Sukant Chandan: Secularism
and Islamism in the Arab
World
By Sukant Chandan
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
Secularism in the political leadership in the Arab world has
had a very short life-span if put into historical context. It
became a dominant political current for a few decades in the
latter half of the twentieth century, and today is seeing a
near complete collapse in political movements struggling for
independence and development in the region.
Different Islamic leaders have been the main political
inspiration for Arabs in their liberation movements.
Salahuddin al-Ayoub, more popularly known as Saladin, who
liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the twelfth century
is probably the Islamic leader most widely known outside of
the region. Saladin’s legacy remains a profound source of
inspiration for Arabs, especially so for radical Islamists who
not only see the parallels with today’s military invasions and
occupations, but directly employ this history in their
political agitation in their fight against what they consider
as the modern-day Crusaders.
More recently, Political Islam was at the forefront of the
fight against colonialism in the twentieth century. There are
examples of movements and leaders from every Arab country, but
some of the more well-known include Sheikh Izz al-Din Qassam,
after who Hamas have named their armed wing. Sheikh Al-Qassam
was killed by the British colonialists in Palestine in an
armed confrontation; his death sparked what some call the
First Palestinian Intifada from 1936 to ‘39. In Iraq Shia
Islamists united with their Sunni counterparts against the
British colonialists in 1920, a popular uprising from which
one of biggest present-day Iraqi Islamist insurgent groups,
the ‘Brigades of the 1920 Revolution’ take their name. Shia
Islamism in Iraq can also be linked to the emergence of the
Lebanese Hizbullah. Shia Islamist scholars such as Fadlallah,
a prominent radical Shia scholar based in Lebanon who has
close ties to Hizbullah, were immigrants to Lebanon from the
religious centres of Iraq and Iran. On a theoretical level it
has been the ideas of Muhammad Abdu and Al-Afghani in the
nineteenth century, and further back to Ibn-Tammiyah from the
fourteenth century who have been some of the most important
contributors to Islamist ideology.
While one can trace back the influences on modern Islamism
from the region’s own history, making it an integral part of
the political identity of the people and their struggles, in
contrast it was the cultural and political influences from
outside of the region in Europe that influenced modern secular
Arab Nationalism. The founding father of modern secular Arab
Nationalism was Syrian Sati al-Husri, who was inspired by
French republicanism and nineteenth century German
nationalism. Arab Nationalism became the ascendant political
force in the post Second World War period.
Like the rest of the ‘Third World’, the post Second World War
period saw the increasing strength of secular and left-wing
nationalist currents in the region, inspired by the example of
the independence and social development of the Socialist Bloc
in the face of neo-colonial hostility. The USSR’s, East
European Socialist countries and China’s direct or indirect
support to radical Third World movements also played a major
role in their growth.
It was the pre-eminent secular Arab Nationalist Gamal Abdel
Nasser of Egypt whose nationalization of the Suez Canal
signalled the pinnacle of the modern Arab renaissance. This in
turn brought about an unprecedented atmosphere of Arab
confidence that invigorated various trends of Arab
Nationalism, a period in which branches of the Arab
Nationalist and Socialist Ba’ath Party came to power in Syria
and Iraq. The Arab National Movement, mainly based in Beirut,
developed into various left-wing forces such as the Marxist
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who put
the largely unknown tragedy that befell the Palestinian people
onto the world agenda by being the first Arab armed group to
hijack passenger airplanes. And of course Yasser Arafat’s
secular and left nationalist Fatah led the Palestinian
national revolution by the late 1960s.
In this same period Islamist forces had also been gaining
momentum and were often in the ranks of the independence
movements. Those inside and outside of the region with vested
interests in opposing the anti-imperialist leftist and
nationalist surge supported sections of Political Islam that
were in opposition to the secularists. In the light of the
complex interaction between the two political movements, this
relationship is all too often over-simplified. In Algeria the
FLN was an Islamist nationalist movement as much as one
inspired by the ideas of Fanon, Mao and Che Guevara, although
the Islamist current was purged shortly after independence.
Many of the original Fatah leadership (including Arafat by his
own claims) belonged to the movement to which Hamas is the
‘Palestinian branch’: the Muslim Brotherhood or ‘Ikhwan
Muslimeen’, a major force of mass radical anti-imperialism
after World War Two with branches throughout the Arab world.
The Ikhwan was strongest in Egypt, the home of its founder
Hassan al-Banna. Another Egyptian leader of the Ikhwan after
Hassan al-Banna’s death, Sayyid Qutb, was possibly modern
Political Islam’s greatest strategist and thinker. He was
executed by Nasser’s regime in 1966 after being accused of
plotting to overthrow the state. Initially Nasser’s Free
Officers and the Ikhwan were allies in the struggle against
the British, before Nasser’s regime conducted a massive
repression against the movement, jailing and cruelly torturing
many of their activists. A fact little known outside of the
region is that the Palestinian Ikhwan also played a major role
in the resistance against the establishment of Israel in
Palestine in the late 1940s.
The 1967 defeat of Nasser and the Arab armies by Israel can
now clearly be seen as the beginning of the decline in
leadership of the secular forces. As soon as the left
nationalists in the Middle East gained power, their leadership
in the struggle against Zionism and neo-colonialism began to
wane. While much of the 1970s saw struggles being conducted
and led by left nationalist forces, this decade also witnessed
a qualitative shift in favour of radical Islamism. The Arab
people were incensed when the Arab Republic of Egypt under
President Sadat sued for peace with Israel, giving the Ikhwan
and other more radical Islamists a greater hearing from the
masses. The event which contributed to the growth of the
Islamists more than any other was the overthrow by Islamists
of the West’s strongest ally in the region after Israel – Iran
under the Shah – which was up to then ‘an island of stability’
according to former US President Carter.
The two most important manifestations of the growth of radical
Islamist movements in the 1980s were the Lebanese Hizbullah
which was directly assisted in military training and
infrastructure by the Pasdaran, an Iranian military force, and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Both movements saw Iran as
their chief inspiration.
PIJ were the first openly Islamist movement to conduct armed
struggle against the Israeli occupation in the early 1980s,
and the first movement in the Sunni community to use the
controversial tactic of kamikaze attacks. At the same time the
Palestinian Ikhwan were involved in building up a network of
charitable and religious organizations that were invaluable
social institutions to the lives of many Palestinians,
especially in Gaza. The Ikhwan established the Islamic
University in Gaza in the late 1970s, the construction of such
a centre of learning, debate and activity constituted a big
step forward for them and forged a new generation of Islamist
educated youth. Nevertheless, PIJ was a challenge to the
Palestinian Ikhwan as it was the only Islamist armed
resistance to Israel at the time. This meant that many young
Ikhwan members either joined PIJ or put pressure on their
leadership to develop and implement a militant strategy for
the Palestinian revolution. The fact that one of the most
charismatic and astute ideologues of the Palestinian Ikhwan
had split and formed PIJ, Fathi Shiqaqi, must have added to
the Palestinian Ikhwan’s image at the time as a movement
unable and unwilling to address the challenges of the
Palestinian liberation struggle. This possibly speeded up
preparations of Sheikh Yassin and other leaders of the
Palestinian Ikhwan for armed struggle which came to fruition
with the establishment of the Harakat Moqawama al-Islamiyya,
the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ or Hamas – on the second day
of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987. The initial document that
Hamas issued in 1988, ‘The Charter’, is problematic as it
gives credence to the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. It has to be borne in mind that this anti-Semitic
document has wide currency across much of the political
spectrum in the region due to the West’s support for Israeli
settler-colonialism, and the feeling of powerlessness amongst
the masses in the face of Israeli aggression. Hamas issued
various subsequent communiqués which give a more accurate
exposition as to their ideology, strategy and tactics.
The PLO claim that the 1987 Intifada was led by them, and that
they were the ‘sole legitimate representatives of the
Palestinian people’. It has been argued by Dr Azzam Tamimi’s
in his new book on Hamas, Unwritten Chapters that the PLO’s
jealous guarding of their claim to leadership may have been
partly due to Hamas playing a major role in the Intifada and
challenging the PLO’s claim to leadership.
In an ironic twist of history it was the Western and Chinese-
supported Afghan mujahideen who fought against the Soviet army
and pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan that gave further
impetus to the development of modern militant Islamism which
was soon to become a powerful force against neo-colonialism in
the region. The Afghan jihad allowed militants to overcome the
rivalry between militants that existed along national and
ethnic lines. Overcoming these divisions and forging Pan-Arab
and Pan-Islamist unity were some of the main strategies of Bin
Laden and Zawahiri in the construction of their organization
that was to become the violent ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad
against Crusaders and Jews’ or commonly known as Al-Qaeda,
meaning ‘The Base’, formed in 1998. Initially for Bin Laden,
Zawahiri and others, Afghanistan was the base for
international jihad, today it is mainly Iraq.
By the late 1980s the popularity of Islamism and the Islamist
movement was such that the hitherto secular Arab Nationalist
Saddam Hussein, like Muammar Qaddafi before him, started to
formally synthesise Islamism with Iraqi and Arab nationalist
ideas into the social and political fabric of Iraq. The most
outwardly visible example of this was adding ‘Allah u Ahkbar’
– Allah is the greatest – to the Iraqi flag during the war
against Iraq in 1990. Saddam Hussein initiated a massive
Mosque building program, and attempted to co-opt the Islamic
revival that was taking place into the Ba’ath’s strategy of
positioning Iraq as the vanguard Arab country resisting neocolonialism. Saddam Hussein may have chiefly been responsible
in contributing to today’s synthesis of radical Arabism and
Islamism, a view advanced by Jerry Long in his book, Saddam’s
War of Words. The 1990 war against Iraq saw for the first time
a unity between left-wing, nationalist and Islamist forces in
the region and beyond against Western aggression.
The US’s establishment of large military bases in Saudi Arabia
during the campaign against Iraq fundamentally shifted the
position of many Islamists who had been hitherto allied with
the US against nationalists in the region. These Islamists,
Osama Bin Laden being the most well-known amongst them, could
not sit idly by and see the Islamic lands of Iraq and Saudi
Arabia occupied by the US. This was compounded by a
realisation amongst some Islamists that the US and Britain
were not going to allow them to use their own oil wealth for
the benefit of their own countries. Western oil exploitation
was going to mean that the only natural wealth of the Gulf –
oil – was going to run out in the next four decades or so, and
that they had fight to wrest control of their own oil from the
West before they were left with nothing. These political
shifts culminated in the establishment of Al-Qaeda and many
other organizations that share their military vanguardist
outlook, and many more yet that share their political aims of
an Arab world free from Western domination.
Today one sees the shift from secular nationalism to Islamism
nearing the final stages of completion. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
writing for The Guardian on June 12th from Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon vividly described this transition,
contrasting the “ailing, ill-equipped and ill-fed fighters of
the old secular factions” and “muscular, bearded and wellequipped jihadis” funded through the network of Islamist
organisations that spans the Middle East, and describing the
migration of Palestinian radicals, both young and middle-aged,
from the former Marxist camp to the Islamist. As one Marxist
in his 50s told Abdul-Ahad, “I have never lost my political
compass. Wherever the Americans and the Israelis are, I am on
the other side. So if Hizbullah and the Iranians and the
Islamists are against the Americans now, so I am an Islamist.”
Highlighting the continuities between armed secular groups of
times gone by with that of armed Islamist groups of today, a
PFLP leader explains to Abdul-Ahad that “most of those jihadis
were once fighters with us and other Palestinian factions … if
you come to me and give me $100,000, I will split from the
PFLP and form the PFLP: Believers’ Army. It’s so easy."
Another secular leader explains of the hopelessness and anger
at their position which drives these wretched youth of the
Arab world to militancy: “we have young men who have nothing,
no hope of a nation, no hope for the right of refugees to
return, nothing but the two streets of the camp. With this
situation I wouldn’t be surprised if half the camp becomes
jihadis.”
Islamists have always been at the forefront of the struggle
against colonialism and neo-colonialism in the Middle East
since the times of the Crusades. Most academics, policy makers
and those who support the independence and development of the
Arab world have some knowledge of the post Second World War
period when Islamist movements were supported by those who saw
them as a counter-weight to the secular anti-imperialist
movements of various Arab Nationalists and Marxist trends.
Further study and reflection on the contemporary history of
the Arab world may on the other hand lead to a more nuanced
understanding of this relationship, rather then labelling one
side ‘reactionaries’ and the other ‘progressives’. Perhaps it
is time to move away from this outdated and problematic
terminology. Islamists see themselves at least as equals to
the radical secularists if not the rightful owners to the
leadership of the national and social liberation struggle. The
end of the strife between the Islamists and what remains of
the secularists in the anti-imperialist struggle is a sign of
the strength of the independence movements in the Arab world,
not just attributable to the weakness of the secularists.
Furthermore, the Islamists leadership in this struggle such as
that of the Iraqi resistance, without the support that the
secularists enjoyed from the Socialist Bloc, is indicative of
the strength of their ideology’s roots in the history, culture
and identity of the masses in the region.
-Sukant Chandan is a London-based freelance journalist,
researcher and political analyst. He runs two websites:
http://ouraim.blogspot.com/
and
http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.com/ and can be contacted at
[email protected]