The Future of Political Islam
Author: Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, Project Director at Endowment for Middle East Truth
Since the beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the interwar years, the modern political phenomenon that is political Islam has shown a remarkable ability of evolution and adaptation. This ability made the ideological movement and its offshoots one of the few political movements to survive and maintain a consistent ideological appeal throughout a century unprecedented in its pace of social, economic, and political changes. Thus, it is only logical to assume political Islam might be down, but it's not out, and societies need to preempt its next wave.
When Hassan Al-Banna started the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt in 1928, there was little to the movement except for the mobilization around Islamic symbols, the quasi-fascist militant posture, the grand sloganeering, the ideological antisemitism, and the organizational structure. In all of this, the Muslim Brotherhood was not unique but part of the phenomenon of fascist youth groups that started in early 20th century Europe spreading globally afterward. It is safe to say that political Islam had no actual ideological content in its beginnings, and I argue that today it largely remains so. Whatever ideological content political Islam acquires, it acquires through imitating its competitive ideological environment not dissimilarly from other fascist movements. This dynamic of constant unwitting imitation explains the changes the movement goes through and its ability to adopt ideological contents, making it relevant to different generations of young men and women living through different socioeconomic and political circumstances. In short, for political Islam, the Islamic symbols are static; their ideological content isn't.
This dynamic of ideological imitation can be clearly discerned in the different phases of Islamist activism since the colonial era and in our post-Arab Spring times. Sayyed Qutub's thought could be confidently mapped onto the doom and gloom writings of the Cold War. This political and literary pessimism characterized post-WW2 pessimistic existentialism and found its strongest expressions in the writings of the French Left coupled with the popularity of Marxist-Leninism among Third World intellectuals. Given this context, Qutb's opening of his Milestones ominously with, "Mankind stands today on the brink of the precipice..." is understandable. His Marxist-Leninist-inspired vanguard extolled to exit the social structure, purify its guiding theory, and then return to liberate the Muslim society, which became the basis of modern Jihadism, was an adaptation of a well-established revolutionary formula of Marxist thought.
A decade after Qutb's death, the Islamic revolution in Iran, which inflamed Islamist passions regionally, marked a new phase of the internalization of revolutionary ideological content by political Islam. Khomeini's rhetoric and political concepts marked a drastic break from traditional Islamic jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shia, not due to the innovative nature of Khomeini's intellectual work but because it drew from an entirely different well of political thought, that of radical Third Worldist revolutionary Marxism. This new ideological content, anti-capitalist, socialist, and anti-American, was internalized through the 70s and 80s by Islamist groups across the Middle East and North Africa, and led to Islamist insurgencies in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere, which can be seen in all Muslim Brotherhood offshoots of the era. The same can also be said of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, whose ideological content mounts to little besides fighting Israel.
In the 1990s, and following the collapse of the USSR and the end of revolutionary Marxism as a viable ideology of globalized revolt, the technical language of modernization, development, and democratization took over the political language as the principal concepts of political imagination. And while movements like Al-Qaeda developed their own brand of transnationalJihadism, the ideological mothership, the Muslim Brotherhood, started to follow the day's agenda and expressed its ideological content in terms of democracy, elections, and development. Islamic revolution gave way to "Islamic democracy," triggering a flood of sympathetic analytical works by Western political scientists maintaining that the Muslim Brotherhood is the democratic future of the Middle East. This is when the Muslim Brotherhood acquired its infrastructure of civil society organizations, rebranded itself as a political opposition movement, and offered itself as a democratic alternative. The waves of protest by the anti-globalization and anti-Iraq war movements were the moment in which the Muslim Brotherhood established itself as a central political opposition movement in coalition with other secular opposition movements. This was, for instance, how the Muslim Brotherhood joined the Egyptian left in creating the Egyptian Movement for Change, Kefaya, which started a drawn-out political mobilization culminating in the Arab Spring.
In this long journey, the Islamic polity envisioned by the Muslim Brotherhood was nothing but the symbol-myth of the Caliphate in which the political ideal of the day was projected. In the interwar year, it was a totalitarian system of organic Islamic nationalism. In the 60s, it was the socioeconomic utopia of socialism, and after the American triumph over the USSR, it became Islamic democracy. I argue that political Islam has no ideological content nor an intellectual life of its own. Its failure to articulate its own political theories could indeed be its strongest weapon, as it allows the movement to project the vogue ideological content of the day unto Islamic historical symbols, ensuring its relevance to the different generations of Muslims whose thought is shaped by global political culture.
If we are to take such an analysis and inquire about the possible coming wave of political Islam, where should we look? Two potential places that may give us an indication of such a potential future are the United States and Israel. Unlikely as it may sound, a moment of rising ferment of progressive politics among the American youth is already producing an Islamist-progressive hybrid of an Islamist movement fusing Islamist rhetoric with the language of American progressivism of identity politics, human rights, empowerment, feminism, social justice, and anti-racism. This potent mixture is already appealing to progressive-minded young American Muslims and could transplant itself to Muslim majority societies with the increasing globalization of American culture. While this new ideological content may clash with older generations of conservative Islamists, its American appeal to the youth could destabilize many societies, especially as it is acquiring the form of an autonomous social movement and forcing older Islamists to adapt since it will allow the political Islam to monopolize the representation of Islam as a sociological value in Western institutions. A source close to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim Brotherhood-associated organization, recently informed me that they are looking for LGBTQ Muslims to become the organization's public face.
A second place to look is Israel, where an Islamist politician, Mansour Abbas, made a historical breakthrough by being the first Arab politician to sit in an Israeli government coalition. While it is difficult to see Abbas's short-lived tenure becoming part of political Islam's wider appeal, it could allow for a sufficient sociological turn in the thinking of older generation Islamists that can help push them to accommodate the American-made progressive Islamism of younger ones as well as serve as inspiration for Islamist politicians in Western countries. Potentially, this could create conditions in which the next wave of political Islam will be popularized with progressive vogue ideological content and led by pragmatic Islamist politicians able to leverage their influence into electoral governments in crisis. Such a scenario could potentially give political Islam of the future the ability to destabilize anti-Islamist states in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, not only through domestic mobilization but from the arena of international relations and international institutionalism.
Regardless of the accuracy of my predictions, policymakers, and institutions tasked with countering political Islam need to preempt its next move through the prevention of its monopolization of Islam as a sociological value by promoting strong nationalism as home and countering Islamist mobilization among American Muslims. This will likely require the reinvention of the tools used to counter Islamism as well as finding meaningful ways to engage with young Western Muslims and promote community organizational structures not tied to Islamism. The former might be more challenging than the latter as it may be difficult to intervene in the appeal of American Islamist progressivism.
