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Trump's Cabinet Members Want Jihad Against Political Islam, but Their
Efforts Will Fail
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_trump_and_his_cabinets_jihad_against
_political_islam_will_fail_20161204/
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Posted on Dec 4, 2016
By Juan Cole (http://www.truthdig.com/staff/juan_cole) / Informed Comment
(http://www.juancole.com/2016/12/cabinets-against-political.html)
Gage Skidmore (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/) / CC BY-SA 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)
Several members of Donald Trump's new team, including National Security
Adviser Mike Flynn and proposed Secretary of Defense James Mattis have
expressed themselves troubled about "political Islam"
(https://youtu.be/7GkXJ_lb2z8 ;) (or in Flynn's case, just "Islam"
(http://www.juancole.com/2016/11/flynn-right-religion.html ;) ). Mattis
seems to have confused Daesh's (ISIS, ISIL) idea of a neo-Caliphate
(bringing back a medieval papacy-like institution to Islam) with "political
Islam" in general. He wants Americans to ask the question of whether
political Islam is good for the US.
Gen. Mattis should grapple a little with whether his 2004 Fallujah campaign
did not alienate the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, turn them off to the 2005
elections, and pave the way for them to ally with Daesh/ ISIL in 2014. That
is, Mattis may have created the political Islam he now wants to name and
ideologically combat.
The American right wing has substituted hysteria about socialism with
hysteria about Islam and especially political Islam, equating both with
terrorism. And its members appear to imagine that Islam is an ideology like
Communism, and can be defeated by the United States just as Communism was
(well, except in China, which, let's face it, is a hell of an exception).
There is hopeless confusion on the American right wing about Islam in
general and political Islam in particular. Let me suggest some
distinctions:
Muslims are adherents of the religion of Islam. Some 85% of them in opinion
polling are not fundamentalists.
Fundamentalist Muslims are those who take a literalist approach to Muslim
law, ritual and doctrine and disallow any ambiguity. Fundamentalists can be
quietist (uninterested in politics) or political.
Political Islam is the attempt to make Islam the basis for a political
ideology that would dictate government policy. It is analogous to Zionism,
which makes Jews the basis for a political ideology. It is also analogous
to the Christian Right in the US, which makes Christianity a political
ideology and pursues the Christianization of American law (e.g. striving to
ban abortion, to outlaw sex outside Christian marriage, etc.)
Not all Muslims are fundamentalists. Many in e.g. West Africa or South Asia
are Sufi mystics who have an allegorical interpretation of the religion.
Others are secular-minded. Of the fundamentalists, not all are devotees of
political Islam.
Terrorism is the tactic of a non-state actor harming non-combatants to
achieve a political goal. Very, very few Muslims engage in terrorism, and
very few fundamentalists do so, and very few devotees of political Islam do
so. (People of Christian heritage also routinely deploy terrorism
(http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html ;) ).
Arguably, Daesh runs a terrorist state, not a political-Islamic one. The
people fighting against Daesh at Mosul include a large contingent of Shiites
who believe in political Islam and belong to the major parties in the Iraqi
parliament that advocate this ideology, including the Da'wa Party of Prime
Minister Haidar al-Abadi and the Islamic Supreme Council of Ammar al-Hakim.
If you denounce political Islam across the board, you'd have to denounce the
Iraqi government, but Gen. Mattis construes it as a friend.
Regular readers will know that I don't like the word "Islamism," which was
coined by French academics in reaction against the English-speaking world's
tendency to speak of Muslim fundamentalism. In English, fundamentalism is a
perfectly good description of the phenomenon, and it has the advantage that
we all recognize that fundamentalism exists in all religions.
Martin Marty's "Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago
resulted in several volumes that underline this point. Here are some common
elements in fundamentalisms across the board as Marty's project discovered
them:
1. Patriarchy: women are to be subservient to their fathers and husbands
and if possible to remain at home.
2. The rules of religion are self-evident and must be literally obeyed.
3. Children of believers should be segregated from non-believers (as
incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos holds).
4. Fundamentalists hold that their religious laws are binding on all,
believer and unbeliever alike (thus, incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions
tried to keep an LGBT meeting from happening on a state college campus;
fundamentalism construes public space as belonging to fundamentalist
believers).
5. Fundamentalist believers are the in-group. The out-group is rejected.
6. They are nostalgic for an imagined religious golden age of the past
that they would like to reinstate.
So here is a question for Gen. Mattis and Gen. Flynn: If political Islam is
so bad, why is political Christianity better?
And, then we have to ask, are governments ruled by believers in political
Islam really inimical to the US?
The ideology of the ruling government of Morocco, a non-NATO ally of the
United States, is political Islam.
The major opposition party in Tunisia, the only successful case of
democratization coming out of the Arab Spring, is a party of political
Islam.
Adherents of political Islam just won a majority in the Kuwaiti parliament.
Kuwait is a key ally of the US which provides basing to the US military.
The major Shiite parties forming the government in Baghdad, Iraq, are all
devotees of political Islam. The Baghdad government is a key ally of the US
in taking down Daesh/ ISIL.
While the Muslim League, the ruling party in that fantastic Pakistan over
which Trump gushed in his phone call to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is not
a fundamentalist party despite its name, many of its backbenchers to believe
in aspects of political Islam. I.e., they believe in using the state to
assert what they consider to be Islamic law. Pakistan is waging a long-term
and important campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, from which the 10,000
US troops in Afghanistan benefit.
The US has been actively backing 30 Syrian rebel groups for years. Almost
all of them have as their ideology political Islam. It is the regime of
Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Ba'ath Party, that is secular.
So Gen. Mattis apparently does not mean by "political Islam" what social
scientists or people in the Middle East mean by it. Governments of political
Islam, aside from Iran and a few others, appear to have perfectly good
relations with the US.
On the other hand, secular governments like that of Syria, Algeria, and
Uzbekistan have often had frosty relationships with the US.
In any case, neither Islam nor political Islam in any way resembles
Communism. Islam is the religion of 1.6 billion people, over a fifth of
humankind. Because of high birthrates in Muslim countries, moreover, the
proportion of the world that is Muslim will probably go to 1/3.
If the United States, which is 5% of the world by population, tries to go
against a third of humankind, it will lose. But the fact is that the US has
no beef with most forms of Islam or even political Islam. And aggressive
attempts to dictate to Muslims what they may believe will backfire, just as
the whole Iraq War backfired.
The US can defeat individual terrorist organizations that appeal to Muslim
themes. Counter-terrorism tactics can work. But it will need Muslim help,
including the help of devotees of political Islam. If Daesh goes down in
Iraq, it will have been defeated in large part by an alternative form of
political Islam, to which the US gave air support. If what the Trump
cabinet wants to say is only that the US plans to promote kinds of Islam
that support the US and to fight those that stand in the way of the
interests of the American Empire, well, the French and British empires used
to plot out those schemes, too. Those empires aren't around any more, but
there are plenty of governments rooted in political Islam.
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