Islamism: R.I.P.

• Author: Takeyh, Ray

NOT LONG after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a chorus of influential opinion-makers in Washington began to sound an alarm about a new ideological threat posed to the West: the spread of "Islamism", a virulent brand of political Islam whose adherents demonized the culture, governments and even the citizens of Western democracies. In recent months, the streets of the West Bank and Gaza have seemingly validated that judgment, as discontented Palestinian youths, infused with religious fervor, revolted against an equitable peace proposition and chose to vent their frustrations against their Israeli neighbor and its distant American ally. Yet, despite sporadic manifestations of terror and fury, the "Green Peril" never made it into the weight class of the "Red Menace." While two decades ago Iran's self-confident mullahs professed to lead an Islamic crusade, today Islamism is everywhere on the retreat and U.S. pundits appear to have forgotten that many of them had recently deemed it an immediate peril. So where did it go?

Radical Islam exploded on the scene at a moment when the Middle East was undergoing a profound identity crisis. The failure of Arab nationalism, revealed most starkly by Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, led its disillusioned ranks to a new ideology, one rooted in religion. For all their professions of piety, however, the new activists eschewed the mosque and sought the guidance of lay intellectuals such as Egypt's Sayyid Qutb and Iran's Ali Shariati, who had recast Islam as a revolutionary creed. In fact, a manifest strain of anti-clericalism pervaded the Islamism of the early 1970s; its followers rejected the apolitical stance of the Muslim clergy and condemned the clerical estate for its political quietism. In the Islamist telling, Islam was, not unlike Marxism, an all-encompassing ideology that would restructure society and revolutionize the polity. As one of Tunisia's leading Islamist thinkers, Rashed Ghannoushi, put it,

Islamism is the sum total of intellectual, social, economic, cultural and political activities which spring from the comprehensive Islamic viewpoint, in order to support them in theory and apply them in practice in all spheres of life with the objective of establishing a new political and cultural entity.

Such exaggerations are not exclusive to Islamist visionaries. In the pages of this very magazine, Daniel Pipes, a perennial critic of political Islam, nonetheless perceived in Islamism "a way of navigating the shoals modernization."

The foremost problem, as the Islamists saw it, was that the Arabs had forsaken their patrimony and adopted Western ways. As a substitute, the Islamists advocated imitating the ancestral ways of the initial Islamic community under Prophet Muhammad. Reclaiming this mythical heritage would lead to the renewal of Islamic civilization. For the new disciples of God, the Quran offered all the solutions to properly guide modern civilization. Sayyid Qutb warned that the "Scientific Revolution has finished its role. It is now the turn of Islam." Islamism initially proved seductive to those on the margins of society, excluded from wealth and power. Yet, unlike Marxism, which described the historical stages that would conceive a new society, Islamism was merely an ideology of wrath, confining itself to fulminating against the debilitating Western culture and the debased, acculturated Arab elites.

In a sense, the Islamists misunderstood the demands of their constituents. The Arab masses desired not a return to the seventh century, but political modernization and economic progress. Before an ideology can transform itself into a governing dogma, it must first offer an appealing platform, and this Islamism plainly lacked. For example, the Islamists claimed to have devised a new economic system that would render obsolete the twentieth-century models of capitalism and Marxism. Supposedly, it would reconcile the imperatives of social justice with the demands of efficiency and productivity. Alas, when pressed for detail, Islamists claimed simply that a society devoted to salvation would produce virtuous citizens willing to...