Islamism, revolution, uprisings and liberalism, 1977–2011

Abstract

Introduction During 1798–1914, mobilizing projects had looked to escape the state, replace it completely in the name of Islamic radicalism, appeal to its justice, or achieve a limited form of representation in it. During 1914–52, a dominant theme in mobilizing projects was the search for a much broader form of representation in the state in the name of the nation. During 1952–76, revolutionaries and Leftists had sought to capture the state for national liberation and far-reaching socio-economic transformation. In some respects, the climax and final defeat of these kinds of projects on the regional stage came in ‘tiny’ Lebanon in 1976, when the democratic socialism of the Lebanese National Movement, allied to the Palestinian thawra , ran aground on the realpolitik of the Syrian dictatorship. This crisis was all the more acute because the Syrian regime claimed to be acting in the name of pan-Arabism, the Palestinian cause, and the Arab socialism of the Ba'th Party, even though it was palpably acting in the name of Al-Asad, and his narrow calculations as to Syrian national security. Partly because the Palestinian guerrilla strategy was ever more threadbare, and because Lebanon was now embroiled in a lengthy civil war, not to mention because of the weakness of the Left revival in Egypt in the 1970s inter alia , the epoch of national liberation and social revolution was grinding to a close. During 1977–2011, the nature of mobilization in the region underwent fundamental changes. Revolutionary mobilizing projects, amid a crisis of the secular state, developed an Islamist politics that sought to replace the corrupted secular state with an Islamic one. Since the 1950s, different strands of Islamism – Shi'a popular, Sunni modernist and Salafi-Wahhabi – had sought to re-group in the face of what they saw as the monstrous, secular usurpation of the true destiny of the independent states of the region after independence. An Egyptian law professor Hussam 'Issa (b. 1939), speaking from an Egyptian perspective, put it very simply: 'After the defeat [of 1967], people would say: we tried liberalism before the revolution in 1952, then we tried Arab nationalism, and then we had to find another form of identity [i.e. Islam]’ (Browers 2009: 6). In the 1970s, Islamist groups started to engage in contentious mobilization that went far beyond sermons, publications and occasional demonstrations or attacks.