Today I came across this highly useful website (packed to the gills with Islamist texts which should make some good lunchtime reading this Christmas week, if I’m quick enough the next time nobody’s hanging around the laser printer at work), which had this quote on its main page:
In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. 'Muslim' is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And 'Jihad' refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective. --Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi, Jihad in Islam p8.
Then tonight I was reading the new Christopher Hitchens collection, Love, Poverty, and War, and in a chapter on Pakistan around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, Hitchens writes:
The historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.
Well, there ya go.
Maududi, btw, is the founder of the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat Islamiyya, and along with Sayyed Qutb (Muslim Brotherhood) and Ali Shariati (Khomeinism, i.e. Shia Islamism), is considered one of the main intellectual fathers of modern Islamism. The Marxist-Leninist influence is obvious in both his and Shariati’s writings (Shariati is reputed to have spent his youth hanging out in Parisian cafes with Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, as a matter of fact); I haven’t been so sure about Qutb, mostly because I haven’t been able to figure out how to get my hands on his writings without potentially giving money to very bad people. (Thanks, internet! You couldn’t have violated the copyright of a nicer guy.)
Mr. Bell Jar asked me a while back if I thought Islamism was a true hybrid of Islam and Marxism, or if Islamists had merely grafted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and organizing tactics onto their own mostly unique ideology. (Theoretically, it could be the latter; Islamist movements have always conceived of themselves primarily as revolutionary opposition movements against corrupt secular Middle Eastern regimes, as defined mostly by Nasserism and Baathism. It would make sense to co-opt the revolutionary rhetoric of these regimes as a means of critiquing their ugly reality. And on some level, this was simply the language of reformist political discourse in the Middle East at the time. And of course Nasserism and Baathism both borrowed freely from both fascist and Marxist thought and practice, so a mix-and-match approach appears to be something of a local habit as well.) But I don’t know either Marxist or Islamist theory well enough to even attempt that kind of analysis.
Whatever the origins, it makes a nice fit; the early history of Islam, as encoded in the Koran and the Hadith, conflates religious community and political identity in a way that makes it quite susceptible to collectivist interpretations, if that’s what you’re looking for. For example, Muhammad said "My community cannot agree on a lie." Historically, this has been understood to confer legitimacy on whichever ruler Muslims have accepted, and to give settled interpretations of Islamic law moral force whether they appear literally in the source material or not. In the modern day, Muslim progressives interpret this as an expression of confidence in the ability of a Muslim community to govern itself properly through deliberative democracy, and as Islamic permission to do so. But you can see as how it might be considered a warrant to prosecute thought crime by Islamist radicals.
Update: A friend commented that the Maududi quote would make an excellent response to those who say jihad does not mean holy war, and Islam is a religion of peace. But the thing is, such people are often arguing with Maududi as much as with you, and so they should. Holy war has always been one meaning of the word jihad, but one that most Muslims regard as part of their history rather than their present. What the Islamists have basically done is ripped it from its original context and drafted it into a modernist revolutionary cause. I agree that it is misleading for Muslims or anyone else to imply that the "holy war" meaning of jihad is an invention of either a demonizing Western media or the Islamists alone, but that doesn't mean that the opposite is any more true (i.e., that jihad really does secretly mean holy war to most Muslims).