Why Islamism Failed

Anonymous Question from My Instagram

There are many reasons why Islamism failed; some of them are internal to Islamist movements – such as their lack of serious engagement with the Islamic tradition – and some of them are the result of a concentrated effort by imperial powers and their indigenous allies to criminalize and demonize Islamist movements. While both can be acknowledged, debating which of these was more important in the eventual failure of many Islamist movements is to miss the forest for the trees. There is only one real cause for the failures of Islamism: the inability of Islamists to recognize their own inheritance of colonial legacies.

Most Islamist movements inherited a fundamental assumption of their Marxist predecessors; that is, the structural formations of state and economy are the primary actors of social organization. Thus, to both Marxist revolutionaries and Islamists, social change can only meaningfully take place when the means of production (economies) and modes of governance (the state) are put in the hands of those who will lead society to its true freedom – which, surprise surprise, is a Marxist or Islamist. To the power-obsessed ideologue, seizing power is always the correct means to achieving the objective.

Both Marxists and Islamists recognized, however, that a political movement was impossible to build on a purely political platform; that culture must first be dominated by their respective ideology before a political movement can manifest. Within Marxism, this was most robustly elucidated by Antonio Gramsci, whereas Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-A’laa Mawdudi refined this concept within Islamism. While both movements were able to mobilize against colonialism and push against liberal capitalism, both movements failed against their greatest foe, the one foe that was able to mobilize popular imagination and dominate public opinion: ethno-nationalist fascism.

Gramsci was the most obvious victim, as he was heavily persecuted by the Mussolini government. Marxism’s greatest and most brutal foe was not, in fact, the United States – rather, it was the Third Reich, which committed more violence against Marxism in the course of a few years than the United States did over decades. Similarly, the greatest foes of Islamism in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and other states were not the forces of American imperialism; rather, it was virulent ethno-nationalist (or, in the case of Pakistan and India, native elitism disguised as geographic nationalism) that was supported and instrumentalized by Russian and American imperialism.

Thus, for both Marxism and Islamism, the real question is as follows: why did they fail to capture the imagination of the very people they claimed to represent (the working class for Marxists and Muslims for Islamists). When the question is posed to both groups, each produces a series of complicated theoretical analysis, the purpose of which is to obfuscate the question, not answer it. The reason for that is simple: the answer is damning. Marxists and Islamists failed to galvanize the populations they simply did not answer the most pressing and important concerns of the people they claimed to represent. Marxists characterized their own base as sheep who were under the control of ideological structures; Islamists characterized them as imperfect Muslims.

Both failed to look at the writing on the wall: their theories and movements were, by in large, had limited relevance to the very people they claimed to represent.

The case of Islamism is without a doubt the most interesting. By-in-large, Islamists focused on a politics of identity while post-colonial populations had significant day-to-day concerns: how they were going to feed their families, educate their children, and manage geo-political tensions. Ideological sloganeering and displays of piety often took the place of serious, pragmatic, and realistic economic and social policy. Most importantly, however, Islamism played within a framework that was at odds with the very concepts they claimed to champion. As I stated in my previous post, Islamic law is a highly pragmatic and context dependent system.

Islamists by-in-large bought into colonial-era ideas about Islam as a rigid system that was outdated and required reform. Many Islamist thinkers leveraged salafism to claim that they would retrieve an “original” Islam that had been misinterpreted by the 1400 year old Islamic tradition. That “original” Islam, however, was fixed and rigid – because, again borrowing from colonial era caricatures of Islam, the religion was perfect and unchanging. This brought Islamism into direct clash with every major movement in society: pragmatic statesmen who required legal flexibility; ulama who understood the tradition better than Islamists; modernists who wished to westernize; Marxists who claimed moral authority, etc.

In the course of this contention, Islamists were unable to put forward a compelling narrative as to why their understanding of Islam and a moral society was more compelling than that of the ulama, the ruling elite, and the socialists, all of whom claimed Islam as well. The inability to monopolize discourse on Islam meant that they failed to create a mass popular movement and were left to contend over power politics – an arena where their uncompromising geopolitics made them an easy target of both the USSR and America. After the fall of the Soviets and the beginning of the American moment, the promises of neo-liberal institution building appeared to make them redundant because the whole world was promised riches beyond measure as long as they accepted the new world order.

As the neo-liberal order collapses, however, and the world undergoes economic, geopolitical, and ideological realignment, Muslims have to ask a serious question: how does one learn from the failures of Islamism if we will advocate for truly Islamic states? The answer, in my view, is fourfold: 1) recognizing that pragmatism is not at odds with Islam; 2) deep engagement with and mastery of the Islamic tradition; 3) an emphasis on social spiritual revival over political ideological contestation; 4) an emphasis on Islam as a religion that solves the social, material, and emotional problems of society.

None of this can be done without a full mastery – and recognition of the limits of – the Islamic tradition. The Islamic tradition provides a robust methodology, but that methodology must be adapted to the realities of modern societies and advancements in modern knowledge. But, as someone who has spent more than a decade engaged with that tradition, I can confidently say, the tradition, with all its flaws and limitations, is our greatest strength and guide. Its methodology is profound; its achievements spectacular. Any attempt to create post-Islamist Muslim movements must be rooted in a deep respect for that tradition as well as a recognition that it must be adapted – not copy and pasted.