Can Islamism be progressive? posted by Richard Seymour

I have covered this territory before, but given some of the reactions in the comments boxes on the 'fascism' post, I feel compelled to repeat myself, albeit in condensed form.

Islamism is a heterogenous body of thought whose sole shared feature is the desire to bring about a society based on the precepts of Islam. The fact is, however, that the Qu'ran, the hadiths and the wisdom of the Rightly Guided Prophets do not provide a sufficient basis for building any kind of society. They are so indeterminate that almost anything can be read into them. Consequently, Islamism has always been leavened by traditions which arise from non-Islamic sources.

The first thing to note is that reactionary versions of Islamism have owed much of their ideological cohesion to ideas imported from modern nationalist and revolutionary movements. The assumptions of the nation-state have always under-pinned most Islamist ideologies, as is evidenced by the case of Iran. Sami Zubaida explains:

“[T]he Iranian constitution and state practice enshrine Iranian nationality as a condition for full citizenship in the Republic. Article 115 states that the president must be Iranian both by origin and nationality, and have a ‘convinced belief in the … official school of thought in the country’, that is, he must be Shi’i … Iranian Islam, being Shi’i, reinforces Iranian nationalism, confronting as it does a predominantly Sunni Arab world and Turkey.” (Zubaida, "Is Iran an Islamic State?", in Joel Benin and Joe Storks (eds), 1997)

Those revolutionary courts smach of nothing less than Jacobinism, and even the term "Islamic Republic" is a throw-back to the French revolution. So, although these traditions, originating with Hassan al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood, would claim to be somehow consistently Islamic and would invoke tradition as if they were doing nothing less than reclaiming the glory of the Caliphate, the truth is that they rely on European notions of state-hood etc.

It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, if in the 1960s some radicals in the Arab and Muslim world had found a way to meld their radical commitments with their faith. (That formulation is a little too lax, but you'll see what I mean). Take, for example, the claim that is persistently and rightly made about Arab states. They are corrupt autocracies which crush internal dissent by all means necessary, including the use of Islamist forces (pace Egypt in the 1970s and 80s). Now, many Muslim intellectuals in the Arab world despised these despotisms, but were themselves of the persuasion that Islam had to form part of the solution to the problems that plagued their compatriots. Many of them practised itjihad to argue for democracy, for the rights of the poor, and against the imperial structure that maintained the corrupt kleptocracies in their place.

Khalid Muhammad Khalid, for instance, insisted that “Shura in Islam is the democracy that gives people the right to choose their rulers and their deputies and their representatives, as well as the right to practise freedom of thought, opinion and opposition”. (Cited in Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam). Similarly, the Mujahideen Khalq of Iran maintain that “true Islam is … progressive and revolutionary, and has always fought against oppression” while Hanafi insists that Islamic sermons should call for “retrieving the rights of the poor from the rich” and “confront Zionism and imperialism”. (Ibid).


There you are, question answered. The complexity and vastness of modern Muslim societies, as well as their integration into the global system, appears to render it almost impossible to locate an alternative modernity purely on the basis of the Quran and the Prophetic Tradition. Consequently, these have been buttressed by traditions that arise from non-Islamic sources. The quilting point - that is, the ideological node which pulls all other discrete signifiers into a cohesive form - is what determines whether what results will be reactionary or progressive in its formulations and demands. This does not mean, of course, that Islamism is an ideological ally of socialism. It is not. The Islamists can be worked with, insofar as what they do is progressive. They should be supported to the extent that they work to uproot the corrupt regimes of the Arab world and the Zionist interloper in their midst. Insofar as some Islamists have attempted to oppress and subjugate (take, say, the moves to force women to wear the hijab in Iraq), they should be opposed.

Islamism can be progressive, just as Christianity or Judaism can; the facile homogenising gestures of modern Orientalists of both left and right cannot erase this simple matter of fact.