The Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism, Feminism PDF

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Chapter 9 Theopolitics and Islamism (I): Philosophical, Ideological, and Historical Contexts “Neither East nor West, Islam!” —Revolutionary Slogan from Iran in the 1970s [W]e, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw [from Afghanistan] in...

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Chapter 9

Theopolitics and Islamism (I): Philosophical, Ideological, and Historical Contexts “Neither East nor West, Islam!” —Revolutionary Slogan from Iran in the 1970s [W]e, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw [from Afghanistan] in defeat. All praise is due to God. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. God willing, and nothing is too great for God. —Osama Bin Laden, 2004 “Acts 5 29: We Ought to Obey GOD Rather Than Men” —Sign at “Kim Davis for President Rally” in the United States, September 2015

INTRODUCTION: SECULAR IDEOLOGIES AND THEOPOLITICS

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he many continuing clashes between dedicated supporters of liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, fascism, and Nazism testify to signiicant differences in the political visions of each of them. When compared with ideologies that are explicitly and self-consciously religious, however, the ideologies we have discussed until this point bear a striking similarity: they all promote a fundamentally secular understanding of humanity and human political possibilities. Put simply, the ideologies we have discussed thus far insist that human beings can be the agents of futures that they decide for themselves according to ends they 360

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determine for themselves—as free individuals or as members of a tradition, class, nation, or race. These ideologies do not derive the bases for human action, or the stipulation of a goal culture, from the commands of an all-powerful God, a set of deities, or their prophets and messengers. God may be seen as the source of human capabilities (as reason is given by God to Locke’s naturally free individuals), religious beliefs and institutions may contribute to the traditions of conservatives and the national will for fascists, and individuals adopting one or the other of these ideologies may be religious, but what human beings do as liberals, conservatives, Marxists, fascists, and Nazis is, fundamentally, up to them as agents of their own futures, not to God or the gods. When it comes to contemporary ideologies formed more thoroughly from religious sensibilities (what we shall call theopolitical ideologies) the picture changes dramatically. Theopolitical ideologies are ideologies that are constituted in explicitly religious terms. They derive their conception of humanity and the goal cultures toward which humanity should strive from purposes understood to emanate directly from God’s or the gods’ judgments. The goals vary according to different human views of those judgments. Some theopolitical ideologies stress greater democracy and social justice; others demand the restoration of ancient practices of divinely inspired, patriarchal rule. Some endorse and wield the instruments of violence; others stand strongly for peace and reconciliation, and not simply for pragmatic reasons, but because they believe God has commanded human beings to live in peace. Indeed, theopolitical ideologies may be quite diverse in their political orientations. What they all share, and what they share with the other ideologies we have discussed, is that they are essentially simpliied, action-oriented responses to modernity. That is to say, they are ideologies. Their simpliication relates signiicantly to their relationship with the broader traditions of meaning, experience, and enchantment from which they derive their political visions and goals. Within the Abrahamic traditions that comprise our focus in this chapter, “Jewish ideological,” “Christian ideological,” and “Islamic ideological” movements draw upon the more expansive and diverse traditions of the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each tradition, it is important to note, traces its origins back to the igure of Abraham, or Ibrahim in Arabic. These traditions are comprised of highly complicated and varying ethical, spiritual, philosophical, juridical, mystical, literary, and artistic forms and meanings. Moreover, both historically and in the present, the traditions offer and exhibit diverse ways of living and relating. The Abrahamic religions, that is, are best conceived as total traditions encompassing enormous complexity and variety, enabling diverse forms of conviction, faithful expression, and committed practice.

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Their modern ideological forms, however, exhibit an important difference. They are, like the other ideologies we have studied, responses to the challenges of modernity. To understand modern theopolitical ideologies, therefore, it is essential to understand not only how they differ in content from the other, more secular ideologies, but also what they have in common with them as ideologies. We must also see precisely how the theopolitical ideologies strive to question the very presumption that political life in modernity should be envisioned in secular terms. These topics will occupy our attention in this irst of two chapters devoted to this subject. In our second chapter, we shall explore in greater detail the content of various contemporary Islamist theopolitical ideologies. As with the previous ideologies we have studied, there is no single Islamism. There are multiple forms, and each has taken shape in response to speciic historical circumstances. A discussion of every Islamist tendency is clearly beyond the scope of this effort. Our emphasis on some movements over others—particularly those that have gained global attention since the historic Iranian revolution of 1979—is intended to illustrate important ideological themes of the current era, not to be a comprehensive account of what is, again, a very extensive and complex subject matter. Theopolitical Ideologies as Modern Ideologies As we stressed in Chapter One, ideologies differ from broader philosophical traditions by involving some form of simpliication and a focused emphasis on action. From the point of view of modern ideology, contemplation of the broader philosophical puzzles of existence and the many options for living must be shelved in favor of providing truths that prescribe action to achieve the idealized form of existence envisioned by the ideology. Secular ideologies and theopolitical ideologies differ on many important matters, but they have these traits in common. By deinition, they reduce possible alternatives so as to deliver that precious, single and certain, action-orienting truth to their adherents. That truth may be the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or it may be the “necessity of a revolution” as in liberalism and Marxism. It may also be, as in the Abrahamic ideologies, the “created” status of human beings in relation to the all-powerful “Creator” God who has commanded them to act in particular ways. To conceptualize human beings as creatures of a creator God has, over the centuries of Abrahamic practice, raised many signiicant questions of ethical, philosophical, and political import. The very idea of a divinely created human being has inspired forms of worship, social and political practice, and literary expression more diverse than a single sentence can capture. But in the hands of the theopoliti-

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cal ideologue, the premise of humanity’s divinely created status turns fundamentally into a call for political action to establish God’s order. This resembles, for example, liberalism’s call to action to protect human rights based on a belief in the natural freedom of individuals. To a certain extent, of course, the Abrahamic traditions have always been constituted by a certain kind of call to live in particular ways. God is said by the prophets to have commanded a certain way of living and being in the world: for example, to keep kosher, to take communion, or to pray toward Mecca. And yet the truth of God’s existence, omnipotence, and signiicance has never had a single, uncontestable, and precise message about how individuals and communities ought to comport themselves in the world. Moreover, participants in these traditions have more or less accepted this diversity. However, this changes dramatically in the modern ideological context. Diversity remains, in the sense that there are different ideological options for the theopolitical activist: one can be a theopolitical activist for or against all war, for or against gender equality or reproductive rights, for development or against imperialism, etc. For the ideologically committed, however, the appreciation of diversity disappears, and singular forms of prescribed action take its place. The modern theopolitical ideologue now says something like, “if one is a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, one must act in precise and certain ways. That is what God demands.” The narrowing or simpliication occurs at the level of “truth” as well: just as the liberal truth of the essential “freedom of the individual” constitutes a narrowing simpliication of the vast philosophical debates over the nature of humanity, the forms of ideological expression that emerge from the Abrahamic traditions constitute a narrowing, a simpliication, of the vast possibilities and alternatives within those traditions. The comparison with the other, non-theopolitical ideologies is extremely important. Recall that each of the earlier ideologies fundamentally participates in what we described as the dynamics of modernity: the conditions made possible by the end of the feudal order, the rise of modern science, the growth of capitalism and imperialism, the emergence of the modern nation-state, and the corresponding “truth” that human beings ought to see themselves—as individuals or as members of some collectivity (humanity, nation, race)—as authors or agents of their own futures. While theopolitical ideologies emerge from religious traditions that precede modernity, they are shaped, like the other ideologies, by the dynamics of modernity as well. A brief summary of how modernity informs each of the ideologies we have studied thus far is helpful to seeing how theopolitical ideologies are also similarly embedded in the politics of modernity.

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The Signiicance of Modernity Liberalism was the irst response to these new conditions of modernity: promoting capitalism and the modern liberal state as institutions necessary to securing the natural liberty of humanity. What makes liberalism modern is the central role for human agency as such—reason in Locke, the will in Rousseau, and humanity’s moral sense in Jefferson—in determining how, and under what political conditions, human beings ought to live. Marxism criticized liberalism’s focus on the atomized individual, but its rejection of liberalism was not a rejection of modernity, especially its promise concerning human agency. That agency would manifest itself in the communist egalitarian emancipation of the species from the competitive, divisive, and miserable conditions of capitalism. We encountered human agency in Burkean conservatism as well, directed against class and in defense of lost or threatened traditions, including religious ones, that have provided cultural meanings and civilizational values over time. Conservatism is part of modernity because it calls upon humanity to use its capacities of historical judgment to restore the mores and customs of the past and to introduce change only after due consideration of the effects of change on those traditions. Even fascism and National Socialism, despite their anti-rationalism and racism, participate in modernity, seeing the national will, interpreted of course by the Leader, as subject to purposeful deinition by members of the nation or the race. What one sees in this brief review is how the ideologies we have studied so far are enmeshed in the fundamental dynamics of modernity. Insofar as theopolitical ideologies draw upon the religious traditions whose histories predate modernity to constitute the meaningful terms of action in the present, it may seem counterintuitive to think of them as modern ideologies. Yet we think that modernity is a proper context in which to understand theopolitical ideologies. Like the other ideologies, theopolitical ideologies both respond to and are shaped by capitalism, the nation-state, colonialism, and modernity’s outlook on human agency. This becomes clearer when considering the signiicance of the action orientation of all ideologies. No ideology counsels that human beings adopt a passive, or even adaptive, orientation to the dynamics of modernity. Action is key—either for or against a particular order. Action is made possible through the articulation of “truths”: clearly articulated (and simpliied) justiications for either acting with or against the status quo. When examining theopolitical ideologies, this action orientation stands out as a prominent feature. In fact, a critique of what they see as the historically passive, nonchalant orientation among the faithful toward the secular and secularizing con-

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ditions of political modernity constitutes one of the distinguishing features of all theopolitical ideologies. They maintain that human beings must shed whatever passivity they have exhibited toward historical change and must contest, resist, and end the evils of modernity. The forms of action differ—some may devote themselves to social welfare projects, others to competitive party politics, and yet others to revolution—but what is important to note here is that, in their call to action, these ideologies not only express themselves as simpliications, again, of varying degrees, of the broader traditions out of which they emerge, but they also show themselves to be founded on the possibility of human agency under the conditions of modernity. That is, they take on and become implicated within modernity’s notion of humanity as the agent of its own future, now made to be the fulillment of God’s will. Challenging Assumptions of “Secular” Modernity It bears mentioning that when we speak of modernity here, we are usually referring to its secular forms. In an earlier chapter we described how the scientiic trends of modernity actually emerged from within religiously informed developments in the sphere of science. In Europe, the sphere of science was eventually distinguished from the sphere of religiosity. Scientists touted “objectivity”—meaning that their inquiries and conclusions are not governed by “subjective” beliefs of any kind. The paradigmatic outlook in this regard was the nineteenth-century positivist conception of science, according to which the modern scientiic outlook sees itself as historically superseding theocentric ways of understanding nature. This outlook helped shape a secular, or non-religious, understanding of modernity. No more than a generation ago, students and trained observers of politics would most likely have considered a section of an ideologies text devoted to religion and politics to be outdated. After all, liberals and Marxists alike told us that, as societies underwent modernization (primarily through urbanization, industrialization, and education), the religious and public spheres would become increasingly differentiated. Matters of governance would be limited to matters of regulating developing markets, or organizing the interests of a given society, and religion would either be private or wither away. Intimated here is what many theorists characterized as a transition from traditional to modern life, based on a particular understanding of history as a continuous, unfolding process. History may have some major bumps—wars, temporary religious revivals, and so forth—but it would, over the long run, be a continuous process of linear transformation where one stage of history would replace a previous stage, where the old would be superseded by the new, the traditional by the modern, the religious by the secular.

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These still widespread assumptions are clearly manifest in some of the ideologies we have discussed thus far. While not anti-religious, liberal theorists suggest that religion should become a matter of private or social conscience, separated from matters of public policy. Recall that it was John Locke who, in his 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, was among the irst in the West to call for this separation. The liberal tradition sees itself partly as providing a solution to the history of religious conlict by encouraging people to separate their beliefs on the question of God— upon which members of mass publics often greatly differ—from the interests they share in common, such as stability, property, and liberty. In contrast to this liberal view, Karl Marx never supported a separation between a private realm of conscience and a public political realm. This was not because he wanted to see a larger role for religion, but because he thought that to relegate matters of conscience to the private “inner self ” was to perpetuate the alienated public sphere of capitalism. According to Marx, this separation was another ideological tactic that shielded capitalism from widespread public criticism. A fully human person would need to act ethically in the entirety of their life. Against both religious liberals and conservatives, Marx was also harshly critical of the essence of the Abrahamic monotheistic belief in an all-powerful God. He described religion as “the heart of the heartless world” and reasoned that by submitting to God, people were placing their creative power outside themselves, a tendency that would prolong their willingness to be dominated by each other and by capital. To be genuinely liberated, humanity would need to see itself as the sole, creative, and responsible power over worldly affairs. Abrahamic monotheism, like capitalism, needed to be, and would be, transcended. Historical experience has shown that these expectations were tremendously misguided. Religiously centered institutions, leaders, and activists have not been uniformly inclined to follow the pattern of what liberals and Marxists once declared were their proper historical roles. Besides mobilizing their faithful to defend their speciic, political, material, and spiritual interests, they reject the logic of the inevitability of the secularization process and defend the belief in God as a moral outlook that better secures human dignity and accommodates the complexities of modern life—including conditions of alienation, environmental destruction under capitalism, and war. Indeed, modern religious social movements, such as Liberation Theology in South America, the Sojourners and major parts of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the Islamist movements we analyze here, have led struggles against political injustice and grave economic inequalities. The Vatican, too, has condemned vast economic inequalities, as well as what Pope John Paul II described as the “purely economic conception of man” that dominates capitalism. For all of these representatives of a modern religious struggle

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against economic injustice, modernity is not, or not only, secular; nor are the proper and just responses to its most dificult challenges. Religious groups assert that religion provides meaning and a moral compass that cannot be found in what they see as merely worldly political ideologies. Each religious tradition has diverse ideological possibilities. We cannot, however, review every theopolitical ideology that has captured attention in recent years. Our focus, rather, will be on the ideologies that have emerged from the Abrahamic traditions, especially that of Islam. One reason for the focus on Islam is its clear importance in the context of global politics. Another is the growing interest in understanding I...