In brief, refers to the distorted interpretation of the role and practice of the religion of Islam currently in vogue among the ignorant and the extremists in the Islamic world. Folks, to begin with, it is important to stress, as Roberts (2003) reminds us, that Islamism should not be conflated with so-called “Islamic fundamentalism.” In fact, the latter does not really exist because all Muslims who practice their religion are in a sense “fundamentalists.” Why? Because the Qur’an is unlike the Bible (hence the fallacy of the analogy between Christian fundamentalism and so-called Islamic fundamentalism) in that the Qur’an is primarily a constitutional document prescriptive in intent—whereas in contrast the Bible is essentially a historical document. In other words, to be a fundamentalist in Islam is to adhere to the true tenets of Islam, it does not imply a form of “anti-scientific eccentricity appropriate to fundamentalist Christianity,” as Roberts puts it (p. 4), where the objective of the Christian fundamentalist is essentially the advocacy of the literal truth of creationism as it appears in the Book of Genesis.
So, what then is Islamism? It refers to the belief among some sections of Muslims that it is possible and necessary to dissolve the division between church and state (or more correctly between mosque and state) that currently exists almost throughout the Islamic world—with the exception of one or two instances (such as Iran). While in theory that may be so, in practice it has amounted to merely a call to replace the current secular authoritarianism of the praetorian oligarchies that dominate (what are virtually) police states that make up a large part of the Islamic world with an equally virulent brutal authoritarianism of a theocracy with a matching horrendous anti-Islamic human rights record (vide the experiences of Islamist rule in Afghanistan, Iran and perhaps one may also add to the list, Sudan). The problem is not just a question of good intentions gone awry, but a fundamental theoretical weakness emanating from the refusal by the ulama (also spelled ulema, referring to the body of Islamic scholars who claim expertise in Islamic theology) to grapple with what Islam has to say on such critical questions as representative government, human rights, constitutional checks and balances, social inequality, economic exploitation, the nation-state, the modern world economy, science and technology, and so on—not in terms of airy-fairy nostalgic references to the caliphates of the past (capped with the usual escapist lines like “God knows best” or “God will take care of it”), but in terms of real, practical, day to day program of action.
No Islamist has yet come up with a single example of what a concretely viable Islamic constitution, one that can be implemented in the modern world of today, would look like. The problem is highlighted by Lazarus-Yafeh (1995: 175) when he accurately observes about the ulama “It is a puzzling historical fact that although Islam produced some of the greatest empires the world has ever known, the ulama eschewed for centuries the issues of the political and constitutional structure of the state and preferred, much like the sages of the small, dispersed Jewish people, to deal in great detail with such problems of the divine law as prayers and fasting or purity and impurity.” There are two related conjectural explanations one may hazard to offer here for this circumstance: One, is that in Islam a political tradition arose where the executive and the legislative branches of government were considered to be subordinate—at least nominally if not always in practice—to the judiciary (since the latter drew its legitimacy from the scriptures). Yet, as we all know, in the context of the complexity of the modern world of today the judiciary, by itself, lacks the wherewithal to be able to fully confront the complex daily tasks of modern governance. Two, is that in its early caliphal history, Islam was perceived to have been ruled by God-fearing and just rulers (even if autocratic) who obeyed Islamic law, the effect of which was to obviate the thorny task of grappling with the issue of devising a political system with the potential to neutralize an unjust and oppressive ruler should one emerge in the future (that is a democratic political system). At the same time, there arose a tradition of almost blind obedience to those in charge of the state.
In other words, on the issue of political authority, while Islamic doctrine evolved to include injunctions for obeying authority, it had little to say in practical terms on what to do if that authority was unjust or non-Islamic because the issue of democracy simply did not enter the equation, especially in a context where Islam did not recognize the separation of church and state. However, even when in later times it became absolutely necessary to confront these thorny issues, especially following the arrival of Western imperialism, the ulama were still found wanting. The reason this time was a peculiar dialectic that had emerged where the traditional refusal by the ulama to accord importance to awail (the foreign sciences) in the curricula of madrasahs as they insisted on hewing to the traditional categories of mnemonic knowledge as a response, ironically, to the increasing irrelevance of Islam in matters of a modern economy and state in a post–1492 Western-dominated global arena, in turn, continued and continues to reinforce this irrelevance. The frustration presented by this dialectic has surfaced among some—repeat, some—sections of Islamists in the form of terrorism (which is tragically ironic given that, supposedly, an important element of Islamism, by definition, is self-righteousness and piety, and Islamic piety—unlike Christian piety of the Crusader era—does not brook terrorism, however the terrorism may be defined.)
The political failure of Islamism in the context of a modern world stems from the fact that it has emerged as a political enterprise of an essentially flag-waving anarchic identity politics bereft of concrete Islamic proposals to address the very problems that are at the root of the rise of Islamism (and this failure one must stress is not because Islam is wholly incapable of supplying these proposals, but for lack of intelligent philosophic analysis of how Islam can provide the answers to the problems of governance in a modern world). Perhaps, Moore (1994) comes closest to the mark when he defines Islamism as “a political ideology akin to nationalism and should be viewed primarily as an abstract assertion of collective identity. Like nationalism, it may harbor a variety of contents or purposes. Consequently it may take many forms, depending on the social and political contexts in which it is expressed. Like nationalism in a colonial situation, however, it becomes a vehicle for collective action when alternative channels are suppressed or lose their legitimacy” (Moore 1994: 213).[1]
[1]. For more on Islamism see the following: Beinin and Stork (1997), Ciment (1997a), Entelis (1997), Naylor (2000), Sonbol (2000), and Wickham (2002).