politics, dealt with civilized issues, and defined and defined the foundations of nationalism, and relied on the legal and intellectual traditions of Islam, and recycled its concepts in new modern discourses.

In the third stage, the question raised by the emerging Egyptian state was related to the ideology that should govern and the determinants of its future identity. Here, the answers were distributed and centered around multiple personalities, but all of them were within the framework of political Islam - that is, in the spaces between Islam, politics, law, education, women, etc.

The multiple discourses in which political Islam was distributed contributed to the creation of the modern Egyptian state. The state mufti - for example - and next to him many civil intellectuals and scholars were contributing to reformulating Islam to be simple, rational, fair, and easy to implement by the various state agencies and in the aspects of society.

With every development in the structures of the Egyptian state, the form of the economy applied in it and its relationship to the developments in the structures of the international economy, we witness similar repercussions on political Islam, that is, the relationship of Islam to politics.

During the period of al-Banna (1906-1949), we witnessed two complementary phenomena: the return after the experience of Muhammad Ali, the expansion of the state’s authority and influence to wide areas, which required an inflated political component in al-Banna’s thinking, but the emerging Egyptian state distributed its powers and its economy between the British occupier and the national ruler and Egyptianization for the economy;

The duality that governed his thinking was represented in such categories as Islam and the West, Islam and secularism, tradition and modernization, etc.

Rather, the centrality of education in his thinking can be attributed to the expanded role played by the state at this stage.

The state at this stage, through education, courts, laws, and economics, gained strength in forming and redefining the religious and the secular in their relationship to each other.

During the Nasserite period (1952-1970) he was embodied in the absolute state capable of bringing about development and victory over the Zionist entity, achieving Arab unity, and solving the problem of the class struggle in a strong alliance with the working people.

To confront this, we found the thought of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who presented us with absolute concepts such as governance and ignorance to confront the emerging July state, and I traced this idea in a previous article in detail.

It can be pointed out that the duplication, distribution, and division that arose in the Egyptian state’s structures and economy between the public and private sector, capitalism and socialism, and Gamal Mubarak’s neoliberal group in the face of the army wishing to continue its hegemony over the land and some foundations of wealth, etc., all of this left its mark on political Islam. When his powers were distributed between formal and informal, conservatives and reformists, as appeared in the Brotherhood, and radicals and moderates, as appeared with the Islamic Group and Jihad.

Here, I would like to stress that in each of these historical stages, regardless of the nature of the political system and who leads it, there was a constant interaction of the state apparatus with Islam in many areas, and this may meet with what comes from the Islamic society or political movements, or separate.

Third: Why was the clash continuing between the regime and a section of the Islamists?

If the structures that produce the state in its developments, the economy in its basic features, and the Islamic discourses are similar in this way, then why was the continuous clash between the regime and a section of the Islamists?

Here it is better for us to distinguish between the state and the regime.

In the state there is a multi-level interaction, influence and influence between its structures and the Islamists from multiple faces and in many areas - as I presented -, but in the field of the supreme authority in the state there is competition for influence and control, and it is a struggle that occurs and will happen with any political force, whatever its ideological identity;

The regime and its leadership do not accept a partner in power and influence.

Fourth: What does the future of political Islam look like?

Talking about the future is complex and characterized by uncertainty, as many factors overlap, such as climate change and technological developments, and many incidents such as the Corona pandemic and the Ukrainian war surprise us.

The structure of the international system has not been stable and is witnessing competition between the United States and China, the emergence of new powers on the stage such as India, and globalization is being rethought through supply chains. Sovereignty in it is between soft and hard, new actors next to it and adversaries from it who may replace it and carry out some of its functions, and a transition in the structures and nature of the economy...etc.

All these factors and others have produced decentralized structures that are dominated by the logic of the network, not stable structures, and their powers and forms are distributed between a center that revolves around it, and a decentralization that reaches disintegration. Reproducing the old forms of holistic organizations, holistic discourses and ideologies is utterly delusional.

We will be facing pluralities that reach liquidity, and a permanent change in jobs and roles, with which the opposing binaries such as the state’s intervention and withdrawal in the economy, or the differentiation between secular and religious structures, etc., are negated.