The Many Faces of Political Islam

In The Many Faces of Political Islam, Professor Mohammad Ayoob neatly organizes a comprehensive overview of the intersection between Islam and politics, tearing down some common conceptions with his more nuanced understanding. The arguments he outlines in the book— that Islam is not a monolith, that the priorities and values of political Islamic groups are filtered through local contexts, and that the majority of these movements are non violent— are substantiated by a series of elucidating comparative cases.
Ayoob’s comparison of the “self-proclaimed Islamic states” of Iran and Saudi Arabia drives home Ayoob’s point that, “the fundamental religious texts of Islam do not prescribe any particular model of temporal rule and that the moral principles underlying just governance advocated in the Islamic scriptures can be put into practice through different types of institutions in different times and places.” The author outlines the history of the two divergent states, including the compact between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab as well as the relationship between the quietest Ayatollah Borujerdi and his activist protégé Ayatollah Khomeini, to show that Islam has played fundamentally different roles that are roles are filtered through other variables such as Persian cultural norms from pre Islamic times as well as the tribal codes and practices of Najd.
Indeed, Ayoob places great importance on the filtering role that local contexts play in shaping political Islamic movements, and he continues that central theme in his comparison of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Jamaat i Islami in Pakistan, both political Islamic movements which have not captured the institutions of the modern state as Saudi Arabia or Iran have. Despite this broad similarity, one of the key differences is in the “action reaction pattern” with their respective nation states. In Egypt, General Nasser brutally crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, which ultimately produced a reactionary Islamic ideology and more radical Islamist groups that emerged in the late 1960s. On the other hand, according to Ayoob, Pakistan has always been a more open polity than Egypt, a “semi-democracy”. This has provided the JI with political space to test their strength and has strengthened their commitment to democracy. This dichotomy underscores another central argument in Ayoob’s book: that democratic space tends to have a moderating force on Islamic parties, and that when they see an opportunity to seize the reins of power, then more concrete priorities such as providing basic services become more important than other considerations. On the other hand, when these groups are brutally crushed by authoritarian regimes, it can actually increase their soft power as the broader population views them as both innocent victims as well as defenders of human rights and democracy.
Two places where we have seen democratic space opened for Islamic movements include Turkey and Indonesia, the subjects of Ayoob’s next comparison as well as the best examples of another thesis: that there is no inherent and irreconcilable contradiction between Islam and democracy. The main similarity between these two countries is that secularism formed a foundational basis of the two republics when they came into existence. Ayoob’s broader points in his comparison of these cases are, again, that political space neutralizes the more extreme and rigid manifestations of Islam, as well as that democracy’s competitive nature helps to split the Islamist base and to reduce the possibility that a monolithic Islamic bloc will take and hold power.
At the other end of the spectrum are Islamist National Resistance groups. Here, Ayoob cautions that one not lump such diverse groups as Hamas and Hizbullah with al-Qaeda under the blanket term “terrorist”. The most important distinction is that groups like Hamas and Hizbullah are territorially circumscribed, whereas AQ chooses targets around the globe. Additionally, the violence of Hizbullah and Hamas is principally determined by the fact of foreign occupation.
In Ayoob’s final chapter he explains some of the external forces that have shaped political Islam, such as US foreign policy. He overstates a bit when he claims “unstinted and unquestioning American support to Israel”; while the relationship is indeed special, it is also marred by occasional flare-ups on the settlements issue, hardly “unquestioning” as Ayoob puts it. The most original and semantic point in his concluding chapter is that the Western media, and perhaps Western world, have a conflated understanding of the term moderation when applied to regimes in the Muslim world to mean “pro Western, specifically pro American, and a willingness to accept Israel’s legitimacy.” Ayoob outlines his own definition of moderate in this context to mean “non-violent opposition, respect for the results of free and fair elections, and willingness to give up power if voted out of office.”