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Islamic Fundamentalism Since 1945
Featuring a brand new examination of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Arab Spring, this fully revised and updated second edition of Islamic Fundamentalism since 1945 analyzes the roots and emergence of Islamic movements in the modern world and the main thinkers that inspired them.Providing a much-needed historical overview of a fast-changing socio-political landscape, the main facets of Islamic fundamentalism are put in a global context, with a thematic debate of issues such - the effects of colonialism on Islam- secularism and the Islamic reaction- Islam and violence in the 9/11 era- globalization and transnational Islamist movements- Islam in the wake of the Arab AwakeningIslamic Fundamentalism since 1945 provides an authoritative account of the causes and diversity of Islamic fundamentalism, a modern phenomenon which has grabbed the headlines as a grave threat to the West and a potentially revolutionary trend in the Middle East. It is a valuable resource for students and those interested in the history, effects and consequences of these Islamic movements
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 12, 2004
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July 21, 2021
Samuel P. Huntington, in his ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order’ (1996), articulated that a foremost source of the inconsistency between Islam and the West lies in the elementary question of power and culture, explicitly in the former colonies in the Middle East and Africa.
A basic raison d'être for this disproportion is that Western civilization, at least in theory, has a ‘humanist outlook’ in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby providing Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion and from religion, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, and property rights, among other values.
This is for the reason that society, expressly in the United States of America, has recognized and implemented the theory of equity—an ingredient opposed by sharia law—into its body politic since, according to the natural law, all “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
A more propelling factor, however, of the dissection between both societies has been the West’s self-created moral vacuum where, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2016, “the moral basis and any traditional identity are being denied.”
The globalized politics of the West have berated the Christian roots that Western society was built upon. Momentous to this is the firm foothold Islam has gained in those countries since Muslims collectively react to such “national, religious, cultural and even gender identities [that] are being denied or relativized.”
As a community, they refute Western “politics [which] treats a family with many children as [juridically] equal to homosexual partnership [and where] faith in God [in their view] is equal to faith in Satan.”
Islamic society sees the globalized West as acquisitive, fraudulent, profligate, and depraved; its many seductions must be fought and eradicated. This is because Muslims profess that “Islam gave to mankind an ideal code of human rights fourteen centuries ago,” in which there is no qualm for any sort of reform or compromise.
Islamists, in their expansionist schema, have exploited this societal disarray as leverage so as to institute a civility governed under the sharia, concurrently inciting the average Muslim into following their lead. They are the new propagators of Islamic fundamentalism, which is often characterized by moral conservatism, literalism, and the effort to implement Islamic values in all spheres of life.
Their crusade fosters a sociopolitical movement that has associated itself with community organizations and charities, thereby assuming bureaucratic positions in government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the United Nations.
In 1924, the abolition of the1300-year caliphate during the Kemalist Revolution in Turkey fundamentally left the political lineage of the Prophet of Islam unclaimed and accordingly ended a centralized and universal Islamic body politic. Yet, the Islamic profession of faith (the shahada, to testify, to witness), “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger,” continues to be propagated by Islamists and integrate itself within Western governmental structures and NGOs.
This is primarily due to the Saudi Arabian-funded global caliphate, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has systemized and structured Islam into an effective proselytizing global entity.
‘Islamic Fundamentalism Since 1945’ by Beverly Milton-Edwards is as good a book on the subject as you you ever come across. .
Rather than being geographically precise and focusing on the regional heartland of Islam – the Middle East – the focus of this book is the whole of the Muslim world, or rather those countries where the preponderance of the population is Muslim.
Suffice to say that since the Second World War citizens in the bulk of these countries have been subject to an assortment of forces such as:
i) Foreign rule and occupation,
ii) Movements for independence,
iii) Rising nationalism and secularism,
iv) Growing Islamist movements,
v) Reform, revolution and repression.
The analytical standpoint guiding this book centres on Islam as a political experience. This is not to say that the religious/spiritual dimension of Islam is ignored but instead it is to say that in this book deliberates on the political materialization of Islam in the late 20th century.
Moreover, Islam for the purposes of this book is defined as a fundamentalist phenomenon. Although this implies a singular unitary entity, as the historical account that unfolds in these pages reveals the reality, is rich in diversity, context and response. Suffice to say, then, the term Islamic fundamentalism is employed freely in this book in respect more generally of a range of impulses, movements, ideas, thinkers and groups that are active across the globe.
The author divides his book into six chapters:
1. A diverse tradition from past to present
2. The advance of secularism: The decline of Islam?
3. Identity and revivalism
4. Islam armed: Resistance in an ideological era
5. Going global: Fundamentalism and terror
6. Ground Zero and Islamic fundamentalism
Chapter 1 goes some way in illuminating this historical diversity. Moreover, this chapter underlines the disorder of the political socioeconomic foundations of many Muslim societies fashioned as a result of the burden of foreign non-Muslim rule. In Indonesia, for example, which is the largest Muslim state in the world, the native population was made subject to over 350 years of foreign European control over their resources and people.
In Central Asia the Muslim populations of ancient cities and provinces such as Uzbekistan were subject to Soviet Communist control for more than 70 years. During this time all religious rights were denied to them. Their mosques and seminaries crumbled through disregard. In Africa, European rule over Muslim countries such as Egypt and Algeria resulted in the perceptible overall alteration of these societies for their Muslim occupants.
By the middle of the 20th century Muslim leaders had come forward in movements for independence and the hold of modernist thinking. A number of thinkers had emerged to confront the conventional clerical elites and supplement the mushrooming movements for independence that had sprung up across the globe.
In this respect many Islamic fundamentalists were little different in their desires for reorganization, sovereignty, self-determination and emancipation than others elsewhere across the colonised world who also recognised that the modern age offered the potential for greater individual rights.
Where they did differ was in their desire for what would come after independence.
To sum up, in Chapter 1, the significant historical outline of Islam from its founding to the 20th century is delineated. This should underpin the working supposition that Islam has always maintained a political silhouette.
In Chapter 2, the author scrutinizes the initiation of national independence and secular rule in a variety of Muslim countries and the impact of this on the place of Islam in the public sphere and the character of the Islamists in helping to shape political discourses in the modern age. Moreover, we discern a series of organized state-enforced crusades against Islam and Islamists leading to the virtual containment of such movements in many areas.
The subjugation of such movements left many Muslim countries subject to secular dictatorship and freedom and democracy were denied to the popular masses.
In Chapter 3, the fall-out of this campaign and the stirrings of revivalism and fundamentalist thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s are spoken of.
In Chapter 4, the assessment focuses on the degree to which the fundamentalist project assumed a militant character in its altercation with the state. There is also a focus on the materialization of new challenges and issues altering and affecting dimensions and struggles for power in Muslim countries.
This analysis is deepened in Chapter 5 when the author evaluates the surfacing of new global political orders and their blow on Islamism. The altering configuration of world order and the balance of power compelled Islamists to re-think the political project and their responses to it. This included a new focus on the West and the growing impression that American global strength would be translated as new cultural and imperial hegemony over Muslim countries.
In the concluding Chapter 6 the shocking outcomes of such assumptions are examined in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks on America.
The book in turn also focuses on the tension apparent in what appear in the 21st century to be two reciprocally exclusive phenomena: Islam and secularism and the fight that presently ensues between the two.
This book places the experience of modern Islamism in context and talks about the power of Islam as a new global force in the 21st century. By looking at examples of Muslim countries, Muslim thinkers, movements, trends and organisations, the diversity of this phenomenon is displayed.
Finally, the issues generated by Islamic fundamentalism and the variance with a global order dominated by Western secular thinking are assessed.
The review would be incomplete without the mention of the following points raised by the book:
1) Islam is not welcomed with open arms in the debates about modern society. Islamic fundamentalists have agitated against what they believe to be the lethal results not only of the activities of the West in their own countries whether as a legacy of colonialism, a spin-off of superpower enmity during the Cold War, or economic manoeuvring to secure energy resources in Muslim countries, but also of Western ideas and political thought on the absorption of the process of modernisation that has affected their nations.
2) One of the most outstanding Islamist thinkers, Sayyid Qutb, has contended: a second step, or a second battle, began in the form of a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the countries which used to be Islamic … It is an effort to exterminate this religion [Islam] as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions, and organisations. These ideas were expected to plug the hole in of faith with unfaithful dogma.
3) Islamic fundamentalists have declared to their fellow Muslims and the rest of the world that they no longer wish to be held up in comparison to the West and be found wanting. Instead they propose that Muslims reassert control over their own political structures, institutions, ideas and political destiny. Their emancipation is posited through the prism of modern Islam.
4) The terrorist emergency is now worldwide. It is changing the quality of life in many countries and absorbing untold energies and resources. It is plain that police methods and repression alone will not defuse it … However distasteful this may be to the governments of the United States, Britain and Israel, a political negotiation with the militants is now essential … A truce must be called with radical Islam. Painful but essential political decisions must then be taken to address the most glaring Arab and Muslim grievances.
Reducing Islamic fundamentalism to an expression of terrorism while ignoring the grievances may only deepen conflict, not resolve it.
Grab a copy if you choose.
A basic raison d'être for this disproportion is that Western civilization, at least in theory, has a ‘humanist outlook’ in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby providing Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion and from religion, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, and property rights, among other values.
This is for the reason that society, expressly in the United States of America, has recognized and implemented the theory of equity—an ingredient opposed by sharia law—into its body politic since, according to the natural law, all “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
A more propelling factor, however, of the dissection between both societies has been the West’s self-created moral vacuum where, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2016, “the moral basis and any traditional identity are being denied.”
The globalized politics of the West have berated the Christian roots that Western society was built upon. Momentous to this is the firm foothold Islam has gained in those countries since Muslims collectively react to such “national, religious, cultural and even gender identities [that] are being denied or relativized.”
As a community, they refute Western “politics [which] treats a family with many children as [juridically] equal to homosexual partnership [and where] faith in God [in their view] is equal to faith in Satan.”
Islamic society sees the globalized West as acquisitive, fraudulent, profligate, and depraved; its many seductions must be fought and eradicated. This is because Muslims profess that “Islam gave to mankind an ideal code of human rights fourteen centuries ago,” in which there is no qualm for any sort of reform or compromise.
Islamists, in their expansionist schema, have exploited this societal disarray as leverage so as to institute a civility governed under the sharia, concurrently inciting the average Muslim into following their lead. They are the new propagators of Islamic fundamentalism, which is often characterized by moral conservatism, literalism, and the effort to implement Islamic values in all spheres of life.
Their crusade fosters a sociopolitical movement that has associated itself with community organizations and charities, thereby assuming bureaucratic positions in government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the United Nations.
In 1924, the abolition of the1300-year caliphate during the Kemalist Revolution in Turkey fundamentally left the political lineage of the Prophet of Islam unclaimed and accordingly ended a centralized and universal Islamic body politic. Yet, the Islamic profession of faith (the shahada, to testify, to witness), “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger,” continues to be propagated by Islamists and integrate itself within Western governmental structures and NGOs.
This is primarily due to the Saudi Arabian-funded global caliphate, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has systemized and structured Islam into an effective proselytizing global entity.
‘Islamic Fundamentalism Since 1945’ by Beverly Milton-Edwards is as good a book on the subject as you you ever come across. .
Rather than being geographically precise and focusing on the regional heartland of Islam – the Middle East – the focus of this book is the whole of the Muslim world, or rather those countries where the preponderance of the population is Muslim.
Suffice to say that since the Second World War citizens in the bulk of these countries have been subject to an assortment of forces such as:
i) Foreign rule and occupation,
ii) Movements for independence,
iii) Rising nationalism and secularism,
iv) Growing Islamist movements,
v) Reform, revolution and repression.
The analytical standpoint guiding this book centres on Islam as a political experience. This is not to say that the religious/spiritual dimension of Islam is ignored but instead it is to say that in this book deliberates on the political materialization of Islam in the late 20th century.
Moreover, Islam for the purposes of this book is defined as a fundamentalist phenomenon. Although this implies a singular unitary entity, as the historical account that unfolds in these pages reveals the reality, is rich in diversity, context and response. Suffice to say, then, the term Islamic fundamentalism is employed freely in this book in respect more generally of a range of impulses, movements, ideas, thinkers and groups that are active across the globe.
The author divides his book into six chapters:
1. A diverse tradition from past to present
2. The advance of secularism: The decline of Islam?
3. Identity and revivalism
4. Islam armed: Resistance in an ideological era
5. Going global: Fundamentalism and terror
6. Ground Zero and Islamic fundamentalism
Chapter 1 goes some way in illuminating this historical diversity. Moreover, this chapter underlines the disorder of the political socioeconomic foundations of many Muslim societies fashioned as a result of the burden of foreign non-Muslim rule. In Indonesia, for example, which is the largest Muslim state in the world, the native population was made subject to over 350 years of foreign European control over their resources and people.
In Central Asia the Muslim populations of ancient cities and provinces such as Uzbekistan were subject to Soviet Communist control for more than 70 years. During this time all religious rights were denied to them. Their mosques and seminaries crumbled through disregard. In Africa, European rule over Muslim countries such as Egypt and Algeria resulted in the perceptible overall alteration of these societies for their Muslim occupants.
By the middle of the 20th century Muslim leaders had come forward in movements for independence and the hold of modernist thinking. A number of thinkers had emerged to confront the conventional clerical elites and supplement the mushrooming movements for independence that had sprung up across the globe.
In this respect many Islamic fundamentalists were little different in their desires for reorganization, sovereignty, self-determination and emancipation than others elsewhere across the colonised world who also recognised that the modern age offered the potential for greater individual rights.
Where they did differ was in their desire for what would come after independence.
To sum up, in Chapter 1, the significant historical outline of Islam from its founding to the 20th century is delineated. This should underpin the working supposition that Islam has always maintained a political silhouette.
In Chapter 2, the author scrutinizes the initiation of national independence and secular rule in a variety of Muslim countries and the impact of this on the place of Islam in the public sphere and the character of the Islamists in helping to shape political discourses in the modern age. Moreover, we discern a series of organized state-enforced crusades against Islam and Islamists leading to the virtual containment of such movements in many areas.
The subjugation of such movements left many Muslim countries subject to secular dictatorship and freedom and democracy were denied to the popular masses.
In Chapter 3, the fall-out of this campaign and the stirrings of revivalism and fundamentalist thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s are spoken of.
In Chapter 4, the assessment focuses on the degree to which the fundamentalist project assumed a militant character in its altercation with the state. There is also a focus on the materialization of new challenges and issues altering and affecting dimensions and struggles for power in Muslim countries.
This analysis is deepened in Chapter 5 when the author evaluates the surfacing of new global political orders and their blow on Islamism. The altering configuration of world order and the balance of power compelled Islamists to re-think the political project and their responses to it. This included a new focus on the West and the growing impression that American global strength would be translated as new cultural and imperial hegemony over Muslim countries.
In the concluding Chapter 6 the shocking outcomes of such assumptions are examined in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks on America.
The book in turn also focuses on the tension apparent in what appear in the 21st century to be two reciprocally exclusive phenomena: Islam and secularism and the fight that presently ensues between the two.
This book places the experience of modern Islamism in context and talks about the power of Islam as a new global force in the 21st century. By looking at examples of Muslim countries, Muslim thinkers, movements, trends and organisations, the diversity of this phenomenon is displayed.
Finally, the issues generated by Islamic fundamentalism and the variance with a global order dominated by Western secular thinking are assessed.
The review would be incomplete without the mention of the following points raised by the book:
1) Islam is not welcomed with open arms in the debates about modern society. Islamic fundamentalists have agitated against what they believe to be the lethal results not only of the activities of the West in their own countries whether as a legacy of colonialism, a spin-off of superpower enmity during the Cold War, or economic manoeuvring to secure energy resources in Muslim countries, but also of Western ideas and political thought on the absorption of the process of modernisation that has affected their nations.
2) One of the most outstanding Islamist thinkers, Sayyid Qutb, has contended: a second step, or a second battle, began in the form of a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the countries which used to be Islamic … It is an effort to exterminate this religion [Islam] as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions, and organisations. These ideas were expected to plug the hole in of faith with unfaithful dogma.
3) Islamic fundamentalists have declared to their fellow Muslims and the rest of the world that they no longer wish to be held up in comparison to the West and be found wanting. Instead they propose that Muslims reassert control over their own political structures, institutions, ideas and political destiny. Their emancipation is posited through the prism of modern Islam.
4) The terrorist emergency is now worldwide. It is changing the quality of life in many countries and absorbing untold energies and resources. It is plain that police methods and repression alone will not defuse it … However distasteful this may be to the governments of the United States, Britain and Israel, a political negotiation with the militants is now essential … A truce must be called with radical Islam. Painful but essential political decisions must then be taken to address the most glaring Arab and Muslim grievances.
Reducing Islamic fundamentalism to an expression of terrorism while ignoring the grievances may only deepen conflict, not resolve it.
Grab a copy if you choose.
October 31, 2023
I will preface this review by saying I tend to side with armed militant groups in the fight against Western Colonialism, Neo-liberal Capitalism, and Anti-Muslim activity/rhetoric. When well-established nation-states start throwing around the word terrorist and terrorism for the groups that are reacting to decades, or even centuries, of oppression, murder, land theft, rape, natural resource theft, union busting, and invasions mistakenly called wars, I tend to perk up. Ask yourself why these groups were formed, and then think about how you can bitch about the spread of global capitalism or the slave trade or state-backed counterinsurgency or targeted assassinations or overthrowing legitimate regimes overseas or the abetting of war crimes or the Patriot Act or Militant Zionist Israel or White christian Nationalist USA. It is impossible to talk about Islamic Fundamentalism Since 1945, acting as if Pre-1945 history is non-existent or immaterial to what came afterwards. Once the christian West decided to spread their specific brand of oppression, manipulation, and subversion across the globe behind the oh-so-thin veil of "spreading democracy" the world became a horrorshow. Islam and the Muslim-majority countries were merely grist for their mills, lands to conquer, people to subdue, and resources to steal. WWI and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire into European puppet-states ended any idea of stability between Islam, Arabs, or Muslim states and the Imperialist West. WWII continued this uneven relationship, and with the creation, ex nihilo, of the State of Israel on Arab lands, there was never to be any chance that Islam, or Muslims, or Arabs would be allowed to co-exist with Western Colonial-Capitalist ambitions. M-E narrative barely touches on this past, and merely starts, for no apparent reason in 1945. Oddly, she completely misses or ignores that this year would be instrumental in the growth and expansion of Islamic resistance and Arab nationalism, as the end of WWII would usher in the beginning of the end of Muslim influence or independence. Since 1945, all Muslim states have been pawns of global politicking. Pawns in the truest chess-related sense: utterly powerless on their own but quite strategically useful for those utilizing them for their own gains. Most Muslim-majority nations are completely reactive, as they don't hold their futures in their own hands, but are subject to the whims of the USA, Western Europe, Russia, China, and Israel for survival. Any sniff of power grabbing is seen as Islamic Fundamentalism rearing its ugly, non-christian head. "War" ensues and the balance of power, or should I say the majority of the power, is reclaimed by the non-Muslim states. As bad as the power imbalances are now, could anyone imagine how much worse off Muslim nations would be if the world's oil had been first found in the USofA or Europe (outside of Russia, at least)?? Yikes!
Anyway, I have severely digressed.
M-E has entirely too much of a Western World View, and this warps all of her arguments about Islamic Fundamentalism. She admits nearly all the meaningful terms are hotly debated, but she almost immediately retreats to the Western World View for analysis of a non-Western religion. Until we start seeing the lies of the "Western Civilization Nations" and how they have warped the world to their selfish needs and desires, there can be no true analysis of Islam, whether moderate, reformist, or fundamentalist. When a religion has to continually apologize for its beliefs and culture, or measure itself against christian values, there can be no understanding or progress.
Maybe M-E should write about Militant Zionist Fundamentalism?
Anyway, I have severely digressed.
M-E has entirely too much of a Western World View, and this warps all of her arguments about Islamic Fundamentalism. She admits nearly all the meaningful terms are hotly debated, but she almost immediately retreats to the Western World View for analysis of a non-Western religion. Until we start seeing the lies of the "Western Civilization Nations" and how they have warped the world to their selfish needs and desires, there can be no true analysis of Islam, whether moderate, reformist, or fundamentalist. When a religion has to continually apologize for its beliefs and culture, or measure itself against christian values, there can be no understanding or progress.
Maybe M-E should write about Militant Zionist Fundamentalism?
July 29, 2016
This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to claim an understanding of the deeper political, economic, and religious current that run below the surface in the Middle East. It is impossible to discuss Islamic fundamentalism without first understanding how, in the region, religion interacted with nationalism what was the effect of European colonialism, and what has changed after 9/11. One almost wants to exclaim, how the Western policy towards the region would be different if this book was required reading in American and European schools!
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October 17, 2014297.09045 M6622 2014
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews