The Cultural Constitution of Political Economy(2006) Seeing War of the Worlds(2006) Ward Churchill and Innocence(2005) Frodo or Gollum: U.S. Foreign Policy and Iraq(2003) Grasping the Mundane (2003) Intertwined Timelines: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the USA(2001) Radical Islam as a Prelude to Secularization? (2001) Does Righteousness Deliver Evil? (2001) Two Approaches to the Meanings of Terror Ithaca article and video Buzzsaw Interview

Circuits of Conversion: From 14,000 to 1 Present Dangers Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies Celebrating the End of the Cold War

International Relations and the Problem of Difference Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War The Global Economy as Political Space

The Rites of Dispossession (PDF) Cultural Constitution of Political Economy (PDF) A Medium of Others (PDF) Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism (PDF) If Only You Could See What I Have Seen with Your Eyes: Staging an Encounting Between Social Science and Literature (PDF)

Radical Islam as a Prelude to Secularization?

by Naeem Inayatullah

Three issues that distinguish between a more mainstream political Islam (Fundamentalism: the desire to implement Islamic Law (Shari’a)) and a radical Political Islam, or Islamacists:
The right to a kind of individual interpretation of the Koran (Luther, Calvin).
The right to topple existing regimes through revolution and violence (Hus, Wycliffe, Karlstaad)
The right to declare currently existing Muslims as non-Muslims (takfir); (Hus, Wycliffe, Karlstaad)
This last issue, especially, according to Olivier Roy, is the watershed between moderate and radical Islam: “If takfir is religiously lawful, then violence and revolution re religious duties. For radical Islamacists, one should kill a ruler who claims to be a Muslim but does not rule according to Islam.” (37-8)

Four Trends among the Mujahideen:
Fundamentalist Sunni Clerics
i. These are the bulk of the traditionalists and the clerics

ii. Example: Harakat-I Inqilab

Sunni Islamacists
i. Jam’iyyat-I Islami (JIA); Burhanuddin Rabbani: opposes Takfir

ii. Hizb-I-Islami (HIH); Hekmatyar: supports Takfir

(Leaders of these types of parties are not based in the local culture of Afghanistan; these are urban laymen, trained in elite institutions abroad like al-Azhar in Cairo. This should tell us something; radical Islam is a kind of response to modernity.)

Shi’a Islamacists
Wahhabis, or neo-Fundamentalists
Copying the West: (skip?)
The Islamicists believe that we must return to the Golden Age of the 7th century. Therefore, since the 7th century, space time is degenerate. This copies the model of Christianity in which space time is degenerate since the Eden, or since the Tower of Babel.
Differences are not seen as a type resource but as a degeneration of an original perfection, just like in Christianity.
Similar Examples in European History:
Luther and Calvin
i. But before we get to them, let us look at some precursors:

Lollards and John Wycliff (1329-84)
i. Wycliff attacked the wealth and greed of the Papacy.

ii. English response:

1. enactment of a statue: “For burning heretics in 1401. This established a legal framework for religious persecution

iii. Scottish Response:

1. Foundation of a university to protect the orthodoxy: St. Andrews (1425).

2. Anti-Lollard legislation in 1425

3. Execution of Lollard sympathizers in 1407

Nevertheless, the Lollard movement survived and succeeded in exporting its ideas to Europe; these ideas were adopted by the Hussites in Bohemia.

c. Hussites and Jan Huss (1369-1415)

i. Huss executed in 1415

ii. Followers raised an army that proved to be unconquerable

iii. In 1433 they forced the Pope and the Emperor to recognize four articles of reform including demands for the redistribution of wealth.

iv. Under the leadership of John Rokycana – between 1429 and 1471 -- the Hussites sustained an anti-Papal and evangelical stance and established a semi-autonomous Czech national church.

d. Luther:

i. Nails his 95 theses against the Catholic Church in 1517, insisting on their own interpretation of the Bible and an unmediated relationship with God.

ii. However, both he and Calvin denounce Karlstaad, Luther’s colleague, because Karlstaad insists on the use of violence to overthrow current regimes, and the right to insist that Christian rulers act as Christians or otherwise be deposed. He insists, that is, on the right to Takfir.

iii. This line between Luther and Calvin on the one side and Karlstaad on the other, is the same line we saw earlier between Rabanni and Hekmatyar of the Mujahideen.

e. Theroeau:

i. “I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government…and not wait until they constitute a majority of one…I think it is enough if they have God on their side…any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one already.”

ii. Thoreau, while not insisting on violence, is insisting on the right to interpret the law and the right to deem all others as in the wrong.

iii. And what do we make of Thomas Jefferson’s claim, I am paraphrasing: “God forbid this country go 20 years without a revolution.”

iv. Then there are the examples of the French and the Haitian Revolutions. In both, the right to revolt turns into TERROR.

The Point:
Perhaps what we are observing are the mundane cycles of burning idealism that wails against a corrupt realism; followed by a set of processes that either burn out that idealism or else institutionalize its aims within a real political process.
That is, seen from a more macro lens, what we are witness today is the mundane repetition of historical cycles.
If so, there is good news and bad news. The good news: we do well to remember that the radical fire generated by Luther and Calvin resulted – after 150 years of utter and extreme bloodshed – in the partial secularization of Christianity.
The bad news: The moral exhaustion by both Protestants and Catholics took a long, long time. The practical point will be to see if we can somehow avoid some of that bloodshed.