Steeped in conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies, Islamists believe that America, Israel, and other "crusader" nations have plotted to destroy Islam, and that they are called upon to defend it. Islamism and Islam exist of course also of other phenomena, not least to say that there are two major groups; shi’ites (example Iran) and Suni (example Saudi-Arabia).Furthermore Osama bin Laden's response is telling (in light of what we presented in the introduction for example) when an interviewer asked him if he was a terrorist: "They rip us of our wealth and of our resources and of our oil. Our religion is under attack. They kill and murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustice, we are called terrorists." As we have seen, conspirational defensiveness makes the politics of identity a desperate affair. Also, for the sake of some form of clarity, we shall be using "terrorism" to mean acts of aggression against unarmed civilians that are not state-sponsored.
Although preoccupied by religion, it will also be evident that Islamists are motivated by, a form of totalitarianism. Whether secular or theocratic, totalitarian societies are, to use Popper's term, "closed societies," meaning that they are ideologically monistic, allowing for only one set of ideas, the so-called party line, to be believed, discussed, and implemented. What is known as "religious fundamentalism" is essentially theocratic totalitarianism, like for example is the case in Iran. It is the wish to have an entire society and polity strictly conform to a certain set of religious rules, which are held to be absolute. As in all forms of totalitarianism, questioning the existing social and political order is not tolerated. Opinions that are contrary to those of the ruling religious authorities draconian punishments are meted out.
Totalitarianism is the antithesis not only of pluralism, but also of individualism, the belief that each person should be free to decide how to live his or her life. In a democracy - one that is founded on the rule of law and that allows for free speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of the press - diverse opinions and individual goals are sanctioned. The state's function (at least under the social contract notion of government of John Locke) is limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Totalitarianism, by contrast, is the belief that the members of a society or nation have no reality or value in themselves. The source of true reality and value is the state or in the case of theocratic totalitarianism, the church/state. A member of a totalitarian nation has the status not of a citizen, but of a subject - and sometimes merely that of a servant, or of a slave - of the state. In regard to Islamism, Allah is the master and ‚man is the slave.’ The totalitarian vision then becomes a battle cry. One is reminded, in this regard, of Arendt's distinction between tyranny and totalitarianism. The former only demands one's material goods and political allegiance, bat the latter demands all that as well as one's individuality, mind, and soul.
For Islamists, the non-separation of church and state means that there is no secular realm, for the existence of such a realm would limit Allah's (meaning the Koran and Sharia law) sphere of influence, thus fragmenting the overarching totalitarian unity. Some Islamist thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, advocated the abolition of free market capitalism altogether.
Qutb regarded contemporary jahiliyya as "rebellion" against God, insisting that Muslims must identify, judge, and overcome unbelievers. Jahiliyya is for Qutb the entire world; current Islamic states are no better than Western ones. Only the Qur'an and the hadith are legitimate sources of social and political guidance; traditional jurists, priests, and men of theory are not to be trusted. But Qutb approved of Jihad, thinking for oneself, since he believed it discredited traditional Islamic authorities and supported militancy. His attention turned from the community-building of al-Bannd to revolution; society must be remade now by direct attack on the state. This was an implicit critique of the Muslim Brotherhood; as the Sudanese Islamist Hassan al-Turabi later put it, "Look at the Brotherhood; they don't change society at all, they never detribalize society, they promote a traditional, sectarian Islam against a progressive Islam" (Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam, 2001: 62).
When Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat lifted the ban on fundamentalism, the children of Qutb emerged from jail with radicalized views. Some called for an internal withdrawal of believers into separatist Islamic communities, given the utter unacceptability of existing majority-Muslim societies. But Muhammed `Abd al-Salam Faraj, a member of the militant group al Jihad, rejected that approach. Like Qutb he insisted that "the Rulers of this age were raised at the tables of imperialism, be it Crusaderism, or Communism, or Zionism. They carry nothing from Islam but their names" (Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. NewYork: Macmillan, 1986: 169). Faraj took the logically final step toward holy war in his Al-Faridah al-Ghâ'ibah (The Neglected Duty). For centuries corrupt rulers and traditional scholars have purposely suppressed the Islamic duty of offensive jihad espoused by the Prophet and the early caliphate: "Neglecting jihad is the cause of the lowness, humiliation, division and fragmentation in which Muslims live today" (Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. NewYork: Macmillan, 1986: 205).True Islam is a violent transformation of the real by the ideal, the takeover of all Islamic states by force of arms, an Islam "spread by the sword" (Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. NewYork: Macmillan, 1986: 193).
Qutb would have even abolished the interest on loans, for he considered it usury, and in conflict with Islamist morality. So it is that totalitarianism, with its ideological monism, requires that all domains of human existence - from marriage to morality, from child-rearing to economics - conform to a single uniform theme, i.e. the social and political ideology dictated by the state.
It would be naive to think that, in most cases, totalitarian regimes are simply imposed upon peoples longing to be free. As excellent a thinker as Natan Sharansky is, one derives a sense from his book The Case for Democracy (2004) that people just want to be free. They often do want very much to be free. But, because human beings are creatures of contradiction, they can also wish to jettison the burden of responsibility that comes with being free. As Camus observed, "The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude"
The lure of totalitarianism derives from an inner epistemological demand. At the core of "totalitarianism" is the notion of "totality," which Kant regards as a category of reason.( Ct. Kant's "axioms of intuition," from his Critique of Pure Reason.) A totality is, of course, a unity of the many in the one. The quest to make sense of it all, to render the world intelligible, to give coherence and shape to one's experience, to "get it together" so to speak, i.e. to organize it all into a totality, is one of the most fundamental of human longings. It is not that one has any choice in the matter; one must continually seek order, intelligibility, unity, totality, and self-identity, for that, according to Kant, is how the mind operates.
In some spheres of human existence, the use of the category of totality is not problematic. For example, the mind unconsciously employs that category when it requires that paragraphs cohere into a chapter, and that chapters cohere into a book. Similarly, a living room has aesthetic appeal when the furniture is arranged into a grouping, which is the aesthetic manifestation of a totality; people say that it all comes together. But human beings are neither chapters in a book, nor pieces of furniture, nor parts of any whole. This is not to deny that they can willingly participate in a larger whole, but in doing so they need not lose their integrity as individuals. But in totalitarianism that integrity is not respected. Thus the unconstrained use of the notion of totality is a dangerous affair. Kant had warned that the uncritical use of pure reason leads to dogmatic theories in science and philosophy.
Camus in 1949 sees a connection between the philosophical longing for unity and its political expression, in the form of totality, and observed, "Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God". The totalitarian dream to which Camus refers is to replace unity in God, which is always an individual matter, with the ersatz unity of everyone acting totalistically, i.e. in accord with the same idea. The latter totalitarian dream of unity is that of human society made into something akin to an ant colony.
Apropos are Dostoevsky's insights from that chapter of The Brothers Karamazov entitled "The Legend of The Grand Inquisitor." (See also:) Dostoevsky's story suggests that theocratic totalitarianism, or fundamentalism, is really the longing to replace God with "the Grand Inquisitor," a religion/ideology that offers one material and spiritual security. Most importantly, the Grand Inquisitor offers one freedom from all the doubts that are intrinsic to having a true relation to the divine, by telling everyone what to believe. After all, true religious faith does not bring certitude but often brings, according to Kierkegaard, "fear and trembling" before the unknown. Again, one recalls that even Christ was subject to doubt, which is the reason for his asking God why he had been forsaken.
But theocratic totalitarianism goes beyond the desire for material security and spiritual certitude. The command to conquer the world through holy war is an unholy command, predicated upon something akin to a Faustian bargain. Of course, it is not quite the same. One rejects the promise of heaven, but not for the material joys of this world - Helen of Troy, and all the rest - that Faust demanded. Here is a different sort of deal, one whose consequences are not just foolish like the deal that Faust struck, but downright horrifying. Satan realizes that the fatal flaw of theocratic totalitarians is their impatience. They do not seek the heavenly state of being that is a function of a transformation of consciousness. They seek the millennium, and they seek it now, on this earth. If they cannot have the millennium now, then death for themselves and for everyone else is the only other alternative. And so it is a vision of the millennium that Satan offers them. They imagine that the manifestation of God's glory would consist in a world in which everyone unquestionably obeys the laws of Shariah, or the laws of any other totalitarian doctrine, and where there are no infidels to ruin the image of perfect harmony. The impatience of the Islamic ‚terrorist’ is analyzed with great clarity by the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, who writes, .Politics is a serious business which requires hard work. It needs to find ways of keeping society in harmony while meeting its basic needs and creating conditions for economic, social and cultural development. Writing a poem, erecting a building, composing a symphony, painting a miniature, compiling a theological study, and making a film are not easy. But making a car-bomb is The terrorist has no need of developing policies, building alliances, and mobilizing popular sentiment for his program. All that is hard work, just like winning free elections. The terrorist does not like hard work; he is in a hurry and wants a short-cut, even if that means tuming himself into a human bomb. The terrorist has no patience with the lesser mortals who argue, answer back, and refuse to commit to anything unless convinced by rational analysis. All that means politics; something the terrorist is afraid of. He has no time to brew a proper coffee; an instant coffee is all he seeks"
The image of human beings blindly obeying, like a colony of ants, or bees, or obedient bureaucrats - the will of the Grand Inquisitor, or the Fuehrer, or the Grand Ayatollah - is a truly banal image of perfection. It is banal for it seeks totality by negating the richness, plenitude, and diversity of human beings, as well as that which distinguishes human beings from all other beings, the capacity for free choice. Freedom cannot be valued if the notion of predestination is a fundamental tenet of a theology.
The idolization of earthly images of totality absorbs-the energies that might have been devoted to an encounter with God. Of course, one could object that the Islamist is truly religious, for Islamism is very much concerned with having its votaries devote themselves to sacred law, and would abolish the secular realm altogether, if it could. But human beings are infinitely clever in their self-deceptions, and an adherence to law and rituals - and Islam is a thoroughly legalistic religion - can be a way of protecting one from an encounter with the sacred. Some might say that radical Islam is a religion characterized by an absence of love and true piety that have been replaced by the strict observation of religious rituals and the hunt for infidels (the reward for martyrdom is said, to be the gift in heaven of seventy-two black-eyed virgins).
What is the essential reason why totalitarianism ends up creating so much misery, if not a downright hell on earth? Human reason, operating uncritically, creates a gap, or a disproportion, between what the mind believes the world should be - i.e. a utopian dream of everyone and everything joyfully organized -into a harmonious totality - and the way that the world actually is, i.e. forever recalcitrant to any effort to bring it all together into any sort of overarching totality. For example, it is absurd to think that most human beings are going to work extra hard and be entrepreneurial, without the chance of individual gain. Maybe some monks will, but few people are willing to live like monks. Is it any surprise, therefore, that totalitarian societies - particularly those that are communistic or theocratic - often end up impoverishing the lives of their citizens?
The gap between the ideal and the actual grew to immense proportions in the first part of the Twentieth Century, for that was a time in which dictators sought to make their societies conform to their utopian visions of goodness, beauty, truth, and reality. Despite the power of these dictators and their hordes of true believers, they could not bridge the gap between their utopian ideals and the actuality of lived life in the totalitarian state. This same gap is created by Islamism.
If the effort to bridge the gap between the ideal and the actual is undertaken with a fanatical zeal, it invariably proves socially, economically and politically disastrous, as would be any effort to place life upon the procrustean bed of a totalitarian theory. It also creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance. This is where the paranoid vision enters the stage. It is an effort to explain why the gap between the ideal and the real exists. It always comes down to assigning blame; a certain group of nefarious individuals has conspired to subvert what could have been utopia. Islamists blame "the infidels." Consequently, if absurdly convoluted conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East - it is because these theories are attempting to bridge the impossibly wide gap between visions of Islamist glory and the actual state of Islamist societies today. Furthermore, those under the sway of the paranoid vision concoct apocalyptic fantasies, mad dreams of a time when there will no longer be a gap between the ideal (totality realized) and the real. Islamism is highly apocalyptic.
Rising expectations, by their very nature, widen the gap between what people believe is possible and the present state of affairs. If that disproportion becomes too extreme, it leads to a dangerous state of social and political dissatisfaction. That is what happened in Iran during the time of the Shah of Iran. Those on the side of greater democracy and freedom - and who were impatient with its gradual evolution in Iranian society and politics - sought the Shah's overthrow. But the result was, as in many revolutions, the emergence of a far more repressive regime, namely that of Ayatollah Khomeini. Something similar happened in Algeria.
It would seem that political leaders who have blatantly unrealistic objectives add fuel to the flames of social and political paranoia by increasing the width of the gap. The career of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser is a case in point. Nasser made grand promises to his people about the Aswan Dam, so much so that he felt that he could not reverse course when it became clearly necessary to do so without feeling disgraced.
From the moment that Nasser had staked his prestige on the dam, practical considerations became irrelevant because the shame of abandoning the scheme would have made his position untenable. Nothing less than the nation's foreign policy was swung by a shame-honor response. Sure enough, the Aswan Dam has spread bilharzia in exact accordance with the 1944 warning. Other consequences of this planned and forcible freeing of the peasants from age-old living patterns were more incalculable. The failure of the dam project was attributed, as were all other failures in the Middle East, then and now, to Zionist conspirators (D. Pipes, The Hidden Hand, 1998, p. 104).
In 1967, Nasser made the same type of grand claims, followed by the same humiliation when he promised to destroy Israel, but was defeated in six days. Naturally, when there are no grand expectations the size of the gap shrinks, and there is then no need to bridge it with paranoid explanations. As Winston Churchill said, "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away." That is why Churchill, during some very dark times, told the British people, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."
The effect of Churchill's honesty was to maintain public morale. The effect of Nasser's braggadocio was demoralizing, creating a culture still imbued today with bitterness, resentment, and hatred, and a fertile ground for terrorism. We can also say that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so it is that the conspirational vision seeks to fill the gap between the totalitarian ideal and the less than glorious reality. Because totalitarianism, whether secular or theocratic, creates a large gap between utopian desires and actual realities.
Democracies, too, can create a gap, but the gaps that they create are, generally, far less extreme than those created by totalitarian political regimes. This is because democracies are generally not energized by millenarian images of Heaven on earth. It is enough for most people to find some modicum of happiness through owning a home, having a relatively satisfying marriage, and sending one's children to college. Those sorts of goals do not create heaven on earth, but they are realizable. Consequently, democracies are far less paranoiagenic or conspirationalist.
Fascism and communism are often regarded as the two types of totalitarianism and theocratic totalitarianism - of which Islamism would be an example - is a third type. Walter Laqueur in his recent book The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism (2006), contends, that theocratic totalitarianism is essentially a form of fascism something we have, investigated in our last years case study about the subject as a whole, including in the introduction to this particular series yesterday. That there are distinctions between Fascism as it existed in Italy, and then in Spain, and Nazism in Germany are not essential to this argument. These affinities were not coincidental, for, as we already observed elsewhere, Hitler himself apparently drew inspiration from Islam including the Armenian ‚Holocoast’ innitiated by the Young Turks.
The connection between Islamism and fascism has also been observed by historians such as Francis Fukuyama in 2002, when used the neologism "Islamofascism." Indeed, with greater justification, it could be argued that the strengthening of fascism then and now, was the result of the failure of democratic systems to resolve the problems facing them. The breakdown of democratic institutions the failure of the democratic spirit - opened the doors to fascism. This generalization should not, however, be pushed too far, for even though it may apply to much of Europe, it is not valid in countries that never knew democracy.
Iran, during the time of the last shah, was a dictatorship already based on a form of Fascism. Discontent there led to the Islamofascism of Khomeini. But there is at least one objection that comes to mind in regard to the notion that Islamism is a species of fascism. Fascism has historically been associated with nation states, often those that have transformed civilian life into a giant paramilitary organization. Examples include Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, as well as Iraq under Sad dam Hussein. An Islamist terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is not a nation state, but is in some ways akin to a holding company for other terrorist organizations, and in other ways it is akin to a large gang. But the Nazis too were very much like a gang before they became a political party, and then a government. And all along they were thoroughly fascistic in their viewpoint.
So what we (the contents of this website are based on our initial research) are contending, is that fascism is not merely a system of government. So Umberto Eco, who wrote for The New York Review of Books, entitled, "Ur-Fascism" which he defines as "eternal fascism." One may gather that Eco means that fascism had a certain historical expression. Its etemality is that of an essence, a prototype, or a Platonic Form. We are, though, thinking of it here not metaphysically, but epistemologically. Fascism is, most fundamentally, a vision of life, a worldview. Its central preoccupation is the polis, but it interprets all of human existence, from relations between the sexes to art, music, and architecture, to food and diet, to religion, in terms of a certain way of seeing, a vision of life, which Eco regards as fascistic. It will have to be determined what that vision of life is. What inspired Mussolini was a vision of renewal, one involving an evocation of mythic origins, which have the mystique of eternality. And it was this vision of renewal itself which became the linchpin of Fascist ideology rather than any particular set of policies or clearly conceived theory of state. So here again it is a vision of life that precedes its objectification in a social and political ideology.