Political Islam and Democracy

Vali Nasr, the author of “The Shia Revival” talks about “Islamic polictical movements” (more specifically in Pakistan),  and their interplay with democracy and electoral politics.

“Political Scientist Vali Nasr joins host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of the role of Islam in politics.”  Series: Conversations with History [2/2005]

Related: Political Islam and the West

 Also See - Political Islam: Beyond Green Menace by John Esposito

 

An Interview with Dr. Mahmood Mamdani: (May 5, 2004): Complete Interview at http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/mamdani.cfm
 
“[...] political identities are not reducible to cultural identities. Political Islam, especially radical political Islam, and even more so, the terrorist wing in radical political Islam, did not emerge from conservative, religious currents, but on the contrary, from a secular intelligentsia. In other words, its preoccupation is this-worldly, it is about power in this world. To take only the most obvious example: I am not aware of anyone who thinks of bin Laden as a theologian; he is a political strategist and is conceived of in precisely such terms. Of course, part of his strategy is employing a particular language through which he addresses specific audiences. …
 
I have doubts about the use of the term “fundamentalism” outside of the context in which it arises, which is the Christian context. My real discomfort with using the two interchangeably – political Islam and Islamic fundamentalism – is that “fundamentalism” is a cultural phenomenon and I want to zero-in on a political phenomenon.

Even in the history of American Christianity, Christian fundamentalism is a turn-of-the-century movement which was the result of battles fought out in all kinds of institutions, including schools and courts. But the decision by a group of Christian fundamentalist intellectuals to cross the boundary between the religious and the secular and to move into the political domain, to organize with an eye on political power, is only a post-World War II phenomenon. I distinguish between Christian fundamentalism, an end-of-19th century counter-cultural movement and political Christianity, a post-Second World War political movement.

I also do not identify the mixing of religion and politics as necessarily retrogressive. One only needs to understand the many forms of post-war political Christianity, from the involvement of Black churches in the civil rights movement to that of Jerry Falwell’s Christian right, to get to a more nuanced understanding of religiously informed politics.

One also needs to recognize that the history of Christianity is very unlike the history of mainstream Islam which simply does not have an institutionally organized church. The Catholic Church is organized as an institutionalized hierarchy, as a prototype of the empire-state, and the Protestant Church hierarchy is organized as a prototype of the nation-state. Until Ayatollah Khomeini created a state-wide clerical authority in Iran, there was no such institutionalized religious hierarchy in Islam and it still does not exist elsewhere. Without the existence of an institutionalized religious hierarchy parallel to a state hierarchy, the question of the proper relation between two domains of power, that of the organized church and the organized state, a central question in Western secularism, has been a non-question in Islam – at least until Ayatollah Khomeini created a constitutional theocracy in Iran as vilayat-i-faqih.

Now with Iraq very much in the throes of resistance, there is an entirely different notion of Iraqi Shi’ism articulated by Sistani. His is a critique of Khomeini; Sistani’s is a secular, religious perspective. His view is that Shi’a clerics are scholars; they should be the conscience of society, not the wielders of state power.

So when political Islam develops – unlike political Christianity – it is not the result of the movement of religious intellectuals into a secular domain but rather the reverse move, that of secular intellectuals into the religious domain. Extremist political Islam, by which I mean Islamist thought which puts political violence at the center of political action, came into its own with Mawdudi and Syed Qutb. Neither was an alim or a mullah. Both had this-worldly pursuits. Mawdudi says, “Mere preaching will not do, it is not enough.” Now which religious person is going to say mere preaching is not enough?”

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Related: “Clash” Euphemisms I: Political Islam and the West, Political Islam and Dictatorships