Whither Political Islam?

The debate over why the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred has been dominated by different versions of "culture talk," the notion that culture is the most reliable clue to people's politics. Their differences notwithstanding, public intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis agree that religion drives both Islamic culture and politics and that the motivation for Islamist violence is religious fundamentalism. Ascribing the violence of one's adversaries to their culture is self-serving: it goes a long way toward absolving oneself of any responsibility.

The singular merit of two new books by Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy is that they take the debate about the rise of political Islam beyond culture talk. Kepel seeks to understand the intellectual history of political Islam, Roy the social conditions under which Muslims think and act. Of the two, Roy makes the most forceful break from culture talk. He dismisses "the culturalist approach" that treats Islam as "the issue" and that assumes it bears a relation to every preoccupation of the moment, from suicide bombings and jihad to democracy and secularism. Not only does culturalism treat Islam "as a discrete entity" and "a coherent and closed set of beliefs," Roy explains, but it turns Islam into "an explanatory concept for almost everything involving Muslims."

Roy argues that the Koran's most important feature is not what it actually says, but what Muslims say about it. "Not surprisingly," Roy observes, "they disagree, while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and clear-cut." Like culturalists, Roy and Kepel examine very carefully the Islamist discourse about both the Koran and the rest of the world. But they understand it as the product of many forces, rather than as the necessary development of its religious origin. In doing so, they provide a more nuanced understanding of doctrinal and political Islam than do the culturalists.

GOING GLOBAL

In a historical account that is both careful and user-friendly, Kepel tracks two radically different strands of Islamic thought: the ultra-strict, quietist Salafist, or Wahhabi, school and the more political thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood. These two schools later merged, producing the more hybrid ideology now identified with Osama bin Laden.

Kepel traces the origins of Salafism to Saudi Arabia and the ideas of the radical theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In the opening decade of the nineteenth century, the Wahhabis and the House of Saud formed an alliance, commencing a state-building project that was completed a century later. Wahhab agreed to glorify the Saudi tribal raids on neighboring oases by treating them as jihads, in return for King Muhammad bin Saud's promise to elevate Wahhabism to a state ideology. The project did not survive the Ottoman invasion in 1818, however, and had to be renewed with a series of Wahhabi-anointed jihads in the 1910s and 1920s. By that time, the jihad was no longer a stand-alone affair: Wahhabi blessings for the Ikhwan, the religious militia of King Saud, were doled out along with bombs dropped by the British, who by then were occupying the Arabian Peninsula. After World War II, the Americans replaced the British as the kingdom's main patrons. And under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was eager to use the Saudis as foils for the Soviet Union, "Wahhabism was elevated to the status of a liberation theology--one that would free the region of communism."

According to Kepel, a second, more autonomous and activist strand of political Islam originated in Egypt in the 1920s when the Muslim Brotherhood resolved to go beyond observing sharia (Islamic law) to establish a full-fledged Islamic state. Their slogan was "The Quran is our constitution." The Brothers joined Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Free Officers' Revolution that toppled King Farouk in 1952, but the alliance soon dissolved. Repression, at first in Egypt and then in Baathist Iraq and Syria, forced them to decamp to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, where they joined forces with religious Palestinians who were uncomfortable with the Palestine Liberation Organization's secular nationalism. Gradually, the brotherhood took control of Saudi intellectual life, positioning itself to shape the country's religious and political awakening after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Its power grew with the attack on the Great Mosque in Mecca on November 20 of that year, which brought the Wahhabists under official suspicion. The religious "awakening" of "a plethora of young radicals" followed; like the Iranian revolutionaries who combined traditional Shiite rhetoric with Third World anti-imperialism (portraying Saudi officials as American lackeys, for example), they mixed the activism of the brotherhood with quietist Salafism, creating "an explosive blend that would detonate throughout the region and the whole world."