islamism and the question of religious authority

7/28/2019 Islamism and the Question of Religious Authority

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DIIS · Religi d Vilece Edied by Mi Cre d M Kwl Seik

Te ocus o this brie will be on Sunni Islamism in

general, and will include observations that apply toboth its peaceul and violent strands.

Islam is a complex corpus o belie and practiceopen to multiple interpretations, rom which di-erent kinds o political attitudes can be legiti-mized, depending on which part o the corpus onedecides to stress. Islamist ideology is one possiblereading o this corpus. How, then, does Islam mat-ter or Islamism?

One way o making sense o this is through SocialMovement Teory (SM). Te advantage o anSM approach is that it deculturalizes Islamismand views it as a social movement like any other.In SM terms, religion then becomes a symbolicresource which Islamists use, in selective ways, to:dene and reinorce an identity, rame their mes-sage and provide legitimacy to their actions. At a more practical level, Islam also provides specicmobilizing structures that can be used or gather-ing or recruitment, (such as the mosques).

A problem with the SM approach is that reli-gion is treated as a discursive resource availableto anyone, regardless o the position rom whichthat person is speaking. In other words, there is

StéphanE LaCRoIx

Islamism and the question

of religious authority J 2012

a general sentiment that the traditional produc-

ers and guardians o religious discourse, the ulama (the Islamic scholars), are irrelevant (or have beenmade irrelevant by the Islamists). It can be arguedthat this is the result o a western modernist bias,

which makes researchers look at the ulama as a mere survival rom the past with no real inuence.In this paper it is argued that the ulama do mattersignicantly and that their lack o support or theIslamists has represented a major challenge to theIslamist movement.

Te ulama’s lack o support or Islamists has beenmentioned in some academic works, and it hasgenerally been explained by the dominance among ulama o a strong tradition o quietism, which goesback to the early centuries o Islam. I it is true thatmost ulama have indeed been quietists, there exista number o counter-examples in Islamic history,starting with Ahmad aqi al-Din Ibn aymiyya (1263-1328), who did not hesitate to proclaim ji-had against the Mongols, despite the act that thelatter had in appearance converted to Islam. Tis

shows that the ulama’s lack o support or Islamistsdoes not only stem rom their supposed quietism.

My contention here is that there exists a structuralexplanation. Te idea that there is no clergy in Is-



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lam has obscured the act that, throughout history,a certain division o labor has developed in Mus-

lim societies, as a result o which the ulama havecome to constitute a distinct and separate socialgroup. In the terminology o the French sociologistPierre Bourdieu, they have constituted a ‘eld’: thereligious eld. Tis is more easily acknowledged inShiism because the ‘religious eld’ there has beeninstitutionalized, and what resembles a religiouscaste, with distinctive clerical eatures, has takenshape since the period o the Saavid dynasty. InSunnism similar dynamics are present, thoughthey are not as visible.

The Saudi example

In this context, the case o Saudi Arabia is in-teresting. In Saudi Arabia, there are very clearboundaries between who is an alim (the singularo ulama) and who is not. Tere are certain placeso learning and certain networks o transmissionthat produce the ulama. Tose who do not belong to these networks may well call themselves ulama,but people will never take them seriously and may even make un o them. o mark their status, the

Saudi ulama have historically developed a specicdress code: they shorten their thobes (traditionalmen’s dress) and remove the iqal , the circle thatholds the shmagh (the piece o cloth that Saudis

wear on their heads). Interestingly, this is not anapplication o any religious principle but is pure’distinction’, as Bourdieu would call it. In many

ways, the azhari dress in Egypt plays a similarrole.

In the last ew years, there has been a growing body

o literature on how globalization and the rise o a new ‘Muslim public sphere’ have ragmentedthe religious sphere, implicitly resulting in the in-uence o the ulama being weakened. Tis brie states, however, that on the ground this is not so,and that the opposite may even be the case: insome respects, globalization actually made the ula-ma stronger by providing them with new vehiclesto channel their inuence. Trough the new me-dia, the Egyptian sheikh Yusu al-Qaradawi, whois based in Qatar and has a weekly very popular

religious talk-show on al-Jazeera, has, rom being a ‘local muti’, become a ‘global muti’.

iSlamiSm

Historically, Islamism emerged as a movement o

religious laymen, and still today it consists prima-rily o teachers, engineers, doctors etc. It emergedpartly in reaction to what these religious laymenconsidered the ulama’s ailure to deend Islamagainst Western inuence and corrupt regimes.Islamism is thus as much a rebellion against estab-lished political authorities as it is a rebellion againstthe religious authorities.

Tese religious laymen’s attempts to sideline theulama was made legitimate by the Sala intellec-tual posture that many o them advocated: i what

was needed was a return to the undamentals o Islam, resulting in sidelining centuries o Islamictradition, the upholders o this tradition were notas central anymore. Tis hostility to the ulama wasnot always as explicit as in the words o SayyidQutb and a ew others who were particularly harsh

with established religious authorities, but it wasgenerally present.

Te ulama were distressed by the rise o this new Islamist movement. It had emerged outside their

control and was independent o them, yet itclaimed to be acting in the name o Islam, a re-source they had always considered their monopoly.In the Saudi case, it could even be argued that therise o Islamism rom the 1960s onwards prompt-ed the development o a new genre o literature,in which the ulama rearmed their leading rolein society as ’heirs o the prophets’ (warathat al-anbiya ). Tis can be seen as a clear sign that they elt their position was called into question. Tispoint is conrmed by numerous interviews con-

ducted by the author in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,in which ulama express their disgust with doctorsor engineers who claim the right to talk with au-thority in the name o Islam.

An important point is that the ulama and Islamistsbelong to two distinct social elds, which are un-damentally in competition. Te struggle betweenthem is not necessarily one o diverging interpreta-tions o Islam. On the contrary, one will nd asmuch writing about sharia and the necessity o an

Islamic state in the ulama’s literature as in Islam-ist writings. Te dividing line is a structural – onecould say corporatist – one.



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The iSlamiST predicamenT

Te Islamists have quickly come to understand that

they could not succeed without minimal supportrom the ulama. Bringing the two groups togetherhas not been easy. Te ollowing quote rom a lead-ing Saudi Islamist opposition gure (and a surgeonby training) illustrates the tension between thesetwo groups and the diculties in them working to-gether. When asked about his views on the ulama,he responded: ‘Te ulama? Tey are a necessary evil. As an Islamist movement, one can do nothing

without their support. But they are conservative! And so out o this world! And they always believethey should take the lead, even when they have noidea o what’s going on’.

Te Islamists’ inability to obtain ulama supportexplains, in many ways, the ailure o the joint Is-lamic Gihad-al-Gama’a Islamiyya attempt to over-throw the Egyptian regime in 1981. Te revolu-tionary Islamists could only enlist the support o one relatively minor sheikh, namely Sheikh Omar

Abd al-Rahman (who was to become known as theblind sheikh, imprisoned in the US since 1993).Te rest o the religious establishment, with al-

Azhar at the oreront, vehemently opposed them.Tough they had relatively good operational ca-pacities and managed to kill Sadat, the popular up-rising which ollowed ailed miserably. Te reasonis that it is unlikely that a movement opposed by virtually all religious authorities would enjoy gen-eral widespread popular support.

In the ew cases in which a signicant part o theulama establishment supported an Islamist mobi-lization, it was essentially or the ‘wrong’ reasons.

An interesting case is Saudi Arabia in the wake o the 1990 Gul War, where a mobilization spear-headed by Islamist intellectuals acting with dissi-dent ulama took place. Yet, the study o the originso this movement shows that a struggle had beengoing on or about a decade within the religiouseld between the established ulama and a new gen-eration o peripheral ulama. In order to prevail inthis conict, the peripheral ulama chose to supportthe Islamists. Tis was a strategic decision, and itdid not last long. By 1992-1993, dissident ulama

and Islamist intellectuals were beginning to quarrelover undamentally diferent objectives and worldviews. Te Islamists criticized the dissident ulama or their ‘corporatism’ and or only being willing to deend and expand the privileges o their own

‘caste’, with no real interest in a broader reormproject. Ater the collapse o the movement in the

mid-1990s, the dissident ulama dissociated them-selves completely rom the Islamist opposition andreturned to the religious eld, a position they havemaintained until this day.

Te ailure o this rst major Islamist mobilizationin Saudi Arabia provided the context in which al-Qaeda started to grow as a visible entity. Like otherIslamist movements, al-Qaeda was ounded by lay-men, including Osama bin Laden, a graduate ineconomics, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon.Tey soon encountered the amiliar problem: very ew ulama were ready to support them. Tis situa-tion has remained until this day.

Tis lack o religious support has been a key handi-cap or ‘jihadists’ because, since the cost o theiractions is higher, they tend to need more thorough

justication. o escape this predicament, jihadishave used diferent strategies, arguably with lim-ited success:

1. Tey have tended to rely on medieval ulama

rather than contemporary ones. Ibn aymiyya is widely quoted and seen as the ideal gure o an alim-mujahid .

2. In many cases, the Islamists pretended to havesupport that in act they did not have. For in-stance, in the mid-1990s, bin Laden claimedthe support o the two Saudi dissident ulama Salman al-‘Awda and Sarar al-Hawli, who werethen in jail. Te two were quick to dissociatethemselves rom al-Qaeda when they were re-

leased in 1999. Another interesting example ishow Abdallah Azzam seems to have thought heneeded to claim the support o religious heavy-

weights or the conclusions in his 1984 book Te Deence o Muslim erritories is the First In-dividual Duty . In the introduction to his book,he thus claimed to have received support romSaudi Arabia’s two most prominent religiousauthorities, Sheikhs Ibn Baz and Ibn Uthay-min, something which never happened.

3. Al-Qaeda groups also started to bestow thenames sheikh and muti upon anyone with eventhe smallest measure o religious capital, insome cases drop-outs rom religious universi-ties. Tis was, or example, what al-Qaeda in



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the Arabian Peninsula did rather pathetically ater 2004 in the case o Abd al-Majid al-Mu-

nay and Sultan al-Utaybi.

4. In parallel with these attempts to claim thesupport o ulama, al-Qaeda’s Saudi militantsbegan striving to redene their raison d’être andthe purpose o their actions. In their writings,

jihad became a crystalline principle whoseimplications, notably the obligation or eve-ryone to engage in armed combat against theindels, were presented as being so clear thatno interpretations were needed. According to

their rhetoric, any exegesis seemed dangerousbecause it risked sullying the purity o jihadby introducing elements o political pragma-tism. As a result, involvement o the ulama

was unnecessary and could even turn out tobe harmul. Jihad was thus presented as a ho-listic category which encompassed and wentbeyond ‘ilm (religious science). According tothe Saudi jihadi web-ideologue Luwis ‘Atiyyat

Allah: ‘rue religion consists (o conducting jihad,) not religious repeating text like parrotsor transmitting them like donkeys … Tat is

why the best evidence o tawhid is the git o one’s soul to God on the elds o jihad or inthe struggle against the tyrant.’

5. Te same tendency to make ‘ilm derive rom jihad – not the contrary – is illustrated by theact that the leaders o jihadi movements in-creasingly call themselves sheikhs, even whenthey do not possess any religious qualica-tions. For instance, the leaders o al-Qaeda arereerred to as ‘Sheikh Usama bin Laden’ and

‘Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri’. o justiy this,some may play on the ambiguity o the termsheikh because it can also serve as a simplemark o respect, although it generally has clearreligious undertones.

concluSion

Despite their claim to speak and act in the name o

religion, the paradox o Islamists is that they haveconstantly encountered great problems in win-ning the support o the ulama, which has limitedtheir ability to mobilize. Tis is even more the caseor violent Islamist movements, because the costo mobilization is higher or them and so it needsmore thorough justication. What this article ar-gues is that the predicament is a structural, nota contextual one, which thereore remains a key problem or Islamist movements.

Te popularity o the Muslim Brotherhood inEgypt may seem a counter-example, but this isactually not the case. Indeed, the Brotherhoodcounts very ew ulama within its ranks (only onereligious scholar sits in the Guidance Bureau, Abdal-Rahman al-Barr), and interviews conducted

with Egyptian ulama suggest that a lot o ulama are weary o the Brotherhood. Sheikh Yousse al-Qaradawi represents an important exception, butthe extent o his inuence is due to the magic o the new media, which is able to make one man asinuential as a thousand.

Te popularity o the Brotherhood thus largely results rom two other actors: political circum-stances (the act that they were the only credibleopposition or decades) and their social work. Tereligious discourse (on which they do not have a monopoly, as everyone uses religious discourse inEgypt anyway) does not seem to be the reason ortheir popularity. Tis slightly counter-intuitiveact should lead us to reconsider the relationshipbetween Islamism as a vehicle or social mobiliza-

tion and the inuence o authoritative religiousdiscourse.

Stéphan Lacroix is Asssistant Professor at Sciences Po, Paris,

France



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reliGion and Violence

DIIS Religi d Vilece ers re bsed e reseis give e ieril cer-ece “te yers er 9/11: W did we Ler buReligi?” eld i Cege 22-23 Seember 2011. te cerece, ws rgized by Cerer advced Securiy tery e Uiversiy Cege (CaSt) d e Dis Isiue r Ieril Sudies (DIIS) gered ledig eers errrism d religi. te im ws cilie dilgue bewee rciiers d sclrs d rvide lrm discuss licy suggesis diiiives del wi religius secs vilece.

Other DIIS Religion and Violence papers:

Seryr Fzli: Secriism d Cfic:te View rm pkis

Sig Jrle hse: Regligi d Mbilizi

tms heggmmer : Religius terrrism s 9/11:Idelgy Mers – bu hw?

pule ois: Religi d Vilece: Relerig eFudmels

D Rssler: tlib d al-Qid:W Rle des Religi ply?

M tylr: Cfic Reslui d Cuer Rdiclizi: Were d we g rm ere?

Jsu t. Wie: Udersdig e tlib:assessig Religius Cegries alysis

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islamism and the question of religious authority

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