Let us talk about the analogues to al-Wahab, that is, to Muslim reformers who drew on native Islamic traditions to create a response to Western-imposed modernity. The first example is the Barelwi movement in India. Without going into detail, we can say that this movement also called for reform/renewal of Islam as a way to restore the fortunes of the Muslim umma (nation/people). The Barelwis, though, actually included Sufi practice as part of their program for deepening and renewing Islam. But while they differed in this from Wahab, they agreed with him that Muslims needed to deepen their observance of the shariah and knowledge of the Islamic tradition to rescue themselves from defeat and loss. In fact, Sufi reform and resistance movements were a common combination; they also appeared in Libya, Sudan and West Africa – where they were also directed against Western colonizers, as well as the Muslim but “foreign” and oppressive Ottomans.
What significance does 1979 have in the evolution of Islamic modernity?
Above we said that secularism continued in the Arab world until the late 1970s. It was towards the end of this decade, in 1979, that the religious option began to really dominate in certain parts of the Muslim world. Three key events can be noted. Firstly, the military leader Zia al-Haq staged coup that pushed out the previous president of Pakistan. Until al-Haq, Pakistan’s ideology had been molded on the Aligargh model (option no.1 above), which looked to British political models and gave Islam a limited role in the new Muslim state. Al-Haq, though himself not particularly religious, now used Islam to gain a popular base. He introduced the Nizam-I Islam, a shariah law code, that was distinguished by its harsh punishments. Secondly, a revolution took place in Iran: the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and the Shah (king) of Persia was forced to flee the country. Khomeini was a religious and political leader, and he turned Iran into an Islamic theocracy. Again, this was odd, as Shiites had always believed that their imams were spiritual leaders and that political leaders were corrupt but to be tolerated until the 12th imam and then mahdi returned to save the world. As with “national shariah” law in Pakistan, the notion of an “imam national president” was very odd and very modern. It is not surprising that Iran shortly produced a thinker, Ali Shariati, who wrote of Iran’s resistance to “Westoxification” in discourse that seems far more Marxist than Islamic. Finally, also in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support a Marxist coup there.
In 1979, another lesser known event occurred in the Islamic world: radical Saudi Salafis occupied the Haram at Mecca (the holiest site of Islam) and threatened to topple the regime, promising the apocalypse would come soon that would achieve this. Saudi security forces killed 237 of the 300 protesters. The logic here seems to be that the fundamentalist Wahabite ideology has the ability to derange people’s minds to the extent that they enter ever further into radical irrational theological delusions. Osama bin Laden and the increasingly radical movements that have come after him are further proof of this.
Why did religion begin to make a comeback in the Arab Muslim world? Are there any parallels to this in other parts of the world?
Another innovation of al-Banna was the idea of jahiliyya, or ignorance. Jahiliyya in Islamic traditional discourse refers to the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs, who lived in non-Islamic ignorance according to the Qur’an and Sunna. Al-Banna now began to refer to secular Arab governments as in a state of jahiliyya: again, he was accusing observant Muslims of being worse than pagans.
Every true Muslim must now fight “hypocritical” Muslims, i.e. those whom the Brotherhood disagreed with, to bring about true Islam.
True Islam was conceived of as a political state ruled by shariah; the Brotherhood was organized in cells that tried to mobilize the masses. Both these facts show that the Brotherhood was much more like a European-style underground radical political movement than a traditional Islamic religious group.
During the Arab Spring in 2012, the Muslim Brothers finally succeeded in attaining power in Egypt, but once in power they failed to turn their fiery rhetoric into practical results and were soon ousted: often this has been the problem with the political Islamic option. It sounds goods for majority Muslim populations, but it fails to solve the problems that it criticizes.