If you reduce Islamism to terror and associate it with violence, you may then— under certain circumstances— speak of “the decline of Islamism.”
Islamism and the Po liti cal Order 51
To do so, however, is to overlook the fundamental nature of Islamism as an ideology for the creation of a shari’a state and an Islamic world order.
The peaceful and violent branches of po liti cal Islam differ over the means by which this “Islamic world revolution”— as advocated by Qutb— is to be brought about, but not over the goals. The rise of this ideology shows that Islamic civilization is at a crossroads: the choices are either to join the demo-cratic peace under conditions of modernity and pluralism, or to endorse the call for the hall Islami (Islamic solution). The compassionate response of the West to the plight of Muslims after the tsunami of December 2004 com-pelled some Muslims to rethink their perception of Islam under siege. Many Muslims in Southeast Asia encountered the West as a helping partner, not as an enemy. At that time I was based in Singapore and observed these positive sentiments at fi rst hand. Yet others, such as the Islamists of Aceh, took advantage of the tsunami to impose a local shari’a order. By and large the deplorable binary advanced by Islamism— a black- and- white choice of either Islam or the West— continues to prevail. The Islamist ambition of a
“postsecular society,” as part of a pattern of anti- Western development that gives religion a new role in world politics, is not abating in most of the Is-lamic world.
While the West (Eu rope in par tic u lar) has largely moved from uni-versalist Christianity to post- Christianity and from secular modernity to the cultural relativism of postmodernity, the universalism of Islam is not only gathering force but changing in disturbing ways. The politicization of Islam transforms the relatively peaceful universalism of Islam into a call for world revolution. Fashionable forecasts of increasing moderation, such as Gilles Kepel’s fi n de l’Islamisme or Olivier Roy’s “post- Islamism,” have been repeatedly belied by events on the ground. While Islamist activists are a mi-nority among Muslims, this vocal mimi-nority constitutes a powerful and highly appealing transnational movement. Islamist fundamentalists are active in the Eu ro pe an diaspora, creating diffi cult choices there as well. Fukuyama, who recognized the power of diaspora Islamists and their identity politics, rightly speaks of Eu rope as “a battlefront of Islamism.” 60 In this triangle comprising the world of Islam, the West at large, and the Islam diaspora in Eu rope, Islamism surely matters.
52 Islamism and the Po liti cal Order
The study of Islamism faces a variety of obstacles. Islamists have been successful in stigmatizing their critics as xenophobes and Islamophobes, and in using the tools of propaganda to impose their own terms of analysis. In fact, neither Islamophobia nor “Orientalism” is at issue here. Few Western scholars are receptive to understanding Islamism as a variety of religious fundamentalism properly or are willing to criticize Islamist thinking as an expression of a totalitarian ideology. The late Ernest Gellner, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who understood fundamentalism, had the vision and courage to criticize Islamist fundamentalism in clear words. In Amsterdam in May 1994, I witnessed a head- on clash between Gellner and the anthro-pologist Clifford Geertz. Gellner called for reviving the ideals of the Enlight-enment against the challenge of neo- absolutisms, among which he ranked Islamist fundamentalism at the top. He had written in his book Religion and Postmodernism that “religious fundamentalism . . . gives psychic satisfac-tion to many. . . . It is at present quite specifi cally persuasive and infl uential within one par tic u lar tradition, namely Islam.” 61 In Amsterdam, he and Geertz engaged in a heated dispute between the universalism of Enlighten-ment (defamed most stupidly as “enlightenEnlighten-ment fundaEnlighten-mentalism”) and the cultural relativism that Geertz favored.62 In response to Geertz’s argument that one needs to respect the “cultural peculiarity of the other,” Gellner angrily stated “then one has to respect Hitlerism as ‘the peculiarity of the Germans.’ ” Geertz disparaged this remark as unfair.63
The Gellner- Geertz controversy compels us to understand “the limits of pluralism” and Gellner’s critique of cultural relativism. Islamism is abso-lutist. It will never accept a place as one among multiple modernities.
Islamism has no commitment to democracy, it stands in opposition to civil Islam, and if it were to prevail, it would mark the beginning of a long era of darkness for the world of Islam, and for its diaspora in Eu rope. Gellner understood— as his opponents did not— that cultural relativism is an inad-equate response to Islamist neo- absolutism.
The shari’a state envisioned by Islamism is not a po liti cal order that can be incorporated into the Westphalian system of sovereign states. To support this system against Islamist neo- absolutism is not necessarily an expression of Eurocentrism.64 Legal scholars like Noah Feldman65 view the shari’a
Islamism and the Po liti cal Order 53
state positively for its apparent ac cep tance of constitutionalism, but this is deceptive. Every expert who reads Arabic and is familiar with the literature Islamists produce knows that Islamists approve neither pop u lar sovereignty nor the Westphalian synthesis that underlies the modern international sys-tem of sovereign states. The Islamist ideology of an Islamic shari’a state rests on the principle of hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule). Furthermore, this state is supposed to be the nucleus of an Islamic world order that will re-place the existing Westphalian one. Given these facts, how can Islamism be accommodated? Some say that Islamists will change. If they ever did aban-don the Islamist concept of order, this would be a positive sign— but they would no longer be Islamists.