Authors: Henry Kissinger
In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life.
From its early days as an informal gathering
of religious Muslims repelled by British domination of Egypt’s Suez Canal Zone, al-Banna’s Brotherhood had grown to a nationwide network of social and political activity, with tens of thousands of members, cells in every Egyptian city, and an influential propaganda network distributing his commentaries on current events. It had won regional respect with its support for the failed 1937–39 anti-British, anti-Zionist Arab Revolt in the British mandate for Palestine. It had also attracted scrutiny from Egyptian authorities.
Barred from direct participation in Egyptian politics but nevertheless among Egypt’s most influential political figures, al-Banna now
sought to vindicate the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision with a public statement addressed to Egypt’s monarch. Lamenting that Egypt and the region had fallen prey to foreign domination and internal moral decay, he proclaimed that the time for renewal had arrived.
The West, al-Banna asserted, “
which was brilliant
by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations, intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost
both
its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and eventually “Islamic unity” would result.
How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “
Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands
to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?”
Where possible, this fight would be gradualist
and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims, so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.” Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create estrangement between us and the Western nations.”
How much of al-Banna’s counseled moderation was tactical and an attempt to find acceptance in a world still dominated by Western powers? How much of the jihadist rhetoric was designed to garner support in traditional Islamist quarters? Assassinated in 1949, al-Banna was not vouchsafed time to explain in detail how to reconcile the revolutionary ambition of his project of world transformation with the principles of tolerance and cross-civilizational amity that he espoused.
These ambiguities lingered in al-Banna’s text, but the record of many Islamist thinkers and movements since then has resolved them in favor of a fundamental rejection of pluralism and secular international order. The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote
Milestones,
a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism.
In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “
low associations based on race
and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of
Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran.
The culmination of this process would be “
the achievement of the freedom of man
on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.
Qutb, with vast learning and passionate intensity, had declared war on a state of affairs—brashly secular modernity and Muslim disunity, as ratified by the post–World War I territorial settlement in the Middle East—that many Muslims had privately lamented. While most of his contemporaries recoiled from the violent methods he advocated, a
core of committed followers
—like the vanguard he had envisioned—began to form.
To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the ideological clashes of “History,” Qutb and his followers’ views long appeared so extreme as to merit no serious attention. In a failure of imagination, many Western elites find revolutionaries’ passions inexplicable and assume that their extreme statements must be metaphorical or advanced merely as bargaining chips. Yet for Islamic fundamentalists, these views represent truths overriding the rules and norms of the Westphalian—or indeed any other—international order. They have been the rallying cry of radicals and jihadists in the Middle East and beyond for decades—echoed by al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran’s clerical regime, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of
Liberation, active in the West and openly advocating the reestablishment of the caliphate in a world dominated by Islam), Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Syria’s extremist militia Jabhat al-Nusrah, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which erupted in a major military assault in mid-2014. They were the militant doctrine of the Egyptian radicals who assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, proclaiming the “neglected duty” of jihad and branding their President an apostate for making peace with Israel. They accused him of two heresies: recognizing the legal existence of the Jewish state, and (in their view) thereby agreeing to cede land deemed historically Muslim to a non-Muslim people.
This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform
dar al-harb,
the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.
For a fleeting moment, the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 raised hopes that the region’s contending forces of autocracy and jihad had been turned irrelevant by a new wave of reform. Upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt were greeted exuberantly by Western political leaders and media as a regional, youth-led revolution on behalf of liberal democratic principles. The United States officially endorsed the protesters’ demands, backing them as undeniable cries for “
freedom
,” “free and fair elections,” “representative government,” and “genuine
democracy,” which should not be permitted to fail. Yet the road to democracy was to be tortuous and anguishing, as became obvious in the aftermath of the collapse of the autocratic regimes.
Many in the West interpreted the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt as a vindication of the argument that an alternative to autocracy should have been promoted much earlier. The real problem had been, however, that the United States found it difficult to discover elements from which pluralistic institutions could be composed or leaders committed to their practice. (This is why some drew the line as between civilian and military rule and supported the anything-but-democratic Muslim Brotherhood.)
America’s democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country’s idealism. But conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed. Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even reformist manner. The democratization approach could not remedy the vacuum looming in pursuit of its objectives; the strategic approach was handicapped by the rigidity of available institutions.
The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis. The existing political forces, embedded in the military and in religion in the countryside, proved stronger and better organized than the middle-class element demonstrating for democratic principles in Tahrir Square. In practice, the Arab Spring has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic world and of the policies designed to resolve them.
The oft-repeated early slogan of the Arab Spring, “The people
want the downfall of the regime,” left open the question of how the people are defined and what will take the place of the supplanted authorities. The original Arab Spring demonstrators’ calls for an open political and economic life have been overwhelmed by a violent contest between military-backed authoritarianism and Islamist ideology.
In Egypt, the original exultant demonstrators professing values of cosmopolitanism and democracy in Tahrir Square have not turned out to be the revolution’s heirs. Electronic social media facilitate demonstrations capable of toppling regimes, but the ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state. In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome. The temptation to foster unity by merging nationalism and fundamentalism overwhelmed the original slogans of the uprising.
Mohammed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood backed by a coalition of even more radical fundamentalist groups, was elected in 2012 to a presidency that the Muslim Brotherhood had pledged in the heady days of the Tahrir Square demonstrations not to seek. In power, the Islamist government concentrated on institutionalizing its authority by looking the other way while its supporters mounted a campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents. The military’s decision to oust this government and declare a new start to the political process was, in the end, welcomed even among the now marginalized, secular democratic element.
This experience raises the issue of humanitarian foreign policy. It distinguishes itself from traditional foreign policy by criticizing national interest or balance-of-power concepts as lacking a moral dimension. It justifies itself not by overcoming a strategic threat but by removing conditions deemed a violation of universal principles of justice. The values and goals of this style of foreign policy reflect a vital aspect of the American tradition. If practiced as the central operating
concept of American strategy, however, they raise their own dilemmas: Does America consider itself obliged to support every popular uprising against any nondemocratic government, including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international system? Is every demonstration democratic by definition? Is Saudi Arabia an ally only until public demonstrations develop on its territory? Among America’s principal contributions to the Arab Spring was to condemn, oppose, or work to remove governments it judged autocratic, including the government of Egypt, heretofore a valued ally. For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however, the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the benefits of liberal reform.