Political Islam is a Journey

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The Journeying in and of Political Islam1 Abdulkader Tayob (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Afro-Middle East Centre Conference Political Islam: Conceptualising power between ‘Islamic States’ and Muslim Social Movements 19-20 January, 2015 Please do not cite without Permission

Introduction An enormous body of literature has been produced on political Islam2, but relatively little has been written on the individual journeys of religious activism. I argue in this presentation that political Islam is the sum of these journeys; that political Islam is best represented as a journey writ large. The journeys of political Islam have not been entirely ignored, but they are usually told in an overly simplistic form. Sayyid Qutb’s journey to the United States and his return to Egypt and to Islam has become a template for others. The journey from sinfulness represented by the West to the dynamism and beauty of Islam has been repeatedly told. A life of debauchery and temptation is left behind for a life of commitment and sometimes martyrdom. Journeys told in such ways create a caricature where good and evil are white and black. There are no grey areas in this binary vision of the world, promoted by insiders and uncritically repeated by many observers. The journeys that make political Islam, the real journeys, are much more complex. They include intellectual tribulations, but also deeply personal struggles with regard to

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This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. The opinions expressed in this work are those of the author, and the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. 2 I use the term political Islam for revival (tajdīd), Islamism, or fundamentalism.

Page 2 of 11   beliefs, practices and attitudes, but also in relation to parents, teachers, partners, children, friends and associates. Islamists want a better society, a more vibrant Islam, and a greater commitment to Islam from themselves and others. Such aspirations demand commitment, choices, temptations, and confrontations. Political Islam lends itself easily to the metaphor of journeying. It has some distinguishing features that suite the metaphor. Most organizations use the word ḥarakah to denote their dynamism, movement and change. On an individual level, this ‘movement’ almost always includes a departure from one place to another, from one lifestyle to another. Political Islam means taking a position different from the one given at birth. There are journeys in space and time, from the rural to the urban, from the East to the West and back again, from the present to the past and back again. The journeys of political Islam are promoted by unusual influences and paradoxes, and include moments of enlightenment and darkness. The journeys are focused, some may say obsessed, with the Other. They pass through a conscious construction and reconstruction of the self in relation to a significant Other. In these and other key ways, Political Islam is best thought of as journeying. I first thought of the journeys of political Islam in Europe in 2010, when I met a Libyan activist who shared his story with me. He was part of the Daʿwah Organization that had opposed Gaddafi for a long time. At one time, he related, he was kidnapped by Libyan security officials and stuffed in a box in the Embassy. When I met him, he was still grateful that the German security services rescued him. Otherwise, he would have been sent to Libya and to a more permanent and ever-lasting abode. In exile, he became an active member of a mosque and still gives the weekly sermon, and was also drawn to Sufism. He sometimes attended the gatherings of the Burhaniyyah Sufi order in Hamburg, but resisted joining them in their heavy breathing and moving dhikr. His interesting journey prompted me to look closer at the biographies of Islamic activists. I began in earnest, then, in Egypt in 2011, when I interviewed some Islamists immediately after the advent of the Arab Spring. However, I was unable to return to Cairo due to the continuing conflict there, and decided to focus on South African activists for a while.

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I want to share with you a few specific journeys of South Africans within the broader frame of journeying in political Islam. Moving from the local to the global and back again, I will share vignettes exemplifying journeying in political Islam. I will then conclude with some reflections on how my approach adds to current scholarly interpretations of this important phenomenon. Mandla3 was a self-declared Black conscious (BC) youth in the Eastern Cape, reciting poetry at anti-apartheid meetings at age 15. In 1986, a friend from the Muslim Youth Movement lent him a book that argued that Islam was an African religion. Mandla was overwhelmed: “…. [the book] captured my imagination immediately; I said no! That this is the faith! I wanted to become a Muslim and this is the religion of my ancestors.” Mandla’s enthusiasm was short-lived as he met Muslims in the Eastern Cape, but he persisted and eight years later joined the Muslim Youth Movement as it committed itself to Africanization in post-apartheid South Africa. Alas, in 2011, he resigned in frustration with racism in the ranks of the organization. But his journey in Islam continues. Mandla’s journey contrasts with the journey of Faqir,4 one of the founder members of the MYM in 1970. Even before the formation of the MYM, Faqir had travelled to Europe and met Sayyid Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, in Geneva. Faqir was impressed with Ramadan’s vision of Islam as a religion of dynamism and modernity, and back home worked tirelessly to establish an Islamic movement in Southern Africa. He played a leading role in connecting Islamists in Southern Africa with the leading figures in Europe and North America, connected in turn with the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and Jamaate Islami in India and Pakistan. In the 1980s, Faqir was confronted by people like Mandla that the MYM had ignored the challenges of apartheid oppression. Their global vision had “failed to land,” did not find resonance in the peoples’ struggles.

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All names have been changed. Interview with author, 26 February, 2013. Interview with author 4 April 2012.

Page 4 of 11   Faqir held passionately to his global vision, but also insisted that political Islam in South Africa was not opposed to national liberation. The different journeys of Mandla and Faqir capture one of the salient features and dilemmas of the journey of political Islam in South Africa. Political Islam in South Africa was rooted in the ideas of liberation, but moved like a pendulum between a global vision of Islam and local politics. These two poles in Mandla and Faqir’s journeys recurred in the journeys of other leaders and followers in the various movements in South Africa. This particular feature of political Islam’s journeying between poles was initiated and framed by leading intellectuals in the beginning of the twentieth century. The founder of the Muslim brothers, Hasan al-Banna, presented Islam as a cause (daʿwa) in comparison with of many other causes (daʿawāt): “the different causes (daʿawāt) that have besieged this period, divided hearts and confused thoughts, can be judged by our cause (daʿwa).”5 In another lecture, al-Banna spoke of the Islam of the Muslim Brothers, contrasted with the Islams of the Persians, the Mamluks and the Turks.6 Around the same time, Muhammad Iqbal in India redefined the ummah as a nation, and directed Muslims to compare and contrast the geographical nation in which they lived, with the religious nation (ummah) that they shared with people across the globe.7 Al-Banna and Iqbal created a language for thinking about Islam in comparison with other religions, causes and nations. When we look at the life trajectories of individuals, these and other choices occupy a central feature of journeying in political Islam. Maududi, we are told by Charles Adams, was faced with a difficult intellectual choice between the Ahle Hadith and the

Hasan (1906-1949) al-Banna, Majmūʿa Rasāʾil Al-Imām Al-Shahīd Ḥasan Al-Bannā (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaḍāra al-Islāmiyya, n.d.), 19. 6 Hasan (1906-1949) al-Banna, Majmūʿa Rasāʾil Al-Imām Al-Shahīd Ḥasan Al-Bannā (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaḍāra al-Islāmiyya, n.d.), 118. 7 Javed Majeed, “Geographies of Subjectivity, Pan-Islam and Muslim Separatism: Muhammad Iqbal and Selfhood,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 1, 2007, 145-61. 5

Page 5 of 11   Deobandis.8 In his political career, he was presented with another difficult choice at partition. Osamah ben Laden, we are told in popular biographies, moved from a Western lifestyle to Islamic jihad. Countless European Muslims find themselves somewhere on the road between Islam and Europe. Sometimes, the choices confronted in the journeys of political Islam appeared to be clear and straightforward. The real journeys of political Islam suggest, however, that the choices were often subtle and indeterminable. An architect in Durban, Aziz9 found that the Good took on unexpected shades of grey. Aziz was initiated into political Islam in Huston (USA), impressed particularly by Iranian activists led by Ebrahim Yazdi. Back in South Africa, he moved between the MYM and the Tablighi Jamaat, not willing to stake his claim as clearly as his friend Faqir. Faqir found the TJ “suffocating […] and intolerable.” Then, Aziz was given an opportunity to design a prayer room on the Howard campus of the University of Natal. He did not want to follow the example of the University of Durban-Westville where a mosque stood apart from other religious groups, and from the faculty buildings. Aziz wanted a mosque that flowed into the campus – one that was not so clearly demarcated from education and from other spheres of life. The mosque was designed and built with this vision, but it has since become very similar to the one that Aziz rejected. When I met him, Aziz was disappointed with such mosques, the one he designed and the others that proliferated in the city. Mosques were a clearly recognizable Good, but their discordant relation to the world unsettled Aziz. The journey of Musa10, another activist from Johannesburg, also included multiple and competing goods. In the early 1980s, he offered to manage the bookshop of the Muslim Youth Movement, primarily to show how it could be made financially viable. But he was also interested in all books, not only the books prescribed by the MYM. Eventually, he was confronted and challenged for stocking Murabitun books by the leadership of 8

Adams, C. (1976). The authority of Prophetic Hadith in the eyes of some modern Muslims. In D. P. Little (Ed.), Essays on Islamic civilization presented to Niyazi Berkes (pp. 25-47). Leiden: Brill. 9 Interview with author, 23 June 2012. 10 Interview with author, 8 April 2014.

Page 6 of 11   the MYM. The Murabitun, a rival Islamist group from the UK challenged the theological credentials of the MYM. Musa was disappointed with the heavy handedness of his superiors in the MYM, but his own journey has followed the books that lined the bookshop: searching for the good among many goods. This confrontation and choice of goods is another key feature of journeying in political Islam. It is well-known that a deep sectarianism dominates political Islam, but little is said about a struggle over multiple goods that appear to be equally right, equally grounded in Islam, or equally attractive. The great al-Ghazali provides a moving representation of the struggle over multiple goods and evils:

It is as if the heart is an object attacked from every side. When influence[d] by one thing, it is immediately matched by its opposite and changes its quality. When the demon descends on it and calls it to respond to impulse, an angel comes and saves it from that. When one demon pulls him towards some evil, another one pulls him in another direction. When an angel directs him to a good, another directs it to something else. Sometimes, (the heart) is torn between two demons, and sometimes between two angels.11

The heart not only faces a choice between good and evil, but also between several goods and evils. A deep and persistent conflict between good and evil, and between varieties of goodness, seems to be the fate of humans according to al-Ghazālī. This representation provides an excellent insight for thinking about this aspect of journeying that constitutes political Islam. Political Islam is confronted and caught between the desires for Islam and democracy, for Islam and modernity, for Islam and revolutionary socialism, for Islam and gender equally, for Islam and outrage. Such goods cannot be compromised. They are not without their deep contradictions and contrasts, and come alive in the journeys that activists undertake.

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al-Ghaẓāli, A. Ḥ. M. (1356). Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (4 vols.). Cairo: Lajnat al-thaqāfah alIslāmiyyah, vol. 2, p. 1419.

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If the realization of multiple goods is too subtle, a meeting of the Other is a more easily recognizable feature of journeying in political Islam. Haroon12 came to Durban to study pharmacy, and was drawn to political Islam through the lectures and debates of Ahmed Deedat. He followed Deedat everywhere, and modeled himself in Deedat’s image as a speaker and debater. And yet, when I asked him about a transformative memory in his life, he mentioned a few nights he spent in the Black township of Kwamashu near Durban. Deedat’s lectures constructed Haroon’s identity against Christianity and Hinduism; but his experience in Kwa-Mashu confronted his identity as an Indian Muslim, unsettling him to think about Islam beyond race. Sumayya13 from Pietermartitzburg related a long and distinguished career as an activist Muslim. She avoided confrontation, but made clear to herself and to others that she would not join the Tablighi Jamaat, that she was aware that Muslim men in general, and the ulama in particular, would not tolerate her initiatives. As a woman, however, her horizon, and her identity expanded dramatically when civil strife in the midlands of Natal introduced her to a variety of religious and cultural groups. In this new social activism, Sumayya’s vision of the Other expanded far beyond the inter-Islamic groups that she had grappled with until then. The Other occupies an important part of the journeys of political Islam. The other is the significant partner that shapes and determines a course of action, an attitude and relation. For many activists in South Africa, the religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) were the significant others. Their understanding and practices were shaped in relation to them, who were invariably seen to be too silent on apartheid, too traditional or incapable of keeping in touch with the times. But the other can take different forms. We know that radical political Islamists have been driven by their conception of the Other as an archenemy. They have framed the West as the great Satan, but so too have they identified other enemies, more closer and within. The biography of Abu Musʿab al-Sūrī, the key strategist of al-Qaeda by Brynjar Lia shows how he rejected the Muslim Brothers in 12 13

Interview with author, 5 April 2012. Interview with author, 21 June 2012.

Page 8 of 11   Syria and then continued to shape his political actions in relation to similar groups in Algeria, Europe and Afghanistan.14 The overwhelming place of the other can take different forms. The other led to a deep and violent sectarianism. But if we look at the entire spectrum of journeys, then we find the Other sometimes breaking boundaries and at other time creating new ones. If there is a journey, then we should ask if there is a destination. This represents another feature of journeying in political Islam. I only interviewed activists who had been involved in political Islam over decades. Rather than taking a snapshot of their lives engaged in a ritual, a practice, a video message or a book, their journeys shed light on destinations and end-points that unfold over decades. Imraan15 was a working class office worker attracted to the “larnies” (middle-class bosses) of the Muslim Youth Movement in the 1970s. I interviewed him at his office in the working-class Indian township of Phoenix, from where he counseled streams of people on government grants, HIV AIDS and rental arrears. He told me of women who prostrated themselves at his feet for his useful services. He was also embarrassed that they promised to pray for him at the local temple, and pleaded with them to do so from outside the temple where there were no “idols.” When I left him, I had no doubt that Imraan had found his destination. In contrast, Musa and Faqir seemed to me still meandering in different ways. Faqir was determined to prove to the world, and mostly to himself that the MYM was committed to the eradication of apartheid from the 1970s. Musa found serial destinations. After withdrawing from an Islamist organization, he became active in the management of a mosque in Johannesburg; immersed himself in the production of a Muslim world radio programme; and then pledged allegiance (bayʿa) to a Sufi shaykh. When I heard that he became a khalifa (representative) to the latter, I thought that he had reached his goal. In conversation, though, I realized that he was still moving, unsettled by the competing goods that he first tasted in the MYM bookshop. Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus’Ab Al-Suri (Hurst & Company, 2007). 15 Interview with author, 5 April 2012. 14

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The journeys of political Islam reminded me of William James’s study of Christian evangelical born-again testimonies in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Analyzing these testimonies, James presented a model of the trials and travails that characterized intense religious experiences. After periods of doubt, remorse, confusion and turmoil, mystics and saints arrived at a holistic vision of the world and the self. I sometimes felt a deep sense of resolution and composure (iṭmiʾnān) when listening to my interviewees. At other times, I heard continuous struggle and confrontation with choices. I have often wondered if martyrdom attackers regard their supreme acts as final and irrevocable end-points, or deeply frustrated acts of giving up a struggle against contradictions. Lankford16 has argued that 9/11 suicide attacker Muhammad Atta was neither brave nor fanatical, but a deeply conflicted individual who saw martyrdom as a final escape. We need to know more about the choices made by radical Muslims, before judging them in their destinations of glory and destruction. In general, then, journeying in political Islam takes shape around life choices, troubling goods and evils, a blinding vision of the Other, and resolutions that may or may not be attained. Journeying in political Islam sheds light on those who have emphasized its political nature. Francois Burgat17 and Salman Sayyid18, for example, have consistently identified political Islam as anti-colonial movements of authenticity. They aspired to eradicate the impact and influence of Western political norms and institutions. Esposito19 followed a similar line of analysis by seeing the revival of religion in general and Islam in particular as alternative paths of modernization. Political Islam certainly reflects these goals and desires. From a journeying perspective, however, it also 16

Lankford, A. (2014). The myth of martyrdom: What really drives suicide bombers, rampage shooters, and other self-destructive killers. Behavioral and brain sciences, 1-27. 17 Burgat, F. (2003). Face to face with political Islam (L’islamisme en face). London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 18 Sayyid, B. S. (2003). A fundamental fear: Eurocentrism and the emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books. 19 Esposito, J. (2003). Islam and civil society. In J. Esposito & F. Burgat (Eds.), Modernizing Islam: religion in the public sphere in the Middle East and Europe (pp. 69100). London: Hurst.

Page 10 of 11   includes deep conflict with other Islamic alternatives, and Western approaches and influences that have been indigenized. Sayyid, Burgat and Esposito seem to take the positions of the insider, without giving full credit to the multiple insider journeys that constitute political Islam. With historical insight, Stephen Humphreys saw political Islam as a new form of religious revival (tajdīd) that could be distinguished from pre-modern forms. It was a distinctive modern language or discourse that gave Muslims from a wide variety of backgrounds a coherent ideology for activism. Euben and Zaman share this sentiment, and write of political Islam as an ‘interpretive’ framework that provides a “lens on the world rather than a mere reflection of material conditions or conduit for socioeconomic grievances.”20 Salvatore has followed a similar line of analysis, but stressed the production of political Islam’s discourse in European-Muslim encounters. The discourse is not merely produced in relation to the challenges faced in local contexts, but in engagement with Western interlocutors.21 With the metaphor of journeying I would add the important role of travelling in time and space that characterizes political Islam. The discursive approach is useful, as long one includes a dynamic element in its constitution. The discourse is not static but in production and invention through both words and deeds, over time. In conclusion, I see political Islam as the sum of individual journeys that are more than the sum of their parts. Individual journeys emerged in their individuality and deep subjectivity, but with others with whom they share key characteristics. They are always journeys that include movement between poles, deliberation, debate and confusion over multiple goods, framing of the self in relation to the other, and sometimes

Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Introduction,” in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts From Al-Banna to Bin Laden, ed. Roxanne L. Euben, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. 21 Salvatore, A. (1997). Islam and the political discourse of modernity. Reading, Berkshire: Ithaca Press. 20

Page 11 of 11   ultimate satisfaction and resolution. They are sometimes forged together to make a deep impact in society and politics. But the individual journeys never lose their uniqueness and agency, and unravel from each other as we trace them over time.