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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/03
Islamism: Roots and Prospects
March 2002
Abstract
The emergence of a political ideology based on Islam is commonly attributed to Jamal Eddine al-Afghani (1838-1898) of Afghanistan, Mohammad Abduh (1849-1905) of Egypt and Abdurrahman al-Kawakibi (1849-1902) of Syria. These early Muslim intellectuals are called "reformers," because they advocated a reversal of what they perceived in their era as a slow but inexorable decline of Islam. In their views, this could be accomplished only through a purification of the faith and a return to strict observance of the word of Allah (i.e. the Koran) and imitation of His prophet's behaviour (i.e. the Sunna). But at the same time, those thinkers believed that Muslims should not shun science and knowledge even if they came from non-Muslims. Thus saved from decay and decadence, the reformed and renovated Islam could inaugurate a period of renaissance (nahdha) that would allow it to join and participate in the economic and social transformations that were under-way in the West.
Paradoxically, those ideas were espoused by various secular parties and movements in the Arab world in the early twentieth century, but were rejected by Muslim intellectuals and political activists as being too influenced by the West to be authentically Islamic. Thus, figures such as Muhammad Rashid-Ridha (1865-1935) of Tripoli (future Lebanon) and Hasan al-Banna (1906-1948) of Egypt opposed this reformist ideology in favour of one that was more conservative and closer to the Wahabism that had established itself in the Arabian Peninsula.
