The Many Faces of Political Islam, Second Edition: Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies

by Mohammed Ayoob, Danielle Nicole Lussier

Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Mohammed Ayoob's The Many Faces of Political Islam thoroughly describes the myriad manifestations of this rising ideology and analyzes its impact on global relations.

"In this beautifully crafted and utterly compelling book, Mohammed Ayoob accomplishes admirably the difficult task of offering a readily accessible yet nuanced and comprehensive analysis of an issue of enormous political importance. Both students and specialists will learn a great deal from this absolutely first-rate book."
---Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow, Cornell University

"Dr. Ayoob addresses the nuances and complexities of political Islam---be it mainstream, radical, or militant---and offers a road map of the pivotal players and issues that define the movement. There is no one as qualified as Mohammed Ayoob to write a synthesis of various manifestations of political Islam. His complex narrative highlights the changes and shifts that have taken place within the Islamist universe and their implications for internal Muslim politics and relations between the world of Islam and the Christian world."
---Fawaz A. Gerges, Carnegie Scholar, and holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies, Sarah Lawrence College

"Let's hope that many readers---not only academics but policymakers as well---will use this invaluable book."
---François Burgat, Director, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institute for Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM), Aix-en-Provence, France

"This is a wonderful, concise book by an accomplished and sophisticated political scientist who nonetheless manages to convey his interpretation of complex issues and movements to even those who have little background on the subject. It is impressive in its clarity, providing a badly needed text on political Islam that's accessible to college students and the general public alike."
---Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, University of Maryland, and Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations with a joint appointment in James Madison College and the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. He is also Coordinator of the Muslim Studies Program at Michigan State University.

Genres: Politics, Islam, Religion, Middle East, Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2007

Reviews

[Tammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helped me to understand the political side of Islam and the various groups I have heard about over the years. Gave me an appreciation for Muslims throughout the world.

[Idealist- Realist · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was reading the book, I came to realize that this book can serve as a response to those who define Islamist groups as monolithic like the book I read by Walid Phares entitled "War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy" that he equated all Islamists on the same footing.

This book by Mohammed Ayoob tries to demonstrate that Political Islamists are not monolith. They are defined according to internal contexts. Even though Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of Hamas and Clerical state of Iran has direct connection with Hizbullah are still determined by the political landscape within their boundaries.

It is important to note that Political Islamists morphed into pragmatism like that of AKP in Turkey to which it adopted radical departure from rigidity to flexibility just to take a leap forward in its political participation in the country. AKP's political success can serve as model for the rest of Muslim world.From the other extreme, the author examined also the al-Qaeda network. This network is a small minority that its global terrorist activities are not directed by its leade Osaman bin Laden. Every segment of this network have significant independence. This suffices it to say the not all terrorizing acts are not directly correlated to its leader Bin Laden.

Another important to consider is the nexus between the Islamists and authoritarian regime to curb the influence of opposition like that of alliance between Mussharraf regime in Pakistan and Islamists party of Jama'ah Islamiyah and others. Also, the nexus between CIA and bin Laden during the soviets invasion on Afganistan. The U.S. interest here is to contain soviets influence. These alliances demonstrate the role of politics.

Political Islamists popularity can be attributed to the failure of the unrepresentative and authoritarian regime to cater that societal demands. The former don't solely speak for Islam but it stands for human rights. Domestic variable is not only contributing to the popularity of Islamist but External variable as well to which the unique interplay of domestic and international factors that continuously reinforce each other. Example of this is the symbolic relationship between the United States and clients state like Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Support of U.S. for these authoritarian regimes will secure their status qou. on the other hand, U.S. interest are also served.

From this book, we can comprehend essential points that emergence of the Islamic movements- may they be mainstream political Islamict or radical Islamist- is a reaction to the perceived hostile nature of the International system towards Muslim populations like the following points:

1. Policies of erstwhile colonial powers in the 1950' and the 1960s; the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 after he had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 951 to the Anglo-Israeli invasion of Egypt following Presidents Nasser's nationalization of Suez Canal in 1956.

2. The bloody war of independence forced on the Algerians by France's intransigent insistence that Algeria was a part of France.

3. America's current military occupation of Iraq has further convinced most Muslims that the United states is working within the same imperialist paradigm used in the Middle east by British and the French.

4. Unqualified support for Israel is also seen as part of America's strategy to create and strengthen proxies so as to better control the resource-rich Middle-East.

5. The support that Western powers have extended to authoritarian and repressive regimes in the Muslim world during the cold war and after United States has alienated the Muslim masses from the west and from the United States in particular.

6. Supported extended to the Shah of Iran. Propping up regimes like those of presidents Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt and kings Hussein and Abdullah in Jordan and collaborating with Saddam Hussein of Iraq to check the growing influence of revolutionary Iran in the 1980's.

7. Unstinted and unquestioning American support to Israel, especially to its policy of continued occupation and of settlement within Palestinian lands conquered in 1967.

8. American foreign policy that is characterized by double standards in relations to the Middle East.One example is that its supports for Israel's nuclear weapon while it opposed Iran's possession of Nuclear option and etc.

9. The American occupation of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein under the guise of Iraq's possession of weapon of mass destruction which is not proven until now.

10. The American endorsement of the Israeli policy of inflicting highly disproportionate damage on Lebanon in July and August 2006.


It is sufficient to argue that Islamist agenda are just responses to the policies inflicted on the Muslim world and it puts them on to defensive side though others recourse to violent approach. Because of the internal and external factors, Political Islamist shifted their tactics and strategies. They were also given space to popularity in the presence of these factors. Another important to note here is that political Islamists mainly mainstream ones are not anti-democracy as others scholars and thinkers may think. To prove this notion is the radical transformation of AKP, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas etc. to fit in political processes in their respective countries. Lastly, there is no single entity to represent the Islam or embodies the genuine model of Islamic state based on time of the Prophet S.W.A. The author expounded this on chapter 3, Iran and Saudi Arabia as self-proclaimed Islamic states.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The following eight chapters make up this book:

1) Defining Concepts, Demolishing Myths
2) Islam’s Multiple Voices
3) Self-Proclaimed Islamic States
4) Between Ideology and Pragmatism
5) Muslim Democracies
6) Islamist National Resistance
7) Violent Transnationalism
8) The Many Faces of Political Islam

This book has attempted, among other things, to address the potential of political Islam to affect the future of major Muslim societies and polities around the world. It starts from the proposition that political Islam is not a monolith, but rather a multidimensional notion that cannot be carved into convenient binaries of modest and radical or violent and peaceful.

What unifies all Islamist actors is the use of religion as a political ideology in quest of political objectives. Ranging from elected office in a democratic state to the construction of a transnational caliphate, the political objectives Islamists pursue vary extensively; as do the strategies they use to trail these objectives.

Islamist groups and actors do not operate in a vacuum, but rather try to achieve their objectives in very different contexts, which can constrain or expand the options available for action.

The self-proclaimed Islamic states explored in chapter 3, Saudi Arabia and Iran, far from being typical of political Islam, represent unique manifestations of Islamism and are very different from each other.

Most Islamists operate in political regimes where religious leaders do not hold temporal power. The typology of political Islam elaborated in chapter 1 proposed three separate dimensions on which Islamist groups tend to vary: political objectives, electoral
participation, and the use of violence.

Our analysis of these dimensions, and of the specific, local conditions that give rise to particular intersections of the dimensions, yields four Islamist “ideal types”: vanguard Islamist movements, nonviolent Islamist political parties, Islamist national resistance groups, and violent transnational Islamist actors.

The author examines these different types in chapters 4–7 through analysis of typical cases of each type, demonstrating that political Islam in the contemporary era is by and large a national phenomenon and that its trajectories, while subject to foreign influence, are primarily determined by factors that are discrete to particular contexts.

This book has argued, both in the introductory chapter and in the various case studies in subsequent chapters, that it is only natural that political Islam is manifested largely as a national phenomenon.

The discrete national manifestations of political Islam result from the wide diversity in the Muslim world in terms of socioeconomic characteristics, culture, political systems, and trajectories of intellectual development, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the political expression of Islam developed in one context to be replicated in other locales. Moreover, as the territorial boundaries of postcolonial nation-states have solidified and have come to be seen as legitimate and permanent, politics has become effectively circumscribed within national territorial limits.

This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of political actors in Muslim countries, Islamists and non-Islamists alike, have internalized the values of the nation-state system and are comfortable working within it rather than challenging its basic premise. Political Islam is therefore effectively nationalized in the contemporary era.

This is as true of self-proclaimed Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, as it is of countries where Islamists are in opposition rather than in power.

The tremendous differences in the ideologies and political systems of Iran and Saudi Arabia demonstrate that, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, there is no consensus on what constitutes an “Islamic state.”

As chapter 3 has shown clearly, both the Saudi and Iranian systems are products of their own historical, cultural, and political contexts and cannot be replicated elsewhere. Similarly, as successive chapters have demonstrated, both vanguard Islamist movements and nonviolent Islamist parties, whether in Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, or Indonesia, are all generated by their own milieus and specific to their geographic and cultural locales. The same is true of Islamist national resistance movements, analyzed in chapter 6.

The chief among them, Hamas and Hizbullah, are as much products of their own context as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i-Islami.

Both seamlessly combine nationalism and Islamism in their ideologies and objectives. In fact, one could argue that the nationalism of Hizbullah and Hamas defines their Islamist agenda, rather than the other way around. It is obvious, therefore, that political Islam comes in various shapes and sizes.

Differences among Islamist groups can be clearly perceived not only among countries but within countries. The latter phenomenon is related to the fact that Islamists in specific countries are usually divided both ideologically and over the objectives and strategies they seek to pursue in the political arena.

The sometimes violent opposition to the Wahhabi Saudi regime from radical neo-Wahhabi elements within the kingdom is irrefutable proof of this phenomenon.

As the chapters of this book have demonstrated, divisions abound among Islamist movements in countries across the Muslim world. There are, indeed, many faces of political Islam.

A core argument of the preceding chapters has been that local variables are preeminent over global factors in explaining the faces of political Islam. Indeed, several Muslim states share some local characteristics that can help account for similarities observed across different national contexts.

For example, most Muslim-majority countries are ruled by nondemocratic regimes, and many have boundaries shaped largely by the whims of colonial powers.

Nonetheless, in this concluding chapter some international variables, especially American policies toward the Muslim world, deserve analysis, even if in abbreviated form, because they have a major impact on the fortunes of political Islam in discrete societies when mediated through local concerns and domestic perceptions of the relationship between international and domestic factors.

This applies especially to America’s close relationship with several unrepresentative and authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world and to the general perception in Muslim countries that American policies are hostile to Muslim interests broadly defined

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayoob's basic thesis is that the violence in the Muslim world is caused by autocratic governments and neocolonialism and furthermore, there isn't a monolithic political Islam, but rather all politics are national. It is a direct challenge to civilizational analysis like Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Ayoob ultimately overstates the case against any civilizational component to the current turmoil in the Muslim world and Islam's bloody borders. He also is rather sanguine on the prospects of successful transitions to democracy and the respect of international standards for human rights.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential, IMO, for understanding that Islam is Not A Monolith. Filled with info, but not so dense that you need years of background knowledge to get the point.

[Ernest · Rating 5 out of 5]

An invaluable introduction to the topic.

[Gaby Chapman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goes a long way to explaining the interrelationship of democracy and Islam in predominantly Muslim countries.