Religion has always been in the business of legitimating the
authority of the state - be it Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism.
The modern state is an exception - its legitimacy is manufactured by its
claim to superior economic rationality - that it - its superior capacity to
deliver material goods. It has been working rather well for the advanced
capitalist countries, and it worked for a while for the developmental states
challenging the hegemony of the advanced capitalist states.
However, the capacity of capitalist economies to deliver the
goodies is fraught with problems of social stratification. This means that some
will get them in excess, while most will suffer shortages. This posed a
serious threat to the legitimacy of secular capitalist states, exploited by
various Communist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that promised to
distribute the goodies to all. Western Europe staved off that challenge
by the creation of a welfare state that combined superior economic rationality
of capitalism with economic redistribution of communism. The
developmental states, otoh, failed on one or both of these fronts. The
Soviet style economy achieved redistribution but started failing behind on
economic rationality. The developmental states of the Middle East (except
perhaps Turkey) failed to achieve redistribution and to achieve economic
rationality on a par with advanced capitalist economies.
As a result, these developmental states lost their legitimacy.
In Eastern Europe, this was manifested by the "downfall of
communism" and the implementation of Western European welfare capitalism.
In the Middle East, this loss of legitimacy of the secular developmental
state was a bit more complicated. The wholesale transfer of welfare
capitalism along Eastern European lines was not feasible, so the loss of
legitimacy resulted in growing repression by secular elites to maintain their
power by brute force. This further eroded the legitimacy of these states,
and the need for an alternative emerged. That alternative was Islamism -
which must NOT, and I repeat, MUST NOT be confused with Islam.
Islamism is a form ideology that the US historian Barrington Moore called "Catonism" after the Roman politician Cato the Elder.
Catonism is an ideological reaction of elites whose traditional grip on
power has been challenged by economic development and modernization. It
represents the glorification of "tradition" or rather its idealized
image to counter the ideological influences of modernity. Catonism is
thus characterized by anti-intellectualism, hatred of foreigners, and the
advocacy of stern "traditional" virtues.
Islamism is a form of Catonism manufactured by state elites as
an ideological weapon against their democratic opponents. PakistaniGeneral Zia ul Haq is a good example - he restored to Islamism as an
ideological weapon against his opponent Ali Bhutto. This was a pure
political move that has nothing to do with religion, tradition, culture and
what not. Zia ul Haq used religion in a way politicians use any form of
knowledge or culture - for support rather than enlightenment. This, btw,
not that much different from the way Soviet leaders used Marxism or for that
matter the way the Roman Emperor Constantine used Christianity. In all
instances, they selected certain traits from a certain body of theological or
philosophical thought to manufacture ideology that legitimizes the power of a political elite or the state.
It is important to note that this recourse to religion as
"Catonist" ideology owes its status to political-military elites
rather than to religious scholars. The latter are basically nothing more
than mouthpieces for the political-military elites that use them.
However, it also creates an opportunity for religious scholars to grab
power for themselves. This happens in situations of political vacuum,
when power is "dropped on the floor" so to speak. This happened
in Iran where secular authority was undermined first by the Western powers conspiring against the Mosaddegh government and then by the downfall of the corrupt Pahlavi regime. At that point, there was no institutional force
in Iran capable of governing a state except the Islamic clergy that used this
opportunity to grab the power for themselves.
The Iranian model is fundamentally not replicable in other
"Islamist" states as long as secular military-political elites can
maintain their grip on state power. In those countries, Islamist scholars
will either play the role of mouthpieces on the payroll of these elites, or
elsewhere they will be suppressed by force if they try to pull an Iran, as it
recently happened in Egypt.
The bottom line is that Islamism and its adherents have as much
to do with Islam as the Nazi Sturmabteilung have to do with Christianity.
Both are gatherings of thugs used by reactionary political forces to grab state power and destroy their liberal/democratic opposition in countries that happen
to have Islamic or Christian majorities. That is to say, this has nothing
to do with religion, theology, or philosophy and everything to do with the
fascist bid to grab state power.
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