MOTTO:

“Allah is our objective.

The Prophet is our leader.

Qur'an is our law.

Jihad is our way.

Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope”

 Hassan Al-Banna,  founder of the Muslim Brotherhood

         In 1929, five years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and of the centuries old institution of Islamic Caliphate, caused by the blows of the winning empires from the 1st World War and by the reformism of the “father of modern Turkey” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in Ismailia, Egypt, a theologian and imam, Hassan Al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement was meant to be an Islamic organization intended to stand against the British imperial rule over Egypt and, even more so, to mobilize the Muslim community to fight - to Jihad - for the sole purpose of reinstating the universal Islamic Caliphate. Slogans such as “Islam is the way” and “Islam must rule” are the driving force of the movement’s ideology, which promotes the idea that Islam is used to control everything regarding Muslims and Muslim nations, from the intimate lives of their citizens to state institutions and societies. These were similar concepts, their dimensions varying (geographically) from a specific Muslim region to the establishment of Islam, “the true faith”, on a global scale.

Hassan Al Banna

         Rooting in the ideological and doctrinarian heritage of Hassan Al-Banna, Hamas movement came to life in Gaza, in 1987 – with the objective of turning historical Palestine into an Islamic Palestinian state - and the universal “Jihad against Jews and crusaders” was launched in 1988. The latter was eventually embraced by Osama bin Laden, whose organization “the base” (al-qa‘ida in Arabic) would be the starting and leading point for the spread of “the great Jihad”. This Jihad, which reached its peak during the carnage on the 11th of September and following the death of Osama bin Laden on the 2nd of May 2011 - killed in a US joint military operation - blew up in a million independent “Jihads”. It later spread on an area stretching from the Arab Peninsula all the way through Mesopotamia, the Levant, Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, to the Pakistani Waziristan and the Philippines. One of these would later become famous when it separated from the “parent organization” Al-Qaeda and became the self-proclaimed “Islamic State in Iraq”. It later became the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” and was renamed, shortly after, the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”, also known as the Caliphate. Following the 2006 general elections that led to the Palestinian movement Hamas forming a government in the Gaza Strip and the presidential elections in Egypt that brought to presidency a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was for the third time that the fundamentalist Islam held the political power. Both “displays of power” proved equally wasteful, with one difference in the case of the ”Islamic Caliphate” – which was, for four years in a row, an exercise of terrorism and crime that became a doctrine and a “display of savagery”. This period ended on the night between the 6th and 7th of this October, when the US Special Forces killed the Iraqi Ibrahim Al-Samarrai, also known as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the first modern “caliph”. Thus ended the third exercise of Islamic political power, and the world rejoiced at the news that one of the most notorious of “Allah’s madmen” got his retribution for all the massacres and suffering he has caused humanity and civilization.

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        These present times, which some analysts - sociologists, historians, political experts and thinkers - call post-modernism, where “post” is accurately used, comes across a question that has been recurring for some time. It is in need of an answer, justly we might add - is fundamentalist or political Islam capable of providing a different approach on how to deal with the future, or how to shape it?

       Islamic trends and their theorists have claimed and are still claiming that the main purpose of the relationship between religion and politics is to accurately reconstitute the original Islamic purity. They claim that the historical evolutions and, most of all, the contact with non-Islamic, Judaic and Christian values has corrupted Islam and drove it away from its original sources - the Koran and the Hadith (the record of the traditions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and his first followers in the 7th century). In the end, this concept is nothing more than an attempt to go back to a long gone tradition.

        A closer examination of the rhetoric of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State will highlight, though, the very fact that these two fundamental sources of the Islamic doctrine have few and inconclusive references to political matters and to matters related to the concept of institutional state that, following the death of the Prophet, became a pressing matter to the Islamic “nation” (ʼumma) and entailed inventiveness and improvisation. It is not without meaning the fact that political matters initially related to the succession of the leader were at the origin of the first political schisms and conflicts, so one may say that politics in Islamic communities was developed starting from religious motivations and arguments. Politics became organized, theorized and codified only later, during the Abbasid Dynasty, after the year 750, which is over a hundred years after the death of Prophet Muhammad (630).

        On the other hand, one should not ignore the fact that politics and law during the first centuries of Islam - when Salafism was the doctrine that served as the ideal and model for the contemporary Muslim society - were but a set of improvisations meant to answer the needs of that time and to legitimise an authority - that of the caliph – frequently enacted by force, intrigue and what could be called “political scheme”. It is obvious that such laws and concepts developed a millennium ago are not compatible with the reality nowadays. This being the case, we won’t be wrong when we say that in the absence of a political tradition in harmony with the social and historical evolutions, politics in Islam will be attributed to religion, which thus becomes both political object and subject.

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         By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the so called Islamic Renaissance (Al-Nahda) of the Muslim people and societies through “purification of the Islamic dogma” from the “bad influences” of the contact with the Western culture and civilization managed to change religion and religiousness into a tool used in the political and ideological fight against the West, obsessively and exclusively identified with colonialism and imperialism.

         This forced politicisation of Islam became the weapon against imperialism and inevitably led to the appearance and development of a generation of both Muslim and converted militants to whom Islam had to be, in comparison to the West, an anti-model, susceptible to free the “Islamic nation” from the reins of underdevelopment and to protect it from the “bad” and destructive influence of the western culture. It aimed to protect the purity of the legacy left by the forefathers of this religion (salaf, pl. aslaf, hence Salafist and Salafism) that was used by the ideologists, followers and militants of the “Renaissance” in their common narratives. The doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood pre-dated a rigid Islamic fundamentalism that was based on the concept that Islam alone, through persuasion or “Islamic revolution”, was the only cure for all the problems humans had all over the world. Given the fact that, closer to our time, a radical movement born in sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, Niger and Nigeria) could call itself “Boko Haram” (literally “Western education is a sin”), the irrational overestimation of this proclaimed Islamic superiority gradually led to the radicalization of the “Islamic Renaissance”, giving birth to the extreme organizations that came to be Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State-ISIS. Distancing themselves from seeing faith as an atemporal, unlimited and transcendental entity, the fundamentalists had another objective - to create, by brutal means, a world-wide Muslim ideal state that would carry on for centuries the same caliphate that functioned back in the Middle Ages.

        Beyond the causes that led to using an overvalued, all-powerful religion as a solution to governance, the failures of the few Islamic exercises of power - Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco and, to a smaller scale, Tunisia - were also directly caused by non-religious issues.

        Firstly, we are referring to the inability of the Islamic political formations that were in power to identify and implement practical and viable social and economic solutions instead of idealistic slogans such as “Islam is the way”, or “Koran is our law”, which can’t help finding a positive solution to the damages those countries suffered from: poverty, unemployment, health security, education, and so on.

       Secondly, we are referring to the fact that the same Islamic political formations haven’t been able to face reality and encourage the fundamental values that ensure strength and vivacity to the social and statal edifice, such as: democracy (that to fundamentalist thinkers is nothing but an “evil bastard of the Western culture”), pluralism, human rights and freedoms etc. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Tunisian party “Al-Nahda”, or the Moroccan “Justice and Development Party” haven’t necessarily had as a fundamental objective reaching out to the social community, but more likely holding on to absolute power and turning the country in a totalitarian entity that is limited to power circles. Such mistakes were sanctioned at the polls when they failed to provide, as did in Egypt, the opportunity for the military to intervene in keeping a working balance between faith and secularity.

       We are also referring to the isolation policy promoted by the fundamentalist Islam that has fully rejected any dialogue with the other trends and ideologies present on the domestic chess-board, favouring privileged and mercantile relationships with the power circles, with the military elites and other elites careless of the realities of the civil society, or with other Islamic entities and foreign governments.

       And if, as we have well seen, Islam isn’t the answer, especially when speaking about violent and terrorist groups abusively calling themselves “Islamic States” or about governance trough Islam and for Islam (the case of the ephemeral fundamentalist radical Islamic leadership in Afghanistan), then what is the answer?

      One may say that the “Arab Spring” has brought forward - however, in a shape insufficiently crystalized, less understood and totally unaccepted - one of the fundamental requirements for the success of any political reformative endeavour. It is about the dynamic cooperation between the religious political factor and the cultural identity of the Arabic-Muslim society that is, in the beginning of this third millennium, at a crossroads between post-colonialism and liberalism. This involvement and identity boost also implies the support, assistance and dissemination of national individual and collective freedoms and the dissolution of the mental barriers of a history always looking back to a past that was sanctified and transformed in a sole destiny set by the power of the founding Islamic texts. Values and concepts such as democracy, equality and human rights are the result of a modernism that political Islam refuses to acknowledge, because it would be a denial of history itself, as well as the denial of the “unique, true and infallible” Muslim identity. Only then, by use of new, strong and even painful solutions will fundamentalist political Islam be able to descend from the minarets to reach out to people and raise their hopes and expectations. Such an experiment is heading towards success on Tunisia’s social and political chessboard following the elections this fall. Without giving up its taboos, political Islam will be the same as when it was born - a long and wasteful utopia.