The end or the evolution of Islamism?

Last week we touched on the French Islamologists Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel's remarks about the "renewed end" of Islamic politicality, based on their finding that there is no Islamic language, content or leadership in the social movements taking place in the Middle East. We also drew attention to Prof. Ümit Cizre's article on the subject (Açık Görüş, 27 March 2011) as an illuminating and different perspective on the meaning of this "end."

Indeed, what is the present position of Islamism, which has an important place in the intellectual and political history of the Middle East and Turkey? It is clear that Islamism is undergoing a noticeable change both in Turkey and in the Middle East, but does this change really show that Islamism has been ended by this or that political actor as a result of this or that process, or that it has turned into something else?

If we assume that the law of the conservation of energy also works to some extent in social and political fields, we must accept that the fact that a political energy which once exerted considerable influence does not exist today in the form we are used to shows not that it has vanished but, at most, that it has been transformed.

Indeed, with its discourse of the seventies, eighties or nineties, Islamism today is seen as an anachronistic politicality in which impossible possibilities are pursued. By contrast, that those who act, or are assumed to act, in the name of Islamism today are far from being in a position to present an identifiable project in the name of Islamism in their political practices, that they have entered a more liberal orientation, and that politically they have surrendered to the context of parliamentary democracy, is frequently expressed both in Roy's and Kepel's arguments and in many other analyses. In this case Islamism is sought to be traced not from the political practices of these larger masses but from the discourse and practices of groups that are shrinking further and hardening as they shrink. Of course the existence of this discourse and these practices is seen as the sole representation of a genuine Islamism, but at the same time an anachronistic label is attached in the name of all Islamist politicality.

Yet these examples are in fact movements that possess very few of the conditions that politicality requires. An understanding of Islamism that is anachronistic is in fact rapidly losing its political quality as well, because it lacks the condition of contextuality that the political requires. By contrast, one can stress that Islamist thought and politics, at the very moment they acquire this contextuality, become unrecognizable with the old tools of identification (stereotypes-clichés).

Therefore we can say that one can speak of the transformation of Islamism rather than its end, and that this transformation corresponds, in the more proper sense of the word, to a higher politicization.

It should be stressed that the radicalism that Islamism acquired under post-caliphate conditions, which corresponds on one side to a diasporic state of mind and on the other to a cynical anti-politics, is in fact a factor that distances it from politicality. For this, both a more inclusive definition of politicality needs to be set out and, within this framework, the nature of the relationship between state and politics, which has recently begun to change, needs to be assessed.

At the end of this assessment, it is established that the transformation of Islamism has been possible in proportion to the opening of channels of participatory politics, and that, thanks to the skill in using these channels best, it has followed, in broad outline, the following course: The first-period Islamist discourse, founded on the trauma created by the abolition of the caliphate, seen as the precondition that makes Islamist politics possible, accepted the permanence of this situation and, by discovering the political possibilities contained in the new situation, turned toward a kind of citizenship politics.

Citizenship politics, in its ideal form, presupposes a contract that is not exclusively for Muslims, one that is quite possibly shaped during a negotiation with others. To follow how an Islamic political theology suited to the course of this process, which is dialogical in essence, has developed, one must begin with a brief description of post-caliphate conditions.