It’s a pleasure to be here. It is a hot sticky evening in central London. You have that feeling of the Middle East as you walk down Edgware Road with the hubble bubble and shops selling Arab newspapers. It is a pleasure to be here again.
I wrote this book out of two different emotions, or two different feelings. One was a sense of frustration over the lack of understanding of Islam and the lack of understanding of Islamism. In a fairly long career it seemed to me that this misunderstanding is very deep. It is not going away. It has reached a kind of low, a kind of depth. Part of the trouble with it is that Islam and Islamism and radical violent Islam are all conflated. There is now a very widespread view that Islam itself is the problem, Muslims themselves are the problem.
I will give you a tiny anecdotal experience. For me this incident was telling. Some time ago my wife and I went on holiday to Madera. And we had the tour guide in a little bus with other people and he was giving us the spiel. He said we are quite multi cultural here: we have Catholics, Protestants and Jews. And in a very neutral voice – it was not a leading question – I asked :”And do you have Muslims?” “Oh no he said you don’t need to worry about that”.
To me it was so telling. It spoke volumes. He thought there was an element of fear – am I going to find these terrible people here. In my experience, I travel a lot, I read as much as I can, not easy now in the age of the internet, I talk to lot of people and I realized that this view is not isolated. I wish it was some aberrant view, some exceptional minority view. I don’t believe it is so. These things are very widespread.
The second reason was a very different one and you could say it was a much more selfish, egotistical reason. I felt that after being a journalist for some 30 years I ought to put something down between the covers of a book. The second half of my career has been very much to do with the Muslim world. The first half was very much to do with the Eastern Mediterranean and in particular the Israeli-Palestinian problem but the more recent part of my career has gone way beyond the Eastern Mediterranean.
And because I had a lot of journeys to different places I wrote the book in the form of a journey. Of course it is not one journey. It is many journeys but I turned it in my mind into one journey. All the different journey’s became one journey and I tried to say something. The book goes as widely as I felt qualified to make it go. Of course the Middle East is there: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, each have chapters but the book goes either side of the Middle East because these issues are global. In one direction I ended up in South East Asia, not only as you might expect in Malaysia and Indonesia but in possibly the least known conflict involving Muslims, the conflict in southern Thailand. And then in the other direction I went much nearer home to the Muslim communities in Western Europe, in the Netherlands, Germany and France and Britain itself. So it was a journey across a wide geographical space that got going in the 1970s but then got going in earnest when I joined the BBC in the mid 1980s.
So I wrote the book and you can read it as reportage: as a guy going to places talking to people. That is fine. I hope it works that way. But I tried to say something and the hardest part for me writing it was to say okay Hardy, you went there you talked to them what do you want to say? What wise words do you have to say to the Muslim world and the non Muslim world at the end of all this? This evening I will share some of my own conclusions and the invite you to debate them with me.
I got into trouble with the title of the book, The Muslim Revolt. My son who is no longer a student, he is of post student age said “oh, the revolting Muslims”. I am going to get some of that. There is a very interesting blog by a very clever Muslim who I know and respect called Aziz Haq. He essentially accused me of being a Huntington an. With the greatest respect to him I don’t believe the book supports the clash of civilizations but he thought that it did.
The simplest way I can explain how the title came to me is from a quotation from Hassan Hanafi the Egyptian philosopher and reformist intellectual. When I saw him in Cairo in 2002 he said to me in a challenging tone of voice :”What is Islam? It is a revolt against colonialism from outside and oppression from inside. No more, no less”. A remark very typical of Hassan Hanafi but this notion of a revolt provided me with a theme for the book or at least with a way of constructing the book. A double revolt. A revolt with an internal and external dimension.
In trying to understand where this came from, and I don’t claim any originality here, it seemed to me that this double revolt emerged with the Islamic revival. The Islamic revival was something much broader, it had many more dimensions, it was and is a revival of religious consciousness, of personal belief, a revival meaning that Muslims have rediscovered Islam in all sorts of ways. It is not synonymous with what I call the Muslim revival.
The Muslim revival is not synonymous with Islamism but the two have emerged globally at more or less the same time from the 1970s onwards and from the same impulses which I do not need to discuss now. But what struck me is that while it is very easy to tell the story of Hassan Al Bannah and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and then take it as the archetypical Islamist movement I do so in the book.
When I thought about it Islamism may have died, it might have failed, it might have fizzled as a project, it might have died in Nasser’s jails. And so I asked myself the question why didn’t it? It has its first coming in the 1920s and 1930s – it had a fantastic growth. It was then persecuted and driven underground after the Nasser Revolution or the Free Officers Revolution in 1952. Al Bannah has already been assassinated by that time.
I am reading a fascinating biography: Saeed Qutub and the origins of radical Islam. I recommend it to you. Qutub of course was one of the early ideologues of Islamism and one of the first significant martyr in Nasser’s jails. But let me repeat my point. Islamism might have died with Saeed Qutub. It might have died in Nasser’s jails. It might have been repressed out of existence. It might have remained an idea that appealed to arm chair intellectuals. It might not have acquired the actual force and the global force that it did acquire.
My argument, and I claim no originality in this, is that 1979 was crucial in terms of both Sunnni and Shia Islamism because those key events in 1979 – the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the war that then ignited – both internationalized and radicalized Islamism. I don’t think there is any getting away from this. In a sense this was an accident of geo politics. Had those events not happened or not happened so close in time in 1979 one can only wonder what course Islamism would have taken. I suspect Islamism might have revived in the 1970s and 80s but it might have taken a more Islamo nationalist form rather than the violent internationalist form that we now associate with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda is a child of the cold war. We can talk about Islamism as a reaction to Western power and a reaction to local autocracy. The failures and disillusionment of independence. We can talk about all of that but in my view a key congruence of geo-political facts gave a fantastic boost to Islamism and made it global. The jihad turned global in the 1980s and has remained global. This is not entirely to do with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is the symbolic representation, the symbolic figure head today of all that.
Why does all this matter in terms of what I want to say this evening? We are left with two forms of Islamism. The Islamo-nationalism of Hamas and Hezbollah which is essentially focused on one piece of turf.. There may be talk of the ummah and solidarity with other Muslims outside Palestine. To me this is nationalism in an Islamic form. This is not a value judgment. It is an analytical judgment, or at least it attempts to be so. The same could be said about the FIS in Algeria. Its essential concern is with Algeria. It welcomes solidarity but it is not in the business of blowing people up in Kings Cross or Madrid or anywhere else outside the territory. Yes, these conflicts sometimes spill over. The Algerian conflict spilt over into France for fairly obvious reasons but those were fairly brief moments. Its focus was a territorial focus.
Part of the West’s mistake or mistakes is a tendency to lump everything together. The Sunni Islamists, the Shia Islamists, the Islamo nationalists, the Islamo internationalists, they are all lumped together especially in the mind of George Bush. They are all the bad guys, they are all the enemy they are all, if you will, a kind of axis of evil. It is mistake, an important mistake, a serious mistake and it inhibits any attempt to form coherent policies in regard to Islamism.
What I want to do now is to say something about the strengths of Islamism and the weaknesses if you will which is perhaps an ambitious task. I think it is not a bad moment to attempt such a task. To put it in a very abrupt way, there are people who say and I have heard them say this in this very room, Islamism has failed, it is bankrupt, it offers Muslims nothing. It was a Muslim who said this. And if lots of Muslims feel and act that way it is very important. It means that Islamists are losing ground in important constituencies.
I am not a Muslim. I am an analyst and I am not here to tell you Islamism is good or bad. I am here to give you my take on this quite complicated and diverse phenomenon. And to my mind no matter what you think about Islamism as a Muslim or a non Muslim I think there is no denying that at the grassroots level Islamism across the world in many many places has been singularly successful. It has captured the grassroots, as I put it in the book, and beats incessantly on the gates of power.
Beating on the gates and busting down the door and getting in are two different things. I will get back to that in a minute. But down at the grassroots level in terms of organization and mobilization Islamism has proved to be a force to be reckoned with by the local governments who clearly fear it.
The degree of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood is an indirect compliment to the Muslim Brotherhood. If the Muslim Brotherhood was of no account in Egypt it would not be repressed, consistently and by diverse means – sometimes crudely, sometimes more subtly. The same for Algeria and Tunisia and many other places one could think of. This is partly about skills or organization and mobilization.
A Turkish friend of mine, no great friend of the Islamists or the Welfare Party said they understand that you have to go and knock on doors, that you send women to work with women, you send men to work with men, you send young people to work with young people, you send workers to work with workers. They understand what practical mobilization is about at a time when the other parties have either forgotten or just don’t do it. They just don’t care.
The Rafah Party knocked on doors in the shanty towns. Shanty town is a very poor translation for the gigicondu, the over night settlements that ring Istanbul and Ankara and other big cities. Many of them now have electricity and running water. They have become permanent settlements.
They are the migrants who came in from Anatolia and found life quite unsettling in the big city as did the migrants who came from Cairo or Tehran or some other place. And they went to them, they worked with them and they returned their votes. Why is it surprising? When it came to election time the people repaid the debt they felt they owed to the Refah party. Nobody else came knocking on their doors. It is that simple. I don’t think this can be denied. It may be that there are ideological failures. Islamism has not been a great success.
The other positive aspect goes beyond organisation. Islamism expresses a social need. It responds to something that people want and need. And if it didn’t it wouldn’t have got anywhere and it won’t get anywhere in the future. You remember when Hamas won the elections. I was watching tv and they said the Palestinians have voted for terrorism. What a load of rubbish. But what a dramatic illustration of the mind set of people. As if the Palestinians had decided we are going to vote for suicide bombings.
Where are these people? Do they not have journalists on the ground? Don’t they talk to anybody? Of course Hamas has its history and its ideology and they were not blind to this. They voted for Hamas because they were sick to death of the other lot who were Fatah, who were incompetent, who had failed to liberate bits of Palestinian territory and the tiny bits that were liberated were run with total incompetence and corruption.
And Hamas ran a very modern campaign which had very little to do with Islam and everything to do with refrom and clean government. We will make the water run, and make the electricity flow and your kids will go to better schools. This is not rocket science. You don’t have to send someone in little rockets to Mars to discover why those people voted that way. It is a simple narrative to say they voted for the bad guys.
Islamism responds to social needs. It expresses grievance which is a way of saying that the other parties the other groups, the other movements in the 20th century also expressed those grievances, those self same grievances don’t function well any more. The left is no longer significant in the Middle East or the Muslim world. They were once in Iraq and Sudan and Egypt. The nationalists? Nationalism as a sentiment is still there but nationalism is very much associated with the movement and the leadership that won independence and got rid of the European colonialists and then failed to deliver.
So I don’t think that nationalism is totally discredited but the people working with the nationalist project are discredited whether it is Yasser Arafat, Abdul Nasser or a whole host of others. They did something at their moment in the 1950s but after that what did they do? They turned out to be corrupt and repressive.
So Islamism became a new way especially from the 70s onwards a way of challenging unrepresentative regimes who were corrupt, repressive, flouted human rights and so on. They filled a vacuum. And what is remarkable today is that still to a large extent they fill this vacuum.
But now let me get to the other side of the equation. In order to make a sound bite I said that the Islamists beat uncessantly at the gates of power but the same old regimes by and large are still there. In only very few cases have the Islamists made the break through to power. So having talked about their strengths and their achievements they themselves are very conscious that they have not made the break through to power and are trying to figure out if there is any kind of model.
In Algeria they came close to winning power by the ballot box and power was snatched away from them by the army. In Turkey a party with Islamist roots as the BBC likes to say, possible a post-Islamist party, there is a huge debate about this has won power through the ballot box. And despite all its problems if there was an election tomorrow I think they would win.
In Iran there was a revolution. In Sudan there was a revolution on the coat tails of a military coup. Hamas having been a militant movement a movement of resistance against the Israelis wins the election in Palestine. Everybody is looking for a model. No one is really finding one. The Turkish movement is maddingly Turkish. Hamas is specific to Palestine. I am very reluctant to make a judgement as to whether Hamas succeeded or failed. Hamas situation since it won the election has been so extraordianry it seems to me almost unfair to say categorically they succeeded or failed. But we can see some pointers. We could say one or two things. I don’t think one could say categorically whether they succeeded or failed.
But look elsewhere. Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan under the taleban. Three extremely diverse places and movements that are very different from one another. They have not been glittering successes. I will only say one or two things about Iran. In 1979 and I have hinted at this already, Iran was a fantastically important role model, catalyst, game changer as they say now. I don’t think that sense of its historic role has changed. No one can take away. The Shah fell and Khomeini came. And there has been nothing like it in the Muslim world ever since. It remains as a revolution and unique as an experiment in Islamic government. Iran is now more than 30 years old. It was a real revolution. In Sudan it was a coup and today we can see that Turabi is no longer influencial and it has problems in the south and in Darfur. So Iran is a one of.
But what do we think that the Iranian people now think of their own revolution. Whenever they are given the chance it is clear that there is a deep disenchantment. When it was possible for the BBC to go to Iran I was astonished at how outspoken the people were. You could stand on the street corner with your microphone and Mr X would give you his name and say the Iranian revolution has failed econmically, culturally and socially. And I would say ‘wow’ and stick that in my programme. You cannot do in Saudi Arabia and many other countries in the region. Sadly I can’t do this now. I would not get the visa to go. The BBC is regarded as the ideological enemy. The power behind trying to achieve a velvet revolution in Iran and so on. It is a bad situation now. In my book I call it the Iranian paradox. What Iran did in 1979 still counts for something among Muslims whether Sunni or Shia. I do not buy the argument that the Iranian revolution is an exclusively Shia thing. It has got caught up in sectarianism which is a terrible blight. But that revolution because of its character, excited an awful lot of Sunni Muslims around the world. I have met a large number of them.
The paradox of Iran is that it has been discredited at home because of the fraudulent election. I don’t think there is any serious doubt that that election was rigged. And yet as I put it just now Iran still has a certain electric current among Muslims because of its historical role in 1979 and because of its role in standing up to important powers the US and Israel.
But my basic point is that Islamists looking for role models and success stories have great difficulty finding them, have great difficulty saying that was the way to do it and we want to do it like that. It is more than saying that by and large Islamists have failed to achieve power. There are not just practical failures, there are ideological failures. I think Islamism overall, the general main stream of Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt for example, rather than some wonderfully reformist intellectual who sits in Cairo but dosen’t represent anybody – the broad picture is not one where Islamist movements and leaders have made the great leap forward, the great historic compromise in issues that are crucial to the Muslim ummah. They have failed to make the compromise with democracy and pluralism and tolerance. The figures who had a huge impression on me in Iran when I met them in Iran – Abdul Karim Soroush, Muhsin Kadavar are now in exile. They cannot write, lecutre to their students or function in Iran today. It is a tragedy. As it happens both of them are in the United States.
You may think this would be a bleak note on which to end. I want to say briefly whether I think Islamism has a future and my answer is yes Islamism has a future. Not because of its own internal coherence, not because it has found and has practically shown that it has found solutions to the everyday problems of Muslim communities around the world, not because it has become modern in the sense of making the breakthrough to democracy, toleralism and pluralism but because of the failure of others. Islamism feeds on failure and there is an awful lot of it.
You may be able to figure out perfectly well what I mean by failure. The West’s failures to understand Islam and Islamism. The West’s failures particularly after 9/11 to deal intelligently with a problem which at 9/11 had reached a new pitch. The term global jihad entered our vocabulary for the first time. And it entered the vocabulary of Muslim activists for the first time. Jihad had a different meaning before 9/11 than it had afterwards.
And above all by charging into Iraq in that ill conceived action the West – George Bush and Tony Blair – gave a tremendous gift to Osama bin Laden, gave a fantastic boost to the concept of global jihad which is extremely controversial among jihadists themselves. They will say it means I should help my Chechan brothers fighting the Russians or I should help my Kashmiri brothers fighting the Indian army. Jihad does not mean, as Osama Bin Laden tells us, that we should blow up people in Kings Cross or Madrid, or kill our Muslim brothers and sisters in Istanbul, or Casablanca, or Algiers. The West has made a bad problem a lot worse.
As for the regimes what can one say? They too have made the same mistake of making a bad problem a hell of a lot worst so no one allows the possibility of a place in the political arena for Islamism in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Saudi Arabia whereever one may look.
And activists who have many grievances against the West, do with Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir will say to themselves that moderation dosen’t pay. This old cliché that moderation pays – one man one vote the Westminster model. Where does that get you if you are sitting in Cairo or Tunis is does not get you anywhere and therefore politics moves to the radical end of the spectrum for want of any other place to go.
I don’t know if my remarks have been cohernet. I have tried to understand Islamism which I do not regard as one thing. I regard it as many things, many different movements. I do think it has a future, it has many futures. The West and western policy makers show little sign of having learned from their past errors which leads me to think they are going to go on making the same errors in the future and will be very interested to hear what you have to say about my take on Islamism.
* Roger Hardy has been a Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst with the BBC World Service for over twenty years. He has made a series of radio programmes about Muslims in the Middle East, Europe and south Asia, and is a regular contributor to the Economist, International Affairs and the New Statesman.
