By Ali A. Mazrui

Islamic Horizons - Vol 37, No 3, May/June 2008
 
Since 9/11, a new concept has entered the vocabulary of political debate: Islamo-fascism. Is this a genuine ideological concept or merely a term of abuse? Most of the time, this term is used by Islamophobes and westerners who are either afraid of or fundamentally hostile to Islam. When used by members of the Bush administration or such failed presidential aspirants as Mike Huckabee and Rudolph Giuliani, it has been narrowly focused on such militant movements as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This term is often used interchangeably with  Islamic terrorism.

While  Islamo-fascism was coined by critics or even enemies of Islam, the much older term  Judeo-Nazism was coined by the distinguished Israeli scholar Prof. Yeshayahu Leibovitz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), in his capacity as editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” out of a sincere concern about certain forms of Jewish extremism. Noam Chomsky also cited this term in his “Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians” (Boston: South End Press, 1983, 446-47). When Israeli bulldozers seemed to be burying Palestinians alive in Jenin, other critics of Israel married  Nazi to  Zionism and came up with  Nazi-onism. But this was a clumsy term of abuse rather than a meaningful ideological characterization.

Similarly, since the 1960s,  fascism has been a term of ideological abuse. In the 1960s, it was popular with the ideological left as a term of denunciation against police brutality, apologists for the American war in Vietnam, corporate greed, white racists in the American South, and even university administrators under siege by radicalized students.

Since 9/11, however, it has become popular with right wing Republicans who denounce not the socialist left, but also newly radicalized Muslims. But fascism, which originated in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, was a systematic body of thought that included a central role for the state, a personality cult for the Leader, and a fusion of corporate power and militant nationalism. In contrast,  Islamo-fascism has little relationship with a body of ideological thought involving elaborate statism, militant nationalism, and corporate power comparable to Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy, or even a mobilized personality cult on the scale of  Heil Hitler. Osama bin Laden is admired as a remote heroic figure, but not as a powerful presence in practical politics like Hitler or Mussolini, both of whom could bestow medals or inflict punishments.

All of these considerations make  Islamo-fascism fundamentally a term of abuse comparable to  Judeo-Nazism, rather than a serious ideological reformulation. Let’s now turn to a genuine ideological comparison between the history of Islamic culture and the rival civilizations with which it has often been negatively contrasted.

Cultures have to be assessed not merely in terms of the heights of achievements to which they can ascend, but also to the depths of brutality and even barbarism to which they can descend. The measure of cultures is not merely their  virtue-potential; it is also their  vice-potential.

In the twentieth century, the Muslim world has not often been a fertile ground for democracy,  (virtue-potential). On the other hand, Islamic culture has also been less fertile for the  vice-potential of Nazism, fascism, and communism than either Christian culture (e.g., Germany, Italy, and Russia), Buddhist culture (e.g., Japan before World War II or Pol Pot's Cambodia), or Confucian culture (Mao's China).

Muslims are often criticized for not producing the best. However, they are seldom congratulated for having standards of behavior that have averted the worst. There are really no Muslim equivalents of systematic Nazi extermination camps; conquests by genocide on the scale perpetrated by Europeans in Bosnia, the Americas, and Australia; versions of the rigid apartheid once approved by the South African Dutch Reformed Church; equivalents of Japan’s brutal racism before the end of World War II; equivalents of Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia; or versions of Stalinist terror in the name of Five Year Plans. What is it in Islam that has resisted the ultimate depths of human depravity?

Communism and Stalinism independently triumphed in such Christian countries as Russia and Czechoslovakia; in such predominantly Buddhist cultures as China, Vietnam, and North Korea; and, if the People's Republic of China is counted as both Buddhist and Confucian, was autonomously triumphant in China. But apart from the dubious case of Albania [and the short-lived People’s Democratic Republic of (south) Yemen (1967-1990)], communism has never autonomously prevailed in a previously Muslim culture.

In the 1930s, we saw fascism grow in such Christian cultures as Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain and witnessed a form of fascist militarism develop in Shintoist-Buddhist Japan. But the world has yet to witness the development of systematic state fascism and its organized brutalities in the Muslim world.
Part of the normative background is that Islam, historically, has been resistant to three forces that contributed to some of the worst features of the twentieth century's worst cases of barbarism. First, Islam has been relatively resistant to  racism and the mosque has been racially integrated from the days of Prophet Muhammad ( salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) himself. One of the Prophet's most beloved companions was Bilal ( radi Allahu anh), a freed Ethiopian slave who rose to great prominence as his disciple. Partly because of Islam's relative non-racial nature, its history is free of systematic efforts to obliterate a whole people. Islam conquered by cooptation and conversion, rather than by  genocide.

It is true that incidents in Muslim history have caused a large-scale loss of life. The Ottoman Empire’s attempt to deport the entire Armenian population of about 1,750,000 to Syria and Palestine in 1915 was catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished through starvation or were actually killed on the way. Armenians in the diaspora have never forgiven Turkey for this horrendous episode. But is a decision to expel a people, however disastrous in its consequences, the equivalent of the systematic Nazi Holocaust against the Jews?

The movement of people between India and Pakistan at the time of the partition of British India involved  mutual massacres between Muslims and Hindus. Saddam Hussein’s use of lethal gas against Kurdish villages is more clearly comparable to Nazi behavior. But this was a case of using an illegitimate weapon in a civil war, rather than a planned program to destroy the whole Kurdish people. The Iraqi case was an evil  incident rather than an evil  program of genocide.

We must also distinguish between massacres and genocide. The history of almost every country in the world includes a massacre on some occasion or another. But only a few cultures have been guilty of outright genocide. If Muslim history has been relatively resistant to both systematic racism and systematic genocide, it has also been spared the whole experience of the Inquisition and burning people at the stake. Indeed, when children in Muslim societies are caught deliberately burning insects, they are sometimes admonished with the ancient Islamic adage:  La yu`adhdhibu bi nar illa Allah ("Only God punishes with fire"). Therefore, there has never been an occasion of Islam sanctioning the burning of heretics at the stake. Cultures that had done this in their past were in danger of tolerating gas-chambers against people of another faith as late as the 1930s and 1940s.

While Islam has been relatively resistant to racism, genocide, and the equivalent of the Inquisition, it has been more ambivalent about slavery. Muslims have both owned and traded in slaves across the centuries. But slavery among Muslims has been almost race-neutral, for they -- as well as the masters -- could be white, black, brown, or other. This is in contrast to the racially polarized trans-Atlantic slave-system of white masters-black slaves. Second, slavery in the Muslim world allowed for high upward social mobility. Both Muslim Egypt and Muslim India produced slave dynasties. The long reign of the Mamlukes in Egypt (1250-1517) was a case of sovereignty exercised by former slaves. [The Mamlukes were Turkish prisoners of Genghis Khan, who sold them as slaves to the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt. The sultan trained them as soldiers, and eventually they became his palace guard. In 1250, they seized control of Egypt and ten years later inflicted the first great defeat on the Mongol armies trying to seize Palestine. They overran Asia Minor and ruled Egypt for more than 250 years. Selim I of Turkey finally defeated them in 1517 and conquered Egypt. Under Turkish rule, the Mamlukes were kept on as soldiers and resisted Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. In 1811, Egypt's viceroy Mehemt Ali ordered their massacre.]

Finally, let’s examine the interplay between Islam and violence. Against the background of all the debates about Islamic "fundamentalism" and Arab "terrorism,” one powerful paradox of the twentieth century may be overlooked: while Islam may generate more political violence, western culture generates more deviant street violence. Islam produces a disproportionate of number of violent  mujahideen, whereas western culture produces a disproportionate number of violent muggers. In terms of the average citizen’s quality of life, is there a tradeoff between the excesses of the Islamic state and those of the liberal state? Let’s look at this dilemma more closely.

The crisis of the western liberal state is still one where citizens are safer from their governments than ever before, but less safe from fellow citizens. The quality of life is becoming increasingly violent in the West. It is less politically frightful than in parts of the Muslim world, but the direction of social change is toward increasing social conflict.

One solution elsewhere in the world is a return to pre-modernism, to indigenous disciplines and values, such as in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The other solution is the search for post-modernism. Tehran is a city of some 10 million people. In the 1990s, I saw families picnicking with small children in public parks between 11 p.m. and midnight. In four different cities, I saw people walking late at night with their children or women, seemingly unafraid of mugging, rape, or being killed. This is a society that has known large-scale purposeful political violence in war and revolution, but also one in which petty interpersonal violence in the streets is much rarer than it is in Washington, Detroit, or New York. Iranian citizens may be less safe from their government than American citizens are from theirs, but Iranians are safer from each other than Americans are. The Iranian solution is, in the moral sphere, pre-modernist.

Can the Muslim world find post-modernist solutions to its own anguish? Indeed, there are two ways of escaping modernity -- retreat to pre-modernism or aspire to transcend modernity. Can it pursue the positive aspects of globalization without descending into the negative aspects of westernization? Africa’s largest westernized city is Johannesburg; its largest Muslim city is Cairo. In terms of population, Cairo is much larger than Johannesburg but has only a fraction of its rate of street violence. Does Islam help to pacify its streets? How wide is the cultural distance between Islam and the West? How long is the historical distance? The measurements are both cultural and demographic.  

In Search of the Future

Francis Fukuyama assumed that the end of history arrives when we discover what is best. But he forgot that we also need to understand how to protect ourselves from what is  worst. We know that western liberal democracy has enabled us to find openness, governmental accountability, popular participation, and high economic productivity. But we also know that western pluralism has been a breeding ground for racism, fascism, Nazism, exploitation, and genocide.

If history, as a quest for the ultimate political order, is to come to an end, it can never be satisfied with the West’s message on how to maximize the best in human nature -- from alcoholism to racism, from materialism to Nazism, and from drug addiction to Marxism as the opium of the intellectuals. Of all of the world’s value systems, Islam’s has been the most resistant to the ultimate destructive forces of the twentieth century -- perhaps, for the time being, including AIDS. Are those societies that are closer to the Shari`ah also more distant from HIV? If so, should we take a closer look? The reduced levels of commercialized prostitution and of hard drugs have so far helped to protect the more conservative Muslim cultures from AIDS better than average.

The interplay between the relativity of culture and the relativity of history continues. In historical terms, the Muslim world may be only decades, rather than centuries, behind the West in some democratic principles. In cultural relativism, on the other hand, one must distinguish between democratic principles and humane principles. In some humane principles, the Muslim world may be ahead of the West, such as in protecting the family, the lower levels of street violence in most Muslim cities, and the relatively non-racial nature of mosque culture.

How can a bridge a bridge be built between democratic principles and humane principles? Turkey is a preeminent example. In times of peace, the Ottoman Empire was more humane in its treatment of minorities than the Turkish Republic became after 1923. The Ottoman  millet system extended considerable tolerance to religious minorities. The Turkish Republic, on the other hand, gradually moved toward a policy of cultural assimilation. While the Ottoman Empire tolerated the Kurdish language, the Turkish Republic outlawed it for a long time. The Ottoman Empire was, in times of peace, more tolerant of religious minorities than the Turkish Republic was of linguistic minorities.

And yet the Turkish Republic (however imperfect) has been a closer approximation of democracy and its values than the Ottoman Empire ever was. This illustrates the proposition that when the country was not at war, the Ottoman Empire was more humane but less democratic than the Turkish Republic. In the final analysis, democracy is a system of how rulers are chosen, whereas human governance is a system of how citizens are treated. Ottoman rule at its best was humane governance; the Turkish Republic at its best has been democratic.

Are events now going on in Turkey during the early years of the twenty-first century a search for reconciliation between Ottoman Empire’s greater humaneness and the Turkish Republic’s greater democracy? The partial Islamic revivalism may be the beginning of a fundamental Turkish review of the Kemalist revolution, which inaugurated the era of Turkish secularism. In the case of England after Henry VIII, we raised the scenario of a theocracy being democratized. In the case of Turkey right now, is there a possibility of a democracy being theocratized? The increasing electoral support for Islamic revivalism in Turkey has increased speculation about pushing back Kemal’s secular revolution.

Was former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan’s relationship to the Kemalist revolution the equivalent of Gorbachev's role in rolling back the Leninist revolution? Or was he a forerunner of the Turkish equivalents of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, jointly rolling back the Kemalist revolution in the years ahead? Is Turkish democracy in the process of being slowly re-theocratized?

The dialectic of history continues its conversation with the dialectic of culture within the wider rhythms of relativity in human experience. Perhaps there is no such phenomenon as Islamo-fascism. There is a confrontation between radicalized Islam and militarized western hegemony, one which is engaged in a search for a future dialogue of civilizations.

Dr. Ali A. Mazrui is director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, Binghamton University State University of New York at Binghamton, NY; Albert Luthuli professor-at-large University of Jos, Nigeria; Andrew D. White professor-at-large emeritus and senior scholar in Africana studies, Cornell University; and Chancellor Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology Nairobi, Kenya. He is perhaps best known in the West for his PBS series “The Africans: A Triple Heritage.”

source: http://www.isnawebpaper.com/webpapers/isna0805/multi/index.html