FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM

This study of dominant social movements in the Middle and Near East by a group of social scientists and historians is the first attempt to bring nationalism and the contemporary Islamic movements into a unified thematic perspective. The process of national economic and political integration supplies the unifying context for the analyses of the various social movements to which it gives rise. The examination of nationalism in general, and of the rise of the Arab nationalist movement in Greater Syria in the early decades of the century in particular, is followed by a close analysis of the interplay of ethnic identity and Islam in the local politics of the tribal North-Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The politicisation oflslam in Algeria, Turkey and Egypt is then explored and explained, together with the characteristics of the emergent Islamic movements. The last three essays cover Shi'ite Islam in Iran since the opening decade of the century, focusing on various components and aspects of the Islamic movement which culminated in the revolution of 1979.. The case-studies thus chart the recent upsurge of revolutionary Islam and the concomitant decline of nationalist movements in the contemporary Middle and Near East. The introduction offers an analytical perspective for the integration of this major theme which is forcefully suggested by the juxtaposition of the essays. St Antony's! Macmillan Series General editor: Archie Brown, Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford Said Amir Arjomand (editor) FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM Anders Aslund PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN EASTERN EUROPE Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (editors) SOVIET POLICY FOR THE 1980s S. B. Burman CHIEFDOM POLITICS AND ALIEN LAW Renfrew Christie ELECTRICITY, INDUSTRY AND CLASS IN SOUTH AFRICA Robert 0. Collins and Francis M. Deng (editors) THE BRITISH IN THE SUDAN, 1898-1956 Wilhelm Deist THE WEHRMACHT AND GERMAN REARMAMENT Julius A. Elias PLATO'S DEFENCE OF POETRY Ricardo Ffrench-Davis and Ernesto Tironi (editors) LATIN AMERICA AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER Bohdan Harasymiw POLITICAL ELITE RECRUITMENT IN THE SOVIET UNION Neil Harding (editor) THE STATE IN SOCIALIST SOCIETY Richard Holt SPORT AND SOCIETY IN MODERN FRANCE Albert Hourani EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST Albert Hourani THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST J. R. Jennings GEORGES SOREL A. Kemp-Welch (translator) THE BIRTH OF SOLIDARITY Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (editors) NATIONALIST AND RACIALIST MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY BEFORE 1914 Richard Kindersley (editor) IN SEARCH OF EUROCOMMUNISM Bohdan Krawchenko SOCIAL CHANGE AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY UKRAINE Gisela C. Lebzelter POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND, 1918-1939 Nancy Lubin LABOUR AND NATIONALITY IN SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA C. A. MacDonald THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN AND APPEASEMENT, 1936-1939 Patrick O'Brien (editor) RAILWAYS AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1830-1914 Roger Owen (editor) STUDIES IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF PALESTINE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES Irena Powell WRITERS AND SOCIETY IN MODERN JAPAN T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher (editors) POLITICAL LEGITIMATION IN COMMUNIST STATES Marilyn Rueschemeyer PROFESSIONAL WORK AND MARRIAGE A. J. R. Russell-Wood THE BLACK MAN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN COLONIAL BRAZIL Aron Shai BRITAIN AND CHINA, 1941-47 Lewis H. Siegelbaum THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION IN RUSSIA, 1914-17 David Stafford BRITAIN AND EUROPEAN RESISTANCE, 1940-1945 Nancy Stepan THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE Guido di Tella ARGENTINA UNDER PERON, 1973-76 Rosemary Thorp (editor) LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1930s Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead (editors) INFLATION AND STABILISATION IN LATIN AMERICA Rudolf L. Tokes (editor) OPPOSITION IN EASTERN EUROPE FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM

Edited by Said Amir Arjomand

Foreword by Ernest Gellner

in association with M Palgrave Macmillan MACMILLAN © Social Science Research Council 1984 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1984 978-0-333-35369-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission

First published 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world

Filmset in Monophoto Times by Latimer Trend & Company Ltd, Plymouth

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Arjomand, Said Amir From nationalism to revolutionary Islam. I. Near East~ History --20th century I. Title 956'.04 DS62.4 ISBN 978-1-349-06849-4 ISBN 978-1-349-06847-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06847-0 Contents

Foreword by Ernest Gellner vii Publishers' Acknowledgement xii Editor's Acknowledgement xiii Notes on the Contributors xiv Notes on Transliteration xvi Glossary xvii

Introduction: Social Movements in the Contemporary Near and Middle East Said Amir Arjomand 9

2 Nationalism in the Middle East: A Behavioural Approach Richard Cottam 28

3 Social Factors in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria Rashid Khalidi 53

4 Emergent Trends in Moslem Tribal Society: the Wazir Movement of the Mullah of Wana in North-Western Fron• tier Province of Pakistan Akbar Ahmed 71

5 National Integration and Traditional Rural Organisation in Algeria, 1970-80: Background for Islamic Traditionalism? Peter von Sivers 94

6 Politicisation of Islam in a Secular State: the National Salvation Party in Turkey Binnaz Toprak 119

7 Ideology, Social Class and Islamic Radicalism in Modern Egypt Eric Davis 134 vi Contents

8 The Fada'iyan-e Islam: Fanaticism, Politics and Terror Farhad Kazemi 158

9 Sermons, Revolutionary Pamphleteering and Mobilisation: Iran, 1978 Shaul Bakhash 177

10 Traditionalism in Twentieth-century Iran Said Amir Arjomand 195

References 233 Index 248 Foreword

ERNEST GELLNER

The central theme of the history of the twentieth century is now totally plain and obvious. In the course of it, industrial/scientific societies, hitherto largely confined to what may loosely be called the North Atlantic world, spread to the rest of the globe. It does not look as if the transformation of the rest of the world will have been completed by the end of the century; but there can be no shadow of doubt that the disruption of the traditional agrarian societies will by then be largely accomplished. The process which we are witnessing is the replacement of agrarian societies by industrial or industrialising ones. What is the difference between them? Agrarian societies contain a majority of direct agricultural producers; they had a fairly stable technological base, cognitive and technical innovation being a rarity rather than a normality; they were generally hierarchical, authoritarian, dogmatic and stability-oriented. They poss• essed belief-systems claiming absolute and transcendental grounding which were linked to the authority and hierarchy structures of their societies and provided them with their legitimation. Industrial societies are defined by the possession of ever-growing and ever more powerful technical equipment, depending in turn on a form of cognition ('science') committed or doomed to perpetual growth. They employ a diminishing proportion of the population in agriculture. Although their political and cultural superstructure is not hom• ogeneous, it is marked by at least the potentiality of a certain liberalisation (political and doctrinal pluralism and choice, the replace• ment of the stick of fear by the carrot of material bribery, and the anticipation of radical enrichment), by a diminution of the chasm between a 'Great' Tradition and a 'Folk' Tradition, a larger population, a much increased social mobility and a tendency towards widespread secularisation.

Vll VIJI Foreword

So much is obvious and general. But there are great and profoundly important differences within both agrarian (which includes pastoral) and industrial/industrialising societies. Marxism is perhaps the greatest observer-participant in the overall process ~ a belief-system which is both a theory of the process and an important actor within it. Its significance as an actor within the drama can hardly be in dispute. Its accuracy as an account of the whole process is more questionable. Two central ideas within it in particular seem open to doubt. One is the employment of the notions of 'feudalism', 'capitalism' and 'soci• alism' as designations of types of society, putatively defined in terms of their mode of production. The facts of history have by now forced virtually everyone (including nominal Marxists) to treat agrarian and industrial as the real designations of forms of production: capitalism and socialism are only names of the optional socio-political superstructures accompanying the latter one. (The idea that 'feudalism' is some kind of general matrix of the emergence of industrial societies is similarly questionable, and can only be sustained by extending the meaning of the term so widely that it is deprived of much of its utility.) The second questionable idea is that modes of production, or societies defined in terms of their productive base, uniquely determine the 'superstructure'. In other words, we now need to operate in terms of a simple social typology, agrarian/industrial, which only revived and conquered our speech after the Second World War, and we are quite clear that, whilst each of these types may determine the problems faced by a society, they do not uniquely determine its solutions. Despite the great diversity displayed by ex-agrarian, industrialising societies, one can nevertheless offer a certain simple formula for their doctrinal, ideological predicament. The reason why they are obliged to undergo change is of course to be sought in the technical, economic and military superiority of industrial society. They are changing, because they, or their members, wish to be as rich and powerful as industrial, 'developed' lands. The ideological consequence of this situation is obvious. These societies are torn between 'westernisation' and (in a broad sense) populism, that is, the idealisation of the local folk tradition. (The old local 'Great' Tradition is generally damned by its failure to resist the West and by its doctrinal and organisational rigidity, once a source of strength, now a great weakness.) The emulation of the developed world flows from the desire to steal its sacred and power• conferring fire; the romanticisation of the- local tradition, real or imagined, is a consequence of the desire to maintain self-respect to possess an identity not borrowed from abroad, to avoid being a mere imitation, second-rate, a reproduction of an alien model. Foreword IX

These two ideological trends or temptations are mutually incompat• ible; nevertheless, most ideologies prevalent in the Third World contain some blend or mixture of the two. The tension between them is manifest and painful. In the far-off days, over a century and a half ago, when the Third World began on the Rhine, the dilemma took the form of the conflict between classicism and romanticism, between the aping of French models and the reverence for the local folk spirit. By the time the dilemma came to be felt in Russia, it was articulated in the terms which we still recognise today. But there is one section of the ancient world which seems at least in part to have escaped this predicament: namely, Islamic societies, notably those of the arid zone. This interesting exception has not yet been widely noticed. But there is an aspect of it which is conspicuous and which really cries out for more thorough investigation. It is the curious, yet supremely important fact that, of all the great traditional belief systems, Islam alone, far from weakening, has become an increasingly powerful social and political mobilising force. The other traditional faiths have had to retreat before diverse mixtures of modernism and populism; Islam, on the other hand, has retained and enhanced its social vitality, and moreover is vigorously invoked both by conservative and radical regimes. Is this an accident? I think not. Islam, like other faiths, was divided between a folk variant and a central, literacy-sustained tradition. But the central, scholarly version was rather special: it was not rigidly tied to any one political ancien regime, it was carried by an open class of scholars/jurists/theologians which would in principle come to embrace the entire society, and it contained an egalitarian doctrine of equal access to God by all believers willing to heed the publicly available and definitely and finally delimited Word. Its scripturalist, orderly, re• strained theology made it compatible with the requirements both of centralising regimes and of developmental programmes. Its sober and restrained unitarianism, its moralism and abstention from spiritual opportunism, manipulativeness and propitiation, in brief its 'protestant' traits, give it an affinity with the modern world. It did not engender the modern world, but it may yet, of all the faiths, turn out to be the one best adapted to it. It can dissociate itself from both folk 'superstitions' and its archaic hierarchies, and it is not dragged down by them. What had once, in the days when literacy was a specialist accomplish• ment, been the faith and stance of a restricted clerical elite, could now, in the age of widespread urbanisation and literacy, become the folk culture of the entire society. It could simultaneously define it against foreign X Foreword

enemies, against over-westernised local rulers, and against the rejected moral corruption of the real local past; and yet it could also be used to invoke an uncorrupt ideal past, whose image had always haunted the society, and thus affirm both past roots and future aspirations, both continuity and transformation, identity and purification, under one single banner. This, in rough outline, is in my view the explanation of the unique and enormously important standing of Islam in the modern world, its potential of both mobilisation and conservation. (The accident of oil explains the power of Moslems; it does not explain the powerful hold of Islam over its adherents.) All this fact has not, of course, saved the Moslem lands from the impact of either nationalism or socialist radicalism. The call for culturally homogeneous communities, endowed with a state-sustained and endorsed culture, in other words nationalism, has been felt in the Middle East and North Africa as powerfully as elsewhere. The requirement that the fruits and benefits of the yearned• for industrial cornucopia should be distributed according to moral and political requirements, and not be left to the vagaries of the market - in other words the imperative of socialism-has been affirmed all the more strongly in societies long habituated to the view that the duty of the state is to proscribe evil and enforce good, and which may consequently be receptive to the idea that the good of industrial society should be decreed by norm, rather than be the fruit of accidental, unplanned interactions. Here the state had ever been moralistic in tone, even if in fact it was based on kin and patronage networks and their usurpation of the benefits of power. The Moslem world is not alone in possessing conservative vested interests, nationalist turbulence and chiliastic social strivings. It is unique in that the fusion of these trends with a genuinely traditional religion, or rather, with its erstwhile top layer, now available to the entire society, is more intimate, more pervasive, more profound, more convincing, than it is anywhere else. How their interaction will con• cretely mould the future can only be grasped by looking at each case in detail. The generalities which I have proposed may or may not be valid. Their soundness will not be determined by their logical neatness but by whether or not they fit the facts. Many of the relevant facts have been assembled in this volume. The struggle of diverse political and ideological trends for the soul of the Middle East is intricate and multiform. These trends can only be properly understood in their diverse complexity. The present outstand- Foreword xi

ing collection of essays explores the microstructure of the various conflicts which are being played out in the Middle East, and provides us with data and insights not available to the superficial view. It in• disputably makes a very major and significant contribution to our understanding of a fascinating and as yet far from decided struggle, whose outcome may in the end be decisive for the fate of our world.

ERNEST GELLNER Publishers' Acknowledgements

The conference on which this volume is based, and the preparation of the volume itself, were supported by the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (USA).

xii Editor's Acknowledgements

The pages in this volume, with one exception, were first presented at a Conference on Social Movements and Political Culture in the Con• temporary Near and Middle East held in Mt Kisco, New York, on 14-17 May 1981. I am most grateful to the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council for organising the conference and for its material assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, to Ernest Gellner for kindly agreeing to write the Foreword, and to Ali Banuazizi, Eric Davis, and Peter von Sivers for their editorial advice. I am also much indebted to the members of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, St Antony's College, Oxford, especially the late Hamid Enayat, and to the Warden and Fellows ofSt Antony's College, where, as a Visiting Fellow in 1981-2, I could complete the editorial work and write the Introduction in a congenial and stimulating atmosphere.

SAID AMIR ARJOMAND

Xlll Notes on the Contributors

Akbar Ahmed, a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, is also a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan. His last post was Political Agent, South Waziristan. He has written extensively on Pakistan and his most recent book is Religion and Politics in Muslim Society: Order and Conflict in Pakistan (1983).

Said Amir Arjomand is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was a Visiting Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1981-2, and is the author of Shadow ofGod and the Hidden Imam (1984).

Shaul Bakhash has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and is the author of Iran: Monarchy, Bureaucracy and Reform Under the Qajars, 1858-1896, The Politics of Oil and Revolution in Iran and numerous articles on Iranian history and politics.

Richard Cottam is University Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His fields include the politics of Iran, foreign policy in the Middle East and international relations theory.

Eric Davis is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. A specialist in problems of political and economic development, he is author of Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (1982).

Farhad Kazemi is Associate Professor of Politics and director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He is the author of Poverty and Revolution in Iran: The Migrant Poor, Urban Marginality and Politics and the editor of Iranian Revolution in Perspective. He is also an editor of Iranian Studies.

xiv Notes on the Contributors XV

Rashid Khalidi teaches politics at the American University of Beirut, where his research interests include modern Arab politics and history, and Soviet Middle East policy. He is the author of British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine 1906-1914 (1980) and a number of papers and monographs.

Binnaz Toprak is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bogazic;i University in Istanbul. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the City University of New York. She is the author of islam and Political Development in Turkey (1981) and has written on religion, women, and politics in contemporary Turkish society.

Peter von Sivers is Associate Professor, Middle East History, University of Utah. He has done research and published in the field of social history (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, 750-1500; Algeria, 1830-1914), and has written articles on the Abbasid Thughur in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 25 (1982) and on the Bou Amama revolt 1881 in Peuples mediterram?ens ( 1982). Note on Transliteration

Turkish words have been written in the modern Turkish alphabet. Two separate simplified transliteration systems have been adopted for Persian and Arabic. Maximum effort has been made to be consistent within each of these systems. However, exceptions have had to be made for such common words as imam, Islam, jihad and ayatollah, and for proper names such as Muhammad, Husayn, Mosaddeq, Nasser and Khomeini which have been spelt uniformly throughout. Diacritical

1 1 marks have been omitted, and' ' is used both for the hamza and the ain.

XVI Glossary

'Adalat Khaneh House of Justice add a Market Akmczlar The Raiders (youth organisation) al-amir The commander al-Ahd The Covenant al-'id The festival (either of the breaking of the fast or the sacrificial festival) 'alim 'Learned' or religious scholar al-infinitah The Open Door al-jihaz al-sirri The Secret Organisation al-umma al-mu'mina The Community of the Faithful al-umma al-jahiliyya The Community of Unbelievers al-usra The family al-wasita Mediator Amir al-mu'minin Commander of the Faithful anjoman (Political) society anomie Absence of social standards; normlessness Ansar Khumayni Helpers of Khomeini aqayid Ideas; ideology 'ashura The day of commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn 'atabat Shi 'ite holy centres in Iraq 'avamm Common masses ayatollah 'Sign of God', title of Shi'ite religious digni- taries badshah King bast Taking of sanctuary Ba'th Rebirth; the ruling party in Iraq and Syria beghairat Shameless dar al-harb Realm of war da'wa Mission ezan Call to prayer

XVll XVlll Glossary

Fada'iyan-e Islam Devotees of Islam Fara'iziyya A movement for observation of religious duties (jar a' iz) in Bengal in early nineteenth century farangi 'Frankish'; European fatwa(h) (Legal) injunction friperie Used cloth gourbi Dwelling built by Algerian peasants Hak i~ (Turkish) Labour Union hadith Tradition (saying or deeds) of the Prophet hay' at mazhabi Religious association hefz-e bayza-ye Protection of the citadel of Islam Eslam hijra/ hijrat Migration after the model of Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina Hizb al-tahir Islamic Liberation Party al-islami hudud Punishments of the Sacred Law ijtihad 'Endeavour'; exercise of independent legal judgement iktisatqilar Kiiltiir (Turkish) Cultural Foundation of Economists Vakji ilim Yayma Cemiyeti (Turkish) Society for the Propagation of Knowledge imam (Prayer) leader imam hatip Prayer leader/preacher imamat Leadership of the community of believers 'irfan Philosophical Sufism jahili Pertaining to pre-Islamic ignorance jahiliyya Pre-Islamic ignorance Jama'at al-jihad The Holy War Association Jama'at al-muslimin The Society of Moslems which Charges Soci• li' 1-takjir ety with Unbelief Jama'at al-takjir Society of excommunication and withdrawal wa' 1-hijra javan mardi Manly valour jazirat al'-arab The Arabian peninsula jihad Holy war lund Allah God's Soldiers kajir Infidel khal' -e yadd Takeover from; dispossession Glossary XIX khassadar Tribal levy (of troops) khavass The elite khilafat Caliphate lashkar Army madrassahfmedrese Religious school; colleges of religious educ- ation mahdi The messianic 'leader' at the End of Time mai-baap Mother-father Majlis Lower House (of Parliament) majles-e ma'delat Assembly of Justice maktab al-rishad The Guidance Council malik King marja' ( -e taq/id) Shi'ite authoritative jurist mashayikh The elder; authorities mashuru'a In accordance with Sacred Law mashurta Constitutional maulvi Man of religion Mekfureci Ogret• Organisation of Idealist Teachers (Turkish) menler Dernegi mian Man of spiritual gifts and holy descent Milli Guru~ Almanya Organisation of National Outlook in Germany Te~kilatlarz Milli Nizam Partisi National Order Party Milli Selamet Partisi National Salvation Party (NSP) (MSP) MSP Genr;lik Lokal• leri NSP Youth Clubs MSP l:jr;i Komisyo• ulair NSP Workers' Commission Milli Turk Talebe National Turkish Union of Students Birligi mos/eh-e kabir The Great Reformer mujaddid/mojadded Renewer mujtahed Jurist; he who is competent to exercise ijtihad mulaqat Meeting mullah Moslem cl~ric musawat Equality mustaz'afin The disinherited nadi Assembly hall Naksibendi A Sufi order namaz Daily prayers XX Glossary

nang A tribal branch of the Pukhtuns nazr Cash donations for a vow niswar Snuff Nizam-e Mustafa Prophetic Order Nurcu 'Seeker of light', a follower of Bediiizzeman Saidi Nursi in Turkey pir Saint, spiritual guide qazi Judge rawza-khani Shi'ite religious ceremonies usually devoted to recitation of the tragedy of Karbala and martyrdom oflmam Husayn and his family ruhaniyyat Clergy ruz-nameh Journal, newspaper sala.fiyya An Islamic movement enjoining the imitations of the ways and the pristine Islam of the 'Pious Ancestors' sartor Black head (symbol of grief) sayyed Descendant of the Prophet ~eyh Shaykh; Sufi guide shaheed Martyr Shari' a Holy law Sufi Islamic mystic tabliq Missionary activity tafsir Interpretation of Koran tak.fir Excommunication talib Seminarian Tanzimat The Reforms tarikat (Sufi) Brotherhood taw hid Unity (of God) tasu'a The day of mourning preceding 'ashura ta'ziyeh Passion play on the martyrdom of Husayn and his family teeman Tribe-at-large Teknik Elemanlar Union of Technical Personnel (Turkish) Birligi thana Eulogy to !lab Seminarians Tudeh Iranian Communist Party Tiirk Yazarlar Syndicate of Turkish Writers Sendikase Tiirkiye Yazarlar Writers' Union of Turkey Birligi Glossary XXI

'ulama 'The learned', plural of 'alim; religious autho• rities 'umad Plural of 'umda; village magnate umma(h) Community of believers Usuli Pertaining to rationalism in jurisprudence Usuli movement A movement of jurisprudential rationalism in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shi'ism vali Guardian, custodian velayat Guardianship, authority, mandate velayat-e faqih Authority, sovereignty of the jurist wilaya Province zakat A religious tax zawiya Sufi convent zendeh bad Long Live ... !