Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement

Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi', Fouad Zakariyya

Description

This classic book explores the intellectual, political and social foundations of Islamism, and current Islamist groups across the Arab and Muslim worlds.



Written by Egyptian philosopher and leading Arab intellectual, Fouad Zakariyya, and now available for the first time in English, this thoughtful book has no rival as a critical introduction to the nature of contemporary Islamism.



The book was written in the aftermath of the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and at the height of global debates about the relevance of Islamism in contemporary Muslim societies - especially in the light of Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979.



Zakariyya offers an important analysis of the multiple voices of current Islamism. He explores various recent attempts to construct an Islamic social and political order, presenting a sustained critique of modern ideological currents and theological worldviews. He delves into the sensitive question of Shari'ah, civil society and democracy in the Arab world. Ultimately, Zakariyya argues for a secular and democratic civil society that is unconstrained by past interpretations of the Shari'ah.
Editor’s Introduction

PART ONE: SECULARISM, THE GULF STATES, AND ISLAM

1. The Contemporary Muslim and the Search for Certitude

2. Secularism: A Civilizational Requirement

3. Critiques of Secularism

4. Islam and Religious Hierarchy

5. Petro-Islam

6. The Contemporary World According to Shaykh Sha‘rãwï

PART TWO: IN DEBATE WITH HASSAN HANAFÎ

7. The Future of Islamic fundamentalism

8. The Evaluation of the Discourse of the Contemporary Islamist Movements

9. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Verdict of History

PART THREE: ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SHARΑAH

10. An Invitation to Dialogue

11. The July Revolution and the Islamic Groups

12. The Implementation of Sharï‘ah: An Attempt at Comprehension

13. The Implementation of Sharï‘ah: A New Dialogue

Select Bibliography in Contemporary Arab Thought

Index

Sujets

• Islam
• Social Science
• Islamic Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849642460
• Langue: English

Extrait

MYTH AND REALITY IN THE
CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIST
MOVEMENT
Fouad Zakariyya
Translated and with an Introduction and Bibliography by
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘
Pluto P Press
LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI
ZZakariyya 00 pre iiiakariyya 00 pre iii 222/2/05 4:32:06 pm2/2/05 4:32:06 pmFirst published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Fouad Zakariyya 2005
English translation and Introduction © Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ 2005
Translated with a grant from The Gateway Trust
The right of Fouad Zakariyya to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2247 6 hardback0 7453 2246 8 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed in the European Union by Gutenberg Press, Malta
ZZakariyya 00 pre ivakariyya 00 pre iv 22/2/05 4:32:06 pm22/2/05 4:32:06 pmContents
Translator’s Introduction vi
PART ONE: SECULARISM, THE GULF STATES, AND ISLAM
1 The Contemporary Muslim and the Search for Certitude 3
2 Secularism: A Civilizational Requirement 13
3 Critiques of Secularism 23
4 Islam and Religious Hierarchy 34
5 Petro-Islam 47
6 The Contemporary World According to Shaykh Sha‘r āw ī 51
PART TWO: IN DEBATE WITH ÓASSAN ÓANAF Ī
7 The Future of Islamic Fundamentalism: A Critical Study
in Light of Óassan Óanaf ī’s Approach 65
8 Evaluating the Discourse of the Contemporary Islamist
Movements 79
9 Islamic Fundamentalism and the Verdict of History 104
PART THREE: ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SHAR Ī‘AH
10 An Invitation to Dialogue 117
11 The July Revolution and the Islamist Groups 121
12 The Implementation of Shar ī‘ah: An Attempt at
Comprehension 129
13 ī‘ah: A New Dialogue 139
A Selected Bibliography in Contemporary Arab Thought 154
Index 167
Zakariyya 00 pre vZakariyya 00 pre v 22/2/05 4:32:07 pm22/2/05 4:32:07 pmTranslator’s Introduction
“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its
doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties,
barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures
the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute or
by remedying the diffi culties and abuses which made their lives
miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and
it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and
exultant corporate whole.” Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thought
on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 44.
“The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which
I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the
mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition
constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1963), 7.
Fouad Zakariyya’s Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist
Movement offers a sustained critique of the intellectual, political, and
social foundations and contemporary manifestations of Islamism in the
Arab and Muslim worlds. This work is a genuine contribution to our
social and political thought: it sensitizes us to the complex relationship
between religion and society in the post-colonial Arab world and
the rise of new social movements that vie for power in the name of
religion. Written in the aftermath of the assassination of former Egyptian
president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and at the height of the global debates
about the relevance of Islamic revivalism in contemporary Muslim
societies, especially after the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran
in 1979, this book sheds important light on the multiple voices of
current Islamism, their theological worldviews, ideological currents,
and attempts to construct an Islamic social and political order in the
contemporary period.
In addition to treating the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood Movement,
1founded by Shaykh Óassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, Zakariyya’s
book delves into the religious and political formations of such militant
vi
ZZakariyya 00 pre viakariyya 00 pre vi 222/2/05 4:32:07 pm2/2/05 4:32:07 pm Translator’s Introduction vii
Islamist movements as the Jam ā‘ah al-Isl āmiyyah and the Egyptian
Jihād, which have been mushrooming in Egypt and the rest of the Arab
world since the 1970s and whose impact on the world was seen in the
2September 11, 2001 tragedy.
While academic studies of Islamism abound, none compares
to Zakariyya’s thorough inquiry into the nature of contemporary
Islamism, its theological foundations and contemporary political and
social practices. A well-known Egyptian philosopher and a leading
Arab intellectual, Zakariyya is in a unique position to shoulder the task
3of critically analyzing contemporary Islamist movements. Although
Zakariyya himself does not belong to the Islamist camp, it makes
sense to place this book in the genre of self-criticism in contemporary
Arab writing since it wrestles with many intellectual, theological, and
ideological issues that are at the heart of contemporary Arab and Muslim
intellectual history.
It is diffi cult to pinpoint the genesis of the genre of self-criticism in
modern Arab intellectual history. However, many consider the 1967
defeat with Israel as its starting point. The 1967 defeat forced a number
of contemporary Arab thinkers to reconsider those issues and questions
that had long been taken for granted, and some thinkers have gone as
far as to question the relevance of the Sacred to contemporary social and
political life. The Arab left, the Islamic trend, and the nationalist trend
were all negatively affected by the reasons behind defeat and sought
in their different ways to diagnose and remedy the situation. The Arab
intelligentsia was anxious to produce a new intellectual project of
selfcriticism and rejuvenation. The Arab left shouldered the responsibility of
self-criticism and analysis, and defeat gave the Islamic tendency its best
historical moment in decades. In short, a mixture of critical traditions
stalked like specters across the wounded paths of Arab consciousness.
From the leftist side, Y āss īn al-Ó āfi z wrote Ideology and
Defeated4 5Ideology; S ādiq Jal āl al-‘Azm wrote Self-Criticism After Defeat and
6Criticism of Religious Thought, and Abdallah Laroui wrote L’idéologie
7arabe contemporaine. Islamist thinker Y ūsuf al-Qara∂āw ī wrote The
8Islamic Solution, and nationalist thinker Costantine Zurayk wrote
9Revisiting the Meaning of Disaster.
In his various writings on Islamism and the need to revive rationalism
in contemporary Arab thought and culture, Zakariyya often refers to
passages from most of the above listed writings. His own Myth and
Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement falls squarely within
the tradition of critical writing on the status of religious movements in
the Arab world. Here, he is not just critical of Islamism per se, but of
ZZakariyya 00 pre viiakariyya 00 pre vii 222/2/05 4:32:07 pm2/2/05 4:32:07 pmviii Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement
the political and economic conditions that led to the rise of religious
extremism in the contemporary Arab world. In Egypt, his home country,
Zakariyya was critical of Nasserism because of its lack of respect for
public freedoms and the way it diminished the role of democracy during
10its almost two decades of power. Likewise, he was critical of the Sadat
regime, particularly of the way it handled the religious question in Egypt
in the 1970s and its wholesome and uncritical embrace of the United
States, which led to the signing of the Camp David Accords between
Israel and Egypt in 1979. Zakariyya argues that Sadat was partially to
blame for the religious crisis in Egypt in the 1970s because he led the
Islamist movements to believe that he was for the implementation of
Sharī‘ah in Egypt, which the different Islamist movements saw as the
11beginning of the formation of the Islamic state in that country.
In this book, Zakariyya focuses on the post-1967 socio-political and
religious scenes in the Arab world. He devotes a great deal of time
to treating the intellectual and religious underpinnings of Islamism in
Egypt in particular and in the Arab and Muslim worlds in general in
the 1970s and 1980s. Here he offers a well-constructed thesis on the
status of Islam and, in particular, of Islamism in the modern Arab and
Muslim worlds.
Zakariyya’s main arguments in this book can be summarized as
follows. First, religion in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds
forms a great part of the public sphere; for various reasons, both state and
society permit the public expression of religion. Second, although religion
contains positive social and ethical values, both the state and Islamism
have exploited religion to advance and/or protect certain political and
economic interests. Third, since the beginning of the decolonization
process almost half a century ago, the political Arab and Muslim elite
have failed to offer a coherent nationalist program or ideology to rid
their societies of economic dependence and political stagnation. Fourth,
authoritarianism has been the hallmark of the power elite in Arab and
Muslim societies. Democracy has not been anchored in contemporary
Arab and Muslim societies, and to take hold in the Arab and Muslim
worlds, democracy must be homegrown. Fifth, because of widespread
social, economic, and demographic changes that have taken place in
the past fi ve decades, religion has g