FIFTY YEARS OF RISE AND DECLINE

Abdullah Gül, the former Foreign Minister of Turkey from the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the ex-president of Turkey and, finally, one of the leading representatives of the Islamist political wing, has recently made a statement about the decline of political Islam, which caused a wide resonance in Turkey.

According to Gül, political Islam is experiencing a deep crisis throughout the world, and the once successful activities of one of the pioneers of the movement in Turkey (AKP) is now outdated. Therefore, a transition to a qualitatively new level is inevitable to be able to respond to modern challenges.

The first ones to express disagreement with Gül's ideas were his former associates. Ahmet Davutoghlu, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister of Turkey, now heading the Party of Future (GP), called Gül’s position nothing more than "imitation." Like traditional political Islamists, Davutoghlu compared Gül to Jewish politicians in Israel and Christian politicians in the US and Europe.

Gül’s statement is not the first and probably not the last such opinion. The influence of Islam on the socio-political processes in Muslim countries has always been and will be, because Islam, unlike other religions, is more dynamic, penetrates all spheres of human life, including the socio-political life of believers. But that is another story. We will focus on the current state of political Islam and the processes that led to the current situation.

Islam has had a significant impact on political processes and public administration from the very first days of its inception. This tendency is observed in all religions, for until the 19th century—that is the emergence of modern political systems—the legitimacy of power has been based on religious principles. The ruling elites and dynasties of both the East and the West were considered legitimate only after receiving “God's blessing”.

With the spread of European political ideas, especially nationalism, resentment in conservative Muslim circles increased, resulting in the birth of Islamism as a protest movement. Pretty soon, an avalanche-like stream of ideas, conventionally called political Islam, or simply Islamism, spread to the entire Muslim world. Jamaleddin Afghani from Afghanistan (in Iranian sources named as Assadabadi) is one of the precursors of political Islam. Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, Pakistani Muhammad Iqbal, Rashid Reza, Mawdudi, as well as other Islamic thinkers and ideologists of political Islam are also well known. Despite methodological differences, the main objective of these ‘first generation’ intellectuals was to restore the lost power of Islam and to strengthen the position of the Muslim ummah in front of the strong Europe. In contrast to socialist, liberal and nationalist ideas, which also had a group of supporters in the Muslim world, Islamist reformers viewed the deeper understanding of Islam, return to the early Islamic tradition (one of the main tenets of Salafism), in other words, religious adherence to canons as the only solution to save the future of Muslims.

The ideas of Afghani contributed to the emergence of numerous Islamist political movements. Perhaps the most significant of these was the Muslim Brotherhood movement (Jam'iyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin), which appeared in Egypt 30 years after Afghani’s death.

Origins

The climax of political Islam in the Muslim world was in the late 1960s-early 1970s. The hopes of socialism among Muslim Arabs vanished after the shameful defeat of the Egyptian army and allies led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the notorious Six-day War in 1967 against Israel. By the beginning of the 1970s, the Muslim world had already “experimented” with various structures of government from caliphate to monarchy to socialism and to the western liberalism.

On August 21, 1969, a fanatical Protestant Mike Dennis Rohan tried to set fire at one of the three main Muslim shrines, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The harsh reaction of the Muslims followed immediately. A month later, senior representatives of Muslim countries gathered in the capital of Morocco, Rabat, to found the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) (now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation).

It was the first manifestation of the Muslim states to come together and to formally lay the foundation of a community of Islamic states. The main objective of OIC was to promote relations and unity between the member states, as well as to support the settlement of the Palestinian issue. Incidentally, one of the main founding states of OIC was Saudi Arabia, the only Sharia state at that time, which currently hosts the organization’s headquarters. Interestingly, about thirty years ago, when the Arab countries also came together to create the League of Arab States (LAS) together, it never occurred to anyone to add the word “Islam” to the name of the organisation. However, in 1969, with the foundation of OIC, it became a political and social necessity.

To defeat the West

The processes following these events happened very quickly. In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur war between Israel and the coalition of Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar announced an oil embargo against states supporting Israel, and mainly the United States. This was the first joint attempt by Muslim countries to exert economic pressure on the West, demonstrating solidarity at the state level.

Ten years after the arson of the Al-Aqsa mosque (according to Islamists, this was a planned action of crusaders), two major events took place in the Muslim world that led to quantitative and qualitative changes. This ensured the transition of political Islam to the level of political ideology.

The first of these events was the Islamic revolution in Iran. For the first time, the idea of political Islam triumphed in a Muslim country and led to the foundation of an Islamic republic. Although Iran’s new political system was created on the basis of Shiite worldviews and the doctrine of Shiite guardianship also known as Wilayat al-Faqih, the success of the Islamic revolution revived the Islamic political movements in many Muslim countries, inspiring them to political struggle.

The second important event was the invasion of Soviet troops in Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, which then escalated into a large-scale war. The world community was unhappy. At the same time, several interested forces stood against global mobilisation against the USSR. For example, the US and the allies tried to expose Soviet occupation policies. For the radical wing of political Islam, this war was sacred. For this reason, Muslims from almost all over the world began to come to Afghanistan to participate in the holy war. Along with ordinary fighters, there were also jihadist ideologists like Abdullah Yusif Azzam from Palestine, Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia and Ayman al-Zawahiri from Egypt. The ten-year Afghan war became a training ground for jihadists from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who later participated in wars in Central Asia, Chechnya, Africa, the Philippines, Thailand, and then in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya.

In 1981, political Islamists organised an assassination attempt on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and a year later, Syrian President Hafez Asad severely suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood separatist movement in the country.

In the same period, the moderate wing of political Islam was lucky. Despite the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in the 1991 municipal and parliamentary elections in Algeria, the military was still able to prevent the Islamists from seizing power. In 1997, the leader of the Turkish Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), Necmeddin Erbakan, became the prime minister of the Turkish coalition government. As a result of the coup in Sudan in 1989, Omar al-Bashir seized power, supported by the leader of the local wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Turabi.

Inspiration of the Arab Spring

Actual occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s caused another sharp anti-Western wave of hatred in the Muslim world, and inspired political Islamists. In the 2002 elections in Turkey, the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party won. In 2005, 88 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been under pressure in Egypt for many years, were elected to the parliament as independent candidates. In the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, the Hamas movement, which also supports the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, defeated the country's ruling party, gaining more than 60% of the votes.

The Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia in December 2010, was the culmination of a 50-year period of political Islam. That’s why many Muslim politicians in the early years called the Arab Spring "the Islamic Awakening," and indeed the leading forces of the revolutions at first were real Islamists. In the wake of the revolutionary movement in a secular African country, Tunisia, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda Movement, who was in exile in Britain for many years, came to power. In Egypt, after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood also came to power. In addition, the political Islamists in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Iraq, where the revolution escalated into military conflict and civil war, are still one of the warring parties.

The Arab Spring and the ensuing wars hit the authority of political Islam in the world. Initially, the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the growing influence of political and jihadist Islamism, but then it was significantly weakened by the ensuing civil war. Although the Ghannouchi team gained a majority in parliament, he still supported the multi-party secular system in the country and refused the proposed presidential post. In Egypt, after the year of the Muslim Brotherhood in power, the military returned to power after a coup. Although the local wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists dominated the Libyan government, the country split in 2014, and 90% of its territory is still controlled by warring secular groups. In Syria, however, radical Islamists control only small areas in the north of the country. Ultimately, the Islamists could not achieve what that they wanted in the territory covered by the events of the Arab Spring all.

Surveys conducted recently in Muslim countries, including Turkey, show that the representatives of Islamism and Shariah have lost a significant number of supporters compared with the period of the Arab Spring. In countries where the revolution turned into a civil war, people gradually began to shun radical Islamic organisations. For example, if in 2012, during the intensive period of the Arab Spring, only 27% of the Turkish population strictly supported secular customs, then in four years this figure increased to 36%.

An analysis conducted in 2015 by the American Pew Research Center in ten Muslim countries showed that in Turkey the number of people who want to see the Qur’an as a source of the country's legal system is only 13%. Currently, in Turkey the number of supporters of hard secularism is almost three times the number of supporters of Sharia. However, surveys conducted in Turkey at different times showed that 70-74% of the population still remain religious. Although even for them, Islam has already lost its former charm.

Opinion polls, as well as the results of elections held in recent years, say that the demands of political Islam are no longer attractive to people. The fact that the Communist Party of Iraq is the main partner of the Sairun coalition that won the 2018 election is a clear example of the fact that Muslim countries are already showing interest in alternative political ideas. Even in Saudi Arabia, strictly regulated by the canons of Sharia, there is an increasing tendency towards weakening.

It would be naive to think that political Islam leaves the international stage any time soon. But, as Abdullah Gül admitted, political Islam has already lost its former influence. After a 50-year period, Muslims saw that a politisized religion cannot give them what they want. On the contrary, the abuse of religion clearly discredits their beliefs and creates a negative attitude towards Islam as a whole. It also means that secular ideologies will gain popularity in the Muslim world in the new era.