Islamic Fundamentalism : Fascism or National Liberation?
Taimur Rahman
While “The War on Terror”, the surrogate euphemism for imperial conquest and
re-colonization, was almost unanimously condemned, especially by those who
live in Muslim countries or were on the left of the political spectrum, it
simultaneously forced upon everyone the need to theoretically engage with
religious fundamentalism, resulting sometimes in a fresh demarcation of
ideological positions.
Fundamentalism has been likened with fascism, especially by scholars in the
West. The inevitable conclusion from this analysis is that all democratic and
socialist forces need to unite behind the ‘democratic West’, much like the
broad unity achieved during the struggle against European fascism in the 1930s
and 1940s. However, there are obvious contradictions in this analogy. While
both fascism and fundamentalism espouse extremely reactionary forms of
capitalism, the former was an outgrowth of the development of economically
advanced capitalism dominated by financial monopolies in states that were
pursuing a redivision of the old colonial empires, and the latter is the
product of extremely backward pre-capitalist areas of the world that have
historically been colonized by the West. Therefore, Islamic fundamentalism
bears more in common with tribal, feudal, or petty bourgeois culture and
represents an attempt to roll back the wheel of history to a ‘golden age’ that
economic
modernization has destroyed in its wake.
Although Islamic political groups are really composed of two different types
of movements with a vastly different social base of support, they often get
bunched into the universal category of “fundamentalists”. In Pakistan, for
example, the MMA is composed either of Islamic traditionalists (the Deobandi
JUI, or the Barelvi JUP) or of Islamic fundamentalists (Jamaat-e-Islami). The
traditionalists have their base of support in the most economically backward
tribal areas of Pakistan, whereas the fundamentalists derive their support
from the middle class in the cities. Thus as a whole they derive their base of
support from pre-capitalist production tribal areas or extremely small retail
and trade businesses in third world countries.
In sum, the analogy with fascism is inaccurate for the simple reason that
these forces are neither representatives of an advanced capitalist country
seeking a redivision of the (neo)colonial empire of the world, nor are they
the product of the financial monopolies and cartels that gave rise to European
fascism.
On the flip side, other writers have attempted to draw parallels between the
Islamic fundamentalist movement and the national liberation struggles of the
1960s and 1970s. Here again certain very obvious contradictions stand in the
way of this simplistic analysis. The class base of the national liberation
movement was in the revolutionary section of the national bourgeoisie. The
national liberation movement, therefore, was generally opposed not merely to
imperialism and its associated big capitalist class within the neo-colonial
countries, but also to feudalism and tribalism. On this basis the national
liberation movement had a relatively progressive stance towards the question
of the emancipation of women.
On the contrary, the Islamic fundamentalists have a history of opposition to
this very national liberation movement. In fact, the history of several Muslim
countries demonstrates that the Islamic fundamentalists were not only opposed
to the national liberation movements in the third world on account of the
latter’s socially progressive views, but also on the question of land reforms
(for evidence see the opposition of the religious right to the land reforms
introduced by the Pakistan People’s Party).
If Islamic fundamentalism is neither analogous to European fascism nor to
third world national liberation movements, what then is the substance of its
political programme? The essence of the Islamic fundamentalists’ political
programme is so obvious as to sometimes escape our attention; it is the
reinstatement of a theocratic state. Alliance or opposition to any power
(socialist or capitalist, Western or Eastern) is based on the singular
imperative of reintroducing “Islam” as the state religion. In that sense
fundamentalism is not “anti-imperialist” in the same sense as the
national-liberation movement, whose principle objective was to become
economically independent of imperial rule; it is more accurately described as
“Anti-Western”. Foreign investments, finance capital, multinational companies
and so on are quite acceptable as long as they do not bring with them the
“morally bankrupt culture of the West”, the epitome of the latter term
captured by the image of jeans-clad women walking around unaccompanied or
unsupervised by men. In that sense then, fundamentalism militates not against
economic inequality but against political equality that accompanies the
separation of religion from affairs of the state.
If it can be said that the indispensable gains of the European Enlightenment
were the liberation of science, politics, and art from the ideological fetters
and dogmas of the Church, the Islamic fundamentalist movement represents an
“anti-enlightenment movement”. It is the Muslim equivalent of the medieval
reaction of the Church against “modernity”, with the exception that this
entire battle is being fought three four hundred years too late and in the
context of an extremely technologically advanced world, and further in the
context of a world dominated by Western capitalism on the march for new
colonial conquests. It is self-explanatory that without enlightenment the
third world cannot possibly hope to build a scientific consciousness and
develop economically in order to liberate itself from neo-colonialism.
The tactics of the fundamentalists are as primitive as their ideological
apparatus. They seek the Islamic unity of the Muslim world by provoking a
confrontation with the West. In their view, suicide attacks, whether of school
children in a bus in Tel Aviv or of the symbols of US capitalist and military
strength, bringing about a disproportionate response, will fill the Muslims of
the world with religious fervour bringing about, inevitably, the final
collapse of Western civilization and a new golden era of Islamic prosperity.
However, the critical error in this scenario is the fact that although the
disproportionate response from the West has brought about a religious
reawakening in the Muslim world, Islamic fundamentalism, even if it were able
to overcome its tendency towards sectarian clashes, lacks a concrete or
tangible programme of internal social change. In fact, internally the movement
seeks to ally itself to the very forces that are abhorred and despised by the
teeming rural and urban poor of the third world. That is why, although
fundamentalism may score temporary or regional victories, its historical
trajectory fails to address the most pressing problem of common people:
freedom from want. In the long view of history, the only political force that
can successfully capture the popular imagination of the people is one that
attempts to solve the most basic problems of people, the beginnings of which
lie in an agrarian revolution that has the strength to uproot the foundations
of feudalism.
Taimur Rahman is a member of the Communist Workers Peasant Party of Pakistan
June 2006
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